Front matter (continued 5)

For answer, with two great blisters of tears forcing their way out of her closed eyes, Ermangarde reached under her pillow for a little wad of envelope concealed there and, burying her head under the bolster so that her sobs were muffled, handed the bit of paper up to Paula:

"Ermangarde," it read, "your little notes make it so hard. I have not seen you in all these weeks, well because, and I should, I must tell you, one night something inside of me just curled up and died.

"It seems too dreadful, for me, who dwells down where the hem of your skirt touches, to have to be the one to write these words. But somehow I must find the strength to be brutal with the truth. Something, little Ermangarde, killed the perfect thing that was forming between us. Something too subtle and too cruel for me to analyse, but toward the end, dear girl, I never put my foot into your home without a dreadful crushing sense of the imminence of the death that was taking place in my heart.

"Forces too enormous and too infinitesimal for us to cope with were at work. The shortcomings were all mine, but alas! there they were. It makes this letter a bitterer task for me to be obliged to close it on a note of my own happiness. I was married yesterday to Rosemary. You remember the night we met her at the play. And that is just what she is. Rosemary. A lovely sprig of it, and she has turned life into a garden. We are sailing to-morrow for the Madeiras. Ermangarde, try to remember me kindly, as I shall always remember you, beautifully.

"Dudley Wells."

After the three of them had read this, standing there shoulder to shoulder and their breathing beating down on to the page, Paula turned suddenly upon her mother, the blue flames, thin as breath, leaping along her eyes.

"I hate you, Mathilde Oessetrich. I hate you. I hate you." And cramming her handkerchief up against the terrifying words, ran choking from the room.

***

And yet the very next morning Ermangarde was up and about as usual. There was something diamond-like in her brightness. Hard. Showy. She was even rude to Paula.

"Don't try to baby me, Paula. I'm all right, I won't stay in bed! Do keep out of my affairs, dear. I know what I'm about. I'm quite well. Don't interfere."

So Paula went back to weaving her hours of music along the keys and Ermangarde to the routine of her French and her drawing and her fencing and her singing lessons. And if once in a while she skipped a luncheon or a dinner for which there was no particular accounting, Mrs. Oessetrich held thin-lipped peace. There was that dry, diamond hardness to Ermangarde.

Every Saturday, Madam Lina Gerbhardt, Mrs. Oessetrich's lifelong friend, an enormous contralto who wore stencilled scarves and had taught Calvé, came to the house to give Ermangarde her singing lesson, and then remained for lunch. Ermangarde had a clear little mountain stream of a voice. Lovely in its middle register and with a thin fluty upper range to which she had climbed on years of Madam Gerbhardt's careful arpeggios. It was pleasant, during these lessons, to dust softly about the hall that led to the music room.

"Do—me—fah—doh—fah—sol—me—doh—ahh-h-hhhhh—"

Madam Gerbhardt's voice ran underneath Ermangarde's, booming it.

"Doh—me—fah—doh——"

Light-colored Tosti bubbles. Flying banners of Bizet. Richard Strauss.

Bertha liked these lessons. Once Madam Gerbhardt thrust two tickets into Bertha's hands. "Here, girl, there is a Ukrainian chorus singing at Carnegie Hall to-night. You should enjoy that. Go, if Mrs. Oessetrich can spare you."

Bertha went and took Helga. The seats were very far back and the faces of the chorus dim as dreams. The drony silence while you waited. The yellow slits of light. The Slav songs that were full of heart beat and the Slav songs that were full of despair. The love of a harlot. The death of a Moujik. Cossacks who chant at dusk. It was as if the heart were embers and the chorus were sitting in its glow. Love and life and the taste of the red lips of harlots and the running of rivers that are made of tears. There was one. It sang of the Volga. The Volga! Boatmen whose thighs were sweating and whose eyes were bulging from the drag. The pulling boatmen along the shore....

"Come," said Helga when the intermission came. "Let's run along. These Polish wops give me the blues."

There was nothing to do but go. Helga could be so querulous. But up under the roof, all of the night rocked softly, like a river. The Volga. The Volga. Rushing of tears along with the tide and where men sang of joy in a key that was minor....

***

One lovely spring Saturday when the breakfast room, where the family lunched, was wide open to the languid drift of spring, Madam Gerbhardt, who had been popping salted almonds into her mouth, chopping them sharply and then popping more, spoke out suddenly, just as Bertha was passing her the fillet of sole:

"Well, I see where Rollo Farley died."

"No!"

"Yes, didn't you read it in the Times this morning? It seems he spoke at the Poetry Society night before last, complained of feeling ill when he arrived home, took a sleeping powder before he went to bed, and never woke up. Oh!"

"Bertha, you clumsy!"

"It's all right, no harm done."

"Bertha, do be careful. She didn't ruin your sleeve with the fish sauce, did she? Bertha, Helga should be serving anyhow. I cannot understand why you insist upon carrying half of that careless girl's work for her—so Rollo Farley is dead."

"Rollo—Farley——"

"A greatly overestimated man. A one-book author."

"Yes, Mother, but what a book! I think that The Cathedral Under the Sea belongs to the esoteric group of really great poems."

"Pish. Free verse. Free-and-easy-verse. I hate faddism. The forms that were good enough for Goethe and Wordsworth and——"

"Have you read The Cathedral Under the Sea, Mother?"

"No, but I know what the entire movement stands for. You belong to the violent reactionaries if you permit two lines to rhyme. A couplet is about as out of date as an antimacassar."

"You speak precisely with the authority of one who knows nothing about the subject."

"At least, Ermangarde, I am not a reactionary in the way I permit my daughters to address me."

"But, Mother, you must admit that at least I speak with the authority of having read the book. The Cathedral Under the Sea is a great impressionistic poem, not the mere dithyrambic prose that the free verse writers are dabbling in. Its metrical devices are as cunning as Masefield's effects of the rolling of the sea."

"Now, when you speak of Masefield——"

"Exactly, Mother, it is because you can appreciate Masefield, that I won't have you condemning Rollo Farley before you have read The Cathedral Under the Sea."

"Ermangarde is right, 'Tilda. Farley accepts technique without being tied to it."

"Of course he does. He does precisely what your Masefield does. He does what he pleases with his rhyme scheme between his first and his sixth or seventh lines but those lines hold the internal ones firmly together. Farley is not an anarchist. He's merely a Progressive. He dares to liberate form and language."

"Pish, you've read that somewhere."

"I've felt it, you mean. Besides I'm not bothered about form. Much of the beauty of The Cathedral Under the Sea lies in its formlessness—the formlessness of life. You understand, don't you, Madam?"

Madam, who had a pudgy, a square, an emotional hand, placed it to the left of her stencilled scarf and closed her eyes.

"Indeed I do. Any work of art, regardless of its form or formlessness, is great when it makes you feel that its creator has dipped into your very heart for his sensation."

"Precisely."

"That turbulent, inarticulate creature in The Cathedral Under the Sea! I can see her sitting there, beautiful-eyed and barefoot, in the forest part of the poem. You remember? Listening. I suppose to the music of the spheres. Hearing it, full of it, and yet silent with it. That is how I feel about so much that is beautiful and fragile in life. Full of it, bursting with it, and yet with no power to express it."

"Oh Madam, you do understand!"

"That is what I meant, Ermangarde, in our lesson this very morning. Lift the tones, or they will sink back into the pools of silence and remain unsung. Can't you understand, Mathilde, why we—why that one beautiful thing, even though he never wrote a line that amounted to a hill of beans afterward, can perpetuate the name of Rollo Farley?"

"I must read it for myself," said Mrs. Oessetrich. "I am always prejudiced in advance by a book which has created the furor that this one did. I've never been able to abide his wife. She was a Neidringhaus. Ethan's daughter. One of those Botticelli creatures who is all effect and little else. And how she has capitalized the success of The Cathedral Under the Sea! I actually think she sometimes believes that she wrote it herself. Her proprietary air. They were wretchedly unhappy together, you know. Services from the old house in Gramercy Park, I suppose?"

"Yes, Thursday afternoon."

"Well, I'm not going. I might have put myself out while his mother lived. Lucretia Farley was at least harmless and not an attitudinizing Mona Lisa. Bertha, get Circle 345 for me on the telephone. I'll be half an hour late for my bridge lesson at this rate. Paula, for heaven's sake, stop staring. You are getting the habit. If it is one thing I can't abide, it is light blue eyes that stare ..."

"The Cathedral Under the Sea," said Paula. "I was just trying to think: Where—The Cathedral Under the Sea—I—know—her—from—somewhere——"

How curious, turning the corner, just as the bier, slanting, was being carried down the steps. The violet blanket, starlit with anemones, slid a little. Its fragrance stole out softly over the fringe of onlookers. They formed the aisle, these onlookers. The bier passed between them, across the sidewalk and into the hearse. The blanket kept breathing out fragrance. You wanted to faint into it. Sweet. Wistful. Tired. It rode on shoulders and rolled a little, that hoisted caravan of Rollo, and the sidewalk was a desert and the blanket a purple sky with stars and the end of the desert was Rollo's eternity.

Something rather sickening happened then and brought you back into the fringe of the onlookers. The bier was tilted into the hearse. It ran forward a little as if on casters, and two doors with silver handles closed and pinched your heart. The doors closing that way. Like shutting a dear book that had a filigree lock on it and turning the tiny key. The doors closing. The last line of a sonnet.

You stood in the fringe that made the aisle through which the bier passed across the sidewalk, with a place nicked out of your heart.

And then the hearse moved up and a carriage slid into its place, and down the steps, through the sweet breath the violets had left, came the mourners. Mr. Farley. It hurt somehow to look. The years had shrunk him up. He seemed shorter, and all the bombastic pink flesh hung now in pale little oysters of empty skin, and his legs, that had used to be fat and strutty, wavered now, and kept wanting to knock at the knees. It was horrible to see him feel three times with the toe of his shoe before he ventured the step.

With Veronica it was different. Her foot came down coolly and slimly just where she pointed it, and through the mesh of her veil you could see the pale ellipse of her face. Dim. But the features in order. The neatly closed lips. Careful curtains of hair. A griefless face. Dry and oval. Ascetic even of tears.

It made one proud. So burstingly proud to stand there on the fringe of the onlookers, rich with the grief that the face of Veronica was as barren of as a crag. To stand there rich and brimming with the precious sorrow of a love! Poor Veronica, who had no grief.

Gradually the carriages were filled. There were the explorer and the broker and the ex-ambassador and Beebe, only without his portfolio, who had interrupted the family at luncheon that day and caused the nesselrode pudding to go out untasted.

The women whispered and made little sounds like the glass icicles of a chandelier. The ushers brushed their white gloved hands together. It was all very cool and very tearless, and the carriages began to move off without more ado.

It was easy in the city to keep pace with them. There were long halts for traffic and the horses, never out of walk, lifted their hoofs with almost a rhythmic leisure. Clip. Clop. The wheels, slow hoops. Unflecked drivers' whips. Wide sun-washed streets, drowsy with spring afternoon, and the narrow black procession winding out along them. Bertha followed from the sidewalk. It was easy, block after block, but then up over the shoulder of an asphalt hill, the green flush of the country set in and the sidewalks left off and now you had to follow more quickly along the stiff frozen dirt road, but just the same you wound along behind, sweetly and deeply into the quiet. Clip. Clop.

The caravan of Rollo rolling rapidly now, out toward the sun's edge, and Bertha with her gift of grief hurrying after it. She could feel her shoulders spangled with perspiration. They had been so deeply white to him, like the flesh of the magnolia. He had trolled four of his fingers along her whiteness. They had melted against her throat and down into her heart. White tapering roads, in the dark forest along which she ran calling.

The first minarets of the cemetery came up over the next hill. Pale moonrises against afternoon sky. A white battalion of a city, there at attention in the spring afternoon. The winding grind of the gravel roads, and the creeping sweetness of the earth. You could almost taste it. How they ground and squeaked, those wheels, and the horses made great splashes of gravel, and the sentinel city stood unbowing as Rollo rode in.

The little pop-ups of anemones. There was a turned-over clump of them beside the grave, standing there on their heads waiting to be patted down into turf again.

There was a yew tree grew beside an urn. Quiet of that! It made the day seem to pause.

The group tightened up around the grave. Closed solidarity of those backs again. But down on the lovely slant of hill the yew grew beside the urn and it was pleasant to wait there in the freckled shade. It ran along Bertha and mottled her into the background. It made her the color of a sparrow in a tree.

The white and listening marbles. The hill might have been a tripod and the faint throbbing of the burial service a slow rhythmic incense stealing down among the headstones.

A poet was dead.

***

Long after the carriages had crunched down along the drive again, and the hearse, lighter now, and looking silly with haste had turned cityward, Bertha stole up to the hill. The sun was gone, and in between the serried ranks of the white battalions the light was the color of sabre steel. The stars, too, had that steely aloofness of a spring day turned suddenly dead cold. They were the very early stars, Mercury, Mars and Jupiter, who love in their seasons, to edge the day.

***

The anemones were back in place. They had been patted there with the broad side of a spade. They looked broken-necked and dying. But the mound itself was raw and brown and its breath came up at you like a sigh. There was a pillow of roses at the head. An empty bed. Rollo was gone. You could sit and weep now, unashamedly.

Rollo must know by now. Everything.

***

Strange Paula. Sometimes now, she did not leave her room for a week. She played a great deal, for hours, in the whispering fashion up alone in her room. Beethoven. Brahms. More Beethoven. And sewed too. Pink wispy things that grew into a pile and then were folded away in trunks between tissue paper.

"Nutty" was Helga's frequent and succinct comment. Her eyes could seem to water at the evidences of pale finery strewn about Paula's fourth floor room. She fingered the stuffs as if they were flesh, and once Bertha walked in on her posing before Paula's dressing mirror, a web of a nightgown, with two lace butterflies poised on the shoulder straps, held up before her.

"Why shouldn't I? She's just my age. The Lord gave me the same kind of flesh. I love it, too. Anyway, she's nutty."

"You mustn't touch anything of hers!"

"Why not? She's no better than me. She thinks what I out and did. What do you think is in the mind of a girl who sits here day after day making flimsies like these, when she isn't even going to be married? She is no better with her mind than I am with my body. Only she is protected from doing what nobody gave a tinker's dam whether I done or not. This poor little nut thinks she's making a trousseau."

"Why not? Maybe she is."

"Why not? Eddie the chauffeur told me why not. There's no man. He passed out. He wasn't much of a go-getter and old Napoleon sent him down to the coffee plantations and he ate a few fever germs. It's a phony trousseau for a spooky groom. Old Napoleon knows. She comes up when the stuff gets too cluttery and packs it away herself in the trunks. Haven't you ever seen Miss Paula stare when she does it? That kid's queer. She sits up here staring at what she's missed. Sewing for what she's missed and trying to play on the piano what she's missed. Only she's protected from going out after what she's missed. That's the only difference between her being good and me bad."

"Helga, put it down. Someone is coming. Mrs. Oessetrich."

"Bertha, Miss Olga has just telephoned from her Settlement House. It is Commencement day for the girls in her Vocational Guidance Classes. Those nice girls are being graduated into full-fledged milliners. She wants the two silver punch bowls. The big car is up for repairs and Eddie has Miss Ermangarde out in the sedan. I'll have to send you down with them in a taxi."

"Yah——."

"I do believe you are up here doing Helga's sweeping for her! What are you made of? Cast iron? Helga, you shameless girl, you, letting Bertha carry your share of the work in this fashion month after month. Get down the two silver punch bowls, Bertha. Never mind, Helga, I'll put away those pink things of Miss Paula's. The idea, Bertha up here doing your sweeping for you. Doing the work for two. What is that girl made of? Sometimes, I wonder...."

***

The Vocational Guidance House on Christie Street had no trade entrance. Only a neat front door, painted red. It stood open, and it was all that Bertha could do to wedge in sidewise with the outlandish bulge of her punch bowls.

The door to the left of the bare hallway was also open. What had once been two parlors of a private residence were thrown into one. It made a sort of small lecture hall, with a platform at one end and rows of camp chairs facing it. An American flag covered one wall and there were white Swiss window curtains and geraniums in bright blue pots and over the platform the usual engraved, "Opening of the First Continental Congress" and "Franklin before the House of Lords."

Odor of embalmed philanthropy.

There were three rows of girls seated on the platform. Latin-looking faces beneath smooth, tamed hair and their young bodies seeming to flicker under the prisons of the neat blue skirts and white shirtwaists.

Blazing absence of blazing neckerchiefs and of blazing skirts. Doused Carmens.

An audience with firm, dry, Anglo-Saxon lips sat along the camp chairs and stared up at them. The safe, trained little Carmens who used toothbrushes and knew now, with an Anglo-Saxon finality, that a rose between the lips was not a rose at all, but lechery. Olga Oessetrich was speaking from the platform.

It was easy to hear through the open doorway. Olga's voice was so clear. As clear as her face with the hair worn smoothly away from it. As clear as her hands, white square hands that came out boldly from the mannish cuffs.

It was pleasant just to stand there and peer over the great protruding armful of bowls. Olga, who when she came to the house, only sat about with her long indolent legs crossed and watched the smoke of her cigarette with her eyes like slits, here now, eager, and talking down into those careful-lipped faces with a fine young fervor.

Every so often a little patter of hand-clapping broke through and then she stood and waited, her arms folded across her flat boyish bosom and her glance sure as a shot down into her audience.

And then the girls with the Latin faces and the bodies like the quiver of flame began to pass one by one for the tubes of white paper that were bound with red ribbon. Olga handing them, one to each, from the pyramid of them upon the table. Each girl as she passed stood for a moment in the little area of Olga's words, flushed, and then sat down to applause. Slim sapling girls with smooth hair and stiff cuffs like Olga's. Oh, how you wanted to think it was fine ... all the doused Carmens....

Suddenly Bertha moved forward, so that her head protruded in. Olga's voice and the face of one of the thin sapling girls were so clear....

"... this young woman need feel no embarrassment as I dwell upon these facts of her early childhood. She is a glory to our institution, and those of you who have endowed us so generously in the past may well look upon this girl with a kind of pride that will inspire you to endow us still more generously in the future.

"Some gracious maternal scheme of things threw her into our midst at the age of fourteen. She has developed from the pinched little undersized waif she then was into a young woman who is prepared to take up her place in the world with dignity and self-respect.

"Chita Migulchi, I have the honor to award you the first honorable mention in your class and a diploma which registers you at our industrial bureau as a graduate milliner of the Christie Street Vocational Guidance School for Girls."

Chita! Chita! You wanted to cry, your throat was so warm and full. Little Chita with the Jocko eyes, but her face smooth now and the lovely pallor of nun's veiling. The well-brushed sheen of her hair. It was hard not to cry with the warmness and fullness. It pressed up against the eyeballs and made them dim. You kept pushing open the door ... Chita....

That made a draught and someone wanted the door closed. It swung to with a little nick. It left you standing in the hall, which had grown very dark, hugging those preposterous punch-bowls and groping your way toward the basement kitchen.

***

There was something about Ermangarde's smile that glinted. She did it with her lips closed and with the merest lifting of their corners. It was a cold ray of a smile, that made you think of pale-flanked little fish swimming snugly under ice. Her open laugh never came through any more. She smiled constantly, but with her lips in their rigid icicle. You were conscious of the warm white young teeth behind them, but they never lit up her inscrutability. Sometimes her mother regarded her with small, bright, cockatoo eyes.

"Ermangarde, you are pale. A good tonic is what you need. Liver, probably."

"Oh no, Mother."

"Nothing to be ashamed of. We all have them."

"Don't worry about mine, Mother."

"Your father used to say that, too. But I found it more expedient to worry about his liver than about the execrable bad temper that could result from its moodiness."

"Your panacea for all mortal ills, Mother, the liver its limitations."

"Of course. Meaning that yours is the immortal ill. I am not so sure that my despised little liver pill is not best sort of cure for lovesickness too. Puppy-lovesickness."

"Mother!"

"Great pouting girl like you. Why, you should be on your knees for thankfulness that you found the fellow out in time. You have been jilted, only you haven't the sound judgment to know it. And here you are, eating out your heart because——'

"Mother, if you discuss it, I'll leave the house—I can't stand it——"

"I am no more eager to discuss it than you are. But you are sallow and you are enigmatic and you are dull. The few hours a day that you spend at home are depressing for the entire household, and, while we are on the subject, you have been seen here and there with Ewald. You are meeting him in public places. Now it must stop. He's a married man and was coming to this house with his wife, Helene Craig, when you were in rompers. It's disgusting and vulgar, and if it continues I shall call him up at his club and forbid him...."

The little icicle smile of Ermangarde's was out.

"Don't forbid any more, Mother. I wouldn't, really."

"You're a sour, enigmatic girl," repeated Mrs. Oessetrich. "The world is yours. You have youth, wealth, and position, but instead of taking advantage of your great opportunities, you sit on the edge of them and mourn for the loss of something that you never owned."

"You mean for the loss of something that you never permitted me to own, Mother."

"Oh, how weary I am of the exactions of my faultfinding daughters. I must be younger than they, in spirit at least, because they all treat me in a fashion that makes me feel juvenile and incorrigible. Family ties and the vulgar wranglings of the household! I wish I were like the cook in my kitchen, free to——"

"You couldn't be like—her, Mother."

"What?"

"Oh—nothing."

***

The war years plunged in. The city turned the sallow green of khaki. Regiments poured through the streets. Flashing impersonal rows of animated scissors. Farm boys with callouses deep in their hands, marching off, to war on farm boys they had never seen. Great oxygen tanks of patriotism, generated in a hurry, gushed out volatile and inflammable from coast to coast. The phrase "Safe for Democracy" began to jiggle like electric signs before bewildered eyes. Dizzy with its euphony, men fell into regimental step. Thousands and thousands of scissors of them. The whole thing began to swing into a horrible motion like the slow acceleration of a voodoo dance.

Envoys crossed word-swords and all the little men began to run, and the red threads of high-sounding idealisms and patriotism to come out in eyeballs. The inflamed voodoo dance around the cauldron brewed on the table of paternal governments began to grow....

That was the way the men went off to war, riveted with that paternal eye and inflamed with the generated oxygen, the generated phrases, and the generated idealism.

Sometimes they passed the house. Regiments of them. They were so young. Lean flanked. Time and time again Bertha drew down the sashes against their passing. Tramp. Tramp. Tramp-tramp-tramp. It was a horrible rhythm. The willy-nilly young men, steaming up hate.

Olga was in khaki, too. It gave her the sleek flatness of a fowl. Where the expensive tweeds had been clumsy, the khaki lay slick. Slanting shoulders, neat at the armholes and a pat little hat. It made her busy and important, all the hating. She drove a small khaki-colored ambulance around town. Everywhere. She was very earnest.

The world safe for democracy. The little women without sons began to bustle so. The sudden splendidness of making the world safe for democracy. It made you as important as you were in your own home, on general cleaning day. Sweaters to be sorted. Chocolates to be stacked in boxes and addressed for overseas. Sandwiches to be cut for canteens. Chest protectors to be stitched in the name of democracy.

Olga ran her ambulance with her lips straight and her eyes probing ahead and stern. The zeal of the women. Democracy. Sandwiches to be cut. Chocolates to be stacked. Tramp. Tramp. Tramp-tramp-tramp.

There was a portrait of Beethoven hung in the dining room.

"Take it down, Bertha," said Olga.

Paula cried, as Bertha, steadied on a ladder by Olga, unhooked it from its moulding.

"That's absurd, Olga. What has Beethoven to do with this horrible fighting?"

"War is war."

"Exactly. War is only war. A matter of nations. Art transcends war. Art is the language of God and war is the barking of men. Beethoven is bigger than war. Next year there may be a new war and we may be in league with the very nation we are hating now. Wars change. Beethoven is eternal."

"Easy there, Bertha. Let me hoist. There!"

"Olga—don't——"

"Paula, don't be absurd! How can I ask those boys who are going overseas to walk into my mother's house with that picture hanging on the wall? Have you no patriotism?"

"No. Not that kind."

"You talk like a pacifist!"

"Perhaps—I am."

"Paula!"

"If it means loathing war sufficiently to bear the unpleasant brunt of being branded a coward, I suppose I am a pacifist. Yes, I am a pacifist! I loathe all this blind rushing pell-mell into a struggle arranged by the mighty minority and paid for with the lives of young men who are drugged on trumped-up ideals. I loathe war which destroys the internationalism of art for the puny nationalism of men. The maimed bodies aren't the worst. That's the easy way to hate war. The safe way. I—hate it just as much for the maimed souls that stay at home—to whom the noise of military brass bands is louder than the music of Beethoven."

"Paula, you are merely stupid and sentimental, but just the same those are dangerous, disloyal utterances. You're not well. Go upstairs to your music. I expect some service men here this afternoon for tea and dancing in the drawing-room. Don't make me ashamed to bring them into this house. Bertha, take that picture upstairs into the storeroom."

"Olga!"

"Paula, I know you're not well. But please, dear, never talk like that, even among ourselves. Do you realize that what you said, even though it may be partially true, makes you a traitor? A traitor to your country. Paula—look at me—a traitor——"

The word bit in like a little asp. All the way up to the storeroom, slanting the picture along the narrow stairways, it stung across Bertha's silence.

Paula, who loved Beethoven and wept his lyricism softly along the keys. Paula, who loved Beethoven more than she could hate anything or anybody. Paula a traitor?

***

Barney, the private night watchman, liked Helga. You knew it by her new slanting and birdwise look. For a long time there had been something shy about her. New silences. She was sweeter about the dull evenings tucked up there under the slant of roof. Sometimes she sewed and smiled or, if Paula was playing, let her head fall back against the chair and her mouth drop open softly. On warm nights, she stole out on the rear stoop for whispering moments with Barney as he passed on his rounds, and on snowy nights, the kitchen range was kept banked a little more than usual. But even after she had gone upstairs for the bit of sewing or to lie back lulled to the weaving of Paula's music, she always slid forward a bit on her chair to the knocking of the night stick. One. Two. Three. Slid forward with the lifted, eager look. Then Bertha knew. The silences were so telltale. Helga, who could suddenly sit neat-lipped and rather inscrutable all evening, and then wear the little smile to bed. It was hard not to tremble for that smile. You trembled more for it than for the garrulous bitterness.

Only once in a while there was a flash in the pan of the old Helga.

In winter she had to snatch her visits with Barney, whispering with him in the kitchen, the ugly gray dish cloth drying across the pan and the great blob of brown soap still soft and smelling from riding greasy water.

"Having to sit company with a fellow like Barney in somebody's kitchen! There never was a girl didn't want a place where she could punch up a few sofa pillows and turn on a pink lamp. A self-respecting man like Barney, and me with no place to entertain him but next to the kitchen sink. A real honest-to-goodness man like him."

Barney was like that. Honest to goodness. A scrub of rough red Irish hair. Enormous hands that fiddled with his hat. Bright blue eyes with wrinkled lids that he batted for all he was worth, and when he laughed his entire face focused in toward the center, until it looked like a shirred rosette.

And Barney could make Helga laugh. Jerky, immature laughter and one night, when she had her head thrown back in merriment at one of his slow overgrown antics, he put out a shy big hand and touched her softly on the neck where it arched.

"You're like a little bird, there," he said.

She was broody after that and Bertha found her crying the next morning, because Mrs. Oessetrich had her at cleaning some high and difficult pantry shelves that aggravated the chronic pain she had in her side, and Bertha did them for her and later that same day she cried because she broke a porcelain bowl and Bertha took that brunt for her and that evening, upstairs in the pocket of the fourth floor back room, she broke out.

"Barney—likes—me."

"Yah——"

"What do you think he says to me the other night, Bertha, and touched me here—soft on my neck. 'You're like a little bird there'—I likta died, I wish I hadda——."

"Helga——."

"He's got an old woman. His mother. Eighty-eight. Keeps house for him. I know what's in the back of his head same as if I could see in. He don't come out and say it, but he keeps hinting. Wants to take me there. Wants his old woman to see me before she passes on. The way he said that one thing to me. 'You're like a little bird there.' I likta died. I wish I hadda——"

"No—no——"

"Yes! I could land Barney. He's just waiting until his old woman passes on. I could land him, but I wouldn't! A man like Barney to happen to me. Got him hook and bait. And what do I do? Unhook him and throw him back into the pond. That's being white, ain't it, Bertha?

"Yes—Helga——"

***

The boys kept marching. You had to stop at street corners to let them tramp past. Tramp. Tramp. Tramp-tramp-tramp.

You scrubbed floors to that rhythm. You breathed in your sleep to it. And the boys with the wide clean faces and the calloused hands stalked and stalked, made drunk with the sudden ecstasy of being a foe. It made the leap in the dark a thing of glory ... that spat of shot ... across the eyes....

Every week Olga held canteen in her mother's gold and brocade drawing-room. Rugs were dragged back. Furniture stacked, planks spread from chair-back to chair-back and then piled with pyramids of sandwiches and mounds of salad stuck all over with small American flags. There was a victrola for dancing.

Helga could carve charming sandwiches. Little hearts and spades and diamond-shaped ones made in layers. The boys gobbled them at one mouthful. But sometimes, when the pain in her side was gnawing from the hours of slicing and buttering and stacking, she made plain, square, ragged ones and Olga was cross.

Olga! Life spun for her those war months and for the little group of drab-clad girls who came to help on canteen days. The eager, hating girls. It was thrilling to hate! Thrilling to feed these wide-faced, clean-faced boys the catnip. It made them heroic and gay and debonair and careless, and full of a very fine fervor for fighting that foe unknown and that foe unseen. It made the fine, high-sounding war phrases shine.

It was easier somehow to hate, and to want to fight, with all of the machinery for making the world safe for democracy so busily in motion. The making of the gas masks. The measuring of the chest expansion. The cutting of the sandwiches. The wearing of the puttees.

If you were a farm hand with those hands still callous from the plow, and every night had slept in the socks and under-drawers that you worked in by day, and all your youth had flung forkfuls of fertilizer out over fields and spat in ditches while you dug them, oh it was stirring and exciting suddenly to be fed the heart-shaped sandwiches, one to a bite, and to be danced with by all the Olgas, whose hands were white caresses and whose eyes adored. It made you long for a thousand thousand foes and a thousand thousand hates.

Busy days for Olga and the thousands of eager girls in the service, who were wearing becoming khaki and beating the tom-tom of the war dance.

Sixteen months of it and on the seventeenth Olga, her eyes high with strange new fires, sailed on a transport.

It was all very simple. She bounced in one day with a jangle of the keys to her studio, while Mrs. Oessetrich and Paula were at lunch. A solemn little meal. Mrs. Oessetrich, with the editorial page of the morning Times propped up against her tumbler, and eating, in her pecksniffy fashion, short quick forkfuls of an omelette soufflé. Paula, whose blue eyes were so languid, almost a little stagnant now, as if something in them had jammed and could not seem to flow on.

"Well, 'Tilda, I've popped in for good-bys. We're sailing sometime between now and midnight."

Mrs. Oessetrich swallowed her portion of omelet, and brushed her mouth with her napkin as a man would. Two ways.

"Well, that's that," she said, and pushed back from the table.

"That's that, Mrs. Oessetrich," repeated Olga, and smiled at her with the eyes with the bonfires in them and whipped a cigarette out of a soft pack of them in her khaki pocket and drew up a chair beside the table and crossed her long legs and drew a puff of smoke.

"Have some lunch?"

"No thanks, Mother."

"Umph."

"Say, Mother, I think you're immense." Olga's eyes were round when she said that, with cockatoo rims to them exactly like Mrs. Oessetrich's. They made her very much her mother's daughter.

"I suppose you feared a sloppy mess. Well don't worry, if I have tears to shed I won't prepare to shed them now."

"I'll write often."

"I suppose this is where I should break in with the usual instructions from moron mothers to moron offspring. 'Keep your feet dry.'"

"Don't you love it, Paula? Isn't she great?"

"And there is no use crossing a submarine until you come to it."

"Here's the key to the studio, 'Tilda. You won't mind, dear, keeping the lease for me. It's only a hundred a month."

"I hate waste."

"I know, dear, but it's such a mess, subletting."

"Very well. Give me the keys."

"Where's Ermangarde?"

"Out."

"Oh."

"Take good care of yourself, Paula. Now—now—please—no waterworks!"

"You know—my sentiments—Olga——."

"Yes, and the true pacifist drops his lamb's clothing in time of war."

"Not the true one. The weak one. He drops it because it is so much easier to fight than not to fight——"

"You're sick, darling. Take care of her, 'Tilda. Good-by, Helga. See that you don't elope with Barney before I get back and don't be a sly one and shove off all your chores on to Bertha. We know your system."

Mrs. Oessetrich stood up very straight, as if there were a rod up her back, and her eyes were sharp and darting and as dry as shoe buttons.

"Hurry, girl."

"Good-by, Bertha, you old Rock of Gibraltar. It helps somehow, knowing you're here—on the job. You—whoever you are—so long—old Bertha."

"Good-by—Miss Olga."

"Well, Mathilde, Paula—old dears—tell Ermie good-by and to cut out the Ewald nonsense. It's disgusting. My bags are out in the taxi. The meter will click me out of house and home. So long, dears. Everybody. You know the address. American Expeditionary Forces. Paris—S'long...."

It was very silent, and for every mouthful of tea poor Paula swallowed a great vein came out in her neck. Her omelet and editorial finished, Mrs. Oessetrich rose and following her custom, carried the few crumbs in her lap into the conservatory to shake them into the aquarium.

"Order the car for three, Bertha."

But it was almost five when Mrs. Oessetrich emerged finally from her room. Eddie started up from a doze at the wheel as she swept out.

"Where, Madam?"

"Oh—why—just drive."

Her eyes were very shiny and the cockatoo rims quite pink. And Bertha had to run out after her with her handkerchief, which she had forgotten.

***

Ermangarde had not returned by nine that evening, but a messenger brought a letter. Bertha carried it into Mrs. Oessetrich, who was sitting alone in the drawing-room, tapping her foot. The high chandelier flooded the room through crystal. Once in a while a prism clicked.

"For me?"

"Yah—a letter."

"Dear Mother," it read, "by the time you receive this note Ewald and I will be on a steamer bound for somewhere sunny. There is nothing to feel concerned about. We are very happy and are going into this thing with our eyes open.

"Ermangarde."

The old, the terrible, the shoe button eyes of Mrs. Oessetrich. When she raised them to Bertha, they lay shattered in her head, broken there as if they had been drilled through and had cracked in a thousand directions.

"Bertha—Bertha—lend me your strength—Bertha—you—where——"

She fainted out stiffly, like a doll. To revive her, you held her very closely and very warmly to your heart, until its beating seemed to beat into her.

The house stood in a great silent yawn. You found yourself tiptoeing through the halls, and the front shades had not been raised, except for general cleaning, in months. Paula played a great deal, but in the whispering fashion, so that if you took your pan of potatoes up to the top of the back stairs and sat there in the gloom to peel them, and to listen, half the time all you heard was the little sing to the silence.

Mrs. Oessetrich drove Olga's little fawn-colored ambulance now. She wore the khaki-colored uniform, too, only where Olga had looked jaunty, she looked stocky. Her waist curved in so and the jacket strained at the armholes. The natty little service hat, too, sat up too high on her head. You suspected some sort of an elastic-band attachment so that if she attempted to remove it, pop, it would snap back like a vaudeville comedian's.

She drove like one possessed. Meeting transports. Carrying supplies. Skiddering across the city at all hours on all missions. The von Schlegels still came to occasional dinners and Madam Gerbhardt rather forlornly, with Ermangarde absent, for Saturday luncheon.

Mrs. Oessetrich dined in uniform. Sometimes a summons came and she rushed off during the meal. There was never a moment of the day that found her passive. She tore ahead of the hours as if they were wolves and their breathing was on her neck, and all day long the relentless jangle jangle of her at the telephone. It ran along your nerves. It pricked you into a frenzy. Jangle. Jangle.

"Hello, Bertha. I'm at a pier in Hoboken. Tell Helga I want the pair of Sevres urns in the drawing-room washed in warm suds and polished. And don't let me discover that you have done it for her. If—if that letter—or cable—if anything that looks like a message from Miss Ermangarde should come, you can reach me in the next hour at the Service Station—no, never mind, I'll call up again."

But that letter or cablegram never came.

More and more the lean, quick, waiting look of a bird came out in Mrs. Oessetrich and more and more, Paula, who drifted, almost it seemed without footsteps, down to her meals and then back again to her piano and the soft silent sewing of the pink things, came to have the look of sleeping with her eyes wide open, and more and more frequently her mother shot out at her with the "Paula, wake up. Don't stare that way. It makes you look positively silly."

Then one day Bertha stumbled across her in the musty store-room, seated on the floor beside the Beethoven picture, twaddling over it. Poor Paula, her eyes had the tranced look and she was whispering to it, a little sillily.

***

The way that Helga happened to break one of the beautiful Sevres urns the day she was put to rinsing them was because in the very act of lifting it from its pedestal, she fell screaming and twisting with the pain in her side. There seemed to be no way to unlock her of the rigid convulsion there on the floor. Paula came creeping down to her cries and could only stand horrified. Helga writhing on the floor and beating off Bertha. Finally, there was nothing left to do but call in the nearest doctor. At five o'clock Helga was bundled off to a public hospital in an ambulance. At six she was successfully operated upon for appendicitis.

It was strange being up there alone again in the room under the rafters. The silence flowed back and all the little sounds and sings and noises stole out of their corners and seemed to sit about like tame mice on their haunches.

***

Helga lay in a ward, but there was a screen around her cot and a bride had sent her altar flowers to be distributed in the hospital, and there was a fan of white hyacinth on a table, and the afternoon that Mrs. Oessetrich and Paula came, they brought the inevitable and innocuous jar of calves' foot jelly, and that glowed like a drug store urn on the snowlit window sill.

The pretty Helga. Two days after the operation her cheeks began to pinken and the nurse brushed and braided her brown hair over each shoulder and out came the frail, fine, small-boned look.

She loved the warm, clean cot and the smell of hyacinth even through the iodoform and the luxury of waking only to coddle over again cozily on her good side, and when Bertha came to see her and remained all of Thursday afternoon, she had the proprietary air of the convalescent.

"See that good-looking fellow in glasses? He's my doctor. I'd give a dime to know if he's married. Say, look around the screen at that little blonde one three cots down. The one with the green circles under her eyes. That kid—poor kid—what does she do? Getting over an appendix and spry as I am. Nothing to get well for. Cries out some fellow's name all through the ether. What does she do? Last night while the nurse wasn't looking, climbs out barefoot on that little balcony, gives herself a snow bath and swallows a pneumonia bug or two. Dyin'. Say, it's a great life. See that ell over there. Maternity ward. Kid born there fresh every hour. Ought to see. Ever see a maternity ward?"

"Me—yah——"

"The interne, he's a little gone on me if anybody should ask you. He lugged one over to-day for me to see. Three hours old. Ever see a little hard-boiled beet of a kid three hours old?"

"Yah——"

"I want a white one. White as my hands. Look at them, Bertha. Three days in bed and that snow out there on the balcony has nothing on them for whiteness. You don't mind yours that way, do you, Bertha?"

"How?"

"Horny."

"Horny?"

"You're like one of those war tanks, you are. Pushing right on over the barbed wire fences without letting them even scratch you. That's because you're all on the inside of yourself. Like your body was just an ulster."

"Don't roll so, Helga. The wound...."

"That ain't the worst. I got what they call on the soap box speeches in Union Square, a social sore. And they bring me calves' foot jelly for it. There's a laugh for you, old tombstone! I got a social sore and they bring me calves' foot jelly for it...."

But the following Sunday when Bertha arrived she was a very subdued Helga.

"He's coming at four."

"Who?"

"Barney. I didn't ask him, Bertha. Didn't even know he knew I was here. I got a postal. You must have told him."

"He kept asking."

"I wouldn't have sent for him. If his old woman was to pass on to-morrow and—and he wanted me, I'd never do it to him—that's something, ain't it, Bertha? I want him. I could have him. He would never find out. He wouldn't understand if I tried to tell him. To him fire don't cleanse—it only scars after you've been through it."

"Yah. Barney is not a wise man. He is yoost a—good man——"

"That just about says it."

"Yah——"

"What are you staring at?"

"I—why you, Helga. You're pretty."

"This nightgown. So coarse! I'm a fright in it. They give them to you like that in the wards. Ugh—and him coming at four. Bertha—would you——"

"What?"

"It's a long trip back to the house, but up in our room, there's a box of some of my little things. I keep it hid. There's no telling when a girl's room can get pried into. There's a little box of my things up on top of the wardrobe. You can reach up and feel for it if you get on a chair. He's—coming at four."

"But Helga, I thought——"

"I want to deck myself out, so anyways he'll know what he's missing—I hate him seeing me like this. All he's ever seen of me is around ugly kitchen things, in ugly kitchen duds. Bertha—if I could just have those few things to deck myself out in when Barney comes. As long as he's going to lose me, he might as well think I'm worth losing. Will you go—Bertha—will you——?"

"Yah——"

The package was behind the wooden frill of the wardrobe. Reaching for it was a difficult tiptoe process that made the chair wobble, and a shower of old dust came down on the shoulders of Bertha's reefer. Hurrying down the steep rear staircase, Mrs. Oessetrich popped out a sudden head.

"That you, Bertha?"

"Yah——"

"I thought you were gone for the afternoon."

"I came back for a minute."

"Did you go to see Helga?"

"Yah——"

"How is she?"

"Better."

"Do you think she will be well in time to be back for the dinner to my Ambulance Corps? It's a great nuisance getting help from the agencies."

"Yah—maybe——"

"You are going out again?"

"Yah—I——"

"Of course, it's your afternoon, but the von Schlegels are coming to tea and it would help if you would stay in and——"

"I cannot—to-day——."

"Oh very well. I dislike asking favors as much as I dislike being denied them. What's that you are carrying?"

"A box."

"That is rather self-evident, but what is in it?"

"Some—oh—I don't know."

"Bertha, I have never known you to be impertinent."

"Mrs. Oessetrich, I am not."

"Very well. If you prefer not to tell me I suppose that technically it is none of my affair. But even with a trusted servant I cannot seem to get over my aversion to seeing packages carted out of my house. Of course with you it's different, but just the same I dislike it. Hurry along, then."

For some reason, taking that long crosstown walk back to the Tenth Avenue Hospital, Bertha's cheeks and eyeballs and the hand that clutched the box began to burn.

***

Helga's eyes were too bright. She threw herself about the cot while she waited and when Bertha returned, she was all thumbs at the package and when the knot would not untie, she lay back against the pillow and began to cry.

"I'm too weak. Help me, Bertha. I give myself the cotton-flannel horrors in this hospital sack. Fortheluvvaga don't stand gaping. It's only silk and it won't bite."

"Helga!"

"Helga what? Helga what?"

There was nothing to do then but to lift out the filmy white crepe gown with the rill of French Valenciennes, and slide it on to Helga. She came up out of it like a flower, her neck and arms suddenly lovely under the shy mesh of the lace. There was another gown just as sheer in the box and oddments and ends of ribbon and trinkety bits of jewelry, and the nurse helped, too, and tied a bandeau of ribbon on Helga's hair and fluffed up the pillows and finally there was something very doll-like about her as she lay back tiredly.

"Dig down in the corner of the box there, Bertha, right-hand corner, there's a little rose quartz pin will look sweet on this lace. If there's one thing I love it's rose quartz, it's the color of a girl's cheeks."

"Oh, Helga—Helga——"

"'Oh Helga, Helga' what? I know what you're thinking. Well you're wrong. Maybe this stuff of mine dates back to—well, you know the days it dates back to—and maybe you don't. And what if what you are thinking is right? Well, what if it is? McMurty——"

"I—don't know—what I'm thinking, Helga."

"I want him to see me once, the color of something lovely instead of something reeking of brown soap. Give me that rose quartz. It's the color of a girl's cheeks and that's the color Barney's entitled to."

Barney came. He was shy about coming around the cot-side of the screen and stood outside twirling his hat until the nurse, who had directed him, had to come all the way down the ward again and steer him in, and even then he could not be brought to approach the cot, advancing one step and retreating two, his great figure in bulky civilian clothing, exhaling the cold snow smell of outdoors. The red of his face ran up under the red of his hair and mustache. He jutted it out fiercely and then sucked it in again.

"Look, Bertha, he's scared of me."

Persiflage and poor Barney. It fuddled him and made him blink.

"Look, Bertha, he's afraid I'm a doll in a box."

"It's snowing for proper," he said. "Just came up now in a flurry."

He had a voice that shook things when he spoke. The spoon in the medicine glass trembled. Helga laughed at it and cried right into the laugh and licked off a tear with the little pink adder of her tongue.

"Howdy—Barney."

"You do look like a doll in the box—laying there."

"I'll be going," said Bertha.

"Don't you be going," he said, "We'll be wanting you," and sat down in the creaky edge of a chair there beside the cot and drew off his leather mitts and unwound his muffler and blew on his hands. And blew and blew.

"You're better, ain't you, Helga?"

She raised her bare arm in a half wreath over her head.

"Lots you care."

He blew and he blew.

"I couldn't come before, Helga. I been in trouble. Sit down, Bertha, we'll be needing you. My old woman died, Helga. Dead and buried this day week."

"I better be going," said Bertha.

"Wait, you, Big One. You know how to help...."

"What?"

He leaned over to touch Helga shyly, where her throat throbbed.

"I want to carry her off from here. Home. There's bedside weddings. I've read of a many of them. To-morrow, Bertha, we'll do the fixings. Helga?"

Helga lay so white and still. You could almost see the heart of her seem to stir the rill of the Valenciennes. And her eyes were closed and the brown braids lay in ropes against her pallor.

"Helga?"

"I better be going," said Bertha.

Outside it was snowing in sudden loose flakes that spat you roundly on the cheek. It snowed up in merry little geysers. Slantwise and down your neck. The whole street blew forward like the frilled petticoat of a frantic lady. Your hat. Your heart. Your breathing. The wind lashed at them so and froze the tears to your cheeks....

***

Something had happened. The screen stood huddled closely about the cot. A white interne came out with a tank. Oxygen. An electric bulb on a flexible stand was bent away from the bed, so that its light flowed down into a pool on the floor. There was a cruel rasping noise against the grain of the silence. It made you cold all over like the jerking back of a hangnail against the direction of the flesh. You stood outside the screen and listened and trembled. The noise was Helga, breathing.

There was something on the chair. It rose and fell. It was Barney's back as he sat by the cot side, all curved forward with his great empty hands between his knees and his eyes like empty cups.

The pink was gone from Helga's face. It was as if some one had held up a transparent finger before a candle and then blown out the flame. The laxness of the hand. It hung down like a lily on a broken stalk. After a time the dead old eyes of Barney swung toward the drift of hand. But without seeing. He only looked. Crowded hurting corner, filled with the little gale of Helga's breathing. The curve of Barney. That twisted neck of the lamp and the bulb that glared to the floor.

"What is it?" said Bertha.

"Pneumonia," said the nurse, and put Helga's hand back under the coverlet as you would a flower or a letter.

"Oh—Helga."

"She was coming along so nicely. She must have become delirious suddenly during the night. The second case of the kind in this ward in one week. They found her out there in that little balcony standing in the snow. Just in her flimsy nightdress. Barefoot. She must have been very sly about it. The night nurse had scarcely turned her back. I've never had a patient do it on me. Let me touch wood. Of course, they all say that I'm not only careful, I'm fanatical. It's double pneumonia. Of course some do rally, but—poor child—you're her nearest relative—or friend——."

"Me? Yes, I guess."

"You can stay and wait if you want."

"Yah—please."

"Has she ever been a mental case?"

"How?"

"A nervous history, I mean."

"Why I—dunno."

"It must have been sudden insanity or hysteria caused her to find her way out to that balcony. Second case in one week. I always say ward patients should be kept in ignorance of such accidents. Dangers of auto-suggestion."

"Oh, Helga—Helga——"

The white rose leaves of Helga's eyelids. One of them seemed to Bertha to crinkle at one corner.

Barney beat his big hands loosely together as they hung between his knees. His big hands. His empty hands.

She seemed to know with her smile that he was there. It lit once toward him and she tried to reach out her hand, but it just drifted along the bedside and hung loose, and he kissed it and put it back under the coverlet as if it were a small dead bird.

"Oh God," cried Barney in his voice that seemed to have the mustache growing right on it. "There's no meaning to your wisdom. That talk is bunk."

"Yes, there is—meaning—somewhere——"

"To you maybe, Big One, but not to me...."

"Maybe."

At dawn Helga began to slip away. She tried to keep the little thread of the smile on her lips but such a foolish sniveling thing was happening.

The years were like water surging her backward.

It was at Mrs. Farley's and she was coming down one cold morning, adjusting the criss-cross straps to her apron and tasting her lips as if they were bitter.

"Fortheluvvaga" was the last thing Helga said before she died. "Warmed-over oatmeal again. This oleo is strong enough to walk. Give me a snack of little Lord Fauntrollo's sweet butter—Bertha——"

***

The boys kept marching. Barney, who was forty, came to say good-by. It was odd to see him. Barney, who was forever bringing all the stray cats on his beat to the back-door for the leavings. Sometimes there were three or four of them standing around him, with hopeful vertical tails and meouwing up into his face. His brick-red, open fireplace of a face. Barney, all bristling now with new phrases which he wore as cockily as his puttees. "To hell with the Kaiser. Dirty Huns."

To hate was not so different from to love. Barney had discovered that. Only it was difficult to steam up the hate. Tramp. Tramp. Tramp-tramp-tramp. It was strange to see him with his fine square back and the curving seams, walking off down the street after the good-by. His shoulders were very ferocious looking and pedestrians made little respectful detours to pass him. Barney, fine and fighty and hating enough to be patriotic.

***

Even Bertha bought a Liberty Bond. When Mrs. Oessetrich was not driving the ambulance she stood on the steps of the Treasury Building or the Public Library and sold Liberty Bonds and collected Red Cross funds. A stretcher was laid along the sidewalk. The money rained down on it. Give. Give. More stretchers for more maimed bodies. And the frightening part of it was that you gave. Gave because the piece of cheesecloth bunting snapping in the breeze made your eyes hot and your heart hot. Bertha gave. It was hard for her to pass one of the stretcher things and not drop a coin. The terrible futility of those marching little scissors-like men. You knew it deep down in your heart and hated the hating.

Bertha could sometimes sit upstairs in her room, big and bitter and inarticulate with it. Paula, who never played any more, since the Beethoven. Olga, gorging the little scissors men with the aniseed cakes of stultification. Barney, who was tender to kittens, marching away with the places for cartridges corrugated along his belt. Mrs. Oessetrich baiting in the public square. And yet the bunting. It made your tonsils tighten. So hating the hate, Bertha gave. Dropped the twenty-five cent pieces on to the stretchers, that there might be more stretchers, and bought a one-hundred-dollar Liberty Bond.

Bertha with her Liberty Bond. It was engraved on tough beautiful paper and scrolled like a bank note. Sometimes she sat and looked at it with her lips a little finicky and folded back from her white square teeth. A wise old Chinese smile. Even the delirious, banging day of the Armistice the smile persisted. The faces of all the little hurrying, scurrying people were so merely guzzled. So merely victorious. An oppressor had been laid. But somehow you trembled. Old hates for new....

***

There was no evading it. Paula's queerness. For two weeks there had been no way to induce her to leave the fourth-floor room. She clung to it like a bit of ash blonde moss. It seemed to embarrass Mrs. Oessetrich, this timid, this astonishing, this not quite rational tenacity of Paula's. She hated even Bertha's knowing it and what went on between mother and daughter usually happened behind closed doors. Paula sat on her little sewing-chair and just faced her parent when she coaxed and cajoled and threatened, and would not be pried out. It was dreadful for Mrs. Oessetrich. Placed her rather in the position of luring a wild bird out of ambush with crumbs. Once she even tried to force her, but Paula's teeth went together with a click and her fingers clenched down around the seat of the chair, and frail little Paula, who looked as if Fra Lippo Lippi had painted her; frail Paula who loved Chopin and the miniature melodies of Mozart, there was no budging her. Not so much as an inch. She gritted her teeth and sat. Just sat.

Bertha used to tiptoe in with her meals. She would eat for Bertha. But sometimes it took an hour. Spoonful by spoonful of the broths that were tilted up against her teeth, and then the slow difficult gulps of muffin or of shredded meat. They were the hardest. She had a way of looking at Bertha over the top of the spoon. Those eyes would hang in Bertha's darkness. Disks of hot blue light.

Something of a sequence was taking place in Paula's aching brain. That was the plain fact that was so embarrassing to her mother.

First the trousseau things. Then the yards of maline veiling which she would pin to her hair and let trail off behind. Mrs. Oessetrich burned the veil one night in the furnace so that the house smelled with it.

And now Paula's sewings for the hours and hours in the little chair were all doll size. Baby things. It made the red fly up into Mrs. Oessetrich's face, and behind the carefully locked door, she went into long, low-voiced pleading conferences with Paula.

But it was no use. The piano remained closed and day after day Paula sat and sewed the small things.

Dr. Ehrenfest came. She only laughed at him, her large blue eyes seeming almost to cover her face and at the slightest approach in her direction, her hands locking down over the sides of the chair.

Down in the drawing-room, over the tea things that Bertha was spreading, Dr. Ehrenfest kept stroking his slim point of beard.

"Well, 'Tilda, let us face our facts."

"I have never been the one to dodge them, Ehrey."

"I think the only thing to do right now is to call in Lauer on this case."

"Dr. Emil Lauer the—the——."

"Yes. The neurologist."

"Then Paula is——."

"It may be only a temporary neurosis. But right now, Lauer is our man. He has that splendid place out at Hill's End. It may be just what Paula needs."

"You mean——"

"His sanitarium. I consider it one of the best in the country."

"Don't mince words with me, Ehrey. Dr. Lauer's place is a private asylum."

"I can't see that calling a spade a bludgeon helps matters."

"I hate minced facts. I can swallow my dose undiluted."

"Well, then, I want a psychopathist like Lauer in on Paula's case."

"All right. All right. I'll have another lump, Bertha. All right."

But her face seemed to shrink, the cheeks to recede, leaving the frontal part with its avian thrust even more leanly forward.

"I've seen it coming. 'Tilda, since——"

"Since Harrison, of course, you mean."

"You cannot suppress every normal instinct in a high-strung girl like Paula and expect——"

"Harrison was not the man for her. He proved it by what happened subsequently."

"What happened subsequently might not have occurred if——"

"Suppressed desires, Freudian pish. Paula has been indulged in every possible manner except in the case of Harrison Gage."

"She pleaded to go to Europe that next winter, if I remember."

"Well, she studied music at home, didn't she? The best that money could buy was hers."

"What is this seems to be on her mind about Beethoven or Mozart or one of them? She cried to me a little up there just now about Beethoven."

"I don't know, I'm sure. There was some discussion a few days before Olga sailed about that print of Beethoven that used to hang in the dining room. That must in some way be fuddled in the poor child's brain. Olga wanted it down. It seems silly now, but during the war in some devilish way, it sounded rational enough, and there was an argument. Olga felt rather firmly about it. Finally Bertha carted it up to the storeroom. That's all there was to it. Up to that time Paula had been working on the Sonata Appassionata. It seemed to upset her. Bertha, get down that print of Beethoven that you carried up to the storeroom that day and hang it back in the dining room."

"I—please excuse—I hung it back there yesterday."

"Presumptuous! The kind of thing I very much dislike. It merely happened to be all right in this case. Don't let it happen again. Bring Dr. Ehrenfest some fresh muffins."

"There's a strange woman."

"A priceless servant and yet sometimes—so strange—so strange—that—that——"

"What?"

"I—don't—know——"

***

You stood in the pantry and shivered and put your hands up over your ears. Your teeth were on edge and the entire surface of your body hurt.

They were taking Paula. Dr. Ehrenfest and Dr. Lauer, and a nurse in a cap like a charlotte russe case. Little Paula, whose bones were squab-like and who was the faint color of ashes of roses. Her strength terrified you. She did not want to go and you knew as you stood hurting all over the surface of you, that she was biting and kicking. Then you stole out to help, but you were trembling so and somehow you did not want Paula to know that you knew.

The strength of Paula. She would not be carried. And so she sat and crouched, with her terrified hands flaming white at the knuckles and twisted around the rungs of the banisters, and her eyes the lovely troubled Ophelia eyes. The blazing, blazing, flame-blue disks.

You cried with your heart. It was not to be borne. The carrying of Paula kicking and screaming down those flights. The streamers of her sobs. The streamers....

"Paula," cried Bertha and ran up the steps toward her cowering at the banisters there.

"Bertha, Bertha," sobbed Paula, and uncurled her fingers, "they're taking me down off the wall. They're taking me up to the storeroom——"

"No, no, Miss Paula, they're taking you to make you well."

"You knew, Bertha. You used to sit on the steps and listen. They took him away from us, Bertha—you remember—I cried. Olga—the feeding of the men. The mad little men who hated Beethoven. They took him away from us, Bertha——"

"No, no, Miss Paula, he's downstairs in the dining room where he used to be."

"Where?"

"Come, Miss Paula, with Bertha."

"Where?"

"To a house in the country where you are going to get well."

"They took—him away—from us. You used to peel the potatoes. I could hear them fall in the pan. You listened——"

"Come, Miss Paula."

She went down the stairs and out of the house like a child then.

"Good-by, Bertha—they took him away from us—but I knew—you knew——"

"Good-by, Miss Paula."

She sat up as stiffly in the car as a doll, with blue Ophelia eyes, and let them seat themselves in a sort of dreadful battalion around her.

"We knew—we knew——" she said to Bertha, who was left standing on the sidewalk.

Upstairs in her bedroom Mrs. Oessetrich sat rocking herself. Rocking herself in a straight chair.

***

The house was like a tomb. It stood all day, listening. Upstairs, downstairs, and the old pulling pains at the backs of Bertha's legs. It was difficult without a second girl. They came and to the trip hammer of Mrs. Oessetrich's tongue they left. Insolently, most of them, and usually in the midst of a half-swept room or with windows flung high and the curtains pinned away for thorough cleaning. It was not much better with the day-help. They never came back the second time.

But after the Armistice, the agencies began to feed them out again.

Sullen men who did outdoor work and washed windows in their old army coats.

"Two dollars and sixty cents a day! What's the world coming to? Don't have that dirty-looking fellow in the old tan coat come here any more. I dislike his manner. There is something so bolsheviki about him."

The old tan coat was a doughboy's, grimy beyond recognition. He was one of the scissors men and had been stoked up on sandwiches from hands as fair as Olga's. The bolsheviki look was the two dollars and sixty cents a day recompense for a badly gassed lung.

Laundry work had gone up, too. "It is ruinous. Three dollars and ten cents. Why, a family could live on that in the old days."

But not in the new. The new purged days since the war.

"Give her my Venetian point tablecloth to launder, Bertha. Tell her to be sure and use tepid water and a warm iron. It cost two hundred and fifty dollars before the war. It has to be done scallop by scallop."

Three dollars and ten cents a day to iron Mrs. Oessetrich's two hundred and fifty dollar Venetian point tablecloth. Scallop by scallop. Somehow if you looked at it that way—three dollars and ten cents for the eight hours of standing on the granatoid floor of the laundry was not so very high. Scallop by scallop....

Bertha's wages had been raised to fifty dollars. The bulge in her petticoat pocket was growing again. Helga's funeral had depleted it for a while. Helga, who loved to be snug and warm, would have hated to lie in an untufted casket.

But with the raise to fifty dollars, the little hit-hit began again. It followed her all around the house. The stilly house. The listening house. The waiting, brooding, silenced house.

You looked forward to Monday nights because of the recreation of all the crystal chandeliers set blazing then and out came the solid gold plate that was kept wadded in cotton in the safe in Mrs. Oessetrich's boudoir.

Monday night was opera night. The Oessetrichs had subscribed for the same first tier box for fifteen years. The Oessetrich little girls had grown up to those seats, so to speak, until gradually their feet had reached the floor and their heads shot up over the backs. Paula had kept the programs. They were in a stack up in the room. The lower ones all yellow.

Usually now the von Schlegels and Madam Gerbhardt or Godfather and Aunt Mary Oessetrich came to dine on Monday nights and then went on to the opera.

Mrs. Oessetrich in her shining expanse of hard colored satin. The beautiful diamond necklace, mounted very clumsily on red gold. The bugle and passementerie and crystal trimmings. The heavy incrustations of bead embroidery. She glittered and she clinked. You wanted to ring her as you would a bell.

Small but complicated dinners with a helper in the kitchen and Bertha in her role of waitress, boxed into a black sateen uniform that spanned her between the shoulders, and the white organdie turnover collar that seemed to jut out her cheek bones and give the wide area between that startling clarity of a nun's.

One evening there was to be a new opera. Madam Gerbhardt had the score. She sang snatches of it at dinner, and before the wraps were brought, she sat down at the concert grand piano in the drawing-room and played off pages of it. Coq D'Or. Tickling golden nonsense.

Oh, but you wanted to strut and stick yourself out in front like a fat king and hold off the gold platter with the excavated mound of pistachio pudding and rollic with it as if you had stepped down off a playing card. Fat, mad king.

Coq D'Or. You wanted Madam Gerbhardt to sit there in her upholstered-looking blue velvet with the cut steel buttons down it, and play them all out over the piano. All the lively little Coq D'Or people who resided in the foolish heart of the opera. The kings and queens and the jacks and the jokers off the playing cards. The little streets down which they swarmed over cobblestones and the houses with waving crooked sides like the bend of a concertina. Crazy houses with a jester's cap on the peak, and a bell hanging down over one window. You could see them as you strutted out with the pistachio pudding. Purple sky like a bruise. And all the ladies had long thin necks with hooks in them, like swans'. They were the queens of the playing cards. And all the kings had little bellies and strutted. Coq D'Or. It made you merry and it made you foolish and it made you see the new-fangled bewilderment of a sky the color of a bruise. Hoodlum music that ran the wrong way off the keys, like the Chinaman in the subway who read up and down off his newspaper. Tra-la-la-la-la—lalala. Lawk, you had almost stumbled with the solid gold platter of the pistachio.

"Bertha, bring the wraps."

Yah—yah—the silly queen.

"Bertha, see if the car is at the door."

Yah—yah—the silly queen with the hook in her neck like the plumbing underneath the stationary washstand. Coq D'Or—pouring golden nonsense....

And the talk. You learned if you listened as you passed around the platters, charmed glittering names. Marguerite. Ophelia. La Navarraise. Sappho. Santuzza. Thais. Heifetz. Tosca. Caruso. Sembrich. Friedheim. Pederewski. von Buelow. Hoffman. Elman. Wieniawski. Ysaye. Charvet. Charvet.

One evening at dinner Madam Gerbhardt said something about this charmed and glittering name, that hung in the memory like a Christmas tree ball.

"Charvet is only a boy. They say, by the way, he is American. Without a doubt he is one of the foremost pianist composers of the day. Have you heard him this season, 'Tilda?"

"No."

"The moon-haunted fashion in which he played at yesterday's concert! He must have the heart of a woman, the brain of a poet, and the valor of a man. Ah, Charvet—there is a new master for you. Charvet."

"Ah, Charvet"—you tiptoed out with the platters. "Ah, Charvet." To be moon-haunted was to live with an opal mist about one's heart. Bertha knew....

***

Go. Go. Go. Mrs. Oessetrich started out early as usual, but in the excellent quality, badly fitting tweed now instead of the khaki, and in the place of the fawn-colored ambulance, Eddie was out at the curb again, usually with the small sedan.

Difficult as it was to keep the tall house from swooning into its silence, somehow she partially accomplished it with the bang-bangings of her comings and goings. The telephone. The telephone.

"Bertha, if Madam Gerbhardt calls, tell her I will be glad to use those tickets for the Vatican Choir at Carnegie Hall to-night. Tell the carpenter when he comes, to meet me at Miss Olga's studio, I want him to build those flower boxes before she gets back. It's beginning to rain. Have those three trunks in the storeroom, with red stars on them, dragged out into the hallway by the time I get home and I'll spend this wet afternoon unpacking some things for Miss Paula. Dr. Ehrenfest call up? Any mail? Nothing from Hill's End? Paris? Miss Ermangarde? Look at the postmarks. No cables—Paris—Miss Ermangarde?—sure? Oh—well——"

There never were.

"Well, I'll be home by two. If the awning man comes tell him to wait."

Hammer. Hammer. Hammer. Mrs. Oessetrich fighting the house's silence. Awnings went up as early as April. Gay orange ones with blue scallops. The old-fashioned little dressing room adjoining Ermangarde's bedroom, with the built-in wardrobe and the stationary washstand, was torn out and a shining rink of a bathroom installed. Hammer. Hammer. The rippling, striped awnings and then one day the entire house front lit up with new window shades. Festooned silk ones that shirred up with the soft rush of a laugh. The piano in Paula's room had been tuned and stood open. Smiling. Waiting. But Paula never came. The door always stood open, too. But you never looked in. Somehow the smile of that piano could seem more like a grin.

Then this happened.

Those three trunks with the red stars on had been dragged into the hallway that faced Paula's room, before it turned off into the ell that led to Bertha's door.

All afternoon, while a slanting rain flew at the roof, Mrs. Oessetrich puttered up there among Paula's things. Bertha, waxing the newly installed hardwood floor in Paula's room could glance out into the hallway and see her stooped there with her dry shattered eyes roving among the dry things. Paula's little things. Paula loved little things. There was a whole trayful of the kind of trinkets that amused her. Jade elephants. Nubs of chrysoprose and malachite. Carved intaglios. Cat's eye trifles and chalcedony. Rock-crystal hens. A silver filigree shrine the size of a thimble and wrought with amazing detail. There was a Christus with the ewe lamb, hand carved out of the yellow eye of a topaz. Green jasper amulet. A little girl's pocket-book, red lined and fashioned out of two shells with Niagara Falls written across it. Shoes. The soles a little thinned in the delicate way that Paula would wear them down. Letters. A tray of them sorted in stacks. The curious rain-tapped silence and Mathilde Oessetrich with her eyes that still had the look of the cracked shoe buttons.

Paula's tray of letters. There was something so faint and pale about them. They seemed to rise up in the vapor of a sigh.

After the waxing of the floor there were potatoes to peel and the great red eye of a roast for dinner required larding to make the juices run.

You picked your way down the back stairs, carefully, to save the squeaks.

The afternoon drew in the silence like a poultice.

The red roast when you larded it with the stripes of suet swelled up around your finger clammily, and with the heart gone from the meat, out came your finger from the hole with a sucky little pop. The house felt like that. It flowed around you so coldly, with the heart gone out of it, and the pop of the rain drops—pop—pop——

Finally Mrs. Oessetrich came down into the kitchen. Her skin was all dry, like a fowl's, and it was beginning to wattle at the neck. She was much thinner. It made everything about her lower. Her waistline and the sags underneath her eyes.

"Bertha." she said, and sat down on the edge of a chair, "has anyone had access to the storeroom besides you?"

"No."

"You have always followed my instructions and permitted none of the day help in there?"

"Yah——"

"Sure? Think carefully."

"Yah——"

"Well, something has happened. Bear in mind that these questions I am about to ask are disagreeable ones, but they must be asked."

"What?"

"Bertha, there has been a systematic rifling of things going on in the storeroom. Trunks have been pried open. Articles are missing. There is a leak in my household."

"A—what——"

"A thief."

"You mean——"

"I mean that articles of Miss Paula's that I have been putting away from time to time in trunks, during the period that she has not been—so—well—have been stolen. Two of the trunks have been pried open with hairpins and articles of more or less value are missing."

"You mean——"

"I mean nothing until I have gone further into this matter. You are still a trusted servant. Now come upstairs with me."

The sickening process of that. Bertha, to whom things were so trivial, suddenly quivering before their omnipotence.

Paula's trunk had been looted. All the neat little stacks of her lovely handiwork were in swirls of confusion on the trays. A pasteboard box had been gouged at one end and its contents dragged out. A hairpin had got itself twisted about the lock and a hurried hand had left it there.

"You can see for yourself, Bertha, someone from the inside has been at work. Can you think of any explanation for these rifled trunks?"

"I—no——"

"This amounts to more than petty thievery. There were beautiful silk garments here. Some of them imported and some of them beautifully made by Miss Paula herself of the sheerest materials."

"Yah ..."

"I was going to take some of them to her at the san—hospital, She will be shocked when she comes home and learns what has happened. Her things. Paula loved things. Why, there were three white crepe gowns on this tray that I remember distinctly packing away. Beauties, with yards and yards of real Valenciennes that her godmother had especially made for her in Valenciennes."

"White crêpe de chine—real Valenciennes."

"Just see! Oh. Oh. This box torn open and a rose quartz brooch that was very precious to her—Harrison's—a gift to her from a dear friend—stolen. Who has dared?"

You just stood and felt your nails dig up into your palms, and your lips were so heavy. You kept trying to move them, but they would not lift.

"I intend to get to the bottom of this—regardless."

"Mrs. Oessetrich——"

"Why Bertha, you are crimson! Bertha?"

"I—you see—yoost remembered—-yoost thought——"

"Just thought what?"

"Answer me."

"I—don't—know——"

"Bertha!"

"It isn't possible. Not you. The most trusted servant I ever had!"

"But Mrs. Oessetrich, I——"

"So this is the mystery of you."

"I——"

"You strange white creature, you. This is the meaning——"

"I didn't know—"

"You thief! I never in my wildest dreams would have suspected you. Who knows what systematic process of stealing has been going on all these years under my very eyes."

"No—no—no!"

"Paula. My daughter Paula who trusted you. Who loved you."

"Please——"

"Thief! I shall call in detectives."

"No—no—please—I didn't know——"

"I too trusted you. I respected you. Oh, I cannot believe my senses."

"Mrs. Oessetrich, I only——"

"What nonsense has been talked in this household about you. Miss Olga who always insisted that you had the soul of a poet trapped in the body of a peasant. The soul of a thief!"

Dumb Bertha standing there with her lips all shirred in like an old woman's and her eyes down. It was horrible keeping her eyes down. It made her face a bonfire around them.

"Come upstairs into your room with me. I intend to go to the bottom of this."

The ignominy of that. Standing there with her arms huddled up and her eyes seeming to suck back into her head like raisins into dough.

The opening and closing of drawers. Each dragging time the wood seemed to run against the grain of her flesh and leave her shivering there with a sense of splinters plunging horridly into her. Jagged little needles.

Open. Shut. Open. Shut.

"What's that, in there?"

"Yoost my aprons."

"And that heavy thick stuff?"

"Yoost my nightgowns."

"Umph. You were clever enough to dispose of what you took, I see. Why come to think of it, I've seen you carting packages out of the house. I remember stopping you in the passageway one day. You were furtive then. I realize it now. What's this?"

"Yoost music, Mrs. Oessetrich. Please—don't touch. Yoost some old sheets of music I had before I came here."

"Humph. Loot from somewhere else, I suppose."

"Oh—oh——"

"Ugh, what a task! To think that I should ever have to resort to such degrading methods with you. Well, I see that you are clever enough to keep your clothes closet bare as a bone. Let's see, now. Oh, get up on that chair and open up those two cupboard doors above the closet. I intend to go to the bottom of this."

"Mrs. Oessetrich—those little doors I have never once opened since I am here."

"Hand me that chair. I don't believe in half-way methods."

Your lips, they were so heavy they would not lift.

To reach the pair of small doors Mrs. Oessetrich had to strain tiptoe on the chair.

"Please Mrs. Oessetrich, if you would just let me say——"

"Oh. Oh. Oh."

The little chills ran off you like sand down a dune. Cold goosefleshing chills. The small cupboard doors jerked open with a spill of things. To stand indicted before the stern irrefutable law of ownership. The indubitable right of Mrs. Oessetrich to her things. The colossal rights of ownership. Those rights had been outraged. It brought out in Mrs. Oessetrich's face the lean look of wolf.

The webby lovelinesses of Paula's. Chiffon with its pollen-like power to cling to a woman's flesh. Articles that had been jammed up there quickly. To stand there and gaze was to turn the eyes into blisters. The cream lace boudoir cap of Mrs. Oessetrich's, for which there had been a topsy-turvy search one Saturday morning, tucked up there behind one of Paula's little fluted silk negligees. The blue fox scarf that Ermangarde had been finally forced to decide she had left in a taxicab. A gold and vermilion batik scarf of Olga's. Stacks of unworn white gloves, Paula's narrow size. More of the filmy things. Peach-colored gowns with the rills of Valenciennes. Things. The scalding wrath of Mrs. Oessetrich over her silk rag-a-tags. Her inalienable right to them.

To stand branded with the puniness of desire for them. To stand there blanched to the very color of her teeth before Mrs. Oessetrich, whose face had begun to narrow until the nose sharpened like the blade of a knife. The shame ... you could scarcely breathe....

"So! These fur-lined bedroom slippers of mine that I haven't even missed. Silk stockings. Bath salts. Sachet. You stupid, luxury-loving girl. You of all people! A great coarse peasant girl who seemed utterly impervious to creature things. But you have not taken all this for the sake of the things themselves. You have carted it out of the house. You are in league with someone. With whom?"

"No. No."

"Miss Ermangarde's French batiste blouse! More sachet! My silver shoe buckles. Why—why this is a case for the police."

"Mrs. Oessetrich, you would not——"

"Up here alone is stored several hundred dollars' worth of my possessions. What quantities you must have carted away without my knowing it. Come here, you. Stand there and look me in the eye. How long has this been going on?"

"I—don't—know——"

"You don't know. Well, I advise you to find out and be pretty quick about it. Maybe the police can help you to remember. This string of lapis lazuli and carnelian beads. Do you realize that it in itself is worth several hundred dollars?"

"Dollars..."

"Yes, dollars and don't dare let on that you did not know the value of them."

"Dollars. Let me pay in dollars. Mrs. Oessetrich. I'll give it back in dollars."

It was impossible to fumble down into the petticoat pocket quickly enough. The fingers were so numb and did not seem separate.

"See, Mrs. Oessetrich, if only you will please be so kind. Dollars. More than two hundred. I will pay for the things with dollars."

"Stolen money, too, I suppose. Thank goodness, my vaults have been safe from you."

"No. No. Saved money."

"Money cannot buy exemption from punishment for crime."

"Mrs. Oessetrich, here, if you will please to take it—my Liberty Bond——"

"You must accept your punishment like anyone else. Our penal system is to protect society from such as you."

"Take what I got."

"Why should I? You are a thief. I do not know why I even listen to you."

"You do—because——"

"Because I am a foolish, sentimental woman, my children to the contrary notwithstanding."

"Please——"

"I am a weakling for permitting you to prevail upon me. You swear to me that you are in league with no one."

"Oh, I do. I do."

"What was it that I saw you carrying out of the house that day I stopped you——"

"——for Helga—at the hospital——"

"I don't seem able to deal with you as you deserve. There is something about you—what is it?"

"Let me pay, Mrs. Oessetrich—see—money, and my bond."

"Put what you have down there on the table."

"Here it is."

"I shall take it and give it to the Red Cross: It is your restitution. You should be made to pay a harder one. Now you leave my house. Get out your valise or whatever you call the bag that you brought your things in. Open it and let me see what is in it. More loot, no doubt."

"No, Mrs. Oessetrich, there is nothing but——"

"Open it, I said."

"There."

"What is that green chiffon? Where did you get that old-fashioned thing?"

"It's mine! Someone gave it to me."

"Ugh, fuzzy old evening wrap. Well, you didn't get that here. Now pack your things. What is this? A book. The Cathedral Under——"

"No. No. Don't touch that book. It is mine."

"What are you doing with that volume of Rollo Farley in your bag? You must have stolen that from Miss Ermangarde's desk. Why that book is almost her bible. How dared you!"

"No! No! No! I tell you, no! Mine! Don't you! That book, Mrs. Oessetrich—is mine."

"I am convinced now that you are vicious. Don't you dare hold my arm that way. Put down that book or I shall telephone this minute for the police."

"Put it down! How dare you ransack even our books. Give me that book. You are not fit to touch it. You! The Cathedral Under the Sea!"

"You don't know——"

"I know that if you do not put it down immediately I shall call the police."

"Please——"

"Immediately, or I'll——"

"There."

"Now pack your things. I'll be waiting for you down in the kitchen. You cannot leave this house without I take a final look into your belongings. I am actually ill from this outrageous scene. Now pack. Remember, just that pile of thick ugly things on the table there. I'll be waiting ... come down the rear stairs...."

It was hard with all her fingers swollen thumbs, to cram the things into the bag and the chills seemed to run down off her spine just like sand. The stiff, unwieldy sailor's union suits. When they were folded over once, they rose up solemnly in the bottom of the bag and had to be weighted down with shoes. The striped, clean-smelling flannel petticoat. The cake of hard brown soap. The bit of Bulgarian embroidery. The green of Mrs. Farley's evening wrap. It crowded over the top. Ocean green. To close your eyes a moment and feel that spread of ocean green. The tears ran down and suddenly they too were ocean. Things. Things. Things. Mrs. Oessetrich's things. Helga's. Olga's. Ermangarde's. The green thought of ocean flowed over and wiped them out and left the old stark uncluttered silence. And to sit in that silence the second before you pinned on your disk of a hat was to gather back strength.

The silence that still seemed full of the mewlings of Mrs. Oessetrich over the things. Things. Helga who had loved them and had never felt the green thought of ocean flow over and obliterate them.