Star-Dust: A Story of an American Girl
by Fannie Hurst · English · Gutenberg #9858 · 676,019 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Star-Dust: A Story of an American Girl
Author: Fannie Hurst
Release date: February 1, 2006 [eBook #9858]
Most recently updated: December 27, 2020
Language: English
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[Illustration: "HER BLOOD WAS POUNDING AND HER VOICE WAS IN FLIGHT"]
STAR-DUST
A Story of an American Girl
BY FANNIE HURST
1921
Book One
THE VINE
Oh, the little more and how much it is:
And the little less, and what worlds away.
--BROWNING.
[Greek: Zoae]
CHAPTER I
When Lilly Becker eked out with one hand that most indomitable of
pianoforte selections, Rubinstein's "Melody in F," her young mind had a
habit of transcending itself into some such illusory realm as this:
Springtime seen lacily through a phantasmagoria of song. A very floral
sward. Fountains that tossed up coloratura bubbles of sheerest aria and
a sort of Greek frieze of youth attitudinized toward herself.
This frieze was almost invariably composed of Estelle Foote, a
successful rival in a class candidacy for the sponge-and-basin
monitorship; Sydney Prothero, infallible of spitball aim; Miss Lare with
her spectacles very low on her nose and a powdering of chalk dust down
her black alpaca; Flora Kemble with infinitely fewer friendship bangles
on her silver link bracelet; Roy Kemble, kissing her yellow, rather than
yanking her brown, braids.
And then suddenly, apropos of nothing except the sweet ache of Lilly's
little soul, the second movement would freeze itself into a proscenium
arch of music, herself, like a stalagmite, its slim center.
At this point, "Melody in F" veils itself in a mist of arpeggios, and
Mrs. Becker, who invariably, during the after-school practice hour, sat
upstairs with Mrs. Kemble in her sunny second-story back, would call
down through the purposely opened floor register.
"Lilly, not so fast on that part."
"Yes'm."
Were it not that the salient spots, the platform places in experience,
are floored over in little more or less identical mosaics of all the
commonplace day by days, Lilly Becker, at the rented-by-the-month piano
in her parents' back parlor in Mrs. Schum's boarding house, her two
chestnut braids rather precociously long and thick down her back, her
mother rocking rhythmically overhead, were spurious to this narrative.
Yet how much more potently than by the mere exposition of it and because
you have looked in on the nine-year-old chemistry of a vocal and blond
dream in the dreaming, are you to know the Lilly of seventeen, who
secretly and unsuccessfully washed her hair in a solution of peroxide,
and at eighteen, through the patent device of a megaphone inserted
through a plate-glass window, was singing to--But anon.
There was a game Lilly used to play on the front stairs of Mrs.
Schum's boarding house, winter evenings after dinner. She and
Lester Eli, who, at seventeen, was to drown in a pleasure canoe; Snow
Horton--clandestinely present--daughter of a neighborhood dentist and
forbidden to play with the "boarding-house children"; Flora and Roy
Kemble, twins; and little Harry Calvert, who would creep up like a dirty
little white mouse from the basement kitchen.
"C"--hissed sibilantly.
"Can't carry cranky cats!"
"No fair, Snow; that doesn't make sense."
"Does."
"Your turn, Roy."
"Z."
"No fair. Nothing begins with 'Z.'"
LILLY: "Does so. Z! Z--zounds--zippy--zingorella--zoe! Zoe!"
By similar strain of alliterative classification, Mrs. Schum's boarding
house might have been indexed as Middle West, middle class, medium
price, and meager of meal.
Poor, callous-footed Mrs. Schum, with her spotted bombazine bosom and
her loosely anchored knob of gray hair! She was the color of cold dish
water at that horrid moment when the grease begins to float, her hands
were corroded with it, and her smile somehow could catch you by the
heartstrings, which smiles have no right to do. How patiently and how
drearily she padded through these early years of Lilly's existence.
There were rubber insets in her shoes which sagged so that her ankles
seemed actually to touch the floor from the climbing upstairs and
downstairs on her missionary treadmill of the cracked slop jar; the fly
in the milk; the too-tepid shaving water; the bathroom monopoly; the
infant cacophony of midnight colic; salt on the sleety sidewalk, the
pasted handkerchief against a front window pane; ice water. Towels.
Towels. Towels.
And how saucily after school would Lilly plant herself down in the
subterranean depths of the kitchen.
"Mrs. Schum, mamma says to give me a piece of bread and butter."
With her worried eyes Mrs. Schum would smile and invariably hand out a
thick slice, thinly buttered.
"More butter, mamma said."
"That's plenty, dearie; too much isn't good for little girls'
complexions."
"More but-ter!"
"Here, then."
Scalloping the air with it before little Harry's meek eyes: "You can't
have any. You don't pay board. We do!"
"My Mamma-Annie she paid board once. Uh-huh! my Mamma-Annie she's an
angel in heaven and you aren't. Uh-huh!" This from little Harry, who was
far too pale and wore furiously stained blouses.
"But your mamma-Annie's dead now. You can't be a real live angel without
being dead first, and I'd rather be me."
"Lilly, aren't you ashamed? You run on now, or I'll tell your mamma.
Poor little Harry can't help it he's an orphan with only his old gramaw
to look after him. You a great big girl with your mother and father to
do for you. It's not nice to be against Harry."
"Well, what was I saying so much, Mrs. Schum? Can I help it he says
she's an angel? Here, Harry, you can have it. Mamma's got a whole basket
of apples in the closet and a dozen oranges. Honest, take it, I'm
not hungry."
He would mouth into it, round eyes gazing at her above the rim of crust.
There were times again when Lilly would bare her teeth and crunch them
in a paroxysm of rage and tyranny over little Harry. She would delight
in making herself terrible to him, pinch and tower over the huddle of
him with her hands hooked inward like talons. His meekness hurt her to
frenzy, and because she was ashamed of tears she clawed.
"Oh, you! You! You just make me feel like--I don't know what."
"Ouch! Lilly, you pinch!"
"Well, then, don't always hold your head off to one side like somebody
was going to hit you. I hate it. It makes me feel like wanting to
hit you."
"I won't."
"You aren't such a goody-goody. You steal. You stole some balls of twine
my papa brought home from his factory. Mamma says you got it behind
your ears."
"I haven't anything behind my ears."
"Oh, silly! Everything isn't there just because you say it's there. If I
close my eyes just a little eeny, I can see birds and fountains and a
beautiful stage, and me with my hair all gold, and a blue satin train
that kicks back when I walk, and all the music in the world winding
around me like--like everything--like smoke. But it isn't truly there,
silly, except inside of me."
"Haw."
"I'm going to be the beautifulest singer in the world some day, with a
voice that goes as high as anything, and be on the stage, and you can't
even be on it with me."
"'N' I'm going to work in a butcher shop and give gramaw all the meat
she wants without even putting it down in the book."
"You steal."
"Don't."
"Do."
"And I won't ever have to touch the meat if it's got blood on."
"Fraidy, scared of a little blood." Then with not a great deal of
relevance, "I could have the yellowest hair in the world if I
wanted to."
"How?"
"Oh, by just wanting to."
"Nit."
"Could."
"Your mamma's calling you."
"Lil-ly, come practice."
"I'm coming." To Harry, "I can do something you can't do."
"What?"
"Hop up six stairs on one foot."
"Dare you."
Ankle cupped in her hand, brown braids bobbing, she would thus essay
two, three, even four steps of staggering ascent, collapsing then
against the banister.
"Ouch!"
"Told you so."
"Well, I nearly did."
"Oh, you _nearly_ do everything."
"I can't help it if my foot isn't strong enough to hold me."
"Lil-ly, don't let me have to call you again."
"I'm coming, mamma." And then for a final tantalizing gleam of her
little self across the banister, "Last tag."
CHAPTER II
One wall of the Becker back parlor was darkly composed of walnut folding
doors dividing it from the front-parlor bachelor apartment of Mr.
Hazzard, city salesman for the J.D. Nichols Fancy Grocery Supply
Company, his own horse and buggy furnished by the firm.
It was Mrs. Becker's habit during his day-long absence, in fact just as
soon as her acute ear detected the scraping departure of his tin-tired
wheels from the curb, to fling back these folding doors for the rush of
daylight and sense of space, often venturing in beside the front window
with a bit of sewing and pottering ever so discreetly at the sample
packages of fine teas, jars of perfectly conserved asparagus, peas, and
olives spread out on his mantelpiece and fingering, again ever so
discreetly, the neatly ripped stack of letters on the dresser. Once, and
despite Mrs. Becker's frantic swoop to save it, a piece of pressed
flower fell out from one of these envelopes in the handling, crumbling
to bits as it fluttered to the floor.
Next morning the folding doors refused to part to touch, an eye to the
keyhole discovering it clogged with key. Then Lilly began music lessons
and the newly rented upright piano was drawn up against these doors.
Never were fingers more recalcitrant at musical chores. The Bach
"Inventions" were weary digital gyrations against the slow-moving hands
of the alarm clock perched directly in her line of vision. Czerny, too,
was punctuated with quick little forays between notes, into a paper bag
of "baby pretzels" at the treble end of the piano, often as not lopping
over on the keyboard.
But with the plunge into brilliant but faulty execution of one of her
"pieces," her little face would flood over and tighten up into the
glyptic immobility of a cameo and her toes curl as they pressed
the pedals.
"The Storm King" of the Parlor Pianoforte Series was a favorite. Dashing
her quickly memorized way through it, she would follow closely the brief
printed synopsis on the cover page ... _suddenly the clouds gather, a
bird carols, a faint rumble is heard in the distance (it is important
that the student practice this base tremolo with left hand only), the
rush of approaching wind mingles with the nearing roll of thunder,
accompanied by occasional flashes of lightning_....
The red would run up into Lilly's face and her hands churn the white
keys into a curdled froth of dissonance.
"Lil-ly, not so fast. Play 'Selections from Faust' now, slowly, and
count, the way Miss Lee said you should."
Another favorite was the just published "Narcissus" of Nevin. Its
cross-hand movement was a phillipic to her ever-ready-to-ferment fancy.
Head back and gaze into the scroll-and-silk front of the piano, the
melody would again, like a curve of gold, shape itself into the lovely
form of a proscenium arch.
"Lilly, that is beautiful. Play the tune part over again."
The tingling that would actually gooseflesh her would die down as
surely as a ringing crystal tumbler, had she closed her warm little
hand over it.
"Mamma," her voice directed upward toward the open register, "can I--may
I go out on my tricycle?"
"No."
"I've only ten minutes yet, mamma. I'll make them up to-morrow."
"No, I don't intend to pay Miss Lee fifty cents a lesson so you can go
out and ride on your tricycle. You bothered me for the lessons, so now
you practice. Work on 'Narcissus' so you can play it for your father
to-night."
"Oh, mom, please."
"I don't care. Go! Only put on your hat and don't let me see you riding
around on Taylor Avenue."
"No'm."
CHAPTER III
The St. Louis of Lilly's little girlhood, sprung so thrivingly from the
left bank of the Mississippi and builded on the dead mounds of a dead
past, was even then inexplicably turning its back to its fine river
frontage; stretching in the form of a great adolescent giant, prone,
legs flung to the west and full of growing pains, arms outstretched and
curving downward in a great north-and-south yawn.
Taylor Avenue (then almost the city's edge, and which now is a girdle
worn high about its gigantic middle) petered out into violently muddy
and unmade streets and great patches of unimproved vacant lots that in
winter were gaunt with husks.
A pantechnicon procession of the more daring, shot with the growing
pains, was grading and building into the vast clayey seas west of
Kings-highway, but for the most part St. Louis contained herself
gregariously enough within her limits, content in those years when the
country rang hollowly to the cracked ring of free silver to huddle under
the same blanket with her smoke-belching industries.
A picture postcard of a brewery, piled high like a castle and with
stables of Augean collosity, rose from the south tip of the city to the
sour-malt supremacy of the world; boots, shoes, tobacco, and street cars
bringing up by a nose, Eads Bridge, across the strong breast of the
Mississippi, flinging roads of commerce westward ho.
For one rapidly transitional moment street-car traffic in St. Louis
stood in three simultaneous stages of its lepidopterous development: a
caterpillar horse-car system crawled north and south along Jefferson
Avenue, glass coin box and the backward glance of the driver, in lieu of
conductor. A cable-car system ready to burst its chrysalis purred the
length of Olive Street, and a first electric car, brightly painted, and
with a proud antenna of trolley, had already whizzed out
Washington Avenue.
When Lilly was twelve years old her walk to school was across quite an
intricacy of electric-car tracks, and on rainy days, out of a small fund
of children's car tickets laid by in Mrs. Becker's glove box for just
that contingency, she would ride to and from school, changing cars with
a drilled precision at Vandaventer and Finney Avenues.
For the first few of these adventures Mrs. Becker wrote tiny notes, to
be handed out by Lilly along with her street-car ticket:
Conductor, please let this little girl off at Jefferson Avenue: she
wants to change cars for the Pope School.
One day by some mischievous mischance Mrs. Schum's board receipt found
its way into Lilly's little pocketbook:
Received of Mrs. Ben Becker, forty-five dollars for one month's board
for three.
"Aw," said the conductor, thrusting it back at her, "ask your mamma to
tell her troubles to a policeman, little girl."
From that day Lilly rebelled.
"Guess I can find my way to school without having to carry a note like a
baby."
"But, Lilly, you might get mixed up."
"Nit."
"Don't sass me that way or I'll tell your father when he comes home
to-night."
A never quite bursting cloud which hung over the entire of Lilly's
girlhood was this ever-impending threat which even in its rare execution
brought forth no more than a mild and rather sad rebuke from a mild and
rather sad father, and yet which was certain to quell any rising
rebellion.
"I notice you never get sassy or ugly to your father, Lilly. I do all
the stinting and make all the sacrifices and your father gets all
the respect."
"Mamma, how can you say that!"
"Because it's a fact. To him it is always, 'Yes, sir, no, sir.' I'm
going to tell him a few things when he comes home to-night of what I go
through with all day in his absence. Elocution lessons! Just you ask him
for them yourself."
"Oh, mamma, you promised!"
"Well, I will, but I oughtn't."
Every evening until long after Lilly's dresses had descended to her shoe
tops and until the ritual came to have a distinctly ridiculous aspect,
there took place the one pleasantry in which Lilly and her father
ever indulged.
About fifteen minutes before seven, three staccato rings would come at
the front-door bell. At her sewing or what not, Mrs. Becker would glance
up with birdlike quickness.
"That's papa!" And Lilly, almost invariably curled over a book, would
jump up and take stand tensely against the wall so that when the room
door opened it would swing back, concealing her.
In the frame of that open doorway Mrs. Becker and her husband would
kiss, the unexcited matrimonial peck of the taken-for-granted which
is as sane to the taste as egg, and as flat, and then the
night-in-and-night-out question that for Lilly, rigid there behind the
door, never failed to thrill through her in little darts.
"Where is Lilly, Carrie?"
MRS. BECKER (assuming an immediate mask of vacuity): "Why, I don't know,
Ben. She was here a minute ago."
"Well, well, well!" looking under the bed, under the little cot drawn
across its baseboard and into a V of a back space created by a
catacorner bureau. "Well, well, well! What could have happened to her?"
At this juncture Lilly, fairly titillating, would burst out and before
his carefully averted glance fling wide her arms in self-revelation.
"Here I am, papa!"
"Well, I'll declare, so she is!" lifting her by the armpits for a kiss.
"Well, well, well!"
"Papa, I got ninety in arithmetic. I'd have got a hundred, but I got the
wrong common denominator."
"That's right, Lilly. Keep up well in your studies. Remember, knowledge
is power."
"Get your father's velveteen coat, Lilly."
"Papa, Ella McBride kisses boys."
"Then don't ever let me hear of your associating with her. The little
girl that doesn't keep her own self-respect cannot expect others to
respect her."
"And you ought to see, papa, she always rides her tricycle down past
Eddie Posner's house on Delmar just to show herself off to him."
"Lilly, go wash your hands for supper. How is business, Ben?"
"Nothing extra, Carrie."
"Oh, I get so tired hearing a poor mouth. Sometimes I could just scream
for wanting to do things we are not in a position to do. Go
housekeeping, for instance, have a little home of my own--"
"Now, now, little woman," at the invariable business of flecking his
neat gray business suit with a whisk broom, "you got up on the wrong
side of bed this morning. Lilly, suppose you shine papa's spectacles
for him."
"There is the supper bell. Quick, Ben and Lilly, before the Kembles."
The dining room, directly over the basement kitchen, jutted in an ell
off the rear of the house so that from the back parlor it was not
difficult to precede the immediate overhead response to that bell. A
black-faced genii of the bowl and weal, in a very dubiously white-duck
coat thrust on hurriedly over clothing reminiscent of the day's window
washing and furnace cinders, held attitude in among the small tables
that littered the room. There were four. A long table seating ten and
punctuated by two sets of cruets, two plates of bread, and two
white-china water pitchers; Mr. Hazzard's tiny square of individual
table, a perpetual bottle of brown medicine beside his place. The
Kembles also enjoyed segregation from the mother table, the family
invariably straggling in one by one. For the Beckers was reserved the
slight bulge of bay window that looked out upon the Suburban street-car
tracks and a battalion of unpainted woodsheds. A red geranium, potted
and wrapped around in green crêpe tissue paper, sprouted center table, a
small bottle of jam and two condiments lending further distinction. A
napkin with self-invented fasteners dangled from Mr. Becker's chair, and
beside Lilly's place a sterling silver and privately owned knife and
fork, monogrammed.
To Mr. Becker, the negro race was largely and genetically christened
Gawge, to be addressed solely in native patois.
"Evenin', Gawge."
"Evenin', Mistah Beckah."
"George, are you going to take good care of my husband to-night? That
piece of steak you served him yesterday wasn't fit to eat."
"Law now, Mis' Beckah, kin I help it if de best de kitchen has ain't
none too good?"
"Don't tell me! I saw the piece you brought Mr. Kemble."
"Now, Carrie ..."
"What have we to-night, George?"
"Fried steak, lamb, or corn'-beef hash."
"Bring us steak, and if it isn't tender, tell Mrs. Schum for me that
right back downstairs it goes! A little piece of lamb on the side in
case Miss Lilly don't like the steak, and bring up a dish of those sweet
pickles. You know, under the tray the way you always do. There's a pair
of Mr. Becker's old shoes, good as new, waiting to be given away."
"Carrie!"
"Miss Lilly loves pickles. George, do as I say."
"Carrie!"
"Law! Mistah Beckah, I knows Mis' Beckah and her ways. Law! I doan take
no offense."
"I wish if you want extras, Carrie, you would buy them. It is a darn
shame to make yourself so small before the other boarders."
"I haven't as much money as you have, Ben Becker. I'm not ashamed to ask
for my money's worth. Lilly, haven't I told you not to talk on your
fingers at meals?"
This form of digital communication between the children of the boarding
house seemed to break out in its most virulent form at dinner. In spite
of a sharp consensus of parental disapproval, there was a continual
flashing of code between Lilly, the Kemble twins, and Lester Eli at the
larger table.
"Ben, will you speak to Lilly? She won't mind me."
"Lilly!"
"Yes, sir," immediately subsiding to a contemplation of the geranium.
Poker played for penny stakes was a favorite after-dinner pastime. A
group including Mrs. Eli, the Kembles, and Mr. Hazzard would gather in
the Becker back parlor, Mrs. Becker, relieved of corsets and in a
dark-blue foulard teagown shotted all over with tiny pink rosebuds,
presiding over a folding table with a glass bowl of the "baby pretzels"
in its center.
The children meanwhile would forgather on the front hall stairs, the
peaked flare of an olive of gaslight that burned through a red glass
globe with warts blown into it, bathing the little group in a sort of
greasy fluid. Roy and Flora Kemble, Snow Horton, Lester Eli, and Stanley
Beinenstock, racked with bronchitis and lending an odor of creosote,
Lilly, and even Harry in his poor outlandish blouse.
"Snow, tell us a story; you're the oldest."
Snow was full of lore; would invoke inspiration with a very wide and
very blue gaze up to the ceiling, her thin hands clasping her thin neck.
"Once upon a time--once upon a time there was the most beautiful girl
in all the world and her name was--"
"Aw, give us one about boys."
LILLY: "You shut up, Roy Kemble. I guess Snow can tell a girl story if
she wants to. Go on, Snow, 'once upon a time there was the most
beautiful girl in all the world' and she had honey-colored curls and--"
"I didn't say she had honey-colored curls. Honey! Who ever heard of a
girl having honey curls?"
"Well, she had."
"Didn't."
"Did."
"--and her name was--was--Gladys."
"Oh no, Snow, call her--"
"I think Gladys is just a beautiful name for a girl," ventured Flora
Kemble on this occasion. "I like Elsie, too. I think Elsie Dinsmore is
my favorite name."
"Elsie Dinsmore!" flared Lilly. "Girls aren't pokey like her any more."
Thus diverted, there ensued a quick confetti of flung opinions.
"Minn is a pretty name."
"That's because you're stuck on Minnie Duganne in your class. Oh-oh, Roy
is stuck on Minnie Duganne!"
"Arabella--I just love that name. Don't you, Lilly?"
"If I was a girl, I would be named Mamma-Annie."
"Shut up, Harry; and, say, you better take back that can opener. You
stole it off Mr. Hazzard's dresser."
"What is your favorite name, Lilly?"
Her eyes on the warts blown into the glass globe, hugging her knees in
their sturdy ribbed stockings, her smooth brown hair enhancing her clean
kind of prettiness, Lilly gazed up roundly.
"I choose," she said, mouthing grandiloquently, her little pink tongue
waving like a clapper--"I choose--choose--ah--Zoe!"
"That isn't a name!"
"'Tis so."
"Who ever heard of a girl named Zoe! You never did yourself."
"I know I never did, Roy Kemble, but just the same I think it is the
most beautiful name in the world. It isn't so much what it really means;
names don't have to mean anything--it's what it feels like it means. To
me the name Zoe feels like it means--means--"
CHORUS: "She don't know what it means. She don't know what it means."
"She means doe! The doe in the zoo at Forest Park. Hauh-hauh--her
favorite name is Doe."
"Zoe," repeated Lilly, her eyes in a trance and lakes of reflected
vision. "Zoe--it means--it means something--something full of life.
Life--free--to me Zoe means free! Life!"
CHAPTER IV
When Lilly was fourteen she graduated from grade school, second in her
class.
"It's an outrage," said Mrs. Becker. "Miss Lare always did pick on the
child."
"I'd rather have been last than second," said Lilly, trying to keep firm
a lip that would tremble.
"Never mind, Lilly, you'll have the prettiest graduation dress of them
all. I've got Katy Stutz engaged for three days in the house. A girl
don't have to be so smart."
"I'd rather have the valedictory address than--clothes," still very
uncertain of lip.
"Of course. That is because for a child you certainly have crazy ideas.
Why don't you nag your father a little with what you've been nagging me
all week?"
"I--Not now, mamma."
"Why not now? All I've got to say about it is, if he is willing, I am."
"What is it?"
"Tell him, Lilly."
"I--You see, papa, I thought if only you would let me begin vocal
lessons, now that I am going to High School. Not real singing, papa--I'm
too young for that--but just the foundation for voice."
"She wants to study with Max Rinehardt, Ben. I say it can't do any harm
for the child to learn parlor singing. I think I can manage it at a
dollar and a half a lesson. The elocution I say 'No' to. We don't need
any play-acting in the family."
"Why--er--I'm surprised, Lilly, that you should have your heart set on
that kind of thing. Seems to me a young girl could find something more
worth while than that. Singers never amount to much."
"Oh, papa, it's what I want most in the world."
"Let her have them. A little parlor singing helps any girl with the
young men. I notice you courted me from the choir. If she waits for
encouragement from you, her accomplishments won't amount to a row
of pins."
"You see, papa, I'm going to take the commercial course at High and
learn stenography and typewriting, so it will just balance my
education fine."
"Well, little woman, whatever you say."
"You know what I say."
"Don't you think she is a bit too young?"
Mimetically: "No, I don't think she's a bit too young. The sooner you
wake up to the fact that your daughter is growing up, the better. She's
a graduate already from grammar school."
"Papa, I'm on the graduating program."
"For what, daughter?"
"A piano solo. 'Alice,' with variations."
"Well, Carrie, if that is the way you feel about it--if you think those
kind of lessons are good for her--"
"That is the way I feel about it."
These little acid places occurring somewhere in almost every day hardly
corroded into Lilly's accustomed consciousness. If they etched their way
at all into Mr. Becker's patient kind of equanimity, the utter quietude
of his personality, which could efface itself behind a newspaper for two
or even three hours at a time, never revealed it. His was the stolidity
of an oak, tickled rather than assailed by a bright-eyed woodpecker.
"Little woman" he liked to call her in his nearest approach of
endearment, although it must have been her petite quickness rather than
a diminutive quality that earned the appellation. Even when he had wooed
her in Granite City, Missouri, and she had sung down at the quiet-faced
youth from a choir loft, she was after the then prevalent form of
hourglass girlish loveliness. Now she was rather enormous of bust,
proudly so, and wore her waist pulled in so that her hips sprang out
roundly. A common gesture was to place her hands on her hips, press
down, and breathe sharply inward, thus holding herself for the moment
from the steel walls of her corsets. Their removal immediately after
dinner was a ritual to be anticipated during the day. She would sit in
her underbodice, unhooked of them, sunk softly into herself, her hands
stroking her tortured jacket of ribs and her breath flowing deeper.
"I don't believe I'd pull in quite so tight, Carrie, if I were you. It
will tell on your health some day."
"You don't catch me with a sloppy figure. I don't give a row of pins for
the woman without some curve to her."
To Mrs. Becker a row of pins was the basest coinage of any realm. It ran
through her speech in pricking idiom.
She was piquant enough of face, quick-eyed, and with little pointy
features enhanced by a psyche worn as emphatically as an exclamation
point on the very top of her head. On eucher or matinée days her bangs,
at the application of a curling iron, were worn frizzed, but usually
they were pinned back beneath the psyche in straight brown wisps.
As she grew older, Lilly came more and more to resemble her father in a
certain tight knit of figure, length of limb, and quiet gray eyes that
could fill blackly with pupil and in the smooth, straight, always
gleaming brown hair growing cleanly and with the merest of widows' peaks
off her forehead.
At fourteen she stood shoulder to shoulder with her mother, and their
gloves and shirt waists were interchangeable. One really distinguishing
loveliness was her complexion. The skin flowed over her body with the
cool fleshliness of a pink rose petal. There was a natural shimmer to
it, a dewiness and a pollen of youth that enveloped her like a caress.
"Looks more like her father, if she looks like either of them," Mrs.
Schum was fond of saying, "and she has his easy disposition. But there
is a child who runs deep. If she was mine I'd educate her to be
something. Ah me, if only my Annie hadn't lost her head and married, she
had the makings, too."
As a matter of fact, Lilly's resemblance to her parents stopped
abruptly. Her first year in High School, a course in natural science
revealed to her the term "botanical sport."
"That's what I am," she determined, with youth's immediate application
of cosmos to self, "a botanical sport." A spontaneous variation from the
normal type. "Papa, I learned to-day that I'm a sport."
MRS. BECKER: "A what? That _is_ a genteel expression for a young girl to
apply to herself! That High School does you more harm than good."
"But, mamma, it's a term used in botany. A term from Darwin."
"Darwin! That's a fine thing to teach children in school--that they come
from monkeys! No wonder children haven't any respect for their parents
nowadays."
"Well, just the same it is in the biology. We're on frogs now. You ought
to see the way frogs get born!"
"In my day children weren't taught such stuff. I'm surprised, Ben, it's
allowed."
Across the biology of life, as if to shut out the loathsome facts of an
abattoir, a curtain of dreadful portent was drawn before Lilly's
clear eyes.
"When baby came," was Mrs. Becker's insinuation for the naked and
impolite fact of birth.
In a vague, inchoate sort of way, Lilly at sixteen was visualizing
nature procreant as an abominable woman creature standing shank deep in
spongy swampland and from behind that portentous curtain moaning in the
agonized key of Mrs. Kemble.
About this time Mrs. Kemble's third child was within a few weeks of
birth.
"Mamma, what makes Mrs. Kemble look so funny!"
"Hush, Lilly. Don't you ever let me hear you talk like that again.
Little girls shouldn't ask such questions."
One night shortly after, a cry that tore like a gash through the
sleeping boarding house roused Lilly to a sitting posture on her little
cot drawn across the baseboard of her parents' bed.
"Mamma! Papa! What was that?"
There were immediate voices and running up and down stairs and more
cries that beat the air and Mrs. Becker already up and clamoring into
her kimono.
"Sh-h-h, Lilly! Go back to sleep. It is nothing but Mrs. Kemble not
feeling very well. I'll run upstairs a minute, Ben. See that Lilly goes
back to sleep."
Until the break of day Lilly lay tense there on her little cot, toes
curled in, and still her mother did not return. Time and time again the
moans rose to shrieks of dreadful supplication that set her to trembling
so that her cot rattled against the baseboard.
"Kill me! God! Put me out of it! Please! I can't suffer any more! Kill
me, God! Kill me!"
"Papa, I--I'm scared."
"Go to sleep, Lilly," said her father from the pool of darkness, his
voice rather thin and sick. "Go to sleep now, like a good girl."
In a little area of quiet that ensued, she did drop healthily off,
wakening to the warmth of sunshine, her father already departed, her
mother rocking and sewing beside the window.
"Mamma, why didn't you wake me? I'll be late to school."
"You won't if you hurry and--and, Lilly, what do you think?"
"What, mamma?"
"The stork brought Flora and Roy the dearest little baby sister last
night. They're going to call her Evelyn. That's why Roy and Flora went
to spend the week with their Aunt Emma, so they wouldn't frighten the
stork away when he flew in with it. In a few days you can go up and see
it. Isn't that nice, Lilly?"
Still tousled with sleep, but the red rising up out of the yoke of her
nightgown, Lilly answered, with averted face, "Yes, mamma."
CHAPTER V
This episode marked the beginning of what was to be a three years'
refrain.
"Ben, we must go housekeeping. It's an outrage to board, with a girl
Lilly's age. Not as much as a parlor for her to bring her friends, and a
great big girl like her without a room to herself! It's not even
delicate."
"Well, Carrie, I'm willing."
"I know, until the time comes. I don't forget so easily the way you
sighed all night in your sleep that time I came near renting the house
on Delmar Avenue. Where is the money coming from! The minute that old
business down there earns a penny, right back into it go the earnings,
instead of drawing out a few dollars for the comfort of his family, like
any other man would."
"But, Carrie--"
"There is not another woman in the world would stand for it but me. A
woman that could enjoy a little home of her own as much as I! What do I
get out of it, I'd like to know! Stint. Stint. Stint. Shove it all back
into that old rope-and-twine business down there that doesn't show a
cent of capital when you take stock except in rope, rope, rope, until
I'd like to hang myself with some of it."
"Now, little woman, you got up on the wrong side of bed this morning.
Just hold your horses. These are tight times, I admit, but we have
our health--"
"I've heard that since I'm married. Health! Suppose we have got our
health. We can't thank the business for that."
"Lilly, your mother certainly got up on the wrong side of bed this
morning, didn't she?"
"Well, it's right discouraging, if you ask me."
"You're all right, little woman."
"Yes, I know," trying not to smile, "I'm all right when it don't cost
nothing and when it comes to the dirty work of trying to make two
ends meet."
"You're certainly a splendid manager. No one can take that away from
you."
"Well, I wish you would both appreciate it a little more."
"We do appreciate it, don't we, Lilly?"
"Yes, papa."
Her second year in High School, Lilly was kept out for five weeks by an
attack of typhoid fever.
An aversion for physical shortcoming, from her mother's occasional
headaches to the mortally afflicted Mr. Hazzard with the great chronic
sore crisscrossed with court plaster at the end of one of his eyes,
amounted in Lilly to something actually Indian.
"Oh, mamma, if I had a headache, I wouldn't always be talking about it.
People aren't interested."
"I'm going to tell your father when he comes home to-night what a
sympathetic daughter I have. If ever I fall sick the City Hospital will
be the place for me. When I see the way that Flora Kemble carries her
mother around and the way my own daughter sympathizes with me. If I
don't tell your father this night!"
It was this queer little congenital urge that kept Lilly on her feet for
two weeks after the malady had hold of her. With a stoicism that taxed
her cruelly, she would march smilingly off to school, a bombardment of
pains shooting through her head, her hands and tongue dry, a ball and
chain of inertia dragging at her ankles.
"Lilly, what is the matter? Why don't you eat your bread and butter
after school? Has Mrs. Schum said anything?"
"No, no, mamma. I'm not hungry, that's all."
"Funny. Open the closet. There is a basket of oranges behind your
father's overcoat, and a bag of baby pretzels, too."
"Goodness! mamma, if I was hungry, I'd eat."
"Don't you feel well, Lilly?"
"Of course I feel well, mamma. Why shouldn't I?"
But next day, at her after-school hour of practice, a small discordant
crash broke suddenly in upon "Chaminade's Scarf Dance" and Mrs. Becker's
rhythmic rocking above. Lilly had fainted, with her head in her arms and
face down among the keys.
Followed two weeks that crowded up the little back parlor with anxiety,
the tension of two doctors in consultation, and a sense of hysteria that
was always just a scratch beneath the surface of Mrs. Becker. She would
break suddenly into loud and unexpected fits of crying, crushing her
palms up against her mouth; would waken from a light doze beside the
bed, on the shriek of a nightmare, and have literally to be dragged from
the room. She harassed the doctors with questions that only the course
of the disease could answer.
The crisis came in the watches of the night, Lilly very straight and
very white and light of breathing in the center of her parents' bed, her
glossy hair in a thick plait over each shoulder, her fine white and
developed chest hardly rising.
"O God! help me to live this night! Ben! Ben!"
"Carrie, you're only making yourself sick and not helping the child."
"My baby! My beautiful snow-white baby! The best child that ever lived!
Help me to live this night!"
"Carrie, little woman, if only you won't take on so. There's every
reason to hope for the best. The doctor assured us."
"How long before we know? Go get Doctor Allison over. Ask Roy Kemble to
run over to Horton's and telephone for Doctor Birch. I want them
here. My baby!"
"Carrie, Carrie, haven't they told you time and time again there is
nothing they can do now? Don't antagonize Doctor Birch by calling him
over here again to-night. Everything is being done for the child. Now
all we can do is to sit and wait and hope for the best."
"You don't care! You're made of iron. At a time like this you stop to
consider the doctors' feelings. Mine don't count. My baby. Get well,
Lilly. Mamma's been cross at times, but never again. We'll do everything
to make you happy. You can read your eyes out and mamma won't turn out
the light on you. Mamma will buy you books and a box of paints and a
little bird's-eye-maple room all your own. Lilly, mamma's baby. We're
going housekeeping--your own piano--your own room. Aren't we, Ben?
Aren't we?"
"Yes, Carrie."
"You can take your choice, baby, of all the things you want to be. Mamma
won't oppose any more, or papa. Opera singing if you want it. You come
by it naturally from my choir voice. Whatever you say, baby. Even an
actress and all the elocution and singing lessons you--"
"Carrie!"
"Oh, you don't care! You're only her father. What does a father know?
You don't care."
Against this age-old indictment of paternity, and absolutely without
precedent, the patient, the iron-gray head of Mr. Becker fell forward, a
fearful and silent storm of sobs beating against his repression.
Full of dumfounded hysteria, walking on her knees around the bed edge to
him, Mrs. Becker drew down his head into the wreath of her arms, kissing
into it, mingling her tears with his, and tasting their anguish.
"My darling! Ben--please, darling! I say a lot of things I don't mean.
You are my husband--and my life. Ben--don't! I can't stand it! Ben!"
At six o'clock Lilly opened her eyes. They were clear and cool and the
petal-like quality was out on her skin.
"Sweet Alice," she said, "oh, Sweet Alice, Ben Bolt," a bit of dream
floating up with her like seaweed to the surface of consciousness.
"Sweet Alice."
She had been reading _Trilby_, surreptitiously filched from Mrs.
Kemble's stack of novels.
"Lilly--mamma's Lilly!"
"Where--I--Where--"
"In your own room, sweetheart, and your own mother and father beside
you."
"I thought--Sweet Alice--"
"The fever is gone now, Lilly. You won't have any of those thoughts any
more. Go to sleep now, papa's girl."
"I must have been singing--'Faust'--what makes you and papa--so
angry--with me--dears?"
"We're not, Lilly. Nothing makes us angry any more."
She was too tired to smile.
"I kept dreaming, mamma, that my hair was two big honey-colored braids
all wound up with pearls, like Marguerite's picture in _Stories of
the Operas_."
"Go to sleep, Lilly, like a good child. Our girl has got too much sense
to fill her head up with such nonsense."
"No, no, papa, I won't have common sense. I want to ride up to meet the
sun, like the princess in--"
"She wants to what? Are you sure her fever is gone, Carrie?"
"Nonsense! It is stuff she reads in her fairy tales. Yes, darling,
anything you want."
"You know, mamma--pearls--in my hair--"
"Yes, yes, darling. Sh-h-h!"
"Mamma?"
"Yes."
"We're middle-class, aren't we?"
"What does she mean?"
"Middle-class people, I mean. You know."
"Why, yes, dear, we're middle-class. I guess that is what you'd call it.
What an idea!"
"Help me."
"Yes, yes. How, baby? The doctor will be here any--"
"You don't know what I mean. No matter what I say, you don't know what I
mean. Isn't that terrible?"
"Help you to get well, that's what mamma and papa are going to do."
"No, no, no! Help me--out--up!"
Presently Lilly fell asleep. To her watching parents her light and
regular breathing took on the meter of a Doxology.
CHAPTER VI
Center High School, the city's only at a time when half a million souls
beat up like sea around it, a model and modern institution that was
presently and paradoxically to become architectural paragon for what to
avoid in future high-school buildings, was again within street-car
distance, except on usually bland days, when Lilly and Flora Kemble
would walk home through Vandaventer Place, the first of those short,
private thoroughfares of pretentious homes that were presently to run
through the warp of the city like threads of gold.
On these homeward walks Flora and Lilly, who referred to each other as
"my chum," were fond of peripatetically exchanging the views, the
consciousness, and the sweetness of sixteen.
"If you had your choice, Lilly, what house would you select for yours in
Vandaventer Place?"
"None."
"Why?"
"I don't want to live in between stone gates with 'No Thoroughfare'
stuck on each end."
"You're the funniest girl! What do you mean, 'No thoroughfare'? Don't
you want to be exclusive and private?"
"Yes, but a person can be private somewhere high--high--not just stuck
between gates like everybody else. Sappho always sat on a balcony that
overlooked the Aegean Sea."
"Maybe she did, and she jumped off, too, but I'm not talking to-day's
Greek history lesson. I'm talking about regular folks. Between the gates
of Vandaventer Place would be good enough for me. Wouldn't I just love
to be mistress over one of these houses and give parties with an awning
stretched out over the sidewalk!"
"What did you get in algebra, Flora?"
"B plus. And you?"
"B minus."
"Lilly Becker, that is the fifth B minus you've had in succession. I'm
going to call you Lilly Minus."
"If she hadn't sprung that old oral exam on us--"
"Oh, if ifs and ands were pots and pans!"
Flora, rather freckly, elbowy, and far too tall, was none the less about
to be pretty. She was frailly fair, like her mother, and could already
throw her blue eyes about their balls, in the Esperanto of coquetry. She
had a treacherous little faculty of appearing never to study and yet
maintaining an excellent grade of scholarship.
"You get me to do all sorts of things with you, Flora, and then you
sneak off and study on the quiet and leave me to flunk because I
promised you I wouldn't study, either."
"Why, Lilly Becker, I never studied one minute for that algebra quiz."
"You did so! When I went downstairs to write in my Friendship Book, like
you said you were going to do, you worked your algebra instead. Roy
told me."
"Well, if I was as pretty as you, Lilly, I wouldn't ever care if I got
my lessons or not," said Flora, to palliate.
"Flora Kemble, I'm not pretty!"
"You are, too. Everybody says your complexion is like peaches and
cream, and look at mine, all freckles."
"Complexion, huh! If I had your yellow hair, you could have all my
complexion."
"Boys hate freckles because so many of them have them themselves."
"Always boys. Honestly, you're boy-crazy, Flora."
"Well, I like that. Can I help it if I got an invitation and you didn't?
You sat right next to him in English and I sat two whole seats away."
A cloud no larger and smudgier than a high-school boy's hand had dropped
its first shadow between them. Eugene Bankhead, son of the credit man
for Slocum-Hines, the city's largest wholesale hardware firm, had
suddenly, out of this clear sky, invited Flora to the Thanksgiving Day
football game between Center High and an exclusive local academy. A new
estate felt, rather than spoken, quickened the eye and authority of
Flora. A sense of it rode on the air waves between them.
"I hate boys."
"How do you know? You've never seen any except my brother and
sneak-thief Harry."
"Papa says if a girl begins to run around with boys too soon it makes
her so forward that by the time she's eighteen she's too old
and faded--"
"That's old-fogy talk."
"You mean it's old fogy for girls to let boys jam everything else out of
their heads. I'd like to see the boy that could make me forget my--my
ambitions."
"If Eugene had asked you instead of me you wouldn't be saying that."
"Anyway, I hate snips. I like men--real men."
"Oh, I know. You're stuck on Lindsley!"
A violent splash of red and a highly superlative denial of word and
manner laid hold of Lilly.
"Why, Flora Kemble!"
"Look at her blushing. Oh, what I know about you!"
"You fibber. I think he's the limit. I never saw a fellow so stuck on
himself."
"Oh, I know! I know now why you carry home twice as many books as you
used to since he got charge of the library."
"I'm reading the _Lady of the Lake_ and you know it. That's why I
stopped in to-night."
"I know why you're always writing compositions since you have him in
English. Lilly's stuck on Lindsley."
Tears were rare with Lilly, but a tremor waved her voice.
"I think you're horrid, Flora Kemble. Anyway, he's more worth while
being stuck on than Eugene Bankhead. He's just--just middle-class. His
future is to work in Slocum-Hines's hardware store, like his father."
"Well, that's more of a man's job than sitting around in a schoolroom
doing lady's work. Papa says Eugene's father is a five-thousand-a-year
man. Eugene has all the spending money he wants and they have a
conservatory in their house."
"Well, I'd rather be Lindsley than Eugene; besides, he's a kid hardly
out of short trousers."
"Silly, you don't think it's Eugene I'm stuck on, do you? His brother
Vincent is a big man down at Slocum-Hines's, too, and a catch. I'm going
to meet him some day. Lindsley! Ugh! I like a little sponduliks thrown
in with a fellow. Lindsley's elbows shine."
For the most part the Board of Education drew upon the offspring of its
own system for teaching talent, occasionally letting in an artery of new
blood. Lilly's second year in High School such an infusion took place in
the form of one H. Horace Lindsley, the young master of arts, his degree
rather heavy upon him, dawning blondly and behind high-power pince-nez
upon the English department.
Sweet sixteen capitulated to English literature. The double wave of Mr.
Lindsley's hair, the intellectual rush of very long, white teeth to the
front, somehow mitigating for the sins of a curriculum that could
present Gorboduc, and _Friar Bacon_ and _Friar Bungay_, to young minds
illy furrowed for such seed.
Notwithstanding the literary odor with which Mr. Lindsley sprayed
himself as he sprayed his handkerchief with a domestic scent called
"Sesame and Lilies," his neoclassic determination to write the American
_Iliad_ must have died painlessly when his iambically disposed feet
ventured too deeply into the quagmire of pedagogy, from which he was not
to emerge. But for the first time in her life Lilly was hearing her name
pronounced by one who rolled it under his tongue like a lollypop. He
rolled all names quite so, but in her beatitude she was only conscious
of her own as it candied. Besides, his eyes, through the pince-nez, had
a gimlet, goosefleshing quality; he recited "Straits of Dover" to a
class of young women with rapt adenoidal expression when he should have
been inoculating them with the bitter serum of Burke's Conciliation
Speech, and walked to school of wintry mornings without an overcoat;
skates and the _Areopagitica_ under his arm.
It was undeniable that at this stage Lilly had veered unaccountably to
authorship, her after-school practice hour gouged into by a suddenly
stimulated pen.
"Papa, I know my ambition!"
Mr. Becker let fall his newspaper to his knee, glancing up over the rim
of his reading glasses.
"What's it now, daughter?"
"I want to be a writer. You know, an author of stories. My English
teacher says I have talent. I get A minus on all my essays, and to-day
he wrote on the edge of one, 'Quite a literary touch.'"
MRS. BECKER (who rocked as she darned): "The trouble with you, Lilly, is
that you have it too good. You don't know what you want."
"You don't care if I am a writer, do you, papa?"
"Last week it was the stage, and last month the opera, and now it's
writing. What next, I wonder?"
"Your mother's right. There's no stability to this art business, Lilly.
They're a loose lot that never come to a good end."
"Well, just the same," cried Lilly, hot with a sense of futility and
rebellion, "your own father was the next thing to an actor. Preaching is
kin to acting."
"Don't you ever let me hear you talk like that again. Your grandfather
was a God-fearing, not a play-acting man." Attacking this subject, a
little furrow would invariably appear between Mr. Becker's fine gray
eyes and his lips express bitter intolerance for a world that translated
itself to him solely in terms of pink tights.
Not that the odor of religion lay any too heavily on Lilly's youth.
Sunday school was not enforced, Sabbath ethics were observed loosely, if
at all, but a yearly membership in the Garrison Avenue Rock Church was
maintained, not without remonstrance from Mrs. Becker.
"I don't see why we belong. If I want to attend church on Easter Sunday
or a Christmas, I don't have to pay dues all year for it. A person can
pray just as well at home as in church if he's inclined that way."
"Our child doesn't need to be raised like a heathen just because we
aren't as regular as we might be about churchgoing. Besides, when
trouble comes we don't want to be buried like heathens, either."
"Calamity howler."
"In England, papa, writers get buried in Westminster Abbey. If I lived
in England, that would be my ambition."
"The child has ambitions even about funerals. I bought you goods for a
navy-blue poplin to-day, Lilly. Gentle's had a sale."
"Oh, mamma, can you get Katy Stutz to come in time to make it for
auditorium next Friday? Mr. Lindsley may call on me to read my essay
out loud."
"That Mr. Lindsley makes me sick. You're a changed child since he's come
to that school. Mrs. Foote said the same thing of Estelle at the euchre
yesterday. All the girls want new dresses and to be in his classes."
"Why, mamma!" coloring up.
"Oh, run over to Pirney's and buy me a postal card. I'll write Katy
Stutz to take Mrs. Foote's days away from her and give them to me."
By small briberies employed without sense of compromise, Mrs. Becker had
a way with those who served her. Katy Stutz, an old soul as lean and as
green as a cotton umbrella, had sewed at minimum wage through fourteen
years of keeping Lilly daintily and a bit too pretentiously clad.
Willie, Mrs. Schum's old negro cook, who wore her feet wrapped in gunny
sacking, and every odd and end that came down in the day's waste
baskets, from empty spools to nubs of pencil, stored away in the kink of
her hair, would somehow invariably send up the giblets along with the
Beckers' Sunday allotment of chicken. Mr. Keebil, too, an old Southern
relic, his head covered with suds of gray astrakhan and a laugh like the
up and down of rusty bedsprings, for ten years had presided over the
hirsute destinies of Lilly and her mother. Bi-monthly he arrived on his
shampooing mission, often making a day's tour throughout the
boarding house.
"Mr. Keebil, don't you do the Kembles' heads first to-day. That's the
way with you people. I get you all your customers and then you neglect
me for them."
"Law! Mrs. Beckah, how cum you think that? Don't I give you and Miss
Lilly shampoos for two bits when I chawges Mrs. Kemble three heads for
a dollar?"
"Yes, but what about the underwear and socks of Mr. Becker's that you
get?"
"I allas say I 'ain't got no bettah friend than Mrs. Beckah. That was
certainly a fine suit you done give me las' time, except for the
buttons cut off."
"You should consider yourself lucky to get a head like Miss Lilly's to
take care of at any price. Just look at it--like spun silk."
He would fluff out the really beautiful cascade of smooth and highly
electric hair, his brown hands, so strangely light pink of palm, full of
pride in their task.
"Law! Miss Lilly, if you ain't going to grow up the pick of them all."
"Ouch! Mr. Keebil, you hurt!" cried Lilly, ever tender of scalp.
Nor was Mrs. Becker above a bit of persiflage.
"Mr. Keebil, I hear it is something scandalous the way you and Willie
are setting up to each other."
The old shoulders would shake, the face crinkle into a raisin, and the
little spade of gray beard heave to the springy laughter.
"Law! Mrs. Beckah. if you ain't the greatest one to joke."
"Joke nothing. It's a fine match. A good upstanding church member like
you and a fine-looking woman like Willie."
Lilly would turn a quirking but disapproving eye upon her mother.
"Mamma, haven't you anything better to do?"
"Law! Miss Lilly, me and your ma we understand each other. Me and your
papa we know she will have her little joke but the heart is there.
That's what counts on the Lord's Judgment Day--the heart."
Lilly's poplin frock was completed for the Friday auditorium exercises.
Her two braids, now consolidated into one hempy rope, lay against her
back, finishing without completement of hair ribbon into a cylinder of
brushed-around-the-finger curl. It was a little mannerism of hers, not
entirely unconscious, to fling the heavy coil of hair over one shoulder.
It enhanced her face, somehow, the fall of shining plait down over her
young bosom. Contrary to her choking expectation, she was not called
upon to read, but to sit on the platform in an honorable-mention row
of five.
Flora Kemble read a B-plus paper, largely and in immaculate vertical
penmanship, entitled "Friendship," Lilly, the tourniquet twist at her
heart, sitting by. Her name was read later among the honorable five,
true to manner, Mr. Lindsley seeming to caress it with his tongue.
"Miss Halpern. Mr. Prothero. Miss Foote. Miss Deidesheimer. Miss
Beck-er."
From where she sat Lilly could see the slightly protuberant shine to his
teeth, the intellectual ride of glasses along his thin nose, the long,
nervous hand with a little-finger fraternity ring.
Her own hands were very cold, her cheeks very pink. She had a pressing
behind the eyes of a not-to-be-endured impulse of wanting to cry. His
reading of her name was a hot javelin through the pit of her being.
After the exercises and as school was in dismissal she saw him hurrying
out of a side door with a tennis racket. It seemed suddenly intolerable
that walk home through Vandaventer Place to her boarding-house world.
Flora's perceptions were small and quick.
"Why, Lilly, your cheeks are as red as anything and you're getting a
fever blister. Somebody kissed you!"
Her hand flew to her mouth almost guiltily, as if to the feel of lips
slightly protuberant.
"Why--Oh, you horrid girl!"
"It was Lind! Lind!"
"Lind--what--who?"
"Lindsley, of course," dipping with laughter.
"Flora Kemble, I'll never speak to you again. You're stuck on him
yourself and trying to put it on to me."
"Me stuck on him, the way his teeth stick out! No poor school-teacher
for mine!"
"You're boy-crazy. I'm not."
But that night for the first time in her life Lilly lay through a
sleepless hour, staring up into the darkness. The blanket irked her and
she plunged it off, burrowing one cheek and then the other into her
pillow in search of cool spots. Her mother puffed out slowly into the
silence, her father a bit more sonorous and full of rumblings.
Lilly felt herself wound up tightly and needing to be run down. She was
taut as a spring. After a while she took to plucking out from the
darkness words of sedative quality.
"Dove," she repeated softly to herself, and very, very slowly. "Dove.
Beautiful, quiet dove. Saint. Cathedral. Peace. Dell."
But when she finally did drop off to sleep a smile of protuberant teeth
was out like a rainbow across her darkness.
CHAPTER VII
Latitudinally speaking, there are about two kinds of Americans--those
who live west of Syracuse, and those who do not. An imaginary line
separates the tropic of candescence, fast trains, naval reviews, broad
a's, Broadway, Beacon Street, Independence Square, and Tammany Hall from
the cancer of craps, silver dollars, lynchings, alfalfa, toothpicks,
detachable cuffs, napkin rings, and boll weevils.
It is more than probable that Horace Lindsley's and Lilly Becker's
lineage were loamy with about the same magnesia of the soil. Generations
of each of them had tilled into the more or less contiguous dirt of
Teutonic Europe.
Lilly's progenitors had bartered in low Dutch; Horace Lindsley's in high
German, which, after all, is more a matter of geography than altitudes.
An oval daguerreotype of a great-grandmother at the harpsichord had hung
in Carrie Becker's (_née_ Ploag) home in Granite City.
A Lindsley had once presented an emperor with a hand-illuminated version
of the King James Bible, wrought out of peasant patience. Horace
Lindsley's mother belonged to a New England suffrage society when ladies
still wore silk mitts, and had dared to open a private kindergarten in
her back parlor after marriage.
It was this tincture of culture running like a light bluing through
Lindsley's heritage that began to set in motion the little sleeping
molecules of Lilly's class consciousness.
"Middle class," came to be a term employed always with lips that curled.
There were, then, actually men creatures outside the English "Fireside
Novels" she was allowed to devour without interruption by parents to
whom books were largely objects with which a room was cluttered up, who
wore spats, did play tennis in white flannels, turned down the page at a
favorite passage of poetry, eschewed suspenders for belts, were
guiltless of sleeve garters, and attended Saturday-afternoon symphony
concerts, in Lindsley's case, almost a lone male, debonaire and
unabashed in a garden of women.
At Lilly's urgent instance she and her mother often attended these
subscription concerts, seats for single performances obtainable (in a
commendable zeal to promote local music) in exchange for a newspaper
coupon and twenty-five cents.
Mrs. Becker frankly yawned through them, nictitating, as it were, during
the long narrative passages of the symphony or occupied with the
personnel of the audience.
"Look, Lilly," whispering behind her unopened program, "that's a pretty
idea over there on that red-haired girl. See the way the baby ribbon is
run through the sleeves. Do you want a dress like that?"
"Sh-h-h-h, mamma! No; it's too fussy!"
"Why don't they play something with a tune to it? I wouldn't give a row
of pins for music without any air at all."
"Sh-h-h-h, mamma. There isn't much tune to classical music."
"I wish the first violinist would play a solo. 'Warum,' like last time.
I've some baby ribbon just like that, Lilly. I picked it up on sale in
Gentle's basement bins--"
"Mamma, don't stare so."
"Don't criticize everything I do."
At one of these concerts Lilly shot out her hand suddenly, closing it
over her mother's wrist.
"Mamma, there's Lindsley. See, down there in the fourth row."
"Who?"
"My English teacher. See, polishing his eyeglasses."
Mrs. Becker sat straight, chin out like an antenna.
"Is that him?"
"Yes, that's he."
"I don't see anything so wonderful about him. He needs a haircut."
"Oh, mamma, you think all men have to wear their hair short and ugly
like papa and Uncle Buck. In the East men look like that."
"The idea! A man calls himself a man coming to a matinée like this. Your
papa ought to know that you have a sissy like him on your mind. Such a
looking thing! Ugh!"
These recurring intimations could sting Lilly almost to tears.
"Oh, mamma, that's just the--the meanest thing to say. Can't I show you
my English teacher without having him on my mind?"
"I never could stand a man whose teeth stick out. He looks like a
horse."
"Papa's teeth stick out."
"Yes, but just one, and his mustache hides that. I only hope for you,
Lilly, that some day you get a man as good as your father."
"How did papa propose to you, mamma? What did he say?"
Even Mrs. Becker could flush, quite prettily, too, her lids dropping at
this not infrequent query of Lilly's.
"It's not nice for young girls to ask such questions."
"Go on, mamma, what did he say?"
"I don't remember."
The overture broke in upon them then, a brilliantly noisy one from
Tschaikowsky that bathed them in a vichy of excited surf.
Settling with her head snuggled against her fur tippet, the back of her
neck against the chair top, Lilly could feel herself recede, as it were,
into a sort of anagogical half consciousness, laved and carried along on
currents of melody that were as sensually delicious as a warm bath. Her
awareness of Lindsley on a diagonal from her so that she could see his
profile hook into the music-scented dimness, ran under her skin like a
quick shimmer.
The proscenium arch curved again into her consciousness, herself its
center and vocal beyond the powers of the human organ.
The slamming up of chairs and mussy shuffling into wraps recalled her.
It was indescribably sad, this swimming up to reality. The buttoning of
her little tippet. The smell of damp umbrellas. Then the jamming down
the aisle toward the late and rainy afternoon. At the door they were
suddenly crushed up against Horace Lindsley, his coat collar turned up
about his ears.
"Miss Becker," he said, by way of greeting, nodding and showing his
teeth.
Her heart became a little elevator dropping in sheer descent.
"Oh--how--do--you--do?" They were pushed shoulder to shoulder, and, to
Lilly's agony, her mother's voice lifted itself in loud concern.
"For pity's sake, look at that downpour, will you? I hope your father
has the good sense to wear his rubbers. Ouch! Don't knock me
down, please."
"Mamma--please. Mr. Lindsley, I want you to meet my mother."
"Pleased to meet you. Lilly certainly has talked of her English teacher
a lot."
"She is a very interesting little student, Mrs. Becker. Quite a quality
to her work."
"Well, I am certainly pleased to hear that. She's our only one, you
know."
"Lilly has a tendency to let her imagination run away with her. A good
fault if she controls it."
"That's what her father and I always tell her. The child has too many
talents to settle down to any one. She gets her music from my side of
the house, but she quits practicing to write and she quits writing to
practice. It's not that we want our little girl ever to make her own
living, but her father and I believe in a girl being prepared, even if
she never has to use it. That's why we are having her take the
commercial course. We don't pretend to be swells, but at least we plan
to do as well for our child as the next."
"Exactly."
LILLY (in her agony): "Come, mamma."
"I wish you could read the poem she wrote last night, Mr. Lindsley. Not
that I give a row of pins for poetry, as a rule, but I told her she
ought to take this one to school."
"Please, mamma, please!"
"If I do say it myself, it was grand. Mr. Hazzard, quite an educated
gentleman who boards where we do, thought so, too. Lilly, why don't you
show Mr. Lindsley that poem? He's authority."
"Mamma, if only you won't talk about it."
"You must bring it to class, Miss Becker."
"No, no! I've--I've torn it up."
"I don't remember all of it, but everybody considered it a grand thought
for such a young girl; it goes--"
"Mamma! Mamma--not here--now!"
"I would not have the restless soul
That sees not beauty everywhere.
I see it glint on ocean waves,
Dance through a youth's or maiden's hair."
"Mamma, they're pushing so! Good night, Mr. Lindsley. Mamma, come!"
Outside in the wet dusk they boarded an electric car, Lilly and her
mother crammed on a rear platform of the wet overcoats, leaking
umbrellas, and wet-smelling mackintoshes of dinner-bound St. Louis.
"He's a right nice young man, intelligent--but if ever a person looked
like a horse! You see, he agrees with your papa and me. You don't apply
yourself to any one thing."
Lilly turned her inflamed, quivering face upon her mother, trying to
speak through a violent aching of tonsils.
"Oh," she cried, "how could you? I'll never look him in the face again!
Oh--oh--how could you?"
"Are you crazy? How could I what?"
"The poem. The--the glint in--his hair. He'll think it was his hair I
meant. Oh! Oh!"
The ready ire which could flame up in Mrs. Becker leaped out then.
"If you are ashamed of your mother, maybe you had better not be seen
out with her again. All I am good for is to stint and manage to get you
pretty clothes."
"No, n-no, mamma, I didn't mean that, dear."
"For a horse-face like him I won't be made little."
"Sh-h-h-h, dear! The whole street car doesn't need to hear."
"I wouldn't give a row of pins for ten like him."
"Mamma, the way you--talked."
"The way I talked, what? I suppose hereafter when I go out with my
educated daughter I will have to wear a muzzle."
"I--Oh, it wasn't what you said, mamma; it was--the way you said it."
"The way I said it? That's a rich one. If I don't tell your father! My
own child is ashamed of her mother. Well, let me tell you I--"
"No, mamma, you don't understand. Take that word 'swells,' for instance.
Oh, I know I've used it myself, but all of a sudden, to-day, it--it
sounded so ordinary."
"For a hundred-dollar-a-month school-teacher that your papa has to pay
taxes to support, I'm not afraid of my p's and q's."
"And, mamma," suddenly and acutely sensitive to pleonasm, "you begin
every sentence with 'say' and you say 'certainly' so often."
"If I don't have a talk with your father when he comes home this night!
That's the thanks I get for sitting through a concert with you when I
might have been enjoying myself at my euchre club. Just get those
high-tone notions out of your head. We're simple people, not swells.
You're a changed child these days."
It was true. An ineffable ache, a darting neuralgia of spirit, too
cunning and quick for diagnosis, was shooting through Lilly her last two
years at High School.
That Horace Lindsley, who was hardly to indent her life and whose
interest in the clean-eyed girl was little more than a leaf upon his
consciousness, and whose feet were already feeling the tug of the
quicksands of mediocrity which were to suck him out of her reckoning,
should have been the innocent source of this neurosis, is hardly
remarkable.
Lilly, with the mysterious tenacity of a crannied flower, was pulling
from her soil toward the light. And light in all its chiaroscuras rules
the _se leve, couche_, complexion, and humors of the world. Lindsley
was a ray.
And so her adolescence came in suddenly, almost stormlike, uprooting
little forests of sapling traditions.
At sixteen she still slept on the cot drawn across the bed end and rode
her bicycle up and down the sidewalks, holding her skirts down against
the wind, but also she had ransacked the boarding-house shelves and High
School library, reading her uncensored way through _Lady Audrey's
Secret, Canterbury Tales, Five Little Peppers and How They Grew, Plain
Facts About Life, Arabian Nights, Golden Treasury, Childe Harold, To
Have and to Hold, Tales from Shakespeare, Pilgrim's Progress, Old
Curiosity Shop, Diary of Marie Baschkertcheff, Pride and Prejudice,
Vanity Fair, Les Misérables, Stories of the Operas_, and a red volume
rescued from propping up the hall hatrack, _Great Lovers_.
Within that same year Katy Stutz twice lowered her skirt hems.
"Mamma, I think it is terrible I haven't a room to myself."
The entire surface of Mrs. Becker seemed to coat over with sensitiveness
to this frequently discussed issue.
"Why," her lips writhing with an excoriating brand of self-pity, "who am
I that I should want a home for my daughter, now that she is grown? Mr.
Kemble can treat his wife like a queen, but me--why, I'm mud under my
husband's feet."
The Kemble family, on a wave of putative prosperity, had eight months
since gone to housekeeping in a rather pretentious rock-fronted house on
one of the many newly graded streets west of Kingshighway. Every Friday
night Lilly slept with Flora, the two side by side in Flora's pretty new
bird's-eye-maple bed, exchanging unextinguishable confidences well
through nights wakeful with their dreams.
"Flora has her own parlor to practice in, and here I can't even sing a
little without the entire boarding house rapping on the wall."
"It's a shame. Watch me talk to your father to-night."
"Mamma, can't I please take elocution?"
"I should say not. Aren't piano and voice sufficient? The idea! I
wouldn't give a row of pins for all the elocution in the world. Reciting
is out of date."
"Mamma, it isn't. Mr. Lindsley says the modern woman of culture should
cultivate her speaking voice the same as she learns to use her singing
voice. Please, mamma; only a dollar a lesson."
"Oh, I don't care! Goodness knows where the money is coming from, with
flax twine where it is; but anything for peace."
And so when Lilly graduated from High School, third in her class, and
again slightly to the rear of Estelle Foote, who read the valedictory,
she was executing excitedly, if sloppily, "The Turkish Patrol," was
singing in an abominably trained but elastic enough soprano, the "Jewel
Song" from "Faust," and "Jocelyn," a lullaby, and at a private recital
of the Alden School of Dramatic Expression had recited "A Set of
Turquoise" to incidental music.
Mrs. Schum's boarding house, to the man, turned out to Lilly's High
School graduation, Katy Stutz and Willie standing in the wings and all
unwittingly visible from the house. A German-silver manicure set,
handsomely embossed, bore the somewhat cryptic card, "To Lilly Becker,
as she stands on the threshold of life, from her friends in the house."
There were a Honiton-lace fan with mother-of-pearl sticks, with the best
wishes of her mother's euchre club, and from her parents a tiny diamond
ring set high in gold facets, "To Lilly, from her parents, June, 1901,"
engraved in the hoop.
That night, still in her white organdie frock, with its whirligig design
of too much Valenciennes lace, her hair worn high and revealing an
unsuspectedly white nape of neck, Lilly regarded her parents across a
little table-display of gifts.
"I feel so queer," she said, looking off through the chocolate-ochre
wall paper, the reaction already set in. "So sort of--finished.
Nothing to do."
MR. BECKER: "That was certainly a fine speech the president of the Board
of Education made. You've something now that no one can take away from
you. Knowledge is power."
"Two girls in our class are going to the University of Missouri, papa.
That's what I'd like to do--go to college."
"Don't spoil a good thing by trying to overdo it, Lilly. It is as bad
for a young girl to permit herself to be educated into one of those
bold, unwomanly woman's-rights girls as it is for her to be frivolous
and empty-headed. When women get too smart they get unattractive."
"But, papa, girls are beginning more and more to go to college, and all
women will be--suffrage--some day."
"Not womanly girls, Lilly."
"I always said that High School would be her ruination."
"I didn't learn it there, mamma. I always wanted to be something--"
"Well, you're a finished stenographer, aren't you? Why not go down to
your father's office a couple of mornings a week?"
"I don't mean stenography. I hated learning it. I mean
something--something--beyond--"
Suddenly Mrs. Becker, quiet at the business of wrapping away some of the
gifts, glanced up, two round spots of color on her cheeks.
"You _are_ going to do something, Lilly. Have a home and entertain in it
like other girls."
"But--"
"I've a piece of news for you and your father. If I waited for him to
take the initiative I'd wait until the crack of doom."
"What is it, little woman?"
"I signed a lease yesterday for one of those yellow-brick houses--seven
rooms, bath, furnace heat, and privilege of buying. Twenty-eight
dollars, out on Page Avenue near Union. We move in two weeks
from to-day."
CHAPTER VIII
There followed one of those years which come and go even in the small
affairs of small men, when for Ben Becker swift waters flowed under the
bridge. He was just that, a small man, prided himself upon it and was
frequent in his boast: "I'm a small man, Carrie. I don't hope to make a
big or showy success of it. Just a comfortable and unassuming living is
about all I expect to get out of it, and that's a pretty good deal."
The Spanish-American War, something of musical comedy in its setting,
had run its brief malarial engagement, netting Ben Becker, in one order
of hemp rope alone, a cleanly realized profit of forty-two
hundred dollars.
On a new and gradually attained bank credit the B. T. Becker Hemp, Rope,
and Twine Company bought out the about-to-be-insolvent Mound City Flax
Twine Company, the consolidated interests moving into a two-story brick
building on South Seventh Street.
The firm took on the subtle and psychological proportions that go with
incorporation, however unassuming, capitalizing at fifteen thousand
dollars, B. T. Becker, president; Jerry Hensel, trusted foreman of
years, vice president and holder of ten shares; Carrie Becker, secretary
and treasurer and, to propitiate the law, holder of one share.
The little house on Page Avenue, too new for wall paper, still exuding
the indescribable cold, white smell of mortar in the drying, was none
the less---and with the flexible personality of houses--taking on the
print of the family. A mission dining-room set, ordered wholesale
through the machinations of one of Mrs. Becker's euchre friends,
arriving from Grand Rapids two months late, completed a careful and
thrifty period of housefurnishing. There were an upright piano, still
rented, but, like the house, payments to apply to a possible future
purchase, in the square of "reception hall"; a double brass bedstead in
the second-story front; and tucked away in the back of the tiny house,
overlooking, through sheerest of dimity curtains, a rolling ocean of
empty lots, the German-silver manicure set spread out on the dressing
table, Lilly's bird's-eye-maple bedroom come true.
Followed even then a long and uneasy period of adjustment. The up and
down stairs tugged at the rear muscles of Mrs. Becker's legs, compelling
evening foot baths. Mr. Becker chafed under the twenty minutes
additional street-car ride, eating his dinner by gaslight even in
August. The bed making and her allotment of the upstairs work irked
Lilly, even though Willie's stepniece, Georgia, came to help out once a
week, and evenings the little house could seem very still and
untenanted.
But after the arrival of the mahogany-and-velours parlor set, the music
cabinet, and the hanging of crispy lace curtains, Lilly standing on the
ladder, her mother steadying from below, and finally the laying of a
well-padded strip of stair carpet to eat in the hollow noises of new
tenancy, the house began to settle, so to speak.
Something latent, something congenital, even malignant, however, had
developed in Mrs. Becker. She took a fierce kind of joy, not untinged
with the mongrel emotion of self-pity, in scrubbing, on hands and knees,
the entire flight of back stairs at the black six-o'clock hour of wintry
mornings, her voice tickling up like a feather duster to Lilly's
reluctantly awakening senses.
"Lil-ly! Get up! I've done a day's work already. If I was a girl I
wouldn't want to sleep while my mother slaves."
But let Lilly so much as venture down into the wintry gaslight of the
bacon-fragrant kitchen, proffering her drowsy aid, a new flow, still in
the key of termagency, would greet her.
"Go right back to bed, Lilly. You want to catch your death of cold?"
"But, mamma, you fuss so. I'd rather help than listen. Here, let me stir
the oatmeal."
"Go back to bed, I say. I don't intend to have you spoil your hands with
kitchen work. Maybe some day your father will feel in a position to give
his wife a permanent servant girl like any other woman has."
"Mamma, he's always begging you to get one,"
"I know. Talk is cheap. Did you hear what I said, Lilly? Stop that
stirring and go back to bed! I'll bring up your breakfast after a while.
I'll fix your sandwiches for the sewing circle this afternoon."
"Oh, mamma, I just hate that circle! I wish to goodness you would let me
resign."
"I have a grateful daughter, I have. Any other child with your
advantages would think she had heaven on earth."
"I hate it, I tell you. Flora and Snow and all those girls, with nothing
on their brains except fellows and fancy work, make me positively sick."
"I notice Flora had enough brains to become engaged to a fine young
fellow with prospects like Vincent Bankhead."
"Every time I sit down at that circle I think I'm going to scream. I
just can't rake up enthusiasm over French knots. Something in me begins
to suffocate and I can't get out from under. I hate it."
Regarding her daughter through the bluish aroma of bacon in the frying,
her early-morning coiffure and wrapper not lenient with her, a
bitterness pulled at the lips of Mrs. Becker.
"That settles it. I'm going to have a talk with your father this
morning."
"Oh, mamma, please don't begin a scene!"
"Ben, are you ready for breakfast? Come down. What do you do up there so
long? You've been one solid hour splashing around the bathroom, as if I
didn't have to get down on my hands and knees to wipe up the flood
around the bathtub. Hurry! Your daughter has something to say to you."
"Coming, Carrie. Don't get excited."
"Don't get excited! I think your father would ram that down my throat if
this house was tumbling around our heads."
It was true that Mr. Becker's imperturbability incased him like a kindly
coating of tallow. His daily and peremptory call to breakfast brought
him down only after the last satisfactory application of whisk, tooth,
hand, shoe, bath, and hair brush, his invariable white-linen string tie
adjusted to a nicety, his neat gray business suit buttoned over a
gradual embonpoint.
"If I took as good care of myself as my husband does, I'd live to be a
thousand."
"Now, little woman, you got up on the wrong side of bed to-day."
On this particular morning he descended genial, rubbing cold,
soap-exuding hands together.
"Well, little woman! Good morning, daughter."
"Ben, I'm at my row's end with Lilly. Something has got to be done or I
can't stand it."
He sat down, an immediate tiredness out in his face, adjusting his
napkin by the patent fasteners to each coat lapel.
"Now, Carrie, have you and Lilly been quarreling again? Doesn't it seem
too bad, Lilly, that you and your mother cannot get on without these
disturbances? Your mother may have her peculiarities, but she
means well."
A ready wave of red self-commiseration dashed itself across Mrs.
Becker's face.
"I can't stand it, Ben. I don't know what she wants. Maybe you can
please her. I can't. Everything I do is wrong. Everything."
In her little blue-gingham morning dress, out of which her neck flowered
white and ever beautiful of nape, Lilly crumbled up her biscuit, eyes
miserably down, the red-hot pricklings which invariably accompanied
these scenes flashing over her and a crowding in her throat as if she
must tear it open for language to make them understand.
"Talk to your father, now! Tell him some of the things you hound me
with."
"Lilly, what seems to be the trouble?"
"I--I don't know. Mamma gets so excited right away. I just happened to
mention that--I don't know what to do with myself."
"Do with yourself! Help me in the house. I can give you enough to do
with yourself. I don't get lonesome."
"Carrie, now, don't holler."
"That's the way she is, papa. She gets excited and hollers at me
because I can't get interested in sewing clubs and housework."
"It's because you've got it too good that you're not satisfied. That
Flora Kemble, that never has a decent thing to wear, gets engaged
to a--"
"Now, Carrie, that's no way to talk."
"Mamma always makes me feel uncomfortable because I'm not married yet."
"Now do you believe what I go through with, Ben?"
"You haven't any faith in me, but--somewhere--destiny, or whatever you
want to call it, has a job waiting for me!"
"That's too poetical for me to keep up with. Thank goodness I'm a plain
woman who knows her place in life."
"Exactly, mamma. It isn't that I consider myself above Flora's party
to-morrow night. It's not my place. I don't belong there. I hate it, I
tell you."
"You hear that, Ben? That's the thanks I get. You know the way I've
tried to make this little home one a child could be proud of. Take the
time that fine young Bryant fellow came to call. Why, that little parlor
of ours was fit for a princess. His knuckles didn't suit her! They
cracked, she said. I've heard of lots of excuses for not taking to boys,
but that beats all. Three girls out of the sewing club already married
and Flora engaged to that well-to-do Bankhead boy, and mine holds
herself above them all."
"Your mother isn't all wrong, Lilly."
"I've run my legs off for the white organdie so Katy Stutz could make it
up for Flora's engagement party to-morrow night. Does she appreciate it?
Oh yes, long face is the kind of appreciation I get."
"I'd rather stay home, mamma, and practice my singing or
read--anything--"
"You'll sing _there_. Mrs. Kemble has it all fixed for Flora to call on
you just before the refreshments. If you begin to pout about this party,
Lilly, I--"
"Oh," cried Lilly, turning her face away to hide the embitterment of lip
and still crumbling up her biscuit, "don't worry. I'm going if--if it
kills me."
Suddenly Mrs. Becker's face quivered ominously, the impending
storm-cloud bursting.
"I wish I was dead. What do I get out of it? Struggle and sacrifice, and
all for an ungrateful daughter that isn't happy in her home."
"It isn't that. Just let me be--myself!"
"Then what is yourself? For God's sake tell us what? Anything to end
this state of affairs."
"I'm suffocating here. Let me make something out of myself."
"Listen to her, Ben. Make something. Her stories come back from the
editors. Her teacher keeps telling me her voice isn't ready yet. Miss
Lee says her piano technique is lazy--"
"Then let me travel--college--anything."
"She thinks we're millionaires, Ben."
"Lilly, Lilly! What is the young generation coming to?"
"I wish I was dead. Dead," cried Mrs. Becker, beating at the table until
the dishes shivered. Danger lights sprang out in little green signals
around about the flanges of her nose. She was mounting to hysteria.
"Lilly, aren't you ashamed to torture your mother like this?" cried Mr.
Becker, his voice shot through with what for him amounted to a pistol
report. "Comfort your mother. Apologize at once!"
"Mamma, I'm sorry! I am, dear."
"You would think we were plotting against her."
"Now, now, Carrie, Lilly doesn't mean all she says."
"But she eats my life out."
"She wants to please us. Don't you, Lilly?"
"Y-yes, papa--"
"Now let us see if things can't run smoother in our little home, eh,
Lilly? We'll all try and do each his part, eh, Lilly?"
"Y-yes, papa."
"It's late," cried Mrs. Becker, suddenly, on the single gong of half
after seven, and, ever quick and kaleidoscopic of mood: "Katy Stutz will
be here any minute. That's her now. Run upstairs, Lilly, and take the
top off the sewing machine and lay out the white organdie. Quick, Lilly.
I want you to have it without fail for to-morrow night."
CHAPTER IX
It was at this controversial gathering of young people at the home of
Flora Kemble that Lilly met, for the first time, Albert Penny.
The Kemble home lent itself gracefully to occasions of this kind, the
parlor and reception hall opening into one, and the impending
refreshments in the dining room shut off with folding doors. There was
more of ostentation in the Kemble home. More festooning of fringed
scarfs, gilt chairs, and a glass curio cabinet crammed with knickknacks.
"Dutch as sauerkraut," was Mrs. Becker's indictment; and Flora Kemble
came under the gaucherie of the impeachment, too.
She had attained tall and exceedingly supine proportions, wore pinks and
blues and an invariable necklace of pink paste pearls to fine advantage,
and a fuzz of yellow bangs that fell down over her eyes, only to be
repeatedly flung back again.
Again MRS. BECKER (who could be caustic): "She makes me so nervous, with
her hair down over her eyes like a poodle dog, that I could scream."
Nevertheless, at eighteen Flora's neat spiritous air lay calm as a
wimple over her keenly motivated little self. The same apparently
guileless exterior that had concealed her struggle along a road lit with
midnight oil toward her graduation, enveloped the campaign of strategy
and minutiae that had resulted victoriously in her engagement to Vincent
Bankhead, assistant credit man to his father.
Albert Penny at this time was second-assistant buyer for Slocum-Hines,
and, at the instance of his friend Vincent, somewhat reluctantly
present.
"Al, what are you doing to-night?"
"Oh, about the same old thing! Take a stroll and turn in, I guess. Why?"
"There is a little gathering up at the Kembles' this evening. Thought
maybe you'd like to meet the girl. Nothing formal, just a few of the
girls and boys over to celebrate."
"I'm not much on that kind of thing, Bankhead. Guess you'd better count
me out."
"Come along. Want to show you the kind of little peach I've picked."
"Ask me out some night to a quiet little supper, Bankhead. I feel a cold
coming on."
"Quiet little supper, nothing. That's your trouble now, too much quiet.
Nice people, her folks. It'll do you good."
And so it came that when the folding doors between the Kemble dining
room and parlor were thrown open, Lilly Becker, still flushed from a
self-accompanied rendition of "Angels' Serenade" and an encore,
"Jocelyn," and Albert Penny, in a neat business suit and plaid
four-in-hand, found themselves side by side, napkin and dish of ice
cream on each of their laps, gay little bubbles of conversation, that
were constantly exploding into laughter, floating up from off the
gathering.
There is a photograph somewhere in an album of Lilly much as she must
have looked that night. Her white organdie frock out charmingly around
her, a fluted ruffle at the low neck forming fitting calyx for the fine
upward flow of her high white chest into firm, smooth throat; the
enormous puff sleeves of the period ending above the elbow where her
arm was roundest; the ardent, rather upward thrust of face as if the
stars were fragrant; the little lilt to the eyebrows; the straight gray
eyes; the complexion smooth as double cream, flowing in cleanest
jointure into the shining brown hair, worn in an age of Psyche or
Pompadour, so swiftly and shiningly drawn back that it might have been
painted there.
That was the Lilly Becker upon whom Albert Penny cast the first second
glance he had ever spared her sex.
"Miss Becker, we certainly did enjoy your solo."
She was still warmed from the effort, the tingling nervousness of the
moment not yet died down, and she was eager and grateful.
"Oh, Mr. Penny, did you really? I was so afraid I flatted there at the
end."
"I had to laugh the way they broke in with clapping before you were
finished. I knew you weren't done."
"Oh, then you're musical, too?"
"No, but I could see there was one more page you hadn't turned."
"Oh!"
"My! but you can go high! Like a regular opera singer."
"Oh, if I thought you meant that! It's my ambition to sing--real big
opera, you know."
"It certainly was a pretty song, not so much the song as the way you
sang it. I could understand every word."
"If only my parents could hear you say that. You see, they don't
approve. They think it's all right for a girl to have a parlor voice,
but it must stop right there, otherwise it becomes a liability instead
of an asset."
At this little conceit of speech he turned delighted eyes upon her.
"Why, you're a regular little business woman!" he cried.
"Yes," she sighed out at him through a smile, "I took the commercial
course at High."
Inhibitions induce callosities, and Albert Penny's inhibitions, incased
within the shell of himself, were as catalogic as Homer's list of ships.
First, like Tithonus, he had no youth. Persiflage, which he secretly
envied in others, on his own lips went off like damp fireworks. He loved
order and his mind easily took in statistics. He had invented a wire
kind of dish for utilizing the left-over blobs of soap. He never
received so much as a street-car transfer without reading its entire
face contents. In seven years he had not availed himself of the annual
two weeks' vacation offered him by his firm, and, conspire as he would
against it, Sunday continued to represent to him a hebdomadal vacuity of
morning paper, afternoon nap and walk, unsatisfactory cold supper, and
early to bed. His very capacity for monotony seemed to engender it. He
could sit in Forest Park the whole of a Sunday afternoon, poring over a
chance railroad time-table picked up on the bench; paring his straight,
clean finger nails with a penknife; observing the carriages go by; or
sit beside the lake, watching the skiffs glide about at twenty-five
cents the hour; and finally, hat brim down over his eyes, doze until
twilight seeped damply into his consciousness.
This same unsensitiveness to routine had enhanced his value with
Slocum-Hines from delivery boy at fifteen to second-assistant buyer at
twenty-five, an amenability, however, that threatened to pauperize him
of any capacity for play. Under the well-meant banterings of friends he
became conscious of it, but to cast it off was to cast off the thing he
was. He tried to learn to recreate, and took Saturday-evening street-car
rides to Forest Park Highlands and joined a bowling club. He paid ten
dollars in advance for a course of six dancing lessons, too, and only
took four of them.
There had never been a woman, a perfume, or a regret in his life. In the
period of ten years since his migration from the paternal farm ten miles
outside of Sparta, Missouri, he had worked for one firm, boarded with
one landlady, and eaten about three thousand quick lunches in the Old
Rock Bakery at Lucas Avenue and Broadway. To further account for the
state of existing hiatus in Mr. Penny's scheme of things would be
tautology.
A short femur line gave him an entirely false appearance of stockiness.
On the contrary, he stood a full five feet ten, was thewed with fine
compactness and solid with clean living and clean with solid living.
Even the fiber of his remarkably fine hair was strong. It was the
brilliant honey color of full-moon shine, lay off his brow, but not
down, lending him a look of distinction to which he was hardly entitled.
He regarded Lilly with a furtiveness prompted solely by a desire not to
appear audacious. Her softly rising throat just recovering its normal
beat reminded him of the sweet agitation of pigeons in the park. He was
close enough to be conscious of an amazing impulse on his part to reach
over and touch the soft white flesh above the cove of her elbow. A
little blue thread of a vein showed there, maddeningly. A sense of inner
pounding suffocated him. He felt as if he had suddenly stepped into a
bath of charged waters, little explosions all over the surface of him.
Then a numbness so that, when he placed his tongue to the roof of his
mouth, it was insensate, and, somewhat frightened, he pinched the back
of his hand, relieved by the stab of pain.
"Do you dance, Mr. Penny?"
"Me? I--No, I guess I'm what you would call temperance when it comes to
frolics."
A little clearing had been made in the parlor, a music box pricking out
the "Blue Danube." From the dining room they sat regarding the three or
four couples, Lilly marking time with the toe of her white-kid slipper.
The elixir of the dance could rush to her head like wine, but she was
not sought after as a partner, due to her reserve against a too locked
embrace and a curious tendency to lead.
"To me, dancing is poetry as written by the feet."
He relieved her of her napkin and ice-cream dish, eager for suitable
reply to this syrupy observation.
"Speaking of feet, have you seen the show at Forest Park Highlands this
week?"
"No."
"Well, really remarkable. There is an armless fellow there who eats and
juggles, even writes, with his toes."
"Indeed!"
"Sometime if you would honor me by--by accompanying--I--er--Becker, did
I understand the name to be? I wonder if by any chance you are related
to Ben Becker."
She turned upon him with the immemorial sense of a point about to be
scored, her eyes full of relish.
"Why, I think I'm slightly related, Mr. Penny. He happens to be my
father."
He whacked his thigh.
"You don't tell me! Why, I've bought rope and twine from your father for
three years! A mighty fine gentleman, there. Well, well, this is a small
world, after all."
She noticed his large, protuberant Adam's apple throbbing with the
accelerando of pleasure, and a thaw set in between them. He let his arm
drape over the back of her chair, a stolen sense of her nearness
dizzying him. He was like a man with a suddenly developed new sense,
which he could not tickle enough.
"Well, well!" he said. "Well, well, well!" And she sighed out again
through her smile that he could fall so short of what he looked to be.
"I used to say, when I was a little girl, Mr. Penny, that I wished my
father were in a more romantic business than rope and twine. I wanted
him to be a florist or a wood carver or a music publisher or some of the
perfectly silly things that girls get into their heads."
"I always say of myself that I must have been born with a wooden spoon
in my mouth. Took to hardware from the very start. Left my stepfather's
farm and general store at fifteen and made a bee line for the hardware
business before I hardly knew what hardware meant. I suppose I'll die
with my nose to one of those very grindstones we carry in stock and be
buried with one of those same wooden spoons in my mouth. Although I
always say, no burial for mine. Burn me up--cremate me when I'm
finished here."
"Papa is that way, too, about his business, I mean. Tied up in twine, I
tell him."
"Just ask your father if he knows Albert Penny, Miss Becker. Queer how
things happen. This very day I turned over a memorandum to the head of
my department, advising a certain buy in hemp rope, Becker and Co. in
the back of my head all the time."
At eleven o'clock the first guest rose to go, Lilly following immediate
suit.
His state of eagerness rose redly to his ears.
"Will you permit me to escort you home, Miss Becker?"
"Why, yes, if it won't upset Flora's plans for me. I only live two
blocks over on Page."
"I wish you lived as far as Carondalet," he said, choking over words too
strange to be his.
They walked home through quiet streets that smelled sweetly and moistly.
He was scrupulously careful of her at crossings, his tingling fingers
closing over the roundest part of her arm, the warmth of her shining
through to the fabric of her eider-down-bordered cape, lending it a
vibrant living quality that thrilled him.
"I certainly have enjoyed a perfect evening, Miss Becker."
The magic of youth stole out of the citified night upon her.
"See!" she cried, her arm darting out of her cape, "that's Taurus up
there. I can always tell him. He's green. See how he glitters to-night.
Sometimes I feel sorry for Taurus. It's as if his little emerald soul is
bursting to twinkle itself out of the monotony of all the white ones.
That's what they were at the party to-night, all white. All of a color."
"Except you."
"Oh! Do you know the names of the stars, Mr. Penny?"
"I know the Dipper. It's our trade-mark, you know. That's how I
happened to work out our nest of aluminum dippers. Wonder if you
wouldn't permit me to bring you out a set of those dippers, Miss Becker.
All sizes fitted into one another. Just a little kitchen novelty you
might enjoy."
They were at her front steps now, the hall light flickering out over
them.
"I just certainly have enjoyed this evening, Miss Becker."
"Nice of you to put it that way, Mr. Penny," she said, trying to appear
unconscious of the unmistakable suns in his eyes.
"I--I'm not much of a fellow for this kind of thing, but I see I've been
making a mistake. A fellow like myself ought to get about more. But most
of the--er--er--ladies--young ladies--I have met, if you will pardon my
saying it, haven't been the sensible kind like yourself that a fellow
could sit down and have a talk with."
"I'm not very congenial, either, Mr. Penny, with the boys and girls I am
thrown in with. Flora's all right, and Vincent, but I'd rather stay at
home with my music or a good book than waste my time with social life. I
just ache sometimes for something better."
"Well, well," he said, "we certainly agree in a lot of ways. I thought I
was the only home body."
She was inside the door now, bare arm escaping the cape and out toward
him.
"Good night, Miss Becker. I--I hope I may be permitted to bring over
those dippers some evening."
"Why--er--yes, thank you."
"Good night."
Turning out the hall light, Lilly felt her way carefully upstairs to
save creaks.
"Lilly, that you?"
"Yes."
"Tear your dress?"
"No."
"Turn out the hall light?"
"Yes."
"Tight? Wait. I'm getting up."
"Never mind."
But during the process of Lilly's undressing, huddled on the bed edge,
arms hugging herself, Mrs. Becker held midnight commune.
"Who was there?"
"Oh, the usual crowd."
"Refreshments?"
"The usual."
"Anybody admire your dress?"
"No."
"Don't tell me too much, Lilly. I might enjoy hearing it."
"But, mamma, won't it keep until to-morrow? I'm sleepy now, dear."
"Who brought you home--Roy?"
"A Mr. Penny."
"Who? I thought you said only the old crowd was there. It's like pulling
teeth to get a word out of you."
"A friend of Vincent's. Works at Slocum-Hines's."
"Seems to me I've heard your father mention that name. Penny--familiar.
Is he nice?"
Lilly shuddered into a yawn. In the long drop of nightdress from
shoulder to peeping toes, her hair cascading straight but full of
electric fluff to her waist, she was as vibrant and as eupeptic as
Diana, and as aloof from desire.
"Yes, he's nice enough--"
"Penny--certainly--familiar name."
"--if you like him."
"What?"
"I say he's nice enough if you like his kind."
"Well, Miss Fastidious, I wish I knew who your kind is."
"I wish I did too, mamma."
Suddenly Mrs. Becker leaned to the door, her voice lifted.
"Ben!"
"Oh, mamma, he's asleep!"
"Oh, Ben!"
"Mamma, how can you?"
"Y-yes, Carrie."
"Isn't that assistant buyer down at Slocum-Hines's, the one you say has
thrown some orders in your way, named Penny?"
"Mamma, surely that will keep until morning."
"Isn't it, Ben?"
"Yes, Carrie; but come back to bed."
"I knew it! He's one of the coming young men at Slocum-Hines's. Vincent
Bankhead swears by him. He throws some fine orders in your papa's way. I
knew the name had a ring. Lilly, did he ask to--call?"
"Mamma, I'm sleepy."
"Did he?"
"Yes--maybe--sometime."
Then Mrs. Becker, full of small, eager ways, insisted upon tucking her
daughter into bed, patting the light coverlet well up under her chin and
opening the windows.
"Good night, baby," she said, giving the covers a final pat. "Sleep
tight and don't get up for breakfast. I want to bring it up to you."
But, contrary to the blandishment, Lilly lay awake, open-eyed, for quite
a round hour after her mother's voice, broken into occasionally by the
patient but sleepy tones of her father, had died down.
From her window she could see quite a patch of sky, finely powdered with
stars, the Dipper pricked out boldly.
For some reason, regarding it, a layer of tears formed on her eyes and
dried over her hot stare.
CHAPTER X
On the 6th of the following July, Lilly Becker and Albert Penny were
married.
The day dawned one of those imperturbable blues that hang over that
latitude of the country like a hot wet blanket steaming down. The corn
belt shriveled of thirst. The automobile had not yet bitten so deeply
into the country roads, but even a light horse and buggy traveled in a
whirligig of its own dust. St. Louis lay stark as if riveted there by
the Cyclopean eye of the sun. For twenty-four hours the weather vanes of
the great Middle West stood stock-still while July came in like a lion.
The city slept in strange, improvised beds drawn up beside windows or
made up on floors, and awoke enervated and damp at the back of the neck.
Throughout the Becker household, however, the morning moved with a whir,
the newly installed telephone lifting its shrill scream, delivery wagons
at the door, the horses panting under wet sponges and awning hats,
Georgia wide-eyed at the concurrence of events.
For the half-dozenth time that morning Mrs. Becker suffered a little
collapse, dropping down to the kitchen chair or hall bench, fanning
herself with the end of her apron.
"I'm dead! Another day like this will finish me. Georgia, have you
polished the door bell? Those delivery boys finger it up so. I'm
wringing wet with _prespiration_. If only there is a breeze in the
church to-night. Georgia, if that is Mr. Albert on the telephone, tell
him Miss Lilly isn't going to leave her room until noon. No, wait. I
want to speak to him myself. Hello, Albert? Well, bridegroom, good
morning!... What's left of me is fine.... I'm making her stay in her
room. Poor child, she's all nerves. Don't be late. I hate last-minute
weddings. Did you see the item in the morning _Globe_?... Yes, the name
is spelled wrong, Pen-nie, but there's quite a few lines. 'In lieu of a
honeymoon,' it goes on to say, 'the young couple will go to housekeeping
at once in their new home, 5199 Page Avenue, directly across from the
parents of the bride.' I'm sending over now to have all the windows
opened so it won't be stuffy for you to-night. Wait until you see the
presents, Albert, that came this morning. A check for five hundred
dollars all the way from her uncle Buck in Alaska. That makes six
hundred in checks. Three beautiful clocks, a dozen berry spoons from my
euchre club, and an invitation in poetry for her to become a member of
the Junior Matron Friday Club. If I wasn't so rushed I think I--I could
just sit down and have a good cry. Albert, be careful of those silk
sleeve garters I sent you for your wedding shirt, don't adjust them too
tight; and you know how you catch cold. Don't perspire and go in a
draught. And--and Albert, I see I have to remind you of little things
the way I do Ben. You men with your heads so chock full of business!"
(Very _sotto voce_.) "Send Lilly flowers this afternoon.
Lilies-of-the-valley and white rosebuds. Remley's on your corner is a
good place. Tell them your mother-in-law is a good customer and they'll
give you a little discount.... Yes, she's upset, poor child. I was the
same way. My mother almost had to shove me into the carriage. Well,
Albert, call up again about noon. She'll be up by then. Good-by--son."
A pox of perspiration was out over her face, sparkling forth again after
each mopping. A box arrived from a jeweler's and one from a department
store. They were a pie knife and a table crumber in the form of a
miniature carpet sweeper. The usual futilities with which such occasions
can be cluttered and which have shaped the destinies of immemorial women
into a tyranny of petty things.
Then Mrs. Becker hurried upstairs, her white wrapper floating after.
In the bathroom her husband leaned to a mirror, his jaw line thrust to
the cleave of a razor.
"I really envy you, Ben. Not even your daughter's wedding day can
disturb you. For a cent I could cry my eyes out. It's only excitement
keeps me going. I--could--c-c-cry."
"Now, now, little woman."
She sat down on a hall chair, regarding him through the open bathroom
door.
"Has she said anything to you, Ben, since yesterday? It's made me so
upset."
"Now, now, little woman, you must make allowances for a young girl's
nervousness."
"I know, Ben, but it worries me so. It's not natural for her to have
crying spells like that one yesterday."
"Nonsense! I'm not so sure you weren't a red-eyed bride."
"My nervousness wasn't anything like hers. She'll make herself sick."
"You mean you will."
"Have you heard her moving about her room yet?"
"No."
"Shall I knock?"
"No, Carrie; now let the child alone this morning."
"I never knew her to stay in bed so long. It's after eleven, and the
hair dresser coming at twelve. It will seem funny, won't it, Ben,
her--little room empty to-night."
"Now, now, no waterworks. What if she was moving away to another city
instead of just settling down across the street? You worked this thing
your way, and even now you don't feel satisfied."
"I do feel satisfied, Ben, but I want her to be, too."
"Now, little woman, mark my word, Lilly may feel that she is doing this
thing in more or less of a spirit of sacrifice to our pleasure, but
inside of a week she'll be as busy and happy a little housekeeper as
her mother."
"Is that her calling?"
"Yes. Go to her, Carrie."
Out in the little upper square of hallway Lilly appeared suddenly; her
hair still down in the beautiful way she let it toss about her in sleep,
and her body boldly outlined in a Japanese kimono she held tightly
about her.
"Mamma, will you and papa please come to my room? I want to talk to
you."
"Your father is shaving, Lilly. Can't you talk to us out here? How is
our girl on her wedding day? Frightened? You're me all over again. Ask
your father if I wasn't as pale as you are." She kissed her daughter on
lips that were cold, brushing back the shower of hair from her
shoulders. "You ought to see the presents, Lilly, that just--"
"Mamma--papa--you must listen."
"Yes, Lilly."
"Please, won't you let me off? Please!"
Her father regarded her from behind the white mud of lather, his eyes
darkening up.
"Now, now, sweetheart," he said, using one of his rarest words of
endearment, "this won't do at all."
"But I can't, papa. I just can't. I know it's terrible, this last
minute, but--but--I tell you--I can't."
"My God, Ben!"
"Can't what, Lilly?"
"Can't! I never had such a funny--a terrible feeling. I can't explain
it, only let me off. Please! It's not too late. Lots of girls have done
it--found out at the last minute they couldn't--"
"My God! What are we to do, Ben? Ben!"
"Carrie, if only you will hold your horses I'll handle this." He mopped
off his face hurriedly, sliding into a dressing gown.
"Come now, Lilly, into the front room. Sit down."
She moved after him with the rather groping look of the blind.
"Now what is this nonsense, Lilly, you've been hinting these last few
days?"
"I've made a mistake, papa. I should have said so weeks--ago--from the
start. It isn't Albert's fault. It isn't anybody's fault. I've had it
all along, this queer feeling all through the engagement and parties,
but I kept hoping for your sakes I'd get over it--hoping--in vain--"
"Why, of course, Lilly, you'll get over it! It's natural for a young
girl to feel--"
"No! No! My feeling won't lift! If only I had said nothing the night
he--proposed. But mamma was waiting up. She--she pressed me so. It was
so hard the way you put it. I know he's a fine fellow. I know, papa,
he's thrown big orders in your way. But I can't help being what I am.
Please, papa, let me off! Please!"
An actual shrinkage of face seemed to have taken place in Mrs. Becker.
"What'll we do? What'll we do, Ben?" she kept repeating, rocking herself
back and forth in what seemed to border on dementia.
"You see, papa, it's only to be a small wedding. We could so easily call
things off. I'll take all the blame--"
"No! No! No!"
"Mamma dear, I'm as sorry--about it as you are, but--"
"No! No! She's ruining our lives, Ben--disgracing--"
"Lilly, are you sure that you are telling us everything?"
"I swear it, papa. I know I'm inarticulate, I don't seem able to explain
the terrible state I've been in for days--"
"It's nervousness, Lilly."
"I tell you, no! I can't make you understand. But I'm not cut out, papa,
for what I'm going to settle down to. I'm something else than what you
think I am. I guess I--I am a sort of botanical sport, papa, off our
family tree. I know what you're going to say, and maybe you're right. I
may have more ideas than I have talent, but let me go my way. Let me be
what I am."
"Lilly, Lilly, let us take this thing step by step, quietly. Surely,
daughter, you appreciate the enormity of the situation!"
"I do. I do."
"Now to go back to the beginning. Did you consent to this engagement of
your own free will?"
"I did and I didn't."
"You didn't?"
"Oh, I know you let me decide for myself, but don't you think I felt the
undercurrent of your attitudes? All the other girls settling down, as
you put it. You and Albert such good friends, and then Albert himself
so--so what he should be."
"Now you are talking. If your mother and I hadn't felt that Albert was
the fine and upright man for their little girl to marry, do you think
they would have--"
"I know! There we go around in the circle again. Everything is perfect.
The little house, Albert's promotion to first assistant. Everything
perfect, but me. I don't want it. I don't love him. You hear me! There
is something in me he hasn't touched. Respect him? Yes, but respect is
only a poor relation to love and comes in for the left-over and the
cast-off emotions."
"Her head is full of the novels she reads!"
"You can't keep me from thinking like a woman. Feeling like one. Is it
shameful to want to love? Is it wrong to desire in the man you are to
marry that fundamental passion that makes the world go around? I'm not
supposed to know any thing about the thing I'm plunging into until after
I've plunged! I'm afraid, papa. Save me!"
"Ben, I could swear who is at the bottom of this indecent talk of hers.
I found his picture cut out of the school magazine and pasted in her
diary. She's a changed child since that Lindsley came to the High School
the year before she graduated."
"Mamma! Mamma!" fairly exploded to her feet by the potency of her sense
of outrage. "Oh, you--you--"
"I know I'm right."
"Why, I haven't even seen him since I graduated! I've never talked ten
words to the man in my life! Oh--oh--how can you?"
"Just the same, he's been your ruination. Since you got him into your
head not one of the boys you met has been good enough. I knew you had
him in mind the day you told me you wished Albert was a little more
bookish and musical. I know why you wanted him to subscribe to the
Symphony. The spats you made him buy. Poor boy! and his ankles aren't
cut for them. Love! Your father and I weren't so much in love, let me
tell you. Only I knew my parents wanted it and that was enough. I wish
to God I'd never lived to see this day--"
"Carrie!"
"I do. Noon of my daughter's wedding day, and she can't make up her mind
whether she'll be married or not. O God! it's funny--love, now at the
last minute--oh--oh--" A geyser of hysteria shot up, raining down in a
glassy kind of laugh. "Oh--oh, it's funny!--love--"
"Carrie, you're hysterical. Here, smell this ammonia."
"The little house--my heart's blood in it. A doll's house, ready for her
to walk into. Membership in the Junior Matrons--trousseau--oh, it's
funny--funny--"
"For God's sake, papa, try to calm her!"
"Funny--funny--funny."
With a wave of sobs that broke over her, she went down, then, literally
to her knees, her back heaving and shuddering.
"Her wedding day--O God--funny--"
"Mamma! Mamma! It's all right, dear. Don't--holler like that. I just got
upset, that's all. Frightened like--like any other girl would. I'm all
right now, mamma. I'm sorry."
"We want to see you happy, baby. It's for your good."
"Of course you do. I know it. I'm all right now, mamma."
"We're your best friends, Lilly. We would go through fire for you."
"Of course, mamma. I--I was nervous, that's all."
"There's no finer boy breathes than Albert."
"You're right."
"He's sending you lilies-of-the-valley, baby. He's ordered himself some
white-flannel tennis pants, too--the kind you admired. He got his report
from the life-insurance people and he's a grand risk, Lilly. In as fine
a condition to marry as a man could be. Baby, tell me--tell papa--aren't
you happy?"
"I am--I--oh, I am, dear! Why, here is Elsa ready to dress my hair!
Mamma--dear--I'm all right now. Fine."
* * * * *
At eight o'clock that evening, in the Garrison Avenue Rock Church,
little Evelyn Kemble, in the bushiest of white skirts and to the
accompaniment of organ music rolling over her, placed a white-satin
cushion before the smilax-banked altar.
Kneeling on it, and to the antiphonal beat of the Reverend Stickney's
voice, Lilly Becker and Albert Penny became as one.
CHAPTER XI
By a strange conspiracy of middle-class morality, which clothes the
white nude of life in suggestive factory-made garments, and by her own
sheer sappiness, which vitalized her, but with the sexlessness of a
young tree, Lilly, with all her rather puerile innocence left her,
walked into her marriage like a blind Nydia, hands out and groping
sensitively.
The same, in a measure, was true of Albert, who came into his immaculate
inheritance, himself immaculate, but with a nervous system well
insulated by a great cautiousness of life.
He was highly subject to head colds and occasional attacks of dyspepsia,
due to his inability to abstain from certain foods. He was, therefore,
sensitive to draughts and would not eat hot bread. He carried an
umbrella absolutely upon all occasions and a celluloid toothpick in his
waistcoat pocket.
Then, too, he gargled. To chronicle the heroic emotions that motivate
men is a fine task. Love and hate and all the chemistry of their
mingling that go to form the plasma of human experience. It is a lesser,
even an ignominious one to narrate Lilly's kind of anguish during this
matinal performance of her husband. She suffered a tight-throated sort
of anguish that could have been no keener had it been of larger
provocation. Her toes and her fingers would curl and a quick ripple of
flesh rush over her.
Mornings, when he departed, his kiss, which smelled of mouth wash, would
remain coldly against her lips with the peculiar burn of camphor ice.
All her sensibilities seemed suddenly to fester.
On a week day of the third week of her marriage, in her little canary
cage of a yellow bedroom dominated with the monstrous brass bedstead of
the period and a swell-front dresser elaborate in Honiton and flat
silver, she endured, with her head crushed into the chair back, those
noisome ablutions from across the hallway. She was wearing, these first
mornings, a rose-colored negligée, foamy with lace and still violet
scented from the trousseau chest, and especially designed to pink this
early hour.
It lay light to a skin that, strangely enough, did not covet its sensual
touch. She craved back to the starchy blue-gingham morning dresses. It
was as if she sat among the ruins of those crispy potential yesterdays,
all her to-morrows ruthlessly and terribly solved.
Something swift and eager had died within her. She was herself gone
flabby. A wife, with a sudden and, to her, horrid new consciousness that
had twisted every ligament of life.
Her husband's collar so intimately there on the dresser top. His shirt,
awaiting studs, spread out on the bed--their bed. His suspenders
straddling the chair back. The ordering of the evening beefsteak lurking
back in her consciousness. He liked sirloin, stabbing it vertically (he
had a way of holding his fork upright between first and third fingers)
when he carved, and cutting it skillfully away from the T bone. After
the first week, he liked the bone, too, gnawing it, not mussily, but
with his broad white teeth predatory and his temples working. She was a
veritable bundle of these petty accumulated concepts, harrowed to
their quick.
She knew that presently he would enter the room in his trousers and
undershirt, which he did upon the very minute, the little purple circle,
like a stamp mark on the rind of a bacon, showing just beneath his
Adam's apple, the shag of his yellow hair wetly curly from dousing, like
a spaniel's.
"Certainly fine water pressure we have in the bathroom, Lilly. I am
going to bring home some tubing from the store and attach a spray."
She looked out of the window over the languid little patch of front
lawn, more gray than green from the scourge of heat. Insect life hung
midair like a curtain of buzzings. Directly opposite the dusty, unmade
street, she could see her parents' home standing unprotected except for
one sapling maple, the sun already pressing against the drawn shades.
There was a slight breeze through this morning that turned the sapling
leaves and even lifted the little twist of tendril at the nape of
Lilly's neck.
It was just that spot, while tugging at his collar, that Albert Penny
stooped to kiss.
"Little wife," he said.
"Ugh!" she felt.
"Poor little wife, it was ninety-four and a half at six-thirty-eight
this morning."
His capacity for accuracy could madden her.
He computed life in the minutiae of fractions, reckoning in terms of the
halfpenny, the half minute, the half degree.
She sat now, laying pleats in the pink negligée where it flowed over her
knees, a half smile forced out on her lips.
"Well, Albert," she said, wanting to keep her voice lifted, "I guess
we're in it, aren't we? Up to our necks."
"In what?"
"Marriage."
Leaning to the mirror for the adjustment of his collar button, he
paused, regarding her reflection.
"Well now, what an idea! Of course we're in it, and the wonder to me is
how we ever stayed out so long."
She reached up to yawn, her long white arms stretched above her head.
"Oh dear! oh dear! oh dear!" she said in what might have been the key of
anything.
"Poor little girl!" he said. "I wish I could make it cooler for you."
"It isn't that."
"What then is bothering your little head?"
"I--oh, I don't know. I guess it's just the reaction after the
excitement of the wedding."
He came back to kiss the same tendril at the nape of her neck.
"I'm glad it's over, too. Feels mighty good to settle down."
"'Settle down.' Somehow I hate that expression."
"All right, then, Mrs. Penny, we'll settle up. Speaking of settling up,
I guess the missus wants her Monday-morning allowance, doesn't she?"
"I--guess--so."
He placed three already counted out five-dollar bills on the dresser,
weighting them down with a silver-back mirror.
"See if you can't make it last this week, Lilly. You watch Mother Becker
market and you'll come out all right."
"Oh, I can't pick around raw meat the way mamma does. It makes me sick."
"Housekeeping may seem a little strange at first, but I'm not afraid my
little wife is going to let any of them get ahead of her."
"Whoever wants it, can have that honor."
"What?"
"Nothing."
"What's the program for to-day, Lilly?"
"Oh, I don't know."
"I'm going to send Joe out from the store to-day with some washers for
the kitchen faucets and some poultry netting for a chicken yard. I'll
potter around this evening and build one behind the woodshed. Chickens
give a place a right homey touch."
"And send out a man from Knatt's to fix the piano. They delivered it
with a middle C that sticks."
"Yes, and I'll send a can of Killbug out with the wire. I noticed a
cockroach run over the ice box last night. You must watch that a little,
even in a new house."
"Ugh!"
"I hope I'm not getting a cold. I feel kind of that way. Mother Becker
fixed me up fine with that wet cloth around my neck last time. I'll try
it to-night."
"Come," she said, "breakfast is ready."
They descended to the little oak dining room, quite a glitter of new cut
glass on the sideboard and the round table white and immaculately
spread. There was a little maidservant, Lena Obendorfer, the
fifteen-year-old daughter of the Kemble washerwoman, shy and red rims
about her eyes from secret tears of homesickness.
"Why, Lena, the breakfast table looks lovely; and don't forget, dearie,
Mr. Penny takes three eggs in the morning, and he doesn't like his
rolls heated."
The child, her poor flat face pock-marked, fluttered into service.
Lilly regarded her husband through his meal, elbows on table, cheek in
her palm. He ate the three two-minute eggs with gusto, alternating with
deep draughts of coffee, and crisp little ribbons of bacon made into a
sandwich between his rolls.
"This is certainly delicious bacon."
"Mamma sent a whole one over yesterday."
"I like it lean. Always buy it with plenty of dark streaks through it.
Don't you like it lean?"
Silence.
"Can't you eat, Lilly? That's a shame."
"Too hot."
"Poor girlie!"
"Lena, bring Mr. Penny some more bacon."
"Certainly delicious. I like it lean."
She watched his temples quiver to the motion of his jaws, her
unspeakable depression tightening up her tonsils and the very pit of her
scared and empty.
"Albert--"
"Um-hum!"
"I--What if you should find that I--I'm not--not--"
"What?"
"Not right--here. Not the--wife for you."
He leaned over to pinch her cheek, waggling it softly and masticating
well before he spoke.
"If my little wife suited me any better they would have to chain me
down. Ah, it's great! I tell you, Lilly, a man makes the mistake of his
life not to do it earlier. If I had it to do over again I'd marry at
twenty. Solid comfort. Something to work for. I feel five years closer
to the general managership than I did six months ago. Certainly fine
bacon. Best I ever ate."
"Albert--let us not permit our marriage to drag us down into the kind
of rut we see all about us. Take Flora and Vincent. Married five months
and she never so much as wears corsets when she takes him to the street
car, mornings. And he used to be such a clever dresser, and look at him
now. All baggy. Let's not get baggy, Albert."
"I agree with you there. A man owes it to himself and his business to
appear well pressed. It's a slogan of mine. Clothes may not make the
man, but neatness often goes a long way toward making the opportunity.
Don't you worry about me becoming baggy, Lilly. I'm going to send one of
those folding ironing boards up from the store this day."
"I don't mean only that. You mustn't be so literal about everything. I
mean let's not become baggy-minded. Take Flora again. Flora was her
class poetess and I don't believe she has a literary thought or a book
in her head now except her account book. Let us improve ourselves,
Albert. Read evenings and subscribe to the Symphony and the Rubinstein
Evening Choral."
"Speaking of Rubinstein, Lilly, I'm going to take out a thousand
dollars' burglary insurance with Eckstein. One cannot be too careful."
She pushed back from the table. "We're invited over to the Duncans'
to-night for supper. They've one of the new self-playing pianos."
He felt in his waistcoat pocket for the toothpick.
"I'll go if you want it, Lilly, but guess where I'd rather eat my
supper."
"Where?"
"Right here. And fry the sirloin the way Mother Becker does it, Lilly,
sprinkle a few onions on it. If I were you I wouldn't let Lena
tackle it."
"This is the third night for beefsteak."
"Fine. You'll learn this about your hubby, he--"
"Don't use that word, Albert. I hate it."
"What?"
"Hubby."
"All right then, husband. Bless her heart, she likes to hear the real
thing. Well then, your husband is a beefsteak fellow. Let the others
have all the ruffly dishes they want. Good strong beefsteak is my pace."
She let him lift her face for a kiss.
"I'll be home six-forty-six to the dot. That's what I've figured out it
takes me if I leave the office at six-five."
He kissed her again, pressing her head backward against the cove of his
arm, pinching her cheeks together so that her mouth puckered.
"Won't kiss my little wife on the lips this morning. I'm getting a head
cold. Good-by, Mrs. Penny. Um-m-m! like to say it."
"Good-by."
"Mother Becker coming over to-day?"
"Yes. We had planned to go to the meat market together."
"Fine."
"But I'm not going."
"Why?"
"I--don't know. Too hot, I guess."
He looked at her rather intently.
"That's right, Lilly," he said, his eyes, with something new in them,
roving over her figure; "if you don't feel up to the mark, just you take
care of yourself. Jove!" he repeated. "Jove!" kissed her again, and went
down the front steps, whistling.
CHAPTER XII
At eleven o'clock Mrs. Becker, hatted, crossed the sun-bleached street,
carrying outheld something that wetted through the snowy napkin that
covered it. At the door she surrendered it to Lena.
"Put this in the ice box for Mr. Albert's supper. It's some of my
coldslaw he's so fond of, and a pound of sweet butter, I took from my
dairyman. See that Miss Lilly never uses it for cooking, Lena; the salt
butter I brought yesterday is for that."
"Yes'm."
"And, Lena," drawing a palm across the banister and showing it up,
"look. That isn't nice. In my house I go over every piece of woodwork
from top to bottom on my hands and knees. You mustn't wait for Miss
Lilly to tell you everything. Where is she?"
"Upstairs, ma'am."
She ascended to a jeremiad of the cardinal laws of housekeeping, palm
still suspicious. Her daughter rose out of a low mound beside
the window.
"Good morning, mamma."
"Lilly, you should help upstairs wash days with the housework. Eight
o'clock and my house is spick span, even my cellar steps wiped down.
Take off that pink thing and I'll help you make the bed. It was all
right to wear it around the first week for your husband, but now one of
your cotton crepes will do. Come, help turn the mattress."
"Oh, mamma, Lena will make the bed."
"Who ever heard of not doing your upstairs work on wash day? Really,
Lilly, I was ignorant as a bride, too, but I wasn't lazy. I wouldn't
give a row of pins for--"
"Please, mamma--don't begin."
"Well, it's your house. If it suits your husband, it suits me."
"Well, it does suit him."
"Not if I judge him right. Albert likes order. I went over his socks the
other day, and he kept them matched up as a bachelor just like a woman
would. He's methodical."
"Don't lift that heavy mattress alone, mamma. Here, if you insist upon
doing it, I'll help."
They dressed the bed to its snowy perfection, a Honiton counterpane over
pink falling almost to the floor.
"Well, that's more like it." Her face quickly moist from exertion, Mrs.
Becker regarded her daughter across the completed task.
"Now for the carpet sweeper."
Lilly returned to her chair, lying back to fan her face with a lacy
fribble of pocket handkerchief. "You can wear yourself out if you
insist, mamma, but I can't see any reason for it. I'm--tired."
Mrs. Becker sat down, hitching her chair toward her daughter's.
"Lilly," she paid, eagerly forward and a highly specialized significance
in her voice, "don't you feel well--baby?"
"Of course I feel well, mamma. As well as anyone can feel in this heat.
If only you wouldn't harass me about this--old house."
Mrs. Becker withdrew, her entire manner lifting with her shoulders.
"Well, if that's the way you feel about it, you need not be afraid that
I'm going to interfere. That's one thing I made up my mind to from the
start, never to be a professional mother-in-law in my daughter's home.
The idea!"
"Mamma, I didn't mean it that way, and you know it. I realize that you
mean well. But I suppose many a family skeleton rattles its bones to the
tune of 'they meant well.'"
"Lilly, you're not yourself. I'm sure you don't feel well. Baby, you
mustn't be bashful with your own mother."
"Please, please don't ask me that again in--in that voice. You know I
always feel well."
"We're both married women now, Lilly. If--if there's anything you want
to say--"
"No."
"I always say, a single woman doesn't know she's on earth. Isn't it so,
Lilly?"
Suddenly Lilly shot her hand out to her mother's arm, her fingers
digging into the flesh.
"You should have told me something--beforehand!"
"I'd have cut out my tongue sooner. What kind of a mother do you think I
am? Shame!"
"It's wicked to rear a girl with no conception of life."
"You're no greener than I was. That's what a man wants in the girl he
marries. Innocence."
"Ignorance."
"It all comes naturally to a woman after she's married, life does."
"I--I hate life."
"Lilly!"
"I do! I do! I do!"
"You poor child!" said Mrs. Becker, stroking her hand, and her voice
pitched to a very private key. "Life is life and what are you going to
do about it?"
"Only love--some sort of magic potion which Nature uses to drug us, can
make her methods seem anything but gross--horrible."
"What's on your mind, Lilly? We don't need to be bashful together any
more. We're married women."
Lilly rose then, moving toward the dresser, drawing the large
tortoise-shell pins from the smooth coil of her hair.
"If you want me to go to the meat market with you, mamma, I'd better be
dressing before it gets any hotter."
"You're too warm, Lilly. I'll go myself. You can learn the beef cuts
later."
"I would rather stay at home and practice awhile. I haven't touched the
piano since--"
"Tack up your shelf paper while I'm gone, Lilly--your cupboards look so
bare--and then come over to lunch with me and we'll go to the euchre
together. It's your first afternoon at the Junior Matrons and I want you
to look your best. Wear your flowered dimity."
"If you don't mind, mamma, I want to unpack my music this afternoon and
get my books straightened. I'd rather not go."
"The nerve! And that poor little Mrs. Wempner goes to extra trouble in
your honor. I hear she's to have pennies attached to the tally cards.
Pretty idea, pennies for Penny. Well, I'm not going to worry my life
away! Work it out your own way. I'll send you home a steak and some
quinine from the drug store for Albert to take to-night."
Presently Lilly heard the lower door slam. It came down across her
nerves like the descent of a cleaver.
For another hour she sat immovable. A light storm had come up with
summer caprice, thunder without lightning, and a thin fall of rain that
hardly laid the dust. There was a certain whiteness to the gloom,
indicating the sun's readiness to pierce it, but a breeze had sprung up,
fanning the Swiss curtains in against Lilly's cheek, and across the
street she could see her mother's shades fly up and windows open to the
refreshment of it.
At twelve o'clock the telephone rang. It was her husband. "Yes, she was
well. Pouring downtown? Funny. Only a light shower out there. No, the
man had not brought the missing caster for the bedstead. Yes,
six-forty-six, and she would put the steak on at six-twenty. Yes, the
poultry netting had come. Fine. Bathtub stopper. Yes."
For quite a while after this she sat in the hallway, her hand on the
instrument, in the attitude of hanging up the receiver.
She did piddle among her books then, a vagabond little collection of
them. Textbooks, in many cases her initials and graduating year printed
in lead pencil along the edges. Rolfe's complete edition of Shakespeare.
A large illustrated edition of Omar Khayyam. Several gift volumes of
English poets. Complete set of small red Poes that had come free with a
two-year magazine subscription. Graduation gift of Emerson's essays.
_Vision of Sir Launfal_. _Journeys to the Homes of Great Men_.
_Lucille_, in padded leather. An unaccountably present _Life of Cardinal
Newman_. _The Sweet Girl Graduate_. _Faust_. _How to Interpret Dreams_.
They occupied three shelves of the little case; the remaining two she
filled in with stacks of sheet music, laying aside ten picked selections
marked "Repertoire" and occasionally sitting back on her heels to hum
through the pages of a score. Once she carried a composition to the
piano, "Who is Sylvia?" to be exact, singing it through to her own
accompaniment. Her voice lifted nicely against the little square
confines of reception hall, Lena, absolutely wringing wet with suds and
perspiration, poking her head up from the laundry stairs.
"Oh, Miss Lilly, that's grand! Please sing it over again."
She did, quickened in spite of herself. Her voice had a pleasant
plangency, a quality of more yet to come and as if the wells of her
vitality were far from drained.
She could hear from the laundry the resumed thrubbing and even smell the
hot suds. The afternoon reeked of Monday. She left off, finally, and
rocked for a time on the cool porch, watching the long, silent needles
of rain, wisps of thought floating like feathers.
"Who am I? Lilly Becker. How do I happen to be me? What if I were Melba
instead? What if Melba were frying the sirloin to-night and five
thousand people were coming to hear me sing in the Metropolitan Opera
House? Albert--husband. What a queer word! Husband. Love. Hate.
Lindsley. Language. How did language ever come to be? We feel, and then
we try to make sounds to convey that feeling. What language could ever
convey the boiling inside of me? I must be a sea, full of terrible
deep-down currents and smooth on top. How does one know whether or not
he is crazy--mad? How do I know that I am not really singing to five
thousand? Maybe this is the dream. Page Avenue. Lena in the laundry.
That sirloin steak being delivered around the side entrance, by a boy
with a gunny sack for an apron. Dreams. Freud. Suppressed desires.
That's me. Thousands--thousands of them. Am I my conscious or my
unconscious self? Can I break through this--this dream into reality?
Which part of me is here on this front porch and which part is
Marguerite with the pearls in her hair? Bed casters, they're real. And
Albert--husband--the rows of days--and nights--nights of my marriage. O
God, make it a dream! Make it a dream!"
At six-forty-six Albert Penny came home to supper.
CHAPTER XIII
There was nothing consciously premeditated about the astonishing speech
Lilly made to her husband that evening. Yet it was as if the words had
been in burning rehearsal, so scuttling hot they came off her lips.
There had been a coolly quiet evening on the front porch, a telephone
from Flora Bankhead, a little run-in visit from her parents, and now at
ten o'clock her husband, shirt-sleeved and before the mirror, tugging to
unbutton his collar.
She did not want that collar off. It brought, rawly, a sense of his
possession of her. She sat fully dressed, in her chair beside the
window, the black irises almost crowding out the gray in her eyes, her
hands tightening and tightening against that removal of collar. Finally
one half of it flew open, and on that tremendous trifle Lilly spoke.
"Albert."
"Yes?"
"Let me go!"
"Huh?"
"It's wrong. I've made a mistake. I don't want to be married."
For a full second he held that pose at his collar button, his entire
being seeming to suspend a beat.
"What say?" not exactly doubting, but wanting to corroborate his senses.
She was amazed at her ability to reply.
"I said I have made a terrible mistake. I can't stand being married to
you."
He came toward her with the open side of his collar jerking like an old
door on its hinges.
"Now lookahere," he said, rather roughly for him; "it's all right for a
woman to have her whims once in a while, but there are limits. I've been
as considerate with you as I know how to be. A darn sight more than many
a man with his woman."
"I'm not that!" she cried, springing to her feet.
"What?"
"That! Your--that!"
"Call it what you want," he said, "all I know is that you're my wife and
I married you to settle down to a decent, self-respecting home life and
that a sensible woman leaves her whims behind her."
She stood with her hands to the beat of her throat, looking at him as if
he had hunted her into her corner, which he had not.
"Let me go," she said.
He seemed trying to gain control of his large, loose hands, clenching
and unclenching them.
"Good God!" he said. "What say?"
"It's no use! I've tried. I'm wrong. Something in me is stronger than
you or mamma or papa or--or environment. All my life I've been fighting
against just--just--this. And now I've let it trap me."
"Darn funny time to be finding it out."
"That's the terrible part! To think it took this--marriage--to awaken me
to a meaning of myself."
"Bah! Your meaning to yourself is no better than any other woman's."
"A month ago it would have been so simple--to have had the
courage--then. To have realized then! Why--why can life be like that?"
"Like what?"
"You remember the night coming home from the Highlands? I tried to tell
you. Something in me was rebelling. Ask mamma; papa. They knew! That's
been my great trouble. My desires for myself were never strong enough to
combat their desires for me. They've always placed me under such ghastly
obligation for their having brought me into the world. Their obligation
is to _me_, for having brought me here, the accident of their desires!
But I let the molasses lake of family sentiment--suck--me in. If only I
had fought harder! It took this trap--marriage! All of a sudden I'm
awake! Don't try to keep me, Albert. I haven't known until this minute
that my mind is made up. So made up that it frightens me even more than
you. I'd rather be on my own in a garret, Albert! It's kinder to tell
you. We mustn't get into this thing deeper. Nothing can change me.
Don't try."
She put up her hands as if to ward off some sort of blow, but in her
heart not afraid, and she wanted to be afraid of him. He did whirl a
chair toward her by the back, but sat down, jerking her into one
opposite, facing her so that their knees touched, and she could see the
spots on his temples that responded so to beefsteak, throbbing. Her
terror rose a little to the volume of his silence. His head was so
square. She wanted him to rage and she to hurl herself against his
storm. Her whole being wanted a lashing. She could pinch herself to the
capacity of her strength without wincing.
But on the contrary, his voice, when it came, was muted.
"Lilly," he said, "you're sick. You're affected with the heat." His look
of utter daze irritated her.
"Sick! You mean I was sick before! I'm well now."
"You're either sick or crazy!"
"I'm trapped. I was born trapped, but now I tell you I'm free! Something
up here in my brain--down here in my heart--has set me free! You can't
keep me. No one can. I want out!"
"In God's name, what are you driving at?"
"You wouldn't understand. Love might have made you--this--possible, but
it didn't come. It didn't come, Albert."
He reached for his coat to plunge into it.
"I'm going across for your mother and father. I'm afraid of you. There
is something behind all this. One of us is crazy!"
"No, no, Albert. Please, not them. I'll run out of the house if they
come. They've defeated me so often. That terrible wall they erect--out
of flesh that bleeds every time I try to climb it. They've killed me
with the selfishness of their love, those two. They put me body and soul
into Chinese shoes the day I was born. I've never ceased paying up for
being their child. Suppose they did sacrifice for me--clothe me--feed
me--what does parenthood mean but that? Don't you dare to call them
over! Don't you dare!"
"In God's name, then, what!"
"Just let me go, Albert--quietly."
"Where?"
She went toward him, her fine white throat palpitating as if her heart
were beating up in it, something even wheedling in her voice.
"I've thought it all out, Albert. These unbearable days since--this.
I'll go quietly; I'll take the blame. In these cases where a woman
leaves it becomes desertion--"
"If you're talking divorce, I'll see you burn like brimstone before
I'll sacrifice my respectability in this community before your
damn whims."
She quivered, and it was a full second before she was able to continue.
"I know, Albert, to you it sounds--worse, probably, than it is. But
think how much worse, how degrading it would be for me to stay here--in
your house--hating. I'll make it so easy. It's done every day, only we
don't happen to hear of it. That's what makes our kind the marrow of
society. We're too immorally respectable to live honestly. We build a
shell of conventionality over the surface of things and rot underneath.
Nature doesn't care how she uses us. It's the next generation concerns
her. She has to drug us or we couldn't endure. We're drugged on
respectability. On a few of us the drug won't react. I'm one. Let me go,
Albert. To Chicago. I was there once with mamma and papa to the Rope and
Hemp Manufacturers' Convention. Or, better still, New York. That's the
field for my kind of work. Many a girl with less voice than I has gotten
on there. Albert, won't you let me go?"
He was like nothing so much as a cornered bull, trying to bash his
bewildered head through the impenetrable wall of things. Little red
shreds had come out in the white of his eyes; he was sweating coarsely
and feeling the corners of his mouth with his tongue.
"You won't ruin my name--you won't ruin my name."
"I'll take the blame. I'll love taking it. You'll have a clean case of
desertion--"
Suddenly he took a step toward her with the threat of a roar in his
voice, and again she found relief in the rising velocity of his anger
and practically thrust herself in the hope of a blow.
"What are you that I am married to," he cried, "a she-devil? What have
I got to do? Treat you like one? Huh? Huh?"
He stopped just short of her, the upper half of his body thrust backward
from restraining his impulse to lunge, his face distorted and quivering
down at her.
"Be careful," he said. "By God! be careful when I get my blood up. The
woman don't live that can touch my respectability. If you go, you go
without a divorce. You're trying to harm me--ruin my life--that's what
you are. Ruin my life." And suddenly, before the impulse to strike had
traveled down his tightening arm, collapsed weakly, his entire body
retched by the dry sobs that men weep. He could so readily arouse her
aversion, that even now, with a quick pity for him stinging her
eyeballs, she could regard him dispassionately, a certain disgust for
him uppermost.
He turned toward her finally with the look of a stricken St. Bernard
dog, his lower lids salt-bitten and showing half moons of red flesh.
"What is it, Lilly? What have I failed in? For God's sake tell me and
I'll make it right."
"That's the terrible part, Albert. You haven't failed. You're _you_.
It's something neither of us can control any more than we can control
the color of our eyes. It's as if I were a--a problem in chemistry that
had reacted differently than was expected and blew off the top
of things."
"Bah! the trouble with you women to-day is that you've got an itch that
you don't know how to scratch. Well, it's high time for you to learn a
way to scratch yours by settling down like a respectable married woman
has to." His voice rising and his wrongs red before him: "I wish to God
I'd never laid eyes on you. I thought you were more sensible than most
and I find you a crazy woman."
"Then, Albert, you don't want a crazy woman for your wife!"
"Ah no, you don't! No, you don't! I've worked like a dog to get where I
am. I'm a respected member of this community and I intend to stay one.
No woman gets a divorce out of me unless over my dead body. I'm a leader
of a Bible class and an officer in my lodge. I wore a plume and gold
braid at the funeral of the mayor of this town. I'm first-assistant
buyer and I propose to become general manager. I'm a respectable citizen
trying to settle down to a respectable home, and, by God! no woman
tomfoolery is going to bamboozle me out of it."
She sat with her eyes closed, tears seeping through them, and her fist
beating softly into her palm.
"Oh, Albert--Albert--how can I make you understand? My brain is
bursting--"
"Lilly," he interrupted, explosively reaching out and closing over her
wrist, and sudden perception lifting his voice, "I know! You--you're not
well! You're ailing. Women aren't--aren't always quite themselves--at
times. You--Lilly--could it be--"
"No! No! No! I'll go mad if you, too, begin to insinuate--that! I'm
myself, I tell you. Never more so in my life."
He regarded her through frank and even tender tears, his voice humoring
her.
"Of course, you're high strung, Lilly, and a high-strung woman is like a
high-strung horse, has to be handled lightly. Don't exert yourself.
If--if I'm embarrassing to you--talk to mother. These are the times a
girl needs her mother. You go ahead and pick on me to your heart's
content. I--I'm a pretty slow kind of fellow about some things. Never
been around women enough. Come, it's ten-thirty-six. You need all the
sleep you can get. Come, Lilly. Why--I--I've been thick-headed--that's
all."
She suffered him to kiss her on the cheek as she turned her face from
him.
"Have it your own way," she said, limp with a sudden sense of futility
and as if all the reflex resiliency had oozed out of her.
"We're all right together, Lilly. Just don't you worry your head. We'll
get adjusted in no time. You and--and mother talk things over to-morrow.
I've been a thick-headed old fool. Pshaw! I--Pshaw!"
She moved to the dresser, removing pins until her hair fell shiningly
all over her, brushing through its thick fluff and weaving it into two
heavy braids over her shoulders. He laid hesitant and rather clumsy
hands to its thickness.
"Fine head of hair."
She jumped back as if a pain had stabbed her.
"Don't forget, Albert, to lock the downstairs windows."
He was full of new comprehensions.
"I understand. Take your time to undress, Lilly. I'll be about fifteen
minutes locking up, and I want to attach some new safety locks I brought
with me. Everything all right?"
"Yes."
"You don't need to keep the light burning."
"I won't."
He opened his lips to say something, but, instead, turned and went out,
the closed half of his collar drenched in perspiration.
When he returned, after a generous fifteen minutes, the room was in
darkness except for a thin veil of whiteness from the arc light in the
street. Between the sweetly new sheets the long, supple mound of Lilly
lay along the bed, her bare arms close to her body.
Her breathing was sufficiently deep to simulate sleep. He undressed in
the darkness and the silence.
Half the night through he tossed, keeping carefully to the bed edge, and
often she heard him sigh out and was conscious that he mopped
continually at the back of his hands. Once he whispered her name.
"Lilly--awake?"
She deepened her breathing.
About four o'clock he dozed off, swooning deeply into sleep, his lips
opening and a slight snore coming.
She lay with her eyes open to the darkness, letting it lave over her as
if it were water and she had drowned in it with her gaze wide.
She felt bathed in a colorless fluid of unreality. Those Swiss window
curtains! To what era of her consciousness did their purchase belong?
She and her mother had shopped them at Gentle's. They hung now lightly
against the darkness. The blond girl who had sold them to her must be
sleeping now, too, in this same curious pool of unreality. She lay sunk
in a strange pause. Once she propped herself on an elbow, gazing across
the street to the blank front of her parents' house. They were sleeping
behind that middle upper window, their clothing folded across chairs, as
if waiting. How eagerly they would greet their new day of small duties,
small pleasures, and small emotions. What gave them the courage to meet
the years of days cut off one identical pattern, like a whole regiment
of paper dolls cut from a folded newspaper? She began to count. Uncle
Buck, five hundred. Grandma Ploag, one hundred. Mamma and papa, one
hundred and fifty. Seven hundred and fifty in the bank in her name! Her
own little checking account. The tan-bound check book. The new tan
valise, monogrammed, L.B.P. The stack of music marked "Répertoire." New
York! She fell to trembling, forcing herself into rigidity when the
figure beside her stirred. She was burning with fever and wanted to
plunge from the cool sheets. She could have run a mile--two.
Instead, she lay the long night through, her mind a loom weaving a
tapestry of her plan of action, and dawn came up pink, hot, and
cloudless.
CHAPTER XIV
At seven o'clock her husband awakened with an ejaculation that landed
him sitting on the bed edge. She lay with her eyes closed, wanting not
to blink. He dressed silently, but she could hear him tiptoeing about,
and finally lay with her hands clenched against the gargling noises that
came through the closed door of the bathroom. At last she was conscious
that, fully dressed, he was standing beside her, looking down. She could
tell by the aroma of mouth wash.
"Lilly?" he said, in a coarse whisper.
She continued to simulate sleep.
"Lilly!"
She did not employ the deception of a start, but opened her eyes quietly
to meet his.
"Lazy!" he said. "It is twenty-six minutes past seven."
"So late?" she said, twisting into a long, luxurious yawn. He kissed her
directly on that yawn between the open lips.
"You stay in bed this morning. Rest up."
"I think I will, Albert, if you don't mind."
"You turn right over and have your nap out. I'll be home at
six-forty-six."
"Good-by, Albert," she said into the crotch of her elbow.
He kissed her again on the ear lobe and the nape of her neck.
"Good-by, Lilly, and if I were you I'd have a little talk with mother
if I found myself not feeling just right. I'm sending Joe up with a pair
of granite scrub buckets and that stopper for the bathtub. All right?"
"Yes."
After a while she could hear him below, the tink of breakfast cutlery
and the little passings in and out of Lena through the swinging pantry
door. Then the front door closed gently, and on its click she swung
herself lightly out of bed, standing barefooted behind the Swiss
curtains to watch the square-shouldered figure swing across the street
toward the Page Avenue car. Her energy to be up and doing suddenly
unstoppered, she turned back to the room, jerking out a dresser drawer
until it flew out to the floor.
At nine o'clock she was still in her nightdress, sloughing about in an
engagement gift of little blue knitted bedroom slippers. There were the
new valise and an old dress-suitcase tightly packed and shoved beneath
the bed, and over a chair a tan-linen suit inserted with strips of
large-holed embroidery that had been dyed in coffee by Katy Stutz. It
had originally been designed as a traveling suit for a honeymoon trip to
Excelsior Springs until that project had been decided against in favor
of immediate possession of the little house.
"Put that extra money into your furniture," Mrs. Becker had advised, to
which Albert had been highly amenable.
There was a large _pièce de resistance_ of a hat, too, floppy of brim
and borne down at one spot by an enormous flat satin rose. Lilly had
rebelled against its cart-wheel proportions, but in the end her mother's
selection prevailed.
She dressed hurriedly, emerging from her bath with her hair wet at the
edges, but combing back easily into its smoothness.
Her nervousness conveyed itself to her mostly through her breathing; it
was short and very fast, but she was as cool of the flesh as the fresh
linen she donned. That was part of the clean young wonder of her. Her
vitality flowed and showered back upon itself, like the ornamental
waters of a fountain. She awoke like a rose with the dew on. Even Albert
Penny, rubbing the grit out of his eyes, had marveled at the matinal
bloom of her.
She ran in her movements, closing drawers and doors after her to keep
down her rising sense of confusion, pinning where fingers could not wait
to fit hook to eye. There were twenty-eight dollars in her little
brown-leather purse and a check for seven hundred and fifty dollars,
payable to "self," in a little chamois bag around her neck.
The pretty solitaire engagement ring, a little aquamarine breastpin,
gift of the groom, a gold band bracelet, and after some hesitation her
wedding ring, she placed in an envelope in the now empty top dresser
drawer, scribbling across it, "Valuable." She pried it open again after
sealing, to drop in a tiny gold chain with a pearl-and-turquoise drop,
still another gift, suggested by her mother to the bridegroom. Finally,
there were the little trinkets of more remote days which she dropped
into her purse. A rolled-gold link bracelet dangling a row of friendship
hearts. Her class pin. A tiny reproduction on porcelain, like the one
burned into the china plate in the parlor, of her parents, cheek to
cheek. Regarding it, her throat tightened and she sat down suddenly.
"O God!" she said, half audibly, "what am I doing?" But on the second
she cocked her head to a passer-by and finally leaned out to hail in a
neighborhood man of all work, paying him a dollar and car fare to carry
her bags down to the new Union Station and check them. Seeing them
lugged out of the house was another moment when it seemed to her that
she must faint of the crowding around her heart.
Lena she dispatched to the grocer's on the homely errand of beeswax for
ironing, and, trembling to take advantage of the interval of her
absence, hurried into her jacket and hat, her face deeply within the
wide brim. Opposite, her mother was scrubbing an upper window sill, the
brush grating against the silence. She waited behind the Swiss curtains
for the figure to withdraw.
The wide, peaceful morning filled with order and sunshine! The pleasant
greeny light cast by awnings into her bedroom. What devil dance was in
her blood? What prickly rash lay under her being? Her mother at that
ordered scrubbing of the window sill! Her eyes swung the smaller orbit
of the room. The rumpled bed. That discarded collar on the dresser, the
two stretched buttonholes like two tiny mouths. That collar...
She caught up her purse and ran downstairs. Her telephone was ringing
violently as she hurried toward the Page Avenue car.
On the ride down there occurred one of those incidents that sometimes
leap out like a long arm of coincidence pointing the way. A classmate
with whom she had once sung in the Girl's High School Glee Club, and
whom she had long lost sight of, sat down beside her.
"Why, it's Lilly Becker!"
"Vera Wohlgemuth!"
"Of all people! The same pretty and stylish Lilly."
Remembering Vera's readiness with the platitude, Lilly smiled down upon
her.
"And you, too, Vera, you look natural"--but the words almost petered out
on her lips. Much of Vera's slender prettiness was gone. She had gone
hippy, as the saying is, even her face insidiously wider and
coarser pored.
"What are you doing, Vera? Have you kept up your music?"
"Oh no! I'm married!"
There was a little click to the finish of that speech that seemed
automatically to lock against the intrusion of old dreams.
"A ten-months-old daughter furnishes me all the music I have time for.
Didn't I read where you got married, Lilly?"
"Yes. You had such a pretty touch on the piano, Vera."
"Why, I don't believe I've opened the piano in six months! Marriage
knocks it out of you pretty quick, don't it? And, say, wait until the
babies begin to come. I said to him last night, 'Ed, why is marriage
like quicksands?' He's no good at conundrums. 'Because it sucks you
down,' I said, and he didn't even see the point. But it's a fact, isn't
it? Mine is city salesman for the Mound City Shoe Company.
What's yours?"
"With Slocum-Hines."
"Lucille Wright is married. And remember Edna Ponscarme? Twins. Nine
months to a day. Maybe she wasn't in a hurry! And Stella Loire, the
class beauty? She wheels her past our house on her way to market every
morning. More like the class dishrag now. Well, well! it does seem
funny. Lilly Becker married and settled down like the rest of us, and
we had you down in the class prophecy for a famous opera singer.
Well, well!"
At Eighteenth Street Lilly left the car, transferring for Union Station.
A sudden exultation was racing through her. She sat well forward on her
seat, as if that could quicken transit.
Union Station, one of the first of those dividend-built and
dividend-building terminals that were to spring up quickly and
palatially the country over, rose with a peculiarly American trick out
of one of the most squalid sections of the city. Fifteen railroads
threaded into it, a gaseous shed _de luxe_, picking up St. Louis like a
gigantic bead upon the necklace of commerce.
The coughing of steam up against a glass roof threw off repetitions of
self. The boom of a train announcer's voice rang out, the echoes fitting
smaller and smaller into one another like a collapsible drinking cup. A
hither and thither! A bustle that caught Lilly up into it. She was
immediately drunk with the moment and train smoke. Life was a gigantic
drum, beating.
The clerk at the Terminal Hotel, Mrs. Kemble's brother-in-law, in fact,
cashed her check for her, without question, but a sort of unspoken
askance, sending it across the street, with his additional indorsement,
to a bank. There were six one-hundred-dollar bills, two fifties, and
five tens. She folded their considerable bulk into the bag around
her neck.
True to direction, the checks for her bags had been left at the
Information Desk in an addressed envelope. A porter scurried for them.
Backed by the precedent of the trip to Buffalo, Niagara Falls, and
Chicago, she bought her ticket, and then, rather more reluctantly and
against her sense of thrift, a berth, which already necessitated a
foray into the little chamois bag.
Last, she dropped an already stamped and addressed envelope into the
station mail box, her heart seeming to swoon to her feet as she did so.
It contained a half-hundredth version of a week-old letter finally
reduced to:
MY DEAREST PARENTS,--When you receive this I will be on my way. I won't
try to explain my action except that now I see plainly my entire life
has been directed toward this moment.
Had I found this courage two months ago a great deal of suffering might
have been spared one person, at least. I cannot say enough for Albert's
patient struggle to make possible the impossible, or for you, my dear
parents, for whom my love is as great as my rebellion.
I am not leaving an address. That would be useless. My decision is
unalterable. It is futile to come after or try to find me. In a large
city I will immediately become a needle in a haystack and that is what I
want and need for my work. Do not worry. You know very well I can take
excellent care of myself, and in case of unforeseen accident I will
always be identified by your name and address on me. So by my very
silence you are to know I am well and happy. Some day, when success has
justified this seemingly rash step, who knows what happy reunion may be
in store for us?
Take Albert into your home. He will be a better son to you than I have
been a daughter. God bless you all. LILLY.
At ten-five the B. & O. Limited, for New York, pulled out. In a Pullman,
her bags on the seat opposite and her hands locked so that her finger
nails bit in, sat Lilly, gazing out over the moving landscape of dirty,
uneven fringe of city. Crossing Eads Bridge, the higher and lighter
rumble of the train, induced by steel over water, was like thin soprano
laughter with ice in it.
She was suddenly terrifyingly conscious of an impulse to join in that
laughter--to laugh and to laugh.
CHAPTER XV
There is a sense of detachment from this old planet of ours goes with
travel, that is not unlike that instant when the pole vaulter's feet are
farthest off ground. It seemed to Lilly, after a while, that both her
starting point and her destination had fallen away. She hung in
abeyance. She was the unanchored streak of a rocket through space.
Time was dropping away from her with a sense of the same steep declivity
that could awaken her out of a doze to a sense of falling. She was
rolling through the pleasant monotony of Indiana, against the light
slant of a morning suddenly turned rainy. Quick diagonal streaks flecked
the pane and she could see the drops spat down into a thick white-plush
road, clipping it of nap.
The sleeper was quite empty save for a medley of drummers' talk and the
rattle of chips from the smoking room and an old man in a skull cap who
dozed incessantly. Even the porter dozed. She sat the day through
without responding to calls for meals, the rain falling steadily now
like a curtain. At five o'clock the lamps were already burning and a
rash of little lights began to break out over the landscape.
"Some day," she mused, "I'll look back upon all this and laugh. I'll
tell it in a newspaper interview. Lillian Ploag. No, Luella Ploag.
Ploag. No-o, Luella--Luella Parlow! Not bad. Luella Parlow!"
She asked a passing porter the time.
"Six-forty-six!"
* * * * *
She slept fitfully, awakening with little exclamations, and once came so
suddenly out of a doze that she awoke sitting bolt upright, bumping her
head against the top of the berth. Cup her hands as she would against
the window pane, she could not see out, but it seemed to her that dawn
must be imminent. She felt for her little watch, leaning to the streak
of light the curtains let in. Ten-five! Not yet midnight. She lay back
on the gritty bed, trembling.
At six o'clock there were still stars, but a coral tremor was against
the sky line and clouds coming up furiously. Suddenly she realized that
the clouds were mountains and that the flat territory had flowed through
the night into Pennsylvania mountains that were like plunging waves, and
with the changed physiognomy, her mood quickened. She would not wait for
the sun, dressing in her berth.
At eight o'clock, and for only the third time in her life, she
breakfasted in a dining car. It was well crowded, the old man in the
skull cap across the aisle from her gouging out an orange. She ordered
with a sense of novelty and thrift, passing on from grilled spring
chicken, bar-le-duc, and honey-dew melon to eggs and bacon. A drummer
with a gold-mounted elk's tooth dangling from his chain ogled her, so
she sat very prim of back, gazing out over flying villages that were
like white-pine toys cut in the cisalpine Alps and invitingly more
clipped and groomed than the straggling Indiana towns of yesterday. She
was cruelly conscious of self, and throughout the meal kept the tail of
her glance darting at her surroundings, dropping a piece of toast once
and apologizing to the waiter, continuing to smile in an agony of strain
after the incident. She ate slowly, her little finger at right angle to
her movements, masticating with closed lips, her napkin constantly
dabbing up at them.
Finally the head waiter, who had been hovering, to Lilly's great
discomfiture, directly at her shoulder, steered a young woman, with a
great deal of very fuzzy light-brown hair about her face, to the empty
seat opposite. She had a certain air of chic, was modishly dressed, wore
no rings except a marriage band, and long pink nails with careful half
moons. With the ripple of a thrill over her, Lilly registered her as
"typical New Yorker." As a matter of fact, she was the wife of a teacher
of physics in Brooklyn Manual Training School, returning from a two
weeks' visit to her mother-in-law in Indianapolis.
She ordered with somewhat of a manner, asking for an immediate cup of
hot water, and to Lilly there was something esoteric even in that. The
sturdy, fine machine of her own body had the crass ability to start off
the day with bacon and eggs. She blushed for the healthiness of
her choice.
A patter of conversation sprang up between them, something like this:
"Would you mind passing me the sugar?"
"Why, certainly not!" from an eager Lilly.
"Going all the way to New York?"
"Yes."
"Live there?"
"No. Do you?"
"Yes, since my marriage."
"Do you like it?"
"New York is not a point of view, my dear. It's a habit. Your system
comes to demand it just as an opium fiend comes to require so many
pipefuls. You know it's bad for you, but the fumes are delicious."
"What fumes?"
"The fumes of the metropolis, my dear. The perfumes of wealth. The next
best to being Mrs. Four Hundred herself is to walk past her Fifth Avenue
home and see her step out of her automobile."
"I suppose so, if wealth is what one craves most."
"It isn't a craving in New York; it's a necessity. But to those of us to
whom life is pretty much of a compromise anyway, there is something in
mere propinquity to wealth that is like smelling into a tumbler with its
sides still wet from some rare old chartreuse. It isn't filling, but
it's heady."
"That's exactly the way I feel about life; it's worth going after if you
only get the aroma. If I can't be Venus, then let me be the star dust
that is nearest to her!"
It seemed to Lilly that she was suddenly talking to her own kind. New
York spoke her language.
"Fearful coffee. I always say the only place outside of my own
percolator I can get a decent cup of coffee is the new Hudson."
"The Hudson? Is that a good hotel?"
"Yes, splendid. Are you alone?"
There occurred to Lilly a swift talent for the moment.
"Certainly," she said, shaping her own voice into a petard against the
little clang of surprise in the voice of her _vis-à-vis_. "I always
travel alone. I'm a professional."
"Really?" her glance running over the somewhat florid details of the
corn-colored linen. "With that fine chest, I'll warrant you're
a singer."
"Right."
"I wonder if you know Margaret Mazarin."
"Indeed I do, from hearsay."
"Well, we virtually gave Margaret her start. Madge Evans is her real
name. My husband grew up next door to her in Indianapolis. She
practically used to make our apartment her home. One day when she was
about as close to bed rock as a girl could be, my husband said to her:
'Madge, if the managers won't give you a hearing, why don't you try some
of those agencies in the Pittman Building in Longacre Square? I see all
sorts of musical and theatrical agencies' signs on the windows.' Bless
us, if the very first one to which she applied didn't give her the
position that indirectly led her straight to the Metropolitan! Some one
connected with one of the biggest patrons of the opera heard her singing
down at a little old ten-twenty-and-thirty theater and got her an
audience right off."
"Oh," cried Lilly, her face ardent, "if only--I--some day--"
"Yes," continued her companion, dipping into her finger bowl and pushing
back, "Madge always says it was that tip from my husband, a mere chance
suggestion, gave her a start."
"Wonderful!"
They paid, each her check, leaving small womanish tips beside their
saucers.
"Well, I hope some day to have the pleasure of hearing you sing. Are you
in concert?"
"Oh yes, concert."
"I must watch for your name," digging down into a reticule for a bit of
cardboard. "Mine is Towser--Mrs. Seymour Towser. What is yours?"
"Mine? Lilly Penny," she replied, her whole body flashing to rescind
the word no sooner than it was spoken. "Lilly-Penny-Parlow."
They swayed their way through the chain of cars, Lilly's coach running
two ahead of her companion's.
"Well, good-by, Miss Parlow, I hope we meet again some day."
"Good-by," said Lilly, making her way relievedly through two more cars
of aisle.
Once in her seat, she withdrew hastily from her valise a small red
memorandum book, giltly inscribed "Mid-West Insurance Company," plying a
quick and small chirography on to its first page:
Pittman Building, Longacre Square.
Hudson Hotel.
The day, which for Lilly began with the tickle of aërial champagne,
petered out humiliatingly. Quite without the precedent of the previous
trip to Buffalo, Niagara Palls, and Chicago, train-sickness set in and
the remainder of the day was spent hunched with her face to the prickly
hot plush of the seat, her hair and linen suit awry, and not a spot on
the pillow mercifully proffered by the porter that would remain cool to
her cheek.
It was well past nine o'clock, and two hours behind schedule, when a
very limp and rumpled Lilly followed the weary straggle of weary
passengers through the pale fog of the New Jersey station to the waiting
ferry. She found a place at the very bow, and, standing there beside her
bags, hat off to the sudden kiss of fresh air, her prostrated senses
seemed to lift.
There was something Trojan, Illiadic, in the way in which they moved out
presently, to bay. The first tang of salt air, that rotten,
indescribable smell of the sea, tickled her nostrils. It was all she
could do to keep from being drunk with it. She felt skittish. She wanted
to kick up.
The approach was not spectacular. The great spangled flank of herself
which New York turns to her harbor had just about died down, only a
lighted tower jutting above the gauze of fog like a château perched on a
mountain. Fog horns sent up rockets of dissonance. Peer as she would,
Lilly could only discern ahead a festoon of lights each smeared a bit
into the haze.
She began her trick of dramatizing the moment. She wanted suddenly to
claw apart the dimness with her finger nails. She wanted to lean into
the beyond, to wind herself in that necklace of lights out there and
bend back until she touched the floor of the universe.
They slid into slip. Chains dropped. There was a sudden plunge forward.
Night was day, white arc lights grilling into a vast black shed. A few
automobiles and a line of horse cabs backed up against a curb--the
one-horse variety that directly antedated the general use of the
taxicab. A porter shoved her bags into one of these, the driver leaning
an ear down off his box.
"Where to, miss?"
"Hudson Hotel," she said, sitting back against the leather tufting.
CHAPTER XVI
They rattled over the cobblestones until her very flesh shivered, and
she bit into her tongue and her hands bounced as they lay in her lap,
and, trying to peer out of the window, she bumped her head, and finally
sat back, forced to be inert as she bumbled over the deep narrow streets
of lower Manhattan which at night become deserted runways to slaughter,
ghostly with the silent thunder of a million stampeding feet.
It was ten o'clock when they finally drew up at the side entrance of the
hotel in a street disappointingly narrow, but which seemed to burst,
just a few feet beyond, into a wildly tossed stream of light,
pedestrians, and, above all, a momentum of traffic that was like the
fast toss of a mountain stream. The cab fare was overwhelmingly large.
Her bags disappeared; she followed them, immediately enveloped in an
atmosphere of upholstery, mosaic floors that seemed to slide from under
her, palms that leaned out of corners, crystal chandeliers, uniforms,
rivulets of music. She had dined upon several occasions at the Planters'
Hotel in St. Louis, and had once spent a night at the Briggs House,
Chicago, and the Hotel Imperial at Niagara Palls, and had objected when
her father signed, "B. T. Becker, Wife and Daughter," taking the pen to
write out her own name boldly under his, and upon all summer excursions
had taken upon herself the ordering of the family meals.
But the Hudson awed her, the very Carrara magnitude of the walls, the
remote gold-leaf ceilings, light-studded, the talcy odor _de luxe_. She
wanted to back out of that lobby of groups of well-dressed loungers; to
turn; to run. Instead, she wrote her name on the register, marveling at
her steady chirography:
Luella Parlow, Dallas
A narrow clerk scanned the bulk of her baggage, unhooked some keys, and
called, "Front." She was mildly taken for granted and her assurance
stiffened.
"Bath?"
"What are your rates?"
"Three-fifty and up."
"Yes--bath."
He shifted among his keys and she noticed that when she returned the pen
to him his hand lingered just too long. She had a way of lifting her
eyebrows to express her archest scorn. The smile on the clerk's face did
not die, but neither did it widen.
She shot upward in an elevator. She padded her way through long hallways
deeply carpeted to eat in footfalls. It seemed to her they must have
rounded a city square of those hallways, door after door after door as
imperturbable as eyeless masks, and yet which somehow seemed to look on.
"Anything else, ma'am?"
"Nothing." She interpreted his wait and felt for a ten-cent piece. He
shifted the key to the room inside of the door and went out.
She was alone in a twelfth-story room that enhanced her aërial sense of
light-headedness. She looked at the bed. Curly birch with a fine sense
of depth to its whiteness. There was a glass top on the dresser, with a
lace scarf beneath it which appealed to her sense of novelty. Also an
extra light above it which she jerked on, peering at herself in
the mirror.
There were soot rims about her eyes, and when she removed her hat her
hair was glued to her brow in its outline. But just the same, the pollen
that gave to her skin its velvetiness was there. She leaned to the
mirror, baring her teeth to scan their whiteness; turned her profile as
if to appraise its strong, sure cast; swelled her chest after the manner
of inhaling for an octave, letting her hand ride on it. Then she
undressed slowly, luxuriating in a deep hot bath that rested her as she
lay back in it. She even washed her hair, wrapping it finally in one of
the thick turkish towels, and then leaned out of her window for a while,
her body well over the sill, and the air, with a cool washed quality to
it, flowing through her nightdress. She looked down on what she thought
must be the bosom of Broadway. Actually it was Forty-fourth Street. An
ocean of roofs billowed under her gaze.
She thought of Tuefelsdröck alone with his stars. Or rather, wanted to
think of herself as thinking of him.
A telephone directory on the desk caught her eye. For an hour she pored
over its pages, names that had blazoned themselves incandescently from
the pages of musical reviews and magazines mixed in casually with the
clayey ones of mere persons. A thrill shot over her with each encounter.
The book began to exhale an odor of sanctity.
It was two o'clock when she turned off her lights, just enough glow from
the hallway pressing against her transom to reassure her. The sheets
were fragrant with cleanliness and she let her body give to the
delicious sag of the mattress. The rumble of the train was gone from
her ears. She felt washed, light, drowsy; cast aside her pillow; wound
her arm up under her head; sighed out of deliciousness; slept.
She awoke with a sense of red. A flame of fear shot through her, and a
first thought of fire, but even before she could rise she saw it was
static, this crimson gash across the blackness, and shaped like a grin.
She began to tremble, and an unreasoning fear of the depth of the
darkness to take hold of her. A sort of paralysis locked her, and,
although she wanted to scream, she lay there drenched in terror.
Finally, out of contempt for her fear, she sprang, landing both feet on
the floor.
A little window in the box of the wall telephone, one of those modern
hotel devices _de luxe_ and _de trop_, had flashed up redly, spelling
out to her dilated gaze, "MAIL IN YOUR BOX." Regarding it, her relief
shifted suddenly to terror. Mail! Not even had she herself known what
her address might be! Her mother--father--Albert? But how? The drummer
with the gold-mounted elk's tooth! The clerk and that almost
imperceptible trail of the hand. Detectives! Her window showed a streak
of dawn. Five-forty by her watch. She tried to go back to bed, but at
six she was up again, dressed fumblingly, finally sliding the linen
jacket over an unbuttoned blouse. She had some difficulty locating the
elevator, scurrying through the deserted halls only to dash herself
against repeated _cul-de-sacs_. It was almost seven when she descended
into a lobby that was littered with sawdust in the sweeping up.
She asked for her mail, a strange clerk handing it out to her without
askance, and hurried to a chair behind a pillar, holding the envelope
between the folds of her skirt without glancing at it, and trying to
hide the trembling of her arm. She sat down, forcing her hand around and
her gaze to meet it. The envelope was blank; she tore its flap and read:
"Valet Service. Suits Cleaned and Pressed in One Hour."
And then she went out into 7 A.M. Broadway, all swept clean and caroling
with the song of the car gong and the whistlings of steamboats. A
line-up of theaters, early-morning mausoleums of last night's madnesses,
first met her eye in the clean light. One of them was violently postered
with lithographs of Minnie Maddern Fiske. A three-sheet proclaimed
Melba. Broadway became an Olympus, every passer-by a probable immortal.
She half expected to pass John Drew there as the Rialto cleaned its
cuspidors, polished its brass, and swept its front. She thought she
caught a flash of Margaret Mazarin in a cab. An exultant chill raced
over her at the vertical sign, "Rector's." A musical comedy full of
frothy and naughty allusions to Rector's had once played Forest Park
Highlands, St. Louis. It was like strolling the pages of an illustrated
magazine. Some one jostled her and smiled around very closely into her
face. Suddenly her eyebrows shot up. It seemed to her that the face
under the gray derby hat was as coldly and as bonelessly fat as an
oyster. Her two hands could have met around the little neck which was
tightly incased in a soft blue collar held with a gold bar pin. She
quickened her step and, what with the lifted brows, promptly lost him.
She stopped finally at a florid lace-and-glass-fronted restaurant on
Forty-third Street, with a mimeographed breakfast menu up against the
window. Her food went down through a throat constricted against it. Her
tightness would not relax.
At half after eight she was back once more in her room, changing from
the tan linen into a pink mull, heavily inserted, too, and throwing up
quite an aura of rosiness about her. She had only the tan hat, too wide
and too floppy of brim, but it had a picturesque value, which is a
greater selling quality than _chic_. In fact, in her own eyes, as she
tilted the mirror for a full-length view, the art of Katy Stutz stood
unimpeached. Eying her reflection in the mirrored walls of the elevator,
she felt as pinkly blown as a rose, and looked it. A head or two turned
after her youth. At the desk she inquired for the Pittman Building. Just
opposite! A policeman held up traffic to let her cross. She picked a
name off a third-story window, "Barnett Bureau--Musical Service," and
rode up to it.
By one of those astonishing flukes of beginner's good fortune, upon the
occasion of this very first effort Lilly obtained.
A ground-glass door opened into a room the size and bareness of a
packing case and crammed to its capacity with a roller-top desk, a
stenographer at a white-pine table, a cuspidor, a pair of shirt sleeves,
a black mustache, and a blacker cigar.
Entering, Lilly was surprised at the measured tempo of her voice and the
manner in which she permitted her eyebrows to arch ever so
superciliously.
"I'm looking for an engagement," she said, speaking through the ticking
of the typewriter.
The jaw ate in half an inch more of cigar and swung around in the
swivel.
"Voice?"
"Yes. High soprano."
He ran a swift cocked eye over her points and turned to the white-pine
table.
"Send her down to Visigoth," he said to the stenographer, who took up
where he left off.
She was as blond and as bland as a summer's day. A Pompadour dipped down
over one eye and her jaws moved as rhythmically as rigorously to gum
with a pull to it. She was herself caricatured. She and Lilly exchanged
that quickest of inventories, woman's for woman.
"Sign here."
Lilly signed.
"Ten dollars."
"Why?"
"Our rules. Ten dollars a year bureau membership, and fifty per cent of
first two weeks' salary."
"But what if--"
"We always place sooner or later."
"But in case--"
"Take this card down to the Union Family Theater, Union Square, and ask
for Robert Visigoth. It's a two-a-day. If you don't do business with
him, come back to-morrow morning."
A quick dozen of questions rushed to Lilly's lips, but instead she laid
down a new ten-dollar bill, crammed the slip into her palm through the
hole in her glove, and went out, the snapping torrent of typewriting
already resumed.
The Union Family Theater was the first of a succession of variety houses
that was to spread, first to Harlem, then Philadelphia, and later gird
the country like a close-link chain. Vaudeville prefaced with
stereopticon views, designed to appeal to the strict respectability of
the most strictly respectable audiences in the world.
The high-class Rialto houses might pander to low-class comedy and
Broadway take its entertainment broad, but Robert Visigoth laid the
corner stone of subsequent fortunes when he decided that a
ten-twenty-thirty vaudeville audience that smells sour of perspiration
and strong foods demands entertainment as pink and as sweet as a baby's
heel, and that a gunman in the gallery will catcall his prototype on
the stage.
Let the Noras and all the pyschanalyzed Magdas go their problematic and
not always prophylactic ways, the Visigoth Family Theaters wanted 'em
sweet, high-necked and low-browed.
Robert Visigoth, attorney-at-law, whose practice had suddenly, by one of
those arbitrary twists as difficult to account for as the changed course
of a river, assumed a theatrical twist, had taken over, on cleverly
obtained backing, the Union Family Theater from an insolvent client.
Within a year it had made a disappearing island of the law office,
flowing over and finally submerging that enterprise in the swifter
waters of the new.
At the end of two years, Bruce Visigoth, a younger brother by ten years
and snatched from the law the very day he graduated into it, was already
in Chicago, launching under the auspices of The Enterprise Amusement
Company, the People's Family Theater, Popular Prices, the sixth link of
the chain already in the soldering.
When Lilly found out the older of these brothers, he was standing in the
black auditorium of the theater, holding an electric bulb made portable
by a coil of cord, and directing the reverberating hammering down of an
additional brace of three orchestra chairs for which room had been found
by shifting the position of the bass drum.
A hairy old watchdog, tilted back against the brick side of the building
and smoking a pipe so foul that its tang clung to her hair that night as
she brushed it out, inspected her slip of paper and led her through a
black labyrinth of wings and properties.
An aroma lay on that blackness that in some indefinable way quickened
her, set her nostrils quivering, and ran along her entire being like a
line of fire. It smelled of Elizabethans in buckskin. Bottom rollicked
through it, thumb to nose. Ophelia leaned out of it. Bernhardt,
Coquelin, Melba, intoned into it. Its cold, pink paintiness lay damply
to her face. She had never smelled simmering mascara, but her lashes
were hot with it. Suddenly to herself she was herself, running ahead of
the wind, her aching senses bathed in an odor which somehow intoxicated
them. She was on a stage for the first time in her life, a bunch light
only half revealing it to her. Through the megaphone of cupped hands and
the dimness of the auditorium a voice came at her.
"Come down here, around through the left box."
She groped her way to a steel door, stumbling down two unsuspected
steps, and was suddenly in the carpeted silence of an aisle. Robert
Visigoth came toward her, the electric bulb held high and dragging the
yards of cord behind him.
"I'm from the agency," she said at once, the little beating quality that
she was feeling all over her in her voice, and holding out the slip.
"Come out here," he said, "where I can see you."
Some daylight flowed in through a slightly open fire exit and she
caught at a last moment of darkness to straighten her hat.
"Sing?"
"Yes."
He shoved open the iron door so that more light flowed over her.
"Why," he said, "you're a big girl, aren't you?"
"I don't know," she said, through a little laugh of embarrassment, and
noticing that, regarding her, he wetted his lips.
"That part's all right. What I need is a good refined ballad voice.
Understand? The kind that can sing 'The Suwanee River' as if the only
thing in the world that mattered is that old plantation down there.
Understand?"
"I see."
He spoke through a slight patois, New-Yorkese, but which she misjudged
for Virginian. He was in inverse ratio to her stock idea of theatrical
manager. Both brothers were to become more and more subject to this soft
indictment.
Born in one of those old morose houses in lower Lexington Avenue, each
had lived there until he obtained his degree of LL.D. from a state
university. It had been a sedate, a mildly prosperous, even an historic
home. A Vice President of the United States had once owned it. Then a
Major O. Higginbothom, and finally, for fifteen years of tenancy, the
Visigoths. One of the kind whose genteel hall light had burned through
the fanlight decade after decade, and then suddenly, overnight, as it
were, disintegrated into a furnished-room house with a sign over the
door bell.
One evening Horace R. Visigoth, of the law firm of Visigoth, Visigoth &
Higginbothom, did not answer his wife's soft question to him across the
green-shaded reading lamp of their library table. His head was quite
sunk forward in a sheaf of proofs. He was dead. One month later his wife
failed to awaken to Pauline Visigoth's frenzied attempts or to even a
dexterous physician's respiratory methods. The year following Pauline
Visigoth married the dexterous physician and moved to Chicago.
The Lexington Avenue house succumbed to a quick sale, and in attempting
to divert the law business out of the clayey rut of quiet old
conservatism, the Enterprise Amusement Company was ultimately to
be born.
Robert Visigoth, twenty-nine at the time, betrayed little of the
heritage his name suggested. His Teutonic blood pretty well laid, he was
a trifle too short and a trifle too heavy, and with none of his mother's
lean patrician quality to which both his younger brother and older
sister had fallen heir.
Suggesting future rotundities and a reddishness of complexion that was
presently to purple, at this stage his chin was undoubted and as square
as a spade, and, as so often happens to chins of this potentiality,
punctuated absurdly with a dimple, and he wore a little clipped edge of
black mustache which he tried to twirl.
Busy at the mannerism, if not the act, of twirling that hirsute
adornment of upper lip, he continued to observe Lilly.
"You understand? What I need is a real heart-to-heart voice."
"I'm quite good at ballads."
"Quite good or darn good?"
"Darn."
"Experience?"
"I'm just in from as far west as--Dallas."
"Now what I want is a turn that hasn't struck the West yet. Understand?
It originated right here in this theater. There is a firm of music
publishers in this town makes up slides of its songs, and all you have
to do is stand beside the screen and sing to the stereopticon
illustrations. Understand? You don't have to follow the pictures. The
pictures follow you. It is sure fire if it is handled right, only the
girl we had on last week must have wrapped her vocal cords in sandpaper.
The secret of the whole thing is to make them--out there--live the song.
Understand?"
"I see."
"Every woman in the audience has to be the sweetheart and every man the
lover you are singing to them about. And to do that the first one to
live that song must be you. Believe in yourself before you expect the
world to. If you come in here and tell me you sing _quite_ good, it
won't be easy to convince me of more if you begin to warble like Melba.
Now you go up there and let me hear a bar or two. Take care of the last
row gallery and the first row orchestra will take care of
itself. Shoot!"
"I--haven't my music with me--my répertoire--"
"Nonsense! Just a bar or two--'Suwanee River'--anything with heart in
it. Give us some lights up there, Bob."
Through the blackness Lilly moved as if she were sleep-walking in it.
Little needles of nervousness were out all over her, and, absurdly
enough, there walked across her vision the utterly irrelevant spectacle
of old black Willie with her feet bound in gunny sacks and the pencil
nubs in her hair, and just as irrelevantly her mind began to pop with a
little explosive ejaculative prayer: "O God, make him take me! O God,
make him take me!"
The bunch light had been dragged down center stage. She stood beside it,
opening her mouth as if to muster voice, then closing it. It was as if
water were swirling around and around her, the unseen presence in the
back of the house surging at her like a multitude.
"Shoot!"
She looked appealingly in the direction of the hammering down of the
seats.
"Never mind that. Sing to the top row of the gallery."
A fearful recurrence of yesterday's train-sickness rushed over her; she
could have crumpled to her knees, had even a sense of wanting to faint,
but instead she opened her lips again, her eyes fixed on the unseen last
two tows of the unseen top gallery, and by miracle finding a pitch that
left her plenty of range.
"Way down upon the Suwanee River-"
"Louder!"
"Far, far away,
There's where my heart is turning ever,
There's where the old folks stay.
All the world am sad and dreary,
Everywhere I roam.
Oh, darkies, how my heart grows weary--"
The lay of Page Avenue was before her, swollen through tears. Her mother
sewing beside Katy Stutz. The patient back of her father's gray head.
Her parents on their knees, far back there somewhere beside her bed of
fever. Albert! Their wedding night when the door had closed behind
them! "O God, make him take me! Please!
"Far from the o-old folks--at ho--"
"That will do."
She stood with her mouth an O on the unfinished note, hand to the little
rise of her bosom.
"Meet me around in my office back stage." His voice was like a call in a
fog, retreating and retreating. She followed it. They met in a narrow
patch of broad daylight.
"I'm afraid," she began, her voice breaking on a gulp--"I'm afraid I
didn't--"
"You did very well," he said, kindly. "Little off key and your voice
won't set the world on fire, and it has a tremolo quality that may be
rotten-bad singing, but it's the right stuff for the act."
She thought, with a swoop of perception, that in this she discerned the
astuteness of a buyer too clever to praise the article he covets. She
felt lighter, as if some of her had melted in the ordeal. The machinery
of her body began to take up again, the saliva to flow, and her heart to
beat without seeming to hit its walls.
"I'll try you out for a week. Twenty dollars?"
"Yes." Trying to seem to pro and con.
"Come to-morrow at ten and I'll have a man down to go over next week's
slides with you. That gives you until Monday. Something pink on the
order of what you are wearing will do, only fluffier. Rough up your hair
a bit, too. No, leave it slick like that, but something fluffy in a hat
or a sun-bonnet with a pink bow under the chin. Right there--under that
little chin."
Her head flew up from his touch.
"I see."
"Manage it?"
"I think so."
"You what?"
"I know so."
"Good. Never let a think show through your answer. Yes or no!"
"Yes."
He tweaked her chin again.
"Watch out somebody doesn't steal you on your way home, big girl."
"To-morrow at ten," she repeated, going out into the sunshine that smote
her with the sting of hot lances. The tweak from his hand lay back
somewhere, branded none too pleasantly into her consciousness.
But just the same, when she inquired of a traffic policeman the
direction to the Hotel Hudson, even the mundane wording of her asking
clicked like happy castanets into her spirit.
CHAPTER XVII
And so it came about, through events of surprisingly simple shaping,
that her first week in the metropolis found Lilly integral to it.
She liked the consciousness that unless she appeared at the Union Family
Theater at two-fifteen and at eight-fifteen she was breaking into the
continuity of a sequence of events in which she had her place.
She was already in the rush of assurance that followed her sense of
earning capacity, regarding the Union Family Theater merely as a means
to an end, and in spare time had registered at two concert bureaus, read
off the same building of plate-glass windows, and had purchased the
score of "Carmen," humming Michaela's aria, in bed of mornings. There
was a letter she had once obtained from Max Rinehardt, addressed:
"_To Whom It May Concern. Miss Lilly Becker has studied with me for a
period of three years. I consider her voice a lyric soprano of fine
quality._"
Evidently it concerned no one. The clerk at the concert bureau tossed it
aside without comment. Visigoth, when he read it one day in the wings,
returned it in just that manner.
She was secretly ashamed of her professional debut in a role that would
not have survived the ridicule of even Flora Bankhead's easy standards.
Many a time, together at matinées, they had giggled and munched
chocolates over acts that hardly rivaled hers for sentimental appeal of
about one dimension. Plenty of length and no depth.
To a series of colored views thrown upon the screen, Lilly sang from a
dark stage into the warm musk and stale linen-smelling theater, a ballad
as slow and sweet as taffy in the pulling.
"Dressed up in her gingham gown,
Just to come with me to town.
How the sun was shining down!
It seemed to bless our lit-tul wedding day."
CHORUS:
"Darling Sue--e dear,
How I miss your laughing!
Seems to me I hear it in the same old way.
Darling Sue dear, don't believe I'm chaffing.
Bless your heart! I love you in the same old way."
Lights! Revealing Lilly in the pink mull and dangling sunbonnet beside
the blank white screen. They liked her, invariably demanding encore,
this time the words and score of the chorus thrown upon the screen and,
to Lilly's importunings and pretty encouragement, the house joining in.
By arrangement with the publishing house, this exploitation of song hits
cost the Visigoth brothers nothing. In fact the little novelty soon came
to supplement one of the eight acts on the program, thus eliminating
a number.
Each week a new song score bordered in hearts and flowers was thrown
upon that darkness, the audience eager to find a hum in it.
Lilly's second song, "Mamma, Why Are You So Sad To-night?" went even
better than the first, and it so pleased Robert Visigoth, who in those
years had his ears to the ground of the daily audience, to hear them
filing out, whistling and carrying it on little tra-la-las, that he
called Lilly into his office the first day of the second week, to
announce a five-dollar raise in salary.
She had been in the habit of oozing past him rather hurriedly in and out
the dark passages, conscious that his touch was ever ready to slide down
her length of arm, or his knee to find out hers and press it if he sat
down beside her as she waited in the wings.
It was before the realty aspect, the buying, leasing, and selling, of
theater property had engulfed him, and his presence around the theater,
often shirt-sleeved, was hardly a matter of moment.
However favorably he differed in aspect from Lilly's preconception of
the managerial genius, her inhibitions concerning him were strong. She
always sat on the edge of her chair in his presence. To accept so much
as a slip of paper from him meant that his touch would trail to the last
long-drawn second. His eyes had a habit of focusing, seeming to move in
a bit toward the tip of his nose and grill intimately into her being.
And then his wetted lips, as if his mouth were watering.
"You need to be waked up," he said once to her. "You're like a great big
sleepy cat."
She jerked away from his touch and his reference, hurrying from the
theater, as always, immediately after her act, which came first on the
afternoon and evening bill. Secretly she was thoroughly ashamed of what
she was doing, putting each performance quickly behind her.
Six hundred and twenty-two dollars still lay in the chamois bag against
her bosom, but the additional five dollars a week on to her salary was a
saving prop against the not infrequent sag of her spirit.
She was listed at half a dozen agencies, but nothing presented itself.
Her first hotel bill, twenty-eight dollars, sent her scurrying, against
further and deeper inroads into the chamois bag, to an immediately
adjoining side street of brownstone fronts as without identity as a row
of soldiers, all of them proclaiming the furnished room to that great
sandstorm of New York transients who blow in and out of them in
nameless whirl.
Their dreariness flowed over her in cold, soupy odors, that left a
feeling of a coating of grease over the surface of her. The poor filbert
of gaslight burning into floor after floor of slits of hallway. The
climb after a w
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