forward so that their heads came together resoundingly and absurdly, but not before the bag had exposed its surface articles: a pair of tortoise-shell military brushes, a packet of documents, and a precious silver and lapis-lazuli box about the dimensions of a playing card, the kind usually dedicated to such elusive addenda as stamps, collar buttons, or sewing box in a lady’s overnight bag.
From where she sat, shorthand book open, pencil poised, Lilly had observed it quite casually, although it was some time before she could co-ordinate it with what ensued.
Suddenly there was the flash of the two men to their feet, R.J., an ox-blood surging into his face, kicking shut the valise, his brother whitening and quivering.
“Why did you lie about that box!”
“What do you mean?” said Robert, through his teeth, his color so livid that teeth and eyeballs seemed to whiten.
His voice like the splitting of silk, Bruce plunged down a pointing forefinger toward the bag.
“Open that up,” he said.
“The hell I will.”
With one swift stroke from the lighter and lither of them, the bag was on its side, spilling its contents of tortoise-shell hair brushes and the silver box, Bruce standing above it, tightening of jaw and knuckles.
“Liar!” he cried. “Liar!”
To Lilly it seemed that out of these years of apparently placid relationship, with something avuncular, even of father and son in it, here were suddenly and terribly Cain and Abel, elemental with an itch for each other’s throat.
“Say that again, by God! and you’ll regret it.”
“Liar! Liar!” he reiterated over and over, standing and towering over the spilling bag. “Why did you lie to me about that box? Three years ago I asked you for it. The spring after her death. Just before the auction. Wasn’t it sufficient that I let you and Pauline settle her personal effects between you? Only that little box–somehow I wanted it. Father gave it to her the first Christmas of their marriage. She always kept it on her table. You were welcome to all the rest between you. All I asked for was that little box of mother’s. And to think that yesterday, the anniversary of her death, I mentioned it again. Liar! Liar! Lost! Never been found among her effects! Bah! Liar! It’s a little thing, a trinket that she loved, but I wanted it. You hear, I wanted that trinket. She used to keep jelly beans in it for me when I came in from school. It’s little–the littlest thing that ever happened between us, but it’s the meanest, and God knows in my dealings with you all my life there have been enough of the little meannesses to contend with. But you have won your last mean little advantage outside this office. You and I can play the cards in business, particularly when we play them six hundred miles apart and where it is a case of man to man out on the mat. But outside this office we play quits! There aren’t going to be any more nasty little personal issues with you, because there aren’t going to be any at all. You’re a liar and a hundred per cent bigger one over that little trinket of a box than if the stakes had been bigger. You hate to give, unless it’s so much for so much. Your sense of fairness is vile! It’s penny mean! Liar!”
With a lowering of head Robert lunged then, his lips dragged to an oblique, threads of red cut in his eyeballs.
“Eat those words or, by God! I’ll ram them down your throat.”
“The hell I will.”
“Gentlemen!”
They were crowded against the door, their breathing flowing against each other’s face, gestures uplifted.
Her eyes black and her notebook crushed up to her, Lilly’s voice rang out like the crack of a whip, springing them apart. There were a whiteness and a sense of emptiness upon her and she wanted to crumple up rather sickly and cry, as if the blows had been diverted to her.
They were suddenly and quiveringly themselves again, the panther laid.
“You’ll rue this,” said Robert, walking back with some uncertainty of step to his desk, his eyes still slits.
Bruce lifted the box rather tenderly, even with the greeny pallor of his rage still out and his features straining for composure.
“I’ll have it valued and send you a check–“
“Damn you!” With snarl-shaped lips the older brother lunged again, this time their bodies meeting and swaying for clutch.
“Bruce!”
The use of his given name, the curdled quality to her voice, had their way. There was a moment of blank staring between the two men, of Bruce placing the box gently on the desk and walking out without slamming the door, and Robert sinking down into the swivel chair, trying to bring the oblique pull of his lips back to straight.
“Get out,” he said, without looking at her.
She did, tiptoeing and fighting down the sense of sickness.
And thus, out of a bauble of silver and lapis lazuli, was reared a tower of silence between these brothers as high as fifteen years is long. Large affairs for their joint unraveling lay ahead, dramatic in their magnitude. The Union Square Family Theater was very presently to become first a tawdry, then a discarded link in the glittering chain of playhouses that was to gird the country.
Toward this end R.J. and Bruce Visigoth steered, with an impeccable oneness of purpose, the destinies of an enterprise audacious in its concept and ultimately to be spectacular in its fulfillment.
But outside the sharply defined inclosures of their business lives, the brothers went down into a wordless vale of fifteen years of estrangement, not in enmity, but rather as a hatpin, plunged through the heart, can kill, bloodlessly.
CHAPTER VII
When Lilly put on her hat outside in the now darkening and deserted offices, it seemed to her that the roar of men’s passions was a gale through the silence. Quite irrelevantly she was clutched with a terror of catastrophe. The possibility of fire! Only last week there had been a devastating one in a children’s hospital out in Columbus, Ohio. She beat down these flames of fear. Yet what strange and horrible passions lay just a scratch beneath the surface of the day-by-days. A little girl aged four had once been found battered and dead beside a farm hand’s dinner pail in St. Louis County! Suddenly all the faces she could conjure began to form staring circles around her–the Visigoths. Minnie Dupree. Ida Blair. Auchinloss. Phonzie. Phonzie!
She decided to walk fast and long and ran downstairs out into the little areaway that ran like an alley from stage entrance to sidewalk. A newly installed nickelodeon, adjoining, was already lighted, throwing out a hard white shine and tinned music at the instance of five cents in the slot. In the glaring pallor Bruce Visigoth was suddenly at her side, his felt hat bunched up in his hand and his hair wet-looking, as if drenched with perspiration.
“I couldn’t let you go without apologizing, Mrs. Penny.”
She smiled with lips that would pull to the nervous impulse to cry.
“The idea!” she said, feeling the words tawdry and provincial as they came.
“It was my fault for permitting it to happen in the presence of a third party–you especially.”
“Those things cannot always be avoided,” again biting down into her tongue for its banality.
“Will you forget it as if it had never occurred?”
She turned her gaze, that could be so singularly clear, full upon him.
“It is already forgotten.”
Strangely enough and with unspoken accord they took to walking then at a clip that was almost a rush and created quite a wind in their faces. It was their first meeting out of office and here they were half running through a cool and winey half darkness and utterly without destination.
She stopped abruptly at West Fourteenth Street, beyond the thunder of the Sixth Avenue Elevated and where the sky line began to dip down toward the piers.
“Good night,” she said, throwing back her head to look up at him from under the low brim of sailor.
He whipped off his resiliently soft hat, hugging it under one arm.
“Of course,” he said, “of course,” mopping at his forehead and so unstrung that she could have laughed. “I’m sorry. I beg your pardon. Is this where you live?”
They were before a greasily lighted taxidermist’s window of mounted raccoon, fox terrior with legs curled for running, and an owl on a branch.
“No,” she said, eying the owl, “I don’t live here,” and were both off into a gale of laughter that swept down the barriers of self-restraint.
“We’ve both been walking it off,” she said, easily. “Here is where I turn for home.”
He caught her hand.
“D-don’t go. I’d be so grateful–so grateful if you’d have dinner with me to-night.”
“Nonsense!” she said, amazed at her fluency of manner. “You’re a bit unstrung, that’s all. Look in at your club or a show.”
“Please.”
“All right,” she said, suddenly, on a little click of teeth. “I’ll come–this once.”
“You’re a brick,” he cried, releasing her hand with a grateful pressure.
She was excited out of all proportions to the event, flushing up with a sense of adventure and crowded moment.
He began to scan for a cab.
“Let’s walk.”
“Not a bit of it,” bringing one down with a cane. “We’re out on a party.”
“But–“
“No buts,” helping her in and climbing in after. “Waldorf.”
“I’m too shirtwaisted.”
“Nothing of the kind. You’re as trim as a dime. I like those waists you wear. They make you look smooth–shining. That’s it, you’ve a shine to you.”
The odor of another drive in an open cab through this same snarl of traffic was winding about her like mist. That doctor’s outer office with its row of thoughtful chairs. Rembrandt’s “Night-Watch.” That frenzied moment of finding the lock! The run up two flights. She sat forward on the slippery leather seat.
“I–I shouldn’t have come.”
“If you’re serious, of course I’ll take you home. But I can’t tell you how much I want you not to feel that way.”
She sat back again.
“I’m behaving like a shop girl.”
They both laughed again and complete thaw set in.
He selected one of the lesser dining rooms where the formality of evening clothes was still the rule, but here and there a couple like themselves, in street attire. It was her first New York meal that was not read off a badly thumbed menu and eaten off thick-lipped china. A stringed orchestra played the Duo of Parsifal and Kundry, which was enough to set the blood rocking in her veins and some of its bombastic maternal passion to dye her face.
He ordered a man’s dinner: Clear soup with croûtons. Long oysters on the half shell. A thick steak with potatoes deliciously concocted beneath a crust of cheese. Light wine. Ices in long glasses as slender as the neck of a crane. Turkish coffee brewed at the table over alcohol.
She sighed out finally, warm with well-being: “I didn’t realize how deadly tired I was of just–grub. You see, it’s the first time I’ve dined at a first-class place since I’m in New York.”
“You don’t mean that.”
She nodded, smiling.
“I think I’m as surprised as you are. It’s just one of the things that never occurred to me.”
He regarded her for a long moment and without smile.
“You queer, queer girl.”
“If anyone tells me that again, I’ll begin to believe it is my inevitable epitaph.”
“No epitaph is inevitable. It is what you write it.”
She leaned her chin into the cup of her palm.
“Do you think that?”
“Yes, and therefore yours should embody courage and dauntless idealism and love of truth.”
She looked off through the atmosphere that was talcy with soft odors and the warm perfume of bare shoulders.
“Love of truth,” she said, her eyes lit, “would be enough.”
“Love of you, would be an epitaph to my liking.”
She was afraid he could see the little beating at her throat and wanted to be facetious. Poor Lilly, to whom persiflage came none too readily.
“Now, you’re making sport of me.”
“Probably it is a case of laugh that I may not weep.”
“Even tears can be idle.”
“Or idolizing.”
“I suppose I am to surmise over the quality of yours?”
“Well, you have had me guessing for three years. Mrs. Penny. Lilly! I can’t say the other, it–won’t s-say itself.”
She asked her question with a cessation of her entire being, as if her heart had missed a beat.
“Hasn’t–your–brother–told–you–anything?”
“Oh yes. I know how you threw over the professional end of it for what you decided you could do better. I thought that pretty plucky; so many of us mistake inflated judgment for genius and stubbornness for perseverance, when that same perseverance applied to the job within one’s capacity may lead to fine fulfillment.”
“It’s good to hear you say that.”
“But that is about all I do know–Lilly–except, of course, that there is a youngster and somewhere in the background a husband whom I would like to meet out some dark night when I happen to be wearing my favorite pair of brass knuckles.”
Something nameless and shapeless had lifted; there was a gavotte to her heartbeat.
“My husband was–is a good man.”
“But not a wise one if he couldn’t hold a creature like you.”
“And my child! You talk about shine! Of course I know it is only her hair and eyes and now her little teeth, but sometimes it seems to me there is an actual iridescence to her. Just as real as the gold circlets the Italians loved to paint about heads they adored.”
“Your head is–“
“You see, the fuzz of her curls gives that effect. Those new stereopticon views that move, that we used on the bills last week, show it–that aura off the hair. Even the nurses and Mrs. Dupree have remarked Zoe’s. She’s really the show child of the place, you know.”
“By inheritance?”
“No. She’s only like me about the eyes, and like–him–in the honey color of her hair. Hers is as brilliant and curly as mine is dull and smooth. And she’s so big. So golden and burstingly big. I can’t look at her without fairly gasping, ‘can this be mine’!”
“And to think a man let you go, once he had you captured.”
“He didn’t let go. I went. I can never hear him referred to slightingly without feeling myself a rotter not to explain. My husband was so terribly all he should have been, Mr. Visigoth. As decent and God-fearing a man as ever–chewed his beefsteak with his temples.”
He threw back his head for one of his sustained laughs.
“It’s horrid of me to belittle him. Let me explain further.”
“Lord! you don’t need to. I know everything about him there is to know. A fine, hefty truck horse trying to do teamwork with a red-nostriled filly.”
“I–I think that’s it–I’ve never been able to get it across to anyone before, but–“
“He was just cast wrong. That’s all there is to be said against the chap. Right?”
“Exactly.”
“I understand. In a way I’m in a similar position with my own brother. Only, I’ve stuck it out because it was my mother’s great wish to see us get on together. After what you have observed these years, particularly to-day, none of this can be particularly new to you.”
“I’ve noticed, of course, you–you’re different.”
“It is the little things about Robert I cannot swallow. Never could. He is the better business man and keeps my head out of the clouds, but many a time I’ve wanted to duck these years of apprenticeship and produce the things I believe in. I will some day, but that is another story. Robert has vision. His sense of land and theater values is unfailing. He–“
“Well, so is your vision just as unfailing in your work. The chain didn’t even begin to form before you took over the booking end.”
“He has fine traits, too. Big ones. His word is his bond. He has business foresight and integrity, but somehow it is his little meannesses. I remember once in my father’s house he took a thrashing for something outrageous he was not guilty of, because he had promised some youngster across the way he would shield him, come what might, and somehow I thought it pretty fine of him. But another time he let me take a thrashing for something he had done and stood by without opening his mouth. It is those indescribable smallnesses in his make-up. Once when I was in favor of branching out and producing a legitimate three-act play which I happened to run across–a rare thing from the French–he–well, I won’t go into it–but this thing–to-night–that bauble of my mother’s–it–it’s the climax of a lifetime of such flea bites–a trifle hardly worth the mentioning, and yet–it’s the most utter–the most damnable–“
There was a half crash of his clenched hand among the silver and a rise of suffusing red up out of the white of his soft collar.
“I beg your pardon. I didn’t mean to let you in for any more of it. I’m sorry. And after you were gracious enough to come alone, too. Come, here is to making this little party a gay one.”
He held up his glass. “Here’s to the shining child.”
“Oh!” she cried, and drank quickly.
“Like it?”
“Not much. It burns.”
“You should see your eyes.”
“You should see hers.”
“Whose?”
“My child’s.”
“Do you know what I should have done in your husband’s place?”
“What?”
“Harnessed you, too, but to a moonbeam.”
“I once knew a man to whom I never spoke ten words in all my life, and yet I always imagined he might have talked to me like that–not literally–not in terms of tin dippers.”
“Of what, you queer, queer girl?”
“Now I know of whom you remind me! An old school-teacher I once had. Odd.”
“I would never have let you slip my harness through.”
“And have deprived the Amusement Enterprise Company of my austere services!”
“You’ve been invaluable. Ninety per cent of your judgments have been ninety-nine per cent there!”
“Luck.”
“Luck nonsense! Judgment isn’t horseshoe-shaped.”
“I love it! Feeling the public pulse for what it wants. The psychology of your vaudeville audience is as elementary as a primer and as intricate as life. It is a bloodhound when it comes to detecting the false from the true. Take that little sketch, ‘Trapped,’ you sent me out to see last week. A more sophisticated audience might have mistaken its brittle epigrammatic quality for brilliancy and its flippancy for cleverness. But not your ten-twenty-thirty’s. In real life a husband doesn’t psychanalyze his wife’s lover. He horsewhips him. And that lovely blank-verse fantasy that you attempted on your own. That is the sort of thing you are going to stand for some day in the theater. I loved your wanting it. But right now, while you are on your way up to the goal, is where I come in. Sort of mediator between your ideals and the box office. Of course you loved the fantasy. So did I, and I loved your wanting to do it. But it took vaudeville just one performance to decide that it wasn’t ready for that kind of mysticism.”
“And you forty minutes.”
“You would never have backed it even over my O.K.”
“Then you don’t realize how far your O.K. goes with me.”
“What is this,” she smiled, “a mutual-admiration fête?”
“I don’t know,” suddenly leaning toward her, reddening. “I can only speak for myself. Lilly–you’re wonderful–“
She chose to be casual, most effectively, too.
“Indeed it is mutual. I need hardly to tell you what association with your office has meant to me. The romance of an organization like yours. The thrill of seeing it triple proportions in these few years. The fine stimulating something that comes with the acquisition of each new Amusement Enterprise Theater. The chats we have had over plays, play writing, producing. Your own fine aim. Oh, it has made bearable even the monotony of the secretarial end of it!”
“I am afraid your secretarial services are about to be dispensed with.”
She placed a quick hand to her heart.
“What do you mean?”
He flecked his cigar, laughing over at her.
“You’re delicious. What could I mean except that you have outgrown your job?”
“You–mean–“
“I mean that I am going to officially place you in charge of the booking department at–well, your own idea of salary.”
“I–I don’t know what to say.”
“Don’t say anything.”
“You can’t know–“
“I do know.”
“You see, she is almost four now, and beautifully cared for, but, now that her little mind is beginning to unfold–I–Oh, to be able to afford a place of my own–next year–when she has outgrown Mrs. Dupree’s. You see, I’ve never really had her. I’ve such plans for the day when I can have her rearing all to myself. I want life to unfold so naturally to her. Like a flower. That’s why I am so terribly jealous of every day we spend apart. That’s why you–you cannot know what it means to have you tell me that I’ve made good. It means that the time is nearing for me to have her with me, to–to–Well, you cannot–cannot know!”
She sat back, feeling foolish because her eyes were filling and trying to smile back the tears.
He reached over to place his palms over her hand.
“How rightly named you are! ‘Lilly.’ One of those big, milky-spathed, calla lilies. Calla Lilly.”
“We’ll be going now,” she said, feeling for her jacket.
They rode down to Eleventh Street in a cab, almost silently, and as she sat looking out, unsmiling, she could feel his gaze burn her profile.
He left her at the stoop, standing bareheaded.
“You’ve saved me from an evening of horrors.”
“I’m glad.”
“You’re not angry–Calla Lilly?”
“Of course not.”
“How soon again?”
“No.”
“Yes, yes!”
“No.”
And somehow the word was like a plummet deep into the years ahead.
CHAPTER VIII
One hot Saturday afternoon, at least a twelvemonth later, as Lilly was rushing down from the children’s department of one of Broadway’s gigantic cut-rate department stores, she stopped so abruptly that she created a little throwback in the sidewalk jam.
Her miracle was broken. Her first impulse even now was to dart back, but the tow of the crowd was strong, and, besides, she was suddenly eye to eye with an exceedingly thin youth with a very long neck rising far above a high collar, a pasty and slightly pimpled face evidently slow to beard, and a soft hat pulled down over meek light-blue eyes, himself even more inclined to push on than she.
It was her first encounter since her clean cleavage from a strangely remote dream phase of her existence. For the first three years she had carried about a fear of some such meeting, a passer-by brushing her shoulders or a sense of presence at her back sending a shock through her. Once she had hurriedly left a Subway train because of a fancied likeness to Roy Kemble in a young fellow across the aisle. Even now there were days when fancied resemblances seem to people the crowds.
“Why, Harry Calvert!”
“Hello,” he said in the tempo of no great surprise, but purpling up into his lightish hair. “I know you. You’re Lilly Becker.”
“Harry, I cannot believe my eyes! I haven’t seen you since you were in knickers. And to think we remembered each other! Come here a minute out of the crowd. I want to talk to you.”
He followed her with some reluctance and a great sheepishness out of Broadway into quieter Thirty-fourth Street, twirling his hat, his nervousness growing.
“You look fine, Lilly.”
“What are you doing here, Harry? How is your grandma? St. Louis?”
She could have embraced, cried over him, the loneliness of years seeming to rush to a head.
“Gramaw and I live here.”
“Harry, not really!”
“Nearly two years, now.”
“Where?”
“‘Way out near Tremont Avenue.”
“And you, Harry, what do you do?”
“I was window dresser for a gents’ furnishing store up to a few weeks ago, but it–it changed hands. I’m out of a job right now.”
“Harry, do you ever hear from–home?”
“No, Miss Lilly, we never see anyone from there. You’re the first.”
“I’ll tell you what. I’m going home with you. Take me out with you to visit your grandma. I haven’t seen her in years–it’s been so long ago–everything.”
He was wringing his hat now and shifting.
“It’s a long way out, Lilly. It’s hardly built up out there at all.”
“I don’t care. I’ll buy some pastries on the way and we will make a party of it. Does she still keep boarders?”
“Roomers.”
“Poor, dear Mrs. Schum, fancy her living here!”
They rode out on a surface car, changing twice and jammed face to face on a rear platform, a brilliant pink out in her face.
“Harry, I just cannot realize it. You a full-fledged man!”
“I’m twenty-four.”
“What is that yellow on your fingers? Not from smoking?”
“I used to a lot, but not now.”
“Is your grandmother just as wrapped up in you as ever, Harry? Poor dear!”
“Yes, she is. You sure look fine, Lilly. You’re pretty!”
“And what in the world brought you to New York and what ever became of Mr. Hazzard and–“
“Oh, gramaw read in the paper once that he died of that sore on his face.”
“And old Willie and Mr. Keebil and Snow Horton–ever see any of them, Harry?”
“No; you see it is nearly two years since–“
“I have a little daughter–almost five years old!”
“Gramaw followed up in the papers when you were married. Flora Kemble and Roy, they’re both married, too.”
“Harry, didn’t you ever hear anything about–well, about my marriage?”
“Yes, there was something about it. I forget. You live in New York?”
“Yes, and, Harry, don’t say anything when we get to your home. Just let me walk in and surprise her.”
“Yes.”
More and more she noticed his indoor whiteness and the eyelids which would twitch nervously.
“Do you keep well, Harry?”
“Fairly.”
There was quite a walk from the car, across a viaduct, down a flight of steps, and into a steep new street of flimsy-looking apartment houses of the dawning era of vertical homes. But the Harlem River, neat as a canal, flowed within easy view and there was something very scoured about the expression of the just graded street of occasional vacant lots, showing the first break in the continuity of city brick that Lilly’s tired eyes had encountered.
“Why, Harry, I’ve never been away out here before! How nice and clean!”
“Here we are.”
They entered one of the tan-brick buildings, “El Dorado” writ in elegant gilt script across the transom. Then up three flights of clean, new, fireproof stairs, Harry inserting his key into one of the two doors that faced the landing.
“Sh-h-h, Harry! Tell her it is just a friend.”
Old odors laden with memory rushed to meet her; that pungency which, unaccountably enough, reeks of the cold boiled potato, and which old upholsteries, windowless hallways, and frequent meat stews can generate.
There was a blob of low-pressure gaslight in the hallway, a weak and watery eye burning from a side bracket into the odor so poignant with association. Tony Eli drowned at eighteen. Her father peering behind the dresser. “Where’s Lilly?” “Here I am!” Herself hugging up her knees in their stout ribbed stockings, her round gaze on the red-glass globe with the warts blown into it.
There it was, that same glass globe around the puny light; and the hatrack–the one with the seat that opened for rubbers and school bags.
“Gramaw, come out. Here is some one.”
A long cooking fork in her hand, and a puff of steam hissing out after her, Mrs. Schum peered into the hallway. She was strangely smaller, Lilly thought, as if the flesh were beginning to wither off the rack of her bones.
“Mrs. Schum! Dear Mrs. Schum!”
“Who’s that?”
“Come out, gramaw. It’s no one to be afraid of.”
“Harry!” Her voice came cracking out like a shot. “Harry, are you in trouble?”
“No–no–“
“Who is hounding you? If you are here about my grandson, madam, they are all the time trying to get the best of my boy. He hasn’t broken parole since old Judge Delahanty down in the Twenty-third Street Court–“
“Mrs. Schum! Dear Mrs. Schum! Don’t you know me? Please! Think, dearie, the little girl out in St. Louis who used to plague you for bread and butter–“
The old face loosened, the eyes peering through spectacles held across the nose with a bit of twine.
“It isn’t–Lilly–Becker?”
“Right the first time, gramaw!”
“Bless my heart! Bless my soul! Let me sit down. I’m right weak. Little Lilly–Becker!”
They embraced there in a hallway hardly wide enough to contain them. These two, who ordinarily might have met again, after such a span of years, in the mildest of reunions, here in each other’s arms, hungrily, heartbeat to heartbeat.
“Lilly, Lilly, come in here and let me look at you. Light up the front room, Harry. Well, I declare! Let me sit down. I’m right weak-kneed. Law! pretty is no name! Well, I declare!”
In the little front room of chromos, folding bed with desk attachment, a bisque knickknack or two, they were finally knee to knee, Lilly’s hat tossed aside, her hands clasping the old veiny ones.
“Begin at the beginning, Mrs. Schum. Everything. First, tell me, dear, how long since you have heard of my folks?”
“Harry, you go out in the kitchen and keep the things warm until gramaw comes out to dish up. Set the table with a cloth on, and run over to the delicatessen for a bit of cold cuts. He’s a right smart help to me, Lilly. Not like some boys, too proud to help. And now–now–let me see–why, it’s two years since I met your mother downtown in St. Louis before I had any idea of coming here.”
“How did she look?”
“Splendid. She was with one of her euchre friends, so I didn’t have the chance for an old-time chat, but she made me promise to come and see her, and ‘pon my word, just as young and pretty as you please, with a fine face veil and a purple feather boa and shopping out of the Busy Bee bins just the way she used to do.”
“She looked–happy?”
“Indeed she did! Buying some menfolk stuff. Wool socks, I think she said, for your father, was it, who is subject to colds in the head–“
“No, those weren’t for papa. Oh, Mrs. Schum, it’s so good to hear of her first hand like this! What–what did she say about me?”
“Told me about you off here studying opera, and your husband was making his home with them. I–I took it from what she said you were none too happy with him, but I had no idea of your being here still! Aren’t things well with you, Lilly? I always said you reminded me of my Annie, and she would have turned out something big if she had lived. I expect it of you, too, Lilly.”
“What else?”
“She put up a bold front with me, I will say that, never letting on that there had been trouble. And then just before I left–we came away mighty unexpectedly–Katy Stutz–“
“Katy Stutz–“
“Yes, came to sew for a family I had boarding with me, and she said she heard you had left him for good and that your parents took sides with your husband and had him in their home, occupying your very room, and that your mother was as fussy over him as she ever was over you, babying him to death. Lilly, Lilly, what is wrong with you?”
“And my father, Mrs. Schum?”
“Fine. Mary says he’s a bit whiter, but not a whit changed. He’s done well in the rope business, hasn’t he? Although I always say it was your mother’s practical ways got him on his feet, and from what I understand that young man you married has given him many a lift. They’ve gone in business together, haven’t they? They tell me, Lilly, there is not a steadier or more advancing young man than yours. Ah me, the ways of young ones are strange I guess you haven’t heard about Harry, either?”
“No.”
“He’s a good boy, Harry is, Lilly, but I’ve been through trouble with him. That’s the reason for our being here. You see, Lilly, him being a poor orphan all his life, they’re all against him. The little fellow never had the right raising, knocking around with all those nigger servants, and me with never the time to do for him.”
“Oh, Mrs. Schum, how can you! Why, there wasn’t any of the youngsters in the boarding house had a sweeter influence over him than Harry.”
“No, no. It was all my fault. I was too pressed trying to make ends meet. I should have given up that big house years ago for a few roomers like now. He got in bad ways, Lilly. Not noisy and with gangs like some rough boys would. But quiet–solitary-like. I never knew him to hang around with that gang of boys that used to loaf over at Pirney’s drug store or anything like that, but after the Kembles and you folks left, Harry got to stealing, Lilly. Little things. The child never took anything more than a bit of lead pipe from Quinn’s empty house across the street, and once a little silver trinket from a milliner I had up in the third floor front–“
“He used to do little things like that when he was a child, don’t you remember, dear?”
“It’s his father in him, Lilly. Maybe you don’t know it, but that’s what killed my Annie, that same streak which was the ruination of a fine, educated man like his father. But Harry’s got too much of his mother in him to be all bad; he–“
“Of course he has, dear.”
“To get back to our coming East, Lilly. One night he–Harry brought me home a brooch, Lilly. A right pretty gold one with a garnet in. It used to hurt him that I never had any finery. He wouldn’t take anything to buy drink and bad times for himself like other boys, but he’d steal something to bring home to his old grandmother. All that night, Lilly, down there in the basement kitchen, I was nearly crazy trying to get out of him where he got that brooch. The next day they was after him, for it and some–nickel-plated facets from out of the washroom where he was working. They hushed it up. Old Judge Mayer, you remember his sister used to board with me. But the next time there was a little trouble–this time a–a little finger ring–not even all gold. I–we–we had to sell out and come here–where we could be swallowed up.”
“Oh, Harry, Harry, how could he!”
“Wasn’t his fault. It wasn’t the place for him out there any more with everybody against a poor orphan. I’ve cut him off, Lilly, from his bad ways out there. You’re the first I’ve seen or heard of since we left, and I don’t want you to even write it to your folks that we’re here. There’s the little matter of that ring–not even all gold–and–some lead pipe–forgotten, now–please God, but they might want him back for it–that’s how down on him they are. He’s a good boy, Harry is, Lilly, with respect for his grandmother. He’s had a slip up or two, but the best of us have that, haven’t we?”
“Yes.”
“It’s to be expected. A boy can’t shake off his inheritance overnight, can he? Can he?”
“No, I suppose not, dear.”
“Don’t let on, Lilly. He’s sensitive. We’ll win yet, Harry and me will. The world hasn’t taken much stock of a poor little basement orphan, but with the kind of mother he had, his grandmother will live yet to see the day that it does take account of him. Harry’s right smart with draping and decorating around the house, and if I do say it, when he dresses a window the traffic stops. He’s a great one for reading and following up the magazines, too. Smart. I’d stake my all on a boy that has got it in him to treat his grandmother with the gentleness he does. And children! There is not one on the street he can pass for love of them. A boy like that cannot be all bad, can he, Lilly?”
Her eyes magnified with the glaze of tears so that one blink would have overflowed them, Lilly laid her lips to the veiny old hand, her voice down into the lap of blue-checkered apron.
“We mothers–Mrs. Schum–God, how we love to suffer to them!”
“We!”
Her face in the tired old lap, the little room seeming to crowd up with voice, Lilly talked on then, until the little clock inset into a china plate ticked out an hour, and in the kitchen, Harry, with all his old capacity for meekness, lay asleep with his head in his arms and the little dinner cloying on the stove.
“I’m afraid my old brain don’t take it all in, Lilly. You mean your mother–father–none of them–know?”
“It isn’t for you to understand, dear. The mere telling of it has somehow eased things. We are bits of seaweed, dear Mrs. Schum, tossed up on the same shores. You and your fugitive from environment. Me and mine. If your secret is to be mine, mine must be yours.”
“God have mercy on you, Lilly, wherever it is your ways are leading you.”
“He has had, Mrs. Schum.”
“I don’t know. I don’t know. You know best, I guess, what is in your heart.”
“I do. It’s this. Why can’t you take–us?”
“Who?”
“I want her with me. She is getting big enough for the kind of training I have all mapped out for her. And now you–it’s nothing short of destiny led me to you. I could put her in day school. Can take her myself in the mornings, say, and you, dear Mrs. Schum, are to call for her? I can pay, I can help you and you can help me. Later we may take a larger place with extra room. Mrs. Schum, don’t you see, we’ve been thrown together!”
“Why, Lilly–I believe–I do.”
It was after ten o’clock when, over a belated little meal, they ceased their planning. Eleven, when Harry finally walked with her across the viaduct to the street car. Stars were out. Thick white ones. She skipped a little, ran a little, and stood a moment at the parapet, looking down at the lights which followed the narrow course of the river. She felt suddenly wild for bauble. Her flesh, which never particularly craved the lay of fine fabric, felt cheated. She wanted to wind her body to its utmost flexuosity, bare her throat to the wind, and fling out a gesture the width of Vegas to Capella.
At the corner she took Harry’s face between her hands, kissing him soundly on the lips.
“Good night, Harry, and God bless you for letting me find you.”
Long after that kiss, ever so lightly bestowed, lay burning against his lips and she had boarded the street car, he stood looking after, with his very light-blue eyes.
Book Three
THE WINE
CHAPTER I
When Zoe Penny was still in knee frocks she graduated, first in her class, from the public grade school. It was a period of great stress for Lilly, of happy shopping and the sweet anxieties of ribbon and frock, and there were always two high circles of color out on her cheeks, and from time to time she would force herself to sit down, uncurl her fingers of their tensity, as Ida Blair had taught her, and thus, starting in at the hands, try to relax.
After two or three moves from the makeshift of the Tremont Avenue apartment, they were finally installed in an old brownstone walk-up house in West Ninety-third Street, a stone’s throw removed from an avenue of Elevated structure and petty shops, but with a quiet enough, if gloomy, dignity. One of those tunnel dwellings, the light from the front room and kitchen gradually petering out into a middle room of almost absolute darkness.
Lilly and her daughter occupied what corresponded to the parlor, a room of white woodwork, flimsy white mantelpiece, and gilded radiator; one of the vertical layers and layers of just such city parlors. Two narrow front windows looked down into Ninety-third Street and there were closed white folding doors with again a rented piano against them. A pretty screen of Japanese paper with a sprig of wistaria across it shut off a bureau with a layout of much juvenile claptrap of hair ribbons, side combs, and the worthless treasures of childhood. Between the windows a “lady’s” desk with hinged writing slab, really Lilly’s, but mostly the dangling place for a pair of Zoe’s roller skates and its pigeonholes bulging with her daughter’s somewhat extraneous matter. But there were a two-tone brown rug, and yellow silk curtains saved the room from the iniquitous Nottingham and Axminster school of interior defamation. The walls, too, were tempered of their whiteness by brown prints of the “Coliseum by Night,” “The Age of Innocence,” and Watt’s “Hope,” blindfolded, atop the world.
These pictures had been shopped one Saturday afternoon at the cut-rate department store and were largely Zoe’s choice, happily corroborated by Lilly.
“Remarkable selections for a miss,” said the clerk.
“Do you really think so?” cried Lilly, herself turning away from an inclination toward the more chromatic and immediately exhilarated out of a state of fatigue.
“Zoe, you’re wonderful!”
“You’re wonderful, too, Lilly.”
There had been scarcely any baby talk.
At three, it was “Zoe, are you happy to see mother this week-end?”
“Ees, ummie.”
And then one day out of the pellucid sky of babyhood, in answer to this invariable query, it was:
“Yes, Lilly,” so suddenly that something seemed to catch at her heartbeat, but after a pang she let it stand.
Let Lilly’s Zoe dawn upon you through this rather typical conversation between them, the night before the graduation from grade school:
“Lilly, am I beautiful?”
“Why, yes, Zoe, so long as you remain fine and unspoiled by it. That is the rarest kind of loveliness–inner beauty.”
“I don’t mean that kind. Am I pretty–for boys to look at?”
“You are pretty enough as little girls go, if that is what you mean.”
“Is it wrong to have beaus?”
“That all depends. Why?”
“Oh, I just wanted to know.”
Silence.
“A boy in my class, Gerald Prang, says he is my beau.”
“Silly fellow.”
“Ethel Watts has one. They kiss.”
“That’s horrid.”
“Is it horrid for me and Ethel to kiss?”
“No, Zoe, you know it isn’t.”
“Would it be horrid for me and Gerald–Gerald and I–to kiss?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Listen, Zoe, a new word. The most beautiful and the most horrible thing in the world can be sex.”
“Sex?”
“Yes, dear. We haven’t used the term in our talks–yet.”
“Isn’t it nice?”
“That lies with you.”
“Then what is sex?”
“Zoe, the world of human beings is divided into two great classes, isn’t it? Boys and girls.”
“Oh, I know! It’s me and Gerald.”
“In a way, yes, but–“
“If me and Ethel kiss, it isn’t sex, but if me and Gerald kiss, it is.”
“If only you wouldn’t keep your mind running ahead. I want to be so sure you are going to understand. That’s what our botany and physiology study has been for. To prepare you to understand. Now take the kingdom of flowers, a rose, for instance–“
“Begin with us, Lilly. I don’t want to hear any botany.”
“But, Zoe–“
“Storks cannot bring babies, can they?”
“No. No. Who put such silly nonsense into your head? Don’t let that stupid fable hide from you the beautiful truth of birth. That is an absurd story, Zoe, invented by those to whom the most sublime fact in the world seems nasty. Babies are born, dear–out of lo–out of the union of the sexes.”
“Lilly, you are all trembling.”
She took her daughter’s face between her hands, her eyes probing and yearning down into the brilliantly blue ones.
“It is because I want to keep life clean and beautiful for you. Nothing that is natural is ugly, Zoe. It’s only when we make something dark and shameful of nature’s methods that we are apt to misunderstand and to err.”
“Did you err, Lilly?”
“How?”
“With him?”
“Who?”
“Penny.”
“Zoe! Zoe! why will you refer to him that way? Yes, I erred out of ignorance, the kind I want to save you from. In my case your father had to pay for the ignorance of a girl who married him without knowing what marriage meant. Ignorance!”
“How funny to hear that–word.”
“What word?”
“Father.”
“Zoe! Zoe! Have I made it clear to you about him? How good–how kind–how wronged by me?”
“You are always so afraid I won’t understand that. Why shouldn’t I?”
“Because it is hard, dear, for you to grasp it all–especially its effect upon you. Some day you will understand how gradually I have tried to prepare your mind to judge me. Even this little graduation to-morrow is a milestone and makes me want to talk to you just a wee bit plainer. Zoe, I–Zoe, does–does–“
“What?”
“Does it ever make you unhappy among the other children to be questioned about your–father?”
“No.”
“Do you ever feel that you would like to see him?”.
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because he is dull. He would spoil things for us.”
“But doesn’t it ever seem terrible to you, Zoe, that I haven’t given you the opportunity to judge him for yourself? If the day ever comes–to-day, tomorrow, next year–that you want your father, you understand, dear, don’t you, that I will be the first to–“
“I tell you No! No! Why do you always keep telling me that? No! No! It’s better his not knowing there is a me! He makes me feel all suffocated up the way he did you. I couldn’t stand it. I want to be what I want to be!”
“Oh, want it badly enough then, Zoe; want it badly enough!”
“The greatest singer in the world! That’s what I want to be, and stand on a stage with all the music there is around me as if I was in the middle of an ocean of it. Lilly, will you take me to another matinée to see Bernhardt? She makes me feel what I want to be. Just–just her being what she–is makes me–want to be what I–am.”
“You funny muddled youngster! Why, you didn’t understand either what she said or what the play was about.”
“I didn’t need to. It was her voice. Something she says with her voice that I feel inside of me, only I can’t say it. I wanted to cry. Isn’t it queer, Lilly, to feel so happy you want to cry? Oh, I’ve learned a new one–only my voice won’t say it the way I feel it. It’s in our school Wordsworth. Something inside of me cries all the time I’m saying it:
“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting; The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star, Hath elsewhere had its setting,
And cometh from afar;
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, Who is our home.
“Oh, Lilly–Lilly–I love that!–trailing clouds of glory–“
“You recited it beautifully, darling. See, you’ve made me cry.”
“And I–I love you, Lilly. Hold me tight. I love you.”
“My baby.”
“Lilly, will you be–angry if I ask you something?”
“What?”
“Why–do you cry in the night sometimes?”
“Why, Zoe! Do I?”
“You know you do. I can feel you crying, and sometimes when I touch your face–“
“Why, child–that’s just my way. At night–things can be so real–so terribly real. It is something you cannot understand yet.”
“Do I make you sad?”
“No! No! No! My light, my life.”
“Is it–Bruce?”
“Why, child–you talk nonsense! Don’t speak of him as Bruce.”
“I hate calling him Mr. Visigoth. It sounds–meek. I won’t be meek! Are you sure, Lilly, it isn’t him–he?”
“Why, child, in Heaven’s name should it be?”
“He looks at you so, Lilly. Maybe he makes you cry the way Bernhardt makes me cry. By what he doesn’t say. Saturday afternoons when I call for you–he looks at you so when you’re not looking.”
“Why shouldn’t he? We’ve worked together for all these years.”
“You and he, when you stand up together you look so–so–_right_.”
“Zoe, you are talking nonsense.”
“But you’re all red, aren’t you?”
“No.”
“Was it sex to say that?”
“No.”
“Are you glad he is coming to-night?”
“Mr. Visigoth and I have business together, Zoe. We cannot sit around in public places and discuss matters. I’m reading Mrs. Blair’s play to him. Go to bed now, dear.”
“Mayn’t I stay up?”
“No.”
Her child looked up at her, chin cupped in her small hand and crystals of light out in her eyes.
“Please, Lilly–why do you cry?”
“Why, darling, I don’t cry because of anything you are quite ready to understand. You know that, don’t you, dear? There is nothing mother won’t talk over with you as soon as you are ready to take it all in. That is part of her scheme for keeping life beautiful and free of rude shocks for you.”
“But I do understand–Lilly.”
Long after her child slept that night Lilly sat beside her. She loved the willful way the curls flung across the pillow. She leaned to the full deep-chested breathing; leaned to kiss the lips which, slightly parted, were perfect with the pollen of vitality.
CHAPTER II
She drew the screen finally about the little davenport, fussing at the room, straightening it into a sort of formality with a woman’s intuition for this chair one-half inch closer to the hearth and that picture ever so slightly straighter. The sheer frock she hung up in a closet, covering it with a shroud of tissue paper, wadding her daughter’s none-too-carefully flung stockings into her shoes and tiptoeing to place them beside the davenport. They were strong, ribbed stockings, still warm and full of curves. She stroked over each. Once she paused at the mantelpiece mirror, drawing back her lip from the even whiteness of her teeth, perusing her points rather absent-mindedly.
Time had handled Lilly with a caress. At past thirty she was herself at twenty, with even more youth, because at twenty she had looked herself almost ten years hence. She had rounded out a bit, but not fatly. If stouter at all, it was only in the slightly deeper look to the cream-colored skin. There were two lines across her forehead, but they had been there at eighteen and were quite obviously the result of tilting her eyebrows so that the flesh folded; and besides, they relieved her clearness, these horizontal traceries, of utter limpidity.
She had drifted, not all unconsciously, into a certain picturesque uniformity of dress and could smile now over the large, cart-wheel hats, coarse embroideries, and short-vamp shoes; neither was she often above mentally contrasting herself in her annual seventy-five dollar suit of dark-blue serge, natty sailor hat, and impeccable blouse, with a certain coffee-colored linen with its slashings of coffee-dipped embroidery, and the blouse that twirled with yards and yards of cotton Valenciennes.
There was still something of the look of the nun to Lilly, but a bit too pinkly, as if she had dressed the part for Act One, but wore the ballet skirts for Act Two underneath.
Her reaction asserted itself in her child. At thirteen Zoe wore straight frocks of navy-blue alpaca with wide patent-leather belts and deep Eton collars. They were mistaken sometimes, and, strangely enough, to Lilly’s invariable chagrin, for sisters, and Lilly, in her refutation, could be smitingly swift.
At nine o’clock, to the staccato of three rings, she admitted Bruce Visigoth, leading him down the tube of hallway. It annoyed her unspeakably that Harry Calvert, collarless, poked out his head from a doorway as they passed, and she was suddenly conscious of the smell of stew. She had meant to burn an incense stick.
But she walked with that free, Hellenic stride of hers, without apology and ahead of him.
“This is our room. Zoe is asleep there behind that screen. Won’t you sit down?”
He placed his hat and a light bamboo stick across the center table, obviously oppressed with a sense of close quarters.
“Tell you what! Suppose we taxi over to Claremont. It’s mild enough to sit out on the terrace.”
She met him with her levelest gaze.
“Aren’t you going to be comfortable here?”
“Of course I am. There you go, getting sensitive right off. Only it is a warmish evening, and why keep the sun-child awake?”
“Zoe can sleep,” she said, with the barely perceptible arch to her brows, “even through the fire of your presence.”
“Good!” he said, seating himself in great good nature and trying not to be quizzical. “So this is where you live.”
He was frankly curious, his gaze humorous, but traveling over details, his head upflung and the scenting movement to his nostrils. He had not changed in weight, but in compactness and as if the house of his being had settled with a fine kind of firmness. He was a bit squarer of jaw and shoulder and ever so prematurely, and to the enormous fancy of women, inclined to a hoar frost of gray at the temples.
She seated herself across the little square of table.
“You don’t seem to care for us here.”
“Certainly I do, only–only–“
“Only what?”
“Only–well, hanged if I make you out, lady. This place–it just isn’t you–that’s all.”
“Nonsense! I don’t count. I’m just a sort of a means to an end, anyway.”
“What end?”
“The wine!”
“The what?”
“Oh, nothing,” she said, and laughed.
“Laugh again.”
“Why?”
“I like it.”
She looked her most serio-comic disapproval and held up a forefinger with a warning little waggle to it.
“Please,” she said, with an inlay of something deeper in her voice, “don’t begin by spoiling things.”
“Rather not,” he said. “I’m going to live up to your letter of the law.”
Except for the frequent conferences now in the new Forty-second Street offices that commanded a view of two rivers and a vast battledoor and shuttlecock of the city, it was the first time in all those years that stretched from the night at the Waldorf that they had sat thus tête-à-tête. The day of the move she had ridden up from the old Union Square offices with him, a stack of files in her lap. Once, too, on a Saturday, the day of Zoe’s invariable luncheon downtown and subsequent opera matinee, he had strolled by what seemed mischievous chance into the tea room where they were dining, but the occasion had hardly been a success. There had been a great deal of badinage between him and Zoe, but Lilly had finished her meal almost in silence. The day following, a toy piano of complete range and really excellent workmanship had arrived. She returned it without showing it to Zoe. These incidents lay between them now.
“So this is where you live,” he repeated, as if his long curiosity could not find satiety in fact.
“That I have an abode seems to amaze you.”
“It does. You’re such a detached sort. You rise so above the mundane things that clutter up life, that it is pretty much of a shock to realize that you use tooth powder and carry a latchkey. It’s hard to reconcile Chopin and George Sand probably to those famous raw-meat sandwiches they loved to eat at midnight. Well, that’s about the way I feel about you–hemmed in by–dull reality such as this.”
“I like raw-meat sandwiches,” she said.
“Me too.”
They laughed.
She took up a sheaf of manuscript.
“If it doesn’t bore you too much, I’m going to read it straight through.”
“Oh, I forgot; the play, of course.”
She looked up at him as if over spectacles.
“What else?”
“You say it has been the rounds?”
“Yes. Peddled in every office in New York. Kline and Alshuler kept it two years. Forensi paid her two hundred and fifty dollars advance on it and then let his option lapse. For another year there was some talk of Comstock and Comstock doing it, and then finally Hy Wolff got hold of it and the very month he died paid her a second two hundred and fifty to renew his option on it. I’ve always felt that if Ida had kept after Hy Wolff he would have produced it. He had faith in it, but somehow just didn’t seem to get to it. You see, Ida hasn’t any gumption–not the kind of aggressiveness the game demands. That is why in fifteen years you scarcely know she is in your office. That is why I plunged in and tried to rewrite ‘The Web’ with her. It’s a big story, sweated out of her own agony. She may never write another. Probably won’t. My little part in it has merely been to help her co-ordinate–round up the jumble of her ideas, so to speak. There is a big play somewhere in this story. I know you didn’t like it as a sketch–I didn’t, either. A short play cannot contain this drama. But out of a clear sky it occurred to me that you might see it as a three-act play. Oh, I know it isn’t the kind of thing you’ve your mind’s eye on, but why not take that step over into the legitimate _via_ a big popular success? It may pave the way to bigger, finer things. Who knows–Ida Blair–‘The Web’–may mean the beginning of your dream come true.”
His mouth had straightened and thinned.
“You’re right there. Ultimately I’ll get into the other. If my brother knew as much about the booking end as he does the realty, I’d have gone over long ago. That is the most the success of the Amusement Enterprise can mean to me–to afford some day the legitimate as a plaything. It costs money to educate the public to better things. It’s been profitable playing down to its taste–some day it is going to enable me to afford to be sufficiently altruistic to foot the bills for serving up the best. It costs to educate.”,
“Fine! And it is only a question of time until you are ready for that inspiring fray. Meanwhile, why not help foot those bills with a little side flier in ‘The Web’?”
“You are a little opportunist, aren’t you?”.
“I know ‘The Web’ isn’t art. But it is a cross section of reality with the veins exposed and the sap of life running through them. Mrs. Blair, poor dear, can’t write. God knows I can’t. That is why the play has been through years of lying around in every office in New York. But the idea is there. You see, it is everything she has lived through. You know her story?”
“Yes.”
“There is a scene when he comes screaming out of the room after having been through the third degree, half blind from the terrible lights and the terrible circle of terrible eyes, that isn’t writing at all. It’s life–a raw, palpitating picture of a social abuse that can touch the public as a reform measure can never hope to. Then the character of the boy–a delinquent. We’ve one right here in this apartment. One of those sweet, shy, half-frightened boys as gentle as a girl. The kind that tells the neighborhood children Peter Pan and reads his grandmother to sleep. I would trust him anywhere with Zoe, and yet there’s the streak! The criminal, congenital streak through him that is as pathological as measles. Only we handle it under the heading of criminology. It’s like taking an earache to the chiropodist. The boy is a thief. It’s through him like a rotten spot, but instead of curing him the law wants to punish him. It’s like spanking a child for having the measles. But to get back–Mrs. Blair has him in this play–just as if she had lifted him out of this apartment. She wrote him from the life, too. A young fellow who used to be on her husband’s beat. It may not be fine writing, but ‘The Web’ has the throb of reality through it, and it is my opinion that one pulsebeat of life is worth all your chastity of form.”
“Right.”
“We’re one on that? Good! Well, here is your opportunity to solder the first link into the legitimate. Keep it in mind while I am reading Ida Blair’s play and remember I am not talking Ida Blair or Lilly Penny to you. I’m talking this play just as I would talk an act to you. Because I believe in it.”
He seemed to look at her through her words, a smile out in his eyes.
“You’re not listening.”
“I am,” he said, “but your hair looks like it is painted on, the way it comes down to that smooth little peak in front. Jove! it’s pretty.”
She looked off, wanting not to color.
“Come,” he said, “I apologize. Read. I’m as predisposed as I can be toward anything conceived by that little dormouse of a person in the office.”
“That’s the trouble. You men are too often satisfied with a surface inventory. The vault of heart sometimes yields up rare treasures.”
“How like you to say that.”
“Ready?”
“Go!”
And so, with her head bent so that the light burnished its smoothness, she read him “The Web” through two uninterrupted hours, her voice throbbing into the quiet. In the third act, when a half-crazed victim of the third degree is led out in shuddering and horrible invocation, she sprang to her feet for an instant, her gesture decrying its fullest arc.
She was like Iphigenia praying for death, he thought.
Later, when the shades of the prison house begin to dawn upon the stunned consciousness of the woman, there were tears in her voice and on her lashes, and one fell to the back of her hand, which she wiped off against her skirt, like a child.
At eleven o’clock she finished, regarding him brilliantly through her flush.
He had wanted to smoke, but thrust the case back into his pocket, sitting tilted, his hands locked at the back of his head and gazing at the line of the picture molding. Her lips parted as the paused held.
“Well?”
He uncrossed his knees, straightening.
“Well?”
“Strong.”
“Then it did grip you?”
“Yes, but I can see why it gathered dust as it went the rounds. From the average commercial manager’s point of view there is a question about that seamy kind of thing getting over with the playgoer. He wants to be entertained, not harrowed. That’s pretty raw stuff. Except for the little woman and the poor delinquent youngster, it is an out-and-out–what shall I say?–an out-and-out crook play, to coin a phrase.”
“Exactly. It is a section of life about which your average playgoer knows little or nothing and yet one for which he nourishes a tremendous curiosity.”
“It’s crude–“
“I know, but the idea is bigger than the writing is crude. If I had the money I would take a chance on producing it to-morrow. It has social and sociological value, and at the same time is corking-good entertainment. I read the police-inspector scene to my little girl just to see what she would get out of it. ‘Why,’ she cried, ‘a man would confess to anything with that white light on him and those big policemen’s eyes on him. That’s not fair! That shouldn’t be allowed. Isn’t there a way to stop it?’ That from a thirteen-year-old! It’s one of those man-made abuses that if we women ever get the vote we’ll go after! Don’t answer me on this play now, Mr. Visigoth. Take it to your hotel. Read it over again. Talk it over with your brother when he comes next week. How’s that? No snap judgment.”
“Good. The play is on the docket for the evening. Now let us get the taste of the underworld out of our mouths. How would the Claremont appeal now?”
“I’d rather not.”
“Well, I suppose that amounts to my _congé?_”
She smiled with her brows arched.
“It is after eleven.”
He was incessantly feeling for his cigarette case and then with a certain unease refraining.
“You may,” she said, “one, before you go.”
He held the case to her. She took one gingerly, accepting the light more gingerly.
“I don’t like them,” she said, exhaling with the violence of the unaccustomed.
“Then whyfore?”
“Because it is a stupid convention which says that a man may and a woman may not. Why should it be a matter of course for you and, in most cases, a matter of comment and even vulgarity for me?”
“Usage.”
“Usage isn’t a reason. It’s Time’s trick for applying the brake to progress.”
He lit up gratefully, waving out the match and hesitating for a spot to dispose of it. She reached across the table, palm up. “Give me.”
He caught her hand.
“Lilly!”
She jerked back with a little clicky catch of breath.
“Don’t.”
“Lilly, you’re maddening! Lilly, can’t you see what I haven’t the words to tell you? For years–since that night at the Waldorf–I–I have been living for this moment. I realized it to-night as you read that play. Lilly, is what is between us insurmountable?”
She jerked back her head, her irises at their trick of growing.
“You don’t know what you are saying!”
“I do know what I am saying. I know that you are the most delectable woman in the world–and for me.”
She held out his hat and cane.
“My little girl is asleep. Hadn’t you better go?”
“That’s not fair,” he said, taking the hat and cane, but flushing up furiously.
“I know it isn’t. But what is there I can say to you?”
“You can talk it out. Man to man.”
“Sit down,” she said, clasping her hands and regarding him through swimming and revealing eyes.
“Now–what is there to say–Bruce–between you and me?”
“Where is he?”
“You know.”
“Are matters unchanged?”
She nodded.
“I love you, Lilly.”
“And I have a husband and a thirteen-year-old child, making of the triangle a rectangle.”
“You have held me off on that dagger point now for ten years. Good God! women don’t martyrize themselves to a past these days. What are you doing with your life? Sacrificing it on the altar of the old burned-out husk of a marriage? Canonizing a mistake!”
“It is the one thing I am able to do for him in some little reparation!”
“Mock heroics.”
“No, it is more than mock heroic to save him that precious shred of his respectability. That is about all I have left him to cherish. There are some human beings you simply cannot conceive of in certain situations. Albert Penny and divorce are irreconcilable. Tear his heart out if you will, but hands off his respectability. It may sound absurd in the face of the enormity of what I have done to him, but it is a great solace to me to be able to sacrifice that much to him and to drag him through my life like a ball and chain. Somehow it seems that I ought to suffer that.”
“Stuff and nonsense! You made your mistake and you had the courage to tear away from it by the roots. Unless those roots have a drag?”
“No. No drag! And yet I sometimes think my revolt has been a half madness. You cannot know the sheer folly, the crazy kind of tenacity that has driven me on through all these years! And for what? This mediocrity? Or is it that I am an instrument clearing the way for her? Zoe! Is there a divinity shapes our end, rough hew them how we will? Listen to something incredible. Do you know that Zoe’s father doesn’t know that he is a father?”
“Good God!”
“Yes, jealous truth going fiction one better.”
“You mean to say you have fought this out alone?”
“He doesn’t know. Neither do my parents. They would suck her down. Dwarf her with their terrible kind of love. She belongs to herself. She’s a beautiful thing God has loaned me to rear into a rose, but the world is her garden in which to bloom and expand.”
“In all these years they don’t know your whereabouts?”
“Oh yes! I write home every Christmas. Just a line that I am well and happy. Occasionally I pick up notes of them in the St. Louis newspapers. I keep them pretty well under glass. It’s all so dreamlike–I’ve always been obsessed with that consciousness. How faint can be the line between the dream and reality.”
He drew her toward him by the hands, their faces lit, quivering, close.
“Lilly, Lilly, let us not stop just short of happiness.”
“All my life I have done that.”
“I cannot put you out of my heart now that I have put you in.”
“No. No. No.” But his embrace had already shaped itself, and, springing back from it and her own singing of the flesh, she crowded up against the wistaria-painted screen, shielding it.
“How dared you–here–in this–room! With her!”
“Lilly!”
“Go, please! Go, please!”
“You mean that?”
“You know I do.”
He bent low in the attitude of kissing her hand, but without touching it.
“Forget everything I’ve said, Lilly, and forgive. We’ll go back to the old. Good night, Lilly! Mrs. Penny.”
He must have departed on the balls of his feet, because presently through the roaring of the silence she heard the door slam without having been conscious of his passage down the hallway; and then, after a second, Harry Calvert tiptoeing to her open door to look in with his light-blue eyes.
She sprang forward, throwing herself against the door as she locked it.
“Don’t,” she cried through it–“don’t you ever dare do that again, Harry! Walk on your heels. You frighten me when you sneak like that–you–you–frighten–me.”
Then she undressed, crying, tears rolling down to her high white chest and finally on to the crispiness of her plain nightgown. Crept to bed finally, into a darkness as sleek as a black cat’s flank, silently, to save the sag of mattress, her body curving to the curve of her child’s.
Once from the inky pool of that long night Zoe’s hand crept up, finding out her mother’s cheek.
“Lilly,” floating up for a drowsy second to the surface of consciousness–“Lilly–you’re crying. Are–you sad–again?”
“Yes, Zoe–terribly–terribly–“
CHAPTER III
The year that Zoe entered High School, 1914, out of an international sky of fairly pellucid blue, the thunderclap of world war burst in fury.
It was strange, though, even after the subsequent plunge of her country to the Allied flank, and the menacing and shifting tides of affairs creeping closer and closer to the edge of everyday life, how little the complexion of Lilly’s routine was changed.
True, her national consciousness flared suddenly from lethargy to blaze. The evening after the sinking of the _Lusitania_, she attended a mass meeting in Astor Place with Zoe and Mrs. Blair, beating out an umbrella-and-floor tom-tom for redress, love of country suddenly a lump in her throat.
The day the Rainbow Division swept up Fifth Avenue in farewell, she could see the rank and file from the roof of the Forty-second Street office building, as if the avenue were running a clayey stream, and she was torn between the ache and the thanksgiving of having no one to give.
But, for the most part, war kept its talons off Lilly. Twice, and as if his exemption from the draft lay heavily, Harry Calvert had tried to enlist, his grandmother, with a zeal that was hardly accountable, exerting every effort toward that end.
It was almost as if war had revived her somewhat fainting faith in Harry’s ultimate justification.
But he was underweight and still in a weakened condition from an operation for an adenoidal complaint. This last he had undergone before the war and at Lilly’s urgent instance. She had read, in the mass of books on child hygiene, psychology, and physiology she was constantly accumulating, the debilitative effects that adenoidal breathing might exercise upon an entire constitution and mentality.
Poor Harry, and his cancerous predilection for the kind of thievery that almost invariably stacked up to not even petty larceny! He could withstand a jewel chest, but not a tool chest. Would steal the robe from an automobile, provided it was not a luxurious one. Once, when his grandmother at great difficulty had procured for him a clerkship, he confiscated the nickel-plated faucets out of the wash room, barely escaping prosecution. Only the utter triviality of his thievery and the fight in Mrs. Schum saved him from the law. She was as indomitable in her protection of him as the granite flesh of rocks.
Quiet, sensitive, with rather a girlish face, slow to beard and quick to quiver, Harry was invariably liked during the period he held a position, but month to month saw him from a clerkship in a real-estate office to window decorator for a retail paper-flower concern, salesman in the novelty and stationery department of a bookstore, and once in the children’s book section of a department store.
He was rarely apprehended, usually abandoning his position, with his absurd loot already under cover, and the loss leaking out later, if at all.
Invariably, as if by way of confession, he brought home to his grandmother the proceeds from these petty sales, effected by who knows what device, dropping down into her lap, almost sadly and with a shrinkage from what was sure to follow, either the few dollars or the bauble of a bit of jewelry.
She would cry up at him and wring her poor hands, and then he would go off into his little room adjoining the kitchen, originally intended as maid’s room, and sit with his head down in his hands, back rounded, and all his throat-constricting capacity for meekness out in his attitude.
And, presently, her sobs subsided, Mrs. Schum would creep in after him, and behind that closed door there was no telling what long hours of pleading and abjuration took place. But, next morning, in her little black bonnet, the rust out in her black dress and the “want ad.” sheet cockily enough beneath her arm, Mrs. Schum would set out with him to combat, by the decency of her presence, some of the difficulties of seeking a new position with only one or two time-and thumb-worn references.
His grandmother’s and Lilly’s possessions were sacred to him, but every morning, after the two roomers had departed, Mrs. Schum would tiptoe after, locking their doors and inserting the keys in her petticoat pocket.
“I like to keep things locked,” she explained to Lilly one day, upon being intercepted. “You can never tell when a sneak thief will break into these apartment houses that haven’t hall service. I’ve even heard of them entering through the fire escape.”
“Of course, dear,” said Lilly, through heartache for her.
There was an indescribable sweetness in Harry’s attitude toward Zoe. There had been countless long evenings of her little girlhood when no waiting beside her bedside was too tedious–sometimes during three and four evenings a week of Lilly’s enforced absence in the pursuit of vaudeville novelties. He was tireless and faithful as a watchdog, keeping awake by whittling at something no more fantastic than a clothespin. There were hundreds of them scattered about the house. It was the sole form his idleness took. He painted heads and eyes on them–cleverly, too–for Zoe, but as she grew older she began to disdain them, bullying him in much the fashion her mother had before her.
“I can hop up four steps on one foot,” Lilly, with a little catch at her heart, chanced to overhear on one occasion.
“No, you can’t,” said Harry, smilingly and a little teasingly.
Catching at her ankle and flinging her curls, she made an unstaggering and easy ascent of not four, but eight.
“There!” she cried, slapping Harry boldly and resoundingly on the cheek. “Don’t you ever dare say I cannot do what I know I can do.”
It left the red print of her little hand, and it was literally as if, as he looked away from her, he had turned the other cheek.
Almost immediately she caught his hand, placing her warm face to its back.
“Harry, I’m a devil! I’m sorry. You know I don’t mean to be a devil. Harry! Are you angry? You’re not! Please! Be nice, Harry–tell me a story–Har-ry.”
“Once upon a time–” he began, his light-blue eyes almost with the patient look of the blind.
A little later, there occurred an infinitesimal but telling incident which served to dissipate whatever growing qualms may have disturbed Lilly over the rearing of her child in this atmosphere of petty crime.
One evening, while Harry was performing his willing chore of carrying out for his grandmother the little dinner prepared by Mrs. Schum and partaken of by Lilly and Zoe at a small card table opened up beside the window of their room, Zoe announced, with a certain high-handedness with which Lilly was more and more hard pressed to cope:
“I want my dresses longer. That big red-headed boy in the white jacket said to me when I went into the drug store over on Columbus Avenue to-day for some licorice drops: ‘That’s right. Wear ’em short; you’ve got the stems.'”
“What a vulgar, horrid remark!”
“Well, I want my dresses longer.”
Lilly regarded her daughter with concern troubling up her eyes.
“Don’t ever go into that store again, Zoe. I’ve a mind to stop in there myself and talk to the proprietor.”
Later that same evening, Harry, with a purpling eye and an opened lip which he tried vainly to smuggle past his grandmother, crept into his room. But she was too quick for him, and at her high cry of shock Lilly rushed into the hallway. There was an utterly alien and vibrating note of anger in Harry’s voice.
“For God’s sake, gramaw, be quiet! It’s nothing. Had a row with that red-headed clerk down at the drug store. Took the freshness out of him for a while.”
Lilly tiptoed back to her room. All through a fitful night she woke in little starts, kissing into the bare white arm of her child as if she could not have done with the assurance of her safe proximity.
It was less than a month later, and over a year after the adenoidal operation, that Harry returned home one evening from the real-estate office with nine dollars and forty cents in his pocket from the proceeds of the nickel-plated wash-room faucets and several liquid-soap attachments.
* * * * *
About eight months after Ida Blair’s play had lain gathering mold in the lower drawer of Bruce Visigoth’s desk, he sent for Lilly.
Their office relationship since the stuffy June evening over the reading of the manuscript had been resumed, with invisible joindure. Together they continued in biweekly conferences to compile the endless cycle of programs that moved like a chain along the cogs of city to city. There were nine Enterprise Amusement Theaters now, the newest red-headed pin on the circuit map as far west as Tulsa, their booking route as yet independent of any of the larger and recent vaudeville mergers.
It was an office boast and pleasantry that Lilly could recite offhand through the current program of any of the nine theaters, leaping glibly from motion picture, to acrobat, and sister acts.
This was hardly true, but her touch at the steering wheel of her department was sensitive and sure. She could substitute for a quarantined team of jumping Arabs in Springfield, Illinois, with hardly more than a sleight of hand through her card index and a telegram or two. She knew that Memphis would not stand for a pickaninny act, and that the same was sure fire in Trenton, and was familiar with every house manager by long-distance-telephone voice. The department was more and more the well-oiled engine under a light steering hand that Lilly wielded well and wisely.
Her judgment of the incoming reports of the various house managers, or a try-out act, although technically subject to Bruce Visigoth’s signature, went usually unchallenged. She virtually was her department, particularly as the realty aspect of the enterprise came more and more to assume the proportions of big business. Within her little office of mahogany appointments she worked with an allotment of stenographers and clerks. She had an assistant, too; at least, she confiscated him from the press department–one Leon Greenberg, a young night student from New