Star-Dust by Fannie HurstThe Story of an American Girl (page 5)

day to nurstle her child.

That was the wrench that began each day. To abandon the pink-and-white bloom that slept all night without crying in the cove of her arm, to the grayness of a nursery that should have been pink and white and sweetly fragrant with powders and puffs and the rosy kind of tufted coverlets with scent between them that her mother had once sewn over with bowknots for the Kemble baby.

She was guilty of extravagances that ate menacingly into the four remaining five-dollar bills. Against the protests of the practical nurse she promptly discarded the long muslin swaddling dress, whose superfluous length wound around the little feet, purchasing three short and sheer ones, also a doll-size toilet set painted in little clumps of forget-me-nots. The hair brush had a thick, soft nap which would spin out her child’s curls into a cloud of gold. They really were the color, these curls, of a jar of strained honey seen through sunlight. It was as if she could never tire of feeling them wind to her finger.

The nurse she kept placated with tips in outlandish proportion to her funds, and often a memory of that dip of lip curving terrifyingly across her consciousness would scurry homeward to this gray-and-black abode of theirs, which only contained them on a tolerance that day after day seared deeply into her being.

Slowly but surely her none too immaculately shod feet ceased their pilgrimages to the agencies. She did apply one sultry morning in answer to an advertisement for a “refined indoor entertainer, city work,” only to find the usual fee exhortation thinly backed by promises. For the most part she marked off at her breakfast table in the adjoining Swedish lunch room, under the newspaper heading, “Help Wanted, Female,” the demands for stenographers, companions, hat models, and, on one occasion, for a cashier’s vacancy in a Madison Avenue florist’s.

A persistent streak of circumstances seemed to prohibit her success. Upon three occasions it happened that she waited all morning in a line, only to see the applicant directly in front of her chosen for the position. At the florist’s shop, bond was required. A lawyer in the Flatiron Building asked her to type a specimen letter for him, and laid heavy lips on the curl at the nape of her neck as she bent to his dictation. R.L. Ginsburg, of the Ginsburg-Flatow Millinery Company, engaged her services, and kissed her squarely on the lips to seal the bargain.

The straight line of those lips had undeniably softened. She walked about with them usually moist and slightly open, and the arch of her brows very high. She had softened ineffably, like a ripened fruit; was more liable to the backward glance of the passer-by.

During these days that were lifting now, each its frankly lashing tail of terror, there were smiles all along the way for Lilly–old faces smiling at and young faces with her, often to the assuagement of the tightening knot of terror at her heart.

With her trick of mind that could close itself against any concern beyond her immediate future, her one burning desire was for a competency, to be earned preferably at stenography, since that would leave her evenings free, and which would tide her over these first weeks of difficult readjustment. To find and afford for this amazing liability of hers the kind of temporary asylum that would set her free for the scheming out of her new cosmos.

She found out, at the instance of the practical nurse, a sort of semi-private institution on Columbus Avenue, but a trip through the wards and nurseries sickened her. There was a score of little blue gingham dresses, dingy fabrics that seemed to darken childhood, flapping on a rear clothes line, and one two-year-old child lay asleep on a step, his little white frock, with black anchors printed into it, furiously smeared, and one hand clutching a sticky gingersnap.

She did not even inquire further, but got out quickly, trembling.

The proprietor of the Swedish bakery gave her an address of a Mrs. Landman, a practical nurse who might consent to board the infant of an employed parent. So on the very day of the lawyer’s encounter there was another sickening journey to what proved to be a tenement in West Fifty-third Street. The newel post to the entrance was defaced with obscene handwriting, the hallways were like cellars, and there was a sign in the window, “Madam Landman, Midwife.”

She did not linger to ring the bell, but worked her way downtown again, toward the lawyer’s office _via_ the florist’s establishment, always with an eye to minimum car fare.

That night she lay awake the night through. Another bed in the infirmary was occupied. One of the girls had spilled scalding tea along her arm, and all night to her groanings Lilly lay staring into the darkness, her child so in the cove of her arm that its slight breathing fanned her flesh.

It was one of those long, calculating nights full of alternatives no sooner contrived than rejected. Only one state of surety came crystalline out of it.

There was no going back.

Twice she rose and, with much of her old revulsion curiously gone, greased the scalded arm by the puny aid of a night light that flowed in from the hall when the door was opened.

At five o’clock her child began a lusty paean to the dawn. She heated the milk and held the warm bottle tilted until it was emptied with the strong, deep draughts that delighted her. There was distinctly more gold out day by day in the ringlets, and the eyes were turning gray and could fill blackly with pupil.

After that Lilly sat in her nightdress beside the window, her eagerness for the day allayed to an extent by her rising sense of panic. She tried to lay her despair. Unthinkable that this new day, dawning so pinkly over chimney pots, would not prove itself a friend in her great need. By eight-thirty, at the instance of a newspaper advertisement, she was the first applicant at the Acme Publishing Company, East Twenty-third Street, a narrow five-story building with ground-floor offices and a tremor through it from the champ of presses.

She obtained this time from a woman who accepted her lack of reference rather negligibly.

She, too, asked her to compose a specimen letter acknowledging receipt of a translator’s manuscript. She accomplished it with a glibness that brought a flush to her cheek and a smile to the face of her employer.

Lilly thought she had never beheld such spick-and-span efficiency as this woman’s. The smooth white hair arranged with a conservative eye to the prevailing mode. The clean, untired skin and rather large, able hands. She made mental note of the crisp organdie collar and cuffs, and was suddenly conscious that her shoes were too short of vamp, and her heels run down because they were too high. A revulsion of taste flowed over Lilly; she hated suddenly the rather tawdry cape piped in red, and mentally retailored herself with a new feeling for simplicity.

Her sinkage of heart at the proffered eight dollars a week was followed by a quick resurgence of vitality at the prospect of the advancement held out.

Her predecessor was being promoted to first reader!

_The Paradise Trail_, a best seller of the moment, had been written in those same offices during spare moments of one of the proof readers.

The Acme Publishing Company printed paperback editions of translations from the more highly papriked of current French novels. The instinct to write rose in Lilly, the quick flame of her faddism easily aroused. Here was nothing more than a stroke of fate. A long-laid plan for a novel lifted, an entire panorama of resolutions dramatizing themselves.

The easy hours from nine to four. Long evenings at work beside the crib. A _nom de plume_, of course–Ann something. Ann Netherland. But eight dollars! Her heart tightened.

She had obtained, the day previous, at a Lexington Avenue Children’s Hospital she chanced to pass, the address of an institution at Spuyten Duyvil said to be conducted for the children of professional parents, and conducted by Minnie Dupree, an old stock actress remembered by the generation preceding Lilly’s for the heavier Shakespearean roles. Her mind leaped to this. Yes, she would return at two o’clock, ready to begin work, and went out into a day warm with sunshine.

A quick resolve formed itself. She inquired at some length in a corner drug store, finally taking a train for Spuyten Duyvil, and fifteen minutes later descended to a little station upon the edge of a park that was brilliant with new green.

More inquiry, the disdaining of a cab, and a twenty minutes’ walk along curving asphalt walks with houses far enough back to lose their identities among trees. A sense of summer and hope swept her.

The Dupree place was an old homestead of painted gray brick and ugly with the millwork and gable bulging wall and tower of American architecture in most horrific mood, but a smooth green lawn fell plushily away from it on four sides and it was all Lilly could do to keep from running up the walk. Her child in the sweet air of this fine old spot! Out of her eight dollars a week she could manage four, even five if need be! Her embarrassment was only temporary. Any arrears incurred she could make up later if only it could be arranged.

There were long, cool halls, a sun-flooded kindergarten, an open-air playroom on the roof, and a white-enameled nursery with a row of ducklings waddling across the walls, and Mrs. Dupree herself, who stopped at each stair landing for ready and copious explanation.

She was very corseted, very mannered, and quick to attitudinize. A flight of framed photographs of her followed the staircase upward step by step, in which she registered at a considerably younger period such staple states as Anger, Meditation, Humiliation, Vengeance, Love.

She was still a commanding figure with copper-colored hair that for ten years had wanted to turn gray, a face of furiously combated wrinkles, and eyes deep with black or blackened lashes.

She was the declamatory kind of Lady Macbeth who had stepped into the role flatly on a No. 7 last, rather than from a Juliette who had fattened into the part; that congenial stateliness now thrown completely out of plumb by a violent limp, which, resulting from a railway accident, threw out her entire left leg as she walked.

All the velvet was unconsciously out in Lilly’s voice coping with the Dupree extravagance of manner.

“Do you accept them as young as four weeks, Mrs. Dupree?”

“Bless you, dearie, the three weeks’ duckie darling of Cissie de Veaux is our youngest at present.”

“The comic-opera Cissie de Veaux?”

“Why, honey child, Cissie tells it on herself, she never would have had those ducky twins of hers five years ago if she hadn’t known there was a Minnie Dupree Infantary. That is our aim, here, you know. To give the child of superior professional parents the most superior environment that money can buy.”

“How much–“

“Elaine Bringhouse, daughter of Harold Bringhouse. Ever seen him in ‘Hamlet’? Before your time, I guess! Poor Harold in his day was the best all-around Hamlet in the country. Cry! I wish you could have seen that child’s father cry on Elaine’s fifth birthday. We don’t keep them over five years of age here, you know. Bless her! she’s in a road company of ‘Little Miss Muffet’ now. Yes, indeedy, dearie, that’s a book of testimonials there on that table from my children’s parents. I take it you’re a professional, dearie?”

“Oh yes–yes. Concert and–vaudeville.”

“I’m a retired member of the profession myself. A little before your time, bless you, but ask anyone who remembers the Manhattan Stock Company about Minnie Dupree. Why, I played Lady Macbeth opposite Claude Melrose when he was making thirty dollars a week in Fredericksburg Stock. Did he use my cutting of the banquet scene all those years after he struck Broadway? He did. Did he give credit where credit was due? He did not. Oh, my dear, I could tell you tales! The dirt I’ve had spun me in my day. Maybe Minnie Dupree never saw Broadway, but dirt! If there is so much as a speck on my name, God strike me dead. You voice, dearie?”

“Yes.”

“Ah, voice! Ask anyone who knew me in the Manhattan Stock if they remember Minnie Dupree in ‘The Silver Lute.’ Donald Deland as fine a Macbeth as ever strode the boards! That’s his picture there as Iago. I’ll show you his little grandchild up in the nursery. ‘Min,’ he used to say, ‘if you’ll throw over Edward Dupree, I’ll give you a year’s voice training at the academy and put you up against Melba.’ Ah, my dear, I hope yours is a happy one.”

“How much–“

“I threw away a career for the caprice of a man who cast me off like an old glove. Be careful, dearie. Here in the Infantary we never ask questions of parents, believing it the right of everyone to work it out her own way, but look twice before you leap in this life, dearie. I could tell you tales! The dirt I’ve been spun!”

“Oh, Mrs. Dupree, what a sunny, lovely nursery! How happy I would be if my little girl could come to you here.”

“My people want the best, dearie, and I give it to them. I’ve put the last ten years of my life, since the accident, dearie, to making this home one the profession can be proud of. My nurses and doctors are the best. We only accept them from two weeks of age to five years, but look over that album of testimonials–“

“Oh, this bright, lovely nursery is sufficient–“

“Look, at that one! Ever see such a flower? God love it, that’s Esther Deland. Her mother’s playing Canada. And this is little Sidonia Vavasour–mother out in one of the highest-priced sketches in vaudeville. Know it? ‘The Snake.’ Every morning that God sends comes her good-morning telegram to this little mite, just as regular as clockwork.”

“I hope, Mrs. Dupree, it isn’t going to be too expensive.”

“Our service divides itself into three classifications, Mrs. —-?”

“Penny.”

“Not Alonzo Penny of the old Trenton Stock?”

“No. You were saying, Mrs. Dupree, three classifications?”

“Yes, I’ll give you a booklet, dearie. The rates vary according to age. Up to one, then one to three, and three to five. We’ve our own cows, sterilizing machines–“

“How much did you say, Mrs. Dupree, up to one year?”

“Six hundred dollars a year, in quarterly advance payments.”

They were down again in the wide, cool hallway, little kindergarten voices of children shrilling through from one of the playrooms.

A white nurse passed them, tilting a white perambulator down a flight of white stone stairs.

“Six hundred dollars a year. That–that would make one hundred and fifty dollars–in advance,” said Lilly, trying to keep the muscles of her face from quivering.

“Right, dearie.”

“I–why–I–I’m afraid–“

“No hurry, dearie. Think it over. It just happens we have a bed on the infant floor right now, so I’d make up my mind right quickly if I were you. Think it over. You know best.”

Out on the sun-swept lawn, the white perambulator and the white nurse just ahead, Lilly broke into a run. Tears were beating up against her throat and there was a knot of sobs behind her breathing. She wanted to throw herself on the warm slope of terrace and kick into it. That vision of that large bone button at the throat of that little muslin nightgown somehow became the symbol of all her misery!

After a while she dropped down on a little grassy knoll just off the curving sidewalk, and leaned her head against a tree, large tears, since there was no one to see them, rolling unheeded down her cheeks toward an inverted crescent of bitterly disappointed mouth.

The sun at her back must have acted as a sedative, because, after a while of crying there tiredly, she started up out of a light doze, all her perceptions startled, and began immediately to run back toward the station. Within view of it she met a pedestrian, inquiring of him the time. Ten minutes before two! This set her to running again, so that she fairly flopped with a little collapse on a station bench. A train was just pulling out. There was another at two-twenty.

It was ten minutes past three when she burst into the outer offices of the Acme Publishing Company, her lips trembling with a prepared apology she had hardly the breath for.

An office boy brought her out an immediate message. Her place had been filled at five minutes past three.

All the way down Second Avenue she was inclined somehow to laugh. She found herself finally in the Swedish bakery and lunch room, ordering, without appetite, but with a growing sense of need of food, a dish of rice pudding and a cup of coffee. She broke into the only remaining bill in her pocket, leaving a five-cent tip beside her saucer, and pouring, with quite a little jangling, one dollar and eighty-five cents back into her purse.

In the hallway of the Home she encountered Miss Scullen, hurrying with a sheaf of papers in her hand.

“Oh yes, Lilly, I want to speak to you.”

“Yes?”

“Have you made different arrangements? You know it is highly irregular your remaining on.”

“I am expecting to take a position and get baby placed any day now, Miss Scullen. I’ve just returned from Spuyten Duyvil, where I have something very good in view. If you could see your way clear to let things run on a few days longer, Miss Scullen?”

“Not beyond next Tuesday evening. It is very irregular and I’ve a board of directors’ meeting Wednesday.”

“Yes, Miss Scullen, not beyond Tuesday evening.”

When Lilly entered the infirmary the smell of iodine smote her queerly and with an unnamable terror. Her child lay sleeping on a pillow hedged in with a chair, and, bending over, the aroma struck her squarely and with a close pungency. There was a great yellow stain on the little forehead, a welt rising and purpling through it. Even the honey-colored curls were stained with a great blotch of the vicious greeny yellow, one little eyelid swelling.

With a cry somewhere from the primordial depths of her, Lilly snatched up the pillow, rushing with it and its burden to the door, kicking it open in a gale of terror, her voice tearing down the hallway.

“Help! For God’s sake–quick–help!”

The nurse came rushing with a stack of sheets in her arms, and in an instant the corridor was a runway of blue-clad girls, ready, even eager for stampede, and finally Miss Scullen herself pushing through.

“My baby! What has happened to her! Quick–my child!”

With immediate realization of the situation, the nurse pushed her red-elbowed way through the tightening congestion, her voice strident above the dreaded hum of panic.

“Get back to your room. It is nothing. The child fell off the bed and bumped its head. Get back, every one of you. I painted the bruise with iodine. It’s nothing but a bumped head. Back, I say!”

There was a blur before Lilly’s eyes that waved like a red flag, and her voice shot up to a shriek.

“You’ve hurt her terribly! You! Devil! Pig! How dared you! You’ve pinched her! too. I know now what those little blue marks are from. Her head! Her little eye! I could kill you! Devil! Pig! You let her fall! I could kill you!”

Through the snarl of the corridor Miss Scullen emerged, her lips very thin and her voice a steady sedative to the rising murmur.

“You get your things and get out! Leave the child, if you want, until you find a place, but you get your things. You thankless, ungrateful girl. You were taken in here on sufferance and against my better judgment. This is the reward which comes from placing myself liable to censure from my board of directors. Girls, go back to your rooms at once and forget this wayward girl’s disgraceful scene. Now you go!”

“Indeed I’ll go! But leave my baby here? Not likely! Why, what’s one baby’s brain more or less to you? One case more or less for your filing cabinet, that’s all. If I were one of these poor girls and found myself stuck in one of these places that screams out their indigence above the very doorway, dresses them in the blue calico of indigence, and then seals and stamps indigence all over them, I’d show you what real indigence is, once you insisted upon stamping me with it. But you’re not going to make an indigent out of my baby. No, you’re not! No! No! No!”

She was presently marching down the street with her head high, her eyes black with iris, a bag in one hand and the bundle of her child clutched under her chin.

She did not heed where she was going, but as she tramped she was saying audibly over and over again:

“My baby. My baby. My baby.”

CHAPTER II

She was not afraid. The blood was rocking in her veins like a sea, and she was raging with an anxiety that mounted as the heliotrope dusk, turping out sky lines, began to blow in like fog through the narrowness of the cross streets.

But neither was she alone. That was the miracle of her state. That peculiar living magnetism was through the blanket she carried and in a current along her arm. A lusty little storm of crying rose once, quite suddenly, and she kissed down into the pink little mouth that was full of the breath of life–her life.

There were three bottles of still warm milk in her bag. She fumbled for one, kneeling right there on the sidewalk, jerking out the stopper with her teeth and fitting on the rubber nipple. The little lips closed over it with the pull and strong insuck of breath which never failed to thrill her.

She was sobering, though, slowly and surely into a state of panic. At Broadway the swirl of the dinner-bound was already tightening. Lights began to pop out in the tall, narrow office and loft buildings of the vertical city.

She boarded an uptown car, counting, and truly enough, upon the chivalry of the mob toward her burden, for obtaining an immediate seat. At West Fifty-third Street she alighted into a day gone two shades darker. A stiffening breeze blew in from the river, whipping up the odor of garbage from curbs. A group of dirty children were building a bonfire of some of these slops and bits of flying paper, lending a certain vicious redness to the scene.

She thought suddenly of Page Avenue at this hour of pinkish mist. The little patch of front porch with the green chairs and tan-linen covers.

“O God, what have I done!”

The window with the midwife’s sign was dark and there was a little coagulation of bareheaded women on the steps. They parted to give her passage, their babel immediately resuming after her.

The hot, sour smells of the hallway smothered her, but she fumbled for the bell, plunging her hand into the damp, clinging gauze of a cobweb that sent her back shuddering. What proved to be Mrs. Landman herself opened the door upon a rushing smell of hops and a cookery and a glimpse of violently disordered interior. It was not so much the furiously stained figure that sent Lilly a step backward, but a black flap tied over one eye and knotted at the back of her head struck her as so unutterably sinister that without a word she turned and, with her head charging the way for her, ran out through the hallway, through the group on the stoop, and the entire length of the block, catching a downtown surface car that stopped for her after it had started.

She was palpitating with the kind of fear that gave her a sense of fleeing through a dark corridor with some one at her heels, and so rode on until her breath caught up and she could relax into a grateful sort of inertia.

At Forty-second Street, on a sudden impulse, she left the car, hurrying into Grand Central Station. In its undress of semicompletion, the swirl of home-going commuters caught her, so that she was swept down a temporary runway and shunted finally into the waiting room. At its far end the “Matron” sign still hung at right angles. She hurried to it, and to her relief was met by a new face above the gray-and-white uniform, rather little and old and framed kindly in white. There was a small boy asleep on the couch this time, and the usual frowsily tired traveling public relaxed against various of the chairs.

“I want to leave my baby here until I get in touch with friends who have failed to meet me.”

A quick suspicion of foundling crossed the old face.

“We don’t take the responsibility of infants.”

“But this is urgent. I must locate my friends in Brooklyn. I cannot find them in the telephone book and evidently they have not received my telegram.”

“We don’t do it.”

Then Lilly went gallantly down to her last handful of change, all but a ten-cent piece.

“She’s the best little thing. Sleeps the night through. I’ve two bottles of prepared food here in my bag. Her next feeding time is at ten and her next at six–“

“We don’t keep infants for nothing like that long, madam. I go off duty at seven and–“

“I haven’t any intention of leaving her that long, just until I get in touch with my friends.”

With the mound of change ingratiated into the old palm and the little bundle transferred to arms more or less reluctantly held out for it, Lilly lifted back a corner of the blanket.

“Wait until nice lady sees mother’s beautiful, then she’ll be glad to watch over her.”

Mysteriously, it seemed to Lilly, there was nothing of the button nose so peculiar to infants about her child. Its was tipped with character; so, too, the little mouth in the firm way it had of closing.

“Say, but ain’t she a beauty!” capitulated the matron.

“Isn’t she! Isn’t she!”

“Look at them curls. You ought to enter her in a show, ma’am.”

“You will see to her carefully until I return, won’t you? She sleeps that way always, sweetly and deeply.”

“Why, I’ll sit and rock her myself this very minute.”

When Lilly went out into the darkness there were the ten cents in her bag and the blurry outline of things she finally laid to hunger. She walked downward for some blocks, finally entering a Third Avenue lunch room and ordering a ten-cent bowl of beef stew. She took it from a tablespoon like a thick soup, its warmth flowing through her and dissipating a chilly discomfort. But her face still felt rather drawn, and, regarding herself in the pink net-draped mirror, she took to rubbing her cheeks, an old, schoolgirl device against pallor. She was quite becomingly large-eyed from the deadly aching tiredness that lay over her, but otherwise the old whiteness of her skin flowed unmarred and intact, also that unadorned look of nun to her face where the hair left it so cleanly.

Beside her at one of the marble-topped tables a great, hefty motorman in uniform kept finding out her knee and pressing it.

“Stop it,” she said, “or I’ll call the proprietor.”

He drew surlily back, draining his thick cup of coffee and shambling out, chewing a toothpick. At the door he looked back with his lips pulled down, mouthing a filthy epithet at her.

After a while she followed, almost slunk, with a sense of no tip left beneath the saucer, her pace swinging into the indefinable tempo of destination, but more and more indeterminate as she approached Madison Square.

She kept close to Third Avenue, something reassuring in the sidewalk gabble, the air of cheap carnival, the white arc lights over open fruit stands, and the percussive roar of Elevated trains. Presently even Third Avenue would withdraw to over its shops, the sidewalks fall quiet and darken, pedestrians become sinister. She shivered against that lateness; stood for a period outside a bird store, watching a pair of Japanese mice chase their little eternities in a wheel cage. At Twenty-third Street a youth with a prison complexion, a cap pulled down and a sweater pulled up, sauntered out of a pool room, matching his pace with hers, and at once easily colloquial.

“Hello, sweetness!”

Her eyebrows shot up. She could smell, feel, and taste the cheap beer on his breath, and anger rather than fear possessed her.

“Cat got your tongue, sweetness? Where you goin’? Lonesome?”

After a while he fell back, flecked off as it were like a burr clutching for a metal surface.

It was her conviction, many times put to test, that such situations lay within her shaping, and that man took his cue from the yea or nay of her attitude.

At the sight of a crowd tightening about a street corner she edged her way in. The iron plug to a corner sewer had been removed, a policeman and the shirt-sleeved figure of a man prone on the ground, red-faced and arms inserted their length.

“What is it?” asked Lilly, tiptoeing.

“A feller’s gold watch rolled down.”

“Who’ll go down on a rope?” called out the owner.

“I will,” cried Lilly.

The crowd turned its face to her.

“I will, for a hundred and fifty dollars–now–here!”

In the derision and boo that went up she escaped, hurrying this time and without uncertainty.

The Union Square Family Theater showed the lighted but quiet front of a performance in progress.

At the stage entrance the old doorman with his look of sea dog recognized her, admitting her with a nod. The titter of music came back through the wings and quick, loud thumps of a tumbling act in progress. The smell of grease paint, like the flop of a cold, wet hand to her face, smote her with a familiarity out of all proportion to her limited experience in the theater.

She wound, unchallenged, up the short spiral staircase.

Through an open doorway of an office that had been refurnished in large mahogany desk, filing case, and a stack of sectional bookcases, Robert Visigoth sat tilted on a swivel chair, his hands locked at the back of his head, gaze and cigar toward the ceiling.

She stood in the doorway a second, watching his perceptions dawn.

“Hel-lo!” he said, finally, uncrossing a knee grown slightly corpulent and his rather small eyes crinkling to slits. “Hel-lo!”

She was arch and laughed back.

“A bad penny, you see.”

He swung a chair toward her without rising.

“Turned up, didn’t you? Good.”

She seated herself, with that coquetry of hers which she could force on occasion, feeling his glance as it ran over her dawning shabbiness as searingly as a flame. It darted on downward to her feet, and because that very day the leather in her right shoe had cracked, showing a grin of white lining, she wound that foot up around the chair rung.

“I took sick–that time,” she explained, fatuously.

He lifted her hand, bending back each finger to match his words.

“You are a naughty girl. Why did you run away?”

She sat swallowing through obvious gulps, but increasingly determined to be arch.

“Please–don’t,” trying to withdraw her hand.

“Come now,” he said through a half smile and watching her redden almost to purple, “you don’t hate me that badly or you wouldn’t be back here.”

“I know I don’t.”

“What?”

“Hate you.”

“Good! Now we’re getting on.”

“I need something, Mr. Visigoth–terribly.”

“We’re not using that song specialty any more,” he said, kindly.

“I’ve given up that sort of thing, too, Mr. Visigoth. I’m a stenographer now.”

“Smartest thing you ever did.”

“I–I’m in a little difficulty right now–a money one. That’s why I thought if you–Could you use me in the office? I know stenography and typewriting. I–It would be a godsend, Mr. Visigoth. I dislike having to put it so strongly–but my present difficulty is serious–very.”

“What’s troubling you?”

“I must have an office position. I want my evenings free and I cannot be situated so that I might have to go on the road at any time.”

“Married?”

“Why, I–I thought–assumed that you knew I was married from the beginning. I–We aren’t together, though; haven’t been–“

“Umph!”

“It’s just that I’m temporarily embarrassed.”

“That was a pretty rough way you left me in the lurch. Those actions don’t get a girl very far in this business.”

“It was sickness.”

He leaned forward to pat her hand, his lids somehow seeming to thicken.

“You’re a queer little duck,” he said, “but I like you. Always have.”

“Then you will, Mr. Visigoth?”

“Well, let’s not bother about that now.”

“But–“

“There is quite a change taking place in these offices. My brother is coming from Chicago to take charge of the booking end and I am going out there after he comes on, and I’ll see if he can use you. Let us talk about you now.”

“No. No. I haven’t made you understand. That isn’t all. I’m in immediate need. So immediate! I need as much as–as a hundred and fifty–two hundred–here, now, to-night!”

“Whew!”

“It is so difficult to explain, but if you would. If you could! I will work it out for you, beginning tomorrow morning. To the last penny. Two hundred dollars advance on any salary you may see fit to pay me, if you would! I’m not afraid to start small. Within a week I’ll prove my value to you–that’s how I’ll slave for advancement. Just two hundred dollars advance on my salary–one hundred and fifty if–“

“Well, well, well,” he said, stropping up and down the back of her hand, “that does put a different face on things, doesn’t it? I just don’t know what to say.”

“Say yes. It is only my predicament gives me the courage to ask. But I need money, Mr. Visigoth. Need it. Need it. Now–to-night! I’ll pay it back in service. I–“

“Come now,” he said, his eyes crinkling again. “You don’t mean that, Lilly. I’m a man and you’re a woman. I don’t want your money.”

“I’ll go any length for yours.”

“What length?”

“Any–you say.”

He leaned forward at that and kissed down into her lips so deeply that her neck was strained backward to hurting. She sprang to her feet, wiping her hand across her mouth until her lips dragged, but trying to laugh.

“You hurt.”

“That’s what I want to do–hurt, hurt,” kissing down into and crushing her lips again and again.

“Oh! oh! oh!” she moaned rather than cried, pummeling at his chest.

“Devil,” he said, jerking her back to him until the breath jumped from her.

“I–I hate you!”

“Good!”

“I’m not what you think I am. I hate you. I hate–sex. I–“

“I don’t care what I think you are. I only know that I want to be the one to wake you up to the knowledge that sex is life and life is sex. Ice maid. I don’t care what you are. I know that I like you. I know that I like your lips. Give me.”

“Quick, then,” she said, trying not to shudder.

* * * * *

She squirmed from him finally, pushing against him with all her strength.

“Ugh. How I–I–hate–“

“Gad! how I like your lips!”

“Let me go now.”

He looked down at her through slits of eyes.

“To the last cent, you said.”

“Yes.”

“Come, then,” he said. “I live alone.”

“Please,” she said, her palm pat against her mouth and looking at him with streaming eyes. “Please–not that–“

For answer he kissed her again so brutally that she sat down, moaning her shame.

“You’re a woman of the world, Lilly. You don’t want anything for nothing. Life wouldn’t balance up that way.”

“But I’ll–“

“Yes, yes, I’m going to give you a position, too. Fifteen a week to start with, to show you I mean well by you. You beautiful sleepy-eyed thing!”

“I’m not what you think–“

“All right, I know. Never again after to-night, so help me God! This isn’t my kind of thing any more than it is yours. Any position you want in this office to-morrow morning and me off to Chicago for permanent headquarters next month. I’m good pay. Are you? Now? To-night?”

“My hundred and fifty–“

“Two hundred!”

“Yes–I’m good pay–now–to-night!”

CHAPTER III

With a flaying intensity that kept her teeth unconsciously ground together so that when she relaxed their pressure the gums fairly sang, Lilly took up her work in the office of the newly incorporated Universal Amusement Enterprises.

The clerical department occupied a large unfinished room, obviously makeshift, that had previously been used for the storage of stage properties. There were two flat-topped desks, placed so that their swivel chairs faced across a considerable expanse of surface, two bookkeepers’ perches also rigged up to meet the exigencies of run-away affairs, and her own little table with its brand-new typewriting machine.

Yet Lilly never entered the rather cold breath of this atmosphere without a sense of haven. It was as if she had turned the key on those areas that lay outside of the immediate present. She could take the dictation of a letter to the printers, or a manufacturer of slot machines for opera glasses, or to a ventriloquist guilty of disorderly conduct behind the scenes, with the whole of her concentration brought to bear upon her pencil point until very often it snapped under the nervousness of her pressure.

Then Robert Visigoth, who dictated with his ten fingertips together to form a little chapel, would invariably wedge a pleasantry into her tightly maintained attitude, but there was a freshly sharpened pencil always at hand in the little patch of shirt-waist pocket, so that even this slight schism was seldom accomplished.

Her work consisted of some correspondence, mimeographing of programs for distribution to orchestra leaders, scene shifters, printers, bookkeeping and publicity department. Quite a bit of communication by wire, letter, and telephone with the Chicago office, and upon one very recent occasion she had been summoned down to the auditorium together with a Mrs. Ida Blair, one of the bookkeepers, for the try-out performance of a sketch, with the request for a written opinion on its box-office value.

Lilly alone had sent in a negative report–“Too sophisticated and not sufficient emotional appeal for vaudeville.” On the strength of several opposing yeas, the playlet was booked, and removed after the second performance–a little secret feather which Lilly wore jauntily on a little secret cap.

In these eight weeks a quiescence that was like a hand to the reverberating parchment of a drum had come over her. It was, in fact, as if the whole throbbing orchestration of her universe had stopped as it sometimes can seem to upon the motion-picture screen, leaving the action to click on quietly without the excitation of music.

She had taken, at the instance of Mrs. Blair, a room in an Eleventh Street house. The odor of Bohemia, which is the odor of poverty through cigarette smoke, lay on the hallways. There were frequent all-night revelries reverberated down from the skylight room on the top floor, and one evening a passing group had beat a can-can of invitation on her doorway; but she could lock and bolt herself into her room, a box, it is true, at two dollars and a half a week, but it boasted half curtains of yellow scrim, a couch-bed with a moth-eaten but gay wool cover, and a small square of table with a reading lamp attached by a tube to the gas jet.

She found herself during the routine of her business day looking forward to these long, quiet evenings beside the tiny table. There had been eight unbroken weeks of them, and each Sunday a fresh little mound of sheer garments to be carried out to Spuyten Duyvil. Her old inaptitude with the needle, by no means overcome, hampered her so that her stitches were often wandering gypsy trails to be ripped over and over, and then her fingers leaving little prick stains to be washed out.

She had grown thinner, so much so that a slight jaw line had come out, but the shells were gone from beneath her eyes and it pleased her, when she brushed out her hair before going to bed, to see that its electricity, which had departed for a while, was out in it again, so that it would snap and stand out horizontally from her head. The little spark of a smile was constantly over her face like a mirage before her lips and her eyes and seeming to hover on the very peak of her brows when she arched them.

She liked to stand before her wavy mirror, folding the completed garments and looking back at herself. Newly freed, probably by the great Auchinloss and her daughter between them, from the bondage of an idea, she felt corporeally lighter, and was. The toothache of her being had ceased its neuralgic stabbings.

It was not unusual for her to stand before this mirror before climbing into bed, her mouth bunched to mimetics.

“Zoe, come to mother. _Mother!_ Daughter, they’re shouting for you! Let me hold your flowers, darling; they’ll smother you!… You mean the one with the yellow curls, madam? The valedictorian? That’s my daughter!”

All the spots would come out in her eyes, like little “niggers” in a pair of diamonds, and more often than not she would fall asleep then with a crescent moon of a smile lying deeply into her face.

One day, after these weeks of minute fidelity to routine, she was startled somewhat by a request from Robert Visigoth, in the form of a note sent over to her desk, to remain after six to take some dictation. The big temporary-looking office with its absence of partitions and staring lack of privacy had become a paradoxical source of security to her. In all the eight weeks, three of which, it is true, he had spent in Chicago, she had not once encountered Robert Visigoth alone. She had subconsciously developed the habit of peering down the dark stairs that led to the stage door before descending them, and on one or two occasions, when they chanced to pass, had flattened herself rather unduly against the wall. Her comings and goings, whether by maneuver or not, were seldom alone. She and this Mrs. Blair, a sparse, umbrella of a woman with a very bitter kind of widowhood, had formed the noonday habit of taking a dairy lunch of milk and cereal at a near-by White Kitchen and of departing evenings for there, too, since it spelled strong, hot, simple foods and a very superior kind of cleanliness.

It was with a distinct sinkage, well laid over with office imperturbability, that she showed Mrs. Blair the note, saw her stab into her greenish-black bird’s nest of a hat and depart alone. Then the office boy; the publicity man, whistling; a clerk or two, and finally a sixteen-year-old girl who pasted clippings into scrap books.

The pleasantly cool summer day had thickened up rather suddenly into the beginnings of dusk, the electric sign down over the theater throwing up a sudden glow through the windows. She sat before her machine, shorthand book in lap, her attitude quiet enough except that her hands, as they clasped each other, showed whitish at the nails, and she would not swerve her gaze by the fraction of an inch, even with the consciousness of a presence behind her.

It was Visigoth at her shoulder, the male aroma of him, a mixture of cigar smoke, bay rum, and freshly washed hands, and the feel of his rough-serge suit very close.

She rose, withholding herself stiffly from his nearness, marveling, as always, at this power of hers to endure him so casually.

“Letters?” she asked.

He placed a knee on the chair rung, tilting it toward him, and leaning across the back at her.

“You funny, funny girl,” he said, regarding her intently through the crinkling eyes.

She met his stare in a challenging sort of silence.

“My, what big eyes you have!”

“Please,” she said, retreating from the look in his, her weight against the table until it slid.

“Please what?” he rather mimicked, advancing the exact distance of her withdrawal, the smile out on his never quite dry lips.

“Please–don’t.”

The corpulency which was one day to envelop him like suet was already giving him the appearance of ten years his senior. He had upon occasion been mistaken for the father of his younger brother, and some of Lilly’s acute distaste for him, across the slight enough chasm of the seven or eight years between them, was already that of youth for lascivious age.

“Shall I take those letters now–Mr. Visigoth?”

“I would rather take you–to dinner.”

“I might have known,” she said, rather tiredly.

“What?”

“That you would not keep your word.”

“I have though, for eight weeks.”

“I thought your promise meant–“

“Ah no. I never broke a promise in my life, but even I cannot be expected to keep one indefinitely with a girl like you within eyeshot.”

“That can be easily corrected.”

“Come now, I’m giving you your chance here to make good.”

“Well then, let me take it.”

“My dear girl, never expect the best of us to be more than human.”

“I suppose, then, this is to be the regulation, theatrical-manager-dangers-of-a-big-city kind of scene.”

“Come now,” he said, his voice plushy with the right to intimacy. “We understand each other–Lilly.”

She stood silent, flaming her humiliation.

“And I like you for it. If there is one thing to my mind less interesting than another, it is the untempted kind of woman who–“

“I never pretended to you, Mr. Visigoth, that I was what you are pleased to term–tempted!”

“No? But how much more redeeming if you had been.”

“Nothing can ever redeem that–night–except–“

“Except?”

“Oh, I don’t know–maybe–except–God.”

“You funny, funny girl!” he repeated. “I like you.”

“I know your kind of liking. You like me for the kind of thing you would protect your wife or your daughter from with all the fury of your little elemental soul.”

“I haven’t a wife, I haven’t a daughter, and I like you.”

“No, but you will have presently. Your kind always does and you’ll be the ideal family man who telephones home from the office three times a day to see if the baby has taken her cough medicine regularly, and you’ll knock the man down that brushes your wife too closely in a crowd, and because of your attitude toward all but your own women you’ll suspect every man who even approaches your daughter. In the eyes of the world you’re entitled to your wild oats. That’s what I am, a wild oat to be sown at your pleasure. If you haven’t any letters, Mr. Visigoth, I’m going. I–“

“No,” he said, closing his hand over hers. “Don’t.”

“You force me.”

“Nonsense! Haven’t I promised to let you be, Lilly? I’ve respected that promise to the letter, as I always respect a promise. The past is dead, it died with that night. I swear it over again.”

“Dead, with your reminding me with every word you utter–every look.”

“Nonsense, I tell you! I’ve treated you like everyone else in this office. Made things easy for you. Helped you.”

“And I’ve tried to justify my position in your office. To hold it by sheer merit so that this–this wouldn’t–couldn’t happen. And now you–your daring to keep me here like this shows me I’ve failed.”

“You haven’t. You’ve raised the efficiency of the office forty per cent. I’m turning you over to my brother as a prize. I’ve got you in mind for the booking end of the business. That’s what I think of you.”

“Oh, Mr. Visigoth, if you knew–if you knew what that would mean to me. I’ll give you my best! Let me go on proving to you that I want to stay here to make good on my merits–as man to man!”

“I wish to God I could figure you out.”

“I made it clear–that night–“

“But I flattered myself at least that–“

“You hadn’t that right. Ours was a cold business deal. So much for so much! I never for a moment pretended otherwise. I was in need. Terrible need. I didn’t think when I came to you that you would do business on any other terms than you did.”

“I envy the fellow that awakens you.”

“Oh, I’ve been awakened! Awakened to the fact that a woman out in the world has to fight through a barrier of yourselves that you men erect. But I’m not afraid of your barrier. In the last analysis I know, that I have the situation in hand. Every woman has. It is a matter of whether she will or she won’t! I had an alternative–that night. Could have taken it, but wouldn’t. Would do the same over again. A man invariably takes his cue. You took yours. Even a street masher takes his cue from the look in her eyes whether he will or won’t follow up.”

“Right, but public sentiment is all on the woman’s side.”

“It’s worth more to me to know that the situation was in my own hands than it is to play the sensational role of more sinned against than usual.”

“You’re immense.”

Dryly, “Doubtless, from your point of view.”

“From any–“

“Now look here. I need this position here more desperately than I ever needed anything in my life. It means the success or failure of something that I’ve staked every card on, of a fight that nobody in the world would understand–possibly not even myself. But that doesn’t change the fact that the situation again is mine. I am in a position now to demand fairer terms than I was–then. I return to work to-morrow only on those terms, Mr. Visigoth.”

The veil of light from the sign fell upon her in the rigidity of her pose and pallor. For some reason she was hugging one of the book-shaped letter files, all the black out in her eyes.

He sat down, straddling the chair, his arms across the back and his chin down upon them.

“Who are you?” he said, regarding her with the intense squint of one in need of glasses.

She felt her power over the moment, and with her old slant for it began to dramatize.

“I’m the grist being ground between yesterday and to-day. Sometimes I think I must be some sort of an unfinished symphony which it will take another generation to complete. I am a river and I long to be a sea. I must be the grape between the vine of my family and the wine of my progeny. That’s it, I’m the grape fermenting!”

Then she felt absurd and looked absurd and stood there with the quick fizzing spurt of exultation died down into a state of bathos.

“Let me stay on here on my terms, Mr. Visigoth,” she finished with a sort of broken-wing lameness of voice.

“What terms?”

“The terms you have been generous enough not to violate up to now. I’ve the most glorious reason for wanting to make good that a girl–a woman could have. I don’t think the career stuff, as you once called it, is rankling any more. I’m suddenly glad and quiet about my job. Let me stay on. Let me make myself indispensable to this growing, interesting enterprise of yours. Why, even watching the letters grow in numbers and importance, and using the little individuality in handling them that you are beginning to allow me, is a game worth playing! I’m like a bad girl who has been spanked by life and is all chastened and ready to be good. If you are the clever business man I think you are, you’ll let me stay, Mr. Visigoth, on my terms.”

There was a shine to her there in the half light, probably because her eyes were wide and the muscles of her face lifted so that her teeth showed, but not in a smile.

“I played the game on your terms, Mr. Visigoth; now meet me on mine.”

“Put your cards on the table, then; no fine flights of speech either. Who are you?”

“I told you from the first I am a married woman, with nothing to be said against my husband except that he was part of a condition that was intolerable to me.”

“Where is he?”

“West.”

“Stage ambition, eh?”

“Yes or–I don’t know. Too many ambitions of all kinds crawling over me like a terrible itch, for God knows what. Fermenting. The grape fermenting! But I’m quiet now. So quiet that sometimes I think I wouldn’t change it for even the–the singing wine of fulfillment. I don’t think I can make you understand. I seem to have been stretching all these years for–for something my arm isn’t quite long enough to touch, and now my child–my little girl–“

“You have a child?”

“A little girl.”

“How old?”

“Eleven weeks.”

He looked at her across a long silence.

“Good God!” he said, and then again, “Good God.”

“Yes,” she said, watching belated comprehensions flood up into his face, “that was it.”

“You mean you had on your hands that night a–“

“Yes, a three-and-a-half-weeks-old one.”

“You were broke?”

“Stony.”

“Good God! You–poor–“

“I’m not pleading for your sympathy, Mr. Visigoth. Only a square deal. Will you give it?”

He walked over to his desk, turning on a green-shaded bulb, the clip back in his voice and manner.

“That will be all for this evening, Mrs. Parlow–“

“Penny.”

“Mrs. Penny,” he said, picking up a random sheaf of papers and not meeting her eyes. “I want you to go over to Newark Monday afternoon and bring back a report on an act over there; and, by the way, you are to begin your new week in the booking department at twenty dollars.”

She wanted to speak and her lips did move, but the tears anticipated her, and, blink as she would, they sprang, magnifying her glance, and besides, there were footsteps coming up the flight of stairs that led from the stage entrance, and a young, a lean, a honed silhouette rather suddenly in the doorway, the right side borne down by the pull of a dress-suit case.

“R.J?” Peering into the gloom.

“Good Lord!” from the figure at the desk, leaning forward on the palm of his hand. “That you, Bruce?”

They met center, gripping hands.

“When did you get in, youngster? Didn’t expect you for another couple of days.”

“Just now. Took a chance on finding you here.”

“Another five minutes and you wouldn’t have.”

“So these are the new diggings?”

“There is your desk.”

He deposited his hat on the flat top indicated, his silhouette cutting vigorously into the dimness, particularly the rather heavy double wave to his hair causing Lilly to grope with a vague sense of having seen him before. It was merely a rather remote resemblance to the remote Horace Lindsley, but not for days did she stumble across this realization.

She knew, instinctively, even while she marveled at his youth and the merest and most lightninglike resemblance to his brother, that here was Bruce Visigoth, and what she did not know was that a certain throaty resonance to his voice had a tendency to gooseflesh her and that quite suddenly her eyes were very hot and her hands very cold.

“Well, R.J.,” he was saying, and she noticed that his head came up with a fine kind of young defiance, as if a pair of invisible Mercury wings flowed with the sleek nap of his hair, “I’m for taking a chance on the Buffalo lease. I stopped over yesterday and the little theater looks good to me.”

It was then Lilly began noiselessly to move toward the door.

“Oh–here–Mrs. Penny. My brother, Mrs. Penny. Sort of secretary on the booking department, and a darn good one.”

“How do you do, Mrs. Penny? Mighty pleased,” he said, through the resonance that had a little aftermath of a ting to it.

Her five fingers rather trailed along the palm of his hand as he slowly released her.

“Thank you, Mr. Visigoth,” she said, smiling up at him with her eyebrows, pressing down her sailor hat, and hurrying toward the staircase.

Outside, the darkness had the quality of cool water to her face. The palm of her right hand and the tips of her fingers were tingling as if they had been kissed.

She could have run before the wind.

CHAPTER IV

From now on for many a month to come, the curve of Lilly’s life would have shown a running festoon; six days whose uneventful continuity was bearable because they were looped up by the rosette of the Sundays at Spuyten Duyvil.

When Zoe was two years old this hebdomadal consciousness was already borne upon her. Into her earliest vocabulary, as haphazard as if the words had been dished up out of the alphabet of a vermicelli soup, crept the word “Sunday,” mysteriously boiled down to “Nunk,” the first time her mother heard it, the pride seeming to crowd around her heart, fairly suffocating her.

As if the luster of this girl child could be any brighter, yet here was the new shine of the mental beginning to radiate through. Nunk!

Was there any limit to this ecstasy of possession? It ran through her days like a song.

It meant that while the home-going six-o’clock rush at Union Square, which of face is the composite immobility of a dead Chinaman, would presently cram into street cars and then deploy out into the inhospitable cubbyholes of the most hospitable city in the world, Lilly, even in her weariness, could be deterred by the lure of a curb vender and a jumping toy dog. There was never a time or a weather that she could pass, without pause, Westheim’s Art Needlework Shop on Broadway and its array of linen-lawn dainties, and, remarkably enough, the purchase of the toy dog or a five-cent peppermint cane could send her home with an actual physical refreshment as if she had slept off, rather than cast off, fatigue.

She would line up during the week, Monday’s toy dog, Tuesday’s peppermint cane, Wednesday’s cap rosettes (fashioned out of five yards of baby ribbon at one cent the yard), and so on to Saturday’s climax of bootines, and on one occasion a large circular wooden arrangement, a sort of first aid to the first step, which she carried out herself, standing with it on the train platform.

With her three months’ running start, paid in advance and duly receipted by Mrs. Dupree, Lilly’s weekly expenditures, by the nicest calculation, reduced themselves thus:

Room rent. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .$2.50 Car fare (one round trip to Spuyten Duyvil). . . . . . . . . .60 Breakfast (gas-jet boiled egg, an apple, three biscuits from a tin, and coffee) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .50 Lunch (milk, cereal, sandwich) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.50 Dinner (lamb or beef stew, green vegetable, pie, coffee. Tip) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.50 Laundry. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .75 —–
$9.35

There were already forty-two dollars and sixty-eight cents hoarded in a little biscuit tin in the depths of her valise, and out of it had come a gift for Mrs. Dupree, a rather interesting relic of an old silver thimble wrought in cunning filigree which she had bought in two payments of seventy-five cents each, and largely by eliminating the pie for a month, from a rapidly diminishing keep-chest of Ida Blair’s.

A friendship had sprung up here, which, born out of the merest propinquity, had sent down strong roots into the common ground between them.

One or two nights they had attended the theater together, on orchestra passes given out to them by one or the other of the Visigoths.

One Wednesday evening they saw the “School for Scandal” presented at the Academy of Music, and once, just before the permanent departure of R.J. for Chicago, he had tossed negligently across the desk a single balcony ticket for Eames in “Faust.”

“Here is something ought to keep one of you busy this rainy evening.”

Ensued a highly feminine parley.

“Mrs. Blair, you take the ticket. Really, I’m too tired and I’ve some sewing to do.”

“Nonsense! You’re musical and I’m not. Besides, it will do you a world of good.”

“I don’t know,” said Lilly, her lips giving a sensitive quiver. “I’ve put it so out of my mind that it might only tantalize.”

But in the end she did attend, seating herself, for the first time in her life, in the F-minor, the perfumed twilight of the Metropolitan Opera House, just as the velvet curtains swished sibilantly apart.

Day was breaking, and in all the passion and churchiness of Gounod, the student calls for death, the echoes of human happiness rustling through the background like the scything sound of harvesting.

Lilly could scarcely breathe for the poignancy of sensation. She was all throat. Faust’s opening greeting to the dawn, his challenge to happiness, pierced her. She sat forward on her chair, anticipating the lyrical vision of Marguerite, her hands clasped over the handle of her wet umbrella, and her knees crowded up unconsciously about its dampness.

She bought the libretto, humming down into it between acts and leaping ahead to verify her memory of the score.

Poor Lilly, it is doubtful if she was by endowment more than a lovely melomaniac doomed never to emerge from her musical primaries. A mere tonal accord could assail her nostrils like a perfume set to music. And yet her quick ear, though, was not exact. Her capacity for fine vocal distinctions in her own singing had been distinctly limited, and a note landing just this side of itself could drop down into her state of ecstatic coma with hardly a plop. She had neither capacity for exactitude nor tireless fidelity to tone. It made her neck ache. She had never graduated from musical sensation to cerebration; a theme washed her over with all the voluptuous abandon of a Henner sea siren letting the water tickling up the beach to roll over her lightly.

There was unrest in the balcony because Faust was singing through laryngitis and a cloud of fog in his throat. A critic who wrote in terms of elliptical rhythms and tonal arabesques tiptoed out for a smoke. One of those sympathetic fits of coughing swept the house. But Lilly sat hunched in her habitual beatific attitude against the chair back, the old opera flowing back to her in association that caught her at the tonsils.

“Lilly, play that over, the left hand alone.”

“Oh, mamma, mamma!”

That blue challis wrapper shotted with pink rosebuds.

“Lilly, play that over.”

Eames down there flinging up the “Jewel Song” like a curve of gold. Her place!

She half rose to her feet.

Down in front!

She sat again, but a sudden, an inexplicable sense of wanting to plunge from the height of the balcony seized her. It had been so long since the old neuralgic stabbings of spirit. She wanted to jump and had a ludicrous vision of herself landing down in the cream of white shoulders and crashing through the U of one of those immaculate shirt fronts. She could have torn and scratched the indestructibility of her failure and wanted suddenly and terribly to wrap those pearl-twined taffy braids around the rising throat of Marguerite as she sprayed the auditorium with the “Jewel Song,” a great fire hose of liquid music finding out every cranny.

In the deep-napped velvet of this melodious darkness Lilly rose suddenly, pushing her way out through knee-impeded aisles and a string of protestations.

An usher helped her to find a door. She ran down several flights and into a side street. A slant of rain met her and she charged into it with bent head and umbrella. Bubbles with a tap of sleet in them exploded like little torpedoes on the sidewalks, curbs were rushing water, and Broadway was as black and oily-looking as a foundry. She tried to visualize it as she had seen it that first morning from her window at the Hudson Hotel, pink with sun.

The picture would not conjure, and finally, because her shoes were full of bubbles and her damp skirt clung and hindered walking, she boarded a street car and sat looking out of the water-lashed windows, her throat full of little moans like the song of a kettle just about to boil.

When she reached home there was an envelope beneath her door. It contained a snapshot picture of herself and Zoe taken by Mrs. Dupree one Sunday afternoon. Still wet, she sat down with it on the bed edge. Against a background of shrub and stone steps Lilly was little more than a blur, but Zoe, with five little fingers dug into her cheek, leaped from the picture, all her dimples out.

The mood induced by the opera fell off like a cloak, a warm, easy tear splashing right down on the adorable little face. She wiped it off ever so painstakingly, holding the little print up to the gas to dry.

Then she stood it up on the table so she could gaze down and smile while she undressed, and even placed it on the floor as she leaned down to unlace her shoes. She climbed into bed with it under her pillow, but rose in the darkness to transfer it, against crumpling, beneath the mattress.

She went to sleep right off with a little smile on her lips, as if the picture had kissed it there, but it was many a day, sixteen years, in fact, before she could be induced to enter the Metropolitan Opera House again, and then only in the most crowded hour of her life.

CHAPTER V

Quite a friendship was thriving between Lilly and Mrs. Blair. The older woman had opened the door to her upon that family skeleton, one of which, by the way, lurks in the cupboards of most of us–the unproduced play! This one, a sketch called “The Web,” read by Lilly and even placed by her with a written word of appreciation on Robert Visigoth’s desk.

He carried it with him to Chicago, mailing it back one day without comment.

“Just the same, there is a corking idea there. You ought to develop it into a long play, Mrs. Blair.”

“I will some day,” she replied, with a cryptic something in her voice that Lilly was only to understand a year later.

One spring evening, that year later, as she and Mrs. Blair sat in her small room beside the open window that looked out over the twilighted rear of housetops, Lilly was induced to sing, quietly, almost under her breath, sitting there on the floor with her hands clasped about her knees, her invariable shirt waist and dark-blue skirt discarded for a pleasant sense of negligée in a pink cotton-crêpe kimono, her hair flowing with the swift sort of rush peculiar to it.

They had just completed, as a relief from the nightly round of lunch rooms, a wood-alcohol meal of canned baked beans, cheese, crackers, and tinned sweet cakes. Even Mrs. Blair, at an age when the years are at the throat of a woman, shriveling it, had opened her blouse at the neck, revealing an unsuspected survival of its whiteness.

Lilly sang “Jocelyn,” a lullaby dimmed in her memory by the mist of years and full of inaccuracies. She had last sung it at Flora Kemble’s.

It lay on the twilight after she had finished.

“How pretty! Why don’t you let one of the Visigoths hear you? It might lead to something.”

“Robert V. has heard me.”

“Well, I don’t pretend to be a judge of music, but considering your youth and looks and when I see the kind of thing that does get across–“

“I know. I used to feel that way about it, too–hot, rebellious–but, somehow, not any more. Strange that it should have taken my child to show me. I realized it last winter when I heard Eames. I simply hadn’t it to give, except in desire. Why, her voice–it seemed to climb up around an invisible spiral staircase to the stars; and that wasn’t all! There was something so richly colored through it–like the candy stripe through a crystal. I know now–and I’m glad I know–that my ambition was bigger than my talent.”

“I suppose that is what you thought about me, too, when you read my sketch.”

“No, no. I admit I did think it amateurish, but there is an idea in ‘The Web.’ Almost as if you had lived it yourself and had written it in blood. Besides, you know the secret of concentration; it shows in your work at the office. I couldn’t stick night after night over one of those trial balances of yours. I’d throw it over. I’ve never in my life really worked for anything. Even as a child I used to cheat myself–move the clock; hadn’t that sublime capacity for grind. That was part of the lack. How clear it all seems now!”

“The cruelest clarity in the world is wisdom after the event.”

“Oh, but I wouldn’t have one thing different! It simply wasn’t in me to want badly enough, and therefore I didn’t attain. But I know–I know, Mrs. Blair, that there is a logic running somewhere through it all. Nothing has been in vain. I’m out on a highroad now with open running ahead. I’m going to rear her into a superwoman. She is my song, Zoe! There is logic, I tell you, Mrs. Blair–straight through the apparent mix-up. Off somewhere in Corsica a vine is putting down roots that there may be wine in somebody’s glass some day. The vine. The grape. The wine.”

“The vine. The grape. The wine.”

“Don’t you understand now a little better, Mrs. Blair, why this poor little fermenting grape couldn’t stay on the vine?”

“You’ve told me so little, dear.”

“More than I’ve ever told a living soul. There’s one thought I love to carry about with me about Zoe. She was born out of captivity. No Chinese shoes for her little mind or her little soul or body. I’m vague about it now, just as I’m half crystallized about everything. But this time my will to do is unlimited and unfaltering! Her whole life is going to be a growth toward fulfillment of self. I want life to dawn upon her in great truths, not in ugly shocks and realizations. She is a plant and I am her trellis toward the light. Do you see? Do you? I may be as wrong as you think I am, Mrs. Blair–terribly, irrevocably wrong–but I wouldn’t take her back there into that–that–sedentary fatness–I wouldn’t–“

A musing sort of silence had fallen into a gloom that was thickening into darkness.

“The more I see of your case, Lilly, the less I understand it. To think of anyone in this world of suffering deliberately bringing it upon herself. Why, my dear, it isn’t any of my business, but when I think of those parents of yours out there, comprehending nothing, and that poor bewildered husband of yours, I could cry for them.”

“Do you think I don’t, Mrs. Blair, whole nightfuls of tears? Why, yesterday at the Library in my home paper I saw a little local notice of my mother’s euchre club meeting at our house–it was a knife, somehow–the pain of it–“

“I’m not saying so much about the husband, only, God knows why a woman should throw away a life-time of protection just because a man chews with his temples and–“

“Surely you haven’t taken that literally! I only tried to symbolize for you that the unimportant mannerisms that may even delight in one person can become monstrosities in another. Oh, I haven’t made you understand–“

“Yes, dear child, you have made me understand this much. What a fine sense of satire the power behind the throne of the world must have. Take me–that first little two-by-four home of mine over in a back street of Newark. Talk to me of freedom! I married to get away from it. Somebody who cared whether I came or went. Somebody who cared enough to want to restrict me.”

“Ah yes, but–“

“We had a little house on Dayton Street; must have been a hundred years old, with funny little leaded panes and a staircase rising out of the parlor to a queer old box of a bedroom with slant walls. We painted the floors ourselves and Lon did the doors in burntwood. He had a feeling for the artistic, Lon had. That was the way we met–that was–the way–we–met.”

“How?”

“He was a police sergeant then, and I was bookkeeping for the time for Metz Producing Company. Lon used to drop in once in a while for passes. Then he got to waiting for me evenings with little pencil drawings of all the funny things that had happened to him during the day. I was strong for him to get off the force and take up art, but even then, now that I look back on it, I can see that Lon was fed up on propositions that it was driving him half mad to resist. That in itself should have put me on my guard, but it didn’t. I don’t know why I’m telling you all this–“

“Go on.”

“Oh, I must have known in a way that Lon was drinking in his effort to keep his eyes shut to the bribe money that could have come his way. He never came home to me under the influence, but toward–the end–his eyes began to glassen up. I was all for getting his beat changed. You see, it took him down into the gang and red-light districts. More than that, I had my heart set on seeing him off the force altogether. I wanted to keep my position for a year or two after we were married and send him to Paris to study art. I’ve some cartoons in my trunk. That boy would have made good as–Well, it didn’t happen. I blame myself. Marriage made a great baby of me, Lilly. You see, I’d never been coddled in my life–all those years of struggle on my own. Well I just turned soft and he loved to baby me. Why, when I went back to bookkeeping I had to learn it all over like a beginner–that’s how wrapped up I became in that little home of ours!”

“How long, Mrs. Blair, did you live in it?”

“Fourteen months and five days. It was a tiny place and we didn’t have much to spend at first, but what I had I managed to good advantage. Lon hated makeshift. He couldn’t get the fun out of simplicity that I could. He wanted to dress me up. He wanted a big house. Big. Everything big. That was his undoing. That’s what they called him in the Ring, I learned later, ‘Gentleman Lon.’ And I never knew there was a Ring! Never knew the filthy inside workings of the graft game existed. That’s the way he protected me from everything ugly–from poverty. Me, that had never been protected from either. O God! if he’d only been truthful with me those last few months. I–I can’t talk about it–I–“

“Then don’t, dear Mrs. Blair, I didn’t mean to–“

“He began bringing home more money than was natural, but he always explained it–a tip from a bucket shop on his beat–extra duty. If I had been right strong those days I might have suspected. Once he walked the floor all night, said it was a toothache, my poor boy! and let me fix a hot-water bottle for him. Then two men came one evening and there was some loud talk down in the parlor and I heard words like ‘squeal’ and ‘gangsters.’ He told me when he came upstairs that one of them was Eckstein. But how was I to know who Eckstein was? Didn’t, until I heard it was he who had been–shot. I–You see, the captain had closed in on Eckstein’s place because of a personal grudge, and Eckstein came running to Lon to save him. Threatened to squeal on Lon–on the whole business–if he didn’t. Lon was hot-headed–got frightened–lost his head. O God! I don’t know what–never will know–“

“Know–what?”

“That evening he stayed home and helped me fix up the nursery. Yes, I was expecting in the spring. That’s why he was so for keeping things from me. We painted the woodwork white and gave a couple of coats to a little brown crib I had picked up second hand. He was for buying an enameled one on casters–he loved the best. Next night–next night–he–didn’t come home–and at eight o’clock the following morning the extras were on the street–about the killing. Even then I didn’t tie up–Lon and Eckstein. O God! God! how could I–“

“Tie up what? Who?”

“He was a cat’s-paw, Lilly. Never believe otherwise. My boy was caught and trapped in the filthy cesspool of politics. There are men in this city–men whom I named at the trial, all the good it did me, living and prospering for doing worse than my boy died for. You wouldn’t know of my boy, Lilly; you were too young then. The whole country knew him, eleven years ago. Lon Elaine. It’s easier Blair; no questions asked. It was the beginning of a cleanup that my boy blazed the way for. He went to the gallows, Lilly–my boy–“

“No! No!”

“He died a gunman. Thank God his child was born dead. But he lies in my heart, Lilly like a saint washed clean. He sinned for love, and because stronger forces than he wanted him for a tool. May every man on his jury live to carry that truth to his grave. He killed in self-defense and he sinned for love. I’ll exonerate him in a play, yet! I will! I’ll tell them! I’ll tell them!”

Told without hysteria, her tale had almost a droning quality on the twilight. She was grim in her tragedy, and her lips were as twisted and dried as paint tubes, yet Lilly crept closer, laying her cheek rather timidly against the corduroyed one.

“Ida Blair,” she said. “I see now. ‘The Web’! Oh–Ida Blair.”

They fell silent, the two of them, dry-eyed, cheek to cheek, drowning back into a long twilight that finally blackened.

“I don’t know why I’ve told you all this. It’s been ten years since I’ve talked it. But your telling me that you threw it all over–that little home out there, and a man that was driving down deeply the stakes of his home–threw it over because the black spot from his collar button made you feel hysterical–Oh, I tell you there is a grin through the scheme of things. A laugh. What old man Metz used to call a belly laugh.”

Chin cupped in hand, Lilly stared out into a back yard that was filled with the tulle of winding mist, the lighted rear windows of the houses opposite blurry, as if seen through tears.

“Just the same,” she said, her lips in the straight line peculiar to this not infrequent reiteration, “I’d do the same if I had it to do over again.”

“How do you know that some day your child is not going to turn upon you with the bitterest reproaches?”

“She won’t; she’s too much like me. That is why it is going to be something sublime to have the rearing of her. It is going to be like living my life over again the way I once dreamed it. I know even now what she wants, before she puckers up her little lips for it. Of course, you are right–he–they have the right to know. But take the shine off that creature? Clip the wings of her spirit? Fatten her little soul back there in that sluggish environment? She’d hate it as I hated! Oh you must have seen for yourself that Sunday I took you out there. The little live stars in her eyes. The plunge and rear to her little body. Never! She’s mine! We two! Out on the open road!”

“I shouldn’t want the responsibility of rearing my child in a paid institution if I had better to offer.”

“I haven’t better! I’ve proved to myself, Mrs. Blair, to what limit I would go to–to save her from back there. Proved it–horribly! No–no, she’s mine. No, not even mine. She belongs to herself. As soon as her little brain is ready to take it in, she shall decide; but until then–she’s mine.”

“Lilly–Lilly–a father ignorant of his child!”

“They’d suck us back, I tell you! Self-preservation even against family is a first law of life! Owls eat their young! So can human beings feed on the thing they love. It’s not these first years would matter. But ten, fifteen, twenty years from now. They would hitch her vision, not to a star, but to a–a tin dipper. You don’t understand. You know it seems to me, Mrs. Blair, that most people, women, anyhow, are like great big houses with only half the rooms in use. The mentality closed up and musty from disuse because they have never found or made the keys. I want my child to live roundly–in all her mental rooms. What is the use closing off any part of a house that was meant for light and sunshine? I want her to know the world she lives in from attic to cellar. The good from the bad, so that, knowing the bad, she can love more the good. The right to live!”

“You’re for woman’s rights. You’re one of those suffragists.”

“I guess I am if woman’s rights mean more breadth, more beauty, more realization of our latent selves. Oh, I don’t know what I mean. That’s been my curse.”

In the darkness Mrs. Blair put up a hand to the sheen of Lilly’s flowing hair.

“You poor child! You funny girl. You need–“

“What?”

“The right man to sweep you off your feet.”

“I knew you were going to say that. No, you’re wrong. I’m not essentially a man’s woman, Mrs. Blair. Sex isn’t even as big a part of my life as it is of most women’s. I can’t flirt. I haven’t an ounce of coquetry in me. I think I almost hate–“

“You mean you hate what your experience has been. The right man for you, dear, a man with enough of the materialist to hold you in check and enough of youth and vision and ideals to soar with you. No, no, you don’t hate him, Lilly.”

“Why–why–who?”

“Oh, I’ve seen it flash between the two of you. I’ve watched it being silently born. Lilly child, look at me!”

“Why, Mrs. Blair! Why–Mrs. Blair! I’ve never seen him outside of office hours in my life. I never laid eyes on him until he walked in that night from Chicago. Why, I–I’m a married woman! He’s younger–than I–a year! He knows there is Zoe. He sent her up a little hobbyhorse from the property room. Why, Mrs. Blair–of course if you look at me like–that–“

She was suddenly in the older woman’s arms, a passionate, a peony red flooding her face and waving down her words. She was all for further resistance, but her denial had taken on an archness for which she somehow blushed.

Besides, it was suddenly delicious to huddle there, tingling in the darkness.

CHAPTER VI

There were a quality of voice, of eye, and a fine, upstanding rush of sooty black hair which he tried to japan down with a pair of swift military brushes, in the way of woman’s safest judgment of Bruce Visigoth.

By the quieter kinetics of his own sex, he was a man’s man. He commingled easily in his clubs, a university, a Mask and Wig, a Long Island Canoe, and the Gramercy. Preceding his brother in this last and later proposing him.

The resemblance between the two was neither of form nor of feature. Rather, it was fleeting as a wing; in fact, was just that. There was something in the batting of the eye, a slant of lid, that showed the mysterious corpuscles of the same blood asserting themselves. Yet it was more the likeness of father and son; the older man shorter, wider of thigh, and with none of that fleet, rather sensitive lift of head, partly because his neck was shorter and not upflung as if so sensitive to the very rush of air that the flanges of the nostrils quivered.

There was a more nervous organization to Bruce that gave him something of the startled look of wild horse, particularly with the laid-back Mercury wing effect to his hair.

In anger Robert had a répertoire of oaths that stained the air like the trail of a wounded shark, his pupils receding to points and his mouth pulling to an oblique.

Bruce, if anything, whitened and quieted. He had once, with hardly more than a lightning lunge, broken a truck driver’s wrist in an office altercation over some manhandled scenery, and gone home rather sick because the fellow’s opened cheek had bled down over his desk.

His office manner was clipped, brisk, and highly impersonal. He cultivated a little mustache to enhance that manner, yet the two sixteen-year-old girls who pasted clippings into scrap books spitted their curls for him, and, since his advent, even Ida Blair had discarded her eye shade.

In moments of high pressure he stuttered slightly, grinding and whirring over a sibilant like a stalled tire. Upon one occasion that was to be memorable Lilly sat between the brothers, notebook in lap, her head bent to dodge the fusillade of high words passing over it.

It was her third year in a firm that had not slipped a cog. She had likened its growth to her child’s–fine–sturdy–normal. There were seven theaters now, lying at points between New York and Denver, a quickening nervous system of them with New York its ganglia. An eighth had just been acquired, through which transaction she had endured with a vicarious anxiety that amazed her. There had been arduous after office hours of deed, mortgage, and bill of sale, and to growing demands had invested herself with power of notary public, proclaiming the same in a neat sign above her desk.

It was the day of the consummation of this last deal, a Bronx Family Theater, in fact, that occurred between the brothers one of those bloodless chasms no wider than a sword blade, but hilt-deep.

After a morning series of conferences with two representatives of Philadelphia capital and the vice president of a Surety Guarantee Company, Lilly in her new capacity thumping down on document after document that slid beneath her punch, the transfer was completed, and, bursting out into the corridor, rather hoyendish with elation, she drew up shortly to avoid collision with Robert Visigoth, himself still warm with the occasion.

“Well,” he said, slapping the side pockets of his waistcoat, “we pulled it off, didn’t we?” The possibility of an evening train back to Chicago and of a big deal creditably accomplished quickening his well-being.

“Indeed we did!” she replied, heartily.

More and more, on these intermittent visits of his, the icy edge of her self-consciousness was beginning to thaw. Probably because the years had done their sebaceous worst with him. Somehow he had receded behind the dumpling of himself.

“Have you seen this one of Rufus II, Mrs. Penny? I want to show you a picture of a youngster with some kick to him. Look at those legs, will you!”

He had married, three years previous, a Miss Hindle Higginbothom, the only child of a Chicago leaf-lard magnate of household-word kind of fame, and brother-in-law to his father’s one-time law partner, O.J. Higginbothom.

For three years now, as if caught in a suet destiny, he had lived in the Lake Shore mansion of his father-in-law, making the Western city his official headquarters for as long as seven and eight-month periods. Ten, the year his first child was born.

Often his wife accompanied him on his trips to New York. She was an enormous girl, looking ten years her senior, but with that fat kind of prettiness which asserts itself so often in clear skin and apple cheeks.

Her capitulation to matrimony, rather than to Robert Visigoth, was complete. She was one of those inevitable mothers with little broody household ways that no immense wealth could dissipate. The first year there were twins. One of them died, but annually thereafter, until there were six, she presented a chuckling grandfather with a literal heir. Literal, because on each such nativity old Rufus Higginbothom, who had found it easier to make millions than to learn to write, signed his famous “X” to a five-hundred-thousand-dollar check of greeting to the new arrival.

Robert Visigoth carried photographs of his babies and wife in a leather pocket portfolio, referring to it constantly and with a great show of casualness, “Oh, by the way, have I ever shown you–“

Lilly returned this to him now, with a rush of amused pleasure at the bouncing rotundities of his newest born.

“He’s a darling!”

“He was a little croupy before I left and I’m taking that six-three for Chicago, Mrs. Penny, and I wonder if you would do something for me. I’m caught empty-handed. Would you take a cab down to Ryan and Steger’s (the wife says they are the best for stouts) and select me a couple of right nobby waists for her? Get the best, and you know pretty much about size. The largest–you know. A few pairs of black silk stockings, extra quality and extra size, would be nice, too. It would save me considerable rush.”

“I’ll do my best.”

“Well, that will be a darn sight better than the wife’s when it comes to clothes. She gets them tubby. Pick out something slick–on the order of what you’ve got on.”

“Why, this is only a two-dollar blouse!”

He flipped her a one-hundred-dollar bill.

“Don’t come back with any change.”

Late in the afternoon of this day which had transmitted its tremor of large transaction throughout the offices, long since partitioned off into ground-glass cells and softened with sound-eating rugs, Lilly was summoned to the office of R.J., carrying with her the box containing her purchases. Bruce was there, too, pacing between windows.

He met her up with an immediate inquiry.

“Mrs. Penny, did you go up to see that ‘June Blossom’ sketch last night?”

“Yes. I’m writing my report on it.”

Constantly now requests like this were tossed in the form of a pair of tickets on her desk.

“Well?”

“Sweet, clean, and obvious.”

He nodded in a short corroborative manner he had, drawing up alongside the desk.

“Take a telegram, please. ‘Mr. Sam Sadler, People’s Theater, Cleveland, Ohio. Book _June Blossom_ for week of nineteenth.’ And now if you’ll sign and stamp this mortgage after my brother and I sign.”

The box proved cumbersome, so before she took up pen she held it out to R.J.

“The blouses,” she said. “There is a blue and a maroon. I hope Mrs. Visigoth is going to like them. And here is the change.”

“That’s mighty fine,” he said, smiling until a second chin appeared. “A trinket or two up his sleeve gives a fellow a right to ring his own door bell.”

He reached then, fumbling at the hasps of his alligator bag which stood by, opening it out and stooping to insert the package.

Simultaneously, as the mouth of that valise yawned, the two men leaped