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Star Dust

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"Oh, my dear, my dear!"

"I don't know why I'm airing my troubles here. God knows you are bottled
up enough about yours, if you have any, but I thought surely you knew.
Everyone does. Is it any wonder that my sister's home-coming is a
nightmare to me? She doesn't want to come; I can read between the lines
of her letter she's fighting it. But you see, Auchinloss is a great man.
He's been invited to conduct his own symphony at its American _première_
and naturally has taken this opportunity to bring about her American
debut. You can imagine my parents' pride."

"I can see it. Why, your father can't keep his face straight--he's
always sort of smiling, slyly, to himself."

"Their daughter, Millie du Gass, coming home with an opera triumph back
of her in every European city, the great Auchinloss himself coming to
conduct for her American debut. That is the kind of homecoming they're
looking forward to and the kind I must make possible for them. My
mother, who screams out every girl in trouble who dares to come into the
drug store for help!"

When Lilly bade Alma Neugass good night, they kissed, a dark bony hand
lingering on each of Lilly's shoulders.

"You've your decision before you yet, Miss Parlow, and you're young and
pretty, too. Much as I love that little sister of mine, and can't find
it in my heart to blame her, I know that somewhere there are women big
enough not to have to pay the price. You--there's something about
you--something so, if you'll permit me to say it, so boyish--so
clean--so wholesome. You should be big enough not to have to pay
the price."

"If only I felt that your sister--cared. That is so horrible--the
beauty-and-the-beast part. To place personal ambition above her
body--the body that holds her soul! Ugh!"

"She sent his picture. He's hairy like an ape. My. little white
sister--he's--hairy, I tell you, like an ape."

"I think I would have to want something--love something--enough to tear
out my very heart for it before I could pay her price. Nothing on earth,
Miss Neugass, can be so hideous--as that! I--I imagine it's flying in
the face of the first law of nature--nothing so hideous as giving of
self to--in--in--payment--"

Tears were racking the worn form of Miss Neugass, Lilly wrapping her in
arms that soothed.

"You musn't," she said; "you've your big job ahead of you."

Through the left wall came a sharp trilogy of raps.

"All right, ma. Coming!" cried Miss Neugass, starting up instantly, her
voice lifted and absolutely without tremor.

That night Lilly dreamed the whole of her marriage. Her father with his
face distorted by lather before his shaving mirror. The Leffingwell Rock
Church. Little Evelyn Kemble placing the white-satin cushion. Herself
and Albert finally locking the door of their new little home that
wedding night.

It was then she awoke with a scream.




CHAPTER XX

About a week later an advertisement in a morning paper caught Lilly's
eye.

WANTED:--Refined young woman of good appearance and soprano voice, to
sing in music store. Must be able to accompany self. Apply between
twelve and six. Broadway Melody Shop, 1432 Broadway.

A recurring and dragging sense of lassitude was over her these mornings,
so that it was all she could do to drag herself through two hours of
practice in the parlor, scrupulously given over by Mrs. Neugass, who
moved constantly and audibly about the kitchen.

Her lessons, one every Tuesday morning, with Leopold Ballman, were
tiresome unmusical periods of diaphragm exercises and an entire tearing
down and reconstruction process of the previous methods taught her. It
was tedious, standing before the long gold-and-black pier glass in the
front parlor, watching the tendinous rise and fall of her lower thorax
when her forbidden arias were on top of the piano and a cabinet of
Millie du Gass's sheet music bulged there at her disposal.

The old disturbing ache would climb up to the back of her neck, and her
half-baked power of concentration falter at the arid monotony of,
breathe-in; breathe-out.

There were about five months between Lilly and the hour of her supreme
travail. They might have been five years, while she paused suspended,
as it were, in this state of abeyance that hung between the hot August
day of her leave-taking of home and that chimeric hour ahead which
depended like a stalactite, stabbing space.

Her most tangible concern was a money one. The breaking of another
one-hundred-dollar bill was imminent and it frightened her. She reduced
her vocal lessons, at three dollars the hour, to one every other week,
finally discontinuing entirely, and took to haunting the agencies daily,
leaving her address where no initial charges were required and scanning
incessantly the want advertisements under Amusements.

She applied one Monday morning at the Broadway Melody Shop, a mere aisle
wedged between a theater and a _rôtisserie_, a megaphone inserted
through a hole cut in the plate-glass frontage that was violently
plastered over with furiously colored copies of what purported to be the
latest song hits: "If I Could Be Molasses to Your Griddle Cakes."
"Snuggle Up, Snookums." "Honey, Does You Love Me?" "Cakin' the Walk."
"It's Twilight on the Tiber." "Tu-Lips for Mine!"

A sort of managerial salesman in a number-thirteen-and-a-half collar and
a part that ran through his varnished-looking hair bisecting the back of
his head like a poodle's, and a soft, pimply jowl that had never borne
beard, stuck up a random sheet of music on the piano, so placed that its
tones carried straight through the megaphone to the sidewalk.

She played and sang it off easily, her tones jaunty and staccato and her
desire to please quivering through them. He stood beside her, the angle
of his body so that the sharp bone of his hip pressed against her.

"Rag up," he said once, insinuating the movement with a slight wriggle
that ran through his apparently rigid body. She quickened her speed,
leaning forward to read more surely:

"Uh-uh! my ba-a-aaby,
You drive me cra-azy,
Uh-uh! quit shovin',
I'm only lov--in'."

The words running along to a stuttering syncopation that filled her with
self-disgust as she sang them. But she finished with quite a flourish,
swinging around on the stool to face him.

"You need ragging up, kiddo. You've the speed of a funeral march."

"A little practice is what I need," she said, half hoping to obtain.

"I'll try you at fifteen a week. Eleven to six Tuesday, Thursday, and
Friday. The other evenings we close at eleven; fifty cents extra for
supper money. You on?"

"Yes."

"Slick, ain't you? Who peeled you to-day, Miss Bermuda Onion? Aw,
touchy! No harm meant. You're too big to suit me; I like 'em squab size.
Rag up a bit between now and to-morrow, Miss Onion."

For five weeks in the little slit of store that was foul with tired and
devitalized air, and concealed behind a screen that shut off the
megaphone device, Lilly sang through an eight and sometimes a
twelve-hour day, her voice drifting out to the sidewalk with a remote
calling quality.

To her relief she quickly learned that Mr. Alphonse
Rook--"Phonzie"--spent the greater part of his time at the office of the
Manhattan Music Publishing Company, under which auspices the Broadway
Melody Shop operated.

He was replaced by a salesgirl of such superlative dress and manner that
her long jet earrings were like exclamations at the audacity of her
personality. An habitual counter line-up of Broadway mental brevities in
the form of young men with bamboo sticks and eyes with perpetual ogles
in them, would while away the syncopated hours with her, occasionally
Lilly emerging from behind her screen to "come up for air," as Miss
Gertrude Kirk put it.

She was "Gert" to the boys, and from the propinquity of that sliver of
store and the natural loquacity of Miss Kirk, which would have
overflowed a much more generous area, Lilly was to learn much of life as
it is lived on that bias which is cut against the warp and woof of
society. Miss Kirk had twice been up in night court. Her mother
alternated under three aliases and was best known on the night boat that
plied between New York and Albany. Occasionally this mother visited upon
her daughter, her laughter hitting through the store like cymbals. She
had the sagging flesh of an old fowl and cheeks that had not been
cleansed of rouge long enough for the pores to breathe in and keep the
flesh alive. To Lilly she was as terrible as a plucked hen on a
butcher's block, with her head dyed to a vicious cock's-comb red and the
wattles of loose skin beneath her chin.

In fact, she was familiarly known around the shop as "old bird," and on
one occasion had invited Lilly for a Sunday excursion "up to Albany."

"Lay off, ma," said her daughter. "Fer Gossake, can't you take a
tumble?"

Miss Kirk's tongue was as nimble as her fingers. She used them both
lightly. Would tear the flounce off her too lacy petticoat to bind up a
messenger boy's cut finger, and no scarf-pin that came within three feet
of her was immune from her quick touch. The only hour that ever struck
for her was sex o'clock. The unmentionable lay mentioned in her
discourse so frequently that to Lilly the Broadway Melody Shop became a
slimy-sided vat, horrible with small-necked young men with flexible
canes and Gertrude Kirk's slit-eyed stare of calculation.

"I don't know what you're trying to put over, Lilly-of-the-valley;
you're one too many for me. But I'd stake my life on one thing."

"What?"

"You got a caul over your face."

"A what?"

"Caul. Sort of veil some get born with. I know a girl carried hers
around in a little wooden box for luck. Well, you got that white-veil
kind of look that would blacklist you for the Vestal Virgin Sextet. I
can pick 'em every time. You look to me like--say, I got a little mud
puddle of my own to play in without wetting my feet in yours."

"I'm sure I don't know what you're talking about," said Lilly, crashing
out the opening bars of "Oh, Willie, I love you when you're silly."

"No?" said Miss Kirk, the slit-eyed stare of terrible sophistication
narrowing down to two blade edges.

That night Lilly eyed herself in all the plate-glass windows as she
walked to the car. She was straight as a lance, but before she went to
bed she readjusted the gathers of her skirt band, pushing them forward.

One evening, because she saw it in the window of one of the Amsterdam
Avenue petty shops, she bought, furtively, a baby dress with a little
nursery legend embroidered on the yoke. She stole home with the package
up under her coat, like a thief. Once in her room, she laid it out on
the bed. It was as tiny as the French apron of the French maid who opens
the play, and as sheer. She wanted suddenly to finger it, and did,
laying her cheek to it with a rushing sense of sweetness, and then
suddenly, on wild lashing tears of her resentment and terror, her hands
tightening into and wringing it. Dragging the suitcase out from beneath
her bed, she crammed in the little garment, and finally, strapping down
the lid again, laid her head against it, silently screaming her despair.

Strangely enough, that very night, long after the street noises had
thinned and she had heard Isaac Neugass, creeping up from the drug
store, drag the bolt across the apartment door, Lilly sat suddenly up in
bed out of a hot tossing period of light doze. She was often crying
unconsciously into her sleep these nights, so that her eyes were
tear-bitten and dilated into the darkness. The night bell that connected
from the drug store was gouging the silence with a long-sustained
grilling. Soft-soled feet were already padding down the hallway past her
door, a bolt withdrawn, then voices.

The grunty tones of Mr. Neugass and a woman's fast soprano that rose and
rent the silence like the tear of silk. More feet down the hallway; sobs
that were filled with coughing; Mrs. Neugass, pitched high in the key of
termagency; the faint, expostulatory voice of Alma Neugass; and finally
one throat-torn sob that grated like a buzz saw against the night and
the banging, reverberating slam of a door.

Barefooted, trembling in the chill, Lilly peered out into the hallway,
the grotesque procession returning down its length. Mr. Neugass bent to
his tired angle, nightshirt striking him midships as it were, the two
dim white women creeping after.

"What has happened?"

"It's nodding, Miss Parlow. It's a shame for decent beoble they should
have to listen. Wash your ears out of it, Alma, and go back to bed."

But instead, to Lilly's importuning arm, Miss Neugass slid into her
room, closing the door softly behind her, standing there shivering in
the blue kind of darkness.

"It's the old story," she said--"some girl in a fix and trying to get pa
to help her. It makes me sick, positively sick."

"A fix?"

"Every once in a while some poor creature comes begging pa to break the
law and help her. It gets him wild. Any girl who doesn't want her child
is a monster and every girl in trouble a vicious sinner. This poor
little thing didn't look seventeen; I couldn't quite understand her. A
Pole, I think. Something about the beach at Coney Island. A man she'd
never seen before or since. My mother in her righteousness! Her
terrible, untempted righteousness. Her easy righteousness. The law in
its righteousness. It can be just as wrong and horrible to have children
as it can be sublime. What right has that little underbred girl to bring
an illegitimate life into the world? The law doesn't provide for the
illegitimate child. Why should it provide for its birth? What right had
my father to withhold his help? ... There are worse crimes than taking
human life; one of them is to give life under such conditions."

"You mean, Alma, there's a way not to--a way out?"

"Why, you poor baby! Of course there is if you see to it in time. That
is, during the first few weeks."

"How--many?"

"Oh, five or six at the outside. Go back to bed, girl; you'll catch your
death. O Lordy! such is life!" And went out.

For the third time in her life, Lilly fainted that night, standing
shivering in her nightdress for a second after Miss Neugass had left. In
a room barely wide enough to contain her length she dropped softly
against the bed, and, her fall broken, slid the remaining distance to
the floor.

After a while the chill air from the open window revived her and she
crept shudderingly into bed.




CHAPTER XXI

Two weeks before Christmas such a gale of house-cleaning swept through
the Neugass apartment that the scoured smell of pine-wood floors and the
scrubbed taste of damp matting lurked at the very threshold.

Then one Sunday morning Mlle. Millie du Gass and maid, also Felix G.
Auchinloss, were registered at the Waldorf.

All that day there wound into Lilly's room the aroma of fowl simmering
in their juices, the quick hither and thither of feet down the hallway,
and later the whirring of an ice-cream freezer and the quick
fork-and-china click of egg whites in the beating. For days she had
hardly glimpsed the family, except as they passed her on excited little
comings and goings, and always package-laden. A strip of new hall carpet
appeared, Miss Neugass nailing it down one night, calling out short,
excited orders through a mouthful of tacks. The piano had been tuned.

A sense of delicacy kept Lilly to her room that bright cold Sunday. She
did her breathing exercises; washed out some handkerchiefs and
stockings; tightened the buttons on a pretty new brown coat with a touch
of modish stone-martin fur at the collar which she had purchased, not
without qualms, for twenty-seven dollars and a half, at an
advertised sale.

Then for two long immobile hours she sat with her cheeks crumpled into
her palms, staring out across the sun-washed roofs and roofs.

At noon she took in a bottle of milk from the window sill, thawed it,
slid a hatpin along the wrapping of a new tin of biscuit. She alternated
between bites and sips, sitting on the bed edge, her gaze into the
design of the wall paper.

At home they must be sitting down to dinner, her father adjusting his
napkin by the patent fasteners and tilting back his head for the
invariable preamble of throwing the contents of his water tumbler down
at a gulp. Her mother in the hebdomadal polka-dotted foulard, her bangs
frizzed. Albert gnawing close to the drumstick, jaws working.

As a matter of fact, just that scene was at just that moment in its
enactment, and in all the fullness of her intuition she now knew it as
unerringly as if it had flowed in replica to her through time and space,
etching itself in dry point into her consciousness.

How often and with uncanny fidelity to fact her retroactive state of
mind had guided her step by step over the site of the domestic disaster.

Her parents' home, reaching around like an amoeba, inclosing Albert in
living walls. The slow readjustment, dumfounded rage, and despair
simmering gradually to bitterness and hardening finally to despair. The
soft, sensitive ground of their sorrow constantly spongy with the
wellsprings of grief beneath, but the surface bubbles showing less and
less, and ultimately a hard dryness setting in. Her heart would hurt as
tangibly as if the surface of her body were red with a wound from it,
yet, sitting there at her milk and biscuit, her gaze into the monotonous
repetition of wall-paper design, the thought of that Sunday dinner out
there, with its invariable roast chicken, bread stuffing, candied sweet
potatoes, and lemon-meringue pie; the Sunday-afternoon lethargy; the
hypothenuse of her father asleep in his chair, the newspaper over his
face; Albert, the celluloid toothpick moving along his lips, puttering
around at favorite locks and bells; the mere visualization was such a
fillip to her present that she lay back on the bed, stretching her arms
and legs like a great, luxurious cat, her lips curved to a smile.

At five o'clock, as she lazed there, Alma Neugass burst in without the
usual scrupulously observed preamble of a knock. There were two round
spots of color out on her long cheeks, and her white cotton shirt waist,
always bearing the imprint of sleeve protectors, was replaced by a
dark-blue silk of candy-stripe plaid, with a standing collar of lace
that fell in a jabot down the front, held there by an ivory hand of a
brooch. There was something of the mausoleum about poor Alma, the grim
skeleton of her everyday personality finding but icy warmth beneath the
ivory, lace, and the seldom-warn black broadcloth skirt that was pinned
over two inches at the waistline to hold it up.

"Did you think I'd forgotten you? I haven't--but it's been such a rush."

She sat down on a chair edge, pressing a bony hand to her brow.

"You poor thing, you're dead tired."

"They're here, you know. Docked this morning, almost twenty-four hours
ahead of schedule. They--they would have come up immediately, but
customs detained them three hours. They are at the hotel now and won't
be up until supper. It's all so confusing. The reporters and
photographers on their trail. He won't let anyone at her until she's
rested. I talked to him over the telephone. His voice is--hairy."

"I've never seen you look so nice, Miss Neugass."

"If I stop to think, I'll scream."

"Then you mustn't stop, dear."

"You should see my father; he can't sit still. I never realized how
little and--old he's getting until I put his black suit on him. He's so
full of pride he--Oh, what a mockery--for him to dare to come
here--home--with her."

"Miss Neugass--this is not the time. Not now."

A cocaine sort of courage seemed to lock her face back into its rather
nondescript immobility.

"You're right," she said. "I'm acting like a fool," and rose. "What I
came in to say, get into that little pink dress of yours about
nine-thirty and I may be able to manage it for you to-night. Two minutes
of his time may mean everything to you and nothing to him."

Lilly flashed to her feet.

"To-night!"

"Keep your head. Sing the 'Jewel Song.' It's always a good, showy
standby. Let go--the way I heard you practice the other Sunday
morning--and forget that it's Auchinloss or anyone else listening
to you."

"No, no, not to-night, Miss Neugass. I--I'm not prepared. It's too
sudden."

"It's as good as any other time. Besides, to-night we have him here, and
there is no telling when we will again. This isn't what you would call
the ideal headquarters for a pair of celebrities. I suppose, if the
truth is known, Millie dreads bringing him here at all. Besides, they
leave to-morrow for Boston, and with the line-up of entertainments the
newspapers say are planned for them, there is no telling when we will
get him alone again."

"I'm not in voice these days. It's all roughened up since I'm singing
downtown. I--oh, I'm not ready to-night, Miss Neugass."

"Nonsense! Don't ask Opportunity to wait outside when he knocks. He may
move on and not return."

"I--I'm so frightened. I've such--such odds against me--right now. What
if he only rubs his hands and says, 'very nice'? What if--"

"That's where you'll have to swallow your medicine. After all, even the
great Auchinloss represents only one man's opinion."

"But his judgment has proved itself--time and time again."

"That's why you have the chance to-night that comes once in a lifetime.
Take it."

"I will!"




CHAPTER XXII

It was just before midnight, after a four-hour period of waiting in the
pink mull dress, when came the summons which brought Lilly into the
presence of Felix Auchinloss.

Cramped from the long period of taut waiting, she was so dry of throat
that in spite of constantly sipped water she could only gulp her reply
to Miss Neugass's knock and eagerly inserted head.

"Quick! He'll hear you now before they leave." She followed her, without
a word, down the hallway and into a front parlor brilliant with the
full-flare gas jets, a bisque angel in the attitude of swinging dangling
from the chandelier, and, swimming in the dance, a circle of faces.

"Miss Parlow, this is my sister, Millie du Gass."

A Greek chorus could have swayed to the epiphany in Millie's voice.

With her short bush of curls, little aquiline profile true to her
father's, tilted upward, as if sniffing the aerial scent, her slender
figure Parisienne to outlandishness, the stream of Millie's ancestry
flowed through the tropics of her very exotic personality. She was the
magnolia on the family tree, the bloom on a century plant that was heavy
with its first bud. Even at this time, slightly before her
internationalism as a song bird was to carry her name to the remote
places of the earth, a little patina of sophistication had set in,
glazing her over and her speech, which carried the whir of three
acquired languages.

"And this is Doctor Auchinloss. I've told him about you and your
eagerness for a foothold. He's going to give you a little home-made
audition. Will you hear Miss Parlow now, Doctor Auchinloss?"

The face of Felix Auchinloss, also to become familiar through subsequent
years of American dictatorship, seemed by the hirsute vagary of a black
beard joining up _via_ sideburns with a Pompadour of sooty black, to
peer through a porthole. It did just that. A face in window looking out
with very quick perceptions which ruffled it not at all, upon a world
that came to him chiefly through two channels, his supernaturally
attuned hearing and his palate.

He could detect a slurred note of the sixteenth violin in the crash of a
ninety-piece ensemble of orchestration, and one-eighth-of-a-second
miscalculation of his two-minute egg could embroil a breakfast table. A
creature of elbows and knees, such as a chimpanzee is, the backs of his
hands were hairy, but the eye seldom strayed from his face. It knew its
Huxley, that face, its Hegel and its Kant. It loved the smoothness of
young girls' bodies. It was attuned to the music of the spheres. It
could hold in leash the outrageous temperaments that responded to his
baton and look with impassivity, even cruelty, upon torture. Mostly the
torture of women. Also it could brighten out of its imperturbability at
the steaming sight of a dish of _sauerbraten_.

There had been no _sauerbraten_ on Mrs. Neugass's festive board, rather
fowl, in a white glue of gravy and great creamy dumplings, and under
three helpings and the steady pour of an extra lager the great
Auchinloss had expanded and expounded.

His glance, still warmed, took in Lilly at a sweep finding resting place
at the swell of her bosom.

There was something about Lilly as she stood thereof the winglike
smoothness of a little wild duck, wet from a skim across water. A slick
and pale kind of beauty which ordinarily held little appeal for him
except that her bosom was very white. Very, very white, he thought.

"Zoprano?" he asked, his gaze still beneath her chin.

"Lyric soprano."

"Om-m-m-m!" After the manner of having his doubts.

"You accompany her, Felix," said Miss du Gass, not unkindly and actually
with an intensive kind of eagerness, as if for the diverting of
his interest.

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