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Star Dust

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"I hardly care to discuss with you the wisdom of our policies."

"But you must," cried Lilly, now thoroughly beside herself. "What about
the girl who would rather fight out her own destiny than live through
the miserable and immoral--yes, immoral--process of a marriage that she
realizes has been a mistake? Is there no provision for the woman who
hasn't a man-made grievance against society? Who simply wants her
one-hundred-per-cent-right to live? Women are coming to demand it more
and more, that right! I venture to say that ten years from now they will
be voting themselves that right. Now we're like a lot of half-hatched
chickens pecking through the shell. I've pecked through! My daughter may
live to see them all pecked through."

"Really, I can't see--"

"To-day a woman on her own with a child has only one meaning. I've been
treated like a leper. Suppose, for argument, my child hadn't had a
legitimate father. All the more reason a hand should have been held out
to us. But I'm not asking anything. A night's lodging, madam, for which
I can pay. Here it is in advance. I'm not going to leave!"

The child was whimpering now lustily and wanting to lift its little body
from the long confinement of wrappings. There were tears and anger and a
brilliant sort of challenge in Lilly's voice and in her glance that
seemed to dart and glance off the starchy shirt waist of the figure
behind the desk. She sat clicking her pencil against her teeth, eyes
averted, as if to galvanize herself against a personality that dared to
intrude itself through a "case."

She openly regarded her work, this Miss Letitia Scullen, who was one day
to lay down her life valiantly enough at the altar of typhus in
war-stricken Rumania, as an exact science. Indigency, like typhus, was a
pandemic which must ultimately respond to an antitoxin. It was as if her
forty-seven charges were sick, and she reading the blood test of
indigency, prescribing in toto.

"If you are what you say you are, then you are not entitled to the
benefits of this home. Our girls here receive absolutely collective
treatment along lines worked out for their general needs. Your case is
an isolated one. You are not in need."

"But please, please, please, is there no need except that covered by
vice? Can you not conceive of a plight being all the worse because there
is no provision for it?"

"It is unthinkable that a woman like you, of evident refinement and
education, should find herself in the predicament you describe."

"Then thank God for being a rebel, if it will make you ponder on what is
new, untried, and not according to formula. There are only two kinds of
women you social workers recognize. The sheltered ones and the
unfortunates. What about the woman who is neither, but merely out on her
own? I try to meet life as an individual and not as a woman. What
happens? Doors slam in my face. I can't buy a night's lodging for the
child in my arms. It sounds like a thirty-cent melodrama. And now you,
whose life study is life--I tell you I won't be turned off. You must
take me in."

"It's very irregular."

"I'll pay."

"We don't accept paying inmates. You may make the institution a present
if you so desire. I'll put you up in the infirmary--it happens to be
empty; and you may have the use of the nursery equipment adjoining, and
there is a practical nurse in the house. Understand that this is
entirely outside the regulations of the institution and I must ask you
to make different arrangements as soon as possible."

"Thank you," said Lilly, ashamed to be grateful and the tears pressing
against her eyeballs. "Oh, my dear, thank you! Thank you!"

And so it came about that in a room of five white cots and three barred
windows, with the aid of a practical nurse and a tiny gas stove on a tin
mat, Lilly prepared her daughter for the night.

In her bag, lugged over from the hospital by one of the uniformed girls,
was the little layout, parting gift of the institution, including a
machine-stitched flannelet nightdress that Lilly could have wept over
as she fastened the thick button at the throat.

Still, with the chapped-faced nurse moving about the bare, ugly room on
her everlasting mission of efficiency, diluting the formula to just the
proportion required, rubbing the little bud of a body with coarse
cornstarch, the sense of ownership did not descend upon Lilly.

She wanted to feel this new estate of hers. In all the three and a half
weeks there had never been a moment of privacy, to give reality to this
pink-and-blue-and-yellow bloom that had somehow flowered from the tree
of her being.

She wanted the quiet to reconcile this new, this terrible, this
throat-throbbing sweetness with the Medean fury which had flung her, a
shuddering, choking mass upon that rooming-house floor. She wanted to
feel again and again the quick, ecstatic brash that could race in a wave
over her when she held this warm rose of life to her breast.

At just before nine there was a wordless round of inspection from the
white starched shirt waist surmounted with the spectacles and the
black-ribbon guard, a final look-in from the nurse whose face was
Swedishly blond and pink from chapping, a bottle of milk placed in the
small refrigerator, and the little bundle on the pillow covered with an
extra thickness of murky blanket.

At nine o'clock the lights went out just as Lilly had slid into her own
gown. She tiptoed to the door, barefooted, locking it and thereby
violating a rule of the institution. There must have been a moon
somewhere behind housetops, because through the three shadeless windows
a sort of gleam whitely powdered the silence.

She was suddenly full of fear there in the darkness and the aloneness,
and ran over to the cot for the miracle of that soft body to her flesh.
She lifted it from the nest of coarse pillow, even in sleep the tendril
of a little finger closing about hers.

There were crisscross shadows on the floor, cast there by the iron bars
at the windows. Her child lay asleep in an institutional garb of
charity. The father of that child, ignorant of its very existence, was
at that moment, and at a distance of one thousand miles, adjusting a new
rubber stopper to the bathtub in the home he shared with his
parents-in-law.

On one of the empty cots the rather silly silhouette of Lilly's hat, its
buckram rim sadly broken, persisted through the gloom. Her shoes, in a
little attitude of waiting beside a chair, lopped slightly of a
tipsiness induced by run-over heels. In the jumble of changing hands the
black valise of her underwear, handkerchiefs, and baby garments had
disappeared, so her little washed-out chemise, quite dainty, hung drying
over a table edge.

Outside the Home for Indigent Girls a city that took absolutely no
reckoning of Lilly wove its pattern toward another to-morrow.

She was alone with the first realization of her child, in a moment that
might have shaped itself to crush her. She felt a throbbing that seemed
to make a rush for her throat. She sat down on the bed, leaning over
until her body formed a sort of cave about the child. She had a sense of
the power to strangle both their lives out there in that strange
darkness. An old fear leaned out at her.

"Am I mad?"

More and more the sense of wanting to strangle flowed over her.

"Here--to-night--now!"

A cry leaped up under her pressure, startled, and with a stab of pain in
it.

She swooped the little squirming burden up under her chin; she buried
her head into the warm froth of curls, the light wind of her laughter
suddenly sweeping the room.

"Mother's darling! Twiddle-de-darling. Moonlit flake! Beautifulest.
Zoeist flower in the world. Mine alone! Alone mine! Oodle-de-dums.
To-morrow! To-morrow!"

* * * * *

There followed for Lilly a week of scars, each exactly as deep as the
day was long.

First, the heartbreaking business of giving over her child to the
chappy-faced nurse and a rear room of nursery hung in the odors of
formaldehyde and lined up into a ward of white iron cribs, each screened
in with a clothes horse of little flannel garments of a thickness that
wrung Lilly's heart.

There were now two additional occupants--a poor, top-heavy infant with a
fourteen-year-old mother, father unknown, and the teething baby of one
of the blue-uniformed inmates whose routine allowed her periods of the
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.

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