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Star Dust

F >> Fannie Hurst >> Star Dust




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.

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