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Star Dust

F >> Fannie Hurst >> Star Dust




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?"

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