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Star Dust

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"And my father, Mrs. Schum?"

"Fine. Mary says he's a bit whiter, but not a whit changed. He's done
well in the rope business, hasn't he? Although I always say it was your
mother's practical ways got him on his feet, and from what I understand
that young man you married has given him many a lift. They've gone in
business together, haven't they? They tell me, Lilly, there is not a
steadier or more advancing young man than yours. Ah me, the ways of
young ones are strange I guess you haven't heard about Harry, either?"

"No."

"He's a good boy, Harry is, Lilly, but I've been through trouble with
him. That's the reason for our being here. You see, Lilly, him being a
poor orphan all his life, they're all against him. The little fellow
never had the right raising, knocking around with all those nigger
servants, and me with never the time to do for him."

"Oh, Mrs. Schum, how can you! Why, there wasn't any of the youngsters
in the boarding house had a sweeter influence over him than Harry."

"No, no. It was all my fault. I was too pressed trying to make ends
meet. I should have given up that big house years ago for a few roomers
like now. He got in bad ways, Lilly. Not noisy and with gangs like some
rough boys would. But quiet--solitary-like. I never knew him to hang
around with that gang of boys that used to loaf over at Pirney's drug
store or anything like that, but after the Kembles and you folks left,
Harry got to stealing, Lilly. Little things. The child never took
anything more than a bit of lead pipe from Quinn's empty house across
the street, and once a little silver trinket from a milliner I had up in
the third floor front--"

"He used to do little things like that when he was a child, don't you
remember, dear?"

"It's his father in him, Lilly. Maybe you don't know it, but that's what
killed my Annie, that same streak which was the ruination of a fine,
educated man like his father. But Harry's got too much of his mother in
him to be all bad; he--"

"Of course he has, dear."

"To get back to our coming East, Lilly. One night he--Harry brought me
home a brooch, Lilly. A right pretty gold one with a garnet in. It used
to hurt him that I never had any finery. He wouldn't take anything to
buy drink and bad times for himself like other boys, but he'd steal
something to bring home to his old grandmother. All that night, Lilly,
down there in the basement kitchen, I was nearly crazy trying to get out
of him where he got that brooch. The next day they was after him, for it
and some--nickel-plated facets from out of the washroom where he was
working. They hushed it up. Old Judge Mayer, you remember his sister
used to board with me. But the next time there was a little
trouble--this time a--a little finger ring--not even all gold. I--we--we
had to sell out and come here--where we could be swallowed up."

"Oh, Harry, Harry, how could he!"

"Wasn't his fault. It wasn't the place for him out there any more with
everybody against a poor orphan. I've cut him off, Lilly, from his bad
ways out there. You're the first I've seen or heard of since we left,
and I don't want you to even write it to your folks that we're here.
There's the little matter of that ring--not even all gold--and--some
lead pipe--forgotten, now--please God, but they might want him back for
it--that's how down on him they are. He's a good boy, Harry is, Lilly,
with respect for his grandmother. He's had a slip up or two, but the
best of us have that, haven't we?"

"Yes."

"It's to be expected. A boy can't shake off his inheritance overnight,
can he? Can he?"

"No, I suppose not, dear."

"Don't let on, Lilly. He's sensitive. We'll win yet, Harry and me will.
The world hasn't taken much stock of a poor little basement orphan, but
with the kind of mother he had, his grandmother will live yet to see the
day that it does take account of him. Harry's right smart with draping
and decorating around the house, and if I do say it, when he dresses a
window the traffic stops. He's a great one for reading and following up
the magazines, too. Smart. I'd stake my all on a boy that has got it in
him to treat his grandmother with the gentleness he does. And children!
There is not one on the street he can pass for love of them. A boy like
that cannot be all bad, can he, Lilly?"

Her eyes magnified with the glaze of tears so that one blink would have
overflowed them, Lilly laid her lips to the veiny old hand, her voice
down into the lap of blue-checkered apron.

"We mothers--Mrs. Schum--God, how we love to suffer to them!"

"We!"

Her face in the tired old lap, the little room seeming to crowd up with
voice, Lilly talked on then, until the little clock inset into a china
plate ticked out an hour, and in the kitchen, Harry, with all his old
capacity for meekness, lay asleep with his head in his arms and the
little dinner cloying on the stove.

"I'm afraid my old brain don't take it all in, Lilly. You mean your
mother--father--none of them--know?"

"It isn't for you to understand, dear. The mere telling of it has
somehow eased things. We are bits of seaweed, dear Mrs. Schum, tossed up
on the same shores. You and your fugitive from environment. Me and mine.
If your secret is to be mine, mine must be yours."

"God have mercy on you, Lilly, wherever it is your ways are leading
you."

"He has had, Mrs. Schum."

"I don't know. I don't know. You know best, I guess, what is in your
heart."

"I do. It's this. Why can't you take--us?"

"Who?"

"I want her with me. She is getting big enough for the kind of training
I have all mapped out for her. And now you--it's nothing short of
destiny led me to you. I could put her in day school. Can take her
myself in the mornings, say, and you, dear Mrs. Schum, are to call for
her? I can pay, I can help you and you can help me. Later we may take a
larger place with extra room. Mrs. Schum, don't you see, we've been
thrown together!"

"Why, Lilly--I believe--I do."

It was after ten o'clock when, over a belated little meal, they ceased
their planning. Eleven, when Harry finally walked with her across the
viaduct to the street car. Stars were out. Thick white ones. She skipped
a little, ran a little, and stood a moment at the parapet, looking down
at the lights which followed the narrow course of the river. She felt
suddenly wild for bauble. Her flesh, which never particularly craved the
lay of fine fabric, felt cheated. She wanted to wind her body to its
utmost flexuosity, bare her throat to the wind, and fling out a gesture
the width of Vegas to Capella.

At the corner she took Harry's face between her hands, kissing him
soundly on the lips.

"Good night, Harry, and God bless you for letting me find you."

Long after that kiss, ever so lightly bestowed, lay burning against his
lips and she had boarded the street car, he stood looking after, with
his very light-blue eyes.




Book Three


THE WINE




CHAPTER I

When Zoe Penny was still in knee frocks she graduated, first in her
class, from the public grade school. It was a period of great stress for
Lilly, of happy shopping and the sweet anxieties of ribbon and frock,
and there were always two high circles of color out on her cheeks, and
from time to time she would force herself to sit down, uncurl her
fingers of their tensity, as Ida Blair had taught her, and thus,
starting in at the hands, try to relax.

After two or three moves from the makeshift of the Tremont Avenue
apartment, they were finally installed in an old brownstone walk-up
house in West Ninety-third Street, a stone's throw removed from an
avenue of Elevated structure and petty shops, but with a quiet enough,
if gloomy, dignity. One of those tunnel dwellings, the light from the
front room and kitchen gradually petering out into a middle room of
almost absolute darkness.

Lilly and her daughter occupied what corresponded to the parlor, a room
of white woodwork, flimsy white mantelpiece, and gilded radiator; one of
the vertical layers and layers of just such city parlors. Two narrow
front windows looked down into Ninety-third Street and there were closed
white folding doors with again a rented piano against them. A pretty
screen of Japanese paper with a sprig of wistaria across it shut off a
bureau with a layout of much juvenile claptrap of hair ribbons, side
combs, and the worthless treasures of childhood. Between the windows a
"lady's" desk with hinged writing slab, really Lilly's, but mostly the
dangling place for a pair of Zoe's roller skates and its pigeonholes
bulging with her daughter's somewhat extraneous matter. But there were a
two-tone brown rug, and yellow silk curtains saved the room from the
iniquitous Nottingham and Axminster school of interior defamation. The
walls, too, were tempered of their whiteness by brown prints of the
"Coliseum by Night," "The Age of Innocence," and Watt's "Hope,"
blindfolded, atop the world.

These pictures had been shopped one Saturday afternoon at the cut-rate
department store and were largely Zoe's choice, happily corroborated
by Lilly.

"Remarkable selections for a miss," said the clerk.

"Do you really think so?" cried Lilly, herself turning away from an
inclination toward the more chromatic and immediately exhilarated out of
a state of fatigue.

"Zoe, you're wonderful!"

"You're wonderful, too, Lilly."

There had been scarcely any baby talk.

At three, it was "Zoe, are you happy to see mother this week-end?"

"Ees, ummie."

And then one day out of the pellucid sky of babyhood, in answer to this
invariable query, it was:

"Yes, Lilly," so suddenly that something seemed to catch at her
heartbeat, but after a pang she let it stand.

Let Lilly's Zoe dawn upon you through this rather typical conversation
between them, the night before the graduation from grade school:

"Lilly, am I beautiful?"

"Why, yes, Zoe, so long as you remain fine and unspoiled by it. That is
the rarest kind of loveliness--inner beauty."

"I don't mean that kind. Am I pretty--for boys to look at?"

"You are pretty enough as little girls go, if that is what you mean."

"Is it wrong to have beaus?"

"That all depends. Why?"

"Oh, I just wanted to know."

Silence.

"A boy in my class, Gerald Prang, says he is my beau."

"Silly fellow."

"Ethel Watts has one. They kiss."

"That's horrid."

"Is it horrid for me and Ethel to kiss?"

"No, Zoe, you know it isn't."

"Would it be horrid for me and Gerald--Gerald and I--to kiss?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Listen, Zoe, a new word. The most beautiful and the most horrible thing
in the world can be sex."

"Sex?"

"Yes, dear. We haven't used the term in our talks--yet."

"Isn't it nice?"

"That lies with you."

"Then what is sex?"

"Zoe, the world of human beings is divided into two great classes, isn't
it? Boys and girls."

"Oh, I know! It's me and Gerald."

"In a way, yes, but--"

"If me and Ethel kiss, it isn't sex, but if me and Gerald kiss, it is."

"If only you wouldn't keep your mind running ahead. I want to be so
sure you are going to understand. That's what our botany and physiology
study has been for. To prepare you to understand. Now take the kingdom
of flowers, a rose, for instance--"

"Begin with us, Lilly. I don't want to hear any botany."

"But, Zoe--"

"Storks cannot bring babies, can they?"

"No. No. Who put such silly nonsense into your head? Don't let that
stupid fable hide from you the beautiful truth of birth. That is an
absurd story, Zoe, invented by those to whom the most sublime fact in
the world seems nasty. Babies are born, dear--out of lo--out of the
union of the sexes."

"Lilly, you are all trembling."

She took her daughter's face between her hands, her eyes probing and
yearning down into the brilliantly blue ones.

"It is because I want to keep life clean and beautiful for you. Nothing
that is natural is ugly, Zoe. It's only when we make something dark and
shameful of nature's methods that we are apt to misunderstand and
to err."

"Did you err, Lilly?"

"How?"

"With him?"

"Who?"

"Penny."

"Zoe! Zoe! why will you refer to him that way? Yes, I erred out of
ignorance, the kind I want to save you from. In my case your father had
to pay for the ignorance of a girl who married him without knowing what
marriage meant. Ignorance!"

"How funny to hear that--word."

"What word?"

"Father."

"Zoe! Zoe! Have I made it clear to you about him? How good--how
kind--how wronged by me?"

"You are always so afraid I won't understand that. Why shouldn't I?"

"Because it is hard, dear, for you to grasp it all--especially its
effect upon you. Some day you will understand how gradually I have tried
to prepare your mind to judge me. Even this little graduation to-morrow
is a milestone and makes me want to talk to you just a wee bit plainer.
Zoe, I--Zoe, does--does--"

"What?"

"Does it ever make you unhappy among the other children to be questioned
about your--father?"

"No."

"Do you ever feel that you would like to see him?".

"No."

"Why?"

"Because he is dull. He would spoil things for us."

"But doesn't it ever seem terrible to you, Zoe, that I haven't given you
the opportunity to judge him for yourself? If the day ever
comes--to-day, tomorrow, next year--that you want your father, you
understand, dear, don't you, that I will be the first to--"

"I tell you No! No! Why do you always keep telling me that? No! No! It's
better his not knowing there is a me! He makes me feel all suffocated up
the way he did you. I couldn't stand it. I want to be what I want
to be!"

"Oh, want it badly enough then, Zoe; want it badly enough!"

"The greatest singer in the world! That's what I want to be, and stand
on a stage with all the music there is around me as if I was in the
middle of an ocean of it. Lilly, will you take me to another matinée to
see Bernhardt? She makes me feel what I want to be. Just--just her being
what she--is makes me--want to be what I--am."

"You funny muddled youngster! Why, you didn't understand either what she
said or what the play was about."

"I didn't need to. It was her voice. Something she says with her voice
that I feel inside of me, only I can't say it. I wanted to cry. Isn't it
queer, Lilly, to feel so happy you want to cry? Oh, I've learned a new
one--only my voice won't say it the way I feel it. It's in our school
Wordsworth. Something inside of me cries all the time I'm saying it:

"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath elsewhere had its setting,
And cometh from afar;
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, Who is our home.

"Oh, Lilly--Lilly--I love that!--trailing clouds of glory--"

"You recited it beautifully, darling. See, you've made me cry."

"And I--I love you, Lilly. Hold me tight. I love you."

"My baby."

"Lilly, will you be--angry if I ask you something?"

"What?"

"Why--do you cry in the night sometimes?"

"Why, Zoe! Do I?"

"You know you do. I can feel you crying, and sometimes when I touch your
face--"

"Why, child--that's just my way. At night--things can be so real--so
terribly real. It is something you cannot understand yet."

"Do I make you sad?"

"No! No! No! My light, my life."

"Is it--Bruce?"

"Why, child--you talk nonsense! Don't speak of him as Bruce."

"I hate calling him Mr. Visigoth. It sounds--meek. I won't be meek! Are
you sure, Lilly, it isn't him--he?"

"Why, child, in Heaven's name should it be?"

"He looks at you so, Lilly. Maybe he makes you cry the way Bernhardt
makes me cry. By what he doesn't say. Saturday afternoons when I call
for you--he looks at you so when you're not looking."

"Why shouldn't he? We've worked together for all these years."

"You and he, when you stand up together you look so--so--_right_."

"Zoe, you are talking nonsense."

"But you're all red, aren't you?"

"No."

"Was it sex to say that?"

"No."

"Are you glad he is coming to-night?"

"Mr. Visigoth and I have business together, Zoe. We cannot sit around in
public places and discuss matters. I'm reading Mrs. Blair's play to him.
Go to bed now, dear."

"Mayn't I stay up?"

"No."

Her child looked up at her, chin cupped in her small hand and crystals
of light out in her eyes.

"Please, Lilly--why do you cry?"

"Why, darling, I don't cry because of anything you are quite ready to
understand. You know that, don't you, dear? There is nothing mother
won't talk over with you as soon as you are ready to take it all in.
That is part of her scheme for keeping life beautiful and free of rude
shocks for you."

"But I do understand--Lilly."

Long after her child slept that night Lilly sat beside her. She loved
the willful way the curls flung across the pillow. She leaned to the
full deep-chested breathing; leaned to kiss the lips which, slightly
parted, were perfect with the pollen of vitality.




CHAPTER II

She drew the screen finally about the little davenport, fussing at the
room, straightening it into a sort of formality with a woman's intuition
for this chair one-half inch closer to the hearth and that picture ever
so slightly straighter. The sheer frock she hung up in a closet,
covering it with a shroud of tissue paper, wadding her daughter's
none-too-carefully flung stockings into her shoes and tiptoeing to place
them beside the davenport. They were strong, ribbed stockings, still
warm and full of curves. She stroked over each. Once she paused at the
mantelpiece mirror, drawing back her lip from the even whiteness of her
teeth, perusing her points rather absent-mindedly.

Time had handled Lilly with a caress. At past thirty she was herself at
twenty, with even more youth, because at twenty she had looked herself
almost ten years hence. She had rounded out a bit, but not fatly. If
stouter at all, it was only in the slightly deeper look to the
cream-colored skin. There were two lines across her forehead, but they
had been there at eighteen and were quite obviously the result of
tilting her eyebrows so that the flesh folded; and besides, they
relieved her clearness, these horizontal traceries, of utter limpidity.

She had drifted, not all unconsciously, into a certain picturesque
uniformity of dress and could smile now over the large, cart-wheel hats,
coarse embroideries, and short-vamp shoes; neither was she often above
mentally contrasting herself in her annual seventy-five dollar suit of
dark-blue serge, natty sailor hat, and impeccable blouse, with a certain
coffee-colored linen with its slashings of coffee-dipped embroidery, and
the blouse that twirled with yards and yards of cotton Valenciennes.

There was still something of the look of the nun to Lilly, but a bit too
pinkly, as if she had dressed the part for Act One, but wore the ballet
skirts for Act Two underneath.

Her reaction asserted itself in her child. At thirteen Zoe wore straight
frocks of navy-blue alpaca with wide patent-leather belts and deep Eton
collars. They were mistaken sometimes, and, strangely enough, to Lilly's
invariable chagrin, for sisters, and Lilly, in her refutation, could be
smitingly swift.

At nine o'clock, to the staccato of three rings, she admitted Bruce
Visigoth, leading him down the tube of hallway. It annoyed her
unspeakably that Harry Calvert, collarless, poked out his head from a
doorway as they passed, and she was suddenly conscious of the smell of
stew. She had meant to burn an incense stick.

But she walked with that free, Hellenic stride of hers, without apology
and ahead of him.

"This is our room. Zoe is asleep there behind that screen. Won't you sit
down?"

He placed his hat and a light bamboo stick across the center table,
obviously oppressed with a sense of close quarters.

"Tell you what! Suppose we taxi over to Claremont. It's mild enough to
sit out on the terrace."

She met him with her levelest gaze.

"Aren't you going to be comfortable here?"

"Of course I am. There you go, getting sensitive right off. Only it is
a warmish evening, and why keep the sun-child awake?"

"Zoe can sleep," she said, with the barely perceptible arch to her
brows, "even through the fire of your presence."

"Good!" he said, seating himself in great good nature and trying not to
be quizzical. "So this is where you live."

He was frankly curious, his gaze humorous, but traveling over details,
his head upflung and the scenting movement to his nostrils. He had not
changed in weight, but in compactness and as if the house of his being
had settled with a fine kind of firmness. He was a bit squarer of jaw
and shoulder and ever so prematurely, and to the enormous fancy of
women, inclined to a hoar frost of gray at the temples.

She seated herself across the little square of table.

"You don't seem to care for us here."

"Certainly I do, only--only--"

"Only what?"

"Only--well, hanged if I make you out, lady. This place--it just isn't
you--that's all."

"Nonsense! I don't count. I'm just a sort of a means to an end, anyway."

"What end?"

"The wine!"

"The what?"

"Oh, nothing," she said, and laughed.

"Laugh again."

"Why?"

"I like it."

She looked her most serio-comic disapproval and held up a forefinger
with a warning little waggle to it.

"Please," she said, with an inlay of something deeper in her voice,
"don't begin by spoiling things."

"Rather not," he said. "I'm going to live up to your letter of the law."

Except for the frequent conferences now in the new Forty-second Street
offices that commanded a view of two rivers and a vast battledoor and
shuttlecock of the city, it was the first time in all those years that
stretched from the night at the Waldorf that they had sat thus
tête-à-tête. The day of the move she had ridden up from the old Union
Square offices with him, a stack of files in her lap. Once, too, on a
Saturday, the day of Zoe's invariable luncheon downtown and subsequent
opera matinee, he had strolled by what seemed mischievous chance into
the tea room where they were dining, but the occasion had hardly been a
success. There had been a great deal of badinage between him and Zoe,
but Lilly had finished her meal almost in silence. The day following, a
toy piano of complete range and really excellent workmanship had
arrived. She returned it without showing it to Zoe. These incidents lay
between them now.

"So this is where you live," he repeated, as if his long curiosity could
not find satiety in fact.

"That I have an abode seems to amaze you."

"It does. You're such a detached sort. You rise so above the mundane
things that clutter up life, that it is pretty much of a shock to
realize that you use tooth powder and carry a latchkey. It's hard to
reconcile Chopin and George Sand probably to those famous raw-meat
sandwiches they loved to eat at midnight. Well, that's about the way I
feel about you--hemmed in by--dull reality such as this."

"I like raw-meat sandwiches," she said.

"Me too."

They laughed.

She took up a sheaf of manuscript.

"If it doesn't bore you too much, I'm going to read it straight
through."

"Oh, I forgot; the play, of course."

She looked up at him as if over spectacles.

"What else?"

"You say it has been the rounds?"

"Yes. Peddled in every office in New York. Kline and Alshuler kept it
two years. Forensi paid her two hundred and fifty dollars advance on it
and then let his option lapse. For another year there was some talk of
Comstock and Comstock doing it, and then finally Hy Wolff got hold of it
and the very month he died paid her a second two hundred and fifty to
renew his option on it. I've always felt that if Ida had kept after Hy
Wolff he would have produced it. He had faith in it, but somehow just
didn't seem to get to it. You see, Ida hasn't any gumption--not the kind
of aggressiveness the game demands. That is why in fifteen years you
scarcely know she is in your office. That is why I plunged in and tried
to rewrite 'The Web' with her. It's a big story, sweated out of her own
agony. She may never write another. Probably won't. My little part in it
has merely been to help her co-ordinate--round up the jumble of her
ideas, so to speak. There is a big play somewhere in this story. I know
you didn't like it as a sketch--I didn't, either. A short play cannot
contain this drama. But out of a clear sky it occurred to me that you
might see it as a three-act play. Oh, I know it isn't the kind of thing
you've your mind's eye on, but why not take that step over into the
legitimate _via_ a big popular success? It may pave the way to bigger,
finer things. Who knows--Ida Blair--'The Web'--may mean the beginning of
your dream come true."

His mouth had straightened and thinned.

"You're right there. Ultimately I'll get into the other. If my brother
knew as much about the booking end as he does the realty, I'd have gone
over long ago. That is the most the success of the Amusement Enterprise
can mean to me--to afford some day the legitimate as a plaything. It
costs money to educate the public to better things. It's been profitable
playing down to its taste--some day it is going to enable me to afford
to be sufficiently altruistic to foot the bills for serving up the best.
It costs to educate.",

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