A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P R S T U V W X Z

Star Dust

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"I--Not now, mamma."

"Why not now? All I've got to say about it is, if he is willing, I am."

"What is it?"

"Tell him, Lilly."

"I--You see, papa, I thought if only you would let me begin vocal
lessons, now that I am going to High School. Not real singing, papa--I'm
too young for that--but just the foundation for voice."

"She wants to study with Max Rinehardt, Ben. I say it can't do any harm
for the child to learn parlor singing. I think I can manage it at a
dollar and a half a lesson. The elocution I say 'No' to. We don't need
any play-acting in the family."

"Why--er--I'm surprised, Lilly, that you should have your heart set on
that kind of thing. Seems to me a young girl could find something more
worth while than that. Singers never amount to much."

"Oh, papa, it's what I want most in the world."

"Let her have them. A little parlor singing helps any girl with the
young men. I notice you courted me from the choir. If she waits for
encouragement from you, her accomplishments won't amount to a row
of pins."

"You see, papa, I'm going to take the commercial course at High and
learn stenography and typewriting, so it will just balance my
education fine."

"Well, little woman, whatever you say."

"You know what I say."

"Don't you think she is a bit too young?"

Mimetically: "No, I don't think she's a bit too young. The sooner you
wake up to the fact that your daughter is growing up, the better. She's
a graduate already from grammar school."

"Papa, I'm on the graduating program."

"For what, daughter?"

"A piano solo. 'Alice,' with variations."

"Well, Carrie, if that is the way you feel about it--if you think those
kind of lessons are good for her--"

"That is the way I feel about it."

These little acid places occurring somewhere in almost every day hardly
corroded into Lilly's accustomed consciousness. If they etched their way
at all into Mr. Becker's patient kind of equanimity, the utter quietude
of his personality, which could efface itself behind a newspaper for two
or even three hours at a time, never revealed it. His was the stolidity
of an oak, tickled rather than assailed by a bright-eyed woodpecker.

"Little woman" he liked to call her in his nearest approach of
endearment, although it must have been her petite quickness rather than
a diminutive quality that earned the appellation. Even when he had wooed
her in Granite City, Missouri, and she had sung down at the quiet-faced
youth from a choir loft, she was after the then prevalent form of
hourglass girlish loveliness. Now she was rather enormous of bust,
proudly so, and wore her waist pulled in so that her hips sprang out
roundly. A common gesture was to place her hands on her hips, press
down, and breathe sharply inward, thus holding herself for the moment
from the steel walls of her corsets. Their removal immediately after
dinner was a ritual to be anticipated during the day. She would sit in
her underbodice, unhooked of them, sunk softly into herself, her hands
stroking her tortured jacket of ribs and her breath flowing deeper.

"I don't believe I'd pull in quite so tight, Carrie, if I were you. It
will tell on your health some day."

"You don't catch me with a sloppy figure. I don't give a row of pins for
the woman without some curve to her."

To Mrs. Becker a row of pins was the basest coinage of any realm. It ran
through her speech in pricking idiom.

She was piquant enough of face, quick-eyed, and with little pointy
features enhanced by a psyche worn as emphatically as an exclamation
point on the very top of her head. On eucher or matinée days her bangs,
at the application of a curling iron, were worn frizzed, but usually
they were pinned back beneath the psyche in straight brown wisps.

As she grew older, Lilly came more and more to resemble her father in a
certain tight knit of figure, length of limb, and quiet gray eyes that
could fill blackly with pupil and in the smooth, straight, always
gleaming brown hair growing cleanly and with the merest of widows' peaks
off her forehead.

At fourteen she stood shoulder to shoulder with her mother, and their
gloves and shirt waists were interchangeable. One really distinguishing
loveliness was her complexion. The skin flowed over her body with the
cool fleshliness of a pink rose petal. There was a natural shimmer to
it, a dewiness and a pollen of youth that enveloped her like a caress.

"Looks more like her father, if she looks like either of them," Mrs.
Schum was fond of saying, "and she has his easy disposition. But there
is a child who runs deep. If she was mine I'd educate her to be
something. Ah me, if only my Annie hadn't lost her head and married, she
had the makings, too."

As a matter of fact, Lilly's resemblance to her parents stopped
abruptly. Her first year in High School, a course in natural science
revealed to her the term "botanical sport."

"That's what I am," she determined, with youth's immediate application
of cosmos to self, "a botanical sport." A spontaneous variation from the
normal type. "Papa, I learned to-day that I'm a sport."

MRS. BECKER: "A what? That _is_ a genteel expression for a young girl to
apply to herself! That High School does you more harm than good."

"But, mamma, it's a term used in botany. A term from Darwin."

"Darwin! That's a fine thing to teach children in school--that they come
from monkeys! No wonder children haven't any respect for their parents
nowadays."

"Well, just the same it is in the biology. We're on frogs now. You ought
to see the way frogs get born!"

"In my day children weren't taught such stuff. I'm surprised, Ben, it's
allowed."

Across the biology of life, as if to shut out the loathsome facts of an
abattoir, a curtain of dreadful portent was drawn before Lilly's
clear eyes.

"When baby came," was Mrs. Becker's insinuation for the naked and
impolite fact of birth.

In a vague, inchoate sort of way, Lilly at sixteen was visualizing
nature procreant as an abominable woman creature standing shank deep in
spongy swampland and from behind that portentous curtain moaning in the
agonized key of Mrs. Kemble.

About this time Mrs. Kemble's third child was within a few weeks of
birth.

"Mamma, what makes Mrs. Kemble look so funny!"

"Hush, Lilly. Don't you ever let me hear you talk like that again.
Little girls shouldn't ask such questions."

One night shortly after, a cry that tore like a gash through the
sleeping boarding house roused Lilly to a sitting posture on her little
cot drawn across the baseboard of her parents' bed.

"Mamma! Papa! What was that?"

There were immediate voices and running up and down stairs and more
cries that beat the air and Mrs. Becker already up and clamoring into
her kimono.

"Sh-h-h, Lilly! Go back to sleep. It is nothing but Mrs. Kemble not
feeling very well. I'll run upstairs a minute, Ben. See that Lilly goes
back to sleep."

Until the break of day Lilly lay tense there on her little cot, toes
curled in, and still her mother did not return. Time and time again the
moans rose to shrieks of dreadful supplication that set her to trembling
so that her cot rattled against the baseboard.

"Kill me! God! Put me out of it! Please! I can't suffer any more! Kill
me, God! Kill me!"

"Papa, I--I'm scared."

"Go to sleep, Lilly," said her father from the pool of darkness, his
voice rather thin and sick. "Go to sleep now, like a good girl."

In a little area of quiet that ensued, she did drop healthily off,
wakening to the warmth of sunshine, her father already departed, her
mother rocking and sewing beside the window.

"Mamma, why didn't you wake me? I'll be late to school."

"You won't if you hurry and--and, Lilly, what do you think?"

"What, mamma?"

"The stork brought Flora and Roy the dearest little baby sister last
night. They're going to call her Evelyn. That's why Roy and Flora went
to spend the week with their Aunt Emma, so they wouldn't frighten the
stork away when he flew in with it. In a few days you can go up and see
it. Isn't that nice, Lilly?"

Still tousled with sleep, but the red rising up out of the yoke of her
nightgown, Lilly answered, with averted face, "Yes, mamma."




CHAPTER V

This episode marked the beginning of what was to be a three years'
refrain.

"Ben, we must go housekeeping. It's an outrage to board, with a girl
Lilly's age. Not as much as a parlor for her to bring her friends, and a
great big girl like her without a room to herself! It's not even
delicate."

"Well, Carrie, I'm willing."

"I know, until the time comes. I don't forget so easily the way you
sighed all night in your sleep that time I came near renting the house
on Delmar Avenue. Where is the money coming from! The minute that old
business down there earns a penny, right back into it go the earnings,
instead of drawing out a few dollars for the comfort of his family, like
any other man would."

"But, Carrie--"

"There is not another woman in the world would stand for it but me. A
woman that could enjoy a little home of her own as much as I! What do I
get out of it, I'd like to know! Stint. Stint. Stint. Shove it all back
into that old rope-and-twine business down there that doesn't show a
cent of capital when you take stock except in rope, rope, rope, until
I'd like to hang myself with some of it."

"Now, little woman, you got up on the wrong side of bed this morning.
Just hold your horses. These are tight times, I admit, but we have
our health--"

"I've heard that since I'm married. Health! Suppose we have got our
health. We can't thank the business for that."

"Lilly, your mother certainly got up on the wrong side of bed this
morning, didn't she?"

"Well, it's right discouraging, if you ask me."

"You're all right, little woman."

"Yes, I know," trying not to smile, "I'm all right when it don't cost
nothing and when it comes to the dirty work of trying to make two
ends meet."

"You're certainly a splendid manager. No one can take that away from
you."

"Well, I wish you would both appreciate it a little more."

"We do appreciate it, don't we, Lilly?"

"Yes, papa."

Her second year in High School, Lilly was kept out for five weeks by an
attack of typhoid fever.

An aversion for physical shortcoming, from her mother's occasional
headaches to the mortally afflicted Mr. Hazzard with the great chronic
sore crisscrossed with court plaster at the end of one of his eyes,
amounted in Lilly to something actually Indian.

"Oh, mamma, if I had a headache, I wouldn't always be talking about it.
People aren't interested."

"I'm going to tell your father when he comes home to-night what a
sympathetic daughter I have. If ever I fall sick the City Hospital will
be the place for me. When I see the way that Flora Kemble carries her
mother around and the way my own daughter sympathizes with me. If I
don't tell your father this night!"

It was this queer little congenital urge that kept Lilly on her feet for
two weeks after the malady had hold of her. With a stoicism that taxed
her cruelly, she would march smilingly off to school, a bombardment of
pains shooting through her head, her hands and tongue dry, a ball and
chain of inertia dragging at her ankles.

"Lilly, what is the matter? Why don't you eat your bread and butter
after school? Has Mrs. Schum said anything?"

"No, no, mamma. I'm not hungry, that's all."

"Funny. Open the closet. There is a basket of oranges behind your
father's overcoat, and a bag of baby pretzels, too."

"Goodness! mamma, if I was hungry, I'd eat."

"Don't you feel well, Lilly?"

"Of course I feel well, mamma. Why shouldn't I?"

But next day, at her after-school hour of practice, a small discordant
crash broke suddenly in upon "Chaminade's Scarf Dance" and Mrs. Becker's
rhythmic rocking above. Lilly had fainted, with her head in her arms and
face down among the keys.

Followed two weeks that crowded up the little back parlor with anxiety,
the tension of two doctors in consultation, and a sense of hysteria that
was always just a scratch beneath the surface of Mrs. Becker. She would
break suddenly into loud and unexpected fits of crying, crushing her
palms up against her mouth; would waken from a light doze beside the
bed, on the shriek of a nightmare, and have literally to be dragged from
the room. She harassed the doctors with questions that only the course
of the disease could answer.

The crisis came in the watches of the night, Lilly very straight and
very white and light of breathing in the center of her parents' bed, her
glossy hair in a thick plait over each shoulder, her fine white and
developed chest hardly rising.

"O God! help me to live this night! Ben! Ben!"

"Carrie, you're only making yourself sick and not helping the child."

"My baby! My beautiful snow-white baby! The best child that ever lived!
Help me to live this night!"

"Carrie, little woman, if only you won't take on so. There's every
reason to hope for the best. The doctor assured us."

"How long before we know? Go get Doctor Allison over. Ask Roy Kemble to
run over to Horton's and telephone for Doctor Birch. I want them
here. My baby!"

"Carrie, Carrie, haven't they told you time and time again there is
nothing they can do now? Don't antagonize Doctor Birch by calling him
over here again to-night. Everything is being done for the child. Now
all we can do is to sit and wait and hope for the best."

"You don't care! You're made of iron. At a time like this you stop to
consider the doctors' feelings. Mine don't count. My baby. Get well,
Lilly. Mamma's been cross at times, but never again. We'll do everything
to make you happy. You can read your eyes out and mamma won't turn out
the light on you. Mamma will buy you books and a box of paints and a
little bird's-eye-maple room all your own. Lilly, mamma's baby. We're
going housekeeping--your own piano--your own room. Aren't we, Ben?
Aren't we?"

"Yes, Carrie."

"You can take your choice, baby, of all the things you want to be. Mamma
won't oppose any more, or papa. Opera singing if you want it. You come
by it naturally from my choir voice. Whatever you say, baby. Even an
actress and all the elocution and singing lessons you--"

"Carrie!"

"Oh, you don't care! You're only her father. What does a father know?
You don't care."

Against this age-old indictment of paternity, and absolutely without
precedent, the patient, the iron-gray head of Mr. Becker fell forward, a
fearful and silent storm of sobs beating against his repression.

Full of dumfounded hysteria, walking on her knees around the bed edge to
him, Mrs. Becker drew down his head into the wreath of her arms, kissing
into it, mingling her tears with his, and tasting their anguish.

"My darling! Ben--please, darling! I say a lot of things I don't mean.
You are my husband--and my life. Ben--don't! I can't stand it! Ben!"

At six o'clock Lilly opened her eyes. They were clear and cool and the
petal-like quality was out on her skin.

"Sweet Alice," she said, "oh, Sweet Alice, Ben Bolt," a bit of dream
floating up with her like seaweed to the surface of consciousness.
"Sweet Alice."

She had been reading _Trilby_, surreptitiously filched from Mrs.
Kemble's stack of novels.

"Lilly--mamma's Lilly!"

"Where--I--Where--"

"In your own room, sweetheart, and your own mother and father beside
you."

"I thought--Sweet Alice--"

"The fever is gone now, Lilly. You won't have any of those thoughts any
more. Go to sleep now, papa's girl."

"I must have been singing--'Faust'--what makes you and papa--so
angry--with me--dears?"

"We're not, Lilly. Nothing makes us angry any more."

She was too tired to smile.

"I kept dreaming, mamma, that my hair was two big honey-colored braids
all wound up with pearls, like Marguerite's picture in _Stories of
the Operas_."

"Go to sleep, Lilly, like a good child. Our girl has got too much sense
to fill her head up with such nonsense."

"No, no, papa, I won't have common sense. I want to ride up to meet the
sun, like the princess in--"

"She wants to what? Are you sure her fever is gone, Carrie?"

"Nonsense! It is stuff she reads in her fairy tales. Yes, darling,
anything you want."

"You know, mamma--pearls--in my hair--"

"Yes, yes, darling. Sh-h-h!"

"Mamma?"

"Yes."

"We're middle-class, aren't we?"

"What does she mean?"

"Middle-class people, I mean. You know."

"Why, yes, dear, we're middle-class. I guess that is what you'd call it.
What an idea!"

"Help me."

"Yes, yes. How, baby? The doctor will be here any--"

"You don't know what I mean. No matter what I say, you don't know what I
mean. Isn't that terrible?"

"Help you to get well, that's what mamma and papa are going to do."

"No, no, no! Help me--out--up!"

Presently Lilly fell asleep. To her watching parents her light and
regular breathing took on the meter of a Doxology.




CHAPTER VI

Center High School, the city's only at a time when half a million souls
beat up like sea around it, a model and modern institution that was
presently and paradoxically to become architectural paragon for what to
avoid in future high-school buildings, was again within street-car
distance, except on usually bland days, when Lilly and Flora Kemble
would walk home through Vandaventer Place, the first of those short,
private thoroughfares of pretentious homes that were presently to run
through the warp of the city like threads of gold.

On these homeward walks Flora and Lilly, who referred to each other as
"my chum," were fond of peripatetically exchanging the views, the
consciousness, and the sweetness of sixteen.

"If you had your choice, Lilly, what house would you select for yours in
Vandaventer Place?"

"None."

"Why?"

"I don't want to live in between stone gates with 'No Thoroughfare'
stuck on each end."

"You're the funniest girl! What do you mean, 'No thoroughfare'? Don't
you want to be exclusive and private?"

"Yes, but a person can be private somewhere high--high--not just stuck
between gates like everybody else. Sappho always sat on a balcony that
overlooked the Aegean Sea."

"Maybe she did, and she jumped off, too, but I'm not talking to-day's
Greek history lesson. I'm talking about regular folks. Between the gates
of Vandaventer Place would be good enough for me. Wouldn't I just love
to be mistress over one of these houses and give parties with an awning
stretched out over the sidewalk!"

"What did you get in algebra, Flora?"

"B plus. And you?"

"B minus."

"Lilly Becker, that is the fifth B minus you've had in succession. I'm
going to call you Lilly Minus."

"If she hadn't sprung that old oral exam on us--"

"Oh, if ifs and ands were pots and pans!"

Flora, rather freckly, elbowy, and far too tall, was none the less about
to be pretty. She was frailly fair, like her mother, and could already
throw her blue eyes about their balls, in the Esperanto of coquetry. She
had a treacherous little faculty of appearing never to study and yet
maintaining an excellent grade of scholarship.

"You get me to do all sorts of things with you, Flora, and then you
sneak off and study on the quiet and leave me to flunk because I
promised you I wouldn't study, either."

"Why, Lilly Becker, I never studied one minute for that algebra quiz."

"You did so! When I went downstairs to write in my Friendship Book, like
you said you were going to do, you worked your algebra instead. Roy
told me."

"Well, if I was as pretty as you, Lilly, I wouldn't ever care if I got
my lessons or not," said Flora, to palliate.

"Flora Kemble, I'm not pretty!"

"You are, too. Everybody says your complexion is like peaches and
cream, and look at mine, all freckles."

"Complexion, huh! If I had your yellow hair, you could have all my
complexion."

"Boys hate freckles because so many of them have them themselves."

"Always boys. Honestly, you're boy-crazy, Flora."

"Well, I like that. Can I help it if I got an invitation and you didn't?
You sat right next to him in English and I sat two whole seats away."

A cloud no larger and smudgier than a high-school boy's hand had dropped
its first shadow between them. Eugene Bankhead, son of the credit man
for Slocum-Hines, the city's largest wholesale hardware firm, had
suddenly, out of this clear sky, invited Flora to the Thanksgiving Day
football game between Center High and an exclusive local academy. A new
estate felt, rather than spoken, quickened the eye and authority of
Flora. A sense of it rode on the air waves between them.

"I hate boys."

"How do you know? You've never seen any except my brother and
sneak-thief Harry."

"Papa says if a girl begins to run around with boys too soon it makes
her so forward that by the time she's eighteen she's too old
and faded--"

"That's old-fogy talk."

"You mean it's old fogy for girls to let boys jam everything else out of
their heads. I'd like to see the boy that could make me forget my--my
ambitions."

"If Eugene had asked you instead of me you wouldn't be saying that."

"Anyway, I hate snips. I like men--real men."

"Oh, I know. You're stuck on Lindsley!"

A violent splash of red and a highly superlative denial of word and
manner laid hold of Lilly.

"Why, Flora Kemble!"

"Look at her blushing. Oh, what I know about you!"

"You fibber. I think he's the limit. I never saw a fellow so stuck on
himself."

"Oh, I know! I know now why you carry home twice as many books as you
used to since he got charge of the library."

"I'm reading the _Lady of the Lake_ and you know it. That's why I
stopped in to-night."

"I know why you're always writing compositions since you have him in
English. Lilly's stuck on Lindsley."

Tears were rare with Lilly, but a tremor waved her voice.

"I think you're horrid, Flora Kemble. Anyway, he's more worth while
being stuck on than Eugene Bankhead. He's just--just middle-class. His
future is to work in Slocum-Hines's hardware store, like his father."

"Well, that's more of a man's job than sitting around in a schoolroom
doing lady's work. Papa says Eugene's father is a five-thousand-a-year
man. Eugene has all the spending money he wants and they have a
conservatory in their house."

"Well, I'd rather be Lindsley than Eugene; besides, he's a kid hardly
out of short trousers."

"Silly, you don't think it's Eugene I'm stuck on, do you? His brother
Vincent is a big man down at Slocum-Hines's, too, and a catch. I'm going
to meet him some day. Lindsley! Ugh! I like a little sponduliks thrown
in with a fellow. Lindsley's elbows shine."

For the most part the Board of Education drew upon the offspring of its
own system for teaching talent, occasionally letting in an artery of new
blood. Lilly's second year in High School such an infusion took place in
the form of one H. Horace Lindsley, the young master of arts, his degree
rather heavy upon him, dawning blondly and behind high-power pince-nez
upon the English department.

Sweet sixteen capitulated to English literature. The double wave of Mr.
Lindsley's hair, the intellectual rush of very long, white teeth to the
front, somehow mitigating for the sins of a curriculum that could
present Gorboduc, and _Friar Bacon_ and _Friar Bungay_, to young minds
illy furrowed for such seed.

Notwithstanding the literary odor with which Mr. Lindsley sprayed
himself as he sprayed his handkerchief with a domestic scent called
"Sesame and Lilies," his neoclassic determination to write the American
_Iliad_ must have died painlessly when his iambically disposed feet
ventured too deeply into the quagmire of pedagogy, from which he was not
to emerge. But for the first time in her life Lilly was hearing her name
pronounced by one who rolled it under his tongue like a lollypop. He
rolled all names quite so, but in her beatitude she was only conscious
of her own as it candied. Besides, his eyes, through the pince-nez, had
a gimlet, goosefleshing quality; he recited "Straits of Dover" to a
class of young women with rapt adenoidal expression when he should have
been inoculating them with the bitter serum of Burke's Conciliation
Speech, and walked to school of wintry mornings without an overcoat;
skates and the _Areopagitica_ under his arm.

It was undeniable that at this stage Lilly had veered unaccountably to
authorship, her after-school practice hour gouged into by a suddenly
stimulated pen.

"Papa, I know my ambition!"

Mr. Becker let fall his newspaper to his knee, glancing up over the rim
of his reading glasses.

"What's it now, daughter?"

"I want to be a writer. You know, an author of stories. My English
teacher says I have talent. I get A minus on all my essays, and to-day
he wrote on the edge of one, 'Quite a literary touch.'"

MRS. BECKER (who rocked as she darned): "The trouble with you, Lilly, is
that you have it too good. You don't know what you want."

"You don't care if I am a writer, do you, papa?"

"Last week it was the stage, and last month the opera, and now it's
writing. What next, I wonder?"

"Your mother's right. There's no stability to this art business, Lilly.
They're a loose lot that never come to a good end."

"Well, just the same," cried Lilly, hot with a sense of futility and
rebellion, "your own father was the next thing to an actor. Preaching is
kin to acting."

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