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Star Dust

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"Fine! And it is only a question of time until you are ready for that
inspiring fray. Meanwhile, why not help foot those bills with a little
side flier in 'The Web'?"

"You are a little opportunist, aren't you?".

"I know 'The Web' isn't art. But it is a cross section of reality with
the veins exposed and the sap of life running through them. Mrs. Blair,
poor dear, can't write. God knows I can't. That is why the play has been
through years of lying around in every office in New York. But the idea
is there. You see, it is everything she has lived through. You know
her story?"

"Yes."

"There is a scene when he comes screaming out of the room after having
been through the third degree, half blind from the terrible lights and
the terrible circle of terrible eyes, that isn't writing at all. It's
life--a raw, palpitating picture of a social abuse that can touch the
public as a reform measure can never hope to. Then the character of the
boy--a delinquent. We've one right here in this apartment. One of those
sweet, shy, half-frightened boys as gentle as a girl. The kind that
tells the neighborhood children Peter Pan and reads his grandmother to
sleep. I would trust him anywhere with Zoe, and yet there's the streak!
The criminal, congenital streak through him that is as pathological as
measles. Only we handle it under the heading of criminology. It's like
taking an earache to the chiropodist. The boy is a thief. It's through
him like a rotten spot, but instead of curing him the law wants to
punish him. It's like spanking a child for having the measles. But to
get back--Mrs. Blair has him in this play--just as if she had lifted him
out of this apartment. She wrote him from the life, too. A young fellow
who used to be on her husband's beat. It may not be fine writing, but
'The Web' has the throb of reality through it, and it is my opinion that
one pulsebeat of life is worth all your chastity of form."

"Right."

"We're one on that? Good! Well, here is your opportunity to solder the
first link into the legitimate. Keep it in mind while I am reading Ida
Blair's play and remember I am not talking Ida Blair or Lilly Penny to
you. I'm talking this play just as I would talk an act to you. Because I
believe in it."

He seemed to look at her through her words, a smile out in his eyes.

"You're not listening."

"I am," he said, "but your hair looks like it is painted on, the way it
comes down to that smooth little peak in front. Jove! it's pretty."

She looked off, wanting not to color.

"Come," he said, "I apologize. Read. I'm as predisposed as I can be
toward anything conceived by that little dormouse of a person in
the office."

"That's the trouble. You men are too often satisfied with a surface
inventory. The vault of heart sometimes yields up rare treasures."

"How like you to say that."

"Ready?"

"Go!"

And so, with her head bent so that the light burnished its smoothness,
she read him "The Web" through two uninterrupted hours, her voice
throbbing into the quiet. In the third act, when a half-crazed victim of
the third degree is led out in shuddering and horrible invocation, she
sprang to her feet for an instant, her gesture decrying its fullest arc.

She was like Iphigenia praying for death, he thought.

Later, when the shades of the prison house begin to dawn upon the
stunned consciousness of the woman, there were tears in her voice and on
her lashes, and one fell to the back of her hand, which she wiped off
against her skirt, like a child.

At eleven o'clock she finished, regarding him brilliantly through her
flush.

He had wanted to smoke, but thrust the case back into his pocket,
sitting tilted, his hands locked at the back of his head and gazing at
the line of the picture molding. Her lips parted as the paused held.

"Well?"

He uncrossed his knees, straightening.

"Well?"

"Strong."

"Then it did grip you?"

"Yes, but I can see why it gathered dust as it went the rounds. From the
average commercial manager's point of view there is a question about
that seamy kind of thing getting over with the playgoer. He wants to be
entertained, not harrowed. That's pretty raw stuff. Except for the
little woman and the poor delinquent youngster, it is an
out-and-out--what shall I say?--an out-and-out crook play, to coin
a phrase."

"Exactly. It is a section of life about which your average playgoer
knows little or nothing and yet one for which he nourishes a tremendous
curiosity."

"It's crude--"

"I know, but the idea is bigger than the writing is crude. If I had the
money I would take a chance on producing it to-morrow. It has social and
sociological value, and at the same time is corking-good entertainment.
I read the police-inspector scene to my little girl just to see what she
would get out of it. 'Why,' she cried, 'a man would confess to anything
with that white light on him and those big policemen's eyes on him.
That's not fair! That shouldn't be allowed. Isn't there a way to stop
it?' That from a thirteen-year-old! It's one of those man-made abuses
that if we women ever get the vote we'll go after! Don't answer me on
this play now, Mr. Visigoth. Take it to your hotel. Read it over again.
Talk it over with your brother when he comes next week. How's that? No
snap judgment."

"Good. The play is on the docket for the evening. Now let us get the
taste of the underworld out of our mouths. How would the Claremont
appeal now?"

"I'd rather not."

"Well, I suppose that amounts to my _congé?_"

She smiled with her brows arched.

"It is after eleven."

He was incessantly feeling for his cigarette case and then with a
certain unease refraining.

"You may," she said, "one, before you go."

He held the case to her. She took one gingerly, accepting the light more
gingerly.

"I don't like them," she said, exhaling with the violence of the
unaccustomed.

"Then whyfore?"

"Because it is a stupid convention which says that a man may and a woman
may not. Why should it be a matter of course for you and, in most cases,
a matter of comment and even vulgarity for me?"

"Usage."

"Usage isn't a reason. It's Time's trick for applying the brake to
progress."

He lit up gratefully, waving out the match and hesitating for a spot to
dispose of it. She reached across the table, palm up. "Give me."

He caught her hand.

"Lilly!"

She jerked back with a little clicky catch of breath.

"Don't."

"Lilly, you're maddening! Lilly, can't you see what I haven't the words
to tell you? For years--since that night at the Waldorf--I--I have been
living for this moment. I realized it to-night as you read that play.
Lilly, is what is between us insurmountable?"

She jerked back her head, her irises at their trick of growing.

"You don't know what you are saying!"

"I do know what I am saying. I know that you are the most delectable
woman in the world--and for me."

She held out his hat and cane.

"My little girl is asleep. Hadn't you better go?"

"That's not fair," he said, taking the hat and cane, but flushing up
furiously.

"I know it isn't. But what is there I can say to you?"

"You can talk it out. Man to man."

"Sit down," she said, clasping her hands and regarding him through
swimming and revealing eyes.

"Now--what is there to say--Bruce--between you and me?"

"Where is he?"

"You know."

"Are matters unchanged?"

She nodded.

"I love you, Lilly."

"And I have a husband and a thirteen-year-old child, making of the
triangle a rectangle."

"You have held me off on that dagger point now for ten years. Good God!
women don't martyrize themselves to a past these days. What are you
doing with your life? Sacrificing it on the altar of the old burned-out
husk of a marriage? Canonizing a mistake!"

"It is the one thing I am able to do for him in some little reparation!"

"Mock heroics."

"No, it is more than mock heroic to save him that precious shred of his
respectability. That is about all I have left him to cherish. There are
some human beings you simply cannot conceive of in certain situations.
Albert Penny and divorce are irreconcilable. Tear his heart out if you
will, but hands off his respectability. It may sound absurd in the face
of the enormity of what I have done to him, but it is a great solace to
me to be able to sacrifice that much to him and to drag him through my
life like a ball and chain. Somehow it seems that I ought to
suffer that."

"Stuff and nonsense! You made your mistake and you had the courage to
tear away from it by the roots. Unless those roots have a drag?"

"No. No drag! And yet I sometimes think my revolt has been a half
madness. You cannot know the sheer folly, the crazy kind of tenacity
that has driven me on through all these years! And for what? This
mediocrity? Or is it that I am an instrument clearing the way for her?
Zoe! Is there a divinity shapes our end, rough hew them how we will?
Listen to something incredible. Do you know that Zoe's father doesn't
know that he is a father?"

"Good God!"

"Yes, jealous truth going fiction one better."

"You mean to say you have fought this out alone?"

"He doesn't know. Neither do my parents. They would suck her down. Dwarf
her with their terrible kind of love. She belongs to herself. She's a
beautiful thing God has loaned me to rear into a rose, but the world is
her garden in which to bloom and expand."

"In all these years they don't know your whereabouts?"

"Oh yes! I write home every Christmas. Just a line that I am well and
happy. Occasionally I pick up notes of them in the St. Louis newspapers.
I keep them pretty well under glass. It's all so dreamlike--I've always
been obsessed with that consciousness. How faint can be the line between
the dream and reality."

He drew her toward him by the hands, their faces lit, quivering, close.

"Lilly, Lilly, let us not stop just short of happiness."

"All my life I have done that."

"I cannot put you out of my heart now that I have put you in."

"No. No. No." But his embrace had already shaped itself, and, springing
back from it and her own singing of the flesh, she crowded up against
the wistaria-painted screen, shielding it.

"How dared you--here--in this--room! With her!"

"Lilly!"

"Go, please! Go, please!"

"You mean that?"

"You know I do."

He bent low in the attitude of kissing her hand, but without touching
it.

"Forget everything I've said, Lilly, and forgive. We'll go back to the
old. Good night, Lilly! Mrs. Penny."

He must have departed on the balls of his feet, because presently
through the roaring of the silence she heard the door slam without
having been conscious of his passage down the hallway; and then, after a
second, Harry Calvert tiptoeing to her open door to look in with his
light-blue eyes.

She sprang forward, throwing herself against the door as she locked it.

"Don't," she cried through it--"don't you ever dare do that again,
Harry! Walk on your heels. You frighten me when you sneak like
that--you--you--frighten--me."

Then she undressed, crying, tears rolling down to her high white chest
and finally on to the crispiness of her plain nightgown. Crept to bed
finally, into a darkness as sleek as a black cat's flank, silently, to
save the sag of mattress, her body curving to the curve of her child's.

Once from the inky pool of that long night Zoe's hand crept up, finding
out her mother's cheek.

"Lilly," floating up for a drowsy second to the surface of
consciousness--"Lilly--you're crying. Are--you sad--again?"

"Yes, Zoe--terribly--terribly--"




CHAPTER III

The year that Zoe entered High School, 1914, out of an international sky
of fairly pellucid blue, the thunderclap of world war burst in fury.

It was strange, though, even after the subsequent plunge of her country
to the Allied flank, and the menacing and shifting tides of affairs
creeping closer and closer to the edge of everyday life, how little the
complexion of Lilly's routine was changed.

True, her national consciousness flared suddenly from lethargy to blaze.
The evening after the sinking of the _Lusitania_, she attended a mass
meeting in Astor Place with Zoe and Mrs. Blair, beating out an
umbrella-and-floor tom-tom for redress, love of country suddenly a lump
in her throat.

The day the Rainbow Division swept up Fifth Avenue in farewell, she
could see the rank and file from the roof of the Forty-second Street
office building, as if the avenue were running a clayey stream, and she
was torn between the ache and the thanksgiving of having no one to give.

But, for the most part, war kept its talons off Lilly. Twice, and as if
his exemption from the draft lay heavily, Harry Calvert had tried to
enlist, his grandmother, with a zeal that was hardly accountable,
exerting every effort toward that end.

It was almost as if war had revived her somewhat fainting faith in
Harry's ultimate justification.

But he was underweight and still in a weakened condition from an
operation for an adenoidal complaint. This last he had undergone before
the war and at Lilly's urgent instance. She had read, in the mass of
books on child hygiene, psychology, and physiology she was constantly
accumulating, the debilitative effects that adenoidal breathing might
exercise upon an entire constitution and mentality.

Poor Harry, and his cancerous predilection for the kind of thievery that
almost invariably stacked up to not even petty larceny! He could
withstand a jewel chest, but not a tool chest. Would steal the robe from
an automobile, provided it was not a luxurious one. Once, when his
grandmother at great difficulty had procured for him a clerkship, he
confiscated the nickel-plated faucets out of the wash room, barely
escaping prosecution. Only the utter triviality of his thievery and the
fight in Mrs. Schum saved him from the law. She was as indomitable in
her protection of him as the granite flesh of rocks.

Quiet, sensitive, with rather a girlish face, slow to beard and quick to
quiver, Harry was invariably liked during the period he held a position,
but month to month saw him from a clerkship in a real-estate office to
window decorator for a retail paper-flower concern, salesman in the
novelty and stationery department of a bookstore, and once in the
children's book section of a department store.

He was rarely apprehended, usually abandoning his position, with his
absurd loot already under cover, and the loss leaking out later, if
at all.

Invariably, as if by way of confession, he brought home to his
grandmother the proceeds from these petty sales, effected by who knows
what device, dropping down into her lap, almost sadly and with a
shrinkage from what was sure to follow, either the few dollars or the
bauble of a bit of jewelry.

She would cry up at him and wring her poor hands, and then he would go
off into his little room adjoining the kitchen, originally intended as
maid's room, and sit with his head down in his hands, back rounded, and
all his throat-constricting capacity for meekness out in his attitude.

And, presently, her sobs subsided, Mrs. Schum would creep in after him,
and behind that closed door there was no telling what long hours of
pleading and abjuration took place. But, next morning, in her little
black bonnet, the rust out in her black dress and the "want ad." sheet
cockily enough beneath her arm, Mrs. Schum would set out with him to
combat, by the decency of her presence, some of the difficulties of
seeking a new position with only one or two time-and thumb-worn
references.

His grandmother's and Lilly's possessions were sacred to him, but every
morning, after the two roomers had departed, Mrs. Schum would tiptoe
after, locking their doors and inserting the keys in her
petticoat pocket.

"I like to keep things locked," she explained to Lilly one day, upon
being intercepted. "You can never tell when a sneak thief will break
into these apartment houses that haven't hall service. I've even heard
of them entering through the fire escape."

"Of course, dear," said Lilly, through heartache for her.

There was an indescribable sweetness in Harry's attitude toward Zoe.
There had been countless long evenings of her little girlhood when no
waiting beside her bedside was too tedious--sometimes during three and
four evenings a week of Lilly's enforced absence in the pursuit of
vaudeville novelties. He was tireless and faithful as a watchdog,
keeping awake by whittling at something no more fantastic than a
clothespin. There were hundreds of them scattered about the house. It
was the sole form his idleness took. He painted heads and eyes on
them--cleverly, too--for Zoe, but as she grew older she began to disdain
them, bullying him in much the fashion her mother had before her.

"I can hop up four steps on one foot," Lilly, with a little catch at her
heart, chanced to overhear on one occasion.

"No, you can't," said Harry, smilingly and a little teasingly.

Catching at her ankle and flinging her curls, she made an unstaggering
and easy ascent of not four, but eight.

"There!" she cried, slapping Harry boldly and resoundingly on the cheek.
"Don't you ever dare say I cannot do what I know I can do."

It left the red print of her little hand, and it was literally as if, as
he looked away from her, he had turned the other cheek.

Almost immediately she caught his hand, placing her warm face to its
back.

"Harry, I'm a devil! I'm sorry. You know I don't mean to be a devil.
Harry! Are you angry? You're not! Please! Be nice, Harry--tell me a
story--Har-ry."

"Once upon a time--" he began, his light-blue eyes almost with the
patient look of the blind.

A little later, there occurred an infinitesimal but telling incident
which served to dissipate whatever growing qualms may have disturbed
Lilly over the rearing of her child in this atmosphere of petty crime.

One evening, while Harry was performing his willing chore of carrying
out for his grandmother the little dinner prepared by Mrs. Schum and
partaken of by Lilly and Zoe at a small card table opened up beside the
window of their room, Zoe announced, with a certain high-handedness with
which Lilly was more and more hard pressed to cope:

"I want my dresses longer. That big red-headed boy in the white jacket
said to me when I went into the drug store over on Columbus Avenue
to-day for some licorice drops: 'That's right. Wear 'em short; you've
got the stems.'"

"What a vulgar, horrid remark!"

"Well, I want my dresses longer."

Lilly regarded her daughter with concern troubling up her eyes.

"Don't ever go into that store again, Zoe. I've a mind to stop in there
myself and talk to the proprietor."

Later that same evening, Harry, with a purpling eye and an opened lip
which he tried vainly to smuggle past his grandmother, crept into his
room. But she was too quick for him, and at her high cry of shock Lilly
rushed into the hallway. There was an utterly alien and vibrating note
of anger in Harry's voice.

"For God's sake, gramaw, be quiet! It's nothing. Had a row with that
red-headed clerk down at the drug store. Took the freshness out of him
for a while."

Lilly tiptoed back to her room. All through a fitful night she woke in
little starts, kissing into the bare white arm of her child as if she
could not have done with the assurance of her safe proximity.

It was less than a month later, and over a year after the adenoidal
operation, that Harry returned home one evening from the real-estate
office with nine dollars and forty cents in his pocket from the proceeds
of the nickel-plated wash-room faucets and several liquid-soap
attachments.

* * * * *

About eight months after Ida Blair's play had lain gathering mold in the
lower drawer of Bruce Visigoth's desk, he sent for Lilly.

Their office relationship since the stuffy June evening over the reading
of the manuscript had been resumed, with invisible joindure. Together
they continued in biweekly conferences to compile the endless cycle of
programs that moved like a chain along the cogs of city to city. There
were nine Enterprise Amusement Theaters now, the newest red-headed pin
on the circuit map as far west as Tulsa, their booking route as yet
independent of any of the larger and recent vaudeville mergers.

It was an office boast and pleasantry that Lilly could recite offhand
through the current program of any of the nine theaters, leaping glibly
from motion picture, to acrobat, and sister acts.

This was hardly true, but her touch at the steering wheel of her
department was sensitive and sure. She could substitute for a
quarantined team of jumping Arabs in Springfield, Illinois, with hardly
more than a sleight of hand through her card index and a telegram or
two. She knew that Memphis would not stand for a pickaninny act, and
that the same was sure fire in Trenton, and was familiar with every
house manager by long-distance-telephone voice. The department was more
and more the well-oiled engine under a light steering hand that Lilly
wielded well and wisely.

Her judgment of the incoming reports of the various house managers, or
a try-out act, although technically subject to Bruce Visigoth's
signature, went usually unchallenged. She virtually was her department,
particularly as the realty aspect of the enterprise came more and more
to assume the proportions of big business. Within her little office of
mahogany appointments she worked with an allotment of stenographers and
clerks. She had an assistant, too; at least, she confiscated him from
the press department--one Leon Greenberg, a young night student from New
York University, with an enormous profile rendered positively
carnivorous of thrust by his struggle up from First Street and Avenue A,
which is mire with a pull to it.

Her own capacity was unnamed. She was probably still down on the books
as stenographer, although at fifty dollars a week now, and it was six
years since she had taken a letter.

It was a gray day in cold and tardy spring when Bruce Visigoth sent for
her--one of those heavy afternoons that darken up at four o'clock and
press thick as gravy against the windows. He was seated at his desk,
hands laced at the back of his head and one foot propped on an open
drawer, his male stenographer typing at the remote corner of a wide and
rather luxuriously appointed office. Except for the green cone of light
over him, the room was plushy with dusk.

"About that play--" he began.

"What play?" she said, seating herself in the entirely easy business
manner she had with him.

"'The Web.'"

Her strong white hand out from its immaculate linen cuff lay unnervously
on the glass top of his desk, but the fingers now began to lift
in rotation.

"Yes?"

"I talked it over with my brother before he returned to Chicago
yesterday. Thought the firm might be interested."

"Yes?"

"He doesn't see it."

"He--wouldn't."

He bent a sliver of ivory paper knife almost double.

"I should have taken this matter up some time ago, but the sudden death
of my sister Pauline's husband, Doctor Enlow--"

"Mrs. Blair understands that."

"And you?"

"Well," she said, looking off and resolutely keeping her smile, "I guess
it means 'The Web' must resume its journey again."

"No, it doesn't."

"Why?"

"It means that I am going to produce it on my own."

She slid to the edge of the chair, her hand closing over the desk edge.

"Oh! Oh!"

"Isn't that what you want?"

"Yes."

"Well, that is my reason."

"You mean you don't see it, either?"

"But you do."

"But--"

"No 'buts.' She goes into rehearsal for a spring try-out in Baltimore,
Stamford, or any of the dog towns. I'm giving the manuscript to Forbes
to read this week. He's the man to direct that type of thing. I'm going
to throw in ten or twenty thousand on your judgment."

"You're serious?" He held out his lean hand. "Ill send for Ida Blair."

"No--please!"

"Why?"

"Sit down."

She did, biting back excitement.

"I don't know how to talk to that little woman. She depresses me. This
is your venture and mine."

"But her play! Its production will mean her resurrection. Her monument
to a memory. Her protest. A chance to get her on her feet. An
opportunity for a home, a background, a reason for living to a woman who
has lost every reason. It's her play and her chance."

"And it is our venture."

"I'm not afraid."

"Are we partners, then?"

"If I had the money, yes, to my limit."

"I don't mean that."

"I do."

"All right; go your limit."

"My limit? How far would six one-hundred-dollar municipal bonds and--"

"Good. I'll sell you six per cent of a twenty-thousand-dollar venture
for the six hundred."

"Six--percent--twenty--thousand--Why, that's not a man-to-man
proposition! You're treating me like a child."

"All right, then; three per cent for the six hundred."

"Done! But no nonsense. If I lose, I lose. Man to man."

"'Man to man,'" he said, clasping her hand and drinking down deep into
her gaze.

And so, when she hurried out to the high ledge to which Ida Blair's
figure had somehow shaped itself as the years went on, she stood for a
moment to steady the hand she placed on that shoulder.

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