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Star Dust

F >> Fannie Hurst >> Star Dust




"Ida!" The older woman raised her eyes of the peculiarly washed quality
of gray that has faded from repeated scaldings in hot water. "Mr.
Visigoth wants you in his office, dear--now."

She kept her voice out of quaver, but it had a singing quality like a
plucked violin string.




CHAPTER IV

As Lilly's months went, the one that followed was abloom with events. In
her vague, untutored way she was already reaching out, through her
daughter, toward a subject about which she knew nothing, but, in an
inchoate way, felt a great deal.

The New York State fight for woman's suffrage had not yet reached its
victorious culmination, and, reading announcement of a great parade up
Fifth Avenue for a Saturday afternoon, she took Zoe.

The smell of spring was dancingly out. Shop windows bloomed with the
millinery of May. Open street cars, open skies, and openwork shirt
waists had arrived.

They climbed the flank of an omnibus and rode down to the Washington
Arch in a midair snapping with bunting.

It was on one of those irresistible afternoons--radiant with the
sun-washed geometry of three architectural renaissances, a
monastic-fronted fur emporium, a Parthenon of a library, a
Doric-columned bank--that Lilly and Zoe lumbered their omnibus way
through the daily carnival of the most rococo avenue in the world.

There was the flare of a sea gull to Zoe--no containing her. Little
snatches of song bubbled. She was a freshet of delight.

"Look at that tray of violets, Lilly! I must have a bunch."

"Zoe, don't lean over so far!"

"See the yellow satin in that shop window, Lilly! I'd love to wind it
round me. It's like sun!"

"See those jams of women in white, Zoe, waiting to form into line!"

"I'd love to march!"

"Why?"

"Oh, I don't know, there--there's something sort of onward about it."

"Exactly! Onward! Forward! March!"

With a precocity that never ceased to amuse and delight Lilly, Zoe,
while only half understanding the content of an occasion, could somehow
imbibe its essence. She leaned now over the rail of the omnibus, the
cross-town streets, as they jogged past, already colloid masses of women
waiting to fall into line.

"Isn't it queer, Lilly, that after all these centuries and centuries
women are just beginning to--what did that woman on the program call it
down at Cooper Union hall the other night--function in the government?
Why has it taken them so long to ask for their half in the say-so
of things?"

"Any great movement, Zoe, must have very slow beginnings. Think for what
ages man lived without Christianity!"

"Yes; but look how long it has been here."

"Reckoning in geology, Zoe, and compared with the age of mountains and
oceans, two thousand years isn't long."

"I think it is."

"You darling!"

They alighted at the Washington Arch, jamming their way into the tight
battalion of spectators already lining both sides of lower Fifth Avenue.
The head of the parade was already forming, a slim young leader holding
in her white mount with difficulty.

"Lilly, she looks like our picture of Jeanne d'Arc when she sees the
vision!"

"She is heeding a vision, Zoe--of to-morrow."

"I feel so--so thrilled, Lilly. Do you?"

"Yes," said Lilly, for some reason breathing hard. "Oh, I do!"

There was a break of music, and all about them women darting into line,
sudden banners floating out, and the white horse prancing in the
archway, for all the world as if spun at a tangent off the narrative
frieze of the arch.

At the Eighth Street curb, where they stood, five hundred women, with
standards lifted, stiffened suddenly into formation, a deputy from their
ranks, a buyer, by the way, for the largest cloak-and-suit house in the
world, calling short, quick orders and distributing American flags.

The air was rent with silk and brass; a simoom of rapture raced over
Zoe. She danced on the balls of her feet. It was then that a deputy,
with a face that recalled newspaper reproductions of it, spied her.

"Here, little girl! You! Oh, lovely! Could you manage this banner, dear,
and lead this section? Miss, is this lovely child your sister? Do let
her lead!"

"She's my daughter."

"Come; you may fall in line right behind her. Do you mind if I unpin
your sister's curls? Oh, she's lovely--"

"I said she's my _daughter!_"

"Here, right in front, dear--my--oh, what a find!"

And so, with her somewhat bewildered parent in the ranks behind her, her
little black frock wrapped in a purple-and-yellow banner, head up, eyes
stars, Zoe Penny led the largest district of Greater New York up Fifth
Avenue, a constant and running line of applause following her lead.

She was youth sonnetized. Cameras clicked after her, and, with the
martial music tickling her blood, her head went higher still, like a
stag's. To her mother, following after, it seemed that the loudest of
all must be music within her own heart, and so she marched on, sprayed,
as it were, by the wave of constant applause as it broke over Zoe and
died down at the rank and file.

It was dusk when they reached Fifty-ninth Street, and in the jam of
disbanding and quite a little demonstration over Zoe by the section she
had distinguished, they worked their way out finally toward the
cross-town street car, hand in hand, like two ecstatic, rather
bewildered babes in the wood.

At a touch upon her shoulder Lilly turned, spun, rather, under high
tension, to encounter the well-bred hesitancy of an exceedingly slender
woman, a very small head set on the stem of a long, gracile neck,
something hauntingly familiar in the somewhat heart-shaped face and the
far-apart eyes that were considerably younger than the white hair which
framed them.

"I beg your pardon"--in a voice perfectly rounded of edges--"but my
husband is so enchanted with the little girl that we are taking the
liberty of asking to meet her. Won't you permit me to present my
husband, Gedney Daab? You have heard of him, I presume."

Lilly had. The "Dolorosa" above her desk was a print from a Gedney Daab.

He stepped forward then, lanky and rugged, with a great shock of
upstanding gray hair, with the path of his fingers through it and his
features with no scheme at all. Just very delightfully irregular, he
jutted out of any crowd.

"Zoe, Mr. and Mrs. Daab want to meet you."

She lifted her clean gaze, dropped a courtesy, and held out her hand
with the short, curved gesture of childhood.

"Hello!" he said, the timbre of real youth in his voice, which childhood
is so quick to detect from the silly enameling of tone coated on by
grown-ups for the occasion. "I want to paint you, youngster."

"Oh, Lilly, what fun!"

"Then she is your sister?"

"Oh no, Mrs. Daab; she is my daughter."

"But the name--"

"It's our way together."

"How droll!"

"Do you think I'm pretty?"

Gedney Daab looked down at her ardent artlessness without a burst of
laughter.

"Oh, as little girls go."

"Zoe knows God has merely given her a fair urn of a body, Mr. Daab,
which she, in turn, must fill with beauty of mind and spirit."

"You are the Dolorosa, aren't you?" continued Zoe, turning to Mrs. Daab.
"The sad one with the tears that don't show, from crying on the
inside of you."

It was not until then that this dawned upon Lilly. Those eyes of the
Dolorosa, bleeding tears, were Mrs. Daab's.

"You'll have to paint me as glad--won't you?--glad all over clear from
the inside."

"Yes, Sunlight; I rather think I will."

"Will you permit my husband and me to take you home, Mrs.--"

"Penny."

"Oh, please, Lilly!"

"We live rather far up from here--Ninety-first Street, West."

"And we live at Park Hill; so you see we hardly regard that as far."

They were presently riding through the Park, Zoe facing the three of
them in the soft gray interior of the Daab limousine. She was
absolutely artless.

"I've been in a taxi three times and a hansom once. But I prefer this. I
shall have my own some day--only, purple upholstery instead of
gray--sort of wine color--"

"An early eye to effect, I see, young miss."

"I'm the class beauty," she explained. "I didn't care to be that at
first--Lilly says it is just a lovely accident and might happen to
anyone else. She wanted me to be class president; so I decided to
be both."

"You will observe that my daughter is not chiefly notable for her
reticence."

"You come to my studio, little lady, and I am going to paint you just as
golden and radiantly innocent as you are."

"What is 'radiantly innocent'?"

"Good Lord! I don't know any definition of it except--you."

"Zoe has no innocence in one sense, Mr. Daab. Her real innocence lies in
the fact that life has no ugly secrets from her. She knows the beautiful
from the ugly, and why it is so. I think that is what Mr. Daab means by
'radiant innocence,' Zoe.' Fearless knowledge of truth."

He whistled softly in the gloom.

"Extraordinary!" said Mrs. Daab. "And you are one of us--aren't you,
dear?"

"For suffrage? Oh yes; and I am going to be a real one when I grow up."

"What else are you going to be?"

"A singer."

"You said that as if you meant it."

"I do. I've already heard nine operas. I am allowed to be anything I
want so long as I get to the biggest--the very biggest!"

"Are you studying?"

"I've had piano lessons for five years."

"I'm looking about now for a vocal teacher for her. She may be too
young, but at least I want her voice tried. I--we think she has quite an
amazing range."

"Have you tried Trieste?"

"Oh, I haven't dared contemplate anyone so inaccessible as he."

Mrs. Daab turned her head.

"Gedney," she said, "couldn't you give her a note to Trieste?"

"Good!" he said, feeling for a card and scrawling across its face. "This
will pass you directly to his nibs."

"You couldn't have granted us a bigger favor," said Lilly, feeling her
face glow.

"Then you grant me one. Bring your little girl to my Fifty-ninth Street
studio. I want to paint her."

"Indeed I will!"

"When?"

"Saturday afternoon is our only time."

"Fine. To-day two weeks?"

"Yes."

They Were at Ninety-first Street now, and he saw them up to their door.

"Good-by," he said. "You're a great youngster, and you've picked a great
little mother for yourself. Mrs. Daab and I want you both at the
studio often."

Up in their room, they embraced, Zoe's arms tight about her mother's
neck.

"It's begun, Lilly, to be wonderful!"

"What?"

"Life!"

* * * * *

The Saturday afternoon following, in a brownstone house in West
Forty-sixth Street that was more like a museum of the storied loot of
many lands, Trieste himself opened the pair of Florentine doors,
originally unhinged from a campanile outside of Rome, of his very
private studio, without appointment, to the magic of Gedney Daab's
scrawled card.

He had a head, Lilly decided, like the one of Praxiteles in the St.
Louis Museum of Fine Arts--only, the bust implied young hair, and
Trieste's curls were full of gray and the lines of his face were slashed
deeply. He listened, while Lilly talked her brief preamble, as he
invariably did, with his eyes closed and finger tips touching. Finally,
he opened them, regarding Lilly from under swollen, rather
diabetic lids.

"You should sing," he said, his acquired language grating slightly
against the native one.

"No! No!"

"You are young," he said, running his eyes down her body, "and fine and
big and strong."

She rose as if to throw off the crowding stress of the moment.

"Once," she said; "but that is all over now. My little girl--"

"You have temperament--let me hear," he said, reaching out to the piano
and striking out a bold C. "Sing the scale."

"Please!" she cried, the situation an agony to her. "Not me. My
little--"

"Why, Lilly!" said Zoe, regarding her mother with wide, unaffected eyes.
"Sing the scale, dear."

"Do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-si-do"--through a crimson flush.

He seemed to lose interest then, turning to Zoe.

"Let me hear you," he said.

"Shall I sing 'Jocelyn' or 'How Like a Bird'?"

"Anything--something simpler."

"Schubert, then, Zoe."

In her straight frock, with its wide patent-leather belt and flat white
collar, the cascade of her hair down over it, Zoe held the center of the
vast studio, singing straight into her mother's eyes.

It seemed to Lilly, at the sound of that voice, not yet cleared of
childish treble, but as ready to rise as a lark, that every ounce of her
blood must be gushing against her throat; so, after it was finished, she
sat on quite dumbly, staring at the manner in which Trieste remained
sitting with his eyes closed.

"Lyric soprano," he said, finally. "Fine! Big! God-given!"

"_Maestro_--you mean that?"

"Heigh-ho!" he said on a sigh, walking over and placing his hand on
Zoe's curls. "I make up my mind I am seeck of this business. I wait only
for this war to live my day quietly in Capri, where I have my _casa_,
and now a new nightingale flies in at my window. Twice now. Ten years
ago comes Carrienta out of just such a clear sky, and once more, when I
am again sure that one voice is only more unmusical than the rest,
comes this--"

Standing there, Lilly was fighting an impulse to faint. She remembered,
with terror, previous sensations, and fought off the vertigo, biting
down into her lips. She wanted to smile, but her mouth felt numb, as if
it dragged instead of lifted.

"You--you make us very happy--_maestro_."

"Some day," cried Zoe, still thrilling from her effort, "I will sing
until my high C hits the sky!"

'I think you will, _bella mia_, if you have in you the power to work for
it."

"I have."

"Art is the most cruel paymaster in the world. It exacts full
recompense, toil, and heartache before it deals out a first payment
in success."

"I'll pay! I'll pay for what I want, and most of all I want to sing!"

She trilled up a brace of scales for him then, and there were minute
questions of health and habits, and, finally, in a waiting pause, Lilly
found word to ask the question against which her lips stiffened.

"What--are--your terms--_maestro_?"

Something strange happened then, his well-known acumen immediately
asserting itself. It was as if he had slipped into another personality.

"Fifteen dollars a lesson. She must have three a week and her school
work and other studies should be reduced."

"Lilly--we're too poor for that!"

"I--I'm afraid my little girl is right, _maestro_. I--I couldn't even
pay that for all three. I'm employed myself, you see."

"Oh," he said, and walked off to the window, dilly-dallying on his
heels and looking out.

Finally he turned, with a gesture of dismissal.

"I have never before, except Carrienta, done such a thing. It must be a
secret between us. My belief is that art should be as well paid as any
life work, whether it is dentistry or lawmaking or storekeeping. But
your child here--they do not come so every day. In ten years, with
hundreds of pupils each year, she is the greatest since Carrienta. But I
must have first right to her. You hear, first right! I will teach her
free of charge. Leave your name and address with my secretary as you go
out. Send her Monday at four. Loose clothing. Not even corset waists.
Good afternoon. Good-by--Zoe"--placing his hands on her curls as if for
their warmth.

In the room adjoining, under whisper of a very soft pedal, some one,
probably a waiting pupil, was playing the indomitable pianoforte
composition, "Melody in F." Staring at her daughter, an old conceit of
Lilly's girlhood came flowing back. It seemed to her that a proscenium
arch of music was forming over Zoe and that her voice, a high-flung
scarf of melody, was winding itself reverently round a star.

* * * * *

That afternoon, Bruce Visigoth again asked Lilly to marry him.

Taking advantage of the quiet of a Saturday afternoon half holiday, she
had returned to the office to clear her desk of an accumulation of
loose ends.

In spite of herself, an extraordinary depression, low as storm clouds,
was gathering over the excitation whipped up by Trieste's acceptance
of Zoe.

The tight squeeze of a lump was gathering in her throat. Finally she
laid her cheek to the desk and cried a little pool of her unaccountable
melancholy on to the glassed surface.

Bruce Visigoth found her so, although, at his entrance, she sprang from
the mound of her misery, violently simulating affairs at a lower drawer.

"Hello!" he cried, then, eying her crumpled cheek and the lane of tears:
"Ah, I say now! Come, come; this won't do. What's up?"

She rubbed her bare hand furiously across the ravages of her sharp
depression.

"Nothing. I--I guess I'm blue," she said, in a half laugh. "Something
wonderful has happened to Zoe, and I--it's made me so happy, I'm blue.
That's it--so--happy--I'm blue."

"What is the wonderful thing?"

She told him.

It was then he caught her hands.

"Lilly, marry me! Make it possible! Don't let the years lead you into a
blind alley. You are bound inevitably to lose a child like Zoe--to life.
That's why you are so unaccountably blue, Lilly; the writing is on
the wall."

"No!" she cried, plunging past him, her hat in hand and her throat now a
cave of the winds for her unreleased sobs. "The years have brought me,
Zoe. She is my fulfillment. You can't frighten me--life cannot take her
from me. I'm not afraid--only, I can't bear anything to-night, least of
all from you--"

"Lilly, you're not--"

"Let me go! I'm all right--only tired--that's all.
Terribly--terribly--tired."

She was presently on her homeward way, walking swiftly, almost, it would
seem, a little madly, through a May evening that hung as thinly as one
thickness of a veil.

At Seventy-second Street she veered suddenly and rather unaccountably
to Riverside Drive and down into a ledge of park that dips like a
terrace to the Hudson River.

An asphalt walk led in festoons from high parky nooks that sheltered
couples, down to the water-slapped edge of docks, where the tidey surf
had a thick, inarticulate lisp, as if what it had to say might only be
comprehended from the under side.

At one of the lowermost curves of the walk, the width of a brace of
railroad tracks between, a coal dock jutted out into the river. Across
these forbidden tracks, indeed, as if they did not exist,
Lilly wandered.

At the last inch of dock, so that the water licked up at her shoes,
Lilly stood poised. Not, it is true, with the diver's blade thrust of
arms, but rather the unskilled, the indeterminate movement of one
vaguely prompted from the unfathomable places of the heart.

It was upon that move that something, a terrifying restraint, laid hold
of Lilly's jangling nerve ends.

"Hey there! None o' that to-night!"

A dockman's hand, hairy as an Airedale, had her by the arm, and
somewhere at her brow, cooling it, the fine hand of Bruce Visigoth,
pressing her against him, and at that touch Lilly's hysteria shot up
like a geyser.

"Don't!" she screamed, and would have struggled for the edge except for
the two firm hands now pressing her arms to her sides.

"Lilly, for God's sake, get hold of yourself!"

"Let me go! Let me go!"

"Aw no; we don't leggo. It's a good stroke we both happened to spy you
at the same minute. There's nothin' gives strength like a spell of the
craziness. You'd 'a' jumped me alone, sure!"

"No! No! It wasn't that--God, not that! Tell me, Bruce, it
wasn't--that."

"Of course it wasn't, Lilly."

"That's what they all say once they git their senses jerked back. Come
in here and pull yourself together, girl, or I'll call an ambulance or a
patrol, suiting your pleasure."

"Let me go, you! I won't stand it. I must have been mad! Bruce, you tell
him, please--it wasn't--that!"

"You're wrong, old man. Here--take this for your trouble, but this young
woman is my sister. We walked out here together."

Quieted suddenly to the merest timbre of insolence, the old man shambled
off.

"Sure!" he said, far too knowingly. "Sure!" And faded shaggily,
impudently into darkness.

Bruce Visigoth took Lilly home in a taxicab. At her door she broke her
shamed silence.

"You understand, Bruce, it wasn't anything--like that. It must have been
nerves--tiredness--but nothing, Bruce, that you think it was. That old
man was wrong. You must understand--for her sake--it wasn't that."

"Of course it wasn't, Lilly." His voice drained off, as if from
exhaustion.

But for years, like a wound whose jagged lips were slow to close, the
memory of this night lay palpitating between them.




CHAPTER V

"The Web" was tried out in Baltimore the following April, Zoe, Ida
Blair, and Bruce Visigoth traveling down on the same train with the
company. It cost Lilly a pang for Zoe to miss the two days of school and
a vocal, a French, and a piano lesson, but the theater attracted Zoe
like the blithesome little moth she was. The duties of her High School
combined with the unrelenting tutelage of Treiste molded her young days
pretty rigidly to form, but more than once, during the rehearsals of
"The Web," Lilly, seated in the black maw of the auditorium, would turn
suddenly to the feel of her daughter's gaze burning like sun through
glass into the darkness. The company adopted her as a pet. The director
babied her. Once, as the afternoon rehearsal was disbanding, she crept
up through a box to the stage. The footlights were dark, but she came
down quite freely toward them, seeming to feel their mock blaze, and
sang a snatch or two from the tenderest _Lieder_ ever written, bits of
Schubert and Hugo Wolf, the company gathering in the wings to listen
and applaud.

The incident, slight as it was, brought the scratch of tears to Lilly's
eyes and the pull of half hysteria to her lips. What if, after all, an
incredible fulfillment was gathering about her like a vast dawn? "O
God! please!"

And so, to the unending delight and amusement of Bruce, Zoe went along
to Baltimore, Lilly pinching a little over the expense and pressing out
ribbons and girlish accessories up to the last minute.

With Ida Blair, who had sunk back against years the colorlessness of
cold dish water, herself more colorless, it was as if she had fired her
one and only shot and run retreating behind the explosion.

Already her name had been linked with a co-author on programs and
three-sheets, because a collaborator, a professional mender of plays,
had been called in at the last moment to riddle the drama's somber story
with a few "laughs." A character policeman, a comedy jury foreman, and a
subplot of love story between the character policeman and an Irish cook
had been "written in." The last act entirely revised, a happy ending
substituted, and the theme of the story extricated like a jumping nerve.

It was the heroic treatment administered by experts to save what looked
like unmistakable demise after the first Baltimore performance, and all
the while Ida Blair sat mutely by, trying to probe through the actuality
of her play or what was left of it, actually in the acting.

"The Steel Trap," as it was renamed, played to indifferent reviews and
receipts the remainder of the Baltimore engagement, and lost money in
Washington, but to the director, Bruce Visigoth, and certainly to Lilly,
looked a potential property.

So after two weeks the play was removed, revamped, recast, still another
play diagnostician called in, and under his surgery the third and fourth
acts combined, and the original role of love story made to predominate
what sociological note the play still contained. After an October tryout
in Stamford and a New York opening of still doubtful reception, when the
production hung between life and death and all the well-known
exigencies of oxygen were applied in the form of "papering" the house
with two weeks of free tickets, press-agenting, _et al._, the public
decided to like it.

"Who Did It?" as it was re-renamed, settled down to a run of forty-three
New York weeks, and along the Rialto the source of its authorship leaked
out and became curbstone, and finally newspaper, patter.

At the end of six months Ida Blair had resigned her bookkeepership,
erected a small but perfect plinth of blue granite in a certain hillside
cemetery, purchased a story-and-a-half bungalow in the heart of two Long
Island acres, and was raising leghorns and educating a niece
by marriage.

For the forty-three metropolitan weeks, not to mention stock, foreign,
motion pictures, and road incomes that were to accrue later, Lilly was
receiving her share, never less than one hundred and twenty-five dollars
a week and often considerably more.

It was a windfall pure and simple. The years of petty pickering suddenly
seemed more horrid to her in retrospect than she had ever realized they
were in the living. It was hateful to have reckoned in car fares and to
so often have appeared to do the niggardly thing before the unspoken
reproach of her child.

That same winter a cashier's note with her weekly check announced a
thirty-three and a third per cent advance in salary. Life had suddenly
quickened its tempo. She was passing through one of those eras when
events, long crouched, seem to spring simultaneously.

* * * * *

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