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Star Dust

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In April, 1917, the United States declared war against Germany. Daily
life, even to the indirectly touched, took on a new throb. Fourteen men
employees of the Amusement Enterprise Company enlisted the first week.
A service flag went up. Bruce Visigoth, outside the draft limit,
immediately enrolled on a service committee, spending two days out of
every week in Washington. Vaudeville ranks sagged suddenly and for a
brief moment the gray-haired actor came back into his own. Office
tension tightened. A nervousness set in. A telephone ringing could set
Lilly's nerves to quivering and the telephone not ringing fill her with
a nameless sort of anxiety.

More and more, too, it seemed to her, with the emotions always just a
scratch beneath the surface those war times, that the agony of pretense
between her and Bruce Visigoth could not endure. That he had applied for
a commission in active service Lilly knew, but merely from
correspondence. There had been no talk about it. She awoke nights, heavy
with a dread she could not name.

Only the violent conjuring of her child and a vision of Albert Penny
carried her rebellion past these bad places. Their frequent enforced
conferences; the chance touching of their fingers, only to fly too
instantly apart; the impeccable masks of indifference and elaborate
casualness of manner; the forbidden singing through her entire being as
he walked into the office and the imperturbability of the manner she
must present to him. To contemplate a future futile with such dreary
repetition became almost more than she could bear, and bitter with that
salt were the lonely tears she cried at night.

Even the occasional appearance of Robert Visigoth came more and more to
be a sort of biting irritant to a gangrenous spot she thought long since
had hardened.

He had grown enormously fat and Rufus G. Higginbothom, dying, had
enhanced that glutted look by bequeathing to his only daughter, Hindle,
without stipulation, a leaf-lard fortune of some seventeen
million dollars.

When his daughter, Pauline, was thirteen, he brought her to New York on
one of his frequent fliers, parading the fat, freckled, and frightened
youngster from one department to another.

"How much do you think she weighs?" he was fond of interrogating, with
his small parental eyes full of pride. "Hundred and thirty-six for
thirteen years. Not bad, eh?"

With about the sickest sensation she was ever to know, Lilly saw him
this day lead his daughter past her open door, his face averted and the
roll of fat at the back of his neck redly conscious.

It was after this incident that a half plan, long dormant, lifted its
head. Every day in her comings and goings through the wide fireproof
corridors of the Forty-second Street building a sign on a ground-glass
door waved at her like a flag:

MISS NELLIE TERRY

Playbroker

Authors'
Manuscripts
Placed

She had little doubt of her ability to launch out into a scheme of this
sort for herself and liked to incubate the idea in the back of her head,
going so far as to inspect a tiny office on the fifteenth floor,
mentally furnishing it up, and visualizing her name in neat black
letters on her own ground-glass door.

She did broach the subject to Zoe one evening, who, with her head
wrapped in a brilliant fez improvised out of an old cushion top, stood
before the mirror, attitudinizing her part in school entertainment.

"No! Don't go into anything tin horn like that! I hate for you to keep
playing _second fiddle._"

In the pause that followed, hardly perceptible enough to hold the drop
of a pin, Zoe flashed toward her mother, the colossal ego of her youth
somehow penetrated for the moment.

"Why, Lilly--I--I mean--You know what I mean--"

"Of course I know what you mean, dear. Second fiddle!"

And so what with Zoe's growing demands and Lilly's rooted fear of any
jeopardy to them, time marched on rather imperceptibly, except that
Lilly thinned and whitened a bit, slendering down, as it were, to more
and more sisterly proportions as her daughter shot up to meet her. They
were shoulder to shoulder now, if the truth were known, Zoe a little in
the preponderance.

Meanwhile, Zoe was growing restive of the somewhat irksome limitations
of the Ninety-first Street apartment. She complained that the room was
oppressive for her long hours of study and practice. Visits to the Daab
studio, faithful in effect to a Doge's palace and where she was more and
more a favorite, and also to the pretentious homes of one or two school
companions, had an upsetting effect upon her. The long, gloomy neck of
hallway depressed her and she voiced bitterly a secret aversion of
Lilly's for the single bathroom with the ugly wooden floor and shallow
bathtub. "Dump" she called the little flat, her brilliant blue gaze
blackening up.

"I can't have the girls and boys visit me in this little two-by-four,
dear. It's a dump!"

And so early in the run of "Who Did It?" the little group moved again.
This time to a strictly modern, pretentious apartment in West End
Avenue, whose upper apartments boasted a river view and three baths and
rented as high as four and five thousand dollars a year.

For twelve hundred Lilly obtained the ground-floor rear, no view, but
five fairly large rooms and two capacious baths. And since such a house
takes its tone from its highest-priced tenants, they enjoyed with them
the uniformed hall service, the ornate entrance _de luxe_ and foyer
_de trop_.

In lieu of maid, Harry again occupied those quarters, his grandmother
sleeping on a davenport in the sitting-dining-room. There were no
roomers, Lilly carrying the resultant deficit.

She and Zoe again shared what corresponded to the parlor, this time a
fairly large room, with alcove curtained off for sleeping quarters. They
furnished it themselves, quite charmingly, too, and with a consensus of
taste except where Lilly gave way to Zoe's really superior intuition.

There were plain écru walls, not papered, but, at Zoe's instance,
painted and roughened up with a process called "stippling." The two-tone
brown rug. An overstuffed couch of generous proportions and upholstered
in a nicely woven imitation of Flemish tapestry. Along the back of this
piece, which occupied virtually the center of the room, was a long,
narrow table the exact length of the couch, with a pair of Italian
polychrome candlesticks, gift of Gedney Daab, at either end.

A piece of old red brocade hung over the fireplace, covering the ugly
mirror, and facing it a brown-rep fireside chair, coarse tan fishnet
curtains, a pair of huge black-velvet floor cushions with orange-colored
balls in each center, bespeaking a new art era which was dawning as
colorfully and as formlessly as a pricked egg yolk.

An upright piano was stacked with music, and, in spite of Lilly's
argument for them, no pictures on the walls, only a brilliant panel
portrait of Zoe, signed Gedney Daab, her young form in faint profile
against a background of cloth of gold, the face up-flung to a flow of
sunlight that crossed the picture in a churchy ray.

"If we cannot have originals or etchings, we won't have any. I hate
middle-classness."

"But, Zoe, dear--a few good prints. 'The Age of Innocence'--"

She kissed her mother on the mouth with all the outrageous patronage of
youth.

"You're a darling, Lilly, but they just aren't doing it that way any
more, dear."

So there were no pictures.

At the time of this move, Harry had been holding the position of clerk
at the cigar, magazine, and book concession of one of the newest and
noisiest of Broadway's terrific commercial hotels.

The hours were difficult, from noon to midnight, but within the
seventeen months he had advanced from fifteen to twenty-five dollars a
week. A new, a surprising spruceness had laid hold of him. He took to
exceedingly tall small collars and vivid neckwear, his suit very narrow
and making him look less than ever his years.

Mrs. Schum, too, had taken on some of that well-being, and, though she
complained constantly of a sciatic twist in her side, something had
lifted from off her. Her patter about the house, in the slippers with
the rubber insets, was lighter; she discarded the old jet-edged dolman
with the humps on the shoulders and the slits for the arms, for a decent
full-length black coat with a stitched braid border and self-covered
buttons, gift of her grandson. There had been a present for Lilly, too,
a light-blue, drugstore-purchased celluloid toilet set.

He no longer sat idle in his room, his light eyes futile with staring at
space or his head down tiredly in his hands. Something had indeed come
over Harry.

"After all," said Lilly, always readily buoyed, "the operation did
accomplish!"

Sometimes, since his mornings were free, he rode down to the office with
Lilly, eagerly insistent to pay her car fare and cram a return Subway
ticket into the warm pink aperture of flesh where her glove clasped.

Once he bought her a little spray of heather off a vender's tray.

"Harry, you mustn't spend on me this way. You must begin to save your
money for that right girl when she comes along."

Never quick with retort, he stood watching her dart into the foyer of
the Forty-second Street building, a sudden silence shaping around him
that had in it the little noises of birds singing. "Right girl," he kept
repeating after her, or something like that, and remained there
loitering for twenty minutes after her presence had fluttered through
the revolving doors and into the elevator.

And then suddenly a quick succession of events set in.

One night Lilly and Zoe, returning from a Boston Symphony concert for
which they held first-balcony season seats, found Harry trying to pour
brandy between the clenched lips of Mrs. Schum, who lay rigid on the
hall floor where she had fallen, her head bleeding from a sharp contact
with the door.

Her poor face with the shriveled bags of flesh seemed suddenly shrunk,
and, holding the flask against her teeth, Harry's hands were trembling
so that the liquid poured in a thin stream off the edge of her mouth.

After half an hour of desperate and unavailing use of home remedies,
Lilly sent for a doctor, one in the building, who came down in
dinner clothes.

At twelve o'clock that night Mrs. Schum, without regaining
consciousness, was rushed to the Saint Genevieve Hospital in East
Seventy-eighth Street, for an emergency operation that had to do with a
growth in her side.

It was Lilly's first contact with the casualty of sudden illness. In the
little anteroom of the hospital, her hand in Harry's, she sat the
remainder of the night through. He was constantly wiping away the tears
from his light eyes and looking away to gulp. She reassured him where
she could, tightening her hold of his hand.

"Don't--let them hurt her."

"They aren't hurting her, Harry dear. She can't feel at all under the
anaesthetic."

"But they won't know. Gramaw won't let them know. Tell them, Lilly,
she's that way--not to hurt her--please."

"Harry--dear!"

At dawn milk wagons began to clatter through streets no grayer than
Harry's face. But at six o'clock Mrs. Schum was reported "as well as
could be expected" and the operation apparently a success.

They rode home through the early morning, Lilly insisting upon a taxicab
and Harry lying back, quite frankly spent, against her arm. Her vitality
was unquenchable, mounted, in fact, under stress. Untired, she brewed
him hot coffee, forced him to drink it and lie down; tidied up the
little flat there at six-thirty o'clock in the morning, with a
hit-and-a-miss it is true, but allaying all signs of confusion; fluted
an Eton collar for Zoe and packed her off to school; and at half after
eight, just out of a cold and invigorating shower, was combing out the
fine electric rush of her hair, a pink Turkish bathrobe, the color of
her firm, cool skin, wrapped tightly about her and caught in by a cord
at her waist line.

Suddenly through the mirror she saw the door open, and before she could
call out, Harry stood in the center of the room, his eyes running quite
unmistakably over the contour of her sheathed body.

It was the first time he had ever violated the slightest nicety, and,
outraged even in her pity for him, her hand flew up, drawing the robe
closer at her breast.

"Don't come in!" she cried, retreating up against the dresser and
turning her shoulder with the hair flowing over it toward him. "How
dared you come in here without knocking! Go!"

He was crying, not seeming to know it, because he continued, even as she
stood blazing at him, to stand staring through the rain of tears.

"Harry, you're forgetting yourself. You mustn't give way. Your
grandmother is over the worst now--"

Suddenly he was on his knees, his back round and shaken with sobs.

"Lilly--Lilly--can't you see?"

"See what? Is anything wrong? Harry," she cried, stooping to shake him
by the shoulder, "has anything happened again? Are you in trouble?"

He would not rise, following her, to her horror, by walking on his
knees, pressing and pressing the hem of her garments, and before she
realized it burning his kisses down into it. She fought him off, tearing
from his grasp and staggering back against the wall.

"Harry--you're in trouble again."

He caught her bare arm, pressing his lips into the yielding flesh.

"Lilly, I can't hold back any longer. I love you. I'm all alone. With
gramaw here I could hold back--somehow--but now--Lilly--Lilly--I
love you."

She could only stare, her mouth fallen open and the rim of her eyes
their widest.

"It's been so long to--hold back--so long. Since that first day at the
street car--you kissed me--and now with gramaw gone--Lilly--"

She jerked him up from his knees this time, holding him firmly, even
absurdly, by the coat lapels, shaking him.

"Harry, you've gone mad!"

"I love you, Lilly. All these years. I'm all alone now and--"

Her glance shot to the egress of the door, but, seeing that he
anticipated her, she did not dart, but held herself back from him, her
hands in an X across her breast.

"Harry," she said, trying to keep out of her voice a rising sense of
fear, "you're not well You don't know what you are saying or doing."

"You treat me like a child, but I'm a man. Your age! You hear--a man
with a man's feelings for a woman--for you--Lilly. You're my--be my--"

"You get out," she cried, her terror bursting out like a flame. "Get out
or I'll call Mr. Alquist."

She referred to the superintendent of the apartment building, although
she knew him to be well out of hearing. It is probable that Harry knew,
too, because he had her by the elbows, pressing them in against her body
and her hair flowing across his face.

"Lilly, Lilly, Lilly!" he kept repeating, breathing so heavily it
sickened her to hear and feel it, and all the time fumbling with his
free hand down into his waistcoat pocket, bringing up a bit of tissue
paper which he tore at with his teeth, revealing the icy flash of a
great oval diamond ring set up high in platinum. "It's yours, Lilly. I
want to cover you with them. I want you to blaze with them--"

He pressed it on her finger, pushing it down the entire length, danced
her hand before her, catching her to him finally and crushing her and
the flow of her hair to him, kissing so fiercely down that red marks
came out against her whiteness, and when her cry finally rose to a
shriek let go of her, staggering back, his face, never quite clean of
pimples, suddenly fat-looking and with a lionlike thickening up of
the features.

"Ah--yah--yah--yah--yah!"

His incoherence was horrible and she began to sob at him through
hysteria.

"You go! You get out! You stole that ring! You're a thief! You stole
that ring!" she cried, thrusting it with a sudden quick hand down the V
of his waistcoat. "Get out! Get out! Your grandmother--your--" Then,
because words failed and her knees threatened to give way, she snatched
up a book from the table, standing quivering and in the attitude
of hurling.

He did go then, as if the book had actually struck, making a detour of
her and his knees quite bent as he walked.

She finished her dressing in quick, fuddled movements, voice out in her
breathing, buttoning up wrong and tearing open again in the grip of a
nervous frenzy.

A panicky need to gain the outdoors seized her; air to sweep and somehow
to cleanse her.

Before she was quite dressed, her belt not yet adjusted, in fact, the
bell rang in three titters and a prolonged grill. She stood arrested,
for some reason beginning all over her trembling. When Harry did not
answer she went out herself, opening the door to a mere slit. A foot was
pushed immediately in, crowding her back against the wall. Two men
walked in, without removing derby hats, and at sight of them the
nameless terror pinned her there in silence.

"Harry Calvert live here?"

She stood with her answer locked in her throat, conscious, on the
moment, of Harry appearing in the kitchen doorway behind her. She
wanted, for the same nameless reason, to motion him back, to shriek out
a warning, to throw herself against his presence. To herself in quick
repetitions:

"O God, make him go back!"

"Harry Calvert?"

"Yes," replied Harry from where he stood.

"Warrant for your arrest. Charged with entering the apartment of Mrs. J.
King at Hotel Admiral and stealing one four-carat diamond ring valued
at five thousand dollars. More evidence than we know what to do with.
You better come quietly."

"Harry, deny it! They've made a mistake! You haven't the right to come
here at a time like this. There is sickness. His grandmother is dying at
a hospital. You've made a mistake. Take me. I'll appear for him. I'll
give his bail. All you want. Deny it, Harry. Harry!"

For answer a sharp explosion rang suddenly into the narrow hallway,
banging and reverberating against the walls, crowding faces out behind
an immediate purplish smoke.

"Harry! Harry! My God! Harry!"

He crumpled up quietly, one shoulder in the lead and his left leg
bending under him, straightening out then, with half a writhe to
his back.

"No! No! Help him! God! No! No! No!"

But yes. Harry had shot himself, very truly, too, through the heart.




CHAPTER VI

There followed black weeks, with Mrs. Schum lying there on the edge of
death, yet reluctant to go, Lilly's days an intricate pattern of
hospital, office, and home.

She was more tired than she knew and for days after the tragedy went
about with a springy little sob just behind her throat, which was
perpetually taut from holding back tears.

The effect upon Zoe was telling. She whose solicitude for her mother had
never been any too noteworthy and who with all the unthinking blitheness
of an unthinking childhood had taken much for granted, developed,
suddenly, a new consciousness.

She would literally drag Lilly away from the pressing board.

"Don't, Lilly. I'm old enough to iron out my own ribbons." Or: "Don't
polish my shoes, Lilly. It's outrageous!"

"But, Zoe, I would rather you put the time on practicing or reading."

"I can do both."

One Saturday morning she was even awakened to an aroma of coffee, her
daughter standing attendant at the bedside with a tray of steaming
breakfast.

"Stay in bed this morning, Lilly. You look fagged. Let me take a message
down to Visi for you. Oh, Lilly, do! I'll wear my new red tam."

"Nonsense! I'm going down as usual."

"But, Lilly, I want him to see me in it."

Probably Lilly regarded her daughter a second longer than the occasion
warranted, because Zoe broke away from the gaze somewhat redly.

"Faugh! I hate him. He reminds me of a wild horse. But I'll show him
some day that I'm on earth. I'm as full of my own ideals as he is
of his."

"Of course you are, dear; but why so angry?"

"I'm not."

Then Lilly rose, smiling as she dressed.

The household was not easy of readjustment until finally were procured
the services of one of the charwomen from the Bronx Theater, who
prepared the meals and could flute Zoe's collars to the utmost delicacy.

At this time Zoe was an advanced junior in High School, president of her
class, although the hawklike tutelage of Cleofant Trieste had delayed
graduation for a year, slowing down her curriculum to meet his demands
of harmony, languages, rhythmic dancing, and sports. She had a long,
sure swimming stroke that could carry her again her length, rode with
the fine fluid movement of a young body at one with her mount, and
because of her five hours a week at gymnasium excelled in the rather
uncommon sport of handball.

She no longer wore her hair in its great avalanche of curls down her
back; they were caught in now with an amber barrette. Nights Lilly loved
to brush them out until they flared to a dust of gold about her head.
There was no light too dull for this hair to catch. It sprang out in
radiance against any background.

"When you sing Marguerite, Zoe, you won't need a wig."

"Ah, but when I sing Electra--Thaïs--the real me--no namby-pamby
Marguerite--no pearls--that's how I feel about Thaïs--as if she were a
great opal full of fire. Hair," flopping her head backward with a bounce
of curls, "is hot--it restricts. These curls--they are all hot and
crawly around my neck, holding me."

"Poor Harry! You remember how he used to love to take you out walking to
show off your curls?"

"Lilly, is Mrs. Schum going to get well?"

"I don't know. It frightens me. I cannot bear to look ahead for her,
poor dear."

"If she gets well she'll have to know, won't she, that Harry didn't go
to war?"

"Yes, and somehow--I couldn't stand her knowing that."

"She'll know it some day, anyhow."

"Yes, but then maybe where it will be easier for her to understand."

On her own responsibility Lilly had employed this subterfuge with Mrs.
Schum. Slowly as she came clutching back at consciousness, the name of
her grandson more and more on her twisted lips, Lilly whispered it down
to her, closing her hand over the tired old bony one.

"Listen, dear Mrs. Schum, I've--news for you."

"They're all against him--"

"No, no, dear. While you've been so ill, what we had hoped for has
happened. Harry's been accepted, dear--he's enlisted."

She crinkled her brow, trying to understand.

"They wouldn't take him. He wanted to fight for his country. They were
all against him--"

"No, no, dear. It's all different now. Since our country is at war Harry
has been accepted. The boys were rushed overnight to training camp.
Thousands of them. He came weeks ago to tell you good-by, but you were
too ill to know. He's on a transport now, dear, sailing to fight for his
country. Aren't you proud? Aren't we all proud?"

The poor hands began to tremble, feeling their way up along Lilly's arm.

"Harry's gone--to war?"

"Y-yes--dear."

She seemed to speak then, through a pale transparent sleep, into which a
new contentment pressed lightly.

"Harry's gone. Annie, he's a soldier. He's so gentle with me, Annie, a
meek child, like you were. Never any back talk or a harsh word. Whatever
wrong he did was forced on him by those working against him. They were
all against him. His Mamma-Annie knows. She bore him and I raised him.
Fight, Harry! The streak from your father can't keep you down. Show
them, Harry, show them. Whatever wrong my boy did was forced on him by
those working against him--"

"That's all past now, dear."

"He liked you, Lilly. He'd have gone through fire for you. You were
always good to my soldier boy. I was forever finding old bits of things
that you had thrown away among his belongings. Don't tell him I told
you. Old pencils and old gloves. He was a great one for gathering up
things for keepsakes after you had thrown them away. Gloves--found some
old ones of yours under his pillow one morning. Not taking things, you
understand, but just pulled out of the rubbish heap for remembrance."

"I do understand, dear."

And so the weeks of her illness and of Lilly's deception dragged on.

There were holes in the fabric of the story, obvious to any but Mrs.
Schum's tired consciousness, and a too sudden inquiry could throw Lilly
off her guard, but there was a flag with one shining service star
glowing above the narrow bed, and evenings straight from the office
Lilly would hasten to the hospital with fruits that could only be looked
at, and newspapers to be unfurled and read.

"Is his name in the papers yet?"

"Not yet."

"Why?"

"I--You see, dear, the transport has just reached the other side."

"My boy will show them--"

The kindly spirit of the deception had fallen over the entire corridor.
A maternity case in the room adjoining sent in a silk flag with
hand-embroidered stars. The head nurse, herself on the eve of sailing
for service, had shopped the flag with the one bright star. The doctor,
fathering the lie, called her "captain" and saluted her upon entering
the room with a flash of palm and a click of heels.

She could smile at this, but with lips as blue and shriveled as drowned
flesh.

One night after she had dozed off and wandered into some phantasmagoria
where she seemed to fancy herself seated in the bow of a boat with her
daughter, she opened her eyes suddenly, reaching out for Lilly's hand.

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