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Star Dust

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"Lilly, your poor mother. Do you ever think of her?"

"Yes, yes, I do, dear."

"You remember, Lilly, how she used to rush down right from the breakfast
table to the bargain bins for those pink and blue mill-ends she used to
dress you so pretty in. My! wasn't she one for Valenciennes lace,
though! Wouldn't she just dress Zoe up, though--"

"Wouldn't she!"

"She was a good woman in her way, Lilly, even with all her fussing and
nagging. My! how she did used to nag! I understood her. The ketchup. She
was a great one for condiments and would have them all over the other
boarders. Ketchup and the best cut of the meat for you and your father.
There was just no pleasing her. But I understood her--she's a good
woman, Lilly."

"Indeed, mamma is good!"

"It's not that I don't glory in you, Lilly, and your having a wonder
child. You know I've always gloried in you. You've a head on you I
always say that's going to carry you beyond us all, but don't you ever
feel, Lilly, that maybe your doings have been wayward?"

"I do. I do."

"Your mother. Your father, as patient and as fine a man as breathed.
Your husband, I don't know him, but life is so short. So terribly short.
So full of pain and regrets for what can't be undone. That's why I
cannot go and leave my boy behind--to suffer alone. I want him to go
first. He's not strong. What is life, except doing for those we love?
Don't you ever feel that about them out there, Lilly? Life is so
short--such a struggle--alone--"

"Dear Mrs. Schum, you--you--you're right."

"Ah, I know---the young man in the box with you at 'The Web' that night
it opened. Your boss. I know! He likes you, that young man does, Lilly.
It's easy to see it in his eyes for you. That's why it's dangerous.
Harry likes you, too--but not that way, I think. He saves your old
gloves. That's always struck me as funny. They're all against him. The
fire escapes; that's why I lock the doors. You hear--the fire escapes.
Poor Lilly! just a little too much ambition and not quite enough talent
to reach. I used to predict for you all the things that are cropping out
in your child. Zoe is to be the one, Lilly. Not you--or Harry--or
Mamma-Annie--Zoe! Funny his saving your gloves--"

These were the times that Lilly would sit there crying, old musty
memories rising around her like kicked-up dust. There were whole
evenings when her mother's name was constantly on the not always
coherent lips, and to Lilly the old sense of the unreality of her
universe, or was it herself, laid somewhat, by the busy years, would
come surging again. Where were the visions for which she had climbed,
spike-shod, up that loving wall of living flesh back there? How long
since her last dream of self had vanished? Zoe was her answer.

One evening when Lilly arrived home from the hospital she found Zoe
squatting in bed, her face naughtily screwed into a little grimalkin
knot, elbows pressed into her sides, palms up, and all attitudinized to
emulate a Chinese god. Holding this pose for a full minute after Lilly
had entered the room, she began to bounce in hilarity up and down on the
mattress, probably to allay her own sense of inner unease.

For the full round of the minute Lilly stared, her glance widening and
darkening. Something had happened to Zoe. Something horrid.

"Don't you love it, Lilly? Don't stand there like you're frozen.
Everybody loves it. All the models down at Daab's are wearing it this
way. Thaïs does. Jeanne d'Arc does. Don't look at me that way."

Zoe had bobbed her hair. It hung quite straight, and in an outstanding
shock, because of its thickness, just below her ears. Franz Hals would
have loved the rectilinear contour of her. She was saucy. She was
abbreviated. She was naughty; and liked to flop her head about for the
soft throw of her hair.

Her mother dropped rather than sat on a chair edge, trying to keep down
the storm of anger that had her by the throat and eyeballs.

"Your curls! All gone! Your beautiful hair! What have you done? You
wicked girl! You--wicked--girl--you!"

It was the first time in all the largesse of her youth that such a tone
had assailed Zoe. The very seventeenness of her revolted; she dropped
her attitude.

"Why, Lilly--you--you're talking like other--mothers."

But the spank in Lilly's hand was suddenly singing against her palm and
there was a rush of her not so forbearing forefathers to the very front.

"You horrid girl! How dared you? Don't come near me! Your beautiful hair
that I've never been too tired to brush for hours! To have realized
those gorgeous curls in you and for--for this! You horrid, selfish
girl--selfish--selfish!"

All during this, her naughtiness fallen from her like a cloak, Zoe sat
regarding her parent, her lower lip less and less steady. She might have
been stunned, trying to keep her equilibrium by a series of rapid little
blinks, Lilly meanwhile sunk into a heap and crying down into her hands.

"Lilly--dearest--darling--est--"

"Don't talk to me."

"But, Lilly--you--you've always wanted me to be true to myself."

"You're not true to yourself. You're true to a pose, a silly fad that
you've picked up around the Daab studio."

"You always said if I wanted to be a circus rider I could, just so I was
better than all the other circus riders. Well, I wanted to have my hair
bobbed and I bobbed it bobbiest."

"Your comparison is stupid. You know it is. You've never taken a step
before without talking it over with me. You know perfectly well I should
not have interfered. I should have tried to make you see the folly of
cutting off your beautiful curls, but if you had still insisted, off
they might have come just the same. I think it is that as much as the
loss of the curls. Your privilege has become a license. You've made
everything seem ridiculous--me--you."

"Then you've made me so. If you want me to be like other girls you
should have reared me like other girls. Have other girls' fathers who
don't know they are on earth? Have other girls' mothers who--"

"Zoe!"

As if the words had been live coals scuttling off her lips before she
knew, Zoe sat back, staring at her mother's stare, scalding tears
already welling.

"Lilly, forgive me. I--I wish I could cut my tongue out. I didn't mean
it that way; you know I didn't. If you don't forgive me I can't stand
it," the stabbing consciousness of that impulsively flung reproach
already through her like a hurting wound.

"You are right, Zoe, I--"

"I didn't mean one word, Lilly darling, not one eeny word. It's just
that all of a sudden it seemed to me to be the freest, gladdest thing in
the world to cut off my hair. That's it, free! Haven't you ever had
that feeling, darling? Free! I wouldn't have done it, Lilly, if I had
known how it would hurt. Lilly--darling--mother. If I've hurt you I want
to just die. My own dear--Lilly--"

Her voice caught on the crest of a sob and she was at her mother's feet,
seeking out her lap, tears rushing down over her incoherence.

"I'll grow it back again for you, Lilly. I'll make it up to you,
sweetheart. I didn't mean that--what I said about fathers or--or other
girls--you know I didn't. I'm bad. Terrible."

In some alarm, Lilly placed her hand on the shorn head, shuddering in
spite of herself as if the ends were bleeding.

"Sh-h-h, Zoe! It upset me, dear, that's all--the shock of seeing you
sitting up in bed there--with it off."

"I'll make it up to you, Lilly. In so many ways. Soon. It's settled,
dear, that Auchinloss is coming to America in the fall to conduct.
Trieste is going to arrange my audition for September. He promised
to-day I'd be ready. Think, Lilly, my audition so soon. I'll have the
wig made out of my own hair, dear, for Marguerite. Don't feel badly,
Lilly; the wig will look--"

"I don't any more, Zoe. It was just the shock--"

"I know it was silly, dear, but it will grow quickly and I just had that
feeling to be free--you see, dear--"

"I do see, dear, I do. Zoe, look at me. Doesn't it ever come over you,
on the eve of so much, dear--that perhaps you do need his--your
father's guardianship--"

"Now just because I said _that_. I tell you I'm a devil. I didn't mean
it--not one word--"

"I know you didn't. It cropped out unconsciously. You're not to blame.
He's a good man, Zoe, your father, and his steady hand might do much
where I--may have failed."

"If you talk that way I can't stand it. You tell me so often he's a good
man, I wonder if he really is--"

"You're getting beyond me, Zoe. I wonder if the day isn't inevitable
when you are going to break out more and more into unconscious
reproach."

"Lilly--no--no--"

"Oh, I don't only mean what you said just now. But it's on my mind more
and more, now that you are old enough to decide for yourself. You cannot
be sucked back any more into a life you would not tolerate. You can
choose. That is what I have been waiting for. Doesn't the ache ever come
over you, Zoe, to see your father? Just a natural instinctive ache, if
nothing else--your grandparents--"

"No! No! No! I hate it all as you hated it. If you want to punish me
terribly--for saying something I didn't mean--just talk them to me. I
want wideness, must have it! Room! I--I could say it in music better
than in words. Some day I shall compose a song that says it for
me--the--the way I feel it. Don't stop now saving me from them. Wait.
Wait, Lilly, until I sing. Trieste understands even better than you. I'm
the surprise he keeps hinting about to everyone. I'm going to bowl them
over at my audition. Lilly--have I ever failed you? Have I ever come in
second for you? No, and I never will. You won't ever be sorry, Lilly--on
my account. You won't even care that I've cut off my hair. Lilly dear,
do you believe me? I'm always going to come in first for you. First!"

"I do, dear, I do."

And of course in the end they sobbed together, and lay far into the
dawn, cheek to cheek, until finally Zoe dropped off to sleep and Lilly
lay wide-eyed beside her, the perfume of her child's soft breathing
against her cheek.

The next morning in the reading room of the Public Library a notice
catapulted itself at Lilly from the second page of the St. Louis
Globe-Democrat:

L.H. Hines, president, and Albert Penny, vice president of Slocum-Hines
Hardware Company, leave shortly for Washington, where they have been
called to give expert advice upon installing American Canteen Service.




CHAPTER VII

The day that followed seemed to Lilly vague with a sort of fog. A
disturbing something lay against her consciousness and one of her
unquiet nights was filled with the unaccountable crying. But morning
invariably brought back reality and her workaday could envelop her
busily, even happily.

Meanwhile, war, like a spreading wing, had blackened against the
international sky. Somme, Vimy Ridge, Aisne had been bled, and more than
ever the streets that led toward the embarkation points were the color
of khaki, women frequently running alongside, crying and laughing
bewildered farewells.

Some of this war hysteria, of which she was really no integral part,
had, however, hold of Lilly. Her throat ached with it. Her state cropped
out in her work. One afternoon she traveled to Newark for the purpose of
seeing a Japanese sleight-of-hand act, and came away without sufficient
impression of any kind to pass judgment.

Bruce Visigoth eyed her closely.

"You're tired," he said, commenting upon her failure to turn in the
report. "You need a rest."

"No," she said, "it's just--a little of everything--I guess--then Harry
Calvert--that was a shock, you see, and now his grandmother. I'm with
her at the hospital every evening--and then this war--this futile
bleeding--horror."

He could never, with her, keep his tone as level as his manner.

"Lilly," he burst out, "drop it all for a couple of weeks. You and the
youngster come out to the place in Tarrytown. There are some things I
want to talk over with you. I'm working now to obtain the rights to that
little beauty from the Spanish you gave me to read. I'm going to produce
after this war mess slows down. It is the exquisite kind of thing I'd
expect you to find."

"I didn't. Zoe read it to me one evening. She was the one to see its
possibilities."

"It's spring, Lilly, and I want you to see the place. My sister Pauline
moved in last week. I want you to be our first guest. It's
spring, Lilly--"

It was his first mention to her of the recent purchase of a
one-hundred-acre estate at Tarrytown, although in her capacity of notary
public she had officiated at the drawing up of certain papers and deed.
Blue prints of plans had passed through her hands. That he had furnished
it she knew, too, from the magnitude of breath-taking bills from
decorators and dealers exclusive antique. It had piqued her more than
she would admit, his failure to solicit even her advice or opinion.
There was a framed photograph of plans on his desk in the office which
her eyes studiously avoided. Furtively and with the edge of her gaze,
she knew the house to be a low-length with Tudor peaks to it that gave
her a nostalgia for pools of green quiet and the leafy whisperings of
English countrysides she had never seen.

"I want you out at the place, Lilly, more than I can say. Please come.
The way things are clouding up, there is no telling how soon they'll let
me over for active service. Lilly?"

She shook her head.

"I can't. Zoe graduates next month, and--"

"Good Lord! the youngster!"

"Seventeen."

He whistled.

"Well, I'll be hanged. The sun-kid. Bring her out too, Lilly."

"Trieste is very strict with her. She is preparing for her audition in
September, and even if it could be managed, there is poor Mrs. Schum,
you know."

His eagerness would not endure obstacle.

"Bring her out, too. How's that, Lilly? I'll send a limousine full of
pillows for her. It will take Pauline's mind off her loneliness, having
some one to mother. We'll put her up in a sun room with a view of pine
woods and Hudson River that cannot be surpassed. It's spring--Lilly--"

"Poor Mrs. Schum!" she replied, her smile tired and twisted. "I'm afraid
her next journey will be a longer one than that."

"Poor soul! Does she still think that boy of hers is fighting?"

"Surely there is no wrong in saving her from the horror of the truth."

"You dear girl, of course, no. It's only that--somehow don't you think
that before she passed on she ought to know that he's gone on
before--even if you have to tell her that he died--gloriously?"

"I've thought of that," she said, looking away, "thought and thought of
it."

"Lilly," he cried, reaching for her two hands She drew them back quickly
and walked out.

That evening when she presented herself at the hospital the nurse met
her outside the door with her finger to her lips.

"She is sinking, but conscious."

Confronted with her emergency, Lilly stood before that closed door,
beating all over with her silent little prayer:

"O God, help me! Help me, help her!"

Mrs. Schum was quite conscious.

"Lilly," she said, reaching out a thin old hand that was covered with
veins as round as cables, "I've been waiting."

"Here I am, dear."

"I think I'm done, Lilly. I--dream so much--of God."

"Why, you're better, dear!"

"No. I'm going. I wanted so to wait for my boy. The doctor, can't he
help me to wait, Lilly? Ask him to help me to wait. I keep thinking he's
over there somewhere--Harry--funny isn't it? Over there waiting. You've
heard no news, Lilly?"

In this moment more propitious than she dared hope Lilly leaned over.

"Yes, dear, there is news."

"Harry?" she said quickly and sharply, lifting her head.

"Yes, dear--Harry--is--over there--waiting."

"His Mamma-Annie's boy--they were all against him. He can't stay back
here alone--he needs me, doctor--help me to wait for him--"

"Listen, dear--Harry's gone."

"Where?"

"Why--over there--just as your intuition told you."

She pulled at the sheet with fingers as fleshless as the feet of a bird,
moving her lips, vainly at first, and suddenly jerked herself up with a
strength no doctor would have conceded her.

"He's dead, Lilly. My boy's dead. Please--please--it is so--isn't it? My
boy's dead?"

"Yes."

"I knew it. Oh, Annie, you're the mother of a soldier. God wouldn't let
me leave him back here--alone. I wouldn't have left him. There wasn't
any good ahead for him. That's why I wanted him to die like a soldier.
Before he should come to the bad places ahead. I can go so easy now. I'm
done. God fixed it for me--Lilly."

She held the racked old form to her, kissed away tears that the washed
old eyes could hardly yield, made a couch of her arms, and held her
close so that their heartbeats met.

"Lilly, I feel so easy. I never felt so easy."

"Lie quietly, dear."

"Life can be hard, Lilly. And now--war. Make it easier for yourself.
Don't let him out there--go over there--anywhere--reproaching. Your
parents--your child--it's his as much as yours, Lilly. If I had gone
first, my boy would have reproached. There is nothing so terrible,
Lilly--as eyes that reproach--eyes--Lilly--don't."

"I--won't."

She drifted off then in the placidity of a sleep from which she was not
to emerge.

* * * * *

Lilly walked home that early morning following. Her direction lay in a
straight line through Central Park. Spring was out in firstlings of
every kind. The baby nap of new grass. Trees ready to quiver into leaf.
The sun came up from behind a sky line of skyscrapers, and as she was
crossing the Mall a fountain rained up a first joyous geyser, some
sparrows immediately plunging for a bath.

She sat down on a bench there in the lovely quiet, quite lax, and,
because of its pressure, her natty little blue sailor in her lap. The
air was like cool water and she closed her tired eyes to it.

Finally children began to trot past on their way to school. She heard
their shouts and watched them. A father passed with his little girl by
the hand and carrying her sheaf of books. A boy in knickerbockers lunged
furiously on roller skates. Another drove his ball under her bench and
she smiled as she drew aside to let him drive. A private in khaki threw
her a flirtatious glance. The sun found her finally.

Then Lilly followed one of her curious and absolutely irrepressible
impulses, one that must have been smoldering who knows how long.

She completed her walk through the Park. At Seventy-second Street, where
she emerged, a family hotel, one of those _de luxe_ mausoleums to family
life, reared showily. Without pause she turned in there, finding out the
telegraph desk; wrote her message largely and flowingly, leaning over
while the operator read out the words to her:

Mr. Albert Penny, 5198 Page Avenue, St. Louis, Missouri. Won't you
include New York in your visit to Washington and if possible bring
parents. Try to. Lilly Penny, 2348 West End Avenue.

Hearing that telegram repeated, the pencil marking time word by word, it
seemed to Lilly that each one of them was released with the spring of an
arrow from its bow, and that the operator recoiled, stunned, from the
impact of the message.

"Well," she said, leaning farther over the desk, and for some reason
shaping the word to a breathless question.

"Fifty-one cents," said the girl, through the inimitable laconism of gum
chewing.




CHAPTER VIII

Six hours later there was a reply folded in Lilly's purse:

We leave to-day for Washington. Arrive New York next Sunday 2.03 _via_
Pennsylvania. Albert Penny.

An incredible state of calm set in. She had the sensation of each
intervening day a shelf of terrace down which she was walking into a
deepening sea. Dreams ill-flavored as Orestes' filled her nights, and
how tired she was must have sopped into her pillow, but her capacity for
the present lessened her dread and made more bearable the fluent and
fateful passing of the time.

There were the details of the poor little funeral to be arranged. Lilly,
who had never known death, was suddenly face to face with it again, at a
time, too, when the incipient beginnings of pandemic that was later to
scourge the country was reaping its first harvest; a strange malady
carried on the stinking winds of war, shooting up in spouty little
flames, that, no sooner laid, found new dry rot to feed upon. Spanish
influenza, it was called, for no more visible reason than that it
probably had its beginnings in Germany or India.

On the Wednesday of Mrs. Schum's funeral five of the Amusement
Enterprise office force were home with it, one little telephone
operator, who occasionally laid the surreptitious offering of an orange
or a carnation on Lilly's desk, succumbing.

It was amazing how light the imprint of Harry and his grandmother. Of
effects there were practically none. A few tired-looking old dresses of
Mrs. Schum's. Eleven dollars and some odd change in a tin box behind a
clock. Harry's pinch-back suit with the slanting pockets. A
daguerreotype or two. The inevitable stack of modest enough but unpaid
bills. Odds. Ends. And in a wooden soap box shoved beneath Harry's cot,
old door bells, faucets, bits of pipe, glass door knobs, and, laid
reverently apart, a stack of Lilly's discarded gloves, placed to
simulate the print of the hand.

For days, Zoe, who had taken the tired willingness of Mrs. Schum so for
granted, cried herself bitterly into a state that threatened to take the
form of a fever, and then to the strophe and antistrophe of her young
grief, becoming self-conscious, burst, with not particularly precocious
rhyme, reason, or meter, into the following, which was printed in her
school paper:

"Teach me to live, O God,
If sorrow be to live,
Then let me know
All pain that it can give."

"Teach me to live, O God,
To know the gold from dross,
To live, dear God, to live.
I care not what it cost."

And Lilly, the dear mother dust in her eyes, had the page framed beneath
a faded photograph of Mrs. Schum, taken when her lips and breast
were young.

To attune Zoe to the coming of her family was no small matter. She was
outrageously rebellious, flagrantly irreverent, and for every outburst
Lilly bled her sense of blame.

"You've made a farce of everything, Lilly. You've fought for a
principle and, with it won, turned maudlin. What is the idea? To drag me
back there to join the sewing circle and the local society for the
prevention of spinsterhood to maidens?"

"You are not funny at all. You know you are clear of that kind of thing.
You're like an arrow on its way to its goal. Straight and sure. Nothing
can deflect you. That's why I dared."

"Well, then?"

"Realizations can come, Zoe, even to a selfishness as great as mine has
been."

"Sacrifice is not always beautiful. It can be silly and futile."

"Zoe!"

"Yes, and bring rewards to neither side. Half the people who are
sacrificed for become tearful tyrants, and those who do the sacrificing
sour and meek, or holy with righteousness."

"You are reciting the kind of thing you hear down at Daab's."

"I'm reciting you."

"You darling boomerang!"

"I suppose now you are sorry you didn't stay at home in your canary cage
to no one's particular advantage and your own terrific disadvantage. Now
that you have reared me into the kind of human being you set out to be,
you renig. Do you want to throw me back into that bowl with the greased
sides that you managed to climb out of? Not much."

This from Zoe, mixed metaphor and all, who at seventeen kept _Doll's
House_, Freud, _Anna Karenina_, and Ellen Key on the table beside
her bed.

"Theories go down, Zoe, before life--and death."

She sat haughtily young, and without tolerance, her profile averted and
trying to keep the quiver off her lips.

"Just when I'm ready to graduate and preparing for my audition--to have
this--"

"Zoe--Zoe--don't make it harder--"

"I'm a dog, Lilly--forgive me."

"The entire abominable condition is my fault--"

"Then thank God for the abominable condition. I love you and everything
you've done."

"Then be sweet to them for my sake. Your grandmother, she's going to be
unlike anyone you have ever known. She's a great one to pick up the
bread crumbs of life with a great ado. That's been her existence,
dear--little things. And your grandfather, Zoe, he's so gentle. Somehow
I imagine he is even gentler now. You remember I used to tell you how
we'd play at hide and seek long after I was grown. Oh, Zoe, be sweet!"

"I will, dear."

"And--your father. Whatever his attitude may be, remember the fault lies
in me--not him."

"Trust me, Lilly, if only he doesn't drop dead when he sees me!"

"Zoe!"

Between them the little drama was carefully rehearsed.

"Visi would pay big money for this act."

"You'll be your own natural sweet self, Zoe? No posing?"

"Don't worry. I suppose if the truth is known I'll have an aggravated
case of stage fright."

"They'll know--everything, Zoe, before I let them see you. Just be
simple, dear--and please--no dramatics!"

"It's all too dramatic for dramatics," she replied, cryptically.

It was finally decided that Lilly was to meet the train alone, settle
the trio at the Hotel Astor, and arrive at the apartment in time for a
dinner prepared by a cook and waitress especially brought in for
the day.

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