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Star Dust

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"Why! Why! I've asked it ever since the moment I sent the wire. Why! I
had to do it somehow--a fear of--something--war--life--death--but you
shall not have her. Not unless she decides it that way. No. Never!"

"I'm a slow thinker! And slower to act. That's been my trouble. But this
time the bit is between my teeth. I've a family now and family
obligations. Don't be so sure yet that I'm on my way overseas. There is
a way around every situation if you look for it hard enough. My place is
here now. Home! My daughter goes home!"

She could see in profile the heavy jaw clamp upward, and more and more
that wooden stodginess became terrible to her. In a flash-back she could
see those seventeen years of beefsteak suppers; his temples at-their
trick of working. Seventeen years all cluttered up with bed casters,
bathtub stoppers, and poultry wiring. That party back there at Flora's.
The lotto and tiddledywinks tables laid out. Page Avenue on a summer's
day with the venders hawking down it--ap-ples--twenty cents a
peck--ap-ples. Zoe--caught!

She closed over his wrists with a little predatory grip.

"Albert, don't do that! Don't take her back. She'll claw you like a wild
eagle in a cage--out there. She belongs to the world. In the fall she
sings for Auchinloss. It may lead to anything! Albert--you ask why I
sent for you. Let her be. Let her stay here with Mrs. Blair--a friend--a
dear--good friend of mine. Her education--Take me, Albert. Take _me_
home--Albert."

At her hand on his wrist something raced over him like the lick of a
flame; he pressed against her with the entire length of his body and his
lips were moist.

"Lilly," he said, very darkly red and trying to clasp her about the
waist, "I'll take you! I oughtn't, but I will. Come back, Lilly, and
make it up to me for all these years. Being near you makes me forget
everything except that--you are near me. I've missed you all these
years--I guess--but never so much as this minute. You've gotten so
handsome with the years. Something--Come home, Lilly--make it up to me.
Give me--your--your lips!"

She kept retreating before the dark red and the moist lips which he wet
more and more with his tongue.

"Will you leave her be--then--Albert? Here?"

"Lilly--your lips--give me."

"Will you, Albert--leave her here--Zoe?"

She could feel the scald of his breathing.

"Yes--if you come."

"You promise?"

"Yes, Lilly. Your lips--let me."

Suddenly he had her to him, there in the light darkness of the deserted
square of reservoir, kissing her so that his mouth smeared over
toward her ear.

She was not quick enough entirely to avert her face, and in the embrace
his Adam's apple was against her throat so that she could feel it beat,
and with her nails biting into her palm to keep her from screaming, she
was shrieking over and over to herself at his nearness: "Ugh! Ugh! Ugh!"




CHAPTER X

Albert did not sail.

A certain depression seemed to settle over him the evening following,
after they had dined at a Broadway restaurant and were spending the
interim before theater in the lobby of the Hotel Astor, where Mrs.
Becker never tired of observing and commenting upon the transient swirl
and peacockery.

"Look at that tight skirt, will you! It's a shame for any
self-respecting woman to have to look at, much less wear it."

"Tippy dear, not so loud."

"Look at that low-cut back, will you! And white hair, too. I wouldn't
live in this town if you gave it to me! Sixty cents for string beans the
menu read to-night. I can buy a bushel at home for that. If I had been
alone I know what I would have done. Walked out. It's only for
millionaires here. The rest have to live in back rooms so they can put
everything on their backs. You should thank your stars you have a home
to go to, Lilly, instead of you and Zoe crying over each other all day.
If I had my say she would go, too. Education! St. Louis education is
good enough for anybody. Ben, I want you to look! If I was to ask you to
buy me a chiffon cape like that you would drop in your tracks."

"Now, old lady, do I ever refuse you anything?"

"No, because I never ask for anything."

"I think we had better be going," said Lilly, leaning forward to tilt
Zoe's hat farther down over her face. "I don't want you to miss the
first act."

There was to be a box for "Who Did It?" and a visit behind scenes
between acts.

"I want to get a look-in on what goes on behind there," specified Mrs.
Becker through a sniff. "Fine mess!"

From where he sat with crossed knees and his nicely polished shoes far
out so that passers-by were forced to a small detour, Albert looked
suddenly across at his mother-in-law, rather scaredly white.

"Mother," he said, "I've got a pain in my chest."

On the instant her rosiness blanched.

"Albert, one of your colds coming on? They never start on your chest.
It's influenza; the papers are full of it. They say next winter we're
going to have it in a terrible epidemic. Albert, what hurts?"

He inserted two fingers into the front pleat of his shirt.

"It hurts here," he said.

"Albert," cried Mrs. Becker, instantly taken with panic, "let me feel if
you have any fever!"

"Now, now, Carrie, don't create a scene here in the lobby. You've nursed
him through enough colds not to be alarmed."

"But, Ben, in his chest! It's a symptom, I tell you; the papers are full
of it!"

"Nonsense, Carrie! It's probably a little indigestion. You will insist
upon those table d'hôtes. On the way to the theater we'll stop in at a
drug store."

"Theater! Don't even mention the word. Come upstairs, Albert. Luckily I
put a pair of your flannelette pajamas in the trunk. Ben, you rush over
to the drug store for some camphorated oil. Albert, do you feel achy?"

Lilly laid out a quietly firm hand on his arm.

"Mamma, please let Albert get a word in."

"I know that boy like a book. He looks feverish."

"Albert," said Lilly, holding to the sedative quality in her voice, "do
you feel ill?"

"I've a pain in my chest," he persisted, doggedly and with the drawn
look about his mouth whitening.

They put him to bed. By nine o'clock a slight flush lay on Albert's
cheek and he kept feeling of his brow.

"I think I have fever," he said once, always in scared white manner.
"Look in the paper and see if dry lips is one of the symptoms."

Then Zoe was dispatched home and the house physician called in, Mrs.
Becker, as usual, tempestuous with instantaneous hysteria and conjuring
to Lilly another sick room from out the hinterland of her childhood.

"Doctor, is it the Spanish influenza? Has he fever? He's always subject
to colds, Doctor. He's not as strong as he looks. I've sat up many a
night with his quincy sore throats. Many is the time, before we got the
auto, that I rode down for him in the street car with his rubbers, if a
rain came up. Doctor, do you think it could be that Spanish influenza? O
God! if he should take sick away from home! Our doctor at home
understands his system. My boy--my son--"

With a frozen sense of her alienism, Lilly sat, as it were, outside the
situation, proffering herself almost with a sense of intrusion.

The doctor would not pronounce, but left with instructions and the
promise of a midnight return. Into that Mrs. Becker read darkly.

"He's a sick man or one of these busy New York doctors wouldn't be
returning again to-night. My boy is a sick man."

Meanwhile Albert had fallen into a light sleep. They sat beside his
bedside watching his lips puff out, sometimes in bubbles.

The silence of midnight descended over the transient formality of the
hotel room.

Undoubtedly Albert had a fever which seemed to be rising. He moistened
his lips now constantly and threw himself about beneath the coverings,
and then Mrs. Becker, not to be restrained, would lean forward to brush
backward from his brow, as if there were hair.

At midnight the doctor returned and at one o'clock Albert was removed to
Murray Hill Hospital.

He was ill three days, slipping off almost from the beginning into a
state of coma from which he did not emerge.

With a celerity that was presently to race it through the country, this
strange malady laid low its victim with what might have been pneumonia,
except for certain complications that baffled and alarmed an already
thoroughly aroused medical world.

The second day a sort of dark rash broke out over Albert's chest, so
that his nurses entered the room in gauze masks, and finally, in spite
of Lilly's protestations and Mrs. Becker's most violent hysterics, no
admittance to the sick room was granted them.

And now comes a tide in the affairs of Lilly Penny which, being too true
life, is not sufficiently true to fiction.

On the day that was to have been Zoe's formal graduation from High
School, so that the pearl-embroidered slippers were never worn and her
diploma brought home to her by a classmate, Albert Penny died, with no
more furor than he had lived.

Stupor enveloped Lilly. She moved through days incredibly crowded with
detail, and yet, somehow, so withdrawn into the very nub of herself that
it was the shell of her seemed to compete with the passing time.
Certainly it was this shell of her followed Albert in that strangest of
little processions, to his cremation.

There had been an effort to travel west with the remains, but quarantine
conditions forbade, and it was just as well so.

Four times on that ride through a warm summer rain to the crematory Mrs.
Becker went off into light faints, sobbing herself back into
consciousness. It frightened Lilly to look at her father; his face had
dropped into hollows and the roundness of his back was suddenly a
decided hump. And he had fallen into a silence. A sort of hollow urn of
it that not even the outbursts of his wife could rouse to his usual
soothing chirpings. He merely sat stroking her hand and staring into a
silence which he seemed to see.

A very quiet and very frightened Zoe had been packed off to Ida Blair's,
through it all Lilly's stupor persisting.

Mrs. Becker's state became cause for concern. Once back at the hotel,
with Albert's room locked off, and once more thrown open to the
impersonal feet of transiency, she would only moan and wind her hands
and go off into the light states of unconsciousness.

"I haven't my son any more! Why did we come? It might not have happened
at home. Our daughter wronged him, but, thank God, we tried to make it
up to him. My boy. He was so steady--so careful. I can't realize he's
gone--without me. The way he used to come home. Never a habit--evening
after evening his newspaper and bed. Thank God, I don't think he ever
missed her going as he might have. It hurt at first. He wanted to resign
his Bible class, and that day we broke up the house--he kept twitching
with his eyes. You remember, Ben. And that bed caster. Funny to have
twitched over that. It seems he brought it home the night she left--it
came over him all of a sudden, it wouldn't ever have to be fitted in.
That's it! O God! all these years without knowing his own child. He was
so steady--a good boy if God ever grew one. Ben, Ben, how can we go home
without him? How can we go home without our boy?"

"Carrie, it is God's will."

"It is nobody's will. God couldn't will it that way. Just as he had got
a little happiness in his way. To think he was willing to take her back.
I don't care for myself, we're on in years, Ben--we're done--and now
we've lost our--all--nothing to live for--"

"Mamma, mamma, don't talk that way. Let me try to make up to you for--"

"I can't face going home. He was my life, that boy. He made up for what
we suffered through our own. He was a son to us. I can't face going home
without him. Albert--where are you? Albert!"

"Mamma, mamma, won't you let me try to make up, dear, for what I have
failed you?"

"Albert--can't you hear me--Albert--"

"Carrie, we've got our daughter back. Isn't that something to be--"

"I want my son, I tell you."

"Mamma darling, you're killing me. Let me make it up to you--even a
little--the--"

"No, no; you're not a daughter to me. I want my son. Our way was his
way."

"Mamma, please--take me home in his place. I'll make it up to you. Let
me go back, dear, in Albert's place. I want to pay up--to you. I'm
finished--here, dear. I'm ready--ready--"

Suddenly Mrs. Becker seemed to experience one of her cyclonic shifts.
Tears came raining down her face, her sobbing cleft with great racking
gulps. Then she dropped to her knees beside her daughter, and, before
Lilly could prevent, reached up to drag down her face against her own
tear-drenched one.

"Don't leave us, Lilly. Don't ever. Come home with us. We're getting
old, Lilly. Don't ever leave us, me and papa. Promise me,
Lilly. Promise."

"Of course I promise, mamma darling. Of course I promise."




CHAPTER XI

For a full week after Albert's strangely curtailed obsequies, a gray
blanket of woolly humidity hung with July unseemliness over the city in
a clinging fog that feathered the throat.

The morning that Lilly returned to the office electric lights were
burning and electric fans were whirring into it.

The unassailed normality of the machine whose functioning depended upon
its parts! How easily even the most component of those parts could be
replaced! The rows of stenographers, in her but two weeks' absence, new
faces among them, outlined against windows of space and East River. The
hinged little mahogany gates swinging to their goings and comings. Her
own office with its glazed pane of door glass and outlook over city
roofs and tug-specked band of river.

It was as if the tide of life were once more licking at her feet. She
hung up her hat, patting at her hair in the little square of mirror
above the stationary washstand, looking back at herself out of eyes a
bit dreggy with tiredness, but her skin so deep in its whiteness that it
was almost as if its creamy quality had congealed of mere richness.

She rubbed her cheeks to pinken and quicken them, and rang for an office
boy, turning her back on the pile of letters and her reports on the desk
and her eagerness to be at them.

"Ask Mr. Bruce Visigoth if he can see me."

The message came back on the instant. He could.

She turned the knob to his office door so slowly that she saved the
slightest squeak, and stood there with her silhouette against the ground
glass for a long moment. When she did enter, from the center of the room
where he had been watching her silhouette against the pane, Bruce
advanced to meet her.

He took her hand and on the instant she felt her eyes fill, burningly.

He was in summer and office negligée, an unlined blue-serge coat, a
white-silk shirt which lay lightly to his body flexuosity, and above the
soft collar he had taken on enough outdoor tan to make his smile whiter.
She could have bitten her lips for their trembling, and tried to smile
with her tortured eyes.

"Lilly," he said, topping her hand with his, "why didn't you let me know
sooner? Your letter an hour ago came out of a clear sky. You see, I
didn't even know he--he was here."

"It was all so--so quick!"

"Jove! I don't seem to take it in yet."

"Nor I," she said, quiescently and letting him lead her to a chair.
"He--You see, he was only ill three days."

"There doesn't seem much for me to say, does there, Lilly?"

"No," she said, "that's it, there's nothing to say."

"I can't bear to think of your having been exposed to it."

"That was the least. He died--afraid. That is so terrible to me,
somehow. I wouldn't mind all of the horrible rest if only he hadn't
died--afraid. I wonder if you know what I mean. He lived so--so meekly
to have died--that way. Afraid."

"Yes," he said, "I think I do know." He wanted to keep his gaze away
from her and to keep it cool, but somehow each time their eyes met a
flame leaped up out of embers, a fiery new consciousness that
kept dancing.

"He and--and my parents--you see, they--Well, I told you everything in
the letter."

"Are your parents returning home?"

"Yes. That's what I've come to say. You see--they--we--we've decided to
remain here two months. Until September--up in my little apartment, all
of us. In September Zoe is to have her audition with Auchinloss. So much
depends on that. We've such hopes, her teacher and I. She's pure lyric
soprano. We think grand-opera brand. And now with the war on, more and
more the American girl is getting her chance. That's why my parents have
finally consented to wait here with me until then. After that, Zoe is to
stay with Ida Blair and we three--my parents and I--are going
home--together. That is what I have come to tell you. I'll be giving up
my work with you in--September. I'm going home--with them."

He regarded her, his flush going down perceptibly.

"You're fooling."

"No," she said, trying to smile. "I suppose it's about the most solemn
job I have left to do in life--going home."

"Why, you--you can't go back there."

"I can," she said, her voice held calm.

"I--we can't let you go."

"Why? Zoe--my big job's done."

"Lilly, I tell you we need you here more than ever. My brother arrives
this morning from Seattle. We've completed the cross-country chain. I'm
free now to branch out. I'm counting on you. I'm full of an idea for
that community opera scheme and I'm ready to do the play from the
Russian on your say-so. Lilly--you cannot go now--"

"I can--must," she said, scraping back her chair. "You must work out your
dreams--alone--with some one else. I--must--go." And then withdrawing
from what she saw: "No! No! Bruce! No! No!"

But just the same they were in each other's arms with the
irresistibility of tide for moon and moon for tide. Press him back with
her palms as she would when his lips found hers, it was as if something
etheric had flowed into her brain. She wanted to resist him and instead
her hands met in a clasp about his neck. "No, no." And yet as he kissed
her eyelids and down against the satinness of her hair, it seemed to her
that toward this moment all the poor blind years had been directed.

"Lilly--darling."

She tried to shake off her enchantment.

"You hurt!"

"I want to."

"My--love."

"My love."

"So this--this is it?"

"What?"

"Love."

"Love. Love."

"How beautiful--sex."

"I want to kiss those stars out of your eyes. I want to wind you in
moonlight."

"Bruce, I think I must be mad. Crazily--deliciously mad."

"Me too. I'm as deliciously, as crazily mad as any young Leander. I want
to swim a thousand Hellesponts for you. I want--"

"No--no--no, Bruce, you don't understand--my love--"

"I do understand. That I have you now to love and adore, to marry--"

The door opened then, quite abruptly. It was Robert Visigoth. He had a
straw hat in one hand and an alligator traveling bag in the other. The
latter he set down rather abruptly.

So instantaneous was their springing apart and so ready the mind to
believe what the heart denied, that it was almost conceivable that he
had not seen. There was not even a pause, and through the perfunctory
greetings of these two men of strangest relation, Lilly found herself
somehow back at her desk, little prickles out all over her body and
particularly against her face, like the bite of sleet, something like
this running behind her lips:

"Please, God, don't let him tell. He promised! Please! God, I'll never
give in again. Bruce--my darling--don't let him tell you. He promised he
wouldn't. Don't tell him, Robert. Bruce, don't let him. Please,
God--don't let him."

After a while, burning with the fever in her blood, she plunged, for the
sedative of it, into the work before her. The first of a stack of
reports on her desk was from the Adelphi Theater, Akron, Ohio.

"Three Melodious Sisters." 12 minutes. Well received. Wardrobe worn.

"Whistling Bicyclers." 14 minutes. Skillful. Comedy weak.

"Please, God--don't let him--"

"Shenck and Bent." 9 minutes. 3 laughs.

"Sylvia King & Co." 9 minutes. Weak patter but finished strong.

"Musical Gypsies." 10 minutes. Fair. Good opening number.

"Please, God, don't let him tell."

After what might have been minutes or hours, then, the door opened and
without preamble Robert Visigoth walked in, and in the wide-kneed
fashion forced upon him by corpulency seated himself beside her desk.

"How long has this thing been going on?" he said, looking at her from
under beetling brows that had grown bushy with the years. Time had done
just that to Robert Visigoth. Beetled him. His years overhung him. He
carried them massively. It was not so much that he had lost his
waistline, but he had settled into himself. That was it! Robert Visigoth
had settled rather appallingly into himself.

For a second Lilly's eyes moved from the two fifty-cent cigars
protruding from his waistcoat pocket to a lodge button at his lapel, and
then, finally trapped, met his.

"How long? I said."

"You've told him?" she asked, leaning forward to hear through the
buzzing in her ears.

"Whether I do or not depends upon you."

She tried not to let him see how the room was rocking around and around,
how suddenly the buzzing had lifted until she felt light-headed. She
could have shouted, danced, wept, or fainted her relief. Nothing
mattered, not even the squatty person sitting there with little diabetic
puffs beneath his eyes.

"How long has this thing been going on?" he repeated, his voice a rising
gale.

"Are you your brother's keeper?"

"From your kind, yes."

"There has been nothing between us."

"That's a lie."

Through the scorch of her humiliation it was a second before she could
command her lips.

"I swear to God."

"Bah!" he almost spat out, "after what I walked in on!"

"Yes," she said, biting off the words with a clip, "after what you
walked in on."

He leaned forward with a thrust of face that was unpleasantly close.

"All I have to say is, hands off there."

"There has been nothing between us. I tell you it's true."

"I'm not concerned whether it is or not. What has been has been. But
now, hands off. You can't land my brother. I heard the word. Marry. The
cheek--you--my brother! You must be crazy."

"You're wrong. You're wrong," she managed to insist, her throat rising
and falling like a sea.

"My eyes aren't wrong. They saw what I stumbled in on."

"I know. I know. It's difficult--impossible to explain away an--an
occurrence like that. How well I know the futility of trying to convince
your kind of man that there are more than two kinds of women in the
world. Good and bad. The woman you marry and the woman you ruin. I'm
bad. Have it your way. Bad. Bad. Bad. But for what was your sin as much
as mine you are free in your man-made society to go your way, fulfilling
your life, and then you dare to come here and sit judgment on my
fulfilling mine. When are women going to venture from _behind_ the
man-made throne to sit beside, and make you men move over?"

"I'm not here to discuss the double code with you. I don't know and
don't care how you have lived since. It is not my business. For sixteen
years you have given this firm fine satisfaction for which we, in turn,
have tried to express our appreciation. You know that. We know that.
Your morals are none of my business except when they touch me! A man's a
man. I don't know how you've lived. For my part, I think you've gone
pretty straight, but that doesn't change matters. I know what I know,
and a man's a man. What are you going to do about it? You know, too,
that there is no love lost between me and my brother in the little
things. We go our ways. But when it comes to the big--he's my brother.
Blood. Get me? Whatever I am can't change me here inside. He's my
brother. You're--you!"

"You're right. I wouldn't. I couldn't. I must have been mad--this
morning. I--somehow--it got all beyond me in a moment. I swear to you
for the first time! Do you think I'd muss up one hour of his life? Even
if I dared? Even if you were to come to me, on your knees, begging me
to--to--marry him? To begin with, I'm older--only a year in time, it's
true, but he--he's just beginning. I'm beginning over. What is my life
compared to his? He's on the brink of a thousand realizations. And
I--oh, I'm not whining. I'd do it all over again, loathing you as you
must know I loathed you--that night. But my child got her chance. You
sold it to me and I paid for it in the basest coin of the realm. But I'd
do it again--knowing what I know now, I'd do it again. You hear! Do
you hear!"

"That's past now--"

"No. For you, yes, but I'm still paying. Paying at this moment with
my--my heart's blood. But if I hadn't done it--gone with you--something
would have been lost that night that was worth every cent I paid.
They'd have got her back. I don't care. I've won. I've won if
I've lost."

She was on her feet now, her eyes, like blue wells that were filling
with ink, plunging beyond his with a Testament defiance that seemed to
shout, "I am fearfully and wonderfully made."

"Yes, I love him. You can't take that from me. That is why he is so safe
from me. I love him too much for him to know. And yet I think--I
believe--I know that even if he did know, in the end it
wouldn't matter--"

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