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Star Dust

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"You must be crazy. Once let your idealist wake up and there is no more
dreaming for him."

"He mustn't ever wake up--for his sake! Promise. Promise me that you
won't ever wake him!"

"Whether I do or not is up to you."

"What do you want?" she said, tiredly.

"I suppose the black and white of it is that you must quit."

"That is easy. I'm resigning anyway the fifteenth of September to go
West to live."

He took on the half-conciliatory graciousness of one who has gained his
advantage with unsuspected ease.

"I'd give a great deal not to have had this happen, but, after all, a
man is a man and life is life."

She let her gaze bore into his like gimlets burning for center.

"I think you've explained that before."

He began to back out before her immobility.

"I am remaining East two months. I hope your resignation will allow us
that much time to attempt to fill your place."

"I leave that to you. It can be either immediate or take effect in
September."

"By all means the latter. Will you--can you believe me when I say if
there is anything I can do--letters--an opening with a Western firm--"

"Please," she said, turning him a shoulder in high distaste.

"I have your word--then?"

"My word," she said, looking past his hand toward the door.

He backed out in the somewhat ludicrous crab fashion and then she sat
down, swinging around on her swivel chair toward the desk. The stack of
reports lay facing her. She caught up the next in order.

People's Playhouse. Tulsa, Oklahoma.

For the next half hour she must have sat there trying to co-ordinate out
of chaos by staring at the heading and repeating over and over again:
"_People's Playhouse. Tulsa, Oklahoma. People's Playhouse. Tulsa,
Oklahoma._"

* * * * *

Whistles were blasting through the noonday fog when Bruce finally and
without preamble burst into her office.

It struck her even on the gale of his entrance how young he was that his
hair should show the nervous plowing of five fingers, and how sensitive
his profile and ready to flare at the nostrils. His tie, too, burnt
orange, from a soft collar and badly knotted! She wanted to jerk up his
chin and putter at remaking the four-in-hand.

"Lilly--sweetheart--"

She sat regarding him over the top of People's Playhouse, Tulsa,
Oklahoma.

"Sweetheart, let us call it a day. I want to drive you out to Tarrytown
to--"

"Don't," she said, frowning.

"Don't what?" Her immobility an ineffectual stop to his exuberance.

"Come now," wanting to draw her from her chair by the two hands,
swinging them wide and then together; "don't let his nibs bouncing in
that way throw a damper. We were too quick for him, anyway. Don't
believe he saw a thing. And what if he did? He's going to know it
anyhow, and pretty quick, too. I want to shout it from the housetops, I
want to megaphone it up to the stars. Lilly--Lilly-mine! Sweetheart!"

She crowded back into the chair.

"How dared you!"

He fell back with his gesture still wide.

"Why--what? Dared what? Oh, come now, sweetheart, I could wager he
didn't see, and suppose he did? We've nothing to conceal. I'm for
telling him to-day!"

"No. No. No. You played unfair. You took me--unawares. You misunderstood
me horribly--most horribly."

"You mean--"

"Why, you--you _boy!_ What has happened cannot make any difference
between you and me. It was outrageous of you--silly _boy_ you--to--to
take advantage. After all that has passed--all these years--it is
unthinkable that you didn't understand. Why, you--you _boy!_"

She saw his jaw fall and the sense of his ridiculousness set in.

"What has merely been absurd all along you have suddenly made
intolerant. You make more imperative my resignation. You must
understand--Mr. Visigoth--under what conditions I will consent to remain
here these few weeks."

The words were so stilted that she had the sensation of throwing metal
disks on a stone floor and waiting for their tinny clatter. She could
see the high red drain out of his face and then rush up again as if he
had been slapped.

"Lilly, for God's sake, you--you cannot be serious!"

"No mock heroics--please."

His ears tipped with flame; he straightened back from her.

"No more mock heroics," he said, in a voice suddenly quieted down like
vichy gone stale. "Forgive an old--fool--a young--fool--and forget it.
Thank you for jerking me up."

He raised her limp hand, bowing over it until his lips hovered but did
not touch.

"My solemn word on it this time--no more--mock--heroics." And still
Lilly, on the click of the door after him, could not clear her brain of
the running threnody of nonsense:

People's Playhouse. Tulsa, Oklahoma. People's Playhouse. Tulsa,
Oklahoma.




CHAPTER XII

Time flies or does not, according to the eyes of the beholder. As the
days began to lengthen into the longest spokes of the cycle, and parlors
and magazines to don summer covers, it seemed to Lilly that somewhere an
interim too subtle for mortal eyes must have occurred, because suddenly
there came a very torrid day in September, the fourteenth, to be exact,
when the little apartment in West End Avenue stood denuded, stripped to
a few huddled trunks, and Zoe's dressing table, chair, piano, and desk
ready to be carted out to the little sea-view room that awaited her in
Ida Blair's Long Island bungalow.

They were a group diverse of emotion and perilous to one another's
nerves this last morning.

MRS. BECKER: "I think I'd better write my girl another postal to be sure
and have supper ready when we get home Thursday night. There is some
canned salmon in the grocery closet, I forgot to mention, and she can
borrow a few potatoes from the Shriners for frying, until I get a chance
to lay in supplies when I get home. Poor Albert! How he loved creamed
salmon and fried potatoes! Ben, help me to realize what has happened.
O God, I--"

MR. BECKER: "Now, Carrie."

MRS. BECKER: "The Shriners are nice neighbors, Lilly. They are the only
ones besides us on the block who stuck after the street began to go
down. You'll like Edna Shriner. You remember her? Pock-marked. She used
to be in your dancing-school class. She never married, but how she keeps
that little home for her old father! Kitchen floor! You could eat off
it. And as handy a body with the needle as ever lived. Her French knots.
The guest-towels that girl has French-knotted."

LILLY (to herself): "Salmon and fried potatoes. Page Avenue. Shriners.
Funny!--O God!--Why--Oh!--Oh!--Funny!--"

ZOE: "Lilly, feel my heart, how it beats."

It was as if Lilly could not take her eyes from off her daughter.

"Remember what Triest said, dearest, let your nerves be so many violin
strings, tightening but not quivering."

"It's your going, Lilly--I--I can't seem quite to grasp it. You will
come back to me soon--in two months--one--I couldn't stand it longer!"

"Yes, and, Zoe, you will write every day. Every little single thing.
Your work--your life--your friends--every tiny success--"

"Lilly, Lilly--don't go! It's madness. Stay, darling. I feel like a
pig--all that money--his fortune. If you are not entitled to touch it,
I am not--"

"You are his child and the only wrong you ever did him was through me."

"Lilly--don't go, darling--"

"Zoe, don't tear me to pieces."

"I'll work, darling, as I've never worked before."

"Zoe, Zoe, go straight to your mark."

"I--I can't realize it, Lilly. To-day! He's going to hear me
to-day--this very afternoon. I--I feel as nervous at the prospect of
singing before you as before him. I--I think I'm the luckiest girl in
the world. Lilly, sometimes I--I--think life has--has sort of cleared
the way for me to walk in its lovely places--you have cleared the way.
But what--what if he doesn't think I've the voice _maestro_ thinks I
have? I couldn't stand that, Lilly--the way you stood it."

"But he will," said Lilly, a memory shaping itself. "Remember your power
begins where mine left off. You heard Du Gass the year before she died,
but you were too young to remember. Your voice is so much--so
infinitely bigger, Zoe, and your knowledge and defiance of life and of
the Auchinlosses--makes me so unafraid for you--"

"Kiss me, Lilly. I'm frightened--not of Auchinloss--or life--but
of--Oh, I don't know--frightened of silliness, I guess."

"I'm not."

"But you're trembling."

"Of hope."

At eleven Lilly went down to her office. Leon Greenberg already had her
desk. It was largely a matter now of sliding in the new prop before
sliding out the old.

There were several farewell offerings from various of the older girls.
The immemorial trifles that women exchange. A bottle of eau de cologne.
The inevitable six handkerchiefs. A silver bodkin for running ribbon
through lingerie. And from the booking department, a silk umbrella
suitably engraved. She cried a little.

By noon the top of her desk was bare and the drawers empty.

She sat looking out over the waves of roofs of a city that had beaten
her back at every turn, lashed her, and yet with the mysterious
counterflow of oceans had carried her out a foot for every ten it
flung her back.

She felt full of sobs, but quiet. Strangely quiet, as if the champing
machinery of her life had stopped suddenly, leaving an hiatus that made
her heart ache of passivity.

At two o'clock, by appointment, came Zoe ... like a blaze of light. Her
eyes with her mother's trick of iris, full of inner glow, and her blond
hair so daringly boxed, set off with a droop of tam-o'-shanter.

There had been a new frock of heavy white crepe with a wide white hat
for this occasion. Instead, with last-moment decision, she had come in
one of the straight blue frocks, the wide patent-leather belt, a knot of
orange and blue ribbon, representing her active membership in a local
canteen service, at her throat. She came glowing through the daring
simplicity, flamboyantly and to the nth power of Lilly's slower
personality, her mother's child.

"Hurry, darling, I've a taxi waiting. We're to meet _maestro_ at the
Opera House."

"Zoe, I'm glad you wore this instead. Did your grandmother feel badly
that you didn't wear the one she gave you?"

"I wasn't myself in it. No--room."

In the corridor, going out, Bruce stepped suddenly out of his office
into their path.

Zoe's hand had shot out.

"Hello, you!" she said.

He looked at her through a slow smile.

"Well, I'll be hanged! The youngster! Good Lord! What have they done!
Who elongated you? Where are the knee dresses and the corkscrews?"

She withdrew a highly haughty hand.

"You poor, misguided Rip Van Winkle. When did you return from the
Catskills?"

"When did it happen?" he asked Lilly, trying to keep his eyes from
crinkling.

It was the first time in this last brace of weeks that there had been
more than the merest perfunctory word between them, and she tried to
thaw her cold lips into a smile.

"You forget that you haven't seen her since last Christmas. Six inches
more of skirt and a few hairpins did it."

"Well, I'll be hanged!" he kept reiterating. "Zoe grown up!"

"Is it true you are going to try for the aviation? Ida Blair says you
are."

"Looks that way."

"You're too old."

"Well, then, I'll have to come down to earth. You and your mother have
different ideas regarding my age. I'm rather dizzy about it this minute,
myself. Either time is putting one over on me or you have caught up. By
Jove! that's it! You've caught up! You're immense!"

She was suddenly, and to Lilly's amazement, a creature of flashes and
quirks, of self and sex consciousness.

"Don't like to be--immense!"

"Gorgeous, then."

"Better."

"Don't go. Let me look at you."

"Come with us. Dare you."

"Zoe!"

"Where?"

"I'm singing this afternoon for Auchinloss. My audition at the Opera
House."

"The deuce you say!"

"I've a cab waiting," she said, challenging him with a flash of eyes to
their corners.

"Wait," he said, darting into his office.

"Zoe, how dared you?"

"Lilly--he's thrilling! I want him along; I feel keyed up now. The way I
want to feel! Edgy!"

Before her persistently cold lips would reply he rejoined them and
presently they were all three in the cab.

His contemplation of Zoe became a stare.

"So the little Zoe grew up."

"I'm eighteen. You used to be old enough to be my father. Not any more.
Now you are old enough to be my--anything."

"Zoe!"

"Good Lord!" he said. "Fact."

Suddenly her nervousness came flowing back over her.

"Lilly, look at me every second while I'm singing, darling. You too,"
leaning toward him and placing cold fingers on each of their wrists.

"Delightful and easy task."

She made him a _moue_, prettily pouty.

"You'll be sorry, when I'm famous, that you didn't take me seriously."

"How can I take you at all when you've taken me off my feet?"

"You've never heard me sing, have you?"

"No."

"Wait."

"I palpitate."

"I'm going to be all alone now, you know," she said, looking at him with
her brilliant eyes filling.

"More's the pity," he said, feeling rather than seeing the downward
brush of Lilly's lashes.

"I'll be out at Ida Blair's until--for a while."

"May I come out and play with you, now that you are caught up and I can
be your--anything?"

"You may."

Laughter.

With the stopping of the cab such a javelin of nervousness shot through
Lilly that it was as if it had pierced her heart.

A lovely pallor was out over Zoe, enlarging the dark pools of her eyes.

"Sit out in the house, center aisle, and look at me, dears--so I can
feel you there--"

To the magic of a bit of cardboard Lilly and Bruce were in the vast
fantastic hinterland of the Opera House, and, stumbling through various
degrees of blackness, were presently down in the colossal maw of the
auditorium, finding out seats in the great pit of darkness.

They sat in silence, except that for Lilly the beating of her heart
seemed to record like a clapper against her brain.

"Don't be nervous," he said once.

"I'm not," she lied.

There was a bunch light on the stage, a dirty backdrop of Corinthian
pillars and esplanade and no wings, one or two stage hands moving about,
and finally a concert grand piano dragged down.

Suddenly Lilly recognized Auchinloss. He was standing just outside the
pool of light that flowed over the piano, the unforgetable outline of
his shaggy head, joined by two little peninsulas of sideburns to the
heavy spade of beard, gray now and not the sooty black she remembered.

The odor of that little room up on Amsterdam Avenue came winding back.
Millie du Gass, the supreme soprano of two continents--dead now, of
heartbreak, some said; Alma, in her plaid-silk waist and the
bookkeeper's curve to her back. That walk across the parlor floor--

"There's Auchinloss now," said Bruce.

She did not reply, but sat with her handkerchief against her mouth and
crowded breathing.

There were three auditions.

A high-bosomed young woman with a powerful mezzo soprano that pulled her
mouth to a rhomboid sang Santuzza's famous aria from "Cavalleria
Rusticana," stopping suddenly to some unseen signal.

"Fine, strong voice of resonant tin," said Visigoth, under his breath.

A throaty young tenor sang "Ride, Ride, Pagliacci," through to the sob,
anticipating it with a violent throw of body.

Then Trieste took the piano, running downward an avalanche of quick
chords, the sepia-outlined head of Auchinloss gone meanwhile from the
stage and down somewhere in the sea of dimness that rolled through the
auditorium. Lilly could see his profile etched into the twilight.

Very suddenly Zoe was downstage, and through the cymbals hitting into
Lilly's consciousness the voice finally came through to her, flowing so
easily on the beautiful, the tried old theme of Michaela's aria that she
had the feeling of great bolts of every color ribbon, winding about and
not even half un-flung as they struck the topmost places.

How true her flight!

With each fluty mount how like a bird, the line of her throat, as her
chin went up, throbbing slightly of its warbling, and from where she
stood her gaze seeming to plumb them out.

She sang through without interruption, so that when she had finished,
the timbre lay like a singing wire on the silence.

Somewhere between the ecstasy of the elbow that pressed against hers,
and the ecstasy of her child's voice still trilling on the black
silence, Lilly was conscious of movement. The gray silhouette marching
down the aisle of gloom. A group up about the piano. Another chord
struck out. Zoe's voice skipping upward in grace notes.

Vague, indeterminate passings of figures through a fluid of unreality,
like submarine life behind glass.

Then somehow they were out again into the gloom of wings and then on to
the white, incredible humdrum of the side street, standing there beside
the little door marked "Private," Bruce at her side, rather quivery at
the flanges and mopping constantly at the damp rim of his hair.

"Lilly, you've won!"

She felt sillily inclined to laugh.

"I seem to have, don't I?" she said, turning her face under pretense of
adjusting her hat, but really for fear that even a smile would induce
the threatening laughter which she knew, once let go, would slip up
beyond her control.

"She's a flute. She's a lark. She's a dream. I--I don't believe I seem
to take it in."

"Nor--I."

Later, Zoe joined them, an air of assumed composure belied by the
flaming brilliancy of her eyes and cheeks.

"Why didn't you come up afterward?" she said, forcing a commonplace,
and to Bruce, "Hail a cab, Pretty-please."

He did, helping them in and poking his head in after.

"Where?"

"Anywhere. Let it be the Park for a while, Lilly?"

She nodded.

"Is three a crowd?"

For answer she drew him in by the sleeve and on the jouncing off of the
cab was in her mother's arms, covering her cheeks with close-pressed,
audible kisses, and, after the inexplicable manner of women, both of
them crying.

"He--he didn't say much, Lilly. Kissed my hands. Told me to live
beautifully and work endlessly. Asked me if I loved poetry and painting
and sunrises and spring--a lot of stuff about the awakening of spring.
And kissed my hands again. I'm going back to-morrow. They're discussing
things now--he and _maestro_--something about a five-year contract--but
a great deal of red tape first--board meeting. I'm to be a secret until
next season, _maestro_ cried--and Auchinloss--Lilly, you need never be
afraid for me--you hear--you hear--never! We measured each other--he
called me wonder-child. Me--Zoe. Lilly--it's happened ... and you--did
it. Lilly, kiss me."

"You darling. You're like a queen. All the little lives that go into the
making of your cloth of gold, yet each proud to be ever so humble a
party to it!"

"Lilly, you're sad! On _my_ day you're sad."

"Glad! You're the meaning of everything. The road had to lead somewhere.
Everything is so clear now. You're the lovely meaning, Zoe, behind all
the circumstances that went to weave you."

Only half plumbed, Zoe sprang from her mood, flashing with all the
amazing coquetry that was so new to Lilly, around toward Bruce.

"Well--what?"

"On the very day I've found you I've lost you."

"To whom?"

"Fame."

"Nonsense!" she cried. "Don't forget the awakening of spring." And
buried her face against her mother because she had been outrageous.

Persiflage rose.

"Skylark, when I become more coherent I'll tell you how wonderful you
are."

"Zoe dear, hadn't we better drive home?"

"Lark. Lark. I cannot go home now, Lilly. Let's have a lark!"

Suddenly Bruce caught her by the dancing hands.

"Let's celebrate."

"Let's!"

"We'll dine at Sherry's, dance at the Bilt--"

"Lovely! Lovely! I've never been to either!"

"No, no, Zoe. Please! Your grandparents at home. Besides, it's war
time."

"Nonsense! Laugh while we may. Next month this time I'll probably be in
the thick of it myself. Let's laugh to-day. Vote her down, Zoe!"

"Pl-ease, Lilly."

"Your grandparents, Zoe, they don't even know the news yet--"

"Lilly, this once. Tippy and Dapples aren't going to be thrilled. They
think the whole business rather low, anyway. Besides--there's time--it's
my day--Lilly--"

"Not Sherry's, then, Zoe--a quieter--"

"Immense! I have it! Tarrytown. An opportunity to show you the place
before you go. We'll drop this taxi and pick up my car at the garage.
How's that, dinner at Tarrytown? Perfect, I'll say."

"What a duck of an idea! Oh, la, la, la, la!"

And so, quite dumbly, Lilly acquiesced and by easy shift to the
tan-upholstered car that ironed out all jolts, and a stiff breeze from
the Hudson whirring softly against their faces, they were whirling out
along quiet stretches, dusk coming down like a veil.

Seated between them, Zoe fell to singing, trilling highly and softly,
her head bared to the wind, her tam-o'-shanter on Bruce's lap, and Lilly
sitting silently by with lids down against hot eyeballs, and fighting a
sense of cross grain.

Presently lights began to come out along the river, like the gold eyes
of cats.

"How cool your fingers are, Zoe. Like the petals of something."

"Lilly, naughty man is holding back one of my hands on me."

"Lovely hands."

"Naughty man."

Silence.

"Oh dear."

"Oh dearest."

"That wasn't for you. That was a sigh."

"But I stole it."

"Cheeky."

Giggles.

Silence again and they turned off a macadamized road that was
prematurely dark with trees and into a lariat of driveway that elicited
from Zoe a squeal of enthrallment.

Even to Lilly, though she had figured in its purchase, there was
something startling in the vast classic whiteness and formal Italian
chastity of the house as they flanked it, drawing up under a
porte-cochère of Corinthian columns. Through a double row of cypresses
turning black, that inclosed a sunken garden, Dante and Virgil might
have moved, and yet, Lilly, aching with the analogy which could not
conjure, could only call up rather foolishly the three-color magazine
advertisement of a low-streamline motor car, drawn up before just such
Renaissance magnificence.

Three sheer and cunningly landscaped terraces dropped down from what was
actually the rear of the house, but which overhung the river, so that,
stepping out of the car, an unsuspected, breath-taking panorama of river
wound itself, at that moment the Albany boat moving upstream,
light-studded.

ZOE (out at a bound): "Oh! Oh! Oh! Isolde's garden. Tristan, where are
you?"

"Here."

"I want to kiss a star--that luscious one up there."

"Let me be proxy."

"Lilly, chastise him!"

She smiled at him with her tortured eyes.

"Like it?" he said, smiling back at her with something impersonal in his
eyes that deadened her. "All this formality is hardly my choice; it's
Pauline's idea."

They were met by Pauline--known to Zoe and her mother through
perfunctory office meetings. She was exceedingly petite, rather
appealingly so in her widowhood, and of her younger brother's rather
Spanish darkness, except for a graying coiffure worn high and
flatteringly.

There were seventeen years between them and yet her shoulders were
deeply white, and rose, quite unwithered, out of a jetted evening gown;
and her profile, also with the heat lightning of a scarcely perceptible
nervous quiver to it, entirely without the sag of tired flesh.

A certain petulance lent to her exceedingly well-bred diction quite a
charm, and she was playful and adoring enough to pinch each cheek of her
brother's as she tiptoed to kiss him.

"Nice boy to bring home charming people and save me from the boredom of
dining alone. How's my handsome brother? Naughty boy! It's the first
time you've looked yourself in weeks. They work him too hard down there,
Mrs. Penny. I tell my fat brother he's become little more than an
ornamental gargoyle. It's too sordid for this boy, and now you running
away from him just when I had hoped the time was ripe for him to dabble
in some of the things he's set his heart on. The kind of plays he reads
all night until I have to turn his lights out. Shame on you for
running away!"

Her twitter, from topical bough to topical bough, hardly demanded reply.
She exclaimed over Zoe, admiring her extravagantly, insisted upon
kissing away a purely imaginary look of headache from her brother's
brow, and led the way quite tinily regal, her running line of
comment unbroken.

In a soft boudoir of French grays, French doors, cerulean blues, and a
litter of every extravagant requisite of the toilet, Lilly faced herself
in a cunningly triplicated mirror.

"We're not dressed. We shouldn't have come," trying to ride down her
sense of misery.

"I'm dressed in all the cloth of gold you have woven for me," quoth Zoe,
in mock grandiloquence, still pitched to her exultant key and in all
her youthful capacity for it, full of self.

There were enamel-backed brushes with deep bristles that plowed her hair
out into dust of gold, and a finely wrought amber comb which she ran
through the fluff, striking an attitude.

"She walks in splendor like the night--"

"Zoe, you're losing your head."

"Splendor! This is me. Marble--terraces--rugs that slide--only I
want peacocks--that strut--and tails that open like fans
and--starlight--him--"

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