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Star Dust

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"Don't you ever let me hear you talk like that again. Your grandfather
was a God-fearing, not a play-acting man." Attacking this subject, a
little furrow would invariably appear between Mr. Becker's fine gray
eyes and his lips express bitter intolerance for a world that translated
itself to him solely in terms of pink tights.

Not that the odor of religion lay any too heavily on Lilly's youth.
Sunday school was not enforced, Sabbath ethics were observed loosely, if
at all, but a yearly membership in the Garrison Avenue Rock Church was
maintained, not without remonstrance from Mrs. Becker.

"I don't see why we belong. If I want to attend church on Easter Sunday
or a Christmas, I don't have to pay dues all year for it. A person can
pray just as well at home as in church if he's inclined that way."

"Our child doesn't need to be raised like a heathen just because we
aren't as regular as we might be about churchgoing. Besides, when
trouble comes we don't want to be buried like heathens, either."

"Calamity howler."

"In England, papa, writers get buried in Westminster Abbey. If I lived
in England, that would be my ambition."

"The child has ambitions even about funerals. I bought you goods for a
navy-blue poplin to-day, Lilly. Gentle's had a sale."

"Oh, mamma, can you get Katy Stutz to come in time to make it for
auditorium next Friday? Mr. Lindsley may call on me to read my essay
out loud."

"That Mr. Lindsley makes me sick. You're a changed child since he's come
to that school. Mrs. Foote said the same thing of Estelle at the euchre
yesterday. All the girls want new dresses and to be in his classes."

"Why, mamma!" coloring up.

"Oh, run over to Pirney's and buy me a postal card. I'll write Katy
Stutz to take Mrs. Foote's days away from her and give them to me."

By small briberies employed without sense of compromise, Mrs. Becker had
a way with those who served her. Katy Stutz, an old soul as lean and as
green as a cotton umbrella, had sewed at minimum wage through fourteen
years of keeping Lilly daintily and a bit too pretentiously clad.
Willie, Mrs. Schum's old negro cook, who wore her feet wrapped in gunny
sacking, and every odd and end that came down in the day's waste
baskets, from empty spools to nubs of pencil, stored away in the kink of
her hair, would somehow invariably send up the giblets along with the
Beckers' Sunday allotment of chicken. Mr. Keebil, too, an old Southern
relic, his head covered with suds of gray astrakhan and a laugh like the
up and down of rusty bedsprings, for ten years had presided over the
hirsute destinies of Lilly and her mother. Bi-monthly he arrived on his
shampooing mission, often making a day's tour throughout the
boarding house.

"Mr. Keebil, don't you do the Kembles' heads first to-day. That's the
way with you people. I get you all your customers and then you neglect
me for them."

"Law! Mrs. Beckah, how cum you think that? Don't I give you and Miss
Lilly shampoos for two bits when I chawges Mrs. Kemble three heads for
a dollar?"

"Yes, but what about the underwear and socks of Mr. Becker's that you
get?"

"I allas say I 'ain't got no bettah friend than Mrs. Beckah. That was
certainly a fine suit you done give me las' time, except for the
buttons cut off."

"You should consider yourself lucky to get a head like Miss Lilly's to
take care of at any price. Just look at it--like spun silk."

He would fluff out the really beautiful cascade of smooth and highly
electric hair, his brown hands, so strangely light pink of palm, full of
pride in their task.

"Law! Miss Lilly, if you ain't going to grow up the pick of them all."

"Ouch! Mr. Keebil, you hurt!" cried Lilly, ever tender of scalp.

Nor was Mrs. Becker above a bit of persiflage.

"Mr. Keebil, I hear it is something scandalous the way you and Willie
are setting up to each other."

The old shoulders would shake, the face crinkle into a raisin, and the
little spade of gray beard heave to the springy laughter.

"Law! Mrs. Beckah. if you ain't the greatest one to joke."

"Joke nothing. It's a fine match. A good upstanding church member like
you and a fine-looking woman like Willie."

Lilly would turn a quirking but disapproving eye upon her mother.

"Mamma, haven't you anything better to do?"

"Law! Miss Lilly, me and your ma we understand each other. Me and your
papa we know she will have her little joke but the heart is there.
That's what counts on the Lord's Judgment Day--the heart."

Lilly's poplin frock was completed for the Friday auditorium exercises.
Her two braids, now consolidated into one hempy rope, lay against her
back, finishing without completement of hair ribbon into a cylinder of
brushed-around-the-finger curl. It was a little mannerism of hers, not
entirely unconscious, to fling the heavy coil of hair over one shoulder.
It enhanced her face, somehow, the fall of shining plait down over her
young bosom. Contrary to her choking expectation, she was not called
upon to read, but to sit on the platform in an honorable-mention row
of five.

Flora Kemble read a B-plus paper, largely and in immaculate vertical
penmanship, entitled "Friendship," Lilly, the tourniquet twist at her
heart, sitting by. Her name was read later among the honorable five,
true to manner, Mr. Lindsley seeming to caress it with his tongue.

"Miss Halpern. Mr. Prothero. Miss Foote. Miss Deidesheimer. Miss
Beck-er."

From where she sat Lilly could see the slightly protuberant shine to his
teeth, the intellectual ride of glasses along his thin nose, the long,
nervous hand with a little-finger fraternity ring.

Her own hands were very cold, her cheeks very pink. She had a pressing
behind the eyes of a not-to-be-endured impulse of wanting to cry. His
reading of her name was a hot javelin through the pit of her being.

After the exercises and as school was in dismissal she saw him hurrying
out of a side door with a tennis racket. It seemed suddenly intolerable
that walk home through Vandaventer Place to her boarding-house world.

Flora's perceptions were small and quick.

"Why, Lilly, your cheeks are as red as anything and you're getting a
fever blister. Somebody kissed you!"

Her hand flew to her mouth almost guiltily, as if to the feel of lips
slightly protuberant.

"Why--Oh, you horrid girl!"

"It was Lind! Lind!"

"Lind--what--who?"

"Lindsley, of course," dipping with laughter.

"Flora Kemble, I'll never speak to you again. You're stuck on him
yourself and trying to put it on to me."

"Me stuck on him, the way his teeth stick out! No poor school-teacher
for mine!"

"You're boy-crazy. I'm not."

But that night for the first time in her life Lilly lay through a
sleepless hour, staring up into the darkness. The blanket irked her and
she plunged it off, burrowing one cheek and then the other into her
pillow in search of cool spots. Her mother puffed out slowly into the
silence, her father a bit more sonorous and full of rumblings.

Lilly felt herself wound up tightly and needing to be run down. She was
taut as a spring. After a while she took to plucking out from the
darkness words of sedative quality.

"Dove," she repeated softly to herself, and very, very slowly. "Dove.
Beautiful, quiet dove. Saint. Cathedral. Peace. Dell."

But when she finally did drop off to sleep a smile of protuberant teeth
was out like a rainbow across her darkness.




CHAPTER VII

Latitudinally speaking, there are about two kinds of Americans--those
who live west of Syracuse, and those who do not. An imaginary line
separates the tropic of candescence, fast trains, naval reviews, broad
a's, Broadway, Beacon Street, Independence Square, and Tammany Hall from
the cancer of craps, silver dollars, lynchings, alfalfa, toothpicks,
detachable cuffs, napkin rings, and boll weevils.

It is more than probable that Horace Lindsley's and Lilly Becker's
lineage were loamy with about the same magnesia of the soil. Generations
of each of them had tilled into the more or less contiguous dirt of
Teutonic Europe.

Lilly's progenitors had bartered in low Dutch; Horace Lindsley's in high
German, which, after all, is more a matter of geography than altitudes.

An oval daguerreotype of a great-grandmother at the harpsichord had hung
in Carrie Becker's (_née_ Ploag) home in Granite City.

A Lindsley had once presented an emperor with a hand-illuminated version
of the King James Bible, wrought out of peasant patience. Horace
Lindsley's mother belonged to a New England suffrage society when ladies
still wore silk mitts, and had dared to open a private kindergarten in
her back parlor after marriage.

It was this tincture of culture running like a light bluing through
Lindsley's heritage that began to set in motion the little sleeping
molecules of Lilly's class consciousness.

"Middle class," came to be a term employed always with lips that curled.
There were, then, actually men creatures outside the English "Fireside
Novels" she was allowed to devour without interruption by parents to
whom books were largely objects with which a room was cluttered up, who
wore spats, did play tennis in white flannels, turned down the page at a
favorite passage of poetry, eschewed suspenders for belts, were
guiltless of sleeve garters, and attended Saturday-afternoon symphony
concerts, in Lindsley's case, almost a lone male, debonaire and
unabashed in a garden of women.

At Lilly's urgent instance she and her mother often attended these
subscription concerts, seats for single performances obtainable (in a
commendable zeal to promote local music) in exchange for a newspaper
coupon and twenty-five cents.

Mrs. Becker frankly yawned through them, nictitating, as it were, during
the long narrative passages of the symphony or occupied with the
personnel of the audience.

"Look, Lilly," whispering behind her unopened program, "that's a pretty
idea over there on that red-haired girl. See the way the baby ribbon is
run through the sleeves. Do you want a dress like that?"

"Sh-h-h-h, mamma! No; it's too fussy!"

"Why don't they play something with a tune to it? I wouldn't give a row
of pins for music without any air at all."

"Sh-h-h-h, mamma. There isn't much tune to classical music."

"I wish the first violinist would play a solo. 'Warum,' like last time.
I've some baby ribbon just like that, Lilly. I picked it up on sale in
Gentle's basement bins--"

"Mamma, don't stare so."

"Don't criticize everything I do."

At one of these concerts Lilly shot out her hand suddenly, closing it
over her mother's wrist.

"Mamma, there's Lindsley. See, down there in the fourth row."

"Who?"

"My English teacher. See, polishing his eyeglasses."

Mrs. Becker sat straight, chin out like an antenna.

"Is that him?"

"Yes, that's he."

"I don't see anything so wonderful about him. He needs a haircut."

"Oh, mamma, you think all men have to wear their hair short and ugly
like papa and Uncle Buck. In the East men look like that."

"The idea! A man calls himself a man coming to a matinée like this. Your
papa ought to know that you have a sissy like him on your mind. Such a
looking thing! Ugh!"

These recurring intimations could sting Lilly almost to tears.

"Oh, mamma, that's just the--the meanest thing to say. Can't I show you
my English teacher without having him on my mind?"

"I never could stand a man whose teeth stick out. He looks like a
horse."

"Papa's teeth stick out."

"Yes, but just one, and his mustache hides that. I only hope for you,
Lilly, that some day you get a man as good as your father."

"How did papa propose to you, mamma? What did he say?"

Even Mrs. Becker could flush, quite prettily, too, her lids dropping at
this not infrequent query of Lilly's.

"It's not nice for young girls to ask such questions."

"Go on, mamma, what did he say?"

"I don't remember."

The overture broke in upon them then, a brilliantly noisy one from
Tschaikowsky that bathed them in a vichy of excited surf.

Settling with her head snuggled against her fur tippet, the back of her
neck against the chair top, Lilly could feel herself recede, as it were,
into a sort of anagogical half consciousness, laved and carried along on
currents of melody that were as sensually delicious as a warm bath. Her
awareness of Lindsley on a diagonal from her so that she could see his
profile hook into the music-scented dimness, ran under her skin like a
quick shimmer.

The proscenium arch curved again into her consciousness, herself its
center and vocal beyond the powers of the human organ.

The slamming up of chairs and mussy shuffling into wraps recalled her.
It was indescribably sad, this swimming up to reality. The buttoning of
her little tippet. The smell of damp umbrellas. Then the jamming down
the aisle toward the late and rainy afternoon. At the door they were
suddenly crushed up against Horace Lindsley, his coat collar turned up
about his ears.

"Miss Becker," he said, by way of greeting, nodding and showing his
teeth.

Her heart became a little elevator dropping in sheer descent.

"Oh--how--do--you--do?" They were pushed shoulder to shoulder, and, to
Lilly's agony, her mother's voice lifted itself in loud concern.

"For pity's sake, look at that downpour, will you? I hope your father
has the good sense to wear his rubbers. Ouch! Don't knock me
down, please."

"Mamma--please. Mr. Lindsley, I want you to meet my mother."

"Pleased to meet you. Lilly certainly has talked of her English teacher
a lot."

"She is a very interesting little student, Mrs. Becker. Quite a quality
to her work."

"Well, I am certainly pleased to hear that. She's our only one, you
know."

"Lilly has a tendency to let her imagination run away with her. A good
fault if she controls it."

"That's what her father and I always tell her. The child has too many
talents to settle down to any one. She gets her music from my side of
the house, but she quits practicing to write and she quits writing to
practice. It's not that we want our little girl ever to make her own
living, but her father and I believe in a girl being prepared, even if
she never has to use it. That's why we are having her take the
commercial course. We don't pretend to be swells, but at least we plan
to do as well for our child as the next."

"Exactly."

LILLY (in her agony): "Come, mamma."

"I wish you could read the poem she wrote last night, Mr. Lindsley. Not
that I give a row of pins for poetry, as a rule, but I told her she
ought to take this one to school."

"Please, mamma, please!"

"If I do say it myself, it was grand. Mr. Hazzard, quite an educated
gentleman who boards where we do, thought so, too. Lilly, why don't you
show Mr. Lindsley that poem? He's authority."

"Mamma, if only you won't talk about it."

"You must bring it to class, Miss Becker."

"No, no! I've--I've torn it up."

"I don't remember all of it, but everybody considered it a grand thought
for such a young girl; it goes--"

"Mamma! Mamma--not here--now!"

"I would not have the restless soul
That sees not beauty everywhere.
I see it glint on ocean waves,
Dance through a youth's or maiden's hair."

"Mamma, they're pushing so! Good night, Mr. Lindsley. Mamma, come!"

Outside in the wet dusk they boarded an electric car, Lilly and her
mother crammed on a rear platform of the wet overcoats, leaking
umbrellas, and wet-smelling mackintoshes of dinner-bound St. Louis.

"He's a right nice young man, intelligent--but if ever a person looked
like a horse! You see, he agrees with your papa and me. You don't apply
yourself to any one thing."

Lilly turned her inflamed, quivering face upon her mother, trying to
speak through a violent aching of tonsils.

"Oh," she cried, "how could you? I'll never look him in the face again!
Oh--oh--how could you?"

"Are you crazy? How could I what?"

"The poem. The--the glint in--his hair. He'll think it was his hair I
meant. Oh! Oh!"

The ready ire which could flame up in Mrs. Becker leaped out then.

"If you are ashamed of your mother, maybe you had better not be seen
out with her again. All I am good for is to stint and manage to get you
pretty clothes."

"No, n-no, mamma, I didn't mean that, dear."

"For a horse-face like him I won't be made little."

"Sh-h-h-h, dear! The whole street car doesn't need to hear."

"I wouldn't give a row of pins for ten like him."

"Mamma, the way you--talked."

"The way I talked, what? I suppose hereafter when I go out with my
educated daughter I will have to wear a muzzle."

"I--Oh, it wasn't what you said, mamma; it was--the way you said it."

"The way I said it? That's a rich one. If I don't tell your father! My
own child is ashamed of her mother. Well, let me tell you I--"

"No, mamma, you don't understand. Take that word 'swells,' for instance.
Oh, I know I've used it myself, but all of a sudden, to-day, it--it
sounded so ordinary."

"For a hundred-dollar-a-month school-teacher that your papa has to pay
taxes to support, I'm not afraid of my p's and q's."

"And, mamma," suddenly and acutely sensitive to pleonasm, "you begin
every sentence with 'say' and you say 'certainly' so often."

"If I don't have a talk with your father when he comes home this night!
That's the thanks I get for sitting through a concert with you when I
might have been enjoying myself at my euchre club. Just get those
high-tone notions out of your head. We're simple people, not swells.
You're a changed child these days."

It was true. An ineffable ache, a darting neuralgia of spirit, too
cunning and quick for diagnosis, was shooting through Lilly her last two
years at High School.

That Horace Lindsley, who was hardly to indent her life and whose
interest in the clean-eyed girl was little more than a leaf upon his
consciousness, and whose feet were already feeling the tug of the
quicksands of mediocrity which were to suck him out of her reckoning,
should have been the innocent source of this neurosis, is hardly
remarkable.

Lilly, with the mysterious tenacity of a crannied flower, was pulling
from her soil toward the light. And light in all its chiaroscuras rules
the _se leve, couche_, complexion, and humors of the world. Lindsley
was a ray.

And so her adolescence came in suddenly, almost stormlike, uprooting
little forests of sapling traditions.

At sixteen she still slept on the cot drawn across the bed end and rode
her bicycle up and down the sidewalks, holding her skirts down against
the wind, but also she had ransacked the boarding-house shelves and High
School library, reading her uncensored way through _Lady Audrey's
Secret, Canterbury Tales, Five Little Peppers and How They Grew, Plain
Facts About Life, Arabian Nights, Golden Treasury, Childe Harold, To
Have and to Hold, Tales from Shakespeare, Pilgrim's Progress, Old
Curiosity Shop, Diary of Marie Baschkertcheff, Pride and Prejudice,
Vanity Fair, Les Misérables, Stories of the Operas_, and a red volume
rescued from propping up the hall hatrack, _Great Lovers_.

Within that same year Katy Stutz twice lowered her skirt hems.

"Mamma, I think it is terrible I haven't a room to myself."

The entire surface of Mrs. Becker seemed to coat over with sensitiveness
to this frequently discussed issue.

"Why," her lips writhing with an excoriating brand of self-pity, "who am
I that I should want a home for my daughter, now that she is grown? Mr.
Kemble can treat his wife like a queen, but me--why, I'm mud under my
husband's feet."

The Kemble family, on a wave of putative prosperity, had eight months
since gone to housekeeping in a rather pretentious rock-fronted house on
one of the many newly graded streets west of Kingshighway. Every Friday
night Lilly slept with Flora, the two side by side in Flora's pretty new
bird's-eye-maple bed, exchanging unextinguishable confidences well
through nights wakeful with their dreams.

"Flora has her own parlor to practice in, and here I can't even sing a
little without the entire boarding house rapping on the wall."

"It's a shame. Watch me talk to your father to-night."

"Mamma, can't I please take elocution?"

"I should say not. Aren't piano and voice sufficient? The idea! I
wouldn't give a row of pins for all the elocution in the world. Reciting
is out of date."

"Mamma, it isn't. Mr. Lindsley says the modern woman of culture should
cultivate her speaking voice the same as she learns to use her singing
voice. Please, mamma; only a dollar a lesson."

"Oh, I don't care! Goodness knows where the money is coming from, with
flax twine where it is; but anything for peace."

And so when Lilly graduated from High School, third in her class, and
again slightly to the rear of Estelle Foote, who read the valedictory,
she was executing excitedly, if sloppily, "The Turkish Patrol," was
singing in an abominably trained but elastic enough soprano, the "Jewel
Song" from "Faust," and "Jocelyn," a lullaby, and at a private recital
of the Alden School of Dramatic Expression had recited "A Set of
Turquoise" to incidental music.

Mrs. Schum's boarding house, to the man, turned out to Lilly's High
School graduation, Katy Stutz and Willie standing in the wings and all
unwittingly visible from the house. A German-silver manicure set,
handsomely embossed, bore the somewhat cryptic card, "To Lilly Becker,
as she stands on the threshold of life, from her friends in the house."
There were a Honiton-lace fan with mother-of-pearl sticks, with the best
wishes of her mother's euchre club, and from her parents a tiny diamond
ring set high in gold facets, "To Lilly, from her parents, June, 1901,"
engraved in the hoop.

That night, still in her white organdie frock, with its whirligig design
of too much Valenciennes lace, her hair worn high and revealing an
unsuspectedly white nape of neck, Lilly regarded her parents across a
little table-display of gifts.

"I feel so queer," she said, looking off through the chocolate-ochre
wall paper, the reaction already set in. "So sort of--finished.
Nothing to do."

MR. BECKER: "That was certainly a fine speech the president of the Board
of Education made. You've something now that no one can take away from
you. Knowledge is power."

"Two girls in our class are going to the University of Missouri, papa.
That's what I'd like to do--go to college."

"Don't spoil a good thing by trying to overdo it, Lilly. It is as bad
for a young girl to permit herself to be educated into one of those
bold, unwomanly woman's-rights girls as it is for her to be frivolous
and empty-headed. When women get too smart they get unattractive."

"But, papa, girls are beginning more and more to go to college, and all
women will be--suffrage--some day."

"Not womanly girls, Lilly."

"I always said that High School would be her ruination."

"I didn't learn it there, mamma. I always wanted to be something--"

"Well, you're a finished stenographer, aren't you? Why not go down to
your father's office a couple of mornings a week?"

"I don't mean stenography. I hated learning it. I mean
something--something--beyond--"

Suddenly Mrs. Becker, quiet at the business of wrapping away some of the
gifts, glanced up, two round spots of color on her cheeks.

"You _are_ going to do something, Lilly. Have a home and entertain in it
like other girls."

"But--"

"I've a piece of news for you and your father. If I waited for him to
take the initiative I'd wait until the crack of doom."

"What is it, little woman?"

"I signed a lease yesterday for one of those yellow-brick houses--seven
rooms, bath, furnace heat, and privilege of buying. Twenty-eight
dollars, out on Page Avenue near Union. We move in two weeks
from to-day."




CHAPTER VIII

There followed one of those years which come and go even in the small
affairs of small men, when for Ben Becker swift waters flowed under the
bridge. He was just that, a small man, prided himself upon it and was
frequent in his boast: "I'm a small man, Carrie. I don't hope to make a
big or showy success of it. Just a comfortable and unassuming living is
about all I expect to get out of it, and that's a pretty good deal."

The Spanish-American War, something of musical comedy in its setting,
had run its brief malarial engagement, netting Ben Becker, in one order
of hemp rope alone, a cleanly realized profit of forty-two
hundred dollars.

On a new and gradually attained bank credit the B. T. Becker Hemp, Rope,
and Twine Company bought out the about-to-be-insolvent Mound City Flax
Twine Company, the consolidated interests moving into a two-story brick
building on South Seventh Street.

The firm took on the subtle and psychological proportions that go with
incorporation, however unassuming, capitalizing at fifteen thousand
dollars, B. T. Becker, president; Jerry Hensel, trusted foreman of
years, vice president and holder of ten shares; Carrie Becker, secretary
and treasurer and, to propitiate the law, holder of one share.

The little house on Page Avenue, too new for wall paper, still exuding
the indescribable cold, white smell of mortar in the drying, was none
the less---and with the flexible personality of houses--taking on the
print of the family. A mission dining-room set, ordered wholesale
through the machinations of one of Mrs. Becker's euchre friends,
arriving from Grand Rapids two months late, completed a careful and
thrifty period of housefurnishing. There were an upright piano, still
rented, but, like the house, payments to apply to a possible future
purchase, in the square of "reception hall"; a double brass bedstead in
the second-story front; and tucked away in the back of the tiny house,
overlooking, through sheerest of dimity curtains, a rolling ocean of
empty lots, the German-silver manicure set spread out on the dressing
table, Lilly's bird's-eye-maple bedroom come true.

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