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Star Dust

F >> Fannie Hurst >> Star Dust




Followed even then a long and uneasy period of adjustment. The up and
down stairs tugged at the rear muscles of Mrs. Becker's legs, compelling
evening foot baths. Mr. Becker chafed under the twenty minutes
additional street-car ride, eating his dinner by gaslight even in
August. The bed making and her allotment of the upstairs work irked
Lilly, even though Willie's stepniece, Georgia, came to help out once a
week, and evenings the little house could seem very still and
untenanted.

But after the arrival of the mahogany-and-velours parlor set, the music
cabinet, and the hanging of crispy lace curtains, Lilly standing on the
ladder, her mother steadying from below, and finally the laying of a
well-padded strip of stair carpet to eat in the hollow noises of new
tenancy, the house began to settle, so to speak.

Something latent, something congenital, even malignant, however, had
developed in Mrs. Becker. She took a fierce kind of joy, not untinged
with the mongrel emotion of self-pity, in scrubbing, on hands and knees,
the entire flight of back stairs at the black six-o'clock hour of wintry
mornings, her voice tickling up like a feather duster to Lilly's
reluctantly awakening senses.

"Lil-ly! Get up! I've done a day's work already. If I was a girl I
wouldn't want to sleep while my mother slaves."

But let Lilly so much as venture down into the wintry gaslight of the
bacon-fragrant kitchen, proffering her drowsy aid, a new flow, still in
the key of termagency, would greet her.

"Go right back to bed, Lilly. You want to catch your death of cold?"

"But, mamma, you fuss so. I'd rather help than listen. Here, let me stir
the oatmeal."

"Go back to bed, I say. I don't intend to have you spoil your hands with
kitchen work. Maybe some day your father will feel in a position to give
his wife a permanent servant girl like any other woman has."

"Mamma, he's always begging you to get one,"

"I know. Talk is cheap. Did you hear what I said, Lilly? Stop that
stirring and go back to bed! I'll bring up your breakfast after a while.
I'll fix your sandwiches for the sewing circle this afternoon."

"Oh, mamma, I just hate that circle! I wish to goodness you would let me
resign."

"I have a grateful daughter, I have. Any other child with your
advantages would think she had heaven on earth."

"I hate it, I tell you. Flora and Snow and all those girls, with nothing
on their brains except fellows and fancy work, make me positively sick."

"I notice Flora had enough brains to become engaged to a fine young
fellow with prospects like Vincent Bankhead."

"Every time I sit down at that circle I think I'm going to scream. I
just can't rake up enthusiasm over French knots. Something in me begins
to suffocate and I can't get out from under. I hate it."

Regarding her daughter through the bluish aroma of bacon in the frying,
her early-morning coiffure and wrapper not lenient with her, a
bitterness pulled at the lips of Mrs. Becker.

"That settles it. I'm going to have a talk with your father this
morning."

"Oh, mamma, please don't begin a scene!"

"Ben, are you ready for breakfast? Come down. What do you do up there so
long? You've been one solid hour splashing around the bathroom, as if I
didn't have to get down on my hands and knees to wipe up the flood
around the bathtub. Hurry! Your daughter has something to say to you."

"Coming, Carrie. Don't get excited."

"Don't get excited! I think your father would ram that down my throat if
this house was tumbling around our heads."

It was true that Mr. Becker's imperturbability incased him like a kindly
coating of tallow. His daily and peremptory call to breakfast brought
him down only after the last satisfactory application of whisk, tooth,
hand, shoe, bath, and hair brush, his invariable white-linen string tie
adjusted to a nicety, his neat gray business suit buttoned over a
gradual embonpoint.

"If I took as good care of myself as my husband does, I'd live to be a
thousand."

"Now, little woman, you got up on the wrong side of bed to-day."

On this particular morning he descended genial, rubbing cold,
soap-exuding hands together.

"Well, little woman! Good morning, daughter."

"Ben, I'm at my row's end with Lilly. Something has got to be done or I
can't stand it."

He sat down, an immediate tiredness out in his face, adjusting his
napkin by the patent fasteners to each coat lapel.

"Now, Carrie, have you and Lilly been quarreling again? Doesn't it seem
too bad, Lilly, that you and your mother cannot get on without these
disturbances? Your mother may have her peculiarities, but she
means well."

A ready wave of red self-commiseration dashed itself across Mrs.
Becker's face.

"I can't stand it, Ben. I don't know what she wants. Maybe you can
please her. I can't. Everything I do is wrong. Everything."

In her little blue-gingham morning dress, out of which her neck flowered
white and ever beautiful of nape, Lilly crumbled up her biscuit, eyes
miserably down, the red-hot pricklings which invariably accompanied
these scenes flashing over her and a crowding in her throat as if she
must tear it open for language to make them understand.

"Talk to your father, now! Tell him some of the things you hound me
with."

"Lilly, what seems to be the trouble?"

"I--I don't know. Mamma gets so excited right away. I just happened to
mention that--I don't know what to do with myself."

"Do with yourself! Help me in the house. I can give you enough to do
with yourself. I don't get lonesome."

"Carrie, now, don't holler."

"That's the way she is, papa. She gets excited and hollers at me
because I can't get interested in sewing clubs and housework."

"It's because you've got it too good that you're not satisfied. That
Flora Kemble, that never has a decent thing to wear, gets engaged
to a--"

"Now, Carrie, that's no way to talk."

"Mamma always makes me feel uncomfortable because I'm not married yet."

"Now do you believe what I go through with, Ben?"

"You haven't any faith in me, but--somewhere--destiny, or whatever you
want to call it, has a job waiting for me!"

"That's too poetical for me to keep up with. Thank goodness I'm a plain
woman who knows her place in life."

"Exactly, mamma. It isn't that I consider myself above Flora's party
to-morrow night. It's not my place. I don't belong there. I hate it, I
tell you."

"You hear that, Ben? That's the thanks I get. You know the way I've
tried to make this little home one a child could be proud of. Take the
time that fine young Bryant fellow came to call. Why, that little parlor
of ours was fit for a princess. His knuckles didn't suit her! They
cracked, she said. I've heard of lots of excuses for not taking to boys,
but that beats all. Three girls out of the sewing club already married
and Flora engaged to that well-to-do Bankhead boy, and mine holds
herself above them all."

"Your mother isn't all wrong, Lilly."

"I've run my legs off for the white organdie so Katy Stutz could make it
up for Flora's engagement party to-morrow night. Does she appreciate it?
Oh yes, long face is the kind of appreciation I get."

"I'd rather stay home, mamma, and practice my singing or
read--anything--"

"You'll sing _there_. Mrs. Kemble has it all fixed for Flora to call on
you just before the refreshments. If you begin to pout about this party,
Lilly, I--"

"Oh," cried Lilly, turning her face away to hide the embitterment of lip
and still crumbling up her biscuit, "don't worry. I'm going if--if it
kills me."

Suddenly Mrs. Becker's face quivered ominously, the impending
storm-cloud bursting.

"I wish I was dead. What do I get out of it? Struggle and sacrifice, and
all for an ungrateful daughter that isn't happy in her home."

"It isn't that. Just let me be--myself!"

"Then what is yourself? For God's sake tell us what? Anything to end
this state of affairs."

"I'm suffocating here. Let me make something out of myself."

"Listen to her, Ben. Make something. Her stories come back from the
editors. Her teacher keeps telling me her voice isn't ready yet. Miss
Lee says her piano technique is lazy--"

"Then let me travel--college--anything."

"She thinks we're millionaires, Ben."

"Lilly, Lilly! What is the young generation coming to?"

"I wish I was dead. Dead," cried Mrs. Becker, beating at the table until
the dishes shivered. Danger lights sprang out in little green signals
around about the flanges of her nose. She was mounting to hysteria.

"Lilly, aren't you ashamed to torture your mother like this?" cried Mr.
Becker, his voice shot through with what for him amounted to a pistol
report. "Comfort your mother. Apologize at once!"

"Mamma, I'm sorry! I am, dear."

"You would think we were plotting against her."

"Now, now, Carrie, Lilly doesn't mean all she says."

"But she eats my life out."

"She wants to please us. Don't you, Lilly?"

"Y-yes, papa--"

"Now let us see if things can't run smoother in our little home, eh,
Lilly? We'll all try and do each his part, eh, Lilly?"

"Y-yes, papa."

"It's late," cried Mrs. Becker, suddenly, on the single gong of half
after seven, and, ever quick and kaleidoscopic of mood: "Katy Stutz will
be here any minute. That's her now. Run upstairs, Lilly, and take the
top off the sewing machine and lay out the white organdie. Quick, Lilly.
I want you to have it without fail for to-morrow night."




CHAPTER IX

It was at this controversial gathering of young people at the home of
Flora Kemble that Lilly met, for the first time, Albert Penny.

The Kemble home lent itself gracefully to occasions of this kind, the
parlor and reception hall opening into one, and the impending
refreshments in the dining room shut off with folding doors. There was
more of ostentation in the Kemble home. More festooning of fringed
scarfs, gilt chairs, and a glass curio cabinet crammed with knickknacks.

"Dutch as sauerkraut," was Mrs. Becker's indictment; and Flora Kemble
came under the gaucherie of the impeachment, too.

She had attained tall and exceedingly supine proportions, wore pinks and
blues and an invariable necklace of pink paste pearls to fine advantage,
and a fuzz of yellow bangs that fell down over her eyes, only to be
repeatedly flung back again.

Again MRS. BECKER (who could be caustic): "She makes me so nervous, with
her hair down over her eyes like a poodle dog, that I could scream."

Nevertheless, at eighteen Flora's neat spiritous air lay calm as a
wimple over her keenly motivated little self. The same apparently
guileless exterior that had concealed her struggle along a road lit with
midnight oil toward her graduation, enveloped the campaign of strategy
and minutiae that had resulted victoriously in her engagement to Vincent
Bankhead, assistant credit man to his father.

Albert Penny at this time was second-assistant buyer for Slocum-Hines,
and, at the instance of his friend Vincent, somewhat reluctantly
present.

"Al, what are you doing to-night?"

"Oh, about the same old thing! Take a stroll and turn in, I guess. Why?"

"There is a little gathering up at the Kembles' this evening. Thought
maybe you'd like to meet the girl. Nothing formal, just a few of the
girls and boys over to celebrate."

"I'm not much on that kind of thing, Bankhead. Guess you'd better count
me out."

"Come along. Want to show you the kind of little peach I've picked."

"Ask me out some night to a quiet little supper, Bankhead. I feel a cold
coming on."

"Quiet little supper, nothing. That's your trouble now, too much quiet.
Nice people, her folks. It'll do you good."

And so it came that when the folding doors between the Kemble dining
room and parlor were thrown open, Lilly Becker, still flushed from a
self-accompanied rendition of "Angels' Serenade" and an encore,
"Jocelyn," and Albert Penny, in a neat business suit and plaid
four-in-hand, found themselves side by side, napkin and dish of ice
cream on each of their laps, gay little bubbles of conversation, that
were constantly exploding into laughter, floating up from off the
gathering.

There is a photograph somewhere in an album of Lilly much as she must
have looked that night. Her white organdie frock out charmingly around
her, a fluted ruffle at the low neck forming fitting calyx for the fine
upward flow of her high white chest into firm, smooth throat; the
enormous puff sleeves of the period ending above the elbow where her
arm was roundest; the ardent, rather upward thrust of face as if the
stars were fragrant; the little lilt to the eyebrows; the straight gray
eyes; the complexion smooth as double cream, flowing in cleanest
jointure into the shining brown hair, worn in an age of Psyche or
Pompadour, so swiftly and shiningly drawn back that it might have been
painted there.

That was the Lilly Becker upon whom Albert Penny cast the first second
glance he had ever spared her sex.

"Miss Becker, we certainly did enjoy your solo."

She was still warmed from the effort, the tingling nervousness of the
moment not yet died down, and she was eager and grateful.

"Oh, Mr. Penny, did you really? I was so afraid I flatted there at the
end."

"I had to laugh the way they broke in with clapping before you were
finished. I knew you weren't done."

"Oh, then you're musical, too?"

"No, but I could see there was one more page you hadn't turned."

"Oh!"

"My! but you can go high! Like a regular opera singer."

"Oh, if I thought you meant that! It's my ambition to sing--real big
opera, you know."

"It certainly was a pretty song, not so much the song as the way you
sang it. I could understand every word."

"If only my parents could hear you say that. You see, they don't
approve. They think it's all right for a girl to have a parlor voice,
but it must stop right there, otherwise it becomes a liability instead
of an asset."

At this little conceit of speech he turned delighted eyes upon her.

"Why, you're a regular little business woman!" he cried.

"Yes," she sighed out at him through a smile, "I took the commercial
course at High."

Inhibitions induce callosities, and Albert Penny's inhibitions, incased
within the shell of himself, were as catalogic as Homer's list of ships.
First, like Tithonus, he had no youth. Persiflage, which he secretly
envied in others, on his own lips went off like damp fireworks. He loved
order and his mind easily took in statistics. He had invented a wire
kind of dish for utilizing the left-over blobs of soap. He never
received so much as a street-car transfer without reading its entire
face contents. In seven years he had not availed himself of the annual
two weeks' vacation offered him by his firm, and, conspire as he would
against it, Sunday continued to represent to him a hebdomadal vacuity of
morning paper, afternoon nap and walk, unsatisfactory cold supper, and
early to bed. His very capacity for monotony seemed to engender it. He
could sit in Forest Park the whole of a Sunday afternoon, poring over a
chance railroad time-table picked up on the bench; paring his straight,
clean finger nails with a penknife; observing the carriages go by; or
sit beside the lake, watching the skiffs glide about at twenty-five
cents the hour; and finally, hat brim down over his eyes, doze until
twilight seeped damply into his consciousness.

This same unsensitiveness to routine had enhanced his value with
Slocum-Hines from delivery boy at fifteen to second-assistant buyer at
twenty-five, an amenability, however, that threatened to pauperize him
of any capacity for play. Under the well-meant banterings of friends he
became conscious of it, but to cast it off was to cast off the thing he
was. He tried to learn to recreate, and took Saturday-evening street-car
rides to Forest Park Highlands and joined a bowling club. He paid ten
dollars in advance for a course of six dancing lessons, too, and only
took four of them.

There had never been a woman, a perfume, or a regret in his life. In the
period of ten years since his migration from the paternal farm ten miles
outside of Sparta, Missouri, he had worked for one firm, boarded with
one landlady, and eaten about three thousand quick lunches in the Old
Rock Bakery at Lucas Avenue and Broadway. To further account for the
state of existing hiatus in Mr. Penny's scheme of things would be
tautology.

A short femur line gave him an entirely false appearance of stockiness.
On the contrary, he stood a full five feet ten, was thewed with fine
compactness and solid with clean living and clean with solid living.
Even the fiber of his remarkably fine hair was strong. It was the
brilliant honey color of full-moon shine, lay off his brow, but not
down, lending him a look of distinction to which he was hardly entitled.

He regarded Lilly with a furtiveness prompted solely by a desire not to
appear audacious. Her softly rising throat just recovering its normal
beat reminded him of the sweet agitation of pigeons in the park. He was
close enough to be conscious of an amazing impulse on his part to reach
over and touch the soft white flesh above the cove of her elbow. A
little blue thread of a vein showed there, maddeningly. A sense of inner
pounding suffocated him. He felt as if he had suddenly stepped into a
bath of charged waters, little explosions all over the surface of him.
Then a numbness so that, when he placed his tongue to the roof of his
mouth, it was insensate, and, somewhat frightened, he pinched the back
of his hand, relieved by the stab of pain.

"Do you dance, Mr. Penny?"

"Me? I--No, I guess I'm what you would call temperance when it comes to
frolics."

A little clearing had been made in the parlor, a music box pricking out
the "Blue Danube." From the dining room they sat regarding the three or
four couples, Lilly marking time with the toe of her white-kid slipper.
The elixir of the dance could rush to her head like wine, but she was
not sought after as a partner, due to her reserve against a too locked
embrace and a curious tendency to lead.

"To me, dancing is poetry as written by the feet."

He relieved her of her napkin and ice-cream dish, eager for suitable
reply to this syrupy observation.

"Speaking of feet, have you seen the show at Forest Park Highlands this
week?"

"No."

"Well, really remarkable. There is an armless fellow there who eats and
juggles, even writes, with his toes."

"Indeed!"

"Sometime if you would honor me by--by accompanying--I--er--Becker, did
I understand the name to be? I wonder if by any chance you are related
to Ben Becker."

She turned upon him with the immemorial sense of a point about to be
scored, her eyes full of relish.

"Why, I think I'm slightly related, Mr. Penny. He happens to be my
father."

He whacked his thigh.

"You don't tell me! Why, I've bought rope and twine from your father for
three years! A mighty fine gentleman, there. Well, well, this is a small
world, after all."

She noticed his large, protuberant Adam's apple throbbing with the
accelerando of pleasure, and a thaw set in between them. He let his arm
drape over the back of her chair, a stolen sense of her nearness
dizzying him. He was like a man with a suddenly developed new sense,
which he could not tickle enough.

"Well, well!" he said. "Well, well, well!" And she sighed out again
through her smile that he could fall so short of what he looked to be.

"I used to say, when I was a little girl, Mr. Penny, that I wished my
father were in a more romantic business than rope and twine. I wanted
him to be a florist or a wood carver or a music publisher or some of the
perfectly silly things that girls get into their heads."

"I always say of myself that I must have been born with a wooden spoon
in my mouth. Took to hardware from the very start. Left my stepfather's
farm and general store at fifteen and made a bee line for the hardware
business before I hardly knew what hardware meant. I suppose I'll die
with my nose to one of those very grindstones we carry in stock and be
buried with one of those same wooden spoons in my mouth. Although I
always say, no burial for mine. Burn me up--cremate me when I'm
finished here."

"Papa is that way, too, about his business, I mean. Tied up in twine, I
tell him."

"Just ask your father if he knows Albert Penny, Miss Becker. Queer how
things happen. This very day I turned over a memorandum to the head of
my department, advising a certain buy in hemp rope, Becker and Co. in
the back of my head all the time."

At eleven o'clock the first guest rose to go, Lilly following immediate
suit.

His state of eagerness rose redly to his ears.

"Will you permit me to escort you home, Miss Becker?"

"Why, yes, if it won't upset Flora's plans for me. I only live two
blocks over on Page."

"I wish you lived as far as Carondalet," he said, choking over words too
strange to be his.

They walked home through quiet streets that smelled sweetly and moistly.

He was scrupulously careful of her at crossings, his tingling fingers
closing over the roundest part of her arm, the warmth of her shining
through to the fabric of her eider-down-bordered cape, lending it a
vibrant living quality that thrilled him.

"I certainly have enjoyed a perfect evening, Miss Becker."

The magic of youth stole out of the citified night upon her.

"See!" she cried, her arm darting out of her cape, "that's Taurus up
there. I can always tell him. He's green. See how he glitters to-night.
Sometimes I feel sorry for Taurus. It's as if his little emerald soul is
bursting to twinkle itself out of the monotony of all the white ones.
That's what they were at the party to-night, all white. All of a color."

"Except you."

"Oh! Do you know the names of the stars, Mr. Penny?"

"I know the Dipper. It's our trade-mark, you know. That's how I
happened to work out our nest of aluminum dippers. Wonder if you
wouldn't permit me to bring you out a set of those dippers, Miss Becker.
All sizes fitted into one another. Just a little kitchen novelty you
might enjoy."

They were at her front steps now, the hall light flickering out over
them.

"I just certainly have enjoyed this evening, Miss Becker."

"Nice of you to put it that way, Mr. Penny," she said, trying to appear
unconscious of the unmistakable suns in his eyes.

"I--I'm not much of a fellow for this kind of thing, but I see I've been
making a mistake. A fellow like myself ought to get about more. But most
of the--er--er--ladies--young ladies--I have met, if you will pardon my
saying it, haven't been the sensible kind like yourself that a fellow
could sit down and have a talk with."

"I'm not very congenial, either, Mr. Penny, with the boys and girls I am
thrown in with. Flora's all right, and Vincent, but I'd rather stay at
home with my music or a good book than waste my time with social life. I
just ache sometimes for something better."

"Well, well," he said, "we certainly agree in a lot of ways. I thought I
was the only home body."

She was inside the door now, bare arm escaping the cape and out toward
him.

"Good night, Miss Becker. I--I hope I may be permitted to bring over
those dippers some evening."

"Why--er--yes, thank you."

"Good night."

Turning out the hall light, Lilly felt her way carefully upstairs to
save creaks.

"Lilly, that you?"

"Yes."

"Tear your dress?"

"No."

"Turn out the hall light?"

"Yes."

"Tight? Wait. I'm getting up."

"Never mind."

But during the process of Lilly's undressing, huddled on the bed edge,
arms hugging herself, Mrs. Becker held midnight commune.

"Who was there?"

"Oh, the usual crowd."

"Refreshments?"

"The usual."

"Anybody admire your dress?"

"No."

"Don't tell me too much, Lilly. I might enjoy hearing it."

"But, mamma, won't it keep until to-morrow? I'm sleepy now, dear."

"Who brought you home--Roy?"

"A Mr. Penny."

"Who? I thought you said only the old crowd was there. It's like pulling
teeth to get a word out of you."

"A friend of Vincent's. Works at Slocum-Hines's."

"Seems to me I've heard your father mention that name. Penny--familiar.
Is he nice?"

Lilly shuddered into a yawn. In the long drop of nightdress from
shoulder to peeping toes, her hair cascading straight but full of
electric fluff to her waist, she was as vibrant and as eupeptic as
Diana, and as aloof from desire.

"Yes, he's nice enough--"

"Penny--certainly--familiar name."

"--if you like him."

"What?"

"I say he's nice enough if you like his kind."

"Well, Miss Fastidious, I wish I knew who your kind is."

"I wish I did too, mamma."

Suddenly Mrs. Becker leaned to the door, her voice lifted.

"Ben!"

"Oh, mamma, he's asleep!"

"Oh, Ben!"

"Mamma, how can you?"

"Y-yes, Carrie."

"Isn't that assistant buyer down at Slocum-Hines's, the one you say has
thrown some orders in your way, named Penny?"

"Mamma, surely that will keep until morning."

"Isn't it, Ben?"

"Yes, Carrie; but come back to bed."

"I knew it! He's one of the coming young men at Slocum-Hines's. Vincent
Bankhead swears by him. He throws some fine orders in your papa's way. I
knew the name had a ring. Lilly, did he ask to--call?"

"Mamma, I'm sleepy."

"Did he?"

"Yes--maybe--sometime."

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