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Star Dust

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"Yes. We had planned to go to the meat market together."

"Fine."

"But I'm not going."

"Why?"

"I--don't know. Too hot, I guess."

He looked at her rather intently.

"That's right, Lilly," he said, his eyes, with something new in them,
roving over her figure; "if you don't feel up to the mark, just you take
care of yourself. Jove!" he repeated. "Jove!" kissed her again, and went
down the front steps, whistling.




CHAPTER XII

At eleven o'clock Mrs. Becker, hatted, crossed the sun-bleached street,
carrying outheld something that wetted through the snowy napkin that
covered it. At the door she surrendered it to Lena.

"Put this in the ice box for Mr. Albert's supper. It's some of my
coldslaw he's so fond of, and a pound of sweet butter, I took from my
dairyman. See that Miss Lilly never uses it for cooking, Lena; the salt
butter I brought yesterday is for that."

"Yes'm."

"And, Lena," drawing a palm across the banister and showing it up,
"look. That isn't nice. In my house I go over every piece of woodwork
from top to bottom on my hands and knees. You mustn't wait for Miss
Lilly to tell you everything. Where is she?"

"Upstairs, ma'am."

She ascended to a jeremiad of the cardinal laws of housekeeping, palm
still suspicious. Her daughter rose out of a low mound beside
the window.

"Good morning, mamma."

"Lilly, you should help upstairs wash days with the housework. Eight
o'clock and my house is spick span, even my cellar steps wiped down.
Take off that pink thing and I'll help you make the bed. It was all
right to wear it around the first week for your husband, but now one of
your cotton crepes will do. Come, help turn the mattress."

"Oh, mamma, Lena will make the bed."

"Who ever heard of not doing your upstairs work on wash day? Really,
Lilly, I was ignorant as a bride, too, but I wasn't lazy. I wouldn't
give a row of pins for--"

"Please, mamma--don't begin."

"Well, it's your house. If it suits your husband, it suits me."

"Well, it does suit him."

"Not if I judge him right. Albert likes order. I went over his socks the
other day, and he kept them matched up as a bachelor just like a woman
would. He's methodical."

"Don't lift that heavy mattress alone, mamma. Here, if you insist upon
doing it, I'll help."

They dressed the bed to its snowy perfection, a Honiton counterpane over
pink falling almost to the floor.

"Well, that's more like it." Her face quickly moist from exertion, Mrs.
Becker regarded her daughter across the completed task.

"Now for the carpet sweeper."

Lilly returned to her chair, lying back to fan her face with a lacy
fribble of pocket handkerchief. "You can wear yourself out if you
insist, mamma, but I can't see any reason for it. I'm--tired."

Mrs. Becker sat down, hitching her chair toward her daughter's.

"Lilly," she paid, eagerly forward and a highly specialized significance
in her voice, "don't you feel well--baby?"

"Of course I feel well, mamma. As well as anyone can feel in this heat.
If only you wouldn't harass me about this--old house."

Mrs. Becker withdrew, her entire manner lifting with her shoulders.

"Well, if that's the way you feel about it, you need not be afraid that
I'm going to interfere. That's one thing I made up my mind to from the
start, never to be a professional mother-in-law in my daughter's home.
The idea!"

"Mamma, I didn't mean it that way, and you know it. I realize that you
mean well. But I suppose many a family skeleton rattles its bones to the
tune of 'they meant well.'"

"Lilly, you're not yourself. I'm sure you don't feel well. Baby, you
mustn't be bashful with your own mother."

"Please, please don't ask me that again in--in that voice. You know I
always feel well."

"We're both married women now, Lilly. If--if there's anything you want
to say--"

"No."

"I always say, a single woman doesn't know she's on earth. Isn't it so,
Lilly?"

Suddenly Lilly shot her hand out to her mother's arm, her fingers
digging into the flesh.

"You should have told me something--beforehand!"

"I'd have cut out my tongue sooner. What kind of a mother do you think I
am? Shame!"

"It's wicked to rear a girl with no conception of life."

"You're no greener than I was. That's what a man wants in the girl he
marries. Innocence."

"Ignorance."

"It all comes naturally to a woman after she's married, life does."

"I--I hate life."

"Lilly!"

"I do! I do! I do!"

"You poor child!" said Mrs. Becker, stroking her hand, and her voice
pitched to a very private key. "Life is life and what are you going to
do about it?"

"Only love--some sort of magic potion which Nature uses to drug us, can
make her methods seem anything but gross--horrible."

"What's on your mind, Lilly? We don't need to be bashful together any
more. We're married women."

Lilly rose then, moving toward the dresser, drawing the large
tortoise-shell pins from the smooth coil of her hair.

"If you want me to go to the meat market with you, mamma, I'd better be
dressing before it gets any hotter."

"You're too warm, Lilly. I'll go myself. You can learn the beef cuts
later."

"I would rather stay at home and practice awhile. I haven't touched the
piano since--"

"Tack up your shelf paper while I'm gone, Lilly--your cupboards look so
bare--and then come over to lunch with me and we'll go to the euchre
together. It's your first afternoon at the Junior Matrons and I want you
to look your best. Wear your flowered dimity."

"If you don't mind, mamma, I want to unpack my music this afternoon and
get my books straightened. I'd rather not go."

"The nerve! And that poor little Mrs. Wempner goes to extra trouble in
your honor. I hear she's to have pennies attached to the tally cards.
Pretty idea, pennies for Penny. Well, I'm not going to worry my life
away! Work it out your own way. I'll send you home a steak and some
quinine from the drug store for Albert to take to-night."

Presently Lilly heard the lower door slam. It came down across her
nerves like the descent of a cleaver.

For another hour she sat immovable. A light storm had come up with
summer caprice, thunder without lightning, and a thin fall of rain that
hardly laid the dust. There was a certain whiteness to the gloom,
indicating the sun's readiness to pierce it, but a breeze had sprung up,
fanning the Swiss curtains in against Lilly's cheek, and across the
street she could see her mother's shades fly up and windows open to the
refreshment of it.

At twelve o'clock the telephone rang. It was her husband. "Yes, she was
well. Pouring downtown? Funny. Only a light shower out there. No, the
man had not brought the missing caster for the bedstead. Yes,
six-forty-six, and she would put the steak on at six-twenty. Yes, the
poultry netting had come. Fine. Bathtub stopper. Yes."

For quite a while after this she sat in the hallway, her hand on the
instrument, in the attitude of hanging up the receiver.

She did piddle among her books then, a vagabond little collection of
them. Textbooks, in many cases her initials and graduating year printed
in lead pencil along the edges. Rolfe's complete edition of Shakespeare.
A large illustrated edition of Omar Khayyam. Several gift volumes of
English poets. Complete set of small red Poes that had come free with a
two-year magazine subscription. Graduation gift of Emerson's essays.
_Vision of Sir Launfal_. _Journeys to the Homes of Great Men_.
_Lucille_, in padded leather. An unaccountably present _Life of Cardinal
Newman_. _The Sweet Girl Graduate_. _Faust_. _How to Interpret Dreams_.

They occupied three shelves of the little case; the remaining two she
filled in with stacks of sheet music, laying aside ten picked selections
marked "Repertoire" and occasionally sitting back on her heels to hum
through the pages of a score. Once she carried a composition to the
piano, "Who is Sylvia?" to be exact, singing it through to her own
accompaniment. Her voice lifted nicely against the little square
confines of reception hall, Lena, absolutely wringing wet with suds and
perspiration, poking her head up from the laundry stairs.

"Oh, Miss Lilly, that's grand! Please sing it over again."

She did, quickened in spite of herself. Her voice had a pleasant
plangency, a quality of more yet to come and as if the wells of her
vitality were far from drained.

She could hear from the laundry the resumed thrubbing and even smell the
hot suds. The afternoon reeked of Monday. She left off, finally, and
rocked for a time on the cool porch, watching the long, silent needles
of rain, wisps of thought floating like feathers.

"Who am I? Lilly Becker. How do I happen to be me? What if I were Melba
instead? What if Melba were frying the sirloin to-night and five
thousand people were coming to hear me sing in the Metropolitan Opera
House? Albert--husband. What a queer word! Husband. Love. Hate.
Lindsley. Language. How did language ever come to be? We feel, and then
we try to make sounds to convey that feeling. What language could ever
convey the boiling inside of me? I must be a sea, full of terrible
deep-down currents and smooth on top. How does one know whether or not
he is crazy--mad? How do I know that I am not really singing to five
thousand? Maybe this is the dream. Page Avenue. Lena in the laundry.
That sirloin steak being delivered around the side entrance, by a boy
with a gunny sack for an apron. Dreams. Freud. Suppressed desires.
That's me. Thousands--thousands of them. Am I my conscious or my
unconscious self? Can I break through this--this dream into reality?
Which part of me is here on this front porch and which part is
Marguerite with the pearls in her hair? Bed casters, they're real. And
Albert--husband--the rows of days--and nights--nights of my marriage. O
God, make it a dream! Make it a dream!"

At six-forty-six Albert Penny came home to supper.




CHAPTER XIII

There was nothing consciously premeditated about the astonishing speech
Lilly made to her husband that evening. Yet it was as if the words had
been in burning rehearsal, so scuttling hot they came off her lips.
There had been a coolly quiet evening on the front porch, a telephone
from Flora Bankhead, a little run-in visit from her parents, and now at
ten o'clock her husband, shirt-sleeved and before the mirror, tugging to
unbutton his collar.

She did not want that collar off. It brought, rawly, a sense of his
possession of her. She sat fully dressed, in her chair beside the
window, the black irises almost crowding out the gray in her eyes, her
hands tightening and tightening against that removal of collar. Finally
one half of it flew open, and on that tremendous trifle Lilly spoke.

"Albert."

"Yes?"

"Let me go!"

"Huh?"

"It's wrong. I've made a mistake. I don't want to be married."

For a full second he held that pose at his collar button, his entire
being seeming to suspend a beat.

"What say?" not exactly doubting, but wanting to corroborate his senses.

She was amazed at her ability to reply.

"I said I have made a terrible mistake. I can't stand being married to
you."

He came toward her with the open side of his collar jerking like an old
door on its hinges.

"Now lookahere," he said, rather roughly for him; "it's all right for a
woman to have her whims once in a while, but there are limits. I've been
as considerate with you as I know how to be. A darn sight more than many
a man with his woman."

"I'm not that!" she cried, springing to her feet.

"What?"

"That! Your--that!"

"Call it what you want," he said, "all I know is that you're my wife and
I married you to settle down to a decent, self-respecting home life and
that a sensible woman leaves her whims behind her."

She stood with her hands to the beat of her throat, looking at him as if
he had hunted her into her corner, which he had not.

"Let me go," she said.

He seemed trying to gain control of his large, loose hands, clenching
and unclenching them.

"Good God!" he said. "What say?"

"It's no use! I've tried. I'm wrong. Something in me is stronger than
you or mamma or papa or--or environment. All my life I've been fighting
against just--just--this. And now I've let it trap me."

"Darn funny time to be finding it out."

"That's the terrible part! To think it took this--marriage--to awaken me
to a meaning of myself."

"Bah! Your meaning to yourself is no better than any other woman's."

"A month ago it would have been so simple--to have had the
courage--then. To have realized then! Why--why can life be like that?"

"Like what?"

"You remember the night coming home from the Highlands? I tried to tell
you. Something in me was rebelling. Ask mamma; papa. They knew! That's
been my great trouble. My desires for myself were never strong enough to
combat their desires for me. They've always placed me under such ghastly
obligation for their having brought me into the world. Their obligation
is to _me_, for having brought me here, the accident of their desires!
But I let the molasses lake of family sentiment--suck--me in. If only I
had fought harder! It took this trap--marriage! All of a sudden I'm
awake! Don't try to keep me, Albert. I haven't known until this minute
that my mind is made up. So made up that it frightens me even more than
you. I'd rather be on my own in a garret, Albert! It's kinder to tell
you. We mustn't get into this thing deeper. Nothing can change me.
Don't try."

She put up her hands as if to ward off some sort of blow, but in her
heart not afraid, and she wanted to be afraid of him. He did whirl a
chair toward her by the back, but sat down, jerking her into one
opposite, facing her so that their knees touched, and she could see the
spots on his temples that responded so to beefsteak, throbbing. Her
terror rose a little to the volume of his silence. His head was so
square. She wanted him to rage and she to hurl herself against his
storm. Her whole being wanted a lashing. She could pinch herself to the
capacity of her strength without wincing.

But on the contrary, his voice, when it came, was muted.

"Lilly," he said, "you're sick. You're affected with the heat." His look
of utter daze irritated her.

"Sick! You mean I was sick before! I'm well now."

"You're either sick or crazy!"

"I'm trapped. I was born trapped, but now I tell you I'm free! Something
up here in my brain--down here in my heart--has set me free! You can't
keep me. No one can. I want out!"

"In God's name, what are you driving at?"

"You wouldn't understand. Love might have made you--this--possible, but
it didn't come. It didn't come, Albert."

He reached for his coat to plunge into it.

"I'm going across for your mother and father. I'm afraid of you. There
is something behind all this. One of us is crazy!"

"No, no, Albert. Please, not them. I'll run out of the house if they
come. They've defeated me so often. That terrible wall they erect--out
of flesh that bleeds every time I try to climb it. They've killed me
with the selfishness of their love, those two. They put me body and soul
into Chinese shoes the day I was born. I've never ceased paying up for
being their child. Suppose they did sacrifice for me--clothe me--feed
me--what does parenthood mean but that? Don't you dare to call them
over! Don't you dare!"

"In God's name, then, what!"

"Just let me go, Albert--quietly."

"Where?"

She went toward him, her fine white throat palpitating as if her heart
were beating up in it, something even wheedling in her voice.

"I've thought it all out, Albert. These unbearable days since--this.
I'll go quietly; I'll take the blame. In these cases where a woman
leaves it becomes desertion--"

"If you're talking divorce, I'll see you burn like brimstone before
I'll sacrifice my respectability in this community before your
damn whims."

She quivered, and it was a full second before she was able to continue.

"I know, Albert, to you it sounds--worse, probably, than it is. But
think how much worse, how degrading it would be for me to stay here--in
your house--hating. I'll make it so easy. It's done every day, only we
don't happen to hear of it. That's what makes our kind the marrow of
society. We're too immorally respectable to live honestly. We build a
shell of conventionality over the surface of things and rot underneath.
Nature doesn't care how she uses us. It's the next generation concerns
her. She has to drug us or we couldn't endure. We're drugged on
respectability. On a few of us the drug won't react. I'm one. Let me go,
Albert. To Chicago. I was there once with mamma and papa to the Rope and
Hemp Manufacturers' Convention. Or, better still, New York. That's the
field for my kind of work. Many a girl with less voice than I has gotten
on there. Albert, won't you let me go?"

He was like nothing so much as a cornered bull, trying to bash his
bewildered head through the impenetrable wall of things. Little red
shreds had come out in the white of his eyes; he was sweating coarsely
and feeling the corners of his mouth with his tongue.

"You won't ruin my name--you won't ruin my name."

"I'll take the blame. I'll love taking it. You'll have a clean case of
desertion--"

Suddenly he took a step toward her with the threat of a roar in his
voice, and again she found relief in the rising velocity of his anger
and practically thrust herself in the hope of a blow.

"What are you that I am married to," he cried, "a she-devil? What have
I got to do? Treat you like one? Huh? Huh?"

He stopped just short of her, the upper half of his body thrust backward
from restraining his impulse to lunge, his face distorted and quivering
down at her.

"Be careful," he said. "By God! be careful when I get my blood up. The
woman don't live that can touch my respectability. If you go, you go
without a divorce. You're trying to harm me--ruin my life--that's what
you are. Ruin my life." And suddenly, before the impulse to strike had
traveled down his tightening arm, collapsed weakly, his entire body
retched by the dry sobs that men weep. He could so readily arouse her
aversion, that even now, with a quick pity for him stinging her
eyeballs, she could regard him dispassionately, a certain disgust for
him uppermost.

He turned toward her finally with the look of a stricken St. Bernard
dog, his lower lids salt-bitten and showing half moons of red flesh.

"What is it, Lilly? What have I failed in? For God's sake tell me and
I'll make it right."

"That's the terrible part, Albert. You haven't failed. You're _you_.
It's something neither of us can control any more than we can control
the color of our eyes. It's as if I were a--a problem in chemistry that
had reacted differently than was expected and blew off the top
of things."

"Bah! the trouble with you women to-day is that you've got an itch that
you don't know how to scratch. Well, it's high time for you to learn a
way to scratch yours by settling down like a respectable married woman
has to." His voice rising and his wrongs red before him: "I wish to God
I'd never laid eyes on you. I thought you were more sensible than most
and I find you a crazy woman."

"Then, Albert, you don't want a crazy woman for your wife!"

"Ah no, you don't! No, you don't! I've worked like a dog to get where I
am. I'm a respected member of this community and I intend to stay one.
No woman gets a divorce out of me unless over my dead body. I'm a leader
of a Bible class and an officer in my lodge. I wore a plume and gold
braid at the funeral of the mayor of this town. I'm first-assistant
buyer and I propose to become general manager. I'm a respectable citizen
trying to settle down to a respectable home, and, by God! no woman
tomfoolery is going to bamboozle me out of it."

She sat with her eyes closed, tears seeping through them, and her fist
beating softly into her palm.

"Oh, Albert--Albert--how can I make you understand? My brain is
bursting--"

"Lilly," he interrupted, explosively reaching out and closing over her
wrist, and sudden perception lifting his voice, "I know! You--you're not
well! You're ailing. Women aren't--aren't always quite themselves--at
times. You--Lilly--could it be--"

"No! No! No! I'll go mad if you, too, begin to insinuate--that! I'm
myself, I tell you. Never more so in my life."

He regarded her through frank and even tender tears, his voice humoring
her.

"Of course, you're high strung, Lilly, and a high-strung woman is like a
high-strung horse, has to be handled lightly. Don't exert yourself.
If--if I'm embarrassing to you--talk to mother. These are the times a
girl needs her mother. You go ahead and pick on me to your heart's
content. I--I'm a pretty slow kind of fellow about some things. Never
been around women enough. Come, it's ten-thirty-six. You need all the
sleep you can get. Come, Lilly. Why--I--I've been thick-headed--that's
all."

She suffered him to kiss her on the cheek as she turned her face from
him.

"Have it your own way," she said, limp with a sudden sense of futility
and as if all the reflex resiliency had oozed out of her.

"We're all right together, Lilly. Just don't you worry your head. We'll
get adjusted in no time. You and--and mother talk things over to-morrow.
I've been a thick-headed old fool. Pshaw! I--Pshaw!"

She moved to the dresser, removing pins until her hair fell shiningly
all over her, brushing through its thick fluff and weaving it into two
heavy braids over her shoulders. He laid hesitant and rather clumsy
hands to its thickness.

"Fine head of hair."

She jumped back as if a pain had stabbed her.

"Don't forget, Albert, to lock the downstairs windows."

He was full of new comprehensions.

"I understand. Take your time to undress, Lilly. I'll be about fifteen
minutes locking up, and I want to attach some new safety locks I brought
with me. Everything all right?"

"Yes."

"You don't need to keep the light burning."

"I won't."

He opened his lips to say something, but, instead, turned and went out,
the closed half of his collar drenched in perspiration.

When he returned, after a generous fifteen minutes, the room was in
darkness except for a thin veil of whiteness from the arc light in the
street. Between the sweetly new sheets the long, supple mound of Lilly
lay along the bed, her bare arms close to her body.

Her breathing was sufficiently deep to simulate sleep. He undressed in
the darkness and the silence.

Half the night through he tossed, keeping carefully to the bed edge, and
often she heard him sigh out and was conscious that he mopped
continually at the back of his hands. Once he whispered her name.

"Lilly--awake?"

She deepened her breathing.

About four o'clock he dozed off, swooning deeply into sleep, his lips
opening and a slight snore coming.

She lay with her eyes open to the darkness, letting it lave over her as
if it were water and she had drowned in it with her gaze wide.

She felt bathed in a colorless fluid of unreality. Those Swiss window
curtains! To what era of her consciousness did their purchase belong?
She and her mother had shopped them at Gentle's. They hung now lightly
against the darkness. The blond girl who had sold them to her must be
sleeping now, too, in this same curious pool of unreality. She lay sunk
in a strange pause. Once she propped herself on an elbow, gazing across
the street to the blank front of her parents' house. They were sleeping
behind that middle upper window, their clothing folded across chairs, as
if waiting. How eagerly they would greet their new day of small duties,
small pleasures, and small emotions. What gave them the courage to meet
the years of days cut off one identical pattern, like a whole regiment
of paper dolls cut from a folded newspaper? She began to count. Uncle
Buck, five hundred. Grandma Ploag, one hundred. Mamma and papa, one
hundred and fifty. Seven hundred and fifty in the bank in her name! Her
own little checking account. The tan-bound check book. The new tan
valise, monogrammed, L.B.P. The stack of music marked "Répertoire." New
York! She fell to trembling, forcing herself into rigidity when the
figure beside her stirred. She was burning with fever and wanted to
plunge from the cool sheets. She could have run a mile--two.

Instead, she lay the long night through, her mind a loom weaving a
tapestry of her plan of action, and dawn came up pink, hot, and
cloudless.




CHAPTER XIV

At seven o'clock her husband awakened with an ejaculation that landed
him sitting on the bed edge. She lay with her eyes closed, wanting not
to blink. He dressed silently, but she could hear him tiptoeing about,
and finally lay with her hands clenched against the gargling noises that
came through the closed door of the bathroom. At last she was conscious
that, fully dressed, he was standing beside her, looking down. She could
tell by the aroma of mouth wash.

"Lilly?" he said, in a coarse whisper.

She continued to simulate sleep.

"Lilly!"

She did not employ the deception of a start, but opened her eyes quietly
to meet his.

"Lazy!" he said. "It is twenty-six minutes past seven."

"So late?" she said, twisting into a long, luxurious yawn. He kissed her
directly on that yawn between the open lips.

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