She was not afraid. The blood was rocking in her veins like a sea, and she was raging with an anxiety that mounted as the heliotrope dusk, turping out sky lines, began to blow in like fog through the narrowness of the cross streets.
But neither was she alone. That was the miracle of her state. That peculiar living magnetism was through the blanket she carried and in a current along her arm. A lusty little storm of crying rose once, quite suddenly, and she kissed down into the pink little mouth that was full of the breath of life—her life.
There were three bottles of still warm milk in her bag. She fumbled for one, kneeling right there on the sidewalk, jerking out the stopper with her teeth and fitting on the rubber nipple. The little lips closed over it with the pull and strong insuck of breath which never failed to thrill her.
She was sobering, though, slowly and surely into a state of panic. At Broadway the swirl of the dinner-bound was already tightening. Lights began to pop out in the tall, narrow office and loft buildings of the vertical city.
She boarded an uptown car, counting, and truly enough, upon the chivalry of the mob toward her burden, for obtaining an immediate seat. At West Fifty-third Street she alighted into a day gone two shades darker. A stiffening breeze blew in from the river, whipping up the odor of garbage from curbs. A group of dirty children were building a bonfire of some of these slops and bits of flying paper, lending a certain vicious redness to the scene.
She thought suddenly of Page Avenue at this hour of pinkish mist. The little patch of front porch with the green chairs and tan-linen covers.
"O God, what have I done!"
The window with the midwife's sign was dark and there was a little coagulation of bareheaded women on the steps. They parted to give her passage, their babel immediately resuming after her.
The hot, sour smells of the hallway smothered her, but she fumbled for the bell, plunging her hand into the damp, clinging gauze of a cobweb that sent her back shuddering. What proved to be Mrs. Landman herself opened the door upon a rushing smell of hops and a cookery and a glimpse of violently disordered interior. It was not so much the furiously stained figure that sent Lilly a step backward, but a black flap tied over one eye and knotted at the back of her head struck her as so unutterably sinister that without a word she turned and, with her head charging the way for her, ran out through the hallway, through the group on the stoop, and the entire length of the block, catching a downtown surface car that stopped for her after it had started.
She was palpitating with the kind of fear that gave her a sense of fleeing through a dark corridor with some one at her heels, and so rode on until her breath caught up and she could relax into a grateful sort of inertia.
At Forty-second Street, on a sudden impulse, she left the car, hurrying into Grand Central Station. In its undress of semicompletion, the swirl of home-going commuters caught her, so that she was swept down a temporary runway and shunted finally into the waiting room. At its far end the "Matron" sign still hung at right angles. She hurried to it, and to her relief was met by a new face above the gray-and-white uniform, rather little and old and framed kindly in white. There was a small boy asleep on the couch this time, and the usual frowsily tired traveling public relaxed against various of the chairs.
"I want to leave my baby here until I get in touch with friends who have failed to meet me."
A quick suspicion of foundling crossed the old face.
"We don't take the responsibility of infants."
"But this is urgent. I must locate my friends in Brooklyn. I cannot find them in the telephone book and evidently they have not received my telegram."
"We don't do it."
Then Lilly went gallantly down to her last handful of change, all but a ten-cent piece.
"She's the best little thing. Sleeps the night through. I've two bottles of prepared food here in my bag. Her next feeding time is at ten and her next at six—"
"We don't keep infants for nothing like that long, madam. I go off duty at seven and—"
"I haven't any intention of leaving her that long, just until I get in touch with my friends."
With the mound of change ingratiated into the old palm and the little bundle transferred to arms more or less reluctantly held out for it, Lilly lifted back a corner of the blanket.
"Wait until nice lady sees mother's beautiful, then she'll be glad to watch over her."
Mysteriously, it seemed to Lilly, there was nothing of the button nose so peculiar to infants about her child. Its was tipped with character; so, too, the little mouth in the firm way it had of closing.
"Say, but ain't she a beauty!" capitulated the matron.
"Isn't she! Isn't she!"
"Look at them curls. You ought to enter her in a show, ma'am."
"You will see to her carefully until I return, won't you? She sleeps that way always, sweetly and deeply."
"Why, I'll sit and rock her myself this very minute."
When Lilly went out into the darkness there were the ten cents in her bag and the blurry outline of things she finally laid to hunger. She walked downward for some blocks, finally entering a Third Avenue lunch room and ordering a ten-cent bowl of beef stew. She took it from a tablespoon like a thick soup, its warmth flowing through her and dissipating a chilly discomfort. But her face still felt rather drawn, and, regarding herself in the pink net-draped mirror, she took to rubbing her cheeks, an old, schoolgirl device against pallor. She was quite becomingly large-eyed from the deadly aching tiredness that lay over her, but otherwise the old whiteness of her skin flowed unmarred and intact, also that unadorned look of nun to her face where the hair left it so cleanly.
Beside her at one of the marble-topped tables a great, hefty motorman in uniform kept finding out her knee and pressing it.
"Stop it," she said, "or I'll call the proprietor."
He drew surlily back, draining his thick cup of coffee and shambling out, chewing a toothpick. At the door he looked back with his lips pulled down, mouthing a filthy epithet at her.
After a while she followed, almost slunk, with a sense of no tip left beneath the saucer, her pace swinging into the indefinable tempo of destination, but more and more indeterminate as she approached Madison Square.
She kept close to Third Avenue, something reassuring in the sidewalk gabble, the air of cheap carnival, the white arc lights over open fruit stands, and the percussive roar of Elevated trains. Presently even Third Avenue would withdraw to over its shops, the sidewalks fall quiet and darken, pedestrians become sinister. She shivered against that lateness; stood for a period outside a bird store, watching a pair of Japanese mice chase their little eternities in a wheel cage. At Twenty-third Street a youth with a prison complexion, a cap pulled down and a sweater pulled up, sauntered out of a pool room, matching his pace with hers, and at once easily colloquial.
"Hello, sweetness!"
Her eyebrows shot up. She could smell, feel, and taste the cheap beer on his breath, and anger rather than fear possessed her.
"Cat got your tongue, sweetness? Where you goin'? Lonesome?"
After a while he fell back, flecked off as it were like a burr clutching for a metal surface.
It was her conviction, many times put to test, that such situations lay within her shaping, and that man took his cue from the yea or nay of her attitude.
At the sight of a crowd tightening about a street corner she edged her way in. The iron plug to a corner sewer had been removed, a policeman and the shirt-sleeved figure of a man prone on the ground, red-faced and arms inserted their length.
"What is it?" asked Lilly, tiptoeing.
"A feller's gold watch rolled down."
"Who'll go down on a rope?" called out the owner.
"I will," cried Lilly.
The crowd turned its face to her.
"I will, for a hundred and fifty dollars—now—here!"
In the derision and boo that went up she escaped, hurrying this time and without uncertainty.
The Union Square Family Theater showed the lighted but quiet front of a performance in progress.
At the stage entrance the old doorman with his look of sea dog recognized her, admitting her with a nod. The titter of music came back through the wings and quick, loud thumps of a tumbling act in progress. The smell of grease paint, like the flop of a cold, wet hand to her face, smote her with a familiarity out of all proportion to her limited experience in the theater.
She wound, unchallenged, up the short spiral staircase.
Through an open doorway of an office that had been refurnished in large mahogany desk, filing case, and a stack of sectional bookcases, Robert Visigoth sat tilted on a swivel chair, his hands locked at the back of his head, gaze and cigar toward the ceiling.
She stood in the doorway a second, watching his perceptions dawn.
"Hel-lo!" he said, finally, uncrossing a knee grown slightly corpulent and his rather small eyes crinkling to slits. "Hel-lo!"
She was arch and laughed back.
"A bad penny, you see."
He swung a chair toward her without rising.
"Turned up, didn't you? Good."
She seated herself, with that coquetry of hers which she could force on occasion, feeling his glance as it ran over her dawning shabbiness as searingly as a flame. It darted on downward to her feet, and because that very day the leather in her right shoe had cracked, showing a grin of white lining, she wound that foot up around the chair rung.
"I took sick—that time," she explained, fatuously.
He lifted her hand, bending back each finger to match his words.
"You are a naughty girl. Why did you run away?"
She sat swallowing through obvious gulps, but increasingly determined to be arch.
"Please—don't," trying to withdraw her hand.
"Come now," he said through a half smile and watching her redden almost to purple, "you don't hate me that badly or you wouldn't be back here."
"I know I don't."
"What?"
"Hate you."
"Good! Now we're getting on."
"I need something, Mr. Visigoth—terribly."
"We're not using that song specialty any more," he said, kindly.
"I've given up that sort of thing, too, Mr. Visigoth. I'm a stenographer now."
"Smartest thing you ever did."
"I—I'm in a little difficulty right now—a money one. That's why I thought if you—Could you use me in the office? I know stenography and typewriting. I—It would be a godsend, Mr. Visigoth. I dislike having to put it so strongly—but my present difficulty is serious—very."
"What's troubling you?"
"I must have an office position. I want my evenings free and I cannot be situated so that I might have to go on the road at any time."
"Married?"
"Why, I—I thought—assumed that you knew I was married from the beginning. I—We aren't together, though; haven't been—"
"Umph!"
"It's just that I'm temporarily embarrassed."
"That was a pretty rough way you left me in the lurch. Those actions don't get a girl very far in this business."
"It was sickness."
He leaned forward to pat her hand, his lids somehow seeming to thicken.
"You're a queer little duck," he said, "but I like you. Always have."
"Then you will, Mr. Visigoth?"
"Well, let's not bother about that now."
"But—"
"There is quite a change taking place in these offices. My brother is coming from Chicago to take charge of the booking end and I am going out there after he comes on, and I'll see if he can use you. Let us talk about you now."
"No. No. I haven't made you understand. That isn't all. I'm in immediate need. So immediate! I need as much as—as a hundred and fifty—two hundred—here, now, to-night!"
"Whew!"
"It is so difficult to explain, but if you would. If you could! I will work it out for you, beginning tomorrow morning. To the last penny. Two hundred dollars advance on any salary you may see fit to pay me, if you would! I'm not afraid to start small. Within a week I'll prove my value to you—that's how I'll slave for advancement. Just two hundred dollars advance on my salary—one hundred and fifty if—"
"Well, well, well," he said, stropping up and down the back of her hand, "that does put a different face on things, doesn't it? I just don't know what to say."
"Say yes. It is only my predicament gives me the courage to ask. But I need money, Mr. Visigoth. Need it. Need it. Now—to-night! I'll pay it back in service. I—"
"Come now," he said, his eyes crinkling again. "You don't mean that,Lilly. I'm a man and you're a woman. I don't want your money."
"I'll go any length for yours."
"What length?"
"Any—you say."
He leaned forward at that and kissed down into her lips so deeply that her neck was strained backward to hurting. She sprang to her feet, wiping her hand across her mouth until her lips dragged, but trying to laugh.
"You hurt."
"That's what I want to do—hurt, hurt," kissing down into and crushing her lips again and again.
"Oh! oh! oh!" she moaned rather than cried, pummeling at his chest.
"Devil," he said, jerking her back to him until the breath jumped from her.
"I—I hate you!"
"Good!"
"I'm not what you think I am. I hate you. I hate—sex. I—"
"I don't care what I think you are. I only know that I want to be the one to wake you up to the knowledge that sex is life and life is sex. Ice maid. I don't care what you are. I know that I like you. I know that I like your lips. Give me."
"Quick, then," she said, trying not to shudder.
* * * * *
She squirmed from him finally, pushing against him with all her strength.
"Ugh. How I—I—hate—"
"Gad! how I like your lips!"
"Let me go now."
He looked down at her through slits of eyes.
"To the last cent, you said."
"Yes."
"Come, then," he said. "I live alone."
"Please," she said, her palm pat against her mouth and looking at him with streaming eyes. "Please—not that—"
For answer he kissed her again so brutally that she sat down, moaning her shame.
"You're a woman of the world, Lilly. You don't want anything for nothing. Life wouldn't balance up that way."
"But I'll—"
"Yes, yes, I'm going to give you a position, too. Fifteen a week to start with, to show you I mean well by you. You beautiful sleepy-eyed thing!"
"I'm not what you think—"
"All right, I know. Never again after to-night, so help me God! This isn't my kind of thing any more than it is yours. Any position you want in this office to-morrow morning and me off to Chicago for permanent headquarters next month. I'm good pay. Are you? Now? To-night?"
"My hundred and fifty—"
"Two hundred!"
"Yes—I'm good pay—now—to-night!"
With a flaying intensity that kept her teeth unconsciously groundtogether so that when she relaxed their pressure the gums fairly sang,Lilly took up her work in the office of the newly incorporated UniversalAmusement Enterprises.
The clerical department occupied a large unfinished room, obviously makeshift, that had previously been used for the storage of stage properties. There were two flat-topped desks, placed so that their swivel chairs faced across a considerable expanse of surface, two bookkeepers' perches also rigged up to meet the exigencies of run-away affairs, and her own little table with its brand-new typewriting machine.
Yet Lilly never entered the rather cold breath of this atmosphere without a sense of haven. It was as if she had turned the key on those areas that lay outside of the immediate present. She could take the dictation of a letter to the printers, or a manufacturer of slot machines for opera glasses, or to a ventriloquist guilty of disorderly conduct behind the scenes, with the whole of her concentration brought to bear upon her pencil point until very often it snapped under the nervousness of her pressure.
Then Robert Visigoth, who dictated with his ten fingertips together to form a little chapel, would invariably wedge a pleasantry into her tightly maintained attitude, but there was a freshly sharpened pencil always at hand in the little patch of shirt-waist pocket, so that even this slight schism was seldom accomplished.
Her work consisted of some correspondence, mimeographing of programs for distribution to orchestra leaders, scene shifters, printers, bookkeeping and publicity department. Quite a bit of communication by wire, letter, and telephone with the Chicago office, and upon one very recent occasion she had been summoned down to the auditorium together with a Mrs. Ida Blair, one of the bookkeepers, for the try-out performance of a sketch, with the request for a written opinion on its box-office value.
Lilly alone had sent in a negative report—"Too sophisticated and not sufficient emotional appeal for vaudeville." On the strength of several opposing yeas, the playlet was booked, and removed after the second performance—a little secret feather which Lilly wore jauntily on a little secret cap.
In these eight weeks a quiescence that was like a hand to the reverberating parchment of a drum had come over her. It was, in fact, as if the whole throbbing orchestration of her universe had stopped as it sometimes can seem to upon the motion-picture screen, leaving the action to click on quietly without the excitation of music.
She had taken, at the instance of Mrs. Blair, a room in an Eleventh Street house. The odor of Bohemia, which is the odor of poverty through cigarette smoke, lay on the hallways. There were frequent all-night revelries reverberated down from the skylight room on the top floor, and one evening a passing group had beat a can-can of invitation on her doorway; but she could lock and bolt herself into her room, a box, it is true, at two dollars and a half a week, but it boasted half curtains of yellow scrim, a couch-bed with a moth-eaten but gay wool cover, and a small square of table with a reading lamp attached by a tube to the gas jet.
She found herself during the routine of her business day looking forward to these long, quiet evenings beside the tiny table. There had been eight unbroken weeks of them, and each Sunday a fresh little mound of sheer garments to be carried out to Spuyten Duyvil. Her old inaptitude with the needle, by no means overcome, hampered her so that her stitches were often wandering gypsy trails to be ripped over and over, and then her fingers leaving little prick stains to be washed out.
She had grown thinner, so much so that a slight jaw line had come out, but the shells were gone from beneath her eyes and it pleased her, when she brushed out her hair before going to bed, to see that its electricity, which had departed for a while, was out in it again, so that it would snap and stand out horizontally from her head. The little spark of a smile was constantly over her face like a mirage before her lips and her eyes and seeming to hover on the very peak of her brows when she arched them.
She liked to stand before her wavy mirror, folding the completed garments and looking back at herself. Newly freed, probably by the great Auchinloss and her daughter between them, from the bondage of an idea, she felt corporeally lighter, and was. The toothache of her being had ceased its neuralgic stabbings.
It was not unusual for her to stand before this mirror before climbing into bed, her mouth bunched to mimetics.
"Zoe, come to mother.Mother!Daughter, they're shouting for you! Let me hold your flowers, darling; they'll smother you!… You mean the one with the yellow curls, madam? The valedictorian? That's my daughter!"
All the spots would come out in her eyes, like little "niggers" in a pair of diamonds, and more often than not she would fall asleep then with a crescent moon of a smile lying deeply into her face.
One day, after these weeks of minute fidelity to routine, she was startled somewhat by a request from Robert Visigoth, in the form of a note sent over to her desk, to remain after six to take some dictation. The big temporary-looking office with its absence of partitions and staring lack of privacy had become a paradoxical source of security to her. In all the eight weeks, three of which, it is true, he had spent in Chicago, she had not once encountered Robert Visigoth alone. She had subconsciously developed the habit of peering down the dark stairs that led to the stage door before descending them, and on one or two occasions, when they chanced to pass, had flattened herself rather unduly against the wall. Her comings and goings, whether by maneuver or not, were seldom alone. She and this Mrs. Blair, a sparse, umbrella of a woman with a very bitter kind of widowhood, had formed the noonday habit of taking a dairy lunch of milk and cereal at a near-by White Kitchen and of departing evenings for there, too, since it spelled strong, hot, simple foods and a very superior kind of cleanliness.
It was with a distinct sinkage, well laid over with office imperturbability, that she showed Mrs. Blair the note, saw her stab into her greenish-black bird's nest of a hat and depart alone. Then the office boy; the publicity man, whistling; a clerk or two, and finally a sixteen-year-old girl who pasted clippings into scrap books.
The pleasantly cool summer day had thickened up rather suddenly into the beginnings of dusk, the electric sign down over the theater throwing up a sudden glow through the windows. She sat before her machine, shorthand book in lap, her attitude quiet enough except that her hands, as they clasped each other, showed whitish at the nails, and she would not swerve her gaze by the fraction of an inch, even with the consciousness of a presence behind her.
It was Visigoth at her shoulder, the male aroma of him, a mixture of cigar smoke, bay rum, and freshly washed hands, and the feel of his rough-serge suit very close.
She rose, withholding herself stiffly from his nearness, marveling, as always, at this power of hers to endure him so casually.
"Letters?" she asked.
He placed a knee on the chair rung, tilting it toward him, and leaning across the back at her.
"You funny, funny girl," he said, regarding her intently through the crinkling eyes.
She met his stare in a challenging sort of silence.
"My, what big eyes you have!"
"Please," she said, retreating from the look in his, her weight against the table until it slid.
"Please what?" he rather mimicked, advancing the exact distance of her withdrawal, the smile out on his never quite dry lips.
"Please—don't."
The corpulency which was one day to envelop him like suet was already giving him the appearance of ten years his senior. He had upon occasion been mistaken for the father of his younger brother, and some of Lilly's acute distaste for him, across the slight enough chasm of the seven or eight years between them, was already that of youth for lascivious age.
"Shall I take those letters now—Mr. Visigoth?"
"I would rather take you—to dinner."
"I might have known," she said, rather tiredly.
"What?"
"That you would not keep your word."
"I have though, for eight weeks."
"I thought your promise meant—"
"Ah no. I never broke a promise in my life, but even I cannot be expected to keep one indefinitely with a girl like you within eyeshot."
"That can be easily corrected."
"Come now, I'm giving you your chance here to make good."
"Well then, let me take it."
"My dear girl, never expect the best of us to be more than human."
"I suppose, then, this is to be the regulation, theatrical-manager-dangers-of-a-big-city kind of scene."
"Come now," he said, his voice plushy with the right to intimacy. "We understand each other—Lilly."
She stood silent, flaming her humiliation.
"And I like you for it. If there is one thing to my mind less interesting than another, it is the untempted kind of woman who—"
"I never pretended to you, Mr. Visigoth, that I was what you are pleased to term—tempted!"
"No? But how much more redeeming if you had been."
"Nothing can ever redeem that—night—except—"
"Except?"
"Oh, I don't know—maybe—except—God."
"You funny, funny girl!" he repeated. "I like you."
"I know your kind of liking. You like me for the kind of thing you would protect your wife or your daughter from with all the fury of your little elemental soul."
"I haven't a wife, I haven't a daughter, and I like you."
"No, but you will have presently. Your kind always does and you'll be the ideal family man who telephones home from the office three times a day to see if the baby has taken her cough medicine regularly, and you'll knock the man down that brushes your wife too closely in a crowd, and because of your attitude toward all but your own women you'll suspect every man who even approaches your daughter. In the eyes of the world you're entitled to your wild oats. That's what I am, a wild oat to be sown at your pleasure. If you haven't any letters, Mr. Visigoth, I'm going. I—"
"No," he said, closing his hand over hers. "Don't."
"You force me."
"Nonsense! Haven't I promised to let you be, Lilly? I've respected that promise to the letter, as I always respect a promise. The past is dead, it died with that night. I swear it over again."
"Dead, with your reminding me with every word you utter—every look."
"Nonsense, I tell you! I've treated you like everyone else in this office. Made things easy for you. Helped you."
"And I've tried to justify my position in your office. To hold it by sheer merit so that this—this wouldn't—couldn't happen. And now you—your daring to keep me here like this shows me I've failed."
"You haven't. You've raised the efficiency of the office forty per cent. I'm turning you over to my brother as a prize. I've got you in mind for the booking end of the business. That's what I think of you."
"Oh, Mr. Visigoth, if you knew—if you knew what that would mean to me. I'll give you my best! Let me go on proving to you that I want to stay here to make good on my merits—as man to man!"
"I wish to God I could figure you out."
"I made it clear—that night—"
"But I flattered myself at least that—"
"You hadn't that right. Ours was a cold business deal. So much for so much! I never for a moment pretended otherwise. I was in need. Terrible need. I didn't think when I came to you that you would do business on any other terms than you did."
"I envy the fellow that awakens you."
"Oh, I've been awakened! Awakened to the fact that a woman out in the world has to fight through a barrier of yourselves that you men erect. But I'm not afraid of your barrier. In the last analysis I know, that I have the situation in hand. Every woman has. It is a matter of whether she will or she won't! I had an alternative—that night. Could have taken it, but wouldn't. Would do the same over again. A man invariably takes his cue. You took yours. Even a street masher takes his cue from the look in her eyes whether he will or won't follow up."
"Right, but public sentiment is all on the woman's side."
"It's worth more to me to know that the situation was in my own hands than it is to play the sensational role of more sinned against than usual."
"You're immense."
Dryly, "Doubtless, from your point of view."
"From any—"
"Now look here. I need this position here more desperately than I ever needed anything in my life. It means the success or failure of something that I've staked every card on, of a fight that nobody in the world would understand—possibly not even myself. But that doesn't change the fact that the situation again is mine. I am in a position now to demand fairer terms than I was—then. I return to work to-morrow only on those terms, Mr. Visigoth."
The veil of light from the sign fell upon her in the rigidity of her pose and pallor. For some reason she was hugging one of the book-shaped letter files, all the black out in her eyes.
He sat down, straddling the chair, his arms across the back and his chin down upon them.
"Who are you?" he said, regarding her with the intense squint of one in need of glasses.
She felt her power over the moment, and with her old slant for it began to dramatize.
"I'm the grist being ground between yesterday and to-day. Sometimes I think I must be some sort of an unfinished symphony which it will take another generation to complete. I am a river and I long to be a sea. I must be the grape between the vine of my family and the wine of my progeny. That's it, I'm the grape fermenting!"
Then she felt absurd and looked absurd and stood there with the quick fizzing spurt of exultation died down into a state of bathos.
"Let me stay on here on my terms, Mr. Visigoth," she finished with a sort of broken-wing lameness of voice.
"What terms?"
"The terms you have been generous enough not to violate up to now. I've the most glorious reason for wanting to make good that a girl—a woman could have. I don't think the career stuff, as you once called it, is rankling any more. I'm suddenly glad and quiet about my job. Let me stay on. Let me make myself indispensable to this growing, interesting enterprise of yours. Why, even watching the letters grow in numbers and importance, and using the little individuality in handling them that you are beginning to allow me, is a game worth playing! I'm like a bad girl who has been spanked by life and is all chastened and ready to be good. If you are the clever business man I think you are, you'll let me stay, Mr. Visigoth, on my terms."
There was a shine to her there in the half light, probably because her eyes were wide and the muscles of her face lifted so that her teeth showed, but not in a smile.
"I played the game on your terms, Mr. Visigoth; now meet me on mine."
"Put your cards on the table, then; no fine flights of speech either.Who are you?"
"I told you from the first I am a married woman, with nothing to be said against my husband except that he was part of a condition that was intolerable to me."
"Where is he?"
"West."
"Stage ambition, eh?"
"Yes or—I don't know. Too many ambitions of all kinds crawling over me like a terrible itch, for God knows what. Fermenting. The grape fermenting! But I'm quiet now. So quiet that sometimes I think I wouldn't change it for even the—the singing wine of fulfillment. I don't think I can make you understand. I seem to have been stretching all these years for—for something my arm isn't quite long enough to touch, and now my child—my little girl—"
"You have a child?"
"A little girl."
"How old?"
"Eleven weeks."
He looked at her across a long silence.
"Good God!" he said, and then again, "Good God."
"Yes," she said, watching belated comprehensions flood up into his face, "that was it."
"You mean you had on your hands that night a—"
"Yes, a three-and-a-half-weeks-old one."
"You were broke?"
"Stony."
"Good God! You—poor—"
"I'm not pleading for your sympathy, Mr. Visigoth. Only a square deal.Will you give it?"
He walked over to his desk, turning on a green-shaded bulb, the clip back in his voice and manner.
"That will be all for this evening, Mrs. Parlow—"
"Penny."
"Mrs. Penny," he said, picking up a random sheaf of papers and not meeting her eyes. "I want you to go over to Newark Monday afternoon and bring back a report on an act over there; and, by the way, you are to begin your new week in the booking department at twenty dollars."
She wanted to speak and her lips did move, but the tears anticipated her, and, blink as she would, they sprang, magnifying her glance, and besides, there were footsteps coming up the flight of stairs that led from the stage entrance, and a young, a lean, a honed silhouette rather suddenly in the doorway, the right side borne down by the pull of a dress-suit case.
"R.J?" Peering into the gloom.
"Good Lord!" from the figure at the desk, leaning forward on the palm of his hand. "That you, Bruce?"
They met center, gripping hands.
"When did you get in, youngster? Didn't expect you for another couple of days."
"Just now. Took a chance on finding you here."
"Another five minutes and you wouldn't have."
"So these are the new diggings?"
"There is your desk."
He deposited his hat on the flat top indicated, his silhouette cutting vigorously into the dimness, particularly the rather heavy double wave to his hair causing Lilly to grope with a vague sense of having seen him before. It was merely a rather remote resemblance to the remote Horace Lindsley, but not for days did she stumble across this realization.
She knew, instinctively, even while she marveled at his youth and the merest and most lightninglike resemblance to his brother, that here was Bruce Visigoth, and what she did not know was that a certain throaty resonance to his voice had a tendency to gooseflesh her and that quite suddenly her eyes were very hot and her hands very cold.
"Well, R.J.," he was saying, and she noticed that his head came up with a fine kind of young defiance, as if a pair of invisible Mercury wings flowed with the sleek nap of his hair, "I'm for taking a chance on the Buffalo lease. I stopped over yesterday and the little theater looks good to me."
It was then Lilly began noiselessly to move toward the door.
"Oh—here—Mrs. Penny. My brother, Mrs. Penny. Sort of secretary on the booking department, and a darn good one."
"How do you do, Mrs. Penny? Mighty pleased," he said, through the resonance that had a little aftermath of a ting to it.
Her five fingers rather trailed along the palm of his hand as he slowly released her.
"Thank you, Mr. Visigoth," she said, smiling up at him with her eyebrows, pressing down her sailor hat, and hurrying toward the staircase.
Outside, the darkness had the quality of cool water to her face. The palm of her right hand and the tips of her fingers were tingling as if they had been kissed.
She could have run before the wind.
From now on for many a month to come, the curve of Lilly's life would have shown a running festoon; six days whose uneventful continuity was bearable because they were looped up by the rosette of the Sundays at Spuyten Duyvil.
When Zoe was two years old this hebdomadal consciousness was already borne upon her. Into her earliest vocabulary, as haphazard as if the words had been dished up out of the alphabet of a vermicelli soup, crept the word "Sunday," mysteriously boiled down to "Nunk," the first time her mother heard it, the pride seeming to crowd around her heart, fairly suffocating her.
As if the luster of this girl child could be any brighter, yet here was the new shine of the mental beginning to radiate through. Nunk!
Was there any limit to this ecstasy of possession? It ran through her days like a song.
It meant that while the home-going six-o'clock rush at Union Square, which of face is the composite immobility of a dead Chinaman, would presently cram into street cars and then deploy out into the inhospitable cubbyholes of the most hospitable city in the world, Lilly, even in her weariness, could be deterred by the lure of a curb vender and a jumping toy dog. There was never a time or a weather that she could pass, without pause, Westheim's Art Needlework Shop on Broadway and its array of linen-lawn dainties, and, remarkably enough, the purchase of the toy dog or a five-cent peppermint cane could send her home with an actual physical refreshment as if she had slept off, rather than cast off, fatigue.
She would line up during the week, Monday's toy dog, Tuesday's peppermint cane, Wednesday's cap rosettes (fashioned out of five yards of baby ribbon at one cent the yard), and so on to Saturday's climax of bootines, and on one occasion a large circular wooden arrangement, a sort of first aid to the first step, which she carried out herself, standing with it on the train platform.
With her three months' running start, paid in advance and duly receipted by Mrs. Dupree, Lilly's weekly expenditures, by the nicest calculation, reduced themselves thus:
Room rent. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .$2.50 Car fare (one round trip to Spuyten Duyvil). . . . . . . . . .60 Breakfast (gas-jet boiled egg, an apple, three biscuits from a tin, and coffee) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .50 Lunch (milk, cereal, sandwich) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.50 Dinner (lamb or beef stew, green vegetable, pie, coffee. Tip) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.50 Laundry. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .75 ——- $9.35
There were already forty-two dollars and sixty-eight cents hoarded in a little biscuit tin in the depths of her valise, and out of it had come a gift for Mrs. Dupree, a rather interesting relic of an old silver thimble wrought in cunning filigree which she had bought in two payments of seventy-five cents each, and largely by eliminating the pie for a month, from a rapidly diminishing keep-chest of Ida Blair's.
A friendship had sprung up here, which, born out of the merest propinquity, had sent down strong roots into the common ground between them.
One or two nights they had attended the theater together, on orchestra passes given out to them by one or the other of the Visigoths.
One Wednesday evening they saw the "School for Scandal" presented at the Academy of Music, and once, just before the permanent departure of R.J. for Chicago, he had tossed negligently across the desk a single balcony ticket for Eames in "Faust."
"Here is something ought to keep one of you busy this rainy evening."
Ensued a highly feminine parley.
"Mrs. Blair, you take the ticket. Really, I'm too tired and I've some sewing to do."
"Nonsense! You're musical and I'm not. Besides, it will do you a world of good."
"I don't know," said Lilly, her lips giving a sensitive quiver. "I've put it so out of my mind that it might only tantalize."
But in the end she did attend, seating herself, for the first time in her life, in the F-minor, the perfumed twilight of the Metropolitan Opera House, just as the velvet curtains swished sibilantly apart.
Day was breaking, and in all the passion and churchiness of Gounod, the student calls for death, the echoes of human happiness rustling through the background like the scything sound of harvesting.
Lilly could scarcely breathe for the poignancy of sensation. She was all throat. Faust's opening greeting to the dawn, his challenge to happiness, pierced her. She sat forward on her chair, anticipating the lyrical vision of Marguerite, her hands clasped over the handle of her wet umbrella, and her knees crowded up unconsciously about its dampness.
She bought the libretto, humming down into it between acts and leaping ahead to verify her memory of the score.
Poor Lilly, it is doubtful if she was by endowment more than a lovely melomaniac doomed never to emerge from her musical primaries. A mere tonal accord could assail her nostrils like a perfume set to music. And yet her quick ear, though, was not exact. Her capacity for fine vocal distinctions in her own singing had been distinctly limited, and a note landing just this side of itself could drop down into her state of ecstatic coma with hardly a plop. She had neither capacity for exactitude nor tireless fidelity to tone. It made her neck ache. She had never graduated from musical sensation to cerebration; a theme washed her over with all the voluptuous abandon of a Henner sea siren letting the water tickling up the beach to roll over her lightly.
There was unrest in the balcony because Faust was singing through laryngitis and a cloud of fog in his throat. A critic who wrote in terms of elliptical rhythms and tonal arabesques tiptoed out for a smoke. One of those sympathetic fits of coughing swept the house. But Lilly sat hunched in her habitual beatific attitude against the chair back, the old opera flowing back to her in association that caught her at the tonsils.
"Lilly, play that over, the left hand alone."
"Oh, mamma, mamma!"
That blue challis wrapper shotted with pink rosebuds.
"Lilly, play that over."
Eames down there flinging up the "Jewel Song" like a curve of gold. Her place!
She half rose to her feet.
Down in front!
She sat again, but a sudden, an inexplicable sense of wanting to plunge from the height of the balcony seized her. It had been so long since the old neuralgic stabbings of spirit. She wanted to jump and had a ludicrous vision of herself landing down in the cream of white shoulders and crashing through the U of one of those immaculate shirt fronts. She could have torn and scratched the indestructibility of her failure and wanted suddenly and terribly to wrap those pearl-twined taffy braids around the rising throat of Marguerite as she sprayed the auditorium with the "Jewel Song," a great fire hose of liquid music finding out every cranny.
In the deep-napped velvet of this melodious darkness Lilly rose suddenly, pushing her way out through knee-impeded aisles and a string of protestations.
An usher helped her to find a door. She ran down several flights and into a side street. A slant of rain met her and she charged into it with bent head and umbrella. Bubbles with a tap of sleet in them exploded like little torpedoes on the sidewalks, curbs were rushing water, and Broadway was as black and oily-looking as a foundry. She tried to visualize it as she had seen it that first morning from her window at the Hudson Hotel, pink with sun.
The picture would not conjure, and finally, because her shoes were full of bubbles and her damp skirt clung and hindered walking, she boarded a street car and sat looking out of the water-lashed windows, her throat full of little moans like the song of a kettle just about to boil.
When she reached home there was an envelope beneath her door. It contained a snapshot picture of herself and Zoe taken by Mrs. Dupree one Sunday afternoon. Still wet, she sat down with it on the bed edge. Against a background of shrub and stone steps Lilly was little more than a blur, but Zoe, with five little fingers dug into her cheek, leaped from the picture, all her dimples out.
The mood induced by the opera fell off like a cloak, a warm, easy tear splashing right down on the adorable little face. She wiped it off ever so painstakingly, holding the little print up to the gas to dry.
Then she stood it up on the table so she could gaze down and smile while she undressed, and even placed it on the floor as she leaned down to unlace her shoes. She climbed into bed with it under her pillow, but rose in the darkness to transfer it, against crumpling, beneath the mattress.
She went to sleep right off with a little smile on her lips, as if the picture had kissed it there, but it was many a day, sixteen years, in fact, before she could be induced to enter the Metropolitan Opera House again, and then only in the most crowded hour of her life.
Quite a friendship was thriving between Lilly and Mrs. Blair. The older woman had opened the door to her upon that family skeleton, one of which, by the way, lurks in the cupboards of most of us—the unproduced play! This one, a sketch called "The Web," read by Lilly and even placed by her with a written word of appreciation on Robert Visigoth's desk.
He carried it with him to Chicago, mailing it back one day without comment.
"Just the same, there is a corking idea there. You ought to develop it into a long play, Mrs. Blair."
"I will some day," she replied, with a cryptic something in her voice that Lilly was only to understand a year later.
One spring evening, that year later, as she and Mrs. Blair sat in her small room beside the open window that looked out over the twilighted rear of housetops, Lilly was induced to sing, quietly, almost under her breath, sitting there on the floor with her hands clasped about her knees, her invariable shirt waist and dark-blue skirt discarded for a pleasant sense of negligée in a pink cotton-crêpe kimono, her hair flowing with the swift sort of rush peculiar to it.
They had just completed, as a relief from the nightly round of lunch rooms, a wood-alcohol meal of canned baked beans, cheese, crackers, and tinned sweet cakes. Even Mrs. Blair, at an age when the years are at the throat of a woman, shriveling it, had opened her blouse at the neck, revealing an unsuspected survival of its whiteness.
Lilly sang "Jocelyn," a lullaby dimmed in her memory by the mist of years and full of inaccuracies. She had last sung it at Flora Kemble's.
It lay on the twilight after she had finished.
"How pretty! Why don't you let one of the Visigoths hear you? It might lead to something."
"Robert V. has heard me."
"Well, I don't pretend to be a judge of music, but considering your youth and looks and when I see the kind of thing that does get across—"
"I know. I used to feel that way about it, too—hot, rebellious—but, somehow, not any more. Strange that it should have taken my child to show me. I realized it last winter when I heard Eames. I simply hadn't it to give, except in desire. Why, her voice—it seemed to climb up around an invisible spiral staircase to the stars; and that wasn't all! There was something so richly colored through it—like the candy stripe through a crystal. I know now—and I'm glad I know—that my ambition was bigger than my talent."
"I suppose that is what you thought about me, too, when you read my sketch."
"No, no. I admit I did think it amateurish, but there is an idea in 'The Web.' Almost as if you had lived it yourself and had written it in blood. Besides, you know the secret of concentration; it shows in your work at the office. I couldn't stick night after night over one of those trial balances of yours. I'd throw it over. I've never in my life really worked for anything. Even as a child I used to cheat myself—move the clock; hadn't that sublime capacity for grind. That was part of the lack. How clear it all seems now!"
"The cruelest clarity in the world is wisdom after the event."
"Oh, but I wouldn't have one thing different! It simply wasn't in me to want badly enough, and therefore I didn't attain. But I know—I know, Mrs. Blair, that there is a logic running somewhere through it all. Nothing has been in vain. I'm out on a highroad now with open running ahead. I'm going to rear her into a superwoman. She is my song, Zoe! There is logic, I tell you, Mrs. Blair—straight through the apparent mix-up. Off somewhere in Corsica a vine is putting down roots that there may be wine in somebody's glass some day. The vine. The grape. The wine."
"The vine. The grape. The wine."
"Don't you understand now a little better, Mrs. Blair, why this poor little fermenting grape couldn't stay on the vine?"
"You've told me so little, dear."
"More than I've ever told a living soul. There's one thought I love to carry about with me about Zoe. She was born out of captivity. No Chinese shoes for her little mind or her little soul or body. I'm vague about it now, just as I'm half crystallized about everything. But this time my will to do is unlimited and unfaltering! Her whole life is going to be a growth toward fulfillment of self. I want life to dawn upon her in great truths, not in ugly shocks and realizations. She is a plant and I am her trellis toward the light. Do you see? Do you? I may be as wrong as you think I am, Mrs. Blair—terribly, irrevocably wrong—but I wouldn't take her back there into that—that—sedentary fatness—I wouldn't—"
A musing sort of silence had fallen into a gloom that was thickening into darkness.
"The more I see of your case, Lilly, the less I understand it. To think of anyone in this world of suffering deliberately bringing it upon herself. Why, my dear, it isn't any of my business, but when I think of those parents of yours out there, comprehending nothing, and that poor bewildered husband of yours, I could cry for them."
"Do you think I don't, Mrs. Blair, whole nightfuls of tears? Why, yesterday at the Library in my home paper I saw a little local notice of my mother's euchre club meeting at our house—it was a knife, somehow—the pain of it—"
"I'm not saying so much about the husband, only, God knows why a woman should throw away a life-time of protection just because a man chews with his temples and—"
"Surely you haven't taken that literally! I only tried to symbolize for you that the unimportant mannerisms that may even delight in one person can become monstrosities in another. Oh, I haven't made you understand—"
"Yes, dear child, you have made me understand this much. What a fine sense of satire the power behind the throne of the world must have. Take me—that first little two-by-four home of mine over in a back street of Newark. Talk to me of freedom! I married to get away from it. Somebody who cared whether I came or went. Somebody who cared enough to want to restrict me."
"Ah yes, but—"
"We had a little house on Dayton Street; must have been a hundred years old, with funny little leaded panes and a staircase rising out of the parlor to a queer old box of a bedroom with slant walls. We painted the floors ourselves and Lon did the doors in burntwood. He had a feeling for the artistic, Lon had. That was the way we met—that was—the way—we—met."
"How?"
"He was a police sergeant then, and I was bookkeeping for the time for Metz Producing Company. Lon used to drop in once in a while for passes. Then he got to waiting for me evenings with little pencil drawings of all the funny things that had happened to him during the day. I was strong for him to get off the force and take up art, but even then, now that I look back on it, I can see that Lon was fed up on propositions that it was driving him half mad to resist. That in itself should have put me on my guard, but it didn't. I don't know why I'm telling you all this—"
"Go on."
"Oh, I must have known in a way that Lon was drinking in his effort to keep his eyes shut to the bribe money that could have come his way. He never came home to me under the influence, but toward—the end—his eyes began to glassen up. I was all for getting his beat changed. You see, it took him down into the gang and red-light districts. More than that, I had my heart set on seeing him off the force altogether. I wanted to keep my position for a year or two after we were married and send him to Paris to study art. I've some cartoons in my trunk. That boy would have made good as—Well, it didn't happen. I blame myself. Marriage made a great baby of me, Lilly. You see, I'd never been coddled in my life—all those years of struggle on my own. Well I just turned soft and he loved to baby me. Why, when I went back to bookkeeping I had to learn it all over like a beginner—that's how wrapped up I became in that little home of ours!"
"How long, Mrs. Blair, did you live in it?"
"Fourteen months and five days. It was a tiny place and we didn't have much to spend at first, but what I had I managed to good advantage. Lon hated makeshift. He couldn't get the fun out of simplicity that I could. He wanted to dress me up. He wanted a big house. Big. Everything big. That was his undoing. That's what they called him in the Ring, I learned later, 'Gentleman Lon.' And I never knew there was a Ring! Never knew the filthy inside workings of the graft game existed. That's the way he protected me from everything ugly—from poverty. Me, that had never been protected from either. O God! if he'd only been truthful with me those last few months. I—I can't talk about it—I—"
"Then don't, dear Mrs. Blair, I didn't mean to—"
"He began bringing home more money than was natural, but he always explained it—a tip from a bucket shop on his beat—extra duty. If I had been right strong those days I might have suspected. Once he walked the floor all night, said it was a toothache, my poor boy! and let me fix a hot-water bottle for him. Then two men came one evening and there was some loud talk down in the parlor and I heard words like 'squeal' and 'gangsters.' He told me when he came upstairs that one of them was Eckstein. But how was I to know who Eckstein was? Didn't, until I heard it was he who had been—shot. I—You see, the captain had closed in on Eckstein's place because of a personal grudge, and Eckstein came running to Lon to save him. Threatened to squeal on Lon—on the whole business—if he didn't. Lon was hot-headed—got frightened—lost his head. O God! I don't know what—never will know—"
"Know—what?"
"That evening he stayed home and helped me fix up the nursery. Yes, I was expecting in the spring. That's why he was so for keeping things from me. We painted the woodwork white and gave a couple of coats to a little brown crib I had picked up second hand. He was for buying an enameled one on casters—he loved the best. Next night—next night—he—didn't come home—and at eight o'clock the following morning the extras were on the street—about the killing. Even then I didn't tie up—Lon and Eckstein. O God! God! how could I—"
"Tie up what? Who?"
"He was a cat's-paw, Lilly. Never believe otherwise. My boy was caught and trapped in the filthy cesspool of politics. There are men in this city—men whom I named at the trial, all the good it did me, living and prospering for doing worse than my boy died for. You wouldn't know of my boy, Lilly; you were too young then. The whole country knew him, eleven years ago. Lon Elaine. It's easier Blair; no questions asked. It was the beginning of a cleanup that my boy blazed the way for. He went to the gallows, Lilly—my boy—"
"No! No!"
"He died a gunman. Thank God his child was born dead. But he lies in my heart, Lilly like a saint washed clean. He sinned for love, and because stronger forces than he wanted him for a tool. May every man on his jury live to carry that truth to his grave. He killed in self-defense and he sinned for love. I'll exonerate him in a play, yet! I will! I'll tell them! I'll tell them!"
Told without hysteria, her tale had almost a droning quality on the twilight. She was grim in her tragedy, and her lips were as twisted and dried as paint tubes, yet Lilly crept closer, laying her cheek rather timidly against the corduroyed one.
"Ida Blair," she said. "I see now. 'The Web'! Oh—Ida Blair."
They fell silent, the two of them, dry-eyed, cheek to cheek, drowning back into a long twilight that finally blackened.
"I don't know why I've told you all this. It's been ten years since I've talked it. But your telling me that you threw it all over—that little home out there, and a man that was driving down deeply the stakes of his home—threw it over because the black spot from his collar button made you feel hysterical—Oh, I tell you there is a grin through the scheme of things. A laugh. What old man Metz used to call a belly laugh."
Chin cupped in hand, Lilly stared out into a back yard that was filled with the tulle of winding mist, the lighted rear windows of the houses opposite blurry, as if seen through tears.
"Just the same," she said, her lips in the straight line peculiar to this not infrequent reiteration, "I'd do the same if I had it to do over again."
"How do you know that some day your child is not going to turn upon you with the bitterest reproaches?"
"She won't; she's too much like me. That is why it is going to be something sublime to have the rearing of her. It is going to be like living my life over again the way I once dreamed it. I know even now what she wants, before she puckers up her little lips for it. Of course, you are right—he—they have the right to know. But take the shine off that creature? Clip the wings of her spirit? Fatten her little soul back there in that sluggish environment? She'd hate it as I hated! Oh you must have seen for yourself that Sunday I took you out there. The little live stars in her eyes. The plunge and rear to her little body. Never! She's mine! We two! Out on the open road!"
"I shouldn't want the responsibility of rearing my child in a paid institution if I had better to offer."
"I haven't better! I've proved to myself, Mrs. Blair, to what limit I would go to—to save her from back there. Proved it—horribly! No—no, she's mine. No, not even mine. She belongs to herself. As soon as her little brain is ready to take it in, she shall decide; but until then—she's mine."
"Lilly—Lilly—a father ignorant of his child!"
"They'd suck us back, I tell you! Self-preservation even against family is a first law of life! Owls eat their young! So can human beings feed on the thing they love. It's not these first years would matter. But ten, fifteen, twenty years from now. They would hitch her vision, not to a star, but to a—a tin dipper. You don't understand. You know it seems to me, Mrs. Blair, that most people, women, anyhow, are like great big houses with only half the rooms in use. The mentality closed up and musty from disuse because they have never found or made the keys. I want my child to live roundly—in all her mental rooms. What is the use closing off any part of a house that was meant for light and sunshine? I want her to know the world she lives in from attic to cellar. The good from the bad, so that, knowing the bad, she can love more the good. The right to live!"
"You're for woman's rights. You're one of those suffragists."
"I guess I am if woman's rights mean more breadth, more beauty, more realization of our latent selves. Oh, I don't know what I mean. That's been my curse."
In the darkness Mrs. Blair put up a hand to the sheen of Lilly's flowing hair.
"You poor child! You funny girl. You need—"
"What?"
"The right man to sweep you off your feet."
"I knew you were going to say that. No, you're wrong. I'm not essentially a man's woman, Mrs. Blair. Sex isn't even as big a part of my life as it is of most women's. I can't flirt. I haven't an ounce of coquetry in me. I think I almost hate—"
"You mean you hate what your experience has been. The right man for you, dear, a man with enough of the materialist to hold you in check and enough of youth and vision and ideals to soar with you. No, no, you don't hate him, Lilly."
"Why—why—who?"
"Oh, I've seen it flash between the two of you. I've watched it being silently born. Lilly child, look at me!"
"Why, Mrs. Blair! Why—Mrs. Blair! I've never seen him outside of office hours in my life. I never laid eyes on him until he walked in that night from Chicago. Why, I—I'm a married woman! He's younger—than I—a year! He knows there is Zoe. He sent her up a little hobbyhorse from the property room. Why, Mrs. Blair—of course if you look at me like—that—"
She was suddenly in the older woman's arms, a passionate, a peony red flooding her face and waving down her words. She was all for further resistance, but her denial had taken on an archness for which she somehow blushed.
Besides, it was suddenly delicious to huddle there, tingling in the darkness.