She drew the screen finally about the little davenport, fussing at the room, straightening it into a sort of formality with a woman's intuition for this chair one-half inch closer to the hearth and that picture ever so slightly straighter. The sheer frock she hung up in a closet, covering it with a shroud of tissue paper, wadding her daughter's none-too-carefully flung stockings into her shoes and tiptoeing to place them beside the davenport. They were strong, ribbed stockings, still warm and full of curves. She stroked over each. Once she paused at the mantelpiece mirror, drawing back her lip from the even whiteness of her teeth, perusing her points rather absent-mindedly.
Time had handled Lilly with a caress. At past thirty she was herself at twenty, with even more youth, because at twenty she had looked herself almost ten years hence. She had rounded out a bit, but not fatly. If stouter at all, it was only in the slightly deeper look to the cream-colored skin. There were two lines across her forehead, but they had been there at eighteen and were quite obviously the result of tilting her eyebrows so that the flesh folded; and besides, they relieved her clearness, these horizontal traceries, of utter limpidity.
She had drifted, not all unconsciously, into a certain picturesque uniformity of dress and could smile now over the large, cart-wheel hats, coarse embroideries, and short-vamp shoes; neither was she often above mentally contrasting herself in her annual seventy-five dollar suit of dark-blue serge, natty sailor hat, and impeccable blouse, with a certain coffee-colored linen with its slashings of coffee-dipped embroidery, and the blouse that twirled with yards and yards of cotton Valenciennes.
There was still something of the look of the nun to Lilly, but a bit too pinkly, as if she had dressed the part for Act One, but wore the ballet skirts for Act Two underneath.
Her reaction asserted itself in her child. At thirteen Zoe wore straight frocks of navy-blue alpaca with wide patent-leather belts and deep Eton collars. They were mistaken sometimes, and, strangely enough, to Lilly's invariable chagrin, for sisters, and Lilly, in her refutation, could be smitingly swift.
At nine o'clock, to the staccato of three rings, she admitted Bruce Visigoth, leading him down the tube of hallway. It annoyed her unspeakably that Harry Calvert, collarless, poked out his head from a doorway as they passed, and she was suddenly conscious of the smell of stew. She had meant to burn an incense stick.
But she walked with that free, Hellenic stride of hers, without apology and ahead of him.
"This is our room. Zoe is asleep there behind that screen. Won't you sit down?"
He placed his hat and a light bamboo stick across the center table, obviously oppressed with a sense of close quarters.
"Tell you what! Suppose we taxi over to Claremont. It's mild enough to sit out on the terrace."
She met him with her levelest gaze.
"Aren't you going to be comfortable here?"
"Of course I am. There you go, getting sensitive right off. Only it is a warmish evening, and why keep the sun-child awake?"
"Zoe can sleep," she said, with the barely perceptible arch to her brows, "even through the fire of your presence."
"Good!" he said, seating himself in great good nature and trying not to be quizzical. "So this is where you live."
He was frankly curious, his gaze humorous, but traveling over details, his head upflung and the scenting movement to his nostrils. He had not changed in weight, but in compactness and as if the house of his being had settled with a fine kind of firmness. He was a bit squarer of jaw and shoulder and ever so prematurely, and to the enormous fancy of women, inclined to a hoar frost of gray at the temples.
She seated herself across the little square of table.
"You don't seem to care for us here."
"Certainly I do, only—only—"
"Only what?"
"Only—well, hanged if I make you out, lady. This place—it just isn't you—that's all."
"Nonsense! I don't count. I'm just a sort of a means to an end, anyway."
"What end?"
"The wine!"
"The what?"
"Oh, nothing," she said, and laughed.
"Laugh again."
"Why?"
"I like it."
She looked her most serio-comic disapproval and held up a forefinger with a warning little waggle to it.
"Please," she said, with an inlay of something deeper in her voice, "don't begin by spoiling things."
"Rather not," he said. "I'm going to live up to your letter of the law."
Except for the frequent conferences now in the new Forty-second Street offices that commanded a view of two rivers and a vast battledoor and shuttlecock of the city, it was the first time in all those years that stretched from the night at the Waldorf that they had sat thus tête-à-tête. The day of the move she had ridden up from the old Union Square offices with him, a stack of files in her lap. Once, too, on a Saturday, the day of Zoe's invariable luncheon downtown and subsequent opera matinee, he had strolled by what seemed mischievous chance into the tea room where they were dining, but the occasion had hardly been a success. There had been a great deal of badinage between him and Zoe, but Lilly had finished her meal almost in silence. The day following, a toy piano of complete range and really excellent workmanship had arrived. She returned it without showing it to Zoe. These incidents lay between them now.
"So this is where you live," he repeated, as if his long curiosity could not find satiety in fact.
"That I have an abode seems to amaze you."
"It does. You're such a detached sort. You rise so above the mundane things that clutter up life, that it is pretty much of a shock to realize that you use tooth powder and carry a latchkey. It's hard to reconcile Chopin and George Sand probably to those famous raw-meat sandwiches they loved to eat at midnight. Well, that's about the way I feel about you—hemmed in by—dull reality such as this."
"I like raw-meat sandwiches," she said.
"Me too."
They laughed.
She took up a sheaf of manuscript.
"If it doesn't bore you too much, I'm going to read it straight through."
"Oh, I forgot; the play, of course."
She looked up at him as if over spectacles.
"What else?"
"You say it has been the rounds?"
"Yes. Peddled in every office in New York. Kline and Alshuler kept it two years. Forensi paid her two hundred and fifty dollars advance on it and then let his option lapse. For another year there was some talk of Comstock and Comstock doing it, and then finally Hy Wolff got hold of it and the very month he died paid her a second two hundred and fifty to renew his option on it. I've always felt that if Ida had kept after Hy Wolff he would have produced it. He had faith in it, but somehow just didn't seem to get to it. You see, Ida hasn't any gumption—not the kind of aggressiveness the game demands. That is why in fifteen years you scarcely know she is in your office. That is why I plunged in and tried to rewrite 'The Web' with her. It's a big story, sweated out of her own agony. She may never write another. Probably won't. My little part in it has merely been to help her co-ordinate—round up the jumble of her ideas, so to speak. There is a big play somewhere in this story. I know you didn't like it as a sketch—I didn't, either. A short play cannot contain this drama. But out of a clear sky it occurred to me that you might see it as a three-act play. Oh, I know it isn't the kind of thing you've your mind's eye on, but why not take that step over into the legitimateviaa big popular success? It may pave the way to bigger, finer things. Who knows—Ida Blair—'The Web'—may mean the beginning of your dream come true."
His mouth had straightened and thinned.
"You're right there. Ultimately I'll get into the other. If my brother knew as much about the booking end as he does the realty, I'd have gone over long ago. That is the most the success of the Amusement Enterprise can mean to me—to afford some day the legitimate as a plaything. It costs money to educate the public to better things. It's been profitable playing down to its taste—some day it is going to enable me to afford to be sufficiently altruistic to foot the bills for serving up the best. It costs to educate.",
"Fine! And it is only a question of time until you are ready for that inspiring fray. Meanwhile, why not help foot those bills with a little side flier in 'The Web'?"
"You are a little opportunist, aren't you?".
"I know 'The Web' isn't art. But it is a cross section of reality with the veins exposed and the sap of life running through them. Mrs. Blair, poor dear, can't write. God knows I can't. That is why the play has been through years of lying around in every office in New York. But the idea is there. You see, it is everything she has lived through. You know her story?"
"Yes."
"There is a scene when he comes screaming out of the room after having been through the third degree, half blind from the terrible lights and the terrible circle of terrible eyes, that isn't writing at all. It's life—a raw, palpitating picture of a social abuse that can touch the public as a reform measure can never hope to. Then the character of the boy—a delinquent. We've one right here in this apartment. One of those sweet, shy, half-frightened boys as gentle as a girl. The kind that tells the neighborhood children Peter Pan and reads his grandmother to sleep. I would trust him anywhere with Zoe, and yet there's the streak! The criminal, congenital streak through him that is as pathological as measles. Only we handle it under the heading of criminology. It's like taking an earache to the chiropodist. The boy is a thief. It's through him like a rotten spot, but instead of curing him the law wants to punish him. It's like spanking a child for having the measles. But to get back—Mrs. Blair has him in this play—just as if she had lifted him out of this apartment. She wrote him from the life, too. A young fellow who used to be on her husband's beat. It may not be fine writing, but 'The Web' has the throb of reality through it, and it is my opinion that one pulsebeat of life is worth all your chastity of form."
"Right."
"We're one on that? Good! Well, here is your opportunity to solder the first link into the legitimate. Keep it in mind while I am reading Ida Blair's play and remember I am not talking Ida Blair or Lilly Penny to you. I'm talking this play just as I would talk an act to you. Because I believe in it."
He seemed to look at her through her words, a smile out in his eyes.
"You're not listening."
"I am," he said, "but your hair looks like it is painted on, the way it comes down to that smooth little peak in front. Jove! it's pretty."
She looked off, wanting not to color.
"Come," he said, "I apologize. Read. I'm as predisposed as I can be toward anything conceived by that little dormouse of a person in the office."
"That's the trouble. You men are too often satisfied with a surface inventory. The vault of heart sometimes yields up rare treasures."
"How like you to say that."
"Ready?"
"Go!"
And so, with her head bent so that the light burnished its smoothness, she read him "The Web" through two uninterrupted hours, her voice throbbing into the quiet. In the third act, when a half-crazed victim of the third degree is led out in shuddering and horrible invocation, she sprang to her feet for an instant, her gesture decrying its fullest arc.
She was like Iphigenia praying for death, he thought.
Later, when the shades of the prison house begin to dawn upon the stunned consciousness of the woman, there were tears in her voice and on her lashes, and one fell to the back of her hand, which she wiped off against her skirt, like a child.
At eleven o'clock she finished, regarding him brilliantly through her flush.
He had wanted to smoke, but thrust the case back into his pocket, sitting tilted, his hands locked at the back of his head and gazing at the line of the picture molding. Her lips parted as the paused held.
"Well?"
He uncrossed his knees, straightening.
"Well?"
"Strong."
"Then it did grip you?"
"Yes, but I can see why it gathered dust as it went the rounds. From the average commercial manager's point of view there is a question about that seamy kind of thing getting over with the playgoer. He wants to be entertained, not harrowed. That's pretty raw stuff. Except for the little woman and the poor delinquent youngster, it is an out-and-out—what shall I say?—an out-and-out crook play, to coin a phrase."
"Exactly. It is a section of life about which your average playgoer knows little or nothing and yet one for which he nourishes a tremendous curiosity."
"It's crude—"
"I know, but the idea is bigger than the writing is crude. If I had the money I would take a chance on producing it to-morrow. It has social and sociological value, and at the same time is corking-good entertainment. I read the police-inspector scene to my little girl just to see what she would get out of it. 'Why,' she cried, 'a man would confess to anything with that white light on him and those big policemen's eyes on him. That's not fair! That shouldn't be allowed. Isn't there a way to stop it?' That from a thirteen-year-old! It's one of those man-made abuses that if we women ever get the vote we'll go after! Don't answer me on this play now, Mr. Visigoth. Take it to your hotel. Read it over again. Talk it over with your brother when he comes next week. How's that? No snap judgment."
"Good. The play is on the docket for the evening. Now let us get the taste of the underworld out of our mouths. How would the Claremont appeal now?"
"I'd rather not."
"Well, I suppose that amounts to mycongé?"
She smiled with her brows arched.
"It is after eleven."
He was incessantly feeling for his cigarette case and then with a certain unease refraining.
"You may," she said, "one, before you go."
He held the case to her. She took one gingerly, accepting the light more gingerly.
"I don't like them," she said, exhaling with the violence of the unaccustomed.
"Then whyfore?"
"Because it is a stupid convention which says that a man may and a woman may not. Why should it be a matter of course for you and, in most cases, a matter of comment and even vulgarity for me?"
"Usage."
"Usage isn't a reason. It's Time's trick for applying the brake to progress."
He lit up gratefully, waving out the match and hesitating for a spot to dispose of it. She reached across the table, palm up. "Give me."
He caught her hand.
"Lilly!"
She jerked back with a little clicky catch of breath.
"Don't."
"Lilly, you're maddening! Lilly, can't you see what I haven't the words to tell you? For years—since that night at the Waldorf—I—I have been living for this moment. I realized it to-night as you read that play. Lilly, is what is between us insurmountable?"
She jerked back her head, her irises at their trick of growing.
"You don't know what you are saying!"
"I do know what I am saying. I know that you are the most delectable woman in the world—and for me."
She held out his hat and cane.
"My little girl is asleep. Hadn't you better go?"
"That's not fair," he said, taking the hat and cane, but flushing up furiously.
"I know it isn't. But what is there I can say to you?"
"You can talk it out. Man to man."
"Sit down," she said, clasping her hands and regarding him through swimming and revealing eyes.
"Now—what is there to say—Bruce—between you and me?"
"Where is he?"
"You know."
"Are matters unchanged?"
She nodded.
"I love you, Lilly."
"And I have a husband and a thirteen-year-old child, making of the triangle a rectangle."
"You have held me off on that dagger point now for ten years. Good God! women don't martyrize themselves to a past these days. What are you doing with your life? Sacrificing it on the altar of the old burned-out husk of a marriage? Canonizing a mistake!"
"It is the one thing I am able to do for him in some little reparation!"
"Mock heroics."
"No, it is more than mock heroic to save him that precious shred of his respectability. That is about all I have left him to cherish. There are some human beings you simply cannot conceive of in certain situations. Albert Penny and divorce are irreconcilable. Tear his heart out if you will, but hands off his respectability. It may sound absurd in the face of the enormity of what I have done to him, but it is a great solace to me to be able to sacrifice that much to him and to drag him through my life like a ball and chain. Somehow it seems that I ought to suffer that."
"Stuff and nonsense! You made your mistake and you had the courage to tear away from it by the roots. Unless those roots have a drag?"
"No. No drag! And yet I sometimes think my revolt has been a half madness. You cannot know the sheer folly, the crazy kind of tenacity that has driven me on through all these years! And for what? This mediocrity? Or is it that I am an instrument clearing the way for her? Zoe! Is there a divinity shapes our end, rough hew them how we will? Listen to something incredible. Do you know that Zoe's father doesn't know that he is a father?"
"Good God!"
"Yes, jealous truth going fiction one better."
"You mean to say you have fought this out alone?"
"He doesn't know. Neither do my parents. They would suck her down. Dwarf her with their terrible kind of love. She belongs to herself. She's a beautiful thing God has loaned me to rear into a rose, but the world is her garden in which to bloom and expand."
"In all these years they don't know your whereabouts?"
"Oh yes! I write home every Christmas. Just a line that I am well and happy. Occasionally I pick up notes of them in the St. Louis newspapers. I keep them pretty well under glass. It's all so dreamlike—I've always been obsessed with that consciousness. How faint can be the line between the dream and reality."
He drew her toward him by the hands, their faces lit, quivering, close.
"Lilly, Lilly, let us not stop just short of happiness."
"All my life I have done that."
"I cannot put you out of my heart now that I have put you in."
"No. No. No." But his embrace had already shaped itself, and, springing back from it and her own singing of the flesh, she crowded up against the wistaria-painted screen, shielding it.
"How dared you—here—in this—room! With her!"
"Lilly!"
"Go, please! Go, please!"
"You mean that?"
"You know I do."
He bent low in the attitude of kissing her hand, but without touching it.
"Forget everything I've said, Lilly, and forgive. We'll go back to the old. Good night, Lilly! Mrs. Penny."
He must have departed on the balls of his feet, because presently through the roaring of the silence she heard the door slam without having been conscious of his passage down the hallway; and then, after a second, Harry Calvert tiptoeing to her open door to look in with his light-blue eyes.
She sprang forward, throwing herself against the door as she locked it.
"Don't," she cried through it—"don't you ever dare do that again, Harry! Walk on your heels. You frighten me when you sneak like that—you—you—frighten—me."
Then she undressed, crying, tears rolling down to her high white chest and finally on to the crispiness of her plain nightgown. Crept to bed finally, into a darkness as sleek as a black cat's flank, silently, to save the sag of mattress, her body curving to the curve of her child's.
Once from the inky pool of that long night Zoe's hand crept up, finding out her mother's cheek.
"Lilly," floating up for a drowsy second to the surface of consciousness—"Lilly—you're crying. Are—you sad—again?"
"Yes, Zoe—terribly—terribly—"
The year that Zoe entered High School, 1914, out of an international sky of fairly pellucid blue, the thunderclap of world war burst in fury.
It was strange, though, even after the subsequent plunge of her country to the Allied flank, and the menacing and shifting tides of affairs creeping closer and closer to the edge of everyday life, how little the complexion of Lilly's routine was changed.
True, her national consciousness flared suddenly from lethargy to blaze. The evening after the sinking of theLusitania, she attended a mass meeting in Astor Place with Zoe and Mrs. Blair, beating out an umbrella-and-floor tom-tom for redress, love of country suddenly a lump in her throat.
The day the Rainbow Division swept up Fifth Avenue in farewell, she could see the rank and file from the roof of the Forty-second Street office building, as if the avenue were running a clayey stream, and she was torn between the ache and the thanksgiving of having no one to give.
But, for the most part, war kept its talons off Lilly. Twice, and as if his exemption from the draft lay heavily, Harry Calvert had tried to enlist, his grandmother, with a zeal that was hardly accountable, exerting every effort toward that end.
It was almost as if war had revived her somewhat fainting faith inHarry's ultimate justification.
But he was underweight and still in a weakened condition from an operation for an adenoidal complaint. This last he had undergone before the war and at Lilly's urgent instance. She had read, in the mass of books on child hygiene, psychology, and physiology she was constantly accumulating, the debilitative effects that adenoidal breathing might exercise upon an entire constitution and mentality.
Poor Harry, and his cancerous predilection for the kind of thievery that almost invariably stacked up to not even petty larceny! He could withstand a jewel chest, but not a tool chest. Would steal the robe from an automobile, provided it was not a luxurious one. Once, when his grandmother at great difficulty had procured for him a clerkship, he confiscated the nickel-plated faucets out of the wash room, barely escaping prosecution. Only the utter triviality of his thievery and the fight in Mrs. Schum saved him from the law. She was as indomitable in her protection of him as the granite flesh of rocks.
Quiet, sensitive, with rather a girlish face, slow to beard and quick to quiver, Harry was invariably liked during the period he held a position, but month to month saw him from a clerkship in a real-estate office to window decorator for a retail paper-flower concern, salesman in the novelty and stationery department of a bookstore, and once in the children's book section of a department store.
He was rarely apprehended, usually abandoning his position, with his absurd loot already under cover, and the loss leaking out later, if at all.
Invariably, as if by way of confession, he brought home to his grandmother the proceeds from these petty sales, effected by who knows what device, dropping down into her lap, almost sadly and with a shrinkage from what was sure to follow, either the few dollars or the bauble of a bit of jewelry.
She would cry up at him and wring her poor hands, and then he would go off into his little room adjoining the kitchen, originally intended as maid's room, and sit with his head down in his hands, back rounded, and all his throat-constricting capacity for meekness out in his attitude.
And, presently, her sobs subsided, Mrs. Schum would creep in after him, and behind that closed door there was no telling what long hours of pleading and abjuration took place. But, next morning, in her little black bonnet, the rust out in her black dress and the "want ad." sheet cockily enough beneath her arm, Mrs. Schum would set out with him to combat, by the decency of her presence, some of the difficulties of seeking a new position with only one or two time-and thumb-worn references.
His grandmother's and Lilly's possessions were sacred to him, but every morning, after the two roomers had departed, Mrs. Schum would tiptoe after, locking their doors and inserting the keys in her petticoat pocket.
"I like to keep things locked," she explained to Lilly one day, upon being intercepted. "You can never tell when a sneak thief will break into these apartment houses that haven't hall service. I've even heard of them entering through the fire escape."
"Of course, dear," said Lilly, through heartache for her.
There was an indescribable sweetness in Harry's attitude toward Zoe. There had been countless long evenings of her little girlhood when no waiting beside her bedside was too tedious—sometimes during three and four evenings a week of Lilly's enforced absence in the pursuit of vaudeville novelties. He was tireless and faithful as a watchdog, keeping awake by whittling at something no more fantastic than a clothespin. There were hundreds of them scattered about the house. It was the sole form his idleness took. He painted heads and eyes on them—cleverly, too—for Zoe, but as she grew older she began to disdain them, bullying him in much the fashion her mother had before her.
"I can hop up four steps on one foot," Lilly, with a little catch at her heart, chanced to overhear on one occasion.
"No, you can't," said Harry, smilingly and a little teasingly.
Catching at her ankle and flinging her curls, she made an unstaggering and easy ascent of not four, but eight.
"There!" she cried, slapping Harry boldly and resoundingly on the cheek."Don't you ever dare say I cannot do what I know I can do."
It left the red print of her little hand, and it was literally as if, as he looked away from her, he had turned the other cheek.
Almost immediately she caught his hand, placing her warm face to its back.
"Harry, I'm a devil! I'm sorry. You know I don't mean to be a devil. Harry! Are you angry? You're not! Please! Be nice, Harry—tell me a story—Har-ry."
"Once upon a time—" he began, his light-blue eyes almost with the patient look of the blind.
A little later, there occurred an infinitesimal but telling incident which served to dissipate whatever growing qualms may have disturbed Lilly over the rearing of her child in this atmosphere of petty crime.
One evening, while Harry was performing his willing chore of carrying out for his grandmother the little dinner prepared by Mrs. Schum and partaken of by Lilly and Zoe at a small card table opened up beside the window of their room, Zoe announced, with a certain high-handedness with which Lilly was more and more hard pressed to cope:
"I want my dresses longer. That big red-headed boy in the white jacket said to me when I went into the drug store over on Columbus Avenue to-day for some licorice drops: 'That's right. Wear 'em short; you've got the stems.'"
"What a vulgar, horrid remark!"
"Well, I want my dresses longer."
Lilly regarded her daughter with concern troubling up her eyes.
"Don't ever go into that store again, Zoe. I've a mind to stop in there myself and talk to the proprietor."
Later that same evening, Harry, with a purpling eye and an opened lip which he tried vainly to smuggle past his grandmother, crept into his room. But she was too quick for him, and at her high cry of shock Lilly rushed into the hallway. There was an utterly alien and vibrating note of anger in Harry's voice.
"For God's sake, gramaw, be quiet! It's nothing. Had a row with that red-headed clerk down at the drug store. Took the freshness out of him for a while."
Lilly tiptoed back to her room. All through a fitful night she woke in little starts, kissing into the bare white arm of her child as if she could not have done with the assurance of her safe proximity.
It was less than a month later, and over a year after the adenoidal operation, that Harry returned home one evening from the real-estate office with nine dollars and forty cents in his pocket from the proceeds of the nickel-plated wash-room faucets and several liquid-soap attachments.
* * * * *
About eight months after Ida Blair's play had lain gathering mold in the lower drawer of Bruce Visigoth's desk, he sent for Lilly.
Their office relationship since the stuffy June evening over the reading of the manuscript had been resumed, with invisible joindure. Together they continued in biweekly conferences to compile the endless cycle of programs that moved like a chain along the cogs of city to city. There were nine Enterprise Amusement Theaters now, the newest red-headed pin on the circuit map as far west as Tulsa, their booking route as yet independent of any of the larger and recent vaudeville mergers.
It was an office boast and pleasantry that Lilly could recite offhand through the current program of any of the nine theaters, leaping glibly from motion picture, to acrobat, and sister acts.
This was hardly true, but her touch at the steering wheel of her department was sensitive and sure. She could substitute for a quarantined team of jumping Arabs in Springfield, Illinois, with hardly more than a sleight of hand through her card index and a telegram or two. She knew that Memphis would not stand for a pickaninny act, and that the same was sure fire in Trenton, and was familiar with every house manager by long-distance-telephone voice. The department was more and more the well-oiled engine under a light steering hand that Lilly wielded well and wisely.
Her judgment of the incoming reports of the various house managers, or a try-out act, although technically subject to Bruce Visigoth's signature, went usually unchallenged. She virtually was her department, particularly as the realty aspect of the enterprise came more and more to assume the proportions of big business. Within her little office of mahogany appointments she worked with an allotment of stenographers and clerks. She had an assistant, too; at least, she confiscated him from the press department—one Leon Greenberg, a young night student from New York University, with an enormous profile rendered positively carnivorous of thrust by his struggle up from First Street and Avenue A, which is mire with a pull to it.
Her own capacity was unnamed. She was probably still down on the books as stenographer, although at fifty dollars a week now, and it was six years since she had taken a letter.
It was a gray day in cold and tardy spring when Bruce Visigoth sent for her—one of those heavy afternoons that darken up at four o'clock and press thick as gravy against the windows. He was seated at his desk, hands laced at the back of his head and one foot propped on an open drawer, his male stenographer typing at the remote corner of a wide and rather luxuriously appointed office. Except for the green cone of light over him, the room was plushy with dusk.
"About that play—" he began.
"What play?" she said, seating herself in the entirely easy business manner she had with him.
"'The Web.'"
Her strong white hand out from its immaculate linen cuff lay unnervously on the glass top of his desk, but the fingers now began to lift in rotation.
"Yes?"
"I talked it over with my brother before he returned to Chicago yesterday. Thought the firm might be interested."
"Yes?"
"He doesn't see it."
"He—wouldn't."
He bent a sliver of ivory paper knife almost double.
"I should have taken this matter up some time ago, but the sudden death of my sister Pauline's husband, Doctor Enlow—"
"Mrs. Blair understands that."
"And you?"
"Well," she said, looking off and resolutely keeping her smile, "I guess it means 'The Web' must resume its journey again."
"No, it doesn't."
"Why?"
"It means that I am going to produce it on my own."
She slid to the edge of the chair, her hand closing over the desk edge.
"Oh! Oh!"
"Isn't that what you want?"
"Yes."
"Well, that is my reason."
"You mean you don't see it, either?"
"But you do."
"But—"
"No 'buts.' She goes into rehearsal for a spring try-out in Baltimore, Stamford, or any of the dog towns. I'm giving the manuscript to Forbes to read this week. He's the man to direct that type of thing. I'm going to throw in ten or twenty thousand on your judgment."
"You're serious?" He held out his lean hand. "Ill send for Ida Blair."
"No—please!"
"Why?"
"Sit down."
She did, biting back excitement.
"I don't know how to talk to that little woman. She depresses me. This is your venture and mine."
"But her play! Its production will mean her resurrection. Her monument to a memory. Her protest. A chance to get her on her feet. An opportunity for a home, a background, a reason for living to a woman who has lost every reason. It's her play and her chance."
"And it is our venture."
"I'm not afraid."
"Are we partners, then?"
"If I had the money, yes, to my limit."
"I don't mean that."
"I do."
"All right; go your limit."
"My limit? How far would six one-hundred-dollar municipal bonds and—"
"Good. I'll sell you six per cent of a twenty-thousand-dollar venture for the six hundred."
"Six—percent—twenty—thousand—Why, that's not a man-to-man proposition! You're treating me like a child."
"All right, then; three per cent for the six hundred."
"Done! But no nonsense. If I lose, I lose. Man to man."
"'Man to man,'" he said, clasping her hand and drinking down deep into her gaze.
And so, when she hurried out to the high ledge to which Ida Blair's figure had somehow shaped itself as the years went on, she stood for a moment to steady the hand she placed on that shoulder.
"Ida!" The older woman raised her eyes of the peculiarly washed quality of gray that has faded from repeated scaldings in hot water. "Mr. Visigoth wants you in his office, dear—now."
She kept her voice out of quaver, but it had a singing quality like a plucked violin string.
As Lilly's months went, the one that followed was abloom with events. In her vague, untutored way she was already reaching out, through her daughter, toward a subject about which she knew nothing, but, in an inchoate way, felt a great deal.
The New York State fight for woman's suffrage had not yet reached its victorious culmination, and, reading announcement of a great parade up Fifth Avenue for a Saturday afternoon, she took Zoe.
The smell of spring was dancingly out. Shop windows bloomed with the millinery of May. Open street cars, open skies, and openwork shirt waists had arrived.
They climbed the flank of an omnibus and rode down to the WashingtonArch in a midair snapping with bunting.
It was on one of those irresistible afternoons—radiant with the sun-washed geometry of three architectural renaissances, a monastic-fronted fur emporium, a Parthenon of a library, a Doric-columned bank—that Lilly and Zoe lumbered their omnibus way through the daily carnival of the most rococo avenue in the world.
There was the flare of a sea gull to Zoe—no containing her. Little snatches of song bubbled. She was a freshet of delight.
"Look at that tray of violets, Lilly! I must have a bunch."
"Zoe, don't lean over so far!"
"See the yellow satin in that shop window, Lilly! I'd love to wind it round me. It's like sun!"
"See those jams of women in white, Zoe, waiting to form into line!"
"I'd love to march!"
"Why?"
"Oh, I don't know, there—there's something sort of onward about it."
"Exactly! Onward! Forward! March!"
With a precocity that never ceased to amuse and delight Lilly, Zoe, while only half understanding the content of an occasion, could somehow imbibe its essence. She leaned now over the rail of the omnibus, the cross-town streets, as they jogged past, already colloid masses of women waiting to fall into line.
"Isn't it queer, Lilly, that after all these centuries and centuries women are just beginning to—what did that woman on the program call it down at Cooper Union hall the other night—function in the government? Why has it taken them so long to ask for their half in the say-so of things?"
"Any great movement, Zoe, must have very slow beginnings. Think for what ages man lived without Christianity!"
"Yes; but look how long it has been here."
"Reckoning in geology, Zoe, and compared with the age of mountains and oceans, two thousand years isn't long."
"I think it is."
"You darling!"
They alighted at the Washington Arch, jamming their way into the tight battalion of spectators already lining both sides of lower Fifth Avenue. The head of the parade was already forming, a slim young leader holding in her white mount with difficulty.
"Lilly, she looks like our picture of Jeanne d'Arc when she sees the vision!"
"She is heeding a vision, Zoe—of to-morrow."
"I feel so—so thrilled, Lilly. Do you?"
"Yes," said Lilly, for some reason breathing hard. "Oh, I do!"
There was a break of music, and all about them women darting into line, sudden banners floating out, and the white horse prancing in the archway, for all the world as if spun at a tangent off the narrative frieze of the arch.
At the Eighth Street curb, where they stood, five hundred women, with standards lifted, stiffened suddenly into formation, a deputy from their ranks, a buyer, by the way, for the largest cloak-and-suit house in the world, calling short, quick orders and distributing American flags.
The air was rent with silk and brass; a simoom of rapture raced over Zoe. She danced on the balls of her feet. It was then that a deputy, with a face that recalled newspaper reproductions of it, spied her.
"Here, little girl! You! Oh, lovely! Could you manage this banner, dear, and lead this section? Miss, is this lovely child your sister? Do let her lead!"
"She's my daughter."
"Come; you may fall in line right behind her. Do you mind if I unpin your sister's curls? Oh, she's lovely—"
"I said she's mydaughter!"
"Here, right in front, dear—my—oh, what a find!"
And so, with her somewhat bewildered parent in the ranks behind her, her little black frock wrapped in a purple-and-yellow banner, head up, eyes stars, Zoe Penny led the largest district of Greater New York up Fifth Avenue, a constant and running line of applause following her lead.
She was youth sonnetized. Cameras clicked after her, and, with the martial music tickling her blood, her head went higher still, like a stag's. To her mother, following after, it seemed that the loudest of all must be music within her own heart, and so she marched on, sprayed, as it were, by the wave of constant applause as it broke over Zoe and died down at the rank and file.
It was dusk when they reached Fifty-ninth Street, and in the jam of disbanding and quite a little demonstration over Zoe by the section she had distinguished, they worked their way out finally toward the cross-town street car, hand in hand, like two ecstatic, rather bewildered babes in the wood.
At a touch upon her shoulder Lilly turned, spun, rather, under high tension, to encounter the well-bred hesitancy of an exceedingly slender woman, a very small head set on the stem of a long, gracile neck, something hauntingly familiar in the somewhat heart-shaped face and the far-apart eyes that were considerably younger than the white hair which framed them.
"I beg your pardon"—in a voice perfectly rounded of edges—"but my husband is so enchanted with the little girl that we are taking the liberty of asking to meet her. Won't you permit me to present my husband, Gedney Daab? You have heard of him, I presume."
Lilly had. The "Dolorosa" above her desk was a print from a Gedney Daab.
He stepped forward then, lanky and rugged, with a great shock of upstanding gray hair, with the path of his fingers through it and his features with no scheme at all. Just very delightfully irregular, he jutted out of any crowd.
"Zoe, Mr. and Mrs. Daab want to meet you."
She lifted her clean gaze, dropped a courtesy, and held out her hand with the short, curved gesture of childhood.
"Hello!" he said, the timbre of real youth in his voice, which childhood is so quick to detect from the silly enameling of tone coated on by grown-ups for the occasion. "I want to paint you, youngster."
"Oh, Lilly, what fun!"
"Then she is your sister?"
"Oh no, Mrs. Daab; she is my daughter."
"But the name—"
"It's our way together."
"How droll!"
"Do you think I'm pretty?"
Gedney Daab looked down at her ardent artlessness without a burst of laughter.
"Oh, as little girls go."
"Zoe knows God has merely given her a fair urn of a body, Mr. Daab, which she, in turn, must fill with beauty of mind and spirit."
"You are the Dolorosa, aren't you?" continued Zoe, turning to Mrs. Daab. "The sad one with the tears that don't show, from crying on the inside of you."
It was not until then that this dawned upon Lilly. Those eyes of theDolorosa, bleeding tears, were Mrs. Daab's.
"You'll have to paint me as glad—won't you?—glad all over clear from the inside."
"Yes, Sunlight; I rather think I will."
"Will you permit my husband and me to take you home, Mrs.—"
"Penny."
"Oh, please, Lilly!"
"We live rather far up from here—Ninety-first Street, West."
"And we live at Park Hill; so you see we hardly regard that as far."
They were presently riding through the Park, Zoe facing the three of them in the soft gray interior of the Daab limousine. She was absolutely artless.
"I've been in a taxi three times and a hansom once. But I prefer this. I shall have my own some day—only, purple upholstery instead of gray—sort of wine color—"
"An early eye to effect, I see, young miss."
"I'm the class beauty," she explained. "I didn't care to be that at first—Lilly says it is just a lovely accident and might happen to anyone else. She wanted me to be class president; so I decided to be both."
"You will observe that my daughter is not chiefly notable for her reticence."
"You come to my studio, little lady, and I am going to paint you just as golden and radiantly innocent as you are."
"What is 'radiantly innocent'?"
"Good Lord! I don't know any definition of it except—you."
"Zoe has no innocence in one sense, Mr. Daab. Her real innocence lies in the fact that life has no ugly secrets from her. She knows the beautiful from the ugly, and why it is so. I think that is what Mr. Daab means by 'radiant innocence,' Zoe.' Fearless knowledge of truth."
He whistled softly in the gloom.
"Extraordinary!" said Mrs. Daab. "And you are one of us—aren't you, dear?"
"For suffrage? Oh yes; and I am going to be a real one when I grow up."
"What else are you going to be?"
"A singer."
"You said that as if you meant it."
"I do. I've already heard nine operas. I am allowed to be anything I want so long as I get to the biggest—the very biggest!"
"Are you studying?"
"I've had piano lessons for five years."
"I'm looking about now for a vocal teacher for her. She may be too young, but at least I want her voice tried. I—we think she has quite an amazing range."
"Have you tried Trieste?"
"Oh, I haven't dared contemplate anyone so inaccessible as he."
Mrs. Daab turned her head.
"Gedney," she said, "couldn't you give her a note to Trieste?"
"Good!" he said, feeling for a card and scrawling across its face. "This will pass you directly to his nibs."
"You couldn't have granted us a bigger favor," said Lilly, feeling her face glow.
"Then you grant me one. Bring your little girl to my Fifty-ninth Street studio. I want to paint her."
"Indeed I will!"
"When?"
"Saturday afternoon is our only time."
"Fine. To-day two weeks?"
"Yes."
They Were at Ninety-first Street now, and he saw them up to their door.
"Good-by," he said. "You're a great youngster, and you've picked a great little mother for yourself. Mrs. Daab and I want you both at the studio often."
Up in their room, they embraced, Zoe's arms tight about her mother's neck.
"It's begun, Lilly, to be wonderful!"
"What?"
"Life!"
* * * * *
The Saturday afternoon following, in a brownstone house in West Forty-sixth Street that was more like a museum of the storied loot of many lands, Trieste himself opened the pair of Florentine doors, originally unhinged from a campanile outside of Rome, of his very private studio, without appointment, to the magic of Gedney Daab's scrawled card.
He had a head, Lilly decided, like the one of Praxiteles in the St. Louis Museum of Fine Arts—only, the bust implied young hair, and Trieste's curls were full of gray and the lines of his face were slashed deeply. He listened, while Lilly talked her brief preamble, as he invariably did, with his eyes closed and finger tips touching. Finally, he opened them, regarding Lilly from under swollen, rather diabetic lids.
"You should sing," he said, his acquired language grating slightly against the native one.
"No! No!"
"You are young," he said, running his eyes down her body, "and fine and big and strong."
She rose as if to throw off the crowding stress of the moment.
"Once," she said; "but that is all over now. My little girl—"
"You have temperament—let me hear," he said, reaching out to the piano and striking out a bold C. "Sing the scale."
"Please!" she cried, the situation an agony to her. "Not me. My little—"
"Why, Lilly!" said Zoe, regarding her mother with wide, unaffected eyes."Sing the scale, dear."
"Do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-si-do"—through a crimson flush.
He seemed to lose interest then, turning to Zoe.
"Let me hear you," he said.
"Shall I sing 'Jocelyn' or 'How Like a Bird'?"
"Anything—something simpler."
"Schubert, then, Zoe."
In her straight frock, with its wide patent-leather belt and flat white collar, the cascade of her hair down over it, Zoe held the center of the vast studio, singing straight into her mother's eyes.
It seemed to Lilly, at the sound of that voice, not yet cleared of childish treble, but as ready to rise as a lark, that every ounce of her blood must be gushing against her throat; so, after it was finished, she sat on quite dumbly, staring at the manner in which Trieste remained sitting with his eyes closed.
"Lyric soprano," he said, finally. "Fine! Big! God-given!"
"Maestro—you mean that?"
"Heigh-ho!" he said on a sigh, walking over and placing his hand on Zoe's curls. "I make up my mind I am seeck of this business. I wait only for this war to live my day quietly in Capri, where I have mycasa, and now a new nightingale flies in at my window. Twice now. Ten years ago comes Carrienta out of just such a clear sky, and once more, when I am again sure that one voice is only more unmusical than the rest, comes this—"
Standing there, Lilly was fighting an impulse to faint. She remembered, with terror, previous sensations, and fought off the vertigo, biting down into her lips. She wanted to smile, but her mouth felt numb, as if it dragged instead of lifted.
"You—you make us very happy—maestro."
"Some day," cried Zoe, still thrilling from her effort, "I will sing until my high C hits the sky!"
'I think you will,bella mia, if you have in you the power to work for it."
"I have."
"Art is the most cruel paymaster in the world. It exacts full recompense, toil, and heartache before it deals out a first payment in success."
"I'll pay! I'll pay for what I want, and most of all I want to sing!"
She trilled up a brace of scales for him then, and there were minute questions of health and habits, and, finally, in a waiting pause, Lilly found word to ask the question against which her lips stiffened.
"What—are—your terms—maestro?"
Something strange happened then, his well-known acumen immediately asserting itself. It was as if he had slipped into another personality.
"Fifteen dollars a lesson. She must have three a week and her school work and other studies should be reduced."
"Lilly—we're too poor for that!"
"I—I'm afraid my little girl is right,maestro. I—I couldn't even pay that for all three. I'm employed myself, you see."
"Oh," he said, and walked off to the window, dilly-dallying on his heels and looking out.
Finally he turned, with a gesture of dismissal.
"I have never before, except Carrienta, done such a thing. It must be a secret between us. My belief is that art should be as well paid as any life work, whether it is dentistry or lawmaking or storekeeping. But your child here—they do not come so every day. In ten years, with hundreds of pupils each year, she is the greatest since Carrienta. But I must have first right to her. You hear, first right! I will teach her free of charge. Leave your name and address with my secretary as you go out. Send her Monday at four. Loose clothing. Not even corset waists. Good afternoon. Good-by—Zoe"—placing his hands on her curls as if for their warmth.
In the room adjoining, under whisper of a very soft pedal, some one, probably a waiting pupil, was playing the indomitable pianoforte composition, "Melody in F." Staring at her daughter, an old conceit of Lilly's girlhood came flowing back. It seemed to her that a proscenium arch of music was forming over Zoe and that her voice, a high-flung scarf of melody, was winding itself reverently round a star.
* * * * *
That afternoon, Bruce Visigoth again asked Lilly to marry him.
Taking advantage of the quiet of a Saturday afternoon half holiday, she had returned to the office to clear her desk of an accumulation of loose ends.
In spite of herself, an extraordinary depression, low as storm clouds, was gathering over the excitation whipped up by Trieste's acceptance of Zoe.
The tight squeeze of a lump was gathering in her throat. Finally she laid her cheek to the desk and cried a little pool of her unaccountable melancholy on to the glassed surface.
Bruce Visigoth found her so, although, at his entrance, she sprang from the mound of her misery, violently simulating affairs at a lower drawer.
"Hello!" he cried, then, eying her crumpled cheek and the lane of tears:"Ah, I say now! Come, come; this won't do. What's up?"
She rubbed her bare hand furiously across the ravages of her sharp depression.
"Nothing. I—I guess I'm blue," she said, in a half laugh. "Something wonderful has happened to Zoe, and I—it's made me so happy, I'm blue. That's it—so—happy—I'm blue."
"What is the wonderful thing?"
She told him.
It was then he caught her hands.
"Lilly, marry me! Make it possible! Don't let the years lead you into a blind alley. You are bound inevitably to lose a child like Zoe—to life. That's why you are so unaccountably blue, Lilly; the writing is on the wall."
"No!" she cried, plunging past him, her hat in hand and her throat now a cave of the winds for her unreleased sobs. "The years have brought me, Zoe. She is my fulfillment. You can't frighten me—life cannot take her from me. I'm not afraid—only, I can't bear anything to-night, least of all from you—"
"Lilly, you're not—"
"Let me go! I'm all right—only tired—that's all.Terribly—terribly—tired."
She was presently on her homeward way, walking swiftly, almost, it would seem, a little madly, through a May evening that hung as thinly as one thickness of a veil.
At Seventy-second Street she veered suddenly and rather unaccountably to Riverside Drive and down into a ledge of park that dips like a terrace to the Hudson River.
An asphalt walk led in festoons from high parky nooks that sheltered couples, down to the water-slapped edge of docks, where the tidey surf had a thick, inarticulate lisp, as if what it had to say might only be comprehended from the under side.
At one of the lowermost curves of the walk, the width of a brace of railroad tracks between, a coal dock jutted out into the river. Across these forbidden tracks, indeed, as if they did not exist, Lilly wandered.
At the last inch of dock, so that the water licked up at her shoes, Lilly stood poised. Not, it is true, with the diver's blade thrust of arms, but rather the unskilled, the indeterminate movement of one vaguely prompted from the unfathomable places of the heart.
It was upon that move that something, a terrifying restraint, laid hold of Lilly's jangling nerve ends.
"Hey there! None o' that to-night!"
A dockman's hand, hairy as an Airedale, had her by the arm, and somewhere at her brow, cooling it, the fine hand of Bruce Visigoth, pressing her against him, and at that touch Lilly's hysteria shot up like a geyser.
"Don't!" she screamed, and would have struggled for the edge except for the two firm hands now pressing her arms to her sides.
"Lilly, for God's sake, get hold of yourself!"
"Let me go! Let me go!"
"Aw no; we don't leggo. It's a good stroke we both happened to spy you at the same minute. There's nothin' gives strength like a spell of the craziness. You'd 'a' jumped me alone, sure!"
"No! No! It wasn't that—God, not that! Tell me, Bruce, it wasn't—that."
"Of course it wasn't, Lilly."
"That's what they all say once they git their senses jerked back. Come in here and pull yourself together, girl, or I'll call an ambulance or a patrol, suiting your pleasure."
"Let me go, you! I won't stand it. I must have been mad! Bruce, you tell him, please—it wasn't—that!"
"You're wrong, old man. Here—take this for your trouble, but this young woman is my sister. We walked out here together."
Quieted suddenly to the merest timbre of insolence, the old man shambled off.
"Sure!" he said, far too knowingly. "Sure!" And faded shaggily, impudently into darkness.
Bruce Visigoth took Lilly home in a taxicab. At her door she broke her shamed silence.
"You understand, Bruce, it wasn't anything—like that. It must have been nerves—tiredness—but nothing, Bruce, that you think it was. That old man was wrong. You must understand—for her sake—it wasn't that."
"Of course it wasn't, Lilly." His voice drained off, as if from exhaustion.
But for years, like a wound whose jagged lips were slow to close, the memory of this night lay palpitating between them.