They were all suddenly in tears, Mr. Becker laying a clumsy hand to his wife's arm.
"Carrie, you promised—"
"Can't help it—can't help it," her lips bubbling. "I'm bursting with it. All these years. I can't hold in. What mother could?"
Only their arrival at the hotel stemmed the rising tide, but, once up in their aerial suite of rooms, the last bell hop tipped out, then broke the storm wave, flaying them all.
"Lilly—Lilly let me look at you. Baby—are you my baby—are you mine?Years—O God—years—"
"Mamma—mamma—"
"Feel my heart. Ben—tell her—what I've suffered—"
"Carrie—now—now—what is past is past; we must look to the present now."
"Papa dear—you look so changed and yet so—natural—"
There was an air of indescribable prosperity that rose off Mr. Becker, in the nondescript but excellent quality of the gray suiting, the polished, square-toed, custom-made shoes, the little linen string of necktie, one for each day, the kind, despite family suasion, he had always worn. But it was difficult for him to speak now because he was always blinking and looking off.
"You've given us a great sorrow to bear, Lilly," he said, in a tone of rehearsed reproach. "We tried to be thankful for our health and—bear our—"
"There he goes on health again at a time like this. I'm a broken woman. Years! Years of explaining lies to the community. Years of holding up our heads over an opera singer that nobody ever hears about and that never came home to her folks. Years of feeling them laugh behind our backs—your father and husband trying to hold up their heads in business under the lie. What have I ever done, I've asked myself all these years—to deserve it? I've never harmed anyone. I've—"
"Carrie—please."
"Where do you live? How do you live? A stranger to my own child. Worse than a stranger!"
"I've a well-paid position with a producing firm, mamma, and I live nicely. You shall see, dear."
"Producing? Producing what? Trouble? A position! For that she threw away her life. Her big talk of prima donna, and we find her in a position. The girl that was going to set the world on fire. That's why we looked our eyes out all these years for her name in the paper, only to find her in a position! Ben, what have we ever done to deserve it? Albert, I'm her mother, but my heart bleeds for you—"
He was tugging at his bag straps, industriously keeping his head averted, but the red up in his ears.
"Mother," he said, "did you pack my throat atomizer?"
She licked up at the taste of her tears.
"It's wrapped in between your socks. You're standing in a draught, Albert; close that window. You heard that man in the train about the epidemic of colds that is starting all over the country. O my God! I'm just so upset. And now that it has happened everything is so different. I could tear out my tongue for what I want to say and I can't say anything—not so much your father and I—at least we had Albert to help make it up to us. We know what a son he has been, don't we, Ben, but to think of him, the upstandingest boy that ever wore shoe leather—him having to suffer for it—"
"Carrie, Carrie, it's time to go over all that later. Let's get our bearings. Lilly, you've not changed except for the bones kind of setting and—"
"I don't like you in those shirt waists. Too mannish. The lace I used to dress that child in! The way I used to love to poke in the bins—sacrificed for her. These years—years. Lilly—tell me you've been a good girl—that your sinning has only been against us—child that I raised—Lilly—"
They were locked in embrace again, Mrs. Becker blown hot and cold by the ever-shifting clouds of her emotions, the two men standing by in a state of helplessness that was always in inverse proportion to the lavalike eruptions from the crater of her nerves.
"Mother, father and I will leave you alone for a while and you have your talk together first—"
"No! She's your wife. You have yours first! It's about time you were coming into some of your rights!"
Such a fiery redness was out in Albert's ears that against the lights they were of the translucency of red-hot iron, and even through her pity for hismalaise, her old poignant distaste of him would not be laid. She wanted him to lunge somehow with that bull-like head of his with the bashedin squareness to its top, but since nothing like that happened, she sprang up instead, grasping her mother's hand.
"Not now," she cried. "I want to tell you all something first, and thenI want to take you—to my place—to see where—the way I live—"
"Yes," said Mrs. Becker, rising with a crinkling of nose and drawing her marabout boa about her, "I want to see the way you live—first. Guests of hers at a hotel like this. A position, she tells me. Lilly—Lilly—for God's sake tell me you've been a good girl—"
"Carrie!" At the sound of rare thunder in her husband's voice she did subside then. Later she began.
"Nice rooms. Nicer than in Chicago that time. Albert, let me give you a clean handkerchief out of the valise…. No, you don't know where they are. Don't like that shirt waist. Too mannish. Don't worry about those pillows, Albert. I brought your little one along. Glass tops. That's nice, isn't it? How would you like one for your chiffonier at home, Albert? Quit whittling toothpicks on the floor, Ben—Oh dear! if somebody don't say something, I'll scream—"
"Come, mamma—papa—Albert. I want to take you—home, and while we drive up there I want to talk to you."
But once within the cab and with her mother's constant runnel of talk and its threat of hysteria, courage failed Lilly, so she sat back, holding herself against rising panic and her mind refusing to hook tentacles into the situation toward which they were speeding.
"You look mighty well, Lilly," her father would repeat, gently; "not much changed, but a little more settled—in the bones—"
"Who does your darning and mending?"
"I do, mamma. See, this is Broadway, papa. We're just rounding the famous Columbus Circle."
"I don't see much difference between this and St. Louis. Do you, Ben?Just stores and stores like there are on Olive Street. Oh, look! Thereis one of the Ryan Cut Price Drug Stores, just like we have at home.Look at the crowds around that thing—what's that? 'Subway,' it says—"
"Lilly, Lilly, it makes me tremble when I think of you in this great city alone."
"Why, papa, I never was so safe."
"It's not decent, that's what it's not."
"Now, Carrie—"
"Stop cutting me off every time I open my mouth."
"How far is it?" asked Albert, speaking for the first time.
"Why, I guess it ought to take about ten minutes from here," repliedLilly, grateful for the question and trying to meet his averted glance.
He withdrew quite a disk of silver watch, reading it carefully.
"We're already on the way seven and a quarter minutes," he said.
"Albert," she began, "there is something I want to—ought to—tell you—first—"
"Albert, close that window next to you."
"I—don't quite know—how to begin—"
"Close it all the way, Albert, you're still in a draught."
Suddenly Lilly sat back, silent holding her father's hand the rest of the way.
But no sooner were the three of them safely into the little front room than, without even seating them, she rushed out to forestall Zoe.
But too late. That young lady herself had already appeared between the curtains of the alcove. She had done the outlandish, the outrageous, the irrelevant thing.
An old red rep portière wound tightly around her body to below the armpits, and held there by skillfully adjusted bands of black velvet, a fillet of the same so low that it touched her eyebrows secured about her boxed and brilliantly blond hair, she held the half-profile pose of a Carmencita, a pair of ten-cent-store black earrings dangling and her upflung gesture one of defiance, mischief with an unmistakable dash of irrepressible dramatics.
In a silence that shaped itself to a grin, Lilly, caught midstep as it were, stood regarding her daughter. She wanted to scream, to throw back her head and shout her hysteria, to spank her daughter bodily there across her knees, and more than that she wanted to laugh! Enormous laughter, to allay her sense of madness.
Instead she found voice, which, when it came, was not her own, for thinness.
"Albert," she said, "this is your daughter—Zoe."
"Ben," whispered Mrs. Becker, out of a fantastic cave of silence and rising suddenly from her chair to plant herself on the overstuffed divan, where there was more horizontal room—"Ben, I think I'm going to faint."
And she did.
Yet within a week Mrs. Becker, through all the fog of her bewilderment, was embroidering seed pearls on her granddaughter's white graduation slippers.
Forty years of dogged loyalty to the white string ties, fresh every day, had gone down before seventeen's mandate; and to Ben Becker's unspeakable sheepishness, he had appeared one evening in an impeccable dark-blue knitted cravat, his collar, of cut heretofore easily inclusive of chin, snugger to his neck, and flowing out to slight points.
"So you let her bamboozle you into something I couldn't accomplish in thirty-eight years," was Mrs. Becker's sole comment through a mouthful of seed pearls.
"Nonsense! The child has ideas. These collars don't dig in."
"Humph! She's had you around her little finger from the start."
"Now, Carrie, why do you say that?"
"Because it's true," trying not to smile.
It was.
An immediateentente cordialehad shaped itself around Zoe and her grandfather. She named him with her usual fantastic aptitude.
"Dapple-dear," she would have it, and could not explain the choice. It must have been some such remote analogy as his likeness to an old dapple-gray family horse, patient flanked and thoroughly imperturbable to the fleck of the whip.
Her grandmother she promptly christened "Tippy," also for a reason she could not or would not divulge. But one evening, to her secret amusement, Lilly found a sheet of paper in the litter of the desk, jotted all over with Zoe's joyous scrawl, "Zantippe," in every case the first syllable crossed out.
All but Albert. She addressed him quite studiedly, "Father," her teeth coming down in a little bite over her lower lip, her use of the term never failing to elicit the rush of red to his ears.
He seemed tranced, falling into all plans, just so they included the presence of his mother-in-law, without comment. To her proverbial apron strings he kept firm hold, literally not permitting her out of his sight. Even when he addressed Lilly or his daughter his gaze was straight for Mrs. Becker, and the flags of her moral support that he must have had the eyes to see waving for him in her glance.
The impending interview began to take on the proportions of a delayed tooth-pulling. Repeatedly Lilly had cleared the way for it; just as repeatedly he had fled to cover. A week passed.
Meanwhile something disquieting happened. It developed in further correspondence from Washington on the matter of canteen equipment, that there was some thought of sending Albert to France. An increased stolidity was his sole reaction, but there was no doubt that the prospect of an impending ocean trip weighed heavily.
The submarine situation, at a time when the seas were sown with the menace of sudden death, was of greatest and worrying concern to him.
No new device was overlooked. His room at the hotel was littered with rubber suits, guaranteed to keep the body floating upright for thirteen hours. Adjustable cork life savers. Patent propellers. Wings.
There was talk, in the face of the impending contingency, of applying for a commission. Albert in olive drab! To Lilly he would not conjure.
But meanwhile, to the slow champings of a huge governmental machine in travail, there was little to do but wait, and in the interim not a day that he and Mrs. Becker failed to follow up this or that newest device against bone-cracking seas.
"Albert, there must be a way out! Don't tell me there are not plenty ofmen who could help install canteen service. Let them send VincentBankhead. He's younger. You leave it to me if they decide to send you.I'll find you a way out. It's done every day."
"Wait until I'm called, mother; then there's time to act."
But his eyes were worried.
One day when the strain of holding together the precarious threads of the situation was becoming almost more than she could bear, and the end of the ten-day vacation period she was allowing herself from the office was at hand, Lilly spread three matinée tickets out on the table of a tea room where the five of them were lunching.
"Zoe, you and your grandparents are going to the Hippodrome this afternoon. Albert and I will take a walk or a drive and meet you at the hotel afterward."
"Mother, you come, too."
"No, Albert, Lilly's right. I want this thing settled. I want something decided or I'll go mad. My husband has got me muzzled; I'm afraid to open my mouth; but if I don't know something soon, I'll go crazy. Why are we here? When are we all going back? I don't like it here. I can't stand the noise. My servant girl is out there eating me out of house and home. I didn't even lock the grocery closet; that is the state of excitement I left home in. Something has got to be settled. The minute I open my mouth to talk about what is in the back of all our heads, everybody shushes me up. Now you two go and talk it out. I want to go home. I want us all to go home. I'm a wreck. I—"
"Carrie—"
"Oh, I'll shut up! Next time you travel with me, get me a muzzle. All I'm good for is to bear the brunt of everything. You've dribbled my head full of enough these last seventeen years to drive any woman but me crazy. But with her, it's a soft mouth. I'll shut up, but for God's sake settle things. I'm going crazy. I can't stand it."
The look of one trapped settled over Albert,
"I think I'd rather walk," he said; "those cabs are reckless and the meters run up so."
"Don't curl up your lips so, Lilly, over a little economy. Albert's right. What good does it do you to earn, the way you spend? Your husband has forty thousand dollars to show, and what have you to show? Taxicab rides don't draw any interest. Don't be so ready to curl up your lips."
"Why, mamma, you imagine things!" And to Albert, "Of course, let's walk."
For two hours, then, oftentimes stopping to face each other, they paced the wind-swept rectangle of the reservoir in Central Park, spring out in the air, but quite a tear of breeze across their high place.
He was sullen, casuistic, and impenetrable as a sea wall under a dashing, and the thought came to her that had he presented any other surface it would have been easier.
"Well, Albert," she began, facing him there in the wide afternoon light, "what is there that we two can say to each other?"
"Words," he said, stodgy in his bitterness, "mean nothing against seventeen years."
"You're right. And yet—I want you to know, Albert—before you go across—"
"Don't be too sure you'll be rid of me that way."
"Or before you go back home—that she is yours as much as mine and—"
"Generous," he said, dryly.
She could have beaten her head with a sense of futility.
"You've been a bad woman with a streak of devil in you. Tried to ruin my life, but I didn't let you. No, siree! I've worked things out. I've gotten on. I'm big in my way—in my business—in my home."
"Albert, I love to hear you say that!"
"You! You don't love anything or anybody outside yourself."
"Why? Because I took my chance to save myself from everything I—I hated! Not you—not they—but everything it stands for out there. Does self-preservation imply only selfishness?"
"Whatever it implies," he answered, stung to dark red by his effort for quick retort, "you're selfish—rotten selfish. But you haven't kept me down. I've gotten up these eighteen years—and you—you—Bah!"
"You've been happy, Albert? Tell me you have."
"Happy! I'm not a hog for happiness. You to inquire about my happiness! Lots you care! I've had my share of contentment. Contented as a man can be in a community where he has kept up a farce for seventeen years that his wife is off with his consent studying opera. But I've kept my name—kept it in spite of you. I don't know what's been what with you. Guess if the truth is known, I'm afraid to think what's what!"
"Albert—"
"Oh, I don't put anything past you. I don't even know if that girl is mine. For all I know you're a—"
"Albert!"
"Bah! I don't put anything past you!"
She faced his words as if they were blows, letting them rain.
"You're lying, Albert," she said, evenly. "She's yours and you know it."
"I've keptmyname! Kept it and tried to make it up to your parents, who deserved better than you!"
She quivered and the red that sprang out in her face was almost purple, and yet by her silence bared her chest for more, as if grateful for the sting of the lash.
"Bah! Don't be afraid. I don't want to know anything, but I'm not the booby I may seem to you. When a woman has lived around this way for all these years, in with a gang of show folks—Bah! I don't want to know." And spat.
"She's yours, Albert, and you know it. You know it!"
"Yes, I guess she is, from the look of her, not that I put anything past you. But that's your business. You're nothing to me. I'm cured of you. You couldn't make me suffer the way they do in books. I've kept my name, so if it's divorce you have on your brain, you might as well get it out, because—"
"No, Albert—"
"I've kept my name, whatever you've done to yours. Your life is your business. But the girl. That's where I have a right or two coming to me."
She was prepared for just this, but somehow when it came it was a full moment before she could answer, for the rush of fear that choked her.
"That's for—for Zoe to decide."
"That's formeto decide. She goes to a decent, respectable home where she belongs. You're not fit to raise her. Look at what you made of her. A fine specimen. A short-haired freak with all your crazy ideas thriving in her head. You've ruined your life, but you didn't succeed in ruining mine and you won't ruin hers. You and your stage-struck notions that never got you anywhere. She's going home where she belongs!"
She could hardly breathe for keeping down the rising tide of her terror, but her eyes were always cold for him.
"Your daughter has a lyric-soprano voice, and however little that may mean to you she is going to delight the world with it some day. One of the great masters of the world has made her his protégée. She is preparing for her audition—her hearing—in the fall, and it is even possible she may be singing in grand opera next season. You cannot—"
"I'll see her dead first. You were an opera bird, too. I'll see her dead first before I let her make a zero mark out of her life as her crazy mother did before her."
"Albert, can't you see! Zoe's the wine. You, mamma—papa—the vine. I don't count. I—I'm sort of the grape—that fermented—you see! She's me—plus. Her arm is long enough to touch what she wants. Mine wasn't. I saw it, but I couldn't reach. I was one generation too underdone. You cannot have Zoe. I cannot. She doesn't belong to you or me. She belongs to life. She's not mine. She is only my success; she—"
"She—goes—home!"
"No!"
"Why in God's name did you get me on here? You don't expect to see me stand by and countenance your craziness?"
"Why! Why! I've asked it ever since the moment I sent the wire. Why! I had to do it somehow—a fear of—something—war—life—death—but you shall not have her. Not unless she decides it that way. No. Never!"
"I'm a slow thinker! And slower to act. That's been my trouble. But this time the bit is between my teeth. I've a family now and family obligations. Don't be so sure yet that I'm on my way overseas. There is a way around every situation if you look for it hard enough. My place is here now. Home! My daughter goes home!"
She could see in profile the heavy jaw clamp upward, and more and more that wooden stodginess became terrible to her. In a flash-back she could see those seventeen years of beefsteak suppers; his temples at-their trick of working. Seventeen years all cluttered up with bed casters, bathtub stoppers, and poultry wiring. That party back there at Flora's. The lotto and tiddledywinks tables laid out. Page Avenue on a summer's day with the venders hawking down it—ap-ples—twenty cents a peck—ap-ples. Zoe—caught!
She closed over his wrists with a little predatory grip.
"Albert, don't do that! Don't take her back. She'll claw you like a wild eagle in a cage—out there. She belongs to the world. In the fall she sings for Auchinloss. It may lead to anything! Albert—you ask why I sent for you. Let her be. Let her stay here with Mrs. Blair—a friend—a dear—good friend of mine. Her education—Take me, Albert. Takemehome—Albert."
At her hand on his wrist something raced over him like the lick of a flame; he pressed against her with the entire length of his body and his lips were moist.
"Lilly," he said, very darkly red and trying to clasp her about the waist, "I'll take you! I oughtn't, but I will. Come back, Lilly, and make it up to me for all these years. Being near you makes me forget everything except that—you are near me. I've missed you all these years—I guess—but never so much as this minute. You've gotten so handsome with the years. Something—Come home, Lilly—make it up to me. Give me—your—your lips!"
She kept retreating before the dark red and the moist lips which he wet more and more with his tongue.
"Will you leave her be—then—Albert? Here?"
"Lilly—your lips—give me."
"Will you, Albert—leave her here—Zoe?"
She could feel the scald of his breathing.
"Yes—if you come."
"You promise?"
"Yes, Lilly. Your lips—let me."
Suddenly he had her to him, there in the light darkness of the deserted square of reservoir, kissing her so that his mouth smeared over toward her ear.
She was not quick enough entirely to avert her face, and in the embrace his Adam's apple was against her throat so that she could feel it beat, and with her nails biting into her palm to keep her from screaming, she was shrieking over and over to herself at his nearness: "Ugh! Ugh! Ugh!"
Albert did not sail.
A certain depression seemed to settle over him the evening following, after they had dined at a Broadway restaurant and were spending the interim before theater in the lobby of the Hotel Astor, where Mrs. Becker never tired of observing and commenting upon the transient swirl and peacockery.
"Look at that tight skirt, will you! It's a shame for any self-respecting woman to have to look at, much less wear it."
"Tippy dear, not so loud."
"Look at that low-cut back, will you! And white hair, too. I wouldn't live in this town if you gave it to me! Sixty cents for string beans the menu read to-night. I can buy a bushel at home for that. If I had been alone I know what I would have done. Walked out. It's only for millionaires here. The rest have to live in back rooms so they can put everything on their backs. You should thank your stars you have a home to go to, Lilly, instead of you and Zoe crying over each other all day. If I had my say she would go, too. Education! St. Louis education is good enough for anybody. Ben, I want you to look! If I was to ask you to buy me a chiffon cape like that you would drop in your tracks."
"Now, old lady, do I ever refuse you anything?"
"No, because I never ask for anything."
"I think we had better be going," said Lilly, leaning forward to tilt Zoe's hat farther down over her face. "I don't want you to miss the first act."
There was to be a box for "Who Did It?" and a visit behind scenes between acts.
"I want to get a look-in on what goes on behind there," specified Mrs.Becker through a sniff. "Fine mess!"
From where he sat with crossed knees and his nicely polished shoes far out so that passers-by were forced to a small detour, Albert looked suddenly across at his mother-in-law, rather scaredly white.
"Mother," he said, "I've got a pain in my chest."
On the instant her rosiness blanched.
"Albert, one of your colds coming on? They never start on your chest. It's influenza; the papers are full of it. They say next winter we're going to have it in a terrible epidemic. Albert, what hurts?"
He inserted two fingers into the front pleat of his shirt.
"It hurts here," he said.
"Albert," cried Mrs. Becker, instantly taken with panic, "let me feel if you have any fever!"
"Now, now, Carrie, don't create a scene here in the lobby. You've nursed him through enough colds not to be alarmed."
"But, Ben, in his chest! It's a symptom, I tell you; the papers are full of it!"
"Nonsense, Carrie! It's probably a little indigestion. You will insist upon those table d'hôtes. On the way to the theater we'll stop in at a drug store."
"Theater! Don't even mention the word. Come upstairs, Albert. Luckily I put a pair of your flannelette pajamas in the trunk. Ben, you rush over to the drug store for some camphorated oil. Albert, do you feel achy?"
Lilly laid out a quietly firm hand on his arm.
"Mamma, please let Albert get a word in."
"I know that boy like a book. He looks feverish."
"Albert," said Lilly, holding to the sedative quality in her voice, "do you feel ill?"
"I've a pain in my chest," he persisted, doggedly and with the drawn look about his mouth whitening.
They put him to bed. By nine o'clock a slight flush lay on Albert's cheek and he kept feeling of his brow.
"I think I have fever," he said once, always in scared white manner."Look in the paper and see if dry lips is one of the symptoms."
Then Zoe was dispatched home and the house physician called in, Mrs. Becker, as usual, tempestuous with instantaneous hysteria and conjuring to Lilly another sick room from out the hinterland of her childhood.
"Doctor, is it the Spanish influenza? Has he fever? He's always subject to colds, Doctor. He's not as strong as he looks. I've sat up many a night with his quincy sore throats. Many is the time, before we got the auto, that I rode down for him in the street car with his rubbers, if a rain came up. Doctor, do you think it could be that Spanish influenza? O God! if he should take sick away from home! Our doctor at home understands his system. My boy—my son—"
With a frozen sense of her alienism, Lilly sat, as it were, outside the situation, proffering herself almost with a sense of intrusion.
The doctor would not pronounce, but left with instructions and the promise of a midnight return. Into that Mrs. Becker read darkly.
"He's a sick man or one of these busy New York doctors wouldn't be returning again to-night. My boy is a sick man."
Meanwhile Albert had fallen into a light sleep. They sat beside his bedside watching his lips puff out, sometimes in bubbles.
The silence of midnight descended over the transient formality of the hotel room.
Undoubtedly Albert had a fever which seemed to be rising. He moistened his lips now constantly and threw himself about beneath the coverings, and then Mrs. Becker, not to be restrained, would lean forward to brush backward from his brow, as if there were hair.
At midnight the doctor returned and at one o'clock Albert was removed toMurray Hill Hospital.
He was ill three days, slipping off almost from the beginning into a state of coma from which he did not emerge.
With a celerity that was presently to race it through the country, this strange malady laid low its victim with what might have been pneumonia, except for certain complications that baffled and alarmed an already thoroughly aroused medical world.
The second day a sort of dark rash broke out over Albert's chest, so that his nurses entered the room in gauze masks, and finally, in spite of Lilly's protestations and Mrs. Becker's most violent hysterics, no admittance to the sick room was granted them.
And now comes a tide in the affairs of Lilly Penny which, being too true life, is not sufficiently true to fiction.
On the day that was to have been Zoe's formal graduation from High School, so that the pearl-embroidered slippers were never worn and her diploma brought home to her by a classmate, Albert Penny died, with no more furor than he had lived.
Stupor enveloped Lilly. She moved through days incredibly crowded with detail, and yet, somehow, so withdrawn into the very nub of herself that it was the shell of her seemed to compete with the passing time. Certainly it was this shell of her followed Albert in that strangest of little processions, to his cremation.
There had been an effort to travel west with the remains, but quarantine conditions forbade, and it was just as well so.
Four times on that ride through a warm summer rain to the crematory Mrs. Becker went off into light faints, sobbing herself back into consciousness. It frightened Lilly to look at her father; his face had dropped into hollows and the roundness of his back was suddenly a decided hump. And he had fallen into a silence. A sort of hollow urn of it that not even the outbursts of his wife could rouse to his usual soothing chirpings. He merely sat stroking her hand and staring into a silence which he seemed to see.
A very quiet and very frightened Zoe had been packed off to Ida Blair's, through it all Lilly's stupor persisting.
Mrs. Becker's state became cause for concern. Once back at the hotel, with Albert's room locked off, and once more thrown open to the impersonal feet of transiency, she would only moan and wind her hands and go off into the light states of unconsciousness.
"I haven't my son any more! Why did we come? It might not have happened at home. Our daughter wronged him, but, thank God, we tried to make it up to him. My boy. He was so steady—so careful. I can't realize he's gone—without me. The way he used to come home. Never a habit—evening after evening his newspaper and bed. Thank God, I don't think he ever missed her going as he might have. It hurt at first. He wanted to resign his Bible class, and that day we broke up the house—he kept twitching with his eyes. You remember, Ben. And that bed caster. Funny to have twitched over that. It seems he brought it home the night she left—it came over him all of a sudden, it wouldn't ever have to be fitted in. That's it! O God! all these years without knowing his own child. He was so steady—a good boy if God ever grew one. Ben, Ben, how can we go home without him? How can we go home without our boy?"
"Carrie, it is God's will."
"It is nobody's will. God couldn't will it that way. Just as he had got a little happiness in his way. To think he was willing to take her back. I don't care for myself, we're on in years, Ben—we're done—and now we've lost our—all—nothing to live for—"
"Mamma, mamma, don't talk that way. Let me try to make up to you for—"
"I can't face going home. He was my life, that boy. He made up for what we suffered through our own. He was a son to us. I can't face going home without him. Albert—where are you? Albert!"
"Mamma, mamma, won't you let me try to make up, dear, for what I have failed you?"
"Albert—can't you hear me—Albert—"
"Carrie, we've got our daughter back. Isn't that something to be—"
"I want my son, I tell you."
"Mamma darling, you're killing me. Let me make it up to you—even a little—the—"
"No, no; you're not a daughter to me. I want my son. Our way was his way."
"Mamma, please—take me home in his place. I'll make it up to you. Let me go back, dear, in Albert's place. I want to pay up—to you. I'm finished—here, dear. I'm ready—ready—"
Suddenly Mrs. Becker seemed to experience one of her cyclonic shifts. Tears came raining down her face, her sobbing cleft with great racking gulps. Then she dropped to her knees beside her daughter, and, before Lilly could prevent, reached up to drag down her face against her own tear-drenched one.
"Don't leave us, Lilly. Don't ever. Come home with us. We're getting old, Lilly. Don't ever leave us, me and papa. Promise me, Lilly. Promise."
"Of course I promise, mamma darling. Of course I promise."
For a full week after Albert's strangely curtailed obsequies, a gray blanket of woolly humidity hung with July unseemliness over the city in a clinging fog that feathered the throat.
The morning that Lilly returned to the office electric lights were burning and electric fans were whirring into it.
The unassailed normality of the machine whose functioning depended upon its parts! How easily even the most component of those parts could be replaced! The rows of stenographers, in her but two weeks' absence, new faces among them, outlined against windows of space and East River. The hinged little mahogany gates swinging to their goings and comings. Her own office with its glazed pane of door glass and outlook over city roofs and tug-specked band of river.
It was as if the tide of life were once more licking at her feet. She hung up her hat, patting at her hair in the little square of mirror above the stationary washstand, looking back at herself out of eyes a bit dreggy with tiredness, but her skin so deep in its whiteness that it was almost as if its creamy quality had congealed of mere richness.
She rubbed her cheeks to pinken and quicken them, and rang for an office boy, turning her back on the pile of letters and her reports on the desk and her eagerness to be at them.
"Ask Mr. Bruce Visigoth if he can see me."
The message came back on the instant. He could.
She turned the knob to his office door so slowly that she saved the slightest squeak, and stood there with her silhouette against the ground glass for a long moment. When she did enter, from the center of the room where he had been watching her silhouette against the pane, Bruce advanced to meet her.
He took her hand and on the instant she felt her eyes fill, burningly.
He was in summer and office negligée, an unlined blue-serge coat, a white-silk shirt which lay lightly to his body flexuosity, and above the soft collar he had taken on enough outdoor tan to make his smile whiter. She could have bitten her lips for their trembling, and tried to smile with her tortured eyes.
"Lilly," he said, topping her hand with his, "why didn't you let me know sooner? Your letter an hour ago came out of a clear sky. You see, I didn't even know he—he was here."
"It was all so—so quick!"
"Jove! I don't seem to take it in yet."
"Nor I," she said, quiescently and letting him lead her to a chair."He—You see, he was only ill three days."
"There doesn't seem much for me to say, does there, Lilly?"
"No," she said, "that's it, there's nothing to say."
"I can't bear to think of your having been exposed to it."
"That was the least. He died—afraid. That is so terrible to me, somehow. I wouldn't mind all of the horrible rest if only he hadn't died—afraid. I wonder if you know what I mean. He lived so—so meekly to have died—that way. Afraid."
"Yes," he said, "I think I do know." He wanted to keep his gaze away from her and to keep it cool, but somehow each time their eyes met a flame leaped up out of embers, a fiery new consciousness that kept dancing.
"He and—and my parents—you see, they—Well, I told you everything in the letter."
"Are your parents returning home?"
"Yes. That's what I've come to say. You see—they—we—we've decided to remain here two months. Until September—up in my little apartment, all of us. In September Zoe is to have her audition with Auchinloss. So much depends on that. We've such hopes, her teacher and I. She's pure lyric soprano. We think grand-opera brand. And now with the war on, more and more the American girl is getting her chance. That's why my parents have finally consented to wait here with me until then. After that, Zoe is to stay with Ida Blair and we three—my parents and I—are going home—together. That is what I have come to tell you. I'll be giving up my work with you in—September. I'm going home—with them."
He regarded her, his flush going down perceptibly.
"You're fooling."
"No," she said, trying to smile. "I suppose it's about the most solemn job I have left to do in life—going home."
"Why, you—you can't go back there."
"I can," she said, her voice held calm.
"I—we can't let you go."
"Why? Zoe—my big job's done."
"Lilly, I tell you we need you here more than ever. My brother arrives this morning from Seattle. We've completed the cross-country chain. I'm free now to branch out. I'm counting on you. I'm full of an idea for that community opera scheme and I'm ready to do the play from the Russian on your say-so. Lilly—you cannot go now—"
"I can—must," she said, scraping back her chair. "You must work out your dreams—alone—with some one else. I—must—go." And then withdrawing from what she saw: "No! No! Bruce! No! No!"
But just the same they were in each other's arms with the irresistibility of tide for moon and moon for tide. Press him back with her palms as she would when his lips found hers, it was as if something etheric had flowed into her brain. She wanted to resist him and instead her hands met in a clasp about his neck. "No, no." And yet as he kissed her eyelids and down against the satinness of her hair, it seemed to her that toward this moment all the poor blind years had been directed.
"Lilly—darling."
She tried to shake off her enchantment.
"You hurt!"
"I want to."
"My—love."
"My love."
"So this—this is it?"
"What?"
"Love."
"Love. Love."
"How beautiful—sex."
"I want to kiss those stars out of your eyes. I want to wind you in moonlight."
"Bruce, I think I must be mad. Crazily—deliciously mad."
"Me too. I'm as deliciously, as crazily mad as any young Leander. I want to swim a thousand Hellesponts for you. I want—"
"No—no—no, Bruce, you don't understand—my love—"
"I do understand. That I have you now to love and adore, to marry—"
The door opened then, quite abruptly. It was Robert Visigoth. He had a straw hat in one hand and an alligator traveling bag in the other. The latter he set down rather abruptly.
So instantaneous was their springing apart and so ready the mind to believe what the heart denied, that it was almost conceivable that he had not seen. There was not even a pause, and through the perfunctory greetings of these two men of strangest relation, Lilly found herself somehow back at her desk, little prickles out all over her body and particularly against her face, like the bite of sleet, something like this running behind her lips:
"Please, God, don't let him tell. He promised! Please! God, I'll never give in again. Bruce—my darling—don't let him tell you. He promised he wouldn't. Don't tell him, Robert. Bruce, don't let him. Please, God—don't let him."
After a while, burning with the fever in her blood, she plunged, for the sedative of it, into the work before her. The first of a stack of reports on her desk was from the Adelphi Theater, Akron, Ohio.
"Three Melodious Sisters." 12 minutes. Well received. Wardrobe worn.
"Whistling Bicyclers." 14 minutes. Skillful. Comedy weak.
"Please, God—don't let him—"
"Shenck and Bent." 9 minutes. 3 laughs.
"Sylvia King & Co." 9 minutes. Weak patter but finished strong.
"Musical Gypsies." 10 minutes. Fair. Good opening number.
"Please, God, don't let him tell."
After what might have been minutes or hours, then, the door opened and without preamble Robert Visigoth walked in, and in the wide-kneed fashion forced upon him by corpulency seated himself beside her desk.
"How long has this thing been going on?" he said, looking at her from under beetling brows that had grown bushy with the years. Time had done just that to Robert Visigoth. Beetled him. His years overhung him. He carried them massively. It was not so much that he had lost his waistline, but he had settled into himself. That was it! Robert Visigoth had settled rather appallingly into himself.
For a second Lilly's eyes moved from the two fifty-cent cigars protruding from his waistcoat pocket to a lodge button at his lapel, and then, finally trapped, met his.
"How long? I said."
"You've told him?" she asked, leaning forward to hear through the buzzing in her ears.
"Whether I do or not depends upon you."
She tried not to let him see how the room was rocking around and around, how suddenly the buzzing had lifted until she felt light-headed. She could have shouted, danced, wept, or fainted her relief. Nothing mattered, not even the squatty person sitting there with little diabetic puffs beneath his eyes.
"How long has this thing been going on?" he repeated, his voice a rising gale.
"Are you your brother's keeper?"
"From your kind, yes."
"There has been nothing between us."
"That's a lie."
Through the scorch of her humiliation it was a second before she could command her lips.
"I swear to God."
"Bah!" he almost spat out, "after what I walked in on!"
"Yes," she said, biting off the words with a clip, "after what you walked in on."
He leaned forward with a thrust of face that was unpleasantly close.
"All I have to say is, hands off there."
"There has been nothing between us. I tell you it's true."
"I'm not concerned whether it is or not. What has been has been. But now, hands off. You can't land my brother. I heard the word. Marry. The cheek—you—my brother! You must be crazy."
"You're wrong. You're wrong," she managed to insist, her throat rising and falling like a sea.
"My eyes aren't wrong. They saw what I stumbled in on."
"I know. I know. It's difficult—impossible to explain away an—an occurrence like that. How well I know the futility of trying to convince your kind of man that there are more than two kinds of women in the world. Good and bad. The woman you marry and the woman you ruin. I'm bad. Have it your way. Bad. Bad. Bad. But for what was your sin as much as mine you are free in your man-made society to go your way, fulfilling your life, and then you dare to come here and sit judgment on my fulfilling mine. When are women going to venture frombehindthe man-made throne to sit beside, and make you men move over?"
"I'm not here to discuss the double code with you. I don't know and don't care how you have lived since. It is not my business. For sixteen years you have given this firm fine satisfaction for which we, in turn, have tried to express our appreciation. You know that. We know that. Your morals are none of my business except when they touch me! A man's a man. I don't know how you've lived. For my part, I think you've gone pretty straight, but that doesn't change matters. I know what I know, and a man's a man. What are you going to do about it? You know, too, that there is no love lost between me and my brother in the little things. We go our ways. But when it comes to the big—he's my brother. Blood. Get me? Whatever I am can't change me here inside. He's my brother. You're—you!"
"You're right. I wouldn't. I couldn't. I must have been mad—this morning. I—somehow—it got all beyond me in a moment. I swear to you for the first time! Do you think I'd muss up one hour of his life? Even if I dared? Even if you were to come to me, on your knees, begging me to—to—marry him? To begin with, I'm older—only a year in time, it's true, but he—he's just beginning. I'm beginning over. What is my life compared to his? He's on the brink of a thousand realizations. And I—oh, I'm not whining. I'd do it all over again, loathing you as you must know I loathed you—that night. But my child got her chance. You sold it to me and I paid for it in the basest coin of the realm. But I'd do it again—knowing what I know now, I'd do it again. You hear! Do you hear!"
"That's past now—"
"No. For you, yes, but I'm still paying. Paying at this moment with my—my heart's blood. But if I hadn't done it—gone with you—something would have been lost that night that was worth every cent I paid. They'd have got her back. I don't care. I've won. I've won if I've lost."
She was on her feet now, her eyes, like blue wells that were filling with ink, plunging beyond his with a Testament defiance that seemed to shout, "I am fearfully and wonderfully made."
"Yes, I love him. You can't take that from me. That is why he is so safe from me. I love him too much for him to know. And yet I think—I believe—I know that even if he did know, in the end it wouldn't matter—"
"You must be crazy. Once let your idealist wake up and there is no more dreaming for him."
"He mustn't ever wake up—for his sake! Promise. Promise me that you won't ever wake him!"
"Whether I do or not is up to you."
"What do you want?" she said, tiredly.
"I suppose the black and white of it is that you must quit."
"That is easy. I'm resigning anyway the fifteenth of September to goWest to live."
He took on the half-conciliatory graciousness of one who has gained his advantage with unsuspected ease.
"I'd give a great deal not to have had this happen, but, after all, a man is a man and life is life."
She let her gaze bore into his like gimlets burning for center.
"I think you've explained that before."
He began to back out before her immobility.
"I am remaining East two months. I hope your resignation will allow us that much time to attempt to fill your place."
"I leave that to you. It can be either immediate or take effect inSeptember."
"By all means the latter. Will you—can you believe me when I say if there is anything I can do—letters—an opening with a Western firm—"
"Please," she said, turning him a shoulder in high distaste.
"I have your word—then?"
"My word," she said, looking past his hand toward the door.
He backed out in the somewhat ludicrous crab fashion and then she sat down, swinging around on her swivel chair toward the desk. The stack of reports lay facing her. She caught up the next in order.
People's Playhouse. Tulsa, Oklahoma.
For the next half hour she must have sat there trying to co-ordinate out of chaos by staring at the heading and repeating over and over again: "People's Playhouse. Tulsa, Oklahoma. People's Playhouse. Tulsa, Oklahoma."
* * * * *
Whistles were blasting through the noonday fog when Bruce finally and without preamble burst into her office.
It struck her even on the gale of his entrance how young he was that his hair should show the nervous plowing of five fingers, and how sensitive his profile and ready to flare at the nostrils. His tie, too, burnt orange, from a soft collar and badly knotted! She wanted to jerk up his chin and putter at remaking the four-in-hand.
"Lilly—sweetheart—"
She sat regarding him over the top of People's Playhouse, Tulsa,Oklahoma.
"Sweetheart, let us call it a day. I want to drive you out to Tarrytown to—"
"Don't," she said, frowning.
"Don't what?" Her immobility an ineffectual stop to his exuberance.
"Come now," wanting to draw her from her chair by the two hands, swinging them wide and then together; "don't let his nibs bouncing in that way throw a damper. We were too quick for him, anyway. Don't believe he saw a thing. And what if he did? He's going to know it anyhow, and pretty quick, too. I want to shout it from the housetops, I want to megaphone it up to the stars. Lilly—Lilly-mine! Sweetheart!"
She crowded back into the chair.
"How dared you!"
He fell back with his gesture still wide.
"Why—what? Dared what? Oh, come now, sweetheart, I could wager he didn't see, and suppose he did? We've nothing to conceal. I'm for telling him to-day!"
"No. No. No. You played unfair. You took me—unawares. You misunderstood me horribly—most horribly."
"You mean—"
"Why, you—youboy!What has happened cannot make any difference between you and me. It was outrageous of you—sillyboyyou—to—to take advantage. After all that has passed—all these years—it is unthinkable that you didn't understand. Why, you—youboy!"
She saw his jaw fall and the sense of his ridiculousness set in.
"What has merely been absurd all along you have suddenly made intolerant. You make more imperative my resignation. You must understand—Mr. Visigoth—under what conditions I will consent to remain here these few weeks."
The words were so stilted that she had the sensation of throwing metal disks on a stone floor and waiting for their tinny clatter. She could see the high red drain out of his face and then rush up again as if he had been slapped.
"Lilly, for God's sake, you—you cannot be serious!"
"No mock heroics—please."
His ears tipped with flame; he straightened back from her.
"No more mock heroics," he said, in a voice suddenly quieted down like vichy gone stale. "Forgive an old—fool—a young—fool—and forget it. Thank you for jerking me up."
He raised her limp hand, bowing over it until his lips hovered but did not touch.
"My solemn word on it this time—no more—mock—heroics." And still Lilly, on the click of the door after him, could not clear her brain of the running threnody of nonsense:
People's Playhouse. Tulsa, Oklahoma. People's Playhouse. Tulsa,Oklahoma.
Time flies or does not, according to the eyes of the beholder. As the days began to lengthen into the longest spokes of the cycle, and parlors and magazines to don summer covers, it seemed to Lilly that somewhere an interim too subtle for mortal eyes must have occurred, because suddenly there came a very torrid day in September, the fourteenth, to be exact, when the little apartment in West End Avenue stood denuded, stripped to a few huddled trunks, and Zoe's dressing table, chair, piano, and desk ready to be carted out to the little sea-view room that awaited her in Ida Blair's Long Island bungalow.
They were a group diverse of emotion and perilous to one another's nerves this last morning.
MRS. BECKER: "I think I'd better write my girl another postal to be sure and have supper ready when we get home Thursday night. There is some canned salmon in the grocery closet, I forgot to mention, and she can borrow a few potatoes from the Shriners for frying, until I get a chance to lay in supplies when I get home. Poor Albert! How he loved creamed salmon and fried potatoes! Ben, help me to realize what has happened. O God, I—"
MR. BECKER: "Now, Carrie."
MRS. BECKER: "The Shriners are nice neighbors, Lilly. They are the only ones besides us on the block who stuck after the street began to go down. You'll like Edna Shriner. You remember her? Pock-marked. She used to be in your dancing-school class. She never married, but how she keeps that little home for her old father! Kitchen floor! You could eat off it. And as handy a body with the needle as ever lived. Her French knots. The guest-towels that girl has French-knotted."
LILLY (to herself): "Salmon and fried potatoes. Page Avenue. Shriners.Funny!—O God!—Why—Oh!—Oh!—Funny!—"
ZOE: "Lilly, feel my heart, how it beats."
It was as if Lilly could not take her eyes from off her daughter.
"Remember what Triest said, dearest, let your nerves be so many violin strings, tightening but not quivering."
"It's your going, Lilly—I—I can't seem quite to grasp it. You will come back to me soon—in two months—one—I couldn't stand it longer!"
"Yes, and, Zoe, you will write every day. Every little single thing.Your work—your life—your friends—every tiny success—"
"Lilly, Lilly—don't go! It's madness. Stay, darling. I feel like a pig—all that money—his fortune. If you are not entitled to touch it, I am not—"
"You are his child and the only wrong you ever did him was through me."
"Lilly—don't go, darling—"
"Zoe, don't tear me to pieces."
"I'll work, darling, as I've never worked before."
"Zoe, Zoe, go straight to your mark."
"I—I can't realize it, Lilly. To-day! He's going to hear me to-day—this very afternoon. I—I feel as nervous at the prospect of singing before you as before him. I—I think I'm the luckiest girl in the world. Lilly, sometimes I—I—think life has—has sort of cleared the way for me to walk in its lovely places—you have cleared the way. But what—what if he doesn't think I've the voicemaestrothinks I have? I couldn't stand that, Lilly—the way you stood it."
"But he will," said Lilly, a memory shaping itself. "Remember your power begins where mine left off. You heard Du Gass the year before she died, but you were too young to remember. Your voice is so much—so infinitely bigger, Zoe, and your knowledge and defiance of life and of the Auchinlosses—makes me so unafraid for you—"
"Kiss me, Lilly. I'm frightened—not of Auchinloss—or life—but of—Oh, I don't know—frightened of silliness, I guess."
"I'm not."
"But you're trembling."
"Of hope."
At eleven Lilly went down to her office. Leon Greenberg already had her desk. It was largely a matter now of sliding in the new prop before sliding out the old.
There were several farewell offerings from various of the older girls. The immemorial trifles that women exchange. A bottle of eau de cologne. The inevitable six handkerchiefs. A silver bodkin for running ribbon through lingerie. And from the booking department, a silk umbrella suitably engraved. She cried a little.
By noon the top of her desk was bare and the drawers empty.
She sat looking out over the waves of roofs of a city that had beaten her back at every turn, lashed her, and yet with the mysterious counterflow of oceans had carried her out a foot for every ten it flung her back.
She felt full of sobs, but quiet. Strangely quiet, as if the champing machinery of her life had stopped suddenly, leaving an hiatus that made her heart ache of passivity.
At two o'clock, by appointment, came Zoe … like a blaze of light. Her eyes with her mother's trick of iris, full of inner glow, and her blond hair so daringly boxed, set off with a droop of tam-o'-shanter.
There had been a new frock of heavy white crepe with a wide white hat for this occasion. Instead, with last-moment decision, she had come in one of the straight blue frocks, the wide patent-leather belt, a knot of orange and blue ribbon, representing her active membership in a local canteen service, at her throat. She came glowing through the daring simplicity, flamboyantly and to the nth power of Lilly's slower personality, her mother's child.
"Hurry, darling, I've a taxi waiting. We're to meetmaestroat theOpera House."
"Zoe, I'm glad you wore this instead. Did your grandmother feel badly that you didn't wear the one she gave you?"
"I wasn't myself in it. No—room."
In the corridor, going out, Bruce stepped suddenly out of his office into their path.
Zoe's hand had shot out.
"Hello, you!" she said.
He looked at her through a slow smile.
"Well, I'll be hanged! The youngster! Good Lord! What have they done!Who elongated you? Where are the knee dresses and the corkscrews?"
She withdrew a highly haughty hand.
"You poor, misguided Rip Van Winkle. When did you return from theCatskills?"
"When did it happen?" he asked Lilly, trying to keep his eyes from crinkling.
It was the first time in this last brace of weeks that there had been more than the merest perfunctory word between them, and she tried to thaw her cold lips into a smile.
"You forget that you haven't seen her since last Christmas. Six inches more of skirt and a few hairpins did it."
"Well, I'll be hanged!" he kept reiterating. "Zoe grown up!"
"Is it true you are going to try for the aviation? Ida Blair says you are."
"Looks that way."
"You're too old."
"Well, then, I'll have to come down to earth. You and your mother have different ideas regarding my age. I'm rather dizzy about it this minute, myself. Either time is putting one over on me or you have caught up. By Jove! that's it! You've caught up! You're immense!"
She was suddenly, and to Lilly's amazement, a creature of flashes and quirks, of self and sex consciousness.
"Don't like to be—immense!"
"Gorgeous, then."
"Better."
"Don't go. Let me look at you."
"Come with us. Dare you."
"Zoe!"
"Where?"
"I'm singing this afternoon for Auchinloss. My audition at the OperaHouse."
"The deuce you say!"
"I've a cab waiting," she said, challenging him with a flash of eyes to their corners.
"Wait," he said, darting into his office.
"Zoe, how dared you?"
"Lilly—he's thrilling! I want him along; I feel keyed up now. The way I want to feel! Edgy!"
Before her persistently cold lips would reply he rejoined them and presently they were all three in the cab.
His contemplation of Zoe became a stare.
"So the little Zoe grew up."
"I'm eighteen. You used to be old enough to be my father. Not any more.Now you are old enough to be my—anything."
"Zoe!"
"Good Lord!" he said. "Fact."
Suddenly her nervousness came flowing back over her.
"Lilly, look at me every second while I'm singing, darling. You too," leaning toward him and placing cold fingers on each of their wrists.
"Delightful and easy task."
She made him amoue, prettily pouty.
"You'll be sorry, when I'm famous, that you didn't take me seriously."
"How can I take you at all when you've taken me off my feet?"