Star-Dust Part 18

Kneeling on it, and to the antiphonal beat of the Reverend Stickney's voice, Lilly Becker and Albert Penny became as one.

CHAPTER XI

By a strange conspiracy of middle-cla.s.s morality, which clothes the white nude of life in suggestive factory-made garments, and by her own sheer sappiness, which vitalized her, but with the s.e.xlessness of a young tree, Lilly, with all her rather puerile innocence left her, walked into her marriage like a blind Nydia, hands out and groping sensitively.

The same, in a measure, was true of Albert, who came into his immaculate inheritance, himself immaculate, but with a nervous system well insulated by a great cautiousness of life.

He was highly subject to head colds and occasional attacks of dyspepsia, due to his inability to abstain from certain foods. He was, therefore, sensitive to draughts and would not eat hot bread. He carried an umbrella absolutely upon all occasions and a celluloid toothpick in his waistcoat pocket.

Then, too, he gargled. To chronicle the heroic emotions that motivate men is a fine task. Love and hate and all the chemistry of their mingling that go to form the plasma of human experience. It is a lesser, even an ignominious one to narrate Lilly's kind of anguish during this matinal performance of her husband. She suffered a tight-throated sort of anguish that could have been no keener had it been of larger provocation. Her toes and her fingers would curl and a quick ripple of flesh rush over her.

Mornings, when he departed, his kiss, which smelled of mouth wash, would remain coldly against her lips with the peculiar burn of camphor ice.

All her sensibilities seemed suddenly to fester.

On a week day of the third week of her marriage, in her little canary cage of a yellow bedroom dominated with the monstrous bra.s.s bedstead of the period and a swell-front dresser elaborate in Honiton and flat silver, she endured, with her head crushed into the chair back, those noisome ablutions from across the hallway. She was wearing, these first mornings, a rose-colored negligee, foamy with lace and still violet scented from the trousseau chest, and especially designed to pink this early hour.

It lay light to a skin that, strangely enough, did not covet its sensual touch. She craved back to the starchy blue-gingham morning dresses. It was as if she sat among the ruins of those crispy potential yesterdays, all her to-morrows ruthlessly and terribly solved.

Something swift and eager had died within her. She was herself gone flabby. A wife, with a sudden and, to her, horrid new consciousness that had twisted every ligament of life.

Her husband's collar so intimately there on the dresser top. His shirt, awaiting studs, spread out on the bed--their bed. His suspenders straddling the chair back. The ordering of the evening beefsteak lurking back in her consciousness. He liked sirloin, stabbing it vertically (he had a way of holding his fork upright between first and third fingers) when he carved, and cutting it skillfully away from the T bone. After the first week, he liked the bone, too, gnawing it, not mussily, but with his broad white teeth predatory and his temples working. She was a veritable bundle of these petty acc.u.mulated concepts, harrowed to their quick.

She knew that presently he would enter the room in his trousers and undershirt, which he did upon the very minute, the little purple circle, like a stamp mark on the rind of a bacon, showing just beneath his Adam's apple, the s.h.a.g of his yellow hair wetly curly from dousing, like a spaniel's.

"Certainly fine water pressure we have in the bathroom, Lilly. I am going to bring home some tubing from the store and attach a spray."

She looked out of the window over the languid little patch of front lawn, more gray than green from the scourge of heat. Insect life hung midair like a curtain of buzzings. Directly opposite the dusty, unmade street, she could see her parents' home standing unprotected except for one sapling maple, the sun already pressing against the drawn shades.

There was a slight breeze through this morning that turned the sapling leaves and even lifted the little twist of tendril at the nape of Lilly's neck.

It was just that spot, while tugging at his collar, that Albert Penny stooped to kiss.

"Little wife," he said.

"Ugh!" she felt.

"Poor little wife, it was ninety-four and a half at six-thirty-eight this morning."

His capacity for accuracy could madden her.

He computed life in the minutiae of fractions, reckoning in terms of the halfpenny, the half minute, the half degree.

She sat now, laying pleats in the pink negligee where it flowed over her knees, a half smile forced out on her lips.

"Well, Albert," she said, wanting to keep her voice lifted, "I guess we're in it, aren't we? Up to our necks."

"In what?"

"Marriage."

Leaning to the mirror for the adjustment of his collar b.u.t.ton, he paused, regarding her reflection.

"Well now, what an idea! Of course we're in it, and the wonder to me is how we ever stayed out so long."

She reached up to yawn, her long white arms stretched above her head.

"Oh dear! oh dear! oh dear!" she said in what might have been the key of anything.

"Poor little girl!" he said. "I wish I could make it cooler for you."

"It isn't that."

"What then is bothering your little head?"

"I--oh, I don't know. I guess it's just the reaction after the excitement of the wedding."

He came back to kiss the same tendril at the nape of her neck.

"I'm glad it's over, too. Feels mighty good to settle down."

"'Settle down.' Somehow I hate that expression."

"All right, then, Mrs. Penny, we'll settle up. Speaking of settling up, I guess the missus wants her Monday-morning allowance, doesn't she?"

"I--guess--so."

He placed three already counted out five-dollar bills on the dresser, weighting them down with a silver-back mirror.

"See if you can't make it last this week, Lilly. You watch Mother Becker market and you'll come out all right."

"Oh, I can't pick around raw meat the way mamma does. It makes me sick."

"Housekeeping may seem a little strange at first, but I'm not afraid my little wife is going to let any of them get ahead of her."

"Whoever wants it, can have that honor."

"What?"

"Nothing."

"What's the program for to-day, Lilly?"

"Oh, I don't know."

"I'm going to send Joe out from the store to-day with some washers for the kitchen faucets and some poultry netting for a chicken yard. I'll potter around this evening and build one behind the woodshed. Chickens give a place a right homey touch."

"And send out a man from Knatt's to fix the piano. They delivered it with a middle C that sticks."