Star-Dust Part 42

"You will find you have made a mistake, my dear young woman. This is a strictly one-price office. Now I will take out that temporary filling and finish you up."

She was loath to mount the chair, except that the nerve was jumping again. For half an hour she lay under his touch; finally, as he fumbled to untie the bib-like towel about her neck, his lips descended so close to her cheek that she could feel their cold, liver-colored caress touch her finally in a kiss. She sprang to her feet, jerking the towel away from her neck and rubbing it across the defiled spot.

"How dare you! You cheat! You miserable creature! How dare you! You come near me and I'll call the police. Let me out of here! Out!"

She ran from the place with her hat in her hand, across the street, and up two flights to her room. Panting and drenched with perspiration, all day she lay on the little iron bed, her face to the wall, shuddering.

"O G.o.d, where are you driving me? What are you driving me on for? Where?

Why? What does it mean?"

At dusk, with a sense of weakness entirely new to her, she rose to undress, resting after each discarded piece of clothing.

She could hear Mrs. McMurtrie pa.s.sing through the outer hall, a tin bucket, on one of its frequent errands to Joe's place across the street, grating against the wall. The room took on a deeper and soupy color of twilight, the great pachyderm of the Hanna Larchmont Hospital casting its shadow.

Suddenly, one of those boltlike perceptions that can spring out apparently from s.p.a.ce, Lilly clapped her hands to her throat, her breast, the back of her neck. Her bag, the little chamois bag, and the pink ribbon at her neck were gone! She shook through her clothing in a frenzy of haste; she tore each piece inside out; slapped her hands over the washstand; flung back her mattress, plunging her fingers into every imaginable crevice. Dragged out the bed; jerked up the tacks from the carpet, turning back the corners; felt along the dark, narrow halls and down two flights on her hands and knees; shook out her clothing again.

The hair came down over her shoulders and her reasoning seemed to go.

That hand fumbling to untie that bib-towel. Those pointed whiskers approaching her cheek. The little pink bow at her neck. Those liverlike lips. That soft, boneless hand at the back of her neck had jerked out the bag! O G.o.d! that soft, slimy kiss and the little jerk of the bow at the back of her neck! and fell down with a screaming that brought Mrs.

McMurtrie.

At noon of the next day Lilly Penny lay in the public ward of the Hanna Larchmont Lying-in Hospital, a premature mother by some weeks.

Lilly Penny, whose trousseau had included twelve of the sheerest batiste ones, in a coa.r.s.e, unbleached nightdress not her own and the least gentle to her flesh she had ever known.

There was a row of her of which she was the whitest; wan women, big-eyed with pain, who had gone down into the canons of death that there might be life.

She had a slow, vagarious notion that all of the cots were tilted, so that they appeared each on a cross, these mothers. It was sad to lie there in that etheric world, yet somehow pleasant. The frieze on the auditorium of the St. Louis Center High School was unaccountably before her. It was still sown with lilies, but with babies' heads for calyxes.

Her mother, her teeth set with effort, was scrubbing something. A window sill? Who was calling? Mamma--Flora. You wouldn't give 'em up after you got 'em, but: it's a wise girl that'll think twice. She felt so white.

Never, in fact, had she enjoyed such a sense of her whiteness. She held up her arm to regard the column of it, and wanted to laugh, but it was easier to cry.

They brought her child. Hers, Lilly Becker Penny's. A huge tray of them, like a vender's street-corner offering of spring flowers. Tiny human blooms with a tag at each wrist. Incredible!

"Three guesses," said the nurse, through a smile, and held out the human bouquet toward her. She could scarcely breathe. She wanted to scream, to draw up the sheet over her head. To suffocate. Herself, external to herself, was breathing out there--off somewhere in that tray. She tried to pull up the covers over her head. A hand would draw them away. There was a black one in that row of little pink nubs of humanity! Heads like hard-boiled eggs not quite cooked through. No! No! No!

Suddenly Lilly raised to her elbow. The second from the end! The big head. The full-blown spring-tight curls! The color of honey. The blue eyes that were almost ready to turn gray. The tag on the wrist. Number two. The tag of her own unbleached gown? Number two!

"Give me!" cried Lilly, on a sudden mounting note that left a little resonance like a plucked violin string.

"Right the first time," cried the nurse, lifting the second from the end, "and a little beauty she is."

That little living ball of head in the crotch of her arm! She leaned forward to the flameless heat of it, her lips moving and wanting to speak.

"What is it, dear?" asked the nurse.

She moved them again, but still silently.

The nurse bent lower, her ear to the pillow.

"Now what is it, dear? Say it again."

This time through the veil of a whisper she could hear quite clearly:

"Zoe."

Book Two

THE GRAPE

CHAPTER I

There were vagrant little streams of water, released by thaw, hurrying along against the curbs of Second Avenue, the absolutely impeccable spring day that Lilly Penny walked out of the Hanna Larchmont Hospital into the warm scented bath of its sunshine, a blanketed bundle in the crook of her arm that mysteriously seemed to animate the nap of the wool, lifting it and suggesting the little life it enfolded.

She felt strangely light and giddy that life could have gone clattering on outside those dim weeks of hers inside the walls.

She had gone down in a dark, a fantastic hiatus in her scheme of things, and it was incredible that out here were street cars still clanging for right of way, pedestrians weaving in and out the great tapestry of a city day, factory whistles splitting asunder with terrific cleavage the fore--from the afternoon. There was a hurdy-gurdy rattling tinnily through the morning that must have played on uninterruptedly through this strange demise of hers.

School children, the air raucous with them, sped home for luncheon through streets that already smelled of sun on asphalt. She had never really noticed them before. That little fat girl with the braids. How pretty to loop them up that way behind each ear with bright red bows.

She pressed against the little warm life at her bosom. She felt throaty with laughter, and the tears of a delicious weakness that made her ache to lie down somewhere in this sun, close to the soft bearing earth whose secret she knew now, and open this bundle. Hers! It was the first moment of her actual ownership. Reality was reclaiming her from that unreal realm of doctors and nurses and the dozy detached period of her convalescence.

She wanted to run with her living loot to some quiet corner and open it up. There was a little square of park with a munic.i.p.al-laid-out bed of tulips across the street, but its benches were crowded with humanity, like sparrows sunning themselves on a wire, and the winding of its asphalt paths swift with the hurry of all the strangely uninterrupted world outside.

She hurried toward Seventeenth Street--could have run, in fact, such a resurgence of the old vitality was upon her. Before one of the private houses a rheumatic-looking oleander was in the supremest moment of its full bloom. It lit up the old street as if a bride had donned her veil there. Outside the cleaning establishment were two stretchers of lace curtains sunning themselves against the wall.

Lilly hurried up the stoop and pulled out the bell that rang dimly in one of those subterranean retreats peculiar to landladies.

Mrs. McMurtrie herself opened the door, as usual her great hands steaming and swollen with suds.

"Well?" she said, her arm immediately flung up to the virago's akimbo and her foot sliding in between the door.

In an agony of anxiety over possible exclusion, Lilly's words came so fast they hardly allowed for the coherence of s.p.a.cing.

"How do you do, Mrs. McMurtrie? I've returned and I'm fine. I'm so sorry about that--that night and the trouble I must have caused you.

Thank you for sending my bag after me. It's a girl. She's the best little thing, Mrs. McMurtrie. Doesn't cry at all. I'll only be wanting her with me for a few days until I can get her placed somewhere near me, so I can spend evenings and Sundays with her. I've such plans! I'm ready to take a position again and forge right ahead. If I might have the old room, Mrs. McMurtrie, I promise you that you won't know she's in the house these few days. It won't mean one thing in the way of extras for you, but I'm willing to pay more. Nothing except a little alcohol stove, and if your little girl could watch her for an hour or two once in a while, when I'm out, I'll pay her, too. Gladly. My bag is at the hospital. I'll send for it--"

"Be saving your breath," cried Mrs. McMurtrie, flinging her gesture upward with a cluck of the fingers. "I wouldn't give that for your yarn!

You're a hussy, from the looks of the whole business, and I've a mind to be suing the railroad station for the sending of you to me. You mentioned the husband of your own free will. Your husband! Faith, and not so much as a relation turning up to be with you in your trouble.

Husband! You'd better be going and telling that to the Home for Indigent Girls. Your husband! Bah!"

To a door slammed full in her face Lilly stood there for a stunned instant, hugging at her bundle. She would have liked to crumple up, to have felt the earth open and drag her down to a merciful oblivion, but after a while she turned and walked down those steps, fumbling with her free hand for an address she had applied for at the hospital information desk, against possible emergency.

The slip of paper read Nineteenth Street, almost in a straight line from where she stood. It was a morose, lean building, only two windows wide and five stories high, with a porcelain sign above the bell, "ROOMS." A wrinkled pod of a woman opened the door.