Star-Dust Part 52

CHAPTER IV

From now on for many a month to come, the curve of Lilly's life would have shown a running festoon; six days whose uneventful continuity was bearable because they were looped up by the rosette of the Sundays at Spuyten Duyvil.

When Zoe was two years old this hebdomadal consciousness was already borne upon her. Into her earliest vocabulary, as haphazard as if the words had been dished up out of the alphabet of a vermicelli soup, crept the word "Sunday," mysteriously boiled down to "Nunk," the first time her mother heard it, the pride seeming to crowd around her heart, fairly suffocating her.

As if the l.u.s.ter of this girl child could be any brighter, yet here was the new shine of the mental beginning to radiate through. Nunk!

Was there any limit to this ecstasy of possession? It ran through her days like a song.

It meant that while the home-going six-o'clock rush at Union Square, which of face is the composite immobility of a dead Chinaman, would presently cram into street cars and then deploy out into the inhospitable cubbyholes of the most hospitable city in the world, Lilly, even in her weariness, could be deterred by the lure of a curb vender and a jumping toy dog. There was never a time or a weather that she could pa.s.s, without pause, Westheim's Art Needlework Shop on Broadway and its array of linen-lawn dainties, and, remarkably enough, the purchase of the toy dog or a five-cent peppermint cane could send her home with an actual physical refreshment as if she had slept off, rather than cast off, fatigue.

She would line up during the week, Monday's toy dog, Tuesday's peppermint cane, Wednesday's cap rosettes (fashioned out of five yards of baby ribbon at one cent the yard), and so on to Sat.u.r.day's climax of bootines, and on one occasion a large circular wooden arrangement, a sort of first aid to the first step, which she carried out herself, standing with it on the train platform.

With her three months' running start, paid in advance and duly receipted by Mrs. Dupree, Lilly's weekly expenditures, by the nicest calculation, reduced themselves thus:

Room rent. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .$2.50 Car fare (one round trip to Spuyten Duyvil). . . . . . . . . .60 Breakfast (gas-jet boiled egg, an apple, three biscuits from a tin, and coffee) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .50 Lunch (milk, cereal, sandwich) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.50 Dinner (lamb or beef stew, green vegetable, pie, coffee.

Tip) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.50 Laundry. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .75 ----- $9.35

There were already forty-two dollars and sixty-eight cents h.o.a.rded in a little biscuit tin in the depths of her valise, and out of it had come a gift for Mrs. Dupree, a rather interesting relic of an old silver thimble wrought in cunning filigree which she had bought in two payments of seventy-five cents each, and largely by eliminating the pie for a month, from a rapidly diminishing keep-chest of Ida Blair's.

A friendship had sprung up here, which, born out of the merest propinquity, had sent down strong roots into the common ground between them.

One or two nights they had attended the theater together, on orchestra pa.s.ses given out to them by one or the other of the Visigoths.

One Wednesday evening they saw the "School for Scandal" presented at the Academy of Music, and once, just before the permanent departure of R.J.

for Chicago, he had tossed negligently across the desk a single balcony ticket for Eames in "Faust."

"Here is something ought to keep one of you busy this rainy evening."

Ensued a highly feminine parley.

"Mrs. Blair, you take the ticket. Really, I'm too tired and I've some sewing to do."

"Nonsense! You're musical and I'm not. Besides, it will do you a world of good."

"I don't know," said Lilly, her lips giving a sensitive quiver. "I've put it so out of my mind that it might only tantalize."

But in the end she did attend, seating herself, for the first time in her life, in the F-minor, the perfumed twilight of the Metropolitan Opera House, just as the velvet curtains swished sibilantly apart.

Day was breaking, and in all the pa.s.sion and churchiness of Gounod, the student calls for death, the echoes of human happiness rustling through the background like the scything sound of harvesting.

Lilly could scarcely breathe for the poignancy of sensation. She was all throat. Faust's opening greeting to the dawn, his challenge to happiness, pierced her. She sat forward on her chair, antic.i.p.ating the lyrical vision of Marguerite, her hands clasped over the handle of her wet umbrella, and her knees crowded up unconsciously about its dampness.

She bought the libretto, humming down into it between acts and leaping ahead to verify her memory of the score.

Poor Lilly, it is doubtful if she was by endowment more than a lovely melomaniac doomed never to emerge from her musical primaries. A mere tonal accord could a.s.sail her nostrils like a perfume set to music. And yet her quick ear, though, was not exact. Her capacity for fine vocal distinctions in her own singing had been distinctly limited, and a note landing just this side of itself could drop down into her state of ecstatic coma with hardly a plop. She had neither capacity for exact.i.tude nor tireless fidelity to tone. It made her neck ache. She had never graduated from musical sensation to cerebration; a theme washed her over with all the voluptuous abandon of a Henner sea siren letting the water tickling up the beach to roll over her lightly.

There was unrest in the balcony because Faust was singing through laryngitis and a cloud of fog in his throat. A critic who wrote in terms of elliptical rhythms and tonal arabesques tiptoed out for a smoke. One of those sympathetic fits of coughing swept the house. But Lilly sat hunched in her habitual beatific att.i.tude against the chair back, the old opera flowing back to her in a.s.sociation that caught her at the tonsils.

"Lilly, play that over, the left hand alone."

"Oh, mamma, mamma!"

That blue challis wrapper shotted with pink rosebuds.

"Lilly, play that over."

Eames down there flinging up the "Jewel Song" like a curve of gold. Her place!

She half rose to her feet.

Down in front!

She sat again, but a sudden, an inexplicable sense of wanting to plunge from the height of the balcony seized her. It had been so long since the old neuralgic stabbings of spirit. She wanted to jump and had a ludicrous vision of herself landing down in the cream of white shoulders and crashing through the U of one of those immaculate shirt fronts. She could have torn and scratched the indestructibility of her failure and wanted suddenly and terribly to wrap those pearl-twined taffy braids around the rising throat of Marguerite as she sprayed the auditorium with the "Jewel Song," a great fire hose of liquid music finding out every cranny.

In the deep-napped velvet of this melodious darkness Lilly rose suddenly, pushing her way out through knee-impeded aisles and a string of protestations.

An usher helped her to find a door. She ran down several flights and into a side street. A slant of rain met her and she charged into it with bent head and umbrella. Bubbles with a tap of sleet in them exploded like little torpedoes on the sidewalks, curbs were rushing water, and Broadway was as black and oily-looking as a foundry. She tried to visualize it as she had seen it that first morning from her window at the Hudson Hotel, pink with sun.

The picture would not conjure, and finally, because her shoes were full of bubbles and her damp skirt clung and hindered walking, she boarded a street car and sat looking out of the water-lashed windows, her throat full of little moans like the song of a kettle just about to boil.

When she reached home there was an envelope beneath her door. It contained a snapshot picture of herself and Zoe taken by Mrs. Dupree one Sunday afternoon. Still wet, she sat down with it on the bed edge.

Against a background of shrub and stone steps Lilly was little more than a blur, but Zoe, with five little fingers dug into her cheek, leaped from the picture, all her dimples out.

The mood induced by the opera fell off like a cloak, a warm, easy tear splashing right down on the adorable little face. She wiped it off ever so painstakingly, holding the little print up to the gas to dry.

Then she stood it up on the table so she could gaze down and smile while she undressed, and even placed it on the floor as she leaned down to unlace her shoes. She climbed into bed with it under her pillow, but rose in the darkness to transfer it, against crumpling, beneath the mattress.

She went to sleep right off with a little smile on her lips, as if the picture had kissed it there, but it was many a day, sixteen years, in fact, before she could be induced to enter the Metropolitan Opera House again, and then only in the most crowded hour of her life.

CHAPTER V

Quite a friendship was thriving between Lilly and Mrs. Blair. The older woman had opened the door to her upon that family skeleton, one of which, by the way, lurks in the cupboards of most of us--the unproduced play! This one, a sketch called "The Web," read by Lilly and even placed by her with a written word of appreciation on Robert Visigoth's desk.

He carried it with him to Chicago, mailing it back one day without comment.

"Just the same, there is a corking idea there. You ought to develop it into a long play, Mrs. Blair."

"I will some day," she replied, with a cryptic something in her voice that Lilly was only to understand a year later.

One spring evening, that year later, as she and Mrs. Blair sat in her small room beside the open window that looked out over the twilighted rear of housetops, Lilly was induced to sing, quietly, almost under her breath, sitting there on the floor with her hands clasped about her knees, her invariable shirt waist and dark-blue skirt discarded for a pleasant sense of negligee in a pink cotton-crepe kimono, her hair flowing with the swift sort of rush peculiar to it.

They had just completed, as a relief from the nightly round of lunch rooms, a wood-alcohol meal of canned baked beans, cheese, crackers, and tinned sweet cakes. Even Mrs. Blair, at an age when the years are at the throat of a woman, shriveling it, had opened her blouse at the neck, revealing an unsuspected survival of its whiteness.