Star-Dust Part 53

Lilly sang "Jocelyn," a lullaby dimmed in her memory by the mist of years and full of inaccuracies. She had last sung it at Flora Kemble's.

It lay on the twilight after she had finished.

"How pretty! Why don't you let one of the Visigoths hear you? It might lead to something."

"Robert V. has heard me."

"Well, I don't pretend to be a judge of music, but considering your youth and looks and when I see the kind of thing that does get across--"

"I know. I used to feel that way about it, too--hot, rebellious--but, somehow, not any more. Strange that it should have taken my child to show me. I realized it last winter when I heard Eames. I simply hadn't it to give, except in desire. Why, her voice--it seemed to climb up around an invisible spiral staircase to the stars; and that wasn't all!

There was something so richly colored through it--like the candy stripe through a crystal. I know now--and I'm glad I know--that my ambition was bigger than my talent."

"I suppose that is what you thought about me, too, when you read my sketch."

"No, no. I admit I did think it amateurish, but there is an idea in 'The Web.' Almost as if you had lived it yourself and had written it in blood. Besides, you know the secret of concentration; it shows in your work at the office. I couldn't stick night after night over one of those trial balances of yours. I'd throw it over. I've never in my life really worked for anything. Even as a child I used to cheat myself--move the clock; hadn't that sublime capacity for grind. That was part of the lack. How clear it all seems now!"

"The cruelest clarity in the world is wisdom after the event."

"Oh, but I wouldn't have one thing different! It simply wasn't in me to want badly enough, and therefore I didn't attain. But I know--I know, Mrs. Blair, that there is a logic running somewhere through it all.

Nothing has been in vain. I'm out on a highroad now with open running ahead. I'm going to rear her into a superwoman. She is my song, Zoe!

There is logic, I tell you, Mrs. Blair--straight through the apparent mix-up. Off somewhere in Corsica a vine is putting down roots that there may be wine in somebody's gla.s.s some day. The vine. The grape.

The wine."

"The vine. The grape. The wine."

"Don't you understand now a little better, Mrs. Blair, why this poor little fermenting grape couldn't stay on the vine?"

"You've told me so little, dear."

"More than I've ever told a living soul. There's one thought I love to carry about with me about Zoe. She was born out of captivity. No Chinese shoes for her little mind or her little soul or body. I'm vague about it now, just as I'm half crystallized about everything. But this time my will to do is unlimited and unfaltering! Her whole life is going to be a growth toward fulfillment of self. I want life to dawn upon her in great truths, not in ugly shocks and realizations. She is a plant and I am her trellis toward the light. Do you see? Do you? I may be as wrong as you think I am, Mrs. Blair--terribly, irrevocably wrong--but I wouldn't take her back there into that--that--sedentary fatness--I wouldn't--"

A musing sort of silence had fallen into a gloom that was thickening into darkness.

"The more I see of your case, Lilly, the less I understand it. To think of anyone in this world of suffering deliberately bringing it upon herself. Why, my dear, it isn't any of my business, but when I think of those parents of yours out there, comprehending nothing, and that poor bewildered husband of yours, I could cry for them."

"Do you think I don't, Mrs. Blair, whole nightfuls of tears? Why, yesterday at the Library in my home paper I saw a little local notice of my mother's euchre club meeting at our house--it was a knife, somehow--the pain of it--"

"I'm not saying so much about the husband, only, G.o.d knows why a woman should throw away a life-time of protection just because a man chews with his temples and--"

"Surely you haven't taken that literally! I only tried to symbolize for you that the unimportant mannerisms that may even delight in one person can become monstrosities in another. Oh, I haven't made you understand--"

"Yes, dear child, you have made me understand this much. What a fine sense of satire the power behind the throne of the world must have. Take me--that first little two-by-four home of mine over in a back street of Newark. Talk to me of freedom! I married to get away from it. Somebody who cared whether I came or went. Somebody who cared enough to want to restrict me."

"Ah yes, but--"

"We had a little house on Dayton Street; must have been a hundred years old, with funny little leaded panes and a staircase rising out of the parlor to a queer old box of a bedroom with slant walls. We painted the floors ourselves and Lon did the doors in burntwood. He had a feeling for the artistic, Lon had. That was the way we met--that was--the way--we--met."

"How?"

"He was a police sergeant then, and I was bookkeeping for the time for Metz Producing Company. Lon used to drop in once in a while for pa.s.ses.

Then he got to waiting for me evenings with little pencil drawings of all the funny things that had happened to him during the day. I was strong for him to get off the force and take up art, but even then, now that I look back on it, I can see that Lon was fed up on propositions that it was driving him half mad to resist. That in itself should have put me on my guard, but it didn't. I don't know why I'm telling you all this--"

"Go on."

"Oh, I must have known in a way that Lon was drinking in his effort to keep his eyes shut to the bribe money that could have come his way. He never came home to me under the influence, but toward--the end--his eyes began to gla.s.sen up. I was all for getting his beat changed. You see, it took him down into the gang and red-light districts. More than that, I had my heart set on seeing him off the force altogether. I wanted to keep my position for a year or two after we were married and send him to Paris to study art. I've some cartoons in my trunk. That boy would have made good as--Well, it didn't happen. I blame myself. Marriage made a great baby of me, Lilly. You see, I'd never been coddled in my life--all those years of struggle on my own. Well I just turned soft and he loved to baby me. Why, when I went back to bookkeeping I had to learn it all over like a beginner--that's how wrapped up I became in that little home of ours!"

"How long, Mrs. Blair, did you live in it?"

"Fourteen months and five days. It was a tiny place and we didn't have much to spend at first, but what I had I managed to good advantage. Lon hated makeshift. He couldn't get the fun out of simplicity that I could.

He wanted to dress me up. He wanted a big house. Big. Everything big.

That was his undoing. That's what they called him in the Ring, I learned later, 'Gentleman Lon.' And I never knew there was a Ring! Never knew the filthy inside workings of the graft game existed. That's the way he protected me from everything ugly--from poverty. Me, that had never been protected from either. O G.o.d! if he'd only been truthful with me those last few months. I--I can't talk about it--I--"

"Then don't, dear Mrs. Blair, I didn't mean to--"

"He began bringing home more money than was natural, but he always explained it--a tip from a bucket shop on his beat--extra duty. If I had been right strong those days I might have suspected. Once he walked the floor all night, said it was a toothache, my poor boy! and let me fix a hot-water bottle for him. Then two men came one evening and there was some loud talk down in the parlor and I heard words like 'squeal' and 'gangsters.' He told me when he came upstairs that one of them was Eckstein. But how was I to know who Eckstein was? Didn't, until I heard it was he who had been--shot. I--You see, the captain had closed in on Eckstein's place because of a personal grudge, and Eckstein came running to Lon to save him. Threatened to squeal on Lon--on the whole business--if he didn't. Lon was hot-headed--got frightened--lost his head. O G.o.d! I don't know what--never will know--"

"Know--what?"

"That evening he stayed home and helped me fix up the nursery. Yes, I was expecting in the spring. That's why he was so for keeping things from me. We painted the woodwork white and gave a couple of coats to a little brown crib I had picked up second hand. He was for buying an enameled one on casters--he loved the best. Next night--next night--he--didn't come home--and at eight o'clock the following morning the extras were on the street--about the killing. Even then I didn't tie up--Lon and Eckstein. O G.o.d! G.o.d! how could I--"

"Tie up what? Who?"

"He was a cat's-paw, Lilly. Never believe otherwise. My boy was caught and trapped in the filthy cesspool of politics. There are men in this city--men whom I named at the trial, all the good it did me, living and prospering for doing worse than my boy died for. You wouldn't know of my boy, Lilly; you were too young then. The whole country knew him, eleven years ago. Lon Elaine. It's easier Blair; no questions asked. It was the beginning of a cleanup that my boy blazed the way for. He went to the gallows, Lilly--my boy--"

"No! No!"

"He died a gunman. Thank G.o.d his child was born dead. But he lies in my heart, Lilly like a saint washed clean. He sinned for love, and because stronger forces than he wanted him for a tool. May every man on his jury live to carry that truth to his grave. He killed in self-defense and he sinned for love. I'll exonerate him in a play, yet! I will! I'll tell them! I'll tell them!"

Told without hysteria, her tale had almost a droning quality on the twilight. She was grim in her tragedy, and her lips were as twisted and dried as paint tubes, yet Lilly crept closer, laying her cheek rather timidly against the corduroyed one.

"Ida Blair," she said. "I see now. 'The Web'! Oh--Ida Blair."

They fell silent, the two of them, dry-eyed, cheek to cheek, drowning back into a long twilight that finally blackened.

"I don't know why I've told you all this. It's been ten years since I've talked it. But your telling me that you threw it all over--that little home out there, and a man that was driving down deeply the stakes of his home--threw it over because the black spot from his collar b.u.t.ton made you feel hysterical--Oh, I tell you there is a grin through the scheme of things. A laugh. What old man Metz used to call a belly laugh."

Chin cupped in hand, Lilly stared out into a back yard that was filled with the tulle of winding mist, the lighted rear windows of the houses opposite blurry, as if seen through tears.

"Just the same," she said, her lips in the straight line peculiar to this not infrequent reiteration, "I'd do the same if I had it to do over again."

"How do you know that some day your child is not going to turn upon you with the bitterest reproaches?"

"She won't; she's too much like me. That is why it is going to be something sublime to have the rearing of her. It is going to be like living my life over again the way I once dreamed it. I know even now what she wants, before she puckers up her little lips for it. Of course, you are right--he--they have the right to know. But take the shine off that creature? Clip the wings of her spirit? Fatten her little soul back there in that sluggish environment? She'd hate it as I hated! Oh you must have seen for yourself that Sunday I took you out there. The little live stars in her eyes. The plunge and rear to her little body. Never!

She's mine! We two! Out on the open road!"

"I shouldn't want the responsibility of rearing my child in a paid inst.i.tution if I had better to offer."

"I haven't better! I've proved to myself, Mrs. Blair, to what limit I would go to--to save her from back there. Proved it--horribly! No--no, she's mine. No, not even mine. She belongs to herself. As soon as her little brain is ready to take it in, she shall decide; but until then--she's mine."