Center High School, the city's only at a time when half a million souls
beat up like sea around it, a model and modern institution that was
presently and paradoxically to become architectural paragon for what to
avoid in future high-school buildings, was again within street-car
distance, except on usually bland days, when Lilly and Flora Kemble
would walk home through Vandaventer Place, the first of those short,
private thoroughfares of pretentious homes that were presently to run
through the warp of the city like threads of gold.
On these homeward walks Flora and Lilly, who referred to each other as
"my chum," were fond of peripatetically exchanging the views, the
consciousness, and the sweetness of sixteen.
"If you had your choice, Lilly, what house would you select for yours in
Vandaventer Place?"
"None."
"Why?"
"I don't want to live in between stone gates with 'No Thoroughfare'
stuck on each end."
"You're the funniest girl! What do you mean, 'No thoroughfare'? Don't
you want to be exclusive and private?"
"Yes, but a person can be private somewhere high--high--not just stuck
between gates like everybody else. Sappho always sat on a balcony that
overlooked the Aegean Sea."
"Maybe she did, and she jumped off, too, but I'm not talking to-day's
Greek history lesson. I'm talking about regular folks. Between the gates
of Vandaventer Place would be good enough for me. Wouldn't I just love
to be mistress over one of these houses and give parties with an awning
stretched out over the sidewalk!"
"What did you get in algebra, Flora?"
"B plus. And you?"
"B minus."
"Lilly Becker, that is the fifth B minus you've had in succession. I'm
going to call you Lilly Minus."
"If she hadn't sprung that old oral exam on us--"
"Oh, if ifs and ands were pots and pans!"
Flora, rather freckly, elbowy, and far too tall, was none the less about
to be pretty. She was frailly fair, like her mother, and could already
throw her blue eyes about their balls, in the Esperanto of coquetry. She
had a treacherous little faculty of appearing never to study and yet
maintaining an excellent grade of scholarship.
"You get me to do all sorts of things with you, Flora, and then you
sneak off and study on the quiet and leave me to flunk because I
promised you I wouldn't study, either."
"Why, Lilly Becker, I never studied one minute for that algebra quiz."
"You did so! When I went downstairs to write in my Friendship Book, like
you said you were going to do, you worked your algebra instead. Roy
told me."
"Well, if I was as pretty as you, Lilly, I wouldn't ever care if I got
my lessons or not," said Flora, to palliate.
"Flora Kemble, I'm not pretty!"
"You are, too. Everybody says your complexion is like peaches and
cream, and look at mine, all freckles."
"Complexion, huh! If I had your yellow hair, you could have all my
complexion."
"Boys hate freckles because so many of them have them themselves."
"Always boys. Honestly, you're boy-crazy, Flora."
"Well, I like that. Can I help it if I got an invitation and you didn't?
You sat right next to him in English and I sat two whole seats away."
A cloud no larger and smudgier than a high-school boy's hand had dropped
its first shadow between them. Eugene Bankhead, son of the credit man
for Slocum-Hines, the city's largest wholesale hardware firm, had
suddenly, out of this clear sky, invited Flora to the Thanksgiving Day
football game between Center High and an exclusive local academy. A new
estate felt, rather than spoken, quickened the eye and authority of
Flora. A sense of it rode on the air waves between them.
"I hate boys."
"How do you know? You've never seen any except my brother and
sneak-thief Harry."
"Papa says if a girl begins to run around with boys too soon it makes
her so forward that by the time she's eighteen she's too old
and faded--"
"That's old-fogy talk."
"You mean it's old fogy for girls to let boys jam everything else out of
their heads. I'd like to see the boy that could make me forget my--my
ambitions."
"If Eugene had asked you instead of me you wouldn't be saying that."
"Anyway, I hate snips. I like men--real men."
"Oh, I know. You're stuck on Lindsley!"
A violent splash of red and a highly superlative denial of word and
manner laid hold of Lilly.
"Why, Flora Kemble!"
"Look at her blushing. Oh, what I know about you!"
"You fibber. I think he's the limit. I never saw a fellow so stuck on
himself."
"Oh, I know! I know now why you carry home twice as many books as you
used to since he got charge of the library."
"I'm reading the _Lady of the Lake_ and you know it. That's why I
stopped in to-night."
"I know why you're always writing compositions since you have him in
English. Lilly's stuck on Lindsley."
Tears were rare with Lilly, but a tremor waved her voice.
"I think you're horrid, Flora Kemble. Anyway, he's more worth while
being stuck on than Eugene Bankhead. He's just--just middle-class. His
future is to work in Slocum-Hines's hardware store, like his father."
"Well, that's more of a man's job than sitting around in a schoolroom
doing lady's work. Papa says Eugene's father is a five-thousand-a-year
man. Eugene has all the spending money he wants and they have a
conservatory in their house."
"Well, I'd rather be Lindsley than Eugene; besides, he's a kid hardly
out of short trousers."
"Silly, you don't think it's Eugene I'm stuck on, do you? His brother
Vincent is a big man down at Slocum-Hines's, too, and a catch. I'm going
to meet him some day. Lindsley! Ugh! I like a little sponduliks thrown
in with a fellow. Lindsley's elbows shine."
For the most part the Board of Education drew upon the offspring of its
own system for teaching talent, occasionally letting in an artery of new
blood. Lilly's second year in High School such an infusion took place in
the form of one H. Horace Lindsley, the young master of arts, his degree
rather heavy upon him, dawning blondly and behind high-power pince-nez
upon the English department.
Sweet sixteen capitulated to English literature. The double wave of Mr.
Lindsley's hair, the intellectual rush of very long, white teeth to the
front, somehow mitigating for the sins of a curriculum that could
present Gorboduc, and _Friar Bacon_ and _Friar Bungay_, to young minds
illy furrowed for such seed.
Notwithstanding the literary odor with which Mr. Lindsley sprayed
himself as he sprayed his handkerchief with a domestic scent called
"Sesame and Lilies," his neoclassic determination to write the American
_Iliad_ must have died painlessly when his iambically disposed feet
ventured too deeply into the quagmire of pedagogy, from which he was not
to emerge. But for the first time in her life Lilly was hearing her name
pronounced by one who rolled it under his tongue like a lollypop. He
rolled all names quite so, but in her beatitude she was only conscious
of her own as it candied. Besides, his eyes, through the pince-nez, had
a gimlet, goosefleshing quality; he recited "Straits of Dover" to a
class of young women with rapt adenoidal expression when he should have
been inoculating them with the bitter serum of Burke's Conciliation
Speech, and walked to school of wintry mornings without an overcoat;
skates and the _Areopagitica_ under his arm.
It was undeniable that at this stage Lilly had veered unaccountably to
authorship, her after-school practice hour gouged into by a suddenly
stimulated pen.
"Papa, I know my ambition!"
Mr. Becker let fall his newspaper to his knee, glancing up over the rim
of his reading glasses.
"What's it now, daughter?"
"I want to be a writer. You know, an author of stories. My English
teacher says I have talent. I get A minus on all my essays, and to-day
he wrote on the edge of one, 'Quite a literary touch.'"
MRS. BECKER (who rocked as she darned): "The trouble with you, Lilly, is
that you have it too good. You don't know what you want."
"You don't care if I am a writer, do you, papa?"
"Last week it was the stage, and last month the opera, and now it's
writing. What next, I wonder?"
"Your mother's right. There's no stability to this art business, Lilly.
They're a loose lot that never come to a good end."
"Well, just the same," cried Lilly, hot with a sense of futility and
rebellion, "your own father was the next thing to an actor. Preaching is
kin to acting."
"Don't you ever let me hear you talk like that again. Your grandfather
was a God-fearing, not a play-acting man." Attacking this subject, a
little furrow would invariably appear between Mr. Becker's fine gray
eyes and his lips express bitter intolerance for a world that translated
itself to him solely in terms of pink tights.
Not that the odor of religion lay any too heavily on Lilly's youth.
Sunday school was not enforced, Sabbath ethics were observed loosely, if
at all, but a yearly membership in the Garrison Avenue Rock Church was
maintained, not without remonstrance from Mrs. Becker.
"I don't see why we belong. If I want to attend church on Easter Sunday
or a Christmas, I don't have to pay dues all year for it. A person can
pray just as well at home as in church if he's inclined that way."
"Our child doesn't need to be raised like a heathen just because we
aren't as regular as we might be about churchgoing. Besides, when
trouble comes we don't want to be buried like heathens, either."
"Calamity howler."
"In England, papa, writers get buried in Westminster Abbey. If I lived
in England, that would be my ambition."
"The child has ambitions even about funerals. I bought you goods for a
navy-blue poplin to-day, Lilly. Gentle's had a sale."
"Oh, mamma, can you get Katy Stutz to come in time to make it for
auditorium next Friday? Mr. Lindsley may call on me to read my essay
out loud."
"That Mr. Lindsley makes me sick. You're a changed child since he's come
to that school. Mrs. Foote said the same thing of Estelle at the euchre
yesterday. All the girls want new dresses and to be in his classes."
"Why, mamma!" coloring up.
"Oh, run over to Pirney's and buy me a postal card. I'll write Katy
Stutz to take Mrs. Foote's days away from her and give them to me."
By small briberies employed without sense of compromise, Mrs. Becker had
a way with those who served her. Katy Stutz, an old soul as lean and as
green as a cotton umbrella, had sewed at minimum wage through fourteen
years of keeping Lilly daintily and a bit too pretentiously clad.
Willie, Mrs. Schum's old negro cook, who wore her feet wrapped in gunny
sacking, and every odd and end that came down in the day's waste
baskets, from empty spools to nubs of pencil, stored away in the kink of
her hair, would somehow invariably send up the giblets along with the
Beckers' Sunday allotment of chicken. Mr. Keebil, too, an old Southern
relic, his head covered with suds of gray astrakhan and a laugh like the
up and down of rusty bedsprings, for ten years had presided over the
hirsute destinies of Lilly and her mother. Bi-monthly he arrived on his
shampooing mission, often making a day's tour throughout the
boarding house.
"Mr. Keebil, don't you do the Kembles' heads first to-day. That's the
way with you people. I get you all your customers and then you neglect
me for them."
"Law! Mrs. Beckah, how cum you think that? Don't I give you and Miss
Lilly shampoos for two bits when I chawges Mrs. Kemble three heads for
a dollar?"
"Yes, but what about the underwear and socks of Mr. Becker's that you
get?"
"I allas say I 'ain't got no bettah friend than Mrs. Beckah. That was
certainly a fine suit you done give me las' time, except for the
buttons cut off."
"You should consider yourself lucky to get a head like Miss Lilly's to
take care of at any price. Just look at it--like spun silk."
He would fluff out the really beautiful cascade of smooth and highly
electric hair, his brown hands, so strangely light pink of palm, full of
pride in their task.
"Law! Miss Lilly, if you ain't going to grow up the pick of them all."
"Ouch! Mr. Keebil, you hurt!" cried Lilly, ever tender of scalp.
Nor was Mrs. Becker above a bit of persiflage.
"Mr. Keebil, I hear it is something scandalous the way you and Willie
are setting up to each other."
The old shoulders would shake, the face crinkle into a raisin, and the
little spade of gray beard heave to the springy laughter.
"Law! Mrs. Beckah. if you ain't the greatest one to joke."
"Joke nothing. It's a fine match. A good upstanding church member like
you and a fine-looking woman like Willie."
Lilly would turn a quirking but disapproving eye upon her mother.
"Mamma, haven't you anything better to do?"
"Law! Miss Lilly, me and your ma we understand each other. Me and your
papa we know she will have her little joke but the heart is there.
That's what counts on the Lord's Judgment Day--the heart."
Lilly's poplin frock was completed for the Friday auditorium exercises.
Her two braids, now consolidated into one hempy rope, lay against her
back, finishing without completement of hair ribbon into a cylinder of
brushed-around-the-finger curl. It was a little mannerism of hers, not
entirely unconscious, to fling the heavy coil of hair over one shoulder.
It enhanced her face, somehow, the fall of shining plait down over her
young bosom. Contrary to her choking expectation, she was not called
upon to read, but to sit on the platform in an honorable-mention row
of five.
Flora Kemble read a B-plus paper, largely and in immaculate vertical
penmanship, entitled "Friendship," Lilly, the tourniquet twist at her
heart, sitting by. Her name was read later among the honorable five,
true to manner, Mr. Lindsley seeming to caress it with his tongue.
"Miss Halpern. Mr. Prothero. Miss Foote. Miss Deidesheimer. Miss
Beck-er."
From where she sat Lilly could see the slightly protuberant shine to his
teeth, the intellectual ride of glasses along his thin nose, the long,
nervous hand with a little-finger fraternity ring.
Her own hands were very cold, her cheeks very pink. She had a pressing
behind the eyes of a not-to-be-endured impulse of wanting to cry. His
reading of her name was a hot javelin through the pit of her being.
After the exercises and as school was in dismissal she saw him hurrying
out of a side door with a tennis racket. It seemed suddenly intolerable
that walk home through Vandaventer Place to her boarding-house world.
Flora's perceptions were small and quick.
"Why, Lilly, your cheeks are as red as anything and you're getting a
fever blister. Somebody kissed you!"
Her hand flew to her mouth almost guiltily, as if to the feel of lips
slightly protuberant.
"Why--Oh, you horrid girl!"
"It was Lind! Lind!"
"Lind--what--who?"
"Lindsley, of course," dipping with laughter.
"Flora Kemble, I'll never speak to you again. You're stuck on him
yourself and trying to put it on to me."
"Me stuck on him, the way his teeth stick out! No poor school-teacher
for mine!"
"You're boy-crazy. I'm not."
But that night for the first time in her life Lilly lay through a
sleepless hour, staring up into the darkness. The blanket irked her and
she plunged it off, burrowing one cheek and then the other into her
pillow in search of cool spots. Her mother puffed out slowly into the
silence, her father a bit more sonorous and full of rumblings.
Lilly felt herself wound up tightly and needing to be run down. She was
taut as a spring. After a while she took to plucking out from the
darkness words of sedative quality.
"Dove," she repeated softly to herself, and very, very slowly. "Dove.
Beautiful, quiet dove. Saint. Cathedral. Peace. Dell."
But when she finally did drop off to sleep a smile of protuberant teeth
was out like a rainbow across her darkness.