There is a sense of detachment from this old planet of ours goes with
travel, that is not unlike that instant when the pole vaulter's feet are
farthest off ground. It seemed to Lilly, after a while, that both her
starting point and her destination had fallen away. She hung in
abeyance. She was the unanchored streak of a rocket through space.
Time was dropping away from her with a sense of the same steep declivity
that could awaken her out of a doze to a sense of falling. She was
rolling through the pleasant monotony of Indiana, against the light
slant of a morning suddenly turned rainy. Quick diagonal streaks flecked
the pane and she could see the drops spat down into a thick white-plush
road, clipping it of nap.
The sleeper was quite empty save for a medley of drummers' talk and the
rattle of chips from the smoking room and an old man in a skull cap who
dozed incessantly. Even the porter dozed. She sat the day through
without responding to calls for meals, the rain falling steadily now
like a curtain. At five o'clock the lamps were already burning and a
rash of little lights began to break out over the landscape.
"Some day," she mused, "I'll look back upon all this and laugh. I'll
tell it in a newspaper interview. Lillian Ploag. No, Luella Ploag.
Ploag. No-o, Luella--Luella Parlow! Not bad. Luella Parlow!"
She asked a passing porter the time.
"Six-forty-six!"
* * * * *
She slept fitfully, awakening with little exclamations, and once came so
suddenly out of a doze that she awoke sitting bolt upright, bumping her
head against the top of the berth. Cup her hands as she would against
the window pane, she could not see out, but it seemed to her that dawn
must be imminent. She felt for her little watch, leaning to the streak
of light the curtains let in. Ten-five! Not yet midnight. She lay back
on the gritty bed, trembling.
At six o'clock there were still stars, but a coral tremor was against
the sky line and clouds coming up furiously. Suddenly she realized that
the clouds were mountains and that the flat territory had flowed through
the night into Pennsylvania mountains that were like plunging waves, and
with the changed physiognomy, her mood quickened. She would not wait for
the sun, dressing in her berth.
At eight o'clock, and for only the third time in her life, she
breakfasted in a dining car. It was well crowded, the old man in the
skull cap across the aisle from her gouging out an orange. She ordered
with a sense of novelty and thrift, passing on from grilled spring
chicken, bar-le-duc, and honey-dew melon to eggs and bacon. A drummer
with a gold-mounted elk's tooth dangling from his chain ogled her, so
she sat very prim of back, gazing out over flying villages that were
like white-pine toys cut in the cisalpine Alps and invitingly more
clipped and groomed than the straggling Indiana towns of yesterday. She
was cruelly conscious of self, and throughout the meal kept the tail of
her glance darting at her surroundings, dropping a piece of toast once
and apologizing to the waiter, continuing to smile in an agony of strain
after the incident. She ate slowly, her little finger at right angle to
her movements, masticating with closed lips, her napkin constantly
dabbing up at them.
Finally the head waiter, who had been hovering, to Lilly's great
discomfiture, directly at her shoulder, steered a young woman, with a
great deal of very fuzzy light-brown hair about her face, to the empty
seat opposite. She had a certain air of chic, was modishly dressed, wore
no rings except a marriage band, and long pink nails with careful half
moons. With the ripple of a thrill over her, Lilly registered her as
"typical New Yorker." As a matter of fact, she was the wife of a teacher
of physics in Brooklyn Manual Training School, returning from a two
weeks' visit to her mother-in-law in Indianapolis.
She ordered with somewhat of a manner, asking for an immediate cup of
hot water, and to Lilly there was something esoteric even in that. The
sturdy, fine machine of her own body had the crass ability to start off
the day with bacon and eggs. She blushed for the healthiness of
her choice.
A patter of conversation sprang up between them, something like this:
"Would you mind passing me the sugar?"
"Why, certainly not!" from an eager Lilly.
"Going all the way to New York?"
"Yes."
"Live there?"
"No. Do you?"
"Yes, since my marriage."
"Do you like it?"
"New York is not a point of view, my dear. It's a habit. Your system
comes to demand it just as an opium fiend comes to require so many
pipefuls. You know it's bad for you, but the fumes are delicious."
"What fumes?"
"The fumes of the metropolis, my dear. The perfumes of wealth. The next
best to being Mrs. Four Hundred herself is to walk past her Fifth Avenue
home and see her step out of her automobile."
"I suppose so, if wealth is what one craves most."
"It isn't a craving in New York; it's a necessity. But to those of us to
whom life is pretty much of a compromise anyway, there is something in
mere propinquity to wealth that is like smelling into a tumbler with its
sides still wet from some rare old chartreuse. It isn't filling, but
it's heady."
"That's exactly the way I feel about life; it's worth going after if you
only get the aroma. If I can't be Venus, then let me be the star dust
that is nearest to her!"
It seemed to Lilly that she was suddenly talking to her own kind. New
York spoke her language.
"Fearful coffee. I always say the only place outside of my own
percolator I can get a decent cup of coffee is the new Hudson."
"The Hudson? Is that a good hotel?"
"Yes, splendid. Are you alone?"
There occurred to Lilly a swift talent for the moment.
"Certainly," she said, shaping her own voice into a petard against the
little clang of surprise in the voice of her _vis-à-vis_. "I always
travel alone. I'm a professional."
"Really?" her glance running over the somewhat florid details of the
corn-colored linen. "With that fine chest, I'll warrant you're
a singer."
"Right."
"I wonder if you know Margaret Mazarin."
"Indeed I do, from hearsay."
"Well, we virtually gave Margaret her start. Madge Evans is her real
name. My husband grew up next door to her in Indianapolis. She
practically used to make our apartment her home. One day when she was
about as close to bed rock as a girl could be, my husband said to her:
'Madge, if the managers won't give you a hearing, why don't you try some
of those agencies in the Pittman Building in Longacre Square? I see all
sorts of musical and theatrical agencies' signs on the windows.' Bless
us, if the very first one to which she applied didn't give her the
position that indirectly led her straight to the Metropolitan! Some one
connected with one of the biggest patrons of the opera heard her singing
down at a little old ten-twenty-and-thirty theater and got her an
audience right off."
"Oh," cried Lilly, her face ardent, "if only--I--some day--"
"Yes," continued her companion, dipping into her finger bowl and pushing
back, "Madge always says it was that tip from my husband, a mere chance
suggestion, gave her a start."
"Wonderful!"
They paid, each her check, leaving small womanish tips beside their
saucers.
"Well, I hope some day to have the pleasure of hearing you sing. Are you
in concert?"
"Oh yes, concert."
"I must watch for your name," digging down into a reticule for a bit of
cardboard. "Mine is Towser--Mrs. Seymour Towser. What is yours?"
"Mine? Lilly Penny," she replied, her whole body flashing to rescind
the word no sooner than it was spoken. "Lilly-Penny-Parlow."
They swayed their way through the chain of cars, Lilly's coach running
two ahead of her companion's.
"Well, good-by, Miss Parlow, I hope we meet again some day."
"Good-by," said Lilly, making her way relievedly through two more cars
of aisle.
Once in her seat, she withdrew hastily from her valise a small red
memorandum book, giltly inscribed "Mid-West Insurance Company," plying a
quick and small chirography on to its first page:
Pittman Building, Longacre Square.
Hudson Hotel.
The day, which for Lilly began with the tickle of aërial champagne,
petered out humiliatingly. Quite without the precedent of the previous
trip to Buffalo, Niagara Palls, and Chicago, train-sickness set in and
the remainder of the day was spent hunched with her face to the prickly
hot plush of the seat, her hair and linen suit awry, and not a spot on
the pillow mercifully proffered by the porter that would remain cool to
her cheek.
It was well past nine o'clock, and two hours behind schedule, when a
very limp and rumpled Lilly followed the weary straggle of weary
passengers through the pale fog of the New Jersey station to the waiting
ferry. She found a place at the very bow, and, standing there beside her
bags, hat off to the sudden kiss of fresh air, her prostrated senses
seemed to lift.
There was something Trojan, Illiadic, in the way in which they moved out
presently, to bay. The first tang of salt air, that rotten,
indescribable smell of the sea, tickled her nostrils. It was all she
could do to keep from being drunk with it. She felt skittish. She wanted
to kick up.
The approach was not spectacular. The great spangled flank of herself
which New York turns to her harbor had just about died down, only a
lighted tower jutting above the gauze of fog like a château perched on a
mountain. Fog horns sent up rockets of dissonance. Peer as she would,
Lilly could only discern ahead a festoon of lights each smeared a bit
into the haze.
She began her trick of dramatizing the moment. She wanted suddenly to
claw apart the dimness with her finger nails. She wanted to lean into
the beyond, to wind herself in that necklace of lights out there and
bend back until she touched the floor of the universe.
They slid into slip. Chains dropped. There was a sudden plunge forward.
Night was day, white arc lights grilling into a vast black shed. A few
automobiles and a line of horse cabs backed up against a curb--the
one-horse variety that directly antedated the general use of the
taxicab. A porter shoved her bags into one of these, the driver leaning
an ear down off his box.
"Where to, miss?"
"Hudson Hotel," she said, sitting back against the leather tufting.