And so it came about, through events of surprisingly simple shaping,
that her first week in the metropolis found Lilly integral to it.
She liked the consciousness that unless she appeared at the Union Family
Theater at two-fifteen and at eight-fifteen she was breaking into the
continuity of a sequence of events in which she had her place.
She was already in the rush of assurance that followed her sense of
earning capacity, regarding the Union Family Theater merely as a means
to an end, and in spare time had registered at two concert bureaus, read
off the same building of plate-glass windows, and had purchased the
score of "Carmen," humming Michaela's aria, in bed of mornings. There
was a letter she had once obtained from Max Rinehardt, addressed:
"_To Whom It May Concern. Miss Lilly Becker has studied with me for a
period of three years. I consider her voice a lyric soprano of fine
quality._"
Evidently it concerned no one. The clerk at the concert bureau tossed it
aside without comment. Visigoth, when he read it one day in the wings,
returned it in just that manner.
She was secretly ashamed of her professional debut in a role that would
not have survived the ridicule of even Flora Bankhead's easy standards.
Many a time, together at matinées, they had giggled and munched
chocolates over acts that hardly rivaled hers for sentimental appeal of
about one dimension. Plenty of length and no depth.
To a series of colored views thrown upon the screen, Lilly sang from a
dark stage into the warm musk and stale linen-smelling theater, a ballad
as slow and sweet as taffy in the pulling.
"Dressed up in her gingham gown,
Just to come with me to town.
How the sun was shining down!
It seemed to bless our lit-tul wedding day."
CHORUS:
"Darling Sue--e dear,
How I miss your laughing!
Seems to me I hear it in the same old way.
Darling Sue dear, don't believe I'm chaffing.
Bless your heart! I love you in the same old way."
Lights! Revealing Lilly in the pink mull and dangling sunbonnet beside
the blank white screen. They liked her, invariably demanding encore,
this time the words and score of the chorus thrown upon the screen and,
to Lilly's importunings and pretty encouragement, the house joining in.
By arrangement with the publishing house, this exploitation of song hits
cost the Visigoth brothers nothing. In fact the little novelty soon came
to supplement one of the eight acts on the program, thus eliminating
a number.
Each week a new song score bordered in hearts and flowers was thrown
upon that darkness, the audience eager to find a hum in it.
Lilly's second song, "Mamma, Why Are You So Sad To-night?" went even
better than the first, and it so pleased Robert Visigoth, who in those
years had his ears to the ground of the daily audience, to hear them
filing out, whistling and carrying it on little tra-la-las, that he
called Lilly into his office the first day of the second week, to
announce a five-dollar raise in salary.
She had been in the habit of oozing past him rather hurriedly in and out
the dark passages, conscious that his touch was ever ready to slide down
her length of arm, or his knee to find out hers and press it if he sat
down beside her as she waited in the wings.
It was before the realty aspect, the buying, leasing, and selling, of
theater property had engulfed him, and his presence around the theater,
often shirt-sleeved, was hardly a matter of moment.
However favorably he differed in aspect from Lilly's preconception of
the managerial genius, her inhibitions concerning him were strong. She
always sat on the edge of her chair in his presence. To accept so much
as a slip of paper from him meant that his touch would trail to the last
long-drawn second. His eyes had a habit of focusing, seeming to move in
a bit toward the tip of his nose and grill intimately into her being.
And then his wetted lips, as if his mouth were watering.
"You need to be waked up," he said once to her. "You're like a great big
sleepy cat."
She jerked away from his touch and his reference, hurrying from the
theater, as always, immediately after her act, which came first on the
afternoon and evening bill. Secretly she was thoroughly ashamed of what
she was doing, putting each performance quickly behind her.
Six hundred and twenty-two dollars still lay in the chamois bag against
her bosom, but the additional five dollars a week on to her salary was a
saving prop against the not infrequent sag of her spirit.
She was listed at half a dozen agencies, but nothing presented itself.
Her first hotel bill, twenty-eight dollars, sent her scurrying, against
further and deeper inroads into the chamois bag, to an immediately
adjoining side street of brownstone fronts as without identity as a row
of soldiers, all of them proclaiming the furnished room to that great
sandstorm of New York transients who blow in and out of them in
nameless whirl.
Their dreariness flowed over her in cold, soupy odors, that left a
feeling of a coating of grease over the surface of her. The poor filbert
of gaslight burning into floor after floor of slits of hallway. The
climb after a whole processional of spotty landladies whose shortness of
breath contributed to the odor-laden air.
The room which she finally obtained at three dollars a week was a
third-floor front, shaped like a shoe box, with an aisle of walking
space between the cot and washstand, and as dank to her and as
shiver-inducing as a damp bathing suit donned at dawn.
But the matting on the floor smelled scrubbed, the bathroom at the head
of the stairs contained a porcelain tub instead of the usual horror in
painted tin, and except for June bugs that bumbled all night against her
ceiling, attracted by the incandescence from the theater sign across the
street, was free from those scavengers of bed slats and woodwork which,
often as she inspected from room to room, to her agonized flush, had
crawled across a landlady's very denial of them.
Robert Visigoth had a habit of appraising this ready blush of hers. It
never rushed hotly to her face but what he noted it in persiflage.
"Look at her blush!" he cried, one afternoon as they both stooped to
recover her dropped hand bag, their heads bumping so that they sprang
apart in laughter.
"The idea, Mr. Visigoth! I'm not blushing!" she cried, stinging with her
inability to control the too ready red.
He ran his hand over the smooth glaze of her hair.
"Don't!"
"Let's see if it will muss. I'll wager it's painted on."
"It grows that way," she said, levelly.
"I like it! Clean as a whistle. Interesting. In fact, you're a mighty
interesting young woman, if you want to know it, Miss Luella Parlow."
"What is the song for next week, Mr. Visigoth?"
"'My Pretty, My Pretty,'" he said, his intimate eyes watching her
wriggle, with a sense of being ridiculous, on the hook of his glance.
"I never know how to take you," she flared, infuriated, and rushed
toward the door.
"Take me--with you."
"Really now--this--this is too absurd."
"Where are you going?"
"Home, of course. I have all this time to myself between now and the
evening performance. Why waste it sitting around with the dog and
trapeze acts?"
"Where do you live?"
"West Forty-fourth Street, near Eighth."
"Where?"
"West Forty-fourth Street."
"Hm-m-m!" he said, with a new easiness of manner that alarmed her.
"Selfish little girl. All this time to yourself."
"You would be surprised how it flies."
"What do you do?"
"Oh, no end of odds and ends. Wash out things. Read. Sew. Practice.
Write."
"What do you write? Letters to suitors? Lucky chaps."
"Nonsense!" she said, coloring.
"A girl like you must have a string of them after her."
"No! I write--you see, I've always sort of wanted to write fiction.
Magazine stories. I like to scribble in my spare time."
"Story writing? You can't serve two masters in this profession."
"Oh, and then I practice." It was here she had shown him the letter
addressed, "To Whom It May Concern." "I haven't a piano, but you would
be surprised how helpful it is just to memorize the role from
the score."
"What role?"
"I know four. Michaela is my last. I haven't memorized all of her aria
yet, but half the time I'm singing her with my mind, if you know what I
mean. I once had twelve lessons on Marguerite. With study, Mr. Visigoth,
and perhaps some more lessons with one of the big teachers here, do you
think I have the slightest chance for opera or--concert? You can be
frank with me. Do you?"
He patted her.
"Too much ambition will make that satiny head of yours ache."
"Let it ache."
"What you need more than lessons is some one to wake you up. That will
do more for you than all the training money can buy. You need a
rousing-good love affair. Love, that's the secret!"
She walked past him now, swinging open the stage door.
"You can be so nice, Mr. Visigoth, and so--horrid."
He followed, laughing.
"I'll walk a ways. Which way you going?"
"Home."
They strolled into the syrupy warmth of a late Indian-summer afternoon.
At each crossing he took her arm, closing gently into the flesh.
"Yes, my little lady, that's what you need."
"What?"
"To be waked up."
"Oh, there you go again! Is there no limit to sex self-consciousness? I
want to be a person in my work. An individual. Not first and foremost
a woman!"
"Why, my dear girl, you talk like a child! Sex is the very soul of art.
The greatest songs have been sung and the greatest pictures painted
because men and women have loved. Don't tell me a great big handsome
creature like you doesn't realize that!"
"Well, just the same," with feminine subjectiveness, "I mean to make my
way as an individual first and a woman second. I give nothing to you men
and I ask nothing except a fighting chance. I don't believe in all this
pay-the-price business. I don't recognize you as the arbiters of my
destiny. I'll pay my price with my ability, and if I can't pay up that
way then I deserve to fail. Women can fight back at the world with
something besides their sex. I intend to prove it."
He closed tighter over her arm.
"I like you when you tilt at windmills, Miss Don Quixote, and I like the
way your eyes turn black."
"There you are at it again."
"Certainly; it's the law of life."
"You mean it's the law of men! Why should you set the price of our
success? We women are going to batter down the monopoly."
"You're a regular little holy terror for woman's rights. Come in here
for a drink and tell me about it."
They were approaching the rapids of Broadway, the quickened torrent of
the pleasure zone that leaps high in folly even under sunlight. Sidewalk
humanity quickened and had a shove to it. Street cars and cabs plunged
in seemingly impassable directions. Frivolity was showing her naked
shoulder on lithograph roof garden and matinée stage. The Times Building
stood like a colossus, breakwater to the tide. Rector's invited.
"Come in for a drink," he repeated.
She threw him a northwest glance with what for her amounted to quite an
adventure in coquetry.
"Aha!" in the key of burlesque. "Either I sully these fair lips with
alcohol or to-morrow I awake jobless."
He was visibly annoyed, dropping her arm and hurrying past the mirrored
entrance.
"You flatter yourself."
She bit into her lips, again with a sense of her ridiculousness,
confessing, in her stress and against the old inhibition, to a state of
being unwell.
"It isn't that, and you know it! I'm done up these last few days.
Feeling seedy. It must be this Indian-summerish heat."
"Poor pussy!" he said, again good-humored.
It was true that a recurring sense of dizziness would sweep like a
sudden wave over her, in street cars, even in bed before she rose
mornings, and that very afternoon as she sang into the murky darkness a
terrifying sense of it had threatened her.
In the little restaurant in Union Square which she frequented, her
healthy young appetite would prompt her to order foods that when they
arrived she would suddenly reject. She tried to guard against these
nervous recurrences by resolutely permitting no thought of her
yesterdays to crop into her to-days. Except, daily, she visited the
Public Library, reading over St. Louis newspapers of last week's
vintage, and never failing to glance at the death notices. For one week
an advertisement under PERSONAL appeared, which every time she
encountered it was sure to blur over her vision with quick tears:
Lilly, come home. All is forgiven.
She attributed some of her nervousness to the condition of mind this
little paragraph invariably induced. To bear out this conviction she
even omitted the visits to the Library for three or four days, but still
the flashes of discomfort persisted.
They had stopped at the stoop of her lean-looking rooming house.
"So this is where you live," he said, half a smile out and his lids well
down.
"Yes," she said, unconsciously defiant, "and for my purpose it's fine."
"No doubt."
"Clean, quiet, and reasonable."
"I see," he said through the same smile that was somehow hateful to her,
and after a moment of apparent indecision raised his hat and walked off.
The following evening, without waiting for the second refrain of chorus
or the lights to flash up, and creating some confusion down in the
orchestra, Lilly left the stage rather hurriedly, her hand groping ahead
of her as if to ward off muzziness, and her very first step into the
wings crumpled up quietly in a faint.
She awoke in her little damp dungeon of a dressing room, a trick bicycle
rider in sateen knickerbockers fanning her with a spangled jockey cap
and immediately rushing off for her act, Robert Visigoth standing and
looking down at her.
Embarrassment flooded her. She insisted upon standing immediately,
smoothing herself down and brushing at the wet spots where the water had
trickled away from her lips.
"Why," she said, through a gasp of apology, "of all things! Why, I have
never done such a thing in my life! It was the heat. Oh, how silly of
me! How unutterably silly!"
He pressed her down into a chair.
"You had better sit quiet there, my young miss, and get yourself
together. One eighth of an inch nearer that bicycle trapeze in the wings
and that smooth head of yours might not be so smooth right now."
"I'm so ashamed."
"I'll call a cab and take you home."
"I'd rather you didn't trouble."
"But I'd rather I did."
She smiled through an impulse to dig her nails into her palms and weep
her sense of ignominy.
While he procured the cab she hurriedly changed from the pink into the
coffee-colored linen, and, frightened at her pallor with the rouge
removed, tried to pinch her cheeks back to pinkness.
In the hansom and behind the wooden apron his hand crept over to hers,
soothing it.
"Poor little sick girl!" he said.
She tried to withdraw, but the black spots were swimming before her, and
to save herself from their engulfing her, as the shields and bracelets
must have buried Tarpeia, sat suddenly erect, blinking and shaking
her head.
"Oh, I say now!"
"Why, I--I'm all right--"
His one arm was at her waist and with the other he was poking open the
little trap door.
"Stop at the corner."
"No--please."
"Yes, please."
She closed her eyes, and almost immediately they drew up at a corner
drug store adjoining a long row of brownstone fronts deep in brown
studies. He helped her down, reading up at one of them. Dr. Barney Lee.
"He leaves his name at the box office once in a while. Suppose you stop
in here instead of the drug store. Don't like the idea of soda-fountain
cures. You've a little sunstroke, I think."
"No, no, Mr. Visigoth. Why, I've hardly ever had a doctor in my life!
The--drug store will--"
"One, two, three--march!"
"Please!"
"March! Got money? Good! I'll have a smoke in the cab. If he's not in,
then I'll drive you around to our house doctor."
He was in. But for ten minutes she sat in a leather-and-oak waiting
room, beneath a fly-specked Rembrandt's "Night-Watch," a clock ticking
spang into the gaslighted silence and the very chairs seeming to
meditate as they stood.
Then a pair of black-walnut doors slid back, and on a puff of iodoform
Lilly passed between them and they clicked shut again.
When she emerged Robert Visigoth's cigar was smoked two thirds its
length and he was slumped down, with one knee hooked comfortably about
the other.
He sprang out to help her in.
"Well?"
Her smile was drawn across her face almost like a gash.
"Tired waiting?" she said, holding her lips lifted.
"Fix you up?"
"You were right. A little sunstroke. A good night's rest will fix me
up."
"You've been playing 'possum."
"That's it," she said, with the plating of hired gayety over her tones,
but her nails printing little half moons into her palms.
"Just for punishment, I'm going to drive you around the Park."
"No, no, no! I don't feel quite up to it. He said rest--a good night's
rest."
He regarded her unmistakable pallor.
"Oh, all right," sulkily, "you tantalizing enigma, you! Gad! you--you'd
drive a man crazy! There's something over your face. A veil. I'd like to
tear it off--"
"You--you're talking like a Third Avenue melodrama."
"I suppose I am," he said, subsiding and regarding the hooked top of his
cane the remaining ten minutes of the drive. "I suppose I am."
He dismissed the cab at her curb. To escape his arm she even ran up the
steps, and to prove how complete recovery called down over one shoulder:
"You've been kind and I'm grateful. Good night."
"Prove it," he said, up and after her, his arm at her waist.
"What?" she said, his meaning flashing as she spoke. She was crowding
away from his nearness against one of the storm doors which folded back
against the entrance, sooty light filtering over them through a frosted
door panel.
His face twisted out of repose, flooded darker and darker with red.
"You devil," he said, "you knew you'd get me."
"You go!" she cried, her lips pulled with the degradation of the moment.
He grasped her so that the breath jumped out of her.
"Oh," she cried, wrenching herself free, "don't you dare put your foot
in this house--"
"Then the Gramatan, Lilly. It's quiet and first class there--we can have
a talk. I'll call a cab--the Gramatan. Or my place--I live alone."
"If you do I--I'll bite! I'll bite, you hear?"
"Do it," he said, his face the color that was Iago's, grasping her then
in the shadow of the storm door, and kissing her so on the open lips
that to evade him she had to wriggle down to her knees and out of
his clasp.
The shamefulness of the scene not to be endured, she held her hand with
the key in it behind her back; then suddenly let it fly up for
her hatpin.
"If you come near me--"
He stood back from her upflung arm, his refinement of feature
incongruous under the rush of ox-blood red, his teeth showing whiter as
he darkened.
"What the devil do you want, then? You devil! Who are you? There's only
one woman in a thousand I'd follow to a joint like this. I'm afraid of
them. Now I've had enough of this baby talk from you. It doesn't match
this house! What's your game? Let me up."
"House!"
"What do you expect, with an address like this? There's two kinds of
women. You can't be the kind you pretend to be and live here. What is
the comedy? I like you, Lilly. Let me up. Come, put that little arm
down. God damn it! what do you want?"
With a wrench that threw him backward, a frenzied instant of struggle
for the lock, and she was in, slamming the door behind her, and up the
two flights with such a sense of pursuit that her breath turned to moans
in her throat.
Once within her room, locking her door on its very slam, and her hat
sliding down on her unpinned hair, she dropped down on her bed edge so
that the springs coughed, seeming to bleed her tears, so roundly and
full of agony they came.
The white light from the electric sign opposite created a pallor in the
room that enveloped her like a veil. She rocked herself as she sat. She
pressed her palms into her eyes until the terrible kind of darkness they
induced was sprinkled with red. She clapped her hands to her mouth to
keep down the rise of shrieks. She burrowed her head down into her
pillow, beating into the surrounding area of bed, chewing at the sheet
end, twisting it until it became rigid. She slid to the floor as if for
relief of its hardness; sat looking into the white kind of darkness with
the rims of her eyes stretched until her gaze seemed to sleep. She fell
to rocking herself again and twisting the sheet in an outrageous
abandonment of despair that was abashing because it was so naked. Her
hands wound each other in a dry wash. She sobbed in long coughs drawn
through a resisting throat. Pounded the matting. Dragged her palms down
over her face, pulling the hair with it.
Half the night through she paced the narrow aisle of the room, repeating
and repeating until the darkness seemed filled with the rushing of a
million frantic little wings:
"O God! O God! Help me, God! Make it a lie! Tell me that the doctor
lied! God, I need you! Where are you? Save me! Where are you? Help me,
God! Help me!"
Thus did Lilly Penny greet the coming of her child.