There was no egress for Lilly's state of panic. It hurled itself into
this and that _cul-de-sac_, only to dash into a black, a colossal wall
of ignorance builded on the sands of false and revolting modesty, and
which, as it tottered, threatened to crush her.
Her mind ran hither and thither, panic and anger plunging into storm
waves of sobs. Around and around spun her terror in its trap. Each pore
of her body might have been a mouth screaming. Distaste for her physical
awareness mounted upon her old peculiar aversion. The maternal did not
even lift its head. She could have beaten her own head, and did, for the
relief of pain. One alternative after another flickered into her
consciousness, only to die out again into blackness. Home! But by the
merest flash of the incongruous, not to say absurd, vision of Albert
Penny's wilted collar on the chiffonier, or his shirt sleeves that were
held back with pink rubber garters, bending over the recalcitrant bed
caster, knew how impossible that!
Forceps sensitive enough to lay hold of an antenna could not capture the
vagariousness of all of this, but none the less it was just that
ridiculous and irrelevant flash across her vision that eliminated the
almost unbearable tugging of nostalgia at her heart strings.
There were long hours of dizzying and fascinated contemplation down into
the cypress-sided vale of self-destruction; that ravine which gets its
glance from most and even the best of us. It seemed to her that she
could not even think for the rush of its dark waters pressing against
her reason; but love of life was strongest of all in Lilly. It was the
sweep of her own vitality which she felt pressing.
She tried to desire what had befallen her, to think in terms of beauty;
to feel the miracle of her state and the age-old throbs that make
maternity sublime. The sense of her aversion debased while it immersed
her. She reasoned how valiantly whole eternities of women had gone down
to meet motherhood and how proudly those eternities of women had worn
the moment. Her mother. Mrs. Kemble. The concept awed her, but then
memory came scourging out of that long night of her childhood:
MRS. KEMBLE: "Kill me, God! Put me out of it! Please! I can't suffer any
more! Kill me, God!"
She buried her head into her pillow; tried to think in terms of God; to
intimidate her rebellion. Finally she did cool to a sort of leaden
despair through which slow determination began to percolate.
At nine o'clock the following morning, a Sunday that wrapped the city
windily in the first cold gray of autumn, without having undressed the
night through, she ventured as far as Times Square for a newspaper, the
dark halls of the house and the rows of closed doors suddenly sinister.
The wind caught at her flimsy skirts, blowing them forward, and she was
forced to clutch the wide brim of her hat. Summer was gone.
But more than that, it seemed to Lilly that a black gauze lay across her
eyes, the very complexion of the streets had darkened, the hurried
wind-blown clouds stamping the whole aspect of things with turbulence.
She could not keep the run out of her steps, and her palms were full of
the half moons impressed there by her finger nails. The city, as joyous
as Chloe, had suddenly turned a frightening grimace upon her.
She bought a Sunday paper, letting the prankish gale around Times Square
scurry the bulk of it through the streets while she stood in the shelter
of the news stand, unfolding the Furnished Room section. Wind puffed the
sheets up into her face, and finally she crossed to a white-tiled lunch
room, ordering coffee and rolls more for the temporary shelter than for
appetite. Scanning column after column, occasionally she poked a
toothpick through the page, and once tore out a little segment, dropping
it into her hand bag. It read:
Neatly Furnished Room near Columbia University and Kroeg School of
Music. Three dollars and a half a week and breakfasts if desired. Ideal
for refined young lady. Inquire at 9000 Amsterdam Avenue.
She paid her check, inquired direction of the cashier, and, hurrying
out, boarded a north-bound Amsterdam Avenue car, riding for half an hour
through streets lined in petty shops and presenting the peculiar swept
look of Sunday.
She had cooled to apathy, a drowsiness descending that made her
reluctant to leave the car; could have ridden on and on in this eased
and half-narcotized state, but people had a habit of remembering her. A
truckman had followed her only the day before through half a block of
snarled traffic to see that she turned properly to the right. New York,
mad as a March hare, was eager to direct her. The conductor now walked
up the aisle of car to tap her on the shoulder.
"Your corner, miss."
Nine thousand Amsterdam Avenue was a drug store sidled in between a
bakeshop that six days a week poured forth sweet hot breath, and an
undertaking establishment with a white-satin infant's coffin _de luxe_
tilted in the window. The sight of it caught Lilly like a pain. That
peculiar power of an obsessed mind to see in everything its own state
reflected had set in. Queer that this infant's coffin should tilt at
her. A bouncing youngster leaned out of its perambulator to dance
its arms.
She hurried into the drug store. Isaac Neugass, Chemist.
It was the older-style pharmacy, with a gilt mortar and pestle for a
sign; and as she entered, a bell attached by a pulley rang somewhere in
a thin, tattling voice. The soda fountain, fountain pen, the picture
postcard, the umbrella, and the face-powder demonstrator had not yet
invaded here. Isaac Neugass, Chemist--was just that. His walls were
lined in labeled jars of panacea. The pungency of valerianate of ammonia
smote the entrant. He pummeled his own pills, percolated his own
paregoric, prescribed for neighborhood miseries from an invariable
bottle that was slow, sluggish, and malodorous in the pouring, anointed
the neighborhood bruises, and extracted, always gratis, neighborhood
cinders from neighborhood eyes.
A Madison Avenue physician, erstwhile of Amsterdam Avenue, and more
recently of two honorary degrees, his own private hospital, two outer
waiting rooms, three assistants, and four-figure operations, still
diverted quite a runnel of his clientele to the impeccable pharmaceutics
of the little Amsterdam Avenue shop, so that the motor car and the
carriage not infrequently sidled up to its curb.
At Lilly's entrance, Isaac Neugass came shuffling around the
ground-glass prescription partition, his hands at their perpetual dry
washing of each other. There was something of a dressed-up wishbone
about him, in the way his clothing scarcely suggested the thin body
within them. They had scarcely a point of contact, even with his angles.
He was a mere inner tubing to what he wore. A skull cap hid his
baldness, a fringe of gray below it suggesting what was not beneath it.
His little eyes were like steel, humorously glinting gimlets in the
process of boring, the old face wrinkling up around them as pliantly as
a dough eraser. In fact, when he laughed his little chin with the tip of
beard did curl up like one of those rubber-toy faces where chin
kicks brow.
"Well," he said, with a great dip of nose down into his smile, "whad can
I do for you?" He reminded Lilly of a great auk, something alcidine in
the thin cheeks with the mouth cutting so widely toward the ears.
She had not realized it, but suddenly the terrible, the impersonal
detachment of the past weeks smote her. There had been voiceless days
and days when the sound of herself asking direction or ordering from a
bill of fare had an element of surprise in it, and the toneless voice of
public service was the only one directed to her: "Step lively." "Two
blocks east." "Don't mention it." "No more rice pudding left, ma'am."
When Isaac Neugass said, "Well, whad can I do for you?" something within
her thawed so that she could have cried.
"I'm looking for this furnished room," she said, and held out the slip
toward him.
"You wand my wife," he said, waving her the direction. "Go right
outside to the next stoop and ring the bell over Neugass."
"Oh, thank you!" she said, suiting her action to his word.
"It's a nize room. I could wish it to an early bird to catch it."
"That's what I want, a nice, quiet room."
"Then you got it," he cried. "It's a room for a needle," his thumb and
forefinger indicating an infinitesibly fine point.
"A needle?"
"So it could hear itself fall."
In his own way Mr. Neugass was a jokester, insisting upon the laugh,
sitting back upon his figurative haunches, waiting.
"Then it is just what I want," said Lilly, giving him his smile, "only I
hope it isn't too--"
He took to waggling his head, his little kindly eyes illuminated with a
sunburst of wrinkles and his voice a festooned chant of rising and
falling inflections.
"Sa-y, if you can't pay three-fifty, she'll make it three. You doan'
need to tell her I told you, but for such a young lady like you, sa-y,
the brice in the newspaper doan' always got to be the brice in the hand,
ain't it?"
She laughed, the irises that had crowded out the gray in her eyes
suddenly smaller and back to normal.
In the little entrance adjoining, with its line-up of door bells, she
pressed the button as directed. A clicking answered her ring, and she
had to learn from a child who entered with a dangling pail of milk, that
she was to speak upward through a tube above the bell.
"About the room?" Yes, she was to come up.
She climbed two flights of dark, clean-smelling stairs, and Mrs.
Neugass herself opened the door.
Mary, Rispah, Cornelia, Monica, Martha Washington, Mrs. Whistler,
Margaret Ogilvy, and Mrs. Neugass, blessed be their tribe, must all have
had about the same look about the eyes. Masha Neugass was sixty, and
looked it. A blue-gingham apron held her in at the waist so that she
bulged softly and fatly above and below it.
Thirty minutes and one hundred years removed from Millionaires' Row, the
apartment was just another of those paradoxes which the city can shake
from its spangled sleeve. Built like a coach, each room opening off a
strip of hallway, it was a scoured chromo of Victoria's age of horrors.
The brilliantly flower-splashed wall paper and carpeting. A front room
that smelled and pricked of horsehair. The little patch of dining room
brightened by a red tablecloth, two canaries, and a window-sill array of
turnips sprouting in bottles. The rush of bead portières as you walked
through them. Hassocks. A freshly washed-and-ironed ribbon bow on a
chair back. Pillow shams. Nottingham-lace curtains with sham drapes
woven into them. A pair of bisque pugs.
The room to let was the size of a freight elevator and crammed with a
fine old walnut bed when there was scarcely room for a cot. Also an
overflow of curlicue divan, and a washstand. It was clean to coolness,
as if the very air were washed, but, entering it, Mrs. Neugass flecked
an imaginary dust particle from the divan with her apron, then wrapping
it muff fashion about her hands.
"It ain't big, but it's gumfortable."
"Indeed it is!" said Lilly, sniffing in appreciatively.
"We doan' got to rent this room, miss. It's our first time. My husband,
if he had his way, wouldn't. But I say it's a shame for the waste, since
our youngest daughter ain't in it no more...."
"It's lovely."
"You see out there between those two chimneys? That's Columbia
University. You're from the college? Yes? We brefer it should be
a student."
"I--I'm a high-school graduate, but not exactly a college student. I
mean--I'm a music student. Voice."
"You doan' tell me! Now ain't that a coinstidance! For why you think I
should have this room empty if not my own baby daughter is in Europe
with her voice! For three years already, with her gone, miss, and my
husband's daughter down to her bookkeeping all day, as I tell him, it's
like my heart will burst from the silence."
"There is something I had better explain--"
"I want a young girl in the house again, I tell him."
Standing there, the words pressing for utterance against her very teeth,
Lilly swallowed them back again.
"I see," she said, smiling her misery. "Then I'm afraid--I--"
"We're used to a young girl. You read maybe of our daughter only in last
Sunday's papers. Millie du Gass, with the Milan Opera?"
Lilly had. "Millie du Gass--your daughter!"
"We got more only last night from her in 'Traviata.' They pulled her
carriage after the opera. Felix Auchinloss went special from Vienna to
conduct her. That's her picture there and there and there. Say, ain't
that a coinstidance you should be a voice!"
Lilly stood regarding one of the framed photographs. A lifted young
profile, ever so slightly of the father's aquilinity, a vocal-looking
swell to the bosom, and a chin that locked up prettily to the
protuberant upper lip.
Regarding her, such a nausea of bitterness flowed over Lilly that her
lips were too wry to speak and she could have sobbed out her plight to
the simple soul there, with her hands in the muff of her apron, and her
gaze soft to tears upon the photograph.
"That ain't so good of her, miss, as some her papa keeps down in the
store. In Milan they call her the American Beauty. Auchinloss won't
conduct 'Faust' without our Millie's Marguerite. How she used to
practice it, miss, righd on that piano you seen in the front room. It's
worth all the sacrifices we made for such a success like hers. I doan'
know who you study with, but if you come to us here, I wand once you
should let her old teacher, Ballman, hear you. He's the man that can
find your voice if you got it."
"Oh, I do want to come here, Mrs. Neugass. I--If only--. Will you--will
you let me talk to you as I would to my own mother? I--somehow--I--I
think you will understand--"
Then Mrs. Neugass came closer, a little whisper of garlic in her breath
and her eyes screwed to conniving.
"Sa-y, miss, you doan' need to worry. Doan' tell it to my husband that
the reduction came from me, but if three dollars is all you can pay,
since it's for some one who will use the piano and liven up things a
little, it's worth the difference to me in pleasure."
"Oh, Mrs. Neugass, if you knew what a place like this would mean to
me--now! If only you--"
"All righd, then, for a few cents we doan' dicker. Say we make it three
dollars, and on rainy mornings coffee and rolls so you doan' get your
feet wet."
"But I--"
"We're blain beoble, miss, but we got a respegtable standing in the
neighborhood for fifteen years. My husband's daughter by his first
marriage is sixteen years bookkeeper down by Aaron Schmoll Paper Box
Company in Green Street. We doan' got to rent, miss, unless it should be
to the righd person. A nice young lady like you--"
"But what if I were to tell you, Mrs. Neugass, that I'm a mar--"
"You got references? It ain't I don't trust, but business is business,
ain't it?"
"I'm afraid I haven't. You see, I'm a stranger. Here from--the West to
study. I don't quite like it where I am. In fact, I want to get
out to-day."
"Say, doan' I know how things can happen? For two months after she
arrived in Munich, where she went first, my Millie used to write home,
'Mamma, I can't get myself settled righd.' In one place bugs and in
another they complained of her practicing. I got sympathy for a girl
trying to get settled. You can come righd away up into a room of mine,
miss. There's no extra cleaning to be done."
"Oh, Mrs. Neugass, if I may! I've only my valise and suitcase."
A complete shrugging of Mrs. Neugass took place, her voice, brow, and
manner lifting.
"Valise and suitcase. Is that a baggage?"
"I'm sending West for my trunks later, Mrs. Neugass."
"You'm _Goyem_, not?"
"Beg pardon?"
"You're Gentiles, ain't it? Well, with _Goyem_ such things ain't so
important. I'll show you sometimes the way my Millie left home, complete
even to hand-crocheted washrags. Three of us had to sit on her trunk.
You'm _Goyem_, not?"
"I was reared in the Unitarian Church, if that's what you mean,
until--well, I guess until I sort of figured out my own religion
for myself."
"We're Jews, you know, miss, in case you should have any _richas_."
"_Richas?_"
"Prejudices against us, like some. My husband has one of the finest
cantor voices of any temple in the city."
"No, no, Mrs. Neugass. I just love Jewish people. Some of the nicest
folks we knew in St. Lo--I ever knew--have been Jews," cried Lilly, with
the colossal, the unconscious patronage of race consciousness.
It left no welt, however, across the sensibilities of Mrs. Neugass. The
centuries had seen to that. She was craven and she was superb in
her heritage.
"I always say, thank God for whad I am, but it doan' matter to me whad
anybody else is, just so she is that with the best she has in her."
"Exactly. There--there is something I ought to say to you, Mrs. Neugass.
You've made it so difficult, with your kindness, but I--well, I--There
are certain conditions I want you to know about. I--Not a--I could
only take the room for a few months, Mrs. Neugass, because I--"
"Say, doan' I know how it is with students?"
"No, no--"
"They go home when it comes summer. You doan' got to worry. It ain't
like we need it to pay rent with. You got my word it's all righd,
Miss--The name, blease--Miss what?"
"Par--Parlow. Lilly Parlow."
"All righd, Miss Parlow; that makes everything fine."
She opened her purse, unfolding a bill.
"I'll pay now," she said, calm with sudden decision.
"Sa-y, I would have trusted you. But you're like me, I always say money
speaks louder than words."
"I'll be right back, Mrs. Neugass."
"That's good. I'll have out fresh towels. That's one thing I doan'
expect from nobody is to stint on towels."
And so it came about that at the moment Robert Visigoth was confronted
with a sudden gap in his program, Lilly Penny, with almost the week's
lodging still to her credit, was tiptoeing through the moldy halls of
the house in Forty-fourth Street, her luggage hitting against wall and
banisters and a palpitating fear fuddling her haste.
At the second flight down she experienced her first and by no means
fragrant encounter in these hallways. A door flew open with a rush and,
her thin body wrapped in something ornate and flowing that was like a
quick sheaf of flame around her, a woman dragged suddenly out to the
head of the stairs, by the actual scruff of the neck, the ridiculous
figure of a male, his collar--the necktie streaming from it--in
his hand.
She spat then a bombardment of screaming profanity that sickened Lilly
as she stood unseen and flattened against the wall. A further shove sent
him sprawling down the remaining stairs, and from the open doorway a
flung waistcoat and coat draped him ludicrously as they struck.
"Cheap skate! Piker! Skinflint!"
Then a slamming, reverberating door, and, while she stood trembling and
waiting, the creature on the stairs, a hulk of Swede with short, square
teeth and a corner of lip that snarled back to bare them, scrambled into
his coat, stumbling out the front door, collar still in his clutch.
Then Lilly wound her weak-kneed way down the flight after him, softly,
to save the creak, her luggage held out before her.
The air outside seemed cleansing as water to her. She could not breathe
deeply enough of it. For a long and indeterminate period she stood at
the corner, Amsterdam Avenue car after car rumbling past, her luggage on
the sidewalk and inclosing her in a little island.
Indecision buffeted her. Even Mrs. Neugass and her apartment had
suddenly become abhorrent; Broadway as barren as any granite gully and
somehow terrifying. She strolled a block toward the station, yet it is
doubtful whether in the back of her head Lilly did not know the impulse
of home to be a mock one.
The tremendous trifles began their running fire.
Her mother pulling her corsets in so that they bottled her up more and
more into the shape of an hourglass. That caster for the brass bed.
Those interminable discussions over that caster for the brass bed!
She boarded an Amsterdam Avenue car.