Star-Dust Part 24

"Vera Wohlgemuth!"

"Of all people! The same pretty and stylish Lilly."

Remembering Vera's readiness with the plat.i.tude, Lilly smiled down upon her.

"And you, too, Vera, you look natural"--but the words almost petered out on her lips. Much of Vera's slender prettiness was gone. She had gone hippy, as the saying is, even her face insidiously wider and coa.r.s.er pored.

"What are you doing, Vera? Have you kept up your music?"

"Oh no! I'm married!"

There was a little click to the finish of that speech that seemed automatically to lock against the intrusion of old dreams.

"A ten-months-old daughter furnishes me all the music I have time for.

Didn't I read where you got married, Lilly?"

"Yes. You had such a pretty touch on the piano, Vera."

"Why, I don't believe I've opened the piano in six months! Marriage knocks it out of you pretty quick, don't it? And, say, wait until the babies begin to come. I said to him last night, 'Ed, why is marriage like quicksands?' He's no good at conundrums. 'Because it sucks you down,' I said, and he didn't even see the point. But it's a fact, isn't it? Mine is city salesman for the Mound City Shoe Company.

What's yours?"

"With Sloc.u.m-Hines."

"Lucille Wright is married. And remember Edna Ponscarme? Twins. Nine months to a day. Maybe she wasn't in a hurry! And Stella Loire, the cla.s.s beauty? She wheels her past our house on her way to market every morning. More like the cla.s.s dishrag now. Well, well! it does seem funny. Lilly Becker married and settled down like the rest of us, and we had you down in the cla.s.s prophecy for a famous opera singer.

Well, well!"

At Eighteenth Street Lilly left the car, transferring for Union Station.

A sudden exultation was racing through her. She sat well forward on her seat, as if that could quicken transit.

Union Station, one of the first of those dividend-built and dividend-building terminals that were to spring up quickly and palatially the country over, rose with a peculiarly American trick out of one of the most squalid sections of the city. Fifteen railroads threaded into it, a gaseous shed _de luxe_, picking up St. Louis like a gigantic bead upon the necklace of commerce.

The coughing of steam up against a gla.s.s roof threw off repet.i.tions of self. The boom of a train announcer's voice rang out, the echoes fitting smaller and smaller into one another like a collapsible drinking cup. A hither and thither! A bustle that caught Lilly up into it. She was immediately drunk with the moment and train smoke. Life was a gigantic drum, beating.

The clerk at the Terminal Hotel, Mrs. Kemble's brother-in-law, in fact, cashed her check for her, without question, but a sort of unspoken askance, sending it across the street, with his additional indors.e.m.e.nt, to a bank. There were six one-hundred-dollar bills, two fifties, and five tens. She folded their considerable bulk into the bag around her neck.

True to direction, the checks for her bags had been left at the Information Desk in an addressed envelope. A porter scurried for them.

Backed by the precedent of the trip to Buffalo, Niagara Falls, and Chicago, she bought her ticket, and then, rather more reluctantly and against her sense of thrift, a berth, which already necessitated a foray into the little chamois bag.

Last, she dropped an already stamped and addressed envelope into the station mail box, her heart seeming to swoon to her feet as she did so.

It contained a half-hundredth version of a week-old letter finally reduced to:

MY DEAREST PARENTS,--When you receive this I will be on my way. I won't try to explain my action except that now I see plainly my entire life has been directed toward this moment.

Had I found this courage two months ago a great deal of suffering might have been spared one person, at least. I cannot say enough for Albert's patient struggle to make possible the impossible, or for you, my dear parents, for whom my love is as great as my rebellion.

I am not leaving an address. That would be useless. My decision is unalterable. It is futile to come after or try to find me. In a large city I will immediately become a needle in a haystack and that is what I want and need for my work. Do not worry. You know very well I can take excellent care of myself, and in case of unforeseen accident I will always be identified by your name and address on me. So by my very silence you are to know I am well and happy. Some day, when success has justified this seemingly rash step, who knows what happy reunion may be in store for us?

Take Albert into your home. He will be a better son to you than I have been a daughter. G.o.d bless you all. LILLY.

At ten-five the B. & O. Limited, for New York, pulled out. In a Pullman, her bags on the seat opposite and her hands locked so that her finger nails bit in, sat Lilly, gazing out over the moving landscape of dirty, uneven fringe of city. Crossing Eads Bridge, the higher and lighter rumble of the train, induced by steel over water, was like thin soprano laughter with ice in it.

She was suddenly terrifyingly conscious of an impulse to join in that laughter--to laugh and to laugh.

CHAPTER XV

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 unanch.o.r.ed streak of a rocket through s.p.a.ce.

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 pa.s.sing 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, b.u.mping 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, pa.s.sing 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 st.u.r.dy, fine machine of her own body had the cra.s.s 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 pa.s.sing me the sugar?"

"Why, certainly not!" from an eager Lilly.

"Going all the way to New York?"

"Yes."

"Live there?"

"No. Do you?"