Star-Dust Part 30

"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 impa.s.sable directions. Frivolity was showing her naked shoulder on lithograph roof garden and matinee 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 p.u.s.s.y!" 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 appet.i.te 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 advertis.e.m.e.nt 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 rus.h.i.+ng off for her act, Robert Visigoth standing and looking down at her.

Embarra.s.sment flooded her. She insisted upon standing immediately, smoothing herself down and brus.h.i.+ng 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 ap.r.o.n 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 s.h.i.+elds 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.