Star-Dust Part 41

Forty copies of 'Cinderella Ella' just like hot cakes the first time she telephones it out to 'em! Hauls in a netful every time she opens her mouth, and, some mouth! 'Phonzie,' I telephones over to him this morning, 'thank G.o.d she's screened from the public or somebody would buy her for codfish b.a.l.l.s.'"

"Do you think there might be something over at the office for me? I've had some training for desk work, too."

"Don't know. I always told you to put some nose into your voice. Let out, that's what they want in this business. You never came out enough from behind your tonsils. The refined stuff through a megaphone has about as much chance as a violet in the six-o'clock rush. In other words, dearie," finished Miss Kirk, her rather close-set eyes focusing upon the tip of Lilly's nose, "I think you're fired. Canned, so to speak. Replaced, as it were."

Lilly laughed, forcing her head high to deny disconcertment.

"Well, anyway, that saves me the trouble of resigning."

"Yes," said Miss Kirk, her gaze suddenly long and full of portent, "I wouldn't be surprised."

To Lilly's heated consciousness the grilling quality in that gaze was so unmistakable that it plunged into her like an arrow. She walked out, stinging with it.

Hurrying toward the music-publis.h.i.+ng office, she caught suddenly her reflection in the plate-gla.s.s window of a shop devoted to Broadway's intense interpretation of the prevalent in modes. She stood, in the very act of motion, regarding this snapshot of herself. Then she entered, emerging presently in a full-length dark-blue cape with gilt b.u.t.tons and little pipings of red along the edge. It was neither so warm nor so durable as the brown coat, and cost her the rather sickening sensation of breaking into a hundred-dollar bill for twelve dollars and ninety-eight cents.

But it was immensely becoming, this flowing wrap, enveloping her like a wimple, her face rising out of it as clear as a nun's. Nevertheless, it was her realization of need for it that quite suddenly ended her quest.

She turned for home, stopping at the Public Library for one of her frequent perusals of the St. Louis newspapers. She read quickly, her eye skimming the obituary, personal, and social columns. For a week there had daily appeared a little insertion which invariably caused her a twist of heart:

To Sublet: Furnished. Seven rooms and bath. Brand new from top to bottom. Every convenience. Will sell furnis.h.i.+ngs if desired. s.p.a.cious front lawn. Poultry yard. 5199 Page Avenue. Apply 5198 Page Avenue.

Then one day it disappeared and something lifted from Lilly's heart.

This time, as she opened the St. Louis paper of just one week previous, a small oval photograph leaped at her from a row of them, choking her as if it had clutched at her throat.

In a full-page advertis.e.m.e.nt, Sloc.u.m-Hines Hardware Company announced to its many friends a twenty-fifth anniversary, the entire sheet bordered in small oval photographs of the personnel of valued employees.

"Albert Penny, first-a.s.sistant buyer." Regarding it, her consciousness of his promotion was secondary to a feeling that straight lines joining the four corners of Albert's face would have produced almost a perfect rectangle. A little farther on was Vincent Bankhead, buyer, and on a lower row, Ralph Sluder, with whom she had graduated from grade school.

Strangely enough, in this very edition the name of Horace Lindsley sprang out at her from the tiniest of type in the marriage-license column. Horace Lindsley, 3345 Bell Avenue. Carol Ingomar Devine, 3899 Westminster Place. The name of the bride was a.s.sociated in Lilly's mind with the society columns of the Sunday _Post-Dispatch_. A hundred little pointed darts shot through her, and even now the old sinking but delicious sensation of too sudden descent in an elevator.

That night she went to bed with a toothache, a biting little spark of pain that toward morning became a raging flame rus.h.i.+ng against the entire inside of her cheek. She could not trace its source, every tooth seeming to stampede.

All of the day following she lay with her face buried into her pillow, abandoning herself utterly to creature discomfort. Toward evening she ventured down as far as Fourteenth Street for a bowl of milk and toast, but the pain raged on, tightening her throat against food, and she crept back to the haven of her cheek to Mrs. McMurtrie's scorched pillow slip.

After another two nights of local application and the rather futile business of holding warm water in the sag of her cheek, she found out, at the direction of Mrs. McMurtrie, a neighborhood dentist who occupied a suite of rooms over a corner drug store, the large grinning picture of a boy, with a delighted hiatus of missing front tooth, painted on each window and giltly inscribed, "It Didn't Hurt a Bit."

It is inconceivable, except that under duress of great pain Lilly could have engaged services so obviously quasi professional, but she was past that perception by now, her nerves from brow to shoulder crackling like a bonfire.

Examination by a dentist with gray pointed side whiskers that flared and brushed her cheek unpleasantly, revealed a pair of abscesses gathering within the gum, and for weeks of mornings she lay back to the agony of steel incisions, for the remainder of the day stretching out on her iron bedstead, face to wall.

Then for a few days a premature spring came out teasingly. The East Seventeenth Street block, with its rows of houses, going down none too debonairly, from gentility to senility, showing a bud here and there.

There even remained one private residence with a polished door bell and name plate and a little cl.u.s.ter of crocuses in an iron jardiniere set out in a front yard about the dimension of an army blanket.

Crocuses, whose cold, moist smell, with all the pungency of a.s.sociations an odor can arouse, somehow suggested, to Lilly, Taylor Avenue and little Harry Calvert. She did not remember it, but Harry had once stolen two satiny red ones for her from a Taylor Avenue flower bed and been soundly cuffed by a housewife.

A block away, Gramercy Park, a rectangle of the Knickerbocker New York of the woodcut, red-brick sidewalk, salon parlor, and crystal chandelier, was already lacy with the first leafwork of spring. Several times, when the sun lay warmest, Lilly ventured into its Old World sobriety, strolling around the tall grill fence that inclosed the park.

It was locked against the public, nursemaids from surrounding homes and a few old ladies stiff with gentility holding keys. Children from the raggedy fringe of Third Avenue played without awareness, against the outside of the iron palings, too young, and, anyway, too imprisoned in cla.s.s, to resent one more monopoly even of G.o.d's suns.h.i.+ne and the brown, warm earth already swollen with life about to be.

It seemed to Lilly that almost any of these mild days Was.h.i.+ngton Irving, in pot hat and lace in his sleeves, might come strolling this pompous Square. She bought a manhandled copy of Volume I of Knickerbocker's _History of New York_ off a secondhand bookstall one day, and read it sitting on the sun-drenched stoop of one of the old houses whose eyeless stare and boarded windows bespoke one absent family. Off this same stall she also purchased a volume of Wordsworth's poems, feeling a vague, a procreative, and who shall say mistaken need for beauty. Over and over she read, milking each phrase dry:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting.

The soul that rises with us, our life's star, Hath elsewhere had its setting and cometh from afar.

Not in entire forgetfulness and not in utter nakedness But trailing clouds of glory, do we come from G.o.d who is our home.

She read of daffodils as if she would steep her soul in the sun of their yellowness, bought some one morning and propped them in the toothbrush mug.

She practiced her shorthand, too, these days, in a blank book bought for the purpose, sometimes an hour--even two or three--until the sun receded off the stoop.

Then for a week it rained, and from the patch of back yard, two stories beneath her window, began to mount the moist smell of living earth.

Beside this open window, after the harrowing mornings of dentistry, with a soft rain falling from a sky swift and low with clouds, she wrote, her pencil dabbing constantly at the well of her tongue, a short story of some six thousand words composed out of the fabric of an idea that suddenly presented itself. She copied it in her most painstaking handwriting, on one side of foolscap, and sent it, with return postage, to a popular magazine.

She was venturing out less and less, preparing over a portable oil stove her own breakfast, and very often her own lunch and dinner. She tried to sew, too, cutting up one of the sheerest and prettiest of her nightgowns into a litter of small garments, but almost immediately her hands would fall idle and the great waves of terror begin to surge.

Certain inevitable decisions crept closer. She decided against the Hanna Larchmont Hospital, its very foyer awakening in her such a sickening sense of public inst.i.tution that she ventured no farther, but engaged a tiny room in a private sanitarium in Nineteenth Street, at twenty dollars a week, and the privilege of boarding on two or three weeks after her discharge.

Her bag of three new one-hundred-dollar bills still hung in all its rea.s.suring entirety from the little pink ribbon about her neck, but the confronting dentist's bill of twenty-five dollars, and the slow but acid process of daily expenditure eating into the thirty or forty dollars left in her purse, lay uncomfortably against her consciousness.

By a series of constantly repeated calculations, particularly if the short story should bring in even a check large enough to cover the dentistry, Lilly planned to span the weeks of her narrowing interval with the three bills intact, but pretty shortly the first piece of mail she had received in New York arrived in a long, bulky envelope:

MY DEAR MISS PARLOW,--Thank you for submitting the accompanying ma.n.u.script. It does not quite get across in this office, but it is near enough to our standard for us to want to see anything more you may care to submit.--THE EDITOR.

That night Lilly cried again all through her sleep, presenting herself next morning at the dentist's with heavy, rimmed eyes. It was her final visit, and before mounting the chair she laid down her carefully counted-out payment, five five-dollar bills, in a little pile on the revolving stand.

Doctor Hotchkiss, with the offshoot of white whiskers from each jowl, and who was fond of pinching her cheek as she lay under his touch, moistened his fingers and counted.

"The charges are fifty dollars," he said.

She was immediately startled.

"Why, Doctor Hotchkiss, you said twenty-five!"

"Fifty, with the bridgework, my dear young woman," he said, the words swimming in the oil of his suavity.

"You said twenty-five."

"You misunderstood, my dear young woman. Twenty-five would not pay for the amount of gold I used. Fifty is what I said. Fifty dollars," his voice rising.

She looked her despair.

"I--It's not honorable. I asked you distinctly. What if I haven't it to spare--"

"That is not my business," he replied, his entire manner roughening up.

"You have forty dollars' worth of my gold in your mouth and the law provides for receiving goods you can't pay for. You've got it, all right, and if you haven't, from the look of you, there is some one behind you who has."

She colored so furiously that her eyes smarted to tears as she reached down into her blouse for the little chamois bag.

"Give me fifty dollars," she said, cramming the five five-dollar bills back into her purse, holding a crisp new hundred-dollar bill out to him, her voice as fluttering as a broken wing; "but nothing--nothing will ever convince me that you have not taken advantage of me."

He counted her fifty dollars off his own roll, all the more suave.