Star-Dust Part 40

Louis Limited, are you? Brazil, Indiana, is mine."

"I--don't know--yet."

"Ever been there?"

"Where?"

"Brazil."

"I've pa.s.sed through."

"Some dump, believe me. I keep saying to him, 'Keep me out here much longer, Fred, and you'll have to s.h.i.+p me home in a wooden kimono.'"

"Wooden kimono?"

"Coffin. Get me?"

"Then Brazil isn't your home?"

"By transplanting, yes. I never married out there, believe me. We was both born and raised right here on the little long and narrow island, till he got a better job out there with the telephone company. Believe me, I'll take my little old fifteen a week in New York to thirty a week out there, bungalow setting thrown in. Bunk-a-low, I call it."

"But isn't it better for the baby?"

"That's right, too. I always say to my twin, I say, 'Myrt, if you don't think I got harder hours than when I worked next to you in the Five and Ten, and no pay day, neither, just trade with me one day and take care of the kid and the bunk-a-low.' I always say to Fred, I say, 'If you think you're dog tired, fasten a speedometer on my ankle and read it when you come home nights and see who's taken the most steps.' It's h.e.l.l, anyways, when they won't eat and you can't hit the right formula."

"Poor baby!"

"You wouldn't give 'em up after you got 'em, but believe me it's a wise girl will think twice before she has 'em. A girl gains a lot by marrying--maybe. But believe me, she gives up a lot--sure."

"But you married the right man."

"Yeh; but Nature is a trickster. How you going to know where her intentions leave off her and your own begin? Fred and me ran off.

Regular love affair. I suppose I am one of them that picked right; right as a girl with my disposition could ever pick. If I hadn't, believe me, eight hours for me behind the counter in preference to eating the rest of my breakfasts across from the wrong face. Sh-h-h, Freddie baby! Can't you see my back is breaking? Sh-h-h! Auntie Myrt's gone to nice matron for barley water. For the love of Mike, sh-h-h! or mamma'll spank."

The twin fluttered up then, a vivid italicized prototype, on slim tall heels that clicked and a very small red hat set just at the angle of sauciness. They moved off together after a bickering over luggage, the slim silhouette with the chin sharply flung up and the accentuated sway-back figure of the little mother, her skirt sagging over run-down heels, and, for want of a free hand, blowing up the loose strands of hair from out her eyes.

For a time Lilly sat quite intently, her gaze on a small sign that hung at right angles from an open doorway, "MATRON." After a while she gathered up her luggage and walked over, entering a little room fitted up with the efficient and inst.i.tutional unprivacy of public service. On a couch, her face to the wall, a woman in a traveling duster lay stretched, hat and all, in an att.i.tude of exhaustion, a young girl with a wayward fling of posture, sitting sullen in a corner, her very pointed and heeled shoes toeing in. A three-year-old child with a large tag pinned across his little dress played with railroad-owned blocks; the matron, a sort of stout Lachesis, with a string of keys at her belt, gray with years and the rather sweet tiredness of service, sorted towels at a rack. It was to her that Lilly spun out a ready tale, reddening as she talked, but stanch to it.

"I'm from Indianapolis. I want a quiet place for the next few months.

Two, to be exact."

Sweeping her with a look. "Are you in any kind of difficulty?"

"No--not that! I've left my husband. We agreed to separate. I want a few weeks of quiet until--afterward, and then I can arrange to start out on my own."

"You're too nice a girl to--"

"I'm not asking anything. I am not the kind you are evidently accustomed to deal with here. It is simply that I'm strange."

"Have you no friends?"

"None with whom I desire to communicate."

"Well," doubtfully, "there is the Nonsectarian Home for Indigent Girls and the Hanna Larchmont Lying-in Hospital--"

"Oh," cried Lilly, with a sting of color to her cheeks, "you don't understand! I have funds. I tell you it is just that I am strange. I want a medium-priced place to live for the next few weeks, where it won't be embarra.s.sing."

The matron unlocked a drawer.

"I have a few addresses here of private rooming houses in the Hanna Larchmont Lying-in Hospital and Bellevue districts, if that is what you want. Personally inspected places that can be recommended for their cleanliness and respectability."

"That is exactly what I need."

"You will find no questions asked so long as you conduct yourself quietly, and of course you are expected to make your plans for leaving well in advance of any emergency. There are several private sanitariums in the neighborhood."

"Of course."

"Here are three addresses. The first is in East Seventeenth Street, just in back of the Hanna Larchmont. It's a very nice place run by an old Irishwoman who has a lace-curtain establishment in the bas.e.m.e.nt. Here are two others on the same block, in case she has rented her room."

"I'll go there at once," said Lilly, taking the memorandum.

"If I were you I should go back home to friends. It is too bad that a girl like you should find herself in this position. Won't you let me help you?"

"Thank you"--lifting her bags again--"you have helped me a great deal."

That night Lilly slept in a small back room, two flights up, over a lace-curtain-cleaning establishment. It was cruder and rougher than anything she had yet encountered; a white-pine table with a washbowl and a toothbrush mug, and a black iron bed that at first glance had sent darting through her a sinking sense of inst.i.tution. But it was clean, and a spa.r.s.e Irish landlady with a moist pink presence that steamed hot suds had left her without question and one week's advance payment tucked into her bosom.

Before going to bed, after she had looked under it and turned out the gas jet, she went over to her single window, opening it wide to the bite of a winter's night and shooting up the shade. Her view was again of roofs and roofs and chimney pots, dirtier, this time, and dingier, and marching against the sky line, like a dark herd of buffalo, a long range of buildings, blackened of bricks.

It was the Hanna Larchmont Lying-in Hospital seen from the rear.

CHAPTER XXIII

When Lilly returned to the Broadway Melody Shop that morning following, there was already a voice driving with such nasal power into the sidewalk din that she hardly needed to enter to learn of her successful replacement.

There was an entirely new hauteur incasing Miss Kirk, who upon her entrance wound into an att.i.tude.

"Well!"

"I was ill."

"I--see."

"I guess the place is filled. Oh, it's all right!"

"Better go over to the office and see Phonzie about it. All I know is they sent over a pair of lungs that can stop traffic when they let out.