Star-Dust Part 9

"Lind--what--who?"

"Lindsley, of course," dipping with laughter.

"Flora Kemble, I'll never speak to you again. You're stuck on him yourself and trying to put it on to me."

"Me stuck on him, the way his teeth stick out! No poor school-teacher for mine!"

"You're boy-crazy. I'm not."

But that night for the first time in her life Lilly lay through a sleepless hour, staring up into the darkness. The blanket irked her and she plunged it off, burrowing one cheek and then the other into her pillow in search of cool spots. Her mother puffed out slowly into the silence, her father a bit more sonorous and full of rumblings.

Lilly felt herself wound up tightly and needing to be run down. She was taut as a spring. After a while she took to plucking out from the darkness words of sedative quality.

"Dove," she repeated softly to herself, and very, very slowly. "Dove.

Beautiful, quiet dove. Saint. Cathedral. Peace. Dell."

But when she finally did drop off to sleep a smile of protuberant teeth was out like a rainbow across her darkness.

CHAPTER VII

Lat.i.tudinally speaking, there are about two kinds of Americans--those who live west of Syracuse, and those who do not. An imaginary line separates the tropic of candescence, fast trains, naval reviews, broad a's, Broadway, Beacon Street, Independence Square, and Tammany Hall from the cancer of c.r.a.ps, silver dollars, lynchings, alfalfa, toothpicks, detachable cuffs, napkin rings, and boll weevils.

It is more than probable that Horace Lindsley's and Lilly Becker's lineage were loamy with about the same magnesia of the soil. Generations of each of them had tilled into the more or less contiguous dirt of Teutonic Europe.

Lilly's progenitors had bartered in low Dutch; Horace Lindsley's in high German, which, after all, is more a matter of geography than alt.i.tudes.

An oval daguerreotype of a great-grandmother at the harpsichord had hung in Carrie Becker's (_nee_ Ploag) home in Granite City.

A Lindsley had once presented an emperor with a hand-illuminated version of the King James Bible, wrought out of peasant patience. Horace Lindsley's mother belonged to a New England suffrage society when ladies still wore silk mitts, and had dared to open a private kindergarten in her back parlor after marriage.

It was this tincture of culture running like a light bluing through Lindsley's heritage that began to set in motion the little sleeping molecules of Lilly's cla.s.s consciousness.

"Middle cla.s.s," came to be a term employed always with lips that curled.

There were, then, actually men creatures outside the English "Fireside Novels" she was allowed to devour without interruption by parents to whom books were largely objects with which a room was cluttered up, who wore spats, did play tennis in white flannels, turned down the page at a favorite pa.s.sage of poetry, eschewed suspenders for belts, were guiltless of sleeve garters, and attended Sat.u.r.day-afternoon symphony concerts, in Lindsley's case, almost a lone male, debonaire and unabashed in a garden of women.

At Lilly's urgent instance she and her mother often attended these subscription concerts, seats for single performances obtainable (in a commendable zeal to promote local music) in exchange for a newspaper coupon and twenty-five cents.

Mrs. Becker frankly yawned through them, nict.i.tating, as it were, during the long narrative pa.s.sages of the symphony or occupied with the personnel of the audience.

"Look, Lilly," whispering behind her unopened program, "that's a pretty idea over there on that red-haired girl. See the way the baby ribbon is run through the sleeves. Do you want a dress like that?"

"Sh-h-h-h, mamma! No; it's too fussy!"

"Why don't they play something with a tune to it? I wouldn't give a row of pins for music without any air at all."

"Sh-h-h-h, mamma. There isn't much tune to cla.s.sical music."

"I wish the first violinist would play a solo. 'Warum,' like last time.

I've some baby ribbon just like that, Lilly. I picked it up on sale in Gentle's bas.e.m.e.nt bins--"

"Mamma, don't stare so."

"Don't criticize everything I do."

At one of these concerts Lilly shot out her hand suddenly, closing it over her mother's wrist.

"Mamma, there's Lindsley. See, down there in the fourth row."

"Who?"

"My English teacher. See, polis.h.i.+ng his eyegla.s.ses."

Mrs. Becker sat straight, chin out like an antenna.

"Is that him?"

"Yes, that's he."

"I don't see anything so wonderful about him. He needs a haircut."

"Oh, mamma, you think all men have to wear their hair short and ugly like papa and Uncle Buck. In the East men look like that."

"The idea! A man calls himself a man coming to a matinee like this. Your papa ought to know that you have a sissy like him on your mind. Such a looking thing! Ugh!"

These recurring intimations could sting Lilly almost to tears.

"Oh, mamma, that's just the--the meanest thing to say. Can't I show you my English teacher without having him on my mind?"

"I never could stand a man whose teeth stick out. He looks like a horse."

"Papa's teeth stick out."

"Yes, but just one, and his mustache hides that. I only hope for you, Lilly, that some day you get a man as good as your father."

"How did papa propose to you, mamma? What did he say?"

Even Mrs. Becker could flush, quite prettily, too, her lids dropping at this not infrequent query of Lilly's.

"It's not nice for young girls to ask such questions."

"Go on, mamma, what did he say?"

"I don't remember."

The overture broke in upon them then, a brilliantly noisy one from Tschaikowsky that bathed them in a vichy of excited surf.