Produced by Suzanne Shell, Charlie Kirschner and PG
Distributed Proofreaders
[Illustration: "HER BLOOD WAS POUNDING AND HER VOICE WAS IN FLIGHT"]
A Story of an American Girl
1921
Oh, the little more and how much it is:
And the little less, and what worlds away.
—BROWNING.
[Greek: Zoae]
When Lilly Becker eked out with one hand that most indomitable ofpianoforte selections, Rubinstein's "Melody in F," her young mind had ahabit of transcending itself into some such illusory realm as this:Springtime seen lacily through a phantasmagoria of song. A very floralsward. Fountains that tossed up coloratura bubbles of sheerest aria anda sort of Greek frieze of youth attitudinized toward herself.
This frieze was almost invariably composed of Estelle Foote, asuccessful rival in a class candidacy for the sponge-and-basinmonitorship; Sydney Prothero, infallible of spitball aim; Miss Lare withher spectacles very low on her nose and a powdering of chalk dust downher black alpaca; Flora Kemble with infinitely fewer friendship bangleson her silver link bracelet; Roy Kemble, kissing her yellow, rather thanyanking her brown, braids.
And then suddenly, apropos of nothing except the sweet ache of Lilly'slittle soul, the second movement would freeze itself into a prosceniumarch of music, herself, like a stalagmite, its slim center.
At this point, "Melody in F" veils itself in a mist of arpeggios, andMrs. Becker, who invariably, during the after-school practice hour, satupstairs with Mrs. Kemble in her sunny second-story back, would calldown through the purposely opened floor register.
"Lilly, not so fast on that part."
"Yes'm."
Were it not that the salient spots, the platform places in experience,are floored over in little more or less identical mosaics of all thecommonplace day by days, Lilly Becker, at the rented-by-the-month pianoin her parents' back parlor in Mrs. Schum's boarding house, her twochestnut braids rather precociously long and thick down her back, hermother rocking rhythmically overhead, were spurious to this narrative.
Yet how much more potently than by the mere exposition of it and becauseyou have looked in on the nine-year-old chemistry of a vocal and blonddream in the dreaming, are you to know the Lilly of seventeen, whosecretly and unsuccessfully washed her hair in a solution of peroxide,and at eighteen, through the patent device of a megaphone insertedthrough a plate-glass window, was singing to—But anon.
There was a game Lilly used to play on the front stairs of Mrs.Schum's boarding house, winter evenings after dinner. She andLester Eli, who, at seventeen, was to drown in a pleasure canoe; SnowHorton—clandestinely present—daughter of a neighborhood dentist andforbidden to play with the "boarding-house children"; Flora and RoyKemble, twins; and little Harry Calvert, who would creep up like a dirtylittle white mouse from the basement kitchen.
"C"—hissed sibilantly.
"Can't carry cranky cats!"
"No fair, Snow; that doesn't make sense."
"Does."...