Evening Star Newspaper, June 2, 1929, Page 99

whoever looks after presents in your family.” “Maybe I wiil.” Cornelius said nothing. He merely told Billy where to drop him. He walked toward the place where he lived, and went half a block past it before he realized where he was. And, more than ever before, he realized the impasse of the situation he was in. Billy Bates seemed to be grinning it at him and Olive smiling it at him, and together they were riding him down, with all those ambitions it had been such fun to wake up to in the morning, all the things that put zest into living. Morning brought Sunday, and Cornelius walked through the district of boarding houses and apartments where he lived, taking that direction because he did not want to meet people whom he knew. Olive lived, as all of Olive’s kind of people did,’ on the East Side. He found himself before long clearing the out- skirts of the business places and coming into & suburb. it was a flat, new little suburb, gleaming with fresh timber and clean stucco, with com- monplace little bungalows grown up every=- where like cheery mushrooms. The sidewalks were ilew cement, the trees were only saplings. A street car rattled noisily through the main street every few minutes, and young men in shirt sleeves were putiing up storm windows or washing small cars. It was altogether a lively place. Cornelius felt vaguely more cheer- ful. For sale and for rent signs peppered the streets. Cornelius stopped and looked idly at a Jittle white cottage set on a 50-foot lot be- tween two others. It was very neat and new, and he wondered why that place stood empty. “Would you like to see the house?” asked some one at his elbow, and he saw a young man about his own age, obviously an agent on the lookout for house hunters. “Oh, no,” said Cornelius; “just walking by.” “Clad to show you around, if you're inter- ested. No harm in looking. Best liitle place you ever saw,” said the agent blithely. It was a box of a place. Small trim rooms, painted freshly, offered themselves as a kitchen, living room, and what the agent said was a breakfast nook. There was a miniature stair- case, a couple of bedrooms above, an ironing board that let down neatly, a basement with & new furnace in it. From the kitchen window Cornelius looked square into the kitchen opposite, where a fat baby sat in a high chair and gazed admiringly on life. “Who lives around here?” he asked. “Young people—finest people you ever saw— honeymooners, newly weds. Fine air, good commuting, street car every 10 minutes, sim- ply can't be beat. There are garages across the street for rent—community garages. In the Summer, it's an awfully pretty little place. And the price is only five thousand. Five hun- drew down, and the balance like rent, $50 & month. Any one can carry it, on a salary, you know. And then you've got something. This suburb’s coming on. You're never going to sell for less than you pay.” He went on with a flood of arguments. . Cornelius was noting the newness of every- thing, the freshness, and a sense of venture erept into him. “If I were interested, whom should I see?” “See me—right now.” “Oh, well, I suppose this thing will be open for a while—" “Don’'t you fool yourself,” said the agent. “It’s just been finished. It'll sell before sun- down.” IT seemed altogether likely to Cornelius. He felt impulsively in his pocket for card and check book. It was just about what he could swing. It was 'what he ought to swing at his age. It was his own speed. “All right,” he said, “I'll buy it. We'll fix #t up tomorrow, and in the meantime I'll give you a check to hold it.” “Now you're talking,” said the agent. beclieve me, you've got a good buy!” Cornelius tried to remember that, later in the afternoon, when Olive whispered, tempt- ingly close to him, “I spoke to Mother about the apartment, and she says she expects to help. I know she’ll take care of all that, Corny; and there’'s no reason why she shouldn’t.” He made two attempts to tell her: “l think I've found something else you'd » “And ave you really? Where?” He didn’t tell her. He evaded, promising to take her to the place. He paid for it next day, at least enough to make it his temporarily, and went out after work to unlock the door and look at it all again. It was even smaller than he remem- bered, and very empty; but it seemed friendly, as if it already knew that it belonged to him. Cornelius, who had lived in boarding houses for five years and in college rooms before that, dic¢ not know quite why he felt so strangely conrtent in the vacant rooms. He did not recog- nize the sense of home. But there was Olive Mary. There were wed- ding presents coming in now, for the invita- tions were already out. Such things as Olive Mary got in tribute! A rare old Spanish desk, thin Oriental rugs, silver dishes, lamps—even books. She would show them to Cornelius, and Cornelius, thinking of the cottage out in Shore Park, felt stranger and stranger. Still he had not told her. He evaded. He was busy. They'd go see the place he had in mind to- morrow, and then the day after that. Until there came a day when Cornelius knew that he could put it off no longer. For in a week they were to be married. He had sent a ton of coal out to the cot- tage and built a fire in the furnace that noon, enormously proud of his victory over drafis and furnace doors. The few things he had had in storage since his mother died were already there, too. He had kept only those things that had been in the Alstyne family for a long wtile, all the time the family grew poorer and poorer—a few pieces of mahogany, a portrait or two, the low rocker that his mother always sat in. They did not fill up the rooms, but they seemed to be at ease there. When he went out at noon, Cornelius had tshought of something else. He had bought ! 424 T Every one who knew Billy Bates knew he hadn’t done a stroke of serious work since he married Nita. roses and they stood on the tilt-top table that had come out of storage, stuck in a milk bottle he had borrowed from the neighbor on the left, the mother of the fat baby. “We don’t need your car,” he told Olive, when he met her, “Let's just go by ourselves. We may want to hunt around. We can take a street car, and the agent has given me the keys.” It was nearly dark when they got off the car in Shore Park. Olive did not say any- thing. She looked around her at the little houses, flat against the barren landscape, and at Cornelius, who avoided her eyes and kept talking of a totally unrelated subject. Olivé Mary’s chin went up and her lips set together a listle. And as he guided her down the block, and up the tiny strip of cement, her chin went higher yet. “You see,” sald Cornelius cheerily, “it’'s a very graceful door, really. You don't often find doors with such nice lines.” She looked at it, and it became a slab of painted pine. He fitted the key into the lock and swung the door open. Olive looked around mercilessly. She didn’t have to take many steps to see all the down- stairs, but she stood quite still in the tiny hall- way. “You're quite mad, Cornelius,” she said. “We can't live in a place like this. You don’t think we could live in Shore Park!” “Lots of people do. Young men like me,” he told her quietly. “I can pay for this. In fact, I am paying for it. It's mine.” She turned on him angrily. “You haven’t bought this dump!” Cornelius stiffened. It wasn’t him she seemed to hit, so much as the kindly little house that had been so friendly to him. “It’'s my home,” he said coldly. “It's where I'm going to live. I'm the sort of person who can afford a place like this. If you don’t want to marry me, you needn’t. But, if you do marry me, you marry me, just as I am, with what I can give you.” “You think I'd live here?” she asked. “I didn’t know. I wondered. I only know that I won’t live in any place your parents pay for. I want to be married as a husband, Olive— or not at all. If you care to look around, the place is at your disposal. If you don't, I'll take you back to your house, I've shown you what I could give you. It's small. There’s no room for a maid. But I wouldn't let you work too hard. It's near to commonplace neighbors, but it’s not as near as you would be in an apart- ment to people of any kind who could afford the rent. It's my home. The best I have. And A Certain T've got to look at the furnace before this place burns up,” he added abruptly. OLIVE saw him go, heard him clumping down wooden stairs somewhere into a cellar, and she gazed around her in a kind of panic, tears tight in her throat. It was unimaginable, this tawdry little house, this cheap suburb!- What insolence to think he could put a thing like this over, to dream she’d live in such a place! She drew the expertly tailored coat close about her, with one of those patrician gestures that were as natural to her as impossible to most girls, and went to the front door. Let him have his little shack, then, if he liked it so much! She was through with him, after this humiliation. The tears swelled and grew violent in her throat as she opened the door and looked out on the silent little street. Up and down its length she gaze” at it. It was incredibly strange to be here. Yet every- thing had suddenly become strange. Her father’s house seemed incalculably distant, re- mote and uncomforting. She didn’t want to go back there alone, have them ask her, be forced to tell them. Forgetting the open door, she turned back into the living-room, where Cornelius had switched the light on. She must reason him out of this nonsense, Through the glaze of angry tears the odd setting of the room came to her; the old pieces of furniture. The odor of roses arrested her, and, as she turned, she saw them spreading gloriously from the stem of the milk bottle. Suddenly, a strange feeling of pride came over her, but it was not the kind common to Olive Mary. Not the consciousness of being a Tillsbury, but that proud glow that comes only to women who are cared for because they are beloved. All her life, people had taken care of Olive Mary in luxury, and yet never like this —not with this sense of her glory, as the roses showed; not with this eagerness to work for her warmth, her shelter. Money had come easily to the Tillsburys for several generations, but Olive Mary was no fool, and she knew it had not come easily here. Spreading over her discomfiture and the humil- iation of the little house came the erasing sense that this was her own, this, and all it stood for, a home born of personal love for her, raw, unfledged, needing~care and needing her. Rich Man. BY THEODOSIA GARRISON. The house I built for my life Is not beautiful—it is magnificent; Omne walks on velvet, sleeps on down And drinks from golden goblets. And at my table sit worthy gentlemen, Sober merchants, affable men of affairs And charming, open-handed sportsmen. They lske the house I built for my life; It has, however, one drawback— The doors are too low— Too low to admit any one with wings. No maiter how high I make my doors Nobody with wings can enter. I have urged the winged to try, To bend this way and that, To fold their wings to left or right. It is useless. “You see!” the wearers say. “Sorry, old man, but it can’t be done.” They step lightly back And unfurl the flashing glory of their wings, Crimson and gold and blue that shine and flash in the sun. I see them rise, from the curb of Maine sireet, Up and up, higher and higher, till they are lost in the sun. I go back to my table, to my estimable guests, My merchants and sportsmen and affable men of affairs. I am very lonely. THE SUNDAY STAR, WASHINGTON, D. C, JUNE 2, 1929—PART 7. It was a strange moment for Olive Mary. She, had a sense of the grimness of Cornelius’ mouth as she heard him shaking the furnace, and she knew that he did not intend to change, his mind. Or, if he did, if she could make, him, he would not forgive her for that. Per=, haps, he shouldn’t—— The room did its best to explain, talking g own simple language, trying to welcome her with its used, much-loved furniture, and the scent of its roses. And Olive Mary stood very gravely in the middle of it, until the splendid sureness that had come to them in the woods seemed to sweep over her again. Then she knew. This was Cornelius’ house, and, therefore, hers. Instinctively, she felt the draft from the opened front door, and shut it, Then she went through the dark kitchen, and, as she was fumbling for the switch, she saw through the lighted window of her neighbor’s house the fat baby in his highchair, pounding a welcome with his spoon. With a queer, un< steady smile, and her head up, Olive Mary Tillebury looked for the door to the cellar stairs, (Copyright, 1929.) Opera Stars Continued from Page Three. invitation to an impromptu supper eagerly age cepted. It is recorded of a famous tenor that, while spending the Summer at their country home, his wife fell ill and simultaneously the cook departed. To these disasters his wife's doctor added orders for a special diet. He prepared it and his own meals, too. I, myself, am no stranger to the art of pots and pans. Having camped out in California, every Summer since my boyhood, I pride my= self on certain dishes which, if not exactly dainties, may be classed as home cooking war= ranted not to poison. Camping in Bohemian Grove, Calif, where they celebrate the high jinx, and where I love to go in summertime, a group of us arranged & lark one night. Some miles distant was a road- house. It has an orchestra. We all agreed to go together, # guised as to dress, sing, and see whether a steady job would be offered us. When we reached the place, I happened to give “On the Road to Mandalay” in our tourna ment of song. It proved hot stuff, for every= body knew it. Taking me aside when I was through, the manager, assuming a portentous air, said, “Young fellow, if you sing here every night with my orchestra, I'll give you $25 & week.” I didn’t tell my would-be employer that I ale ready had another job that I couldn’t leave. Two other singers, hearing of our adventure, also tried it. Unfortunately, they went across the border into Mexico. And they got an en- gagement. However, it turned out that by law there any one agreeing to take employment cannot leave under two weeks. If I dared tell games, their lives and my own would be worth ttle. When, at the Metropolitan Opera House, the role of Jonny, a blackface comedian, was given me in “Jonny Spielt Auf,” a jazzy opera, as you know, I went up to Harlem in search of new dance steps, visiting various colored cabarets, I got them; they were peaches. Long and hard I practiced, with rugs lifted from the floor. Finally things went pretty well, But on that night when I appeared for the first time as Jonny, the thrill of things made me do the dance steps as I had never done them before. Lost in the joy of it, I danced and danced. And forgot that I must have some breath to sing. So when I needed it most it came in pants and puffs. Grown wiser when I next came out as Jonny, I was careful to remember that it was not to be an all-night dance. (Copyright, 1929.)