A FITTING
During the spring and summer Persis rose at half past five, and though
she slept little the night following Thomas Hardin's disclosures, she
refused to concede to her feeling of weariness so much as an extra
half-hour. Her fitful slumbers had been haunted by dreams of apples,
apples in barrels, apples in baskets, apples dropping from full
boughs and pelting her like hail-stones, for all her dodging. There
were feverishly red apples, gnarly green apples and the golden sweets,
the favorites of her childhood, all of them turning into goblins as she
approached, and leering up at her out of impish eyes which nevertheless
bore a startling resemblance to those eyes in whose depths she had once
seen only the reflection of her own loyalty. It was small wonder that
Persis woke unrefreshed. "I declare," she mused, as she twisted her
hair into the unyielding knob, highly in favor among the feminine
residents of Clematis as a morning coiffure, "a few more nights like
that would set me against apple pie for good and all."
But the developments of the day were soon to elbow out of Persis'
thoughts the visions of the night. As she stepped out on the porch for
a whiff of the invigorating morning air, her eyes fell upon a unique
figure coming toward her across the dewy grass. In certain details it
gave a realistic presentment of an Indian famine sufferer. In respect
to costume, it was reminiscent of a bathing beach in mid-July.
"Of all things!" Persis gasped, one hand groping for support, while the
other shaded her incredulous and indignant eyes. "Have you taken leave
of your senses, Joel Dale?"
Her brother ascended the steps, wearing the expression of triumph
ordinarily assumed in honor of his great hygienic discoveries. He
replied to her question by another: "Persis, what do you s'pose is at
the bottom of all human ills?"
Persis rallied.
"I don't know as I'd undertake to speak for 'em all, but I should say
that a good nine-tenths was due to a lack of common sense."
Joel disdained to take up the gauntlet. "Persis, it's clothes."
His sister looked him over. Joel was attired in a pair of bathing
trunks and a bath towel, the latter festooned gracefully about his
body, low enough to show his projecting ribs. "If the style you're
wearing at present was ever to get what you'd call popular," she agreed
dryly, "I think it would make considerable trouble."
Joel again refused to be diverted. "Clothes, Persis, are an invention
of the devil. The electricity of the body, instead of passing off into
the earth as it would do if we went around the way the Lord intended,
is kept pent up in our insides by our clothes, and of course it gets to
playing the mischief with all our organs. As old Fuller says, 'He that
is proud of the rustling of his silks, like a madman laughs at the
rattling of his fetters.'"
"The sun is shining right on your bare back," remarked Persis acridly.
"According to your ideas yesterday, you'd ought to be ready to drop
dead."
Joel magnanimously ignored the taunt. Like some greater men, he had
discovered that to be true to to-day's vision, one must often violate
yesterday's conviction. The charge of inconsistency never troubled him.
"Earth and air are stuffed with helpfulness, Persis, and the clothes we
wear won't give it a chance at us. If the Lord had wanted us to be
covered, we'd have come into the world with a shell like a turtle.
Now, this rig ain't ideal because we've got to make some concessions to
folks' narrowness and prejudice, but it's a long way ahead of ordinary
dress."
"Joel Dale!" The grim resolution of Persis' voice warned the dreamer
of the family that the limit of her forbearance had been reached. "I'm
not going to stand up for clothes, though seeing that my living, and
yours too, depends on 'em, it's not for me to run 'em down. But this I
will say, as long as we live in a civilized land, we've got to act
civilized. And as for having you show yourself on this lawn in a
get-up that would set every dog in Clematis to barking, I won't. Go
up-stairs and dress like somebody beside a Fiji islander, but first
give your feet and legs a good rubbing. If you don't, the next thing
you know, you'll be down with pneumonia."
Perhaps Joel's tyrannical rule in the household for the last twenty
years had been due in part to his knowing the time to yield, a
knowledge that would have prolonged the sway of many a despot. He went
up-stairs in a rebellious mood which found expression in invectives
against womankind, its blindness, its wilfulness, its weak subservience
to usage. But when he appeared at the breakfast table, the
conventional shirt and trousers testified to the extent of Persis'
authority.
Little was said during the progress of the meal. Joel, saddened by the
lack of enthusiasm with which his great discovery had been received,
maintained a dignified silence. Persis, always moved to magnanimity by
triumph, forbore to emphasize her victory by obtruding on her brother's
reserve. Not till Joel had been fortified by a hearty breakfast and
had reached the advertising columns in his perusal of the weekly paper,
did she venture to touch upon another delicate theme.
"Joel, I wish you'd open the shutters of your bedroom and run up the
shade to the top. If ever a room needed airing and sunning, that's the
one. I'm going to give it a good cleaning as soon as I can take the
time, but this morning I'm too busy. Annabel Sinclair's coming for a
fitting at ten o'clock and that young Mis' Thompson at eleven. And I'm
as sure as I can be of anything but death and taxes, that Annabel will
be late."
Persis' apprehension would have taken on a keener edge, could she have
been favored at that moment with a glimpse of the patron of whose
punctuality she was in doubt. Ever since eight o'clock, Diantha
Sinclair had been opening the door of her mother's room at intervals of
five minutes and closing the same noiselessly, after a brief survey of
the figure on the bed. As the tenantry of field and forest apprehend
the approach of some natural cataclysm, by means of signs imperceptible
to man's grosser senses, so to Diantha the curve of her mother's
shoulder under the sheet, presaged a storm. Her uneasiness was due to
a horrid uncertainty as to which would anger her mother the more, to be
wakened too early or to be allowed to sleep too long.
By nine o'clock, the second of the alternatives seemed to Diantha the
more serious. She stole into her mother's room, and stationing herself
by the bed, spoke in the softest of voices; "Mama, your new dress--"
The opening showed a tact creditable to her years. After all, it is
one thing to be wakened by the crashing of a boarding-house breakfast
gong, and another to be roused by the music of a harp. Annabel opened
her eyes with a sense of something agreeable on the way, and Diantha
promptly acted on her advantage.
"Mama, you are to try on your new dress at ten o'clock, and it's nine
already."
"Nine!" moaned Annabel. "You should have called me before." Yet she
made no effort to rise and after a moment added sharply: "What are you
waiting for? Can't you see I'm awake?"
Diantha scurried like a rabbit, and her mother turned on her pillow for
another half-hour, an indulgence she would not have ventured under her
daughter's observant eyes. Like many people who defy public opinion in
large matters, she was acutely sensitive to criticism over trifles.
Aspersions of her character she accepted philosophically, almost
complacently indeed, because of her inward conviction that they were
indirectly a tribute paid by jealousy to her superior fascinations.
But a suggestion that a dress was unbecoming would make her unhappy for
days.
Her first act on rising was to run up the shade, in order to benefit by
the full light of the morning sun. Then for some minutes she studied
her reflection in a little hand-mirror which gave back to her view a
face rapt and absorbed. With Annabel this rite was a substitute for
morning prayer, and it brought her a peace not always secured by
equally sincere devotions. Diantha's willowy height woke in her a
sense of exasperated fear. It sometimes seemed to her that the girl's
growth was with deliberate purpose, a malicious demonstration of the
fact that her mother was not so young as she looked.
The testimony of the hand-mirror was reassuring, clear pink and white,
the crisp freshness of apple blossoms. Annabel worshiped and rose from
her knees, duly fortified against the mischances of the day, though her
divinity had been only her own beauty.
At nineteen, Annabel had married a man twenty years her senior, who
like many of his sex assumed that a pretty wife is from the Lord and
associated amiability, compliance and other feminine graces with a
rose-leaf complexion. The earlier years of their married life had been
a succession of ghastly struggles in which both sides had been worsted,
descending to incredible brutalities. Sinclair was essentially a
gentleman, and long after those contentious years he sometimes woke
from his sleep in a cold sweat, remembering what he had said to his
wife and she to him. Her unwelcome motherhood had only widened the
breach between them. Her hysterically fierce resentment of that which
he had innocently assumed to be a woman's crowning happiness, had
extinguished finally the last gleaming embers of a flame which might
have been altar fire and hearth fire both in one.
The man's growing apathy at length gave the victory to the woman. If
he did not hate his wife, Stanley Sinclair was so far from loving her
that his thin lips curled mockingly over the recollection of what he
had hoped on his wedding-day. If there is pathos in the lost illusions
of youth, those of middle life are grim tragedy. Sinclair wanted peace
at any price. The masculine intolerance of rivalry was less insistent
than it would have been in a younger man. Out of the wreck of things
he asked to save only quiet and the chance to live a gentleman. His
wife might go her way, so that she showed him a serene face and treated
him with tolerable courtesy. And so tacitly the two made the Great
Compromise.
At fifty-seven Stanley Sinclair was a cynically cheerful philosopher.
He had long before discovered that technically his rights as a husband
were safe. The woman whose vanity is stronger than her affections is
shielded by triple armor, and Annabel's virtue was safe, at least while
her complexion lasted. She was a glutton of admiration, and since the
highest homage a man could pay her charms was to fall in love with her,
she bent her energies unweariedly to bringing him to the point of
candid love-making. With success, her interest waned. A lover might
last six months or even a year, but as a rule he was displaced in
considerably less time by some understudy whom Annabel had thoughtfully
kept in training for the star rôle.
In Annabel's creed, masculine admiration was the supreme good. It was
the ultimate test of a woman's success, as the ability to make money
tested the success of men. Beauty was precious, because it was the
most effective lure. Talent was not to be despised, since it too could
boast its captives. But the woman who claimed that she prized her gift
for its own sake was guilty of an affectation which could deceive no
one, not at least, so shrewd an observer as Annabel.
At nineteen she had married a man more than twice her age. Since then
her preference for youthfulness had been growing, a phenomenon not
unusual in women of her type. At thirty-seven, she looked upon her
husband as senile, patriarchal, as far removed from her generation as
the Pilgrim fathers. Men of her own age bored her. They were
interested in business, politics, their families, a thousand things
besides herself. They had lost the obsession of personality, the
you-and-I attitude which is the life-blood of flirtation.
Just now Annabel preferred boys still young enough to be secretly proud
of the necessity of shaving every other day, young enough to swagger a
little when they lighted a cigarette. At her present rate of progress,
by the time she was fifty, she would have come by successive gradations
to the level of short trousers and turn-over collars.
The average worshiper may hurry over his prayers, but the devotee of
vanity must not make haste with her toilet. It was quarter of eleven
when Annabel was dressed, but since the results were satisfactory, she
was untroubled over her lack of punctuality. It was Diantha who
fidgeted, and looked at the clock.
"You're 'most an hour behind time. You'd better hurry if you don't
want Miss Persis to scold."
"I shan't hurry for any one," Annabel returned, selecting after due
deliberation the parasol with the pink lining. Her husband was
lounging on the porch as she went out, and he greeted her with his
usual, "Good morning, my dear," his gaze following her with the gently
satiric smile which always made her feverishly impatient to consult the
little mirror she carried in her hand-bag. That smile hinted at
extraordinary insight and unnerved her as his frenzied outbursts of
anger had never done. She had lost her power to hurt him except in the
way of humiliation, but he cynically argued that the constant amusement
she afforded him almost paid this last indebtedness. It was like
having a season ticket to a theater.
Persis Dale was fitting young Mrs. Thompson, the traveling man's wife,
when Annabel made her appearance. She nodded, glad that the half dozen
pins held loosely between her lips, relieved her from the obligation of
a welcoming smile.
"Maybe you'd like to set on the porch, Mis' Sinclair, till I'm at
liberty. Your hour was ten, you know. It's shady out there and you
can look over the new books. And now, Mis' Thompson, before I go any
further we've got to decide whether it's to open in the front or in the
back."
"I think the buttons down the back are more stylish," said young Mrs.
Thompson.
"There's no doubt of that," Persis agreed. "Everything in the book is
back. But there's always more'n one way to skin a cat. I could put a
row of hooks under the lace, around this side of the yoke, and nobody'd
ever know where it was fastened, or whether you were just run into it."
Young Mrs. Thompson hesitated, studying herself in the mirror. Persis
employed several pins in tightening a seam and expressed her views at
some length.
"It's just this way, Mis' Thompson. If you had a nice little girl, big
enough to stand on a chair and fasten you up the back, I wouldn't say a
word against it. But of all things that rack your nerves and spoil
your temper, twisting and squirming and trying to reach three or four
buttons, first from above and then from below, is certainly the limit.
And putting a shawl over your shoulders on a hot day and going to find
some neighbor to do it for you, ain't a great deal better."
"But this is going to be my Sunday dress," said the six-months bride,
whose color had increased appreciably during the course of Persis'
remarks. "And Will is always home for Sunday."
"Well, if you feel like taking the risk, Mis' Thompson, I haven't a
word to say. But when a man's home for a Sunday rest, he generally
wants a rest, and dresses that button up the back don't seem to fit in
with the idea. Human nature can't stand only just so much and man
nature considerable less."
An undecided murmur escaped the lips of young Mrs. Thompson.
"I had a customer," continued Persis, recklessly filling her mouth with
pins, "who gave up a good position as cashier in a city glove store, to
keep house for her brother when his wife died. She was always telling
me how grateful he was. Seemed like he couldn't do enough for her.
She used to say it 'most made her uncomfortable to see that man racking
his brains to find some way of showing her how he appreciated what
she'd done for him. Please walk to the end of the room, Mis' Thompson,
slow and graceful, till I see how that skirt hangs. Just a trifle long
on the seam. I thought so.
"Well, I made her a princess dress; gray it was and very stylish. It
hooked down the back, and then there was a drapery effect that hooked
up the side and across the shoulder. I wouldn't dare say how many
cards of hooks and eyes I used on that dress. I did ask her once how
she'd get into it, and she said that her brother, what with having been
married and all, was as handy as a woman at such things.
"I sent it home of a Saturday, and I didn't see her for two weeks.
Then she brought it in and she was crying. She wanted me to fix it
some way so that she could get into it by herself. Easier said than
done, you can believe. She'd worn it twice, and both times they'd had
words, and some of 'em were swear words, too. Well, I did the best I
could by the dress, but it was too late to save the day. You see she'd
taken such comfort in thinking how grateful he was, that she hadn't
minded what she'd given up herself, but after that, things was
different. She went back to the city in less than a year. I think
she's a cashier in some restaurant. She couldn't get her old place in
the glove store."
Young Mrs. Thompson had a bright idea. "Couldn't you put a row of
buttons down the back, just for looks, and then hook it under the lace,
same as you said?"
"Easiest thing in the world," Persis assured her. The domestic peace
of the Thompson family was preserved for the time being, though neither
woman guessed for how brief a period.
Annabel Sinclair was thoroughly out of temper when the time for her
fitting came, though she paid Persis the compliment of making a
whole-hearted effort to conceal her feelings. Persis Dale was one of
the few of whom Annabel stood in awe. Behind her back she frequently
referred to the dressmaker as an "interfering old maid," but in Persis'
presence she paid reluctant tribute to the dominating personality. When
very angry, Annabel indulged in whatever brutalities of plain speech
were suggested by a somewhat limited imagination, but her habitual
weapon was innuendo. She shrank from Persis' bluntness as a dog
cringes away from a whip.
When young Mrs. Thompson had hurried off to the brand-new cottage on
the hill, Annabel concealed her annoyance under a smile, inquired after
Joel's health and yielded to Persis' opinion with flattering deference.
But Persis' mood was not merciful.
"How your Diantha is growing, Mis' Sinclair. She must have left you
way behind before this."
Annabel winced. She had long been in the habit of referring to Diantha
as "my little girl." Of late she had fancied that her listeners looked
amused at her choice of a qualifying adjective.
"It's such a pity," she answered in her softest voice, "for a child to
grow that way. People expect so much more of tall children."
"Well, girls often get their growth by the time they're Diantha's age.
Let's see. She must be six--"
"I believe that seam twists," Annabel exclaimed. She chose her
criticism at random with the sole purpose of distracting Persis'
attention before the obnoxious word should be spoken. Yet it was true
that she had been married eighteen years. In another seven she would
be able to celebrate her silver wedding, an anniversary she had always
associated with old age. The horror of the situation was not lessened
by its grotesqueness.
"The worst of it is that everybody in this dreadful little town knows
all about it," she thought with a sense of panic. "People haven't
anything to do but remember dates." She wondered if she could prevail
upon her husband to go west, leaving Diantha in school somewhere. Then
she could say what she chose of her "little girl" without appealing to
the risibilities of her audience.
Persis, distracted for a moment by the false alarm of a twisting seam,
soon returned to her guns. With a skill Annabel was forced to admire,
she veiled her cruelty in compliment.
"Diantha is a pretty girl. Pretty and clever with her tongue. An
apple's got to have flavor as well as a rosy skin. There'll be lively
times at your place before long. It'll make you and Mr. Sinclair feel
young again to have courting going on in the house."
If murderous thoughts were as potent as daggers, Persis would never
have fitted another gown. Annabel was reaching the point where
self-control was difficult. Young again! Again! Even her reflection
in the mirror and the knowledge that the new dress was becoming, failed
to restore her equanimity.
Yet in the end it was Annabel who scored. For when at length she
crossed Persis' threshold, a young man happened to be passing. A
ravishing smile banished Annabel's look of sullen resentment. Her
white-gloved hand fluttered in greeting.
The young fellow swung upon his heel, his boyish face flushing in
undisguised rapture. He waited till Annabel reached the sidewalk, took
the pink-lined parasol from her hand with an air of proud possession,
and the two walked away together.
From the window Persis looked grimly after them. "Make the most of
this chance," she apostrophized the pair. "I'm getting ready to take
your case in hand."