on his elbow to listen. The old aunt, the old cousin were talking
together: "Oh, the naughty little girl, off there in the meadow chasing
butterflies! How heartless children are! To leave her poor brother all
alone, when he needs so to be cheered!"
The blind man lying in the ferns broke out into a laugh, a ringing young
laugh, without irony, without bitterness.
It was the first time he had laughed since ... since his blindness.
HATS
My attention was first attracted to him by the ring of his voice as he
answered the question a woman near me put to him, amiably trying to
start a conversation: "And may I ask, Mr. Williams, what are you in
France for, Red Cross, or Y.M.C.A., or perhaps reconstruction work? I'm
refugees, myself. It's always interesting to know other people's
specialties. You often have so much in common. The only branches I
_don't_ know anything about are orphans and the blind."
To this the distinguished-looking, gray-haired man responded gravely,
"Madame, I am in France for hats."
"_Hats!_" exclaimed the war-worker.
"Hats," he reaffirmed quietly.
She looked at him wildly and moved to another part of the room towards a
recognizably tagged young woman in a gray uniform.
The timbre of his voice struck curiously on my ear. I cannot express its
quality other than to say it made the voices of the rest of us sound
like those of college professors and school-teachers; and I don't
pretend to know exactly what I mean by that.
He aroused my curiosity. I wanted to investigate, so I began looking
vague, letting my eyes wander, and answering at random. Presently the
earnest talker holding forth to me grew indignant at my lack of
attention, broke off abruptly, and went away. I turned to the man with
the different voice and asked, "What in the world makes you come to
France for hats, _just now_ in the midst of the war?"
He answered with instant decision, "Because the only hats worth buying
are made in Paris."
"_Now?_ with France bleeding to death, how _can_ they make hats, invent
new fashions!"
His eye kindled. "Madame, a good French modiste on her deathbed could
make a better hat than any one in New York ever could."
I pondered this. His accent was indubitably American, not to say New
York. But there are cases of French people who have spent part of their
childhood in the States who speak perfectly. "You must be at least
partly of French extraction to be able so to understand and admire
France," I ventured.
He opposed a rather startled and very emphatic negative. "Me? Not much!
I'm as American as they make 'em. Born on lower Broadway and brought up
in the New York public schools. I don't know anything about France,
except that we have to come here to get the right styles in hats. I
don't even speak any French except to say '_combien_' and enough to
count."
I was put off the scent entirely. "Oh, I thought from the way you spoke
that you knew France well. This is your first visit, then?"
He was silent a moment, making a mental calculation.
Then he said: "This is my fifty-first visit to Paris. I have come twice
a year for a little more than twenty-five years."
"Always for hats?" I queried, my imagination reeling at this vista.
"Always for hats," he said seriously.
I tried to be facetious. "Dear me! You must know all there is to know
about hats."
He shook his head. "Nobody knows anything about hats." He added, very
much in earnest, "Style is one of the great obscure mysteries of life."
This had always been one of my observations, but one I have petulantly
and impatiently deplored. I had never thought to hear it expressed with
such heartfelt gravity and weight by a man of such evident vigor of
personality.
I said, laughing uneasily, "It makes one very self-conscious about one's
own hat, to know oneself in the presence of such a connoisseur."
He reassured me: "Oh, I never look at hats except in the way of
business." In his turn he looked vague, and let his eyes wander,
evidently much bored with my remarks. In another moment he would have
turned away, but just then an acquaintance came up to me, addressing me
by name, and my new interlocutor broke in with a quite human eagerness,
"Oh, are you Mr. John P. Hulme's niece?"
"Why, do you know my Uncle John?" I cried astonished.
"He's one of the best business friends I have," he assured me, "and I
have often seen the picture of you and the children he has on his desk.
You must let me go to see them. I've got grown-up children of my own. It
will be a real treat to me to know some American children here."
In this casual manner, slipping in on the good graces of my little son
and daughter, I entered a world the very existence of which I had never
suspected, long and frequent as had been my sojourns in Paris; the world
of hat-buyers. And I had for guide the very dean and master of the
guild, to whom the younger aspirants looked up, whose sure, trained
instinct was their despair and inspiration.
It was perhaps his influence, dominating that circle, which made them
all so serious and intent on mastering their profession, so respectful
of their chosen occupation, so willing to give it the very best of their
judgment and taste. This was the more remarkable as, with the exception
of my new friend, they were quite the opposite of serious-minded men and
women, and, in the intervals of the exercise of their profession,
enjoyed rather more than was good for their health, morals, and
pocketbooks, the multiple occasions offered by a great city to damage
those possessions. I was not at all in sympathy with what seemed to me
the indifference of their relaxations in a country so stricken as
France; but I could not withhold my astonished admiration for the
excellent seriousness with which they approached their business. I
would have blushed to disclose to them the light shallow femininity of
my careless, rather slighting attitude towards "la mode." Also I was
amazed at the prodigious financial importance of their operations. The
sums which, without a blink, they paid out for hats, and the number of
hats they thus secured and the further sums which they looked forward to
paying into the coffers of the United States Customs, sounded to me as
unbelievable as those nightmare calculations as to the distance of the
stars from the earth or how much it has cost to build the Panama Canal.
"All that for _hats_!" I cried, "and every year, twice a year!"
"Oh, this is only the smallest part of what goes into hats," the expert
assured me. "What I'm buying now are only single models, you understand;
the successful ones, the well-chosen ones, will be copied by the hundred
dozen in the States and in Canada. That chenille toque you saw me buy
the other day..."
"That little, plain, ugly scrap of a thing you paid a hundred dollars
for?" I asked, giddy again with the remembered shock of that price.
"Yes. Well, probably that will be very widely copied, at first in New
York and then everywhere. It's a fair guess to say, that being a model
that's sure to be popular, there will be at least twenty thousand toques
like it sold in different places in the States for five dollars apiece."
I was staggered. "A hundred thousand dollars spent in _one_ season,
just for _one_ out of all the different models of women's hats!" My old
superficial scorn for "the style" disappeared in an alarmed dismay at
its unsuspected scope. "Why, that's _terrible_! It's appalling! When
there isn't enough money to make the schools what they ought to be, nor
to take care of the sick, nor to keep up the...."
He showed an unexpected humanity. "Yes, it is awful," he agreed
gravely--"very, very awful. And still more awful is the way we live
right along beside such an awful force and never have the slightest idea
that it rules our lives and not what we wish or decide."
For all my consternation I found this excessive. "Oh, come, it's not so
bad as _that_!" I cried.
"Yes, it is," he assured me with his formidable quiet certainty. "Yes,
it is. It goes beyond anything we can imagine. It's the greatest force
in the world, this desire, this absolute necessity to be in the style.
Nothing else can stand up against it for a moment, not hunger, not fear,
not love, not religion. They only exist so far as they don't get in the
way of being in the style. The minute they interfere with that, over
they go like a pack of cards in a tornado! What do you think a man is
doing when he works all his life for his family? Is he earning their
livings? Not much. He's enabling them to keep in style, and if he
doesn't he is a failure. What do you really want for your children? That
they may grow up to develop all the best they have in them ... yes, _if_
that doesn't prevent their being in style."
I found all this so outrageous that I could only stare a silent protest.
"I don't mean just my small part of it, hats," he explained, "although
hats are always, so to speak, the crest of the tidal wave. It's
everything. Style rules everything. Of course all material things,
furniture, clothes, the way houses are built and gardens laid out and
parks made and pictures painted. Everybody can _see_ with his own eyes
how _they_ are all determined by whatever the style happens to be in
that century or year, and not by anything we want or need. But more than
that, too. Everything goes together. We talk and eat and act according
to the kind of furniture we have; for instance, when rough-hewn Morris
furniture was the rage and we all had to have it or dry up and blow away
with envy, don't you remember how the athletic blowsy styles in clothes
and manners came in too, and it was all the thing to go to a funeral in
a striped shirt and yellow shoes and the girls' shirtwaists bloused over
in front as though they had forgotten to tuck them in, and how bulging
pompadours straggled down in every woman's eyes?"
"Do you mean," I was ready to laugh at him, "that you think that our
Morris furniture influenced us so deeply as all that? Even Morris would
be surprised to hear so much claimed for it."
He was scornful of my incapacity to grasp the scope of his idea. "No,
Lord no! The Morris furniture hadn't anything more to do with it than a
tree bent double with the storm has to do with making the wind blow. I
mean that the same thing that _made_ us mortgage our souls to have
Morris furniture just then, made us also talk slang and wear yellow
shoes to funerals."
"Well, what _did_ make us?" I challenged him.
He answered monosyllabically, solemnly, with his redoubtable, arresting
conviction, "The style did."
We were both silent a moment as if in the presence of Niagara or the
ocean.
Then I said, in a feebler challenge, "Well, what _is_ 'the style'?"
He professed the admirable ignorance of a wise man in the face of
mystery.
"I wish I knew. It looks to me like a big current that takes in
everything, that is so big we don't know it's there, just the way people
didn't use to know the world was round, because it is too big to see.
And it carries us along like dry leaves and where it's going to, nobody
knows. We know just as much about it, as we do about where water runs
underground; which is to say, nothing. But when it comes to that part of
style that makes hats and dresses, there are a few people who can hold a
hazel-rod and have it point downwards, and they are oftener right than
the rest of us. And every one of those few is French and lives in Paris.
Don't ask me why! That's the way it is. And it would be enough sight
more convenient for _me_, let me tell you, if it were otherwise."
I understood this exclamation, having learned by this time how great an
affliction to Mr. Williams personally were these semi-annual trips to
France. He knew nothing of Paris outside of the great modistes' shops,
and he cared less. Since he knew no French the theaters were closed to
him. Since he was mildly musical (he played the violin a little)
concerts helped a little to allay his ennui; but only a little. Being a
family man of very domestic tastes, he took slight part in the very
cheerful proceedings with which the other buyers whiled away the hours
between business operations, and although he was invited to their gay
suppers in expensive restaurants, he struck an austere note there,
drinking only water, not smoking, and eating sparingly of simple dishes,
quite evidently counting the hours till he could get back to America and
to his garden in Westchester County.
In spite of this lack of appreciation of what was offered him, he was
very frequently invited to the nightly feasts of his young confreres,
and they hung about him eagerly because of their superstitious reverence
for what they called his "hunch." "Whatever Grandpa says is going to go,
goes," was their expressed belief. They tried by ingenious devices to
exploit his scent for the style, to be within earshot when he was making
selections, to suborn the milliners into showing them the models he had
selected. Such crude, outright efforts at getting the better of him he
defeated with a wary dexterity, getting up and leaving a shop abruptly
if one of his rivals began to loiter too near him, and letting it be
known that he would buy no more from any milliner who reproduced "his"
models for one of the other American buyers. This last precaution was
not necessary, for the sense of professional honor and jealousy is not
keener among doctors themselves than among Paris fashion-makers, nor was
the capacity for darkly guarding secrets more developed in Renaissance
Italian poisoners than in a twentieth-century modiste's shop on the
Place Vendome. Also Mr. Williams, who had seen a whole generation of
modistes grow up and disappear into old age, enjoyed the very high
esteem of those quick-eyed, quick-fingered, quick-witted ladies with the
wonderful simple coiffures and the wonderful simple hats. This was not
solely because of the very large sums of money which were at his
disposition and which he spent with Napoleonic decision and despatch.
They respected his competence also. "There is one who can appreciate our
work!" they said of him. "He always picks out the best. There is one who
could have made hats, himself!" A characterization which the American
would have repudiated with energy if he could have understood a word
they were saying.
But although, as a matter of business acuteness, he refused to allow
himself to be exploited in small ways by his young competitors, he was
always ready to expound his philosophy to them and to lay down the
general lines along which they might develop as he had. Not infrequently
their elaborate dinners, where too much had been eaten and drunk by the
elaborately dressed women and smooth-shaven, young-old men, ended by the
question flung despairingly at Mr. Williams' impassive respectability,
"Grandpa, how the dickens _do_ you _do_ it? Tell us!"
He always told them, at length, in detail, as long as they would listen,
although they never understood one word of what he said. Hoping to catch
him off his guard and to cull some valuable short-cut tip to success,
they lent ears as attentive as their somewhat bemused condition would
let them, as long as their patience held out.
"The trouble with most of you young people," he was wont to say,
presenting as he went on the abhorrent spectacle of a man at the Cafe
Riche taking occasional sips from a glass of water, "is that you don't
realize that you are up against a _big thing_, the biggest thing there
is. You think you can just josh along somehow, pick out what looks good
to you, what you think would be pretty for your best girl to wear, and
have it go. Nothing like that! What _you_ like, what _you_ think is
pretty, hasn't a thing to do with what's going to happen. What's going
to happen, _happens_, whether anybody likes it or not, and the only
thing for us to do is to keep our ears to the ground _hard_ and try to
guess three or four months sooner than most people. Nobody can guess
further ahead than that and mighty few people even as far as that. Most
people don't know what style is coming till it hits them in the eye.
Now, to make a good guess you've got to keep your eyes open to
everything, everything, and then sort of gather yourself together and
listen, hold your breath and listen, as if you were eavesdropping folks
who were trying to keep a secret from you; as if you had to catch a very
faint A sounded way off that you could tune your own fiddle to. And
you've got to get passive all over, the way the hypnotizers tell you to
do, let yourself go, don't try to have any ideas of your own, don't try
to swim against the current, don't try to hurry things up by swimming
faster than the current. No power on earth can hurry that current, nor
make it bring anything but what it's going to bring! And it's up to us,
let me tell you, to take what it does bring! I've seen lots of styles
that nobody liked, not the modistes who made them, not the buyers who
took them to the States, not the hundreds of thousands of American women
who paid out their husbands' good money to buy them. And yet those
styles had just as big a vogue and lasted just as long as any others,
and the buyers who tried to dodge them and who chose what looked
prettier to them got everlastingly stung. And aren't there styles that
everybody just hates to see disappear, comfortable, decent, becoming
styles? But do they stay in, just because we'd like to have them? You
know they don't.
"And it's no use trying to do anything on your own hook. There was old
man Blackmar, head of the Blackmar and Jennings Ribbon Company; he could
manufacture ribbons to beat any French factory going, _if_ he got the
designs from France. Every time he tried to have one designed by a
perfectly good American designer, the ribbon didn't sell. It didn't look
so very different, but it wouldn't sell. You'd have thought he'd have
learned something out of seeing that happen every time he tried it,
wouldn't you? But he never did. Why, I was honestly sorry for him, five
or six years ago when all of a sudden the styles went dead against
ribbons or any other trimming for hats. It pretty near ruined him,
coming after the modistes had been piling everything they could buy on
top of their hats. But he didn't know enough to take his medicine
without making a face. He couldn't get it through his head that he was
up against a bigger proposition than _he_ was, than anybody is. He came
to me and he said: 'Williams, I'll give you fifteen thousand dollars,
cash, in your hand, if you'll steer things over in Paris so's to bring
hat-trimmings back into style; ribbons of course if you can, but if not,
most any kind of trimmings. I can alter our machines to do braids and
such. This craze for just the naked hat-shapes with one little rag of an
ornament, I tell you, it'll send me into the bankruptcy court.'
"I was very sorry for him and I said so, and I said I'd do anything to
help him out except try to slap back the Hudson river with the flat of
my hand. He said he was sick of hearing me always get off that same old
guff, and if I really wanted to, I could. 'Why, they tell me every
modiste in Paris calls you "uncle." With plenty of money you could get
on the right side of them and get them to launch trimmed styles.'
"I just threw up my hands at that. I saw he didn't know any more about
the innerds of his business than a babe unborn. I said to him: 'Why,
old man, you don't suppose for a minute that the modistes in Paris
_invent_ the styles, make 'em up out of their heads? They haven't got
any more to say about what it's to be than you or me. All they can do is
to take the style that's going to arrive in six months, and put it into
silk and felt and straw. They can't have it the way they _want_ it any
more than the priestess of something-or-other could say what she wanted,
when they put her over the oracle-hole, filled her up with gas, and told
her to make an oracle.'
"Blackmar was sore as a boil at me, and said if I wouldn't do it he'd
give the job to Pierce. Pierce was buying for Condit and Vergary in
those days. I said he could throw away all the money he wanted to, but
_I_ wouldn't help him spill it.
"Well, Pierce tried to swing the deal, bucking the universe all alone,
and so proud to have the chance to. He went to all the best modistes in
Paris and said he'd give--well, I'm ashamed to tell you what he gave--if
they would make him models all trimmed up, heavy and expensive with
handsome trimmings. Of course, at first they said they couldn't do it,
the hats wouldn't be in style. And he said if they made the hats that
way and sent them out with their names in gilt letters in the lining,
they would be in style, would _be_ the style. Didn't everything they
made set the fashion? They tried to explain to him that that was because
they took the greatest pains to make things that were in fashion, but
Lord! he couldn't talk their language. He just kept on insisting and
holding out those banknotes, and by and by they said, well, to get rid
of him they _would_. And he came to my hotel and bragged all over me
like a man who's cornered the wheat-market.
"They did make him trimmed models: and as they were the best modistes in
the world they were as pretty hats as ever you saw. They were all
trimmed up as per agreement with ribbons that would make a dead woman
sit up and reach out her hand. Pierce took me into his office before
they were packed, to show them to me, and he said, '_Now_, Grandpa, what
you got to say?' And I said, 'You let me know four months from now how
much money you've made on them.'
"About six weeks after that, back in New York, I went into his office
and there, by George, were all but two of his fifteen models. None of
the American manufacturers would have them, not at any price. They'd
send their head milliner to see them and she'd say, 'Oh, what perfectly
lovely ribbon,'--but no, thanks, she didn't want to buy the model,
because they wouldn't sell. They weren't what were being worn that
season. Pierce said: 'Great Scott! look at the labels. They come from
all the best modistes in Paris'; and she'd say she couldn't help that;
if they weren't what was being worn they wouldn't sell. And before three
months were up he'd given them to the janitor's little girl for dolls'
clothes. There you are."
There were evident signs of inattention from his audience by this time,
but he went on: "And young Hammond, he tried to tear the teeth off the
buzz-saw with his fingers, too. And _he_ got what was coming to him. He
had a great idea, regular perpetual motion scheme for economy, of how he
could beat the game and he hypnotized old John Harbine into standing for
it. It was as simple as bread and milk. Hammond would take up a Paris
modiste, somebody on a back-street somewhere, get her under contract to
be 'Harbine's,' and Harbine's alone. Then they'd put her name in the
hands of the best advertising agency in New York and let things rip.
Well, they started out as though they were going to a fire. You couldn't
see the spokes, the wheels went around so fast. The advertising people
delivered the goods, put the best people on their force on the job. I
remember they had one college-graduate woman that could write ads that
would make you pay five dollars for a strawberry basket--_once_! She
wrote up their great find in Paris, wrote it up like a magazine
short-story--modiste who up to the time Hammond had spotted her had been
so exclusive you couldn't find her with a microscope, had only worked
for the pure-bloods among the French aristocracy, no mere Americans had
ever known her name (you can bet your life they hadn't)--you can imagine
the kind of patter, the sort of thing women suck up by the barrelful.
And then, owing to unheard-of prices offered by Harbine's out of that
disinterested devotion to American womanhood which is Harbine's great
quality, she had finally consented to send a few hats, never more than a
dozen a season, to Harbine's, where the first collection would be on
exhibition March 21st, and which would be exactly copied to order in
imported materials with all the inimitable _chic_ of the original
models, for such low prices as from fifteen dollars up.
"It was well done. I'm bound to admit that ad.-writer got just the right
esthetic, superior tone into it. And as for Hammond, he ought to have
been a stage-manager. He got some of the people back of me sort of
worried. They came to me, 'Look-y here, Grandpa, sure you're not missing
a point in the game? How _about_ this Suzette Rellot person?'