TOYLAND
From her own point of view, the lost dryad was a prominent figure in
the middle of the foreground; for life was strenuous for those in the
grasp of the Hands, and it was only at night, when her body could lie
quiet while her brain was still terribly active, that other figures
assumed their due importance for Win in the great, bright picture of
New York.
It was something to be thankful for that she had escaped Peter the day
of that visit of inspection to the store. Not that she was afraid of
him or anything he could do if they should meet. That would have been
too silly and Victorian! Girls were not like that nowadays, if they
had any sense, no matter how "dangerous" men might be. But she had
liked him so much, and had been so bitterly disappointed to learn from
his own loving sister that he was not the "Mr. Balm of Gilead" created
by her imagination that it would be unbearable to meet him again, to
see him "giving himself away," and thus proving his sister right.
To be sure, after seeing Miss Rolls in the lift, certain kind
protestations of friendship had been contradicted by a frozen smile, a
cold, embarrassed eye. If Peter's sister were insincere in one way,
why not untrustworthy in others? This was one of the questions that
darted into Win's brain at night through one of the holes made there
by the giant bees of the "L" road. But the answer was obvious. Miss
Rolls might be superficial, insincere, and snobbish enough to dislike
claiming acquaintance with a girl of the "working classes," but there
was no motive strong enough to make her traduce her brother's
character. Even untrustworthy people told the truth sometimes.
It was rather fortunate, perhaps, that Win had another exciting
thought to engross her attention at this time, though it was no more
agreeable than the thought of Peter Rolls. After her conversation with
Mr. Meggison, she confidently expected to find her dismissal in the
next pay envelope. It was not there; but, suddenly and without
warning, she was dragged out of Blouses and Neckwear and dumped into
Toys.
This was as great a surprise to Sadie Kirk and Earl Usher as to Win
herself. She dropped upon them as if she had fallen out of the sky--or
at least from the top floor. And nobody knew why: whether it was a
punishment or a reward. For Toys gave harder work for the hands
without a capital H than Blouses and Neckwear, even when Miss Stein
was badly "peeved." Also, Mr. Tobias, the floorwalker concerned with
the toy department was "a spalpeen and a pie-faced mutt from 'way
back," whereas Fred Thorpe was a well-known angel. Yet, on the other
hand, not only were more than half the toy assistants men, but many of
the customers also were men. This made the department more lively to
be in than Blouses, and some girls considered Toys next best to
Gloves.
It was almost like coming into a strange shop when Win arrived with
Sadie before eight o'clock in the morning for her first day in
Toyland, as Earl Usher facetiously named it. The December morning
hardly knew yet that it had been born, and though already there was
life in the Hands--fierce, active life--those pulsing white globes
which made artificial sunshine whatever the weather, had not yet begun
to glow like illuminated snowballs. Shadowy men were lifting pale
shrouds off the counters. Voices chattering in the gloom were like
voices of monkeys in a dusky jungle--a jungle quite unlike that fairy
place where Peter Rolls had talked of Win to Lady Eileen. Out of the
gloom wondrous things emerged to people, a weird world--the Hands'
world of toys.
As Win strained her eyes to see through the dusk, forth from its
depths loomed uncouth, motionless shapes. Almost life-size lions and
Teddy bears, and huge, grinning baboons as big as five-year-old boys,
posed in silent, expressive groups, dangerously near to unprotected
dolls' houses with open fronts--splendid dolls' houses, large enough
for children to enter, and less important dolls' houses, only big
enough for fairies. Dolls' eyes and dolls' dresses and dolls' golden
curls caught what little light there was and drew attention to
themselves.
Some of them stood, three rows deep (the little ones in front, like
children watching a show), on shelves. Others were being fetched out
by the chattering shadows, as if they were favourite chorus girls, to
display their graces on the counters. They were placed in chairs, or
motor cars of doll land, or seated carefully in baby carriages. There
were walking dolls and talking dolls and dolls who could suck real
milk out of real bottles into tin-lined stomachs. Some exquisitely
gowned porcelain Parisiennes, with eyelashes and long hair cut from
the heads of penniless children, were almost as big and as
aristocratic as their potential millionaire mistresses. Humbler
sisters of middle class combined prettiness with cheapness, and had
the satisfaction of showing their own price marks.
These delicate creatures, lovely in pale-tinted robes or forlorn in
chemises, were the bright spots in the vast, dark department, shining
out through the dusk as stars shine through thin clouds. As Win became
one of the band of shadows, under Sadie's direction, gradually she
grew accustomed to the gloom, and her gaze called many of the strange
objects forth into life.
She found long-haired Shetland ponies big enough to ride, glorified
hobby horses clad in real skins, and unglorified ones with nostrils
like those of her landlady in Columbus Avenue. Biscuit-coloured Jersey
cows, which could be milked, gazed mildly into space with expensive
glass eyes. Noah's arks, big enough to be lived in if the animals
would move up, seemed to have been painted with Bakst colours.
Fearsome faces glared from behind the bars of menagerie cages. Donkeys
and Chinese mandarins nodded good-morning and forgot to stop. Dragon
broods of miniature motor cars nested in realistic garages.
Dramatic scenes from real plays were being enacted in dumb show on the
stages of theatres apparently decorated by Rothenstein. The Russian
ballet had stopped in the midst of "Le Spectre de la Rose." Suits of
armour, which Ursus called "pewter raincoats," glimmered in dark
spaces behind piled drums and under limply hanging flags or
aeroplanes ready to take flight. Almost everything was
mechanical--each article warranted to do what it pretended to do in
order to have its appeal for the modern child.
Win was a child of yesterday; yet the big girl has always the little
girl of the past asleep in her heart, ready to wake up on the
slightest encouragement, and she felt the thrill of Toyland. If when
she was small she could ever have dreamed of spending her days in a
place like this, she would have bartered her chance of heaven for
it--heaven as described in her father's sermons. It was another of
life's little ironies that her lot should be cast in a world of toys
when she was too old to prefer it to Paradise.
Sadie and Ursus had used up the little time they had in warning her
what she would have to expect in Toys.
"There are some punk fellers who'll try it on with you--pinch or
tickle you as you pass by, and say things not fit for a dandy guyl
like you to hear," the lion tamer had hurriedly explained. "But don't
you stand for it. You don't have to! Just hand 'em along to me, and
I'll make 'em sorry their fathers ever seen their mothers."
Sadie's story of girl life in Toyland was on the same lines, but with
a different moral.
"Don't you tell tales out o' school, no matter what any of the chaps
_do_," was her advice. "I kin hold my own, and I bet you can. You may
be a looker, but you ain't anybody's baby doll. If a feller calls you
'childie' or 'sweet lamb' or tells you you're the peacherino in the
peach basket, don't you answer back, but just smile and wend your
ways. If he goes so far as to put his arm around your waist or take a
nip with his nails out of your arm or hip, why, then you can land him
one on the napper if nobody's lookin'. But all the same, the chaps
mostly ain't so black at heart. They just try to decorate their gray
lives a bit, and if those sort of things didn't happen to me once or
twicet a day, why I'd be discouraged and think I'd lost my fatal
beauty."
For some subtle reason, however, "chaps" did not pinch or tickle Win
or slip arms around her waist. One confided to another that he guessed
there was nothing "didding" in that direction, and he'd as soon make
love to the Statue of Liberty as an English Maypole; which was as
well, for from the first moment of her entrance on the scene, the lion
tamer kept his eyes open. There were all sorts and conditions of men
in Toys, but he was among them as a giant among pygmies; and even if
the ex-ship's steward, the ex-trolley driver, the conjurer out of a
job, and the smart young men who had been "clerking since they were in
long pants," had wished to try their luck with Win, Earl Usher would
have shown them the wisdom of turning their eyes elsewhere.
The news soon ran round Toyland that "Winsome Winnie" was Usher's
girl. The male "assistants" did no worse than call her by her
Christian name (they must have caught it from Sadie), and that was no
cause of offence to girl from man in a department store. Every girl in
a department shared by men was "Kitty" or "Winny," "Sadie" or
"Sweetie," while the men expected to be addressed as Mr. Jones or Mr.
Brown, except by their own particular "petsies." Sadie was popular
with all, even the "permanences," who considered themselves above the
"holiday extras." The ex-steward, a good-looking young German, had
offered to get her a dandy place as stewardess when he felt ready to
sniff salt water again, and though she wasn't "taking any," and often
boxed his ears, she made "dates" with him for dance halls after
business hours, especially one called Dreamland, which was too lovely
for "wuyds." There were movies, and you could dance till 'most
morning. Real swell gentlemen, who wore red badges to show "they was
all right," came up and asked if they could "interdooce" other gents
to you, in case you'd come in alone and didn't have friends. But Sadie
always did have friends.
The red-haired girl, who had from the first been a haunting mystery
for Win, was in the toy department. Her name was Lily Leavitt, and--as
Sadie had already told Win--she was "chucking herself" at Earl Usher's
head. At first Miss Leavitt "lamped" Miss Child "something awful." But
on the English girl's third Toy day a thing happened which converted
the enemy into a friend--an all too devoted friend.
It was now so near Christmas that in the department devoted to toys
and games you could not have placed a sheet of foreign notepaper
between mothers (with a sprinkling of aunts and grandmas) unless you
wanted it torn to pieces before you could count "One!" Children were
massed together in a thick, low-growing underbrush, and of their
species only babies were able to rise, like cream, to the top. The
air, or rather the atmosphere (since all the air had been breathed
long ago), was to the nerves what tow is to fire. Nobody could be in
it for ten minutes without wanting to hit somebody else or push
somebody else's child, little brute! out of the way.
What with heat, the rage for buying, impatience to get in and
impatience to get out, the fragrance of pine and holly decorations,
the smell of hot varnish and hot people and cheap furs, the babble of
excited voices and shrieks of exhausted children, it was the true
Christmas spirit. Peter Rolls's store in general, and the toy
department in particular, were having what would be alluded to later
in advertisements as an "unprecedented success."
Before Win came the folding chairs for "assistants" had all been
broken or out of order. But (no doubt, said Sadie) because of some
lingering suspicion that she might, after all, be an anti-sweat spy,
the springs or hinges were mysteriously repaired throughout the
department. By law any girl could sit down. By unwritten law she
mustn't, yet there were the chairs as good as gold and fresh as paint.
They were even pointed out to Win, but in the whirl of things the
moment after she forgot their very existence and never had time to
remember it again.
That third day in Toys was the most appalling she had known of all the
long, wild days at Peter Rolls's since coming in as an extra holiday
hand. Dozens of customers clamoured for her at once. Each female
creature seemed to have as many hands as Briareus, all reaching for
things they wanted, or gesticulating and brandishing money, or
snatching for change. If each distracted girl had had half a dozen
highly trained astral bodies with which to serve these terrible
ladies, it would not have been enough. More ladies would have come.
Yet (Win noticed with wondering admiration) some of the girls, those
most experienced and less easily rattled, did find opportunities to
polish their nails and pat their hair. They would turn as if to find
something "in stock," stoop quickly, taking advantage of the crowd
behind the counters, snatch out of their stockings tiny mirrors and
bags of powder or rouge, and "fix themselves," while their anxious
customers supposed they were diving for a toy. These were the girls
who kept their own perfumed soap and scent bottles in their lockers
and could afford becoming hats, whether or no they had money to buy
new underclothes and stockings when the old ones gave out.
Win, however, had neither experience enough nor desire to find time
for personal matters. She gave her whole soul to her work and wore
that pleasant Christmas smile which floorwalkers wish to see on
salesladies' faces. But her smile was only skin deep. She had never
liked her sister women less--cross, silly, snapping, inconsiderate
things, strutting and pushing about in skins and plumes of animals far
more agreeable and beautiful than themselves! Dangling all over with
poor little heads of dead creatures, just as if they were moving
butcher shops, and apparently without a sense of humour to tell them
what idiots they looked.
Yes, idiots! That was the word. And if they had enough humour to put
on a thumb nail, _could_ they wear the stick-out and stick-up
ornaments on their hats they did wear, to prod each other's eyes? No,
they couldn't! And what with feathers standing straight out behind,
and long corsets down to their knees, they could never lean back
against anything, no matter how tired they were. So, what with tight
dresses and high heels and thin silk stockings and low shoes and
blouses on winter days, no wonder men wouldn't let them have the vote!
Win turned from an incipient suffragette into a temporarily venomous
woman hater when a customer made her show nine dozen dolls, and then
minced away saying that Peter Rolls never did have anything worth
buying. Another patronizingly bestowed five cents upon Win for her
"trouble" after making her change three toys bought yesterday and
taking half an hour over it. Altogether, when Winifred Child happened
to think of Mrs. Belmont's building with the great figure of a woman
falling down the front of it, she would have liked the statue to drop
to earth with a crash.
Once in a while, contriving to pass near, Ursus tried to whisper a
word of encouragement:
"You're a Wonderchild, you are! Say, it don't spoil your looks bein'
tired. You're the picture postal, you are! Never you mind these dames.
Say the word and we'll make up with a large time to-night. I'll blow
you through all the best movies and stake you to an ice-cream, soda.
Do you get yes?"
Despite his well-meant solicitude, however, Win's vitality was at an
exceedingly low ebb toward five o'clock in the afternoon of the third
day. There had been no time to go out for an alleged luncheon and a
breath of fresh air. She had eaten nothing since her breakfast of hot
chocolate at a soda fountain, save a poached egg in the employees'
restaurant, and, as Sadie said, it wasn't safe to accept an egg from
the Hands unless you'd met the hen socially and knew her past. Since
four o'clock the exile had been thinking passionately of England, with
its millions of women sitting down--actually sitting down!--to tea.
And then, suddenly, a man pushed aside a female thing who was being
cross because she couldn't find a doll that said "Papa" and "Mama" in
German.
"As you can't get what you want, madam, I'm sure you won't mind my
taking your place," apologized a cheerful voice. "Madam" was so
dumfounded that she gave way. And Win, thankful for a change of sex in
her customer, had put on her polite saleslady air before she realized
that she was face to face with Jim Logan, her motoring acquaintance of
the park.
"Howdy do?" he inquired, and hastily added: "I want a doll. I don't
care whether she can talk German or not. Though I do want a little
conversation--with somebody."
Money could not be lost to the house of Rolls because one of its
female servants wished to snub an admirer. Mr. Logan was even better
dressed than when Win had seen him before. He looked rich enough to
buy Peter Rolls's star doll, price five hundred dollars, with
trousseau. Nevertheless Miss Child determined to outwit him.
"What kind of a doll?" she asked in a business-like tone, showing no
sign of recognition. "For a small girl or a large girl? And about what
price do you wish to pay?"
"Doll for a middle-sized girl," replied the customer, his twinkling
eyes on the young woman serving him. "I like large girls best, girls
exactly your size and age, twenty at most, and warranted to look
seventeen if given a day's rest and a pretty hat and a supper at
Sherry's--with the right man. I don't mind how much trouble I take
looking for a doll any more than I mind the trouble of looking for a
girl. This is a little sister of mine who has to have a doll. I like
other men's sisters better, but---"
"I think I know just what you want," said Win briskly. "If you'll be
good enough to wait here half a minute; I'll see that you get it."
Like a flash she was off, looking for Sadie. But Sadie was too far
away. Win didn't want the redoubtable Tobias to scold her for
neglecting customers, as she had heard him scold Lily Leavitt the day
before, when Lily was trying to flirt with Earl Usher. Close by was
Miss Lily Leavitt herself, looking bored to the verge of extinction by
an old lady who wished advice in choosing five presents for five
grandchildren. "Miss Leavitt," Win whispered, "would it be possible
for you to take my man, who wants a doll for a middle-aged sister--I
mean, middle-sized--and let me attend to your customer?"
Miss Leavitt threw a green-eyed glance at the man indicated, and said:
"Ginks! Ye-h!" as quickly as she could draw breath.
The immediate and brilliant success of the stratagem was as reviving
to tired Win as the encounter in the park had been. Her splendid
vitality came bubbling to the surface again, and she showed such an
interest in selecting the five grandchildren's presents that the old
lady thanked Providence for the exchange. No time, no trouble, was too
much, and grandma joyously wallowed in layers of toys produced for her
inspection.
Now and then, when the old lady was choosing between an aeroplane and
a train of cars, or a schoolroom and a Noah's ark, Win took an
eyelash-veiled look at Miss Leavitt and her customer. He had
apparently bought one doll, veiled like a harem woman, and was
hesitating over another. The grandmother of five was not the only
person needing advice, it seemed. The brother of one middle-sized
sister was evidently demanding it from Miss Leavitt.
In any case, their heads were close together over a Tango Tea doll who
tried to look as if she had been dressed by Poiret. It stood to reason
that a man might want a woman to tell him whether that was the sort of
thing a middle-sized child would like, but though their heads were
bent over the doll, their eyes turned occasionally toward Miss Child.
"Keep the change and buy yourself and your friends some little thing
for Christmas," Win heard Logan say at last when, discouraged by the
interminable length of grandma's visit, he had resigned himself to go
away.
The girl glanced involuntarily at Miss Leavitt's hand, which was
clenched into a fist. In it was a crisp-looking new greenback on which
at one end she thought she saw the word "Ten."
Ten dollars! The man had made Lily Leavitt a present of ten dollars,
and she had accepted it! Would he have tried to do the same with
_her,_ or would he have attempted to be even more generous if she had
not been chaperoned by the grandmother of five? Also, was it just the
Christmas spirit, or had Lily done something special to earn the
money?