"YES" TO ANYTHING
At last it was July, and New York felt like a vast hermetically sealed
Turkish bath into which all were free to enter, but once in, must
remain, as there were no exits and no closing hours. Most of the
people you read about in the Sunday supplements (except those who
commit murders and such things) had escaped to the sea or mountains
before the Turkish bath opened for the summer. But there is never
anything in Sunday supplements about the assistants in department
stores, for they are fashionable only in restricted districts, and
they do not commit murders and such things, though they might
occasionally enjoy doing so.
It had been, said the newspapers, an exceptionally gay winter and
spring. Seldom had there been so many beautiful and important
débutantes. Lovely girls and admiring men had decorated each page of
the calendar, like rose petals. There had been cup races for
automobiles, and football and baseball matches for men and girls, and
other matches less noisy but almost as emotional. There had been
dinners and balls, first nights at the opera, Washington's Birthday
week-end house parties in the Adirondacks, and Easter church parades
for those who had not gone abroad or to Florida. Among those who chose
Florida (there had been a great deal about this in the Sunday
supplements) were Miss Rolls and her brother. Ena had collapsed under
an alleged attack of grippe after Lord Raygan went away and his
engagement with Portia (_alias_ "Pobbles") Gregory--the rich Miss
Gregory--was announced. Some people were mean enough to say that it
was not grippe but grief which laid Ena low in the height of the
season; and if there was anything in this gossip, the grief would have
been greater had Miss Rolls known that she herself was (indirectly)
responsible for the happy ending of Raygan's romance.
A letter written by Lady Eileen while at Sea Gull Manor to her cousin
Pobbles had (so Pobbles confessed later) suddenly opened the lady's
eyes to her own true feelings. She began to wonder if Rags had loved
her "for herself," after all. And, anyhow, she didn't want a girl like
Ena Rolls to get him. So she met the ship on which Lady Raygan, Rags,
and Eileen returned to Ireland, in order to "make a dead set" at the
man she had once discarded. An engagement was the consequence, and in
the first letter Rags wrote to thank his kind host and hostess on Long
Island, he asked for congratulations.
It was the same day that Ena began to sneeze so dismally that the only
place for her was bed. And when she could leave its seclusion the next
only place was Palm Beach. She said she would die unless she could go
to Palm Beach, so mother took her, and Peter took them both, not to
speak of Ena's maid.
He did not wish to play courier. To turn his back on New York
interfered seriously with his plans and half plans and hopes and half
hopes. But father would not go, and mother and Ena could not without
a man. Peter was the only one available at the moment, and it was
April when Ena felt well enough to face the North again. By this time
the news of her engagement to the Marchese di Rivoli had been copied
from all the principal papers into the little papers, and even the
most confirmed cats must be acknowledging far and near that to lose an
earl and gain a marquis is a step up in life.
It was, of course, not ideal that the Marchese di Rivoli had no
remaining family estates of which his _fiancée_ could talk, and there
were creatures ready to swear not only that he had come to Palm Beach
to pick up an heiress, but that the penniless princess who introduced
him to Miss Rolls had received a commission. Still there are always
family estates in the market, and where a coronet is there is gossip
also. Only the cat tribe start or believe it, and even cats purr to a
_marchesa_, lest they may want to visit Italy next year.
In the Turkish bath which was New York that July, Peter Rolls's
department store was one of the hot rooms. Miss Rolls did not come
over from Long Island to choose her trousseau there, as a badly
informed newspaper announced that she would do. She went to London and
Paris instead, because it was cooler as well as smarter to put the
Atlantic between her and "New York with the lid off." She ran over
with the divorced Italian princess who had made her acquainted with
the Marchese di Rivoli, and mother and Peter were released.
No doubt other big stores were as hot or hotter than Peter Rolls's
that July; but it seemed to Winifred Child that the Tropic of Cancer
might have breezes which the Hands missed. Those of the salespeople
who did not look as if at any moment their eyes might come out and all
their veins burst, were living advertisements for Somebody's
Anti-Anemia Mixture before the mixture was taken. Win was of the
latter type. She had become so pale and thin that Sadie Kirk compared
her to a celery stalk. Sadie herself had, according to her own
criticism, "shrunk and faded in the wash," but the two girls had now
few chances of "passing remarks" on each other's appearance, for,
though Sadie was still in Toys, Win had been put into Mantles.
This in itself was a solution of the Meggison mystery. The girl's
"cheek" had frightened the would-be "dog" and reminded him that a
model superintendent must never lose a born saleswoman. But he had not
sent for Win again, and Gloves were not for such as she.
Sadie, having "sauced" her landlady, found it wise to change her
quarters. She had taken a room in an apartment house two blocks
removed from her former home, and Win, not being able to afford a
"flit," remained at the old address. At first, when her pay was
increased by two dollars a week, she had intended to save and follow
Sadie. One had, however, to live mostly on ice-cream soda in the hot
weather, which cost money. Besides, even had she possessed the
dollars, she lacked energy of late. It was easier to keep on doing
what one had done than do anything new. And, in any case, nothing that
one did seemed to matter.
As for the lion tamer, Peter Rolls's shop saw him no more. He had "got
his nerve back" and had returned to lion taming, not because the old
life drew him irresistibly, but because there was far more money in
dominating real lions than in selling Teddy ones.
In the birth of Earl Usher's adoring love for Win the demise of the
animal who had "died on him" was forgotten. "Nerve" and courage and
love and the desire to conquer were one in his heart. When a "good
summer job at Coney" came his way, through an old friend in the "show
business," he took it.
Reluctant as he was to leave Peter Rolls, which meant leaving "his
girl," a change of position offered the only hope of obtaining her in
the end. And despite every discouragement from his Lygia, Ursus did
secretly cherish this hope. As she no longer lived in Toyland when he
went, the wrench of parting was not what it would have been to leave
her at the mercy of any man who could afford to buy a doll. There was
no excuse for men to "butt into" Mantles, unless accompanied by female
belongings, and thus accompanied, their sting was gone.
At Coney Island Ursus was earning thirty dollars a week instead of
ten, and was encouraged by crowds of admiring girls (who watched his
performance and bought his photographs) to consider himself
exceedingly eligible on that income. Many indeed made it plain to him
that he would have been worth taking for his face, his muscles, and
his spangled tights alone.
Sometimes on Sundays Sadie Kirk persuaded Win to "go to Coney for a
blow." The crowd on the boats was alarming and on the beach when you
got there, but the air was splendid, and poor Ursus beamed over his
lions' heads with pride and pleasure. These few excursions, however,
had been Winifred's only outings, except a play or two seen from a
gallery, since she came to make her fortune in America; and as each
day the heat pressed more heavily upon her with its leaden weight, she
felt that she would collapse and "do something stupid" if she could
not have a change. Anything--anything at all that was different and
would break the monotony!
Lily Leavitt, who was in the Mantles, too, had never ceased to be
friendly, and had often invited Win to go out with her in the long
summer evenings, but always in vain, month after month, until one day
in mid-July, when the heat wave had surged to its record height. It
just chanced--if there be such a thing as chance--to happen on the day
when the girl's craving for a change had become an obsession, almost
an illness.
It was a little past noon, and the seniors in Mantles had gone out to
lunch. They were rather by way of being aristocrats, these seniors,
for the mantle department, Jewellery, and some others worked "on
commission." Salaries were no larger than elsewhere, but a handsome
percentage was paid on sales; and those tigers and tigresses who were
strong and ferocious enough to grab meat from under their weaker
comrades' noses did extremely well. The Mantles girls who had gone out
were champion tigresses. They could afford to eat at something like
real restaurants, and as there was nothing worth rushing back for,
they would not return until the last moment.
Lily Leavitt, who was qualifying as a tigress, had just snatched a
sale which ought to have been Win's, but that did not count in their
private relations. It was business, and Win was "welcome to play the
same game"--if she could. Only, there was no danger that she would.
Win was not of the stuff from which tigresses are made, and was
incapable of seizing for herself anything--be it a seat in the subway
or the chance to sell a mantle--which some other human creature was
striving to get.
Win bore Lily no grudge for having "bagged" her customer and gained in
three minutes three dollars which should rightfully have found their
way to her purse. She listened without resentment to the description
of a hat which Lily intended to buy with the money--a "sticker" it had
proved in Hats, and was now marked down to half price. Lily had had an
eye on it for some time, and would, of course, get it "ten per." off.
"I bought me a sweet party dress last week--a bargain," Miss Leavitt
went on, seeing that Win had no intention of "slanging" her for what
she had just done. "It came outta commission on that green chiffon
evening cloak and that white yachtin' I snapped off Kit Vance when she
was daydreamin' and let me catch onto her customer like you done just
now. Things is down to no price this hot weather. It's an ill wind
blows no one good, and now is us guyls' time to get a bit of our own.
P.R. always manages to make his hay, rain or shine. And even with our
ten per. off, it's forty per. profit for him. When you think there's
two thousand folks forced to buy on the premises, you savvy what he
squeezes outta us! If we do pick up a bargain, it's a rare chance. I
wonder you don't hustle more'n you do and make enough com to buy
yourself sumpin' nice. Your sheryt waists are the wuyst in the dep, if
you don't mind my sayin' so, and the guyls speak of it. Now if you had
a party dress to doll up in, I could give you the time of your life
to-night."
"Could you?" echoed Win, more in the desire to turn Miss Leavitt's
attention from her "shirt waist" to something else than because she
wished to hear about the great opportunity.
Miss Leavitt had offered her numerous opportunities of alleged
entertainment, none of which, though glowingly described, had ever
tempted her to acceptance. At first she had been afraid of Lily's
fruit and chocolates and theatre tickets, which, like the
marshmallows, might have come from Mr. Logan. But for the last three
or four months, since the two girls migrated together into Mantles,
Logan had been conspicuously absent. Apparently he had not invented a
cloak as well as a toy! Win no longer connected Lily Leavitt's
occasional invitations with him. Her refusals were prompted merely by
a disinclination for Lily's society out of business hours and the
conviction that her friends would be no more congenial than herself.
Winifred now, however, particularly wished to show her companion that
she bore no animosity for the filched commission, therefore she became
loquacious.
"I don't need to spend my hard-earned dollars on a party dress, as it
happens," she said. "I can save all my pennies for the hire of my
typewriter, which is going to lead me from the Hands some day along
the road to fortune. I've got the most gorgeous gown you can possibly
imagine. I don't believe _Cinderella's_ godmother could give her
anything better. There's only one trouble. I shall never be invited to
a party good enough for it."
"I've invited you to as swell a party as there could be in little old
New York," boasted Miss Leavitt. "I ain't foolin'. That's straight.
Honour bright, cross my heart."
"Oh, but you didn't invite me. You said you would if I had a dress.
You've got only my word for that," Win reminded her.
"I meant to invite you all the same, dress or no dress," Lily
confessed, "I'd o' lent you one. Have you really got something swell?
If you have, now's your chance to show it off. It's an artist gives
this party. I sit to artists sometimes, Sundays, for my hair. I guess
you offen seen it on covers o' magazines. This artist friend o' mine's
the best o' the whole bunch."
"Man or woman?" Win wanted to know.
She expected the answer to be "man," but Lily did not seem to hear.
Her face looked dreamy.
"It's the loveliest house where the party'll be," she said. "'Tain't
the artist's own. It's some relation's that's lent it for the summer
while they're away at the seashore. I bin there. It's in the Fifties,
just off Fift' Av'noo. Tonight it'll be cool as snow, and
everything'll be iced for supper. Iced consummay, chicken salad cold
as the refrigerator, iced champagne cup flowin' like water; ice-cream
and strawb'ries, the big, sweet, red ones from up north, where they
keep on growin' all summer, and lilies and roses from the country to
give away to us when we go home."
Win forgot the question that had not been answered. She seemed to see
those strawberries and to smell the sweetness of roses and lilies in a
house "as cool as snow."
"Heavenly!" she sighed. "I didn't remember there were such things in
the world!"
"Well, come with me to-night and remind yourself," coaxed Miss
Leavitt. "You needn't be afraid, because I said it was artists, to
butt into some rowdy crowd. They'll be as quiet and refined as mice.
They're more your kind than mine, I guess."
"But who invites me?" Win made another bid for information.
"My artist friend said I could bring any one I wanted to bring, and I
want to bring you. I don't just know who all'll be there, but I guess
not many, and it's a real swell house to see. You always refuse
everything I ask you to, but I do think you might say yes this one
time and show you're not proud and stuck up. It'd do you good!"
"I believe it would, and I'll go!" cried Win. She was in the mood to
say "yes" to anything.
"Hully gee! That's the best thing's happened to me since the measles!"
exclaimed Miss Leavitt jovially. "I'll call for you at your place
half-past nine this evening, so you can have a good rest before you
begin fixin' yourself up."
"It's an engagement," said Win, with a kind of self-defiance.
She had wished for a change, "anything for a change," and presto! her
wish had been suddenly granted by fate. Rather spitefully granted, it
would seem, because to go to a "party" with Lily Leavitt was the very
last thing she would have chosen. And spitefully, also, as if to
punish her own foolishness in wishing, she accepted such goods as the
gods had mischievously provided.
"You've said yes, and now you must stick to it," she told herself in
preparation for a wave of regret, but to her surprise the day wore on
and the expected tide of repentance did not set in.
The girl realized that she was looking forward, actually looking
forward to the evening. It would be like walking wide awake into the
Hall of Dreams to put on a dress beautiful enough for a princess, and
eat ice-cream and big red strawberries in a house "cool as snow"
instead of sitting in her hot bedroom practising on the hired
typewriter or panting on her bed, dead to everything in the world
except a palm-leaf fan.
When she had been a little girl, invited to children's parties, it had
not been of the slightest importance whether she liked the child or
not. The party was the thing. Now history was repeating itself in her
nature. The blank monotony of life and work had given back that
childish eagerness for fun, no matter whence it came. She did not care
whose ice-cream and strawberries she was going to eat, provided she
got them and they were good. Besides, it would be like finding an old
lost friend to look into her mirror (it was cracked and turned one's
complexion pale green, with iridescent spots; but that was a detail)
and see a bare-necked, white-armed girl in evening dress.
There was a new way of doing the hair which Win had noticed on a
smiling wax beauty in Peter Rolls's Window-World and had dimly wished
to try for herself. Only dimly, because if her hair were glossy and
trim it suited those plain, ninety-eight-cent shirt waists better than
the elaborate fashions affected by Lily Leavitt and one or two of the
more successful tigresses who cheaply copied expensive customers. Now
there was an incentive for the experiment and Win laughed at the
eagerness with which she looked forward to the moment of making it,
laughed patronizingly, as she might have laughed at a child's longing
for Christmas.
"Anyhow, it's something that I _can_ laugh," she thought, recalling,
as she often did, her boast to Peter Rolls, Jr. "And I haven't cried
yet!"
She had not guessed how vividly the sight of the Moon dress and
putting it on would bring Mr. Balm of Gilead to her mind. But as she
stood gazing into the greenish glass, with her hair very successfully
done in the new way and the Moon gown shimmering night-blue and
silver, it was as if Peter Rolls came and looked over her shoulder,
their eyes meeting in the mirror.
Yes, she saw him for an instant as clearly as that. He was there. He
was her friend, the nicest, most altogether delightful man she had
ever seen; the one she knew best and needed most, though their actual
acquaintanceship was but a few days old. The kind blue eyes were true
and brave, and said: "I dare you not to believe in me, as I believe in
you!"
Then the vision (it had almost amounted to that) was gone like a
broken bubble. Win felt physically sick, as if the one thing worth
having in the world had been shown her for a second, then suddenly
snatched away forever.
The silvery sheen and the faint, lingering perfume of that Nadine
model gown had woven a magic carpet of moonbeams and transported her
back to the mirrored room on the _Monarchic_ for an instant. But it
was only for an instant. Then the Columbus Avenue bedroom, with its
window open to the roar and rush of the "L," had her again, and made
the Moon dress and the Moon-dress dreams seem ridiculously unsuited to
life.
Win touched a switch which shut off light from the one unshaded
electric bulb hanging like a lambent pear over her head. Then,
palm-leaf fan in hand, she sat down in the blue summer darkness to
await the coming of Miss Leavitt.
For the first time she repented her promise to go out. Monotony was
preferable to the party as she pictured it--a silly, giggling crowd of
crude young people among whom she, the stranger, would be like a muted
note on a cheap piano. Should she stay at home, after all, and tell
Lily that the heat had made her too limp to stir? It would be quite
true. But no. If she stayed she would not have the courage to undress
for a long, long time. She would just sit there in the dark by the
window in the Moon gown, its perfume surrounding her with the past,
shutting her up, as it were, in the mirror room with Mr. Balm of
Gilead who had never really existed.
Yet, had he not? What had the eyes in the cracked glass said just now?
Why shouldn't she believe them instead of Ena Rolls's dreadful hints?
Why might not a sister, even with the best intentions, be mistaken
about a brother?
These were exactly the sort of questions that were upsetting and
altogether useless to ask one's self, and Win jumped up to turn on the
electric light again. She _would_ go with Lily Leavitt!
Five minutes later a taxicab--a real, live, magnificent, unthinkably
expensive taxicab--stopped and chortled in front of the apartment
house in which Mrs. McFarrell's flat was one of many. Heads flew out
of windows, for the thing was unbelievable, and among other heads was
Win's.
Instinct cried that the chortling was for her. The balcony where the
rubber plants had died and mummied themselves, being scarcely more
than a foot wide, she was able to see a face, crowned with red hair
and white as a _Pierrette's_ in the lights of the street, looking
anxiously up from the cab window. Its expression implored the guest to
hurry down, because each heart-throb meant not a drop of red blood,
but several red cents. Win caught the message, and seizing the ancient
though still respectable evening cloak which had spent months in a
trunk with the "New Moon," she flew downstairs.
"What an extravagant creature!" she gasped, breathless when after a
wasted sixty seconds at most the taxi was _en route_.
"I had a present from a gentleman friend," said Lily in a
self-satisfied voice, adding hastily, in deference to Miss Child's
"stuck-up primness," "a filopena present, to choose myself anything I
liked with. I thought us bein' in party dress, and you sort o' tired
out, a taxi'd be just about the best thing goin'."
This reduced Win to the necessity for gratitude, and after months of
the "L," the subway, and the crosstown car, the girl could not help
revelling in a taxi. She refused to be depressed by the gloomy
spectacle of lower-class New York in the throes of a heat wave--pallid
people hanging out of windows or standing at corners to be eased of
their torture by the merciful spray from fire hydrants; barefooted
half-naked children staring thirstily at soda fountains in bright, hot
drug stores they could never hope to enter--every one limp, lethargic,
glistening unhealthily with horrid moisture, all loathing themselves
and indifferent to each other. Sometimes Win felt that these were her
true brothers and sisters, the only ones who could understand, because
they were the only ones who really suffered; but to-night she dared
not think of them. If she did, because of what they endured she could
not enjoy the ice-cream and strawberries in the snow coolness of the
artist's borrowed house.
New York not being her own city, its different divisions lacked for
her the meaning and importance they had for those at home; therefore
she was disappointingly calm when Lily made the taxi stop in front of
a house only three or four doors off Fifth Avenue. Miss Leavitt had
the fare ready, with a small tip for the driver, and the two were out
of the cab, standing in the street, before Win noticed a thing that
struck her sharply and quickly as being very strange.
"Why!" she exclaimed, "we must have come to the wrong place. All these
houses are shut. Their doors and windows are boarded up!"