When a child grows to boyhood, and a boy to manhood under the
soul-searing blight of a given name like Florian, one of two things must
follow. He will degenerate into a weakling, crushed beneath the
inevitable diminutive--Flossie; or he will build up painfully, inch by
inch, a barrier against the name's corroding action. He will boast of
his biceps, flexing them the while. He will brag about cold baths. He
will prate of chest measurements; regard golf with contempt; and speak
of the West as God's country.
Florian Sykes was five feet three and a half, and he liked to quote
those red-blooded virile poems about the big open spaces out where the
West begins. The biggest open space in his experience was Madison
Square, New York; and Eighth Avenue spelled the Far West for him. When
Florian spoke or thought of great heights it was never in terms of
nature, such as mountains, but in artificial ones, like skyscrapers. Yet
his job depended on what he called the great outdoors.
The call of the wild, by the time it had filtered into his city abode,
was only a feeble cheep. But he answered it daily from his rooms to the
store in the morning, from the store to his rooms in the evening. It
must have been fully ten blocks each way. There are twenty New York
blocks to the mile. He threw out his legs a good deal when he walked and
came down with his feet rather flat, and he stooped ever so little with
the easy slouch that came in with the one-button sack suit. It's the
walk you see used by English actors of the what-what school who come
over here to play gentlemanly juveniles.
Down at Inverness & Heath's they called him Nature's Rival, but that was
mostly jealousy, with a strong dash of resentment. Two of the men in his
department had been Maine guides, and another boasted that he knew the
Rockies as he knew the palm of his hand. But Florian, whose
trail-finding had all been done in the subway shuttle, and who thought
that butter sauce with parsley was a trout's natural element, had been
promoted above their heads half a dozen times until now he lorded it
over the fifth floor.
Not one of you, unless bedridden from birth, but has felt the influence
of the firm of Inverness & Heath. You may never have seen the great
establishment itself, rising story on story just off New York's main
shopping thoroughfare. But you have felt the call of their catalogue.
Surely at one time or another, they have supplied you with tents or
talcum; with sleeping-bags or skis or skates; with rubber boots, or
resin or reels. On their fourth floor you can be hatted for Palm Beach
or booted for Skagway. On the third, outfitted for St. Moritz or San
Antonio. But the fifth floor is the pride of the store. There is the
camper's dream realized. There you will find man's most ingenious
devices for softening Mother Nature's flinty bosom. Mosquito-proof
tents; pails that will not leak; fleece-lined sleeping-bags; cooking
outfits made up of pots and pans of every size, each shaped to disappear
mysteriously into the next, like a conjurer's outfit, the whole
swallowed up by a magic leather case.
Here Florian reigned. If you were a regular Inverness & Heath customer
you learned to ask for him as soon as the elevator tossed you up to his
domain. He met you with what is known in the business efficiency guides
as the strong personality greeting. It consisted in clasping your hand
with a grip that drove your ring into the bone, looking you straight in
the eye, registering alert magnetic force, and pronouncing your name
very distinctly. Like this: hand-clasp firm--straight in the eye--"How
do you do, Mr. Outertown. Haven't seen you since last June. How was the
trip?" He didn't mean to be a liar. And yet he lied daily and
magnificently for years, to the world and himself. When, for example,
in the course of purchasing rods, flies, tents, canoes, saddles, boots,
or sleeping-bags of him, you spoke of the delights of your contemplated
vacation, he would say, "That's the life. I'm a Western man, myself....
God's country!" He said it with a deep breath, and an exhalation, as one
who pants to be free of the city's noisome fumes. You felt he must have
been born with an equipment of chaps, quirts, spurs, and sombrero. You
see him flinging himself on a horse and clattering off with a flirt of
hoofs as they do it in the movies. His very manner sketched in a
background of plains, mountains, six-shooters, and cacti.
The truth of it was Florian Sykes had been born in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
At the age of three he had been brought to New York by a pair of
inexpert and migratory parents. Their reasons for migrating need not
concern us. They must, indeed, have been bad reasons. For Florian, at
thirteen, a spindle-legged errand-boy in over-size knickers, a cold sore
on his lip, and shoes chronically in need of resoling, had started to
work for the great sporting goods store of Inverness & Heath.
Now, at twenty-nine, he was head of the fifth floor. The cold sore had
vanished permanently under a régime of health-food, dumb-bells, and icy
plunges. The shoes were bench-made and flawless. If the legs still were
somewhat spindling their correctly creased casings hid the fact.
There's little doubt that if Florian had been named Bill, and if the
calves of his legs had bulged, and if, in his youth, he had gone to work
for a wholesale grocer, he would never have forged for himself a coat of
mail whose links were pretense and whose bolts were sham. He probably
would have been frankly content with the sight of an occasional
ball-game out at the Polo Grounds, and the newspaper bulletins of a
prizefight by rounds. But here he was at the base that supplied
America's outdoor equipment. He who outfitted mountaineers must speak
knowingly of glaciers, chasms, crevices, and peaks. He who advised
canoeists must assume wisdom of paddles, rapids, currents, and portages.
He whose sleeping hours were spangled with the clang of the street cars
must counsel such hardy ones as were preparing cheerfully to seek rest
rolled in blankets before a camp-fire's dying embers. And so, slowly,
year by year, in his rise from errand to stock boy, from stock boy to
clerk, from clerk to assistant manager, thence to his present official
position, he had built about himself a tissue of innocent lies. He
actually believed them himself.
Sometimes a customer who in June had come in to purchase his vacation
supplies with the city pallor upon him, returned in September, brown,
hard, energized, to thank Florian for the comfort of the outfit
supplied him.
"I just want to tell you, Sykes, that that was a great little outfit you
sold me. Yessir! Not a thing too much, and not a thing too little,
either. Remember how I kicked about that air mattress? Well, say, it
saved my life! I slept like a baby every night. And the trip! You've
been there, haven't you?"
Florian would smile and nod his head. His grateful customer would clap
him on the shoulder. "Some pebble, that mountain!"
"Get to the top?" Florian would ask.
"Well, we didn't do the peak. That is, not right to the top. Started to
a couple of times, but the girls got tired, and we didn't want to leave
'em alone. Pretty stiff climb, let me tell you, young feller."
"You should have made the top."
"Been up, have you?"
"A dozen times."
"Oh, well, that's your business, you might say. Next time, maybe, we'll
do it. The missus says she wants to go back there every year."
Florian would shake his head. "Oh, you don't want to do that. Have you
been out to Glacier? Have you done the Yellowstone on horseback? Ever
been down the Grand Canyon?"
"Why--no--but----"
"You've got a few thrills coming to you then."
The sunburned traveller would flush mahogany. "That's all right for you
to say. But I'm no chamois. But it was a great trip, just the same. I
want to thank you."
Then, for example, Florian's clothes. He had adopted that careful
looseness--that ease of fit--that skilful sloppiness--which is the last
word in masculine sartorial smartness. In talking he dropped his final
g's and said "sportin'" and "mountain climbin'" and "shootin'." From
June until September he wore those Norfolk things with bow ties, and his
shirt patterns were restrained to the point of austerity. A signet ring
with a large scrolled monogram on the third finger of his right hand was
his only ornament, and he had worn a wrist watch long before the War. He
had never seen a mountain. The ocean meant Coney Island. He breakfasted
at Child's. He spent two hours over the Sunday papers. He was a
Tittlebat Titmouse without the whiskers. And Myra loved him.
If Florian had not pretended to be something he wasn't; and if he had
not professed an enthusiastic knowledge of things of which he was
ignorant, he would, in the natural course of events, have loved Myra
quickly in return. In fact, he would have admitted that he had loved her
first, and desperately. And there would have been no story entitled,
"Ain't Nature Wonderful!"
Myra worked in the women's and misses', third floor, and she didn't care
a thing about the big outdoors or the great open spaces. She didn't even
pretend to--at first. A clear-eyed, white-throated, capable young woman,
almost poignantly pretty. You sensed it was the kind of loveliness that
fades a bit with marriage. In its place come two sturdy babies to carry
on the torch of beauty. You sensed, too, that Myra would keep their
noses wiped, their knees scrubbed, and their buttons buttoned and that,
between a fresh blouse for herself and fresh rompers for them, the
blouse would always lose.
She hated discomfort, did Myra, as does one who has always had too much
of it. After you have stood all day, from 8:30 A. M. to 5:30
P. M., selling sweaters, riding togs, golf clothes, and
trotteurs to athletic Dianas whose lines are more lathe than lithe, you
can't work up much enthusiasm about exercising for the pure joy of it.
Myra had never used a tennis-racket in her life, but daily she outfitted
for the sport bronzed young ladies who packed a nasty back-hand wallop
in their right. She wore (and was justly proud of) a 4-A shoe, and took
a good deal of comfort in the fact as she sold 7-Cs at $22.50 a pair to
behemothian damsels who possessed money in proportion to Myra's beauty.
Myra was the only girl in her section who never tried to dress in
imitation of the moneyed ones whom she served. The other girls were wont
to wear severely tailored shirts, mannish ties, stocks, flat-heeled
shoes, rough tweed skirts. Not so Myra. That delicate cup-like hollow at
the base of her white throat was fittingly framed in a ruffle of frilly
georgette. She did her hair in soft undulations that flowed away from
forehead and temple, and she powdered her nose a hundred times a day.
Her little shoes were high-heeled and her hands were miraculously white,
and if you prefer Rosalind to Viola you'd better quit her now.
"Anybody who wants to wear those cross-country clothes is welcome to
them," she said. "I'm a girl and I'm satisfied to be. I don't see why I
should wear a hard-boiled shirt and a necktie any more than a man should
wear a pink georgette trimmed with filet. By the end of the week, when
I've spent six solid days selling men's clothes to women, I feel's if
I'd die happy if I could take a milk bath and put on white satin and
pearls and a train six yards long from the shoulders--_you_ know."
Not the least of Myra's charm was a certain unexpected and pleasing
humour. It was as though, on opening a chocolate box, you were to find
it contained caviar.
Of course by now you know that Myra is the girl you used to see smiling
out at you from the Inverness & Heath catalogue entitled Sportswomen's
Apparel. The head of her department had soon discovered that Myra,
posing for illustrations to be used in the spring booklet, raised that
pamphlet's selling power about 100 per cent. Sunburned misses, with
wind-ravaged complexions, gazing at the picture of Myra, cool, slim,
luscious-looking, saw themselves as they would fain be--and bought the
Knollwood sweater depicted--in silk or wool--putty, maize, navy, rose,
copen, or white--$35. Myra posed in paddock coat and breeches--she who
had never been nearer a horse than the distance between sidewalk and
road. She smiled at you over her shoulder radiant in a white tricot Palm
Beach suit, who thought palms grew in jardinières only. On page 17 she
was revealed in the boyish impudence of our Aiken Polo Habit, complete,
$90. She was ravishing in her golf clothes, her small feet in sturdy,
flat-heeled boots planted far apart, and only the most carping would
have commented on the utter impossibility of her stance. Then there was
the Killiecrankie Travel Tog (background of assorted mountains) made of
Scotch tweed (she would never come nearer Scotland than oatmeal for
breakfast) only $140. To say nothing of motor clothes, woodland suits,
trap-shooting costumes, Yellowstone Park outfits, hunting habits. She
wore brogues, and boots, and skating shoes, and puttees and tennis ties;
sou'westers, leather topcoats, Jersey silks, military capes. You saw her
fishing, hunting, boating, riding, golfing, snow-shoeing, swimming. She
was equally lovely in khaki with woollen stockings, or in a habit of
white linen and the shiniest of riding-boots. And as she peeled off the
one to put on the next she remarked wearily, "A kimono and felt slippers
and my hair down my back will look pretty good to me to-night, after
this."
You see, Myra and Florian really had so much in common that if he had
been honest with himself the course of their love would have run too
smooth to be true. But Florian, in his effort to register as a
two-fisted, hard-riding, nature-taming male, made such a success of it
that for a long time he deceived even Myra who loved him. And during
that time she, too, lied in her frantic effort to match her step with
his. When he talked of riding and swimming; of long, hard mountain
hikes; of impenetrable woods, she looked at him with sparkling eyes.
(She didn't need to throw much effort into that, nature having supplied
her with the ground materials.) When, on their rare Sundays together, he
suggested a long tramp up the Palisades she agreed enthusiastically,
though she hated it. Not only that, she went, loathing it. The stones
hurt her feet. Her slender ankles ached. The sun burned her delicate
skin. The wind pierced her thin coat. Florian strode along with the
exaggerated step of the short man who bitterly resents his lack of
stature. Every now and then he stood still, and breathed deeply, and
said, "Glorious!" And Myra looked at his straight back, and his
clear-cut profile, and his well-dressed legs and said, "Isn't it!" and
wished he would kiss her. But he never did.
In between times he bemoaned his miserable two weeks' vacation which
made impossible the sort of thing he said he craved--a long, hard, rough
trip into a mountain interior. The Rockies, preferably, in their
jaggedest portions.
"That's the kind of thing that makes a fellow over. Roughing it. You
forget about the city. In the saddle all day--nothing but sky and
mountains. God's big open spaces! That's the life!"
Myra trudged along, painfully. "But isn't it awfully uncomfortable? You
know. Cold? And tents? I don't think I'd like----"
"I wouldn't give a cent for a person who was so soft they couldn't stand
roughing it a little. That's the trouble with you Easterners. Soft! No
red blood. Too many street cars, and high buildings, and restaurants.
Chop down a few trees and fry your own bacon, and make your own camp,
and saddle your own horses--that's what I call living. I'm going back to
it some day, see if I don't."
Myra looked down at her own delicate wrists, with the blue veins so
exquisitely etched against the white flesh. A little look of terror and
hopelessness came into her eyes.
"I--I couldn't chop down a tree," she said. She was panting a little in
keeping up with him, for he was walking very fast. "I'd be afraid to
saddle a horse. You have to stand right next to them, don't you? Most
girls can't chop----"
Florian smiled a little superior smile. "Miss Jessie Heath can." Myra
looked up at him, quickly. "She's a wonder! She was in yesterday," he
went on. "Spent all of two hours up in my department, looking things
over. There's nothing she can't do. She won a blue ribbon at the Horse
Show in February. Saddle. She's climbed every peak that amounts to
anything in Europe. Did the Alps when she was a little girl. This summer
she's going to do the Rockies, because things are so mussed up in
Europe, she says. I'm selecting the outfit for the party. Gad, what a
trip!" He sighed, deeply.
Myra was silent. She was not ungenerous toward women, as are so many
pretty girls. But she was human, after all, and she did love this
Florian, and Jessie Heath was old man Heath's daughter. Whenever she
came into the store she created a little furore among the clerks. Myra
could not resist a tiny flash of claws.
"She's flat, like a man. And she wears 7-1/2-C. And her face looks as if
it had been rubbed with a scouring brick."
"She's a goddess!" said Florian, striding along. Myra laughed, a little
high hysterical laugh. Then she bit her lip, and then she was silent for
a long time. He was silent, too, until suddenly he heard a little sound
that made him turn quickly to look at her stumbling along at his side.
And she was crying.
"Why--what's the matter! What's!----"
"I'm tired," sobbed Myra, and sank in a little limp heap on a convenient
rock. "I'm tired. I want to go home."
"Why"--he was plainly bewildered--"why didn't you tell me you were
tired!"
"I'm telling you now."
They took the nearest ferry across the river, and the Subway home. At
the entrance to the noisy, crowded flat in which she lived Myra turned
to face him. She was through with pretense. She was tired of
make-believe. She felt a certain relief in the thought of what she had
to say. She faced him squarely.
"I've lived in the city all my life and I'm crazy about it. I love it. I
like to walk in the park a little maybe, Sundays, but I hate tramping
like we did this afternoon, and you might as well know it. I wouldn't
chop down a tree, not if I was freezing to death, and I'd hate to have
to sleep in a tent, so there! I hate sunburn, and freckles, and ants in
the pie, and blisters on my feet, and getting wet, and flat-heeled
shoes, and I never saddled a horse. I'd be afraid to. And what's more, I
don't believe you do, either."
"Don't believe I do what?" asked Florian in a stunned kind of voice.
But Myra had turned and left him. And as he stood there, aghast,
bewildered, resentful, clear and fair in the back of his mind, against
all the turmoil of thoughts that seethed there, was the picture of her
white, slim, exquisite throat with a little delicate pulse beating in it
as she cried out her rebellion. He wished--or some one inside him that
he could not control wished--that he could put his fingers there on her
throat, gently.
It was very warm that evening, for May. And as he sat by the window in
his pajamas, just before going to bed, he thought about Myra, and he
thought about himself. But when he thought about himself he slammed the
door on what he saw. Florian's rooms were in Lexington Avenue in the old
brownstone district that used to be the home of white-headed
millionaires with gold-headed canes, who, on dying, left their millions
to an Alger newsboy who had once helped them across the street.
Millionaires, gold-headed canes, and newsboys had long vanished, and the
old brownstone fronts were rooming houses now, interspersed with
delicatessens, interior decorators, and dressmaking establishments.
Florian was fond of boasting when he came down to the store in the
morning, after a hot, muggy July night, "My place is like a summer
resort. Breeze just sweeps through it. I have to have the covers on."
Sometimes Mrs. Pet, his landlady, made him a pitcher of lemonade and
brought it up to him, and he sipped it, looking out over the city,
soothed by its roar, fascinated by its glow and brilliance. Mrs. Pet
said it was a pleasure to have him around, he was so neat.
Florian was neat. Not only neat, but methodical. He had the same
breakfast every week-day morning at Child's; half a grapefruit, one
three-minute egg, coffee, rolls. On Sunday morning he had bacon and
eggs. It was almost automatic. Speaking of automatics, he never took his
meals at one of those modern mechanical feeders. Though at Child's he
never really beheld the waitress with his seeing eye, he liked to have
her slap his dishes down before him with a genial crash. A gentleman has
his little foibles, and being waited on at meal-time was one of his.
Occasionally, to prove to himself that he wasn't one of those fogies who
get in a rut, he ordered wheat cakes with maple syrup for breakfast.
They always disagreed with him.
She was a wise young woman, Myra.
Perhaps Florian, as he sat by his window that Sunday night of Myra's
outburst, thought on these things. But he would not admit to himself
whither his thinking led. And presently he turned back the spread,
neatly, and turned out the light, and opened the window a little wider,
and felt of his chin, as men do, though the next shave is eight hours
distant, and slept, and did not dream of white throats as he had
secretly hoped he would.
And next morning, at eleven, a very wonderful thing began to happen.
Next morning, at eleven, Miss Jessie Heath loped (well, it can't be
helped. That describes it exactly) into the broad aisles of the fifth
floor. She had been coming in a great deal, lately. The Western trip, no
doubt.
Descriptions of people are clumsy things, at best, and stop one's story.
But Jessie Heath must have her paragraph. A half-dozen lines ought to do
it. Well--she was the kind of girl who always goes around with a couple
of Airedales, and in woollen stockings, low shoes and mannish shirts,
and shell-rimmed glasses, and you felt she wore Ferris waists. Her hair
was that ashen blonde with no glint of gold in it. You knew it would
become grey in middle age with no definite period of transition. She
never buttoned her heavy welted gloves but wore them back over her hand,
like a cuff, very English. You felt there must be a riding crop
concealed about her somewhere. Perhaps up her spine.
As has been said, there was always a little flurry when she came into
the big store that had made millions for her father. It would be
nonsense to suppose that Jessie Heath ever deliberately set out to
attract a man who was an employee in that store. But it is pleasant and
soothing to be admired, and to have a fine pair of eyes look fine things
into one's own (shell-rimmed) ones. And, after all, the Jessie Heaths of
this world are walked with, and golfed with, and ridden with, and
tennised with, and told that they're wonderful pals. But it's the Myras
that are made love to. So now, when Florian Sykes looked at her, and
flushed a little, and said, "I suppose there are a lot of lucky ones
going along with you on this trip, Miss--Jessie," she flushed, too, and
flicked her boot with her riding crop--No, no! I forgot. She didn't have
a riding crop. Well, anyway she gave the effect of flicking her boot
with her riding crop, and said:
"Would you like to go?"
"Would I like to go----!" He choked over it. Then he sighed, and smiled
rather wistfully. "That's needlessly cruel of you, Miss Jessie."
"Maybe it's not so cruel as you think," Jessie Heath answered. "Did you
make out that list?"
"I spent practically all of yesterday on it." Which we know was a lie
because, look, wasn't he with Myra?
They went over the list together. Fishing tackle, tents, pocket-flashes,
puttees, ponchos, chocolate, quirts, slickers, matches, medicine-case,
sweaters, cooking utensils, blankets. It grew longer, and longer. Their
heads came close together over it. And they trailed from department to
department, laughing and talking together. And the two Maine ex-guides
and the clerk who boasted he knew the Rockies like the palm of his hand,
said to one another, "Get on to Nature's Rival trying to make a hit with
Jessie."
Meanwhile Jessie was saying, "Of course you know the Rockies, being a
Western man, and all."
Florian smiled rather deprecatingly. "Queer part of it is I don't know
the Rockies so well--" with an emphasis on the word Rockies that led one
to think his more noteworthy feats of altitude had been accomplished
about the Alps, the Pyrenees, the Andes, and the lesser Appalachians.
"But you've climbed them, haven't you?"