new to this traveling game. As I said, I'd like to accommodate you,
but-- Let's see now. Tell you what I'll do. If I can get the housekeeper
to go over and sleep in the maids' quarters just for to-night, you can
use her room. There you are! Of course, it's over the kitchen, and there
may be some little noise early in the morning----"
Emma McChesney raised a protesting hand. "Don't mention it. Just lead me
thither. I'm so tired I could sleep in an excursion special that was
switching at Pittsburgh. Jock, me child, we're in luck. That's twice in
the same place. The first time was when we were inspired to eat our
supper on the diner instead of waiting until we reached here to take the
leftovers from the Bisons' grazing. I hope that housekeeper hasn't a
picture of her departed husband dangling life-size on the wall at the
foot of the bed. But they always have. Good-night, son. Don't let the
Bisons bite you. I'll be up at seven."
But it was just 6.30 A.M. when Emma McChesney turned the little bend in
the stairway that led to the office. The scrub-woman was still in
possession. The cigar-counter girl had not yet made her appearance.
There was about the place a general air of the night before. All but the
night clerk. He was as spruce and trim, and alert and smooth-shaven as
only a night clerk can be after a night's vigil.
"'Morning!" Emma McChesney called to him. She wore blue serge, and a
smart fall hat. The late autumn morning was not crisper and sunnier than
she.
"Good-morning, Mrs. McChesney," returned Mr. Sims, sonorously. "Have a
good night's sleep? I hope the kitchen noises didn't wake you."
Emma McChesney paused with her hand on the door. "Kitchen? Oh, no. I
could sleep through a vaudeville china-juggling act. But--what an
extraordinarily unpleasant-looking man that housekeeper's husband must
have been."
That November morning boasted all those qualities which November-morning
writers are so prone to bestow upon the month. But the words wine, and
sparkle, and sting, and glow, and snap do not seem to cover it. Emma
McChesney stood on the bottom step, looking up and down Main Street and
breathing in great draughts of that unadjectivable air. Her complexion
stood the test of the merciless, astringent morning and came up
triumphantly and healthily firm and pink and smooth. The town was still
asleep. She started to walk briskly down the bare and ugly Main Street
of the little town. In her big, generous heart, and her keen, alert
mind, there were many sensations and myriad thoughts, but varied and
diverse as they were they all led back to the boy up there in the
stuffy, over-crowded hotel room--the boy who was learning his lesson.
Half an hour later she reentered the hotel, her cheeks glowing. Jock was
not yet down. So she ordered and ate her wise and cautious breakfast of
fruit and cereal and toast and coffee, skimming over her morning paper
as she ate. At 7:30 she was back in the lobby, newspaper in hand. The
Bisons were already astir. She seated herself in a deep chair in a quiet
corner, her eyes glancing up over the top of her paper toward the
stairway. At eight o'clock Jock McChesney came down.
There was nothing of jauntiness about him. His eyelids were red. His
face had the doughy look of one whose sleep has been brief and feverish.
As he came toward his mother you noticed a stain on his coat, and a
sunburst of wrinkles across one leg of his modish brown trousers.
"Good-morning, son!" said Emma McChesney. "Was it as bad as that?"
Jock McChesney's long fingers curled into a fist.
"Say," he began, his tone venomous, "do you know what
those--those--those----"
"Say it!" commanded Emma McChesney. "I'm only your mother. If you keep
that in your system your breakfast will curdle in your stomach."
Jock McChesney said it. I know no phrase better fitted to describe his
tone than that old favorite of the erotic novelists. It was vibrant with
passion. It breathed bitterness. It sizzled with savagery. It--Oh,
alliteration is useless.
"Well," said Emma McChesney, encouragingly, "go on."
"Well!" gulped Jock McChesney, and glared; "those two double-bedded,
bloomin', blasted Bisons came in at twelve, and the single one about
fifteen minutes later. They didn't surprise me. There was a herd of
about ninety-three of 'em in the hall, all saying good-night to each
other, and planning where they'd meet in the morning, and the time, and
place and probable weather conditions. For that matter, there were
droves of 'em pounding up and down the halls all night. I never saw such
restless cattle. If you'll tell me what makes more noise in the middle
of the night than the metal disk of a hotel key banging and clanging up
against a door, I'd like to know what it is. My three Bisons were all
dolled up with fool ribbons and badges and striped paper canes. When
they switched on the light I gave a crack imitation of a tired working
man trying to get a little sleep. I breathed regularly and heavily, with
an occasional moaning snore. But if those two hippopotamus Bisons had
been alone on their native plains they couldn't have cared less. They
bellowed, and pawed the earth, and threw their shoes around, and yawned,
and stretched and discussed their plans for the next day, and reviewed
all their doings of that day. Then one of them said something about
turning in, and I was so happy I forgot to snore. Just then another key
clanged at the door, in walked a fat man in a brown suit and a brown
derby, and stuff was off."
"That," said Emma McChesney, "would be Ed Meyers, of the Strauss
Sans-silk Skirt Company."
"None other than our hero." Jock's tone had an added acidity. "It took
those four about two minutes to get acquainted. In three minutes they
had told their real names, and it turned out that Meyers belonged to an
organization that was a second cousin of the Bisons. In five minutes
they had got together a deck and a pile of chips and were shirt-sleeving
it around a game of pinochle. I would doze off to the slap of cards, and
the click of chips, and wake up when the bell-boy came in with another
round, which he did every six minutes. When I got up this morning I
found that Fat Ed Meyers had been sitting on the chair over which I
trustingly had draped my trousers. This sunburst of wrinkles is where he
mostly sat. This spot on my coat is where a Bison drank his beer."
Emma McChesney folded her paper and rose, smiling. "It is sort of
trying, I suppose, if you're not used to it."
"Used to it!" shouted the outraged Jock. "Used to it! Do you mean to
tell me there's nothing unusual about----"
"Not a thing. Oh, of course you don't strike a bunch of Bisons every
day. But it happens a good many times. The world is full of Ancient
Orders and they're everlastingly getting together and drawing up
resolutions and electing officers. Don't you think you'd better go in to
breakfast before the Bisons begin to forage? I've had mine."
The gloom which had overspread Jock McChesney's face lifted a little.
The hungry boy in him was uppermost. "That's so. I'm going to have some
wheat cakes, and steak, and eggs, and coffee, and fruit, and toast, and
rolls."
"Why slight the fish?" inquired his mother. Then, as he turned toward
the dining-room, "I've two letters to get out. Then I'm going down the
street to see a customer. I'll be up at the Sulzberg-Stein department
store at nine sharp. There's no use trying to see old Sulzberg before
ten, but I'll be there, anyway, and so will Ed Meyers, or I'm no skirt
salesman. I want you to meet me there. It will do you good to watch how
the overripe orders just drop, ker-plunk, into my lap."
Maybe you know Sulzberg & Stein's big store? No? That's because you've
always lived in the city. Old Sulzberg sends his buyers to the New York
market twice a year, and they need two floor managers on the main floor
now. The money those people spend for red and green decorations at
Christmas time, apple-blossoms and pink crepe paper shades in the
spring, must be something awful. Young Stein goes to Chicago to have his
clothes made, and old Sulzberg likes to keep the traveling men waiting
in the little ante-room outside his private office.
Jock McChesney finished his huge breakfast, strolled over to Sulzberg &
Stein's, and inquired his way to the office only to find that his mother
was not yet there. There were three men in the little waiting-room. One
of them was Fat Ed Meyers. His huge bulk overflowed the spindle-legged
chair on which he sat. His brown derby was in his hands. His eyes were
on the closed door at the other side of the room. So were the eyes of
the other two travelers. Jock took a vacant seat next to Fat Ed Meyers
so that he might, in his mind's eye, pick out a particularly choice spot
upon which his hard young fist might land--if only he had the chance.
Breaking up a man's sleep like that, the great big overgrown mutt!
"What's your line?" said Ed Meyers, suddenly turning toward Jock.
Prompted by some imp--"Skirts," answered Jock. "Ladies' petticoats."
("As if men ever wore 'em!" he giggled inwardly.)
Ed Meyers shifted around in his chair so that he might better stare at
this new foe in the field. His little red mouth was open ludicrously.
"Who're you out for?" he demanded next.
There was a look of Emma McChesney on Jock's face. "Why--er--the Union
Underskirt and Hosiery Company of Chicago. New concern."
"Must be," ruminated Ed Meyers. "I never heard of 'em, and I know 'em
all. You're starting in young, ain't you, kid! Well, it'll never hurt
you. You'll learn something new every day. Now me, I----"
In breezed Emma McChesney. Her quick glance rested immediately upon
Meyers and the boy. And in that moment some instinct prompted Jock
McChesney to shake his head, ever so slightly, and assume a blankness of
expression. And Emma McChesney, with that shrewdness which had made her
one of the best salesmen on the road, saw, and miraculously understood.
"How do, Mrs. McChesney," grinned Fat Ed Meyers. "You see I beat you to
it."
"So I see," smiled Emma, cheerfully. "I was delayed. Just sold a nice
little bill to Watkins down the street." She seated herself across the
way, and kept her eyes on that closed door.
"Say, kid," Meyers began, in the husky whisper of the fat man, "I'm
going to put you wise to something, seeing you're new to this game. See
that lady over there?" He nodded discreetly in Emma McChesney's
direction.
"Pretty, isn't she?" said Jock, appreciatively.
"Know who she is?"
"Well--I--she does look familiar, but----"
"Oh, come now, quit your bluffing. If you'd ever met that dame you'd
remember it. Her name's McChesney--Emma McChesney, and she sells T. A.
Buck's Featherloom Petticoats. I'll give her her dues; she's the best
little salesman on the road. I'll bet that girl could sell a ruffled,
accordion-plaited underskirt to a fat woman who was trying to reduce.
She's got the darndest way with her. And at that she's straight, too."
If Ed Meyers had not been gazing so intently into his hat, trying at
the same time to look cherubically benign he might have seen a quick and
painful scarlet sweep the face of the boy, coupled with a certain tense
look of the muscles around the jaw.
"Well, now, look here," he went on, still in a whisper. "We're both
skirt men, you and me. Everything's fair in this game. Maybe you don't
know it, but when there's a bunch of the boys waiting around to see the
head of the store like this, and there happens to be a lady traveler in
the crowd, why, it's considered kind of a professional courtesy to let
the lady have the first look-in. See? It ain't so often that three
people in the same line get together like this. She knows it, and she's
sitting on the edge of her chair, waiting to bolt when that door opens,
even if she does act like she was hanging on the words of that lady
clerk there. The minute it does open a crack she'll jump up and give me
a fleeting, grateful smile, and sail in and cop a fat order away from
the old man and his skirt buyer. I'm wise. Say, he may be an oyster, but
he knows a pretty woman when he sees one. By the time she's through with
him he'll have enough petticoats on hand to last him from now until
Turkey goes suffrage. Get me?"
"I get you," answered Jock.
"I say, this is business, and good manners be hanged. When a woman
breaks into a man's game like this, let her take her chances like a man.
Ain't that straight?"
"You've said something," agreed Jock.
"Now, look here, kid. When that door opens I get up. See? And shoot
straight for the old man's office. See? Like a duck. See? Say, I may be
fat, kid, but I'm what they call light on my feet, and when I see an
order getting away from me I can be so fleet that I have Diana looking
like old Weston doing a stretch of muddy country road in a
coast-to-coast hike. See? Now you help me out on this and I'll see that
you don't suffer for it. I'll stick in a good word for you, believe me.
You take the word of an old stager like me and you won't go far--"
The door opened. Simultaneously three figures sprang into action. Jock
had the seat nearest the door. With marvelous clumsiness he managed to
place himself in Ed Meyers' path, then reddened, began an apology,
stepped on both of Ed's feet, jabbed his elbow into his stomach, and
dropped his hat. A second later the door of old Sulzberg's private
office closed upon Emma McChesney's smart, erect, confident figure.
Now, Ed Meyers' hands were peculiar hands for a fat man. They were
tapering, slender, delicate, blue-veined, temperamental hands. At this
moment, despite his purpling face, and his staring eyes, they were the
most noticeable thing about him. His fingers clawed the empty air,
quivering, vibrant, as though poised to clutch at Jock's throat.
Then words came. They spluttered from his lips. They popped like corn
kernels in the heat of his wrath; they tripped over each other; they
exploded.
"You darned kid, you!" he began, with fascinating fluency. "You
thousand-legged, double-jointed, ox-footed truck horse! Come on out of
here and I'll lick the shine off your shoes, you blue-eyed babe, you!
What did you get up for, huh? What did you think this was going to be--a
flag drill?"
With a whoop of pure joy Jock McChesney turned and fled.
They dined together at one o'clock, Emma McChesney and her son Jock.
Suddenly Jock stopped eating. His eyes were on the door. "There's that
fathead now," he said, excitedly. "The nerve of him! He's coming over
here."
Ed Meyers was waddling toward them with the quick light step of the fat
man. His pink, full-jowled face was glowing. His eyes were bright as a
boy's. He stopped at their table and paused for one dramatic moment.
"So, me beauty, you two were in cahoots, huh? That's the second low-down
deal you've handed me. I haven't forgotten that trick you turned with
Nussbaum at DeKalb. Never mind, little girl. I'll get back at you yet."
He nodded a contemptuous head in Jock's direction. "Carrying a packer?"
Emma McChesney wiped her fingers daintily on her napkin, crushed it on
the table, and leaned back in her chair. "Men," she observed,
wonderingly, "are the cussedest creatures. This chap occupied the same
room with you last night and you don't even know his name. Funny! If two
strange women had found themselves occupying the same room for a night
they wouldn't have got to the kimono and back hair stage before they
would not only have known each other's names, but they'd have tried on
each other's hats, swapped corset cover patterns, found mutual friends
living in Dayton, Ohio, taught each other a new Irish crochet stitch,
showed their family photographs, told how their married sister's little
girl nearly died with swollen glands, and divided off the mirror into
two sections to paste their newly-washed handkerchiefs on. Don't tell
_me_ men have a genius for friendship."
"Well, who is he?" insisted Ed Meyers. "He told me everything but his
name this morning. I wish I had throttled him with a bunch of Bisons'
badges last night."
"His name," smiled Emma McChesney, "is Jock McChesney. He's my one and
only son, and he's put through his first little business deal this
morning just to show his mother that he can be a help to his folks if he
wants to. Now, Ed Meyers, if you're going to have apoplexy, don't you go
and have it around this table. My boy is only on his second piece of
pie, and I won't have his appetite spoiled."
EDNA FERBER
A professor of literature once began a lecture on Lowell by saying: "It
makes a great deal of difference to an author whether he is born in
Cambridge or Kalamazoo." Miss Ferber was born in Kalamazoo, but it
hasn't made much difference to her. The date was August 15, 1887. She
attended high school at Appleton, Wisconsin, and at seventeen secured a
position as reporter on the Appleton _Daily Crescent_. That she was
successful in newspaper work is shown by the fact that she soon had a
similar position on the _Milwaukee Journal_, and went from there to the
staff of the _Chicago Tribune_, one of the leading newspapers in the
United States.
But journalism, engrossing as it is, did not take all of her time. She
began a novel, working on it in spare moments, but when it was finished
she was so dissatisfied with it that she threw the manuscript into the
waste basket. Here her mother found it, and sent it to a publisher, who
accepted it at once. The book was _Dawn O'Hara_. It was dedicated "To my
dear mother who frequently interrupts, and to my sister Fannie who says
Sh-sh-sh outside my door." With this book Miss Ferber, at twenty-four,
found herself the author of one of the successful novels of the year.
Her next work was in the field of the short story, and here too she
quickly gained recognition. The field that she has made particularly her
own is the delineation of the American business woman, a type familiar
in our daily life, but never adequately presented in fiction until Emma
McChesney appeared. The fidelity with which these stories describe the
life of a traveling salesman show that Miss Ferber knew her subject
through and through before she began to write. Her knowledge of other
things is shown in an amusing letter which she wrote to the editor of
the _Bookman_ in 1912. He had criticized her for writing a story about
baseball, saying that no woman really knew baseball. This was her reply,
in part:
You, buried up there in your office, or your apartment, with your
books, books, books, and your pipe, and your everlasting
manuscripts, and makers of manuscripts, don't you know that your
woman secretary knows more about baseball than you do? Don't you
know that every American girl knows baseball, and that most of us
read the sporting page, not as a pose, but because we're interested
in things that happen on the field, and track, and links, and
gridiron? Bless your heart, that baseball story was the worst story
in the book, but it was written after a solid summer of watching
our bush league team play ball in the little Wisconsin town that I
used to call home.
Humanity? Which of us really knows it? But take a fairly
intelligent girl of seventeen, put her on a country daily
newspaper, and then keep her on one paper or another, country and
city, for six years, and--well, she just naturally can't help
learning some things about some folks, now can she?...
You say that two or three more such books may entitle me to serious
consideration. If I can get the editors to take more stories, why I
suppose there'll be more books. But please don't perform any more
serious consideration stuff over 'em. Because me'n Georgie Cohan,
we jest aims to amuse.
Her first book of short stories was called _Buttered Side Down_ (her
titles are always unusual). This was followed by _Roast Beef, Medium_,
in which Mrs. McChesney appears as the successful distributor of
Featherloom skirts. _Personality Plus_ tells of the adventures of her
son Jock as an advertising man. _Cheerful--by Request_ introduces Mrs.
McChesney and some other people. By this time her favorite character had
become so well known that the stage called for her, so Miss Ferber
collaborated with George V. Hobart in a play called _Our Mrs.
McChesney_, which was produced with Ethel Barrymore in the title role.
Her latest book, _Fanny Herself_, is a novel, and in its pages Mrs.
McChesney appears again.
Her stories show the effect of her newspaper training. The style is
crisp; the descriptions show close observation. Humor lights up every
page, and underlying all her stories is a belief in people, a faith that
life is worth while, a courage in the face of obstacles, that we like to
think is characteristically American. In the structure and the style of
her stories, Miss Ferber shows the influence of O. Henry, or as a
newspaper wit put it,
O. Henry's fame, unless mistaken I'm
Goes ednaferberating down through time.
AFTER THE BIG STORE CLOSES
_We all go to the Big Store to buy its bargains, and sometimes we
wonder idly what the clerks are like when they are not behind the
counter. This story deals with the lives of two people who punched the
time-clock. When the store closes, it is like the striking of the clock
in the fairy tales: the clerks are transformed into human beings, and
become so much like ourselves that it is hard to tell the difference._
BITTER-SWEET
BY
FANNIE HURST
Much of the tragical lore of the infant mortality, the malnutrition, and
the five-in-a-room morality of the city's poor is written in statistics,
and the statistical path to the heart is more figurative than literal.
It is difficult to write stylistically a per-annum report of 1,327
curvatures of the spine, whereas the poor specific little vertebra of
Mamie O'Grady, daughter to Lou, your laundress, whose alcoholic husband
once invaded your very own basement and attempted to strangle her in the
coal-bin, can instantly create an apron bazaar in the church
vestry-rooms.
That is why it is possible to drink your morning coffee without nausea
for it, over the head-lines of forty thousand casualties at Ypres, but
to push back abruptly at a three-line notice of little Tony's, your
corner bootblack's, fatal dive before a street-car.
Gertie Slayback was statistically down as a woman wage-earner; a typhoid
case among the thousands of the Borough of Manhattan for 1901; and her
twice-a-day share in the Subway fares collected in the present year of
our Lord.
She was a very atomic one of the city's four millions. But after all,
what are the kings and peasants, poets and draymen, but great, greater,
or greatest, less, lesser, or least atoms of us? If not of the least,
Gertie Slayback was of the very lesser. When she unlocked the front door
to her rooming-house of evenings, there was no one to expect her, except
on Tuesdays, which evening it so happened her week was up. And when she
left of mornings with her breakfast crumblessly cleared up and the box
of biscuit and condensed-milk can tucked unsuspectedly behind her
camisole in the top drawer there was no one to regret her.
There are some of us who call this freedom. Again there are those for
whom one spark of home fire burning would light the world.
Gertie Slayback was one of these. Half a life-time of opening her door
upon this or that desert-aisle of hall bedroom had not taught her heart
how not to sink or the feel of daily rising in one such room to seem
less like a damp bathing-suit, donned at dawn.
The only picture--or call it atavism if you will--which adorned Miss
Slayback's dun-colored walls was a passe-partout snowscape, night
closing in, and pink cottage windows peering out from under eaves. She
could visualize that interior as if she had only to turn the frame for
the smell of wood fire and the snap of pine logs and for the scene of
two high-back chairs and the wooden crib between.
What a fragile, gracile thing is the mind that can leap thus from nine
bargain basement hours of hairpins and darning-balls to the downy
business of lining a crib in Never-Never Land and warming No Man's
slippers before the fire of imagination.
There was that picture so acidly etched into Miss Slayback's brain that
she had only to close her eyes in the slit-like sanctity of her room and
in the brief moment of courting sleep feel the pink penumbra of her
vision begin to glow.