MILLIE WHITCOMB, of the fancy goods and notions, beckoned me with
her finger. I had been standing at Kate O'Malley's counter,
pretending to admire her new basket-weave suitings; but in
reality reveling in her droll account of how, in the train coming
up from Chicago, Mrs. Judge Porterfield had worn the negro
porter's coat over her chilly shoulders in mistake for her
husband's. Kate O'Malley can tell a funny story in a way to make
the after-dinner pleasantries of a Washington diplomat sound like
the clumsy jests told around the village grocery stove.
"I wanted to tell you that I read that last story of yours," said
Millie, sociably, when I had strolled over to her counter, "and I
liked it, all but the heroine. She had an `adorable throat' and
hair that `waved away from her white brow,' and eyes that `now
were blue and now gray.' Say, why don't you write a story about
an ugly girl?"
"My land!" protested I. "It's bad enough trying to make them
accept my stories as it is. That last heroine was a raving
beauty, but she came back eleven times before the editor of
Blakely's succumbed to her charms."
Millie's fingers were busy straightening the contents of a tray
of combs and imitation jet barrettes. Millie's fingers were not
intended for that task. They are slender, tapering fingers,
pink-tipped and sensitive.
"I should think," mused she, rubbing a cloudy piece of jet with a
bit of soft cloth, "that they'd welcome a homely one with relief.
These goddesses are so cloying."
Millie Whitcomb's black hair is touched with soft mists of gray,
and she wears lavender shirtwaists and white stocks edged with
lavender. There is a Colonial air about her that has nothing to
do with celluloid combs and imitation jet barrettes. It breathes
of dim old rooms, rich with the tones of mahogany and old brass,
and Millie in the midst of it, gray-gowned, a soft white fichu
crossed upon her breast.
In our town the clerks are not the pert and gum-chewing young
persons that story-writers are wont to describe. The girls at
Bascom's are institutions. They know us all by our first names,
and our lives are as an open book to them. Kate O'Malley, who has
been at Bascom's for so many years that she is rumored to have
stock in the company, may be said to govern the fashions of our
town. She is wont to say, when we express a fancy for gray as the
color of our new spring suit:
"Oh, now, Nellie, don't get gray again. You had it year before
last, and don't you think it was just the least leetle bit
trying? Let me show you that green that came in yesterday. I said
the minute I clapped my eyes on it that it was just the color for
you, with your brown hair and all."
And we end by deciding on the green.
The girls at Bascom's are not gossips--they are too busy for
that--but they may be said to be delightfully well informed. How
could they be otherwise when we go to Bascom's for our wedding
dresses and party favors and baby flannels? There is news at
Bascom's that out daily paper never hears of, and wouldn't dare
to print if it did.
So when Millie Whitcomb, of the fancy goods and notions,
expressed her hunger for a homely heroine, I did not resent the
suggestion. On the contrary, it sent me home in thoughtful mood,
for Millie Whitcomb has acquired a knowledge of human nature in
the dispensing of her fancy goods and notions. It set me casting
about for a really homely heroine.
There never has been a really ugly heroine in fiction. Authors
have started bravely out to write of an unlovely woman, but they
never have had the courage to allow her to remain plain. On Page
237 she puts on a black lace dress and red roses, and the
combination brings out unexpected tawny lights in her hair, and
olive tints in her cheeks, and there she is, the same old
beautiful heroine. Even in the "Duchess " books one finds the
simple Irish girl, on donning a green corduroy gown cut square at
the neck, transformed into a wild-rose beauty, at sight of whom a
ball-room is hushed into admiring awe. There's the case of Jane
Eyre, too. She is constantly described as plain and mouse-like,
but there are covert hints as to her gray eyes and slender figure
and clear skin, and we have a sneaking notion that she wasn't
such a fright after all. Therefore, when I tell you that I am
choosing Pearlie Schultz as my leading lady you are to understand
that she is ugly, not only when the story opens, but to the
bitter end. In the first place, Pearlie is fat. Not plump, or
rounded, or dimpled, or deliciously curved, but FAT. She bulges
in all the wrong places, including her chin. (Sister, who has a
way of snooping over my desk in my absence, says that I may as
well drop this now, because nobody would ever read it, anyway,
least of all any sane editor. I protest when I discover that Sis
has been over my papers. It bothers me. But she says you have to
do these things when you have a genius in the house, and cites
the case of Kipling's "Recessional," which was rescued from the
depths of his wastebasket by his wife.)
Pearlie Schultz used to sit on the front porch summer evenings
and watch the couples stroll by, and weep in her heart. A fat
girl with a fat girl's soul is a comedy. But a fat girl with a
thin girl's soul is a tragedy. Pearlie, in spite of her two
hundred pounds, had the soul of a willow wand.
The walk in front of Pearlie's house was guarded by a row of big
trees that cast kindly shadows. The strolling couples used to
step gratefully into the embrace of these shadows, and from them
into other embraces. Pearlie, sitting on the porch, could see
them dimly, although they could not see her. She could not help
remarking that these strolling couples were strangely lacking in
sprightly conversation. Their remarks were but fragmentary,
disjointed affairs, spoken in low tones with a queer, tremulous
note in them. When they reached the deepest, blackest, kindliest
shadow, which fell just before the end of the row of trees, the
strolling couples almost always stopped, and then there came a
quick movement, and a little smothered cry from the girl, and
then a sound, and then a silence. Pearlie, sitting alone on the
porch in the dark, listened to these things and blushed
furiously. Pearlie had never strolled into the kindly shadows
with a little beating of the heart, and she had never been
surprised with a quick arm about her and eager lips pressed
warmly against her own.
In the daytime Pearlie worked as public stenographer at the Burke
Hotel. She rose at seven in the morning, and rolled for fifteen
minutes, and lay on her back and elevated her heels in the air,
and stood stiff kneed while she touched the floor with her finger
tips one hundred times, and went without her breakfast. At the
end of each month she usually found that she weighed three pounds
more than she had the month before.
The folks at home never joked with Pearlie about her weight. Even
one's family has some respect for a life sorrow. Whenever Pearlie
asked that inevitable question of the fat woman: "Am I as fat as
she is?" her mother always answered: "You! Well, I should hope
not! You're looking real peaked lately, Pearlie. And your blue
skirt just ripples in the back, it's getting so big for you."
Of such blessed stuff are mothers made.
But if the gods had denied Pearlie all charms of face or form,
they had been decent enough to bestow on her one gift. Pearlie
could cook like an angel; no, better than an angel, for no angel
could be a really clever cook and wear those flowing kimono-like
sleeves. They'd get into the soup. Pearlie could take a piece of
rump and some suet and an onion and a cup or so of water, and
evolve a pot roast that you could cut with a fork. She could turn
out a surprisingly good cake with surprisingly few eggs, all
covered with white icing, and bearing cunning little jelly
figures on its snowy bosom. She could beat up biscuits that fell
apart at the lightest pressure, revealing little pools of golden
butter within. Oh, Pearlie could cook!
On week days Pearlie rattled the typewriter keys, but on Sundays
she shooed her mother out of the kitchen. Her mother went,
protesting faintly: "Now, Pearlie, don't fuss so for dinner. You
ought to get your rest on Sunday instead of stewing over a hot
stove all morning."
"Hot fiddlesticks, ma," Pearlie would say, cheerily. "It ain't
hot, because it's a gas stove. And I'll only get fat if I sit
around. You put on your black-and-white and go to church. Call me
when you've got as far as your corsets, and I'll puff your hair
for you in the back." In her capacity of public stenographer at
the Burke Hotel, it was Pearlie's duty to take letters dictated
by traveling men and beginning: "Yours of the 10th at hand. In
reply would say . . ." or: "Enclosed please find, etc." As
clinching proof of her plainness it may be stated that none of
the traveling men, not even Max Baum, who was so fresh that the
girl at the cigar counter actually had to squelch him, ever
called Pearlie "baby doll," or tried to make a date with her. Not
that Pearlie would ever have allowed them to. But she never had
had to reprove them. During pauses in dictation she had a way of
peering near-sightedly over her glasses at the dapper,
well-dressed traveling salesman who was rolling off the items on
his sale bill. That is a trick which would make the prettiest
kind of a girl look owlish.
On the night that Sam Miller strolled up to talk to her, Pearlie
was working late. She had promised to get out a long and
intricate bill for Max Baum, who travels for Kuhn and Klingman,
so that he might take the nine o'clock evening train. The
irrepressible Max had departed with much eclat and clatter, and
Pearlie was preparing to go home when Sam approached her.
Sam had just come in from the Gayety Theatre across the street,
whither he had gone in a vain search for amusement after supper.
He had come away in disgust. A soiled soubrette with
orange-colored hair and baby socks had swept her practiced eye
over the audience, and, attracted by Sam's good-looking blond
head in the second row, had selected him as the target of her
song. She had run up to the extreme edge of the footlights at the
risk of teetering over, and had informed Sam through the medium
of song--to the huge delight of the audience, and to Sam's
red-faced discomfiture--that she liked his smile, and he was just
her style, and just as cute as he could be, and just the boy for
her. On reaching the chorus she had whipped out a small, round
mirror and, assisted by the calcium-light man in the rear, had
thrown a wretched little spotlight on Sam's head.
Ordinarily, Sam would not have minded it. But that evening, in
the vest pocket just over the place where he supposed his heart
to be, reposed his girl's daily letter. They were to be married
on Sam's return to New York from his first long trip. In the
letter near his heart she had written prettily and seriously
about traveling men, and traveling men's wives, and her little
code for both. The fragrant, girlish, grave little letter had
caused Sam to sour on the efforts of the soiled soubrette.
As soon as possible he had fled up the aisle and across the
street to the hotel writing-room. There he had spied Pearlie's
good-humored, homely face, and its contrast with the silly,
red-and-white countenance of the unlaundered soubrette had
attracted his homesick heart.
Pearlie had taken some letters from him earlier in the day. Now,
in his hunger for companionship, he strolled up to her desk just
as she was putting her typewriter to bed.
"Gee! This is a lonesome town!" said Sam, smiling down at her.
Pearlie glanced up at him, over her glasses. "I guess you must be
from New York," she said. "I've heard a real New Yorker can get
bored in Paris. In New York the sky is bluer, and the grass is
greener, and the girls are prettier, and the steaks are thicker,
and the buildings are higher, and the streets are wider, and the
air is finer, than the sky, or the grass, or the girls, or the
steaks, or the air of any place else in the world. Ain't they?"
"Oh, now," protested Sam, "quit kiddin' me! You'd be lonesome for
the little old town, too, if you'd been born and dragged up in
it, and hadn't seen it for four months."
"New to the road, aren't you?" asked Pearlie.