There is a story--Kipling, I think--that tells of a spirited horse
galloping in the dark suddenly drawing up tense, hoofs bunched, slim
flanks quivering, nostrils dilated, ears pricked. Urging being of no
avail the rider dismounts, strikes a match, advances a cautious step or
so, and finds himself at the precipitous brink of a newly formed
crevasse.
So it is with your trained editor. A miraculous sixth sense guides him.
A mysterious something warns him of danger lurking within the seemingly
innocent oblong white envelope. Without slitting the flap, without
pausing to adjust his tortoise-rimmed glasses, without clearing his
throat, without lighting his cigarette--he knows.
The deadly newspaper story he scents in the dark. Cub reporter. Crusty
city editor. Cub fired. Stumbles on to a big story. Staggers into
newspaper office wild-eyed. Last edition. "Hold the presses!" Crusty
C.E. stands over cub's typewriter grabbing story line by line. Even
foreman of pressroom moved to tears by tale. "Boys, this ain't just a
story this kid's writin'. This is history!" Story finished. Cub faints.
C.E. makes him star reporter.
The athletic story: "I could never marry a mollycoddle like you, Harold
Hammond!" Big game of the year. Team crippled. Second half. Halfback
hurt. Harold Hammond, scrub, into the game. Touchdown! Broken leg. Five
to nothing. "Harold, can you ever, ever forgive me?"
The pseudo-psychological story: She had been sitting before the fire for
a long, long time. The flame had flickered and died down to a
smouldering ash. The sound of his departing footsteps echoed and
re-echoed through her brain. But the little room was very, very still.
The shop-girl story: Torn boots and temptation, tears and snears, pathos
and bathos, all the way from Zola to the vice inquiry.
Having thus attempted to hide the deadly commonplaceness of this story
with a thin layer of cynicism, perhaps even the wily editor may be
tricked into taking the leap.
* * * * *
Four weeks before the completion of the new twelve-story addition the
store advertised for two hundred experienced saleswomen. Rachel
Wiletzky, entering the superintendent's office after a wait of three
hours, was Applicant No. 179. The superintendent did not look up as
Rachel came in. He scribbled busily on a pad of paper at his desk, thus
observing rules one and two in the proper conduct of superintendents
when interviewing applicants. Rachel Wiletzky, standing by his desk,
did not cough or wriggle or rustle her skirts or sag on one hip. A sense
of her quiet penetrated the superintendent's subconsciousness. He
glanced up hurriedly over his left shoulder. Then he laid down his
pencil and sat up slowly. His mind was working quickly enough though. In
the twelve seconds that intervened between the laying down of the pencil
and the sitting up in his chair he had hastily readjusted all his
well-founded preconceived ideas on the appearance of shop-girl
applicants.
Rachel Wiletzky had the colouring and physique of a dairymaid. It was
the sort of colouring that you associate in your mind with lush green
fields, and Jersey cows, and village maids, in Watteau frocks, balancing
brimming pails aloft in the protecting curve of one rounded upraised
arm, with perhaps a Maypole dance or so in the background. Altogether,
had the superintendent been given to figures of speech, he might have
said that Rachel was as much out of place among the preceding one
hundred and seventy-eight bloodless, hollow-chested, stoop-shouldered
applicants as a sunflower would be in a patch of dank white fungi.
He himself was one of those bleached men that you find on the office
floor of department stores. Grey skin, grey eyes, greying hair, careful
grey clothes--seemingly as void of pigment as one of those sunless
things you disclose when you turn over a board that has long lain on the
mouldy floor of a damp cellar. It was only when you looked closely that
you noticed a fleck of golden brown in the cold grey of each eye, and a
streak of warm brown forming an unquenchable forelock that the
conquering grey had not been able to vanquish. It may have been a
something within him corresponding to those outward bits of human
colouring that tempted him to yield to a queer impulse. He whipped from
his breast-pocket the grey-bordered handkerchief, reached up swiftly and
passed one white corner of it down the length of Rachel Wiletzky's
Killarney-rose left cheek. The rude path down which the handkerchief had
travelled deepened to red for a moment before both rose-pink cheeks
bloomed into scarlet. The superintendent gazed rather ruefully from
unblemished handkerchief to cheek and back again.
"Why--it--it's real!" he stammered.
Rachel Wiletzky smiled a good-natured little smile that had in it a dash
of superiority.
"If I was putting it on," she said, "I hope I'd have sense enough to
leave something to the imagination. This colour out of a box would take
a spiderweb veil to tone it down."
Not much more than a score of words. And yet before the half were spoken
you were certain that Rachel Wiletzky's knowledge of lush green fields
and bucolic scenes was that gleaned from the condensed-milk ads that
glare down at one from billboards and street-car chromos. Hers was the
ghetto voice--harsh, metallic, yet fraught with the resonant music of
tragedy.
"H'm--name?" asked the grey superintendent. He knew that vocal quality.
A queer look stole into Rachel Wiletzky's face, a look of cunning and
determination and shrewdness.
"Ray Willets," she replied composedly. "Double l."
"Clerked before, of course. Our advertisement stated--"
"Oh yes," interrupted Ray Willets hastily, eagerly. "I can sell goods.
My customers like me. And I don't get tired. I don't know why, but I
don't."
The superintendent glanced up again at the red that glowed higher with
the girl's suppressed excitement. He took a printed slip from the little
pile of paper that lay on his desk.
"Well, anyway, you're the first clerk I ever saw who had so much red
blood that she could afford to use it for decorative purposes. Step into
the next room, answer the questions on this card and turn it in. You'll
be notified."
Ray Willets took the searching, telltale blank that put its questions so
pertinently. "Where last employed?" it demanded. "Why did you leave? Do
you live at home?"
Ray Willets moved slowly away toward the door opposite. The
superintendent reached forward to press the button that would summon
Applicant No. 180. But before his finger touched it Ray Willets turned
and came back swiftly. She held the card out before his surprised eyes.
"I can't fill this out. If I do I won't get the job. I work over at the
Halsted Street Bazaar. You know--the Cheap Store. I lied and sent word I
was sick so I could come over here this morning. And they dock you for
time off whether you're sick or not."
The superintendent drummed impatiently with his fingers. "I can't listen
to all this. Haven't time. Fill out your blank, and if--"
All that latent dramatic force which is a heritage of her race came to
the girl's aid now.
"The blank! How can I say on a blank that I'm leaving because I want to
be where real people are? What chance has a girl got over there on the
West Side? I'm different. I don't know why, but I am. Look at my face!
Where should I get red cheeks from? From not having enough to eat half
the time and sleeping three in a bed?"
She snatched off her shabby glove and held one hand out before the man's
face.
"From where do I get such hands? Not from selling hardware over at
Twelfth and Halsted. Look at it! Say, couldn't that hand sell silk and
lace?"
Some one has said that to make fingers and wrists like those which Ray
Willets held out for inspection it is necessary to have had at least
five generations of ancestors who have sat with their hands folded in
their laps. Slender, tapering, sensitive hands they were, pink-tipped,
temperamental. Wistful hands they were, speaking hands, an inheritance,
perhaps, from some dreamer ancestor within the old-world ghetto, some
long-haired, velvet-eyed student of the Talmud dwelling within the pale
with its squalor and noise, and dreaming of unseen things beyond the
confining gates--things rare and exquisite and fine.
"Ashamed of your folks?" snapped the superintendent.
"N-no--No! But I want to be different. I am different! Give me a chance,
will you? I'm straight. And I'll work. And I can sell goods. Try me."
That all-pervading greyness seemed to have lifted from the man at the
desk. The brown flecks in the eyes seemed to spread and engulf the
surrounding colourlessness. His face, too, took on a glow that seemed to
come from within. It was like the lifting of a thick grey mist on a
foggy morning, so that the sun shines bright and clear for a brief
moment before the damp curtain rolls down again and effaces it.
He leaned forward in his chair, a queer half-smile on his face.
"I'll give you your chance," he said, "for one month. At the end of that
time I'll send for you. I'm not going to watch you. I'm not going to
have you watched. Of course your sale slips will show the office whether
you're selling goods or not. If you're not they'll discharge you. But
that's routine. What do you want to sell?"
"What do I want to--Do you mean--Why, I want to sell the lacy
things."
"The lacy--"
Ray, very red-cheeked, made the plunge. "The--the lawnjeree, you know.
The things with ribbon and handwork and yards and yards of real lace.
I've seen 'em in the glass case in the French Room. Seventy-nine dollars
marked down from one hundred."
The superintendent scribbled on a card. "Show this Monday morning. Miss
Jevne is the head of your department. You'll spend two hours a day in
the store school of instruction for clerks. Here, you're forgetting your
glove."
The grey look had settled down on him again as he reached out to press
the desk button. Ray Willets passed out at the door opposite the one
through which Rachel Wiletzky had entered.
Some one in the department nick-named her Chubbs before she had spent
half a day in the underwear and imported lingerie. At the store school
she listened and learned. She learned how important were things of which
Halsted Street took no cognisance. She learned to make out a sale slip
as complicated as an engineering blueprint. She learned that a clerk
must develop suavity and patience in the same degree as a customer waxes
waspish and insulting, and that the spectrum's colours do not exist in
the costume of the girl-behind-the-counter. For her there are only black
and white. These things she learned and many more, and remembered them,
for behind the rosy cheeks and the terrier-bright eyes burned the
indomitable desire to get on. And the finished embodiment of all of Ray
Willets' desires and ambitions was daily before her eyes in the presence
of Miss Jevne, head of the lingerie and negligées.
Of Miss Jevne it might be said that she was real where Ray was
artificial, and artificial where Ray was real. Everything that Miss
Jevne wore was real. She was as modish as Ray was shabby, as slim as Ray
was stocky, as artificially tinted and tinctured as Ray was naturally
rosy-cheeked and buxom. It takes real money to buy clothes as real as
those worn by Miss Jevne. The soft charmeuse in her graceful gown was
real and miraculously draped. The cobweb-lace collar that so delicately
traced its pattern against the black background of her gown was real. So
was the ripple of lace that cascaded down the front of her blouse. The
straight, correct, hideously modern lines of her figure bespoke a real
eighteen-dollar corset. Realest of all, there reposed on Miss Jevne's
bosom a bar pin of platinum and diamonds--very real diamonds set in a
severely plain but very real bar of precious platinum. So if you except
Miss Jevne's changeless colour, her artificial smile, her glittering
hair and her undulating head-of-the-department walk, you can see that
everything about Miss Jevne was as real as money can make one.
Miss Jevne, when she deigned to notice Ray Willets at all, called her
"girl," thus: "Girl, get down one of those Number Seventeens for
me--with the pink ribbons." Ray did not resent the tone. She thought
about Miss Jevne as she worked. She thought about her at night when she
was washing and ironing her other shirtwaist for next day's wear. In the
Halsted Street Bazaar the girls had been on terms of dreadful intimacy
with those affairs in each other's lives which popularly are supposed to
be private knowledge. They knew the sum which each earned per week; how
much they turned in to help swell the family coffers and how much they
were allowed to keep for their own use. They knew each time a girl spent
a quarter for a cheap sailor collar or a pair of near-silk stockings.
Ray Willets, who wanted passionately to be different, whose hands so
loved the touch of the lacy, silky garments that made up the lingerie
and negligee departments, recognised the perfection of Miss Jevne's
faultless realness--recognised it, appreciated it, envied it. It worried
her too. How did she do it? How did one go about attaining the same
degree of realness?
Meanwhile she worked. She learned quickly. She took care always to be
cheerful, interested, polite. After a short week's handling of lacy
silken garments she ceased to feel a shock when she saw Miss Jevne
displaying a _robe-de-nuit_ made up of white cloud and sea-foam and
languidly assuring the customer that of course it wasn't to be expected
that you could get a fine handmade lace at that price--only
twenty-seven-fifty. Now if she cared to look at something really
fine--made entirely by hand--why--
The end of the first ten days found so much knowledge crammed into Ray
Willets' clever, ambitious little head that the pink of her cheeks had
deepened to carmine, as a child grows flushed and too bright-eyed when
overstimulated and overtired.
Miss Myrtle, the store beauty, strolled up to Ray, who was straightening
a pile of corset covers and _brassieres_. Miss Myrtle was the store's
star cloak-and-suit model. Tall, svelte, graceful, lovely in line and
contour, she was remarkably like one of those exquisite imbeciles that
Rossetti used to love to paint. Hers were the great cowlike eyes, the
wonderful oval face, the marvellous little nose, the perfect lips and
chin. Miss Myrtle could don a forty-dollar gown, parade it before a
possible purchaser, and make it look like an imported model at one
hundred and twenty-five. When Miss Myrtle opened those exquisite lips
and spoke you got a shock that hurt. She laid one cool slim finger on
Ray's ruddy cheek.
"Sure enough!" she drawled nasally. "Whereja get it anyway, kid? You
must of been brought up on peaches 'n' cream and slept in a pink cloud
somewheres."
"Me!" laughed Ray, her deft fingers busy straightening a bow here, a
ruffle of lace there. "Me! The L-train runs so near my bed that if it
was ever to get a notion to take a short cut it would slice off my legs
to the knees."
"Live at home?" Miss Myrtle's grasshopper mind never dwelt long on one
subject.
"Well, sure," replied Ray. "Did you think I had a flat up on the Drive?"
"I live at home too," Miss Myrtle announced impressively. She was
leaning indolently against the table. Her eyes followed the deft, quick
movements of Ray's slender, capable hands. Miss Myrtle always leaned
when there was anything to lean on. Involuntarily she fell into melting
poses. One shoulder always drooped slightly, one toe always trailed a
bit like the picture on the cover of the fashion magazines, one hand and
arm always followed the line of her draperies while the other was raised
to hip or breast or head.
Ray's busy hands paused a moment. She looked up at the picturesque
Myrtle. "All the girls do, don't they?"
"Huh?" said Myrtle blankly.
"Live at home, I mean? The application blank says--"
"Say, you've got clever hands, ain't you?" put in Miss Myrtle
irrelevantly. She looked ruefully at her own short, stubby,
unintelligent hands, that so perfectly reflected her character in that
marvellous way hands have. "Mine are stupid-looking. I'll bet you'll get
on." She sagged to the other hip with a weary gracefulness. "I ain't
got no brains," she complained.
"Where do they live then?" persisted Ray.
"Who? Oh, I live at home"--again virtuously--"but I've got some heart if
I am dumb. My folks couldn't get along without what I bring home every
week. A lot of the girls have flats. But that don't last. Now Jevne--"
"Yes?" said Ray eagerly. Her plump face with its intelligent eyes was
all aglow.
Miss Myrtle lowered her voice discreetly. "Her own folks don't know
where she lives. They says she sends 'em money every month, but with the
understanding that they don't try to come to see her. They live way over
on the West Side somewhere. She makes her buying trip to Europe every
year. Speaks French and everything. They say when she started to earn
real money she just cut loose from her folks. They was a drag on her and
she wanted to get to the top."
"Say, that pin's real, ain't it?"
"Real? Well, I should say it is! Catch Jevne wearing anything that's
phony. I saw her at the theatre one night. Dressed! Well, you'd have
thought that birds of paradise were national pests, like English
sparrows. Not that she looked loud. But that quiet, rich elegance, you
know, that just smells of money. Say, but I'll bet she has her lonesome
evenings!"
Ray Willets' eyes darted across the long room and rested upon the
shining black-clad figure of Miss Jevne moving about against the
luxurious ivory-and-rose background of the French Room.
"She--she left her folks, h'm?" she mused aloud.
Miss Myrtle, the brainless, regarded the tips of her shabby boots.
"What did it get her?" she asked as though to herself. "I know what it
does to a girl, seeing and handling stuff that's made for millionaires,
you get a taste for it yourself. Take it from me, it ain't the
six-dollar girl that needs looking after. She's taking her little pay
envelope home to her mother that's a widow and it goes to buy milk for
the kids. Sometimes I think the more you get the more you want.
Somebody ought to turn that vice inquiry on to the tracks of that
thirty-dollar-a-week girl in the Irish crochet waist and the diamond bar
pin. She'd make swell readin'."
There fell a little silence between the two--a silence of which neither
was conscious. Both were thinking, Myrtle disjointedly, purposelessly,
all unconscious that her slow, untrained mind had groped for a great and
vital truth and found it; Ray quickly, eagerly, connectedly, a new and
daring resolve growing with lightning rapidity.
"There's another new baby at our house," she said aloud suddenly. "It
cries all night pretty near."
"Ain't they fierce?" laughed Myrtle. "And yet I dunno--"
She fell silent again. Then with the half-sign with which we waken from
day dreams she moved away in response to the beckoning finger of a
saleswoman in the evening-coat section. Ten minutes later her exquisite
face rose above the soft folds of a black charmeuse coat that rippled
away from her slender, supple body in lines that a sculptor dreams of
and never achieves.
Ray Willets finished straightening her counter. Trade was slow. She
moved idly in the direction of the black-garbed figure that flitted
about in the costly atmosphere of the French section. It must be a very
special customer to claim Miss Jevne's expert services. Ray glanced in
through the half-opened glass and ivory-enamel doors.
"Here, girl," called Miss Jevne. Ray paused and entered. Miss Jevne was
frowning. "Miss Myrtle's busy. Just slip this on. Careful now. Keep your
arms close to your head."
She slipped a marvellously wrought garment over Ray's sleek head. Fluffy
drifts of equally exquisite lingerie lay scattered about on chairs, over
mirrors, across showtables. On one of the fragile little ivory-and-rose
chairs, in the centre of the costly little room, sat a large, blonde,
perfumed woman who clanked and rustled and swished as she moved. Her
eyes were white-lidded and heavy, but strangely bright. One ungloved
hand was very white too, but pudgy and covered so thickly with gems that
your eye could get no clear picture of any single stone or setting.
Ray, clad in the diaphanous folds of the _robe-de-nuit_ that was so
beautifully adorned with delicate embroideries wrought by the patient,
needle-scarred fingers of some silent, white-faced nun in a far-away
convent, paced slowly up and down the short length of the room that the
critical eye of this coarse, unlettered creature might behold the
wonders woven by this weary French nun, and, beholding, approve.
"It ain't bad," spake the blonde woman grudgingly. "How much did you
say?"
"Ninety-five," Miss Jevne made answer smoothly. "I selected it myself
when I was in France my last trip. A bargain."
She slid the robe carefully over Ray's head. The frown came once more to
her brow. She bent close to Ray's ear. "Your waist's ripped under the
left arm. Disgraceful!"
The blonde woman moved and jangled a bit in her chair. "Well, I'll take
it," she sighed. "Look at the colour on that girl! And it's real too."
She rose heavily and came over to Ray, reached up and pinched her cheek
appraisingly with perfumed white thumb and forefinger.
"That'll do, girl," said Miss Jevne sweetly. "Take this along and change
these ribbons from blue to pink."
Ray Willets bore the fairy garment away with her. She bore it tenderly,
almost reverently. It was more than a garment. It represented in her
mind a new standard of all that was beautiful and exquisite and
desirable.
Ten days before the formal opening of the new twelve-story addition
there was issued from the superintendent's office an order that made a
little flurry among the clerks in the sections devoted to women's dress.
The new store when thrown open would mark an epoch in the retail
drygoods business of the city, the order began. Thousands were to be
spent on perishable decorations alone. The highest type of patronage was
to be catered to. Therefore the women in the lingerie, negligée,
millinery, dress, suit and corset sections were requested to wear during
opening week a modest but modish black one-piece gown that would blend
with the air of elegance which those departments were to maintain.
Ray Willets of the lingerie and negligée sections read her order slip
slowly. Then she reread it. Then she did a mental sum in simple
arithmetic. A childish sum it was. And yet before she got her answer the
solving of it had stamped on her face a certain hard, set, resolute
look.
The store management had chosen Wednesday to be the opening day. By
eight-thirty o'clock Wednesday morning the French lingerie, millinery
and dress sections, with their women clerks garbed in modest but modish
black one-piece gowns, looked like a levee at Buckingham when the court
is in mourning. But the ladies-in-waiting, grouped about here and
there, fell back in respectful silence when there paced down the aisle
the queen royal in the person of Miss Jevne. There is a certain sort of
black gown that is more startling and daring than scarlet. Miss Jevne's
was that style. Fast black you might term it. Miss Jevne was aware of
the flurry and flutter that followed her majestic progress down the
aisle to her own section. She knew that each eye was caught in the tip
of the little dog-eared train that slipped and slunk and wriggled along
the ground, thence up to the soft drapery caught so cunningly just below
the knee, up higher to the marvelously simple sash that swayed with each
step, to the soft folds of black against which rested the very real
diamond and platinum bar pin, up to the lace at her throat, and then
stopping, blinking and staring again gazed fixedly at the string of
pearls that lay about her throat, pearls rosily pink, mistily grey. An
aura of self-satisfaction enveloping her, Miss Jevne disappeared behind
the rose-garlanded portals of the new cream-and-mauve French section.
And there the aura vanished, quivering. For standing before one of the
plate-glass cases and patting into place with deft fingers the satin bow
of a hand-wrought chemise was Ray Willets, in her shiny little black
serge skirt and the braver of her two white shirtwaists.
Miss Jevne quickened her pace. Ray turned. Her bright brown eyes grew
brighter at sight of Miss Jevne's wondrous black. Miss Jevne, her train
wound round her feet like an actress' photograph, lifted her eyebrows
to an unbelievable height.
"Explain that costume!" she said.
"Costume?" repeated Ray, fencing.
Miss Jevne's thin lips grew thinner. "You understood that women in this
department were to wear black one-piece gowns this week!"