That women who toil not neither do they spin might know the feel of
fabrics so cunningly devised that they lay to the flesh like the inner
petals of buds, three hundred and fifty men, women, and children
contrived, between strikes, to make the show-rooms of the Kessler
Costume Company, Incorporated, a sort of mauve and mirrored Delphi where
buyers from twenty states came to invoke forecast of the mood of skirts,
the caprice of sleeves, and the rumored flip to the train. Before these
flips and moods, a gigantic industry held semi-annual pause, destinies
of lace-factories trembling before a threatened season of strictly
tailor-mades, velvet-looms slowing at the shush of taffeta. When woman
would be sleazy, petticoat manufacturers went overnight into an oblivion
from which there might or might not be returning. The willow plume waved
its day, making and unmaking merchants.
Destiny loves thus to spring from acorn beginnings. Helen smiled, and
Troy fell. Roast pork, and I doubt not then and there the apple sauce,
became a national institution because a small boy burnt his fingers.
That is why, out from the frail love of women for the flesh and its
humors, and because for the webby cling of chiffon too often no price is
too high, the Kessler Costume Company employed, on the factory side of
the door, the three hundred and fifty sewers and cutters, not one of
whose monthly wage could half buy the real-lace fichu or the
painted-chiffon frock of his own handiwork.
On the show-room side of the door, painted mauve within and not without,
_mannequins_, so pink finger-tipped, so tilted of instep, and so bred in
the thrust to the silhouette, trailed these sleazy products of thick
ringers across mauve-colored carpet and before the appraising eyes of
twenty states.
Often as not, smoke rose in that room from the black cigar of the Omaha
Store, Omaha, or Ladies' Wear, Cleveland. In season, and particularly
during the frenzied dog-days of August, when the fate of the new
waist-line or his daring treatment of cloth of silver hung yet in the
balance, and the spirit of Detroit must be browbeaten by the dictum of
the sleeveless thing in evening frocks, Leon Kessler himself smoked a
day-long chain of cigarettes, lighting one off the other.
In the model-room, a long, narrow slit, roaringly ventilated by a
whirling machine, lined in frocks suspended from hangers, and just wide
enough for two very perfect thirty-sixes to stand abreast, August fell
heavily. So heavily that occasionally a cloak-model, her lot to show
next December's conceit in theater wraps, fainted on the show-dais; or a
cloth-of-gold evening gown, donned for the twentieth time that
sweltering day, would suddenly, with its model, crumple, a glittering
huddle, to the floor.
Upon Miss Hattie Becker, who within the narrow slit had endured eight of
these Augusts with only two casual faints and a swoon or two nipped in
the bud, this ninth August came in so furiously that, sliding out of her
sixth showing of a cloth-of-silver and blue-fox opera wrap, a shivering
that amounted practically to chill took hold of her.
"Br-r-r!" she said, full of all men's awe at the carbon-dioxide paradox.
"I'm so hot I'm cold!"
Miss Clarice Delehanty slid out of a shower of tulle-of-gold
dancing-frock and into an Avenue gown of rough serge. The tail of a very
arched eyebrow threatened, and then ran down in a black rill.
"If Niagara Falls was claret lemonade,
You'd see me beat it to a watery grave."
"That'll be enough canary-talk out of you, Clare. Hand me my shirt-waist
there off the hook."
"Didn't Kess say we had to show Keokuk the line before lunch?"
"If the King of England was buying ermine sport coats this morning, I
wouldn't show 'em before I had a cold cut and a long drink in me. Hurry!
Hand me my waist, Clare, before the girls come in from showing the
bridesmaid line."
Miss Delehanty flung the garment down the narrow length of the room.
"Minneapolis don't know it, but after this showing he's going to blow me
to the frappiest little lunch on the Waldorf roof."
Miss Becker buttoned her flimsy blouse with three pearl beads down its
front, wiping constantly at a constantly dampening brow.
"You'd shove over the Goddess of Liberty if you thought she had her foot
on a meal ticket."
"Yes; and if I busted her, you could build a new one on the lunch money
you've saved in your time."
"Waldorf! You've got a fine chance with Minneapolis. You mean the
Automat, and two spoons for the ice-cream."
Miss Delehanty adjusted a highly eccentric hat, a small green velvet,
outrageously tilted off the rear of its _bandeau_, and a wide black
streamer flowing down over one shoulder. It was the match to the
explosive effect of the _trotteur_ gown. She was Fashion's humoresque,
except that Fashion has no sense of humor. Very presently Minneapolis
would appraise her at two hundred and seventy-five as is. Miss Delehanty
herself came cheaper.
"Say, Hattie, don't let being an old man's darling go to your head. The
grandchildren may issue an injunction."
A flare of crimson rushed immediately over Miss Becker's face, spreading
down into her neck.
"You let him alone! He's a darn sight better than anything I've seen you
girls picking for yourselves. You never met a man in your life whose
name wasn't Johnnie. You couldn't land a John in a million years."
Miss Delehanty raised her face from over a shoe-buckle. A stare began to
set in, as obviously innocent as a small boy's between spitballs.
"Well, who said anything about old St. Louis, I'd like to know?"
"You did, and you leave him alone! What do you know about a real man?
You'd pass up a Ford ride to sit still in a pasteboard limousine
every time!"
"Well, of all things! Did I say anything?"
"Yes, you did!"
"Why, for my part, he can show you a good time eight nights in the week
and Sundays, too."
"He 'ain't got grandchildren--if you want to know it."
"Did I say he had?"
"Yes, you did!"
"Why, I don't blame any girl for showing grandpa a good time."
"You could consider yourself darn lucky, Clarice Delehanty, if one half
as good ever--"
"Ask the girls if I don't always say old St. Louis is all to the good.
Three or four years ago, right after his wife died, I said to Ada,
I said--"
A head showed suddenly through the lining side of the mauve portières,
blue-eyed, blue-shaved, and with a triple ripple of black hair
trained backward.
"Hurry along there with fifty-seven, Delehanty! Heyman's got to see the
line and catch that six-two Chicago flier."
Miss Delehanty fell into pose, her profile turned back over one
shoulder.
"Tell him to chew a clove; it's good for breathless haste," she said,
disappearing through portières into the show-room.
Miss Becker thrust herself from a hastily-found-out aperture, patting,
with final touch, her belt into place.
"Have I been asking you for five years, Kess, to knock before you poke
your head in on us girls?"
Mr. Leon Kessler appeared then fully between the curtains, letting them
drape heavily behind him. Gotham garbs her poets and her brokers, her
employers and employees, in the national pin-stripes and sack coat.
Except for a few pins stuck upright in his coat lapel, Mr. Kessler might
have been his banker or his salesman. Typical New-Yorker is the pseudo,
half enviously bestowed upon his kind by _hinter_ America. It signifies
a bi-weekly manicure, femininely administered; a hotel lobbyist who can
outstare a seatless guest; the sang-froid to add up a dinner check;
spats. When Mr. Kessler tipped, it did not clink; it rustled. In
theater, at each interval between acts, he piled out over ladies' knees
and returned chewing a mint. He journeyed twice a year to a famous
Southern spa, and there won or lost his expenses. He regarded Miss
Becker, peering at her around the fluff of a suspended frock of
pink tulle.
"What's the idea, Becker? Keokuk wants to see you in the wrap line."
Miss Becker swallowed hard, jamming down and pinning into a small
taffy-colored turban, her hair, the exact shade of it, escaping in
scallops. Carefully powdered-out lines of her face seemed to emerge
suddenly through the conserved creaminess of her skin. Thirty-four, in
its unguarded moments, will out. Miss Becker had almost detained
twenty's waistline and twenty-two's ardent thrust of face. It was only
the indentures of time that had begun to tell slightly--indentures that
powder could not putty out. There was a slight bagginess of throat where
the years love to eat in first, and out from the eyes a spray of fine
lines. It was these lines that came out now indubitably.
"If you want me to lay down on you, Kess, for sure, just ask me to show
the line again before lunch. I'm about ready to keel. And you can't put
me off again. I'm ready, and you got to come now."
He dug so deeply into his pockets that his sleeves crawled up.
"Say, look here. I've got my business to attend to, and, when my trade's
in town, my trade comes first. See? Take off and show Keokuk a few
numbers. I want him to see that chinchilla drape."
She reached out, closing her hand over his arm.
"I'll show him the whole line, Kess, when we're back from lunch. I got
to talk to you, I tell you. You put me off yesterday and the day before,
and this--this is the last."
"The last what?"
"Please, Kess, if you only run over to Rinehardt's with me. I got to
tell you something. Something about me and--and--"