"Shall it be steak or chops to-night, Mrs. Mc--Buck?"
Emma turned her head in Annie"s direction--then her eyes. The two actions were distinct and separate.
"Steak or----" There was a little bewildered look in her eyes.
Her mind had not yet focused on the question. "Steak--oh! Oh, yes, of course! Why--why, Annie"--and the splendid thousand-h.-p. mind brought itself down to the settling of this b.u.t.ter-churning, two-h.-p.
question--"why, Annie, considering all things, I think we"ll make it filet with mushrooms."
IV
BLUE SERGE
For ten years, Mrs. Emma McChesney"s home had been a wardrobe-trunk.
She had taken her family life at second hand. Four nights out of the seven, her bed was "Lower Eight," and her breakfast, as many mornings, a cinder-strewn, lukewarm horror, taken tete-a-tete with a sleepy-eyed stranger and presided over by a white-coated, black-faced bandit, to whom a coffee-slopped saucer was a matter of course.
It had been her habit during those ten years on the road as traveling saleswoman for the T. A. Buck Featherloom Petticoat Company, to avoid the discomfort of the rapidly chilling car by slipping early into her berth. There, in kimono, if not in comfort, she would shut down the electric light with a snap, raise the shade, and, propped up on one elbow, watch the little towns go by. They had a wonderful fascination for her, those Middle Western towns, whose very names had a comfortable, home-like sound--Sandusky, Galesburg, Crawfordsville, Appleton--very real towns, with very real people in them. Peering wistfully out through the dusk, she could get little intimate glimpses of the home life of these people as the night came on. In those modest frame houses near the station they need not trouble to pull down the shades as must their cautious city cousins. As the train slowed down, there could be had a glimpse of a matronly housewife moving deftly about in the kitchen"s warm-yellow glow, a man reading a paper in slippered, shirt-sleeved comfort, a pig-tailed girl at the piano, a woman with a baby in her arms, or a family group, perhaps, seated about the table, deep in an after-supper conclave. It had made her homeless as she was homesick.
Emma always liked that picture best. Her keen, imaginative mind could sense the scene, could actually follow the trend of the talk during this, the most genial, homely, soul-cheering hour of the day. The trifling events of the last twelve hours in schoolroom, in store, in office, in street, in kitchen loom up large as they are rehea.r.s.ed in that magic, animated, cozy moment just before ma says, with a sigh:
"Well, folks, go on into the sitting-room. Me and Nellie"ve got to clear away."
Just silhouettes as the train flashed by--these small-town people--but very human, very enviable to Emma McChesney.
"They"re real," she would say. "They"re regular, three-meals-a-day people. I"ve been peeking in at their windows for ten years, and I"ve learned that it is in these towns that folks really live. The difference between life here and life in New York is the difference between area and depth. D"you see what I mean? In New York, they live by the mile, and here they live by the cubic foot. Well, I"d rather have one juicy, thick club-steak than a whole platterful of quarter-inch. It"s the same idea."
To those of her business colleagues whose habit it was to lounge in the hotel window with sneering comment upon the small-town procession as it went by, Emma McChesney had been wont to say:
"Don"t sneer at Main Street. When you come to think of it, isn"t it true that Fifth Avenue, any bright winter afternoon between four and six, is only Main Street on a busy day multiplied by one thousand?"
Emma McChesney was not the sort of woman to rail at a fate that had placed her in the harness instead of in the carriage. But during all the long years of up-hill pull, from the time she started with a humble salary in the office of the T. A. Buck Featherloom Petticoat Company, through the years spent on the road, up to the very time when the crown of success came to her in the form of the secretaryship of the prosperous firm of T. A. Buck, there was a minor but fixed ambition in her heart. That same ambition is to be found deep down in the heart of every woman whose morning costume is a tailor suit, whose newspaper must be read in hurried s.n.a.t.c.hes on the way downtown in crowded train or car, and to whom nine A.M. spells "Business."
"In fifteen years," Emma McChesney used to say, "I"ve never known what it is to loll in leisure. I"ve never had a chance to luxuriate.
Sunday? To a working woman, Sunday is for the purpose of repairing the ravages of the other six days. By the time you"ve washed your brushes, mended your skirt-braid, darned your stockings and gloves, looked for gray hairs and crows"-feet, and skimmed the magazine section, it"s Monday."
It was small wonder that Emma McChesney"s leisure had been limited. In those busy years she had not only earned the living for herself and her boy; she had trained that boy into manhood and placed his foot on the first rung of business success. She had transformed the T. A. Buck Featherloom Petticoat Company from a placidly mediocre concern to a thriving, flourishing, nationally known inst.i.tution. All this might have turned another woman"s head. It only served to set Emma McChesney"s more splendidly on her shoulders. Not too splendidly, however; for, with her marriage to her handsome business partner, T. A.
Buck, that well-set, independent head was found to fit very cozily into the comfortable hollow formed by T. A. Buck"s right arm.
"Emma," Buck had said, just before their marriage, "what is the arrangement to be after--after----"
"Just what it is now, I suppose," Emma had replied, "except that we"ll come down to the office together."
He had regarded her thoughtfully for a long minute. Then, "Emma, for three months after our marriage will you try being just Mrs. T. A.
Buck?"
"You mean no factory, no Featherlooms, no dictation, no business bothers!" Her voice was a rising scale of surprise.
"Just try it for three months, with the privilege of a lifetime, if you like it. But try it. I--I"d like to see you there when I leave, Emma.
I"d like to have you there when I come home. I suppose I sound like a selfish Turk, but----"
"You sound like a regular husband," Emma McChesney had interrupted, "and I love you for it. Now listen, T. A. For three whole months I"m going to be what the yellow novels used to call a doll-wife. I"m going to meet you at the door every night with a rose in my hair. I shall wear pink things with lace ruffles on "em. Don"t you know that I"ve been longing to do just those things for years and years? I"m going to blossom out into a beauty. Watch me! I"ve never had time to study myself. I"ll hold shades of yellow and green and flesh-color up to my face to see which brings out the right tints. I"m going to gaze at myself through half-closed eyes to see which shade produces tawny lights in my hair. Ever since I can remember, I"ve been so busy that it has been a question of getting the best possible garments in the least possible time for the smallest possible sum. In that case, one gets blue serge. I"ve worn blue serge until it feels like a convict"s uniform. I"m going to blossom out into fawn and green and mauve. I shall get evening dresses with only bead shoulder-straps. I"m going to shop. I"ve never really seen Fifth Avenue between eleven and one, when the real people come out. My views of it have been at nine A.M. when the office-workers are going to work, and at five-thirty when they are going home. I will now cease to observe the proletariat and mingle with the predatory. I"ll probably go in for those tiffin things at the Plaza. If I do, I"ll never be the same woman again."
Whereupon she paused with dramatic effect.
To all of which T. A. Buck had replied:
"Go as far as you like. Take fencing lessons, if you want to, or Sanskrit. You"ve been a queen bee for so many years that I think the role of drone will be a pleasant change. Let me shoulder the business worries for a while. You"ve borne them long enough."
"It"s a bargain. For three months I shall do nothing more militant than to pick imaginary threads off your coat lapel and pout when you mention business. At the end of those three months we"ll go into private session, compare notes, and determine whether the plan shall cease or become permanent. Shake hands on it."
They shook hands solemnly. As they did so, a faint shadow of doubt hovered far, far back in the depths of T. A. Buck"s fine eyes. And a faint, inscrutable smile lurked in the corners of Emma"s lips.
So it was that Emma McChesney, the alert, the capable, the brisk, the business-like, a.s.sumed the role of Mrs. T. A. Buck, the leisurely, the languid, the elegant. She, who formerly, at eleven in the morning, might have been seen bent on selling the best possible bill of spring Featherlooms to Joe Greenbaum, of Keokuk, Iowa, could now be found in a modiste"s gray-and-raspberry salon, being draped and pinned and fitted.
She, whose dynamic force once charged the entire office and factory with energy and efficiency, now distributed a t.i.the of that priceless vigor here, a t.i.the there, a t.i.the everywhere, and thus broke the very backbone of its power.
She had never been a woman to do things by halves. What she undertook to do she did thoroughly and whole-heartedly. This principle she applied to her new mode of life as rigidly as she had to the old.
That first month slipped magically by. Emma was too much a woman not to feel a certain exquisite pleasure in the selecting of delicate and becoming fabrics. There was a thrill of novelty in being able to spend an hour curled up with a book after lunch, to listen to music one afternoon a week, to drive through the mistily gray park; to walk up the thronged, sparkling Avenue, pausing before its Aladdin"s Cave windows. Simple enough pleasures, and taken quite as a matter of course by thousands of other women who had no work-filled life behind them to use as contrast.
She plunged into her new life whole-heartedly. The first new gown was exciting. It was a velvet affair with furs, and gratifyingly becoming.
Her shining blond head rose above the soft background of velvet and fur with an effect to distract the least observing.
"Like it?" she had asked Buck, turning slowly, frankly sure of herself.
"You"re wonderful in it," said T. A. Buck. "Say, Emma, where"s that blue thing you used to wear--the one with the white cuffs and collar, and the little blue hat with the what-cha-ma-call-ems on it?"
"T. A. Buck, you"re--you"re--well, you"re a man, that"s what you are!
That blue thing was worn threadbare in the office, and I gave it to the laundress"s niece weeks ago." Small wonder her cheeks took on a deeper pink.
"Oh," said Buck, unruffled, "too bad! There was something about that dress--I don"t know----"
At the first sitting of the second gown, Emma revolted openly.
On the floor at Emma"s feet there was knotted into a contortionistic att.i.tude a small, wiry, impolite person named Smalley. Miss Smalley was an artist in draping and knew it. She was the least fashionable person in all that smart dressmaking establishment. She refused to notice the corset-coiffure-and-charmeuse edict that governed all other employees in the shop. In her shabby little dress, her steel-rimmed spectacles, her black-sateen ap.r.o.n, Smalley might have pa.s.sed for a Bird Center home dressmaker. Yet, given a yard or two or three of satin and a saucer of pins, Smalley could make the dumpiest of debutantes look like a fragile flower.
At a critical moment Emma stirred. Handicapped as she was by a mouthful of nineteen pins and her bow-knot att.i.tude, Smalley still could voice a protest.
"Don"t move!" she commanded, thickly.
"Wait a minute," Emma said, and moved again, more disastrously than before. "Don"t you think it"s too--too young?"
She eyed herself in the mirror anxiously, then looked down at Miss Smalley"s nut-cracker face that was peering up at her, its lips pursed grotesquely over the pins.
"Of course it is," mumbled Miss Smalley. "Everybody"s clothes are too young for "em nowadays. The only difference between the dresses we make for girls of sixteen and the dresses we make for their grandmothers of sixty is that the sixty-year-old ones want "em shorter and lower, and they run more to rose-bud tr.i.m.m.i.n.g."
Emma surveyed the acid Miss Smalley with a look that was half amused, half vexed, wholly determined.