He was swept with the crowd toward a high platform at the extreme end of the auditorium. All about that platform stood hundreds, close packed, faces raised eagerly, the better to see the slight, graceful, girlish figure occupying the center of the stage--a figure strangely familiar to Jock"s eyes in spite of its quaintly billowing, ante-bellum garb. She was speaking. Jock, mouth agape, eyes protruding, ears straining, heard, as in a daze, the sweet, clear, charmingly modulated voice:
"The feature of the skirt, ladies and gentlemen, is that it gives a fulness without weight, something which the skirt-maker has never before been able to achieve. This is due to the patent featherboning process invented by Mrs. T. A. Buck, of the T. A. Buck Featherloom Petticoat Company, New York. Note, please, that it has all the advantages of our grandmother"s hoop-skirt, but none of its awkward features. It is graceful"--she turned slowly, lightly--"it is bouffant" she twirled on her toes--"it is practical, serviceable, elegant. It can be made up in any shade, in any material--silk, lace, crepe de Chine, charmeuse, taffeta. The T. A. Buck Featherloom Petticoat Company is prepared to fill orders for immediate----"
"Well, I"ll be darned!" said Jock McChesney aloud. And, again, heedless of the protesting "Sh-sh-sh-sh!" that his neighbors turned upon him, "Well, I"ll--be--darned!"
A hand twitched his coat sleeve. He turned, still dazed. His mother, very pink-cheeked, very bright-eyed, pulled him through the throng. As they reached the edge of the crowd, there came a great burst of applause, a buzz of conversation, the turning, shifting, nodding, staccato movements which mean approval in a ma.s.s of people.
"What the d.i.c.kens! How!" stammered Jock. "When--did she--did she----"
Emma, half smiling, half tearful, raised a protesting hand.
"I don"t know. Don"t ask me, dear. And don"t hate me for it. I tried to tell her not to, but she insisted. And, Jock, she"s done it, I tell you! She"s done it! They love the skirt! Listen to "em!"
"Don"t want to," said Jock. "Lead me to her."
"Angry, dear!"
"Me? No! I"m--I"m proud of her! She hasn"t only brains and looks, that little girl; she"s got nerve--the real kind! Gee, how did I ever have the gall to ask her to marry me!"
Together they sped toward the door that led to the dressing-rooms.
Buck, his fine eyes more luminous than ever as he looked at this wonder-wife of his, met them at the entrance.
"She"s waiting for you, Jock," he said, smiling. Jock took the steps in one leap.
"Well, T. A.?" said Emma.
"Well, Emma?" said T. A.
Which burst of eloquence was interrupted abruptly by a short, squat, dark man, who seized Emma"s hand in his left and Buck"s in his right, and pumped them up and down vigorously. It was that volatile, voluble person known to the skirt trade as Abel I. Fromkin, of the "Fromkin Form-fit Skirt. It Clings!"
"I"m looking everywhere for you!" he panted. Then, his shrewd little eyes narrowing, "You want to talk business?"
"Not here," said Buck abruptly.
"Sure--here," insisted Fromkin. "Say, that"s me. When I got a thing on my mind, I like to settle it. How much you take for the rights to that skirt?"
"Take for it!" exclaimed Emma, in the tone a mother would use to one who has suggested taking a beloved child from her.
"Now wait a minute. Don"t get mad. You ain"t started that skirt right. It should have been advertised. It"s too much of a shock.
You"ll see. They won"t buy. They"re afraid of it. I"ll take it off your hands and push it right, see? I offer you forty thousand for the rights to make that skirt and advertise it as the "Fromkin Full-flounce Skirt. It Flares!""
Emma smiled.
"How much?" she asked quizzically.
Abel I. Fromkin gulped.
"Fifty thousand," he said.
"Fifty thousand," repeated Emma quietly, and looked at Buck. "Thanks, Mr. Fromkin! I know, now, that if it"s worth fifty thousand to you to-day as the "Fromkin Full-flounce Skirt. It Flares!" then it"s worth one hundred and fifty thousand to us as the "T. A. Buck Balloon-Petticoat. It Billows!""
And it was.
VI
SISTERS UNDER THEIR SKIN
Women who know the joys and sorrows of a pay envelope do not speak of girls who work as Working Girls. Neither do they use the term Laboring Cla.s.s, as one would speak of a distinct and separate race, like the Ethiopian.
Emma McChesney Buck was no exception to this rule. Her fifteen years of man-size work for a man-size salary in the employ of the T. A. Buck Featherloom Petticoat Company, New York, precluded that. In those days, she had been Mrs. Emma McChesney, known from coast to coast as the most successful traveling saleswoman in the business. It was due to her that no feminine clothes-closet was complete without a Featherloom dangling from one hook. During those fifteen years she had educated her son, Jock McChesney, and made a man of him; she had worked, fought, saved, triumphed, smiled under hardship; and she had acquired a broad and deep knowledge of those fascinating and diversified subjects which we lump carelessly under the heading of Human Nature. She was Mrs. T. A. Buck now, wife of the head of the firm, and partner in the most successful skirt manufactory in the country. But the hard-working, clear-thinking, sane-acting habits of those fifteen years still clung.
Perhaps this explained why every machine-girl in the big, bright shop back of the offices raised adoring eyes when Emma entered the workroom.
Italian, German, Hungarian, Russian--they lifted their faces toward this source of love and sympathetic understanding as naturally as a plant turns its leaves toward the sun. They glowed under her praise; they confided to her their troubles; they came to her with their joys--and they copied her clothes.
This last caused her some uneasiness. When Mrs. T. A. Buck wore blue serge, an epidemic of blue serge broke out in the workroom. Did Emma"s spring hat flaunt flowers, the elevators, at closing time, looked like gardens abloom. If she appeared on Monday morning in severely tailored white-linen blouse, the shop on Tuesday was a Boston seminary in its starched primness.
"It worries me," Emma told her husband-partner. "I can"t help thinking of the story of the girl and the pet chameleon. What would happen if I were to forget myself some day and come down to work in black velvet and pearls?"
"They"d manage it somehow," Buck a.s.sured her. "I don"t know just how; but I"m sure that twenty-four hours later our shop would look like a Buckingham drawing-room when the court is in mourning."
Emma never ceased to marvel at their ingenuity, at their almost uncanny clothes-instinct. Their cheap skirts hung and fitted with an art as perfect as that of a Fifty-seventh Street modiste; their blouses, in some miraculous way, were of to-day"s style, down to the last detail of cuff or collar or st.i.tching; their hats were of the shape that the season demanded, set at the angle that the season approved, and finished with just that repression of decoration which is known as "single tr.i.m.m.i.n.g." They wore their clothes with a chic that would make the far-famed Parisian outriere look dowdy and down at heel in comparison. Upper Fifth Avenue, during the shopping or tea-hour, has been sung, painted, vaunted, boasted. Its furs and millinery, its eyes and figure, its complexion and ankles have flashed out at us from ten thousand magazine covers, have been adjectived in reams of Sunday-supplement stories. Who will picture Lower Fifth Avenue between five and six, when New York"s unsung beauties pour into the streets from a thousand loft-buildings? Theirs is no mere empty pink-and-white prettiness. Poverty can make prettiness almost poignantly lovely, for it works with a scalpel. Your Twenty-sixth Street beauty has a certain wistful appeal that your Forty-sixth Street beauty lacks; her very bravado, too, which falls just short of boldness, adds a final piquant touch. In the face of the girl who works, whether she be a spindle-legged errand-girl or a ten-thousand-a-year foreign buyer, you will find both vivacity and depth of expression. What she loses in softness and bloom she gains in a something that peeps from her eyes, that lurks in the corners of her mouth. Emma never tired of studying them--these girls with their firm, slim throats, their lovely faces, their Oriental eyes, and their conscious grace. Often, as she looked, an unaccountable mist of tears would blur her vision.
So that sunny little room whose door was marked "MRS. BUCK" had come to be more than a mere private office for the transaction of business. It was a clearing-house for trouble; it was a shrine, a confessional, and a court of justice. When Carmela Colarossi, her face swollen with weeping, told a story of parental harshness grown unbearable, Emma would put aside business to listen, and six o"clock would find her seated in the dark and smelly Colarossi kitchen, trying, with all her tact and patience and sympathy, to make home life possible again for the flashing-eyed Carmela. When the deft, brown fingers of Otti Markis became clumsy at her machine, and her wage slumped unaccountably from sixteen to six dollars a week, it was in Emma"s quiet little office that it became clear why Otti"s eyes were shadowed and why Otti"s mouth drooped so pathetically. Emma prescribed a love philter made up of common sense, understanding, and world-wisdom. Otti took it, only half comprehending, but sure of its power. In a week, Otti"s eyes were shadowless, her lips smiling, her pay-envelope bulging. But it was in Sophy k.u.mpf that the T. A. Buck Company best exemplified its policy.
Sophy k.u.mpf had come to Buck"s thirty years before, slim, pink-cheeked, brown-haired. She was a grandmother now, at forty-six, broad-bosomed, broad-hipped, but still pink of cheek and brown of hair. In those thirty years she had spent just three away from Buck"s. She had brought her children into the world; she had fed them and clothed them and sent them to school, had Sophy, and seen them married, and helped them to bring their children into the world in turn. In her round, red, wholesome face shone a great wisdom, much love, and that infinite understanding which is born only of bitter experience. She had come to Buck"s when old T. A. was just beginning to make Featherlooms a national inst.i.tution. She had seen his struggles, his prosperity; she had grieved at his death; she had watched young T. A. take the reins in his unaccustomed hands, and she had gloried in Emma McChesney"s rise from office to salesroom, from salesroom to road, from road to private office and recognized authority. Sophy had left her early work far behind. She had her own desk now in the busy workshop, and it was she who allotted the piece-work, marked it in her much-thumbed ledger--that powerful ledger which, at the week"s end, decided just how plump or thin each pay-envelope would be. So the shop and office at T. A.
Buck"s were bound together by many ties of affection and sympathy and loyalty; and these bonds were strongest where, at one end, they touched Emma McChesney Buck, and, at the other, faithful Sophy k.u.mpf. Each a triumphant example of Woman in Business.
It was at this comfortable stage of Featherloom affairs that the Movement struck the T. A. Buck Company. Emma McChesney Buck had never mingled much in movements. Not that she lacked sympathy with them; she often approved of them, heart and soul. But she had been heard to say that the Movers got on her nerves. Those well-dressed, glib, staccato ladies who spoke with such ease from platforms and whose pictures stared out at one from the woman"s page failed, somehow, to convince her. When Emma approved a new movement, it was generally in spite of them, never because of them. She was brazenly unapologetic when she said that she would rather listen to ten minutes of Sophy k.u.mpf"s world-wisdom than to an hour"s talk by the most magnetic and silken-clad spellbinder in any cause. For fifteen business years, in the office, on the road, and in the thriving workshop, Emma McChesney had met working women galore. Women in offices, women in stores, women in hotels--chamber-maids, clerks, buyers, waitresses, actresses in road companies, women demonstrators, occasional traveling saleswomen, women in factories, scrubwomen, stenographers, models--every grade, type and variety of working woman, trained and untrained. She never missed a chance to talk with them. She never failed to learn from them. She had been one of them, and still was. She was in the position of one who is on the inside, looking out. Those other women urging this cause or that were on the outside, striving to peer in.
The Movement struck T. A. Buck"s at eleven o"clock Monday morning.
Eleven o"clock Monday morning in the middle of a busy fall season is not a propitious moment for idle chit-chat. The three women who stepped out of the lift at the Buck Company"s floor looked very much out of place in that hummingly busy establishment and appeared, on the surface, at least, very chit-chatty indeed. So much so, that T. A.
Buck, glancing up from the cards which had preceded them, had difficulty in repressing a frown of annoyance. T. A. Buck, during his college-days, and for a lamentably long time after, had been known as "Beau" Buck, because of his faultless clothes and his charming manner.
His eyes had something to do with it, too, no doubt. He had lived down the t.i.tle by sheer force of business ability. No one thought of using the nickname now, though the clothes, the manner, and the eyes were the same. At the entrance of the three women, he had been engrossed in the difficult task of selling a fall line to Mannie Nussbaum, of Portland, Oregon. Mannie was what is known as a temperamental buyer. He couldn"t be forced; he couldn"t be coaxed; he couldn"t be led. But when he liked a line he bought like mad, never cancelled, and T. A. Buck had just got him going. It spoke volumes for his self-control that he could advance toward the waiting three, his manner correct, his expression bland.
"I am Mr. Buck," he said. "Mrs. Buck is very much engaged. I understand your visit has something to do with the girls in the shop.
I"m sure our manager will be able to answer any questions----"
The eldest women raised a protesting, white-gloved hand.
"Oh, no--no, indeed! We must see Mrs. Buck." She spoke in the crisp, decisive platform-tones of one who is often addressed as "Madam Chairman."
Buck took a firmer grip on his self-control.
"I"m sorry; Mrs. Buck is in the cutting-room."
"We"ll wait," said the lady, brightly. She stepped back a pace. "This is Miss Susan H. Croft"--indicating a rather spa.r.s.e person of very certain years--"But I need scarcely introduce her."
"Scarcely," murmured Buck, and wondered why.