Chapter 8

"But I want you to think of the skirt, too. We've gone into this thing, and it has cost us thousands. Don't think I'm going to sit quietly by and watch those thousands trickle out of our hands. We've played our first card. It didn't take a trick. Here's another."

Buck and Spalding were leaning forward, interested, attentive. There was that in Emma's vivid, glowing face which did not mean defeat.

"March fifteenth, at Madison Square Garden, there is to be held the first annual exhibition of the Society for the Promotion of American Styles for American Women. For one hundred years we've taken our fashions as Paris dictated, regardless of whether they outraged our sense of humor or decency or of fitness. This year the American designer is going to have a chance. Am I an American designer, T. A., Billy?"

"Yes!" in chorus.

"Then I shall exhibit that skirt on a live model at the First Annual American Fashion Show next month. Every skirt-buyer in the country will be there. If it takes hold there, it's made--and so are we."

March came, and with it an army of men and women buyers, dependent, for the first time in their business careers, on the ingenuity of the American brain. The keen-eyed legions that had advanced on Europe early, armed with letters of credit--the vast horde that returned each spring and autumn laden with their spoils--hats, gowns, laces, linens, silks, embroideries--were obliged to content themselves with what was to be found in their own camp.

Clever manager that she was, Emma took as much pains with her model as with the skirt itself. She chose a girl whose demure prettiness and quiet charm would enhance the possibilities of the skirt's practicability in the eye of the shrewd buyer. Gertrude, the model, developed a real interest in the success of the petticoat. Emma knew enough about the psychology of crowds to realize how this increased her chances for success.

The much heralded fashion show was to open at one o'clock on the afternoon of March fifteenth. At ten o'clock that morning, there breezed in from Chicago a tall, slim, alert young man, who made straight for the offices of the T. A. Buck Featherloom Petticoat Company, walked into the junior partner's private office, and took that astonished lady in his two strong arms.

"Jock McChesney!" gasped his rumpled mother, emerging from the hug. "I've been hungry for a sight of you!" She was submerged in a second hug. "Come here to the window where I can get a real look at you! Why didn't you wire me? What are you doing away from your own job? How's business? And why come to-day, of all days, when I can't make a fuss over you?"

Jock McChesney, bright-eyed, clear-skinned, steady of hand, stood up well under the satisfied scrutiny of his adoring mother. He smiled down at her.

"Wanted to surprise you. Here for three reasons--the Abbott Grape-juice advertising contract, you, and Grace. And why can't you make a fuss over me, I'd like to know?"

Emma told him. His keen, quick mind required little in the way of explanation.

"But why didn't you let me in on it sooner?"

"Because, son, nothing explains harder than embryo success. I always prefer to wait until it's grown up and let it do its own explaining."

"But the thing ought to have national advertising," Jock insisted, with the advertising expert's lightning grasp of its possibilities. "What that skirt needs is publicity. Why didn't you let me handle----"

"Yes, I know, dear; but you haven't seen the skirt. It won't do to ram it down their throats. I want to ease it to them first. I want them to get used to it. It failed utterly on the road, because it jarred their notion of what a petticoat ought to be. That's due to five years of sheath skirts."

"But suppose--just for the sake of argument--that it doesn't strike them right this afternoon?"

"Then it's gone, that's all. Six months from now, every skirt-factory in the country will be manufacturing a similar garment. People will be ready for it then. I've just tried to cut in ahead of the rest. Perhaps I shouldn't have tried to do it."

Jock hugged her again at that, to the edification of the office windows across the way.

"Gad, you're a wiz, mother! Now listen: I 'phoned Grace when I got in. She's going to meet me here at one. I'll chase over to the office now on this grape-juice thing and come back here in time for lunch. Is T. A. in? I'll look in on him a minute. We'll all lunch together, and then----"

"Can't do it, son. The show opens at one. Gertrude, my model, comes on at three. She's going to have the stage to herself for ten minutes, during which she'll make four changes of costume to demonstrate the usefulness of the skirt for every sort of gown from chiffon to velvet. Come back here at one, if you like. If I'm not here, come over to the show. But--lunch! I'd choke."

At twelve-thirty, there scampered into Emma's office a very white-faced, round-eyed little stock-girl. Emma, deep in a last-minute discussion with Buck, had a premonition of trouble before the girl gasped out her message.

"Oh, Mrs. Buck, Gertie's awful sick!"

"Sick!" echoed Emma and Buck, in duet. Then Emma:

"But she can't be! It's impossible! She was all right a half hour ago." She was hurrying down the hall as she spoke. "Where is she?"

"They've got her on one of the tables in the workroom. She's moaning awful."

Gertie's appendix, with that innate sense of the dramatic so often found in temperamental appendices, had indeed chosen this moment to call attention to itself. Gertie, the demurely pretty and quietly charming, was rolled in a very tight ball on the workroom cutting-table. At one o'clock, she was on her way home in a cab, under the care of a doctor, Miss Kelly, the bookkeeper, and Jock, who, coming in gaily at one, had been pressed into service, bewildered but willing.

Three rather tragic figures stared at one another in the junior partner's office. They were Emma, Buck, and Grace Galt, Jock's wife-to-be. Grace Galt, slim, lovely, girlish, was known, at twenty-four, as one of the most expert copy writers in the advertising world. In her clear-headed, capable manner, she tried to suggest a way out of the difficulty now.

"But surely the world's full of girls," she said. "It's late, I know; but any theatrical agency will send a girl over."

"That's just what I tried to avoid," Emma replied. "I wanted to show this skirt on a sweet, pretty, refined sort of girl who looks and acts like a lady. One of those blond show girls would kill it."

Gloom settled down again over the three. Emma broke the silence with a rueful little laugh.

"I think," she said, "that perhaps you're right, T. A., and this is the Lord's way of showing me that the world is not quite ready for this skirt."

"You're not beaten yet, Emma," Buck assured her vigorously. "How about this new girl--what's her name?--Myrtle. She's one of those thin, limp ones, isn't she? Try her."

"I will," said Emma. "You're right. I'm not beaten yet. I've had to fight for everything worth while in my life. I'm superstitious about it now. When things come easy I'm afraid of them." Then, to the stock-girl, "Annie, tell Myrtle I want to see her."

Silence fell again upon the three. Myrtle, very limp, very thin, very languid indeed, roused them at her entrance. The hopeful look in Emma's eyes faded as she beheld her. Myrtle was so obviously limp, so hopelessly new.

"Annie says you want me to take Gertie's place," drawled Myrtle, striking a magazine-cover attitude.

"I don't know that you are just the--er--type; but perhaps, if you're willing----"

"Of course I didn't come here as a model," said Myrtle, and sagged on the other hip. "But, as a special favor to you I'm willing to try it--at special model's rates."

Emma ran a somewhat frenzied hand through her hair.

"Then, as a special favor to me, will you begin by trying to stand up straight, please? That debutante slouch would kill a queen's coronation costume."

Myrtle straightened, slumped again.

"I can't help it if I am willowy"--listlessly.

"Your hair!" Myrtle's hand went vaguely to her head. "I can't have you wear it that way."

"Why, this is the French roll!" protested Myrtle, offended.

"Then do it in a German bun!" snapped Emma. "Any way but that. Will you walk, please?"

"Walk?"--dully.

"Yes, walk; I want to see how you----"

Myrtle walked across the room. A groan came from Emma.

"I thought so." She took a long breath.

"Myrtle, listen: That Australian crawl was necessary when our skirts were so narrow we had to negotiate a curbing before we could take it. But the skirt you're going to demonstrate is wide. Like that! You're practically a free woman in it. Step out! Stride! Swing! Walk!"

Myrtle tried it, stumbled, sulked.

Emma, half smiling, half woeful, patted the girl's shoulder.

"Oh, I see; you're wearing a tight one. Well, run in and get into the skirt. Miss Loeb will help you. Then come back here--and quickly, please."

The three looked at each other in silence. It was a silence brimming with eloquent meaning. Each sought encouragement in the eyes of the other--and failed to find it. Failing, they broke into helpless laughter. It proved a safety-valve.

"She may do, Emma--when she has her hair done differently, and if she'll only stand up."

But Emma shook her head.

"T. A., something tells me you're going to have a wonderful chance to say, 'I told you so!' at three o'clock this afternoon."

"You know I wouldn't say it, Emma."

"Yes; I do know it, dear. But what's the difference, if the chance is there?"

Suspense settled down on the little office. Billy Spalding entered, smiling. After five minutes of waiting, even his buoyant spirits sank.

"Don't you think--if you were to go in and--and sort of help adjust things----" suggested Buck vaguely.

"No; I don't want to prop her up. She'll have to stand alone when she gets there. She'll either do, or not. When she enters that door, I'll know."

When Myrtle entered, wearing the fascinatingly fashioned new model, they all knew.

Emma spoke decisively.

"That settles it."

"What's the matter? Don't it look all right?" demanded Myrtle.

"Take it off, Myrtle."

Then, to the others, as Myrtle, sulking, left the room:

"I can stand to see that skirt die if necessary. But I won't help murder it."

"But, Mrs. Buck," protested Spalding, almost tearfully, "you've got to exhibit that skirt. You've got to!"

Emma shook a sorrowing head.

"That wouldn't be an exhibition, Billy. It would be an expose."

Spalding clapped a desperate hand to his bald head.

"If only I had Julian Eltinge's shape, I'd wear it to the show for you myself."

"That's all it needs now," retorted Emma grimly.

Whereupon, Grace Galt spoke up in her clear, decisive voice.

"Wait a minute," she said quietly. "I'm going to wear that skirt at the fashion show."

"You!" cried the three, like a trained trio.

"Why not?" demanded Grace Galt, coolly. Then: "No; don't tell me why not. I won't listen."

But Emma, equally cool, would have none of it.

"It's impossible, dear. You're an angel to want to help me. But you must know it's quite out of the question."

"It's nothing of the kind. This skirt isn't merely a fad. It has a fortune in it. I'm business woman enough to know that. You've got to let me do it. It isn't only for yourself. It's for T. A. and for the future of the firm."

"Do you suppose I'd allow you to stand up before all those people?"

"Why not? I don't know them. They don't know me. I can make them get the idea in that skirt. And I'm going to do it. You don't object to me on the same grounds that you did to Myrtle, do you?"

"You!" burst from the admiring Spalding. "Say, you'd make a red-flannel petticoat look like crepe de Chine and lace."

"There!" said Grace, triumphant. "That settles it!" And she was off down the hall. They stood a moment in stunned silence. Then:

"But Jock!" protested Emma, following her. "What will Jock say? Grace! Grace dear! I can't let you do it! I can't!"

"Just unhook this for me, will you?" replied Grace Galt sweetly.

At two o'clock, Jock McChesney, returned from his errand of mercy, burst into the office to find mother, step-father, and fiancee all flown.

"Where? What?" he demanded of the outer office.

"Fashion show!" chorused the office staff

"Might have waited for me," Jock said to himself, much injured. And hurled himself into a taxi.

There was a crush of motors and carriages for a block on all sides of Madison Square Garden. He had to wait for what seemed an interminable time at the box-office. Then he began the task of worming his way through the close-packed throng in the great auditorium. It was a crowd such as the great place had not seen since the palmy days of the horse show. It was a crowd that sparkled and shone in silks and feathers and furs and jewels.

"Jove, if mother has half a chance at this gang!" Jock told himself. "If only she has grabbed some one who can really show that skirt!"

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 mass of people.

"What the dickens! 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 Class, 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 assured 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 stitching; 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 trimming." 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.