Part 8

She did look handsome. Momma had always hated to have even Poppa see her before breakfast. She began to be a little eager for her cure.

“When do I go to see this Dr. Courtneidge?”

Ella hesitated a moment, then spoke with a certain sternness:

“There are two or three things that have to be done first, Mattie dear. I’m always a beast up till noon, so you mustn’t be surprised if I’m brutally frank now. Dr. Courtneidge is a very fussy and snappy old gentleman. He has only swells for patients and he’s very particular.”

“Don’t he treat poor folks at tall?” Momma gasped.

“Oh, yes, he has free clinics and hospitals and all that and does half his work for nothing. That’s why he’s so particular with his pay patients. You’ve got to go through a course of sprouts and buy some things or you’ll never get near him.

“His reception room is full of people, and you’d feel terribly embarrassed to wait there till he gets round. So you really must have some of this year’s clothes and a 1920 hat. And your hair--you mustn’t be offended, Mattie, dear, but really your hair and your skin! He’d give you one glance and send you away without an examination even. You see, I know him.

“And then the examination, Mattie dear--well, you know what that’s like. And in the hospital--well! I saw the nightgown laid out on your pillow and that sort of thing would simply frighten the doctor to death. He really couldn’t operate.”

“I’m not looking to marry the old fool,” Momma mumbled. “I got one husband a’ready.”

“I know, my dear Mattie, but your one husband put you in my charge and I’m going to see you through. My masseuse is coming to my house this morning. She’s downstairs now, I imagine, and I’m going to have her begin on you. When she’s finished, my hairdresser, François, will get to work on that dear old poll of yours and take off about forty years of age. Then we’ll have lunch and go shopping.”

Momma was choked with wrath, but Ella would neither fight nor plead. She just bullied her with laughter, and Momma, feeling like a convict unjustly imprisoned, set her jaws and resolved to go through with the sentence. She revolted, however, at the insolence of the masseuse--and her exclamations of horror at the neglect of a “skin that had never really been cleaned.”

But the wretch silenced Momma’s indignation with the indignity of smeared cold cream, and smothered her with hot towels and cold towels, and with lotions of every odor and smart.

Momma would not speak to her as she left, but when she scowled at the mirror, she gazed at the new face aghast it flung back at her. The dull parchment of her skin had become a living integument with a kind of dreamy radiance alive in it.

Momma felt bewitched. She would have sworn that the image in the looking-glass smiled first at her and nodded, compelling her to smile back and nod in return. She hung there fascinated, understanding a little of what Narcissus felt when he looked first in the pool.

Then a quiet Frenchman was shown in. He overawed Momma by his dignity and his dexterity. She dared not slap his face when he spoke of her hair as a crime. He called it a “cream,” but she understood his shoulders.

And then he attacked her poor head with ferocious familiarity. If Poppa had ever caught him, and her, he’d certainly have shot them both.

Momma was in for it, however, and she actually permitted this strange man, this appalling foreigner, to take down her hair, drench it, soap it, souse her head in water, pour curious smelly things over her scalp, and rinse them out, massage her occiput, comb and pull and torture and iron her hair and dress it on top of her astounded skull in what he called a “French twist.” She spent a whole hour of “feeling like a shirt in a steam laundry,” as she afterward expressed it. Then he brandished before her a mirror and uttered a triumphant cry of something that sounded like:

“Ah, my damn, walla, walla!”

Momma blushed vermilion and felt as immoral as she looked. Yet not at all remorseful, somehow. Fortunately Franswa dashed out to prepare the hair of Ella, leaving Momma to ponder her new face and her new hair with a new soul.

She felt that, in Hattie’s formula, she ought to be ashamed of herself, but, to save her immortal being, she could not.

Only one thing she was sure of, and that was that that head and that hair did not belong on top of that old dress of hers. Her one “best dress” was the one worst dress she had ever seen.

When at length she saw Ella, Ella screamed with delight at the transformation and said something that rimed:

_Grow old along with me, The best is yet to be._

The afternoon was spent in shopping for what Ella called “landjerree.”

Until she had the proper underpinnings, Ella simply refused to buy Mattie the new dress and hat she was already clamoring for.

The amount of Poppa’s money that Ella spent on silken shamelessness dazed Momma, but Ella would not be checked, and Momma was too childishly interested in the new doll rags to make more than a show of resistance.

Ella said: “If your husband has money enough to waste ten thousand dollars on my husband’s foolish investments, he has money enough to buy you some decent underclothes.”

“Did you say ‘decent’?” was Momma’s feeble disclaimer, but she barely muttered it.

That night, on a plea of going to bed early, Momma locked herself in her room and tried on the new things. She nearly died of palpitation of the heart when she stood up in silk stockings, satin mules, and in a new streamline corset that gave her a figure! A heroic figure indeed, but a shape, a contour, that was not altogether an insult to the Creator who fashioned it. Momma had to give it a religious significance to live through it.

* * * * *

And why not? What instinct is more deeply implanted in womanhood than the immemorial insatiable lust for pretty things? It has resisted the immemorial insatiable lust of preachers and satirists for insulting it, of economists and hardworking men for denouncing it. It has been called every contemptuous and cruel name in every language. Laws have been made against it innumerably, in vain. And it has flourished as unconquerably as violets in moss, as perfume in hyacinths, as bright plumage in birds, and ornate sunsets in western skies.

The weavers of silk and the needlers of laces, the designers of gowns and of hats have kept up their beautiful careers despite the thunders of self-styled virtue and the slanders of all times.

Poets and prosers and painters who have turned less beautiful lines and have married less beautiful colors, and the critics who have celebrated their achievements, have looked down with disdain on those who have devoted their inspirations and their toil to the creation of felicitous decorations for the living body.

But the women have known better. They never have despised the artists who improved them and enhanced them; and by hook or by crook they have kept those artists alive and blessed them with fame.

And again why not? The pietists and the Puritans who cannot forgive women for trying to be beautiful, do they not belie their own gods in their own barbaric praise of ugliness?

“O Justice, what crimes are committed in thy name!” And, O Beauty, what crimes in thine! Yet beauty shall not die nor the love of ornament, and those who hate them cannot prove their right to cast a stone. Frightful extravagances and cruelties are the result of the hunger for beauty and the feeding of that appetite, but this is true of every other religion and law and ideal.

If everybody who dressed plainly and lived without luxury, gave all he saved or she did not spend to the poor, their miserliness might be justified, but everybody knows that this is not so.

Beauty is generous. She who is pleased with herself is already hospitable, and until the millennium is here those who have not the energy or the wile to get fine clothes and wear them well may content themselves as best they can by watching the well-bedecked go by.

And who is he so mean of soul that he would decree the extinction of the custom women have of making themselves as pleasing to the eye as possible? And what benefits would the vandal confer on bedulled mankind?

Momma at least at last was not of that humor. She had become a girl again at heart. She could never be again the gracile nymph who had turned the heads of Carthage swains with her flesh of apple-blossom hue, her fleecy hair in its ribbons, and her gay body in its winsome fabrics.

But she could be a splendid white-haired matron; and that age has a nobler beauty and a grander charm than even youth can give, youth so common and so helpless in its grace.

When Momma walked by chance in front of the long cheval glass, she fell back with a sob of fear and shame. But she approached again and studied herself. She stood up straight, lifting her head proudly on her throat, her torso on her hips; holding herself stalwart as an empress.

And she thanked God for what He had given her, and promised Him she would take better care of the chalice of her soul. And a happiness possessed her like a benediction.

* * * * *

The next day she went forth to buy dresses, not mere tents to hide her shapeless body under, colored bags to cover her lumps and bulges from the casual and unlingering eye, but exquisite masterpieces from skilled looms, piously accepting the human form and developing its graces.

Ella was not fool enough to put kittenish anachronisms of dress on Momma. She made her look herself at her supreme.

And the slithy mannequins who stood about raved over the miracle that had been accomplished in turning the dowdy peasant that entered the shop into a high-bred dowager who smiled upon an approving mirror.

Momma’s only grief was that she could not wear any of the gowns out on the street at once. She had a frantic desire to prance up Fifth Avenue without delay. But there were alterations to make, and she must wait.

And so must Dr. Courtneidge.

She took the delay as her punishment for having put off so long the day of her at-one-ment with her better self.

The afternoon was spent among the milliners. Glistening countesses in black satin came and went with hats like coronets. They set them daintily on Momma’s turreted hair and lifted them away again. Momma sat up so straight that she felt taller sitting down than she had seemed hitherto reaching for a pantry shelf.

It was unbelievable how much it changed her face to change her hat. She cowered in horror from beneath some of the brims, but others so caught her up into the clouds that they amounted to translation--apotheosis almost.

In spite of Ella’s cries of protest, she bought five of the costliest and wore one of them away.

She went to bed prostrated. But it was the prostration of a girl come home from a great ball, worn out with rapture and pursued by remembered music.

* * * * *

Poppa had not heard a word of Momma since the telegram she sent him saying that she had arrived and been met and was awful tired and discouraged.

When no letters came he was sure that she was up to her old trick of concealing the worst from him as long as possible. He was sure that she was in the hospital, delirious with pain and on her way to the grave. His heart went mad with visions of her loss and of the dismal life without her.

On another of his impulses he took a train for New York, sending a brief telegram to Ella.

He got off the train in much the desolate mood that had dejected Momma when she arrived. He also resisted the redcap and trudged dolefully to the line where people waited behind the rope. And up to him also came a gorgeous creature whom he did not recognize until he heard the ancient voice.

“Poppa, don’t you know me?”

The voice was Momma’s, but since when was she a tsarina off the throne? He, too, dropped his handbag and collapsed. And she lifted him and murmured as she kissed him:

“Don’t you like me?”

“I don’t know you,” he faltered.

But he kissed her suave and fragrant cheek again and looked into the gleaming eyes of the bride he remembered out of the long ago.

Then he began to laugh in great gulps of blissful anguish, like a boy who has found on the Christmas tree a richer gift than he had ever dreamed of, or dared to ask.

Momma cried too. But such a different wail from the wails he had heard from her of late!

Finally Poppa thought that he must give credit for the redemption where it was due.

“That Dr. Courtneidge is certainly a wonder. What on earth did he do to you?”

“I haven’t seen him yet,” said Momma. “And I’m not goin’ to. I’ve taken what Ella calls the ‘hat cure’ and all the other clothes cures. And they haven’t cost much more than old Courtneidge would have charged.”

Poppa felt very uneasy walking along with Momma in all her glittering glory. He had always loved her. Now he felt proud of her with the goodly pride of a man who has the luck to get a beautiful wife and the brains to keep her beautiful.

The only fly in the great bowl of ointment was himself, his shabby self. He confessed as much.

“I’m ashamed to be seen with you, Momma.”

“You won’t be after I get through taking you to the tailor’s and the other places I’m goin’ to take you to. This is our second honeymoon, Poppa. We didn’t have any trousseau at tall before, but we’re going to make up for it now. I think I’ll telegraph for Hattie and give her a look, just so’s to hear her say: ‘Why, Momma, you ought to be ashamed of yourself!’”

“I guess you’d oughta, at that,” Poppa guffawed.

And as she swept into Ella’s limousine like a Roman empress entering a chariot. Momma tittered:

“I am! I’m so ashamed of myself, I’m proud of it!”

_Cosmopolitan Magazine_

BACK PAY

BY

FANNIE HURST

BACK PAY[5]

By FANNIE HURST

I set out to write a love-story, and for the purpose sharpened a bright-pink pencil with a glass ruby frivolously at the eraser end.

Something sweet. Something dainty. A candied rose-leaf after all is the bitter war-lozenges. A miss. A kiss. A golf-stick. A motor-car. Or, if need be, a bit of khaki, but without one single spot of blood or mud, and nicely pressed as to those fetching peg-top trouser effects where they wing out just below the skirt-coat. The oldest story in the world told newly. No wear out to it. Editors know. It’s as staple as eggs or printed lawn or ipecac. The good old-fashioned love story with the above-mentioned miss, kiss and, if need be for the sake of timeliness, the bit of khaki, pressed.

Just my luck that, with one of these most salable tales in the world at the tip of my pink pencil, Hester Bevins should come pounding and clamoring at the door of my mental reservation, quite drowning out the rather high, the lipsy, and, if I do say it myself, distinctly musical patter of Arline. That was to have been her name. Arline Kildane. Sweet, don’t you think, and with just a bit of wild Irish rose in it?

But Hester Bevins would not let herself be gainsaid, sobbing a little, elbowing her way through the group of mental unborns, and leaving me to blow my pitch-pipe for a minor key.

Not that Hester’s isn’t one of the oldest stories in the world, too. No matter how newly told, she is as old as sin, and sin is but a few weeks younger than love--and how often the two are interchangeable!

There is another Hester in fiction who wore a literal scarlet letter, but she is sprung from the brain of genius, from whence all immortal brain-children are born. My poor Hester is of far less fertile gray matter, but here she is as she is.

If it be a fact that the true lady is, in theory, either a virgin or a lawful wife, then Hester Bevins stands immediately convicted on two charges.

She was neither. The most that can be said for her is that she was honestly what she was.

“If the wages of sin is death,” she said to a road-house party of roysterers one dawn, “then I’ve quite a bit of back pay coming to me.” And joined in the shout that rose off the table.

I can sketch her in for you rather simply because of the hackneyed lines of her very, very old story. Whose pasts so quickly mold and disintegrate as those of women of Hester’s stripe? Their yesterdays are entirely soluble in the easy waters of their to-days.

For the first seventeen years of her life, she lived in what we might call Any American Town of, say, fifteen or twenty thousand inhabitants. Her particular one was in Ohio. Demopolis, I think. One of those change-engine-and-take-on-water stops with a stucco art-nouveau station, a roof drooping all round it, as if it needed to be shaved off like edges of a pie, and the name of the town writ in conch shells on a green slant of terrace. You know--the kind that first establishes a ten-o’clock curfew for its young, its dance-halls, and motion-picture theaters, and then sends in a hurry call for a social-service expert from one of the large Eastern cities to come and diagnose its malignant vice undergrowth.

Hester Bevins, of a mother who died bearing her and one of those disappearing fathers who can speed away after the accident without even stopping to pick up the child or leave a license-number, was reared--no; grew up, is better--in the home of an aunt. A blond aunt with many gold teeth and many pink and blue wrappers.

Whatever Hester knew of the kind of home that fostered her, it left apparently no welt across her sensibilities. It was a rather poor house, an unpainted frame in a poor street, but there was never a lack of gaiety or, for that matter, any pinching lack of funds. It was an actual fact that, at thirteen, cotton or lisle stockings brought out a little irritated rash on Hester’s slim young legs, and she wore silk. Abominations, it is true, at three pair for a dollar, that sprung runs and would not hold a darn, but, just the same, they were silk. There was an air of easy _camaraderie_ and easy money about that house. It was not unusual for her to come home from school at high noon and find a front-room group of one, two, three, or four guests, almost invariably men. Frequently these guests handed her out as much as half a dollar for candy-money, and not another child in school reckoned in more than pennies.

Once, a guest, for reasons of odd change, I suppose, handed her out thirteen cents. Outraged perhaps at the meanness of the sum, and with an early and deep-dyed superstition of thirteen, she dashed the coins out of his hand and to the four corners of the room, escaping in the guffaw of laughter that went up.

Often her childish sleep in a small top room with slanting sides would be broken upon by loud ribaldry that lasted into dawn, but never by word, and certainly not by deed, was she to know from her aunt any of its sordid significance.

Literally, Hester Bevins was left to feather her own nest. There were no demands made upon her. Once, in the little atrocious front parlor of horsehair and chromo, one of the guests, the town baggage-master, to be exact, made to embrace her, receiving from the left rear a sounding smack across cheek and ear from the aunt.

“Cut that! Hester, go out and play! Whatever she’s got to learn from life, she can’t say she learned it in my house.”

There were even two years of high school, and at sixteen, when she went, at her own volition, to clerk in Finley’s two story department store on High Street, she was still innocent, although she and Gerald Fishback were openly sweethearts.

Gerald was a Thor. Of course, you are not to take that literally; but if ever there was a carnification of the great god himself, then Gerald was in his image. A wide streak of the Scandinavian ran through his make-up, although he had been born in Middletown, and from there had come recently to the Finley Dry Goods Company as an accountant.

He was so the viking in his bigness that once, on a picnic, he had carried two girls, screaming their fun, across twenty feet of stream. Hester was one of them.

It was at this picnic, the Finley annual, that he asked Hester, then seventeen, to marry him. She was darkly, wildly pretty, as a rambler rose tugging at its stem is restlessly pretty, as a pointed little gazelle smelling up at the moon is whimsically pretty, as a runaway stream from off the flank of a river is naughtily pretty, and she wore a crisp percale shirt-waist with a saucy bow at the collar, fifty-cent silk stockings, and already she had almond incarnadine nails with points to them.

They were in the very heart of Wallach’s Grove, under a natural cathedral of trees, the noises of the revelers and the small explosions of soda-water and beer-bottles almost remote enough for perfect quiet. He was stretched his full and splendid length at the picnickers’ immemorial business of plucking and sucking grass blades, and she seated very trimly, her little blue-serge skirt crawling up ever so slightly to reveal the silken ankle, on a rock beside him.

“Tickle-tickle!” she cried, with some of that irrepressible animal spirit of hers, and leaning to brush his ear with a twig.

He caught at her hand.

“Hester,” he said, “marry me.”

She felt a foaming through her until her finger-tips sang.

“Well, I like that!” was what she said, though, and flung up a pointed profile that was like that same gazelle’s smelling the moon.

He was very darkly red, and rose to his knees to clasp her about the waist. She felt like relaxing back against his blondness and feeling her fingers plow through the great double wave of his hair. But she did not.

“You’re too poor,” she said.

He sat back without speaking for a long minute.

“Money isn’t everything,” he said finally, and with something gone from his voice.

“I know,” she said, looking off; “but it’s a great deal if you happen to want it more than anything else in the world.”

“Then, if that’s how you feel about it, Hester, next to wanting you, I want it, too, more than anything else in the world.”

“There’s no future in bookkeeping.”

“I know a fellow in Cincinnati who’s a hundred-and-fifty-dollar man. Hester? Dear?”

“A week?”

“Why, of course not, dear--a month.”

“Faugh!” she said, still looking off.

He felt out for her hand, at the touch of her reddening up again.

“Hester,” he said, “you’re the most beautiful, the most exciting, the most maddening, the most--the most everything girl in the world! You’re not going to have an easy time of it, Hester, with your--your environment and your dangerousness, if you don’t settle down--quick, with some strong fellow to take care of you. A fellow who loves you. That’s me, Hester. I want to make a little home for you and protect you. I can’t promise you the money--right off, but I can promise you the bigger something from the very start. From the very start, Hester. Dear?”

She would not let her hand relax to his.

“I hate this town,” she said.

“There’s Cincinnati. Maybe my friend could find an opening there.”

“Faugh!”

“Cincinnati dear, is a metropolis.”

“No, no! You don’t understand. I hate littleness. Even little metropolises. Cheapness. I hate little towns and little spenders and mercerized stockings and cotton lisle next to my skin, and machine-stitched nightgowns--ugh; it scratches!”

“And I--I just love you in those starchy white shirt-waists, Hester. You’re beautiful.”

“That’s just the trouble. It satisfies you, but it suffocates me. I’ve got a pink-crêpe-de-Chine soul. Pink crêpe de Chine--you hear?”

He sat back on his heels.

“It--is it true, then, Hester that--that you’re making up with that Jewish traveling salesman from New York?”

“Why!” she said, coloring. “Why, I’ve only met him twice walking up High Street evenings!”

“But it _is_ true, isn’t it, Hester?”

“Say, who was answering your questions this time last year?”

“But it _is_ true, isn’t it, Hester? Isn’t it?”

“Well, of all the nerve!”

But it was.

* * * * *