For the benefit of the bewildered reader it should be said that there are two distinct species of chickens. There is the chicken which you find in the barnyard, in the incubator, or on a hat. And there is the type indigenous to State Street, Chicago. Each is known by its feathers. The barnyard variety may puzzle the amateur fancier, but there is no mistaking the State Street chicken. It is known by its soiled, high, white canvas boots; by its tight, short black skirt; by its slug pearl earrings; by its bewildering coiffure. By every line of its slim young body, by every curve of its cheek and throat you know it is adorably, pitifully young. By its carmined lip, its near-smart hat, its babbling of “him,” and by the knowledge which looks boldly out of its eyes you know it is tragically old.
Seated in the Pullman car, with a friendly newspaper protecting her bright hair from the doubtful gray-white of the chair cover, Emma McChesney, traveling saleswoman for T. A. Buck's Featherloom Petticoats, was watching the telegraph poles chase each other back to Duluth, Minnesota, and thinking fondly of Mary Cutting, who is the mother-confessor and comforter of the State Street chicken.
Now, Duluth, Minnesota, is trying to be a city. In watching its struggles a hunger for a taste of the real city had come upon Emma McChesney. She had been out with her late Fall line from May until September. Every Middle-Western town of five thousand inhabitants or over had received its share of Emma McChesney's attention and petticoats. It had been a mystifyingly good season in a bad business year. Even old T. A. himself was almost satisfied. Commissions piled up with gratifying regularity for Emma McChesney. Then, quite suddenly, the lonely evenings, the lack of woman companionship, and the longing for a sight of her seventeen-year-old son had got on Emma McChesney's nerves.
She was two days ahead of her schedule, whereupon she wired her son, thus:
“Dear Kid:
“Meet me Chicago usual place Friday large time my treat. MOTHER.”
Then she had packed her bag, wired Mary Cutting that she would see her Thursday, and had taken the first train out for Chicago.
You might have found the car close, stuffy, and uninteresting. Ten years on the road had taught Emma McChesney to extract a maximum of enjoyment out of a minimum of material. Emma McChesney's favorite occupation was selling T. A. Buck's Featherloom Petticoats, and her favorite pastime was studying men and women. The two things went well together.
When the train stopped for a minute or two you could hear a faint rattle and click from the direction of the smoking compartment where three jewelry salesmen from Providence, Rhode Island, were indulging in their beloved, but dangerous diversion of dice throwing. Just across the aisle was a woman, with her daughter, Chicago-bound to buy a trousseau. They were typical, wealthy small-town women smartly garbed in a fashion not more than twenty minutes late. In the quieter moments of the trip Emma McChesney could hear the mother's high-pitched, East End Ladies' Reading Club voice saying:
“I'd have the velvet suit made fussy, with a real fancy waist to for afternoons. You can go anywhere in a handsome velvet three-piece suit.”
The girl had smiled, dreamily, and gazed out of the car window. “I wonder,” she said, “if there'll be a letter from George. He said he would sit right down and write.”
In the safe seclusion of her high-backed chair Emma McChesney smiled approvingly. Seventeen years ago, when her son had been born, and ten years ago, when she had got her divorce, Emma McChesney had thanked her God that her boy had not been a girl. Sometimes, now, she was not so sure about it. It must be fascinating work—selecting velvet suits, made “fussy,” for a daughter's trousseau.
Just how fully those five months of small-town existence had got on her nerves Emma McChesney did not realize until the train snorted into the shed and she sniffed the mingled smell of smoke and stockyards and found it sweet in her nostrils. An unholy joy seized her. She entered the Biggest Store and made for the millinery department, yielding to an uncontrollable desire to buy a hat. It was a pert, trim, smart little hat. It made her thirty-six years seem less possible than ever, and her seventeen-year-old son an absurdity.
It was four-thirty when she took the elevator up to Mary Cutting's office on the tenth floor. She knew she would find Mary Cutting there—Mary Cutting, friend, counselor, adviser to every young girl in the great store and to all Chicago's silly, helpless “chickens.”
A dragon sat before Mary Cutting's door and wrote names on slips. But at sight of Emma McChesney she laid down her pencil.
“Well,” smiled the dragon, “you're a sight for sore eyes. There's nobody in there with her. Just walk in and surprise her.”
At a rosewood desk in a tiny cozy office sat a pink-cheeked, white-haired woman. You associated her in your mind with black velvet and real lace. She did not look up as Emma McChesney entered. Emma McChesney waited for one small moment. Then:
“Cut out the bank president stuff, Mary Cutting, and make a fuss over me,” she commanded.
The pink-cheeked, white-haired woman looked up. You saw that her eyes were wonderfully young. She made three marks on a piece of paper, pushed a call-button at her desk, rose, and hugged Emma McChesney thoroughly and satisfactorily, then held her off a moment and demanded to know where she had bought her hat.
“Got it ten minutes ago, in the millinery department downstairs. Had to. If I'd have come into New York after five months' exile like this I'd probably have bought a brocade and fur-edged evening wrap, to relieve this feeling of wild joy. For five months I've spent my evenings in my hotel room, or watching the Maude Byrnes Stock Company playing “Lena Rivers,” with the ingenue coming out between the acts in a calico apron and a pink sunbonnet and doing a thing they bill as vaudeville. I'm dying to see a real show—a smart one that hasn't run two hundred nights on Broadway—one with pretty girls, and pink tights, and a lot of moonrises, and sunsets and things, and a prima donna in a dress so stunning that all the women in the audience are busy copying it so they can describe it to their home-dressmaker next day.”
“Poor, poor child,” said Mary Cutting, “I don't seem to recall any such show.”
“Well, it will look that way to me, anyway,” said Emma McChesney. “I've wired Jock to meet me to-morrow, and I'm going to give the child a really sizzling little vacation. But to-night you and I will have an old-girl frolic. We'll have dinner together somewhere downtown, and then we'll go to the theater, and after that I'm coming out to that blessed flat of yours and sleep between real sheets. We'll have some sandwiches and beer and other things out of the ice-box, and then we'll have a bathroom bee. We'll let down our back hair, and slap cold cream around, and tell our hearts' secrets and use up all the hot water. Lordy! It will be a luxury to have a bath in a tub that doesn't make you feel as though you wanted to scrub it out with lye and carbolic. Come on, Mary Cutting.”
Mary Cutting's pink cheeks dimpled like a girl's.
{Illustration: “'You'll never grow up, Emma McChesney'”}
“You'll never grow up, Emma McChesney—at least, I hope you never will. Sit there in the corner and be a good child, and I'll be ready for you in ten minutes.”
Peace settled down on the tiny office. Emma McChesney, there in her corner, surveyed the little room with entire approval. It breathed of things restful, wholesome, comforting. There was a bowl of sweet peas on the desk; there was an Indian sweet grass basket filled with autumn leaves in the corner; there was an air of orderliness and good taste; and there was the pink-cheeked, white-haired woman at the desk.
“There!” said Mary Cutting, at last. She removed her glasses, snapped them up on a little spring-chain near her shoulder, sat back, and smiled upon Emma McChesney.
Emma McChesney smiled back at her. Theirs was not a talking friendship. It was a thing of depth and understanding, like the friendship between two men.
They sat looking into each other's eyes, and down beyond, where the soul holds forth. And because what each saw there was beautiful and sightly they were seized with a shyness such as two men feel when they love each other, and so they awkwardly endeavored to cover up their shyness with words.
“You could stand a facial and a decent scalp massage, Emma,” observed Mary Cutting in a tone pregnant with love and devotion. “Your hair looks a little dry. Those small-town manicures don't know how to give a real treatment.”
“I'll have it to-morrow morning, before the Kid gets in at eleven. As the Lily Russell of the traveling profession I can't afford to let my beauty wane. That complexion of yours makes me mad, Mary. It goes through a course of hard water and Chicago dirt and comes up looking like a rose leaf with the morning dew on it. Where'll we have supper?”
“I know a new place,” replied Mary Cutting. “German, but not greasy.”
She was sorting, marking, and pigeonholing various papers and envelopes. When her desk was quite tidy she shut and locked it, and came over to Emma McChesney.
“Something nice happened to me to-day,” she said, softly. “Something that made me realize how worth while life is. You know we have five thousand women working here—almost double that during the holidays. A lot of them are under twenty and, Emma, a working girl, under twenty, in a city like this—Well, a brand new girl was looking for me today. She didn't know the way to my office, and she didn't know my name. So she stopped one of the older clerks, blushed a little, and said, 'Can you tell me the way to the office of the Comfort Lady?' That's worth working for, isn't it, Emma McChesney?”
“It's worth living for,” answered Emma McChesney, gravely. “It—it's worth dying for. To think that those girls come to you with their little sacred things, their troubles, and misfortunes, and unhappinesses and—”
“And their disgraces—sometimes,” Mary Cutting finished for her. “Oh, Emma McChesney, sometimes I wonder why there isn't a national school for the education of mothers. I marvel at their ignorance more and more every day. Remember, Emma, when we were kids our mothers used to send us flying to the grocery on baking day? All the way from our house to Hine's grocery I'd have to keep on saying, over and over: 'Sugar, butter, molasses; sugar, butter, molasses; sugar, butter, molasses.' If I stopped for a minute I'd forget the whole thing. It isn't so different now. Sometimes at night, going home in the car after a day so bad that the whole world seems rotten, I make myself say, over and over, as I used to repeat my 'Sugar, butter, and molasses.' 'It's a glorious, good old world; it's a glorious, good old world; it's a glorious, good old world.' And I daren't stop for a minute for fear of forgetting my lesson.”
For the third time in that short half-hour a silence fell between the two—a silence of perfect sympathy and understanding.
Five little strokes, tripping over each other in their haste, came from the tiny clock on Mary Cutting's desk. It roused them both.
“Come on, old girl,” said Mary Cutting. “I've a chore or two still to do before my day is finished. Come along, if you like. There's a new girl at the perfumes who wears too many braids, and puffs, and curls, and in the basement misses' ready-to-wear there's another who likes to break store rules about short-sleeved, lace-yoked lingerie waists. And one of the floor managers tells me that a young chap of that callow, semi-objectionable, high-school fraternity, flat-heeled shoe type has been persistently hanging around the desk of the pretty little bundle inspector at the veilings. We're trying to clear the store of that type. They call girls of that description chickens. I wonder why some one hasn't found a name for the masculine chicken.”
{Illustration: “'Well, s'long, then, Shrimp. See you at eight'”}
“I'll give 'em one,” said Emma McChesney as they swung down a broad, bright aisle of the store. “Call 'em weasels. That covers their style, occupation, and character.”
They swung around the corner to the veilings, and there they saw the very pretty, very blond, very young “chicken” deep in conversation with her weasel. The weasel's trousers were very tight and English, and his hat was properly woolly and Alpine and dented very much on one side and his heels were fashionably flat, and his hair was slickly pompadour.
Mary Cutting and Emma McChesney approached them very quietly just in time to hear the weasel say:
“Well, s' long then, Shrimp. See you at eight.”
And he swung around and faced them.
That sick horror of uncertainty which had clutched at Emma McChesney when first she saw the weasel's back held her with awful certainty now. But ten years on the road had taught her self-control, among other things. So she looked steadily and calmly into her son's scarlet face. Jock's father had been a liar.
She put her hand on the boy's arm.
“You're a day ahead of schedule, Jock,” she said evenly.
“So are you,” retorted Jock, sullenly, his hands jammed into his pockets.
“All the better for both of us, Kid. I was just going over to the hotel to clean up, Jock. Come along, boy.”
The boy's jaw set. His eyes sought any haven but that of Emma McChesney's eyes. “I can't,” he said, his voice very low. “I've an engagement to take dinner with a bunch of the fellows. We're going down to the Inn. Sorry.”
A certain cold rigidity settled over Emma McChesney's face. She eyed her son in silence until his miserable eyes, perforce, looked up into hers.
“I'm afraid you'll have to break your engagement,” she said.
She turned to face Mary Cutting's regretful, understanding gaze. Her eyebrows lifted slightly. Her head inclined ever so little in the direction of the half-scared, half-defiant “chicken.”
“You attend to your chicken, Mary,” she said. “I'll see to my weasel.”
So Emma McChesney and her son Jock, looking remarkably like brother and sister, walked down the broad store aisles and out into the street. There was little conversation between them. When the pillared entrance of the hotel came into sight Jock broke the silence, sullenly:
“Why do you stop at that old barracks? It's a rotten place for a woman. No one stops there but clothing salesmen and boobs who still think it's Chicago's leading hotel. No place for a lady.”
“Any place in the world is the place for a lady, Jock,” said Emma McChesney quietly.
Automatically she started toward the clerk's desk. Then she remembered, and stopped. “I'll wait here,” she said. “Get the key for five-eighteen, will you please? And tell the clerk that I'll want the room adjoining beginning to-night, instead of to-morrow, as I first intended. Tell him you're Mrs. McChesney's son.”
He turned away. Emma McChesney brought her handkerchief up to her mouth and held it there a moment, and the skin showed white over the knuckles of her hand. In that moment every one of her thirty-six years were on the table, face up.
“We'll wash up,” said Emma McChesney, when he returned, “and then we'll have dinner here.”
“I don't want to eat here,” objected Jock McChesney. “Besides, there's no reason why I can't keep my evening's engagements.”
“And after dinner,” went on his mother, as though she had not heard, “we'll get acquainted, Kid.”
It was a cheerless, rather tragic meal, though Emma McChesney saw it through from soup to finger-bowls. When it was over she led the way down the old-fashioned, red-carpeted corridors to her room. It was the sort of room to get on its occupant's nerves at any time, with its red plush arm-chairs, its black walnut bed, and its walnut center table inlaid with an apoplectic slab of purplish marble.
{Illustration: “'I'm still in position to enforce that ordinance against pouting'”}
Emma McChesney took off her hat before the dim old mirror, and stood there, fluffing out her hair here, patting it there. Jock had thrown his hat and coat on the bed. He stood now, leaning against the footboard, his legs crossed, his chin on his breast, his whole attitude breathing sullen defiance.
“Jock,” said his mother, still patting her hair, “perhaps you don't know it, but you're pouting just as you used to when you wore pinafores. I always hated pouting children. I'd rather hear them howl. I used to spank you for it. I have prided myself on being a modern mother, but I want to mention, in passing, that I'm still in a position to enforce that ordinance against pouting.” She turned around abruptly. “Jock, tell me, how did you happen to come here a day ahead of me, and how do you happen to be so chummy with that pretty, weak-faced little thing at the veiling counter, and how, in the name of all that's unbelievable, have you managed to become a grown-up in the last few months?”
Jock regarded the mercifully faded roses in the carpet. His lower lip came forward again.
“Oh, a fellow can't always be tied to his mother's apron strings. I like to have a little fling myself. I know a lot of fellows here. They are frat brothers. And anyway, I needed some new clothes.”
For one long moment Emma McChesney stared, in silence. Then: “Of course,” she began, slowly, “I knew you were seventeen years old. I've even bragged about it. I've done more than that—I've gloried in it. But somehow, whenever I thought of you in my heart—and that was a great deal of the time it was as though you still were a little tyke in knee-pants, with your cap on the back of your head, and a chunk of apple bulging your cheek. Jock, I've been earning close to six thousand a year since I put in that side line of garters. Just how much spending money have I been providing you with?”
Jock twirled a coat button uncomfortably “Well, quite a lot. But a fellow's got to have money to keep up appearances. A lot of the fellows in my crowd have more than I. There are clothes, and tobacco, and then flowers and cabs for the skirts—girls, I mean, and—”
“Kid,” impressively, “I want you to sit down over there in that plush chair—the red one, with the lumps in the back. I want you to be uncomfortable. From where I am sitting I can see that in you there is the making of a first-class cad. That's no pleasant thing for a mother to realize. Now don't interrupt me. I'm going to be chairman, speaker, program, and ways-and-means committee of this meeting. Jock, I got my divorce from your father ten years ago. Now, I'm not going to say anything about him. Just this one thing. You're not going to follow in his footsteps, Kid. Not if I have to take you to pieces like a nickel watch and put you all together again. You're Emma McChesney's son, and ten years from now I intend to be able to brag about it, or I'll want to know the reason why—and it'll have to be a blamed good reason.”
“I'd like to know what I've done!” blurted the boy. “Just because I happened to come here a few hours before you expected me, and just because you saw me talking to a girl! Why—”
“It isn't what you've done. It's what those things stand for. I've been at fault. But I'm willing to admit it. Your mother is a working woman, Jock. You don't like that idea, do you? But you don't mind spending the money that the working woman provides you with, do you? I'm earning a man's salary. But Jock, you oughtn't to be willing to live on it.
“What do you want me to do?” demanded Jock. “I'm not out of high school yet. Other fellows whose fathers aren't earning as much—”
“Fathers,” interrupted Emma McChesney. “There you are. Jock, I don't have to make the distinction for you. You're sufficiently my son to know it, in your heart. I had planned to give you a college education, if you showed yourself deserving. I don't believe in sending a boy in your position to college unless he shows some special leaning toward a profession.”
“Mother, you know how wild I am about machines, and motors, and engineering, and all that goes with it. Why I'd work—”
“You'll have to, Jock. That's the only thing that will make a man of you. I've started you wrong, but it isn't too late yet. It's all very well for boys with rich fathers to run to clothes, and city jaunts, and 'chickens,' and cabs and flowers. Your mother is working tooth and nail to earn her six thousand, and when you realize just what it means for a woman to battle against men in a man's game, you'll stop being a spender, and become an earner—because you'll want to. I'll tell you what I'm going to do, Kid. I'm going to take you on the road with me for two weeks. You'll learn so many things that at the end of that time the sides of your head will be bulging.”
“I'd like it!” exclaimed the boy, sitting up. “It will be regular fun.”
“No, it won't,” said Emma McChesney; “not after the first three or four days. But it will be worth more to you than a foreign tour and a private tutor.”
She came over to him and put her hand on his shoulder. “Your room's just next to mine,” she said. “You and I are going to sleep on this. To-morrow we'll have a real day of it, as I promised. If you want to spend it with the fellows, say so. I'm not going to spoil this little lark that I promised you.”
“I think,” said the boy, looking up into his mother's face, “I think that I'll spend it with you.”
The door slammed after him.
Emma McChesney remained standing there, in the center of the room. She raised her arms and passed a hand over her forehead and across her hair until it rested on the glossy knot at the back of her head. It was the weary little gesture of a weary, heart-sick woman.
There came a ring at the 'phone.
Emma McChesney crossed the room and picked up the receiver.
“Hello, Mary Cutting,” she said, without waiting for the voice at the other end. “What? Oh, I just knew. No, it's all right. I've had some high-class little theatricals of my own, right here, with me in the roles of leading lady, ingenue, villainess, star, and heavy mother. I've got Mrs. Fiske looking like a First Reader Room kid that's forgotten her Friday piece. What's that?”
There was no sound in the room but the hollow cackle of the voice at the other end of the wire, many miles away.
Then: “Oh, that's all right, Mary Cutting. I owe you a great big debt of gratitude, bless your pink cheeks and white hair! And, Mary,” she lowered her voice and glanced in the direction of the room next door, “I don't know how a hard, dry sob would go through the 'phone, so I won't try to get it over. But, Mary, it's been 'sugar, butter, and molasses' for me for the last ten minutes, and I'm dead scared to stop for fear I'll forget it. I guess it's 'sugar, butter, and molasses' for me for the rest of the night, Mary Cutting; just as hard and fast as I can say it, 'sugar, butter, molasses.'”
“Full?” repeated Emma McChesney (and if it weren't for the compositor there'd be an exclamation point after that question mark).
“Sorry, Mrs. McChesney,” said the clerk, and he actually looked it, “but there's absolutely nothing stirring. We're full up. The Benevolent Brotherhood of Bisons is holding its regular annual state convention here. We're putting up cots in the hall.”
Emma McChesney's keen blue eyes glanced up from their inspection of the little bunch of mail which had just been handed her. “Well, pick out a hall with a southern exposure and set up a cot or so for me,” she said, agreeably; “because I've come to stay. After selling Featherloom Petticoats on the road for ten years I don't see myself trailing up and down this town looking for a place to lay my head. I've learned this one large, immovable truth, and that is, that a hotel clerk is a hotel clerk. It makes no difference whether he is stuck back of a marble pillar and hidden by a gold vase full of thirty-six-inch American Beauty roses at the Knickerbocker, or setting the late fall fashions for men in Galesburg, Illinois.”
By one small degree was the perfect poise of the peerless personage behind the register jarred. But by only one. He was a hotel night clerk.
“It won't do you any good to get sore, Mrs. McChesney,” he began, suavely. “Now a man would—”
“But I'm not a man,” interrupted Emma McChesney. “I'm only doing a man's work and earning a man's salary and demanding to be treated with as much consideration as you'd show a man.”
The personage busied himself mightily with a pen, and a blotter, and sundry papers, as is the manner of personages when annoyed. “I'd like to accommodate you; I'd like to do it.”
“Cheer up,” said Emma McChesney, “you're going to. I don't mind a little discomfort. Though I want to mention in passing that if there are any lady Bisons present you needn't bank on doubling me up with them. I've had one experience of that kind. It was in Albia, Iowa. I'd sleep in the kitchen range before I'd go through another.”
Up went the erstwhile falling poise. “You're badly mistaken, madam. I'm a member of this order myself, and a finer lot of fellows it has never been my pleasure to know.”
“Yes, I know,” drawled Emma McChesney. “Do you know, the thing that gets me is the inconsistency of it. Along come a lot of boobs who never use a hotel the year around except to loaf in the lobby, and wear out the leather chairs, and use up the matches and toothpicks and get the baseball returns, and immediately you turn away a traveling man who uses a three-dollar-a-day room, with a sample room downstairs for his stuff, who tips every porter and bell-boy in the place, asks for no favors, and who, if you give him a half-way decent cup of coffee for breakfast, will fall in love with the place and boom it all over the country. Half of your Benevolent Bisons are here on the European plan, with a view to patronizing the free-lunch counters or being asked to take dinner at the home of some local Bison whose wife has been cooking up on pies, and chicken salad and veal roast for the last week.”
{Illustration: “'Son!' echoed the clerk, staring"}
Emma McChesney leaned over the desk a little, and lowered her voice to the tone of confidence. “Now, I'm not in the habit of making a nuisance of myself like this. I don't get so chatty as a rule, and I know that I could jump over to Monmouth and get first-class accommodations there. But just this once I've a good reason for wanting to make you and myself a little miserable. Y'see, my son is traveling with me this trip.”
“Son!” echoed the clerk, staring.
“Thanks. That's what they all do. After a while I'll begin to believe that there must be something hauntingly beautiful and girlish about me or every one wouldn't petrify when I announce that I've a six-foot son attached to my apron-strings. He looks twenty-one, but he's seventeen. He thinks the world's rotten because he can't grow one of those fuzzy little mustaches that the men are cultivating to match their hats. He's down at the depot now, straightening out our baggage. Now I want to say this before he gets here. He's been out with me just four days. Those four days have been a revelation, an eye-opener, and a series of rude jolts. He used to think that his mother's job consisted of traveling in Pullmans, eating delicate viands turned out by the hotel chefs, and strewing Featherloom Petticoats along the path. I gave him plenty of money, and he got into the habit of looking lightly upon anything more trifling than a five-dollar bill. He's changing his mind by great leaps. I'm prepared to spend the night in the coal cellar if you'll just fix him up—not too comfortably. It'll be a great lesson for him. There he is now. Just coming in. Fuzzy coat and hat and English stick. Hist! As they say on the stage.”
The boy crossed the crowded lobby. There was a little worried, annoyed frown between his eyes. He laid a protecting hand on his mother's arm. Emma McChesney was conscious of a little thrill of pride as she realized that he did not have to look up to meet her gaze.
“Look here, Mother, they tell me there's some sort of a convention here, and the town's packed. That's what all those banners and things were for. I hope they've got something decent for us here. I came up with a man who said he didn't think there was a hole left to sleep in.”
“You don't say!” exclaimed Emma McChesney, and turned to the clerk. “This is my son, Jock McChesney—Mr. Sims. Is this true?”
“Glad to know you, sir,” said Mr. Sims. “Why, yes, I'm afraid we are pretty well filled up, but seeing it's you maybe we can do something for you.”
He ruminated, tapping his teeth with a pen-holder, and eying the pair before him with a maddening blankness of gaze. Finally:
“I'll do my best, but you can't expect much. I guess I can squeeze another cot into eighty-seven for the young man. There's—let's see now—who's in eighty-seven? Well, there's two Bisons in the double bed, and one in the single, and Fat Ed Meyers in the cot and—”
Emma McChesney stiffened into acute attention. “Meyers?” she interrupted. “Do you mean Ed Meyers of the Strauss Sans-silk Skirt Company?”
“That's so. You two are in the same line, aren't you? He's a great little piano player, Ed is. Ever hear him play?”
“When did he get in?”
“Oh, he just came in fifteen minutes ago on the Ashland division. He's in at supper.”
“Oh,” said Emma McChesney. The two letters breathed relief.
But relief had no place in the voice, or on the countenance of Jock McChesney. He bristled with belligerence. “This cattle-car style of sleeping don't make a hit. I haven't had a decent night's rest for three nights. I never could sleep on a sleeper. Can't you fix us up better than that?”
“Best I can do.”
“But where's mother going? I see you advertise three 'large and commodious steam-heated sample rooms in connection.' I suppose mother's due to sleep on one of the tables there.”
“Jock,” Emma McChesney reproved him, “Mr. Sims is doing us a great favor. There isn't another hotel in town that would—”
“You're right, there isn't,” agreed Mr. Sims. “I guess the young man is new to this traveling game. As I said, I'd like to accommodate you, but—Let's see now. Tell you what I'll do. If I can get the housekeeper to go over and sleep in the maids' quarters just for to-night, you can use her room. There you are! Of course, it's over the kitchen, and there may be some little noise early in the morning—”
Emma McChesney raised a protesting hand. “Don't mention it. Just lead me thither. I'm so tired I could sleep in an excursion special that was switching at Pittsburgh. Jock, me child, we're in luck. That's twice in the same place. The first time was when we were inspired to eat our supper on the diner instead of waiting until we reached here to take the leftovers from the Bisons' grazing. I hope that housekeeper hasn't a picture of her departed husband dangling, life-size, on the wall at the foot of the bed. But they always have. Good-night, son. Don't let the Bisons bite you. I'll be up at seven.”
But it was just 6:30 A.M. when Emma McChesney turned the little bend in the stairway that led to the office. The scrub-woman was still in possession. The cigar-counter girl had not yet made her appearance. There was about the place a general air of the night before. All but the night clerk. He was as spruce and trim, and alert and smooth-shaven as only a night clerk can be after a night's vigil.
“'Morning!” Emma McChesney called to him. She wore blue serge, and a smart fall hat. The late autumn morning was not crisper and sunnier than she.
“Good-morning, Mrs. McChesney,” returned Mr. Sims, sonorously. “Have a good night's sleep? I hope the kitchen noises didn't wake you.”
Emma McChesney paused with her hand on the door. “Kitchen? Oh, no. I could sleep through a vaudeville china-juggling act. But—-what an extraordinarily unpleasant-looking man that housekeeper's husband must have been.”
That November morning boasted all those qualities which November-morning writers are so prone to bestow upon the month. But the words wine, and sparkle, and sting, and glow, and snap do not seem to cover it. Emma McChesney stood on the bottom step, looking up and down Main Street and breathing in great draughts of that unadjectivable air. Her complexion stood the test of the merciless, astringent morning and came up triumphantly and healthily firm and pink and smooth. The town was still asleep. She started to walk briskly down the bare and ugly Main Street of the little town. In her big, generous heart, and her keen, alert mind, there were many sensations and myriad thoughts, but varied and diverse as they were they all led back to the boy up there in the stuffy, over-crowded hotel room—the boy who was learning his lesson.
Half an hour later she reentered the hotel, her cheeks glowing. Jock was not yet down. So she ordered and ate her wise and cautious breakfast of fruit and cereal and toast and coffee, skimming over her morning paper as she ate. At 7:30 she was back in the lobby, newspaper in hand. The Bisons were already astir. She seated herself in a deep chair in a quiet corner, her eyes glancing up over the top of her paper toward the stairway. At eight o'clock Jock McChesney came down.
There was nothing of jauntiness about him. His eyelids were red. His face had the doughy look of one whose sleep has been brief and feverish. As he came toward his mother you noticed a stain on his coat, and a sunburst of wrinkles across one leg of his modish brown trousers.
“Good-morning, son!” said Emma McChesney. “Was it as bad as that?”
Jock McChesney's long fingers curled into a fist.
“Say,” he began, his tone venomous, “do you know what those—those—those—”
“Say it!” commanded Emma McChesney. “I'm only your mother. If you keep that in your system your breakfast will curdle in your stomach.”
Jock McChesney said it. I know no phrase better fitted to describe his tone than that old favorite of the erotic novelties. It was vibrant with passion. It breathed bitterness. It sizzled with savagery. It—Oh, alliteration is useless.
“Well,” said Emma McChesney, encouragingly, “go on.”
{Illustration: “'Well!' gulped Jock, 'those two double-bedded, bloomin' blasted Bisons—'"}
“Well!” gulped Jock McChesney, and glared; “those two double-bedded, bloomin', blasted Bisons came in at twelve, and the single one about fifteen minutes later. They didn't surprise me. There was a herd of about ninety-three of 'em in the hall, all saying good-night to each other, and planning where they'd meet in the morning, and the time, and place and probable weather conditions. For that matter, there were droves of 'em pounding up and down the halls all night. I never saw such restless cattle. If you'll tell me what makes more noise in the middle of the night than the metal disk of a hotel key banging and clanging up against a door, I'd like to know what it is. My three Bisons were all dolled up with fool ribbons and badges and striped paper canes. When they switched on the light I gave a crack imitation of a tired working man trying to get a little sleep. I breathed regularly and heavily, with an occasional moaning snore. But if those two hippopotamus Bisons had been alone on their native plains they couldn't have cared less. They bellowed, and pawed the earth, and threw their shoes around, and yawned, and stretched and discussed their plans for the next day, and reviewed all their doings of that day. Then one of them said something about turning in, and I was so happy I forgot to snore. Just then another key clanged at the door, in walked a fat man in a brown suit and a brown derby, and stuff was off.”
“That,” said Emma McChesney, “would be Ed Meyers, of the Strauss Sans-silk Skirt Company.”
“None other than our hero.” Jock's tone had an added acidity. “It took those four about two minutes to get acquainted. In three minutes they had told their real names, and it turned out that Meyers belonged to an organization that was a second cousin of the Bisons. In five minutes they had got together a deck and a pile of chips and were shirt-sleeving it around a game of pinochle. I would doze off to the slap of cards, and the click of chips, and wake up when the bell-boy came in with another round, which he did every six minutes. When I got up this morning I found that Fat Ed Meyers had been sitting on the chair over which I trustingly had draped my trousers. This sunburst of wrinkles is where he mostly sat. This spot on my coat is where a Bison drank his beer.”
Emma McChesney folded her paper and rose, smiling. “It is sort of trying, I suppose, if you're not used to it.”
“Used to it!” shouted the outraged Jock. “Used to it! Do you mean to tell me there's nothing unusual about—”
“Not a thing. Oh, of course you don't strike a bunch of Bisons every day. But it happens a good many times. The world is full of Ancient Orders and they're everlastingly getting together and drawing up resolutions and electing officers. Don't you think you'd better go in to breakfast before the Bisons begin to forage? I've had mine.”
The gloom which had overspread Jock McChesney's face lifted a little. The hungry boy in him was uppermost. “That's so. I'm going to have some wheat cakes, and steak, and eggs, and coffee, and fruit, and toast, and rolls.”
“Why slight the fish?” inquired his mother. Then, as he turned toward the dining-room, “I've two letters to get out. Then I'm going down the street to see a customer. I'll be up at the Sulzberg-Stein department store at nine sharp. There's no use trying to see old Sulzberg before ten, but I'll be there, anyway, and so will Ed Meyers, or I'm no skirt salesman. I want you to meet me there. It will do you good to watch how the overripe orders just drop, ker-plunk, into my lap.”
Maybe you know Sulzberg & Stein's big store? No? That's because you've always lived in the city. Old Sulzberg sends his buyers to the New York market twice a year, and they need two floor managers on the main floor now. The money those people spend for red and green decorations at Christmas time, and apple-blossoms and pink crepe paper shades in the spring, must be something awful. Young Stein goes to Chicago to have his clothes made, and old Sulzberg likes to keep the traveling men waiting in the little ante-room outside his private office.
Jock McChesney finished his huge breakfast, strolled over to Sulzberg & Stein's, and inquired his way to the office only to find that his mother was not yet there. There were three men in the little waiting-room. One of them was Fat Ed Meyers. His huge bulk overflowed the spindle-legged chair on which he sat. His brown derby was in his hands. His eyes were on the closed door at the other side of the room. So were the eyes of the other two travelers. Jock took a vacant seat next to Fat Ed Meyers so that he might, in his mind's eye, pick out a particularly choice spot upon which his hard young fist might land—if only he had the chance. Breaking up a man's sleep like that, the great big overgrown mutt!
“What's your line?” said Ed Meyers, suddenly turning toward Jock.
Prompted by some imp—“Skirts,” answered Jock. “Ladies' petticoats.” (“As if men ever wore 'em!” he giggled inwardly.)
Ed Meyers shifted around in his chair so that he might better stare at this new foe in the field. His little red mouth was open ludicrously.
“Who're you out for?” he demanded next.
There was a look of Emma McChesney on Jock's face. “Why—er—the Union Underskirt and Hosiery Company of Chicago. New concern.”
“Must be,” ruminated Ed Meyers. “I never heard of 'em, and I know 'em all. You're starting in young, ain't you, kid! Well, it'll never hurt you. You'll learn something new every day. Now me, I—”
In breezed Emma McChesney. Her quick glance rested immediately upon Meyers and the boy. And in that moment some instinct prompted Jock McChesney to shake his head, ever so slightly, and assume a blankness of expression. And Emma McChesney, with that shrewdness which had made her one of the best salesmen on the road, saw, and miraculously understood.
“How do, Mrs. McChesney,” grinned Fat Ed Meyers. “You see I beat you to it.”
“So I see,” smiled Emma, cheerfully. “I was delayed. Just sold a nice little bill to Watkins down the Street.” She seated herself across the way, and kept her eyes on that closed door.
“Say, kid,” Meyers began, in the husky whisper of the fat man, “I'm going to put you wise to something, seeing you're new to this game. See that lady over there?” He nodded discreetly in Emma McChesney's direction.
“Pretty, isn't she?” said Jock, appreciatively.
“Know who she is?”
“Well—I—she does look familiar but—”
“Oh, come now, quit your bluffing. If you'd ever met that dame you'd remember it. Her name's McChesney—Emma McChesney, and she sells T. A. Buck's Featherloom Petticoats. I'll give her her dues; she's the best little salesman on the road. I'll bet that girl could sell a ruffled, accordion-plaited underskirt to a fat woman who was trying to reduce. She's got the darndest way with her. And at that she's straight, too.”
If Ed Meyers had not been gazing so intently into his hat, trying at the same time to look cherubically benign he might have seen a quick and painful scarlet sweep the face of the boy, coupled with a certain tense look of the muscles around the jaw.
“Well, now, look here,” he went on, still in a whisper. “We're both skirt men, you and me. Everything's fair in this game. Maybe you don't know it, but when there's a bunch of the boys waiting around to see the head of the store like this, and there happens to be a lady traveler in the crowd, why, it's considered kind of a professional courtesy to let the lady have the first look-in. See? It ain't so often that three people in the same line get together like this. She knows it, and she's sitting on the edge of her chair, waiting to bolt when that door opens, even if she does act like she was hanging on the words of that lady clerk there. The minute it does open a crack she'll jump up and give me a fleeting, grateful smile, and sail in and cop a fat order away from the old man and his skirt buyer. I'm wise. Say, he may be an oyster, but he knows a pretty woman when he sees one. By the time she's through with him he'll have enough petticoats on hand to last him from now until Turkey goes suffrage. Get me?”
“I get you,” answered Jock.
“I say, this is business, and good manners be hanged. When a woman breaks into a man's game like this, let her take her chances like a man. Ain't that straight?”
“You've said something,” agreed Jock.
“Now, look here, kid. When that door opens I get up. See? And shoot straight for the old man's office. See? Like a duck. See? Say, I may be fat, kid, but I'm what they call light on my feet, and when I see an order getting away from me I can be so fleet that I have Diana looking like old Weston doing a stretch of muddy country road in a coast to coast hike. See? Now you help me out on this and I'll see that you don't suffer for it. I'll stick in a good word for you, believe me. You take the word of an old stager like me and you won't go far—”
The door opened. Simultaneously three figures sprang into action. Jock had the seat nearest the door. With marvelous clumsiness he managed to place himself in Ed Meyers' path, then reddened, began an apology, stepped on both of Ed's feet, jabbed his elbow into his stomach, and dropped his hat. A second later the door of old Sulzberg's private office closed upon Emma McChesney's smart, erect, confident figure.
Now, Ed Meyers' hands were peculiar hands for a fat man. They were tapering, slender, delicate, blue-veined, temperamental hands. At this moment, despite his purpling face, and his staring eyes, they were the most noticeable thing about him. His fingers clawed the empty air, quivering, vibrant, as though poised to clutch at Jock's throat.
Then words came. They spluttered from his lips. They popped like corn kernels in the heat of his wrath; they tripped over each other; they exploded.
“You darned kid, you!” he began, with fascinating fluency. “You thousand-legged, double-jointed, ox-footed truck horse. Come on out of here and I'll lick the shine off your shoes, you blue-eyed babe, you! What did you get up for, huh? What did you think this was going to be—a flag drill?”
With a whoop of pure joy Jock McChesney turned and fled.
They dined together at one o'clock, Emma McChesney and her son Jock. Suddenly Jock stopped eating. His eyes were on the door. “There's that fathead now,” he said, excitedly. “The nerve of him! He's coming over here.”
Ed Meyers was waddling toward them with the quick light step of the fat man. His pink, full-jowled face was glowing. His eyes were bright as a boy's. He stopped at their table and paused for one dramatic moment.
“So, me beauty, you two were in cahoots, huh? That's the second low-down deal you've handed me. I haven't forgotten that trick you turned with Nussbaum at DeKalb. Never mind, little girl. I'll get back at you yet.”
He nodded a contemptuous head in Jock's direction. “Carrying a packer?”
{Illustration: “'Come on out of here, and I'll lick the shine off your shoes, you blue-eyed babe, you!'”}
Emma McChesney wiped her fingers daintily on her napkin, crushed it on the table, and leaned back in her chair. “Men,” she observed, wonderingly, “are the cussedest creatures. This chap occupied the same room with you last night and you don't even know his name. Funny! If two strange women had found themselves occupying the same room for a night they wouldn't have got to the kimono and back hair stage before they would not only have known each other's name, but they'd have tried on each other's hats, swapped corset cover patterns, found mutual friends living in Dayton, Ohio, taught each other a new Irish crochet stitch, showed their family photographs, told how their married sister's little girl nearly died with swollen glands, and divided off the mirror into two sections to paste their newly washed handkerchiefs on. Don't tellmemen have a genius for friendship.”
“Well, who is he?” insisted Ed Meyers. “He told me everything but his name this morning. I wish I had throttled him with a bunch of Bisons' badges last night.”
“His name,” smiled Emma McChesney, “is Jock McChesney. He's my one and only son, and he's put through his first little business deal this morning just to show his mother that he can be a help to his folks if he wants to. Now, Ed Meyers, if you're going to have apoplexy don't you go and have it around this table. My boy is only on his second piece of pie, and I won't have his appetite spoiled.”