Americans All Part 17

"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?"

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 names, 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 st.i.tch, 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 tell _me_ men 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 appet.i.te spoiled."

EDNA FERBER

A professor of literature once began a lecture on Lowell by saying: "It makes a great deal of difference to an author whether he is born in Cambridge or Kalamazoo." Miss Ferber was born in Kalamazoo, but it hasn't made much difference to her. The date was August 15, 1887. She attended high school at Appleton, Wisconsin, and at seventeen secured a position as reporter on the Appleton _Daily Crescent_. That she was successful in newspaper work is shown by the fact that she soon had a similar position on the _Milwaukee Journal_, and went from there to the staff of the _Chicago Tribune_, one of the leading newspapers in the United States.

But journalism, engrossing as it is, did not take all of her time. She began a novel, working on it in spare moments, but when it was finished she was so dissatisfied with it that she threw the ma.n.u.script into the waste basket. Here her mother found it, and sent it to a publisher, who accepted it at once. The book was _Dawn O'Hara_. It was dedicated "To my dear mother who frequently interrupts, and to my sister Fannie who says Sh-sh-sh outside my door." With this book Miss Ferber, at twenty-four, found herself the author of one of the successful novels of the year.

Her next work was in the field of the short story, and here too she quickly gained recognition. The field that she has made particularly her own is the delineation of the American business woman, a type familiar in our daily life, but never adequately presented in fiction until Emma McChesney appeared. The fidelity with which these stories describe the life of a traveling salesman show that Miss Ferber knew her subject through and through before she began to write. Her knowledge of other things is shown in an amusing letter which she wrote to the editor of the _Bookman_ in 1912. He had criticized her for writing a story about baseball, saying that no woman really knew baseball. This was her reply, in part:

You, buried up there in your office, or your apartment, with your books, books, books, and your pipe, and your everlasting ma.n.u.scripts, and makers of ma.n.u.scripts, don't you know that your woman secretary knows more about baseball than you do? Don't you know that every American girl knows baseball, and that most of us read the sporting page, not as a pose, but because we're interested in things that happen on the field, and track, and links, and gridiron? Bless your heart, that baseball story was the worst story in the book, but it was written after a solid summer of watching our bush league team play ball in the little Wisconsin town that I used to call home.

Humanity? Which of us really knows it? But take a fairly intelligent girl of seventeen, put her on a country daily newspaper, and then keep her on one paper or another, country and city, for six years, and--well, she just naturally can't help learning some things about some folks, now can she?...

You say that two or three more such books may ent.i.tle me to serious consideration. If I can get the editors to take more stories, why I suppose there'll be more books. But please don't perform any more serious consideration stuff over 'em. Because me'n Georgie Cohan, we jest aims to amuse.

Her first book of short stories was called _b.u.t.tered Side Down_ (her t.i.tles are always unusual). This was followed by _Roast Beef, Medium_, in which Mrs. McChesney appears as the successful distributor of Featherloom skirts. _Personality Plus_ tells of the adventures of her son Jock as an advertising man. _Cheerful--by Request_ introduces Mrs.

McChesney and some other people. By this time her favorite character had become so well known that the stage called for her, so Miss Ferber collaborated with George V. Hobart in a play called _Our Mrs.

McChesney_, which was produced with Ethel Barrymore in the t.i.tle role.

Her latest book, _f.a.n.n.y Herself_, is a novel, and in its pages Mrs.

McChesney appears again.

Her stories show the effect of her newspaper training. The style is crisp; the descriptions show close observation. Humor lights up every page, and underlying all her stories is a belief in people, a faith that life is worth while, a courage in the face of obstacles, that we like to think is characteristically American. In the structure and the style of her stories, Miss Ferber shows the influence of O. Henry, or as a newspaper wit put it,

O. Henry's fame, unless mistaken I'm Goes ednaferberating down through time.

AFTER THE BIG STORE CLOSES

_We all go to the Big Store to buy its bargains, and sometimes we wonder idly what the clerks are like when they are not behind the counter. This story deals with the lives of two people who punched the time-clock. When the store closes, it is like the striking of the clock in the fairy tales: the clerks are transformed into human beings, and become so much like ourselves that it is hard to tell the difference._

BITTER-SWEET

BY

FANNIE HURST

Much of the tragical lore of the infant mortality, the malnutrition, and the five-in-a-room morality of the city's poor is written in statistics, and the statistical path to the heart is more figurative than literal.

It is difficult to write stylistically a per-annum report of 1,327 curvatures of the spine, whereas the poor specific little vertebra of Mamie O'Grady, daughter to Lou, your laundress, whose alcoholic husband once invaded your very own bas.e.m.e.nt and attempted to strangle her in the coal-bin, can instantly create an ap.r.o.n bazaar in the church vestry-rooms.

That is why it is possible to drink your morning coffee without nausea for it, over the head-lines of forty thousand casualties at Ypres, but to push back abruptly at a three-line notice of little Tony's, your corner bootblack's, fatal dive before a street-car.

Gertie Slayback was statistically down as a woman wage-earner; a typhoid case among the thousands of the Borough of Manhattan for 1901; and her twice-a-day share in the Subway fares collected in the present year of our Lord.

She was a very atomic one of the city's four millions. But after all, what are the kings and peasants, poets and draymen, but great, greater, or greatest, less, lesser, or least atoms of us? If not of the least, Gertie Slayback was of the very lesser. When she unlocked the front door to her rooming-house of evenings, there was no one to expect her, except on Tuesdays, which evening it so happened her week was up. And when she left of mornings with her breakfast crumblessly cleared up and the box of biscuit and condensed-milk can tucked unsuspectedly behind her camisole in the top drawer there was no one to regret her.

There are some of us who call this freedom. Again there are those for whom one spark of home fire burning would light the world.

Gertie Slayback was one of these. Half a life-time of opening her door upon this or that desert-aisle of hall bedroom had not taught her heart how not to sink or the feel of daily rising in one such room to seem less like a damp bathing-suit, donned at dawn.

The only picture--or call it atavism if you will--which adorned Miss Slayback's dun-colored walls was a pa.s.se-partout snowscape, night closing in, and pink cottage windows peering out from under eaves. She could visualize that interior as if she had only to turn the frame for the smell of wood fire and the snap of pine logs and for the scene of two high-back chairs and the wooden crib between.

What a fragile, gracile thing is the mind that can leap thus from nine bargain bas.e.m.e.nt hours of hairpins and darning-b.a.l.l.s to the downy business of lining a crib in Never-Never Land and warming No Man's slippers before the fire of imagination.

There was that picture so acidly etched into Miss Slayback's brain that she had only to close her eyes in the slit-like sanct.i.ty of her room and in the brief moment of courting sleep feel the pink penumbra of her vision begin to glow.

Of late years, or, more specifically, for two years and eight months, another picture had invaded, even superseded the old. A stamp-photograph likeness of Mr. James P. Batch in the corner of Miss Slayback's mirror, and thereafter No Man's slippers became number eight-and-a-half C, and the hearth a gilded radiator in a dining-living-room somewhere between the Fourteenth Street Subway and the land of the Bronx.

How Miss Slayback, by habit not gregarious, met Mr. Batch is of no consequence, except to those snug ones of us to whom an introduction is the only means to such an end.

At a six o'clock that invaded even Union Square with heliotrope dusk, Mr. James Batch mistook, who shall say otherwise, Miss Gertie Slayback, as she stepped down into the wintry shade of a Subway kiosk, for Miss Whodoesitmatter. At seven o'clock, over a dish of lamb stew _a la_ White Kitchen, he confessed, and if Miss Slayback affected too great surprise and too little indignation, try to conceive six nine-hour week-in-and week-out days of hairpins and darning-b.a.l.l.s, and then, at a heliotrope dusk, James P. Batch, in invitational mood, stepping in between it and the papered walls of a dun-colored evening. To further enlist your tolerance, Gertie Slayback's eyes were as blue as the noon of June, and James P. Batch, in a belted-in coat and five kid finger-points protruding ever so slightly and rightly from a breast pocket, was hewn and honed in the image of youth. His the smile of one for whom life's cup holds a heady wine, a wrinkle or two at the eye only serving to enhance that smile; a one-inch feather stuck upright in his derby hatband.

It was a forelock once stamped a Corsican with the look of emperor. It was this hat feather, a c.o.c.k's feather at that and worn without sense of humor, to which Miss Slayback was fond of attributing the consequences of that heliotrope dusk.

"It was the feather in your cap did it, Jimmie. I can see you yet, stepping up with that innocent grin of yours. You think I didn't know you were flirting? Cousin from Long Island City! 'Say,' I says to myself, I says, 'I look as much like his cousin from Long Island City, if he's got one, as my cousin from Hoboken (and I haven't got any) would look like my sister if I had one.' It was that sa.s.sy little feather in your hat!"