Half Portions Part 22

She poured the coffee, trying to keep her gaze away from the tantalizing tail-end of the headline at whose first half she could only guess.

"By Jove, Emma! Listen to this! Pershing says if we have one m--"

"Stop right there! We've become pretty well acquainted in the last three years, T.A. But if you haven't learned that if there's one thing I can't endure, it's being fed across the table with sc.r.a.ps of the day's news, I shall have to consider our marriage a failure."

"Oh, very well. I merely thought you'd be--"

"I am. But there's something about having it read to you--"

On the second morning Emma, hurriedly fastening the middle b.u.t.ton of her blouse on her way downstairs, collided with her husband, who was shrugging himself into his coat. They continued their way downstairs with considerable dignity and p.r.o.nounced leisure. The paper lay on the hall table. They reached for it. There was a moment--just the fraction of a minute--when each clutched a corner of it, eying the other grimly.

Then both let go suddenly, as though the paper had burned their fingers.

They stared at each other, surprise and horror in their gaze. The paper fell to the floor with a little slap. Both stooped for it, apologetically. Their heads b.u.mped. They staggered back, semi-stunned.

Emma found herself laughing, rather wildly. Buck joined in after a moment--a rueful laugh. She was the first to recover.

"That settles it. I'm willing to eat trick bread and whale meat and drink sugarless coffee, but I draw the line at hating my husband for the price of a newspaper subscription. White paper may be scarce but so are husbands. It's cheaper to get two newspapers than to set up two establishments."

They were only two among many millions who, at that time, were playing an amusing and fashionable game called Win the War. They did not realize that the game was to develop into a grim and magnificently functioning business to whose demands they would cheerfully sacrifice all that they most treasured.

Of late, Emma had spent less and less time in the offices of the Featherloom Company. For more than ten years that flourishing business, and the career of her son, Jock McChesney, had been the twin orbits about which her existence had revolved. But Jock McChesney was a man of family now, with a wife, two babies, and an uncanny advertising sense that threatened to put his name on the letterhead of the Raynor Advertising Company of Chicago. As for the Featherloom factory--it seemed to go of its own momentum. After her marriage to the firm's head, Emma's interest in the business was unflagging.

"Now look here, Emma," Buck would say. "You've given enough to this firm. Play a while. Cut up. Forget you're the 'And Company' in T.A. Buck & Co."

"But I'm so used to it. I'd miss it so. You know what happened that first year of our marriage when I tried to do the d.u.c.h.ess. I don't know how to loll. If you take Featherlooms away from me I'll degenerate into a Madam Chairman. You'll see."

She might have, too, if the War had not come along and saved her.

By midsummer the workrooms were turning out strange garments, such as gray and khaki flannel shirts, flannelette one-piece pajamas, and woollen bloomers, all intended for the needs of women war workers going abroad.

Emma had dropped into the workroom one day and had picked up a half-finished gray flannel garment. She eyed it critically, her deft fingers manipulating the neckband. A little frown gathered between her eyes.

"Somehow a woman in a flannel shirt always looks as if she had quinsy.

It's the collar. They cut them like a man's small-size. But a woman's neck is as different from a man's as her collarbone is."

She picked up a piece of flannel and smoothed it on the cutting-table.

The head designer had looked on in disapproval while her employer's wife had experimented with sc.r.a.ps of cloth, and pins, and chalk, and scissors. But Emma had gone on serenely cutting and snipping and pinning. They made up samples of service shirts with the new neck-hugging collar and submitted them to Miss Nevins, the head of the woman's uniform department at Fyfe & Gordon's. That astute lady had been obliged to listen to scores of canteeners, nurses, secretaries, and motor leaguers who, standing before a long mirror in one of the many fitting-rooms, had gazed, frowned, fumbled at collar and topmost b.u.t.ton, and said, "But it looks so--so lumpy around the neck."

Miss Kate Nevins's reply to this plaint was: "Oh, when you get your tie on--"

"Perhaps they'll let me wear a turn-down collar."

"Absolutely against regulations. The rules strictly forbid anything but the high, close-fitting collar."

The fair war worker would sigh, mutter something about supposing they'd shoot you at sunrise for wearing a becoming shirt, and order six, grumbling.

Kate Nevins had known Mrs. T.A. Buck in that lady's Emma McChesney days.

At the end of the first day's trial of the new Featherloom shirt she had telephoned the Featherloom factory and had asked for Emma McChesney.

People who had known her by that name never seemed able to get the trick of calling her by any other.

With every fitting-room in the Fyfe & Gordon establishment demanding her attention, Miss Nevins's conversation was necessarily brief. "Emma McChesney?... Kate Nevins.... Who's responsible for the collar on those Featherloom shirts?... I was sure of it.... No regular designer could cut a collar like that. Takes a genius.... H'm?... Well, I mean it. I'm going to write to Washington and have 'em vote you a distinguished service medal. This is the first day since last I-don't-know-when that hasn't found me in the last stages of nervous exhaustion at six o'clock.... All these women warriors are willing to bleed and die for their country, but they want to do it in a collar that fits, and I don't blame 'em. After I saw the pictures of that Russian Battalion of Death, I understood why.... Yes, I know I oughtn't to say that, but...."

By autumn Emma was wearing one of those Featherloom service shirts herself. It was inevitable that a woman of her executive ability, initiative, and detail sense should be pressed into active service.

November saw Fifth Avenue a-glitter with uniforms, and one third of them seemed to be petticoated. The Featherloom factory saw little of Emma now. She bore the t.i.tle of Commandant with feminine captains, lieutenants, and girl workers under her; and her blue uniform, as she herself put it, was so a-jingle with straps, buckles, belts, bars, and bolts that when she first put it on she felt like a jail.

She left the house at eight in the morning now. Dinner time rarely found her back in Sixty-third Street. Buck was devoting four evenings a week to the draft board. At the time of the second Liberty Loan drive in the autumn he had deserted Featherlooms for bonds. His success was due to the commodity he had for sale, the type of person to whom he sold it, and his own selling methods and personality. There was something about this slim, leisurely man, with the handsome eyes and the quiet voice, that convinced and impressed you.

"It's your complete lack of eagerness in the transaction, too," Emma remarked after watching him land a twenty-five-thousand-dollar bond pledge, the buyer a business rival of the Featherloom Petticoat Company.

"You make it seem a privilege, not a favour. A man with your method could sell sandbags in the Sahara."

Sometimes the two dined downtown together. Sometimes they scarcely saw each other for days on end. One afternoon at 5.30, Emma, on duty bound, espied him walking home up Fifth Avenue, on the opposite side of the street. She felt a little pang as she watched the easy, graceful figure swinging its way up the brilliant, flag-decked avenue. She had given him so little time and thought; she had bestowed upon the house such scant attention in the last few weeks. She turned abruptly and crossed the street, dodging the late afternoon traffic with a sort of expert recklessness. She almost ran after the tall figure that was now a block ahead of her, and walking fast. She caught up with him, matched his stride, and touched his arm lightly.

"I beg your pardon, but aren't you Mr. T.A. Buck?"

"Yes."

"How do you do! I'm Mrs. Buck."

Then they had giggled together, deliciously, and he had put a firm hand on the smartly tailored blue serge sleeve.

"I thought so. That being the case, you're coming home along o' me, young 'ooman."

"Can't do it. I'm on my way to the Ritz to meet a dashing delegation from Serbia. You never saw such gorgeous creatures. All gold and green and red, with swords, and snake-work, and glittering boots. They'd make a musical-comedy soldier look like an undertaker."

There came a queer little look into his eyes. "But this isn't a musical comedy, dear. These men are--Look here, Emma. I want to talk to you.

Let's walk home together and have dinner decently in our own dining room. There are things at the office--"

"S'impossible, Mr. Buck. I'm late now. And you know perfectly well there are two vice-commandants ready to s.n.a.t.c.h my shoulder-straps."

"Emma! Emma!"

At his tone the smiling animation of her face was dimmed. "What's gone wrong?"

"Nothing. Everything. At least, nothing that I can discuss with you at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-fifth Street. When does this Serbian thing end? I'll call for you."

"There's no telling. Anyway, the Fannings will drive me home, thanks, dear."

He looked down at her. She was unbelievably girlish and distingue in the blue uniform; a straight, slim figure, topped by an impudent c.o.c.ked hat.

The flannel shirt of workaday service was replaced to-day by a severely smart affair of white silk, high-collared, st.i.tched, expensively simple.

And yet he frowned as he looked.

"Fisk got his exemption papers to-day." With apparent irrelevance.

"Yes?" She was glancing sharply up and down the thronged street. "Better call me a cab, dear. I'm awfully late. Oh, well, with his wife practically an invalid, and all the expense of the baby's illness, and the funeral--The Ritz, dear. And tell him to hurry." She stepped into the cab, a little nervous frown between her eyes.

But Buck, standing at the curb, seemed bent on delaying her. "Fisk told me the doctor said all she needs is a couple of months at a sanitarium, where she can be bathed and ma.s.saged and fed with milk. And if Fisk could go to a camp now he'd have a commission in no time. He's had training, you know. He spent his vacation last summer at Plattsburg."

"But he's due on his advance spring trip in two or three weeks, isn't he?... I really must hurry, T.A."

"Ritz," said Buck, shortly, to the chauffeur. "And hurry." He turned away abruptly, without a backward glance. Emma's head jerked over her shoulder in surprise. But he did not turn. The tall figure disappeared.