Home Fires in France Part 17

In spite of this lack of appreciation of what was offered him, he was very frequently invited to the nightly feasts of his young confreres, and they hung about him eagerly because of their superst.i.tious reverence for what they called his "hunch." "Whatever Grandpa says is going to go, goes," was their expressed belief. They tried by ingenious devices to exploit his scent for the style, to be within earshot when he was making selections, to suborn the milliners into showing them the models he had selected. Such crude, outright efforts at getting the better of him he defeated with a wary dexterity, getting up and leaving a shop abruptly if one of his rivals began to loiter too near him, and letting it be known that he would buy no more from any milliner who reproduced "his"

models for one of the other American buyers. This last precaution was not necessary, for the sense of professional honor and jealousy is not keener among doctors themselves than among Paris fashion-makers, nor was the capacity for darkly guarding secrets more developed in Renaissance Italian poisoners than in a twentieth-century modiste's shop on the Place Vendome. Also Mr. Williams, who had seen a whole generation of modistes grow up and disappear into old age, enjoyed the very high esteem of those quick-eyed, quick-fingered, quick-witted ladies with the wonderful simple coiffures and the wonderful simple hats. This was not solely because of the very large sums of money which were at his disposition and which he spent with Napoleonic decision and despatch.

They respected his competence also. "There is one who can appreciate our work!" they said of him. "He always picks out the best. There is one who could have made hats, himself!" A characterization which the American would have repudiated with energy if he could have understood a word they were saying.

But although, as a matter of business acuteness, he refused to allow himself to be exploited in small ways by his young compet.i.tors, he was always ready to expound his philosophy to them and to lay down the general lines along which they might develop as he had. Not infrequently their elaborate dinners, where too much had been eaten and drunk by the elaborately dressed women and smooth-shaven, young-old men, ended by the question flung despairingly at Mr. Williams' impa.s.sive respectability, "Grandpa, how the d.i.c.kens _do_ you _do_ it? Tell us!"

He always told them, at length, in detail, as long as they would listen, although they never understood one word of what he said. Hoping to catch him off his guard and to cull some valuable short-cut tip to success, they lent ears as attentive as their somewhat bemused condition would let them, as long as their patience held out.

"The trouble with most of you young people," he was wont to say, presenting as he went on the abhorrent spectacle of a man at the Cafe Riche taking occasional sips from a gla.s.s of water, "is that you don't realize that you are up against a _big thing_, the biggest thing there is. You think you can just josh along somehow, pick out what looks good to you, what you think would be pretty for your best girl to wear, and have it go. Nothing like that! What _you_ like, what _you_ think is pretty, hasn't a thing to do with what's going to happen. What's going to happen, _happens_, whether anybody likes it or not, and the only thing for us to do is to keep our ears to the ground _hard_ and try to guess three or four months sooner than most people. n.o.body can guess further ahead than that and mighty few people even as far as that. Most people don't know what style is coming till it hits them in the eye.

Now, to make a good guess you've got to keep your eyes open to everything, everything, and then sort of gather yourself together and listen, hold your breath and listen, as if you were eavesdropping folks who were trying to keep a secret from you; as if you had to catch a very faint A sounded way off that you could tune your own fiddle to. And you've got to get pa.s.sive all over, the way the hypnotizers tell you to do, let yourself go, don't try to have any ideas of your own, don't try to swim against the current, don't try to hurry things up by swimming faster than the current. No power on earth can hurry that current, nor make it bring anything but what it's going to bring! And it's up to us, let me tell you, to take what it does bring! I've seen lots of styles that n.o.body liked, not the modistes who made them, not the buyers who took them to the States, not the hundreds of thousands of American women who paid out their husbands' good money to buy them. And yet those styles had just as big a vogue and lasted just as long as any others, and the buyers who tried to dodge them and who chose what looked prettier to them got everlastingly stung. And aren't there styles that everybody just hates to see disappear, comfortable, decent, becoming styles? But do they stay in, just because we'd like to have them? You know they don't.

"And it's no use trying to do anything on your own hook. There was old man Blackmar, head of the Blackmar and Jennings Ribbon Company; he could manufacture ribbons to beat any French factory going, _if_ he got the designs from France. Every time he tried to have one designed by a perfectly good American designer, the ribbon didn't sell. It didn't look so very different, but it wouldn't sell. You'd have thought he'd have learned something out of seeing that happen every time he tried it, wouldn't you? But he never did. Why, I was honestly sorry for him, five or six years ago when all of a sudden the styles went dead against ribbons or any other tr.i.m.m.i.n.g for hats. It pretty near ruined him, coming after the modistes had been piling everything they could buy on top of their hats. But he didn't know enough to take his medicine without making a face. He couldn't get it through his head that he was up against a bigger proposition than _he_ was, than anybody is. He came to me and he said: 'Williams, I'll give you fifteen thousand dollars, cash, in your hand, if you'll steer things over in Paris so's to bring hat-tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs back into style; ribbons of course if you can, but if not, most any kind of tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs. I can alter our machines to do braids and such. This craze for just the naked hat-shapes with one little rag of an ornament, I tell you, it'll send me into the bankruptcy court.'

"I was very sorry for him and I said so, and I said I'd do anything to help him out except try to slap back the Hudson river with the flat of my hand. He said he was sick of hearing me always get off that same old guff, and if I really wanted to, I could. 'Why, they tell me every modiste in Paris calls you "uncle." With plenty of money you could get on the right side of them and get them to launch trimmed styles.'

"I just threw up my hands at that. I saw he didn't know any more about the innerds of his business than a babe unborn. I said to him: 'Why, old man, you don't suppose for a minute that the modistes in Paris _invent_ the styles, make 'em up out of their heads? They haven't got any more to say about what it's to be than you or me. All they can do is to take the style that's going to arrive in six months, and put it into silk and felt and straw. They can't have it the way they _want_ it any more than the priestess of something-or-other could say what she wanted, when they put her over the oracle-hole, filled her up with gas, and told her to make an oracle.'

"Blackmar was sore as a boil at me, and said if I wouldn't do it he'd give the job to Pierce. Pierce was buying for Condit and Vergary in those days. I said he could throw away all the money he wanted to, but _I_ wouldn't help him spill it.

"Well, Pierce tried to swing the deal, bucking the universe all alone, and so proud to have the chance to. He went to all the best modistes in Paris and said he'd give--well, I'm ashamed to tell you what he gave--if they would make him models all trimmed up, heavy and expensive with handsome tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs. Of course, at first they said they couldn't do it, the hats wouldn't be in style. And he said if they made the hats that way and sent them out with their names in gilt letters in the lining, they would be in style, would _be_ the style. Didn't everything they made set the fashion? They tried to explain to him that that was because they took the greatest pains to make things that were in fashion, but Lord! he couldn't talk their language. He just kept on insisting and holding out those banknotes, and by and by they said, well, to get rid of him they _would_. And he came to my hotel and bragged all over me like a man who's cornered the wheat-market.

"They did make him trimmed models: and as they were the best modistes in the world they were as pretty hats as ever you saw. They were all trimmed up as per agreement with ribbons that would make a dead woman sit up and reach out her hand. Pierce took me into his office before they were packed, to show them to me, and he said, '_Now_, Grandpa, what you got to say?' And I said, 'You let me know four months from now how much money you've made on them.'

"About six weeks after that, back in New York, I went into his office and there, by George, were all but two of his fifteen models. None of the American manufacturers would have them, not at any price. They'd send their head milliner to see them and she'd say, 'Oh, what perfectly lovely ribbon,'--but no, thanks, she didn't want to buy the model, because they wouldn't sell. They weren't what were being worn that season. Pierce said: 'Great Scott! look at the labels. They come from all the best modistes in Paris'; and she'd say she couldn't help that; if they weren't what was being worn they wouldn't sell. And before three months were up he'd given them to the janitor's little girl for dolls'

clothes. There you are."

There were evident signs of inattention from his audience by this time, but he went on: "And young Hammond, he tried to tear the teeth off the buzz-saw with his fingers, too. And _he_ got what was coming to him. He had a great idea, regular perpetual motion scheme for economy, of how he could beat the game and he hypnotized old John Harbine into standing for it. It was as simple as bread and milk. Hammond would take up a Paris modiste, somebody on a back-street somewhere, get her under contract to be 'Harbine's,' and Harbine's alone. Then they'd put her name in the hands of the best advertising agency in New York and let things rip.

Well, they started out as though they were going to a fire. You couldn't see the spokes, the wheels went around so fast. The advertising people delivered the goods, put the best people on their force on the job. I remember they had one college-graduate woman that could write ads that would make you pay five dollars for a strawberry basket--_once_! She wrote up their great find in Paris, wrote it up like a magazine short-story--modiste who up to the time Hammond had spotted her had been so exclusive you couldn't find her with a microscope, had only worked for the pure-bloods among the French aristocracy, no mere Americans had ever known her name (you can bet your life they hadn't)--you can imagine the kind of patter, the sort of thing women suck up by the barrelful.

And then, owing to unheard-of prices offered by Harbine's out of that disinterested devotion to American womanhood which is Harbine's great quality, she had finally consented to send a few hats, never more than a dozen a season, to Harbine's, where the first collection would be on exhibition March 21st, and which would be exactly copied to order in imported materials with all the inimitable _chic_ of the original models, for such low prices as from fifteen dollars up.

"It was well done. I'm bound to admit that ad.-writer got just the right esthetic, superior tone into it. And as for Hammond, he ought to have been a stage-manager. He got some of the people back of me sort of worried. They came to me, 'Look-y here, Grandpa, sure you're not missing a point in the game? How _about_ this Suzette Rellot person?'

"I said: 'Her real name is Marie Duval and she used to sew in linings at Reboux', that's who _she_ is. If she _could_ have trimmed hats you can bet your life Reboux would have developed her years ago. Reboux has candles burning in every church in Paris, praying Heaven to send her apprentices that she can do something with! And if she _can't_ trim hats you can bet your life old man Harbine is going to lose some money, a lot of it in one clip, and he and Jimmy Hammond will part company with a bang.'

"Well, I was over here in Paris when their great opening came off. But I heard about it. Nothing lacked. They all but served free champagne. But when I went back only a month later, the talk was already going around among folks on the ins, that there was something the matter with the Rellot collection. The women weren't just crazy about the hats and the modistes wouldn't look at them. Later on, what was left of them were sent down to South America--Colombia, I think. Women just hatching out from mantillas will stand for anything with a French label on it! And that summer Jimmy Hammond decided he'd go in for life-insurance."

When he had talked as long as this I was usually the only person left listening, the rest having yawned, turned to each other, or melted away.

But I listened, always, open-mouthed with astonishment and wonder.

Before putting on my hats in those days I used to look at them hard, with respect, almost with alarm, feeling heavy on my head the weight of their unsuspected significance. Wondering what the great expert's opinion would be about the plain, everyday hats of ordinary women I asked him one day: "Tell me, can you descend to small beer? What do you think of the hats you see, not in those wonderful, silk-hung studios, but those you see on the heads of the women in the streets, on mine? Is this hat I have on stylish? I warn you I bought it off a counter for less than four dollars."

He answered instantly, without giving a glance at my headgear: "You are a healthy, normal woman and you're wearing it. Of course it's in style.

If it weren't, and you had to wear it, you'd be sick abed."

"You exaggerate, you are always exaggerating," I protested. "You only know women who _care_ about the styles. I never bother my head about my hats! I just walk into almost any shop and buy the first hat that doesn't make me look too queer."

"You don't have to bother yourself about it," he told me, his accent tinged with weary bitterness. "_We_ do the bothering! Months beforehand.

An army of us, able-bodied men, smart women, pretty young girls, we all of us give up our lives to fixing things so you can walk into most any shop and pick up most any hat and find it doesn't make you look too 'queer,' which is your way of saying that it doesn't make you look out of style."

"There are moments," I told him, in a half-serious indignation, "when I find you too absurd for words, the victim of the most absurd hallucinations! All this portentous talk about the world-wide conspiracy to make people keep up with the style. As if the style had any importance for sensible people!"

"If you knew more about the capital and brains that are invested in that conspiracy, you'd take it seriously, all right," he a.s.sured me with melancholy, "and as for not taking the styles seriously, how many thousand dollars would it take to pay you to go around in the street one day, just one day, in the big bustle your mother used to be ashamed to go outdoors without?"

I lost myself in horrified contemplation of the grotesque vision he had conjured up and forgot to refute him. Perhaps I couldn't.

Towards the end of his stay he was very much troubled by persistent rumors that the boat on which he was to sail would be torpedoed on the way to New York. He acknowledged, with the fatigued frankness of his sixty years past, that he was mortally afraid of the pa.s.sage and that his fear would deprive him of sleep all the way over. "No sane man likes to be killed," he complained, "let alone be blown up and burned to death and drowned into the bargain! I'm a family man! I want to go on earning a living for my wife and children!"

The evening before he went away he was so fretful about this and so outspoken about his dread, that I asked him, "Why don't you wait over a boat?"

"Oh, what's the use? One boat's as likely to go down as another. And, anyhow, I've got to get home. And then come over again for the next season, curse the luck!"

I thought him again a little absurd. "Oh, come, the heavens wouldn't fall if you missed one or two seasons!"

He turned grave, and after a moment's hesitation, opened a door which I had thought locked and nailed up, and showed me that the room in his heart which I had thought was certainly empty and vacant was a queer, dimly lighted little chapel, with queer, dim little candles burning before what was recognizably an ideal.

"Oh, it's no time for anybody to lie down on the job," he said offhand.

I did not dream that he was referring to the war. I had become convinced that his curious, specialized world held no place for the horror and apprehension which filled the lives of the rest of us. Nor had I ever seen him give any signs of the shocked pity which most people feel at the sight of the war-maimed men, the black-clad, white-faced war-orphans and the widows with blurred eyes. I had thought he saw in France, only and uniquely, hats. So I asked in genuine ignorance of his meaning: "How do you mean, this being no time to lie down on the job?

What job?"

He sat back in his chair and looked at the ceiling; thereafter, as he talked, transferring his gaze to his finger-tips, joined with nicety.

"Well, I guess I mean something about like this. If we humans are to get on at all, get any further away from having tails and living in trees, we've got to knock down the part.i.tions and make one big room of the world, the same way each nation is one big room, with the blacksmith trading his horseshoes for clothes and not trying to be a tailor himself. Take farmers. Maybe you can't remember, but _I_ can, when old farmers in Connecticut raised nearly every single thing they used all the year around, and were proud of being such idiots. Nowadays the Connecticut farmer don't waste his time trying to grow corn in a climate where you're liable to get frosts in early September; he leaves the farmer in Iowa to do that, and he raises the best apples in the world and with the money he makes that way, he buys him oranges that a Florida farmer has raised. It's my opinion that we've got to come to that on a big, big scale. And if we do come to it there won't be any more wars.

Now, I don't know anything about anything but hats, and so I don't try to have an opinion about the League of Nations, nor how the trick is going to be turned by the statesmen--if there are any such--but if it _is_ going to be turned, it's going to take everybody's shoulder to the wheel, you can be sure. And I've got a shoulder. What's got to be done is to get it through everybody's head that every nation ought not to learn to produce anything but what it can produce best, and that self-defense ought not to force it to make a botch of trying to do what another nation could do better. Now, _one_ of the things that France can produce better than other people (and it happens to be the thing that I know about) is hats. I don't know whether it's because she's been at the business of running the styles so long, so much longer than anybody else so that she's got all her fibers settled together, just right to catch the note, the way the wood in an old violin trembles all over at sounds that leave the wood in the leg of a chair perfectly calm. Mind, I don't say the violin is any more important than a chair. As far as I'm concerned personally, if I had to choose I'd rather have the chair. What I'm trying to say is that they are _different_. And we've got to get used to the idea that _because things are different it doesn't mean one is better than the other and they ought both to be like the best one_.

Now, maybe it's the other way around, that France has been at this business of setting styles so long because she's had the gift to begin with. Anyhow, what's sure is that they do it better, everything along that line, ribbons, braids, straws, hats, dresses, furniture, houses, parks--original designs don't come from anywhere but France. But France is at war and pretty nearly gone under. She's got to make her designs with one hand and fight for her life with the other."

He paused. "Well, I don't feel just like picking out that time to stop coming to France to get her designs and to do my part to keep up the taste for them, at home."

I found no sufficiently admiring comment to make on this, and kept a respectful silence.

He went on, rubbing his hand back and forth over his gray hair: "But all that is only my guess at it. What's my guess worth? Nothing. But it's all I've got to go by, and so I _do_ go by it. I don't _know_ anything about anything but hats, and I can't but just make a guess at them."

He folded his hands before him and sighed. "There is a lot too much in hats for any one man to understand."

A HONEYMOON ... VIVE L'AMERIQUE!

I never knew many of the mere facts of their existence; where all their money came from, nor the extraordinary romance which must have lain back of them. Nor did I care to. They were too epic a pair for realism to touch. I find on thinking them over that I never quite came to believe in their actual existence; and yet, whatever value this slight sketch of them may have will be due to its literal truthfulness to fact.

My first sight of them was on a very cold day in the second year of the war when they suddenly filled with their resplendent presence the dreary room which was known as my "office." For several difficult months, against all the obstacles which made up everyday life in war-time France, I had been laboring to organize and get into shape a Braille printing establishment which would provide books for those most tragic of war-victims, the blind. Together with a crew of devoted volunteers I had tugged at the task, struggling like everybody else in France with a universal shortage of supplies, which began with able-bodied men and ran down to tacks and cheesecloth. There was also the difficulty of getting the "Authorization from the Government" before drawing your breath; but unless you have experienced this potent brake on enterprise, there is no use trying to describe it to you.

And yet, somehow, we had managed to get along, had added to our two plaque-making machines a couple of presses (very poor, both of them), had scrambled together a home-made device for wetting and drying the paper, had hunted down enough men to run the machines, had trained enough proof-readers and a.s.sembled enough voluntary editors, so that after a fashion we were really printing. The magazine, liberally bedewed with our blood and sweat, came out once a month; and although the two presses broke down with great frequency, we managed, by dint of incessant repairing, to keep at least one in shape to do tolerable work.

We really had something patched-up, ungainly, but reasonably valid to show the sightseers who came through on the weekly visiting day, when all the rest of the inst.i.tution was open to visitors.

I took my two Olympian guests for the usual idle, visiting-day couple. I went the rounds with them, pointing out with a weary satisfaction our various makeshifts. When I found that they listened receptively, I indulged in considerable self-pity over our difficulties, past and present. On their part they asked a good many pointed questions about the business end of our enterprise, about the financial status of the inst.i.tution, about the probability of permanence for the venture. They came back to the "office" with me, the G.o.ddess in sables taking the solitary chair, while her mate sat down on the edge of my little table, stretching out before him legs clad in cloth of a fineness I had forgotten could exist. Quite casually, like the diamonds and pearls of the fairy-tales, amazing words now issued from their lips. "See here,"

said he of the broadcloth overcoat, "this is no way to do business. You can't get good work done with any such junk as those two presses! Why, I wouldn't take them as a gift, not for old iron! And turned by hand-power! Isn't that Europe for you? Why, for twenty-five cents a day of electric current, you could do ten times the work you are doing now, and have women run the presses! Go find a modern electric press that a man can look at and not think he's Benjamin Franklin come to life again, and let us know how much it costs."

He handed me his card as he spoke.