Cheerful By Request by Edna Ferber

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She rose early, like the rest of us; and as summer came on we used to
see her moving about in her little garden patch in the dewy, golden
morning. She wore absurd pale-blue kimonos that made her stout figure
loom immense against the greenery of garden and apple tree. The
neighbourhood women viewed these negligees with Puritan disapproval as
they smoothed down their own prim, starched gingham skirts. They said it
was disgusting--and perhaps it was; but the habit of years is not easily
overcome. Blanche Devine--snipping her sweet peas; peering anxiously at
the Virginia creeper that clung with such fragile fingers to the
trellis; watering the flower baskets that hung from her porch--was
blissfully unconscious of the disapproving eyes. I wish one of us had
just stopped to call good morning to her over the fence, and to say in
our neighbourly, small town way: "My, ain't this a scorcher! So early
too! It'll be fierce by noon!" But we did not.

I think perhaps the evenings must have been the loneliest for her. The
summer evenings in our little town are filled with intimate, human,
neighbourly sounds. After the heat of the day it is infinitely pleasant
to relax in the cool comfort of the front porch, with the life of the
town eddying about us. We sew and read out there until it grows dusk. We
call across-lots to our next-door neighbour. The men water the lawns and
the flower boxes and get together in little quiet groups to discuss the
new street paving. I have even known Mrs. Hines to bring her cherries
out there when she had canning to do, and pit them there on the front
porch partially shielded by her porch vine, but not so effectually that
she was deprived of the sights and sounds about her. The kettle in her
lap and the dishpan full of great ripe cherries on the porch floor by
her chair, she would pit and chat and peer out through the vines, the
red juice staining her plump bare arms.

I have wondered since what Blanche Devine thought of us those lonesome
evenings--those evenings filled with little friendly sights and sounds.
It is lonely, uphill business at best--this being good. It must have
been difficult for her, who had dwelt behind closed shutters so long, to
seat herself on the new front porch for all the world to stare at; but
she did sit there--resolutely--watching us in silence.

She seized hungrily upon the stray crumbs of conversation that fell to
her. The milkman and the iceman and the butcher boy used to hold daily
conversation with her. They--sociable gentlemen--would stand on her
doorstep, one grimy hand resting against the white of her doorpost,
exchanging the time of day with Blanche in the doorway--a tea towel in
one hand, perhaps, and a plate in the other. Her little house was a
miracle of cleanliness. It was no uncommon sight to see her down on her
knees on the kitchen floor, wielding her brush and rag like the rest of
us. In canning and preserving time there floated out from her kitchen
the pungent scent of pickled crab apples; the mouth-watering,
nostril-pricking smell that meant sweet pickles; or the cloying,
tantalising, divinely sticky odour that meant raspberry jam. Snooky,
from her side of the fence, often used to peer through the pickets,
gazing in the direction of the enticing smells next door. Early one
September morning there floated out from Blanche Devine's kitchen that
clean, fragrant, sweet scent of fresh-baked cookies--cookies with butter
in them, and spice, and with nuts on top. Just by the smell of them your
mind's eye pictured them coming from the oven--crisp brown circlets,
crumbly, toothsome, delectable. Snooky, in her scarlet sweater and cap,
sniffed them from afar and straightway deserted her sandpile to take her
stand at the fence. She peered through the restraining bars, standing on
tiptoe. Blanche Devine, glancing up from her board and rolling-pin, saw
the eager golden head. And Snooky, with guile in her heart, raised one
fat, dimpled hand above the fence and waved it friendlily. Blanche
Devine waved back. Thus encouraged, Snooky's two hands wigwagged
frantically above the pickets. Blanche Devine hesitated a moment, her
floury hand on her hip. Then she went to the pantry shelf and took out a
clean white saucer. She selected from the brown jar on the table three
of the brownest, crumbliest, most perfect cookies, with a walnut meat
perched atop of each, placed them temptingly on the saucer and,
descending the steps, came swiftly across the grass to the triumphant
Snooky. Blanche Devine held out the saucer, her lips smiling, her eyes
tender. Snooky reached up with one plump white arm.

"Snooky!" shrilled a high voice. "Snooky!" A voice of horror and of
wrath. "Come here to me this minute! And don't you dare to touch those!"
Snooky hesitated rebelliously, one pink finger in her pouting mouth.
"Snooky! Do you hear me?"

And the Very Young Wife began to descend the steps of her back porch.
Snooky, regretful eyes on the toothsome dainties, turned away aggrieved.
The Very Young Wife, her lips set, her eyes flashing, advanced and
seized the shrieking Snooky by one writhing arm and dragged her away
toward home and safety.

Blanche Devine stood there at the fence, holding the saucer in her hand.
The saucer tipped slowly, and the three cookies slipped off and fell to
the grass. Blanche Devine followed them with her eyes and stood staring
at them a moment. Then she turned quickly, went into the house and shut
the door.

It was about this time we noticed that Blanche Devine was away much of
the time. The little white cottage would be empty for a week. We knew
she was out of town because the expressman would come for her trunk. We
used to lift our eyebrows significantly. The newspapers and handbills
would accumulate in a dusty little heap on the porch; but when she
returned there was always a grand cleaning, with the windows open, and
Blanche--her head bound turbanwise in a towel--appearing at a window
every few minutes to shake out a dustcloth. She seemed to put an
enormous amount of energy into those cleanings--as if they were a sort
of safety valve.

As winter came on she used to sit up before her grate fire long, long
after we were asleep in our beds. When she neglected to pull down the
shades we could see the flames of her cosy fire dancing gnomelike on the
wall.

There came a night of sleet and snow, and wind and rattling hail--one of
those blustering, wild nights that are followed by morning-paper reports
of trains stalled in drifts, mail delayed, telephone and telegraph wires
down. It must have been midnight or past when there came a hammering at
Blanche Devine's door--a persistent, clamorous rapping. Blanche Devine,
sitting before her dying fire half asleep, started and cringed when she
heard it; then jumped to her feet, her hand at her breast--her eyes
darting this way and that, as though seeking escape.

She had heard a rapping like that before. It had meant bluecoats
swarming up the stairway, and frightened cries and pleadings, and wild
confusion. So she started forward now, quivering. And then she
remembered, being wholly awake now--she remembered, and threw up her
head and smiled a little bitterly and walked toward the door. The
hammering continued, louder than ever. Blanche Devine flicked on the
porch light and opened the door. The half-clad figure of the Very Young
Wife next door staggered into the room. She seized Blanche Devine's arm
with both her frenzied hands and shook her, the wind and snow beating in
upon both of them.

"The baby!" she screamed in a high, hysterical voice. "The baby! The
baby--"

Blanche Devine shut the door and shook the Young Wife smartly by the
shoulders.

"Stop screaming," she said quietly. "Is she sick?"

The Young Wife told her, her teeth chattering:

"Come quick! She's dying! Will's out of town. I tried to get the doctor.
The telephone wouldn't--I saw your light! For God's sake--"

Blanche Devine grasped the Young Wife's arm, opened the door, and
together they sped across the little space that separated the two
houses. Blanche Devine was a big woman, but she took the stairs like a
girl and found the right bedroom by some miraculous woman instinct. A
dreadful choking, rattling sound was coming from Snooky's bed.

"Croup," said Blanche Devine, and began her fight.

It was a good fight. She marshalled her little inadequate forces, made
up of the half-fainting Young Wife and the terrified and awkward hired
girl.

"Get the hot water on--lots of it!" Blanche Devine pinned up her
sleeves. "Hot cloths! Tear up a sheet--or anything! Got an oilstove? I
want a teakettle boiling in the room. She's got to have the steam. If
that don't do it we'll raise an umbrella over her and throw a sheet
over, and hold the kettle under till the steam gets to her that way. Got
any ipecac?"

The Young Wife obeyed orders, whitefaced and shaking. Once Blanche
Devine glanced up at her sharply.

"Don't you dare faint!" she commanded.

And the fight went on. Gradually the breathing that had been so
frightful became softer, easier. Blanche Devine did not relax. It was
not until the little figure breathed gently in sleep that Blanche Devine
sat back satisfied. Then she tucked a cover ever so gently at the side
of the bed, took a last satisfied look at the face on the pillow, and
turned to look at the wan, dishevelled Young Wife.

"She's all right now. We can get the doctor when morning comes--though I
don't know's you'll need him."

The Young Wife came round to Blanche Devine's side of the bed and stood
looking up at her.

"My baby died," said Blanche Devine simply. The Young Wife gave a little
inarticulate cry, put her two hands on Blanche Devine's broad shoulders
and laid her tired head on her breast.

"I guess I'd better be going," said Blanche Devine.

The Young Wife raised her head. Her eyes were round with fright.

"Going! Oh, please stay! I'm so afraid. Suppose she should take sick
again! That awful--awful breathing--"

"I'll stay if you want me to."

"Oh, please! I'll make up your bed and you can rest--"

"I'm not sleepy. I'm not much of a hand to sleep anyway. I'll sit up
here in the hall, where there's a light. You get to bed. I'll watch and
see that everything's all right. Have you got something I can read out
here--something kind of lively--with a love story in it?"

So the night went by. Snooky slept in her little white bed. The Very
Young Wife half dozed in her bed, so near the little one. In the hall,
her stout figure looming grotesque in wall-shadows, sat Blanche Devine
pretending to read. Now and then she rose and tiptoed into the bedroom
with miraculous quiet, and stooped over the little bed and listened and
looked--and tiptoed away again, satisfied.

The Young Husband came home from his business trip next day with tales
of snowdrifts and stalled engines. Blanche Devine breathed a sigh of
relief when she saw him from her kitchen window. She watched the house
now with a sort of proprietary eye. She wondered about Snooky; but she
knew better than to ask. So she waited. The Young Wife next door had
told her husband all about that awful night--had told him with tears and
sobs. The Very Young Husband had been very, very angry with her--angry
and hurt, he said, and astonished! Snooky could not have been so sick!
Look at her now! As well as ever. And to have called such a woman! Well,
really he did not want to be harsh; but she must understand that she
must never speak to the woman again. Never!

So the next day the Very Young Wife happened to go by with the Young
Husband. Blanche Devine spied them from her sitting-room window, and she
made the excuse of looking in her mailbox in order to go to the door.
She stood in the doorway and the Very Young Wife went by on the arm of
her husband. She went by--rather white-faced--without a look or a word
or a sign!

And then this happened! There came into Blanche Devine's face a look
that made slits of her eyes, and drew her mouth down into an ugly,
narrow line, and that made the muscles of her jaw tense and hard. It was
the ugliest look you can imagine. Then she smiled--if having one's lips
curl away from one's teeth can be called smiling.

Two days later there was great news of the white cottage on the corner.
The curtains were down; the furniture was packed; the rugs were rolled.
The wagons came and backed up to the house and took those things that
had made a home for Blanche Devine. And when we heard that she had
bought back her interest in the House With the Closed Shutters, near the
freight depot, we sniffed.

"I knew she wouldn't last!" we said.

"They never do!" said we.

VII

THE GIRL WHO WENT RIGHT

There is a story--Kipling, I think--that tells of a spirited horse
galloping in the dark suddenly drawing up tense, hoofs bunched, slim
flanks quivering, nostrils dilated, ears pricked. Urging being of no
avail the rider dismounts, strikes a match, advances a cautious step or
so, and finds himself at the precipitous brink of a newly formed
crevasse.

So it is with your trained editor. A miraculous sixth sense guides him.
A mysterious something warns him of danger lurking within the seemingly
innocent oblong white envelope. Without slitting the flap, without
pausing to adjust his tortoise-rimmed glasses, without clearing his
throat, without lighting his cigarette--he knows.

The deadly newspaper story he scents in the dark. Cub reporter. Crusty
city editor. Cub fired. Stumbles on to a big story. Staggers into
newspaper office wild-eyed. Last edition. "Hold the presses!" Crusty
C.E. stands over cub's typewriter grabbing story line by line. Even
foreman of pressroom moved to tears by tale. "Boys, this ain't just a
story this kid's writin'. This is history!" Story finished. Cub faints.
C.E. makes him star reporter.

The athletic story: "I could never marry a mollycoddle like you, Harold
Hammond!" Big game of the year. Team crippled. Second half. Halfback
hurt. Harold Hammond, scrub, into the game. Touchdown! Broken leg. Five
to nothing. "Harold, can you ever, ever forgive me?"

The pseudo-psychological story: She had been sitting before the fire for
a long, long time. The flame had flickered and died down to a
smouldering ash. The sound of his departing footsteps echoed and
re-echoed through her brain. But the little room was very, very still.

The shop-girl story: Torn boots and temptation, tears and snears, pathos
and bathos, all the way from Zola to the vice inquiry.

Having thus attempted to hide the deadly commonplaceness of this story
with a thin layer of cynicism, perhaps even the wily editor may be
tricked into taking the leap.

* * * * *

Four weeks before the completion of the new twelve-story addition the
store advertised for two hundred experienced saleswomen. Rachel
Wiletzky, entering the superintendent's office after a wait of three
hours, was Applicant No. 179. The superintendent did not look up as
Rachel came in. He scribbled busily on a pad of paper at his desk, thus
observing rules one and two in the proper conduct of superintendents
when interviewing applicants. Rachel Wiletzky, standing by his desk,
did not cough or wriggle or rustle her skirts or sag on one hip. A sense
of her quiet penetrated the superintendent's subconsciousness. He
glanced up hurriedly over his left shoulder. Then he laid down his
pencil and sat up slowly. His mind was working quickly enough though. In
the twelve seconds that intervened between the laying down of the pencil
and the sitting up in his chair he had hastily readjusted all his
well-founded preconceived ideas on the appearance of shop-girl
applicants.

Rachel Wiletzky had the colouring and physique of a dairymaid. It was
the sort of colouring that you associate in your mind with lush green
fields, and Jersey cows, and village maids, in Watteau frocks, balancing
brimming pails aloft in the protecting curve of one rounded upraised
arm, with perhaps a Maypole dance or so in the background. Altogether,
had the superintendent been given to figures of speech, he might have
said that Rachel was as much out of place among the preceding one
hundred and seventy-eight bloodless, hollow-chested, stoop-shouldered
applicants as a sunflower would be in a patch of dank white fungi.

He himself was one of those bleached men that you find on the office
floor of department stores. Grey skin, grey eyes, greying hair, careful
grey clothes--seemingly as void of pigment as one of those sunless
things you disclose when you turn over a board that has long lain on the
mouldy floor of a damp cellar. It was only when you looked closely that
you noticed a fleck of golden brown in the cold grey of each eye, and a
streak of warm brown forming an unquenchable forelock that the
conquering grey had not been able to vanquish. It may have been a
something within him corresponding to those outward bits of human
colouring that tempted him to yield to a queer impulse. He whipped from
his breast-pocket the grey-bordered handkerchief, reached up swiftly and
passed one white corner of it down the length of Rachel Wiletzky's
Killarney-rose left cheek. The rude path down which the handkerchief had
travelled deepened to red for a moment before both rose-pink cheeks
bloomed into scarlet. The superintendent gazed rather ruefully from
unblemished handkerchief to cheek and back again.

"Why--it--it's real!" he stammered.

Rachel Wiletzky smiled a good-natured little smile that had in it a dash
of superiority.

"If I was putting it on," she said, "I hope I'd have sense enough to
leave something to the imagination. This colour out of a box would take
a spiderweb veil to tone it down."

Not much more than a score of words. And yet before the half were spoken
you were certain that Rachel Wiletzky's knowledge of lush green fields
and bucolic scenes was that gleaned from the condensed-milk ads that
glare down at one from billboards and street-car chromos. Hers was the
ghetto voice--harsh, metallic, yet fraught with the resonant music of
tragedy.

"H'm--name?" asked the grey superintendent. He knew that vocal quality.

A queer look stole into Rachel Wiletzky's face, a look of cunning and
determination and shrewdness.

"Ray Willets," she replied composedly. "Double l."

"Clerked before, of course. Our advertisement stated--"

"Oh yes," interrupted Ray Willets hastily, eagerly. "I can sell goods.
My customers like me. And I don't get tired. I don't know why, but I
don't."

The superintendent glanced up again at the red that glowed higher with
the girl's suppressed excitement. He took a printed slip from the little
pile of paper that lay on his desk.

"Well, anyway, you're the first clerk I ever saw who had so much red
blood that she could afford to use it for decorative purposes. Step into
the next room, answer the questions on this card and turn it in. You'll
be notified."

Ray Willets took the searching, telltale blank that put its questions so
pertinently. "Where last employed?" it demanded. "Why did you leave? Do
you live at home?"

Ray Willets moved slowly away toward the door opposite. The
superintendent reached forward to press the button that would summon
Applicant No. 180. But before his finger touched it Ray Willets turned
and came back swiftly. She held the card out before his surprised eyes.

"I can't fill this out. If I do I won't get the job. I work over at the
Halsted Street Bazaar. You know--the Cheap Store. I lied and sent word I
was sick so I could come over here this morning. And they dock you for
time off whether you're sick or not."

The superintendent drummed impatiently with his fingers. "I can't listen
to all this. Haven't time. Fill out your blank, and if--"

All that latent dramatic force which is a heritage of her race came to
the girl's aid now.

"The blank! How can I say on a blank that I'm leaving because I want to
be where real people are? What chance has a girl got over there on the
West Side? I'm different. I don't know why, but I am. Look at my face!
Where should I get red cheeks from? From not having enough to eat half
the time and sleeping three in a bed?"

She snatched off her shabby glove and held one hand out before the man's
face.

"From where do I get such hands? Not from selling hardware over at
Twelfth and Halsted. Look at it! Say, couldn't that hand sell silk and
lace?"

Some one has said that to make fingers and wrists like those which Ray
Willets held out for inspection it is necessary to have had at least
five generations of ancestors who have sat with their hands folded in
their laps. Slender, tapering, sensitive hands they were, pink-tipped,
temperamental. Wistful hands they were, speaking hands, an inheritance,
perhaps, from some dreamer ancestor within the old-world ghetto, some
long-haired, velvet-eyed student of the Talmud dwelling within the pale
with its squalor and noise, and dreaming of unseen things beyond the
confining gates--things rare and exquisite and fine.

"Ashamed of your folks?" snapped the superintendent.

"N-no--No! But I want to be different. I am different! Give me a chance,
will you? I'm straight. And I'll work. And I can sell goods. Try me."

That all-pervading greyness seemed to have lifted from the man at the
desk. The brown flecks in the eyes seemed to spread and engulf the
surrounding colourlessness. His face, too, took on a glow that seemed to
come from within. It was like the lifting of a thick grey mist on a
foggy morning, so that the sun shines bright and clear for a brief
moment before the damp curtain rolls down again and effaces it.

He leaned forward in his chair, a queer half-smile on his face.

"I'll give you your chance," he said, "for one month. At the end of that
time I'll send for you. I'm not going to watch you. I'm not going to
have you watched. Of course your sale slips will show the office whether
you're selling goods or not. If you're not they'll discharge you. But
that's routine. What do you want to sell?"

"What do I want to--Do you mean--Why, I want to sell the lacy
things."

"The lacy--"

Ray, very red-cheeked, made the plunge. "The--the lawnjeree, you know.
The things with ribbon and handwork and yards and yards of real lace.
I've seen 'em in the glass case in the French Room. Seventy-nine dollars
marked down from one hundred."

The superintendent scribbled on a card. "Show this Monday morning. Miss
Jevne is the head of your department. You'll spend two hours a day in
the store school of instruction for clerks. Here, you're forgetting your
glove."

The grey look had settled down on him again as he reached out to press
the desk button. Ray Willets passed out at the door opposite the one
through which Rachel Wiletzky had entered.

Some one in the department nick-named her Chubbs before she had spent
half a day in the underwear and imported lingerie. At the store school
she listened and learned. She learned how important were things of which
Halsted Street took no cognisance. She learned to make out a sale slip
as complicated as an engineering blueprint. She learned that a clerk
must develop suavity and patience in the same degree as a customer waxes
waspish and insulting, and that the spectrum's colours do not exist in
the costume of the girl-behind-the-counter. For her there are only black
and white. These things she learned and many more, and remembered them,
for behind the rosy cheeks and the terrier-bright eyes burned the
indomitable desire to get on. And the finished embodiment of all of Ray
Willets' desires and ambitions was daily before her eyes in the presence
of Miss Jevne, head of the lingerie and negligees.

Of Miss Jevne it might be said that she was real where Ray was
artificial, and artificial where Ray was real. Everything that Miss
Jevne wore was real. She was as modish as Ray was shabby, as slim as Ray
was stocky, as artificially tinted and tinctured as Ray was naturally
rosy-cheeked and buxom. It takes real money to buy clothes as real as
those worn by Miss Jevne. The soft charmeuse in her graceful gown was
real and miraculously draped. The cobweb-lace collar that so delicately
traced its pattern against the black background of her gown was real. So
was the ripple of lace that cascaded down the front of her blouse. The
straight, correct, hideously modern lines of her figure bespoke a real
eighteen-dollar corset. Realest of all, there reposed on Miss Jevne's
bosom a bar pin of platinum and diamonds--very real diamonds set in a
severely plain but very real bar of precious platinum. So if you except
Miss Jevne's changeless colour, her artificial smile, her glittering
hair and her undulating head-of-the-department walk, you can see that
everything about Miss Jevne was as real as money can make one.

Miss Jevne, when she deigned to notice Ray Willets at all, called her
"girl," thus: "Girl, get down one of those Number Seventeens for
me--with the pink ribbons." Ray did not resent the tone. She thought
about Miss Jevne as she worked. She thought about her at night when she
was washing and ironing her other shirtwaist for next day's wear. In the
Halsted Street Bazaar the girls had been on terms of dreadful intimacy
with those affairs in each other's lives which popularly are supposed to
be private knowledge. They knew the sum which each earned per week; how
much they turned in to help swell the family coffers and how much they
were allowed to keep for their own use. They knew each time a girl spent
a quarter for a cheap sailor collar or a pair of near-silk stockings.
Ray Willets, who wanted passionately to be different, whose hands so
loved the touch of the lacy, silky garments that made up the lingerie
and negligee departments, recognised the perfection of Miss Jevne's
faultless realness--recognised it, appreciated it, envied it. It worried
her too. How did she do it? How did one go about attaining the same
degree of realness?

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