Part 1 (2/2)

Chippewa--or that comfortable, middle-cla.s.s section of it which got its exercise walking home to dinner from the store at noon, and cutting the gra.s.s evenings after supper--laughed as it read this interview in the Chippewa _Eagle_.

”A golf course,” they repeated to one another, grinning. ”Conklin's cow pasture, up the river. It's full of natural--wait a minute--what was?--oh, yeh, here it is--hazards. Full of natural hazards. Say, couldn't you die!”

For H. Charnsworth Baldwin had been little Henry Baldwin before he went East to college. Ten years later H. Charnsworth, in knickerbockers and gay-topped stockings, was winning the cup in the men's tournament played on the Chippewa golf-club course, overlooking the river. And his name, in stout gold letters, blinked at you from the plate-gla.s.s windows of the office at the corner of Elm and Winnebago:

NORTHERN LUMBER AND LAND COMPANY.

H. CHARNSWORTH BALDWIN, PRES.

Two blocks farther down Elm Street was another sign, not so glittering, which read:

MISS SOPHY DECKER Millinery

Sophy's hat-making, in the beginning, had been done at home. She had always made her sisters' hats, and her own, of course, and an occasional hat for a girl friend. After her sisters had married Sophy found herself in possession of a rather bewildering amount of spare time. The hat trade grew so that sometimes there were six rather botchy little bonnets all done up in yellow paper pyramids with a pin at the top, awaiting their future wearers. After her mother's death Sophy still stayed on in the old house. She took a course in millinery in Milwaukee, came home, stuck up a home-made sign in the parlour window (the untidy cuc.u.mber vines came down), and began her hat-making in earnest. In five years she had opened a shop on a side street near Elm; had painted the old house, installed new plumbing, built a warty stucco porch, and transformed the weedy, gra.s.s-tangled yard into an orderly stretch of green lawn and bright flower-beds. In ten years she was in Elm Street, and the Chippewa _Eagle_ ran a half column twice a year describing her spring and fall openings. On these occasions Aunt Sophy, in black satin, and marcel wave, and her most relentless corsets was, in all the superficial things, not a pleat, or fold, or line, or wave behind her city colleagues. She had all the catch phrases:

”This is awfully good this year.”

”Here's a sweet thing. A Mornet model.... Well, but my dear, it's the style--the line--you're paying for, not the material.”

”I've got the very thing for you. I had you in mind when I bought it.

Now don't say you can't wear henna. Wait till you see it on.”

When she stood behind you as you sat, uncrowned and expectant before the mirror, she would poise the hat four inches above your head, holding it in the tips of her fingers, a precious, fragile thing. Your fascinated eyes were held by it, and your breath as well. Then down it descended, slowly, slowly. A quick pressure. Her fingers firm against your temples.

A little sigh of relieved suspense.

”That's wonderful on you!... You don't! Oh, my dear! But that's because you're not used to it. You know how you said, for years, you had to have a brim, and couldn't possibly wear a turban, with your nose, until I proved to you that if the head-size was only big ... Well, perhaps this needs just a lit-tle lift here. Ju-u-ust a nip. There! That does it.”

And that did it. Not that Sophy Decker ever tried to sell you a hat against your judgment, taste, or will. She was too wise a psychologist and too shrewd a business woman for that. She preferred that you go out of her shop hatless rather than with an unbecoming hat. But whether you bought or not you took with you out of Sophy Decker's shop something more precious than any hatbox ever contained. Just to hear her admonis.h.i.+ng a customer, her good-natured face all aglow:

”My dear, always put on your hat before you get into your dress. I do.

You can get your arms above your head, and set it right. I put on my hat and veil as soon's I get my hair combed.”

In your mind's eye you saw her, a stout, well-stayed figure in tight bra.s.siere and scant petticoat, bare-armed and bare-bosomed, in smart hat and veil, attired as though for the street from the neck up and for the bedroom from the shoulders down.

The East-End set bought Sophy Decker's hats because they were modish and expensive hats. But she managed, miraculously, to gain a large and lucrative following among the paper-mill girls and factory hands as well. You would have thought that any attempt to hold both these opposites would cause her to lose one or the other. Aunt Sophy said, frankly, that of the two, she would have preferred to lose her smart trade.

”The mill girls come in with their money in their hands, you might say.

They get good wages and they want to spend them. I wouldn't try to sell them one of those little plain model hats. They wouldn't understand 'em, or like them. And if I told them the price they'd think I was trying to cheat them. They want a velvet hat with something good and solid on it.

Their fathers wouldn't prefer caviar to pork roast, would they? It's the same idea.”

Her shop windows reflected her business ac.u.men. One was chastely, severely elegant, holding a single hat poised on a slender stick. In the other were a dozen honest arrangements of velvet and satin and plumes.

At the spring opening she always displayed one of those little toques completely covered with violets. No one ever bought a hat like that. No one ever will. That violet-covered toque is a symbol.

”I don't expect 'em to buy it,” Sophy Decker explained. ”But everybody feels there should be a hat like that at a spring opening. It's like a fruit centre-piece at a family dinner. n.o.body ever eats it but it has to be there.”

The two Baldwin children--Adele and Eugene--found Aunt Sophy's shop a treasure trove. Adele, during her doll days, possessed such boxes of satin and velvet sc.r.a.ps, and bits of lace, and ribbon and jet as to make her the envy of all her playmates. She used to crawl about the floor of the shop workroom and under the table and chairs like a little scavenger.

”What in the world do you do with all that truck, child?” asked Aunt Sophy. ”You must have barrels of it.”

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