CHAPTER V

WHERE MILDRED GOT NEXT

There's nothin' wins out surer in this town of New York than puttin' up a good front. If you've got the fur coat and the goggles on your cap, you can walk or ride on a transfer, and folks'll take it as a cinch that your bubble's back in the garage bein' fitted with a new set of hundred-dollar tires. Why, just the smell of benzine on a suit you've had out to the cleaners will give 'em the dream, if you throw your chest out right.

Look at the way Mildred has us goin'. Maybe you don't know about Mildred. Say, I'll bet if you met up with her on Fift'-ave. you'd hold your breath till she got by and wonder whether she was a Vanderbilt or one of the Goulds! But she floats into the Corrugated Trust offices more or less reg'lar every day, just the same, and does her little stunt on the typewriter at so much per. Honest, when I sees her sailin' in mornin's, with all her swell drygoods on, I'm just as liable as not to half break my neck openin' the door for her. That's what I did the first time I saw her, when I was new on the gate.

"This way, lady," says I, and when she pikes right by and heads for the cloakroom I almost has a fit.

Maybe there's some hot ones down around Broad-st. that drives to business in cabs and pounds the keys durin' office hours; but for a genuine, mercerized near silk we stand ready to back Mildred against the field. She'd have an expert guessin', Mildred would. "Miss Morgan" is the way she figures on the payroll; but that never sounded rich enough for me.

It was the first week I was there that I begun to get a line on Mildred.

One day the old man calls me in and hands me a letter that's been put on his desk for him to sign. He was plum color, Old Hickory was, so mad he could have chewed a file.

"Boy," says he, "take this into the main office, find out who M. M. is, and bring her in here. Anybody that can spell in that fashion I want to take a good look at."

Think of the shock I gets when Piddie tells me them letters stand for Mildred Morgan.

"Lady," says I, "I hates to say it, but the boss is waitin' to hand out a call-down to you. Don't you go to gettin' scared stiff, though; for the first cussword he lets go of I'll chuck a chair at him."

The smile I gets for that would have been worth half a dozen jobs. I was lookin' for her to go white and begin bitin' her upper lip, like they usually does; but she ain't that kind--not on your nameplate! She just peels off the sleeve protectors, sets her side combs in firm, gives her face a dab or so with the rabbit's foot, and starts along after me, with that new antelope walk of hers, as easy and pleased as if she'd been asked to come to the front and pour tea.

And she's got the costume the part calls for, mind you! They're the only clothes of the kind I ever see wore into this buildin'. I couldn't say what they was made of; but I know they're the b.u.t.ton-up-the-back style, and that they stick to her as if they'd been put on by a paper-hanger. I guess you'd call Mildred a 1911 model. Anyway, she seems to bulge in the right places; though how anyone so long-waisted as that can get themselves into such a rig without callin' for help is somethin' I pa.s.ses up.

Well, I tows her into the boss's office, feelin' as mean as a welsher.

The old man has settled back in his chair, a cigar pointin' out of one corner of his mouth, and a letter in one fist. While I'm gone he's run across another, worse than the first, by the marks he's made on it, and he's got to the point where a thermometer slipped down the back of his neck would go off like a cap pistol.

"See here!" says he, growlin' it out grouchy, without lookin' up. "I'd like to have you run your eye over that, and then tell me where in thunder you learned to spell such s-u-t-c-h!"

"Why," says she, "I always spell it that way; don't you?"

"Don't I!" roars the old man. "Do you take me for a----"

Then he looks up. Well, say, you talk about your fadin' sunsets! Nothin'

I ever see beat the way the boss lost his crushed raspb'rry face tint and bleached out salmon pink. "Why--why--er--are you sure this is some of your work, young woman?"

"Oh yes, indeed," says she, kind of gurgly and aristocratic and as sweet as pie, "that's mine. But you've made so many horrid marks on it that I shall have to do it all over again."

"Yes," says he, "I'm afraid that's so. But we have a way here, you know, of spelling explicit with a C instead of an S."

"Ruhlly?" says she. "How odd!"

"It's one of our fads, too," goes on the old man, "not to spell Corrugated g-a-i-t-e-d. We've simplified it by leaving out the I. Of course, we don't expect you to learn all these things at once; but pick 'em up as fast as you can. That--that's all. Thank you very much, Miss--er----What's the name?"

"Morgan," says she, "Mildred Morgan."

"Ah," says the boss, "very much obliged, Mil--er--Miss Morgan," and before I could get to the door he has hopped up and opened it for her.

Then he turns around and sees me standin' there grinnin'. "Torchy," says he, "are there any more like that around the shop?"

"None that I ever saw," says I.

"Thank Heaven!" says he. "Send in one of the other kind."

"Want a real ripe one?" says I.

He does. And say, we got plenty of them. I picks out one with washed-out eyes, front teeth that sticks out, and no shape to speak of. She could make the typewriter do a double shuffle, though, and there couldn't anybody around the place sling out words faster'n she could take 'em down on her pad, or any she couldn't spell right the first crack. The old man fixes it that she's to go over Mildred's work with an ink eraser before it comes to him.

If Mildred knew about it, she never let on. Nothin' much bothered her.

She'd come sailin' in any old time durin' the forenoon, lookin' as han'some as a florist's window and actin' as if she never heard of such a thing as a time clock. Piddie tackles her only once.

"Miss Morgan," says he, "business begins here at nine o'clock promptly."

"How absurd!" says Mildred, and Piddie don't get over the shock for an hour.

About the second week all hands took a vote that Mildred wa'n't much of a success as a typewriter artist and that she ought to be fired. The old man put it up to Mr. Robert, and Mr. Robert shoves it back at him. Then they both loaded it onto Piddie and cleared out. When they come back they asks him if he's done it.

"Well," says he, colorin' up, "not exactly."

Come to make him own up, he'd gone at the job so easy and had been so polite about it that Miss Morgan has time to head him off with a strike for more pay, and before he can back out he's promised to see what can be done.

"Couldn't you talk to her, Mr. Ellins?" says he.

"Great Scott, no!" says the boss. "Tell her she's raised, and let it go at that."

For awhile, though, Mildred cost the firm a lot more money than her salary, if you reckon up as worth anything the time a lot of two-by-four ink-slingers spent makin' goo-goo eyes at her. It was a losin' game all around. Mildred didn't seem to be pinin' for any such honors, and after they got well acquainted with the fact that she wouldn't stand for lunch invites, or bids to the theater, and didn't want to be walked home with by a perfect gent, they let up on that foolishness. It leaves 'em dizzy, though. There's pinheads on our gen'ral office staff who believes they never missed breakin' a heart before, and they can't figure out just what's the matter with the combination.

There was others, too, that couldn't place Mildred, until some one hints that maybe she's a sure enough swell whose folks had gone broke, and that she's picked out a typewriter job as a sort of trapdoor that would let her down out of sight and keep the meal ticket renewed.

After that Mildred is as much of a myst'ry as why folks live in Brooklyn. We was all wise to the main proposition, though, and it was funny to hear 'em all sayin' that they'd known it right along. Kind of set us up some, too, havin' a real ex-ice cutter like her right on the floor with us. All the other key pounders, that had been givin' her the stary eye at first, flops around and uses the sugar shaker. There wasn't anything they wouldn't do for her, and they takes turns holdin' her jacket, so's to get a peek at the trademark on the inside of the collar.

But Piddie is the most pleased of any. He thinks he's right to home among carriage folks, and every time she comes near he bows and sc.r.a.pes and begins to shoot off the "Aw, I'm suah's" and the "Don'tcher know's,"

until you'd think he was talkin' through a mouthful of hot breakfast food.

"Chee!" says I to him. "You act like you thought this was a five o'clock tea."

"I trust," says he, "I know a lady when I see one, and that I know how to treat her too."

"That's so," says I. "Too bad you wa'n't on the stage, Piddie, in one of them 'Me lu'd, the carriage waits' parts."

That gives me a cue, and the next time she sends me for supplies I says to him, "Mr. Piddie," says I, "the Lady Mildred presents her compliments and says she wants a new paste brush."

Gets him wild, that does; so I sticks to it. The others hears it and picks it up too, and she wa'n't called anything but Lady Mildred from that on. First thing I knew I'd said it to her face; but she never so much as looks surprised. You'd thought she'd been called Lady Mildred all her life.

"Who knows?" says Piddie. "Perhaps she has."

Honest, we was makin' up all kinds of pipe dreams about her, and believin' 'em as we went along. There was no findin' out from her what was so and what she wa'n't. She never gets real chummy with anyone; but keeps us jollied along about so much. It was dead easy. All she had to do was to throw a smile our way, and we was tickled for a week. Wasn't anyone around the place needed so much waitin' on as her; but no one ever minds. Gen'rally there was two or three on the jump for her, and others willin' to be.