Orchids and Overalls

The youthful Mr. Tommy Rogers was calling upon Miss Dale Lowrie Van Zandt Hamilton. Not personally, that is, but in a more or less official capacity. As a matter of fact, Miss D. L. V. Z. Hamilton did not even know him. And had her name in its entirety been pronounced in Mr. Rogers’ hearing, he would have sworn it was that of a patent medicine.

Mr. Rogers rested his kit of tools on the pavement for a second and paused to gaze up at the house he was about to enter. To take it in full he had to throw his head as far back as it would go, so that his chin was the highest part of him. Admiration overcame Mr. Rogers. “Some tenement!” he commented aloud. It was, strangely enough, situated on the same thoroughfare as Mr. Rogers’ own home, but considerably farther down. Mr. Rogers dwelt on Park Avenue — at 124th Street.

Mr. Rogers, having gazed his fill, lowered his chin to the perpendicular once more, retrieved his tool-kit, and went within. With perfect savoir faire he ignored the entrance decked with two antique bronze lamps, two miniature orange-trees set in the tile pots, and two uniformed persons with white gloves, who seemed to have nowhere to go, and turned the corner to descend a short flight of steps into a doorway labeled “Service Entrance.” He rang a bell, and when an elevator innocent of human occupancy had presented itself, rose with it, tool-kit, mottled overalls and all, to some considerable height, until he faced a door that, had he but known it, was Miss Dale Lowrie Van Zandt Hamilton’s back door.

It was opened to him immediately by a most fetching young person, her knee-length black skirt adorned with a square of lace the size of a handkerchief. “Electrician,” he remarked monosyllabically. “Follow me,” she said haughtily.

After he had obediently done so for quite some time, across passages and in and out of rooms, a stern, forbidding person materialized in their path. He wore white gloves.

“Show this gentleman where the meter is,” instructed the dainty guide, and vanished in the surrounding gloom. “Follow me,” ordered the stern forbidding person.

“They work in relays,” young Mr. Rogers assured himself philosophically. “There is a meter, isn’t there?” he asked aloud, with just a shade of anxiety.

“There most certainly is!” his new chaperon snapped. “And watch where you’re going. The young people are playing in the dark somewhere about here.” In fact, a number of muffled screams and gasps issuing from the blackness about him had been making Mr. Rogers’ usually well-behaved nerves rather jumpy.

“Here you are,” said Mr. Rogers’ guide condescendingly. “It’s to the side of the fireplace there. And I trust you won’t leave any more dirt behind you than is strictly necessary.”

Ignoring him, the competent Mr. Rogers promptly dropped his tool-kit to the carpet, squatted on his heels, began to draw on a pair of rubber gloves, and set to work by the light of his trusty torch, tinkering, poking, and whistling in snatches. He was in the act of inserting a new fuse in the box when suddenly his blood froze in his veins. A pair of soft, white arms, coming out of nowhere, had just reached over his shoulders from behind and clasped themselves about him. Dissatisfied, they untwined themselves again and began to travel lightly, tentatively down each arm. The horrified Mr. Rogers managed to snatch at his torch and whirl about on his heels to face this blood-curdling menace, whatever it was.

“You can’t get away,” a soft young voice breathed in his ear. A second later the torch had revealed to him the most adorable sleep-walker he had ever encountered. She was fully dressed, but he could tell beyond a shadow of a doubt that she was walking in her sleep because her hands, leaving his arms, began to flutter gropingly about his face, feeling it here and there.

Entranced, young Mr. Rogers allowed his nose, mouth, chin and jaws to be examined and explored by fingertips light as feathers and soft as silk while he sat back and gazed his fill of the gorgeous being who knew not what she did.

“Kenneth?” she cooed in her sleep, feeling of his left ear as though it were a piece of dress-goods. “No, he’s ticklish,” she corrected herself, still speaking in the same honey-soft, honey-sweet voice that all but bereft the hitherto matter-of-fact Mr. Rogers of his wits. “It must be Walter, then. Tell me, is it?”

With that, as though drawn upward from the floor by an irresistible magnet, Mr. Rogers uncoiled his slender length and reverently placed his lips upon hers.

“Oh, you shouldn’t do that,” she remonstrated gently, “that’s not in the game.”

The inexperienced Mr. Rogers sank back upon his heels again, trembling at his own daring and the results of it. And as he did so, his own shadow, which had been between her and the rays of the uptilted torch, likewise sank out of the way and revealed her entire face in the light for the first time. Until now only the lower part of it had been discernible. She had a handkerchief tied across her eyes. Mr. Rogers’ stomach suddenly felt as though the bottom had fallen out. Was it possible that she was not a sleep-walker after all, that she was as fully awake as he was? What had he done? Mr. Rogers’ point of view had better be explained at this point. His pride was hurt. He had kissed a swell. He, who had always looked down upon swells, had been tricked into kissing one, thinking she was asleep. That was bad enough. But then to find out later that she had been awake all the time and knew about it — that was too much!

Meanwhile the loathsome, if attractive, swell in her little white velvet frock and the diamonds (or things that looked like diamonds) in the buckles on her slippers, had put her hands behind her head and removed the handkerchief. The morose Mr. Rogers looked into her newly revealed eyes sadly, as though his worst fears had just been realized. Nature certainly had no sense. Those eyes should have been standing by themselves in a plush case in Tiffany’s window, with all the trash called jewelry swept out of the way.

The eyes took Mr. Rogers in from head to foot and back again. Then she emitted a slight gasp. “An electrician!”

Mr. Rogers, who felt he had more right to be angered than she at the faux pas he had committed a while ago, said nothing.

“Well, of all the darn nerve!” she added, and swept violently from the room.

Mr. Rogers, scowling and still unable to forgive himself for his betrayal of his family and its traditions, turned and resumed his doctoring of the meter-box.

But she had not gone very far away it seemed, only just far enough to whip up her evaporating indignation. A moment later she was back again, standing over him.

“How would you like me to report you to the company for your impudence?” she demanded crisply, tapping a little foot under her skirt.

“Get out of my light, I can’t see what I’m doing,” was all Mr. Rogers vouchsafed her.

A rather passionate little stamp of the heel succeeded the foot-tapping, and she was gone again. Mr. Rogers sighed relievedly.

When she returned a third time, she came into the room much more slowly. The indignation, meanwhile, had all oozed away. She now had a thoughtful air about her.

“Is that what you always do when you’re working on a job — kiss people?” she demanded coldly.

“Never — what do you think I am?” said young Mr. Rogers shortly, proceeding with his work.

“Then why did you happen to this time?” Coldness had thawed into curiosity.

“Hand me that awl under your foot,” he ordered suddenly.

She passed it to him with a dazed stare. “Don’t you even say ‘please’?”

“No,” he said gruffly.

“Well, I like that!” he heard her mutter bewilderedly.

But instead of being driven away, as he had hoped, she came even closer and developed a sudden interest in his work, crouching over him with her hands to her knees. “You’re not a very good electrician, are you?” she commented finally.

“What do you know about it?” he said resentfully.

“Well, it takes you so long—”

“Maybe I’d get through quicker,” he told her, “if I didn’t have a lot of people hanging around me asking foolish questions.”

“What’s that little round thing there with the glass over it?” she asked sociably.

“That’s the fuse,” he said, “if anything happens to that, it throws the whole works out of order.”

“And the lights go out all over the house and have to be repaired again?” she persisted.

“Didn’t I just finish telling you?” he said, irritably.

There was a sudden cheerful glow of rose and amber on all the walls, and Mr. Rogers began replacing his tools in their kit. He rose and passed her a slip of paper. “Will you have somebody sign this slip, so I can show it at the office when I get back?”

“I’ll sign it myself,” she said readily, “Let me have your pencil.” And using two dotted lines instead of one, she wrote Dale Lowrie Van Zandt Hamilton. “But most of my friends,” she confided, “just call me Dale.” And then she said a surprising thing: “What’s your name?”

Was she going to report him to the company after all for having kissed her, Mr. Rogers wondered apprehensively; was that why she wanted his name? But he had never been a coward, and he wasn’t going to be one now. “Tommy Rogers,” he said, defiantly, looking her straight in the eye. And he picked up his tool-kit, slung it over his shoulder, nodded to her indifferently, and walked out.

“Go down to Park Avenue and Sixty-blank Street,” Tommy, Rogers’ chief told him the following evening, “they’ve had a blow-out. Hamilton. Seventeenth floor.”

“What, again?” demanded young Mr. Rogers truculently, “I just fixed their lights for them last night.”

“Maybe you didn’t fix ’em as good as you thought you did,” commented the chief shrewdly.

“Good,” said Tommy insubordinately, “then send somebody else down instead. It isn’t my shift tonight.”

“I know, I know,” said the chief patiently, “only it happens you were asked for by name. ‘We don’t care to have anyone else attend to the matter.’

“I been with the company thirty-five years,” he concluded, “and it’s the first time I ever heard of a repairman being asked for by name.”

Three-quarters of an hour later young Mr. Rogers, on his hands and knees once more before the Lowrie-Van Zandt-Hamilton electric meter, was swearing under his breath as he extracted quantities of sugar-coated almonds, not to mention a chiffon handkerchief, from the depths of said meter. The lights obediently flashed on once more as he did so, and none other than Miss Dale Lowrie Van Zandt Hamilton herself was revealed sitting in a chair in a far corner of the room, where the light of the torch had not reached her, staring pleadingly and fearfully over at him. The look he gave her was nothing for her to be reassured about.

“You did that,” he accused her instantly, “What are you trying to do, make a fool out of me? The chief thinks I don’t do good work!” And he picked up his tool-kit and prepared to depart, facial muscles working angrily.

She left the chair like a flash and was beside him before he reached the door. “I... I owe you an apology. I don’t know how I came to do that. But then,” she quavered, turning her face away suddenly, “I haven’t known what I’ve been doing ever since I saw you last evening.”

Complete understanding was written on young Mr. Rogers’ face, but he simply stood there looking at her, without saying or doing anything.

“Oh,” she said suddenly, almost fiercely, “I’m only a girl after all — help me a little!”

“What’s this all about?” he said unwillingly at last, “you think you’re in love, is that it?”

“Think?” she echoed passionately, “I know I am, you mean!”

Young Mr. Rogers studied her critically from head to foot. “Look at yourself,” he said at last, “just look at yourself, will you. Pretty satin shoes and ritzy lace dress and orchids on your shoulder and pearls around your neck. Why, you’re just a swell!” He began to laugh, cruelly and loudly, and a little nervously, as though something inside of him hurt while he was doing it. “What would a swell like you know about love?” And turning on his heel, was gone.

But Miss Dale Lowrie Van Zandt Hamilton did not act at all as one might have expected her to act. She neither melted into instant tears nor stood staring dazedly at the door. She rang for the second maid. And while she waited, a peculiar expression made up of equal parts of grimness and determination froze itself onto her lovely face.

“Clara,” said Miss D. L. V. Z. Hamilton, the instant the second maid appeared, “I want the oldest, shiniest tailor-made suit you’ve got. And a beret. And a blouse. And run-down pumps — they’ve got to be run-down. I’ll pay you for them if you’ll let me have them.”

And then glancing down toward the fireplace she noticed a small object lying on the marble. She went over to it and picked it up and examined it curiously. It was a small screw-driver that Mr. Rogers, in his mental agitation, must have left behind. “This,” said Miss D. L. V. Z. Hamilton to herself, “gives me an idea.”

The following day Miss Hamilton had the electric company on the wire. “Mr. Rogers, repair department, please,” she said sweetly. “Tommy Rogers? Who wants me?” his own voice answered. She felt like saying “I do, more than anything in this world.” As a matter of fact what she did say was, “Oh, Mr. Rogers, you left one of your screwdrivers here and I’m keeping it for you. When would you like to come over and get it?”

“Miss Hamilton,” he said gratefully, but with just a touch of irony, “you didn’t have to put yourself out about a little thing like that. I don’t need it; I have a new one.”

What was the use? After all, there was such a thing as pride and self-respect. Wearily, she hung up without another word. It could have been so wonderful — but now it was over before it had even begun.

At his end of the line Mr. Rogers had remained by the phone. For her own sake, he was thinking, she ought to be cured of this infatuation. Couldn’t she see that nothing could ever come of it? If, reasoned Mr. Rogers, she could be made to realize the vast difference between them—

He called her back. “Miss Dale Hamilton?”

“This is Dale.”

“This is Tommy Rogers again. Are you busy on Saturday?”

“No!” she breathed, “no!” Seventeen engagements went smash.

“Well, will you come up to my house with me and have supper with the family?”

She, who had always answered invitations with a languid “I’d love to,” actually couldn’t find words to express her delight. “Will I!” she gasped.

“I’ll call for you when I’m through work,” he said, and hung up.

Saturday afternoon Miss Dale Hamilton donned a blue tailor-made suit which shone at places like the elbow and collar. Around her neck went a string of white coral beads for which, Clara had assured her, there was a great demand at the “five-and-ten.” Her feet were encased in patent pumps veined with cracks. She also had purchased Clara’s imitation alligator handbag and her three-ninety-five imitation felt hat. “Now,” she commented, standing back and studying the effect, “he has no kick coming.” He had none, nor had any other man either. For she looked as radiant as ever, only a little less prosperous, that was all.

Meanwhile Mr. Rogers, having doffed his overalls and donned his Saturday night gray suit, arrived at her door looking neat if inexpensive. “Ready?” he greeted her, “let’s go.”

“Well, how do you like me?” she said as they stood waiting for the Lexington Avenue surface car.

“Much better,” quoth the hard-to-please Mr. Rogers, “much, much better. I only wish you dressed that way all the time!”

Arrived at 124th Street and Park Avenue, they mounted four flights of stairs, hand in hand. Mr. Rogers threw open a door dashingly, led his guest down a long linoleum-covered hall, and arrived at the kitchen, which boasted electricity. He delivered a loud kiss on his mother’s round beaming face, sounding somewhat like the explosion of a small-sized firecracker, and tossed an insulting greeting to his slightly older sister. “H’lo, useless.” He then drew the suddenly stage-frightened Dale into the room almost by main force. “I’ve brought company,” he said. “This is Dale Hamilton. She’s going to have supper with us.”

“Well, now, isn’t that nice,” said Mrs. Rogers hospitably, “I’ll have the table laid in a jiffy.”

“Let me take your hat,” said his sister cordially.

“I hope you like corned beef and cabbage, Miss Hamilton,” Mrs. Rogers said, spreading a checked cloth.

Tommy was watching Dale closely. “I love it,” she said, and looked at him defiantly.

Later she held out her plate and said, “That was delicious. Could I have a little more, please?”

Mrs. Rogers beamed proudly. Tommy looked perplexed, as though his calculations had gone wrong.

“And what does your father do, dear?” Mrs. Rogers asked afterwards, as they sat one on each side of her showing her the family photograph album.

“He works downtown on Wall Street,” Dale answered, blushing.

“Janitor?” said Mrs. Rogers innocently.

“Want to go to a movie?” suggested young Mr. Rogers with surprising abruptness.

Miss Dale Hamilton clasped her hands together ecstatically. “I’d adore it!” she sighed blissfully.

“Don’t forget, we’re expecting you next Saturday,” Mrs. Rogers called down the stairs after them.

“I’ll be here!” Dale promised.

“So that’s what your idea was!” she said somewhat later, in the darkness of the Silver Star Palace. “You thought you’d frighten me away, did you? Well, guess again. I loved it, every moment of it. And I’m coming back again — and again.”

“Just who do you think you’re bluffing?” he said softly.

She took something out of her handbag and pressed it into his palm. “And just to show you that I’m not bluffing — put this on my finger,” she said, “and make me happy.”

He saw something twinkling in the dim light. A diamond ring.

He took her hand and forced it in, and pressed her fingertips cruelly over it. “When I give my girl a ring,” he said to her, “I buy the ring. You ever show me that again, and I’ll let you go home by yourself!”

“Tommy,” she said, riding home with him on the Lexington Avenue car, “it isn’t because there’s — some one else, is it?”

“There isn’t anyone else,” Tommy told her, “and there isn’t you, either.”

A forlorn look came into her eyes as he left her at the canopied entrance with the potted orange trees. She quickly banished it and said, as she turned to go in, “I’ve always had what I wanted — and I’ll get what I want now, too.”

Events, for the next several weeks, proceeded with an almost monotonous regularity. Twice a week without fail, usually on Tuesdays and Thursdays, the Hamilton ménage had electricity trouble. Strangely enough, this trouble was never reported directly to the company, it was always reported personally to young Mr. Rogers. It was noticeable that Dale never went out on those evenings.

And Saturday evenings, on the contrary, nothing could keep her at home — nor induce her to dine at home. On one occasion Mrs. Hamilton, returning from an afternoon bridge party, passed a rather shabbily dressed young person who kept her head averted in the doorway of the downstairs lobby.

But from that time on Dale used the service entrance and the service elevator on Saturdays. Clara’s rundown pumps became even more rundown from dancing in chop suey restaurants, and the heavenly bliss of the back seat on top of a Fifth Avenue bus was no longer a secret to Dale.

“But if it’s only the money,” she said a hundred times to Tommy, “I’d leave it all. I don’t want it anyway. Suppose I came with just the clothes I have on now?”

“Oh, don’t torture me,” he’d plead, “I wish I’d never met you.”

“But you do love me, now, and you have from the very beginning. Oh, Tommy, Tommy, what are you doing to both of us?”

But Tommy was stubborn; he wasn’t marrying any rich girl, not even if she happened to be the girl he loved.

“But I can’t go on like this, Tommy,” she said at last. “I have to have something to hope for, to look forward to. Won’t you at least say that if I was poor you’d marry me?”

“If you were poor,” Tommy told her, “I wouldn’t marry anyone but you.”

That night she cried herself to sleep. How on earth was she ever going to make herself poor, when all her father did all day from ten to five (with an hour off for lunch) was to sit and clip coupons?

One night at Palisades Park they came upon a gilt ring at the bottom of a bag of popcorn. “Hold out your finger,” said Tommy suddenly. “Now wear this,” he went on, “until I make enough money, or you lose enough, for us to be equals.”

So all might have gone well for a while longer, had not the majestic Mrs. Hamilton begun to “put two and two together.”

“Dale,” she said sharply at the breakfast table one morning, “I don’t know why, but I have an impression you’ve been tampering with the lights in this house. And I notice it always happens on the nights you remain at home. Of course, if you’re that interested in electricity, there are other ways of studying it.”

“And what,” she demanded several mornings later on, “is that most peculiar thing you have on your finger? No, don’t hide it, let me look at it. Why, it’s brass!” she ejaculated in horror.

“It may be brass,” said Dale huskily as she got up to leave the table, “but it’s wonderful!”

That very evening was Tuesday, one of the fateful Tuesdays and Thursdays. “I am going to the theater with a friend,” Mrs. Hamilton announced, standing in the doorway in mink. “Your father telephones that he doesn’t like the way the market’s behaving at all; he’s spending the night at his club.”

“Enjoy yourself,” Dale called after her.

Ten minutes later the lights went out all over the house. Dale lifted the telephone receiver — she had been sitting beside it all along, anyway — and after getting her connection, simply uttered four words. “All right, Tommy dear.”

For the next fifteen or twenty minutes there was not a sound in the house. Then the white moon of an electric flashlight made its way from room to room, and Tommy’s voice called out, “Here we are!”

“Dale dear!”

“Tommy dear!”

“Wait, I’ll put the lights on first.”

“I just put an old glove in the box this time, dearest.”

The lights flashed on again as they had so many times before, and then a third voice said: “And now, young man, would you mind going — and not coming back again? I have a few words I’d like to say to my daughter.” And Mrs. Hamilton stood in the doorway, still in the mink wrap.

“Take me along with you, Tommy,” said Dale at once. “This is as good a time as any other.”

“Don’t disobey your mother on my account, Dale. I’m not worth it.” And Tommy went alone.

Mrs. Hamilton, after all, had surprisingly little to say to her daughter. In fact she only said one thing. “Keeping company with an electrician in overalls!” And when Dale had gone to her room, she locked the door on the outside.

In the morning when she rose Dale found it unlocked once more. The breakfast table, when she had seated herself at it, resembled, as she had expected, nothing so much as a funeral board. In fact, shortly after she had taken her place at it, her mother began to sob loudly over her grapefruit. Mr. Hamilton kept running his fingers up and down where his hair should have been.

“Oh, for pity’s sake,” said Dale finally, “start in and let’s get it over with! I can’t stand this!”

“It’s not about you at all,” sobbed Mrs. Hamilton noisily, “there are other th-things more im-important right now. The market crashed — we’re wiped out.” She looked around reproachfully, but Dale had gone.

Like many others in the city that night, young Mr. Tommy Rogers was not whistling as he proceeded from his place of work to his residence. Nor did he ascend the four flights of stairs with any great sprightliness when he had reached there. The gas jets on the landing did not even flicker as he passed lethargically by them. He trudged dispiritedly down the hallway and entered the family kitchen. And there before him sat Miss D. L. V. Z. Hamilton, between his mother and sister. She was not in her maid’s blue tailor-made any longer, nor in her maid’s cracked pumps. Quite the opposite. Her little beige shoes must have cost about as much as the Rogers’ rent for one month. A light fur scarf hung jauntily over one shoulder. A little silver mesh-bag — or maybe it was platinum — dangled from her wrist. Before her stood a cup of tea, a dish of Mrs. Rogers’ doughnuts, and a newspaper with glaring headlines. Behind her, on the floor, stood four or five cowhide valises and hatboxes.

“Oh, so you’ve come over to say goodbye,” said Tommy, going all weak inside. “Where are they taking you?”

“Isn’t it too bad about Dale?” interrupted his sister.

“Yes,” said his mother, “why didn’t you tell us she was rich, the poor dear?”

Dale stood up. She was triumphant, she was radiant. “Read that!” she said, passing him the newspaper.

“Oh, I’m so happy!” she cried. “Everything has to go — the apartment, the cars, mother’s jewelry. I signed my personal account over to father this morning, to help him out. Well,” she demanded, shooting gold and sapphire arrows at him from under her lashes, “what’s to stop us now, stubborn?”

“N-nothing,” Tommy faltered, “but are you sure you’re not fooling me? What about the way you’re dressed?”

“Well, I like that!” she said haughtily. “That’s my trousseau. No matter how poor a girl is, she’s entitled to a trousseau — ask anybody.”