But with any of those I have to stop too often for explanations. Mrs. Garr’s house, I’ve found, isn’t a house into which I can just plump you down. You need introductions. And so, at last, I have come around to begin at the beginning, giving you all the detail first, telling you, first, the little incidents which were to grow into such heart-shaking happenings. For the seeds of the mystery lay either in happenings which seemed at the time to bear no relationship to each other or to life in Mrs. Garr’s house, or else in very small things, in incidents which might easily have meant nothing at all; incidents which, at the time, I considered myself silly for noting and wondering over.
First of all, as long as I’m telling this, and the only way you can go back in time and get into Mrs. Garr’s house during those event-crammed weeks is by living there through me, I’m afraid you’ll have to know, first, who and what I am and how I got to Mrs. Garr’s house.
The whole thing began, for me, with a lost job.
I’m Gwynne Dacres, Mrs. Dacres. I’m twenty-six and divorced; I was married for six months when I was twenty-two—it took only that long for Carl Dacres to decide I was more of a wife and less of a nurse than he wanted. The last I heard of him, he was blissfully coddling his hypochondriac’s soul with a day nurse and a night nurse, hired, down in South Carolina somewhere. The only thing I got out of my marriage was a bunch of complexes; I didn’t ask alimony.
At Easter, this spring, I had been working in the advertising department at Tellier’s for three years. Then, suddenly, I wasn’t working at all.
There was drama, if you like that kind.
People as unimportant as advertising copywriters in a store as big as Tellier’s aren’t invited into the office of Mr. William Tellier, the president, very often. But I was bidden there at three o’clock of the Monday after Easter. I walked in to face Mr. Gangan, the advertising manager who was my boss, five vice presidents, and Mr. Tellier himself, all standing, all steel. On Mr. Tellier’s desk was spread my own check sheet—I read the proofs of fashion ads—for that day’s ad. Mr. Tellier bent toward it silkily.
“You recognize this proof, Mrs. Dacres?”
“Yes, it’s my noon check sheet.”
“You see this?”
The ad was a full-page ad for the big after-Easter sales, and across the top ran a big headline in 60 point caps and lower case:
Tellier’s—
Where People Save!
What he was pointing at was my own scribbled notation at the side: “Change to 60 point caps.”
“Certainly,” I said. “The order to change the type came out on Mr. Gangan’s revised proof this morning.”
“Exactly. Then perhaps,” he said, and his voice was awful, “perhaps you also recognize this?”
He picked up the check sheet, and under it was spread the first edition of that night’s Gilling City Comet, opened to our ad, with the proof the paper had sent that noon right beside it. And on them both, on them both, blaring in 60 point capitals, was:
TELLIER’S—
WHERE PEOPLE SLAVE!
It didn’t take even a split second to get it. I raised my eyes to Mr. Gangan’s, opened my mouth to say what my instinct for self-preservation shouted to me to say.
But I shut my mouth again.
Only ruthlessness can raise a man to executive power at Tellier’s. If I said what I had to say, I’d never again get a job in advertising in any department store in the United States. Mr. Gangan would see to that.
When I walked out of Tellier’s big swinging doors, jobless, I fastened my mind, to keep its balance, on the laughter that must be rocking the town. For once a Tellier’s ad had told the truth whole.
At the Comet offices, I knew that a printer and a proofreader were losing their jobs, too.
What I hadn’t said in my defense was that Mr. Gangan had ordered me to shop a rival store’s showing of new fabrics that noon, saying that he would have someone else check the noon proofs.
He’d forgotten, of course. Easy to forget. But he’d have taken hell if I’d told, and he’d have made it hell for me, and I’d have lost my job anyway. Now, at least, he’d recommend me—secretly.
Well, I knew, going through those swinging doors, exactly where I stood. It was almost April. The slow summer season was right ahead. The other stores would be suspicious of a recently fired Tellier’s copywriter after this riot—even if they didn’t want one to read proof. I had no earthly chance of getting another steady job before heavy advertising began again in August and September; perhaps not then.
I had exactly $278.32 in the bank.
—
NO JOB. TWO HUNDRED and seventy-eight dollars and thirty-two cents in the bank. I supposed I should be glad I had that much.
But if you’ve ever been on your own and out of a job—it’s an experience plenty of people have shared with me—you’ll know how I did feel, and glad wasn’t any part of it.
I tried to shake it off, going home in the streetcar; tried to think instead of things I could do: look over the Help Wanteds, apply at all the other stores in town, do something about the way I lived. How could I afford thirty-five dollars a month for an apartment, on nothing a week?
But when I stood in my living room with the door locked behind me, I didn’t think I could give the apartment up. It had been my harbor and refuge for two years; I’d created it myself; I loved it. I looked at my blue rug, my blue window hangings, my white lamps; looked at the sofa I’d had reupholstered gorgeously in blue satin on the strength of a raise the year before, looked at my clear, light salmon walls, so delectably lovely; looked at my grandmother’s old rug on the wall,
