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One Hundred Per Cent
by
“By Jove, Emma! Listen to this! Pershing says if we have one m–“
“Stop right there! We’ve become pretty well acquainted in the last three years, T.A. But if you haven’t learned that if there’s one thing I can’t endure, it’s being fed across the table with scraps of the day’s news, I shall have to consider our marriage a failure.”
“Oh, very well. I merely thought you’d be–“
“I am. But there’s something about having it read to you–“
On the second morning Emma, hurriedly fastening the middle button of her blouse on her way downstairs, collided with her husband, who was shrugging himself into his coat. They continued their way downstairs with considerable dignity and pronounced leisure. The paper lay on the hall table. They reached for it. There was a moment–just the fraction of a minute–when each clutched a corner of it, eying the other grimly. Then both let go suddenly, as though the paper had burned their fingers. They stared at each other, surprise and horror in their gaze. The paper fell to the floor with a little slap. Both stooped for it, apologetically. Their heads bumped. They staggered back, semi-stunned.
Emma found herself laughing, rather wildly. Buck joined in after a moment–a rueful laugh. She was the first to recover.
“That settles it. I’m willing to eat trick bread and whale meat and drink sugarless coffee, but I draw the line at hating my husband for the price of a newspaper subscription. White paper may be scarce but so are husbands. It’s cheaper to get two newspapers than to set up two establishments.”
They were only two among many millions who, at that time, were playing an amusing and fashionable game called Win the War. They did not realize that the game was to develop into a grim and magnificently functioning business to whose demands they would cheerfully sacrifice all that they most treasured.
Of late, Emma had spent less and less time in the offices of the Featherloom Company. For more than ten years that flourishing business, and the career of her son, Jock McChesney, had been the twin orbits about which her existence had revolved. But Jock McChesney was a man of family now, with a wife, two babies, and an uncanny advertising sense that threatened to put his name on the letterhead of the Raynor Advertising Company of Chicago. As for the Featherloom factory–it seemed to go of its own momentum. After her marriage to the firm’s head, Emma’s interest in the business was unflagging.
“Now look here, Emma,” Buck would say. “You’ve given enough to this firm. Play a while. Cut up. Forget you’re the ‘And Company’ in T.A. Buck & Co.”
“But I’m so used to it. I’d miss it so. You know what happened that first year of our marriage when I tried to do the duchess. I don’t know how to loll. If you take Featherlooms away from me I’ll degenerate into a Madam Chairman. You’ll see.”
She might have, too, if the War had not come along and saved her.
By midsummer the workrooms were turning out strange garments, such as gray and khaki flannel shirts, flannelette one-piece pajamas, and woollen bloomers, all intended for the needs of women war workers going abroad.
Emma had dropped into the workroom one day and had picked up a half-finished gray flannel garment. She eyed it critically, her deft fingers manipulating the neckband. A little frown gathered between her eyes.
“Somehow a woman in a flannel shirt always looks as if she had quinsy. It’s the collar. They cut them like a man’s small-size. But a woman’s neck is as different from a man’s as her collarbone is.”
She picked up a piece of flannel and smoothed it on the cutting-table. The head designer had looked on in disapproval while her employer’s wife had experimented with scraps of cloth, and pins, and chalk, and scissors. But Emma had gone on serenely cutting and snipping and pinning. They made up samples of service shirts with the new neck-hugging collar and submitted them to Miss Nevins, the head of the woman’s uniform department at Fyfe & Gordon’s. That astute lady had been obliged to listen to scores of canteeners, nurses, secretaries, and motor leaguers who, standing before a long mirror in one of the many fitting-rooms, had gazed, frowned, fumbled at collar and topmost button, and said, “But it looks so–so lumpy around the neck.”