And Dangerous to Know

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER TWOBargains

Alice Dunbar closed the door behind her. She stood for a few moments leaning her shoulder against it, her hand still on the knob; she felt herself trembling a little, and waited as she was until she had controlled that absurd chattering of the teeth and had stiffened her knees. Then she turned and walked firmly across the room and sat down in front of the low dressing-table.

It was a girl’s room, hardly changed from the day when she had been promoted to it from the nursery. Pink walls, white woodwork, iridescent pink tiles enclosing the gas log fire, maple furniture, Dresden ornaments on the mantelpiece. Pictures in maple frames—flower pieces. One of them was an early effort of her own, a watercolour and an awful daub, she knew very well. But it always got rehung after the walls were repainted.

The curtains and the old-rose rug had been put away for the summer, and their absence gave the room a pleasantly bare look; as if it were ready for a change. But in the autumn the pink curtains would go up again, the imperishable rug go down.

She sat looking at herself closely in the glass. Not bad features, she had never been able to see anything much wrong with them. Baffled by that problem as always, she turned her eyes away from herself and opened a drawer. She took out a large black handbag with a wide, stiff base, which seemed well-filled already. She transferred a few things to it from her other bag, the one she had carried that morning; a compact, a plain handkerchief, a purse with clean notes in it.

She got up, took the small plain hat off the bed and put it on, pulled her gloves on, picked up the handbag, and stood looking about her; seeing nothing, merely thinking whether she had forgotten something. Then she went quietly out into the hall.

The house was silent; all the way downstairs there was not a sound. Her mother would be in her room, her father reading in the upstairs sitting-room—unless he had gone to his office. Not that it mattered. She opened the front door and went out, slammed the great walnut-and-glass bulwark behind her, and descended the steps. Turning left, she walked to Fifth Avenue; turning left again, she went south for several blocks; then she crossed to the park side.

She waited for a bus, boarded it, and settled herself next to a window as for a long ride. She got off at a busy corner in the midtown shopping district, and stood surprised at the crowds; Alice Dunbar had had a vague idea that there were very few people in New York in summer. The Friday afternoon bustle astonished her.

She entered a department store, looking about her as if she was unfamiliar with it, but asking no questions. After a while she found a stocking counter, a table where boxes of stockings were displayed at a reduction. She pushed through the crowd, found a pair of stockings that would fit her, and got hold of a salesgirl. The things were an ugly light colour, and would not last long, but she saw many just like them on the legs that went past in droves up and down the aisles.

A little farther on, at a cosmetics counter, she bought a compact of a lighter powder than her own carefully blended brand, and bright lipstick. The girl was too busy to help her, so she found rouge for herself, thrusting her arm between other women to get it. She held out her hand with the things in it, and they were snatched from her and wrapped. She had to wait for her change.

She fought her way out of the store, crossed the avenue, and went into another bigger place. Here she found a counter where hats were being sold—mere strips of ribbon and cheap flowers. She bought one, and on her way out, a white muslin collar worked with machine-made embroidery. At a nearby ten cent store, she bought a paper shopping bag and put her parcels into it.

On the avenue again, she crossed and took a bus downtown. She got out and walked to a huge emporium which she had often heard of but never seen. Here she acquired a pair of fabric gloves, thick and white; gilt earrings, fastened to a card; and a transparent red raincoat off a rack. Then she went up in the elevator to the ladies’ room.

It was a big place with cross-aisles, and no attendant in sight. She shut herself into a cubicle, changed her stockings, changed her hat, put on the earrings, and, as well as she could without a mirror, adjusted the collar. Afterwards, at one of the long row of mirrors, she fastened the collar more firmly and began to make up. When she had finished she half smiled at the figure in the glass; by her own standards she looked like a clown, but no more clownish than the faces around her; and there was a certain haggard handsomeness about her that she had certainly never had before.

She slipped on the mackintosh, leaving it open. A warm day to be wearing any coat, but perhaps the kind of suburbanite she had turned into would carry one from the end of some mysterious subway line, in case of a thunderstorm, and wear it for convenience.

Would anybody recognize her now? Not her own parents. She had changed more than her appearance, she had changed her whole personality.

Her handbag under her arm, her shopping bag in her white-gloved hand, she went down in the elevator and out into the street. She found an uptown subway station, and stood aghast; shoppers were already making for home. But she finally allowed herself to be swept down the stairs, dropped her dime in the turnstile, and pushed her way into the local that was standing there as if actually waiting for her. The doors closed her in, the lights of the station moved past, there was a roar, and they were in the dark.