These hands fascinated Win. They beckoned her gaze and held it. Slowly they came up and drew attention to themselves, silently filching it from Broadway's emblems of
business success. The stranger in New York stopped involuntarily as if hypnotized, watching for the ten colossal outspread fingers to materialize on their unseen frames; to become hands, with wrists and upraised arms; and then to drop out of sight, like the last appeal for help of a drowning Atlas who had lost his grip on the globe.
Yet this immense, arresting gesture was never the last. Three seconds gone, then blazing back again, came fingers, hands, wrists, arms. And on every one of the ten fingers (including thumbs) flashed a huge ring, each different from the other in colour and design. Each ring was adorned with a jewelled letter, and as the hands reached toward the zenith the colour of the rings changed rapidly twice. It was impossible to remove the eyes from this sign until the gesture pageant had completed itself. To the lost dryad New York seemed dominated by Peter Rolls's Hands.
THE TWO PETERS
The hands of Peter Rolls!
They had Winifred Child's imagination in their grip. Sleeping and waking, she saw the glitter of their rings. For on her first night in New York Mr. Löwenfeld told her a story about the hands.
They were the hands of Peter senior. His commercial genius had spread them across the sky to beckon the public to his great new department store on Sixth Avenue. Just as at the beginning of the gesture you saw only the tips of the fingers, so Peter Rolls, Sr., had begun with a tiny flicker, the first groping of his inspiration feeling its way to success.
Everybody in the United States had heard of Peter Rolls, or it was not the fault of the magazines and Sunday papers. Peter Rolls had been for years one of the greatest advertisers in America. Mr. Winfield didn't see how, even on a remote little island like England, Miss Child could have escaped hearing about Peter Rolls's hands. This had now become the snappy way of saying that you intended to shop at Peter Rolls's store: "I'm going to the Hands." "I'll get that at the Hands." And Peter Rolls had emphasized the phrase on the public tongue by his method of advertising.
Each advertisement that appeared took the same form—a square space heavily outlined in black or colour, held up by a pair of ringed hands, facsimiles in miniature of his famous sky sign. And the several thousand salespeople in the huge store were slangily nicknamed "Peter Rolls's hands." But naturally these insignificant morsels of the great mosaic were not spelled with a capital H, unless, perhaps by themselves, and once when a vaudeville favourite sang a song, "I'm a Hand, I'm a Hand." It was a smart song, and made a hit; but Peter Rolls was said to have paid both the star and the management.