Home Fires in France

by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

"Do you mean," I was ready to laugh at him, "that you think that our Morris furniture influenced us so deeply as all that? Even Morris would be surprised to hear so much claimed for it."

He was scornful of my incapacity to grasp the scope of his idea. "No, Lord no! The Morris furniture hadn't anything more to do with it than a tree bent double with the storm has to do with making the wind blow. I mean that the same thing that made us mortgage our souls to have Morris furniture just then, made us also talk slang and wear yellow shoes to funerals."

"Well, what did make us?" I challenged him.

He answered monosyllabically, solemnly, with his redoubtable, arresting conviction, "The style did."

We were both silent a moment as if in the presence of Niagara or the ocean.

Then I said, in a feebler challenge, "Well, what is 'the style'?"

He professed the admirable ignorance of a wise man in the face of mystery.

"I wish I knew. It looks to me like a big current that takes in everything, that is so big we don't know it's there, just the way people didn't use to know the world was round, because it is too big to see. And it carries us along like dry leaves and where it's going to, nobody knows. We know just as much about it, as we do about where water runs underground; which is to say, nothing. But when it comes to that part of style that makes hats and dresses, there are a few people who can hold a hazel-rod and have it point downwards, and they are oftener right than the rest of us. And every one of those few is French and lives in Paris. Don't ask me why! That's the way it is. And it would be enough sight more convenient for me, let me tell you, if it were otherwise."

I understood this exclamation, having learned by this time how great an affliction to Mr. Williams personally were these semi-annual trips to France. He knew nothing of Paris outside of the great modistes' shops, and he cared less. Since he knew no French the theaters were closed to him. Since he was mildly musical (he played the violin a little) concerts helped a little to allay his ennui; but only a little. Being a family man of very domestic tastes, he took slight part in the very cheerful proceedings with which the other buyers whiled away the hours between business operations, and although he was invited to their gay suppers in expensive restaurants, he struck an austere note there, drinking only water, not smoking, and eating sparingly of simple dishes, quite evidently counting the hours till he could get back to America and to his garden in Westchester County.

In spite of this lack of appreciation of what was offered him, he was very frequently invited to the nightly feasts of his young confrères, and they hung about him eagerly because of their superstitious reverence for what they called his "hunch." "Whatever Grandpa says is going to go, goes," was their expressed belief. They tried by ingenious devices to exploit his scent for the style, to be within earshot when he was making selections, to suborn the milliners into showing them the models he had selected. Such crude, outright efforts at getting the better of him he defeated with a wary dexterity, getting up and leaving a shop abruptly if one of his rivals began to loiter too near him, and letting it be known that he would buy no more from any milliner who reproduced "his" models for one of the other American buyers. This last precaution was not necessary, for the sense of professional honor and jealousy is not keener among doctors themselves than among Paris fashion-makers, nor was the capacity for darkly guarding secrets more developed in Renaissance Italian poisoners than in a twentieth-century modiste's shop on the Place Vendôme. Also Mr. Williams, who had seen a whole generation of modistes grow up and disappear into old age, enjoyed the very high esteem of those quick-eyed, quick-fingered, quick-witted ladies with the wonderful simple coiffures and the wonderful simple hats. This was not solely because of the very large sums of money which were at his disposition and which he spent with Napoleonic decision and despatch. They respected his competence also. "There is one who can appreciate our work!" they said of him. "He always picks out the best. There is one who could have made hats, himself!" A characterization which the American would have repudiated with energy if he could have understood a word they were saying.