They had run a model plane construction contest; it was open to all boys under the age of ten who wished to send in three new subscriptions to the Banner. Gail Wynand, who was a licensed pilot, had made a solo flight from Los Angeles to New York, establishing a transcontinental speed record, in a small, specially built craft costing one hundred thousand dollars. He had made a slight miscalculation on reaching New York and had been forced to land in a rocky pasture; it had been a hair-raising landing, faultlessly executed; it had just so happened that a battery of photographers from the Banner were present in the neighborhood. Gail Wynand had stepped out of the plane. An ace pilot would have been shaken by the experience. Gail Wynand had stood before the cameras, an immaculate gardenia in the lapel of his flying jacket, his hand raised with a cigarette held between two fingers that did not tremble. When questioned about his first wish on returning to earth, he had expressed the desire to kiss the most attractive woman present, had chosen the dowdiest old hag from the crowd and bent to kiss her gravely on the forehead, explaining that she reminded him of his mother.
Later, at the start of the slum campaign, Gail Wynand had said to Alvah Scarret; “Go ahead. Squeeze all you can out of the thing,” and had departed on his yacht for a world cruise, accompanied by an enchanting aviatrix of twenty-four to whom he had made a present of his transcontinental plane.
Alvah Scarret went ahead. Among many other steps of his campaign he assigned Dominique Francon to investigate the condition of homes in the slums and to gather human material. Dominique Francon had just returned from a summer in Biarritz; she always took a whole summer’s vacation and Alvah Scarret granted it, because she was one of his favorite employees, because he was baffled by her and because he knew that she could quit her job whenever she pleased.
Dominique Francon went to live for two weeks in the hall bedroom of an East-Side tenement. The room had a skylight, but no windows; there were five flights of stairs to climb and no running water. She cooked her own meals in the kitchen of a numerous family on the floor below; she visited neighbors, she sat on the landings of fire escapes in the evenings and went to dime movies with the girls of the neighborhood.
She wore frayed skirts and blouses. The abnormal fragility of her normal appearance made her look exhausted with privation in these surroundings; the neighbors felt certain that she had TB. But she moved as she had moved in the drawing room of Kiki Holcombe–with the same cold poise and confidence. She scrubbed the floor of her room, she peeled potatoes, she bathed in a tin pan of cold water. She had never done these things before; she did them expertly. She had a capacity for action, a competence that clashed incongruously with her appearance. She did not mind this new background; she was indifferent to the slums as she had been indifferent to the drawing rooms.
At the end of two weeks she returned to her penthouse apartment on the roof of a hotel over Central Park, and her articles on life in the slums appeared in the Banner. They were a merciless, brilliant account.
She heard baffled questions at a dinner party. “My dear, you didn’t actually write those things?”
“Dominique, you didn’t really live in that place?”
“Oh, yes,” she answered. “The house you own on East Twelfth Street, Mrs. Palmer,” she said, her hand circling lazily from under the cuff of an emerald bracelet too broad and heavy for her thin wrist, “has a sewer that gets clogged every other day and runs over, all through the courtyard. It looks blue and purple in the sun, like a rainbow.”
“The block you control for the Claridge estate, Mr. Brooks, has the most attractive stalactites growing on all the ceilings,” she said, her golden head leaning to her corsage of white gardenias with drops of water sparkling on the lusterless petals.
She was asked to speak at a meeting of social workers. It was an important meeting, with a militant, radical mood, led by some of the most prominent women in the field. Alvah Scarret was pleased and gave her his blessing. “Go to it, kid,” he said, “lay it on thick. We want the social workers.” She stood in the speaker’s pulpit of an unaired hall and looked at a flat sheet of faces, faces lecherously eager with the sense of their own virtue. She spoke evenly, without inflection. She said, among many other things: “The family on the first floor rear do not bother to pay their rent, and the children cannot go to school for lack of clothes. The father has a charge account at a corner speak-easy. He is in good health and has a good job….The couple on the second floor have just purchased a radio for sixty-nine dollars and ninety-five cents cash. In the fourth floor front, the father of the family has not done a whole day’s work in his life, and does not intend to. There are nine children, supported by the local parish. There is a tenth one on its way…” When she finished there were a few claps of angry applause. She raised her hand and said: “You don’t have to applaud. I don’t expect it.” She asked politely: “Are there any questions?” There were no questions.
When she returned home she found Alvah Scarret waiting for her. He looked incongruous in the drawing room of her penthouse, his huge bulk perched on the edge of a delicate chair, a hunched gargoyle against the glowing spread of the city beyond a solid wall of glass. The city was like a mural designed to illuminate and complete the room: the fragile lines of spires on a black sky continued the fragile lines of the furniture; the lights glittering in distant windows threw reflections on the bare, lustrous floor; the cold precision of the angular structures outside answered the cold, inflexible grace of every object within. Alvah Scarret broke the harmony. He looked like a kindly country doctor and like a cardsharp. His heavy face bore the benevolent, paternal smile that had always been his passkey and his trademark. He had the knack of making the kindliness of his smile add to, not detract from his solemn appearance of dignity; his long, thin, hooked nose did detract from the kindliness, but it added to the dignity; his stomach, cantilevered over his legs, did detract from the dignity, but it added to the kindliness. He rose, beamed and held Dominique’s hand. “Thought I’d drop in on my way home,” he said. “I’ve got something to tell you. How did it go, kid?”
“As I expected it.”
She tore her hat off and threw it down on the first chair in sight. Her hair slanted in a flat curve across her forehead and fell in a straight line to her shoulders; it looked smooth and tight, like a bathing cap of pale, polished metal. She walked to the window and stood looking out over the city. She asked without turning: “What did you want to tell me?”
Alvah Scarret watched her pleasurably. He had long since given up any attempts beyond holding her hand when not necessary or patting her shoulder; he had stopped thinking of the subject, but he had a dim, half-conscious feeling which he summed up to himself in the words: You never can tell.
“I’ve got good news for you, child,” he said. “I’ve been working out a little scheme, just a bit of reorganization, and I’ve figured where I’ll consolidate a few things together into a Women’s Welfare Department. You know, the schools, the home economics, the care of babies, the juvenile delinquents and all the rest of it–all to be under one head. And I see no better woman for the job than my little girl.”
“Do you mean me?” she asked, without turning.
“No one else but. Just as soon as Gail comes back, I’ll get his okay.”
She turned and looked at him, her arms crossed, her hands holding her elbows. She said:
“Thank you, Alvah. But I don’t want it.”
“What do you mean, you don’t want it?”
“I mean that I don’t want it.”
“For heaven’s sake, do you realize what an advance that would be?”
“Toward what?”
“Your career.”
“I never said I was planning a career.”
“But you don’t want to be running a dinky back-page column forever!”
“Not forever. Until I get bored with it.”
“But think of what you could do in the real game! Think of what Gail could do for you once you come to his attention!”
“I have no desire to come to his attention.”
“But, Dominique, we need you. The women will be for you solid after tonight.”