Cheerful - By Request | Page 2

glare
of Broadway. The dress with the Russian sable bands went the way of
all Hahn & Lohman tragedies. Josie Fifer received it, if not reverently,
still appreciatively.
"I should think Sid Hahn would know by this time," she observed
sniffily, as her expert fingers shook out the silken folds and smoothed
the fabulous fur, "that auburn hair and a gurgle and a Lucille dress don't
make a play. Besides, Fritzi Kirke wears the biggest shoe of any actress
I ever saw. A woman with feet like that"--she picked up a satin slipper,
size 7-1/2 C--"hasn't any business on the stage. She ought to travel with
a circus. Here, Etta. Hang this away in D, next to the amethyst blue
velvet, and be sure and lock the door."
McCabe had been right. A waspish wit was Josie's.
The question is whether to reveal to you now where it was that Josie
Fifer reigned thus, queen of the cast-offs; or to take you back to the
days that led up to her being there--the days when she was José Fyfer

on the programme.
Her domain was the storage warehouse of Hahn & Lohman, as you
may have guessed. If your business lay Forty-third Street way, you
might have passed the building a hundred times without once giving it
a seeing glance. It was not Forty-third Street of the small shops, the
smart crowds, and the glittering motors. It was the Forty-third lying
east of the Grand Central sluice gates; east of fashion; east, in a word,
of Fifth Avenue--a great square brick building smoke-grimed,
cobwebbed, and having the look of a cold-storage plant or a car barn
fallen into disuse; dusty, neglected, almost eerie. Yet within it lurks
Romance, and her sombre sister Tragedy, and their antic brother
Comedy, the cut-up.
A worn flight of wooden steps leads up from the sidewalk to the dim
hallway; a musty-smelling passage wherein you are met by a genial
sign which reads:
"No admittance. Keep out. This means you."
To confirm this, the eye, penetrating the gloom, is confronted by a
great blank metal door that sheathes the elevator. To ride in that
elevator is to know adventure, so painfully, so protestingly, with such
creaks and jerks and lurchings does it pull itself from floor to floor, like
an octogenarian who, grunting and groaning, hoists himself from his
easy-chair by slow stages that wring a protest from ankle, knee, hip,
back and shoulder. The corkscrew stairway, broken and footworn
though it is, seems infinitely less perilous.
First floor--second--third--fourth. Whew! And there you are in Josie
Fifer's kingdom--a great front room, unexpectedly bright and even cosy
with its whir of sewing machines: tables, and tables, and tables, piled
with orderly stacks of every sort of clothing, from shoes to hats, from
gloves to parasols; and in the room beyond this, and beyond that, and
again beyond that, row after row of high wooden cabinets stretching the
width of the room, and forming innumerable aisles. All of Bluebeard's
wives could have been tucked away in one corner of the remotest and
least of these, and no one the wiser. All grimly shut and locked, they

are, with the key in Josie's pocket. But when, at the behest of McCabe,
or sometimes even Sid Hahn himself, she unlocked and opened one of
these doors, what treasures hung revealed! What shimmer and sparkle
and perfume--and moth balls! The long-tailed electric light bulb held
high in one hand, Josie would stand at the door like a priestess before
her altar.
There they swung, the ghosts and the skeletons, side by side. You
remember that slinking black satin snakelike sheath that Gita Morini
wore in "Little Eyolf"? There it dangles, limp, invertebrate, yet how
eloquent! No other woman in the world could have worn that gown,
with its unbroken line from throat to hem, its smooth, high, black satin
collar, its writhing tail that went slip-slip-slipping after her. In it she
had looked like a sleek and wicked python that had fasted for a long,
long time.
Dresses there are that have made stage history. Surely you remember
the beruffled, rose-strewn confection in which the beautiful Elsa
Marriott swam into our ken in "Mississipp'"? She used to say, wistfully,
that she always got a hand on her entrance in that dress. It was due to
the sheer shock of delight that thrilled audience after audience as it
beheld her loveliness enhanced by this floating, diaphanous tulle cloud.
There it hangs, time-yellowed, its pristine freshness vanished quite, yet
as fragrant with romance as is the sere and withered blossom of a dead
white rose pressed within the leaves of a book of love poems. Just next
it, incongruously enough, flaunt the wicked froufrou skirts and the
low-cut bodice and the wasp waist of