"What for!What does anybody go out for!" "I don't know."If they could have talked it over together, these two, the girl might have found relief.But the family shyness of their class was too strong upon them.Once Mrs.Golden had said, in an effort at sympathy, "Person'd think Chuck Mory was the only one who'd gone to war an' the last fella left in the world."A grim flash of the old humor lifted the corners of the wide mouth."He is.Who's there left? Stumpy Gans, up at the railroad crossing? Or maybe Fatty Weiman, driving the garbage.Guess I'll doll up this evening and see if I can't make a hit with one of them."She relapsed into bitter silence.The bottom had dropped out of Tessie Golden's world.
In order to understand the Tessie of today one would have to know the Tessie of six months ago--Tessie the impudent, the life-loving.Tessie Golden could say things to the escapement-room foreman that anyone else would have been fired for.Her wide mouth was capable of glorious insolences.Whenever you heard shrieks of laughter from the girls' washroom at noon you knew that Tessie was holding forth to an admiring group.She was a born mimic; audacious, agile, and with the gift of burlesque.The autumn that Angie Hatton came home from Europe wearing the first tight skirt that Chippewa had ever seen, Tessie gave an imitation of that advanced young woman's progress down Grand Avenue in this restricting garment.The thing was cruel in its fidelity, though containing just enough exaggeration to make it artistic.She followed it up by imitating the stricken look on the face of Mattie Haynes, cloak-and- suit buyer at Megan's, who, having just returned from the East with what she considered the most fashionable of the new fall styles, now beheld Angie Hatton in the garb that was the last echo of the last cry in Paris modes--and no model in Mattie's newly selected stock bore even the remotest resemblance to it.
You would know from this that Tessie was not a particularly deft worker.Her big-knuckled fingers were cleverer at turning out a blouse or retrimming a hat.Hers were what are known as handy hands, but not sensitive.It takes a light and facile set of fingers to fit pallet and arbor and fork together: close work and tedious.Seated on low benches along the tables, their chins almost level with the table top, the girls worked with pincers and flame, screwing together the three tiny parts of the watch's anatomy that were their particular specialty.Each wore a jeweler's glass in one eye.Tessie had worked at the watch factory for three years, and the pressure of the glass on the eye socket had given her the slightly hollow- eyed appearance peculiar to experienced watchmakers.It was not unbecoming, though, and lent her, somehow, a spiritual look which made her impudence all the more piquant.
Tessie wasn't always witty, really.But she had achieved a reputationfor wit which insured applause for even her feebler efforts.Nap Ballou, the foreman, never left the escapement room without a little shiver of nervous apprehension--a feeling justified by the ripple of suppressed laughter that went up and down the long tables.He knew that Tessie Golden, like a naughty schoolgirl when teacher's back is turned, had directed one of her sure shafts at him.
Ballou, his face darkling, could easily have punished her.Tessie knew it.But he never did, or would.She knew that, too.Her very insolence and audacity saved her.
"Someday," Ballou would warn her, "you'll get too gay, and then you'll find yourself looking for a job.""Go on--fire me," retorted Tessie, "and I'll meet you in Lancaster"--a form of wit appreciated only by watchmakers.For there is a certain type of watch hand who is as peripatetic as the old-time printer.Restless, ne'er-do- well, spendthrift, he wanders from factory to factory through the chain of watchmaking towns: Springfield, Trenton, Waltham, Lancaster, Waterbury, Chippewa.Usually expert, always unreliable, certainly fond of drink, Nap Ballou was typical of his kind.The steady worker had a mingled admiration and contempt for him.He, in turn, regarded the other as a stick-in-the-mud.Nap wore his cap on one side of his curly head, and drank so evenly and steadily as never to be quite drunk and never strictly sober.He had slender, sensitive fingers like an artist's or a woman's, and he knew the parts of that intricate mechanism known as a watch from the jewel to the finishing room.It was said he had a wife or two.He was forty- six, good-looking in a dissolute sort of way, possessing the charm of the wanderer, generous with his money.It was known that Tessie's barbs were permitted to prick him without retaliation because Tessie herself appealed to his errant fancy.
When the other girls teased her about this obvious state of affairs, something fine and contemptuous welled up in her."Him! Why, say, he ought to work in a pickle factory instead of a watchworks.All he needs is a little dill and a handful of grape leaves to make him good eatin' as a relish."And she thought of Chuck Mory, perched on the high seat of theAmerican Express truck, hatless, sunburned, stockily muscular, clattering down Winnebago Street on his way to the depot and the 7:50 train.
