by Paul Gallico
But it was just the fact that Mrs Harris had pierced the front of Miss Snite to a certain extent that made her stick to her, for she understood the fierce, wild, hungry craving of the girl to be something, to be somebody, to lift herself out of the rut of everyday struggle and acquire some of the good things of life for herself.
Before her own extraordinary craving which had brought her to Paris Mrs Harris had not experienced this in herself though she understood it very well. With her it had not been so much the endeavour to make something of herself as a battle to survive, and in that sense the two of them were not unalike. When Mrs Harris’s husband had died some twenty years past and left her penniless she simply had to make a go of things, her widow’s pension being insufficient.
And then too there was the glamour of the theatre which surrounded Miss Snite, or rather Penrose, as Mrs Harris chose to think of her, and this was irresistible.
Mrs Harris was not impressed by titles, wealth, position, or family, but she was susceptible to the enchantment that enveloped anything or anyone that had to do with the stage, the television, or the flicks.
She had no way of knowing how tenuous and sketchy was Miss Penrose’s connexion with these, that she was not only a bad little girl but a mediocre actress. It was sufficient for Mrs Harris that from time to time her voice was heard on the wireless or she would pass across the television screen wearing an apron and carrying a tray. Mrs Harris respected the lone battle the girl was waging, humoured her, cosseted her, and took from her what she would not from anyone else.
The taxi cab entered a broad street, lined with beautiful buildings, but Mrs Harris had no eye or time for architecture.
‘ ’Ow far is it?’ she shouted at the cab driver who replied, not slowing down one whit, by taking both hands off the steering wheel, waving his arms in the air, turning around and shouting back at her. Mrs Harris, of course, understood not a word, but his smile beneath a walrus moustache was engaging and friendly enough, and so she settled back to endure the ride until she should reach the so-long-coveted destination. She reflected upon the strange series of events that led to her being there.
IT had all begun that day several years back when during the course of her duties at Lady Dant’s house, Mrs Harris had opened a wardrobe to tidy it and had come upon the two dresses hanging there. One was a bit of heaven in cream, ivory, lace, and chiffon, the other an explosion in crimson satin and taffeta, adorned with great red bows and a huge red flower. She stood there as though struck dumb, for never in all her life had she seen anything quite as thrilling and beautiful.
Drab and colourless as her existence would seem to have been, Mrs Harris had always felt a craving for beauty and colour which up to this moment had manifested itself in a love for flowers. She had the proverbial green fingers, coupled with no little skill, and plants flourished for her where they would not, quite possibly, for any other.
Outside the windows of her basement flat were two window boxes of geraniums, her favourite flower, and inside, wherever there was room, stood a little pot containing a geranium struggling desperately to conquer its environment, or a single hyacinth or tulip, bought from a barrow for a hard-earned shilling.
Then, too, the people for whom she worked would sometimes present her with the leavings of their cut flowers which in their wilted state she would take home and try to nurse back to health, and once in a while, particularly in the spring, she would buy herself a little box of pansies, primroses, or anemones. As long as she had flowers, Mrs Harris had no serious complaints concerning the life she led. They were her escape from the sombre stone desert in which she lived. These bright flashes of colour satisfied her. They were something to return to in the evening, something to wake up to in the morning.
But now as she stood before the stunning creations hanging in the wardrobe she found herself face to face with a new kind of beauty - an artificial one created by the hand of man the artist, but aimed directly and cunningly at the heart of woman. In that very instant she fell victim to the artist; at that very moment there was born within her the craving to possess such a garment.
There was no rhyme or reason for it, she would never wear such a creation, there was no place in her life for one. Her reaction was purely feminine. She saw it and she wanted it dreadfully. Something inside her yearned and reached for it as instinctively as an infant in the crib reaches at a bright object. How deeply this craving went, how powerful it was Mrs Harris herself did not even know at that moment. She could only stand there enthralled, rapt, and enchanted, gazing at the dresses, leaning upon her mop, in her music-hall shoes, soiled overall, and wispy hair down about her ears, the classic figure of the cleaning woman.
It was thus that Lady Dant found her when she happened to come in from her waiting room. ‘Oh!’ she exclaimed, ‘my dresses!’ And then noting Mrs Harris’s attitude and the expression on her face said: ‘Do you like them? I haven’t made up my mind yet which one I am going to wear tonight.’
Mrs Harris was hardly conscious that Lady Dant was speaking, she was still engrossed in these living creations of silks and taffetas and chiffons in heart-lifting colours, daring cut, and stiff with cunning internal construction so that they appeared to stand almost by themselves like creatures with a life of their own. ‘Coo,’ she gasped finally, ‘ain’t they beauties. I’ll bet they didn’t ’arf cost a packet.’
Lady Dant had been unable to resist the temptation to impress Mrs Harris. London chars are not easily impressed, in fact they are the least impressionable people in the world. She had always been a little afraid of Mrs Harris and here was her chance to score. She laughed her brittle laugh and said: ‘Well, yes, in a way. This one here - “lvoire” - cost three hundred and fifty pounds and the big one, the red - it’s called “Ravishing” - came to around four hundred and fifty. I always go to Dior, don’t you think? Then, of course, you know you’re right.’
‘Four hundred and fifty quid,’ echoed Mrs Harris, ‘ ’ow would anyone ever get that much money?’ She was not unfamiliar with Paris styles, for she was an assiduous reader of old fashion magazines sometimes presented to her by clients, and she had heard of Fath, Chanel, and Balenciaga, Carpentier, Lanvin, and Dior, and the last named now rang a bell through her beauty-starved mind.
For it was one thing to encounter photographs of dresses, leafing through the slick pages of Vogue or Elle where, whether in colour or black and white, they were impersonal and as out of her world and her reach as the moon or the stars. It was quite another to come face to face with the real article to feast one’s eyes upon its every clever stitch, to touch it, smell it, love it, and suddenly to become consumed with the fires of desire.
Mrs Harris was quite unaware that in her reply to Lady Dant she had already given voice to a determination to possess a dress such as this. She had not meant ‘how would anyone find that much money?’ but ‘how would I find that much money?’ There, of course, was no answer to this, or rather only one. One would have to win it. But the chances of this were likewise as remote as the planets.
Lady Dant was quite well pleased with the impression she seemed to have created and even took each one down and held it up to her so that Mrs Harris could get some idea of the effect. And since the char’s hands were spotless from the soap and water in which they were immersed most of the time, she let her touch the materials which the little drudge did as though it were the Grail.
‘Ain’t it loverly,’ she whispered again. Lady Dant did not know at that instant Mrs Harris had made up her mind that what she desired above all else on earth, and in Heaven thereafter, was to have a Dior dress of her own hanging in her cupboard.
Smiling slyly, pleased with herself, Lady Dant shut the wardrobe door, but she could not shut out from the mind of Mrs Harris what she had seen there: beauty, perfection, the ultimate in adornment that a woman could desire. Mrs Harris was no less a woman than Lady Dant, or any other. She wanted, she wanted, she wanted a dress from what must be surely the most expensive s
hop in the world, that of Mr Dior in Paris.
Mrs Harris was no fool. Not so much as a thought of ever wearing such a garment in public ever entered her head. If there was one thing Mrs Harris knew, it was her place. She kept to it herself, and woe to anyone who tried to encroach upon it. Her place was a world of unremitting toil, but it was illuminated by her independence. There was no room in it for extravagance and pretty clothes.
But it was possession she desired now, feminine physical possession; to have it hanging in her cupboard, to know that it was there when she was away, to open the door when she returned and find it waiting for her, exquisite to touch, to see, and to own. It was as though all she had missed in life through the poverty, the circumstances of her birth and class in life could be made up by becoming the holder of this one glorious bit of feminine finery. The same vast, unthinkable amount of money could be represented as well by a piece of jewellery, or a single diamond which would last for ever. Mrs Harris had no interest in diamonds. The very fact that one dress could represent such a huge sum increased its desirability and her yearning for it. She was well aware that her wanting it made no sense whatsoever, but that did not prevent her one whit from doing so.
All through the rest of that damp, miserable, and foggy day, she was warmed by the images of the creations she had seen, and the more she thought of them the more the craving grew upon her.
That evening as the rain dripped from the thick London fog, Mrs Harris sat in the cosy warmth of Mrs Butterfield’s kitchen for the important ceremony of making out their coupons for the weekly football pool.
Ever since she could remember, it seemed that she and Mrs Butterfield had been contributing their threepence a week to this fascinating national lottery. It was cheap at the price, the hope and excitement and the suspense that could be bought for no more than three pennies each. For once the coupon was filled in and dropped into the pillar box it represented untold wealth until the arrival of the newspapers with the results and disillusionment, but never really disappointment since they actually did not expect to win. Once Mrs Harris had achieved a prize of thirty shillings and several times Mrs Butterfield had got her money back, or rather a free play for the following week, but, of course, that was all. The fantastic major prizes remained glamorous and ambition- inspiring fairy tales that occasionally found their way into the newspapers.
Since Mrs Harris was not sports-minded nor had the time to follow the fortunes of the football teams, and since as well the possible combinations and permutations ran into the millions, she was accustomed to making out her selections by guess and by God. The results of some thirty games, win, lose, or draw, had to be predicted, and Mrs Harris’s method was to pause with her pencil poised over each line and to wait for some inner or outer message to arrive and tell her what to put down. Luck, she felt, was something tangible that floated around in the air and sometimes settled on people in large chunks. Luck was something that could be felt, grabbed at, bitten off; luck could be all around one at one moment and vanish in the next. And so, at the moment of wooing good fortune in the guise of the football pools, Mrs Harris tried to attune herself to the unknown. Usually, as she paused, if she experienced no violent hunches or felt nothing at all, she would mark it down as a draw.
On this particular evening as they sat in the pool of lamplight, their coupons and steaming cups of tea before them, Mrs Harris felt the presence of luck as thickly about her as the fog without. As her pencil hovered over the first line - ‘Aston Villa v. Bolton Wanderers’ - she looked up and said intensely to Mrs Butterfield: ‘This is for me Dior dress.’
‘Your what, dearie?’ queried Mrs Butterfield who had but half heard what her friend said, for she herself was addicted to the trance method of filling out her list and was already entering into that state where something clicked in her head and she wrote her selections down one after the other without even stopping for a breath.
‘Me Dior dress,’ repeated Mrs Harris and then said fiercely as though by her very vehemence to force it to happen, ‘I’m going to ’ave a Dior dress.’
‘Are you now?’ murmured Mrs Butterfield unwilling to emerge entirely from the state of catalepsy she had been about to enter, ‘something new at Marks and Sparks?’
‘Marks and Sparks me eye,’ said Mrs Harris. ‘ ’Aven’t you ever heard of Dior?’
‘Can’t say I ’ave, love,’ Mrs Butterfield replied still half betwixt and between.
‘It’s the most expensive shop in the world. It’s in Paris. The dresses cost four hundred and fifty quid.’
Mrs Butterfield came out of it with a bang. Her jaw dropped, her chins folded into one another like the sections of a collapsible drinking cup.
‘Four hundred and fifty what?’ she gasped, ‘’ave you gone barmy, dearie?’
For a moment even Mrs Harris was shocked by the figure, but then its very outrageousness, coupled with the force of the desire that had been born within her, restored her conviction. She said: ‘Lady Dant ’as one of them in ’er cupboard. She brought it up for the charity ball tonight. I’ve never seen anything like it in me life before except perhaps in a dream or in a book.’ Her voice lowered for a moment as she became reflective. ‘Why, even the Queen ain’t got a dress like that,’ she said, and then, loudly and firmly, ‘and I mean to ’ave one.’
The shock waves had now begun to subside in Mrs Butterfield and she returned to her practical pessimism. ‘Where’re you going to get the money, ducks?’ she queried.
‘Right ’ere,’ replied Mrs Harris, tapping her coupon with her pencil so as to leave the fates in no doubt as to what was expected of them.
Mrs Butterfield accepted this since she herself had a long list of articles she expected to acquire immediately should her ticket come home. But she had another idea. ‘Dresses like that ain’t for the likes of us, dearie,’ she gloomed.
Mrs Harris reacted passionately: ‘What do I care what is or isn’t for a likes of us; it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever laid me eyes on and I mean to ’ave it.’
Mrs Butterfield persisted: ‘What would you do with it when you got it?’
This brought Mrs Harris up short, for she had not even thought beyond the possession of such a wonderful creation. All she knew was that she craved it most fearfully and so to Mrs Butterfield’s question she could not make other reply than: ‘ ’Ave it! Just ’ave it!’
Her pencil was resting on the first line of the pool coupon. She turned her attention to it and said: ‘Now then, ’ere goes for it’ And without another moment’s hesitation, almost as though her fingers were working outside her own volition, she filled in line after line, win, lose, draw, win, win, draw, draw, draw, lose, and win, until the entire blank was completed. She had never done it like that before. ‘There,’ she said.
‘Good luck to you, love,’ said Mrs Butterfield. She was so fascinated by her friend’s performance that she only paid perfunctory attention to her own and soon had it completed.
Still in the grip of something, Mrs Harris said hoarsely: ‘Let’s post them now, right now while me luck is running.’
They put on coats, wound scarves about their heads, and went off into the rain and the dripping fog to the red pillar box gleaming faintly on the corner beneath the street-lamp. Mrs Harris pressed the envelope to her lips for a moment, said ‘ ’Ere’s for me Dior dress,’ and slipped the letter through the slit, listening for its fall. Mrs Butterfield posted hers with less confidence. ‘Don’t expect nuffink and you won’t get disappointed. That’s me motto,’ she said. They returned to their tea.
THE marvellous and universe-shattering discovery was made that weekend not by Mrs Harris, but by Mrs Butterfield who, flesh a-quivering, came storming into the former’s kitchen in such a state that she was hardly able to speak and indeed seemed to be on the verge of apoplexy.
‘D-d-d-ducks—,’ she stammered - ‘ducks, it’s ’APPENED!’
Mrs Harris who was engaged in ironing Major Wallace’s shirts after washing the
m – this was one of the ways in which she spoiled him – said without looking up from the nicety of turning the neckband: ‘Take it easy, dear, or you’ll ’ave an attack. Wot’ s’appened?’
Panting and snorting like a hippopotamus, Mrs Butter - field waved the newspaper – ‘You’ve won!’
The full import of what her friend was saying did not reach Mrs Harris at once, for having placed her ultimate fate in the hands of the powerful feeling of luck, she had then temporarily put the matter from her mind. But at last the meaning of what Mrs Butterfield was shouting came to her and she dropped her iron to the floor with a crash. ‘Me Dior dress!’ she cried, and the next moment she had seized her stout friend about the waist and the two of them were dancing like children about the kitchen.
Then, lest there be a mistake, they had to sit down, and minutely, score by score, figure by figure (for, of course, they kept duplicates of their selections), pore over the results of that Saturday’s contests. It was true. But for two games, Mrs Harris had made a perfect score. There would be a prize, a rich one, certainly, perhaps even the jackpot, depending upon whether anyone else had surpassed or matched Mrs Harris’s effort.
One thing seemed certain, however, the Dior dress, or at least the money for it, was assured, for neither could conceive that the prize for achieving twelve out of fourteen games could be less. But there was one great trial yet to be undergone by both. They would have to wait until Wednesday before being advised by telegram of the amount of Mrs Harris’s swag.
‘Whatever’s over from what I need for me dress, I’ll split with you,’ the little charwoman told her stout friend in a moment of warm generosity and meant every word of it. In the first flush of excitement over the win Mrs Harris saw herself marching through this Dior’s emporium, flanked by scraping and bowing sales staff. Her handbag would be crammed to bursting with the stuff. She would walk down aisle after aisle, past rack after rack of wondrous garments standing stiff with satin, lace, velvets, and brocades to make her choice finally and say - ‘I’ll ’ave that one.’
