3

"HUMPTY-DUMPTY HAD A GREAT FALL"

French's occupied a square block in the heart of the mid-town section of New York, on Fifth Avenue. On the borderline between the more fashionable upper avenue and the office-building district farther downtown, it catered to a mixed patronage of wealth and penury. At the noon hour its broad aisles and six floors were crowded with shop girls and stenographers; in mid-afternoon the tone of its clientele improved perceptibly. It boasted at once therefore the lowest prices, the most modern models, the widest assortment of saleable articles, in New York. As a result of this compromise between attractive prices and exclusive merchandise it was the most popular department store in the city. From nine o'clock in the morning until five-thirty in the evening French's was thronged with shoppers, the sidewalks surrounding the marble structure and its many wings almost impassable.

Cyrus French, pioneer department store owner, assisted by his associate Board, exerted the full financial strength of his powerful organization to make French's—an institution of two generations of French ownership—the show place of the city. In those days, long before the artistic movement had been communicated in the United States to the more practical articles of use and wear, French's had already made contact with its European representatives and held public exhibitions of art objects, art furniture, and kindred modernistic ware. These exhibits attracted huge crowds to the store. One of its main windows fronting Fifth Avenue was devoted to exhibits of periodically imported articles. This window became the focal point for the eyes of all New York. Curious throngs constantly besieged its sheathing of plate glass.

On the morning of Tuesday the twenty-fourth of May, at three minutes of the noon hour, the heavy unpaneled door to this window opened and a Negress in black dress, white apron and white cap entered. She sauntered about the window, seemed to appraise its contents, and then stood stiffly at attention, as if awaiting a predetermined moment to begin her mysterious work.

The contents of the window were arranged to illustrate a combination living-room and bedroom, of an ultra-modern design created by Paul Lavery, of Paris, according to a placard in a corner. This card acknowledged Lavery's authorship of the articles on exhibition, and called attention to "lectures on the fifth floor by M. Lavery." The rear wall, into which the one door opened by which the Negress had entered, was unrelieved by ornament and tinted a pastelle green. On this wall hung a huge Venetian mirror, unframed, its edges cut in an irregular design. Against the wall stood a long narrow table, exhibiting an unpainted grain highly waxed. On the table stood a squat prismatic lamp, made of a clouded glass procurable at that period only from a unique modern art-objects factory in Austria. Odd pieces—chairs, end-tables, bookcases, a divan, all of unorthodox construction, peculiar and daring in conception—stood about the gleaming floor of the window-room. The side walls served as background for several pieces of miscellaneous utility.

The lighting fixtures in the ceiling and on the side walls were all of the "concealed" variety rapidly gaining vogue on the Continent.

At the stroke of noon the Negress, who had remained motionless since her entrance into the room, stirred into activity. By this time a viscid mass of people had gathered outside the window on the sidewalk, awaiting the Negress's demonstration with hungry eyes and restless shoulders.

Setting down a metal rack on which were hung a number of simply lettered placards, the Negress picked up a long ivory wand and, pointing to the legend on the first placard, proceeded solemnly to one of the pieces on the east wall and began a pantomimic demonstration of its construction and properties.

The fifth placard—by this time the crowd had doubled in size and overflowed from the sidewalk—bore the words:

Wall-Bed This Article of Furniture Is Concealed in the West Wall and Is Operated Electrically by a Push-Button. It is of Special Design, Created by M. Paul Lavery, and Is the Only One of Its Kind in This Country.

Pointing to the words once more, for emphasis, the Negress sedately walked to the west wall, indicated with a flourish a small ivory button set in a nacreous panel, and touched the button with one long black finger.

Before pressing it, she looked out once more on the jostling, expectant crowd before the window. Necks craned eagerly to see the marvel about to be revealed.

What they saw was a marvel indeed—so unexpected, so horrible, so grotesque that at the instant of its occurrence faces froze into masks of stunned incredulity. It was like a moment snatched out of an unbelievable nightmare.... For, as the Negress pushed the ivory button, a section of the wall slid outward and downward with a swift noiseless movement, two small wooden legs unfolded and shot out of the forepart of the bedstead, the bed settled to a horizontal position—and the body of a woman, pale-faced, crumpled, distorted, her clothes bloody in two places, fell from the silken sheet to the floor at the Negress's feet.

It was twelve-fifteen exactly.