The Red Apron-Hat: The Cliffhanging
Right. Remember the ungodly fuss made over the pass?
It turns out that Secret Services types just love railroad owners. They can't get enough of them. On confirmation that it is DAN STEVENS THE SON OF THE GUY WHO OWNS THE RAILROAD! they are elated, for no clear reason. They tell her she's a guest of the government while they get the case laid out against the terrorists. She considers this.
But how could she stay in a great city without more suitable clothing? She looked down at herself in her little brown working gingham, and her hand went instinctively up to the improvised hat, which, all unknown to her, looked very sweet and pretty on her shapely crown of hair, with its little rumpled waves and curls slipping loose about her tired face. To the young men who watched her furtively she seemed a pleasant picture.
I told you they all loved that hat.
Couldn't I tell you all that is necessary now and then go? You see, I haven't anything with me. I had to run away just as I was, in my working clothes, and I dropped my hat and coat on the way to the train and couldn't stop to pick them up because Mr. Schwarz was almost up to me. I had to pin my apron together into a hat to wear on the train.”
Ladies, do your patriotic duty, unless you are self-conscious about your headgear! Then you can try to beg off. Also: APRON HAT.
She touched her brown denim hat with a laughing apology. The eyes of the officers went to the innocent-looking cap in astonishment. There was nothing to suggest an apron in that shapely little crown. It seemed to them that any pretty woman might have worn it to advantage.
Only Grace Livingston Hill could get a woman in the White House with a suitcase full of stolen intelligence and have everyone staring hypnotized at her hat. Any lesser author would slip and place the focus elsewhere, but APRON HAT.
I'm not likely to get hold of my own things again if he carries out his program and gives it to the captain of the submarine on Wednesday night.”
No.No, the Secret Service, mighty as they are, cannot serve as your Lost and Found. In fact, about what is done with the false suitcase while they grasp the true, I cannot say they give a damn.
“Why, what's that? You don't say!” said the Chief sitting clown again.
"Sitting clown" is a typo because of the way these books were scanned, but it's perfection.
“I forgot all about that submarine business and ‘Adolph.’ You say they have your suitcase? Well, that's interesting. That gives us another clue. I wonder if you could tell me just what was in that case?”
It's not a goddamn clue that they've shoved her spare nightie, her socks, her Sunday dress, her comb, and her second-best hat into the torpedo tubes and jettisoned them between Virginia Beach and Morocco! So she and the hat-obsessed Secret Service continue to have a grand old chat about the time she fished up a note with some toothpaste, and goes all vague before they can ask her to fold them hats too and maybe they can do each other's nails. It's interrupted by the engineer calling to say hello, mention he found her mom and little brother, and make her pinkie promise to stay put until they can find her. I... I don't know... for some reason his mother shows up to take Hilda to her house to stay for a time. Hilda demurs:
“I would much rather you would send me to a plain boarding house where I shall not mortify you. I haven't even any hat. I pinned this up out of my work apron after I got on the train.” She took off the little brown cap and looked at it ruefully, thereby revealing her lovely bead of heavy hair, beautiful even in its disarray from the long hard day.
It needs its own theme song by now.
Apron Hat! Apron Hat!
Perky brown pinned-up thing
Never squashed or flat
APRON HAAAAAAAAAT!
“It is a very clever little cap, my dear,” said the lady, examining it curiously, “and a wonderful little girl to be able to evolve it in necessity. Don't worry about your clothes, dear. We'll fix all that up in the morning.
I don't know how the publisher messed up the title to "The Red Signal" when it was obviously supposed to be "THE APRON HAT." Somehow the whole book has been taken over by a bit of trumped-up headgear. This is all followed by Hilda getting a whole new wardrobe (we never learn if The Apron Hat was burned, buried, or given a Viking funeral) and going back to meet the president and get a medal.
and then all at once she was in the genial presence of the President himself, and he was looking at her with those friendly, keen eyes and saying gracious words to her.
I was picturing Barack Obama the whole time. My mother informs me it was actually Woodrow Wilson. Then Hilda meets her engineer, who has also had an offscreen makeover. Doubtless it involves a hat.
He was dressed now in the full uniform of an officer of the United States Army; and fine and handsome did he look as he stood ready to salute her, pausing to admire his little friend, whom he had not known was so beautiful until his mother had put on the finishing touches of suitable garments.
If he'd seen her in The Apron Hat he would have rushed her to a chapel on the spot. The book here gets horribly bogged down in makeovers for everyone and day-tours through the Capital right and left. The Engineer's Mom (I can't remember anyone's name and they're frankly not important) finds Hilda a job so she can stay in Patriot Heaven. There is even more tourism and romantic stuff between Hilda and her man. Thankfully, Grace realizes that the audience is nodding off:
"By the way, I didn't tell you that down under the iron lid below your cabbages I saw hundreds of guns stored and ready for quick handing out. And do you know that very likely before many days the Government will know just where other stores are kept, the powder and the dynamite you heard them talk about, and who are the ones employed to blow up munition plants and shipyards , and place bombs under bridges and in the holds of loaded ships?"
Only we already knew she knew, we already knew he knew, and we already knew she had reported this and now we know he did too. Grace manages a last gasp and gets to what everyone really cares about:
"Hilda! Where are you? Hurry up, you two! We're going back to the hotel and we're going to have ice-cream again for dinner!"
The chapter is saved before something drastic has to happen, like Hilda losing her hat in the coat-room of the restaurant and folding the tablecloth into a turban.
Things go on as they have been, although Hilda, in her romance-heroine way, kind of misses the mark:
She was as lovely and unconscious of self as a girl could be, and more and more young Daniel Stevens's mother was drawn to her.
Fortunately they get this all straightened out as Hilda tries to ID the pilot and thinks she has the right man, a high-status political figure so far beyond suspect:
There were no proofs, but many indications that he was the moving spirit in German intrigue and propaganda, and yet he was like the proverbial flea, no one could put a finger on him.
Ew. I don't know what proverb this is, and I'm happy that way. But that is not the only worm in this apple:
in spite of the careful watch set about the truck farm, Schwarz and his wife had disappeared ; dropped out of existence as it were in the night! Of course, there had been time for them to leave before Hilda reached Washington with her report and set the machinery of the Government in action;
That is so much bull. The Secret Service was all sitting around trying to fold aprons into hats and wouldn't have noticed any number of Schwarzes slipping past. Anyway, Dan Stevens, the forgettable young engineer, lectures Hilda very carefully on not getting kidnapped before he goes away to war. It's been a chapter or so since the last mention of the apron hat:
She could not help contrasting herself with the little girl in the brown denim cap who travelled that way alone so short a time before,
And finally we suspect we have heard the last hurrah of that damned hat.
...the first thing I noticed about you was the pretty contour of the little cap you improvised so cleverly.
Says Dan Stevens' mom. This is chapter 16. The apron-hat was folded into being from strange dimensions back on chapter 9. It was not destroyed, or mankind might be safe. It was confiscated by the Secret Service and a shrine sprang up around it. The book trucks on, although I am beginning to slip from page to page scanning cautiously for that damned apron hat. Hilda goes to school, Uncle Otto is suspected more and more as a German fiend-spy-blackguard. There is a lot of stuff about Hilda's bedroom and Hilda's letter romance and society and orchestras and schools for the little brother. Thankfully we have reached the end of hat-chat. It's kind of emptily fun, but it's getting rather stupefying. Something must happen.
Then, suddenly, like a bomb bursting at her feet, an incident, trifling in itself, occurred, which turned all her sweetness into sorrow and brought a cloud over her bright life.
It's just a girl that knows Dan Stevens and there is a lot of "but this girl! She could be the One!" nonsense when clearly that girl couldn't make a hat out of a simpler hat. However, it's built up for a long time until Hilda goes to mail a letter and Destiny intervenes:
as she lifted her eyes she caught the glance of familiar cold blue eyes. Her heart stopped dead still and then leaped on with a horrible bound. It was the airman, just drawing his hand away from the post box where he had dropped a letter! Even while she looked aghast he dived behind a pillar and melted into the throng, leaving the swift impression behind him that he had both seen and recognized her!
Of course the guy who stood under Hilda's window reciting every secret plan he'd ever brushed against lost track of the one person who could identify him. And then he went bounding around the architecture of Patriot Heaven in case he hadn't been suspicious enough. Egad.
Like an old trained spy, she slid behind the pillar and rose to her tiptoes. Was that his hat over by the silk bargain counter? Yes? No?
He is supposed to be an old trained spy, so her hat-seeking hijinks (of course she is fixated on his damned, damned hat) are not as disastrously out of place as they could be.
She could not think now, she must concentrate all her attention on keeping him in sight and finding out his hiding-place. Then she could slip back and notify the right people, and he would never know he had been followed, that is, if she did her work well.
Only he has already seen her. He knows she is there. He went and fell over the one person in Washington DC who could unmask him. So Hilda goes tearing across all of Washington DC with the sort of great specificity which suggests GLH gave the spot a tour when, suddenly, something completely predictable happens.
The white face seemed to move across her vision back in the room again, 2217 burned in upon her brain, followed by a sharp breathless blank of utter darkness as a great hand reached out behind her and drew her into the passage and something dark and thick dropped about her face and enveloped her completely. She felt herself carried swiftly through a door into the passage, up stairs and stairs to the top of a house, and thrown heavily upon a hard bed. She tried to struggle, but it was all so sudden and her enveloping was so complete that she was helpless from the start.
What? No hat could have saved her the whole time, so naturally this was going to happen. She lies still as she is bound and gagged and overhears what is to come for her next:
A submarine for her with the airman as her master! Her heart almost stopped at the thought. She had read the tales of women whose awful fate had been to be prisoners on a submarine. She knew that death in comparison would be as nothing.
Which, after all the lurid spy stuff, is still a bit more sensational than I think GLH should be trying to get away with. Mrs. Schwarz comes wandering in, lifts her eyelid with a finger, reiterates that she will be helpless with the menfolk, thank you so much Grace, and then smacks her across the face before wandering off again. I guess this is to establish that Mrs. Schwarz really is going along with them instead of just feeling caught in their plans, in case any readerly sympathy was drifting her way.
So there is one person in this room that can save Hilda:
Hilda.
This should be good.
It turns out that Secret Services types just love railroad owners. They can't get enough of them. On confirmation that it is DAN STEVENS THE SON OF THE GUY WHO OWNS THE RAILROAD! they are elated, for no clear reason. They tell her she's a guest of the government while they get the case laid out against the terrorists. She considers this.
But how could she stay in a great city without more suitable clothing? She looked down at herself in her little brown working gingham, and her hand went instinctively up to the improvised hat, which, all unknown to her, looked very sweet and pretty on her shapely crown of hair, with its little rumpled waves and curls slipping loose about her tired face. To the young men who watched her furtively she seemed a pleasant picture.
I told you they all loved that hat.
Couldn't I tell you all that is necessary now and then go? You see, I haven't anything with me. I had to run away just as I was, in my working clothes, and I dropped my hat and coat on the way to the train and couldn't stop to pick them up because Mr. Schwarz was almost up to me. I had to pin my apron together into a hat to wear on the train.”
Ladies, do your patriotic duty, unless you are self-conscious about your headgear! Then you can try to beg off. Also: APRON HAT.
She touched her brown denim hat with a laughing apology. The eyes of the officers went to the innocent-looking cap in astonishment. There was nothing to suggest an apron in that shapely little crown. It seemed to them that any pretty woman might have worn it to advantage.
Only Grace Livingston Hill could get a woman in the White House with a suitcase full of stolen intelligence and have everyone staring hypnotized at her hat. Any lesser author would slip and place the focus elsewhere, but APRON HAT.
I'm not likely to get hold of my own things again if he carries out his program and gives it to the captain of the submarine on Wednesday night.”
No.No, the Secret Service, mighty as they are, cannot serve as your Lost and Found. In fact, about what is done with the false suitcase while they grasp the true, I cannot say they give a damn.
“Why, what's that? You don't say!” said the Chief sitting clown again.
"Sitting clown" is a typo because of the way these books were scanned, but it's perfection.
“I forgot all about that submarine business and ‘Adolph.’ You say they have your suitcase? Well, that's interesting. That gives us another clue. I wonder if you could tell me just what was in that case?”
It's not a goddamn clue that they've shoved her spare nightie, her socks, her Sunday dress, her comb, and her second-best hat into the torpedo tubes and jettisoned them between Virginia Beach and Morocco! So she and the hat-obsessed Secret Service continue to have a grand old chat about the time she fished up a note with some toothpaste, and goes all vague before they can ask her to fold them hats too and maybe they can do each other's nails. It's interrupted by the engineer calling to say hello, mention he found her mom and little brother, and make her pinkie promise to stay put until they can find her. I... I don't know... for some reason his mother shows up to take Hilda to her house to stay for a time. Hilda demurs:
“I would much rather you would send me to a plain boarding house where I shall not mortify you. I haven't even any hat. I pinned this up out of my work apron after I got on the train.” She took off the little brown cap and looked at it ruefully, thereby revealing her lovely bead of heavy hair, beautiful even in its disarray from the long hard day.
It needs its own theme song by now.
Apron Hat! Apron Hat!
Perky brown pinned-up thing
Never squashed or flat
APRON HAAAAAAAAAT!
“It is a very clever little cap, my dear,” said the lady, examining it curiously, “and a wonderful little girl to be able to evolve it in necessity. Don't worry about your clothes, dear. We'll fix all that up in the morning.
I don't know how the publisher messed up the title to "The Red Signal" when it was obviously supposed to be "THE APRON HAT." Somehow the whole book has been taken over by a bit of trumped-up headgear. This is all followed by Hilda getting a whole new wardrobe (we never learn if The Apron Hat was burned, buried, or given a Viking funeral) and going back to meet the president and get a medal.
and then all at once she was in the genial presence of the President himself, and he was looking at her with those friendly, keen eyes and saying gracious words to her.
I was picturing Barack Obama the whole time. My mother informs me it was actually Woodrow Wilson. Then Hilda meets her engineer, who has also had an offscreen makeover. Doubtless it involves a hat.
He was dressed now in the full uniform of an officer of the United States Army; and fine and handsome did he look as he stood ready to salute her, pausing to admire his little friend, whom he had not known was so beautiful until his mother had put on the finishing touches of suitable garments.
If he'd seen her in The Apron Hat he would have rushed her to a chapel on the spot. The book here gets horribly bogged down in makeovers for everyone and day-tours through the Capital right and left. The Engineer's Mom (I can't remember anyone's name and they're frankly not important) finds Hilda a job so she can stay in Patriot Heaven. There is even more tourism and romantic stuff between Hilda and her man. Thankfully, Grace realizes that the audience is nodding off:
"By the way, I didn't tell you that down under the iron lid below your cabbages I saw hundreds of guns stored and ready for quick handing out. And do you know that very likely before many days the Government will know just where other stores are kept, the powder and the dynamite you heard them talk about, and who are the ones employed to blow up munition plants and shipyards , and place bombs under bridges and in the holds of loaded ships?"
Only we already knew she knew, we already knew he knew, and we already knew she had reported this and now we know he did too. Grace manages a last gasp and gets to what everyone really cares about:
"Hilda! Where are you? Hurry up, you two! We're going back to the hotel and we're going to have ice-cream again for dinner!"
The chapter is saved before something drastic has to happen, like Hilda losing her hat in the coat-room of the restaurant and folding the tablecloth into a turban.
Things go on as they have been, although Hilda, in her romance-heroine way, kind of misses the mark:
She was as lovely and unconscious of self as a girl could be, and more and more young Daniel Stevens's mother was drawn to her.
Fortunately they get this all straightened out as Hilda tries to ID the pilot and thinks she has the right man, a high-status political figure so far beyond suspect:
There were no proofs, but many indications that he was the moving spirit in German intrigue and propaganda, and yet he was like the proverbial flea, no one could put a finger on him.
Ew. I don't know what proverb this is, and I'm happy that way. But that is not the only worm in this apple:
in spite of the careful watch set about the truck farm, Schwarz and his wife had disappeared ; dropped out of existence as it were in the night! Of course, there had been time for them to leave before Hilda reached Washington with her report and set the machinery of the Government in action;
That is so much bull. The Secret Service was all sitting around trying to fold aprons into hats and wouldn't have noticed any number of Schwarzes slipping past. Anyway, Dan Stevens, the forgettable young engineer, lectures Hilda very carefully on not getting kidnapped before he goes away to war. It's been a chapter or so since the last mention of the apron hat:
She could not help contrasting herself with the little girl in the brown denim cap who travelled that way alone so short a time before,
And finally we suspect we have heard the last hurrah of that damned hat.
...the first thing I noticed about you was the pretty contour of the little cap you improvised so cleverly.
Says Dan Stevens' mom. This is chapter 16. The apron-hat was folded into being from strange dimensions back on chapter 9. It was not destroyed, or mankind might be safe. It was confiscated by the Secret Service and a shrine sprang up around it. The book trucks on, although I am beginning to slip from page to page scanning cautiously for that damned apron hat. Hilda goes to school, Uncle Otto is suspected more and more as a German fiend-spy-blackguard. There is a lot of stuff about Hilda's bedroom and Hilda's letter romance and society and orchestras and schools for the little brother. Thankfully we have reached the end of hat-chat. It's kind of emptily fun, but it's getting rather stupefying. Something must happen.
Then, suddenly, like a bomb bursting at her feet, an incident, trifling in itself, occurred, which turned all her sweetness into sorrow and brought a cloud over her bright life.
It's just a girl that knows Dan Stevens and there is a lot of "but this girl! She could be the One!" nonsense when clearly that girl couldn't make a hat out of a simpler hat. However, it's built up for a long time until Hilda goes to mail a letter and Destiny intervenes:
as she lifted her eyes she caught the glance of familiar cold blue eyes. Her heart stopped dead still and then leaped on with a horrible bound. It was the airman, just drawing his hand away from the post box where he had dropped a letter! Even while she looked aghast he dived behind a pillar and melted into the throng, leaving the swift impression behind him that he had both seen and recognized her!
Of course the guy who stood under Hilda's window reciting every secret plan he'd ever brushed against lost track of the one person who could identify him. And then he went bounding around the architecture of Patriot Heaven in case he hadn't been suspicious enough. Egad.
Like an old trained spy, she slid behind the pillar and rose to her tiptoes. Was that his hat over by the silk bargain counter? Yes? No?
He is supposed to be an old trained spy, so her hat-seeking hijinks (of course she is fixated on his damned, damned hat) are not as disastrously out of place as they could be.
She could not think now, she must concentrate all her attention on keeping him in sight and finding out his hiding-place. Then she could slip back and notify the right people, and he would never know he had been followed, that is, if she did her work well.
Only he has already seen her. He knows she is there. He went and fell over the one person in Washington DC who could unmask him. So Hilda goes tearing across all of Washington DC with the sort of great specificity which suggests GLH gave the spot a tour when, suddenly, something completely predictable happens.
The white face seemed to move across her vision back in the room again, 2217 burned in upon her brain, followed by a sharp breathless blank of utter darkness as a great hand reached out behind her and drew her into the passage and something dark and thick dropped about her face and enveloped her completely. She felt herself carried swiftly through a door into the passage, up stairs and stairs to the top of a house, and thrown heavily upon a hard bed. She tried to struggle, but it was all so sudden and her enveloping was so complete that she was helpless from the start.
What? No hat could have saved her the whole time, so naturally this was going to happen. She lies still as she is bound and gagged and overhears what is to come for her next:
A submarine for her with the airman as her master! Her heart almost stopped at the thought. She had read the tales of women whose awful fate had been to be prisoners on a submarine. She knew that death in comparison would be as nothing.
Which, after all the lurid spy stuff, is still a bit more sensational than I think GLH should be trying to get away with. Mrs. Schwarz comes wandering in, lifts her eyelid with a finger, reiterates that she will be helpless with the menfolk, thank you so much Grace, and then smacks her across the face before wandering off again. I guess this is to establish that Mrs. Schwarz really is going along with them instead of just feeling caught in their plans, in case any readerly sympathy was drifting her way.
So there is one person in this room that can save Hilda:
Hilda.
This should be good.