"Oh, I dun"no"; you"re so darn honest, and you got so much more sense than this bunch of Bronx totties. Gee! they"ll make b.u.m stenogs. I know.
I"ve worked in an office. They"ll keep their gum and a looking-gla.s.s in the upper right-hand drawer of their typewriter desks, and the old man will call them down eleventy times a day, and they"ll marry the shipping-clerk first time he sneaks out from behind a box. But you got sense, and somehow--gee! I never know how to express things--glad I"m taking this English composition stuff--oh, you just seem to understand a guy. I never liked that Yid Weintraub till you made me see how darn clever and nice he really is, even if he does wear spats."
Sanford told her often that he wished she was going to come over to the Lowry Paint Company to work, when she finished. He had entered the college before her; he would be through somewhat earlier; he was going back to the paint company and would try to find an opening for her there. He wanted her to meet Mr. Julius Edward Schwirtz, the Manhattan salesman of the company.
When Mr. Schwirtz was in that part of town, interviewing the department-store buyers, he called up Sanford Hunt, and Sanford insisted that she come out to lunch with Schwirtz and himself and his girl. She went shyly.
Sanford"s sweetheart proved to be as clean and sweet as himself, but mute, smiling instead of speaking, inclined to admire every one, without much discrimination. Sanford was very proud, very eager as host, and his boyish admiration of all his guests gave a certain charm to the corner of the crude German sausage-and-schnitzel restaurant where they lunched.
Una worked at making the party as successful as possible, and was cordial to Mr. Julius Edward Schwirtz, the paint salesman.
Mr. Schwirtz was forty or forty-one, a red-faced, clipped-mustached, derby-hatted average citizen. He was ungrammatical and jocose; he panted a good deal and gurgled his soup; his nails were ragged-edged, his stupid brown tie uneven, and there were signs of a growing grossness and fatty unwieldiness about his neck, his shoulders, his waist. But he was affable. He quietly helped Sanford in ordering lunch, to the great economy of embarra.s.sment. He was smilingly ready to explain to Una how a paint company office was run; what chances there were for a girl. He seemed to know his business, he didn"t gossip, and his heavy, coa.r.s.e-lipped smile was almost sweet when he said to Una, "Makes a hard-cased old widower like me pretty lonely to see this nice kid and girly here. Eh? Wish I had some children like them myself."
He wasn"t vastly different from Henry Carson, this Mr. Schwirtz, but he had a mechanical city smartness in his manner and a jocular energy which the stringy-necked Henry quite lacked.
Because she liked to be with Sanford Hunt, hoped to get from Mr. Julius Edward Schwirtz still more of the feeling of how actual business men do business, she hoped for another lunch.
But a crisis unexpected and alarming came to interrupt her happy progress to a knowledge of herself and men.
- 5
The Goldens had owned no property in Panama, Pennsylvania; they had rented their house. Captain Lew Golden, who was so urgent in advising others to purchase real estate--with a small, justifiable commission to himself--had never quite found time to decide on his own real-estate investments. When they had come to New York, Una and her mother had given up the house and sold the heavier furniture, the big beds, the stove. The rest of the furniture they had brought to the city and installed in a little flat way up on 148th Street.
Her mother was, Una declared, so absolutely the lady that it was a crying shame to think of her immured here in their elevatorless tenement; this new, clean, barren building of yellow brick, its face broken out with fire-escapes. It had narrow halls, stairs of slate treads and iron rails, and cheap wooden doorways which had begun to warp the minute the structure was finished--and sold. The bright-green burlap wall-covering in the hallways had faded in less than a year to the color of dry gra.s.s. The janitor grew tired every now and then. He had been markedly diligent at first, but he was already giving up the task of keeping the building clean. It was one of, and typical of, a mile of yellow brick tenements; it was named after an African orchid of great loveliness, and it was filled with clerks, motormen, probationer policemen, and enormously prolific women in dressing-sacques.
The Goldens had three rooms and bath. A small linoleous gas-stove kitchen. A bedroom with standing wardrobe, iron bed, and just one graceful piece of furniture--Una"s dressing-table; a room pervasively feminine in its scent and in the little piles of lingerie which Mrs.
Golden affected more, not less, as she grew older. The living-room, with stiff, brown, woolen brocade chairs, transplanted from their Panama home, a red plush sofa, two large oak-framed Biblical pictures--"The Wedding-feast at Cana," and "Solomon in His Temple." This living-room had never been changed since the day of their moving in. Una repeatedly coveted the German color-prints she saw in shop windows, but she had to economize.
She planned that when she should succeed they would have such an apartment of white enamel and gla.s.s doors and mahogany as she saw described in the women"s magazines. She realized mentally that her mother must be lonely in the long hours of waiting for her return, but she who was busy all day could never feel emotionally how great was that loneliness, and she expected her mother to be satisfied with the future.
Quite suddenly, a couple of weeks after the dance, when they were talking about the looming topic--what kind of work Una would be able to get when she should have completed school--her mother fell violently a-weeping; sobbed, "Oh, Una baby, I want to go home. I"m so lonely here--just n.o.body but you and the Sessionses. Can"t we go back to Panama? You don"t seem to really know what you _are_ going to do."
"Why, mother--"
Una loved her mother, yet she felt a grim disgust, rather than pity....
Just when she had been working so hard! And for her mother as much as for herself.... She stalked over to the table, severely rearranged the magazines, slammed down a newspaper, and turned, angrily. "Why, can"t you see? I _can"t_ give up my work now."
"Couldn"t you get something to do in Panama, dearie?"
"You know perfectly well that I tried."
"But maybe now, with your college course and all--even if it took a little longer to get something there, we"d be right among the folks we know--"
"Mother, can"t you understand that we have only a little over three hundred dollars now? If we moved again and everything, we wouldn"t have two hundred dollars to live on. Haven"t you _any_ sense of finances?"
"You must not talk to me that way, my daughter!"
A slim, fine figure of hurt-dignity, Mrs. Golden left the room, lay down in the bedroom, her face away from the door where Una stood in perplexity. Una ran to her, kissed her shoulder, begged for forgiveness.
Her mother patted her cheek, and sobbed, "Oh, it doesn"t matter," in a tone so forlorn and lonely that it did matter, terribly. The sadness of it tortured Una while she was realizing that her mother had lost all practical comprehension of the details of life, was become a child, trusting everything to her daughter, yet retaining a power of suffering such as no child can know.
It had been easy to bring her mother here, to start a career. Both of them had preconceived a life of gaiety and beauty, of charming people and pictures and concerts. But all those graces were behind a dusty wall of shorthand and typewriting. Una"s struggle in coming to New York had just begun.
Gently arbitrary, dearer than ever to Una in her helpless longing for kindly neighbors and the familiar places, Mrs. Golden went on hoping that she could persuade Una to go back to Panama. She never seemed to realize that their capital wasn"t increasing as time pa.s.sed. Sometimes impatient at her obtuseness, sometimes pa.s.sionate with comprehending tenderness, Una devoted herself to her, and Mr. Schwirtz and Sanford Hunt and Sam Weintraub and Todd faded. She treasured her mother"s happiness at their Christmas dinner with the Sessionses. She encouraged the Sessionses to come up to the flat as often as they could, and she lulled her mother to a tolerable calm boredom. Before it was convenient to think of men again, her school-work was over.
The commercial college had a graduation once a month. On January 15, 1906, Una finished her course, regretfully said good-by to Sam Weintraub, and to Sanford Hunt, who had graduated in mid-December, but had come back for "cla.s.s commencement"; and at the last moment she hesitated so long over J. J. Todd"s hints about calling some day, that he was discouraged and turned away. Una glanced about the study-hall--the first place where she had ever been taken seriously as a worker--and marched off to her first battle in the war of business.
CHAPTER IV
Sanford Hunt telephoned to Una that he and Mr. Julius Edward Schwirtz--whom he called "Eddie"--had done their best to find an "opening" for her in the office of the Lowry Paint Company, but that there was no chance.
The commercial college gave her the names of several possible employers, but they all wanted approximate perfection at approximately nothing a week. After ten days of panic-stricken waiting at the employment office of a typewriter company, and answering want advertis.e.m.e.nts, the typewriter people sent her to the office of the _Motor and Gas Gazette_, a weekly magazine for the trade. In this atmosphere of the literature of lubricating oil and drop forgings and body enamels, as an eight-dollar-a-week copyist, Una first beheld the drama and romance of the office world.
- 2
There is plenty of romance in business. Fine, large, meaningless, general terms like romance and business can always be related. They take the place of thinking, and are highly useful to optimists and lecturers.
But in the world of business there is a bewildered new Muse of Romance, who is clad not in silvery tissue of dreams, but in a neat blue suit that won"t grow too shiny under the sleeves.
Adventure now, with Una, in the world of business; of offices and jobs and tired, ordinary people who know such reality of romance as your masquerading earl, your shoddy Broadway actress, or your rosily amorous dairy-maid could never imagine. The youths of poetry and of the modern motor-car fiction make a long diversion of love; while the sleezy-coated office-man who surprises a look of humanness in the weary eyes of the office-woman, knows that he must compress all the wonder of madness into five minutes, because the Chief is prowling about, glancing meaningly at the little signs that declare, "Your time is your employer"s money; don"t steal it."
A world is this whose n.o.blest vista is composed of desks and typewriters, filing-cases and insurance calendars, telephones, and the bald heads of men who believe dreams to be idiotic. Here, no galleon b.r.e.a.s.t.s the sky-line; no explorer in evening clothes makes love to an heiress. Here ride no rollicking cowboys, nor heroes of the great European war. It is a world whose crises you cannot comprehend unless you have learned that the difference between a 2-A pencil and a 2-B pencil is at least equal to the contrast between London and Tibet; unless you understand why a normally self-controlled young woman may have a week of tragic discomfort because she is using a billing-machine instead of her ordinary correspondence typewriter. The shifting of the water-cooler from the front office to the packing-room may be an epochal event to a copyist who apparently has no human existence beyond bending over a clacking typewriter, who seems to have no home, no family, no loves; in whom all pride and wonder of life and all transforming drama seem to be satisfied by the possession of a new V-necked blouse. The moving of the water-cooler may mean that she must now pa.s.s the sentinel office-manager; that therefore she no longer dares break the incredible monotony by expeditions to get gla.s.ses of water. As a consequence she gives up the office and marries unhappily.
A vast, competent, largely useless cosmos of offices. It spends much energy in causing advertis.e.m.e.nts of beer and chewing-gum and union suits and pot-cleansers to spread over the whole landscape. It marches out ponderous battalions to sell a bra.s.s pin. It evokes shoes that are uncomfortable, hideous, and perishable, and touchingly hopes that all women will aid the cause of good business by wearing them. It turns n.o.ble valleys into fields for pickles. It compels men whom it has never seen to toil in distant factories and produce useless wares, which are never actually brought into the office, but which it nevertheless sells to the heathen in the Solomon Islands in exchange for commodities whose very names it does not know; and in order to perform this miracle of trans.m.u.tation it keeps stenographers so busy that they change from dewy girls into tight-lipped spinsters before they discover life.
The reason for it all, n.o.body who is actually engaged in it can tell you, except the bosses, who believe that these sacred rites of composing dull letters and solemnly filing them away are observed in order that they may buy the large automobiles in which they do not have time to take the air. Efficiency of production they have learned; efficiency of life they still consider an effeminate hobby.
An unreasonable world, sacrificing bird-song and tranquil dusk and high golden noons to selling junk--yet it rules us. And life lives there. The office is filled with thrills of love and distrust and ambition. Each alley between desks quivers with secret romance as ceaselessly as a battle-trench, or a lane in Normandy.
- 3
Una"s first view of the _Motor and Gas Gazette_ was of an overwhelming ma.s.s of desks and files and books, and a confusing, spying crowd of strange people, among whom the only safe, familiar persons were Miss Moynihan, the good-natured solid block of girl whom she had known at the commercial college, and Mr. S. Herbert Ross, the advertising-manager, who had hired her. Mr. Ross was a poet of business; a squat, nervous little man, whose hair was cut in a Dutch bang, straight across his forehead, and who always wore a black bow tie and semi-clerical black clothes. He had eyed Una amusedly, asked her what was her reaction to green and crimson posters, and given her a little book by himself, "R U A Time-clock, Mr. Man?" which, in large and tremendously black type, related two stories about the youth of Carnegie, and strongly advocated industry, correspondence schools, and expensive advertising. When Una entered the office, as a copyist, Mr. S. Herbert Ross turned her over to the office-manager, and thereafter ignored her; but whenever she saw him in pompous conference with editors and advertisers she felt proudly that she knew him.
The commercial college had trained her to work with a number of people, as she was now to do in the office; but in the seriousness and savage continuity of its toil, the office was very different. There was no let-up; she couldn"t shirk for a day or two, as she had done at the commercial college. It was not so much that she was afraid of losing her job as that she came to see herself as part of a chain. The others, beyond, were waiting for her; she mustn"t hold them up. That was her first impression of the office system, that and the insignificance of herself in the presence of the office-hierarchy--manager above manager and the Mysterious Owner beyond all. She was alone; once she transgressed they would crush her. They had no personal interest in her, none of them, except her cla.s.smate, Miss Moynihan, who smiled at her and went out to lunch with her.
They two did not dare to sit over parcels of lunch with the curious other girls. Before fifteen-cent lunches of baked apples, greasy Napoleons, and cups of coffee, at a cheap restaurant, Miss Moynihan and she talked about the office-manager, the editors, the strain of copying all day, and they united in lyric hatred of the lieutenant of the girls, a satiric young woman who was a wonderful hater. Una had regarded Miss Moynihan as thick and stupid, but not when she had thought of falling in love with Charlie Martindale at a dance at Panama, not in her most fervid hours of comforting her mother, had she been so closely in sympathy with any human being as she was with Miss Moynihan when they went over and over the problems of office politics, office favorites, office rules, office customs.
The customs were simple: Certain hours for arrival, for lunch, for leaving; women"s retiring-room embarra.s.sedly discovered to be on the right behind the big safe; water-cooler in the center of the stenographers" room. But the office prejudices, the taboos, could not be guessed. They offered you every possible chance of "queering yourself." Miss Moynihan, on her very first day, discovered, perspiringly, that you must never mention the _Gazette"s_ rival, the _Internal Combustion News_. The _Gazette"s_ att.i.tude was that the _News_ did not exist--except when the _Gazette_ wanted the plate of an advertis.e.m.e.nt which the _News_ was to forward. You mustn"t chew gum in the office; you were to ask favors of the lieutenant, not of the office-manager; and you mustn"t be friendly with Mr. Bush of the circulation department, nor with Miss Caldwell, the filing-clerk. Why they were taboo Una never knew; it was an office convention; they seemed pleasant and proper people enough.
She was initiated into the science of office supplies. In the commercial college the authorities had provided stenographers" note-books and pencils, and the representatives of typewriter companies had given lectures on cleaning and oiling typewriters, putting in new ribbons, adjusting tension-wheels. But Una had not realized how many tools she had to know----
Desks, filing-cabinets, mimeographs, adding-machines, card indexes, desk calendars, telephone-extensions, adjustable desk-lights. Wire correspondence-baskets, erasers, carbon paper, type-brushes, dust-rags, waste-baskets. Pencils, hard and soft, black and blue and red. Pens, pen-points, backing-sheets, note-books, paper-clips. Mucilage, paste, stationery; the half-dozen sorts of envelopes and letter-heads.
Tools were these, as important in her trade as the masthead and black flag, the cutla.s.ses and crimson sashes, the gold doubloons and damsels fair of pirate fiction; or the cheese and cream, old horses and slumberous lanes of rustic comedy. As important, and perhaps to be deemed as romantic some day; witness the rhapsodic advertis.e.m.e.nts of filing-cabinets that are built like battle-ships; of carbon-paper that is magic-inked and satin-smooth.