When she got home she found her mother awake, very angry over Una"s staying out till after midnight, and very wordy about the fact that "that nice, clean young man," Mr. J. J. Todd, of Chatham and of the commercial college, had come to call that evening. Una made little answer to her. Through her still and sacred agony she could scarce hear her mother"s petulant whining.
- 5
Next morning at the office, Walter abruptly asked her to come out into the hall, told her that he was leaving without notice that afternoon. He could never bear to delay, once he had started out on the "Long Trail,"
he said, not looking at her. He hastily kissed her, and darted back into the office. She did not see him again till, at five-thirty, he gave noisy farewell to all the adoring stenographers and office-boys, and ironical congratulations to his disapproving chiefs. He stopped at her desk, hesitated noticeably, then said, "Good-by, Goldie," and pa.s.sed on.
She stared, hypnotized, as, for the last time, Walter went bouncing out of the office.
- 6
A week later J. J. Todd called on her again. He was touching in his description of his faithful labor for the Charity Organization Society.
But she felt dead; she could not get herself to show approval. It was his last call.
- 7
Walter wrote to her on the train--a jumbled rhapsody on missing her honest companionship. Then a lively description of his new chief at Omaha. A lonely letter on a barren evening, saying that there was nothing to say. A note about a new project of going to Alaska. She did not hear from him again.
- 8
For weeks she missed him so tragically that she found herself muttering over and over, "Now I sha"n"t ever have a baby that would be a little image of him."
When she thought of the shy games and silly love-words she had lavished, she was ashamed, and wondered if they had made her seem a fool to him.
But presently in the week"s unchanging routine she found an untroubled peace; and in mastering her work she had more comfort than ever in his clamorous summons.
At home she tried not merely to keep her mother from being lonely, but actually to make her happy, to coax her to break into the formidable city. She arranged summer-evening picnics with the Sessionses.
She persuaded them to hold one of these picnics at the foot of the Palisades. During it she disappeared for nearly half an hour. She sat alone by the river. Suddenly, with a feverish wrench, she bared her breast, then shook her head angrily, rearranged her blouse, went back to the group, and was unusually gay, though all the while she kept her left hand on her breast, as though it pained her.
She had been with the _Gazette_ for only a little over six months, and she was granted only a week"s vacation. This she spent with her mother at Panama. In parties with old neighbors she found sweetness, and on a motor-trip with Henry Carson and his fiancee, a young widow, she let the fleeting sun-flecked land absorb her soul.
At the office Una was transferred to S. Herbert Ross"s department, upon Walter"s leaving. She sometimes took S. Herbert"s majestic, flowing dictation. She tried not merely to obey his instructions, but also to discover his unvoiced wishes. Her wage was raised from eight dollars a week to ten. She again determined to be a real business woman. She read a small manual on advertising.
But no one in the _Gazette_ office believed that a woman could bear responsibilities, not even S. Herbert Ross, with his aphorisms for stenographers, his prose poems about the ecstatic joy of running a typewriter nine hours a day, which appeared in large, juicy-looking type in business magazines.
She became bored, mechanical, somewhat hopeless. She planned to find a better job and resign. In which frame of mind she was rather contemptuous of the _Gazette_ office; and it was an unforgettable shock suddenly to be discharged.
Ross called her in, on a winter afternoon, told her that he had orders from the owner to "reduce the force," because of a "change of policy,"
and that, though he was sorry, he would have to "let her go because she was one of the most recent additions." He a.s.sured her royally that he had been pleased by her work; that he would be glad to give her "the best kind of a recommend--and if the situation loosens up again, I"d be tickled to death to have you drop in and see me. Just between us, I think the owner will regret this tight-wad policy."
But Mr. S. Herbert Ross continued to go out to lunch with the owner, and Una went through all the agony of not being wanted even in the prison she hated. No matter what the reason, being discharged is the final insult in an office, and it made her timid as she began wildly to seek a new job.
CHAPTER VIII
In novels and plays architects usually are delicate young men who wear silky Vand.y.k.e beards, play the piano, and do a good deal with pictures and rugs. They leap with desire to erect charming cottages for the poor, and to win prize contests for the Jackson County Courthouse. They always have good taste; they are perfectly mad about simplicity and gracefulness. But from the number of flat-faced houses and three-toned wooden churches still being erected, it may be deduced that somewhere there are architects who are not enervated by too much good taste.
Mr. Troy Wilkins, architect, with an office in the Septimus Building, was a commuter. He wore a derby and a clipped mustache, and took interest in cameras, player-pianos, phonographs, small motor-cars, speedometers, tires, patent nicotineless pipes, jolly tobacco for jimmy-pipes, tennis-rackets, correspondence courses, safety-razors, optimism, Theodore Roosevelt, pocket flashlights, rubber heels, and all other well-advertised wares. He was a conservative Republican and a Congregationalist, and on his desk he kept three silver-framed photographs--one of his wife and two children, one of his dog Rover, and one of his architectural masterpiece, the mansion of Peter B. Reardon, the copper king of Montana.
Mr. Troy Wilkins lamented the pa.s.sing of the solid and expensive stone residences of the nineties, but he kept "up to date," and he had added ideals about half-timbered villas, doorway settles, garages, and sleeping-porches to his repertoire. He didn"t, however, as he often said, "believe in bungalows any more than he believed in these labor unions."
- 2
Una Golden had been the chief of Mr. Troy Wilkins"s two stenographers for seven months now--midsummer of 1907, when she was twenty-six. She had climbed to thirteen dollars a week. The few hundred dollars which she had received from Captain Golden"s insurance were gone, and her mother and she had to make a science of saving--economize on milk, on bread, on laundry, on tooth-paste. But that didn"t really matter, because Una never went out except for walks and moving-picture shows, with her mother. She had no need, no want of clothes to impress suitors.... She had four worn letters from Walter Babson which she re-read every week or two; she had her mother and, always, her job.
- 3
Una, an errand-boy, and a young East-Side Jewish stenographer named Bessie Kraker made up the office force of Troy Wilkins. The office was on the eighth floor of the Septimus Building, which is a lean, jerry-built, flashingly pretentious cement structure with cracking walls and dirty, tiled hallways.
The smeary, red-gold paint which hides the imperfect ironwork of its elevators does not hide the fact that they groan like lost souls, and tremble and jerk and threaten to fall. The Septimus Building is typical of at least one half of a large city. It was "run up" by a speculative builder for a "quick turn-over." It is semi-fire-proof, but more semi than fire-proof. It stands on Na.s.sau Street, between two portly stone buildings that try to squeeze this lanky impostor to death, but there is more cheerful whistling in its hallways than in the halls of its disapproving neighbors. Near it is City Hall Park and Newspaper Row, Wall Street and the lordly Stock Exchange, but, aside from a few dull and honest tenants like Mr. Troy Wilkins, the Septimus Building is filled with offices of fly-by-night companies--shifty promoters, mining-concerns, beauty-parlors for petty brokers, sample-shoe shops, discreet lawyers, and advertising dentists. Seven desks in one large room make up the entire headquarters of eleven international corporations, which possess, as capital, eleven hundred and thirty dollars, much embossed stationery--and the seven desks. These modest capitalists do not lease their quarters by the year. They are doing very well if they pay rent for each of four successive months. But also they do not complain about repairs; they are not fussy about demanding a certificate of moral perfection from the janitor. They speak cheerily to elevator-boys and slink off into saloons. Not all of them keep Yom Kippur; they all talk of being "broad-minded."
Mr. Wilkins"s office was small and agitated. It consisted of two rooms and an insignificant entry-hall, in which last was a water-cooler, a postal scale, a pile of newspapers, and a morose office-boy who drew copies of Gibson girls all day long on stray pieces of wrapping-paper, and confided to Una, at least once a week, that he wanted to take a correspondence course in window-dressing. In one of the two rooms Mr.
Wilkins cautiously made drawings at a long table, or looked surprised over correspondence at a small old-fashioned desk, or puffed and scratched as he planned form-letters to save his steadily waning business.
In the other room there were the correspondence-files, and the desks of Una, the chief stenographer, and of slangy East-Side Bessie Kraker, who conscientiously copied form-letters, including all errors in them, and couldn"t, as Wilkins complainingly pointed out, be trusted with dictation which included any words more difficult than "sincerely."
From their window the two girls could see the windows of an office across the street. About once a month an interesting curly-haired youth leaned out of one of the windows opposite. Otherwise there was no view.
- 4
Twelve o"clock, the hour at which most of the offices closed on Sat.u.r.day in summer, was excitedly approaching. The office-women throughout the Septimus Building, who had been showing off their holiday frocks all morning, were hastily finishing letters, or rushing to the women"s wash-rooms to discuss with one another the hang of new skirts. All morning Bessie Kraker had kept up a monologue, beginning, "Say, lis-ten, Miss Golden, say, gee! I was goin" down to South Beach with my gentleman friend this afternoon, and, say, what d"you think the piker had to go and get stuck for? He"s got to work all afternoon. I don"t care--I don"t care! I"m going to Coney Island with Sadie, and I bet you we pick up some fellows and do the light fantastic till one G. M. Oh, you sad sea waves! I bet Sadie and me make "em sad!"
"But we"ll be straight," said Bessie, half an hour later, apropos of nothing. "But gee! it"s fierce to not have any good times without you take a risk. But gee! my dad would kill me if I went wrong. He reads the Talmud all the time, and hates Goys. But gee! I can"t stand it all the time being a mollycoddle. I wisht I was a boy! I"d be a" aviator."
Bessie had a proud new blouse with a deep V, the edges of which gaped a bit and suggested that by ingenuity one could see more than was evident at first. Troy Wilkins, while pretending to be absent-mindedly fussing about a correspondence-file that morning, had forgotten that he was much married and had peered at the V. Una knew it, and the sordidness of that curiosity so embarra.s.sed her that she stopped typing to clutch at the throat of her own high-necked blouse, her heart throbbing. She wanted to run away. She had a vague desire to "help" Bessie, who purred at poor, good Mr. Wilkins and winked at Una and chewed gum enjoyably, who was brave and hardy and perfectly able to care for herself--an organism modified by the Ghetto to the life which still bewildered Una.
Mr. Wilkins went home at 11.17, after giving them enough work to last till noon. The office-boy chattily disappeared two minutes later, while Bessie went two minutes after that. Her delay was due to the adjustment of her huge straw hat, piled with pink roses and tufts of blue malines.
Una stayed till twelve. Her ambition had solidified into an unreasoning conscientiousness.
With Bessie gone, the office was so quiet that she hesitated to typewrite lest They sneak up on her--They who dwell in silent offices as They dwell beneath a small boy"s bed at night. The hush was intimidating; her slightest movement echoed; she stopped the sharply tapping machine after every few words to listen.
At twelve she put on her hat with two jabs of the hat-pins, and hastened to the elevator, exulting in freedom. The elevator was crowded with girls in new white frocks, voluble about their afternoon"s plans. One of them carried a wicker suit-case. She was, she announced, starting on her two weeks" vacation; there would be some boys, and she was going to have "a peach of a time."
Una and her mother had again spent a week of June in Panama, and she now recalled the bright, free mornings and lingering, wonderful twilights.
She had no place to go this holiday afternoon, and she longed to join a noisy, excited party. Of Walter Babson she did not think. She stubbornly determined to s.n.a.t.c.h this time of freedom. Why, of course, she a.s.serted, she could play by herself quite happily! With a spurious gaiety she patted her small black hand-bag. She skipped across to the Sixth Avenue Elevated and went up to the department-store district. She made elaborate plans for the great adventure of shopping. Bessie Kraker had insisted, with the nonchalant shrillness of eighteen, that Una "had ought to wear more color"; and Una had found, in the fashion section of a woman"s magazine, the suggestion for exactly the thing--"a modest, attractive frock of brown, with smart touches of orange"--and economical. She had the dress planned--ribbon-belt half brown and half orange, a collar edged with orange, cuffs slashed with it.
There were a score of mild matter-of-fact Unas on the same Elevated train with her, in their black hats and black jackets and black skirts and white waists, with one hint of coquetry in a white-lace jabot or a white-lace veil; faces slightly sallow or channeled with care, but eyes that longed to flare with love; women whom life didn"t want except to type its letters about invoices of rubber heels; women who would have given their salvation for the chance to sacrifice themselves for love.... And there was one man on that Elevated train, a well-bathed man with cynical eyes, who read a little book with a florid gold cover, all about Clytemnestra, because he was certain that modern cities have no fine romance, no high tragedy; that you must go back to the Greeks for real feeling. He often aphorized, "Frightfully hackneyed to say, "woman"s place is in the home," but really, you know, these women going to offices, vulgarizing all their fine womanliness, and this shrieking sisterhood going in for suffrage and Lord knows what. Give me the reticences of the harem rather than one of these office-women with gum-chewing vacuities. None of them clever enough to be tragic!" He was ever so whimsical about the way in which the suffrage movement had cheated him of the chance to find a "_grande amoureuse_." He sat opposite Una in the train and solemnly read his golden book. He did not see Una watch with shy desire every movement of a baby that was talking to its mother in some unknown dialect of baby-land. He was feeling deep sensations about Clytemnestra"s misfortunes--though he controlled his features in the most gentlemanly manner, and rose composedly at his station, letting a well-bred glance of pity fall upon the gum-chewers.