Mr. Ross disregarded her letter for ten days, then so urgently telephoned her to come and see him that she took a taxicab clear to the Pemberton Building in Long Island City. After paying a week"s lunch money for the taxicab, it was rather hard to discover why Mr. Ross had been quite so urgent. He rolled about his magnificent mahogany and tapestry office, looked out of the window at the Long Island Railroad tracks, and told her (in confidence) what fools all the _Gas Gazette_ chiefs had been, and all his employers since then. She smiled appreciatively, and tried to get in a tactful remark about a position.
She did discover that Mr. Ross had not as yet chosen his secretary at Pemberton"s, but beyond this Una could find no evidence that he supposed her to have come for any reason other than to hear his mellow wisdom and even mellower stories.
After more than a month, during which Mr. Ross diverted himself by making appointments, postponing them, forgetting them, telephoning, telegraphing, sending special-delivery letters, being paged at hotels, and doing all the useless melodramatic things he could think of, except using an aeroplane or a submarine, he decided to make her his secretary at twenty dollars a week. Two days later it occurred to him to test her in regard to speed in dictation and typing, and a few other minor things of the sort which her ability as a long-distance listener had made him overlook. Fortunately, she also pa.s.sed this test.
When she told Mr. Wilkins that she was going to leave, he used another set of phrases which all side-street office potentates know--they must learn these _cliches_ out of a little red-leather manual.... He tightened his lips and tapped on his desk-pad with a blue pencil; he looked grieved and said, touchingly: "I think you"re making a mistake. I was making plans for you; in fact, I had just about decided to offer you eighteen dollars a week, and to advance you just as fast as the business will warrant. I, uh, well, I think you"re making a mistake in leaving a sure thing, a good, sound, conservative place, for something you don"t know anything about. I"m not in any way urging you to stay, you understand, but I don"t like to see you making a mistake."
But he had also told Bessie Kraker that she was "making a mistake" when she had resigned to be married, and he had been so very certain that Una could never be "worth more" than fifteen. Una was rather tart about it.
Though Mr. Ross didn"t want her at Pemberton"s for two weeks more, she told Mr. Wilkins that she was going to leave on the following Sat.u.r.day.
It did not occur to her till Mr. Wilkins developed nervous indigestion by trying to "break in" a new secretary who couldn"t tell a blue-print from a set of specifications, that he had his side in the perpetual struggle between ill-paid failure employers and ill-paid ambitious employees. She was sorry for him as she watched him putter, and she helped him; stayed late, and powerfully exhorted her successor. Mr.
Wilkins revived and hoped that she would stay another week, but stay she could not. Once she knew that she was able to break away from the scrub-rag, that specter of the wash-room, and the bleak, frosted gla.s.s on the semi-part.i.tion in front of her desk, no wage could have helped her. Every moment here was an edged agony.
In this refusal there may have been a trace of aspiration. Otherwise the whole affair was a hodge-podge of petty people and ign.o.ble motives--of Una and Wilkins and S. Herbert Ross and Bessie Kraker, who married a mattress-renovator, and Bessie"s successor; of fifteen dollars a week, and everybody trying to deceive everybody else; of vague reasons for going, and vaguer reasons for letting Una go, and no reason at all for her remaining; in all, an ascent from a scrub-rag to a glorified soap-factory designed to provide Mr. Pemberton"s daughters-in-law with motors.
So long as her world was ruled by chance, half-training, and lack of clear purpose, how could it be other than a hodge-podge?
- 2
She could not take as a holiday the two weeks intervening between the Wilkins office and Pemberton"s. When she left Wilkins"s, exulting, "This is the last time I"ll ever go down in one of these rickety elevators,"
she had, besides her fifteen dollars in salary, one dollar and seventeen cents in the savings-bank.
Mamie Magen gave her the opportunity to spend the two weeks installing a modern filing-system at Herzfeld & Cohn"s.
So Una had a glimpse of the almost beautiful thing business can be.
Herzfeld and Cohn were Jews, old, white-bearded, orthodox Jews; their unpoetic business was the jobbing of iron beds; and Una was typical of that New York which the Jews are conquering, in having nebulous prejudices against the race; in calling them "mean" and "grasping" and "un-American," and wanting to see them shut out of offices and hotels.
Yet, with their merry eyes, their quick little foreign cries and gestures of sympathy, their laughter that rumbled in their tremendous beards, their habit of having coffee and pinochle in the office every Friday afternoon, their sincere belief that, as the bosses, they were not omniscient rulers, but merely elder fellow-workers--with these un-American, eccentric, patriarchal ways, Herzfeld and Cohn had made their office a joyous adventure. Other people "in the trade" sniffed at Herzfeld and Cohn for their Quixotic notions of discipline, but they made it pay in dividends as well as in affection. At breakfast Una would find herself eager to get back to work, though Herzfeld and Cohn had but a plain office in an ugly building of brownstone and iron Corinthian columns, resembling an old-fashioned post-office, and typical of all that block on Church Street. There was such gentleness here as Una was not to find in the modern, glazed-brick palace of Pemberton"s.
- 3
Above railroad yards and mean tenements in Long Island City, just across the East River from New York, the shining milky walls of Pemberton"s bulk up like a castle overtowering a thatched village. It is magnificently the new-fashioned, scientific, efficient business inst.i.tution.... Except, perhaps, in one tiny detail. King Pemberton and his princely sons do not believe in all this nonsense about profit-sharing, or a minimum wage, or an eight-hour day, or pensions, or any of the other fads by which dangerous persons like Mr. Ford, the motor manufacturer, encourage the lazier workmen to think that they have just as much right to rise to the top as the men who have had nerve and foresight. And indeed Mr. Pemberton may be sound. He says that he bases wages on the economic law of supply and demand, instead of on sentiment; and how shrewdly successful are he and his sons is indicated by the fact that Pemberton"s is one of the largest sources of drugs and proprietary medicines in the world; the second largest manufactory of soda-fountain syrups; of rubber, celluloid, and leather goods of the kind seen in corner drug-stores; and the third largest manufactory of soaps and toilet articles. It has been calculated that ninety-three million women in all parts of the world have ruined their complexions, and, therefore, their souls, by Pemberton"s creams and lotions for saving the same; and that nearly three-tenths of the alcohol consumed in prohibition counties is obtained in Pemberton"s tonics and blood-builders and women"s specifics, the last being regarded by large farmers with beards as especially tasty and stimulating. Mr. Pemberton is the Napoleon of patent medicine, and also the Napoleon of drugs used by physicians to cure the effects of patent medicine. He is the Shakespeare of ice-cream sodas, and the Edison of hot-water bags. He rules more than five thousand employees, and his name is glorious on cartons in drug-stores, from Sandy Hook to San Diego, and chemists" shops from Hong-Kong to the Scilly Isles. He is a modern Allah, and Mr. S. Herbert Ross is his prophet.
- 4
Una discovered that Mr. Ross, who had been negligible as advertising-manager of the _Gas and Motor Gazette_, had, in two or three years, become a light domestic great man, because he so completely believed in his own genius, and because advertising is the romance, the faith, the mystery of business. Mr. Pemberton, though he knew well enough that soap-making was a perfectly natural phenomenon, could never get over marveling at the supernatural manner in which advertising seemed to create something out of nothing. It took a cherry fountain syrup which was merely a chemical imitation that under an old name was familiar to everybody; it gave the syrup a new name, and made twenty million children clamor for it. Mr. Pemberton could never quite understand that advertising was merely a matter of salesmanship by paper and ink, nor that Mr. Ross"s a.s.sistants, who wrote the copy and drew the pictures and selected the mediums and got the "mats" over to the agency on time, were real advertising men. No, the trusting old pirate believed it was also necessary to have an ordained advertising-manager like Mr.
Ross, a real initiate, who could pull a long face and talk about "the psychology of the utilitarian appeal" and "pulling power" and all the rest of the theology. So he, who paid packing-girls as little as four dollars a week, paid Mr. Ross fifteen thousand dollars a year, and let him have competent a.s.sistants, and invited him out to the big, lonely, unhappy Pemberton house in the country, and listened to his sacerdotal discourses, and let him keep four or five jobs at once. For, besides being advertising-manager for Pemberton"s, Mr. Ross went off to deliver Lyceum lectures and Chautauqua addresses and club chit-chats on the blessings of selling more soap or underwear; and for the magazines he wrote prose poems about stars, and sympathy, and punch, and early rising, and roadside flowers, and argosies, and farming, and saving money.
All this doge-like splendor Una discovered, but could scarcely believe, for in his own office Mr. Ross seemed but as the rest of us--a small round man, with a clown-like little face and hair cut Dutch-wise across his forehead. When he smoked a big cigar he appeared naughty. One expected to see his mother come and judiciously smack him. But more and more Una felt the force of his att.i.tude that he was a genius incomparable. She could not believe that he knew what a gorgeous fraud he was. On the same day, he received an advance in salary, discharged an a.s.sistant for requesting an advance in salary, and dictated a magazine filler to the effect that the chief duty of executives was to advance salaries. She could not chart him.... Thus for thousands of years have servants been amazed at the difference between pontiffs in the pulpit and pontiffs in the pantry.
Doubtless it helped Mr. Ross in maintaining his sublimity to dress like a cleric--black, modest suits of straight lines, white shirts, small, black ties. But he also wore silk socks, which he reflectively scratched while he was dictating. He was of an elegance in linen handkerchiefs, in a chased-gold cigarette-case, in cigarettes with a monogram. Indeed, he often stopped during dictation to lean across the enormous mahogany desk and explain to Una how much of a connoisseur he was in tennis, fly-casting, the ordering of small, smart dinners at the Plaza.
He was fond of the word "smart."
"Rather smart poster, eh?" he would say, holding up the latest creation of his genius--that is to say, of his genius in hiring the men who had planned and prepared the creation.
Mr. Ross was as full of ideas as of elegance. He gave birth to ideas at lunch, at "conferences," while motoring, while being refreshed with a manicure and a violet-ray treatment at a barber-shop in the middle of one of his arduous afternoons. He would gallop back to the office with notes on these ideas, pant at Una in a controlled voice, "Quick--your book--got a" idea," and dictate the outline of such schemes as the Tranquillity Lunch Room--a place of silence and expensive food; the Grand Arcade--a ten-block-long rival to Broadway, all under gla.s.s; the Barber-Shop Syndicate, with engagement cards sent out every third week to notify customers that the time for a hair-cut had come again. None of these ideas ever had anything to do with a.s.sisting Mr. Pemberton in the sale of soap, and none of them ever went any farther than being outlined. Whenever he had dictated one of them, Mr. Ross would a.s.sume that he had already made a million out of it, and in his quiet, hypnotizing voice he would permit Una to learn what a great man he was.
Hitching his chair an inch nearer to her at each sentence, looking straight into her eyes, in a manner as unboastful as though he were giving the market price of eggs, he would tell her how J. Pierpont Morgan, Burbank, or William Randolph Hearst had praised him; or how much more he knew about electricity or toxicology or frogs or Java than anybody else in the world.
Not only a priest, but a virtuoso of business was he, and Una"s chief task was to keep a.s.suring him that he was a great man, a very great man--in fact, as great as he thought he was. This task was, to the uneasily sincere Una, the hardest she had ever attempted. It was worth five dollars more a week than she had received from Troy Wilkins--it was worth a million more!
She got confidence in herself from the ease with which she satisfied Mr.
Ross by her cold, canned compliments. And though she was often dizzied by the whirling dynamo of Pemberton"s, she was not bored by the routine of valeting Mr. Ross in his actual work.... For Mr. Ross actually did work now and then, though his chief duty was to make an impression on old Mr. Pemberton, his sons, and the other big chiefs. Still, he did condescend to "put his O. K." on pictures, on copy and proof for magazine advertis.e.m.e.nts, car cards, window-display "cut-outs," and he dictated highly ethical reading matter for the house organ, which was distributed to ten thousand drug-stores, and which spoke well of honesty, feminine beauty, gardening, and Pemberton"s. Occasionally he had a really useful idea, like the celebrated slogan, "_Pemberton"s_ Means PURE," which you see in every street-car, on every fourth or fifth bill-board. It is frequent as the "In G.o.d We Trust" on our coins, and at least as accurate. This slogan, he told Una, surpa.s.sed "A train every hour on the hour," or "The watch that made the dollar famous," or, "The ham what am," or any of the other masterpieces of lyric advertising. He had created it after going into a sibyllic trance of five days, during which he had drunk champagne and black coffee, and ridden about in hansoms, delicately brushing his nose with a genuine California poppy from the Monterey garden of R. L. S.
If Mr. Ross was somewhat agitating, he was calm as the desert compared with the rest of Pemberton"s.
His office, which was like a million-dollar hotel lobby, and Una"s own den, which was like the baggage-porter"s den adjoining the same, were the only spots at Pemberton"s where Una felt secure. Outside of them, fourteen stories up in the t.i.tanic factory, was an enormous office-floor, which was a wilderness of desks, toilet-rooms, elevators, waiting-rooms, filing-cabinets. Her own personality was absorbed in the cosmic (though soapy) personality of Pemberton"s. Instead of longing for a change, she clung to her own corner, its desk and spring-back chair, and the insurance calendar with a high-colored picture of Washington"s farewell. She preferred to rest here rather than in the "club-room and rest-room for women employees," on which Mr. Pemberton so prided himself.
Una heard rumors of rest-rooms which were really beautiful, really restful; but at Pemberton"s the room resembled a Far Rockaway cottage rented by the week to feeble-minded bookkeepers. Musty it was, with curtains awry, and it must have been of use to all the branches of the Pemberton family in cleaning out their attics. Here was the old stuffed chair in which Pemberton I. had died, and the cot which had been in the cook"s room till she had protested. The superst.i.tion among the chiefs was that all the women employees were very grateful for this charity.
The room was always shown to exclamatory visitors, who told Mr.
Pemberton that he was almost too good. But in secret conclaves at lunch the girls called the room "the junk-shop," and said that they would rather go out and sit on the curb.
Una herself took one look--and one smell--at the room, and never went near it again.
But even had it been enticing, she would not have frequented it. Her caste as secretary forbade. For Pemberton"s was as full of caste and politics as a Republican national convention; caste and politics, cliques and factions, plots and secrets, and dynasties that pa.s.sed and were forgotten.
Plots and secrets Una saw as secretary to Mr. Ross. She remembered a day on which Mr. Ross, in her presence, a.s.sured old Pemberton that he hoped to be with the firm for the rest of his life, and immediately afterward dictated a letter to the president of a rival firm in the effort to secure a new position. He destroyed the carbon copy of that letter and looked at Una as serenely as ever. Una saw him read letters on the desks of other chiefs while he was talking to them; saw him "listen in"
on telephone calls, and casually thrust his foot into doors, in order to have a glimpse of the visitors in offices. She saw one of the younger Pembertons hide behind a bookcase while his father was talking to his brother. She knew that this Pemberton and Mr. Ross were plotting to oust the brother, and that the young, alert purchasing agent was trying to undermine them both. She knew that one of the girls in the private telephone exchange was the mistress and spy of old Pemberton. All of the chiefs tried to emulate the _moyen-age_ Italians in the arts of smiling poisoning--but they did it so badly; they were as fussily ineffectual as a group of school-boys who hate their teacher. Not "big deals" and vast grim power did they achieve, but merely a constant current of worried insecurity, and they all tended to prove Mrs. Lawrence"s a.s.sertion that the office-world is a method of giving the largest possible number of people the largest possible amount of nervous discomfort, to the end of producing the largest possible quant.i.ty of totally useless articles....
The struggle extended from the chiefs to the clerks; they who tramped up and down a corridor, waiting till a chief was alone, glaring at others who were also manoeuvering to see him; they who studied the lightest remark of any chief and rushed to allies with the problem of, "Now, what did he mean by that, do you think?"... A thousand questions of making an impression on the overlords, and of "House Policy"--that malicious little spirit which stalks through the business house and encourages people to refuse favors.
Una"s share in the actual work at Pemberton"s would have been only a morning"s pastime, but her contact with the high-voltage current of politics exhausted her--and taught her that commercial rewards come to those who demand and take.
The office politics bred caste. Caste at Pemberton"s was as clearly defined as ranks in an army.
At the top were the big chiefs, the officers of the company, and the heads of departments--Mr. Pemberton and his sons, the treasurer, the general manager, the purchasing-agent, the superintendents of the soda-fountain-syrup factory, of the soap-works, of the drug-laboratories, of the toilet-accessories shops, the sales-manager, and Mr. S. Herbert Ross. The Olympian council were they; divinities to whom the lesser clerks had never dared to speak. When there were rumors of "a change," of "a cut-down in the force," every person on the office floor watched the chiefs as they a.s.sembled to go out to lunch together--big, florid, shaven, large-chinned men, talking easily, healthy from motoring and golf, able in a moment"s conference at lunch to "shift the policy" and to bring instant poverty to the families of forty clerks or four hundred workmen in the shops. When they jovially entered the elevator together, some high-strung stenographer would rush over to one of the older women to weep and be comforted.... An hour from now her tiny job might be gone.
Even the chiefs" outside a.s.sociates were tremendous, buyers and diplomatic representatives; big-chested men with watch-chains across their beautiful tight waistcoats. And like envoys extraordinary were the efficiency experts whom Mr. Pemberton occasionally had in to speed up the work a bit more beyond the point of human endurance.... One of these experts, a smiling and pale-haired young man who talked to Mr. Ross about the new poetry, arranged to have office-boys go about with trays of water-gla.s.ses at ten, twelve, two, and four. Thitherto, the stenographers had wasted a great deal of time in trotting to the battery of water-coolers, in actually being human and relaxed and gossipy for ten minutes a day. After the visitation of the expert the girls were so efficient that they never for a second stopped their work--except when one of them would explode in hysteria and be hurried off to the rest-room. But no expert was able to keep them from jumping at the chance to marry any one who would condescend to take them out of this efficient atmosphere.
Just beneath the chiefs was the caste of bright young men who would some day have the chance to be beatified into chiefs. They believed enormously in the virtue of spreading the blessings of Pemberton"s patent medicines; they worshiped the house policy. Once a month they met at what they called "punch lunches," and listened to electrifying addresses by Mr. S. Herbert Ross or some other inspirer, and turned fresh, excited eyes on one another, and vowed to adhere to the true faith of Pemberton"s, and not waste their evenings in making love, or reading fiction, or hearing music, but to read diligently about soap and syrups and window displays, and to keep firmly before them the vision of fifteen thousand dollars a year. They had quite the best time of any one at Pemberton"s, the bright young men. They sat, in silk shirts and new ties, at shiny, flat-topped desks in rows; they answered the telephone with an air; they talked about tennis and business conditions, and were never, never bored.
Intermingled with this caste were the petty chiefs, the office-managers and bookkeepers, who were velvety to those placed in power over them, but tw.a.n.gily nagging to the girls and young men under them. Failures themselves, they eyed sourly the stenographers who desired two dollars more a week, and a.s.sured them that while _personally_ they would be _very_ glad to obtain the advance for them, it would be "unfair to the other girls." They were very strong on the subject of not being unfair to the other girls, and their own salaries were based on "keeping down overhead." Oldish men they were, wearing last-year hats and smoking Virginia cigarettes at lunch; always gossiping about the big chiefs, and at night disappearing to homes and families in New Jersey or Harlem.
Awe-encircled as the very chiefs they appeared when they lectured stenographers, but they cowered when the chiefs spoke to them, and tremblingly fingered their frayed cuffs.
Such were the castes above the buzzer-line.
Una"s caste, made up of private secretaries to the chiefs, was not above the buzzer. She had to leap to the rattlesnake tattoo, when Mr. Ross summoned her, as quickly as did the newest Jewish stenographer. But hers was a staff corps, small and exclusive and out of the regular line. On the one hand she could not a.s.sociate with the chiefs; on the other, it was expected of her in her capacity as daily confidante to one of the G.o.ds, that she should not be friendly, in coat-room or rest-room or elevator, with the unrecognized horde of girls who merely copied or took the bright young men"s dictation of letters to drug-stores. These girls of the common herd were expected to call the secretaries, "Miss," no matter what street-corner impertinences they used to one another.
There was no caste, though there was much factional rivalry, among the slaves beneath--the stenographers, copyists, clerks, waiting-room attendants, office-boys, elevator-boys. They were expected to keep clean and be quick-moving; beyond that they were as unimportant to the larger phases of office politics as frogs to a summer hotel. Only the cashier"s card index could remember their names.... Though they were not deprived of the chief human satisfaction and vice--feeling superior. The most snuffle-nosed little mailing-girl on the office floor felt superior to all of the factory workers, even the foremen, quite as negro house-servants look down on poor white trash.
Jealousy of position, cattishness, envy of social standing--these were as evident among the office-women as they are in a woman"s club; and Una had to admit that woman"s cruelty to woman often justified the prejudices of executives against the employment of women in business; that women were the worst foes of Woman.
To Una"s sympathies, the office proletarians were her own poor relations. She sighed over the cheap jackets, with silesia linings and raveled b.u.t.tonholes, which nameless copyists tried to make attractive by the clean embroidered linen collars which they themselves laundered in wash-bowls in the evening. She discovered that even after years of experience with actual office-boys and elevator-boys, Mr. Ross still saw them only as slangy, comic-paper devils. Then, in the elevator, she ascertained that the runners made about two hundred trips up and down the dark chutes every day, and wondered if they always found it comic to do so. She saw the office-boys, just growing into the age of interest in s.e.x and acquiring husky male voices and shambling sense of shame, yearn at the shrines of pasty-faced stenographers. She saw the humanity of all this ma.s.s--none the less that they envied her position and spoke privily of "those snippy private secretaries that think they"re so much sweller than the rest of us."
She watched with peculiar interest one stratum: the old ladies, the white-haired, fair-handed women of fifty and sixty and even seventy, spinsters and widows, for whom life was nothing but a desk and a job of petty pickings--mailing circulars or a.s.sorting letters or checking up lists. She watched them so closely because she speculated always, "Will I ever be like that?"
They seemed comfortable; gossipy they were, and fond of mothering the girls. But now and then one of them would start to weep, cry for an hour together, with her white head on a spotty desk-blotter, till she forgot her homelessness and uselessness. Epidemics of hysteria would spring up sometimes, and women of thirty-five or forty--normally well content--would join the old ladies in sobbing. Una would wonder if she would be crying like that at thirty-five--and at sixty-five, with thirty barren, weeping years between. Always she saw the girls of twenty-two getting tired, the women of twenty-eight getting dry and stringy, the women of thirty-five in a solid maturity of large-bosomed and widowed spinsterhood, the old women purring and catty and tragic.... She herself was twenty-eight now, and she knew that she was growing sallow, that the back of her neck ached more often, and that she had no release in sight save the affably dull Mr. Julius Edward Schwirtz.