“Sure,” affirmed Mr. Schwirtz, “I like poetry fine. Used to read it myself when I was traveling out of St. Paul and got kind of stuck on a waitress at Eau Claire.” This did not perfectly satisfy Una, but she was more satisfied that he had heard the gospel of culture after he had described, with much detail, his enjoyment of a “fella from Boston, perfessional reciter; they say he writes swell poetry himself; gave us a program of Kipling and Ella Wheeler Wilcox before the Elks—real poetic fella.”
“Do you go to concerts, symphonies, and so on, much?” Una next catechized.
“Well, no; that’s where I fall down. Just between you and I, I never did have much time for these high-brows that try to make out they’re so darn much better than common folks by talking about motifs and symphony poems and all that long-haired stuff. Fellow that’s in music goods took me to a Philharmonic concert once, and I couldn’t make head or tail of the stuff—conductor batting a poor musician over the ear with his swagger-stick (and him a union man, oughta kicked to his union about the way the conductor treated him) and him coming back with a yawp on the fiddle and getting two laps ahead of the brass band, and they all blowing their stuffings out trying to catch up. Music they call that! And once I went to grand opera—lot of fat Dutchmen all singing together like they was selling old rags. Aw nix, give me one of the good old songs like ‘The Last Rose of Summer.’... I bet you could sing that so that even a sporting-goods drummer would cry and think about the sweetheart he had when he was a kid.”
“No, I couldn’t—I can’t sing a note,” Una said, delightedly.... She had laughed very much at Mr. Schwirtz’s humor. She slid down in her chair and felt more expansively peaceful than she ever had been in the stress of Walter Babson.
“Straight, now, little sister. Own up. Don’t you get more fun out of hearing Raymond Hitchcock sing than you do out of a bunch of fiddles and flutes fighting out a piece by Vaugner like they was Kilkenny cats? ’Fess up, now; don’t you get more downright amusement?”
“Well, maybe I do, sometimes; but that doesn’t mean that all this cheap musical comedy music is as good as opera, and so on, if we had our—had musical educations—”
“Oh yes; that’s what they all say! But I notice that Hitchcock and George M. Cohan go on drawing big audiences every night—yes, and the swellest, best-dressed, smartest people in New York and Brooklyn, too—it’s in the gallery at the opera that you find all these Wops and Swedes and Lord knows what-all. And when a bunch of people are out at a lake, say, you don’t ever catch’em singing Vaugner or Lits or Gryge or any of them guys. If they don’t sing, ‘In the Good Old Summer-Time,’ it’s ‘Old Black Joe,’ or ‘Nelly Was a Lady,’ or something that’s really got some melody to it.”
The neophyte was lured from her new-won altar. Cold to her knees was the barren stone of the shrine; and she feebly recanted, “Yes, that’s so.”
Mr. Schwirtz cheerfully took out a cigar, smelled it, bit it, luxuriously removed the band, requested permission to smoke, lighted the cigar without waiting for an answer to that request, sighed happily, and dived again:
“Not that I’m knocking the high-brows, y’ understand. This dress-suit music is all right for them that likes it. But what I object to is their trying to stuff it down my throat! I let’em alone, and if I want to be a poor old low-brow and like reg’lar music, I don’t see where they get off to be telling me I got to go to concerts. Honest now, ain’t that the truth?”
“Oh yes, that way—”
“All these here critics telling what low-brows us American business men are! Just between you and I, I bet I knock down more good, big, round, iron men every week than nine-tenths of these high-brow fiddlers—yes, and college professors and authors, too!”
“Yes, but you shouldn’t make money your standard,” said Una, in company with the invisible chorus of Mamie Magen and Walter Babson.
“Well, then, what are you going to make a standard?” asked Mr. Schwirtz, triumphantly.
“Well—” said Una.
“Understan’ me; I’m a high-brow myself some ways. I never could stand these cheap magazines. I’d stop the circulation of every last one of them; pass an act of Congress to make every voter read some A-1, high-class, intellectual stuff. I read Rev. Henry van Dyke and Newell Dwight Hillis and Herbert Kaufman and Billy Sunday, and all these brainy, inspirational fellows, and let me tell you I get a lot of talking-points for selling my trade out of their spiels, too. I don’t believe in all this cheap fiction—these nasty realistic stories (like all the author could see in life was just the bad side of things—I tell you life’s bad enough without emphasizing the rotten side, all these unhappy marriages and poverty and everything—I believe if you can’t write bright, optimistic, cheerful things, better not write at all). And all these sex stories! Don’t believe in’em! Sensational! Don’t believe in cheap literature of no sort.... Oh, of course it’s all right to read a coupla detective stories or a nice, bright, clean love-story just to pass the time away. But me, I like real, classy, high-grade writers, with none of this slangy dialogue or vulgar stuff. ’Specially I like essays on strenuous, modern American life, about not being in a rut, but putting a punch in life. Yes, sir!”
“I’m glad,” said Una. “I do like improving books.”
“You’ve said it, little sister.... Say, gee! you don’t know what a luxury it is for me to talk about books and literature with an educated, cultured girl like you. Now take the rest of these people here at the farm—nice folks, you understand, mighty well-traveled, broad-gauged, intelligent folks, and all that. There’s a Mr. and Mrs. Cannon; he’s some kind of an executive in the Chicago stock-yards—nice, fat, responsible job. And he was saying to me, ’Mr. Schwirtz,’ he says, ‘Mrs. C. and I had never been to New England till this summer, but we’d toured every other part of the country, and we’ve done Europe thoroughly and put in a month doing Florida, and now,’ he says, ‘I think we can say we’ve seen every point of interest that’s worth an American’s time.’ They’re good American people like that, well-traveled and nice folks. But books—Lord! they can’t talk about books no more than a Jersey City bartender. So you can imagine how pleased I was to find you here.... World’s pretty small, all right. Say, I just got here yesterday, so I suppose we’ll be here about the same length o’ time. If you wouldn’t think I was presumptuous, I’d like mighty well to show you some of the country around here. We could get up a picnic party, ten or a dozen of us, and go up on Bald Knob and see the scenery and have a real jolly time. And I’d be glad to take you down to Lesterhampton—there’s a real old-fashioned inn down there, they say, where Paul Revere stayed one time; they say you can get the best kind of fried chicken and corn on cob and real old-fashioned New England blueberry pie. Would you like to?”
“Why, I should be very pleased to,” said Una.
§ 2
Mr. Schwirtz seemed to know everybody at the farm. He had been there only thirty-six hours, but already he called Mr. Cannon “Sam,” and knew that Miss Vincent’s married sister’s youngest child had recently passed away with a severe and quite unexpected attack of cholera morbus. Mr. Schwirtz introduced Una to the others so fulsomely that she was immediately taken into the inner political ring. He gave her a first lesson in auction pinochle also. They had music and recitations at ten, and Una’s shyness was so warmed away that she found herself reciting, “I’m Only Mammy’s Pickaninny Coon.”
She went candle-lighted up to a four-poster bed. As she lay awake, her job-branded mind could not keep entirely away from the office, the work she would have to do when she returned, the familiar series of indefinite worries and disconnected office pictures. But mostly she let the rustle of the breathing land inspirit her while she thought of Mr. Julius Edward Schwirtz.
She knew that he was ungrammatical, but she denied that he was uncouth. His deep voice had been very kindly; his clipped mustache was trim; his nails, which had been ragged at that commercial-college lunch, were manicured now; he was sure of himself, while Walter Babson doubted and thrashed about. All of which meant that the tired office-woman was touchily defensive of the man who liked her.
She couldn’t remember just where she had learned it, but she knew that Mr. Schwirtz was a widower.
§ 3
The fact that she did not have to get up and go to the office was Una’s chief impression at awakening, but she was not entirely obtuse to the morning, to the chirp of a robin, the cluck of the hens, the creak of a hay-wagon, and the sweet smell of cattle. When she arose she looked down a slope of fields so far away that they seemed smooth as a lawn. Solitary, majestic trees cast long shadows over a hilly pasture of crisp grass worn to inviting paths by the cropping cattle. Beyond the valley was a range of the Berkshires with every tree distinct.
Una was tired, but the morning’s radiance inspired her. “My America—so beautiful! Why do we turn you into stuffy offices and ugly towns?” she marveled while she was dressing.
But as breakfast was not ready, her sudden wish to do something magnificent for America turned into what she called a “before-coffee grouch,” and she sat on the porch waiting for the bell, and hoping that the conversational Mr. Schwirtz wouldn’t come and converse. It was to his glory that he didn’t. He appeared in masterful white-flannel trousers and a pressed blue coat and a new Panama, which looked well on his fleshy but trim head. He said, “Mornin’,” cheerfully, and went to prowl about the farm.
All through the breakfast Una caught the effulgence of Mr. Schwirtz’s prosperous-looking solidness, and almost persuaded herself that his jowls and the slabs of fat along his neck were powerful muscles.
He asked her to play croquet. Una played a game which had been respected in the smartest croqueting circles of Panama; she defeated him; and while she blushed and insisted that he ought to have won, Mr. Schwirtz chuckled about his defeat and boasted of it to the group on the porch.
“I was afraid,” he told her, “I was going to find this farm kinda tame. Usually expect a few more good fellows and highballs in mine, but thanks to you, little sister, looks like I’ll have a bigger time than a high-line poker Party.”
He seemed deeply to respect her, and Una, who had never had the débutante’s privilege of ordering men about, who had avoided Henry Carson and responded to Walter Babson and obeyed chiefs in offices, was now at last demanding that privilege. She developed feminine whims and desires. She asked Mr. Schwirtz to look for her handkerchief, and bring her magazine, and arrange her chair cushions, and take her for a walk to “the Glade.”
He obeyed breathlessly.
Following an old and rutted woodland road to the Glade, they passed a Berkshire abandoned farm—a solid house of stone and red timbers, softened by the long grasses that made the orchard a pleasant place. They passed berry-bushes—raspberry and blackberry and currant, now turned wild; green-gold bushes that were a net for sunbeams. They saw yellow warblers flicker away, a king-bird swoop, a scarlet tanager glisten in flight.
“Wonder what that red bird is?” He admiringly looked to her to know.
“Why, I think that’s a cardinal.”
“Golly! I wish I knew about nature.”
“So do I! I don’t really know a thing—”
“Huh! I bet you do!”
“—though I ought to, living in a small town so long. I’d planned to buy me a bird-book,” she rambled on, giddy with sunshine, “and a flower-book and bring them along, but I was so busy getting away from the office that I came off without them. Don’t you just love to know about birds and things?”
“Yuh, I cer’nly do; I cer’nly do. Say, this beats New York, eh? I don’t care if I never see another show or a cocktail. Cer’nly do beat New York. Cer’nly does! I was saying to Sam Cannon, ‘Lord,’ I says, ‘I wonder what a fellow ever stays in the city for; never catch me there if I could rake in the coin out in the country, no, sir!’ And he laughed and said he guessed it was the same way with him. No, sir; my idea of perfect happiness is to be hiking along here with you, Miss Golden.”
He gazed down upon her with a mixture of amorousness and awe. The leaves of scrub-oaks along the road crinkled and shone in the sun. She was lulled to slumberous content. She lazily beamed her pleasure back at him, though a tiny hope that he would be circumspect, not be too ardent, stirred in her. He was touching in his desire to express his interest without ruffling her. He began to talk about Miss Vincent’s affair with Mr. Starr, the wealthy old boarder at the farm. In that topic they passed safely through the torrid wilderness of summer shine and tangled blooms.
The thwarted boyish soul that persisted in Mr. Schwirtz’s barbered, unexercised, coffee-soaked, tobacco-filled, whisky-rotted, fattily degenerated city body shone through his red-veined eyes. He was having a fête champêtre. He gathered berries and sang all that he remembered of “Nut Brown Ale,” and chased a cow and pantingly stopped under a tree and smoked a cigar as though he enjoyed it. In his simple pleasure Una was glad. She admired him when he showed his trained, professional side and explained (with rather confusing details) why the Ætna Automobile Varnish Company was a success. But she fluttered up to her feet, became the wilful débutante again, and commanded, “Come on, Mr. Slow! We’ll never reach the Glade.” He promptly struggled up to his feet. There was lordly devotion in the way he threw away his half-smoked cigar. It indicated perfect chivalry.... Even though he did light another in about three minutes.
The Glade was filled with a pale-green light; arching trees shut off the heat of the summer afternoon, and the leaves shone translucent. Ferns were in wild abundance. They sat on a fallen tree, thick upholstered with moss, and listened to the trickle of a brook. Una was utterly happy. In her very weariness there was a voluptuous feeling that the air was dissolving the stains of the office.
He urged a compliment upon her only once more that day; but she gratefully took it to bed with her: “You’re just like this glade—make a fellow feel kinda calm and want to be good,” he said. “I’m going to cut out—all this boozing and stuff— Course you understand I never make a habit of them things, but still a fellow on the road—”
“Yes,” said Una.
All evening they discussed croquet, Lenox, Florida, Miss Vincent and Mr. Starr, the presidential campaign, and the food at the farm-house. Boarders from the next farm-house came a-calling, and the enlarged company discussed the food at both of the farm-houses, the presidential campaign, Florida, and Lenox. The men and women gradually separated; relieved of the strain of general and polite conversation, the men gratefully talked about business conditions and the presidential campaign and food and motoring, and told sly stories about Mike and Pat, or about Ikey and Jakey; while the women listened to Mrs. Cannon’s stories about her youngest son, and compared notes on cooking, village improvement societies, and what Mrs. Taft would do in Washington society if Judge Taft was elected President. Miss Vincent had once shaken hands with Judge Taft, and she occasionally referred to the incident. Mrs. Cannon took Una aside and told her that she thought Mr. Starr and Miss Vincent must have walked down to the village together that afternoon, as she had distinctly seen them coming back up the road.
Yet Una did not feel Panama-ized.
She was a grown-up person, accepted as one, not as Mrs. Golden’s daughter; and her own gossip now passed at par.
And all evening she was certain that Mr. Schwirtz was watching her.
§ 4
The boarders from the two farm-houses organized a tremendous picnic on Bald Knob, with sandwiches and chicken salad and cake and thermos bottles of coffee and a whole pail of beans and a phonograph with seven records; with recitations and pastoral merriment and kodaks snapping every two or three minutes; with groups sitting about on blankets, and once in a while some one explaining why the scenery was so scenic. Una had been anxious lest Mr. Schwirtz “pay her too marked attentions; make them as conspicuous as Mr. Starr and Miss Vincent”; for in the morning he had hung about, waiting for a game of croquet with her. But Mr. Schwirtz was equally pleasant to her, to Miss Vincent, and to Mrs. Cannon; and he was attractively ardent regarding the scenery. “This cer’nly beats New York, eh? Especially you being here,” he said to her, aside.
They sang ballads about the fire at dusk, and trailed home along dark paths that smelled of pungent leaf-mold. Mr. Schwirtz lumbered beside her, heaped with blankets and pails and baskets till he resembled a camel in a caravan, and encouraged her to tell how stupid and unenterprising Mr. Troy Wilkins was. When they reached the farm-house the young moon and the great evening star were low in a wash of turquoise above misty meadows; frogs sang; Una promised herself a long and unworried sleep; and the night tingled with an indefinable magic. She was absolutely, immaculately happy, for the first time since she had been ordered to take Walter Babson’s dictation.
§ 5
Mr. Schwirtz was generous; he invited all the boarders to a hay-ride picnic at Hawkins’s Pond, followed by a barn dance. He took Una and the Cannons for a motor ride, and insisted on buying—not giving, but buying—dinner for them, at the Lesterhampton Inn.
When the débutante Una bounced and said she did wish she had some candy, he trudged down to the village and bought for her a two-pound box of exciting chocolates. And when she longed to know how to play tennis, he rented balls and two rackets, tried to remember what he had learned in two or three games of ten years before, and gave her elaborate explanations. Lest the farm-house experts (Mr. Cannon was said by Mrs. Cannon to be one of the very best players at the Winnetka Country Club) see them, Una and Mr. Schwirtz sneaked out before breakfast. Their tennis costumes consisted of new canvas shoes. They galloped through the dew and swatted at balls ferociously—two happy dubs who proudly used all the tennis terms they knew.
§ 6
Mr. Schwirtz was always there when she wanted him, but he never intruded, he never was urgent. She kept him away for a week; but in their second week Mr. and Mrs. Cannon, Mr. Starr, Miss Vincent, and the pleasant couple from Gloversville all went away, and Una and Mr. Schwirtz became the elder generation, the seniors, of the boarders. They rather looked down upon the new boarders who came in—tenderfeet, people who didn’t know about Bald Knob or the Glade or Hawkins’s Pond, people who weren’t half so witty or comfy as the giants of those golden, olden days when Mr. Cannon had ruled. Una and Mr. Schwirtz deigned to accompany them on picnics, even grew interested in their new conceptions of the presidential campaign and croquet and food, yet held rather aloof, as became the ancien régime; took confidential walks together, and in secret laughed enormously when the green generation gossiped about them as though they were “interested in each other,” as Mr. Starr and Miss Vincent had been in the far-forgotten time. Una blushed a little when she discovered that every one thought they were engaged, but she laughed at the rumor, and she laughed again, a nervous young laugh, as she repeated it to Mr. Schwirtz.
“Isn’t it a shame the way people gossip! Silly billies,” she said. “We never talked that way about Mr. Starr and Miss Vincent—though in their case we would have been justified.”
“Yes, bet they were engaged. Oh, say, did I tell you about the first day I came here, and Starr took me aside, and says he—”
In their hour-long talks Mr. Schwirtz had not told much about himself, though of his business he had talked often. But on an afternoon when they took a book and a lunch and tramped off to a round-topped, grassy hill, he finally confided in her, and her mild interest in him as an amiable companion deepened to sympathy.
The book was The People of the Abyss, by Jack London, which Mamie Magen had given to Una as an introduction to a knowledge of social conditions. Una had planned to absorb it; to learn how the shockingly poor live. Now she read the first four pages to Mr. Schwirtz. After each page he said that he was interested. At the end of the fourth page, when Una stopped for breath, he commented: “Fine writer, that fella London. And they say he’s quite a fella; been a sailor and a miner and all kinds of things; ver’ intimate friend of mine knows him quite well—met him in’Frisco—and he says he’s been a sailor and all kinds of things. But he’s a socialist. Tell you, I ain’t got much time for these socialists. Course I’m kind of a socialist myself lots-a ways, but these here fellas that go around making folks discontented—! Agitators—! Don’t suppose it’s that way with this London—he must be pretty well fixed, and so of course he’s prob’ly growing conservative and sensible. But most of these socialists are just a lazy bunch of bums that try and see how much trouble they can stir up. They think that just because they’re too lazy to find an opening, that they got the right to take the money away from the fellas that hustle around and make good. Trouble with all these socialist guys is that they don’t stop to realize that you can’t change human nature. They want to take away all the rewards for initiative and enterprise, just as Sam Cannon was saying. Do you s’pose I’d work my head off putting a proposition through if there wasn’t anything in it for me? Then,’nother thing, about all this submerged tenth—these ‘People of the Abyss,’ and all the rest: I don’t feel a darn bit sorry for them. They stick in London or New York or wherever they are, and live on charity, and if you offered’em a good job they wouldn’t take it. Why, look here! all through the Middle West the farmers are just looking for men at three dollars a day, and for hired girls, they’d give hired girls three and four dollars a week and a good home. But do all these people go out and get the jobs? Not a bit of it! They’d rather stay home and yelp about socialism and anarchism and Lord knows what-all. ‘Nother thing: I never could figger out what all these socialists and I. W. W.’s, these ‘I Won’t Work’s,’ would do if we did divide up and hand all the industries over to them. I bet they’d be the very first ones to kick for a return to the old conditions! I tell you, it surprises me when a good, bright man like Jack London or this fella, Upton Sinclair—they say he’s a well-educated fella, too—don’t stop and realize these things.”
“But—” said Una.
Then she stopped.
Her entire knowledge of socialism was comprised in the fact that Mamie Magen believed in it, and that Walter Babson alternated between socialism, anarchism, and a desire to own a large house in Westchester and write poetry and be superior to the illiterate mass. So to the economic spokesman for the Great American Business Man her answer was:
“But—”
“Then look here,” said Mr. Schwirtz. “Take yourself. S’pose you like to work eight hours a day? Course you don’t. Neither do I. I always thought I’d like to be a gentleman farmer and take it easy. But the good Lord saw fit to stick us into these jobs, that’s all we know about it; and we do our work and don’t howl about it like all these socialists and radicals and other windjammers that know more than the Constitution and Congress and a convention of Philadelphia lawyers put together. You don’t want to work as hard as you do and then have to divide up every Saturday with some lazy bum of a socialist that’s too lazy to support himself—yes, or to take a bath!—now do you?”
“Well, no,” Una admitted, in face of this triumphant exposure of liberal fallacies.
The book slipped into her lap.
“How wonderful that line of big woolly clouds is, there between the two mountains!” she said. “I’d just like to fly through them.... I am tired. The clouds rest me so.”
“Course you’re tired, little sister. You just forget about all those guys in the abyss. Tell you a person on the job’s got enough to do looking out for himself.”
“Well—” said Una.
Suddenly she lay back, her hands behind her head, her fingers outstretched among the long, cool grasses. A hum of insects surrounded her. The grasses towering above her eyes were a forest. She turned her head to watch a lady-bug industriously ascend one side of a blade of grass, and with equal enterprise immediately descend the other side. With the office always in her mind as material for metaphors, Una compared the lady-bug’s method to Troy Wilkins’s habit of having his correspondence filed and immediately calling for it again. She turned her face to the sky. She was uplifted by the bold contrast of cumulus clouds and the radiant blue sky.
Here she could give herself up to rest; she was so secure now, with the affable Mr. Schwirtz to guard her against outsiders—more secure and satisfied, she reflected, than she could ever have been with Walter Babson.... A hawk soared above her, a perfect thing of sun-brightened grace, the grasses smelled warm and pleasant, and under her beat the happy heart of the summer land.
“I’m a poor old rough-neck,” said Mr. Schwirtz, “but to-day, up here with you, I feel so darn good that I almost think I’m a decent citizen. Honest, little sister, I haven’t felt so bully for a blue moon.”
“Yes, and I—” she said.
He smoked, while she almost drowsed into slumber to the lullaby of the afternoon.
When a blackbird chased a crow above her, and she sat up to watch the aerial privateering, Mr. Schwirtz began to talk.
He spoke of the flight of the Wright brothers in France and Virginia, which were just then—in the summer of 1908—arousing the world to a belief in aviation. He had as positive information regarding aeroplanes as he had regarding socialism. It seemed that a man who was tremendously on the inside of aviation—who was, in fact, going to use whole tons of aeroplane varnish on aeroplane bodies, next month or next season—had given Mr. Schwirtz secret advices that within five years, by 1913, aeroplanes would be crossing the Atlantic daily, and conveying passengers and mail on regular routes between New York and Chicago.... “Though,” said Mr. Schwirtz, in a sophisticated way, “I don’t agree with these crazy enthusiasts that believe aeroplanes will be used in war. Too easy to shoot’em down.” His information was so sound that he had bought a hundred shares of stock in his customer’s company. In on the ground floor. Stock at three dollars a share. Would be worth two hundred a share the minute they started regular passenger-carrying.
“But at that, I only took a hundred shares. I don’t believe in all this stock-gambling. What I want is sound, conservative investments,” said Mr. Schwirtz.
“Yes, I should think you’d be awfully practical,” mused Una. “My! three dollars to two hundred! You’ll make an awful lot out of it.”
“Well, now, I’m not saying anything. I don’t pretend to be a Wisenheimer. May be nine or ten years—nineteen seventeen or nineteen eighteen—before we are doing a regular business. And at that, the shares may never go above par. But still, I guess I’m middlin’ practical—not like these socialists, ha, ha!”
“How did you ever get your commercial training?”
The question encouraged him to tell the story of his life.
Mostly it was a story of dates and towns and jobs—jobs he had held and jobs from which he had resigned, and all the crushing things he had said to the wicked bosses during those victorious resignings.... Clerk in a general store, in a clothing-store, in a hardware-store—all these in Ohio. A quite excusable, almost laudable, failure in his own hardware-store in a tiny Wisconsin town. Half a dozen clerkships. Collector for a harvester company in Nebraska, going from farm to farm by buggy. Traveling salesman for a St. Paul wholesaler, for a Chicago clothing-house. Married. Partner with his brother-in-law in a drug, paint, and stationery store. Traveling for a Boston paint-house. For the Lowry Paint Company of Jersey City. Now with the automobile wax company. A typical American business career, he remarked, though somehow distinctive, different— A guiding star—
Una listened murmuringly, and he was encouraged to try to express the inner life behind his jobs. Hesitatingly he sought to make vivid his small-boy life in the hills of West Virginia: carving initials, mowing lawns, smoking corn silk, being arrested on Hallowe’en, his father’s death, a certain Irving who was his friend, “carrying a paper route” during two years of high school. His determination to “make something of himself.” His arrival in Columbus, Ohio, with just seventy-eight cents—he emphasized it: “just seventy-eight cents, that’s every red cent I had, when I started out to look for a job, and I didn’t know a single guy in town.” His reading of books during the evenings of his first years in Ohio; he didn’t “remember their titles, exactly,” he said, but he was sure that “he read a lot of them. ”... At last he spoke of his wife, of their buggy-riding, of their neat frame house with the lawn and the porch swing. Of their quarrels—he made it clear that his wife had been “finicky,” and had “fool notions,” but he praised her for having “come around and learned that a man is a man, and sometimes he means a lot better than it looks like; prob’ly he loves her a lot better than a lot of these plush-soled, soft-tongued fellows that give’em a lot of guff and lovey-dovey stuff and don’t shell out the cash. She was a good sport—one of the best.”
Of the death of their baby boy.
“He was the brightest little kid—everybody loved him. When I came home tired at night he would grab my finger—see, this first finger—and hold it, and want me to show him the bunny-book.... And then he died.”
Mr. Schwirtz told it simply, looking at clouds spread on the blue sky like a thrown handful of white paint.
Una had hated the word “widower”; it had suggested Henry Carson and the Panama undertaker and funerals and tired men trying to wash children and looking for a new wife to take over that work; all the smell and grease of disordered side-street kitchens. To her, now, Julius Edward Schwirtz was not a flabby-necked widower, but a man who mourned, who felt as despairingly as could Walter Babson the loss of the baby who had crowed over the bunny-book. She, the motherless, almost loved him as she stood with him in the same depth of human grief. And she cried a little, secretly, and thought of her longing for the dead mother, as he gently went on:
“My wife died a year later. I couldn’t get over it; seemed like I could have killed myself when I thought of any mean thing I might have said to her—not meaning anything, but hasty-like, as a man will. Couldn’t seem to get over it. Evenings were just hell; they were so—empty. Even when I was out on the road, there wasn’t anybody to write to, anybody that cared. Just sit in a hotel room and think about her. And I just couldn’t realize that she was gone. Do you know, Miss Golden, for months, whenever I was coming back to Boston from a trip, it was her I was coming back to, seemed like, even though I knew she wasn’t there—yes, and evenings at home when I’d be sitting there reading, I’d think I heard her step, and I’d look up and smile—and she wouldn’t be there; she wouldn’t ever be there again.... She was a lot like you—same cute, bright sort of a little woman, with light hair—yes, even the same eye-glasses. I think maybe that’s why I noticed you particular when I first met you at that lunch and remembered you so well afterward.... Though you’re really a lot brighter and better educated than what she was—I can see it now. I don’t mean no disrespect to her; she was a good sport; they don’t make’em any better or finer or truer; but she hadn’t never had much chance; she wasn’t educated or a live wire, like you are.... You don’t mind my saying that, do you? How you mean to me what she meant—”
“No, I’m glad—” she whispered.
Unlike the nimble Walter Babson, Mr. Schwirtz did not make the revelation of his tragedy an excuse for trying to stir her to passion. But he had taken and he held her hand among the long grasses, and she permitted it.
That was all.
He did not arouse her; still was it Walter’s dark head and the head of Walter’s baby that she wanted to cradle on her breast. But for Mr. Schwirtz she felt a good will that was broad as the summer afternoon.
“I am very glad you told me. I do understand. I lost my mother just a year ago,” she said, softly.
He squeezed her hand and sighed, “Thank you, little sister.” Then he rose and more briskly announced, “Getting late—better be hiking, I guess.”
Not again did he even touch her hand. But on his last night at the farm-house he begged, “May I come to call on you in New York?” and she said, “Yes, please do.”
She stayed for a day after his departure, a long and lonely Sunday. She walked five miles by herself. She thought of the momently more horrible fact that vacation was over, that the office would engulf her again. She declared to herself that two weeks were just long enough holiday to rest her, to free her from the office; not long enough to begin to find positive joy.
Between shudders before the swiftly approaching office she thought of Mr. Schwirtz. (She still called him that to herself. She couldn’t fit “Eddie” to his trim bulkiness, his maturity.)
She decided that he was wrong about socialism; she feebly tried to see wherein, and determined to consult her teacher in ideals, Mamie Magen, regarding the proper answers to him. She was sure that he was rather crude in manners and speech, rather boastful, somewhat loquacious.
“But I do like him!” she cried to the hillsides and the free sky. “He would take care of me. He’s kind; and he would learn. We’ll go to concerts and things like that in New York—dear me, I guess I don’t know any too much about art things myself. I don’t know why, but even if he isn’t interesting, like Mamie Magen, I like him—I think!”
§ 7
On the train back to New York, early Monday morning, she felt so fresh and fit, with morning vigorous in her and about her, that she relished the thought of attacking the job. Why, she rejoiced, every fiber of her was simply soaked with holiday; she was so much stronger and happier; New York and the business world simply couldn’t be the same old routine, because she herself was different.
But the train became hot and dusty; the Italians began to take off their collars and hand-painted ties.
And hot and dusty, perspiring and dizzily rushing, were the streets of New York when she ventured from the Grand Central station out into them once more.
It was late. She went to the office at once. She tried to push away her feeling that the Berkshires, where she had arisen to a cool green dawn just that morning, were leagues and years away. Tired she was, but sunburnt and easy-breathing. She exploded into the office, set down her suit-case, found herself glad to shake Mr. Wilkins’s hand and to answer his cordial, “Well, well, you’re brown as a berry. Have a good time?”
The office was different, she cried—cried to that other earlier self who had sat in a train and hoped that the office would be different.
She kissed Bessie Kraker, and by an error of enthusiasm nearly kissed the office-boy, and told them about the farm-house, the view from her room, the Glade, Bald Knob, Hawkins’s Pond; about chickens and fresh milk and pigeons aflutter; she showed them the kodak pictures taken by Mrs. Cannon and indicated Mr. Starr and Miss Vincent and laughed about them till—
“Oh, Miss Golden, could you take a little dictation now?” Mr. Wilkins called.
There was also a pile of correspondence unfiled, and the office supplies were low, and Bessie was behind with her copying, and the office-boy had let the place get as dusty as a hay-loft—and the stiff, old, gray floor-rag was grimly at its post in the wash-room.
“The office isn’t changed,” she said; and when she went out at three for belated lunch, she added, “and New York isn’t, either. Oh, Lord! I really am back here. Same old hot streets. Don’t believe there are any Berkshires; just seems now as though I hadn’t been away at all.”
She sat in negligée on the roof of the Home Club and learned that Rose Larsen and Mamie Magen and a dozen others had just gone on vacation.
“Lord! it’s over for me,” she thought. “Fifty more weeks of the job before I can get away again—a whole year. Vacation is farther from me now than ever. And the same old grind.... Let’s see, I’ve got to get in touch with the Adine Company for Mr. Wilkins before I even do any filing in the morning—”
She awoke, after midnight, and worried: “I mustn’t forget to get after the Adine Company, the very first thing in the morning. And Mr. Wilkins has got to get Bessie and me a waste-basket apiece. Oh, Lord! I wish Eddie Schwirtz were going to take me out for a walk to-morrow, the old darling that he is— I’d walk anywhere rather than ask Mr. Wilkins for those blame waste-baskets!”
CHAPTER XIV
MRS. ESTHER LAWRENCE was, she said, bored by the general atmosphere of innocent and bounding girlhood at the Temperance Home Club, and she persuaded Una to join her in taking a flat—three small rooms—which they made attractive with Japanese toweling and Russian, or at least Russian-Jew, brassware. Here Mrs. Lawrence’s men came calling, and sometimes Mr. Julius Edward Schwirtz, and all of them, except Una herself, had cigarettes and highballs, and Una confusedly felt that she was getting to be an Independent Woman.
Then, in January, 1909, she left the stiff, gray scrub-rag which symbolized the routine of Mr. Troy Wilkins’s office.
In a magazine devoted to advertising she had read that Mr. S. Herbert Ross, whom she had known as advertising-manager of the Gas and Motor Gazette, had been appointed advertising-manager for Pemberton’s—the greatest manufactory of drugs and toilet articles in the world. Una had just been informed by Mr. Wilkins that, while he had an almost paternal desire to see her successful financially and otherwise, he could never pay her more than fifteen dollars a week. He used a favorite phrase of commuting captains of commerce: “Personally, I’d be glad to pay you more, but fifteen is all the position is worth.” She tried to persuade him that there is no position which cannot be made “worth more.” He promised to “think it over.” He was still taking a few months to think it over—while while her Saturday pay-envelope remained as thin as ever—when Bessie Kraker resigned, to marry a mattress-renovator, and in Bessie’s place Mr. Wilkins engaged a tall, beautiful blonde, who was too much of a lady to take orders from Una. This wrecked Una’s little office home, and she was inspired to write to Mr. S. Herbert Ross at Pemberton’s, telling him what a wise, good, noble, efficient man he was, and how much of a privilege it would be to become his secretary. She felt that Walter Babson must have been inexact in ever referring to Mr. Ross as “Sherbet Souse.”
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 passed 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 clichés 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 Saturday.
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 glass on the semi-partition 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 ignoble 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 institution.... 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 assistants, 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 assistants, 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 attitude 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 assistant 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 glass; 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 assisting 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 assume 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 assuring 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 advertisements, 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 God We Trust” on our coins, and at least as accurate. This slogan, he told Una, surpassed “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 titanic 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 superstition 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 passed and were forgotten.
Plots and secrets Una saw as secretary to Mr. Ross. She remembered a day on which Mr. Ross, in her presence, assured 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 assertion 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 quantity 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 manœuvering 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 assembled 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 associates 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-glasses 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 twangily nagging to the girls and young men under them. Failures themselves, they eyed sourly the stenographers who desired two dollars more a week, and assured 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 associate with the chiefs; on the other, it was expected of her in her capacity as daily confidante to one of the gods, 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 buttonholes, 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 sex 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 mass—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 assorting 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.
Machines were the Pemberton force, and their greatest rivals were the machines of steel and wood, at least one of which each new efficiency expert left behind him: Machines for opening letters and sealing them, automatic typewriters, dictation phonographs, pneumatic chutes. But none of the other machines was so tyrannical as the time-clock. Una admitted to herself that she didn’t see how it was possible to get so many employees together promptly without it, and she was duly edified by the fact that the big chiefs punched it, too.... But she noticed that after punching it promptly at nine, in an unctuous manner which said to all beholders, “You see that even I subject myself to this delightful humility,” Mr. S. Herbert Ross frequently sneaked out and had breakfast....
She knew that the machines were supposed to save work. But she was aware that the girls worked just as hard and long and hopelessly after their introduction as before; and she suspected that there was something wrong with a social system in which time-saving devices didn’t save time for anybody but the owners. She was not big enough nor small enough to have a patent cure-all solution ready. She could not imagine any future for these women in business except the accidents of marriage or death—or a revolution in the attitude toward them. She saw that the comfortable average men of the office sooner or later, if they were but faithful and lived long enough, had opportunities, responsibility, forced upon them. No such force was used upon the comfortable average women!
She endeavored to picture a future in which women, the ordinary, philoprogenitive, unambitious women, would have some way out besides being married off or killed off. She envisioned a complete change in the fundamental purpose of organized business from the increased production of soap—or books or munitions—to the increased production of happiness. How this revolution was to be accomplished she had but little more notion than the other average women in business. She blindly adopted from Mamie Magen a half-comprehended faith in a Fabian socialism, a socializing that would crawl slowly through practical education and the preaching of kinship, through profit-sharing and old-age pensions, through scientific mosquito-slaying and cancer-curing and food reform and the abolition of anarchistic business competition, to a goal of tolerable and beautiful life. Of one thing she was sure: This age, which should adjudge happiness to be as valuable as soap or munitions, would never come so long as the workers accepted the testimony of paid spokesmen like S. Herbert Ross to the effect that they were contented and happy, rather than the evidence of their own wincing nerves to the effect that they lived in a polite version of hell.... She was more and more certain that the workers weren’t discontented enough; that they were too patient with lives insecure and tedious. But she refused to believe that the age of comparative happiness would always be a dream; for already, at Herzfeld & Cohn’s she had tasted of an environment where no one considered himself a divinely ruling chief, and where it was not a crime to laugh easily. But certainly she did not expect to see this age during her own life. She and her fellows were doomed, unless they met by chance with marriage or death; or unless they crawled to the top of the heap. And this last she was determined to do. Though she did hope to get to the top without unduly kicking the shrieking mass of slaves beneath her, as the bright young men learned to do.