§ 4
Three hours after Una reached New York she telephoned to the object of her secret commercial affections, the unconscious Mr. Robert Sidney, at the White Line Hotels office. She was so excited that she took ten minutes for calming herself before she telephoned. Every time she lifted the receiver from its hook she thrust it back and mentally apologized to the operator. But when she got the office and heard Mr. Bob Sidney’s raw voice shouting, “Yas? This ’s Mist’ Sidney,” Una was very cool.
“This is Mrs. Schwirtz, realty salesman for Truax & Fein. I’ve just been through Pennsylvania, and I stayed at your White Line Hotels. Of course I have to be an expert on different sorts of accommodations, and I made some notes on your hotels—some suggestions you might be glad to have. If you care to, we might have lunch together to-morrow, and I’ll give you the suggestions.”
“Why, uh, why—”
“Of course I’m rather busy with our new Long Island operations, so if you have a date to-morrow, the matter can wait, but I thought you’d better have the suggestions while they were fresh in my mind. But perhaps I can lunch with you week after next, if—”
“No, no, let’s make it to-morrow.”
“Very well. Will you call for me here—Truax & Fein, Zodiac Building?”
Una arose at six-thirty next morning, to dress the part of the great business woman, and before she went to the office she had her hair waved.
Mr. Bob Sidney called for her. He was a simple, energetic soul, with a derby on the back of his head, cheerful, clean-shaven, large-chinned, hoarse-voiced, rapidly revolving a chewed cigar. She, the commonplace, was highly evolved in comparison with Mr. Sidney, and there was no nervousness in her as she marched out in a twenty-dollar hat and casually said, “Let’s go to the Waldorf—it’s convenient and not at all bad.”
On the way over Mr. Sidney fairly massaged his head with his agitated derby—cocked it over one eye and pushed it back to the crown of his head—in his efforts to find out what and why was Mrs. Una Schwirtz. He kept appraising her. It was obvious that he was trying to decide whether this mysterious telephone correspondent was an available widow who had heard of his charms. He finally stumbled over the grating beside the Waldorf and bumped into the carriage-starter, and dropped his dead cigar. But all the while Una steadily kept the conversation to the vernal beauties of Pennsylvania.
Thanks to rice powder and the pride of a new hat, she looked cool and adequate. But she was thinking all the time: “I never could keep up this Beatrice-Joline pose with Mr. Fein or Mr. Ross. Poor Una, with them she’d just have to blurt out that she wanted a job!”
She sailed up to a corner table by a window. The waiter gave the menu to Mr. Sidney, but she held out her hand for it. “This is my lunch. I’m a business woman, not just a woman,” she said to Mr. Sidney; and she rapidly ordered a lunch which was shockingly imitative of one which Mr. Fein had once ordered for her.
“Prett’ hot day for April,” said Mr. Sidney.
“Yes.... Is the White Line going well?”
“Yump. Doing a land-office business.”
“You’re having trouble with your day clerk at Brockenfelt, I see.”
“How juh know?”
“Oh—” She merely smiled.
“Well, that guy’s a four-flush. Came to us from the New Willard, and to hear him tell it you’d think he was the guy that put the “will” in the Willard. But he’s a credit-grabber, that’s what he is. Makes me think— Nev’ forget one time I was up in Boston and I met a coon porter and he told me he was a friend of the president of the Pullman Company and had persuaded him to put on steel cars. Bet a hat he believed it himself. That’s’bout like this fellow. He’s going to get the razoo.... Gee! I hope you ain’t a friend of his.”
Una had perfectly learned the Bœotian dialect so strangely spoken by Mr. Sidney, and she was able to reply:
“Oh no, no indeed! He ought to be fired. He gave me a room as though he were the superintendent of a free lodging-house.”
“But it’s so hard to get trained employees that I hate to even let him go. Just to show you the way things go, just when I was trying to swing a deal for a new hotel, I had to bust off negotiations and go and train a new crew of chambermaids at Sandsonville myself. You’d died laughing to seen me making beds and teaching those birds to clean a spittador, beggin’ your pardon, but it certainly was some show, and I do, by gum! know a traveling-man likes his bed tucked in at the foot! Oh, it’s fierce! The traveling public kicks if they get bum service, and the help kick if you demand any service from’em, and the boss gets it right in the collar-button both ways from the ace.”
“Well, I’m going to tell you how to have trained service and how to make your hotels distinctive. They’re good hotels, as hotels go, and you really do give people good coffee and good beds and credit conveniences, as you promise, but your hotels are not distinctive. I’m going to tell you how to make them so.”
Una had waited till Mr. Sidney had disposed of his soup and filet mignon. She spoke deliberately, almost sternly. She reached for her new silver link bag, drew out immaculate typewritten schedules, and while he gaped she read to him precisely the faults of each of the hotels, her suggested remedies, and her general ideas of hotels, with less cuspidors, more originality, and a room where traveling-men could be at home on a rainy Sunday.
“Now you know, and I know,” she wound up, “that the proprietor’s ideal of a hotel is one to which traveling-men will travel sixty miles on Saturday evening, in order to spend Sunday there. You take my recommendations and you’ll have that kind of hotels. At the same time women will be tempted there and the local trade will go there when wife or the cook is away, or they want to give a big dinner.”
“It does sound like it had some possibilities,” said Mr. Sidney, as she stopped for breath, after quite the most impassioned invocation of her life.
She plunged in again:
“Now the point of all this is that I want to be the general manager of certain departments of the Line—catering, service, decoration, and so on. I’ll keep out of the financial end and we’ll work out the buying together. You know it’s women who make the homes for people at home, and why not the homes for people traveling?... I’m woman sales-manager for Truax & Fein—sell direct, and six women under me. I’ll show you my record of sales. I’ve been secretary to an architect, and studied architecture a little. And plenty other jobs. Now you take these suggestions of mine to your office and study’em over with your partner and we’ll talk about the job for me by and by.”
She left him as quickly as she could, got back to her office, and in a shaking spasm of weeping relapsed into the old, timorous Una.
§ 5
Tedious were the negotiations between Una and Mr. Sidney and his partner. They wanted her to make their hotels—and yet they had never heard of anything so nihilistic as actually having hotel “offices” without “desks.” They wanted her, and yet they “didn’t quite know about adding any more overhead at this stage of the game.”
Meantime Una sold lots and studied the economical buying of hotel supplies. She was always willing to go with Mr. Sidney and his partner to lunch—but they were brief lunches. She was busy, she said, and she had no time to “drop in at their office.” When Mr. Sidney once tried to hold her hand (not seriously, but with his methodical system of never failing to look into any possibilities), she said, sharply, “Don’t try that—let’s save a lot of time by understanding that I’m what you would call ‘straight.’” He apologized and assured her that he had known she was a “high-class genuwine lady all the time.”
The very roughness which, in Mr. Schwirtz, had abraised her, interested her in Mr. Sidney. She knew better now how to control human beings. She was fascinated by a comparison of her four average citizens—four men not vastly varied as seen in a street-car, yet utterly different to one working with them: Schwirtz, the lumbering; Troy Wilkins, the roaring; Truax, the politely whining; and Bob Sidney, the hesitating.
The negotiations seemed to arrive nowhere.
Then, unexpectedly, Bob Sidney telephoned to her at her flat one evening: “Partner and I have just decided to take you on, if you’ll come at thirty-eight hundred a year.”
Una hadn’t even thought of the salary. She would gladly have gone to her new creative position at the three thousand two hundred she was then receiving. But she showed her new training and demanded:
“Four thousand two hundred.”
“Well, split the difference and call it four thousand for the first year.”
“All right.”
Una stood in the center of the room. She had “succeeded on her job.” Then she knew that she wanted some one with whom to share the good news.
She sat down and thought of her almost-forgotten plan to adopt a child.
§ 6
Mr. Sidney had, during his telephone proclamation, suggested: “Come down to the office to-morrow and get acquainted. Haven’t got a very big force, you know, but there’s a couple of stenographers, good girls, crazy to meet the new boss, and a bright, new Western fellow we thought we might try out as your assistant and publicity man, and there’s an office-boy that’s a sketch. So come down and meet your subjects, as the fellow says.”
Una found the office, on Duane Street, to consist of two real rooms and a bare anteroom decorated with photographs of the several White Line Hotels—set on maple-lined streets, with the local managers, in white waistcoats, standing proudly in front. She herself was to have a big flat-topped desk in the same room with Mr. Sidney. The surroundings were crude compared with the Truax & Fein office, but she was excited. Here she would be a pioneer.
“Now come in the other room,” said Mr. Sidney, “and meet the stenographers and the publicity man I was telling you about on the ’phone.”
He opened a door and said, “Mrs. Schwirtz, wantcha shake hands with the fellow that’s going to help you to put the Line on the map—Mr. Babson.”
It was Walter Babson who had risen from a desk and was gaping at her.
CHAPTER XXIII
BUT I did write to you, Goldie—once more, anyway—letter was returned to me after being forwarded all over New York,” said Walter, striding about her flat.
“And then you forgot me completely.”
“No, I didn’t—but what if I had? You simply aren’t the same girl I liked—you’re a woman that can do things; and, honestly, you’re an inspiration to me.” Walter rubbed his jaw in the nervous way she remembered.
“Well, I hope I shall inspire you to stick to the White Line and make good.”
“Nope, I’m going to make one more change. Gee! I can’t go on working for you. The problem of any man working for a woman boss is hard enough. He’s always wanting to give her advice and be superior, and yet he has to take her orders. And it’s twice as hard when it’s me working for you that I remember as a kid—even though you have climbed past me.”
“Well?”
“Well, I’m going to work for you till I have a job where I can make good, and when I do—or if I do—I’m going to ask you to marry me.”
“But, my dear boy, I’m a business woman. I’m making good right now. In three months I’ve boosted White Line receipts seventeen per cent., and I’m not going back to minding the cat and the gas-stove and waiting—”
“You don’t need to. We can both work, keep our jobs, and have a real housekeeper—a crackajack maid at forty a month—to mind the cat.”
“But you seem to forget that I’m more or less married already.”
“So do you!... If I make good— Listen: I guess it’s time now to tell you my secret. I’m breaking into your old game, real estate. You know I’ve been turning out pretty good publicity for the White Line, besides all the traveling and inspecting, and we have managed to have a few good times, haven’t we? But, also, on the side, I’ve been doing a whale of a lot of advertising, and so on, for the Nassau County Investment Company, and they’ve offered me a steady job at forty-five a week. And now that I’ve got you to work for, my Wanderjahre are over. So, if I do make good, will you divorce that incubus of an Eddie Schwirtz and marry me? Will you?”
He perched on the arm of her chair, and again demanded: “Will you? You’ve got plenty legal grounds for divorcing him—and you haven’t any ethical grounds for not doing it.”
She said nothing. Her head drooped. She, who had blandly been his manager all day, felt managed when his “Will you?” pierced her, made her a woman.
He put his forefinger under her chin and lifted it. She was conscious of his restless, demanding eyes.
“Oh, I must think it over,” she begged.
“Then you will!” he triumphed. “Oh, my soul, we’ve bucked the world—you’ve won, and I will win. Mr. and Mrs. Babson will be won’erfully happy. They’ll be a terribly modern couple, both on the job, with a bungalow and a Ford and two Persian cats and a library of Wells, and Compton Mackenzie, and Anatole France. And everybody will think they’re exceptional, and not know they’re really two lonely kids that curl up close to each other for comfort.... And now I’m going home and do a couple miles publicity for the Nassau Company.... Oh, my dear, my dear—”
§ 2
“I will keep my job—if I’ve had this world of offices wished on to me, at least I’ll conquer it, and give my clerks a decent time,” the business woman meditated. “But just the same—oh, I am a woman, and I do need love. I want Walter, and I want his child, my own baby and his.”