 CHAPTER XIII It was hard enough to get Mr. Wilkins to set a definite date for her summer vacation. The time was delayed and juggled till Mrs. Lawrence, who was to have gone with Una, had to set off alone. But it was even harder for Una to decide where to go for her vacation. There was no accumulation of places which she had fervently been planning to see. Indeed, Una wasn't much interested in any place besides New York and Panama, and of the questions and stale reminiscences of Panama she was weary. She decided to go to a farm in the Berkshires largely because she had overheard a girl in the subway say that it was a good place. When she took the train, she was brave with a new blue suit, a new suitcase, a two-pound box of candy, copies of the Saturday Evening Post and the Woman's Home Companion, and Jack London's People of the Abyss, which Mamie Maggin had given her. All the way to Pittsfield, all the way out to the farm by stage, she sat still and looked politely at every large detached elm, every cow, or barefoot boy. She had set her methodical mind in order, had told herself that she would have time to think and observe. Yet if a census had been taken of her thoughts, not sex nor economics, not improving observations of the flora and fauna of western Massachusetts would have been found, but a half-glad, half-hysterical acknowledgement that she had not known how tired and office-soaked she was till now, when she had relaxed, and a dull, recurrent wonder if two weeks would be enough to get the office poison out of her body. Now that she gave up to it, she was so nearly sick that she couldn't see the magic of the sheer green hillsides and unexpected ponds, the elm-shrined winding road, towns demure and white. She did not notice the huge, in-like farmhouse, nor her bare room nor the noisy dining room. She sat on the porch, exhausted, telling herself that she was enjoying the hill's slope down to a pond that was yet bright as a silver shield, though its woody shores had blurred into soft darkness, the enchantment of frog choruses, the cooing pigeons in the barnyard. Listen, a cow mooing! Thank the Lord I'm away from New York, clean-forgotten it, might be a million miles away, she assured herself. Yet all the while she continued to picture the office. Bessie's desk, Mr. Wilkins's inkwell, the sinister gray scrub rag in the washroom, and she knew that she needed someone to lure her mind from the office. She was conscious that some man had left the chattering rocking-chair group at the other end of the long porch, and had taken the chair beside her. Miss Golden, a thick voice, hesitated. Yes? Say, I thought it was you. Well, well, the world's pretty small after all. Say, I bet you don't remember me. In the porch light, Una beheld a heavy-shouldered, typical American businessman, in derby hat and clipped mustache, his jowls shining with a recent shave, an alert, solid man of about forty-five. She remembered him as a man she had been glad to meet. She felt guiltily that she ought to know him. Perhaps he was a Wilkins client, and she was making future difficulty in the office, but place him she could not. Oh, yes, yes, of course, though I can't just remember your name. I always can remember faces, but I never can remember names, she achieved. Sure, I know how it is. I've often said I never forget a face, but I never can remember names. Well, sir, you remember Sanford Hunt that went to the commercial college? Oh, now I know, you're Mr. Schwartz of the Lowry Paint Company, who had lunch with us and told me about the paint company, Mr. Julius Schwartz. You got me, though the fellows usually call me Eddie. Julius Edward Schwartz is my full name. My father was named Julius, and my mother's oldest brother was named Edward. My old dad used to say it wasn't respectful to him because I always preferred Eddie. Old Codger used to get quite head up about it. Julius sounds like he was an old Roman or something, and in the business you got to have a good, easy name. Say, speaking of that, I ain't with Lowry anymore. I'm Chief Salesman for the Etna Automobile Varnish and Wax Company. I certainly got a swell territory, New York, Philly, Beantown, Washington, Baltimore, Cleveland, Columbus, Akron, and so on, and of course, most especially, Detroit. Sell right direct to the jobbers and the big auto companies. Good bunch of live wires, some class. I'm rolling in my little old 4,000 bucks a year now, where before I didn't hardly make more in 26 or 2800. Keeps me on the jump, all righty. Fact. I got so tired and run down, I hadn't planned to take any vacation at all. But the boss himself says to me, Eddie, we can't afford to let you get sick. You're the best man we've got, he says. And you got to take a good vacation now and forget all about business for a couple weeks. Well, I says, I was just wondering if you was smart enough to get along without me if I was to sneak out and rubber at some scenery and maybe get up a flirtation with a pretty summer girl. And I guess that must be you, Miss Golden. And he laughs and says, oh yes, I guess the business wouldn't go bust for a few days. And so I goes down and gets a shave and a haircut and a singe and a shampoo. There ain't as much to cut as there used to be, though. And here I am. Yes, said Una affably. Miss Una Golden of Panama and the Office did not in the least feel superior to Mr. Eddie Schwartz's robust commonness. The men she knew, except for pariahs like Walter Babson, talked thus. She could admire Mamie Magan's verbal symphonies, but with Mr. Schwartz she was able to forget her little private stock of worries and settle down to her holiday. Mr. Schwartz hitched forward in his rocker, took off his derby, stroked his damp forehead, laid his derby in both his hands on his stomach, rocked luxuriously, and took a fresh hold on the conversation. But say, here I am, gassing all about myself, and you'll want to be hearing about Sandy Hunt, seen him lately? No, I've lost track of him. You do know how it is in such a big city. Sure, I know how it is. I was saying to a fellow just the other day. Why, gosh, all fish hooks, I was saying. It seems like it's harder to keep in touch with a fellow here in New York than if he lived in Chicago. Time you go from the Bronx to Flatbush or Weehawken, it's time to turn round again and go home. Well, Hunt's married, you know, to that same girl that was with us at lunch that day. And he's got a nice little house in C. Caucus. He's still with Lowry. Good job, too, assistant bookkeeper, pulling down his little twenty-seven-fifty regular. And they got a baby. And let me tell you, she makes him a mighty fine wife, mighty bright little woman. Well, now say, how are you getting along, Ms. Golden? Everything going bright and cheery? Yes, kind of. Well, that's good. You'll do fine, and pick up some good live wire of a husband, too. I'm never going to marry. I'm going, why, sure you are. Nice, bright woman like you sticking in an office. Office is no place for a woman. It takes a man to stand the racket. Home's the place for a woman. Except maybe some hatchet-faced old battle-axe like the cashier at our shop. Shame to spoil a nice home with her. Why, she tried to hold up my vacation money, because she said I'd overdrawn. Oh, but Mr. Schwartz, what can a poor girl do if you high and mighty men don't want to marry her? Shaw, there ain't no trouble like that. In your case, I'll gamble. Oh, but there is. If I were pretty, like Rose Larson, she's a girl that stays where I live. Oh, I could just eat her up. She's so pretty, curly hair and big brown eyes, and a round face like a boy in one of those medieval pictures. That's all right about pretty squabs. They're all right for a bunch of young boys that like a cute nose and a good figure better than they do sense. Well, you notice I remembered you all right, when you went and forgot poor old Eddie Schwartz. Yes, sir, by golly, tea totally plum forgot me. I guess I won't get over that slam for a while. Now, that isn't fair, Mr. Schwartz. You know it isn't. It's almost dark here on the porch, even with the lamps. I couldn't really see you. And besides, I did recognize you. I just couldn't think of your name for the moment. Yeah, that listens fine, but poor old Eddie's heart is clean busted, just the same. Me thinking of you and your nice complexion and goldy hair, and the cute way you talked at our lunch whenever Hunt shut up and gave you a chance. Honest, I haven't forgot yet the way you took off old man. What was it? The old stiff that ran the commercial college. What was his name? Mr. Whiteside? Una was enormously pleased and interested. Far off and dim were Miss Magan and the distressing Mrs. Lawrence, and the office of Mr. Troy Wilkins was fading. Yeah, I guess that was it. Do you remember how you gave us an imitation of him telling the class that if they'd work like 60 they might get to be little ten gods on wheels like himself, and how he'd always keep dropping his eyeglasses and fishing him up on a cord while he was talking? Don't you remember how you took him off? Why, I thought Mrs. Hunt, that is, I've forgotten what her name was before Sandy married her. Why, I thought she'd split laughing. She admired you a whole pile. Let me tell you, I could see that. Not unwelcome to the ears of Una was this praise, but she was properly deprecatory. Why, she probably thought I was just a stuffy, stupid, ugly old thing, as old as Eddie Schwertz, hey? Go on, insult me, I can stand it. Let me tell you, I ain't forty-three till next October. Look here now, little sister. I know when a woman admires another. Let me tell you, if you'd ever traveled for dry goods like I did out of St. Paul once for a couple of months, never again. Paint and varnish is good enough for Eddie any day. And if you'd sold a bunch of women buyers, you'd know how they looked when they liked a thing. Alrighty. Not that I want to knock the sex, you understand, but you know yourself, being a she-mail, that there's an awful lot of cats among the ladies, God bless them, that wouldn't admit another lady was beautiful, not if she was as good-looking as Lily and Russell, corking figure and the swellest dresser in town. Yes, perhaps, sometimes, said Una. She did not find Mr. Schwertz dull. But I was saying it was a cinch to see that Sandy's girl thought you was ace-high, all righty. She kept her eyes glommed on to you all the time. But what would she find to admire? Uh-huh. Fishing for compliments. No, I am not. So there. Una's cheeks burned delightfully. She was back in Panama again, in Panama, where, for endless hours on dark porches, young men tease young women and tell them that they are beautiful. Mr. Schwertz was direct and jolly, like Panama people. But he was so much more active and forceful than Henry Carson, so much more hearty than Charlie Martindale, so distinguished by that knowledge of New York streets and cafes and local heroes which, to Una, the recent convert to New York, seemed the one great science. Their rockers creaked in complete sympathy. The perfect summer man took up his shepherd's tail. There's a whole lot of things she'd certainly ought to have admired in you, let me tell you. I suppose probably Maxine Elliott is better looking than what you are, maybe, but I always was crazy over your kind of girl. Blonde hair and nice, clear eyes and just shoulder high. Kind of a girl that could snuggle down beside a fireplace and look like she grew there. Not one of these domineering, sufferin' cats females. No, nor one of these overdressed New York chickens, neither, but cute and bright. Oh, you're just flattering me, Mr. Schwartz. Mr. Hunt told me I should watch out for you. No, no, you got me wrong, there. I dwell on what is it, mountain, and my name is truthful James, like the poet says. Believe me, I may be a roughneck drummer, but I notice these things. Oh, oh, do you like poetry? Without knowing precisely what she was trying to do, Una was testing Mr. Schwartz according to the somewhat contradictory standards of culture which she had acquired from Walter Babson, Mamie Maggin, Esther Lawrence, Mr. Wilkins' books on architecture, and stray copies of The Outlook, The Literary Digest, Current Opinion, The Nation, The Independent, The Review of Reviews, The World's Work, Colliers, and The Atlantic Monthly, which she had been glancing over in the Home Club Library. She hadn't learned much of the technique of the arts, but she had acquired an uneasy conscience of the sort which rather discredits any book or music or picture which it easily enjoys. She was, for a moment, apologetic to these insistent new standards, because she had given herself up to Mr. Schwartz's low conversation. She was not vastly different from a young lady just back in Panama from a term in the normal school, with new lights derived from a gentlemanly young English teacher with poetic interests and a curly moustache. Sure, affirmed Mr. Schwartz, 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, professional 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 catacysed. Well, no, that's where I fall down. Just between you and I, I never did have much time for these highbrows that try to make out their 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 ought a kick to his union about the way the conductor treated him, and him coming back with a yop 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. Ah, Nix, give me one of the good ol' 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. Schwartz'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 Wagner 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 noticed that Hitchcock and George M. Cohen 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 whops and Swedes and Lord knows what all. And when a bunch of people are out at a lake, say, you don't ever catch them singing Wagner or Litz or Greige or any of them guys, if they don't sing in the good old summertime, it's Old Black Joe or Nelly was a Lady or something that's really got some melody to it. The neo-fight was lured from her new one altar. Cold to her knees was the barren stone of the shrine and she feebly recanted. Yes, that's so. Mr. Schwertz 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, you understand. This dress suit music is all right for them that likes it, but what I object to is they're trying to stuff it down my throat. I let them alone and if I want to be a poor old low-brow and like regular 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 businessmen 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 Maggan and Walter Babson. Well, then, what are you going to make a standard? asked Mr. Schwertz triumphantly. Well, said Una. Understand 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 A1 high-class intellectual stuff. I read Reverend 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 spills, 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 them, sensational, don't believe in cheap literature of no sort. Oh, of course, it's all right to read a couple of 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. Especially, 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-gaged, intelligent folks and all that. There's a Mr. and Mrs. Cannon. He's some kind of an executive in the Chicago Stockyards. Nice, fat, responsible job. And he was saying to me, Mr. Schwartz, he says, Mrs. C. and I had never been to New England till this summer. But we 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 of 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 bold 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. Mr. Schwert 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 morbis. Mr. Schwert's 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 pinnacle 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 Piccinini 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 in spirit her while she thought of Mr. Julius Edward Schwert's. She knew that he was ungrammatical, but she denied that he was uncouth. His deep voice had been very kindly. His clipped moustache 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. Schwertz was a widower. 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. Schwertz 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, mourning, cheerfully, and went to prowl about the farm. All through the breakfast, Una caught the effulgence of Mr. Schwertz'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. Schwertz 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 kind of 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 highline poker party. He seemed deeply to respect her, and Una, who had never had the debutante'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. Schwertz 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 redded 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 tannager 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 plan 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? Yeah, I certainly do. I certainly do. Say, this beats New York, eh? I don't care if I never see another show or a cocktail. Certainly do beat New York. Certainly 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 border at the farm. In that topic they passed safely through the torrid wilderness of summer shine entangled blooms. The thwarted boyish soul that persisted in Mr. Schwartz's barbed, unexercised, coffee-soaked, tobacco-filled, whiskey-rodded, fatally degenerated city body shone through his red-veined eyes. He was having a fete champetre. 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 had 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 Etna Automobile Varnish Company was a success. But she fluttered up to her feet, became the willful debutante 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 kind of calm and want to be good, he said. I'm going to cut out all this boozing and stuff. Of 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, Lennox, Florida, Miss Vincent and Mr. Starr, the presidential campaign, and the food at the farmhouse. Borders from the next farmhouse came a calling, and the enlarged company discussed the food at both of the farmhouses, the presidential campaign, Florida and Lennox. 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 Ike 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 Parr. And all evening she was certain that Mr. Schwertz was watching her. End of Chapter 13 Part 1 Part 2 Chapter 13 Part 2 of The Job This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The Job by Sinclair Lewis Part 2 The Office Chapter 13 Part 2 The Borders from the two farmhouses 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 Kodak snapping every two or three minutes, with groups sitting about on blankets and once in a while someone explaining why the scenery was so scenic. Una had been anxious lest Mr. Schwertz pay her two 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. Mr. Schwertz was equally pleasant to her, to Miss Vincent and to Mrs. Cannon, and he was attractively ardent regarding the scenery. This certainly 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. Schwertz 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 farmhouse, 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. Mr. Schwertz was generous. He invited all the boarders to a hayride picnic at Hawkins 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 debutante 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 farmhouse 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. Schwertz 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. Mr. Schwertz 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, Ms. Vincent, and the pleasant couple from Gloversville all went away, and Una and Mr. Schwertz became the elder generation, the seniors of the boarders. They rather looked down upon the new boarders who came in, tender feet, people who didn't know about Bald Knob or the Glade or Hawkins 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. Schwertz 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 Ms. Vincent had been in the far-forgotten time. Una blushed a little when she discovered that everyone thought they were engaged, but she laughed at the rumor, and she laughed again, a nervous young laugh, as she repeated it to Mr. Schwertz. Isn't it a shame the way people gossip? Silly billies, she said. We never talked that way about Mr. Starr and Ms. 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. Schwertz 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-toped 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 Magan 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. Schwertz. After each page he said that he was interested. At the end of the fourth page, when Una stopped for breath, he commented, Find writer that fellow London, and they say he's quite a fella, been a sailor and a miner and all kinds of things. Very intimate friend of mine knows him quite well, met him in Frisco, and he says he's been a sailor in all kinds of things. But he's a socialist. Tell you, I ain't got much time for these socialists. Of course I'm kind of a socialist myself, lots of 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 probably 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 suppose I'd work my head off putting a proposition through if there wasn't anything in it for me? Then another 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 them 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 in 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. Another thing, I never could figure out what all these socialists and IWWs, these I won't works, 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 Magan 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 businessman her answer was, but then look here, said Mr. Schwartz, take yourself. Suppose 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 wind jammers 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 just like to fly through them. I am tired. The clouds rest me so. Course you're tired, little sister. Don't 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 ladybug 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 ladybug's method to Troy Wilkins' 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 in the radiant blue sky. Here she could give herself up to rest. She was so secure now with the affable Mr. Schwertz 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 roughneck, said Mr. Schwertz, but today, 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. Schwertz 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. Schwertz 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. Schwertz in a sophisticated way, I don't agree with these crazy enthusiasts that believe aeroplanes will be used in war. Too easy to shoot them 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 $3 a share would be worth $200 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. Schwertz. Yes, I should think you'd be awfully practical, mused Una. My, $3 to $200. You'll make an awful lot out of it. Well, now I'm not saying anything. I don't pretend to be a Weisenheimer. Maybe nine or ten years, 1917 or 1918, before we are doing a regular business. And at that the shares may never go above par. But still I guess I'm middling practical, not like these socialists. 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 stationary 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 Halloween, 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 writing, 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 full 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. Probably he loves her a lot better than a lot of these plush-sold, soft-tongued fellas that give them 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. Schwertz 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 Schwertz 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 eyeglasses. 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 them any better or finer or truer. But she hadn't never had much chance. She wasn't educated or 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. Schwertz 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. Schwertz 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 inside. 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 farmhouse 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 shutters before the swiftly approaching office she thought of Mr. Schwartz. 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 Maggin, 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 in 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 Maggin, I like him, I think. On the train back to New York, early Monday morning, she felt so fresh and fit, with mourning 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 suitcase, found herself glad to shake Mr. Wilkins' hand, and to answer his cordial, Well, well, your brown is a berry. Have a good time? The office was different, she cried, cried to that other earlier self and sat in a train and hoped that the office would be different. She kissed Bessie Craker and, by an error of enthusiasm, nearly kissed the office boy and told them about the farmhouse, the view from her room, the glade, bald knob, Hawkins pond, about chickens and fresh milk and pigeons of flutter. 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 hayloft and the stiff, old gray floor rag was grimly at its post in the washroom. 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 birch shears. Just seems now as though I hadn't been away at all. She sat in negligee on the roof of the home club and learned that Rose Larson and Mamie Magan 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 Aedine 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 Aedine Company the very first thing in the morning and Mr. Wilkins has got to get Bessie and me a wastebasket apiece. Oh, Lord, I wish Eddie Schwartz were going to take me out for a walk tomorrow. The old darling that he is. I'd walk anywhere rather than ask Mr. Wilkins for those blame wastebaskets. End of Chapter 13. Part 2 Chapter 14 of The Job This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The Job by Sinclair Lewis. Part 2 The Office Chapter 14 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 tallying and Russian, or at least Russian Jew, brassware. Here Mrs. Lawrence's men came calling and sometimes Mr. Julius Edward Schwartz 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' 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 manufacturing 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 her Saturday pay envelope remained as thin as ever. When Bessie Craker 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 taxi cab clear to the Pemberton Building in Long Island City. After paying a week's lunch money for the taxi cab 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 without 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 and 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 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, 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 Craker 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 blueprint 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 carefully 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 washroom, 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 experience. In this refusal there may have been a trace of aspiration. Otherwise the whole affair was a hodgepodge of petty people and ignoble motives of Una and Wilkins and S. Herbert Ross and Bessie Craker, who married a mattress renovator and Bessie's successor of fifteen dollars a week and everybody trying to deceive everybody else for 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 hodgepodge? 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. And gave her the opportunity to spend the two weeks installing a modern filing system at Hertzfeld and Kohn's. So Una had a glimpse of the almost beautiful thing business can be. Hertzfeld and Kohn 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 their tremendous beards, their habit of having coffee and pinnacle 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 Hertzfeld and Kohn had made their office a joyous adventure. People in the trade sniffed at Hertzfeld and Kohn 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 Hertzfeld and Kohn 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 Pembertons. Above railroad yards and mean tenements in Long Island City, just across the East River from New York, the shining milky walls of Pembertons bulk up like a castle covering 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 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 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 of soda fountain syrups, of rubber, celluloid and leather goods of the kind seen in corner drug stores, and the third largest of soap 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 and drug stores from Sandy Hook to San Diego and chemists shops from Hong Kong to the Silly Isles. He is a modern a-law and Mr. S. Herbert Ross is his prophet. Una discovered that Mr. Ross, who had been negligible as advertising manager Zett, 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 soapmaking was a perfectly natural phenomenon, could never get over marvelling 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 and 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 to 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 country and listen 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 about stars and sympathy and punch and early rising and roadside flowers and argoses 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 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 had 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? That is to 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 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 an idea, and dictate the outline of such schemes as the tranquility lunchroom, 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 haircut 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 dizzyed by the whirling dynamo of Pemberton's, she was not bored by the routine of valaying 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 put his okay on pictures, on copy and proof for magazine advertisements, car cards, window display cutouts, and he dictated highly ethical reading matter for the house organ, which was distributed to ten thousand drugstores, 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 streetcar on every fourth or fifth billboard. 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 sibilic trance of five days, during which he had drunk champagne and black coffee, and ridden about in handsoms, delicately brushing his nose with a genuine California poppy from the Monterey Monterey Garden of RLS. 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 without secure. Outside of them, 14 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 rest room, 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 restroom for women employees on which Mr. Pemberton so prided himself. Una heard rumors of rest rooms which were really cool. 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 the first had died, and the women 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 get 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 cast as secretary forbade. For Pemberton's was as full of cast and politics as a Republican national convention. Cast 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 she saw one of the younger Pemberton's 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 Moyan-age Italians in the arts of smiling poisoning but they did it so badly they were as fussily ineffectual as a group of schoolboys 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 the chief was alone glaring at others who were also maneuvering 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 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 bread cast cast 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 for lunch together big florid shaven large chinned men talking easily healthy for motoring and golf able in a moments conference at lunch to shift the policy and to bring instant poverty to the families of 40 clerks or 400 workmen in the shops when they jovially entered the elevator together some high strung stenographer rushed 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 thither too 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 restroom but no expert was able to keep them from jumping at the chance to marry anyone who would condescend to take them out of this efficient atmosphere just beneath the chiefs was the cast of bright young men who would someday 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 or 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 anyone 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 cast 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 all 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 casts above the buzzer line Una's cast 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 confidant to one of the gods that she should not be friendly in coat room or restroom or elevator with the unrecognized horde of girls who merely copied or took the bright young men's dictation of letters to drugstores these girls of the common herd were expected to call the secretaries miss no matter what street corner impertenances they used to one another there was no cast 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 on that they were as unimportant to the larger phases of office politics as frogs to a summer hotel only the cashiers 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 looked down on poor white trash jealousy of position catishness envy of social standing these were as evident among the office women as they are in a woman's club and Oona had to admit that woman's cruelty to woman often justified prejudices of executives against the employment of women in business that women were the worst foes of woman to Oona's sympathies the office proletarians were her own poor relations she sighed over the cheap jackets with seligia linings and raviled buttonholes which nameless copyists tried to make attractive elevated 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 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 nonetheless that they envied her position and spoke privily 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 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 spinster hood the old women purring and caddy 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 Schwartz 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 shoots 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 work just as hard and long and hopelessly after their introduction as before and she suspected that there was something wrong with the 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 cural 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 fellow progenitive 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 Magan 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 a judge 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 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 Hertzfeld and Collins she had tasted of an environment where no one considered herself 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 whenever she faced Mr. Ross's imperturbable belief that things as they are were going pretty well that you can't change human nature Una would become meek and puzzled lose her small store of revolutionary economics and wonder, grope, doubt her millennial faith then she would again see the dead eyes of young girls as they entered the elevators at 5.30 and she would rage at all chiefs and bright young men a gold eyeglass kitten-stepping good little things she was and competent to assist Mr. Ross in his mighty labors yet at heart she was a shawl irish peasant or a moujik lost in the vastness of the steps a creature elemental and despairing facing mysterious powers of nature human nature end of chapter 14