 Part 1, Chapter 1 of The Job. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Michelle Harris. The Job by Sinclair Lewis. Part 1, The City. Captain Lou Golden would have saved any foreign observer a great deal of trouble in studying America. He was an almost perfect type of the petty, small-town, middle-class lawyer. He lived in Panama, Pennsylvania. He had never been captain of anything except the Crescent Volunteer Fire Company, but he owned the title because he collected rents, wrote insurance, and meddled with lawsuits. He carried a quite visible mustache comb and wore a collar but no tie. On warm days he appeared on the street in his shirt sleeves and discussed the comparative temperatures of the past 30 years with Dr. Smith and the mansion house bus driver. He never used the word beauty except in reference to a setter dog. Beauty of words or music of faith or rebellion did not exist for him. He rather fancied large, ambitious, banal, red and gold sunsets, but he merely glanced at them as he straggled home and remarked that they were nice. He believed that all Parisians, artists, millionaires, and socialists were immoral. His entire system of theology was comprised in the Bible, which he never read, and the Methodist Church, which he rarely attended, and he desired no system of economics beyond the current platform of the Republican Party. He was aimlessly industrious, crotchety but kind, and almost quixotically honest. He believed that Panama, Pennsylvania was good enough for anybody. This last opinion was not shared by his wife nor by his daughter, Una. Mrs. Golden was one of the women who aspire just enough to be vaguely discontented, not enough to make them toil at the acquisition of understanding and knowledge. She had floated into a comfortable semi-belief in a semi-Christian science, and she read novels with a conviction that she would have been a romantic person if she hadn't married Mr. Golden, not but what he's a fine man and very bright and all, but he hasn't got much imagination or any, well, romance. She wrote poetry about spring and neighborhood births, and Captain Golden admired it so actively that he read it aloud to callers. She attended all the meetings of the Panama Study Club and desired to learn French, though she never went beyond borrowing a French grammar from the Episcopalian rector and learning one conjugation. But in the pioneer suffrage movement she took no part. She didn't think it was quite ladylike. She was a poor cook, and her house always smelled stuffy, but she liked to have flowers about. She was pretty of face, frail of body, genuinely gracious of manner. She really did like people, like to give cookies to the neighborhood boys, and if you weren't impatient with her slackness, you found her a wistful and touching figure in her slight youthfulness and in the ambition to be a romantic personage, a Marie Antoinette, or a Mrs. Grover Cleveland, which ambition she still retained at 55. She was, in appearance, the ideal wife and mother, sympathetic, forgiving, bright-lipped as a May morning. She never demanded. She merely suggested her desires, and, if they were refused, let her lips droop in a manner which only a brute could withstand. She plaintively admired her efficient daughter, Una. Una Golden was a good little woman, not pretty, not noisy, not particularly articulate, but instinctively on the inside of things, naturally able to size up people and affairs. She had common sense and unkindled passion. She was a matter-of-fact idealist with a healthy woman's simple longing for love and life. At 24, Una had half a dozen times fancied herself in love. She had been embraced at a dance and felt the stirring of a desire for surrender, but always a native shrewdness had kept her from agonizing over these affairs. She was not, and will not be, a misunderstood genius, an undeveloped artist, an embryonic leader in feminism, nor an ugly duckling who had put on a georgette hat and captivate the theatrical world. She was an untrained, ambitious, thoroughly commonplace, small-town girl, but she was a natural executive, and she secretly controlled the Golden household, kept Captain Golden from eating with his knife, and her mother from becoming drugged with too much reading of poppy-flavored novels. She wanted to learn, learn anything, but the Goldens were too respectable to permit her to have a job and too poor to permit her to go to college. From the age of 17, when she had graduated from the high school in white ribbons and heavy new boots and tight new organdy, to 23, she had kept house and gone to gossip parties and unmethodically read books from the town library. Walter Scott, Richard Legallean, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mrs. Humphrey Ward, How to Know the Birds, My Year in the Holy Land, Home Needlework, Sardar Resardus, and Ships that Pass in the Night. Her residue of knowledge from reading them was a disbelief in Panama, Pennsylvania. She was likely never to be anything more amazing than a mother and wife who would entertain the Honiton embroidery circle twice a year. Yet potentially Una Golden was as glowing as any princess of balladry. She was waiting for the fairy prince, though he seemed likely to be nothing more decorative than a salesman in a brown derby. She was fluid, indeterminate as a moving cloud. Although Una Golden had neither peckent prettiness nor grave handsomeness, her soft littleness made people call her puss and want to cuddle her as a child cuddles a kitten. If you noted Una at all when you met her, you first noted her gentle face, her fine textured hair of faded gold, and her rimless eyeglasses with a gold chain over her ear. These glasses made a business-like center to her face. You felt that without them she would have been too childish. Her mouth was as kind as her spirited eyes, but it drooped. Her body was so femininely soft that you regarded her as rather plump. But for all her curving hips and the thick ankles, which she considered common, she was rather anemic. Her cheeks were round, not rosy but clear and soft. Her lips a pale pink. Her chin was plucky and undimpled. It was usually spotted with one or two unimportant eruptions, which she kept so well covered with powder that they were never noticeable. No one ever thought of them except Una herself, to whom they were tragic blemishes which she timorously examined in the mirror every time she went to wash her hands. She knew that they were the result of the indigestible golden family meals. She tried to take comfort by noticing their prevalence among other girls, but they kept startling her anew. She would secretly touch them with a worried forefinger and wonder whether men were able to see anything else in her face. You remembered her best as she hurried through the street in her tan Macintosh with its yellow velveteen collar turned high up, and one of those modest round hats to which she was addicted. For then you were aware only of the pale gold hair fluffing round her schoolmistress eyeglasses, her gentle air of respectability, and her undistinguished littleness. She trusted in the village ideal of virginal vacuousness as the type of beauty which most captivated men, though every year she was more shrewdly doubtful of the divine superiority of these men. That a woman's business in life was to remain respectable and to secure a man and consequent security was her unmeditated faith, but still in 1905, when Una was 24 years old, her father died. Captain Golden left to wife and daughter a good name, a number of debts, and $1,100 in lodge insurance. The funeral was scarcely over before neighbors, the furniture man, the grocer, the polite old homeopathic doctor, began to come in with bland sympathy and large bills. When the debts were all cleared away, the Goldens had only $600 and no income beyond the good name. All right-minded persons agree that a good name is precious beyond rubies, but Una would have preferred less honor and more rubies. She was so engaged in comforting her mother that she scarcely grieved for her father. She took charge of everything, money, house, bills. Mrs. Golden had been overwhelmed by a realization that, however slack and shallow Captain Golden had been, he had adored her and encouraged her in her gentility, her pawing at culture. With an emerging sincerity, Mrs. Golden mourned him now, missed his gossipy presence, and at the same time she was alive to the distinction it added to her slim gracefulness to wear black and look wan. She sobbed on Una's shoulder. She said that she was lonely, and Una sturdily comforted her and looked for work. One of the most familiar human combinations in the world is that of unemployed daughter and widowed mother. A thousand times you have seen the jobless daughter devoting all of her curiosity, all of her youth, to a widowed mother of small pleasantries, a small income, and a shabby security. Thirty comes and thirty-five. The daughter ages steadily. At forty she is as old as her unwithering mother. Sweet she is, and pathetically hopeful of being a pianist or a nurse, never quite reconciled to spinsterhood, though she often laughs about it. Often, by her insistence that she is an old maid, she makes the thought of her barren age embarrassing to others. The mother is sweet, too, and wants to keep in touch with her daughter's interests, only her daughter has no interests. Had the daughter revolted at eighteen, had she stubbornly insisted that mother either accompany her to parties or be content to stay alone, had she acquired interests, she might have meant something in the new generation. But the time for revolt passes. However much the daughter may long to seem young among younger women. The mother is usually unconscious of her selfishness. She would be unspeakably horrified if some brutal soul told her that she was a vampire. Chance, chance and waste, rule them both, and the world passes by while the mother has her games of cards with daughter and deems herself unselfish, because now and then she lets daughter join a party, only to hasten back to mother, and even wonders why daughter doesn't take an interest in girls her own age. That ugly couple on the porch of the applesauce and wash-pitcher boarding house, the mother a mute dwarfish punchinello, and the daughter a drab woman of forty with a mole, a wart, a silence. That charming mother of white hair and real lace with the well-groomed daughter. That comfortable mother at home and daughter in an office, but with no suitors, no ambition beyond the one at home. They are all examples of the mother and daughter phenomenon, that most touching, most destructive example of selfless unselfishness, which robs all the generations to come, because mother has never been trained to endure the long, long thoughts of solitude, because she sees nothing by herself, and within herself hears no diverting voice. There were many such mothers and daughters in Panama. If they were wealthy, daughter collected rents and saw lawyers and belonged to a club and tried to keep youthful at parties. If middle-class, daughter taught school almost invariably. If poor, mother did the washing and daughter collected it. So it was marked down for Una that she should be a teacher. Not that she wanted to be a teacher. After graduating from high school, she had spent two miserable terms of teaching in the small, white district school four miles out on the Bethlehem Road. She hated the drive out and back, the airless room and the foul outbuildings, the shy, stupid, staring children, the jolly little arithmetical problems about wallpaper, piles of lumber, the amount of time that notoriously efficient workmen will take to do a certain piece of work. Una was honest enough to know that she was not an honest teacher. That she neither loved masses of other people's children nor had any ideals of developing the new generation. But she had to make money. Of course, she would teach. When she talked over affairs with her tearful mother, Mrs. Golden always ended by suggesting, I wonder if perhaps you couldn't go back to school teaching again. Everybody said you were so successful and maybe I could get some needlework to do. I do want to help so much. Mrs. Golden did apparently really want to help. But she never suggested anything besides teaching and she went on recklessly investing in the nicest morning. Meantime, Una tried to find other work in Panama. Seen from a balloon, Panama is merely a mole on the long hill slopes. But to Una, its few straggly streets were a whole cosmos. She knew somebody in every single house. She knew just where the succotash, the cake boxes, the clothes lines were kept in each of the grocery stores. And on market Saturdays, she could wait on herself. She summed up the whole town and its possibilities and she wondered what opportunities the world out beyond Panama had for her. She recalled two trips to Philadelphia and one to Harrisburg. She made out a list of openings with such methodical exactness as she devoted to keeping the dwindling lodge insurance from disappearing altogether. Hers was no poetic outreach like that of the young genius who wants to be off for Bohemia. It was a question of earning money in the least tedious way. Una was facing the feminist problem without knowing what the word feminist meant. This was her list of fair fields of fruitful labor. She could and probably would teach in some hen coop of pedagogy. She could marry, but no one seemed to want her except old Henry Carson the widower with Qatar and three children who called on her and her mother once in two weeks and would propose whenever she encouraged him to. This she knew scientifically. She had only to sit beside him on the sofa, let her hand drop down beside his. But she positively and ungrateful didn't want to marry Henry and listened to his hawking and his grumbling for the rest of her life. Sooner or later one of the boys might propose but in a small town it was all a gamble. There weren't so very many desirable young men. Most of the energetic ones went off to Philadelphia and New York. True that Jenny McTevish had been married at thirty-one when everybody had thought she was hopelessly an old maid. Yet here was Birdie Mayberry unmarried at thirty-four. No one could ever understand why for she had been the prettiest and jolliest girl in town. Una crossed blessed matrimony off the list as a commercial prospect. She could go off and study music, law, medicine, elocution, or any of that amazing hodgepodge of pursuits which are permitted to small town women. But she really couldn't afford to do any of these and besides she had no talent for music of a higher grade than Susa and Victor Herbert. She was afraid of lawyers, blood made her sick, and her voice was too quiet for the noble art of elocution as practiced by several satin-waisted semi-artistic ladies who gave readings of Enoch Arden and Evangeline before the Panama Study Circle and the Panama Annual Chautauqua. She could have a job selling dry goods behind the counter in the hub store, but that meant loss of cast. She could teach dancing, but she couldn't dance particularly well and that was all that she could do. She had tried to find work as office woman for Dr. Mayberry, the dentist, in the office of the Panama Woodturning Company, in the post office, as lofty and thrown cashier for the hub store, painting place cards and making fancy work for the art needlework exchange. The job behind the counter in the hub store was the only one offered her. If I were only a boy, sighed Una, I could go to work in the hardware store or on the railroad or anywhere and not lose respectability. Oh, I hate being a woman. Una had been trying to persuade her father's old-time rival, Squire Up-to-Graph, the real estate and insurance man, that her experience with Captain Golden would make her a perfect treasure in the office. Squire Up-to-Graph had leaped up at her entrance and blared, Well, well, and how is the little girl making it? He had set out a chair for her and held her hand, but he knew that her only experience with her father's affairs had been an effort to balance Captain Golden's account books, which were works of genius insofar as they were composed according to the inspirational method. So there was nothing very serious in their elaborate discussion of giving Una a job. It was her last hope in Panama. She went disconsolately down the short street between the two-story buildings and the rows of hitched lumber wagons. Nelly Page, the town bell, tripping by in canvas sneakers and a large red hair ribbon, shouted at her, and Charlie Martindale of the First National Bank nodded to her. But these exquisites were too young for her. They danced too well and laughed too easily. The person who stopped her for a long, curb-stone conference about the weather, while most of the town observed and gossiped, was the fateful Henry Carson. The village son was unusually blank and hard on Henry's bald spot today. Heavens, she cried to herself in almost hysterical protest, would she have to marry Henry? Miss Maddie Pugh drove by, returning from district school. Miss Maddie had taught at Clark's Crossing for seventeen years, had grown meek and meager and hopeless. Heavens, thought Una, would she have to be shut into the fetid barn of a small school unless she married Henry? I won't be genteel. I'll work in the hub or any place first, Una declared. While she trudged home, a pleasant, inconspicuous, fluffy-haired young woman, undramatic as a field-daisy, a cataract of protest poured through her. All the rest of her life she would have to meet that doddering old Mr. Mosley, who was unavoidably bearing down on her now, and beheld by him in long, meaningless talks. And there was nothing amusing to do. She was so frightfully bored. She suddenly hated the town, hated every evening she would have to spend there, reading newspapers and playing cards with her mother, and dreading a call from Mr. Henry Carson. She wanted—wanted someone to love, to talk with. Why had she discouraged the beautiful Charlie Martindale, the time he had tried to kiss her at a dance? Charlie was fatuous, but he was young, and she wanted—yes, yes, that was it—she wanted youth, she who was herself so young. And she would grow old here unless someone, one of these godlike young men, condescended to recognize her. Grow old among these streets like piles of lumber. She charged into the small, white, ambling golden house, with its peculiar smell of stale lamb-gravy, and on the old broken couch, where her father had snored all through every bright Sunday afternoon, she sobbed feebly. She raised her head to consider a noise overhead, the faint, domestic thunder of the sewing machine, shaking the walls with its rhythm. The machine stopped. She heard the noise of scissors dropped on the floor, the most stuffily domestic sound in the world. The airless house was crushing her. She sprang up, and then she sat down again. There was no place to which she could flee. Henry Carson and the district school were menacing her. And, meantime, she had to find out what her mother was sewing, whether she had again been wasting money in buying mourning. Poor, poor little mother, working away happy up there, and I've got to go and scold you, Una agonized. Oh, I want to earn money. I want to earn real money for you. She saw a quadrangle of white on the table behind a book. She pounced on it. It was a letter from Mrs. Sessions, and Una scratched it open excitedly. Mr. and Mrs. Albert Sessions of Panama had gone to New York. Mr. Sessions was in machinery. They liked New York. They lived in a flat and went to theaters. Mrs. Sessions was a pillowy soul whom Una trusted. Why don't you, wrote Mrs. Sessions, if you don't find the kind of work you want in Panama, think about coming up to New York and taking stenography. There are lots of chances here for secretaries, et cetera. Una carefully laid down the letter. She went over and straightened her mother's red wool slippers. She wanted to postpone for an exquisite throbbing moment the joy of announcing to herself that she had made a decision. She would go to New York, become a stenographer, a secretary to a corporation president, a rich woman, free, responsible. The fact of making this revolutionary decision so quickly gave her a feeling of power, of already being a businesswoman. She galloped upstairs to the room where her mother was driving the sewing machine. Mumsy, she cried, we're going to New York. I'm going to learn to be a businesswoman and the little mother will be all dressed in satin and silks and dine on what is it and peaches and cream. Mum don't come out right, but oh, my little mother, we're going out adventuring, we are. She plunged down beside her mother, burrowed her head in her mother's lap, kissed that hand whose skin was like thinnest wrinkly tissue paper. Why, my little daughter, what is it? Has someone sent for us? Is it the letter from Emma Sessions? What did she say in it? She suggested it, but we are going up independent. But can we afford to? I would like the Dramas and art galleries and all. We will afford to. We'll gamble for once. End of chapter one. Part one, chapter two of The Job. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The Job by Sinclair Lewis. Chapter one, The City. Chapter two. Una Golden had never realized how ugly and petty were the streets of Panama till that evening when she walked down for the mail, spurning the very dust on the sidewalks, and there was plenty to spurn. An old mansion of towers and scalloped shingles, broken-shuttered now and unpainted, six stores marching up on its once leisurely lawn. The town hall, a square wooden barn with a sagging upper porch from which the mayor would presumably have made proclamations, had there ever been anything in Panama to proclaim about, staring loafers in front of the Gerard House. To Una there was no romance in the sick mansion, no kindly democracy in the village street, no bare freedom in the hills beyond. She was not much to blame, she was a creature of action to whom this constricted town had denied all action except sweeping. She felt so strong now, she had expected a struggle in persuading her mother to go to New York, but acquiescence had been easy. Una had an exultant joy, a little youthful and cruel, in meeting old Henry Carson and telling him that she was going away, that she didn't know for how long, maybe for always. So hopelessly did he stroke his lean brown neck, which was never quite clean shaven, that she tried to be kind to him. She promised to write, but she felt, when she had left him, as though she had just been released from prison. To live with him, to give him the right to claw at her with those desiccated hands, she imagined it with a vividness which shocked her all the while she was listening to his halting regrets. A dry, dusty September wind whirled down the village street, it choked her. There would be no dusty winds in New York, but only mellow breezes over marble palaces of efficient business, no Henry Carson's but slim, alert businessmen, young of eye and light of tongue. Una Golden had expected to thrill to her first sight of the New York skyline, crossing on the ferry in mid-afternoon, but it was so much like all the postcard views of it, so stolidly devoid of any surprises, that she merely remarked, Oh yes, there it is, that's where I'll be, and turned to tuck her mother into a ferry seat and count the suitcases and assure her that there was no danger of pickpockets. Though as the ferry sidled along the land, passed an English liner, and came close enough to the shore so that she could see the people who actually lived in the state of blessedness called New York, Una suddenly hugged her mother and cried, Oh, little mother, we're going to live here and do things together, everything! The familiar faces of Mr. and Mrs. Albert Sessions were awaiting them at the end of the long cavernous walk from the ferry boat, and New York immediately became a blur of cabs, cobblestones, bales of cotton, long vistas of very dirty streets, high buildings, surface cars, elevators, shop windows that seem dark and foreign, and everywhere such a rush of people has made her feel insecure, cling to the Sessions' and try to ward off the dizziness of the swirl of new impressions. She was daunted for a moment, but she rejoiced in the conviction that she was going to like this madness of multi-form energy. The Sessions' lived in a flat on Amsterdam Avenue near 96th Street. They all went up from Cortland Street in the subway, which was still new and miraculous in 1905. For five minutes Una was terrified by the jam of people, the blind roar through tunneled darkness, the sense of being powerlessly hurled forward in a mass of ungovernable steel. But nothing particularly fatal happened, and she grew proud to be part of this black energy and contendedly swung by a strap. When they reached the Sessions' flat and fell upon the gossip of Panama, Pennsylvania, Una was absent-minded, except when the Sessions' teased her about Henry Carson and Charlie Martindale. The rest of the time, curled up on a black walnut couch, which she had known for years in Panama, and which looked plaintively rustic here in New York, Una gave herself up to impressions of the city, the voices of many children down on Amsterdam Avenue, the shriek of a flat-wheeled surface car, the sturdy pound of trucks, horns of automobiles, the separate sounds scarcely distinguishable in a whir, which seemed visible as a thick, grey-yellow dust cloud. Her mother went to lie down. The Sessions', after an elaborate explanation of why they did not keep a maid, began to get dinner, and Una stole out to see New York by herself. It all seemed different, at once more real and not so jumbled together, now that she used her own eyes instead of the guidance of that knowing old city bird Mr. Albert Sessions. Amsterdam Avenue was, even in the dusk of early autumn, disappointing in its walls of yellow flat buildings cluttered with firescapes, the first stories all devoted to the same sort of shops over and over again, delicatessens, laundries, barber shops, saloons, groceries, lunchrooms. She ventured down a side street toward a furnace glow of sunset. West End Avenue was imposing to her in its solid brick and greystone houses and pavements milky in the waning light. Then came a block of expensive apartments. She was finding the city of golden rewards. Frivolous curtains hung at windows. In a huge apartment house hall, she glimpsed a negro attendant in a green uniform with a monkey cap and close set rows of brass buttons. She had a hint of palms, or what looked like palms, of marble and mahogany and tiling and a flash of people in evening dress. In her plain, sensible suit, Una tramped past. She was unenvious because she was going to have all these things soon. Out of a rather stodgy vision of silk opera wraps and suitors who were like floor walkers, she came suddenly out on Riverside Drive and the splendor of the city. A dull city of straight front, unvaried streets is New York, but she aspires in her skyscrapers. She dreams a garden dream of Georgian days in Gramercy Park and on Riverside Drive she bears her exquisite breast and wantons in beauty. Here she is sophisticated yet eager, comparable to Paris and Vienna, and here Una exalted. Down a polished roadway that reflected every light rolled smart motors with gay people in the sort of clothes she had studied in advertisements. The driveway was bordered with mist, breathing among the shrubs. Above Una shouldered the tremendous facades of gold-cornest apartment houses. Across the imperial Hudson everything was enchanted by the long, smoky afterglow against which the silhouettes of dome and tower and factory chimney stood out like an orient city. Oh, I want all this, it's mine. An apartment up there, a big broad window seat and look out on all this. Oh, dear God, she was unconsciously praying to her vague, Panama-Wesley Methodist church God who gave you things if you were good. I will work for all this and for the little mother, dear mother, that's never had a chance. In the step of the slightly stolid girl there was a new lightness, a new ecstasy in walking rapidly through the stirring New York air as she turned back to the Sessions' flat. Later, when the streets fell into order and became normal, Una could never quite identify the vaudeville theater to which the Sessions' took them that evening. The golden ivory walls of the lobby seemed to rise immeasurably to a ceiling flashing with frescoes of light lovers in blue and fluffy white, mincing steps and ardent kisses and flaunting draperies. They climbed a tremendous arching stairway of marble, upon which her low shoes clattered with a pleasant sound. They passed niches hung with heavy curtains of plum-colored velvet, framing the sly peep of plaster fawns, and came out on a balcony stretching as wide as the sea at twilight, looking down on thousands of people in the orchestra below, up at a vast golden dome lighted by glowing spheres hung with diamonds, forward at a towering proscenic arch, above which slim nude goddesses in barry leaf floated in a langer which obsessed her, set free the bare-brown laughing nymph that hides in every stiff Una in semi-morning. Nothing so diverting as that program has ever been witnessed. The funny men with their solemn mock battles, their extravagance in dress, their galloping wit, made her laugh till she wanted them to stop. The singers were bell-voiced, the dancers graceful as clouds, and just touched with a beguiling naughtiness. And in the playlet there was a chill intensity that made her shudder when the husband accused the wife whom he suspected, oh, so absurdly, as Una indignantly assured herself. The entertainment was pure magic, untouched by human clumsiness, rare and spellbound as a stilly afternoon in oak woods by a lake. They went to a marvelous café, and Mr. Sessions astounded them by the urbanity with which he hurried captains and waiters and busboys, and ordered lobster and coffee, and pretended that he was going to be wicked and have wine and cigarettes. Months afterward, when she was going to vaudeville by herself, Una tried to identify the theatre of wizardry. But she never could. The Sessions' couldn't remember which theatre it was. They thought it was the pit, but surely they must have been mistaken, for the pit was a shanty, dogged with grotesque nudes, rambling and pretentious, with shockingly amateurish programs. And afterward, on the occasion or two when they went out to dinner with the Sessions' it seemed to Una that Mr. Sessions was provincial in restaurants, too deprecatingly friendly with the waiters, hesitating about choosing dinner. Whiteside and Schlussner's College of Commerce, where Una learned the art of business, occupied only five shabby rooms of crepuscular windows and perpetually dusty corners and hard, glistening wall paint in a converted but not sanctified, old dwelling house on West 18th Street. The faculty were six. Mr. Whiteside, an elaborate pomposity who smoothed his concrete brow as though he had a headache and took obvious pride in being able to draw birds with Spinsarian strokes. Mr. Schlussner, who was small and vulgar and de classe and really knew something about business. A shabby man like a broken down bookkeeper, silent and diligent and afraid. A towering man with a red face who kept licking his lips with a small red triangle of tongue and taught English, commercial college English, in a bombastic voice of finicky correctness and always smelled of cigar smoke. An active young Jewish New Yorker of wonderful black hair, elfin face, tilted hat and smart clothes who did something on the side in real estate. Finally, a thin widow who was so busy and matter of fact that she was no more individualized than a streetcar. Any one of them was considered competent to teach any line and among them they ground out instruction in shorthand, typewriting, bookkeeping, English grammar, spelling, composition with a special view to the construction of deceptive epistles and commercial geography. Once or twice a week, language masters from a linguistic mill down the street were had in to chatter the more vulgar phrases of French, German and Spanish. A cluttered, wheezy omnibus of a school, but in it Una rode to spacious and beautiful hours of learning. It was even more to her than is the art school to the urner who has always believed that she has a talent for painting. For the urner has, even as a child, been able to draw and daub and revel in the results. While for Una this was the first time in her life when her labor seemed to count for something. Her school teaching had been a mere time filler. Now she was at once the responsible head of the house and a seer of the future. Most of the girls in the school learned nothing but shorthand and typewriting, but to these Una added English grammar, spelling and letter composition. After breakfast at the little flat which she had taken with her mother, she fled to the school. She drove into her books. She delighted in the pleasure of her weary teachers when she snapped out a quick answer to questions or typed a page correctly or was able to remember the shorthand symbol for a difficult word like psychologize. Her belief in the sacredness of the game was boundless. End of chapter two. Part one, chapter three of The Job. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The Job by Sinclair Lewis. Part one, The City. Chapter three. Except for the young man in the bank, the new young man in the hardware store and the proprietors of the new Broadway clothing shop, Una had known most of the gallants in Panama, Pennsylvania from Knickerbocker days. She remembered their bony, boyish knees and their school day whippings too well to be romantic about them. But in the commercial college, she was suddenly associated with 70 entirely new and interesting males. So brief were the courses, so irregular the classifications that there was no spirit of seniority to keep her out of things. And Una, with her fever of learning, her instinctive common sense about doing things in the easiest way stood out among the girl students. The young men did not buzz about her as they did about the slim, diabolic, star-eyed girl from Brooklyn in her tempting low-cut blouses or the intense, curly-headed, boyish, brown Jew girl or the ardent dancers and gigglers. But Una's self-sufficient eagerness gave a fervor to her blue eyes and a tilt to her commonplace chin, which made her almost pretty. And the young men liked to consult her about things. She was really more prominent here in a school of 170 than in her Panama High School with its enrollment of 70. Panama, Pennsylvania, had never regarded Una as a particularly capable young woman. Dozens of others were more masterful at trimming the Christmas tree for Wesley Methodist Church, preparing for the annual picnic of the art needlework coterie, arranging a surprise donation party for the Methodist pastor, even spring house cleaning. But she had been well-spoken of as a marketer, a cook, a neighbor who would take care of your baby while you went visiting, because these tasks had seemed worthwhile to her. She was more practical than either Panama or herself believed. All these years she had, without knowing that she was philosophizing, without knowing that there was a worldwide inquiry into woman's place, been trying to find work that needed her. Her father's death had freed her, had permitted her to toil for her mother, cherish her, be regarded as useful. Instantly, still without learning that there was such a principle as feminism, she had become a feminist, demanding the world and all the fullness thereof as her field of labor. And now, in this fumbling school, she was beginning to feel the theory of efficiency, the ideal of big business, for business that one necessary field of activity to which the egotistic arts and sciences and theologies and military pluralities are but servants. That long-despised and always valiant effort to unify the labor of the world is at last beginning to be something more than dirty smithing. No longer does the businessman thank the better classes for permitting him to make and distribute bread and motor cars and books. No longer does he crawl to the church to bipartisan for usury. Business is being recognized and is recognizing itself as ruler of the world. With this consciousness of power, it is reforming its old, petty, half-hearted ways, its idea of manufacture as a filthy sort of tinkering, of distribution as chance-peddling and squalid shopkeeping. It is feverishly seeking efficiency in its machinery, but, like all monarchies, it must fail unless it becomes noble of heart. So long as capital and labor are divided, so long as the making of munitions or injurious food is regarded as business, so long as big business believes that it exists merely to enrich a few of the lucky or the well-born or the nervously active, it will not be efficient, but deficient. But the vision of an efficiency so broad that it can be kindly and sure is growing, is discernible at once in the scientific businessman and the courageous labor unionist. That vision, Una Golden, feebly comprehended. Where she first beheld it cannot be said, certainly not in the lectures of her teachers, humorless and un-visioned grinds, who drone that by divine edict letters must end with a yours truly one space to the left of the middle of the page, who sniffed at card-ledgers as newfangled nonsense and, at their most inspired, croaked out such platitudes as look out for the pennies and the pounds will look out for themselves, or the man who fails is the man who watches the clock. Nor was the vision of the inspired big business that shall be to be found in the books over which Una labored, the flat, maroon-covered, dusty commercial geography, the arid book of phrases and rules of the thumb called Fish's Commercial English, the manual of touch typewriting, or the shorthand primer that, with its grotesque symbols and numbered exercises, and yellow pages dog-eared by many owners, looked like an old-fashioned Arabic grammar headacheily perused in some Divinity School library. Her vision of it all must have come partly from the eager talk of a few of the students, the girl who wasn't ever going to give up her job, even if she did marry, the man who saw a future in these motion pictures, the shaggy-haired zealot who talked about profit-sharing, which was a bold radicalism back in 1905, almost as subversive of office discipline as believing in unions. Partly it came from the new sorts of business magazines for the man who didn't, like his father's, insist, I guess I can run my business without any outside interference, but sought everywhere for systems and charts and new markets and the scientific mind. While her power of faith and vision was satisfied by the largeness of the city and by her chance to work, there was, quickening in Una, a shy, indefinable inner life of tenderness and desire for love. She did not admit it, but she observed the young men about her with an interest that was as diverting as her ambition. At first they awed her by their number and their strangeness, but when she seemed to be quite their equal in this school of the timorously clerical, she began to look at them level-eyed. A busy, commonplace, soft-armed, pleasant, good little thing she was, glancing at them through eyeglasses attached to a gold chain over her ear. Not much impressed now, slightly ashamed by the delight she took in winning their attention by brilliant recitations. She decided that most of them were earnest-minded, but intelligent serfs, not much stronger than the girls who were taking stenography for want of anything better to do. They sprawled and looked vacuous as they worked in rows in the big study hall, with its hard blue walls showing the marks of two removed partitions, its old iron fireplace stuffed with rubbers and overshoes and crayon boxes. As a provincial, Una disliked the many Jews among them and put down their fervor for any sort of learning to acquisitiveness. The rest she came to despise for the clumsy slowness with which they learned even the simplest lessons, and to all of them she, who was going to be rich and powerful directly, she was good for one hundred words a minute at stenography, felt disdainfully superior because they were likely to be poor the rest of their lives. In a twilight walk on Washington Heights, a walk of such vigor and happy absorption with new problems as she had never known in Panama, she caught herself being contemptuous about their frayed poverty. With a sharp emotional sincerity, she rebuked herself for such sordidness, mocked herself for assuming that she was already rich. Even out of this mass of clerklings emerged two or three who were interesting. Sam Weintraub, a young, active, red-headed, slim-waisted Jew who was born in Brooklyn. He smoked large cigars with an air, knew how to wear his clothes, and told about playing tennis at the Prospect Athletic Club. He would be a smart secretary or confidential clerk someday. Una was certain. He would own a car and be seen in evening clothes and even larger cigars at after-theater suppers. She was rather in awe of his sophistication. He was the only man who made her feel like a freshman. J.J. Todd, a reticent, hesitating, hard-working man of thirty, from Chatham on Cape Cod. It was he who, in noontime arguments, grimly advocated profit-sharing, which Sam Weintraub debonarily dismissed as socialistic. And, most appealing to her, enthusiastic young Sanford Hunt, inarticulate but longing for a chance to attach himself to some master. Weintraub and Todd had desks on either side of her. They had that great romantic virtue propinquity. But Sanford Hunt she had noticed in his corner across the room because he glanced about with such boyish loneliness. Sanford Hunt helped her find a rubber in the high school-like coat room on a rainy day when the girls were giggling and the tremendous swells of the institution were whooping and slapping one another on the back and acting as much as possible like their ideal of college men, an ideal presumably derived from motion pictures and college playlets in Vaudeville. Una saw J.J. Todd gopping at her but not offering to help while a foreshortened Sanford groped along the floor under the dusty line of coats for her missing left rubber. Sanford came up with the rubber, smiled like a nice boy, and walked with her to the subway. He didn't need much encouragement to tell his ambitions. He was twenty-one, three years younger than herself. He was a semi-orphan born in Newark, had worked up from office boy to clerk in the office of a huge Jersey City paint company, had saved money to take a commercial course, was going back to the paint company, and hoped to be office manager there. He had a conviction that the finest man in the world was Mr. Claude Lowry, president of the Lowry paint company. The next finest, Mr. Ernest Lowry, vice president and general manager. The next, Mr. Julius Schwertz, one of the two city salesmen. Mr. Schwertz having occupied a desk next to his own for two years and that the best paint on the market today is Lowry's lasting paint, simply no getting around it. In the five-minute walk over to the eighteenth street station of the subway, Sanford had lastingly impressed Una by his devotion to the job, eager and faithful as the glory that a young subaltern takes in his regiment. She agreed with him that the dour J.J. Todd was crazy in his theories about profit-sharing and selling stocks to employees. While she was with young Sanford, Una found herself concurring that the bosses know so much better about all those things, gee whiz, they've had so much more experience. Besides, you can't expect them to give away all their profits to please these walking delegates or a Cape Cod farmer like Todd. All these theories don't do a fellow any good. What he wants is to stick on a job and make good. Though in keeping with the general schoolboyishness of the institution, the study room supervisors tried to prevent conversation. There was always a current of whispering and low talk, and Sam Weintraub gave Una daily reports of the tennis, the dances, the dinners, at the Prospect Athletic Club. Her evident awe of his urban amusements pleased him. He told his former idol, the slim, blond giggler, that she was altogether too fresh for a Bronx kid, and he basked in Una's admiration. Through him she had a revelation of the New York in which people actually were born, which they took casually as she did Panama. She tried consciously to become a real New Yorker herself. After lunch, her homemade lunch of sandwiches and an apple, which she ate in the buzzing, gossiping study hall at noon hour, she explored the city. Sometimes Sanford Hunt begged to go with her. Once Todd stalked along and embarrassed her by being indignant over an anti-socialist orator in Madison Square. Once on Fifth Avenue she met Sam Weintraub and he nonchalantly pointed out in a passing motor a man whom he declared to be John D. Rockefeller. Even at lunch hour Una could not come to much understanding with the girls of the commercial college. They seemed alternately third-rate stenographers and very haughty urbanites who knew all about fellows and shows and glad rags, except for good-natured, square-rigged Miss Moynihan and the oldish, anxious, industrious Miss Ingalls who, like Una, came from a small town and the adorably pretty little Miss Moore whom you couldn't help loving, Una saw the girls of the school only in a mass. It was Sam Weintraub, J.J. Todd, and Sanford Hunt whom Una watched and liked and of whom she thought when the school authorities pompously invited them all to a dance early in November. The excitement, the giggles, the discussions of girdles and slippers and hair-waving and men which filled the study hall at noon and the coat room at closing hour was like midnight silence compared with the tumult in Una's breast when she tried to make herself believe that either her blue satin evening dress or her white and pink frock of novelty crepe was attractive enough for the occasion. The crepe was the older, but she had worn the blue satin so much that now the crepe suddenly seemed the newer, the less soiled. After discussions with her mother, which involved much holding up of the crepe and the tracing of imaginary diagrams with a forefinger, she decided to put a new velvet girdle and new sleeve ruffles on the crepe, and then she said, It will have to do. Very different is the dressing of the girl who isn't quite pretty, nor at all rich, from the luxurious joy which the beautiful woman takes in her new toilettes. Instead of the faint, shivery wonder as to whether men will realize how exquisitely the line of a new bodice accentuates the molding of her neck, the unpretty girl hopes that no one will observe how unevenly her dress hangs, how pointed and red and rough are her elbows, how clumsily waved her hair. I don't think anybody will notice, she sighs, and is contemptuously conscious of her own stolid, straight, healthy waist, while her mother flutters about and pretends to believe that she is curved like a hoary, like Helen of Troy, like Esouled at eighteen. Una was touched by her mother's sincere eagerness in trying to make her pretty. Poor little mother, it had been hard on her to sit alone all day in a city flat with no Panama neighbors to drop in on her, no meeting of the Panama Study Club, and with Una bringing home her books to work aloof all evening. The day before the dance, J.J. Todd dourally asked her if he might call for her and take her home. Una accepted hesitatingly. As she did so, she unconsciously glanced at the decorative Sam Weintraub, who was rocking on his toes and flirting with Miss Moore, the kittenish bell of the school. She must have worried for fifteen minutes over the question of whether she was going to wear a hat or a scarf, trying to remember the best social precedents of Panama as laid down by Mrs. Dr. Smith, trying to recall New York women as she had once or twice seen them in the evening on Broadway. Finally she jerked a pale blue chiffon scarf over her mildly pretty hair, pulled on her new long white kid gloves, noted miserably that the gloves did not quite cover her pebbly elbows and snapped at her fussing mother. Oh, it doesn't matter, I'm a perfect sight anyway, so what's the use of worrying? Her mother looked so hurt and bewildered that Una pulled her down into a chair and, kneeling on the floor with her arms about her, crooned, oh, I'm just nervous, Mumsie dear, working so hard and all. I'll have the best time, now you've made me so pretty for the dance. Clasp thus an intense brooding affection holding them and seeming to fill the shabby sitting room. They waited for the coming of her Tristan, her Chevalier, the flat-footed J.J. Todd. They heard Todd shamble along the hall. They wriggled with concealed laughter and held each other tighter when he stopped at the door of the flat and blew his nervous nose in a tremendous blast. More vulgar, possibly, than the trumpet-tree which heralded the arrival of Lancelot at a chateau, but on the whole quite as effective. She set out with him, observing his pitiful home-cleaned black sack-suit and home-shined expansive black boots and ready-made tie while he talked easily and was merely rude about dances and clothes and the weather. In the study hall which had been cleared of all seats except for a fringe along the walls and was unevenly hung with school flags and patriotic bunting, Una found the empty-headed time-servers, the little folk to whom she was so superior in the classroom. Brooklyn Jews used to side-street dance halls. Bronx girls who went to the bartender's ball and the dinner and grand ball of the clam chowder twenty. They laughed and talked and danced, all three at once with an ease which dismayed her. To Una Golden of Panama the waltz and the two-step were solemn affairs. She could make her feet go in a one-two-three triangle with approximate accuracy if she didn't take any liberties with them. She was relieved to find that Todd danced with a heavy accuracy which kept her from stumbling. But their performance was solemn and joyless, while by her skipped Sam Weintraub in evening clothes with black velvet collar and cuffs, swinging and making dips with the lovely Miss Moore who cuddled into his arms and swayed to his swing. Let's cut out the next, said Todd, and she consented, though Sanford Hunt came boyishly, blushingly up to ask her for a dance. She was intensely aware that she was a wallflower in a row with the anxious Miss Ingalls and the elderly Frump Miss Faisal. Sam Weintraub seemed to avoid her and, though she tried to persuade herself that his greasy curly red hair and his pride of evening clothes and sharp face were blatantly Jewish, she knew that she admired his atmosphere of gorgeousness and was in despair at being shut out of it. She even feared that Sanford Hunt really wanted to dance with her, and she willfully ignored his frequent glances of friendliness and his efforts to introduce her and his lady friend. She was silent and hard, while poor Todd trying not to be a radical and lecture on single tax or municipal ownership attempted to be airy about the theater which meant the one show he had seen since he had come to New York. From vague dissatisfaction, she drifted into an active resentment at being shut out of the world of pretty things, of clinging gowns and graceful movement in fragrant rooms. While Todd was taking her home, she was saying to herself over and over, nope, it's just as bad as parties at Panama. Never really enjoyed him. I'm out of it. I'll stick to my work. Oh, dread it. Blindly, in a daily growing faith in her commercial future, she shut out the awkward gayities of the school, ignored Todd and Sanford Hunt and Sam Weintraub, made no effort to cultivate the adorable Miss Moore's rather flattering friendliness for her. She was like a girl grind in a coeducational college who determines to head the class and to that devotes all of the sexless energy. Only Una was not sexless. Though she hadn't the dancing girl's oblivious delight and pleasure, though her energetic common sense and willingness to serve had turned into a durable plotting, Una was alive, normal, desirous of love as the flower-faced girl grind of the college so often is not to the vast confusion of numerous ardent young gentlemen. She could not long forbid herself an interest in Sanford Hunt and Sam Weintraub. She even idealized Todd as a humble hero, a self-made and honest man, which he was, though Una considered herself highly charitable to him. Sweet to her, even when he told her that he was engaged, even when it was evident that he regarded her as an older sister or as a very young and understanding aunt, was Sanford Hunt's liking. Why do you like me if you do? She demanded one lunch hour and he had brought her a bar of milk chocolate. Oh, I don't know. You're so darn honest and you got so much more sense than this bunch of bronx toddies. Gee, they'll make bums to nogs. I know, I've worked in an office. They'll keep their gum and a looking glass in the upper right-hand drawer of their typewriter desks, and the old man will call them down eleven-t times a day and they'll marry the shipping clerk and he sneaks out from behind a box. But you got sense and somehow, gee, I never know how to express things. Glad I'm taking this English composition stuff. Oh, you just seem to understand a guy. I never liked that yid wine-trob till you made me see how darn clever and nice he really is, even if he does wear spats. Sanford told her often that he wished she was going to come over to the salary-paint company to work when she finished. He had entered the college before her. He would be through somewhat earlier. He was going back to the paint company and would try to find an opening for her there. He wanted her to meet Mr. Julius Edward Schwartz, the Manhattan salesman of the company. When Mr. Schwartz was in that part of town, interviewing the department store buyers, he called up Sanford Hunt, and Sanford insisted that she come out to lunch with Schwartz and himself and his girl. She went, shyly. Sanford's sweetheart proved to be as clean and sweet as himself, but mute, smiling instead of speaking, inclined to admire everyone without much discrimination. Sanford was very proud, very eager as host, and his boyish admiration of all his guests gave a certain charm to the corner of the crude German sausage and schnitzel restaurant where they lunched. Una worked at making the party as successful as possible and was cordial to Mr. Julius Edward Schwartz, the paint salesman. Mr. Schwartz was 40 or 41, a red-faced, clipped moustache, derby-hatted, average citizen. He was ungrammatical and jacose. He panted a good deal and gurgled his soup. His nails were ragged-edged, his stupid brown tie uneven, and there were signs of a growing grossness and fatty unwieldiness about his neck, his shoulders, his waist. But he was affable. He quietly helped Sanford in ordering lunch to the great economy of embarrassment. He was smilingly ready to explain to Una how a paint company office was run, what chances there were for a girl. He seemed to know his business, he didn't gossip, and his heavy, coarse-lipped smile was almost sweet when he said to Una, makes a hard-cased old widower like me pretty lonely to see this nice kid and girlie here, eh? Wish I had some children like them myself. He wasn't vastly different from Henry Carson, this Mr. Schwartz, but he had a mechanical city smartness in his manner and a jocular energy which the stringy-necked Henry quite lacked. Because she liked to be with Sanford Hunt, hoped to get from Mr. Julius Edward Schwartz still more of the feeling of how actual businessmen do business, she hoped for another lunch. But a crisis unexpected and alarming came to interrupt her happy progress to a knowledge of herself and men. The Golden's had owned no property in Panama, Pennsylvania. They had rented their house. Captain Lou Golden, who was so urgent in advising others to purchase real estate with a small justifiable commission to himself, had never quite found time to decide on his own real estate investments. When they had come to New York, Una and her mother had given up the house and sold the heavier furniture, the big beds, the stove, the rest of the furniture they had brought to the city and installed in a little flat way up on 148th Street. Her mother was, Una declared, so absolutely the lady that it was a crying shame to think of her immured here in their elevatorless tenement, this new clean barren building of yellow brick, its face broken out with fire escapes. It had narrow halls, stairs of slate treads and iron rails, and cheap wooden doorways which had begun to warp the minute the structure was finished and sold. The bright green burlap wall covering in the hallways had faded in less than a year the color of dry grass. The janitor grew tired every now and then. He had been markedly diligent at first, but he was already giving up the task of keeping the building clean. It was one of, and typical of, a mile of yellow brick tenements. It was named after an African orchid of great loveliness, and it was filled with clerks, motormen, probationer policemen, and enormously prolific women in dressing sacks. The goldens had three rooms and baths, a small, enolious, gas-stove kitchen, a bedroom with standing wardrobe, iron bed, and just one graceful piece of furniture, Una's dressing table, a room pervasively feminine in its scent and in the little piles of lingerie, which Mrs. Golden affected more, not less, as she grew older. The living room with stiff, brown, woolen, brocade chairs transplanted from their Panama home, a red plush sofa, two large oak-framed biblical pictures, the wedding feast at Cana, and Solomon in his temple. This living room had never been changed since the day of their moving in. Una repeatedly coveted the German color prints she saw in shop windows, but she had to economize. She planned that when she should succeed, they would have such an apartment of white enamel and glass doors and mahogany, as she saw described in the women's magazines. She realized mentally that her mother must be lonely in the long hours of waiting for her return, but she, who was busy all day, could never feel emotionally how great was that loneliness, and she expected her mother to be satisfied with the future. Quite suddenly, a couple of weeks after the dance, when they were talking about the looming topic, what kind of work Una would be able to get when she should have completed school, her mother fell violently a-weeping, sobbed, Oh, Una, baby, I want to go home. I'm so lonely here. Just nobody but you in the sessions is. Can't we go back to Panama? You don't seem to really know what you're going to do. Why mother? Una loved her mother, yet she felt a grim disgust rather than pity, just when she had been working so hard and for her mother as much as for herself. She stalked over to the table, severely rearranged the magazines, slammed down a newspaper and turned angrily. Why, can't you see? I can't give up my work now. Couldn't you get something to do in Panama, dearie? You know perfectly well that I tried. But maybe now with your college course and all, even if it took a little longer to get something there, we'd be right among the folks we know. Mother, can't you understand that we have only a little over $300 now? If we moved again and everything, we wouldn't have $200 to live on. Haven't you any sense of finances? You must not talk to me that way, my daughter! A slim, fine figure of hurt dignity, Mrs. Golden left the room, lay down in the bedroom, her face away from the door, where Una stood in perplexity. Una ran to her, kissed her shoulder, begged for forgiveness. Her mother patted her cheek and sobbed, oh, it doesn't matter. In a tone so forlorn and lonely that it did matter terribly, the sadness of it tortured Una while she was realizing that her mother had lost all practical comprehension of the details of life, was become a child, trusting everything to her daughter, yet retaining a power of suffering such as no child can know. It had been easy to bring her mother here to start a career. Both of them had preconceived a life of gaiety and beauty, of charming people and pictures and concerts. But all those graces were behind a dusty wall of shorthand and typewriting. Una's struggle in coming to New York had just begun. Gently arbitrary, dearer than ever to Una in her helpless longing for kindly neighbors and the familiar places, Mrs. Golden went on hoping that she could persuade Una to go back to Panama. She never seemed to realize that their capital wasn't increasing as time passed. Sometimes impatient at her obtuseness, sometimes passionate with comprehending tenderness, Una devoted herself to her. And Mr. Schwartz and Sanford Hunt and Sam Weintraub and Todd faded. She treasured her mother's happiness at their Christmas dinner with the Sessionses. She encouraged the Sessionses to come up to the flat as often as they could, and she lulled her mother to a tolerable, calm boredom. Before it was convenient to think of men again, her schoolwork was over. The commercial college had a graduation once a month. On January 15, 1906, Una finished her course, regretfully said goodbye to Sam Weintraub and to Sanford Hunt, who had graduated in mid-December, but had come back for class commencement. And at the last moment, she hesitated so long over J.J. Todd's hints about calling some day that he was discouraged and turned away. Una glanced about the study-hall, the first place where she had ever been taken seriously as a worker, and marched off to her first battle in the War of Business. End of Chapter 3 Part 1, Chapter 4 of The Job This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The Job by Sinclair Lewis. Part 1, The City. Chapter 4 Sanford Hunt telephoned to Una that he and Mr. Julius Edward Schwertz, whom he called Eddie, had done their best to find an opening for her in the office of the Lowry Paint Company, but that there was no chance. The commercial college gave her the names of several possible employers, but they all wanted approximate perfection at approximately nothing a week. After ten days of panic-stricken waiting at the employment office of a typewriter company and answering want advertisements, the typewriter people sent her to the office of the Motor and Gas Gazette, a weekly magazine for the trade. In this atmosphere of the literature of lubricating oil and drop-forging and body enamels, as an eight-dollar-a-week copyist, Una first beheld the drama and romance of the office world. There is plenty of romance in business. Fine, large, meaningless general terms like romance and business can always be related. They take the place of thinking and are highly useful to optimists and lecturers. But in the world of business, there is a bewildered new muse of romance who is clad not in silvery tissue of dreams, but in a neat blue suit that won't grow too shiny under the sleeves. Adventure now with Una in the world of business, of offices and jobs and tired, ordinary people who know such reality of romance as your masquerading Earl, your shoddy Broadway actress, or your rosely, amorous dairy maid could never imagine. The youths of poetry and of the modern motor car fiction make a long diversion of love. While the sleazy-coated office man who surprises a look of humanness in the weary eyes of the office woman knows that he must compress all the wonder of madness into five minutes because the chief is prowling about, glancing meaningly at the little signs that declare, your time is your employer's money. Don't steal it. A world is this whose noblest vista is composed of desks and typewriters, filing cases and insurance calendars, telephones, and the bald heads of men who believe dreams to be idiotic. Here no galleon breasts the skyline. No explorer in evening clothes makes love to an heiress. Here ride no rollicking cowboys nor heroes of the great European war. It is a world whose crises you cannot comprehend unless you have learned that the difference between a 2A pencil and a 2B pencil is at least equal to the contrast between London and Tibet. Unless you understand why a normally self-controlled young woman may have a week of tragic discomfort because she is using a billing machine instead of her ordinary correspondence typewriter. The shifting of the water cooler from the front office to the packing room may be an epical event to a copyist who apparently has no human existence beyond bending over a clacking typewriter who seems to have no home, no family, no loves, in whom all pride and wonder of life and all transforming drama seem to be satisfied by the possession of a new v-necked blouse. The moving of the water cooler may mean that she must now pass the sentinel office manager that therefore she no longer dares break the incredible monotony by expeditions to get glasses of water. As a consequence, she gives up the office and marries unhappily. A vast, competent, largely useless cosmos of offices. It spends much energy in causing advertisements of beer and chewing gum and union suits and pot cleansers to spread over the whole landscape. It marches out ponderous battalions to sell a brass pin. It evokes shoes that are uncomfortable, hideous, and perishable, and touchingly hopes that all women will aid the cause of good business by wearing them. It turns noble valleys into fields for pickles. It compels men whom it has never seen to toil in distant factories and produce useless wares, which are never actually brought into the office, but which it nevertheless sells to the heathen in the Solomon Islands in exchange for commodities whose very names it does not know. And in order to perform this miracle of transmutation, it keeps stenographers so busy that they change from dewy girls into tight-lipped spinsters before they discover life. The reason for it all, nobody who is actually engaged in it can tell you, except the bosses, who believe that these sacred rites of composing dull letters and solemnly filing them away are observed in order that they may buy the large automobiles in which they do not have time to take the air. Efficiency of production they have learned. Efficiency of life they still consider an effeminate hobby. An unreasonable world sacrificing birdsong and tranquil dusk and high golden noons to selling junk, yet it rules us. And life lives there. The office is filled with thrills of love and distrust and ambition. Each alley between desks delivers with secret romance as ceaselessly as a battle trench or a lane in Normandy. Una's first view of the motor and gas gazette was of an overwhelming mass of desks and files and books and a confusing, spying crowd of strange people among whom the only safe, familiar persons were Miss Moynihan, the good-natured, solid block of girl she had known at the commercial college, and Mr. S. Herbert Ross, the advertising manager who had hired her. Mr. Ross was a poet of business, a squat, nervous little man whose hair was cut in a Dutch bang straight across his forehead and who always wore a black bow tie and semi-clerical black clothes. He had eyed Una amusedly, what was her reaction to green and crimson posters and given her a little book by himself, R. U. A. Time Clock, Mr. Mann, which in large and tremendously black type related two stories about the youth of Carnegie and strongly advocated industry, correspondent schools, and expensive advertising. When Una entered the office as a copyist, Mr. S. Herbert Ross turned her over to the office manager and thereafter ignored her. But whenever she saw him in pompous conference with editors and advertisers, she felt proudly that she knew him. The commercial college had trained her to work with a number of people as she was now to do in the office. But in the seriousness and savage continuity of its toil, the office was very different. There was no let-up. She couldn't shirk for a day or two as she had done at the commercial college. It was not so much that she was afraid of losing her job as that she came to see herself as part of a chain. The others, beyond, were waiting for her. She mustn't hold them up. That was her first impression of the office system, that and the insignificance of herself in the presence of the office hierarchy, manager above manager and the mysterious owner beyond all. She was alone. Once she transgressed, they would crush her. They had no personal interest in her, none of them except her classmate, Miss Moynihan, who smiled at her and went out to lunch with her. They, too, did not dare to sit over parcels of lunch with the curious other girls. Before fifteen-cent lunches of baked apples, greasy Napoleons and cups of coffee at a cheap restaurant, Miss Moynihan and she talked about the office manager, the editors, the strain of copying all day, and they united in lyric hatred of the lieutenant of the girls, a satiric young woman who was a wonderful hater. Una had regarded Miss Moynihan as thick and stupid, but not when she had thought of falling in love with Charlie Martindale at a dance at Panama, not in her most fervid hours of comforting her mother, had she been so closely in sympathy with any human being as she was with Miss Moynihan when they went over and over the problems of office politics, office favorites, office rules, office customs. The customs were simple. Certain hours for arrival, for lunch, for leaving. Women's retiring room embarrassingly discovered to be on the right behind the big safe, water cooler in the center of the stenographer's room. But the office prejudices, the taboos, could not be guessed. They offered you every possible chance of queering yourself. Miss Moynihan, on her very first day, discovered, perspiringly, that you must never mention the gazette's rival, the internal combustion news. The gazette's attitude was that the news did not exist, except when the gazette wanted the plate of an advertisement that the news was to forward. You mustn't you gum in the office. You were to ask favors of the lieutenant, not of the office manager. And you mustn't be friendly with Mr. Bush of the circulation department, nor with Miss Caldwell, the filing clerk. Why they were taboo, Una never knew. It was an office convention. They seemed pleasant and proper people enough. She was initiated into the science of office supplies. In the commercial college the authorities had provided stenographer's notebooks and pencils, and the representatives of typewriter companies had given lectures on cleaning and oiling typewriters, putting in new ribbons, adjusting tension wheels. But Una had not realized how many tools she had to know. Desks, filing cabinets, mimeographs, adding machines, card indexes, desk calendars, telephone extensions, adjustable desk lights, wire correspondence baskets, erasers, carbon paper, type brushes, dust rags, waste baskets. Pencils, hard and soft, black and blue and red. Pens, pen points, backing sheets, notebooks, paper clips. Pencils, hard and soft, notebooks, paper clips. Musillage, paste, stationery, the half-dozen sorts of envelopes and letterheads. Tools were these, as important in her trade as the mast head and black flag, the cutlasses and crimson sashes, the gold doubloons and damsel's fair of pirate fiction, or the cheese and cream, old horses and slumberous lanes of rustic comedy. As important, and perhaps to be deemed as romantic some day, witness the rhapsodic advertisements of filing cabinets that are built like battleships, of carbon paper that is magic inked and satin smooth. Not as priest or soldier or judge does youth seek honor today, but as a man of offices. The business subaltern, charming and gallant as the jungle gallipers of Kipling, drills, files, not of troops, but of correspondence. The artist plays the keys, not of pianos, but of typewriters. Desks, not decks. Courts of office buildings, not of palaces. These are the stuff of our latter-day drama. Not through wolf-haunted forests or purple canyons, but through tiled hallways and elevators move our heroes of today. And our heroine is important, not because she is an Amazon or a Ramona, but because she is representative of some millions of women in business. And because, in a vague but undiscouraged way, she keeps on inquiring what women in business can do to make human their existence of loveless routine. Una spent much of her time in copying, over and over, a hundred times, two hundred times, form letters soliciting advertising, letters too personal in appearance to be multi-graphed. She had lists of manufacturers of motor car accessories, of makers of lubricating oils, of distributors of ball bearings and speedometers and springs and carburetors, and compositions for waterproofing automobile tops. Sometimes she was requisitioned by the editorial department to copy and form legible for the printer, the rough items sent in by outsiders for publication in the Gazette. Una, like most people of Panama, had believed that there was nothing artistic about the office of any publication. One would see editors, wonderful men like Grand Dukes, prone to lunch with the president. But there was nothing artistic about the editorial office of the Gazette. Several young men in shirt sleeves and green celluloid eye shades, very slangy and pipe smelly, and an older man with unpressed trousers and ragged arms. Nor was there anything literary in the things that Una copied for the editorial department, just painfully handwritten accounts of the meeting of the Southeastern Iowa Auto Dealers Association, or boasts about the increased sales of road eater tires, a page originally smartly typed, but cut and marked up by the editors. Lists and letters and items over and over, sitting at her typewriter till her shoulder blades ached and she had to shut her eyes to the blur of the keys, the racket of office noises all day, the three o'clock hour when she felt that she simply could not endure the mill till five o'clock. No interest in anything she wrote. Then the blessed hour of release, the stretching of cramped legs and the blind creeping to the subway, the crush in the train, and home to comfort the mother who had been lonely all day. Such was Una's routine in these early months of 1906. After the novelty of the first week, it was all rigidly the same, except that distinct personalities began to emerge from the mass, especially the personality of Walter Babson. Out of the mist of strange faces, blurred hordes of people who swaggered up the office aisle so knowingly and grinned at her when she asked questions, individualities began to take form. Miss Moynihan, the Jewish stenographer with the laughing lips and hot eyes, the four superior older girls the still more superior girl lieutenant and the office manager who was the least superior of all the telephone girl the office boys Mr. S. Herbert Ross and his assistant, the managing editor, a motor magnate whose connection was mysterious, the owner a courteous, silent glancing man who was reported to be hard and stingy. Other people still remained unidentifiable to her but the office appeared smaller and less formidable in a month. Out of each nine square feet of floor space in the office a novel might have been made the tale of the managing editor's neurotic wife the tragedy of Chubby Hubbard, the stupid young editor who had been a college football star then an automobile racer then a failure and indeed there was a whole novel, a story told and retold in the girls gossip about each of the men before whom they were so demure but it was Walter Babson whom the girls most discussed and in whom Una found the most interest On her first day in the office she had been startled by an astounding young man who had come flying past her desk with his coat off his figured waistcoat half open his red, foreign hand tie askew under a rolling soft collar He had dashed up to the office manager and demanded Say, say, Nat Got that Coco Mobile description copied for me yet? God, you're slow. Got a cigarette? He went off huffing out cigarette smoke shaking his head and audibly muttering slow bunch, wary He seemed to be of Una's own age or perhaps a year older a slender young man with horn-rimmed eyeglasses curly black hair and a trickle of black moustache His sleeves were rolled up to his elbow and Una had a secret shamed, shivering in the contrast of the dead-white skin of his thin forearms with the long, thick, soft black hairs matted over them They seemed at once feminine and acidly male Crazy idiot she observed apparently describing herself and the nervous young man together, but she knew that she wanted to see him again She discovered that he was prone to such violent appearances, that his name was Walter Babson that he was one of the three desk editors under the managing editor, that the stenographers and office boys alternately disapproved of him because he went on sprees and borrowed money from anybody in sight and adored him because he was democratically frank with them He was at once a hero clown, prodigal son and preacher of honesty It was variously said that he was a socialist an anarchist and a believer in an American monarchy which he was reported as declaring would give some color to this flat-faced province of a country It was related that he had been fresh even to the owner and had escaped discharge only by being the quickest worker in the office the best handyman at turning motor statistics into lively news stories Una saw that he liked to stand about, bawling to the quizzical S. Herbert Ross that this is a hell of a shop to work in, rotten pay and no esprit de corps I'd quit in freelance if I could break in with fiction, but a rotten bunch of log rollers have got the inside track with book publishers Ever tried to write any fiction? Una once heard S. Herbert retort No, but lord any fool could write better stuff than they publish, it's all a freeze-out game editors just accept stuff by their friends In one week, Una heard Walter Babson make approximately the same assertions to three different men who ever in the open office might care to listen and profit thereby Then, apparently, he ceased to hear the call of literature and he snorted at S. Herbert Ross's stodgy assistant that he was a wage slave and a fool not to form a clerks union In a week or two he was literary again He dashed down to the office manager, poked a sheet Say, Nat, read that and tell me just what you think of it I'm going to put some literary flavor into the gas bag, even if it does explode it Look, see, I've taken a boost for the Kells carburetor rotten lying boost it is too and turned it into this running verse Read it like prose, pleasant and easy to digest especially beneficial to children in S. Herbert Souse I mean rapidly read an amazing lyric beginning motorists you hadn't better monkey with the carburetor all the racers all the swells have equipped their cars with Kells we are privileged to announce what will give the trade a jounce that the floats have been improved like all motorists would have loved He broke off and shouted punk last line but I'll fix it up Say, that'll get them all going, eh? Say, I bet the Kells people use it in billboard ads all over the country and maybe sign my name ads, why say it takes a literary guy to write ads not a fat headed commercialist like S. Charlie Haas Two days later Una heard Babson come out and lament that the managing editor didn't like his masterpiece and was going to use the Kells carburetor company's original write up that's what you get when you try to give the gas bag some literary flavor don't appreciate it she would rather have despised him except that he stopped by the office boys bench to pull their hair and tell them to read English dictionaries and when Miss Moynihan looked dejected Babson demanded of her What's trouble, girly? Anybody I can lick for you? Glad to fire the owner or anything I haven't met you yet but my name is Roosevelt and I'm the new janitor with a hundred other chuckling idiocies till Miss Moynihan was happy again Una warmed to his friendliness like that of a tail wagging little yellow pup and always she craved the touch of his dark blunt nervous hands whenever he lighted a cigarette she was startled by his masculine way of putting out the match and jerking it away from him in one abrupt motion she had never studied male mannerisms before to Miss Golden of Panama men had always been the boys all this time Walter Babson had never spoken to her End of chapter 4