The Job (Lewis)/The City/Chapter 3

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 seventy 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 one hundred and seventy, than in her Panama high school with its enrolment of seventy.

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 worth while 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 world-wide 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 puerilities 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 business man 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 buy pardon 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 business man 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 unvisioned grinds, who droned 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 new-fangled 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 headachily 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 fathers, 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 eye-glasses 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 some day, 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 noon-time arguments, grimly advocated profit-sharing, which Sam Weintraub debonairly 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 gawping 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 Schwirtz, one of the two city salesmen—Mr. Schwirtz having occupied a desk next to his own for two years—and that “the best paint on the market to-day 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 school-boyishness 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 home-made 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 crêpe” was attractive enough for the occasion. The crêpe was the older, but she had worn the blue satin so much that now the crêpe suddenly seemed the newer, the less soiled. After discussions with her mother, which involved much holding up of the crêpe and the tracing of imaginary diagrams with a forefinger, she decided to put a new velvet girdle and new sleeve ruffles on the crêpe, 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 houri, like Helen of Troy, like Isolde 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 dourly 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 belle 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.” Clasped 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 trumpetry which heralded the arrival of Lancelot at a château, 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 class-room. Brooklyn Jews used to side-street dance-halls, Bronx girls who went to the bartenders’ ball, and the dinner and grand ball of the Clamchowder 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 fantastic 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 wall-flower, in a row with the anxious Miss Ingalls and the elderly frump, Miss Fisle. 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 hadn’t really wanted to dance with her, and she wilfully 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 and 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 ’em. I’m out of it. I’ll stick to my work. Oh, drat it!”

Blindly, in a daily growing faith in her commercial future, she shut out the awkward gaieties 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 a sexless energy.

Only Una was not sexless. Though she hadn’t the dancing-girl’s oblivious delight in pleasure, though her energetic common sense and willingness to serve had turned into a durable plodding, 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, when he had brought her a bar of milk-chocolate.

“Oh, I dun’no’; you’re so darn honest, and you got so much more sense than this bunch of Bronx totties. Gee! they’ll make bum stenogs. 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 eleventy times a day, and they’ll marry the shipping-clerk first time 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 Weintraub 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 Lowry 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 Schwirtz, the Manhattan salesman of the company.

When Mr. Schwirtz 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 Schwirtz 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 every one, 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 Schwirtz, the paint salesman.

Mr. Schwirtz was forty or forty-one, a red-faced, clipped-mustached, derby-hatted average citizen. He was ungrammatical and jocose; 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 girly here. Eh? Wish I had some children like them myself.”

He wasn’t vastly different from Henry Carson, this Mr. Schwirtz, 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 Schwirtz still more of the feeling of how actual business men 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 Goldens had owned no property in Panama, Pennsylvania; they had rented their house. Captain Lew 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 to 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-sacques.

The Goldens had three rooms and bath. A small linoleous 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 and the Sessionses. Can’t we go back to Panama? You don’t seem to really know what you are 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 three hundred dollars now? If we moved again and everything, we wouldn’t have two hundred dollars 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. Schwirtz 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 school-work was over.

The commercial college had a graduation once a month. On January 15, 1906, Una finished her course, regretfully said good-by 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.