The Job (Lewis)/The City/Chapter 7

THESE children of the city, where there is no place for love-making, for discovering and testing each other’s hidden beings, ran off together in the scanted parties of the ambitious poor. Walter was extravagant financially as he was mentally, but he had many debts, some conscience, and a smallness of salary. She was pleased by the smallest diversions, however, and found luxury in a bowl of chop-suey. He took her to an Italian restaurant and pointed out supposititious artists. They had gallery seats for a Maude Adams play, at which she cried and laughed whole-heartedly and held his hand all through. Her first real tea was with him—in Panama one spoke of “ladies’ afternoon tea,” not of “tea.” She was awed by his new walking-stick and the new knowledge of cinnamon toast which he displayed for her. She admired, too, the bored way he swung his stick as they sauntered into and out of the lobbies of the great hotels.

The first flowers from a real florist’s which she had ever received, except for a bunch of carnations from Henry Carson at Panama high-school commencement, came from Walter—long-stemmed roses in damp paper and a florist’s box, with Walter’s card inside.

And perhaps the first time that she had ever really seen spring, felt the intense light of sky and cloud and fresh greenery as her own, was on a Sunday just before the fragrant first of June, when Walter and she slipped away from her mother and walked in Central Park, shabby but unconscious.

She explored with him, too; felt adventurous in quite respectable Japanese and Greek and Syrian restaurants.

But her mother waited for her at home, and the job, the office, the desk, demanded all her energy.

Had they seen each other less frequently, perhaps Walter would have let dreams serve for real kisses, and have been satisfied. But he saw her a hundred times a day—and yet their love progressed so little. The propinquity of the office tantalized them. And Mrs. Golden kept them apart.

The woman who had aspired and been idle while Captain Golden had toiled for her, who had mourned and been idle while Una had planned for her, and who had always been a compound of selfishness and love, was more and more accustomed to taking her daughter’s youth to feed her comfort and her canary—a bird of atrophied voice and uncleanly habit.

If this were the history of the people who wait at home, instead of the history of the warriors, rich credit would be given to Mrs. Golden for enduring the long, lonely days, listening for Una’s step. A proud, patient woman with nothing to do all day but pick at a little housework, and read her eyes out, and wish that she could run in and be neighborly with the indifferent urbanites who formed about her a wall of ice. Yet so confused are human purposes that this good woman who adored her daughter also sapped her daughter’s vigor. As the office loomed behind all of Una’s desires, so behind the office, in turn, was ever the shadowy thought of the appealing figure there at home; and toward her mother Una was very compassionate.

Yes, and so was her mother!

Mrs. Golden liked to sit soft and read stories of young love. Partly by nature and partly because she had learned that thus she could best obtain her wishes, she was gentle as a well-filled cat and delicate as a tulle scarf. She was admiringly adhesive to Una as she had been to Captain Golden, and she managed the new master of the house just as she had managed the former one. She listened to dictates pleasantly, was perfectly charmed at suggestions that she do anything, and then gracefully forgot.

Mrs. Golden was a mistress of graceful forgetting. Almost never did she remember to do anything she didn’t want to do. She did not lie about it; she really and quite beautifully did forget.

Una, hurrying off to the office every morning, agonized with the effort to be on time, always had to stop and prepare a written list of the things her mother was to do. Otherwise, bespelled by the magazine stories which she kept forgetting and innocently rereading, Mrs. Golden would forget the marketing, forget to put the potatoes on to boil, forget to scrub the bathroom.... And she often contrived to lose the written list, and searched for it, with trembling lips but no vast persistence.

Una, bringing home the palsying weariness of the day’s drudgery, would find a cheery welcome—and the work not done; no vegetables for dinner, no fresh boric-acid solution prepared for washing her stinging eyes.

Nor could Una herself get the work immediately out of the way, because her mother was sure to be lonely, to need comforting before Una could devote herself to anything else or even wash away the sticky office grime.... Mrs. Golden would have been shocked into a stroke could she have known that while Una was greeting her, she was muttering within herself, “I do wish I could brush my teeth first!”

If Una was distraught, desirous of disappearing in order to get hold of herself, Mrs. Golden would sigh, “Dear, have I done something to make you angry?” In any case, whether Una was silent or vexed with her, the mother would manage to be hurt but brave; sweetly distressed, but never quite tearful. And Una would have to kiss her, pat her hair, before she could escape and begin to get dinner (with her mother helping, always ready to do anything that Una’s doggedly tired mind might suggest, but never suggesting novelties herself).

After dinner, Mrs. Golden was always ready to do whatever Una wished—to play cribbage, or read aloud, or go for a walk—not a long walk; she was so delicate, you know, but a nice little walk with her dear, dear daughter.... For such amusements she was ready to give up all her own favorite evening diversions—namely, playing solitaire, and reading and taking nice little walks.... But she did not like to have Una go out and leave her, nor have naughty, naughty men like Walter take Una to the theater, as though they wanted to steal the dear daughter away. And she wore Una’s few good frocks, and forgot to freshen them in time for Una to wear them. Otherwise, Mrs. Golden had the unselfishness of a saint on a marble pillar.

Una, it is true, sometimes voiced her irritation over her mother’s forgetfulness and her subsequent pathos, but for that bitterness she always blamed herself, with horror remembered each cutting word she had said to the Little Mother Saint (as, in still hours when they sat clasped like lovers, she tremblingly called her).

Mrs. Golden’s demand of Una for herself had never been obvious till it clashed with Walter’s demand.

Una and Walter talked it over, but they seemed mutely to agree, after the evening of Mrs. Golden and conversation, that it was merely balking for him to call at the flat. Nor did Una and Mrs. Golden discuss why Mr. Babson did not come again, or whether Una was seeing him. Una was accustomed to say only that she would be “away this evening,” but over the teapot she quoted Walter’s opinions on Omar, agnosticism, motor magazines, pipe-smoking, Staten Island, and the Himalayas, and it was evident that she was often with him.

Mrs. Golden’s method of opposition was very simple. Whenever Una announced that she was going out, her mother’s bright, birdlike eyes filmed over; she sighed and hesitated, “Shall I be alone all evening—after all day, too?” Una felt like a brute. She tried to get her mother to go to the Sessionses’ flat more often, to make new friends, but Mrs. Golden had lost all her adaptability. She clung to Una and to her old furniture as the only recognizable parts of her world. Often Una felt forced to refuse Walter’s invitations; always she refused to walk with him on the long, splendid Saturday afternoons of freedom. Nor would she let him come and sit on the roof with her, lest her mother see them in the hall and be hurt.

So it came to pass that only in public did she meet Walter. He showed his resentment by inviting her out less and less, by telling her less and less frankly his ambitions and his daily dabs at becoming a great man. Apparently he was rather interested in a flour-faced actress at his boarding-house.

Never, now, did he speak of marriage. The one time when he had spoken of it, Una had been so sure of their happiness that she had thought no more of that formality than had his reckless self. But now she yearned to have him “propose,” in the most stupid, conventional, pink-romance fashion. “Why can’t we be married?” she fancied herself saying to him, but she never dared say it aloud.

Often he was abstracted when he was with her, in the office or out. Always he was kindly, but the kindliness seemed artificial. She could not read his thoughts, now that she had no hand-clasp to guide her.

On a hot, quivering afternoon of early July, Walter came to her desk at closing-hour and said, abruptly: “Look. You’ve simply got to come out with me this evening. We’ll dine at a little place at the foot of the Palisades. I can’t stand seeing you so little. I won’t ask you again! You aren’t fair.”

“Oh, I don’t mean to be unfair—”

“Will you come? Will you?”

His voice glared. Regardless of the office folk about them, he put his hand over hers. She was sure that Miss Moynihan was bulkily watching them. She dared not take time to think.

“Yes,” she said, “I will go.”

It was a beer-garden frequented by yachtless German yachtsmen in shirt-sleeves, boating-caps, and mustaches like muffs, but to Una it was Europe and the banks of the Rhine, that restaurant below the Palisades where she dined with Walter.

A placid hour it was, as dusk grew deeper and more fragrant, and they leaned over the terrace rail to meditate on the lights springing out like laughing jests incarnate—reflected lights of steamers paddling with singing excursionists up the Hudson to the storied hills of Rip Van Winkle; imperial sweeps of fire that outlined the mighty city across the river.

Walter was at peace. He spared her his swart intensity; he shyly quoted Tennyson, and bounced with cynicisms about “Sherbert Souse” and “the Gas-bag.” He brought happiness to her, instead of the agitation of his kisses.

She was not an office machine now, but one with the village lovers of poetry, as her job-exhaustion found relief in the magic of the hour, in the ancient music of the river, in breezes which brought old tales down from the Catskills.

She would have been content to sit there for hours, listening to the twilight, absently pleating the coarse table-cloth, trying to sip the saline claret which he insisted on their drinking. She wanted nothing more.... And she had so manœuvered their chairs that the left side of her face, the better side, was toward him!

But Walter grew restless. He stared at the German yachtsmen, at their children who ate lumps of sugar dipped in claret, and their wives who drank beer. He commented needlessly on a cat which prowled along the terrace rail. He touched Una’s foot with his, and suddenly condemned himself for not having been able to bring her to a better restaurant. He volubly pointed out that their roast chicken had been petrified—“vile restaurant, very vile food.”

“Why, I love it here!” she protested. “I’m perfectly happy to be just like this.”

As she turned to him with a smile that told all her tenderness, she noted how his eyes kept stealing from the riverside to her, and back again, how his hands trembled as he clapped two thick glass salt-shakers together. A current of uneasiness darted between them.

He sprang up. “Oh, I can’t sit still!” he said. “Come on. Let’s walk down along the river.”

“Oh, can’t we just sit here and be quiet?” she pleaded, but he rubbed his chin and shook his head and sputtered: “Oh, rats, you can’t see the river, now that they’ve turned on the electric lights here. Come on. Besides, it’ll be cooler right by the river.”

She felt a menace; the darkness beyond them was no longer dreaming, but terror-filled. She wanted to refuse, but he was so fretfully demanding that she could only obey him.

Up on the crest of the Palisades is an “amusement park,” and suburbs and crowded paths; and across the river is New York, in a solid mass of apartment-houses; but between Palisades and river, at the foot of the cliffs, is an unfrequented path which still keeps some of the wildness it had when it was a war-path of the Indians. It climbs ridges, twists among rocks, dips into damp hollows, widens out into tiny bowling-greens for Hendrik Hudson’s fairy men. By night it is ghostly, and beside it the river whispers strange tragedies.

Along this path the city children crept, unspeaking, save when his two hands, clasping her waist to guide her down a rocky descent, were clamorous.

Where a bare sand jetty ran from the path out into the river’s broad current, Walter stopped and whispered, “I wish we could go swimming.”

“I wish we could—it’s quite warm,” she said, prosaically.

But river and dark woods and breeze overhead seemed to whisper to her—whisper, whisper, all the shrouded night aquiver with low, eager whispers. She shivered to find herself imagining the unimaginable—that she might throw off her stodgy office clothes, her dull cloth skirt and neat blouse, and go swimming beside him, revel in giving herself up to the utter frankness of cool water laving her bare flesh.

She closed her mind. She did not condemn herself for wanting to bathe as Mother Eve had bathed, naked and unafraid. She did not condemn herself—but neither did she excuse. She was simply afraid. She dared not try to make new standards; she took refuge in the old standards of the good little Una. Though all about her called the enticing voices of night and the river, yet she listened for the tried counsel voices of the plain Panama streets and the busy office.

While she struggled, Walter stood with his arm fitted about her shoulder, letting the pregnant silence speak, till again he insisted: “Why couldn’t we go swimming?” Then, with all the cruelly urgent lovers of the days of hungry poetry: “We’re going to let youth go by and never dare to be mad. Time will get us—we’ll be old—it will be too late to enjoy being mad.” His lyric cry dropped to a small-boy excuse: “Besides, it wouldn’t hurt.... Come on. Think of plunging in.”

“No, no, no, no!” she cried, and ran from him up the jetty, back to the path.... She was not afraid of him, because she was so much more afraid of herself.

He followed sullenly as the path led them farther and farther. She stopped on a rise, and found herself able to say, calmly, “Don’t you think we’d better go back now?”

“Maybe we ought to. But sit down here.”

He hunched up his knees, rested his elbows on them, and said, abstractedly, apparently talking to himself as much as to her:

“I’m sorry I’ve been so grouchy coming down the path. But I don’t apologize for wanting us to go swimming. Civilization, the world’s office-manager, tells us to work like fiends all day and be lonely and respectable all evening, and not even marry till we’re thirty, because we can’t afford to! That’s all right for them as likes to become nice varnished desks, but not for me! I’m going to hunger and thirst and satisfy my appetites—even if it makes me selfish as the devil. I’d rather be that than be a bran-stuffed automaton that’s never human enough to hunger. But of course you’re naturally a Puritan and always will be one, no matter what you do. You’re a good sort— I’d trust you to the limit—you’re sincere and you want to grow. But me—my Wanderjahr isn’t over yet. Maybe some time we’ll again— I admire you, but—if I weren’t a little mad I’d go literally mad.... Mad—mad!”

He suddenly undid the first button of her blouse and kissed her neck harshly, while she watched him, in a maze. He abruptly fastened the button again, sprang up, stared out at the wraith-filled darkness over the river, while his voice droned on, as though it were a third person speaking:

“I suppose there’s a million cases a year in New York of crazy young chaps making violent love to decent girls and withdrawing because they have some hidden decency themselves. I’m ashamed that I’m one of them—me, I’m as bad as a nice little Y. M. C. A. boy—I bow to conventions, too. Lordy! the fact that I’m so old-fashioned as even to talk about ‘conventions’ in this age of Shaw and d’Annunzio shows that I’m still a small-town, district-school radical! I’m really as mid-Victorian as you are, in knowledge. Only I’m modern by instinct, and the combination will always keep me half-baked, I suppose. I don’t know what I want from life, and if I did I wouldn’t know how to get it. I’m a Middle Western farmer, and yet I regard myself about half the time as an Oxford man with a training in Paris. You’re lucky, girl. You have a definite ambition—either to be married and have babies or to boss an office. Whatever I did, I’d spoil you—at least I would till I found myself—found out what I wanted.... Lord! how I hope I do find myself some day!”

“Poor boy!” she suddenly interrupted; “it’s all right. Come, we’ll go home and try to be good.”

“Wonderful! There speaks the American woman, perfectly. You think I’m just chattering. You can’t understand that I was never so desperately in earnest in my life. Well, to come down to cases. Specification A—I couldn’t marry you, because we haven’t either of us got any money—aside from my not having found myself yet. Ditto B—We can’t play, just because you are a Puritan and I’m a typical intellectual climber. Same C—I’ve actually been offered a decent job in the advertising department of a motor-car company in Omaha, and now I think I’ll take it.”

And that was all that he really had to say, just that last sentence, though for more than an hour they discussed themselves and their uncharted world, Walter trying to be honest, yet to leave with her a better impression of himself; Una trying to keep him with her. It was hard for her to understand that Walter really meant all he said.

But, like him, she was frank.

There are times in any perplexed love when the lovers revel in bringing out just those problems and demands and complaints which they have most carefully concealed. At such a time of mutual confession, if the lovers are honest and tender, there is none of the abrasive hostility of a vulgar quarrel. But the kindliness of the review need not imply that it is profitable; often it ends, as it began, with the wail, “What can we do?” But so much alike are all the tribe of lovers, that the debaters never fail to stop now and then to congratulate themselves on being so frank!

Thus Una and Walter, after a careful survey of the facts that he was too restless, that she was too Panamanian and too much mothered, after much argument as to what he had meant when he had said this, and what she had thought he meant when he had said that, and whether he could ever have been so inconsiderate as to have said the other, and frequent admiration of themselves for their open-mindedness, the questing lovers were of the same purpose as at the beginning of their inquiry. He still felt the urge to take up his pilgrimage again, to let the “decent job” and Omaha carry him another stage in his search for the shrouded gods of his nebulous faith. And she still begged for a chance to love, to be needed; still declared that he was merely running away from himself.

They had quite talked themselves out before he sighed: “I don’t dare to look and see what time it is. Come, we’ll have to go.”

They swung arms together shyly as they stumbled back over the path. She couldn’t believe that he really would go off to the West, of which she was so ignorant. But she felt as though she were staggering into a darkness blinder and ever more blind.

When she got home she found her mother awake, very angry over Una’s staying out till after midnight, and very wordy about the fact that “that nice, clean young man,” Mr. J. J. Todd, of Chatham and of the commercial college, had come to call that evening. Una made little answer to her. Through her still and sacred agony she could scarce hear her mother’s petulant whining.

Next morning at the office, Walter abruptly asked her to come out into the hall, told her that he was leaving without notice that afternoon. He could never bear to delay, once he had started out on the “Long Trail,” he said, not looking at her. He hastily kissed her, and darted back into the office. She did not see him again till, at five-thirty, he gave noisy farewell to all the adoring stenographers and office-boys, and ironical congratulations to his disapproving chiefs. He stopped at her desk, hesitated noticeably, then said, “Good-by, Goldie,” and passed on. She stared, hypnotized, as, for the last time, Walter went bouncing out of the office.

A week later J. J. Todd called on her again. He was touching in his description of his faithful labor for the Charity Organization Society. But she felt dead; she could not get herself to show approval. It was his last call.

Walter wrote to her on the train—a jumbled rhapsody on missing her honest companionship. Then a lively description of his new chief at Omaha. A lonely letter on a barren evening, saying that there was nothing to say. A note about a new project of going to Alaska. She did not hear from him again.

For weeks she missed him so tragically that she found herself muttering over and over, “Now I sha’n’t ever have a baby that would be a little image of him.”

When she thought of the shy games and silly love-words she had lavished, she was ashamed, and wondered if they had made her seem a fool to him.

But presently in the week’s unchanging routine she found an untroubled peace; and in mastering her work she had more comfort than ever in his clamorous summons.

At home she tried not merely to keep her mother from being lonely, but actually to make her happy, to coax her to break into the formidable city. She arranged summer-evening picnics with the Sessionses.

She persuaded them to hold one of these picnics at the foot of the Palisades. During it she disappeared for nearly half an hour. She sat alone by the river. Suddenly, with a feverish wrench, she bared her breast, then shook her head angrily, rearranged her blouse, went back to the group, and was unusually gay, though all the while she kept her left hand on her breast, as though it pained her.

She had been with the Gazette for only a little over six months, and she was granted only a week’s vacation. This she spent with her mother at Panama. In parties with old neighbors she found sweetness, and on a motor-trip with Henry Carson and his fiancée, a young widow, she let the fleeting sun-flecked land absorb her soul.

At the office Una was transferred to S. Herbert Ross’s department, upon Walter’s leaving. She sometimes took S. Herbert’s majestic, flowing dictation. She tried not merely to obey his instructions, but also to discover his unvoiced wishes. Her wage was raised from eight dollars a week to ten. She again determined to be a real business woman. She read a small manual on advertising.

But no one in the Gazette office believed that a woman could bear responsibilities, not even S. Herbert Ross, with his aphorisms for stenographers, his prose poems about the ecstatic joy of running a typewriter nine hours a day, which appeared in large, juicy-looking type in business magazines.

She became bored, mechanical, somewhat hopeless. She planned to find a better job and resign. In which frame of mind she was rather contemptuous of the Gazette office; and it was an unforgettable shock suddenly to be discharged.

Ross called her in, on a winter afternoon, told her that he had orders from the owner to “reduce the force,” because of a “change of policy,” and that, though he was sorry, he would have to “let her go because she was one of the most recent additions.” He assured her royally that he had been pleased by her work; that he would be glad to give her “the best kind of a recommend—and if the situation loosens up again, I’d be tickled to death to have you drop in and see me. Just between us, I think the owner will regret this tight-wad policy.”

But Mr. S. Herbert Ross continued to go out to lunch with the owner, and Una went through all the agony of not being wanted even in the prison she hated. No matter what the reason, being discharged is the final insult in an office, and it made her timid as she began wildly to seek a new job.