The Job (Lewis)/The Office/Chapter 12

THAT same oasis of a week gave to Una her first taste of business responsibility, of being in charge and generally comporting herself as do males. But in order to rouse her thus, Chance broke the inoffensive limb of unfortunate Mr. Troy Wilkins as he was stepping from his small bronchial motor-car to an icy cement block, on seven o’clock of Friday evening.

When Una arrived at the office on Saturday morning she received a telephone message from Mr. Wilkins, directing her to take charge of the office, of Bessie Kraker, and the office-boy, and the negotiations with the Comfy Coast Building and Development Company regarding the planning of three rows of semi-detached villas.

For three weeks the office was as different from the treadmill that it familiarly had been, as the Home Club and Lawrence’s controversial room were different from the Grays’ flat. She was glad to work late, to arrive not at eight-thirty, but at a quarter to eight, to gallop down to a cafeteria for coffee and a sandwich at noon, to be patient with callers, and to try to develop some knowledge of spelling in that child of nature, Bessie Kraker. She walked about the office quickly, glancing proudly at its neatness. Daily, with an operator’s headgear, borrowed from the telephone company, over her head, she spent half an hour talking with Mr. Wilkins, taking his dictation, receiving his cautions and suggestions, reassuring him that in his absence the Subway ran and Tammany still ruled. After an agitated conference with the vice-president of the Comfy Coast Company, during which she was eloquent as an automobile advertisement regarding Mr. Wilkins’s former masterpieces with their “every modern improvement, parquet floors, beam ceilings, plate-rack, hardwood trim throughout, natty and novel decorations,” Una reached the zenith of salesman’s virtues—she “closed the deal.”

Mr. Wilkins came back and hemmed and hawed a good deal; he praised the work she hadn’t considered well done, and pointed out faults in what she considered particularly clever achievements, and was laudatory but dissatisfying in general. In a few days he, in turn, reached the zenith of virtue on the part of boss—he raised her salary. To fifteen dollars a week. She was again merely his secretary, however, and the office trudged through another normal period when all past drama seemed incredible and all the future drab.

But Una was certain now that she could manage business, could wheedle Bessies and face pompous vice-presidents and satisfy querulous Mr. Wilkinses. She looked forward; she picked at architecture as portrayed in Mr. Wilkins’s big books; she learned the reason and manner of the rows of semi-detached, semi-suburban, semi-comfortable, semi-cheap, and somewhat less than semi-attractive houses.

She was not afraid of the office world now; she had a part in the city and a home.

She thought of Walter Babson. Sometimes, when Mrs. Lawrence was petulant or the office had been unusually exhausting, she fancied that she missed him. But instead of sitting and brooding over folded hands, in woman’s ancient fashion, she took a man’s unfair advantage—she went up to the gymnasium of the Home Club and worked with the chest-weights and flying-rings—a solemn, happy, busy little figure. She laughed more deeply, and she felt the enormous rhythm of the city, not as a menacing roar, but as a hymn of triumph.

She could never be intimate with Mamie Magen as she was with the frankly disillusioned Mrs. Lawrence; she never knew whether Miss Magen really liked her or not; her smile, which transfigured her sallow face, was equally bright for Una, for Mrs. Fike, and for beggars. Yet it was Miss Magen whose faith in the purpose of the struggling world inspired Una. Una walked with her up Madison Avenue, past huge old brownstone mansions, and she was unconscious of suiting her own quick step to Miss Magen’s jerky lameness as the Jewess talked of her ideals of a business world which should have generosity and chivalry and the accuracy of a biological laboratory; in which there would be no need of charity to employee.... Or to employer.

Mamie Magen was the most highly evolved person Una had ever known. Una had, from books and newspapers and Walter Babson, learned that there were such things as socialists and earnest pessimists, and the race sketchily called “Bohemians”—writers and artists and social workers, who drank claret and made love and talked about the free theater, all on behalf of the brotherhood of man. Una pictured the socialists as always attacking capitalists; the pessimists as always being bitter and egotistic; Bohemians as always being dissipated, but as handsome and noisy and gay.

But Mamie Magen was a socialist who believed that the capitalists with their profit-sharing and search for improved methods of production were as sincere in desiring the scientific era as were the most burning socialists; who loved and understood the most oratorical of the young socialists with their hair in their eyes, but also loved and understood the clean little college boys who came into business with a desire to make it not a war, but a crusade. She was a socialist who was determined to control and glorify business; a pessimist who was, in her gentle reticent way, as scornful of half-churches, half-governments, half-educations, as the cynical Mrs. Lawrence. Finally, she who was not handsome or dissipated or gay, but sallow and lame and Spartan, knew “Bohemia” better than most of the professional Hobohemians. As an East Side child she had grown up in the classes and parties of the University Settlement; she had been held upon the then juvenile knees of half the distinguished writers and fighters for reform, who had begun their careers as settlement workers; she, who was still unknown, a clerk and a nobody, and who wasn’t always syntactical, was accustomed to people whose names had been made large and sonorous by newspaper publicity; and at the age when ambitious lady artists and derailed Walter Babsons came to New York and determinedly seized on Bohemia, Mamie Magen had outgrown Bohemia and become a worker.

To Una she explained the city, made it comprehensible, made art and economics and philosophy human and tangible. Una could not always follow her, but from her she caught the knowledge that the world and all its wisdom is but a booby, blundering school-boy that needs management and could be managed, if men and women would be human beings instead of just business men, or plumbers, or army officers, or commuters, or educators, or authors, or clubwomen, or traveling salesmen, or Socialists, or Republicans, or Salvation Army leaders, or wearers of clothes. She preached to Una a personal kinghood, an education in brotherhood and responsible nobility, which took in Una’s job as much as it did government ownership or reading poetry.

Not always was Una breathlessly trying to fly after the lame but broad-winged Mamie Magen. She attended High Mass at the Spanish church on Washington Heights with Mrs. Lawrence; felt the beauty of the ceremony; admired the simple, classic church; adored the padre; and for about one day planned to scorn Panama Methodism and become a Catholic, after which day she forgot about Methodism and Catholicism. She also accompanied Mrs. Lawrence to a ceremony much less impressive and much less easily forgotten—to a meeting with a man.

Mrs. Lawrence never talked about her husband, but in this reticence she was not joined by Rose Dawn or Jennie Cassavant. Jennie maintained that the misfitted Mr. Lawrence was alive, very much so; that Esther and he weren’t even divorced, but merely separated. The only sanction Mrs. Lawrence ever gave to this report was to blurt out one night: “Keep up your belief in the mysticism of love and all that kind of sentimental sex stuff as long as you can. You’ll lose it some day fast enough. Me, I know that a woman needs a man just the same as a man needs a woman—and just as darned unpoetically. Being brought up a Puritan, I never can quite get over the feeling that I oughtn’t to have anything to do with men—me as I am—but believe me it isn’t any romantic ideal. I sure want ’em.”

Mrs. Lawrence continually went to dinners and theaters with men; she told Una all the details, as women do, from the first highly proper handshake down in the pure-minded hall of the Home Club at eight, to the less proper good-night kiss on the dark door-step of the Home Club at midnight. But she was careful to make clear that one kiss was all she ever allowed, though she grew dithyrambic over the charming, lonely men with whom she played—a young doctor whose wife was in a madhouse; a clever, restrained, unhappy old broker.

Once she broke out: “Hang it! I want love, and that’s all there is to it—that’s crudely all there ever is to it with any woman, no matter how much she pretends to be satisfied with mourning the dead or caring for children, or swatting a job or being religious or anything else. I’m a low-brow; I can’t give you the economics of it and the spiritual brotherhood and all that stuff, like Mamie Magen. But I know women want a man and love—all of it.”

Next evening she took Una to dinner at a German restaurant, as chaperon to herself and a quiet, insistent, staring, good-looking man of forty. While Mrs. Lawrence and the man talked about the opera, their eyes seemed to be defying each other. Una felt that she was not wanted. When the man spoke hesitatingly of a cabaret, Una made excuse to go home.

Mrs. Lawrence did not return till two. She moved about the room quietly, but Una awoke.

“I’m glad I went with him,” Mrs. Lawrence said, angrily, as though she were defending herself.

Una asked no questions, but her good little heart was afraid. Though she retained her joy in Mrs. Lawrence’s willingness to take her and her job seriously, Una was dismayed by Mrs. Lawrence’s fiercely uneasy interest in men.... She resented the insinuation that the sharp, unexpected longing to feel Walter’s arms about her might be only a crude physical need for a man, instead of a mystic fidelity to her lost love.

Being a lame marcher, a mind which was admittedly “shocked at each discovery of the aliveness of theory,” Una’s observation of the stalking specter of sex did not lead her to make any very lucid conclusions about the matter. But she did wonder a little if this whole business of marriages and marriage ceremonies and legal bonds which any clerkly pastor can gild with religiosity was so sacred as she had been informed in Panama. She wondered a little if Mrs. Lawrence’s obvious requirement of man’s companionship ought to be turned into a sneaking theft of love. Una Golden was not a philosopher; she was a workaday woman. But into her workaday mind came a low light from the fire which was kindling the world; the dual belief that life is too sacred to be taken in war and filthy industries and dull education; and that most forms and organizations and inherited castes are not sacred at all.

The aspirations of Mamie Magen and the alarming frankness of Mrs. Lawrence were not all her life at the Home Club. With pretty Rose Larsen and half a dozen others she played. They went in fluttering, beribboned parties to the theater; they saw visions at symphony concerts, and slipped into exhibits of contemporary artists at private galleries on Fifth Avenue. When spring came they had walking parties in Central Park, in Van Cortlandt Park, on the Palisades, across Staten Island, and picnicked by themselves or with neat, trim-minded, polite men clerks from the various offices and stores where the girls worked. They had a perpetual joy in annoying Mrs. Fike by parties on fire-escapes, by lobster Newburgh suppers at midnight. They were discursively excited for a week when Rose Larsen was followed from the surface-car to the door by an unknown man; and they were unhappily excited when, without explanations, slim, daring Jennie Cassavant was suddenly asked to leave the Home Club; and they had a rose-lighted dinner when Livy Hedger announced her engagement to a Newark lawyer.

Various were the Home Club women in training and work and ways; they were awkward stenographers and dependable secretaries; fashion artists and department-store clerks; telephone girls and clever college-bred persons who actually read manuscripts and proof, and wrote captions or household-department squibs for women’s magazines—real editors, or at least real assistant editors; persons who knew authors and illustrators, as did the great Magen. They were attendants in dentists’ offices and teachers in night-schools and filing-girls and manicurists and cashiers and blue-linen-gowned super-waitresses in artistic tea-rooms. And cliques, caste, they did have. Yet their comradeship was very sweet, quite real; the factional lines were not drawn according to salary or education or family, but according to gaiety or sobriety or propriety.

Una was finding not only her lost boarding-school days, but her second youth—perhaps her first real youth.

Though the questions inspired by the exceptional Miss Magen and the defiant Mrs. Lawrence kept her restless, her association with the play-girls, her growing acquaintanceship with women who were easy-minded, who had friends and relatives and a place in the city, who did not agonize about their jobs or their loves, who received young men casually and looked forward to marriage and a comfortable flat in Harlem, made Una feel the city as her own proper dwelling. Now she no longer plodded along the streets wonderingly, a detached little stranger; she walked briskly and contentedly, heedless of crowds, returning to her own home in her own city. Most workers of the city remain strangers to it always. But chance had made Una an insider.

It was another chapter in the making of a business woman, that spring of happiness and new stirrings in the Home Club; it was another term in the unplanned, uninstructed, muddling, chance-governed college which civilization unwittingly keeps for the training of men and women who will carry on the work of the world.

It passed swiftly, and July and vacation-time came to Una.