SO, toward the end of 1912, when she was thirty-one years old, Mrs. Una Golden Schwirtz began her business career, as confidential secretary to Mr. Truax, of Truax & Fein.
Her old enemy, routine, was constantly in the field. Routine of taking dictation, of getting out the letters, prompting Mr. Truax’s memory as to who Mrs. A was, and what Mr. B had telephoned, keeping plats and plans and memoes in order, making out cards regarding the negotiations with possible sellers of suburban estates. She did not, as she had hoped, always find this routine one jolly round of surprises. She was often weary, sometimes bored.
But in the splendor of being independent again and of having something to do that seemed worth while she was able to get through the details that never changed from day to day. And she was rewarded, for the whole job was made fascinating by human contact. She found herself enthusiastic about most of the people she met at Truax & Fein’s; she was glad to talk with them, to work with them, to be taken seriously as a brain, a loyalty, a woman.
By contrast with two years of hours either empty or filled with Schwirtz, the office-world was of the loftiest dignity. It may have been that some of the men she met were Schwirtzes to their wives, but to her they had to be fellow-workers. She did not believe that the long hours,the jealousies, the worry, or Mr. Truax’s belief that he was several planes above ordinary humanity, were desirable or necessary parts of the life at Truax & Fein’s. Here, too, she saw nine hours of daily strain aging slim girls into skinny females. But now her whole point of view was changed. Instead of looking for the evils of the business world, she was desirous of seeing in it all the blessings she could; and, without ever losing her belief that it could be made more friendly, she was, nevertheless, able to rise above her own personal weariness and see that the world of jobs, offices, business, had made itself creditably superior to those other muddled worlds of politics and amusement and amorous Schwirtzes. She believed again, as in commercial college she had callowly believed, that business was beginning to see itself as communal, world-ruling, and beginning to be inspired to communal, kingly virtues and responsibility.
Looking for the good (sometimes, in her joy of escape, looking for it almost with the joy of an S. Herbert Ross in picking little lucrative flowers of sentiment along the roadside) she was able to behold more daily happiness about her.
Fortunately, Truax & Fein’s was a good office, not too hard, not too strained and factional like Pemberton’s; not wavering like Troy Wilkins’s. Despite Mr. Truax’s tendency to courteous whining, it was doing its work squarely and quietly. That was fortunate. Offices differ as much as office-managers, and had chance condemned Una to another nerve-twanging Pemberton’s her slight strength might have broken. She might have fallen back to Schwirtz and the gutter.
Peaceful as reapers singing on their homeward path now seemed the teasing voices of men and girls as, in a group, they waited for the elevator at five-thirty-five. The cheerful, “Good-night, Mrs. Schwirtz!” was a vesperbenediction, altogether sweet with its earnest of rest and friendship.
Tranquillity she found when she stayed late in the deserted office. Here no Schwirtz could reach her. Here her toil counted for something in the world’s work—in the making of suburban homes for men and women and children. She sighed, and her breast felt barren, as she thought of the children. But tranquillity there was, and a brilliant beauty of the city as across dark spaces of evening were strung the jewels of light, as in small, French restaurants sounded desirous violins. On warm evenings of autumn Una would lean out of the window and be absorbed in the afterglow above the North River: smoke-clouds from Jersey factories drifting across the long, carmine stain, air sweet and cool, and the yellow-lighted windows of other skyscrapers giving distant companionship. She fancied sometimes that she was watching the afterglow over a far northern lake, among the pines; and with a sigh more of content than of restlessness she turned back to her work.... Time ceased to exist when she worked alone. Of time and of the office she was manager. What if she didn’t go out to dinner till eight? She could dine whenever she wanted to. If a clumsy man called Eddie Schwirtz got hungry he could get his own dinner. What if she did work slowly? There were no telephone messages, no Mr. Truax to annoy her. She could be leisurely and do the work as it should be done.... She was no longer afraid of the rustling silence about her, as Una Golden had been at Troy Wilkins’s. She was a woman now, and trained to fill the blank spaces of the deserted office with her own colored thoughts.
Hours of bustling life in the daytime office had their human joys as well. Una went out of her way to be friendly with the ordinary stenographers, and, as there was novast Pembertonian system of caste, she succeeded, and had all the warmth of their little confidences. Nor after her extensive experience with Messrs. Schwirtz, Sanderson, and McCullough, did even the noisiest of the salesmen offend her. She laughed at the small signs they were always bringing in and displaying: “Oh, forget it! I’ve got troubles of my own!” or, “Is that you again? Another half hour gone to hell!” The sales-manager brought this latter back from Philadelphia and hung it on his desk, and when the admiring citizenry surrounded it, Una joined them.... As a married woman she was not expected to be shocked by the word, “hell!”...
But most beautiful was Christmas Eve, when all distinctions were suspended for an hour before the office closed, when Mr. Truax distributed gold pieces and handshakes, when “Chas.,” the hat-tilted sales-manager, stood on a chair and sang a solo. Mr. Fein hung holly on all their desks, and for an hour stenographers and salesmen and clerks and chiefs all were friends.
When she went home to Schwirtz she tried to take some of the holiday friendship. She sought to forget that he was still looking for the hypothetical job, while he subsisted on her wages and was increasingly apologetic. She boasted to herself that her husband hated to ask her for money, that he was large and strong and masculine.
She took him to dinner at the Pequoit, in a room of gold and tapestry. But he got drunk, and wept into his sherbet that he was a drag on her; and she was glad to be back in the office after Christmas.
The mist of newness had passed, that confusion of the recent arrival in office or summer hotel or revengeful reception;and she now saw the office inhabitants as separate people. She wondered how she could ever have thought that the sales-manager and Mr. Fein were confusingly alike, or have been unable to get the salesmen’s names right.
There was the chief, Mr. Daniel T. Truax, usually known as “D. T.,” a fussily courteous whiner with a rabbity face (his pink nose actually quivered), a little yellow mustache, and a little round stomach. Himself and his business he took very seriously, though he was far less tricky than Mr. Pemberton. The Real Estate Board of Trade was impressed by his unsmiling insistence on the Dignity of the Profession, and always asked him to serve on committees. It was Mr. Truax who bought the property for sub-development, and though he had less abstract intelligence than Mr. Fein, he was a better judge of “what the people want”; of just how high to make restrictions on property, and what whim would turn the commuters north or south in their quest for homes.
There was the super-chief, the one person related to the firm whom Una hated—Mrs. D. T. Truax. She was not officially connected with the establishment, and her office habits were irregular. Mostly they consisted in appearing at the most inconvenient hours and asking maddening questions. She was fat, massaged, glittering, wheezy-voiced, nagging. Una peculiarly hated Mrs. Truax’s nails. Una’s own finger-tips were hard with typing; her manicuring was a domestic matter of clipping and hypocritical filing. But to Mrs. Truax manicuring was a life-work. Because of much clipping of the cuticle, the flesh at the base of each nail had become a noticeably raised cushion of pink flesh. Her nails were too pink, too shiny, too shapely, and sometimes they were an unearthly whiteat the ends, because of nail-paste left under them. At that startling whiteness Una stared all the while Mrs. Truax was tapping her fingers and prying into the private morals of the pretty hall-girl, and enfilading Una with the lorgnon that so perfectly suited her Upper West Side jowls.
Collating Mrs. Truax and the matrons of the Visiting Board of the Temperance Home Club, Una concluded that women trained in egotism, but untrained in business, ought to be legally enjoined from giving their views to young women on the job.
The most interesting figure in the office was Mr. Fein, the junior partner, a Harvard Jew, who was perfectly the new type of business man. Serious, tall, spectacled, clean-shaven, lean-faced, taking business as a profession, and kindly justice as a religion, studying efficiency, but hating the metamorphosis of clerks into machines, he was the distinction and the power of Truax & Fein. At first Una had thought him humorless and negligible, but she discovered that it was he who pulled Mr. Truax out of his ruts, his pious trickeries, his cramping economies. She found that Mr. Fein loved books and the opera, and that he could be boyish after hours.
Then the sales-manager, that driving but festive soul, Mr. Charles Salmond, whom everybody called “Chas.”—pronounced “Chaaz”—a good soul who was a little tiresome because he was so consistently an anthology of New York. He believed in Broadway, the Follies, good clothes, a motor-car, Palm Beach, and the value of the Salvation Army among the lower classes. When Mr. Fein fought for real beauty in their suburban developments it was Chas. who echoed all of New York by rebelling, “We aren’t in business for our health—this idealistic game is O. K. for the guys that have the cash, but you can’t expect my salesmen to sell this Simplicityand High-Thinking stuff to prospects that are interested in nothing but a sound investment with room for a garage and two kids.”
Sixty or seventy salesmen, clerks, girls—these Una was beginning to know.
Finally, there was a keen, wide-awake woman, willing to do anything for anybody, not forward, but not to be overridden—a woman with a slight knowledge of architecture and a larger knowledge of the way of promotion; a woman whom Una took seriously; and the name of this paragon was Mrs. Una Golden Schwirtz.
Round these human islands flowed a sea of others. She had a sense of flux, and change, and energy; of hundreds of thousands of people rushing about her always—crowds on Broadway and Fifth Avenue and Sixth, and on Thirty-fourth Street, where stood the Zodiac Building in which was the office. Crowds in the hall of the Zodiac Building, examining the black-and-white directory board with its list of two hundred offices, or waiting to surge into one of the twelve elevators—those packed vertical railroads. A whole village life in the hallway of the Zodiac Building: the imperial elevator-starter in a uniform of blue and gold, and merely regal elevator-runners with less gold and more faded blue; the oldest of the elevator-boys, Harry, the Greek, who knew everybody in the building; the cigar-stand, with piles of cigarettes, cans of advertised tobacco, maple fudge wrapped in tinfoil, stamps, and even a few cigars, also the keeper thereof, an Italian with an air of swounding romance. More romantic Italians in the glass-inclosed barber-shop—Desperate Desmond devils, with white coats like undress uniforms, and mustaches that recalled the Riviera and baccarat and a secret-service count; the two manicure-girls of the barber-shop, princesses reigningamong admirers from the offices up-stairs; janitors, with brooms, and charwomen with pails, and a red, sarcastic man, the engineer, and a meek puppet who was merely the superintendent of the whole thing.... Una watched these village people, to whom the Zodiac hall was Main Street, and in their satisfied conformation to a life of marble floors and artificial light she found such settled existence as made her feel at home in this town, with its eighteen strata called floors. She, too, at least during the best hours of the day, lived in the Zodiac Building’s microcosm.
And to her office penetrated the ever flowing crowds—salesmen, buyers of real estate, inquirers, persons who seemed to have as a hobby the collection of real-estate folders. Indeed, her most important task was the strategy of “handling callers”—the callers who came to see Mr. Truax himself, and were passed on to Una by the hall-girl. To the clever secretary the management of callers becomes a question of scientific tactics, and Una was clever at it because she liked people.
She had to recognize the type of awkward shabby visitor who looks like a beggar, but has in his pocket the cash for investment in lots. And the insinuating caller, with tailor-made garments and a smart tie, who presents himself as one who yearns to do a good turn to his dear, dear personal friend, Mr. D. T. Truax, but proves to be an insurance-agent or a salesman of adding-machines. She had to send away the women with high-pitched voices and purely imaginary business, who came in for nothing whatever, and were willing to spend all of their own time and Mr. Truax’s in obtaining the same; women with unsalable houses to sell or improbable lots to buy, dissatisfied clients, or mere cranks—old, shattered, unhappy women, to whom Una could give sympathy, but no time....She was expert at standing filially listening to them at the elevator, while all the time her thumb steadily pressed the elevator signal.
Una had been trained, perhaps as much by enduring Mr. Schwirtz as by pleasing Mr. S. Herbert Ross, to be firm, to say no, to keep Mr. Truax’s sacred rites undisturbed. She did not conventionally murmur, “Mr. Truax is in a conference just now, and if you will tell me the nature of your business—” Instead, she had surprising, delightful, convincing things for Mr. Truax to be doing, just at that particularmoment—
From Mr. Truax himself she learned new ways of delicately getting rid of people. He did not merely rise to indicate that an interview was over, but also arranged a system of counterfeit telephone-calls, with Una calling up from the outside office, and Mr. Truax answering, “Yes, I’ll be through now in just a moment,” as a hint for the visitor. He even practised such play-acting as putting on his hat and coat and rushing out to greet an important but unwelcome caller with, “Oh, I’m so sorry I’m just going out—late f’ important engagement—given m’ secretary full instructions, and I know she’ll take care of you jus’ as well as I could personally,” and returning to his private office by a rear door.
Mr. Truax, like Mr. S. Herbert Ross, gave Una maxims. But his had very little to do with stars and argosies, and the road to success, and vivisection, and the abstract virtues. They concerned getting to the office on time, and never letting a customer bother him if an office salesman could take care of the matter.
So round Una flowed all the energy of life; and she of the listening and desolate hotel room and the overshadowing storm-clouds was happy again.
She began to make friendships. “Chas.,” the office-manager,stopped often at her desk to ridicule—and Mr. Fein to praise—the plans she liked to make for garden-suburbs which should be filled with poets, thatched roofs, excellent plumbing, artistic conversation, fireplaces, incinerators, books, and convenient trains.
“Some day,” said Mr. Fein to her, “we’ll do that sort of thing, just as the Sage Foundation is doing it at Forest Hills.” And he smiled encouragingly.
“Some day,” said Mr. Truax, “when you’re head of a women’s real-estate firm, after you women get the vote, and rusty, old-fashioned people like me are out of the way, perhaps you can do that sort of thing.” And he smiled encouragingly.
“Rot,” said Chas., and amiably chucked her under the chin.
TRUAX & FEIN was the first firm toward which Una was able to feel such loyalty as is supposed to distinguish all young aspirants—loyalty which is so well spoken of by bosses, and which is so generally lacking among the bossed. Partly, this was her virtue, partly it was the firm’s, and partly it was merely the accident of her settling down.
She watched the biological growth of Truax & Fein with fascination; was excited when they opened a new subdivision, and proudly read the half-page advertisements thereof in the Sunday newspapers.
That loyalty made her study real estate, not merely stenography; for to most stenographers their work is the same whether they take dictation regarding real estate, or book-publishing, or felt slippers, or the removal of taconite. They understand transcription, but not what they transcribe. She read magazines—System,Printer’s Ink,Real Estate Record(solemnly studying “Recorded Conveyances,” and “Plans Filed for New Construction Work,” and “Mechanics’ Liens”). She got ideas for houses from architectural magazines, garden magazines, women’s magazines. But what most indicated that she was a real devotee was the fact that, after glancing at the front-page headlines, the society news, and the joke column in her morning paper, she would resolutely turn to “The Real Estate Field.”
On Sundays she often led Mr. Schwirtz for a walk among the new suburban developments.... For always, no matter what she did at the office, no matter how much Mr. Truax depended on her or Mr. Fein praised her, she went home to the same cabbage-rose-carpeted housekeeping-room, and to a Mr. Schwirtz who had seemingly not stirred an inch since she had left him in the morning.... Mr. Schwirtz was of a harem type, and not much adapted to rustic jaunting, but he obediently followed his master and tried to tell stories of the days when he had known all about real estate, while she studied model houses, the lay of the land, the lines of sewers and walks.
That was loyalty to Truax & Fein as much as desire for advancement.
And that same loyalty made her accept as fellow-workers even the noisiest of the salesmen—and even Beatrice Joline.
Though Mr. Truax didn’t “believe in” women salesmen, one woman briskly overrode his beliefs: Miss Beatrice Joline, of the Gramercy Park Jolines, who cheerfully called herself “one of thenouveau pauvre,” and condescended to mere Upper West Side millionaires, and had to earn her frocks and tea money. She earned them, too; but she declined to be interested in office regulations or office hours. She sold suburban homes as a free lance, and only to the very best people. She darted into the office now and then, slender, tall, shoulder-swinging, an exclamation-point of a girl, in a smart, check suit and a Bendel hat. She ignored Una with a coolness which reduced her to the status of a new stenographer. All the office watched Miss Joline with hypnotized envy. Always in offices those who have social position outside are observed with secret awe by those who have not.
Once, when Mr. Truax was in the act of persuading anunfortunate property-owner to part with a Long Island estate for approximately enough to buy one lot after the estate should be subdivided into six hundred lots, Miss Joline had to wait. She perched on Una’s desk, outside Mr. Truax’s door, swung her heels, inspected the finger-ends of her chamois gloves, and issued a command to Una to perform conversationally.
Una was thinking, “I’d like to spank you—and then I’d adore you. You’re what story-writers call a thoroughbred.”
While unconscious that a secretary in a tabby-gray dress and gold eye-glasses was venturing to appraise her, Miss Joline remarked, in a high, clear voice: “Beastly bore to have to wait, isn’t it! I suppose you can rush right in to see Mr. Truax any time you want to, Mrs. Ummmmm.”
“Schwirtz. Rotten name, isn’t it?” Una smiled up condescendingly.
Miss Joline stopped kicking her heels and stared at Una as though she might prove to be human, after all.
“Oh no, it’s a very nice name,” she said. “Fancy being called Joline. Now Schwirtz sounds rather like Schenck, and that’s one of the smartest of the old names.... Uh,wouldit be too much trouble to see if Mr. Truax is still engaged?”
“He is.... Miss Joline, I feel like doing something I’ve wanted to do for some time. Of course we both know you think of me as ‘that poor little dub, Mrs. What’s-her-name, D. T.’s secretary—’”
“Why, really—”
“—or perhaps you hadn’t thought of me at all. I’m naturally quite a silent little dub, but I’ve been learning that it’s silly to be silent in business. So I’ve been planning to get hold of you and ask you where and how youget those suits of yours, and what I ought to wear. You see, after you marry I’ll still be earning my living, and perhaps if I could dress anything like you I could fool some business man into thinking I was clever.”
“As I do, you mean,” said Miss Joline, cheerfully.
“Well—”
“Oh, I don’t mind. But, my dear, good woman—oh, I suppose I oughtn’t to call you that.”
“I don’t care what you call me, if you can tell me how to make a seventeen-fifty suit look likeVogue. Isn’t it awful, Miss Joline, that us lower classes are interested in clothes, too?”
“My dear girl, even the beautiful, the accomplished Beatrice Joline—I’ll admit it—knows when she is being teased. I went to boarding-school, and if you think I haven’t ever been properly and thoroughly, and oh, most painstakingly told what a disgusting, natural snob I am, you ought to have heard Tomlinson, or any other of my dear friends, taking me down. I rather fancy you’re kinder-hearted than they are; but, anyway, you don’t insult me half so scientifically.”
“I’m so sorry. I tried hard— I’m a well-meaning insulter, but I haven’t the practice.”
“My dear, I adore you. Isn’t it lovely to be frank? When us females get into Mr. Truax’s place we’ll have the most wonderful time insulting each other, don’t you think? But, really, please don’t think I like to be rude. But you see we Jolines are so poor that if I stopped it all my business acquaintances would think I was admitting how poor we are, so I’m practically forced to be horrid. Now that we’ve been amiable to each other, what can I do for you?... Does that sound business-like enough?”
“I want to make you give me some hints about clothes. I used to like terribly crude colors, but I’ve settled downto tessie things that are safe—this gray dress, and brown, and black.”
“Well, my dear, I’m the best little dressmaker you ever saw, and I do love to lay down the law about clothes. With your hair and complexion, you ought to wear clear blues. Order a well-made—be sure it’s well-made, no matter what it costs. Get some clever little Jew socialist tailor off in the outskirts of Brooklyn, or some heathenish place, and stand over him. A well-made tailored suit of not too dark navy blue, with matching blue crêpe de Chine blouses with nice, soft, white collars, and cuffs of crêpe or chiffon—and change’em often.”
“What about a party dress? Ought I to have satin, or chiffon, or blue net, or what?”
“Well, satin is too dignified, and chiffon too perishable, and blue net is too tessie. Why don’t you try black net over black satin? You know there’s really lots of color in black satin if you know how to use it. Get good materials, and then you can use them over and over again—perhaps white chiffon over the black satin.”
“White over black?”
Though Miss Joline stared down with one of the quick, secretive smiles which Una hated, the smile which reduced her to the rank of a novice, her eyes held Miss Joline, made her continue her oracles.
“Yes,” said Miss Joline, “and it isn’t very expensive. Try it with the black net first, and have soft little folds of white tulle along the edge of the décolletage—it’s scarcely noticeable, but it does soften the neck-line. And wear a string of pearls. Get these Artifico pearls, a dollar-ninety a string.... Now you see how useful a snob is to the world! I’d never give you all this god-like advice if I didn’t want to advertise what an authority I am on ‘Smart Fashions for Limited Incomes.’”
“You’re a darling,” said Una.
“Come to tea,” said Miss Joline.
They did go to tea. But before it, while Miss Joline was being voluble with Mr. Truax, Una methodically made notes on the art of dress and filed them for future reference. Despite the fact that, with the support of Mr. Schwirtz as her chief luxury, she had only sixteen dollars in the world, she had faith that she would sometime take a woman’s delight in dress, and a business woman’s interest in it.... This had been an important hour for her, though it cannot be authoritatively stated which was the more important—learning to dress, or learning not to be in awe of a Joline of Gramercy Park.
They went to tea several times in the five months before the sudden announcement of Miss Joline’s engagement to Wally Castle, of the Tennis and Racquet Club. And at tea they bantered and were not markedly different in their use of forks or choice of pastry. But never were they really friends. Una, of Panama, daughter of Captain Golden, and wife of Eddie Schwirtz, could comprehend Walter Babson and follow Mamie Magen, and even rather despised that Diogenes of an enameled tub, Mr. S. Herbert Ross; but it seemed probable that she would never be able to do more than ask for bread and railway tickets in the language of Beatrice Joline, whose dead father had been ambassador to Portugal and friend to Henry James and John Hay.
It hurt a little, but Una had to accept the fact that Beatrice Joline was no more likely to invite her to the famous and shabby old house of the Jolines than was Mrs. Truax to ask her advice about manicuring. They did, however, have dinner together on an evening whenMiss Joline actually seemed to be working late at the office.
“Let’s go to a Café des Enfants,” said Miss Joline. “Such a party! And, honestly, I do like their coffee and the nice, shiny, bathroom walls.”
“Yes,” said Una, “it’s almost as much of a party to me as running a typewriter.... Let’s go Dutch to the Martha Washington.”
“Verra well. Though I did want buckwheats and little sausages. Exciting!”
“Huh!” said Una, who was unable to see any adventurous qualities in a viand which she consumed about twice a week.
Miss Joline’s clean litheness, her gaiety that had never been made timorous or grateful by defeat or sordidness, her whirlwind of nonsense, blended in a cocktail for Una at dinner. Schwirtz, money difficulties, weariness, did not exist. Her only trouble in the entire universe was the reconciliation of her admiration for Miss Joline’s amiable superiority to everybody, her gibes at the salesmen, and even at Mr. Truax, with Mamie Magen’s philanthropic socialism. (So far as this history can trace, she never did reconcile them.)
She left Miss Joline with a laugh, and started home with a song—then stopped. She foresaw the musty room to which she was going, the slatternly incubus of a man. Saw—with just such distinctness as had once dangled the stiff, gray scrub-rag before her eyes—Schwirtz’s every detail: bushy chin, stained and collarless shirt, trousers like old chair-covers. Probably he would always be like this. Probably he would never have another job. But she couldn’t cast him out. She had married him, in his own words, as a “good provider.” She had lost the bet; she would be a good loser—and a good provider forhim.... Always, perhaps.... Always that mass of spoiled babyhood waiting at home for her.... Always apologetic and humble—she would rather have the old, grumbling, dominant male....
She tried to push back the moment of seeing him again. Her steps dragged, but at last, inevitably, grimly, the house came toward her. She crept along the moldy hall, opened the door of their room, saw him—
She thought it was a stranger, an intruder. But it was veritably her husband, in a new suit that was fiercely pressed and shaped, in new, gleaming, ox-blood shoes, with a hair-cut and a barber shave. He was bending over the bed, which was piled with new shirts, Afro-American ties, new toilet articles, and he was packing a new suit-case.
He turned slowly, enjoying her amazement. He finished packing a shirt. She said nothing, standing at the door. Teetering on his toes and watching the effect of it all on her, he lighted a large cigar.
“Some class, eh?” he said.
“Well—”
“Nifty suit, eh? And how are those for swell ties?”
“Very nice.... From whom did you borrow the money?”
“Now that cer’nly is a nice, sweet way to congratulate friend hubby. Oh,sure! Man lands a job, works his head off getting it, gets an advance for some new clothes he’s simply got to have, and of course everybody else congratulates him—everybody but his own wife. She sniffs at him—not a word about the new job, of course. First crack outa the box, she gets busy suspecting him, and says, ‘Who you been borrowing of now?’ And this after always acting as though she was an abused little innocent that nobody appreciated—”
He was in mid-current, swimming strong, and wavinghis cigar above the foaming waters, but she pulled him out of it with, “Iamsorry. I ought to have known. I’m a beast. I am glad, awfully glad you’ve got a new job. What is it?”
“New company handling a new kind of motor for row-boats—converts’em to motor-boats in a jiffy—outboard motors they call’em. Got a swell territory and plenty bonus on new business.”
“Oh, isn’t that fine! It’s such a fine surprise—and it’s cute of you to keep it to surprise me with all this while—”
“Well, ’s a matter of fact, I just got on to it to-day. Ran into Burke McCullough on Sixth Avenue, and he gave me the tip.”
“Oh!” A forlorn little “Oh!” it was. She had pictured him proudly planning to surprise her. And she longed to have the best possible impression of him, because of a certain plan which was hotly being hammered out in her brain. She went on, as brightly as possible:
“And they gave you an advance? That’s fine.”
“Well, no,theydidn’t, exactly, but Burke introduced me to his clothier, and I got a swell line of credit.”
“Oh!”
“Now for the love of Pete, don’t go oh-ing and ah-ing like that. You’ve handed me the pickled visage since I got the rowdy-dow on my last job—good Lord! you acted like you thought Ilikedto sponge on you. Now let me tell you I’ve kept account of every red cent you’ve spent on me, and I expect to pay it back.”
She tried to resist her impulse, but she couldn’t keep from saying, as nastily as possible: “How nice. When?”
“Oh, I’ll pay it back, all right, trust you for that! You won’t fail to keep wising me up on the fact that you think I’m a drunken bum. You’ll sit around all day in a hoteland take it easy and have plenty time to figger out all the things you can roast me for, and then spring them on me the minute I get back from a trip all tired out. Like you always used to.”
“Oh, I did not!” she wailed.
“Sure you did.”
“And what do you mean by my sitting around, from now on—”
“Well, what the hell else are you going to do? You can’t play the piano or maybe run an aeroplane, can you?”
“Why, I’m going to stay on my job, of course, Ed.”
“You are not going-to-of-course-stay-on-your-job-Ed, any such a thing. Lemme tell you that right here and now, my lady. I’ve stood just about all I’m going to stand of your top-lofty independence and business airs—as though you weren’t a wife at all, but just as ‘be-damned-to-you’ independent as though you were as much of a business man as I am! No, sir, you’ll do whatIsay from now on. I’ve been tied to your apron strings long enough, and now I’m the boss—see? Me!” He tapped his florid bosom. “You used to be plenty glad to go to poker parties and leg-shows with me, when I wanted to, but since you’ve taken to earning your living again you’ve become so ip-de-dee and independent that when I even suggest rushing a growler of beer you scowl at me, and as good as say you’re too damn almighty good for Eddie Schwirtz’s low-brow amusements. And you’ve taken to staying out all hours—course it didn’t matter whether I stayed here without a piece of change, or supper, or anything else, or any amusements, while you were out whoop-de-doodling around— Yousaidit was with women!”
She closed her eyes tight; then, wearily: “You mean, I suppose, that you think I was out with men.”
“Well, I ain’t insinuating anything about what youbeendoing. You been your own boss, and of course I had to take anything off anybody as long as I was broke. But lemme tell you, from now on, no pasty-faced female is going to rub it in any more. You’re going to try some of your own medicine. You’re going to give up your rotten stenographer’s job, and you’re going to stay home where I put you, and when I invite you to come on a spree you’re going to be glad—”
Her face tightened with rage. She leaped at him, shook him by the shoulder, and her voice came in a shriek:
“Now that’s enough. I’m through. You did mean to insinuate I was out with men. I wasn’t—but that was just accident. I’d have been glad to, if there’d been one I could have loved even a little. I’d have gone anywhere with him—done anything! And now we’re through. I stood you as long as it was my job to do it.God!what jobs we women have in this chivalrous world that honors women so much!—but now that you can take care of yourself, I’ll do the same.”
“What d’ yuh mean?”
“I mean this.”
She darted at the bed, yanked from beneath it her suit-case, and into it began to throw her toilet articles.
Mr. Schwirtz sat upon the bed and laughed enormously.
“You women cer’nly are a sketch!” he caroled. “Going back to mamma, are you? Sure! That’s what the first Mrs. Schwirtz was always doing. Let’s see. Once she got as far as the depot before she came back and admitted that she was a chump. I doubt if you get that far. You’ll stop on the step. You’re too tightwad to hire a taxi, even to try to scare me and make it unpleasant for me.”
Una stopped packing, stood listening. Now, her voice unmelodramatic again, she replied:
“You’re right about several things. I probably wasthoughtless about leaving you alone evenings—though it isnottrue that I ever left you without provision for supper. And of course you’ve often left me alone back there in the hotel while you were off with other women—”
“Now who’s insinuating?” He performed another characteristic peroration. She did not listen, but stood with warning hand up, a small but plucky-looking traffic policeman, till he ceased, then went on:
“But I can’t really blame you. Even in this day when people like my friend Mamie Magen think that feminism has won everything, I suppose there must still be a majority of men like you—men who’ve never even heard of feminism, who think that their women are breed cattle. I judge that from the conversations I overhear in restaurants and street-cars, and these pretty vaudeville jokes about marriage that you love so, and from movie pictures of wives beating husbands, and from the fact that women even yet haven’t the vote. I suppose that you don’t really know many men besides the mucky cattle-drover sort, and I can’t blame you for thinking like them—”
“Say, what is all this cattle business about? I don’t seem to recall we were discussing stockyards. Are you trying to change the conversation, so you won’t even have to pack your grip before you call your own bluff about leaving me? Don’t get it at all, at all!”
“You will get it, my friend!... As I say, I can see—now it’s too late—how mean I must have been to you often. I’ve probably hurt your feelings lots of times—”
“You have, all right.”
“—but I still don’t see how I could have avoided it. I don’t blame myself, either. We two simply never could get together—you’re two-thirds the old-fashioned brute, and I’m at least one-third the new, independent woman.We wouldn’t understand each other, not if we talked a thousand years. Heavens alive! just see all these silly discussions of suffrage that men like you carry on, when the whole thing is really so simple: simply that women are intelligent human beings, and have the right—”
“Now who mentioned suffrage? If you’ll kindly let me know what you’re trying to getat, then—”
“You see? We two never could understand each other! So I’m just going to clean house. Get rid of things that clutter it up. I’m going, to-night, and I don’t think I shall ever see you again, so do try to be pleasant while I’m packing. This last time.... Oh, I’m free again. And so are you, you poor, decent man. Let’s congratulate each other.”
Despite the constant hammering of Mr. Schwirtz, who changed swiftly from a tyrant to a bewildered orphan, Una methodically finished her packing, went to a hotel, and within a week found in Brooklyn, near the Heights, a pleasant white-and-green third-floor-front.
Her salary had been increased to twenty-five dollars a week.
She bought the blue suit and the crêpe de Chine blouse recommended by Miss Beatrice Joline. She was still sorry for Mr. Schwirtz; she thought of him now and then, and wondered where he had gone. But that did not prevent her enjoying the mirror’s reflection of the new blouse.
While he was dictating to Una, Mr. Truax monologized: “I don’t see why we can’t sell that Boutell family a lot. We wouldn’t make any profit out of it, now, anyway—that’snearly eaten up by the overhead we’ve wasted on them. But I hate to give them up, and your friend Mr. Fein says that we aren’t scientific salesmen if we give up the office problems that everybody takes a whack at and seems to fail on.”
More and more Mr. Truax had been recognizing Una as an intelligence, and often he teased her regarding her admiration for Mr. Fein’s efficiency. Now he seemed almost to be looking to her for advice as he plaintively rambled on:
“Every salesman on the staff has tried to sell this asinine Boutell family and failed. We’ve got the lots—give’em anything from a fifteen-thousand-dollar-restriction, water-front, high-class development to an odd lot behind an Italian truck-farm. They’ve been considering a lot at Villa Estates for a month, now, and they aren’t—”
“Let me try them.”
“Let you try them?”
“Try to sell them.”
“Of course, if you want to—in your own time outside. This is a matter that the selling department ought to have disposed of. But if you want to try—”
“I will. I’ll try them on a Saturday afternoon—next Saturday.”
“But what do you know about Villa Estates?”
“I walked all over it, just last Sunday. Talked to the resident salesman for an hour.”
“That’s good. I wish all our salesmen would do something like that.”
All week Una planned to attack the redoubtable Boutells. She telephoned (sounding as well-bred and clever as she could) and made an appointment for Saturday afternoon. The Boutells were going to a matinée, Mrs. Boutell’s grating voice informed her, but they would bepleased t’ see Mrs. Schwirtz after the show. All week Una asked advice of “Chas.,” the sales-manager, who, between extensive exhortations to keep away from selling—“because it’s the hardest part of the game, and, believe me, it gets the least gratitude”—gave her instructions in the tactics of “presenting a proposition to a client,” “convincing a prospect of the salesman’s expert knowledge of values,” “clinching the deal,” “talking points,” and “desirability of location.”
Wednesday evening Una went out to Villa Estates to look it over again, and she conducted a long, imaginary conversation with the Boutells regarding the nearness of the best school in Nassau County.
But on Saturday morning she felt ill. At the office she wailed on the shoulder of a friendly stenographer that she would never be able to follow up this, her first chance to advance.
She went home at noon and slept till four. She arrived at the Boutells’ flat looking like a dead leaf. She tried to skip into the presence of Mrs. Boutell—a dragon with a frizz—and was heavily informed that Mr. Boutell wouldn’t be back till six, and that, anyway, they had “talked over the Villa Estates proposition, and decided it wasn’t quite time to come to a decision—be better to wait till the weather cleared up, so a body can move about.”
“Oh, Mrs. Boutell, I just can’t argue it out with you,” Una howled. “Idoknow Villa Estates and its desirability for you, but this is my very first experience in direct selling, and as luckwouldhave it, I feel perfectly terrible to-day.”
“You poor lamb!” soothed Mrs. Boutell. “You do look terrible sick. You come right in and lie down and I’ll have my Lithuanian make you a cup of hot beef-tea.”
While Mrs. Boutell held her hand and fed her beef-tea,Una showed photographs of Villa Estates and became feebly oratorical in its praises, and when Mr. Boutell came home at six-thirty they all had a light dinner together, and went to the moving-pictures, and through them talked about real estate, and at eleven Mr. Boutell uneasily took the fountain-pen which Una resolutely held out to him, and signed a contract to purchase two lots at Villa Estates, and a check for the first payment.
Una had climbed above the rank of assistant to the rank of people who do things.
TO Una and to Mr. Fein it seemed obvious that, since women have at least half of the family decision regarding the purchase of suburban homes, women salesmen of suburban property should be at least as successful as men. But Mr. Truax had a number of “good, sound, conservative” reasons why this should not be so, and therefore declined to credit the evidence of Una, Beatrice Joline, and saleswomen of other firms that it really was so.
Yet, after solving the Boutell office problem, Una was frequently requisitioned by “Chas.” to talk to women about the advantages of sites for themselves and their children, while regular and intelligent (that is, male) salesmen worked their hypnotic arts on the equally regular and intelligent men of the families. Where formerly it had seemed an awesome miracle, like chemistry or poetry, to “close a deal” and bring thousands of dollars into the office, now Una found it quite normal. Responsibility gave her more poise and willingness to take initiative. Her salary was raised to thirty dollars a week. She banked two hundred dollars of commissions, and bought a Japanese-blue silk negligée, a wrist-watch, and the gown of black satin and net recommended by Miss Joline. Yet officially she was still Mr. Truax’s secretary; she took his dictation and his moods.
Her greatest reward was in the friendship of the careful, diligent Mr. Fein.
She never forgot a dinner with Mr. Fein, at which, for the first time, she heard a complete defense of the employer’s position—saw the office world from the stand-point of the “bosses.”
“I never believed I’d be friendly with one of the capitalists,” Una was saying at their dinner, “but I must admit that you don’t seem to want to grind the faces of the poor.”
“I don’t. I want to wash’em.”
“I’m serious.”
“My dear child, so am I,” declared Mr. Fein. Then, apparently addressing his mixed grill, he considered: “It’s nonsense to say that it’s just the capitalists that ail the world. It’s the slackers. Show me a man that we can depend on to do the necessary thing at the necessary moment without being nudged, and we’ll keep raising him before he has a chance to ask us, even.”
“No, you don’t—that is, I really think you do, Mr. Fein, personally, but most bosses are so afraid of a big pay-roll that they deliberately discourage their people till they lose all initiative. I don’t know; perhaps they’re victims along with their employees. Just now I adore my work, and I do think that business can be made as glorious a profession as medicine, or exploring, or anything, but in most offices, it seems to me, the biggest ideal the clerks have issafety—a two-family house on a stupid street in Flatbush as a reward for being industrious. Doesn’t matter whether theyenjoyliving there, if they’re just secure. And you do know—Mr. Truax doesn’t, butyou do know—that the whole office system makes pale, timid, nervous people out of all the clerks—”
“But, good heavens! child, the employers have just as hard a time. Talk about being nervous! Take it in our game. The salesman does the missionary work, but the employer is the one who has to worry. Take some big deal that seems just about to get across—and then falls through just when you reach for the contract and draw a breath of relief. Or say you’ve swung a deal and have to pay your rent and office force, and you can’t get the commission that’s due you on an accomplished sale. And your clerks dash in and want a raise, under threat of quitting, just at the moment when you’re wondering how you’ll raise the money to pay them theirpresentsalaries on time! Those are the things that make an employer a nervous wreck. He’s got to keep it going. I tell you there’s advantages in being a wage-slave and having the wages coming—”
“But, Mr. Fein, if it’s just as hard on the employers as it is on the employees, then the whole system is bad.”
“Good Lord! of course it’s bad. But do you know anything in this world that isn’t bad—that’s anywhere near perfect? Except maybe Bach fugues? Religion, education, medicine, war, agriculture, art, pleasure,anything—all systems are choked with clumsy, outworn methods and ignorance—the whole human race works and plays at about ten-per-cent. efficiency. The only possible ground for optimism about the human race that I can see is that in most all lines experts are at work showing up the deficiencies—proving that alcohol and war are bad, and consumption and Greek unnecessary—and making a beginning. You don’t do justice to the big offices and mills where they have real efficiency tests, and if a man doesn’t make good in one place, they shift him to another.”
“There aren’t very many of them. In all the offices I’ve ever seen, the boss’s indigestion is the only test of employees.”
“Yes, yes, I know, but that isn’t the point. The point is that they are making such tests—beginning to. Take the schools where they actually teach future housewives to cook and sew as well as to read aloud. But, of course, I admit the very fact that there can be and are such schools and offices is a terrible indictment of the slatternly schools and bad-tempered offices we usually do have, and if you can show up this system of shutting people up in treadmills, why go to it, and good luck. The longer people are stupidly optimistic, the longer we’ll have to wait for improvements. But, believe me, my dear girl, for every ardent radical who says the whole thing is rotten there’s ten clever advertising-men who think it’s virtue to sell new brands of soap-powder that are no better than the old brands, and a hundred old codgers who are so broken into the office system that they think they are perfectly happy—don’t know how much fun in life they miss. Still, they’re no worse than the adherents to any other paralyzed system. Look at the comparatively intelligent people who fall for any freak religious system and let it make their lives miserable. I suppose that when the world has no more war or tuberculosis, then offices will be exciting places to work in—but not till then. And meantime, if the typical business man with a taste for fishing heard even so mild a radical as I am, he’d sniff, ‘The fellow don’t know what he’s talking about; everybody in all the offices I know is perfectly satisfied.’”
“Yes, changes will be slow, I suppose, but that doesn’t excuse bosses of to-day for thinking they are little tin gods.”
“No, of course it doesn’t. But people in authority alwaysdo that. The only thing we can do about it is for us, personally, to make our offices as clean and amusing as we can, instead of trying to buy yachts. But don’t ever think either that capitalists are a peculiar race of fiends, different from anarchists or scrubwomen, or that we’ll have a millennium about next election. We’ve got to be anthropological in our view. It’s taken the human race about five hundred thousand years to get where it is, and presumably it will take quite a few thousand more to become scientific or even to understand the need of scientific conduct of everything. I’m not at all sure that there’s any higher wisdom than doing a day’s work, and hoping the Subway will be a little less crowded next year, and in voting for the best possible man, and then forgetting all theWeltschmertz, and going to an opera. It sounds pretty raw and crude, doesn’t it? But living in a world that’s raw and crude, all you can do is to be honest and not worry.”
“Yes,” said Una.
She grieved for the sunset-colored ideals of Mamie Magen, for the fine, strained, hysterical enthusiasms of Walter Babson, as an enchantment of thought which she was dispelling in her effort to become a “good, sound, practical business woman.” Mr. Fein’s drab opportunist philosophy disappointed her. Yet, in contrast to Mr. Schwirtz, Mr. Truax, and Chas., he was hyperbolic; and after their dinner she was gushingly happy to be hearing the opportunist melodies of “Il Trovatore” beside him.
The Merryton Realty Company had failed, and Truax & Fein were offered the small development property of Crosshampton Hill Gardens at so convenient a price thatthey could not refuse it, though they were already “carrying” as many properties as they could easily handle. In a characteristic monologue Mr. Truax asked a select audience, consisting of himself, his inkwell, and Una, what he was to do.
“Shall I try to exploit it and close it out quick? I’ve got half a mind to go back to the old tent-and-brass-band method and auction it off. The salesmen have all they can get away with. I haven’t even a good, reliable resident salesman I could trust to handle it on the grounds.”
“Let me try it!” said Una. “Give me a month’s trial as salesman on the ground, and see what I can do. Just run some double-leaded classified ads. and forget it. You can trust me; you know you can. Why, I’ll write my own ads., even: ‘View of Long Island Sound, and beautiful rolling hills. Near to family yacht club, with swimming and sailing.’ I know I could manage it.”
Mr. Truax pretended not to hear, but she rose, leaned over his desk, stared urgently at him, till he weakly promised: “Well, I’ll talk it over with Mr. Fein. But you know it wouldn’t be worth a bit more salary than you’re getting now. And what would I do for a secretary?”
“I don’t worry about salary. Think of being out on Long Island, now that spring is coming! And I’ll find a successor and train her.”
“Well—” said Mr. Truax, while Una took her pencil and awaited dictation with a heart so blithe that she could scarcely remember the symbols for “Yours of sixteenth instant received.”
OF the year and a half from March, 1914, to the autumn of 1915, which Una spent on Long Island, as the resident salesman and director of Crosshampton Hill Gardens, this history has little to say, for it is a treatise regarding a commonplace woman on a job, and at the Gardens there was no job at all, but one long summer day of flushed laughter. It is true that “values were down on the North Shore” at this period, and sales slow; it is true that Una (in high tan boots and a tweed suit from a sporting-goods house) supervised carpenters in constructing a bungalow as local office and dwelling-place for herself. It is true that she quarreled with the engineer planning the walks and sewers, usurped authority and discharged him, and had to argue with Mr. Truax for three hours before he sustained her decision. Also, she spent an average of nine hours a day in waiting for people or in showing them about, and serving tea and biscuits to dusty female villa-hunters. And she herself sometimes ran a lawn-mower and cooked her own meals. But she had respect, achievement, and she ranged the open hills from the stirring time when dogwood blossoms filled the ravines with a fragrant mist, round the calendar, and on till the elms were gorgeous with a second autumn, and sunsets marched in naked glory of archangels over the Connecticut hills beyond the flaming waters of Long Island Sound. Slow-moving, but gentle, were the wintermonths, for she became a part of the commuting town of Crosshampton Harbor, not as the negligible daughter of a Panama Captain Golden, but as a woman with the glamour of independence, executive position, city knowledge, and a certain marital mystery. She was invited to parties at which she obediently played bridge, to dances at the Harbor Yacht Club, to meetings of the Village Friendly Society. A gay, easy-going group, with cocktail-mixers on their sideboards, and motors in their galvanized-iron garages, but also with savings-bank books in the drawers beneath their unit bookcases, took her up as a woman who had learned to listen and smile. And she went with them to friendly, unexacting dances at the Year-Round Inn, conducted by Charley Duquesne, in the impoverished Duquesne mansion on Smiley Point. She liked Charley, and gave him advice about bedroom chintzes for the inn, and learned how a hotel is provisioned and served. Charley did not know that her knowledge of chintzes was about two weeks old and derived from a buyer at Wanamacy’s. He only knew that it solved his difficulties.
She went into the city about once in two weeks, just often enough to keep in touch with Truax, Fein, Chas., and Mamie Magen, the last of whom had fallen in love with a socialistic Gentile charities secretary, fallen out again, and was quietly dedicating all her life to Hebrew charities.
Una closed the last sale at Crosshampton Hill Gardens in the autumn of 1915, and returned to town, to the office-world and the job. Her record had been so clean and promising that she was able to demand a newly-created position—woman sales-manager, at twenty-five hundred dollars a year, selling direct and controlling five other women salesmen.
Mr. Truax still “didn’t believe in” women salesmen,and his lack of faith was more evident now that Una was back in the office. Una grew more pessimistic as she realized that his idea of women salesmen was a pure, high, aloof thing which wasn’t to be affected by anything happening in his office right under his nose. But she was too busy selling lots, instructing her women aides, and furnishing a four-room flat near Stuyvesant Park, to worry much about Mr. Truax. And she was sure that Mr. Fein would uphold her. She had the best of reasons for that assurance, namely, that Mr. Fein had hesitatingly made a formal proposal for her hand in marriage.
She had refused him for two reasons—that she already had one husband somewhere or other, and the more cogent reason that though she admired Mr. Fein, found him as cooling and pleasant as lemonade on a July evening, she did not love him, did not want to mother him, as she had always wanted to mother Walter Babson, and as, now and then, when he had turned to her, she had wanted to mother even Mr. Schwirtz.
The incident brought Mr. Schwirtz to her mind for a day or two. But he was as clean gone from her life as was Mr. Henry Carson, of Panama. She did not know, and did not often speculate, whether he lived or continued to die. If the world is very small, after all, it is also very large, and life and the world swallow up those whom we have known best, and they never come back to us.
Una had, like a Freshman envying the Seniors, like a lieutenant in awe of the council of generals, always fancied that when she became a real executive with a salary of several thousands, and people coming to her for orders, she would somehow be a different person from the goodlittle secretary. She was astonished to find that in her private office and her new flat, and in her new velvet suit she was precisely the same yearning, meek, efficient woman as before. But she was happier. Despite her memories of Schwirtz and the fear that some time, some place, she would encounter him and be claimed as his wife, and despite a less frequent fear that America would be involved in the great European war, Una had solid joy in her office achievements, in her flat, in taking part in the vast suffrage parade of the autumn of 1915, and feeling comradeship with thousands of women.
Despite Mr. Fein’s picture of the woes of executives, Una found that her new power and responsibility were inspiring as her little stenographer’s wage had never been. Nor, though she did have trouble with the women responsible to her at times, though she found it difficult to secure employees on whom she could depend, did Una become a female Troy Wilkins.
She was able to work out some of the aspirations she had cloudily conceived when she had herself been a slave. She did find it possible to be friendly with her aides, to be on tea and luncheon and gossip terms of intimacy with them, to confide in them instead of tricking them, to use frank explanations instead of arbitrary rules; and she was rewarded by their love and loyalty. Her chief quarrels were with Mr. Truax in regard to raising the salaries and commissions of her assistant saleswomen.
Behind all these discoveries regarding the state of being an executive, behind her day’s work and the evenings at her flat when Mamie Magen and Mr. Fein came to dinner, there were two tremendous secrets:
For her personal life, her life outside the office, she had found a way out such as might, perhaps, solve the question of loneliness for the thousands of other empty-hearted,fruitlessly aging office-women. Not love of a man. She would rather die than have Schwirtz’s clumsy feet trampling her reserve again. And the pleasant men who came to her flat were—just pleasant. No, she told herself, she did not need a man or man’s love. But a child’s love and presence she did need.
She was going to adopt a child. That was her way out.
She was thirty-four now, but by six of an afternoon she felt forty. Youth she would find—youth of a child’s laughter, and the healing of its downy sleep.
She took counsel with Mamie Magen (who immediately decided to adopt a child also, and praised Una as a discoverer) and with the good housekeeping women she knew at Crosshampton Harbor. She was going to be very careful. She would inspect a dozen different orphan-asylums.
Meanwhile her second secret was making life pregnant with interest:
She was going to change her job again—for the last time she hoped. She was going to be a creator, a real manager, unhampered by Mr. Truax’s unwillingness to accept women as independent workers and by the growing animosity of Mrs. Truax.
Una’s interest in the Year-Round Inn at Crosshampton Harbor, the results obtained by reasonably good meals and a little chintz, and her memory of the family hotel, had led her attention to the commercial possibilities of innkeeping.
She was convinced that, despite the ingenuity and care displayed by the managers of the great urban hotels and the clever resorts, no calling included more unimaginativeslackers than did innkeeping. She had heard traveling-men at Pemberton’s and at Truax & Fein’s complain of sour coffee and lumpy beds in the hotels of the smaller towns; of knives and forks that had to be wiped on the napkins before using; of shirt-sleeved proprietors who loafed within reach of the cuspidors while their wives tried to get the work done.
She began to read theHotel Newsand theHotel Bulletin, and she called on the manager of a supply-house for hotels.
She read in theBulletinof Bob Sidney, an ex-traveling-man, who, in partnership with a small capitalist, had started a syndicate of inns. He advertised: “The White Line Hotels. Fellow-drummers, when you see the White Line sign hung out, you know you’re in for good beds and good coffee.”
The idea seemed good to her. She fancied that traveling-men would go from one White Line Hotel to another. The hotels had been established in a dozen towns along the Pennsylvania Railroad, in Norristown, Reading, Williamsport, and others, and now Bob Sidney was promising to invade Ohio and Indiana. The blazed White Line across the continent caught Una’s growing commercial imagination. And she liked several of Mr. Sidney’s ideas: The hotels would wire ahead to others of the Line for accommodations for the traveler; and a man known to the Line could get credit at any of its houses, by being registered on identifying cards.
She decided to capture Mr. Sidney. She made plans.
In the spring she took a mysterious two weeks’ leave of absence and journeyed through New York State, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana. The woman who had quite recently regarded it as an adventure to go to Brooklyn was so absorbed in her Big Idea that she didn’t feel self-conscious even when she talked to men on the train.If they smacked their lips and obviously said to themselves, “Gee! this is easy—not a bad little dame,” she steered them into discussing hotels; what they wanted at hotels and didn’t get; what was their favorite hotel in towns in from fifteen hundred to forty thousand inhabitants, and precisely what details made it the favorite.
She stayed at two or three places a day for at least one meal—hotels in tiny towns she had never heard of, and in larger towns that were fumbling for metropolitanism. She sought out all the summer resorts that were open so early. She talked to travelers, men and women; to hack-drivers and to grocers supplying hotels; to proprietors and their wives; to clerks and waitresses and bell-boys, and unconsidered, observant porters. She read circulars and the catalogues of furniture establishments.
Finally, she visited each of Mr. Bob Sidney’s White Line Hotels. Aside from their arrangements for “accommodations” and credit, their superior cleanliness, good mattresses, and coffee with a real taste, she did not find them preferable to others. In their rows of cuspidors and shouldering desks, and barren offices hung with insurance calendars, and dining-rooms ornamented with portraits of decomposed ducks, they were typical of all the hotels she had seen.
On the train back to New York she formulated her suggestions for hotels, among which, in her own words, were the following:
“(1) Make the offices decent rooms—rem. living-room at Gray Wolf Lodge. Take out desks—guests to register and pay bills in small office off living-room—keep letters there, too. Not much room needed and can’t make pleasant room with miserable old ‘desk’ sticking out into it.
“(2) Cut out the cuspidors. Have special room wheredrummers can play cards and tell stories andspit. Allow smoking in ‘office,’ but make it pleasant. Rem. chintz and wicker chairs at $3 each. Small round tables with reading-lamps. Maybe fireplace.
“(3) Better pastry and soup and keep coffee up to standard. One surprise in each meal—for example, novel form of eggs, good salad, or canned lobster cocktail. Rem. the same old pork, beans, cornbeef, steak, deadly cold boiled potato everywhere I went.
“(4) More attractive dining-rooms. Esp. small tables for 2 and 4. Cater more to local customers with à la carte menus—not long but good.
“(5) Women housekeepers and pay’em good.
“(6) Hygienic kitchens and advertise’em.
“(7) Train employees, as rem. trav. man told me United Cigar Stores do.
“(8) Better accom. for women. Rem. several traveling men’s wives told me they would go on many trips w. husbands if they could get decent hotels in all these towns.
“(9) Not ape N. Y. hotels. Nix on gilt and palms and marble. But clean and tasty food, and don’t have things like desks just because most hotels do.”