The Job Part 35

Fein.

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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 is _safety_--a two-family house on a stupid street in Flatbush as a reward for being industrious. Doesn't matter whether they _enjoy_ living there, if they're just secure. And you do know--Mr. Truax doesn't, but you 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 their _present_ salaries 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 s.h.i.+ft 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 fis.h.i.+ng 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 G.o.ds."

"No, of course it doesn't. But people in authority always do 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 the _Weltschmertz_, 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 gus.h.i.+ngly happy to be hearing the opportunist melodies of "Il Trovatore" beside him.

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The Merryton Realty Company had failed, and Truax & Fein were offered the small development property of Crosshampton Hill Gardens at so convenient a price that they 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-bra.s.s-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 cla.s.sified 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."

CHAPTER XXII

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 Sh.o.r.e" 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 winter months, 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 c.o.c.ktail-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 furnis.h.i.+ng 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 a.s.surance, 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.

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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 good little 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 comrades.h.i.+p 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 a.s.sistant 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.

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