CHAPTER XVIII

So long as Mr. Schwirtz contrived to keep his position in the retail paint-store, Una was busy at home, copying doc.u.ments and specifications and form-letters for a stenographic agency and trying to make a science of quick and careful housework.

She suspected that, now he had a little money again, Mr. Schwirtz was being riotous with other women--as riotous as one can be in New York on eighteen dollars a week, with debts and a wife to interfere with his manly pleasures. But she did not care; she was getting ready to break the coc.o.o.n, and its grubbiness didn't much matter.

s.e.x meant nothing between them now. She did not believe that she would ever be in love again, in any phase, n.o.ble or crude. While she aspired and worked she lived like a nun in a cell. And now that she had something to do, she could be sorry for him. She made the best possible dinners for him on their gas-range. She realized--sometimes, not often, for she was not a contemplative seer, but a battered woman--that their marriage had been as unfair to him as it was to her. In small-town boy-gang talks behind barns, in clerkly confidences as a young man, in the chatter of smoking-cars and provincial hotel offices, he had been trained to know only two kinds of women, both very complaisant to smart live-wires: The bouncing la.s.sies who laughed and kissed and would share with a man his pleasures, such as poker and c.o.c.ktails, and rapid motoring to no place in particular; and the meek, attentive, "refined"

kind, the wives and mothers who cared for a man and admired him and believed whatever he told them about his business.

Una was of neither sort for him, though for Walter Babson she might have been quite of the latter kind. Mr. Schwirtz could not understand her, and she was as sorry for him as was compatible with a decided desire to divorce him and wash off the stain of his damp, pulpy fingers with the water of life.

But she stayed home, and washed and cooked, and earned money for him--till he lost his retail-store position by getting drunk and being haughty to a customer.

Then the chrysalis burst and Una was free again. Free to labor, to endeavor--to die, perhaps, but to die clean. To quest and meet whatever surprises life might hold.

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She couldn't go back to Troy Wilkins's, nor to Mr. S. Herbert Ross and the little Pemberton stenographers who had enviously seen her go off to be married. But she made a real business of looking for a job. While Mr.

Schwirtz stayed home and slept and got mental bed-sores and drank himself to death--rather too slowly--on another fifty dollars which he had borrowed after a Verdun campaign, Una was joyous to be out early, looking over advertis.e.m.e.nts, visiting typewriter companies' employment agencies.

She was slow in getting work because she wanted twenty dollars a week.

She knew that any firm taking her at this wage would respect her far more than if she was an easy purchase.

Work was slow to come, and she, who had always been so securely above the rank of paupers who submit to the dreadful surgery of charity, became afraid. She went at last to Mamie Magen.

Mamie was now the executive secretary of the Hebrew Young Women's Professional Union. She seemed to be a personage. In her office she had a secretary who spoke of her with adoring awe, and when Una said that she was a personal friend of Miss Magen the secretary cried: "Oh, then perhaps you'd like to go to her apartment, at ---- Washington Place.

She's almost always home for tea at five."

The small, tired-looking Una, a business woman again, in her old tailor-made and a new, small hat, walked longingly toward Washington Place and tea.

In her seven years in New York she had never known anybody except S.

Herbert Ross who took tea as a regular function. It meant to her the gentlest of all forms of distinction, more appealing than riding in motors or going to the opera. That Mamie Magen had, during Una's own experience, evolved from a Home Club girl to an executive who had tea at her apartment every afternoon was inspiriting; meeting her an adventure.

An apartment of buff-colored walls and not bad prints was Mamie's, small, but smooth; and taking tea in a manner which seemed to Una impressively suave were the insiders of the young charity-workers'

circle. But Mamie's uncouth face and eyes of molten heroism stood out among them all, and she hobbled over to Una and kissed her. When the cl.u.s.ter had thinned, she got Una aside and invited her to the "Southern Kitchen," on Washington Square.

Una did not speak of her husband. "I want to get on the job again, and I wish you'd help me. I want something at twenty a week (I'm more than worth it) and a chance to really climb," was all she said, and Mamie nodded.

And so they talked of Mrs. Harriet Fike of the Home Club, of dreams and work and the fight for suffrage. Una's marriage slipped away--she was ardent and unstained again.

Mamie's nod was worth months of Mr. Schwirtz's profuse masculine boasts.

Within ten days, Mamie's friend, Mr. Fein, of Truax & Fein, the real-estate people, sent for Una and introduced her to Mr. Daniel T.

Truax. She was told to come to work on the following Monday as Mr.

Truax's secretary, at twenty-one dollars a week.

She went home defiant, determined to force her husband to let her take the job.... She didn't need to use force. He--slippered and drowsy by the window--said: "That's fine; that'll keep us going till my big job breaks. I'll hear about it by next week, _anyway_. Then, in three-four weeks you can kick Truax & Fein in the face and beat it. Say, girlie, that's fine! Say, tell you what I'll do. Let's have a little party to celebrate. I'll chase out and rush a growler of beer and some wienies--"

"No! I've got to go out again."

"Can't you stop just long enough to have a little celebration? I--I been kind of lonely last few days, little sister. You been away so much, and I'm too broke to go out and look up the boys now."

He was peering at her with a real wistfulness, but in the memory of Mamie Magen, the lame woman of the golden heart, Una could not endure his cackling enthusiasm about the job he would probably never get.

"No, I'm sorry--" she said, and closed the door. From the walk she saw him puzzled and anxious at the window. His face was becoming so ruddy and fatuous and babyish. She was sorry for him--but she was not big enough to do anything about it. Her sorrow was like sympathy for a mangy alley cat which she could not take home.

She had no place to go. She walked for hours, planlessly, and dined at a bakery and lunch-room in Harlem. Sometimes she felt homeless, and always she was prosaically footsore, but now and then came the understanding that she again had a chance.

CHAPTER XIX

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 amus.e.m.e.nt 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-tw.a.n.ging 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 vesper benediction, 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 s.p.a.ces 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 skysc.r.a.pers 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 s.p.a.ces 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 no vast 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 h.e.l.l!" 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, "h.e.l.l!"...

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.

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The mist of newness had pa.s.sed, 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.