Not as priest or soldier or judge does youth seek honor to-day, but as a man of offices. The business subaltern, charming and gallant as the jungle-gallopers of Kipling, drills files, not of troops, but of correspondence. The artist plays the keys, not of pianos, but of typewriters. Desks, not decks; courts of office-buildings, not of palaces--these are the stuff of our latter-day drama. Not through wolf-haunted forests nor purple canons, but through tiled hallways and elevators move our heroes of to-day.

And our heroine is important not because she is an Amazon or a Ramona, but because she is representative of some millions of women in business, and because, in a vague but undiscouraged way, she keeps on inquiring what women in business can do to make human their existence of loveless routine.

- 4

Una spent much of her time in copying over and over--a hundred times, two hundred times--form-letters soliciting advertising, letters too personal in appearance to be multigraphed. She had lists of manufacturers of motor-car accessories, of makers of lubricating oils, of distributors of ball-bearings and speedometers and springs and carburetors and compositions for water-proofing automobile tops.

Sometimes she was requisitioned by the editorial department to copy in form legible for the printer the rough items sent in by outsiders for publication in the _Gazette_. Una, like most people of Panama, had believed that there was something artistic about the office of any publication. One would see editors--wonderful men like grand dukes, p.r.o.ne to lunch with the President. But there was nothing artistic about the editorial office of the _Gazette_--several young men in shirt-sleeves and green celluloid eye-shades, very slangy and pipe-smelly, and an older man with unpressed trousers and ragged mustache. Nor was there anything literary in the things that Una copied for the editorial department; just painfully handwritten accounts of the meeting of the Southeastern Iowa Auto-dealers' a.s.sociation; or boasts about the increased sales of Roadeater Tires, a page originally smartly typed, but cut and marked up by the editors.

Lists and letters and items, over and over; sitting at her typewriter till her shoulder-blades ached and she had to shut her eyes to the blur of the keys. The racket of office noises all day. The three-o'clock hour when she felt that she simply could not endure the mill till five o'clock. No interest in anything she wrote. Then the blessed hour of release, the stretching of cramped legs, and the blind creeping to the Subway, the crush in the train, and home to comfort the mother who had been lonely all day.

Such was Una's routine in these early months of 1906. After the novelty of the first week it was all rigidly the same, except that distinct personalities began to emerge from the ma.s.s.

Especially the personality of Walter Babson.

- 5

Out of the mist of strange faces, blurred hordes of people who swaggered up the office aisle so knowingly, and grinned at her when she asked questions, individualities began to take form:

Miss Moynihan; the Jewish stenographer with the laughing lips and hot eyes; the four superior older girls in a corner, the still more superior girl lieutenant, and the office-manager, who was the least superior of all; the telephone-girl; the office-boys; Mr. S. Herbert Ross and his a.s.sistant; the managing editor; a motor magnate whose connection was mysterious; the owner, a courteous, silent, glancing man who was reported to be hard and "stingy."

Other people still remained unidentifiable to her, but the office appeared smaller and less formidable in a month. Out of each nine square feet of floor s.p.a.ce in the office a novel might have been made: the tale of the managing editor's neurotic wife; the tragedy of Chubby Hubbard, the stupid young editor who had been a college football star, then an automobile racer, then a failure. And indeed there was a whole novel, a story told and retold, in the girls' gossip about each of the men before whom they were so demure. But it was Walter Babson whom the girls most discussed and in whom Una found the most interest.

On her first day in the office she had been startled by an astounding young man who had come flying past her desk, with his coat off, his figured waistcoat half open, his red four-in-hand tie askew under a rolling soft collar. He had dashed up to the office-manager and demanded, "Say! Say! Nat! Got that Kokomobile description copied for me yet? Heh? Gawd! you're slow. Got a cigarette?" He went off, puffing out cigarette smoke, shaking his head and audibly muttering, "Slow bunch, werry." He seemed to be of Una's own age, or perhaps a year older--a slender young man with horn-rimmed eye-gla.s.ses, curly black hair, and a trickle of black mustache. His sleeves were rolled up to his elbow, and Una had a secret, shamed, shivering thrill in the contrast of the dead-white skin of his thin forearms with the long, thick, soft, black hairs matted over them. They seemed at once feminine and acidly male.

"Crazy idiot," she observed, apparently describing herself and the nervous young man together. But she knew that she wanted to see him again.

She discovered that he was p.r.o.ne to such violent appearances; that his name was Walter Babson; that he was one of the three desk editors under the managing editor; that the stenographers and office-boys alternately disapproved of him, because he went on sprees and borrowed money from anybody in sight, and adored him because he was democratically frank with them. He was at once a hero, clown, prodigal son, and preacher of honesty. It was variously said that he was a socialist, an anarchist, and a believer in an American monarchy, which he was reported as declaring would "give some color to this flat-faced province of a country." It was related that he had been "fresh" even to the owner, and had escaped discharge only by being the quickest worker in the office, the best handy man at turning motor statistics into lively news-stories.

Una saw that he liked to stand about, bawling to the quizzical S.

Herbert Ross that "this is a h.e.l.l of a shop to work in--rotten pay and no _esprit de corps_. I'd quit and free-lance if I could break in with fiction, but a rotten bunch of log-rollers have got the inside track with all the magazines and book-publishers."

"Ever try to write any fiction?" Una once heard S. Herbert retort.

"No, but Lord! any fool could write better stuff than they publish. It's all a freeze-out game; editors just accept stuff by their friends."

In one week Una heard Walter Babson make approximately the same a.s.sertions to three different men, and to whoever in the open office might care to listen and profit thereby. Then, apparently, he ceased to hear the call of literature, and he snorted at S. Herbert Ross's stodgy a.s.sistant that he was a wage-slave, and a fool not to form a clerks'

union. In a week or two he was literary again. He dashed down to the office-manager, poked a sheet of copy-paper at him, and yelped: "Say, Nat. Read that and tell me just what you think of it. I'm going to put some literary flavor into the _Gas-bag_ even if it does explode it.

Look--see. I've taken a boost for the Kells Karburetor--rotten lying boost it is, too--and turned it into this running verse, read it like prose, pleasant and easy to digest, especially beneficial to children and S. Herbert Souse, Sherbert Souse, I mean." He rapidly read an amazing lyric beginning, "Motorists, you hadn't better monkey with the carburetor, all the racers, all the swells, have equipped their cars with Kells. We are privileged to announce what will give the trade a jounce, that the floats have been improved like all motorists would have loved."

He broke off and shouted, "Punk last line, but I'll fix it up. Say, that'll get 'em all going, eh? Say, I bet the Kells people use it in bill-board ads. all over the country, and maybe sign my name. Ads., why say, it takes a literary guy to write ads., not a fat-headed commercialist like S. Charlie Hoss."

Two days later Una heard Babson come out and lament that the managing editor didn't like his masterpiece and was going to use the Kells Karburetor Kompany's original write-up. "That's what you get when you try to give the _Gas-bag_ some literary flavor--don't appreciate it!"

She would rather have despised him, except that he stopped by the office-boys' bench to pull their hair and tell them to read English dictionaries. And when Miss Moynihan looked dejected, Babson demanded of her, "What's trouble, girlie? Anybody I can lick for you? Glad to fire the owner, or anything. Haven't met you yet, but my name is Roosevelt, and I'm the new janitor," with a hundred other chuckling idiocies, till Miss Moynihan was happy again. Una warmed to his friendliness, like that of a tail-wagging little yellow pup.

And always she craved the touch of his dark, blunt, nervous hands.

Whenever he lighted a cigarette she was startled by his masculine way of putting out the match and jerking it away from him in one abrupt motion.... She had never studied male mannerisms before. To Miss Golden of Panama men had always been "the boys."

All this time Walter Babson had never spoken to her.

CHAPTER V

The office-manager came casually up to Una's desk and said, "You haven't taken any dictation yet, have you?"

"No, but," with urgent eagerness, "I'd like--I'm quite fast in stenography."

"Well, Mr. Babson, in the editorial department, wants to give some dictation and you might try--"

Una was so excited that she called herself a silly little fool. She seized her untouched note-book, her pencils sharpened like lances, and tried to appear a very mouse of modesty as she marched down the office to take her first real dictation, to begin her triumphant career.... And to have Walter Babson, the beloved fool, speak to her.

It was a cold shock to have to stand waiting behind Babson while he rummaged in his roll-top desk and apparently tried to pull out his hair.

He looked back at her and blurted, "Oh! You, Miss Golden? They said you'd take some dictation. Chase those blue-prints off that chair and sit down. Be ready in a sec."

While she sat on the edge of the chair Babson yanked out drawers, plunged his wriggling hands into folders, thrashed through a pile of papers and letters that over-flowed a wire basket, and even hauled a dictionary down from the top of the desk and hopefully peered inside the front cover. All the time he kept up comment at which Una smiled doubtfully, not quite sure whether it was meant for her or not:

"Now what the doggone doggonishness did I ever do with those doggone notes, anyway? I ask you, in the-- Here they-- Nope--"

At last he found inside a book on motor fuels the wad of copy-paper on which he had scrawled notes with a broad, soft pencil, and he began to dictate a short article on air-cooling. Una was terrified lest she be unable to keep up, but she had read recent numbers of the _Gazette_ thoroughly, she had practised the symbols for motor technologies, and she was not troubled by being watched. Indeed, Babson seemed to have enough to do in keeping his restless spirit from performing the dismaying feat of leaping straight out of his body. He leaned back in his revolving desk-chair with a complaining squawk from the spring, he closed his eyes, put his fingers together piously, then seized the chair-arms and held them, while he c.o.c.ked one eye open and squinted at a large alarm-clock on the desk. He sighed profoundly, bent forward, gazed at his ankle, and reached forward to scratch it. All this time he was dictating, now rapidly, now gurgling and grunting while he paused to find a word.

"Don't be so _nervous_!" Una wanted to scream at him, and she wanted to add, "You didn't ask my permission!" when he absently fumbled in a cigarette-box.

She didn't like Walter Babson, after all!

But he stopped after a rhapsody on the divine merits of an air-cooling system, clawed his billowing black hair, and sighed, "Sounds improbable, don't it? Must be true, though; it's going to appear in the _Gazette_, and that's the motor-dealer's bible. If you don't believe it, read the blurbs we publish about ourselves!" Then he solemnly winked at her and went on dictating.

When he had finished he demanded, "Ever take any dictation in this office before?"

"No, sir."

"Ever take any motor dictation at all?"

"No, sir."

"Then you'd better read that back to me. Your immejit boss--the office-manager--is all right, but the secretary of the company is always p.u.s.s.y-footing around, and if you're ever having any trouble with your stuff when old plush-ears is in sight, keep on typing fast, no matter what you put down. Now read me the dope."

It was approximately correct. He nodded, and, "Good work, little girl,"

he said. "You'll get along all right. You get my dictation better than that agitated antelope Miss Harman does, right now. That's all."

- 2

So far as anything connected with Walter Babson could be regular, Una became his regular stenographer, besides keeping up her copying. He was always rushing out, apologizing for troubling her, sitting on the edge of her desk, dictating a short letter, and advising her to try his latest brand of health food, which, this spring, was bran biscuits--probably combined with highb.a.l.l.s and too much coffee. The other stenographers winked at him, and he teased them about their coiffures and imaginary sweethearts.... For three days the women's coat-room boiled with giggles over Babson's declaration that Miss MacThrostle was engaged to a burglar, and was taking a correspondence course in engraving in order to decorate her poor dear husband's tools with birds and poetic mottoes.