“Mr. Fenger will see you now.” Mr. Fenger, general manager, had been
a long time about it. This heel-cooling experience was new to Fanny
Brandeis. It had always been her privilege to keep others waiting.
Still, she felt no resentment as she sat in Michael Fenger's outer
office. For as she sat there, waiting, she was getting a distinct
impression of this unseen man whose voice she could just hear as he
talked over the telephone in his inner office. It was characteristic of
Michael Fenger that his personality reached out and touched you before
you came into actual contact with the man. Fanny had heard of him long
before she came to Haynes-Cooper. He was the genie of that glittering
lamp. All through the gigantic plant (she had already met department
heads, buyers, merchandise managers) one heard his name, and felt the
impress of his mind:
“You'll have to see Mr. Fenger about that.”
“Yes,”--pointing to a new conveyor, perhaps,--“that has just been
installed. It's a great help to us. Doubles our shipping-room
efficiency. We used to use baskets, pulled by a rope. It's Mr. Fenger's
idea.”
Efficiency, efficiency, efficiency. Fenger had made it a slogan in the
Haynes-Cooper plant long before the German nation forced it into our
everyday vocabulary. Michael Fenger was System. He could take a muddle
of orders, a jungle of unfilled contracts, a horde of incompetent
workers, and of them make a smooth-running and effective unit.
Untangling snarls was his pastime. Esprit de corps was his shibboleth.
Order and management his idols. And his war-cry was “Results!”
It was eleven o'clock when Fanny came into his outer office. The very
atmosphere was vibrant with his personality. There hung about the place
an air of repressed expectancy. The room was electrically charged with
the high-voltage of the man in the inner office. His secretary was a
spare, middle-aged, anxious-looking woman in snuff-brown and spectacles;
his stenographer a blond young man, also spectacled and anxious; his
office boy a stern youth in knickers, who bore no relation to the
slangy, gum-chewing, redheaded office boy of the comic sections.
The low-pitched, high-powered voice went on inside, talking over the
long-distance telephone. Fenger was the kind of man who is always
talking to New York when he is in Chicago, and to Chicago when he is in
New York. Trains with the word Limited after them were invented for
him and his type. A buzzer sounded. It galvanized the office boy into
instant action. It brought the anxious-looking stenographer to the
doorway, notebook in hand, ready. It sent the lean secretary out, and up
to Fanny.
“Temper,” said Fanny, to herself, “or horribly nervous and high-keyed.
They jump like a set of puppets on a string.”
It was then that the lean secretary had said, “Mr. Fenger will see you
now.”
Fanny was aware of a pleasant little tingle of excitement. She entered
the inner office.
It was characteristic of Michael Fenger that he employed no cheap
tricks. He was not writing as Fanny Brandeis came in. He was not
telephoning. He was not doing anything but standing at his desk, waiting
for Fanny Brandeis. As she came in he looked at her, through her, and
she seemed to feel her mental processes laid open to him as a skilled
surgeon cuts through skin and flesh and fat, to lay bare the muscles
and nerves and vital organs beneath. He put out his hand. Fanny extended
hers. They met in a silent grip. It was like a meeting between two
men. Even as he indexed her, Fanny's alert mind was busy docketing,
numbering, cataloguing him. They had in common a certain force, a
driving power. Fanny seated herself opposite him, in obedience to a
gesture. He crossed his legs comfortably and sat back in his big desk
chair. A great-bodied man, with powerful square shoulders, a long head,
a rugged crest of a nose--the kind you see on the type of Englishman
who has the imagination and initiative to go to Canada, or Australia, or
America. He wore spectacles, not the fashionable horn-rimmed sort, but
the kind with gold ear pieces. They were becoming, and gave a certain
humanness to a face that otherwise would have been too rugged, too
strong. A man of forty-five, perhaps.
He spoke first. “You're younger than I thought.”
“So are you.”
“Old inside.”
“So am I.”
He uncrossed his legs, leaned forward, folded his arms on the desk.
“You've been through the plant, Miss Brandeis?”
“Yes. Twice. Once with a regular tourist party. And once with the
special guide.” “Good. Go through the plant whenever you can. Don't
stick to your own department. It narrows one.” He paused a moment. “Did
you think that this opportunity to come to Haynes-Cooper, as assistant
to the infants' wear department buyer was just a piece of luck,
augmented by a little pulling on your part?”
“Yes.”
“It wasn't. You were carefully picked by me, and I don't expect to find
I've made a mistake. I suppose you know very little about buying and
selling infants' wear?”
“Less than about almost any other article in the world--at least, in the
department store, or mail order world.”
“I thought so. And it doesn't matter. I pretty well know your history,
which means that I know your training. You're young; you're ambitious,
you're experienced; you're imaginative. There's no length you can't go,
with these. It just depends on how farsighted your mental vision is.
Now listen, Miss Brandeis: I'm not going to talk to you in millions. The
guides do enough of that. But you know we do buy and sell in terms of
millions, don't you? Well, our infants' wear department isn't helping
to roll up the millions; and it ought to, because there are millions of
babies born every year, and the golden-spoon kind are in the minority.
I've decided that that department needs a woman, your kind of woman.
Now, as a rule, I never employ a woman when I can use a man. There's
only one other woman filling a really important position in the
merchandise end of this business. That's Ella Monahan, head of the glove
department, and she's a genius. She is a woman who is limited in every
other respect--just average; but she knows glove materials in a way
that's uncanny. I'd rather have a man in her place; but I don't happen
to know any men glove-geniuses. Tell me, what do you think of that
etching?”
Fanny tried--and successfully--not to show the jolt her mind had
received as she turned to look at the picture to which his finger
pointed. She got up and strolled over to it, and she was glad her suit
fitted and hung as it did in the back.
“I don't like it particularly. I like it less than any other etching you
have here.” The walls were hung with them. “Of course you understand I
know nothing about them. But it's too flowery, isn't it, to be good?
Too many lines. Like a writer who spoils his effect by using too many
words.”
Fenger came over and stood beside her, staring at the black and white
and gray thing in its frame. “I felt that way, too.” He stared down at
her, then. “Jew?” he asked.
A breathless instant. “No,” said Fanny Brandeis.
Michael Fenger smiled for the first time. Fanny Brandeis would have
given everything she had, everything she hoped to be, to be able to
take back that monosyllable. She was gripped with horror at what she had
done. She had spoken almost mechanically. And yet that monosyllable must
have been the fruit of all these months of inward struggle and thought.
“Now I begin to understand you,” Fenger went on. “You've decided to
lop off all the excrescences, eh? Well, I can't say that I blame you. A
woman in business is handicapped enough by the very fact of her sex.” He
stared at her again. “Too bad you're so pretty.”
“I'm not!” said Fanny hotly, like a school-girl.
“That's a thing that can't be argued, child. Beauty's subjective, you
know.”
“I don't see what difference it makes, anyway.”
“Oh, yes, you do.” He stopped. “Or perhaps you don't, after all. I
forget how young you are. Well, now, Miss Brandeis, you and your woman's
mind, and your masculine business experience and sense are to be turned
loose on our infants' wear department. The buyer, Mr. Slosson, is going
to resent you. Naturally. I don't know whether we'll get results from
you in a month, or six months or a year. Or ever. But something tells me
we're going to get them. You've lived in a small town most of your life.
And we want that small-town viewpoint. D'you think you've got it?”
Fanny was on her own ground here. “If knowing the Wisconsin small-town
woman, and the Wisconsin farmer woman--and man too, for that
matter--means knowing the Oregon, and Wyoming, and Pennsylvania, and
Iowa people of the same class, then I've got it.”
“Good!” Michael Fenger stood up. “I'm not going to load you down with
instructions, or advice. I think I'll let you grope your own way around,
and bump your head a few times. Then you'll learn where the low places
are. And, Miss Brandeis, remember that suggestions are welcome in this
plant. We take suggestions all the way from the elevator starter to the
president.” His tone was kindly, but not hopeful.
Fanny was standing too, her mental eye on the door. But now she turned
to face him squarely.
“Do you mean that?”
“Absolutely.”
“Well, then, I've one to make. Your stock boys and stock girls walk
miles and miles every day, on every floor of this fifteen-story
building. I watched them yesterday, filling up the bins, carrying
orders, covering those enormous distances from one bin to another, up
one aisle and down the next, to the office, back again. Your floors are
concrete, or cement, or some such mixture, aren't they? I just happened
to think of the boy who used to deliver our paper on Norris Street, in
Winnebago, Wisconsin. He covered his route on roller skates. It saved
him an hour. Why don't you put roller skates on your stock boys and
girls?”
Fenger stared at her. You could almost hear that mind of his
working, like a thing on ball bearings. “Roller skates.” It wasn't an
exclamation. It was a decision. He pressed a buzzer--the snuff-brown
secretary buzzer. “Tell Clancy I want him. Now.” He had not glanced
up, or taken his eyes from Fanny. She was aware of feeling a little
uncomfortable, but elated, too. She moved toward the door. Fenger stood
at his desk. “Wait a minute.” Fanny waited. Still Fenger did not speak.
Finally, “I suppose you know you've earned six months' salary in the
last five minutes.”
Fanny eyed him coolly. “Considering the number of your stock force, the
time, energy, and labor saved, including wear and tear on department
heads and their assistants, I should say that was a conservative
statement.” And she nodded pleasantly, and left him.
Two days later every stock clerk in the vast plant was equipped with
light-weight roller skates. They made a sort of carnival of it at first.
There were some spills, too, going around corners, and a little too much
hilarity. That wore off in a week. In two weeks their roller skates were
part of them; just shop labor-savers. The report presented to Fenger was
this: Time and energy saved, fifty-five per cent; stock staff decreased
by one third. The picturesqueness of it, the almost ludicrous simplicity
of the idea appealed to the entire plant. It tickled the humor sense in
every one of the ten thousand employees in that vast organization. In
the first week of her association with Haynes-Cooper Fanny Brandeis was
actually more widely known than men who had worked there for years. The
president, Nathan Haynes himself, sent for her, chuckling.
Nathan Haynes--but then, why stop for him? Nathan Haynes had been
swallowed, long ago, by this monster plant that he himself had
innocently created. You must have visited it, this Gargantuan thing that
sprawls its length in the very center of Chicago, the giant son of
a surprised father. It is one of the city's show places, like the
stockyards, the Art Institute, and Field's. Fifteen years before,
a building had been erected to accommodate a prosperous mail order
business. It had been built large and roomy, with plenty of seams,
planned amply, it was thought, to allow the boy to grow. It would do for
twenty-five years, surely. In ten years Haynes-Cooper was bursting its
seams. In twelve it was shamelessly naked, its arms and legs
sticking out of its inadequate garments. New red brick buildings
another--another. Five stories added to this one, six stories to that,
a new fifteen story merchandise building.
The firm began to talk in tens of millions. Its stock became gilt-edged,
unattainable. Lucky ones who had bought of it diffidently, discreetly,
with modest visions of four and a half per cent in their unimaginative
minds, saw their dividends doubling, trebling, quadrupling, finally
soaring gymnastically beyond all reason. Listen to the old guide who (at
fifteen a week) takes groups of awed visitors through the great plant.
How he juggles figures; how grandly they roll off his tongue. How glib
he is with Nathan Haynes's millions.
“This, ladies and gentlemen, is our mail department. From two thousand
to twenty-five hundred pounds of mail, comprising over one hundred
thousand letters, are received here every day. Yes, madam, I said every
day. About half of these letters are orders. Last year the banking
department counted one hundred and thirty millions of dollars. One
hundred and thirty millions!” He stands there in his ill-fitting coat,
and his star, and rubs one bony hand over the other.
“Dear me!” says a lady tourist from Idaho, rather inadequately. And yet,
not so inadequately. What exclamation is there, please, that fits a sum
like one hundred and thirty millions of anything?
Fanny Brandeis, fresh from Winnebago, Wisconsin, slipped into the great
scheme of things at the Haynes-Cooper plant like part of a perfectly
planned blue print. It was as though she had been thought out and
shaped for this particular corner. And the reason for it was, primarily,
Winnebago, Wisconsin. For Haynes-Cooper grew and thrived on just such
towns, with their surrounding farms and villages. Haynes-Cooper had
their fingers on the pulse and heart of the country as did no other
industry. They were close, close. When rugs began to take the place of
ingrain carpets it was Haynes-Cooper who first sensed the change. Oh,
they had had them in New York years before, certainly. But after all,
it isn't New York's artistic progress that shows the development of this
nation. It is the thing they are thinking, and doing, and learning in
Backwash, Nebraska, that marks time for these United States. There may
be a certain significance in the announcement that New York has dropped
the Russian craze and has gone in for that quaint Chinese stuff. My
dear, it makes the loveliest hangings and decorations. When Fifth
Avenue takes down its filet lace and eyelet embroidered curtains, and
substitutes severe shantung and chaste net, there is little in the
act to revolutionize industry, or stir the art-world. But when the
Haynes-Cooper company, by referring to its inventory ledgers, learns
that it is selling more Alma Gluck than Harry Lauder records; when its
statistics show that Tchaikowsky is going better than Irving Berlin,
something epochal is happening in the musical progress of a nation. And
when the orders from Noose Gulch, Nevada, are for those plain dimity
curtains instead of the cheap and gaudy Nottingham atrocities, there is
conveyed to the mind a fact of immense, of overwhelming significance.
The country has taken a step toward civilization and good taste.
So. You have a skeleton sketch of Haynes-Cooper, whose feelers reach the
remotest dugout in the Yukon, the most isolated cabin in the Rockies,
the loneliest ranch-house in Wyoming; the Montana mining shack, the
bleak Maine farm, the plantation in Virginia.
And the man who had so innocently put life into this monster? A
plumpish, kindly-faced man; a bewildered, gentle, unimaginative and
somewhat frightened man, fresh-cheeked, eye-glassed. In his suite of
offices in the new Administration Building--built two years ago--marble
and oak throughout--twelve stories, and we're adding three already;
offices all two-toned rugs, and leather upholstery, with dim, rich,
brown-toned Dutch masterpieces on the walls, he sat helpless and
defenseless while the torrent of millions rushed, and swirled, and
foamed about him. I think he had fancied, fifteen years ago, that he
would some day be a fairly prosperous man; not rich, as riches are
counted nowadays, but with a comfortable number of tens of thousands
tucked away. Two or three hundred thousand; perhaps five hundred
thousand!--perhaps a--but, nonsense! Nonsense!
And then the thing had started. It was as when a man idly throws a
pebble into a chasm, or shoves a bit of ice with the toe of his boot,
and starts a snow-slide that grows as it goes. He had started this
avalanche of money, and now it rushed on of its own momentum, plunging,
rolling, leaping, crashing, and as it swept on it gathered rocks, trees,
stones, houses, everything that lay in its way. It was beyond the power
of human hand to stop this tumbling, roaring slide. In the midst of it
sat Nathan Haynes, deafened, stunned, terrified at the immensity of what
he had done.
He began giving away huge sums, incredible sums. It piled up faster than
he could give it away. And so he sat there in the office hung with the
dim old masterpieces, and tried to keep simple, tried to keep sane, with
that austerity that only mad wealth can afford--or bitter poverty. He
caused the land about the plant to be laid out in sunken gardens and
baseball fields and tennis courts, so that one approached this monster
of commerce through enchanted grounds, glowing with tulips and heady
hyacinths in spring, with roses in June, blazing with salvia and
golden-glow and asters in autumn. There was something apologetic about
these grounds.
This, then, was the environment that Fanny Brandeis had chosen. On the
face of things you would have said she had chosen well. The inspiration
of the roller skates had not been merely a lucky flash. That idea had
been part of the consistent whole. Her mind was her mother's mind raised
to the nth power, and enhanced by the genius she was trying to crush.
Refusing to die, it found expression in a hundred brilliant plans, of
which the roller skate idea was only one.
Fanny had reached Chicago on Sunday. She had entered the city as a
queen enters her domain, authoritatively, with no fear upon her, no
trepidation, no doubts. She had gone at once to the Mendota Hotel,
on Michigan Avenue, up-town, away from the roar of the loop. It was a
residential hotel, very quiet, decidedly luxurious. She had no idea of
making it her home. But she would stay there until she could find an
apartment that was small, bright, near the lake, and yet within fairly
reasonable transportation facilities for her work. Her room was on the
ninth floor, not on the Michigan Avenue side, but east, overlooking the
lake. She spent hours at the windows, fascinated by the stone and steel
city that lay just below with the incredible blue of the sail-dotted
lake beyond, and at night, with the lights spangling the velvety
blackness, the flaring blaze of Thirty-first Street's chop-suey
restaurants and moving picture houses at the right; and far, far away,
the red and white eye of the lighthouse winking, blinking, winking,
blinking, the rumble and clank of a flat-wheeled Indiana avenue car, the
sound of high laughter and a snatch of song that came faintly up to her
from the speeding car of some midnight joy-riders!
But all this had to do with her other side. It had no bearing on
Haynes-Cooper, and business. Business! That was it. She had trained
herself for it, like an athlete. Eight hours of sleep. A cold plunge on
arising. Sane food. Long walks. There was something terrible about her
earnestness.
On Monday she presented herself at the Haynes-Cooper plant. Monday and
Tuesday were spent in going over the great works. It was an exhausting
process, but fascinating beyond belief. It was on Wednesday that she had
been summoned for the talk with Michael Fenger. Thursday morning she was
at her desk at eight-thirty. It was an obscure desk, in a dingy corner
of the infants' wear department, the black sheep section of the great
plant. Her very presence in that corner seemed to change it magically.
You must remember how young she was, how healthy, how vigorous, with the
freshness of the small town still upon her. It was health and youth,
and vigor that gave that gloss to her hair (conscientious brushing too,
perhaps), that color to her cheeks and lips, that brightness to her
eyes. But crafty art and her dramatic instinct were responsible for the
tailored severity of her costume, for the whiteness of her blouse, the
trim common-sense expensiveness of her shoes and hat and gloves.
Slosson, buyer and head of the department, came in at nine. Fanny rose
to greet him. She felt a little sorry for Slosson. In her mind she
already knew him for a doomed man.
“Well, well!”--he was the kind of person who would say, well,
well!--“You're bright and early, Miss--ah--”
“Brandeis.”
“Yes, certainly; Miss Brandeis. Well, nothing like making a good start.”
“I wanted to go through the department by myself,” said Fanny. “The
shelves and bins, and the numbering system. I see that your new
maternity dresses have just come in.”
“Oh, yes. How do you like them?”
“I think they're unnecessarily hideous, Mr. Slosson.”
“My dear young lady, a plain garment is what they want. Unnoticeable.”
“Unnoticeable, yes; but becoming. At such a time a woman is at her
worst. If she can get it, she at least wants a dress that doesn't add to
her unattractiveness.”
“Let me see--you are not--ah--married, I believe, Miss Brandeis?”
“No.”
“I am. Three children. All girls.” He passed a nervous hand over his
head, rumpling his hair a little. “An expensive proposition, let me tell
you, three girls. But there's very little I don't know about babies, as
you may imagine.”
But there settled over Fanny Brandeis' face the mask of hardness that
was so often to transform it.
The morning mail was in--the day's biggest grist, deluge of it, a flood.
Buyer and assistant buyer never saw the actual letters, or attended to
their enclosed orders. It was only the unusual letter, the complaint or
protest that reached their desk. Hundreds of hands downstairs sorted,
stamped, indexed, filed, after the letter-opening machines had slit the
envelopes. Those letter-openers! Fanny had hung over them, enthralled.
The unopened envelopes were fed into them. Flip! Zip! Flip! Out! Opened!
Faster than eye could follow. It was uncanny. It was, somehow, humorous,
like the clever antics of a trained dog. You could not believe that this
little machine actually performed what your eyes beheld. Two years later
they installed the sand-paper letter-opener, marvel of simplicity.
It made the old machine seem cumbersome and slow. Guided by Izzy, the
expert, its rough tongue was capable of licking open six hundred and
fifty letters a minute.
Ten minutes after the mail came in the orders were being filled; bins,
shelves, warehouses, were emptying their contents. Up and down the
aisles went the stock clerks; into the conveyors went the bundles, down
the great spiral bundle chute, into the shipping room, out by mail, by
express, by freight. This leghorn hat for a Nebraska country belle; a
tombstone for a rancher's wife; a plow, brave in its red paint; coffee,
tea, tinned fruit, bound for Alaska; lace, muslin, sheeting, toweling,
all intended for the coarse trousseau of a Georgia bride.
It was not remarkable that Fanny Brandeis fitted into this scheme of
things. For years she had ministered to the wants of just this type of
person. The letters she saw at Haynes-Cooper's read exactly as customers
had worded their wants at Brandeis' Bazaar. The magnitude of the thing
thrilled her, the endless possibilities of her own position.
During the first two months of her work there she was as unaggressive
as possible. She opened the very pores of her mind and absorbed every
detail of her department. But she said little, followed Slosson's
instructions in her position as assistant buyer, and suggested no
changes. Slosson's wrinkle of anxiety smoothed itself away, and his
manner became patronizingly authoritative again. Fanny seemed to have
become part of the routine of the place. Fenger did not send for her.
June and July were insufferably hot. Fanny seemed to thrive, to expand
like a flower in the heat, when others wilted and shriveled. The
spring catalogue was to be made up in October, as always, six months
in advance. The first week in August Fanny asked for an interview with
Fenger. Slosson was to be there. At ten o'clock she entered Fenger's
inner office. He was telephoning--something about dinner at the Union
League Club. His voice was suave, his tone well modulated, his accent
correct, his English faultless. And yet Fanny Brandeis, studying the
etchings on his wall, her back turned to him, smiled to herself. The
voice, the tone, the accent, the English, did not ring true They were
acquired graces, exquisite imitations of the real thing. Fanny Brandeis
knew. She was playing the same game herself. She understood this man
now, after two months in the Haynes-Cooper plant. These marvelous
examples of the etcher's art, for example. They were the struggle for
expression of a man whose youth had been bare of such things. His love
for them was much the same as that which impels the new made millionaire
to buy rare pictures, rich hangings, tapestries, rugs, not so much
in the desire to impress the world with his wealth as to satisfy the
craving for beauty, the longing to possess that which is exquisite, and
fine, and almost unobtainable. You have seen how a woman, long denied
luxuries, feeds her starved senses on soft silken things, on laces and
gleaming jewels, for pure sensuous delight in their feel and look.
Thus Fanny mused as she eyed these treasures--grim, deft, repressed
things, done with that economy of line which is the test of the etcher's
art.
Fenger hung up the receiver.
“So it's taken you two months, Miss Brandeis. I was awfully afraid, from
the start you made, that you'd be back here in a week, bursting with
ideas.”
Fanny smiled, appreciatively. He had come very near the truth. “I had to
use all my self-control, that first week. After that it wasn't so hard.”
Fenger's eyes narrowed upon her. “Pretty sure of yourself, aren't you?”
“Yes,” said Fanny. She came over to his desk.
“I wish we needn't have Mr. Slosson here this morning. After all, he's
been here for years, and I'm practically an upstart. He's so much older,
too. I--I hate to hurt him. I wish you'd--”
But Fenger shook his head. “Slosson's due now. And he has got to take
his medicine. This is business, Miss Brandeis. You ought to know what
that means. For that matter, it may be that you haven't hit upon an
idea. In that case, Slosson would have the laugh, wouldn't he?”
Slosson entered at that moment. And there was a chip on his shoulder.
It was evident in the way he bristled, in the way he seated himself.
His fingers drummed his knees. He was like a testy, hum-ha stage father
dealing with a willful child.
Fenger took out his watch.
“Now, Miss Brandeis.”
Fanny took a chair facing the two men, and crossed her trim blue serge
knees, and folded her hands in her lap. A deep pink glowed in her
cheeks. Her eyes were very bright. All the Molly Brandeis in her was
at the surface, sparkling there. And she looked almost insultingly
youthful.
“You--you want me to talk?”
“We want you to talk. We have time for just three-quarters of an hour of
uninterrupted conversation. If you've got anything to say you ought to
say it in that time. Now, Miss Brandeis, what's the trouble with the
Haynes-Cooper infants' wear department?”