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 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 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 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 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.
§ 2
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 white at 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
Simplicity and 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 reigning among 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 particular _moment_--
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.