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 Shore" 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 cocktail-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 furnishing 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 assurance, 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.
§ 2
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
comradeship 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 assistant
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.
§ 3
Una's interest in the Year-Round Inn at Crosshampton Harbor, the results
obtained by reasonably good meals and a little chintz, and her memory of
the family hotel, had led her attention to the commercial possibilities
of innkeeping.
She was convinced that, despite the ingenuity and care displayed by the
managers of the great urban hotels and the clever resorts, no calling
included more unimaginative slackers than did innkeeping. She had heard
traveling-men at Pemberton's and at Truax & Fein's complain of sour
coffee and lumpy beds in the hotels of the smaller towns; of knives and
forks that had to be wiped on the napkins before using; of shirt-sleeved
proprietors who loafed within reach of the cuspidors while their wives
tried to get the work done.
She began to read the _Hotel News_ and the _Hotel Bulletin_, and she
called on the manager of a supply-house for hotels.
She read in the _Bulletin_ of Bob Sidney, an ex-traveling-man, who, in
partnership with a small capitalist, had started a syndicate of inns. He
advertised: "The White Line Hotels. Fellow-drummers, when you see the
White Line sign hung out, you know you're in for good beds and good
coffee."
The idea seemed good to her. She fancied that traveling-men would go
from one White Line Hotel to another. The hotels had been established in
a dozen towns along the Pennsylvania Railroad, in Norristown, Reading,
Williamsport, and others, and now Bob Sidney was promising to invade
Ohio and Indiana. The blazed White Line across the continent caught
Una's growing commercial imagination. And she liked several of Mr.
Sidney's ideas: The hotels would wire ahead to others of the Line for
accommodations for the traveler; and a man known to the Line could get
credit at any of its houses, by being registered on identifying cards.
She decided to capture Mr. Sidney. She made plans.
In the spring she took a mysterious two weeks' leave of absence and
journeyed through New York State, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana. The
woman who had quite recently regarded it as an adventure to go to
Brooklyn was so absorbed in her Big Idea that she didn't feel
self-conscious even when she talked to men on the train. If they
smacked their lips and obviously said to themselves, "Gee! this is
easy--not a bad little dame," she steered them into discussing hotels;
what they wanted at hotels and didn't get; what was their favorite hotel
in towns in from fifteen hundred to forty thousand inhabitants, and
precisely what details made it the favorite.
She stayed at two or three places a day for at least one meal--hotels in
tiny towns she had never heard of, and in larger towns that were
fumbling for metropolitanism. She sought out all the summer resorts that
were open so early. She talked to travelers, men and women; to
hack-drivers and to grocers supplying hotels; to proprietors and their
wives; to clerks and waitresses and bell-boys, and unconsidered,
observant porters. She read circulars and the catalogues of furniture
establishments.
Finally, she visited each of Mr. Bob Sidney's White Line Hotels. Aside
from their arrangements for "accommodations" and credit, their superior
cleanliness, good mattresses, and coffee with a real taste, she did not
find them preferable to others. In their rows of cuspidors and
shouldering desks, and barren offices hung with insurance calendars, and
dining-rooms ornamented with portraits of decomposed ducks, they were
typical of all the hotels she had seen.
On the train back to New York she formulated her suggestions for hotels,
among which, in her own words, were the following:
"(1) Make the offices decent rooms--rem. living-room at Gray Wolf Lodge.
Take out desks--guests to register and pay bills in small office off
living-room--keep letters there, too. Not much room needed and can't
make pleasant room with miserable old 'desk' sticking out into it.
"(2) Cut out the cuspidors. Have special room where drummers can play
cards and tell stories and _spit_. Allow smoking in 'office,' but make
it pleasant. Rem. chintz and wicker chairs at $3 each. Small round
tables with reading-lamps. Maybe fireplace.
"(3) Better pastry and soup and keep coffee up to standard. One surprise
in each meal--for example, novel form of eggs, good salad, or canned
lobster cocktail. Rem. the same old pork, beans, cornbeef, steak, deadly
cold boiled potato everywhere I went.
"(4) More attractive dining-rooms. Esp. small tables for 2 and 4. Cater
more to local customers with à la carte menus--not long but good.
"(5) Women housekeepers and pay 'em good.
"(6) Hygienic kitchens and advertise 'em.
"(7) Train employees, as rem. trav. man told me United Cigar Stores do.
"(8) Better accom. for women. Rem. several traveling men's wives told me
they would go on many trips w. husbands if they could get decent hotels
in all these towns.
"(9) Not ape N. Y. hotels. Nix on gilt and palms and marble. But clean
and tasty food, and don't have things like desks just because most
hotels do."
§ 4
Three hours after Una reached New York she telephoned to the object of
her secret commercial affections, the unconscious Mr. Robert Sidney, at
the White Line Hotels office. She was so excited that she took ten
minutes for calming herself before she telephoned. Every time she lifted
the receiver from its hook she thrust it back and mentally apologized to
the operator. But when she got the office and heard Mr. Bob Sidney's raw
voice shouting, "Yas? This 's Mist' Sidney," Una was very cool.
"This is Mrs. Schwirtz, realty salesman for Truax & Fein. I've just been
through Pennsylvania, and I stayed at your White Line Hotels. Of course
I have to be an expert on different sorts of accommodations, and I made
some notes on your hotels--some suggestions you might be glad to have.
If you care to, we might have lunch together to-morrow, and I'll give
you the suggestions."
"Why, uh, why--"
"Of course I'm rather busy with our new Long Island operations, so if
you have a date to-morrow, the matter can wait, but I thought you'd
better have the suggestions while they were fresh in my mind. But
perhaps I can lunch with you week after next, if--"
"No, no, let's make it to-morrow."
"Very well. Will you call for me here--Truax & Fein, Zodiac Building?"
Una arose at six-thirty next morning, to dress the part of the great
business woman, and before she went to the office she had her hair
waved.
Mr. Bob Sidney called for her. He was a simple, energetic soul, with a
derby on the back of his head, cheerful, clean-shaven, large-chinned,
hoarse-voiced, rapidly revolving a chewed cigar. She, the commonplace,
was highly evolved in comparison with Mr. Sidney, and there was no
nervousness in her as she marched out in a twenty-dollar hat and
casually said, "Let's go to the Waldorf--it's convenient and not at all
bad."
On the way over Mr. Sidney fairly massaged his head with his agitated
derby--cocked it over one eye and pushed it back to the crown of his
head--in his efforts to find out what and why was Mrs. Una Schwirtz. He
kept appraising her. It was obvious that he was trying to decide whether
this mysterious telephone correspondent was an available widow who had
heard of his charms. He finally stumbled over the grating beside the
Waldorf and bumped into the carriage-starter, and dropped his dead
cigar. But all the while Una steadily kept the conversation to the
vernal beauties of Pennsylvania.
Thanks to rice powder and the pride of a new hat, she looked cool and
adequate. But she was thinking all the time: "I never could keep up this
Beatrice-Joline pose with Mr. Fein or Mr. Ross. Poor Una, with them
she'd just have to blurt out that she wanted a job!"
She sailed up to a corner table by a window. The waiter gave the menu to
Mr. Sidney, but she held out her hand for it. "This is my lunch. I'm a
business woman, not just a woman," she said to Mr. Sidney; and she
rapidly ordered a lunch which was shockingly imitative of one which Mr.
Fein had once ordered for her.
"Prett' hot day for April," said Mr. Sidney.
"Yes.... Is the White Line going well?"
"Yump. Doing a land-office business."
"You're having trouble with your day clerk at Brockenfelt, I see."
"How juh know?"
"Oh--" She merely smiled.
"Well, that guy's a four-flush. Came to us from the New Willard, and to
hear him tell it you'd think he was the guy that put the "will" in the
Willard. But he's a credit-grabber, that's what he is. Makes me
think-- Nev' forget one time I was up in Boston and I met a coon porter
and he told me he was a friend of the president of the Pullman Company
and had persuaded him to put on steel cars. Bet a hat he believed it
himself. That's 'bout like this fellow. He's going to get the razoo....
Gee! I hope you ain't a friend of his."
Una had perfectly learned the Boeotian dialect so strangely spoken by
Mr. Sidney, and she was able to reply:
"Oh no, no indeed! He ought to be fired. He gave me a room as though he
were the superintendent of a free lodging-house."
"But it's so hard to get trained employees that I hate to even let _him_
go. Just to show you the way things go, just when I was trying to swing
a deal for a new hotel, I had to bust off negotiations and go and train
a new crew of chambermaids at Sandsonville myself. You'd died laughing
to seen _me_ making beds and teaching those birds to clean a spittador,
beggin' your pardon, but it certainly was some show, and I do, by gum!
know a traveling-man likes his bed tucked in at the foot! Oh, it's
fierce! The traveling public kicks if they get bum service, and the help
kick if you demand any service from 'em, and the boss gets it right in
the collar-button both ways from the ace."
"Well, I'm going to tell you how to have trained service and how to make
your hotels distinctive. They're good hotels, as hotels go, and you
really do give people good coffee and good beds and credit conveniences,
as you promise, but your hotels are not distinctive. I'm going to tell
you how to make them so."
Una had waited till Mr. Sidney had disposed of his soup and filet
mignon. She spoke deliberately, almost sternly. She reached for her new
silver link bag, drew out immaculate typewritten schedules, and while he
gaped she read to him precisely the faults of each of the hotels, her
suggested remedies, and her general ideas of hotels, with less
cuspidors, more originality, and a room where traveling-men could be at
home on a rainy Sunday.
"Now you know, and I know," she wound up, "that the proprietor's ideal
of a hotel is one to which traveling-men will travel sixty miles on
Saturday evening, in order to spend Sunday there. You take my
recommendations and you'll have that kind of hotels. At the same time
women will be tempted there and the local trade will go there when wife
or the cook is away, or they want to give a big dinner."
"It does sound like it had some possibilities," said Mr. Sidney, as she
stopped for breath, after quite the most impassioned invocation of her
life.
She plunged in again:
"Now the point of all this is that I want to be the general manager of
certain departments of the Line--catering, service, decoration, and so
on. I'll keep out of the financial end and we'll work out the buying
together. You know it's women who make the homes for people at home, and
why not the homes for people traveling?... I'm woman sales-manager for
Truax & Fein--sell direct, and six women under me. I'll show you my
record of sales. I've been secretary to an architect, and studied
architecture a little. And plenty other jobs. Now you take these
suggestions of mine to your office and study 'em over with your partner
and we'll talk about the job for me by and by."
She left him as quickly as she could, got back to her office, and in a
shaking spasm of weeping relapsed into the old, timorous Una.
§ 5
Tedious were the negotiations between Una and Mr. Sidney and his
partner. They wanted her to make their hotels--and yet they had never
heard of anything so nihilistic as actually having hotel "offices"
without "desks." They wanted her, and yet they "didn't quite know about
adding any more overhead at this stage of the game."
Meantime Una sold lots and studied the economical buying of hotel
supplies. She was always willing to go with Mr. Sidney and his partner
to lunch--but they were brief lunches. She was busy, she said, and she
had no time to "drop in at their office." When Mr. Sidney once tried to
hold her hand (not seriously, but with his methodical system of never
failing to look into any possibilities), she said, sharply, "Don't try
that--let's save a lot of time by understanding that I'm what you would
call 'straight.'" He apologized and assured her that he had known she
was a "high-class genuwine lady all the time."
The very roughness which, in Mr. Schwirtz, had abraised her, interested
her in Mr. Sidney. She knew better now how to control human beings. She
was fascinated by a comparison of her four average citizens--four men
not vastly varied as seen in a street-car, yet utterly different to one
working with them: Schwirtz, the lumbering; Troy Wilkins, the roaring;
Truax, the politely whining; and Bob Sidney, the hesitating.
The negotiations seemed to arrive nowhere.
Then, unexpectedly, Bob Sidney telephoned to her at her flat one
evening: "Partner and I have just decided to take you on, if you'll come
at thirty-eight hundred a year."
Una hadn't even thought of the salary. She would gladly have gone to her
new creative position at the three thousand two hundred she was then
receiving. But she showed her new training and demanded:
"Four thousand two hundred."
"Well, split the difference and call it four thousand for the first
year."
"All right."
Una stood in the center of the room. She had "succeeded on her job."
Then she knew that she wanted some one with whom to share the good news.
She sat down and thought of her almost-forgotten plan to adopt a child.
§ 6
Mr. Sidney had, during his telephone proclamation, suggested: "Come down
to the office to-morrow and get acquainted. Haven't got a very big
force, you know, but there's a couple of stenographers, good girls,
crazy to meet the new boss, and a bright, new Western fellow we thought
we might try out as your assistant and publicity man, and there's an
office-boy that's a sketch. So come down and meet your subjects, as the
fellow says."
Una found the office, on Duane Street, to consist of two real rooms and
a bare anteroom decorated with photographs of the several White Line
Hotels--set on maple-lined streets, with the local managers, in white
waistcoats, standing proudly in front. She herself was to have a big
flat-topped desk in the same room with Mr. Sidney. The surroundings were
crude compared with the Truax & Fein office, but she was excited. Here
she would be a pioneer.
"Now come in the other room," said Mr. Sidney, "and meet the
stenographers and the publicity man I was telling you about on the
'phone."
He opened a door and said, "Mrs. Schwirtz, wantcha shake hands with the
fellow that's going to help you to put the Line on the map--Mr. Babson."
It was Walter Babson who had risen from a desk and was gaping at her.