CHAPTER XXII
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.