§ 2
Una was sorry. She hated herself as what she called a “quitter,” but now, in January, 1910, she was at an impasse. She could just stagger through each day of S. Herbert Ross and office diplomacies. She had been at Pemberton’s for a year and a third, and longer than that with Mrs. Lawrence at the flat. The summer vacation of 1909 she had spent with Mrs. Lawrence at a Jersey coast resort. They had been jealous, had quarreled, and made it up every day, like lovers. They had picked up two summer men, and Mrs. Lawrence had so often gone off on picnics with her man that Una had become uneasy, felt soiled, and come back to the city early. For this Mrs. Lawrence had never forgiven her. She had recently become engaged to a doctor who was going to Akron, Ohio, and she exasperated Una by giving her bland advice about trying to get married. Una never knew whether she was divorced, or whether the mysterious Mr. Lawrence had died.
But even the difficile Lawrence was preferable to the strain at the office. Una was tired clean through and through. She felt as though her very soul had been drained out by a million blood-sucker details—constant adjustments to Ross’s demands for admiration of his filthiest office political deals, and the need of keeping friendly with both sides when Ross was engaged in one of his frequent altercations with an assistant.
Often she could not eat in the evening. She would sit on the edge of the bed and cry hopelessly, with a long, feeble, peculiarly feminine sobbing, till Mrs. Lawrence slammed the door and went off to the motion pictures. Una kept repeating a little litany she had made regarding the things she wished people would stop doing—praying to be delivered from Ross’s buoyant egotism, from Mrs. Lawrence’s wearing of Una’s best veils, from Mr. Schwirtz’s acting as though he wanted to kiss her whenever he had a whisky breath, from the office-manager who came in to chat with her just when she was busiest, from the office-boy who always snapped his fingers as he went down the corridor outside her door, and from the elevator-boy who sucked his teeth.
She was sorry. She wanted to climb. She didn’t want to be a quitter. But she was at an impasse.
On a January day the Pemberton office beheld that most terrifying crisis that can come to a hard, slave-driving office. As the office put it, “The Old Man was on a rampage.”
Mr. Pemberton, senior, most hoarily awful of all the big chiefs, had indigestion or a poor balance-sheet. He decided that everything was going wrong. He raged from room to room. He denounced the new poster, the new top for the talcum-powder container, the arrangement of the files, and the whispering in the amen corner of veteran stenographers. He sent out flocks of “office memoes.” Everybody trembled. Mr. Pemberton’s sons actually did some work; and, as the fire spread and the minor bosses in turn raged among their subordinates, the girls who packed soap down in the works expected to be “fired.” After a visitation from Mr. Pemberton and three raging memoes within fifteen minutes, Mr. S. Herbert Ross retreated toward the Lafayette Café, and Una was left to face Mr. Pemberton’s bear-like growls on his next appearance.
When he did appear he seemed to hold her responsible for all the world’s long sadness. Meanwhile the printer was telephoning for Mr. Ross’s O. K. on copy, the engravers wanted to know where the devil was that color-proof, the advertising agency sarcastically indicated that it was difficult for them to insert an advertisement before they received the order, and a girl from the cashier’s office came nagging in about a bill for India ink.
The memoes began to get the range of her desk again, and Mr. Pemberton’s voice could be heard in a distant part of the office, approaching, menacing, all-pervading.
Una fled. She ran to a wash-room, locked the door, leaned panting against it, as though detectives were pursuing her. She was safe for a moment. They might miss her, but she was insulated from demands of, “Where’s Ross, Miss Golden? Well, why don’t you know where he is?” from telephone calls, and from memoes whose polite “please” was a gloved threat.
But even to this refuge the familiar sound of the office penetrated—the whirr which usually sounded as a homogeneous murmur, but which, in her acute sensitiveness, she now analyzed into the voices of different typewriters—one flat, rapid, staccato; one a steady, dull rattle. The “zzzzz” of typewriter-carriages being shoved back. The roll of closing elevator doors, and the rumble of the ascending elevator. The long burr of an unanswered telephone at a desk, again and again; and at last an angry “Well! Hello? Yes, yes; this ’s Mr. Jones. What-duh-yuh want?” Voices mingled; a shout for Mr. Brown; the hall-attendant yelping: “Miss Golden! Where’s Miss Golden? Anything for Sanford? Mr. Smith, d’you know if there’s anything for Sanford?” Always, over and through all, the enveloping clatter of typewriters, and the city roar behind that, breaking through the barrier of the door.
The individual, analyzed sounds again blended in one insistent noise of hurry which assailed Una’s conscience, summoned her back to her work.
She sighed, washed her stinging eyes, opened the door, and trailed back toward her den.
In the corridor she passed three young stenographers and heard one of them cry: “Yes, but I don’t care if old Alfalfa goes on a rampage twenty-five hours a day. I’m through. Listen, May, say, what d’you know about me? I’m engaged! No, honest, straight I am! Look at me ring! Aw, it is not; it’s a regular engagement-ring. I’m going to be out of this hell-hole in two weeks, and Papa Pemberton can work off his temper on somebody else. Me, I’m going to do a slumber marathon till noon every day.”
“Gee!”
“Engaged!”
—said the other girls, and—
“Engaged! Going to sleep till noon every day. And not see Mr. Ross or Mr. Pemberton! That’s my idea of heaven!” thought Una.
There was a pile of inquiring memoes from Mr. Pemberton and the several department heads on her desk. As she looked at them Una reached the point of active protest.
“S. Herbert runs for shelter when the storm breaks, and leaves me here to stand it. Why isn’t he supposed to be here on the job just as much as I am?” she declaimed. “Why haven’t I the nerve to jump up and go out for a cup of tea the way he would? By jiminy! I will!”
She was afraid of the indefinite menace concealed in all the Pemberton system as she signaled an elevator. But she did not answer a word when the hall-attendant said, “You are going out, Miss Golden?”
She went to a German-Jewish bakery and lunch-room, and reflectively got down thin coffee served in a thick cup, a sugar-warted Kaffeekuche, and two crullers. She was less willing to go back to work than she had been in her refuge in the wash-room. She felt that she would rather be dead than return and subject herself to the strain. She was “through,” like the little engaged girl. She was a “quitter.”
For half an hour she remained in the office, but she left promptly at five-thirty, though her desk was choked with work and though Mr. Ross telephoned that he would be back before six, which was his chivalrous way of demanding that she stay till seven.
Mr. Schwirtz was coming to see her that evening. He had suggested vaudeville.
She dressed very carefully. She did her hair in a new way.
When Mr. Schwirtz came she cried that she couldn’t go to a show. She was “clean played out.” She didn’t know what she could do. Pemberton’s was too big a threshing-machine for her. She was tired—“absolutely all in.”
“Poor little sister!” he said, and smoothed her hair.
She rested her face on his shoulder. It seemed broad and strong and protective.
She was glad when he put his arm about her.
She was married to Mr. Schwirtz about two weeks later.