§ 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 Bœotian 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.