In the use of swear words I had imagined the men buyers unsurpassed. They couldn’t touch that girl. It did not seem possible for her to open her mouth without letting out a string of oaths. She swore at her fellow buyers, at the men and women who came bringing samples from manufacturers. She swore at members of the firm, at me, and all the other addressers, but most of all she swore at the telephone.
Strange to say, the men buyers were shocked. So long as she was in the room they acted like a handful of mice in the presence of a cat. Puzzled by this I asked the girl with the tomahawk face for an explanation.
“Who, Miss Sojowski?” she replied. “She’s got these men beat to a finish. That’s what’s the matter. She’s buyer for women and girls’ suits, hats, and coats—four jobs in one. She’s been with the firm five years, and she’s never made a mistake—all her styles sell, no left-overs. Sure she makes big money. Three times as much as any of these little simps pulls down.” She glared at the men buyers, who could not have avoided hearing every word she said.
My next-seat neighbor at this place was a young man from Canada. He spent his time breathing darkly hideous threats against the Germans, what he would do once he “got across.” Bit by bit his fellow workers learned that soon after England entered the war he had induced the sixteen-year-old daughter of his employer, a prosperous farmer, to elope with him. When, in spite of his marriage he was called to the colors, he eloped alone to the United States, and had been living in New York under an assumed name.
It was a shame, he declared, that a young fellow of his ability should be forced to address envelopes. He had expected to get a position as manager of some millionaire’s farm—a sort of all-pay-and-no-work job. He would have got it, too, he assured us, if the people in the States were not so prejudiced against the Irish. Soon as would-be employers learned that he was not born in Canada, they turned against him, he asserted—gave the position to a “dirty Dago” or a man of some other inferior race.
Recalling the abundance of king-descended men and women of his race, I inquired about his forebears. Sure enough, he gave me a long list of kings and saints, and assured us all that only the tyranny of England prevented him from living in a palace without having to “turn a hand.”
The day that the addressers were paid off this slacker suggested to a lame man who sat across the table from him that it would be a friendly thing for him to start a subscription—get up enough money to pay his, the slacker’s, railroad fare back to Canada.
“If your wife’s daddy is so rich, why don’t you ask him to send you the money?” the lame man, a middle-aged Jew, asked.
“Him!” the young, healthy Irish-Canadian exclaimed contemptuously. “He don’t want I should come back. Both of his boys were killed by the Germans. Now he’s trying to turn my wife against me, saying I deserted her.”
“Well, didn’t you?” the lame man demanded. “You told me your child was more than a year old, and you’d never seen it. You said you had never got enough ahead to send your wife money.”