How often did I see a man, when called to the telephone, pick up the receiver with indifference. Then on hearing the voice at the other end of the wire his face would brighten until it beamed, and his voice would change from the resentful tone of having his work interrupted to a loving purr. It was watching the men at work in the T. Z. that I discovered the reason why our business men prefer musical comedy to high-brow drama—it comes nearer visualizing their dreams.
God bless them!—American business men. That I worked among them only six weeks was entirely my own fault, a fault for which I have often reproached myself. Had it not been for Turpin and Hoolagan—or rather had those two unworthies crossed my path later on during my four years’ experience, after I had acquired a greater amount of self-control—I might not have gone to Mr. Morton before the end of my third week and assured him that I did not like bank work, and never would like it.
Yet had I remained at the T. Z. until our soldiers returned from abroad I would not have worked in the tenements of New York City. Without what I saw and learned there my four years’ experience would hardly have been worth writing. It was working in the tenements, living in the tenements on my wages that showed me what the working man and woman are up against—how they face their problems, and how they feel about present-day conditions. It was there, too, that I realized the menace of idle women to American ideals and institutions.
CHAPTER XI
I AM SICK IN THE UNDERBRUSH
About a week before leaving the T. Z. I had a set-to with my landlady. Stopping at the door of her room to pay my rent, I handed her two dollars and seventy-five cents—the additional quarter for gas used in cooking. Imagine my astonishment when the woman began to goggle her eyes at me, to wiggle her tongue back and forth, making a hissing sound, all the while trying to elongate and contract her fat stub of a neck. When I demanded to know if she had lost her mind, she became apologetic and assured me that she was only trying to get my vibrations. Thereupon, forgetting the biblical threat of hell-fire, I told her she was a fool—not the scientific fool that she claimed to be, but the plain garden variety.
Finding Molly on the top floor, I told her I did not wish Mrs. Brown to go into my room so long as I paid rent for it. The next day I went direct from work to the Jane Leonard House—another home for working girls. There I paid a deposit on a room with two meals a day at six-fifty a week, to take possession at the end of my time with Mrs. Brown. When I notified this woman that I was leaving her house she denounced me bitterly.
“You’re deserting me because I didn’t succeed in stopping the war,” she accused. Then she added, wagging her head at me: “I would’ve done it if President Wilson had a-done what I told him to. That’s who’s a fool—President Wilson. If he’d a stopped the war my fortune would’ve been made.”
President Wilson! I wonder how many persons call him a fool because he refused to make them fortunes? But that was not the last of this owner of my first rooming-house. The day that I moved out she waylaid me on the stairs.
“Ain’t you ashamed?” she demanded. “Ain’t you ashamed to treat a fellow woman like you’ve treated me?”
“It is because you are a woman that I am leaving your house,” I told her. “You are knowingly and intentionally a faker. It is the duty of every decent woman to make you feel that you dishonor your sex. A man won’t do it—not an American—he has too much respect for your sex.”