Bread

by Charles G. Norris

Odd to have been a man’s wife, to have belonged to someone! It would be hard to think of herself as a “Mrs.” again, to call herself “Mrs. Martin Devlin.” How many years ago had it been? Fifteen? Sixteen? Something like that. Had there really ever been an interval of four years in her life when she had been a married woman? It seemed to her she had always been part of the Chandler B. Corey Company,—or the Corey Publishing Company as it now was called,—part of it without a break since those days of long ago when it had occupied three floors in a clumsy old office building and had looked out, with Schirmer’s Music Store and Tiffany’s, upon Union Square. What a slim, tall, ignorant, ill-equipped young thing she had been that day she went eagerly to meet Roy at the office and had watched Miss Reubens looking at photographs in the reception room! Jeannette smiled now at the memory of herself. It strained the imagination to believe that the present Miss Sturgis of the Mail Order Department had been that awkward girl so long ago.

The years—the years! The changes they had wrought! Jeannette thought of her last painful interview with Martin and the shadow of a frown came to her brow. She had gone over every detail of it a million times. It had indeed been harrowing. Poor Martin! He had pleaded so hard for her to come back to him, he had offered to do anything she wanted, but it was too late then; she couldn’t make him see it. She reminded him again and again that he had talked just the same way when he begged her to marry him; she had doubtfully agreed then, had consented to give their union a trial, and it had turned out a failure,—a hopeless failure. No, she didn’t blame him; she told him so over and over and admitted it was as much her fault as his; she was no more fitted to be a wife than he a husband; many people were constituted that way; they weren’t suited to married life. She pointed out to him that unless a marriage was happy, it was a mistake, and neither he nor she had been happy as man and wife. Why, she had never been for one minute as happy married to Martin Devlin as she had been since she became her own mistress again! She loved her independence, she told him, too much to surrender it to any man. And he? Well, it had been clearly demonstrated that he liked the society of men and enjoyed outdoor sports more than he did being a husband. She tried hard not to reproach him, had even said she saw no reason why they, two, could not go on being friends, occasionally seeing one another, but at that point Martin got angry,—a sort of madness seemed to take hold of him and he had said all sorts of terrible things to her, even called her names,—unforgettable ones. It had ended in a dreadful scene, a terrible scene,—dreadful and terrible because in spite of the fury and bitterness that gripped them, they knew love still remained. Jeannette would never forget the storm of tears, the abject grief that had come to her at their parting. Love Martin though she did, she realized she loved her re-won independence more, and she would not,—could not return to him. Mr. Corey had taken her in; she had promised to work for him for a while at least, and it was utterly impossible for her to tell him, after he had discharged his other secretary, that she was going back to her husband again. If Martin had only given her a year or two she might have been willing to be his wife once more, and she had told him as much, but Martin refused to listen; he had thrown down his challenge and forced her then and there to choose between her job and himself. There was nothing else for her to do; she had made her decision, and Martin had gone his way. She had never regretted it, she said to herself now; she was far better off to-day, far happier and more contented than she ever would have been as Mrs. Martin Devlin. As his wife she would have had ties and known sickness; she and he would have quarrelled and there would have been everlasting recriminations; she would have lost her looks, and her clothes would have become shabby; she would have grown familiar with poverty and have had to fight for herself and family the way Alice did,—poor, deserving, hard-working Alice, with her five children and unsuccessful husband! No doubt she, Jeannette, had missed much in life, but hers had been the safe course, the prudent and sure one. She was now in charge of the Mail Order Department of the Corey Publishing Company, she was earning fifty dollars a week, had five Liberty bonds all paid for, and was beholden to no one.... Of Martin she had not heard for years. On a visit to Alice at Cohasset Beach, she had one Sunday encountered ’Stel Teschemacher and that lady had informed her that Zeb Kline, while on a brief visit to Philadelphia, had seen Martin, and Martin had an agency for a motor-car there and was doing quite well. Jeannette would have liked to hear more, but she did not care to have ’Stel Teschemacher suspect she was interested.

It was ’Stel’s husband who sold the Beardsleys their home at Cohasset Beach. The purchase had followed the death of Roy’s father and the return of Roy and his family to New York. Dr. Beardsley had not lived long enough to make a writer’s career for his son possible. His death had sadly broken up the small home in Mill Valley, and Roy and Alice had deemed it wiser to put the little money the clergyman left them into a home of their own than spend it in paying rent, butchers’ and grocers’ bills on the chance that Roy’s pen might some day earn a livelihood sufficient for their needs. He had been only moderately successful as an author. His dog story had been published and he had placed several short stories but these had been few and far between and then little Frank had come to add his chubby countenance to the family circle and his parents decided a writer’s career was too precarious for a man with a family. A job on a newspaper or magazine would insure a steady income. So with grief over their bereavement and disappointment in their hearts for the abandoned profession, Roy and his wife returned to New York and then in quick succession had come the finding of his position on the Quart-z-Arts Review which carried with it a moderate salary, the purchase of the house at Cohasset Beach, and in time the arrival of the small Jeannette,—’Nettie she was called to distinguish her from her aunt,—and Baby Roy, who was seven years old now and had recently asserted his manhood by resenting the identifying adjective by which he had been known since birth. Jeannette paused a moment in her retrospective thoughts to calculate: Twenty-two years! Yes,—Alice and Roy had been married twenty-two years! They were an old married couple now.

§ 3

She realized abruptly she had reached the office. Men and women, up and down the street, were converging in their courses toward the doors of the publishing company. The great concrete block of eight stories, crowded now to the limit of its capacity, with the thundering presses on the lower floors, had often seemed to her a monster that sucked in through its tiny mouth each morning a small army of workers, mulled them about all day between its ruminating jaws, fed on their juices and spewed them forth at evening to go their ways and gather new strength during the night to feed its hungry maw again upon the morrow.

Though the picture was grim and repellent, she cherished no hostility toward the institution that employed her. With the exception of the four-year interlude of adventuring in matrimony, she had been an employee of the self-same concern since she was eighteen; for nearly twenty years her name had appeared upon its pay-roll; in November she could make that very boast. More than any building in the world this block of steel and concrete was bound up with her destiny; she had spent most of the days of her life within it; she had seen its beginnings, had watched it spring into being, had had a hand in altering and adapting it to the needs of business, had observed its almost barren floors slowly fill year after year with human activity until now the use of every square foot of space was a matter of debate; she was one of the half dozen still gleaning a livelihood within its walls to-day who could speak of a time before its existence had even been conceived.

Most of those early associates on Union Square were gone now,—dead or following other lines of endeavor. Old Kipps still pottered about in the manufacturing department, Mr. Cavendish white-haired, gray-moustached and rosy, still edited Corey’s Commentary; Miss Travers, her merry face now lined with many criss-crossed wrinkles, had succeeded Mr. Olmstead and while not accorded the title of Auditor, which he had enjoyed, was known as the Cashier. Then there was Sidney Frank Allister, who, while he did not date back to the Union Square days, was still to be reckoned among those early associated with the fortunes of the publishing company, and now very much identified with them since he had become President and sat in the seat of Chandler B. Corey.

For Mr. Corey was dead. He had died the year Jeannette lost her mother and had followed his son, Willis, to the grave after a few months. Mrs. Corey had left him a widower many years before. There remained only his daughter, Babs, in an Adirondack sanitarium for the insane, to inherit his wealth and fifty-one per cent of the stock of the business he had created. He died a rich man and his will provided that his worldly possessions should be divided equally between his two children, their heirs and assigns, and of these last there were none, for Willis had never married and Babs could not. Jeannette often used to muse upon the futility of human ambition when she thought of the man she had served so long as secretary. She knew it had been the great desire of his life to found a publishing house that should become identified with the growth of American literature and pass on down the years in the hands of the Corey family, father and son succeeding one another after the fashion of some of the great English houses.

One day while sitting in his office intent upon affairs of business, his head dropped forward and banged on the hard surface of his desk before him, and he was dead. His heart had suddenly grown tired of its work. Even before he was laid away at Woodlawn, there had begun the mad scramble for the control of stock which would elect his successor. Jeannette never learned how Mr. Allister succeeded in obtaining it, but Mr. Featherstone had shortly been eliminated entirely from the affairs of the company and it was whispered that Mr. Kipps had played a double game. However that may have been, Sidney Frank Allister was by far the best man to fill Corey’s place, in Jeannette’s opinion. He was not so shrewd nor so far-seeing, but he had certain literary qualifications which fitted him for the position. Mr. Featherstone, Jeannette had early come to regard as a blustering blow-hard, while Mr. Kipps was hardly grammatical in speech or in letters, and had grown into a fussy old man. Francis Holm or Walt Chase might have proven themselves even better material, but three years prior to Mr. Corey’s death, both these young men had broken away from the old organization; Holm had launched forth into the publishing business for himself, and Walt Chase had gone to Sears, Roebuck & Co. in Chicago at a salary, it was rumored, of ten thousand a year, and Jeannette had succeeded him as head of the Mail Order Department.

Much as she had enjoyed being secretary to Mr. Corey, she was forced to realize as the years rolled by, that the position held no future for her. She would always be the president’s secretary as long as Mr. Corey lived but against the congenial work and easy rôle her ambition had protested. Recollections of early resolutions she had made on entering the business world returned to disturb her complacency. She remembered vowing then she would go to the very top and some day become herself an executive instead of a secretary. She saw no reason why she should not follow in Walt Chase’s footsteps and be worth ten thousand a year, if not to the Corey Company then to some other. She had great confidence in herself, felt especially qualified to do mail order work, and was sure she could increase sales and manage the department better than Walt Chase. It was a pet idea of hers that women, not men, bought books by mail, and she was confident that attacks directed at women, written from a feminine standpoint, would show results. When the offer from Chicago came and Chase announced he was going, she determined suddenly to seize the opportunity and asked Mr. Corey for Chase’s place; she had played secretary long enough, she told him,—she wanted her chance at bigger work.