§ 5
Life began to take on a new flavor. The future held hidden golden promises. Jeannette had always had a protecting, proprietary attitude toward her mother and Alice, but now she was acutely aware of it, and the thought was sweet to her; she revelled in the prospect of the rôle she must inevitably assume. All her world was centered in her eager, hard-working, ever-cheerful, fussy little mother, and her gentle brown-eyed sister who looked up to her with such adoration and implicit faith. Jeannette felt she had forever established their confidence in her by this successful step into the business world. Her mother had been completely won by her good fortune, and her stout little bosom swelled with pride in her daughter’s achievement. Eagerly she told her pupils about it, and even regaled with the news fat good-natured Signor Bellini and politely indifferent Miss Loughborough.
To Jeannette, the Soulé Publishing Company became at once a concern of tremendous importance. Before little Miss Ingram had mentioned its name to her, she was not sure she had ever heard it. Now she seemed to see it wherever she turned, heard about it in chance conversations at least once a day; it leaped at her from advertisements in the newspapers and from the pages of magazines. Books, she casually picked up, bore its imprint. A great pride in the big company that employed her came to her: it was the largest and most enterprising of all publishing houses; it was spending a million dollars advertising The Universal History of the World; it had hundreds of employees on its pay-roll!
If there were less roseate aspects of the concern that paid her fifteen dollars every Saturday, Jeannette did not see them. She never stopped to examine critically the history she was helping to sell, nor to glance into the pages of the Secret Memoirs, nor to open the leaves of the set of books labelled Favorites of Great Kings. She never thought it curious that the firm employed so many cheaply dressed, vulgar-tongued little Jewesses, and sallow-skinned, covert-eyed girls. Nor did she wonder that she never observed any important-looking individuals who might be officials of the company, walking about or up and down the aisles of the racketting, bustling loft. There was only Mr. Kent. The others, whoever they might be, confined their activities, she came to understand, to the main offices of the Company on West Thirty-second Street. This great loft with its sea of life was only a temporary arrangement,—part of the great selling campaign by which a hundred thousand sets of the History were to be sold before May first. Something of tremendous import was to happen on this fateful date,—an upheaval in trade conditions, a great change in the publishing world. Jeannette was not sure what it was all to be about, but she was convinced that after May first, the public would no longer have this wonderful chance to buy the twenty-five volumes of the History at such a ridiculously low price.
Behind glass partitions in one corner of the extensive floor were the inner offices,—the “holy of holies” Jeannette thought of them,—where Mr. Edmund Kent existed, pulled wires, touched bells, and gave orders that generalled the activities of the hundreds of human beings who clicked away at their typewriters, or deftly folded thousands and thousands of circulars, to tuck into waiting envelopes that were later dragged away in grimy, striped-canvas mail sacks. Mr. Edmund Kent was the Napoleon, the great King, the Far-seeing Master who in his awesome, mysterious glass-partitioned office, ruled them with arbitrary and benevolent power. All day long, Jeannette heard Mr. Kent’s name mentioned. Miss Gibson quoted him; Mr. Beardsley decided this or that important matter must be referred to him. What Mr. Kent thought, said, did, was final. The girl used to catch a glimpse of the great man, now and then, as he came in, in the morning, or went out to a late lunch: a square-shouldered, firm-stepping man with a derby hat, a straight, trim mustache, and an overcoat whose corners flapped about his knees. He seemed wonderful to her.
“Shhhh....” a whisper would come from one of the girls near by; “there’s Mr. Kent”; and all would watch him out of the corners of their eyes as they pretended to bend over their work.
“Mr. Kent is President of the Company?” Jeannette one day ventured to ask Mr. Beardsley.
“Oh, no, just the selling agent,” he replied. This was perplexing, but it did not make Jeannette regard with any less veneration the stocky figure in derby hat and flapping coat corners which strode in and out of the office.
There were other mysterious persons who had desks in the “holy of holies,” but Jeannette was never able to make out who these were, nor what might be their duties. Miss Gibson was in charge of the girls on the floor; Mr. Beardsley was her immediate “boss.” There was a cashier who made up the pay-roll and whose assistants handed out the little manila envelopes on Saturday morning containing the neatly folded bills. She had no occasion to be concerned about anyone else.
Her “boss’s” full name was Roy Beardsley. Roy! She smiled when she heard it. He was young,—twenty-three or-four; he was a recent Princeton graduate, was unmarried and lived in a boarding-house somewhere on Madison Avenue. She found out so much from the girls her second day at the office; they were glib with information concerning any one of the force.