Often she could not eat in the evening. She would sit on the edge of the bed and cry hopelessly, with a long, feeble, peculiarly feminine sobbing, till Mrs. Lawrence slammed the door and went off to the motion pictures. Una kept repeating a little litany she had made regarding the things she wished people would stop doing—praying to be delivered from Ross’s buoyant egotism, from Mrs. Lawrence’s wearing of Una’s best veils, from Mr. Schwirtz’s acting as though he wanted to kiss her whenever he had a whisky breath, from the office-manager who came in to chat with her just when she was busiest, from the office-boy who always snapped his fingers as he went down the corridor outside her door, and from the elevator-boy who sucked his teeth.
She was sorry. She wanted to climb. She didn’t want to be a quitter. But she was at an impasse.
On a January day the Pemberton office beheld that most terrifying crisis that can come to a hard, slave-driving office. As the office put it, “The Old Man was on a rampage.”
Mr. Pemberton, senior, most hoarily awful of all the big chiefs, had indigestion or a poor balance-sheet. He decided that everything was going wrong. He raged from room to room. He denounced the new poster, the new top for the talcum-powder container, the arrangement of the files, and the whispering in the amen corner of veteran stenographers. He sent out flocks of “office memoes.” Everybody trembled. Mr. Pemberton’s sons actually did some work; and, as the fire spread and the minor bosses in turn raged among their subordinates, the girls who packed soap down in the works expected to be “fired.” After a visitation from Mr. Pemberton and three raging memoes within fifteen minutes, Mr. S. Herbert Ross retreated toward the Lafayette Café, and Una was left to face Mr. Pemberton’s bear-like growls on his next appearance.
When he did appear he seemed to hold her responsible for all the world’s long sadness. Meanwhile the printer was telephoning for Mr. Ross’s O. K. on copy, the engravers wanted to know where the devil was that color-proof, the advertising agency sarcastically indicated that it was difficult for them to insert an advertisement before they received the order, and a girl from the cashier’s office came nagging in about a bill for India ink.
The memoes began to get the range of her desk again, and Mr. Pemberton’s voice could be heard in a distant part of the office, approaching, menacing, all-pervading.
Una fled. She ran to a wash-room, locked the door, leaned panting against it, as though detectives were pursuing her. She was safe for a moment. They might miss her, but she was insulated from demands of, “Where’s Ross, Miss Golden? Well, why don’t you know where he is?” from telephone calls, and from memoes whose polite “please” was a gloved threat.
But even to this refuge the familiar sound of the office penetrated—the whirr which usually sounded as a homogeneous murmur, but which, in her acute sensitiveness, she now analyzed into the voices of different typewriters—one flat, rapid, staccato; one a steady, dull rattle. The “zzzzz” of typewriter-carriages being shoved back. The roll of closing elevator doors, and the rumble of the ascending elevator. The long burr of an unanswered telephone at a desk, again and again; and at last an angry “Well! Hello? Yes, yes; this ’s Mr. Jones. What-duh-yuh want?” Voices mingled; a shout for Mr. Brown; the hall-attendant yelping: “Miss Golden! Where’s Miss Golden? Anything for Sanford? Mr. Smith, d’you know if there’s anything for Sanford?” Always, over and through all, the enveloping clatter of typewriters, and the city roar behind that, breaking through the barrier of the door.
The individual, analyzed sounds again blended in one insistent noise of hurry which assailed Una’s conscience, summoned her back to her work.
She sighed, washed her stinging eyes, opened the door, and trailed back toward her den.