“But, Mr. Fein, if it’s just as hard on the employers as it is on the employees, then the whole system is bad.”
“Good Lord! of course it’s bad. But do you know anything in this world that isn’t bad—that’s anywhere near perfect? Except maybe Bach fugues? Religion, education, medicine, war, agriculture, art, pleasure, anything—all systems are choked with clumsy, outworn methods and ignorance—the whole human race works and plays at about ten-per-cent. efficiency. The only possible ground for optimism about the human race that I can see is that in most all lines experts are at work showing up the deficiencies—proving that alcohol and war are bad, and consumption and Greek unnecessary—and making a beginning. You don’t do justice to the big offices and mills where they have real efficiency tests, and if a man doesn’t make good in one place, they shift him to another.”
“There aren’t very many of them. In all the offices I’ve ever seen, the boss’s indigestion is the only test of employees.”
“Yes, yes, I know, but that isn’t the point. The point is that they are making such tests—beginning to. Take the schools where they actually teach future housewives to cook and sew as well as to read aloud. But, of course, I admit the very fact that there can be and are such schools and offices is a terrible indictment of the slatternly schools and bad-tempered offices we usually do have, and if you can show up this system of shutting people up in treadmills, why go to it, and good luck. The longer people are stupidly optimistic, the longer we’ll have to wait for improvements. But, believe me, my dear girl, for every ardent radical who says the whole thing is rotten there’s ten clever advertising-men who think it’s virtue to sell new brands of soap-powder that are no better than the old brands, and a hundred old codgers who are so broken into the office system that they think they are perfectly happy—don’t know how much fun in life they miss. Still, they’re no worse than the adherents to any other paralyzed system. Look at the comparatively intelligent people who fall for any freak religious system and let it make their lives miserable. I suppose that when the world has no more war or tuberculosis, then offices will be exciting places to work in—but not till then. And meantime, if the typical business man with a taste for fishing heard even so mild a radical as I am, he’d sniff, ‘The fellow don’t know what he’s talking about; everybody in all the offices I know is perfectly satisfied.’”
“Yes, changes will be slow, I suppose, but that doesn’t excuse bosses of to-day for thinking they are little tin gods.”
“No, of course it doesn’t. But people in authority always do that. The only thing we can do about it is for us, personally, to make our offices as clean and amusing as we can, instead of trying to buy yachts. But don’t ever think either that capitalists are a peculiar race of fiends, different from anarchists or scrubwomen, or that we’ll have a millennium about next election. We’ve got to be anthropological in our view. It’s taken the human race about five hundred thousand years to get where it is, and presumably it will take quite a few thousand more to become scientific or even to understand the need of scientific conduct of everything. I’m not at all sure that there’s any higher wisdom than doing a day’s work, and hoping the Subway will be a little less crowded next year, and in voting for the best possible man, and then forgetting all the Weltschmertz, and going to an opera. It sounds pretty raw and crude, doesn’t it? But living in a world that’s raw and crude, all you can do is to be honest and not worry.”
“Yes,” said Una.
She grieved for the sunset-colored ideals of Mamie Magen, for the fine, strained, hysterical enthusiasms of Walter Babson, as an enchantment of thought which she was dispelling in her effort to become a “good, sound, practical business woman.” Mr. Fein’s drab opportunist philosophy disappointed her. Yet, in contrast to Mr. Schwirtz, Mr. Truax, and Chas., he was hyperbolic; and after their dinner she was gushingly happy to be hearing the opportunist melodies of “Il Trovatore” beside him.
§ 3
The Merryton Realty Company had failed, and Truax & Fein were offered the small development property of Crosshampton Hill Gardens at so convenient a price that they could not refuse it, though they were already “carrying” as many properties as they could easily handle. In a characteristic monologue Mr. Truax asked a select audience, consisting of himself, his inkwell, and Una, what he was to do.