She was in the office all day, being as curtly exact as she could. But in the evening she sat alone in her flat and feared the city.
Sometimes she rushed down to the Sessionses’ flat, but the good people bored her with their assumption that she was panting to know all the news from Panama. She had drifted so far away from the town that the sixth assertion that “it was a great pity Kitty Wilson was going to marry that worthless Clark boy” aroused no interest in her. She was still more bored by their phonograph, on which they played over and over the same twenty records. She would make quick, unconvincing excuses about having to hurry away. Their slippered stupidity was a desecration of her mother’s memory.
Her half-hysterical fear of the city’s power was increased by her daily encounter with the clamorous streets, crowded elevators, frantic lunch-rooms, and, most of all, the experience of the Subway.
Amazing, incredible, the Subway, and the fact that human beings could become used to it, consent to spend an hour in it daily. There was a heroic side to this spectacle of steel trains clanging at forty miles an hour beneath twenty-story buildings. The engineers had done their work well, made a great thought in steel and cement. And then the business men and bureaucrats had made the great thought a curse. There was in the Subway all the romance which story-telling youth goes seeking: trains crammed with an inconceivable complexity of people—marquises of the Holy Roman Empire, Jewish factory hands, speculators from Wyoming, Iowa dairymen, quarreling Italian lovers, with their dramatic tales, their flux of every human emotion, under the city mask. But however striking these dramatic characters may be to the occasional spectator, they figure merely as an odor, a confusion, to the permanent serf of the Subway.... A long underground station, a catacomb with a cement platform, this was the chief feature of the city vista to the tired girl who waited there each morning. A clean space, but damp, stale, like the corridor to a prison—as indeed it was, since through it each morning Una entered the day’s business life.
Then, the train approaching, filling the tunnel, like a piston smashing into a cylinder; the shoving rush to get aboard. A crush that was ruffling and fatiguing to a man, but to a woman was horror.
Una stood with a hulking man pressing as close to her side as he dared, and a dapper clerkling squeezed against her breast. Above her head, to represent the city’s culture and graciousness, there were advertisements of soap, stockings, and collars. At curves the wheels ground with a long, savage whine, the train heeled, and she was flung into the arms of the grinning clerk, who held her tight. She, who must never be so unladylike as to enter a polling-place, had breathed into her very mouth the clerkling’s virile electoral odor of cigarettes and onions and decayed teeth.
A very good thing, the Subway. It did make Una quiver with the beginnings of rebellious thought as no suave preacher could ever have done. Almost hysterically she resented this daily indignity, which smeared her clean, cool womanhood with a grease of noise and smell and human contact.
As was the Subway, so were her noons of elbowing to get impure food in restaurants.
For reward she was permitted to work all day with Troy Wilkins. And for heavens and green earth, she had a chair and a desk.
But the human organism, which can modify itself to arctic cold and Indian heat, to incessant labor or the long enervation of luxury, learns to endure. Unwilling dressing, lonely breakfast, the Subway, dull work, lunch, sleepiness after lunch, the hopelessness of three o’clock, the boss’s ill-tempers, then the Subway again, and a lonely flat with no love, no creative work; and at last a long sleep so that she might be fresh for such another round of delight. So went the days. Yet all through them she found amusement, laughed now and then, and proved the heroism as well as the unthinking servility of the human race.