“You won’t tell me?”
“There’s nothing to tell.” The smile cracked a little. “You seem to assume that if a girl decides she isn’t going somewhere with you, something terrible must have happened. Don’t you admit the possibility that she merely doesn’t care to go?”
“Why, I— but you—” He was stuttering. He stopped abruptly, and stood staring at her, his color slowly deepening. After a moment her eyes dropped from his.
“I beg your pardon,” he said stiffly. “I seem to have made some kind of mistake.” He walked to the door and opened it, and was gone.
Amy stood, with no other movement than turning her head, until steps from the hall were no longer heard. Then she clattered into the bedroom, grabbed up the gray fur coat, threw it down again, sat on the edge of the bed, and stared at the top of the dressing table.
She muttered to herself, aloud, “I did a swell job of that, didn’t I, though? And my voice is trembling. You admit your voice is trembling, do you, Miss Duncan? What, no tears? Supreme effort of the will, huh? He’ll take a girl to the ball game, by golly, or he’ll know the reason why. You’ll fix your face, my fine girl, that’s what you’ll do, and you’ll go to work, and you’ll like it!”
She opened her compact.
At a few minutes before three that afternoon she emerged from the 54th Street entrance of the Churchill in the company of a slender smiling elegant middle-aged man, was handed by him into a taxi, and waved through the window at him as the taxi rolled away. The s.s.e.m. man was Mrs. Grimsby’s blackmailer. The lunch with him had been barren of results, for she had been too much preoccupied with her own affairs to function effectively. Now, having made a decision, she was acting upon it without loss of time. She leaned forward and told the driver to go to the 59th Street station of the Ninth Avenue El. Since she regarded this excursion as private business and therefore the fare could not be put on her expense account, forty or fifty cents made a difference.
Leaving the El at 23rd Street, she walked three short blocks north and a long one west. The three-story brick building she stopped in front of was old and grimy-looking, with a cobbled driveway for trucks tunneled through its middle, and there was nothing there or at the pedestrian entrance to proclaim its status or reason for existence, but anyone tilting his head a little from across the street could have seen stretched along the expanse of the bricks of the upper story, enormous letters in dingy white paint:
Inside was a dingy hall and a dingy and dilapidated staircase, the deep hollows in the treads witnesses of thousands of impatient feet up and down through many patient years. On the floor above was a good deal of noise: the hum of machinery from behind wooden partitions to the ceiling, and, as Amy passed through a door in still another partition to the left, a clatter of typewriters and other sounds of a busy office. It was only an anteroom; more partitions confronted her; and through a window in one of them a gray-haired man peered out and told her in a cracked voice that he thought Mr. Tingley was somewhere in the building. Amy forgave his rheumy old eyes for not recognizing her, and was about to tell him her name when she heard it pronounced from another direction by a young man who had emerged from a nearby door, glanced at her, and altered his intended course to approach the window.
“Amy? Sure it is! Hello there!”
“Hello, Phil.” She let his long bony fingers wrap themselves around the knuckles of her outstretched hand, and slanted her eyes up to the altitude of his bony face with its hollowed cheeks, hoping that her own face was not betraying the vague discomfort, the mild repulsion, she had always felt at the sight of him, especially his mouth with its hint of strain at the down-turning corners — the mouth, properly, of a fanatic or a fiend stoically enduring unheard of and ceaseless torture.
She smiled at him. “I haven’t seen you for ages. How’s technocracy?”
“Technocracy?” He frowned. “My God, I don’t know. Somewhere on a junk heap, I guess.”
“Oh.” Amy was apologetic. “I thought it was the road to happiness or wealth. Or both.”
“No, no. Never. It was perhaps a step in education. But truth, like life, is dynamic.” He pulled a pamphlet from his pocket. “Here, read that. You’ll have to read it several times to understand it...”
Amy took it and glanced at it. On its printed cover the most prominent word, in large black type, was WOMON. She looked up at him in astonishment.
“Woman?” she demanded. “Women? Phil! Don’t tell me you’ve gone in for matriarchy! Or even — sex? My sex?”
“Of course not,” he denied indignantly. “It has nothing to do with women or sex either. WOMON means WORK-MONEY. The basis of the world economic structure is money. The basis of money is — has been — gold. It is antiquated and unsound, it no longer functions. What does a dollar of our currency represent? A speck of gold. Ridiculous! It has been proposed to base the dollar on commodities instead of gold. On potatoes and wool and iron! Even more ridiculous! Commodities are even more unstable than gold. The basis of money must be stable, solid, unalterable. What is stable? What is the most stable thing in the world?”
He tapped her on the shoulder with a forefinger. “The work of a man! That’s stable!” He stretched out his arms. “What these hands can do!” He tapped his temple. “What this head can do! That’s the basis, the only sound basis, for the world’s money! Work-Money! We call it Womon!”
“I see,” Amy nodded. “It sounds sensible, but I still think it looks and sounds too much like woman. You’ll have trouble with that, see if you don’t.” She stuffed the pamphlet into her bag. “I’ll read this over. I don’t know about several times, but I’ll read it. Is Uncle Arthur in his office?”
“Yes. I just left him. I’d be glad to send you a bunch of those, if you’d care to pass them around.”
“I’d better read it first. I might not like it.” Amy offered a hand. “Nice to see you again. Hooray for happiness and wealth.”
That was indiscreet, for it started him on Womon’s explanation of the true nature of wealth, but after a few minutes she succeeded in heading him off. Soon after he had gone, through a door that led toward the hum of machinery, word came for her to penetrate to Mr. Tingley’s office. To get there she had to pass through two or three more partitions, exchange greetings with women and girls at desks who called her Amy, and traverse a long wide passageway. As she stopped at a door on the frosted glass panel of which THOMAS TINGLEY was inscribed, her shoulders moved with a little shiver of discomposure. She had forgotten about that. There was no Thomas Tingley and had not been for all of her twenty-five years and then some. It was his grandson she was calling on. To keep his name painted there on the door had always struck her — she shrugged the shiver off, and entered.
Though Thomas Tingley no longer occupied that room, certainly his office furniture did. The old-fashioned roll-top desk was battered and scarred, the varnish on the chair seats had long since been rubbed away, and the ancient massive safe was anything but streamlined. Wherever shelves and cabinets left enough wall space for a large framed photograph, one was there, the oldest and most faded, of a hundred or more men and women in strange and ludicrous costumes, bearing the hand-printed legend: Tingley’s Titbits Employees Picnic, Colton Beach, Long Island, July 4th, 1891. A large folding screen of green burlap, at Amy’s right as she entered, concealed, as she knew, a marble wash basin with hot and cold running water which, say what you please about it, had once been so de luxe as to be next door to sybaritic.
She knew all three of the people whose conversation her entrance had interrupted. The plump fussy-looking man at the desk, with hair not really gray but showing signs of it, was Arthur Tingley, grandson of the name on the door. The one with hair completely gray, even white, standing like a parson with his hands behind his back and four buttons on his coat, all buttoned, was Sol Fry, the sales manager. The woman, somewhere between the two men as to age, who in case of need could have been transformed instantly into the commanding officer of a Women’s Battalion by merely buying her a uniform, was G. Yates, devoid of title in the unincorporated firm, but actually in charge of production. No one was supposed to know that the G. stood for Gwendolyn; Amy had learned it inadvertently from Phil Tingley.