When she got to the office, everything seemed natural and reassuring and so handsomely furnished and polished so bright and typewriters going so fast and much more stir and bustle than there’d been in the offices of Dreyfus and Carroll; but everybody looked Jewish and she was afraid they wouldn’t like her and afraid she wouldn’t be able to hold down the job.
A girl named Gladys Compton showed her her desk, that she said had been Miss Rosenthal’s desk. It was in a little passage just outside J. Ward’s private office opposite the door to Mr. Robbins’ office. Gladys Compton was Jewish and was Mr. Robbins’ stenographer and said what a lovely girl Miss Rosenthal had been and how sorry they all were in the office about her accident and Janey felt that she was stepping into a dead man’s shoes and would have a stiff row to hoe. Gladys Compton stared at her with resentful brown eyes that had a slight squint in them when she looked hard at anything and said she hoped she’d be able to get through the work, that sometimes the work was simply killing, and left her.
When things were closing up at five, J. Ward came out of his private office. Janey was so pleased to see him standing by her desk. He said he’d talked to Miss Compton and asked her to look out for Janey a little at first and that he knew it was hard for a young girl finding her way around a new city, finding a suitable place to live and that sort of thing, but that Miss Compton was a very nice girl and would help her out and he was sure everything would work out fine. He gave her a blueeyed smile and handed her a closely written packet of notes and said would she mind coming in the office a little early in the morning and having them all copied and on his desk by nine o’clock. He wouldn’t usually ask her to do work like that but all the typists were so stupid and everything was in confusion owing to his absence. Janey felt only too happy to do it and warm all over from his smile.
She and Gladys Compton left the office together. Gladys Compton suggested that seeing as she didn’t know the city hadn’t she better come home with her. She lived in Flatbush with her father and mother and of course it wouldn’t be what Miss Williams was accustomed to but they had a spare room that they could let her have until she could find her way around that it was clean at least and that was more than you could say about many places. They went by the station to get her bag. Janey felt relieved not to have to find her way alone in all that crowd. Then they went down into the subway and got on an expresstrain that was packed to the doors and Janey didn’t think she could stand it being packed in close with so many people. She thought she’d never get there and the trains made so much noise in the tunnel she couldn’t hear what the other girl was saying.
At last they got out into a wide street with an elevated running down it where the buildings were all one or two stories and the stores were groceries and vegetable and fruit stores. Gladys Compton said, “We eat kosher, Miss Williams, on account of the old people. I hope you don’t mind; of course Benny — Benny’s my brudder — and I haven’t any prejudices.” Janey didn’t know what kosher was but she said of course she didn’t mind and told the other girl about how funny the food was down in Mexico, so peppery you couldn’t hardly eat it.
When they got to the house Gladys Compton began to pronounce her words less precisely and was very kind and thoughtful. Her father was a little old man with glasses on the end of his nose and her mother was a fat pearshaped woman in a wig. They talked Yiddish among themselves. They did everything they could to make Janey comfortable and gave her a nice room and said they’d give her board and lodging for ten dollars a week as long as she wanted to stay and when she wanted to move she could go away and no hard feelings. The house was a yellow twofamily frame house on a long block of houses all exactly alike, but it was well heated and the bed was comfortable. The old man was a watchmaker and worked at a Fifth Avenue jeweler’s. In the old country their name had been Kompshchski but they said that in New York nobody could pronounce it. The old man had wanted to take the name of Freedman but his wife thought Compton sounded more refined. They had a good supper with tea in glasses and soup with dumplings and red caviar and gefültefisch and Janey thought it was very nice knowing people like that. The boy Benny was still in highschool, a gangling youth with heavy glasses who ate with his head hung over his plate and had a rude way of contradicting anything anybody said. Gladys said not to mind him, that he was very good in his studies and was going to study law. When the strangeness had worn off a little Janey got to like the Comptons, particularly old Mr. Compton, who was very kind and treated everything that happened with gentle heartbroken humor.
The work at the office was so interesting. J. Ward was beginning to rely on her for things. Janey felt it was going to be a good year for her.
The worst thing was the threequarters of an hour ride in the subway to Union Square mornings. Janey would try to read the paper and to keep herself in a corner away from the press of bodies. She liked to get to the office feeling bright and crisp with her dress feeling neat and her hair in nice order, but the long jolting ride fagged her out, made her feel as if she wanted to get dressed and take a bath all over again. She liked walking along Fourteenth Street all garish and shimmery in the sunny early morning dust and up Fifth Avenue to the office. She and Gladys were always among the first to get in. Janey kept flowers on her desk and would sometimes slip in and put a couple of roses in a silver vase on J. Ward’s broad mahogany desk. Then she’d sort the mail, lay his personal letters in a neat pile on the corner of the blotter-pad that was in a sort of frame of red illuminated Italian leather, read the other letters, look over his engagement book and make up a small typewritten list of engagements, interviews, copy to be got out, statements to the press. She laid the list in the middle of the blotter under a rawcopper paperweight from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, checking off with a neat W. the items she could attend to without consulting him.
By the time she was back at her desk correcting the spelling in the copy that had emanated from Mr. Robbins’ office the day before she began to feel a funny tingle inside her; soon J. Ward would be coming in. She told herself it was all nonsense but every time the outer office door opened she looked up expectantly. She began to worry a little; he might have had an accident driving in from Great Neck. Then when she’d given up expecting him he’d walk hurriedly through with a quick smile all around and the groundglass door of his private office would close behind him. Janey would notice whether he wore a dark or a light suit, what color his necktie was, whether he had a fresh haircut or not. One day he had a splatter of mud on the trouserleg of his blue serge suit and she couldn’t keep her mind off it all morning trying to think of a pretext to go in and tell him about it. Rarely he’d look at her directly with a flash of blue eyes as he passed, or stop and ask her a question. Then she’d feel fine.
The work at the office was so interesting. It put her right in the midst of headlines like when she used to talk to Jerry Burnham back at Dreyfus and Carroll’s. There was the Onondaga Salt Products account and literature about bathsalts and chemicals and the employees’ baseball team and cafeteria and old age pensions, and Marigold Copper and combating subversive tendencies among the miners who were mostly foreigners who had to be educated in the principles of Americanism, and the Citrus Center Chamber of Commerce’s campaign to educate the small investors in the North in the stable building qualities of the Florida fruit industry, and the slogan to be launched, “Put an Alligator Pear on Every Breakfast Table” for the Avocado Producers Coöperative. That concern occasionally sent up a case so that everybody in the office had an alligator pear to take home, except Mr. Robbins who wouldn’t take his, but said they tasted like soap. Now the biggest account of all was Southwestern Oil campaign to counter the insidious anti-American propaganda of the British oilcompanies in Mexico and to oppose the intervention lobby of the Hearst interests in Washington.