"But, good heavens! child, the employers have just as hard a time. Talk about being nervous! Take it in our game. The salesman does the missionary work, but the employer is the one who has to worry. Take some big deal that seems just about to get across-and then falls through just when you reach for the contract and draw a breath of relief. Or say you've swung a deal and have to pay your rent and office force, and you can't get the commission that's due you on an accomplished sale. And your clerks dash in and want a raise, under threat of quitting, just at the moment when you're wondering how you'll raise the money to pay them their present salaries on time! Those are the things that make an employer a nervous wreck. He's got to keep it going. I tell you there's advantages in being a wage-slave and having the wages coming-"
"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.
"Shall I try to exploit it and close it out quick? I've got half a mind to go back to the old tent-and-brass-band method and auction it off. The salesmen have all they can get away with. I haven't even a good, reliable resident salesman I could trust to handle it on the grounds."
"Let me try it!" said Una. "Give me a month's trial as salesman on the ground, and see what I can do. Just run some double-leaded classified ads. and forget it. You can trust me; you know you can. Why, I'll write my own ads., even: 'View of Long Island Sound, and beautiful rolling hills. Near to family yacht club, with swimming and sailing.' I know I could manage it."
Mr. Truax pretended not to hear, but she rose, leaned over his desk, stared urgently at him, till he weakly promised: "Well, I'll talk it over with Mr. Fein. But you know it wouldn't be worth a bit more salary than you're getting now. And what would I do for a secretary?"
"I don't worry about salary. Think of being out on Long Island, now that spring is coming! And I'll find a successor and train her."
"Well-" said Mr. Truax, while Una took her pencil and awaited dictation with a heart so blithe that she could scarcely remember the symbols for "Yours of sixteenth instant received."
CHAPTER XXII
Of the year and a half from March, 1914, to the autumn of 1915, which Una spent on Long Island, as the resident salesman and director of Crosshampton Hill Gardens, this history has little to say, for it is a treatise regarding a commonplace woman on a job, and at the Gardens there was no job at all, but one long summer day of flushed laughter. It is true that "values were down on the North Shore" at this period, and sales slow; it is true that Una (in high tan boots and a tweed suit from a sporting-goods house) supervised carpenters in constructing a bungalow as local office and dwelling-place for herself. It is true that she quarreled with the engineer planning the walks and sewers, usurped authority and discharged him, and had to argue with Mr. Truax for three hours before he sustained her decision. Also, she spent an average of nine hours a day in waiting for people or in showing them about, and serving tea and biscuits to dusty female villa-hunters. And she herself sometimes ran a lawn-mower and cooked her own meals. But she had respect, achievement, and she ranged the open hills from the stirring time when dogwood blossoms filled the ravines with a fragrant mist, round the calendar, and on till the elms were gorgeous with a second autumn, and sunsets marched in naked glory of archangels over the Connecticut hills beyond the flaming waters of Long Island Sound. Slow-moving, but gentle, were the winter months, for she became a part of the commuting town of Crosshampton Harbor, not as the negligible daughter of a Panama Captain Golden, but as a woman with the glamour of independence, executive position, city knowledge, and a certain marital mystery. She was invited to parties at which she obediently played bridge, to dances at the Harbor Yacht Club, to meetings of the Village Friendly Society. A gay, easy-going group, with cocktail-mixers on their sideboards, and motors in their galvanized-iron garages, but also with savings-bank books in the drawers beneath their unit bookcases, took her up as a woman who had learned to listen and smile. And she went with them to friendly, unexacting dances at the Year-Round Inn, conducted by Charley Duquesne, in the impoverished Duquesne mansion on Smiley Point. She liked Charley, and gave him advice about bedroom chintzes for the inn, and learned how a hotel is provisioned and served. Charley did not know that her knowledge of chintzes was about two weeks old and derived from a buyer at Wanamacy's. He only knew that it solved his difficulties.