The Job (Unabridged). Sinclair Lewis
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and alarming came to interrupt her happy progress to a knowledge of herself and men.
5
The Goldens had owned no property in Panama, Pennsylvania; they had rented their house. Captain Lew Golden, who was so urgent in advising others to purchase real estate — with a small, justifiable commission to himself — had never quite found time to decide on his own real-estate investments. When they had come to New York, Una and her mother had given up the house and sold the heavier furniture, the big beds, the stove. The rest of the furniture they had brought to the city and installed in a little flat way up on 148th Street.
Her mother was, Una declared, so absolutely the lady that it was a crying shame to think of her immured here in their elevatorless tenement; this new, clean, barren building of yellow brick, its face broken out with fire-escapes. It had narrow halls, stairs of slate treads and iron rails, and cheap wooden doorways which had begun to warp the minute the structure was finished — and sold. The bright-green burlap wall-covering in the hallways had faded in less than a year to the color of dry grass. The janitor grew tired every now and then. He had been markedly diligent at first, but he was already giving up the task of keeping the building clean. It was one of, and typical of, a mile of yellow brick tenements; it was named after an African orchid of great loveliness, and it was filled with clerks, motormen, probationer policemen, and enormously prolific women in dressing-sacques.
The Goldens had three rooms and bath. A small linoleous gas-stove kitchen. A bedroom with standing wardrobe, iron bed, and just one graceful piece of furniture — Una’s dressing-table; a room pervasively feminine in its scent and in the little piles of lingerie which Mrs. Golden affected more, not less, as she grew older. The living-room, with stiff, brown, woolen brocade chairs, transplanted from their Panama home, a red plush sofa, two large oak-framed Biblical pictures — “The Wedding-feast at Cana,” and “Solomon in His Temple.” This living-room had never been changed since the day of their moving in. Una repeatedly coveted the German color-prints she saw in shop windows, but she had to economize.
She planned that when she should succeed they would have such an apartment of white enamel and glass doors and mahogany as she saw described in the women’s magazines. She realized mentally that her mother must be lonely in the long hours of waiting for her return, but she who was busy all day could never feel emotionally how great was that loneliness, and she expected her mother to be satisfied with the future.
Quite suddenly, a couple of weeks after the dance, when they were talking about the looming topic — what kind of work Una would be able to get when she should have completed school — her mother fell violently a-weeping; sobbed, “Oh, Una baby, I want to go home. I’m so lonely here — just nobody but you and the Sessionses. Can’t we go back to Panama? You don’t seem to really know what you are going to do.”
“Why, mother — ”
Una loved her mother, yet she felt a grim disgust, rather than pity.... Just when she had been working so hard! And for her mother as much as for herself.... She stalked over to the table, severely rearranged the magazines, slammed down a newspaper, and turned, angrily. “Why, can’t you see? I can’t give up my work now.”
“Couldn’t you get something to do in Panama, dearie?”
“You know perfectly well that I tried.”
“But maybe now, with your college course and all — even if it took a little longer to get something there, we’d be right among the folks we know — ”
“Mother, can’t you understand that we have only a little over three hundred dollars now? If we moved again and everything, we wouldn’t have two hundred dollars to live on. Haven’t you any sense of finances?”
“You must not talk to me that way, my daughter!”
A slim, fine figure of hurt-dignity, Mrs. Golden left the room, lay down in the bedroom, her face away from the door where Una stood in perplexity. Una ran to her, kissed her shoulder, begged for forgiveness. Her mother patted her cheek, and sobbed, “Oh, it doesn’t matter,” in a tone so forlorn and lonely that it did matter, terribly. The sadness of it tortured Una while she was realizing that her mother had lost all practical comprehension of the details of life, was become a child, trusting everything to her daughter, yet retaining a power of suffering such as no child can know.
It had been easy to bring her mother here, to start a career. Both of them had preconceived a life of gaiety and beauty, of charming people and pictures and concerts. But all those graces were behind a dusty wall of shorthand and typewriting. Una’s struggle in coming to New York had just begun.
Gently arbitrary, dearer than ever to Una in her helpless longing for kindly neighbors and the familiar places, Mrs. Golden went on hoping that she could persuade Una to go back to Panama. She never seemed to realize that their capital wasn’t increasing as time passed. Sometimes impatient at her obtuseness, sometimes passionate with comprehending tenderness, Una devoted herself to her, and Mr. Schwirtz and Sanford Hunt and Sam Weintraub and Todd faded. She treasured her mother’s happiness at their Christmas dinner with the Sessionses. She encouraged the Sessionses to come up to the flat as often as they could, and she lulled her mother to a tolerable calm boredom. Before it was convenient to think of men again, her school-work was over.
The commercial college had a graduation once a month. On January 15, 1906, Una finished her course, regretfully said good-by to Sam Weintraub, and to Sanford Hunt, who had graduated in mid-December, but had come back for “class commencement”; and at the last moment she hesitated so long over J. J. Todd’s hints about calling some day, that he was discouraged and turned away. Una glanced about the study-hall — the first place where she had ever been taken seriously as a worker — and marched off to her first battle in the war of business.
CHAPTER IV
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SANFORD HUNT telephoned to Una that he and Mr. Julius Edward Schwirtz — whom he called “Eddie” — had done their best to find an “opening” for her in the office of the Lowry Paint Company, but that there was no chance.
The commercial college gave her the names of several possible employers, but they all wanted approximate perfection at approximately nothing a week. After ten days of panic-stricken waiting at the employment office of a typewriter company, and answering want advertisements, the typewriter people sent her to the office of the Motor and Gas Gazette, a weekly magazine for the trade. In this atmosphere of the literature of lubricating oil and drop forgings and body enamels, as an eight-dollar-a-week copyist, Una first beheld the drama and romance of the office world.
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There is plenty of romance in business. Fine, large, meaningless, general terms like romance and business can always be related. They take the place of thinking, and are highly useful to optimists and lecturers.
But in the world of business there is a bewildered new Muse of Romance, who is clad not in silvery tissue of dreams, but in a neat blue suit that won’t grow too shiny under the sleeves.
Adventure now, with Una, in the world of business; of offices and jobs and tired, ordinary people who know such reality of romance as your masquerading earl, your shoddy Broadway actress, or your rosily amorous dairy-maid could never imagine. The youths of poetry and of the modern motor-car fiction make a long diversion of love; while the sleezy-coated office-man who surprises a look of humanness in the weary eyes of the office-woman, knows that he must compress all the wonder of madness into five minutes, because the Chief is prowling about, glancing meaningly at the little signs that declare, “Your time is your employer’s money; don’t steal it.”
A world is this whose noblest vista is composed of desks and typewriters, filing-cases and insurance calendars, telephones, and the bald heads of men who believe dreams to be idiotic. Here, no galleon breasts the sky-line; no explorer in evening clothes makes love to an heiress. Here ride no rollicking cowboys, nor