The Job Part 15

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 amus.e.m.e.nt, laughed now and then, and proved the heroism as well as the unthinking servility of the human race.

- 2

The need of feeling that there were people near to her urged Una to sell her furniture and move from the flat to a boarding-house.

She avoided Mrs. Sessions's advice. She was sure that Mrs. Sessions would bustle about and find her a respectable place where she would have to be cheery. She didn't want to be cheery. She wanted to think. She even bought a serious magazine with articles. Not that she read it.

But she was afraid to be alone any more. Anyway, she would explore the city.

Of the many New Yorks, she had found only Morningside Park, Central Park, Riverside Drive, the shopping district, the restaurants and theaters which Walter had discovered to her, a few down-town office streets, and her own arid region of flats. She did not know the proliferating East Side, the factories, the endless semi-suburban stretches--nor Fifth Avenue. Her mother and Mrs. Sessions had inculcated in her the earnest idea that most parts of New York weren't quite nice.

In over two years in the city she had never seen a millionaire nor a criminal; she knew the picturesqueness neither of wealth nor of pariah poverty.

She did not look like an adventurer when, at a Sat.u.r.day noon of October, she left the office--slight, kindly, rather timid, with her pale hair and school-teacher eye-gla.s.ses, and clear cheeks set off by comely mourning. But she was seizing New York. She said over and over, "Why, I can go and live any place I want to, and maybe I'll meet some folks who are simply fascinating." She wasn't very definite about these fascinating folks, but they implied girls to play with and--she hesitated--and decidedly men, men different from Walter, who would touch her hand in courtly reverence.

She poked through strange streets. She carried an a.s.sortment of "Rooms and Board" clippings from the "want-ad" page of a newspaper, and obediently followed their hints about finding the perfect place. She resolutely did not stop at places not advertised in the paper, though nearly every house, in some quarters, had a sign, "Room to Rent." Una still had faith in the veracity of whatever appeared in the public prints, as compared with what she dared see for herself.

The advertis.e.m.e.nts led her into a dozen parts of the city frequented by roomers, the lonely, gray, detached people who dwell in other people's houses.

It was not so splendid a quest as she had hoped; it was too sharp a revelation of the cannon-food of the city, the people who had never been trained, and who had lost heart. It was scarcely possible to tell one street from another; to remember whether she was on Sixteenth Street or Twenty-sixth. Always the same rows of red-brick or brownstone houses, all alike, the monotony broken only by infrequent warehouses or loft-buildings; always the same doubtful mounting of stone steps, the same searching for a bell, the same waiting, the same slatternly, suspicious landlady, the same evil hallway with a brown hat-rack, a steel-engraving with one corner stained with yellow, a carpet worn through to the flooring in a large oval hole just in front of the stairs, a smell of cabbage, a lack of ventilation. Always the same desire to escape, though she waited politely while the landlady in the same familiar harsh voice went through the same formula.

Then, before she could flee to the comparatively fresh air of the streets, Una would politely have to follow the panting landlady to a room that was a horror of dirty carpet, lumpy mattress, and furniture with everything worn off that could wear off. And at last, always the same phrases by which Una meant to spare the woman: "Well, I'll think it over. Thank you so much for showing me the rooms, but before I decide-- Want to look around--"

Phrases which the landlady heard ten times a day.

She conceived a great-hearted pity for landladies. They were so patient, in face of her evident distaste. Even their suspiciousness was but the growling of a beaten dog. They sighed and closed their doors on her without much attempt to persuade her to stay. Her heart ached with their lack of imagination. They had no more imagination than those landladies of the insect world, the spiders, with their unchanging, instinctive, ancestral types of webs.

Her depression was increased by the desperate physical weariness of the hunt. Not that afternoon, not till two weeks later, did she find a room in a large, long, somber railroad flat on Lexington Avenue, conducted by a curly-haired young bookkeeper and his pretty wife, who provided their clients with sympathy, with extensive and scientific data regarding the motion-picture houses in the neighborhood, and board which was neither scientific nor very extensive.

It was time for Una to sacrifice the last material contact with her mother; to sell the furniture which she had known ever since, as a baby in Panama, she had crawled from this horsehair chair, all the long and perilous way across this same brown carpet, to this red-plush couch.

- 3

It was not so hard to sell the furniture; she could even read and burn her father's letters with an unhappy resoluteness. Despite her tenderness, Una had something of youth's joy in getting rid of old things, as preparation for acquiring the new. She did sob when she found her mother's straw hat, just as Mrs. Golden had left it, on the high shelf of the wardrobe as though her mother might come in at any minute, put it on, and start for a walk. She sobbed again when she encountered the tiny tear in the bottom of the couch, which her own baby fingers had made in trying to enlarge a pirate's cave. That brought the days when her parents were immortal and all-wise; when the home sitting-room, where her father read the paper aloud, was a security against all the formidable world outside.

But to these recollections Una could shut her heart. To one absurd thing, because it was living, Una could not shut her heart--to the senile canary.

Possibly she could have taken it with her, but she felt confusedly that d.i.c.kie would not be appreciated in other people's houses. She evaded asking the Sessionses to shelter the bird, because every favor that she permitted from that smug family was a bond that tied her to their life of married spinsterhood.

"Oh, d.i.c.kie, d.i.c.kie, what am I going to do with you?" she cried, slipping a finger through the wires of the cage.

The canary hopped toward her and tried to chirp his greeting.

"Even when you were sick you tried to sing to me, and mother did love you," she sighed. "I just can't kill you--trusting me like that."

She turned her back, seeking to solve the problem by ignoring it. While she was sorting dresses--some trace of her mother in every fold, every wrinkle of the waists and lace collars--she was listening to the bird in the cage.

"I'll think of some way--I'll find somebody who will want you, d.i.c.kie dear," she murmured, desperately, now and then.

After dinner and nightfall, with her nerves tw.a.n.ging all the more because it seemed silly to worry over one dissolute old bird when all her life was breaking up, she hysterically sprang up, s.n.a.t.c.hed d.i.c.kie from the cage, and trotted down-stairs to the street.

"I'll leave you somewhere. Somebody will find you," she declared.

Concealing the bird by holding it against her breast with a hand supersensitive to its warm little feathers, she walked till she found a deserted tenement doorway. She hastily set the bird down on a stone bal.u.s.trade beside the entrance steps. d.i.c.kie chirped more cheerily, more sweetly than for many days, and confidingly hopped back to her hand.

"Oh, I can't leave him for boys to torture and I can't take him, I can't--"

In a sudden spasm she threw the bird into the air, and ran back to the flat, sobbing, "I can't kill it--I can't--there's so much death." Longing to hear the quavering affection of its song once more, but keeping herself from even going to the window, to look for it, with bitter haste she completed her work of getting rid of things--things--things--the things which were stones of an imprisoning past.

- 4

Shyness was over Una when at last she was in the house of strangers.

She sat marveling that this square, white cubby-hole of a room was hers permanently, that she hadn't just come here for an hour or two.

She couldn't get it to resemble her first impression of it. Now the hallway was actually a part of her life--every morning she would face the picture of a magazine-cover girl when she came out of her room.

Her agitation was increased by the problem of keeping up the maiden modesty appropriate to a Golden, a young female friend of the Sessionses', in a small flat with gentlemen lodgers and just one bathroom. Una was saved by not having a spinster friend with whom to share her shrinking modesty. She simply had to take waiting for her turn at the bathroom as a matter of course, and insensibly she was impressed by the decency with which these dull, ordinary people solved the complexities of their enforced intimacy. When she wildly clutched her virgin bathrobe about her and pa.s.sed a man in the hall, he stalked calmly by without any of the teetering apologies which broad-beamed Mr.

Sessions had learned from his genteel spouse.

She could not at first distinguish among her companions. Gradually they came to be distinct, important. They held numberless surprises for her.

She would not have supposed that a bookkeeper in a fish-market would be likely to possess charm. Particularly if he combined that amorphous occupation with being a boarding-house proprietor. Yet her landlord, Herbert Gray, with his look of a track-athlete, his confessions of ignorance and his nave enthusiasms about whatever in the motion pictures seemed to him heroic, large, colorful, was as admirable as the several youngsters of her town who had plodded through Princeton or Pennsylvania and come back to practise law or medicine or gentlemanly inheritance of business. And his wife, round and comely, laughing easily, wearing her clothes with an untutored grace which made her cheap waists smart, was so thoroughly her husband's comrade in everything, that these struggling n.o.bodies had all the riches of the earth.

The Grays took Una in as though she were their guest, but they did not bother her. They were city-born, taught by the city to let other people live their own lives.

The Grays had taken a flat twice too large for their own use. The other lodgers, who lived, like monks on a bare corridor, along the narrow "railroad" hall, were three besides Una:

A city failure, one with a hundred thousand failures, a gray-haired, neat man, who had been everything and done nothing, and who now said evasively that he was "in the collection business." He read d.i.c.kens and played a masterful game of chess. He liked to have it thought that his past was brave with mysterious splendors. He spoke hintingly of great lawyers. But he had been near to them only as a clerk for a large law firm. He was grateful to any one for noticing him. Like most of the failures, he had learned the art of doing nothing at all. All Sunday, except for a two hours' walk in Central Park, and one game of chess with Herbert Gray, he dawdled in his room, slept, regarded his stocking-feet with an appearance of profound meditation, yawned, picked at the Sunday newspaper. Una once saw him napping on a radiant autumn Sunday afternoon, and detested him. But he was politely interested in her work for Troy Wilkins, carefully exact in saying, "Good-morning, miss," and he became as familiar to her as the gas-heater in her cubicle.

Second fellow-lodger was a busy, reserved woman, originally from Kansas City, who had something to do with some branch library. She had solved the problems of woman's lack of place in this city scheme by closing tight her emotions, her sense of adventure, her hope of friendship. She never talked to Una, after discovering that Una had no interesting opinions on the best reading for children nine to eleven.

These gentle, inconsequential city waifs, the Grays, the failure, the library-woman, meant no more to Una than the crowds who were near, yet so detached, in the streets. But the remaining boarder annoyed her by his noisy whine. He was an underbred maverick, with sharp eyes of watery blue, a thin mustache, large teeth, and no chin worth noticing. He would bounce in of an evening, when the others were being decorous and dull in the musty dining-room, and yelp: "How do we all find our seskpadalian selves this bright and balmy evenin'? How does your perspegacity discipulate, Herby? What's the good word, Miss Golden? Well, well, well, if here ain't our good old friend, the Rev. J. Pilkington Corned Beef; how 'r' you, Pilky? Old Mrs. Cabbage feelin' well, too? Well, well, still discussing the movies, Herby? Got any new opinions about Mary Pickford? Well, well. Say, I met another guy that's as nutty as you, Herby; he thinks that Wilhelm Jenkins Bryan is a great statesman. Let's hear some more about the Sage of Free Silver, Herby."

The little man was never content till he had drawn them into so bitter an argument that some one would rise, throw down a napkin, growl, "Well, if that's all you know about it--if you're all as ignorant as that, you simply ain't worth arguing with," and stalk out. When general topics failed, the disturber would catechize the library-woman about Louisa M.

Alcott, or the failure about his desultory inquiries into Christian Science, or Mrs. Gray about the pictures plastering the dining-room--a dozen spiritual revelations of apples and oranges, which she had bought at a department-store sale.

The maverick's name was Fillmore J. Benson. Strangers called him Benny, but his more intimate acquaintances, those to whom he had talked for at least an hour, were requested to call him Phil. He made a number of pretty puns about his first name. He was, surprisingly, a doctor--not the sort that studies science, but the sort that studies the gullibility of human nature--a "Doctor of Manipulative Osteology." He had earned a diploma by a correspondence course, and had scrabbled together a small practice among retired shopkeepers. He was one of the strange, impudent race of fakers who prey upon the clever city. He didn't expect any one at the Grays' to call him a "doctor."

He drank whisky and gambled for pennies, was immoral in his relations with women and as thick-skinned as he was blatant. He had been a newsboy, a contractor's clerk, and climbed up by the application of his wits. He read enormously--newspapers, cheap magazines, medical books; he had an opinion about everything, and usually worsted every one at the Grays' in arguments. And he did his patients good by giving them sympathy and ma.s.sage. He would have been an excellent citizen had the city not preferred to train him, as a child in its reeling streets, to a sharp unscrupulousness.

Una was at first disgusted by Phil Benson, then perplexed. He would address her in stately Shakespearean phrases which, as a boy, he had heard from the gallery of the Academy of Music. He would quote poetry at her. She was impressed when he almost silenced the library-woman, in an argument as to whether Longfellow or Whittier was the better poet, by parroting the whole of "Snow Bound."

She fancied that Phil's general pea-weevil aspect concealed the soul of a poet. But she was shocked out of her pleasant fabling when Phil roared at Mrs. Gray: "Say, what did the baker use this pie for? A bureau or a trunk? I've found three pairs of socks and a safety-pin in my slab, so far."