Mr. Wilkins's office was small and agitated. It consisted of two rooms and an insignificant entry-hall, in which last was a water-cooler, a postal scale, a pile of newspapers, and a morose office-boy who drew copies of Gibson girls all day long on stray pieces of wrapping-paper, and confided to Una, at least once a week, that he wanted to take a correspondence course in window-dressing. In one of the two rooms Mr. Wilkins cautiously made drawings at a long table, or looked surprised over correspondence at a small old-fashioned desk, or puffed and scratched as he planned form-letters to save his steadily waning business.
In the other room there were the correspondence-files, and the desks of Una, the chief stenographer, and of slangy East-Side Bessie Kraker, who conscientiously copied form-letters, including all errors in them, and couldn't, as Wilkins complainingly pointed out, be trusted with dictation which included any words more difficult than "sincerely."
From their window the two girls could see the windows of an office across the street. About once a month an interesting curly-haired youth leaned out of one of the windows opposite. Otherwise there was no view.
§ 4
Twelve o'clock, the hour at which most of the offices closed on Saturday in summer, was excitedly approaching. The office-women throughout the Septimus Building, who had been showing off their holiday frocks all morning, were hastily finishing letters, or rushing to the women's wash-rooms to discuss with one another the hang of new skirts. All morning Bessie Kraker had kept up a monologue, beginning, "Say, lis-ten, Miss Golden, say, gee! I was goin' down to South Beach with my gentleman friend this afternoon, and, say, what d'you think the piker had to go and get stuck for? He's got to work all afternoon. I don't care-I don't care! I'm going to Coney Island with Sadie, and I bet you we pick up some fellows and do the light fantastic till one G. M. Oh, you sad sea waves! I bet Sadie and me make 'em sad!"
"But we'll be straight," said Bessie, half an hour later, apropos of nothing. "But gee! it's fierce to not have any good times without you take a risk. But gee! my dad would kill me if I went wrong. He reads the Talmud all the time, and hates Goys. But gee! I can't stand it all the time being a mollycoddle. I wisht I was a boy! I'd be a' aviator."
Bessie had a proud new blouse with a deep V, the edges of which gaped a bit and suggested that by ingenuity one could see more than was evident at first. Troy Wilkins, while pretending to be absent-mindedly fussing about a correspondence-file that morning, had forgotten that he was much married and had peered at the V. Una knew it, and the sordidness of that curiosity so embarrassed her that she stopped typing to clutch at the throat of her own high-necked blouse, her heart throbbing. She wanted to run away. She had a vague desire to "help" Bessie, who purred at poor, good Mr. Wilkins and winked at Una and chewed gum enjoyably, who was brave and hardy and perfectly able to care for herself-an organism modified by the Ghetto to the life which still bewildered Una.
Mr. Wilkins went home at 11.17, after giving them enough work to last till noon. The office-boy chattily disappeared two minutes later, while Bessie went two minutes after that. Her delay was due to the adjustment of her huge straw hat, piled with pink roses and tufts of blue malines.
Una stayed till twelve. Her ambition had solidified into an unreasoning conscientiousness.
With Bessie gone, the office was so quiet that she hesitated to typewrite lest They sneak up on her-They who dwell in silent offices as They dwell beneath a small boy's bed at night. The hush was intimidating; her slightest movement echoed; she stopped the sharply tapping machine after every few words to listen.
At twelve she put on her hat with two jabs of the hat-pins, and hastened to the elevator, exulting in freedom. The elevator was crowded with girls in new white frocks, voluble about their afternoon's plans. One of them carried a wicker suit-case. She was, she announced, starting on her two weeks' vacation; there would be some boys, and she was going to have "a peach of a time."
Una and her mother had again spent a week of June in Panama, and she now recalled the bright, free mornings and lingering, wonderful twilights.
She had no place to go this holiday afternoon, and she longed to join a noisy, excited party. Of Walter Babson she did not think. She stubbornly determined to snatch this time of freedom. Why, of course, she asserted, she could play by herself quite happily! With a spurious gaiety she patted her small black hand-bag. She skipped across to the Sixth Avenue Elevated and went up to the department-store district. She made elaborate plans for the great adventure of shopping. Bessie Kraker had insisted, with the nonchalant shrillness of eighteen, that Una "had ought to wear more color"; and Una had found, in the fashion section of a woman's magazine, the suggestion for exactly the thing-"a modest, attractive frock of brown, with smart touches of orange"-and economical. She had the dress planned-ribbon-belt half brown and half orange, a collar edged with orange, cuffs slashed with it.
There were a score of mild matter-of-fact Unas on the same Elevated train with her, in their black hats and black jackets and black skirts and white waists, with one hint of coquetry in a white-lace jabot or a white-lace veil; faces slightly sallow or channeled with care, but eyes that longed to flare with love; women whom life didn't want except to type its letters about invoices of rubber heels; women who would have given their salvation for the chance to sacrifice themselves for love.... And there was one man on that Elevated train, a well-bathed man with cynical eyes, who read a little book with a florid gold cover, all about Clytemnestra, because he was certain that modern cities have no fine romance, no high tragedy; that you must go back to the Greeks for real feeling. He often aphorized, "Frightfully hackneyed to say, 'woman's place is in the home,' but really, you know, these women going to offices, vulgarizing all their fine womanliness, and this shrieking sisterhood going in for suffrage and Lord knows what. Give me the reticences of the harem rather than one of these office-women with gum-chewing vacuities. None of them clever enough to be tragic!" He was ever so whimsical about the way in which the suffrage movement had cheated him of the chance to find a "grande amoureuse." He sat opposite Una in the train and solemnly read his golden book. He did not see Una watch with shy desire every movement of a baby that was talking to its mother in some unknown dialect of baby-land. He was feeling deep sensations about Clytemnestra's misfortunes-though he controlled his features in the most gentlemanly manner, and rose composedly at his station, letting a well-bred glance of pity fall upon the gum-chewers.
Una found a marvelously clean, new restaurant on Sixth Avenue, with lace curtains at the window and, between the curtains, a red geranium in a pot covered with red-crêpe paper tied with green ribbon. A new place! She was tired of the office, the Elevated, the flat on 148th Street, the restaurants where she tediously had her week-day lunches. She entered the new restaurant briskly, swinging her black bag. The place had Personality-the white enameled tables were set diagonally and clothed with strips of Japanese toweling. Una smiled at a lively photograph of two bunnies in a basket. With a sensation of freedom and novelty she ordered coffee, chicken patty, and cocoanut layer-cake.
But the patty and the cake were very much like the hundreds of other patties and cakes which she had consumed during the past two years, and the people about her were of the horde of lonely workers who make up half of New York. The holiday enchantment dissolved. She might as well be going back to the office grind after lunch! She brooded, while outside, in that seething summer street, the pageant of life passed by and no voice summoned her. Men and girls and motors, people who laughed and waged commerce for the reward of love-they passed her by, life passed her by, a spectator untouched by joy or noble tragedy, a woman desperately hungry for life.