She had real satisfaction in the game of work-in winning points and tricks in doing her work briskly and well, in helping Mr. Wilkins to capture clients. She was eager when she popped in to announce to him that a wary, long-pursued "prospect" had actually called. She was rather more interested in her day's work than are the average of meaningless humanity who sell gingham and teach algebra and cure boils and repair lawn-mowers, because she was daily more able to approximate perfection, to look forward to something better-to some splendid position at twenty or even twenty-five dollars a week. She was certainly in no worse plight than perhaps ninety-five million of her free and notoriously red-blooded fellow-citizens.
But she was in no better plight. There was no drama, no glory in affection, nor, so long as she should be tied to Troy Wilkins's dwindling business, no immediate increase in power. And the sameness, the unceasing discussions with Bessie regarding Mr. Wilkins-Mr. Wilkins's hat, Mr. Wilkins's latest command, Mr. Wilkins's lost fountain-pen, Mr. Wilkins's rudeness to the salesman for the Sky-line Roofing Company, Mr. Wilkins's idiotic friendship for Muldoon, the contractor, Mr. Wilkins's pronounced unfairness to the office-boy in regard to a certain lateness in arrival-
At best, Una got through day after day; at worst, she was as profoundly bored as an explorer in the arctic night.
§ 4
Una, the initiate New-Yorker, continued her study of city ways and city currents during her lunch-hours. She went down to Broad Street to see the curb market; marveled at the men with telephones in little coops behind opened windows; stared at the great newspaper offices on Park Row, the old City Hall, the mingling on lower Broadway of sky-challenging buildings with the history of pre-Revolutionary days. She got a momentary prejudice in favor of socialism from listening to an attack upon it by a noon-time orator-a spotted, badly dressed man whose favorite slur regarding socialists was that they were spotted and badly dressed. She heard a negro shouting dithyrambics about some religion she could never make out.
Sometimes she lunched at a newspaper-covered desk, with Bessie and the office-boy, on cold ham and beans and small, bright-colored cakes which the boy brought in from a bakery. Sometimes she had boiled eggs and cocoa at a Childs restaurant with stenographers who ate baked apples, rich Napoleons, and, always, coffee. Sometimes at a cafeteria, carrying a tray, she helped herself to crackers and milk and sandwiches. Sometimes at the Arden Tea Room, for women only, she encountered charity-workers and virulently curious literary ladies, whom she endured for the marked excellence of the Arden chicken croquettes. Sometimes Bessie tempted her to a Chinese restaurant, where Bessie, who came from the East Side and knew a trick or two, did not order chop-suey, like a tourist, but noodles and eggs foo-young.
In any case, the lunch-hour and the catalogue of what she was so vulgar as to eat were of importance in Una's history, because that hour broke the routine, gave her for an hour a deceptive freedom of will, of choice between Boston beans and-New York beans. And her triumphant common sense was demonstrated, for she chose light, digestible food, and kept her head clear for the afternoon, while her overlord, Mr. Troy Wilkins, like vast numbers of his fellow business men, crammed himself with beefsteak-and-kidney pudding, drugged himself with cigar smoke and pots of strong coffee and shop-talk, spoke earnestly of the wickedness of drunkenness, and then, drunk with food and tobacco and coffee and talk, came back dizzy, blur-eyed, slow-nerved; and for two hours tried to get down to work.
After hours of trudging through routine, Una went home.
She took the Elevated now instead of the Subway. That was important in her life. It meant an entire change of scenery.
On the Elevated, beside her all evening, hovering over her bed at night, was Worry.
"Oh, I ought to have got all that Norris correspondence copied to-day. I must get at it first thing in the morning.... I wonder if Mr. Wilkins was sore because I stayed out so long for lunch?... What would I do if I were fired?"
So would she worry as she left the office. In the evening she wouldn't so much criticize herself as suddenly and without reason remember office settings and incidents-startle at a picture of the T-square at which she had stared while Mr. Wilkins was telephoning.... She wasn't weary because she worried; she worried because she was weary from the airless, unnatural, straining life. She worried about everything available, from her soul to her finger-nails; but the office offered the largest number of good opportunities.
"After all," say the syndicated philosophers, "the office takes only eight or nine hours a day. The other fifteen or sixteen, you are free to do as you wish-loaf, study, become an athlete." This illuminative suggestion is usually reinforced by allusions to Lincoln and Edison.
Only-you aren't a Lincoln or an Edison, for the most part, and you don't do any of those improving things. You have the office with you, in you, every hour of the twenty-four, unless you sleep dreamlessly and forget-which you don't. Probably, like Una, you do not take any exercise to drive work-thoughts away.
She often planned to take exercise regularly; read of it in women's magazines. But she could never get herself to keep up the earnest clowning of bedroom calisthenics; gymnasiums were either reekingly crowded or too expensive-and even to think of undressing and dressing for a gymnasium demanded more initiative than was left in her fagged organism. There was walking-but city streets become tiresomely familiar. Of sports she was consistently ignorant.
So all the week she was in the smell and sound of the battle, until Saturday evening with its blessed rest-the clean, relaxed time which every woman on the job knows.
Saturday evening! No work to-morrow! A prospect of thirty-six hours of freedom. A leisurely dinner, a languorous slowness in undressing, a hot bath, a clean nightgown, and fresh, smooth bed-linen. Una went to bed early to enjoy the contemplation of these luxuries. She even put on a lace bed-cap adorned with pink silk roses. The pleasure of relaxing in bed, of looking lazily at the pictures in a new magazine, of drifting into slumber-not of stepping into a necessary sleep that was only the anteroom of another day's labor....
Such was her greatest joy in this period of uneventfulness.
§ 5
Una was, she hoped, "trying to think about things." Naturally, one who used that boarding-house phrase could not think transformingly.
She wasn't illuminative about Romain Rolland or Rodin or village welfare. She was still trying to decide whether the suffrage movement was ladylike and whether Dickens or Thackeray was the better novelist. But she really was trying to decide.
She compiled little lists of books to read, "movements" to investigate. She made a somewhat incoherent written statement of what she was trying to do, and this she kept in her top bureau drawer, among the ribbons, collars, imitation pearl necklaces, handkerchiefs, letters from Walter, and photographs of Panama and her mother.
She took it out sometimes, and relieved the day's accumulated suffering by adding such notes as:
"Be nice &human w. employes if ever have any of own; office wretched hole anyway bec. of econ. system; W. used to say, why make worse by being cranky."
Or:
"Study music, it brings country and W. and poetry and everything; take piano les. when get time."
So Una tramped, weary always at dusk, but always recreated at dawn, through one of those periods of timeless, unmarked months, when all drama seems past and unreal and apparently nothing will ever happen again.
Then, in one week, everything became startling-she found melodrama and a place of friendship.
CHAPTER XI
"I'm tired of the Grays. They're very nice people, but they can't talk," said Una to Bessie Kraker, at lunch in the office, on a February day.