Mr. Ross disregarded her letter for ten days, then so urgently telephoned her to come and see him that she took a taxicab clear to the Pemberton Building in Long Island City. After paying a week's lunch money for the taxicab, it was rather hard to discover why Mr. Ross had been quite so urgent. He rolled about his magnificent mahogany and tapestry office, looked out of the window at the Long Island Railroad tracks, and told her (in confidence) what fools all the Gas Gazette chiefs had been, and all his employers since then. She smiled appreciatively, and tried to get in a tactful remark about a position. She did discover that Mr. Ross had not as yet chosen his secretary at Pemberton's, but beyond this Una could find no evidence that he supposed her to have come for any reason other than to hear his mellow wisdom and even mellower stories.
After more than a month, during which Mr. Ross diverted himself by making appointments, postponing them, forgetting them, telephoning, telegraphing, sending special-delivery letters, being paged at hotels, and doing all the useless melodramatic things he could think of, except using an aeroplane or a submarine, he decided to make her his secretary at twenty dollars a week. Two days later it occurred to him to test her in regard to speed in dictation and typing, and a few other minor things of the sort which her ability as a long-distance listener had made him overlook. Fortunately, she also passed this test.
When she told Mr. Wilkins that she was going to leave, he used another set of phrases which all side-street office potentates know-they must learn these clichés out of a little red-leather manual.... He tightened his lips and tapped on his desk-pad with a blue pencil; he looked grieved and said, touchingly: "I think you're making a mistake. I was making plans for you; in fact, I had just about decided to offer you eighteen dollars a week, and to advance you just as fast as the business will warrant. I, uh, well, I think you're making a mistake in leaving a sure thing, a good, sound, conservative place, for something you don't know anything about. I'm not in any way urging you to stay, you understand, but I don't like to see you making a mistake."
But he had also told Bessie Kraker that she was "making a mistake" when she had resigned to be married, and he had been so very certain that Una could never be "worth more" than fifteen. Una was rather tart about it. Though Mr. Ross didn't want her at Pemberton's for two weeks more, she told Mr. Wilkins that she was going to leave on the following Saturday.
It did not occur to her till Mr. Wilkins developed nervous indigestion by trying to "break in" a new secretary who couldn't tell a blue-print from a set of specifications, that he had his side in the perpetual struggle between ill-paid failure employers and ill-paid ambitious employees. She was sorry for him as she watched him putter, and she helped him; stayed late, and powerfully exhorted her successor. Mr. Wilkins revived and hoped that she would stay another week, but stay she could not. Once she knew that she was able to break away from the scrub-rag, that specter of the wash-room, and the bleak, frosted glass on the semi-partition in front of her desk, no wage could have helped her. Every moment here was an edged agony.
In this refusal there may have been a trace of aspiration. Otherwise the whole affair was a hodge-podge of petty people and ignoble motives-of Una and Wilkins and S. Herbert Ross and Bessie Kraker, who married a mattress-renovator, and Bessie's successor; of fifteen dollars a week, and everybody trying to deceive everybody else; of vague reasons for going, and vaguer reasons for letting Una go, and no reason at all for her remaining; in all, an ascent from a scrub-rag to a glorified soap-factory designed to provide Mr. Pemberton's daughters-in-law with motors.
So long as her world was ruled by chance, half-training, and lack of clear purpose, how could it be other than a hodge-podge?
§ 2
She could not take as a holiday the two weeks intervening between the Wilkins office and Pemberton's. When she left Wilkins's, exulting, "This is the last time I'll ever go down in one of these rickety elevators," she had, besides her fifteen dollars in salary, one dollar and seventeen cents in the savings-bank.
Mamie Magen gave her the opportunity to spend the two weeks installing a modern filing-system at Herzfeld &Cohn's.
So Una had a glimpse of the almost beautiful thing business can be.
Herzfeld and Cohn were Jews, old, white-bearded, orthodox Jews; their unpoetic business was the jobbing of iron beds; and Una was typical of that New York which the Jews are conquering, in having nebulous prejudices against the race; in calling them "mean" and "grasping" and "un-American," and wanting to see them shut out of offices and hotels.
Yet, with their merry eyes, their quick little foreign cries and gestures of sympathy, their laughter that rumbled in their tremendous beards, their habit of having coffee and pinochle in the office every Friday afternoon, their sincere belief that, as the bosses, they were not omniscient rulers, but merely elder fellow-workers-with these un-American, eccentric, patriarchal ways, Herzfeld and Cohn had made their office a joyous adventure. Other people "in the trade" sniffed at Herzfeld and Cohn for their Quixotic notions of discipline, but they made it pay in dividends as well as in affection. At breakfast Una would find herself eager to get back to work, though Herzfeld and Cohn had but a plain office in an ugly building of brownstone and iron Corinthian columns, resembling an old-fashioned post-office, and typical of all that block on Church Street. There was such gentleness here as Una was not to find in the modern, glazed-brick palace of Pemberton's.
§ 3
Above railroad yards and mean tenements in Long Island City, just across the East River from New York, the shining milky walls of Pemberton's bulk up like a castle overtowering a thatched village. It is magnificently the new-fashioned, scientific, efficient business institution.... Except, perhaps, in one tiny detail. King Pemberton and his princely sons do not believe in all this nonsense about profit-sharing, or a minimum wage, or an eight-hour day, or pensions, or any of the other fads by which dangerous persons like Mr. Ford, the motor manufacturer, encourage the lazier workmen to think that they have just as much right to rise to the top as the men who have had nerve and foresight. And indeed Mr. Pemberton may be sound. He says that he bases wages on the economic law of supply and demand, instead of on sentiment; and how shrewdly successful are he and his sons is indicated by the fact that Pemberton's is one of the largest sources of drugs and proprietary medicines in the world; the second largest manufactory of soda-fountain syrups; of rubber, celluloid, and leather goods of the kind seen in corner drug-stores; and the third largest manufactory of soaps and toilet articles. It has been calculated that ninety-three million women in all parts of the world have ruined their complexions, and, therefore, their souls, by Pemberton's creams and lotions for saving the same; and that nearly three-tenths of the alcohol consumed in prohibition counties is obtained in Pemberton's tonics and blood-builders and women's specifics, the last being regarded by large farmers with beards as especially tasty and stimulating. Mr. Pemberton is the Napoleon of patent medicine, and also the Napoleon of drugs used by physicians to cure the effects of patent medicine. He is the Shakespeare of ice-cream sodas, and the Edison of hot-water bags. He rules more than five thousand employees, and his name is glorious on cartons in drug-stores, from Sandy Hook to San Diego, and chemists' shops from Hong-Kong to the Scilly Isles. He is a modern Allah, and Mr. S. Herbert Ross is his prophet.