The cold of winter clung with a tenacious grip to the city that year until far into April. Jeannette had eagerly looked forward to the spectacular flower-vendors’ sale of spring blooms in Union Square on the Saturday before Easter but a bitter wind began to assert itself early in the day and by ten o’clock had wrought pitiful havoc with the brave show of potted lilies and azaleas. The Square was littered with their battered petals and torn leaves. Three days before the first of May a flurry of snow clothed the city again in white, and then, without warning, summer breathed its hot, moist breath upon the town. The air was heavy with water; a mist, thick and enervating, spread itself like a miasma from a stagnant pool, through the streets. A tropical heat,—the wet clinging heat of a conservatory,—enveloped New York. And in June came the rain, an intermittent downpour that lasted for weeks.
It was a trying time for everyone. The office felt damp, and there was a constant smell all day of wet rubber and damp woolens. Black streams of water meandered over the floor from the tips of wet umbrellas, stacked in corners. On the fifth floor the roof leaked, and old Hodgson had to be moved elsewhere. In the midst of the general discomfort Mr. Corey fell sick.
It proved nothing more serious than a heavy bronchial cold, but his physician ordered him to bed, and he was warned he must not venture into the damp streets until the last vestige of the cold had disappeared. The doctor consented to let him see his secretary and to keep in touch with the office by telephone. It was thus that Jeannette came to visit her employer in his own home.
Mr. Corey lived in one of three cream-painted brick houses on Tenth Street, a hundred yards or so from the corner of Fifth Avenue. The houses were quaint affairs, only two stories in height, with square-paned glass in the shallow windows and wide, deep-panelled front doors ornamented in the center with heavy, shining brass knockers. They were old buildings, dating back to the early nineteenth century, and had somewhat of a colonial atmosphere about them. The Corey family consisted of Mrs. Corey and two children,—a boy of eighteen, Willis Corey, in his first year at Harvard, and a girl, Helen, a year younger, who lived at home and was called “Babs.” Jeannette was disappointed, not to say disturbed, at meeting her employer’s wife.
“I wasn’t aware that I had a preconceived idea of her,” she said to Alice in recounting her impressions. “Mr. Corey seems to be devoted to her, and has a large silver-framed photograph of her on his desk. I supposed from her picture and from the way he speaks about her that she was the same kind of earnest, hard-headed, clear-thinking person as himself. But she isn’t that way at all. In the first place, she’s very tall and stately; she’s got lots of hair,—it’s quite gray and very curly,—and she piles it up on top of her head and always wears a bandeau or a fillet to bind it. She’s rather intense in her manner and a trifle theatrical. She’s a handsome woman, faded of course now, but she has very large dark eyes, that she uses effectively, and really beautiful brows. She affects the weirdest of costumes, all lace and floating scarf, with lots of color. She had several rings on her fingers and bracelets dangling and jingling on her wrists. I thought her stupid; I mean really dense. When I got to the house she came out to the hall where I was waiting, led me into the parlor and made me sit down. She said she wanted to have a good talk with me. She was so glad Mr. Smith had gone, and she went on at once to say how she had urged ‘Chandler!’—it was funny to hear Mr. Corey called by his first name!—how she had urged him to make a change for a long time. She said he said to her: ‘Where do you think I could find anybody to replace him?’ and she said: ‘Well, how about that clever Miss Sturgis who’s just come to you?’ She told me she had begged him for weeks to give me a trial before he consented.
“You know, Allie, it rather puzzled me what her object could be in romancing that way, for, of course, I don’t believe a word of it. She never heard of me until Mr. Corey happened to tell her he had a new secretary! And then she went on to talk about the business. My dear, it was pathetic! She wanted me to think that she knew about everything that went on at the office, that Mr. Corey kept nothing from her, and talked over every important decision with her before he made up his mind. I almost laughed in her face! She doesn’t know one single thing about his affairs. She hasn’t the faintest idea, for instance, that he’s in debt, that the paper company could wind up his affairs to-morrow if it wanted to, nor what bank has helped to finance him from the start, nor where the money comes from that buys her food and clothing. She supposes, I presume, that it comes from profits. Profits are a negligible quantity with the Chandler B. Corey Company and have been ever since Mr. Corey launched it. It’s getting in better shape all the time, and some day there will be profits.
“Mrs. Corey looked brightly at me with her large soulful eyes and said: ‘Those two volumes of The Life and Letters of Alexander Hamilton are quite wonderful, aren’t they? Such beautiful bookmaking!’ and ‘We were quite successful with The Den, weren’t we?’ Imagine, Alice! ‘We!’ What she knows about the business is about as much as she can gather from the books Mr. Corey publishes and occasionally brings home to her! She talked a lot about the magazines, and asked me if I didn’t think Miss Reubens was making a very wonderful periodical out of The Wheel of Fortune.
“I just nodded and agreed with her. She was trying to impress me how well-informed she was, and I let her think she succeeded. Toward the end she got started on Mr. Corey, and how hard he worked, and how keenly I ought to feel it my duty to save him from petty annoyances; I must consider myself a guard, a sentinel, stationed at the door of his tent to keep the rabble from disturbing the great man! I let her rave on, but it was all I could do to listen. I thought as I sat there that in all probability she was the noisiest and most disturbing of the lot. She wound up by telling me what the doctor had said to her about Mr. Corey having caught cold, and she wanted to urge me particularly to guard him against draughts. Then she asked me if Mr. Corey ever took me to lunch! Now what do you think made her ask me a question like that? You don’t suppose she’s jealous? It seems too ridiculous even to think about. My goodness! When you see the kind of women some men get for wives you wonder how they put up with them!”
All Mr. Corey’s personal mail passed through Jeannette’s hands; she opened and read most of it. He dictated to her his letters to his son at Cambridge, and even those to his wife and Babs when they went to Kennebunkport for the summer. Jeannette learned that Willis had been madly in love with a married woman who sang in the choir of a Fifth Avenue church, that he was given to midnight carousing, smoked far too many cigarettes, that his mother spoiled him, and his father was disgusted with him. With the aid of a “cramming” school, he had somehow wiggled himself into Harvard, but Mr. Corey had made him distinctly understand that at the first complaint concerning him he would have to withdraw and go to work. Jeannette came to know, too, that Babs was epileptic and that early in May she had had the first fit in two years, and that the day after her mother and herself had arrived in Kennebunkport, she had had another. Letters of a very agitated nature passed between the parents as to what should now be done. Nothing was decided. Likewise Jeannette learned that Mrs. Corey was at times recklessly extravagant. Her husband repeatedly had to call her to account, and sometimes they had violent quarrels about the matter. Just before Mrs. Corey departed for Maine she had bought six hats for herself and Babs, and had charged over three hundred dollars’ worth of new clothing. Mr. Corey had been exasperated, as only a few weeks before he had made a point of asking her to economize in every way possible during the coming summer. He himself, Jeannette knew, must shortly undergo a more or less serious operation, of which his family was totally ignorant, that he was worried because his Life Insurance Company had declined after an examination to increase the amount of his insurance, and that he had successfully engineered a loan to wipe off his indebtedness to the big Pulp and Paper Company.
There was little that concerned him with which she did not become acquainted. She knew that his house on Tenth Street was heavily mortgaged and that on the second loan carried by the property he was paying an outrageous rate of interest; that on the tenth of every month he never failed to send a check for sixty-six dollars and sixty-seven cents to a man in Memphis, Tennessee, that his dentist threatened to sue him unless he settled a bill that had been owing for two years; that on the first of every month, Mr. Olmstead deposited to his account in the Chemical National Bank five hundred dollars; that no month ever passed without his chief sending for the old man and directing him to deposit an additional hundred, or two hundred, or sometimes three hundred to his account, and that these sums appeared on the books of the company as personal indebtedness. Frequently this levy upon the Company’s bank balance upset Mr. Olmstead, and more than once Jeannette heard the old cashier emphatically assert as he rapped his eye-glasses in his agitated fashion upon his thumb-nail:
“All right, Mr. Corey,—you’re the boss here, and I’ve got to do as you say, but I won’t answer for it, Mr. Corey. I warn you, sir, we won’t have enough for next week’s pay-roll!”
“Oh, yes, yes, yes,” Mr. Corey would soothe him. “We’ll manage somehow; you pay the money in the bank for me and we’ll talk about it afterwards.”
There were even more intimate things about the man she served which became his secretary’s knowledge. He sometimes took the sixtieth of a grain of strychnine when he was unusually tired, he dyed his mustache and eyebrows, and wore hygienic underwear for which he paid six dollars a garment. She had charge of his personal bank account. She drew the checks, put them before him for his signature, and sent them out in the mail. While Mrs. Corey was in Kennebunkport, she paid all the household expenses of the establishment on Tenth Street: electric light and milk bills, grocer’s and butcher’s accounts, the wages of the cook. She knew what were Mr. Corey’s dues and expenses at the Lotus Club, what he paid for his clothes, what he owed at Brooks Bros., and at the Everett House where he had a charge account and signed checks for his lunches. There were no secrets in his life that were closed to her; he had less than most men to conceal; she considered him the most generous, the most upright, the most admirable man in the world.
It was on a hot Saturday afternoon in July when no one but themselves were in the office, that Jeannette told Mr. Corey about Roy. She had not seen quite so much of Roy lately; he had been away on a business trip, and Horatio Stephens had asked him to spend his fortnight’s vacation with himself and family at Asbury Park. He had written her letters full of endearments and underscored assertions of love, and had returned to plead eagerly that she set the day for the wedding and begin to plan with him how and where they should live. His earnestness made her realize she could temporize no longer.
“It isn’t that I don’t care for him,” she said to Mr. Corey; “it’s just that I don’t want to get married, I guess.”
The windows were open and a gentle hot wind stirred the loose papers on the desk. A lazy rumble of traffic rose from the street, punctuated now and then by the shrill voices of children in the Square, and the merry jingle of a hurdy-gurdy.
“You mustn’t trifle with your happiness, Miss Sturgis,” Corey said, pulling at his mustache thoughtfully. “You know this is all very well here for a time, but you must think of the future.”
Jeannette stared out of the window and for some minutes there was silence; she spoke presently with knitted brows.
“Oh, I’ve gone over it and over it, again and again, and it seems more than I can do to give up my independence and the fun of living my own life just yet. I—I like Mr. Beardsley; I think we’d be happy together. He’s devoted to me, and he’s most amiable,”—she glanced with a smile at her employer’s face. “My mother and my sister are eager to have me marry him, but I just can’t—can’t bring myself to give up my work and my life here to substitute matrimony.”
“No consideration for me, my dear girl, ought to influence you. I’d be sorry to lose you, of course; you’re the best secretary I ever had, and I’d be hard put to it to find anyone who could begin to fill your place even remotely. But you mustn’t think I couldn’t manage; I’d find somebody. Your duty is to yourself and living your own life.”
“It isn’t that, Mr. Corey. It’s the work that I love; I don’t want to give it up,—the excitement and the fun of it. It’s a thousand times more exhilarating than cooking and dish-washing.... And then there’s the question of finances, which, it seems to me, I’m bound to consider. Mr. Beardsley’s getting twenty-five and I’m getting twenty-five; that’s fifty dollars a week we earn, but if I marry him, we both would have to live on just his salary.”
“Yes,—that’s very true,” the man admitted.
The girl threw him a quick glance, and went on hesitatingly:
“I don’t suppose we could marry and each of us go on holding our jobs?”
Mr. Corey considered, stroking his black mustache with a thoughtful thumb and finger.
“Well,” he said slowly, “what do you gain? If you went on working, you’d find it difficult to keep house; you’d have to live in a boarding-house. And that isn’t homemaking. And then, Miss Sturgis, there’s the, question of children. What would you do about them? You wouldn’t care to have a child as long as you came downtown to an office every day.... No, I wouldn’t advise it. If you love your young man well enough, I would urge you to marry him.”
“I don’t!” Jeannette said to herself violently on her way home.
But did she? Almost with the denial, she began to wonder.
That night when Roy came to see her and asked her again for the thousandth time to name the day, she took his face between her hands and kissed him tenderly, folded his head against her breast, and with arms tight about him, pressed her lips again and again to his unruly hair.
Later, when he had gone and she was alone, she dropped upon her knees before the old davenport where they had been sitting, and wept.
It was the end of the struggle. She told no one for a long time, but in her mind she knew she would never marry him. Her work was too precious to her; her independence too dear; to give them up was demanding of her more than she had the strength to give.
END OF BOOK I