It took all Jeannette’s young vigorous determination to carry into effect the plan she had conceived the night of the Armenian dance. She met with an unexpected degree of opposition from her mother, and even from Alice, who was as a rule indecisive, and the vaguest of persons in expressing opinions. It was too grave a step; Janny might come to regret it bitterly some day, and it might be too late then to go back; Alice thought perhaps it would be wiser to wait awhile. But Jeannette did not want to wait. The more she thought about being a wage-earner, and her own mistress, free to do as she pleased and spend her money as she chose, the more eager she was to be done with school and the supervision of teachers. She felt suddenly grown up, and looked enviously at the young women she met hurrying to the elevated station at Ninety-third Street in the early mornings on their way downtown to business. She noted how they dressed and critically observed those who carried their lunches. She thought about what she should wear, the kind of hat and shoes she would select, when she was one of them. If it meant skipping her noonday meal entirely, she decided, she would never be guilty of carrying lunch with her. Alice and her intimates at school on a sudden became drearily young to her; she was irritated by their giggling silliness. She chose to treat them all with a certain aloofness, and began to regard herself already as a highly-paid, valued secretary of the president of a large corporation. In the evenings she found excuses for visiting Rosa Najarian and eagerly listened to the older girl’s account of the business routine of her days.
The tuition at the Gerard Commercial School for ten weeks’ instruction in shorthand and typing was fifty dollars payable in advance, and it was her inability to get this sum that prevented Jeannette from putting her plan immediately into effect. She made herself unhappy and her mother and sister unhappy by worrying about it. Mrs. Sturgis fretted uncomfortably. She alone was aware of an easy way by which the money could be obtained, but since she did not approve of her daughter’s purpose, she had no inclination to divulge it.
A five thousand dollar paid-up insurance policy from a benevolent society had become hers at the time of her husband’s death. It represented a nest-egg, the thought of which had always been the greatest comfort to her. In sickness or in case of her death, the girls would have something; they would not be left absolutely destitute. She had never mentioned this policy to her daughters, always being afraid she might borrow on it, and many a time she had been sorely tempted to do so. With the knowledge of its existence unshared with anyone, Mrs. Sturgis felt herself equal to temptation; but once taking her children into her confidence, she feared she would soon weakly make inroads upon it.
Now as Jeannette became restive and impatient for want of fifty dollars, her mother grew correspondingly depressed. It was to protect herself against just such wild-goose schemes as this, she told herself over and over, that she had refrained from telling her darlings anything about the money.
But events, unforeseen, and from her point of view, calamitous, robbed her of her fortitude, and forced her to play into her daughter’s hands. Scarlet fever broke out in the neighborhood; an epidemic swept the upper West Side; the Wednesday and Saturday lessons,—all of them,—had to be discontinued; Miss Loughborough’s school closed its doors. Mrs. Sturgis found some music to copy, but the money she earned in this way was far short of the meager income upon which she and her daughters had depended. The days stretched into weeks and still new cases were reported in the district. The time came when there was actual want in the little household, literally no money with which to buy food, and no further credit to be had among the tradespeople.
Jeannette applied for and secured the promise of a job in a small upholsterer’s shop in the neighborhood at six dollars a week, and in the face of her firm resolution to accept the offer and go to work on the following Monday morning, Mrs. Sturgis confessed her secret. As she had foreseen, Jeannette had little difficulty in persuading her,—since now she would be compelled to borrow on her store,—to make the amount of her loan fifty dollars additional.
“Why, Mama, I’ll be earning that much a month in ten weeks, and I can pay it back to you in no time.”
“I know—I know, dearie. But I just hate to do it.”
Eventually, she gave way before her daughter’s flood of arguments. It was what she had feared ever since Ralph died; there would be no stopping now the inroads upon her little capital; she saw the beginning of the end.
But Jeannette went triumphantly to school.
After the first few days while she felt herself conspicuous as a new pupil, she began to enjoy herself immensely. The studies fascinated her. Hers was an alert mind and she was unusually intelligent. She had always been regarded as an exceptionally bright student, but she had achieved this reputation with little application. Her school work heretofore had represented merely “lessons” to her; it had never carried any significance. But now she threw herself with all the intensity of her nature upon what seemed to her a vital business. She realized she had only ten weeks in which to master shorthand and typing, and at the end of that time would come the test of her ability to fill a position as stenographer. She dared not risk the humiliation of failure; her pride,—the strongest element in her make-up,—would not permit it. She must work, work, work; she must utilize every hour, every minute of these precious weeks of instruction!
The girl knew in her heart that she had many of the qualifications of a good secretary. She was pretty, she was well-mannered, intelligent, and could speak and write good English. To find ample justification for this estimate, she had but to compare herself with other girls in the school. These for the most part were foreign-born. A large percentage were Jewesses, thick-lipped and large-nosed, with heavy black coils of hair worn over ill-disguised “rats.” Jeannette detected a finer type, but even to these exceptions she felt herself superior. They chewed gum a great deal, and shrieked over their confidences as they ate their lunches out of cardboard boxes at the noon hour. She could not bring herself to associate with such girls, and forestalled any approach to friendliness on their part by choosing a remote corner to devote the leisure minutes to study. In consequence she became the butt of much of their silly laughter, and though she winced at these whisperings and jibes, she never betrayed annoyance. There was a sprinkling of men and boys throughout the school, but the male element was made up of middle-aged dullards and pimply-necked raw youths, none of whom interested her.
The weeks fled by, and Jeannette was carried along on an undiminished wave of excitement. Everything she coveted most in the world depended upon her winning a diploma from the school at the end of the ten weeks’ instruction. She discovered soon after her enrollment, that while this might be physically possible, it was rarely accomplished, and most of her fellow students had been attending the school for months. A diploma represented to her the measure of success, and as the time grew shorter before she was to take the final examinations, she could hardly sleep from the intensity of her emotions.
At home, matters had materially improved. The epidemic was over; Miss Loughborough’s school had reopened its doors, and Mrs. Sturgis was again beginning to fill her Wednesdays and Saturdays with lessons. But the problem of finances was still unsolved. There was a loan of five hundred dollars now on the insurance policy, and Jeannette foresaw her mother would not cease to fret and worry over that until it had somehow been paid back. Everything, it seemed to her, depended on her success at school. There was no hope for the little family otherwise. Alice—trusting, complacent little Alice—was not the type who could shoulder any of the burden; her mother was perceptibly not as strong as she had been. There would always be debts, there would always be worry, there would always be skimping and self-denial, unless she, Jeannette, got a job and went to work.
Weary with fatigue, she would drive herself at her practice on the rented typewriter in the studio every evening until her back flamed with fire and her fingertips grew sore. She made Alice read aloud to her while she filled page after page in her note-book with her hooks and dashes, until her sister drooped with sleep. Mrs. Sturgis protested, actually cried a little. The child was killing herself to no purpose! There wasn’t any sense in working so hard! She was wasting her time and it would end by their having a doctor!
Jeannette shook her head and held her peace, but when the reward came and old Roger Mason, who had been principal of the school for nearly twenty years, sent for her and told her he wanted to congratulate her on the excellent showing she had made, she felt amply compensated. But none of those who eagerly congratulated her,—not even her mother nor Alice,—suspected how infinitely harder than mastering her lessons had been what she had endured from the jeering, mimicking girls who had made fun of her through the dreadful ten weeks.
But that was all behind her now. She could forget it. She had justified herself, and stood ready to prove to her mother and sister that she could now fill a position as a regular stenographer, could hold it, and moreover bring them material help. She was all eagerness to begin,—frightened at the prospect, yet confident of success.
Graduates of the Gerard Commercial School ordinarily did not have to wait long for a job. The demand for stenographers was usually in excess of the supply. Little Miss Ingram, down at the school, who had in hand the matter of finding positions for Gerard graduates, was interested in obtaining the best that was available for Miss Sturgis who had made such an excellent record, and Jeannette was thrilled one morning at receiving a note asking her to report at the school without delay if she wished employment.
Miss Ingram handed her an address on Fourth Avenue.
“It’s a publishing house. They publish subscription books, I think,—something of that sort. I don’t urge you to take it,—something better may come along,—but you can look them over and see how you think you’d like it. They’ll pay fifteen.”
“Fifteen a week?” Jeanette raised delighted eyes. “Oh, Miss Ingram, do you think I can please them? Do you think they’ll give me a chance?”
Miss Ingram smiled and squeezed Jeannette’s arm reassuringly.
“Of course, my dear, and they’ll be delighted with you. You’re a great deal better equipped than most of our girls.”
The Soulé Publishing Company occupied a spacious floor of a tall building on Fourth Avenue. Jeannette was deafened by the clatter of typewriters as she stepped out of the elevator.
The loft was filled with long lines of girls seated at typewriting machines and at great broad-topped tables piled high with folded circulars. Figures, silhouetted against the distant windows, moved to and fro between the aisles. It was a turmoil of noise and confusion.
As she stood before the low wooden railing that separated her from it all, trying to adjust her eyes to the kaleidoscopic effect of movement and light, a pert young voice addressed her:
“Who did chou want t’ see, ple-ease?”
A little Jewess of some fourteen or fifteen years with an elaborate coiffure surmounting her peaked pale face was eyeing her inquiringly.
“I called to see about—about a position as stenographer.”
Jeannette’s voice all but failed her; the words fogged in her throat.
“Typist or regular steno?”
“Stenographer, I think; shorthand and transcription,—wasn’t that what was wanted?”
“See Miss Gibson; first desk over there, end of third aisle.” The little girl swung back a gate in the railing, screwed up the corners of her mouth, tucked a stray hair into place at the nape of her neck, and with an assumed expression of elaborate boredom waited for Jeannette to pass through.
It took courage to invade that region of bustle and clamor. Jeannette advanced with faltering step, felt the waters close over her head, and herself engulfed in the whirling tide. Once of it, it did not seem so terrifying. Already her ears were becoming attuned to the rat-ti-tat-tating that hummed in a roar about her, and her eyes accustomed to the flying fingers, the flashing paper, the bobbing heads, and hurrying figures.
Miss Gibson was a placid, gray-haired woman, large-busted and severely dressed in an immaculate shirtwaist that was tucked trimly into a snug belt about her firm, round person.
She smiled perfunctorily at the girl as she indicated the chair beside her desk. Jeannette felt her eyes swiftly taking inventory of her. Her interrogations were of the briefest. She made a note of Jeannette’s age, name and address, and schooling. She then launched into a description of the work.
The Soulé Publishing Company sold a great many books by subscription: Secret Memoirs, The Favorites of Great Kings, A Compendium of Mortal Knowledge. Their most recent publication was a twenty-five volume work entitled A Universal History of the World. This set of books was supposed to contain a complete historical record of events from the beginning of time, and was composed of excerpts from the writings of great historians, all deftly welded together to make a comprehensive narrative. A tremendous advertising campaign was in progress; all magazines carried full-page advertisements, and a coupon clipped from a corner of them brought a sample volume by mail for inspection. When these volumes were returned, they were accompanied by an order or a letter giving the reason why none was enclosed. To the latter, a personal reply was immediately written by Mr. Beardsley,—Miss Gibson indicated a young man seated by a window some few desks away. He dictated to a corps of stenographers, and followed up his first letters with others, each containing an argument in favor of the books.
Miss Gibson enunciated this information with a glibness that suggested many previous recitations. When she had finished, with disconcerting abruptness, she asked Jeannette if she thought she could do the work. The girl, taken aback, could only stare blankly; she had no idea whether she could do it or not; she shook her head aimlessly. Miss Gibson frowned.
“Well,—we’ll see what you can do,” she declared. “Miss Rosen,” she called, and as a young Jewess came toward them, she directed: “Take Miss—Miss”—she glanced at her notes,—“Sturgis to the cloak room, and bring her back here.”
Jeannette’s mind was a confused jumble. “They won’t kill me,—they won’t eat me,” she found herself thinking.
Presently she stood before Miss Gibson once more. The woman glanced at her, and rose.
“Come this way.” They walked toward the young man she had previously indicated.
“Mr. Beardsley, try this girl out. She comes from the Gerard School, but she’s had no practical experience.”
Jeannette looked into a pleasant boy’s face. He had an even row of glittering white teeth, a small, quaint mouth that stretched tightly across them when he smiled, blue eyes, and rather unruly stuck-up hair.
She wanted to please him—she could please him—he seemed nice.
“Miss—Miss—I beg pardon,—Miss Gibson did not mention the name.”
“Sturgis.”
“There’s a vacant table over there. You can have a Remington or an Underwood—anything you are accustomed to; we have all styles.... Miss Flannigan, take charge of Miss Sturgis, will you?”
A big-boned Irish girl came toward him. She was a slovenly type but apparently disposed to be friendly.
“I’ll lend you a note-book and pencils till you can draw your own from the stock clerk. You have to make out a requisition for everything you want, here. You’ll find paper in that drawer, and that’s a Remington if you use one.”
Jeannette slipped into the straight-back chair and settled with a sense of relief before the flimsy little table on which the typewriter stood. She was eager for a moment’s inconspicuousness.
“This is the kind of stuff he gives you.”
Miss Flannigan leaned over from behind and offered her several yellow sheets of typewriting.
Jeannette took them with a murmured thanks, and began to read.
“... deferred payment plan. Five dollars will immediately secure this handsome twenty-five volume set.... On the first of May, the price of these books, as advertised, must advance, but by subscribing now....”
She wet her dry lips and glanced at another page.
“The authenticity of these sources of historical information cannot be doubted.... Eliminating the traditions which can hardly be accepted as dependable chronicles, we turn to the Egyptian records which are still extant in graven symbols.”
She couldn’t do it! It was harder than anything she had ever had in practice! She saw failure confronting her. The sting of tears pricked her eyes, and she pressed her lips tightly together.
Blindly she picked up a stiff bristle brush and began to clean the type of her machine. She slipped in a sheet of paper, and, to distract herself, rattled off briskly some of her school exercises. Those other girls could do it! She saw them glancing at their notes, and busily clicking at their machines. They did not seem to be having difficulty. Miss Flannigan,—that raw-boned Irish girl with no breeding, no education, no brains!—how was it that she managed it?
She frowned savagely and her fingers flew.
“Miss Sturgis.”
Young Mr. Beardsley was smiling at her invitingly. She rose, gathering up her pencils and note-book.
“Sit down, Miss Sturgis. This work may seem a little difficult to you at first but you’ll soon get on to it. Most of these letters are very much alike. There’s no particular accuracy required. The idea is to get in closer touch with these people who have written in or inquired about the books, and we write them personal letters for the effect the direct message....”
He went on explaining, amiably, reassuringly. Jeannette thawed under his pleasant manner; confidence came surging back. She made up her mind she liked this young man; he was considerate, he was kind, he was a gentleman.
“The idea, of course, is always to have your letters intelligible. If you don’t understand what you have written, the person to whom it is addressed, won’t either. I don’t care whether you get my actual words or not. You’re always at liberty to phrase a sentence any way you choose as long as it makes sense.... Now let’s see; we’ll try one. Frank Curry, R.F.D. 1, Topeka, Kansas.... I’ll go slow at first, but if I forget and get going too rapidly, don’t hesitate to stop me.”
Jeannette, with her note-book balanced on her knee, bent to her work. Beardsley spoke slowly and distinctly. After the first moments of agonizing despair, she began to catch her breath and concentrate on the formation of her notes. More than once she was tempted to write a word out long-hand; she hesitated over “historical,” “consummation,” “inaccurate.” She had been told at school never to permit herself to do this. Better to fail at first, they had said, than to grow to depend on slipshod ways.
The ordeal lasted half-an-hour.
“Suppose you try that much, Miss Sturgis, and see how you get along.”
She rose and gathered up the bundle of letters. Beardsley gave her a friendly, encouraging smile as she turned away.
“How pleasant and kind everyone is!” Jeannette thought as she made her way back to her little table.
But her heart died within her as she began to decipher her notes. Again and again they seemed utterly meaningless,—a whole page of them when the curlicues, hooks and dashes looked to her like so many aimless pencil marks. She frowned and bent over her book despairingly, squeezing hard the fingers of her clasped hands together. What had he said! How had he begun that paragraph? ... Oh, she hadn’t had enough training yet, not enough experience! She couldn’t do it! She’d have to go to him and tell him she couldn’t do the work! And he had been so kind to her! And she would have to tell capable, friendly Miss Gibson that a month or two more in school perhaps would be wiser before she could attempt to do the work of a regular stenographer! And there were her mother and sister, too! She would have to confess to them as well that she had failed! The thought strangled her. Tears brimmed her eyes.
“Perhaps you’re in trouble? Can I help?” A gentle voice from across the narrow aisle addressed her. Jeannette through blurred vision saw a round, white face with kindly sympathetic eyes looking at her.
“What system do you use? The Munson? ... That’s good. Let me see your notes. Just read as far as you can; his letters are so much alike, I think I can help you.”
Jeannette winked away the wetness in her eyes, and read what she was able.
“Oh, yes, I know,” interrupted this new friend; “it goes this way.” She flashed a paper into her machine and clicked out with twinkling fingers a dozen lines.
“See if that isn’t it,” said the girl handing her the paper.
Jeannette read the typewritten lines and referred to her notes.
“Yes, it’s just the same.” Her eyes shone. “I’m so much obliged.”
“It seemed to me awfully hard at first. I thought I never could do it.”
“Did you?” Jeannette smiled gratefully.
“Oh, yes; we all had an awful time. He uses such outlandish words.”
The morning was gone before she knew it. She went out at lunch-time, walked a few blocks up Fourth Avenue and then turned back to the office. She did not eat; she did not want any lunch; her mind was absorbed in her work; she had hardly left the building before she wanted to get back to her desk, to recopy a letter or two in which she had made some erasures. The afternoon fled like the morning.
A whirl of confused impressions spun about in her brain as she shut her eyes and tried to go to sleep that night. Although she ached with fatigue, she was too excited to lose consciousness at once. The day’s events, like a merry-go-round, wheeled around and around her. On the whole she was satisfied. She had finished all of the letters Mr. Beardsley had given her; he had beckoned her to come to him after he had read them, had commended her, and given her back but one to correct in which the punctuation was faulty.
“I’m sure you’ll do all right, Miss Sturgis,” he told her. “You’ll find it much easier as soon as you get used to the work.”
And Jeannette felt she had made a real friend in Miss Alexander, the girl across the aisle who had so generously, so wonderfully helped her. Among the riff-raff of girls that surged in and out of the office, cheaply dressed, loud-laughing, common little chits, Beatrice Alexander was easily recognizable as belonging to Jeannette’s own class. Each had discerned in the other a similarity of thought, of taste and refinement that drew them immediately together.
A wonderful, tremendous feeling of importance and self-respect came to Jeannette as she had made her way across crowded Twenty-third Street and encountered a great tide of other workers homeward bound; as she climbed the steep elevated station steps, and with the pushing, jostling crowd wedged her way on board a train; as she hung to a strap in the swaying car and squeezed herself through the jam of people about the doorway when Ninety-third Street was reached, and as she walked the brief block and a half that remained before she was at last at home. Every instant of the way she hugged the soul-satisfying thought that she had proven herself; now she was truly a full-fledged wage-earner, a working girl. She had achieved, she felt, economic value.
Life began to take on a new flavor. The future held hidden golden promises. Jeannette had always had a protecting, proprietary attitude toward her mother and Alice, but now she was acutely aware of it, and the thought was sweet to her; she revelled in the prospect of the rôle she must inevitably assume. All her world was centered in her eager, hard-working, ever-cheerful, fussy little mother, and her gentle brown-eyed sister who looked up to her with such adoration and implicit faith. Jeannette felt she had forever established their confidence in her by this successful step into the business world. Her mother had been completely won by her good fortune, and her stout little bosom swelled with pride in her daughter’s achievement. Eagerly she told her pupils about it, and even regaled with the news fat good-natured Signor Bellini and politely indifferent Miss Loughborough.
To Jeannette, the Soulé Publishing Company became at once a concern of tremendous importance. Before little Miss Ingram had mentioned its name to her, she was not sure she had ever heard it. Now she seemed to see it wherever she turned, heard about it in chance conversations at least once a day; it leaped at her from advertisements in the newspapers and from the pages of magazines. Books, she casually picked up, bore its imprint. A great pride in the big company that employed her came to her: it was the largest and most enterprising of all publishing houses; it was spending a million dollars advertising The Universal History of the World; it had hundreds of employees on its pay-roll!
If there were less roseate aspects of the concern that paid her fifteen dollars every Saturday, Jeannette did not see them. She never stopped to examine critically the history she was helping to sell, nor to glance into the pages of the Secret Memoirs, nor to open the leaves of the set of books labelled Favorites of Great Kings. She never thought it curious that the firm employed so many cheaply dressed, vulgar-tongued little Jewesses, and sallow-skinned, covert-eyed girls. Nor did she wonder that she never observed any important-looking individuals who might be officials of the company, walking about or up and down the aisles of the racketting, bustling loft. There was only Mr. Kent. The others, whoever they might be, confined their activities, she came to understand, to the main offices of the Company on West Thirty-second Street. This great loft with its sea of life was only a temporary arrangement,—part of the great selling campaign by which a hundred thousand sets of the History were to be sold before May first. Something of tremendous import was to happen on this fateful date,—an upheaval in trade conditions, a great change in the publishing world. Jeannette was not sure what it was all to be about, but she was convinced that after May first, the public would no longer have this wonderful chance to buy the twenty-five volumes of the History at such a ridiculously low price.
Behind glass partitions in one corner of the extensive floor were the inner offices,—the “holy of holies” Jeannette thought of them,—where Mr. Edmund Kent existed, pulled wires, touched bells, and gave orders that generalled the activities of the hundreds of human beings who clicked away at their typewriters, or deftly folded thousands and thousands of circulars, to tuck into waiting envelopes that were later dragged away in grimy, striped-canvas mail sacks. Mr. Edmund Kent was the Napoleon, the great King, the Far-seeing Master who in his awesome, mysterious glass-partitioned office, ruled them with arbitrary and benevolent power. All day long, Jeannette heard Mr. Kent’s name mentioned. Miss Gibson quoted him; Mr. Beardsley decided this or that important matter must be referred to him. What Mr. Kent thought, said, did, was final. The girl used to catch a glimpse of the great man, now and then, as he came in, in the morning, or went out to a late lunch: a square-shouldered, firm-stepping man with a derby hat, a straight, trim mustache, and an overcoat whose corners flapped about his knees. He seemed wonderful to her.
“Shhhh....” a whisper would come from one of the girls near by; “there’s Mr. Kent”; and all would watch him out of the corners of their eyes as they pretended to bend over their work.
“Mr. Kent is President of the Company?” Jeannette one day ventured to ask Mr. Beardsley.
“Oh, no, just the selling agent,” he replied. This was perplexing, but it did not make Jeannette regard with any less veneration the stocky figure in derby hat and flapping coat corners which strode in and out of the office.
There were other mysterious persons who had desks in the “holy of holies,” but Jeannette was never able to make out who these were, nor what might be their duties. Miss Gibson was in charge of the girls on the floor; Mr. Beardsley was her immediate “boss.” There was a cashier who made up the pay-roll and whose assistants handed out the little manila envelopes on Saturday morning containing the neatly folded bills. She had no occasion to be concerned about anyone else.
Her “boss’s” full name was Roy Beardsley. Roy! She smiled when she heard it. He was young,—twenty-three or-four; he was a recent Princeton graduate, was unmarried and lived in a boarding-house somewhere on Madison Avenue. She found out so much from the girls her second day at the office; they were glib with information concerning any one of the force.
Jeannette liked her young boss, principally because it soon became apparent that he treated her with a courtesy he did not accord the other girls. She was, after all, a “lady,” she told herself, straightening her shoulders a trifle, and he was sufficiently well-bred himself to recognize that fact. He must see, of course, the difference between herself and such girls as—well—as Miss Flannigan, for instance. But more than this, Jeannette grew daily more and more convinced that he was beginning to take a personal interest in her for which none of these considerations accounted. Nothing definite between them gave this justification. There was no word, no inflection of voice that had any significance, but she saw it in a quick glimpse of his blue eyes watching her as she sat beside his desk, in the smile of his strange little mouth that stretched itself tightly across his small teeth when he