Chapter 12
Book 2, Chapter 1, Sections 1-3 of Bread. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Read by Wild Shimmering Path. Bread by Charles G. Norris. Book 2, Chapter 1, Sections 1-3.
The Chandler P. Corey Company was moving its offices. a twenty-year lease had been taken on a building especially designed to fit its needs in the East 30s. The new home was a great cavernous concrete structure of eight spacious floors. On the ground floor were to be the new presses destined to print the magazines, and perhaps some of the books in the future. The next two floors were to house the bindery, the composing room and typesetting
machines. The editorial rooms were to be located on the fourth floor, and above these would come in order the advertising, circulation, and pattern departments, each with a stratum in the great concrete block itself. The eighth floor was to be given over to surplus stock, and it would also serve as a storeroom for paper and supplies. Both Corey's commentary and the Wheel of Fortune had made money for their owners during the past three years. It was the day of the muckraking magazine,
and Cavendish had unearthed a Wall Street scandal that sent the circulation of Corey's commentary climbing by leaps and bounds. The Wheel of Fortune had been rechristened the Lady's Fortune, and its contents were now devoted to women's interests and fashions. The pattern business that had been launched in connection with it had proven from the outset immensely successful. Horatio Stevens was now its editor, and Miss Rubens conducted these special departments
appearing among the advertising in its back pages, always referred to in the office as contaminated matter. The circulation of both periodicals had increased so rapidly that Mr. Featherstone had been obliged to announce an advance in their advertising rates every three months. Other branches of the business, too, had grown and shown a profit. Francis Holm, who was head of the book sales department and now a member of the firm, had developed the
manufacture and sale of book premiums and school books. He sold large quantities of the former to the publishers of other magazines, for use in their subscription campaigns, and was even more successful with the latter among private schools and some public ones throughout the country. One or two recent novels had sold over the 100,000 mark, and the general standing of the Chandler B. Corey publications had improved. It was conceded in the trade they had now a better
line. Something was being done, too, in the mail order department in charge of Walt Chase, and more and more sets of standard works were being sold by circularizing methods. The installation and operation of their own presses had been a grave undertaking. Mr. Kipps had strenuously opposed it, arguing that the new building was enough of a responsibility, and that they should mark time for a while and see how they stood, rather than incur a new loan
of half a million dollars which the new presses involved. Mr. Corey was convinced, however, that a tide had arrived in their affairs which demanded a rapid expansion of the business, and if he and his partners were to make the most of the opportunity thus presented, they must rise to the occasion and show themselves able to expand with it. There's no use of ours trying to crowd back into our shells after we've outgrown them,
is there, Miss Sturgis? He said to his secretary with an amused twinkle in his eye, after a heated conference with the other members of the firm, during which Kipps and High Dutton had left the room. Jeanette smiled wisely. She believed that her chief was one of those few men who had far-seeing vision, and could look with keen perception and unfaltering eye into the future, and that he would carry Mr. Kipps, Mr. Featherstone, the office, his family, herself,
everybody who attached themselves to him, to fame and fortune in spite of anything any one of them might do. When he was right he knew it, and knew it with conviction, and nothing could shake him. He had only one weakness, his secretary felt, and that was his attitude toward his son, Willis, who two years before had been withdrawn from the intellectual atmosphere of Cambridge and put into the business, presumably that his father might watch him.
He was one of the sub-editors of Corey's commentary and demoralized the office by his late hours, his disregard of office rules against smoking, and his condescending attitude toward everyone in his father's employ. The three years that Jeanette Sturgis had been Mr. Corey's secretary had seen many changes. Poor Mrs. Innes had turned out to be a dipsomaniac. Jeanette guessed her secret long before it was discovered by anyone else, and she had been full of pity and sorrow
when this gray-haired regal woman had to be dismissed. Then Alstein was gone, and Humphrey Stubbs as well. Max Oppenheim, likewise, had departed. The new circulation manager was a shrewd, keen-eyed, spectacled young Scotchman named McGregor, whom everyone familiarly spoke to and of as Sandy. Miss Holland was still Mr. Kipps's assistant, and now most of the routine affairs of the business were administered by her. Besides Mr. Holm, there was another new member of
the firm, Sidney Frank Allister, who had come into the Chandler B. Corey Company from a rival house, and was now entrusted with the book-publishing end of the business. It was usually his opinion that decided the fate of a manuscript. He had his assistants, a haughty Radcliffe graduate named Miss Peckinbaugh, whom Jeanette heartily disliked, and old Major Tickner, who had a stiff leg since his Civil War days, and who stumped into the office two or three times a week with his bundle
of manuscripts and stumped out again with a fresh supply. Very rarely Mr. Corey was consulted. He frankly declared he hated to read a book, and would only do so under the most vigorous pressure. Do I have to read this, Frank? Jeanette would often hear him ask Alistair when the latter brought him a bulky manuscript and laid it on his desk. You know, I don't know anything about literature.
He would add, smilingly, with his favorite assumption of being only a plain businessman and lacking in appreciation of the arts. Well, Mr. Corey, this is really important, Alistair would say. We don't agree about it in my department. Has Holm read it? He can tell you whether it will sell or not. Mr. Holm doesn't think it will, but I believe this is a very important book,
and one we most assuredly ought to have on our list. Frequently Mr. Corey would hand the manuscript over to Jeanette after Mr. Alistair had left the room, and beg her to take it home with her, read it, and give him a careful synopsis and her opinion. She used to smile to herself when she would hear him quoting her, and once when he repeated a phrase she had used in her report,
he winked at her in a most undignified fashion. I'm nothing but a hard-headed businessman, you know, he would say, justifying himself to his secretary when they were alone together. I haven't any time to read books. I can hire men to do that,
men with much keener judgment about such things than I have. I'm watching the circulation of our magazines, the advertising revenues, our daily sales report, and seeing that our presses are being worked to their maximum capacity. I'm negotiating with a mill for a year's supply of paper
and buying 50,000 pounds of ink and at the same time arranging for a loan from the bank. I haven't got time for books. Anyhow, I never went to college. This with a humorous twinkle as he had a general contempt for college men.
And I don't know anything about literature. Jeanette took a tremendous pride in the new building. She had an office to herself now, one adjoining Mr. Corey's. He left the details of equipping both to her. She took the greatest delight in doing so. She bought some very handsome furniture,
a great mahogany desk covered with a sheet of plate glass for Mr. Corey, some finely upholstered leather armchairs, a rich moquette rug, and she had the walls distempered and lined on three sides with tall mahogany bookcases with diamond-pane glass doors. She had all the author's autographed photographs reframed in a uniform narrow black molding and hung them herself.
She arranged to have some greens always on the bookcases and a great bunch of feathery pine boughs in a large round earthenware jar on the floor in one corner. There had come to exist a very warm and affectionate companionship between the president of the publishing house and his secretary. Jeanette thought him the finest man she knew.
She admired him tremendously, admired his shrewdness, his cleverness, his extraordinary capacity for work. He was impatient beyond all reason sometimes. She had often seen him jump up with a bang of a fist on his desk and an angry exclamation on his lips when an office boy had dallied over an errand, or had heard these things
when it was she who was keeping him waiting, and he would come himself after the carbon of the letter, or the report, or the book he had asked for. He would stride through the aisles between the desks or across the floor to somebody's office with great long steps, his fists swinging, his brows knit intent upon putting his hands at once upon what he wanted. He could be brutally rude when annoyed, and he gave small consideration
to anyone else's opinion when he had a definite one of his own. But she could forgive these shortcomings. She saw the odds against which he contended, she saw the ultimate goal at which he aimed, and she saw the vigorous battle he was waging toward this end, and her esteem for him knew no bounds. She felt herself to be his only real ally, though she did not overestimate her services. Among those who came close to him, his business associates and family, she was the only
one not an actual drag upon him. Mr. Featherstone and Mr. Kipps were of no more assistance to him in conducting the affairs of the company than any two of the salaried clerks. Frequently they hampered him, rubbing their chins or hemming and hawing over one of his brilliant flashes of wisdom to rob him of his enthusiasm. As the business increased, they were more and more inclined to demure at any new scheme he proposed. His family were so much dead weight about his neck.
The boy had proved himself of small account, the daughter was epileptic, Mrs. Corey, an exacting, extravagant, capricious wife. Jeanette surmised upon their first meeting that her employer's wife was already unaccountably jealous of her soon found ample confirmation. Mrs. Corey grew more and more resentful of Jeanette's intimate knowledge of her personal affairs, the complete confidence of her husband which she enjoyed, the close daily association with him. Jeanette was
aware there had been several violent quarrels over her between husband and wife, Mrs. Corey demanding that she be dismissed, Mr. Corey firmly declining to agree. It did not make matters any too pleasant for the girl. Whenever Mrs. Corey encountered her, she was effusively sweet, but her manner suggested, You and I, my dear, we know about him, or we women, his secretary and his wife, must stand together for his protection. Jeanette was keenly conscious of the utter falseness and
insincerity of this attitude. She knew that Mrs. Corey hated her, and would gladly see her summarily dismissed. She would smile with equally apparent sweetness in return, and fume in silence. She considered she was often doing for Mr. Corey what his wife should have been doing, that she filled the place of assistant, philosopher, and friend only because Mrs. Corey was utterly incompetent to fill any of these roles. If her relation to her employer
had grown to be that of companion and helpmate, if she had been obliged to assume part of the province of a wife, none of the compensations were hers, she reflected indignantly. Mrs. Corrie lived in luxury, came and went as she pleased, observed no hours, exercised no self-restraint, posed as her husband's partner in life, his guide and counselor, spent his money extravagantly, and enjoyed the satisfaction of being the wife of the president of what had now become one of
the big publishing houses in New York, while she, Jeanette, who worked beside him eight, nine, sometimes eleven or twelve hours out of every twenty-four, got thirty-five dollars a week. but in moments of fairer judgment she realized she received much more than merely the contents of her pay envelope. She had an affection and a regard for Mr. Corey that he never had given his wife. She was closer to him than anyone else in the world. She was what both wife and daughter
should have meant to him. He loved her with a warm paternal feeling, and her love for him, in return was equally sincere, deep, and devoted. She sometimes felt that she and this man for whom she slaved and whom she served and helped could conquer the world. There existed no sex attraction between them, each recognized in the other the half of an excellent team of indefatigable workers. Their relation was always that of father and daughter, but their feelings could only be
measured in terms of love, staunch, enduring, unswerving loyalty. There was nothing in Jeanette's life from which she derived more satisfaction than the way in which she had deflected Roy Beardley's interest in herself to her sister. There was a time after she had made up her mind she could not marry him, when dark hours and aching thoughts assailed her, when she felt she was sacrificing all her happiness in life to a mere idea. But she had fought against these
disturbing reflections, resolutely banishing Roy from her mind, and making herself think of ways in which their relationship could be put upon a platonic basis. She took walks with him, made him read aloud to her when he came in the evenings, persuaded him to take her to lectures, and formed the habit of going with him once a week to a vaudeville show in a neighboring theater on Upper Broadway. Her policy was always to be doing things with him, never to be idle or to sit alone
with him, for this always led to intimate talk and lovemaking. She strove to keep the conversation impersonal. Roy was so easily managed, she sometimes smiled over it. And yet there came times when it was hard to deny herself the firm hold of his young arms. What proved an immediate and tremendous help in conquering herself was a discovery she made from a chance glimpse of her sister's earnest brown eyes fixed upon Roy's face. The three of them were in the studio one evening
and happened to be discussing religion. Roy delivered himself sententiously of a trite truism, something like, it should be part of everyone's religion to respect the religion of others. As Jeanette was considering him rather than his words at the moment, her gaze happened to light upon her sister's face, and little Alice's secret stood revealed. The girl sat with her mouth half-opened, staring at Roy with wide eyes and an adoring look eloquent of her thoughts.
Jeanette was staggered. She was instantly aware of a great pain in her own heart, a great longing and hurt. It was clear Alice did not understand herself, and had no suspicion that she was in love. At once the elder sister began to readjust herself. Clean house, as she expressed it.
She marveled again and again about Alice. It was hard to accept the idea that love had come to her little sister. Yet the look in the rapt face had been unmistakable, and as the days went by, Jeanette found plenty of evidence to confirm her suspicions. It was surprising how much the knowledge of her sister's secret helped her to overcome any weakness for Roy that remained in
her own heart. She saw at once the suitableness of a match between them. Alice and Roy were ideally suited to each other, and their coming to care for one another would surely be the best possible solution to her own problem. She could not, would not marry him. The next best thing, of course, would be for him to marry her sister. She set about her schemes at once. The very next evening it had been arranged Roy was to go with her to the theatre. They usually sat in one of the back
rows of the balcony. That afternoon she left a little note on his desk to say she wanted to see him when he came in, and when he appeared told him she would be obliged to work with Mr. Corey that evening, and suggested he take her sister to the show in her place. When he came of an evening to see her at her home, she would send Alice out to talk to him, while she dallied over her dressing. Whenever Alice happened to join her and Roy, she found an excuse to leave them together.
She persuaded the young man frequently to include her sister in their jaunts or walks, and in the evenings more and more often she complained of a headache, took herself to bed, and left Alice to entertain him. Poor little Alice was blindly unconscious of the strings that were being pulled about her, but she came to a full and terrifying realization at last of where her heart was leading her. She began to mope and weep, to talk of going away, she spoke of wanting
to be a trained nurse. Roy was still placidly indifferent to her interest in him. His ardor for Jeanette had cooled, but he still fancied himself in love with her, and expected that someday they would be married. He no longer fretted her, however, with demands or troubled her with lovemaking. His days were full of interests. He had his friends, his work at the office, his companionship with the two Sturgis girls, all of which was very agreeable and
entertaining. Jeanette and he would be married some day before long. He was content to let matters drift until she was ready to name the day. Alice? Oh, Alice was a lovely girl, a deuce of a lovely girl. She was going to be his sister-in-law soon. Before long, Mrs. Sturgis came fluttering in great agitation to her oldest daughter. By various circumlocutions, she approached the subject, which was causing her so much distress. It was quite evident that Alice
was not well. She was run down and getting terribly nervous. Had Jeanette noticed anything wrong with her? Jeanette didn't suppose it could be a man, did she? The little brown bird was still her mother's baby, after all, but she never could tell about girls. Alice was, well, Alice was 19, and if it was a man, the dear child acted exactly as if there was one, who could it possibly be? She didn't see anybody but Roy. She didn't go anyplace with anybody else. Now, her mother
didn't want to say one word to distress Jeanette or to say anything that would upset her. Perhaps she was all wrong about it anyway, but did Jeanette think it was possible that Alice and Roy? That Alice? That Alice? Amused, Jeanette watched her anxious little mother floundering on helplessly. Then she suddenly took the plump and worried figure in her arms, hugged her, and told her all about it. Mrs. Sturgis could only stare in amazement and interject breathless
exclamations of, But dearie! Why dearie! Well, I don't know what to make of you. But the question now remaining was how to jog Roy's consciousness awake, make him see the little brown flower at his feet that looked up at him so adoringly, only waiting to be plucked. Jeanette said nothing to her mother, but she went to Roy direct. She felt sure of her touch with him.
First, she made him realize that she could never be satisfied with being his wife. She explained carefully and convincingly why it could never be, and then, while he gazed tragically at the ground, twisting his lean white fingers, she spoke to him frankly of Alice. As she talked, it came over her with fresh conviction that,
had she married him, she could have done as she liked with Roy. He was putty in her hands. But her husband must be a man who would mold her, make her do what he wished, bend her to his will. Only such a man would awaken her love and keep it. She despised Roy for his amiability.
He looked very boyish and silly to her now, as he rumpled his stuck-up hair and dubiously shook his head. He was surprised to hear about Alice, and Jeanette could see, at once interested. She left the thought with him and confidently waited for it to take hold. Mr. Corey, she felt, would have handled the situation in just such fashion as she had. Direct, cutting the Gordian knot, plunging straight to the heart of the matter.
One night at dinner she casually told her mother and sister that her engagement with Roy had been broken by mutual consent. She explained they both had begun to realize they did not really love one another well enough to marry and had decided to call it off. Roy was a sweet boy, she added, and would make some girl a splendid husband.
She glanced covertly at Alice. The girl was bending over her plate, pretending an interest in her food, but her face was deadly white. A rush of tenderest love flooded Jeanette's heart. At the moment, she would have given much to have been free to take her little sister in
her arms and tell her everything, assure her that the man she loved was beginning to love her in return, and would someday make her his wife. And that was how it turned out. A year later, Roy and Alice were married by the Reverend Dr. Fitzgibbons in the church on 89th Street in just the way the bride's mother had planned for her older daughter.
And now they were living in a small but pretty four-room apartment out in the Bronx, for which they paid $25 a month. Happy little Mrs. Beardsley's mother and sister were aware that very shortly those grave responsibilities at which Mrs. Sturgis had often mysteriously hinted were to come upon her.
Alice was expecting in March. Roy was no longer an employee of the Chandler B. Corey Company. He had found another job just before he married, and was now with the Sporting Gazette, a magazine devoted to athletic interests, gaming, and fishing, where he was getting $40 a week as sub-editor. He had always wanted to write, and this came nearer his ambition than soliciting advertisements. Moreover, there was the increase in salary. Of course, the Sporting Gazette was new and had
nothing like the circulation of the Corrie publications, but Roy considered it a step ahead. He had given Mr. Featherstone a chance to keep him, but Mr. Featherstone had rubbed his chin and wagged his head dubiously when he asked for a raise. No, there mustn't be any more raises for a while. No more increases in salary until the company was making larger profits. They were expanding. There was the new building with the larger rent and all those new presses to be paid
for. So Roy had gone in quest of another job, and had found it in one of three rough little rooms comprising the editorial offices of the Sporting Gazette. He considered himself extremely happy, extremely fortunate. The attraction Jeanette had once felt for him was as dead as though it had never been. End of Book Two, Chapter One, Sections One through Three.
