menu_book Chapter 4

Book I, Chapter II, Sections IV-6 of Bread. For more information, or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Read by Wild Shimmering Path. Bread by Charles G. Norris. Book I, Chapter II, Sections IV-6

The morning was gone before she knew it. She went out at lunchtime, 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 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 Jeanette 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 riffraff 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 Jeanette'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 Jeanette as she made her way across crowded 23rd 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 93rd 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. Jeanette had always had a protecting, proprietary attitude toward her mother and Alice, but now she was actually aware of it, and the thought was sweet to her. She reveled in the prospect of the role she must inevitably assume. All her world was centered in her eager, hard-working, ever-chearful, fussy little mother, and her gentle brown-eyed sister who looked up to her

with such adoration and implicit faith. Jeanette 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 Lauberow. To Jeanette, the Soleil 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 payroll. If there were less rosette aspects of the concern that paid her fifteen dollars every Saturday, Jeanette 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 labeled favorites

of great kings. She never thought it curious that the firm employed so many cheaply dressed, vulgarly 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 racketing, 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 32nd 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 1st. Something of tremendous importance was to happen on this fateful day, an upheaval in trade conditions, a great change in the publishing world. Jeanette was not sure what it was all to be about, but she was convinced that after May 1st 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, Jeanette thought of them—where Mr. Edmund Kent existed, pulled wires, touched bells, and gave orders that generaled 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 Jeanette 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. Shhh! A whisper would come from one of the girls nearby. 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? Jeanette one day ventured to ask Mr. Beardsley. Oh, no, just the selling agent, he replied. This was perplexing, but it did not make Jeanette 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 Jeanette 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 payroll 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, 23 or 4. 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. Jeanette 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 Flanagan, for instance, but more than this, Jeanette 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 first greeted her in the day, and wished her good morning. Some strange thrilling of her pulses beset her as she sat near him. It irritated her. She struggled against it, even rose to her feet, and went to her desk upon a manufactured excuse to check the subtle influence that began to steal upon her when she was near him. All her instincts battled against

this upsetting something, whatever it was. She could not identify it by a name, which began more and more to trouble her. Jeanette was a normal, healthy girl, butting into womanhood, with broadening horizons and rapidly increasing intimate associations with the world. She was growing daily more mature, more impressive in her bearing, and notably more beautiful. She was fully conscious of this. Her mirror told her so. The glances of men on the street

contributed their evidence. The covert inspection of her own sex both in and out of the office confirmed it. She was becoming aware, too, of a growing self-confidence, of poise and power in herself that she had never suspected. With what constituted crushes, cases, with what was implied in saying one was smitten, she was thoroughly familiar. To a confidant, she would now have frankly described Roy Beardsley as having a crush on her. He was not the first youth of whom she

could have truthfully said as much. Various boys at one time or another, during her school days, had slipped notes to her as they passed her desk, or shamblingly trailed her home after school, carrying her books for her and had hung around the doorstep of the apartment house loitering over their leave-taking, digging the toe of a shoe into the pavement, grinning foolishly. Some of them had confided to her that they loved her and asked her to promise to be their

girl. She herself had a terrible case on a vaudeville dancer named Maurice Monteagle, and on a youth of Greek extraction who worked in Bannerman's drugstore on the corner near home, tended the soda-water counter there, and whose name she never learned. But in none of these affairs of her young heart had there been anything like this. She began by being somewhat flattered by Beardsley's attention,

and was guilty of provoking him a little at first with a smile and a glance. Like all girls of her age, she had been willing, even anxious, to whip his interest into flame. but she soon grew frightened. There was now something in the air, something in herself she could not quite control. She could not still the sudden throbbing of her heart, the swimming of her senses. The moment came when she actually dreaded meeting him in the mornings, when the

minutes she was obliged to sit beside his desk and listen to the peculiar little twang in his voice were an ordeal. She dared not lift her eyes to meet his, but she could see his long white fingers moving about on the desk, playing with pencil and pen, and she could feel him looking at her when his voice fell silent. These were the moments that disturbed her most, when she could not, not for the life of her, control the mounting color that began somewhere deep down within her

and swept up into her cheeks, over her temples, to the roots of her hair. She had to rest her hand against her notebook to keep it from trembling. During these silences, when she felt him studying her. She sometimes thought she must scream or do something mad unless he turned his eyes elsewhere. She seriously considered resigning and seeking another position. Jeanette drank deeply of satisfaction in being a wage earner. She walked the streets of the city with a buoyant tread.

She gazed with pride and affection into the eyes of other working girls she passed. She was self-supporting like them. She had something in common with each and every one of them. There was a great bond that drew them all together, but while she felt thus affectionately sympathetic to these girls in the mass, no one of them drew the line of social distinction more rigidly, even more cruelly, than did she herself. She felt she was the superior of the vast majority

of them, and the equal of the best. She might not be earning the salary perhaps some of them did who were private secretaries, but she was confident that she would. Her experience with stenography confirmed this self-confidence. With three weeks of actual practice, the trick, the knack, the knowledge, whatever it was, had come to her of a sudden. Now she could sweep her pencil across the page of her notebook, leaving in its wake an easy string of curves, dots, and dashes, setting them

down automatically, keeping pace with even the swiftest of young Beardsley's sentences. Nothing could stop her progress in the business world. She loved being of it, reveled in its atmosphere, realizing that she was cleverer than most men, shrewder, quicker, with the additional advantage of unerring intuition. This newborn ambition told her to keep herself aloof from other working girls. Not that she had any inclination to associate with them, they offended her, not only those in

the office, but the giggling, simpering girls she saw on the street, who were obviously of the same class, teetering along on ridiculously high heels, wearing imitation furs and building their hair into enormous, bulging pompadours. They were the kind who did not leave the offices where they worked at the noon hour, but gathered in groups to eat their lunches out of cardboard boxes and left a litter of crumbs on the floor. They were the kind who crowded Child's Restaurant, adding

their shrill voices and shrieks to the deafening clatter of banging crockery. Jeanette, feeling that it was a working girl's privilege to become an habitu of Child's, eagerly entered one of these restaurants at a noon hour during the early days of her employment. Accustomed as she had become to the din of an office, the noise in the eating place did not distress her, but she shrank from rubbing elbows with neighbors whose manner of feeding themselves horrified her. A study of the

price card and an estimate of what she could buy for fifteen cents, the amount she decided she might properly allow herself for lunches, completed her dissatisfaction with the restaurant and similar places. She decided to go without lunch, and to spend the leisure time of her noon hour wandering up and down Fifth Avenue and Broadway looking into shop windows, Lord and Taylor's, Arnold Constable's, and even Tiffany's on Union Square, and in making tours of inspection through

the aisles of Siegel Cooper's mammoth establishment on Sixth Avenue. It was in the rotunda of this gigantic store where stood a great golden symbolic figure of a laurel-crowned woman that there was a large circular candy counter and soda fountain, and here the girl discovered one might get coffee creamed and sugared, and served in a neat little floured china cup, and two saltine crackers on the edge of the saucer, for a nickel. In time this came to constitute her daily lunch. She could

stand at the counter, sipping her drink and nibbling the crackers at her ease, feeling inconspicuous and comfortable, presenting, she realized, merely the appearance of a lady shopper, who had taken a moment from her purchasing for a bit of refreshment. The nourishment, slight as it was, proved sufficient. On the days she had gone lunchless, she had developed headaches late in the afternoon, but the coffee and crackers, she found,

were enough to sustain her from a seven o'clock breakfast to dinner at six-thirty. A nickel for lunch, a dime for car fare, sometimes she walked downtown, took less than a dollar out of her weekly wage. That left fourteen dollars to spend as she liked. She gave her mother nine and kept five for clothes. Five dollars a week for new clothes. Her heart never failed to leap with joy at the thought. Five dollars a week to save or to spend for whatever she fancied. Oh, life was too

wonderful. Just to exist these days and to plan how she would dress herself and what else she would do with her earnings filled her cup of joy to the brim. Her little mother protested vehemently when she put nine dollars in crisp bills into her hand at the end of the first week of work. Oh, dearie, what's this? What's all this money for? It's what I'm going to give you every week, Mama. Mrs. Sturgis, for a moment, was speechless, gazing with wide eyes into her daughter's

smiling face. She wouldn't accept it. She wouldn't hear of such a thing. It was the child's own money that she had earned herself, and not one cent of it should go for any old stupid bills or household expenses, she shook her head until her round, fat cheeks trembled like cupped jelly. But Jeanette had her way, as she knew, and her mother knew, and admiring exclaiming Alice knew, she would from the first. That same evening, after the pots and pans and the supper dishes

had been washed, Mrs. Sturgis established herself under the light at the dining-room table with the canvas-covered ledger before her, and began to figure, Thirty-six dollars a month! Thirty-six dollars a month! Six times six? That was... Why, they'd almost be out of debt in six months, and they wouldn't need to fall behind a cent during summer. It was too wonderful. It was too, too wonderful.

Tears filmed Mrs. Sturgis's bright blue eyes. Her glasses fogged so that she had to take them off and wipe them. She didn't deserve such daughters. No woman ever had better girls. They got laughing happily, excitedly over this, an hysterical sob threatening each. They kissed each other, the girls kneeling by their mother's chair,

their arms around one another, and clung together. And then Alice said she had half a mind to go to work too and do her share. But there was an immediate outcry at this from both her mother and sister. What nonsense! What a foolish idea! She mustn't think of such a thing.

Just because Jeanette had given up her schooling and gone out into the world was no reason why both sisters should do it, there was not the slightest necessity. Alice's place was at school and at home. Someone had to run the house. That was her contribution. She was fitted for it in every way. She was domestic. She liked to cook, and she liked to clean. A still more convincing argument that persuaded apologetic Alice that indeed she was

quite wrong and her mother and sister were entirely right was voiced by Jeanette. Alice had much too retiring a nature to be a success in business. Assurance, self-assertiveness, even boldness were required, and Alice had none of these qualities. This was undeniably true. They all agreed to it. It seemed to be the last word on the matter. The topic was dismissed. Mrs. Sturgis went back to figuring on her bills, Jeanette to speculating about Roy Beardsley as

she darned a tear in an old shirtwaist. I've often wondered, ventured Alice after a considerable pause, just what I could do, how I could support myself if both of you happened to die. I mean, well, if Jeanette should go off somewhere, to Europe maybe, and Mother should get sick, and I should have to. Her voice trailed off into silence before the astonished looks turned upon her. Well, upon my word, began Jeanette, why, Alice, dearie, what's got into you? You're going

to kill us both off. Is that it? I'm to run away and leave Mother sick on your hands? I mean, well, I meant, struggled the confused Alice. Dearie, said her mother, you won't have to worry about the future. Mom will take care of you until some nice, worthy young man comes along to claim you for his own. You'll be married, Allie dear, long before I will. You're just the kind rich men fall madly in love with. Oh, hush, Janney, please. But her sister's thoughts were already upon a more

engaging matter. She was busy once again with Roy Beardsley.