The 42nd Parallel (36 page)

raining in historic Quebec      it was raining on the Château in historic Quebec where gallant Wolfe in a three cornered hat sat in a boat in a lithograph and read Gray’s “Elegy” to his men gallant Wolfe climbing up the cliffs to meet gallant Montcalm in a threecornered hat on the plains of Abraham with elaborate bows and lace ruffles on the uniforms in the hollow squares and the gallantry and the command to fire and the lace ruffles ruined in the mud on the plains of Abraham

but the Château was the Château Frontenac world-famous hostelry historic in the gray rain in historic gray Quebec and we were climbing up from the Saguenay River Scenic Steamer Greatest Scenic Route in the World the Chautauqua Lecturer and his wife and the baritone from Athens Kentucky where they have a hill called the Acropolis exactly the way it is in Athens Greece and culture and a reproduction of the Parthenon exactly the way it is in Athens Greece

stony rain on stony streets and out onto the platform and the St. Lawrence people with umbrellas up walking back and forth on the broad wooden rainy platform looking over the slatepointed roofs of Quebec and the coalwharves and the grainelevators and the ferries and the
Empress of Ireland
with creamcolored funnels steaming in from the Other Side and Levis and green hills across the river and the Isle of Orléans green against green and the stony rain on the shining gray slatepointed roofs of Quebec

but the Chautauqua Lecturer wants his dinner and quarrels with his wife and makes a scene in the historic diningroom of the historic Château Frontenac and the headwaiter comes and the Chautauqua Lecturer’s a big thick curlyhaired angry man with a voice used to bawling in tents about the Acropolis just like it is in Athens Greece and the Parthenon just like it is in Athens Greece and the Winged Victory and the baritone is too attentive to the small boy who wants to get away and wishes he hadn’t said he’d come and wants to shake the whole bunch

but it’s raining in historic Quebec and walking down the street alone with the baritone he kept saying about how there were bad girls in a town like this and boys shouldn’t go with bad girls and the Acropolis and the bel canto and the Parthenon and voice culture and the beautiful statues of Greek boys and the Winged Victory and the beautiful statues

but I finally shook him and went out on the cars to see the falls of Montmorency famous in song and story and a church full of crutches left by the sick in St. Anne de Beaupré

and the gray rainy streets full of girls

In the second year of the European War Mr. Carroll sold out his interest in the firm of Dreyfus and Carroll to Mr. Dreyfus and went home to Baltimore. There was a chance that the state Democratic convention would nominate him for Governor. Janey missed him in the office and followed all the reports of Maryland politics with great interest. When Mr. Carroll didn’t get the nomination Janey felt quite sorry about it. Round the office there got to be more and more foreigners and talk there took on a distinctly pro-German trend that she didn’t at all like. Mr. Dreyfus was very polite and generous with his employees but Janey kept thinking of the ruthless invasion of Belgium and the horrible atrocities and didn’t like to be working for a Hun, so she began looking round for another job. Business was slack in Washington and she knew it was foolish to leave Mr. Dreyfus but she couldn’t help it so she went to work for Smedley Richards, a realestate operator on Connecticut Avenue, at a dollar less a week. Mr. Richards was a stout man who talked a great deal about the gentleman’s code and made love to her. For a couple of weeks she kept him off, but the third week he took to drinking and kept putting his big beefy hands on her and borrowed a dollar one day and at the end of the week said he wouldn’t be able to pay her for a day or two, so she just didn’t go back and there she was out of a job.

It was scary being out of a job; she dreaded having to go back to live at her mother’s with the boarders and her sisters’ noisy ways. She read the ads in
The Star
and
The Post
every day and answered any she saw, but someone had always been there ahead of her, although she got to the address the first thing in the morning. She even put her name down at an employment agency. The woman at the desk was a stout woman with bad teeth and a mean smile, she made Janey pay two dollars as a registration fee and showed her the waiting list of expert stenographers she had and said that girls ought to marry and that trying to earn their own living was stuff and nonsense because it couldn’t be done. The bad air and the pinched faces of the girls waiting on benches made her feel quite sick so she went and sat a little while in the sun in Lafayette Square getting her courage up to tell Alice, who was still at Mrs. Robinson’s, that she hadn’t found a job yet. A young man with a red face sat down beside her and tried to start talking to her, so she had to walk on. She went into a drugstore and had a chocolate milk, but the sodajerker tried to kid her a little, and she burst out crying. The sodajerker looked scared to death and said, “Beg pardon, miss, I didn’t mean no offence.” Her eyes were still red when she met Alice coming out of the Riggs Building; Alice insisted on paying for a thirtyfive cent lunch for her at The Brown Teapot, although Janey couldn’t eat a thing. Alice had an Itoldyouso manner that made Janey mad, and she said that it was too late now for her to try to go back to Mrs. Robinson’s because Mrs. Robinson didn’t have work for the girls she had there as it was. That afternoon Janey felt too discouraged to look for work and roamed round the Smithsonian Institution trying to interest herself in the specimens of Indian beadwork and war canoes and totempoles, but everything gave her the creeps and she went up to the room and had a good cry. She thought of Joe and Jerry Burnham and wondered why she never got letters from them, and thought of the poor soldiers in the trenches and felt very lonely. By the time Alice came home she’d washed her face and put on powder and rouge and was bustling briskly about their room; she joked Alice about the business depression and said that if she couldn’t get a job in Washington she’d go to Baltimore or New York or Chicago to get a job. Alice said that sort of talk made her miserable. They went out and ate a ham sandwich and a glass of milk for supper to save money.

All that fall Janey went round trying to get work. She got so that the first thing she was conscious of in the morning when she woke up was the black depression of having nothing to do. She ate Christmas dinner with her mother and sisters and told them that she’d been promised twentyfive a week after the first of the year to keep them from sympathizing with her. She wouldn’t give them the satisfaction.

At Christmas she got a torn paper package from Joe through the mail with an embroidered kimono in it. She went through the package again and again hoping to find a letter, but there was nothing but a little piece of paper with Merry Xmas scrawled on it. The package was postmarked St. Nazaire in France and was stamped
OUVERT PAR LA CENSURE
. It made the war seem very near to her and she hoped Joe wasn’t in any danger over there.

One icy afternoon in January when Janey was lying on the bed reading
The Old Wives’ Tale
, she heard the voice of Mrs. Baghot, the landlady, calling her. She was afraid it was about the rent that they hadn’t paid that month yet, but it was Alice on the phone. Alice said for her to come right over because there was a man calling up who wanted a stenographer for a few days and none of the girls were in and she thought Janey might just as well go over and see if she wanted the job. “What’s the address? I’ll go right over.” Alice told her the address. Her voice was stuttering excitedly at the other end of the line. “I’m so scared . . . if Mrs. Robinson finds out she’ll be furious.” “Don’t worry, and I’ll explain it to the man,” said Janey.

The man was at the Hotel Continental on Pennsylvania Avenue. He had a bedroom and a parlor littered with typewritten sheets and papercovered pamphlets. He wore shellrimmed spectacles that he kept pulling off and putting on as if he wasn’t sure whether he saw better with them or without them. He started to dictate without looking at Janey, as soon as she’d taken off her hat and gotten pad and pencil out of her handbag. He talked in jerks as if delivering a speech, striding back and forth on long thin legs all the while. It was some sort of article to be marked “For immediate release,” all about capital and labor and the eighthour day and the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers. It was with a little feeling of worry that she worked out that he must be a laborleader. When he’d finished dictating he went out of the room abruptly and told her please to type it out as soon as she could that he’d be back in a minute. There was a Remington on the table but she had to change the ribbon and typed in a great hurry for fear he would come back and find her not finished. Then she sat there waiting, with the article and the carbon copies all piled on the table looking neat and crisp. An hour passed and he didn’t come. Janey got restless, roamed about the room, looked into the pamphlets. They were all about labor and economics and didn’t interest her. Then she looked out of the window and tried to crane her neck out to see what time it said by the clock on the postoffice tower. But she couldn’t see it, so she went over to the phone to ask the office if Mr. Barrow was in the hotel please to tell him his manuscript was ready. The desk said it was five o’clock and that Mr. Barrow hadn’t come in yet, although he’d left word that he’d be back immediately. As she set down the receiver she knocked a letter on lavender paper off the stand. When she picked it up, as she had nothing to do and was tired of playing naughts and crosses with herself, she read it. She was ashamed of herself but once she’d started she couldn’t stop.

D
EAR
G. H.

I hate to do this but honestly, kid, I’m in a hell of a fix for jack. You’ve got to come across with two thousand iron men ($2000) or else I swear I’ll stop behaving like a lady and raise the roof. I hate to do this but I know you’ve got it or else I wouldn’t plague you like I do. I mean business this time

—the little girl you used to love
Q
UEENIE

Janey blushed and put the letter back exactly the way it had been. Weren’t men awful, always some skeleton in the closet. It was dark outside and Janey was getting hungry and uneasy when the telephone rang. It was Mr. Barrow, who said that he was sorry he’d kept her waiting and that he was at the Shoreham in Mr. Moorehouse’s suite and would she mind coming right over—no, not to bring the manuscript—but he had some more dictation for her right there, J. Ward Moorehouse it was, she must know the name. Janey didn’t know the name, but the idea of going to take dictation at the Shoreham quite thrilled her and this letter and everything. This was some excitement like when she used to go round with Jerry Burnham. She put on her hat and coat, freshened up her face a little in the mirror over the mantel and walked through the stinging January evening to the corner of F and 14th where she stood waiting for the car. She wished she had a muff; the lashing wind bit into her hands in her thin gloves and into her legs just above the shoetops. She wished she was a wealthy married woman living in Chevy Chase and waiting for her limousine to come by and take her home to her husband and children and a roaring open fire. She remembered Jerry Burnham and wondered if she could have married him if she’d handled it right. Or Johnny Edwards; he’d gone to New York when she’d refused him, and was making big money in a broker’s office. Or Morris Byer. But he was a Jew. This year she hadn’t had any beaux. She was on the shelf; that was about the size of it.

At the corner before the Shoreham she got out of the car. The lobby was warm. Welldressed people stood around talking in welldressed voices. It smelt of hothouse flowers. At the desk they told her to go right up to apartment number eight on the first floor. A man with a wrinkled white face under a flat head of sleek black hair opened the door. He wore a sleek black suit and had a discreet skating walk. She said she was the stenographer for Mr. Barrow and he beckoned her into the next room. She stood at the door waiting for someone to notice her. At the end of the room there was a big fireplace where two logs blazed. In front of it was a broad table piled with magazines, newspapers, and typewritten manuscripts. On one end stood a silver teaservice, on the other a tray with decanters, a cocktail shaker and glasses. Everything had a well-polished silvery gleam, chairs, tables, teaset, and the watchchain and the teeth and sleek prematurely gray hair of the man who stood with his back to the fire.

Immediately she saw him Janey thought he must be a fine man. Mr. Barrow and a little baldheaded man sat in deep chairs on either side of the fireplace listening to what he said with great attention.

“It’s a very important thing for the future of this country,” he was saying in a low earnest voice. “I can assure you that the great executives and the powerful interests in manufacturing and financial circles are watching these developments with the deepest interest. Don’t quote me in this; I can assure you confidentially that the President himself . . .” His eye caught Janey’s. “I guess this is the stenographer. Come right in, Miss . . .” “Williams is the name,” said Janey.

His eyes were the blue of alcoholflame, with a boyish flicker in them; this must be J. Ward Moorehouse whose name she ought to know.

“Have you a pencil and paper? That’s fine; sit right down at the table. Morton, you’d better carry away those teathings.” Morton made the teathings disappear noiselessly. Janey sat down at the end of the table and brought out her pad and pencil. “Hadn’t you better take off your hat and coat, or you won’t feel them when you go out?” There was something homey in his voice, different when he talked to her than when he talked to the men. She wished she could work for him. Anyway she was glad she had come.

“Now, Mr. Barrow, what we want is a statement that will allay unrest. We must make both sides in this controversy understand the value of coöperation. That’s a great word, coöperation . . . First we’ll get it down in rough . . . You’ll please make suggestions from the angle of organized labor, and you, Mr. Jonas, from the juridical angle. Ready, Miss Williams . . . Released by J. Ward Moorehouse, Public Relations Counsel, Hotel Shoreham, Washington, D.C., Jan. 15, 1916 . . .” Then Janey was too busy taking down the dictation to catch the sense of what was being said.