The 42nd Parallel (37 page)

That evening when she got home she found Alice already in bed. Alice wanted to go to sleep, but Janey chattered like a magpie about Mr. Barrow and labor troubles and J. Ward Moorehouse and what a fine man he was, and so kind and friendly and had such interesting ideas for collaboration between capital and labor, and spoke so familiarly about what the President thought and what Andrew Carnegie thought and what the Rockefeller interests or Mr. Schick or Senator LaFollette intended, and had such handsome boyish blue eyes, and was so nice, and the silver teaservice, and how young he looked in spite of his prematurely gray hair, and the open fire and the silver cocktail shaker and the crystal glasses.

“Why, Janey,” broke in Alice, yawning, “I declare you must have a crush on him. I never heard you talk about a man that way in my life.” Janey blushed and felt very sore at Alice. “Oh, Alice, you’re so silly . . . It’s no use talking to you about anything.” She got undressed and turned out the light. It was only when she got to bed that she remembered that she hadn’t had any supper. She didn’t say anything about it because she was sure Alice would say something silly.

Next day she finished the job for Mr. Barrow. All morning she wanted to ask him about Mr. Moorehouse, where he lived, whether he was married or not, where he came from, but she reflected it wouldn’t be much use. That afternoon, after she had been paid, she found herself walking along H Street past the Shoreham. She pretended to herself that she wanted to look in the storewindows. She didn’t see him, but she saw a big shiny black limousine with a monogram that she couldn’t make out without stooping and it would look funny if she stooped; she decided that was his car.

She walked down the street to the corner opposite the big gap in the houses where they were tearing down the Arlington. It was a clear sunny afternoon. She walked round Lafayette Square looking at the statue of Andrew Jackson on a rearing horse among the bare trees.

There were children and nursemaids grouped on the benches. A man with a grizzled vandyke with a black portfolio under his arm sat down on one of the benches and immediately got up again and strode off; foreign diplomat, thought Janey, and how fine it was to live in the Capital City where there were foreign diplomats and men like J. Ward Moorehouse. She walked once more round the statue of Andrew Jackson rearing green and noble on a greennoble horse in the russet winter afternoon sunlight and then back towards the Shoreham, walking fast as if she were late to an appointment. She asked a bellboy where the public stenographer was. He sent her up to a room on the second floor where she asked an acideyed woman with a long jaw, who was typing away with her eyes on the little sector of greencarpeted hall she could see through the halfopen door, whether she knew of anyone who wanted a stenographer. The acideyed woman stared at her. “Well, this isn’t an agency, you know.” “I know; I just thought on the chance . . .” said Janey, feeling everything go suddenly out of her. “Do you mind if I sit down a moment?” The acideyed woman continued staring at her.

“Now, where have I seen you before . . . ? No, don’t remind me . . . You . . . you were working at Mrs. Robinson’s the day I came in to take out her extra work. There, you see, I remember you perfectly.” The woman smiled a yellow smile. “I’d have remembered you,” said Janey, “only I’m so tired of going round looking for a job.”

“Don’t I know?” sighed the woman.

“Don’t you know anything I could get?”

“I’ll tell you what you do . . . They were phoning for a girl to take dictation in number eight. They’re using ’em up like . . . like sixty in there, incorporating some concern or something. Now, my dear, you listen to me, you go in there and take off your hat like you’d come from somewhere and start taking dictation and they won’t throw you out, my dear, even if the other girl just came, they use ’em up too fast.”

Before Janey knew what she was doing she’d kissed the acideyed woman on the edge of the jaw and had walked fast along the corridor to number eight and was being let in by the sleekhaired man who recognized her and asked, “Stenographer?”

“Yes,” said Janey and in another minute she had taken out her pad and paper and taken off her hat and coat and was sitting at the end of the shinydark mahogany table in front of the crackling fire, and the firelight glinted on silver decanters and hotwater pitchers and teapots and on the black perfectly shined shoes and in the flameblue eyes of J. Ward Moorehouse.

There she was sitting taking dictation from J. Ward Moorehouse.

At the end of the afternoon the sleekhaired man came in and said, “Time to dress for dinner, sir,” and J. Ward Moorehouse grunted and said, “Hell.” The sleekhaired man skated a little nearer across the thick carpet. “Beg pardon, sir; Miss Rosenthal’s fallen down and broken ’er ’ip. Fell on the ice in front of the Treasury Buildin’, sir.”

“The hell she has . . . Excuse me, Miss Williams,” he said and smiled. Janey looked up at him indulgent-understandingly and smiled too. “Has she been fixed up all right?”

“Mr. Mulligan took her to the orspital, sir.”

“That’s right . . . You go downstairs, Morton, and send her some flowers. Pick out nice ones.”

“Yessir . . . About five dollars’ worth, sir?”

“Two fifty’s the limit, Morton, and put my card in.”

Morton disappeared. J. Ward Moorehouse walked up and down in front of the fireplace for a while as if he were going to dictate. Janey’s poised pencil hovered above the pad. J. Ward Moorehouse stopped walking up and down and looked at Janey. “Do you know anyone, Miss Williams . . . I want a nice smart girl as stenographer and secretary, someone I can repose confidence in . . . Damn that woman for breaking her hip.”

Janey’s head swam. “Well, I’m looking for a position of that sort myself.”

J. Ward Moorehouse was still looking at her with a quizzical blue stare. “Do you mind telling me, Miss Williams, why you lost your last job?”

“Not at all. I left Dreyfus and Carroll, perhaps you know them . . . I didn’t like what was going on round there. It would have been different if old Mr. Carroll had stayed, though Mr. Dreyfus was very kind, I’m sure.”

“He’s an agent of the German government.”

“That’s what I mean. I didn’t like to stay after the President’s proclamation.”

“Well, round here we’re all for the Allies, so it’ll be quite all right. I think you’re just the person I like . . . Of course, can’t be sure, but all my best decisions are made in a hurry. How about twentyfive a week to begin on?”

“All right, Mr. Moorehouse; it’s going to be very interesting work, I’m sure.”

“Tomorrow at nine please, and send these telegrams from me as you go out:

“Mrs. J. Ward Moorehouse

“Great Neck Long Island New York

     “May have to go Mexico City explain Saltworths unable attend dinner Hope everything allright love to all Ward

“Miss Eleanor Stoddard

“45 E 11th Street New York

     “Write me what you want brought back from Mexico as ever J.W.

“Do you mind traveling, Miss Williams?”

“I’ve never traveled, but I’m sure I’d like it.”

“I may have to take a small office force down with me . . . oil business. Let you know in a day or two . . .

“James Frunze c/o J. Ward Moorehouse

“100 Fifth Avenue New York

     “Advise me immediately shoreham development situation A and B Barrow restless release statement on unity of interest americanism versus foreign socialistic rubbish. JWM . . .

“Thank you; that’ll be all today. When you’ve typed those out and sent the wires you may go.”

J. Ward Moorehouse went through a door in the back, taking his coat off as he went. When Janey had typed the articles and was slipping out of the hotel lobby to send the wires at the Western Union she caught a glimpse of him in a dress suit with a gray felt hat on and a buffcolored overcoat over his arm. He was hurrying into a taxi and didn’t see her. It was very late when she went home. Her cheeks were flushed but she didn’t feel tired. Alice was sitting up reading on the edge of the bed. “Oh, I was so worried . . .” she began, but Janey threw her arms round her and told her she had a job as private secretary to J. Ward Moorehouse and that she was going to Mexico. Alice burst out crying, but Janey was feeling so happy she couldn’t stop to notice it but went on to tell her everything about the afternoon at the Shoreham.

Edison was born in Milan, Ohio, in eighteen fortyseven;

Milan was a little town on the Huron River that for a while was the wheatshipping port for the whole Western Reserve; the railroads took away the carrying trade, the Edison family went up to Port Huron in Michigan to grow up with the country;

his father was a shinglemaker who puttered round with various small speculations; he dealt in grain and feed and lumber and built a wooden tower a hundred feet high; tourists and excursionists paid a quarter each to go up the tower and look at the view over Lake Huron and the St. Clair River and Sam Edison became a solid and respected citizen of Port Huron.

Thomas Edison only went to school for three months because the teacher thought he wasn’t right bright. His mother taught him what she knew at home and read eighteenth century writers with him, Gibbon and Hume and Newton, and let him rig up a laboratory in the cellar.

Whenever he read about anything he went down cellar and tried it out.

When he was twelve he needed money to buy books and chemicals; he got a concession as newsbutcher on the daily train from Detroit to Port Huron. In Detroit there was a public library and he read it.

He rigged up a laboratory on the train and whenever he read about anything he tried it out. He rigged up a printing press and printed a paper called
The Herald
, when the Civil War broke out he organized a newsservice and cashed in on the big battles. Then he dropped a stick of phosphorus and set the car on fire and was thrown off the train.

By that time he had considerable fame in the country as the boy editor of the first newspaper to be published on a moving train. The London
Times
wrote him up.

He learned telegraphy and got a job as night operator at Stratford Junction in Canada, but one day he let a freighttrain get past a switch and had to move on.

(During the Civil War a man that knew telegraphy could get a job anywhere.)

Edison traveled round the country taking jobs and dropping them and moving on, reading all the books he could lay his hands on, whenever he read about a scientific experiment he tried it out, whenever he could get near an engine he’d tinker with it, whenever they left him alone in a telegraph office he’d do tricks with the wires. That often lost him the job and he had to move on.

He was tramp operator through the whole Middle West: Detroit, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Louisville, New Orleans, always broke, his clothes stained with chemicals, always trying tricks with the telegraph.

He worked for the Western Union in Boston.

In Boston he doped out the model of his first patent, an automatic voterecorder for use in Congress, but they didn’t want an automatic voterecorder in Congress, so Edison had the trip to Washington and made some debts and that was all he got out of that; he worked out a stockticker and burglar alarms and burned all the skin off his face with nitric acid.

But New York was already the big market for stocks and ideas and gold and greenbacks.

(This part is written by Horatio Alger:)

When Edison got to New York he was stony broke and had debts in Boston and Rochester. This was when gold was at a premium and Jay Gould was trying to corner the gold market. Wall Street was crazy. A man named Law had rigged up an electric indicator (Callahan’s invention) that indicated the price of gold in brokers’ offices. Edison, looking for a job, broke and with no place to go, had been hanging round the central office passing the time of day with the operators when the general transmitter stopped with a crash in the middle of a rush day of nervous trading; everybody in the office lost his head. Edison stepped up and fixed the machine and landed a job at $300 a month.

In sixtynine the year of Black Friday he started an electrical engineering firm with a man named Pope.

From then on he was on his own, he invented a stock ticker and it sold. He had a machineshop and a laboratory; whenever he thought of a device he tried it out. He made forty thousand dollars out of the Universal Stock Ticker.

He rented a shop in Newark and worked on an automatic telegraph and on devices for sending two and four messages at the same time over the same wire.

In Newark he tinkered with Sholes on the first typewriter, and invented the mimeograph, the carbon rheostat, the microtasimeter and first made paraffin paper.

Something he called etheric force worried him, he puzzled a lot about etheric force but it was Marconi who cashed in on the Hertzian waves. Radio was to smash the ancient universe. Radio was to kill the old Euclidian God, but Edison was never a man to worry about philosophical concepts;

he worked all day and all night tinkering with cogwheels and bits of copperwire and chemicals in bottles, whenever he thought of a device he tried it out. He made things work. He wasn’t a mathematician. I can hire mathematicians but mathematicians can’t hire me, he said.

In eighteen seventysix he moved to Menlo Park where he invented the carbon transmitter that made the telephone a commercial proposition, that made the microphone possible

he worked all day and all night and produced

         the phonograph

                 the incandescent electric lamp

and systems of generation, distribution, regulation and measurement of electric current, sockets, switches, insulators, manholes. Edison worked out the first systems of electric light using the direct current and small unit lamps and the multiple arc that were installed in London Paris New York and Sunbury Pa.,

the threewire system,