Читать книгу Bread - Charles G. Norris - Страница 16

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 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.

Jeannette was a normal, healthy girl budding 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 had a “terrible case” on a vaudeville dancer named Maurice Monteagle, and on a youth of Greek extraction who worked in Bannerman’s Drug Store on the corner near her 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 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 note-book, 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.