text:
Translation:Shulchan Aruch/Yoreh Deah/84

דין שרצים הנמצאים במים בפירות בקמח ובגבינה.

Contains 17 Seif

ובו י"ז סעיפים

1
Shratzim (creeping things) that grow in water that is in house vessels and in wells, ditches and caves that don't have fountain in them, are permitted, even though they don't have fins and scales. Therefore, one can lean over and drink from them, and needn't be concerned about shratzim in them, if they happened to come into his mouth. (But it is forbidden to draw [water] in a vessel and drink from them) (Ashiri פא"ט and the Arukh Klal 48 and the Kol Bo) And if they're separated from the place where they grow, like outside the well or on the lip of the vessel on the outside, even though they go back inside they're forbidden. Presumably there's worry that they left, but if they only left onto the wall of the vessel on the inside they're permitted.

2
Those that grow in water that is in furrows or ditches, (explanation: slits, long and short ditches, wide like made for fish inclosures, Rashi), they are withdrawn and not flowing, there are those who forbid and there are those who permit.

3
The one who filters water, or the rest of liquids, if it had worms or gnats or mosquitoes in it, even though they returned inside, it is prohibited, because they had already left. Therefore a drink that worms normally grow in them, and similar situations, one does not filter it with wood slivers and straw, at night, lest they will return or fall inside the vessel, and one comes to drink them. Gloss: But it is permitted to filter through a garment or sieve, for behold they are not able to fall through there into the drink, also it is permitted to pour a liquid from one vessel to another vessel, since they always are with a liquid, this is sanitary treatment (Beit Yosef).

4
Worms that grow in fruit, in picked [fruit], they are permitted. The Torah only forbade crawling things that crawl on land. To what are we referring, when they did not leave the fruit. But if they left the fruit, even if it did not reach the land rather it dead in the air before it reached the ground, even if it did not entirely leave the fruit, only a little, or it only left onto the fruit, or on the seed that is inside, or if it left from fruit to fruit, it is forbidden. And there are those who say even if it died within the fruit and left afterwards. Any time that it is found within the fruit, even a hole bored to the outside, we are not concerned lest it left and returned. There are those who forbid if the hole bored to the outside (Moredechai PAT and ShD in the name of RABN and Rabbi ABIH in the name of Rabbi Yoel Huvah BTH Siman 171) and this is how we are accustomed (Terumat HaDeshen ibid. and Hagahot SHD.

5
Worms found in flour and the like are forbidden, lest they spread and crawl on the ground and then return. (Responsa of the Rash, Volume 20, Section 3) Additionally, the same ruling applies to salt or other substances that are not liquid. (Responsa of the Rash, Volume 20, and the glosses of the Shulchan Aruch HaRav in the name of the Mahar"m and see Beit Yosef and see subparagraph 33). It is forbidden to sell it to a non-Jew, lest he sell it back to a Jew (ibid. and so Beit Yosef accepts the ruling from the Mahari"v of the Mahari"sh).

6
Worms that grow in fruits while they are still attached are considered like creeping creatures on the ground and are forbidden, even though they have not yet detached and merely wriggled. However, worms found in pulses and beans beneath their shell, and the shell covers them from the outside, and when the shell is removed, they are found underneath it, are permitted because they are situated in a narrow place, and we do not consider them like creeping creatures on the ground as long as they have not wriggled. But those found in mushrooms are forbidden, as they have room to wriggle.

[Note:] Worms that grow in vinegar and mushrooms are judged like other fruits. However, we do not consider them as attached to the ground since we do not recite a blessing over them as over produce of the soil (Dvarim, and contrary to Orach Chayim). Sometimes, there is found in fruit a kind of black dot, which is the place where the worm begins to form, and one must remove it from there, for it is forbidden like the worm itself (Responsa of the Rashba, Section 271).

7
A fruit that became infested and it's unknown whether it happened while attached or detached, is forbidden.

8
All types of fruits that typically have worms should not be eaten until the fruit is checked inside to see if there is a worm. If the fruit was left after it was detached for twelve months, it may be eaten without inspection because any living creature without a spine does not survive twelve months. Nonetheless, one must still inspect them to remove any worms found on the outside or on the fruit. Even after removing those found outside, there is concern that when placed in water in the pot, they may come out and wriggle (translation of "reshisha derachish") in the water or on the sides of the pot or on the fruit. Therefore, one who wishes to cook fruits that have been left for more than twelve months should place them in cold water; the worms and larvae will rise to the surface. Afterward, they should be placed in a pot of boiling water, so if there is any worm left, it will die immediately.

(It does not suffice if the majority is checked; one must check all of them because the minority is common) (Responsa of the Rashba, Section 5 and in Responsa Section 274).

9
One who cooked fruits within twelve months without inspection: if one can inspect, they should inspect. If not, it is permitted. If some worms are found in the pot, discard them and eat the rest (because there is no fruit without some measure corresponding to the taste of the worm inside) (Responsa of the Rash, citing the Mahar"m). And some say that this applies only when only one or two worms are found, but if three or four are found, everything is forbidden.

[Note:] Specifically, this applies to food that can be strained, and the worms removed from it. Since the entire food is assumed to be infested with worms, it is forbidden. However, if it is possible to strain and remove the worms from there, it is permissible. (Responsa of the Rashba, Section 150) See further in the end of Section 150.

10
Cooked vegetables that have worms in them are permitted after straining (meaning passing them through a sieve). However, if worms are found in the vegetables themselves three times, there is a concern that there might be worms even if they are not visible.

11
A woman whose examination reveals visible crawling creatures, such as ants, it is forbidden to eat from her examination. But if only worms that burrow inside the leaves are found, which are not visible until the leaves are soaked, it is permitted to eat from her examination.

12
A compound where ants have fallen into it and twelve months have passed, one should be cautious about them because honey has the property of preserving substances inside it.

13
Honey in which ants have fallen should be heated until it is melted and then strained.

14
Wheat with worms is permitted to be ground, provided that the flour dances in the light of day. (And any visible worm found there should be discarded, and the rest is permitted) (Responsa of the Rashba, Section 181).

15
All kinds of birds that grow on a tree and cling to it with their claws are forbidden because they are considered as if they creep on the ground.

16
All worms found in livestock, whether between the skin and the flesh or in their intestines, are forbidden. Those found in fish's intestines, whether between the skin and the flesh or inside the flesh, are permitted. Even if some of them have detached and then returned, they are permitted because most of them detach and return (Sha'arei Dura). The prohibition applies only to living ones, but those that grow in flesh after slaughter, or in fish and cheese, are permitted as long as they have not detached. Therefore, worms found in a bowl that fell from meat are permitted according to those who permit, as long as they detached and we do not fear that they detached while the meat was rinsed. Some prohibit worms that form after slaughter from anything that requires slaughter.

[Note:] The custom is to be lenient according to the first opinion (according to Mordechai in Tractate Hullin). There is also a custom regarding worms in cheese to eat them even if they are jumping around on the cheese. But if they detached completely, they are forbidden (Mahar"i and in Aruch HaShulchan, Chapter 10). However, if they are mixed with other food and cannot be removed, they do not render the food forbidden because there are authorities who permit them in any case (Orach Chayim, ibid.). It is preferable to be strict where the prevalent custom is so.

17
A burnt creeping creature is permitted to be eaten due to its medicinal properties as it is just ordinary dust.

סעיף א
שרצים הגדלים במים שבכלים ושבבורות שיחין ומערות שאינם נובעים מותרים אע"פ שאין להם סנפיר וקשקשת לפיכך שוחה ושותה מהם ואינו חושש לשרצים שבהם אם יזדמנו לתוך פיו (אבל אסור לשאוב בכלי ולשתות מהם) (אשיר"י פא"ט וארוך כלל מ"א וכל בו). ואם פירשו ממקום רביתן כגון לאחורי הבור או על שפת הכלי מבחוץ אע"פ שחזרו אסורים ומסתמא אין לחוש שמא פירשו אבל אם לא פירשו אלא על דופן הכלי מבפנים מותרים:

סעיף ב
הגדלים במים שבחריצין ונעיצים ( פי' חריצים ארוכים וקצרים. נעיצים רחבים כגון אותם שעושים לביברי דגים. רש"י ) שהם מושכים ואינם נובעים יש אוסרים ויש מתירים:

סעיף ג
המסנן מים או שאר משקים והיו בו תולעים או יבחושין או יתושים אף על פי שחזרו לתוכו אסורים שכבר פירשו לפיכך משקה שדרך ליגדל בו תולעים וכיוצא בהן אין לסננו בקסמים וקשים בלילה שמא יחזרו ויפלו לתוך הכלי ויבא לשתותן:

 * הגה: אבל מותר לסננן דרך בגד או מסננת שהרי לא יוכלו ליפול דרך שם אל תוך המשקה וכן מותר לערות המשקים מכלי אל כלי הואיל והם תמיד עם המשקים היינו רביתייהו (בית יוסף):

סעיף ד
תולעים הגדלים בפירות בתלוש מותרים שלא אסרה תורה אלא שרץ השורץ על הארץ במה דברים אמורים שלא פירשו מן הפרי אבל פירשו מן הפרי אפילו לא הגיע לארץ אלא שמת באויר קודם שהגיע לארץ ואפילו לא פירש כולו מהפרי אלא מקצתו או שלא פירש אלא על גבי הפרי או על הגרעין שבתוכו או שפירש מפרי לפרי אסור ויש אוסרים אפילו מת בתוך הפרי ופירש אח"כ. כל זמן שנמצא בתוך הפרי אפילו חורו נקוב לחוץ לא חיישינן שמא פירש וחזר. (ויש אוסרים אם חורו נקוב לחוץ ( מרדכי פא"ט וש"ד בשם ראב"ן ור' אבי"ה בשם ר' יואל. הובא בת"ה סי' קע"א ) והכי נהוג) (ת"ה שם ובהגהות ש"ד):

סעיף ה
תולעים הנמצאים בקמח וכיוצא בו אסורים שמא פירשו ושרצו על הארץ וחזרו (תשובת הרא"ש כלל כ' סימן ג'):

 * הגה: והוא הדין במלח או שאר דברים שאינו משקה (תשובת הרא"ש כלל כ' והגהות ש"ד בשם מהר"ם וע"פ עיין ב"י ועיין ס"ק ל"ט) ואסור למכרו לעובד כוכבים שמא יחזור וימכרנו לישראל (שם וכ"כ ב"י מקבלה מהרי"ב ממהרי"ש):

סעיף ו
תולעים הגדלים בפירות בעודם במחובר חשוב כשורץ על הארץ ואסור אע"פ שלא פירש והוא שריחש אבל תולעים הנמצאים בפולין ואפונים תחת הקליפה והקליפה משחרת עליהם מבחוץ וכשמסירים הקליפה מוצאים היבחושים תחתיהם מותרים לפי שהם מונחים במקום צר ולא קרינן בהו השורץ על הארץ כל זמן שלא ריחשו אבל הנמצאים בשרביטים אסורים שיש להם מקום לרחוש:

 * הגה: תולעים הגדלים בכמיהין ופטריות דינן כמו בשאר פירות ולא אמרינן דלא חשיבי מחובר לקרקע הואיל ואין מברכין עליהם פרי האדמה (ד"ע ולאפוקי או"ה) ופעמים נמצא בפרי כמין נקודה שחורה והוא מקום שמתחיל התולעת להתרקם וצריך ליטלו משם בעומק דאסור כמו התולעת עצמו (תשובת הרשב"א סימן ער"ה):

סעיף ז
פרי שהתליע ואין ידוע אם במחובר אם בתלוש אסור:

סעיף ח
כל מיני פירות שדרכן להתליע כשהם מחוברים לא יאכל עד שיבדוק הפרי מתוכו שמא יש בו תולעת ואם שהה הפרי אחר שנעקר י"ב חדש אוכל בלא בדיקה שכל בריה שאין בה עצם אינו מתקיים י"ב חדש ומכל מקום צריך לבדקן להשליך התולעים הנמצאים ביניהם בחוץ או על גבי הפרי ואף לאחר שישליך הנמצאים בחוץ יש לחוש שמא כשיתנם במים בתוך הקדירה יצאו לחוץ וירחשו ( תרגום "השרץ השורץ" - רחשא דרחיש ) במים או בדופני הקדרה או על גבי הפרי הלכך הבא לבשל לאחר י"ב חדש פירות שהתליעו יתנם לתוך מים צוננים המתולעים והמנוקבים יעלו למעלה ואחר כך יתנם בקדרת מים רותחים שאם נשאר בו תולעת ימות מיד.

 * (ולא מהני בהם אם בדק הרוב אלא צריך לבדוק כולם דהוי מיעוט דשכיח) (רשב"א בת"ה ובתשובה סימן רע"ד):

סעיף ט
עבר ובישל תוך י"ב חדש בלא בדיקה אם יכול לבדוק בודק ואם לאו מותר ואם נמצאו קצת בקדרה משליכם ואוכל השאר (כי אין לך פרי שאין בו ס' נגד טעם התולעת שבתוכו) (תשובת הרא"ש בשם מהר"ם). ויש מי שאומר דהני מילי שלא נמצאו אלא א' או ב', אבל ג' או ד' הכל אסור:

 * הגה: ודוקא מאכל דאי אפשר לסננו ולהסיר מהם התולעים ומאחר שהוחזק בתולעים כולו אסור אבל אם אפשר לסננו מעביר משם התולעים הנמצאים שם והשאר מותר (רשב"א סימן ק"נ) ועיין לקמן סוף סימן ק':

סעיף י
ירקות מבושלים שנמצאו בהם תולעים הרוטב מותר על ידי סינון ( פירוש שמעבירין במסננת ) אבל ירקות עצמם אם מצא בהם ג' פעמים יש לחוש שמא יש ואינם ניכרות:

סעיף יא
אשה שנמצא אחר בדיקתה שרץ הנראה לעינים כגון חומט אסור לאכול מבדיקתה אבל אם לא נמצאו אלא תולעים המתליעים בתוך העלים שאינם נראים אלא לאחר שליקתן מותר לאכול מבדיקתה:

סעיף יב
מרקחת שנפלו לתוכו נמלים ועברו עליהם י"ב חדש יש להסתפק בהם מפני שהדבש דרכו להעמיד הדברים הנטמנים בתוכו:

סעיף יג
דבש שנפלו בו נמלים יחממנו עד שיהא ניתך ויסננו:

סעיף יד
חטים מתולעים מותר לטחנן והוא שירקד הקמח לאור היום. (וכל תולעת שיראה שם יזרקנו והשאר מותר) (ת"ה סימן קעא ):

סעיף טו
מיני עופות הגדילים באילן ותלוים באילן בחרטומיהן אסורים משום שרץ השורץ על הארץ:

סעיף טז
כל תולעים הנמצאים בבהמה בין שהם בין עור לבשר בין שהם במעיה אסורים והנמצאים בדגים במעיהם אסורים בין עור לבשר או בתוך הבשר מותרים (ואפילו פירשו קצת וחזרו מותרין כי כן רביתייהו לפרוש קצת ולחזור) (הגה' שערי דורא) והא דאסרינן דוקא דמחיים אבל הגדלים בבשר אחר שחיטה או בדגים וגבינה מותרים כל זמן שלא פירשו הלכך תולעים הנמצאים בקערה שנפלו מן הבשר מותרים לדעת המתירים והוא שפירש מת ולא חיישינן שמא פירשו מחיים חוץ לחתיכה דמסתמא אותם שפירשו מחיים נפלו כשהדיחו הבשר ויש מי שאוסר התולעים המתהוים לאחר שחיטה מכל דבר הטעון שחיטה:

 * הגה: ונהגו להקל כסברא הראשונה (ע"פ מרדכי דפרק אלו טרפות) עוד נוהגים בתולעים של גבינה לאכלן אע"פ שקופצין הנה והנה על הגבינה אבל אם פירשו לגמרי אוסרין אותן (מהרא"י ובארוך כמ"א דין י') מיהו אם נתערבו בשאר מאכל ולא יכולין להסירן משם אין אוסרין המאכל כי יש מתירין אותם בכל ענין (או"ה שם) וטוב להחמיר במקום שאין הפ"מ (עד"מ):

סעיף יז
שרץ שרוף מותר לאכלו משום רפואה דעפרא בעלמא הוא:
 * }


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Rh among the children, and Abigail and Ruth died before the month was over. Doctor Job Ives diagnosed the trouble as some infantile fever, though others declared it was more of a mere wasting-away or decline. It seemed, in any event, to be contagious; for Hannah Bowen, one of the two servants, died of it in the following June. Eli Lideason, the other servant, constantly complained of weakness; and would have returned to his father's farm in Rehoboth but for a sudden attachment for Mehitabel Pierce, who was hired to succeed Hannah. He died the next year—a sad year indeed, since it marked the death of William Harris himself, enfeebled as he was by the climate of Martinique, where his occupation had kept him for considerable periods during the preceding decade.

The widowed Rhoby Harris never recovered from the shock of her husband's death, and the passing of her first-born Elkanah two years later was the final blow to her reason. In 1768 she fell victim to a mild form of insanity, and was thereafter confined to the upper part of the house; her elder maiden sister, Mercy Dexter, having moved in to take charge of the family. Mercy was a plain, raw-boned woman of great strength; but her health visibly declined from the time of her advent. She was greatly devoted to her unfortunate sister, and had an especial affection for her only surviving nephew William, who from a sturdy infant had become a sickly, spindling lad. In this year the servant Mehitabel died, and the other servant, Preserved Smith, left without coherent explanation—or at least, with only some wild tales and a complaint that he disliked the smell of the place. For a time Mercy could secure no more help, since the seven deaths and case of madness, all occurring within five years' space, had begun to set in motion the body of fireside rumor which later became so bizarre. Ultimately, however, she obtained new servants from out of town; Ann White, a morose woman from that part of North Kingstown now set off as the township of Exeter, and a capable Boston man named Zenas Low.

Ann White who first gave definite shape to the sinister idle talk. Mercy should have known better than to hire anyone from the Nooseneck Hill country, for that remote bit of backwoods was then, as now, a seat of the most uncomfortable superstitions. As lately as 1892 an Exeter community exhumed a dead body and ceremoniously burnt its heart in order to prevent certain alleged visitations injurious to the public health and peace, and one may imagine the point of view of the same section in 1768. Ann's tongue was perniciously active, and within a few months Mercy discharged her, filling her place with a faithful and amiable Amazon from Newport, Maria Robbins.

Meanwhile poor Rhoby Harris, in her madness, gave voice to dreams and imaginings of the most hideous sort. At times her screams became insupportable, and for long periods she would utter shrieking horrors which necessitated her son's temporary residence with his cousin, Peleg Harris, in Presbyterian Lane near the new college building. The boy would seem to improve after these visits, and had Mercy been as wise as she was well-meaning, she would have let him live permanently with Peleg. Just what Mrs. Harris cried out in her fits of violence, tradition hesitates to say; or rather, presents such extravagant accounts that they nullify themselves through sheer absurdity. Certainly it sounds absurd to hear that a woman educated only in the rudiments of French often shouted for hours in a coarse and idiomatic form of that language, or that the same person, alone and

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424 guarded, complained wildly of a staring thing which bit and chewed at her. In 1772 the servant Zenas died, and when Mrs. Harris heard of it she laughed with a shocking delight utterly foreign to her. The next year she herself died, and was laid to rest in the North Burial Ground beside her husband.

Upon the outbreak of trouble with Great Britain in 1775. William Harris, despite his scant sixteen years and feeble constitution, managed to enlist in the Army of Observation under General Greene; and from that time on enjoyed a steady rise in health and prestige. In 1780, as a captain in the Rhode Island forces in New Jersey under Colonel Angell, he met and married Phebe Hetfield of Elizabeth town, whom he brought to Providence upon his honorable discharge in the following year.

The young soldier's return was not a thing of unmitigated happiness. The house, it is true, was still in good condition; and the street had been widened and changed in name from Back Street to Benefit Street. But Mercy Dexter's once robust frame had undergone a sad and curious decay, so that she was now a stooped and pathetic figure with hollow voice and disconcerting pallor—qualities shared to a singular degree by the one remaining servant Maria. In the autumn of 1782 Phebe Harris gave birth to a still-born daughter, and on the fifteenth of the next May Mercy Dexter took leave of a useful, austere, and virtuous life.

William Harris, at last thoroughly convinced of the radically unhealthful nature of his abode, now took steps toward quitting it and closing it for ever. Securing temporary quarters for himself and his wife at the newly opened Golden Ball Inn, he arranged for the building of a new and finer house in Westminster Street, in the growing part of the town across the Great Bridge. There, in 1785, his son Dutee was born; and there the family dwelt till the encroachments of commerce drove them back across the river and over the hill to Angell Street, in the newer East Side residence district, where the late Archer Harris built his sumptuous but hideous French-roofed mansion in 1876. William and Phebe both succumbed to the yellow fever epidemic of 1797, but Dutee was brought up by his cousin Rathbone Harris, Peleg's son.

Rathbone was a practical man, and rented the Benefit Street house despite William's wish to keep it vacant. He considered it an obligation to his ward to make the most of all the boy's property, nor did he concern himself with the deaths and illnesses which caused so many changes of tenants, or the steadily growing aversion with which the house was generally regarded. It is likely that he felt only vexation when, in 1804, the town council ordered him to fumigate the place with sulfur, tar, and gum camphor on account of the much-discussed deaths of four persons, presumably caused by the then diminishing fever epidemic. They said the place had a febrile smell.

Dutee himself thought little of the house, for he grew up to be a privateersman, and served with distinction on the Vigilant under Captain Cahoone in the War of 1812. He returned unharmed, married in 1814, and became a father on that memorable night of September 23, 1815, when a great gale drove the waters of the bay over half the town, and floated a tall sloop well up Westminster Street so that its masts almost tapped the Harris windows in symbolic affirmation that the new boy, Welcome, was a seaman's son.

Welcome did not survive his father, but lived to perish gloriously at Fredericksburg in 1862. Neither he nor his son Archer knew of the shunned house as other than a nuisance almost


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Rh to rent—perhaps on account of the mustiness and sickly odor of unkempt old age. Indeed, it never was rented after a series of deaths culminating in 1861, which the excitement of the war tended to throw into obscurity. Carrington Harris, last of the male line, knew it only as a deserted and somewhat picturesque center of legend until I told him my experience. He had meant to tear it down and build an apartment house on the site, but after my account decided to let it stand, install plumbing, and rent it. Nor has he yet had any difficulty in obtaining tenants. The horror has gone.

3

well be imagined how powerfully I was affected by the annals of the Harrises. In this continuous record there seemed to me to brood a persistent evil beyond anything in nature as I had known it; an evil clearly connected with the house and not with the family. This impression was confirmed by my uncle's less systematic array of miscellaneous data—legends transcribed from servant gossip, cuttings from the papers, copies of death certificates by fellow-physicians, and the like. All of this material I cannot hope to give, for my uncle was a tireless antiquarian and very deeply interested in the shunned house; but I may refer to several dominant points which earn notice by their recurrence through many reports from diverse sources. For example, the servant gossip was practically unanimous in attributing to the fungous and malodorous cellar of the house a vast supremacy in evil influence. There had been servants—Ann White especially—who would not use the cellar kitchen, and at least three well-defined legends bore upon the queer quasi-human or diabolic outlines assumed by tree-roots and patches of mold in that region. These latter narratives interested me profoundly, on account of what I had seen in my boyhood, but I felt that most of the significance had in each case been largely obscured by additions from the common stock of local ghost lore.

Ann White, with her Exeter superstition, had promulgated the most extravagant and at the same time most consistent tale; alleging that there must lie buried beneath the house one of those vampires—the dead who retain their bodily form and live on the blood or breath of the living—whose hideous legions send their preying shapes or spirits abroad by night. To destroy a vampire one must, the grandmothers say, exhume it and burn its heart, or at least drive a stake through that organ; and Ann's dogged insistence on a search under the cellar had been prominent in bringing about her discharge.

Her tales, however, commanded a wide audience, and were the more readily accepted because the house indeed stood on land once used for burial purposes. To me their interest depended less on this circumstance than on the peculiarly appropriate way in which they dovetailed with certain other things—the complaint of the departing servant Preserved Smith, who had preceded Ann and never heard of her, that something "sucked his breath" at night; the death-certificates of the fever victims of 1804, issued by Doctor Chad Hopkins, and showing the four deceased persons all unaccountably lacking in blood; and the obscure passages of poor Rhoby Harris's ravings, where she complained of the sharp teeth of a glassy-eyed, half-visible presence.

Free from unwarranted superstititionsuperstition [sic] though I am, these things produced in me an odd sensation, which was intensified by a pair of widely separated newspaper cuttings relating to deaths in the shunned house—one from the Providence


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 Plot controversy and was written in answer to Bellarmine’s Matthaeus Tortus, which attacked James I.’s book on the oath of allegiance. After his translation to Ely (1609), he again controverted Bellarmine in the Responsio ad Apologiam, a treatise never answered. In 1617 he accompanied James I. to Scotland with a view to persuading the Scots that Episcopacy was preferable to Presbyterianism. In 1618 he attended the synod of Dort, and was soon after made dean of the Chapel Royal and translated to Winchester, a diocese which he administered with loving prudence and the highest success. He died on the 26th of September 1626, mourned alike by leaders in church and state.

Two generations later, Richard Crashaw caught up the universal sentiment, when, in his lines “Upon Bishop Andrewes’ Picture before his Sermons,” he exclaims:— This reverend shadow cast that setting sun, Whose glorious course through our horizon run, Left the dim face of this dull hemisphere”, All one great eye, all drown'd in one great teare.”

Andrewes was distinguished in many fields. At court, though no trifler or flatterer, he was a favourite counsellor in three successive reigns, but he never meddled much in civil or temporal affairs. His learning made him the equal and the friend of Grotius, and of the foremost contemporary scholars. His preaching was a unique combination of rhetorical splendour and scholarly richness; his piety that of an ancient saint, semi-ascetic and unearthly in its self-denial. As a churchman he is typically Anglican, equally removed from the Puritan and the Roman positions. He stands in true succession to Richard Hooker in working out the principles of the English Reformation, though while Hooker argued mainly against Puritanism, Andrewes chiefly combated Romanism. A good summary of his position is found in his First Answer to Cardinal Perron, who had challenged James I.’s use of the title “Catholic.” His position in regard to the Eucharist is naturally more mature than that of the first reformers. “As to the Real Presence we are agreed; our controversy is as to the mode of it. As to the mode we define nothing rashly, nor anxiously investigate, any more than in the Incarnation of Christ we ask how the human is united to the divine nature in One Person. There is a real change in the elements—we allow ut panis iam consecratus non sit panis quem natura formavit; sed, quem benedictio consecravit, et consecrando etiam immutavit” (Responsio, p. 263). Adoration is permitted, and the use of the terms “sacrifice” and “altar” maintained as being consonant with scripture and antiquity. Christ is “a sacrifice—so, to be slain; a propitiatory sacrifice—so, to be eaten” (Sermons, vol. ii. p. 296). “By the same rules that the Passover was, by the same may ours be termed a sacrifice. In rigour of speech, neither of them; for to speak after the exact manner of divinity, there is but one only sacrifice, veri nominis, that is Christ’s death. And that sacrifice but once actually performed at His death, but ever before represented in figure, from the beginning; and ever since repeated in memory to the world’s end. That only absolute, all else relative to it, representative of it, operative by it Hence it is that what names theirs carried, ours do the like, and the Fathers make no scruple at it—no more need we” (Sermons, vol. ii. p. 300). As to reservation, “it needeth not: the intent is had without it,” since an invalid may always have his private communion. Andrewes declares against the invocation of saints, the apparent examples in patristic literature are “rhetorical outbursts, not theological definitions.” His services to his church have been summed up thus:—(1) he has a keen sense of the proportion of the faith and maintains a clear distinction between what is fundamental, needing ecclesiastical commands, and subsidiary, needing only ecclesiastical guidance and suggestion; (2) as distinguished from the earlier protesting standpoint, e.g. of the Thirty-nine Articles, he emphasized a positive and constructive statement of the Anglican position.

.—Of his works the Manual of Private Devotions is the best known, for it appeals to Christians of every church. One of the many good modern editions is that by Alex. Whyte (1900). Andrewes’s other works occupy eight volumes in the Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology (1841–1854). Of biographies we have those by H. Isaacson (1650), A. T. Russell (1863), R. L. Ottley (1894), and Dean Church’s essay in Masters in English Theology. See also W. H. Frere, Lancelot Andrewes as a Representative of Anglican Principles (1898; Church Hist. Soc. Publications, No. 44).

ANDREWS, JAMES PETTIT (c. 1737–1797), English historian and antiquary, was the younger son of Joseph Andrews, of Shaw House, Newbury, Berkshire, where he was born. He was educated privately, and having taken to the law was one of the magistrates at the police court in Queen Square, Westminster, from 1792 to his death. He developed a taste for literature, and his miscellaneous works include The Savages of Europe (London, 1764), a satire on the English which he translated from the French, and Anecdotes Ancient and Modern (London, 1789), an amusing collection of gossip. His chief work was a History of Great Britain connected with the Chronology of Europe from Caesar’s Invasion to Accession of Edward VI., in 2 vols. (London, 1794–1795). Its plan is somewhat singular, as a portion of the history of England is given on one page, and a general sketch of the contemporaneous history of Europe on the opposite page. He also wrote a ''History of Great Britain from Death of Henry VIII. to Accession of James VI. of Scotland, a continuation of Robert Henry’s History of Great Britain'', published in 1796 and again in 1806. Andrews died at Brompton on the 6th of August 1797, and was buried in Hampstead Church. He married Anne Penrose, daughter of a rector of Newbury. ANDREWS, THOMAS (1813–1885), Irish chemist and physicist, was born on the 19th of December 1813 at Belfast, where his father was a linen merchant. After attending the Belfast Academy and also the Academical Institution, he went to Glasgow in 1828 to study chemistry under Professor Thomas Thomson, and thence migrated to Trinity College, Dublin, where he gained distinction in classics as well as in science. Finally, he graduated as M.D. at Edinburgh in 1835, and settled down to a successful medical practice in his native place, also giving instruction in chemistry at the Academical Institution. Ten years later he was appointed vice-president of the newly established Queen’s College, Belfast, and professor of chemistry, and these two offices he held till 1879, when failing health compelled his retirement. He died on the 26th of November 1885. Andrews first became known as a scientific investigator by his work on the heat developed in chemical actions, for which the Royal Society awarded him a Royal medal in 1844. Another important research, undertaken with P. G. Tait, was devoted to ozone. But the work on which his reputation mainly rests, and which best displayed his skill and resourcefulness in experiment, was concerned with the liquefaction of gases. He carried out a very complete inquiry into the laws expressing the relations of pressure, temperature and volume in carbonic dioxide, in particular establishing the conceptions of critical temperature and critical pressure, and showing that the gas passes from the gaseous to the liquid state without any breach of continuity.

ANDRIA, a town and episcopal see of Apulia, Italy, in the province of Bari; 35 m. W. of the town of Bari by steam tramway, and 6 m. S.S.E. of Barletta. Pop. (1901) 49,569. It was founded probably about 1046 by Peter, the first Norman count of Andria. It was a favourite residence of the emperor Frederick II., whose second and third wives, Iolanthe and Isabella of England, were buried in the cathedral dedicated to St Richard, who is believed to have come from England in 492; their tombs, however, no longer exist. There are several other fine churches of the 13th century. The Castel del Monte, 9 m. S. of Andria, was constructed by Frederick II., who frequently resided here; it is an octagonal building in two storeys with octagonal towers at each angle, and was further surrounded by three outer walls. Despite its massive and imposing exterior, its details are fine.

ANDRIEU, BERTRAND (1761—1822), French engraver of medals, was born at Bordeaux. He is considered as the restorer of the art in France, which had declined after the time of Louis XIV.; and during the last twenty years of his life he was entrusted by the French government with the execution of every work of importance. Many of his medals are figured in the Medallic History of Napoleon. ANDRIEUX, FRANÇOIS GUILLAUME JEAN STANISLAS (1759–1833), French man of letters, was born at Strassburg on the 6th of May 1759. He was educated at Strassburg and proceeded to Paris to study law. There he became a close friend of Collin d’Harleville. He became secretary to the duke of Uzès, and practised at the bar, but his attention was divided between his profession and literature. His plays are of the 18th century style, comedies of intrigue, but they rank with those of Collin d’Harleville among the best of the period next to those of Beaumarchais. Les Étourdis, his best comedy,

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-Arch dude (talk) 02:23, 20 June 2012 (UTC)


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Executive Order 9687

By virtue of the authority vested in me as President of the United States by the Act of March 26. 1934, 48 Stat. 466, as amended by the Act of August 14, 1937, ch. 627, 50 Stat. 641 (5 U.S.C. 118c). it Is hereby ordered as follows:

Executive Order No. 7972 of September 15, 1938, prescribing regulations governing payment of losses sustained by officers, enlisted men, and employees of the United States while serving in foreign countries on account of appreciation of foreign currencies in their relation to the American dollar, and Executive Orders Nos. 8018 of December 2, 1938, 8261 of September 21, 1939, 8269 of October 11, 1939, 8800 of June 22, 1941, 9057 of February 11, 1942, 9261 of October 31, 1942, and 9449 of June 15, 1944, amendatory thereof, are hereby revoked.

This order shall become effective with respect to any agency concerned as of the close of its pay period terminating or current on January 31, 1946.

Harry S. Truman The White House, January 26, 1946. [Filed 1–??–46; 8:45 am]

title: Executive Order 9687


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 being his history of the German wars of Gustavus Adolphus, entitled Arma Suecica (pub. 1631–1634, in 12 parts), and the Inventarium Sueciae (1632)—both compilations from existing records. His best known work is the Theatrum Europaeum, a series of chronicles of the chief events in the history of the world down to 1619. He was himself responsible for the first two volumes. It was continued by various writers and grew to twenty-one volumes (Frankf. 1633–1738). The chief interest of the work is, however, its illustration by the beautiful copperplate engravings of Matthäus Merian (1593–1650). Abelin also wrote a history of the antipodes, Historia Antipodum (posthumously pub. Frankf. 1655), and a history of India.

See G. Droysen, Arlanibaeus, Godofredus, Abelinus (Berlin, 1864); and notice in Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie.

ABENCERRAGES, a family or faction that is said to have held a prominent position in the Moorish kingdom of Granada in the 15th century. The name appears to have been derived from the Yussuf ben-Serragh, the head of the tribe in the time of Mahommed VII., who did that sovereign good service in his struggles to retain the crown of which he was three times deprived. Nothing is known of the family with certainty; but the name is familiar from the interesting romance of Gines Perez de Hita, Guerras civiles de Granada, which celebrates the feuds of the Abencerrages and the rival family of the Zegris, and the cruel treatment to which the former were subjected. J. P. de Florian’s Gonsalve de Cordoue and Chateaubriand’s Le dernier des Abencerrages are imitations of Perez de Hita’s work. The hall of the Abencerrages in the Alhambra takes its name from being the reputed scene of the massacre of the family. ABENDANA, the name of two Jewish theologians. (1) (1630–1695), rabbi (Hakham) of the Spanish Jews in London from 1680. Like his brother Isaac, Jacob Abendana had a circle of Christian friends, and his reputation led to the appreciation of Jewish scholarship by modern Christian theologians. (2) (c. 1650–1710), his brother, taught Hebrew at Cambridge and afterwards at Oxford. He compiled a Jewish Calendar and wrote Discourses on the Ecclesiastical and Civil Polity of the Jews (1706). ABENEZRA, or, to give him his full name, (1092 or 1093–1167), one of the most distinguished Jewish men of letters and writers of the Middle Ages. He was born at Toledo, left his native land of Spain before 1140 and led until his death a life of restless wandering, which took him to North Africa, Egypt, Italy (Rome, Lucca, Mantua, Verona), Southern France (Narbonne, Beziers), Northern France (Dreux), England (London), and back again to the South of France. At several of the above-named places he remained for some time and developed a rich literary activity. In his native land he had already gained the reputation of a distinguished poet and thinker; but, apart from his poems, his works, which were all in the Hebrew language, were written in the second period of his life. With these works, which cover in the first instance the field of Hebrew philology and Biblical exegesis, he fulfilled the great mission of making accessible to the Jews of Christian Europe the treasures of knowledge enshrined in the works written in Arabic which he had brought with him from Spain. His grammatical writings, among which Moznayim (“the Scales,” written in 1140) and Zahot (“Correctness,” written in 1141) are the most valuable, were the first expositions of Hebrew grammar in the Hebrew language, in which the system of Hayyūj and his school prevailed. He also translated into Hebrew the two writings of Hayyūj in which the foundations of the system were laid down. Of greater original value than the grammatical works of Ibn Ezra are his commentaries on most of the books of the Bible, of which, however, a part has been lost. His reputation as an intelligent and acute expounder of the Bible was founded on his commentary on the Pentateuch, of which the great popularity is evidenced by the numerous commentaries which were written upon it. In the editions of this commentary (ed. princ. Naples 1488) the commentary on the book of Exodus is replaced by a second, more complete commentary of Ibn Ezra, while the first and shorter commentary on Exodus was not printed until 1840. The great editions of the Hebrew Bible with rabbinical commentaries contained also commentaries of Ibn Ezra’s on the following books of the Bible: Isaiah, Minor Prophets, Psalms, Job, Pentateuch, Daniel; the commentaries on Proverbs, Ezra and Nehemiah which bear his name are really those of Moses Kimhi. Ibn Ezra wrote a second commentary on Genesis as he had done on Exodus, but this was never finished. There are second commentaries also by him on the Song of Songs, Esther and Daniel. The importance of the exegesis of Ibn Ezra consists in the fact that it aims at arriving at the simple sense of the text, the so-called “Pesohat,” on solid grammatical principles. It is in this that, although he takes a great part of his exegetical material from his predecessors, the originality of his mind is everywhere apparent, an originality which displays itself also in the witty and lively language of his commentaries. To judge by certain signs, of which Spinoza in his Tractatus Theologico Politicus makes use, Ibn Ezra belongs to the earliest pioneers of the criticism of the Pentateuch. His commentaries, and especially some of the longer excursuses, contain numerous contributions to the philosophy of religion. One writing in particular, which belongs to this province (Yōsōd Mēra), on the division and the reasons for the Biblical commandments, he wrote in 1158 for a London friend, Joseph b. Jacob. In his philosophical thought neo-platonic ideas prevail; and astrology also had a place in his view of the world. He also wrote various works on mathematical and astronomical subjects. Ibn Ezra died on the 28th of January 1167, the place of his death being unknown.

Among the literature on Ibn Ezra may be especially mentioned: M. Friedländer, Essays on the Writings of Ibn Ezra (London, 1877); W. Bacher, Abraham Ibn Ezra als Grammatiker (Strasburg, 1882); M. Steinschneider, Abraham Ibn Ezra, in the Zeitschrift für Mathematik und Physik, Band xxv., Supplement; D. Rosin, Die Religionsphilosophie Abraham Ibn Ezra’s in vols. xlii. and xliii. of the Monatschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judenthums; his Diwan was edited by T. Egers (Berlin, 1886); a collection of his poems, Reime und Gedichte, with translation and commentary, were published by D. Rosin in several annual reports of the Jewish theological Seminary at Breslau (1885–1894).

ABENSBERG, a town of Germany, in the kingdom of Bavaria, on the Abens, a tributary of the Danube, 18 m. S.W. of Regensburg, with which it is connected by rail. Pop. 2202. It has a small spa, and its sulphur baths are resorted to for the cure of rheumatism and gout. The town is the Castra Abusina of the Romans, and Roman remains exist in the neighbourhood. Here, on the 20th of April 1809, Napoleon gained a signal victory over the Austrians under the Archduke Louis and General Hiller. ABEOKUTA, a town of British West Africa in the Egba division of the Yoruba country, S. Nigeria Protectorate. It is situated in 7° 8′ N., 3° 25′ E., on the Ogun river, 64 m. N. of Lagos by railway, or 81 m. by water. Population, approximately 60,000. Abeokuta lies in a beautiful and fertile country, the surface of which is broken by masses of grey granite. It is spread over an extensive area, being surrounded by mud walls 18 miles in extent. Abeokuta, under the reforming zeal of its native rulers, was largely transformed during the early years of the 20th century. Law courts, government offices, prisons and a substantial bridge were built, good roads made, and a large staff of sanitary inspectors appointed. The streets are generally narrow and the houses built of mud. There are numerous markets in which a considerable trade is done in native products and articles of European manufacture. Palm-oil, timber, rubber, yams and shea-butter are the chief articles of trade. An official newspaper is published in the Yoruba and English languages. Abeokuta is the headquarters of the Yoruba branch of the Church Missionary Society, and British and American missionaries have met with some success in their civilizing work. In their schools about 2000 children are educated. The completion in 1899 of a railway from Lagos helped not only to develop trade but to strengthen generally the influence of the white man.

Abeokuta (a word meaning “under the rocks”), dating

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v. 19- 10. King Varuṇa called that a god-made poison; no one soever, having devoured the cow of the Brahman, keeps watch in the kingdom.

11. Those same nine nineties whom the earth shook off, having injured the progeny of the Brahman, perished irretrievably.

12. The kūdī́ which they tie on after a dead man, as effacer (?) of the track, that verily, O Brahman-scather, did the gods call thy couch (upastáraṇa).

13. The tears of one weeping (kṛp), which rolled [down] when he was scathed, these verily, O Brahman-scather, did the gods maintain as thy portion of water.

14. With what they bathe a dead man, with what they wet (ud) beards, that verily, O Brahman-scather, did the gods maintain as thy portion of water.

15. The rain of Mitra-and- Varuna does not rain upon the Brahman-scather; the assembly (sámiti) does not suit (kḷp) him; he wins (nī) no friend to his control.

1. The loud-noised drum, warrior-like, of forest-tree, brought together (sámbhṛta) with the ruddy [kine], whetting the voice, dominating our rivals; thunder thou loudly against [them] like a lion, about to conquer.

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255

2. Like a lion hath thundered the wooden one, stretched (vi-bandh), like a bull roaring at a longing cow; virile (vṛ́ṣan) [art] thou, impotent thy rivals; Indra-like [is] thy vehemence (çúṣma), overpowering hostile plotters.

3. Found (vidāná) suddenly (sáhasā) like a bull in a herd, do thou, seeking kine, bellow (ru) at [them], winning booty; pierce thou with pain the heart of our adversaries; let our foes, leaving their villages, go urged forth (pra-cyu).

4. Wholly conquering the fighters, shrill-crying, do thou, seizing those that are to be seized, look abroad on many sides; respond (? ā-gur), O drum, devout, to the voice of the gods; bring the possession of our foes.

5. Hearing the uttered (pra-yam) voice of the drum speaking, let the woman, suppliant, noise-wakened, run to her son, seizing his hand—our enemy, frightened in the conflict of deadly weapons.

6. Mayest thou first (pū́rva), O drum, speak forth thy voice; on the back of earth speak thou, shining (ruc); opening wide the jaws (jabh) on the army of our enemies, speak thou clearly, O drum, pleasantly (sūnṛ́tāvat).

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text: Atharva-Veda Samhita/Book V/Hymn 19

title: Atharva-Veda Samhita/Book V/Hymn 19


text:
The Job (Lewis)/The Office

Chapter IX

Chapter X

Chapter XI

Chapter XII

Chapter XIII

Chapter XIV

Chapter XV

title: The Job (Lewis)/The Office


text:
The Job (Lewis)/The Office/Chapter 9

THE effect of grief is commonly reputed to be noble. But mostly it is a sterile nobility. Witness the widows who drape their musty weeds over all the living; witness the mother of a son killed in war who urges her son’s comrades to bring mourning to the mothers of all the sons on the other side.

Grief is a paralyzing poison. It broke down Una’s resistance to the cares of the office. Hers was no wholesome labor in which she could find sacred forgetfulness. It was the round of unessentials which all office-women know so desperately well. She bruised herself by shrinking from those hourly insults to her intelligence; and outside the office her most absorbing comfort was in the luxury of mourning—passion in black, even to the black-edged face-veil.... Though she was human enough to realize that with her fair hair she looked rather well in mourning, and shrewd enough to get it on credit at excellent terms.

She was in the office all day, being as curtly exact as she could. But in the evening she sat alone in her flat and feared the city.

Sometimes she rushed down to the Sessionses’ flat, but the good people bored her with their assumption that she was panting to know all the news from Panama. She had drifted so far away from the town that the sixth assertion that “it was a great pity Kitty Wilson was going to marry that worthless Clark boy” aroused no interest in her. She was still more bored by their phonograph, on which they played over and over the same twenty records. She would make quick, unconvincing excuses about having to hurry away. Their slippered stupidity was a desecration of her mother’s memory.

Her half-hysterical fear of the city’s power was increased by her daily encounter with the clamorous streets, crowded elevators, frantic lunch-rooms, and, most of all, the experience of the Subway.

Amazing, incredible, the Subway, and the fact that human beings could become used to it, consent to spend an hour in it daily. There was a heroic side to this spectacle of steel trains clanging at forty miles an hour beneath twenty-story buildings. The engineers had done their work well, made a great thought in steel and cement. And then the business men and bureaucrats had made the great thought a curse. There was in the Subway all the romance which story-telling youth goes seeking: trains crammed with an inconceivable complexity of people—marquises of the Holy Roman Empire, Jewish factory hands, speculators from Wyoming, Iowa dairymen, quarreling Italian lovers, with their dramatic tales, their flux of every human emotion, under the city mask. But however striking these dramatic characters may be to the occasional spectator, they figure merely as an odor, a confusion, to the permanent serf of the Subway.... A long underground station, a catacomb with a cement platform, this was the chief feature of the city vista to the tired girl who waited there each morning. A clean space, but damp, stale, like the corridor to a prison—as indeed it was, since through it each morning Una entered the day’s business life.

Then, the train approaching, filling the tunnel, like a piston smashing into a cylinder; the shoving rush to get aboard. A crush that was ruffling and fatiguing to a man, but to a woman was horror.

Una stood with a hulking man pressing as close to her side as he dared, and a dapper clerkling squeezed against her breast. Above her head, to represent the city’s culture and graciousness, there were advertisements of soap, stockings, and collars. At curves the wheels ground with a long, savage whine, the train heeled, and she was flung into the arms of the grinning clerk, who held her tight. She, who must never be so unladylike as to enter a polling-place, had breathed into her very mouth the clerkling’s virile electoral odor of cigarettes and onions and decayed teeth.

A very good thing, the Subway. It did make Una quiver with the beginnings of rebellious thought as no suave preacher could ever have done. Almost hysterically she resented this daily indignity, which smeared her clean, cool womanhood with a grease of noise and smell and human contact.

As was the Subway, so were her noons of elbowing to get impure food in restaurants.

For reward she was permitted to work all day with Troy Wilkins. And for heavens and green earth, she had a chair and a desk.

But the human organism, which can modify itself to arctic cold and Indian heat, to incessant labor or the long enervation of luxury, learns to endure. Unwilling dressing, lonely breakfast, the Subway, dull work, lunch, sleepiness after lunch, the hopelessness of three o’clock, the boss’s ill-tempers, then the Subway again, and a lonely flat with no love, no creative work; and at last a long sleep so that she might be fresh for such another round of delight. So went the days. Yet all through them she found amusement, laughed now and then, and proved the heroism as well as the unthinking servility of the human race.

The need of feeling that there were people near to her urged Una to sell her furniture and move from the flat to a boarding-house.

She avoided Mrs. Sessions’s advice. She was sure that Mrs. Sessions would bustle about and find her a respectable place where she would have to be cheery. She didn’t want to be cheery. She wanted to think. She even bought a serious magazine with articles. Not that she read it.

But she was afraid to be alone any more. Anyway, she would explore the city.

Of the many New Yorks, she had found only Morningside Park, Central Park, Riverside Drive, the shopping district, the restaurants and theaters which Walter had discovered to her, a few down-town office streets, and her own arid region of flats. She did not know the proliferating East Side, the factories, the endless semi-suburban stretches—nor Fifth Avenue. Her mother and Mrs. Sessions had inculcated in her the earnest idea that most parts of New York weren’t quite nice. In over two years in the city she had never seen a millionaire nor a criminal; she knew the picturesqueness neither of wealth nor of pariah poverty.

She did not look like an adventurer when, at a Saturday noon of October, she left the office—slight, kindly, rather timid, with her pale hair and school-teacher eye-glasses, and clear cheeks set off by comely mourning. But she was seizing New York. She said over and over, “Why, I can go and live any place I want to, and maybe I’ll meet some folks who are simply fascinating.” She wasn’t very definite about these fascinating folks, but they implied girls to play with and—she hesitated—and decidedly men, men different from Walter, who would touch her hand in courtly reverence.

She poked through strange streets. She carried an assortment of “Rooms and Board” clippings from the “want-ad” page of a newspaper, and obediently followed their hints about finding the perfect place. She resolutely did not stop at places not advertised in the paper, though nearly every house, in some quarters, had a sign, “Room to Rent.” Una still had faith in the veracity of whatever appeared in the public prints, as compared with what she dared see for herself.

The advertisements led her into a dozen parts of the city frequented by roomers, the lonely, gray, detached people who dwell in other people’s houses.

It was not so splendid a quest as she had hoped; it was too sharp a revelation of the cannon-food of the city, the people who had never been trained, and who had lost heart. It was scarcely possible to tell one street from another; to remember whether she was on Sixteenth Street or Twenty-sixth. Always the same rows of red-brick or brownstone houses, all alike, the monotony broken only by infrequent warehouses or loft-buildings; always the same doubtful mounting of stone steps, the same searching for a bell, the same waiting, the same slatternly, suspicious landlady, the same evil hallway with a brown hat-rack, a steel-engraving with one corner stained with yellow, a carpet worn through to the flooring in a large oval hole just in front of the stairs, a smell of cabbage, a lack of ventilation. Always the same desire to escape, though she waited politely while the landlady in the same familiar harsh voice went through the same formula.

Then, before she could flee to the comparatively fresh air of the streets, Una would politely have to follow the panting landlady to a room that was a horror of dirty carpet, lumpy mattress, and furniture with everything worn off that could wear off. And at last, always the same phrases by which Una meant to spare the woman: “Well, I’ll think it over. Thank you so much for showing me the rooms, but before I decide— Want to look around—”

Phrases which the landlady heard ten times a day.

She conceived a great-hearted pity for landladies. They were so patient, in face of her evident distaste. Even their suspiciousness was but the growling of a beaten dog. They sighed and closed their doors on her without much attempt to persuade her to stay. Her heart ached with their lack of imagination. They had no more imagination than those landladies of the insect world, the spiders, with their unchanging, instinctive, ancestral types of webs.

Her depression was increased by the desperate physical weariness of the hunt. Not that afternoon, not till two weeks later, did she find a room in a large, long, somber railroad flat on Lexington Avenue, conducted by a curly-haired young bookkeeper and his pretty wife, who provided their clients with sympathy, with extensive and scientific data regarding the motion-picture houses in the neighborhood, and board which was neither scientific nor very extensive.

It was time for Una to sacrifice the last material contact with her mother; to sell the furniture which she had known ever since, as a baby in Panama, she had crawled from this horsehair chair, all the long and perilous way across this same brown carpet, to this red-plush couch.

It was not so hard to sell the furniture; she could even read and burn her father’s letters with an unhappy resoluteness. Despite her tenderness, Una had something of youth’s joy in getting rid of old things, as preparation for acquiring the new. She did sob when she found her mother’s straw hat, just as Mrs. Golden had left it, on the high shelf of the wardrobe as though her mother might come in at any minute, put it on, and start for a walk. She sobbed again when she encountered the tiny tear in the bottom of the couch, which her own baby fingers had made in trying to enlarge a pirate’s cave. That brought the days when her parents were immortal and all-wise; when the home sitting-room, where her father read the paper aloud, was a security against all the formidable world outside.

But to these recollections Una could shut her heart. To one absurd thing, because it was living, Una could not shut her heart—to the senile canary.

Possibly she could have taken it with her, but she felt confusedly that Dickie would not be appreciated in other people’s houses. She evaded asking the Sessionses to shelter the bird, because every favor that she permitted from that smug family was a bond that tied her to their life of married spinsterhood.

“Oh, Dickie, Dickie, what am I going to do with you?” she cried, slipping a finger through the wires of the cage.

The canary hopped toward her and tried to chirp his greeting.

“Even when you were sick you tried to sing to me, and mother did love you,” she sighed. “I just can’t kill you—trusting me like that.”

She turned her back, seeking to solve the problem by ignoring it. While she was sorting dresses—some trace of her mother in every fold, every wrinkle of the waists and lace collars—she was listening to the bird in the cage.

“I’ll think of some way—I’ll find somebody who will want you, Dickie dear,” she murmured, desperately, now and then.

After dinner and nightfall, with her nerves twanging all the more because it seemed silly to worry over one dissolute old bird when all her life was breaking up, she hysterically sprang up, snatched Dickie from the cage, and trotted down-stairs to the street.

“I’ll leave you somewhere. Somebody will find you,” she declared.

Concealing the bird by holding it against her breast with a hand supersensitive to its warm little feathers, she walked till she found a deserted tenement doorway. She hastily set the bird down on a stone balustrade beside the entrance steps. Dickie chirped more cheerily, more sweetly than for many days, and confidingly hopped back to her hand.

“Oh, I can’t leave him for boys to torture and I can’t take him, I can’t—”

In a sudden spasm she threw the bird into the air, and ran back to the flat, sobbing, “I can’t kill it—I can’t—there’s so much death.” Longing to hear the quavering affection of its song once more, but keeping herself from even going to the window, to look for it, with bitter haste she completed her work of getting rid of things—things—things—the things which were stones of an imprisoning past.

Shyness was over Una when at last she was in the house of strangers. She sat marveling that this square, white cubby-hole of a room was hers permanently, that she hadn’t just come here for an hour or two. She couldn’t get it to resemble her first impression of it. Now the hallway was actually a part of her life—every morning she would face the picture of a magazine-cover girl when she came out of her room.

Her agitation was increased by the problem of keeping up the maiden modesty appropriate to a Golden, a young female friend of the Sessionses’, in a small flat with gentlemen lodgers and just one bathroom. Una was saved by not having a spinster friend with whom to share her shrinking modesty. She simply had to take waiting for her turn at the bathroom as a matter of course, and insensibly she was impressed by the decency with which these dull, ordinary people solved the complexities of their enforced intimacy. When she wildly clutched her virgin bathrobe about her and passed a man in the hall, he stalked calmly by without any of the teetering apologies which broad-beamed Mr. Sessions had learned from his genteel spouse.

She could not at first distinguish among her companions. Gradually they came to be distinct, important. They held numberless surprises for her. She would not have supposed that a bookkeeper in a fish-market would be likely to possess charm. Particularly if he combined that amorphous occupation with being a boarding-house proprietor. Yet her landlord, Herbert Gray, with his look of a track-athlete, his confessions of ignorance and his naïve enthusiasms about whatever in the motion pictures seemed to him heroic, large, colorful, was as admirable as the several youngsters of her town who had plodded through Princeton or Pennsylvania and come back to practise law or medicine or gentlemanly inheritance of business. And his wife, round and comely, laughing easily, wearing her clothes with an untutored grace which made her cheap waists smart, was so thoroughly her husband’s comrade in everything, that these struggling nobodies had all the riches of the earth.

The Grays took Una in as though she were their guest, but they did not bother her. They were city-born, taught by the city to let other people live their own lives.

The Grays had taken a flat twice too large for their own use. The other lodgers, who lived, like monks on a bare corridor, along the narrow “railroad” hall, were three besides Una:

A city failure, one with a hundred thousand failures, a gray-haired, neat man, who had been everything and done nothing, and who now said evasively that he was “in the collection business.” He read Dickens and played a masterful game of chess. He liked to have it thought that his past was brave with mysterious splendors. He spoke hintingly of great lawyers. But he had been near to them only as a clerk for a large law firm. He was grateful to any one for noticing him. Like most of the failures, he had learned the art of doing nothing at all. All Sunday, except for a two hours’ walk in Central Park, and one game of chess with Herbert Gray, he dawdled in his room, slept, regarded his stocking-feet with an appearance of profound meditation, yawned, picked at the Sunday newspaper. Una once saw him napping on a radiant autumn Sunday afternoon, and detested him. But he was politely interested in her work for Troy Wilkins, carefully exact in saying, “Good-morning, miss,” and he became as familiar to her as the gas-heater in her cubicle.

Second fellow-lodger was a busy, reserved woman, originally from Kansas City, who had something to do with some branch library. She had solved the problems of woman’s lack of place in this city scheme by closing tight her emotions, her sense of adventure, her hope of friendship. She never talked to Una, after discovering that Una had no interesting opinions on the best reading for children nine to eleven.

These gentle, inconsequential city waifs, the Grays, the failure, the library-woman, meant no more to Una than the crowds who were near, yet so detached, in the streets. But the remaining boarder annoyed her by his noisy whine. He was an underbred maverick, with sharp eyes of watery blue, a thin mustache, large teeth, and no chin worth noticing. He would bounce in of an evening, when the others were being decorous and dull in the musty dining-room, and yelp: “How do we all find our seskpadalian selves this bright and balmy evenin’? How does your perspegacity discipulate, Herby? What’s the good word, Miss Golden? Well, well, well, if here ain’t our good old friend, the Rev. J. Pilkington Corned Beef; how ’r’ you, Pilky? Old Mrs. Cabbage feelin’ well, too? Well, well, still discussing the movies, Herby? Got any new opinions about Mary Pickford? Well, well. Say, I met another guy that’s as nutty as you, Herby; he thinks that Wilhelm Jenkins Bryan is a great statesman. Let’s hear some more about the Sage of Free Silver, Herby.”

The little man was never content till he had drawn them into so bitter an argument that some one would rise, throw down a napkin, growl, “Well, if that’s all you know about it—if you’re all as ignorant as that, you simply ain’t worth arguing with,” and stalk out. When general topics failed, the disturber would catechize the library-woman about Louisa M. Alcott, or the failure about his desultory inquiries into Christian Science, or Mrs. Gray about the pictures plastering the dining-room—a dozen spiritual revelations of apples and oranges, which she had bought at a department-store sale.

The maverick’s name was Fillmore J. Benson. Strangers called him Benny, but his more intimate acquaintances, those to whom he had talked for at least an hour, were requested to call him Phil. He made a number of pretty puns about his first name. He was, surprisingly, a doctor—not the sort that studies science, but the sort that studies the gullibility of human nature—a “Doctor of Manipulative Osteology.” He had earned a diploma by a correspondence course, and had scrabbled together a small practice among retired shopkeepers. He was one of the strange, impudent race of fakers who prey upon the clever city. He didn’t expect any one at the Grays’ to call him a “doctor.”

He drank whisky and gambled for pennies, was immoral in his relations with women and as thick-skinned as he was blatant. He had been a newsboy, a contractor’s clerk, and climbed up by the application of his wits. He read enormously—newspapers, cheap magazines, medical books; he had an opinion about everything, and usually worsted every one at the Grays’ in arguments. And he did his patients good by giving them sympathy and massage. He would have been an excellent citizen had the city not preferred to train him, as a child in its reeling streets, to a sharp unscrupulousness.

Una was at first disgusted by Phil Benson, then perplexed. He would address her in stately Shakespearean phrases which, as a boy, he had heard from the gallery of the Academy of Music. He would quote poetry at her. She was impressed when he almost silenced the library-woman, in an argument as to whether Longfellow or Whittier was the better poet, by parroting the whole of “Snow Bound.”

She fancied that Phil’s general pea-weevil aspect concealed the soul of a poet. But she was shocked out of her pleasant fabling when Phil roared at Mrs. Gray: “Say, what did the baker use this pie for? A bureau or a trunk? I’ve found three pairs of socks and a safety-pin in my slab, so far.”

Pretty Mrs. Gray was hurt and indignant, while her husband growled: “Aw, don’t pay any attention to that human phonograph, Amy. He’s got bats in his belfry.”

Una had acquired a hesitating fondness for the mute gentleness of the others, and it infuriated her that this insect should spoil their picnic. But after dinner Phil Benson dallied over to her, sat on the arm of her chair, and said: “I’m awfully sorry that I make such a bum hit with you, Miss Golden. Oh, I can see I do, all right. You’re the only one here that can understand. Somehow it seems to me—you aren’t like other women I know. There’s something—somehow it’s different. A—a temperament. You dream about higher things than just food and clothes. Oh,” he held up a deprecating hand, “don’t deny it. I’m mighty serious about it, Miss Golden. I can see it, even if you haven’t waked up to it as yet.”

The absurd part of it was that, at least while he was talking, Mr. Phil Benson did believe what he was saying, though he had borrowed all of his sentiments from a magazine story about hobohemians which he had read the night before.

He also spoke of reading good books, seeing good plays, and the lack of good influences in this wicked city.

He didn’t overdo it. He took leave in ten minutes—to find good influences in a Kelly pool-parlor on Third Avenue. He returned to his room at ten, and, sitting with his shoeless feet cocked up on his bed, read a story in Racy Yarns. While beyond the partition, about four feet from him, Una Golden lay in bed, her smooth arms behind her aching head, and worried about Phil’s lack of opportunity.

She was finding in his loud impudence a twisted resemblance to Walter Babson’s erratic excitability, and that won her, for love goes seeking new images of the god that is dead.

Next evening Phil varied his tactics by coming to dinner early, just touching Una’s hand as she was going into the dining-room, and murmuring in a small voice, “I’ve been thinking so much of the helpful things you said last evening, Miss Golden.”

Later, Phil talked to her about his longing to be a great surgeon—in which he had the tremendous advantage of being almost sincere. He walked down the hall to her room, and said good-night lingeringly, holding her hand.

Una went into her room, closed the door, and for full five minutes stood amazed. “Why!” she gasped, “the little man is trying to make love to me!”

She laughed over the absurdity of it. Heavens! She had her Ideal. The Right Man. He would probably be like Walter Babson—though more dependable. But whatever the nature of the paragon, he would in every respect be just the opposite of the creature who had been saying good-night to her.

She sat down, tried to read the paper, tried to put Phil out of her mind. But he kept returning. She fancied that she could hear his voice in the hall. She dropped the paper to listen.

“I’m actually interested in him!” she marveled. “Oh, that’s ridiculous!”

Now that Walter had made a man’s presence natural to her, Una needed a man, the excitation of his touch, the solace of his voice. She could not patiently endure a cloistered vacuousness.

Even while she was vigorously representing to herself that he was preposterous, she was uneasily aware that Phil was masculine. His talons were strong; she could feel their clutch on her hands. “He’s a rat. And I do wish he wouldn’t—spit!” she shuddered. But under her scorn was a surge of emotion.... A man, not much of a man, yet a man, had wanted the contact of her hand, been eager to be with her. Sensations vast as night or the ocean whirled in her small, white room. Desire, and curiosity even more, made her restless as a wave.

She caught herself speculating as she plucked at the sleeve of her black mourning waist: “I wonder would I be more interesting if I had the orange-and-brown dress I was going to make when mother died?... Oh, shame!”

Yet she sprang up from the white-enameled rocker, tucked in her graceless cotton corset-cover, stared at her image in the mirror, smoothed her neck till the skin reddened.

Phil talked to her for an hour after their Sunday-noon dinner. She had been to church; had confessed indeterminate sins to a formless and unresponsive deity. She felt righteous, and showed it. Phil caught the cue. He sacrificed all the witty things he was prepared to say about Mrs. Gray’s dumplings; he gazed silently out of the window till she wondered what he was thinking about, then he stumblingly began to review a sermon which he said he had heard the previous Sunday—though he must have been mistaken, as he shot several games of Kelly pool every Sunday morning, or slept till noon.

“The preacher spoke of woman’s influence. You don’t know what it is to lack a woman’s influence in a fellow’s life, Miss Golden. I can see the awful consequences among my patients. I tell you, when I sat there in church and saw the colored windows—” He sighed portentously. His hand fell across hers—his lean paw, strong and warm-blooded from massaging puffy old men. “I tell you I just got sentimental, I did, thinking of all I lacked.”

Phil melted mournfully away—to indulge in a highly cheerful walk on upper Broadway with Miss Becky Rosenthal, sewer for the Sans Peur Pants and Overalls Company—while in her room Una grieved over his forlorn desire to be good.

Two evenings later, when November warmed to a passing Indian summer of golden skies that were pitifully far away from the little folk in city streets, Una was so restless that she set off for a walk by herself.

Phil had been silent, glancing at her and away, as though he were embarrassed.

“I wish I could do something to help him,” she thought, as she poked down-stairs to the entrance of the apartment-house.

Phil was on the steps, smoking a cigarette-sized cigar, scratching his chin, and chattering with his kinsmen, the gutter sparrows.

He doffed his derby. He spun his cigar from him with a deft flip of his fingers which somehow agitated her. She called herself a little fool for being agitated, but she couldn’t get rid of the thought that only men snapped their fingers like that.

“Goin’ to the movies, Miss Golden?”

“No, I was just going for a little walk.”

“Well, say, walks, that’s where I live. Why don’t you invite Uncle Phil to come along and show you the town? Why, I knew this burg when they went picnicking at the reservoir in Bryant Park.”

He swaggered beside her without an invitation. He did not give her a chance to decline his company—and soon she did not want to. He led her down to Gramercy Park, loveliest memory of village days, houses of a demure red and white ringing a fenced garden. He pointed out to her the Princeton Club, the Columbia Club, the National Arts, and the Players’, and declared that two men leaving the last were John Drew and the most famous editor in America. He guided her over to Stuyvesant Park, a barren square out of old London, with a Quaker school on one side, and the voluble Ghetto on the other. He conducted her through East Side streets, where Jewish lovers parade past miles of push-carts and venerable Rabbis read the Talmud between sales of cotton socks, and showed her a little café which was a hang-out for thieves. She was excited by this contact with the underworld.

He took her to a Lithuanian restaurant, on a street which was a débâcle. One half of the restaurant was filled with shaggy Lithuanians playing cards at filthy tables; the other half was a clean haunt for tourists who came to see the slums, and here, in the heart of these “slums,” saw only one another.

“Wait a while,” Phil said, “and a bunch of Seeing-New-Yorkers will land here and think we’re crooks.”

In ten minutes a van-load of sheepish trippers from the Middle West filed into the restaurant and tried to act as though they were used to cocktails. Una was delighted when she saw them secretly peering at Phil and herself; she put one hand on her thigh and one on the table, leaned forward and tried to look tough, while Phil pretended to be quarreling with her, and the trippers’ simple souls were enthralled by this glimpse of two criminals. Una really enjoyed the acting; for a moment Phil was her companion in play; and when the trippers had gone rustling out to view other haunts of vice she smiled at Phil unrestrainedly.

Instantly he took advantage of her smile, of their companionship.

He was really as simple-hearted as the trippers in his tactics.

She had been drinking ginger-ale. He urged her now to “have a real drink.” He muttered confidentially: “Have a nip of sherry or a New Orleans fizz or a Bronx. That’ll put heart into you. Not enough to affect you a-tall, but just enough to cheer up on. Then we’ll go to a dance and really have a time. Gee! poor kid, you don’t get any fun.”

“No, no, I never touch it,” she said, and she believed it, forgetting the claret she had drunk with Walter Babson.

She felt unsafe.

He laughed at her; assured her from his medical experience that “lots of women need a little tonic,” and boisterously ordered a glass of sherry for her.

She merely sipped it. She wanted to escape. All their momentary frankness of association was gone. She feared him; she hated the complaisant waiter who brought her the drink; the fat proprietor who would take his pieces of silver, though they were the price of her soul; the policeman on the pavement, who would never think of protecting her; and the whole hideous city which benignly profited by saloons. She watched another couple down at the end of the room—an obese man and a young, pretty girl, who was hysterically drunk. Not because she had attended the Women’s Christian Temperance Union at Panama and heard them condemn “the demon rum,” but because the sickish smell of the alcohol was all about her now, she suddenly turned into a crusader. She sprang up, seized her gloves, snapped, “I will not touch the stuff.” She marched down the room, out of the restaurant and away, not once looking back at Phil.

In about fifteen seconds she had a humorous picture of Phil trying to rush after her, but stopped by the waiter to pay his check. She began to wonder if she hadn’t been slightly ridiculous in attempting to slay Demon Rum by careering down the restaurant. But “I don’t care!” she said, stoutly. “I’m glad I took a stand instead of just rambling along and wondering what it was all about, the way I did with Walter.”

Phil caught up to her and instantly began to complain. “Say, you certainly made a sight out of yourself—and out of me—leaving me sitting there with the waiter laughing his boob head off at me. Lord! I’ll never dare go near the place again.”

“Your own fault.” This problem was so clear, so unconfused to her.

“It wasn’t all my fault,” he said. “You didn’t have to take a drink.” His voice fell to a pathetic whimper. “I was showing you hospitality the best way I knew how. You won’t never know how you hurt my feelin’s.”

The problem instantly became complicated again. Perhaps she had hurt his rudimentary sense of courtesy. Perhaps Walter Babson would have sympathized with Phil, not with her. She peeped at Phil. He trailed along with a forlorn baby look which did not change.

She was very uncomfortable as she said a brief good-night at the flat. She half wished that he would give her a chance to recant. She saw him and his injured feelings as enormously important.

She undressed in a tremor of misgiving. She put her thin, pretty kimono over her nightgown, braided her hair, and curled on the bed, condemning herself for having been so supercilious to the rat who had never had a chance.

It was late—long after eleven—when there was a tapping on the door.

She started, listened rigidly.

Phil’s voice whispered from the hall: “Open your door just half an inch, Miss Golden. Something I wanted to say.”

Her pity for him made his pleading request like a command. She drew her kimono close and peeped out at him.

“I knew you were up,” he whispered; “saw the light under your door. I been so worried. I didn’t mean to shock you, or nothing, but if you feel I did mean to, I want to apologize. Gee! me, I couldn’t sleep one wink if I thought you was offended.”

“It’s all right—” she began.

“Say, come into the dining-room. Everybody gone to bed. I want to explain—gee! you gotta give me a chance to be good. If you don’t use no good influence over me, nobody never will, I guess.”

His whisper was full of masculine urgency, husky, bold. She shivered. She hesitated, did not answer.

“All right,” he mourned. “I don’t blame you none, but it’s pretty hard—”

“I’ll come just for a moment,” she said, and shut the door.

She was excited, flushed. She wrapped her braids around her head, gentle braids of pale gold, and her undistinguished face, thus framed, was young and sweet.

She hastened out to the dining-room.

What was the “parlor” by day the Grays used for their own bedroom, but the dining-room had a big, ugly, leather settee and two rockers, and it served as a secondary living-room.

Here Phil waited, at the end of the settee. She headed for a rocker, but he piled sofa-cushions for her at the other end of the settee, and she obediently sank down there.

“Listen,” he said, in a tone of lofty lamentation, “I don’t know as I can ever, ever make you understand I just wanted to give you a good time. I seen you was in mourning, and I thinks, ‘Maybe you could brighten her up a little—’”

“I am sorry I didn’t understand.”

“Una, Una! Do you suppose you could ever stoop to helping a bad egg like me?” he demanded.

His hand fell on hers. It comforted her chilly hand. She let it lie there. Speech became difficult for her.

“Why, why yes—” she stammered.

In reaction to her scorn of him, she was all accepting faith.

“Oh, if you could—and if I could make you less lonely sometimes—”

In his voice was a perilous tenderness; for the rat, trained to beguile neurotic patients in his absurd practice, could croon like the very mother of pity.

“Yes, I am lonely sometimes,” she heard herself admitting—far-off, dreaming, needing the close affection that her mother and Walter had once given her.

“Poor little girl—you’re so much better raised and educated than me, but you got to have friendship jus’ same.”

His arm was about her shoulder. For a second she leaned against him.

All her scorn of him suddenly gathered in one impulse. She sprang up—just in time to catch a grin on his face.

“You gutter-rat!” she said. “You aren’t worth my telling you what you are. You wouldn’t understand. You can’t see anything but the gutter.”

He was perfectly unperturbed: “Poor stuff, kid. Weak come-back. Sounds like a drayma. But, say, listen, honest, kid, you got me wrong. What’s the harm in a little hugging—”

She fled. She was safe in her room. She stood with both arms outstretched. She did not feel soiled by this dirty thing. She was triumphant. In the silhouette of a water-tank, atop the next-door apartment-house, she saw a strong tower of faith.

“Now I don’t have to worry about him. I don’t have to make any more decisions. I know! I’m through! No one can get me just because of curiosity about sex again. I’m free. I can fight my way through in business and still keep clean. I can! I was hungry for—for even that rat. I—Una Golden! Yes, I was. But I don’t want to go back to him. I’ve won!

“Oh, Walter, Walter, I do want you, dear, but I’ll get along without you, and I’ll keep a little sacred image of you.”

title: The Job (Lewis)/The Office/Chapter 9


text:
The Job (Lewis)/The Office/Chapter 10

THE three-fourths of Una employed in the office of Mr. Troy Wilkins was going through one of those periods of unchanging routine when all past drama seems unreal, when nothing novel happens nor apparently ever will happen—such a time of dull peacefulness as makes up the major part of our lives.

Her only definite impressions were the details of daily work, the physical aspects of the office, and the presence of the “Boss.”

Day after day the same details of the job: letters arriving, assorted, opened, answered by dictation, the answers sealed and stamped (and almost every day the same panting crisis of getting off some cosmically important letter).... The reception of callers; welcome to clients; considerate but firm assurances to persons looking for positions that there was “no opening just at present—” The suave answering of irritating telephone calls.... The filing of letters and plans; the clipping of real-estate-transfer items from newspapers.... The supervision of Bessie Kraker and the office-boy.

Equally fixed were the details of the grubby office itself. Like many men who have pride in the smartest suburban homes available, Mr. Wilkins was content with an office shabby and inconvenient. He regarded beautiful offices as in some way effeminate.... His wasn’t effeminate; it was undecorative as a filled ash-tray, despite Una’s daily following up of the careless scrubwomen with dust-cloth and whisk. She knew every inch of it, as a gardener knows his plot. She could never keep from noticing and running her finger along the pebbled glass of the oak-and-glass partition about Mr. Wilkins’s private office, each of the hundreds of times a day she passed it; and when she lay awake at midnight, her finger-tips would recall precisely the feeling of that rough surface, even to the sharp edges of a tiny flaw in the glass over the bookcase.

Or she would recall the floor-rag—symbol of the hard realness of the office grind....

It always hung over the twisted, bulbous lead pipes below the stationary basin in the women’s wash-room provided by the Septimus Building for the women on three floors. It was a rag ancient and slate-gray, grotesquely stiff and grotesquely hairy at its frayed edges—a corpse of a scrub-rag in rigor mortis. Una was annoyed with herself for ever observing so unlovely an object, but in the moment of relaxation when she went to wash her hands she was unduly sensitive to that eternal rag, and to the griminess of the wash-room—the cracked and yellow-stained wash-bowl, the cold water that stung in winter, the roller-towel which she spun round and round in the effort to find a dry, clean, square space, till, in a spasm of revulsion, she would bolt out of the wash-room with her face and hands half dried.

Woman’s place is in the home. Una was doubtless purely perverse in competing with men for the commercial triumphs of running that gray, wet towel round and round on its clattering roller, and of wondering whether for the entire remainder of her life she would see that dead scrub-rag.

It was no less annoying a fact that Bessie and she had only one waste-basket, which was invariably at Bessie’s desk when Una reached for it.

Or that the door of the supply-cupboard always shivered and stuck.

Or that on Thursday, which is the three P.M. of the week, it seemed impossible to endure the tedium till Saturday noon; and that, invariably, her money was gone by Friday, so that Friday lunch was always a mere insult to her hunger, and she could never get her gloves from the cleaner till after Saturday pay-day.

Una knew the office to a point where it offered few beautiful surprises.

And she knew the tactics of Mr. Troy Wilkins.

All managers—“bosses”—“chiefs”—have tactics for keeping discipline; tricks which they conceive as profoundly hidden from their underlings, and which are intimately known and discussed by those underlings.... There are the bosses who “bluff,” those who lie, those who give good-fellowship or grave courtesy in lieu of wages. None of these was Mr. Wilkins. He was dully honest and clumsily paternal. But he was a roarer, a grumbler; he bawled and ordained, in order to encourage industry and keep his lambs from asking for “raises.” Thus also he tried to conceal his own mistakes; when a missing letter for which everybody had been anxiously searching was found on his own desk, instead of in the files, he would blare, “Well, why didn’t you tell me you put it on my desk, heh?” He was a delayer also and, in poker patois, a passer of the buck. He would feebly hold up a decision for weeks, then make a whole campaign of getting his office to rush through the task in order to catch up; have a form of masculine-commuter hysterics because Una and Bessie didn’t do the typing in a miraculously short time.... He never cursed; he was an ecclesiastical believer that one of the chief aims of man is to keep from saying those mystic words “hell” and “damn”; but he could make “darn it” and “why in tunket” sound as profane as a gambling-den.... There was included in Una’s duties the pretense of believing that Mr. Wilkins was the greatest single-handed villa architect in Greater New York. Sometimes it nauseated her. But often he was rather pathetic in his shaky desire to go on having faith in his superseded ability, and she would willingly assure him that his rivals, the boisterous young firm of Soule, Smith & Fissleben, were frauds.

All these faults and devices of Mr. Troy Wilkins Una knew. Doubtless he would have been astonished to hear that fact, on evenings in his plate-racked, much-raftered, highly built-in suburban dining-room, when he discoursed to the admiring Mrs. Wilkins and the mouse-like little Wilkinses on the art of office discipline; or mornings in the second smoker of the 8.16 train, when he told the other lords of the world that “these stenographers are all alike—you simply can’t get’em to learn system.”

It is not recorded whether Mr. Wilkins also knew Una’s faults—her habit of falling a-dreaming at 3.30 and trying to make it up by working furiously at 4.30; her habit of awing the good-hearted Bessie Kraker by posing as a nun who had never been kissed nor ever wanted to be; her graft of sending the office-boy out for ten-cent boxes of cocoanut candy; and a certain resentful touchiness and ladylikeness which made it hard to give her necessary orders. Mr. Wilkins has never given testimony, but he is not the villain of the tale, and some authorities have a suspicion that he did not find Una altogether perfect.

It must not be supposed that Una or her million sisters in business were constantly and actively bored by office routine.

Save once or twice a week, when he roared, and once or twice a month, when she felt that thirteen dollars a week was too little, she rather liked Mr. Wilkins—his honesty, his desire to make comfortable homes for people, his cheerful “Good-morning!” his way of interrupting dictation to tell her antiquated but jolly stories, his stolid, dependable-looking face.

She had real satisfaction in the game of work—in winning points and tricks in doing her work briskly and well, in helping Mr. Wilkins to capture clients. She was eager when she popped in to announce to him that a wary, long-pursued “prospect” had actually called. She was rather more interested in her day’s work than are the average of meaningless humanity who sell gingham and teach algebra and cure boils and repair lawn-mowers, because she was daily more able to approximate perfection, to look forward to something better—to some splendid position at twenty or even twenty-five dollars a week. She was certainly in no worse plight than perhaps ninety-five million of her free and notoriously red-blooded fellow-citizens.

But she was in no better plight. There was no drama, no glory in affection, nor, so long as she should be tied to Troy Wilkins’s dwindling business, no immediate increase in power. And the sameness, the unceasing discussions with Bessie regarding Mr. Wilkins—Mr. Wilkins’s hat, Mr. Wilkins’s latest command, Mr. Wilkins’s lost fountain-pen, Mr. Wilkins’s rudeness to the salesman for the Sky-line Roofing Company, Mr. Wilkins’s idiotic friendship for Muldoon, the contractor, Mr. Wilkins’s pronounced unfairness to the office-boy in regard to a certain lateness in arrival—

At best, Una got through day after day; at worst, she was as profoundly bored as an explorer in the arctic night.

Una, the initiate New-Yorker, continued her study of city ways and city currents during her lunch-hours. She went down to Broad Street to see the curb market; marveled at the men with telephones in little coops behind opened windows; stared at the great newspaper offices on Park Row, the old City Hall, the mingling on lower Broadway of sky-challenging buildings with the history of pre-Revolutionary days. She got a momentary prejudice in favor of socialism from listening to an attack upon it by a noon-time orator—a spotted, badly dressed man whose favorite slur regarding socialists was that they were spotted and badly dressed. She heard a negro shouting dithyrambics about some religion she could never make out.

Sometimes she lunched at a newspaper-covered desk, with Bessie and the office-boy, on cold ham and beans and small, bright-colored cakes which the boy brought in from a bakery. Sometimes she had boiled eggs and cocoa at a Childs restaurant with stenographers who ate baked apples, rich Napoleons, and, always, coffee. Sometimes at a cafeteria, carrying a tray, she helped herself to crackers and milk and sandwiches. Sometimes at the Arden Tea Room, for women only, she encountered charity-workers and virulently curious literary ladies, whom she endured for the marked excellence of the Arden chicken croquettes. Sometimes Bessie tempted her to a Chinese restaurant, where Bessie, who came from the East Side and knew a trick or two, did not order chop-suey, like a tourist, but noodles and eggs foo-young.

In any case, the lunch-hour and the catalogue of what she was so vulgar as to eat were of importance in Una’s history, because that hour broke the routine, gave her for an hour a deceptive freedom of will, of choice between Boston beans and—New York beans. And her triumphant common sense was demonstrated, for she chose light, digestible food, and kept her head clear for the afternoon, while her overlord, Mr. Troy Wilkins, like vast numbers of his fellow business men, crammed himself with beefsteak-and-kidney pudding, drugged himself with cigar smoke and pots of strong coffee and shop-talk, spoke earnestly of the wickedness of drunkenness, and then, drunk with food and tobacco and coffee and talk, came back dizzy, blur-eyed, slow-nerved; and for two hours tried to get down to work.

After hours of trudging through routine, Una went home.

She took the Elevated now instead of the Subway. That was important in her life. It meant an entire change of scenery.

On the Elevated, beside her all evening, hovering over her bed at night, was Worry.

“Oh, I ought to have got all that Norris correspondence copied to-day. I must get at it first thing in the morning.... I wonder if Mr. Wilkins was sore because I stayed out so long for lunch?... What would I do if I were fired?”

So would she worry as she left the office. In the evening she wouldn’t so much criticize herself as suddenly and without reason remember office settings and incidents—startle at a picture of the T-square at which she had stared while Mr. Wilkins was telephoning.... She wasn’t weary because she worried; she worried because she was weary from the airless, unnatural, straining life. She worried about everything available, from her soul to her finger-nails; but the office offered the largest number of good opportunities.

“After all,” say the syndicated philosophers, “the office takes only eight or nine hours a day. The other fifteen or sixteen, you are free to do as you wish—loaf, study, become an athlete.” This illuminative suggestion is usually reinforced by allusions to Lincoln and Edison.

Only—you aren’t a Lincoln or an Edison, for the most part, and you don’t do any of those improving things. You have the office with you, in you, every hour of the twenty-four, unless you sleep dreamlessly and forget—which you don’t. Probably, like Una, you do not take any exercise to drive work-thoughts away.

She often planned to take exercise regularly; read of it in women’s magazines. But she could never get herself to keep up the earnest clowning of bedroom calisthenics; gymnasiums were either reekingly crowded or too expensive—and even to think of undressing and dressing for a gymnasium demanded more initiative than was left in her fagged organism. There was walking—but city streets become tiresomely familiar. Of sports she was consistently ignorant.

So all the week she was in the smell and sound of the battle, until Saturday evening with its blessed rest—the clean, relaxed time which every woman on the job knows.

Saturday evening! No work to-morrow! A prospect of thirty-six hours of freedom. A leisurely dinner, a languorous slowness in undressing, a hot bath, a clean nightgown, and fresh, smooth bed-linen. Una went to bed early to enjoy the contemplation of these luxuries. She even put on a lace bed-cap adorned with pink silk roses. The pleasure of relaxing in bed, of looking lazily at the pictures in a new magazine, of drifting into slumber—not of stepping into a necessary sleep that was only the anteroom of another day’s labor....

Such was her greatest joy in this period of uneventfulness.

Una was, she hoped, “trying to think about things.” Naturally, one who used that boarding-house phrase could not think transformingly.

She wasn’t illuminative about Romain Rolland or Rodin or village welfare. She was still trying to decide whether the suffrage movement was ladylike and whether Dickens or Thackeray was the better novelist. But she really was trying to decide.

She compiled little lists of books to read, “movements” to investigate. She made a somewhat incoherent written statement of what she was trying to do, and this she kept in her top bureau drawer, among the ribbons, collars, imitation pearl necklaces, handkerchiefs, letters from Walter, and photographs of Panama and her mother.

She took it out sometimes, and relieved the day’s accumulated suffering by adding such notes as:

“Be nice & human w. employes if ever have any of own; office wretched hole anyway bec. of econ. system; W. used to say, why make worse by being cranky.”

Or:

“Study music, it brings country and W. and poetry and everything; take piano les. when get time.”

So Una tramped, weary always at dusk, but always recreated at dawn, through one of those periods of timeless, unmarked months, when all drama seems past and unreal and apparently nothing will ever happen again.

Then, in one week, everything became startling—she found melodrama and a place of friendship.

title: The Job (Lewis)/The Office/Chapter 10