Part 16 (1/2)

Now listen, Miss Brandeis: I'm not going to talk to you in millions. The guides do enough of that. But you know we do buy and sell in terms of millions, don't you? Well, our infants' wear department isn't helping to roll up the millions; and it ought to, because there are millions of babies born every year, and the golden-spoon kind are in the minority.

I've decided that that department needs a woman, your kind of woman.

Now, as a rule, I never employ a woman when I can use a man. There's only one other woman filling a really important position in the merchandise end of this business. That's Ella Monahan, head of the glove department, and she's a genius. She is a woman who is limited in every other respect--just average; but she knows glove materials in a way that's uncanny. I'd rather have a man in her place; but I don't happen to know any men glove-geniuses. Tell me, what do you think of that etching?”

f.a.n.n.y tried--and successfully--not to show the jolt her mind had received as she turned to look at the picture to which his finger pointed. She got up and strolled over to it, and she was glad her suit fitted and hung as it did in the back.

”I don't like it particularly. I like it less than any other etching you have here.” The walls were hung with them. ”Of course you understand I know nothing about them. But it's too flowery, isn't it, to be good?

Too many lines. Like a writer who spoils his effect by using too many words.”

Fenger came over and stood beside her, staring at the black and white and gray thing in its frame. ”I felt that way, too.” He stared down at her, then. ”Jew?” he asked.

A breathless instant. ”No,” said f.a.n.n.y Brandeis.

Michael Fenger smiled for the first time. f.a.n.n.y Brandeis would have given everything she had, everything she hoped to be, to be able to take back that monosyllable. She was gripped with horror at what she had done. She had spoken almost mechanically. And yet that monosyllable must have been the fruit of all these months of inward struggle and thought.

”Now I begin to understand you,” Fenger went on. ”You've decided to lop off all the excrescences, eh? Well, I can't say that I blame you. A woman in business is handicapped enough by the very fact of her s.e.x.” He stared at her again. ”Too bad you're so pretty.”

”I'm not!” said f.a.n.n.y hotly, like a school-girl.

”That's a thing that can't be argued, child. Beauty's subjective, you know.”

”I don't see what difference it makes, anyway.”

”Oh, yes, you do.” He stopped. ”Or perhaps you don't, after all. I forget how young you are. Well, now, Miss Brandeis, you and your woman's mind, and your masculine business experience and sense are to be turned loose on our infants' wear department. The buyer, Mr. Slosson, is going to resent you. Naturally. I don't know whether we'll get results from you in a month, or six months or a year. Or ever. But something tells me we're going to get them. You've lived in a small town most of your life.

And we want that small-town viewpoint. D'you think you've got it?”

f.a.n.n.y was on her own ground here. ”If knowing the Wisconsin small-town woman, and the Wisconsin farmer woman--and man too, for that matter--means knowing the Oregon, and Wyoming, and Pennsylvania, and Iowa people of the same cla.s.s, then I've got it.”

”Good!” Michael Fenger stood up. ”I'm not going to load you down with instructions, or advice. I think I'll let you grope your own way around, and b.u.mp your head a few times. Then you'll learn where the low places are. And, Miss Brandeis, remember that suggestions are welcome in this plant. We take suggestions all the way from the elevator starter to the president.” His tone was kindly, but not hopeful.

f.a.n.n.y was standing too, her mental eye on the door. But now she turned to face him squarely.

”Do you mean that?”

”Absolutely.”

”Well, then, I've one to make. Your stock boys and stock girls walk miles and miles every day, on every floor of this fifteen-story building. I watched them yesterday, filling up the bins, carrying orders, covering those enormous distances from one bin to another, up one aisle and down the next, to the office, back again. Your floors are concrete, or cement, or some such mixture, aren't they? I just happened to think of the boy who used to deliver our paper on Norris Street, in Winnebago, Wisconsin. He covered his route on roller skates. It saved him an hour. Why don't you put roller skates on your stock boys and girls?”

Fenger stared at her. You could almost hear that mind of his working, like a thing on ball bearings. ”Roller skates.” It wasn't an exclamation. It was a decision. He pressed a buzzer--the snuff-brown secretary buzzer. ”Tell Clancy I want him. Now.” He had not glanced up, or taken his eyes from f.a.n.n.y. She was aware of feeling a little uncomfortable, but elated, too. She moved toward the door. Fenger stood at his desk. ”Wait a minute.” f.a.n.n.y waited. Still Fenger did not speak.

Finally, ”I suppose you know you've earned six months' salary in the last five minutes.”

f.a.n.n.y eyed him coolly. ”Considering the number of your stock force, the time, energy, and labor saved, including wear and tear on department heads and their a.s.sistants, I should say that was a conservative statement.” And she nodded pleasantly, and left him.

Two days later every stock clerk in the vast plant was equipped with light-weight roller skates. They made a sort of carnival of it at first.

There were some spills, too, going around corners, and a little too much hilarity. That wore off in a week. In two weeks their roller skates were part of them; just shop labor-savers. The report presented to Fenger was this: Time and energy saved, fifty-five per cent; stock staff decreased by one third. The picturesqueness of it, the almost ludicrous simplicity of the idea appealed to the entire plant. It tickled the humor sense in every one of the ten thousand employees in that vast organization. In the first week of her a.s.sociation with Haynes-Cooper f.a.n.n.y Brandeis was actually more widely known than men who had worked there for years. The president, Nathan Haynes himself, sent for her, chuckling.

Nathan Haynes--but then, why stop for him? Nathan Haynes had been swallowed, long ago, by this monster plant that he himself had innocently created. You must have visited it, this Gargantuan thing that sprawls its length in the very center of Chicago, the giant son of a surprised father. It is one of the city's show places, like the stockyards, the Art Inst.i.tute, and Field's. Fifteen years before, a building had been erected to accommodate a prosperous mail order business. It had been built large and roomy, with plenty of seams, planned amply, it was thought, to allow the boy to grow. It would do for twenty-five years, surely. In ten years Haynes-Cooper was bursting its seams. In twelve it was shamelessly naked, its arms and legs sticking out of its inadequate garments. New red brick buildings another--another. Five stories added to this one, six stories to that, a new fifteen story merchandise building.

The firm began to talk in tens of millions. Its stock became gilt-edged, unattainable. Lucky ones who had bought of it diffidently, discreetly, with modest visions of four and a half per cent in their unimaginative minds, saw their dividends doubling, trebling, quadrupling, finally soaring gymnastically beyond all reason. Listen to the old guide who (at fifteen a week) takes groups of awed visitors through the great plant.

How he juggles figures; how grandly they roll off his tongue. How glib he is with Nathan Haynes's millions.