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Title: The Job

An American Novel

Author: Sinclair Lewis

Release Date: May 15, 2008 [EBook #25474]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1

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THE JOB

AN AMERICAN NOVEL

SINCLAIR LEWIS

AUTHOR OF

MAIN STREET,

BABBITT, Etc.

GROSSET & DUNLAP

PUBLISHERS NEW YORK

Made in the United States of America

The Job

Printed in the United States of America

Published February, 1917

B-R

My Wife

WHO HAS MADE “THE JOB”

POSSIBLE AND LIFE ITSELF

QUITE BEAUTIFULLY

IMPROBABLE

CONTENTS.

• Page

• Part I 3

THE CITY

• Part II 133

THE OFFICE

• Part III 251

MAN AND WOMAN

[3] Part I

THE CITY

CHAPTER I

CAPTAIN LEW GOLDEN would have saved any foreign observer a great deal of trouble in

studying America. He was an almost perfect type of the petty small-town middle-class lawyer. He

lived in Panama, Pennsylvania. He had never been “captain” of anything except the Crescent

Volunteer Fire Company, but he owned the title because he collected rents, wrote insurance, and

meddled with lawsuits.

He carried a quite visible mustache-comb and wore a collar, but no tie. On warm days he appeared

on the street in his shirt-sleeves, and discussed the comparative temperatures of the past thirty years

with Doctor Smith and the Mansion House ’bus-driver. He never used the word “beauty” except in

reference to a setter dog—beauty of words or music, of faith or rebellion, did not exist for him. He

rather fancied large, ambitious, banal, red-and-gold sunsets, but he merely glanced at them as he

straggled home, and remarked that they were “nice.” He believed that all Parisians, artists,

millionaires, and socialists were immoral. His entire system of theology was comprised in the Bible,

which he never read, and the Methodist Church, which he rarely attended; and he desired no system

of economics beyond the current platform[4] of the Republican party. He was aimlessly industrious,

crotchety but kind, and almost quixotically honest.

He believed that “Panama, Pennsylvania, was good enough for anybody.”

This last opinion was not shared by his wife, nor by his daughter Una.

Mrs. Golden was one of the women who aspire just enough to be vaguely discontented; not enough

to make them toil at the acquisition of understanding and knowledge. She had floated into a

comfortable semi-belief in a semi-Christian Science, and she read novels with a conviction that she

would have been a romantic person “if she hadn’t married Mr. Golden—not but what he’s a fine

man and very bright and all, but he hasn’t got much imagination or any, well, romance !”

She wrote poetry about spring and neighborhood births, and Captain Golden admired it so actively

that he read it aloud to callers. She attended all the meetings of the Panama Study Club, and desired

to learn French, though she never went beyond borrowing a French grammar from the Episcopalian

rector and learning one conjugation. But in the pioneer suffrage movement she took no part—she

didn’t “think it was quite ladylike.” ... She was a poor cook, and her house always smelled stuffy,

but she liked to have flowers about. She was pretty of face, frail of body, genuinely gracious of

manner. She really did like people, liked to give cookies to the neighborhood boys, and—if you

weren’t impatient with her slackness—you found her a wistful and touching figure in her slight

youthfulness and in the ambition to be a romantic personage, a Marie Antoinette or a Mrs. Grover

Cleveland, which ambition she still retained at fifty-five.

She was, in appearance, the ideal wife and mother—sympathetic, forgiving, bright-lipped as a May

morning.[5] She never demanded; she merely suggested her desires, and, if they were refused, let

her lips droop in a manner which only a brute could withstand.

She plaintively admired her efficient daughter Una.

Una Golden was a “good little woman”—not pretty, not noisy, not particularly articulate, but

instinctively on the inside of things; naturally able to size up people and affairs. She had common

sense and unkindled passion. She was a matter-of-fact idealist, with a healthy woman’s simple

longing for love and life. At twenty-four Una had half a dozen times fancied herself in love. She had

been embraced at a dance, and felt the stirring of a desire for surrender. But always a native

shrewdness had kept her from agonizing over these affairs.

She was not—and will not be—a misunderstood genius, an undeveloped artist, an embryonic leader

in feminism, nor an ugly duckling who would put on a Georgette hat and captivate the theatrical

world. She was an untrained, ambitious, thoroughly commonplace, small-town girl. But she was a

natural executive and she secretly controlled the Golden household; kept Captain Golden from

eating with his knife, and her mother from becoming drugged with too much reading of poppy-

flavored novels.

She wanted to learn, learn anything. But the Goldens were too respectable to permit her to have a

job, and too poor to permit her to go to college. From the age of seventeen, when she had graduated

from the high school—in white ribbons and heavy new boots and tight new organdy—to twenty-

three, she had kept house and gone to gossip-parties and unmethodically read books from the town

library—Walter Scott, Richard Le Gallienne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mrs. Humphry Ward, How to

Know the Birds , My Year in the Holy Land , Home Needlework ,[6] Sartor Resartus , and Ships that

Pass in the Night . Her residue of knowledge from reading them was a disbelief in Panama,

Pennsylvania.

She was likely never to be anything more amazing than a mother and wife, who would entertain the

Honiton Embroidery Circle twice a year.

Yet, potentially, Una Golden was as glowing as any princess of balladry. She was waiting for the

fairy prince, though he seemed likely to be nothing more decorative than a salesman in a brown

derby. She was fluid; indeterminate as a moving cloud.

Although Una Golden had neither piquant prettiness nor grave handsomeness, her soft littleness

made people call her “Puss,” and want to cuddle her as a child cuddles a kitten. If you noted Una at

all, when you met her, you first noted her gentle face, her fine-textured hair of faded gold, and her

rimless eye-glasses with a gold chain over her ear. These glasses made a business-like center to her

face; you felt that without them she would have been too childish. Her mouth was as kind as her

spirited eyes, but it drooped. Her body was so femininely soft that you regarded her as rather plump.

But for all her curving hips, and the thick ankles which she considered “common,” she was rather

anemic. Her cheeks were round, not rosy, but clear and soft; her lips a pale pink. Her chin was

plucky and undimpled; it was usually spotted with one or two unimportant eruptions, which she

kept so well covered with powder that they were never noticeable. No one ever thought of them

except Una herself, to whom they were tragic blemishes which she timorously examined in the

mirror every time she went to wash her hands. She knew that they were the result of the indigestible

Golden family meals; she tried to take comfort by noticing their prevalence among other girls; but

they[7] kept startling her anew; she would secretly touch them with a worried forefinger, and

wonder whether men were able to see anything else in her face.

You remembered her best as she hurried through the street in her tan mackintosh with its yellow

velveteen collar turned high up, and one of those modest round hats to which she was addicted. For

then you were aware only of the pale-gold hair fluffing round her school-mistress eye-glasses, her

gentle air of respectability, and her undistinguished littleness.

She trusted in the village ideal of virginal vacuousness as the type of beauty which most captivated

men, though every year she was more shrewdly doubtful of the divine superiority of these men.

That a woman’s business in life was to remain respectable and to secure a man, and consequent

security, was her unmeditated faith—till, in 1905, when Una was twenty-four years old, her father

died.

§ 2

Captain Golden left to wife and daughter a good name, a number of debts, and eleven hundred

dollars in lodge insurance. The funeral was scarcely over before neighbors—the furniture man, the

grocer, the polite old homeopathic doctor—began to come in with bland sympathy and large bills.

When the debts were all cleared away the Goldens had only six hundred dollars and no income

beyond the good name. All right-minded persons agree that a good name is precious beyond rubies,

but Una would have preferred less honor and more rubies.

She was so engaged in comforting her mother that she scarcely grieved for her father. She took

charge of everything—money, house, bills.

Mrs. Golden had been overwhelmed by a realization[8] that, however slack and shallow Captain

Golden had been, he had adored her and encouraged her in her gentility, her pawing at culture. With

an emerging sincerity, Mrs. Golden mourned him, now, missed his gossipy presence—and at the

same time she was alive to the distinction it added to her slim gracefulness to wear black and look

wan. She sobbed on Una’s shoulder; she said that she was lonely; and Una sturdily comforted her

and looked for work.

One of the most familiar human combinations in the world is that of unemployed daughter and

widowed mother. A thousand times you have seen the jobless daughter devoting all of her curiosity,

all of her youth, to a widowed mother of small pleasantries, a small income, and a shabby security.

Thirty comes, and thirty-five. The daughter ages steadily. At forty she is as old as her unwithering

mother. Sweet she is, and pathetically hopeful of being a pianist or a nurse; never quite reconciled

to spinsterhood, though she often laughs about it; often, by her insistence that she is an “old maid,”

she makes the thought of her barren age embarrassing to others. The mother is sweet, too, and

“wants to keep in touch with her daughter’s interests,” only, her daughter has no interests. Had the

daughter revolted at eighteen, had she stubbornly insisted that mother either accompany her to

parties or be content to stay alone, had she acquired “interests,” she might have meant something in

the new generation; but the time for revolt passes, however much the daughter may long to seem

young among younger women. The mother is usually unconscious of her selfishness; she would be

unspeakably horrified if some brutal soul told her that she was a vampire. Chance, chance and

waste, rule them both, and the world passes by while the mother has her games of cards with

daughter,[9] and deems herself unselfish because now and then she lets daughter join a party (only

to hasten back to mother), and even “wonders why daughter doesn’t take an interest in girls her own

age.” That ugly couple on the porch of the apple-sauce and wash-pitcher boarding-house—the

mother a mute, dwarfish punchinello, and the daughter a drab woman of forty with a mole, a wart, a

silence. That charming mother of white hair and real lace with the well-groomed daughter. That

comfortable mother at home and daughter in an office, but with no suitors, no ambition beyond the

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