DUSKIN (17 page)

She woke up laughing and jerked herself up into a sitting posture.

“Carol Berkley, if you’re going to get hysterics,” she said aloud, “you’d better go home today and own yourself beaten! You can’t pull anything off with your nerves all frazzled out like this. You’ve got to buck up.”

A glance at her watch showed it was eight o’clock, and she had meant to be on the job by this time. She sprang up quickly, and dashing into her bathroom, took a cold shower. That brought a reaction and she felt better. She telephoned down for coffee and rolls to be sent up, and to save time, ate while she was dressing, a bite between everything she did.

It was a warm morning and breezeless, demanding thin garments. She put on her little rose-colored silk casual dress and a broad hat of transparent white, rimmed and tied around with rosy velvet ribbon. It wasn’t at all the sort of dress for a businesswoman to wear on a job. But she hadn’t a suitable thing with her. If things went on much longer she must go out and buy a plain, sensible, dark blue or black dress she supposed, but since she had nothing more suitable, why not wear the prettiest? Since she could not wear these confections of clothes on the seashore as she had planned, why not enjoy them by herself while she fought her desperate battle in this strange city?

Before she left her room she dashed off a cold little note to Schlessinger to leave at the desk as she went out, saying that business matters would prevent her accepting his kind invitation for lunch.

Then she wrote a hurried note to Duskin to be sent up to whatever part of the building he was in. Not again did she propose unnecessarily to expose herself to the gossip of those unmannerly men. Her cheeks burned as she thought of them.

My dear Mr. Duskin:

I have been thinking over what you said yesterday and have come to the conclusion that it is unfair to you
to make a change at this time. I shall therefore be glad to have you continue in your position of manager for the present at least, and will do my best to help you in every way. I would like to speak with you at once for a few moments and will wait downstairs until you can leave what you are doing.

Sincerely,

Carol Berkley

As she was going out the door pondering what she had written, it seemed to her that she had been rather too informal in the letter, but there was no time to go back. She must hurry to the building. There was no telling what Duskin might have taken it into his head to do if he was still angry with her.

She went downstairs hurriedly, by the side entrance again, and took a taxi to the building. She was running no more risks of meeting Schlessinger or the Arthwaits. She had serious business ahead.

Arriving at her destination, she found the place simply swarming with workmen. For some minutes she could not even get near the steps. Six men were carrying in large bronze grills, obviously a part of the elevator system. When the doorway was finally cleared and she stepped inside the hall she found it fully occupied with workmen placing and arranging the parts of the elevators. There was no room to pass them to the back of the hall where she had found the man mixing paint on her former visit. She had to step within the doorway of the front room on the left of the entrance to get out of the way of a big packing case that was being rolled into the hallway.

There was nobody in this room. It seemed to be used as a sort of office, although there were piles of trim and moulding across one end and boxes of screws and knobs and hinges lying around in little heaps at intervals on the floor.

There was an old, cheap desk of pine, its drawers pulled out and bulging with papers, its top also piled high with letters, circulars, and papers. A man’s dark blue serge coat was folded neatly on the top and a much-thumbed panama hat atop of it. There were two cheap oak chairs and a locked safe in one corner. That was all.

She stepped to the back of the room to see if there was egress to the hall from the other door, but the way was entirely blocked. It was some time before there was opportunity to interrupt the noisy workers in the hall to enquire for the janitor, but at last the big trucks in front of the door thundered on their way and the hall was cleared of all but the regular workmen, and she ventured once more on a search for the man they had called Bill.

She found him in a little, dark room in the sub-cellar filing a saw for one of the carpenters. He agreed to take the note up when he got the saw done, as the carpenter was in a hurry for it. Ten minutes Carol stood in that dingy basement, watching her letter as it lay among the filings, and waiting for Bill, while the file gave forth heart-rending sounds that rasped every nerve in her body. She would not leave until she was sure Bill had taken her letter, and meantime she looked around upon the solid masonry, the network of pipes and tubes and wires. What a work it had been to bring that great mass of materials to even this stage of perfection! She had never realized before what lay beneath the mighty structures of the world.

But at last the saw was filed, and she saw Bill take her dainty envelope between a grimy thumb and finger, blow off the steel filings, and carry it and the saw over to the lift.

“You better go back up the ladder.” He indicated a crude stair down which she had crept. “Tain’t no place fer a lady up by them shafts now. You better go home, lady! This ain’t no place fer a woman. Not today, ‘specially. Too much goin’ on. Get yer cloes all mess up!”

“Thank you,” said Carol sweetly. “I have to see Mr. Duskin at once. I will wait in the office for him to come down.”

“Suit yerse’f, lady, you may have a long wait.”

So Carol climbed her way gingerly up to the office again and sat down in one of the two oak chairs to wait for Duskin, more aware than ever that her rose-pink dress was out of place on a job like this.

I
t was ten o’clock when Carol glanced at her wristwatch and settled down to wait for Duskin. At twelve when the workmen all knocked off and sat around on the floor in the hall with their backs against the wall and brought out huge sandwiches and bottles of cold coffee and hunks of cheese, she was still there waiting.

Bill had brought up the note, holding it in the tips of his grimy thumb and finger just as he had started with it, much as if it were something that might explode.

“Where’s the boss?” he asked when he arrived at the top with his lift. “Lady boss sent this up. She’s waitin’ down in the sub fer a nanswer! You wantta be quick about it, too.”

Duskin turned grinning and looked at the letter.

“Stuff it in my pocket, Bill, I’ve got my hands full now. I’ll read it when there’s time.”

“She’s gonna wait till you come.”

“All right. Get her a chair, Bill.”

Bill hung around a few minutes, but the boss hadn’t read the letter. He was moving a great pile of trim and lumber from a room where the painters were to come. He did not read the letter until the lumber was all moved.

Charlie was watching him out of the corner of his eye, his canny Scotch eye.

A twinkle dawned over Duskin’s face and fled like the dart of a hummingbird, something golden to see in its flight. Charlie began to hum a bonny tune.

The twinkle had left Duskin’s face and taken some of the worn lines with it.

Duskin took a pencil out of his pocket and looked around for stationery. There was nothing in sight but Ted’s empty doughnut bag. Duskin tore a bit off where there was the least grease and wrote:

Have been working on the job all along and expect to till it’s done, but I haven’t time to stop and talk now. Sorry. Don’t worry.

Duskin

“Hey Bill!”

“Right ho!” said Bill, appearing an instant later at the door. As if Duskin hadn’t known what he was there for all the time!

“Deliver the answer, please.”

Duskin went back to work and Bill drifted slowly down on his lift, and in due time delivered the old bit of brown paper with its message.

At first Carol was very angry. She had waited so long already that it seemed her patience had ceased to be a virtue, and she was anxious to get to work. There would be things she should do of course. For one thing this room needed putting in order. There were unopened letters on that desk, letters that wore the air of having been abandoned before they had been answered. That was something just in her line, and she ached to get at it for nothing else than to rebuke this paragon of a manager who seemed to think he knew it all and she was an upstart to come in here and give him orders. But there was something in Duskin’s glance as she remembered it that kept her from touching his papers without his permission. His presence seemed to linger in his domain and patrol the place for him about as well as if he had been there.

Carol read the brown paper message over several times taking in everything there was about it. The almost insolence of keeping her waiting so long and then the out-and-out insolence of telling her he had been on the job all along and meant to stay there until it was done. It was as much as to say that she had nothing to do with the matter any more than a fly on the wall. She really hadn’t made much headway after all, and perhaps she had been wrong in lowering her dignity and retracting her dismissal of yesterday. Oh, it was most humiliating. She had a feeling that he meant it to be.

Well, perhaps she had humiliated him—several times—without realizing it. Probably Mr. Fawcett’s letter cut deep, too.

And then what he overheard her say in Chicago. It was all most unfortunate. It offset the thing from the beginning. And after all, wasn’t she more offended because she felt she was a woman and therefore should be treated well whatever she did? Well that wasn’t right after all. But he really was being insolent now toward the company. She represented the company, no matter how poorly, and he had no right to ignore her this way.

She went through various stages of indignation, righteous and otherwise, while she sat for another hour waiting. Incidentally, she had opportunity to note that a great many men were very hard at work on a great many different parts of that building, and that they were not loafing on the job. Moreover, things were getting done before her very eyes. Two more trucks arrived bearing large sheets of what looked like marble, which were carried in noisily and steadily by strong men, breathing heavily, great lungs puffing with hot breath, great hearts pumping fast under the heavy burden! She had never realized before how many burden-bearers it took to complete just one little operation in the world, and there were so many millions of other operations. Why, the universe was like a great anthill of workers, each one doing his little part, giving his time and strength and brain and muscle to make the world a success. And when one worker fell down on his job how it tied up all the rest!

Then suddenly it came over her how like a panorama things were moving on in this building. The elevator workers had arrived along with the material they were to put up, and now, on the very heels of the great sheets of marble, came a troop of men in white overalls and little white caps and began to mix cement in a great rough box they brought and manipulate those slabs of marble until they became a shining lining to the wall around the stairway. Everything was moving like clockwork, and yet the boss had not once appeared on the scene. He must after all have been a pretty good manager, for all these things could not just have happened.

Was it just by chance that her eye fell at that moment upon an open page of a letter lying on top of the pile of papers on the table? It was from a well-known millwork firm in Chicago, and it stated:

We are very sorry to have to tell you that we shall be delayed in sending the arched window sashes which you
ordered from us two months ago for the lower floor of your present operation. We are the only firm in this part of the country making that particular style of window, and it has been in great demand of late. We regret to say that we are behind in our work because of a mistake in an order that was sent in by telephone, and therefore we shall not be able to send yours as soon as we promised them. It will be at least three weeks before we can touch them. Regretting, etc.

Carol lifted her eyes instinctively to the wall, and there were the windows! She glanced back to the letter which she found was dated only a week ago, and then she stared up at the windows again, with their mullioned arches.

Was that one of the million little details that he had to set right? And if it was, how had he done it? If, as the letter stated, they were the only makers of such windows in that part of the country, how had he procured them so soon? Here they were, already fitted into their frames and started on their life work and only one short week from the time the letter was written! Well, it must be magic. Either he had known some way to compel the firm to furnish them or had found some other place to get them. Her thoughts began to work on a number of things, beginning back with those rivets that had not arrived and the paint that had been stolen nine months or more ago. Could it be possible that someone was systematically at work trying to keep that building from being finished on time?

Just then Bill came in stealthily on his rubber soles and picked up the telephone, calling a number.

“Hey you, Saxe! Is that Saxe? Well the boss says if you can’t have them fixures here fer the side walls in the Fawcett building by three o’clock you needn’t send ‘em at all. He says he ain’t fooling with you anymore. This is the third time you’ve disappointed him. He’s going out elsewhere and get ‘em, if they don’t get here on the dot. The men are ready fer ‘em now, and we ain’t paying men to wait.”

Bill slung the receiver in with a swank and was just shambling out again when Carol rose with an imploring gesture.

“Oh!” she said earnestly. “Will you please let Mr. Duskin know that I’m still here waiting. I know he’s busy and mustn’t be disturbed, but I thought perhaps he had forgotten about me, and it’s really quite important. I have to send a telegram to the home office and I must see him first. Doesn’t he ever go out for lunch? Is there some other exit and have I missed him?”