



Produced by K Nordquist, Jacqueline Jeremy and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
book was produced from scanned images of public domain
material from the Google Print project.)









    THE JOB

    AN AMERICAN NOVEL

    BY
    SINCLAIR LEWIS

    AUTHOR OF MAIN STREET, BABBITT, ETC.

    GROSSET & DUNLAP
    PUBLISHERS     NEW YORK

    Made in the United States of America


    Copyright, 1917, by Harper & Brothers
    Printed in the United States of America
    Published February, 1917




    TO

    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




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 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. 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_, _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 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.


Sec. 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 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