Anybody Can Do Anything
“The man said that this is the greatest placer property the world has ever seen”, I said excitedly. “Do you suppose we should telegraph Mr Webster?” Mary glanced at the card and with a bored look dropped both it and the sample of ore into the waste-basket.
“Mary Bard,” I said, “What are you doing?” She said, “I’m doing just what Mr Webster would have done. In other words I’m saving him trouble, which is the first duty of a good private secretary. Now I’m going to pound a few facts into that humble little head of yours. In the first place you have two of the greatest assets a mining engineer’s secretary could possibly have. A, your father was a mining engineer. B, you have seen a mine and when Webster talks about an assay you don’t think he’s referring to a literary composition. The rest is all a matter of common sense and practice. Here’s the telephone number of the smelter, here’s Webster’s address. Open and read all the mail and keep a record of all telephone calls.”
“What about visitors like the fat man?” I asked. Mary said, “For a while you can keep all that trash and show it to Webster. After you get more used to things you’ll be able to tell the crackpots from the real mining men. Or at least you can pretend you can”, she added honestly. “What about the home office”, I said. “They’re one of the richest corporations in the world. How will they feel about me?” “They’ll never know about you”, said Mary. “We’re both Miss Bard and to the richest corporation in the world, a Miss Bard more or less at one hundred dollars a month in the Seattle office isn’t that much.” She snapped her fingers and we went out for coffee.
In spite of Mary’s vehement and reiterated assurance that I possessed the two greatest assets the secretary of a mining engineer could possibly have, I had an uneasy feeling that Webster’s reaction to a secretary who could neither type nor take shorthand, might be that of a hungry man who day after day opens his lunch-box and finds it empty.
So, with feverish intensity, I tried to remedy the situation. I practised my typing, I studied shorthand, I memorized the number of spaces to indent on a letter, I tried to remember which was the right side of the carbon paper and I prayed that Mr Webster would begin every letter with weareinreceiptofyoursofthe, the way all John Robert Gregg’s business friends did.
Mary said it was all a waste of time. She told me to read some of the geology books, to study the maps, to thumb through the files and to try and get the feeling of mining. I suggested that I might buy a miner’s lamp and wear it in the office and she said it would go further with Mr Webster than that scared look I put on every time I opened the office door.
I couldn’t help the scared look, I felt like an impostor, and as the days succeeded each other and the return of Mr Webster grew more and more imminent, every morning when I took out my key and inserted it in the lock of the door marked menacingly CHARLES WEBSTER, MINING ENGINEER I drew a deep quivering breath and prayed that Mr Webster’s office would be empty.
Then one morning when I opened the office door there in Mr Webster’s office, sitting at Mr Webster’s big mahogany desk was Mr Webster. I almost fainted. Mr Webster had very brown skin and nice bright blue eyes and he called out, “Who are you?” So scared I had tears in my eyes, I said, “Well, ah, well, ah, I’m Mary’s sister Betty and I’m your new secretary.” He said, “Where’s Mary?” “Oh, she’s in an office right across the street”, I said, adding hurriedly, “She said that if you wanted to dictate to call her and she’d come right over.” He said, “This all sounds very much like Mary. Well, as long as she’s deserted me she doesn’t deserve the present I’ve brought her. Here”, and he handed me a huge green barley sugar Scottie dog.
I took the dog and because I was nervous and felt guilty, I was too effusive in my thanks and kept saying over and over and over, “Oh, Mr Webster, you shouldn’t have done it!” as though he were trying to force a diamond anklet on me. Then, God knows why, but in an effort to offer further proof of my gratitude, I bit into the candy dog and one whole enormous green leg came off in my mouth just as Mr Webster, who by this time was sick to death of me and obviously trying to think of some kind way to get rid of me looked up to ask if there had been any mail or calls. I couldn’t answer, I just stood there in my hat and coat, trying desperately to manoeuvre the huge log around in my mouth, my eyes full of tears and green drool running down my chin. It was not a sight to inspire confidence in my efficiency. In fact, if I had been Mr Webster I wouldn’t have kept me if I’d been able to produce degrees in shorthand, typing, mining, geology and map drawing. But Mr Webster was very kind, and had been a good friend of Daddy’s, so he went over and looked out the windows at the mountains while I pulled myself together.
As I look back on it now, it would have been cheaper and less of a strain for Mr Webster to have dispensed with me and hired a cleaning woman, because, eager though I was to help, all I could do well was to dust the furniture and his ore samples and clean out cupboards. I typed a few letters but I was so nervous that I made terrible mistakes, used reams of paper and the finished product usually had little holes in it where my eraser had bitten too deeply.
Mr Webster, upset by the holes in his letters but not wanting to hurt my feelings, said I was much too thin and ordered a quart of milk to be delivered to the office every morning, and at ten and three came out and stood over me while I drank a glass. This embarrassed me so I gulped the milk down in huge glurping swallows, which brought on terrible gas pains and several times made me belch loudly into the telephone when I was following Mary’s instructions and trying to use Standard English.
The first day Mr Webster was back he took Mary and me to lunch at a small French restaurant in an alley. While we ate goslings en casserole and drank Chablis, Mary told him that he had nothing to worry about because she had figured out everything. Whenever he wanted to dictate he was to tell me and I would call her on the phone and while she took his dictation I would go over and answer her phone. To my intense relief Mr Webster laughed and said that he thought it was a wonderful scheme, and it did work out very well until Mary’s very demanding boss arrived in town and it became harder and harder for her to get away.
Then Mr Webster suggested that I take his easier dictation and I did and one morning when I had written ‘dead sir’ and ‘kinkly yours’ on a letter, he offered to send me to night school to learn shorthand and typing. I told him that I would like to go but I didn’t think Mary would approve and he said, “Betty, my dear girl, you and Mary are entirely different personalities and anyway she is a whizz in both shorthand and typing.”
So, I went to night school, which Mr Webster paid for at the rate of fifteen dollars a month, and studied shorthand and typing. My shorthand teacher, a small, sandy man with a nasal voice and thin yellow lips, seemed to be an excellent shorthand teacher because at the end of three months everyone in the class but me could take down and transcribe business letters and little stories.
I couldn’t learn shorthand. I got p’s and b’s mixed up, I couldn’t tell m from n and even when I could write it I couldn’t read it back. I didn’t have too much trouble with Mr Webster’s letters because he dictated very slowly, and I knew what he was talking about, but I was such a miserable failure at night school that the only thing that kept me from shooting myself was the amazing fact that, although everyone in the class, and there were forty-two of them, was an expert typist and shorthand dynamo, I was the only one with a job. When I told Mary, she said, “Naturally. I told you you wouldn’t find any executives at night school.”
I never did get to feel like an executive and I never did conquer my obsession that there was a mysterious key to office work which, like holding a letter written in lemon juice over a candle, would one day be revealed to me all at once; but by the end of June I had stopped getting tears in my eyes when Mr Webster called me for dictation; the letters I typed had fewer, smaller holes in them, I occasionally got the right side of the carbon paper so the copy was on onion skin instead of inside out on the back of the original letter;
I could sometimes find things in the files and I had almost finished the maps.
The maps and the files were the worst things I did to dear, kind Mr Webster. I never was able to figure out the filing system; why letters were sometimes filed by the name of the man who wrote them, sometimes by the name of a mine, sometimes in a little black folder marked Urgent and sometimes in a drawer marked Hold.
Of course, if I’d stopped batting around the office like a moth around a nightlight, had read the correspondence and asked a few intelligent questions, I might have learned the secret of the filing system, but I didn’t. I operated on the theory that always hurrying wildly, never asking questions and shutting up Mr Webster with ‘I know, I know’, any time he tried to volunteer any information, were proof of great efficiency on my part. Because of this unfortunate state of affairs, Mr Webster is still looking for things.
I’d pick up a letter, notice that the letterhead was Fulton Mining Company or that it was signed by a man named Thompson, so eeny, meeny, miney, mo—it would go either in F or T. Then Mr Webster would ask for that letter on the Beede Mine and I would look under B, under Urgent, under Hold, under M, under my desk, under his, and finally days later, quite by accident, would find it under T or F because the Fulton Mining letter, written by Thompson, was about the Beede Mine.
It is hard now for me to believe that I was that stupid, but I was, and it was easy for me. Take the matter of the maps.
One rainy, dull morning, when Mr Webster was away on a short trip and I was flitting around the office, I happened to bump into the map case. Now there was a messy thing. Thousands of maps all rolled sloppily and stuffed in the case every which way.
“How does poor dear Mr Webster ever find anything?” I said, opening the glass door and settling myself for a good thorough cleaning job. Now, a mining engineer’s maps like an architect’s drawings or a surgeon’s living patients, are the visual proof that he did graduate from college, has examined the property and does know what he is doing.
“Here is the ore deposit”, Mr Webster would say, spreading out his maps and indicating little specks. “By tunnelling through this mountain, changing the course of this river, bringing a rail-road in here and putting a smelter here . . .”
So, I unrolled all the maps, cleaned the smudges off them with an eraser, and rolled them all up again, each one separately and each one with an elastic band around it. Then I sorted them according to size, the littlest ones on the top shelf, the medium-sized ones on the next shelf, the biggest one on the bottom. I was very tired and dirty when I finished but I glowed with accomplishment.
That night at dinner I told Mary about my wonderful progress at Mr Webster’s; how I took dictation, found things in the files and had even sorted his maps. Mary said, “I told you mining was easy.”
Then Mr Webster returned from his trip, accompanied by an important man from Johannesburg, South Africa, and for the first time since I had been working there, asked me to find him some maps. “Get me those maps on the Connor mine”, he said and I jogged happily over to the map case but when I got there I realized that with my new filing system, it wasn’t the name of the map that counted but the size.
I called to Mr Webster, “What size is the Connor map?”
He answered rather testily, “What do you mean, ‘what size’? It’s that big bundle near the front on the bottom shelf.”
My spirits fell with a thud that rattled the glass doors of the map case as I suddenly realized that the big bundle near the front on the bottom shelf was now about twenty-five bundles on all the shelves. So Mr Webster, who had heretofore always filed the maps and knew exactly where each one had been, the man from Johannesburg and I spent the rest of the day on the floor by the map case unrolling maps. We had found most of the Connor mine by eight-thirty and I was released.
The next morning there was a note on my desk. ‘Betty: Have gone to Denver, will be back Monday—please return maps to their original confusion—Webster.’
Before I finished, however, the home office closed the Seattle office and mining was over.
4
‘So Is Lumber’
‘YOU THOUGHT YOU COULDN’T learn mining’, Mary told me when she installed me as her assistant in the office across the street. ‘There’s nothing to lumber, it’s just a matter of being able to divide everything by twelve.’
“What about Mr Chalmers?” I asked. “Does he know you’ve hired me?”
“He knows that I’ve hired an extremely intelligent young lady who has spent the last four years practically living in logging camps in the greatest stand of timber in the United States and anyway what’s it to him? You’re my assistant. Go and sharpen this pencil.”
I was worried. I hadn’t yet met Mr Chalmers and, though I knew that he didn’t want to be bothered with details, I had no assurance that he would consider Mary’s new assistant at $125 a month, a detail; especially when he learned that in Seattle most female office workers were paid from seven to twenty dollars a week and $125 a month was considered a man’s salary, except in a few rare instances where a woman with years of experience showed terrific and unusual efficiency.
I was quite sure that as soon as Mr Chalmers found out about me he would fire me, but what worried me more was a fear that he would also fire Mary for having hired me. Of course, I was reckoning without Mary or Mr Chalmers. Mr Chalmers was not a figment of Mary’s imagination, requiring Joe Doner to prove him, but was a real, unique individual whose sole aim actually was to be the biggest-time executive that had ever hit Seattle, no matter what it cost the lumbermen, and in Mary he had certainly chosen the right person to help him.
About ten-thirty Mr Chalmers made his entrance into, or rather descent upon, the office. The door to the outer office crashed open and banged shut; the door to the conference room crashed open and banged shut; the door to his private office crashed open and banged shut; then the buzzer on Mary’s desk began to buzz with short angry bursts like a bee in a tin can. I flinched nervously at each slamming door and jumped to my feet at the first ring of the buzzer.
Mary, who was checking some lumber reports, didn’t even look up. The angry buzzing continued. Finally, anxiously I asked, “Do you want me to see what he wants?” Mary said, “I already know what the old stinker wants. He wants somebody to yell at because he is nasty in the morning. Come on, let’s get a cup of coffee. He’ll be pleasanter when we get back.”
She picked up the phone, pressed a bell at the side of the desk and said, “Mr Chalmers, I’m going out for coffee, will you please take any calls?” There was a roar from the inner office and the phone sputtered like water on a hot stove, but Mary put it back on the hook, beckoned to me and we skittered out of the office and down the stairs to the next floor to wait for the elevator. While we waited we could hear via the elevator shaft and the stairwell, Mr Chalmers charging around on the floor above, slamming doors and bellowing, ‘Miss Bard! Miss BARD!’
I certainly did not look forward to meeting him and couldn’t understand how Mary could laugh and talk and eat a butterhorn in the coffee shop while that monster waited for her upstairs. She said not to worry, he would be cooled off by the time we got back, and he was. Mary dragged me, quivering, in to introduce me, and Mr Chalmers, looking like a hair seal with a cigar in its mouth, smiled at me kindly and said, “Humph!”
For the next two or three days he buzzed for me (my signal was two short) to get him drinks of water, to open and close the windows, to pick up scraps of paper off the floor, to lower the Venetian blinds four inches and to unlock the safe and get him his whisky. Once he asked me some questions about logging on the Olympic Peninsula and when I was able to answer he seemed terribly pleased and retaliated with stories of logging in the cypress swamps.
I still don’t know exactly what Mr Chalmers was doing, or what the office was for, but it was a very pleasant place to work. When I wasn’t answering the buzzer and ministering to the many little personal needs of Mr Chalmers, I was in the outer o
ffice typing reports for Mary, learning to cut stencils, running the mimeograph or working on a story we were writing, called ‘Sandra Surrenders’.
Then one day Mr Chalmers buzzed for me and when I came eagerly in, dustcloth in hand, instead of ordering me to kill a fly or empty the ash trays, he announced that starting the next morning, I was to spend all my time in the Seattle Public Library reading everything that had been written on the Sherman Anti-Trust Act.
He didn’t tell me what he had in mind and I was too timid to ask him, so I asked Mary. She wrinkled her forehead in a puzzled way and said, “It sounds as if I might have told him that you had studied law. Oh, well, don’t worry about it, you’ve got as good a brain as he has, which isn’t saying much for you. Go on up and read everything you can find, take notes and write a report. He’ll never look at it but he’ll be very pleased at your industry.”
So, for the next week or two, feeling as though I were still in college trying for straight A’s, I dutifully spent my days in the library reading and taking notes and when I handed Mr Chalmers an original and two copies of the voluminous report, he, obviously having forgotten who I was or what I was doing, glanced at it and put it in the bottom drawer of his desk, then gave me a long lecture on Pitman shorthand, which he wrote and I didn’t.
A week after the Sherman Anti-Trust laws had been disposed of, Mr Chalmers announced one morning that from then on I was to read the Wall Street Journal, The Banker’s Digest and a couple of other financial papers, pick out all items of importance and interest and relay them weekly, by means of an interesting, he stressed this word vehemently, bulletin to all the lumbermen in the State of Washington. Friday I was to assemble my material, write it up and leave it on his desk for him to peruse and digest (and confuse and insert ‘point of fact’ every other word); Saturday morning was to cut the stencils, run them off on the mimeograph and assemble and mail the bulletin.