New York (N.Y.) -- Fiction; Women white collar workers -- Fiction
Yet, with their merry eyes, their quick little foreign cries and
gestures of sympathy, their laughter that rumbled in their tremendous
beards, their habit of having coffee and pinochle in the office every
Friday afternoon, their sincere belief that, as the bosses, they were
not omniscient rulers, but merely elder fellow-workers--with these
un-American, eccentric, patriarchal ways, Herzfeld and Cohn had made
their office a joyous adventure. Other people "in the trade" sniffed at
Herzfeld and Cohn for their Quixotic notions of discipline, but they
made it pay in dividends as well as in affection. At breakfast Una would
find herself eager to get back to work, though Herzfeld and Cohn had but
a plain office in an ugly building of brownstone and iron Corinthian
columns, resembling an old-fashioned post-office, and typical of all
that block on Church Street. There was such gentleness here as Una was
not to find in the modern, glazed-brick palace of Pemberton's.
§ 3
Above railroad yards and mean tenements in Long Island City, just across
the East River from New York, the shining milky walls of Pemberton's
bulk up like a castle overtowering a thatched village. It is
magnificently the new-fashioned, scientific, efficient business
institution.... Except, perhaps, in one tiny detail. King Pemberton and
his princely sons do not believe in all this nonsense about
profit-sharing, or a minimum wage, or an eight-hour day, or pensions, or
any of the other fads by which dangerous persons like Mr. Ford, the
motor manufacturer, encourage the lazier workmen to think that they have
just as much right to rise to the top as the men who have had nerve and
foresight. And indeed Mr. Pemberton may be sound. He says that he bases
wages on the economic law of supply and demand, instead of on sentiment;
and how shrewdly successful are he and his sons is indicated by the fact
that Pemberton's is one of the largest sources of drugs and proprietary
medicines in the world; the second largest manufactory of soda-fountain
syrups; of rubber, celluloid, and leather goods of the kind seen in
corner drug-stores; and the third largest manufactory of soaps and
toilet articles. It has been calculated that ninety-three million women
in all parts of the world have ruined their complexions, and, therefore,
their souls, by Pemberton's creams and lotions for saving the same; and
that nearly three-tenths of the alcohol consumed in prohibition counties
is obtained in Pemberton's tonics and blood-builders and women's
specifics, the last being regarded by large farmers with beards as
especially tasty and stimulating. Mr. Pemberton is the Napoleon of
patent medicine, and also the Napoleon of drugs used by physicians to
cure the effects of patent medicine. He is the Shakespeare of ice-cream
sodas, and the Edison of hot-water bags. He rules more than five
thousand employees, and his name is glorious on cartons in drug-stores,
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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