§ 2
When Mr. Schwirtz was away Una was happy by contrast. Indeed she found a more halcyon rest than at any other period since her girlhood; and in long hours of thinking and reading and trying to believe in life, the insignificant good little thing became a calm-browed woman.
Mrs. Lawrence had married the doctor and gone off to Ohio. They motored much, she wrote, and read aloud, and expected a baby. Una tried to be happy in them.
Una had completely got out of touch with Mr. and Mrs. Sessions, but after her marriage she had gone to call on Mamie Magen, now prosperous and more earnest than ever, in a Greenwich Village flat; on Jennie Cassavant, sometime of the Home Club, now obscurely on the stage; on curly-haired Rose Larsen, who had married a young lawyer. But Una had fancied that they were suspiciously kind to her, and in angry pride she avoided them. She often wondered what they had heard about Mr. Schwirtz from the talkative Mrs. Lawrence. She conceived scenes in which she was haughtily rhapsodic in defending her good, sensible husband before them. Then she would long for them and admit that doubtless she had merely imagined their supercilious pity. But she could not go back to them as a beggar for friendship.
Also, though she never admitted this motive to herself, she was always afraid that some day, if she kept in touch with them, her husband would demand: “Why don’t you trot out these fussy lady friends of yours? Ashamed of me, eh?”
So she drifted away from them, and at times when she could not endure solitariness she depended upon the women of the family hotel, whom she met in the corridors and café and “parlor.”
The aristocrats among them, she found, were the wives of traveling salesmen, good husbands and well loved, most of them, writing to their wives daily and longing for the time when they could have places in the suburbs, with room for chickens and children and love. These aristocrats mingled only with the sound middle-class of the hotel women, whose husbands were clerks and bookkeepers resident in the city, or traveling machinery experts who went about installing small power-plants. They gossiped with Una about the husbands of the déclassé women—men suspected to be itinerant quack doctors, sellers of dubious mining or motor stock, or even crooks and gamblers.
There was a group of three or four cheery, buxom, much-bediamonded, much-massaged women, whose occasionally appearing husbands were sleek and overdressed. To Una these women were cordial. They invited her to go shopping, to matinées. But they stopped so often for cocktails, they told so many intimate stories of their relations with their husbands, that Una was timid before them, and edged away from their invitations except when she was desperately lonely. Doubtless she learned more about the mastery of people from them, however, than from the sighing, country-bred hotel women of whom she was more fond; for the cheerful hussies had learned to make the most of their shoddy lives.
Only one woman in the hotel did Una accept as an actual friend—Mrs. Wade, a solid, slangy, contented woman with a child to whom she was devoted. She had, she told Una, “been stuck with a lemon of a husband. He was making five thousand a year when I married him, and then he went to pieces. Good-looking, but regular poor white trash. So I cleaned house—kicked him out. He’s in Boston now. Touches me for a ten-spot now and then. I support myself and the kid by working for a department store. I’m a wiz at bossing dressmakers—make a Lucile gown out of the rind of an Edam cheese. Take nothing off nobody—especially you don’t see me taking any more husbands off nobody.”
Mostly, Una was able to make out an existence by herself.
She read everything—from the lacy sentimentalism of Myrtle Read to Samuel Butler and translations of Gorky and Flaubert. She nibbled at histories of art, and was confirmed in her economic theology by shallow but earnest manuals of popular radicalism. She got books from a branch public library, or picked them up at second-hand stalls. At first she was determined to be “serious” in her reading, but more and more she took light fiction as a drug to numb her nerves—and forgot the tales as soon as she had read them.
In ten years of such hypnotic reading Mrs. Una Golden Schwirtz would not be very different from that Mrs. Captain Golden who, alone in a flat, had read all day, and forgotten what she had read, and let life dream into death.
But now Una was still fighting to keep in life.
She began to work out her first definite philosophy of existence. In essence it was not so very different from the blatant optimism of Mr. S. Herbert Ross—except that it was sincere.
“Life is hard and astonishingly complicated,” she concluded. “No one great reform will make it easy. Most of us who work—or want to work—will always have trouble or discontent. So we must learn to be calm, and train all our faculties, and make others happy.”
No more original than this was her formulated philosophy—the commonplace creed of a commonplace woman in a rather less than commonplace family hotel. The important thing was not the form of it, but her resolve not to sink into nothingness.... She hoped that some day she would get a job again. She sometimes borrowed a typewriter from the manager of the hotel, and she took down in shorthand the miscellaneous sermons—by Baptists, Catholics, Reformed rabbis, Christian Scientists, theosophists, High Church Episcopalians, Hindu yogis, or any one else handy—with which she filled up her dull Sundays.... Except as practice in stenography she found their conflicting religions of little value to lighten her life. The ministers seemed so much vaguer than the hard-driving business men with whom she had worked; and the question of what Joshua had done seemed to have little relation to what Julius Schwirtz was likely to do. The city had come between her and the Panama belief that somehow, mysteriously, one acquired virtue by enduring dull sermons.
She depended more on her own struggle to make a philosophy.
That philosophy, that determination not to sink into paralyzed despair, often broke down when her husband was in town, but she never gave up trying to make it vital to her.
So, through month on month, she read, rocking slowly in the small, wooden rocker, or lying on the coarse-coverleted bed, while round her the hotel room was still and stale-smelling and fixed, and outside the window passed the procession of life—trucks laden with crates of garments consigned to Kansas City and Bangor and Seattle and Bemidji; taxicabs with passengers for the mammoth hotels; office-girls and policemen and salesmen and all the lusty crew that had conquered the city or were well content to be conquered by it.
CHAPTER XVII
LATE in the summer of 1912, at a time when Una did not expect the return of her husband for at least three weeks, she was in their room in the afternoon, reading “Salesmanship for Women,” and ruminatively eating lemon-drops from a small bag.
As though he were a betrayed husband dramatically surprising her, Mr. Schwirtz opened the door, dropped a large suit-case, and stood, glaring.
“Well!” he said, with no preliminary, “so here you are! For once you could—”
“Why, Ed! I didn’t expect to see you for—”
He closed the door and gesticulated. “No! Of course you didn’t. Why ain’t you out with some of your swell friends that I ain’t good enough to meet, shopping, and buying dresses, and God knows what—”
“Why, Ed!”
“Oh, don’t ‘why-Ed’ me! Well, ain’t you going to come and kiss me? Nice reception when a man’s come home tired from a hard trip—wife so busy reading a book that she don’t even get up from her chair and make him welcome in his own room that he pays for. Yes, by—”
“Why, you didn’t—you don’t act as though—”
“Yes, sure, that’s right; lay it all on—”
“—you wanted me to kiss you.”
“Well, neither would anybody if they’d had all the worries I’ve had, sitting there worrying on a slow, hot train that stopped at every pig-pen—yes, and on a day-coach, too, by golly! Somebody in this family has got to economize!—while you sit here cool and comfortable; not a thing on your mind but your hair; not a thing to worry about except thinking how damn superior you are to your husband! Oh, sure! But I made up my mind—I thought it all out for once, and I made up my mind to one thing, you can help me out by economizing, anyway.”
“Oh, Ed, I don’t know what you’re driving at. I haven’t been extravagant, ever. Why, I’ve asked you any number of times not to spend so much money for suppers and so forth—”
“Yes, sure, lay it all onto me. I’m fair game for everybody that’s looking for a nice, soft, easy, safe boob to kick! Why, look there!”
While she still sat marveling he pounced on the meek little five-cent bag of lemon-drops, shook it as though it were a very small kitten, and whined: “Look at this! Candy or something all the while! You never have a single cent left when I come home—candy and ice-cream sodas, and matinées, and dresses, and everything you can think of. If it ain’t one thing, it’s another. Well, you’ll either save from now on—”
“Look here! What do you mean, working off your grouch on—”
“—or else you won’t have anything to spend, un’erstand? And when it comes down to talking about grouches I suppose you’ll be real pleased to know—this will be sweet news, probably, to you—I’ve been fired!”
“Fired? Oh, Ed!”
“Yes, fired-oh-Ed. Canned. Got the gate. Thrown out. Got the razzle-dazzle. Got the hook thrown into me. Bounced. Kiyudeled. That is, at least, I will be, as soon as I let the old man get at me, judging from the love-letters he’s been sending me, inviting me to cut a switch and come out to the wood-shed with him.”
“Oh, Ed dear, what was the trouble?”
She walked up to him, laid her hand on his shoulder. Her voice was earnest, her eyes full of pity. He patted her hand, seemed from her gentle nearness to draw comfort—not passion. He slouched over to the bed, and sat with his thick legs stuck out in front of him, his hands in his trousers pockets, while he mused:
“Oh, I don’t hardly know what it is all about. My sales have been falling off, all rightee. But, good Lord! that’s no fault of mine. I work my territory jus’ as hard as I ever did, but I can’t meet the competition of the floor-wax people. They’re making an auto polish now—better article at a lower price—and what can I do? They got a full line, varnish, cleaner, polish, swell window displays, national advertising, swell discounts—everything; and I can’t buck competition like that. And then a lot of the salesmen at our shop are jealous of me, and one thing and another. Well, now I’ll go down and spit the old man in the eye couple o’ times, and get canned, unless I can talk him out of his bad acting. Oh, I’ll throw a big bluff. I’ll be the little misunderstood boy, but I don’t honestly think I can put anything across on him. I’m— Oh, hell, I guess I’m getting old. I ain’t got the pep I used to have. Not but what J. Eddie Schwirtz can still sell goods, but I can’t talk up to the boss like I could once. I gotta feel some sympathy at the home office. And I by God deserve it—way I’ve worked and slaved for that bunch of cutthroats, and now— Sure, that’s the way it goes in this world. I tell you, I’m gonna turn socialist!”
“Ed—listen, Ed. Please, oh, please don’t be offended now; but don’t you think perhaps the boss thinks you drink too much?”
“How could he? I don’t drink very much, and you know it. I don’t hardly touch a drop, except maybe just for sociability. God! this temperance wave gets my goat! Lot of hot-air females telling me what I can do and what I can’t do—fella that knows when to drink and when to stop. Drink? Why, you ought to see some of the boys! There’s Burke McCullough. Say, I bet he puts away forty drinks a day, if he does one, and I don’t know that it hurts him any; but me—”
“Yes, I know, dear. I was just thinking—maybe your boss is one of the temperance cranks,” Una interrupted. Mr. Schwirtz’s arguments regarding the privileges of a manly man sounded very familiar. This did not seem to be a moment for letting her husband get into the full swing of them. She begged: “What will you do if they let you out? I wish there was something I could do to help.”
“Dun’no’. There’s a pretty close agreement between a lot of the leading paint-and-varnish people—gentleman’s agreement—and it’s pretty hard to get in any place if you’re in Dutch with any of the others. Well, I’m going down now and watch’em gwillotine me. You better not wait to have dinner with me. I’ll be there late, thrashing all over the carpet with the old man, and then I gotta see some fellas and start something. Come here, Una.”
He stood up. She came to him, and when he put his two hands on her shoulders she tried to keep her aversion to his touch out of her look.
He shook his big, bald head. He was unhappy and his eyes were old. “Nope,” he said; “nope. Can’t be done. You mean well, but you haven’t got any fire in you. Kid, can’t you understand that there are wives who’ve got so much passion in’em that if their husbands came home clean-licked, like I am, they’d—oh, their husbands would just naturally completely forget their troubles in love—real love, with fire in it. Women that aren’t ashamed of having bodies.... But, oh, Lord! it ain’t your fault. I shouldn’t have said anything. There’s lots of wives like you. More’n one man’s admitted his wife was like that, when he’s had a couple drinks under his belt to loosen his tongue. You’re not to blame, but— I’m sorry.... Don’t mind my grouch when I came in. I was so hot, and I’d been worrying and wanted to blame things onto somebody.... Don’t wait for me at dinner. If I ain’t here by seven, go ahead and feed. Good-by.”