§ 3
They had less than two hundred dollars ahead. But Mr. Schwirtz borrowed a hundred from his friend, Burke McCullough, and did not visibly have to suffer from want of highballs, cigars, and Turkish baths. From the window of their room Una used to see him cross the street to the café entrance of the huge Saffron Hotel—and once she saw him emerge from it with a fluffy blonde. But she did not attack him. She was spellbound in a strange apathy, as in a dream of swimming on forever in a warm and slate-hued sea. She was confident that he would soon have another position. He had over-ridden her own opinions about business—the opinions of the underling who never sees the great work as a rounded whole—till she had come to have a timorous respect for his commercial ability.
Apparently her wifely respect was not generally shared in the paint business. At least Mr. Schwirtz did not soon get his new position.
The manager of the hotel came to the room with his bill and pressed for payment. And after three weeks—after a night when he had stayed out very late and come home reeking with perfume—Mr. Schwirtz began to hang about the room all day long and to soak himself in the luxury of complaining despair.
Then came the black days.
There were several scenes (during which she felt like a beggar about to be arrested) between Mr. Schwirtz and the landlord, before her husband paid part of a bill whose size astounded her.
Mr. Schwirtz said that he was “expecting something to turn up—nothin’ he could do but wait for some telephone calls.” He sat about with his stockinged feet cocked up on the bed, reading detective stories till he fell asleep in his chair. He drank from unlabeled pint flasks of whisky all day. Once, when she opened a bureau drawer of his by mistake, she saw half a dozen whisky-flasks mixed with grimy collars, and the sour smell nauseated her. But on food—they had to economize on that! He took her to a restaurant of fifteen-cent breakfasts and twenty-five-cent dinners. It was the “parlor floor” of an old brownstone house—two rooms, with eggy table-cloths, and moldings of dusty stucco.
She avoided his presence as much as possible. Mrs. Wade, the practical dressmaker, who was her refuge among the women of the hotel, seemed to understand what was going on, and gave Una a key to her room. Here Una sat for hours. When she went back to their room quarrels would spring up apropos of anything or nothing.
The fault was hers as much as his. She was no longer trying to conceal her distaste, while he, who had a marital conscience of a sort, was almost pathetic in his apologies for being unable to “show her a good time.” And he wanted her soothing. He was more and more afraid of her as the despair of the jobless man in the hard city settled down on him. He wanted her to agree with him that there was a conspiracy against him.
She listened to him and said nothing, till he would burst out in abuse:
“You women that have been in business simply ain’t fit to be married. You think you’re too good to help a man. Yes, even when you haven’t been anything but dub stenographers. I never noticed that you were such a whale of a success! I don’t suppose you remember how you used to yawp to me about the job being too much for you! And yet when I want a little sympathy you sit there and hand me the frozen stare like you were the president of the Standard Oil Company and I was a bum office-boy. Yes, sir, I tell you business simply unfits a skirt for marriage.”
“No,” she said, “not for marriage that has any love and comradeship in it. But I admit a business woman doesn’t care to put up with being a cow in a stable.”
“What the devil do you mean—”
“Maybe,” she went on, “the business women will bring about a new kind of marriage in which men will have to keep up respect and courtesy.... I wonder—I wonder how many millions of women in what are supposed to be happy homes are sick over being chambermaids and mistresses till they get dulled and used to it. Nobody will ever know. All these books about women being emancipated—you’d think marriage had changed entirely. Yet, right now, in 1912, in Panama and this hotel—not changed a bit. The business women must simply compel men to—oh, to shave!”
She went out (perhaps she slammed the door a little, in an unemancipated way) to Mrs. Wade’s room.
That discussion was far more gentle and coherent than most of their quarrels.
It may have been rather to the credit of Mr. Schwirtz—it may have been a remnant of the clean pride which the boy Eddie Schwirtz must once have had, that, whenever she hinted that she would like to go back to work—he raged: “So you think I can’t support you, eh? My God! I can stand insults from all my old friends—the fellas that used to be tickled to death to have me buy’em a drink, but now they dodge around the corner as though they thought I was going to try to borrow four bits from’em—I can stand their insults, but, by God! it is pretty hard on a man when his own wife lets him know that she don’t think he can support her!”
And he meant it.
She saw that, felt his resentment. But she more and more often invited an ambition to go back to work, to be independent and busy, no matter how weary she might become. To die, if need be, in the struggle. Certainly that death would be better than being choked in muck.... One of them would have to go to work, anyway.
She discovered that an old acquaintance of his had offered him an eighteen-dollar-a-week job as a clerk in a retail paint-shop, till he should find something better. Mr. Schwirtz was scornful about it, and his scorn, which had once intimidated Una, became grotesquely absurd to her.
Then the hotel-manager came with a curt ultimatum: “Pay up or get out,” he said.
Mr. Schwirtz spent an hour telephoning to various acquaintances, trying to raise another hundred dollars. He got the promise of fifty. He shaved, put on a collar that for all practical purposes was quite clean, and went out to collect his fifty as proudly as though he had earned it.
Una stared at herself in the mirror over the bureau, and said, aloud: “I don’t believe it! It isn’t you, Una Golden, that worked, and paid your debts. You can’t, dear, you simply can’t be the wife of a man who lives by begging—a dirty, useless, stupid beggar. Oh, no, no! You wouldn’t do that—you couldn’t marry a man like that simply because the job had exhausted you. Why, you’d die at work first. Why, if you married him for board and keep, you’d be a prostitute—you’d be marrying him just because he was a ‘good provider.’ And probably, when he didn’t provide any more, you’d be quitter enough to leave him—maybe for another man. You couldn’t do that. I don’t believe life could bully you into doing that.... Oh, I’m hysterical; I’m mad. I can’t believe I am what I am—and yet I am!... Now he’s getting that fifty and buying a drink—”