“Yes, bet they were engaged. Oh, say, did I tell you about the first day I came here, and Starr took me aside, and says he—”
In their hour-long talks Mr. Schwirtz had not told much about himself, though of his business he had talked often. But on an afternoon when they took a book and a lunch and tramped off to a round-topped, grassy hill, he finally confided in her, and her mild interest in him as an amiable companion deepened to sympathy.
The book was The People of the Abyss, by Jack London, which Mamie Magen had given to Una as an introduction to a knowledge of social conditions. Una had planned to absorb it; to learn how the shockingly poor live. Now she read the first four pages to Mr. Schwirtz. After each page he said that he was interested. At the end of the fourth page, when Una stopped for breath, he commented: “Fine writer, that fella London. And they say he’s quite a fella; been a sailor and a miner and all kinds of things; ver’ intimate friend of mine knows him quite well—met him in’Frisco—and he says he’s been a sailor and all kinds of things. But he’s a socialist. Tell you, I ain’t got much time for these socialists. Course I’m kind of a socialist myself lots-a ways, but these here fellas that go around making folks discontented—! Agitators—! Don’t suppose it’s that way with this London—he must be pretty well fixed, and so of course he’s prob’ly growing conservative and sensible. But most of these socialists are just a lazy bunch of bums that try and see how much trouble they can stir up. They think that just because they’re too lazy to find an opening, that they got the right to take the money away from the fellas that hustle around and make good. Trouble with all these socialist guys is that they don’t stop to realize that you can’t change human nature. They want to take away all the rewards for initiative and enterprise, just as Sam Cannon was saying. Do you s’pose I’d work my head off putting a proposition through if there wasn’t anything in it for me? Then,’nother thing, about all this submerged tenth—these ‘People of the Abyss,’ and all the rest: I don’t feel a darn bit sorry for them. They stick in London or New York or wherever they are, and live on charity, and if you offered’em a good job they wouldn’t take it. Why, look here! all through the Middle West the farmers are just looking for men at three dollars a day, and for hired girls, they’d give hired girls three and four dollars a week and a good home. But do all these people go out and get the jobs? Not a bit of it! They’d rather stay home and yelp about socialism and anarchism and Lord knows what-all. ‘Nother thing: I never could figger out what all these socialists and I. W. W.’s, these ‘I Won’t Work’s,’ would do if we did divide up and hand all the industries over to them. I bet they’d be the very first ones to kick for a return to the old conditions! I tell you, it surprises me when a good, bright man like Jack London or this fella, Upton Sinclair—they say he’s a well-educated fella, too—don’t stop and realize these things.”
“But—” said Una.
Then she stopped.
Her entire knowledge of socialism was comprised in the fact that Mamie Magen believed in it, and that Walter Babson alternated between socialism, anarchism, and a desire to own a large house in Westchester and write poetry and be superior to the illiterate mass. So to the economic spokesman for the Great American Business Man her answer was:
“But—”
“Then look here,” said Mr. Schwirtz. “Take yourself. S’pose you like to work eight hours a day? Course you don’t. Neither do I. I always thought I’d like to be a gentleman farmer and take it easy. But the good Lord saw fit to stick us into these jobs, that’s all we know about it; and we do our work and don’t howl about it like all these socialists and radicals and other windjammers that know more than the Constitution and Congress and a convention of Philadelphia lawyers put together. You don’t want to work as hard as you do and then have to divide up every Saturday with some lazy bum of a socialist that’s too lazy to support himself—yes, or to take a bath!—now do you?”
“Well, no,” Una admitted, in face of this triumphant exposure of liberal fallacies.
The book slipped into her lap.