“But at that, I only took a hundred shares. I don’t believe in all this stock-gambling. What I want is sound, conservative investments,” said Mr. Schwirtz.
“Yes, I should think you’d be awfully practical,” mused Una. “My! three dollars to two hundred! You’ll make an awful lot out of it.”
“Well, now, I’m not saying anything. I don’t pretend to be a Wisenheimer. May be nine or ten years—nineteen seventeen or nineteen eighteen—before we are doing a regular business. And at that, the shares may never go above par. But still, I guess I’m middlin’ practical—not like these socialists, ha, ha!”
“How did you ever get your commercial training?”
The question encouraged him to tell the story of his life.
Mostly it was a story of dates and towns and jobs—jobs he had held and jobs from which he had resigned, and all the crushing things he had said to the wicked bosses during those victorious resignings.... Clerk in a general store, in a clothing-store, in a hardware-store—all these in Ohio. A quite excusable, almost laudable, failure in his own hardware-store in a tiny Wisconsin town. Half a dozen clerkships. Collector for a harvester company in Nebraska, going from farm to farm by buggy. Traveling salesman for a St. Paul wholesaler, for a Chicago clothing-house. Married. Partner with his brother-in-law in a drug, paint, and stationery store. Traveling for a Boston paint-house. For the Lowry Paint Company of Jersey City. Now with the automobile wax company. A typical American business career, he remarked, though somehow distinctive, different— A guiding star—
Una listened murmuringly, and he was encouraged to try to express the inner life behind his jobs. Hesitatingly he sought to make vivid his small-boy life in the hills of West Virginia: carving initials, mowing lawns, smoking corn silk, being arrested on Hallowe’en, his father’s death, a certain Irving who was his friend, “carrying a paper route” during two years of high school. His determination to “make something of himself.” His arrival in Columbus, Ohio, with just seventy-eight cents—he emphasized it: “just seventy-eight cents, that’s every red cent I had, when I started out to look for a job, and I didn’t know a single guy in town.” His reading of books during the evenings of his first years in Ohio; he didn’t “remember their titles, exactly,” he said, but he was sure that “he read a lot of them. ”... At last he spoke of his wife, of their buggy-riding, of their neat frame house with the lawn and the porch swing. Of their quarrels—he made it clear that his wife had been “finicky,” and had “fool notions,” but he praised her for having “come around and learned that a man is a man, and sometimes he means a lot better than it looks like; prob’ly he loves her a lot better than a lot of these plush-soled, soft-tongued fellows that give’em a lot of guff and lovey-dovey stuff and don’t shell out the cash. She was a good sport—one of the best.”
Of the death of their baby boy.
“He was the brightest little kid—everybody loved him. When I came home tired at night he would grab my finger—see, this first finger—and hold it, and want me to show him the bunny-book.... And then he died.”
Mr. Schwirtz told it simply, looking at clouds spread on the blue sky like a thrown handful of white paint.