The Job Part 28

She rested her face on his shoulder. It seemed broad and strong and protective.

She was glad when he put his arm about her.

She was married to Mr. Schwirtz about two weeks later.

- 3

She had got herself to call him "Ed." ... "Eddie" she could not encompa.s.s, even in that fortnight of rushing change and bewilderment.

She asked for a honeymoon trip to Savannah. She wanted to rest; she had to rest or she would break, she said.

They went to Savannah, to the live-oaks and palmettoes and quiet old squares.

But she did not rest. Always she brooded about the unleashed brutality of their first night on the steamer, the strong, inescapable man-smell of his neck and shoulders, the boisterous jokes he kept telling her.

He insisted on their staying at a commercial hotel at Savannah. Whenever she went to lie down, which was frequently, he played poker and drank highb.a.l.l.s. He tried in his sincerest way to amuse her. He took her to theaters, restaurants, road-houses. He arranged a three days'

hunting-trip, with a darky cook. He hired motor-boats and motor-cars and told her every "here's a new one," that he heard. But she dreaded his casual-seeming suggestions that she drink plenty of champagne; dreaded his complaints, whiney as a small boy, "Come now, Unie, show a little fire. I tell you a fellow's got a right to expect it at this time." She dreaded his frankness of undressing, of shaving; dreaded his occasional irritated protests of "Don't be a finicking, romantic school-miss. I may not wear silk underclo' and perfume myself like some b.u.m actor, but I'm a regular guy"; dreaded being alone with him; dreaded always the memory of that first cataclysmic night of their marriage; and mourned, as in secret, for year on year, thousands of women do mourn. "Oh, I wouldn't care now if he had just been gentle, been considerate.... Oh, Ed _is_ good; he _does_ mean to care for me and give me a good time, but--"

When they returned to New York, Mr. Schwirtz said, robustly: "Well, little old trip made consid'able hole in my wad. I'm clean busted. Down to one hundred bucks in the bank."

"Why, I thought you were several thousand ahead!"

"Oh--oh! I lost most of that in a little flyer on stocks--thought I'd make a killing, and got turned into lamb-chops; tried to recoup my losses on that d.a.m.n flying-machine, pa.s.senger-carrying game that that ---- ---- ---- ---- let me in for. Never mind, little sister; we'll start saving now. And it was worth it. Some trip, eh? You enjoyed it, didn't you--after the first couple days, while you were seasick? You'll get over all your fool, girly-girly notions now. Women always are like that. I remember the first missus was, too.... And maybe a few other skirts, though I guess I hadn't better tell no tales outa school on little old Eddie Schwirtz, eh? Ha, ha!... Course you high-strung virgin kind of s.h.e.m.a.l.es take some time to learn to get over your choosey, finicky ways. But, Lord love you! I don't mind that much. Never could stand for these rough-necks that claim they'd rather have a good, healthy walloping country wench than a nice, refined city lady. Why, I _like_ refinement! Yes, sir, I sure do!... Well, it sure was some trip.

Guess we won't forget it in a hurry, eh? Sure is nice to rub up against some Southern swells like we did that night at the Avocado Club. And that live bunch of salesmen. Gosh! Say, I'll never forget that Jock Sanderson. He was a comical cuss, eh? That story of his--"

"No," said Una, "I'll never forget the trip."

But she tried to keep the frenzy out of her voice. The frenzy was dying, as so much of her was dying. She hadn't realized a woman can die so many times and still live. Dead had her heart been at Pemberton's, yet it had secreted enough life to suffer horribly now, when it was again being mauled to death.

And she wanted to spare this man.

She realized that poor Ed Schwirtz, puttering about their temporary room in a side-street family hotel, yawning and scratching his head, and presumably comfortable in suspenders over a woolen undershirt--she realized that he treasured a joyous memory of their Savannah diversions.

She didn't want to take joy away from anybody who actually had it, she reflected, as she went over to the coa.r.s.e-lace hotel curtains, parted them, stared down on the truck-filled street, and murmured, "No, I can't ever forget."

Part III

MAN AND WOMAN

CHAPTER XVI

For two years Una Golden Schwirtz moved amid the blank procession of phantoms who haunt cheap family hotels, the apparitions of the corridors, to whom there is no home, nor purpose, nor permanence. Mere lodgers for the night, though for score on score of tasteless years they use the same alien hotel room as a place in which to take naps and store their trunks and comb their hair and sit waiting--for nothing. The men are mysterious. They are away for hours or months, or they sit in the smoking-room, glancing up expectant of fortunes that never come. But the men do have friends; they are permitted familiarities by the bartender in the cafe. It is the women and children who are most dehumanized. The children play in the corridors; they become bold and sophisticated; they expect attention from strangers. At fourteen the girls have long dresses and mature admirers, and the boys ape the manners of their shallow elders and discuss brands of cigarettes. The women sit and rock, empty-hearted and barren of hands. When they try to make individual homes out of their fixed molds of rooms--the hard walls, the bra.s.s bedsteads, the inevitable bureaus, the small rockers, and the transoms that always let in too much light from the hall at night--then they are only the more pathetic. For the small pictures of pulpy babies photographed as cupids, the tin souvenirs and the pseudo-Turkish scarves draped over trunks rob the rooms of the simplicity which is their only merit.

For two years--two years s.n.a.t.c.hed out of her life and traded for somnambulatory peace, Una lived this spectral life of one room in a family hotel on a side street near Sixth Avenue. The only other dwelling-places she saw were the flats of friends of her husband.

He often said, with a sound of pride: "We don't care a darn for all these would-be social climbers. The wife and I lead a regular Bohemian life. We know a swell little bunch of live ones, and we have some pretty nifty parties, lemme tell you, with plenty poker and hard liquor. And one-two of the bunch have got their own cars--I tell you they make a whole lot more coin than a lot of these society-column guys, even if they don't throw on the agony; and we all pile in and go up to some road-house, and sing, and play the piano, and have a real time."

Conceive Una--if through the fumes of cheap cigarettes you can make out the low lights of her fading hair--sitting there, trying patiently to play a "good, canny fist of poker"--which, as her husband often and irritably a.s.sured her, she would never learn to do. He didn't, he said, mind her losing his "good, hard-earned money," but he "hated to see Eddie Schwirtz's own wife more of a b.o.o.b than Mrs. Jock Sanderson, who's a regular guy; plays poker like a man."

Mrs. Sanderson was a black-haired, big-bosomed woman with a face as hard and smooth and expressionless as a dinner-plate, with cackling laughter and a tendency to say, "Oh, h.e.l.l, boys!" apropos of nothing. She was a "good sport" and a "good mixer," Mr. Schwirtz averred; and more and more, as the satisfaction of having for his new married mistress a "refined lady" grew dull, he adjured the refined lady to imitate Mrs.

Sanderson.

Fortunately, Mr. Schwirtz was out of town two-thirds of the time. But one-third of the time was a good deal, since for weeks before his coming she dreaded him; and for weeks after his going she remembered him with chill shame; since she hadn't even the whole-hearted enthusiasm of hating him, but always told herself that she was a prude, an abnormal, thin-blooded creature, and that she ought to appreciate "Ed's" desire to have her share his good times, be coa.r.s.e and jolly and natural.

His extravagance was constant. He was always planning to rent an expensive apartment and furnish it, but the money due him after each trip he spent immediately and they were never able to move away from the family hotel. He had to have taxicabs when they went to theaters. He would carol, "Oh, don't let's be pikers, little sister--nothing too good for Eddie Schwirtz, that's my motto." And he would order champagne, the one sort of good wine that he knew. He always overtipped waiters and enjoyed his own generosity. Generous he really was, in a clumsy way. He gave to Una all he had over from his diversions; urged her to buy clothes and go to matinees while he was away, and told it as a good joke that he "blew himself" so extensively on their parties that he often had to take day-coaches instead of sleepers for a week after he left New York.... Una had no notion of how much money he made, but she knew that he never saved it. She would beg: "Why don't you do like so many of the other traveling-men? Your Mr. Sanderson is saving money and buying real estate, even though he does have a good time. Let's cut out some of the unnecessary parties and things--"

"Rats! My Mr. Sanderson is a leet-le tight, like all them Scotch laddies. I'm going to start saving one of these days. But what can you do when the firm screws you down on expense allowances and don't hardly allow you one red cent of bonus on new business? There's no chance for a man to-day--these d.a.m.n capitalists got everything lashed down. I tell you I'm getting to be a socialist."

He did not seem to be a socialist of the same type as Mamie Magen, but he was interested in socialism to this extent--he always referred to it at length whenever Una mentioned saving money.

She had not supposed that he drank so much. Always he smelled of whisky, and she found quart bottles of it in his luggage when he returned from a trip.

But he never showed signs of drunkenness, except in his urgent attentions to her after one of their "jolly Bohemian parties."

More abhorrent to her was the growing slackness in his personal habits.... He had addressed her with great volubility and earnestness upon his belief that now they were married, she must get rid of all her virginal book-learned notions about reticence between husband and wife.

Such feminine "hanky-panky tricks," he a.s.sured her, were the cause of "all these finicky, unhappy marriages and these rotten divorces--lot of fool clubwomen and suffragettes and highbrows expecting a man to be like a nun. A man's a man, and the sooner a female gets on to that fact and doesn't nag, nag, nag him, and let's him go round being comfortable and natural, the kinder he'll be to her, and the better it'll be for all parties concerned. Every time! Don't forget that, old lady. Why, there's J. J. Vance at our shop. Married one of these up-dee-dee, poetry-reading, finicky women. Why, he did _everything_ for that woman.

Got a swell little house in Yonkers, and a vacuum cleaner, and a hired girl, and everything. Then, my G.o.d! she said she was _lonely_! Didn't have enough housework, that was the trouble with her; and darned if she doesn't kick when J. J. comes in all played out at night because he makes himself comfortable and sits around in his shirt-sleeves and slippers. Tell you, the first thing these women have gotta learn is that a man's a man, and if they learn that they won't _need_ a vote!"

Mr. Schwirtz's notion of being a man was to perform all hygienic processes as publicly as the law permitted. Apparently he was proud of his G.o.d-given body--though it had been slightly bloated since G.o.d had given it to him--and wanted to inspire her not only with the artistic vision of it, but with his care for it.... His thick woolen undergarments were so uncompromisingly wooleny.

Nor had Mr. Schwirtz any false modesty in his speech. If Una had made out a list of all the things she considered the most ba.n.a.l or nauseatingly vulgar, she would have included most of the honest fellow's favorite subjects. And at least once a day he mentioned his former wife.

At a restaurant dinner he gave a full account of her death, embalming, and funeral.

Una identified him with vulgarity so completely that she must often have been unjust to him. At least she was surprised now and then by a rea.s.sertion that he was a "highbrow," and that he decidedly disapproved of any sort of vulgarity. Several times this came out when he found her reading novels which were so coa.r.s.ely realistic as to admit the s.e.x and sweat of the world.

"Even if they _are_ true to life," he said, "I don't see why it's necessary to drag in unpleasant subjects. I tell you a fella gets too much of bad things in this world without reading about 'em in books.

Trouble with all these 'realists' as you call 'em, is that they're such dirty-minded hounds themselves that all they can see in life is the bad side."

Una surmised that the writers of such novels might, perhaps, desire to show the bad side in the hope that life might be made more beautiful.

But she wasn't quite sure of it, and she suffered herself to be overborne, when he snorted: "Nonsense! These fellas are just trying to show how sensational they can be, t' say nothing of talking like they was so d.a.m.n superior to the rest of us. Don't read 'em. Read pure authors like Howard Banc.o.c.k Binch, where, whenever any lady gets seduced or anything like that, the author shows it's because the villain is an atheist or something, and he treats all those things in a nice, fine, decent manner. Good Gawd! sometimes a fella 'd think, to see you scrooge up your nose when I'm shaving, that I'm common as dirt, but lemme tell you, right now, miss, I'm a darn sight too refined to read any of these nasty novels where they go to the trouble of describing homes that ain't any better than pig-pens. Oh, and another thing! I heard you telling Mrs. Sanderson you thought all kids oughta have s.e.x education. My _Gawd_! I don't know where you get those rotten ideas! Certainly not from me. Lemme tell you, no kid of mine is going to be made nasty-minded by having a lot of stuff like that taught her. Yes, sir, actually taught her right out in school."

Una was sufficiently desirous of avoiding contention to keep to novels which portrayed life--offices and family hotels and perspiratory husbands--as all for the best. But now and then she doubted, and looked up from the pile of her husband's white-footed black-cotton socks to question whether life need be confined to Panama and Pemberton and Schwirtz.

In deference to Mr. Schwirtz's demands on the novelists, one could scarce even suggest the most dreadful scene in Una's life, lest it be supposed that other women really are subject to such horror, or that the statistics regarding immoral diseases really mean anything in households such as we ourselves know.... She had reason to suppose that her husband was damaged goods. She crept to an old family doctor and had a fainting joy to find that she had escaped contamination.

"Though," said the doctor, "I doubt if it would be wise to have a child of his."

"I won't!" she said, grimly.

She knew the ways of not having children. The practical Mr. Schwirtz had seen to that. Strangely enough, he did not object to birth-control, even though it was discussed by just the sort of people who wrote these sensational realistic novels.

There were periods of reaction when she blamed herself for having become so set in antipathy that she always looked for faults; saw as a fault even the love for amus.e.m.e.nts which had once seemed a virtue in him.