She tried, wistfully and honestly, to be just. She reminded herself constantly that she had enjoyed some of the parties with him--theater and a late supper, with a couple just back from South America.

But--there were so many "buts"! Life was all one obliterating But.

Her worst moments were when she discovered that she had grown careless about appearing before him in that drabbest, most ign.o.ble of feminine attire--a pair of old corsets; that she was falling into his own indelicacies.

Such marionette tragedies mingled ever with the grander pa.s.sion of seeing life as a ruined thing; her birthright to aspiring cleanness sold for a mess of quick-lunch pottage. And as she walked in a mist of agony, a dumb, blind creature heroically distraught, she could scarce distinguish between sordidness and the great betrayals, so chill and thick was the fog about her.

She thought of suicide, often, but too slow and sullen was her protest for the climax of suicide. And the common sense which she still had urged her that some day, incredibly, there might again be hope. Oftener she thought of a divorce. Of that she had begun to think even on the second day of her married life. She suspected that it would not be hard to get a divorce on statutory grounds. Whenever Mr. Schwirtz came back from a trip he would visibly remove from his suit-case bunches of letters in cheaply pretentious envelopes of pink and lavender. She scorned to try to read them, but she fancied that they would prove interesting to the judges.

- 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 Ca.s.savant, sometime of the Home Club, now obscurely on the stage; on curly-haired Rose La.r.s.en, 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 cafe 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-cla.s.s 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 _decla.s.se_ 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-ma.s.saged women, whose occasionally appearing husbands were sleek and overdressed. To Una these women were cordial. They invited her to go shopping, to matinees. But they stopped so often for c.o.c.ktails, 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 n.o.body--especially you don't see me taking any more husbands off n.o.body."

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 coa.r.s.e-coverleted bed, while round her the hotel room was still and stale-smelling and fixed, and outside the window pa.s.sed the procession of life--trucks laden with crates of garments consigned to Kansas City and Bangor and Seattle and Bemidji; taxicabs with pa.s.sengers for the mammoth hotels; office-girls and policemen and salesmen and all the l.u.s.ty 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 G.o.d 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 d.a.m.n 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 b.o.o.b 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 matinees, 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 pa.s.sion. 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: