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 café. 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 brass
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 snatched 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 assured 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 boob 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, hell, 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 coarse 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 matinées 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 damn 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 assured 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 God! 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 God-given body--though it had been slightly bloated since God 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 banal 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
reassertion 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 coarsely realistic as to admit the sex 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 damn superior to the rest of us. Don't read 'em. Read pure
authors like Howard Bancock 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 sex 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 amusements which had once seemed a virtue in him.
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 ignoble of feminine
attire--a pair of old corsets; that she was falling into his own
indelicacies.
Such marionette tragedies mingled ever with the grander passion 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
Cassavant, sometime of the Home Club, now obscurely on the stage; on
curly-haired Rose Larsen, 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 café 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-class 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 _déclassé_ 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-massaged women, whose occasionally appearing husbands were sleek
and overdressed. To Una these women were cordial. They invited her to
go shopping, to matinées. But they stopped so often for cocktails, 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 nobody--especially you don't
see me taking any more husbands off nobody."
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 coarse-coverleted bed, while round her
the hotel room was still and stale-smelling and fixed, and outside the
window passed the procession of life--trucks laden with crates of
garments consigned to Kansas City and Bangor and Seattle and Bemidji;
taxicabs with passengers for the mammoth hotels; office-girls and
policemen and salesmen and all the lusty crew that had conquered the
city or were well content to be conquered by it.