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"Gee! this ain't so bad," declared Mr. Schwirtz. "We can cook all our eats here, and live on next to nothing per, till the big job busts loose." With which he prepared to settle down to a life of leisure. He went out and bought a pint of whisky, a pound of steak, a pound of cheese, a loaf of bread, six cigars, and for her a bar of fudge.
Cannon had ruled. Una and Mr. Schwirtz deigned to accompany them on picnics, even grew interested in their new conceptions of the presidential campaign and croquet and food, yet held rather aloof, as became the ancien régime; took confidential walks together, and in secret laughed enormously when the green generation gossiped about them as though they were "interested in each other," as Mr.
She was still sorry for Mr. Schwirtz; she thought of him now and then, and wondered where he had gone. But that did not prevent her enjoying the mirror's reflection of the new blouse. §
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.
Schwirtz was being riotous with other women as riotous as one can be in New York on eighteen dollars a week, with debts and a wife to interfere with his manly pleasures. But she did not care; she was getting ready to break the cocoon, and its grubbiness didn't much matter. Sex meant nothing between them now. She did not believe that she would ever be in love again, in any phase, noble or crude.
Cannon; he's some kind of an executive in the Chicago stock-yards nice, fat, responsible job. And he was saying to me, 'Mr. Schwirtz, he says, 'Mrs.
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.
Julius Edward Schwirtz. Machines were the Pemberton force, and their greatest rivals were the machines of steel and wood, at least one of which each new efficiency expert left behind him: Machines for opening letters and sealing them, automatic typewriters, dictation phonographs, pneumatic chutes. But none of the other machines was so tyrannical as the time-clock.
Starr, Miss Vincent, and the pleasant couple from Gloversville all went away, and Una and Mr. Schwirtz became the elder generation, the seniors, of the boarders. They rather looked down upon the new boarders who came in tenderfeet, people who didn't know about Bald Knob or the Glade or Hawkins's Pond, people who weren't half so witty or comfy as the giants of those golden, olden days when Mr.
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.
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