"Oh, you're just flattering me, Mr. Schwirtz. Mr. Hunt told me I should watch out for you."
"No, no; you got me wrong there. 'I dwell on what-is-it mountain, and my name is Truthful James,' like the poet says! Believe me, I may be a rough-neck drummer, but I notice these things."
"Oh!... Oh, do you like poetry?"
Without knowing precisely what she was trying to do, Una was testing Mr. Schwirtz according to the somewhat contradictory standards of culture which she had acquired from Walter Babson, Mamie Magen, Esther Lawrence, Mr. Wilkins's books on architecture, and stray copies of The Outlook, The Literary Digest, Current Opinion, The Nation, The Independent, The Review of Reviews, The World's Work, Collier's, and The Atlantic Monthly, which she had been glancing over in the Home Club library. She hadn't learned much of the technique of the arts, but she had acquired an uneasy conscience of the sort which rather discredits any book or music or picture which it easily enjoys. She was, for a moment, apologetic to these insistent new standards, because she had given herself up to Mr. Schwirtz's low conversation.... She was not vastly different from a young lady just back in Panama from a term in the normal school, with new lights derived from a gentlemanly young English teacher with poetic interests and a curly mustache.
"Sure," affirmed Mr. Schwirtz, "I like poetry fine. Used to read it myself when I was traveling out of St. Paul and got kind of stuck on a waitress at Eau Claire." This did not perfectly satisfy Una, but she was more satisfied that he had heard the gospel of culture after he had described, with much detail, his enjoyment of a "fella from Boston, perfessional reciter; they say he writes swell poetry himself; gave us a program of Kipling and Ella Wheeler Wilcox before the Elks-real poetic fella."
"Do you go to concerts, symphonies, and so on, much?" Una next catechized.
"Well, no; that's where I fall down. Just between you and I, I never did have much time for these high-brows that try to make out they're so darn much better than common folks by talking about motifs and symphony poems and all that long-haired stuff. Fellow that's in music goods took me to a Philharmonic concert once, and I couldn't make head or tail of the stuff-conductor batting a poor musician over the ear with his swagger-stick (and him a union man, oughta kicked to his union about the way the conductor treated him) and him coming back with a yawp on the fiddle and getting two laps ahead of the brass band, and they all blowing their stuffings out trying to catch up. Music they call that! And once I went to grand opera-lot of fat Dutchmen all singing together like they was selling old rags. Aw nix, give me one of the good old songs like 'The Last Rose of Summer.'... I bet you could sing that so that even a sporting-goods drummer would cry and think about the sweetheart he had when he was a kid."
"No, I couldn't-I can't sing a note," Una said, delightedly.... She had laughed very much at Mr. Schwirtz's humor. She slid down in her chair and felt more expansively peaceful than she ever had been in the stress of Walter Babson.
"Straight, now, little sister. Own up. Don't you get more fun out of hearing Raymond Hitchcock sing than you do out of a bunch of fiddles and flutes fighting out a piece by Vaugner like they was Kilkenny cats? 'Fess up, now; don't you get more downright amusement?"
"Well, maybe I do, sometimes; but that doesn't mean that all this cheap musical comedy music is as good as opera, and so on, if we had our-had musical educations-"
"Oh yes; that's what they all say! But I notice that Hitchcock and George M. Cohan go on drawing big audiences every night-yes, and the swellest, best-dressed, smartest people in New York and Brooklyn, too-it's in the gallery at the opera that you find all these Wops and Swedes and Lord knows what-all. And when a bunch of people are out at a lake, say, you don't ever catch 'em singing Vaugner or Lits or Gryge or any of them guys. If they don't sing, 'In the Good Old Summer-Time,' it's 'Old Black Joe,' or 'Nelly Was a Lady,' or something that's really got some melody to it."
The neophyte was lured from her new-won altar. Cold to her knees was the barren stone of the shrine; and she feebly recanted, "Yes, that's so."
Mr. Schwirtz cheerfully took out a cigar, smelled it, bit it, luxuriously removed the band, requested permission to smoke, lighted the cigar without waiting for an answer to that request, sighed happily, and dived again:
"Not that I'm knocking the high-brows, y' understand. This dress-suit music is all right for them that likes it. But what I object to is their trying to stuff it down my throat! I let 'em alone, and if I want to be a poor old low-brow and like reg'lar music, I don't see where they get off to be telling me I got to go to concerts. Honest now, ain't that the truth?"
"Oh yes, that way-"
"All these here critics telling what low-brows us American business men are! Just between you and I, I bet I knock down more good, big, round, iron men every week than nine-tenths of these high-brow fiddlers-yes, and college professors and authors, too!"
"Yes, but you shouldn't make money your standard," said Una, in company with the invisible chorus of Mamie Magen and Walter Babson.
"Well, then, what are you going to make a standard?" asked Mr. Schwirtz, triumphantly.
"Well-" said Una.
"Understan' me; I'm a high-brow myself some ways. I never could stand these cheap magazines. I'd stop the circulation of every last one of them; pass an act of Congress to make every voter read some A-1, high-class, intellectual stuff. I read Rev. Henry van Dyke and Newell Dwight Hillis and Herbert Kaufman and Billy Sunday, and all these brainy, inspirational fellows, and let me tell you I get a lot of talking-points for selling my trade out of their spiels, too. I don't believe in all this cheap fiction-these nasty realistic stories (like all the author could see in life was just the bad side of things-I tell you life's bad enough without emphasizing the rotten side, all these unhappy marriages and poverty and everything-I believe if you can't write bright, optimistic, cheerful things, better not write at all). And all these sex stories! Don't believe in 'em! Sensational! Don't believe in cheap literature of no sort.... Oh, of course it's all right to read a coupla detective stories or a nice, bright, clean love-story just to pass the time away. But me, I like real, classy, high-grade writers, with none of this slangy dialogue or vulgar stuff. 'Specially I like essays on strenuous, modern American life, about not being in a rut, but putting a punch in life. Yes, sir!"
"I'm glad," said Una. "I do like improving books."
"You've said it, little sister.... Say, gee! you don't know what a luxury it is for me to talk about books and literature with an educated, cultured girl like you. Now take the rest of these people here at the farm-nice folks, you understand, mighty well-traveled, broad-gauged, intelligent folks, and all that. There's a Mr. and Mrs. 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. C. and I had never been to New England till this summer, but we'd toured every other part of the country, and we've done Europe thoroughly and put in a month doing Florida, and now,' he says, 'I think we can say we've seen every point of interest that's worth an American's time.' They're good American people like that, well-traveled and nice folks. But books-Lord! they can't talk about books no more than a Jersey City bartender. So you can imagine how pleased I was to find you here.... World's pretty small, all right. Say, I just got here yesterday, so I suppose we'll be here about the same length o' time. If you wouldn't think I was presumptuous, I'd like mighty well to show you some of the country around here. We could get up a picnic party, ten or a dozen of us, and go up on Bald Knob and see the scenery and have a real jolly time. And I'd be glad to take you down to Lesterhampton-there's a real old-fashioned inn down there, they say, where Paul Revere stayed one time; they say you can get the best kind of fried chicken and corn on cob and real old-fashioned New England blueberry pie. Would you like to?"