"But-" said Una.
Then she stopped.
Her entire knowledge of socialism was comprised in the fact that Mamie Magen believed in it, and that Walter Babson alternated between socialism, anarchism, and a desire to own a large house in Westchester and write poetry and be superior to the illiterate mass. So to the economic spokesman for the Great American Business Man her answer was:
"But-"
"Then look here," said Mr. Schwirtz. "Take yourself. S'pose you like to work eight hours a day? Course you don't. Neither do I. I always thought I'd like to be a gentleman farmer and take it easy. But the good Lord saw fit to stick us into these jobs, that's all we know about it; and we do our work and don't howl about it like all these socialists and radicals and other windjammers that know more than the Constitution and Congress and a convention of Philadelphia lawyers put together. You don't want to work as hard as you do and then have to divide up every Saturday with some lazy bum of a socialist that's too lazy to support himself-yes, or to take a bath!-now do you?"
"Well, no," Una admitted, in face of this triumphant exposure of liberal fallacies.
The book slipped into her lap.
"How wonderful that line of big woolly clouds is, there between the two mountains!" she said. "I'd just like to fly through them.... I am tired. The clouds rest me so."
"Course you're tired, little sister. You just forget about all those guys in the abyss. Tell you a person on the job's got enough to do looking out for himself."
"Well-" said Una.
Suddenly she lay back, her hands behind her head, her fingers outstretched among the long, cool grasses. A hum of insects surrounded her. The grasses towering above her eyes were a forest. She turned her head to watch a lady-bug industriously ascend one side of a blade of grass, and with equal enterprise immediately descend the other side. With the office always in her mind as material for metaphors, Una compared the lady-bug's method to Troy Wilkins's habit of having his correspondence filed and immediately calling for it again. She turned her face to the sky. She was uplifted by the bold contrast of cumulus clouds and the radiant blue sky.
Here she could give herself up to rest; she was so secure now, with the affable Mr. Schwirtz to guard her against outsiders-more secure and satisfied, she reflected, than she could ever have been with Walter Babson.... A hawk soared above her, a perfect thing of sun-brightened grace, the grasses smelled warm and pleasant, and under her beat the happy heart of the summer land.
"I'm a poor old rough-neck," said Mr. Schwirtz, "but to-day, up here with you, I feel so darn good that I almost think I'm a decent citizen. Honest, little sister, I haven't felt so bully for a blue moon."
"Yes, and I-" she said.
He smoked, while she almost drowsed into slumber to the lullaby of the afternoon.
When a blackbird chased a crow above her, and she sat up to watch the aerial privateering, Mr. Schwirtz began to talk.
He spoke of the flight of the Wright brothers in France and Virginia, which were just then-in the summer of 1908-arousing the world to a belief in aviation. He had as positive information regarding aeroplanes as he had regarding socialism. It seemed that a man who was tremendously on the inside of aviation-who was, in fact, going to use whole tons of aeroplane varnish on aeroplane bodies, next month or next season-had given Mr. Schwirtz secret advices that within five years, by 1913, aeroplanes would be crossing the Atlantic daily, and conveying passengers and mail on regular routes between New York and Chicago.... "Though," said Mr. Schwirtz, in a sophisticated way, "I don't agree with these crazy enthusiasts that believe aeroplanes will be used in war. Too easy to shoot 'em down." His information was so sound that he had bought a hundred shares of stock in his customer's company. In on the ground floor. Stock at three dollars a share. Would be worth two hundred a share the minute they started regular passenger-carrying.
"But at that, I only took a hundred shares. I don't believe in all this stock-gambling. What I want is sound, conservative investments," said Mr. Schwirtz.
"Yes, I should think you'd be awfully practical," mused Una. "My! three dollars to two hundred! You'll make an awful lot out of it."
"Well, now, I'm not saying anything. I don't pretend to be a Wisenheimer. May be nine or ten years-nineteen seventeen or nineteen eighteen-before we are doing a regular business. And at that, the shares may never go above par. But still, I guess I'm middlin' practical-not like these socialists, ha, ha!"
"How did you ever get your commercial training?"
The question encouraged him to tell the story of his life.
Mostly it was a story of dates and towns and jobs-jobs he had held and jobs from which he had resigned, and all the crushing things he had said to the wicked bosses during those victorious resignings.... Clerk in a general store, in a clothing-store, in a hardware-store-all these in Ohio. A quite excusable, almost laudable, failure in his own hardware-store in a tiny Wisconsin town. Half a dozen clerkships. Collector for a harvester company in Nebraska, going from farm to farm by buggy. Traveling salesman for a St. Paul wholesaler, for a Chicago clothing-house. Married. Partner with his brother-in-law in a drug, paint, and stationery store. Traveling for a Boston paint-house. For the Lowry Paint Company of Jersey City. Now with the automobile wax company. A typical American business career, he remarked, though somehow distinctive, different-A guiding star-
Una listened murmuringly, and he was encouraged to try to express the inner life behind his jobs. Hesitatingly he sought to make vivid his small-boy life in the hills of West Virginia: carving initials, mowing lawns, smoking corn silk, being arrested on Hallowe'en, his father's death, a certain Irving who was his friend, "carrying a paper route" during two years of high school. His determination to "make something of himself." His arrival in Columbus, Ohio, with just seventy-eight cents-he emphasized it: "just seventy-eight cents, that's every red cent I had, when I started out to look for a job, and I didn't know a single guy in town." His reading of books during the evenings of his first years in Ohio; he didn't "remember their titles, exactly," he said, but he was sure that "he read a lot of them." ... At last he spoke of his wife, of their buggy-riding, of their neat frame house with the lawn and the porch swing. Of their quarrels-he made it clear that his wife had been "finicky," and had "fool notions," but he praised her for having "come around and learned that a man is a man, and sometimes he means a lot better than it looks like; prob'ly he loves her a lot better than a lot of these plush-soled, soft-tongued fellows that give 'em a lot of guff and lovey-dovey stuff and don't shell out the cash. She was a good sport-one of the best."
Of the death of their baby boy.
"He was the brightest little kid-everybody loved him. When I came home tired at night he would grab my finger-see, this first finger-and hold it, and want me to show him the bunny-book.... And then he died."
Mr. Schwirtz told it simply, looking at clouds spread on the blue sky like a thrown handful of white paint.
Una had hated the word "widower"; it had suggested Henry Carson and the Panama undertaker and funerals and tired men trying to wash children and looking for a new wife to take over that work; all the smell and grease of disordered side-street kitchens. To her, now, Julius Edward Schwirtz was not a flabby-necked widower, but a man who mourned, who felt as despairingly as could Walter Babson the loss of the baby who had crowed over the bunny-book. She, the motherless, almost loved him as she stood with him in the same depth of human grief. And she cried a little, secretly, and thought of her longing for the dead mother, as he gently went on: