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.