text:
Psmith in the City/Chapter 26

Dashing away from the call-box, Mike nearly cannoned into Psmith, who was making his way pensively to the telephone with the object of ringing up the box office of the Haymarket Theatre.

'Sorry,' said Mike. 'Hullo, Smith.'

'Hullo indeed,' said Psmith, courteously. 'I rejoice, Comrade Jackson, to find you going about your commercial duties like a young bomb. How is it, people repeatedly ask me, that Comrade Jackson contrives to catch his employer's eye and win the friendly smile from the head of his department? My reply is that where others walk, Comrade Jackson runs. Where others stroll, Comrade Jackson legs it like a highly-trained mustang of the prairie. He does not loiter. He gets back to his department bathed in perspiration, in level time. He—'

'I say, Smith,' said Mike, 'you might do me a favour.'

'A thousand. Say on.'

'Just look in at the Fixed Deposits and tell old Gregory that I shan't be with him today, will you? I haven't time myself. I must rush!'

Psmith screwed his eyeglass into his eye, and examined Mike carefully.

'What exactly—?' be began.

'Tell the old ass I've popped off.'

'Just so, just so,' murmured Psmith, as one who assents to a thoroughly reasonable proposition. 'Tell him you have popped off. It shall be done. But it is within the bounds of possibility that Comrade Gregory may inquire further. Could you give me some inkling as to why you are popping?'

'My brother Joe has just rung me up from Lords. The county are playing Middlesex and they're one short. He wants me to roll up.'

Psmith shook his head sadly.

'I don't wish to interfere in any way,' he said, 'but I suppose you realize that, by acting thus, you are to some extent knocking the stuffing out of your chances of becoming manager of this bank? If you dash off now, I shouldn't count too much on that marrying the Governor's daughter scheme I sketched out for you last night. I doubt whether this is going to help you to hold the gorgeous East in fee, and all that sort of thing.'

'Oh, dash the gorgeous East.'

'By all means,' said Psmith obligingly. 'I just thought I'd mention it. I'll look in at Lord's this afternoon. I shall send my card up to you, and trust to your sympathetic cooperation to enable me to effect an entry into the pavilion on my face. My father is coming up to London today. I'll bring him along, too.'

'Right ho. Dash it, it's twenty to. So long. See you at Lord's.'

Psmith looked after his retreating form till it had vanished through the swing-door, and shrugged his shoulders resignedly, as if disclaiming all responsibility.

'He has gone without his hat,' he murmured. 'It seems to me that this is practically a case of running amok. And now to break the news to bereaved Comrade Gregory.'

He abandoned his intention of ringing up the Haymarket Theatre, and turning away from the call-box, walked meditatively down the aisle till he came to the Fixed Deposits Department, where the top of Mr Gregory's head was to be seen over the glass barrier, as he applied himself to his work.

Psmith, resting his elbows on the top of the barrier and holding his head between his hands, eyed the absorbed toiler for a moment in silence, then emitted a hollow groan.

Mr Gregory, who was ruling a line in a ledger—most of the work in the Fixed Deposits Department consisted of ruling lines in ledgers, sometimes in black ink, sometimes in red—started as if he had been stung, and made a complete mess of the ruled line. He lifted a fiery, bearded face, and met Psmith's eye, which shone with kindly sympathy.

He found words.

'What the dickens are you standing there for, mooing like a blanked cow?' he inquired.

'I was groaning,' explained Psmith with quiet dignity. 'And why was I groaning?' he continued. 'Because a shadow has fallen on the Fixed Deposits Department. Comrade Jackson, the Pride of the Office, has gone.'

Mr Gregory rose from his seat.

'I don't know who the dickens you are—' he began.

'I am Psmith,' said the old Etonian,

'Oh, you're Smith, are you?'

'With a preliminary P. Which, however, is not sounded.'

'And what's all this dashed nonsense about Jackson?'

'He is gone. Gone like the dew from the petal of a rose.'

'Gone! Where's he gone to?'

'Lord's.'

'What lord's?'

Psmith waved his hand gently.

'You misunderstand me. Comrade Jackson has not gone to mix with any member of our gay and thoughtless aristocracy. He has gone to Lord's cricket ground.'

Mr Gregory's beard bristled even more than was its wont.

'What!' he roared. 'Gone to watch a cricket match! Gone—!'

'Not to watch. To play. An urgent summons I need not say. Nothing but an urgent summons could have wrenched him from your very delightful society, I am sure.'

Mr Gregory glared.

'I don't want any of your impudence,' he said.

Psmith nodded gravely.

'We all have these curious likes and dislikes,' he said tolerantly. 'You do not like my impudence. Well, well, some people don't. And now, having broken the sad news, I will return to my own department.'

'Half a minute. You come with me and tell this yarn of yours to Mr Bickersdyke.'

'You think it would interest, amuse him? Perhaps you are right. Let us buttonhole Comrade Bickersdyke.'

Mr Bickersdyke was disengaged. The head of the Fixed Deposits Department stumped into the room. Psmith followed at a more leisurely pace.

'Allow me,' he said with a winning smile, as Mr Gregory opened his mouth to speak, 'to take this opportunity of congratulating you on your success at the election. A narrow but well-deserved victory.'

There was nothing cordial in the manager's manner.

'What do you want?' he said.

'Myself, nothing,' said Psmith. 'But I understand that Mr Gregory has some communication to make.'

'Tell Mr Bickersdyke that story of yours,' said Mr Gregory.

'Surely,' said Psmith reprovingly, 'this is no time for anecdotes. Mr Bickersdyke is busy. He—'

'Tell him what you told me about Jackson.'

Mr Bickersdyke looked up inquiringly.

'Jackson,' said Psmith, 'has been obliged to absent himself from work today owing to an urgent summons from his brother, who, I understand, has suffered a bereavement.'

'It's a lie,' roared Mr Gregory. 'You told me yourself he'd gone to play in a cricket match.'

'True. As I said, he received an urgent summons from his brother.'

'What about the bereavement, then?'

'The team was one short. His brother was very distressed about it. What could Comrade Jackson do? Could he refuse to help his brother when it was in his power? His generous nature is a byword. He did the only possible thing. He consented to play.'

Mr Bickersdyke spoke.

'Am I to understand,' he asked, with sinister calm, 'that Mr Jackson has left his work and gone off to play in a cricket match?'

'Something of that sort has, I believe, happened,' said Psmith. 'He knew, of course,' he added, bowing gracefully in Mr Gregory's direction, 'that he was leaving his work in thoroughly competent hands.'

'Thank you,' said Mr Bickersdyke. 'That will do. You will help Mr Gregory in his department for the time being, Mr Smith. I will arrange for somebody to take your place in your own department.'

'It will be a pleasure,' murmured Psmith.

'Show Mr Smith what he has to do, Mr Gregory,' said the manager.

They left the room.

'How curious, Comrade Gregory,' mused Psmith, as they went, 'are the workings of Fate! A moment back, and your life was a blank. Comrade Jackson, that prince of Fixed Depositors, had gone. How, you said to yourself despairingly, can his place be filled? Then the cloud broke, and the sun shone out again. I came to help you. What you lose on the swings, you make up on the roundabouts. Now show me what I have to do, and then let us make this department sizzle. You have drawn a good ticket, Comrade Gregory.'

title: Psmith in the City/Chapter 26


text:
Psmith in the City/Chapter 27

Mike got to Lord's just as the umpires moved out into the field. He raced round to the pavilion. Joe met him on the stairs.

'It's all right,' he said. 'No hurry. We've won the toss. I've put you in fourth wicket.'

'Right ho,' said Mike. 'Glad we haven't to field just yet.'

'We oughtn't to have to field today if we don't chuck our wickets away.'

'Good wicket?'

'Like a billiard-table. I'm glad you were able to come. Have any difficulty in getting away?'

Joe Jackson's knowledge of the workings of a bank was of the slightest. He himself had never, since he left Oxford, been in a position where there were obstacles to getting off to play in first-class cricket. By profession he was agent to a sporting baronet whose hobby was the cricket of the county, and so, far from finding any difficulty in playing for the county, he was given to understand by his employer that that was his chief duty. It never occurred to him that Mike might find his bank less amenable in the matter of giving leave. His only fear, when he rang Mike up that morning, had been that this might be a particularly busy day at the New Asiatic Bank. If there was no special rush of work, he took it for granted that Mike would simply go to the manager, ask for leave to play in the match, and be given it with a beaming smile.

Mike did not answer the question, but asked one on his own account.

'How did you happen to be short?' he said.

'It was rotten luck. It was like this. We were altering our team after the Sussex match, to bring in Ballard, Keene, and Willis. They couldn't get down to Brighton, as the 'Varsity had a match, but there was nothing on for them in the last half of the week, so they'd promised to roll up.'

Ballard, Keene, and Willis were members of the Cambridge team, all very capable performers and much in demand by the county, when they could get away to play for it.

'Well?' said Mike.

'Well, we all came up by train from Brighton last night. But these three asses had arranged to motor down from Cambridge early today, and get here in time for the start. What happens? Why, Willis, who fancies himself as a chauffeur, undertakes to do the driving; and naturally, being an absolute rotter, goes and smashes up the whole concern just outside St Albans. The first thing I knew of it was when I got to Lord's at half past ten, and found a wire waiting for me to say that they were all three of them crocked, and couldn't possibly play. I tell you, it was a bit of a jar to get half an hour before the match started. Willis has sprained his ankle, apparently; Keene's damaged his wrist; and Ballard has smashed his collar-bone. I don't suppose they'll be able to play in the 'Varsity match. Rotten luck for Cambridge. Well, fortunately we'd had two reserve pros, with us at Brighton, who had come up to London with the team in case they might be wanted, so, with them, we were only one short. Then I thought of you. That's how it was.'

'I see,' said Mike. 'Who are the pros?'

'Davis and Brockley. Both bowlers. It weakens our batting a lot. Ballard or Willis might have got a stack of runs on this wicket. Still, we've got a certain amount of batting as it is. We oughtn't to do badly, if we're careful. You've been getting some practice, I suppose, this season?'

'In a sort of a way. Nets and so on. No matches of any importance.'

'Dash it, I wish you'd had a game or two in decent class cricket. Still, nets are better than nothing, I hope you'll be in form. We may want a pretty long knock from you, if things go wrong. These men seem to be settling down all right, thank goodness,' he added, looking out of the window at the county's first pair, Warrington and Mills, two professionals, who, as the result of ten minutes' play, had put up twenty.

'I'd better go and change,' said Mike, picking up his bag. 'You're in first wicket, I suppose?'

'Yes. And Reggie, second wicket.'

Reggie was another of Mike's brothers, not nearly so fine a player as Joe, but a sound bat, who generally made runs if allowed to stay in.

Mike changed, and went out into the little balcony at the top of the pavilion. He had it to himself. There were not many spectators in the pavilion at this early stage of the game.

There are few more restful places, if one wishes to think, than the upper balconies of Lord's pavilion. Mike, watching the game making its leisurely progress on the turf below, set himself seriously to review the situation in all its aspects. The exhilaration of bursting the bonds had begun to fade, and he found himself able to look into the matter of his desertion and weigh up the consequences. There was no doubt that he had cut the painter once and for all. Even a friendly-disposed management could hardly overlook what he had done. And the management of the New Asiatic Bank was the very reverse of friendly. Mr Bickersdyke, he knew, would jump at this chance of getting rid of him. He realized that he must look on his career in the bank as a closed book. It was definitely over, and he must now think about the future.

It was not a time for half-measures. He could not go home. He must carry the thing through, now that he had begun, and find something definite to do, to support himself.

There seemed only one opening for him. What could he do, he asked himself. Just one thing. He could play cricket. It was by his cricket that he must live. He would have to become a professional. Could he get taken on? That was the question. It was impossible that he should play for his own county on his residential qualification. He could not appear as a professional in the same team in which his brothers were playing as amateurs. He must stake all on his birth qualification for Surrey.

On the other hand, had he the credentials which Surrey would want? He had a school reputation. But was that enough? He could not help feeling that it might not be.

Thinking it over more tensely than he had ever thought over anything in his whole life, he saw clearly that everything depended on what sort of show he made in this match which was now in progress. It was his big chance. If he succeeded, all would be well. He did not care to think what his position would be if he did not succeed.

A distant appeal and a sound of clapping from the crowd broke in on his thoughts. Mills was out, caught at the wicket. The telegraph-board gave the total as forty-eight. Not sensational. The success of the team depended largely on what sort of a start the two professionals made.

The clapping broke out again as Joe made his way down the steps. Joe, as an All England player, was a favourite with the crowd.

Mike watched him play an over in his strong, graceful style: then it suddenly occurred to him that he would like to know how matters had gone at the bank in his absence.

He went down to the telephone, rang up the bank, and asked for Psmith.

Presently the familiar voice made itself heard.

'Hullo, Smith.'

'Hullo. Is that Comrade Jackson? How are things progressing?'

'Fairly well. We're in first. We've lost one wicket, and the fifty's just up. I say, what's happened at the bank?'

'I broke the news to Comrade Gregory. A charming personality. I feel that we shall be friends.'

'Was he sick?'

'In a measure, yes. Indeed, I may say he practically foamed at the mouth. I explained the situation, but he was not to be appeased. He jerked me into the presence of Comrade Bickersdyke, with whom I had a brief but entertaining chat. He had not a great deal to say, but he listened attentively to my narrative, and eventually told me off to take your place in the Fixed Deposits. That melancholy task I am now performing to the best of my ability. I find the work a little trying. There is too much ledger-lugging to be done for my simple tastes. I have been hauling ledgers from the safe all the morning. The cry is beginning to go round, "Psmith is willing, but can his physique stand the strain?" In the excitement of the moment just now I dropped a somewhat massive tome on to Comrade Gregory's foot, unfortunately, I understand, the foot in which he has of late been suffering twinges of gout. I passed the thing off with ready tact, but I cannot deny that there was a certain temporary coolness, which, indeed, is not yet past. These things, Comrade Jackson, are the whirlpools in the quiet stream of commercial life.'

'Have I got the sack?'

'No official pronouncement has been made to me as yet on the subject, but I think I should advise you, if you are offered another job in the course of the day, to accept it. I cannot say that you are precisely the pet of the management just at present. However, I have ideas for your future, which I will divulge when we meet. I propose to slide coyly from the office at about four o'clock. I am meeting my father at that hour. We shall come straight on to Lord's.'

'Right ho,' said Mike. 'I'll be looking out for you.'

'Is there any little message I can give Comrade Gregory from you?'

'You can give him my love, if you like.'

'It shall be done. Good-bye.'

'Good-bye.'

Mike replaced the receiver, and went up to his balcony again.

As soon as his eye fell on the telegraph-board he saw with a start that things had been moving rapidly in his brief absence. The numbers of the batsmen on the board were three and five.

'Great Scott!' he cried. 'Why, I'm in next. What on earth's been happening?'

He put on his pads hurriedly, expecting every moment that a wicket would fall and find him unprepared. But the batsmen were still together when he rose, ready for the fray, and went downstairs to get news.

He found his brother Reggie in the dressing-room.

'What's happened?' he said. 'How were you out?'

'L.b.w.,' said Reggie. 'Goodness knows how it happened. My eyesight must be going. I mistimed the thing altogether.'

'How was Warrington out?'

'Caught in the slips.'

'By Jove!' said Mike. 'This is pretty rocky. Three for sixty-one. We shall get mopped.'

'Unless you and Joe do something. There's no earthly need to get out. The wicket's as good as you want, and the bowling's nothing special. Well played, Joe!'

A beautiful glide to leg by the greatest of the Jacksons had rolled up against the pavilion rails. The fieldsmen changed across for the next over.

'If only Peters stops a bit—' began Mike, and broke off. Peters' off stump was lying at an angle of forty-five degrees.

'Well, he hasn't,' said Reggie grimly. 'Silly ass, why did he hit at that one? All he'd got to do was to stay in with Joe. Now it's up to you. Do try and do something, or we'll be out under the hundred.'

Mike waited till the outcoming batsman had turned in at the professionals' gate. Then he walked down the steps and out into the open, feeling more nervous than he had felt since that far-off day when he had first gone in to bat for Wrykyn against the M.C.C. He found his thoughts flying back to that occasion. Today, as then, everything seemed very distant and unreal. The spectators were miles away. He had often been to Lord's as a spectator, but the place seemed entirely unfamiliar now. He felt as if he were in a strange land.

He was conscious of Joe leaving the crease to meet him on his way. He smiled feebly. 'Buck up,' said Joe in that robust way of his which was so heartening. 'Nothing in the bowling, and the wicket like a shirt-front. Play just as if you were at the nets. And for goodness' sake don't try to score all your runs in the first over. Stick in, and we've got them.'

Mike smiled again more feebly than before, and made a weird gurgling noise in his throat.

It had been the Middlesex fast bowler who had destroyed Peters. Mike was not sorry. He did not object to fast bowling. He took guard, and looked round him, taking careful note of the positions of the slips.

As usual, once he was at the wicket the paralysed feeling left him. He became conscious again of his power. Dash it all, what was there to be afraid of? He was a jolly good bat, and he would jolly well show them that he was, too.

The fast bowler, with a preliminary bound, began his run. Mike settled himself into position, his whole soul concentrated on the ball. Everything else was wiped from his mind.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Psmith in the City/Chapter 27


text:
Psmith in the City/Chapter 28

It was exactly four o'clock when Psmith, sliding unostentatiously from his stool, flicked divers pieces of dust from the leg of his trousers, and sidled towards the basement, where he was wont to keep his hat during business hours. He was aware that it would be a matter of some delicacy to leave the bank at that hour. There was a certain quantity of work still to be done in the Fixed Deposits Department—work in which, by rights, as Mike's understudy, he should have lent a sympathetic and helping hand. 'But what of that?' he mused, thoughtfully smoothing his hat with his knuckles. 'Comrade Gregory is a man who takes such an enthusiastic pleasure in his duties that he will go singing about the office when he discovers that he has got a double lot of work to do.'

With this comforting thought, he started on his perilous journey to the open air. As he walked delicately, not courting observation, he reminded himself of the hero of 'Pilgrim's Progress'. On all sides of him lay fearsome beasts, lying in wait to pounce upon him. At any moment Mr Gregory's hoarse roar might shatter the comparative stillness, or the sinister note of Mr Bickersdyke make itself heard.

'However,' said Psmith philosophically, 'these are Life's Trials, and must be borne patiently.'

A roundabout route, via the Postage and Inwards Bills Departments, took him to the swing-doors. It was here that the danger became acute. The doors were well within view of the Fixed Deposits Department, and Mr Gregory had an eye compared with which that of an eagle was more or less bleared.

Psmith sauntered to the door and pushed it open in a gingerly manner.

As he did so a bellow rang through the office, causing a timid customer, who had come in to arrange about an overdraft, to lose his nerve completely and postpone his business till the following afternoon.

Psmith looked up. Mr Gregory was leaning over the barrier which divided his lair from the outer world, and gesticulating violently.

'Where are you going,' roared the head of the Fixed Deposits.

Psmith did not reply. With a benevolent smile and a gesture intended to signify all would come right in the future, he slid through the swing-doors, and began to move down the street at a somewhat swifter pace than was his habit.

Once round the corner he slackened his speed.

'This can't go on,' he said to himself. 'This life of commerce is too great a strain. One is practically a hunted hare. Either the heads of my department must refrain from View Halloos when they observe me going for a stroll, or I abandon Commerce for some less exacting walk in life.'

He removed his hat, and allowed the cool breeze to play upon his forehead. The episode had been disturbing.

He was to meet his father at the Mansion House. As he reached that land-mark he saw with approval that punctuality was a virtue of which he had not the sole monopoly in the Smith family. His father was waiting for him at the tryst.

'Certainly, my boy,' said Mr Smith senior, all activity in a moment, when Psmith had suggested going to Lord's. 'Excellent. We must be getting on. We must not miss a moment of the match. Bless my soul: I haven't seen a first-class match this season. Where's a cab? Hi, cabby! No, that one's got some one in it. There's another. Hi! Here, lunatic! Are you blind? Good, he's seen us. That's right. Here he comes. Lord's Cricket Ground, cabby, as quick as you can. Jump in, Rupert, my boy, jump in.'

Psmith rarely jumped. He entered the cab with something of the stateliness of an old Roman Emperor boarding his chariot, and settled himself comfortably in his seat. Mr Smith dived in like a rabbit.

A vendor of newspapers came to the cab thrusting an evening paper into the interior. Psmith bought it.

'Let's see how they're getting on,' he said, opening the paper. 'Where are we? Lunch scores. Lord's. Aha! Comrade Jackson is in form.'

'Jackson?' said Mr Smith, 'is that the same youngster you brought home last summer? The batsman? Is he playing today?'

'He was not out thirty at lunch-time. He would appear to be making something of a stand with his brother Joe, who has made sixty-one up to the moment of going to press. It's possible he may still be in when we get there. In which case we shall not be able to slide into the pavilion.'

'A grand bat, that boy. I said so last summer. Better than any of his brothers. He's in the bank with you, isn't he?'

'He was this morning. I doubt, however, whether he can be said to be still in that position.'

'Eh? what? How's that?'

'There was some slight friction between him and the management. They wished him to be glued to his stool; he preferred to play for the county. I think we may say that Comrade Jackson has secured the Order of the Boot.'

'What? Do you mean to say—?'

Psmith related briefly the history of Mike's departure.

Mr Smith listened with interest.

'Well,' he said at last, 'hang me if I blame the boy. It's a sin cooping up a fellow who can bat like that in a bank. I should have done the same myself in his place.'

Psmith smoothed his waistcoat.

'Do you know, father,' he said, 'this bank business is far from being much of a catch. Indeed, I should describe it definitely as a bit off. I have given it a fair trial, and I now denounce it unhesitatingly as a shade too thick.'

'What? Are you getting tired of it?'

'Not precisely tired. But, after considerable reflection, I have come to the conclusion that my talents lie elsewhere. At lugging ledgers I am among the also-rans—a mere cipher. I have been wanting to speak to you about this for some time. If you have no objection, I should like to go to the Bar.'

'The Bar? Well—'

'I fancy I should make a pretty considerable hit as a barrister.'

Mr Smith reflected. The idea had not occurred to him before. Now that it was suggested, his always easily-fired imagination took hold of it readily. There was a good deal to be said for the Bar as a career. Psmith knew his father, and he knew that the thing was practically as good as settled. It was a new idea, and as such was bound to be favourably received.

'What I should do, if I were you,' he went on, as if he were advising a friend on some course of action certain to bring him profit and pleasure, 'is to take me away from the bank at once. Don't wait. There is no time like the present. Let me hand in my resignation tomorrow. The blow to the management, especially to Comrade Bickersdyke, will be a painful one, but it is the truest kindness to administer it swiftly. Let me resign tomorrow, and devote my time to quiet study. Then I can pop up to Cambridge next term, and all will be well.'

'I'll think it over—' began Mr Smith.

'Let us hustle,' urged Psmith. 'Let us Do It Now. It is the only way. Have I your leave to shoot in my resignation to Comrade Bickersdyke tomorrow morning?'

Mr Smith hesitated for a moment, then made up his mind.

'Very well,' he said. 'I really think it is a good idea. There are great opportunities open to a barrister. I wish we had thought of it before.'

'I am not altogether sorry that we did not,' said Psmith. 'I have enjoyed the chances my commercial life has given me of associating with such a man as Comrade Bickersdyke. In many ways a master-mind. But perhaps it is as well to close the chapter. How it happened it is hard to say, but somehow I fancy I did not precisely hit it off with Comrade Bickersdyke. With Psmith, the worker, he had no fault to find; but it seemed to me sometimes, during our festive evenings together at the club, that all was not well. From little, almost imperceptible signs I have suspected now and then that he would just as soon have been without my company. One cannot explain these things. It must have been some incompatibility of temperament. Perhaps he will manage to bear up at my departure. But here we are,' he added, as the cab drew up. 'I wonder if Comrade Jackson is still going strong.'

They passed through the turnstile, and caught sight of the telegraph-board.

'By Jove!' said Psmith, 'he is. I don't know if he's number three or number six. I expect he's number six. In which case he has got ninety-eight. We're just in time to see his century.'

title: Psmith in the City/Chapter 28


text:
Psmith in the City/Chapter 29

For nearly two hours Mike had been experiencing the keenest pleasure that it had ever fallen to his lot to feel. From the moment he took his first ball till the luncheon interval he had suffered the acutest discomfort. His nervousness had left him to a great extent, but he had never really settled down. Sometimes by luck, and sometimes by skill, he had kept the ball out of his wicket; but he was scratching, and he knew it. Not for a single over had he been comfortable. On several occasions he had edged balls to leg and through the slips in quite an inferior manner, and it was seldom that he managed to hit with the centre of the bat.

Nobody is more alive to the fact that he is not playing up to his true form than the batsman. Even though his score mounted little by little into the twenties, Mike was miserable. If this was the best he could do on a perfect wicket, he felt there was not much hope for him as a professional.

The poorness of his play was accentuated by the brilliance of Joe's. Joe combined science and vigour to a remarkable degree. He laid on the wood with a graceful robustness which drew much cheering from the crowd. Beside him Mike was oppressed by that leaden sense of moral inferiority which weighs on a man who has turned up to dinner in ordinary clothes when everybody else has dressed. He felt awkward and conspicuously out of place.

Then came lunch—and after lunch a glorious change.

Volumes might be written on the cricket lunch and the influence it has on the run of the game; how it undoes one man, and sends another back to the fray like a giant refreshed; how it turns the brilliant fast bowler into the sluggish medium, and the nervous bat into the masterful smiter.

On Mike its effect was magical. He lunched wisely and well, chewing his food with the concentration of a thirty-three-bites a mouthful crank, and drinking dry ginger-ale. As he walked out with Joe after the interval he knew that a change had taken place in him. His nerve had come back, and with it his form.

It sometimes happens at cricket that when one feels particularly fit one gets snapped in the slips in the first over, or clean bowled by a full toss; but neither of these things happened to Mike. He stayed in, and began to score. Now there were no edgings through the slips and snicks to leg. He was meeting the ball in the centre of the bat, and meeting it vigorously. Two boundaries in successive balls off the fast bowler, hard, clean drives past extra-cover, put him at peace with all the world. He was on top. He had found himself.

Joe, at the other end, resumed his brilliant career. His century and Mike's fifty arrived in the same over. The bowling began to grow loose. Joe, having reached his century, slowed down somewhat, and Mike took up the running. The score rose rapidly.

A leg-theory bowler kept down the pace of the run-getting for a time, but the bowlers at the other end continued to give away runs. Mike's score passed from sixty to seventy, from seventy to eighty, from eighty to ninety. When the Smiths, father and son, came on to the ground the total was ninety-eight. Joe had made a hundred and thirty-three.

Mike reached his century just as Psmith and his father took their seats. A square cut off the slow bowler was just too wide for point to get to. By the time third man had sprinted across and returned the ball the batsmen had run two.

Mr Smith was enthusiastic.

'I tell you,' he said to Psmith, who was clapping in a gently encouraging manner, 'the boy's a wonderful bat. I said so when he was down with us. I remember telling him so myself. "I've seen your brothers play," I said, "and you're better than any of them." I remember it distinctly. He'll be playing for England in another year or two. Fancy putting a cricketer like that into the City! It's a crime.'

'I gather,' said Psmith, 'that the family coffers had got a bit low. It was necessary for Comrade Jackson to do something by way of saving the Old Home.'

'He ought to be at the University. Look, he's got that man away to the boundary again. They'll never get him out.'

At six o'clock the partnership was broken, Joe running himself out in trying to snatch a single where no single was. He had made a hundred and eighty-nine.

Mike flung himself down on the turf with mixed feelings. He was sorry Joe was out, but he was very glad indeed of the chance of a rest. He was utterly fagged. A half-day match once a week is no training for first-class cricket. Joe, who had been playing all the season, was as tough as india-rubber, and trotted into the pavilion as fresh as if he had been having a brief spell at the nets. Mike, on the other hand, felt that he simply wanted to be dropped into a cold bath and left there indefinitely. There was only another half-hour's play, but he doubted if he could get through it.

He dragged himself up wearily as Joe's successor arrived at the wickets. He had crossed Joe before the latter's downfall, and it was his turn to take the bowling.

Something seemed to have gone out of him. He could not time the ball properly. The last ball of the over looked like a half-volley, and he hit out at it. But it was just short of a half-volley, and his stroke arrived too soon. The bowler, running in the direction of mid-on, brought off an easy c.-and-b.

Mike turned away towards the pavilion. He heard the gradually swelling applause in a sort of dream. It seemed to him hours before he reached the dressing-room.

He was sitting on a chair, wishing that somebody would come along and take off his pads, when Psmith's card was brought to him. A few moments later the old Etonian appeared in person.

'Hullo, Smith,' said Mike, 'By Jove! I'm done.'

'"How Little Willie Saved the Match,"' said Psmith. 'What you want is one of those gin and ginger-beers we hear so much about. Remove those pads, and let us flit downstairs in search of a couple. Well, Comrade Jackson, you have fought the good fight this day. My father sends his compliments. He is dining out, or he would have come up. He is going to look in at the flat latish.'

'How many did I get?' asked Mike. 'I was so jolly done I didn't think of looking.'

'A hundred and forty-eight of the best,' said Psmith. 'What will they say at the old homestead about this? Are you ready? Then let us test this fruity old ginger-beer of theirs.'

The two batsmen who had followed the big stand were apparently having a little stand all of their own. No more wickets fell before the drawing of stumps. Psmith waited for Mike while he changed, and carried him off in a cab to Simpson's, a restaurant which, as he justly observed, offered two great advantages, namely, that you need not dress, and, secondly, that you paid your half-crown, and were then at liberty to eat till you were helpless, if you felt so disposed, without extra charge.

Mike stopped short of this giddy height of mastication, but consumed enough to make him feel a great deal better. Psmith eyed his inroads on the menu with approval.

'There is nothing,' he said, 'like victualling up before an ordeal.'

'What's the ordeal?' said Mike.

'I propose to take you round to the club anon, where I trust we shall find Comrade Bickersdyke. We have much to say to one another.'

'Look here, I'm hanged—' began Mike.

'Yes, you must be there,' said Psmith. 'Your presence will serve to cheer Comrade B. up. Fate compels me to deal him a nasty blow, and he will want sympathy. I have got to break it to him that I am leaving the bank.'

'What, are you going to chuck it?'

Psmith inclined his head.

'The time,' he said, 'has come to part. It has served its turn. The startled whisper runs round the City. "Psmith has had sufficient."'

'What are you going to do?'

'I propose to enter the University of Cambridge, and there to study the intricacies of the Law, with a view to having a subsequent dash at becoming Lord Chancellor.'

'By Jove!' said Mike, 'you're lucky. I wish I were coming too.'

Psmith knocked the ash off his cigarette.

'Are you absolutely set on becoming a pro?' he asked.

'It depends on what you call set. It seems to me it's about all I can do.'

'I can offer you a not entirely scaly job,' said Smith, 'if you feel like taking it. In the course of conversation with my father during the match this afternoon, I gleaned the fact that he is anxious to secure your services as a species of agent. The vast Psmith estates, it seems, need a bright boy to keep an eye upon them. Are you prepared to accept the post?'

Mike stared.

'Me! Dash it all, how old do you think I am? I'm only nineteen.'

'I had suspected as much from the alabaster clearness of your unwrinkled brow. But my father does not wish you to enter upon your duties immediately. There would be a preliminary interval of three, possibly four, years at Cambridge, during which I presume, you would be learning divers facts concerning spuds, turmuts, and the like. At least,' said Psmith airily, 'I suppose so. Far be it from me to dictate the line of your researches.'

'Then I'm afraid it's off,' said Mike gloomily. 'My pater couldn't afford to send me to Cambridge.'

'That obstacle,' said Psmith, 'can be surmounted. You would, of course, accompany me to Cambridge, in the capacity, which you enjoy at the present moment, of my confidential secretary and adviser. Any expenses that might crop up would be defrayed from the Psmith family chest.'

Mike's eyes opened wide again.

'Do you mean,' he asked bluntly, 'that your pater would pay for me at the 'Varsity? No I say—dash it—I mean, I couldn't—'

'Do you suggest,' said Psmith, raising his eyebrows, 'that I should go to the University without a confidential secretary and adviser?'

'No, but I mean—' protested Mike.

'Then that's settled,' said Psmith. 'I knew you would not desert me in my hour of need, Comrade Jackson. "What will you do," asked my father, alarmed for my safety, "among these wild undergraduates? I fear for my Rupert." "Have no fear, father," I replied. "Comrade Jackson will be beside me." His face brightened immediately. "Comrade Jackson," he said, "is a man in whom I have the supremest confidence. If he is with you I shall sleep easy of nights." It was after that that the conversation drifted to the subject of agents.'

Psmith called for the bill and paid it in the affable manner of a monarch signing a charter. Mike sat silent, his mind in a whirl. He saw exactly what had happened. He could almost hear Psmith talking his father into agreeing with his scheme. He could think of nothing to say. As usually happened in any emotional crisis in his life, words absolutely deserted him. The thing was too big. Anything he could say would sound too feeble. When a friend has solved all your difficulties and smoothed out all the rough places which were looming in your path, you cannot thank him as if he had asked you to lunch. The occasion demanded some neat, polished speech; and neat, polished speeches were beyond Mike.

'I say, Psmith—' he began.

Psmith rose.

'Let us now,' he said, 'collect our hats and meander to the club, where, I have no doubt, we shall find Comrade Bickersdyke, all unconscious of impending misfortune, dreaming pleasantly over coffee and a cigar in the lower smoking-room.'

title: Psmith in the City/Chapter 29


text:
Psmith in the City/Chapter 30

As it happened, that was precisely what Mr Bickersdyke was doing. He was feeling thoroughly pleased with life. For nearly nine months Psmith had been to him a sort of spectre at the feast inspiring him with an ever-present feeling of discomfort which he had found impossible to shake off. And tonight he saw his way of getting rid of him.

At five minutes past four Mr Gregory, crimson and wrathful, had plunged into his room with a long statement of how Psmith, deputed to help in the life and thought of the Fixed Deposits Department, had left the building at four o'clock, when there was still another hour and a half's work to be done.

Moreover, Mr Gregory deposed, the errant one, seen sliding out of the swinging door, and summoned in a loud, clear voice to come back, had flatly disobeyed and had gone upon his ways 'Grinning at me,' said the aggrieved Mr Gregory, 'like a dashed ape.' A most unjust description of the sad, sweet smile which Psmith had bestowed upon him from the doorway.

Ever since that moment Mr Bickersdyke had felt that there was a silver lining to the cloud. Hitherto Psmith had left nothing to be desired in the manner in which he performed his work. His righteousness in the office had clothed him as in a suit of mail. But now he had slipped. To go off an hour and a half before the proper time, and to refuse to return when summoned by the head of his department—these were offences for which he could be dismissed without fuss. Mr Bickersdyke looked forward to tomorrow's interview with his employee.

Meanwhile, having enjoyed an excellent dinner, he was now, as Psmith had predicted, engaged with a cigar and a cup of coffee in the lower smoking-room of the Senior Conservative Club.

Psmith and Mike entered the room when he was about half through these luxuries.

Psmith's first action was to summon a waiter, and order a glass of neat brandy. 'Not for myself,' he explained to Mike. 'For Comrade Bickersdyke. He is about to sustain a nasty shock, and may need a restorative at a moment's notice. For all we know, his heart may not be strong. In any case, it is safest to have a pick-me-up handy.'

He paid the waiter, and advanced across the room, followed by Mike. In his hand, extended at arm's length, he bore the glass of brandy.

Mr Bickersdyke caught sight of the procession, and started. Psmith set the brandy down very carefully on the table, beside the manager's coffee cup, and, dropping into a chair, regarded him pityingly through his eyeglass. Mike, who felt embarrassed, took a seat some little way behind his companion. This was Psmith's affair, and he proposed to allow him to do the talking.

Mr Bickersdyke, except for a slight deepening of the colour of his complexion, gave no sign of having seen them. He puffed away at his cigar, his eyes fixed on the ceiling.

'An unpleasant task lies before us,' began Psmith in a low, sorrowful voice, 'and it must not be shirked. Have I your ear, Mr Bickersdyke?'

Addressed thus directly, the manager allowed his gaze to wander from the ceiling. He eyed Psmith for a moment like an elderly basilisk, then looked back at the ceiling again.

'I shall speak to you tomorrow,' he said.

Psmith heaved a heavy sigh.

'You will not see us tomorrow,' he said, pushing the brandy a little nearer.

Mr Bickersdyke's eyes left the ceiling once more.

'What do you mean?' he said.

'Drink this,' urged Psmith sympathetically, holding out the glass. 'Be brave,' he went on rapidly. 'Time softens the harshest blows. Shocks stun us for the moment, but we recover. Little by little we come to ourselves again. Life, which we had thought could hold no more pleasure for us, gradually shows itself not wholly grey.'

Mr Bickersdyke seemed about to make an observation at this point, but Psmith, with a wave of the hand, hurried on.

'We find that the sun still shines, the birds still sing. Things which used to entertain us resume their attraction. Gradually we emerge from the soup, and begin—'

'If you have anything to say to me,' said the manager, 'I should be glad if you would say it, and go.'

'You prefer me not to break the bad news gently?' said Psmith. 'Perhaps you are wise. In a word, then,'—he picked up the brandy and held it out to him—'Comrade Jackson and myself are leaving the bank.'

'I am aware of that,' said Mr Bickersdyke drily.

Psmith put down the glass.

'You have been told already?' he said. 'That accounts for your calm. The shock has expended its force on you, and can do no more. You are stunned. I am sorry, but it had to be. You will say that it is madness for us to offer our resignations, that our grip on the work of the bank made a prosperous career in Commerce certain for us. It may be so. But somehow we feel that our talents lie elsewhere. To Comrade Jackson the management of the Psmith estates seems the job on which he can get the rapid half-Nelson. For my own part, I feel that my long suit is the Bar. I am a poor, unready speaker, but I intend to acquire a knowledge of the Law which shall outweigh this defect. Before leaving you, I should like to say—I may speak for you as well as myself, Comrade Jackson—?'

Mike uttered his first contribution to the conversation—a gurgle—and relapsed into silence again.

'I should like to say,' continued Psmith, 'how much Comrade Jackson and I have enjoyed our stay in the bank. The insight it has given us into your masterly handling of the intricate mechanism of the office has been a treat we would not have missed. But our place is elsewhere.'

He rose. Mike followed his example with alacrity. It occurred to Mr Bickersdyke, as they turned to go, that he had not yet been able to get in a word about their dismissal. They were drifting away with all the honours of war.

'Come back,' he cried.

Psmith paused and shook his head sadly.

'This is unmanly, Comrade Bickersdyke,' he said. 'I had not expected this. That you should be dazed by the shock was natural. But that you should beg us to reconsider our resolve and return to the bank is unworthy of you. Be a man. Bite the bullet. The first keen pang will pass. Time will soften the feeling of bereavement. You must be brave. Come, Comrade Jackson.'

Mike responded to the call without hesitation.

'We will now,' said Psmith, leading the way to the door, 'push back to the flat. My father will be round there soon.' He looked over his shoulder. Mr Bickersdyke appeared to be wrapped in thought.

'A painful business,' sighed Psmith. 'The man seems quite broken up. It had to be, however. The bank was no place for us. An excellent career in many respects, but unsuitable for you and me. It is hard on Comrade Bickersdyke, especially as he took such trouble to get me into it, but I think we may say that we are well out of the place.'

Mike's mind roamed into the future. Cambridge first, and then an open-air life of the sort he had always dreamed of. The Problem of Life seemed to him to be solved. He looked on down the years, and he could see no troubles there of any kind whatsoever. Reason suggested that there were probably one or two knocking about somewhere, but this was no time to think of them. He examined the future, and found it good.

'I should jolly well think,' he said simply, 'that we might.'

title: Psmith in the City/Chapter 30


text:
Page:Tom Swift and His Motor Boat.djvu/16

 boys fairly well, even if he only had one, and he knew Tom perfectly.

"Would you really like to make a bid on that boat, Tom?" he asked.

"Would I, dad? Well" The youth did not finish, but his father knew what he meant.

"I suppose a motor-boat would be a nice thing to have on Lake Carlopa," went on Mr. Swift musingly. "You and I could take frequent trips in it. It isn't like a motor-cycle, only useful for one. What do you suppose the boat will go for, Tom?"

"I hardly know. Not a high price, I believe, for motor-boats are so new on our lake that few persons will take a chance on them. But if Mr. Hastings is getting another, he will not be so particular about insisting on a high price for the old one. Then, too, the fact that it is damaged will help to keep the price down, though I know I can easily put it in good shape. I would like to make a bid, if you think it's all right."

"Well, I guess you may, Tom, if you really want it. You have money of your own and a motor-boat is not a bad investment. What do you think ought to be the limit?"

"Would you consider a hundred and fifty dollars too high?"

Mr. Swift looked at Tom critically. He was


text:
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Rh plainly going over several matters in his mind, and not the least of them was the pluck his son had shown in getting back some valuable papers and a model from a gang of thieves. The lad certainly was entitled to some reward, and to allow him to get a boat might properly be part of it.

"I think you could safely go as high as two hundred dollars, Torn," said Mr. Swift at length. "That would be my limit on a damaged boat, for it might be better to pay a little more and get a new one. However, use your own judgment, but don't go over two hundred. So the thieves who made so much trouble for me stole that boat from Mr. Hastings, eh?"

"Yes, and they didn't take much care of it either. They damaged the engine, but the hull is in good shape. I'm ever so glad you'll let me bid on it. I'll start right off. The auction is at ten o'clock and I haven't more than time to get there."

"Now be careful how you bid. Don't raise your own figures, as I've sometimes seen women and men, too, do in their excitement. Somebody may go over your head, and if he does, let them. If you get the boat I'll be very glad on your account. But don't bring any of Anson Morse's gang back in it with you. I've seen enough of them."

"I'll not, dad!" cried Tom as he trundled his motor-cycle out of the gate and into the country


text:
Page:Atharva-Veda samhita.djvu/433

263

9. The three-headed, the three-humped (-kakúd), the variegated, the whitish worm—I crush the ribs of it; I hew at what is its head.

10. Like Atri I slay you, O worms, like Kaṇva, like Jamadagni; with the incantation of Agastya I mash together the worms.

11. Slain is the king of the worms, also the chief of them is slain; slain is the worm, having its mother slain, its brother slain, its sister slain.

12. Slain are its neighbors, slain its further neighbors, also those that are petty, as it were—all those worms are slain.

13. Both of all worms and of all she-worms I split the head with a stone, I burn the mouth with fire.

1. Savitar ('the impeller') is overlord of impulses; let him favor (av) me, in this worship (bráhman), in this rite (kárman), in this representation

title: Page:Atharva-Veda samhita.djvu/433


text:
Page:Tom Swift and His Motor Boat.djvu/18

6 road that led to the village of Shopton, where he lived, and to Lanton, where the auction was to be held. The young inventor had not gone far before he turned back, leaving his machine standing on the side path.

"What's the matter?" asked his father, who had started toward one of several machine shops on the premises—shops where Mr. Swift and his son did inventive work.

"Guess I'd better get a blank check and some money," replied Tom as he entered the house. "I'll need to pay a deposit if I secure the boat."

"That's so. Well, good luck," and with his mind busy on a plan for a new kind of storage battery, the inventor went on to his workroom. Tom got some cash and his check book from a small safe he owned and was soon speeding over the road to Lanton, his motor-cycle making quite a cloud of dust. While he is thus hurrying along to the auction I will tell you something about him.

Tom Swift, son of Barton Swift, lived with his father and a motherly housekeeper, Mrs. Baggert, in a large house on the outskirts of the town of Shopton, in New York State. Mr. Swift had acquired considerable wealth from his many inventions and patents, but he did not give up working out his ideas simply because he had plenty of


text: Atharva-Veda Samhita/Book V/Hymn 23

title: Atharva-Veda Samhita/Book V/Hymn 23


text:
Page:Tom Swift and His Motor Boat.djvu/19

Rh money. Tom followed in the footsteps of his parent and had already taken out several patents.

Shortly before this story opens the youth had become possessed of a motor-cycle in a peculiar fashion. As told in the first volume of this series, entitled "Tom Swift and His Motor Cycle," Tom was riding to the town of Mansburg on an errand for his father one day when he was nearly run down by a motor cyclist. A little later the same motor cyclist, who was a Mr. Wakefield Damon, of Waterfield, collided with a tree near Tom's home and was severely cut and bruised, the machine being broken. Tom and his father cared for the injured rider, and Mr. Damon, who was an eccentric individual, was so disheartened by his attempts to ride the motor-cycle that he sold it to Tom for fifty dollars, though it had cost much more.

About the same time that Tom bought the motor-cycle a firm of rascally lawyers, Smeak & Katch by name, had, in conjunction with several men, made an attempt to get control of an invention of a turbine motor perfected by Mr. Swift The men, who were Ferguson Appleson, Anson Morse, Wilson Featherton, alias Simpson, and Jake Burke, alias Happy Harry, who sometimes disguised himself as a tramp, tried several times to steal the model.


text:
Page:Tom Swift and His Motor Boat.djvu/20

8 Their anxiety to get it was due to the fact that they had invested a large sum in a turbine motor invented by another man, but their motor would not work and they sought to steal Mr. Swift's. Tom was sent to Albany on his motor-cycle to deliver the model and some valuable papers to Mr. Crawford, of the law firm of Reid & Crawford, of Washington, attorneys for Mr. Swift. Mr. Crawford had an errand in Albany and had agreed to meet Tom there with the model.

But, on the way, Tom was attacked by the gang of unscrupulous men and the model was stolen. He was assaulted and carried far away in an automobile. In an attempt to capture the gang in a deserted mansion, in the woods on the shore of Lake Carlopa, Tom was aided by Mr. Damon, of whom he had purchased the motor-cycle. The men escaped, however, and nothing could be done to punish them.

Tom was thinking of the exciting scenes he had passed through about a month previous as he spun along the road leading to Lanton.

"I hope I don't meet Happy Harry or any of his gang to-day," mused the lad as he turned on a little more power to enable his machine to mount a hill. "I don't believe they'll attend the auction, though. It would be too risky for them."

As Tom swung along at a rapid pace he heard,


text:
Page:Tom Swift and His Motor Boat.djvu/21

Rh behind him, the puffing of an automobile, with the muffler cut out. He turned and cast a hasty glance behind.

"I hope that ain't Andy Foger or any of his cronies," he said to himself. "He might try to run me down just for spite. He generally rushes along with the muffler open so as to attract attention and make folks think he has a racing car."

It was not Andy, however, as Tom saw a little later, as a man passed him in a big touring car. Andy Foger, as my readers will recollect, was a red-haired, squinty-eyed lad with plenty of money and not much else. He and his cronies, including Sam Snedecker, nearly ran Tom down one day, when the latter was on his bicycle, as told in the first volume of this series. Andy had been off on a tour with his chums during the time when Tom was having such strenuous adventures and had recently returned.

"If I can only get that boat," mused Tom as he swung back into the middle of the road after the auto had passed him, "I certainly will have lots of fun. I'll make a week's tour of Lake Carlopa and take dad and Ned Newton with me." Ned was Tom's most particular chum, but as young Newton was employed in the Shopton bank, the lad did not have much time for pleasure. Lake Carlopa was a large body of water, and it


text:
Page:Tom Swift and His Motor Boat.djvu/22

10 would take a moderately powered boat several days to make a complete circuit of the shore, so cut up into bays and inlets was it.

In about an hour Tom was at Lanton, and as he neared the home of Mr. Hastings, which was on the shore of the lake, he saw quite a throng going down toward the boathouse.

"There'll be some lively bidding," thought Tom as he got off his machine and pushed it ahead of him through the drive and down toward the river. "I hope they don't go above two hundred dollars, though."

"Get out the way there!" called a sudden voice, and looking back, Tom saw that an automobile had crept up silently behind him. In it were Andy Foger and Sam Snedecker. "Why don't you get out the way?" petulantly demanded the red-haired lad.

"Because I don't choose to," replied Tom calmly, knowing that Andy would never dare to speed up his machine on the slope leading down to the lake.

"Go ahead, bump him!" the young inventor heard Sam whisper.

"You'd better try it, if you want to get the best trouncing you ever had!" cried Tom hotly.

"Hu! I s'pose you think you're going to bid on the boat?" sneered Andy.


text:
Page:Tom Swift and His Motor Boat.djvu/23

Rh "Is there any law against it?" asked Tom.

"Hu! Well, you'll not get it I'm going to take that boat," retorted the squint-eyed bully. "Dad gave me the money to get it."

"All right," answered Tom non-committally. "Go ahead. It's a free country."

He stood his motor-cycle up against a tree and went toward a group of persons who were surrounding the auctioneer. The time had arrived to start the sale. As Tom edged in closer he brushed against a man who looked at him sharply. The lad was just wondering if he had ever seen the individual before, as there seemed to be something strangely familiar about him, when the man turned quickly away, as if afraid of being recognized.

"That's odd," thought Tom, but he had no further time for speculation, as the auctioneer was mounting on a soap box and had begun to address the gathering.


text: Tom Swift and His Motor-Boat

title: Tom Swift and His Motor-Boat


text: Tom Swift and His Motor-Boat/Chapter 1

title: Tom Swift and His Motor-Boat/Chapter 1


text:
The Job (Lewis)/Man and Woman

Chapter XVI

Chapter XVII

Chapter XVIII

Chapter XIX

Chapter XX

Chapter XXI

Chapter XXII

Chapter XXIII

title: The Job (Lewis)/Man and Woman


text:
The Job (Lewis)/Man and Woman/Chapter 16

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.


text:
The Job (Lewis)/Man and Woman/Chapter 17

LATE in the summer of 1912, at a time when Una did not expect the return of her husband for at least three weeks, she was in their room in the afternoon, reading “Salesmanship for Women,” and ruminatively eating lemon-drops from a small bag.

As though he were a betrayed husband dramatically surprising her, Mr. Schwirtz opened the door, dropped a large suit-case, and stood, glaring.

“Well!” he said, with no preliminary, “so here you are! For once you could—”

“Why, Ed! I didn’t expect to see you for—”

He closed the door and gesticulated. “No! Of course you didn’t. Why ain’t you out with some of your swell friends that I ain’t good enough to meet, shopping, and buying dresses, and God knows what—”

“Why, Ed!”

“Oh, don’t ‘why-Ed’ me! Well, ain’t you going to come and kiss me? Nice reception when a man’s come home tired from a hard trip—wife so busy reading a book that she don’t even get up from her chair and make him welcome in his own room that he pays for. Yes, by—”

“Why, you didn’t—you don’t act as though—”

“Yes, sure, that’s right; lay it all on—”

“—you wanted me to kiss you.”

“Well, neither would anybody if they’d had all the worries I’ve had, sitting there worrying on a slow, hot train that stopped at every pig-pen—yes, and on a day-coach, too, by golly! Somebody in this family has got to economize!—while you sit here cool and comfortable; not a thing on your mind but your hair; not a thing to worry about except thinking how damn superior you are to your husband! Oh, sure! But I made up my mind—I thought it all out for once, and I made up my mind to one thing, you can help me out by economizing, anyway.”

“Oh, Ed, I don’t know what you’re driving at. I haven’t been extravagant, ever. Why, I’ve asked you any number of times not to spend so much money for suppers and so forth—”

“Yes, sure, lay it all onto me. I’m fair game for everybody that’s looking for a nice, soft, easy, safe boob to kick! Why, look there!”

While she still sat marveling he pounced on the meek little five-cent bag of lemon-drops, shook it as though it were a very small kitten, and whined: “Look at this! Candy or something all the while! You never have a single cent left when I come home—candy and ice-cream sodas, and matinées, and dresses, and everything you can think of. If it ain’t one thing, it’s another. Well, you’ll either save from now on—”

“Look here! What do you mean, working off your grouch on—”

“—or else you won’t have anything to spend, un’erstand? And when it comes down to talking about grouches I suppose you’ll be real pleased to know—this will be sweet news, probably, to you—I’ve been fired!”

“Fired? Oh, Ed!”

“Yes, fired-oh-Ed. Canned. Got the gate. Thrown out. Got the razzle-dazzle. Got the hook thrown into me. Bounced. Kiyudeled. That is, at least, I will be, as soon as I let the old man get at me, judging from the love-letters he’s been sending me, inviting me to cut a switch and come out to the wood-shed with him.”

“Oh, Ed dear, what was the trouble?”

She walked up to him, laid her hand on his shoulder. Her voice was earnest, her eyes full of pity. He patted her hand, seemed from her gentle nearness to draw comfort—not passion. He slouched over to the bed, and sat with his thick legs stuck out in front of him, his hands in his trousers pockets, while he mused:

“Oh, I don’t hardly know what it is all about. My sales have been falling off, all rightee. But, good Lord! that’s no fault of mine. I work my territory jus’ as hard as I ever did, but I can’t meet the competition of the floor-wax people. They’re making an auto polish now—better article at a lower price—and what can I do? They got a full line, varnish, cleaner, polish, swell window displays, national advertising, swell discounts—everything; and I can’t buck competition like that. And then a lot of the salesmen at our shop are jealous of me, and one thing and another. Well, now I’ll go down and spit the old man in the eye couple o’ times, and get canned, unless I can talk him out of his bad acting. Oh, I’ll throw a big bluff. I’ll be the little misunderstood boy, but I don’t honestly think I can put anything across on him. I’m— Oh, hell, I guess I’m getting old. I ain’t got the pep I used to have. Not but what J. Eddie Schwirtz can still sell goods, but I can’t talk up to the boss like I could once. I gotta feel some sympathy at the home office. And I by God deserve it—way I’ve worked and slaved for that bunch of cutthroats, and now— Sure, that’s the way it goes in this world. I tell you, I’m gonna turn socialist!”

“Ed—listen, Ed. Please, oh, please don’t be offended now; but don’t you think perhaps the boss thinks you drink too much?”

“How could he? I don’t drink very much, and you know it. I don’t hardly touch a drop, except maybe just for sociability. God! this temperance wave gets my goat! Lot of hot-air females telling me what I can do and what I can’t do—fella that knows when to drink and when to stop. Drink? Why, you ought to see some of the boys! There’s Burke McCullough. Say, I bet he puts away forty drinks a day, if he does one, and I don’t know that it hurts him any; but me—”

“Yes, I know, dear. I was just thinking—maybe your boss is one of the temperance cranks,” Una interrupted. Mr. Schwirtz’s arguments regarding the privileges of a manly man sounded very familiar. This did not seem to be a moment for letting her husband get into the full swing of them. She begged: “What will you do if they let you out? I wish there was something I could do to help.”

“Dun’no’. There’s a pretty close agreement between a lot of the leading paint-and-varnish people—gentleman’s agreement—and it’s pretty hard to get in any place if you’re in Dutch with any of the others. Well, I’m going down now and watch’em gwillotine me. You better not wait to have dinner with me. I’ll be there late, thrashing all over the carpet with the old man, and then I gotta see some fellas and start something. Come here, Una.”

He stood up. She came to him, and when he put his two hands on her shoulders she tried to keep her aversion to his touch out of her look.

He shook his big, bald head. He was unhappy and his eyes were old. “Nope,” he said; “nope. Can’t be done. You mean well, but you haven’t got any fire in you. Kid, can’t you understand that there are wives who’ve got so much passion in’em that if their husbands came home clean-licked, like I am, they’d—oh, their husbands would just naturally completely forget their troubles in love—real love, with fire in it. Women that aren’t ashamed of having bodies.... But, oh, Lord! it ain’t your fault. I shouldn’t have said anything. There’s lots of wives like you. More’n one man’s admitted his wife was like that, when he’s had a couple drinks under his belt to loosen his tongue. You’re not to blame, but— I’m sorry.... Don’t mind my grouch when I came in. I was so hot, and I’d been worrying and wanted to blame things onto somebody.... Don’t wait for me at dinner. If I ain’t here by seven, go ahead and feed. Good-by.”

§ 2

All she knew was that at six a woman’s purring voice on the telephone asked if Mr. Eddie Schwirtz had returned to town yet. That he did not reappear till after midnight. That his return was heralded by wafting breezes with whisky laden. That, in the morning, there was a smear of rice powder on his right shoulder and that he was not so urgent in his attentions to her as ordinarily. So her sympathy for him was lost. But she discovered that she was neither jealous nor indignant—merely indifferent.

He told her at breakfast that, with his usual discernment, he had guessed right. When he had gone to the office he had been discharged.

“Went out with some business acquaintances in the evening—got to pull all the wires I can now,” he said.

She said nothing.

§ 3

They had less than two hundred dollars ahead. But Mr. Schwirtz borrowed a hundred from his friend, Burke McCullough, and did not visibly have to suffer from want of highballs, cigars, and Turkish baths. From the window of their room Una used to see him cross the street to the café entrance of the huge Saffron Hotel—and once she saw him emerge from it with a fluffy blonde. But she did not attack him. She was spellbound in a strange apathy, as in a dream of swimming on forever in a warm and slate-hued sea. She was confident that he would soon have another position. He had over-ridden her own opinions about business—the opinions of the underling who never sees the great work as a rounded whole—till she had come to have a timorous respect for his commercial ability.

Apparently her wifely respect was not generally shared in the paint business. At least Mr. Schwirtz did not soon get his new position.

The manager of the hotel came to the room with his bill and pressed for payment. And after three weeks—after a night when he had stayed out very late and come home reeking with perfume—Mr. Schwirtz began to hang about the room all day long and to soak himself in the luxury of complaining despair.

Then came the black days.

There were several scenes (during which she felt like a beggar about to be arrested) between Mr. Schwirtz and the landlord, before her husband paid part of a bill whose size astounded her.

Mr. Schwirtz said that he was “expecting something to turn up—nothin’ he could do but wait for some telephone calls.” He sat about with his stockinged feet cocked up on the bed, reading detective stories till he fell asleep in his chair. He drank from unlabeled pint flasks of whisky all day. Once, when she opened a bureau drawer of his by mistake, she saw half a dozen whisky-flasks mixed with grimy collars, and the sour smell nauseated her. But on food—they had to economize on that! He took her to a restaurant of fifteen-cent breakfasts and twenty-five-cent dinners. It was the “parlor floor” of an old brownstone house—two rooms, with eggy table-cloths, and moldings of dusty stucco.

She avoided his presence as much as possible. Mrs. Wade, the practical dressmaker, who was her refuge among the women of the hotel, seemed to understand what was going on, and gave Una a key to her room. Here Una sat for hours. When she went back to their room quarrels would spring up apropos of anything or nothing.

The fault was hers as much as his. She was no longer trying to conceal her distaste, while he, who had a marital conscience of a sort, was almost pathetic in his apologies for being unable to “show her a good time.” And he wanted her soothing. He was more and more afraid of her as the despair of the jobless man in the hard city settled down on him. He wanted her to agree with him that there was a conspiracy against him.

She listened to him and said nothing, till he would burst out in abuse:

“You women that have been in business simply ain’t fit to be married. You think you’re too good to help a man. Yes, even when you haven’t been anything but dub stenographers. I never noticed that you were such a whale of a success! I don’t suppose you remember how you used to yawp to me about the job being too much for you! And yet when I want a little sympathy you sit there and hand me the frozen stare like you were the president of the Standard Oil Company and I was a bum office-boy. Yes, sir, I tell you business simply unfits a skirt for marriage.”

“No,” she said, “not for marriage that has any love and comradeship in it. But I admit a business woman doesn’t care to put up with being a cow in a stable.”

“What the devil do you mean—”

“Maybe,” she went on, “the business women will bring about a new kind of marriage in which men will have to keep up respect and courtesy.... I wonder—I wonder how many millions of women in what are supposed to be happy homes are sick over being chambermaids and mistresses till they get dulled and used to it. Nobody will ever know. All these books about women being emancipated—you’d think marriage had changed entirely. Yet, right now, in 1912, in Panama and this hotel—not changed a bit. The business women must simply compel men to—oh, to shave!”

She went out (perhaps she slammed the door a little, in an unemancipated way) to Mrs. Wade’s room.

That discussion was far more gentle and coherent than most of their quarrels.

It may have been rather to the credit of Mr. Schwirtz—it may have been a remnant of the clean pride which the boy Eddie Schwirtz must once have had, that, whenever she hinted that she would like to go back to work—he raged: “So you think I can’t support you, eh? My God! I can stand insults from all my old friends—the fellas that used to be tickled to death to have me buy’em a drink, but now they dodge around the corner as though they thought I was going to try to borrow four bits from’em—I can stand their insults, but, by God! it is pretty hard on a man when his own wife lets him know that she don’t think he can support her!”

And he meant it.

She saw that, felt his resentment. But she more and more often invited an ambition to go back to work, to be independent and busy, no matter how weary she might become. To die, if need be, in the struggle. Certainly that death would be better than being choked in muck.... One of them would have to go to work, anyway.

She discovered that an old acquaintance of his had offered him an eighteen-dollar-a-week job as a clerk in a retail paint-shop, till he should find something better. Mr. Schwirtz was scornful about it, and his scorn, which had once intimidated Una, became grotesquely absurd to her.

Then the hotel-manager came with a curt ultimatum: “Pay up or get out,” he said.

Mr. Schwirtz spent an hour telephoning to various acquaintances, trying to raise another hundred dollars. He got the promise of fifty. He shaved, put on a collar that for all practical purposes was quite clean, and went out to collect his fifty as proudly as though he had earned it.

Una stared at herself in the mirror over the bureau, and said, aloud: “I don’t believe it! It isn’t you, Una Golden, that worked, and paid your debts. You can’t, dear, you simply can’t be the wife of a man who lives by begging—a dirty, useless, stupid beggar. Oh, no, no! You wouldn’t do that—you couldn’t marry a man like that simply because the job had exhausted you. Why, you’d die at work first. Why, if you married him for board and keep, you’d be a prostitute—you’d be marrying him just because he was a ‘good provider.’ And probably, when he didn’t provide any more, you’d be quitter enough to leave him—maybe for another man. You couldn’t do that. I don’t believe life could bully you into doing that.... Oh, I’m hysterical; I’m mad. I can’t believe I am what I am—and yet I am!... Now he’s getting that fifty and buying a drink—”

§ 4

Mr. Schwirtz actually came home with forty-five out of the fifty intact. That was because he wanted to be able to pay the hotel-manager and insultingly inform him that they were going to leave.... The manager bore up under the blow.... They did move to a “furnished housekeeping-room” on West Nineteenth Street—in the very district of gray rooms and pathetic landladies where Una had sought a boarding-house after the death of her mother.

As furnished housekeeping-rooms go, theirs was highly superior. Most of them are carpetless, rusty and small of coal-stove, and filled with cockroaches and the smell of carbolic acid. But the maison Schwirtz was almost clean. It had an impassioned green carpet, a bedspring which scarcely sagged at all, a gas-range, and at least a dozen vases with rococo handles and blobs of gilt.

“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.

So far as Una could calculate, he had less than forty dollars. She burst out on him. She seemed to be speaking with the brusque voice of an accomplishing man. In that voice was all she had ever heard from executives; all the subconsciously remembered man-driving force of the office world. She ordered him to go and take the job in the paint-shop—at eighteen dollars a week, or eight dollars a week. She briefly, but thoroughly, depicted him as alcohol-soaked, poor white trash. She drove him out, and when he was gone she started to make their rooms presentable, with an energy she had not shown for months. She began to dust, to plan curtains for the room, to plan to hide the bric-à-brac, to plan to rent a typewriter and get commercial copying to do.

If any one moment of life is more important than the others, this may have been her crisis, when her husband had become a begging pauper and she took charge; began not only to think earnest, commonplace, little Una thoughts about “mastering life,” but actually to master it.