Sinclair Lewis

“ Despite her tenderness, Una had something of youth’s joy in getting rid of old things, as preparation for acquiring the new. She did sob when she found her mother’s straw hat, just as Mrs. Golden had left it, on the high shelf of the wardrobe as though her mother might come in at any minute, put it on, and start for a walk. She sobbed again when she encountered the tiny tear in the bottom of the couch, which her own baby fingers had made in trying to enlarge a pirate’s cave. That brought the days when her parents were immortal and all-wise ”

“ Golden mourned him, now, missed his gossipy presence—and at the same time she was alive to the distinction it added to her slim gracefulness to wear black and look wan. She sobbed on Una’s shoulder; she said that she was lonely; and Una sturdily comforted her and looked for work.
One of the most familiar human combinations in the world is that of unemployed daughter and widowed mother. A thousand times you have seen the jobless daughter devoting all of her curiosity, all of her youth, to a widowed mother of small pleasantries, a small income, and a shabby security. ”

“ Later she chided herself for being so bold, so un-Panamanian; but she was proud to know that she could long for the pressure of a baby’s lips. The brick-walled street echoed with jagged cries of children; tired women in mussed waists poked their red, steamy necks out of windows; the sky was a blur of gray; and, lest she forget the job, Una’s left wrist ached from typing; yet she heard the rustle of spring, and her spirit swelled with thankfulness as she felt her life to be not a haphazard series of days, but a divine progress. ”

“ Una was annoyed with herself for ever observing so unlovely an object, but in the moment of relaxation when she went to wash her hands she was unduly sensitive to that eternal rag, and to the griminess of the wash-room—the cracked and yellow-stained wash-bowl, the cold water that stung in winter, the roller-towel which she spun round and round in the effort to find a dry, clean, square space, till, in a spasm of revulsion, she would bolt out of the wash-room with her face and hands half dried.
Woman’s place is in the home. ”

“ The youths of poetry and of the modern motor-car fiction make a long diversion of love; while the sleezy-coated office-man who surprises a look of humanness in the weary eyes of the office-woman, knows that he must compress all the wonder of madness into five minutes, because the Chief is prowling about, glancing meaningly at the little signs that declare, “Your time is your employer’s money; don’t steal it.”
A world is this whose noblest vista is composed of desks and typewriters, filing-cases and insurance calendars, telephones, and the bald heads of men who believe dreams to be idiotic. ”

“ Like sickness and war, the office grind absorbs all personal desires. Love and ambition and wisdom it turns to its own purposes. Every day Una and Walter saw each other. Their hands touched as he gave her papers to [89] file; there was affection in his voice when he dictated, and once, outside the office door, he kissed her. Yet their love was kept suspended. They could not tease each other and flirt raucously, like the telephone-girl and the elevator-starter. ”

“ She plaintively admired her efficient daughter Una.
Una Golden was a “good little woman”—not pretty, not noisy, not particularly articulate, but instinctively on the inside of things; naturally able to size up people and affairs. She had common sense and unkindled passion. She was a matter-of-fact idealist, with a healthy woman’s simple longing for love and life. At twenty-four Una had half a dozen times fancied herself in love. She had been embraced at a dance, and felt the stirring of a desire for surrender. ”

“ Finally, there was a keen, wide-awake woman, willing to do anything for anybody, not forward, but not to be overridden—a woman with a slight knowledge of architecture and a larger knowledge of the way of promotion; a woman whom Una took seriously; and the name of this paragon was Mrs. Una Golden Schwirtz.
Round these human islands flowed a sea of others. She had a sense of flux, and change, and energy; of hundreds of thousands of people rushing about her always—crowds on Broadway and Fifth Avenue and Sixth, and on Thirty-fourth Street, where stood the Zodiac Building in which was the office. ”

“ Una had, from books and newspapers and Walter Babson, learned that there were such things as socialists and earnest pessimists, and the race sketchily called “Bohemians”—writers and artists and social workers, who drank claret and made love and talked about the free theater, all on behalf of the brotherhood of man. Una pictured the socialists as always attacking capitalists; the pessimists as always being bitter and egotistic; Bohemians as always being dissipated, but as handsome and noisy and gay. ”

“ A dull city of straight-front unvaried streets is New York. But she aspires in her sky-scrapers; she dreams a garden dream of Georgian days in Gramercy Park; and on Riverside Drive she bares her exquisite breast and wantons in beauty. Here she is sophisticated, yet eager, comparable to Paris and Vienna; and here Una exulted.
Down a polished roadway that reflected every light rolled smart motors, with gay people in the sort of clothes she had studied in advertisements. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Here, no galleon breasts the sky-line; no explorer in evening clothes makes love to an heiress. Here ride no rollicking cowboys, nor heroes of the great European war. It is a world whose crises you cannot comprehend unless you have learned that the difference between a 2-A pencil and a 2-B pencil is at least equal to the contrast between London and Tibet; unless you understand why a normally self-controlled young woman may have a week of tragic discomfort because she is using a billing-machine instead of her ordinary correspondence typewriter. ”

“ There weren’t so very many desirable young men—most of the energetic ones went off to Philadelphia and New York. True that Jennie McTevish had been married at thirty-one, when everybody had thought she was hopelessly an old maid. Yet here was Birdie Mayberry unmarried at thirty-four, no one could ever understand why, for she had been the prettiest and jolliest girl in town. Una crossed blessed matrimony off the list as a commercial prospect.
She could go off and study music, law, medicine, elocution, or any of that amazing hodge-podge of pursuits which are permitted to small-town women. ”

“ Most workers of the city remain strangers to it always. But chance had made Una an insider.
It was another chapter in the making of a business woman, that spring of happiness and new stirrings in the Home Club; it was another term in the unplanned, uninstructed, muddling, chance-governed college which civilization unwittingly keeps for the training of men and women who will carry on the work of the world.
It passed swiftly, and July and vacation-time came to Una. ”

“ Una had acquired a hesitating fondness for the mute gentleness of the others, and it infuriated her that this insect should spoil their picnic. But after dinner Phil Benson dallied over to her, sat on the arm of her chair, and said: “I’m awfully sorry that I make such a bum hit with you, Miss Golden. Oh, I can see I do, all right. You’re the only one here that can understand. Somehow it seems to me—you aren’t like other women I know. There’s something—somehow it’s different. A—a temperament. You dream about higher things than just food and clothes. ”

“ That ugly couple on the porch of the apple-sauce and wash-pitcher boarding-house—the mother a mute, dwarfish punchinello, and the daughter a drab woman of forty with a mole, a wart, a silence. That charming mother of white hair and real lace with the well-groomed daughter. That comfortable mother at home and daughter in an office, but with no suitors, no ambition beyond the one at home. ”

“ Una was of neither sort for him, though for Walter Babson she might have been quite of the latter kind. Mr. Schwirtz could not understand her, and she was as sorry for him as was compatible with a decided desire to divorce him and wash off the stain of his damp, pulpy fingers with the water of life.
But she stayed home, and washed and cooked, and earned money for him—till he lost his retail-store position by getting drunk and being haughty to a customer.
Then the chrysalis burst and Una was free again. Free to labor, to endeavor—to die, perhaps, but to die clean. ”

“ Feel this breeze on your lips—it’s simply plumb-full of mystery. Wouldn’t you like to run away? and we’d tramp the Palisades till dawn and go to sleep with the May sun glaring down the Hudson. Wouldn’t you like to, wouldn’t you?”
She was conscious that, though his head was passionately thrown back, his faunlike eyes stared into hers, and that his thin lips arched. Terribly she wanted to say, “Yes!” Actually, Una Golden of Panama and the Gazette office speculated, for a tenth of a second, whether she couldn’t go. Madness—river-flow and darkness and the stars! ”

“ But, like all monarchies, it must fail unless it becomes noble of heart. So long as capital and labor are divided, so long as the making of munitions or injurious food is regarded as business, so long as Big Business believes that it exists merely to enrich a few of the lucky or the well born or the nervously active, it will not be efficient, but deficient. But the vision of an efficiency so broad that it can be kindly and sure, is growing—is discernible at once in the scientific business man and the courageous labor-unionist.
That vision Una Golden feebly comprehended. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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!” ”

“ Una, like most people of Panama, had believed that there was something artistic about the office of any publication. One would see editors—wonderful men like grand dukes, prone to lunch with the President. But there was nothing artistic about the editorial office of the Gazette—several young men in shirt-sleeves and green celluloid eye-shades, very slangy and pipe-smelly, and an older man with unpressed trousers and ragged mustache. ”

“ She knew every inch of it, as a gardener knows his plot. She could never keep from noticing and running her finger along the pebbled glass of the oak-and-glass partition about Mr. Wilkins’s private office, each of the hundreds of times a day she passed it; and when she lay awake at midnight, her finger-tips would recall precisely the feeling of that rough surface, even to the sharp edges of a tiny flaw in the glass over the bookcase. ”