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The Sturdy Oak

S >> Samuel Merwin >> The Sturdy Oak




George watched him with fevered eyes, listened with fevered ears. The
conversation, it was easy to gather, did not proceed as Mr. Doolittle
wished.

"Oh! in entire charge--E. Eliot. Oh! In sympathy yourself. Oh, come now,
Mrs. McMonigal----"

But Mrs. McMonigal did not come now. The campaign manager frowned as he
replaced the receiver.

"Widow owns the place. That Eliot woman is the agent. The suffrage gang has
the owner's permission to use the building from now on to election. She
says she's in sympathy. Well, we'll have to think of something----"

"It's easy enough," declared George. "I'll simply have a set of posters
printed answering their questions. And we'll engage sandwich men to carry
them in front of McMonigal's windows. Certainly I mean to enforce the law.
I'll give the order to the _Sentinel_ press now for the answers--definite,
dignified answers." "See here, George." Mr. Doolittle interrupted him with
unusual weightiness of manner. "It's too far along in the campaign for you
to go flying off on your own. You've got to consult your managers. This is
your first campaign; it's my thirty-first. You've got to take advice----"

"I will not be muzzled."

"Shucks! Who wants to muzzle, anybody! But you can't say everything that's
inside of you, can you? There's got to be some choosing. We've got to help
you choose.

"The silly questions the women are displaying over there--you can't answer
'em in a word or in two words. This city is having a boom; every valve
factory in the valley, every needle and pin factory, is makin' munitions
today--valves and needles and pins all gone by the board for the time
being. Money's never been so plenty in Whitewater County and this city
is feelin' the benefits of it. People are buying things--clothes, flour,
furniture, victrolas, automobiles, rum.

"There ain't a merchant of any description in this county but his business
is booming on account of the work in the factories. You can't antagonize
the whole population of the place. Why, I dare say, some of your own money
and Mrs. Remington's is earning three times what it was two years ago. The
First National Bank has just declared a fifteen per cent. dividend, and
Martin Jaffry owns fifty-four per cent. of the stock.

"You don't want to put brakes on prosperity. It ain't decent citizenship to
try it. It ain't neighborly. Think of the lean years we've known. You can't
do it. This war won't last forever--" Mr. Doolittle's voice was tinged with
regret--"and it will be time enough to go in for playing the deuce with
business when business gets slack again. That's the time for reforms,
George,--when things are dull."

George was silent, the very presentment of a sorely harassed young man. He
had not, even in a year when blamelessness rather than experience was his
party's supreme need in a candidate, become its banner bearer without
possessing certain political apperceptions. He knew, as Benjie Doolittle
spoke, that Benjie spoke the truth--White-water city and county would
never elect a man who had too convincingly promised to interfere with the
prosperity of the city and county.

"Better stick to the gambling out at Erie Oval, George," counseled the
campaign manager. "They're mostly New Yorkers that are interested in that,
anyway."

"I'll not reply without due consideration and--er--notice," George sullenly
acceded to his manager and to necessity. But he hated both Doolittle and
necessity at the moment.

That sun-bright vision of himself which so splendidly and sustainingly
companioned him, which spoke in his most sonorous periods, which so
completely and satisfyingly commanded the reverence of Genevieve--that
George Remington of his brave imaginings would not thus have answered
Benjamin Doolittle.

Through the silence following the furniture man's departure, Betty, at
the typewriter, clicked upon Georgie's ears. An evil impulse assailed
him--impolitic, too, as he realized--impolitic but irresistible. It was
the easiest way in which candidate Remington, heckled by suffragists,
overridden by his campaign committee, mortifyingly tormented by a feeling
of inadequacy, could re-establish himself in his own esteem as a man of
prompt and righteous decisions.

He might not be able to run his campaign to suit himself, but, by Jove, his
office was his own!

He went into Betty's quarters and suggested to her that a due sense of the
eternal fitness of things would cause her to offer him her resignation,
which his own sense of the eternal fitness of things would lead him at once
to accept.

It seemed, he said, highly indecorous of her to remain in the employ of
Remington and Evans the while she was busily engaged in trying to thwart
the ambitions of the senior partner. He marveled that woman's boasted
sensitiveness had not already led her to perceive this for herself.

For a second, Betty seemed startled, even hurt. She colored deeply and her
eyes darkened. Then the flush of surprise and the wounded feeling died. She
looked at him blankly and asked how soon it would be possible for him to
replace her. She would leave as soon as he desired.

In her bearing, so much quieter than usual, in the look in her face, George
read a whole volume. He read that up to this time, Betty had regarded her
presence in the ranks of his political enemies as she would have regarded
being opposed to him in a tennis match. He read that he, with that biting
little speech which he already wished unspoken, had given her a sudden,
sinister illumination upon the relations of working women to their
employers.

He read the question in the back of her mind. Suppose (so it ran in his
constructive fancy) that instead of being a prosperous, protected young
woman playing the wage-earner more or less as Marie Antoinette had played
the milkmaid, she had been Mamie Riley across the hall, whose work was
bitter earnest, whose earnings were not pin-money, but bread and meat and
brother's schooling and mother's health--would George still have made the
stifling of her views the price of her position?

And if George--George, the kind, friendly, clean-minded man would drive
that bargain, what bargain might not other men, less gentle, less
noble, drive?

All this George's unhappily sensitized conscience read into Betty
Sheridan's look, even as the imp who urged him on bade him tell her that
she could leave at her own convenience; at once, if she pleased; the supply
of stenographers in Whitewater was adequately at demand.

He rather wished that Penny Evans would come in; Penny would doubtless take
a high hand with him concerning the episode, and there was nothing which
George Remington would have welcomed like an antagonist of his own size and
sex.

But Penny did not appear, and the afternoon passed draggingly for the
candidate for the district attorneyship. He tried to busy himself with the
affairs of his clients, but even when he could keep away from his windows
he was aware of the crowds in front of McMonigal's block, of Frances
Herrington, her "ducky" toque and her infernal voiceless speech.

And when, for a second, he was able to forget these, he heard from the
outer office the unmistakable sounds of a desk being permanently
cleared of its present incumbent's belongings.

After a while, Betty bade him a too courteous good-by, still with that
abominable new air of gravely readjusting her old impressions of him. And
then there was nothing to do but to go home and make ready for dinner at
the Herrington's, unless he could induce Genevieve to have an opportune
headache.

Of course Betty had been right. Not upon his masculine shoulders should
there be laid the absurd burden of political chagrin strong enough to break
a social engagement.

Genevieve was in her room. The library was given over to Alys
Brewster-Smith, Cousin Emelene Brand, two rusty callers and the tea things.
Before the drawing-room fire, Hanna slept in Maltese proprietorship. George
longed with passion to kick the cat.

Genevieve, as he saw through the open door, sat by the window. She had, it
appeared, but recently come in. She still wore her hat and coat; she had
not even drawn off her gloves. And seeing her thus, absorbed in some
problem, George's sense of his wrongs grew greater.

He had, he told himself, hurried home out of the jar and fret of a man's
day to find balm, to feel the cool fingers of peace pressed upon hot
eyelids, to drink strengthening draughts of refreshment from his wife's
unquestioning belief, from the completeness of her absorption in him. And
here she sat thinking of something else!

Genevieve arose, a little startled as he snapped on the lights and grunted
out something which optimism might translate into an affectionate husbandly
greeting. She came dutifully forward and raised her face, still exquisite
and cool from the outer air, for her lord's home-coming kiss. That resolved
itself into a slovenly peck.

"Been out?" asked George unnecessarily. He tried to quell the unreasonable
inclination to find her lacking in wifely devotion because she had been
out.

"Yes. There was a meeting at the Woman's Forum this afternoon," she
answered. She was unpinning her hat before the pier glass, and in it
he could see the reflection of her eyes turned upon his image with a
questioning look.

"The ladies seem to be having a busy day of it."

He struggled not quite successfully to be facetious over the pretty,
negligible activities of his wife's sex. "What mighty theme engaged your
attention?"

"That Miss Eliot--the real estate woman, you know--" George stiffened into
an attitude of close attention--"spoke about the conditions under which
women are working in the mills in this city and in the rest of the
county--" Genevieve averted her mirrored eyes from his mirrored face. She
moved toward her dressing-table.

"Oh, she did! and is the Woman's Forum going to come to grips with the
industrial monster and bring in the millennium by the first of the year?"

But George was painfully aware that light banter which fails to be
convincingly light is but a snarl.

Genevieve colored slightly as she studied the condition of a pair of long
white gloves which she had taken from a drawer.

"Of course the Woman's Forum is only for discussion," she said mildly. "It
doesn't initiate any action." Then she raised her eyes to his face and
George felt his universe reel about him.

For his wife's beautiful eyes were turned upon him, not in limpid
adoration, not in perfect acceptance of all his views, unheard, unweighed;
but with a question in their blue depths.

The horrid clairvoyance which harassment and self-distrust had given him
that afternoon enabled him, he thought, to translate that look. The Eliot
woman, in her speech before the Woman's Forum, had doubtless placed the
responsibility for the continuation of those factory conditions upon
the district attorney's office, had doubtless repeated those damn fool,
impractical questions which the suffragists were displaying in McMonigal's
windows.

And Genevieve was asking them in her mind! Genevieve was questioning
him, his motives, his standards, his intentions! Genevieve was not
intellectually a charming mechanical doll who would always answer "yes" and
"no" as he pressed the strings, and maintain a comfortable vacuity when he
was not at hand to perform the kindly act. Genevieve was thinking on her
own account. What, he wondered angrily, as he dressed--for he could not
bring himself to ask her aid in escaping the Herringtons and, indeed,
was suddenly balky at the thought of the intimacies of a domestic
evening--_what_ was she thinking? She was not such an imbecile as to be
unaware how large a share of her comfortable fortune was invested in the
local industry. Why, her father had been head of the Livingston Loomis-Ladd
Collar Company, when that dreadful fire--! And she certainly knew that his
uncle, Martin Jaffry, was the chief stockholder in the Jaffry-Bradshaw
Company.

What was the question in Genevieve's eyes? Was she asking if he were the
knight of those women who worked and sweated and burned, or of her and the
comfortable women of her class, of Alys Brewster-Smith with her little
cottages, of Cousin Emelene with her little stocks, of masquerading Betty
Sheridan whose sortie of independence was from the safe vantage-grounds of
entrenched privilege?

And all that evening as he watched his wife across the crystal and the
roses of the Herrington table, trying to interpret the question that had
been in her eyes, trying to interpret her careful silence, he realized what
every husband sooner or later awakes to realize--that he had married a
stranger.

He did not know her. He did not know what ambitions, what aspirations apart
from him, ruled the spirit behind that charming surface of flesh.

Of course she was good, of course she was tender, of course she was
high-minded! But how wide-enveloping was the cloak of her goodness? How far
did her tenderness reach out? Was her high-mindedness of the practical or
impractical variety?

From time to time, he caught her eyes in turn upon him, with that curious
little look of re-examination in their depths. She could look at him like
that! She could look at him as though appraisals were possible from a wife
to a husband!

They avoided industrial Whitewater County as a topic when they left the
Herrington's. They talked with great animation and interest of the people
at the party. Arrived at home, George, pleading press of work, went down
into the library while Genevieve went to bed. Carefully they postponed
the moment of making articulate all that, remaining unspoken, might be
ignored.

It was one o'clock and he had not moved a paper for an hour, when the
library door opened.

Genevieve stood there. She had sometimes come before when he had worked at
night, to chide him for neglecting sleep, to bring bouillon or chocolate.
But tonight she did neither.

She did not come far into the room, but standing near the door and looking
at him with a new expression--patient, tender, the everlasting eternal
look--she said: "I couldn't sleep, either. I came down to say something,
George. Don't interrupt me----" for he was coming toward her with sounds
of affectionate protest at her being out of bed. "Don't speak! I want to
say--whatever you do, whatever you decide--now--always--I love you. Even if
I don't agree, I love you."

She turned and went swiftly away.

George stood looking at the place where she had stood,--this strange, new
Genevieve, who, promising to love, reserved the right to judge.




CHAPTER VIII

BY MARY HEATON VORSE


The high moods of night do not always survive the clear, cold light of day.
Indeed it requires the contribution of both man and wife to keep a high
mood in married life.

Genevieve had gone in to make her profession of faith to her husband in a
mood which touched the high altitudes. She had gone without any conscious
expectation of anything from him in the way of response. She had vaguely
but confidingly expected him to live up to the moment.

She had expected something beautiful, a lovely flower of the
spirit--comprehension, generosity. Living up to the demand of the moment
was George's forte. Indeed, there were those among his friends who felt
that there were moments when George lived up to things too brightly and
too beautifully. His Uncle Jaffry, for instance, had his openly skeptical
moments. But George even lived up to his uncle's skepticism. He accepted
his remarks with charming good humor. It was his pride that he could laugh
at himself.

At the moment of Genevieve's touching speech he lived up to exactly
nothing. He didn't even smile. He only stared at her--a stare which said:

"Now what the devil do you mean by that?"

Genevieve had a flicker of bitter humor when she compared her moment of
sentiment to a toy balloon pulled down from the blue by an unsympathetic
hand.

The next morning, while George was still shaving, the telephone rang. It
was Betty.

"Can you have lunch with me at Thorne's, where we can talk?" she asked
Genevieve. "And give me a little time tomorrow afternoon?"

"Why," Geneviève responded, "I thought you were a working girl."

There was a perceptible pause before Betty replied.

"Hasn't George told you?" "Told what?" Genevieve inquired. "George hasn't
told me anything."

"I've left the office."

"Left! For heaven's sake, why?"

Betty's mind worked swiftly.

"Better treat it as a joke," was her decision. There was no pause before
she answered.

"Oh, trouble with the boss."

"You'll get over it. You're always having trouble with Penny.

"Oh," said Betty, "it's not with Penny this time."

"Not with George?"

"Yes, with George," Betty answered. "Did you think one couldn't quarrel
with the noblest of his sex? Well, one can."

"Oh, Betty, I'm sorry." Genevieve's tone was slightly reproachful.

"Well, I'm not," said Betty. "I like my present job better. It was a good
thing he fired me."

"_Fired_ you! George fired _you_?"

"Sure thing," responded Betty blithely. "I can't stand here talking all
day. What I want to know is, can I see you at lunch?"

"Yes--why, yes, of course," said Genevieve, dazedly. Then she hung up the
receiver and stared into space.

George, beautifully dressed, tall and handsome, now emerged from his room.
For once his adoring wife failed to notice that in appearance he rivaled
the sun god. She had one thing she wanted to know, and she wanted to know
it badly. It was,

"Why did you fire Betty Sheridan?"

She asked this in the insulting "point of the bayonet" tone which angry
equals use to one another the world over.

Either question or tone would have been enough to have put George's already
sensitive nerves on edge. Both together were unbearable. It was, when you
came down to it, the most awkward question in the world.

Why, indeed, had he fired Betty Sheridan? He hadn't really given himself an
account of the inward reasons yet. The episode had been too disturbing; and
it was George's characteristic to put off looking on unpleasant facts as
long as possible. Had he been really hard up, which he never had been, he
would undoubtedly have put away, unopened, the bills he couldn't pay. Life
was already presenting him with the bill of yesterday's ill humor, and
he was not yet ready to add up the amount. He hid himself now behind the
austerity of the offended husband.

"My dear," he inquired in his turn, "don't you think that you had best
leave the details of my office to me?"

He knew how lame this was, and how inadequate, before Genevieve replied.

"Betty Sheridan is not a detail of your office. She's one of my best
friends, and I want to know why you fired her. I dare say she was
exasperating; but I can't see any reason why you should have done it. You
should have let her leave."

It was Betty, with that lamentable lack of delicacy which George had
pointed out to her, who had not been ready to leave.

"You will have to let me be the judge of what I should or should not have
done," said George. This piece of advice Genevieve ignored.

"Why did you send her away?" she demanded.

"I sent her away, if you want to know, for her insolence and her damned bad
taste. If you think--working in my office as she was--it's decent or proper
on her part to be active in a campaign that is against me----"

"You mean because she's a suffragist? You sent her away for _that_! Why,
really, that's _tyranny_! It's like my sending away some one working for me
for her beliefs----"

They stood staring at each other, not questioningly as they had yesterday,
but as enemies,--the greater enemies that they so loved each other.

Because of that each word of unkindness was a doubled-edged sword. They
quarreled. It was the first time that they had seen each other without
illusion. They had been to each other the ideal, the lover, husband, wife.

Now, in the dismay of his amazement in finding himself quarreling with
the perfect wife, a vagrant memory came to George that he had heard that
Genevieve had a hot temper. She certainly had. He didn't notice how
handsome she looked kindled with anger. He only knew that the rose garden
in which they lived was being destroyed by their angry hands; that the very
foundation of the life they had been leading was being undermined.

The time of mirage and glamour was over. He had ceased being a hero and
an ideal, and why? Because, forgetting his past life, his record, his
achievement, Genevieve obstinately insisted on identifying him with one
single mistake. He was willing to concede it was a mistake. She had not
only identified him with it, but she had called him a number of wounding
things.

"Tyrant" was the least of them, and, worse than that, she had, in a
very fury of temper, told him that he "needn't take that pompous"--yes,
"pompous" had been her unpleasant word--"tone" with her, when he had
inquired, more in sorrow than in anger, if this were really his Genevieve
speaking.

There was a pause in their hostilities. They looked at each other aghast.
Aghast, they had perceived the same awful truth. Each saw that love
[Illustration: "You mean because she's a suffragist? You sent her away for
_that_? Why, really, that's _tyranny_!"] in the other's heart was dead, and
that things never could be the same again. So they stood looking down this
dark gulf, and the light of anger died.

In a toneless voice: "We mustn't let Cousin Emelene and Alys hear us
quarreling," said George. And Genevieve answered, "They've gone down to
breakfast."

The two ladies were seated at table.

"We heard you two love birds cooing and billing, and thought we might
as well begin," said Alys Brewster-Smith. "Regularity is of the highest
importance in bringing up a child."

Cousin Emelene was reading the _Sentinel._ George's quick eye glanced at
the headlines:

_Candidate Remington Heckled by Suffragists. Ask Him Leading Questions._

"Why, dear me," she remarked, her kind eyes on George, "it's perfectly
awful, isn't it, that they break the laws that way just for a little more
money. But I don't see why they want to annoy dear George. They ought to be
glad they are going to get a district attorney who'll put all those
things straight. I think it's very silly of them to ask him, don't you,
Genevieve?"

"Let me see," said Genevieve, taking the paper.

"All he's got to do, anyway, is to answer," pursued Cousin Emelene.

"Yes, that's all," replied Genevieve, her melancholy gaze on George.
Yesterday she would have had Emelene's childlike faith. But this stranger,
who, for a trivial and tyrannical reason, had sent away Betty--how would
_he_ act?

"They showed these right opposite your windows?" she questioned.

"Yes," he returned. "Our friend Mrs. Herrington did it herself. It was the
first course of our dinner. If you think that's good taste--"

"I would expect it of her," said Alys Brewster-Smith.

"But it makes it so easy for George," Emelene repeated. "They'll know now
what sort of a man he is. Little children at work, just to make a little
more money--it's awful!"

"Talking about money, George," said Alys, "have you seen to my houses yet?"
"Not yet," replied the harassed George. "You'll have to excuse my going
into the reasons now. I'm late as it is."

His voice had not the calm he would have wished for. As he took his
departure, he heard Alys saying,

"If you'll let me, my dear, I'd adore helping you about the housekeeping. I
don't want to stay here and be a burden. If you'll just turn it over to me,
I could cut your housekeeping expenses in half."

"Damn the women," was the unchivalrous thought that rose to George's lips.

One would have supposed that trouble had followed closely enough on George
Remington's trail, but now he found it awaiting him in his office.

Usually, Penny was the late one. It was this light-hearted young man's
custom to blow in with so engaging an expression and so cheerful a manner
that any comment on his unpunctuality was impossible. Today, instead of a
gay-hearted young man, he looked more like a sentencing judge.

What he wanted to know was,

"What have you done to Betty Sheridan? Do you mean to say that you had
the nerve to send her away, send her out of my office without consulting
me--and for a reason like that? How did you think I was going to feel about
it?"

"I didn't think about you," said George.

"You bet you didn't. You thought about number one and your precious vanity.
Why, if one were to separate you from your vanity, one couldn't see you
when you were going down the street. Go on, make a frock coat gesture! Play
the brilliant but outraged young district attorney. Do you know what it was
to do a thing of that kind--to fire a girl because she didn't agree with
you?"

"It wasn't because she didn't agree with me," George interrupted, with
heat.

"It was the act of a cad," Penny finished. "Look here, young man, I'm going
to tell you a few plain truths about yourself. You're not the sort of
person that you think you are. You've deceived yourself the way other
people are deceived about you--by your exterior. But inside of that
good-looking carcass of yours there's a brain composed of cheese. You
weren't only a cad to do it--you were a fool!" "You can't use that tone to
me!" cried George.

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