A Poor Wise Man - Mary Roberts Rinehart (good e books to read .txt) 📗
- Author: Mary Roberts Rinehart
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“No. But it is good of you to think of it.”
“You know what the actual trouble was last night? It was not her coming here.”
“I know, Howard.”
“Don’t let her marry him, Nellie! Better than any one, you ought to know what that would mean.”
“I knew too, Howard, but I did it.”
In the end he went away not greatly comforted, to fight his own battles, to meet committees from the union, and having met them, to find himself facing the fact that, driven by some strange urge he could not understand, the leaders wished a strike. There were times when he wondered what would happen if he should suddenly yield every point, make every concession. They would only make further demands, he felt. They seemed determined to put him out of business. If only he could have dealt with the men directly, instead of with their paid representatives, he felt that he would get somewhere. But always, interposed between himself and his workmen, was this barrier of their own erecting.
It was like representative government. It did not always represent. It, too, was founded on representation in good faith; but there was not always good faith. The union system was wrong. It was like politics. The few handled the many. The union, with its all-powerful leaders, was only another form of autocracy. It was Prussian. Yet the ideal behind the union was sound enough.
He had no quarrel with the union. He puzzled it out, traveling unaccustomed mental paths. The country was founded on liberty. All men were created free and equal. Free, yes, but equal? Was not equality a long way ahead along a thorny road? Men were not equal in the effort they made, nor did equal efforts bring equal result. If there was class antagonism behind all this unrest, would there not always be those who rose by dint of ceaseless effort? Equality of opportunity, yes. Equality of effort and result, no.
To destroy the chance of gain was to put a premium on inertia; to kill ambition; to reduce the high without raising the low.
At noon on the same day Willy Cameron went back to the house on Cardew Way, to find Lily composed and resigned, instead of the militant figure he had expected. He asked her to go home, and she told him then that she had no longer a home to go to.
“I meant to go, Willy,” she finished. “I meant to go this morning. But you see how things are.”
He had stood for a long time, looking at nothing very hard. “I see,” be said finally. “Of course your grandfather will be sorry in a day or two, but he may not swallow his pride very soon.”
That rather hurt her.
“What about my pride?” she asked.
“You can afford to be magnanimous with all your life before you.” Then he faced her. “Besides, Lily, you’re wrong. Dead wrong. You’ve hurt three people, and all you’ve got out of it has been your own way.”
“There is such a thing as liberty.”
“I don’t know about that. And a good many crimes have been committed in its name.” Even in his unhappiness he was controversial. “We are never really free, so long as we love people, and they love us. Well - ” He picked up his old felt hat and absently turned down the brim; it was raining. “I’ll have to get back. I’ve overstayed my lunch hour as it is.”
“You haven’t had any luncheon?”
“I wasn’t hungry,” he had said, and had gone away, his coat collar turned up against the shower. Lily had had a presentiment that he was taking himself out of her life, that he had given her up as a bad job. She felt depressed and lonely, and not quite so sure of herself as she bad been; rather, although she did not put it that way, as though something fine had passed her way, like Pippa singing, and had then gone on.
She settled down as well as she could to her new life, making no plans, however, and always with the stricken feeling that she had gained her own point at the cost of much suffering. She telephoned to her mother daily, broken little conversations with long pauses while Grace steadied her voice. Once her mother hung up the receiver hastily, and Lily guessed that her grandfather had come in. She felt very bitter toward him.
But she found the small oneage interesting, in a quiet way; to make her own bed and mend her stockings - Grace had sent her a trunkful of clothing; and on the elderly maid’s afternoon out, to help Elinor with the supper. She seldom went out, but Louis Akers came daily, and on the sixth day of her stay she promised to marry him.
She had not meant to do it, but it was difficult to refuse him. She had let him think she would do it ultimately, for one thing. And, however clearly she might analyze him in his absences, his strange attraction reasserted itself when he was near. But her acceptance of him was almost stoical.
“But not soon, Louis,” she said, holding him off. “And - I ought to tell you - I don’t think we will be happy together.”
“Why not?”
“Because - ” she found it hard to put into words - “because love with you is a sort of selfish thing, I think.”
“I’ll lie down now and let you tramp on me,” he said exultantly, and held out his arms. But even as she moved toward him she voiced her inner perplexity.
“I never seem to be able to see myself married to you.”
“Then the sooner the better, so you can.”
“You won’t like being married, you know.”
“That’s all you know about it, Lily. I’m mad about you. I’m mad for you.”
There was a new air of maturity about Lily those days, and sometimes a sort of aloofness that both maddened him and increased his desire to possess her. She went into his arms, but when he held her closest she sometimes seemed farthest away.
“I want you now.”
“I want to be engaged a long time, Louis. We have so much to learn about each other.”
He thought that rather childish. But whatever had been his motive in the beginning, he was desperately in love with her by that time, and because of that he frightened her sometimes. He was less sure of himself, too, even after she had accepted him, and to prove his continued dominance over her he would bully her.
“Come here,” be would say, from the hearth rug, or by the window.
“Certainly not.”
“Come here.”
Sometimes she went, to be smothered in his hot embrace; sometimes she did not.
But her infatuation persisted, although there were times when his inordinate vitality and his caresses gave her a sense of physical weariness, times when sheer contact revolted her. He seemed always to want to touch her. Fastidiously reared, taught a sort of aloofness from childhood, Lily found herself wondering if all men in love were like that, always having to be held off.
Ellen was staying at the Boyd house. She went downstairs the morning after her arrival, and found the bread - bakery bread-toasted and growing cold on the table, while a slice of ham, ready to be cooked, was not yet on the fire, and Mrs. Boyd had run out to buy some milk.
Dan had already gone, and his half-empty cup of black coffee was on the kitchen table. Ellen sniffed it and raised her eyebrows.
She rolled up her sleeves, put the toast in the oven and the ham in the frying pan, with much the same grimness with which she had sat the night before listening to Mrs. Boyd’s monologue. If this was the way they looked after Willy Cameron, no wonder he was thin and pale. She threw out the coffee, which she suspected had been made by the time-saving method of pouring water on last night’s grounds, and made a fresh pot of it. After that she inspected the tea towels, and getting a tin dishpan, set them to boil in it on the top of the range.
“Enough to give him typhoid,” she reflected.
Ellen disapproved of her surroundings; she disapproved of any woman who did not boil her tea towels. And when Edith came down carefully dressed and undeniably rouged she formed a disapproving opinion of that young lady, which was that she was trying to land Willy Cameron, and that he would be better dead than landed.
She met Edith’s stare of surprise with one of thinly veiled hostility.
“Hello!” said Edith. “When did you blow in, and where from?”
“I came to see Mr. Cameron last night, and he made me stay.”
“A friend of Willy’s! Well, I guess you needn’t pay for your breakfast by cooking it. Mother’s probably run out for something - she never has anything in the house - and is talking somewhere. I’ll take that fork.”
But Ellen proceeded to turn the ham.
“I’ll do it,” she said. “You might spoil your hands.”
But Edith showed no offense.
“All right,” she acceded indifferently. “If you’re going to eat it you’d better cook it. We’re rotten housekeepers here.”
“I should think, if you’re going to keep boarders, somebody would learn to cook. Mr. Cameron’s mother is the best housekeeper in town, and he was raised on good food and plenty of it.”
Her tone was truculent. Ellen’s world, the world of short hours and easy service, of the decorum of the Cardew servants’ hall, of luxury and dignity and good pay, had suddenly gone to pieces about her. She was feeling very bitter, especially toward a certain chauffeur who had prophesied the end of all service. He had made the statement that before long all people would be equal. There would be no above and below-stairs, no servants’ hall.
“They’ll drive their own cars, then, damn them,” he had said once, “if they can get any to drive. And answer their own bells, if they’ve got any to ring. And get up and cook their own breakfasts.”
“Which you won’t have any to cook,” Grayson had said irritably, from the head of the long table. “Just a word, my man. That sort of talk is forbidden here. One word more and I go to Mr. Cardew.”
The chauffeur had not sulked, however. “All right, Mr. Grayson,” he said affably. “But I can go on thinking, I daresay. And some of these days you’ll be wishing you’d climbed on the band wagon before it’s too late.”
Ellen, turning the ham carefully, was conscious that her revolt had been only partially on Lily’s account. It was not so much Lily’s plight as the abuse of power, although she did not put it that way, that had driven her out. Ellen then had carried out her own small revolution, and where had it put her? She had lost a good home, and what could she do? All she knew was service.
Edith poured herself a cup of coffee, and taking a piece of toast from the oven, stood nibbling it. The crumbs fell on the not over-clean floor.
“Why don’t you go into the dining-room to eat?” Ellen demanded.
“Got out of the wrong side of the bed, didn’t you?” Edith asked. “Willy’s bed, I suppose. I’m not hungry, and I always eat breakfast like this. I wish he would hurry. We’ll be late.”
Ellen stared. It was her first knowledge that this girl, this painted hussy, worked in Willy’s pharmacy, and her suspicions increased. She had a quick vision, as she had once had of Lily, of Edith in the Cameron house; Edith reading or embroidering on the front porch while Willy’s mother slaved for her;
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