The Sturdy Oak Part 15

Well, and do you know what the conditions are in every big mill in this town? With this boom in war orders, they've simply taken off the lid.

Anything goes. The fire and building ordinances are disregarded, and for six months the mills have been running a night shift as well as a day shift, on Sundays and week-days, and three-quarters of their operatives are women. Those women go to work at seven o'clock at night, and quit at six in the morning; and they have an hour off from twelve to one in the middle of the night.

"Now do you see? It's up to the district attorney to enforce the law.

Isn't it fair to ask this defender of the home whether he believes that women should be home at night or not, and if he does, what he's going to do about it? Talk about slogans! The situation bristles with them!

We could placard this town with a lot of big black-faced questions that would make it the hottest place for George Remington that he ever found himself in.

"Well, it would be pretty good campaign work if he was the hypocrite I took him to be, from his stuff in the _Sentinel_. But if he's on the level, as you think he is, there's a chance--don't you see there's a chance that he'd come out flat-footed for the enforcement of the law?

And if he did!... Child, can you see what would happen if he _did_?"

Betty's eyes were shining like a pair of big sapphires. When she spoke, it was in a whisper like an excited child.

"I can see a little," she said. "I think I can see. But tell me."

"In the first place," said E. Eliot, "see whom he'd have against him.

There'd be the best people, to start with. Most of them are stockholders in the mills. Why, you must be, yourself, in the Jaffry-Bradshaw Company! Your father was, anyway."

Betty nodded.

"You want to be sure you know what it means," the older woman went on.

"This thing might cut into your dividends, if it went through."

"I hope it will," said Betty fiercely. "I never realized before that my money was earned like that--by women, girls of my age, standing over a machine all night." She shivered. "And there are some of us, I'm sure,"

she went on, "who would feel the way I do about it."

"Well,--some," E. Eliot admitted. "Not many, though. And then there are the merchants. These are great times for them--town crammed with people, all making money, and buying right and left. And then there's the labor vote itself! A lot of laboring men would be against him. Their women just now are earning as much as they are. There are a lot of these men--whatever they might say--who'd take good care not to vote for a man who would prevent their daughters from bringing in the fifteen, twenty, or twenty-five dollars a week they get for that night work.

"Well, and who would be with him? Why, the women themselves. The one chance on earth he'd have for election would be to have the women organized and working for him, bringing every ounce of influence they had to bear on their men--on all the men they knew.

"Mind you, I don't believe he could win at that. But, win or lose, he'd have done something. He'd have shown the women that they needed the vote, and he'd have found out for himself--he and the other men who believe in fair human treatment for everybody--that they can't secure that treatment without women's votes. That's the real issue. It isn't that women are better than men, or that they could run the world better if they got the chance. It's that men and women have got to work together to do the things that need doing."

"You're perfectly wonderful," said Betty, and sat thereafter, for perhaps a minute and a half, in an entranced silence.

Then, with a shake of the head, a straightening of the spine, and a good, deep, business-like preliminary breath, she turned to her new friend and said, "Well, shall we do it?"

This time it was E. Eliot's turn to gasp.

She hadn't expected to have a course of action put up to her in that instantaneous and almost casual manner. She wasn't young like Betty.

She'd been working hard ever since she was seventeen years old. She'd succeeded, in a way, to be sure. But her success had taught her how hard success is to obtain. She saw much farther into the consequences of the proposed campaign than Betty could see. She realized the bitter animosity that it would provoke. She knew it was well within the probabilities that her business would be ruined by it.

She sat there silent for a while, her face getting grimmer and grimmer all the time. But she turned at last and looked into the eager face of the girl beside her, and she smiled,--though even the smile was grim.

"All right," she said, holding out her hand to bind the bargain. "We'll start and we'll stick. And here's hoping! We'd better lunch together, hadn't we?"

CHAPTER VII. BY ANNE O'HAGAN

Mr. Benjamin Doolittle, by profession White-water's leading furniture dealer and funeral director, and by the accident of political fortune the manager of Mr. George Remington's campaign, sat in his candidate's private office, and from time to time restrained himself from hasty speech by the diplomatic and dexterous use of a quid of tobacco.

He found it difficult to preserve his philosophy in the face of George Remington's agitation over the woman's suffrage issue.

"It's the last time," he had frequently informed his political cronies since the opening of the campaign, "that I'll wet-nurse a new-fledged candidate. They've got at least to have their milk teeth through if they want Benjamin Doolittle after this." To George, itchingly aware through all his rasped nerves of Mrs. Herrington's letter in that morning's _Sentinel_ asking him to refute, if he could, an abominable half column of statistics in regard to legislation in the Woman Suffrage States, the furniture dealer was drawling pacifically:

"Now, George, you made a mistake in letting the women get your goat.

Don't pay no attention to them. Of course their game's fair enough. I will say that you gave them their opening; stood yourself for a target with that statement of yours. Howsomever, you ain't obligated to keep on acting as the n.i.g.g.e.r head in the shooting gallery.

"Let 'em write; let 'em ask questions in the papers; let 'em heckle you on the stump. All that you've got to say is that you've expressed your personal convictions already, and that you've stood by those convictions in your private life, and that as you ain't up for legislator, the question don't really concern your candidacy. And that, as you're running for district attorney, you will, with their kind permission, proceed to the subjects that do concern you there--the condition of the court calendar of Whitewater County, the prosecution of the racetrack gamblers out at Erie Oval, and so forth, and so forth.

"You laid yourself open, George, but you ain't obligated in law or equity to keep on presenting yourself bare chest for their outrageous slings and arrows."

"Of course, what you say about their total irrelevancy is quite true,"

said George, making the concession so that it had all the belligerency of a challenge. "But of course I would never have consented to run for office at the price of muzzling my convictions."

Mr. Doolittle wearily agreed that that was more than could be expected from any candidate of the high moral worth of George Remington. Then he went over a list of places throughout the county where George was to speak during the next week, and intimated dolefully that the committee could use a little more money, if it had it.

He expressed it thus: "A few more contributions wouldn't put any strain to speak of on our pants' pockets. Anything more to be got out of Old Martin Jaffry? Don't he realize that blood's thicker than water?"

"I'll speak to him," growled George.

He hated Mr. Benjamin Doolittle's colloquialisms, though once he had declared them amusing, racy, of the soil, and had rebuked Genevieve's fastidious criticisms of them on an occasion when she had interpreted her role of helpmeet to include that of hostess to Mr. and Mrs.

Doolittle--oh, not in her own home, of course!--at luncheon, at the Country Club!

"Well, I guess that's about all for today."

Mr. Doolittle brought the conference to a close, hoisting himself by links from his chair.

"It takes $3000 every time you circularize the const.i.tuency, you know----"

He lounged toward the window and looked out again upon the pleasant, mellow scene around Fountain Square. And with the look his affectation of bucolic calm dropped from him. He turned abruptly.

"What's that going on at McMonigal's corner?" he demanded sharply. "I don't know, I am sure," said George, with indifference, still bent upon teaching his manager that he was a free and independent citizen, in leading strings to no man. "It's been vacant since the fire in March, when Petrosini's fish market and Miss Letterblair's hat st----"

He had reached the window himself by this time, and the sentence was destined to remain forever unfinished.

From the low, old-fashioned brick building on the northeast corner of Fountain Square, whose boarded eyes had stared blindly across toward the glittering orbs of its towering neighbor, the Jaffry Building, for six months, a series of great placards flared.

Planks had been removed from the windows, plate gla.s.s restored, and behind it he read in d.a.m.nable irritation:

"SOME QUESTIONS FOR CANDIDATE REMINGTON."

A foot high, an inch broad, black as Erebus, the letters shouted at him against an orange background. Every window of the second story contained a placard. On the first story, in the show window where Petrosini had been wont to ravish epicurean eyes by shad and red snapper, perch and trout, cunningly imbedded in ice blocks upon a marble slab--in that window, framed now in the hated orange and black, stood a woman.

She was turning backward, for the benefit of onlookers who pressed close to the gla.s.s, the leaves of a mammoth pad resting upon an easel.

From their point of vantage in the second story of the Jaffry Building, the candidate and his manager could see that each sheet bore that horrid headline:

"QUESTIONS FOR CANDIDATE REMINGTON."