The Sturdy Oak Part 32

"Paying for the job! Do you think he knew of this plot?" cried George as Evans stood at the telephone.

"Oh, no. He just knew, in a leer from Doolittle, that they had extraordinary need for Eve thousand dollars or so in your behalf--that they had consulted you. And then Doolittle winked and Noonan c.o.c.ked his head rakishly, and Uncle Martin put--h.e.l.lo, Mr. Jaffry. This is Penny.

Dress and come down to the office quickly. We are in serious trouble."

Twenty minutes later Uncle Martin was sitting with the two young men in the office of Remington and Evans. When they explained the situation to him his dry little face screwed up.

"Well, at least Genevieve will be all right," he muttered. "E. Eliot will take care of her. But, boys--boys," he squeezed his hands and rocked in misery, "the devil of it is that I gave Doolittle the money in a check and then went and got another check from the Owners' Protective a.s.sociation and took the peak load off myself, and Doolittle was with me when I got the P. A. check. We've simply got to protect him. And, of course, what he knows, Noonan knows. We can't go tearing up Jack here, calling police and raising the town!"

George Remington rose.

"Then I've got to let my wife lie in some dive with that unspeakable Turk and that Mike the Goat while you men d.i.c.ker with the scoundrels who committed this crime!" he said. "My G.o.d, every minute is precious! We must act. Let me call the chief of police and the sheriff----"

"All dear friends of Noonan's," Penny quietly reminded him. "They probably have the same tip about what is on as you and Uncle Martin have! Calm down, George! First, let me go out and learn when Noonan and Doolittle are coming home! When we know that, we can----"

"Penny, I can't wait. I must act now. I must denounce the whole d.a.m.nable plot to the people of this country. I must not rest one second longer in silence as an accessory. I shall denounce----"

"Yes, George, you shall denounce," exclaimed his partner. "But just whom--yourself, that you did not warn Miss Eliot all day yesterday!"

"Yes," cried Remington, "first of all, myself as a coward!"

"All right. Next, then, your Uncle Martin Jaffry, who was earnestly trying to help you in the only way he knew how to help! Why, George, that would be----" "That would be the least I could do to let the people see----"

"To let the people see that Mrs. Brewster-Smith and all your social friends in this town are a.s.sociated with Mike the Goat and his gang----"

Before Evans could finish, his partner stopped him.

"Yes, yes--the whole d.a.m.ned system of greed! The rich greed and the poor greed--our criminal cla.s.ses plotting to keep justice from the decent law-abiding people of the place, who are led like sheep to the slaughter. What did the owners pay that money for? Not for the dirty job that was turned--not primarily. But to elect me, because they thought I would not enforce the factory laws and the housing laws and would protect them in their larceny! That money Uncle Martin collected was my price--my price!"

He was standing before his friends, rigid and white in rage. Neither man answered him.

"And because the moral sense of the community was in the hearts and heads of the women of the community," he went on, "those who are upholding the immoral compact between business and politics had to attack the womanhood of the town--and Genevieve's peril is my share in the shame. By G.o.d, I'm through!"

CHAPTER XIII. BY MARY AUSTIN

Close on Young Remington's groan of utter disillusionment came a sound from the street, formless and clumsy, but brought to a sharp climax with the crash of breaking gla.s.s.

Even through the closed window which Penfield Evans hastily threw up, there was an obvious quality to the disturbance which revealed its character even before they had grasped its import.

The street was still full of morning shadows, with here and there a dancing glimmer on the cobbles of the still level sun, caught on swinging dinner pails as the loosely a.s.sorted crowd drifted toward shop and factory.

In many of the windows half-drawn blinds marked where spruce window trimmers added last touches to masterpieces created overnight, but directly opposite nothing screened the offense of the Voiceless Speech, which continued to display its accusing questions to the pa.s.ser-by.

Clean through the plate-gla.s.s front a stone had crashed, leaving a heap of shining splinters, on either side of which a score of men and boys loosely cl.u.s.tered, while further down a ripple of disturbance marked where the thrower of the stone had just vanished into some recognized port of safety.

It was a clumsy crowd, half-hearted, moved chiefly by a cruel delight in destruction for its own sake, and giving voice at intervals to coa.r.s.e comment of which the wittiest penetrated through a stream of profanity, like one of those same splinters of gla.s.s, to the consciousness of at least two of the three men who hung listening in the window above:

"To h.e.l.l with the----suffragists!"

At the same moment another stone hurled through the break sent the Voiceless Speech toppling; it lay crumpled in a pathetic feminine sort of heap, subject to ribald laughter, but Penny Evans' involuntary cry of protest was cut off by his partner's hand on his shoulder. "They're Noonan's men, Penny; it's a put-up job."

George had marked some of the crowd at the meetings Noonan had arranged for him, and the last touch to the perfunctory character of the disturbance was added by the leisurely stroll of the policeman turning in at the head of the street. Before he reached the crowd it had redissolved into the rapidly filling thoroughfare.

"It's no use, Penny. Our women have seen the light and beaten us to it; we've got to go with them or with Noonan and his--Mike the Goat!"

Recollection of his wife's plight cut him like a knife. "The Brewster-Smith women have got to choose for themselves!" He felt about for his hat like a man blind with purpose.

The street sweeper was taking up the fragments of the shattered windows half an hour later, when Martin Jaffry found himself going rather aimlessly along Main Street with a feeling that the bottom had recently dropped out of things--a sensation which, if the truth must be told, was greatly augmented by the fact that he hadn't yet breakfasted. He had remained behind the two younger men to get into communication with Betty Sheridan and ask her to stay close to the telephone in case Miss Eliot should again attempt to get into touch with her. He lingered still, dreading to go into any of the places where he was known lest he should somehow be led to commit himself embarra.s.singly on the subject of his nephew's candidacy.

His middle-aged jauntiness considerably awry, he moved slowly down the heedless street, subject to the most gloomy reflections. Like most men, Martin Jaffry had always been dimly aware that the fabric of society is held together by a system of mutual weaknesses and condonings, but he had always thought of himself and his own family as moving freely in the interstices, peculiarly exempt, under Providence, from strain. Now here they were, in such a position that the first stumbling foot might tighten them all into inextricable scandal.

It is true that Penny, at the last moment, had prevailed on George to put off the relief of his feelings by public repudiation of his political connections, at least until after a conference with the police. And to George's fear that the newspapers would get the news from the police before he had had a chance to repudiate, he had countered with a suggestion, drawn from an item in the private history of the chief--known to him through his father's business--which he felt certain would quicken the chief's sense of the propriety of keeping George's predicament from the press.

"My G.o.d!" said George in amazement, and Martin Jaffry had responded fervently with "O Lord!"

Not because it shocked him to think that there might be indiscretions known to the lawyer of a chief of police which the chief might not wish known to the world, but because, with the addition of this new coil to his nephew's affairs, he was suddenly struck with the possibility of still other coils in any one of which the saving element of indiscretion might be wanting.

Suppose they should come upon one, just one impregnable honesty, one soul whom the fear of exposure left unshaken. On such a possibility rested the exemption of the Jaffry-Remingtons. It was the reference to E. Eliot in his instructions to Betty which had awakened in Jaffry's mind the disquieting reflection that just here might prove such an impregnability. They probably wouldn't be able to "do anything" with E.

Eliot simply because she herself had never done anything she was afraid to go to the public about. To do him justice, it never occurred to him that in the case of a lady it was easily possible to invent something which would be made to answer in place of an indiscretion.

Probably that was Martin Jaffry's own impregnability--that he wouldn't have lied about a lady to save himself. What he did conclude was that it was just this unbending quality of women, this failure to provide the saving weakness, which unfitted them for political life.

He shuddered, seeing the whole fabric of politics fall in ruins around an electorate composed largely of E. Eliots, feeling himself stripped of everything that had so far distinguished him from the Noonans and the Doolittles.

Out of his sudden need for reinstatement with himself, he raised in his mind the vision of woman as the men of Martin Jaffry's world conceived her--a tender, enveloping medium in which male complacency, unchecked by any breath of criticism, reaches its perfect flower--the flower whose fruit, eaten in secret and afar from the soil which nourishes it, is graft, corruption and civic incompetence.

Instinctively his need directed him toward the Remington place.

Mrs. Brewster-Smith was glad to see him. Between George's hurried departure and Jaffry's return several of the specters that haunt such women's lives looked boldly in at the window.

There was the specter of scandal, as it touched the Remingtons, touching that dearest purchase of femininity, social standing; there was the specter of poverty, which threatened from the exposure of the source of her income and the enforcement of the law; nearer and quite as poignant, was the specter of an ignominious retreat from the comfort of George Remington's house to her former lodging, which she was shrewd enough to realize would follow close on the return of her cousin's wife.

All morning she had beaten off the invisible host with that courage--worthy of a better cause--with which women of her cla.s.s confront the a.s.saults of reality; and the sight of Martin Jaffry coming up the broad front walk met her like a warm waft of security. She flung open the door and met him with just that mixture of deference and relief which the situation demanded.

She was terribly anxious about poor Genevieve, of course, but not so anxious that she couldn't perceive how Genevieve's poor uncle had suffered.

"What, no breakfast! Oh, you poor man! Come right out into the dining-room."

Mrs. Brewster-Smith might have her limitations, but she was entirely aware of the appeasing effect of an open fire and a spread cloth even when no meal is in sight; she was adept in the art of enveloping tenderness and the extent to which it may be augmented by the pleasing aroma of ham and eggs and the coffee which she made herself. And oh, those _poor_ women, what _disaster_ they were bringing on themselves by their prying into things that were better left to more competent minds, and what pain to _other_ minds! So _selfish_, but of course they didn't realize. Really she hoped it would be a lesson to Genevieve. The dear girl was so changed that she didn't see how she was going to go on living with her; though, of course, she would like to stand by dear George--and a woman did so appreciate a home!

At this point the enveloping tenderness of Mrs. Brewster-Smith concentrated in her fine eyes, just brushed the heart of her listener as with a pa.s.sing wing, hovered a moment, and dropped demurely to the tablecloth.

In the meantime two sorely perplexed citizens were grappling with the problem of the disappearance of two highly respectable women from their homes under circ.u.mstances calculated to give the greatest anxiety to faithful "party" men. It hadn't needed Penny's professional acquaintance with Chief Buckley to impress the need of secrecy on that official's soul. "Squeal" on Noonan or Mike the Goat? Not if he knew himself.

Naturally Mr. Remington must have his wife, but at the same time it was important to proceed regularly.

"And the day before election, too!" mourned the chief. "Lord, what a mess! But keep cool, Mr. Remington; this will come out all right!"