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Sturdy Oak, The

<h2> CHAPTER VI. BY HENRY KITCHELL WEBSTER </h2> Of the quartette who, an hour later, emerged from the bath-houses and scampered across the satiny beech into a discreetly playful surf, Genevieve was the one real swimmer. She was better even than Penny, and she left Betty and George nowhere. She had an endless repertory of amphibious stunts which she performed with gusto, and in the intervals she took an equal satisfaction in watching Penny's heroic but generally disastrous attempts to imitate them. The other two splashed around aimlessly and now and then remonstrated. Now, it's all very well to talk about two hearts beating as one, and in the accepted poetical sense of the words, of course Genevieve's and George's did. But as a matter of physiological fact, they didn't. At the end of twenty minutes or so George began turning a delicate blue and a clatter as of distant castanets provided an obligato when he spoke, the same being performed by George's teeth. The person who made these observations was Betty. "You'd better go out," she said. "You're freezing." It ought to have been Genevieve who said it, of course, though the fact that she was under water more than half the time might be advanced as her excuse for failing to say it. But who could venture to excuse the downright callous way in which she exclaimed, "Already? Why we've just got in! Come along and dive through that wave. That'll warm you up!" It was plain to George that she didn't care whether he was cold or not. And, though the idea wouldn't quite go into words, it was also clear to him that an ideal wife—a really womanly wife—would have turned blue just a little before he began to. "Thanks," he said, in a cold blue voice that matched the color of his finger nails. "I think I've had enough." Betty came splashing along beside him. "I'm going out, too," she said. "We'll leave these porpoises to their innocent play." This was almost pure amiability, because she wasn't cold, and she'd been having a pretty good time. Her other (practically negligible) motive was that Penny might be reminded, by her withdrawal, of his forgotten promise to teach her to float—and be sorry. Altogether, George would have been showing only a natural and reasonable sense of his obligations if he'd brightened up and flirted with her a little, instead of glooming out to sea the way he did, paying simply no attention to her at all. So at last she pricked him. "Isn't it funny," she said, "the really blighting contempt that swimmers feel for people who can't feel at home in the water—people who gasp and shiver and keep their heads dry?" She could see that, in one way, this remark had done George good. It helped warm him up. Leaning back on her hands, as she did, she could see the red come up the back of his neck and spread into his ears. But it didn't make him conversationally any more exciting. He merely grunted. So she tried again. "I suppose," she said dreamily, "that the myth about mermaids must be founded in fact. Or is it sirens I'm thinking about? Perfectly fascinating, irresistible women, who lure men farther and farther out, in the hope of a kiss or something, until they get exhausted and drown. I'll really be glad when Penny gets back alive." "And I shall be very glad," said George, trying hard for a tone of condescending indifference appropriate for use with one who has played dolls with one's little sister, "I shall really be very glad when you make up your mind what you are going to do with Penny. He's just about a total loss down at the office as it is, and he's getting a worse idiot from day to day. And the worst of it is, I imagine you know all the while what you're going to do about it—whether you're going to take him or not." The girl flushed at that. He was being almost too outrageously rude, even for George. But before she said anything to that effect, she thought of something better. "I shall never marry any man," she said very intensely, "whose heart is not with the Cause. You know what Cause I mean, George—the Suffrage Cause. When I see thoughtless girls handing over their whole lives to men who..." It sounded like the beginning of an oration. "Good Lord!" her victim cried. "Isn't there anything else than that to talk about—ever?" "But just think how lucky you are, George," she said, "that at home they all think exactly as you do!" He jumped up. Evidently this reminder of the purring acquiescences of Cousin Emelene and Mrs. Brewster-Smith laid no balm upon his harassed spirit. "You may leave my home alone, if you please." He was frightfully annoyed, of course, or he wouldn't have said anything as crude as that. In a last attempt to recover his scattered dignity, he caught at his office manner. "By the way," he said, "you forgot to remind me today to write a letter to that Eliot woman about Mrs. Brewster-Smith's cottages." With that he stalked away to dress. Genevieve and Penny, now shoreward bound, hailed him. But it wasn't quite impossible to pretend he didn't hear, and he did it. The dinner afterward at the Sea Light Inn was a rather gloomy affair. George's lonely grandeur was only made the worse, it seemed, by Genevieve's belated concern lest he might have taken cold through not having gone and dressed directly he came out of the water. Genevieve then turned very frosty to Penny, having decided suddenly that it was all his fault. As for Betty, though she was as amiable a little soul as breathed, she didn't see why she should make any particular effort to console Penny, just because his little flirtation with Genevieve had stopped with a bump. Even the ride home in the moonlight didn't help much. Genevieve sat beside George on the front seat, and between them there stretched a tense, tragic silence. In the back seat with Penfield Evans, and in the intervals of frustrating his attempts to hold her hand, Betty considered how frightfully silly young married couples could be over microscopic differences. But Betty was wrong here and the married pair on the front seat were right. Just reflect for a minute what Genevieve's George was. He was her knight, her Bayard, her thoroughly Tennysonian King Arthur. The basis of her adoration was that he should remain like that. You can see then what a staggering experience it was to have caught herself, even for a minute, in the act of smiling over him as sulky and absurd. And think of George's Genevieve! A saint enshrined, that his soul could profitably bow down before whenever it had leisure to escape from the activities of a wicked world. Fancy his horror over the mere suspicion that she could be indifferent to his wishes—his comfort—even his health, because of a mere tomboy flirtation with a man who could swim better than he could! Most women were like that, he knew—vain, shallow, inconstant creatures! But was not his pearl an exception? It was horrible to have to doubt it. By three o'clock the next morning, after many tears and much grave discourse, they succeeded in getting these doubts to sleep—killing them, they'd have said, beyond the possibility of resurrection. It was the others who had made all the trouble. If only they could have the world to themselves—no Cousin Emelene, no Alys Brewster-Smith, no Penfield Evans and Betty Sheridan, with their frivolity and low ideals, to complicate things! An Arcadian Island in some Aeonian Sea. "Well," he said hopefully, "our home can be like that. It shall be like that, when we get rid of Alys and her horrible little girl, and Cousin Emelene and her unspeakable cat. It shall be our world; and no troubles or cares or worries shall ever get in there!" She acquiesced in this prophecy, but even as she did so, cuddling her face against his own, a low-down, unworthy spook, whose existence in her he must never suspect, said audibly in her inner ear, "Much he knows about it!" Betty did not forget to remind George of the letter he was to write to Miss Eliot about taking over the agency of Mrs. Brewster-Smith's cottages. In the composition of this letter George washed his hands of responsibility with, you might say, antiseptic care. He had taken pleasure in recommending Miss Eliot, he explained, and Mrs. Brewster-Smith was acting on his recommendation. Any questions arising out of the management of the property should be taken up directly with her client. Miss Eliot would have no difficulty in understanding that the enormous pressure of work which now beset him precluded him from having anything more to do with the matter. The letter was typed and inclosed in a big linen envelope, with the mess of papers Alys had dumped upon his desk a few days previously, and it was despatched forthwith by the office boy. "There," said George on a note of grim satisfaction, "that's done!" The grimness lasted, but the satisfaction did not. Or only until the return of the office boy, half an hour later, with the identical envelope and a three-line typewritten note from Miss Eliot. She was sorry to say, she wrote, that she did not consider it advisable to undertake the agency for the property in question. Thanking him, nevertheless, for his courtesy, she was his very truly, E. Eliot. George summoned Betty by means of the buzzer, and asked her, with icy indignation, what she thought of that. But, as he was visibly bursting with impatience to say what he thought of it, she gave him the opportunity. "I thought you advanced women," he said, "were supposed to stand by each other—stand by all women—try to make things better for them. One for all—all for one. That sort of thing. But it really works the other way. It's just because a woman owns those cottages that Miss Eliot won't have anything to do with them. She knows that women are unreasonable and hard to get on with in business matters, so she passes the buck! Back to a man, if you please, who hasn't any more real responsibility for it than she has." There was, of course, an obvious retort to this; namely, that business was business, and that a business woman had the same privilege a business man had, of declining a job that looked as if it would entail more bother than it was worth. But Betty couldn't quite bring herself to take this line. Women, if they could ever get the chance (through the vote and in other ways), were going to make the world a better place—run it on a better lot of ideals. It wouldn't do to begin justifying women on the ground that they were only doing what men did. As well abandon the whole crusade right at the beginning. George saw her looking rather thoughtful, and pressed his advantage. Suppose Betty went and saw Miss Eliot personally, sometime today, and urged her to reconsider. The business didn't amount to much, it was true, and it no doubt involved the adjustment of some troublesome details. But unless Miss Eliot would undertake it, he wouldn't know just where to turn. Alys had quarreled with Allen, and Sampson was a skate. And perhaps a little plain talk to Alys about the condition of the cottages—"from one of her own sex," George said this darkly and looked away out of the window at the time—might be productive of good. "All right," Betty agreed, "I'll see what I can do. It's kind of hard to go to a woman you barely know by sight, and talk to her about her duty, but I guess I'm game. If you can spare me, I'll go now and get it over with." There were no frills about Edith Eliot's real estate office, though the air of it was comfortably busy and prosperous. The place had once been a store. An architect's presentation of an apartment building, now rather dusty, occupied the show-window. There was desk accommodation for two or three of those bright young men who make a selection of keys and take people about to look at houses; there was a stenographer's desk with a stenographer sitting at it; and back of a table in the corner, in the attitude of one making herself as comfortable as the heat of the day would permit, while she scowled over a voluminous typewritten document, was E. Eliot herself. It was almost superfluous to mention that her name was Edith. She never signed it, and there was no one, in Whitewater anyway, who called her by it. She was a big-boned young woman (that is, if you call the middle thirties young), with an intelligent, homely face, which probably got the attraction some people surprisingly found in it from the fact that she thought nothing about its looks one way or the other. It was rather red when Betty came in, and she was making it rapidly redder with the vigorous ministrations of a man's-size handkerchief. She greeted Betty with a cordial "how-de-doo," motioned her to the other chair at the table (Betty had a fleeting wish that she might have dusted it before she sat down), and asked what she could do for her. "I'm from Mr. Remington's office," Betty said, "Remington and Evans. He wrote you a note this morning about some cottages that belong to a cousin of his, Mrs. Brewster-Smith." "I answered that note by his own messenger," said E. Eliot. "He should have got the reply before this." "Oh, he got it," said Betty, "and was rather upset about it. What I've come for, is to urge you to reconsider." E. Eliot smiled rather grimly at her blotting-pad, looked up at Betty, and allowed her smile to change its quality. What she said was not what she had meant to say before she looked up. E. Eliot was always upbraiding herself for being sentimental about youth and beauty in her own sex. She'd never been beautiful, and she'd never been young—not young like Betty. But the upbraidings never did any good. She said: "I thought I had considered sufficiently when I answered Mr. Remington's note. But it's possible I hadn't. What is it you think I may have overlooked?" "Why," said Betty, "George thought the reason you wouldn't take the cottages was because a woman owned them. He used it as a sort of example of how women wouldn't stick together. He said that you probably knew that women were unreasonable and hard to deal with and didn't want the bother." It disconcerted Betty a little that E. Eliot interposed no denial at this point, though she'd paused to give her the opportunity. "You see," she went on a little breathlessly, "I'm for women suffrage and economic independence and all that. I think it's perfectly wonderful that you should be doing what you are—showing that women can be just as successful in business as men can. Of course I know that you've got a perfect right to do just what a man would do—refuse to take a piece of business that wasn't worth while. But—but what we hope is, and what we want to show men is, that when women get into politics and business they'll be better and less selfish." "Which do you mean will be better?" E. Eliot inquired. "The politics and the business, or the women?" "I mean the politics and the business," Betty told her rather frostily. Was the woman merely making fun of her? E. Eliot caught the note. "I meant my question seriously," she said. "It has a certain importance. But I didn't mean to interrupt you. Go ahead." "Well," Betty said, "that's about all. George—Mr. Remington—that is—is running for district attorney, and he has come out against suffrage as you know. I thought perhaps this was a chance to convert him a little. It would be a great favor to him, anyway, if you took the cottages; because he doesn't know whom to turn to, if you won't. I didn't come to try to tell you what your duty is, but I thought perhaps you hadn't just looked at it that way." "All right," said E. Eliot. "Now I'll tell you how I do look at it. In the first place, about doing business for women. It all depends on the woman you're doing business with. If she's had the business training of a man, she's as easy to deal with as a man. If she's never had any business training at all, if business doesn't mean anything to her except some vague hocus-pocus that produces her income, then she's seven kinds of a Tartar. "She has no more notion about what she has a right to expect from other people, or what they've a right to expect from her, than a white Angora cat. Of course, the majority of women who have property to attend to have had it dumped on their hands in middle life, or after, by the wills of loving husbands. Those women, I'll say frankly, are the devil and all to deal with. But it's their husbands' and fathers' fault, and not their own. Anyhow, that isn't the reason I wouldn't take those cottages. "It was the cottages themselves, and not the woman who owned them, that decided me. That whole Kentwood district is a disgrace to civilization. The sanitary conditions are filthy; have been for years. The owners have been resisting condemnation proceedings right along, on the ground that the houses brought in so little rental that it would be practical confiscation to compel them to make any improvements. Now, since the war boon struck the mills, and every place with four walls and a roof is full, they're saying they can't afford to make any change because of the frightful loss they'd suffer in potential profits. "Well, when you agree to act as a person's agent, you've got to act in that person's interest; and when it's a question of the interest of the owners of those Kentwood cottages, whether they're men or women, my idea was that I didn't care for the job." "I think you're perfectly right about it," Betty said. "I wouldn't have come to urge you to change your mind, if I had understood what the situation was. But," here she held out her hand, "I'm glad I did come, and I wish we might meet again sometime and get acquainted and talk about things." "No time like the present," said E. Eliot. "Sit down again, if you've got a minute." She added, as Betty dropped back into her chair, "You're Elizabeth Sheridan, aren't you?—Judge Sheridan's daughter? And you're working as a stenographer for Remington and Evans?" Betty nodded and stammered out the beginning of an apology for not having introduced herself earlier. But the older woman waved this aside. "What I really want to know," she went on, "if it isn't too outrageous a question, is what on earth you're doing it for—working in that law office, I mean?" It was a question Betty was well accustomed to answering. But coming from this source, it surprised her into a speechless stare. "Why," she said at last, "I do it because I believe in economic independence for women. Don't you? But of course you do." "I don't know," said E. Eliot. "I believe in food and clothes, and money to pay the rent, and the only way I have ever found of having those things was to get out and earn them. But if ever I make money enough to give me an independent income half the size of what yours must be, I'll retire from business in short order." "Do you know," said Betty, "I don't believe you would. I think you're mistaken. I don't believe a woman like you could live without working." "I didn't say I'd quit working," said E. Eliot. "I said I'd quit business. That's another thing. There's plenty of real work in the world that won't earn you a living. Lord! Don't I see it going by right here in this office! There are things I just itch to get my hands into, and I have to wait and tell myself 'some day, perhaps!' There's a thing I'd like to do now, and that's to take a hand in this political campaign for district attorney. It would kill my business deader than Pharaoh's aunt, so I've got to let it go. But it would certainly put your friend George Remington up a tall tree." "Oh, you're a suffragist, then?" Betty exclaimed eagerly. "I was wondering about that. I've never seen you at any of our meetings." "I'm a suffragist, all right," said E. Eliot, "but as your meetings are mostly held in the afternoons, when I'm pretty busy, I haven't been able to get 'round. "I'm curious about Remington," she went on. "I've known him a little, for years. When I worked for Allen, I used to see him quite often in the office. And I'd always rather liked him. So that I was surprised, clear down to the ground, when I read that statement of his in the Sentinel. I'd never thought he was that sort. And from the fact that you work in his office and like him well enough to call him George one might almost suppose he wasn't." Clearly Betty was puzzled. "Of course," she said, "I think his views about women are obsolete and ridiculous. But I don't see what they've got to do with liking him or not, personally." E. Eliot's smile became grim again, but she said nothing, so Betty asked a direct question. "That was what you meant, wasn't it?" "Yes," the other woman said, "that was what I meant. Why, if you don't mind plain speaking, it's been my observation that the sort of men who think the world is too indecent for decent women to go out into, generally have their own reasons for knowing how indecent it is; and that when they spring a line of talk like that, they're being sickening hypocrites into the bargain." Betty's face had gone flame color. "George isn't like that at all," she said. "He's—he's really fine. He's old-fashioned and sentimental about women, but he isn't a hypocrite. He really means those things he says. Why..." And then Betty went on to tell her new friend about Cousin Emelene and Alys Brewster-Smith, and how George, though he writhed, had stood the gaff. "A grown-up man," E. Eliot summed up, "who honestly believes that women are made of something fine and fragile, and that they ought to be kept where even the wind can't blow upon them! But good heavens, child, if he really means that, it makes it all the better for what I was thinking of. You don't understand, of course. I hadn't meant to tell you, but I've changed my mind. "Listen now. That statement in the Sentinel has set the town talking, of course, and stirred up a lot of feeling, for and against suffrage. But what it would be worth as an issue to go to the mat with on election day, is exactly nothing at all. You go out and ask a voter to vote against a candidate for district attorney because he's an anti-suffragist, and he'll say, 'What difference does it make? It isn't up to him to give women the vote. It doesn't matter to me what his private opinions are, as long as he makes a good district attorney!' But there is an issue that we can go to the mat with, and so far it hasn't been raised at all. There hasn't been a peep." She reached over and laid a hand on Betty's arm. "Do you know what the fire protection laws for factories are? And do you know that it's against the law for women to work in factories at night? 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?" <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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