The discovery that Lily had left his house threw Jim Doyle into a
frenzy. The very manner of her going filled him with dark suspicion.
Either she had heard more that morning than he had thought, or--In his
cunning mind for weeks there had been growing a smoldering suspicion
of his wife. She was too quiet, too acquiescent. In the beginning, when
Woslosky had brought the scheme to him, and had promised it financial
support from Europe, he had taken a cruel and savage delight in
outlining it to her, in seeing her cringe and go pale.
He had not feared her then. She had borne with so much, endured,
tolerated, accepted, that he had not realized that she might have a
breaking point.
The plan had appealed to his cynical soul from the first. It was the
apotheosis of cynicism, this reducing of a world to its lowest level.
And it had amused him to see his wife, a gentlewoman born, bewildered
before the chaos he depicted.
“But--it is German!” she had said.
“I bow before intelligence. It is German. Also it is Russian. Also it
is of all nations. All this talk now, of a League of Nations, a few dull
diplomats acting as God over the peoples of the earth!” His eyes blazed.
“While the true league, of the workers of the world, is already in
effect!”
But he watched her after that, not that he was afraid of her, but
because her re-action as a woman was important. He feared women in the
movement. It had its disciples, fervent and eloquent, paid and unpaid
women agitators, but he did not trust them. They were invariably women
without home ties, women with nothing to protect, women with everything
to gain and nothing to lose. The woman in the home was a natural
anti-radical. Not the police, not even the army, but the woman in the
home was the deadly enemy of the great plan.
He began to hate Elinor, not so much for herself, as for the women she
represented. She became the embodiment of possible failure. She stood in
his path, passively resistant, stubbornly brave.
She was not a clever woman, and she was slow in gathering the full
significance of a nation-wide general strike, that with an end of all
production the non-producing world would be beaten to its knees. And
then she waited for a world movement, forgetting that a flame must start
somewhere and then spread. But she listened and learned. There was a
great deal of talk about class and mass. She learned that the mass, for
instance, was hungry for a change. It would welcome any change. Woslosky
had been in Russia when the Kerensky regime was overthrown, and had seen
that strange three days when the submerged part of the city filled the
streets, singing, smiling, endlessly walking, exalted and without guile.
No problems troubled them. They had ceased to labor, and that was
enough.
Had it not been for its leaders, the mass would have risen like a tide,
and ebbed again.
Elinor had struggled to understand. This was not Socialism. Jim had been
a Socialist for years. He had believed that the gradual elevation of the
few, the gradual subjection of the many, would go on until the majority
would drag the few down to their own level. But this new dream was
something immediate. At her table she began to hear talk of substituting
for that slow process a militant minority. She was a long time, months,
in discovering that Jim Doyle was one of the leaders of that militant
minority, and that the methods of it were unspeakably criminal.
Then had begun Elinor Doyle's long battle, at first to hold him back,
and that failing, the fight between her duty to her husband and that to
her country. He had been her one occupation and obsession too long to
be easily abandoned, but she was sturdily national, too. In the end she
made her decision. She lived in his house, mended his clothing, served
his food, met his accomplices, and--watched.
She hated herself for it. Every fine fiber of her revolted. But as time
went on, and she learned the full wickedness of the thing, her days
became one long waiting. She saw one move after another succeed, strike
after strike slowing production, and thus increasing the cost of living.
She saw the growing discontent and muttering, the vicious circle of
labor striking for more money, and by its own ceasing of activity making
the very increases they asked inadequate. And behind it all she saw
the ceaseless working, the endless sowing, of a grim-faced band of
conspirators.
She was obliged to wait. A few men talking in secret meetings, a hidden
propaganda of crime and disorder--there was nothing to strike at. And
Elinor, while not clever, had the Cardew shrewdness. She saw that,
like the crisis in a fever, the thing would have to come, be met, and
defeated.
She had no hope that the government would take hold. Government was
aloof, haughty, and secure in its own strength. Just now, too, it was
objective, not subjective. It was like a horse set to win a race, and
unconscious of the fly on its withers. But the fly was a gadfly.
Elinor knew Doyle was beginning to suspect her. Sometimes she thought
he would kill her, if he discovered what she meant to do. She did
not greatly care. She waited for some inkling of the day set for the
uprising in the city, and saved out of her small house allowance by
innumerable economies and subterfuges. When she found out the time she
would go to the Governor of the State. He seemed to be a strong man,
and she would present him facts. Facts and names. Then he must act--and
quickly.
Cut off from her own world, and with no roots thrown out in the new, she
had no friends, no one to confide in or of whom to ask assistance. And
she was afraid to go to Howard. He would precipitate things. The leaders
would escape, and a new group would take their places. Such a group, she
knew, stood ready for that very emergency.
On the afternoon of Lily's departure she heard Doyle come in. He had not
recovered from his morning's anger, and she heard his voice, raised in
some violent reproof to Jennie. He came up the stairs, his head sagged
forward, his every step deliberate, heavy, ominous. He had an evening
paper in his hand, and he gave it to her with his finger pointing to a
paragraph.
“You might show that to the last of the Cardews,” he sneered.
It was the paragraph about Louis Akers. Elinor read it. “Who were the
masked men?” she asked. “Do you know?”
“I wish to God I did. I'd--Makes him a laughing stock, of course. And
just now, when--Where's Lily?”
Elinor put down the paper.
“She is not here. She went home this afternoon.”
He stared at her, angrily incredulous.
“Home?”
“This afternoon.”
She passed him and went out into the hall. But he followed her and
caught her by the arm as she reached the top of the staircase.
“What made her go home?”
“I don't know, Jim.”
“She didn't say?”
“Don't hold me like that. No.”
She tried to free her arm, but he held her, his face angry and
suspicious.
“You are lying to me,” he snarled. “She gave you a reason. What was it?”
Elinor was frightened, but she had not lost her head. She was thinking
rapidly.
“She had a visitor this afternoon, a young man. He must have told her
something about last night. She came up and told me she was going.”
“You know he told her something, don't you?”
“Yes.” Elinor had cowered against the wall. “Jim, don't look like that.
You frighten me. I couldn't keep her here. I--”
“What did he tell her?”
“He accused you.”
He was eyeing her coldly, calculatingly. All his suspicions of the past
weeks suddenly crystallized. “And you let her go, after that,” he said
slowly. “You were glad to have her go. You didn't deny what she said.
You let her run back home, with what she had guessed and what you told
her to-day. You--”
He struck her then. The blow was as remorseless as his voice, as
deliberate. She fell down the staircase headlong, and lay there, not
moving.
The elderly maid came running from the kitchen, and found him half-way
down the stairs, his eyes still calculating, but his body shaking.
“She fell,” he said, still staring down. But the servant faced him, her
eyes full of hate.
“You devil!” she said. “If she's dead, I'll see you hang for it.”
But Elinor was not dead. Doctor Smalley, making rounds in a nearby
hospital and answering the emergency call, found her lying on her bed,
fully conscious and in great pain, while her husband bent over her in
seeming agony of mind. She had broken her leg. He sent Doyle out during
the setting. It was a principle of his to keep agonized husbands out of
the room.