Elinor Doyle was up and about her room. She walked slowly and with
difficulty, using crutches, and she spent most of the time at her
window, watching and waiting. From Lily there came, at frequent
intervals, notes, flowers and small delicacies. The flowers and food
Olga brought to her, but the notes she never saw. She knew they came.
She could see the car stop at the curb, and the chauffeur, his shoulders
squared and his face watchful, carrying a white envelope up the walk,
but there it ended.
She felt more helpless than ever. The doctor came less often, but the
vigilance was never relaxed, and she had, too, less and less hope of
being able to give any warning. Doyle was seldom at home, and when he
was he had ceased to give her his taunting information. She was quite
sure now of his relations with the Russian girl, and her uncertainty
as to her course was gone. She was no longer his wife. He held another
woman in his rare embraces, a traitor like himself. It was sordid. He
was sordid.
Woslosky had developed blood poisoning, and was at the point of death,
with a stolid policeman on guard at his bedside. She knew that from the
newspapers she occasionally saw. And she connected Doyle unerringly with
the tragedy at the farm behind Friendship. She recognized, too, since
that failure, a change in his manner to her. She saw that he now both
hated her and feared her, and that she had become only a burden and
a menace to him. He might decide to do away with her, to kill her.
He would not do it himself; he never did his own dirty work, but the
Russian girl--Olga was in love with Jim Doyle. Elinor knew that, as she
knew many things, by a sort of intuition. She watched them in the room
together, and she knew that to Doyle the girl was an incident, the
vehicle of his occasional passion, a strumpet and a tool. He did not
even like her; she saw him looking at her sometimes with a sort of
amused contempt. But Olga's somber eyes followed him as he moved, lit
with passion and sometimes with anger, but always they followed him.
She was afraid of Olga. She did not care particularly about death, but
it must not come before she had learned enough to be able to send out a
warning. She thought if it came it might be by poison in the food that
was sent up, but she had to eat to live. She took to eating only
one thing on her tray, and she thought she detected in the girl an
understanding and a veiled derision.
By Doyle's increasing sullenness she knew things were not going well
with him, and she found a certain courage in that, but she knew him
too well to believe that he would give up easily. And she drew certain
deductions from the newspapers she studied so tirelessly. She saw the
announcement of the unusual number of hunting licenses issued, for one
thing, and she knew the cover that such licenses furnished armed men
patrolling the country. The state permitted the sale of fire-arms
without restriction. Other states did the same, or demanded only the
formality of a signature, never verified.
Would they never wake to the situation?
She watched the election closely. She knew that if Akers were elected
the general strike and the chaos to follow would be held back until
he had taken office and made the necessary changes in the city
administration, but that if he went down to defeat the Council would
turn loose its impatient hordes at once.
She waited for election day with burning anxiety. When it came it so
happened that she was left alone all day in the house. Early in the
morning Olga brought her a tray and told her she was going out. She was
changed, the Russian; she had dropped the mask of sodden servility and
stood before her, erect, cunningly intelligent and oddly powerful.
“I am going to be away all day, Mrs. Doyle,” she said, in her excellent
English. “I have work to do.”
“Work?” said Elinor. “Isn't there work to do here?”
“I am not a house-worker. I came to help Mr. Doyle. To-day I shall make
speeches.”
Elinor was playing the game carefully. “But--can you make speeches?” she
asked.
“Me? That is my work, here, in Russia, everywhere. In Russia it is the
women who speak, the men who do what the women tell them to do. Here
some day it will be the same.”
Always afterwards Elinor remembered the five minutes that followed, for
Olga, standing before her, suddenly burst into impassioned oratory.
She cited the wrongs of the poor under the old regime. She painted in
glowing colors the new. She was excited, hectic, powerful. Elinor in
her chair, an aristocrat to the finger-tips, was frightened, interested,
thrilled.
Long after Olga had gone she sat there, wondering at the real
conviction, the intensity of passion, of hate and of revenge that
actuated this newest tool of Doyle's. Doyle and his associates might be
actuated by self-interest, but the real danger in the movement lay not
with the Doyles of the world, but with these fanatic liberators. They
preached to the poor a new religion, not of creed or of Church, but
of freedom. Freedom without laws of God or of man, freedom of love, of
lust, of time, of all responsibility. And the poor, weighted with laws
and cares, longed to throw off their burdens.
Perhaps it was not the doctrine itself that was wrong. It was its
imposition by force on a world not yet ready for it that was wrong;
its imposition by violence. It might come, but not this way. Not, God
preventing, this way.
There was a polling place across the street, in the basement of a school
house. The vote was heavy and all day men lounged on the pavements,
smoking and talking. Once she saw Olga in the crowd, and later on Louis
Akers drove up in an open automobile, handsome, apparently confident,
and greeted with cheers. But Elinor, knowing him well, gained nothing
from his face.
Late that night she heard Doyle come in and move about the lower floor.
She knew every emphasis of his walk, and when in the room underneath she
heard him settle down to steady, deliberate pacing, she knew that he was
facing some new situation, and, after his custom, thinking it out alone.
At midnight he came up the stairs and unlocked her door. He entered,
closing the door behind him, and stood looking at her. His face was so
strange that she wondered if he had decided to do away with her.
“To-morrow,” he said, in an inflectionless voice, “you will be moved by
automobile to a farm I have selected in the country. You will take only
such small luggage as the car can carry.”
“Is Olga going with me?”
“No. Olga is needed here.”
“I suppose I am to understand from this that Louis has been defeated and
there is no longer any reason for delay in your plans.”
“You can understand what you like.”
“Am I to know where I am going?”
“You will find that out when you get there. I will tell you this: It is
a lonely place, without a telephone. You'll be cut off from your family,
I am afraid.”
She gazed at him. It seemed unbelievable to her that she had once lain
in this man's arms.
“Why don't you kill me, Jim? I know you've thought about it.”
“Yes, I've thought of it. But killing is a confession of fear, my dear.
I am not afraid of you.”
“I think you are. You are afraid now to tell me when you are going to
try to put this wild plan into execution.”
He smiled at her with mocking eyes.
“Yes,” he agreed again. “I am afraid. You have a sort of diabolical
ingenuity, not intelligence so much as cunning. But because I always do
the thing I'm afraid to do, I'll tell you. Of course, if you succeed in
passing it on--” He shrugged his shoulders. “Very well, then. With your
usual logic of deduction, you have guessed correctly. Louis Akers has
been defeated. Your family--and how strangely you are a Cardew!--lost
its courage at the last moment, and a gentleman named Hendricks is now
setting up imitation beer and cheap cigars to his friends.”
Behind his mocking voice she knew the real fury of the man, kept
carefully in control by his iron will.
“As you have also correctly surmised,” he went on, “there is now nothing
to be gained by any delay. A very few days, three or four, and--” His
voice grew hard and terrible--“the first stone in the foundation of
this capitalistic government will go. Inevitable law, inevitable
retribution--” His voice trailed off. He turned like a man asleep and
went toward the door. There he stopped and faced her.
“I've told you,” he said darkly. “I am not afraid of you. You can no
more stop this thing than you can stop living by ceasing to breathe. It
has come.”
She heard him in his room for some time after that, and she surmised
from the way he moved, from closet to bed and back again, that he was
packing a bag. At two o'clock she heard Olga coming in; the girl was
singing in Russian, and Elinor had a sickening conviction that she had
been drinking. She heard Doyle send her off to bed, his voice angry and
disgusted, and resume his packing, and ten minutes later she heard a
car draw up on the street, and knew that he was off, to begin the
mobilization of his heterogeneous forces.
Ever since she had been able to leave her bed Elinor had been
formulating a plan of escape. Once the door had been left unlocked, but
her clothing had been removed from the room, and then, too, she had
not learned the thing she was waiting for. Now she had clothing, a dark
dressing gown and slippers, and she had the information. But the door
was securely locked.
She had often thought of the window, In the day time it frightened her
to look down, although it fascinated her, too. But at night it seemed
much simpler. The void below was concealed in the darkness, a soft
darkness that hid the hard, inhospitable earth. A darkness one could
fall into and onto.
She was not a brave woman. She had moral rather than physical courage.
It was easier for her to face Doyle in a black mood than the gulf below
the window-sill, but she knew now that she must get away, if she were to
go at all. She got out of bed, and using her crutches carefully moved
to the sill, trying to accustom herself to the thought of going over the
edge. The plaster cast on her leg was a real handicap. She must get it
over first. How heavy it was, and unwieldy!
She found her scissors, and, stripping the bed, sat down to cut and tear
the bedding into strips. Prisoners escaped that way; she had read about
such things. But the knots took up an amazing amount of length. It was
four o'clock in the morning when she had a serviceable rope, and she
knew it was too short. In the end she tore down the window curtains and
added them, working desperately against time.
She began to suspect, too, that Olga was not sleeping. She smelled
faintly the odor of the long Russian cigarettes the girl smoked. She put
out her light and worked in the darkness, a strange figure of adventure,
this middle-aged woman with her smooth hair and lined face, sitting in
her cambric nightgown with her crutches on the floor beside her.
She secured the end of the rope to the foot of her metal bed, pushing
the bed painfully and cautiously, inch by inch, to the window. And in
so doing she knocked over the call-bell on the stand, and almost
immediately she heard Olga moving about.
The girl was coming unsteadily toward the door. If she opened it--
“I don't want anything, Olga,” she called, “I knocked the bell over
accidentally.”
Olga hesitated, muttered, moved away again. Elinor was covered with a
cold sweat.
She began to think of the window as a refuge. Surely nothing outside
could be so terrible as this house itself. The black aperture seemed
friendly; it beckoned to her with friendly hands.
She dropped her crutches. They fell with two soft thuds on the earth
below and it seemed to her that they were a long time in falling. She
listened after that, but Olga made no sign. Then slowly and painfully
she worked her injured leg over the sill, and sat there looking down and
breathing with difficulty. Then she freed her dressing gown around her,
and slid over the edge.