CHAPTER XXXI
The discovery that Lily had left his house threw Jim Doyle into afrenzy. The very manner of her going filled him with dark suspicion.Either she had heard more that morning than he had thought, or--In hiscunning mind for weeks there had been growing a smoldering suspicionof his wife. She was too quiet, too acquiescent. In the beginning, whenWoslosky had brought the scheme to him, and had promised it financialsupport from Europe, he had taken a cruel and savage delight inoutlining 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 abreaking point.
The plan had appealed to his cynical soul from the first. It was theapotheosis of cynicism, this reducing of a world to its lowest level.And it had amused him to see his wife, a gentlewoman born, bewilderedbefore the chaos he depicted.
"But--it is German!" she had said.
"I bow before intelligence. It is German. Also it is Russian. Also itis of all nations. All this talk now, of a League of Nations, a few dulldiplomats acting as God over the peoples of the earth!" His eyes blazed."While the true league, of the workers of the world, is already ineffect!"
But he watched her after that, not that he was afraid of her, butbecause her re-action as a woman was important. He feared women in themovement. It had its disciples, fervent and eloquent, paid and unpaidwomen agitators, but he did not trust them. They were invariably womenwithout home ties, women with nothing to protect, women with everythingto gain and nothing to lose. The woman in the home was a naturalanti-radical. Not the police, not even the army, but the woman in thehome was the deadly enemy of the great plan.
He began to hate Elinor, not so much for herself, as for the women sherepresented. She became the embodiment of possible failure. She stood inhis path, passively resistant, stubbornly brave.
She was not a clever woman, and she was slow in gathering the fullsignificance of a nation-wide general strike, that with an end of allproduction the non-producing world would be beaten to its knees. Andthen she waited for a world movement, forgetting that a flame must startsomewhere and then spread. But she listened and learned. There was agreat deal of talk about class and mass. She learned that the mass, forinstance, was hungry for a change. It would welcome any change. Wosloskyhad been in Russia when the Kerensky regime was overthrown, and had seenthat strange three days when the submerged part of the city filled thestreets, singing, smiling, endlessly walking, exalted and without guile.
No problems troubled them. They had ceased to labor, and that wasenough.
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 beena Socialist for years. He had believed that the gradual elevation of thefew, the gradual subjection of the many, would go on until the majoritywould drag the few down to their own level. But this new dream wassomething immediate. At her table she began to hear talk of substitutingfor that slow process a militant minority. She was a long time, months,in discovering that Jim Doyle was one of the leaders of that militantminority, 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 toher country. He had been her one occupation and obsession too long tobe easily abandoned, but she was sturdily national, too. In the end shemade her decision. She lived in his house, mended his clothing, servedhis food, met his accomplices, and--watched.
She hated herself for it. Every fine fiber of her revolted. But as timewent on, and she learned the full wickedness of the thing, her daysbecame one long waiting. She saw one move after another succeed, strikeafter strike slowing production, and thus increasing the cost of living.She saw the growing discontent and muttering, the vicious circle oflabor striking for more money, and by its own ceasing of activity makingthe very increases they asked inadequate. And behind it all she sawthe ceaseless working, the endless sowing, of a grim-faced band ofconspirators.
She was obliged to wait. A few men talking in secret meetings, a hiddenpropaganda of crime and disorder--there was nothing to strike at. AndElinor, while not clever, had the Cardew shrewdness. She saw that,like the crisis in a fever, the thing would have to come, be met, anddefeated.
She had no hope that the government would take hold. Government wasaloof, haughty, and secure in its own strength. Just now, too, it wasobjective, not subjective. It was like a horse set to win a race, andunconscious of the fly on its withers. But the fly was a gadfly.
Elinor knew Doyle was beginning to suspect her. Sometimes she thoughthe would kill her, if he discovered what she meant to do. She didnot greatly care. She waited for some inkling of the day set for theuprising in the city, and saved out of her small house allowance byinnumerable economies and subterfuges. When she found out the time shewould 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--andquickly.
Cut off from her own world, and with no roots thrown out in the new, shehad no friends, no one to confide in or of whom to ask assistance. Andshe was afraid to go to Howard. He would precipitate things. The leaderswould escape, and a new group would take their places. Such a group, sheknew, stood ready for that very emergency.
On the afternoon of Lily's departure she heard Doyle come in. He had notrecovered from his morning's anger, and she heard his voice, raised insome violent reproof to Jennie. He came up the stairs, his head saggedforward, his every step deliberate, heavy, ominous. He had an eveningpaper in his hand, and he gave it to her with his finger pointing to aparagraph.
"You might show that to the last of the Cardews," he sneered.
It was the paragraph about Louis Akers. Elinor read it. "Who were themasked men?" she asked. "Do you know?"
"I wish to God I did. I'd--Makes him a laughing stock, of course. Andjust 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 andcaught 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 andsuspicious.
"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 thinkingrapidly.
"She had a visitor this afternoon, a young man. He must have told hersomething 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 pastweeks suddenly crystallized. "And you let her go, after that," he saidslowly. "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 toldher to-day. You--"
He struck her then. The blow was as remorseless as his voice, asdeliberate. She fell down the staircase headlong, and lay there, notmoving.
The elderly maid came running from the kitchen, and found him half-waydown the stairs, his eyes still calculating, but his body shaking.
"She fell," he said, still staring down. But the servant faced him, hereyes 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 nearbyhospital and answering the emergency call, foun
d her lying on her bed,fully conscious and in great pain, while her husband bent over her inseeming agony of mind. She had broken her leg. He sent Doyle out duringthe setting. It was a principle of his to keep agonized husbands out ofthe room.