A Poor Wise Man, Mary Roberts Rinehart [classic book list TXT] 📗

Willy Cameron came home from a night class in metallurgy the evening after the day Lily had made her declaration of independence, and let himself in with his night key. There was a light in the little parlor, and Mrs. Boyd’s fragile silhouette against the window shade.

He was not surprised at that. She had developed a maternal affection for him stronger than any she showed for either Edith or Dan. She revealed it in rather touching ways, too, keeping accounts when he accused her of gross extravagance, for she spent Dan’s swollen wages wastefully; making him coffee late at night, and forcing him to drink it, although it kept him awake for hours; and never going to bed until he was safely closeted in his room at the top of the stairs.

He came in as early as possible, therefore, for he had had Doctor Smalley in to see her, and the result had been unsatisfactory.

“Heart’s bad,” said the doctor, when they had retired to Willy’s room. “Leaks like a sieve. And there may be an aneurism. Looks like it, anyhow.”

“What is there to do?” Willy asked, feeling helpless and extremely shocked. “We might send her somewhere.”

“Nothing to do. Don’t send her away; she’d die of loneliness. Keep her quiet and keep her happy. Don’t let her worry. She only has a short time, I should say, and you can’t lengthen it. It could be shortened, of course, if she had a shock, or anything like that.”

“Shall I tell the family?”

“What’s the use?” asked Doctor Smalley, philosophically. “If they fuss over her she’ll suspect something.”

As he went down the stairs he looked about him. The hall was fresh with new paper and white paint, and in the yard at the rear, visible through an open door, the border of annuals was putting out its first blossoms.

“Nice little place you’ve got here,” he observed. “I think I see the fine hand of Miss Edith, eh?”

“Yes,” said Willy Cameron, gravely.

He had made renewed efforts to get a servant after that, but the invalid herself balked him. When he found an applicant Mrs. Boyd would sit, very much the grande dame, and question her, although she always ended by sending her away.

“She looked like the sort that would be running out at nights,” she would say. Or: “She wouldn’t take telling, and I know the way you like your things, Willy. I could see by looking at her that she couldn’t cook at all.”

She cherished the delusion that he was improving and gaining flesh under her ministrations, and there was a sort of jealousy in her care for him. She wanted to yield to no one the right to sit proudly behind one of her heavy, tasteless pies, and say:

“Now I made this for you, Willy, because I know country boys like pies. Just see if that crust isn’t nice.”

“You don’t mean to say you made it!”

“I certainly did.” And to please her he would clear his plate. He rather ran to digestive tablets those days, and Edith, surprising him with one at the kitchen sink one evening, accused him roundly of hypocrisy.

“I don’t know why you stay anyhow,” she said, staring into the yard where Jinx was burying a bone in the heliotrope bed. “The food’s awful. I’m used to it, but you’re not.”

“You don’t eat anything, Edith.”

“I’m not hungry. Willy, I wish you’d go away. What right we got to tie you up with us, anyhow? We’re a poor lot. You’re not comfortable and you know it. D’you know where she is now?”

“She” in the vernacular of the house, was always Mrs. Boyd.

“She forgot to make your bed, and she’s doing it now.”

He ran up the stairs, and forcibly putting Mrs. Boyd in a chair, made up his own bed, awkwardly and with an eye on her chest, which rose and fell alarmingly. It was after that that he warned Edith.

“She’s not strong,” he said. “She needs care and - well, to be happy. That’s up to the three of us. For one thing, she must not have a shock. I’m going to warn Dan against exploding paper bags; she goes white every time.”

Dan was at a meeting, and Willy dried the supper dishes for Edith. She was silent and morose. Finally she said:

“She’s not very strong for me, Willy. You needn’t look so shocked. She loves Dan and you, but not me. I don’t mind, you know. She doesn’t know it, but I do.”

“She is very proud of you.”

“That’s different. You’re right, though. Pride’s her middle name. It nearly killed her at first to take a roomer, because she is always thinking of what the neighbors will say. That’s why she hates me sometimes.”

“I wish you wouldn’t talk that way.”

“But it’s true. That fool Hodge woman at the corner came here one day last winter and filled her up with a lot of talk about me, and she’s been queer to me ever since.”

“You are a very good daughter.”

She eyed him furtively. If only he wouldn’t always believe in her! It was almost worse than to have him know the truth. But he went along with his head in the clouds; all women were good and all men meant well. Sometimes it worked out; Dan, for instance. Dan was trying to live up to him. But it was too late for her. Forever too late.

It was Willy Cameron’s night off, and they went, the three of them, to the movies that evening. To Mrs. Boyd the movies was the acme of dissipation. She would, if warned in advance, spend the entire day with her hair in curlers, and once there she feasted her starved romantic soul to repletion. But that night the building was stifling, and without any warning Edith suddenly got up and walked toward the door. There was something odd about her walk and Willy followed her, but she turned on him almost fiercely outside.

“I wish you’d let me alone,” she said, and then swayed a little. But she did not faint.

“I’m going home,” she said. “You stay with her. And for heaven’s sake don’t stare at me like that. I’m all right.”

Nevertheless he had taken her home, Edith obstinately silent and sullen, and Willy anxious and perplexed. At the door she said:

“Now go back to her, and tell her I just got sick of the picture. It was the smells in that rotten place. They’d turn a pig’s stomach.”

“I wish you’d see a doctor.”

She looked at him with suspicious eyes. “If you run Smalley in on me I’ll leave home.” “Will you go to bed?”

“I’ll go to bed, all right.”

He had found things rather more difficult after that. Two women, both ill and refusing to acknowledge it, and the prospect of Dan’s being called out by the union. Try as he would, he could not introduce any habit of thrift into the family. Dan’s money came and went, and on Saturday nights there was not only nothing left, but often a deficit. Dan, skillfully worked upon outside, began to develop a grievance, also, and on his rare evenings at home or at the table he would voice his wrongs.

“It’s just hand to mouth all the time,” he would grumble. “A fellow working for the Cardews never gets ahead. What chance has he got, anyhow? It takes all he can get to live.”

Willy Cameron began to see that the trouble was not with Dan, but with his women folks. And Dan was one of thousands. His wages went for food, too much food, food spoiled in cooking. There were men, with able women behind them, making less than Dan and saving money.

“Keep some of it out and bank it,” he suggested, but Dan sneered.

“And have a store bill a mile long! You know mother as well as I do. She means well, but she’s a fool with money.”

He counted his hours from the time he entered the mill until he left it, but he revealed once that there were long idle periods when the heating was going on, when he and the other men of the furnace crew sat and waited, doing nothing.

“But I’m there, all right,” he said. “I’m not playing golf or riding in my automobile. I’m on the job.”,

“Well,” said Willy Cameron, “I’m on the job about eleven hours a day, and I wear out more shoe leather than trouser seats at that. But it doesn’t seem to hurt me.”

“It’s a question of principle,” said Dan doggedly. “I’ve got no personal kick, y’understand. Only I’m not getting anywhere, and something’s got to be done about it.”

So, on the evening of the day after Lily had made her declaration of independence, Willy Cameron made his way rather heavily toward the Boyd house. He was very tired. He had made one or two speeches for Hendricks already, before local ward organizations, and he was working hard at his night class in metallurgy. He had had a letter from his mother, too, and he thought he read homesickness between the lines. He was not at all sure where his duty lay, yet to quit now, to leave Mr. Hendricks and the Boyds flat, seemed impossible.

He had tried to see Lily, too, and failed. She had been very gentle over the telephone, but, attuned as he was to every inflection of her voice, he had thought there was unhappiness in it. Almost despair. But she had pleaded a week of engagements.

“I’m sorry,” she had said. “I’ll call you up next week some time I have a lot of things I want to