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

Edith on the same porch in the evening, with all the boys in town around her. She knew the type, the sort that set an entire village by the ears and in the end left home and husband and ran away with a traveling salesman.

Ellen had already got Willy married and divorced when Mrs. Boyd came in. She carried the milk pail, but her lips were blue and she sat down in a chair and held her hand to her heart.

“I’m that short of breath!” she gasped. “I declare I could hardly get back.”

“I’ll give you some coffee, right off.”

When Willy Cameron had finished his breakfast she followed him into the parlor. His pallor was not lost on her, or his sunken eyes. He looked badly fed, shabby, and harassed, and he bore the marks of his sleepless night on his face. “Are you going to stay here?” she demanded.

“Why, yes, Miss Ellen.”

“Your mother would break her heart if she knew the way you’re living.”

“I’m very comfortable. We’ve tried to get a ser - ” He changed color at that. In the simple life of the village at home a woman whose only training was the town standard of good housekeeping might go into service in the city and not lose caste. But she was never thought of as a servant. ” - help,” he substituted. “But we can’t get any one, and Mrs. Boyd is delicate. It is heart trouble.”

“Does that girl work where you do?”

“Yes. Why?”

“Is she engaged to you? She calls you Willy.” He smiled into her eyes.

“Not a bit of it, or thinking of it.”

“How do you know what she’s thinking? It’s all over her. It’s Willy this and Willy that - and men are such fools.”

There flashed into his mind certain things that he had tried to forget; Edith at his doorway, with that odd look in her eyes; Edith never going to sleep until he had gone to bed; and recently, certain things she had said, that he had passed over lightly and somewhat uncomfortably.

“That’s ridiculous, Miss Ellen. But even if it were true, which it isn’t, don’t you think it would be rather nice of her?” He smiled.

“I do not. I heard you going out last night, Willy. Did you find her?”.

“She is at the Doyles’. I didn’t see her.”

“That’ll finish it,” Ellen prophesied, somberly. She glanced around the parlor, at the dust on the furniture, at the unwashed baseboard, at the unwound clock on the mantel shelf.

“If you’re going to stay here I will,” she announced abruptly. “I owe that much to your mother. I’ve got some money. I’ll take what they’d pay some foreigner who’d throw out enough to keep another family.” Then, seeing hesitation in his eyes: “That Woman’s sick, and you’ve got to be looked after. I could do all the work, if that - if the girl would help in the evenings.”

He demurred at first. She would find it hard. They had no luxuries, and she was accustomed to luxury. There was no room for her. But in the end he called Edith and Mrs. Boyd, and was rather touched to find Edith offering to share her upper bedroom.

“It’s a hole,” she said, “cold in winter and hot as blazes in summer. But there’s room for a cot, and I guess we can let each other alone.”

“I wish you’d let me move up there, Edith,” he said for perhaps the twentieth time since he had found out where she slept, “and you would take my room.”

“No chance,” she said cheerfully. “Mother would raise the devil if you tried it.” She glanced at Ellen’s face. “If that word shocks you, you’re due for a few shocks, you know.”

“The way you talk is your business, not mine,” said Ellen austerely.

When they finally departed on a half-run Ellen was established as a fixture in the Boyd house, and was already piling all the cooking utensils into a wash boiler and with grim efficiency was searching for lye with which to clean them.

Two weeks later, the end of June, the strike occurred. It was not, in spite of predictions, a general walk-out. Some of the mills, particularly the smaller plants, did not go down at all, and with reduced forces kept on, but the chain of Cardew Mills was closed. There was occasional rioting by the foreign element in outlying districts, but the state constabulary handled it easily.

Dan was out of work, and the loss of his pay was a serious matter in the little house. He had managed to lay by a hundred dollars, and Willy Cameron had banked it for him, but there was a real problem to be faced. On the night of the day the Cardew Mills went down Willy called a meeting of the household after supper, around the dining room table. He had been in to see Mr. Hendricks, who had been laid up with bronchitis, and Mr. Hendricks had predicted a long strike.

“The irresistible force and the immovable body, son,” he said. “They’ll stay set this time. And unless I miss my guess that is playing Doyle’s hand for him, all right. His chance will come when the men have used up their savings and are growing bitter. Every strike plays into the hands of the enemy, son, and they know it. The moment production ceases prices go up, and soon all the money in the world won’t pay them wages enough to live on.”

He had a store of homely common sense, and a gift of putting things into few words. Willy Cameron, going back to the little house that evening, remembered the last thing he had said.

“The only way to solve this problem of living,” he said, “is to see how much we can work, and not how little. Germany’s working ten hours a day, and producing. We’re talking about six, and loafing and fighting while we talk.”

So Willy went home and called his meeting, and knowing Mrs. Boyd’s regard for figures, set down and added or subtracted, he placed a pad and pencil on the table before him. It was an odd group: Dan sullen, resenting the strike and the causes that had led to it; Ellen, austere and competent; Mrs. Boyd with a lace fichu pinned around her neck, now that she had achieved the dignity of hired help, and Edith. Edith silent, morose and fixing now and then rather haggard eyes on Willy Cameron’s unruly hair. She seldom met his eyes.

“First of all,” said Willy, “we’ll take our weekly assets. Of course Dan will get something temporarily, but we’ll leave that out for the present.”

The weekly assets turned out to be his salary and Edith’s.

“Why, Willy,” said Mrs. Boyd, “you can’t turn all your money over to us.”

“You are all the family I have just now. Why not? Anyhow, I’ll have to keep out lunch money and carfare, and so will Edith. Now as to expenses.”

Ellen had made a great reduction in expenses, but food was high. And there was gas and coal, and Dan’s small insurance, and the rent. There was absolutely no margin, and a sort of silence fell.

“What about your tuition at night school?” Edith asked suddenly.

“Spring term ended this week.”

“But you said there was a summer one.”

“Well, I’ll tell you about that,” Willy said, feeling for words. “I’m going to be busy helping Mr. Hendricks in his campaign. Then next fall - well, I’ll either go back or Hendricks will make me chief of police, or something.” He smiled around the table. “I ought to get some sort of graft out of it.”

“Mother!” Edith protested. “He mustn’t sacrifice himself for us. What are we to him anyhow? A lot of stones hung around his neck. That’s all.”

It was after Willy had declared that this was his home now, and he had a right to help keep it going, and after Ellen had observed that she had some money laid by and would not take any wages during the strike, that the meeting threatened to become emotional. Mrs. Boyd shed a few tears, and as she never by any chance carried a handkerchief, let them flow over her fichu. And Dan shook Willy’s hand and Ellen’s, and said that if he’d had his way he’d be working, and not sitting round like a stiff letting other people work for him. But Edith got up and went out into the little back garden, and did not come back until the meeting was both actually and morally broken up. When she heard Dan go out, and Ellen and Mrs. Boyd go upstairs, chatting in a new amiability brought about by trouble and sacrifice, she put on her hat and left the house.

Ellen, rousing on her cot in Edith’s upper room, heard her come in some time later, and undress and get into bed. Her old suspicion of the girl revived, and she sat upright.

“Where I come from girls don’t stay out alone until all hours,” she said.

“Oh, let me alone.”

Ellen fell asleep, and in her sleep she dreamed that Mrs. Boyd had taken sick and was moaning. The moaning was terrible; it filled the little house. Ellen wakened suddenly. It was not moaning; it was strange, heavy breathing, strangling; and it came from Edith’s bed.

“Are you sick?” she called, and getting up, her knees hardly holding her, she lighted the gas at its unshaded bracket on the wall and ran to the other bed.

Edith was lying there, her mouth open, her lips bleached and twisted. Her stertorous breathing filled the room, and over all was the odor of carbolic acid.

“Edith, for God’s sake!”

The girl was only partially conscious. Ellen ran down the stairs and into Willy’s room.

“Get up,” she cried, shaking him. “That girl’s killed herself.”

“Lily!”

“No, Edith. Carbolic acid.”

Even then he remembered her mother.

“Don’t let her hear anything, It will kill her,” he said, and ran up the stairs. Almost immediately he was down again, searching for alcohol; he found a small quantity and poured that down the swollen throat. He roused Dan then, and sent him running madly for Doctor Smalley, with a warning to bring him past Mrs. Boyd’s door quietly, and to bring an intubation set with him in case her throat should close. Then, on one of his innumerable journeys up and down the stairs he encountered Mrs. Boyd herself, in her nightgown, and terrified.

“What’s the matter, Willy?” she asked. “Is it a fire?”

“Edith is sick. I don’t want you to go up. It may be contagious. It’s her throat.”

And from that Mrs. Boyd deduced diphtheria; she sat on the stairs in her nightgown, a shaken helpless figure, asking countless questions of those that hurried past. But they reassured her, and after a time she went downstairs and made a pot of coffee. Ensconced with it in the lower hall, and milk bottle in hand, she waylaid them with it as they hurried up and down.

Upstairs the battle went on. There were times when the paralyzed muscles almost stopped lifting the chest walls, when each breath was a new miracle. Her throat was closing fast, too, and at eight o’clock came a brisk young surgeon, and with Willy Cameron’s assistance, an operation was performed. After that, and for days, Edith breathed through a tube in her neck.

The fiction of diphtheria was kept up, and Mrs. Boyd, having a childlike faith in medical men, betrayed no anxiety after the first hour or two. She saw nothing incongruous in Ellen going down through the house while she herself was kept out of that upper room where Edith lay, conscious now but sullen, disfigured, silent. She was happy, too, to