A Poor Wise Man, Mary Roberts Rinehart [classic book list TXT] 📗
- Author: Mary Roberts Rinehart
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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.
“Tomorrow,” 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.
Election night found various groups in various places. In the back room of the Eagle Pharmacy was gathered once again the neighborhood forum, a wildly excited forum, which ever and anon pounded Mr. Hendricks on the back, and drank round after round of soda water and pop. Doctor Smalley, coming in rather late found them all there, calling Mr. Hendricks “Mr. Mayor” or “Your Honor,” reciting election anecdotes, and prophesying the end of the Reds. Only Willy Cameron, sitting on a table near the window, was silent.
Mr. Hendricks, called upon for a speech, rose with his soda water glass in his hand.
“I’ve got a toast for you, boys,” he said. “You’ve been talking all evening about my winning this election. Well, I’ve been elected, but I didn’t win it. It was the plain people of this town who elected me, and they did it because my young friend on the table yonder told them to.” He raised his glass. “Cameron!” he said.
“Cameron! Cameron!” shouted the crowd. “Speech! Cameron!”
But Willy shook his head.
“I haven’t any voice left,” he said, “and you’ve heard me say all I know a dozen times. The plain truth is that Mr. Hendricks got the election because he was the best man, and enough people knew it. That’s all.”
To Mr. Hendricks the night was one of splendid solemnity. He felt at once very strong and very weak, very proud and very humble. He would do his best, and if honesty meant anything, the people would have it, but he knew that honesty was not enough. The city needed a strong man; he hoped that the Good Man who made cities as He made men, both evil and good, would lend him a hand with things. As prayer in his mind was indissolubly connected with church, he made up his mind to go to church the next Sunday and get matters straightened out.
At the same time another group was meeting at the Benedict.
Louis Akers had gone home early. By five o’clock he knew that the chances were against him, but he felt a real lethargy as to the outcome. He had fought, and fought hard, but it was only the surface mind of him that struggled. Only the surface mind of him hated, and had ambitions, dreamed revenge. Underneath that surface mind was a sore that ate like a cancer, and that sore was his desertion by Lily Cardew. For once in his life he suffered, who had always inflicted pain.
At six o’clock Doyle had called him on the telephone and told him that Woslosky was dead, but the death of the Pole had been discounted in advance, and already his place had been filled by a Russian agent, who had taken the first syllable of his name and called himself Ross. Louis Akers heard the news apathetically, and went back to his chair again.
By eight o’clock he knew that he had lost the election, but that, too, seemed relatively unimportant. He was not thinking coherently, but certain vague ideas floated through his mind. There was a law of compensation in the universe: it was all rot to believe that one was paid or punished in the hereafter for what one did. Hell was real, but it was on earth and its place was in a man’s mind. He couldn’t get away from it, because each man carried his own hell around with him. It was all stored up there; nothing he had done was left out, and the more he put into it the more he got out, when the time came.
This was his time.
Ross and Doyle, with one or two others, found him there at nine o’clock, an untasted meal on the table, and the ends of innumerable cigarettes on the hearth. In the conference that followed he took but little part. The Russian urged immediate action, and Doyle by a saturnine silence tacitly agreed with him. But Louis only half heard them. His mind was busy with that matter of hell. Only once he looked up. Ross was making use of the phrase: “Militant minority.”
“Militant minority!” he said scornfully, “you overwork that idea, Ross. What we’ve got here now is a militant majority, and that’s what elected Hendricks. You’re licked before you begin. And my advice is, don’t begin.”
But they laughed at him.
“You act like a whipped dog,” Doyle said, “crawling under the doorstep for fear somebody else with a strap comes along.”
“They’re organized against us. We could have put it over six months ago. Not now.”
“Then you’d better get out,” Doyle said, shortly.
“I’m thinking of it.”
But Doyle had no real fear of him. He was sulky. Well, let him sulk.
Akers relapsed into silence. His interest in the conspiracy had always been purely self-interest; he had never had Woslosky’s passion, or Doyle’s cold fanaticism. They had carried him off his feet with
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