A Poor Wise Man

by Mary Roberts Rinehart

  CHAPTER XLIV

  Elinor Doyle was up and about her room. She walked slowly and withdifficulty, using crutches, and she spent most of the time at herwindow, watching and waiting. From Lily there came, at frequentintervals, notes, flowers and small delicacies. The flowers and foodOlga 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 shoulderssquared 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 thevigilance was never relaxed, and she had, too, less and less hope ofbeing able to give any warning. Doyle was seldom at home, and when hewas he had ceased to give her his taunting information. She was quitesure now of his relations with the Russian girl, and her uncertaintyas to her course was gone. She was no longer his wife. He held anotherwoman in his rare embraces, a traitor like himself. It was sordid. Hewas 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 thenewspapers she occasionally saw. And she connected Doyle unerringly withthe tragedy at the farm behind Friendship. She recognized, too, sincethat failure, a change in his manner to her. She saw that he now bothhated her and feared her, and that she had become only a burden anda 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 theRussian girl--Olga was in love with Jim Doyle. Elinor knew that, as sheknew many things, by a sort of intuition. She watched them in the roomtogether, and she knew that to Doyle the girl was an incident, thevehicle of his occasional passion, a strumpet and a tool. He did noteven like her; she saw him looking at her sometimes with a sort ofamused contempt. But Olga's somber eyes followed him as he moved, litwith passion and sometimes with anger, but always they followed him.

  She was afraid of Olga. She did not care particularly about death, butit must not come before she had learned enough to be able to send out awarning. She thought if it came it might be by poison in the food thatwas sent up, but she had to eat to live. She took to eating onlyone thing on her tray, and she thought she detected in the girl anunderstanding and a veiled derision.

  By Doyle's increasing sullenness she knew things were not going wellwith him, and she found a certain courage in that, but she knew himtoo well to believe that he would give up easily. And she drew certaindeductions from the newspapers she studied so tirelessly. She saw theannouncement of the unusual number of hunting licenses issued, for onething, and she knew the cover that such licenses furnished armed menpatrolling the country. The state permitted the sale of fire-armswithout restriction. Other states did the same, or demanded only theformality of a signature, never verified.

  Would they never wake to the situation?

  She watched the election closely. She knew that if Akers were electedthe general strike and the chaos to follow would be held back untilhe had taken office and made the necessary changes in the cityadministration, but that if he went down to defeat the Council wouldturn loose its impatient hordes at once.

  She waited for election day with burning anxiety. When it came it sohappened that she was left alone all day in the house. Early in themorning Olga brought her a tray and told her she was going out. She waschanged, the Russian; she had dropped the mask of sodden servility andstood before her, erect, cunningly intelligent and oddly powerful.

  "I am going to be away all day, Mrs. Doyle," she said, in her excellentEnglish. "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 makespeeches."

  Elinor was playing the game carefully. "But--can you make speeches?" sheasked.

  "Me? That is my work, here, in Russia, everywhere. In Russia it is thewomen who speak, the men who do what the women tell them to do. Heresome day it will be the same."

  Always afterwards Elinor remembered the five minutes that followed, forOlga, standing before her, suddenly burst into impassioned oratory.She cited the wrongs of the poor under the old regime. She painted inglowing colors the new. She was excited, hectic, powerful. Elinor inher chair, an aristocrat to the finger-tips, was frightened, interested,thrilled.

  Long after Olga had gone she sat there, wondering at the realconviction, the intensity of passion, of hate and of revenge thatactuated this newest tool of Doyle's. Doyle and his associates might beactuated by self-interest, but the real danger in the movement lay notwith the Doyles of the world, but with these fanatic liberators. Theypreached to the poor a new religion, not of creed or of Church, butof freedom. Freedom without laws of God or of man, freedom of love, oflust, of time, of all responsibility. And the poor, weighted with lawsand cares, longed to throw off their burdens.

  Perhaps it was not the doctrine itself that was wrong. It was itsimposition 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, Godpreventing, this way.

  There was a polling place across the street, in the basement of a schoolhouse. 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 LouisAkers drove up in an open automobile, handsome, apparently confident,and greeted with cheers. But Elinor, knowing him well, gained nothingfrom 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 sheheard him settle down to steady, deliberate pacing, she knew that he wasfacing 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 sostrange that she wondered if he had decided to do away with her.

  "To-morrow," he said, in an inflectionless voice, "you will be moved byautomobile to a farm I have selected in the country. You will take onlysuch 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 andthere 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 isa 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 lainin 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 totry 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 diabolicalingenuity, not intelligence so much as cunning. But because I always dothe thing I'm afraid to do, I'll tell you. Of course, if you succeed inpassing it on--" He shrugged his shoulders. "Very well, then. With yourusual logic of deduction, you have guessed correctly. Louis Akers hasbeen defeated. Your family--and how strangely you are a Cardew!--lostits courage at the last moment, and a gentleman named Hendricks is nowsetting up imitation beer and cheap cigars to his friends."

  Behind his mocking voice she knew the real fury of the man, keptcarefully in control by his iron will.

  "As you have also correctly surmised," he went on, "there is now nothingto be gained by any delay. A very few days, three or four, and--" Hisvoice grew hard and terrible--"the first stone in the foundation ofthis capitalistic government will go. Inevitable law, inevitableretribution--" His voice trailed off. He turned like a man asleep andwent toward the door. There he stopped and faced her.

  "I've told you," he said darkly. "I am not afraid of you. You can nomore stop this thing tha
n you can stop living by ceasing to breathe. Ithas come."

  She heard him in his room for some time after that, and she surmisedfrom the way he moved, from closet to bed and back again, that he waspacking a bag. At two o'clock she heard Olga coming in; the girl wassinging in Russian, and Elinor had a sickening conviction that she hadbeen drinking. She heard Doyle send her off to bed, his voice angry anddisgusted, and resume his packing, and ten minutes later she heard acar draw up on the street, and knew that he was off, to begin themobilization of his heterogeneous forces.

  Ever since she had been able to leave her bed Elinor had beenformulating a plan of escape. Once the door had been left unlocked, buther clothing had been removed from the room, and then, too, she hadnot learned the thing she was waiting for. Now she had clothing, a darkdressing gown and slippers, and she had the information. But the doorwas securely locked.

  She had often thought of the window, In the day time it frightened herto look down, although it fascinated her, too. But at night it seemedmuch simpler. The void below was concealed in the darkness, a softdarkness that hid the hard, inhospitable earth. A darkness one couldfall 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 belowthe window-sill, but she knew now that she must get away, if she were togo at all. She got out of bed, and using her crutches carefully movedto the sill, trying to accustom herself to the thought of going over theedge. The plaster cast on her leg was a real handicap. She must get itover first. How heavy it was, and unwieldy!

  She found her scissors, and, stripping the bed, sat down to cut and tearthe bedding into strips. Prisoners escaped that way; she had read aboutsuch things. But the knots took up an amazing amount of length. It wasfour o'clock in the morning when she had a serviceable rope, and sheknew it was too short. In the end she tore down the window curtains andadded them, working desperately against time.

  She began to suspect, too, that Olga was not sleeping. She smelledfaintly the odor of the long Russian cigarettes the girl smoked. She putout her light and worked in the darkness, a strange figure of adventure,this middle-aged woman with her smooth hair and lined face, sitting inher cambric nightgown with her crutches on the floor beside her.

  She secured the end of the rope to the foot of her metal bed, pushingthe bed painfully and cautiously, inch by inch, to the window. And inso doing she knocked over the call-bell on the stand, and almostimmediately 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 overaccidentally."

  Olga hesitated, muttered, moved away again. Elinor was covered with acold sweat.

  She began to think of the window as a refuge. Surely nothing outsidecould be so terrible as this house itself. The black aperture seemedfriendly; it beckoned to her with friendly hands.

  She dropped her crutches. They fell with two soft thuds on the earthbelow and it seemed to her that they were a long time in falling. Shelistened after that, but Olga made no sign. Then slowly and painfullyshe worked her injured leg over the sill, and sat there looking down andbreathing with difficulty. Then she freed her dressing gown around her,and slid over the edge.