The Angry Wife (26 page)

“Yes—I have been happy,” Georgia answered. “But it is better now for me to leave it—and find my own place.”

He bowed his head, and kept Sally’s hand tight under his arm, and drew her with him into the house, and Georgia stood alone in the garden.

“Poor Papa,” Sally said.

They were back at Malvern again and he and Sally were riding along the familiar woodland paths.. His horse was Beauty’s great-grandchild, and Sally rode her own golden bay that he had bought for her once in Kentucky.

“Explain your pity,” he said gaily. It was good to be safe at home.

“You’re living before the war, Papa,” Sally said smartly.

“You mean I’m old,” he said.

“No—because Martin is just like you. It’s Malvern that does it—all this—”

She waved her riding crop at the rolling green of the hills and blue of mountains beyond. “You made this and Martin inherits it, and neither of you can bear to give it up.”

“Who’s asking us to give it up?” Pierce demanded.

“Nobody, darling—but you’re afraid somebody might!”

“You and Carey and John—you’re more enlightened, I suppose?” he said with heavy pretense at sarcasm.

She shook her head. “I don’t like Carey—he’ll just be a sharp lawyer. Carey has no principle—did you know that, Papa? But John—oh, well, one of these days you’ll quarrel with John and maybe throw him out of the house and he knows it. He’s getting ready for it.”

He was aghast at her intuition. It corroborated his own. He was afraid of his third son. The boy did not reveal himself.

“And you?” he asked, avoiding his fears.

“Oh, Lucie and I—we don’t belong in Malvern anyway—we’ll have to be married off and go somewhere else. It doesn’t matter about women.”

He looked at her lovely face. She held her head high, and he saw only her sweet profile, the red gold hair piled under the little black derby hat. “Sally, I wish you wouldn’t talk like that—you’ll always be my daughter, whomever you marry—”

“Unless I marry someone you don’t like,” she amended and flashed him a smile lit by intense blue eyes.

“I can’t imagine that,” he said gravely.

“You mustn’t imagine what I can or can’t do,” she said willfully.

He felt he must strike now upon this hot iron. “Sally, I sincerely hope the visit to Tom’s house has not upset you.”

She did not answer and he went on. “I confess it upset me very much. Tom has done something, which if many men did it, could destroy our whole nation—our civilization, indeed—”

Sally interrupted him. “I haven’t seen anybody I want to marry yet, if that’s what you mean, Papa.”

He was so relieved that he was impelled to hide it. “I am not thinking only of your marriage, Sally. I am thinking of—of—of the foundations of our country.” He went on reluctantly. “We are a white nation—and we must stay white—”

His eyes met hers, and he was shocked by the brilliant, mocking mischief hers revealed. She burst into laughter.

“Oh, Papa, how funny men are!”

He stared at her, and she took out a tiny lace handkerchief from the breast pocket of her coat and wiped her eyes. “As if Uncle Tom had really done anything unusual! He’s only owned up to it, that’s all.” She was laughing again—high laughter, with an edge of heartbreak in it. “But that is very unusual—I grant you, Papa—and maybe such honesty does threaten the—the nation!”

“Sally!” he cried.

But she shook her head and smiling too brightly she struck her horse hard and galloped ahead of him and disappeared down the long green lane. He let her go. He was frightened at the glimpse she had shown him into herself, and he wanted to see no more.

When he got home there was a telegram from John MacBain asking him to come at once to Chicago. He left, thankfully, without seeing Sally. Lucinda would be home by the time he came back, and the house would be itself again.

He met John in the red plush parlor of the bridal suite of the railroad hotel, and was shocked by his haggard looks. John sat at a small round table drinking whiskey from a cloudy glass tumbler. He had not shaved or washed, and he did not get up when Pierce came in.

“Thank God you’ve come,” he groaned. “I haven’t slept in I don’t know how many nights. Pierce—I got here yesterday from Pittsburgh—there’s only four hundred police here—they can’t handle the mob.”

“That means more war,” Pierce exclaimed.

John nodded. “Want some whiskey?”

“No,” Pierce said.

John poured half a tumbler and drank it down. He got up and wiped his hand across his beard. “You come with me and see what we’re up against—but you better leave that silk hat here—it’ll only be a target for pot shots—”

Pierce took off his hat and followed John into the street. They hailed a horse cab lurking in an alley.

“Market Street,” John ordered the driver.

“You don’t want to go there,” the driver remonstrated. “Why, there must be ten thousand people now in that mob.”

“That’s why I want to go,” John said grimly. “Put us down a block away and we’ll walk—”

They took the ride in silence, unwilling to reveal to the driver who they were. A block away he set them down and John paid the fare. They could hear the roar of the mob and the loud, shrieking harangue of voices. They turned the corner of Market Street and saw a sea of heads. “Good God, John,” Pierce muttered, “where have they come from?”

“By Gawd, the communists have forced everybody to stop work,” John said sternly. “We’ll wedge our way in—then you listen for yourself—and tell me what we ought to do, Pierce—if you can.”

They edged their way through the crowd. No one noticed them. The eyes of men and women alike were glazed and unseeing. There were six platforms along the street, a man haranguing on each, and to his astonishment Pierce heard German as well as English. He stood almost directly beneath a young man with blond uncombed hair and frenzied face.

“Better for a thousand of us to be shot in the streets than ten thousand of us to starve!” the young man screamed, and a deep roar rose from the mob.

He felt the mob respond to the wild words that were being thrown to them. They began to surge about him, to move in a terrible rhythm. He felt himself caught upon the waves, twisted and pressed upon. Yet no one knew him or cared who he was. The movement was bestial and mad, and he grew frightened.

“Let’s get out of this,” he muttered to John.

John nodded, and hooking arms they began to work their way out doggedly, breaking across the rhythm, silent in the midst of the roar, until they were free at last, staggering out of the mob as though a sea had thrown them upon a beach.

They went back to the hotel and Pierce stripped himself of his clothes. They stank of the mob. He bathed himself and dressed clean from head to foot.

“Go and wash and shave yourself, John,” he commanded. “You and I have got to get hold of things.”

An hour later they had eaten and Pierce was planning resolutely what must be done.

“This isn’t going to be finished within a day,” he told John. “You come with me and we’ll go and see the mayor.”

“You going to wear that hat?” John asked. Pierce had put on his silk top hat again.

“I am,” Pierce said with determination. “I don’t belong to the mob and I want everybody to know it.”

It was two o’clock in the afternoon and the mob had taken possession of the railroad yards. They had the news from a terrified clerk as they stepped from the hotel door.

“Half of them are drunk!” the fellow wailed to John.

“Get out of my way,” Pierce said contemptuously, and pushed him aside.

They drove to the mayor’s offices and found that he was at home. They were ushered into a great parlor where the mayor was staring out of the long windows, his hands in his pockets, his hat on the back of his head. About the room were his aides and secretaries.

“I have come to demand that the property of the railroad be protected by the Grand Army of the Republic,” Pierce said formally, when a doorman had announced them.

“Great guns!” the mayor replied, “I am thinking of the whole city! Why, sir, that mob will reach twenty thousand by night!”

“Why don’t you get the whole police force armed?” Pierce demanded.

“We haven’t guns enough,” the mayor groaned.

“There must be guns—” Pierce retorted. “Guns hidden in attics or hung on walls—relics from the war, if nothing else.”

His tall upright frame, his harsh voice, his bold blue eyes took command of the wavering and frightened men. The mayor yelled at his henchmen and they began to scurry from the room.

Pierce sat down by a rosewood table and banged it with his fist. “And now,” he said loudly, “send for the Army!”

The mayor hesitated and bit his nails.

“It isn’t of Chicago alone I’m thinking,” Pierce said, “nor of the railroad—it’s the nation we have to save. If this mob is unchecked, mobs will rise in a dozen other big cities.”

“I’ll do what I can,” the mayor promised. In an hour the order had gone and they waited for reply. It came before midnight. The Grand Army of the Republic was on its way. Meantime messengers brought more news of the mob. There had been a battle on Market Street, but the mob was dispersed. Four policemen were wounded, one dead. The railroad roundhouse had been taken back and the fires in the engines put out. An hour later there were five more dead. Again no one knew the number of the dead among the mob. Whenever a man fell, he was hidden.

Pierce and John slept in the mayor’s house that night. No meals were served in the great dining room but servants brought platters of sandwiches and cold meats into the parlor which had become the center of the city’s control, and the men ate little and drank much. Pierce went to bed in a stupor of weariness and was awakened again by gun shots in the morning. When he had dressed and hastened downstairs he found that the first contingents of the Army had arrived, had met the overflow of the mob in an open space near a hall, and had dispersed them. Meantime the meeting in the hall had gone on behind locked doors.

By noon six more policemen were wounded. Still no one knew or counted the number of wounded in the unarmed mob. The rioters continued to take their dead away as soon as they fell.

In the disordered parlor Pierce sat all day listening, suggesting, conferring, but underneath activity he was aware of a deep empty silence. What did this war mean, here in the heart of his country? Who were the enemies—and for whom did he fight? He left his own questions unanswered.

The strange war ended the next day in a foolish way which only confused him the more, A crowd of Bohemian women, angered because two of their lads had been killed the night before, gathered together from the small Bohemian villages on the outskirts of the city. They fought fiercely, out of outraged motherhood, until in the middle of the evening the hardbitten Regulars appeared and dispersed them. By the middle of the next day the rioters had been overcome and the city took stock of its wounds. Shops had been looted and men robbed. A farmer coming into the city with his vegetables had been waylaid and beaten and his little store of money taken away. To the unrest of the working people had been added the selfishness of petty thieves and the lawlessness of gangsters.

“We’ve licked them,” the mayor sighed, and wiped his bald head with a handkerchief so dirty that it left a smear of black across his face.

“Wait,” Pierce said and opened a telegram that a boy held at his elbow.

It announced the attack of a mob in San Francisco upon Chinatown.

“I’m going,” John said. “I’ll drive these communists into the Pacific Ocean and hold ’em under!”

“I am going home,” Pierce said heavily.

The strikes subsided and the war ended slowly as the weeks passed. Everywhere the mob was put down by Regulars from the Federal Army. In his library Pierce studied the newspapers and approved, but with deep disquiet. Of course the mob must be put down. Order must be upheld. He could not hide from himself that he was profoundly relieved when Malvern stood safe once more upon a subdued working class. But, out of his disquiet, he now recommended and worked for substantial wage increases. He wrote long, detailed letters to every member of the Board of Directors. To Henry Mallows he wrote with peculiar insistence: “I tell you, I have seen the faces of these men and women—yes, women, too. They are savage with despair. In the interest of our own security we must grant them enough for life, even if our own dividends shrink for a while.”

To Jim McCagney he wrote: “We overbuilt. Let’s face our own mistake. We went too fast for the country. But the country will catch up with us if we can be willing to make less profit for the next few years. It’s a great country, and we haven’t begun to produce what we can. I’m a farmer and I know.”

At Malvern he steadily set himself to bigger crops and finer animals, as his duty to the nation.

But underneath all his efforts he still knew secret terror. He woke at night in a sweat, seeing the faces of the mob. In his dreams they were mixed up strangely with Tom and Tom’s house and the faces of Tom’s children—yes, and of Georgia’s. He woke frightened even on the clear bright mornings of autumn and harvest and the peace which followed the summer’s storms.

“We’ve got to do something about the poor,” he told Lucinda again and again and at the next Board meeting in a restored Baltimore he argued his fellow members into setting up a relief department in the company for the benefit of the sick and aged and those who had suffered from accident in their work.

He met the solid opposition of everyone, even of John MacBain.

“We licked them with the help of the Army, and that’s how we’ll have to lick them always,” John declared.

But Pierce argued his case stubbornly. “For our own safety it is better to have contented workingmen than discontented ones.”

“You can’t satisfy workingmen,” Jonathan Yates said with his thin tired smile. He was more relentless than any of them, now that he had risen above his fellows.

“We’ve got to be realistic,” Henry Mallows said. His narrow face hardened. He tore the gold band from a slender cigar and lit it. Perfume spread in the air with the smoke. “Anything that doesn’t bring in returns to the stockholders—” he went on.