The Angry Wife (23 page)

They turned to her, grasping at the straw of escape.

“I’ve been thinking I would ask you to let me visit Bettina, please,” Georgia said. “If you’re willing, ma’am—Miss Sally can come, too.”

“No,” Lucinda said.

“Yes!” Sally cried. “Yes—yes—Papa, I’ve always wanted to see Uncle Tom again—”

“Sally!” Lucie’s prim whisper, horror-struck, hissed across the room.

“I don’t care—I do,” Sally insisted.

“Sally can stay at a hotel,” Pierce reasoned to Lucinda. “Georgia can be with her and look after her and Tom can come and see her.”

A volley of shots struck in the street and a window pane shattered.

Lucinda put her hands to her ears. “We’ve got to get away before we’re all killed—”

An hour later Pierce stood alone on the platform of the railroad station. His private car had gone, the last in a line of passage cars headed for the south. No one knew when the next train would leave, if ever. Trains were still leaving irregularly for the north, and on one of them he had put Sally and Georgia into a day coach, jammed with frightened people trying to leave Baltimore. He had held Sally close for a moment, exasperated with love for this wilful child of his. But Sally had been gay and excited.

“Mind you stay at a hotel,” he had commanded. “Your mama will never let me hear the end of it if you don’t.”

“Of course,” she had promised, without, he felt, in the least meaning it. He saw them on the train, squeezed against the window, and through the open window he had continued to talk.

“If things quiet down,” he said, “I may run up myself for a day or so, tell Tom. If I find you’ve been disobedient, Sally—”

“Oh, no!” she trilled.

The whistle blew and she waved and laughed. He saw Georgia’s face, softly alight, behind her.

“I hold you responsible for your young mistress, Georgia!” he shouted. The train was moving and he did not hear her answer, whatever it was. He caught her smile, and had a pang of foreboding.

But there was no time to think of what he felt. Across the platform a group of guardsmen were carrying the body of a young man. They laid him down and Pierce saw that he was dead. He drew near and looked down at him. He was bleeding from a gunwound and his face was mangled to a pulp, the features wiped away.

“A brickbat out of the damned mob,” one of the men muttered.

Before Pierce could speak the mob surged into the station.

“Get out of here, sir!” the guardsmen begged him—“They’ll tear you to pieces—in that silk hat!”

They surrounded him and hurried him across the tracks, and he made his way alone by back streets to the offices where the directors awaited him.

Pierce had never before faced the Board without John. Now as he looked down the long mahogany table, lined with grim faces, he felt his resolution fade. The power was in the hands of these men. He had been all for wielding that power while he was in Malvern. What threatened Malvern threatened the world. But now in the great dim board room, hung with red velvet from ceiling to floor at every window and paneled with the portraits of dead directors, he was confused. Feelings that he had forgotten came crowding back into his mind, memories so distant that he would have said they had ceased to exist.

He remembered again the young men who had died under his command in the war. They had fought with heartbreaking bravery, the pure bravery of the young, who alone are unselfish enough to die for a cause. The young man whom he had just seen in the street had died, too. How uselessly! A brick flung at random had crushed him. He had been ordered out this morning to do his duty and now he was dead.

He was distracted by his memories, confused and mingled with the news in telegrams and messages which lay before him.

“Military action must be taken all along the railroad,” Henry Mallows was saying in his high clear cold voice. “Nothing else will suffice.”

“The mob has command,” Jim McCagney said. He had aged greatly in the years that he had sat on the Board. His bitter grey eyes were set deep under eyebrows like bunches of dry heather.

Daniel Rutherford, the youngest of them all, turned at the sound of an open door, and took an envelope from a messenger boy. He tore it open and read it. “The Mayor has sworn in three thousand citizens as special police,” he cried. “He promises that the ringleaders of the mob will be in jail tonight.”

“Tut!” Jim McCagney growled, “don’t give a hoot for citizens in a case like this. Mallows is right. Guns are what’s wanted.”

“A detachment of one hundred marines is expected this evening,” Baird Hancock said drily.

“It’s the shops I’m thinking of,” Jonathan Yates put in. He was the one man in the room who had come up from the ranks, a thin, tired-looking man in a broadcloth suit too large for him. The heavy, velvet-lined collar rode up the back of his head and now and again he struggled with it.

Pierce was staring at the dispatches before him. “Pittsburgh, Reading, Harrisburg, Shamokin, Hornellsville, Chicago, Cincinnati, Zanesville, Columbus, Fort Wayne, St. Louis, Kansas City,” he read the names aloud solemnly.

Murmurs of anger rose from the men around the table. Pierce lifted his head. “I came into this room as fixed as any of you in my determination to put down these strikes,” he said slowly. “Now, as I see these foes catching from one place to another clear across the country, I ask myself—what have we done that was wrong?”

“Man, it’s not us—it’s the Reds!” McCagney shouted. “Our men alone wouldn’t have dared! The foreign communists have used our honest working folk as a pretext for their infamous machinations to overthrow the government of the United States!” He leaped to his feet, towering six foot six, his white hair flying, his beard a tangle. He banged the table with his fists. “Ne’er-do-wells!” he bellowed. “Rascals—robbers—internationalists!” He ground out the last word between his teeth with special hatred.

Silence followed, and in the silence Pierce drove away his memories. What had the past to do with today? “If we have proof that these strikes are inspired by foreigners,” he said slowly, “then it is time to put on our uniforms again and fight.”

“Amen, amen—” The word roared around the table from mouth to mouth.

They sat far into the night, while messages continued to pour in from the four corners of the nation. At midnight a last message was sent by the mayor. Two hundred and fifty rebels had been imprisoned. “Upon inquiry,” the mayor reported, “it was found that not one of them had been a worker on the railroad.”

“If we needed any further proof of foreign machination,” Henry Mallows said looking about triumphantly, “here it is.”

Pierce looked back at him, and wished that he need not agree with him. He had disliked Henry Mallows increasingly throughout the evening. Mallows had grown more handsome and distinguished looking with the years. Worldliness became him. His smooth cheeks and well-cut mouth were still young. What had seemed timid and foreign in his youth had become hard and self-assured as he had become a native and a patriot in his own country. His foreign wife had grown into a silent and delicate creature, finicking and invalid. There had been no children.

Pierce turned away from this man of whom John MacBain had spoken so bitterly, and looked at the other listening, stubborn faces. “We must remember that the sympathies of the press and of the people, however, are with the workingmen,” he said. “If we act too severely or even too swiftly we may find ourselves condemned, though unjustly. We must distinguish between our own men and the communists.”

Silence fell about him as the directors digested this common sense.

“I move we adjourn,” Jim McCagney said abruptly.

“To meet again on Monday morning,” Henry Mallows amended.

Pierce seconded the amended motion and it was carried and the endless meeting was over.

Pierce slept deep in exhaustion through the night and was awakened just before dawn by a fire alarm. He got out of bed and without lighting the lamp he went to the window and looked down. The streets were swarming again with people. Trouble had begun again. Toward the west the sky blazed almost to the zenith.

The railroad shops!

He dressed himself hurriedly and went out bareheaded, fearing that his silk hat would betray him. The streets were so crowded that he could barely force his way westward. It was an hour before he reached the railroad shops and found that they had not yet caught fire. A train of oil cars was burning. The firemen had isolated the cars and so far had saved the shops. While they worked the mob turned to a lumberyard and planing mill a few blocks away and set it afire. In a few minutes the air was filled with smoke and the flames roared black-edged toward the sky.

Pierce stood back among the crowd, watching and helpless. He looked at the faces around him. Some were silent and grave, some were wild, some were drunken. He recognized no one and with a strange feeling that the whole world was burning to destruction he went back to the hotel. Downstairs the clerk gave him his door key and noted his return.

“Terrible, ain’t it, sir?” he murmured.

“Yes,” Pierce said.

He felt chilled although the night had been warm. But there was no hot water with which to warm himself. He was grimed with smoke and he washed himself in cold water and then put on his nightshirt again and got back into bed.

He lay shivering and strangely lonely, but for no one. He did not want Lucinda or the children. He was glad that they were not with him. His mood was old and he recognized it as the mood of many nights in the war when battle loomed in the morning. Then as though to carry the illusion to reality he heard the sudden sharpness of guns firing in the streets. He listened, lying tense and ready to spring out of bed. Then the sounds were stilled and he fell asleep at last for an hour.

All through the next day he came and went, restless and yet exhausted. The streets were milling with people again, the crowds falling back only before the marines who had arrived early in the morning. It was a war which he did not understand. What was the cause and what the end?

By afternoon eight marines and eight policemen were dead. How many other dead there were no one knew, for the mob hid their own dead. At midnight the mayor reported again. The armed men had won and the city was safe once more. Trains would run within the hour. Pierce went back to the hotel and found a telegram from John MacBain.

“Change in company policy absolutely necessary. Postpone meeting until I come. John.”

Pierce rang for a messenger and sent the telegram to Henry Mallows. Crisis in Baltimore was over, but would arms suffice for final victory? He sat down in his room, grimed and exhausted and this night too tired to go to sleep. Suddenly he knew what he wanted. He wanted to go and see Tom. Maybe Tom could tell him what the war was about.

Chapter Seven

P
IERCE KNEW FBOM TOM’S
letters that what he would see was a decent house on a quiet street in Philadelphia. He hired a hansom cab at the disordered railroad station and arrived at Tom’s house in the middle of the afternoon. The heat of the day had been ended by a sharp swift thunderstorm, which had beaten against the windows of the train. Now the sycamore trees that lined both sides of the street were wet and the air was clean. The cab drew up in front of a whitewashed stone house. He compared the number on the door with that of the figures set at the top of Tom’s last letter, got out and paid the driver. For a moment he had a strange feeling of isolation as the cab drove away. Then he crossed the street and knocked on the oak door. White marble steps shone beneath his feet and the knocker was polished brass. Bettina had always been a good worker.

Bettina herself opened the door. At the sight of him she stood rigid for a moment. Then a deep flush spread over her face. She controlled her surprise.

“Come in,” she said quietly. “We are glad to see you.”

He stepped into the hall. “Tom home?” he asked.

She made no move to take his hat and stick and he put them on a settee. “I expect him in a very few minutes,” she replied.

She avoided the use of his name. He noticed it and did not care. Had Lucinda been with him, he would have been uncomfortable at such namelessness, but Lucinda could not possibly have been with him.

“Come into the parlor, please,” Bettina said. She opened the door into a cool dim room.

He hesitated. “Now, Bettina, you know I don’t care much for parlors.” He gave her his frank smile. “Why don’t you take me into Tom’s study? I’d relish a good cold drink, too.”

Bettina dimpled suddenly. The dimples which became Georgia’s soft oval cheeks were odd in her handsome and angular face. “How good you are!” she exclaimed under her breath.

“Nonsense,” he said, but he was set at ease by his own goodness. He followed her into a large room whose three windows, placed side by side, faced upon a garden. It looked comfortable to him. He sank down in Tom’s big leather chair and gave a great sigh. “Bettina, I’m so tired—so damned tired and confused—I’ve got to rest.”

“Then rest here,” she replied. She stood before him and they looked at each other.

He smiled suddenly. “I know why you look different—you haven’t got an apron on.”

“Tom won’t let me wear aprons any more,” she told him.

“Sally staying at the hotel?” he asked abruptly.

“Yes,” Bettina said. Then after a second, she added, “This is a colored street.”

“It is? Looks mighty nice!”

“Nice people live here.”

“Where’s Georgia?”

“She’s with Miss Sally. They and Tom went to the museum with the school children. But she has a room here.”

“Tom doesn’t have school in summer, surely,” he said.

“No—but he does have some work going on in the building for the neighborhood children. The summer’s long and they get into mischief.”

“Where are yours?”

“Leslie has a summer job in the store down the street. Georgy went with Georgia, The other two are out there—” She lifted her eyes to the garden and he saw a girl playing with a little boy. The girl’s hair was softly curled down her back and it was a copper color. The sun shone on it. The little boy was very dark.