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Sturdy Oak, The

"M. J." <h2> CHAPTER II. BY HARRY LEON WILSON </h2> It may have been surmised that our sterling young candidate for district attorney had not yet become skilled in dalliance with the equivocal; that he was no adept in ambiguity; that he would confront all issues with a rugged valiance susceptible of no misconstruction; that, in short, George Remington was no trimmer. If he opposed an issue, one knew that he opposed it from the heart out. He said so and he meant it. And, being opposed to the dreadful heresy of equal suffrage, no reader of the Whitewater Sentinel that morning could say, as the shrewd so often say of our older statesmen, that George was "side-stepping." Not George's the mellow gift to say, in effect, that of course woman should vote the instant she wishes to, though perhaps that day has not yet come. Meantime the speaker boldly defies the world to show a man holding woman in loftier regard than he does, or ready to accord her a higher value in all true functions of the body politic. Equal suffrage, thank God, is inevitable at some future time, but until that glorious day when we can be assured that the sex has united in a demand for it, it were perhaps as well not to cloud the issues of the campaign now opening; though let it be understood, and he cannot put this too plainly, that he reveres the memory of his gray-haired mother without whose tender ministrations and wise guidance he could never have reached the height from which he now speaks. And so let us pass on to the voting on these canal bonds, the true inwardness of which, thanks to the venal activities of a corrupt opposition, even an exclusively male constituency has thus far failed to comprehend. And so forth. Our hero, then, had yet to acquire this finesse. As we are now privileged to observe him, he is as easy to understand as the multiplication table, as little devious and, alas! as lacking in suavity. Yet, let us be fair to George. Mere innocence of guile, of verbal trickery, had not alone sufficed for his passionate bluntness in the present crisis. At a later stage in his career as a husband he might have been equally blunt; yet never again, perhaps, would he have been so emotional in his opposition to woman polluting herself with the mire of politics. Be it recalled that but five weeks had elapsed since George had solemnly promised to cherish and protect the fairest of the non-voting sex—at least in his State—and he was still taking his mission seriously. As he wrote the words that were now electrifying, in a manner of speaking, the readers of the Sentinel, and of neighboring journals with enough enterprise to secure them, he had beheld his own Genevieve, fine, flawless, tenderly nourished flower that she was, being dragged from her high place with the most distressing results. He saw her rushed from the sacred shelter of her home and made to attend primaries; he saw her compelled to strive tearfully with problems that revolted all her finer instincts; he saw her insulted at polling booths; saw her voting in company with persons of both sexes whom one could never know. He saw her tainted, bruised, beaten down in the struggle, losing little by little all sense of the holy values of Wife, Mother, Home. As he wrote he heard her weakening cries for help as she perished, and more than once his left arm instinctively curved to shield her. Was it not for his wife, then; nay, for wifehood itself, that he wrote? And so, was it quite fair for unmarried Penfield Evans, burning at his breakfast table a cynical cigarette over the printed philippic, to murmur, "Gee! old George has spilled the beans!" Simple words enough and not devoid of friendly concern. But should he not have divined that George had been appalled to his extremities of speech by the horrendous vision of his fair young bride being hurled into depths where she would be obliged, if not to have opinions of her own, at least to vote with the rabble as he might decide they ought to vote? And should not other critics known to us have divined the racking anguish under which George had labored? For one, should not Elizabeth Sheridan, amateur spinster, have been all sympathy for one who was palpably more an alarmed bridegroom than a mere candidate? Should not her maiden heart have been touched by this plausible aspect of George's dilemma, rather than her mere brain to have been steeled to a humorous disparagement tinged with bitterness? And yet, "What rot!" muttered Miss Sheridan,—"silly rot, bally rot, tommy rot, and all the other kinds!" Hereupon she creased a brow not meant for creases and defaced an admirable nose with grievous wrinkles of disdain. "Sacred names of wife and mother!" This seemed regrettably like swearing as she delivered it, though she quoted verbatim. "Sacred names of petted imbeciles!" she amended. Then, with berserker fury, crumpling her Sentinel into a ball, she venomously hurled it to the depths of a waste basket and religiously rubbed the feel of it from her fingers. As she had not even glanced at the column headed "Births, Deaths, Marriages," it will be seen that her agitation was real. And surely a more discerning sympathy might have been looked for from the seasoned Martin Jaffry. A bachelor full of years and therefore with illusions not only unimpaired but ripened, who more quickly than he should have divined that his nephew for the moment viewed all womankind as but one multiplied Genevieve, upon whom it would be heinous to place the shackles of suffrage? Perhaps Uncle Martin did divine this. Perhaps he was a mere trimmer, a rank side-stepper, steeped in deceit and ever ready to mouth the abominable phrase "political expediency." It were rash to affirm this, for no analyst has ever fathomed the heart of a man who has come to his late forties a bachelor by choice. One may but guess from the ensuing meager data. Uncle Martin at a certain corner of Maple Avenue that morning, fell in with Penfield Evans, who, clad as the lilies of a florist's window, strode buoyantly toward his office, the vision of his day's toil pinkly suffused by an overlaying vision of a Betty or Sheridan character. Mr. Evans bubbled his greeting. "Morning! Have you seen it? Oh, say, have you seen it?" The immediate manner of Uncle Martin not less than his subdued garb of gray, his dark gloves and his somber stick, intimated that he saw nothing to bubble about. "He has burned his bridges behind him." The speaker looked as grim as any bachelor-by-choice ever may. "Regular little fire-bug," blithely responded Mr. Evans, moderating his stride to that of the other. "Can't understand it," resumed the gloomy uncle. "I sent him word in time; sent it from your office by messenger. It was plain enough. I told him no money of mine would go into his campaign if he made a fool of himself—or words to that effect." "Phew! Cast you off, did he? Just like that?" "Just like that! Went out of his way to overdo it, too. Needn't have come out half so strong. No chance now to backwater—not a chance on earth to explain what he really did mean—and make it something different." "Quixotic! That's how it reads to me." Uncle Martin here became oracular, his somber stick gesturing to point his words. "Trouble with poor George, he's been silly enough to blurt out the truth, what every man of us thinks in his heart—" "Eh?" said Mr. Evans quickly, as one who has been jolted. "No more sense than to come right out and say what every one of us thinks in his secret heart about women. I think it and you think it—" "Oh, well, if you put it that way," admitted young Mr. Evans gracefully. "But of course—" "Certainly, of course! We all think it—sacred names of home and mother and all the rest of it; but a man running for office these days is a chump to say so, isn't he? Of course he is! What chance does it leave him? Answer me that." "Darned little, if you ask me," said Mr. Evans judicially. "Poor old George!" "Talks as if he were going to be married tomorrow instead of its having come off five weeks ago," pursued Uncle Martin bitterly. Plainly there were depths of understanding in the man, trimmer though he might be. Mr. Evans made no reply. Irrationally he was considering the terms "five weeks" and "married" in relation to a spinster who would have professed to be indignant had she known it. "Got to pull the poor devil out," said Uncle Martin, when in silence they had traversed fifty feet more of the shaded side of Maple Avenue. "How?" demanded the again practical Mr. Evans. "Make him take it back; make him recant; swing him over the last week before election. Make him eat his words with every sign of exquisite relish. Simple enough!" "How?" persisted Mr. Evans. "Wiles, tricks, subterfuges, chicanery—understand what I mean?" "Sure! I understand what you mean as well as you do, but—come down to brass tacks." "That's an entirely different matter," conceded Uncle Martin gruffly. "It may take thought." "Oh, is that all? Very well then; we'll think. I, myself, will think. First, I'll have a talk with the sodden amorist. I'll grill him. I'll find the weak spot in his armor. There must be something we can put over on him." "By fair means or foul," insisted Uncle Martin as they paused at the parting of their ways. "Low-down, underhanded work—do you get what I mean?" "I do, I do!" declared young Mr. Evans and broke once more into the buoyant stride of an earlier moment. This buoyance was interrupted but once, and briefly, ere he gained the haven of his office. As he stepped quite too buoyantly into Fountain Square, he was all but run down by the new six-cylinder roadster of Mrs. Harvey Herrington, driven by the enthusiastic owner. He regained the curb in time, with a ready and heartfelt utterance nicely befitting the emergency. The president of the Whitewater Women's Club, the Municipal League and the Suffrage Society, brought her toy to a stop fifteen feet beyond her too agile quarry, with a fine disregard for brakes and tire surfaces. She beckoned eagerly to him she might have slain. She was a large woman with an air of graceful but resolute authority; a woman good to look upon, attired with all deference to the modes of the moment, and exhaling an agreeable sense of good-will to all. "Be careful always to look before you start across and you'll never have to say such things," was her greeting to Mr. Evans, as he halted beside this minor juggernaut. "Sorry you heard it," lied the young man readily. "Such a flexible little car—picks up before one realizes," conceded Whitewater's acknowledged social dictator. "But what I wanted to say is this: that poor daft partner of yours has mortally offended every woman in town except three, with that silly screed of his. I've seen nearly all of them that count this morning, or they've called me by telephone. Now, why couldn't he have had the advice of some good, capable woman before committing himself so rabidly?" "Who were the three?" queried Mr. Evans. "Oh, poor Genevieve, of course; she goes without saying. And you'd guess the other two if you knew them better—his cousin, Alys Brewster-Smith, and poor Genevieve's Cousin Emelene. They both have his horrible school-boy composition committed to memory, I do believe. "Cousin Emelene recited most of it to me with tears in her weak eyes, and Alys tells me his noble words have made the world seem like a different place to her. She said she had been coming to believe that chivalry of the old true brand was dying out, but that dear Cousin George has renewed her faith in it. "Think of poor Genevieve when they both fall on his neck. They're going up for that particular purpose this afternoon. The only two in town, mind you, except poor Genevieve. Oh, it's too awfully bad, because aside from this medieval view of his, George was probably as acceptable for this office as any man could be." The lady burdened the word "man" with a tiny but distinguishable emphasis. Mr. Evans chose to ignore this. "George's friends are going to take him in hand," said he. "Of course he was foolish to come out the way he has, even if he did say only what every man believes in his secret heart." The president of the Whitewater Woman's Club fixed him with a glittering and suddenly hostile eye. "What! you too?" she flung at him. He caught himself. He essayed explanations, modifications, a better lighting of the thing. But at the expiration of his first blundering sentence Mrs. Herrington, with her flexible little car, was narrowly missing an aged and careless pedestrian fifty yards down the street. <hr /> "George come in yet?" For the second time Mr. Evans was demanding this of Miss Elizabeth Sheridan who had also ignored his preliminary "Good morning!" Now for a moment more she typed viciously. One would have said that the thriving legal business of Remington and Evans required the very swift completion of the document upon which she wrought. And one would have been grossly deceived. The sheet had been drawn into the machine at the moment Mr. Evans' buoyant step had been heard in the outer hall, and upon it was merely written a dozen times the bald assertion, "Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party." Actually it was but the mechanical explosion of the performer's mood, rather than the wording of a sentiment now or at any happier time entertained by her. At last she paused; she sullenly permitted herself to be interrupted. Her hands still hovered above the already well-punished keys of the typewriter. She glanced over a shoulder at Mr. Evans and allowed him to observe her annoyance at the interruption. "George has not come in yet," she said coldly. "I don't think he will ever come in again. I don't see how he can have the face to. I shouldn't think he could ever show himself on the street again after that—that—" The young woman's emotion overcame her at this point. Again her relentless fingers stung the blameless mechanism—"to come to the aid of the party. Now is the time for all good—" She here controlled herself to further speech. "And you! Of course you applaud him for it. Oh, I knew you were all alike!" "Now look here, Betty, this thing has gone far enough——" "Far enough, indeed!" "But you won't give me a chance!" Mr. Evans here bent above his employee in a threatening manner. "You don't even ask what I think about it. You say I'm guilty and ought to be shot without a trial—not even waiting till sunrise. If you had the least bit of fairness in your heart you'd have asked me what I really thought about this outbreak of George's, and I'd have told you in so many words that I think he's made all kinds of a fool of himself." "No! Do you really, Pen?" Miss Sheridan had swiftly become human. She allowed her eyes to meet those of Mr. Evans' with an easy gladness but little known to him of late. "Of course I do, Betty. The idea of a candidate for office in this enlightened age breaking loose in that manner! It's suicide. He could be arrested for the attempt in this State. Is that strong enough for you? You surely know how I feel now, don't you? Come on, Betty dear! Let's not spar in that foolish way any longer. Remember all I said yesterday. It goes double today—really, I see things more clearly." Plainly Miss Sheridan was disarmed. "And I thought you'd approve every word of his silly tirade," she murmured. Mr. Evans, still above her, was perilously shaken by the softer note in her voice, but he controlled himself in time and sat in one of the chairs reserved for waiting clients. It was near Miss Sheridan, yet beyond reaching distance. He felt that he must be cool in this moment of impending triumph. "Wasn't it the awfullest rot?" demanded the spinster, pounding out a row of periods for emphasis. "And he's got to be made to eat his words," said Mr. Evans, wisely taking the same by-path away from the one subject in all the world that really mattered. "Who could make him?" "I could, if I tried." It came in quiet, masterful tones that almost convinced the speaker himself. "Oh, Pen, if you could! Wouldn't that be a victory, though? If you only could——" "Well, if I only could—and if I do?" His intention was too pointed to be ignored. "Oh, that!" He winced at the belittling "that." "Of course I couldn't promise—anyway I don't believe you could ever do it, so what's the use of being silly?" "But you will—will you promise, if I do convert George? Answer the question, please!" Mr. Evans glared as only actual district attorneys have the right to. "Oh, what nonsense—but, well, I'll promise—I'll promise to promise to think very seriously about it indeed, if you bring George around." "Betty!" It was the voice of an able pleader and he half arose from his chair, his arms eloquent of purpose. "'Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party. Now is the time for'—" wrote Miss Sheridan with dazzling fingers, and the pleader resumed his seat. "How will you bring him 'round," she then demanded. "Wiles, tricks, stratagems," replied the rising young diplomat moodily, smarting under the moment's defeat. "Serve him right for pulling all that old-fashioned nonsense," said Miss Sheridan, and accorded her employer a glance in which admiration for his prowess was not half concealed. "The words of a fool wise in his own folly," went on the encouraged Mr. Evans, and then, alas! a victim to the slight oratorical thrill these words brought him,—"honestly uttering what every last man believes and feels about woman in his heart and yet what no sane man running for office can say in public—here, what's the matter?" The latter clause had been evoked by the sight of a blazing Miss Sheridan, who now stood over him with fists tightly clenched. "Oh, oh, oh!" This was low, tense, thrilling. It expressed horror. "So that's what your convictions amount to! Then you do applaud him, every word of him, and you were deceiving me. Every man in his own heart, indeed. Thank heaven I found you out in time!" It may be said that Mr. Evans now cowered in his chair. The term is not too violent. He ventured to lift a hand in weak protest. "No, no, Betty, you are being unjust to me again. I meant that that was what Martin Jaffry told me this morning. It isn't what I believe at all. I tell you my own deepest sentiments are exactly what yours are in this great cause which—which—" Painfully he became aware of his own futility. Miss Sheridan had ceased to blaze. Seated again before the typewriter she grinned at him with amused incredulity. "You nearly had me going, Pen." Mr. Evans summoned the deeper resources of his manhood and achieved an easier manner. He brazenly returned her grin. "I'll have you going again before I'm through—remember that." "By wiles, tricks and stratagems, I suppose." "The same. By those I shall make poor George recant, and by those, assuming you to be a woman with a fine sense of honor who will hold a promise sacred, I shall have you going. And, mark my words, you'll be going good, too!" "Silly!" She drew from the waste basket the maltreated Sentinel, unfurled it to expose the offending matter, and smote the column with the backs of four accusing fingers. "There, my dear, is your answer. Now run along like a good boy." "Silly!" said Mr. Evans, striving for a masterly finish to the unequal combat. He arose, dissembling cheerful confidence, straightened the frame of a steel-engraved Daniel Webster on the wall, and thrice paced the length of the room, falsely appearing to be engaged in deep thought. Miss Sheridan, apparently for mere exclamatory purposes, now reread the fulmination of the absent partner. She scoffed, she sneered, flouted, derided, and one understood that she was including both members of the firm. Then her listener became aware that she had achieved coherence. "Indeed, yes! Do you know what ought to happen to him? Every unprotected female in this county ought to pack her trunk and trudge right up to the Remington place and say, 'Here we are, noble man! We have read your burning words in which you offer to protect us. Save us from the vote! Let your home be our sanctuary. That's what you mean if you meant anything but tommy-rot. Here and now we throw ourselves upon your boasted chivalry. Where are our rooms, and what time is luncheon served.'" "Here! Just say that again," called Mr. Evans from across the room. Miss Sheridan obliged. She elaborated her theme. George should be taken at his word by every weak flower of womanhood. If women were nothing but ministering angels, it was "up to" George to give 'em a chance to minister. So went Miss Sheridan's improvisation and Mr. Evans, suffering the throes of a mighty inspiration, suddenly found it sweetest music. When Miss Sheridan subsided, Mr. Evans appeared to have forgotten the cause of their late encounter. Whistling cheerily he bustled into his own office, mumbling of matters that had to be "gotten off." For some moments he busied himself at his desk, then emerged to dictate three business letters to his late antagonist. He dictated in a formal and distant manner, pausing in the midst of the last letter to spell out the word "analysis," which he must have known would enrage her further. Then, quite casually, he wished to be told if she might know the local habitat of Mrs. Alys Brewster-Smith and a certain Cousin Emelene. His manner was arid. Miss Sheridan chanced to know that the ladies were sheltered in the exclusive boarding-house of one Mrs. Gallup, out on Erie Street, and informed him to this effect in the fewest possible words. Mr. Evans whistled absently a moment, then formally announced that he should be absent from the office for perhaps an hour. Hat, gloves and stick in hand, he was about to nod punctiliously to the back of Miss Sheridan's head when the door opened to admit none other than our hero, George Remington. George wore the look of one who is uplifted and who yet has found occasion to be thoughtful about it. Penfield Evans grasped his hand and shook it warmly. "Fine, George, old boy—simply corking! Honestly, I didn't believe you had it in you. You covered the ground and you did it in a big way. It took nerve, all right! Of course you probably know that every woman in town is speaking of your young wife as 'poor Genevieve,' but you've had the courage of your convictions. It's great!" "Thanks, old man! I've spoken for the right as I saw it, let come what may. By the way, has Uncle Martin been in this morning, or telephoned, or sent any word?" Miss Sheridan coldly signified that none of these things had occurred, whereupon George sighed in an interesting manner and entered his own room. Mr. Evans had uttered his congratulations in clear, ringing tones and Miss Sheridan, even as she wrote, contrived with her trained shoulders to exhibit to his lingering eye an overwhelming contempt for his opinions and his double-dealing. In spite of which he went out whistling, and dosed the door in a defiant manner. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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