The Sturdy Oak by Samuel Merwin

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"And now you have asked me here; one of the dearest old places in town!"
Emelene added innocently.

Genevieve listened in a stupefaction. This was married life, then? Not
since her childhood had Genevieve so longed to stamp, to scream, to
protest, to tear this twisted scheme apart and start anew!

She was not a crying woman, but she wanted to cry now. She was not--she
told herself indignantly--quite a fool. But she felt that if George went
on being martyred, and mechanically polite, and grim, she would go into
hysterics. She had been married less than six weeks; that night she cried
herself to sleep.

Her guests were as agreeable as their natures permitted; but Genevieve was
reduced, before the third day of their visit, to a condition of continual
tears.

This was her home, this was the place sacred to George and herself, and
their love. Nobody in the world,--not his mother, not hers, had their
mothers been living!--was welcome here. She had planned to be such a good
wife to him, so thoughtful, so helpful, so brave when he must be away.
But she could not rise to the height of sharing him with other women, and
saying whatever she said to him in the hearing of witnesses. And then she
dared not complain too openly! That was an additional hardship, for if
George insulted his guests, then that horrid Penny--

Genevieve had always liked Penny, and had danced and flirted with him aeons
ago. She had actually told Betty that she hoped Betty would marry Penny.
But now she felt that she loathed him. He was secretly laughing at George,
at George who had dared to take a stand for old-fashioned virtue and the
purity of the home!

It was all so unexpected, so hard. Women everywhere were talking about
George's article, and expected her to defend it! George, she could have
defended. But how could she talk about a subject upon which she was not
informed, in which, indeed, as she was rather fond of saying, she was
absolutely uninterested?

George was changed, too. Something was worrying him; and it was hard on the
darling old boy to come home to Miss Emelene and the cat and Eleanor and
Alys, every night! Emelene adored him, of course, and Alys was always
interesting and vivacious, but--but it wasn't like coming home to his own
little Genevieve!

The bride wept in secret, and grew nervous and timid in manner. Mrs.
Brewster-Smith, however, found this comprehensible enough, and one hot
summer afternoon Genevieve went into George's office with her lovely
head held high, her color quite gone, and her breath coming quickly with
indignation. [Illustration: It was hard on the darling old boy to come home
to Miss Emelene and the cat and Eleanor and Alys every night!] "George--I
don't care what we do, or where we go! But I can't stand it! She said--she
said--she told me--"

Her husband was alone in his office, and Genevieve was now crying in his
arms. He patted her shoulder tenderly.

"I'm so worried all the time about dinners, and Lottie's going, and that
child getting downstairs and letting in flies and licking the frosting off
the maple cake," sobbed Genevieve, "that of _course_ I show it! And if I
_have_ given up my gym work, it's just because I was so busy trying to get
some one in Lottie's place! And now they say--they say--that _they_ know
what the matter is, and that I mustn't dance or play golf--the horrible,
spying cats! I won't go back, George, I will not! I--"

Again George was wonderful. He put his arm about her, and she sat down on
the edge of his desk, and leaned against that dear protective shoulder and
dried her eyes on one of his monogrammed handkerchiefs. He reminded her of
a long-standing engagement for this evening with Betty and Penny, to go out
to Sea Light and have dinner and a swim, and drive home in the moonlight.
And when she was quiet again, he said tenderly:

"You mustn't let the 'cats' worry you, Pussy. What they think isn't true,
and I don't blame you for getting cross! But in one way, dear, aren't they
right? Hasn't my little girl been riding and driving and dancing a little
too hard? Is it the wisest thing, just now? You have been nervous lately,
dear, and excitable. Mightn't there be a reason? Because I don't have to
tell you, sweetheart, nothing would make me prouder, and Uncle Martin, of
course, has made no secret of how _he_ feels! You wouldn't be sorry, dear?"

Genevieve had always loved children deeply. Long before this her happy
dreams had peopled the old house in Sheridan Road with handsome, dark-eyed
girls, and bright-eyed boys like their father.

But, to her own intense astonishment, she found this speech from her
husband distasteful. George would be "proud," and Uncle Martin pleased.
But it suddenly occurred to Genevieve that neither George nor Uncle Martin
would be tearful and nervous. Neither George nor Uncle Martin need eschew
golf and riding and dancing. To be sick, when she had always been so well!
To face death, for which she had always had so healthy a horror! Cousin
Alex had died when her baby came, and Lois Farwell had never been well
after the fourth Farwell baby made his appearance.

Genevieve's tears died as if from flame. She gently put aside the
sustaining arm, and went to the little mirror on the wall, to straighten
her hat. She remembered buying this hat, a few weeks ago, in the ecstatic
last days of the old life.

"We needn't talk of that yet, George," she said quietly.

She could see George's grieved look, in the mirror. There was a short
silence in the office.

Then Betty Sheridan, cool in pongee, came briskly in.

"Hello, Jinny!" said she. "Had you forgotten our plan tonight? You're
chaperoning me, I hope you realize! I'm rather difficile, too. Genevieve,
Pudge is outside; he'll take you out and buy you something cold. I took him
to lunch today. It was disgraceful! Except for a frightful-looking mess
called German Pot Roast With Carrots and Noodles Sixty, he ate nothing but
melon, lemon-meringue pie, and pineapple special. I was absolutely ashamed!
George, I would have speech with you."

"Private business, Betty?" he asked pleasantly. "My wife may not have the
vote, but I trust her with all my affairs!"

"Indeed, I'm not in the least interested!" Genevieve said saucily.

She knew George was pleased with her as she went happily away.

"It's just as well Jinny went," said Betty, when she and the
district-attorney-elect were alone. "Because it's that old bore Colonel
Jaynes! He's come again, and he says he _will_ see you!"

Deep red rose in George's handsome face.

"He came here last week, and he came yesterday," Betty said, sitting down,
"and really I think you should see him! You see, George, in that far-famed
article of yours, you remarked that 'a veteran of the civil as well as the
Spanish war' had told you that it was the restless outbreaking of a few
northern women that helped to precipitate the national catastrophe, and he
wants to know if you meant him!"

"I named no names!" George said, with dignity, yet uneasily, too.

"I know you didn't. But you see we haven't many veterans of _both_ wars,"
Betty went on, pleasantly. "And of course old Mrs. Jaynes is a rabid
suffragist, and she is simply hopping. He's a mild old man, you know, and
evidently he wants to square things with 'Mother.' Now, George, who _did_
you mean?"

"A statement like that may be made in a general sense," George remarked,
after scowling thought.

"You might have made the statement on your own hook," Betty conceded, "but
when you mention an anonymous Colonel, of course they all sit up! He says
that he's going to get a signed statement from you that _he_ never said
that, and publish it!"

"Ridiculous!" said George.

"Then here are two letters," Betty pursued. "One is from the corresponding
secretary of the Women's Non-partisan Pacific Coast Association. She says
that they would be glad to hear from you regarding your statement that
equal suffrage, in the western states, is an acknowledged failure."

"She'll wait!" George predicted grimly.

"Yes, I suppose so. But she's written to our Mrs. Herrington here, asking
her to follow up the matter. George, dear," asked Betty maternally, "_why_
did you do it? Why couldn't you let well enough alone!"

"What's your other letter?" asked George.

"It's just from Mr. Riker, of the _Sentinel_, George. He wants you to drop
in. It seems that they want a correction on one of your statistics about
the number of workingwomen in the United States who don't want the vote. He
says it only wants a signed line from you that you were mistaken--"

Refusing to see Colonel Jaynes, or to answer the Colonel's letter, George
curtly telephoned the editor of the _Sentinel_, and walked home at four
o'clock, his cheeks still burning, his mind in a whirl. Big issues should
have been absorbing him: and his mind was pestered instead with these
midges of the despised cause. Well, it was all in the day's work--

And here was his sweet, devoted wife, fluttering across the hall, as cool
as a rose, in her pink and white. And she had packed his things, in case
they wanted to spend the night at Sea Light, and the "cats" had gone off
for library books, and he must have some ginger-ale, before it was time to
go for Betty and Penny.

The day was perfection. The motor-car purred like a racing tiger under
George's gloved hand. Betty and Penny were waiting, and the three young
persons forgot all differences, and laughed and chatted in the old happy
way, as they prepared for the start. But Betty was carrying a book:
_Catherine of Russia_.

"Do you know why suffragists should make an especial study of queens,
George?" she asked, as she and Penny settled themselves on the back seat.

"Well, I'll be interlocutor," George smiled, glancing up at the house, from
which his wife might issue at any moment. "Why should suffragists read the
lives of queens, Miss Bones?"

"Because queens are absolutely the only women in all history who had equal
rights!" Betty answered impassively. "Do you realize that? The only women
whose moral and social and political instincts had full sway!"

"And a sweet use they made of them, sometimes!" said George.

"And who were the great rulers," pursued Betty. "Whose name in English
history is like the names of Elizabeth and Victoria, or Matilda or Mary,
for the matter of that? Who mended and conserved and built up what the
kings tore down and wasted? Who made Russia an intellectual power--"

Again Penny had an odd sense of fear. Were women perhaps superior to men,
after all!

"I don't think Catherine of Russia is a woman to whom a lady can point with
pride," George said conclusively. Genevieve, who had appeared, shot Betty a
triumphant glance as they started. Pudge waved to them from the candy store
at the corner.

"There's a new candy store every week!" said Penny, shuddering. "Heaven
help that poor boy; it must be in the blood!"

"Women must always have something sweet to nibble," George said, leaning
back. "The United States took in two millions last year in gum alone!"

"Men chew gum!" suggested Betty.

"But come now, Betty, be fair!" George said. "Which sex eats more candy?"

"Well, I suppose women do," she admitted.

"You count the candy stores, down Main Street," George went on, "and ask
yourself how it is that these people can pay rents and salaries just on
candy,--nothing else. Did you ever think of that?"

"Well, I could vote with a chocolate in my mouth!" Betty muttered
mutinously, as the car turned into the afternoon peace of the main
thoroughfare.

"You count them on your side, Penny, and I will on mine!" Genevieve
suggested. "All down the street." "Well, wait--we've passed two!" Penny
said excitedly.

"Go on; there's three. That grocery store with candy in the window!"

"Groceries don't count!" objected Betty.

"Oh, they do, too! And drug stores.... Every place that sells candy!"

"Drug stores and groceries and fruit stores only count half a point," Betty
stipulated. "Because they sell other things!"

"That's fair enough," George conceded here, with a nod.

Genevieve and Penny almost fell out of the car in their anxiety not to miss
a point, and George quite deliberately lingered on the cross-streets, so
that the damning total might be increased.

Laughing and breathless, they came to the bridge that led from the town to
the open fields, and took the count.

"One hundred and two and a half!" shouted Penny and Genevieve triumphantly.
George smiled over his wheel.

"Oh, women, women!" he said. "One hundred and sixty-one!" said Betty. There
was a shout of protest.

"Oh, Betty Sheridan! You didn't! Why, we didn't miss _one_!"

"I wasn't counting candy stores," smiled Betty. "Just to be different, I
counted cigar stores and saloons. But it doesn't signify much either way,
does it, George?"

CHAPTER VI

BY HENRY KITCHELL WEBSTER

Of the quartette who, an hour later, emerged from the bath-houses and
scampered across the satiny beech into a discreetly playful surf, Genevieve
was the one real swimmer. She was better even than Penny, and she left
Betty and George nowhere.

She had an endless repertory of amphibious stunts which she performed with
gusto, and in the intervals she took an equal satisfaction in watching
Penny's heroic but generally disastrous attempts to imitate them.

The other two splashed around aimlessly and now and then remonstrated.

Now, it's all very well to talk about two hearts beating as one, and in the
accepted poetical sense of the words, of course Genevieve's and George's
did. But as a matter of physiological fact, they didn't. At the end of
twenty minutes or so George began turning a delicate blue and a clatter as
of distant castanets provided an obligato when he spoke, the same being
performed by George's teeth.

The person who made these observations was Betty.

"You'd better go out," she said. "You're freezing."

It ought to have been Genevieve who said it, of course, though the fact
that she was under water more than half the time might be advanced as her
excuse for failing to say it. But who could venture to excuse the downright
callous way in which she exclaimed, "Already? Why we've just got in! Come
along and dive through that wave. That'll warm you up!"

It was plain to George that she didn't care whether he was cold or not.
And, though the idea wouldn't quite go into words, it was also clear to him
that an ideal wife--a really womanly wife--would have turned blue just a
little before he began to.

"Thanks," he said, in a cold blue voice that matched the color of his
finger nails. "I think I've had enough."

Betty came splashing along beside him.

"I'm going out, too," she said. "We'll leave these porpoises to their
innocent play."

This was almost pure amiability, because she wasn't cold, and she'd been
having a pretty good time. Her other (practically negligible) motive was
that Penny might be reminded, by her withdrawal, of his forgotten promise
to teach her to float--and be sorry. Altogether, George would have been
showing only a natural and reasonable sense of his obligations if he'd
brightened up and flirted with her a little, instead of glooming out to sea
the way he did, paying simply no attention to her at all. So at last she
pricked him.

"Isn't it funny," she said, "the really blighting contempt that swimmers
feel for people who can't feel at home in the water--people who gasp and
shiver and keep their heads dry?"

She could see that, in one way, this remark had done George good. It helped
warm him up. Leaning back on her hands, as she did, she could see the red
come up the back of his neck and spread into his ears. But it didn't make
him conversationally any more exciting. He merely grunted. So she tried
again.

"I suppose," she said dreamily, "that the myth about mermaids must be
founded in fact. Or is it sirens I'm thinking about? Perfectly fascinating,
irresistible women, who lure men farther and farther out, in the hope of a
kiss or something, until they get exhausted and drown. I'll really be glad
when Penny gets back alive."

"And I shall be very glad," said George, trying hard for a tone of
condescending indifference appropriate for use with one who has played
dolls with one's little sister, "I shall really be very glad when you make
up your mind what you are going to do with Penny. He's just about a total
loss down at the office as it is, and he's getting a worse idiot from day
to day. And the worst of it is, I imagine you know all the while what
you're going to do about it--whether you're going to take him or not."

The girl flushed at that. He was being almost too outrageously rude, even
for George. But before she said anything to that effect, she thought of
something better.

"I shall never marry any man," she said very intensely, "whose heart is not
with the Cause. You know what Cause I mean, George--the Suffrage Cause.
When I see thoughtless girls handing over their whole lives to men who ..."

It sounded like the beginning of an oration.

"Good Lord!" her victim cried. "Isn't there anything else than that to talk
about--_ever_?"

"But just think how lucky you are, George," she said, "that at home they
all think exactly as you do!"

He jumped up. Evidently this reminder of the purring acquiescences of
Cousin Emelene and Mrs. Brewster-Smith laid no balm upon his harassed
spirit.

"You may leave my home alone, if you please."

He was frightfully annoyed, of course, or he wouldn't have said anything
as crude as that. In a last attempt to recover his scattered dignity, he
caught at his office manner. "By the way," he said, "you forgot to remind
me today to write a letter to that Eliot woman about Mrs. Brewster-Smith's
cottages."

With that he stalked away to dress. Genevieve and Penny, now shoreward
bound, hailed him. But it wasn't quite impossible to pretend he didn't
hear, and he did it.

The dinner afterward at the Sea Light Inn was a rather gloomy affair.
George's lonely grandeur was only made the worse, it seemed, by Genevieve's
belated concern lest he might have taken cold through not having gone and
dressed directly he came out of the water. Genevieve then turned very
frosty to Penny, having decided suddenly that it was all his fault.

As for Betty, though she was as amiable a little soul as breathed, she
didn't see why she should make any particular effort to console Penny, just
because his little flirtation with Genevieve had stopped with a bump.

Even the ride home in the moonlight didn't help much. Genevieve sat beside
George on the front seat, and between them there stretched a tense, tragic
silence. In the back seat with Penfield Evans, and in the intervals of
frustrating his attempts to hold her hand, Betty considered how frightfully
silly young married couples could be over microscopic differences.

But Betty was wrong here and the married pair on the front seat were right.

Just reflect for a minute what Genevieve's George was. He was her knight,
her Bayard, her thoroughly Tennysonian King Arthur. The basis of her
adoration was that he should remain like that. You can see then what a
staggering experience it was to have caught herself, even for a minute, in
the act of smiling over him as sulky and absurd.

And think of George's Genevieve! A saint enshrined, that his soul could
profitably bow down before whenever it had leisure to escape from the
activities of a wicked world. Fancy his horror over the mere suspicion
that she could be indifferent to his wishes--his comfort--even his health,
because of a mere tomboy flirtation with a man who could swim better than
he could! Most women were like that, he knew--vain, shallow, inconstant
creatures! But was not his pearl an exception? It was horrible to have to
doubt it.

By three o'clock the next morning, after many tears and much grave
discourse, they succeeded in getting these doubts to sleep--killing them,
they'd have said, beyond the possibility of resurrection. It was the
others who had made all the trouble. If only they could have the world to
themselves--no Cousin Emelene, no Alys Brewster-Smith, no Penfield Evans
and Betty Sheridan, with their frivolity and low ideals, to complicate
things! An Arcadian Island in some Aeonian Sea.

"Well," he said hopefully, "our home can be like that. It shall be like
that, when we get rid of Alys and her horrible little girl, and Cousin
Emelene and her unspeakable cat. It shall be our world; and no troubles or
cares or worries shall ever get in there!"

She acquiesced in this prophecy, but even as she did so, cuddling her face
against his own, a low-down, unworthy spook, whose existence in her he must
never suspect, said audibly in her inner ear, "Much he knows about it!"
Betty did not forget to remind George of the letter he was to write to Miss
Eliot about taking over the agency of Mrs. Brewster-Smith's cottages. In
the composition of this letter George washed his hands of responsibility
with, you might say, antiseptic care.

He had taken pleasure in recommending Miss Eliot, he explained, and Mrs.
Brewster-Smith was acting on his recommendation. Any questions arising out
of the management of the property should be taken up directly with her
client. Miss Eliot would have no difficulty in understanding that the
enormous pressure of work which now beset him precluded him from having
anything more to do with the matter.

The letter was typed and inclosed in a big linen envelope, with the mess
of papers Alys had dumped upon his desk a few days previously, and it was
despatched forthwith by the office boy.

"There," said George on a note of grim satisfaction, "that's done!"

The grimness lasted, but the satisfaction did not. Or only until the return
of the office boy, half an hour later, with the identical envelope and a
three-line typewritten note from Miss Eliot. She was sorry to say, she
wrote, that she did not consider it advisable to undertake the agency for
the property in question. Thanking him, nevertheless, for his courtesy, she
was his very truly, E. Eliot.

George summoned Betty by means of the buzzer, and asked her, with icy
indignation, what she thought of that. But, as he was visibly bursting with
impatience to say what _he_ thought of it, she gave him the opportunity.

"I thought you advanced women," he said, "were supposed to stand by each
other--stand by all women--try to make things better for them. One for
all--all for one. That sort of thing. But it really works the other way.
It's just because a woman owns those cottages that Miss Eliot won't have
anything to do with them. She knows that women are unreasonable and hard to
get on with in business matters, so she passes the buck! Back to a man, if
you please, who hasn't any more real responsibility for it than she has."

There was, of course, an obvious retort to this; namely, that business was
business, and that a business woman had the same privilege a business man
had, of declining a job that looked as if it would entail more bother than
it was worth. But Betty couldn't quite bring herself to take this line.
Women, if they could ever get the chance (through the vote and in other
ways), were going to make the world a better place--run it on a better lot
of ideals. It wouldn't do to begin justifying women on the ground that they
were only doing what men did. As well abandon the whole crusade right at
the beginning.

George saw her looking rather thoughtful, and pressed his advantage.
Suppose Betty went and saw Miss Eliot personally, sometime today, and urged
her to reconsider. The business didn't amount to much, it was true, and it
no doubt involved the adjustment of some troublesome details. But unless
Miss Eliot would undertake it, he wouldn't know just where to turn. Alys
had quarreled with Allen, and Sampson was a skate. And perhaps a little
plain talk to Alys about the condition of the cottages--"from one of her
own sex," George said this darkly and looked away out of the window at the
time--might be productive of good.

"All right," Betty agreed, "I'll see what I can do. It's kind of hard to go
to a woman you barely know by sight, and talk to her about her duty, but I
guess I'm game. If you can spare me, I'll go now and get it over with."

There were no frills about Edith Eliot's real estate office, though the air
of it was comfortably busy and prosperous.

The place had once been a store. An architect's presentation of an
apartment building, now rather dusty, occupied the show-window. There was
desk accommodation for two or three of those bright young men who make a
selection of keys and take people about to look at houses; there was a
stenographer's desk with a stenographer sitting at it; and back of a table
in the corner, in the attitude of one making herself as comfortable as
the heat of the day would permit, while she scowled over a voluminous
typewritten document, was E. Eliot herself. It was almost superfluous to
mention that her name was Edith. She never signed it, and there was no one,
in Whitewater anyway, who called her by it.

She was a big-boned young woman (that is, if you call the middle thirties
young), with an intelligent, homely face, which probably got the attraction
some people surprisingly found in it from the fact that she thought nothing
about its looks one way or the other. It was rather red when Betty came in,
and she was making it rapidly redder with the vigorous ministrations of a
man's-size handkerchief.

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