The Sturdy Oak by Samuel Merwin

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She greeted Betty with a cordial "how-de-doo," motioned her to the other
chair at the table (Betty had a fleeting wish that she might have dusted it
before she sat down), and asked what she could do for her.

"I'm from Mr. Remington's office," Betty said, "Remington and Evans. He
wrote you a note this morning about some cottages that belong to a cousin
of his, Mrs. Brewster-Smith."

"I answered that note by his own messenger," said E. Eliot. "He should have
got the reply before this." "Oh, he got it," said Betty, "and was rather
upset about it. What I've come for, is to urge you to reconsider."

E. Eliot smiled rather grimly at her blotting-pad, looked up at Betty, and
allowed her smile to change its quality. What she said was not what she had
meant to say before she looked up. E. Eliot was always upbraiding herself
for being sentimental about youth and beauty in her own sex. She'd never
been beautiful, and she'd never been young--not young like Betty. But the
upbraidings never did any good.

She said: "I thought I had considered sufficiently when I answered Mr.
Remington's note. But it's possible I hadn't. What is it you think I may
have overlooked?"

"Why," said Betty, "George thought the reason you wouldn't take the
cottages was because a woman owned them. He used it as a sort of example
of how women wouldn't stick together. He said that you probably knew that
women were unreasonable and hard to deal with and didn't want the bother."

It disconcerted Betty a little that E. Eliot interposed no denial at
this point, though she'd paused to give her the opportunity.

"You see," she went on a little breathlessly, "I'm for women suffrage and
economic independence and all that. I think it's perfectly wonderful
that you should be doing what you are--showing that women can be just as
successful in business as men can. Of course I know that you've got a
perfect _right_ to do just what a man would do--refuse to take a piece of
business that wasn't worth while. But--but what we hope is, and what we
want to show men is, that when women get into politics and business they'll
be better and less selfish."

"Which do you mean will be better?" E. Eliot inquired. "The politics and
the business, or the women?"

"I mean the politics and the business," Betty told her rather frostily. Was
the woman merely making fun of her?

E. Eliot caught the note. "I meant my question seriously," she said. "It
has a certain importance. But I didn't mean to interrupt you. Go ahead."
"Well," Betty said, "that's about all. George--Mr. Remington--that is--is
running for district attorney, and he has come out against suffrage as you
know. I thought perhaps this was a chance to convert him a little. It would
be a great favor to him, anyway, if you took the cottages; because he
doesn't know whom to turn to, if you won't. I didn't come to try to tell
you what your duty is, but I thought perhaps you hadn't just looked at it
that way."

"All right," said E. Eliot. "Now I'll tell you how I do look at it. In the
first place, about doing business for women. It all depends on the woman
you're doing business with. If she's had the business training of a man,
she's as easy to deal with as a man. If she's never had any business
training at all, if business doesn't mean anything to her except some vague
hocus-pocus that produces her income, then she's seven kinds of a Tartar.

"She has no more notion about what she has a right to expect from other
people, or what they've a right to expect from her, than a white Angora
cat. Of course, the majority of women who have property to attend to have
had it dumped on their hands in middle life, or after, by the wills of
loving husbands. Those women, I'll say frankly, are the devil and all to
deal with. But it's their husbands' and fathers' fault, and not their own.
Anyhow, that isn't the reason I wouldn't take those cottages.

"It was the cottages themselves, and not the woman who owned them, that
decided me. That whole Kentwood district is a disgrace to civilization. The
sanitary conditions are filthy; have been for years. The owners have been
resisting condemnation proceedings right along, on the ground that the
houses brought in so little rental that it would be practical confiscation
to compel them to make any improvements. Now, since the war boon struck the
mills, and every place with four walls and a roof is full, they're saying
they can't afford to make any change because of the frightful loss they'd
suffer in potential profits.

"Well, when you agree to act as a person's agent, you've got to act in that
person's interest; and when it's a question of the interest of the owners
of those Kentwood cottages, whether they're men or women, my idea was that
I didn't care for the job."

"I think you're perfectly right about it," Betty said. "I wouldn't have
come to urge you to change your mind, if I had understood what the
situation was. But," here she held out her hand, "I'm glad I did come,
and I wish we might meet again sometime and get acquainted and talk about
things."

"No time like the present," said E. Eliot. "Sit down again, if you've got a
minute." She added, as Betty dropped back into her chair, "You're Elizabeth
Sheridan, aren't you?--Judge Sheridan's daughter? And you're working as a
stenographer for Remington and Evans?"

Betty nodded and stammered out the beginning of an apology for not having
introduced herself earlier. But the older woman waved this aside.

"What I really want to know," she went on, "if it isn't too outrageous a
question, is what on earth you're doing it for--working in that law office,
I mean?"

It was a question Betty was well accustomed to answering. But coming from
this source, it surprised her into a speechless stare.

"Why," she said at last, "I do it because I believe in economic
independence for women. Don't you? But of course you do."

"I don't know," said E. Eliot. "I believe in food and clothes, and money to
pay the rent, and the only way I have ever found of having those things was
to get out and earn them. But if ever I make money enough to give me an
independent income half the size of what yours must be, I'll retire from
business in short order."

"Do you know," said Betty, "I don't believe you would. I think you're
mistaken. I don't believe a woman like you could live without working."

"I didn't say I'd quit working," said E. Eliot. "I said I'd quit business.
That's another thing. There's plenty of real work in the world that won't
earn you a living. Lord! Don't I see it going by right here in this office!
There are things I just itch to get my hands into, and I have to wait and
tell myself 'some day, perhaps!' There's a thing I'd like to do now, and
that's to take a hand in this political campaign for district attorney. It
would kill my business deader than Pharaoh's aunt, so I've got to let it
go. But it would certainly put your friend George Remington up a tall
tree."

"Oh, you're a suffragist, then?" Betty exclaimed eagerly. "I was wondering
about that. I've never seen you at any of our meetings."

"I'm a suffragist, all right," said E. Eliot, "but as your meetings are
mostly held in the afternoons, when I'm pretty busy, I haven't been able to
get 'round.

"I'm curious about Remington," she went on. "I've known him a little,
for years. When I worked for Allen, I used to see him quite often in the
office. And I'd always rather liked him. So that I was surprised, clear
down to the ground, when I read that statement of his in the _Sentinel_.
I'd never thought he was _that_ sort. And from the fact that you work in
his office and like him well enough to call him George one might almost
suppose he wasn't."

Clearly Betty was puzzled. "Of course," she said, "I think his views about
women are obsolete and ridiculous. But I don't see what they've got to do
with liking him or not, personally."

E. Eliot's smile became grim again, but she said nothing, so Betty asked a
direct question.

"That was what you meant, wasn't it?"

"Yes," the other woman said, "that was what I meant. Why, if you don't mind
plain speaking, it's been my observation that the sort of men who think the
world is too indecent for decent women to go out into, generally have their
own reasons for knowing how indecent it is; and that when they spring
a line of talk like that, they're being sickening hypocrites into the
bargain."

Betty's face had gone flame color.

"George isn't like that at all," she said. "He's--he's really fine. He's
old-fashioned and sentimental about women, but he isn't a hypocrite. He
really means those things he says. Why ..."

And then Betty went on to tell her new friend about Cousin Emelene and Alys
Brewster-Smith, and how George, though he writhed, had stood the gaff.

"A grown-up man," E. Eliot summed up, "who honestly believes that women are
made of something fine and fragile, and that they ought to be kept where
even the wind can't blow upon them! But good heavens, child, if he really
means that, it makes it all the better for what I was thinking of. You
don't understand, of course. I hadn't meant to tell you, but I've changed
my mind.

"Listen now. That statement in the _Sentinel_ has set the town talking, of
course, and stirred up a lot of feeling, for and against suffrage. But what
it would be worth as an issue to go to the mat with on election day, is
exactly nothing at all. You go out and ask a voter to vote against a
candidate for district attorney because he's an anti-suffragist, and he'll
say, 'What difference does it make? It isn't up to him to give women the
vote. It doesn't matter to me what his private opinions are, as long as he
makes a good district attorney!' But there is an issue that we _can_ go to
the mat with, and so far it hasn't been raised at all. There hasn't been a
peep." She reached over and laid a hand on Betty's arm.

"Do you know what the fire protection laws for factories are? And do you
know that it's against the law for women to work in factories at night?
Well, and do you know what the conditions are in every big mill in this
town? With this boom in war orders, they've simply taken off the lid.
Anything goes. The fire and building ordinances are disregarded, and for
six months the mills have been running a night shift as well as a day
shift, on Sundays and week-days, and three-quarters of their operatives are
women. Those women go to work at seven o'clock at night, and quit at six in
the morning; and they have an hour off from twelve to one in the middle of
the night.

"Now do you see? It's up to the district attorney to enforce the law. Isn't
it fair to ask this defender of the home whether he believes that women
should be home at night or not, and if he does, what he's going to do about
it? Talk about slogans! The situation bristles with them! We could placard
this town with a lot of big black-faced questions that would make it the
hottest place for George Remington that he ever found himself in.

"Well, it would be pretty good campaign work if he was the hypocrite I took
him to be, from his stuff in the _Sentinel_. But if he's on the level, as
you think he is, there's a chance--don't you see there's a chance that he'd
come out flat-footed for the enforcement of the law? And if he did!...
Child, can you see what would happen if he _did_?"

Betty's eyes were shining like a pair of big sapphires. When she spoke, it
was in a whisper like an excited child.

"I can see a little," she said. "I think I can see. But tell me."

"In the first place," said E. Eliot, "see whom he'd have against him.
There'd be the best people, to start with. Most of them are stockholders in
the mills. Why, you must be, yourself, in the Jaffry-Bradshaw Company! Your
father was, anyway."

Betty nodded.

"You want to be sure you know what it means," the older woman went on.
"This thing might cut into your dividends, if it went through."

"I hope it will," said Betty fiercely. "I never realized before that my
money was earned like that--by women, girls of my age, standing over a
machine all night." She shivered. "And there are some of us, I'm sure," she
went on, "who would feel the way I do about it."

"Well,--some," E. Eliot admitted. "Not many, though. And then there are the
merchants. These are great times for them--town crammed with people, all
making money, and buying right and left. And then there's the labor vote
itself! A lot of laboring men would be against him. Their women just now
are earning as much as they are. There are a lot of these men--whatever
they might say--who'd take good care not to vote for a man who would
prevent their daughters from bringing in the fifteen, twenty, or
twenty-five dollars a week they get for that night work.

"Well, and who would be with him? Why, the women themselves. The one chance
on earth he'd have for election would be to have the women organized and
working for him, bringing every ounce of influence they had to bear on
their men--on all the men they knew.

"Mind you, I don't believe he could win at that. But, win or lose, he'd
have done something. He'd have shown the women that they needed the vote,
and he'd have found out for himself--he and the other men who believe in
fair human treatment for everybody--that they can't secure that treatment
without women's votes. That's the real issue. It isn't that women are
better than men, or that they could run the world better if they got the
chance. It's that men and women have got to work together to do the things
that need doing."

"You're perfectly wonderful," said Betty, and sat thereafter, for perhaps a
minute and a half, in an entranced silence.

Then, with a shake of the head, a straightening of the spine, and a good,
deep, business-like preliminary breath, she turned to her new friend and
said, "Well, shall we do it?"

This time it was E. Eliot's turn to gasp.

She hadn't expected to have a course of action put up to her in that
instantaneous and almost casual manner. She wasn't young like Betty. She'd
been working hard ever since she was seventeen years old. She'd succeeded,
in a way, to be sure. But her success had taught her how hard success is to
obtain. She saw much farther into the consequences of the proposed campaign
than Betty could see. She realized the bitter animosity that it would
provoke. She knew it was well within the probabilities that her business
would be ruined by it.

She sat there silent for a while, her face getting grimmer and grimmer all
the time. But she turned at last and looked into the eager face of the girl
beside her, and she smiled,--though even the smile was grim.

"All right," she said, holding out her hand to bind the bargain. "We'll
start and we'll stick. And here's hoping! We'd better lunch together,
hadn't we?"

CHAPTER VII

BY ANNE O'HAGAN

Mr. Benjamin Doolittle, by profession White-water's leading furniture
dealer and funeral director, and by the accident of political fortune the
manager of Mr. George Remington's campaign, sat in his candidate's private
office, and from time to time restrained himself from hasty speech by the
diplomatic and dexterous use of a quid of tobacco.

He found it difficult to preserve his philosophy in the face of George
Remington's agitation over the woman's suffrage issue.

"It's the last time," he had frequently informed his political cronies
since the opening of the campaign, "that I'll wet-nurse a new-fledged
candidate. They've got at least to have their milk teeth through if they
want Benjamin Doolittle after this." To George, itchingly aware through all
his rasped nerves of Mrs. Herrington's letter in that morning's _Sentinel_
asking him to refute, if he could, an abominable half column of statistics
in regard to legislation in the Woman Suffrage States, the furniture dealer
was drawling pacifically:

"Now, George, you made a mistake in letting the women get your goat. Don't
pay no attention to them. Of course their game's fair enough. I will say
that you gave them their opening; stood yourself for a target with that
statement of yours. Howsomever, you ain't obligated to keep on acting as
the nigger head in the shooting gallery.

"Let 'em write; let 'em ask questions in the papers; let 'em heckle you
on the stump. All that you've got to say is that you've expressed your
personal convictions already, and that you've stood by those convictions in
your private life, and that as you ain't up for legislator, the question
don't really concern your candidacy. And that, as you're running for
district attorney, you will, with their kind permission, proceed to the
subjects that do concern you there--the condition of the court calendar of
Whitewater County, the prosecution of the racetrack gamblers out at Erie
Oval, and so forth, and so forth.

"You laid yourself open, George, but you ain't obligated in law or equity
to keep on presenting yourself bare chest for their outrageous slings and
arrows."

"Of course, what you say about their total irrelevancy is quite true," said
George, making the concession so that it had all the belligerency of a
challenge. "But of course I would never have consented to run for office at
the price of muzzling my convictions."

Mr. Doolittle wearily agreed that that was more than could be expected from
any candidate of the high moral worth of George Remington. Then he went
over a list of places throughout the county where George was to speak
during the next week, and intimated dolefully that the committee could use
a little more money, if it had it.

He expressed it thus: "A few more contributions wouldn't put any strain to
speak of on our pants' pockets. Anything more to be got out of Old Martin
Jaffry? Don't he realize that blood's thicker than water?"

"I'll speak to him," growled George.

He hated Mr. Benjamin Doolittle's colloquialisms, though once he had
declared them amusing, racy, of the soil, and had rebuked Genevieve's
fastidious criticisms of them on an occasion when she had interpreted her
role of helpmeet to include that of hostess to Mr. and Mrs. Doolittle--oh,
not in her own home, of course!--at luncheon, at the Country Club!

"Well, I guess that's about all for today."

Mr. Doolittle brought the conference to a close, hoisting himself by links
from his chair.

"It takes $3000 every time you circularize the constituency, you know----"

He lounged toward the window and looked out again upon the pleasant, mellow
scene around Fountain Square. And with the look his affectation of bucolic
calm dropped from him. He turned abruptly.

"What's that going on at McMonigal's corner?" he demanded sharply. "I don't
know, I am sure," said George, with indifference, still bent upon teaching
his manager that he was a free and independent citizen, in leading strings
to no man. "It's been vacant since the fire in March, when Petrosini's fish
market and Miss Letterblair's hat st----"

He had reached the window himself by this time, and the sentence was
destined to remain forever unfinished.

From the low, old-fashioned brick building on the northeast corner of
Fountain Square, whose boarded eyes had stared blindly across toward the
glittering orbs of its towering neighbor, the Jaffry Building, for six
months, a series of great placards flared.

Planks had been removed from the windows, plate glass restored, and behind
it he read in damnable irritation:

"SOME QUESTIONS FOR CANDIDATE REMINGTON."

A foot high, an inch broad, black as Erebus, the letters shouted at him
against an orange background. Every window of the second story contained a
placard. On the first story, in the show window where Petrosini had been
wont to ravish epicurean eyes by shad and red snapper, perch and trout,
cunningly imbedded in ice blocks upon a marble slab--in that window, framed
now in the hated orange and black, stood a woman.

She was turning backward, for the benefit of onlookers who pressed close to
the glass, the leaves of a mammoth pad resting upon an easel.

From their point of vantage in the second story of the Jaffry Building,
the candidate and his manager could see that each sheet bore that horrid
headline:

"QUESTIONS FOR CANDIDATE REMINGTON."

The whole population of White water, it seemed to George, was crowded about
that corner.

"I'll be back in a minute," said Benjie Doolittle, disappearing through
the private office door with the black tails of his coat achieving a true
horizontal behind him. As statesman and as undertaker, Mr. Doolittle never
swerved from the garment which keeps green the memory of the late Prince
Consort.

As the door opened, the much-tried George Remington had a glimpse of that
pleasing industrial unit, Betty Sheridan, searching through the file for
the copy of the letter to the Cummunipaw Steel Works, which he had recently
demanded to see. He pressed the buzzer imperiously, and Betty responded
with duteous haste. He pointed through the window to the crowd in front of
McMonigal's block.

"Perhaps," he said, with what seemed to him Spartan self-restraint, "_you_
can explain the meaning of that scene."

Betty looked out with an air of intelligent interest.

"Oh yes!" she said vivaciously. "I think I can. It's a Voiceless Speech."

"A voice l--" George's own face was a voiceless speech as he repeated two
syllables of his stenographer's explanation.

"Yes. Don't you know about voiceless speeches? It's antiquated to try to
run any sort of a campaign without them nowadays."

"Perhaps you also know who that--female--" again George's power of
utterance failed him. Betty came closer to the window and peered out.

"It's Frances Herrington who is turning the leaves now," she said amiably.
"I know her by that ducky toque."

"Frances Herrington! What Harvey Herrington is thinking of to allow----"
George's emotion constrained him to broken utterance. "And we're dining
there tonight! She has no sense of the decencies--the--the--the hospitality
of existence. We won't go--I'll telephone Genevieve----"

"Fie, fie Georgie!" observed Betty. "Why be personal over a mere detail of
a political campaign?"

But before George could tell her why his indignation against his
prospective hostess was impersonal and unemotional, the long figure of Mr.
Doolittle again projected itself upon the scene.

Betty effaced herself, gliding from the inner office, and George turned
a look of inquiry upon his manager.

"Well?" the monosyllable had all the force of profanity.

"Well, the women, durn them, have brought suffrage into your campaign."

"How?"

"How? They've got a list of every blamed law on the statute books relating
to women and children, and they're asking on that sheet of leaves over
there, if you mean to proceed against all who are breaking those laws here
in Whitewater County. And right opposite your own office! It's--it's damn
smart. You ought to have got that Herrington woman on your committee."

"It's indelicate, unwomanly, indecent. It shows into what unsexed
degradation politics will drag woman. But I'm relieved that that's all
they're asking. Of course, I shall enforce the law for the protection of
every class in our community with all the power of the----"

"Oh, shucks! There's nobody here but me--you needn't unfurl Old Glory,"
counseled Mr. Doolittle, a trifle impatiently. "They're asking real
questions, not blowing off hot-air. Oh, I say, who owns McMonigal's block
since the old man died? We'll have the owner stop this circus. That's the
first thing to do."

"I'll telephone Allen. He'll know."

Allen's office was very obliging and would report on the ownership on
McMonigal's block in ten minutes.

Mr. Doolittle employed the interval in repeating to George some of the
"Questions for Candidate Remington," illegible from George's desk.

"You believe that 'WOMAN'S PLACE IS IN THE HOME.' Will you enforce the law
against woman's night work in the factories? Over nine hundred women of
Whitewater County are doing night work in the munition plants of Airport,
Whitewater and Ondegonk. What do you mean to do about it?"

"You 'DESIRE TO CONSERVE THE THREATENED FLOWER OF WOMANHOOD.'"

A critical listener would have caught a note of ribald scorn in Mr.
Doolittle's drawl, as he quoted from his candidate's statement, via the
voiceless speech placards.

"To conserve the threatened flower of womanhood, the grape canneries of
Omega and Onicrom Townships are employing children of five and six years
in defiance of the Child Labor Law of this State. Are you going to proceed
against them?"

"'WOMAN IS MAN'S RAREST HERITAGE.' Do you think man ought to burn her
alive? Remember the Livingston Loomis-Ladd collar factory fire--fourteen
women killed, forty-eight maimed. In how many of the factories in
Whitewater, in which women work, are the fire laws obeyed? Do you mean to
enforce them?"

The telephone interrupted Mr. Doolittle's hateful litany.

Alien's bright young man begged to report that McMonigal's block was held
in fee simple by the widow of the late Michael McMonigal.

Mr. Doolittle juggled the leaves of the telephone directory with the
dazzling swiftness of a Japanese ball thrower, and in a few seconds he was
speaking to the relict of the late Michael.

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