“Thanks for your lecture on the Rise, Progress and Future of Civilization,” he said ironically, trying to suppress himself. “But interesting as it was, it has nothing whatever to do with the case. We’re not talking about civilization, and the universe, and evolution, and the fourth dimension, and who’s got the button. We’re talking about you and me. About you and me, and our love.”
“Yes, Arnold, about you and me and our love,” she cried eagerly. “I spoke of these things only because they concern you and me and our love so very, very much.”
“Of all things for two lovers to talk about!” he exclaimed with mounting exasperation.
“They are the things of all things! For our love, our life, hangs upon them!”
“Well, anyhow, you haven’t got these new institutions, these new experts,” he retorted, brushing the whole matter aside. “You’re living to-day, not in the millennium!”
“I know, I know. In the meantime, life for us women is in a stage of transition. Until these better forms develop we are going to have a hard time. It will be difficult for me to manage, I know. But I’m certain I can manage it.”
He stood up. His face was very red, and he swallowed once or twice before the words seemed able to come out.
“I’m surprised, Katherine – surprised! – that you should be so persistent in this nonsense. What you say is all against nature. It won’t work.”
“Perhaps not. But at least you’ll let me try! That’s all I ask of you – that you let me try!”
“It would be weak in me, wrong in me, to yield.”
“Then you’re not willing to give me a chance?”
He shook his head.
She rose and moved before him.
“But, Arnold, do you realize what you are doing?” she cried with desperate passion. “Do you realize what it is I’m asking you for? Work, interesting work – that’s what I need to make me happy, to make you happy! Without it, I shall be miserable, and you will be miserable in having a miserable wife about you – and all our years together will be years of misery. So you see what a lot I’m fighting for: work, development, happiness! – the happiness of all our married years!”
“That’s only a delusion. For your sake, and my sake, I’ve got to stand firm.”
“Then you will not let me?”
“I will not.”
She stared palely at his square, adamantine face.
“Arnold!” she breathed. “Arnold! – do you know what you’re trying to do?”
“I am trying to save you from yourself!”
“You’re trying to break my will across yours,” she cried a little wildly. “You’re trying to crush me into the iron mould of your idea of a woman. You’re trying to kill me – yes, to kill me.”
“I am trying to save you!” he repeated, his temper breaking its frail leash. “Your ideas are all wrong – absurd – insane!”
“Please don’t be angry, Arnold!” she pleaded.
“How can I help it, when you won’t listen to reason! When you are so perversely obstinate!”
“I’m not obstinate,” she cried breathlessly, holding one of his hands tightly in both her own. “I’m just trying to cling as hard as I can to life – to our happiness. Please give me a chance, Arnold! Please, please!”
“Confound such obstinate wrong-headedness!” he exploded. “No, I tell you! No! And that settles it!”
She shrank back.
“Oh!” she cried. Her breast began to rise and fall tumultuously, and her cheeks slowly to redden. “Oh!” she cried again. Then her words leaped hotly out: “Oh, you bigot!”
“If to stand by what I know is right, and to save you from making a fool of yourself, is to be a bigot – then I’m a bigot all right, and I thank the God that made me one!”
“And you think you are going to save me from myself?” she demanded.
He stepped nearer, and towering over her, he took hold of her shoulders in a powerful grasp and looked down upon her dominantly.
“I know I am! I am going to make you exactly what I want you to be!”
Her eyes flamed back up into his.
“Because you are the stronger?”
“Because I am the stronger – and because I am right,” he returned grimly.
“I admit that you are the superior brute,” she said with fierce passion. “But you will never break me to your wishes!”
“And I tell you I will!”
“And I tell you you will not!”
There was a strange and new fire in her eyes.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“I mean this,” she returned, and the hands that gripped her shoulders felt her tremble through all her body. “I should not expect you to marry a woman who was so unreasonable as to demand that you, for her sake, should give up your loved career. And, for my part, I shall never marry a man so unreasonable as to make the same demand of me.”
He fell back a pace.
“You mean – ”
“Was I not plain enough? I mean that you will never have the chance to crush me into your iron mould, for I will never marry you.”
“What!” And then: “So I’m fired, am I?” he grated out.
“Yes, for you’re as narrow and as conventional as the rest of men,” she rushed on hotly. “You never say a word so long as a woman’s work is unpleasant! It’s all right for her to scrub, and wash dishes, and wear her life away in factories. But as soon as she wants to do any work that is pleasant and interesting and that will gain her recognition, you cry out that she’s unwomanly, unsexed, that she’s flying in the face of God! Oh, you are perfectly willing that woman, on the one hand, should be a drudge, or on the other the pampered pet of your one-woman harem. But I shall be neither, I tell you. Never! Never! Never!”
They stared at one another, trembling with passion.
“And you,” he said with all the fierce irony of his soul, “and you, I suppose, will now go ahead and clear your father, expose Blake, and perform all those other wonders you’ve talked so big about!”
“That’s just what I am going to do!” she cried defiantly.
“And that’s just what you are not!” he blazed back. “I may have admired the woman in you – but, for those things, you have not the smallest atom of ability. Your father’s trial, your failure to get evidence – hasn’t that shown you? You are going to be a failure – a fizzle – a fiasco! Did you hear that? A pitiable, miserable, humiliated fiasco! And time will prove it!”
“We’ll see what time will prove!” And she swept furiously past him out of the room.
CHAPTER XX
A SPECTRE COMES TO TOWN
For many an hour Katherine’s wrath continued high, and she repeated, with clinched hands, all her invectives against the bigotry of Bruce. He was a bully – a boor – a brute – a tyrant. He considered himself the superman. And in pitiable truth he was only a moral coward – for his real reason in opposing her had been that he was afraid to have Westville say that his wife worked. And he had insulted her, for his parting words to her had been a jeering statement that she had no ability, only a certain charm of sex. How, oh, how, had she ever imagined that they two might possibly share a happy life together?
But after a season her wrath began to subside, and she began to see that after all Bruce was no very different man from the Bruce she had loved the last few weeks. He had been thoroughly consistent with himself. She had known that he was cocksure and domineering. She had foreseen that the chances were at least equal that he would take the position he had. She had foreseen and feared this very issue. His virtues were just as big as on yesterday, when she and he had thought of marriage, and his faults were no greater. And she realized, after the first passion of their battle had spent its force, that she still loved him.
In the long hours of the night a pang of emptiness, of vast, irretrievable loss, possessed her. She and Love had touched each other for a space – then had flung violently apart, and were speeding each in their eternally separate direction. Life for her might be rich and full of honour and achievement, but as she looked forward into the long procession of years, she saw that life was going to have its dreariness, its vacancies, its dull, unending aches. It was going to be such a very, very different business from that life of work and love and home and mutual aid she had daringly dreamed of during the two weeks she and Bruce had been lovers.
But she did not regret her decision. She did not falter. Her resentment of Bruce’s attitude stiffened the backbone of her purpose. She was going straight ahead, bear the bitterness, and live the life she had planned as best she could.
But there quickly came other matters to share her mind with a lost love and a broken dream. First was the uproar created by Bruce’s defiant announcement in the Express of Blind Charlie’s threatened treachery. That sensation reigned for a day or two, then was almost forgotten in a greater. This second sensation made its initial appearance quite unobtrusively; it had a bare dozen lines down in a corner of the same issue of the Express that had contained Bruce’s defiance and Doctor Sherman’s departure. The substance of the item was that two cases of illness had been reported from the negro quarter in River Court, and that the doctors said the symptoms were similar to those of typhoid fever.
Those two cases of fever in that old frame tenement up a narrow, stenchy alley were the quiet opening of a new act in the drama that was played that year in Westville. The next day a dozen cases were reported, and now the doctors unhesitatingly pronounced them typhoid. The number mounted rapidly. Soon there were a hundred. Soon there was an epidemic. And the Spectre showed no deference to rank. It not only stalked into the tenements of River Court and Railroad Alley – and laid its felling finger on starveling children and drink-shattered men – It visited the large and airy homes on Elm and Maple Streets and Wabash Avenue, where those of wealth and place were congregated.
In Westville was the Reign of Terror. Haggard doctors were ever on the go, snatching a bite or a moment’s sleep when chance allowed. Till then, modern history had been reckoned in Westville from the town’s invasion by factories, or from that more distant time when lightning had struck the Court House. But those milestones of time are to-day forgotten. Local history is now dated, and will be for many a decade, from the “Days of Fever” and the related events which marked that epoch.
In the early days of the epidemic Katherine heard one morning that Elsie Sherman had just been stricken. She had seen little of Elsie during the last few weeks; the strain of their relation was too great to permit the old pleasure in one another’s company; but at this news she hastened to Elsie’s bedside. Her arrival was a God-send to the worn and hurried Doctor Woods, who had just been called in. She telegraphed to Indianapolis for a nurse; she telegraphed to a sister of Doctor Sherman to come; and she herself undertook the care of Elsie until the nurse should arrive.
“What do you think of her case, Doctor?” she asked anxiously when Doctor Woods dropped in again later in the day.
He shook his head.
“Mrs. Sherman is very frail.”
“Then you think – ”
“I’m afraid it will be a hard fight. I think we’d better send for her husband.”
Despite her sympathy for Elsie, Katherine thrilled with the possibility suggested by the doctor’s words. Here was a situation that should bring Doctor Sherman out of his hiding, if anything could bring him. Once home, and unnerved by the sight of his wife precariously balanced between life and death, she was certain that he would break down and confess whatever he might know.
She asked Elsie for her husband’s whereabouts, but Elsie answered that she had had letters but that he had never given an address. Katherine at once determined to see Blake, and demand to know where Doctor Sherman was; and after the nurse arrived on an afternoon train, she set out for Blake’s office.
But Blake was out, and his return was not expected for an hour. To fill in the time, Katherine paid a visit to her father in the jail. She told him of Elsie’s illness, and told at greater length than she had yet had chance to do about the epidemic. In his turn he talked to her about the fever’s causes; and when she left the jail and returned to Blake’s office an idea far greater than merely asking Doctor Sherman’s whereabouts was in her mind.
This time she was told that Blake was in, but could see no one. Undeterred by this statement, Katherine walked quickly past the stenographer and straight for his private door, which she quickly and quietly opened and closed.
Blake was sitting at his desk, his head bowed forward in one hand. He was so deep in thought, and she had entered so quietly, that he had not heard her. She crossed to his desk, stood opposite him, and for a moment gazed down upon his head.
“Mr. Blake,” she remarked at length.
He started up.
“You here!” he ejaculated.
“Yes. I came to talk to you.”
He did not speak at once, but stood staring a little wildly at her. She had not spoken to him since the day of her father’s trial, nor seen him save at a distance. She was now startled at the change this closer view revealed to her. His eyes were sunken and ringed with purple, his face seemed worn and thin, and had taken on a tinge of yellowish-green.
“I left orders that I could see no one,” he said, trying to speak sharply.
“I know,” she answered quietly. “But you’ll see me.”
For an instant he hesitated.
“Very well – sit down,” he said, resuming his chair. “Now what is it you wish?”
She seated herself and leaned across the desk toward him.
“I wish to talk to you about the fever,” she said with her former composure, and looking him very steadily in the eyes. “I suppose you know what caused it?”
“I am no doctor. I do not.”
“Then let me tell you. My father has just told me that there must have been a case of typhoid during the summer somewhere back in the drainage area of the water-system. That recent big storm carried the summer’s accumulation of germ-laden filth down into the streams. And since the city was unguarded by a filter, those germs were swept into the water-mains, we drank them, and the epidemic – ”
“That filter was useless – a complete failure!” Blake broke in rather huskily.
“You know, Mr. Blake, and I know,” she returned, “that that filter has been, and still is, in excellent condition. And you know, and I know, that if it had been in operation, purifying the water, there might possibly have been a few cases of typhoid, but there would never have been this epidemic. That’s the God’s truth, and you know it!”
He swallowed, but did not answer her.
“I suppose,” she pursued in her steady tone, “you realize who is responsible for all these scores of sick?”
“If what you say is true, then your father is guilty, for building such a filter.”
“You know better. You know that the guilty man is yourself.”
His face grew more yellowish-green.
“It’s not so! No one is more appalled by this disaster than I am!”
“I know you are appalled by the outcome. You did not plan to murder citizens. You only planned to defraud the city. But this epidemic is the direct consequence of your scheme. Every person who is now in a sick bed, you put that person there. Every person who may later go to his grave, you will have sent that person there.”
Her steady voice grew more accusing. “What does your conscience say to you? And what do you think the people will say to you, to the great public-spirited Mr. Blake, when they learn that you, prompted by the desire for money and power, have tried to rob the city and have stricken hundreds with sickness?”
His yellowish face contorted most horribly, but he did not answer.
“I see that your conscience has been asking you those same questions,” Katherine pursued. “It is something, at least, that your conscience is not dead. Those are not pleasant questions to have asked one, are they?”
Again his face twisted, but he seemed to gather hold of himself.
“You are as crazy as ever – that’s all rot!” he said huskily, with a denying sweep of a clinched hand. “But what do you want?”
“Three things. First, that you have the filter put back in commission. Let’s at least do what we can to prevent any more danger from that source.”
“The filter is useless. Besides, I am no official, and have nothing to do with it.”
“It is in perfect condition, and you have everything to do with it,” she returned steadily.
He swallowed. “I’ll suggest it to the mayor.”
“Very well; that is settled. To the next point. Have you heard that Mrs. Sherman is sick?”
“Yes.”
“She wants her husband.”
“Well?”
“My second demand is to know where you have hidden Doctor Sherman.”
“Doctor Sherman? I have nothing to do with Doctor Sherman!”
“You also have everything to do with Doctor Sherman,” she returned steadily. “He is one of the instruments of your plot. You feared that he would break down and confess, and so you sent him out of the way. Where is he?”
Again his face worked spasmodically. “I tell you once more I have nothing whatever to do with Doctor Sherman! Now I hope that’s all. I am tired of this. I have other matters to consider. Good day.”
“No, it is not all. For there is my third demand. And that is the most important of the three. But perhaps I should not say demand. What I make you is an offer.”
“An offer?” he exclaimed.
She did not reply to him directly. She leaned a little farther across his desk and looked at him with an even greater intentness.
“I do not need to ask you to pause and think upon all the evil you have done the town,” she said slowly. “For you have thought. You were thinking at the moment I came in. I can see that you are shaken with horror at the unforeseen results of your scheme. I have come to you to take sides with your conscience; to join it in asking you, urging you, to draw back and set things as nearly right as you can. That is my demand, my offer, my plea – call it what you will.”
He had been gazing at her with wide fixed eyes. When he spoke, his voice was dry, mechanical.
“Set things right? How?”
“Come forward, confess, and straighten out the situation of your own accord. Westville is in a terrible condition. If you act at once, you can at least do something to relieve it.”
“By setting things right, as you call it, you of course include the clearing of your father?”
“The clearing of my father, of course. And let me say to you, Mr. Blake – and for this moment I am speaking as your friend – that it will be better for you to clear this whole matter up voluntarily, at once, than to be exposed later, as you certainly will be. To clear this matter at once may have the result of simplifying the fight against the epidemic – it may save many lives. That is what I am thinking of first of all just now.”
“You mean to say, then, that it is either confess or be exposed?”
“There is no use in my beating about the bush with you,” she replied in her same steady tone. “For I know that you know that I am after you.”
He did not speak at once. He sat gazing fixedly at her, with twitching face. She met his gaze without blinking, breathlessly awaiting his reply.
Suddenly a tremor ran through him and his face set with desperate decision.
“Yes, I know you are after me! I know you are having me followed – spied upon!” There was a biting, contemptuous edge to his tone. “Even if I were guilty, do you think I would be afraid of exposure from you? Oh, I know the man you have sleuthing about on my trail. Elijah Stone! And I once thought you were a clever girl!”
“You refuse, then?” she said slowly.
“I do! And I defy you! If your accusations against me are true, go out and proclaim them to the city. I’m willing to stand for whatever happens!”
She regarded his flushed, defiant face. She perceived clearly that she had failed, that it was useless to try further.
“Very well,” she said slowly. “But I want you to remember in the future that I have given you this chance; that I have given you your choice, and you have chosen.”
“And I tell you again that I defy you!”
“You are a more hardened man, or a more desperate man, than I thought,” said she.
He did not reply upon the instant, but sat gazing into her searching eyes. Before he could speak, the telephone at his elbow began to ring. He picked it up.
“Hello! Yes, this is Mr. Blake… Her temperature is the same, you say?.. No, I have not had an answer yet. I expect a telegram any minute. I’ll let you know as soon as it comes. Good-by.”
“Is some one sick?” Katherine asked, as he hung up the receiver.
“My mother,” he returned briefly, his recent defiance all gone.
Katherine, too, for the moment, forgot their conflict.
“I did not know it. There are so many cases, you know. Who is attending her?”
“Doctor Hunt, temporarily,” he answered. “But these Westville doctors are all amateurs in serious cases. I’ve telegraphed for a specialist – the best man I could hear of – Doctor Brenholtz of Chicago.”
His defiance suddenly returned.
“If I have seemed to you worn, unnerved, now you know the real cause!” he said.
“So,” she remarked slowly, “the disaster you have brought on Westville has struck your own home!”
His face twitched convulsively.
“I believe we have finished our conversation. Good afternoon.”
Katherine rose.
“And if she dies, you know who will have killed her.”
He sprang up.
“Go! Go!” he cried.
But she remained in her tracks, looking him steadily in the eyes. While they stood so, the stenographer entered and handed him a telegram. He tore it open, glanced it through, and stood staring at it in a kind of stupor.
“My God!” he breathed.
He tore the yellow sheet across, dropped the pieces in the waste-basket and began to pace his room, on his face a wild, dazed look. He seemed to have forgotten Katherine’s presence. But a turn brought her into his vision. He stopped short.
“You still here?”
“I was waiting to hear if Doctor Brenholtz was coming,” she said.
He stared at her a moment. Then he crossed to his desk, took the two fragments of the telegram from his waste-basket and held them out to her.
“There is what he says.”
She took the telegram and read:
“No use my coming. Best man on typhoid in West lives in your own town. See Dr. David West.”
Katherine laid down the yellow pieces and raised her eyes to Blake’s white, strained face. The two gazed at each other for a long moment.
“Well?” he said huskily.
“Well?” she quietly returned.
“Do you think I can get him?”
“How can you get a man who is serving a sentence in jail?”
“If I – if I – ” He could not get the words out.
“Yes. If you confess – clear him – get him out of jail – of course he will treat the case.”
“I didn’t mean that! God!” he cried, “is confession of a thing I never did the fee you exact for saving a life?”
“What, you still hold out?”
“I’m not guilty! I tell you, I’m not guilty!”
“Then you’ll not confess?”
“Never! Never!”
“Not even to save your mother?”
“She’s sick – very sick. But she’s not going to die – I’ll not let her die! Your father does not have to be cleared to get out of jail. In this emergency I can arrange to get him out for a time on parole. What do you say?”
She gazed at the desperate, wildly expectant figure. A little shiver ran through her.
“What do you say?” he repeated.
“There can be but one answer,” she replied. “My father is too big a man to demand any price for his medical skill – even the restoration of his honest name by the man who stole it. Parole him, and he will go instantly to Mrs. Blake.”
He dropped into his chair and seized his telephone.
“Central, give me six-o-four – quick!” There was a moment of waiting. “This you, Judge Kellog?.. This is Harrison Blake. I want you to arrange the proper papers for the immediate parole of Doctor West. I’ll be responsible for everything. Am coming right over and will explain.”
He fairly threw the receiver back upon its hook. “Your father will be free in an hour,” he cried. And without waiting for a reply, he seized his hat and hurried out.