Manslaughter/Chapter 2

YDIA had offered to drop Bobby at the railroad station on her way home, although she had to go a few miles out of her way to do it. He was going back to town. It was dark by the time they started. She liked the feeling of having him there tucked in beside her while she absolutely controlled his destiny for the next half hour. She liked even to take risks with his life, more precious to her at least for the time than any other, in the hope that he would protest, but he never did. He understood his Lydia.

After a few minutes she observed, "I suppose you know Eleanor has a new young man."

"Intensely interesting, or absolutely worth while?" he asked.

"Both, according to her. She's bringing him out at the Piers' this evening. She was just asking me to be nice to him."

"Like asking the boa constrictor to be nice to a new-born lamb, isn't it?"

"If I'm nice to her men it gives her a feeling of confidence in them."

"If you're nice to them you take them away from her."

"No, Bobby. It's a funny thing, but it isn't so easy as you think to get Eleanor's men away from her."

"Ah, you've tried?"

"She has a funny kind of hold on them. It's her brains. She has brains, and they appreciate it. I don't often want her men. They're apt to be so dreadful. Do you remember the biologist with the pearl buttons on his boots? This one is in politics—or something. He has a funny name—O'Bannon."

"Oh, yes—Dan O'Bannon."

"You know him?"

"I used to know him in college. Lord, he was a wild man in those days!" Bobby snickered reminiscently. "And now he's the local district attorney."

"What does a district attorney do, Bobby?"

"Why, he's a fellow elected by the county to prosecute"

"Look here, Bobby, if the Emmonses ask you to spend this coming Sunday with them, go, because I'm going." She interrupted him because it was the kind of explanation that she had never been able to listen to. In fact she had so completely ceased to listen that she was unaware of having interrupted the answer to her own question, and Bobby did not care to bring the matter to her attention for fear her invitation to the Emmonses might be lost in the subsequent scuffle. Besides he esteemed it his own fault. Most people who ask you a question like that really mean to say, "Would there be anything interesting to me in the answer to this question? If not, for goodness' sake don't answer it." So he gladly abandoned defining the duties of the district attorney and answered her more important statement.

"Of course I'll go, only they haven't asked me."

"They will—or else I won't go. You'll come out on Friday afternoon."

"I can't, Lydia, until Saturday."

"Now, Bobby, don't be absurd. Don't let that old man treat you like a slave."

Lydia's attitude to Bobby's work was a trifle confusing. She wished him to attain a commanding position in the financial world but had no patience with his industry when it interfered with her own plans. The attaining of any position at all seemed unlikely in Bobby's case. He was a clerk in the great banking house of Gordon & Co., a firm which in the course of a hundred and twenty-five years had built itself into the very financial existence of the country. In almost any part of the civilized globe to say you were with Gordon & Co. was a proud boast. But pride was all that a man of Bobby's type was likely to get out of it. Promotion was slow. Lydia talked of a junior partnership some day, but Bobby knew that partnerships in Gordon & Co. went to qualities more positively valuable than his. Sometimes he thought of leaving them, but he could not bear to give up the easy honor of the connection.

It was better to be a doorkeeper with Gordon & Co. than a partner with some ephemeral firm.

It amused him to hear her talk of Peter Gordon treating him like a slave. The dignified, middle-aged head of the firm, whose business was like an ancestral religion to him, hardly knew his clerks by sight.

"It isn't exactly servile to work half a day on Saturday," he said mildly.

"They'd respect you more if you asserted yourself. Do come on Friday, Bobby. I shall be so bored if you're not there."

He reflected that after all he would rather be dismissed by Gordon & Co. than by the young lady beside him.

"Dearest Lydia, how nice you can be when you want to—like all tyrants."

They had reached the small deserted wooden hut that served as a railroad station, and Lydia stopped the car.

"I suppose it's silly, but I wish you wouldn't say that—that I'm a tyrant," she said appealingly. "I don't want to be, only so often I know I know better what ought to be done. This afternoon, for instance, wasn't it much better for us all to play outside instead of in that stuffy little room of Eleanor's? Was that being a tyrant?"

"Yes, Lydia, it was; but I like it. All I ask is a little tyrant in my home."

She sighed so deeply that he leaned over and kissed her cool cheek.

"Good-by, my dear," he said.

The kiss did not go badly. He had done it as if, though not sure of success, he was not adventuring on absolutely untried ground.

"I think you'd better not do that, Bobby."

"Do you hate it?"

"Not particularly, only I don't want you to get dependent on it."

He laughed as he shut the car door. The light of the engine was visible above the low woods to their left.

"I'll take my chances on that," he said.

As she drove away she felt the injustice of the world. Everyone did ask your advice; they did want you to take an interest, but they complained when this interest led you to exert the slightest pressure on them to do what you saw was best. That was so illogical. You couldn't give a person advice that was any good unless you entered in and made their problem yours, and of course if you did that—only how few people except herself ever did it for their friends—then you were concerned, personally concerned that they should follow your advice. They were all content, too, she thought, when her tyranny worked out for their good. Bobby, for instance, had not complained of her having forced the Emmonses to ask him for Sunday. He thought that commendable. Perhaps the Emmonses hadn't. And yet how much better to be clear. She did not want to go and spend Sunday with anyone unless she could be sure of having someone to amuse her. Suppose she had gone there and found that like Benny they were using her to entertain some of their dull friends. That would have made her angry. She might have been disagreeable and broken up a friendship. This way it was safe.

She did not get home until half past seven, and she was dining at eight, fifteen minutes' drive away.

A pleasant smell of roses and wood smoke greeted her as she entered the house. She loved her house, with the broad shingles and classic pilasters of the front still untouched. Ten years ago her father had bought it—a nice old farmhouse with an ornamental band running round it below the eaves and a perfect little porch before the door. Since then she had been becoming more and more attached to it as it became more and more the work of her own creation. She had added whatever she needed without much regard to the effect of the whole—a large paneled room, English as much as anything, an inner garden suggestive of a Spanish patio, a tiled Italian hall and a long servant's wing that was nothing at all.

She put her head in the dining room, where Miss Bennett in a stately tea gown was just beginning a solitary dinner.

"Hello, Benny! Have a good dinner. I forgot to tell you I'm going to the Emmonses for Sunday, so if you want to ask someone down to keep you company, do. I'm going to be late for dinner."

Miss Bennett smiled and nodded, recognizing this as a peace demonstration. Fourteen years had taught her that Lydia was not without generosity.

Fourteen years ago this coming winter the Thornes had entered Miss Bennett's life. Old Joe Thorne had come by appointment to her little New York apartment. The appointment had been made by a friend of Miss Bennett's—Miss Bennett's friends were always looking for something desirable for her in those days. Her family, who had been identified with New York for a hundred and fifty years, had gradually declined in fortune until the panic of 1893 had almost wiped out the little fortune of Adeline and her mother, the last of the family. Adeline had been brought up, not in luxury but in a comfortable, unalterable feminine idleness. She had always had all the clothes she needed to go about among the people she knew, and they were the people who had everything. The Bennetts had never kept a carriage, but they had never stinted themselves in cabs. The truth was they had never stinted themselves in anything that they really wanted. And Adeline, when she found herself alone in the world at thirty, with an income of only a few thousand, continued the family tradition of having what she wanted. She took a small apartment, which she contrived to make charming, and she lived nicely by the aid of her old French nurse, who came and cooked for her and dressed her and turned her out as perfectly as ever. She continued to dine out every night, and though nominally she spent her summers in New York as an economy, she was always on somebody's yacht or in somebody's country house. She paid any number of visits and enjoyed life more than most people.

Her friends, however, for she had the power of creating real attachments, were not so well satisfied. At first they were persuaded that Adeline would marry—it was so obviously the thing for Adeline to do—but she was neither designing nor romantic. She lacked both the reckless emotion which may lead one to marry badly and the cold-blooded determination to marry well.

She was just past forty the day Joe Thorne came. She could still see him as he entered in his blue overcoat with a velvet collar. A big powerful man with prominent eyes like Bismarck's, and a heavy dark brown mustache bulging over his upper lip. He did not expect to give much time to the interview. He had come to see if Miss Bennett would do to bring up his daughter, who at ten years was giving him trouble. He wanted her prepared for the social opportunities he intended her to have. It seemed strange to him that a person who lived as simply as Miss Bennett could really have these social opportunities in her control, but he had been advised by people whom he trusted that such was the fact, and he accepted it.

He was the son of a Kansas farmer, had left the farm as a boy and settled in a small town, and had learned the trade of bricklaying. By hard work he gradually amassed a few hundred dollars, and this he invested in a gravel bank just outside the town. It was the only gravel bank in the neighborhood and brought him a high return on the money. Then just as the gravel was exhausted the town began to spread in that direction, and Thorne was arranging to level his property and sell it in building lots, when a still more unexpected development took place. Oil was struck in the neighborhood, and beneath Thorne's gravel lay a well.

If Fate had intended him to be poor she should never have allowed him to make his first thousand dollars, for from the moment he had any surplus everything he touched did well. In one of his trips to the Louisiana oil district he met and married a local belle, a slim, pale girl with immense dark-circled black eyes and a skin like a gardenia. She followed him meekly about the country from oil wells to financial centers until after the birth of her daughter. Then she settled down in Kansas City and waited his rare visits. The only inconsiderate thing she had ever done to him was to die and leave him with an eight-year-old daughter.

For several stormy years he tried various solutions—foreign governesses who tried to marry him, American college girls who attempted to make him take his fair share of parental responsibility, an old cousin who had been a school teacher and dared to criticize his manner of life. At last his enlarging affairs brought him to New York and he heard of Miss Bennett. He heard of her through Wiley, his lawyer. Wiley, a man in the forties, then attaining preëminence at the bar in New York, had been thought by many people to be an ideal husband for Adeline. They were old friends. He admired her, wished her well, and thought of her instantly when his new client applied to him for help.

The minute Thorne saw Miss Bennett he saw that she would do perfectly. He made her the offer of a good salary. He couldn't believe that she would refuse it. She could hardly believe it herself, for she was unaccustomed to setting up her will against anyone's least of all against a man like Joe Thorne, who had successfully battled his way up against the will of the world. The contest went on for weeks and weeks. Poor Miss Bennett kept consulting her friends, almost agreeing to go when she saw Thorne, and then telephoning him that she had changed her mind, and bringing him round to her apartment—which was just what she didn't want—to argue her into it again.

Some of her friends opposed her going to the house of a widower whose reputation in regard to women was not spotless. Others thought—though they did not say—that if she went, and succeeded in marrying him, she would be doing better than she had any right to expect. Perhaps if Miss Bennett could have fallen in love with Lydia she might have yielded, but even at ten, Lydia, a black-eyed determined little person, inspired fear more than love.

Poor Adeline grew pale and thin over the struggle. At last she decided, after due consultation with friends, to end the matter by being a little bit rude, by telling Thorne that she just didn't like the whole prospect; that she preferred her own little place and her own little life.

"Like it—like this cramped little place?" he said, looking about at the sunshine and chintz and potted daisies of her cherished home. "But I'd make you comfortable, give you what you ought to have—Europe, your friends, your carriage, everything."

He went on to argue with her that she was wrong, utterly wrong to like her own life. Her last card didn't win. She yielded at last for no better reason than that her powers of resistance were exhausted.

Thorne was then living in a house on a corner of upper Fifth Avenue, with a pale-pink brocade ballroom running across the front and taking all the morning sunshine, and a living room and library at the back so dark that you couldn't read in it at mid-day, with marble stairs and huge fire-places that didn't draw—a terrible house. Some years later, under Miss Bennett's influence, he had bought the more modest house in the Seventies where Lydia now spent her winters. But it was to the Fifth Avenue house that Miss Bennett came, and found herself plunged into one of the most desperate struggles in the world. Thorne, whose continuous interest was given to business, attempted to rule Lydia in crises—by scenes, scenes of a violence that Miss Bennett had never seen equaled. As it turned out, her coming weakened Thorne's power; not that she wasn't usually on his side—she was—but she was an audience, and Thorne had some sense of shame before an audience, while Lydia had none at all.

Many a time she had seen him box Lydia's ears and, mild as she was, had been glad to see him do it. But it was his violence that undid him. It was then that Lydia became suddenly dignified and, unbroken, contrived to make him appear like a brute.

There is nothing really more unbreakable than a child who considers neither her physical well-being nor public opinion. An older person, however violent, has learned that he must consider such questions, and it is a weakness in a campaign of violence to consider anything but the desired end.

And on the whole Thorne lost. He could make Lydia do or refrain from doing specific acts—at least he could when he was at home. He had not permitted her at ten to keep her great Danes nor at thirteen to drive a high-stepping hackney in a red-wheeled cart which she ordered for herself without consultation with anyone.

The evening after that struggle was over he had asked Miss Bennett to marry him. She knew why he did it. Lydia in the course of the row had referred to her as a paid companion. He had long been considering it as a sensible arrangement, particularly in case of his death. Miss Bennett refused him. She tried to think that she had been tempted by his offer, but she was not. To her he seemed a violent man who had been a bricklayer, and she always breathed a sigh of relief when he was out of the house. She was glad that he did not press the point, but in after years it was a solid comfort to her to remember that she might have been Lydia's stepmother if she had chosen.

But it was in the long-drawn-out contest that Thorne failed. He could not make Lydia keep governesses that she didn't like. Her method was simple—she made their lives so disagreeable that nothing could make them stay. He never succeeded in getting her to boarding school, though he and Miss Bennett, after a long conference, decided that that was the thing to do. But that failure was partly due to his failing health.

That was their last great struggle. He died in 1912. In his will he left Miss Bennett ten thousand a year, with the request that she stay with his daughter until her marriage. It touched Miss Bennett that he should have seen that she could not have stayed if she had been dependent on Lydia's capricious will. It was this that made her position possible—the fact that they both knew she could go in an instant if she wanted; not that she ever doubted that Lydia was sincerely attached to her.