Читать книгу Jericho's Daughters - Paul Iselin Wellman - Страница 5

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Almost at once there was a knock on the door: it was the waiter with the gin-and-tonic. Mary Agnes took a sip of the bittersweet drink while she glanced over the menu and ordered a slender breakfast. Then, after the waiter departed, she sipped again at the gin-and-tonic, found that she did not want it, left it on the table, and went over to the open window.

This was midwinter, and she reflected that it probably was bitter-cold and snowy at home. Yet in the gardens below her window the trees were in full rich leaf and the flower beds rioting with bloom. Linnets warbled their twittering songs in the vines and the soft California air touched her cheek like fairy fingers.

Such a contrast should have given her pleasure. Yet, gazing out at the semi-tropical luxuriance, she knew a feeling of discontent akin to bitterness.

When a woman has not seen her husband for more than three months, a conversation with him should have some meaning to it, even when conducted over the long-distance telephone. But the conversation she had just concluded with Wistart was empty, or irritating, or both. She and he simply meant nothing to each other—less than nothing. It was one of the things wrong with her life. Wistart constituted a failure in it; an annoying, apparently irremediable failure.

She pictured to herself her husband’s broad fair face, his pale-lashed blue eyes, his plump large frame, and all these things seemed, to her mood, traits singularly unlovely. Wistart Wedge, she thought, was one of the most ineffectual men she had ever known; and she believed that she knew men measurably well. After all, she had been through the valley of matrimonial humiliation known as divorce thrice before she was thirty: a childish high school elopement, annulled; a college girl campus romance, quickly ended in a somewhat juvenile disagreement; a crush on a visiting actor in Jericho’s “little theater,” who had a profile and almost nothing else, concluded almost as soon as begun.

Mary Agnes was the spoiled and headstrong only daughter of the oldest propertied family in Jericho, the Timothy Coxes. From her parents, both now dead, she inherited a very considerable fortune, chiefly in the ownership of the great and prosperous department store known as Cox’s, Incorporated. Money provides excuses for erratic conduct in the minds of many people; nevertheless, three divorces before she was thirty constituted something of a record in Jericho, and the spiteful tongues made the most of it.

But then she married Wistart Wedge, whose mother owned the only newspaper in the city and whose late father had been a United States senator. To be sure, they took each other on the rebound: he had been infatuated with Gilda Westcott of the packing house family, and she, secretly, with Dr. Murray Clifton, a society physician—and she had never forgiven that couple for marrying each other. Nevertheless, for ten years now she had been Mrs. Wistart Wedge; and the criticism over her three divorces had stilled.

Curious, she sometimes thought, how the simple fact of living in conventional wedlock invested a woman with standing and respectability she could hardly otherwise attain. She might be lazy, incompetent, stupid, shrewish, but her status was secure if she was Mrs. Somebody. It was like standing still to win a race.

Mary Agnes was habitually cynical concerning the conventions: she considered them stereotyped and dull. Yet she subscribed to them, at least publicly. And though her ten years of marriage with Wistart had been ten years of boredom, she endured them for the reason that it was necessary to do so if one were a woman, and a somewhat prominent woman, and lived in a community like Jericho, Kansas.

She revenged herself on the conventions by sometimes shocking her Jericho friends with derision.

“You can’t do this, you can’t do that!” she once snapped at Bess Attwater, whose husband, Sidney, was cashier of Jericho’s largest bank. “Why can’t you? Who made all those rules that keep women from doing almost anything that’s any fun? I’ll tell you. Women made them—and women maintain them, like self-established concentration camps of custom, because women prefer the imprisonment with its indolence and protection to freedom with its risks and dangers!”

Since Mary Agnes was known to be sarcastic by habit, feline by temperament, and sophisticated in a brittle-glass manner, Bess Attwater did not dare take issue with her—nor did any of the other women present, for that matter. They were all afraid of her, of her edged tongue, of her superb manner, which carried off even wild acts of rudeness or unreason, of her assumption of superior experience and knowledge of the world, of the sometimes deadly penetration with which her intuitions sought out and laid bare their most deeply hidden secret thoughts.

Her husband was afraid of her also. She thought of Wistart with a little twist of scorn on her lips. She was older than he by three years, although she did not like to remind herself of the fact, and that may have been one reason why she held an ascendancy of will over him from the very day of their marriage. In no respect was she dependent on him: she was wealthier in her own right than was he, and she did not permit him to forget it. And she considered herself in every way his intellectual superior.

It was characteristic of Wistart that, though he was fully aware of how she felt toward him, he accepted her attitude without much resentment or even thought. She had made it very plain to him in the first months of their marriage that she could not abide him, even to be fondled by him, much less the physical crudity of sex. Thereafter, in all the years since, they occupied separate rooms in their home, the intercommunicating doors of which remained closed. In all those years they had gone their separate ways, with different associates, different interests, different tastes, journeying in divergent directions when they left Jericho for business or pleasure.

Mary Agnes, to be sure, was gone from home far more often than was Wistart, since she was dedicated to a life of idleness, and could leave the operation of her store to her capable manager, and had the money and taste for travel, and was almost constantly weary of Jericho. She did not permit him to inquire into her comings and goings, and she was too contemptuous to care about his.

Yet a contradictory emotion entered here. Wistart’s very subservience, his oxlike acquiescence to her every wish, his acceptance of her scorn, comprised part of her discontent with life, of her resentment toward her husband. A man should not, after all, be an ox ...

In the recent telephone conversation, she remembered now, he had sounded somewhat agitated about something. She shrugged a thin shoulder: Wistart’s agitation made little impression on her compared to her irritation at his childish secretiveness. He was forever being agitated in a rather feeble sort of way, and his agitation invariably bored her.

She asked herself: I wonder what it’s about this time?

And she answered her own question: It must be that damned Clarion again.

Wearying. It seemed to Mary Agnes that every time she went to Honolulu something happened to Wistart’s newspaper. Seven years ago, for example, when she was in the Islands, Wistart’s mother, Mrs. Algeria Wedge, died suddenly of something called a coronary thrombosis.

Mary Agnes and Algeria Wedge never got along well together, since both had strong wills and were not averse to saying the cutting thing when it seemed called for. But with Algeria seven years in her grave, Mary Agnes could concede to herself that Wistart’s mother was an enormously capable woman, a person who did difficult things so well that she made them appear easy. She combined an adroit mind, the ability to get people to do things she wanted of them, and a feminine lack of scruples so well that she put her husband in the Senate: although his own political blunders soon lost him his seat in that august assemblage. After the senator’s death Algeria took over the publication of his newspaper, the Jericho Daily Clarion, with such ability that she brought it to a high state of success.

Algeria was competent enough, there was no doubt of that, but after she was gone the responsibility for the family newspaper fell on Wistart’s not very competent, or even willing, shoulders. Under his management, or perhaps lack of management, the Clarion actually succeeded in losing ground, both in circulation and revenue, in spite of the fact that it seemed to be in an impregnable position, alone in its field in Jericho.

Then, three years ago, when Mary Agnes again happened to be in Honolulu, a rival newspaper, the Morning Sentinel, suddenly burgeoned into publication in Jericho. Wistart, she recalled with half-amused scorn, was at the time dreadfully upset, in a panic almost.

His alarm was occasioned by his fear of his own inability to meet opposition that might be very tough: a fear that was hardly without good grounds. The new Sentinel brought to Jericho as its publishers two brothers, Eddie and Tony Ender, strong-arm artists, trained under a high-binding big-city newspaper in dirty back-alley fighting and guttersnipe tactics. They sneered at ethics, believed in blackmail, disdained dignity, and from the first created enough noisy, blatant, vulgar confusion to make life a misery for Wistart Wedge and the poor old Clarion.

And now, once more during one of her trips to Hawaii, something evidently had happened again. She wondered what was the matter with that damned newspaper this time; and she was sure Wistart wanted something from her. He hesitated to ask it offhand, over the telephone, so it must be something rather important that he hoped he could make her see in his light, perhaps by a rather long and involved argument and presentation of facts and viewpoints. The mere thought of a session like that with him was so distasteful that she made a little grimace of petulance.

Whatever it was, she said to herself, it could damn well wait. She certainly had no intention of returning to Jericho just at present.

She decided that when she had her breakfast she would take a bath and a nap. After that she would consider plans.