The Rising Tide

by Margaret Wade Campbell Deland

Arthur Weston put his feet on his desk, and reflected. Why had he said what he did about going to Europe? When he went up to see Fred, nothing had been farther from his mind than leaving America. Well, he knew why he had said it.... Flight! Self-preservation! "Preposterous," he said, "what am I thinking of? I'm fond of her, and I'm confoundedly sorry for her, but that's all. Anyhow, Maitland settles the question. And if he wasn't in it—she's twenty-five and I'm forty-six." He got up and walked aimlessly about the room. "I've cut my wisdom teeth," he thought, with a dry laugh, and wondered where the lady was who had superintended that teething. For Kate's sake he had taken a broken heart to Europe. The remembrance of that heartbreak reassured him; the feeling he had about Fred wasn't in the least like his misery of that time. He gave a shrug of relief; it occurred to him that he would go and see some Chinese rugs which had been advertised in the morning paper; "might give her one for a wedding present?—oh, the devil! Haven't I anything else to think of than that girl?" He stood at the window for a long time, his hands in his pockets, looking at three pigeons strutting and balancing on a cornice of the Chamber of Commerce. "She interests me," he conceded; then he smiled,—"and she wants me to stay at home and 'take care of her'!" Well, there was nothing he would like better than to take care of Fred. The first thing he would do would be to shut up that ridiculous plaything of an "office" on the tenth floor. Billy Childs put it just right: "perfec' nonsense!" Then, having removed "F. Payton" from the index of the Sturtevant Building, they—he and Fred—would go off, to Europe. He followed this vagrant thought for a moment, then reddened with impatience at his own folly: "What an idiot I am! I'm not the least in love with her, but I'll miss her like the devil when she marries that cub Maitland. She's a perpetual cocktail! She'd be as mad as a hornet if she knew that I never took her seriously." He laughed, and found himself wishing that he could take her in his arms, and tease her, and scold her, and make her "mad as a hornet." Again the color burned in his cheeks; he would do something else than tease her and scold her; he would most certainly kiss her. "Oh, confound it!" he said to himself, angrily; "I'm getting stale." He did not want to kiss her! He only wanted to make her happy, and be himself amused. "That is the difference between now and ten years ago," he analyzed. "Kate never 'amused' me; oh, how deadly serious it all was!" He speculated about Kate quite comfortably. She was married; very likely she had half a dozen brats. Again he contrasted his feeling for Fred with that brief madness of pain, and was cheered; it was so obvious that he was merely fond of her. How could he help it—she was so honest, so unselfconscious! Besides, she was pathetic. Her harangues upon subjects of which she was (like most of mankind) profoundly ignorant, were funny, but they were touching, too, for her complacent certainties would so inevitably bring her into bruising contact with Life. "She thinks 'suffrage' a cure-all," he thought, amused and pitiful,—"and she's so desperately young!" In her efforts to reform the world, she was like some small creature buffeting the air. In fact, all this row that women were making was like beating the air. "What's it about, anyhow?" he thought. "What on earth do they want—the women?" It seemed to him, looking a little resentfully at the ease and release from certain kinds of toil that had come to women in the last two or three decades, that they had everything that reasonable creatures could possibly want. "Think how their grandmothers had to work!" he said to himself. "Now, all that these ridiculous creatures have to do is to touch a button—and men's brains do the rest." Certainly there is an enormous difference in the collective ease of existence; women don't have to make their candles, or knit their stockings, as their grandmothers did:—"yet, nowadays, they are making more fuss than all the women that ever lived, put together! What's the matter with 'em?"

He grew quite hot over the ingratitude of the sex. His old Scotch housekeeper, reading her Bible, and sewing from morning to night, was far happier than these restless, dissatisfied creatures, who, in the upper classes, flooded into schools of design and conservatories of music—not one in a hundred with talent enough to cover a five-cent piece!—and in the lower classes pulled down wages in factories and shops. "Amateur Man," he said, sarcastically. "Suppose we tried to do their jobs?" Then he paused to think what Fred's job, for instance, would be. Not discovering it offhand, he told himself again that if women would keep busy, like their grandmothers—his contemptuous thought stopped, with a jerk; how could women do the things their grandmothers did? What was it Fred had got off—something about machinery being the cuckoo which had pushed women out of the nest of domesticity? "Why," he was surprised into saying, "she's right!"

He came upon the deduction so abruptly that for a moment he forgot his sore feeling about Frederica's youth. Suppose the women should suddenly take it into their heads to be domestic, and flock out of the mechanical industries, back to the "Home"? Arthur Weston whistled. "Financially," said he, candidly, "we would bu'st in about ten minutes."...

"Do you want to give me those prices to Laughlin before I go out to lunch?" a flat voice asked in the outer office; he slid into his desk-chair as the door opened.

"I haven't had time to look them up yet. Don't wait."

He took up his pen, but only made aimless marks on his blotting-paper; the interruption jarred him back into irritated denial of possibilities: "She amuses me, that's all; I'm not in the least—in love." Suddenly, with a spring of resolution, he took down the telephone receiver and called up a number. The conversation was brief: "Hello! Jim?... Yes; I'm Arthur. Look here, I want to break away for a week.... Yes—break away. B-r-e-a-k. I'm stale. Can't you go down to the marshes with me, for ducks?... What? Oh, come on! You're not as important as you think.... What?... I'll do the work—you just come along!"

There followed a colloquy of some urgency on his part, and then a final, satisfied "Good boy! Wednesday, then, on the seven-thirty."

He had hardly secured his man before he regretted it; the mere prospect of the arrangements he must make for the trip began to bore him. However, he sat there at his desk and made some memoranda, conscious all the time of a nagging self-questioning in the back of his mind. "I'm not!" he said, again and again. "I'll get some shooting and clear my brain up."

But by the time he had sent a despatch or two, and called Jim Jackson up a second time to decide some detail, he knew that shooting would not help him much. The nag had settled itself: he had accepted the revelation that he was "interested" in Freddy Payton. With the contrast between the pain of the old wound and the new, he would not use the word "love," but "interest" committed him to an affection, tender almost to poignancy. Of course there was nothing to do about it. He must just take his medicine, as Fred took hers, "without making faces." There was nothing to strive for, nothing to avoid, nothing to expect. She was as good as engaged to Howard Maitland, and it would be a very sensible and desirable match;—to marry a man of forty-six would be neither sensible nor desirable! No; the only thing left to her trustee was to take every care of her that her eccentricities would permit, guard her, play with her, and correct her appalling taste. "Lord! what bad taste she has!" Also, while he and Jackson were wading about on the marshes for the next week, kick some sense into himself!