In the street car, homeward bound beside Frank Metcalf, Clara thought of Phillip Grimes and wondered whether or not he would have stood the test of Kate Chanceller's speech regarding love and friendship. He had confused her, but that was perhaps her own fault. He had not insisted on himself at all. Frank Metcalf had done nothing else. “One should be able,” she thought, “to find somewhere a man who respects himself and his own desires but can understand also the desires and fears of a woman.” The street car went bouncing along over railroad crossings and along residence streets. Clara looked at her companion, who stared straight ahead, and then turned to look out of the car window. The window was open and she could see the interiors of the laborers' houses along the streets. In the evening with the lamps lighted they seemed cosy and comfortable. Her mind ran back to the life in her father's house and its loneliness. For two summers she had escaped going home. At the end of her first year in school she had made an illness of her uncle's an excuse for spending the summer in Columbus, and at the end of the second year she had found another excuse for not going. This year she felt she would have to go home. She would have to sit day after day at the farm table with the farm hands. Nothing would happen. Her father would remain silent in her presence. She would become bored and weary of the endless small talk of the town girls. If one of the town boys began to pay her special attention, her father would become suspicious and that would lead to resentment in herself. She would do something she did not want to do. In the houses along the streets through which the car passed, she saw women moving about. Babies cried and men came out of the doors and stood talking to one another on the sidewalks. She decided suddenly that she was taking the problem of her own life too seriously. “The thing to do is to get married and then work things out afterward,” she told herself. She made up her mind that the puzzling, insistent antagonism that existed between men and women was altogether due to the fact that they were not married and had not the married people's way of solving such problems as Frank Metcalf had been talking about all afternoon. She wished she were with Kate Chancellor so that she could discuss with her this new viewpoint. When she and Frank Metcalf got off the car she was no longer in a hurry to go home to her uncle's house. Knowing she did not want to marry him, she thought that in her turn she would talk, that she would try to make him see her point of view as all the afternoon he had been trying to make her see his.
For an hour the two people walked about and Clara talked. She forgot about the passage of time and the fact that she had not dined. Not wishing to talk of marriage, she talked instead of the possibility of friendship between men and women. As she talked her own mind seemed to her to have become clearer. “It's all foolishness your going on as you have,” she declared. “I know how dissatisfied and unhappy you sometimes are. I often feel that way myself. Sometimes I think it's marriage I want. I really think I want to draw close to some one. I believe every one is hungry for that experience. We all want something we are not willing to pay for. We want to steal it or have it given us. That's what's the matter with me, and that's what's the matter with you.”
They came to the Woodburn house, and turning in stood on a porch in the darkness by the front door. At the back of the house Clara could see a light burning. Her aunt and uncle were at the eternal figuring and knitting. They were finding a substitute for living. It was the thing Frank Metcalf was protesting against and was the real reason for her own constant secret protest. She took hold of the lapel of his coat, intending to make a plea, to urge upon him the idea of a friendship that would mean something to them both. In the darkness she could not see his rather heavy, sullen face. The maternal instinct became strong in her and she thought of him as a wayward, dissatisfied boy, wanting love and understanding as she had wanted to be loved and understood by her father when life in the moment of the awakening of her womanhood seemed ugly and brutal. With her free hand she stroked the sleeve of his coat. Her gesture was misunderstood by the man who was not thinking of her words but of her body and of his hunger to possess it. He took her into his arms and held her tightly against his breast. She tried to struggle, to tear herself away but, although she was strong and muscular, she found herself unable to move. As he held her uncle, who had heard the two people come up the steps to the door, threw it open. Both he and his wife had on several occasions warned Clara to have nothing to do with young Metcalf. One day when he had sent flowers to the house, her aunt had urged her to refuse to receive them. “He's a bad, dissipated, wicked man,” she had said. “Have nothing to do with him.” When he saw his niece in the arms of the man who had been the subject of so much discussion in his own house and in every respectable house in Columbus, Henderson Woodburn was furious. He forgot the fact that young Metcalf was the son of the president of the company of which he was treasurer. It seemed to him that some sort of a personal insult had been thrown at him by a common ruffian. “Get out of here,” he screamed. “What do you mean, you nasty villain? Get out of here.”
Frank Metcalf went off along the street laughing defiantly, and Clara went into the house. The sliding doors that led into the living room had been thrown open and the light from a hanging lamp streamed in upon her. Her hair was disheveled and her hat twisted to one side. The man and woman stared at her. The knitting needles and a sheet of paper held in their hands suggested what they had been doing while Clara was getting another lesson from life. Her aunt's hands trembled and the knitting needles clicked together. Nothing was said and the confused and angry girl ran up a stairway to her own room. She locked herself in and knelt on the floor by the bed. She did not pray. Her association with Kate Chanceller had given her another outlet for her feelings. Pounding with her fists on the bed coverings, she swore. “Fools, damned fools, the world is filled with nothing but a lot of damned fools.”
CHAPTER X
Clara Butterworth left Bidwell, Ohio, in September of the year in which Steve Hunter's plant-setting machine company went into the hands of a receiver, and in January of the next year that enterprising young man, together with Tom Butterworth, bought the plant. In March a new company was organized and at once began making Hugh's corn-cutting machine, a success from the beginning. The failure of the first company and the sale of the plant had created a furor in the town. Both Steve and Tom Butterworth could, however, point to the fact that they had held on to their stock and lost their money in common with every one else. Tom had indeed sold his stock because he needed ready money, as he explained, but had shown his good faith by buying again just before the failure. “Do you suppose I would have done that had I known what was up?” he asked the men assembled in the stores. “Go look at the books of the company. Let's have an investigation here. You will find that Steve and I stuck to the rest of the stockholders. We lost our money with the rest. If any one was crooked and when they saw a failure coming went and got out from under at the expense of some one else, it wasn't Steve and me. The books of the company will show we were game. It wasn't our fault the plant-setting machine wouldn't work.”
In the back room of the bank, John Clark and young Gordon Hart cursed Steve and Tom, who, they declared, had sold them out. They had lost no money by the failure, but on the other hand they had gained nothing. The four men had sent in a bid for the plant when it was put up for sale, but as they expected no competition, they had not bid very much. It had gone to a firm of Cleveland lawyers who bid a little more, and later had been resold at private sale to Steve and Tom. An investigation was started and it was found that Steve and Tom held large blocks of stock in the defunct company, while the bankers held practically none. Steve openly said that he had known of the possibility of failure for some time and had warned the larger stock-holders and asked them not to sell their stock. “While I was working my head off trying to save the company, what were they up to?” he asked sharply, and his question was repeated in the stores and in the homes of the people.
The truth of the matter, and the thing the town never found out, was that from the beginning Steve had intended to get the plant for himself, but at the last had decided it would be better to take some one in with him. He was afraid of John Clark. For two or three days he thought about the matter and decided that the banker was not to be trusted. “He's too good a friend to Tom Butterworth,” he told himself. “If I tell him my scheme, he'll tell Tom. I'll go to Tom myself. He's a money maker and a man who knows the difference between a bicycle and a wheelbarrow when you put one of them into bed with him.”