Root of His Evil by James M. Cain Read Free Book Online Page B

little nearer to him and I felt terribly happy and didn’t want it ever to stop raining.
    But it stopped, and the sun came out and when we went outside to look at the rainbow there were the Sunday papers, all wet and soggy on the grass where we hadn’t seen them in the morning. We took them in, and the middle sections weren’t so wet, and we looked at them for a while and then turned on the radio. I went to the powder room to straighten up—then decided to dress, and went to the bedroom where my things were. When I came out he wasn’t the same any more. He began marching around, then said he had to stow the sail, and went out.
    I felt it had something to do with the radio. I turned it on and noticed the station, but Bergen was on and that didn’t seem to explain anything. The sail took a long time. When he came in he went in and changed into his regular clothes, then came out and kept up that restless tramping around.
    By now it was getting dark and I kept thinking of the meeting. “Isn’t it time for us to be starting back?”
    “Is it?”
    “It must be getting on toward seven o’clock.”
    “H’m.”
    He sat down and began to glower at his feet. “I’ve been organizing a junior executives’ union. Or trying to.”
    I didn’t think it was at all what had been bothering him, but just to be agreeable, I said: “Are you a junior executive?”
    “Me? I’m nothing.”
    “Oh, I see.”
    “Yes, I’m a junior executive, God help me. I’ve got a desk, a phone extension and a title. Statistician. You can’t beat that, can you? It sounds as important as a member of the Interstate Commerce Commission. But all I can make out of it is slave. In the Army we had slaves and overseers, and I was both. Here I’m one, but I’m supposed to pretend I’m the other. But I’ve accepted my lowly lot. Did you hear me? I’ve accepted it.”
    “I don’t accept my lowly lot. I’m nothing too. I’m only a waitress, but I have ambitions to be something more.”
    “The emancipated slave wants to drive slaves.”
    “All right, but they can get emancipated if they’ve got enough gump.”
    “But you still see no objection to slavery.”
    “It’s not slavery.”
    “Oh, yes, it is, yes, it is.”
    “To me, it’s work.”
    “Suppose you wanted to do work that didn’t pay, and yet they made you be an office worker?”
    “All real work pays.”
    “Oh, no. That’s where you’re wrong. Some work doesn’t pay. And yet you want to do it, and you can choose between going to them with your hat in your hand—a junior executive. Either way you’re their slave.”
    “Whose slave?”
    “All of them. The system.”
    “I don’t see any system. All I see is a lot of people trying to make a living.”
    “Well, I see it. And I accept it. But I’m going to make them accept it too—accept the other side, show them there’s two sides to it. I’ve been trying to organize a junior executives’ union.”
    “Any success?”
    “...No!”
    “Why not?”
    “They won’t admit they’re slaves!”
    “Maybe they’re not, really.”
    “Maybe the dead are not dead, really. They want to pretend they’re something they’re not—white-collar workers thinking they’re part of the system, on the other side. They think they’re going to be masters, too—”
    “Like me.”
    “Like you, and a fat chance—”
    “You can just leave me out. I don’t want to drive any slaves, but one day I’m going to be something, and I can’t be stopped—”
    “You can be, and you will be!”
    “Oh, no. Not me.”
    There was a great deal more, all in the same vein, and finally I got very annoyed. “I don’t like this kind of talk and I wish you’d stop.”
    “Because at heart you’re a cold little slave-driver.”
    “No, that’s not it at all.”
    “And what is it?”
    “Because you sound so weak.”
    He sulked a long time over that and then he said: “I am weak. You’re weak—”
    “I am not!”
    “We’re all weak,