A Poor Wise Man
by
Mary Roberts Rinehart
Part 2 out of 9
CHAPTER VII
"I wish you'd stop whistling that thing," said Miss Boyd, irritably.
"It makes me low in my mind."
"Sorry," said Willy Cameron. "I do it because I'm low in my mind."
"What are you low about?" Miss Boyd had turned toward the rear of
the counter, where a mirror was pasted to a card above a box of
chewing gum, and was carefully adjusting her hair net. "Lady friend
turned you down?"
Willy Cameron glanced at her.
"I'm low because I haven't got a lady friend, Miss Boyd." He held
up a sheet of prescription paper and squinted at it. "Also because
the medical profession writes with its feet, apparently. I've done
everything to this but dip it in acid. I've had it pinned to the
wall, and tried glancing at it as I went past. Sometimes you can
surprise them that way. But it does no good. I'm going to take it
home and dream on it, like bride's cake."
"They're awful, aren't they?"
"When I get into the Legislature," said Willy Cameron, "I'm going
to have a bill passed compelling doctors to use typewriters. Take
this now. Read upside down, its horse liniment. Read right side
up, it's poison. And it's for internal use."
"What d'you mean you haven't got a lady friend?"
"The exact and cruel truth." He smiled at her, and had Miss Boyd
been more discerning she might have seen that the smile was slightly
forced. Also that his eyes were somewhat sunken in his head. Which
might, of course, have been due to too much political economy and
history, and the eminent divines on Sunday evenings. Miss Boyd,
however, was not discerning, and moreover, she was summoning her
courage to a certain point.
"Why don't you ask me to go to the movies some night?" she said.
"I like the movies, and I get sick of going alone."
"My dear child," observed Willy Cameron, "if that young man in the
sack suit who comes in to see you every day were three inches shorter
and twenty pounds lighter, I'd ask you this minute."
"Oh, him!" said Miss Boyd, with a self-conscious smile. "I'm
through with him. He's a Bolshevik!"
"He has the Bolshevist possessive eye," agreed Willy Cameron,
readily. "Does he know you are through with him? Because that's
important, too. You may know it, and I may know it, but if he
doesn't know it
"Why don't you say right out you don't want to take me? Willy
Cameron's chivalrous soul was suddenly shocked. To his horror he
saw tears in Miss Boyd's eyes.
"I'm just a plain idiot, Miss Edith," he said. "I was only fooling.
It will mean a lot to me to have a nice girl go with me to the
movies, or anywhere else. We'll make it to-night, if that suits you,
and I'll take a look through the neighborhood at noon and see what's
worth while."
The Eagle Pharmacy was a small one in a quiet neighborhood. During
the entire day, and for three evenings a week, Mr. William Wallace
Cameron ran it almost single-handed, having only the preoccupied
assistance of Miss Boyd in the candy and fancy goods. At the noon
and dinner hours, and four evenings a week, he was relieved by the
owner, Mr. Davis, a tired little man with large projecting ears and
worried, child-like eyes, who was nursing an invalid wife at home.
A pathetic little man, carrying home with unbounded faith day after
day bottles of liquid foods and beef capsules, and making wistful
comments on them when he returned.
"She couldn't seem to keep that last stuff down, Mr. Cameron," he
would say. "I'll try something else."
And he would stand before his shelves, eyes upturned, searching,
eliminating, choosing.
Miss Boyd attended to the general merchandise, sold stationary and
perfumes, candy and fancy soaps, and in the intervals surveyed the
world that lay beyond the plate glass windows with shrewd,
sophisticated young eyes.
"That new doctor across the street is getting busier," she would
say. Or, "The people in 42 have got a Ford. They haven't got room
for a garage, either. Probably have to leave it out at nights."
Her sophistication was kindly in the main. She combined it with an
easy tolerance of weakness, and an invincible and cheery romanticism,
as Willy Cameron discovered the night they first went to a moving
picture theater together. She frankly wept and joyously laughed,
and now and then, delighted at catching some film subtlety and
fearful that he would miss it, she would nudge him with her elbow.
"What d'you think of that?" she would say. "D'you get it? He thinks
he's getting her - Alice Joyce, you know - on the telephone, and it's
a private wire to the gang." She was rather quiet after that
particular speech. Then she added: "I know a place that's got a
secret telephone." But he was absorbed in the picture, and made no
comment on that. She seemed rather relieved.
Once or twice she placed an excited hand on his knee. He was very
uncomfortable until she removed it, because he had a helpless sort
of impression that she was not quite so unconscious of it as she
appeared. Time had been, and not so long ago, when he might have
reciprocated her little advance in the spirit in which it was
offered, might have taken the hand and held it, out of the sheer
joy of youth and proximity. But there was nothing of the philanderer
in the Willy Cameron who sat beside Edith Boyd that night in body,
while in spirit he was in another state, walking with his slight limp
over crisp snow and sodden mud, but through magic lands, to the
little moving picture theater at the camp.
Would he ever see her again? Ever again? And if he did, what good
would it be? He roused himself when they started toward her home.
The girl was chattering happily. She adored Douglas Fairbanks. She
knew a girl who had written for his picture but who didn't get one.
She wouldn't do a thing like that. "Did they really say things when
they moved their lips?"
"I think they do," said Willy Cameron. "When that chap was talking
over the telephone I could tell what he was saying by - Look here,
what did you mean when you said you knew of a place that has a secret
telephone?"
"I was only talking."
"No house has any business with a secret telephone," he said
virtuously.
"Oh, forget it. I say a lot of things I don't mean." He was a
little puzzled and rather curious, but not at all disturbed.
"Well, how did you get to know about it?"
"I tell you I was only talking."
He let it drop at that. The street crowds held and interested him.
He liked to speculate about them; what life meant to them, in work
and love and play; to what they were going on such hurrying feet.
A country boy, the haste of the city impressed him.
"Why do they hurry so?" he demanded, almost irritably.
"Hurrying home, most of them, because they've got to get up in the
morning and go to work."
"Do you ever wonder about the homes they are hurrying to?"
"Me? I don't wonder. I know. Most of them have to move fast to
keep up with the rent."
"I don't mean houses," he explained, patiently. "I mean - A house
isn't a home."
"You bet it isn't."
"It's the families I'm talking about. In a small town you know all
about people, who they live with, and all that." He was laboriously
talking down to her. "But here - "
He saw that she was not interested. Something he had said started
an unpleasant train of thought in her mind. She was walking faster,
and frowning slightly. To cheer her he said:
"I am keeping an eye out for the large young man in the sack suit,
you know. If he jumps me, just yell for the police, will you?
Because I'll probably not be able to."
"I wish you'd let me forget him."
"I will. The question is, will he?" But he saw that the subject
was unpleasant.
"We'll have to do this again. It's been mighty nice of you to come."
"You'll have to ask me, the next time."
"I certainly will. But I think I'd better let your family look me
over first, just so they'll know that I don't customarily steal
the silver spoons when I'm asked out to dinner. Or anything like
that."
"We're just - folks."
"So am I, awfully - folks! And pretty lonely folks at that.
Something like that pup that has adopted me, only worse. He's got
me, but I haven't anybody."
"You'll not be lonely long." She glanced up at him.
"That's cheering. Why?"
"Well, you are the sort that makes friends," she said, rather
vaguely. "That crowd that drops into the shop on the evenings
you're there - they're crazy about you. They like to hear you talk."
"Great Scott! I suppose I've been orating all over the place!"
"No, but you've got ideas. You give them something to think about
when they go home. I wish I had a mind like yours."
He was so astonished that he stopped dead on the pavement. "My
Scottish blood," he said despondently. "A Scot is always a reformer
and a preacher, in his heart. I used to orate to my mother, but she
liked it. She is a Scot, too. Besides, it put her to sleep. But
I thought I'd outgrown it."
"You don't make speeches. I didn't mean that."
But he was very crestfallen during the remainder of the way, and
rather silent. He wondered, that night before he went to bed, if he
had been didactic to Lily Cardew. He had aired his opinions to her
at length, he knew. He groaned as he took off his coat in his cold
little room at the boarding house which lodged and fed him, both
indifferently, for the sum of twelve dollars per week.
Jinx, the little hybrid dog, occupied the seat of his one comfortable
chair. He eyed the animal somberly.
"Hereafter, old man," he said, "when I feel a spell of oratory coming
on, you will have to be the audience." He took his dressing gown
from a nail behind the door, and commenced to put it on. Then he
took it off again and wrapped the dog in it.
"I can read in bed, which you can't," he observed. "Only, I can't
help thinking, with all this town to pick from, you might have chosen
a fellow with two dressing gowns and two chairs."
* * * * *
He was extremely quiet all the next day. Miss Boyd could hear him,
behind the partition with its "Please Keep Out" sign, fussing with
bottles and occasionally whistling to himself. Once it was the Long,
Long Trail, and a moment later he appeared in his doorway, grinning.
"Sorry," he said. "I've got in the habit of thinking to the fool
thing. Won't do it again."
"You must be thinking hard."
"I am," he replied, grimly, and disappeared. She could hear the
slight unevenness of his steps as he moved about, but there was no
more whistling. Edith Boyd leaned both elbows on the top of a
showcase and fell into a profound and troubled thought. Mostly her
thoughts were of Willy Cameron, but some of them were for herself.
Up dreary and sordid by-paths her mind wandered; she was facing ugly
facts for the first time, and a little shudder of disgust shook her.
He wanted to meet her family. He was a gentleman and he wanted to
meet her family. Well, he could meet them all right, and maybe he
would understand then that she had never had a chance. In all her
young life no man had ever proposed letting her family look him over.
Hardly ever had they visited her at home, and when they did they
seemed always glad to get away. She had met them on street corners,
and slipped back alone, fearful of every creak of the old staircase,
and her mother's querulous voice calling to her:
"Edie, where've you been all this time?" And she had lied. How
she had lied!
"I'm through with all that," she resolved. "It wasn't any fun
anyhow. I'm sick of hating myself."
Some time later Willy Cameron heard the telephone ring, and taking
pad and pencil started forward. But Miss Boyd was at the telephone,
conducting a personal conversation.
"No.... No, I think not.... Look here, Lou, I've said no twice."
There was a rather lengthy silence while she listened. Then:
"You might as well have it straight, Lou. I'm through.... No, I'm
not sick. I'm just through.... I wouldn't.... What's the use?"
Willy Cameron, retreating into his lair, was unhappily conscious
that the girl was on the verge of tears. He puzzled over the
situation for some time. His immediate instinct was to help any
troubled creature, and it had dawned on him that this composed
young lady who manicured her nails out of a pasteboard box during
the slack portion of every day was troubled. In his abstraction
he commenced again his melancholy refrain, and a moment later she
appeared in the doorway:
"Oh, for mercy's sake, stop," she said. She was very pale.
"Look here, Miss Edith, you come in here and tell me what's wrong.
Here's a chair. Now sit down and talk it out. It helps a lot to
get things off your chest."
"There's nothing the matter with me. And if the boss comes in
here and finds me - "
Quite suddenly she put her head down on the back of the chair and
began to cry. He was frightfully distressed. He poured some
aromatic ammonia into a medicine glass and picking up her limp hand,
closed her fingers around it.
"Drink that," he ordered.
She shook her head.
"I'm not sick," she said. "I'm only a fool."
"If that fellow said anything over the telephone - !"
She looked up drearily.
"It wasn't him. He doesn't matter. It's just - I got to hating
myself." She stood up and carefully dabbed her eyes. "Heavens, I
must be a sight. Now don't you get to thinking things, Mr. Cameron.
Girls can't go out and fight off a temper, or get full and sleep it
off. So they cry."
Some time later he glanced out at her. She was standing before the
little mirror above the chewing gum, carefully rubbing her cheeks
with a small red pad. After that she reached into the show case,
got out a lip pencil and touched her lips.
"You're pretty enough without all that, Miss Edith."
"You mind your own business," she retorted acidly.
CHAPTER VIII
Lily had known Alston Denslow most of her life. The children of
that group of families which formed the monied aristocracy of the
city knew only their own small circle. They met at dancing classes,
where governesses and occasionally mothers sat around the walls,
while the little girls, in handmade white frocks of exquisite
simplicity, their shining hair drawn back and held by ribbon bows,
made their prim little dip at the door before entering, and the
boys, in white Eton collars and gleaming pumps, bowed from the
waist and then dived for the masculine corner of the long room.
No little girl ever intruded on that corner, although now and then
a brave spirit among the boys would wander, with assumed
unconsciousness but ears rather pink, to the opposite corner where
the little girls were grouped like white butterflies milling in the
sun.
The pianist struck a chord, and the children lined up, the girls on
one side, the boys on the other, a long line, with Mrs. Van Buren
in the center. Another chord, rather a long one. Mrs. Van Buren
curtsied to the girls. The line dipped, wavered, recovered itself.
Mrs. Van Buren turned. Another chord. The boys bent, rather too
much, from the waist, while Mrs. Van Buren swept another deep
curtsey. The music now, very definite as to time. Glide and short
step to the right. Glide and short step to the left. Dancing
school had commenced. Outside were long lines of motors waiting.
The governesses chatted, and sometimes embroidered. Mademoiselle
tatted.
Alton Denslow was generally known as Pink, but the origin of the
name was shrouded in mystery. As "Pink" he had learned to waltz
at the dancing class, at a time when he was more attentive to the
step than to the music that accompanied it. As Pink Denslow he
had played on a scrub team at Harvard, and got two broken ribs for
his trouble, and as Pink he now paid intermittent visits to the
Denslow Bank, between the hunting season in October and polo at
eastern fields and in California. At twenty-three he was still the
boy of the dancing class, very careful at parties to ask his hostess
to dance, and not noticeably upset when she did, having arranged to
be cut in on at the end of the second round.
Pink could not remember when he had not been in love with Lily
Cardew. There had been other girls, of course, times when Lily
seemed far away from Cambridge, and some other fair charmer was
near. But he had always known there was only Lily. Once or twice
he would have become engaged, had it not been for that. He was a
blond boy, squarely built, good-looking without being handsome, and
on rainy Sundays when there was no golf he went quite cheerfully to
St. Peter's with his mother, and watched a pretty girl in the choir.
He wished at those times that he could sing.
A pleasant cumberer of the earth, he had wrapped his talents in a
napkin and buried them by the wayside, and promptly forgotten where
they were. He was to find them later on, however, not particularly
rusty, and he increased them rather considerably before he got
through.
It was this pleasant cumberer of the earth, then, who on the morning
after Lily's return, stopped his car before the Cardew house and got
out. Immediately following his descent he turned, took a square
white box from the car, ascended the steps, settled his neck in his
collar and his tie around it, and rang the bell.
The second man, hastily buttoned into his coat and with a faint odor
of silver polish about him, opened the door. Pink gave him his hat,
but retained the box firmly.
"Mrs. Cardew and Miss Cardew at home?" he asked. "Yes? Then you
might tell Grayson I'm here to luncheon - unless the family is
lunching out."
"Yes, sir," said the footman. "No, sir, they are lunching at home."
Pink sauntered into the library. He was not so easy as his manner
indicated. One never knew about Lily. Sometimes she was in a mood
when she seemed to think a man funny, and not to be taken seriously.
And when she was serious, which was the way he liked her - he rather
lacked humor - she was never serious about him or herself. It had
been religion once, he remembered. She had wanted to know if he
believed in the thirty-nine articles, and because he had seen them
in the back of the prayer-book, where they certainly would not be if
there was not authority for them, he had said he did.
"Well, I don't," said Lily. And there had been rather a bad
half-hour, because he had felt that he had to stick to his
thirty-nine guns, whatever they were. He had finished on a rather
desperate note of appeal.
"See here, Lily," he had said. "Why do you bother your head about
such things, anyhow?"
"Because I've got a head, and I want to use it."
"Life's too short."
"Eternity's pretty long. Do you believe in eternity?" And there
they were, off again, and of course old Anthony had come in after
that, and had wanted to know about his Aunt Marcia, and otherwise
had shown every indication of taking root on the hearth rug.
Pink was afraid of Anthony. He felt like a stammering fool when
Anthony was around. That was why he had invited himself to luncheon.
Old Anthony lunched at his club.
When he heard Lily coming down the stairs, Pink's honest heart beat
somewhat faster. A good many times in France, but particularly on
the ship coming back, he had thought about this meeting. In France
a fellow had a lot of distractions, and Lily had seemed as dear as
ever, but extremely remote. But once turned toward home, and she
had filled the entire western horizon. The other men had seen
sunsets there, and sometimes a ship, or a school of porpoises. But
Pink had seen only Lily.
She came in. The dear old girl! The beautiful, wonderful, dear
old girl! The -
"Pink!"
"H - hello, Lily."
"Why, Pink - you're a man!"
"What'd you think I'd be? A girl?"
"You've grown."
"Oh, now see here, Lily. I quit growing years ago."
"And to think you are back all right. I was so worried, Pink."
He flushed at that.
"Needn't have worried," he said, rather thickly. "Didn't get to the
front until just before the end. My show was made a labor division
in the south of France. If you laugh, I'll take my flowers and go
home."
"Why, Pink dear, I wouldn't laugh for anything. And it was the man
behind the lines who - "
"Won the war," he finished for her, rather grimly. "All right, Lily.
We've heard it before. Anyhow, it's all done and over, and - I
brought gardenias and violets. You used to like 'em."
"It was dear of you to remember."
"Couldn't help remembering. No credit to me. I - you were always in
my mind."
She was busily unwrapping the box.
"Always," he repeated, unsteadily.
"What gorgeous things!" she buried her face in them.
"Did you hear what I said, Lily?"
"Yes, and it's sweet of you. Now sit down and tell me about things.
I've got a lot to tell you, too."
He had a sort of quiet obstinacy, however, and he did not sit down.
When she had done so he stood in front of her, looking down at her.
"You've been in a camp. I know that. I heard it over there. Anne
Devereaux wrote me. It worried me because - we had girls in the
camps over there, and every one of them had a string of suitors a
mile long."
"Well, I didn't," said Lily, spiritedly. Then she laughed. He had
been afraid she would laugh. "Oh, Pink, how dear and funny and
masculine you are! I have a perfectly uncontrollable desire to kiss
you."
Which she did, to his amazement and consternation. Nothing she
could have done would more effectually have shown him the
hopelessness of his situation than that sisterly impulse.
"Good Lord," he gasped, "Grayson's in the hall."
"If he comes in I shall probably do it again. Pink, you darling
child, you are still the little boy at Mrs. Van Buren's and if you
would only purse your lips and count one - two - three - Are you
staying to luncheon?"
He was suffering terribly. Also he felt strangely empty inside,
because something that he had carried around with him for a long
time seemed to have suddenly moved out and left a vacancy.
"Thanks. I think not, Lily; I've got a lot to do to-day."
She sat very still. She had had to do it, had had to show him,
somehow, that she loved him without loving him as he wanted her to.
She had acted on impulse, on an impulse born of intention, but she
had hurt him. It was in every line of his rigid body and set face.
"You're not angry, Pink dear?"
"There's nothing to be angry about," he said, stolidly. "Things have
been going on, with me, and staying where they've always been, with
you. That's all. I'm not very keen, you know, and I used to think
- Your people like me. I mean, they wouldn't - "
"Everybody likes you, Pink."
"Well, I'll trot along." He moved a step, hesitated. "Is there
anybody else, Lily?"
"Nobody."
"You won't mind if I hang around a bit, then? You can always send
me off when you are sick of me. Which you couldn't if you were fool
enough to marry me."
"Whoever does marry you, dear, will be a lucky woman."
In the end he stayed to luncheon, and managed to eat a very fair one.
But he had little lapses into silence, and Grace Cardew drew her own
shrewd conclusions.
"He's such a nice boy, Lily," she said, after he had gone. "And
your grandfather would like it. In a way I think he expects it."
"I'm not going to marry to please him, mother."
"But you are fond of Alston."
"I want to marry a man, mother. Pink is a boy. He will always be a
boy. He doesn't think; he just feels. He is fine and loyal and
honest, but I would loathe him in a month."
"I wish," said Grace Cardew unhappily, "I wish you had never gone to
that camp."
All afternoon Lily and Grace shopped. Lily was fitted into shining
evening gowns, into bright little afternoon frocks, into Paris wraps.
The Cardew name was whispered through the shops, and great piles of
exotic things were brought in for Grace's critical eye. Lily's own
attitude was joyously carefree. Long lines of models walked by,
draped in furs, in satins and velvet and chiffon, tall girls, most
of them, with hair carefully dressed, faces delicately tinted and
that curious forward thrust at the waist and slight advancement of
one shoulder that gave them an air of languorous indifference.
"The only way I could get that twist," Lily confided to her mother,
"would be to stand that way and be done up in plaster of paris. It
is the most abandoned thing I ever saw."
Grace was shocked, and said so.
Sometimes, during the few hours since her arrival, Lily had wondered
if her year's experiences had coarsened her. There were so many
times when her mother raised her eyebrows. She knew that she had
changed, that the granddaughter of old Anthony Cardew who had come
back from the war was not the girl who had gone away. She had gone
away amazingly ignorant; what little she had known of life she had
learned away at school. But even there she had not realized the
possibility of wickedness and vice in the world. One of the girls
had run away with a music master who was married, and her name was
forbidden to be mentioned. That was wickedness, like blasphemy,
and a crime against the Holy Ghost.
She had never heard of prostitution. Near the camp there was a
district with a bad name, and the girls of her organization were
forbidden to so much as walk in that direction. It took her a long
time to understand, and she suffered horribly when she did. There
were depths of wickedness, then, and of abasement like that in the
world. It was a bad world, a cruel, sordid world. She did not want
to live in it.
She had had to reorganize all her ideas of life after that. At
first she was flamingly indignant. God had made His world clean and
beautiful, and covered it with flowers and trees that grew, cleanly
begotten, from the earth. Why had He not stopped there? Why had He
soiled it with passion and lust?
It was a little Red Cross nurse who helped her, finally.
"Very well," she said. "I see what you mean. But trees and flowers
are not God's most beautiful gift to the world."
"I think they are."
"No. It is love."
"I am not talking about love," said Lily, flushing.
"Oh, yes, you are. You have never loved, have you? You are talking
of one of the many things that go to make up love, and out of that
one phase of love comes the most wonderful thing in the world. He
gives us the child."
And again:
"All bodies are not whole, and not all souls. It is wrong to judge
life by its exceptions, or love by its perversions, Lily."
It had been the little nurse finally who cured her, for she secured
Lily's removal to that shady house on a by-street, where the
tragedies of unwise love and youth sought sanctuary. There were
prayers there, morning and evening. They knelt, those girls, in
front of their little wooden chairs, and by far the great majority
of them quite simply laid their burdens before God, and with an
equal simplicity, felt that He would help them out.
"We have erred, and strayed from Thy ways like lost sheep. We have
followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. We
have offended against Thy holy laws.... Restore Thou those who are
penitent, according to Thy promises.... And grant, Oh most merciful
Father, that we may hereafter live a godly, righteous and sober life."
After a time Lily learned something that helped her. The soul was
greater and stronger than the body and than the mind. The body
failed. It sinned, but that did not touch the unassailable purity
and simplicity of the soul. The soul, which lived on, was always
clean. For that reason there was no hell.
Lily rose and buttoned her coat. Grace was fastening her sables,
and making a delayed decision in satins.
"Mother, I've been thinking it over. I am going to see Aunt Elinor."
Grace waited until the saleswoman had moved away.
"I don't like it, Lily."
"I was thinking, while we were ordering all that stuff. She is a
Cardew, mother. She ought to be having that sort of thing. And
just because grandfather hates her husband, she hasn't anything."
"That is rather silly, dear. They are not in want. I believe he is
quite flourishing."
"She is father's sister. And she is a good woman. We treat her
like a leper."
Grace was weakening. "If you take the car, your grandfather may
hear of it."
"I'll take a taxi."
Grace followed her with uneasy eyes. For years she paid a price
for peace, and not a small price. She had placed her pride on the
domestic altar, and had counted it a worthy sacrifice for Howard's
sake. And she had succeeded. She knew Anthony Cardew had never
forgiven her and would never like her, but he gave her, now and
then, the tribute of a grudging admiration.
And now Lily had come home, a new and different Lily, with her
father's lovableness and his father's obstinacy. Already Grace saw
in the girl the beginning of a passionate protest against things as
they were. Perhaps, had Grace given to Lily the great love of her
life, instead of to Howard, she might have understood her less
clearly. As it was, she shivered slightly as she got into the
limousine.
CHAPTER IX
Lily Cardew inspected curiously the east side neighborhood through
which the taxi was passing. She knew vaguely that she was in the
vicinity of one of the Cardew mills, but she had never visited any
of the Cardew plants. She had never been permitted to do so.
Perhaps the neighborhood would have impressed her more had she not
seen, in the camp, that life can be stripped sometimes to its
essentials, and still have lost very little. But the dinginess
depressed her. Smoke was in the atmosphere, like a heavy fog. Soot
lay on the window-sills, and mingled with street dust to form little
black whirlpools in the wind. Even the white river steamers,
guiding their heavy laden coal barges with the current, were gray
with soft coal smoke. The foam of the river falling in broken
cataracts from their stern wheels was oddly white in contrast.
Everywhere she began to see her own name. "Cardew" was on the ore
hopper cars that were moving slowly along a railroad spur. One of
the steamers bore "Anthony Cardew" in tall black letters on its side.
There was a narrow street called "Cardew Way."
Aunt Elinor lived on Cardew Way. She wondered if Aunt Elinor found
that curious, as she did. Did she resent these ever-present
reminders of her lost family? Did she have any bitterness because
the very grayness of her skies was making her hard old father richer
and more powerful?
Yet there was comfort, stability and a certain dignity about Aunt
Elinor's house when she reached it. It stood in the district, but
not of it, withdrawn from the street in a small open space which
gave indication of being a flower garden in summer. There were two
large gaunt trees on either side of a brick walk, and that walk had
been swept to the last degree of neatness. The steps were freshly
scoured, and a small brass door-plate, like a doctor's sign, was as
bright as rubbing could make it. "James Doyle," she read.
Suddenly she was glad she had come. The little brick house looked
anything but tragic, with its shining windows, its white curtains
and its evenly drawn shades. Through the windows on the right came
a flickering light, warm and rosy. There must be a coal fire there.
She loved a coal fire.
She had braced herself to meet Aunt Elinor at the door, but an
elderly woman opened it.
"Mrs. Doyle is in," she said; "just step inside."
She did not ask Lily's name, but left her in the dark little hall
and creaked up the stairs. Lily hesitated. Then, feeling that Aunt
Elinor might not like to find her so unceremoniously received, she
pushed open a door which was only partly closed, and made a step
into the room. Only then did she see that it was occupied. A man
sat by the fire, reading. He was holding his book low, to get the
light from the fire, and he turned slowly to glance at Lily. He
had clearly expected some one else. Elinor, probably.
"I beg your pardon," Lily said. "I am calling on Mrs. Doyle, and
when I saw the firelight - "
He stood up then, a tall, thin man, with close-cropped gray mustache
and heavy gray hair above a high, bulging forehead. She had never
seen Jim Doyle, but Mademoiselle had once said that he had pointed
ears, like a satyr. She had immediately recanted, on finding Lily
searching in a book for a picture of a satyr. This man had ears
pointed at the top. Lily was too startled then to analyze his face,
but later on she was to know well the high, intellectual forehead,
the keen sunken eyes, the full but firmly held mouth and pointed,
satyr-like ears of that brilliant Irishman, cynic and arch scoundrel,
Jim Doyle.
He was inspecting her intently.
"Please come in," he said. "Did the maid take your name?"
"No. I am Lily Cardew."
"I see." He stood quite still, eyeing her. "You are Anthony's
granddaughter?"
"Yes."
"Just a moment." He went out, closing the door behind him, and she
heard him going quickly up the stairs. A door closed above, and a
weight settled down on the girl's heart. He was not going to let
her see Aunt Elinor. She was frightened, but she was angry, too.
She would not run away. She would wait until he came down, and if
he was insolent, well, she could be haughty. She moved to the fire
and stood there, slightly flushed, but very straight.
She heard him coming down again almost immediately. He was outside
the door. But he did not come in at once. She had a sudden
impression that he was standing there, his hand on the knob,
outlining what he meant to say to her when he showed the door to a
hated Cardew. Afterwards she came to know how right that impression
was. He was never spontaneous. He was a man who debated everything,
calculated everything beforehand.
When he came in it was slowly, and with his head bent, as though he
still debated within himself. Then:
"I think I have a right to ask what Anthony Cardew's granddaughter
is doing in my house."
"Your wife's niece has come to call on her, Mr. Doyle."
"Are you quite sure that is all?"
"I assure you that is all," Lily said haughtily. "It had not
occurred to me that you would be here."
"I dare say. Still, strangely enough, I do spend a certain amount
of time in my home."
Lily picked up her muff.
"If you have forbidden her to come down, I shall go."
"Wait," he said slowly. "I haven't forbidden her to see you. I
asked her to wait. I wanted a few moments. You see, it is not
often that I have a Cardew in my house, and I am a selfish man."
She hated him. She loathed his cold eyes, his long, slim white
hands. She hated him until he fascinated her.
"Sit down, and I will call Mrs. Doyle."
He went out again, but this time it was the elderly maid who went
up the stairs. Doyle himself came back, and stood before her on
the hearth rug. He was slightly smiling, and the look of uncertainty
was gone.
"Now that you've seen me, I'm not absolutely poisonous, am I, Miss
Lily? You don't mind my calling you that, do you? You are my niece.
You have been taught to hate me, of course."
"Yes," said Lily, coldly.
"By Jove, the truth from a Cardew!" Then: "That's an old habit of
mine, damning the Cardews. I'll have to try to get over it, if they
are going to reestablish family relations." He was laughing at her,
Lily knew, and she flushed somewhat.
"I wouldn't make too great an effort, then," she said.
He smiled again, this time not unpleasantly, and suddenly he threw
into his rich Irish voice an unexpected softness. No one knew better
than Jim Doyle the uses of the human voice.
"You mustn't mind me, Miss Lily. I have no reason to love your
family, but I am very happy that you came here to-day. My wife has
missed her people. If you'll run in like this now and then it will
do her worlds of good. And if my being here is going to keep you
away I can clear out."
She rather liked him for that speech. He was totally unlike what
she had been led to expect, and she felt a sort of resentment toward
her family for misleading her. He was a gentleman, on the surface
at least. He had not been over-cordial at first, but then who could
have expected cordiality under the circumstances? In Lily's defense
it should be said that the vicissitudes of Elinor's life with Doyle
had been kept from her always. She had but two facts to go on: he
had beaten her grandfather as a young man, for a cause, and he held
views as to labor which conflicted with those of her family.
Months later, when she learned all the truth, it was too late.
"Of course you're being here won't keep me away, if you care to have
me come."
He was all dignity and charm then. They needed youth in that quiet
place. They ought all to be able to forget the past, which was
done with, anyhow. He showed the first genuine interest she had
found in her work at the camp, and before his unexpected geniality
the girl opened like a flower.
And all the time he was watching her with calculating eyes. He was
a gambler with life, and he rather suspected that he had just drawn
a valuable card.
"Thank you," he said gravely, when she had finished. "You have done
a lot to bridge the gulf that lies - I am sure you have noticed it
- between the people who saw service in this war and those who
stayed at home."
Suddenly Lily saw that the gulf between her family and herself was
just that, which was what he had intended.
When Elinor came in they were absorbed in conversation, Lily flushed
and eager, and her husband smiling, urbane, and genial.
To Lily, Elinor Doyle had been for years a figure of mystery. She
had not seen her for many years, and she had, remembered a thin,
girlish figure, tragic-eyed, which eternally stood by a window in
her room, looking out. But here was a matronly woman, her face
framed with soft, dark hair, with eyes like her father's, with
Howard Cardew's ease of manner, too, but with a strange passivity,
either of repression or of fires early burned out and never renewed.
Lily was vaguely disappointed. Aunt Elinor, in soft gray silk,
matronly, assured, unenthusiastically pleased to see her; Doyle
himself, cheerful and suave; the neat servant; the fire lit,
comfortable room, - there was no drama in all that, no hint of
mystery or tragedy. All the hatred at home for an impulsive assault
of years ago, and - this!
"Lily, dear!" Elinor said, and kissed her. "Why, Lily, you are a
woman!"
"I am twenty, Aunt Elinor."
"Yes, of course. I keep forgetting. I live so quietly here that
the days go by faster than I know." She put Lily back in her chair,
and glanced at her husband.
"Is Louis coming to dinner, Jim?"
"Yes."
"I suppose you cannot stay, Lily?"
"I ought to tell you, Aunt Elinor. Only mother knows that I am here."
Aunt Elinor smiled her quiet smile.
"I understand, dear. How are they all?"
"Grandfather is very well. Father looks tired. There is some trouble
at the mill, I think."
Elinor glanced at Doyle, but he said nothing.
"And your mother?"
"She is well."
Lily was commencing to have an odd conviction, which was that her
Aunt Elinor was less glad to have her there than was Jim Doyle.
He seemed inclined to make up for Elinor's lack of enthusiasm by
his own. He built up a larger fire, and moved her chair near it.
"Weather's raw," he said. "Sure you are comfortable now? And why
not have dinner here? We have an interesting man coming, and we
don't often have the chance to offer our guests a charming young
lady."
"Lily only came home yesterday, Jim," Elinor observed. "Her own
people will want to see something of her. Besides, they do no
know she is here."
Lily felt slightly chilled. For years she had espoused her Aunt
Elinor's cause; in the early days she had painfully hemstitched a
small handkerchief each fall and had sent it, with much secrecy, to
Aunt Elinor's varying addresses at Christmas. She had felt a
childish resentment of Elinor Doyle's martyrdom. And now -
"Her father and grandfather are dining out to-night." Had Lily
looked up she would have seen Doyle's eyes fixed on his wife,
ugly and menacing.
"Dining out?" Lily glanced at him in surprise.
"There is a dinner to-night, for the - " He checked himself "The
steel manufacturers are having a meeting," he finished. "I believe
to discuss me, among other things. Amazing the amount of
discussion my simple opinions bring about."
Elinor Doyle, unseen, made a little gesture of despair and surrender.
"I hope you will stay, Lily," she said. "You can telephone, if you
like. I don't see you often, and there is so much I want to ask
you."
In the end Lily agreed. She would find out from Grayson if the men
were really dining out, and if they were Grayson would notify her
mother that she was staying. She did not quite know herself why
she had accepted, unless it was because she was bored and restless
at home. Perhaps, too, the lure of doing a forbidden thing
influenced her sub-consciously, the thought that her grandfather
would detest it. She had not forgiven him for the night before.
Jim Doyle left her in the back hall at the telephone, and returned
to the sitting room, dosing the door behind him. His face was set
and angry.
"I thought I told you to be pleasant."
"I tried, Jim. You must remember I hardly know her." She got up
and placed her hand on his arm, but he shook it off. "I don't
understand, Jim, and I wish you wouldn't. What good is it?"
"I've told you what I want. I want that girl to come here, and to
like coming here. That's plain, isn't it? But if you're going to
sit with a frozen face - She'll be useful. Useful as hell to a
preacher."
"I can't use my family that way."
"You and your family! Now listen, Elinor. This isn't a matter o
the Cardews and me. It may be nothing, but it may be a big thing.
I hardly know yet - " His voice trailed off; he stood with his head
bent, lost in those eternal calculations with which Elinor Doyle
was so familiar.
The doorbell rang, and was immediately followed by the opening and
closing of the front door.
>From her station at the telephone Lily Cardew saw a man come in,
little more than a huge black shadow, which placed a hat on the
stand and then, striking a match, lighted the gas overhead. In the
illumination he stood before the mirror, smoothing back his shining
black hair. Then he saw her, stared and retreated into the sitting
room.
"Got company, I see."
"My niece, Lily Cardew," said Doyle, dryly.
The gentleman seemed highly amused. Evidently he considered Lily's
presence in the house in the nature of a huge joke. He was
conveying this by pantomime, in deference to the open door, when
Doyle nodded toward Elinor.
"It's customary to greet your hostess, Louis."
"Easiest thing I do," boasted the new arrival cheerily. "'Lo, Mrs.
Doyle. Is our niece going to dine with us?"
"I don't know yet, Mr. Akers," she said, without warmth. Louis
Akers knew quite well that Elinor did not like him, and the thought
amused him, the more so since as a rule women liked him rather too
well. Deep in his heart he respected Jim Doyle's wife, and
sometimes feared her. He respected her because she had behind her
traditions of birth and wealth, things he professed to despise but
secretly envied. He feared her because he trusted no woman, and
she knew too much.
She loved Jim Doyle, but he had watched her, and he knew that
sometimes she hated Doyle also. He knew that could be, because
there had been women who had both loved and hated himself.
Elinor had gone out, and Akers sat down.
"Well," he said, in a lowered tone. "I've written it."
Doyle closed the door, and stood again with his head lowered,
considering.
"You'd better look over it," continued Lou. "I don't want to be
jailed. You're better at skating over thin ice than I am. And
I've been thinking over the Prohibition matter, Jim. In a sense
you're right. It will make them sullen and angry. But they won't
go the limit without booze. I'd advise cache-ing a lot of it
somewhere, to be administered when needed."
Doyle returned to his old place on the hearth-rug, still thoughtful.
He had paid no attention to Aker's views on Prohibition, nor to the
paper laid upon the desk in the center of the room.
"Do you know that that girl in the hall will be worth forty million
dollars some day?"
"Some money," said Akers, calmly. "Which reminds me, Jim, that
I've got to have a raise. And pretty soon."
"You get plenty, if you'd leave women alone."
"Tell them to leave me alone, then," said Akers, stretching out his
long legs. "All right. We'll talk about that, after dinner. What
about this forty millions?"
Doyle looked at him quickly. Akers' speech about women had
crystallized the vague plans which Lily's arrival had suddenly given
rise to. He gave the young man a careful scrutiny, from his handsome
head to his feet, and smiled. It had occurred to him that the
Cardew family would loathe a man of Louis Akers' type with an entire
and whole-hearted loathing.
"You might try to make her have a pleasant evening," he suggested
dryly. "And, to do that, it might be as well to remember a number
of things, one of which is that she is accustomed to the society of
gentlemen."
"All right, old dear," said Akers, without resentment.
"She hates her grandfather like poison," Doyle went on. "She doesn't
know it, but she does. A little education, and it is just possible - "
"Get Olga. I'm no kindergarten teacher."
"You haven't seen her in the light yet."
Louis Akers smiled and carefully settled his tie.
Like Doyle, Akers loved the game of life, and he liked playing for
high stakes. He had joined forces with Doyle because the game was
dangerous and exciting, rather than because of any real conviction.
Doyle had a fanatic faith, with all his calculation, but Louis
Akers had only calculation and ambition. A practicing attorney in
the city, a specialist in union law openly, a Red in secret, he
played his triple game shrewdly and with zest.
Doyle turned to go, then stopped and came back. "I was forgetting
something," he said, slowly. "What possessed you to take that Boyd
girl to the Searing Building the other night?"
"Who told you that?"
"Woslosky saw you coming out."
"I had left something there," Akers said sullenly. "That's the
truth, whether you believe it or not. I wasn't there two minutes.
"You're a fool, Louis," Doyle said coldly. "You'll play that game
once too often. What happens to you is your own concern, but what
may happen to me is mine. And I'll take mighty good care it doesn't
happen."
Doyle was all unction and hospitality when he met Lily in the hall.
At dinner he was brilliant, witty, the gracious host. Akers played
up to him. At the foot of the table Elinor sat, outwardly passive,
inwardly puzzled, and watched Lily. She knew the contrast the girl
must be drawing, between the bright little meal, with its simple
service and clever talk, and those dreary formal dinners at home
when old Anthony sometimes never spoke at all, or again used his
caustic tongue like a scourge. Elinor did not hate her father; he
was simply no longer her father. As for Howard, she had had a
childish affection for him, but he had gone away early to school,
and she hardly knew him. But she did not want his child here,
drinking in as she was, without clearly understanding what they
meant, Doyle's theories of unrest and revolution.
"You will find that I am an idealist, in a way," he was saying.
"That is, if you come often. I hope you will, by the way. I am
perpetually dissatisfied with things as they are, and wanting them
changed. With the single exception of my wife" - he bowed to
Elinor, "and this little party, which is delightful."
"Are you a Socialist?" Lily demanded, in her direct way.
"Well, you might call it that. I go a bit further."
"Don't talk politics, Jim," Elinor hastily interposed. He caught
her eye and grinned.
"I'm not talking politics, my dear." He turned to Lily, smiling.
"For one thing, I don't believe that any one should have a lot of
money, so that a taxicab could remain ticking away fabulous sums
while a charming young lady dines at her leisure." He smiled again.
"Will it be a lot?" Lily asked. "I thought I'd better keep him,
because - " She hesitated.
"Because this neighborhood is unlikely to have a cab stand? You
were entirely right. But I can see that you won't like my
idealistic community. You see, in it everybody will have enough,
and nobody will have too much."
"Don't take him too seriously, Miss Cardew," said Akers, bending
forward. "You and I know that there isn't such a thing as too much."
Elinor changed the subject; as a girl she had drawn rather well,
and she had retained her interest in that form of art. There was
an exhibition in town of colored drawings. Lily should see them.
But Jim Doyle countered her move.
"I forgot to mention," he said, "that in this ideal world we were
discussing the arts will flourish. Not at once, of course,
because the artists will be fighting - "
"Fighting?"
"Per aspera ad astra," put in Louis Akers. "You cannot change a
world in a day, without revolution - "
"But you don't believe that revolution is ever worth while, do you?"
"If it would drive starvation and wretchedness from the world, yes."
Lily found Louis Akers interesting. Certainly he was very handsome.
And after all, why should there be misery and hunger in the world?
There must be enough for all. It was hardly fair, for instance,
that she should have so much, and others scarcely anything. Only
it was like thinking about religion; you didn't get anywhere with it.
You wanted to be good, and tried to be. And you wanted to love God,
only He seemed so far away, mostly. And even that was confusing,
because you prayed to God to be forgiven for wickedness, but it was
to His Son our Lord one went for help in trouble.
One could be sorry for the poor, and even give away all one had, but
that would only help a few. It would have to be that every one who
had too much would give up all but what he needed.
Lily tried to put that into words.
"Exactly," said Jim Doyle. "Only in my new world we realize that
there would be a few craven spirits who might not willingly give up
what they have. In that case it would be taken from them."
"And that is what you call revolution?"
"Precisely."
"But that's not revolution. It is a sort of justice, isn't it?"
"You think very straight, young lady," said Jim Doyle.
He had a fascinating theory of individualism, too; no man should
impose his will and no community its laws, on the individual. Laws
were for slaves. Ethics were better than laws, to control.
"Although," he added, urbanely, "I daresay it might be difficult to
convert Mr. Anthony Cardew to such a belief."
While Louis Akers saw Lily to her taxicab that night Doyle stood
in the hall, waiting. He was very content with his evening's work.
"Well?" he said, when Akers returned.
"Merry as a marriage bell. I'm to show her the Brunelleschi
drawings to-morrow."
Slightly flushed, he smoothed his hair in front of the mirror over
the stand.
"She's a nice child," he said. In his eyes was the look of the
hunting animal that scents food.
CHAPTER X
Lily did not sleep very well that night. She was repentant, for
one thing, for her mother's evening alone, and for the anxiety in
her face when she arrived.
"I've been so worried," she said, "I was afraid your grandfather
would get back before you did."
"I'm sorry, mother dear. I know it was selfish. But I've had a
wonderful evening."
"Wonderful?"
"All sorts of talk," Lily said, and hesitated. After all, her
mother would not understand, and it would only make her uneasy.
"I suppose it is rank hearsay to say it, but I like Mr. Doyle."
"I detest him."
"But you don't know him, do you?"
"I know he is stirring up all sorts of trouble for us. Lily, I
want you to promise not to go back there."
There was a little silence. A small feeling of rebellion was
rising in the girl's heart.
"I don't see why. She is my own aunt."
"Will you promise?"
"Please don't ask me, mother. I - oh, don't you understand? It
is interesting there, that's all. It isn't wrong to go. And the
moment you forbid it you make me want to go back."
"Were there any other people there to dinner?" Grace asked, with
sudden suspicion.
"Only one man. A lawyer named Akers."
The name meant nothing to Grace Cardew.
"A young man?"
"Not very young. In his thirties, I should think," Lily hesitated
again. She had meant to tell her mother of the engagement for the
next day, but Grace's attitude made it difficult. To be absolutely
forbidden to meet Louis Akers at the gallery, and to be able to
give no reason beyond the fact that she had met him at the Doyle
house, seemed absurd.
"A gentleman?"
"I hardly know," Lily said frankly. "In your sense of the word,
perhaps not, mother. But he is very clever."
Grace Cardew sighed and picked up her book. She never retired until
Howard came in. And Lily went upstairs, uneasy and a little defiant.
She must live her own life, somehow; have her own friends; think her
own thoughts. The quiet tyranny of the family was again closing down
on her. It would squeeze her dry, in the end, as it had her mother
and Aunt Elinor.
She stood for a time by her window, looking out at the city. Behind
her was her warm, luxurious room, her deep, soft bed. Yet all
through the city there were those who did not sleep warm and soft.
Close by, perhaps, in that deteriorated neighborhood, there were
children that very night going to bed hungry.
Because things had always been like that, should they always be so?
Wasn't Mr. Doyle right, after all? Only he went very far. You
couldn't, for instance, take from a man the thing he had earned.
What about the people who did not try to earn?
She rather thought she would be clearer about it if she talked to
Willy Cameron.
She went to bed at last, a troubled young thing in a soft white
night-gown, passionately in revolt against the injustice which gave
to her so much and to others so little. And against that quiet
domestic tyranny which was forcing her to her first deceit.
Yet the visit to the gallery was innocuous enough. Louis Akers
met her there, and carefully made the rounds with her. Then he
suggested tea, and chose a quiet tea-room, and a corner.
"I'll tell you something, now it's over," he said, his bold eyes
fixed on hers. "I loathe galleries and pictures. I wanted to see
you again. That's all. You see, I am starting in by being honest
with you."
She was rather uncomfortable.
"Why don't you like pictures?"
"Because they are only imitations of life. I like life." He pushed
his teacup away. "I don't want tea either. Tea was an excuse,
too." He smiled at her. "Perhaps you don't like honesty," he said.
"If you don't you won't care for me."
She was too inexperienced to recognize the gulf between frankness
and effrontery, but he made her vaguely uneasy. He knew so many
things, and yet he was so obviously not quite a gentleman, in her
family's sense of the word. He had a curious effect on her, too,
one that she resented. He made her insistently conscious of her
sex.
And of his. His very deference had something of restraint about it.
She thought, trying to drink her tea quietly, that he might be very
terrible if he loved any one. There was a sort of repressed
fierceness behind his suavity.
But he interested her, and he was undeniably handsome, not in her
father's way but with high-colored, almost dramatic good looks.
There could be no doubt, too, that he was interested in her. He
rarely took his eyes off hers. Afterwards she was to know well
that bold possessive look of his.
It was just before they left that he said:
"I am going to see you again, you know. May I come in some
afternoon?"
Lily had been foreseeing that for some moments, and she raised
frank eyes to his.
"I am afraid not," she said. "You see, you are a friend of Mr.
Doyle's, and you must know that my people and Aunt Elinor's husband
are on bad terms."
"What has that got to do with you and me?" Then he laughed. "Might
be unpleasant, I suppose. But you go to the Doyles'."
She was very earnest.
"My mother knows, but my grandfather wouldn't permit it if he knew."
"And you put up with that sort of thing?" He leaned closer to her.
"You are not a baby, you know. But I will say you are a good sport
to do it, anyhow."
"I'm not very comfortable about it."
"Bosh," he said, abruptly. "You go there as often as you can.
Elinor Doyle's a lonely woman, and Jim is all right. You pick your
own friends, my child, and live your own life. Every human being
has that right."
He helped her into a taxi at the door of the tea shop, giving her
rather more assistance than she required, and then standing
bare-headed in the March wind until the car had moved away. Lily,
sitting back in her corner, was both repelled and thrilled. He was
totally unlike the men she knew, those carefully repressed,
conventional clean-cut boys, like Pink Denslow. He was raw,
vigorous and possibly brutal. She did not quite like him, but she
found herself thinking about him a great deal.
The old life was reaching out its friendly, idle hands toward her.
The next day Grace gave a luncheon for her at the house, a gay
little affair of color, chatter and movement. But Lily found
herself with little to say. Her year away had separated her from
the small community of interest that bound the others together, and
she wondered, listening to them in her sitting room later, what
they would all talk about when they had exchanged their bits of
gossip, their news of this man and that. It would all be said so
soon. And what then?
Here they were, and here they would always be, their own small
circle, carefully guarded. They belonged together, they and the
men who likewise belonged. Now and then there would be changes.
A new man, of irreproachable family connections would come to live
in the city, and cause a small flurry. Then in time he would be
appropriated. Or a girl would come to visit, and by the same
system of appropriation would come back later, permanently. Always
the same faces, the same small talk. Orchids or violets at
luncheons, white or rose or blue or yellow frocks at dinners and
dances. Golf at the country club. Travel, in the Cardew private
car, cut off from fellow travelers who might prove interesting.
Winter at Palm Beach, and a bit of a thrill at seeing moving picture
stars and theatrical celebrities playing on the sand. One never
had a chance to meet them.
And, in quiet intervals, this still house, and grandfather shut
away in his upstairs room, but holding the threads of all their
lives as a spider clutches the diverging filaments of its web.
"Get in on this, Lily," said a clear young voice. "We're talking
about the most interesting men we met in our war work. You ought
to have known a lot of them."
"I knew a lot of men. They were not so very interesting. There
was a little nurse -
"Men, Lily dear."
"There was one awfully nice boy. He wasn't a soldier, but he was
very kind to the men. They adored him."
"Did he fall in love with your?"
"Not a particle."
"Why wasn't he a soldier?"
"He is a little bit lame. But he is awfully nice."
"But what is extraordinary about him, then?"
"Not a thing, except his niceness.
But they were surfeited with nice young men. They wanted something
dramatic, and Willy Cameron was essentially undramatic. Besides, it
was quite plain that, with unconscious cruelty, his physical
handicap made him unacceptable to them.
"'Don't be ridiculous, Lily. You're hiding some one behind this
kind person. You must have met somebody worth while."
"Not in the camp. I know a perfectly nice Socialist, but he was not
in the army. Not a Socialist, really. Much worse. He believes in
having a revolution."
That stirred them somewhat. She saw their interested faces turned
toward her.
"With a bomb under his coat, of course, Lily."
"He didn't bulge."
"Good-looking?"
"Well, rather."
"How old is he, Lily?" one of them asked, suspiciously.
"Almost fifty, I should say."
"Good heavens!"
Their interest died. She could have revived it, she knew, if she
mentioned Louis Akers; he would have answered to their prime requisite
in an interesting man. He was both handsome and young. But she felt
curiously disinclined to mention him.
The party broke up. By ones and twos luxuriously dressed little
figures went down the great staircase, where Grayson stood in the
hall and the footman on the doorstep signaled to the waiting cars.
Mademoiselle, watching from a point of vantage in the upper hall,
felt a sense of comfort and well-being after they had all gone.
This was as it should be. Lily would take up life again where she
had left it off, and all would be well.
It was now the sixth day, and she had not yet carried out that
absurd idea of asking Ellen's friend to dinner.
Lily was, however, at that exact moment in process of carrying it
out.
"Telephone for you, Mr. Cameron."
"Thanks. Coming," sang out Willy Cameron.
Edith Boyd sauntered toward his doorway.
"It's a lady."
"Woman," corrected Willy Cameron. "The word 'lady' is now obsolete,
since your sex has entered the economic world. He put on his coat.
"I said 'lady' and that's what I mean," said Edith. "'May I speak
to Mr. Cameron?'" she mimicked. "Regular Newport accent."
Suddenly Willy Cameron went rather pale. If it should be Lily Cardew
- but then of course it wouldn't be. She had been home for six days,
and if she had meant to call -
"Hello," he said.
It was Lily. Something that had been like a band around his heart
suddenly loosened, to fasten about his throat. His voice sounded
strangled and strange.
"Why, yes," he said, in the unfamiliar voice. "I'd like to come,
of course."
Edith Boyd watched and listened, with a slightly strained look in
her eyes.
"To dinner? But - I don't think I'd better come to dinner."
"Why not, Willy?"
Mr. William Wallace Cameron glanced around. There was no one about
save Miss Boyd, who was polishing the nails of one hand on the palm
of the other.
"May I come in a business suit?"
"Why, of course. Why not?"
"I didn't know," said Willy Cameron. "I didn't know what your people
would think. That's all. To-morrow at eight, then. Thanks."
He hung up the receiver and walked to the door, where he stood
looking out and seeing nothing. She had not forgotten. He was going
to see her. Instead of standing across the street by the park fence,
waiting for a glimpse of her which never came, he was to sit in the
room with her. There would be - eight from eleven was three - three
hours of her.
What a wonderful day it was! Spring was surely near. He would like
to be able to go and pick up Jinx, and then take a long walk through
the park. He needed movement. He needed to walk off his excitement
or he felt that he might burst with it.
"Eight o'clock!" said Edith. "I wish you joy, waiting until eight
for supper."
He had to come back a long, long way to her.
"'May I come in a business suit?'" she mimicked him. "My evening
clothes have not arrived yet. 'My valet's bringing them up to town
to-morrow."
Even through the radiant happiness that surrounded him like a mist,
he caught the bitterness under her raillery. It puzzled him.
"It's a young lady I knew at camp. I was in an army camp, you know."
"Is her name a secret?"
"Why, no. It is Cardew. Miss Lily Cardew."
"I believe you - not."
"But it is," he said, genuinely concerned. "Why in the world should
I give you a wrong name?"
Her eyes were fixed on his face.
"No. You wouldn't. But it makes me laugh, because - well, it was
crazy, anyhow."
"What was crazy?"
"Something I had in my mind. Just forget it. I'll tell you what
will happen, Mr. Cameron. You'll stay here about six weeks. Then
you'll get a job at the Cardew Mills. They use chemists there, and
you will be - "
She lifted her finger-tips and blew along them delicately.
"Gone - like that," she finished.
Sometimes Willy Cameron wondered about Miss Boyd. The large young
man, for instance, whose name he had learned was Louis Akers, did
not come any more. Not since that telephone conversation. But he
had been distinctly a grade above that competent young person,
Edith Boyd, if there were such grades these days; fluent and
prosperous-looking, and probably able to offer a girl a good home.
But she had thrown him over. He had heard her doing it, and when he
had once ventured to ask her about Akers she had cut him off curtly.
"I was sick to death of him. That's all," she had said.
But on the night of Lily's invitation he was to hear more of Louis
Akers.
It was his evening in the shop. One day he came on at seven-thirty
in the morning and was off at six, and the next he came at ten and
stayed until eleven at night. The evening business was oddly
increasing. Men wandered in, bought a tube of shaving cream or a
tooth-brush, and sat or stood around for an hour or so; clerks whose
families had gone to the movies, bachelors who found their lodging
houses dreary, a young doctor or two, coming in after evening office
hours to leave a prescription, and remaining to talk and listen.
Thus they satisfied their gregarious instinct while within easy call
of home.
The wealthy had their clubs. The workmen of the city had their
balls and sometimes their saloons. But in between was that vast,
unorganized male element which was neither, and had neither. To
them the neighborhood pharmacy, open in the evening, warm and bright,
gave them a rendezvous. They gathered there in thousands, the
country over. During the war they fought their daily battles there,
with newspaper maps. After the war the League of Nations, local
politics, a bit of neighborhood scandal, washed down with soft drinks
from the soda fountain, furnished the evening's entertainment.
The Eagle Pharmacy had always been the neighborhood club, but with
the advent of Willy Cameron it was attaining a new popularity. The
roundsman on the beat dropped in, the political boss of the ward,
named Hendricks, Doctor Smalley, the young physician who lived across
the street, and others. Back of the store proper was a room, with
the prescription desk at one side and reserve stock on shelves around
the other three. Here were a table and a half dozen old chairs, a
war map, still showing with colored pins the last positions before
the great allied advance, and an ancient hat-rack, which had held
from time immemorial an umbrella with three broken ribs and a pair
of arctics of unknown ownership.
"Going to watch this boy," Hendricks confided to Doctor Smalley a
night or two after Lily's return, meeting him outside. "He sure
can talk."
Doctor Smalley grinned.
"He can read my writing, too, which is more than I can do myself.
What do you mean, watch him?"
But whatever his purposes Mr. Hendricks kept them to himself. A
big, burly man, with a fund of practical good sense a keen
knowledge of men, he had gained a small but loyal following. He
was a retired master plumber, with a small income from careful
investments, and he had a curious, almost fanatic love for the city.
"I was born here," he would say, boastfully. "And I've seen it grow
from fifty thousand to what it's got now. Some folks say it's dirty,
but it's home to me, all right."
But on the evening of Lily's invitation the drug store forum found
Willy Cameron extremely silent. He had been going over his
weaknesses, for the thought of Lily always made him humble, and one
of them was that he got carried away by things and talked too much.
He did not intend to do that the next night, at the Cardew's.
"Something's scared him off," said Mr. Hendricks to Doctor Smalley,
after a half hour of almost taciturnity, while Willy Cameron smoked
his pipe and listened. "Watch him rise to this, though." And aloud:
"Why don't you fellows drop the League of Nations, which none of you
knows a damn about anyhow, and get to the thing that's coming in
this country?"
"I'll bite," said Mr. Clarey, who sold life insurance in the daytime
and sometimes utilized his evenings in a similar manner. "What's
coming to this country?"
"Revolution."
The crowd laughed.
"All right," said Mr. Hendricks. "Laugh while you can. I saw the
Chief of Police to-day, and he's got a line of conversation that
makes a man feel like taking his savings out of the bank and burying
them in the back yard."
Willy Cameron took his pipe out of his mouth, but remained dumb.
Mr. Hendricks nudged Doctor Smalley, who rose manfully to the
occasion. "What does he say?"
"Says the Russians have got a lot of paid agents here. Not all
Russians either. Some of our Americans are in it. It's to begin
with a general strike."
"In this town?"
"All over the country. But this is a good field for them. The
crust's pretty thin here, and where that's the case there is likely
to be earthquakes and eruptions. The Chief says they're bringing
in a bunch of gunmen, wobblies and Bolshevists from every industrial
town on the map. Did you get that, Cameron? Gunmen!"
"Any of you men here dissatisfied with this form of government?"
inquired Willy, rather truculently.
"Not so you could notice it," said Mr. Clarey. "And once the
Republican party gets in - "
"Then there will never be a revolution."
"Why?"
"That's why," said Willy Cameron. "Of course you are worthless now.
You aren't organized. You don't know how many you are or how strong
you are. You can't talk. You sit back and listen until you believe
that this country is only capital and labor. You get squeezed in
between them. You see labor getting more money than you, and howling
for still more. You see both capital and labor raising prices until
you can't live on what you get. There are a hundred times as many
of you as represent capital and labor combined, and all you do is
loaf here and growl about things being wrong. Why don't you do
something? You ought to be running this country, but you aren't.
You're lazy. You don't even vote. You leave running the country
to men like Mr. Hendricks here."
Mr. Hendricks was cheerfully unirritated.
"All right, son," he said, "I do my bit and like it. Go on. Don't
stop to insult me. You can do that any time."
"I've been buying a seditious weekly since I came," said Willy
Cameron. "It's preaching a revolution, all right. I'd like to see
its foreign language copies. They'll never overthrow the government,
but they may try. Why don't you fellows combine to fight them? Why
don't you learn how strong you are? Nine-tenths of the country,
and milling like sheep with a wolf around!"
Mr. Hendricks winked at the doctor.
"What'd I tell you?" whispered Hendricks. "Got them, hasn't he? If
he'd suggest arming them with pop bottles and attacking that gang of
anarchists at the cobbler's down the street, they'd do it this minute."
"All right, son," he offered. "We'll combine. Anything you say
goes. And we'll get the Jim Doyle-Woslosky-Louis Akers outfit first.
I know a first-class brick wall - "
"Akers?" said Willy Cameron. "Do you know him?"
"I do," said Hendricks. "But that needn't prejudice you against me
any. He's a bad actor, and as smooth as butter. D'you know what
their plan is? They expect to take the city. This city! The - "
Mr. Hendrick's voice was lost in fury.
"Talk!" said the roundsman. "Where'd the police be, I'm asking?"
"The police," said Mr. Hendricks, evidently quoting, "are as filled
with sedition as a whale with corset bones. Also the army. Also the
state constabulary."
"The hell they are," said the roundsman aggressively. But Willy
Cameron was staring through the smoke from his pipe at the crowd.
"They might do it, for a while," he said thoughtfully. "There's a
tremendous foreign population in the mill towns around, isn't there?
Does anybody in the crowd own a revolver? Or know how to use it
if he has one
"I've got one," said the insurance agent. "Don't know how it would
work. Found my wife nailing oilcloth with it the other day."
"Very well. If we're a representative group, they wouldn't need a
battery of eight-inch guns, would they?"
A little silence fell on the group. Around them the city went about
its business; the roar of the day had softened to muffled night
sounds, as though one said: "The city sleeps. Be still." The red
glare of the mills was the fire on the hearth. The hills were its
four protecting walls. And the night mist covered it like a blanket.
"Here's one representative of the plain people," said Mr. Hendricks,
"who is going home to get some sleep. And tomorrow I'll buy me a
gun, and if I can keep the children out of the yard I'll learn to
use it."
For a long time after he went home that night Willy Cameron paced
the floor of his upper room, paced it until an irate boarder below
hammered on his chandelier. Jinx followed him, moving sedately
back and forth, now and then glancing up with idolatrous eyes.
Willy Cameron's mind was active and not particularly coordinate.
The Cardews and Lily; Edith Boyd and Louis Akers; the plain people;
an army marching to the city to loot and burn and rape, and another
army meeting it, saying: "You shall not pass"; Abraham Lincoln,
Russia, Lily.
His last thought, of course, was of Lily Cardew. He had neglected
to cover Jinx, and at last the dog leaped on the bed and snuggled
close to him. He threw an end of the blanket over him and lay
there, staring into the darkness. He was frightfully lonely. At
last he fell asleep, and the March wind, coming in through the open
window, overturned a paper leaning against his collar box, on
which he had carefully written:
Have suit pressed.
Buy new tie.
Shirts from laundry.
CHAPTER XI
Going home that night Mr. Hendricks met Edith Boyd, and accompanied
her for a block or two. At his corner he stopped.
"How's your mother, Edith?"
It was Mr. Hendricks' business to know his ward thoroughly.
"About the same. She isn't really sick, Mr. Hendricks. She's just
low spirited, but that's enough. I hate to go home."
Hendricks hesitated.
"Still, home's a pretty good place," he said. "Especially for a
pretty girl." There was unmistakable meaning in his tone, and she
threw up her head.
"I've got to get some pleasure out of life, Mr. Hendricks."
"Sure you have," he agreed affably. "But playing around with Louis
Akers is like playing with a hand-grenade, Edith." She said nothing.
"I'd cut him out, little girl. He's poor stuff. Mind, I'm not
saying he's a fool, but he's a bad actor. Now if I was a pretty
girl, and there was a nice fellow around like this Cameron, I'd be
likely to think he was all right. He's got brains." Mr. Hendricks
had a great admiration for brains.
"I'm sick of men."
He turned at her tone and eyed her sharply.
"Well, don't judge them all by Akers. This is my corner. Good-night.
Not afraid to go on by yourself, are you?"
"If I ever was I've had a good many chances to get over it."
He turned the corner, but stopped and called after her.
"Tell Dan I'll be in to see him soon, Edith. Haven't seen him since
he came back from France."
"All right."
She went on, her steps lagging. She hated going home. When she
reached the little house she did not go in at once. The March night
was not cold, and she sat the step, hoping to see her mother's light
go out in the second-story front windows. But it continued to burn
steadily, and at last, with a gesture of despair, she rose and
unlocked the door.
Almost at once she heard footsteps above, and a peevish voice.
"That you, Edie?"
"Yes."
"D'you mind bringing up the chloroform liniment and rubbing my back?"
"I'll bring it, mother."
She found it on the wainscoting in the untidy kitchen. She could
hear the faint scurrying of water beetles over the oilcloth-covered
floor, and then silence. She fancied myriads of tiny, watchful eyes
on her, and something crunched under her foot. She felt like
screaming. That new clerk at the store was always talking about
homes. What did he know of squalid city houses, with their insects
and rats, their damp, moldy cellars, their hateful plumbing? A
thought struck her. She lighted the gas and stared around. It was
as she had expected. The dishes had not been washed. They were
piled in the sink, and a soiled dish-towel had been thrown over them.
She lowered the gas and went upstairs. The hardness had, somehow,
gone out of her when she thought of Willy Cameron.
"Back bad again, is it?" she asked.
"It's always bad. But I've got a pain in my left shoulder and down
my arm that's driving me crazy. I couldn't wash the dishes."
"Never mind the dishes. I'm not tired. Now crawl into bed and let
me rub you."
Mrs. Boyd complied. She was a small, thin woman in her early fifties,
who had set out to conquer life and had been conquered by it. The
hopeless drab of her days stretched behind her, broken only by the
incident of her widowhood, and stretched ahead hopelessly. She had
accepted Dan's going to France resignedly, with neither protest nor
undue anxiety. She had never been very close to Dan, although she
loved him more than she did Edith. She was the sort of woman who
has no fundamental knowledge of men. They had to be fed and mended
for, and they had strange physical wants that made a great deal of
trouble in the world. But mostly they ate and slept and went to work
in the morning, and came home at night smelling of sweat and beer.
There had been one little rift in the gray fog of her daily life,
however. And through it she had seen Edith well married, with
perhaps a girl to do the house work, and a room where Edith's mother
could fold her hands and sit in the long silences without thought
that were her sanctuary against life.
"Is that the place, mother?"
"Yes." Edith's unwonted solicitude gave her courage.
"Edie, I want to ask you something."
"Well?" But the girl stiffened.
"Lou hasn't been round, lately."
"That's all over, mother."
"You mean you've quarreled? Oh, Edie, and me planning you'd have a
nice home and everything."
"He never meant to marry me, if that's what you mean."
Mrs. Boyd turned on her back impatiently.
"You could have had him. He was crazy about you. Trouble is with
you, you think you've got a fellow hard and fast, and you begin
acting up. Then, first thing you know - "
Some of that strange new tolerance persisted in the girl. "Listen,
mother," she said. "I give you my word, Lou'd run a mile if he
thought any girl wanted to marry him. I know him better than you
do. If any one ever does rope him in, he'll stick about three
months, and then beat it."
"I don't know why we have to have men, anyhow. Put out the gas,
Edie. No, don't open the window. The night air makes me cough."
Edith started downstairs and set to work in the kitchen. Something
would have to be done about the house. Dan was taking to staying
out at nights, because the untidy rooms repelled him. And there was
the question of food. Her mother had never learned to cook, and
recently more and more of the food had been something warmed out of
a tin. If only they could keep a girl, one who would scrub and wash
dishes. There was a room on the third floor, an attic, full now of
her mother's untidy harborings of years, that might be used for a
servant. Or she could move up there, and they could get a roomer.
The rent would pay a woman to come in now and then to clean up.
She had played with that thought before, and the roomer she had had
in mind was Willy Cameron. But the knowledge that he knew the
Cardews had somehow changed all that. She couldn't picture him
going from this sordid house to the Cardew mansion, and worse still,
returning to it afterwards. She saw him there, at the Cardews,
surrounded by bowing flunkies - a picture of wealth gained from the
movies - and by women who moved indolently, trailing through long
vistas of ball room and conservatory in low gowns without sleeves,
and draped with ropes of pearls. Women who smoked cigarettes after
dinner and played bridge for money.
She hated the Cardews.
On her way to her room she paused at her mother's door.
"Asleep yet, mother?"
"No. Feel like I'm not going to sleep at all."
"Mother," she said, with a desperate catch in her voice, "we've got
to change things around here. It isn't fair to Dan, for one thing.
We've got to get a girl to do the work. And to do that we'll have
to rent a room."
She heard the thin figure twist impatiently.
"I've never yet been reduced to taking roomers, and I'm not going
to let the neighbors begin looking down on me now.
"Now, listen, mother - "
"Go on away, Edie."
"But suppose we could get a young man, a gentleman, who would be out
all but three evenings a week. I don't know, but Mr. Cameron at the
store isn't satisfied where he is. He's got a dog, and they haven't
any yard. We've got a yard."
"I won't be bothered with any dog," said the querulous voice, from
the darkness.
With a gesture of despair the girl turned away. What was the use,
anyhow? Let them go on, then, her mother and Dan. Only let them
let her go on, too. She had tried her best to change herself, the
house, the whole rotten mess. But they wouldn't let her.
Her mood of disgust continued the next morning. When, at eleven
o'clock, Louis Akers sauntered in for the first time in days, she
looked at him somberly but without disdain. Lou or somebody else,
what did it matter? So long as something took her for a little
while away from the sordidness of home, its stale odors, its
untidiness, its querulous inmates.
"What's got into you lately, Edith?" he inquired, lowering his voice.
"You used to be the best little pal ever. Now the other day, when
I called up - "
"Had the headache," she said laconically. "Well?"
"Want to play around this evening?"
She hesitated. Then she remembered where Willy Cameron would be
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