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 It stood in the district, but not of it, withdrawn from the street in a small open space which gave indication of being a flower garden in summer.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 he 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.
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: