“Well, grandfather,” said Lily Cardew, “the last of the Cardews is home from the wars.”
“So I presume,” observed old Anthony. “Owing, however, to your mother's determination to shroud this room in impenetrable gloom, I can only presume. I cannot see you.”
His tone was less unpleasant than his words, however. He was in one of the rare moods of what passed with him for geniality. For one thing, he had won at the club that afternoon, where every day from four to six he played bridge with his own little group, reactionaries like himself, men who viewed the difficulties of the younger employers of labor with amused contempt. For another, he and Howard had had a difference of opinion, and he had, for a wonder, made Howard angry.
“Well, Lily,” he inquired, “how does it seem to be at home?”
Lily eyed him almost warily. He was sometimes most dangerous in these moods.
“I'm not sure, grandfather.”
“Not sure about what?”
“Well, I am glad to see everybody, of course. But what am I to do with myself?”
“Tut.” He had an air of benignantly forgiving her. “You'll find plenty. What did you do before you went away?”
“That was different, grandfather.”
“I'm blessed,” said old Anthony, truculently, “if I understand what has come over this country, anyhow. What is different? We've had a war. We've had other wars, and we didn't think it necessary to change the Constitution after them. But everything that was right before this war is wrong after it. Lot of young idiots coming back and refusing to settle down. Set of young Bolshevists!”
He had always managed to arouse a controversial spirit in the girl.
“Maybe, if it isn't right now, it wasn't right before.” Having said it, Lily immediately believed it. She felt suddenly fired with an intense dislike of anything that her grandfather advocated.
“Meaning what?” He fixed her with cold but attentive eyes.
“Oh—conditions,” she said vaguely. She was not at all sure what she meant. And old Anthony realized it, and gave a sardonic chuckle.
“I advise you to get a few arguments from your father, Lily. He is full of them. If he had his way I'd have a board of my workmen running my mills, while I played golf in Florida.”
Dinner was a relatively pleasant meal. In her gradual rehabilitation of the house Grace had finally succeeded in doing over the dining room. Over the old walnut paneling she had hung loose folds of faded blue Italian velvet, with old silver candle sconces at irregular intervals along the walls. The great table and high-backed chairs were likewise Italian, and the old-fashioned white marble fireplace had been given an over-mantel, also white, enclosing an old tapestry. For warmth of color there were always flowers, and that night there were red roses.
Lily liked the luxury of it. She liked the immaculate dinner dress of the two men; she liked her mother's beautiful neck and arms; she liked the quiet service once more; she even liked herself, moderately, in a light frock and slippers. But she watched it all with a new interest and a certain detachment. She felt strange and aloof, not entirely one of them. She felt very keenly that no one of them was vitally interested in this wonder-year of hers. They asked her perfunctory questions, but Grace's watchful eyes were on the service, Anthony was engrossed with his food, and her father—
Her father was changed. He looked older and care-worn. For the first time she began to wonder about her father. What was he, really, under that calm, fastidiously dressed, handsome exterior? Did he mind the little man with the sardonic smile and the swift unpleasant humor, whose glance reduced the men who served into terrified menials? Her big, blond father, with his rather slow speech, his honest eyes, his slight hesitation before he grasped some of the finer nuances of his father's wit. No, he was not brilliant, but he was real, real and kindly. Perhaps he was strong, too. He looked strong.
With the same pitiless judgment she watched her mother. Either Grace was very big, or very indifferent to the sting of old Anthony's tongue. Sometimes women suffered much in silence, because they loved greatly. Like Aunt Elinor. Aunt Elinor had loved her husband more than she had loved her child. Quite calmly Lily decided that, as between her husband and herself, her mother loved her husband. Perhaps that was as it should be, but it added to her sense of aloofness. And she wondered, too, about these great loves that seemed to feed on sacrifice.
Anthony, who had a most unpleasant faculty of remembering things, suddenly bent forward and observed to her, across the table:
“I should be interested to know, since you regard present conditions as wrong, and, I inferred, wrong because of my mishandling of them, just what you would propose to do to right them.”
“But I didn't say they were wrong, did I?”
“Don't answer a question with a question. It's a feminine form of evasion, because you have no answer and no remedy. Yet, heaven save the country, women are going to vote!” He pushed his plate away and glanced at Grace. “Is that the new chef's work?”
“Yes. Isn't it right?”
“Right? The food is impossible.”
“He came from the club.”
“Send him back,” ordered Anthony. And when Grace observed that it was difficult to get servants, he broke into a cold fury. What had come over the world, anyhow? Time was when a gentleman's servants stayed with the family until they became pensioners, and their children took their places. Now—!
Grace said nothing. Her eyes sought Howard's, and seemed to find some comfort there. And Lily, sorry for her mother, said the first thing that came into her head.
“The old days of caste are gone, grandfather. And service, in your sense of the word, went with them.”
“Really?” he eyed her. “Who said that? Because I daresay it is not original.”
“A man I knew at camp.”
“What man?”
“His name was Willy Cameron.”
“Willy Cameron! Was this—er—person qualified to speak? Does he know anything about what he chooses to call caste?”
“He thinks a lot about things.”
“A little less thinking and more working wouldn't hurt the country any,” observed old Anthony. He bent forward. “As my granddaughter, and the last of the Cardews,” he said, “I have a certain interest in the sources of your political opinions. They will probably, like your father's, differ from mine. You may not know that your father has not only opinions, but ambitions.” She saw Grace stiffen, and Howard's warning glance at her. But she saw, too, the look in her mother's eyes, infinitely loving and compassionate. “Dear little mother,” she thought, “he is her baby, really. Not I.”
She felt a vague stirring of what married love at its best must be for a woman, its strange complex of passion and maternity. She wondered if it would ever come to her. She rather thought not. But she was also conscious of a new attitude among the three at the table, her mother's tense watchfulness, her father's slightly squared shoulders, and across from her her grandfather, fingering the stem of his wineglass and faintly smiling.
“It's time somebody went into city politics for some purpose other than graft,” said Howard. “I am going to run for mayor, Lily. I probably won't get it.”
“You can see,” said old Anthony, “why I am interested in your views, or perhaps I should say, in Willy Cameron's. Does your father's passion for uplift, for instance, extend to you?”
“Why won't you be elected, father?”
“Partly because my name is Cardew.”
Old Anthony chuckled.
“What!” he exclaimed, “after the bath-house and gymnasium you have built at the mill? And the laundries for the women—which I believe they do not use. Surely, Howard, you would not accuse the dear people of ingratitude?”
“They are beginning to use them, sir.” Howard, in his forties, still addressed his father as “Sir!”
“Then you admit your defeat beforehand.”
“You are rather a formidable antagonist.”
“Antagonist!” Anthony repeated in mock protest. “I am a quiet onlooker at the game. I am amused, naturally. You must understand,” he said to Lily, “that this is a matter of a principle with your father. He believes that he should serve. My whole contention is that the people don't want to be served. They want to be bossed. They like it; it's all they know. And they're suspicious of a man who puts his hand into his own pocket instead of into theirs.”
He smiled and sipped his wine.
“Good wine, this,” he observed. “I'm buying all I can lay my hands on, against the approaching drought.”
Lily's old distrust of her grandfather revived. Why did people sharpen like that with age? Age should be mellow, like old wine. And—what was she going to do with herself? Already the atmosphere of the house began to depress and worry her; she felt a new, almost violent impatience with it. It was so unnecessary.
She went to the pipe organ which filled the space behind the staircase, and played a little, but she had never been very proficient, and her own awkwardness annoyed her. In the dining room she could hear the men talking, Howard quietly, his father in short staccato barks. She left the organ and wandered into her mother's morning room, behind the drawing room, where Grace sat with the coffee tray before her.
“I'm afraid I'm going to be terribly on your hands, mother,” she said, “I don't know what to do with myself, so how can you know what to do with me?”
“It is going to be rather stupid for you at first, of course,” Grace said. “Lent, and then so many of the men are not at home. Would you like to go South?”
“Why, I've just come home!”
“We can have some luncheons, of course. Just informal ones. And there will be small dinners. You'll have to get some clothes. I saw Suzette yesterday. She has some adorable things.”
“I'd love them. Mother, why doesn't he want father to go into politics?”
Grace hesitated.
“He doesn't like change, for one thing. But I don't know anything about politics. Suzette says—”
“Will he try to keep him from being elected?”
“He won't support him. Of course I hardly think he would oppose him. I really don't understand about those things.”
“You mean you don't understand him. Well, I do, mother. He has run everything, including father, for so long—”
“Lily!”
“I must, mother. Why, out at the camp—” She checked herself. “All the papers say the city is badly governed, and that he is responsible. And now he is going to fight his own son! The more I think about it, the more I understand about Aunt Elinor. Mother, where do they live?”
Grace looked apprehensively toward the door. “You are not allowed to visit her.”
“You do.”
“That's different. And I only go once or twice a year.”
“Just because she married a poor man, a man whose father—”
“Not at all. That is all dead and buried. He is a very dangerous man. He is running a Socialist newspaper, and now he is inciting the mill men to strike. He is preaching terrible things. I haven't been there for months.”
“What do you mean by terrible things, mother?”
“Your father says it amounts to a revolution. I believe he calls it a general strike. I don't really know much about it.”
Lily pondered that.
“Socialism isn't revolution, mother, is it? But even then—is all this because grandfather drove his father to—”
“I wish you wouldn't, Lily. Of course it is not that. I daresay he believes what he preaches. He ought to be put into jail. Why the country lets such men go around, preaching sedition, I don't understand.”
Lily remembered something else Willy Cameron had said, and promptly repeated it.
“We had a muzzled press during the war,” she said, “and now we've got free speech. And one's as bad as the other. She must love him terribly, mother,” she added.
But Grace harked back to Suzette, and the last of the Cardews harked with her. Later on people dropped in, and Lily made a real attempt to get back into her old groove, but that night, when she went upstairs to her bedroom, with its bright fire, its bed neatly turned down, her dressing gown and slippers laid out, the shaded lamps shining on the gold and ivory of her dressing table, she was conscious of a sudden homesickness. Homesickness for her bare little room in the camp barracks, for other young lives, noisy, chattering, often rather silly, occasionally unpleasant, but young. Radiantly, vitally young. The great house, with its stillness and decorum, oppressed her. There was no youth in it, save hers.
She went to her window and looked out. Years ago, like Elinor, she had watched the penitentiary walls from that window, with their endlessly pacing sentries, and had grieved for those men who might look up at the sky, or down at the earth, but never out and across, to see the spring trees, for instance, or the children playing on the grass. She remembered the story about Jim Doyle's escape, too. He had dug a perilous way to freedom. Vaguely she wondered if he were not again digging a perilous way to freedom.
Men seemed always to be wanting freedom, only they had so many different ideas of what freedom was. At the camp it had meant breaking bounds, balking the Military Police, doing forbidden things generally. Was that, after all, what freedom meant, to do the forbidden thing? Those people in Russia, for instance, who stole and burned and appropriated women, in the name of freedom. Were law and order, then, irreconcilable with freedom?
After she had undressed she rang her bell, and Castle answered it.
“Please find out if Ellen has gone to bed,” she said. “If she has not, I would like to talk to her.”
The maid looked slightly surprised.
“If it's your hair, Miss Lily, Mrs. Cardew has asked me to look after you until she has engaged a maid for you.”
“Not my hair,” said Lily, cheerfully. “I rather like doing it myself. I just want to talk to Ellen.”
It was a bewildered and rather scandalized Castle who conveyed the message to Ellen.
“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 stationery 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.
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.