Have suit pressed.Buy new tie.Shirts from laundry.
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 that night, and her face hardened. Had any one told Edith that she was beginning to care for the lame young man in the rear room, with his exaggerated chivalry toward women, his belief in home, and his sentimental whistling, she would have laughed. But he gave her something that the other men she knew robbed her of, a sort of self-respect. It was perhaps not so much that she cared for him, as that he enabled her to care more for herself.
But he was going to dinner with Lily Cardew.
“I might, depending on what you've got to offer.”
“I've got a car now, Edith. I'm not joking. There was a lot of outside work, and the organization came over. I've been after it for six months. We can have a ride, and supper somewhere. How's the young man with the wooden leg?”
“If you want to know I'll call him out and let him tell you.”
“Quick, aren't you?” He smiled down at where she stood, firmly entrenched behind a show case. “Well, don't fall in love with him. That's all. I'm a bad man when I'm jealous.”
He sauntered out, leaving Edith gazing thoughtfully after him. He did not know, nor would have cared had he known, that her acceptance of his invitation was a complex of disgust of home, of the call of youth, and of the fact that Willy Cameron was dining at the Cardews that night.
Howard Cardew was in his dressing room, sitting before the fire. His man had put out his dinner clothes and retired, and Howard was sifting before the fire rather listlessly.
In Grace's room, adjoining, he could hear movements and low voices. Before Lily's return, now and then when he was tired Grace and he had dined by the fire in her boudoir. It had been very restful. He was still in love with his wife, although, as in most marriages, there was one who gave more than the other. In this case it was Grace who gave, and Howard who received. But he loved her. He never thought of other women. Only his father had never let him forget her weaknesses.
Sometimes he was afraid that he was looking at Grace with his father's eyes, rather than his own.
He had put up a hard fight with his father. Not about Grace. That was over and done with, although it had been bad while it lasted. But his real struggle had been to preserve himself, to keep his faiths and his ideals, and even his personality. In the inessentials he had yielded easily, and so bought peace. Or perhaps a truce, of a sort. But for the essentials he was standing with a sort of dogged conviction that if he lowered his flag it would precipitate a crisis. He was not brilliant, but he was intelligent, progressive and kindly. He knew that his father considered him both stupid and obstinate.
There was going to be a strike. The quarrel now was between Anthony's curt “Let them strike,” and his own conviction that a strike at this time might lead to even worse things. The men's demands were exorbitant. No business, no matter how big, could concede them and live. But Howard was debating another phase of the situation.
Not all the mills would go down. A careful canvass of some of the other independent concerns had shown the men eighty, ninety, even one hundred per cent, loyal. Those were the smaller plants, where there had always been a reciprocal good feeling between the owners and the men; there the men knew the owners, and the owners knew the men, who had been with them for years.
But the Cardew Mills would go down. There had been no liaison between the Cardews and the workmen. The very magnitude of the business forbade that. And for many years, too, the Cardews had shown a gross callousness to the welfare of the laborers. Long ago he had urged on his father the progressive attitude of other steel men, but Anthony had jeered, and when Howard had forced the issue and gained concessions, it was too late. The old grievances remained in too many minds. To hate the Cardews bad become a habit. Their past sins would damn them now. The strike was wrong, a wicked thing. It was without reason and without aim. The men were knocking a hole in the boat that floated them. But—
There was a tap at his door, and he called “Come in.” From her babyhood Lily had had her own peculiar method of signaling that she stood without, a delicate rapid tattoo of finger nails on the panel. He watched smilingly for her entrance.
“Well!” she said. “Thank goodness you haven't started to dress. I tried to get here earlier, but my hair wouldn't go up, I want to make a good impression to-night.”
“Is there a dinner on? I didn't know it.”
“Not a dinner. A young man. I came to see what you are going to wear.”
“Really! Well, I haven't a great variety. The ordinary dinner dress of a gentleman doesn't lend itself to any extraordinary ornamentation. If you like, I'll pin on that medal from the Iron and Steel—Who's coming, Lily?”
“Grayson says grandfather's dining out.”
“I believe so.”
“What a piece of luck! I mean—you know what he'd say if I asked him not to dress for dinner.”
“Am I to gather that you are asking me?”
“You wouldn't mind, would you? He hasn't any evening clothes.”
“Look here, Lily,” said her father, sitting upright. “Who is coming here to-night? And why should he upset the habits of the entire family?”
“Willy Cameron. You know, father. And he has the queerest ideas about us. Honestly. And I want him to like us, and it's such a good chance, with grandfather out.”
He ignored that.
“How about our liking him?”
“Oh, you'll like him. Everybody does. You will try to make a good impression, won't you, father?”
He got up, and resting his hands on her shoulders, smiled down into her upturned face. “I will,” he said. “But I think I should tell you that your anxiety arouses deep and black suspicions in my mind. Am I to understand that you have fixed your young affections on this Willy Cameron, and that you want your family to help you in your dark designs?”
Lily laughed.
“I love him,” she said. “I really do. I could listen to him for hours. But people don't want to marry Willy Cameron. They just love him.”
There was born in Howard's mind a vision of a nice pink and white young man, quite sexless, whom people loved but did not dream of marrying.
“I see,” he said slowly. “Like a puppy.”
“Not at all like a puppy.”
“I'm afraid I'm not subtle, my dear. Well, ring for Adams, and—you think he wouldn't care for the medal?”
“I think he'd love it. He'd probably think some king gave it to you. I'm sure he believes that you and grandfather habitually hobnob with kings.” She turned to go out. “He doesn't approve of kings.”
“You are making me extremely uneasy,” was her father's shot. “I only hope I acquit myself well.”
“Hurry, then. He is sure to be exactly on the hour.” Howard was still smiling slightly to himself when, a half-hour later, he descended the staircase. But he had some difficulty first in reconciling his preconceived idea of Willy with the tall young man, with the faint unevenness of step, who responded to his greeting so calmly and so easily. “We are always glad to see any of Lily's friends.”
“It is very good of you to let me come, sir.”
Why, the girl was blind. This was a man, a fine, up-standing fellow, with a clean-cut, sensitive face, and honest, almost beautiful eyes. How did women judge men, anyhow?
And, try as he would, Howard Cardew could find no fault with Willy Cameron that night. He tried him out on a number of things. In religion, for instance, he was orthodox, although he felt that the church had not come up fully during the war.
“Religion isn't a matter only of churches any more,” said Mr. Cameron. “It has to go out into the streets, I think, sir. It's a-well, Christ left the tabernacle, you remember.”
That was all right. Howard felt that himself sometimes. He was a vestryman at Saint Peter's, and although he felt very devout during the service, especially during the offertory, when the music filled the fine old building, he was often conscious that he shed his spirituality at the door, when he glanced at the sky to see what were the prospects for an afternoon's golf.
In politics Willy Cameron was less satisfactory.
“I haven't decided, yet,” he said. “I voted for Mr. Wilson in 1916, but although I suppose parties are necessary, I don't like to feel that I am party-bound. Anyhow, the old party lines are gone. I rather look—”
He stopped. That terrible speech of Edith Boyd's still rankled.
“Go on, Willy,” said Lily. “I told them they'd love to you talk.”
“That's really all, sir,” said Willy Cameron, unhappily. “I am a Scot, and to start a Scot on reform is fatal.”
“Ah, you believe in reform?”
“We are not doing very well as we are, sir.”
“I should like extremely to know how you feel about things,” said Howard, gravely.
“Only this: So long as one party is, or is considered, the representative of capital, the vested interests, and the other of labor, the great mass of the people who are neither the one nor the other cannot be adequately represented.”
“And the solution?”
“Perhaps a new party. Or better still, a liberalizing of the Republican.”
“Before long,” said Lily suddenly, “there will be no state. There will be enough for everybody, and nobody will have too much.”
Howard smiled at her indulgently.
“How do you expect to accomplish this ideal condition?”
“That's the difficulty about it,” said Lily, thoughtfully. “It means a revolution. It would be peaceful, though. The thing to do is to convince people that it is simple justice, and then they will divide what they have.”
“Why, Lily!” Grace's voice was anxious. “That's Socialism.”
But Howard only smiled tolerantly, and changed the subject. Every one had these attacks of idealism in youth. They were the exaggerated altruism of adolescence; a part of its dreams and aspirations. He changed the subject.
“I like the boy,” he said to Grace, later, over the cribbage board in the morning room. “He has character, and a queer sort of magnetism. It mightn't be a bad thing—”
Grace was counting.
“I forgot to tell you; I think she refused Pink Denslow the other day.”
“I rather gathered, from the way she spoke of young Cameron, that she isn't interested there either.”
“Not a bit,” said Grace, complacently. “You needn't worry about him.”
Howard smiled. He was often conscious that after all the years of their common life, his wife's mind and his traveled along parallel lines that never met.
Willy Cameron was extremely happy. He had brought his pipe along, although without much hope, but the moment they were settled by the library fire Lily had suggested it.
“You know you can't talk unless you have it in your hand to wave around,” she said. “And I want to know such a lot of things. Where you live, and all that.”
“I live in a boarding house. More house than board, really. And the work's all right. I'm going to study metallurgy some day. There are night courses at the college, only I haven't many nights.”
He had lighted his pipe, and kept his eyes on it mostly, or on the fire. He was afraid to look at Lily, because there was something he could not keep out of his eyes, but must keep from her. It had been both better and worse than he had anticipated, seeing her in her home. Lily herself had not changed. She was her wonderful self, in spite of her frock and her surroundings. But the house, her people, with their ease of wealth and position, Grace's slight condescension, the elaborate simplicity of dining, the matter-of-course-ness of the service. It was not that Lily was above him. That was ridiculous. But she was far removed from him.
“There is something wrong with you, Willy,” she said unexpectedly. “You are not happy, or you are not well. Which is it? You are awfully thin, for one thing.”
“I'm all right,” he said, evading her eyes.
“Are you lonely? I don't mean now, of course.”
“Well, I've got a dog. That helps. He's a helpless sort of mutt. I carry his meat home from the shop in my pocket, and I feel like a butcher's wagon, sometimes. But he's taken a queer sort of liking to me, and he is something to talk to.”
“Why didn't you bring him along?”
Dogs were forbidden in the Cardew house, by old Anthony's order, as were pipes, especially old and beloved ones, but Lily was entirely reckless.
“He did follow me. He's probably sitting on the doorstep now. I tried to send him back, but he's an obstinate little beast.”
Lily got up.
“I am going to bring him in,” she said. “And if you'll ring that bell we'll get him some dinner.”
“I'll get him, while you ring.”
Half an hour later Anthony Cardew entered his house. He had spent a miserable evening. Some young whipper snapper who employed a handful of men had undertaken to show him where he, Anthony Cardew, was a clog in the wheel of progress. Not in so many words, but he had said: “Tempora mutantur, Mr. Cardew. And the wise employer meets those changes half-way.”
“You young fools want to go all the way.”
“Not at all. We'll meet them half-way, and stop.”
“Bah!” said Anthony Cardew, and had left the club in a temper. The club was going to the dogs, along with the rest of the world. There was only a handful of straight-thinking men like himself left in it. Lot of young cravens, letting their men dominate them and intimidate them.
So he slammed into his house, threw off his coat and hat, and—sniffed. A pungent, acrid odor was floating through a partly closed door. Anthony Cardew flung open the door and entered.
Before the fire, on a deep velvet couch, sat his granddaughter. Beside her was a thin young man in a gray suit, and the thin young man was waving an old pipe about, and saying:
“Tempora mutantur, Lily. The wise employer—”
“I am afraid, sir,” said Anthony, in a terrible voice, “that you are not acquainted with the rules of my house. I object to pipes. There are cigars in the humidor behind you.”
“Very sorry, Mr. Cardew,” Willy Cameron explained. “I didn't know. I'll put it away, sir.”
But Anthony was not listening. His eyes had traveled from an empty platter on the hearth-rug to a deep chair where Jinx, both warm and fed at the same time, and extremely distended with meat, lay sleeping. Anthony put out a hand and pressed the bell beside him.
“I want you to meet Mr. Cameron, grandfather.” Lily was rather pale, but she had the Cardew poise. “He was in the camp when I was.”
Grayson entered on that, however, and Anthony pointed to Jinx.
“Put that dog out,” he said, and left the room, his figure rigid and uncompromising.
“Grayson,” Lily said, white to the lips, “that dog is to remain here. He's perfectly quiet. And, will you find Ellen and ask her to come here?”
“Haven't I made enough trouble?” asked Willy Cameron, unhappily. “I can see her again, you know.”
“She's crazy to see you, Willy. And besides—”
Grayson had gone, after a moment's hesitation.
“Don't you see?” she said. “The others have always submitted. I did, too. But I can't keep it up, Willy. I can't live here and let him treat me like that. Or my friends. I know what will happen. I'll run away, like Aunt Elinor.”
“You must not do that, Lily.” He was very grave.
“Why not? They think she is unhappy. She isn't. She ran away and married a man she cared about. I may call you up some day and ask you to marry me!” she added, less tensely. “You would be an awfully good husband, you know.”
She looked up at him, still angry, but rather amused with this new conceit.
“Don't!”
She was startled by the look on his face.
“You see,” he said painfully, “what only amuses you in that idea is—well, it doesn't amuse me, Lily.”
“I only meant—” she was very uncomfortable. “You are so real and dependable and kind, and I—”
“I know what you mean. Like Jinx, there. I'm sorry! I didn't mean that. But you must not talk about marrying me unless you mean it. You see, I happen to care.”
“Willy!”
“It won't hurt you to know, although I hadn't meant to tell you. And of course, you know, I am not asking you to marry me. Only I'd like you to feel that you can count on me, always. The one person a woman can count on is the man who loves her.”
And after a little silence:
“You see, I know you are not in love with me. I cared from the beginning, but I always knew that.”
“I wish I did.” She was rather close to tears. She had not felt at all like that with Pink. But, although she knew he was suffering, his quietness deceived her. She had the theory of youth about love, that it was a violent thing, tempestuous and passionate. She thought that love demanded, not knowing that love gives first, and then asks. She could not know how he felt about his love for her, that it lay in a sort of cathedral shrine in his heart. There were holy days when saints left their niches and were shown in city streets, but until that holy day came they remained in the church.
“You will remember that, won't you?”
“I'll remember, Willy.”
“I won't be a nuisance, you know. I've never had any hope, so I won't make you unhappy. And don't be unhappy about me, Lily. I would rather love you, even knowing I can't have you, than be loved by anybody else.”
Perhaps, had he shown more hurt, he would have made it seem more real to her. But he was frightfully anxious not to cause her pain.
“I'm really very happy, loving you,” he added, and smiled down at her reassuringly. But he had for all that a wild primitive impulse which almost overcame him for a moment, to pick her up in his arms and carry her out the door and away with him. Somewhere, anywhere. Away from that grim old house, and that despotic little man, to liberty and happiness and—William Wallace Cameron.
Ellen came in, divided between uneasiness and delight, and inquired painstakingly about his mother, and his uncle in California, and the Presbyterian minister. But she was uncomfortable and uneasy and refused to sit down, and Willy watched her furtively slipping out again with a slight frown. It was not right, somehow, this dividing of the world into classes, those who served and those who were served. But he had an idea that it was those below who made the distinction, nowadays. It was the masses who insisted on isolating the classes. They made kings, perhaps that they might some day reach up and pull them off their thrones. At the top of the stairs Ellen found Mademoiselle, who fixed her with cold eyes.
“What were you doing down there,” she demanded.
“Miss Lily sent for me, to see that young man I told you about.”
“How dare you go down? And into the library?”
“I've just told you,” said Ellen, her face setting. “She sent for me.”
“Why didn't you say you were in bed?”
“I'm no liar, Mademoiselle. Besides, I guess it's no crime to see a boy I've known all his life, and his mother and me like sisters.”
“You are a fool,” said Mademoiselle, and turning clumped back in her bedroom slippers to her room.
Ellen went up to her room. Heretofore she had given her allegiance to Mademoiselle and Mrs. Cardew, and in a more remote fashion, to Howard. But Ellen, crying angry tears in her small white bed that night, sensed a new division in the family, with Mademoiselle and Anthony and Howard and Grace on one side, and Lily standing alone, fighting valiantly for the right to live her own life, to receive her own friends, and the friends of her friends, even though one of these latter might be a servant in her own house.
Yet Ellen, with the true snobbishness of the servants' hall, disapproved of Lily's course while she admired it.
“But they're all against her,” Ellen reflected. “The poor thing! And just because of Willy Cameron. Well, I'll stand by her, if they throw me out for it.”
In her romantic head there formed strange, delightful visions. Lily eloping with Willy Cameron, assisted by herself. Lily in the little Cameron house, astounding the neighborhood with her clothes and her charm, and being sponsored by Ellen. The excitement of the village, and the visits to Ellen to learn what to wear for a first call, and were cards necessary?
Into Ellen's not very hard-working but monotonous life had comes its first dream of romance.
For three weeks Lily did not see Louis Akers, nor did she go back to the house on Cardew Way. She hated doing clandestine or forbidden things, and she was, too, determined to add nothing to the tenseness she began to realize existed at home. She went through her days, struggling to fit herself again into the old environment, reading to her mother, lending herself with assumed enthusiasm to such small gayeties as Lent permitted, and doing penance in a dozen ways for that stolen afternoon with Louis Akers.
She had been forbidden to see him again. It had come about by Grace's confession to Howard as to Lily's visit to the Doyles. He had not objected to that.
“Unless Doyle talks his rubbish to her,” he said. “She said something the other night that didn't sound like her. Was any one else there?”
“An attorney named Akers,” she said.
And at that Howard had scowled.
“She'd better keep away altogether,” he observed, curtly. “She oughtn't to meet men like that.”
“Shall I tell her?”
“I'll tell her,” he said. And tell her he did, not too tactfully, and man-like shielding her by not telling her his reasons.
“He's not the sort of man I want you to know,” he finished. “That ought to be sufficient. Have you seen him since?”
Lily flushed, but she did not like to lie.
“I had tea with him one afternoon. I often have tea with men, father. You know that.”
“You knew I wouldn't approve, or you would have mentioned it.”
Because he felt that he had been rather ruthless with her, he stopped in at the jeweler's the next morning and sent her a tiny jeweled watch. Lily was touched and repentant. She made up her mind not to see Louis Akers again, and found a certain relief in the decision. She was conscious that he had a peculiar attraction for her, a purely emotional appeal. He made her feel alive. Even when she disapproved of him, she was conscious of him. She put him resolutely out of her mind, to have him reappear in her dreams, not as a lover, but as some one dominant and insistent, commanding her to do absurd, inconsequential things.
Now and then she saw Willy Cameron, and they had gone back, apparently, to the old friendly relationship. They walked together, and once they went to the moving pictures, to Grace's horror. But there were no peanuts to eat, and instead of the jingling camp piano there was an orchestra, and it was all strangely different. Even Willy Cameron was different. He was very silent, and on the way home he did not once speak of the plain people.
Louis Akers had both written and telephoned her, but she made excuses, and did not see him, and the last time he had hung up the receiver abruptly. She felt an odd mixture of relief and regret.
Then, about the middle of April, she saw him again.
Spring was well on by that time. Before the Doyle house on Cardew Way the two horse-chestnuts were showing great red-brown buds, ready to fall into leaf with the first warm day, and Elinor, assisted by Jennie, the elderly maid, was finishing her spring house-cleaning. The Cardew mansion showed window-boxes at each window, filled by the florist with spring flowers, to be replaced later by summer ones. A potted primrose sat behind the plate glass of the Eagle Pharmacy, among packets of flower seeds and spring tonics, its leaves occasionally nibbled by the pharmacy cat, out of some atavistic craving survived through long generations of city streets.
The children's playground near the Lily furnace was ready; Howard Cardew himself had overseen the locations of the swings and chute-the-chutes. And at Friendship an army of workers was sprinkling and tamping the turf of the polo field. After two years of war, there was to be polo again that spring and early summer. The Cherry Hill Hunt team was still intact, although some of the visiting outfits had been badly shot to pieces by the war. But the war was over. It lay behind, a nightmare to be forgotten as soon as possible. It had left its train of misery and debt, but—spring had come.
On a pleasant Monday, Lily motored out to the field with Pink Denslow. It had touched her that he still wanted her, and it had offered an escape from her own worries. She was fighting a sense of failure that day. It seemed impossible to reconcile the warring elements at home. Old Anthony and his son were quarreling over the strike, and Anthony was jibing constantly at Howard over the playground. It was not so much her grandfather's irritability that depressed her as his tyranny over the household, and his attitude toward her mother roused her to bitter resentment.
The night before she had left the table after one of his scourging speeches, only to have what amounted to a scene with her mother afterward.
“But I cannot sit by while he insults you, mother.”
“It is just his way. I don't mind, really. Oh, Lily, don't destroy what I have built up so carefully. It hurts your father so.”
“Sometimes,” Lily said slowly, “he makes me think Aunt Elinor's husband was right. He believes a lot of things—”
“What things?” Grace had asked, suspiciously.
Lily hesitated.
“Well, a sort of Socialism, for one thing, only it isn't exactly that. It's individualism, really, or I think so; the sort of thing that this house stifles.” Grace was too horrified for speech. “I don't want to hurt you, mother, but don't you see? He tyrannizes over all of us, and it's bad for our souls. Why should he bellow at the servants? Or talk to you the way he did to-night?” She smiled faintly. “We're all drowning, and I want to swim, that's all. Mr. Doyle—”
“You are talking nonsense,” said Grace sharply. “You have got a lot of ideas from that wretched house, and now you think they are your own. Lily, I warn you, if you insist on going back to the Doyles I shall take you abroad.”
Lily turned and walked out of the room, and there was something suggestive of old Anthony in the pitch of her shoulders. Her anger did not last long, but her uneasiness persisted. Already she knew that she was older in many ways than Grace; she had matured in the past year more than her mother in twenty, and she felt rather like a woman obeying the mandates of a child.
But on that pleasant Monday she was determined to be happy.
“Old world begins to look pretty, doesn't it?” said Pink, breaking in on her thoughts.
“Lovely.”
“It's not a bad place to live in, after all,” said Pink, trying to cheer his own rather unhappy humor. “There is always spring to expect, when we get low in winter. And there are horses and dogs, and—and blossoms on the trees, and all that.” What he meant was, “If there isn't love.”
“You are perfectly satisfied with things just as they are, aren't you?” Lily asked, half enviously.
“Well, I'd change some things.” He stopped. He wasn't going to go round sighing like a furnace. “But it's a pretty good sort of place. I'm for it.”
“Have you sent your ponies out?”
“Only two. I want to show you one I bought from the Government almost for nothing. Remount man piped me off. Light in flesh, rather, but fast. Handy, light mouth—all he needs is a bit of training.”
They had been in the open country for some time, but now they were approaching the Cardew's Friendship plant. The furnaces had covered the fields with a thin deposit of reddish ore dust. Such blighted grass as grew had already lost its fresh green, and the trees showed stunted blossoms. The one oasis of freshness was the polo field itself, carefully irrigated by underground pipes. The field, with its stables and grandstand, had been the gift of Anthony Cardew, thereby promoting much discussion with his son. For Howard had wanted the land for certain purposes of his own, to build a clubhouse for the men at the plant, with a baseball field. Finding his father obdurate in that, he had urged that the field be thrown open to the men and their families, save immediately preceding and during the polo season. But he had failed there, too. Anthony Cardew had insisted, and with some reason, that to use the grounds for band concerts and baseball games, for picnics and playgrounds, would ruin the turf for its legitimate purpose.
Howard had subsequently found other land, and out of his own private means had carried out his plans, but the location was less desirable. And he knew what his father refused to believe, that the polo ground, taking up space badly needed for other purposes, was a continual grievance.
Suddenly Pink stared ahead.
“I say,” he said, “have they changed the rule about that sort of thing?”
He pointed to the field. A diamond had been roughly outlined on it with bags of sand, and a ball-game was in progress, boys playing, but a long line of men watching from the side lines.
“I don't know, but it doesn't hurt anything.”
“Ruins the turf, that's all.” He stopped the car and got out. “Look at this sign. It says 'ball-playing or any trespassing forbidden on these grounds.' I'll clear them off.”
“I wouldn't, Pink. They may be ugly.”
But he only smiled at her reassuringly, and went off. She watched him go with many misgivings, his sturdy young figure, his careful dress, his air of the young aristocrat, easy, domineering, unconsciously insolent. They would resent him, she knew, those men and boys. And after all, why should they not use the field? There was injustice in that sign.
Yet her liking and real sympathy were with Pink.
“Pink!” she called, “Come back here. Let them alone.”
He turned toward her a face slightly flushed with indignation and set with purpose.
“Sorry. Can't do it, Lily. This sort of thing's got to be stopped.”
She felt, rather hopelessly, that he was wrong, but that he was right, too. The grounds were private property. She sat back and watched.
Pink was angry. She could hear his voice, see his gestures. He was shooing them off like a lot of chickens, and they were laughing. The game had stopped, and the side lines were pressing forward. There was a moment's debate, with raised voices, a sullen muttering from the crowd, and the line closing into a circle. The last thing she saw before it closed was a man lunging at Pink, and his counter-feint. Then some one was down. If it was Pink he was not out, for there was fighting still going on. The laborers working on the grounds were running.
Lily stood up in the car, pale and sickened. She was only vaguely conscious of a car that suddenly left the road, and dashed recklessly across the priceless turf, but she did see, and recognize, Louis Akers as he leaped from it and flinging men this way and that disappeared into the storm center. She could hear his voice, too, loud and angry, and see the quick dispersal of the crowd. Some of the men, foreigners, passed quite near to her, and eyed her either sullenly or with mocking smiles. She was quite oblivious of them. She got out and ran with shaking knees across to where Pink lay on the grass, his profile white and sharply chiseled, with two or three men bending over him.
Pink was dead. Those brutes had killed him. Pink.
He was not dead. He was moving his arms.
Louis Akers straightened when he saw her and took off his hat.
“Nothing to worry about, Miss Cardew,” he said. “But what sort of idiocy—! Hello, old man, all right now?”
Pink sat up, then rose stiffly and awkwardly. He had a cut over one eye, and he felt for his handkerchief.
“Fouled me,” he said. “Filthy lot, anyhow. Wonder they didn't walk on me when I was down.” He turned to the grounds-keeper, who had come up. “You ought to know better than to let those fellows cut up this turf,” he said angrily. “What're you here for anyhow?”
But he was suddenly very sick. He looked at Lily, his face drawn and blanched.
“Got me right,” he muttered. “I—”
“Get into my car,” said Akers, not too amiably. “I'll drive you to the stables. I'll be back, Miss Cardew.”
Lily went back to the car and sat down. She was shocked and startled, but she was strangely excited. The crowd had beaten Pink, but it had obeyed Louis Akers like a master. He was a man. He was a strong man. He must be built of iron. Mentally she saw him again, driving recklessly over the turf, throwing the men to right and left, hoarse with anger, tall, dominant, powerful.
It was more important that a man be a man than that he be a gentleman.
After a little he drove back across the field, sending the car forward again at reckless speed. Some vision of her grandfather, watching the machine careening over the still soft and spongy turf and leaving deep tracks behind it, made her smile. Akers leaped out.
“No need to worry about our young friend,” he said cheerfully. “He is alternately being very sick at his stomach and cursing the poor working man. But I think I'd better drive you back. He'll be poor company, I'll say that.”
He looked at her, his bold eyes challenging, belying the amiable gentleness of his smile.
“I'd better let him know.”
“I told him. He isn't strong for me. Always hate the fellow who saves you, you know. But he didn't object.”
Lily moved into his car obediently. She felt a strange inclination to do what this man wanted. Rather, it was an inability to oppose him. He went on, big, strong, and imperious. And he carried one along. It was easy and queer. But she did, unconsciously, what she had never done with Pink or any other man; she sat as far away from him on the wide seat as she could.
He noticed that, and smiled ahead, over the wheel. He had been infuriated over her avoidance of him, but if she was afraid of him—
“Bully engine in this car. Never have to change a gear.”
“You certainly made a road through the field.”
“They'll fix that, all right. Are you warm enough?”
“Yes, thank you.”
“You have been treating me very badly, you know, Miss Cardew.”
“I have been frightfully busy.”
“That's not true, and you know it. You've been forbidden to see me, haven't you?”
“I have been forbidden to go back to Cardew Way.”
“They don't know about me, then?”
“There isn't very much to know, is there?”
“I wish you wouldn't fence with me,” he said impatiently. “I told you once I was frank. I want you to answer one question. If this thing rested with you, would you see me again?”
“I think I would, Mr. Akers,” she said honestly.
Had she ever known a man like the one beside her, she would not have given him that opportunity. He glanced sharply around, and then suddenly stopped the car and turned toward her.
“I'm crazy about you, and you know it,” he said. And roughly, violently, he caught her to him and kissed her again and again. Her arms were pinned to her sides, and she was helpless. After a brief struggle to free herself she merely shut her eyes and waited for him to stop.
“I'm mad about you,” he whispered.
Then he freed her. Lily wanted to feel angry, but she felt only humiliated and rather soiled. There were men like that, then, men who gave way to violent impulses, who lost control of themselves and had to apologize afterwards. She hated him, but she was sorry for him, too. He would have to be so humble. She was staring ahead, white and waiting for his explanation, when he released the brake and started the car forward slowly.
“Well?” he said, with a faint smile.
“You will have to apologize for that, Mr. Akers.”
“I'm damned if I will. That man back there, Denslow—he's the sort who would kiss a girl and then crawl about it afterwards. I won't. I'm not sorry. A strong man can digest his own sins. I kissed you because I wanted to. It wasn't an impulse. I meant to when we started. And you're only doing the conventional thing and pretending to be angry. You're not angry. Good God, girl, be yourself once in a while.”
“I'm afraid I don't understand you.” Her voice was haughty. “And I must ask you to stop the car and let me get out.”
“I'll do nothing of the sort, of course. Now get this straight, Miss Cardew. I haven't done you any harm. I may have a brutal way of showing that I'm crazy about you, but it's my way. I'm a man, and I'm no hand kisser.”
And when she said nothing:
“You think I'm unrestrained, and I am, in a way. But if I did what I really want to do, I'd not take you home at all. I'd steal you. You've done something to me, God knows what.”
“Then I can only say I'm sorry,” Lily said slowly.
She felt strangely helpless and rather maternal. With all his strength this sort of man needed to be protected from himself. She felt no answering thrill whatever to his passion, but as though, having told her he loved her, he had placed a considerable responsibility in her hands.
“I'll be good now,” he said. “Mind, I'm not sorry. But I don't want to worry you.”
He made no further overtures to her during the ride, but he was neither sulky nor sheepish. He feigned an anxiety as to the threatened strike, and related at great length and with extreme cleverness of invention his own efforts to prevent it.
“I've a good bit of influence with the A.F.L.,” he said. “Doyle's in bad with them, but I'm still solid. But it's coming, sure as shooting. And they'll win, too.”
He knew women well, and he saw that she was forgiving him. But she would not forget. He had a cynical doctrine, to the effect that a woman's first kiss of passion left an ineradicable mark on her, and he was quite certain that Lily had never been so kissed before.
Driving through the park he turned to her:
“Please forgive me,” he said, his mellow voice contrite and supplicating. “You've been so fine about it that you make me ashamed.”
“I would like to feel that it wouldn't happen again: That's all.”
“That means you intend to see me again. But never is a long word. I'm afraid to promise. You go to my head, Lily Cardew.” They were halted by the traffic, and it gave him a chance to say something he had been ingeniously formulating in his mind. “I've known lots of girls. I'm no saint. But you are different. You're a good woman. You could do anything you wanted with me, if you cared to.”
And because she was young and lovely, and because he was always the slave of youth and beauty, he meant what he said. It was a lie, but he was lying to himself also, and his voice held unmistakable sincerity. But even then he was watching her, weighing the effect of his words on her. He saw that she was touched.
He was very well pleased with himself on his way home. He left the car at the public garage, and walked, whistling blithely, to his small bachelor apartment. He was a self-indulgent man, and his rooms were comfortable to the point of luxury. In the sitting room was a desk, as clean and orderly as Doyle's was untidy. Having put on his dressing gown he went to it, and with a sheet of paper before him sat for some time thinking.
He found his work irksome at times. True, it had its interest. He was the liaison between organized labor, which was conservative in the main, and the radical element, both in and out of the organization. He played a double game, and his work was always the same, to fan the discontent latently smoldering in every man's soul into a flame. And to do this he had not Doyle's fanaticism. Personally, Louis Akers found the world a pretty good place. He hated the rich because they had more than he had, but he scorned the poor because they had less. And he liked the feeling of power he had when, on the platform, men swayed to his words like wheat to a wind.
Personal ambition was his fetish, as power was Anthony Cardew's. Sometimes he walked past the exclusive city clubs, and he dreamed of a time when he, too, would have the entree to them. But time was passing. He was thirty-three years old when Jim Doyle crossed his path, and the clubs were as far away as ever. It was Doyle who found the weak place in his armor, and who taught him that when one could not rise it was possible to pull others down.
But it was Woslosky, the Americanized Pole; who had put the thing in a more appealing form.
“Our friend Doyle to the contrary,” he said cynically, “we cannot hope to contend against the inevitable. The few will always govern the many, in the end. It will be the old cycle, autocracy, anarchy, and then democracy; but out of this last comes always the one man who crowns himself or is crowned. One of the people. You, or myself, it may be.”
The Pole had smiled and shrugged his shoulders.
Akers did not go to work immediately. He sat for some time, a cigarette in his hand, his eyes slightly narrowed. He believed that he could marry Lily Cardew. It would take time and all his skill, but he believed he could do it. His mind wandered to Lily herself, her youth and charm, her soft red mouth, the feel of her warm young body in his arms. He brought himself up sharply. Where would such a marriage take him?
He pondered the question pro and con. On the one hand the Cardews, on the other, Doyle and a revolutionary movement. A revolution would be interesting and exciting, and there was strong in him the desire to pull down. But revolution was troublesome. It was violent and bloody. Even if it succeeded it would be years before the country would be stabilized. This other, now—
He sat low in his chair, his long legs stretched out in his favorite position, and dreamed. He would not play the fool like Doyle. He would conciliate the family. In the end he would be put up at the clubs; he might even play polo. His thoughts wandered to Pink Denslow at the polo grounds, and he grinned.
“Young fool!” he reflected. “If I can't beat his time—” He ordered dinner to be sent up, and mixed himself a cocktail, using the utmost care in its preparation. Drinking it, he eyed himself complacently in the small mirror over the mantel. Yes, life was not bad. It was damned interesting. It was a game. No, it was a race where a man could so hedge his bets that he stood to gain, whoever won.
When there was a knock at the door he did not turn. “Come in,” he said.
But it was not the waiter. It was Edith Boyd. He saw her through the mirror, and so addressed her.
“Hello, sweetie,” he said. Then he turned. “You oughtn't to come here, Edith. I've told you about that.”
“I had to see you, Lou.”
“Well, take a good look, then,” he said. Her coming fitted in well with the complacence of his mood. Yes, life was good, so long as it held power, and drink, and women.
He stooped to kiss her, but although she accepted the caress, she did not return it.
“Not mad at me, Miss Boyd, are you?”
“No. Lou, I'm frightened!”