On clear Sundays Anthony Cardew played golf all day. He kept his religious observances for bad weather, but at such times as he attended service he did it with the decorum and dignity of a Cardew, who bowed to his God but to nothing else. He made the responses properly and with a certain unction, and sat during the sermon with a vigilant eye on the choir boys, who wriggled. Now and then, however, the eye wandered to the great stained glass window which was a memorial to his wife. It said beneath: “In memoriam, Lilian Lethbridge Cardew.”
He thought there was too much yellow in John the Baptist. On the Sunday afternoon following her ride into the city with Louis Akers, Lily found herself alone. Anthony was golfing and Grace and Howard had motored out of town for luncheon. In a small office near the rear of the hall the second man dozed, waiting for the doorbell. There would be people in for tea later, as always on Sunday afternoons; girls and men, walking through the park or motoring up in smart cars, the men a trifle bored because they were not golfing or riding, the girls chattering about the small inessentials which somehow they made so important.
Lily was wretchedly unhappy. For one thing, she had begun to feel that Mademoiselle was exercising over her a sort of gentle espionage, and she thought her grandfather was behind it. Out of sheer rebellion she had gone again to the house on Cardew Way, to find Elinor out and Jim Doyle writing at his desk. He had received her cordially, and had talked to her as an equal. His deferential attitude had soothed her wounded pride, and she had told him something—very little—of the situation at home.
“Then you are still forbidden to come here?”
“Yes. As if what happened years ago matters now, Mr. Doyle.”
He eyed her.
“Don't let them break your spirit, Lily,” he had said. “Success can make people very hard. I don't know myself what success would do to me. Plenty, probably.” He smiled. “It isn't the past your people won't forgive me, Lily. It's my failure to succeed in what they call success.”
“It isn't that,” she had said hastily. “It is—they say you are inflammatory. Of course they don't understand. I have tried to tell them, but—”
“There are fires that purify,” he had said, smilingly.
She had gone home, discontented with her family's lack of vision, and with herself.
She was in a curious frame of mind. The thought of Louis Akers repelled her, but she thought of him constantly. She analyzed him clearly enough; he was not fine and not sensitive. He was not even kind. Indeed, she felt that he could be both cruel and ruthless. And if she was the first good woman he had ever known, then he must have had a hateful past.
The thought that he had kissed her turned her hot with anger and shame at such times, but the thought recurred.
Had she had occupation perhaps she might have been saved, but she had nothing to do. The house went on with its disciplined service; Lent had made its small demands as to church services, and was over. The weather was bad, and the golf links still soggy with the spring rains. Her wardrobe was long ago replenished, and that small interest gone.
And somehow there had opened a breach between herself and the little intimate group that had been hers before the war. She wondered sometimes what they would think of Louis Akers. They would admire him, at first, for his opulent good looks, but very soon they would recognize what she knew so well—the gulf between him and the men of their own world, so hard a distinction to divine, yet so real for all that. They would know instinctively that under his veneer of good manners was something coarse and crude, as she did, and they would politely snub him. She had no name and no knowledge for the urge in the man that she vaguely recognized and resented. But she had a full knowledge of the obsession he was becoming in her mind.
“If I could see him here,” she reflected, more than once, “I'd get over thinking about him. It's because they forbid me to see him. It's sheer contrariness.”
But it was not, and she knew it. She had never heard of his theory about the mark on a woman.
She was hating herself very vigorously on that Sunday afternoon. Mademoiselle and she had lunched alone in Lily's sitting-room, and Mademoiselle had dozed off in her chair afterwards, a novel on her knee. Lily was wandering about downstairs when the telephone rang, and she had a quick conviction that it was Louis Akers. It was only Willy Cameron, however, asking her if she cared to go for a walk.
“I've promised Jinx one all day,” he explained, “and we might as well combine, if you are not busy.”
She smiled at that.
“I'd love it,” she said. “In the park?”
“Wait a moment.” Then: “Yes, Jinx says the park is right.”
His wholesome nonsense was good for her. She drew a long breath.
“You are precisely the person I need to-day,” she said. “And come soon, because I shall have to be back at five.”
When he came he was very neat indeed, and most scrupulous as to his heels being polished. He was also slightly breathless.
“Had to sew a button on my coat,” he explained. “Then I found I'd sewed in one of my fingers and had to start all over again.”
Lily was conscious of a change in him. He looked older, she thought, and thinner. His smile, when it came, was as boyish as ever, but he did not smile so much, and seen in full daylight he was shabby. He seemed totally unconscious of his clothes, however.
“What do you do with yourself, Willy?” she asked. “I mean when you are free?”
“Read and study. I want to take up metallurgy pretty soon. There's a night course at the college.”
“We use metallurgists in the mill. When you are ready I know father would be glad to have you.”
He flushed at that.
“Thanks,” he said. “I'd rather get in, wherever I go, by what I know, and not who I know.”
She felt considerably snubbed, but she knew his curious pride. After a time, while he threw a stick into the park lake and Jinx retrieved it, he said:
“What do you do with yourself these days, Lily?”
“Nothing. I've forgotten how to work, I'm afraid. And I'm not very happy, Willy. I ought to be, but I'm just—not.”
“You've learned what it is to be useful,” he observed gravely, “and now it hardly seems worth while just to live, and nothing else. Is that it?”
“I suppose.”
“Isn't there anything you can do?”
“They won't let me work, and I hate to study.”
There was a silence. Willy Cameron sat on the bench, bent and staring ahead. Jinx brought the stick, and, receiving no attention, insinuated a dripping body between his knees. He patted the dog's head absently.
“I have been thinking about the night I went to dinner at your house,” he said at last. “I had no business to say what I said then. I've got a miserable habit of saying just what comes into my mind, and I've been afraid, ever since, that it would end in your not wanting to see me again. Just try to forget it happened, won't you?”
“I knew it was an impulse, but it made me very proud, Willy.”
“All right,” he said quietly. “And that's that. Now about your grandfather. I've had him on my mind, too. He is an old man, and sometimes they are peculiar. I am only sorry I upset him. And you are to forget that, too.”
In spite of herself she laughed, rather helplessly.
“Is there anything I am to remember?”
He smiled too, and straightened himself, like a man who has got something off his chest.
“Certainly there is, Miss Cardew. Me. Myself. I want you to know that I'm around, ready to fetch and carry like Jinx here, and about as necessary, I suppose. We are a good bit alike, Jinx and I. We're satisfied with a bone, and we give a lot of affection. You won't mind a bone now and then?”
His cheerful tone reassured the girl. There was no real hurt, then.
“That's nice of you, you know.”
“Well,” he said slowly, “you know there are men who prefer a dream to reality. Perhaps I'm like that. Anyhow, that's enough about me. Do you know that there is a strike coming?”
“Yes. I ought to tell you, Willy. I think the men are right.”
He stared at her incredulously.
“Right?” he said. “Why, my dear child, most of them want to strike about as much as I want delirium tremens. I've talked to them, and I know.”
“A slave may be satisfied if he has never known freedom.”
“Oh, fudge,” said Willy Cameron, rudely. “Where do you get all that? You're quoting; aren't you? The strike, any strike, is an acknowledgment of weakness. It is a resort to the physical because the collective mentality of labor isn't as strong as the other side. Or labor thinks it isn't, which amounts to the same thing. And there is a fine line between the fellow who fights for a principle and the one who knocks people down to show how strong he is.”
“This is a fight for a principle, Willy.”
“Fine little Cardew you are!” he scoffed. “Don't make any mistake. There have been fights by labor for a principle, and the principle won, as good always wins over evil. But this is different. It's a direct play by men who don't realize what they are doing, into the hands of a lot of—well, we'll call them anarchists. It's Germany's way of winning the war. By indirection.”
“If by anarchists you mean men like my uncle—”
“I do,” he said grimly. “That's a family accident and you can't help it. But I do mean Doyle. Doyle and a Pole named Woslosky, and a scoundrel of an attorney here in town, named Akers, among others.”
“Mr. Akers is a friend of mine, Willy.”
He stared at her.
“If they have been teaching you their dirty doctrines, Lily,” he said at last, “I can only tell you this. They can disguise it in all the fine terms they want. It is treason, and they are traitors. I know. I've had a talk with the Chief of Police.”
“I don't believe it.”
“How well do you know Louis Akers?”
“Not very well.” But there were spots of vivid color flaming in her cheeks. He drew a long breath.
“I can't retract it,” he said. “I didn't know, of course. Shall we start back?”
They were very silent as they walked. Willy Cameron was pained and anxious. He knew Akers' type rather than the man himself, but he knew the type well. Every village had one, the sleek handsome animal who attracted girls by sheer impudence and good humor, who made passionate, pagan love promiscuously, and put the responsibility for the misery they caused on the Creator because He had made them as they were.
He was agonized by another train of thought. For him Lily had always been something fine, beautiful, infinitely remote. There were other girls, girls like Edith Boyd, who were touched, some more, some less, with the soil of life. Even when they kept clean they saw it all about them, and looked on it with shrewd, sophisticated eyes. But Lily was—Lily. The very thought of Louis Akers looking at her as he had seen him look at Edith Boyd made him cold with rage.
“Do you mind if I say something?”
“That sounds disagreeable. Is it?”
“Maybe, but I'm going to anyhow, Lily. I don't like to think of you seeing Akers. I don't know anything against him, and I suppose if I did I wouldn't tell you. But he is not your sort.”
An impulse of honesty prevailed with her.
“I know that as well as you do. I know him better than you do. But, he stands for something, at least,” she added rather hotly. “None of the other men I know stand for anything very much. Even you, Willy.”
“I stand for the preservation of my country,” he said gravely. “I mean, I represent a lot of people who—well, who don't believe that change always means progress, and who do intend that the changes Doyle and Akers and that lot want they won't get. I don't believe—if you say you want what they want—that you know what you are talking about.”
“Perhaps I am more intelligent than you think I am.”
He was, of course, utterly wretched, impressed by the futility of arguing with her.
“Do your people know that you are seeing Louis Akers!”
“You are being rather solicitous, aren't you?”
“I am being rather anxious. I wouldn't dare, of course, if we hadn't been such friends. But Akers is wrong, wrong every way, and I have to tell you that, even if it means that you will never see me again. He takes a credulous girl—”
“Thank you!”
“And talks bunk to her and possibly makes love to her—”
“Haven't we had enough of Mr. Akers?” Lily asked coldly. “If you cannot speak of anything else, please don't talk.”
The result of which was a frozen silence until they reached the house.
“Good-by,” she said primly. “It was very nice of you to call me up. Good-by, Jinx.” She went up the steps, leaving him bare-headed and rather haggard, looking after her.
He took the dog and went out into the country on foot, tramping through the mud without noticing it, and now and then making little despairing gestures. He was helpless. He had cut himself off from her like a fool. Akers. Akers and Edith Boyd. Other women. Akers and other women. And now Lily. Good God, Lily!
Jinx was tired. He begged to be carried, planting two muddy feet on his master's shabby trouser leg, and pleading with low whines. Willy Cameron stooped and, gathering up the little animal, tucked him under his arm. When it commenced to rain he put him under his coat and plunged his head through the mud and wet toward home.
Lily had entered the house in a white fury, but a moment later she was remorseful. For one thing, her own anger bewildered her. After all, he had meant well, and it was like him to be honest, even if it cost him something he valued.
She ran to the door and looked around for him, but he had disappeared. She went in again, remorseful and unhappy. What had come over her to treat him like that? He had looked almost stricken.
“Mr. Akers is calling, Miss Cardew,” said the footman. “He is in the drawing-room.”
Lily went in slowly.
Louis Akers had been waiting for some time. He had lounged into the drawing-room, with an ease assumed for the servant's benefit, and had immediately lighted a cigarette. That done, and the servant departed, he had carefully appraised his surroundings. He liked the stiff formality of the room. He liked the servant in his dark maroon livery. He liked the silence and decorum. Most of all, he liked himself in these surroundings. He wandered around, touching a bowl here, a vase there, eyeing carefully the ancient altar cloth that lay on a table, the old needle-work tapestry on the chairs.
He saw himself fitted into this environment, a part of it; coming down the staircase, followed by his wife, and getting into his waiting limousine; sitting at the head of his table, while the important men of the city listened to what he had to say. It would come, as sure as God made little fishes. And Doyle was a fool. He, Louis Akers, would marry Lily Cardew and block that other game. But he would let the Cardews know who it was who had blocked it and saved their skins. They'd have to receive him after that; they would cringe to him.
Then, unexpectedly, he had one of the shocks of his life. He had gone to the window and through it he saw Lily and Willy Cameron outside. He clutched at the curtain and cursed under his breath, apprehensively. But Willy Cameron did not come in; Akers watched him up the street with calculating, slightly narrowed eyes. The fact that Lily Cardew knew the clerk at the Eagle Pharmacy was an unexpected complication. His surprise was lost in anxiety. But Lily, entering the room a moment later, rather pale and unsmiling, found him facing the door, his manner easy, his head well up, and drawn to his full and rather overwhelming height. She found her poise entirely gone, and it was he who spoke first.
“I know,” he said. “You didn't ask me, but I came anyhow.”
She held out her hand rather primly.
“It is very good of you to come.”
“Good! I couldn't stay away.”
He took her outstretched hand, smiling down at her, and suddenly made an attempt to draw her to him.
“You know that, don't you?”
“Please!”
He let her go at once. He had not played his little game so long without learning its fine points. There were times to woo a woman with a strong arm, and there were other times that required other methods.
“Right-o,” he said, “I'm sorry. I've been thinking about you so much that I daresay I have got farther in our friendship than I should. Do you know that you haven't been out of my mind since that ride we had together?”
“Really? Would you like some tea?”
“Thanks, yes. Do you dislike my telling you that?”
She rang the bell, and then stood Lacing him.
“I don't mind, no. But I am trying very hard to forget that ride, and I don't want to talk about it.”
“When a beautiful thing comes into a man's life he likes to remember it.”
“How can you call it beautiful?”
“Isn't it rather fine when two people, a man and a woman, suddenly find a tremendous attraction that draws them together, in spite of the fact that everything else is conspiring to keep them apart?”
“I don't know,” she said uncertainly. “It just seemed all wrong, somehow.”
“An honest impulse is never wrong.”
“I don't want to discuss it, Mr. Akers. It is over.”
While he was away from her, her attraction for him loomed less than the things she promised, of power and gratified ambition. But he found her, with her gentle aloofness, exceedingly appealing, and with the tact of the man who understands women he adapted himself to her humor.
“You are making me very unhappy; Miss Lily,” he said. “If you'll only promise to let me see you now and then, I'll promise to be as mild as dish-water. Will you promise?”
She was still struggling, still remembering Willy Cameron, still trying to remember all the things that Louis Akers was not.
“I think I ought not to see you at all.”
“Then,” he said slowly, “you are going to cut me off from the one decent influence in my life.”
She was still revolving that in her mind when tea came. Akers, having shot his bolt, watched with interest the preparation for the little ceremony, the old Georgian teaspoons, the Crown Derby cups, the bell-shaped Queen Anne teapot, beautifully chased, the old pierced sugar basin. Almost his gaze was proprietary. And he watched Lily, her casual handling of those priceless treasures, her taking for granted of service and beauty, her acceptance of quality because she had never known anything else, watched her with possessive eyes.
When the servant had gone, he said:
“You are being very nice to me, in view of the fact that you did not ask me to come. And also remembering that your family does not happen to care about me.”
“They are not at home.”
“I knew that, or I should not have come. I don't want to make trouble for you, child.” His voice was infinitely caressing. “As it happens, I know your grandfather's Sunday habits, and I met your father and mother on the road going out of town at noon. I knew they had not come back.”
“How do you know that?”
He smiled down at her. “I have ways of knowing quite a lot of things. Especially when they are as vital to me as this few minutes alone with you.”
He bent toward her, as he sat behind the tea table.
“You know how vital this is to me, don't you?” he said. “You're not going to cut me off, are you?”
He stood over her, big, compelling, dominant, and put his hand under her chin.
“I am insane about you,” he whispered, and waited.
Slowly, irresistibly, she lifted her face to his kiss.
On the first day of May, William Wallace Cameron moved his trunk, the framed photograph of his mother, eleven books, an alarm clock and Jinx to the Boyd house. He went for two reasons. First, after his initial call at the dreary little house, he began to realize that something had to be done in the Boyd family. The second reason was his dog.
He began to realize that something had to be done in the Boyd family as soon as he had met Mrs. Boyd.
“I don't know what's come over the children,” Mrs. Boyd said, fretfully. She sat rocking persistently in the dreary little parlor. Her chair inched steadily along the dull carpet, and once or twice she brought up just as she was about to make a gradual exit from the room. “They act so queer lately.”
She hitched the chair into place again. Edith had gone out. It was her idea of an evening call to serve cakes and coffee, and a strong and acrid odor was seeping through the doorway. “There's Dan come home from the war, and when he gets back from the mill he just sits and stares ahead of him. He won't even talk about the war, although he's got a lot to tell.”
“It takes some time for the men who were over to get settled down again, you know.”
“Well, there's Edith,” continued the querulous voice. “You'd think the cat had got her tongue, too. I tell you, Mr. Cameron, there are meals here when if I didn't talk there wouldn't be a word spoken.”
Mr. Cameron looked up. It had occurred to him lately, not precisely that a cat had got away with Edith's tongue, but that something undeniably had got away with her cheerfulness. There were entire days in the store when she neglected to manicure her nails, and stood looking out past the fading primrose in the window to the street. But there were no longer any shrewd comments on the passers-by.
“Of course, the house isn't very cheerful,” sighed Mrs. Boyd. “I'm a sick woman, Mr. Cameron. My back hurts most of the time. It just aches and aches.”
“I know,” said Mr. Cameron. “My mother has that, sometimes. If you like I'll mix you up some liniment, and Miss Edith can bring it to you.”
“Thanks. I've tried most everything. Edith wants to rent a room, so we can keep a hired girl, but it's hard to get a girl. They want all the money on earth, and they eat something awful. That's a nice friendly dog of yours, Mr. Cameron.”
It was perhaps Jinx who decided Willy Cameron. Jinx was at that moment occupying the only upholstered chair, but he had developed a strong liking for the frail little lady with the querulous voice and the shabby black dress. He had, indeed, insisted shortly after his entrance on leaping into her lap, and had thus sat for some time, completely eclipsing his hostess.
“Just let him sit,” Mrs. Boyd said placidly. “I like a dog. And he can't hurt this skirt I've got on. It's on its last legs.”
With which bit of unconscious humor Willy Cameron had sat down. Something warm and kindly glowed in his heart. He felt that dogs have a curious instinct for knowing what lies concealed in the human heart, and that Jinx had discovered something worth while in Edith's mother.
It was later in the evening, however, that he said, over Edith's bakery cakes and her atrocious coffee:
“If you really mean that about a roomer, I know of one.” He glanced at Edith. “Very neat. Careful with matches. Hard to get up in the morning, but interesting, highly intelligent, and a clever talker. That's his one fault. When he is interested in a thing he spouts all over the place.”
“Really?” said Mrs. Boyd. “Well, talk would be a change here. He sounds kind of pleasant. Who is he?”
“This paragon of beauty and intellect sits before you,” said Willy Cameron.
“You'll have to excuse me. I didn't recognize you by the description,” said Mrs. Boyd, unconsciously. “Well, I don't know. I'd like to have this dog around.”
Even Edith laughed at that. She had been very silent all evening, sitting most of the time with her hands in her lap, and her eyes on Willy Cameron. Rather like Jinx's eyes they were, steady, unblinking, loyal, and with something else in common with Jinx which Willy Cameron never suspected.
“I wouldn't come, if I were you,” she said, unexpectedly.
“Why, Edie, you've been thinking of asking him right along.”
“We don't know how to keep a house,” she persisted, to him. “We can't even cook—you know that's rotten coffee. I'll show you the room, if you like, but I won't feel hurt if you don't take it, I'll be worried if you do.”
Mrs. Boyd watched them perplexedly as they went out, the tall young man with his uneven step, and Edith, who had changed so greatly in the last few weeks, and blew hot one minute and cold the next. Now that she had seen Willy Cameron, Mrs. Boyd wanted him to come. He would bring new life into the little house. He was cheerful. He was not glum like Dan or discontented like Edie. And the dog—She got up slowly and walked over to the chair where Jinx sat, eyes watchfully on the door.
“Nice Jinx,” she said, and stroked his head with a thin and stringy hand. “Nice doggie.”
She took a cake from the plate and fed it to him, bit by bit. She felt happier than she had for a long time, since her children were babies and needed her.
“I meant it,” said Edith, on the stairs. “You stay away. We're a poor lot, and we're unlucky, too. Don't get mixed up with us.”
“Maybe I'm going to bring you luck.”
“The best luck for me would be to fall down these stairs and break my neck.”
He looked at her anxiously, and any doubts he might have had, born of the dreariness, the odors of stale food and of the musty cellar below, of the shabby room she proceeded to show him, died in an impulse to somehow, some way, lift this small group of people out of the slough of despondency which seemed to be engulfing them all.
“Why, what's the matter with the room?” he said. “Just wait until I've got busy in it! I'm a paper hanger and a painter, and—”
“You're a dear, too,” said Edith.
So on the first of May he moved in, and for some evenings Political Economy and History and Travel and the rest gave way to anxious cuttings and fittings of wall paper, and a pungent odor of paint. The old house took on new life and activity, the latter sometimes pernicious, as when Willy Cameron fell down the cellar stairs with a pail of paint in his hand, or Dan, digging up some bricks in the back yard for a border the seeds of which were already sprouting in a flat box in the kitchen, ran a pickaxe into his foot.
Some changes were immediate, such as the white-washing of the cellar and the unpainted fence in the yard, where Willy Cameron visualized, later on, great draperies of morning glories. He papered the parlor, and coaxed Mrs. Boyd to wash the curtains, although she protested that, with the mill smoke, it was useless labor.
But there were some changes that he knew only time would effect. Sometimes he went to his bed worn out both physically and spiritually, as though the burden of lifting three life-sodden souls was too much. Not that he thought of that, however. What he did know was that the food was poor. No servant had been found, and years of lack of system had left Mrs. Boyd's mind confused and erratic. She would spend hours concocting expensive desserts, while the vegetables boiled dry and scorched and meat turned to leather, only to bring pridefully to the table some flavorless mixture garnished according to a picture in the cook book, and totally unedible.
She would have ambitious cleaning days, too, starting late and leaving off with beds unmade to prepare the evening meal. Dan, home from the mill and newly adopting Willy Cameron's system of cleaning up for supper, would turn sullen then, and leave the moment the meal was over.
“Hell of a way to live,” he said once. “I'd get married, but how can a fellow know whether a girl will make a home for him or give him this? And then there would be babies, too.”
The relations between Dan and Edith were not particularly cordial. Willy Cameron found their bickering understandable enough, but he was puzzled, sometimes, to find that Dan was surreptitiously watching his sister. Edith was conscious of it, too, and one evening she broke into irritated speech.
“I wish you'd quit staring at me, Dan Boyd.”
“I was wondering what has come over you,” said Dan, ungraciously. “You used to be a nice kid. Now you're an angel one minute and a devil the next.”
Willy spoke to him that night when they were setting out rows of seedlings, under the supervision of Jinx.
“I wouldn't worry her, Dan,” he said; “it is the spring, probably. It gets into people, you know. I'm that way myself. I'd give a lot to be in the country just now.”
Dan glanced at him quickly, but whatever he may have had in his mind, he said nothing just then. However, later on he volunteered:
“She's got something on her mind. I know her. But I won't have her talking back to mother.”
A week or so after Willy Cameron had moved, Mr. Hendricks rang the bell of the Boyd house, and then, after his amiable custom, walked in.
“Oh, Cameron!” he bawled.
“Upstairs,” came Willy Cameron's voice, somewhat thickened with carpet tacks. So Mr. Hendricks climbed part of the way, when he found his head on a level with that of the young gentleman he sought, who was nailing a rent in the carpet.
“Don't stop,” said Mr. Hendricks. “Merely friendly call. And for heaven's sake don't swallow a tack, son. I'm going to need you.”
“Whaffor?” inquired Willy Cameron, through his nose.
“Don't know yet. Make speeches, probably. If Howard Cardew, or any Cardew, thinks he's going to be mayor of this town, he's got to think again.”
“I don't give a tinker's dam who's mayor of this town, so long as he gives it honest government.”
“That's right,” said Mr. Hendricks approvingly. “Old Cardew's been running it for years, and you could put all the honest government he's given us in a hollow tooth. If you'll stop that hammering, I'd like to make a proposition to you.”
Willy Cameron took an admiring squint at his handiwork.
“Sorry to refuse you, Mr. Hendricks, but I don't want to be mayor.”
Mr. Hendricks chuckled, as Willy Cameron led the way to his room. He wandered around the room while Cameron opened a window and slid the dog off his second chair.
“Great snakes!” he said. “Spargo's Bolshevism! Political Economy, History of—. What are you planning to be? President?”
“I haven't decided yet. It's a hard job, and mighty thankless. But I won't be your mayor, even for you.”
Mr. Hendricks sat down.
“All right,” he said. “Of course if you'd wanted it!” He took two large cigars from the row in his breast pocket and held one out, but Willy Cameron refused it and got his pipe.
“Well?” he said.
Mr. Hendrick's face became serious and very thoughtful. “I don't know that I have ever made it clear to you, Cameron,” he said, “but I've got a peculiar feeling for this city. I like it, the way some people like their families. It's—well, it's home to me, for one thing. I like to go out in the evenings and walk around, and I say to myself: 'This is my town.' And we, it and me, are sending stuff all over the world. I like to think that somewhere, maybe in China, they are riding on our rails and fighting with guns made from our steel. Maybe you don't understand that.”
“I think I do.”
“Well, that's the way I feel about it, anyhow. And this Bolshevist stuff gets under my skin. I've got a home and a family here. I started in to work when I was thirteen, and all I've got I've made and saved right here. It isn't much, but it's mine.”
Willy Cameron was lighting his pipe. He nodded. Mr. Hendricks bent forward and pointed a finger at him.
“And to govern this city, who do you think the labor element is going to put up and probably elect? We're an industrial city, son, with a big labor vote, and if it stands together—they're being swindled into putting up as an honest candidate one of the dirtiest radicals in the country. That man Akers.”
He got up and closed the door.
“I don't want Edith to hear me,” he said. “He's a friend of hers. But he's a bad actor, son. He's wrong with women, for one thing, and when I think that all he's got to oppose him is Howard Cardew—” Mr. Hendricks got up, and took a nervous turn about the room.
“Maybe you know that Cardew has a daughter?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I hear a good many things, one way and another, and my wife likes a bit of gossip. She knows them both by sight, and she ran into them one day in the tea room of the Saint Elmo, sitting in a corner, and the girl had her back to the room. I don't like the look of that, Cameron.”
Willy Cameron got up and closed the window. He stood there, with his back to the light, for a full minute. Then:
“I think there must be some mistake about that, Mr. Hendricks. I have met her. She isn't the sort of girl who would do clandestine things.”
Mr. Hendricks looked up quickly. He had made it his business to study men, and there was something in Willy Cameron's voice that caught his attention, and turned his shrewd mind to speculation.
“Maybe,” he conceded. “Of course, anything a Cardew does is likely to be magnified in this town. If she's as keen as the men in her family, she'll get wise to him pretty soon.” Willy Cameron came back then, but Mr. Hendricks kept his eyes on the tip of his cigar.
“We've got to lick Cardew,” he said, “but I'm cursed if I want to do it with Akers.”
When there was no comment, he looked up. Yes, the boy had had a blow. Mr. Hendricks was sorry. If that was the way the wind blew it was hopeless. It was more than that; it was tragic.
“Sorry I said anything, Cameron. Didn't know you knew her.”
“That's all right. Of course I don't like to think she is being talked about.”
“The Cardews are always being talked about. You couldn't drop her a hint, I suppose?”
“She knows what I think about Louis Akers.”
He made a violent effort and pulled himself together. “So it is Akers and Howard Cardew, and one's a knave and one's a poor bet.”
“Right,” said Mr. Hendricks. “And one's Bolshevist, if I know anything, and the other is capital, and has about as much chance as a rich man to get through the eye of a needle.”
Which was slightly mixed, owing to a repressed excitement now making itself evident in Mr. Hendricks's voice.
“Why not run an independent candidate?” Willy Cameron asked quietly. “I've been shouting about the plain people. Why shouldn't they elect a mayor? There is a lot of them.”
“That's the talk,” said Mr. Hendricks, letting his excitement have full sway. “They could. They could run this town and run it right, if they'd take the trouble. Now look here, son, I don't usually talk about myself, but—I'm honest. I don't say I wouldn't get off a street-car without paying my fare if the conductor didn't lift it! But I'm honest. I don't lie. I keep my word. And I live clean—which you can't say for Lou Akers. Why shouldn't I run on an independent ticket? I mightn't be elected, but I'd make a damned good try.”
He stood up, and Willy Cameron rose also and held out his hand.
“I don't know that my opinion is of any value, Mr. Hendricks. But I hope you get it, and I think you have a good chance. If I can do anything—”
“Do anything! What do you suppose I came here for? You're going to elect me. You're going to make speeches and kiss babies, and tell the ordinary folks they're worth something after all. You got me started on this thing, and now you've got to help me out.”
The future maker of mayors here stepped back in his amazement, and Jinx emitted a piercing howl. When peace was restored the F.M. of M. had got his breath, and he said:
“I couldn't remember my own name before an audience, Mr. Hendricks.”
“You're fluent enough in that back room of yours.”
“That's different.”
“The people we're going after don't want oratory. They want good, straight talk, and a fellow behind it who doesn't believe the country's headed straight for perdition. We've had enough calamity bowlers. You've got the way out. The plain people. The hope of the nation. And, by God, you love your country, and not for what you can get out of it. That's a thing a fellow's got to have inside him. He can't pretend it and get it over.”
In the end the F.M. of M. capitulated.
It was late when Mr. Hendricks left. He went away with all the old envelopes in his pockets covered with memoranda.
“Just wait a minute, son,” he would say. “I've got to make some speeches myself. Repeat that, now. 'Sins of omission are as great, even greater than sins of commission. The lethargic citizen throws open the gates to revolution.' How do you spell 'lethargic'?”
But it was not Hendricks and his campaign that kept the F.M. of M. awake until dawn. He sat in front of his soft coal fire, and when it died to gray-white ash he still sat there, unconscious of the chill of the spring night. Mostly he thought of Lily, and of Louis Akers, big and handsome, of his insolent eyes and his self-indulgent mouth. Into that curious whirlpool that is the mind came now and then other visions: His mother asleep in her chair; the men in the War Department who had turned him down; a girl at home who had loved him, and made him feel desperately unhappy because he could not love her in return. Was love always like that? If it was what He intended, why was it so often without reciprocation?
He took to walking about the room, according to his old habit, and obediently Jinx followed him.
It was four by his alarm clock when Edith knocked at his door. She was in a wrapper flung over her nightgown, and with her hair flying loose she looked childish and very small.
“I wish you would go to bed,” she said, rather petulantly. “Are you sick, or anything?”
“I was thinking, Edith. I'm sorry. I'll go at once. Why aren't you asleep?”
“I don't sleep much lately.” Their voices were cautious. “I never go to sleep until you're settled down, anyhow.”
“Why not? Am I noisy?”
“It's not that.”
She went away, a drooping, listless figure that climbed the stairs slowly and left him in the doorway, puzzled and uncomfortable.
At six that morning Dan, tip-toeing downstairs to warm his left-over coffee and get his own breakfast, heard a voice from Willy Cameron's room, and opened the door. Willy Cameron was sitting up in bed with his eyes closed and his arms extended, and was concluding a speech to a dream audience in deep and oratorical tones.
“By God, it is time the plain people know their power.”
Dan grinned, and, his ideas of humor being rather primitive, he edged his way into the room and filled the orator's sponge with icy water from the pitcher.
“All right, old top,” he said, “but it is also time the plain people got up.”
Then he flung the sponge and departed with extreme expedition.