Edith Boyd's child was prematurely born at the Memorial Hospital early the next morning. It lived only a few moments, but Edith's mother never knew either of its birth or of its death.
When Willy Cameron reached the house at two o'clock that night he found Dan in the lower hall, a new Dan, grave and composed but very pale.
“Mother's gone, Willy,” he said quietly. “I don't think she knew anything about it. Ellen heard her breathing hard and went in, but she wasn't conscious.” He sat down on the horse-hair covered chair by the stand. “I don't know anything about these things,” he observed, still with that strange new composure. “What do you do now?”
“Don't worry about that, Dan, just now. There's nothing to do until morning.”
He looked about him. The presence of death gave a new dignity to the little house. Through the open door he could see in the parlor Mrs. Boyd's rocking chair, in which she had traveled so many conversational miles. Even the chair had gained dignity; that which it had once enthroned had now penetrated the ultimate mystery.
He was shaken and very weary. His mind worked slowly and torpidly, so that even grief came with an effort. He was grieved; he knew that. Some one who had loved him and depended on him was gone; some one who loved life had lost it. He ran his hand over his singed hair.
“Where is Edith?”
Dan's voice hardened.
“She's out somewhere. It's like her, isn't it?”
Willy Cameron roused himself.
“Out?” he said incredulously. “Don't you know where she is?”
“No. And I don't care.”
Willy Cameron was fully alert now, and staring down at Dan.
“I'll tell you something, Dan. She probably saved my life to-night. I'll tell you how later. And if she is still out there is something wrong.”
“She used to stay out to all hours. She hasn't done it lately, but I thought—”
Dan got up and reached for his hat.
“Where'll I start to look for her?”
But Willy Cameron had no suggestion to make. He was trying to think straight, but it was not easy. He knew that for some reason Edith had not waited until midnight to open the envelope. She had telephoned her message clearly, he had learned, but with great excitement, saying that there was a plot against his life, and giving the farmhouse and the message he had left in full; and she had not rung off until she knew that a posse would start at once. And that had been before eleven o'clock.
Three hours. He looked at his watch. Either she had been hurt or was a prisoner, or—he came close to the truth then. He glanced at Dan, standing hat in hand.
“We'll try the hospitals first, Dan,” he said. “And the best way to do that is by telephone. I don't like Ellen being left alone here, so you'd better let me do that.”
Dan acquiesced unwillingly. He resumed his seat in the hail, and Willy Cameron went upstairs. Ellen was moving softly about, setting in order the little upper room. The windows were opened, and through them came the soft night wind, giving a semblance of life and movement under it to the sheet that covered the quiet figure on the bed.
Willy Cameron stood by it and looked down, with a great wave of thankfulness in his heart. She had been saved much, and if from some new angle she was seeing them now it would be with the vision of eternity, and its understanding. She would see how sometimes the soul must lose here to gain beyond. She would see the world filled with its Ediths, and she would know that they too were a part of the great plan, and that the breaking of the body sometimes freed the soul.
He was shy of the forms of religion, but he voiced a small inarticulate prayer, standing beside the bed while Ellen straightened the few toilet articles on the dresser, that she might have rest, and then a long and placid happiness. And love, he added. There would be no Heaven without love.
Ellen was looking at him in the mirror.
“Your hair looks queer, Willy,” she said. “And I declare your clothes are a sight.” She turned, sternly. “Where have you been?”
“It's a long story, Ellen. Don't bother about it now. I'm worried about Edith.”
Ellen's lips closed in a grim line.
“The less said about her the better. She came back in a terrible state about something or other, ran in and up to your room, and out again. I tried to tell her her mother wasn't so well, but she looked as if she didn't hear me.”
It was four o'clock in the morning when Willy Cameron located Edith. He had gone to the pharmacy and let himself in, intending to telephone, but the card on the door, edged with black, gave him a curious sense of being surrounded that night by death, and he stood for a moment, unwilling to begin for fear of some further tragedy. In that moment, what with reaction from excitement and weariness, he had a feeling of futility, of struggling to no end. One fought on, and in the last analysis it was useless.
“So soon passeth it away, and we are gone.”
He saw Mr. Davis, sitting alone in his house; he saw Ellen moving about that quiet upper room; he saw Cusick lying on the ground beside the smoldering heap that had been the barn, and staring up with eyes that saw only the vast infinity that was the sky. All the struggling and the fighting, and it came to that.
He picked up the telephone book at last, and finding the hospital list in the directory began his monotonous calling of numbers, and still the revolt was in his mind. Even life lay through the gates of death; daily and hourly women everywhere laid down their lives that some new soul be born. But the revulsion came with that, a return to something nearer the normal. Daily and hourly women lived, having brought to pass the miracle of life.
At half-past four he located Edith at the Memorial, and learned that her child had been born dead, but that she was doing well. He was suddenly exhausted; he sat down on a stool before the counter, and with his arms across it and his head on them, fell almost instantly asleep. When he waked it was almost seven and the intermittent sounds of early morning came through the closed doors, as though the city stirred but had not wakened.
He went to the door and opened it, looking out. He had been wrong before. Death was a beginning and not an end; it was the morning of the spirit. Tired bodies lay down to sleep and their souls wakened to the morning, rested; the first fruits of them that slept.
From the chimneys of the houses nearby small spirals of smoke began to ascend, definite promise of food and morning cheer behind the closed doors, where the milk bottles stood like small white sentinels and the morning paper was bent over the knob. Morning in the city, with children searching for lost stockings and buttoning little battered shoes; with women hurrying about, from stove to closet, from table to stove; with all burdens a little lighter and all thoughts a little kinder. Morning.
In her bed in the maternity ward Edith at first lay through the days, watching the other women with their babies, and wondering over the strange instinct that made them hover, like queer mis-shaped ministering angels, over the tiny quivering bundles. Some of them were like herself, or herself as she might have been, bearing their children out of wedlock. Yet they faced their indefinite futures impassively, content in relief from pain, in the child in their arms, in present peace and security. She could not understand.
She herself felt no sense of loss. Having never held her child in her arms she did not feel them empty.
She had not been told of her mother's death; men were not admitted to the ward, but early on that first morning, when she lay there, hardly conscious but in an ecstasy of relief from pain, Ellen had come. A tired Ellen with circles around her eyes, and a bag of oranges in her arms.
“How do you feel?” she had asked, sitting down self-consciously beside the bed. The ward had its eyes on her.
“I'm weak, but I'm all right. Last night was awful, Ellen.”
She had roused herself with an effort. Ellen reminded her of something, something that had to do with Willy Cameron. Then she remembered, and tried to raise herself in the bed.
“Willy!” she gasped. “Did he come home? Is he all right?”
“He's all right. It was him that found you were here. You lie back now; the nurse is looking.”
Edith lay down and closed her eyes, and the ecstasy of relief and peace gave to her pale face an almost spiritual look. Ellen saw it, and patted her arm with a roughened hand.
“You poor thing!” she said. “I've been as mean to you as I knew how to be. I'm going to be different, Edith. I'm just a cross old maid, and I guess I didn't understand.”
“You've been all right,” Edith said.
Ellen kissed her when she went away.
So for three days Edith lay and rested. She felt that God had been very good to her, and she began to think of God as having given her another chance. This time He had let her off, but He had given her a warning. He had said, in effect, that if she lived straight and thought straight from now on He would forget this thing she had done. But if she did not—
Then what about Willy Cameron? Did He mean her to hold him to that now? Willy did not love her. Perhaps he would grow to love her, but she was seeing things more clearly than she had before, and one of the things she saw was that Willy Cameron was a one-woman man, and that she was not the woman.
“But I love him so,” she would cry to herself.
The ward moved in its orderly routine around her. The babies were carried out, bathed and brought back, their nuzzling mouths open for the waiting mother-breast. The nurses moved about, efficient, kindly, whimsically maternal. Women went out when their hour came, swollen of feature and figure, and were wheeled back later on, etherealized, purified as by fire, and later on were given their babies. Their faces were queer then, frightened and proud at first, and later watchful and tenderly brooding.
For three days Edith's struggle went on. She had her strong hours and her weak ones. There were moments when, exhausted and yet exalted, she determined to give him up altogether, to live the fiction of the marriage until her mother's death, and then to give up the house and never see him again. If she gave him up she must never see him again. At those times she prayed not to love him any longer, and sometimes, for a little while after that, she would have peace. It was almost as though she did not love him.
But there were the other times, when she lay there and pictured them married, and dreamed a dream of bringing him to her feet. He had offered a marriage that was not a marriage, but he was a man, and human. He did not want her now, but in the end he would want her; young as she was she knew already the strength of a woman's physical hold on a man.
Late on the afternoon of the third day Ellen came again, a swollen-eyed Ellen, dressed in black with black cotton gloves, and a black veil around her hat. Ellen wore her mourning with the dogged sense of duty of her class, and would as soon have gone to the burying ground in her kitchen apron as without black. She stood in the doorway of the ward, hesitating, and Edith saw her and knew.
Her first thought was not of her mother at all. She saw only that the God who had saved her had made her decision for her, and that now she would never marry Willy Cameron. All this time He had let her dream and struggle. She felt very bitter.
Ellen came and sat down beside her.
“She's gone. Edith,” she said; “we didn't tell you before, but you have to know sometime. We buried her this afternoon.”
Suddenly Edith forgot Willy Cameron, and God, and Dan, and the years ahead. She was a little girl again, and her mother was saying:
“Brush your teeth and say your prayers, Edie. And tomorrow's Saturday. So you don't need to get up until you're good and ready.”
She lay there. She saw her mother growing older and more frail, the house more untidy, and her mother's bright spirit fading to the drab of her surroundings. She saw herself, slipping in late at night, listening always for that uneasy querulous voice. And then she saw those recent months, when her mother had bloomed with happiness; she saw her struggling with her beloved desserts, cheerfully unconscious of any failure in them; she saw her, living like a lady, as she had said, with every anxiety kept from her. There had been times when her thin face had been almost illuminated with her new content and satisfaction.
Suddenly grief and remorse overwhelmed her.
“Mother!” she said, huskily. And lay there, crying quietly, with Ellen holding her hand. All that was hard and rebellious in Edith Boyd was swept away in that rush of grief, and in its place there came a new courage and resolution. She would meet the future alone, meet it and overcome it. But not alone, either; there was always—
It was a Sunday afternoon, and the nurse had picked up the worn ward Bible and was reading from it, aloud. In their rocking chairs in a semi-circle around her were the women, some with sleeping babies in their arms, others with tense, expectant faces.
“Let not your heart be troubled,” read the nurse, in a grave young voice. “Ye believe in God. Believe also in Me. In my Father's house—”
There was always God.
Edith Boyd saw her mother in the Father's house, pottering about some small celestial duty, and eagerly seeking and receiving approval. She saw her, in some celestial rocking chair, her tired hands folded, slowly rocking and resting. And perhaps, as she sat there, she held Edith's child on her knee, like the mothers in the group around the nurse. Held it and understood at last.
It was at this time that Doyle showed his hand, with his customary fearlessness. He made a series of incendiary speeches, the general theme being that the hour was close at hand for putting the fear of God into the exploiting classes for all time to come. His impassioned oratory, coming at the psychological moment, when the long strike had brought its train of debt and evictions, made a profound impression. Had he asked for a general strike vote then, he would have secured it.
As it was, it was some time before all the unions had voted for it. And the day was not set. Doyle was holding off, and for a reason. Day by day he saw a growth of the theory of Bolshevism among the so-called intellectual groups of the country. Almost every university had its radicals, men who saw emerging from Russia the beginning of a new earth. Every class now had its Bolshevists. They found a ready market for their propaganda, intelligent and insidious as it was, among a certain liberal element of the nation, disgruntled with the autocracy imposed upon them by the war.
The reaction from that autocracy was a swinging to the other extreme, and, as if to work into the hands of the revolutionary party, living costs remained at the maximum. The cry of the revolutionists, to all enough and to none too much, found a response not only in the anxious minds of honest workmen, but among an underpaid intelligentsia. Neither political party offered any relief; the old lines no longer held, and new lines of cleavage had come. Progressive Republicans and Democrats had united against reactionary members of both parties. There were no great leaders, no men of the hour.
The old vicious cycle of empires threatened to repeat itself, the old story of the many led by the few. Always it had come, autocracy, the too great power of one man; then anarchy, the overthrow of that power by the angry mob. Out of that anarchy the gradual restoration of order by the people themselves, into democracy. And then in time again, by that steady gravitation of the strong up and the weak down, some one man who emerged from the mass and crowned himself, or was crowned. And there was autocracy again, and again the vicious circle.
But such movements had always been, in the last analysis, the work of the few. It had always been the militant minority which ruled. Always the great mass of the people had submitted. They had fought, one way or the other when the time came, but without any deep conviction behind them. They wanted peace, the right to labor. They warred, to find peace. Small concern was it, to the peasant plowing his field, whether one man ruled over him or a dozen. He wanted neither place nor power.
It came to this, then, Willy Cameron argued to himself. This new world conflict was a struggle between the contented and the discontented. In Europe, discontent might conquer, but in America, never. There were too many who owned a field or had the chance to labor. There were too many ways legitimately to aspire. Those who wanted something for nothing were but a handful to those who wanted to give that they might receive.
Three days before the election, Willy Cameron received a note from Lily, sent by hand.
“Father wants to see you to-night,” she wrote, “and mother suggests that as you are busy, you try to come to dinner. We are dining alone. Do come, Willy. I think it is most important.”
He took the letter home with him and placed it in a locked drawer of his desk, along with a hard and shrunken doughnut, tied with a bow of Christmas ribbon, which had once helped to adorn the Christmas tree they had trimmed together. There were other things in the drawer; a postcard photograph, rather blurred, of Lily in the doorway of her little hut, smiling; and the cigar box which had been her cash register at the camp.
He stood for some time looking down at the post card; it did not seem possible that in the few months since those wonderful days, life could have been so cruel to them both. Lily married, and he himself—
Ellen came up when he was tying his tie. She stood behind him, watching him in the mirror.
“I don't know what you've done to your hair, Willy,” she said; “it certainly looks queer.”
“It usually looks queer, so why worry, heart of my heart?” But he turned and put an arm around her shoulders. “What would the world be without women like you, Ellen?” he said gravely.
“I haven't done anything but my duty,” Ellen said, in her prim voice. “Listen, Willy. I saw Edith again to-day, and she told me to do something.”
“To go home and take a rest? That's what you need.”
“No. She wants me to tear up that marriage license.”
He said nothing for a moment. “I'll have to see her first.”
“She said it wouldn't be any good, Willy. She's made up her mind.” She watched him anxiously. “You're not going to be foolish, are you? She says there's no need now, and she's right.”
“Somebody will have to look after her.”
“Dan can do that. He's changed, since she went.” Ellen glanced toward Mrs. Boyd's empty room. “You've done enough, Willy. You've seen them through, all of them. I—isn't it time you began to think about yourself?”
He was putting on his coat, and she picked a bit of thread from it, with nervous fingers.
“Where are you going to-night, Willy?”
“To the Cardews. Mr. Cardew has sent for me.”
She looked up at him.
“Willy, I want to tell you something. The Cardews won't let that marriage stand, and you know it. I think she cares for you. Don't look at me like that. I do.”
“That's because you are fond of me,” he said, smiling down at her. “I'm not the sort of man girls care about, Ellen. Let's face that. The General Manager said when he planned me, 'Here's going to be a fellow who is to have everything in the world, health, intelligence, wit and the beauty of an Adonis, but he has to lack something, so we'll make it that'.”
But Ellen, glancing up swiftly, saw that although his tone was light, there was pain in his eyes.
He reflected on Edith's decision as he walked through the park toward the Cardew house. It had not surprised him, and yet he knew it had cost her an effort. How great an effort, man-like, he would never understand, but something of what she had gone through he realized. He wondered vaguely whether, had there never been a Lily Cardew in his life, he could ever have cared for Edith. Perhaps. Not the Edith of the early days, that was certain. But this new Edith, with her gentleness and meekness, her clear, suffering eyes, her strange new humility.
She had sent him a message of warning about Akers, and from it he had reconstructed much of the events of the night she had taken sick.
“Tell him to watch Louis Akers,” she had said. “I don't know how near Willy was to trouble the other night, Ellen, but they're going to try to get him.”
Ellen had repeated the message, watching him narrowly, but he had only laughed.
“Who are they?” she had persisted.
“I'll tell you all about it some day,” he had said. But he had told Dan the whole story, and, although he did not know it, Dan had from that time on been his self-constituted bodyguard. During his campaign speeches Dan was always near, his right hand on a revolver in his coat pocket, and for hours at a time he stood outside the pharmacy, favoring every seeker for drugs or soap or perfume with a scowling inspection. When he could not do it, he enlisted Joe Wilkinson in the evenings, and sometimes the two of them, armed, policed the meeting halls.
As a matter of fact, Joe Wilkinson was following him that night. On his way to the Cardews Willy Cameron, suddenly remembering the uncanny ability of Jinx to escape and trail him, remaining meanwhile at a safe distance in the rear, turned suddenly and saw Joe, walking sturdily along in rubber-soled shoes, and obsessed with his high calling of personal detective.
Joe, discovered, grinned sheepishly.
“Thought that looked like your back,” he said. “Nice evening for a walk, isn't it?”
“Let me look at you, Joe,” said Willy Cameron. “You look strange to me. Ah, now I have it. You look like a comet without a tail. Where's the family?”
“Making taffy. How—is Edith?”
“Doing nicely.” He avoided the boy's eyes.
“I guess I'd better tell you. Dan's told me about her. I—” Joe hesitated. Then: “She never seemed like that sort of a girl,” he finished, bitterly.
“She isn't that sort of girl, Joe.”
“She did it. How could a fellow know she wouldn't do it again?”
“She has had a pretty sad sort of lesson.”
Joe, his real business forgotten, walked on with eyes down and shoulders drooping.
“I might as well finish with it,” he said, “now I've started. I've always been crazy about her. Of course now—I haven't slept for two nights.”
“I think it's rather like this, Joe,” Willy Cameron said, after a pause. “We are not one person, really. We are all two or three people, and all different. We are bad and good, depending on which of us is the strongest at the time, and now and then we pay so much for the bad we do that we bury that part. That's what has happened to Edith. Unless, of course,” he added, “we go on convincing her that she is still the thing she doesn't want to be.”
“I'd like to kill the man,” Joe said. But after a little, as they neared the edge of the park, he looked up.
“You mean, go on as if nothing had happened?”
“Precisely,” said Willy Cameron, “as though nothing had happened.”
The atmosphere of the Cardew house was subtly changed and very friendly. Willy Cameron found himself received as an old friend, with no tendency to forget the service he had rendered, or that, in their darkest hour, he had been one of them.
To his surprise Pink Denslow was there, and he saw at once that Pink had been telling them of the night at the farm house. Pink was himself again, save for a small shaved place at the back of his head, covered with plaster.
“I've told them, Cameron,” he said. “If I could only tell it generally I'd be the most popular man in the city, at dinners.”
“Pair of young fools,” old Anthony muttered, with his sardonic smile. But in his hand-clasp, as in Howard's, there was warmth and a sort of envy, envy of youth and the adventurous spirit of youth.
Lily was very quiet. The story had meant more to her than to the others. She had more nearly understood Pink's reference to the sealed envelope Willy Cameron had left, and the help sent by Edith Boyd. She connected that with Louis Akers, and from that to Akers' threat against Cameron was only a step. She was frightened and somewhat resentful, that this other girl should have saved him from a revenge that she knew was directed at herself. That she, who had brought this thing about, had sat quietly at home while another woman, a woman who loved him, had saved him.
She was puzzled at her own state of mind.
Dinner was almost gay. Perhaps the gayety was somewhat forced, with Pink keeping his eyes from Lily's face, and Howard Cardew relapsing now and then into abstracted silence. Because of the men who served, the conversation was carefully general. It was only in the library later, the men gathered together over their cigars, that the real reason for Willy Cameron's summons was disclosed.
Howard Cardew was about to withdraw from the contest. “I'm late in coming to this decision,” he said. “Perhaps too late. But after a careful canvas of the situation, I find you are right, Cameron. Unless I withdraw, Akers”—he found a difficulty in speaking the name—“will be elected. At least it looks that way.”
“And if he is,” old Anthony put in, “he'll turn all the devils of hell loose on us.”
It was late; very late. The Cardews stood ready to flood the papers with announcements of Howard's withdrawal, and urging his supporters to vote for Hendricks, but the time was short. Howard had asked his campaign managers to meet there that night, and also Hendricks and one or two of his men, but personally he felt doubtful.
And, as it happened, the meeting developed more enthusiasm than optimism. Cardew's withdrawal would be made the most of by the opposition. They would play it up as the end of the old regime, the beginning of new and better things.
Before midnight the conference broke up, to catch the morning editions. Willy Cameron, detained behind the others, saw Lily in the drawing-room alone as he passed the door, and hesitated.
“I have been waiting for you, Willy,” she said.
But when he went in she seemed to have nothing to say. She sat in a low chair, in a soft dark dress which emphasized her paleness. To Willy Cameron she had never seemed more beautiful, or more remote.
“Do you remember how you used to whistle 'The Long, Long Trail,' Willy?” she said at last. “All evening I have been sitting here thinking what a long trail we have both traveled since then.”
“A long, hard trail,” he assented.
“Only you have gone up, Willy. And I have gone down, into the valley. I wish”—she smiled faintly—“I wish you would look down from your peak now and then. You never come to see me.”
“I didn't know you wanted me,” he said bluntly.
“Why shouldn't I want to see you?”
“I couldn't help reminding you of things.”
“But I never forget them, anyhow. Sometimes I almost go mad, remembering. It isn't quite as selfish as it sounds. I've hurt them all so. Willy, do you mind telling me about the girl who opened that letter and sent you help?”
“About Edith Boyd? I'd like to tell you, Lily. Her mother is dead, and she lost her child. She is in the Memorial Hospital.”
“Then she has no one but you?”
“She has a brother.”
“Tell me about her sending help that night. She really saved your life, didn't she?”
While he was telling her she sat staring straight ahead, her fingers interlaced in her lap. She was telling herself that all this could not possibly matter to her, that she had cut herself off, finally and forever, from the man before her; that she did not even deserve his friendship.
Quite suddenly she knew that she did not want his friendship. She wanted to see again in his face the look that had been there the night he had told her, very simply, that he loved her. And it would never be there; it was not there now. She had killed his love. All the light in his face was for some one else, another girl, a girl more unfortunate but less wicked than herself.
When he stopped she was silent. Then:
“I wonder if you know how much you have told me that you did not intend to tell?”
“That I didn't intend to tell? I have made no reservations, Lily.”
“Are you sure? Or don't you realize it yourself?”
“Realize what?” He was greatly puzzled.
“I think, Willy,” she said, quietly, “that you care a great deal more for Edith Boyd than you think you do.”
He looked at her in stupefaction. How could she say that? How could she fail to know better than that? And he did not see the hurt behind her careful smile.
“You are wrong about that. I—” He made a little gesture of despair. He could not tell her now that he loved her. That was all over.
“She is in love with you.”
He felt absurd and helpless. He could not deny that, yet how could she sit there, cool and faintly smiling, and not know that as she sat there so she sat enshrined in his heart. She was his saint, to kneel and pray to; and she was his woman, the one woman of his life. More woman than saint, he knew, and even for that he loved her. But he did not know the barbarous cruelty of the loving woman.
“I don't know what to say to you, Lily,” he said, at last. “She—it is possible that she thinks she cares, but under the circumstances—”
“Ellen told Mademoiselle you were going to marry her. That's true, isn't it?”
“Yes.”
“You always said that marriage without love was wicked, Willy.”
“Her child had a right to a name. And there were other things. I can't very well explain them to you. Her mother was ill. Can't you understand, Lily? I don't want to throw any heroics.” In his excitement he had lapsed into boyish vernacular. “Here was a plain problem, and a simple way to solve it. But it is off now, anyhow; things cleared up without that.”
She got up and held out her hand.
“It was like you to try to save her,” she said.
“Does this mean I am to go?”
“I am very tired, Willy.”
He had a mad impulse to take her in his arms, and holding her close to rest her there. She looked so tired. For fear he might do it he held his arms rigidly at his sides.
“You haven't asked me about him,” she said unexpectedly.
“I thought you would not care to talk about him. That's over and done, Lily. I want to forget about it, myself.”
She looked up at him, and had he had Louis Akers' intuitive knowledge of women he would have understood then.
“I am never going back to him, Willy. You know that, don't you?”
“I hoped it, of course.”
“I know now that I never loved him.”
But the hurt of her marriage was still too fresh in him for speech. He could not discuss Louis Akers with her.
“No,” he said, after a moment, “I don't think you ever did. I'll come in some evening, if I may, Lily. I must not keep you up now.”
How old he looked, for him! How far removed from those busy, cheerful days at the camp! And there were new lines of repression in his face; from the nostrils to the corners of his mouth. Above his ears his hair showed a faint cast of gray.
“You have been having rather a hard time, Willy, haven't you'?” she said, suddenly.
“I have been busy, of course.”
“And worried?”
“Sometimes. But things are clearing up now.”
She was studying him with the newly opened eyes of love. What was it he showed that the other men she knew lacked? Sensitiveness? Kindness? But her father was both sensitive and kind. So was Pink, in less degree. In the end she answered her own question, and aloud.
“I think it is patience,” she said. And to his unspoken question: “You are very patient, aren't you?”
“I never thought about it. For heaven's sake don't turn my mind in on myself, Lily. I'll be running around in circles like a pup chasing his tail.”
He made a movement to leave, but she seemed oddly reluctant to let him go.
“Do you know that father says you have more influence than any other man in the city?”
“That's more kind than truthful.”
“And—I think he and grandfather are planning to try to get you, when the mills reopen. Father suggested it, but grandfather says you'd have the presidency of the company in six months, and he'd be sharpening your lead pencils.”
Suddenly Willy Cameron laughed, and the tension was broken.
“If he did it with his tongue they'd be pretty sharp,” he said.
For just a moment, before he left, they were back to where they had been months ago, enjoying together their small jokes and their small mishaps. The present fell away, with its hovering tragedy, and they were boy and girl together. Exaltation and sacrifice were a part of their love, as of all real and lasting passion, but there was always between them also that soundest bond of all, liking and comradeship.
“I love her. I like her. I adore her,” was the cry in Willy Cameron's heart when he started home that night.
Elinor Doyle was up and about her room. She walked slowly and with difficulty, using crutches, and she spent most of the time at her window, watching and waiting. From Lily there came, at frequent intervals, notes, flowers and small delicacies. The flowers and food Olga brought to her, but the notes she never saw. She knew they came. She could see the car stop at the curb, and the chauffeur, his shoulders squared and his face watchful, carrying a white envelope up the walk, but there it ended.
She felt more helpless than ever. The doctor came less often, but the vigilance was never relaxed, and she had, too, less and less hope of being able to give any warning. Doyle was seldom at home, and when he was he had ceased to give her his taunting information. She was quite sure now of his relations with the Russian girl, and her uncertainty as to her course was gone. She was no longer his wife. He held another woman in his rare embraces, a traitor like himself. It was sordid. He was sordid.
Woslosky had developed blood poisoning, and was at the point of death, with a stolid policeman on guard at his bedside. She knew that from the newspapers she occasionally saw. And she connected Doyle unerringly with the tragedy at the farm behind Friendship. She recognized, too, since that failure, a change in his manner to her. She saw that he now both hated her and feared her, and that she had become only a burden and a menace to him. He might decide to do away with her, to kill her. He would not do it himself; he never did his own dirty work, but the Russian girl—Olga was in love with Jim Doyle. Elinor knew that, as she knew many things, by a sort of intuition. She watched them in the room together, and she knew that to Doyle the girl was an incident, the vehicle of his occasional passion, a strumpet and a tool. He did not even like her; she saw him looking at her sometimes with a sort of amused contempt. But Olga's somber eyes followed him as he moved, lit with passion and sometimes with anger, but always they followed him.
She was afraid of Olga. She did not care particularly about death, but it must not come before she had learned enough to be able to send out a warning. She thought if it came it might be by poison in the food that was sent up, but she had to eat to live. She took to eating only one thing on her tray, and she thought she detected in the girl an understanding and a veiled derision.
By Doyle's increasing sullenness she knew things were not going well with him, and she found a certain courage in that, but she knew him too well to believe that he would give up easily. And she drew certain deductions from the newspapers she studied so tirelessly. She saw the announcement of the unusual number of hunting licenses issued, for one thing, and she knew the cover that such licenses furnished armed men patrolling the country. The state permitted the sale of fire-arms without restriction. Other states did the same, or demanded only the formality of a signature, never verified.
Would they never wake to the situation?
She watched the election closely. She knew that if Akers were elected the general strike and the chaos to follow would be held back until he had taken office and made the necessary changes in the city administration, but that if he went down to defeat the Council would turn loose its impatient hordes at once.
She waited for election day with burning anxiety. When it came it so happened that she was left alone all day in the house. Early in the morning Olga brought her a tray and told her she was going out. She was changed, the Russian; she had dropped the mask of sodden servility and stood before her, erect, cunningly intelligent and oddly powerful.
“I am going to be away all day, Mrs. Doyle,” she said, in her excellent English. “I have work to do.”
“Work?” said Elinor. “Isn't there work to do here?”
“I am not a house-worker. I came to help Mr. Doyle. To-day I shall make speeches.”
Elinor was playing the game carefully. “But—can you make speeches?” she asked.
“Me? That is my work, here, in Russia, everywhere. In Russia it is the women who speak, the men who do what the women tell them to do. Here some day it will be the same.”
Always afterwards Elinor remembered the five minutes that followed, for Olga, standing before her, suddenly burst into impassioned oratory. She cited the wrongs of the poor under the old regime. She painted in glowing colors the new. She was excited, hectic, powerful. Elinor in her chair, an aristocrat to the finger-tips, was frightened, interested, thrilled.
Long after Olga had gone she sat there, wondering at the real conviction, the intensity of passion, of hate and of revenge that actuated this newest tool of Doyle's. Doyle and his associates might be actuated by self-interest, but the real danger in the movement lay not with the Doyles of the world, but with these fanatic liberators. They preached to the poor a new religion, not of creed or of Church, but of freedom. Freedom without laws of God or of man, freedom of love, of lust, of time, of all responsibility. And the poor, weighted with laws and cares, longed to throw off their burdens.
Perhaps it was not the doctrine itself that was wrong. It was its imposition by force on a world not yet ready for it that was wrong; its imposition by violence. It might come, but not this way. Not, God preventing, this way.
There was a polling place across the street, in the basement of a school house. The vote was heavy and all day men lounged on the pavements, smoking and talking. Once she saw Olga in the crowd, and later on Louis Akers drove up in an open automobile, handsome, apparently confident, and greeted with cheers. But Elinor, knowing him well, gained nothing from his face.
Late that night she heard Doyle come in and move about the lower floor. She knew every emphasis of his walk, and when in the room underneath she heard him settle down to steady, deliberate pacing, she knew that he was facing some new situation, and, after his custom, thinking it out alone.
At midnight he came up the stairs and unlocked her door. He entered, closing the door behind him, and stood looking at her. His face was so strange that she wondered if he had decided to do away with her.
“To-morrow,” he said, in an inflectionless voice, “you will be moved by automobile to a farm I have selected in the country. You will take only such small luggage as the car can carry.”
“Is Olga going with me?”
“No. Olga is needed here.”
“I suppose I am to understand from this that Louis has been defeated and there is no longer any reason for delay in your plans.”
“You can understand what you like.”
“Am I to know where I am going?”
“You will find that out when you get there. I will tell you this: It is a lonely place, without a telephone. You'll be cut off from your family, I am afraid.”
She gazed at him. It seemed unbelievable to her that she had once lain in this man's arms.
“Why don't you kill me, Jim? I know you've thought about it.”
“Yes, I've thought of it. But killing is a confession of fear, my dear. I am not afraid of you.”
“I think you are. You are afraid now to tell me when you are going to try to put this wild plan into execution.”
He smiled at her with mocking eyes.
“Yes,” he agreed again. “I am afraid. You have a sort of diabolical ingenuity, not intelligence so much as cunning. But because I always do the thing I'm afraid to do, I'll tell you. Of course, if you succeed in passing it on—” He shrugged his shoulders. “Very well, then. With your usual logic of deduction, you have guessed correctly. Louis Akers has been defeated. Your family—and how strangely you are a Cardew!—lost its courage at the last moment, and a gentleman named Hendricks is now setting up imitation beer and cheap cigars to his friends.”
Behind his mocking voice she knew the real fury of the man, kept carefully in control by his iron will.
“As you have also correctly surmised,” he went on, “there is now nothing to be gained by any delay. A very few days, three or four, and—” His voice grew hard and terrible—“the first stone in the foundation of this capitalistic government will go. Inevitable law, inevitable retribution—” His voice trailed off. He turned like a man asleep and went toward the door. There he stopped and faced her.
“I've told you,” he said darkly. “I am not afraid of you. You can no more stop this thing than you can stop living by ceasing to breathe. It has come.”
She heard him in his room for some time after that, and she surmised from the way he moved, from closet to bed and back again, that he was packing a bag. At two o'clock she heard Olga coming in; the girl was singing in Russian, and Elinor had a sickening conviction that she had been drinking. She heard Doyle send her off to bed, his voice angry and disgusted, and resume his packing, and ten minutes later she heard a car draw up on the street, and knew that he was off, to begin the mobilization of his heterogeneous forces.
Ever since she had been able to leave her bed Elinor had been formulating a plan of escape. Once the door had been left unlocked, but her clothing had been removed from the room, and then, too, she had not learned the thing she was waiting for. Now she had clothing, a dark dressing gown and slippers, and she had the information. But the door was securely locked.
She had often thought of the window, In the day time it frightened her to look down, although it fascinated her, too. But at night it seemed much simpler. The void below was concealed in the darkness, a soft darkness that hid the hard, inhospitable earth. A darkness one could fall into and onto.
She was not a brave woman. She had moral rather than physical courage. It was easier for her to face Doyle in a black mood than the gulf below the window-sill, but she knew now that she must get away, if she were to go at all. She got out of bed, and using her crutches carefully moved to the sill, trying to accustom herself to the thought of going over the edge. The plaster cast on her leg was a real handicap. She must get it over first. How heavy it was, and unwieldy!
She found her scissors, and, stripping the bed, sat down to cut and tear the bedding into strips. Prisoners escaped that way; she had read about such things. But the knots took up an amazing amount of length. It was four o'clock in the morning when she had a serviceable rope, and she knew it was too short. In the end she tore down the window curtains and added them, working desperately against time.
She began to suspect, too, that Olga was not sleeping. She smelled faintly the odor of the long Russian cigarettes the girl smoked. She put out her light and worked in the darkness, a strange figure of adventure, this middle-aged woman with her smooth hair and lined face, sitting in her cambric nightgown with her crutches on the floor beside her.
She secured the end of the rope to the foot of her metal bed, pushing the bed painfully and cautiously, inch by inch, to the window. And in so doing she knocked over the call-bell on the stand, and almost immediately she heard Olga moving about.
The girl was coming unsteadily toward the door. If she opened it—
“I don't want anything, Olga,” she called, “I knocked the bell over accidentally.”
Olga hesitated, muttered, moved away again. Elinor was covered with a cold sweat.
She began to think of the window as a refuge. Surely nothing outside could be so terrible as this house itself. The black aperture seemed friendly; it beckoned to her with friendly hands.
She dropped her crutches. They fell with two soft thuds on the earth below and it seemed to her that they were a long time in falling. She listened after that, but Olga made no sign. Then slowly and painfully she worked her injured leg over the sill, and sat there looking down and breathing with difficulty. Then she freed her dressing gown around her, and slid over the edge.