The new movement was growing rapidly, and with a surprising catholicity of range. Already it included lawyers and doctors, chauffeurs, butchers, clergymen, clerks of all sorts, truck gardeners from the surrounding county, railroad employees, and some of the strikers from the mills, men who had obeyed their union order to quit work, but had obeyed it unwillingly; men who resented bitterly the invasion of the ranks of labor by the lawless element which was fomenting trouble.
Dan had joined.
On the day that Lily received her engagement ring from Louis Akers, one of the cards of the new Vigilance Committee was being inspected with cynical amusement by two clerks in a certain suite of offices in the Searing Building. They studied it with interest, while the man who had brought it stood by.
“Where'd you pick it up, Cusick?”
“One of our men brought it into the store. Said you might want to see it.”
The three men bent over it.
The Myers Housecleaning Company had a suite of three rooms. During the day two stenographers, both men, sat before machines and made a pretense of business at such times as the door opened, or when an occasional client, seeing the name, came in to inquire for rates. At such times the clerks were politely regretful. The firm's contracts were all they could handle for months ahead.
There was a constant ebb and flow of men in the office, presumably professional cleaners. They came and went, or sat along the walls, waiting. A large percentage were foreigners but the clerks proved to be accomplished linguists. They talked, with more or less fluency, with Croats, Serbs, Poles and Slavs.
There was a supply room off the office, a room filled with pails and brushes, soap and ladders. But there was a great safe also, and its compartments were filled with pamphlets in many tongues, a supply constantly depleted and yet never diminishing. Workmen, carrying out the pails of honest labor, carried them loaded down with the literature it was their only business to circulate.
Thus, openly, and yet with infinite caution, was spread the doctrine of no God; of no government, and of no church; of the confiscation of private property; of strikes and unrest; of revolution, rape, arson and pillage.
And around this social cancer the city worked and played. Its theatres were crowded, its expensive shops, its hotels. Two classes of people were spending money prodigally; women with shawls over their heads, women who in all their peasant lives had never owned a hat, drove in automobiles to order their winter supply of coal, and vast amounts of liquors were being bought by the foreign element against the approaching prohibition law, and stored in untidy cellars.
On the other hand, the social life of the city was gay with reaction from war. The newspapers were filled with the summer plans of the wealthy, and with predictions of lavish entertaining in the fall. Among the list of debutantes Lily's name always appeared.
And, in between the upper and the nether millstone, were being ground the professional and salaried men with families, the women clerks, the vast army who asked nothing but the right to work and live. They went through their days doggedly, with little anxious lines around their eyes, suffering a thousand small deprivations, bewildered, tortured with apprehension of to-morrow, and yet patiently believing that, as things could not be worse, they must soon commence to improve.
“It's bound to clear up soon,” said Joe Wilkinson over the back fence one night late in June, to Willy Cameron. Joe supported a large family of younger brothers and sisters in the house next door, and was employed in a department store. “I figure it this way—both sides need each other, don't they? Something like marriage, you know. It'll all be over in six months. Only I'm thanking heaven just now it's summer, because our kids are hell on shoes.”
“I hope so,” said Willy Cameron. “What are you doing over there, anyhow?”
“Wait and see,” said Joe, cryptically. “If you think you're going to be the only Central Park in this vicinity you've got to think again.” He hesitated and glanced around, but the small Wilkinsons were searching for worms in the overturned garden mold. “How's Edith?” he asked.
“She's all right, Joe.”
“Seeing anybody yet?”
“Not yet. In a day or so she'll be downstairs.”
“You might tell her I've been asking about her.”
There was something in Joel's voice that caught Willy Cameron's attention. He thought about Joe a great deal that night. Joe was another one who must never know about Edith's trouble. The boy had little enough, and if he had built a dream about Edith Boyd he must keep his dream. He was rather discouraged that night, was Willy Cameron, and he began to think that dreams were the best things in life. They were a sort of sanctuary to which one fled to escape realities. Perhaps no reality was ever as beautiful as one's dream of it.
Lily had passed very definitely out of his life. Sometimes during his rare leisure he walked to Cardew Way through the warm night, and past the Doyle house, but he never saw her, and because it did not occur to him that she might want to see him he never made an attempt to call. Always after those futile excursions he was inclined to long silences, and only Jinx could have told how many hours he sat in his room at night, in the second-hand easy chair he had bought, pipe in hand and eyes on nothing in particular, lost in a dream world where the fields bore a strong resemblance to the parade ground of an army camp, and through which field he and Lily wandered like children, hand in hand.
But he had many things to think of. So grave were the immediate problems, of food and rent, of Mrs. Boyd and Edith, that a little of his fine frenzy as to the lurking danger of revolution departed from him. The meetings in the back room at the pharmacy took on a political bearing, and Hendricks was generally the central figure. The ward felt that Mr. Hendricks was already elected, and called him “Mr. Mayor.” At the same time the steel strike pursued a course of comparative calm. At Friendship and at Baxter there had been rioting, and a fatality or two, but the state constabulary had the situation well in hand. On a Sunday morning Willy Cameron went out to Baxter on the trolley, and came home greatly comforted. The cool-eyed efficiency of the state police reassured him. He compared them, disciplined, steady, calm with the calmness of their dangerous calling, with the rabble of foreigners who shuffled along the sidewalks, and he felt that his anxiety had been rather absurd.
He was still making speeches, and now and then his name was mentioned in the newspapers. Mrs. Boyd, now mostly confined to her room, spent much time in searching for these notices, and then in painfully cutting them out and pasting them in a book. On those days when there was nothing about him she felt thwarted, and was liable to sharp remarks on newspapers in general, and on those of the city in particular.
Then, just as he began to feel that the strike would pass off like other strikes, and that Doyle and his crowd, having plowed the field for sedition, would find it planted with healthier grain, he had a talk with Edith.
She came downstairs for the first time one Wednesday evening early in July, the scars on her face now only faint red blotches, and he placed her, a blanket over her knees, in the small parlor. Dan had brought her down and had made a real effort to be kind, but his suspicion of the situation made it difficult for him to dissemble, and soon he went out. Ellen was on the doorstep, and through the open window came the shrieks of numerous little Wilkinsons wearing out expensive shoe-leather on the brick pavement.
They sat in the dusk together, Edith very quiet, Willy Cameron talking with a sort of determined optimism. After a time he realized that she was not even listening.
“I wish you'd close the window,” she said at last. “Those crazy Wilkinson kids make such a racket. I want to tell you something.”
“All right.” He closed the window and stood looking down at her. “Are you sure you want me to hear it?” he asked gravely.
“Yes. It is not about myself. I've been reading the newspapers while I've been shut away up there, Willy. It kept me from thinking. And if things are as bad as they say I'd better tell you, even if I get into trouble doing it. I will, probably. Murder's nothing to them.”
“Who are 'them'?”
“You get the police to search the Myers Housecleaning Company, in the Searing Building.”
“Don't you think you'd better tell me more than that? The police will want something definite to go on.”
She hesitated.
“I don't know very much. I met somebody there, once or twice, at night. And I know there's a telephone hidden in the drawer of the desk in the back room. I swore not to tell, but that doesn't matter now. Tell them to examine the safe, too. I don't know what's in it. Dynamite, maybe.”
“What makes you think the company is wrong? A hidden telephone isn't much to go on.”
“When a fellow's had a drink or two, he's likely to talk,” she said briefly, and before that sordid picture Willy Cameron was silent. After a time he said:
“You won't tell me the name of the man you met there?”
“No. Don't ask me, Willy. That's between him and me.” He got up and took a restless turn or two about the little rooms. Edith's problem had begun to obsess him. Not for long would it be possible to keep her condition from Mrs. Boyd. He was desperately at a loss for some course to pursue.
“Have you ever thought,” he said at last, “that this man, whoever he is, ought to marry you?”
Edith's face set like a flint.
“I don't want to marry him,” she said. “I wouldn't marry him if he was the last man on earth.”
He knew very little of Edith's past. In his own mind he had fixed on Louis Akers, but he could not be sure.
“I won't tell you his name, either,” Edith added, shrewishly. Then her voice softened. “I will tell you this, Willy,” she said wistfully. “I was a good girl until I knew him. I'm not saying that to let myself out. It's the truth.”
“You're a good girl now,” he said gravely.
Some time after he got his hat and came in to tell her he was going out.
“I'll tell what you've told me to Mr. Hendricks,” he said. “And we may go on and have a talk with the Chief of Police. If you are right it may be important.”
After that for an hour or two Edith sat alone, save when Ellen now and then looked in to see if she was comfortable.
Edith's mind was chaotic. She had spoken on impulse, a good impulse at that. But suppose they trapped Louis Akers in the Searing Building?
Ellen went now and then to the Cardew house, and brought back with her the news of the family. At first she had sternly refused to talk about the Cardews to Edith, but the days in the sick room had been long and monotonous, and Edith's jealousy of Lily had taken the form, when she could talk, of incessant questions.
So Edith knew that Louis Akers had been the cause of Lily's leaving home, and called her a poor thing in her heart. Quite lately she had heard that if Lily was not already engaged she probably would be, soon. Now her motives were mixed, and her emotions confused. She had wanted to tell Willy Cameron what she knew, but she wanted Lily to marry Louis Akers. She wanted that terribly. Then Lily would be out of the way, and—Willy was not like Dan; he did not seem to think her forever lost. He had always been thoughtful, but lately he had been very tender with her. Men did strange things sometimes. He might be willing to forget, after a long time. She could board the child out somewhere, if it lived. Sometimes they didn't live.
But if they arrested Louis, Lily Cardew would fling him aside like an old shoe.
She closed her eyes. That opened a vista of possibilities she would not face.
She stopped in her mother's room on her slow progress upstairs, moved to sudden pity for the frail life now wearing to its close. If that were life she did not want it, with its drab days and futile effort, its incessant deprivations, its hands, gnarled with work that got nowhere, its greatest blessing sleep and forgetfulness.
She wondered why her mother did not want to die, to get away.
“I'll soon be able to look after you a bit, mother,” she said from the doorway. “How's the pain down your arm?”
“Bring me the mucilage, Edie,” requested Mrs. Boyd. She was propped up in bed and surrounded by newspapers. “I've found Willy's name again. I've got fourteen now. Where's the scissors?”
Eternity was such a long time. Did she know? Could she know, and still sit among her pillows, snipping?
“I wonder,” said Mrs. Boyd, “did anybody feed Jinx? That Ellen is so saving that she grudges him a bone.”
“He looks all right,” said Edith, and went on up to bed. Maybe the Lord did that for people, when they reached a certain point. Maybe He took away the fear of death, by showing after years of it that life was not so valuable after all. She remembered her own facing of eternity, and her dread of what lay beyond. She had prayed first, because she wanted to have some place on the other side. She had prayed to be received young and whole and without child. And her mother—
Then she had a flash of intuition. There was something greater than life, and that was love. Her mother was upheld by love. That was what the eternal cutting and pasting meant. She was lavishing all the love of her starved days on Willy Cameron; she was facing death, because his hand was close by to hold to.
For just a moment, sitting on the edge of her bed, Edith Boyd saw what love might be, and might do. She held out both hands in the darkness, but no strong and friendly clasp caught them close. If she could only have him to cling to, to steady her wavering feet along the gray path that stretched ahead, years and years of it. Youth. Middle age. Old age.
“I'd only drag him down,” she muttered bitterly.
Willy Cameron, meanwhile, had gone to Mr. Hendricks with Edith's story, and together late that evening they saw the Chief of Police at his house. Both Willy Cameron and Mr. Hendricks advocated putting a watch on the offices of the Myers Housecleaning Company and thus ultimately getting the heads of the organization. But the Chief was unwilling to delay.
“Every day means more of their infernal propaganda,” he said, “and if this girl's telling a straight story, the thing to do is to get the outfit now. Those clerks, for instance—we'll get some information out of them. That sort always squeals. They're a cheap lot.”
“Going to ball it up, of course,” Mr. Hendricks said disgustedly, on the way home. “Won't wait, because if Akers gets in he's out, and he wants to make a big strike first. I'll drop in to-morrow evening and tell you what's happened.”
He came into the pharmacy the next evening, with a bundle of red-bound pamphlets under his arm, and a look of disgust on his face.
“What did I tell you, Cameron?” he demanded, breathing heavily. “Yes, they got them all right. Got a safe full of stuff so inflammable that, since I've read some of it, I'm ready to blow up myself. It's worse than that first lot I showed you. They got the two clerks, and a half-dozen foreigners, too. And that's all they got.”
“They won't talk?”
“Talk? Sure they'll talk. They say they're employed by the Myers Housecleaning Company, that they never saw the inside of the vault, and they're squealing louder than two pigs under a gate about false arrest. They'll have to let them go, son. Here. You can do most everything. Can you read Croatian? No? Well, here's something in English to cut your wisdom teeth on. Overthrowing the government is where these fellows start.”
It was intelligent, that propaganda. Willy Cameron thought he saw behind it Jim Doyle and other men like Doyle, men who knew the discontents of the world, and would fatten by them; men who, secretly envious of the upper classes and unable to attain to them, would pull all men to their own level, or lower. Men who cloaked their own jealousies with the garb of idealism. Intelligent it was, dangerous, and imminent.
The pamphlets spoke of “the day.” It was a Prussian phrase. The revolution was Prussian. And like the Germans, they offered loot as a reward. They appealed to the ugliest passions in the world, to lust and greed and idleness.
At a signal the mass was to arise, overthrow its masters and rule itself.
Mr. Hendricks stood in the doorway of the pharmacy and stared out at the city he loved.
“Just how far does that sort of stuff go, Cameron?” he asked. “Will our people take it up? Is the American nation going crazy?”
“Not a bit of it,” said Willy Cameron stoutly. “They're about as able to overthrow the government as you are to shove over the Saint Elmo Hotel.”
“I could do that, with a bomb.”
“No, you couldn't. But you could make a fairly sizeable hole in it. It's the hole we don't want.”
Mr. Hendricks went away, vaguely comforted.
To old Anthony the early summer had been full of humiliations, which he carried with an increased arrogance of bearing that alienated even his own special group at his club.
“Confound the man,” said Judge Peterson, holding forth on the golf links one Sunday morning while Anthony Cardew, hectic with rage, searched for a lost ball and refused to drop another. “He'll hold us up all morning, for that ball, just as he tries to hold up all progress.” He lowered his voice. “What's happened to the granddaughter, anyhow?”
Senator Lovell lighted a cigarette.
“Turned Bolshevist,” he said, briefly.
The Judge gazed at him.
“That's a pretty serious indictment, isn't it?”
“Well, that's what I hear. She's living in Jim Doyle's house. I guess that's the answer. Hey, Cardew! D'you want these young cubs behind us to play through, or are you going to show some sense and come on?”
Howard, fighting his father tooth and nail, was compelled to a reluctant admiration of his courage. But there was no cordiality between them. They were in accord again, as to the strike, although from different angles. Both of them knew that they were fighting for very life; both of them felt that the strikers' demands meant the end of industry, meant that the man who risked money in a business would eventually cease to control that business, although if losses came it would be he, and not the workmen, who bore them. Howard had gone as far as he could in concessions, and the result was only the demand for more. The Cardews, father and son, stood now together, their backs against a wall, and fought doggedly.
But only anxiety held them together.
His father was now backing Howard's campaign for the mayoralty, but he was rather late with his support, and in private he retained his cynical attitude. He had not come over at all until he learned that Louis Akers was an opposition candidate. At that his wrath knew no bounds and the next day he presented a large check to the campaign committee.
Mr. Hendricks, hearing of it, was moved to a dry chuckle.
“Can't you hear him?” he demanded. “He'd stalk into headquarters as important as an office boy who's been sent to the bank for money, and he'd slam down his check and say just two words.”
“Which would be?” inquired Willy Cameron.
“'Buy 'em',” quoted Mr. Hendricks. “The old boy doesn't know that things have changed since the 80's. This city has changed, my lad. It's voting now the way it thinks, right or wrong. That's why these foreign language papers can play the devil with us. The only knowledge the poor wretches have got of us is what they're given to read. And most of it stinks of sedition. Queer thing, this thinking. A fellow can think himself into murder.”
The strike was going along quietly enough. There had been rioting through the country, but not of any great significance. It was in reality a sort of trench warfare, with each side dug in and waiting for the other to show himself in the open. The representatives of the press, gathered in the various steel cities, with automobiles arranged for to take them quickly to any disturbance that might develop, found themselves with little news for the telegraph, and time hung heavy on their hands.
On an evening in July, Howard found Grace dressing for dinner, and realized with a shock that she was looking thin and much older. He kissed her and then held her off and looked at her.
“You've got to keep your courage up, dear,” he said. “I don't think it will be long now.”
“Have you seen her?”
“No. But something has happened. Don't look like that, Grace. It's not—”
“She hasn't married that man?”
“No. Not that. It only touches her indirectly. But she can't stay there. Even Elinor—” he checked himself. “I'll tell you after dinner.”
Dinner was very silent, although Anthony delivered himself of one speech rather at length.
“So far as I can make out, Howard,” he said, “this man Hendricks is getting pretty strong. He has a young fellow talking for him who gets over pretty well. It's my judgment that Hendricks had better be bought off. He goes around shouting that he's a plain man, after the support of the plain people. Although I'm damned if I know what he means by that.”
Anthony Cardew was no longer comfortable in his own house. He placed the blame for it on Lily, and spent as many evenings away from home as possible. He considered that life was using him rather badly. Tied to the city in summer by a strike, his granddaughter openly gone over to his enemy, his own son, so long his tool and his creature, merely staying in his house to handle him, an income tax law that sent him to his lawyers with new protests almost daily! A man was no longer master even in his own home. His employees would not work for him, his family disobeyed him, his government held him up and shook him. In the good old days—
“I'm going out,” he said, as he rose from the table. “Grace, that chef is worse than the last. You'd better send him off.”
“I can't get any one else. I have tried for weeks. There are no servants anywhere.”
“Try New York.”
“I have tried—it is useless.”
No cooks, either. No servants. Even Anthony recognized that, with the exception of Grayson, the servants in his house were vaguely hostile to the family. They gave grudging service, worked short hours, and, the only class of labor to which the high cost of food was a negligible matter, demanded wages he considered immoral.
“I don't know what the world's coming to,” he snarled. “Well, I'm off. Thank God, there are still clubs for a man to go to.”
“I want to have a talk with you, father.”
“I don't want to talk.”
“You needn't. I want you to listen, and I want Grace to hear, too.”
In the end he went unwillingly into the library, and when Grayson had brought liqueurs and coffee and had gone, Howard drew the card from his pocket.
“I met young Denslow to-day,” he said. “He came in to see me. As a matter of fact, I signed a card he had brought along, and I brought one for you, sir. Shall I read it?”
“You evidently intend to.”
Howard read the card slowly. Its very simplicity was impressive, as impressive as it had been when Willy Cameron scrawled the words on the back of an old envelope. Anthony listened.
“Just what does that mean?”
“That the men behind this movement believe that there is going to be a general strike, with an endeavor to turn it into a revolution. Perhaps only local, but these things have a tendency to spread. Denslow had some literature which referred to an attempt to take over the city. They have other information, too, all pointing the same way.”
“Strikers?”
“Foreign strikers, with the worst of the native born. Their plans are fairly comprehensive; they mean to dynamite the water works, shut down the gas and electric plants, and cut off all food supplies. Then when they have starved and terrorized us into submission, we'll accept their terms.”
“What terms?”
“Well, the rule of the mob, I suppose. They intend to take over the banks, for one thing.”
“I don't believe it. It's incredible.”
“They meant to do it in Seattle.”
“And didn't. Don't forget that.”
“They may have learned some things from Seattle,” Howard said quietly.
“We have the state troops.”
“What about a half dozen similar movements in the state at the same time? Or rioting in other places, carefully planned to draw the troops and constabulary away?”
In the end old Anthony was impressed, if not entirely convinced. But he had no faith in the plain people, and said so. “They'll see property destroyed and never lift a hand,” he said. “Didn't I stand by in Pittsburgh during the railroad riots, and watch them smile while the yards burned? Because the railroads meant capital to them, and they hate capital.”
“Precisely,” said Howard, “but after twenty-four hours they were fighting like demons to restore law and order. It is”—he fingered the card—“to save that twenty-four hours that this organization is being formed. It is secret. Did I tell you that? And the idea originated with the young man you spoke about as supporting Hendricks—you met him here once, a friend of Lily's. His name is Cameron—William Wallace Cameron.”
Old Anthony remained silent, but the small jagged vein on his forehead swelled with anger. After a time:
“I suppose Doyle is behind this?” he asked. “It sounds like him.”
“That is the supposition. But they have nothing on him yet; he is too shrewd for that. And that leads to something else. Lily cannot continue to stay there.”
“I didn't send her there.”
“Actually, no. In effect—but we needn't go into that now. The situation is very serious. I can imagine that nothing could fit better into his plans than to have her there. She gives him a cachet of respectability. Do you want that?”
“She is probably one of them now. God knows how much of his rotten doctrine she has absorbed.”
Howard flushed, but he kept his temper.
“His theories, possibly. His practice, no. She certainly has no idea... it has come to this, father. She must have a home somewhere, and if it cannot be here, Grace and I must make one for her elsewhere.”
Probably Anthony Cardew had never respected Howard more than at that moment, or liked him less.
“Both you and Grace are free to make a home where you please.”
“We prefer it here, but you must see yourself that things cannot go on as they are. We have waited for you to see that, all three of us, and now this new situation makes it imperative to take some action.”
“I won't have that fellow Akers coming here.”
“He would hardly come, under the circumstances. Besides, her friendship with him is only a part of her revolt. If she comes home it will be with the understanding that she does not see him again.”
“Revolt?” said old Anthony, raising his eyebrows.
“That is what it actually was. She found her liberty interfered with, and she staged her own small rebellion. It was very human, I think.”
“It was very Cardew,” said old Anthony, and smiled faintly. He had, to tell the truth, developed a grudging admiration for his granddaughter in the past two months. He saw in her many of his own qualities, good and bad. And, more than he cared to own, he had missed her and the young life she had brought into the quiet house. Most important of all, she was the last of the Cardews. Although his capitulation when it came was curt, he was happier than he had been for weeks.
“Bring her home,” he said, “but tell her about Akers. If she says that is off, I'll forget the rest.”
On her way to her room that night Grace Cardew encountered Mademoiselle, a pale, unhappy Mademoiselle, who seemed to spend her time mostly in Lily's empty rooms or wandering about corridors. Whenever the three members of the family were together she would retire to her own quarters, and there feverishly with her rosary would pray for a softening of hearts. She did not comprehend these Americans, who were so kind to those beneath them and so hard to each other.
“I wanted to see you, Mademoiselle,” Grace said, not very steadily. “I have good news for you.”
Mademoiselle began to tremble. “She is coming? Lily is coming?”
“Yes. Will you have some fresh flowers put in her rooms in the morning?”
Suddenly Mademoiselle forgot her years of repression, and flinging her arms around Grace's neck she kissed her. Grace held her for a moment, patting her shoulder gently.
“We must try to make her very happy, Mademoiselle. I think things will be different now.”
Mademoiselle stood back and wiped her eyes.
“But she must be different, too,” she said. “She is sweet and good, but she is strong of will, too. The will to do, to achieve, that is one thing, and very good. But the will to go one's own way, that is another.”
“The young are always headstrong, Mademoiselle.”
But, alone later on, her rosary on her knee, Mademoiselle wondered. If youth were the indictment against Lily, was she not still young? It took years, or suffering, or sometimes both, to break the will of youth and chasten its spirit. God grant Lily might not have suffering.
It was Grace's plan to say nothing to Lily, but to go for her herself, and thus save her the humiliation of coming back alone. All morning housemaids were busy in Lily's rooms. Rugs were shaken, floors waxed and rubbed, the silver frames and vases in her sitting room polished to refulgence. And all morning Mademoiselle scolded and ran suspicious fingers into corners, and arranged and re-arranged great boxes of flowers.
Long before the time she had ordered the car Grace was downstairs, dressed for the street, and clad in cool shining silk, was pacing the shaded hall. There was a vague air of expectation about the old house. In a room off the pantry the second man was polishing the buttons of his livery, using a pasteboard card with a hole in it to save the fabric beneath. Grayson pottered about in the drawing room, alert for the parlor maid's sins of omission.
The telephone in the library rang, and Grayson answered it, while Grace stood in the doorway.
“A message from Miss Lily,” he said. “Mrs. Doyle has telephoned that Miss Lily is on her way here.”
Grace was vaguely disappointed. She had wanted to go to Lily with her good news, to bring her home bag and baggage, to lead her into the house and to say, in effect, that this was home, her home. She had felt that they, and not Lily, should take the first step.
She went upstairs, and taking off her hat, smoothed her soft dark hair. She did not want Lily to see how she had worried; she eyed herself carefully for lines. Then she went down, to more waiting, and for the first time, to a little doubt.
Yet when Lily came all was as it should have been. There was no doubt about her close embrace of her mother, her happiness at seeing her. She did not remove her gloves, however, and after she had put Grace in a chair and perched herself on the arm of it, there was a little pause. Each was preparing to tell something, each hesitated. Because Grace's task was the easier it was she who spoke first.
“I was about to start over when you telephoned, dear,” she said. “I—we want you to come home to us again.”
There was a queer, strained silence.
“Who wants me?” Lily asked, unsteadily.
“All of us. Your grandfather, too. He expects to find you here to-night. I can explain to your Aunt Elinor over the telephone, and we can send for your clothes.”
Suddenly Lily got up and walked the length of the room. When she came back her eyes were filled with tears, and her left hand was bare.
“It nearly kills me to hurt you,” she said, “but—what about this?”
She held out her hand.
Grace seemed frozen in her chair. At the sight of her mother's face Lily flung herself on her knees beside the chair.
“Mother, mother,” she said, “you must know how I love you. Love you both. Don't look like that. I can't bear it.”
Grace turned away her face.
“You don't love us. You can't. Not if you are going to marry that man.”
“Mother,” Lily begged, desperately, “let me come home. Let me bring him here. I'll wait, if you'll only do that. He is different; I know all that you want to say about his past. He has never had a real chance in all his life. He won't belong at first, but—he's a man, mother, a strong man. And it's awfully important. He can do so much, if he only will. And he says he will, if I marry him.”
“I don't understand you,” Grace said coldly. “What can a man like that do, but wreck all our lives?”
Resentment was rising fast in Lily, but she kept it down. “I'll tell you about that later,” she said, and slowly got to her feet. “Is that all, mother? You won't see him? I can't bring him here? Isn't there any compromise? Won't you meet me half-way?”
“When you say half-way, you mean all the way, Lily.”
“I wanted you so,” Lily said, drearily, “I need you so just now. I am going to be married, and I have no one to go to. Aunt Elinor doesn't understand, either. Every way I look I find—I suppose I can't come back at all, then.”
“Your grandfather's condition was that you never see this Louis Akers again.”
Lily's resentment left her. Anger was a thing for small matters, trivial affairs. This that was happening, an irrevocable break with her family, was as far beyond anger as it was beyond tears. She wondered dully if any man were worth all this. Perhaps she knew, sub-consciously, that Louis Akers was not. All her exaltation was gone, and in its stead was a sort of dogged determination to see the thing through now, at any cost; to re-make Louis into the man he could be, to build her own house of life, and having built it, to live in it as best she could.
“That is a condition I cannot fulfill, mother. I am engaged to him.”
“Then you love him more than you do any of us, or all of us.”
“I don't know. It is different,” she said vaguely.
She kissed her mother very tenderly when she went away, but there was a feeling of finality in them both. Mademoiselle, waiting at the top of the stairs, heard the door close and could not believe her ears. Grace went upstairs, her face a blank before the servants, and shut herself in her room. And in Lily's boudoir the roses spread a heavy, funereal sweetness over the empty room.
The strike had been carried on with comparatively little disorder. In some cities there had been rioting, but half-hearted and easily controlled. Almost without exception it was the foreign and unassimilated element that broke the peace. Alien women spat on the state police, and flung stones at them. Here and there property was destroyed. A few bomb outrages filled the newspapers with great scare-heads, and sent troops and a small army of secret service men here and there.
In the American Federation of Labor a stocky little man grimly fought to oppose the Radical element, which was slowly gaining ground, and at the same time to retain his leadership. The great steel companies, united at last by a common danger and a common fate if they yielded, stood doggedly and courageously together, waiting for a return of sanity to the world. The world seemed to have gone mad. Everywhere in the country production was reduced by the cessation of labor, and as a result the cost of living was mounting.
And every strike lost in the end. Labor had yet to learn that to cease to labor may express a grievance, but that in itself it righted no wrongs. Rather, it turned that great weapon, public opinion, without which no movement may succeed, against it. And that to stand behind the country in war was not enough. It must stand behind the country in peace.
It had to learn, too, that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. The weak link in the labor chain was its Radical element. Rioters were arrested with union cards in their pockets. In vain the unions protested their lack of sympathy with the unruly element. The vast respectable family of union labor found itself accused of the sins of the minority, and lost standing thereby.
At Friendship the unruly element was very strong. For a time it held its meetings in a hall. When that was closed it resorted to the open air.
On the fifteenth of July it held an incendiary meeting on the unused polo field, and the next day awakened to the sound of hammers, and to find a high wooden fence, reenforced with barbed wire, being built around the field, with the state police on guard over the carpenters. In a few days the fence was finished, only to be partly demolished the next night, secretly and noiselessly. But no further attempts were made to hold meetings there. It was rumored that meetings were being secretly held in the woods near the town, but the rendezvous was not located.
On the restored fence around the polo grounds a Red flag was found one morning, and two nights later the guard at the padlocked gate was shot through the heart, from ambush.
Then, about the first of August, out of a clear sky, sporadic riotings began to occur. They seemed to originate without cause, and to end as suddenly as they began. Usually they were in the outlying districts, but one or two took place in the city itself. The rioters were not all foreign strikers from the mills. They were garment workers, hotel waiters, a rabble of the discontented from all trades. The riots were to no end, apparently. They began with a chance word, fought their furious way for an hour or so, and ended, leaving a trail of broken heads and torn clothing behind them.
On toward the end of July one such disturbance grew to considerable size. The police were badly outnumbered, and a surprising majority of the rioters were armed, with revolvers, with wooden bludgeons, lengths of pipe and short, wicked iron bars. Things were rather desperate until the police found themselves suddenly and mysteriously reenforced by a cool-headed number of citizens, led by a tall thin man who limped slightly, and who disposed his heterogeneous support with a few words and considerable skill.
The same thin young man, stopping later in an alley way to investigate an arm badly bruised by an iron bar, overheard a conversation between two roundsmen, met under a lamppost after the battle, for comfort and a little conversation.
“Can you beat that, Henry?” said one. “Where the hell'd they come from?”
“Search me,” said Henry. “D'you see the skinny fellow? Limped, too. D'you notice that? Probably hurt in France. But he hasn't forgotten how to fight, I'll tell the world.”
The outbreaks puzzled the leaders of the Vigilance Committee. Willy Cameron was inclined to regard them as without direction or intention, purely as manifestations of hate, and as such contrary to the plans of their leaders. And Mr. Hendricks, nursing a black eye at home after the recent outburst, sized up the situation shrewdly.
“You can boil a kettle too hard,” he said, “and then the lid pops off. Doyle and that outfit of his have been burning the fire a little high, that's all. They'll quit now, because they want to get us off guard later. You and your committee can take a vacation, unless you can set them to electioneering for me. They've had enough for a while, the devils. They'll wait now for Akers to get in and make things easy for them. Mind my words, boy. That's the game.”
And the game it seemed to be. Small violations of order still occurred, but no big ones. To the headquarters in the Denslow Bank came an increasing volume of information, to be duly docketed and filed. Some of it was valueless. Now and then there came in something worth following up. Thus one night Pink and a picked band, following a vague clew, went in automobiles to the state borderline, and held up and captured two trucks loaded with whiskey and destined for Friendship and Baxter. He reported to Willy Cameron late that night.
“Smashed it all up and spilled it in the road,” he said. “Hurt like sin to do it, though. Felt like the fellow who shot the last passenger pigeon.”
But if the situation in the city was that of armed neutrality, in the Boyd house things were rapidly approaching a climax, and that through Dan. He was on edge, constantly to be placated and watched. The strike was on his nerves; he felt his position keenly, resented Willy Cameron supporting the family, and had developed a curious jealousy of his mother's affection for him.
Toward Edith his suspicions had now become certainty, and an open break came on an evening when she said that she felt able to go to work again. They were at the table, and Ellen was moving to and from the kitchen, carrying in the meal. Her utmost thrift could not make it other than scanty, and finally Dan pushed his plate away.
“Going back to work, are you?” he sneered. “And how long do you think you'll be able to work?”
“You keep quiet,” Edith flared at him. “I'm going to work. That's all you need to know. I can't sit here and let a man who doesn't belong to us provide every bite we eat, if you can.” Willy Cameron got up and closed the door, for Mrs. Boyd an uncanny ability to hear much that went on below.
“Now,” he said when he came back, “we might as well have this out. Dan has a right to be told, Edith, and he can help us plan something.” He turned to Dan. “It must be kept from your mother, Dan.”
“Plan something!” Dan snarled. “I know what to plan, all right. I'll find the—” he broke into foul, furious language, but suddenly Willy Cameron rose, and there was something threatening in his eyes.
“I know who it is,” Dan said, more quietly, “and he's got to marry her, or I'll kill him.”
“You know, do you? Well, you don't,” Edith said, “and I won't marry him anyhow.”
“You will marry him. Do you think I'm going to see mother disgraced, sick as she is, and let you get away with it? Where does Akers live? You know, don't you? You've been there, haven't you?”
All Edith's caution was forgotten in her shame and anger.
“Yes, I know,” she said, hysterically, “but I won't tell you. And I won't marry him. I hate him. If you go to him he'll beat you to death.” Suddenly the horrible picture of Dan in Akers' brutal hands overwhelmed her. “Dan, you won't go?” she begged. “He'll kill you.”
“A lot you'd care,” he said, coldly. “As if we didn't have enough already! As if you couldn't have married Joe Wilkinson, next door, and been a decent woman. And instead, you're a—”
“Be quiet, Dan,” Willy Cameron interrupted him. “That sort of talk doesn't help any. Edith is right. If you go to Akers there will be a fight. And that's no way to protect her.”
“God!” Dan muttered. “With all the men in the world, to choose that rotten anarchist!”
It was sordid, terribly tragic, the three of them sitting there in the badly lighted little room around the disordered table, with Ellen grimly listening in the doorway, and the odors of cooking still heavy in the air. Edith sat there, her hands on the table, staring ahead, and recounted her wrongs. She had never had a chance. Home had always been a place to get away from. Nobody had cared what became of her. And hadn't she tried to get out of the way? Only they all did their best to make her live. She wished she had died.
Dan, huddled low in his chair, his legs sprawling, stared at nothing with hopeless eyes.
Afterwards Willy Cameron could remember nothing of the scene in detail. He remembered its setting, but of all the argument and quarreling only one thing stood out distinctly, and that was Edith's acceptance of Dan's accusation. It was Akers, then. And Lily Cardew was going to marry him. Was in love with him.
“Does he know how things are?” he asked.
She nodded. “Yes.”
“Does he offer to do anything?”
“Him? He does not. And don't you go to him and try to get him to marry me. I tell you I'd die first.”
He left them there, sitting in the half light, and going out into the hall picked up his hat. Mrs. Boyd heard him and called to him, and before he went out he ran upstairs to her room. It seemed to him, as he bent over her, that her lips were bluer than ever, her breath a little shallower and more difficult. Her untouched supper tray was beside her.
“I wasn't hungry,” she explained. “Seems to me, Willy, if you'd let me go downstairs so I could get some of my own cooking I'd eat better. Ellen's all right, but I kind o' crave sweet stuff, and she don't like making desserts.”
“You'll be down before long,” he assured her. “And making me pies. Remember those pies you used to bake?”
“You always were a great one for my pies,” she said, complacently.
He kissed her when he left. He had always marveled at the strange lack of demonstrativeness in the household, and he knew that she valued his small tendernesses.
“Now remember,” he said, “light out at ten o'clock, and no going downstairs in the middle of the night because you smell smoke. When you do, it's my pipe.”
“I don't think you hardly ever go to bed, Willy.”
“Me? Get too much sleep. I'm getting fat with it.”
The stale little joke was never stale with her. He left her smiling, and went down the stairs and out into the street.
He had no plan in his mind except to see Louis Akers, and to find out from him if he could what truth there was in Edith Boyd's accusation. He believed Edith, but he must have absolute certainty before he did anything. Girls in trouble sometimes shielded men. If he could get the facts from Louis Akers—but he had no idea of what he would do then. He couldn't very well tell Lily, but her people might do something. Or Mrs. Doyle.
He knew Lily well enough to know that she would far rather die than marry Akers, under the circumstances. That her failure to marry Louis Akers would mean anything as to his own relationship with her he never even considered. All that had been settled long ago, when she said she did not love him.
At the Benedict he found that his man had not come home, and for an hour or two he walked the streets. The city seemed less majestic to him than usual; its quiet by-streets were lined with homes, it is true, but those very streets hid also vice and degradation, and ugly passions. They sheltered, but also they concealed.
At eleven o'clock he went back to the Benedict, and was told that Mr. Akers had come in.
It was Akers himself who opened the door. Because the night was hot he had shed coat and shirt, and his fine torso, bare to the shoulders and at the neck, gleamed in the electric light. Willy Cameron had not seen him since those spring days when he had made his casual, bold-eyed visits to Edith at the pharmacy, and he had a swift insight into the power this man must have over women. He himself was tall; but Akers was taller, fully muscled, his head strongly set on a neck like a column. But he surmised that the man was soft, out of condition. And he had lost the first elasticity of youth.
Akers' expression had changed from one of annoyance to watchfulness when he opened the door.
“Well!” he said. “Making a late call, aren't you?”
“What I had to say wouldn't wait.”
Akers had, rather unwillingly, thrown the door wide, and he went in. The room was very hot, for a small fire, littered as to its edges with papers, burned in the grate. Although he knew that Akers had guessed the meaning of his visit at once and was on guard, there was a moment or two when each sparred for an opening.
“Sit down. Have a cigarette?”
“No, thanks.” He remained standing.
“Or a high-ball? I still have some fairly good whiskey.”
“No. I came to ask you a question, Mr. Akers.”
“Well, answering questions is one of the best little things I do.”
“You know about Edith Boyd's condition. She says you are responsible. Is that true?”
Louis Akers was not unprepared. Sooner or later he had known that Edith would tell. But what he had not counted on was that she would tell any one who knew Lily. He had felt that her leaving the pharmacy had eliminated that chance. “What do you mean, her condition?”
“You know. She says she has told you.”
“You're pretty thick with her yourself, aren't you?”
“I happen to live at the Boyd house.”
He was keeping himself well under control, but Akers saw his hand clench, and resorted to other tactics. He was not angry himself, but he was wary now; he considered that life was unnecessarily complicated, and that he had a distinct grievance.
“I have asked you a question, Mr. Akers.”
“You don't expect me to answer it, do you?”
“I do.”
“If you have come here to talk to me about marrying her—”
“She won't marry you,” Willy Cameron said steadily. “That's not the point I want your own acknowledgment of responsibility, that's all.”
Akers was puzzled, suspicious, and yet relieved. He lighted a cigarette and over the match stared at the other man's quiet face.
“No!” he said suddenly. “I'm damned if I'll take the responsibility. She knew her way around long before I ever saw her. Ask her. She can't lie about it. I can produce other men to prove what I say. I played around with her, but I don't know whose child that is, and I don't believe she does.”
“I think you are lying.”
“All right. But I can produce the goods.”
Willy Cameron went very pale. His hands were clenched again, and Akers eyed him warily.
“None of that,” he cautioned. “I don't know what interest you've got in this, and I don't give a God-damn. But you'd better not try any funny business with me.”
Willy Cameron smiled. Much the sort of smile he had worn during the rioting.
“I don't like to soil my hands on you,” he said, “but I don't mind telling you that any man who ruins a girl's life and then tries to get out of it by defaming her, is a skunk.”
Akers lunged at him.
Some time later Mr. William Wallace Cameron descended to the street. He wore his coat collar turned up to conceal the absence of certain articles of wearing apparel which he had mysteriously lost. And he wore, too, a somewhat distorted, grim and entirely complacent smile.