The city had taken the rioting with a weary philosophy. It was tired of fighting. For two years it had labored at high tension for the European war. It had paid taxes and bought bonds, for the war. It had saved and skimped and denied itself, for the war. And for the war it had made steel, steel for cannon and for tanks, for ships and for railroads. It had labored hard and well, and now all it wanted was to be allowed to get back to normal things. It wanted peace.
It said, in effect: “I have both fought and labored, sacrificed and endured. Give me now my rest of nights, after a day's work. Give me marriage and children. Give me contentment. Give me the things I have loved long since, and lost awhile.”
And because the city craved peace, it was hard to rouse it to its danger. It was war-weary, and its weariness was not of apathy, but of exhaustion. It was not yet ready for new activity.
Then, the same night that had seen Willy Cameron's encounter with Akers, it was roused from its lethargy. A series of bomb outrages shook the downtown district. The Denslow Bank was the first to go. Willy Cameron, inspecting a cut lip in his mirror, heard a dull explosion, and ran down to the street. There he was joined by Joe Wilkinson, in trousers over his night shirt, and as they looked, a dull red glare showed against the sky. Joe went back for more clothing, but Willy Cameron ran down the street. At the first corner he heard a second explosion, further away and to the east, but apparently no fire followed it. That, he learned later, was the City Club, founded by Anthony Cardew years before.
The Denslow Bank was burning. The facade had been shattered and from the interior already poured a steady flow of flame and smoke. He stood among the crowd, while the engines throbbed and the great fire hose lay along the streets, and watched the little upper room where the precious records of the Committee were burning brightly. The front wall gone, the small office stood open to the world, a bright and shameless thing, flaunting its nakedness to the crowd below.
He wondered why Providence should so play into the hands of the enemy.
After a time he happened on Pink Denslow, wandering alone on the outskirts of the crowd.
“Just about kill the governor, this,” said Pink, heavily. “Don't suppose the watchmen got out, either. Not that they'd care,” he added, savagely.
“How about the vaults? I suppose they are fireproof?”
“Yes. Do you realize that every record we've got has gone? D'you suppose those fellows knew about them?”
Willy Cameron had been asking himself the same question.
“Trouble is,” Pink went on, “you don't know who to trust. They're not all foreigners. Let's get away from here; it makes me sick.”
They wandered through the night together, almost unconsciously in the direction of the City Club, but within a block of it they realized that something was wrong. A hospital ambulance dashed by, its gong ringing wildly, and a fire engine, not pumping, stood at the curb.
“Come on,” Pink said suddenly. “There were two explosions. It's just possible—”
The club was more sinister than the burning bank; it was a mass of grim wreckage, black and gaping, with now and then the sound of settling masonry, and already dotted with the moving flash-lights of men who searched.
To Pink this catastrophe was infinitely greater than that of the bank. Men he knew had lived there. There were old club servants who were like family retainers; one or two employees were ex-service men for whom he had found employment. He stood there, with Willy Cameron's hand on his arm, with a new maturity and a vast suffering in his face.
“Before God,” he said solemnly, “I swear never to rest until the fellows behind this are tried, condemned and hanged. You've heard it, Cameron.”
The death list for that night numbered thirteen, the two watchmen at the bank and eleven men at the club, two of them members. Willy Cameron, going home at dawn, exhausted and covered with plaster dust, bought an extra and learned that a third bomb, less powerful, had wrecked the mayor's house. It had been placed under the sleeping porch, and but for the accident of a sick baby the entire family would have been wiped out.
Even his high courage began to waver. His records were gone; that was all to do over again. But what seemed to him the impasse was this fighting in the dark. An unseen enemy, always. And an enemy which combined with skill a total lack of any rules of warfare, which killed here, there and everywhere, as though for the sheer joy of killing. It struck at the high but killed the low. And it had only begun.
Dominant family traits have a way of skipping one generation and appearing in the next. Lily Cardew at that stage of her life had a considerable amount of old Anthony's obstinacy and determination, although it was softened by a long line of Cardew women behind her, women who had loved, and suffered dominance because they loved. Her very infatuation for Louis Akers, like Elinor's for Doyle, was possibly an inheritance from her fore-mothers, who had been wont to overlook the evil in a man for the strength in him. Only Lily mistook physical strength for moral fibre, insolence and effrontery for courage.
In both her virtues and her faults, however, irrespective of heredity, Lily represented very fully the girl of her position and period. With no traditions to follow, setting her course by no compass, taught to think but not how to think, resentful of tyranny but unused to freedom, she moved ahead along the path she had elected to follow, blindly and obstinately, yet unhappy and suffering.
Her infatuation for Louis Akers had come to a new phase of its rapid development. She had reached that point where a woman realizes that the man she loves is, not a god of strength and wisdom, but a great child who needs her. It is at that point that one of two things happens: the weak woman abandons him, and follows her dream elsewhere. The woman of character, her maternal instinct roused, marries him, bears him children, is both wife and mother to him, and finds in their united weaknesses such strength as she can.
In her youth and self-sufficiency Lily stood ready to give, rather than to receive. She felt now that he needed her more than she needed him. There was something unconsciously patronizing those days in her attitude toward him, and if he recognized it he did not resent it. Women had always been “easy” for him. Her very aloofness, her faint condescension, her air of a young grande dame, were a part of her attraction for him.
Love sees clearly, and seeing, loves on. But infatuation is blind; when it gains sight, it dies. Already Lily was seeing him with the critical eyes of youth, his loud voice, his over-fastidious dress, his occasional grossnesses. To offset these she placed vast importance on his promise to leave his old associates when she married him.
The time was very close now. She could not hold him off much longer, and she began to feel, too, that she must soon leave the house on Cardew Way. Doyle's attitude to her was increasingly suspicious and ungracious. She knew that he had no knowledge of Louis's promise, but he began to feel that she was working against him, and showed it.
And in Louis Akers too she began to discern an inclination not to pull out until after the election. He was ambitious, and again and again he urged that he would be more useful for the purpose in her mind if he were elected first.
That issue came to a climax the day she had seen her mother and learned the terms on which she might return home. She was alarmed by his noisy anger at the situation.
“Do sit down, Louis, and be quiet,” she said. “You have known their attitude all along, haven't you?”
“I'll show them,” he said, thickly. “Damned snobs!” He glanced at her then uneasily, and her expression put him on his guard. “I didn't mean that, little girl. Honestly I didn't. I don't care for myself. It's you.”
“You must understand that they think they are acting for my good. And I am not sure,” she added, her clear eyes on him, “that they are not right. You frighten me sometimes, Louis.”
But a little later he broke out again. If he wasn't good enough to enter their house, he'd show them something. The election would show them something. They couldn't refuse to receive the mayor of the city. She saw then that he was bent on remaining with Doyle until after the election.
Lily sat back, listening and thinking. Sometimes she thought that he did not love her at all. He always said he wanted her, but that was different.
“I think you love yourself more than you love me, Louis,” she said, when he had exhausted himself. “I don't believe you know what love is.”
That brought him to his knees, his arms around her, kissing her hands, begging her not to give him up, and once again her curious sense of responsibility for him triumphed.
“You will marry me soon, dear, won't you?” he implored her. But she thought of Willy Cameron, oddly enough, even while his arms were around her; of the difference in the two men. Louis, big, crouching, suppliant and insistent; Willy Cameron, grave, reserved and steady, taking what she now knew was the blow of her engagement like a gentleman and a soldier.
They represented, although she did not know it, the two divisions of men in love, the men who offer much and give little, the others who, out of a deep humility, offer little and give everything they have.
In the end, nothing was settled. After he had gone Lily, went up to Elinor's room. She had found in Elinor lately a sort of nervous tension that puzzled her, and that tension almost snapped when Lily told her of her visit home, and of her determination to marry Louis within the next few days. Elinor had dropped her sewing and clenched her hands in her lap.
“Not soon, Lily!” she said. “Oh, not soon. Wait a little—wait two months.”
“Two months?” Lily said wonderingly. “Why two months?”
“Because, at the end of two months, nothing would make you marry him,” Elinor said, almost violently. “I have sat by and waited, because I thought you would surely see your mistake. But now—Lily, do you envy me my life?”
“No,” Lily said truthfully; “but you love him.”
Elinor sat, her eyes downcast and brooding.
“You are different,” she said finally. “You will break, where I have only bent.”
But she said no more about a delay. She had been passive too long to be able to take any strong initiative now. And all her moral and physical courage she was saving for a great emergency.
Cardew Way was far from the center of town, and Lily knew nothing of the bomb outrages of that night.
When she went down to breakfast the next morning she found Jim Doyle pacing the floor of the dining room in a frenzy of rage, a newspaper clenched in his hand. By the window stood Elinor, very pale and with slightly reddened eyes. They had not heard her, and Doyle continued a furious harangue.
“The fools!” he said. “Damn such material as I have to work with! This isn't the time, and they know it. I've warned them over and over. The fools!”
Elinor saw her then, and made a gesture of warning. But it was too late. Lily had a certain quality of directness, and it did not occur to her to dissemble.
“Is anything wrong?” she asked, and went at once to Elinor. She had once or twice before this stood between them for Elinor's protection.
“Everything is as happy as a May morning,” Doyle sneered. “Your Aunt Elinor has an unpleasant habit of weeping for joy.”
Lily stiffened, but Elinor touched her arm.
“Sit down and eat your breakfast, Lily,” she said, and left the room.
Doyle stood staring at Lily angrily. He did not know how much she had heard, how much she knew. At the moment he did not care. He had a reckless impulse to tell her the truth, but his habitual caution prevailed. He forced a cold smile.
“Don't bother your pretty head about politics,” he said.
Lily was equally cold. Her dislike of him had been growing for weeks, coupled to a new and strange distrust.
“Politics? You seem to take your politics very hard.”
“I do,” he said urbanely. “Particularly when I am fighting my wife's family. May I pour you some coffee?”
And pour it he did, eyeing her furtively the while, and brought it to her.
“May I give you a word of advice, Lily?” he said. “Don't treat your husband to tears at breakfast—unless you want to see him romping off to some other woman.”
“If he cared to do that I shouldn't want him anyhow.”
“You're a self-sufficient child, aren't you? Well, the best of us do it, sometimes.”
He had successfully changed the trend of her thoughts, and he went out, carrying the newspaper with him.
Nevertheless, he began to feel that her presence in the house was a menace. With all her theories he knew that a word of the truth would send her flying, breathless with outrage, out of his door. He could quite plainly visualize that home-coming of hers. The instant steps that would be taken against him, old Anthony on the wire appealing to the governor, Howard closeted with the Chief of Police, an instant closing of the net. And he was not ready for the clash.
No. She must stay. If only Elinor would play the game, instead of puling and mouthing! In the room across the hall where his desk stood he paced the floor, first angrily, then thoughtfully, his head bent. He saw, and not far away now, himself seated in the city hall, holding the city in the hollow of his hand. From that his dreams ranged far. He saw himself the head, not of the nation—there would be no nation, as such—but of the country. The very incidents of the night before, blundering as they were, showed him the ease with which the new force could be applied.
He was drunk with power.
Lily had an unexpected visitor that afternoon, in the person of Pink Denslow. She had assumed some of Elinor's cares for the day, for Elinor herself had not been visible since breakfast. It soothed the girl to attend to small duties, and she was washing and wiping Elinor's small stock of fine china when the bell rang.
“Mr. Denslow is calling,” said Jennie. “I didn't know if you'd see him, so I said I didn't know if you were in.”
Lily's surprise at Pink's visit was increased when she saw him. He was covered with plaster dust, even to the brim of his hat, and his hands were scratched and rough.
“Pink!” she said. “Why, what is the matter?”
For the first time he was conscious of his appearance, and for the first time in his life perhaps, entirely indifferent to it.
“I've been digging in the ruins,” he said. “Is that man Doyle in the house?”
Her color faded. Suddenly she noticed a certain wildness about Pink's eyes, and the hard strained look of his mouth.
“What ruins, Pink?” she managed to ask.
“All the ruins,” he said. “You know, don't you? The bank, our bank, and the club?”
It seemed to her afterwards that she knew before he told her, saw it all, a dreadful picture which had somehow superimposed upon it a vision of Jim Doyle with the morning paper, and the thing that this was not the time for.
“That's all,” he finished. “Eleven at the club, two of them my own fellows. In France, you know. I found one of them myself, this morning.” He stared past her, over her head. “Killed for nothing, the way the Germans terrorized Belgium. Haven't you seen the papers?”
“No, they wouldn't let you see them, of course. Lily, I want you to leave here. If you don't, if you stay now, you're one of them, whether you believe what they preach or not. Don't you see that?”
She was not listening. Her faith was dying hard, and the mental shock had brought her dizziness and a faint nausea. He stood watching her, and when she glanced up at him it seemed to her that Pink was hard. Hard and suspicious, and the suspicion was for her. It was incredible.
“Do you believe what they preach?” he demanded. “I've got to know, Lily. I've suffered the tortures of the damned all night.”
“I didn't know it meant this.”
“Do you?” he repeated.
“No. You ought to know me better than that. But I don't believe that it started here, Pink. He was very angry this morning, and he wouldn't let me see the paper.”
“He's behind it all right,” Pink said grimly. “Maybe he didn't plant the bombs, but his infernal influence did it, just the same. Do you mean to say you've lived here all this time and don't know he is plotting a revolution? What if he didn't authorize these things last night? He is only waiting, to place a hundred bombs instead of three. A thousand, perhaps.”
“Oh, no!”
“We've got their own statements. Department of Justice found them. The fools, to think they can overthrow the government! Can you imagine men planning to capture this city and hold it?”
“It wouldn't be possible, Pink?”
“It isn't possible now, but they'll make a try at it.”
There was a short pause, with Lily struggling to understand. Pink's set face relaxed somewhat. All that night he had been fighting for his belief in her.
“I never dreamed of it, Pink. I suppose all the talk I've heard meant that, but I never—are you sure? About Jim Doyle, I mean.”
“We know he is behind it. We haven't got the goods on him yet, but we know. Cameron knows. You ask him and he'll tell you.”
“Willy Cameron?”
“Yes. He's had some vision, while the rest of us—! He's got a lot of us working now, Lily. We are on the right trail, too, although we lost some records last night that put us back a couple of months. We'll get them, all right. We'll smash their little revolution into a cocked hat.” It occurred to him, then, that this house was a poor place for such a confidence. “I'll tell you about it later. Get your things now, and let me take you home.”
But Lily's problem was too complex for Pink's simple remedy. She was stricken with sudden conviction; the very mention of Willy Cameron gave Pink's statements authority. But to go like that, to leave Elinor in that house, with all that it implied, was impossible. And there was her own private problem to dispose of.
“I'll go this afternoon, Pink. I'll promise you that. But I can't go with you now. I can't. You'll have to take my word, that's all. And you must believe I didn't know.”
“Of course you didn't know,” he said, sturdily. “But I hate like thunder to go and leave you here.” He picked up his hat, reluctantly. “If I can do anything—”
Lily's mind was working more clearly now. This was the thing Louis Akers had been concerned with, then, a revolution against his country. But it was the thing, too, that he had promised to abandon. He was not a killer. She knew him well, and he was not a killer. He had got to a certain point, and then the thing had sickened him. Even without her he would never have gone through with it. But it would be necessary now to get his information quickly. Very quickly.
“Suppose,” she said, hesitatingly, “suppose I tell you that I think I am going to be able to help you before long?”
“Help? I want you safe. This is not work for women.”
“But suppose I can bring you a very valuable ally?” she persisted. “Some one who knows all about certain plans, and has changed his views about them?”
“One of them?”
“He has been.”
“Is he selling his information?”
“In a way, yes,” said Lily, slowly.
“Ware the fellow who sells information,” Pink said. “But we'll be glad to have it. We need it, God knows. And—you'll leave?”
“I couldn't stay, could I?”
He kissed her hand when he went away, doing it awkwardly and self-consciously, but withal reverently. She wondered, rather dully, why she could not love Pink. A woman would be so safe with him, so sure.
She had not even then gathered the full force of what he had told her. But little by little things came back to her; the man on guard in the garden; the incident of the locked kitchen door; Jim Doyle once talking angrily over a telephone in his study, although no telephone, so far as she knew, was installed in the room; his recent mysterious absences, and the increasing visits of the hateful Woslosky.
She went back to Louis. This was what he had meant. He had known all along, and plotted with them; even if his stomach had turned now, he had been a party to this infamy. Even then she did not hate him; she saw him, misled as she had been by Doyle's high-sounding phrases, lured on by one of those wild dreams of empire to which men were sometimes given. She did not love him any more; she was sorry for him.
She saw her position with the utmost clearness. To go home was to abandon him, to lose him for those who needed what he could give, to send him back to the enemy. She had told Pink she could secure an ally for a price, and she was the price. There was not an ounce of melodrama in her, as she stood facing the situation. She considered, quite simply, that she had assumed an obligation which she must carry out. Perhaps her pride was dictating to her also. To go crawling home, bowed to the dust, to admit that life had beaten her, to face old Anthony's sneers and her mother's pity—that was hard for any Cardew.
She remembered Elinor's home-comings of years ago, the strained air of the household, the whispering servants, and Elinor herself shut away, or making her rare, almost furtive visits downstairs when her father was out of the house.
No, she could not face that.
Her own willfulness had brought her to this pass; she faced that uncompromisingly. She would marry Louis, and hold him to his promise, and so perhaps out of all this misery some good would come. But at the thought of marriage she found herself trembling violently. With no love and no real respect to build on, with an intuitive knowledge of the man's primitive violences, the reluctance toward marriage with him which she had always felt crystallized into something very close to dread.
But a few minutes later she went upstairs, quite steady again, and fully determined. At Elinor's door she tapped lightly, and she heard movements within. Then Elinor opened the door wide. She had been lying on her bed, and automatically after closing the door she began to smooth it. Lily felt a wave of intense pity for her.
“I wish you would go away from here, Aunt Elinor,” she said.
Elinor glanced up, without surprise.
“Where could I go?”
“If you left him definitely, you could go home.”
Elinor shook her head, dumbly, and her passivity drove Lily suddenly to desperation.
“You know what is going on,” she said, her voice strained. “You don't believe it is right; you know it is wicked. Clothe it in all the fine language in the world, Aunt Elinor, and it is still wicked. If you stay here you condone it. I won't. I am going away.”
“I wish you had never come, Lily.”
“It's too late for that,” Lily said, stonily. “But it is not too late for you to get away.”
“I shall stay,” Elinor said, with an air of finality. But Lily made one more effort.
“He is killing you.”
“No, he is killing himself.” Suddenly Elinor flared into a passionate outburst. “Don't you think I know where all this is leading? Do you believe for a moment that I think all this can lead to anything but death? It is a madness, Lily; they are all mad, these men. Don't you know that I have talked and argued and prayed, against it?”
“Then come away. You have done all you could, and you have failed, haven't you?”
“It is not time for me to go,” Elinor said. And Lily, puzzled and baffled, found herself again looking into Elinor's quiet, inscrutable eyes.
Elinor had taken it for granted that the girl was going home, and together they packed almost in silence. Once Elinor looked up from folding a garment, and said:
“You said you had not understood before, but that now you do. What did you mean?”
“Pink Denslow was here.”
“What does he know?”
“Do you think I ought to tell you, Aunt Elinor? It isn't that I don't trust you. You must believe that, but don't you see that so long as you stay here—he said that to me—you are one of them.”
Elinor resumed her folding.
“Yes, I suppose I am one of them,” she said quietly. “And you are right. You must not tell me anything. Pink is Henry Denslow's son, I suppose.”
“Yes.”
“Do they—still live in the old house?”
“Yes.”
Elinor continued her methodical work.
Willy Cameron was free that evening. Although he had not slept at all the night before, he felt singularly awake and active. The Committee had made temporary quarters of his small back room at the pharmacy, and there had sat in rather depressed conclave during a part of the afternoon. Pink Denslow had come in late, and had remained, silent and haggard, through the debate.
There was nothing to do but to start again in an attempt to get files and card indexes. Greater secrecy was to be preserved and enjoined, the location of the office to be known only to a small inner circle, and careful policing of it and of the building which housed it to be established. As a further safeguard, two duplicate files would be kept in other places. The Committee groaned over its own underestimate of the knowledge of the radicals.
The two buildings chosen for destruction were, respectively, the bank building where their file was kept, and the club, where nine-tenths of the officers of the Committee were members. The significance of the double outrage was unquestionable.
When the meeting broke up Pink remained behind. He found it rather difficult to broach the matter in his mind. It was always hard for him to talk about Lily Cardew, and lately he had had a growing conviction that Willy Cameron found it equally difficult. He wondered if Cameron, too, was in love with Lily. There had been a queer look in his face on those rare occasions when Pink had mentioned her, a sort of exaltation, and an odd difficulty afterwards in getting back to the subject in hand.
Pink had developed an enormous affection and admiration for Willy Cameron, a strange, loyal, half wistful, totally unselfish devotion. It had steadied him, when the loss of Lily might have made him reckless, and had taken the form in recent weeks of finding innumerable business opportunities, which Willy Cameron cheerfully refused to take.
“I'll stay here until this other thing is settled,” was Willy's invariable answer. “I have a certain amount of time here, and the fellows can drop in to see me without causing suspicion. In an office it would be different. And besides, I can't throw Mr. Davis down. His wife is in bad shape.”
So, that afternoon, Pink waited until the Committee had dispersed, and then said, with some difficulty:
“I saw her, Cameron. She has promised to leave.”
“To-day?”
“This afternoon. I wanted to take her away, but she had some things to do.”
“Then she hadn't known before?”
“No. She thought it was just talk. And they'd kept the papers from her. She hadn't heard about last night. Well, that's all. I thought you'd want to know.”
Pink started out, but Willy Cameron called him back.
“Have any of your people any influence with the Cardews?”
“No one has any influence with the Cardews, if you mean the Cardew men. Why?”
“Because Cardew has got to get out of the mayoralty campaign. That's all.”
“That's a-plenty,” said Pink, grinning. “Why don't you go and tell him so?”
“I'm thinking of it. He hasn't a chance in the world, but he'll defeat Hendricks by splitting the vote, and let the other side in. And you know what that means.”
“I know it,” Pink observed, “but Mr. Cardew doesn't, and he won't after you've told him. They've put a lot of money in, and once a Cardew has invested in a thing he holds on like death. Especially the old man. Wouldn't wonder he was the fellow who pounded the daylights out of Akers last night,” he added.
Willy Cameron, having carefully filled his pipe, closed the door into the shop, and opened a window.
“Akers?” he inquired.
“Noon edition has it,” Pink said. “Claims to have been attacked in his rooms by two masked men. Probably wouldn't have told it, but the doctor talked. Looks as though he could wallop six masked men, doesn't he?”
“Yes,” said Willy Cameron, reflectively. “Yes; he does, rather.”
He felt more hopeful than he had for days. Lily on her way home, clear once more of the poisonous atmosphere of Doyle and his associates; Akers temporarily out of the way, perhaps for long enough to let the normal influences of her home life show him to her in a real perspective; and a rather unholy but very human joy that he had given Akers a part of what was coming to him—all united to cheer him. He saw Lily going home, and a great wave of tenderness flooded him. If only they would be tactful and careful, if only they would be understanding and kind. If they would only be normal and every-day, and accept her as though she had never been away. These people were so hedged about with conventions and restrictions, they put so much emphasis on the letter and so little on the spirit. If only—God, if only they wouldn't patronize her!
His mother would have known how to receive her. He felt, that afternoon, a real homesickness for his mother. He saw her, ample and comfortable and sane, so busy with the comforts of the body that she seemed to ignore the soul, and yet bringing healing with her every matter-of-fact movement.
If only Lily could have gone back to her, instead of to that great house, full of curious eyes and whispering voices.
He saw Mr. Hendricks that evening on his way home to supper. Mr. Hendricks had lost flesh and some of his buoyancy, but he was persistently optimistic.
“Up to last night I'd have said we were done, son,” he observed. “But this bomb business has settled them. The labor vote'll split on it, sure as whooping cough.”
“They've bought a half-page in all the morning papers, disclaiming all responsibility and calling on all citizens to help them in protecting private property.”
“Have they, now,” said Hendricks, with grudging admiration. “Can you beat that? Where do they get the money, anyhow? If I lost my watch these days I'd have to do some high-finance before I'd be able to advertise for it.”
“All right, see Cardew,” were his parting words. “But he doesn't want this election any more than I want my right leg. He'll stick. You can talk, Cameron, I'll say it. But you can't pry him off with kind words, any more than you can a porous plaster.”
Behind Mr. Hendricks' colloquialisms there was something sturdy and fine. His very vernacular made him popular; his honesty was beyond suspicion. If he belonged to the old school in politics, he had most of its virtues and few of its vices. He would take care of his friends, undoubtedly, but he was careful in his choice of friends. He would make the city a good place to live in. Like Willy Cameron, he saw it, not a center of trade so much as a vast settlement of homes. Business supported the city in his mind, not the city business.
Nevertheless the situation was serious, and it was with a sense of a desperate remedy for a desperate disease that Willy Cameron, after a careful toilet, rang the bell of the Cardew house that night. He had no hope of seeing Lily, but the mere thought that they were under one roof gave him a sense of nearness and of comfort in her safety.
Dinner was recently over, and he found both the Cardews, father and son, in the library smoking. He had arrived at a bad moment, for the bomb outrage, coming on top of Lily's refusal to come home under the given conditions, had roused Anthony to a cold rage, and left Howard with a feeling of helplessness.
Anthony Cardew nodded to him grimly, but Howard shook hands and offered him a chair.
“I heard you speak some time ago, Mr. Cameron,” he said. “You made me wish I could have had your support.”
“I came to talk about that. I am sorry to have to come in the evening, but I am not free at any other time.”
“When we go into politics,” said old Anthony in his jibing voice, “the ordinary amenities have to go. When you are elected, Howard, I shall live somewhere else.”
Willy Cameron smiled.
“I don't think you will be put to that inconvenience, Mr. Cardew.”
“What's that?” Old Anthony's voice was incredulous. Here, in his own house, this whipper-snapper—
“I am sure Mr. Howard Cardew realizes he cannot be elected.”
The small ragged vein on Anthony's forehead was the storm signal for the family. Howard glanced at him, and said urbanely:
“Will you have a cigar, Mr. Cameron? Or a liqueur?”
“Nothing, thank you. If I can have a few minutes' talk with you—”
“If you mean that as a request for me to go out, I will remind you that I am heavily interested in this matter myself,” said old Anthony. “I have put in a great deal of money. If you people are going to drop out, I want to hear it. You've played the devil with us already, with your independent candidate who can't talk English.”
Willy Cameron kept his temper.
“No,” he said, slowly. “It wasn't a question of Mr. Hendricks withdrawing. It was a question of Mr. Cardew getting out.”
Sheer astonishment held old Anthony speechless.
“It's like this,” Willy Cameron said. “Your son knows it. Even if we drop out he won't get it. Justly or unjustly—and I mean that—nobody with the name of Cardew can be elected to any high office in this city. There's no reflection on anybody in my saying that. I am telling you a fact.”
Howard had listened attentively and without anger. “For a long time, Mr. Cameron,” he said, “I have been urging men of—of position in the city, to go into politics. We have needed to get away from the professional politician. I went in, without much hope of election, to—well, you can say to blaze a trail. It is not being elected that counts with me, so much as to show my willingness to serve.”
Old Anthony recovered his voice.
“The Cardews made this town, sir,” he barked. “Willingness to serve, piffle! We need a business man to run the city, and by God, we'll get it!”
“You'll get an anarchist,” said Willy Cameron, slightly flushed.
“If you want my opinion, young man, this is a trick, a political trick. And how do we know that your Vigilance Committee isn't a trick, too? You try to tell us that there is an organized movement here to do heaven knows what, and by sheer terror you build up a machine which appeals to the public imagination. You don't say anything about votes, but you see that they vote for your man. Isn't that true?”
“Yes. If they can keep an anarchist out of office. Akers is an anarchist. He calls himself something else, but that's what it amounts to. And those bombs last night were not imaginary.”
The introduction of Louis Akers' name had a sobering effect on Anthony Cardew. After all, more than anything else, he wanted Akers defeated. The discussion slowly lost its acrimony, and ended, oddly enough, in Willy Cameron and Anthony Cardew virtually uniting against Howard. What Willy Cameron told about Jim Doyle fed the old man's hatred of his daughter's husband, and there was something very convincing about Cameron himself. Something of fearlessness and honesty that began, slowly, to dispose Anthony in his favor.
It was Howard who held out.
“If I quit now it will look as though I didn't want to take a licking,” he said, quietly obstinate. “Grant your point, that I'm defeated. All right, I'll be defeated—but I won't quit.”
And Anthony Cardew, confronted by that very quality of obstinacy which had been his own weapon for so many years, retired in high dudgeon to his upper rooms. He was living in a strange new world, a reasonable soul on an unreasonable earth, an earth where a man's last sanctuary, his club, was blown up about him, and a man's family apparently lived only to thwart him.
With Anthony gone, Howard dropped the discussion with the air of a man who has made a final stand.
“What you have said about Mr. Doyle interests me greatly,” he observed, “because—you probably do not know this—my sister married him some years ago. It was a most unhappy affair.”
“I do know it. For that reason I am glad that Miss Lily has come home.”
“Has come home? She has not come home, Mr. Cameron. There was a condition we felt forced to make, and she refused to agree to it. Perhaps we were wrong. I—”
Willy Cameron got up.
“Was that to-day?” he asked.
“No.”
“But she was coming home to-day. She was to leave there this afternoon.”
“How do you know that?”
“Denslow saw her there this afternoon. She agreed to leave at once. He had told her of the bombs, and of other things. She hadn't understood before, and she was horrified. It is just possible Doyle wouldn't let her go.”
“But—that's ridiculous. She can't be a prisoner in my sister's house.”
“Will you telephone and find out if she is there?” Howard went to the telephone at once. It seemed to Willy Cameron that he stood there for uncounted years, and as though, through all that eternity of waiting, he knew what the answer would be. And that he knew, too, what that answer meant, where she had gone, what she had done. If only she had come to him. If only she had come to him. He would have saved her from herself. He—
“She is not there,” Howard Cardew said, in a voice from which all life had gone. “She left this afternoon, at four o'clock. Of course she has friends. Or she may have gone to a hotel. We had managed to make it practically impossible for her to come home.”
Willy Cameron glanced at his watch. He had discounted the worst before it came, and unlike the older man, was ready for action. It was he who took hold of the situation.
“Order a car, Mr. Cardew, and go to the hotels,” he said. “And if you will drop me downtown—I'll tell you where—I'll follow up something that has just occurred to me.”