Lily was idle, for the first time in months. She wandered about, even penetrating to those upper rooms sacred to her grandfather, to which he had retired on Howard's marriage. How strangely commonplace they were now, in the full light of day, and yet, when he was in them, the doors closed and only Burton, his valet, in attendance, how mysterious they became!
Increasingly, in later years, Lily had felt and resented the domination of the old man. She resented her father's acquiescence in that domination, her mother's good-humored tolerance of it. She herself had accepted it, although unwillingly, but she knew, rather vaguely, that the Lily Cardew who had gone away to the camp and the Lily Cardew who stood that day before her grandfather's throne-like chair under its lamp, were two entirely different people.
She was uneasy rather than defiant. She meant to keep the peace. She had been brought up to the theory that no price was too great to pay for peace. But she wondered, as she stood there, if that were entirely true. She remembered something Willy Cameron had said about that very thing.
"What's wrong with your grandfather," he had said, truculently, and waving his pipe, "is that everybody gets down and lets him walk on them. If everybody lets a man use them as doormats, you can't blame him for wiping his feet on them. Tell him that sometime, and see what happens."
"Tell him yourself!" said Lily.
He had smiled cheerfully. He had an engaging sort of smile.
"Maybe I will," he said. "I am a rising young man, and my voice may some day be heard in the land. Sometimes I feel the elements of greatness in me, sweet child. You haven't happened to notice it yourself, have you?"
He had gazed at her with solemn anxiety through the smoke of his pipe, and had grinned when she remained silent.
Lily drew a long breath. All that delightful fooling was over; the hard work was over. The nights were gone when they would wander like children across the parade grounds, or past the bayonet school, with its rows of tripods upholding imitation enemies made of sacks stuffed with hay, and showing signs of mortal injury with their greasy entrails protruding. Gone, too, were the hours when Willy sank into the lowest abyss of depression over his failure to be a fighting man.
"But you are doing your best for your country," she would say.
"I'm not fighting for it, or getting smashed up for it. I don't want to be a hero, but I'd like to have had one good bang at them before I quit."
Once she had found him in the hut, with his head on a table. He said he had a toothache.
Well, that was all over. She was back in her grandfather's house, and—
"He'll get me too, probably," she reflected, as she went down the stairs, "just as he's got all the others."
Mademoiselle was in Lily's small sitting room, while Castle was unpacking under her supervision. The sight of her uniforms made Lily suddenly restless.
"How you could wear these things!" cried Mademoiselle. "You, who have always dressed like a princess!"
"I liked them," said Lily, briefly. "Mademoiselle, what am I going to do with myself, now?"
"Do?" Mademoiselle smiled. "Play, as you deserve, Cherie. Dance, and meet nice young men. You are to make your debut this fall. Then a very charming young man, and marriage."
"Oh!" said Lily, rather blankly. "I've got to come out, have I? I'd forgotten people did such things. Please run along and do something else, Castle. I'll unpack."
"That is very bad for discipline," Mademoiselle objected when the maid had gone. "And it is not necessary for Mr. Anthony Cardew's granddaughter."
"It's awfully necessary for her," Lily observed, cheerfully. "I've been buttoning my own shoes for some time, and I haven't developed a spinal curvature yet." She kissed Mademoiselle's perplexed face lightly. "Don't get to worrying about me," she added. "I'll shake down in time, and be just as useless as ever. But I wish you'd lend me your sewing basket."
"Why?" asked Mademoiselle, suspiciously.
"Because I am possessed with a mad desire to sew on some buttons."
A little later Lily looked up from her rather awkward but industrious labors with a needle, and fixed her keen young eyes on Mademoiselle.
"Is there any news about Aunt Elinor?" she asked.
"She is with him," said Mademoiselle, shortly. "They are here now, in the city. How he dared to come back!"
"Does mother see her?"
"No. Certainly not."
"Why 'certainly' not? He is Aunt Elinor's husband. She isn't doing anything wicked."
"A woman who would leave a home like this," said Mademoiselle, "and a distinguished family. Position. Wealth. For a brute who beats her. And desert her child also!"
"Does he really beat her? I don't quite believe that, Mademoiselle."
"It is not a subject for a young girl."
"Because really," Lily went on, "there is something awfully big about a woman who will stick to one man like that. I am quite sure I would bite a man who struck me, but—suppose I loved him terribly—" her voice trailed off. "You see, dear, I have seen a lot of brutality lately. An army camp isn't a Sunday school picnic. And I like strong men, even if they are brutal sometimes."
Mademoiselle carefully cut a thread.
"This—you were speaking to Ellen of a young man. Is he a—what you term brutal?"
Suddenly Lily laughed.
"You poor dear!" she said. "And mother, too, of course! You're afraid I'm in love with Willy Cameron. Don't you know that if I were, I'd probably never even mention his name?"
"But is he brutal?" persisted Mademoiselle.
"I'll tell you about him. He is a thin, blond young man, tall and a bit lame. He has curly hair, and he puts pomade on it to take the curl out. He is frightfully sensitive about not getting in the army, and he is perfectly sweet and kind, and as brutal as a June breeze. You'd better tell mother. And you can tell her he isn't in love with me, or I with him. You see, I represent what he would call the monied aristocracy of America, and he has the most fearful ideas about us."
"An anarchist, then?" asked. Mademoiselle, extremely comforted.
"Not at all. He says he belongs to the plain people. The people in between. He is rather oratorical about them. He calls them the backbone of the country."
Mademoiselle relaxed. She had been too long in old Anthony's house to consider very seriously the plain people. Her world, like Anthony Cardew's, consisted of the financial aristocracy, which invested money in industries and drew out rich returns, while providing employment for the many; and of the employees of the magnates, who had recently shown strong tendencies toward upsetting the peace of the land, and had given old Anthony one or two attacks of irritability when it was better to go up a rear staircase if he were coming down the main one.
"Wait a moment," said Lily, suddenly. "I have a picture of him somewhere."
She disappeared, and Mademoiselle heard her rummaging through the drawers of her dressing table. She came back with a small photograph in her hand.
It showed a young man, in a large apron over a Red Cross uniform, bending over a low field range with a long-handled fork in his hand.
"Frying doughnuts," Lily explained. "I was in this hut at first, and I mixed them and cut them, and he fried them. We made thousands of them. We used to talk about opening a shop somewhere, Cardew and Cameron. He said my name would be fine for business. He'd fry them in the window, and I'd sell them. And a coffee machine—coffee and doughnuts, you know."
"Not—seriously?"
At the expression on Mademoiselle's face Lily laughed joyously.
"Why not?" she demanded. "And you could be the cashier, like the ones in France, and sit behind a high desk and count money all day. I'd rather do that than come out," she added.
"You are going to be a good girl, Lily, aren't you?"
"If that means letting grandfather use me for a doormat, I don't know."
"Lily!"
"He's old, and I intend to be careful. But he doesn't own me, body and soul. And it may be hard to make him understand t
hat."
Many times in the next few months Mademoiselle was to remember that conversation, and turn it over in her shrewd, troubled mind. Was there anything she could have done, outside of warning old Anthony himself? Suppose she had gone to Mr. Howard Cardew?
"And how," said Mademoiselle, trying to smile, "do you propose to assert this new independence of spirit?"
"I am going to see Aunt Elinor," observed Lily. "There, that's eleven buttons on, and I feel I've earned my dinner. And I'm going to ask Willy Cameron to come here to see me. To dinner. And as he is sure not to have any evening clothes, for one night in their lives the Cardew men are going to dine in mufti. Which is military, you dear old thing, for the everyday clothing that the plain people eat in, without apparent suffering!"
Mademoiselle got up. She felt that Grace should be warned at once. And there was a look in Lily's face when she mentioned this Cameron creature that made Mademoiselle nervous.
"I thought he lived in the country."
"Then prepare yourself for a blow," said Lily Cardew, cheerfully. "He is here in the city, earning twenty-five dollars a week in the Eagle Pharmacy, and serving the plain people perfectly preposterous patent potions—which is his own alliteration, and pretty good, I say."
Mademoiselle went out into the hall. Over the house, always silent, there had come a death-like hush. In the lower hall the footman was hanging up his master's hat and overcoat. Anthony Cardew had come home for dinner.
CHAPTER V
Mr. William Wallace Cameron, that evening of Lily's return, took a walk. From his boarding house near the Eagle Pharmacy to the Cardew residence was a half-hour's walk. There were a number of things he had meant to do that evening, with a view to improving his mind, but instead he took a walk. He had made up a schedule for those evenings when he was off duty, thinking it out very carefully on the train to the city. And the schedule ran something like this:
Monday: 8-11. Read History. Wednesday: 8-11. Read Politics and Economics. Friday: 8-9:30. Travel. 9:30-11. French. Sunday: Hear various prominent divines.
He had cut down on the travel rather severely, because travel was with him an indulgence rather than a study. The longest journey he had ever taken in his life was to Washington. That was early in the war, when it did not seem possible that his country would not use him, a boy who could tramp incredible miles in spite of his lameness and who could shoot a frightened rabbit at almost any distance, by allowing for a slight deflection to the right in the barrel of his old rifle.
But they had refused him.
"They won't use me, mother," he had said when he got home, home being a small neat house on a tidy street of a little country town. "I tried every branch, but the only training I've had—well, some smart kid said they weren't planning to serve soda water to the army. They didn't want cripples, you see."
"I wish you wouldn't, Willy."
He had been frightfully sorry then and had comforted her at some length, but the fact remained.
"And you the very best they've ever had for mixing prescriptions!" she had said at last. "And a graduate in chemistry!"
"Well," he said, "that's that, and we won't worry about it. There's more than one way of killing a cat."
"What do you mean, Willy? More than one way?"
There was no light of prophecy in William Wallace Cameron's gray eyes, however, when he replied: "More than one way of serving my country. Don't you worry. I'll find something."
So he had, and he had come out of his Red Cross work in the camp with one or two things in his heart that had not been there before. One was a knowledge of men. He could not have put into words what he felt about men. It was something about the fundamental simplicity of them, for one thing. You got pretty close to them at night sometimes, especially when the homesick ones had gone to bed, and the phonograph was playing in a corner of the long, dim room. There were some shame-faced tears hidden under army blankets those nights, and Willy Cameron did some blinking on his own account.
Then, under all the blasphemy, the talk about women, the surface sordidness of their daily lives and thoughts, there was one instinct common to all, one love, one hidden purity. And the keyword to those depths was "home."
"Home," he said one day to Lily Cardew. "Mostly it's the home they've left, and maybe they didn't think so much of it then. But they do now. And if it isn't that, it's the home they want to have some day." He looked at Lily. Sometimes she smiled at things he said, and if she had not been grave he would not have gone on. "You know," he continued, "there's mostly a girl some place. All this talk about the nation, now—" He settled himself on the edge of the pine table where old Anthony Cardew's granddaughter had been figuring up her week's accounts, and lighted his pipe, "the nation's too big for us to understand. But what is the nation, but a bunch of homes?"
"Willy dear," said Lily Cardew, "did you take any money out of the cigar box for anything this week?"
"Dollar sixty-five for lard," replied Willy dear. "As I was saying, we've got to think of this country in terms of homes. Not palaces like yours—"
"Good gracious!" said Lily, "I don't live in a palace. Get my pocket-book, will you? I'm out three dollars somehow, and I'd rather make it up myself than add these figures over again. Go on and talk, Willy. I love hearing you."
"Not palaces like yours," repeated Mr. Cameron, "and not hovels. But mostly self-respecting houses, the homes of the plain people. The middle class, Miss Cardew. My class. The people who never say anything, but are squeezed between capital, represented by your grandfather, with its parasites, represented by you, and—"
"You represent the people who never say anything," observed the slightly flushed parasite of capital, "about as adequately as I represent the idle rich."
Yet not even old Anthony could have resented the actual relationship between them. Lily Cardew, working alone in her hut among hundreds of men, was as without sex consciousness as a child. Even then her flaming interest was in the private soldiers. The officers were able to amuse themselves; they had money and opportunity. It was the doughboys she loved and mothered. For them she organized her little entertainments. For them she played and sang in the evenings, when the field range in the kitchen was cold, and her blistered fingers stumbled sometimes over the keys of the jingling camp piano.
Gradually, out of the chaos of her early impressions, she began to divide the men in the army into three parts. There were the American born; they took the war and their part in it as a job to be done, with as few words as possible. And there were the foreigners to whom America was a religion, a dream come true, whose flaming love for their new mother inspired them to stuttering eloquence and awkward gestures. And then there was a third division, small and mostly foreign born, but with a certain percentage of native malcontents, who hated the war and sneered among themselves at the other dupes who believed that it was a war for freedom. It was a capitalists' war. They considered the state as an instrument of oppression, as a bungling interference with liberty and labor; they felt that wealth inevitably brought depravity. They committed both open and overt acts against discipline, and found in their arrest and imprisonment renewed grievances, additional oppression, tyranny. And one day a handful of them, having learned Lily's identity, came into her hut and attempted to bait her.
"Gentlemen," said one of them, "we have here an example of one of the idle rich, sacrificing herself to make us happy. Now, boys, be happy. Are we all happy?" He surveyed the group. "Here, you," he addressed a sullen-eyed squat Hungarian. "Smile when I tell you. You're a slave in one of old Cardew's mills, aren't you? Well, aren't you grateful to him? Here he goes and sends his granddaughter—"
Willy Cameron had entered the room with a platter of doughnuts in his hand, and stood watching, his face going pale. Quite suddenly there was a crash, and the gang leader went down in a welter of porcelain and fried pastry. Willy Cameron was badly beaten up, in the end, and the beaters were court-martialed. But something of Lily's fine faith in humanity was gone.
"But," she said to him, visiting him one day in the base hospital, where he was still an aching, mass of bruises, "there must be something behind it. They didn't hate me. They only hated my—well, my family."
"My dear child," said Willy Cameron, feeling very old and experienced, and, it must be confessed, extremely happy, "of course there's something behind it. But the most that's behind it is a lot of fellows who want without working what the other fellow's worked to get."
It was about that time that Lily was exchanged into the town near the camp, and Willy Cameron suddenly found life a stale thing, and ashes in the mouth. He finally decided that he had not been such a hopeless fool as to fall in love with her, but that it would be as well not to see her too much.
"The thing to do," he reasoned to himself, "is, first of all, not to see her. Or only on Friday nights, because she likes the movies, and it would look queer to stop." Thus Willy Cameron speciously to himself, and deliberately ignoring the fact that some twenty-odd officers stood ready to seize those Friday nights. "And then to work hard, so I'll sleep better, and not lie awake making a fool of myself. And when I get a bit of idiocy in the daytime, I'd better just walk it off. Because I've got to live with myself a long time, probably, and I'm no love-sick Romeo."
Which excellent practical advice had cost him considerable shoe-leather at first. In a month or two, however, he considered himself quite cured, and pretended to himself that he was surprised to find it Friday again. But when, after retreat, the band marched back again to its quarters playing, for instance, "There's a Long, Long Trail," there was something inside him that insisted on seeing the years ahead as a long, long trail, and that the trail did not lead to the lands of his dreams.
The Best of Mary Roberts Rinehart Page 268
