He got to know that very well indeed during the winter that followed the armistice. Because there was work to do he stayed and finished up, as did Lily Cardew. But the hut was closed and she was working in the town, and although they kept up their Friday evenings, the old intimacy was gone. And one night she said:
"Isn't it amazing, when you are busy, how soon Friday night comes along?"
And on each day of the preceding week he had wakened and said to himself: "This is Monday—"—or whatever it might be—"and in four more days it will be Friday."
In February he was sent home. Lily stayed on until the end of March. He went back to his little village of plain people, and took up life again as best he could. But sometimes it seemed to him that from behind every fire-lit window in the evenings—he was still wearing out shoe-leather, particularly at nights—somebody with a mandolin was wailing about the long, long trail.
His mother watched him anxiously. He was thinner than ever, and oddly older, and there was a hollow look about his eyes that hurt her.
"Why don't you bring home a bottle of tonic from the store, Willy," she said, one evening when he had been feverishly running through the city newspaper. He put the paper aside hastily.
"Tonic!" he said. "Why, I'm all right, mother. Anyhow, I wouldn't take any of that stuff." He caught her eye and looked away. "It takes a little time to get settled again, that's all, mother."
"The Young People's Society is having an entertainment at the church to-night, Willy."
"Well, maybe I'll go," he agreed to her unspoken suggestion. "If you insist on making me a society man—"
But some time later he came downstairs with a book.
"Thought I'd rather read," he explained. "Got a book here on the history of steel. Talk about romances! Let me read some of it to you. You sit there and close your eyes and just listen to this: 'The first Cardew furnace was built in 1868. At that time—'"
Some time later he glanced up. His mother was quietly sleeping, her hands folded in her lap. He closed the book and sat there, fighting again his patient battle with himself. The book on his knee seemed to symbolize the gulf between Lily Cardew and himself. But the real gulf, the unbridgeable chasm, between Lily and himself, was neither social nor financial.
"As if that counted, in America," he reflected scornfully.
No. It was not that. The war had temporarily broken down the old social barriers. Some of them would never be erected again, although it was the tendency of civilization for men to divide themselves, rather than to be divided, into the high, the middle and the low. But in his generation young Cameron knew that there would be no uncrossable bridge between old Anthony's granddaughter and himself, were it not for one thing.
She did not love him. It hurt his pride to realize that she had never thought of him in any terms but that of a pleasant comradeship. Hardly even as a man. Men fought, in war time. They did not fry doughnuts and write letters home for the illiterate. Any one of those boys in the ranks was a better man than he was. All this talk about a man's soul being greater than his body, that was rot. A man was as good as the weakest part of him, and no more.
His sensitive face in the lamplight was etched with lines of tragedy. He put the book on the table, and suddenly flinging his arms across it, dropped his head on them. The slight movement wakened his mother.
"Why, Willy!" she said.
After a moment he looked up. "I was almost asleep," he explained, more to protect her than himself. "I—I wish that fool Nelson kid would break his mandolin—or his neck," he said irritably. He kissed her and went upstairs. From across the quiet street there came thin, plaintive, occasionally inaccurate, the strains of the long, long trail.
There was the blood of Covenanters in Willy Cameron's mother, a high courage of sacrifice, and an exceedingly shrewd brain. She lay awake that night, carefully planning, and when everything was arranged in orderly fashion in her mind, she lighted her lamp and carried it to the door of Willy's room. He lay diagonally across his golden-oak bed, for he was very long, and sleep had rubbed away the tragic lines about his mouth. She closed his door and went back to her bed.
"I've seen too much of it," she reflected, without bitterness. She stared around the room. "Too much of it," she repeated. And crawled heavily back into bed, a determined little figure, rather chilled.
The next morning she expressed a desire to spend a few months with her brother in California.
"I coughed all last winter, after I had the flu," she explained, "and James has been wanting me this long time. I don't want to leave you, that's all, Willy. If you were in the city it would be different."
He was frankly bewildered and a little hurt, to tell the truth. He no more suspected her of design than of crime.
"Of course you are going," he said, heartily. "It's the very thing. But I like the way you desert your little son!"
"I've been thinking about that, too," she said, pouring his coffee. "I—if you were in the city, now, there would always be something to do."
He shot her a suspicious glance, but her face was without evidence of guile.
"What would I do in the city?"
"They use chemists in the mills, don't they?"
"A fat chance I'd have for that sort of job," he scoffed. "No city for me, mother."
But she knew. She read his hesitation accurately, the incredulous pause of the bird whose cage door is suddenly opened. He would go.
"I'd think about it, anyhow, Willy."
But for a long time after he had gone she sat quietly rocking in her rocking chair in the bay window of the sitting room. It was a familiar attitude of hers, homely, middle-class, and in a way symbolic. Had old Anthony Cardew ever visualized so imaginative a thing as a Nemesis, he would probably have summoned a vision of a huddled figure in his stable-yard, dying, and cursing him as he died. Had Jim Doyle, cunningly plotting the overthrow of law and order, been able in his arrogance to conceive of such a thing, it might have been Anthony Cardew he saw. Neither of them, for a moment, dreamed of it as an elderly Scotch Covenanter, a plain little womanly figure, rocking in a cane-seated rocking chair, and making the great sacrifice of her life.
All of which simply explains how, on a March Wednesday evening of the great year of peace after much tribulation, Mr. William Wallace Cameron, now a clerk at the Eagle Pharmacy, after an hour of Politics, and no Economics at all, happened to be taking a walk toward the Cardew house. Such pilgrimages has love taken for many years, small uncertain ramblings where the fancy leads the feet and far outstrips them, and where heart-hunger hides under various flimsy pretexts; a fine night, a paper to be bought, a dog to be exercised.
Not that Willy Cameron made any excuses to himself. He had a sort of idea that if he saw the magnificence that housed her, it would through her sheer remoteness kill the misery in him. But he regarded himself with a sort of humorous pity, and having picked up a stray dog, he addressed it now and then.
"Even a cat can look at a king," he said once. And again, following some vague train of thought, on a crowded street: "The People's voice is a queer thing. 'It is, and it is not, the voice of God.' The people's voice, old man. Only the ones that count haven't got a voice."
There were, he felt, two Lily Cardews. One lived in an army camp, and wore plain clothes, and got a bath by means of calculation and persistency, and went to the movies on Friday nights, and was quite apt to eat peanuts at those times, carefully putting the shells in her pocket.
And another one lived inside this great pile of brick,—he was standing across from it, by the park railing, by that time—where motor cars drew up, and a footman with an umbrella against a light rain ushered to their limousines draped women and men in evening clothes, their strong blacks and whites revealed in the light of the street door. And this Lily Cardew lived in state, bowed to by flunkeys in livery, dressed and undressed—his Scotch sense of decorum resented this—by serving women. This Lily Cardew would wear frivolous ball-gowns, such things as he saw in
the shop windows, considered money only as a thing of exchange, and had traveled all over Europe a number of times.
He took his station against the park railings and reflected that it was a good thing he had come, after all. Because it was the first Lily whom he loved, and she was gone, with the camp and the rest, including war. What had he in common with those lighted windows, with their heavy laces and draperies?
"Nothing at all, old man," he said cheerfully to the dog, "nothing at all."
But although the ache was gone when he turned homeward, the dog still at his heels, he felt strangely lonely without it. He considered that very definitely he had put love out of his life. Hereafter he would travel the trail alone. Or accompanied only by History, Politics, Economics, and various divines on Sunday evenings.
CHAPTER VI
"Well, grandfather," said Lily Cardew, "the last of the Cardews is home from the wars."
"So I presume," observed old Anthony. "Owing, however, to your mother's determination to shroud this room in impenetrable gloom, I can only presume. I cannot see you."
His tone was less unpleasant than his words, however. He was in one of the rare moods of what passed with him for geniality. For one thing, he had won at the club that afternoon, where every day from four to six he played bridge with his own little group, reactionaries like himself, men who viewed the difficulties of the younger employers of labor with amused contempt. For another, he and Howard had had a difference of opinion, and he had, for a wonder, made Howard angry.
"Well, Lily," he inquired, "how does it seem to be at home?"
Lily eyed him almost warily. He was sometimes most dangerous in these moods.
"I'm not sure, grandfather."
"Not sure about what?"
"Well, I am glad to see everybody, of course. But what am I to do with myself?"
"Tut." He had an air of benignantly forgiving her. "You'll find plenty. What did you do before you went away?"
"That was different, grandfather."
"I'm blessed," said old Anthony, truculently, "if I understand what has come over this country, anyhow. What is different? We've had a war. We've had other wars, and we didn't think it necessary to change the Constitution after them. But everything that was right before this war is wrong after it. Lot of young idiots coming back and refusing to settle down. Set of young Bolshevists!"
He had always managed to arouse a controversial spirit in the girl.
"Maybe, if it isn't right now, it wasn't right before." Having said it, Lily immediately believed it. She felt suddenly fired with an intense dislike of anything that her grandfather advocated.
"Meaning what?" He fixed her with cold but attentive eyes.
"Oh—conditions," she said vaguely. She was not at all sure what she meant. And old Anthony realized it, and gave a sardonic chuckle.
"I advise you to get a few arguments from your father, Lily. He is full of them. If he had his way I'd have a board of my workmen running my mills, while I played golf in Florida."
Dinner was a relatively pleasant meal. In her gradual rehabilitation of the house Grace had finally succeeded in doing over the dining room. Over the old walnut paneling she had hung loose folds of faded blue Italian velvet, with old silver candle sconces at irregular intervals along the walls. The great table and high-backed chairs were likewise Italian, and the old-fashioned white marble fireplace had been given an over-mantel, also white, enclosing an old tapestry. For warmth of color there were always flowers, and that night there were red roses.
Lily liked the luxury of it. She liked the immaculate dinner dress of the two men; she liked her mother's beautiful neck and arms; she liked the quiet service once more; she even liked herself, moderately, in a light frock and slippers. But she watched it all with a new interest and a certain detachment. She felt strange and aloof, not entirely one of them. She felt very keenly that no one of them was vitally interested in this wonder-year of hers. They asked her perfunctory questions, but Grace's watchful eyes were on the service, Anthony was engrossed with his food, and her father—
Her father was changed. He looked older and care-worn. For the first time she began to wonder about her father. What was he, really, under that calm, fastidiously dressed, handsome exterior? Did he mind the little man with the sardonic smile and the swift unpleasant humor, whose glance reduced the men who served into terrified menials? Her big, blond father, with his rather slow speech, his honest eyes, his slight hesitation before he grasped some of the finer nuances of his father's wit. No, he was not brilliant, but he was real, real and kindly. Perhaps he was strong, too. He looked strong.
With the same pitiless judgment she watched her mother. Either Grace was very big, or very indifferent to the sting of old Anthony's tongue. Sometimes women suffered much in silence, because they loved greatly. Like Aunt Elinor. Aunt Elinor had loved her husband more than she had loved her child. Quite calmly Lily decided that, as between her husband and herself, her mother loved her husband. Perhaps that was as it should be, but it added to her sense of aloofness. And she wondered, too, about these great loves that seemed to feed on sacrifice.
Anthony, who had a most unpleasant faculty of remembering things, suddenly bent forward and observed to her, across the table:
"I should be interested to know, since you regard present conditions as wrong, and, I inferred, wrong because of my mishandling of them, just what you would propose to do to right them."
"But I didn't say they were wrong, did I?"
"Don't answer a question with a question. It's a feminine form of evasion, because you have no answer and no remedy. Yet, heaven save the country, women are going to vote!" He pushed his plate away and glanced at Grace. "Is that the new chef's work?"
"Yes. Isn't it right?"
"Right? The food is impossible."
"He came from the club."
"Send him back," ordered Anthony. And when Grace observed that it was difficult to get servants, he broke into a cold fury. What had come over the world, anyhow? Time was when a gentleman's servants stayed with the family until they became pensioners, and their children took their places. Now—!
Grace said nothing. Her eyes sought Howard's, and seemed to find some comfort there. And Lily, sorry for her mother, said the first thing that came into her head.
"The old days of caste are gone, grandfather. And service, in your sense of the word, went with them."
"Really?" he eyed her. "Who said that? Because I daresay it is not original."
"A man I knew at camp."
"What man?"
"His name was Willy Cameron."
"Willy Cameron! Was this—er—person qualified to speak? Does he know anything about what he chooses to call caste?"
"He thinks a lot about things."
"A little less thinking and more working wouldn't hurt the country any," observed old Anthony. He bent forward. "As my granddaughter, and the last of the Cardews," he said, "I have a certain interest in the sources of your political opinions. They will probably, like your father's, differ from mine. You may not know that your father has not only opinions, but ambitions." She saw Grace stiffen, and Howard's warning glance at her. But she saw, too, the look in her mother's eyes, infinitely loving and compassionate. "Dear little mother," she thought, "he is her baby, really. Not I."
She felt a vague stirring of what married love at its best must be for a woman, its strange complex of passion and maternity. She wondered if it would ever come to her. She rather thought not. But she was also conscious of a new attitude among the three at the table, her mother's tense watchfulness, her father's slightly squared shoulders, and across from her her grandfather, fingering the stem of his wineglass and faintly smiling.
"It's time somebody went into city politics for some purpose other than graft," said Howard. "I am going to run for mayor, Lily. I probably won't get it."
"You can see," said old Anthony, "why I am interested in your views, or perhaps I should say, in Willy Cameron's. Does your father's
passion for uplift, for instance, extend to you?"
"Why won't you be elected, father?"
"Partly because my name is Cardew."
Old Anthony chuckled.
"What!" he exclaimed, "after the bath-house and gymnasium you have built at the mill? And the laundries for the women—which I believe they do not use. Surely, Howard, you would not accuse the dear people of ingratitude?"
"They are beginning to use them, sir." Howard, in his forties, still addressed his father as "Sir!"
"Then you admit your defeat beforehand."
"You are rather a formidable antagonist."
"Antagonist!" Anthony repeated in mock protest. "I am a quiet onlooker at the game. I am amused, naturally. You must understand," he said to Lily, "that this is a matter of a principle with your father. He believes that he should serve. My whole contention is that the people don't want to be served. They want to be bossed. They like it; it's all they know. And they're suspicious of a man who puts his hand into his own pocket instead of into theirs."
He smiled and sipped his wine.
"Good wine, this," he observed. "I'm buying all I can lay my hands on, against the approaching drought."
Lily's old distrust of her grandfather revived. Why did people sharpen like that with age? Age should be mellow, like old wine. And—what was she going to do with herself? Already the atmosphere of the house began to depress and worry her; she felt a new, almost violent impatience with it. It was so unnecessary.
She went to the pipe organ which filled the space behind the staircase, and played a little, but she had never been very proficient, and her own awkwardness annoyed her. In the dining room she could hear the men talking, Howard quietly, his father in short staccato barks. She left the organ and wandered into her mother's morning room, behind the drawing room, where Grace sat with the coffee tray before her.
"I'm afraid I'm going to be terribly on your hands, mother," she said, "I don't know what to do with myself, so how can you know what to do with me?"
The Best of Mary Roberts Rinehart Page 269
