Mr. Hendricks was cheerfully unirritated.
"All right, son," he said, "I do my bit and like it. Go on. Don't stop to insult me. You can do that any time."
"I've been buying a seditious weekly since I came," said Willy Cameron. "It's preaching a revolution, all right. I'd like to see its foreign language copies. They'll never overthrow the government, but they may try. Why don't you fellows combine to fight them? Why don't you learn how strong you are? Nine-tenths of the country, and milling like sheep with a wolf around!"
Mr. Hendricks winked at the doctor.
"What'd I tell you?" whispered Hendricks. "Got them, hasn't he? If he'd suggest arming them with pop bottles and attacking that gang of anarchists at the cobbler's down the street, they'd do it this minute."
"All right, son," he offered. "We'll combine. Anything you say goes. And we'll get the Jim Doyle-Woslosky-Louis Akers outfit first. I know a first-class brick wall—"
"Akers?" said Willy Cameron. "Do you know him?"
"I do," said Hendricks. "But that needn't prejudice you against me any. He's a bad actor, and as smooth as butter. D'you know what their plan is? They expect to take the city. This city! The—" Mr. Hendrick's voice was lost in fury.
"Talk!" said the roundsman. "Where'd the police be, I'm asking?"
"The police," said Mr. Hendricks, evidently quoting, "are as filled with sedition as a whale with corset bones. Also the army. Also the state constabulary."
"The hell they are," said the roundsman aggressively. But Willy Cameron was staring through the smoke from his pipe at the crowd.
"They might do it, for a while," he said thoughtfully. "There's a tremendous foreign population in the mill towns around, isn't there? Does anybody in the crowd own a revolver? Or know how to use it if he has one."
"I've got one," said the insurance agent. "Don't know how it would work. Found my wife nailing oilcloth with it the other day."
"Very well. If we're a representative group, they wouldn't need a battery of eight-inch guns, would they?"
A little silence fell on the group. Around them the city went about its business; the roar of the day had softened to muffled night sounds, as though one said: "The city sleeps. Be still." The red glare of the mills was the fire on the hearth. The hills were its four protecting walls. And the night mist covered it like a blanket.
"Here's one representative of the plain people," said Mr. Hendricks, "who is going home to get some sleep. And tomorrow I'll buy me a gun, and if I can keep the children out of the yard I'll learn to use it."
For a long time after he went home that night Willy Cameron paced the floor of his upper room, paced it until an irate boarder below hammered on his chandelier. Jinx followed him, moving sedately back and forth, now and then glancing up with idolatrous eyes. Willy Cameron's mind was active and not particularly coordinate. The Cardews and Lily; Edith Boyd and Louis Akers; the plain people; an army marching to the city to loot and burn and rape, and another army meeting it, saying: "You shall not pass"; Abraham Lincoln, Russia, Lily.
His last thought, of course, was of Lily Cardew. He had neglected to cover Jinx, and at last the dog leaped on the bed and snuggled close to him. He threw an end of the blanket over him and lay there, staring into the darkness. He was frightfully lonely. At last he fell asleep, and the March wind, coming in through the open window, overturned a paper leaning against his collar box, on which he had carefully written:
Have suit pressed.
Buy new tie.
Shirts from laundry.
CHAPTER XI
Going home that night Mr. Hendricks met Edith Boyd, and accompanied her for a block or two. At his corner he stopped.
"How's your mother, Edith?"
It was Mr. Hendricks' business to know his ward thoroughly.
"About the same. She isn't really sick, Mr. Hendricks. She's just low spirited, but that's enough. I hate to go home."
Hendricks hesitated.
"Still, home's a pretty good place," he said. "Especially for a pretty girl." There was unmistakable meaning in his tone, and she threw up her head.
"I've got to get some pleasure out of life, Mr. Hendricks."
"Sure you have," he agreed affably. "But playing around with Louis Akers is like playing with a hand-grenade, Edith." She said nothing. "I'd cut him out, little girl. He's poor stuff. Mind, I'm not saying he's a fool, but he's a bad actor. Now if I was a pretty girl, and there was a nice fellow around like this Cameron, I'd be likely to think he was all right. He's got brains." Mr. Hendricks had a great admiration for brains.
"I'm sick of men."
He turned at her tone and eyed her sharply.
"Well, don't judge them all by Akers. This is my corner. Good-night. Not afraid to go on by yourself, are you?"
"If I ever was I've had a good many chances to get over it."
He turned the corner, but stopped and called after her.
"Tell Dan I'll be in to see him soon, Edith. Haven't seen him since he came back from France."
"All right."
She went on, her steps lagging. She hated going home. When she reached the little house she did not go in at once. The March night was not cold, and she sat the step, hoping to see her mother's light go out in the second-story front windows. But it continued to burn steadily, and at last, with a gesture of despair, she rose and unlocked the door.
Almost at once she heard footsteps above, and a peevish voice.
"That you, Edie?"
"Yes."
"D'you mind bringing up the chloroform liniment and rubbing my back?"
"I'll bring it, mother."
She found it on the wainscoting in the untidy kitchen. She could hear the faint scurrying of water beetles over the oilcloth-covered floor, and then silence. She fancied myriads of tiny, watchful eyes on her, and something crunched under her foot. She felt like screaming. That new clerk at the store was always talking about homes. What did he know of squalid city houses, with their insects and rats, their damp, moldy cellars, their hateful plumbing? A thought struck her. She lighted the gas and stared around. It was as she had expected. The dishes had not been washed. They were piled in the sink, and a soiled dish-towel had been thrown over them.
She lowered the gas and went upstairs. The hardness had, somehow, gone out of her when she thought of Willy Cameron.
"Back bad again, is it?" she asked.
"It's always bad. But I've got a pain in my left shoulder and down my arm that's driving me crazy. I couldn't wash the dishes."
"Never mind the dishes. I'm not tired. Now crawl into bed and let me rub you."
Mrs. Boyd complied. She was a small, thin woman in her early fifties, who had set out to conquer life and had been conquered by it. The hopeless drab of her days stretched behind her, broken only by the incident of her widowhood, and stretched ahead hopelessly. She had accepted Dan's going to France resignedly, with neither protest nor undue anxiety. She had never been very close to Dan, although she loved him more than she did Edith. She was the sort of woman who has no fundamental knowledge of men. They had to be fed and mended for, and they had strange physical wants that made a great deal of trouble in the world. But mostly they ate and slept and went to work in the morning, and came home at night smelling of sweat and beer.
There had been one little rift in the gray fog of her daily life, however. And through it she had seen Edith well married, with perhaps a girl to do the house work, and a room where Edith's mother could fold her hands and sit in the long silences without thought that were her sanctuary against life.
"Is that the place, mother?"
"Yes." Edith's unwonted solicitude gave her courage.
"Edie, I want to ask you something."
"Well?" But the girl stiffened.
"Lou hasn't been round, lately."
"That's all over, mother."
"You mean you've quarreled? Oh, Edie, and me planning you'd have a nice home and everything."
"He never meant to marry me, if th
at's what you mean."
Mrs. Boyd turned on her back impatiently.
"You could have had him. He was crazy about you. Trouble is with you, you think you've got a fellow hard and fast, and you begin acting up. Then, first thing you know—"
Some of that strange new tolerance persisted in the girl. "Listen, mother," she said. "I give you my word, Lou'd run a mile if he thought any girl wanted to marry him. I know him better than you do. If any one ever does rope him in, he'll stick about three months, and then beat it."
"I don't know why we have to have men, anyhow. Put out the gas, Edie. No, don't open the window. The night air makes me cough."
Edith started downstairs and set to work in the kitchen. Something would have to be done about the house. Dan was taking to staying out at nights, because the untidy rooms repelled him. And there was the question of food. Her mother had never learned to cook, and recently more and more of the food had been something warmed out of a tin. If only they could keep a girl, one who would scrub and wash dishes. There was a room on the third floor, an attic, full now of her mother's untidy harborings of years, that might be used for a servant. Or she could move up there, and they could get a roomer. The rent would pay a woman to come in now and then to clean up.
She had played with that thought before, and the roomer she had had in mind was Willy Cameron. But the knowledge that he knew the Cardews had somehow changed all that. She couldn't picture him going from this sordid house to the Cardew mansion, and worse still, returning to it afterwards. She saw him there, at the Cardews, surrounded by bowing flunkies—a picture of wealth gained from the movies—and by women who moved indolently, trailing through long vistas of ball room and conservatory in low gowns without sleeves, and draped with ropes of pearls. Women who smoked cigarettes after dinner and played bridge for money.
She hated the Cardews.
On her way to her room she paused at her mother's door.
"Asleep yet, mother?"
"No. Feel like I'm not going to sleep at all."
"Mother," she said, with a desperate catch in her voice, "we've got to change things around here. It isn't fair to Dan, for one thing. We've got to get a girl to do the work. And to do that we'll have to rent a room."
She heard the thin figure twist impatiently.
"I've never yet been reduced to taking roomers, and I'm not going to let the neighbors begin looking down on me now."
"Now, listen, mother—"
"Go on away, Edie."
"But suppose we could get a young man, a gentleman, who would be out all but three evenings a week. I don't know, but Mr. Cameron at the store isn't satisfied where he is. He's got a dog, and they haven't any yard. We've got a yard."
"I won't be bothered with any dog," said the querulous voice, from the darkness.
With a gesture of despair the girl turned away. What was the use, anyhow? Let them go on, then, her mother and Dan. Only let them let her go on, too. She had tried her best to change herself, the house, the whole rotten mess. But they wouldn't let her.
Her mood of disgust continued the next morning. When, at eleven o'clock, Louis Akers sauntered in for the first time in days, she looked at him somberly but without disdain. Lou or somebody else, what did it matter? So long as something took her for a little while away from the sordidness of home, its stale odors, its untidiness, its querulous inmates.
"What's got into you lately, Edith?" he inquired, lowering his voice. "You used to be the best little pal ever. Now the other day, when I called up—"
"Had the headache," she said laconically. "Well?"
"Want to play around this evening?"
She hesitated. Then she remembered where Willy Cameron would be that night, and her face hardened. Had any one told Edith that she was beginning to care for the lame young man in the rear room, with his exaggerated chivalry toward women, his belief in home, and his sentimental whistling, she would have laughed. But he gave her something that the other men she knew robbed her of, a sort of self-respect. It was perhaps not so much that she cared for him, as that he enabled her to care more for herself.
But he was going to dinner with Lily Cardew.
"I might, depending on what you've got to offer."
"I've got a car now, Edith. I'm not joking. There was a lot of outside work, and the organization came over. I've been after it for six months. We can have a ride, and supper somewhere. How's the young man with the wooden leg?"
"If you want to know I'll call him out and let him tell you."
"Quick, aren't you?" He smiled down at where she stood, firmly entrenched behind a show case. "Well, don't fall in love with him. That's all. I'm a bad man when I'm jealous."
He sauntered out, leaving Edith gazing thoughtfully after him. He did not know, nor would have cared had he known, that her acceptance of his invitation was a complex of disgust of home, of the call of youth, and of the fact that Willy Cameron was dining at the Cardews that night.
CHAPTER XII
Howard Cardew was in his dressing room, sitting before the fire. His man had put out his dinner clothes and retired, and Howard was sifting before the fire rather listlessly.
In Grace's room, adjoining, he could hear movements and low voices. Before Lily's return, now and then when he was tired Grace and he had dined by the fire in her boudoir. It had been very restful. He was still in love with his wife, although, as in most marriages, there was one who gave more than the other. In this case it was Grace who gave, and Howard who received. But he loved her. He never thought of other women. Only his father had never let him forget her weaknesses.
Sometimes he was afraid that he was looking at Grace with his father's eyes, rather than his own.
He had put up a hard fight with his father. Not about Grace. That was over and done with, although it had been bad while it lasted. But his real struggle had been to preserve himself, to keep his faiths and his ideals, and even his personality. In the inessentials he had yielded easily, and so bought peace. Or perhaps a truce, of a sort. But for the essentials he was standing with a sort of dogged conviction that if he lowered his flag it would precipitate a crisis. He was not brilliant, but he was intelligent, progressive and kindly. He knew that his father considered him both stupid and obstinate.
There was going to be a strike. The quarrel now was between Anthony's curt "Let them strike," and his own conviction that a strike at this time might lead to even worse things. The men's demands were exorbitant. No business, no matter how big, could concede them and live. But Howard was debating another phase of the situation.
Not all the mills would go down. A careful canvass of some of the other independent concerns had shown the men eighty, ninety, even one hundred per cent, loyal. Those were the smaller plants, where there had always been a reciprocal good feeling between the owners and the men; there the men knew the owners, and the owners knew the men, who had been with them for years.
But the Cardew Mills would go down. There had been no liaison between the Cardews and the workmen. The very magnitude of the business forbade that. And for many years, too, the Cardews had shown a gross callousness to the welfare of the laborers. Long ago he had urged on his father the progressive attitude of other steel men, but Anthony had jeered, and when Howard had forced the issue and gained concessions, it was too late. The old grievances remained in too many minds. To hate the Cardews bad become a habit. Their past sins would damn them now. The strike was wrong, a wicked thing. It was without reason and without aim. The men were knocking a hole in the boat that floated them. But—
There was a tap at his door, and he called "Come in." From her babyhood Lily had had her own peculiar method of signaling that she stood without, a delicate rapid tattoo of finger nails on the panel. He watched smilingly for her entrance.
"Well!" she said. "Thank goodness you haven't started to dress. I tried to get here earlier, but my hair wouldn't go up, I want to make a good impression to-night."
"Is there a dinner on? I didn't know it."
/>
"Not a dinner. A young man. I came to see what you are going to wear."
"Really! Well, I haven't a great variety. The ordinary dinner dress of a gentleman doesn't lend itself to any extraordinary ornamentation. If you like, I'll pin on that medal from the Iron and Steel—Who's coming, Lily?"
"Grayson says grandfather's dining out."
"I believe so."
"What a piece of luck! I mean—you know what he'd say if I asked him not to dress for dinner."
"Am I to gather that you are asking me?"
"You wouldn't mind, would you? He hasn't any evening clothes."
"Look here, Lily," said her father, sitting upright. "Who is coming here to-night? And why should he upset the habits of the entire family?"
"Willy Cameron. You know, father. And he has the queerest ideas about us. Honestly. And I want him to like us, and it's such a good chance, with grandfather out."
He ignored that.
"How about our liking him?"
"Oh, you'll like him. Everybody does. You will try to make a good impression, won't you, father?"
He got up, and resting his hands on her shoulders, smiled down into her upturned face. "I will," he said. "But I think I should tell you that your anxiety arouses deep and black suspicions in my mind. Am I to understand that you have fixed your young affections on this Willy Cameron, and that you want your family to help you in your dark designs?"
Lily laughed.
"I love him," she said. "I really do. I could listen to him for hours. But people don't want to marry Willy Cameron. They just love him."
The Best of Mary Roberts Rinehart Page 274
