She ignored that.
"I don't like the men who come here, Louis. I wish they were not friends of yours."
"Friends of mine! That bunch?"
"You are always with them."
"I draw a salary for being with them, honey."
"But what do you draw a salary for?" He was immediately on the alert, but her eyes were candid and unsuspicious. "They are strikers, aren't they?"
"Yes."
"Is it legal business?"
"Partly that."
"Louis, is there going to be a general strike?"
"There may be some bad times coming, honey." He bent his head and kissed her hands, lying motionless in her lap. "I wish you would marry me soon. I want you. I want to keep you safe."
She drew her hands away.
"Safe from what, Louis?"
He sat back and looked up into her face.
"You must remember, dear, that for all your theories, which are very sweet, this is a man's world, and men have rather brutal methods of settling their differences."
"And you advocate brutality?"
"Well, the war was brutal, wasn't it? And you were in a white heat supporting it, weren't you? How about another war,"—he chose his words carefully—"just as reasonable and just? You've heard Doyle. You know what I mean."
"Not now!"
He was amazed at her horror, a horror that made her recoil from him and push his hands away when he tried to touch her. He got up angrily and stood looking down at her, his hands in his pockets.
"What the devil did you think all this talk meant?" he demanded. "You've heard enough of it."
"Does Aunt Elinor know?"
"Of course."
"And she approves?"
"I don't know and I don't care." Suddenly, with one of the quick changes she knew so well, he caught her hands and drawing her to her feet, put his arms around her. "All I know is that I love you, and if you say the word I'll cut the whole business."
"You would?"
He amended his offer somewhat.
"Marry me, honey," he begged. "Marry me now. Do you think I'll let anything in God's world come between us? Marry me, and I'll do more than leave them." He was whispering to her, stroking her hair. "I'll cut the whole outfit. And on the day I go into your house as your husband I'll tell your people some things they want to know. That's a promise."
"What will they do to you?"
"Your people?"
"The others."
He drew himself to his full height, and laughed.
"They'll try to do plenty, old girl," he said, "but I'm not afraid of them, and they know it. Marry me, Lily," he urged. "Marry me now. And we'll beat them out, you and I."
He gave her a sense of power, over him and over evil. She felt suddenly an enormous responsibility, that of a human soul waiting to be uplifted and led aright.
"You can save me, honey," he whispered, and kneeling suddenly, he kissed the toe of her small shoe.
He was strong. But he was weak too. He needed her. "I'll do it, Louis," she said. "You—you will be good to me, won't you?"
"I'm crazy about you."
The mood of exaltation upheld her through the night, and into the next day. Elinor eyed her curiously, and with some anxiety. It was a long time since she had been a girl, going about star-eyed with power over a man, but she remembered that lost time well.
At noon Louis came in for a hasty luncheon, and before he left he drew Lily into the little study and slipped a solitaire diamond on her engagement finger. To Lily the moment was almost a holy one, but he seemed more interested in the quality of the stone and its appearance on her hand than in its symbolism.
"Got you cinched now, honey. Do you like it?"
"It makes me feel that I don't belong to myself any longer."
"Well, you've passed into good hands," he said, and laughed his great, vibrant laugh. "Costing me money already, you mite!"
A little of her exaltation died then. But perhaps men were like that, shyly covering the things they felt deepest.
She was rather surprised when he suggested keeping the engagement a secret.
"Except the Doyles, of course," he said. "I am not taking any chances on losing you, child."
"Not mother?"
"Not unless you want to be kidnaped and taken home. It's only a matter of a day or two, anyhow."
"I want more time than that. A month, anyhow."
And he found her curiously obstinate and determined. She did not quite know herself why she demanded delay, except that she shrank from delivering herself into hands that were so tender and might be so cruel. It was instinctive, purely.
"A month," she said, and stuck to it.
He was rather sulky when he went away, and he had told her the exact amount he had paid for her ring.
Having forced him to agree to the delay, she found her mood of exaltation returning. As always, it was when he was not with he that she saw him most clearly, and she saw his real need for her. She had a sense of peace, too, now that at last something was decided. Her future, for better or worse, would no longer be that helpless waiting which had been hers for so long. And out of her happiness came a desire to do kind things, to pat children on the head, to give alms to beggars, and—to see Willy Cameron.
She came downstairs that afternoon, dressed for the street.
"I am going out for a little while, Aunt Nellie," she said, "and when I come back I want to tell you something."
"Perhaps. I can guess."
"Perhaps you can."
She was singing to herself as she went out the door.
Elinor went back heavy-hearted to her knitting. It was very difficult always to sit by and wait. Never to raise a hand. Just to wait and watch. And pray.
Lily was rather surprised, when she reached the Eagle Pharmacy, to find Pink Denslow coming out. It gave her a little pang, too; he looked so clean and sane and normal, so much a part of her old life. And it hurt her, too, to see him flush with pleasure at the meeting.
"Why, Lily!" he said, and stood there, gazing at her, hat in hand, the sun on his gleaming, carefully brushed hair. He was quite inarticulate with happiness. "I—when did you get back?"
"I have not been away, Pink. I left home—it's a long story. I am staying with my aunt, Mrs. Doyle."
"Mrs. Doyle? You are staying there?"
"Why not? My father's sister."
His young face took on a certain sternness.
"If you knew what I suspect about Doyle, Lily, you wouldn't let the same roof cover you." But he added, rather wistfully, "I wish I might see you sometimes."
Lily's head had gone up a trifle. Why did her old world always try to put her in the wrong? She had had to seek sanctuary, and the Doyle house had been the only sanctuary she knew.
"Since you feel as you do, I'm afraid that's impossible. Mr. Doyle's roof is the only roof I have."
"You have a home," he said, sturdily.
"Not now. I left, and my grandfather won't have me back. You mustn't blame him, Pink. We quarreled and I left. I was as much responsible as he was."
For a moment after she turned and disappeared inside the pharmacy door he stood there, then he put on his hat and strode down the street, unhappy and perplexed. If only she had needed him, if she had not looked so self-possessed and so ever so faintly defiant, as though she dared him to pity her, he would have known what to do. All he needed was to be needed. His open face was full of trouble. It was unthinkable that Lily should be in that center of anarchy; more unthinkable that Doyle might have filled her up with all sorts of wild ideas. Women were queer; they liked theories. A man could have a theory of life and play with it and boast about it, but never dream of living up to it. But give one to a woman, and she chewed on it like a dog on a bone. If those Bolshevists had got hold of Lily—!
The encounter had hurt Lily, too. The fine edge of her exaltation was gone, and it did not return during her brief talk with Willy Cameron. He looked much older and very thin; there
were lines around his eyes she had never seen before, and she hated seeing him in his present surroundings. But she liked him for his very unconsciousness of those surroundings. One always had to take Willy Cameron as he was.
"Do you like it, Willy?" she asked. It had dawned on her, with a sort of panic, that there was really very little to talk about. All that they had had in common lay far in the past.
"Well, it's my daily bread, and with bread costing what it does, I cling to it like a limpet to a rock."
"But I thought you were studying, so you could do something else."
"I had to give up the night school. But I'll get back to it sometime."
She was lost again. She glanced around the little shop, where once Edith Boyd had manicured her nails behind the counter, and where now a middle-aged woman stood with listless eyes looking out over the street.
"You still have Jinx, I suppose?"
"Yes. I—"
Lily glanced up as he stopped. She had drawn off her gloves, and his eyes had fallen on her engagement ring. To Lily there had always been a feeling of unreality about his declaration of love for her. He had been so restrained, so careful to ask nothing in exchange, so without expectation of return, that she had put it out of her mind as an impulse. She had not dreamed that he could still care, after these months of silence. But he had gone quite white.
"I am going to be married, Willy," she said, in a low tone. It is doubtful if he could have spoken, just then. And as if to add a finishing touch of burlesque to the meeting, a small boy with a swollen jaw came in just then and demanded something to "make it stop hurting."
He welcomed the interruption, she saw. He was very professional instantly, and so absorbed for a moment in relieving the child's pain that he could ignore his own.
"Let's see it," he said in a businesslike, slightly strained voice. "Better have it out, old chap. But I'll give you something just to ease it up a bit."
Which he proceeded to do. When he came back to Lily he was quite calm and self-possessed. As he had never thought of dramatizing himself, nor thought of himself at all, it did not occur to him that drama requires setting, that tragedy required black velvet rather than tooth-brushes, and that a small boy with an aching tooth was a comedy relief badly introduced.
All he knew was that he had somehow achieved a moment in which to steady himself, and to find that a man can suffer horribly and still smile. He did that, very gravely, when he came back to Lily.
"Can you tell me about it?"
"There is not very much to tell. It is Louis Akers."
The middle-aged clerk had disappeared.
"Of course you have thought over what that means, Lily."
"He wants me to marry him. He wants it very much, Willy. And—I know you don't like him, but he has changed. Women always think they have changed men, I know. But he is very different."
"I am sure of that," he said, steadily.
There was something childish about her, he thought. Childish and infinitely touching. He remembered a night at the camp, when some of the troops had departed for over-seas, and he had found her alone and crying in her hut. "I just can't let them go," she had sobbed. "I just can't. Some of them will never come back."
Wasn't there something of that spirit in her now, the feeling that she could not let Akers go, lest worse befall him? He did not know. All he knew was that she was more like the Lily Cardew he had known then than she had been since her return. And that he worshiped her.
But there was anger in him, too. Anger at Anthony Cardew. Anger at the Doyles. And a smoldering, bitter anger at Louis Akers, that he should take the dregs of his life and offer them to her as new wine. That he should dare to link his scheming, plotting days to this girl, so wise and yet so ignorant, so clear-eyed and yet so blind.
"Do they know at home?"
"I am going to tell mother to-day."
"Lily," he said, slowly, "there is one thing you ought to do. Go home, make your peace there, and get all this on the right footing. Then have him there. You have never seen him in that environment, yet that is the world he will have to live in, if you marry him. See how he fits there."
"What has that got to do with it?"
"Think a minute. Am I quite the same to you here, as I was in the camp?"
He saw her honest answer in her eyes.
CHAPTER XXII
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.
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