A Poor Wise Man by Mary Roberts Rinehart (page 8)

the bed.

Willy Cameron stood by it and looked down, with a great wave of thankfulness in his heart. She had been saved much, and if from some new angle she was seeing them now it would be with the vision of eternity, and its understanding. She would see how sometimes the soul must lose here to gain beyond. She would see the world filled with its Ediths, and she would know that they too were a part of the great plan, and that the breaking of the body sometimes freed the soul.

He was shy of the forms of religion, but he voiced a small inarticulate prayer, standing beside the bed while Ellen straightened the few toilet articles on the dresser, that she might have rest, and then a long and placid happiness. And love, he added. There would be no Heaven without love.

Ellen was looking at him in the mirror.

“Your hair looks queer, Willy,” she said. “And I declare your clothes are a sight.” She turned, sternly. “Where have you been?”

“It’s a long story, Ellen. Don’t bother about it now. I’m worried about Edith.”

Ellen’s lips closed in a grim line.

“The less said about her the better. She came back in a terrible state about something or other, ran in and up to your room, and out again. I tried to tell her her mother wasn’t so well, but she looked as if she didn’t hear me.”

It was four o’clock in the morning when Willy Cameron located Edith. He had gone to the pharmacy and let himself in, intending to telephone, but the card on the door, edged with black, gave him a curious sense of being surrounded that night by death, and he stood for a moment, unwilling to begin for fear of some further tragedy. In that moment, what with reaction from excitement and weariness, he had a feeling of futility, of struggling to no end. One fought on, and in the last analysis it was useless.

“So soon passeth it away, and we are gone.”

He saw Mr. Davis, sitting alone in his house; he saw Ellen moving about that quiet upper room; he saw Cusick lying on the ground beside the smoldering heap that had been the barn, and staring up with eyes that saw only the vast infinity that was the sky. All the struggling and the fighting, and it came to that.

He picked up the telephone book at last, and finding the hospital list in the directory began his monotonous calling of numbers, and still the revolt was in his mind. Even life lay through the gates of death; daily and hourly women everywhere laid down their lives that some new soul be born. But the revulsion came with that, a return to something nearer the normal. Daily and hourly women lived, having brought to pass the miracle of life.

At half-past four he located Edith at the Memorial, and learned that her child had been born dead, but that she was doing well. He was suddenly exhausted; he sat down on a stool before the counter, and with his arms across it and his head on them, fell almost instantly asleep. When he waked it was almost seven and the intermittent sounds of early morning came through the closed doors, as though the city stirred but had not wakened.

He went to the door and opened it, looking out. He had been wrong before. Death was a beginning and not an end; it was the morning of the spirit. Tired bodies lay down to sleep and their souls wakened to the morning, rested; the first fruits of them that slept.

>From the chimneys of the houses nearby small spirals of smoke began to ascend, definite promise of food and morning cheer behind the closed doors, where the milk bottles stood like small white sentinels and the morning paper was bent over the knob. Morning in the city, with children searching for lost stockings and buttoning little battered shoes; with women hurrying about, from stove to closet, from table to stove; with all burdens a little lighter and all thoughts a little kinder. Morning.

CHAPTER XLI

In her bed in the maternity ward Edith at first lay through the days, watching the other women with their babies, and wondering over the strange instinct that made them hover, like queer mis-shaped ministering angels, over the tiny quivering bundles. Some of them were like herself, or herself as she might have been, bearing their children out of wedlock. Yet they faced their indefinite futures impassively, content in relief from pain, in the child in their arms, in present peace and security. She could not understand.

She herself felt no sense of loss. Having never held her child in her arms she did not feel them empty.

She had not been told of her mother’s death; men were not admitted to the ward, but early on that first morning, when she lay there, hardly conscious but in an ecstasy of relief from pain, Ellen had come. A tired Ellen with circles around her eyes, and a bag of oranges in her arms.

“How do you feel?” she had asked, sitting down self-consciously beside the bed. The ward had its eyes on her.

“I’m weak, but I’m all right. Last night was awful, Ellen.”

She had roused herself with an effort. Ellen reminded her of something, something that had to do with Willy Cameron. Then she remembered, and tried to raise herself in the bed.

“Willy!” she gasped. “Did he come home? Is he all right?”

“He’s all right. It was him that found you were here. You lie back now; the nurse is looking.”

Edith lay down and closed her eyes, and the ecstasy of relief and peace gave to her pale face an almost spiritual look. Ellen saw it, and patted her arm with a roughened hand.

“You poor thing!” she said. “I’ve been as mean to you as I knew how to be. I’m going to be different, Edith. I’m just a cross old maid, and I guess I didn’t understand.”

“You’ve been all right,” Edith said.

Ellen kissed her when she went away.

So for three days Edith lay and rested. She felt that God had been very good to her, and she began to think of God as having given her another chance. This time He had let her off, but He had given her a warning. He had said, in effect, that if she lived straight and thought straight from now on He would forget this thing she had done. But if she did not –

Then what about Willy Cameron? Did He mean her to hold him to that now? Willy did not love her. Perhaps he would grow to love her, but she was seeing things more clearly than she had before, and one of the things she saw was that Willy Cameron was a one-woman man, and that she was not the woman.

“But I love him so,” she would cry to herself.

The ward moved in its orderly routine around her. The babies were carried out, bathed and brought back, their nuzzling mouths open for the waiting mother-breast. The nurses moved about, efficient, kindly, whimsically maternal. Women went out when their hour came, swollen of feature and figure, and were wheeled back later on, etherealized, purified as by fire, and later on were given their babies. Their faces were queer then, frightened and proud at first, and later watchful and tenderly brooding.

For three days Edith’s struggle went on. She had her strong hours and her weak ones. There were moments when, exhausted and yet exalted, she determined to give him up altogether, to live the fiction of the marriage until her mother’s death, and then to give up the house and never see him again. If she gave him up she must never see him again. At those times she prayed not to love him any longer, and sometimes, for a little while after that, she would have peace. It was almost as though she did not love him.

But there were the other times, when she lay there and pictured them married, and dreamed a dream of bringing him to her feet. He had offered a marriage that was not a marriage, but he was a man, and human. He did not want her now, but in the end he would want her; young as she was she knew already the strength of a woman’s physical hold on a man.

Late on the afternoon of the third day Ellen came again, a swollen-eyed Ellen, dressed in black with black cotton gloves, and a black veil around her hat. Ellen wore her mourning with the dogged sense of duty of her class, and would as soon have gone to the burying ground in her kitchen apron as without black. She stood in the doorway of the ward, hesitating, and Edith saw her and knew.

Her first thought was not of her mother at all. She saw only that the God who had saved her had made her decision for her, and that now she would never marry Willy Cameron. All this time He had let her dream and struggle. She felt very bitter.

Ellen came and sat down beside her.

“She’s gone. Edith,” she said; “we didn’t tell you before, but you have to know sometime. We buried her this afternoon.”

Suddenly Edith forgot Willy Cameron, and God, and Dan, and the years ahead. She was a little girl again, and her mother was saying:

“Brush your teeth and say your prayers, Edie. And tomorrow’s Saturday. So you don’t need to get up until you’re good and ready.”

She lay there. She saw her mother growing older and more frail, the house more untidy, and her mother’s bright spirit fading to the drab of her surroundings. She saw herself, slipping in late at night, listening always for that uneasy querulous voice. And then she saw those recent months, when her mother had bloomed with happiness; she saw her struggling with her beloved desserts, cheerfully unconscious of any failure in them; she saw her, living like a lady, as she had said, with every anxiety kept from her. There had been times when her thin face had been almost illuminated with her new content and satisfaction.

Suddenly grief and remorse overwhelmed her.

“Mother!” she said, huskily. And lay there, crying quietly, with Ellen holding her hand. All that was hard and rebellious in Edith Boyd was swept away in that rush of grief, and in its place there came a new courage and resolution. She would meet the future alone, meet it and overcome it. But not alone, either; there was always –

It was a Sunday afternoon, and the nurse had picked up the worn ward Bible and was reading from it, aloud. In their rocking chairs in a semi-circle around her were the women, some with sleeping babies in their arms, others with tense, expectant faces.

“Let not your heart be troubled,” read the nurse, in a grave young voice. “Ye believe in God. Believe also in Me. In my Father’s house – “

There was always God.

Edith Boyd saw her mother in the Father’s house, pottering about some small celestial duty, and eagerly seeking and receiving approval. She saw her, in some celestial rocking chair, her tired hands folded, slowly rocking and resting. And perhaps, as she sat there, she held Edith’s child on her knee, like the mothers in the group around the nurse. Held it and understood at last.

CHAPTER XLII

It was at this time that Doyle showed his hand, with his customary fearlessness. He made a series of incendiary speeches, the general theme being that the hour was close at hand for putting the fear of God into the exploiting classes for all time to come. His impassioned oratory, coming at the psychological moment, when the long strike had brought its train of debt and evictions, made a profound impression. Had he asked for a general strike vote then, he would have secured it.

As it was, it was some time before all the unions had voted for it. And the day was not set. Doyle was holding off, and for a reason. Day by day he saw a growth of the theory of Bolshevism among the so-called intellectual groups of the country. Almost every university had its radicals, men who saw emerging from Russia the beginning of a new earth. Every class now had its Bolshevists. They found a ready market for their propaganda, intelligent and insidious as it was, among a certain liberal element of the nation, disgruntled with the autocracy imposed upon them by the war.

The reaction from that autocracy was a swinging to the other extreme, and, as if to work into the hands of the revolutionary party, living costs remained at the maximum. The cry of the revolutionists, to all enough and to none too much, found a response not only in the anxious minds of honest workmen, but among an underpaid intelligentsia. Neither political party offered any relief; the old lines no longer held, and new lines of cleavage had come. Progressive Republicans and Democrats had united against reactionary members of both parties. There were no great leaders, no men of the hour.

The old vicious cycle of empires threatened to repeat itself, the old story of the many led by the few. Always it had come, autocracy, the too great power of one man; then anarchy, the overthrow of that power by the angry mob. Out of that anarchy the gradual restoration of order by the people themselves, into democracy. And then in time again, by that steady gravitation of the strong up and the weak down, some one man who emerged from the mass and crowned himself, or was crowned. And there was autocracy again, and again the vicious circle.

But such movements had always been, in the last analysis, the work of the few. It had always been the militant minority which ruled. Always the great mass of the people had submitted. They had fought, one way or the other when the time came, but without any deep conviction behind them. They wanted peace, the right to labor. They warred, to find peace. Small concern was it, to the peasant plowing his field, whether one man ruled over him or a dozen. He wanted neither place nor power.

It came to this, then, Willy Cameron argued to himself. This new world conflict was a struggle between the contented and the discontented. In Europe, discontent might conquer, but in America, never. There were too many who owned a field or had the chance to labor. There were too many ways legitimately to aspire. Those who wanted something for nothing were but a handful to those who wanted to give that they might receive.

* * * * *

Three days before the election, Willy Cameron received a note from Lily, sent by hand.

“Father wants to see you to-night,” she wrote, “and mother suggests that as you are busy, you try to come to dinner. We are dining alone. Do come, Willy. I think it is most important.”

He took the letter home with him and placed it in a locked drawer of his desk, along with a hard and shrunken doughnut, tied with a bow of Christmas ribbon, which had once helped to adorn the Christmas tree they had trimmed together. There were other things in the drawer; a postcard photograph, rather blurred, of Lily in the doorway of her little hut, smiling; and the cigar box which had been her cash register at the camp.

He stood for some time looking down at the post card; it did not seem possible that in the few months since those wonderful days, life could have been so cruel to them both. Lily married, and he himself –

Ellen came up when he was tying his tie. She stood behind him, watching him in the mirror.

“I don’t know what you’ve done to your hair, Willy,” she said; “it certainly looks queer.”

“It usually looks queer, so why worry, heart of my heart?” But he turned and put an arm around her shoulders. “What would the world be without women like you, Ellen?” he said gravely.

“I haven’t done anything but my duty,” Ellen said, in her prim voice. “Listen, Willy. I saw Edith again to-day, and she told me to do something.”

“To go home and take a rest? That’s what you need.”

“No. She wants me to tear up that marriage license.”

He said nothing for a moment. “I’ll have to see her first.”

“She said it wouldn’t be any good, Willy. She’s made up her mind.” She watched him anxiously. “You’re not going to be foolish, are you? She says there’s no need now, and she’s right.”

“Somebody will have to look after her.”

“Dan can do that. He’s changed, since she went.” Ellen glanced toward Mrs. Boyd’s empty room. “You’ve done enough, Willy. You’ve seen them through, all of them. I – isn’t it time you began to think about yourself?”

He was putting on his coat, and she picked a bit of thread from it, with nervous fingers.

“Where are you going to-night, Willy?”

“To the Cardews. Mr. Cardew has sent for me.”

She looked up at him.

“Willy, I want to tell you something. The Cardews won’t let that marriage stand, and you know it. I think she cares for you. Don’t look at me like that. I do.”

“That’s because you are fond of me,” he said, smiling down at her. “I’m not the sort of man girls care about, Ellen. Let’s face that. The General Manager said when he planned me, ‘Here’s going to be a fellow who is to have everything in the world, health, intelligence, wit and the beauty of an Adonis, but he has to lack something, so we’ll make it that’.”

But Ellen, glancing up swiftly, saw that although his tone was light, there was pain in his eyes.

He reflected on Edith’s decision as he walked through the park toward the Cardew house. It had not surprised him, and yet he knew it had cost her an effort. How great an effort, man-like, he would never understand, but something of what she had gone through he realized. He wondered vaguely whether, had there never been a Lily Cardew in his life, he could ever have cared for Edith. Perhaps. Not the Edith of the early days, that was certain. But this new Edith, with her gentleness and meekness, her clear, suffering eyes, her strange new humility.

She had sent him a message of warning about Akers, and from it he had reconstructed much of the events of the night she had taken sick.

“Tell him to watch Louis Akers,” she had said. “I don’t know how near Willy was to trouble the other night, Ellen, but they’re going to try to get him.”

Ellen had repeated the message, watching him narrowly, but he had only laughed.

“Who are they” she had persisted.

“I’ll tell you all about it some day,” he had said. But he had told Dan the whole story, and, although he did not know it, Dan had from that time on been his self-constituted bodyguard. During his campaign speeches Dan was always near, his right hand on a revolver in his coat pocket, and for hours at a time he stood outside the pharmacy, favoring every seeker for drugs or soap or perfume with a scowling inspection. When he could not do it, he enlisted Joe Wilkinson in the evenings, and sometimes the two of them, armed, policed the meeting halls.

As a matter of fact, Joe Wilkinson was following him that night. On his way to the Cardews Willy Cameron, suddenly remembering the uncanny ability of Jinx to escape and trail him, remaining meanwhile at a safe distance in the rear, turned suddenly and saw Joe, walking sturdily along in rubber-soled shoes, and obsessed with his high calling of personal detective.

Joe, discovered, grinned sheepishly.

“Thought that looked like your back,” he said. “Nice evening for a walk, isn’t it?”

“Let me look at you, Joe,” said Willy Cameron. “You look strange to me. Ah, now I have it. You look like a comet without a tail. Where’s the family?”

“Making taffy. How – is Edith?”

“Doing nicely.” He avoided the boy’s eyes.

“I guess I’d better tell you. Dan’s told me about her. I – ” Joe hesitated. Then: “She never seemed like that sort of a girl,” he finished, bitterly.

“She isn’t that sort of girl, Joe.”

“She did it. How could a fellow know she wouldn’t do it again?”

“She has had a pretty sad sort of lesson.”

Joe, his real business forgotten, walked on with eyes down and shoulders drooping.

“I might as well finish with it,” he said, “now I’ve started. I’ve always been crazy about her. Of course now – I haven’t slept for two nights.”

“I think it’s rather like this, Joe,” Willy Cameron said, after a pause. “We are not one person, really. We are all two or three people, and all different. We are bad and good, depending on which of us is the strongest at the time, and now and then we pay so much for the bad we do that we bury that part. That’s what has happened to Edith. Unless, of course,” he added, “we go on convincing her that she is still the thing she doesn’t want to be.”

“I’d like to kill the man,” Joe said. But after a little, as they neared the edge of the park, he looked up.

“You mean, go on as if nothing had happened?”

“Precisely,” said Willy Cameron. “as though nothing had happened.”

CHAPTER XLIII

The atmosphere of the Cardew house was subtly changed and very friendly. Willy Cameron found himself received as an old friend, with no tendency to forget the service he had rendered, or that, in their darkest hour, he had been one of them.

To his surprise Pink Denslow was there, and he saw at once that Pink had been telling them of the night at the farm house. Pink was himself again, save for a small shaved place at the back of his head, covered with plaster.

“I’ve told them, Cameron,” he said. “If I could only tell it generally I’d be the most popular man in the city, at dinners.”

“Pair of young fools,” old Anthony muttered, with his sardonic smile. But in his hand-clasp, as in Howard’s, there was warmth and a sort of envy, envy of youth and the adventurous spirit of youth.

Lily was very quiet. The story had meant more to her than to the others. She had more nearly understood Pink’s reference to the sealed envelope Willy Cameron had left, and the help sent by Edith Boyd. She connected that with Louis Akers, and from that to Akers’ threat against Cameron was only a step. She was frightened and somewhat resentful, that this other girl should have saved him from a revenge that she knew was directed at herself. That she, who had brought this thing about, had sat quietly at home while another woman, a woman who loved him, had saved him.

She was puzzled at her own state of mind.

Dinner was almost gay. Perhaps the gayety was somewhat forced, with Pink keeping his eyes from Lily’s face, and Howard Cardew relapsing now and then into abstracted silence. Because of the men who served, the conversation was carefully general. It was only in the library later, the men gathered together over their cigars, that the real reason for Willy Cameron’s summons was disclosed.

Howard Cardew was about to withdraw from the contest. “I’m late in coming to this decision,” he said. “Perhaps too late. But after a careful canvas of the situation, I find you are right, Cameron. Unless I withdraw, Akers” – he found a difficulty in speaking the name – “will be elected. At least it looks that way.”

“And if he is,” old Anthony put in, “he’ll turn all the devils of hell loose on us.”

It was late; very late. The Cardews stood ready to flood the papers with announcements of Howard’s withdrawal, and urging his supporters to vote for Hendricks, but the time was short. Howard had asked his campaign managers to meet there that night, and also Hendricks and one or two of his men, but personally he felt doubtful.

And, as it happened, the meeting developed more enthusiasm than optimism. Cardew’s withdrawal would be made the most of by the opposition. They would play it up as the end of the old regime, the beginning of new and better things.

Before midnight the conference broke up, to catch the morning editions. Willy Cameron, detained behind the others, saw Lily in the drawing-room alone as he passed the door, and hesitated.

“I have been waiting for you, Willy,” she said.

But when he went in she seemed to have nothing to say. She sat in a low chair, in a soft dark dress which emphasized her paleness. To Willy Cameron she had never seemed more beautiful, or more remote.

“Do you remember how you used to whistle ‘The Long, Long Trail,’ Willy?” she said at last. “All evening I have been sitting here thinking what a long trail we have both traveled since then.”

“A long, hard trail.” he assented.

“Only you have gone up, Willy. And I have gone down, into the valley. I wish” – she smiled faintly – “I wish you would look down from your peak now and then. You never come to see me.”

“I didn’t know you wanted me,” he said bluntly.

“Why shouldn’t I want to see you?”

“I couldn’t help reminding you of things.”
“But I never forget them, anyhow. Sometimes I almost go mad, remembering. It isn’t quite as selfish as it sounds. I’ve hurt them all so. Willy, do you mind telling me about the girl who opened that letter and sent you help?”

“About Edith Boyd? I’d like to tell you, Lily. Her mother is dead, and she lost her child. She is in the Memorial Hospital.”

“Then she has no one but you?”

“She has a brother.”

“Tell me about her sending help that night. She really saved your life, didn’t she?”

While he was telling her she sat staring straight ahead, her fingers interlaced in her lap. She was telling herself that all this could not possibly matter to her, that she had cut herself off, finally and forever, from the man before her; that she did not even deserve his friendship.

Quite suddenly she knew that she did not want his friendship. She wanted to see again in his face the look that had been there the night he had told her, very simply, that he loved her. And it would never be there; it was not there now. She had killed his love. All the light in his face was for some one else, another girl, a girl more unfortunate but less wicked than herself.

When he stopped she was silent. Then:

“I wonder if you know how much you have told me that you did not intend to tell?”

“That I didn’t intend to tell? I have made no reservations, Lily.”

“Are you sure? Or don’t you realize it yourself?”

“Realize what?” He was greatly puzzled.

“I think, Willy,” she said, quietly. “that you care a great deal more for Edith Boyd than you think you do.

He looked at her in stupefaction. How could she say that? How could she fail to know better than that? And he did not see the hurt behind her careful smile.

“You are wrong about that. I – ” He made a little gesture of despair. He could not tell her now that he loved her. That was all over.

“She is in love with you.”

He felt absurd and helpless. He could not deny that, yet how could she sit there, cool and faintly smiling, and not know that as she sat there so she sat enshrined in his heart. She was his saint, to kneel and pray to; and she was his woman, the one woman of his life. More woman than saint, he knew, and even for that he loved her. But he did not know the barbarous cruelty of the loving woman.

“I don’t know what to say to you, Lily,” he said, at last. “She – it is possible that she thinks she cares, but under the circumstances – “

“Ellen told Mademoiselle you were going to marry her. That’s true, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“You always said that marriage without love was wicked, Willy.”

“Her child had a right to a name. And there were other things. I can’t very well explain them to you. Her mother was ill. Can’t you understand, Lily? I don’t want to throw any heroics.” In his excitement he had lapsed into boyish vernacular. “Here was a plain problem, and a simple way to solve it. But it is off now, anyhow; things cleared up without that.”

She got up and held out her hand.

“It was like you to try to save her,” she said.

“Does this mean I am to go?”

“I am very tired, Willy.”

He had a mad impulse to take her in his arms, and holding her close to rest her there. She looked so tired. For fear he might do it he held his arms rigidly at his sides.

“You haven’t asked me about him,” she said unexpectedly.

“I thought you would not care to talk about him. That’s over and done, Lily. I want to forget about it, myself.”

She looked up at him, and had he had Louis Akers’ intuitive knowledge of women he would have understood then.

“I am never going back to him, Willy. You know that, don’t you?”

“I hoped it, of course.”

“I know now that I never loved him.”

But the hurt of her marriage was still too fresh in him for speech. He could not discuss Louis Akers with her.

“No,” he said, after a moment, “I don’t think you ever did. I’ll come in some evening, if I may, Lily. I must not keep you up now.”

How old he looked, for him! How far removed from those busy, cheerful days at the camp! And there were new lines of repression in his face; from the nostrils to the corners of his mouth. Above his ears his hair showed a faint cast of gray.

“You have been having rather a hard time, Willy, haven’t you’?” she said, suddenly.

“I have been busy, of course.”

“And worried?”

“Sometimes. But things are clearing up now.”

She was studying him with the newly opened eyes of love. What was it he showed that the other men she knew lacked? Sensitiveness? Kindness? But her father was both sensitive and kind. So was Pink, in less degree. In the end she answered her own question, and aloud.

“I think it is patience,” she said. And to his unspoken question: “You are very patient, aren’t you?”

“I never thought about it. For heaven’s sake don’t turn my mind in on myself, Lily. I’ll be running around in circles like a pup chasing his tail.”

He made a movement to leave, but she seemed oddly reluctant to let him go.

“Do you know that father says you have more influence than any other man in the city?”

“That’s more kind than truthful.”

“And – I think he and grandfather are planning to try to get you, when the mills reopen. Father suggested it, but grandfather says you’d have the presidency of the company in six months, and he’d be sharpening your lead pencils.”

Suddenly Willy Cameron laughed, and the tension was broken.

“If he did it with his tongue they’d be pretty sharp,” he said.

For just a moment, before he left, they were back to where they had been months ago, enjoying together their small jokes and their small mishaps. The present fell away, with its hovering tragedy, and they were boy and girl together. Exaltation and sacrifice were a part of their love, as of all real and lasting passion, but there was always between them also that soundest bond of all, liking and comradeship.

“I love her. I like her. I adore her,” was the cry in Willy Cameron’s heart when he started home that night.

CHAPTER XLIV

Elinor Doyle was up and about her room. She walked slowly and with difficulty, using crutches, and she spent most of the time at her window, watching and waiting. From Lily there came, at frequent intervals, notes, flowers and small delicacies. The flowers and food Olga brought to her, but the notes she never saw. She knew they came. She could see the car stop at the curb, and the chauffeur, his shoulders squared and his face watchful, carrying a white envelope up the walk, but there it ended.

She felt more helpless than ever. The doctor came less often, but the vigilance was never relaxed, and she had, too, less and less hope of being able to give any warning. Doyle was seldom at home, and when he was he had ceased to give her his taunting information. She was quite sure now of his relations with the Russian girl, and her uncertainty as to her course was gone. She was no longer his wife. He held another woman in his rare embraces, a traitor like himself. It was sordid. He was sordid.

Woslosky had developed blood poisoning, and was at the point of death, with a stolid policeman on guard at his bedside. She knew that from the newspapers she occasionally saw. And she connected Doyle unerringly with the tragedy at the farm behind Friendship. She recognized, too, since that failure, a change in his manner to her. She saw that he now both hated her and feared her, and that she had become only a burden and a menace to him. He might decide to do away with her, to kill her. He would not do it himself; he never did his own dirty work, but the Russian girl – Olga was in love with Jim Doyle. Elinor knew that, as she knew many things, by a sort of intuition. She watched them in the room together, and she knew that to Doyle the girl was an incident, the vehicle of his occasional passion, a strumpet and a tool. He did not even like her; she saw him looking at her sometimes with a sort of amused contempt. But Olga’s somber eyes followed him as he moved, lit with passion and sometimes with anger, but always they followed him.

She was afraid of Olga. She did not care particularly about death, but it must not come before she had learned enough to be able to send out a warning. She thought if it came it might be by poison in the food that was sent up, but she had to eat to live. She took to eating only one thing on her tray, and she thought she detected in the girl an understanding and a veiled derision.

By Doyle’s increasing sullenness she knew things were not going well with him, and she found a certain courage in that, but she knew him too well to believe that he would give up easily. And she drew certain deductions from the newspapers she studied so tirelessly. She saw the announcement of the unusual number of hunting licenses issued, for one thing, and she knew the cover that such licenses furnished armed men patrolling the country. The state permitted the sale of fire-arms without restriction. Other states did the same, or demanded only the formality of a signature, never verified.

Would they never wake to the situation?

She watched the election closely. She knew that if Akers were elected the general strike and the chaos to follow would be held back until he had taken office and made the necessary changes in the city administration, but that if he went down to defeat the Council would turn loose its impatient hordes at once.

She waited for election day with burning anxiety. When it came it so happened that she was left alone all day in the house. Early in the morning Olga brought her a tray and told her she was going out. She was changed, the Russian; she had dropped the mask of sodden servility and stood before her, erect, cunningly intelligent and oddly powerful.

“I am going to be away all day, Mrs. Doyle,” she said, in her excellent English. “I have work to do.”

“Work?” said Elinor. “Isn’t there work to do here?”

“I am not a house-worker. I came to help Mr. Doyle. To-day I shall make speeches.”

Elinor was playing the game carefully. “But – can you make speeches?” she asked.

“Me? That is my work, here, in Russia, everywhere. In Russia it is the women who speak, the men who do what the women tell them to do. Here some day it will be the same.”

Always afterwards Elinor remembered the five minutes that followed, for Olga, standing before her, suddenly burst into impassioned oratory. She cited the wrongs of the poor under the old regime. She painted in glowing colors the new. She was excited, hectic, powerful. Elinor in her chair, an aristocrat to the finger-tips, was frightened, interested, thrilled.

Long after Olga had gone she sat there, wondering at the real conviction, the intensity of passion, of hate and of revenge that actuated this newest tool of Doyle’s. Doyle and his associates might be actuated by self-interest, but the real danger in the movement lay not with the Doyles of the world, but with these fanatic liberators. They preached to the poor a new religion, not of creed or of Church, but of freedom. Freedom without laws of God or of man, freedom of love, of lust, of time, of all responsibility. And the poor, weighted with laws and cares, longed to throw off their burdens.

Perhaps it was not the doctrine itself that was wrong. It was its imposition by force on a world not yet ready for it that was wrong; its imposition by violence. It might come, but not this way. Not, God preventing, this way.

There was a polling place across the street, in the basement of a school house. The vote was heavy and all day men lounged on the pavements, smoking and talking. Once she saw Olga in the crowd, and later on Louis Akers drove up in an open automobile, handsome, apparently confident, and greeted with cheers. But Elinor, knowing him well, gained nothing from his face.

Late that night she heard Doyle come in and move about the lower floor. She knew every emphasis of his walk, and when in the room underneath she heard him settle down to steady, deliberate pacing, she knew that he was facing some new situation, and, after his custom, thinking it out alone.

At midnight he came up the stairs and unlocked her door. He entered, closing the door behind him, and stood looking at her. His face was so strange that she wondered if he had decided to do away with her.

“To-morrow,” he said, in an inflectionless voice, “you will be moved by automobile to a farm I have selected in the country. You will take only such small luggage as the car can carry.”

“Is Olga going with me?”

“No. Olga is needed here.”

“I suppose I am to understand from this that Louis has been defeated and there is no longer any reason for delay in your plans.”

“You can understand what you like.”

“Am I to know where I am going?”

“You will find that out when you get there. I will tell you this: It is a lonely place, without a telephone. You’ll be cut off from your family, I am afraid.”

She gazed at him. It seemed unbelievable to her that she had once lain in this man’s arms.

“Why don’t you kill me, Jim? I know you’ve thought about it.”

“Yes, I’ve thought of it. But killing is a confession of fear, my dear. I am not afraid of you.”

“I think you are. You are afraid now to tell me when you are going to try to put this wild plan into execution.”

He smiled at her with mocking eyes.

“Yes,” he agreed again. “I am afraid. You have a sort of diabolical ingenuity, not intelligence so much as cunning. But because I always do the thing I’m afraid to do, I’ll tell you. Of course, if you succeed in passing it on – ” He shrugged his shoulders. “Very well, then. With your usual logic of deduction, you have guessed correctly. Louis Akers has been defeated. Your family – and how strangely you are a Cardew! – lost its courage at the last moment, and a gentleman named Hendricks is now setting up imitation beer and cheap cigars to his friends.”

Behind his mocking voice she knew the real fury of the man, kept carefully in control by his iron will.

“As you have also correctly surmised,” he went on, “there is now nothing to be gained by any delay. A very few days, three or four, and – ” His voice grew hard and terrible – “the first stone in the foundation of this capitalistic government will go. Inevitable law, inevitable retribution – ” His voice trailed off. He turned like a man asleep and went toward the door. There he stopped and faced her.

“I’ve told you,” he said darkly. “I am not afraid of you. You can no more stop this thing than you can stop living by ceasing to breathe. It has come.”

She heard him in his room for some time after that, and she surmised from the way he moved, from closet to bed and back again, that he was packing a bag. At two o’clock she heard Olga coming in; the girl was singing in Russian, and Elinor had a sickening conviction that she had been drinking. She heard Doyle send her off to bed, his voice angry and disgusted, and resume his packing, and ten minutes later she heard a car draw up on the street, and knew that he was off, to begin the mobilization of his heterogeneous forces.

Ever since she had been able to leave her bed Elinor had been formulating a plan of escape. Once the door had been left unlocked, but her clothing had been removed from the room, and then, too, she had not learned the thing she was waiting for. Now she had clothing, a dark dressing gown and slippers, and she had the information. But the door was securely locked.

She had often thought of the window, In the day time it frightened her to look down, although it fascinated her, too. But at night it seemed much simpler. The void below was concealed in the darkness, a soft darkness that hid the hard, inhospitable earth. A darkness one could fall into and onto.

She was not a brave woman. She had moral rather than physical courage. It was easier for her to face Doyle in a black mood than the gulf below the window-sill, but she knew now that she must get away, if she were to go at all. She got out of bed, and using her crutches carefully moved to the sill, trying to accustom herself to the thought of going over the edge. The plaster cast on her leg was a real handicap. She must get it over first. How heavy it was, and
unwieldy!

She found her scissors, and, stripping the bed, sat down to cut and tear the bedding into strips. Prisoners escaped that way; she had read about such things. But the knots took up an amazing amount of length. It was four o’clock in the morning when she had a serviceable rope, and she knew it was too short. In the end she tore down the window curtains and added them, working desperately against time.

She began to suspect, too, that Olga was not sleeping. She smelled faintly the odor of the long Russian cigarettes the girl smoked. She put out her light and worked in the darkness, a strange figure of adventure, this middle-aged woman with her smooth hair and lined face, sitting in her cambric nightgown with her crutches on the floor beside her.

She secured the end of the rope to the foot of her metal bed, pushing the bed painfully and cautiously, inch by inch, to the window. And in so doing she knocked over the call-bell on the stand, and almost immediately she heard Olga moving about.

The girl was coming unsteadily toward the door. If she opened it –

“I don’t want anything, Olga,” she called, “I knocked the bell over accidentally.”

Olga hesitated, muttered, moved away again. Elinor was covered with a cold sweat.

She began to think of the window as a refuge. Surely nothing outside could be so terrible as this house itself. The black aperture seemed friendly; it beckoned to her with friendly hands.

She dropped her crutches. They fell with two soft thuds on the earth below and it seemed to her that they were a long time in falling. She listened after that, but Olga made no sign. Then slowly and painfully she worked her injured leg over the sill, and sat there looking down and breathing with difficulty. Then she freed her dressing gown around her, and slid over the edge.

CHAPTER XLV

Election night found various groups in various places. In the back room of the Eagle Pharmacy was gathered once again the neighborhood forum, a wildly excited forum, which ever and anon pounded Mr. Hendricks on the back, and drank round after round of soda water and pop. Doctor Smalley, coming in rather late found them all there, calling Mr. Hendricks “Mr. Mayor” or “Your Honor,” reciting election anecdotes, and prophesying the end of the Reds. Only Willy Cameron, sitting on a table near the window, was silent.

Mr. Hendricks, called upon for a speech, rose with his soda water glass in his hand.

“I’ve got a toast for you, boys,” he said. “You’ve been talking all evening about my winning this election. Well, I’ve been elected, but I didn’t win it. It was the plain people of this town who elected me, and they did it because my young friend on the table yonder told them to.” He raised his glass. “Cameron!” he said.

“Cameron! Cameron!” shouted the crowd. “Speech! Cameron!”

But Willy shook his head.

“I haven’t any voice left,” he said, “and you’ve heard me say all I know a dozen times. The plain truth is that Mr. Hendricks got the election because he was the best man, and enough people knew it. That’s all.”

To Mr. Hendricks the night was one of splendid solemnity. He felt at once very strong and very weak, very proud and very humble. He would do his best, and if honesty meant anything, the people would have it, but he knew that honesty was not enough. The city needed a strong man; he hoped that the Good Man who made cities as He made men, both evil and good, would lend him a hand with things. As prayer in his mind was indissolubly connected with church, he made up his mind to go to church the next Sunday and get matters straightened out.

At the same time another group was meeting at the Benedict.

Louis Akers had gone home early. By five o’clock he knew that the chances were against him, but he felt a real lethargy as to the outcome. He had fought, and fought hard, but it was only the surface mind of him that struggled. Only the surface mind of him hated, and had ambitions, dreamed revenge. Underneath that surface mind was a sore that ate like a cancer, and that sore was his desertion by Lily Cardew. For once in his life he suffered, who had always inflicted pain.

At six o’clock Doyle had called him on the telephone and told him that Woslosky was dead, but the death of the Pole had been discounted in advance, and already his place had been filled by a Russian agent, who had taken the first syllable of his name and called himself Ross. Louis Akers heard the news apathetically, and went back to his chair again.

By eight o’clock he knew that he had lost the election, but that, too, seemed relatively unimportant. He was not thinking coherently, but certain vague ideas floated through his mind. There was a law of compensation in the universe: it was all rot to believe that one was paid or punished in the hereafter for what one did. Hell was real, but it was on earth and its place was in a man’s mind. He couldn’t get away from it, because each man carried his own hell around with him. It was all stored up there; nothing he had done was left out, and the more he put into it the more he got out, when the time came.

This was his time.

Ross and Doyle, with one or two others, found him there at nine o’clock, an untasted meal on the table, and the ends of innumerable cigarettes on the hearth. In the conference that followed he took but little part. The Russian urged immediate action, and Doyle by a saturnine silence tacitly agreed with him. But Louis only half heard them. His mind was busy with that matter of hell. Only once he looked up. Ross was making use of the phrase: “Militant minority.”

“Militant minority!” he said scornfully, “you overwork that idea, Ross. What we’ve got here now is a militant majority, and that’s what elected Hendricks. You’re licked before you begin. And my advice is, don’t begin.”

But they laughed at him.

“You act like a whipped dog,” Doyle said, “crawling under the doorstep for fear somebody else with a strap comes along.”

“They’re organized against us. We could have put it over six months ago. Not now.”

“Then you’d better get out,” Doyle said, shortly.

“I’m thinking of it.”

But Doyle had no real fear of him. He was sulky. Well, let him sulk.

Akers relapsed into silence. His interest in the conspiracy had always been purely self-interest; he had never had Woslosky’s passion, or Doyle’s cold fanaticism. They had carried him off his feet with their promises, but how much were they worth? They had failed to elect him. Every bit of brains, cunning and resource in their organization had been behind him, and they had failed.

This matter of hell, now? Suppose one put by something on the other account? Suppose one turned square? Wouldn’t that earn something? Suppose that one went to the Cardews and put all his cards on the table, asking nothing in return? Suppose one gave up the by-paths of life, and love in a hedgerow, and did the other thing? Wouldn’t that earn something?

He roused himself and took a perfunctory part in the conversation, but his mind obstinately returned to itself. He knew every rendezvous of the Red element in the country; he knew where their literature was printed; he knew the storehouses of arms and ammunition, and the plans for carrying on the city government by the strikers after the reign of terrorization which was to subdue the citizens.

Suppose he turned informer? Could he set a price, and that price Lily? But he discarded that. He was not selling now, he was earning. He would set himself right first, and – provided the government got the leaders before those leaders got him, as they would surely try to do – he would have earned something, surely.

Lily had come to him once when he called. She might come again, when he had earned her.

Doyle sat back in his chair and watched him. He saw that he had gone to pieces under defeat, and men did strange things at those times. With uncanny shrewdness he gauged Akers’ reaction; his loss of confidence and, he surmised, his loyalty. He would follow his own interest now, and if he thought that it lay in turning informer, he might try it. But it would take courage.

When the conference broke up Doyle was sure of where his man stood. He was not worried. They did not need Akers any longer. He had been a presentable tool, a lay figure to give the organization front, and they had over-rated him, at that. He had failed them. Doyle, watching him contemptuously, realized in him his own fallacious judgment, and hated Akers for proving him wrong.

Outside the building Doyle drew the Russian aside, and spoke to him. Ross started, then grinned.

“You’re wrong,” he said. “He won’t try it. But of course he may, and we’ll see that he doesn’t get away with it.”

>From that time on Louis Akers was under espionage.

CHAPTER XLVI

DOCTOR Smalley was by way of achieving a practice. During his morning and evening office hours he had less and less time to read the papers and the current magazines in his little back office, or to compare the month’s earnings, visit by visit, with the same month of the previous year.

He took to making his hospital rounds early in the morning, rather to the outrage of various head nurses, who did not like the staff to come a-visiting until every counterpane was drawn stiff and smooth, every bed corner a geometrical angle, every patient washed and combed and temperatured, and in the exact center of the bed.

Interns were different. They were like husbands. They came and went, seeing things at their worst as well as at their best, but mostly at their worst. Like husbands, too, they developed a sort of philosophy as to the early morning, and would only make occasional remarks, such as:

“Cyclone struck you this morning, or anything?”

Doctor Smalley, being a bachelor, was entirely blind to the early morning deficiencies of his wards. Besides, he was young and had had a cold shower and two eggs and various other things, and he saw the world at eight A.M. as a good place. He would get into his little car, whistling, and driving through the market square he would sometimes stop and buy a bag of apples for the children’s ward, or a bunch of fall flowers. Thus armed, it was impossible for the most austere of head nurses to hate him.

“We’re not straightened up yet, doctor,” they would say.

“Looks all right to me,” he would reply cheerfully, and cast an eager eye over the ward. To him they were all his children, large and small, and if he did not exactly carry healing in his wings, having no wings, he brought them courage and a breath of fresh morning air, slightly tinged with bay rum, and the feeling that this was a new day. A new page, on which to write such wonderful things (in the order book) as: “Jennie may get up this afternoon.” Or: “Lizzie Smith, small piece of beef steak.”

On the morning after the election Doctor Smalley rose unusually early, and did five minutes of dumb bells, breathing very deep before his window, having started the cold water in the tub first. At the end of that time he padded in his bare feet to the top of the stairs and called in a huge, deep-breathing voice:

“Ten minutes.”

These two cryptic words seeming to be perfectly understood below, followed the sound of a body plunging into water, a prolonged “Wow!” from the bathroom, and noisy hurried splashing. Dressing was a rapid process, due to a method learned during college days, which consists of wearing as little as possible, and arranging it at night so that two thrusts (trousers and under-drawers), one enveloping gesture (shirt and under-shirt), and a gymnastic effort of standing first on one leg and then on the other (socks and shoes), made a fairly completed toilet.

While putting on his collar and tie the doctor stood again by the window, and lustily called the garage across the narrow street.

“Jim!” he yelled. “Annabelle breakfasted yet?”

Annabelle was his shabby little car.

Annabelle had breakfasted, on gasoline, oil and water. The doctor finished tying his tie, singing lustily, and went to the door. At the door he stopped singing, put on a carefully professional air, restrained an impulse to slide down the stairrail, and descended with the dignity of a man with a growing practice and a possible patient in the waiting-room.

At half-past seven he was on his way to the hospital. He stopped at the market and bought three dozen oranges out of a ten-dollar bill he had won on the election, and almost bought a live rabbit because it looked so dreary in its slatted box. He restrained himself, because his housekeeper had a weakness for stewed rabbit, and turned into Cardew Way. He passed the Doyle house slowly, inspecting it as he went, because he had a patient there, and because he had felt that there was something mysterious about the household, quite aside from the saturnine Doyle himself. He knew all about Doyle, of course; all, that is, that there was to know, but he was a newcomer to the city, and he did not know that Doyle’s wife was a Cardew. Sometimes he had felt that he was under a sort of espionage all the time he was in the house. But that was ridiculous, wasn’t it? Because they could not know that he was on the Vigilance Committee.

There was something curious about one of the windows. He slowed Annabelle and gazed at it. That was strange; there was a sort of white rope hanging from Mrs. Doyle’s window.

He stopped Annabelle and stared. Then he drew up to the curb and got out of the car. He was rather uneasy when he opened the gate and started up the walk, but there was no movement of life in the house. At the foot of the steps he saw something, and almost stopped breathing. Behind a clump of winter-bare shrubbery was what looked like a dark huddle of clothing.

It was incredible.

He parted the branches and saw Elinor Doyle lying there, conscious and white with pain. Perhaps never in his life was Doctor Smalley to be so rewarded as with the look in her eyes when she saw him.

“Why, Mrs. Doyle!” was all he could think to say.

“I have broken my other leg, doctor,” she said, “the rope gave way.”

“You come down that rope?”

“I tried to. I was a prisoner. Don’t take me back to the house, doctor. Don’t take me back!”

“Of course I’ll not take you back,” he said, soothingly. “I’ll carry you out to my car. It may hurt, but try to be quiet. Can you get your arms around my neck?”

She managed that, and he raised her slowly, but the pain must have been frightful, for a moment later he felt her arms relax and knew that she had fainted. He got to the car somehow, kicked the oranges into the gutter, and placed her, collapsed, on the seat. It was only then that he dared to look behind him, but the house, like the street, was without signs of life. As he turned the next corner, however, he saw Doyle getting off a streetcar, and probably never before had Annabelle made such speed as she did for the next six blocks

Hours later Elinor Cardew wakened in a quiet room with gray walls, and with the sickening sweet odor of ether over everything. Instead of Olga a quiet nurse sat by her bed, and standing by a window, in low-voiced conversation, were two men. One she knew, the doctor. The other, a tall young man with a slight limp as he came toward her, she had never seen before. A friendly young man, thin, and grave of voice, who put a hand over hers and said:

“You are not to worry about anything, Mrs. Doyle. You understand me, don’t you? Everything. is all right. I am going now to get your people.”

“My husband?”

“Your own people,” he said. “I have already telephoned to your brother. And the leg’s fixed. Everything’s as right as rain.

Elinor closed her eyes. She felt no pain and no curiosity. Only there was something she had to do, and do quickly. What was it? But she could not remember, because she felt very sleepy and relaxed, and as though everything was indeed as right as rain.

It was evening when she looked up again, and the room was dark. The doctor had gone, and the grave young man was still in the room. There was another figure there, tall and straight, and at first she thought it was Jim Doyle.

“Jim!” she said. And then: “You must go away, Jim. I warn you. I am going to tell all I know.”

But the figure turned, and it was Howard Cardew, a tense and strained Howard Cardew, who loomed amazingly tall and angry, but not with her.

“I’m sorry, Nellie dear,” he said, bending over her. “If we’d only known – can you talk now?”

Her mind was suddenly very clear.

“I must. There is very little time.”

“I want to tell you something first, Nellie. I think we have located the Russian woman, but we haven’t got Doyle.”

Howard was not very subtle, but Willy Cameron saw her face and understood. It was strange beyond belief, he felt, this loyalty of women to their men, even after love had gone; this feeling that, having once lain in a man’s arms, they have taken a vow of protection over that man. It was not so much that they were his as that he was theirs. Jim Doyle had made her a prisoner, had treated her brutally, was a traitor to her and to his country, but – he had been hers. She was glad that he had got away.

CHAPTER XLVII

It was dark when Howard Cardew and Willy Cameron left the hospital. Elinor’s information had been detailed and exact. Under cover of the general strike the radical element intended to take over the city. On the evening of the first day of the strike, armed groups from the revolutionary party would proceed first to the municipal light plant, and, having driven out any employees who remained at their posts, or such volunteers as had replaced them, would plunge the city into darkness.

Elinor was convinced that following this would come various bomb outrages, perhaps a great number of them, but of this she had no detailed information. What she did know, however, was the dependence that Doyle and the other leaders were placing in the foreign element in the nearby mill towns and from one or two mining districts in the county.

Around the city, in the mill towns, there were more than forty thousand foreign laborers. Subtract from that the loyal aliens, but add a certain percentage of the native-born element, members of seditious societies and followers of the red flag, and the Reds had a potential army of dangerous size.

As an actual fighting force they were much less impressive. Only a small percentage, she knew and told them, were adequately armed. There were a few machine guns, and some long-range rifles, but by far the greater number had only revolvers. The remainder had extemporized weapons, bars of iron, pieces of pipe, farm implements, lances of wood tipped with iron and beaten out on home forges.

They were a rabble, not an army, without organization and with few leaders. Their fighting was certain to be as individualistic as their doctrines. They had two elements in their favor only, numbers and surprise.

To oppose them, if the worst came, there were perhaps five thousand armed men, including the city and county police, the state constabulary, and the citizens who had signed the cards of the Vigilance Committee. The local post of the American Legion stood ready for instant service, and a few national guard troops still remained in the vicinity. “What they expect,” she said, looking up from her pillows with tragic eyes, “is that the police and the troops will join them. You don’t think they will, do you?”

They reassured her, and after a time she slept again. When she wakened, at midnight, the room was empty save for a nurse reading under a night lamp behind a screen. Elinor was not in pain. She lay there, listening to the night sounds of the hospital, the watchman shuffling along the corridor in slippers, the closing of a window, the wail of a newborn infant far away.

There was a shuffling of feet in the street below, the sound of many men, not marching but grimly walking, bent on some unknown errand. The nurse opened the window and looked out.

“That’s queer!” she said. “About thirty men, and not saying a word. They walk like soldiers, but they’re not in uniform.”

Elinor pondered that, but it was not for some days that she knew that Pink Denslow and a picked number of volunteers from the American Legion had that night, quite silently and unemotionally, broken into the printing office where Doyle and Akers had met Cusick, and had, not so silently but still unemotionally, destroyed the presses and about a ton of inflammatory pamphlets.

CHAPTER XLVIII

There was a little city, and few men within it; And there came a great king against it, and besieged it, And built great bulwarks against it; Now there was found in it a Poor Wise Man, And he by his wisdom delivered the city. – Ecclesiastes IX :14, 15.

The general strike occurred two days later, at mid-day. During the interval a joint committee representing the workers, the employers and the public had held a protracted sitting, but without result, and by one o’clock the city was in the throes of a complete tie-up. Laundry and delivery wagons were abandoned where they stood. Some of the street cars had been returned to the barns, but others stood in the street where the crews had deserted them.

There was no disorder, however, and the city took its difficulties with a quiet patience and a certain sense of humor. Bulletins similar to the ones used in Seattle began to appear.

“Strikers, the world is the workers’ for the taking, and the workers are the vast majority in society. Your interests are paramount to those of a small, useless band of parasites who exploit you to their advantage. You have nothing to lose but your chains and you have a world to gain. The world for the workers.”

There was one ray of light in the darkness, however. The municipal employees had refused to strike, and only by force would the city go dark that night. It was a blow to the conspirators. In the strange psychology of the mob, darkness was an essential to violence, and by three o’clock that afternoon the light plant and city water supply had been secured against attack by effectual policing. The power plant for the car lines was likewise protected, and at five o’clock a line of street cars, stalled on Amanda Street, began to show signs of life.

The first car was boarded by a half dozen youngish men, unobtrusively ready for trouble, and headed by a tall youth who limped slightly and wore an extremely anxious expression. He went forward and commenced a series of experiments with levers and brake, in which process incidentally he liberated a quantity of sand onto the rails. A moment later the car lurched forward, and then stopped with a jerk.

Willy Cameron looked behind him and grinned. The entire guard was piled in an ignoble mass on the floor.

By six o’clock volunteer crews were running a number of cars, and had been subjected to nothing worse than abuse. Strikers lined the streets and watched them, but the grim faces of the guards kept them back. They jeered from the curbs, but except for the flinging of an occasional stone they made no inimical move.

By eight o’clock it was clear that the tie-up would be only partial. Volunteers from all walks of life were in line at the temporary headquarters of the Vigilance Committee and were being detailed, for police duty, to bring in the trains with the morning milk, to move street cars and trucks. The water plant and the reservoirs were protected. Willy Cameron, abandoning his car after the homeward rush of the evening, found a line before the Committee Building which extended for blocks down the street.

Troops had been sent for, but it took time to mobilize and move them. It would be morning before they arrived. And the governor, over the long distance wire to the mayor, was inclined to be querulous.

“We’ll send them, of course,” he said. “But if the strikers are keeping quiet – I don’t know what the country’s coming to. We’re holding a conference here now. There’s rioting breaking out all over the state.”

* * * * *

There was a conference held in the Mayor’s office that night: Cameron and Cardew and one or two others of the Vigilance Committee, two agents of the government secret service, the captains of the companies of state troops and constabulary, the Chief of Police, the Mayor himself, and some representatives of the conservative element of organized labor. Quiet men, these last, uneasy and anxious, as ignorant as the others of which way the black cat, the symbol of sabotage and destruction, would jump. The majority of their men would stand for order, they declared, but there were some who would go over. They urged, to offset that reflection on their organization that the proletariat of the city might go over, too.

But, by midnight, it seemed as though the situation was solving itself. In the segregated district there had been a small riot, and another along the river front, disturbances quickly ended by the police and the volunteer deputies. The city had not gone dark. The bombs had not exploded. Word came in that by back roads and devious paths the most rabid of the agitators were leaving town. And before two o’clock Howard Cardew and some of the others went home to bed.

At three o’clock the Cardew doorbell rang, and Howard, not asleep, flung on his dressing gown and went out into the hall. Lily was in her doorway, intent and anxious.

“Don’t answer it, father,” she begged. “You don’t know what it may be.”

Howard smiled, but went back and got his revolver. The visitor was Willy Cameron.

“I don’t like to waken you,” he said, “but word has come in of suspicious movements at Baxter and Friendship, and one or two other places. It looks like concerted action of some sort.”

“What sort of concerted action?”

“They still have one card to play. The foreign element outside hasn’t been heard from. It looks as though the fellows who left town to-night have been getting busy up the river.

“They wouldn’t be such fools as to come to the city.”

“They’ve been made a lot of promises. They may be out of hand, you know.”

While Howard was hastily dressing, Willy Cameron waited below. He caught a glimpse of himself in the big mirror and looked away. His face was drawn and haggard, his eyes hollow and his collar a wilted string. He was dusty and shabby, too, and to Lily, coming down the staircase, he looked almost ill.

Lily was in a soft negligee garment, her bare feet thrust into slippers, but she was too anxious to be self-conscious.

“Willy,” she said, “there is trouble after all?”

“Not in the city. Things are not so quiet up the river.

She placed a hand on his arm.

“Are you and father going up the river?”

He explained, after a momentary hesitation. “It may crystallize into something, or it may not,” he finished.

“You think it will, don’t you?”

“It will be nothing more, at the worst, than rioting.”

“But you may be hurt!”

“I may have one chance to fight for my country,” he said, rather grimly. “Don’t begrudge me that.” But he added: “I’ll not be hurt. The thing will blow up as soon as it starts.”

“You don’t really believe that, do you?”

“I know they’ll never get into the city.”

But as he moved away she called him back, more breathlessly than ever, and quite white.

“I don’t want you to go without knowing – Willy, do you remember once that you said you cared for me?”

“I remember.” He stared straight ahead.

“Are you – all over that?”

“You know better than that, don’t you?”

“But I’ve done so many things,” she said, wistfully. “You ought to hate me.” And when he said nothing, for the simple reason that he could not speak: “I’ve ruined us both, haven’t I?”

Suddenly he caught up her hand and, bending over it, held it to his lips.

“Always,” he said, huskily, “I love you, Lily. I shall always love you.”

CHAPTER XLIX

Howard went back to the municipal building, driving furiously through the empty streets. The news was ominous. Small bodies of men, avoiding the highways, were focusing at different points in the open country. The state police had been fired at from ambush, and two of them had been killed. They had ridden into and dispersed various gatherings in the darkness, but only to have them re-form in other places. The enemy was still shadowy, elusive; it was apparently saving its ammunition. It did little shooting, but reports of the firing of farmhouses and of buildings in small, unprotected towns began to come in rapidly.

In a short time the messages began to be more significant, indicating that the groups were coalescing and that a revolutionary army, with the city its objective, was coming down the river, evidently making for the bridge at Chester Street.

“They’ve lighted a fire they can’t put out,” was Howard’s comment. His mouth was very dry and his face twitching, for he saw, behind the frail barrier of the Chester Street bridge, the quiet houses of the city, the sleeping children. He saw Grace and Lily, and Elinor. He was among the first to reach the river front.

All through the dawn volunteers labored at the bridge head. Members of the Vigilance Committee, policemen and firemen, doctors, lawyers, clerks, shop-keepers, they looted the river wharves with willing, unskillful hands. They turned coal wagons on their sides, carried packing cases and boxes, and, under the direction of men who wore the Legion button, built skillfully and well. Willy Cameron toiled with the others. He lifted and pulled and struggled, and in the midst of his labor he had again that old dream of the city. The city was a vast number of units, and those units were homes. Behind each of those men there was, somewhere, in some quiet neighborhood, a home. It was for their homes they were fighting, for the right of children to play in peaceful streets, for the right to go back at night to the rest they had earned by honest labor, for the right of the hearth, of lamp-light and sunlight, of love, of happiness.

Then, in the flare of a gasoline torch, he came face to face with Louis Akers. The two men confronted each other, silently, with hostility. Neither moved aside, but it was Akers who spoke first.

“Always busy, Cameron,” he said. “What’d the world do without you, anyhow?”

“Aren’t you on the wrong side of this barricade?”

“Smart as ever,” Akers observed, watching him intently. “As it happens, I’m here because I want to be, and because I can’t get where I ought to be.”

For a furious moment Willy Cameron thought he was referring to his wife, but there was something strange in Akers’ tone.

“I could be useful to you fellows,” he was saying, “but it seems you don’t want help. I’ve been trying to see the Mayor all night.”

“What do you want to see him about?”

“I’ll tell him that.”

Willy Cameron hesitated.

“I think it’s a trick, Akers.”

“All right. Then go to the devil!”

He turned away sullenly, leaving Willy Cameron still undecided. It would be like the man as he knew him, this turning informer when he saw the strength of the defense, and Cameron had a flash of intuition, too, that Akers might see, in this new role, some possible chance to win back with Lily Cardew. He saw how the man’s cheap soul might dramatize itself.

“Akers!” he called.

Akers stopped, but he did not turn.

“I’ve got a car here. If you mean what you say, and it’s straight, I’ll take you.”

“Where’s the car?”

On their way to it, threading in and out among the toiling crowd, Willy Cameron had a chance to observe the change in the other man, his drooping shoulders and the almost lassitude of his walk. He went ahead, charging the mass and going through it by sheer bulk and weight, his hands in his coat pockets, his soft hat pulled low over his face. Neither of them noticed that one of the former clerks of the Myers Housecleaning Company followed close behind, or that, holding to a tire, he rode on the rear of the Cardew automobile as it made its way into the center of the city.

In the car Akers spoke only once.

“Where is Howard Cardew?” he asked.

“With the Mayor, probably. I left him there.”

It seemed to him that Akers found the answer satisfactory. He sat back in the deep seat, and lighted a cigarette.

The Municipal Building was under guard. Willy Cameron went up the steps and spoke to the sentry there. It was while his back was turned that the sharp crack of a revolver rang out, and he whirled, in time to see Louis Akers fall forward on his face and lie still.

* * * * *

The shadowy groups through the countryside had commenced to coalesce. Groups of twenty became a rabble of five hundred. The five hundred grew, and joined other five hundreds. From Baxter alone over two thousand rioters, mostly foreigners, started out, and by daylight the main body of the enemy reached the outskirts of the city, a long, irregular line of laughing, jostling, shouting men, constantly renewed at the rear until the procession covered miles of roadway. They were of all races and all types; individually they were, many of them, like boys playing truant from school, not quite certain of themselves, smiling and yet uneasy, not entirely wicked in intent. But they were shepherded by men with cunning eyes, men who knew well that a mob is greater than the sum of its parts, more wicked than the individuals who compose it, more cruel, more courageous.

As it marched it laughed. It was like a lion at play, ready to leap at the first scratch that brought blood.

Where the street car line met the Friendship Road the advance was met by the Chief of Police, on horseback and followed by a guard of mounted men, and ordered back. The van hesitated, but it was urged ahead, pushed on by the irresistible force behind it, and it came on no longer singing, but slowly, inevitably, sullenly protesting and muttering. Its good nature was gone.

As the Chief turned his horse was shot under him. He took another horse from one of his guard, and they retired, moving slowly and with drawn revolvers. There was no further shooting at that time, nothing but the irresistible advance. The police could no more have held the armed rabble than they could have held the invading hordes in Belgium. At the end of the street the Chief stopped and looked back. They had passed over his dead horse as though it were not there.

In the mill district, which they had now reached, they received reenforcements, justifying the judgment of the conference that to have erected their barricades there would have been to expose the city’s defenders to attack from the rear. And the mill district suffered comparatively little. It was the business portion of the city toward which they turned their covetous eyes, the great stores, the hotels and restaurants, the homes of the wealthy.

Pleased by the lack of opposition the mob grew more cheerful. The lion played. They pressed forward, wanton and jeering, firing now and then at random, breaking windows as they passed, looting small shops which they stripped like locusts. Their pockets bulging, and the taste of pillage forecasting what was to come, they moved onward more rapidly, shooting at upper windows or into the air, laughing, yelling, cursing, talking. From the barricades, long before the miles-long column came into view, could be heard the ominous far-off muttering of the mob.

It was when they found the bridge barricaded on the far side, however, that the lion bared its teeth and snarled. Temporarily checked by the play of machine guns which swept the bridge and kept it clear for a time, they commenced wild, wasteful firing, from the bridge-head and from along the Cardew wharves. Their leaders were prepared, and sent snipers into the bridge towers, but the machine guns continued to fire.

That the struggle would be on the bridge Doyle and his Council had anticipated from the reports of the night before. They were prepared to take a heavy loss on the bridges, but they had not prepared for the thing that defeated them; that as the mob is braver than the individual, so also it is more cowardly.

Pushed forward from the rear and unable to retreat through the dense mass behind that was every moment growing denser, a few hundreds found themselves facing the steady machine-gun fire from behind the barricades, and unable either to advance or to retire. Thus trapped, they turned on their own forces behind them, and tried to fight their way to safety, but the inexorable pressure kept on, and the defenders, watching and powerless, saw men fling themselves from the bridges and disappear in the water below, rather than advance into the machine-gun zone. The guns were not firing into the rioters, but before them, to hold them back, and into that leaden stream there were no brave spirits to hurl themselves.

The trapped men turned on their own and battled for escape. With the same violence which had been directed toward the city they now fought each other, and the bridge slowly cleared. But the mob did not disperse.

It spread out on the bank across, a howling, frustrated, futile mass, disorganized and demoralized, which fired its useless guns across the river, which seethed and tossed and struggled, and spent itself in its own wild fury. And all the time cool-eyed men, on the wharves across, watched and waited for the time to attack.

“They’re sick at their stomachs now,” said an old army sergeant, watching, to Willy Cameron. “The dirty devils! They’ll be starting their filthy work over there soon, and that’s the zero hour.”

Willy Cameron nodded. He had seen one young Russian boy with a child-like face venture forward alone into the fire zone and drop. He still lay there, on the bridge. And all of Willy Cameron was in revolt. What had he been told, that boy, that had made him ready to pour out his young life like wine? There were others like him in that milling multitude on the river bank across, young men who had come to America with a dream in their hearts, and America had done this to them. Or had she? She had taken them in, but they were not her own, and now, since she would not take them, they would take her. Was that it? Was it that America had made them her servants, but not her children? He did not know.

* * * * *

Robbed of the city proper, the mob turned on the mill district it had invaded. Its dream of lust and greed was over, but it could still destroy.

Like a battle charge, as indeed it was, the mounted city and state police crossed the bridge. It was followed by the state troops on foot, by city policemen in orderly files, and then by the armed citizens. The bridge vibrated to the step of marching men, going out to fight for their homes. The real battle was fought there, around the Cardew mills, a battle where the loyalists were greatly outnumbered, and where the rioters fought, according to their teaching, with every trick they could devise. Posted in upper windows they fired down from comparative safety; ambulances crossed and re-crossed the bridges. The streets were filled with rioting men, striking out murderously with bars and spikes. Fires flamed up and burned themselves out. In one place, eight blocks of mill-workers’ houses, with their furnishings, went in a quarter of an hour.

Willy Cameron was fighting like a demon. Long ago his reserve of ammunition had given out, and he was fighting with the butt end of his revolver. Around him had rallied some of the men he knew best, Pink and Mr. Hendricks, Doctor Smalley, Dan and Joe Wilkinson, and they stayed together as, street by street, the revolutionists were driven back. There were dead and wounded everywhere, injured men who had crawled into the shelter of doorways and sat or lay there, nursing their wounds.

Suddenly, to his amazement, Willy saw old Anthony Cardew. He had somehow achieved an upper window of the mill office building, and he was showing himself fearlessly, a rifle in his hands; in his face was a great anger, but there was more than that. Willy Cameron, thinking it over later, decided that it was perplexity. He could not understand.

He never did understand. For other eyes also had seen old Anthony Cardew. Willy Cameron, breasting the mob and fighting madly toward the door of the building, with Pink behind him, heard a cheer and an angry roar, and, looking up, saw that the old man had disappeared. They found him there later on, the rifle beside him, his small and valiant figure looking, with eyes no longer defiant, toward the Heaven which puts, for its own strange purpose, both evil and good into the same heart.

By eleven o’clock the revolution was over. Sodden groups of men, thoroughly cowed and frightened, were on their way by back roads to the places they had left a few hours before. They had no longer dreams of empire. Behind them they could see, on the horizon, the city itself, the smoke from its chimneys, the spires of its churches. Both, homes and churches, they had meant to destroy, but behind both there was the indestructible. They had failed.

They turned, looked back, and went on.

* * * * *

On the crest of a hill-top overlooking the city a man was standing, looking down to where the softened towers of the great steel bridges rose above the river mist like fairy towers. Below him lay the city, powerful, significant, important.

The man saw the city only as a vast crucible, into which he had flung his all, and out of which had come only defeat and failure. But the city was not a crucible. The melting pot of a nation is not a thing of cities, but of the human soul.

The city was not a melting pot. It was a sanctuary. The man stood silent and morose, his chin dropped on his chest, and stared down.

Beside and somewhat behind him stood a woman, a somber, passionate figure, waiting passively. His eyes traveled from the city to her, and rested on her, contemptuous, thwarted, cynical.

“You fool,” he said, “I hate you, and you know it.”

But she only smiled faintly. “We’d better get away now, Jim,” she said.

He got into the car.

CHAPTER L

Late that afternoon Joe Wilkinson and Dan came slowly up the street, toward the Boyd house. The light of battle was still in Dan’s eyes, his clothes were torn and his collar missing, and he walked with the fine swagger of the conqueror.

“Y’ask me,” he said, “and I’ll tell the world this thing’s done for. It was just as well to let them give it a try, and find out it won’t work.”

Joe said nothing. He was white and very tired, and a little sick.

“If you don’t mind I’ll go in your place and wash up,” he remarked, as they neared the house. “I’ll scare the kids to death if they see me like this.”

Edith was in the parlor. She had sat there almost all day, in an agony of fear. At four o’clock the smallest Wilkinson had hammered at the front door, and on being admitted had made a shameless demand.

“Bed and thugar,” she had said, looking up with an ingratiating smile.

“You little beggar!”

“Bed and thugar.”

Edith had got the bread and sugar, and, having lured the baby into the parlor, had held her while she ate, receiving now and then an exceedingly sticky kiss in payment. After a little the child’s head began to droop, and Edith drew the small head down onto her breast. She sat there, rocking gently, while the chair slowly traveled, according to its wont, about the room.

The child brought her comfort. She began to understand those grave rocking figures in the hospital ward, women who sat, with eyes that seemed to look into distant places, with a child’s head on their breasts.

After all, that was life for a woman. Love was only a part of the scheme of life, a means to an end. And that end was the child.

For the first time she wished that her child had lived.

She felt no bitterness now, and no anger. He was dead. It was hard to think of him as dead, who had been so vitally alive. She was sorry he had had to die, but death was like love and children, it was a part of some general scheme of things. Suppose this had been his child she was holding? Would she so easily have forgiven him? She did not know.

Then she thought of Willy Cameron. The bitterness had strangely gone out of that, too. Perhaps, vaguely, she began to realize that only young love gives itself passionately and desperately, when there is no hope of a return, and that the agonies of youth, although terrible enough, pass with youth itself.

She felt very old.

Joe found her there, the chair displaying its usual tendency to climb the chimney flue, and stood in the doorway, looking at her with haunted, hungry eyes. There was a sort of despair in Joe those days, and now he was tired and shaken from the battle.

“I’ll take her home in a minute,” he said, still with the strange eyes!”

He came into the room, and suddenly he was kneeling beside the chair, his head buried against the baby’s warm, round body. His bent shoulders shook, and Edith, still with the maternal impulse strong within her, put her hand on his bowed head.

“Don’t, Joe!”

He looked up.

“I loved you so, Edith!”

“Don’t you love me now?”

“God knows I do. I can’t get over it. I can’t. I’ve tried, Edith.”

He sat back on the floor and looked at her.

“I can’t,” he repeated. “And when I saw you like that just now, with the kid in your arms – I used to think that maybe you and I – “

“I know, Joe. No decent man would want me now.”

She was still strangely composed, peaceful, almost detached.

“That!” he said, astonished. “I don’t mean that, Edith. I’ve had my fight about that, and got it over. That’s done with. I mean – ” he got up and straightened himself. “You don’t care about me.”

“But I do care for you. Perhaps not quite the way you care, Joe but I’ve been through such a lot. I can’t seem to feel anything terribly. I just want peace.”

“I could give you that,” he said eagerly.

Edith smiled. Peace, in that noisy house next door, with children and kittens and puppies everywhere! And yet it would be peace, after all, a peace of the soul, the peace of a good man’s love. After a time, too, there might come another peace, the peace of those tired women in the ward, rocking.

“If you want me, I’ll marry you,” she said, very simply. “I’ll be a good wife, Joe. And I want children. I want the right to have them.”

He never noticed that the kiss she gave him, over the sleeping baby, was slightly tinged with granulated sugar.

CHAPTER LI

OLD Anthony’s body had been brought home, and lay in state in his great bed. There had been a bad hour; death seems so strangely to erase faults and leave virtues. Something strong and vital had gone from the house, and the servants moved about with cautious, noiseless steps. In Grace’s boudoir, Howard was sitting, his arms around his wife, telling her the story of the day. At dawn he had notified her by telephone of Akers’ murder.

“Shall I tell Lily?” she had asked, trembling.

“Do you want to wait until I get back?”

“I don’t know how she will take it, Howard. I wish you could be here, anyhow.”

But then had come the battle and his father’s death, and in the end it was Willy Cameron who told her. He had brought back all that was mortal of Anthony Cardew, and, having seen the melancholy procession up the stairs, had stood in the hall, hating to intrude but hoping to be useful. Howard found him there, a strange, disheveled figure, bearing the scars of battle, and held out his hand.

“It’s hard to thank you, Cameron,” he said; “you seem to be always about when we need help. And” he paused. “We seem to have needed it considerably lately.”