"Precisely," said Howard, "but after twenty-four hours they were fighting like demons to restore law and order. It is"—he fingered the card—"to save that twenty-four hours that this organization is being formed. It is secret. Did I tell you that? And the idea originated with the young man you spoke about as supporting Hendricks—you met him here once, a friend of Lily's. His name is Cameron—William Wallace Cameron."
Old Anthony remained silent, but the small jagged vein on his forehead swelled with anger. After a time:
"I suppose Doyle is behind this?" he asked. "It sounds like him."
"That is the supposition. But they have nothing on him yet; he is too shrewd for that. And that leads to something else. Lily cannot continue to stay there."
"I didn't send her there."
"Actually, no. In effect—but we needn't go into that now. The situation is very serious. I can imagine that nothing could fit better into his plans than to have her there. She gives him a cachet of respectability. Do you want that?"
"She is probably one of them now. God knows how much of his rotten doctrine she has absorbed."
Howard flushed, but he kept his temper.
"His theories, possibly. His practice, no. She certainly has no idea... it has come to this, father. She must have a home somewhere, and if it cannot be here, Grace and I must make one for her elsewhere."
Probably Anthony Cardew had never respected Howard more than at that moment, or liked him less.
"Both you and Grace are free to make a home where you please."
"We prefer it here, but you must see yourself that things cannot go on as they are. We have waited for you to see that, all three of us, and now this new situation makes it imperative to take some action."
"I won't have that fellow Akers coming here."
"He would hardly come, under the circumstances. Besides, her friendship with him is only a part of her revolt. If she comes home it will be with the understanding that she does not see him again."
"Revolt?" said old Anthony, raising his eyebrows.
"That is what it actually was. She found her liberty interfered with, and she staged her own small rebellion. It was very human, I think."
"It was very Cardew," said old Anthony, and smiled faintly. He had, to tell the truth, developed a grudging admiration for his granddaughter in the past two months. He saw in her many of his own qualities, good and bad. And, more than he cared to own, he had missed her and the young life she had brought into the quiet house. Most important of all, she was the last of the Cardews. Although his capitulation when it came was curt, he was happier than he had been for weeks.
"Bring her home," he said, "but tell her about Akers. If she says that is off, I'll forget the rest."
On her way to her room that night Grace Cardew encountered Mademoiselle, a pale, unhappy Mademoiselle, who seemed to spend her time mostly in Lily's empty rooms or wandering about corridors. Whenever the three members of the family were together she would retire to her own quarters, and there feverishly with her rosary would pray for a softening of hearts. She did not comprehend these Americans, who were so kind to those beneath them and so hard to each other.
"I wanted to see you, Mademoiselle," Grace said, not very steadily. "I have good news for you."
Mademoiselle began to tremble. "She is coming? Lily is coming?"
"Yes. Will you have some fresh flowers put in her rooms in the morning?"
Suddenly Mademoiselle forgot her years of repression, and flinging her arms around Grace's neck she kissed her. Grace held her for a moment, patting her shoulder gently.
"We must try to make her very happy, Mademoiselle. I think things will be different now."
Mademoiselle stood back and wiped her eyes.
"But she must be different, too," she said. "She is sweet and good, but she is strong of will, too. The will to do, to achieve, that is one thing, and very good. But the will to go one's own way, that is another."
"The young are always headstrong, Mademoiselle."
But, alone later on, her rosary on her knee, Mademoiselle wondered. If youth were the indictment against Lily, was she not still young? It took years, or suffering, or sometimes both, to break the will of youth and chasten its spirit. God grant Lily might not have suffering.
It was Grace's plan to say nothing to Lily, but to go for her herself, and thus save her the humiliation of coming back alone. All morning housemaids were busy in Lily's rooms. Rugs were shaken, floors waxed and rubbed, the silver frames and vases in her sitting room polished to refulgence. And all morning Mademoiselle scolded and ran suspicious fingers into corners, and arranged and re-arranged great boxes of flowers.
Long before the time she had ordered the car Grace was downstairs, dressed for the street, and clad in cool shining silk, was pacing the shaded hall. There was a vague air of expectation about the old house. In a room off the pantry the second man was polishing the buttons of his livery, using a pasteboard card with a hole in it to save the fabric beneath. Grayson pottered about in the drawing room, alert for the parlor maid's sins of omission.
The telephone in the library rang, and Grayson answered it, while Grace stood in the doorway.
"A message from Miss Lily," he said. "Mrs. Doyle has telephoned that Miss Lily is on her way here."
Grace was vaguely disappointed. She had wanted to go to Lily with her good news, to bring her home bag and baggage, to lead her into the house and to say, in effect, that this was home, her home. She had felt that they, and not Lily, should take the first step.
She went upstairs, and taking off her hat, smoothed her soft dark hair. She did not want Lily to see how she had worried; she eyed herself carefully for lines. Then she went down, to more waiting, and for the first time, to a little doubt.
Yet when Lily came all was as it should have been. There was no doubt about her close embrace of her mother, her happiness at seeing her. She did not remove her gloves, however, and after she had put Grace in a chair and perched herself on the arm of it, there was a little pause. Each was preparing to tell something, each hesitated. Because Grace's task was the easier it was she who spoke first.
"I was about to start over when you telephoned, dear," she said. "I—we want you to come home to us again."
There was a queer, strained silence.
"Who wants me?" Lily asked, unsteadily.
"All of us. Your grandfather, too. He expects to find you here to-night. I can explain to your Aunt Elinor over the telephone, and we can send for your clothes."
Suddenly Lily got up and walked the length of the room. When she came back her eyes were filled with tears, and her left hand was bare.
"It nearly kills me to hurt you," she said, "but—what about this?"
She held out her hand.
Grace seemed frozen in her chair. At the sight of her mother's face Lily flung herself on her knees beside the chair.
"Mother, mother," she said, "you must know how I love you. Love you both. Don't look like that. I can't bear it."
Grace turned away her face.
"You don't love us. You can't. Not if you are going to marry that man."
"Mother," Lily begged, desperately, "let me come home. Let me bring him here. I'll wait, if you'll only do that. He is different; I know all that you want to say about his past. He has never had a real chance in all his life. He won't belong at first, but—he's a man, mother, a strong man. And it's awfully important. He can do so much, if he only will. And he says he will, if I marry him."
"I don't understand you," Grace said coldly. "What can a man like that do, but wreck all our lives?"
Resentment was rising fast in Lily, but she kept it down. "I'll tell you about that later," she said, and slowly got to her feet. "Is that all, mother? You won't see him? I can't bring him here? Isn't there any compromise? Won't you meet me half-way?"
"When you say half-way, you mean all the way, Lily."
"I wanted you so," Lily said, drearily, "I need you so just now. I am going to be
married, and I have no one to go to. Aunt Elinor doesn't understand, either. Every way I look I find—I suppose I can't come back at all, then."
"Your grandfather's condition was that you never see this Louis Akers again."
Lily's resentment left her. Anger was a thing for small matters, trivial affairs. This that was happening, an irrevocable break with her family, was as far beyond anger as it was beyond tears. She wondered dully if any man were worth all this. Perhaps she knew, sub-consciously, that Louis Akers was not. All her exaltation was gone, and in its stead was a sort of dogged determination to see the thing through now, at any cost; to re-make Louis into the man he could be, to build her own house of life, and having built it, to live in it as best she could.
"That is a condition I cannot fulfill, mother. I am engaged to him."
"Then you love him more than you do any of us, or all of us."
"I don't know. It is different," she said vaguely.
She kissed her mother very tenderly when she went away, but there was a feeling of finality in them both. Mademoiselle, waiting at the top of the stairs, heard the door close and could not believe her ears. Grace went upstairs, her face a blank before the servants, and shut herself in her room. And in Lily's boudoir the roses spread a heavy, funereal sweetness over the empty room.
CHAPTER XXIV
The strike had been carried on with comparatively little disorder. In some cities there had been rioting, but half-hearted and easily controlled. Almost without exception it was the foreign and unassimilated element that broke the peace. Alien women spat on the state police, and flung stones at them. Here and there property was destroyed. A few bomb outrages filled the newspapers with great scare-heads, and sent troops and a small army of secret service men here and there.
In the American Federation of Labor a stocky little man grimly fought to oppose the Radical element, which was slowly gaining ground, and at the same time to retain his leadership. The great steel companies, united at last by a common danger and a common fate if they yielded, stood doggedly and courageously together, waiting for a return of sanity to the world. The world seemed to have gone mad. Everywhere in the country production was reduced by the cessation of labor, and as a result the cost of living was mounting.
And every strike lost in the end. Labor had yet to learn that to cease to labor may express a grievance, but that in itself it righted no wrongs. Rather, it turned that great weapon, public opinion, without which no movement may succeed, against it. And that to stand behind the country in war was not enough. It must stand behind the country in peace.
It had to learn, too, that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. The weak link in the labor chain was its Radical element. Rioters were arrested with union cards in their pockets. In vain the unions protested their lack of sympathy with the unruly element. The vast respectable family of union labor found itself accused of the sins of the minority, and lost standing thereby.
At Friendship the unruly element was very strong. For a time it held its meetings in a hall. When that was closed it resorted to the open air.
On the fifteenth of July it held an incendiary meeting on the unused polo field, and the next day awakened to the sound of hammers, and to find a high wooden fence, reenforced with barbed wire, being built around the field, with the state police on guard over the carpenters. In a few days the fence was finished, only to be partly demolished the next night, secretly and noiselessly. But no further attempts were made to hold meetings there. It was rumored that meetings were being secretly held in the woods near the town, but the rendezvous was not located.
On the restored fence around the polo grounds a Red flag was found one morning, and two nights later the guard at the padlocked gate was shot through the heart, from ambush.
Then, about the first of August, out of a clear sky, sporadic riotings began to occur. They seemed to originate without cause, and to end as suddenly as they began. Usually they were in the outlying districts, but one or two took place in the city itself. The rioters were not all foreign strikers from the mills. They were garment workers, hotel waiters, a rabble of the discontented from all trades. The riots were to no end, apparently. They began with a chance word, fought their furious way for an hour or so, and ended, leaving a trail of broken heads and torn clothing behind them.
On toward the end of July one such disturbance grew to considerable size. The police were badly outnumbered, and a surprising majority of the rioters were armed, with revolvers, with wooden bludgeons, lengths of pipe and short, wicked iron bars. Things were rather desperate until the police found themselves suddenly and mysteriously reenforced by a cool-headed number of citizens, led by a tall thin man who limped slightly, and who disposed his heterogeneous support with a few words and considerable skill.
The same thin young man, stopping later in an alley way to investigate an arm badly bruised by an iron bar, overheard a conversation between two roundsmen, met under a lamppost after the battle, for comfort and a little conversation.
"Can you beat that, Henry?" said one. "Where the hell'd they come from?"
"Search me," said Henry. "D'you see the skinny fellow? Limped, too. D'you notice that? Probably hurt in France. But he hasn't forgotten how to fight, I'll tell the world."
The outbreaks puzzled the leaders of the Vigilance Committee. Willy Cameron was inclined to regard them as without direction or intention, purely as manifestations of hate, and as such contrary to the plans of their leaders. And Mr. Hendricks, nursing a black eye at home after the recent outburst, sized up the situation shrewdly.
"You can boil a kettle too hard," he said, "and then the lid pops off. Doyle and that outfit of his have been burning the fire a little high, that's all. They'll quit now, because they want to get us off guard later. You and your committee can take a vacation, unless you can set them to electioneering for me. They've had enough for a while, the devils. They'll wait now for Akers to get in and make things easy for them. Mind my words, boy. That's the game."
And the game it seemed to be. Small violations of order still occurred, but no big ones. To the headquarters in the Denslow Bank came an increasing volume of information, to be duly docketed and filed. Some of it was valueless. Now and then there came in something worth following up. Thus one night Pink and a picked band, following a vague clew, went in automobiles to the state borderline, and held up and captured two trucks loaded with whiskey and destined for Friendship and Baxter. He reported to Willy Cameron late that night.
"Smashed it all up and spilled it in the road," he said. "Hurt like sin to do it, though. Felt like the fellow who shot the last passenger pigeon."
But if the situation in the city was that of armed neutrality, in the Boyd house things were rapidly approaching a climax, and that through Dan. He was on edge, constantly to be placated and watched. The strike was on his nerves; he felt his position keenly, resented Willy Cameron supporting the family, and had developed a curious jealousy of his mother's affection for him.
Toward Edith his suspicions had now become certainty, and an open break came on an evening when she said that she felt able to go to work again. They were at the table, and Ellen was moving to and from the kitchen, carrying in the meal. Her utmost thrift could not make it other than scanty, and finally Dan pushed his plate away.
"Going back to work, are you?" he sneered. "And how long do you think you'll be able to work?"
"You keep quiet," Edith flared at him. "I'm going to work. That's all you need to know. I can't sit here and let a man who doesn't belong to us provide every bite we eat, if you can." Willy Cameron got up and closed the door, for Mrs. Boyd an uncanny ability to hear much that went on below.
"Now," he said when he came back, "we might as well have this out. Dan has a right to be told, Edith, and he can help us plan something." He turned to Dan. "It must be kept from your mother, Dan."
"Plan something!" Dan snarled. "I know what to plan, all right. I'll find the—" he broke into foul, furious language, bu
t suddenly Willy Cameron rose, and there was something threatening in his eyes.
"I know who it is," Dan said, more quietly, "and he's got to marry her, or I'll kill him."
"You know, do you? Well, you don't," Edith said, "and I won't marry him anyhow."
"You will marry him. Do you think I'm going to see mother disgraced, sick as she is, and let you get away with it? Where does Akers live? You know, don't you? You've been there, haven't you?"
All Edith's caution was forgotten in her shame and anger.
"Yes, I know," she said, hysterically, "but I won't tell you. And I won't marry him. I hate him. If you go to him he'll beat you to death." Suddenly the horrible picture of Dan in Akers' brutal hands overwhelmed her. "Dan, you won't go?" she begged. "He'll kill you."
"A lot you'd care," he said, coldly. "As if we didn't have enough already! As if you couldn't have married Joe Wilkinson, next door, and been a decent woman. And instead, you're a—"
"Be quiet, Dan," Willy Cameron interrupted him. "That sort of talk doesn't help any. Edith is right. If you go to Akers there will be a fight. And that's no way to protect her."
"God!" Dan muttered. "With all the men in the world, to choose that rotten anarchist!"
It was sordid, terribly tragic, the three of them sitting there in the badly lighted little room around the disordered table, with Ellen grimly listening in the doorway, and the odors of cooking still heavy in the air. Edith sat there, her hands on the table, staring ahead, and recounted her wrongs. She had never had a chance. Home had always been a place to get away from. Nobody had cared what became of her. And hadn't she tried to get out of the way? Only they all did their best to make her live. She wished she had died.
Dan, huddled low in his chair, his legs sprawling, stared at nothing with hopeless eyes.
Afterwards Willy Cameron could remember nothing of the scene in detail. He remembered its setting, but of all the argument and quarreling only one thing stood out distinctly, and that was Edith's acceptance of Dan's accusation. It was Akers, then. And Lily Cardew was going to marry him. Was in love with him.
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