But there was a truce for a time. Lily came and went without
interference, and without comment. Nothing more was said about Newport.
She motored on bright days to the country club, lunched and played golf
or tennis, rode along the country lanes with Pink Denslow, accepted such
invitations as came her way cheerfully enough but without enthusiasm,
and was very gentle to her mother. But Mademoiselle found her tense and
restless, as though she were waiting.
And there were times when she disappeared for an hour or two in the
afternoons, proffering no excuses, and came back flushed, and perhaps a
little frightened. On the evenings that followed those small excursions
she was particularly gentle to her mother. Mademoiselle watched and
waited for the blow she feared was about to fall. She felt sure that the
girl was seeing Louis Akers, and that she would ultimately marry him. In
her despair she fell back on Willy Cameron and persuaded Grace to invite
him to dinner. It was meant to be a surprise for Lily, but she had
telephoned at seven o'clock that she was dining at the Doyles'.
It was that evening that Willy Cameron learned that Mr. Hendricks had
been right about Lily. He and Grace dined alone, for Howard was away at
a political conference, and Anthony had dined at his club. And in the
morning room after dinner Grace found herself giving him her confidence.
“I have no right to burden you with our troubles, Mr. Cameron,” Grace
said, “but she is so fond of you, and she has great respect for your
judgment. If you could only talk to her about the anxiety she is
causing. These Doyles, or rather Mr. Doyle--the wife is Mr. Cardew's
sister--are putting all sorts of ideas into her head. And she has met a
man there, a Mr. Akers, and--I'm afraid she thinks she is in love with
him, Mr. Cameron.”
He met her eyes gravely.
“Have you tried not forbidding her to go to the Doyles?”
“I have forbidden her nothing. It is her grandfather.”
“Then it seems to be Mr. Cardew who needs to be talked to, doesn't it?”
he said. “I wouldn't worry too much, Mrs. Cardew. And don't hold too
tight a rein.”
He was very down-hearted when he left. Grace's last words placed a heavy
burden on him.
“I simply feel,” she said, “that you can do more with her than we can,
and that if something isn't done she will ruin her life. She is too fine
and wonderful to have her do that.”
To picture Lily as willfully going her own gait at that period would be
most unfair. She was suffering cruelly; the impulse that led her to meet
Louis Akers against her family's wishes was irresistible, but there was
a new angle to her visits to the Doyle house. She was going there now,
not so much because she wished to go, as because she began to feel that
her Aunt Elinor needed her.
There was something mysterious about her Aunt Elinor, mysterious and
very sad. Even her smile had pathos in it, and she was smiling less
and less. She sat in those bright little gatherings, in them but not of
them, unbrilliant and very quiet. Sometimes she gave Lily the sense that
like Lily herself she was waiting. Waiting for what?
Lily had a queer feeling too, once or twice, that Elinor was afraid. But
again, afraid of what? Sometimes she wondered if Elinor Doyle was afraid
of her husband; certainly there were times, when they were alone, when
he dropped his unctuous mask and held Elinor up to smiling contempt.
“You can see what a clever wife I have,” he said once. “Sometimes I
wonder, Elinor, how you have lived with me so long and absorbed so
little of what really counts.”
“Perhaps the difficulty,” Elinor had said quietly, “is because we differ
as to what really counts.”
Lily brought Elinor something she needed, of youth and irresponsible
chatter, and in the end the girl found the older woman depending on her.
To cut her off from that small solace was unthinkable. And then too she
formed Elinor's sole link with her former world, a world of dinners and
receptions, of clothes and horses and men who habitually dressed for
dinner, of the wealth and panoply of life. A world in which her interest
strangely persisted.
“What did you wear at the country club dance last night?” she would ask.
“A rose-colored chiffon over yellow. It gives the oddest effect, like an
Ophelia rose.”
Or:
“At the Mainwarings? George or Albert?”
“The Alberts.”
“Did they ever have any children?”
One day she told her about not going to Newport, and was surprised to
see Elinor troubled.
“Why won't you go? It is a wonderful house.”
“I don't care to go away, Aunt Nellie.” She called her that sometimes.
Elinor had knitted silently for a little. Then:
“Do you mind if I say something to you?”
“Say anything you like, of course.”
“I just--Lily, don't see too much of Louis Akers. Don't let him carry
you off your feet. He is good-looking, but if you marry him, you will be
terribly unhappy.”
“That isn't enough to say, Aunt Nellie,” she said gravely. “You must
have a reason.”
Elinor hesitated.
“I don't like him. He is a man of very impure life.”
“That's because he has never known any good women.” Lily rose valiantly
to his defense, but the words hurt her. “Suppose a good woman came into
his life? Couldn't she change him?”
“I don't know,” Elinor said helplessly. “But there is something else. It
will cut you off from your family.”
“You did that. You couldn't stand it, either. You know what it's like.”
“There must be some other way. That is no reason for marriage.”
“But--suppose I care for him?” Lily said, shyly.
“You wouldn't live with him a year. There are different ways of caring,
Lily. There is such a thing as being carried away by a man's violent
devotion, but it isn't the violent love that lasts.”
Lily considered that carefully, and she felt that there was some truth
in it. When Louis Akers came to take her home that night he found her
unresponsive and thoughtful.
“Mrs. Doyle's been talking to you,” he said at last. “She hates me, you
know.”
“Why should she hate you?”
“Because, with all her vicissitudes, she's still a snob,” he said
roughly. “My family was nothing, so I'm nothing.”
“She wants me to be happy, Louis.”
“And she thinks you won't be with me.”
“I am not at all sure that I would be.” She made an effort then to throw
off the strange bond that held her to him. “I should like to have three
months, Louis, to get a--well, a sort of perspective. I can't think
clearly when you're around, and--”
“And I'm always around? Thanks.” But she had alarmed him. “You're
hurting me awfully, little girl,” he said, in a different tone. “I can't
live without seeing you, and you know it. You're all I have in life.
You have everything, wealth, friends, position. You could play for three
months and never miss me. But you are all I have.”
In the end she capitulated
Jim Doyle was very content those days. There had been a time when Jim
Doyle was the honest advocate of labor, a flaming partizan of those who
worked with their hands. But he had traveled a long road since then,
from dreamer to conspirator. Once he had planned to build up; now he
plotted to tear down.
His weekly paper had enormous power. To the workers he had begun to
preach class consciousness, and the doctrine of being true to their
class. From class consciousness to class hatred was but a step.
Ostensibly he stood for a vast equality, world wide and beneficent;
actually he preached an inflammable doctrine of an earth where the
last shall be first. He advocated the overthrow of all centralized
government, and considered the wages system robbery. Under it workers
were slaves, and employers of workers slave-masters. It was with
such phrases that he had for months been consistently inflaming the
inflammable foreign element in and around the city, and not the foreign
element only. A certain percentage of American-born workmen fell before
the hammer-like blows of his words, repeated and driven home each week.
He had no scruples, and preached none. He preached only revolt, and in
that revolt defiance of all existing laws. He had no religion; Christ
to him was a pitiful weakling, a historic victim of the same system that
still crucified those who fought the established order. In his new world
there would be no churches and no laws. He advocated bloodshed, arson,
sabotage of all sorts, as a means to an end.
Fanatic he was, but practical fanatic, and the more dangerous for that.
He had viewed the failure of the plan to capture a city in the northwest
in February with irritation, but without discouragement. They had acted
prematurely there and without sufficient secrecy. That was all. The
plan in itself was right. And he had watched the scant reports of the
uprising in the newspapers with amusement and scorn. The very steps
taken to suppress the facts showed the uneasiness of the authorities and
left the nation with a feeling of false security.
The people were always like that. Twice in a hundred years France had
experienced the commune. Each time she had been warned, and each time
she had waited too long. Ever so often in the life of every nation came
these periodic outbursts of discontent, economic in their origin, and
ran their course like diseases, contagious, violent and deadly.
The commune always followed long and costly wars. The people would
dance, but they revolted at paying the piper.
The plan in Seattle had been well enough conceived; the city light plant
was to have been taken over during the early evening of February 6, and
at ten o'clock that night the city was to have gone dark. But the reign
of terrorization that was to follow had revolted Jim Osborne, one
of their leaders, and from his hotel bedroom he had notified the
authorities. Word had gone out to “get” Osborne.
If it had not been for Osborne, and the conservative element behind him,
a flame would have been kindled at Seattle that would have burnt across
the nation.
Doyle watched Gompers cynically.. He considered his advocacy of
patriotic cooperation between labor and the Government during the war
the skillful attitude of an opportunist. Gompers could do better with
public opinion behind him than without it. He was an opportunist, riding
the wave which would carry him farthest. Playing both ends against the
middle, and the middle, himself. He saw Gompers, watching the release
of tension that followed the armistice and seeing the great child he
had fathered, grown now and conscious of its power,--watching it, fully
aware that it had become stronger than he.
Gompers, according to Doyle, had ceased to be a leader and become a
follower, into strange and difficult paths.
The war had made labor's day. No public move was made without consulting
organized labor, and a certain element in it had grown drunk with power.
To this element Doyle appealed. It was Doyle who wrote the carefully
prepared incendiary speeches, which were learned verbatim by his
agents for delivery. For Doyle knew one thing, and knew it well. Labor,
thinking along new lines, must think along the same lines. Be taught the
same doctrines. Be pushed in one direction.
There were, then, two Doyles, one the poseur, flaunting his outrageous
doctrines with a sardonic grin, gathering about him a small circle of
the intelligentsia, and too openly heterodox to be dangerous. And the
other, secretly plotting against the city, wary, cautious, practical and
deadly, waiting to overthrow the established order and substitute for it
chaos. It was only incidental to him that old Anthony should go with the
rest.
But he found a saturnine pleasure in being old Anthony's Nemesis. He
meant to be that. He steadily widened the breach between Lily and her
family, and he watched the progress of her affair with Louis Akers with
relish. He had not sought this particular form of revenge, but Fate had
thrust it into his hands, and he meant to be worthy of the opportunity.
He was in no hurry. He had extraordinary patience, and he rather liked
sitting back and watching the slow development of his plans. It was like
chess; it was deliberate and inevitable. One made a move, and then sat
back waiting and watching while the other side countered it, or fell,
with slow agonizing, into the trap.
A few days after Lily had had her talk with Elinor, Doyle found a way to
widen the gulf between Lily and her grandfather. Elinor seldom left the
house, and Lily had done some shopping for her. The two women were in
Elinor's bedroom, opening small parcels, when he knocked and came in.
“I don't like to disturb the serenity of this happy family group,” he
said, “but I am inclined to think that a certain gentleman, standing not
far from a certain young lady's taxicab, belongs to a certain department
of our great city government. And from his unflattering lack of interest
in me, that he--”
Elinor half rose, terrified.
“Not the police, Jim?”
“Sit down,” he said, in a tone Lily had never heard him use before. And
to Lily, more gently: “I am not altogether surprised. As a matter of
fact, I have known it for some time. Your esteemed grandfather seems to
take a deep interest in your movements these days.”
“Do you mean that I am being followed?”
“I'm afraid so. You see, you are a very important person, and if you
will venture in the slums which surround the Cardew Mills, you should be
protected. At any time, for instance, Aunt Elinor and I may despoil you
of those pearls you wear so casually, and--”
“Don't talk like that, Jim,” Elinor protested. She was very pale. “Are
you sure he is watching Lily?”
He gave her an ugly look.
“Who else?” he inquired suavely.
Lily sat still, frozen with anger. So this was her grandfather's method
of dealing with her. He could not lock her up, but he would know, day
by day, and hour by hour, what she was doing. She could see him reading
carefully his wicked little notes on her day. Perhaps he was watching
her mail, too. Then when he had secured a hateful total he would go to
her father, and together they would send her away somewhere. Away from
Louis Akers. If he was watching her mail too he would know that Louis
was in love with her. They would rake up all the things that belonged
in the past he was done with, and recite them to her. As though they
mattered now!
She went to the window and looked out. Yes, she had seen the
detective before. He must have been hanging around for days, his face
unconsciously impressing itself upon her. When she turned:
“Louis is coming to dinner, isn't he?”
“Yes.”
“If you don't mind, Aunt Nellie, I think I'll dine out with him
somewhere. I want to talk to him alone.”
“But the detective--”
“If my grandfather uses low and detestable means to spy on me, Aunt
Nellie, he deserves what he gets, doesn't he?”
When Louis Akers came at half-past six, he found that she had been
crying, but she greeted him calmly enough, with her head held high.
Elinor, watching her, thought she was very like old Anthony himself just
then.