A Poor Wise Man Part 46

The three men bent over it.

The Myers Housecleaning Company had a suite of three rooms. During the day two stenographers, both men, sat before machines and made a pretense of business at such times as the door opened, or when an occasional client, seeing the name, came in to inquire for rates. At such times the clerks were politely regretful. The firm's contracts were all they could handle for months ahead.

There was a constant ebb and flow of men in the office, presumably professional cleaners. They came and went, or sat along the walls, waiting. A large percentage were foreigners but the clerks proved to be accomplished linguists. They talked, with more or less fluency, with Croats, Serbs, Poles and Slavs.

There was a supply room off the office, a room filled with pails and brushes, soap and ladders. But there was a great safe also, and its compartments were filled with pamphlets in many tongues, a supply constantly depleted and yet never diminis.h.i.+ng. Workmen, carrying out the pails of honest labor, carried them loaded down with the literature it was their only business to circulate.

Thus, openly, and yet with infinite caution, was spread the doctrine of no G.o.d; of no government, and of no church; of the confiscation of private property; of strikes and unrest; of revolution, rape, arson and pillage.

And around this social cancer the city worked and played. Its theatres were crowded, its expensive shops, its hotels. Two cla.s.ses of people were spending money prodigally; women with shawls over their heads, women who in all their peasant lives had never owned a hat, drove in automobiles to order their winter supply of coal, and vast amounts of liquors were being bought by the foreign element against the approaching prohibition law, and stored in untidy cellars.

On the other hand, the social life of the city was gay with reaction from war. The newspapers were filled with the summer plans of the wealthy, and with predictions of lavish entertaining in the fall. Among the list of debutantes Lily's name always appeared.

And, in between the upper and the nether millstone, were being ground the professional and salaried men with families, the women clerks, the vast army who asked nothing but the right to work and live. They went through their days doggedly, with little anxious lines around their eyes, suffering a thousand small deprivations, bewildered, tortured with apprehension of to-morrow, and yet patiently believing that, as things could not be worse, they must soon commence to improve.

"It's bound to clear up soon," said Joe Wilkinson over the back fence one night late in June, to w.i.l.l.y Cameron. Joe supported a large family of younger brothers and sisters in the house next door, and was employed in a department store. "I figure it this way--both sides need each other, don't they? Something like marriage, you know. It'll all be over in six months. Only I'm thanking heaven just now it's summer, because our kids are h.e.l.l on shoes."

"I hope so," said w.i.l.l.y Cameron. "What are you doing over there, anyhow?"

"Wait and see," said Joe, cryptically. "If you think you're going to be the only Central Park in this vicinity you've got to think again." He hesitated and glanced around, but the small Wilkinsons were searching for worms in the overturned garden mold. "How's Edith?" he asked.

"She's all right, Joe."

"Seeing anybody yet?"

"Not yet. In a day or so she'll be downstairs."

"You might tell her I've been asking about her."

There was something in Joel's voice that caught w.i.l.l.y Cameron's attention. He thought about Joe a great deal that night. Joe was another one who must never know about Edith's trouble. The boy had little enough, and if he had built a dream about Edith Boyd he must keep his dream. He was rather discouraged that night, was w.i.l.l.y Cameron, and he began to think that dreams were the best things in life. They were a sort of sanctuary to which one fled to escape realities. Perhaps no reality was ever as beautiful as one's dream of it.

Lily had pa.s.sed very definitely out of his life. Sometimes during his rare leisure he walked to Cardew Way through the warm night, and past the Doyle house, but he never saw her, and because it did not occur to him that she might want to see him he never made an attempt to call.

Always after those futile excursions he was inclined to long silences, and only Jinx could have told how many hours he sat in his room at night, in the second-hand easy chair he had bought, pipe in hand and eyes on nothing in particular, lost in a dream world where the fields bore a strong resemblance to the parade ground of an army camp, and through which field he and Lily wandered like children, hand in hand.

But he had many things to think of. So grave were the immediate problems, of food and rent, of Mrs. Boyd and Edith, that a little of his fine frenzy as to the lurking danger of revolution departed from him.

The meetings in the back room at the pharmacy took on a political bearing, and Hendricks was generally the central figure. The ward felt that Mr. Hendricks was already elected, and called him "Mr. Mayor." At the same time the steel strike pursued a course of comparative calm. At Friends.h.i.+p and at Baxter there had been rioting, and a fatality or two, but the state constabulary had the situation well in hand. On a Sunday morning w.i.l.l.y Cameron went out to Baxter on the trolley, and came home greatly comforted. The cool-eyed efficiency of the state police rea.s.sured him. He compared them, disciplined, steady, calm with the calmness of their dangerous calling, with the rabble of foreigners who shuffled along the sidewalks, and he felt that his anxiety had been rather absurd.

He was still making speeches, and now and then his name was mentioned in the newspapers. Mrs. Boyd, now mostly confined to her room, spent much time in searching for these notices, and then in painfully cutting them out and pasting them in a book. On those days when there was nothing about him she felt thwarted, and was liable to sharp remarks on newspapers in general, and on those of the city in particular.

Then, just as he began to feel that the strike would pa.s.s off like other strikes, and that Doyle and his crowd, having plowed the field for sedition, would find it planted with healthier grain, he had a talk with Edith.

She came downstairs for the first time one Wednesday evening early in July, the scars on her face now only faint red blotches, and he placed her, a blanket over her knees, in the small parlor. Dan had brought her down and had made a real effort to be kind, but his suspicion of the situation made it difficult for him to dissemble, and soon he went out.

Ellen was on the doorstep, and through the open window came the shrieks of numerous little Wilkinsons wearing out expensive shoe-leather on the brick pavement.

They sat in the dusk together, Edith very quiet, w.i.l.l.y Cameron talking with a sort of determined optimism. After a time he realized that she was not even listening.

"I wish you'd close the window," she said at last. "Those crazy Wilkinson kids make such a racket. I want to tell you something."

"All right." He closed the window and stood looking down at her. "Are you sure you want me to hear it?" he asked gravely.

"Yes. It is not about myself. I've been reading the newspapers while I've been shut away up there, w.i.l.l.y. It kept me from thinking. And if things are as bad as they say I'd better tell you, even if I get into trouble doing it. I will, probably. Murder's nothing to them."

"Who are 'them'?"

"You get the police to search the Myers Housecleaning Company, in the Searing Building."

"Don't you think you'd better tell me more than that? The police will want something definite to go on."

She hesitated.

"I don't know very much. I met somebody there, once or twice, at night.

And I know there's a telephone hidden in the drawer of the desk in the back room. I swore not to tell, but that doesn't matter now. Tell them to examine the safe, too. I don't know what's in it. Dynamite, maybe."

"What makes you think the company is wrong? A hidden telephone isn't much to go on."

"When a fellow's had a drink or two, he's likely to talk," she said briefly, and before that sordid picture w.i.l.l.y Cameron was silent. After a time he said:

"You won't tell me the name of the man you met there?"

"No. Don't ask me, w.i.l.l.y. That's between him and me." He got up and took a restless turn or two about the little rooms. Edith's problem had begun to obsess him. Not for long would it be possible to keep her condition from Mrs. Boyd. He was desperately at a loss for some course to pursue.

"Have you ever thought," he said at last, "that this man, whoever he is, ought to marry you?"

Edith's face set like a flint.

"I don't want to marry him," she said. "I wouldn't marry him if he was the last man on earth."

He knew very little of Edith's past. In his own mind he had fixed on Louis Akers, but he could not be sure.

"I won't tell you his name, either," Edith added, shrewishly. Then her voice softened. "I will tell you this, w.i.l.l.y," she said wistfully. "I was a good girl until I knew him. I'm not saying that to let myself out.

It's the truth."

"You're a good girl now," he said gravely.

Some time after he got his hat and came in to tell her he was going out.

"I'll tell what you've told me to Mr. Hendricks," he said. "And we may go on and have a talk with the Chief of Police. If you are right it may be important."

After that for an hour or two Edith sat alone, save when Ellen now and then looked in to see if she was comfortable.

Edith's mind was chaotic. She had spoken on impulse, a good impulse at that. But suppose they trapped Louis Akers in the Searing Building?

Ellen went now and then to the Cardew house, and brought back with her the news of the family. At first she had sternly refused to talk about the Cardews to Edith, but the days in the sick room had been long and monotonous, and Edith's jealousy of Lily had taken the form, when she could talk, of incessant questions.

So Edith knew that Louis Akers had been the cause of Lily's leaving home, and called her a poor thing in her heart. Quite lately she had heard that if Lily was not already engaged she probably would be, soon.

Now her motives were mixed, and her emotions confused. She had wanted to tell w.i.l.l.y Cameron what she knew, but she wanted Lily to marry Louis Akers. She wanted that terribly. Then Lily would be out of the way, and--w.i.l.l.y was not like Dan; he did not seem to think her forever lost.

He had always been thoughtful, but lately he had been very tender with her. Men did strange things sometimes. He might be willing to forget, after a long time. She could board the child out somewhere, if it lived.

Sometimes they didn't live.