A Poor Wise Man, Mary Roberts Rinehart [classic book list TXT] 📗
- Author: Mary Roberts Rinehart
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He found his work irksome at times. True, it had its interest. He was the liaison between organized labor, which was conservative in the main, and the radical element, both in and out of the organization. He played a double game, and his work was always the same, to fan the discontent latently smoldering in every man’s soul into a flame. And to do this he had not Doyle’s fanaticism. Personally, Louis Akers found the world a pretty good place. He hated the rich because they had more than he had, but he scorned the poor because they had less. And he liked the feeling of power he had when, on the platform, men swayed to his words like wheat to a wind.
Personal ambition was his fetish, as power was Anthony Cardew’s. Sometimes he walked past the exclusive city clubs, and he dreamed of a time when he, too, would have the entree to them. But time was passing. He was thirty-three years old when Jim Doyle crossed his path, and the clubs were as far away as ever. It was Doyle who found the weak place in his armor, and who taught him that when one could not rise it was possible to pull others down.
But it was Woslosky, the Americanized Pole; who had put the thing in a more appealing form.
“Our friend Doyle to the contrary,” he said cynically, “we cannot hope to contend against the inevitable. The few will always govern the many, in the end. It will be the old cycle, autocracy, anarchy, and then democracy; but out of this last comes always the one man who crowns himself or is crowned. One of the people. You, or myself, it may be.”
The Pole had smiled and shrugged his shoulders.
Akers did not go to work immediately. He sat for some time, a cigarette in his hand, his eyes slightly narrowed. He believed that he could marry Lily Cardew. It would take time and all his skill, but he believed he could do it. His mind wandered to Lily herself, her youth and charm, her soft red mouth, the feel of her warm young body in his arms. He brought himself up sharply. Where would such a marriage take him?
He pondered the question pro and con. On the one hand the Cardews, on the other, Doyle and a revolutionary movement. A revolution would be interesting and exciting, and there was strong in him the desire to pull down. But revolution was troublesome. It was violent and bloody. Even if it succeeded it would be years before the country would be stabilized. This other, now -
He sat low in his chair, his long legs stretched out in his favorite position, and dreamed. He would not play the fool like Doyle. He would conciliate the family. In the end he would be put up at the clubs; he might even play polo. His thoughts wandered to Pink Denslow at the polo grounds, and he grinned.
“Young fool!” he reflected. “If I can’t beat his time - ” He ordered dinner to be sent up, and mixed himself a cocktail, using the utmost care in its preparation. Drinking it, he eyed himself complacently in the small mirror over the mantel. Yes, life was not bad. It was damned interesting. It was a game. No, it was a race where a man could so hedge his bets that he stood to gain, whoever won.
When there was a knock at the door he did not turn. “Come in,” he said.
But it was not the waiter. It was Edith Boyd. He saw her through the mirror, and so addressed her.
“Hello, sweetie,” he said. Then he turned. “You oughtn’t to come here, Edith. I’ve told you about that.”
“I had to see you, Lou.”
“Well, take a good look, then,” he said. Her coming fitted in well with the complacence of his mood. Yes, life was good, so long as it held power, and drink, and women.
He stooped to kiss her, but although she accepted the caress, she did not return it.
“Not mad at me, Miss Boyd, are you?”
“No. Lou, I’m frightened!”
On clear Sundays Anthony Cardew played golf all day. He kept his religious observances for bad weather, but at such times as he attended service he did it with the decorum and dignity of a Cardew, who bowed to his God but to nothing else. He made the responses properly and with a certain unction, and sat during the sermon with a vigilant eye on the choir boys, who wriggled. Now and then, however, the eye wandered to the great stained glass window which was a memorial to his wife. It said beneath: “In memoriam, Lilian Lethbridge Cardew.”
He thought there was too much yellow in John the Baptist. On the Sunday afternoon following her ride into the city with Louis Akers, Lily found herself alone. Anthony was golfing and Grace and Howard had motored out of town for luncheon. In a small office near the rear of the hall the second man dozed, waiting for the doorbell. There would be people in for tea later, as always on Sunday afternoons; girls and men, walking through the park or motoring up in smart cars, the men a trifle bored because they were not golfing or riding, the girls chattering about the small inessentials which somehow they made so important.
Lily was wretchedly unhappy. For one thing, she had begun to feel that Mademoiselle was exercising over her a sort of gentle espionage, and she thought her grandfather was behind it. Out of sheer rebellion she had gone again to the house on Cardew Way, to find Elinor out and Jim Doyle writing at his desk. He had received her cordially, and had talked to her as an equal. His deferential attitude had soothed her wounded pride, and she had told him something - very little - of the situation at home.
“Then you are still forbidden to come here?”
“Yes. As if what happened years ago matters now, Mr. Doyle.”
He eyed her.
“Don’t let them break your spirit, Lily,” he had said. “Success can make people very hard. I don’t know myself what success would do to me. Plenty, probably.” He smiled. “It isn’t the past your people won’t forgive me, Lily. It’s my failure to succeed in what they call success.”
“It isn’t that,” she had said hastily. “It is - they say you are inflammatory. Of course they don’t understand. I have tried to tell them, but - “
“There are fires that purify,” he had said, smilingly.
She had gone home, discontented with her family’s lack of vision, and with herself.
She was in a curious frame of mind. The thought of Louis Akers repelled her, but she thought of him constantly. She analyzed him clearly enough; he was not fine and not sensitive. He was not even kind. Indeed, she felt that he could be both cruel and ruthless. And if she was the first good woman he had ever known, then he must have had a hateful past.
The thought that he had kissed her turned her hot with anger and shame at such times, but the thought recurred.
Had she had occupation perhaps she might have been saved, but she had nothing to do. The house went on with its disciplined service; Lent had made its small demands as to church services, and was over. The weather was bad, and the golf links still soggy with the spring rains. Her wardrobe was long ago replenished, and that small interest gone.
And somehow there had opened a breach between herself and the little intimate group that had been hers before the war. She wondered sometimes what they would think of Louis Akers. They would admire him, at first, for his opulent good looks, but very soon they would recognize what she knew so well - the gulf between him and the men of their own world, so hard a distinction to divine, yet so real for all that. They would know instinctively that under his veneer of good manners was something coarse and crude, as she did, and they would politely snub him. She had no name and no knowledge for the urge in the man that she vaguely recognized and resented. But she had a full knowledge of the obsession he was becoming in her mind.
“If I could see him here,” she reflected, more than once, “I’d get over thinking about him. It’s because they forbid me to see him. It’s sheer contrariness.”
But it was not, and she knew it. She had never heard of his theory about the mark on a woman.
She was hating herself very vigorously on that Sunday afternoon. Mademoiselle and she had lunched alone in Lily’s sitting-room, and Mademoiselle had dozed off in her chair afterwards, a novel on her knee. Lily was wandering about downstairs when the telephone rang, and she had a quick conviction that it was Louis Akers. It was only Willy Cameron, however, asking her if she cared to go for a walk.
“I’ve promised Jinx one all day,” he explained, “and we might as well combine, if you are not busy.”
She smiled at that.
“I’d love it,” she said. “In the park?”
“Wait a moment.” Then: “Yes, Jinx says the park is right.”
His wholesome nonsense was good for her. She drew a long breath.
“You are precisely the person I need to-day,” she said. “And come soon, because I shall have to be back at five.”
When he came he was very neat indeed, and most scrupulous as to his heels being polished. He was also slightly breathless.
“Had to sew a button on my coat,” he explained. “Then I found I’d sewed in one of my fingers and had to start all over again.”
Lily was conscious of a change in him. He looked older, she thought, and thinner. His smile, when it came, was as boyish as ever, but he did not smile so much, and seen in full daylight he was shabby. He seemed totally unconscious of his clothes, however.
“What do you do with yourself, Willy?” she asked. “I mean when you are free?”
“Read and study. I want to take up metallurgy pretty soon. There’s a night course at the college.”
“We use metallurgists in the mill. When you are ready I know father would be glad to have you.”
He flushed at that.
“Thanks,” he said. “I’d rather get in, wherever I go, by what I know, and not who I know.”
She felt considerably snubbed, but she knew his curious pride. After a time, while he threw a stick into the park lake and Jinx retrieved it, he said:
“What do you do with yourself these days, Lily?”
“Nothing. I’ve forgotten how to work, I’m afraid. And I’m not very happy, Willy. I ought to be, but I’m just - not.”
“You’ve learned what it is to be useful,” he observed gravely, “and now it hardly seems worth while just to live, and nothing else. Is that it?”
“I suppose.”
“Isn’t there anything you can do?”
“They won’t let me work, and I hate to study.”
There was a silence. Willy Cameron sat on the bench, bent and staring ahead. Jinx brought the stick, and, receiving no attention, insinuated a dripping body between his knees. He patted the dog’s head absently.
“I have been thinking about the night I went to dinner at your house,” he said at last. “I had no business to say what I said then. I’ve got a miserable habit of saying just what comes into my mind, and I’ve been
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