Part 59 (1/2)

”A good woman, Grace,” he said, ”and a good daughter to me. I'm sorry.

I'll try to do better.”

As Grace straightened she heard the door close below, and Howard's voice. Almost immediately she heard him coming up the staircase, and going out into the hall she called softly to him.

”Where are you?” he asked, looking up. ”Is father there?”

”Yes.”

”I want you both to come down to the library, Grace.”

She heard him turn and go slowly down the stairs. His voice had been strained and unnatural. As she turned she found Anthony behind her.

”Something has happened!”

”I rather think so,” said old Anthony, slowly.

They went together down the stairs.

In the library Lily was standing, facing the door, a quiet figure, listening and waiting. Howard had dropped into a chair and was staring ahead. And beyond the circle of lights was a shadowy figure, vaguely familiar, tall, thin, and watchful. w.i.l.l.y Cameron.

CHAPTER x.x.xI

The discovery that Lily had left his house threw Jim Doyle into a frenzy. The very manner of her going filled him with dark suspicion.

Either she had heard more that morning than he had thought, or--In his cunning mind for weeks there had been growing a smoldering suspicion of his wife. She was too quiet, too acquiescent. In the beginning, when Woslosky had brought the scheme to him, and had promised it financial support from Europe, he had taken a cruel and savage delight in outlining it to her, in seeing her cringe and go pale.

He had not feared her then. She had borne with so much, endured, tolerated, accepted, that he had not realized that she might have a breaking point.

The plan had appealed to his cynical soul from the first. It was the apotheosis of cynicism, this reducing of a world to its lowest level.

And it had amused him to see his wife, a gentlewoman born, bewildered before the chaos he depicted.

”But--it is German!” she had said.

”I bow before intelligence. It is German. Also it is Russian. Also it is of all nations. All this talk now, of a League of Nations, a few dull diplomats acting as G.o.d over the peoples of the earth!” His eyes blazed.

”While the true league, of the workers of the world, is already in effect!”

But he watched her after that, not that he was afraid of her, but because her re-action as a woman was important. He feared women in the movement. It had its disciples, fervent and eloquent, paid and unpaid women agitators, but he did not trust them. They were invariably women without home ties, women with nothing to protect, women with everything to gain and nothing to lose. The woman in the home was a natural anti-radical. Not the police, not even the army, but the woman in the home was the deadly enemy of the great plan.

He began to hate Elinor, not so much for herself, as for the women she represented. She became the embodiment of possible failure. She stood in his path, pa.s.sively resistant, stubbornly brave.

She was not a clever woman, and she was slow in gathering the full significance of a nation-wide general strike, that with an end of all production the non-producing world would be beaten to its knees. And then she waited for a world movement, forgetting that a flame must start somewhere and then spread. But she listened and learned. There was a great deal of talk about cla.s.s and ma.s.s. She learned that the ma.s.s, for instance, was hungry for a change. It would welcome any change. Woslosky had been in Russia when the Kerensky regime was overthrown, and had seen that strange three days when the submerged part of the city filled the streets, singing, smiling, endlessly walking, exalted and without guile.

No problems troubled them. They had ceased to labor, and that was enough.

Had it not been for its leaders, the ma.s.s would have risen like a tide, and ebbed again.

Elinor had struggled to understand. This was not Socialism. Jim had been a Socialist for years. He had believed that the gradual elevation of the few, the gradual subjection of the many, would go on until the majority would drag the few down to their own level. But this new dream was something immediate. At her table she began to hear talk of subst.i.tuting for that slow process a militant minority. She was a long time, months, in discovering that Jim Doyle was one of the leaders of that militant minority, and that the methods of it were unspeakably criminal.