A Poor Wise Man - Mary Roberts Rinehart (good e books to read .txt) 📗

Mr. William Wallace Cameron, that evening of Lily’s return, took a walk. From his boarding house near the Eagle Pharmacy to the Cardew residence was a half-hour’s walk. There were a number of things he had meant to do that evening, with a view to improving his mind, but instead he took a walk. He had made up a schedule for those evenings when he was off duty, thinking it out very carefully on the train to the city. And the schedule ran something like this:

Monday: 8-11. Read History. Wednesday: 8-11. Read Politics and Economics. Friday: 8-9:30. Travel. 9:30-11. French. Sunday: Hear various prominent divines.

He had cut down on the travel rather severely, because travel was with him an indulgence rather than a study. The longest journey he had ever taken in his life was to Washington. That was early in the war, when it did not seem possible that his country would not use him, a boy who could tramp incredible miles in spite of his lameness and who could shoot a frightened rabbit at almost any distance, by allowing for a slight deflection to the right in the barrel of his old rifle.

But they had refused him.

“They won’t use me, mother,” he had said when he got home, home being a small neat house on a tidy street of a little country town. “I tried every branch, but the only training I’ve had - well, some smart kid said they weren’t planning to serve soda water to the army. They didn’t want cripples, you see.”

“I wish you wouldn’t, Willy.”

He had been frightfully sorry then and had comforted her at some length, but the fact remained.

“And you the very best they’ve ever had for mixing prescriptions!” she had said at last. “And a graduate in chemistry!”

“Well,” he said, “that’s that, and we won’t worry about it. There’s more than one way of killing a cat.”

“What do you mean, Willy? More than one way?”

There was no light of prophecy in William Wallace Cameron’s gray eyes, however, when he replied: “More than one way of serving my country. Don’t you worry. I’ll find something.”

So he had, and he had come out of his Red Cross work in the camp with one or two things in his heart that had not been there before. One was a knowledge of men. He could not have put into words what he felt about men. It was something about the fundamental simplicity of them, for one thing. You got pretty close to them at night sometimes, especially when the homesick ones had gone to bed, and the phonograph was playing in a corner of the long, dim room. There were some shame-faced tears hidden under army blankets those nights, and Willy Cameron did some blinking on his own account.

Then, under all the blasphemy, the talk about women, the surface sordidness of their daily lives and thoughts, there was one instinct common to all, one love, one hidden purity. And the keyword to those depths was “home.”

“Home,” he said one day to Lily Cardew. “Mostly it’s the home they’ve left, and maybe they didn’t think so much of it then. But they do now. And if it isn’t that, it’s the home they want to have some day.” He looked at Lily. Sometimes she smiled at things he said, and if she had not been grave he would not have gone on. “You know,” he continued, “there’s mostly a girl some place. All this talk about the nation, now - ” He settled himself on the edge of the pine table where old Anthony Cardew’s granddaughter had been figuring up her week’s accounts, and lighted his pipe, “the nation’s too big for us to understand. But what is the nation, but a bunch of homes?”

“Willy dear,” said Lily Cardew, “did you take any money out of the cigar box for anything this week?”

“Dollar sixty-five for lard,” replied Willy dear. “As I was saying, we’ve got to think of this country in terms of homes. Not palaces like yours - “

“Good gracious!” said Lily, “I don’t live in a palace. Get my pocket-book, will you? I’m out three dollars somehow, and I’d rather make it up myself than add these figures over again. Go on and talk, Willy. I love hearing you.”

“Not palaces like yours,” repeated Mr. Cameron, “and not hovels. But mostly self-respecting houses, the homes of the plain people. The middle class, Miss Cardew. My class. The people who never say anything, but are squeezed between capital, represented by your grandfather, with its parasites, represented by you, and - “

“You represent the people who never say anything,” observed the slightly flushed parasite of capital, “about as adequately as I represent the idle rich.”

Yet not even old Anthony could have resented the actual relationship between them. Lily Cardew, working alone in her hut among hundreds of men, was as without sex consciousness as a child. Even then her flaming interest was in the private soldiers. The officers were able to amuse themselves; they had money and opportunity. It was the doughboys she loved and mothered. For them she organized her little entertainments. For them she played and sang in the evenings, when the field range in the kitchen was cold, and her blistered fingers stumbled sometimes over the keys of the jingling camp piano.

Gradually, out of the chaos of her early impressions, she began to divide the men in the army into three parts. There were the American born; they took the war and their part in it as a job to be done, with as few words as possible. And there were the foreigners to whom America was a religion, a dream come true, whose flaming love for their new mother inspired them to stuttering eloquence and awkward gestures. And then there was a third division, small and mostly foreign born, but with a certain percentage of native malcontents, who hated the war and sneered among themselves at the other dupes who believed that it was a war for freedom. It was a capitalists’ war. They considered the state as an instrument of oppression, as a bungling interference with liberty and labor; they felt that wealth inevitably brought depravity. They committed both open and overt acts against discipline, and found in their arrest and imprisonment renewed grievances, additional oppression, tyranny. And one day a handful of them, having learned Lily’s identity, came into her hut and attempted to bait her.

“Gentlemen,” said one of them, “we have here an example of one of the idle rich, sacrificing herself to make us happy. Now, boys, be happy. Are we all happy?” He surveyed the group. “Here, you,” he addressed a sullen-eyed squat Hungarian. “Smile when I tell you. You’re a slave in one of old Cardew’s mills, aren’t you? Well, aren’t you grateful to him? Here he goes and sends his granddaughter - “

Willy Cameron had entered the room with a platter of doughnuts in his hand, and stood watching, his face going pale. Quite suddenly there was a crash, and the gang leader went down in a welter of porcelain and fried pastry. Willy Cameron was badly beaten up, in the end, and the beaters were court-martialed. But something of Lily’s fine faith in humanity was gone.

“But,” she said to him, visiting him one day in the base hospital, where he was still an aching, mass of bruises, “there must be something behind it. They didn’t hate me. They only hated my - well, my family.”

“My dear child,” said Willy Cameron, feeling very old and experienced, and, it must be confessed, extremely happy, “of course there’s something behind it. But the most that’s behind it is a lot of fellows who want without working what the other fellow’s worked to get.”

It was about that time that Lily was exchanged into the town near the camp, and Willy Cameron suddenly found life a stale thing, and ashes in the mouth. He finally decided that he had not been such a hopeless fool as to fall in love with her, but that it would be as well not to see her too much.

“The thing to do,” he reasoned to himself, “is, first of all, not to see her. Or only on Friday nights, because she likes the movies, and it would look queer to stop.” Thus Willy Cameron speciously to himself, and deliberately ignoring the fact that some twenty-odd officers stood ready to seize those Friday nights. “And then to work hard, so I’ll sleep better, and not lie awake making a fool of myself. And when I get a bit of idiocy in the daytime, I’d better just walk it off. Because I’ve got to live with myself a long time, probably, and I’m no love-sick Romeo.”

Which excellent practical advice had cost him considerable shoe-leather at first. In a month or two, however, he considered himself quite cured, and pretended to himself that he was surprised to find it Friday again. But when, after retreat, the band marched back again to its quarters