A Poor Wise Man by Mary Roberts Rinehart (popular books of all time TXT) 📖

the city had their balls and sometimes their saloons. But in between was that vast, unorganized male element which was neither, and had neither. To them the neighborhood pharmacy, open in the evening, warm and bright, gave them a rendezvous. They gathered there in thousands, the country over. During the war they fought their daily battles there, with newspaper maps. After the war the League of Nations, local politics, a bit of neighborhood scandal, washed down with soft drinks from the soda fountain, furnished the evening’s entertainment.

The Eagle Pharmacy had always been the neighborhood club, but with the advent of Willy Cameron it was attaining a new popularity. The roundsman on the beat dropped in, the political boss of the ward, named Hendricks, Doctor Smalley, the young physician who lived across the street, and others. Back of the store proper was a room, with the prescription desk at one side and reserve stock on shelves around the other three. Here were a table and a half dozen old chairs, a war map, still showing with colored pins the last positions before the great allied advance, and an ancient hat-rack, which had held from time immemorial an umbrella with three broken ribs and a pair of arctics of unknown ownership.

“Going to watch this boy,” Hendricks confided to Doctor Smalley a night or two after Lily’s return, meeting him outside. “He sure can talk.”

Doctor Smalley grinned.

“He can read my writing, too, which is more than I can do myself. What do you mean, watch him?”

But whatever his purposes Mr. Hendricks kept them to himself. A big, burly man, with a fund of practical good sense a keen knowledge of men, he had gained a small but loyal following. He was a retired master plumber, with a small income from careful investments, and he had a curious, almost fanatic love for the city.

“I was born here,” he would say, boastfully. “And I’ve seen it grow from fifty thousand to what it’s got now. Some folks say it’s dirty, but it’s home to me, all right.”

But on the evening of Lily’s invitation the drug store forum found Willy Cameron extremely silent. He had been going over his weaknesses, for the thought of Lily always made him humble, and one of them was that he got carried away by things and talked too much. He did not intend to do that the next night, at the Cardew’s.

“Something’s scared him off,” said Mr. Hendricks to Doctor Smalley, after a half hour of almost taciturnity, while Willy Cameron smoked his pipe and listened. “Watch him rise to this, though.” And aloud:

“Why don’t you fellows drop the League of Nations, which none of you knows a damn about anyhow, and get to the thing that’s coming in this country?”

“I’ll bite,” said Mr. Clarey, who sold life insurance in the daytime and sometimes utilized his evenings in a similar manner. “What’s coming to this country?”

“Revolution.”

The crowd laughed.

“All right,” said Mr. Hendricks. “Laugh while you can. I saw the Chief of Police to-day, and he’s got a line of conversation that makes a man feel like taking his savings out of the bank and burying them in the back yard.”

Willy Cameron took his pipe out of his mouth, but remained dumb.

Mr. Hendricks nudged Doctor Smalley, who rose manfully to the occasion. “What does he say?”

“Says the Russians have got a lot of paid agents here. Not all Russians either. Some of our Americans are in it. It’s to begin with a general strike.”

“In this town?”

“All over the country. But this is a good field for them. The crust’s pretty thin here, and where that’s the case there is likely to be earthquakes and eruptions. The Chief says they’re bringing in a bunch of gunmen, wobblies and Bolshevists from every industrial town on the map. Did you get that, Cameron? Gunmen!”

“Any of you men here dissatisfied with this form of government?” inquired Willy, rather truculently.

“Not so you could notice it,” said Mr. Clarey. “And once the Republican party gets in - “

“Then there will never be a revolution.”

“Why?”

“That’s why,” said Willy Cameron. “Of course you are worthless now. You aren’t organized. You don’t know how many you are or how strong you are. You can’t talk. You sit back and listen until you believe that this country is only capital and labor. You get squeezed in between them. You see labor getting more money than you, and howling for still more. You see both capital and labor raising prices until you can’t live on what you get. There are a hundred times as many of you as represent capital and labor combined, and all you do is loaf here and growl about things being wrong. Why don’t you do something? You ought to be running this country, but you aren’t. You’re lazy. You don’t even vote. You leave running the country to men like Mr. Hendricks here.”

Mr. Hendricks was cheerfully unirritated.

“All right, son,” he said, “I do my bit and like it. Go on. Don’t stop to insult me. You can do that any time.”

“I’ve been buying a seditious weekly since I came,” said Willy Cameron. “It’s preaching a revolution, all right. I’d like to see its foreign language copies. They’ll never overthrow the government, but they may try. Why don’t you fellows combine to fight them? Why don’t you learn how strong you are? Nine-tenths of the country, and milling like sheep with a wolf around!”

Mr. Hendricks winked at the doctor.

“What’d I tell you?” whispered Hendricks. “Got them, hasn’t he? If he’d suggest arming them with pop bottles and attacking that gang of anarchists at the cobbler’s down the street, they’d do it this minute.”

“All right, son,” he offered. “We’ll combine. Anything you say goes. And we’ll get the Jim Doyle-Woslosky-Louis Akers outfit first. I know a first-class brick wall - “

“Akers?” said Willy Cameron. “Do you know him?”

“I do,” said Hendricks. “But that needn’t prejudice you against me any. He’s a bad actor, and as smooth as butter. D’you know what their plan is? They expect to take the city. This city! The - ” Mr. Hendrick’s voice was lost in fury.

“Talk!” said the roundsman. “Where’d the police be, I’m asking?”

“The police,” said Mr. Hendricks, evidently quoting, “are as filled with sedition as a whale with corset bones. Also the army. Also the state constabulary.”

“The hell they are,” said the roundsman aggressively. But Willy Cameron was staring through the smoke from his pipe at the crowd.

“They might do it, for a while,” he said thoughtfully. “There’s a tremendous foreign population in the mill towns around, isn’t there? Does anybody in the crowd own a revolver? Or know how to use it if he has one

“I’ve got one,” said the insurance agent. “Don’t know how it would work. Found my wife nailing oilcloth with it the other day.”

“Very well. If we’re a representative group, they wouldn’t need a battery of eight-inch guns, would they?”

A little silence fell on the group. Around them the city went about its business; the roar of the day had softened to muffled night sounds, as though one said: “The city sleeps. Be still.” The red glare of the mills was the fire on the hearth. The hills were its four protecting walls. And the night mist covered it like a blanket.

“Here’s one representative of the plain people,” said Mr. Hendricks, “who is going home to get some sleep. And tomorrow I’ll buy me a gun, and if I can keep the children out of the yard I’ll learn to use it.”

For a long time after he went home that night Willy Cameron paced the floor of his upper room, paced it until an irate boarder below hammered on his chandelier. Jinx followed him, moving sedately back and forth, now and then glancing up with idolatrous eyes. Willy Cameron’s mind was active and not particularly coordinate. The Cardews and Lily; Edith Boyd and Louis Akers; the plain people; an army marching to the city to loot and burn and rape, and another army meeting it, saying: “You shall not pass”; Abraham Lincoln, Russia, Lily.

His last thought, of course, was of Lily Cardew. He had neglected to cover Jinx, and at last the dog leaped on the bed and snuggled close to him. He threw an end of the blanket over him and lay there, staring into the darkness. He was frightfully lonely. At last he fell asleep, and the March wind, coming in through the open window, overturned a paper leaning against his collar box, on which he had carefully written:

Have suit pressed. Buy new tie. Shirts from laundry.