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

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 Willy 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 - Willy 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.

But if they arrested Louis, Lily Cardew would fling him aside like an old shoe.

She closed her eyes. That opened a vista of possibilities she would not face.

She stopped in her mother’s room on her slow progress upstairs, moved to sudden pity for the frail life now wearing to its close. If that were life she did not want it, with its drab days and futile effort, its incessant deprivations, its hands, gnarled with work that got nowhere, its greatest blessing sleep and forgetfulness.

She wondered why her mother did not want to die, to get away.

“I’ll soon be able to look after you a bit, mother,” she said from the doorway. “How’s the pain down your arm?” “Bring me the mucilage, Edie,” requested Mrs. Boyd. She was propped up in bed and surrounded by newspapers. “I’ve found Willy’s name again. I’ve got fourteen now. Where’s the scissors?”

Eternity was such a long time. Did she know? Could she know, and still sit among her pillows, snipping?

“I wonder,” said Mrs. Boyd, “did anybody feed Jinx? That Ellen is so saving that she grudges him a bone.”

“He looks all right,” said Edith, and went on up to bed. Maybe the Lord did that for people, when they reached a certain point. Maybe He took away the fear of death, by showing after years of it that life was not so valuable after all. She remembered her own facing of eternity, and her dread of what lay beyond. She had prayed first, because she wanted to have some place on the other side. She had prayed to be received young and whole and without child. And her mother -

Then she had a flash of intuition. There was something greater than life, and that was love. Her mother was upheld by love. That was what the eternal cutting and pasting meant. She was lavishing all the love of her starved days on Willy Cameron; she was facing death, because his hand was close by to hold to.

For just a moment, sitting on the edge of her bed, Edith Boyd saw what love might be, and might do. She held out both hands in the darkness, but no strong and friendly clasp caught them close. If she could only have him to cling to, to steady her wavering feet along the gray path that stretched ahead, years and years of it. Youth. Middle age. Old age.

“I’d only drag him down,” she muttered bitterly.

Willy Cameron, meanwhile, had gone to Mr. Hendricks with Edith’s story, and together late that evening they saw the Chief of Police at his house. Both Willy Cameron and Mr. Hendricks advocated putting a watch on the offices of the Myers Housecleaning Company and thus ultimately getting the heads of the organization. But the Chief was unwilling to delay.

“Every day means more of their infernal propaganda,” he said, “and if this girl’s telling a straight story, the thing to do is to get the outfit now. Those clerks, for instance - we’ll get some information out of them. That sort always squeals. They’re a cheap lot.”

“Going to ball it up, of course,” Mr. Hendricks said disgustedly, on the way home. “Won’t wait, because if Akers gets in he’s out, and he wants to make a big strike first. I’ll drop in tomorrow evening and tell you what’s happened.”

He came into the pharmacy the next evening, with a bundle of red-bound pamphlets under his arm, and a look of disgust on his face.

“What did I tell you, Cameron?” he demanded, breathing heavily. “Yes, they got them all right. Got a safe full of stuff so inflammable that, since I’ve read some of it, I’m ready to blow up myself. It’s worse than that first lot I showed you. They got the two clerks, and a half-dozen foreigners, too. And that’s all they got.”

“They won’t talk?”

“Talk? Sure they’ll talk. They say they’re employed by the Myers Housecleaning Company, that they never saw the inside of the vault, and they’re squealing louder than two pigs under a gate about false arrest. They’ll have to let them go, son. Here. You can do most everything. Can you read Croatian? No? Well, here’s something in English to cut your wisdom teeth on. Overthrowing the government is where these fellows start.”

It was intelligent, that propaganda. Willy Cameron thought he saw behind it Jim Doyle and other men like Doyle, men who knew the discontents of the world, and would fatten by them; men who, secretly envious of the upper classes and unable to attain to them, would pull all men to their own level, or lower. Men who cloaked their own jealousies with the garb of idealism. Intelligent it was, dangerous, and imminent.

The pamphlets spoke of “the day.” It was a Prussian phrase. The revolution was Prussian. And like the Germans, they offered loot as a reward. They appealed to the ugliest passions in the world, to lust and greed and idleness.

At a signal the mass was to arise, overthrow its masters and rule itself.

Mr. Hendricks stood in the doorway of the pharmacy and stared out at the city he loved.

“Just how far does that sort of stuff go, Cameron?” he asked. “Will our people take it up? Is the American nation going crazy?”

“Not a bit of it,” said Willy Cameron stoutly.” They’re about as able to overthrow the government as you are to shove over the Saint Elmo Hotel.”

“I could do that, with a bomb.”

“No, you couldn’t. But you could make a fairly sizeable hole in it. It’s the hole we don’t want.”

Mr. Hendricks went away, vaguely comforted.