A Poor Wise Man by Mary Roberts Rinehart (best book recommendations .TXT) 📕

“Don’t stop,” said Mr. Hendricks. “Merely friendly call. And for heaven’s sake don’t swallow a tack, son. I’m going to need you.”

“Whaffor?” inquired Willy Cameron, through his nose.

“Don’t know yet. Make speeches, probably. If Howard Cardew, or any Cardew, thinks he’s going to be mayor of this town, he’s got to think again.”

“I don’t give a tinker’s dam who’s mayor of this town, so long as he gives it honest government.”

“That’s right,” said Mr. Hendricks approvingly. “Old Cardew’s been running it for years, and you could put all the honest government he’s given us in a hollow tooth. If you’ll stop that hammering, I’d like to make a proposition to you.”

Willy Cameron took an admiring squint at his handiwork.

“Sorry to refuse you, Mr. Hendricks, but I don’t want to be mayor.”

Mr. Hendricks chuckled, as Willy Cameron led the way to his room. He wandered around the room while Cameron opened a window and slid the dog off his second chair.

“Great snakes!” he said. “Spargo’s Bolshevism! Political Economy, History of -. What are you planning to be? President?”

“I haven’t decided yet. It’s a hard job, and mighty thankless. But I won’t be your mayor, even for you.”

Mr. Hendricks sat down.

“All right,” he said. “Of course if you’d wanted it!” He took two large cigars from the row in his breast pocket and held one out, but Willy Cameron refused it and got his pipe.

“Well?” he said.

Mr. Hendrick’s face became serious and very thoughtful. “I don’t know that I have ever made it clear to you, Cameron,” he said, “but I’ve got a peculiar feeling for this city. I like it, the way some people like their families. It’s - well, it’s home to me, for one thing. I like to go out in the evenings and walk around, and I say to myself: ‘This is my town. And we, it and me, are sending stuff all over the world. I like to think that somewhere, maybe in China, they are riding on our rails and fighting with guns made from our steel. Maybe you don’t understand that.”

“I think I do.”

“Well, that’s the way I feel about it, anyhow. And this Bolshevist stuff gets under my skin. I’ve got a home and a family here. I started in to work when I was thirteen, and all I’ve got I’ve made and saved right here. It isn’t much, but it’s mine.”

Willy Cameron was lighting his pipe. He nodded. Mr. Hendricks bent forward and pointed a finger at him.

“And to govern this city, who do you think the labor element is going to put up and probably elect? We’re an industrial city, son, with a big labor vote, and if it stands together - they’re being swindled into putting up as an honest candidate one of the dirtiest radicals in the country. That man Akers.”

He got up and closed the door.

“I don’t want Edith to hear me,” he said. “He’s a friend of hers. But he’s a bad actor, son. He’s wrong with women, for one thing, and when I think that all he’s got to oppose him is Howard Cardew - ” Mr. Hendricks got up, and took a nervous turn about the room.

“Maybe you know that Cardew has a daughter?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I hear a good many things, one way and another, and my wife likes a bit of gossip. She knows them both by sight, and she ran into them one day in the tea room of the Saint Elmo, sitting in a corner, and the girl had her back to the room. I don’t like the look of that, Cameron.”

Willy Cameron got up and closed the window. He stood there, with his back to the light, for a full minute. Then:

“I think there must be some mistake about that, Mr. Hendricks. I have met her. She isn’t the sort of girl who would do clandestine things.”

Mr. Hendricks looked up quickly. He had made it his business to study men, and there was something in Willy Cameron’s voice that caught his attention, and turned his shrewd mind to speculation.

“Maybe,” he conceded. “Of course, anything a Cardew does is likely to be magnified in this town. If she’s as keen as the men in her family, she’ll get wise to him pretty soon. Willy Cameron came back then, but Mr. Hendricks kept his eyes on the tip of his cigar.

“We’ve got to lick Cardew,” he said, “but I’m cursed if I want to do it with Akers.”

When there was no comment, he looked up. Yes, the boy had had a blow. Mr. Hendricks was sorry. If that was the way the wind blew it was hopeless. It was more than that; it was tragic.

“Sorry I said anything, Cameron. Didn’t know you knew her.”

“That’s all right. Of course I don’t like to think she is being talked about.”

“The Cardews are always being talked about. You couldn’t drop her a hint, I suppose?”

“She knows what I think about Louis Akers.”

He made a violent effort and pulled himself together. “So it is Akers and Howard Cardew, and one’s a knave and one’s a poor bet.”

“Right,” said Mr. Hendricks. “And one’s Bolshevist, if I know anything, and the other is capital, and has about as much chance as a rich man to get through the eye of a needle.”

Which was slightly mixed, owing to a repressed excitement now making itself evident in Mr. Hendricks’s voice.

“Why not run an independent candidate?” Willy Cameron asked quietly. “I’ve been shouting about the plain people. Why shouldn’t they elect a mayor? There is a lot of them.”

“That’s the talk,” said Mr. Hendricks, letting his excitement have full sway. “They could. They could run this town and run it right, if they’d take the trouble. Now look here, son, I don’t usually talk about myself, but - I’m honest. I don’t say I wouldn’t get off a streetcar without paying my fare if the conductor didn’t lift it! But I’m honest. I don’t lie. I keep my word. And I live clean - which you can’t say for Lou Akers. Why shouldn’t I run on an independent ticket? I mightn’t be elected, but I’d make a damned good try.”

He stood up, and Willy Cameron rose also and held out his hand.

“I don’t know that my opinion is of any value, Mr. Hendricks. But I hope you get it, and I think you have a good chance. If I can do anything - “

“Do anything! What do you suppose I came here for? You’re going to elect me. You’re going to make speeches and kiss babies, and tell the ordinary folks they’re worth something after all. You got me started on this thing, and now you’ve got to help me out.”

The future maker of mayors here stepped back in his amazement, and Jinx emitted a piercing howl. When peace was restored the F.M. of M. had got his breath, and he said:

“I couldn’t remember my own name before an audience, Mr. Hendricks.”

“You’re fluent enough in that back room of yours.”

“That’s different.”

“The people we’re going after don’t want oratory. They want good, straight talk, and a fellow behind it who doesn’t believe the country’s headed straight for perdition. We’ve had enough calamity bowlers. You’ve got the way out. The plain people. The hope of the nation. And, by God, you love your country, and not for what you can get out of it. That’s a thing a fellow’s got to have inside him. He can’t pretend it and get it over.”

In the end the F.M. of M. capitulated.

It was late when Mr. Hendricks left. He went away with all the old envelopes in his pockets covered with memoranda.

“Just wait a minute, son,” he would say. “I’ve got to make some speeches myself. Repeat that, now. ‘Sins of omission are as great, even greater than sins of commission. The lethargic citizen throws open the gates to revolution.’ How do you spell ‘lethargic’?”

But it was not Hendricks and his campaign that kept the F.M. of M. awake until dawn. He sat in front of his soft coal fire, and when it died to gray-white ash he still sat there, unconscious of the chill of the spring night. Mostly he thought of Lily, and of Louis Akers, big and handsome, of his insolent eyes and his self-indulgent mouth. Into that curious whirlpool that is the mind came now and then other visions: His mother asleep in her chair; the men in the War Department who had turned him down; a girl at home who had loved him, and made him feel desperately unhappy because he could not love her in return. Was love always like that? If it was what He intended, why was it so often without reciprocation?

He took to walking about the room, according to his old habit, and obediently Jinx followed him.

It was four by his alarm clock when Edith knocked at his door. She was in a wrapper flung over her nightgown, and with her hair flying loose she looked childish and very small.

“I wish you would go to bed,” she said, rather petulantly. “Are you sick, or anything?”

“I was thinking, Edith. I’m sorry. I’ll go at once. Why aren’t you asleep?”

“I don’t sleep much lately.” Their voices were cautious. “I never go to sleep until you’re settled down, anyhow.”

“Why not? Am I noisy?”

“It’s not that.”

She went away, a drooping, listless figure that climbed the stairs slowly and left him in the doorway, puzzled and uncomfortable.

At six that morning Dan, tiptoeing downstairs to warm his left-over coffee and get his own breakfast, heard a voice from Willy Cameron’s room, and opened the door. Willy Cameron was sitting up in bed with his eyes closed and his arms extended, and was concluding a speech to a dream audience in deep and oratorical tones.

“By God, it is time the plain people know their power.”

Dan grinned, and, his ideas of humor being rather primitive, he edged his way into the room and filled the orator’s sponge with icy water from the pitcher.

“All right, old top,” he said, “but it is also time the plain people got up.”

Then he flung the sponge and departed with extreme expedition.