To Pink this catastrophe was infinitely greater than
that of the bank. Men he knew had lived there.
There were old club servants who were like family
retainers; one or two employees were ex-service men
for whom he had found employment. He stood there,
with Willy Cameron’s hand on his arm, with a
new maturity and a vast suffering in his face.
“Before God,” he said solemnly, “I
swear never to rest until the fellows behind this
are tried, condemned and hanged. You’ve
heard it, Cameron.”
The death list for that night numbered thirteen, the
two watchmen at the bank and eleven men at the club,
two of them members. Willy Cameron, going home
at dawn, exhausted and covered with plaster dust,
bought an extra and learned that a third bomb, less
powerful, had wrecked the mayor’s house.
It had been placed under the sleeping porch, and
but for the accident of a sick baby the entire family
would have been wiped out.
Even his high courage began to waver. His records
were gone; that was all to do over again. But
what seemed to him the impasse was this fighting in
the dark. An unseen enemy, always. And
an enemy which combined with skill a total lack of
any rules of warfare, which killed here, there and
everywhere, as though for the sheer joy of killing.
It struck at the high but killed the low. And
it had only begun.
Dominant family traits have a way of skipping one
generation and appearing in the next. Lily Cardew
at that stage of her life had a considerable amount
of old Anthony’s obstinacy and determination,
although it was softened by a long line of Cardew women
behind her, women who had loved, and suffered dominance
because they loved. Her very infatuation for
Louis Akers, like Elinor’s for Doyle, was possibly
an inheritance from her fore-mothers, who had been
wont to overlook the evil in a man for the strength
in him. Only Lily mistook physical strength
for moral fibre, insolence and effrontery for courage.
In both her virtues and her faults, however, irrespective
of heredity, Lily represented very fully the girl
of her position and period. With no traditions
to follow, setting her course by no compass, taught
to think but not how to think, resentful of tyranny
but unused to freedom, she moved ahead along the path
she had elected to follow, blindly and obstinately,
yet unhappy and suffering.
Her infatuation for Louis Akers had come to a new
phase of its rapid development. She had reached
that point where a woman realizes that the man she
loves is, not a god of strength and wisdom, but a
great child who needs her. It is at that point
that one of two things happens: the weak woman
abandons him, and follows her dream elsewhere.
The woman of character, her maternal instinct roused,
marries him, bears him children, is both wife and mother
to him, and finds in their united weaknesses such strength
as she can.
