I don’t know just what sort of a mess it is.”
“Are you going to tell me about it?”
“Some of it. And if I don’t start to yelling like a tom-cat.”
“You’re not going to do that. Let me get you something.”
He was terrified by her eyes. “Some aromatic ammonia.” That was Natalie’s cure for everything.
“I’m not going to faint. I never do. Close the door and sit down. And then – give me a hundred dollars, if you have it. Will you?”
“Is that enough?” he asked. And drew out his black silk evening wallet, with its monogram in seed pearls. He laid the money on her knee, for she made no move to take it. She sat back, her face colorless, and surveyed him intently.
“What a comfort you are, Clay,” she said. “Not a word in question. Just like that! Yet you know I don’t borrow money, usually.”
“The only thing that is important is that I have the money with me. Are you sure it’s enough?”
“Plenty. I’ll send it back in a week or so. I’m selling this house. It’s practically sold. I don’t know why anybody wants it. It’s a poky little place. But – well, it doesn’t matter about the house. I called up some people to-day who have been wanting one in this neighborhood and I’m practically sure they’ll take it.”
“But – you and Chris – “
“We have separated, Clay. At least, Chris has gone. There’s a long story behind it. I’m not up to telling it to-night. And this money will end part of it. That’s all I’m going to tell about the money. It’s a small sum, isn’t it, to break up a family!”
“Why, it’s absurd! It’s – it’s horrible, Audrey.”
“Oh, it isn’t the money. That’s a trifle. I just had to have it quickly. And when I learned I needed it of course the banks were closed. Besides, I fancy Chris had to have all there was.”
Clayton was puzzled and distressed. He had not liked Chris. He had hated his cynicism, his pose of indifference. His very fastidiousness had never seemed entirely genuine. And this going away and taking all Audrey’s small reserve of money –
“Where is he?”
“I don’t know. I believe on his way to Canada.”
“Do you mean – “
“Oh, no, he didn’t steal anything. He’s going to enlist in the Canadian army. Or he said so when he left.”
“Look here, Audrey, you can’t tell me only part of the story. Do you mean to say that Chris has had a magnificent impulse and gone to fight? Or that he’s running away from something?”
“Both,” said Audrey. “I’ll tell you this much, Clay. Chris has got himself into a scrape. I won’t tell you about that, because after all that’s his story. And I’m not asking for sympathy. If you dare to pity me I’ll cry, and I’ll never forgive you.”
“Why didn’t he stay and face it like a man? Not leave you to face it.”
“Because the only person it greatly concerned was myself. He didn’t want to face me. The thing that is driving me almost mad is that he may be killed over there. Not because I love him so much. I think you know how things have been. But because he went to – well, I think to reinstate himself in my esteem, to show me he’s a man, after all.”
“Good heavens, Audrey. And you went through dinner with all this to bear!”
“I’ve got to carry it right along, haven’t I? You know how I’ve been about this war, Clay. I’ve talked and talked about wondering how our men could stay out of it. So when the smash came, he just said he was going. He would show me there was some good stuff in him still. You see, I’ve really driven him to it, and if he’s killed – “
A surge of resentment against the absent man rose in Clayton Spencer’s mind. How like the cynicism of Chris’s whole attitude that he should thrust the responsibility for his going onto Audrey. He had made her unhappy while he was with her, and now his death, if it occurred, would be a horror to her.
“I don’t know why I burden you with all this,” she said, rather impatiently. “I daresay it is because I knew you’d have the money. No, I don’t mean that. I’d rather go to you in trouble than to any one else; that’s why.”
“I hope you always will.”
“Oh, I shall! Don’t worry.” But her attempt at gayety fell flat. She lighted a cigaret from the stand beside her and fell to studying his face.
“What’s happened to you?” she asked. “There’s a change in you, somehow. I’ve noticed it ever since you came home. You ought to be smug and contented, if any man should. But you’re not, are you?”
“I’m working hard. That’s all. I don’t want to talk about myself,” he added impatiently. “What about you? What are you going to do?”
“Sell my house, pay my debts and live on my own little bit of an income.”
“But, good heavens, Audrey! Chris has no right to cut off like this, and leave you. I don’t know the story, but at least he must support you. A man can’t just run away and evade every obligation. I think I’ll have to go after him and give him a talking to.”
“No!” she said, bending forward. “Don’t do that. He has had a bad scare. But he’s had one decent impulse, too. Let him alone, Clay.”
She placed the money on the stand, and rose. As she faced him, she impulsively placed her hands on his shoulders.
“I wish I could tell you, Clay,” she said, in her low, slightly husky voice, “how very, very much I admire you. You’re pretty much of a man, you know. And – there aren’t such a lot of them.”
For an uneasy moment he thought she was going to kiss him. But she let her hands fall, and smiling faintly, led the way downstairs. Once down, however, she voiced the under lying thought in her mind.
“If he comes out, Clay, he’ll never forgive me, probably. And if he is – if he doesn’t, I’ll never forgive myself. So I’m damned either way.”
But ten minutes later, with a man on either side of her, she was sitting at the piano with a cigaret tucked behind her ear, looking distractingly pretty and very gay and singing a slightly indecorous but very witty little French song.
Clayton Spencer, cutting in on the second rubber, wondered which of the many he knew was the real Audrey. He wondered if Chris had not married, for instance, the girl at the piano, only to find she was the woman upstairs. And he wondered, too, if that were true, why he should have had to clear out. So many men married the sort Audrey had been, in Chris’s little study, only to find that after all the thing they had thought they were getting was a pose, and it was the girl at the piano after all.
He missed her, somewhat later. She was gone a full half hour, and he fancied her absence had something to do with the money she had borrowed.
CHAPTER VII
Two things helped greatly to restore Clayton to a more normal state of mind during the next few days. One of them undoubtedly was the Valentine situation. Beside Audrey’s predicament and Chris’s wretched endeavor to get away and yet prove himself a man, his own position seemed, if not comfortable, at least tenable. He would have described it, had he been a man to put such a thing into words, as that “he and Natalie didn’t exactly hit it off.”
There were times, too, during those next few days, when he wondered if he had not exaggerated their incompatibility. Natalie was unusually pleasant. She spent some evening hours on the arm of his big chair, talking endlessly about the Linndale house, and he would lean back, smiling, and pretend to a mad interest in black and white tiles and loggias.
He made no further protest as to the expense.
“Tell me,” he said once, “what does a fellow wear in this – er – Italian palace? If you have any intention of draping me in a toga and putting vine leaves in my hair, or whatever those wreaths were made of -!”
Natalie had no sense of humor, however. She saw that he meant to be amusing, and she gave the little fleeting smile one gives to a child who is being rather silly.
“Of course,” he went on, “we’ll have Roman baths, and be anointed with oil afterwards by lady Greek slaves. Perfumed oil.”
“Don’t be vulgar, Clay.” And he saw she was really offended.
While there was actually no change in their relationship, which remained as it had been for a dozen years, their surface life was pleasanter. And even that small improvement cheered him greatly. He was thankful for such a peace, even when he knew that he had bought it at a heavy price.
The other was his work. The directorate for the new munition plant had been selected, and on Thursday of that week he gave a dinner at his club to the directors. It had been gratifying to him to find how easily his past reputation carried the matter of the vast credits needed, how absolutely his new board deferred to his judgment. The dinner became, in a way, an ovation. He was vastly pleased and a little humbled. He wanted terribly to make good, to justify their faith in him. They were the big financial men of his time, and they were agreeing to back his judgment to the fullest extent.
When the dinner was over, a few of the younger men were in no mood to go home. They had dined and wined, and the night was young. Denis Nolan, who had been present as the attorney for the new concern, leaned back in his chair and listened to them with a sort of tolerant cynicism.
“Oh, go home, you fellows,” he said at last. “You make me sick. Enough’s enough. Why the devil does every dinner like this have to end in a debauch?”
In the end, however, both he and Clayton went along, Clayton at least frankly anxious to keep an eye on one or two of them until they started home. He had the usual standards, of course, except for himself. A man’s private life, so long as he was not a bounder, concerned him not at all. But this had been his dinner. He meant to see it through. Once or twice he had seen real tragedy come to men as a result of the recklessness of long dinners, many toasts and the instinct to go on and make a night of it.
Afterward they went to a midnight roof-garden, and at first it was rather dreary. Their youth was only comparative after all, and the eyes of the girls who danced and sang passed over them, to rest on boys in their twenties.
Nolan chuckled.
“Pathetic!” he said. “The saddest sight in the world! Every one of you here would at this moment give up everything he’s got to be under thirty.”
“Oh, shut up!” some one said, almost savagely.
“Of course, there are compensations,” he drawled. “At twenty you want to take the entire bunch home and keep ’em. At thirty you know you can’t, but you still want to. At forty and over you don’t want them at all, but you think it’s damned curious they don’t want you.”
Clayton had watched the scene with a rather weary interest. He was, indeed, trying to put himself in Graham’s place, at Graham’s age. He remembered once, at twenty, having slipped off to see “The Black Crook,” then the epitome of wickedness, and the disillusionment of seeing women in tights with their accentuated curves and hideous lack of appeal to the imagination. The caterers of such wares had learned since then. Here were soft draperies instead, laces and chiffons. The suggestion was not to the eyes but to the mind. How devilishly clever it all was.
Perhaps there were some things he ought to discuss with Graham. He wondered how a man led up to such a thing.
Nolan bent toward him.
“I’ve been watching for a girl,” he said, “but I don’t see her. Last time I was here I came with Chris. She was his girl.”
“Chris!”
“Yes. It stumped me, at first. She came and sat with us, not a bad little thing, but – Good Lord, Clay, ignorant and not even pretty! And Chris was fastidious, in a way. I don’t understand it.”
The ancient perplexity of a man over the sex selections of his friends puckered his forehead.
“Damned if I understand it,” he repeated.
A great wave of pity for Audrey Valentine surged in Clayton Spencer’s heart. She had known it, of course; that was why Chris had gone away. How long had she known it? She was protecting Chris’s name, even now. For all her frivolity, there was something rather big in Audrey. The way she had held up at her dinner, for instance – and he rather fancied that the idea of his going into the army had come from her, directly or indirectly. So Chris, from being a fugitive, was already by way of being a hero to his friends.
Poor Audrey!
He made a mental note to send her some flowers in the morning.
He ordered them on his way down-town, and for some curious reason she was in his mind most of the day. Chris had been a fool to throw away a thing so worth having. Not every man had behind him a woman of Audrey’s sort.
CHAPTER VIII
That afternoon, accompanied by a rather boyishly excited elderly clergyman, he took two hours off from the mill and purchased a new car for Doctor Haverford.
The rector was divided between pleasure at the gift and apprehension at its cost, but Clayton, having determined to do a thing, always did it well.
“Nonsense,” he said. “My dear man, the church has owed you this car for at least ten years. If you get half the pleasure out of using it that I’m having in presenting it to you, it will be well worth while. I only wish you’d let me endow the thing. It’s likely to cost you a small fortune.”
Doctor Haverford insisted that he could manage that. He stood off, surveying with pride not unmixed with fear its bright enamel, its leather linings, the complicated system of dials and bright levers which filled him with apprehension.
“Delight says I must not drive it,” he said. “She is sure I would go too fast, and run into things. She is going to drive for me.”
“How is Delight?”
“I wish you could see her, Clayton. She – well, all young girls are lovely, but sometimes I think Delight is lovelier than most. She is much older than I am, in many ways. She looks after me like a mother. But she has humor, too. She has been drawing the most outrageous pictures of me arrested for speeding, and she has warned me most gravely against visiting road houses!”
“But Delight will have to be taught, if she is to run the car.”
“The salesman says they will send some one.”
“They give one lesson, I believe. That’s not enough. I think Graham could show her some things. He drives well.”
Flying uptown a little later in Clayton’s handsome car, the rector dreamed certain dreams. First his mind went to his parish visiting list, so endless, so never cleaned up, and now about to be made a pleasure instead of a penance. And into his mind, so strangely compounded of worldliness and spirituality, came a further dream – of Delight and Graham Spencer – of ease at last for the girl after the struggle to keep up appearances of a clergyman’s family in a wealthy parish.
Money had gradually assumed an undue importance in his mind. Every Sunday, every service, he dealt in money. He reminded his people of the church debt. He begged for various charities. He tried hard to believe that the money that came in was given to the Lord, but he knew perfectly well that it went to the janitor and the plumber and the organist. He watched the offertory after the sermon, and only too often as he stood waiting, before raising it before the altar, he wondered if the people felt that they had received their money’s worth.
He had started life with a dream of service, but although his own sturdy faith persisted, he had learned the cost of religion in dollars and cents. So, going up town, he wondered if Clayton would increase his church subscription, now that things were well with him.
“After all,” he reflected, “war is not an unmixed evil,” and outlined a sermon, to be called the Gains of War, and subsequently reprinted in pamphlet form and sold for the benefit of the new altar fund. He instructed Jackson to drive to the parish house instead of to the rectory, so that he might jot down the headings while they were in his mind. They ran like this: Spiritual growth; the nobility of sacrifice; the pursuit of an ideal; the doctrine of thy brother’s keeper.
He stopped to speak to Jackson from the pavement.
“I daresay we shall be in frequent difficulties with that new car of ours, Jackson,” he said genially. “I may have to ask you to come round and explain some of its mysterious interior to me.”
Jackson touched his cap.
“Thank you, sir, I’ll be glad to come. But I am leaving Mr. Spencer soon.”
“Leaving!”
“Going back to the army, sir.”
In the back of his mind the rector had been depending on Jackson, and he felt vaguely irritated.
“I’m sorry to hear it. I’d been counting on you.”
“Very sorry, sir. I’m not leaving immediately.”
“I sometimes think,” observed the rector, still ruffled, “that a man’s duty is not always what it appears on the surface. To keep Mr. Spencer – er – comfortable, while he is doing his magnificent work for the Allies, may be less spectacular, but it is most important.”
Jackson smiled, a restrained and slightly cynical smile.
“That’s a matter for a man’s conscience, isn’t it, sir?” he asked. And touching his cap again, moved off. Doctor Haverford felt reproved. Worse than that, he felt justly reproved. He did not touch the Gains of War that afternoon.
In the gymnasium he found Delight, captaining a basket-ball team. In her knickers and middy blouse she looked like a little girl, and he stood watching her as, flushed and excited, she ran round the long room. At last she came over and dropped onto the steps at his feet.
“Well?” she inquired, looking up. “Did you get it?”
“I did, indeed. A beauty, Delight.”
“A flivver?”
“Not at all. A very handsome car.” He told her the make, and she flushed again with pleasure.
“Joy and rapture!” she said. “Did you warn him I am to drive it?”
“I did. He suggests that Graham give you some lessons.”
“Graham!”
“Why not?”
“He’ll be bored to insanity. That’s all. You – you didn’t suggest it, did you, daddy?”
With all her adoration of her father, Delight had long recognized under his real spirituality a certain quality of worldly calculation. That, where it concerned her, it was prompted only by love did not make her acceptance of it easier.
“Certainly not,” said the rector, stiffly.
“Graham’s changed, you know. He used to be a nice little kid. But he’s – I don’t know what it is. Spoiled, I suppose.”
“He’ll steady down, Delight.”
She looked up at him with clear, slightly humorous eyes.
“Don’t get any queer ideas about Graham Spencer and me, Daddy,” she said. “In the first place, I intend to choose my own husband. He’s to look as much as possible like you, but a trifle less nose. And in the second place, after I’ve backed the car into a telegraph pole; and turned it over in a ditch, Graham Spencer is just naturally going to know I am no woman to tie to.”
She got up and smiled at him.
“Anyhow, I wouldn’t trust him with the communion service,” she added, and walking out onto the floor, blew shrilly on her whistle. The rector watched her with growing indignation. These snap judgments of youth! The easy damning of the young! They left no room for argument. They condemned and walked away, leaving careful plans in ruin behind them.
And Delight, having gone so far, went further. She announced that evening at dinner that she would under no circumstances be instructed by Graham Spencer. Her mother ventured good-humored remonstrance.
“The way to learn to drive a car,” said Delight, “is to get into it and press a few things, and when it starts, keep on going. You’ve got to work it out for yourself.”
And when Clayton, calling up with his usual thoughtfulness that evening, offered Graham as instructor, she refused gratefully but firmly.
“You’re a dear to think of it,” she said, “and you’re a dear to have given Daddy the car. But I’m just naturally going to fight it out in my own way if it takes all winter.”
Natalie, gathering her refusal from Clayton’s protest, had heaved a sigh of relief. Not that she objected to Delight Haverford. She liked her as much as she liked and understood any young girl, which was very little. But she did not want Graham to marry. To marry would be to lose him. And again, watching Clayton’s handsome head above his newspaper, she reflected that Graham was all she had.
Nevertheless, Delight received a lesson in driving from Graham, and that within two days.
On Saturday afternoon, finding the mill getting on his nerves, Clayton suggested to Graham what might be the last golf of the autumn and Graham consented cheerfully enough. For one thing, the offices closed at noon, and Anna Klein had gone. He was playing a little game with Anna – a light-hearted matter of a glance now and then caught and held, a touched hand, very casually done, and an admiring comment now and then on her work. And Anna was blossoming like a flower. She sat up late to make fresh white blouses for the office, and rose early to have abundance of time to dress. She had taken to using a touch of rouge, too, although she put it on after she reached the mill, and took it off before she started for home.
Her father, sullen and irritable these days, would have probably beaten her for using it.
But Anna had gone, and a telephone call to Marion Hayden had told him she was not at home. He thought it possible she had gone to the country club, and accepted his father’s suggestion of golf willingly.
From the moment he left the mill Anna had left his mind. He was at that period when always in the back of his mind there was a girl. During the mill hours the girl was Anna, because she was there. In the afternoon it was Marion, just then, but even at that there were entire evenings when, at the theater, a pretty girl in the chorus held and absorbed his entire attention – or at a dance a debutante, cloudy and mysterious in white chiffon, bounded his universe for a few hours.
On this foundation of girl he built the superstructure of his days. Not evil, but wholly irresponsible. The urge of vital youth had caught him and held him. And Clayton, sitting that day beside him in the car, while Graham drove and the golf clubs rattled in their bags at his feet, remembered again the impulses of his own adolescence, and wondered. There had been a time when he would have gone to the boy frankly, with the anxieties he was beginning to feel. There were so many things he wanted to tell the boy. So many warnings he should have.
But Natalie had stolen him. That was what it amounted to. She had stolen his confidence, as only a selfish woman could. And against that cabal of mother and son he felt helpless. It was even more than that. As against Natalie’s indulgence he did not wish to pose as a mentor pointing out always the way of duty.
“How old are you, Graham?” he said suddenly.
“Twenty-two.” Graham glanced at him curiously. His father knew his age, of course.
“I was married at your age.”
“Tough luck,” said Graham. And then: “I’m sorry, father, I didn’t mean that. But it’s pretty early, isn’t it? No time for a good time, or anything.”
“I fancy Nature meant men to marry young, don’t you? It saves a lot of – complications.”
“The girl a fellow marries at that age isn’t often the one he’d marry at thirty,” said Graham. And feeling that he had said the wrong thing, changed the subject quickly. Clayton did not try to turn it back into its former channel. The boy was uncomfortable, unresponsive. There was a barrier between them, of self-consciousness on his part, of evasion and discomfort on Graham’s.
On the way over they had sighted Delight in the new car. She had tried to turn, had backed into a ditch and was at that moment ruefully surveying a machine which had apparently sat down on its rear wheels with its engine pointed pathetically skyward.
Delight’s face fell when she recognized them.
“Of course it would have to be you,” she said. “Of all the people who might have seen my shame – I’m going on with you. I never want to see the old thing again.”
“Anything smashed?” Graham inquired.
“It looks smashed. I can’t tell.”
It was not until the car was out of the ditch, and Clayton had driven off in Graham’s car toward the club that Delight remembered her father’s voice the day he had told her Graham would teach her to drive. She stiffened and he was quick to see the change in her manner. The total damage was one flat tire, and while the engine was inflating it, he looked at her. She had grown to be quite pretty. His eyes approved her.
“Better let me come round and give you a few lessons, Delight.”
“I’d rather learn by myself, if you don’t mind.”
“You’ll have a real smash unless you learn properly.”
But she remained rather obstinately silent.
“What’s the matter with me, Delight? You’re not exactly crazy about me, are you?”
“That’s silly. I don’t know anything about you any more.”
“That’s your fault. You know I’ve been away for four years, and since I came back I haven’t seen much of you. But, if you’ll let me come round – “
“You can come if you like. You’ll be bored, probably.”
“You’re being awfully nasty, you know. Here I come to pull you out of a ditch and generally rescue you, and – Come, now, Delight, what is it? There’s something. We used to be pals.”
“I don’t know, Graham,” she said truthfully. “I only know – well, I hear things, of course. Nothing very bad. Just little things. I wish you wouldn’t insist. It’s idiotic. What does it matter what I think?”
Graham flushed. He knew well enough one thing she had heard. Her father and mother had been at dinner the other night, and he had had too much to drink.
“Sorry.”
He stopped the pump and put away the tools, all in silence. Good heavens, was all the world divided into two sorts of people: the knockers – and under that heading he placed his father, Delight, and all those who occasionally disapproved of him – and the decent sort who liked a fellow and understood him?
But his training had been too good to permit him to show his angry scorn. He made an effort and summoned a smile.
“All ready,” he said. “And since you won’t let me teach you, perhaps I’d better take you home.”
“You were going to the club.”
“Oh, that’s all right. Father’s probably found some one.”
But she insisted that he drive them both to the club, and turn the car round there. Then, with a grinding of gear levers that made him groan, she was off toward home, leaving Graham staring after her.
“Well, can you beat it?” he inquired of the empty air. “Can you beat it?”
And wounded in all the pride of new manhood, he joined Marion and her rather riotous crowd around the fire inside the clubhouse. Clayton had given him up and was going around alone, followed by a small caddie. The links were empty, and the caddie lonely. He ventured small bits of conversation now and then, looking up with admiration at Clayton’s tall figure. And, after a little, Clayton took the bag from him and used him only for retrieving balls. The boy played round, whistling.
“Kinda quiet to-day, ain’t it?” he offered, trudging a foot or two behind.
“It is, rather, young man.”
“Mostly on Saturdays I caddie for Mr. Valentine. But he’s gone to the war.”
“Oh, he has, has he?” Clayton built a small tee, and placed his ball on it. “Well, maybe we’ll all be going some day.”
He drove off and started after the ball. It was not until he was on the green that he was conscious of the boy beside him again.
“How old d’you have to be to get into the army, Mr. Spencer?” inquired the caddie, anxiously.
Clayton looked at him quizzically.
“Want to try for it, do you? Well, I’m afraid you’ll have to wait a bit.”
“I’m older than I look, Mr. Spencer.”
“How old are you?”
“Sixteen.”
“Afraid you’ll have to wait a while,” said Clayton and achieved a well-nigh perfect long putt.
“I’d just like to get a whack at them Germans,” offered the boy, and getting no response, trudged along again at his heels.
Suddenly it struck Clayton as rather strange that, in all the time since his return from Europe, only four people had shown any but a sort of academic interest in the war, and that, ironically enough, a German had been the first to make a sacrifice for principle. Chris had gone, to get out of trouble. The little caddie wanted to go, to get a “whack” at the madmen of Europe. And Jackson, the chauffeur, was going, giving up his excellent wages to accept the thirty-odd dollars a month of a non-com, from a pure sense of responsibility.
But, among the men he knew best, in business and in the clubs, the war still remained a magnificent spectacle. A daily newspaper drama.
Suddenly Clayton saw Audrey Valentine. She was swinging toward him, her bag with its clubs slung over her shoulder, her hands in the pockets of an orange-colored sweater. In her black velvet tam and short skirt she had looked like a little girl, and at first he did not recognize her. She had seen him, however, and swung toward him.
“Hello, Clay,” she called, when they were within hailing distance. “Bully shot, that last.”
“Where’s your caddie?”
“I didn’t want one. I had a feeling that, if I took one, and he lost a ball in these impecunious times of mine, I’d murder him. Saw you at the fifth hole. I’d know your silhouette anywhere.”
Under her rakish cap her eyes were rather defiant. She did not want pity; she almost dared him to pity her.
“Come round again with me, Audrey, won’t you?”
“I’m off my game to-day. I’ll wander along, if you don’t mind. I’ll probably sneeze or something when you’re driving, of course.”
“Nothing,” he said, gravely approaching his ball, “so adds distance to my drive as a good explosive sneeze just behind it.”
They talked very little. Audrey whistled as she walked along with the free swinging step that was characteristic of her, and Clayton was satisfied merely to have her companionship. She was not like some women; a man didn’t have to be paying her compliments or making love to her. She even made no comments on his shots, and after a time that rather annoyed him.
“Well?” he demanded, after an excellent putt. “Was that good or wasn’t it?”
“Very good,” she said gravely. “I am only surprised when you do a thing badly. Not when you do it well.”
He thought that over.
“Have you anything in mind that I do badly? I mean, particularly in mind.”
“Not very much.” But after a moment: “Why don’t you make Natalie play golf?”
“She hates it.”
He rather wondered if she thought Natalie was one of the things he managed badly.
The sense of companionship warmed him. Although neither of them realized it, their mutual loneliness and dissatisfaction had brought them together, and mentally at least they were clinging, each desperately to the other. But their talk was disjointed:
“I’ll return that hundred soon. I’ve sold the house.”
“I wish you wouldn’t worry about it. It’s ridiculous, Audrey.”
And, a hundred yards or so further on, “They wouldn’t have Chris in Canada. His heart. He’s going into the French Ambulance service.”
“Good for Chris.”
But she came out very frankly, when they started back to the clubhouse.
“It’s done me a lot of good, meeting you, Clay. There’s something so big and solid and dependable about you. I wonder – I suppose you don’t mind my using you as a sort of anchor to windward?”
“Good heavens, Audrey! If I could only do something.”
“You don’t have to do a thing.” She smiled up at him, and her old audacity was quite gone. “You’ve just got to be. And – you don’t have to send me flowers, you know. I mean, I understand that you’re sorry for me, without that. You’re the only person in the world I’d allow to be sorry for me.”
He was touched. There was no coquetry in her manner. She paid her little tribute quite sincerely and frankly.
“I’ve been taking stock to-day,” she went on, “and I put you among my assets. One reliable gentleman, six feet tall, weight about a hundred and seventy, in good condition. Heavens, what a lot of liabilities you had to off-set!”
He stopped and looked down at her.
“Audrey dear,” he said, “what am I to say to all that? What can I do? How can I help?”
“You might tell me – No, that’s silly.”
“V/hat is silly?”
But she did not answer. She called “Joey!” and gave him her clubs.
“Joey wants to be a soldier,” she observed.
“So he says.”
“I want to be a soldier, too, Clay. A good soldier.”
He suspected that she was rather close to unusual tears.
As they approached the clubhouse they saw Graham and Marion Hayden standing outside. Graham was absently dropping balls and swinging at them. It was too late when Clayton saw the danger and shouted sharply.
A ball caught the caddie on the side of the head and he dropped like a shot.
All through that night Clayton and Audrey Valentine sat by the boy’s white bed in the hospital. Clayton knew Graham was waiting outside, but he did not go out to speak to him. He was afraid of himself, afraid in his anger that he would widen the breach between them.
Early in the evening Natalie had come, in a great evening-coat that looked queerly out of place, but she had come, he knew, not through sympathy for the thin little figure on the bed, but as he had known she would come, to plead for Graham. And her cry of joy when the surgeons had said the boy would live was again for Graham.
She had been too engrossed to comment on Audrey’s presence there, and Audrey had gone out immediately and left them together. Clayton was forced, that night, to an unwilling comparison of Natalie with another woman. On the surface of their lives, where only they met, Natalie had always borne comparison well. But here was a new standard to measure by, and another woman, a woman with hands to serve and watchful, intelligent eyes, outmeasured her.
Not that Clayton knew all this. He felt, in a vague way, that Natalie was out of place there, and he felt, even more strongly, that she had not the faintest interest in the still figure on its white bed – save as it touched Graham and herself.
He was resentful, too, that she felt it necessary to plead with him for his own boy. Good God, if she felt that way about him, no wonder Graham –
She had placed a hand on Clayton’s arm, as he sat in that endless vigil, and bent down to whisper, although no sound would have penetrated that death-like stupor.
“It was an accident, Clay,” she pled. “You know Graham’s the kindest soul in the world. You know that, Clay.”
“He had been drinking.” His voice sounded cold and strained to his own ears.
“Not much. Almost nothing, Toots says positively.”
“Then I’d rather he had been, Natalie. If he drove that ball out of wanton indifference – “
“He didn’t see the boy.”
“He should have looked.”
In her anger she ceased her sibilant whispering, and stood erect.
“I told him you’d be hard,” she said. “He’s outside, half-sick with fright, because he is afraid. Afraid of you,” she added, and went out, her silks rustling in the quiet corridor.
She had gone away soon after that, the nurse informed him. And toward dawn Clayton left Audrey in the sick room and found Graham. He was asleep in a chair in the waiting-room, and looked boyish and very tired. Clayton’s heart contracted.
He went back to his vigil, and let Graham sleep on.
Some time later he roused from a doze in his chair. Graham was across the bed from him, looking down. Audrey was gone. And the injured boy stirred and opened his eyes.
“H-hello, Joey,” said Graham, with a catch in his voice.
Joey lay still, his eyes taking in his new surroundings. Then he put out a hand and touched the bandage on his head.
“What I got on?” he demanded, faintly.
Graham caught his father’s eyes across the bed, and smiled a shaky, tremulous smile.
“I guess he’s all right, Father,” he said. And suddenly crumpled up beside the bed, and fell into a paroxysm of silent sobbing. With his arm around the boy’s shoulders, Clayton felt in that gray dawn the greatest thankfulness of his life. Joey would live. That cup was taken from his boy’s lips. And he and Graham were together again, close together. The boy’s grip on his hand was tight. Please God, they would always be together from now on.
CHAPTER IX
Clayton did not care to tell Natalie of Chris’s flight. She would learn it soon enough, he knew, and he felt unwilling to discuss the affair as Natalie would want to discuss it. Not that he cared about Chris, but he had begun to feel a protective interest in Audrey Valentine, an interest that had in it a curious aversion to hearing her name in connection with Chris’s sordid story.
He and Natalie met rarely in the next few days. He dined frequently at his club with men connected in various ways with the new enterprise, and transacted an enormous amount of business over the dinner or luncheon table. Natalie’s door was always closed on those occasions when he returned, and he felt that with the stubbornness characteristic of her she was still harboring resentment against him for what he had said at the hospital.
He knew she was spending most of her days at Linndale, and he had a vague idea that she and Rodney together had been elaborating still further on the plans for the house. It was the furtiveness of it rather than the fact itself that troubled him. He was open and straightforward himself. Why couldn’t Natalie be frank with him?
It was Mrs. Haverford, punctually paying her dinner-call in an age which exacts dinner-calls no longer – even from its bachelors – who brought Natalie the news of Chris’s going. Natalie, who went down to see her with a mental protest, found her at a drawing-room window, making violent signals at somebody without, and was unable to conceal her amazement.
“It’s Delight,” explained Mrs. Haverford. “She’s driving me round. She won’t come in, and she’s forgotten her fur coat. And it’s simply bitter outside. Well, my dear, how are you?”
Natalie was well, and said so. She was conscious that Mrs. Haverford was listening with only half an ear, and indeed, a moment later she had risen again and hurried to the window.
“Natalie!” she cried. “Do come and watch. She’s turning the car. We do think she drives wonderfully. Only a few days, too.”
“Why won’t she come in?”
“I’m sure I don’t know. Unless she is afraid Graham may be here.”
“What in the world has Graham got to do with it?” Natalie’s voice was faintly scornful.
“I was going to ask you that, Natalie. Have they quarreled, or anything?”
“I don’t think they meet at all, do they?”
“They met once since Clayton gave Doctor Haverford the car. Graham helped her when she had got into a ditch, I believe. And I thought perhaps they had quarreled about something.”
“That would imply a degree of intimacy that hardly exists, does it?” Natalie said, sharply.
But Mrs. Haverford had not fought the verbal battles of the parish for twenty years in vain.
“It was the day of that unfortunate incident at the country club, Natalie.”
Natalie colored.
“Accident, rather than incident.”
“How is the poor child?”
“He is quite well again,” Natalie said impatiently “I can not understand the amount of fuss every one makes over the boy. He ran in front of where Graham was driving and got what he probably deserved.”
“I understand Clayton has given him a position.”
“He has made him an office boy.”
“How like dear Clayton!” breathed Mrs. Haverford, and counted the honors as hers. But she had not come to quarrel. She had had, indeed, a frankly benevolent purpose in coming, and she proceeded to carry it out at once.
“I do think, my dear,” she said, “that some one ought to tell Audrey Valentine the stories that are going about.”
“What has she been doing?” Natalie asked, with her cool smile. “There is always some story about Audrey, isn’t there?”
“Do you mean to say you haven’t heard?”
“I don’t hear much gossip.”
Mrs. Haverford let that pass.
“You know how rabid she has been about the war. Well, the story is,” she went on, with a certain unction, “that she has driven Chris to enlisting in the Foreign Legion, or something. Anyhow, he sailed from Halifax last week.”
Natalie straightened in her chair.
“Are you certain?”
“It’s town talk, my dear. Doctor Haverford spoke to Clayton about it some days ago. He rather gathered Clayton already knew.”
That, too, was like dear Clayton, Natalie reflected bitterly. He had told her nothing. In her heart she added secretiveness to the long list of Clayton’s deficiencies toward her.
“Personally, I imagine they were heavily in debt,” Mrs. Haverford went on. “They had been living beyond their means, of course. I like Mrs. Valentine, but I do think, to drive a man to his death, or what may be his death – “
“I don’t believe it. I don’t believe he went to fight, anyway. He was probably in some sort of a scrape.”
“She has sold her house.”
Natalie’s impulse of sympathy toward Audrey was drowned in her rising indignation. That all this could happen and Audrey not let her know was incredible.
“I haven’t seen her recently,” she said coldly.
“Nobody has. I do think she might have seen her clergyman. There is a time when only the church can give us the comfort we need, my dear.”
And whatever Mrs. Haverford’s faults, she meant that quite simply.
“And you say Clay knew?”
“It’s rather likely he would. They were golfing together, weren’t they, when that caddie was hurt?”
Natalie was not a jealous woman. She had, for years, taken Clay’s faithfulness for granted, and her own complacency admitted no chance of such a possibility. But she was quick to realize that she had him at a disadvantage.
“How long have you known it?” she asked him that night, when, after the long dinner was over, she sat with her elbows on the table and faced him across the candles.
He was tired and depressed, and his fine face looked drawn. But he roused and smiled across at her. He had begun to have a feeling that he must make up to Natalie for something – he hardly knew for what.
“Known what, dear?”
“About Chris and Audrey?”
He was fundamentally honest, so he answered her directly.
“Since the day Chris left.”
“When was that?”
“The day we dined there.”
“And Audrey told you?”
“She had to, in a way. I’m sure she’ll tell you herself. She’s been rather hiding away, I imagine.”
“Why did she have to tell you?”
“If you want the exact truth, she borrowed a small sum from me, as the banks were closed, naturally. There was some emergency – I don’t know what.”
“She borrowed from you!”
“A very small amount, my dear. Don’t look like that, Natalie. She knew I generally carried money with me.”
“Oh, I’m not jealous! Audrey probably thinks of you as a sort of grandfather, anyhow. It’s not that. It is your keeping the thing from me.”
“It was not my secret.”
But Natalie was jealous. She had that curious jealousy of her friends which some women are cursed with, of being first in their regard and their confidence. A slow and smoldering anger against Audrey, which had nothing whatever to do with Clayton, darkened her eyes.
“I’m through with Audrey. That’s all,” she said.
And the man across regarded her with a sort of puzzled wonder.
Her indignation against Clayton took the form of calculation; and she was quick to pursue her advantage. In the library she produced the new and enlarged plans for the house.
“Roddie says he has tried to call you at the mill, but you are always out of your office. So he sent these around to-day.”
True to the resolution he had made that night in the hospital, he went over them carefully. And even their magnitude, while it alarmed him, brought no protest from him. After all the mill and the new plant were his toys to play with. He found there something to fill up the emptiness of his life. If a great house was Natalie’s ambition, if it gave her pleasure and something to live for, she ought to have it.
She had prepared herself for a protest, but he made none, even when the rather startling estimate was placed before him.
“I just want you to be happy, my dear,” he said. “But I hope you’ll arrange not to run over the estimate. It is being pretty expensive as it is. But after all, success doesn’t mean anything, unless we are going to get something out of it.”
They were closer together that evening than they had been for months. And at last he fell to talking about the mill. Natalie, curled up on the chaise longue in her boudoir, listened attentively, but with small comprehension as he poured out his dream, for himself now, for Graham later. A few years more and he would retire. Graham could take hold then. He might even go into politics. He would be fifty then, and a man of fifty should be in his prime. And to retire and do nothing was impossible. A fellow went to seed.
Eyes on the wood fire, he talked on until at last, roused by Natalie’s silence, he glanced up. She was sound asleep.
Some time later, in his dressing-gown and slippers, he came and roused her. She smiled up at him like a drowsy child.
“Awfully tired,” she said. “Is Graham in?”
“Not yet.”
She held up her hands, and he drew her to her feet.
“You’ve been awfully dear about the house,” she said. And standing on tiptoe, she kissed him on the cheek. Still holding both her hands, he looked down at her gravely.
“Do you really think that, Natalie?”
“Of course.”
“Then – will you do something in return?”
Her eyes became shrewd, watchful.
“Anything in reason.”
“Don’t, don’t, dear, make Graham afraid of me.”
“As if I did! If he is afraid of you, it is your own fault”
“Perhaps it is. But I try – good God, Natalie, I do try. He needs a curb now and then. All boys do. But if we could only agree on it – don’t you see how it is now?” he asked, trying to reason gently with her. “All the discipline comes from me, all the indulgence from you. And – I don’t want to lose my boy, my dear.”
She freed her hands.
“So we couldn’t even have one happy evening!” she said. “I won’t quarrel with you, Clay. And I won’t be tragic over Graham. If you’ll just be human to him, he’ll come out all right.”
She went into her bedroom, the heavy lace of her negligee trailing behind her, and closed the door.
Clayton had a visitor the next morning at the mill, a man named Dunbar, who marked on his visitors’ slip, under the heading of his business with the head of the concern, the words, “Private and confidential.”
Clayton, looking up, saw a small man, in a suit too large for him, and with ears that projected wide on either side of a shrewd, rather humorous face.
“Mr. Spencer?”
“Yes. Sit down, please.”
Even through the closed window the noise of the mill penetrated. The yard-engine whistled shrilly. The clatter of motor-trucks, the far away roar of the furnaces, the immediate vicinity of many typewriters, made a very bedlam of sound. Mr. Dunbar drew his chair closer, and laid a card on the desk.
“My credentials,” he explained.
Clayton read the card.
“Very well, Mr. Dunbar. What can I do for you?”
Dunbar fixed him with shrewd, light eyes, and bent forward.
“Have you had any trouble in your mill, Mr. Spencer?”
“None whatever.”
“Are you taking any measures to prevent trouble?”
“I had expected to. Not that I fear anything, but of course no one can tell. We have barely commenced to get lined up for our new work.”
“May I ask the nature of the precautions?”
Clayton told him, with an uneasy feeling that Mr. Dunbar was finding them childish and inefficient.
“Exactly,” said his visitor. “And well enough as far as they go. They don’t go far enough. The trouble with you manufacturers is that you only recognize one sort of trouble, and that’s a strike. I suppose you know that the Kaiser has said, if we enter the war, that he need not send an army here at all. That his army is here already, armed and equipped.”
“Bravado,” said Clayton.
“I wonder!”
Mr. Dunbar reached into his breast pocket, and produced a long typed memorandum.
“You might just glance at that.”
Clayton read it carefully. It was a list of fires, mostly in granaries and warehouses, and the total loss was appalling.
“All German work,” said his visitor. “Arson, for the Fatherland. All supplies for the Allies, you see. I’ve got other similar lists, here, all German deviltry. And they’re only commencing. If we go into the war – “
The immediate result of the visit was that Clayton became a member of a protective league which undertook, with his cooperation, to police and guard the mill. But Mr. Dunbar’s last words left him thinking profoundly.
“We’re going to be in it, that’s sure. And soon. And Germany’s army is here. It’s not only Germans either. It’s the I.W.W., for one thing. We’ve got a list through the British post-office censor, of a lot of those fellows who are taking German money to-day. They’re against everything. Not only work. They’re against law and order. And they’re likely to raise hell.”
He rose to leave.
“How do your Germans like making shells for the Allies?” he asked.
“We haven’t a great many. We’ve had no trouble. One man resigned – a boss roller. That’s all.”
“Watch him. He’s got a grievance.”
“He’s been here a long time. I haven’t an idea he’d do us any harm. It was a matter of principle with him.”
“Oh, it’s a matter of principle with all of them. They can justify themselves seven ways to the ace. Keep an eye on him, or let us do it for you.”
Clayton sat for some time after Dunbar had gone. Was it possible that Klein, or men like Klein, old employees and faithful for years, could be reached by the insidious wickedness of Germany? It was incredible. But then the whole situation was incredible; that a peaceful and home-loving people, to all appearances, should suddenly shed the sheep skin of years of dissimulation, and appear as the wolves of the world.
One of his men had died on the Lusitania, a quiet little chap, with a family in the suburbs and a mania for raising dahlias. He had been in the habit of bringing in his best specimens, and putting them in water on Clayton’s desk. His pressed glass vase was still there, empty.
Then his mind went back to Herman Klein. He had a daughter in the mill. She was earning the livelihood for the family now, temporarily. And the Germans were thrifty. If for no other reason he thought Klein would not imperil either his daughter’s safety or her salary.
There was a good bit of talk about German hate, but surely there was no hate in Klein.
Something else Dunbar had said stuck in his mind.
“We’ve got to get wise, and soon. It’s too big a job for the regular departments to handle. Every city in the country and every town ought to have a civilian organization to watch and to fight it if it has to. They’re hiding among us everywhere, and every citizen has got to be a sleuth, if we’re to counter their moves. Every man his own detective!”
He had smiled as he said it, but Clayton had surmised a great earnestness and considerable knowledge behind the smile.
CHAPTER X
Delight Haverford was to come out in December, but there were times when the Doctor wondered if she was really as keen about it as she pretended to be. He found her once or twice, her usually active hands idle in her lap, and a pensive droop to her humorous young mouth.
“Tired, honey?” he asked, on one of those occasions.
“No. Just talking to myself.”
“Say a few nice things for me, while you’re about it, then.”
“Nice things! I don’t deserve them.”
“What awful crime have you been committing? Break it to me gently. You know my weak heart.”
“Your tobacco heart!” she said, severely. “Well, I’ve been committing a mental murder, if you want to know the facts. Don’t protest. It’s done. She’s quite dead already.”
“Good gracious! And I have reared this young viper! Who is she?”
“I don’t intend to make you an accessory, daddy.”
But’ behind her smile he felt a real hurt. He would have given a great deal to have taken her in his arms and tried to coax out her trouble so he might comfort her. But that essential fineness in him which his worldliness only covered like a veneer told him not to force her confidence. Only, he wandered off rather disconsolately to hunt his pipe and to try to realize that Delight was now a woman grown, and liable to woman’s heart-aches.
“What do you think it is?” he asked that night, when after her nightly custom Mrs. Haverford had reached over from the bed beside his and with a single competent gesture had taken away his book and switched off his reading lamp, and he had, with the courage of darkness, voiced a certain uneasiness.
“Who do you think it is, you mean.”
“Very well, only the word is ‘whom.'”
Mrs. Haverford ignored this.
“It’s that Hayden girl,” she said. “Toots. And Graham Spencer.”
“Do you think that Delight – “
“She always has. For years.”
Which was apparently quite clear to them both.
“If it had only been a nice girl,” Mrs. Haverford protested, plaintively. “But Toots! She’s fast, I’m sure of it.”
“My dear!”
“And that boy needs a decent girl, if anybody ever did. A shallow mother, and a money-making father – all Toots Hay den wants is his money. She’s ages older than he is. I hear he is there every day and all of Sundays.”
The rector had precisely as much guile as a turtle dove, and long, after Mrs. Haverford gave unmistakable evidences of slumber, he lay with his arms above his head, and plotted. He had no conscience whatever about it. He threw his scruples to the wind, and if it is possible to follow the twists of a theological mind turned from the straight and narrow way into the maze of conspiracy, his thoughts ran something like this:
“She is Delight. Therefore to see her is to love her. To see her with any other girl is to see her infinite superiority and charm. Therefore – “
Therefore, on the following Sunday afternoon, the totally unsuspecting daughter of a good man gone wrong took a note from the rector to the Hayden house, about something or other of no importance, and was instructed to wait for an answer. And the rector, vastly uneasy and rather pleased with himself, took refuge in the parish house and waited ten eternities, or one hour by the clock.
Delight herself was totally unsuspicious. The rectory on a Sunday afternoon was very quiet, and she was glad to get away. She drove over, and being in no hurry she went by the Spencer house. She did that now and then, making various excuses to herself, such as liking the policeman at the corner or wanting to see the river from the end of the street. But all she saw that day was Rodney Page going in, in a top hat and very bright gloves.
“Precious!” said Delight to herself. Her bump of reverence was very small.
But she felt a little thrill, as she always did, when she passed the house. Since she could remember she had cared for Graham. She did not actually know that she loved him. She told herself bravely that she was awfully fond of him, and that it was silly, because he never would amount to anything. But she had a little argument of her own, for such occasions, which said that being really fond of any one meant knowing all about them and liking them anyhow.
She stopped the car at the Hayden house, and carried her note to the door. When she went in, however, she was instantly uncomfortable. The place reeked with smoke, and undeniably there was dancing going on somewhere. A phonograph was scraping noisily. Delight’s small nose lifted a little. What a deadly place! Coming in from the fresh outdoors, the noise and smoke and bar-room reek stifled her.
Then a door opened, and Marion Hayden was drawing her into a room.
“How providential, Delight!” she said. “You’ll take my hand, won’t you? It’s Graham’s dummy, and we want to dance.”
The two connecting rooms were full of people, and the air was heavy. Through the haze she saw Graham, and nodded to him, but with a little sinking of the heart. She was aware, however, that he was looking at her with a curious intentness and a certain expectancy. Maybe he only hoped she would let him dance with Toots.
“No, thanks,” she said. “Sorry.”
“Why not, Delight? Just a hand, anyhow.”
“Three good reasons: I don’t play cards on Sunday; I don’t ever play for money; and I’m stifling for breath already in this air.”
She was, indeed, a little breathless.
There was, had she only seen it, relief in Graham’s face. She did not belong there, he felt. Delight was – well, she was different. He had not been thinking of her before she came in; he forgot her promptly the moment she went out. But she had given him, for an instant, a breath of the fresh out-doors, and quietness and – perhaps something clean and fine.
There was an insistent clamor that she stay, and Tommy Hale even got down on his knees and made a quite impassioned appeal. But Delight’s chin was very high, although she smiled.
“You are all very nice,” she said. “But I’m sure I’d bore you in a minute, and I’m certain you’d bore me. Besides, I think you’re quite likely to be raided.”
Which met with great applause.
But there was nothing of Delight of the high head when she got out of her car and crept up the rectory steps. How could she even have cared? How could she? That was his life, those were the people he chose to play with. She had a sense of loss, rather than injury.
The rector, tapping at her door a little later, received the answer to his note through a very narrow crack, and went away feeling that the way of the wicked is indeed hard.
Clayton had been watching with growing concern Graham’s intimacy with the gay crowd that revolved around Marion Hayden. It was more thoughtless than vicious; more pleasure-seeking than wicked; but its influence was bad, and he knew it.
But he was very busy. At night he was too tired to confront the inevitable wrangle with Natalie that any protest about Graham always evoked, and he was anxious not to disturb the new rapprochement with the boy by direct criticism.
The middle of December, which found the construction work at the new plant well advanced, saw the social season definitely on, also, and he found himself night after night going to dinners and then on to balls. There were fewer private dances than in previous Winters, but society had taken up various war activities and made them fashionable. The result was great charity balls.
On these occasions he found himself watching for Audrey, always. She had, with a sort of diabolical cleverness, succeeded in losing herself. Her house was sold, he knew, and he had expected that she would let him know where to find her. She had said she counted on him, and he had derived an odd sort of comfort from the thought. It had warmed him to think that, out of all the people he knew, to one woman he meant something more than success.
But although he searched the gayest crowds with his eyes, those hilarious groups of which she had been so frequently the center, he did not find her. And there had been no letter save a brief one without an address, enclosing her check for the money she had borrowed. She had apparently gone, not only out of her old life, but out of his as well.
At one of the great charity balls he met Nolan, and they stood together watching the crowd.
“Pretty expensive, I take it,” Nolan said, indicating the scene. “Orchestra, florist, supper – I wonder how much the Belgians will get.”
“Personally, I’d rather send the money and get some sleep.”
“Precisely. But would you send the money? We’ve got to have a quid pro quo, you know-most of us.” He surveyed the crowd with cynical, dissatisfied eyes. “At the end of two years of the war,” he observed, apropos of nothing, “five million men are dead, and eleven million have been wounded. A lot of them were doing this sort of thing two years ago.”
“I would like to know where we will be two years from now.”
“Some of us won’t be here. Have you seen Lloyd George’s speech on the German peace terms? That means going on to the end. A speedy peace might have left us out, but there will be no peace. Not yet, or soon.”
“And still we don’t prepare!”
“The English tradition persists,” said the Irishman, bitterly. “We want to wait, and play to the last moment, and then upset our business and overthrow the whole country, trying to get ready in a hurry.
“I wonder what they will do, when the time comes, with men like you and myself?”
“Take our money,” said Nolan viciously. “Tax our heads off. Thank God I haven’t a son.”
Clayton eyed him with the comprehension of long acquaintance.
“Exactly,” he said. “But you’ll go yourself, if you can,”
“And fight for England? I will not.”
He pursued the subject further, going into an excited account of Ireland’s grievances. He was flushed and loquacious. He quoted Lloyd George’s “quagmire of distrust” in tones raised over the noise of the band. And Clayton was conscious of a growing uneasiness. How much of it was real, how much a pose? Was Nolan representative of the cultured Irishman in America? And if he was, what would be the effect of their anti-English mania? Would we find ourselves, like the British, split into factions? Or would the country be drawn together by trouble until it changed from a federation of states to a great nation, united and unbeatable?
Were we really the melting pot of the world, and was war the fiery furnace which was to fuse us together, or were there elements, like Nolan, like the German-Americans, that would never fuse?
He left Nolan still irritable and explosive, and danced once with Natalie, his only dance of the evening. Then, finding that Rodney Page would see her to her car later, he went home.
He had a vague sense of disappointment, a return of the critical mood of the early days of his return from France. He went to his room and tried to read, but he gave it up, and lay, cigaret in hand, thinking!
There ought to have come to a man, when he reached the middle span, certain compensations for the things that had gone with his youth, the call of adventure, the violent impulses of his early love life. There should come, to take their place, friends, a new zest in the romance of achievement, since other romance had gone, and – peace. But the peace of the middle span of life should be the peace of fulfillment, and of a home and a woman.
Natalie was not happy, but she seemed contented enough. Her life satisfied her. The new house in the day-time, bridge, the theater in the evening or the opera, dinners, dances, clothes – they seemed to be enough for her. But his life was not enough for him. What did he want anyhow? In God’s name, what did he want?
One night, impatient with himself, he picked up the book of love lyrics in its mauve cover, from his bedside table. He read one, then another. He read them slowly, engrossingly. It was as though something starved in him was feeding eagerly on this poor food. Their passion stirred him as in his earlier years he had never been stirred. For just a little time, while Natalie danced that night, Clayton Spencer faced the tragedy of the man in his prime, still strong and lusty with life, with the deeper passions of the deepening years, who has outgrown and outloved the woman he married.
A man’s house must be built on love. Without love it can not stand.
Natalie, coming in much later and seeing his light still on, found him sleeping, with one arm under his head, and a small black hole burned in the monogrammed linen sheet. The book of poems had slipped to the floor.
The next day she missed it from its place, and Clayton’s man, interrogated, said he had asked to have it put away somewhere. He did not care for it. Natalie raised her eyebrows. She had thought the poems rather pretty.
One resolution Clayton made, as a result of that night. He would not see Audrey again if he could help it. He was not in love with her and he did not intend to be. He was determinedly honest with himself. Men in his discontented state were only too apt to build up a dream-woman, compounded of their own starved fancy, and translate her into terms of the first attractive woman who happened to cross the path. He was not going to be a driveling idiot, like Chris and some of the other men he knew. Things were bad, but they could be much worse.
It happened then that when Audrey called him at the mill a day or so later it was a very formal voice that came back to her over the wire. She was quick to catch his tone.
“I suppose you hate being called in business hours, Clay!”
“Not at all.”
“That means yes, you know. But I’m going even further. I’m coming down to see you.”
“Why, is anything wrong?”
He could hear her laughter, a warm little chuckle.
“Don’t be so urgent,” she said gayly. “I want to consult you. That’s all. May I come?”
There was a second’s pause. Then,
“Don’t you think I’d better come to see you?”
“I’ve only a little flat. I don’t think you’ll like it.”
“That’s nonsense. Where is it?”
She gave him the address.
“When shall I come?”
“Whenever it suits you. I have nothing to do. Say this afternoon about four.”
That “nothing to do” was an odd change, in itself, for Audrey had been in the habit of doling out her time like sweetmeats.
“Where in the world have you been all this time?” he demanded, almost angrily. To his own surprise he was suddenly conscious of a sense of indignation and affront. She had said she depended on him, and then she had gone away and hidden herself. It was ridiculous.
“Just getting acquainted with myself,” she replied, with something of her old airy manner. “Good-by.”
His irritation passed as quickly as it came. He felt calm and very sure of himself, and rather light-hearted. Joey, who was by now installed as an office adjunct, and who commonly referred to the mill as “ours,” heard him whistling blithely and cocked an ear in the direction of the inner room.
“Guess we’ve made another million dollars,” he observed to the pencil-sharpener.
Clayton was not in the habit of paying afternoon calls on women. The number of such calls that he had paid without Natalie during his married life could have been numbered on the fingers of his two hands. Most of the men he knew paid such visits, dropping in somewhere for tea or a highball on the way uptown. He had preferred his club, when he had a little time, the society of other men.
He wondered if he should call Natalie and tell her. But he decided against it. It was possible, for one thing, that Audrey still did not wish her presence in town known. If she did, she would tell Natalie herself. And it was possible, too, that she wanted to discuss Chris, and the reason for his going.
He felt a real sense of relief, when at last he saw her, to find her looking much the same as ever. He hardly knew what he had expected. Audrey, having warned him as to the apartment, did not mention its poverty again. It was a tiny little place, but it had an open fire in the living-room, and plain, pale-yellow walls, and she had given it that curious air of distinction with which she managed, in her casual way, to invest everything about her.
“I hope you observe how neat I am,” she said, as she gave him her hand. “My rooms, of course.”
“Frightfully so.”
He towered in the low room. Audrey sat down and surveyed him as he stood by the fire.
“It is nice to have a man about again.”
“Do you mean to say you have been living here, without even visitors, for two months?”
“You’ll laugh. Clay, I’m studying!”
“Studying! What?”
“Stenography. Oh, it’s not as bad as that. I don’t have to earn my living. I’ve just got to do something for my soul’s sake. I went all over the ground, and I saw I was just a cumberer of the earth, and then I thought – “
She hesitated.
“What did you think?”
“If, some time or other, I could release a man to go and fight, it would be the next best thing to giving myself. Not here, necessarily; I don’t believe we will ever go in. But in England, anywhere.”
“You’ve released Chris.”
“He released himself. And he’s not fighting. He’s driving an ambulance.”
He waited, hoping she would go on. He was not curious, but he thought it might be good for her to talk Chris and the trouble over with some one. But she sat silent, and suddenly asked him if he cared for tea. He refused.
“How’s Natalie?”
“Very well.”
“And the house?”
“Held up by cold weather now. It should be finished by the end of April.”
“Clay,” she said, after a moment, “are you going to employ women in the new munition works?”
“In certain departments, yes.”
“I have a girl I want work for. She’s not trained, of course.”
“None of them are. We have to teach them. I can give you a card to the employment department if you want it.”
“Thanks.”
There was a short silence. She sat looking at the fire, and he had a chance to notice the change in her. She had visualized it herself. Her long ear-rings were gone, and with them some of the insolence they had seemed to accentuate. She was not rouged, and he had thought at first, for that reason, that she looked ill. She was even differently dressed, in something dark and girlish with a boyish white Eton collar.
“I wonder if you think I’m hiding, Clay,” she said, finally.
“Well, what are you doing?” He smiled down at her from the hearth-rug.
“Paying my bills! That’s not all the truth, either. I’ll tell you, Clay. I just got sick of it all. When Chris left I had a chance to burn my bridges and I burned them. The same people, the same talk, the same food, the same days filled with the same silly things that took all my time and gave me nothing.”
“How long had you been feeling like that?”
“I don’t know. Ever since the war, I suppose. I just got to thinking – “
Her voice trailed off.
“I have some of Chris’s Scotch, if you want a high-ball.”
“Thanks, no. Audrey, do you hear from Chris?”
“Yes. He’s in a dangerous place now, and sometimes at night – I suppose I did force him, in a way. He was doing no good here, and I thought he would find himself over there. But I didn’t send him. He – Tell me about making shells.”
He was a little bit disappointed. Evidently she did not depend on him enough to tell him Chris’s story. But again, she was being loyal to Chris.
He told her about the mill, phrasing his explanation in the simplest language; the presses drilling on white-hot metal; the great anvils; the forge; the machine-shop, with its lathes, where the rough surfaces of the shells were first rough-turned and then machined to the most exact measurements. And finding her interested, he told her of England’s women workers, in their khaki-colored overalls and caps, and of the convent-like silence and lack of movement in the filling-sheds, where one entered with rubber-shod feet, and the women, silent and intent, sat all day and all night, with queer veils over their faces, filling shells with the death load.
Audrey listened, her hands clasped behind her head.
“If other women can do that sort of thing, why can’t I, Clay?”
“Nonsense.”
“But why? I’m intelligent.”
“It’s not work for a lady.”
“Lady! How old-fashioned you are! There are no ladies any more. Just women. And if we aren’t measured by our usefulness instead of our general not-worth-a-damn-ness, well, we ought to be. Oh, I’ve had time to think, lately.”
He was hardly listening. Seeing her, after all those weeks, had brought him a wonderful feeling of peace. The little room, with its fire, was cozy and inviting. But he was quite sure, looking down at her, that he was not in danger of falling in love with her. There was no riot in him, no faint stirring of the emotions of that hour with the mauve book.
There was no suspicion in him that the ways of love change with the years, that the passions of the forties, when they come, are to those of the early years as the deep sea to a shallow lake, less easily roused, infinitely more terrible.
“This girl you spoke about, that was the business you mentioned?”
“Yes.” She hesitated. “I could have asked you that over the telephone, couldn’t I? The plain truth is that I’ve had two bad months – never mind why, and Christmas was coming, and – I just wanted to see your perfectly sane and normal face again.”
“I wish you’d let me know sooner where you were.”
She evaded his eyes.
“I was getting settled, and studying, and learning to knit, and – oh, I’m the most wretched knitter, Clay! I just stick at it doggedly. I say to myself that hands that can play golf, and use a pen, and shoot, and drive a car, have got to learn to knit. But look here!”
She held up a forlorn looking sock to his amused gaze. “And I think I’m a clever woman.”
“You’re a very brave woman, Audrey,” he said. “You’ll let me come back, won’t you?”
“Heavens, yes. Whenever you like. And I’m going to stop being a recluse. I just wanted to think over some things.”
On the way home he stopped at his florist’s, and ordered a mass of American beauties for her on Christmas morning. She had sent her love to Natalie, so that night he told Natalie he had seen her, and such details of her life as he knew.
“I’m glad she’s coming to her senses,” Natalie said. “Everything’s been deadly dull without her. She always made things go – I don’t know just how,” she added, as if she had been turning her over in her mind. “What sort of business did she want to see you about?”
“She has a girl she wants to get into the mill.”
“Good gracious, she must be changed,” said Natalie. And proceeded – she was ready to go out to dinner – to one of her long and critical surveys of herself in the cheval mirror. Recently those surveys had been rather getting on Clayton’s nerves. She customarily talked, not to him, but to his reflection over her shoulder, when, indeed, she took her eyes from herself.
“I wonder,” she said, fussing with a shoulder-strap, “who Audrey will marry if anything happens to Chris?”
She saw his face and raised her eyebrows.
“You needn’t scowl like that. He’s quite as likely as not never to come back, isn’t he? And Audrey didn’t care a pin for him.”
“We’re talking rather lightly of a very terrible thing, aren’t we?”
“Oh, you’re not,” she retorted. “You think just the same things as I do, but you’re not so open about them. That’s all”
CHAPTER XI
Graham was engaged. He hardly knew himself how it had come about. His affair with Marion had been, up to the very moment of his blurted – out “I want you,” as light-hearted as that of any of the assorted young couples who flirted and kissed behind the closed doors of that popular house.
The crowd which frequented the Hayden home was gay, tolerant and occasionally nasty. It made ardent love semi-promiscuously, it drank rather more than it should, and its desire for a good time often brought it rather close to the danger line. It did not actually step over, but it hovered gayly on the brink.
And Toots remained high-priestess of her little cult. The men liked her. The girls imitated her. And Graham, young as he was, seeing her popularity, was vastly gratified to find himself standing high in her favor.
Marion was playing for the stake of the Spencer money. In her intimate circle every one knew it but Graham.
“How’s every little millionaire?” was Tommy Hale’s usual greeting.
She knew only one way to handle men, and with the stake of the Spencer money she tried every lure of her experience on Graham. It was always Marion who on cold nights sat huddled against him in the back seat of the Hayden’s rather shabby car, her warm ungloved hand in his. It was Marion who taught him to mix the newest of cocktails, and who later praised his skill. It was Marion who insisted on his having a third, too, when the second had already set his ears drumming.
The effect on the boy of her steady propinquity, of her constant caressing touches, of the general letting-down of the bars of restraint, was to rouse in him impulses of which he was only vaguely conscious, and his proposal of marriage, when it finally came, was by nature of a confession. He had kissed her, not for the first time, but this time she had let him hold her, and he had rained kisses on her face.
“I want you,” he had said, huskily.
And even afterward, when the thing was done, and she had said she would marry him, she had to ask him if he loved her.
“I – of course I do,” he had said. And had drawn her back into his arms.
He wanted to marry her at once. It was the strongest urge of his life, and put into his pleading an almost pathetic earnestness. But she was firm enough now.
“I don’t think your family will be crazy about this, you know.”
“What do we care for the family? They’re not marrying you, are they?”
“They will have to help to support me, won’t they?”
And he had felt a trifle chilled.
It was not a part of Marion’s program to enter the Spencer family unwelcomed. She had a furtive fear of Clayton Spencer, the fear of the indirect for the direct, of the designing woman for the essentially simple and open male. It was not on her cards to marry Graham and to try to live on his salary.
So for a few weeks the engagement was concealed even from Mrs. Hayden, and Graham, who had received some stock from his father on his twenty-first birthday, secretly sold a few shares and bought the engagement ring. With that Marion breather easier. It was absolute evidence.
Her methods were the methods of her kind and her time. To allure a man by every wile she knew, and having won him to keep him uncertain and uneasy, was her perfectly simple creed. So she reduced love to its cheapest terms, passion and jealousy, played on them both, and made Graham alternately happy and wretched.
Once he found Rodney Page there, lounging about with the manner of a habitue. It seemed to Graham that he was always stumbling over Rodney those days, either at home, with drawings and color sketches spread out before him, or at the Hayden house.
“What’s he hanging around here for?” he demanded when Rodney, having bent over Marion’s hand and kissed it, had gone away. “If he could see that bare spot on the top of his head he’d stop all that kow-towing.”
“You’re being rather vulgar, aren’t you?” Marion had said. “He’s a very old friend and a very dear one.”
“Probably in love with you once, like all the rest?”
He had expected denial from her, but she had held her cigaret up in the air, and reflectively regarded its small gilt tip.
“I’m afraid he’s rather unhappy. Poor Rod!”
“About me?”
“About me.”
“Look here, Toots,” he burst out. “I’m playing square with you. I never go anywhere but here. I – I’m perfectly straight with you. But every time here I find some of your old guard hanging round. It makes me wild.”
“They’ve always come here, and as long as our engagement isn’t known, I can’t very well stop them.”
“Then let me go to father.”
“He’ll turn you out, you know. I know men, dear old thing, and father is going to raise a merry little hell about us. He’s the sort who wants to choose his son’s wife for him. He’d like to play Providence.” She watched him, smiling, but with slightly narrowed eyes. “I rather think he has somebody in mind for you now.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“Of course you don’t. But he has.”
“Who?”
“Delight. She’s exactly the sort he thinks you’ll need. He still