The immediate outstanding result of the holocaust at the munitions works was the end of Natalie's dominion aver Graham. She never quite forgave him the violence with which he threw off her shackles.
“If I'd been half a man I'd have been over there long ago,” he said, standing before her, tall and young and flushed. “I'd have learned my job by now, and I'd be worth something, now I'm needed.”
“And broken my heart.”
“Hearts don't break that way, mother.”
“Well, you say you are going now. I should think you'd be satisfied. There's plenty of time for you to get the glory you want.”
“Glory! I don't want any glory. And as for plenty of time—that's exactly what there isn't.”
During the next few days she preserved an obstinate silence on the subject. She knew he had been admitted to one of the officers' training-camps, and that he was making rather helpless and puzzled purchases. Going into his room she would find a dressing-case of khaki leather, perhaps, or flannel shirts of the same indeterminate hue. She would shed futile tears over them, and order them put out of sight. But she never offered to assist him.
Graham was older, in many ways. He no longer ran up and down the stairs whistling, and he sought every opportunity to be with his father. They spent long hours together in the library, when, after a crowded day, filled with the thousand, problems of reconstructions, Clayton smoked a great deal, talked a little, rather shame-facedly after the manner of men, of personal responsibility in the war, and quietly watched the man who was Graham.
Out of those quiet hours, with Natalie at the theater or reading up-stairs in bed, Clayton got the greatest comfort of his life. He would neither look back nor peer anxiously ahead.
The past, with its tragedy, was gone. The future might hold even worse things. But just now he would live each day as it came, working to the utmost, and giving his evenings to his boy. The nights were the worst. He was not sleeping well, and in those long hours of quiet he tried to rebuild his life along stronger, sterner lines. Love could have no place in it, but there was work left. He was strong and he was still young. The country should have every ounce of energy in him. He would re-build the plant, on bigger lines than before, and when that was done, he would build again. The best he could do was not enough.
He scarcely noticed Natalie's withdrawal from Graham and himself. When she was around he was his old punctilious self, gravely kind, more than ever considerate. Beside his failure to her, her own failure to him faded into insignificance. She was as she was, and through no fault of hers. But he was what he had made himself.
Once or twice he had felt an overwhelming remorse toward her, and on one such occasion he had made a useless effort to break down the barrier of her long silence.
“Don't go up-stairs, Natalie,” he had begged. “I am not very amusing, I know, but—I'll try my best. I'll promise not to touch on anything disagreeable.” He had been standing in the hail, looking up at her on the stair-case, and he smiled. There was pleading behind the smile, an inarticulate feeling that between them there might at least be friendship.
“You are never disagreeable,” she had said, looking down with hostile eyes. “You are quite perfect.”
“Then won't you wait?”
“Perfection bores me to tears,” she said, and went on up the stairs.
On the morning of Graham's departure, however, he found her prepared to go to the railway-station. She was red-eyed and pale, and he was very sorry for her.
“Do you think it is wise?” he asked.
“I shall see him off, of course. I may never see him again.”
And his own tautened nerves almost gave way.
“Don't say that!” he cried. “Don't even think that. And for God's sake, Natalie, send him off with a smile. That's the least we can do.”
“I can't take it as casually as you do.”
He gave up then in despair. He saw that Graham watched her uneasily during the early breakfast, and he surmised that the boy's own grip on his self-control was weakened by the tears that dropped into her coffee-cup. He reflected bitterly that all over the country strong women, good women, were sending their boys away to war, giving them with prayer and exaltation. What was wrong with Natalie? What was wrong with his whole life?
When Graham was up-stairs, he turned to her.
“Why do you persist in going, Natalie?”
“I intend to go. That's enough.”
“Don't you think you've made him unhappy enough?”
“He has made me unhappy enough.”
“You. It is always yourself, Natalie. Why don't you ever think of him?” He went to the door. “Countermand the order for the limousine,” he said to the butler, “and order the small car for Mr. Graham and myself.”
“How dare you do that?”
“I am not going to let you ruin the biggest day in his life.”
She saw that he meant it. She was incredulous, reckless, angry, and thwarted for the first time in her self-indulgent life.
“I hate you,” she said slowly. “I hate you!”
She turned and went slowly up the stairs. Graham, knocking at her door a few minutes later, heard the sound of hysterical sobbing, within, but received no reply.
“Good-by, mother,” he called. “Good-by. Don't worry. I'll be all right.”
When he saw she did not mean to open the door or to reply, he went rather heavily down the stairs.
“I wish she wouldn't,” he said. “It makes me darned unhappy.”
But Clayton surmised a relief behind his regret, and in the train the boy's eyes were happier than they had been for months.
“I don't know how I'll come out, dad,” he said. “But if I don't get through it won't be because I didn't try.”
And he did try. The enormous interest of the thing gripped him from the start; There was romance in it, too. He wore his first uniform, too small for him as it was, with immense pride. He rolled out in the morning at reveille, with the feeling that he had just gone to bed, ate hugely at breakfast, learned to make his own cot-bed, and lined up on a vast dusty parade ground for endless evolutions in a boiling sun.
It was rather amusing to find himself being ordered about, in a stentorian voice, by Jackson. And when, in off moments, that capable ex-chauffeur condescended to a few moments of talk and relaxation, the boy was highly gratified.
“Do you think I've got anything in me?” he would inquire anxiously.
And Jackson always said heartily, “Sure you have.”
There were times when Graham doubted himself, however. There was one dreadful hour when Graham, in the late afternoon, and under the eyes of his commanding officer and a group of ladies, conducting the highly formal and complicated ceremony of changing the guard, tied a lot of grinning men up in a knot which required the captain of the company and two sergeants to untangle.
“I'm no earthly good,” he confided to Jackson that night, sitting on the steps of his barracks. “I know it like a-b-c, and then I get up and try it and all at once I'm just a plain damned fool.”
“Don't give up like that, son,” Jackson said. “I've seen 'em march a platoon right into the C.O.'s porch before now. And once I just saved a baby-buggy and a pair of twins.”
Clayton wrote him daily, and now and then there came a letter from Natalie, cheerful on the surface, but its cheerfulness obviously forced. And once, to his great surprise, Marion Hayden wrote him.
“I just want you to know,” she said, “that I am still interested in you, even if it isn't going to be anything else. And that I am ridiculously proud of you. Isn't it queer to look back on last Winter and think what a lot of careless idiots we were? I suppose war doesn't really change us, but it does make us wonder what we've got in us. I am surprised to find that I am a great deal better than I ever thought I was!”
There was comfort in the letter, but no thrill. He was far away from all that now, like one on the first stage of a long journey, with his eyes ahead.
Then one day he saw a familiar but yet strange figure striding along the country road. Graham was map-sketching that day, and the strange but familiar figure was almost on him when he looked up. It was extremely military, and looked like a general at least. Also it was very red in the face, and was clutching doggedly in its teeth an old briar pipe. But what had appeared from the front to be an ultra military figure on closer inspection turned out to be a procession. Pulling back hard on a rope behind was the company goat, Elinor.
The ultra-military figure paused by Graham's sketching-stool, and said, “Young man, do you know where this creature belongs? I found her trying to commit suicide on the rifle range—why, Graham!”
It was Doctor Haverford. He grew a trifle less military then, and borrowed some pipe tobacco. He looked oddly younger, Graham thought, and rather self-conscious of his uniform.
“Every inch a soldier, Graham,” he chuckled. “Still have to use a hook and eye at the bottom of the coat—blouse,” he corrected himself. “But I'm getting my waist-line again. How's the—whoa!” he called, as Elinor wrapped the rope around his carefully putted legs. “Infernal animal!” he grumbled. “I just paid a quarter to have these puttees shined. How's the family?”
“Mother has gone to Linndale. The house is finished. Have you been here long, sir?”
“Two weeks. Hang it all, Graham, I wish I'd let this creature commit suicide. She's—do you know Delight is here?”
“Here? Why, no.”
“At the hostess house,” said the chaplain, proudly. “Doing her bit, too. Mrs. Haverford wanted to come too, and sew buttons on, or something. But I told her two out of three was a fair percentage. I hear that Washington has sent for your father.
“I hadn't heard.”
“He's a big man, Graham. We're going to hear from him. Only—I thought he looked tired when I saw him last. Somebody ought to look after him a bit.” He was patiently untangling himself from Elinor's rope. “You know there are two kinds of people in the world: those who look after themselves and those who look after others. That's your father—the last.”
Graham's face clouded. How true that was! He knew now, as he had not known before. He was thinking clearly those days. Hard work and nothing to drink had clarified his mind, and he saw things at home as they really were. Clayton's infinite patience, his strength and his gentleness. But he only said:
“He has had a hard year.” He raised his eyes and looked at the chaplain. “I didn't help him any, you know, sir.”
“Well, well, that's all over now. We've just one thing to think of, and that's to beat those German devils back to Berlin. And then burn Berlin,” he added, militantly.
The last Graham saw of him, he was dragging Elinor down the road, and a faint throaty humming came back, which sounded suspiciously like “Where do we go from here, boys? Where do we go from here?”
Candidate Spencer took great pains with his toilet that afternoon. He polished his shoes, and shaved, and he spent a half hour on some ten sadly neglected finger-nails. At retreat he stood at attention in the long line, and watched the flag moving slowly and majestically to the stirring bugle notes. Something swelled almost to bursting in his throat. That was his flag. He was going to fight for it. And after that was done he was going to find some girl, some nice girl—the sort, for instance, that would leave her home to work in a hostess house. And having found her, he would marry her, and love and cherish her all his life. Unless, of course, she wouldn't have him. He was inclined to think she wouldn't.
He ate very little supper that night, little being a comparative term, of course. And then he went to discover Delight. It appeared, however, that she had been already discovered. She was entirely surrounded by uniforms, and Graham furiously counted a colonel, two majors, and a captain.
“Pulling rank, of course!” he muttered, and retired to a corner, where he had at least the mild gratification of seeing that even the colonel could not keep Delight from her work.
“Silly asses!” said Graham, again, and then she saw him. There was no question about her being pleased. She was quite flushed with it, but a little uncomfortable, too, at Graham's attitude. He was oddly humble, and yet he had a look of determination that was almost grim. She filled in a rather disquieting silence by trying to let him know, without revealing that she had ever been anything else, how proud she was of him. Then she realized that he was not listening, and that he was looking at her with an almost painful intensity.
“When can you get away, Delight?” he asked abruptly.
“From here?” She cast an appraising glance over the room. “Right away, I think. Why?”
“Because I want to talk to you, and I can't talk to you here.”
She brought a bright colored sweater and he helped her into it, still with his mouth set and his eyes a trifle sunken. All about there were laughing groups of men in uniform. Outside, the parade glowed faintly in the dusk, and from the low barrack windows there came the glow of lights, the movement of young figures, voices, the thin metallic notes of a mandolin.
“How strange it all is,” Delight said. “Here we are, you and father and myself—and even Jackson. I saw him to-day. All here, living different lives, doing different things, even thinking different thoughts. It's as though we had all moved into a different world.”
He walked on beside her, absorbed in his own thoughts, which were yet only of her.
“I didn't know you were here,” he brought out finally.
“That's because you've been burying yourself. I knew you were here.”
“Why didn't you send me some word?”
She stiffened somewhat in the darkness.
“I didn't think you would be greatly interested, Graham.”
And again, struggling with his new humility, he was silent. It was not until they had crossed the parade ground and were beyond the noises of the barracks that he spoke again.
“Do you mind if I talk to you, Delight? I mean, about myself? I—since you're here, we're likely to see each other now and then, if you are willing. And I'd like to start straight.”
“Do you really want to tell me?”
“No. But I've got to. That's all.”
He told her. He made no case for himself. Indeed, some of it Delight understood far better than he did himself. He said nothing against Marion; on the contrary, he blamed himself rather severely. And behind his honest, halting sentences, Delight read his own lack of understanding. She felt infinitely older than this tall, honest-eyed boy in his stained uniform—older and more sophisticated. But if she had understood the Marion Hayden situation, she was totally at a loss as to Anna.
“But I don't understand!” she cried. “How could you make love to her if you didn't love her?”
“I don't know. Fellows do those things. It's just mischief—some sort of a devil in them, I suppose.”
When he reached the beating and Anna's flight, however, she understood a little better.
“Of course you had to stand by her,” she agreed.
“You haven't heard it all,” he said quietly. “When I'm through, if you get up and leave me, I'll understand, Delight, and I won't blame you.”
He told her the rest of the story in a voice strained with anxiety. It was as though he had come to a tribunal for judgment. He spared her nothing, the dinner at the road-house with Rudolph at the window, his visit to Anna's room, and her subsequent disappearance.
“She told the Department of Justice people that Rudolph found her that night, and, took her home. She was a prisoner then, poor little kid. But she overheard her father and Rudolph plotting to blow up the mill. That's where I came in, Delight. He was crazy at me. He was a German, of course, and he might have done it anyhow. But Rudolph told him a lot of lies about me, and—he did it. When I think about it all, and about Joey, I'm crazy.”
She slipped her hand over his.
“Of course they would have done it anyhow,” she said softly.
“You aren't going to get up and go away?”
“Why should I?” she asked. “I only feel—oh, Graham, how wretched you must have been.”
Something in her voice made him sit up straighter. He knew now that it had always been Delight, always. Only she had been too good for him. She had set a standard he had not hoped to reach. But now things were different. He hadn't amounted to much in other things, but he was a soldier now. He meant to be a mighty good soldier. And when he got his commission—
“You won't mind, then, if I come in to see you now and then?”
“Mind? Why, Graham!”
“And you don't think I'm quite hopeless, do you?”
There were tears in her eyes, but she answered bravely:
“I believe in you every minute. But then I think I always have.”
“Like fun you have!” But although he laughed, it was a shaky laugh. Suddenly he stood up and shook himself. He felt young and strong and extremely happy. There had been a bad time, but it was behind him now. Ahead there lay high adventure, and here, beside him in the dusk, was the girl of his heart. She believed in him. Work to do and a woman who believed in a fellow—that was life.
“Aren't you cold?” he asked, and drew the gaudy sweater tenderly around her shoulders.
The fact that Audrey Valentine, conspicuous member of a conspicuous social group that she was, had been working in the machine-shop of the Spencer munitions works at the time of the explosion was in itself sufficient to rouse the greatest interest. When a young reporter, gathering human-interest stories about the event from the pitiful wreckage in the hospitals, happened on Clare Gould, he got a feature-story for the Sunday edition that made Audrey's own world, reading it in bed or over its exquisite breakfast-tables, gasp with amazement.
For, following up Clare's story, he found that Audrey had done much more than run toward the telephone. She had reached it, had found the operator gone, and had succeeded, before the roof fell in on her, in calling the fire department and in sending in a general alarm to all the hospitals.
The reporter found the night operator who had received the message. He got a photograph of her, too, and, from the society file, an old one of Audrey, very delicate and audacious, and not greatly resembling the young woman who lay in her bed and read the article aloud, between dismay and laughter, to old Terry Mackenzie.
“Good heavens, Terry,” she said. “Listen! I had heard the explosion, but did not of course know what it was. And then I got a signal, and it was the Spencer plant. A sweet Southern voice said, very calmly, 'Operator, this is important. Listen carefully. There has been an explosion at the Spencer plant and the ruins are on fire. There will probably be more explosions in a minute. Send in a general fire-alarm, and then get all the ambulances and doctors—' Then there was another explosion, and their lines went out of commission. I am glad she is not dead. She certainly had her nerve.”
“Fame at last, Audrey!” said old Terry, very gently.
“It's shameless!” But she was a little pleased, nevertheless. Not at the publicity. That was familiar enough. But that, when her big moment came, she had met it squarely.
Terry was striding about the room. His visits were always rather cyclonic. He moved from chair to chair, leaving about each one an encircling ring of cigaret ashes, and carefully inspecting each new vase of flowers. He stopped in front of a basket of exquisite small orchids.
“Who sent this?” he demanded.
“Rodney Page. Doesn't it look like him?”
He turned and stared at her.
“What's come over Clayton Spencer? Is he blind?”
“Blind?”
“About Rodney. He's head over heels in love with Natalie Spencer, God alone knows why.”
“I daresay it isn't serious. He is always in love with somebody.”
“There's a good bit of talk. I don't give a hang for either of them, but I'm fond of Clayton. So are you. Natalie's out in the country now, and Rodney is there every week-end. It's a scandal, that's all. As for Natalie herself, she ought to be interned as a dangerous pacifist. She's a martyr, in her own eyes. Thank heaven there aren't many like her.”
Audrey leaned back against her pillows.
“I wonder, Terry,” she said, “if you haven't shown me what to do next. I might be able to reach some of the women like Natalie. There are some of them, and they've got to learn that if they don't stand behind the men, we're lost.”
“Fine!” he agreed. “Get 'em to knit less and write more letters, cheerful letters. Tell 'em to remember that by the time their man gets the letter the baby's tooth will be through. There are a good many men in the army-camps to-day vicariously cutting teeth. Get after 'em, Audrey! A worried man is a poor soldier.”
After he had gone, she had the nurse bring her paper and pencil, and she wrote, rather incoherently, it is true, her first appeal to the women of the country. It was effective, too. Audrey was an effective person. When Clayton came for his daily visit she had just finished it, and was reading it over with considerable complacency.
“I've become an author, Clay,” she said, “I think myself I'm terribly good at it. May I read it to you?”
He listened gravely, but with a little flicker of amusement in his eyes. How like her it was, to refuse to allow herself even time to get entirely well! But when she finished he was thoughtful. She had called it “Slacker Women.” That was what Natalie was; he had never put it into words before. Natalie was a slacker.
He had never discussed Natalie's attitude toward the war with Audrey. He rather thought she was entirely ignorant of it. But her little article, glowing with patriotism, frank, simple, and convincing, might have been written to Natalie herself.
“It is very fine,” he said. “I rather think you have found yourself at last. There aren't a lot of such women and I daresay they will be fewer all the time. But they exist, of course.”
She glowed under his approval.
There was, in all their meetings, a sub-current of sadness, that they must be so brief, that before long they must end altogether, that they could not put into words the things that were in their eyes and their hearts. After that first hour of her return to consciousness there had been no expressed tenderness between them. The nurse sat in the room, eternally knitting, and Clayton sat near Audrey, or read to her, or, like Terry, wandered about the room. But now and then Audrey, enthroned, like a princess on her pillows, would find his eyes on her, and such a hungry look in them that she would clench her hands. And after such times she always said: “Now, tell me about the mill.” Or about Washington, where he was being summoned with increasing frequency. Or about Graham. Anything to take that look out of his eyes. He told her all his plans; he even brought the blue-prints of the new plant and spread them out on the bed. He was dreaming a great dream those days, and Audrey knew it. He was building again, this time not for himself, but for the nation.
After he had gone, looking boyish and reluctant, she would lie for a little while watching the door. Perhaps he had forgotten something, and would come back! One day he did, and was surprised to find her suddenly in tears.
“You came back!” she said half hysterically. “You came back.”
That was the only time in all those weeks that he kissed her. The nurse had gone out, and suddenly he caught her in his arms and held her to him. He put her back very gently, and she saw that he was pale.
“I think I'd better go now, and not come back,” he said.
And for two long and endless days he did not come. Then on the third he came, very stiff and formal, and with himself well in hand. Audrey, leaning back and watching him, felt what a boy he was after all, so determined to do the right thing, so obvious with his blue-prints, and so self-conscious.
In June she left the hospital and went to the country. She had already made a little market for her work, and she wanted to carry it on. By that time, too, she knew that the break must come between Clayton and herself if it came at all.
“No letters, no anything, Clay,” she said, and he acquiesced quietly. But the night she left, the butler, coming downstairs to investigate a suspicious sound, found him restlessly pacing the library floor.
In August he went abroad, and some time about the middle of the month while he was in London, he received a cable from Graham. He had been commissioned a first lieutenant in the infantry. Clayton had been seeing war at first hand then, and for a few moments he was fairly terrified. On that first of August the Germans had used liquid fire for the first time, thus adding a new horror. Men in the trenches swept by it had been practically annihilated. Attacks against it were practically suicide. Already the year had seen the last of Kitchener's army practically destroyed, and the British combing the country for new divisions.
In the deadly give and take of that summer, where gains and losses were measured by yards, the advantage was steadily on the German side, and it would be a year before the small force of American regulars could be augmented to any degree by the great new army. It was the darkest hour.
Following on the heels of Graham's cable came a hysterical one from Natalie.
“Graham probably ordered abroad. Implore you use influence with Washington.”
He resorted to his old remedy when he was in trouble. He walked the streets. He tried to allow for Natalie's lack of exaltation by the nature of her life. If she could have seen what he had seen, surely she would have felt, as he did, that no sacrifice could be too great to end this cancer of the world. But deep in his heart he knew that Natalie was—Natalie. Nothing would change her.
As it happened, he passed Graham on the Atlantic. There was a letter for him at the office, a boyish, exultant letter:
“Dad dear, I'm married!” it began. “Married and off for France. It is Delight, of course. It always was Delight, altho I know that sounds queer. And now I'm off to kill a Hun or two. More than that, I hope. I want two Germans for every poor devil they got at the works. That's the minimum. The maximum—!
“You'll look after Delight, I know. She has been perfectly bully, but it's hard on her. We were married two days ago, and already I feel as though I've always been married. She's going on with the canteen work, and I shall try not to be jealous. She's popular! And if you'd seen the General when we were married you'd have thought he was losing a daughter.
“I wired Mother, but she was too cut up about my leaving to come. I wish she had, for it was a strange sort of wedding. The division was about to move, and at the last minute five girls turned up to be married to fellows who were leaving. They came from all over, and believe me there was some excitement. All day the General and Chaplain Haverford were fussing about licenses, and those girls sat around and waited, and looked droopy but sort of happy—you know what I mean.
“It was nine o'clock in the evening before everything was ready. Delight had trimmed up the little church which is in the camp and had a flag over the altar. Then we had a multiple wedding. Honestly! The organ played a squeaky wedding march, and we went in, six couples. The church was full of soldiers, and—I don't mind saying I was ready to shed tears.
“We lined up, and Doctor Haverford married us. Delight says she is sure we are only one-sixth married. Quiet! You never heard such quiet—except for the General blowing his nose. I think myself he was weeping, and there was a rumor about the camp to that effect. You know—the flag over the altar, and all that. I tell you it made a fellow think.
“Well, I'm going over now. Quick work, isn't it? And to think that a few months ago I was hanging around the club and generally making a mess of life. That's all over now, thank God. I'm going to make good. Try to buck mother up. It's pretty hard for her. It's hard for all women, just waiting. And while I know I'm coming back, safe and sound, I'd like to feel that you are going to keep an eye on Delight. She's the most important thing in the world to me now.”
Then scrawled in a corner he had added,
“You've been mighty fine with me always, dad. I was a good bit of a pup last winter. If I make anything of myself at all, it will be because I want to be like you.”
Clayton sat for a long time with the letter in his hand. The happiness and hope that fairly radiated from it cheered and warmed him. He was nearly happy. And it came to him then that, while every man had the right to happiness, only those achieved it who craved it for others, and having craved it for them, at last saw the realization of their longing.
Natalie had had a dull Spring. With Graham's departure for camp she moved to the country house, carrying with her vast amounts of luggage, the innumerable thing, large and small, which were necessary for her comfort. The installing of herself in her new and luxurious rooms gave her occupation for several days. She liked her new environment. She liked herself in it. The rose-colored taffetas of her bedroom brought out the delicacy of her skin. The hangings of her bed, small and draped, reflected a faint color into her face, and the morning inspection with a hand-mirror, which always followed her coffee, showed her at her best instead of her worst.
Of her dressing-room she was not so sure. It's ivory-paneled walls, behind whose sliding panels were hung her gowns, her silk and satin chiffon negligees, her wraps and summer furs—all the vast paraphernalia with which she armed herself, as a knight with armor—the walls seemed cold. She hated old-blue, but old-blue Rodney had insisted upon.
He had held a bit of the taffeta to her cheek.
“It is delicious, Natalie,” he said. “It makes your eyes as blue as the sea.”
“Always a decorator!” she had replied, smiling.
And, standing in her blue room, the first day of her arrival, and frowning at her reflection, she remembered his reply.
“Because I have no right, with you, to be anything else.” He had stopped for a moment, and had absently folded and refolded the bit of blue silk. Suddenly he said, “What do you think I am going to do, now that our work together is done? Have you ever thought about that, Natalie?”
“You are coming often to enjoy your handiwork?”
He had made an impulsive gesture.
“I'm not coming. I've been seeing too much of you as it is. If you want the truth, I'm just wretchedly unhappy, Natalie. You know I'm in love with you, don't you?”
“I believe you think you are.”
“Don't laugh.” He almost snarled. “I may laugh at my idiocy, but you haven't any right to. I know I'm ridiculous. I've known it for months. But it's pretty serious for me.”
He had meant it. There could be no doubt of that. It is the curious quality of very selfish women that they inspire a certain sort of love. They are likely to be loved often, even tho the devotion they inspire is neither deep nor lasting. Big and single-hearted women are loved by one man, and that forever.
Natalie had not laughed, but she had done what was almost as bad. She had patted him on the arm.
“Don't talk like that,” she said, gently. “You are all I have now, Rodney, and I don't want to lose you. I'm suffering horribly these days. You're my greatest comfort.”
“I've heard you say that of a chair.”
“As for loving me, you must not talk like that. Under the circumstances, it's indelicate.”
“Oh!” he had said, and looked at her quickly. “I can love you, but it's indelicate to tell you about it!”
“I am married, Rodney.”
“Good God, do you think I ever forget it?”
There was a real change in their relationship, but neither of them understood it. The change was that Rodney was no longer playing. Little by little he had dropped his artistic posing for her benefit, his cynical cleverness, his adroit simulation of passion. He no longer dramatized himself, because rather often he forgot himself entirely. His passion had ceased to be spurious, and it was none the less real because he loved not a real woman, but one of his own artistic creation.
He saw in Natalie a misunderstood and suffering woman, bearing the burdens he knew of with dignity and a certain beauty. And behind her slightly theatrical silences he guessed at other griefs, nobly borne and only gently intimated. He developed, after a time, a certain suspicion of Clayton, not of his conduct but of his character. These big men were often hard. It was that quality which made them successful. They married tender, gentle girls, and then repressed and trampled on them.
Natalie became, in his mind, a crushed and broken thing, infinitely lonely and pathetic. And, without in the least understanding, Natalie instinctively knew it was when she was wistful and dependent that he found her most attractive, and became wistful and dependent to a point that imposed even on herself.
“I've been very selfish with you, Rodney, dear,” she said, lifting sad eyes to his. “I am going to be better. You must come often this summer, and I'll have some nice girls for you to play with.”
“Thank you,” he said, stiffly.
“We'll have to be as gay as we can,” she sighed. “I'm just a little dreary these days, you know.”
It was rather absurd that they were in a shop, and that the clerk should return just then with curtain cords, and that the discussion of certain shades of yellow made an anti-climax to it all. But in the car, later, he turned to her, roughly.
“You needn't ask any girls for me,” he said. “I only want one woman, and if I can't have her I don't want any one.”
At first the very fact that he could not have her had been, unconsciously, the secret of her attraction. She was a perfect thing, and unattainable. He could sigh for her with longing and perfect safety. But as time went on, with that incapacity of any human emotion to stand still, but either to go on or to go back, his passion took on a more human and less poetic aspect. She satisfied him less, and he wanted more.
For one thing, he dreamed that strange dream of mankind, of making ice burn, of turning snow to fire. The old chimera of turning the cold woman to warmth through his own passion began to obsess him. Sometimes he watched Natalie, and had strange fancies. He saw her lit from within by a fire, which was not the reflection of his, but was recklessly her own. How wonderful she would be, he thought. And at those times he had wild visions of going away with her into some beautiful wilderness and there teaching her what she had missed in life.
But altho now he always wanted her, he was not always thinking of a wilderness. It was in his own world that he wanted her, to fit beautifully into his house, to move, exquisitely dressed, through ball-rooms beside him. He wanted her, at those times, as the most perfect of all his treasures. He was still a collector!
The summer only served to increase his passion. During the long hot days, when Clayton was abroad or in Washington, or working late at night, as he frequently did how, they were much together. Natalie's plans for gayety had failed dismally. The city and the country houses near were entirely lacking in men. She found it a real grievance.
“I don't know what we are coming to,” she complained. “The country club is like a girl's boarding-school. I wish to heaven the war was over, and things were sensible again.”
So, during his week-end visits, they spent most of the time together. There were always girls there, and now and then a few men, who always explained immediately that they had been turned down for the service, or were going in the fall.
“I'm sure somebody has to stay home and attend to things here,” she said to him one August night. “But even when they are in America, they are rushing about, pretending to do things. One would think to see Clayton that he is the entire government. It's absurd.”
“I wish I could go,” he said unexpectedly.
“Don't be idiotic. You're much too old.”
“Not as old as Clay.”
“Oh, Clay! He's in a class by himself.” She laughed lightly.
“Where is he now?”
“In France, I think. Probably telling them how to run the war.”
“When is he coming back?”
“I don't know. What do you mean by wishing you could go?”
“Do you want me to tell you the truth?”
“Not if it's disagreeable.”
“Well, I will, and it's not very agreeable. I can't keep this up, Natalie. I can't keep on coming here, being in Clayton's house, and eating his bread, while I'm in love with his wife. It isn't decent.”
He flung away his cigaret, and bent forward.
“Don't you see that?” he asked gently. “Not while he is working for the country, and Graham is abroad.”
“I don't see why war needs to deprive me of my friends. I've lost everything else.”
His morals were matters of his private life, and they had been neither better nor worse than the average. But he had breeding and a sure sense of the fitness of things, and this present week-end visit, with the ostentatious care the younger crowd took to allow him time to see Natalie alone, was galling to him. It put him in a false position; what hurt more, perhaps, in an unfavorable light. The war had changed standards, too. Men were being measured, especially by women, and those who failed to measure up were being eliminated with cruel swiftness, especially the men who stayed at home.
With all this, too, there was a growing admiration for Clayton Spencer in their small circle. His name had been mentioned in connection with an important position in Washington. In the clubs there was considerable praise and some envy. And Rodney knew that his affair with Natalie was the subject of much invidious comment.
“Do you love him?” he asked, suddenly.
“I—why, of course I do.”
“Do you mean that?”
“I don't see what that has to do with our friendship.”
“Oh—friendship! You know how I feel, and yet you go on, bringing up that silly word. If you love him, you don't—love me, and yet you've let me hang around all these months, knowing I am mad about you. You don't play the game, Natalie.”
“What do you want to say?”
“If you don't love Clayton, why don't you tell him so? He's honest enough. And I miss my guess if he wants a wife who—cares for somebody else.”
She sat in the dusk, thinking, and he watched her. She looked very lovely in the setting which he himself had designed for her. She hated change; she loathed trouble, of any sort. And she was, those days, just a little afraid of that strange, quiet Clayton who seemed eternally engrossed in war and the things of war. She glanced about, at the white trellises that gleamed in the garden, at the silvery fleur de lis which was the fountain, at all the lovely things with which Clayton's wealth had allowed her to surround herself. And suddenly she knew she could not give them up.
“I don't see why you have to spoil everything,” she said fretfully. “It had been so perfect. Of course I'm not going to say anything to Clay. He has enough to worry him now,” she added, virtuously.
Suddenly Rodney stooped and kissed her, almost savagely.
“Then I'm going,” he said. And to her great surprise he went.
Alone in his room up-stairs Rodney had, in his anger, a glimpse of insight. He saw her, her life filled with small emotions, lacking the courage for big ones. He saw her, like a child, clutching one piece of cake and holding out a hand for another. He saw her, taking always, giving never.
“She's not worth it,” he muttered.
On the way to the station he reflected bitterly over the past year. He did not blame her so much as he blamed himself. He had been playing a game, an attractive game. During the first months of it his interest in Natalie had been subordinate to his interest in her house. He had been creating a beautiful thing, and he had had a very real joy in it. But lately he knew that his work on the house had been that he might build a background for Natalie. He had put into it the best of his ability, and she was not worth it.
For some days he neither wrote nor called her up. He was not happy, but he had a sense of relief. He held his head a trifle higher, was his own man again, and he began to make tentative inquiries as to whether he could be useful in the national emergency or not. He was half-hearted at first, but he found out something. The mere fact that he wanted to work in some capacity brought back some of his old friends. They had seemed to drop away, before, but they came back heartily and with hands out.
“Work?” said Terry Mackenzie, at the club one day, looking up from the billiard table, where he was knocking balls about, rather at haphazard. “Why, of course you can work. What about these new cantonments we're building all over the country? You ought to be useful there. They don't want 'em pretty, tho.” And Terry had laughed. But he put down his cue and took Rodney by the arm.
“Let's ask Nolan about it,” he said. “He's in the reading-room, tearing the British strategy to pieces. He knows everything these days, from the draft law to the month's shipping losses. Come along.”
It was from Nolan, however, that Rodney first realized how seriously Clayton's friends were taking his affair with Natalie, and that not at first from anything he said. It was an indefinable aloofness of manner, a hostility of tone. Nolan never troubled himself to be agreeable unless it suited his inclination, and apparently Terry found nothing unusual in his attitude. But Rodney did.
“Something he could build?” said Nolan, repeating Terry's question. “How do I know? There's a lot of building going on, Page, but it's not exactly your sort.” And there was a faint note of contempt in his voice.
“Who would be the man to see in Washington?” Rodney inquired.
“I'll look it up and let you know. You might call me up to-morrow.”
Old Terry, having got them together, went back to his billiards and left them. Nolan sat down and picked up his paper, with an air of ending the interview. But he put it down again as Rodney turned to leave the room.
“Page!”
“Yes?”
“D'you mind having a few minutes talk?”
Rodney braced himself.
“Not at all.”
But Nolan was slow to begin. He sat, newspaper on his knee, his deep-set eyes thoughtful. When he began it was slowly.
“I am one of Clay Spencer's oldest friends,” he said. “He's a white man, the whitest man I know. Naturally, anything that touches him touches me, in a way.”
“Well?”
“The name stands for a good bit, too. His father and his grandfather were the same sort. It's not often in this town that we have three generations without a breath of scandal against them.”
Rodney flushed angrily.
“What has that got to do with me?” he demanded.
“I don't know. I don't want to know. I simply wanted to tell you that there are a good many of us who take a peculiar pride in Clayton Spencer, and who resent anything that reflects on a name we respect rather highly.”
“That sounds like a threat.”
“Not at all. I was merely calling your attention to something I thought perhaps you had forgotten.” Then he got up' and his tone changed, became brisk, almost friendly. “Now, about this building thing. If you're in earnest I think it can be managed. You won't get any money to speak of, you know.”
“I don't want any money,” sullenly.
“Fine. You'll probably have to go west somewhere, and you'll be set down in the center of a hundred corn-fields and told to make them overnight into a temporary town. I suppose you've thought of all that?”
“I'll go wherever I'm sent.”
“Come along to the telephone, then.”
Rodney hesitated. He felt cheap and despicable, and his anger was still hot. They wanted to get him out of town. He saw that. They took little enough trouble to hide it. Well, he would go. He wanted to go anyhow, and he would show them something, too, if he got a chance. He would show them that he was as much a man as Clayton Spencer. He eyed Nolan's insolently slouching figure with furious eyes. But he followed him.
Had he secured an immediate appointment things might have been different for him. Like Chris Valentine, he had had one decent impulse, and like Chris too, there was a woman behind it. But Chris had been able to act on his impulse at once, and Rodney was compelled to wait while the mills of the government ground slowly.
Then, on the fourteenth of August, Natalie telegraphed him:
“Have had bad news about Graham. Can you come?”
He thought of Graham ill, possibly dead, and he took the next train, late in the evening. It was mid-week and Natalie was alone. He had thought of that possibility in the train and he was miserably uncomfortable, with all his joy at the prospect of seeing her again. He felt that the emergency must be his justification. Clayton was still abroad, and even his most captious critics would admit that Natalie should have a friend by if she were in trouble. Visions of Graham wounded filled his mind. He was anxious, restless and in a state of the highest nervous tension.
And there was no real emergency.
He found Natalie in the drawing-room, pacing the floor. She was still in her morning dress, and her eyes were red and swollen. She gave him both her hands, and he was surprised to find them cold as ice.
“I knew you would come,” she said. “I am so alone, so terrified.”
He could hardly articulate.
“What is it?”
“Graham has been ordered abroad.”
He stood still, staring at her, and then he dropped her hands.
“Is that all?” he asked, dully.
“No.”
“Good heavens, Natalie! Tell me. I've been frantic with anxiety about you.”
“He was married to-night to Delight Haverford.”
And still he stared at her.
“Then he's not hurt, or ill?”
“I didn't say he was. Good gracious, Rodney, isn't that bad enough?”
“But—what did you expect? He would have to go abroad some time. You knew that. I'm sorry, but—why in God's name didn't you say in your wire what the trouble was?”
“You sound exactly like Clay.”
She was entirely incapable of understanding. She stood before him, straight and resentful, and yet strangely wistful and appealing.
“I send you word that my only son is going to France, that he has married without so much as consulting me, that he is going to war and may never come back. I needed you, and you said once that when I needed you, wherever you were, you would come. So I sent for you, and now you act like—like Clay.”
“Have you any one here?”
“The servants. Good gracious, Rodney, are you worrying about that?”
“Only for you, Natalie.”
“We resent anything that reflects on a name we respect rather highly.” That was what Nolan had said.
“I'm sorry about Graham, dearest. I am sorry about any trouble that comes to you. You know that, Natalie. I'm only regretful that you have let me place you in an uncomfortable position. If my being here is known—Look here, Natalie, dear, I hate to bother you, but I'll have to take one of the cars and go back to the city to-night.”
“Aren't you being rather absurd?”
He hesitated. He could not tell her of that awkward talk with Nolan. There were many things he would not tell her; his own desire to rehabilitate himself among the men he knew, his own new-born feeling that to take advantage of Clayton's absence on business connected with the war was peculiarly indefensible.
“I shall order the car at once,” she said, and touched a bell. When she turned he was just behind her, but altho he held out his arms she evaded them, her eyes hard and angry.
“I wish you would try to understand,” he said.
“I do, very thoroughly. Too thoroughly. You are afraid for yourself, not for me. I am in trouble, but that is a secondary consideration. Don't bother about me, Rodney. I have borne a great deal alone in my life, and I can bear this.”
She turned, and went with considerable dignity out of the door.
“Natalie!” he called. But he heard her with a gentle rustle of silks going up the staircase. It did not add to his comfort that she had left him to order the car.
All through the night Rodney rode and thought. He was angry at Natalie, but he was angrier at himself. He felt that he had been brutal, unnecessarily callous. After all, her only son was on his way to war. It was on the cards that he might not come back. And he had let his uneasiness dominate his sympathy. He had lost her, but then he had never had her. He never could have her.
Half way to town, on a back road, the car broke down, and after vainly endeavoring to start it the chauffeur set off on foot to secure help. Rodney slept, uncomfortably, and wakened with the movement of the machine to find it broad day. That was awkward, for Natalie's car was conspicuous, marked too with her initials. He asked to be set down at a suburban railway station, and was dismayed to find it crowded with early commuters, who stared at the big car with interest. On the platform, eyeing him with unfriendly eyes, was Nolan. Rodney made a movement toward him. The situation was intolerable, absurd. But Nolan turned his back and proceeded to read his newspaper.
Perhaps not in years had Rodney Page faced the truth about himself so clearly as he did that morning, riding into the city on the train which carried, somewhere ahead, that quietly contemptuous figure that was Denis Nolan. Faced the truth, saw himself for what he was, and loathed the thing he saw. For a little time, too, it was given him to see Natalie for what she was, for what she would always be, her sole contribution to life the web of her selfishness, carefully woven, floating apparently aimlessly, and yet snaring and holding relentlessly whatever it touched. Killing freedom. He saw Clayton and Graham and himself, feeders for her monstrous complacency and vanity, and he made a definite determination to free himself.
“I'm through,” he reflected savagely. “I'll show them something, too. I'll—”
He hesitated. How lovely she was! And she cared for him. She was small and selfish and unspeakably vain, but she cared for him.
The war had done something for Rodney Page. He no longer dreamed the old dream, of turning her ice to fire. But he dreamed, for a moment, something finer. He saw Natalie his, and growing big and fine through love. He saw himself and Natalie, like cards in the game of life, re-dealt. A new combination; a winning hand—