From the moment, the day before Christmas, when Graham had taken the little watch from his pocket and fastened it on Anna's wrist, he was rather uneasily aware that she had become his creature. He had had no intention of buying Anna. He was certainly not in love with her. But he found her amusing and at times comforting.
He had, of course, expected to lose her after the unlucky day when Clayton had found them together, but Dunbar had advised that she be kept on for a time at least. Mentally Graham figured that the first of January would see her gone, and the thought of a Christmas present for her was partly compounded of remorse.
He had been buying a cigaret case for Marion when the thought came to him. He had not bought a Christmas present for a girl, except flowers, since the first year he was at college. He had sent Delight one that year, a half-dozen little leather-bound books of poetry. What a precious young prig he must have been! He knew now that girls only pretended to care for books. They wanted jewelry, and they got past the family with it by pretending it was not real, or that they had bought it out of their allowances. One of Toots' friends was taking a set of silver fox from a man, and she was as straight as a die. Oh, he knew girls, now.
The next day he asked Anna Klein: “What would you like for Christmas?”
Anna, however, had insisted that she did not want a Christmas present.
Later on, however, she had seen a watch one of the girls on the hill had bought for twelve dollars, and on his further insistence a day or so later she had said:
“Do you really want to know?”
“Of course I do.”
“You oughtn't to spend money on me, you know.”
“You let me attend to that. Now, out with it!”
So she told him rather nervously, for she felt that twelve dollars was a considerable sum. He had laughed, and agreed instantly, but when he went to buy it he found himself paying a price that rather startled him.
“Don't you lose it, young lady!” he admonished her when, the day before Christmas, he fastened it on her wrist. Then he had stooped down to kiss her, and the intensity of feeling in her face had startled him. “It's a good watch,” he had said, rather uneasily; “no excuse for your being late now!”
All the rest of the day she was radiant.
He meant well enough even then. He had never pretended to love her. He accepted her adoration, petted and teased her in return, worked off his occasional ill humors on her, was indeed conscious sometimes that he was behaving extremely well in keeping things as they were.
But by the middle of January he began to grow uneasy. The atmosphere at Marion's was bad; there was a knowledge of life plus an easy toleration of certain human frailties that was as insidious as a slow fever. The motto of live and let live prevailed. And Marion refused to run away with him and marry him, or to let him go to his father.
In his office all day long there was Anna, so yielding, so surely his to take if he wished. Already he knew that things there must either end or go forward. Human emotions do not stand still; they either advance or go back, and every impulse of his virile young body was urging him on.
He made at last an almost frenzied appeal to Marion to marry him at once, but she refused flatly.
“I'm not going to ruin you,” she said. “If you can't bring your people round, we'll just have to wait.”
“They'd be all right, once it is done.”
“Not if I know your father! Oh, he'd be all right—in ten years or so. But what about the next two or three? We'd have to live, wouldn't we?”
He lay awake most of the night thinking things over. Did she really care for him, as Anna cared, for instance? She was always talking about their having to live. If they couldn't manage on his salary for a while, then it was because Marion did not care enough to try.
For the first time he began to question Marion's feeling for him. She had been rather patronizing him lately. He had overheard her, once, speaking of him as a nice kid, and it rankled. In sheer assertion of his manhood he met Anna Klein outside the mill at the noon hour, the next day, and took her for a little ride in his car. After that he repeatedly did the same thing, choosing infrequented streets and roads, dining with her sometimes at a quiet hotel out on the Freeland road.
“How do you get away with this to your father?” he asked her once.
“Tell him you're getting ready to move out to the new plant, and we're working. He's not round much in the evenings now. He's at meetings, or swilling beer at Gus's saloon. They're a bad lot, Graham, that crowd at Gus's.”
“How do you mean, bad?”
“Well, they're Germans, for one thing, the sort that shouts about the Fatherland. They make me sick.”
“Let's forget them, honey,” said Graham, and reaching under the table-cloth, caught and held one of her hands.
He was beginning to look at things with the twisted vision of Marion's friends. He intended only to flirt a little with Anna Klein, but he considered that he was extremely virtuous and, perhaps, a bit of a fool for letting things go at that. Once, indeed, Tommy Hale happened on them in a road-house, sitting very quietly with a glass of beer before Graham and a lemonade in front of Anna, and had winked at him as though he had received him into the brotherhood of those who were seeing life.
Then, near the end of January, events took another step forward. Rudolph Klein was discharged from the mill.
Clayton, coming down one morning, found the manager, Hutchinson, and Dunbar in his office. The two men had had a difference of opinion, and the matter was laid before him.
“He is a constant disturbing element,” Hutchinson finished; “I understand Mr. Dunbar's position, but we can't afford to have the men thrown into a ferment, constantly.”
“If you discharge him you rouse his suspicions and those of his gang,” said Dunbar, sturdily.
“There is a gang, then?”
“A gang! My God!”
In the end, however, Clayton decided to let Rudolph go. Hutchinson was insistent. Production was falling down. One or two accidents to the machinery lately looked like sabotage. He had found a black cat crudely drawn on the cement pavement outside his office-door that very morning, the black cat being the symbol of those I.W.W.'s who advocated destruction.
“What about the girl?” Dunbar asked, when the manager had gone.
“I have kept her, against my better judgment, Mr. Dunbar.”
For just a moment Dunbar hesitated. He knew certain things that Clayton Spencer did not, things that it was his business to know. The girl might be valuable one of these days. She was in love with young Spencer. The time might come when he, Dunbar, would need to capitalize that love and use it against Rudolph and the rest of the crowd that met in the little room behind Shroeder's saloon. It was too bad, in a way. He was sorry for this man with the strong, repressed face and kindly mouth, who sat across from him. But these were strange times. A man could not be too scrupulous.
“Better keep her on for a month or two, anyhow,” he said. “They're up to something, and I miss my guess if it isn't directed against you.”
“How about Herman Klein?”
“Nothing doing,” stated Mr. Dunbar, flatly. “Our informer is tending bar at Gus's. Herman listens and drinks their beer, but he's got the German fear of authority in him. He's a beer socialist. That's all.”
But in that Mr. Dunbar left out of account the innate savagery that lurked under Herman's phlegmatic surface.
“You don't think it would do if she was moved to another office?”
“The point is this.” Dunbar moved his chair forward. “The time may come when we will need the girl as an informer. Rudolph Klein is infatuated with her. Now I understand that she has a certain feeling of—loyalty to Mr. Graham. In that case”—he glanced at Clayton—“the welfare of the many, Mr. Spencer, against the few.”
For a long time after he was gone Clayton sat at his desk, thinking. Every instinct in him revolted against the situation thus forced on him. There was something wrong with Dunbar's reasoning. Then it flashed on him that Dunbar probably was right, and that their points of view were bitterly opposed. Dunbar would have no scruples, because he was not quite a gentleman. But war was a man's game. It was not the time for fine distinctions of ethics. And Dunbar was certainly a man.
If only he could talk it over with Natalie! But he knew Natalie too well to expect any rational judgment from her. She would demand at once that the girl should go. Yet he needed a woman's mind on it. In any question of relationship between the sexes men were creatures of impulse, but women had plotted and planned through the ages. They might lose their standards, but never their heads. Not that he put such a thought into words. He merely knew that women were better at such things than men.
That afternoon, as a result of much uncertainty, he took his problem to Audrey. And Audrey gave him an answer.
“You've got to think of the mill, Clay,” she said. “The Dunbar man is right. And all you or any other father of a boy can do is to pray in season, and to trust to Graham's early training.”
And all the repressed bitterness in Clayton Spencer's heart was in his answer.
“He never had any early training, Audrey. Oh, he had certain things. His manners, for instance. But other things? I ought not to say that. It was my fault, too. I'm not blaming only Natalie. Only now, when it is all we have to count on—”
He was full of remorse when he started for home. He felt guilty of every disloyalty. And in masculine fashion he tried to make up to Natalie for the truth that had been wrung from him. He carried home a great bunch of roses for her. But he carried home, too, a feeling of comfort and vague happiness, as though the little room behind him still reached out and held him in its warm embrace.
In the evening of the thirty-first of January Clayton and Graham were waiting for Natalie to come down to dinner when the bell rang, and Dunbar was announced. Graham welcomed the interruption. He had been vaguely uneasy with his father since that day in his office when Clayton had found him on Anna Klein's desk. Clayton had tried to restore the old friendliness of their relation, but the boy had only half-heartedly met his advances. Now and then he himself made an overture, but it was the almost timid advance of a puppy that has been beaten. It left Clayton discouraged and alarmed, set him to going back over the past for any severity on his part to justify it. Now and then he wondered if, in Graham's frequent closetings with Natalie, she did not covertly undermine his influence with the boy, to increase her own.
But if she did, why? What was going on behind the impassive, lovely mask that was her face.
Dunbar was abrupt, as usual.
“I've brought you some news, Mr. Spencer,” he said. He looked oddly vital and alive in the subdued and quiet room. “They've shown their hand at last. But maybe you've heard it.”
“I've heard nothing new.”
“Then listen,” said Dunbar, bending forward over a table, much as it was his habit to bend over Clayton's desk. “We're in it at last. Or as good as in it. Unrestricted submarine warfare! All merchant-ships bound to and from Allied ports to be sunk without warning! We're to be allowed—mark this, it's funny!—we're to be allowed to send one ship a week to England, nicely marked and carrying passengers only.”
There was a little pause. Clayton drew a long breath.
“That means war,” he said finally.
“Hell turned over and stirred up with a pitch-fork, if we have any backbone at all,” agreed Dunbar. He turned to Graham. “You young fellows'll be crazy about this.”
“You bet we will,” said Graham.
Clayton slipped an arm about the boy's shoulders. He could not speak for a moment. All at once he saw what the news meant. He saw Graham going into the horror across the sea. He saw vast lines of marching men, boys like Graham, boys who had frolicked through their careless days, whistled and played and slept sound of nights, now laden like pack-animals and carrying the implements of death in their hands, going forward to something too terrible to contemplate.
And a certain sure percentage of them would never come back.
His arm tightened about the boy. When he withdrew it Graham straightened.
“If it's war, it's my war, father.”
And Clayton replied, quietly:
“It is your war, old man.”
Dunbar turned his back and inspected Natalie's portrait. When he faced about again Graham was lighting a cigaret, and Natalie herself was entering the room. In her rose-colored satin she looked exotic, beautiful, and Dunbar gave her a fleeting glance of admiration as he bowed. She looked too young to have a boy going to war. Behind her he suddenly saw other women, thousands of other women, living luxurious lives, sheltered and pampered, and suddenly called on to face sacrifice without any training for it.
“Didn't know you were going out,” he said. “Sorry. I'll run along now.”
“We are dining at home,” said Natalie, coldly. She remained standing near the door, as a hint to the shabby gentleman with the alert eyes who stood by the table. But Dunbar had forgotten her already.
“I came here right away,” he explained, “because you may be having trouble now. In fact, I'm pretty sure you will. If we declare war to-morrow, as we may?”
“War!” said Natalie, and took a step forward.
Dunbar remembered her.
“We will probably declare war in a day or two. The Germans...”
But Natalie was looking at Clayton with a hostility in her eyes she took no trouble to conceal.
“I hope you'll be happy, now. You've been talking war, wanting war—and now you've got it.”
She turned and went out of the room. The three men in the library below heard her go up the stairs and the slam of her door behind her. Later on she sent word that she did not care for any dinner, and Clayton asked Dunbar to remain. Practical questions as to the mill were discussed, Graham entering into them with a new interest. He was flushed and excited. But Clayton was rather white and very quiet.
Once Graham took advantage of Dunbar's preoccupation with his asparagus to say:
“You don't object to the aviation service, father?”
“Wherever you think you can be useful.”
After coffee Graham rose.
“I'll go and speak to mother,” he said. And Clayton felt in him a new manliness. It was as though his glance said, “She is a woman, you know. War is men's work, work for you and me. But it's hard on them.”
Afterward Clayton was to remember with surprise how his friends gathered that night at the house. Nolan came in early, his twisted grin rather accentuated, his tall frame more than usually stooped. He stood in the doorway of the library, one hand in his pocket, a familiar attitude which made him look oddly boyish.
“Well!” he drawled, without greeting. “They've done it. The English have got us. We hadn't a chance. The little Welshman—”
“Come in,” Clayton said, “and talk like an American and not an Irishman. I don't want to know what you think about Lloyd George. What are you going to do?”
“I was thinking,” Nolan observed, advancing, “of blowing up Washington. We'd have a fresh start, you see. With Washington gone root and branch we would have some sort of chance, a clear sweep, with the capital here or in Boston. Or London.”
Clayton laughed. Behind Nolan's cynicism he felt a real disturbance. But Dunbar eyed him uncertainly. He didn't know about some of these Irish. They'd fight like hell, of course, if only they'd forget England.
“Don't worry about Washington,” Clayton said. “Let it work out its own problems. We will have our own. What do you suppose men like you and myself are going to do? We can't fight.”
Nolan settled himself in a long chair.
“Why can't we fight?” he asked. “I heard something the other day. Roosevelt is going to take a division abroad—older men. I rather like the idea. Wherever he goes there'll be fighting. I'm no Rough Rider, God knows; but I haven't spent a half hour every noon in a gymnasium for the last ten years for nothing. And I can shoot.”
“And you are free,” Clayton observed, quietly.
Nolan looked up.
“It's going to be hard on the women,” he said. “You're all right. They won't let you go. You're too useful where you are. But of course there's the boy.”
When Clayton made no reply Nolan glanced at him again.
“I suppose he'll want to go,” he suggested.
Clayton's face was set. For more than an hour now Graham had been closeted with his mother, and as the time went on, and no slam of a door up-stairs told of his customary method of leaving a room, he had been conscious of a growing uneasiness. The boy was soft; the fiber in him had not been hardened yet, not enough to be proof against tears. He wanted desperately to leave Nolan, to go up and learn what arguments, what coaxing and selfish whimperings Natalie was using with the boy. But he wanted, also desperately, to have the boy fight his own fight and win.
“He will want to go, I think. Of course, his mother will be shaken just now. It'll all new to her. She wouldn't believe it was coming.”
“He'll go,” Nolan said reflectively. “They'll all go, the best of them first. After all, we've been making a lot of noise about wanting to get into the thing. Now we're in, and that's the first price we pay—the boys.”
A door slammed up-stairs, and Clayton heard Graham coming down. He passed the library door, however, and Clayton suddenly realized that he was going out.
“Graham!” he called.
Graham stopped, and came back slowly.
“Yes, father,” he said, from the doorway.
“Aren't you coming in?”
“I thought I'd go out for a hit of a spin, if you don't mind. Evening, Mr. Nolan.”
The boy was shaken. Clayton knew it from his tone. All the fine vigor of the early evening was gone. And an overwhelming rage filled him, against Natalie, against himself, even against the boy. Trouble, which should have united his house, had divided it. The first threat of trouble, indeed.
“You can go out later,” he said rather sharply. “We ought to talk things over, Graham. This is a mighty serious time.”
“What's the use of talking things over, father? We don't know anything but that we may declare war.”
“That's enough, isn't it?”
But he was startled when he saw Graham's face. He was very pale and his eyes already looked furtive. They were terribly like Natalie's eyes sometimes. The frankness was gone out of them. He came into the room, and stood there, rigid.
“I promised mother to get her some sleeping-powders.”
“Sleeping-powders!”
“She's nervous.”
“Bad things, sleeping-powders,” said Nolan. “Get her to take some setting-up exercises by an open window and she'll sleep like a top.”
“Do you mind, if I go, father?”
Clayton saw that it was of no use to urge the boy. Graham wanted to avoid him, wanted to avoid an interview. The early glow of the evening faded. Once again the sense of having lost his son almost overwhelmed him.
“Very well,” he said stiffly. And Graham went out.
However, he did not leave the house. At the door he met Doctor Haverford. And Delight, and Clayton heard the clergyman's big bass booming through the hall.
“—like a lamb to the slaughter!” he was saying. “And I a man of peace!”
When he came into the library he was still holding forth with an affectation of rage.
“I ask you, Clayton,” he said, “what refuge is there for a man of peace? My own child, leading me out into the night, and inquiring on the way over if I did not feel that the commandment not to kill was a serious error.”
“Of course he's going,” she said. “He has been making the most outrageous excuses, just to hear mother and me reply to them. And all the time nothing would hold him back.”
“My dear,” said the rector solemnly. “T shall have to tell you something. I shall have to lay bare the secrets of my heart. How are you, Nolan? Delight, they will not take me. I have three back teeth on a plate. I have never told you this before. I did not wish to ruin your belief that I am perfect. But—”
In the laugh that greeted this Graham returned. He was, Clayton saw, vaguely puzzled by the rector and rather incredulous as to Delight's attitude.
“Do you really want him to go?” he asked her.
“Of course. Aren't you going? Isn't everybody who is worth anything going? I'd go myself if I could. You don't know how lucky you are.”
“But is your Mother willing?”
“Why, what sort of a mother do you think I have?”
Clayton overheard that, and he saw Graham wince. His own hands clenched. What a power in the world a brave woman was! And what evil could be wrought by a woman without moral courage, a selfish woman. He brought himself up short at that.
Others came in. Hutchinson, from the mill. Terry Mackenzie, Rodney Page, in evening clothes and on his way from the opera to something or other. In a corner Graham and Delight talked. The rector, in a high state of exaltation, was inclined to be oratorical and a trifle noisy. He dilated on the vast army that would rise overnight, at the call. He considered the raising of a company from his own church, and nominated Clayton as its captain. Nolan grinned sardonically.
“Precisely,” he said dryly. “Clayton, because he looks like a Greek god, is ideally fitted to lead a lot of men who never saw a bayonet outside of a museum. Against trained fighting men. There's a difference you know, dominie, between a clay pigeon and a German with a bomb in one hand and a saw-toothed bayonet in the other.”
“We did that in the Civil War.”
“We did. And it took four years to fight a six-months war.”
“We must have an army. I daresay you'll grant that.”
“Well, you can bet on one thing; we're not going to have every ward boss who wants to make a record raising a regiment out of his henchmen and leading them to death.”
“What would you suggest?” inquired the rector, rather crestfallen.
“I'd suggest training men as officers. And then—a draft.”
“Never come to it in the world.” Hutchinson spoke up. “I've heard men in the mill talking. They'll go, some of them, but they won't be driven. It would be civil war.”
Clayton glanced at Graham as he replied. The boy was leaning forward, listening.
“There's this to be said for the draft,” he said. “Under the volunteer system the best of our boys will go first. That's what happened in England. And they were wiped out. It's every man's war now. There is no reason why the few should be sacrificed for the many.”
“And there's this, too,” Graham broke in. He was flushed and nervous. “A fellow would have to go. He wouldn't be having to think whether his going would hurt anybody or not. He wouldn't have to decide. He'd—just go.”
There was a little hush in the room. Then Nolan spoke.
“Right-o!” he said. “The only trouble about it is that it's likely to leave out some of us old chaps, who'd like to have a fist in it.”
Hutchinson remained after the others had gone. He wanted to discuss the change in status of the plant.
“We'll be taken over by the government, probably,” Clayton told him. “They have all the figures, capacity and so on. The Ordnance Department has that in hand.”
Hutchinson nodded. He had himself made the report.
“We'll have to look out more than ever, I suppose,” he said, as he rose to go. “The government is guarding all bridges and railways already. Met a lot of National Guard boys on the way.”
Graham left when he did, offering to take him to his home, and Clayton sat for some time alone, smoking and thinking. So the thing had come at last. A year from now, and where would they all be? The men who had been there to-night, himself, Graham? Would they all be even living? Would Graham—?
He looked back over the years. Graham a baby, splashing water in his bath and shrieking aloud with joy; Graham in his first little-boy clothes, riding a velocipede in the park and bringing in bruises of an amazing size and blackness; Graham going away to school, and manfully fixing his mind on his first long trousers, so he would not cry; Graham at college, coming in with the winning crew, and stumbling, half collapsed, into the arms of a waiting, cheering crowd. And the Graham who had followed his mother up the stairs that night, to come down baffled, thwarted, miserable.
He rose and threw away his cigar. He must have the thing out with Natalie. The boy's soul was more important than his body. He wanted him safe. God, how he wanted him safe! But he wanted him to be a man.
Natalie's room was dark when he went in. He hesitated. Then he heard her in bed, sobbing quietly. He was angry at himself for his impatience at the sound. He stood beside the bed, and forced a gentleness he did not feel.
“Can I get you anything?” he asked.
“No, thank you.” And he moved toward the lamp. “Don't turn the light on. I look dreadful.”
“Shall I ring for Madeleine?”
“No. Graham is bringing me a sleeping-powder.”
“If you are not sleepy, may I talk to you about some things?”
“I'm sick, Clay. My head is bursting.”
“Sometimes it helps to talk out our worries, dear.” He was still determinedly gentle.
He heard her turning her pillow, and settling herself more comfortably.
“Not to you. You've made up your mind. What's the use?”
“Made up my mind to what?”
“To sending Graham to be killed.”
“That's hardly worthy of you, Natalie,” he said gravely. “He is my son, too. I love him at least as much as you do. I don't think this is really up to us, anyhow. It is up to him. If he wants to go?”
She sat up, suddenly, her voice thin and high.
“How does he know what he wants?” she demanded. “He's too young. He doesn't know what war is; you say so yourself. You say he is too young to have a position worth while at the plant, but of course he's old enough to go to war and have a leg shot off, or to be blinded, or something.” Her voice broke.
He sat down on the bed and felt around until he found her hand. But she jerked it from him.
“You promised me once to let him make his own decision if the time came.”
“When did I promise that?”
“In the fall, when I came home from England.”
“I never made such a promise.”
“Will you make it now?”
“No!”
He rose, more nearly despairing than he had ever been. He could not argue with a hysterical woman. He hated cowardice, but far deeper than that was his conviction that she had already exacted some sort of promise. And the boy was not like her in that respect. He regarded a promise as almost in the nature of an oath. He himself had taught him that in the creed of a gentleman a promise was a thing of his honor, to be kept at any cost.
“You are compelling me to do a strange and hateful thing,” he said. “If you intend to use your influence to keep him out, I shall have to offset it by urging him to go. That is putting a very terrible responsibility on me.”
He heard her draw her breath sharply.
“If you do that I shall leave you,” she said, in a frozen voice.
Suddenly he felt sorry for her. She was so weak, so childish, so cowardly. And this was the nearest they had come to a complete break.
“You're tired and nervous,” he said. “We have come a long way from what I started out to say. And a long way from—the way things used to be between us. If this thing, to-night, does not bring two people together—”
“Together!” she cried shrilly. “When have we been together? Not in years. You have been married to your business. I am only your housekeeper, and Graham's mother. And even Graham you are trying to take away from me. Oh, go away and let me alone.”
Down-stairs, thoughts that were almost great had formulated themselves in his mind; that to die that others might live might be better than to live oneself; that he loved his country, although he had been shamefaced about it; that America was really the melting-pot of the world, and that, perhaps, only the white flame of war would fuse it into a great nation.
But Natalie made all these thoughts tawdry. She cheapened them. She found in him nothing fine; therefore there was probably nothing fine in him. He went away, to lie awake most of the night.
But, with the breaking off of diplomatic relations, matters remained for a time at a standstill. Natalie dried her eyes and ordered some new clothes, and saw rather more of Rodney Page than was good for her.
With the beginning of February the country house was far enough under way for it to be promised for June, and Natalie, the fundamentals of its decoration arranged for, began to haunt old-furniture shops, accompanied always by Rodney.
“Not that your taste is not right, Natalie,” he explained. “It is exquisite. But these fellows are liars and cheats, some of them. Besides, I like trailing along, if you don't mind.”
Trailing along was a fairly accurate phrase. There was scarcely a day now when Natalie's shining car, with its two men in livery, did not draw up before Rodney's office building, or stand, as unostentatiously as a fire engine, not too near the entrance of his club. Clayton, going in, had seen it there once or twice, and had smiled rather grimly. He considered its presence there in questionable taste, but he felt no uneasiness. Determined as he was to give Natalie such happiness as was still in him to give, he never mentioned these instances.
But a day came, early in February, which was to mark a change in the relationship between Natalie and Rodney.
It started simply enough. They had lunched together at a down-town hotel, and then went to look at rugs. Rodney had found her rather obdurate as to old rugs. They were still arguing the matter in the limousine.
“I just don't like to think of all sorts of dirty Turks and Arabs having used them,” she protested. “Slept on them, walked on them, spilled things on the—? ugh!”
“But the colors, Natalie dear! The old faded 'copper-tones, the dull-blues, the dead-rose! There is a beauty about age, you know. Lovely as you are, you'll be even lovelier as an old woman.”
“I'm getting there rather rapidly.”
He turned and looked at her critically. No slightest aid that she had given her beauty missed his eyes, the delicate artificial lights in her hair, her eyebrows drawn to a hair's breadth and carefully arched, the touch of rouge under her eyes and on the lobes of her ears. But she was beautiful, no matter what art had augmented her real prettiness. She was a charming, finished product, from her veil and hat to her narrowly shod feet. He liked finished things, well done. He liked the glaze on a porcelain; he liked the perfect lacquering on the Chinese screen he had persuaded Natalie to buy; he preferred wood carved into the fine lines of Sheraton to the trees that grow in the Park, for instance, through which they were driving.
A Sheraton sideboard was art. Even certain forms of Colonial mahogany were art, although he was not fond of them. And Natalie was—art. Even if she represented the creative instincts of her dressmaker and her milliner, and not her own—he did not like a Louis XV sofa the less that it had not carved itself.
Possibly Natalie appealed then to his collective instinct, he had not analyzed it. He only knew that he liked being with her, and he was not annoyed, certainly, by the fact that he knew their constant proximity was arousing a certain amount of comment.
So:
“You are very beautiful,” he said with his appraising glance full on her. “You are quite the loveliest woman I know.”
“Still? With a grown son?”
“I am not a boy myself, you know.”
“What has that to do with it?”
He hesitated, then laughed a little.
“I don't know,” he said. “I didn't mean to say that, exactly. Of course, that fact is that I'm rather glad you are not a debutante. You would be giving me odds and ends of dances if you were, you know, and shifting me as fast as possible. As it is—”
The coquetry which is a shallow woman's substitute for passion stirred in her.
“Well? I'm awfully interested.”
He turned and faced her.
“I wonder if you are!”
“Go on, Roddie. As it is??”
“As it is,” he said, rather rapidly, “you give me a great deal of happiness. I can't say all I would like to, but just being with you—Natalie, I wonder if you know how much it means to me to see you every day.”
“I like it, or I wouldn't do it.”
“But—I wonder if it means anything to you?”
Curiously enough, with the mere putting it into words, his feeling for her seemed to grow. He was even somewhat excited. He bent toward her, his eyes on her face, and caught one of her gloved hands. He was no longer flirting with a pretty woman. He was in real earnest. But Natalie was still flirting.
“Do you want to know why I like to be with you? Because of course I do, or I shouldn't be.”
“Does a famishing man want water?”
“Because you are sane and sensible. You believe, as I do, in going on as normally as possible. All these people who go around glooming because there is a war across the Atlantic! They are so tiresome. Good heavens, the hysterical attitude of some women! And Clay!”
He released her hand.
“So you like me because I'm sensible! Thanks.”
“That's a good reason, isn't it?”
“Good God, Natalie, I'm only sensible because I have to be. Not about the war. I'm not talking about that. About you.”
“What have I got to do with your being sensible and sane?”
“Just think about things, and you'll know.”
She was greatly thrilled and quite untouched. It was a pleasant little game, and she held all the winning cards. So she said, very softly:
“We mustn't go on like this, you know. We mustn't spoil things.”
And by her very “we” let him understand that the plight was not his but theirs. They were to suffer on, she implied, in a mutual, unacknowledged passion. He flushed deeply.
But although he was profoundly affected, his infatuation was as spurious as her pretense of one. He was a dilettante in love, as he was in art. His aesthetic sense, which would have died of an honest passion, fattened on the very hopelessness of his beginning an affair with Natalie. Confronted just then with the privilege of marrying her, he would have drawn back in dismay.
Since no such privilege was to be his, however, he found a deep satisfaction in considering himself hopelessly in love with her. He was profoundly sorry for himself. He saw himself a tragic figure, hopeless and wretched. He longed for the unattainable; he held up empty hands to the stars, and by so mimicking the gesture of youth, he regained youth.
“You won't cut me out of your life, Natalie?” he asked wistfully.
And Natalie, who would not have sacrificed this new thrill for anything real in the world, replied:
“It would be better, wouldn't it?”
There was real earnestness in his voice when he spoke. He had dramatized himself by that time.
“Don't take away the only thing that makes life worth living, dear!”
Which Natalie, after a proper hesitation, duly promised not to do.
There were other conversations after that. About marriage, for instance, which Rodney broadly characterized as the failure of the world; he liked treading on dangerous ground.
“When a man has married, and had children, he has fulfilled his duty to the State. That's all marriage is—duty to the State. After that he follows his normal instincts, of course.”
“If you are defending unfaithfulness?”
“Not at all. I admire faithfulness. It's rare enough for admiration. No. I'm recognizing facts. Don't you suppose even dear old Clay likes a pretty woman? Of course he does. It's a total difference of view-point, Natalie. What is an incident to a man is a crime to a woman.”
Or:
“All this economic freedom of women is going to lead to other freedoms, you know.”
“What freedoms?”
“The right to live wherever they please. One liberty brings another, you know. Women used to marry for a home, for some one to keep them. Now they needn't, but—they have to live just the same.”
“I wish you wouldn't, Rodney. It's so—cheap.”
It was cheap. It was the old game of talking around conversational corners, of whispering behind mental doors. It was insidious, dangerous, and tantalizing. It made between them a bond of lowered voices, of being on the edge of things. Their danger was as spurious as their passion, but Natalie, without humor and without imagination, found the sense of insecurity vaguely attractive.
Fundamentally cold, she liked the idea of playing with fire.