When Natalie roused from her nap that Sunday afternoon, it was to find Marion gone, and Graham waiting for her in her boudoir. Through the open door she could see him pacing back and forward and something in his face made her vaguely uneasy. She assumed the child-like smile which so often preserved her from the disagreeable.
“What a sleep I've had,” she said, and yawned prettily. “I'll have one of your cigarets, darling, and then let's take a walk.”
Graham knew Natalie's idea of a walk, which was three or four blocks along one of the fashionable avenues, with the car within hailing distance. At the end of the fourth block she always declared that her shoes pinched, and called the machine.
“You don't really want to walk, mother.”
“Of course I do, with you. Ring for Madeleine, dear.”
She was uncomfortable. Graham had been very queer lately. He would have long, quiet spells, and then break out in an uncontrollable irritation, generally at the servants. But Graham did not ring for Madeleine. He lighted a cigaret for Natalie, and standing off, surveyed her. She was very pretty. She was prettier than Toots. That pale blue wrapper, or whatever it was, made her rather exquisite. And Natalie, curled up on her pale rose chaise longue, set to work as deliberately to make a conquest of her son as she had ever done to conquer Rodney Page, or the long list of Rodney's predecessors.
“You're growing very handsome, you know, boy,” she said. “Almost too handsome. A man doesn't need good looks. They're almost a handicap. Look at your father.”
“They haven't hurt him any, I should say.”
“I don't know.” She reflected, eyeing her cigaret. “He presumes on them, rather. And a good many men never think a handsome man has any brains.”
“Well, he fools them there, too.”
She raised her eyebrows slightly.
“Tell me about the new plant, Graham.”
“I don't know anything about it yet,” he said bluntly. “And you wouldn't be really interested if I did.”
“That's rather disagreeable of you.”
“No; I'm just trying to talk straight, for once. We—you and I—we always talk around things. I don't know why.”
“You look terribly like your father just now. You are quite savage.”
“That's exactly what I mean, mother. You don't say father is savage. God knows he isn't that. You just say I act like father, and that I am savage.”
Natalie blew a tiny cloud of cigaret smoke, and watched it for a moment.
“You sound fearfully involved. But never mind about that. I daresay I've done something; I don't know what, but of course I am guilty.”
“Why did you bring Marion here to-day, mother?”
“Well, if you want to know exactly, I met her coming out of church, and it occurred to me that we were having rather a nice luncheon, and that it would be a pity not to ask some one to come in. It was a nice luncheon, wasn't it?”
“That's why you asked her? For food?”
“Brutally put, but correct.”
“You have been asking her here a lot lately. And yet the last time we discussed her you said she was fast. That she wanted to marry me for my money. That people would laugh if I fell for it.”
“I hardly used those words, did I?”
“For heaven's sake, mother,” he cried, exasperated. “Don't quibble. Let's get down to facts. Does your bringing her here mean that you've changed your mind?”
Natalie considered. She was afraid of too quick a surrender lest he grow suspicious. She decided to temporize, with the affectation of frankness that had once deceived Clayton, and that still, she knew, affected Graham.
“I'll tell you exactly,” she said, slowly. “At first I thought it was just an infatuation. And—you really are young, Graham, although you look and act like such a man. But I feel, now that time has gone on and you still care about her, that after all, your happiness is all that matters.”
“Mother!”
But she held up her hand.
“Remember, I am only speaking for myself. My dearest wish is to make you happy. You are all I have. But I cannot help you very much. Your father looks at those things differently. He doesn't quite realize that you are grown up, and have a right to decide some things for yourself.”
“He has moved me up, raised my salary.”
“That's different. You're valuable to him, naturally. I don't mean he doesn't love you,” she added hastily, as Graham wheeled and stared at her. “Of course he does, in his own way. It's not my way, but then—I'm only a woman and a mother.”
“You think he'll object?”
“I think he must be handled. If you rush at him, and demand the right to live your own life—”
“It is my life.”
“Precisely. Only he may not see it that way.”
He took a step toward her.
“Mother, do you really want me to marry Marion?”
“I think you ought to be married.”
“To Marion?”
“To some one you love.”
“Circles again,” he muttered. “You've changed your mind, for some reason. What is it, mother?”
He had an uneasy thought that she might have learned of Anna. There was that day, for instance, when his father had walked into the back room.
Natalie was following a train of thought suggested by her own anxiety.
“You might be married quietly,” she suggested. “Once it was done, I am sure your father would come around. You are both of age, you know.”
He eyed her then with open-eyed amazement.
“I'm darned if I understand you,” he burst out. And then, in one of his quick remorses, “I'm sorry, mother. I'm just puzzled, that's all. But that plan's no good, anyhow. Marion won't do it. She will have to be welcome in the family, or she won't come.”
“She ought to be glad to come any way she can,” Natalie said sharply. And found Graham's eyes on her, studying her.
“You don't want her. That's plain. But you do want her. That's not so plain. What's the answer, mother?”
And Natalie, with an irritable feeing that she had bungled somehow, got up and flung away the cigaret.
“I am trying to give you what you want,” she said pettishly. “That's clear enough, I should think.”
“There's no other reason?”
“What other reason could there be?”
Dressing to dine at the Hayden's that night, Graham heard Clayton come in and go into his dressing-room. He had an impulse to go over, tie in hand as he was, and put the matter squarely before his father. The marriage-urge—surely a man would understand that. Even Anna, and his predicament there. Anything was better than this constant indirectness of gaining his father's views through his mother.
Had he done so, things would have been different later. But by continual suggestion a vision of his father as hard, detached, immovable, had been built up in his mind. He got as far as the door, hesitated, turned back.
It was Marion herself who solved the mystery of Natalie's changed attitude, when Graham told of it that night. She sat listening, her eyes slightly narrowed, restlessly turning her engagement ring.
“Well, at least that's something,” she said, noncommittally. But in her heart she knew, as one designing woman may know another. She knew that Natalie had made Graham promise not to enlist at once, if war was declared, and now she knew that she was desperately preparing to carry her fear for Graham a step further, even at the cost of having her in the family.
She smiled wryly. But there was triumph in the smile, too. She had them now. The time would come when they would crawl to her to marry Graham, to keep him from going to war. Then she would make her own terms.
In the meantime the thing was to hold him by every art she knew.
There was another girl, somewhere. She had been more frightened about that than she cared to admit, even to herself. She must hold him close.
She used every art she knew. She deliberately inflamed him. And the vicious circle closed in about him, Natalie and Marion and Anna Klein. And to offset them, only Delight Haverford, at evening prayer in Saint Luke's, and voicing a tiny petition for him, that he might walk straight, that he might find peace, even if that peace should be war.
Herman Klein, watch between forefinger and thumb, climbed heavily to Anna's room. She heard him pause outside the door, and her heart almost stopped beating. She had been asleep, and rousing at his step, she had felt under the pillow for her watch to see the time. It was not there.
She remembered then; she had left it below, on the table. And he was standing outside her door. She heard him scratching a match, striking it against the panel of her door. For so long as it would take the match to burn out, she heard him there, breathing heavily. Then the knob turned.
She leaped out of the bed in a panic of fear. The hall, like the room, was dark, and she felt his ponderous body in the doorway, rather than saw it.
“You will put on something and come down-stairs,” he said harshly.
“I will not.” She tried to keep her voice steady. “I've got to work, if you haven't. I've got to have my sleep.” Her tone rose, hysterically. “If you think you can stay out half the night, and guzzle beer, and then come here to get me up, you can think again.”
“You are already up,” he said, in a voice slowed and thickened by rage. “You will come down-stairs.”
He turned away and descended the creaking stairs again. She listened for the next move, but he made none. She knew then that he was waiting at the foot of the stairs.
She was half-maddened with terror by that time, and she ran to the window. But it was high. Even if she could have dropped out, and before she could put on enough clothing to escape in, he would be back again, his rage the greater for the delay. She slipped into a kimono, and her knees giving way under her she went down the stairs. Herman was waiting. He moved under the lamp, and she saw that he held the watch, dangling.
“Now!” he said. “Where you got this? Tell me.”
“I've told you how I got it.”
“That was a lie.”
So—Rudolph had told him!
“I like that!” she blustered, trying to gain time. “I guess it's time they gave me something—I've worked hard enough. They gave them to all the girls.”
“That is a lie also.”
“I like that. Telling me I'm lying. You ask Mr. Graham Spencer. He'll tell you.”
“If that is true, why do you shake so?”
“You scare me, father.” She burst into frightened tears. “I don't know what's got into you. I do my best. I give you all I make. I've kept this house going, and”—-she gained a little courage—“I've had darned little thanks for it.”
“You think I believe the mill gave five thousand dollars in watches last Christmas? To-morrow I go, with this to Mr. Clayton Spencer, not to that degenerate son of his, and I ask him. Then I shall know.”
He turned, as if about to leave her, but the alternative he offered her was too terrible.
“Father!” she said. “I'll tell you the truth. I bought it myself.”
“With what money?”
“I had a raise. I didn't tell you. I had a raise of five dollars a week. I'm paying for it myself. Honest to heaven, that's right, father.”
“So—you have had a raise, and you have not told me?”
“I give all the rest to you. What do I get out of all my hard work? Just a place to live. No clothes. No fun. No anything. All the other girls have a good time now and then, but I'm just like a prisoner. You take all I earn, and I get—the devil.”
Her voice rose to a terrified squeal. Behind her she heard the slovenly servant creaking down the stairs. As Herman moved toward her she screamed.
“Katie!” she called. “Quick. Help!”
But Herman had caught her by the shoulder and was dragging her toward a corner, where there hung a leather strap.
Katie, peering round the door of the enclosed staircase, saw him raise the strap, and Anna's white face upraised piteously.
“For God's sake, father.”
The strap descended. Even after Katie had rushed up the stairs and locked herself in the room, she could hear, above Anna's cries, the thud of the strap, relentless, terrible, lusty with cruelty.
Herman went to church the next morning. Lying in her bed, too sore and bruised to move, Anna heard him carefully polishing his boots on the side porch, heard him throw away the water after he had shaved, heard at last the slam of the gate as he started, upright in his Sunday clothes, for church.
Only when he had reached the end of the street, and Katie could see him picking his way down the blackened hill, did she venture up with a cup of coffee. Anna had to unlock her door to admit her, to remove a further barricade of chairs. When Katie saw her she almost dropped the cup.
“You poor little rat,” she said compassionately. “Gee! He was crazy. I never saw such a face. Gee!”
Anna said nothing. She dropped on the side of the bed and took the coffee, drinking gingerly through a lip swollen and cut.
“I'm going to leave,” Katie went on. “It'll be my time next. If he tries any tricks on me I'll have the law on him. He's a beast; that's what he is.”
“Katie,” Anna said, “if I leave can you get my clothes to me? I'll carry all I can.”
“He'd take the strap to me.”
“Well, if you're leaving anyhow, you can put some of my things in your trunk.”
“Good and right you are to get out,” Katie agreed. “Sure I'll do it. Where do you think you'll go?”
“I thought last night I'd jump in the river. I've changed my mind, though. I'll pay him back, and not the way he expects.”
“Give it to him good,” assented Katie. “I'd have liked to slip some of that Paris green of his in his coffee this morning. And now he's off for church, the old hypocrite!”
To Katie's curious inquiries as to the cause of the beating Anna was now too committal.
“I held out some money on him,” was all she said.
Katie regarded her with a mixture of awe and admiration.
“You've got your nerve,” she said. “I wonder he didn't kill you. What's yours is his and what's his is his own!”
But Anna could not leave that morning. She lay in her bed, cold compresses on her swollen face and shoulders, a bruised and broken thing, planning hideous reprisals. Herman made no inquiry for her. He went stolidly about the day's work, carried in firewood and coal from the shed, inspected the garden with a view to early planting, and ate hugely of the mid-day dinner.
In the afternoon Rudolph came.
“Where's Anna?” he asked briskly.
“She is in her room. She is not well.”
If Rudolph suspected anything, it was only that Anna was sulking. But later on he had reason to believe that there trouble. Out of a clear sky Herman said:
“She has had a raise.” Anna was “she” to him.
“Since when?” Rudolph asked with interest.
“I know nothing. She has not given it to me. She has been buying herself a watch.”
“So!” Rudolph's tone was wary.
“She will buy herself no more watches,” said Herman, with an air of finality.
Rudolph hesitated. The organization wanted Herman; he had had great influence with the millworkers. Through him many things would be possible. The Spencers trusted him, too. At any time Rudolph knew they would be glad to reinstate him, and once inside the plant, there was no limit to the mischief he could do. But Herman was too valuable to risk. Suppose he was told now about Graham Spencer and Anna, and beat the girl and was jailed for it? Besides, ugly as Rudolph's suspicions were, they were as yet only suspicions. He decided to wait until he could bring Herman proof of Graham Spencer's relations with Anna. When that time came he knew Herman. He would be clay for the potter. He, Rudolph, intended to be the potter.
Katie had an afternoon off that Sunday. When she came back that night, Herman, weary from the late hours of Saturday, was already snoring in his bed. Anna met Katie at her door and drew her in.
“I've found a nice room,” Katie whispered. “Here's the address written down. The street cars go past it. Three dollars a week. Are you ready?”
Anna was ready, even to her hat. Over it she placed a dark veil, for she was badly disfigured. Then, with Katie crying quietly, she left the house. In the flare from the Spencer furnaces Katie watched until the girl reappeared on the twisting street below which still followed the old path—that path where Herman, years ago, had climbed through the first spring wild flowers to the cottage on the hill.
Graham was uncomfortable the next morning on his way to the mill. Anna's face had haunted him. But out of all his confusion one thing stood out with distinctness. If he was to be allowed to marry Marion, he must have no other entanglement. He would go to her clean and clear.
So he went to the office, armed toward Anna with a hardness he was far from feeling.
“Poor little kid!” he reflected on the way down. “Rotten luck, all round.”
He did not for a moment believe that it would be a lasting grief. He knew that sort of girl, he reflected, out of his vast experience of twenty-two. They were sentimental, but they loved and forgot easily. He hoped she would forget him; but even with that, there was a vague resentment that she should do so.
“She'll marry some mill-hand,” he reflected, “and wear a boudoir cap, and have a lot of children who need their noses wiped.”
But he was uncomfortable.
Anna was not in her office. Her coat and hat were not there. He was surprised, somewhat relieved. It was out of his hands, then; she had gone somewhere else to work. Well, she was a good stenographer. Somebody was having a piece of luck.
Clayton, finding him short-handed, sent Joey over to help him pack up his office belongings, the fittings of his desk, his personal papers, the Japanese prints and rugs Natalie had sent after her single visit to the boy's new working quarters. And, when Graham came back from luncheon, Joey had a message for him.
“Telephone call for you, Mr. Spencer.”
“What was it?”
“Lady called up, from a pay phone. She left her number and said she'd wait.” Joey lowered his voice confidentially. “Sounded like Miss Klein,” he volunteered.
He was extremely resentful when Graham sent him away on an errand. And Graham himself frowned as he called the number on the pad. It was like a girl, this breaking off clean and then telephoning, instead of letting the thing go, once and for all. But his face changed as he heard Anna's brief story over the wire.
“Of course I'll come,” he said. “I'm pretty busy, but I can steal a half-hour. Don't you worry. We'll fix it up some way.”
He was more concerned than deeply anxious when he rang off. It was unfortunate, that was all. And the father was a German swine, and ought to be beaten himself. To think that his Christmas gift had brought her to such a pass! A leather strap! God!
He was vaguely uneasy, however. He had a sense of a situation being forced on him. He knew, too, that Clayton was waiting for him at the new plant. But Anna's trouble, absurd as its cause seemed to him, was his responsibility.
It ceased to be absurd, however, when he saw her discolored features. It would be some time before she could even look for another situation. Her face was a swollen mask, and since such attraction as she had had for him had been due to a sort of evanescent prettiness of youth, he felt a repulsion that he tried his best to conceal.
“You poor little thing!” he said. “He's a brute. I'd like—” He clenched his fists. “Well, I got you into it. I'm certainly going to see you through.”
She had lowered her veil quickly, and he felt easier. The telephone booth was in the corner of a quiet hotel, and they were alone. He patted her shoulder.
“I'll see you through,” he repeated. “Don't you worry about anything. Just lie low.”
“See me through? How?”
“I can give you money; that's the least I can do. Until you are able to work again.” And as she drew away, “We'll call it a loan, if that makes you feel better. You haven't anything, have you?”
“He has everything I've earned.. I've never had a penny except carfare.”
“Poor little girl!” he said again.
She was still weak, he saw, and he led her into the deserted cafe. He took a highball himself, not because he wanted it, but because she refused to drink, at first. He had never before had a drink in the morning, and he felt a warm and reckless glow to his very finger-tips. Bending toward her, while the waiter's back was turned, he kissed her marred and swollen cheek.
“To think I have brought you all this trouble!”
“You mustn't blame yourself.”
“I do. But I'll make it up to you, Anna. You don't hate me for it, do you?”
“Hate you! You know better than that.”
“I'll come round to take you out now and then, in the evenings. I don't want you to sit alone in that forsaken boarding-house and mope.” He drew out a bill-fold, and extracted some notes. “Don't be silly,” he protested, as she drew back. “It's the only way I can get back my self-respect. You owe it to me to let me do it.”
She was not hard to persuade. Anything was better than going back to the cottage on the hill, and to that heavy brooding figure, and the strap on the wall. But the taking of the money marked a new epoch in the girl's infatuation. It bought her. She did not know it, nor did he. But hitherto she had been her own, earning her own livelihood. What she gave of love, of small caresses and intimacies, had been free gifts.
From that time she was his creature. In her creed, which was the creed of the girls on the hill, one did not receive without giving. She would pay him back, but all that she had to give was herself.
“You'll come to see me, too. Won't you?”
The tingling was very noticeable now. He felt warm, and young, and very, very strong.
“Of course I'll come to see you,” he said, recklessly. “You take a little time off—you've worked hard—and we'll play round together.”
She bent down, unexpectedly, and put her bruised cheek against his hand, as it lay on the table.
“I love you dreadfully,” she whispered.
February and March were peaceful months, on the surface. Washington was taking stock quietly of national resources and watching for Germany's next move. The winter impasse in Europe gave way to the first fighting of spring, raids and sorties mostly, since the ground was still too heavy for the advancement of artillery. On the high seas the reign of terror was in full swing, and little tragic echoes of the world drama began again to come by cable across the Atlantic. Some of Graham's friends, like poor Chris, found the end of the path of glory. The tall young Canadian Highlander died before Peronne in March. Denis Nolan's nephew was killed in the Irish Fusileers.
One day Clayton came home to find a white-faced Buckham taking his overcoat in the hall, and to learn that he had lost a young brother.
Clayton was uncomfortable at dinner that night. He wondered what Buckham thought of them, sitting there around the opulent table, in that luxurious room. Did he resent it? After dinner he asked him if he cared to take a few days off, but the old butler shook his head.
“I'm glad to have my work to keep me busy, sir,” he said. “And anyhow, in England, it's considered best to go on, quite as though nothing had happened. It's better for the troops, sir.”
There was a new softness and tolerance in Clayton that early spring. He had mellowed, somehow, a mellowing that had nothing to do with his new prosperity. In past times he had wondered how he would stand financial success if it ever came. He had felt fairly sure he could stand the other thing. But success—Now he found that it only increased his sense of responsibility. He was, outside of the war situation, as nearly happy as he had been in years. Natalie's petulant moods, when they came, no longer annoyed him. He was supported, had he only known it, by the strong inner life he was living, a life that centered about his weekly meetings with Audrey.
Audrey gave him courage to go on. He left their comradely hours together better and stronger. All the week centered about that one hour, out of seven days, when he stood on her hearth-rug, or lay back in a deep chair, listening or talking—such talk as Natalie might have heard without resentment.
Some times he felt that that one hour was all he wanted; it carried so far, helped so greatly. He was so boyishly content in it. And then she would make a gesture, or there would be, for a second, a deeper note in her voice, and the mad instinct to catch her to him was almost overwhelming.
Some times he wondered if she were not very lonely, not knowing that she, too, lived for days on that one hour. She was not going out, because of Chris's death, and he knew there were long hours when she sat alone, struggling determinedly with the socks she was knitting.
Only once did they tread on dangerous ground, and that was on her birthday. He stopped in a jeweler's on his way up-town and brought her a black pearl on a thin almost invisible chain, only to have her refuse to take it.
“I can't Clay!”
“Why not?”
“It's too valuable. I can't take valuable presents from men.”
“It's value hasn't anything to do with it.”
“I'm not wearing jewelry, anyhow.”
“Audrey,” he said gravely, “it isn't the pearl. It isn't its value. That's absurd. Don't you understand that I would like to think that you have something I have given you?”
When she sat still, thinking over what he had said, he slipped the chain around her neck and clasped it. Then he stooped down, very gravely, and kissed her.
“For my silent partner!” he said.
In all those weeks, that was the only time he had kissed her. He knew quite well the edge of the gulf they stood on, and he was determined not to put the burden of denial on her. He felt a real contempt for men who left the strength of refusal to a woman, who pleaded, knowing that the woman's strength would save them from themselves, and that if she weakened, the responsibility was hers.
So he fed on the husks of love, and was, if not happy, happier.
Graham, too, was getting on better. For one thing, Anna Klein had been ill. She lay in her boarding-house, frightened at every step on the stairs, and slowly recovered from a low fever. Graham had not seen her, but he sent her money for a doctor, for medicines, for her room rent, enclosed in brief letters, purely friendly and interested. But she kept them under her pillow and devoured them with feverish eyes.
But something had gone out of life for Graham. Not Anna. Natalie, watching him closely, wondered what it was. He had been strange and distant with her ever since that tall boy in kilts had been there. He was studiously polite and attentive to her, rose when she entered a room and remained standing until she was seated, brought her the book she had forgotten, lighted her occasional cigaret, kissed her morning and evening. But he no longer came into her dressing-room for that hour before dinner when Natalie, in dressing-gown and slippers, had closed the door to Clayton's room and had kept him for herself.
She was jealous of Clayton those days. Some times she found the boy's eyes fixed on his father, with admiration and something more. She was jealous of the things they had in common, of the days at the mill, of the bits of discussion after dinner, when Clayton sat back with his cigar, and Graham voiced, as new discoveries, things about the work that Clayton had realized for years.
He always listened gravely, with no hint of patronage. But Natalie would break in now and then, impatient of a conversation that excluded her.
“Your father knows all these things, Graham,” she said once. “You talk as though you'd just discovered the mill, like Columbus discovering America.”
“Not at all,” Clayton said, hastily. “He has a new viewpoint. I am greatly interested. Go on, Graham.”
But the boy's enthusiasm had died. He grew self-conscious, apologetic. And Clayton felt a resentment that was close to despair.
The second of April fell on a Saturday. Congress, having ended the session the fourth of March, had been hastily reconvened, and on the evening of that day, Saturday, at half past eight, the President went before the two Houses in joint session.
Much to Clayton's disgust, he found on returning home that they were dining out.
“Only at the Mackenzies. It's not a party,” Natalie said. As usual, she was before the dressing-table, and she spoke to his reflection in the mirror. “I should think you could do that, without looking like a thunder-cloud. Goodness knows we've been quiet enough this Lent.”
“You know Congress has been re-convened?”
“I don't know why that should interfere.”
“It's rather a serious time.” He tried very hard to speak pleasantly. Her engrossment in her own reflection irritated him, so he did not look at her. “But of course I'll go.”
“Every time is a serious time with you lately,” she flung after him. Her tone was not disagreeable. She was merely restating an old grievance. A few moments later he heard her calling through the open door.
“I got some wonderful old rugs to-day, Clay.”
“Yes?”
“You'll scream when you pay for them.”
“I've lost my voice screaming, my dear.”
“You'll love these. They have the softest colors, dead rose, and faded blue, and old copper tones.”
“I'm very glad you're pleased.”
She was in high good humor when they started. Clayton, trying to meet her conversational demands found himself wondering if the significance of what was to happen in Washington that night had struck home to her. If it had, and she could still be cheerful, then it was because she had forced a promise from Graham.
He made his decision then; to force her to release the boy from any promise; to allow him his own choice. But he felt with increasing anxiety that some of Natalie's weakness of character had descended to Graham, that in him, as in Natalie, perhaps obstinacy was what he hoped was strength. He wondered listening to her, what it would be to have beside him that night some strong and quiet woman, to whom he could carry his problems, his perplexities. Some one to sit, hand in his, and set him right as such a woman could, on many things.
And for a moment, he pictured Audrey. Audrey, his wife, driving with him in their car, to whatever the evening might hold. And after it was all over, going back with her, away from all the chatter that meant so little, to the home that shut them in together.
He was very gentle to Natalie that night.
Natalie had been right. It was a small and informal group, gathered together hastily to discuss the emergency; only Denis Nolan, the Mackenzies, Clayton and Natalie, and Audrey.
“We brought her out of her shell,” said Terry, genially, “because the country is going to make history to-night. The sort of history Audrey has been shouting for for months.”
The little party was very grave. Yet, of them all, only the Spencers would be directly affected. The Mackenzies had no children.
“Button, my secretary,” Terry announced, “is in Washington. He is to call me here when the message is finished.”
“Isn't it possible,” said Natalie, recalling a headline from the evening paper, “that the House may cause an indefinite delay?”
And, as usual, Clayton wondered at the adroitness with which, in the talk that followed, she escaped detection.
They sat long at the table, rather as though they clung together. And Nolan insisted on figuring the cost of war in money.
“Queer thing,” he said. “In ancient times the cost of war fell almost entirely on the poor. But it's the rich who will pay for this war. All taxation is directed primarily against the rich.”
“The poor pay in blood,” said Audrey, rather sharply. “They give their lives, and that is all they have.”
“Rich and poor are going to do that, now,” old Terry broke in. “Fight against it all you like, you members of the privileged class, the draft is coming. This is every man's war.”
But Clayton Spencer was watching Natalie. She had paled and was fingering her liqueur-glass absently. Behind her lowered eyelids he surmised that again she was planning. But what? Then it came to him, like a flash. Old Terry had said the draft would exempt married men. She meant to marry Graham to a girl she detested, to save him from danger.
Through it all, however, and in spite of his anger and apprehension, he was sorry for her. Sorry for her craven spirit. Sorry even with an understanding that came from his own fears. Sorry for her, that she had remained an essential child in a time that would tax the utmost maturity. She was a child. Even her selfishness was the selfishness of a spoiled child. She craved things, and the spirit, the essence of life, escaped her.
And beside him was Audrey, valiant-eyed, courageous, honest. Natalie and Audrey! Some time during the evening his thoughts took this form: that there were two sorts of people in the world: those who seized their own happiness, at any cost; and those who saw the promised land from a far hill, and having seen it, turned back.
Graham was waiting in Clayton's dressing-room when he went up-stairs. Through the closed door they could hear Natalie's sleepy and rather fretful orders to her maid. Graham rose when he entered, and threw away his cigaret.
“I guess it has come, father.”
“It looks like it.”
A great wave of tenderness for the boy flooded over him. That tall, straight body, cast in his own mold, but young, only ready to live, that was to be cast into the crucible of war, to come out—God alone knew how. And not his boy only, but millions of other boys. Yet—better to break the body than ruin the soul.
“How is mother taking it?”
Natalie's voice came through the door. She was insisting that the house be kept quiet the next morning. She wanted to sleep late. Clayton caught the boy's eyes on him, and a half smile on his face.
“Does she know?”
“Yes.”
“She isn't taking it very hard, is she?” Then his voice changed. “I wish you'd talk to her, father. She's—well, she's got me! You see, I promised her not to go in without her consent.”
“When did you do that?”
“The night we broke with Germany in February. I was a fool, but she was crying, and I didn't know what else to do. And”—there was a ring of desperation in his voice—“she's holding me to it. I've been to her over and over again.”
“And you want to go?”
“Want to go! I've got to go.”
He broke out then into a wild appeal. He wanted to get away. He was making a mess of all sorts of things. He wasn't any good. He would try to make good in the army. Maybe it was only the adventure he wanted—he didn't know. He hadn't gone into that. He hated the Germans. He wanted one chance at them, anyhow. They were beasts.
Clayton, listening, was amazed at the depth of feeling and anger in his voice.
“I'll talk to your mother,” he agreed, when the boy's passion had spent itself. “I think she will release you.” But he was less certain than he pretended to be. He remembered Natalie's drooping eyelids that night at dinner. She might absolve him from the promise, but there were other ways of holding him back than promises.
“Perhaps we would better go into the situation thoroughly,” he suggested. “I have rather understood, lately, that you—what about Marion Hayden, Graham?”
“I'm engaged to her.”
There was rather a long pause. Clayton's face was expressionless.
“Since when?”
“Last fall, sir.”
“Does your mother know?”
“I told her, yes.” He looked up quickly. “I didn't tell you. I knew you disliked her, and mother said?” He checked himself. “Marion wanted to wait. She wanted to be welcome when she came into the family.”
“I don't so much dislike her as I—disapprove of her.”
“That's rather worse, isn't it?”
Clayton was tired. His very spirit was tired. He sat down in his big chair by the fire.
“She is older than you are, you know.”
“I don't see what that has to do with it, father.”
In Clayton's defense was his own situation. He did not want the boy to repeat his mistakes, to marry the wrong woman, and then find, too late, the right one. During the impassioned appeal that followed he was doggedly determined to prevent that. Perhaps he lost the urgency in the boy's voice. Perhaps in his new conviction that the passions of the forties were the only real ones, he took too little count of the urge of youth.
He roused himself.
“You think you are really in love with her?”
“I want her. I know that.”
“That's different. That's—you are too young to know what you want.”
“I ought to be married. It would settle me. I'm sick of batting round.”
“You want to marry before you enter the army?”
“Yes.”
“Do you think for a moment that your wife will be willing to let you go?”
Graham straightened himself.
“She would have to let me go.”
And in sheer despair, Clayton played his last card. Played it, and regretted it bitterly a moment later.
“We must get this straight, Graham. It's not a question of your entering the army or not doing it. It's a question of your happiness. Marriage is a matter of a life-time. It's got to be based on something more than—” he hesitated. “And your mother?”
“Please go on.”
“You have just said that your mother does not want you to go into the army. Has it occurred to you she would even see you married to a girl she detests, to keep you at home?”
Graham's face hardened.
“So;” he said, heavily, “Marion wants me for the money she thinks I'm going to have, and mother wants me to marry to keep me safe! By God, it's a dirty world, isn't it?”
Suddenly he was gone, and Clayton, following uneasily to the doorway, heard a slam below. When, some hours later, Graham had not come back, he fell into the heavy sleep that follows anxiety and brings no rest. In the morning he found that Graham had gone back to the garage and taken his car, and that he had not returned.
Afterward Clayton was to look back and to remember with surprise how completely the war crisis had found him absorbed in his own small group. But perhaps in the back of every man's mind war was always, first of all, a thing of his own human contacts. It was only when those were cleared up that he saw the bigger problem. The smaller questions loomed so close as to obscure the larger vision.
He went out into the country the next day, a cold Sunday, going afoot, his head down against the wind, and walked for miles. He looked haggard and tired when he came back, but his quiet face held a new resolve. War had come at last. He would put behind him the selfish craving for happiness, forget himself. He would not make money out of the nation's necessity. He would put Audrey out of his mind, if not out of his heart. He would try to rebuild his house of life along new and better lines. Perhaps he could bring Natalie to see things as he saw them, as they were, not as she wanted them to be.
Some times it took great crises to bring out women. Child-bearing did it, often. Urgent need did it, too. But after all the real test was war. The big woman met it squarely, took her part of the burden; the small woman weakened, went down under it, found it a grievance rather than a grief.
He did not notice Graham's car when it passed him, outside the city limits, or see Anna Klein's startled eyes as it flashed by.
Graham did not come in until evening. At ten o'clock Clayton found the second man carrying up-stairs a tray containing whisky and soda, and before he slept he heard a tap at Graham's door across the hall, and surmised that he had rung for another. Later still he heard Natalie cross the hall, and rather loud and angry voices. He considered, ironically, that a day which had found a part of the nation on its knees found in his own house only dissension and bitterness.
In the morning, at the office, Joey announced a soldier to see him, and added, with his customary nonchalance:
“We'll be having a lot of them around now, I expect.”
Clayton, glancing up from the visitor's slip in his hand, surprised something wistful in the boy's eyes.
“Want to go, do you?”
“Give my neck to go—sir.” He always added the “sir,” when he remembered it, with the air of throwing a sop to a convention he despised.
“You may yet, you know. This thing is going to last a while. Send him in, Joey.”
He had grown attached to this lad of the streets. He found in his loyalty a thing he could not buy.
Jackson was his caller. Clayton, who had been rather more familiar with his back in its gray livery than with any other aspect of him, found him strange and impressive in khaki.
“I'm sorry I couldn't get here sooner, Mr. Spencer,” he explained. “I've been down on the border. Yuma. I just got a short leave, and came back to see my family.”
He stood very erect, a bronzed and military figure. Suddenly it seemed strange to Clayton Spencer that this man before him had only a few months before opened his automobile door for him, and stood waiting with a rug to spread over his knees. He got up and shook hands.
“You look like a different man, Jackson.”
“Well, at least I feel like a man.”
“Sit down,” he said. And again it occurred to him that never before had he asked Jackson to sit down in his presence. It was wrong, somehow. The whole class system was absurd. Maybe war would change that, too. It was doing many queer things, already.
He had sent for Jackson, but he did not at once approach the reason. He sat back, while Jackson talked of the border and Joey slipped in and pretended to sharpen lead pencils.
Clayton's eyes wandered to the window. Outside in the yard were other men, now employees of his, who would soon be in khaki. Out of every group there in a short time some would be gone, and of those who would go a certain number would never come back. That was what war was; one day a group of men, laboring with their hands or their brains, that some little home might live; that they might go back at evening to that home, and there rest for the next day's toil. And the next, gone. Every man out there in the yard was loved by some one. To a certain number of them this day meant death, or wounding. It meant separation, and suffering, and struggle.
And all over the country there were such groups.
The roar of the plant came in through the open window. A freight car was being loaded with finished shells. As fast as it was filled, another car was shunted along the spur to take its place. Over in Germany, in hundreds of similar plants, similar shells were being hurried to the battle line, to be hurled against the new army that was soon to cross the seas.
All those men, and back of every man, a woman.
Jackson had stopped. Joey was regarding him with stealthy admiration, and holding his breast bone very high. Already in his mind Joey was a soldier.
“You did not say in your note why you wanted to see me, Mr. Spencer.”
He roused himself with a visible effort.
“I sent for you, yes,” he said. “I sent—I'll tell you why I sent for you, Jackson. I've been meaning to do it for several weeks. Now that this has come I'm more than glad I did so. You can't keep your family on what you are getting. That's certain.”
“My wife is going to help me, sir. The boy will soon be weaned. Then she intends to get a position. She was a milliner when we were married.”
“But—Great Scott! She ought not to leave a child as young as that.”
Jackson smiled.
“She's going to fix that, all right. She wants to do it. And we're all right so far I had saved a little.”
Then there were women like that! Women who would not only let their men go to war, but who would leave their homes and enter the struggle for bread, to help them do it.
“She says it's the right thing,” volunteered Jackson, proudly. Women who felt that a man going into the service was a right thing. Women who saw war as a duty to be done, not a wild adventure for the adventurous.
“You ought to be very proud of her,” he said slowly. “There are not many like that.”
“Well,” Jackson said, apologetically, “they'll come round, sir. Some of them kind of hate the idea, just at first. But I look to see a good many doing what my wife's doing.”
Clayton wondered grimly what Jackson would think if he knew that at that moment he was passionately envious of him, of his uniform, of the youth that permitted him to wear that uniform, of his bronzed skin, of his wife, of his pride in that wife.
“You're a lucky chap, Jackson,” he said. “I sent for you because I wanted to say that, as long as you are in the national service, I shall feel that you are on a vacation”—he smiled at the word—“on pay. Under those circumstances, I owe you quite a little money.”
Jackson was too overwhelmed to reply at once.
“As a matter of fad,” Clayton went on, “it's a national move, in a way. You don't owe any gratitude. We need our babies, you see. More than we do hats! If this war goes on, we shall need a good many boy babies.”
And his own words suddenly crystallized the terror that was in him. It was the boys who would go; boys who whistled in the morning; boys who dreamed in the spring, long dreams of romance and of love.
Boys. Not men like himself, with their hopes and dreams behind them. Not men who had lived enough to know that only their early dreams were real. Not men, who, having lived, knew the vast disillusion of living and were ready to die.
It was only after Jackson had gone that he saw the fallacy of his own reasoning. If to live were disappointment, then to die, still dreaming the great dream, was not wholly evil. He found himself saying,
“To earn some honorable advancement for one's soul.”
Deep down in him, overlaid with years of worldliness, there was a belief in a life after death. He looked out the window at the little, changing group. In each man out there there was something that would live on, after he had shed that sweating, often dirty, always weary, sometimes malformed shell that was the body. And then the thing that would count would be not how he had lived but what he had done.
This war was a big thing. It was the biggest thing in all the history of the world. There might be, perhaps, some special heaven for those who had given themselves to it, some particular honorable advancement for their souls. Already he saw Jackson as one apart, a man dedicated.
Then he knew that all his thinking was really centered about his boy. He wanted Graham to go. But in giving him he was giving him to the chance of death. Then he must hold to his belief in eternity. He must feel that, or the thing would be unbearable. For the first time in his life he gave conscious thought to Natalie's religious belief. She believed in those things. She must. She sat devoutly through the long service; she slipped, with a little rustle of soft silk, so easily to her knees. Perhaps, if he went to her with that?