For a week after Anna's escape Herman Klein had sat alone and brooded. Entirely alone now, for following a stormy scene on his discovery of Anna's disappearance, Katie had gone too.
“I don't know where she is,” she had said, angrily, “and if I did know I wouldn't tell you. If I was her I'd have the law on you. Don't you look at that strap. You lay a hand on me and I'll kill you. If you think I'm afraid of you, you can think again.”
“She is my daughter, and not yet of age,” Herman said heavily. “You tell her for me that she comes back, or I go and bring her.”
“Yah!” Katie jeered. “You try it! She's got marks on her that'll jail you.” And on his failure to reply her courage mounted. “This ain't Germany, you know. They know how to treat women over here. And you ask me”—her voice rose—“and I'll just say that there's queer comings and goings here with that Rudolph. I've heard him say some things that'll lock him up good and tight.”
For all his rage, Teutonic caution warned him not to lay hands on the girl. But his anger against her almost strangled him. Indeed, when she came down stairs, dragging her heavy suitcase, he took a step or two toward her, with his fists clenched. She stopped, terrified.
“You old bully!” she said, between white lips. “You touch me, and I'll scream till I bring in every neighbor in the block. There's a good lamp-post outside that's just waiting for your sort of German.”
He had refused to pay her for the last week, also. But that she knew well enough was because he was out of money. As fast as Anna's salary had come in, he had taken out of it the small allowance that was to cover the week's expenses, and had banked the remainder. But Anna had carried her last pay envelope away with her, and added to his anger at her going was his fear that he would have to draw on his savings.
With Katie gone, he set heavily about preparing his Sunday dinner. Long years of service done for him, however, had made him clumsy. He cooked a wretched meal, and then, leaving the dishes as they were, he sat by the fire and brooded. When Rudolph came in, later, he found him there, in his stocking-feet, a morose and untidy figure.
Rudolph's reception of the news roused him, however. He looked up, after the telling, to find the younger man standing over him and staring down at him with blood-shot eyes.
“You beat her!” he was saying. “What with?”
“What does that matter—She had bought herself a watch—”
“What did you beat her with?” Rudolph was licking his lips. Receiving no reply, he called “Katie!”
“Katie has gone.”
“Maybe you beat her, too.”
“She wasn't my daughter.”
“No by God! You wouldn't dare to touch her. She didn't belong to you. You—”
“Get out,” said Herman, somberly. He stood up menacingly. “You go, now.”
Rudolph hesitated. Then he laughed.
“All right, old top,” he said, in a conciliatory tone. “No offense meant. I lost my temper.”
He picked up the empty coal-scuffle, and went out into the shed where the coal was kept. He needed a minute to think. Besides, he always brought in coal when he was there. In the shed, however, he put down the scuttle and stood still.
“The old devil!” he muttered.
But his rage for Anna was followed by rage against her. Where was she to-night? Did Graham Spencer know where she was? And if he did, what then? Were they at that moment somewhere together? Hidden away, the two of them? The conviction that they were together grew on him, and with it a frenzy that was almost madness. He left the coal scuttle in the shed, and went out into the air. For a half hour he stood there, looking down toward the Spencer furnace, sending up, now red, now violet bursts of flame.
He was angry enough, jealous enough. But he was quick, too, to see that that particular lump of potters' clay which was Herman Klein was ready for the wheel. Even while he was cursing the girl his cunning mind was already plotting, revenge for the Spencers, self-aggrandizement among his fellows for himself. His inordinate conceit, wounded by Anna's defection, found comfort in the early prospect of putting over a big thing. He carried the coal in, to find Herman gloomily clearing his untidy table. For a moment they worked in silence, Rudolph at the stove, Herman at the sink.
Then Rudolph washed his hands under the faucet and faced the older man. “How do you know she bought herself that watch,” he demanded.
Herman eyed him.
“Perhaps you gave it to her!” Something like suspicion of Rudolph crept into his eyes.
“Me? A hundred-dollar watch!”
“How do you know it cost a hundred dollars?”
“I saw it. She tried that story on me, too. But I was too smart for her. I went to the store and asked. A hundred bucks!”
Herman's lips drew back over his teeth.
“You knew it, eh? And you did not tell me?”
“It wasn't my funeral,” said Rudolph coolly. “If you wanted to believe she bought it herself?”
“If she bought it herself!” Rudolph's shoulder was caught in an iron grip. “You will tell me what you mean.”
“Well, I ask you, do you think she'd spend that much on a watch? Anyhow, the installment story doesn't go. That place doesn't sell on installments.”
“Who is there would buy her such a watch?” Herman's voice was thick.
“How about Graham Spencer? She's been pretty thick with him.”
“How you mean—thick?”
Rudolph shrugged his shoulders.
“I don't mean anything. But he's taken her out in his car. And the Spencers think there's nothing can't be bought with money.”
Herman put down the dish-cloth and commenced to draw down his shirt sleeves.
“Where you going?” Rudolph demanded uneasily.
“I go to the Spencers!”
“Listen!” Rudolph said, excitedly. “Don't you do it; not yet. You got to get him first. We don't know anything; we don't even know he gave her that watch. We've got to find her, don't you see? And then, we've got to learn if he's going there—wherever she is.”
“I shall bring her back,” Herman said, stubbornly. “I shall bring her back, and I shall kill her.”
“And get strung up yourself! Now listen?” he argued. “You leave this to me. I'll find her. I've got a friend, a city detective, and he'll help me, see? We'll get her back, all right. Only you've got to keep your hands off her. It's the Spencers that have got to pay.”
Herman went back to the sink, slowly.
“That is right. It is the Spencers,” he muttered.
Rudolph went out. Late in the evening he came back, with the news that the search was on. And, knowing Herman's pride, he assured him that the hill need never learn of Anna's flight, and if any inquiries came he advised him to say the girl was sick.
In Rudolph's twisted mind it was not so much Anna's delinquency that enraged him. The hill had its own ideas of morality. But he was fiercely jealous, with that class-jealousy which was the fundamental actuating motive of his life. He never for a moment doubted that she had gone to Graham.
And, sitting by the fire in the little house, old Herman's untidy head shrunk on his shoulders, Rudolph almost forgot Anna in plotting to use this new pawn across the hearth from him in his game of destruction.
By the end of the week, however, there was no news of Anna. She had not returned to the mill. Rudolph's friend on the detective force had found no clew, and old Herman had advanced from brooding by the fire to long and furious wanderings about the city streets.
He felt no remorse, only a growing and alarming fury. He returned at night, to his cold and unkempt house, to cook himself a frugal and wretched meal. His money had run very low, and with true German stubbornness he refused to draw any from the savings bank.
Rudolph was very busy. There were meetings always, and to the little inner circle that met behind Gus's barroom one night later in March, he divulged the plan for the destruction of the new Spencer munition plant.
“But—will they take him back?” one of the men asked. He was of better class than the rest, with a military bearing and a heavy German accent, for all his careful English.
“Will a dog snatch at a bone?” countered Rudolph. “Take him back! They'll be crazy about it.”
“He has been there a long time. He may, at the last, weaken.”
But Rudolph only laughed, and drank more whisky of the German agent's providing.
“He won't weaken,” he said. “Give me a few days more to find the girl, and all hell won't hold him.”
On the Sunday morning after the President had been before Congress, he found Herman dressed for church, but sitting by the fire. All around him lay the Sunday paper, and he barely raised his head when Rudolph entered.
“Well, it's here!” said Rudolph.
“It has come. Yes.”
“Wall Street will be opening champagne to-day.”
Herman said nothing. But later on he opened up the fountain of rage in his heart. It was wrong, all wrong. We had no quarrel with Germany. It was the capitalists and politicians who had done it. And above all, England.
He went far. He blamed America and Americans for his loss of work, for Anna's disappearance. He searched his mind for grievances and found them in the ore dust on the hill, which killed his garden; in the inefficiency of the police, who could not find Anna; in the very attitude of Clayton Spencer toward his resignation.
And on this smoldering fire Rudolph piled fuel Not that he said a great deal. He worked around the cottage, washed dishes, threw pails of water on the dirty porches, swept the floor, carried in coal and wood. And gradually he began to play on the older man's vanity. He had had great influence with the millworkers. No one man had ever had so much.
Old Herman sat up, and listened sourly. But after a time he got up and pouring some water out of the kettle, proceeded to shave himself. And Rudolph talked on. If now he were to go back, and it were to the advantage of the Fatherland and of the workers of the world to hamper the industry, who so able to do it as Herman.
“Hamper? How?” Herman asked, suspiciously, holding his razor aloft. He had a great fear of the law.
Rudolph re-assured him, cunning eyes averted.
“Well, a strike,” he suggested. “The men'll listen to you. God knows they've got a right to strike.”
“I shall not go back,” said Herman stolidly, and finished his shaving.
But Rudolph was satisfied. He left Herman sitting again by the fire, but his eyes were no longer brooding. He was thinking, watching the smoke curl up from the china-bowled German pipe which he had brought from the Fatherland, and which he used only on special occasions.
The declaration of war found Graham desperately unhappy. Natalie held him rigidly to his promise, but it is doubtful if Natalie alone could have kept, him out of the army. Marion was using her influence, too! She held him by alternating between almost agreeing to runaway marriage and threats of breaking the engagement if he went to war. She had tacitly agreed to play Natalie's game, and she was doing it.
Graham did not analyze his own misery. What he said to himself was that he was making a mess of things. Life, which had seemed to be a simple thing, compounded of work and play, had become involved, difficult and wretched.
Some times he watched Clayton almost with envy. He seemed so sure of himself; he was so poised, so calm, so strong. And he wondered if there had been a tumultuous youth behind the quiet of his maturity. He compared the even course of Clayton's days, his work, his club, the immaculate orderliness of his life, with his own disordered existence.
He was hedged about with women. Wherever he turned, they obtruded themselves. He made plans and women brushed them aside. He tried to live his life, and women stepped in and lived it for him. His mother, Marion, Anna Klein. Even Delight, with her friendship always overclouded with disapproval. Wherever he turned, a woman stood in the way. Yet he could not do without them. He needed them even while he resented them.
Then, gradually, into his self-engrossment there penetrated a conviction that all was not well between his father and his mother. He had always taken them for granted much as he did the house and the servants. In his brief vacations during his college days they had agreed or disagreed, amicably enough. He had considered, in those days, that life was a very simple thing. People married and lived together. Marriage, he considered, was rather the end of things.
But he was older now, and he knew that marriage was a beginning and not an end. It did not change people fundamentally. It only changed their habits.
His discovery that his father and mother differed about the war was the first of other discoveries; that they differed about him; that they differed about many matters; that, indeed, they had no common ground at all on which to meet; between them, although Graham did not put it that way, was a No-Man's Land strewn with dead happiness, lost desires, and the wreckage of years of dissension.
It was incredible to Graham that he should ever reach the forties, but he wondered some times if all of life was either looking forward or looking back. And it seemed to him rather tragic that for Clayton, who still looked like a boy, there should be nothing but his day at the mill, his silent evening at home, or some stodgy dinner-party where the women were all middle-aged, and the other men a trifle corpulent.
For the first time he was beginning to think of Clayton as a man, rather than a father.
Not that all of this was coherently thought out. It was a series of impressions, outgrowth of his own beginning development and of his own uneasiness.
He wondered, too, about Rodney Page. He seemed to be always around, underfoot, suave, fastidious, bowing Natalie out of the room and in again. He had deplored the war until he found his attitude unfashionable, and then he began, with great enthusiasm, to arrange pageants for Red Cross funds, and even to make little speeches, graceful and artificial, patterned on his best after-dinner manner.
Graham was certain that he supported his mother in trying to keep him at home, and he began to hate him with a healthy young hate. However, late in April, he posed in one of the pageants, rather ungraciously, in a khaki uniform. It was not until the last minute that he knew that Delight Haverford was to be the nurse bending over his prostrate figure. He turned rather savage.
“Rotten nonsense,” he said to her, “when they stood waiting to be posed.
“Oh, I don't know. They're rather pretty.”
“Pretty! Do you suppose I want it be pretty?”
“Well, I do,” said Delight, calmly.
“It's fake. That's what I hate. If you were really a nurse, and was really in uniform—! But this parading in somebody else's clothes, or stuff hired for the occasion—it's sickening.”
Delight regarded him with clear, appraising eyes.
“Why don't you get a uniform of your own, then?” she inquired. She smiled a little.
He never knew what the effort cost her. He was pale and angry, and his face in the tableau was so set that it brought a round of applause. With the ringing down of the curtain he confronted her, almost menacingly.
“What did you mean by that?” he demanded. “We've hardly got into this thing yet.”
“We are in it, Graham.”
“Just because I don't leap into the first recruiting office and beg them to take me—what right have you got to call me a slacker?”
“But I heard—”
“Go on!”
“It doesn't matter what I heard, if you are going.”
“Of course I'm going,” he said, truculently.
He meant it, too. He would get Anna settled somewhere—she had begun to mend—and then he would have it out with Marion and his mother. But there was no hurry. The war would last a long time. And so it was that Graham Spencer joined the long line of those others who had bought a piece of ground, or five yoke of oxen, or had married a wife.
It was the morning after the pageant that Clayton, going down-town with him in the car, voiced his expectation that the government would take over their foreign contracts, and his feeling that, in that case, it would be a mistake to profit by the nation's necessities.
“What do you mean, sir?”
“I mean we should take only a small profit. A banker's profit.”
Graham had been fairly stunned, and had sat quiet while Clayton explained his attitude. There were times when big profits were allowable. There was always the risk to invested capital to consider. But he did not want to grow fat on the nation's misfortunes. Italy was one thing. This was different.
“But—we are just getting on our feet!”
“Think it over!” said Clayton. “This is going to be a long war, and an expensive one. We don't particularly want to profit by it, do we?”
Graham flushed. He felt rather small and cheap, but with that there was a growing admiration of his father. Suddenly he saw that this man beside him was a big man, one to be proud of. For already he knew the cost of the decision. He sat still, turning this new angle of war over in his mind.
“I'd like to see some of your directors when you put that up to them!”
Clayton nodded rather grimly. He did not anticipate a pleasant hour.
“How about mother?”
“I think we may take it for granted that she feels as we do.”
Graham pondered that, too.
“What about the new place?”
“It's too soon to discuss that. We are obligated to do a certain amount. Of course it would be wise to cut where we can.”
Graham smiled.
“She'll raise the deuce of a row,” was his comment.
It had never occurred to him before to take sides between his father and his mother, but there was rising in him a new and ardent partisanship of his father, a feeling that they were, in a way, men together. He had, more than once, been tempted to go to him with the Anna Klein situation. He would have, probably, but a fellow felt an awful fool going to somebody and telling him that a girl was in love with him, and what the dickens was he to do about it?
He wondered, too, if anybody would believe that his relationship with Anna was straight, under the circumstances. For weeks now he had been sending her money, out of a sheer sense of responsibility for her beating and her illness. He took no credit for altruism. He knew quite well the possibilities of the situation. He made no promises to himself. But such attraction as Anna had had for him had been of her prettiness, and their propinquity. Again she was girl, and that was all. And the attraction was very faint now. He was only sorry for her.
When she could get about she took to calling him up daily from a drug-store at a near-by corner, and once he met her after dark and they walked a few blocks together. She was still weak, but she was spiritualized, too. He liked her a great deal that night.
“Do you know you've loaned me over a hundred dollars, Graham?” she asked.
“That's not a loan. I owed you that.”
“I'll pay it back. I'm going to start to-morrow to look for work, and it won't cost me much to live.”
“If you send it back, I'll buy you another watch!”
And, tragic as the subject was, they both laughed.
“I'd have died if I hadn't had you to think about when I was sick, Graham. I wanted to die—except for you.”
He had kissed her then, rather because he knew she expected him to. When they got back to the house she said:
“You wouldn't care to come up?”
“I don't think I had better, Anna.”
“The landlady doesn't object. There isn't any parlor. All the girls have their callers in their rooms.”
“I have to go out to-night,” he said evasively. “I'll come some other time.”
As he started away he glanced back at her. She was standing in the doorway, eying him wistfully, a lonely and depressed little figure. He was tempted to throw discretion to the wind and go back. But he did not.
On the day when Clayton had broached the subject of offering their output to the government at only a banker's profit, Anna called him up at his new office in the munition plant.
He was rather annoyed. His new secretary was sitting across the desk, and it was difficult to make his responses noncommittal.
“Graham!”
“Yes.”
“Is anybody there? Can you talk?”
“Not very well.”
“Then listen; I'll talk. I want to see you.”
“I'm busy all day. Sorry.”
“Listen, Graham, I must see you. I've something to tell you.”
“All right, go ahead.”
“It's about Rudolph. I was out looking for a position yesterday and I met him.”
“Yes?”
He looked up. Miss Peterson was absently scribbling on the cover of her book, and listening intently.
“He was terrible, Graham. He accused me of all sorts of things, about you.”
He almost groaned aloud over the predicament he was in. It began to look serious.
“Suppose I pick you up and we have dinner somewhere?”
“At the same corner?”
“Yes.”
He was very irritable all morning. He felt as though a net was closing in around him, and his actual innocence made him the more miserable. Miss Peterson found him very difficult that day, and shed tears in her little room before she went to lunch.
Anna herself was difficult that evening. Her landlady's son had given up a good job and enlisted. Everybody was going. She supposed Graham would go next, and she'd be left alone.
“I don't know. I'd like to.”
“Oh, you'll go, all right. And you'll forget I ever existed.” She made an effort. “You're right, of course. I'm only looking ahead. If anything happens to you, I'll kill myself.”
The idea interested her. She began to dramatize herself, a forlorn figure, driven from home, and deserted by her lover. She saw herself lying in the cottage, stately and mysterious, while the hill girls went in and out, and whispered.
“I'll kill myself,” she repeated.
“Nothing will happen to me, Anna, dear.”
“I don't know why I care so. I'm nothing to you.”
“That's not so.”
“If you cared, you'd have come up the other night. You left me alone in that lonesome hole. It's hell, that place. All smells and whispering and dirt.”
“Now listen to me, Anna. You're tired, or you wouldn't say that. You know I'm fond of you. But I've got you into trouble enough. I'm not—for God's sake don't tempt me, Anna.”
She looked at him half scornfully.
“Tempt you!” Then she gave a little scream. Graham following her eyes looked through the window near them.
“Rudolph!” she whimpered. And began to weep out of pure terror.
But Graham saw nobody. To soothe her, however, he went outside and looked about. There were half a dozen cars, a group of chauffeurs, but no Rudolph. He went hack to her, to find her sitting, pale and tense, her hands clenched together.
“They'll pay you out some way,” she said. “I know them. They'll never believe the truth. That was Rudolph, all right. He'll think we're living together. He'd never believe anything else.”
“Do you think he followed you the other day?”
“I gave him the shake, in the crowd.”
“Then I don't see why you're worrying. We're just where we were before, aren't we?”
“You don't know them. I do. They'll be up to something.”
She was excited and anxious, and with the cocktail he ordered for her she grew reckless.
“I'm just hung around your neck like a stone,” she lamented. “You don't care a rap for me; I know it. You're just sorry for me.”
Her eyes filled again, and Graham rose, with an impatient movement.
“Let's get out of this,” he said roughly. “The whole place is staring at you.”
But on the road the fact that she had been weeping for him made him relent. He put an arm around her and drew her to him.
“Don't cry, honey,” he said. “It makes me unhappy to see you miserable.”
He kissed her. And they clung together, finding a little comfort in the contact of warm young bodies.
He went up to her room that night. He was more anxious as to Rudolph than he cared to admit, but he went up, treading softly on stairs that creaked with every step. He had no coherent thoughts. He wanted companionship rather than love. He was hungry for what she gave him, the touch of her hands about his neck, the sense of his manhood that shone from her faithful eyes, the admiration and unstinting love she offered him.
But alone in the little room he had a reaction, not the less keen because it was his fastidious rather than his moral sense that revolted. The room was untidy, close, sordid. Even Anna's youth did not redeem it. Again he had the sense, when he had closed the door, of being caught in a trap, and this time a dirty trap. When she had taken off her hat, and held up her face to be kissed, he knew he would not stay.
“It's awful, isn't it?” she asked, following his eyes.
“It doesn't look like you. That's sure.”
“I hurried out. It's not so bad when it's tidy.”
He threw up the window, and stood there a moment. The spring air was cool and clean, and there was a sound of tramping feet below. He looked down. The railway station was near-by, and marching toward it, with the long swing of regulars, a company of soldiers was moving rapidly. The night, the absence of drums or music, the businesslike rapidity of their progress, held him there, looking down. He turned around. Anna had slipped off her coat, and had opened the collar of her blouse. Her neck gleamed white and young. She smiled at him.
“I guess I'll be going,” he stammered.
“Going!”
“I only wanted to see how you are fixed.” His eyes evaded hers. “I'll see you again in a day or two. I—”
He could not tell her the thoughts that were surging in him. The country was at war. Those fellows below there were already in it, of it. And here in this sordid room, he had meant to take her, not because he loved her, but because she offered herself. It was cheap. It was terrible. It was—dirty.
“Good night,” he said, and tried to kiss her. But she turned her face away. She stood listening to his steps on the stairs as he went down, steps that mingled and were lost in the steady tramp of the soldiers' feet in the street below.
With his many new problems following the declaration of war, Clayton Spencer found a certain peace. It was good to work hard. It was good to fill every working hour, and to drop into sleep at night too weary for consecutive thought.
Yet had he been frank with himself he would have acknowledged that Audrey was never really out of his mind. Back of his every decision lay his desire for her approval. He did not make them with her consciously in his mind, but he wanted her to know and understand, In his determination, for instance, to offer his shells to the government at a nominal profit, there was no desire to win her approbation.
It was rather that he felt her behind him in the decision. He shrank from telling Natalie. Indeed, until he had returned from Washington he did not broach the subject. And then he was tired and rather discouraged, and as a result almost brutally abrupt.
Coming on top of a hard fight with the new directorate, a fight which he had finally won, Washington was disheartening. Planning enormously for the future it seemed to have no vision for the things of the present. He was met vaguely, put off, questioned. He waited hours, as patiently as he could, to find that no man seemed to have power to act, or to know what powers he had.
He found something else, too—a suspicion of him, of his motives. Who offered something for nothing must be actuated by some deep and hidden motive. He found his plain proposition probed and searched for some ulterior purpose behind it.
“It's the old distrust, Mr. Spencer,” said Hutchinson, who had gone with him to furnish figures and various data. “The Democrats are opposed to capital. They're afraid of it. And the army thinks all civilians are on the make—which is pretty nearly true.”
He saw the Secretary of War, finally, and came away feeling better. He had found there an understanding that a man may—even should—make sacrifices for his country during war. But, although he carried away with him the conviction that his offer would ultimately be accepted, there was nothing actually accomplished. He sent Hutchinson back, and waited for a day or two, convinced that his very sincerity must bring a concrete result, and soon.
Then, lunching alone one day in the Shoreham, he saw Audrey Valentine at another table. He had not seen her for weeks, and he had an odd moment of breathlessness when his eyes fell on her. She was pale and thin, and her eyes looked very tired. His first impulse was to go to her. The second, on which he acted, was to watch her for a little, to fill his eyes for the long months of emptiness ahead.
She was with a man in uniform, a young man, gay and smiling. He was paying her evident court, in a debonair fashion, bending toward her across the table. Suddenly Clayton was jealous, fiercely jealous.
The jealousy of the young is sad enough, but it is an ephemeral thing. Life calls from many directions. There is always the future, and the things of the future. And behind it there is the buoyancy and easy forgetfulness of youth. But the jealousy of later years knows no such relief. It sees time flying and happiness evading it. It has not the easy self-confidence of the twenties. It has learned, too, that happiness is a rare elusive thing, to be held and nursed and clung to, and that even love must be won and held.
It has learned that love must be free, but its instinct is to hold it with chains.
He suffered acutely, and was ashamed of his suffering. After all, Audrey was still young. Life had not been kind to her, and she should be allowed to have such happiness as she could. He could offer her nothing.
He would give her up. He had already given her up. She knew it.
Then she saw him, and his determination died under the light that came in her eyes. Give her up! How could he give her up, when she was everything he had in the world? With a shock, he recognized in the thought Natalie's constant repetition as to Graham. So he had come to that!
He felt Audrey's eyes on him, but he did not go to her. He signed his check, and went out. He fully meant to go away without seeing her. But outside he hesitated. That would hurt her, and it was cowardly. When, a few moments later, she came out, followed by the officer, it was to find him there, obviously waiting.
“I wondered if you would dare to run away!” she said. “This is Captain Sloane, Clay, and he knows a lot about you.”
Close inspection showed Sloane handsome, bronzed, and with a soft Southern voice, somewhat like Audrey's. And it developed that he came from her home, and was on his way to one of the early camps. He obviously intended to hold on to Audrey, and Clayton left them there with the feeling that Audrey's eyes were following him, wistful and full of trouble. He had not even asked her where she was stopping.
He took a long walk that afternoon, and re-made his noon-hour resolution. He would keep away from her. It might hurt her at first, but she was young. She would forget. And he must not stand in her way. Having done which, he returned to the Shoreham and spent an hour in a telephone booth, calling hotels systematically and inquiring for her.
When he finally located her his voice over the wire startled her.
“Good heavens, Clay,” she said. “Are you angry about anything?”
“Of course not. I just wanted to—I am leaving to-night and I'm saying good-by. That's all.”
“Oh!” She waited.
“Have you had a pleasant afternoon?”
“Aren't you going to see me before you go?”
“I don't think so.”
“Don't you want to know what I am doing in Washington?”
“That's fairly clear, isn't it?”
“You are being rather cruel, Clay.”
He hesitated. He was amazed at his own attitude. Then, “Will you dine with me to-night?”
“I kept this evening for you.”
But when he saw her, his sense of discomfort only increased. Their dining together was natural enough. It was not even faintly clandestine. But the new restraint he put on himself made him reserved and unhappy. He could not act a part. And after a time Audrey left off acting, too, and he found her watching him. On the surface he talked, but underneath it he saw her unhappiness, and her understanding of his.
“I'm going back, too,” she said. “I came down to see what I can do, but there is nothing for the untrained woman. She's a cumberer of the earth. I'll go home and knit. I daresay I ought to be able to learn to do that well, anyhow.”
“Have you forgiven me for this afternoon?”
“I wasn't angry. I understood.”
That was it, in a nutshell. Audrey understood. She was that sort. She never held small resentments. He rather thought she never felt them.
“Don't talk about me,” she said. “Tell me about you and why you are here. It's the war, of course.”
So, rather reluctantly, he told her. He shrank from seeming to want her approval, but at the same time he wanted it. His faith in himself had been shaken. He needed it restored. And some of the exaltation which had led him to make his proffer to the government came back when he saw how she flushed over it.
“It's very big,” she said, softly. “It's like you, Clay. And that's the best thing I can say. I am very proud of you.”
“I would rather have you proud of me than anything in the world,” he said, unsteadily.
They drifted, somehow, to talking of happiness. And always, carefully veiled, it was their own happiness they discussed.
“I don't think,” she said, glancing away from him, “that one finds it by looking for it. That is selfish, and the selfish are never happy. It comes—oh, in queer ways. When you're trying to give it to somebody else, mostly.”
“There is happiness, of a sort, in work.”
Their eyes met. That was what they had to face, she dedicated to service, he to labor.
“It's never found by making other people unhappy, Clay.”
“No. And yet, if the other people are already unhappy?”
“Never!” she said. And the answer was to the unspoken question in both their hearts.
It was not until they were in the taxicab that Clayton forced the personal note, and then it came as a cry, out of the very depths of him. She had slipped her hand into his, and the comfort of even that small touch broke down the barriers he had so carefully erected.
“I need you so!” he said. And he held her hand to his face. She made no movement to withdraw it.
“I need you, too,” she replied. “I never get over needing you. But we are going to play the game, Clay. We may have our weak hours—and this is one of them—but always, please God, we'll play the game.”
The curious humility he felt with her was in his voice.
“I'll need your help, even in that.”
And that touch of boyishness almost broke down her reserve of strength. She wanted to draw his head down on her shoulder, and comfort him. She wanted to smooth back his heavy hair, and put her arms around him and hold him. There was a great tenderness in her for him. There were times when she would have given the world to have gone into his arms and let him hold her there, protected and shielded. But that night she was the stronger, and she knew it.
“I love you, Audrey. I love you terribly.”
And that was the word for it. It was terrible. She knew it.
“To have gone through all the world,” he said, brokenly, “and then to find the Woman, when it is too late. Forever too late.” He turned toward her. “You know it, don't you? That you are my woman?”
“I know it,” she answered, steadily. “But I know, too—”
“Let me say it just once. Then never again. I'll bury it, but you will know it is there. You are my woman. I would go through all of life alone to find you at the end. And if I could look forward, dear, to going through the rest of it with you beside me, so I could touch you, like this—”
“I know.”
“If I could only protect you, and shield you—oh, how tenderly I could care for you, my dear, my dear!”
The strength passed to him, then. Audrey had a clear picture of what life with him might mean, of his protection, his tenderness. She had never known it. Suddenly every bit of her called out for his care, his quiet strength.
“Don't make me sorry for myself.” There were tears in her eyes. “Will you kiss me, Clay? We might have that to remember.”
But they were not to have even that, for the taxicab drew up before her hotel. It was one of the absurd anti-climaxes of life that they should part with a hand-clasp and her formal “Thank you for a lovely evening.”
Audrey was the better actor of the two. She went in as casually as though she had not put the only happiness of her life away from her. But Clayton Spencer stood on the pavement, watching her in, and all the tragedy of the empty years ahead was in his eyes.