Dangerous Days: (18 page)

Clayton, standing glass in hand, surveyed the scene with a mixture of satisfaction and impatience. He found Terry Mackenzie at his elbow.

“Great party, Clay,” he said. “Well, here’s to 1917, and may it bring luck.”

“May it bring peace,” said Clayton, and raised his glass.

Some time later going home in the car with Mrs. Mackenzie, quiet and slightly grim beside him, Terry spoke out of a thoughtful silence.

“There’s something wrong with Clay,” he said. “If ever a fellow had a right to be happy - he has a queer look. Have you noticed it?”

“Anybody married to Natalie Spencer would develop what you call a queer look,” she replied, tartly.

“Don’t you think he is in love with her?”

“If you ask me, I think he has reached the point where he can’t bear the sight of her. But he doesn’t know it.”

“She’s pretty.”

“So is a lamp-shade,” replied Mrs. Terry, acidly. “Or a kitten, or a fancy ice-cream. But you wouldn’t care to be married to them, would you?”

It was almost dawn when Natalie came in. Clayton had not been asleep. He had got to thinking rather feverishly of the New-year. Without in any way making a resolution, he had determined to make it a better year than the last; to be more gentle with Natalie, more understanding with Graham; to use his new prosperity wisely; to forget his own lack of happiness in making others happy. He was very vague about that. The search of the ages the rector had called happiness, and one found it by giving it.

To his surprise, Natalie came into his bedroom, looking like some queer oriental bird, vivid and strangely unlike herself.

“I saw your light. Heavens, what a party!”

“I’m glad you enjoyed it. I hope you didn’t mind my not going on.”

“I wish you had. Clay, you’ll never guess what happened.”

“Probably not. What?”

“Well, Audrey just made it, that’s all. Funny! I wish you’d seen some of their faces. Of course she was disgraceful, but she took it off right away. But it was like her - no one else would have dared.”

His mouth felt dry. Audrey - disgraceful!

“It was in the stable, you know, I told you. And just at midnight the doors opened and a big white horse leaped in with Audrey on his back. No saddle - nothing. She was dressed like a bare-back rider in the circus, short tulle skirts and tights. They nearly mobbed her with joy.” She yawned. “Well, I’m off to bed.”

He roused himself.

“A happy New-year, my dear.”

“Thanks,” she said, and wandered out, her absurd feathered tail trailing behind her.

He lay back and closed his eyes. So Audrey had done that, Audrey, who had been in his mind all those sleepless hours; for he knew now that back of all his resolutions to do better had been the thought of her.

He felt disappointed and bitter. The sad disillusion of the middle years, still heroically clinging to faiths that one after another destroyed themselves, was his.

Audrey was frightened. She did not care a penny’s worth what her little world thought. Indeed, she knew that she had given it a new thrill and so had won its enthusiastic approval. She was afraid of what Clayton would think.

She was absurdly quiet and virtuous all the next day, gathered out her stockings and mended them; began a personal expenditure account for the New-year, heading it carefully with “darning silk, 50 cents”; wrote a long letter to Chris, and - listened for the telephone. If only he would call her, so she could explain. Still, what could she explain? She had done it. It was water over the dam - and it is no fault of Audrey’s that she would probably have spelled it “damn.”

By noon she was fairly abject. She did not analyze her own anxiety, or why the recollection of her escapade, which would a short time before have filled her with a sort of unholy joy, now turned her sick and trembling.

Then, in the middle of the afternoon, Clay called her up. She gasped a little when she heard his voice.

“I wanted to tell you, Audrey,” he said, “that we can probably use the girl you spoke about, rather soon.”

“Very well. Thank you. Is - wasn’t there something else, too?”

“Something else?”

“You are angry, aren’t you?”

He hesitated.

“Surprised. Not angry. I haven’t any possible right to be angry.”

“Will you come up and let me tell you about it, Clay?”

“I don’t see how that will help any.”

“It will help me.”

He laughed at that; her new humility was so unlike her.

“Why, of course I’ll come, Audrey,” he said, and as he rang off he was happier than he had been all day.

He was coming. Audrey moved around the little room, adjusting chairs, rearranging the flowers that had poured in on New-year’s day, brushing the hearth. And as she worked she whistled. He would be getting into the car now. He would be so far on his way. He would be almost there. She ran into her bedroom and powdered her nose, with her lips puckered, still whistling, and her heart singing.

But he scolded her thoroughly at first.

“Why on earth did you do it,” he finished. “I still can’t understand. I see you one day, gravity itself, a serious young woman - as you are to-day. And then I hear - it isn’t like you, Audrey.”

“Oh yes, it is. It’s exactly like me. Like one me. There are others, of course.”

She told him then, making pitiful confession of her own pride and her anxiety to spare Chris’s name.

“I couldn’t bear to have them suspect he had gone to the war because of a girl. Whatever he ran away from, Clay, he’s doing all right now.”

He listened gravely, with, toward the end, a jealousy he would not have acknowledged even to himself. Was it possible that she still loved Chris? Might she not, after the fashion of women, be building a new and idealized Chris, now that he had gone to war, out of his very common clay?

“He has done splendidly,” he agreed.

Again the warmth and coziness of the little room enveloped him. Audrey’s low huskily sweet voice, her quick smile, her new and unaccustomed humility, and the odd sense of her understanding, comforted him. She made her indefinite appeal to the best that was in him.

Nothing so ennobles a man as to have some woman believe in his nobility.

“Clay,” she said suddenly, “you are worrying about something.”

“Nothing that won’t straighten out, in time.”

“Would it help to talk about it?”

He realized that he had really come to her to talk about it. It had been in the back of his head all the time.

“I’m rather anxious about Graham.”

“Toots Hayden?”

“Partly.”

“I’m afraid she’s got him, Clay. There isn’t a trick in the game she doesn’t know. He had about as much chance as I have of being twenty again. She wants to make a wealthy marriage, and she’s picked on Graham. That’s all.”

“It isn’t only Marion. I’m afraid there’s another girl, a girl at the mill - his stenographer. I have no proof of anything. In fact, I don’t think there is anything yet. She’s in love with him, probably, or she thinks she is. I happened on them together, and she looked - Of course, if what you say about Marion is true, he can not care for her, even, well, in any way.”

“Oh, nonsense, Clay. A man - especially a boy - can love a half-dozen girls. He can be crazy about any girl he is with. It may not be love, but it plays the same tricks with him that the real thing does.”

“I can’t believe that.”

“No. You wouldn’t.”

She leaned back and watched him. How much of a boy he was himself, anyhow! And yet how little he understood the complicated problems of a boy like Graham, irresponsible but responsive, rich without labor, with time for the sort of dalliance Clay himself at the same age had had neither leisure nor inclination to indulge.

He was wandering about the room, his hands in his pockets, his head bent. When he stopped:

“What am I to do with the girl, Audrey?”

“Get rid of her. That’s easy.”

“Not so easy as it sounds.”

He told her of Dunbar and the photographs, of Rudolph Klein, and the problem as he saw it.

“So there I am,” he finished. “If I let her go, I lose one of the links in Dunbar’s chain. If I keep her?”

“Can’t Natalie talk to him? Sometimes a woman can get to the bottom of these things when a man can’t. He might tell her all about it.”

“Possibly. But I think it unlikely Natalie would tell me.”

She leaned over and patted his hand impulsively.

“What devils we women are!” she said. “Now and then one of us gets what she deserves. That’s me. And now and then one of us get’s something she doesn’t deserve. And that’s Natalie. She’s over-indulgent to Graham.”

“He is all she has.”

“She has you.”

Something in her voice made him turn and look at her.

“That ought to be something, you know,” she added. And laughed a little.

“Does Natalie pay his debts?”

“I rather think so.”

But that was a subject he could not go on with.

“The fault is mine. I know my business better than I know how to handle my life, or my family. I don’t know why I trouble you with it all, anyhow. You have enough.” He hesitated. “That’s not exactly true, either. I do know. I’m relying on your woman’s wit to help me. I’m wrong somehow.”

“About Graham?”

“I have a curious feeling that I am losing him. I can’t ask for his confidence. I can’t, apparently, even deserve it. I see him, day after day, with all the good stuff there is in him, working as little as he can, drinking more than he should, out half the night, running into debt - good heavens, Audrey, what can I do?”

She hesitated.

“Of course, you know one thing that would save him, Clay?”

“What?”

“Our getting into the war.”

“I ought not to have to lose my boy in order to find him. But - we are going to be in it.”

He had risen and was standing, an elbow on the mantel-piece, looking down at her.

“I suppose every man wonders, once in a while, how he’d conduct himself in a crisis. When the Lusitania went down I dare say a good many fellows wondered if they’d have been able to keep their coward bodies out of the boats. I know I did. And I wonder about myself now. What can I do if we go into the war? I couldn’t do a forced march of more than five miles. I can’t drill, or whatever they call it. I can shoot clay pigeons, but I don’t believe I could hit a German coming at me with a bayonet at twenty feet. I’d be pretty much of a total loss. Yet I’ll want to do something.”

And when she sat, very silent, looking into the fire: “You see, you think it absurd yourself.”

“Hardly absurd,” she roused herself to look up at him. “If it is, it’s the sort of splendid absurdity I am proud of. I was wondering what Natalie would say.”

“I don’t believe it lies between a man and his wife. It’s between him and his God.”

He was rather ashamed of that, however, and soon after he went away.

Natalie Spencer was finding life full of interest that winter. Now and then she read the headings in the newspapers, not because she was really interested, but that she might say, at the dinner-party which was to her the proper end of a perfect day:

“What do you think of Turkey declaring her independence?”

Or:

“I see we have taken the Etoile Wood.”

Clayton had overheard her more than once, and had marveled at the dexterity with which, these leaders thrown out, she was able to avoid committing herself further.

The new house engrossed her. She was seeing a great deal of Rodney, too, and now and then she had fancied that there was a different tone in Rodney’s voice when he addressed her. She never analyzed that tone, or what it suggested, but it gave her a new interest in life. She was always marceled, massaged, freshly manicured. And she had found a new facial treatment. Clayton, in his room at night, could hear the sharp slapping of flesh on flesh, as Madeleine gently pounded certain expensive creams into the skin of her face and neck.

She refused all forms of war activity, although now and then she put some appeal before Clayton and asked him if he cared to send a check. He never suggested that she answer any of these demands personally, after an experience early in the winter.

“Why don’t you send it yourself?” he had asked. “Wouldn’t you like it to go in your name?”

“It doesn’t matter. I don’t know any of the committee.”

He had tried to explain what he meant.

“You might like to feel that you are doing something.”

“I thought my allowance was only to dress on. If I’m to attend to charities, too, you’ll have to increase it.”

“But,” he argued patiently, “if you only sent them twenty-five dollars, did without some little thing to do it, you’d feel rather more as though you were giving, wouldn’t you?”

“Twenty-five dollars! And be laughed at!”

He had given in then.

“If I put an extra thousand dollars to your account to-morrow, will you check it out to this fund?”

“It’s too much.”

“Will you?’

“Yes, of course,” she had agreed, indifferently. And he had notified her that the money was in the bank. But two months later the list of contributors was published, and neither his name nor Natalie’s was among them.

Toward personal service she had no inclination whatever. She would promise anything, but the hour of fulfilling always found her with something else to do. Yet she had kindly impulses, at times, when something occurred to take her mind from herself. She gave liberally to street mendicants. She sent her car to be used by those of her friends who had none. She was lavish with flowers to the sick - although Clayton paid her florist bills.

She was lavish with money - but never with herself.

In the weeks after the opening of the new year Clayton found himself watching her. He wondered sometimes just what went on in her mind during the hours when she sat, her hands folded, gazing into space. He could not tell. He surmised her planning, always planning; the new house, a gown, a hat, a party.

But late in January he began to think that she was planning something else. Old Terry Mackenzie had been there one night, and he had asserted not only that war was coming, but that we would be driven to conscription to raise an army.