Dangerous Days: (37 page)

“I don’t want a romantic adventure, Mrs. Valentine.”

“Poor little thing,” Audrey reflected to herself. And aloud: “Good! Of course I know you’re sincere about working. I - I understand, awfully well.”

Delight was pleased, but Audrey saw that she was not happy. Even when the details had been arranged she still sat in her straight chair and made no move to go. And Audrey felt that the next move was up to her.

“What’s the news about Graham Spencer?” she inquired. “He’ll be drafted, I suppose.”

“Not if they claim exemption. He’s making shells, you know.”

She lifted rather heavy eyes to Audrey’s.

“His mother is trying that now,” she said. “Ever since his engagement was broken?”

“Oh, it was broken, was it?”

“Yes. I don’t know why. But it’s off. Anyhow Mrs. Spencer is telling everybody he can’t be spared.”

“And his father?”

“I don’t know. He doesn’t talk about it, I think.”

“Perhaps he wants him to make his own decision.”

Delight rose and drew down her veil with hands that Audrey saw were trembling a little.

“How can he make his own decision?” she asked. “He may think it’s his own, but it’s hers, Mrs. Spencer’s. She’s always talking, always. And she’s plausible. She can make him think black is white, if she wants to.”

“Why don’t you talk to him?”

“I? He’d think I’d lost my mind! Besides, that isn’t it. If you - like a man, you want him to do the right thing because he wants to, not because a girl asks him to.”

“I wonder,” Audrey said, slowly, “if he’s worth it, Delight?”

“Worth what?” She was startled.

“Worth your - worth our worrying about him.”

But she did not need Delight’s hasty and flushed championship of Graham to tell her what she already knew.

After she had gone, Audrey sat alone in her empty rooms and faced a great temptation. She was taking herself out of Clayton’s life. She knew that she would be as lost to him among the thousands of workers in the munition plant as she would have been in Russia. According to Clare, he rarely went into the shops themselves, and never at night.

Of course “out of his life” was a phrase. They would meet again. But not now, not until they had had time to become resigned to what they had already accepted. The war would not last forever. And then she thought of their love, which had been born and had grown, always with war at its background. They had gone along well enough until this winter, and then everything had changed. Chris, Natalie, Clayton, herself - none of them were quite what they had been. Was that one of the gains of war, that sham fell away, and people revealed either the best or the worst in them?

War destroyed, but it also revealed.

The temptation was to hear Clayton’s voice again. She went to the telephone, and stood with the instrument in her hands, thinking. Would it comfort him? Or would it only bring her close for a moment, to emphasize her coming silence?

She put it down, and turned away. When, some time later, the taxicab came to take her to Perry Street, she was lying on her bed in the dusk, face-down and arms outstretched, a lonely and pathetic figure, all her courage dead for the moment, dead but for the desire to hear Clayton’s voice again before the silence closed down.

She got up and pinned on her hat for the last time, before the mirror of the little inlaid dressing-table. And she smiled rather forlornly at her reflection in the glass.

“Well, I’ve got the present, anyhow,” she considered. “I’m not going either to wallow in the past or peer into the future. I’m going to work.”

The prospect cheered her. After all, work was the great solution. It was the great healer, too. That was why men bore their griefs better than women. They could work.

She took a final glance around her stripped and cheerless rooms. How really little things mattered! All her life she had been burdened with things. Now at last she was free of them.

The shabby room on Perry Street called her. Work called, beckoned to her with calloused, useful hands. She closed and locked the door and went quietly down the stairs.

One day late in May, Clayton, walking up-town in lieu of the golf he had been forced to abandon, met Doctor Haverford on the street, and found his way barred by that rather worried-looking gentleman.

“I was just going to see you, Clayton,” he said. “About two things. I’ll walk back a few blocks with you.”

He was excited, rather exalted.

“I’m going in,” he announced. “Regimental chaplain. I’ve got a year’s leave of absence. I’m rather vague about what a chaplain does, but I rather fancy he can be useful.”

“You’ll get over, of course. You’re lucky. And you’ll find plenty to do.”

“I’ve been rather anxious,” Doctor Haverford confided. “I’ve been a clergyman so long that I don’t know just how I’ll measure up as a man. You know what I mean. I am making no reflection on the church. But I’ve been sheltered and - well, I’ve been looked after. I don’t think I am physically brave. It would be a fine thing,” he said wryly, “if the chaplain were to turn and run under fire!”

“I shouldn’t worry about that.”

“My salary is to go on. But I don’t like that, either. If I hadn’t a family I wouldn’t accept it. Delight thinks I shouldn’t, anyhow. As a matter of fact, there ought to be no half-way measures about our giving ourselves. If I had a son to give it would be different.”

Clayton looked straight ahead. He knew that the rector had, for the moment, forgotten that he had a son to give and that he had not yet given.

“Why don’t you accept a small allowance?” he inquired quietly. “Or, better still, why don’t you let me know how much it will take and let me do it? I’d like to feel that I was represented in France - by you,” he added.

And suddenly the rector remembered. He was most uncomfortable, and very flushed.

“Thanks. I can’t let you do that, of course.”

“Why not?”

“Because, hang it all, Clayton, I’m not a parasite. I took the car, because it enabled me to do my parish work better. But I’m not going to run off to war and let you keep my family.”

Clayton glanced at him, at his fine erect old figure, his warmly flushed face. War did strange things. There was a new light in the rector’s once worldly if kindly eyes. He had the strained look of a man who sees great things, as yet far away, and who would hasten toward them. Insensibly he quickened his pace.

“But I can’t go myself, so why can’t I send a proxy?”

Clayton asked, smiling. “I’ve an idea I’d be well represented.”

“That’s a fine way to look at it, but I can’t do it. I’ve saved something, not much, but it will do for a year or two. I’m glad you made the offer, though. It was like you, and - it showed me the way. I can’t let any man, or any group of men, finance my going.”

And he stuck to it. Clayton, having in mind those careful canvasses of the congregation of Saint Luke’s which had every few years resulted in raising the rector’s salary, was surprised and touched. After all, war was like any other grief. It brought out the best or the worst in us. It roused or it crushed us.

The rector had been thinking.

“I’m a very fortunate man,” he said, suddenly. “They’re standing squarely behind me, at home. It’s the women behind the army that will make it count, Clayton.”

Clayton said nothing.

“Which reminds me,” went on the rector, “that I find Mrs. Valentine has gone away. I called on her to-day, and she has given up her apartment. Do you happen to know where she is? She has left no address.”

“Gone away?” Clayton repeated. “Why, no. I hadn’t heard of it.”

There in the busy street he felt a strange sense of loneliness. Always, although he did not see her, he felt her presence. She walked the same streets. For the calling, if his extremity became too great, he could hear her voice over the telephone. There was always the hope, too, of meeting her. Not by design. She had forbidden that. But some times perhaps God would be good to them both, if they earned it, and they could touch hands for a moment.

But - gone!

“You are certain she left no address?”

“Quite certain. She has stored her furniture, I believe.”

There was a sense of hurt, then, too. She had made this decision without telling him. It seemed incredible. A dozen decisions a day he made, and when they were vital there was always in his mind the question as to whether she would approve or not. He could not go to her with them, but mentally he was always consulting with her, earning her approbation. And she had gone without a word.

“Do you think she has gone to France?” He knew his voice sounded stiff and constrained.

“I hope not. She was being so useful here. Of course, the draft law - amazing thing, the draft law! Never thought we’d come to it. But it threw her out, in a way, of course.”

“What has the draft law to do with Mrs. Valentine?”

“Why, you know what she was doing, don’t you?”

“I haven’t seen her recently.”

The rector half-stopped.

“Well!” he said. “Let me tell you, Clayton, that that girl has been recruiting men, night after night and day after day. She’s done wonders. Standing in a wagon, mind you, in the slums, or anywhere; I heard her one night. By George, I went home and tore up a sermon I had been working on for days.”

Why hadn’t he known? Why hadn’t he realized that that was exactly the sort of thing she would do? There was bitterness in his heart, too. He might easily have stood unseen in the crowd, and have watched and listened and been proud of her. Then, these last weeks, when he had been working, or dining out, or sitting dreary and bored in a theater, she had been out in the streets. Ah, she lived, did Audrey. Others worked and played, but she lived. Audrey! Audrey!

” - in the rain,” the rector was saying. “But she didn’t mind it. I remember her saying to the crowd, ‘It’s raining over here, and maybe it’s raining on the fellows in the trenches. But I tell you, I’d rather be over there, up to my waist in mud and water, than scurrying for a doorway here.’ They had started to run out of the shower, but at that they grinned and stopped. She was wonderful, Clayton.”

In the rain! And after it was over she would go home, in some crowded bus or car, to her lonely rooms, while he rolled about the city in a limousine! It was cruel of her not to have told him, not to have allowed him at least to see that she was warm and dry.

“I’ve been very busy. I hadn’t heard,” he said, slowly. “Is it - was it generally known?”

Had Natalie known, and kept it from him?

“I think not. Delight saw her and spoke to her, I believe.”

“And you have no idea where she is now.”

“None whatever.”

He learned that night that Natalie had known, and he surprised a little uneasiness in her face.

“I - heard about it,” she said. “I can’t imagine her making a speech. She’s not a bit oratorical.”

“We might have sent out one of the cars for her, if I’d known.”

“Oh, she was looked after well enough.”

“Looked after?”

Natalie had made an error, and knew it.

“I heard that a young clergyman was taking her round,” she said, and changed the subject. But he knew that she was either lying or keeping something from him. In those days of tension he found her half-truths more irritating than her rather childish falsehoods. In spite of himself, however, the thought of the young clergyman rankled.

That night, stretched in the low chair in his dressing-room, under the reading light, he thought over things carefully. If he loved her as he thought he did, he ought to want her to be happy. Things between them were hopeless and wretched. If this clergyman, or Sloane, or any other man loved her, and he groaned as he thought how lovable she was, then why not want for her such happiness as she could find?

He slept badly that night, and for some reason Audrey wove herself into his dreams of the new plant. The roar of the machinery took on the soft huskiness of her voice, the deeper note he watched for and loved.

Anna Klein stood in her small room and covered her mouth with her hands, lest she shriek aloud. She knew quite well that the bomb in the suitcase would not suffice to blow up the whole great plant. But she knew what the result of its explosion would be.

The shells were not loaded at the Spencer plant. They were shipped away for that. But the fuses were loaded there, and in the small brick house at the end of the fuse building there were stored masses of explosive, enough to destroy a town. It was there, of course, that Herman was to place the bomb. She knew how he would do it, carefully, methodically, and with what a lumbering awkward gait he would make his escape.

Her whole mind was bent on giving the alarm. On escaping, first, and then on arousing the plant. But when the voices below continued, long after Herman had gone, she was entirely desperate. Herman had not carried out the suitcase. He had looked, indeed, much as usual as he walked out the garden path and closed the gate behind him. He had walked rather slowly, but then he always walked slowly. She seemed to see, however, a new caution in his gait, as of one who dreaded to stumble.

She dressed herself, with shaking fingers, and pinned on her hat. The voices still went on below, monotonous, endless; the rasping of Rudolph’s throat, irritated by cheap cigarets, the sound of glasses on the table, once a laugh, guttural and mirthless. It was ten o’clock when she knew, by the pushing back of their chairs, that they were preparing to depart. Ten o’clock!

She was about to commence again the feverish unscrewing of the door hinges, when she heard Rudolph’s step on the stairs. She had only time to get to the back of her room, beside the bed, when she heard him try the knob.

“Anna?”

She let him call her again.

“Anna!”

“What is it?”

“You in bed?”

“Yes. Go away and let me alone. I’ve got a right to sleep, anyhow.”

“I’m going out, but I’ll be back in ten minutes. You try any tricks and I’ll get you. See?”

“You make me sick,” she retorted.

She heard him turn and run lightly down the stairs. Only when she heard the click of the gate did she dare to begin again at the door. She got downstairs easily, but she was still a prisoner. However, she found the high little window into the coal-shed open, and crawled through it, to stand listening. The street was quiet.