Dangerous Days: (8 page)

“Good heavens, Audrey. And you went through dinner with all this to bear!”

“I’ve got to carry it right along, haven’t I? You know how I’ve been about this war, Clay. I’ve talked and talked about wondering how our men could stay out of it. So when the smash came, he just said he was going. He would show me there was some good stuff in him still. You see, I’ve really driven him to it, and if he’s killed - “

A surge of resentment against the absent man rose in Clayton Spencer’s mind. How like the cynicism of Chris’s whole attitude that he should thrust the responsibility for his going onto Audrey. He had made her unhappy while he was with her, and now his death, if it occurred, would be a horror to her.

“I don’t know why I burden you with all this,” she said, rather impatiently. “I daresay it is because I knew you’d have the money. No, I don’t mean that. I’d rather go to you in trouble than to any one else; that’s why.”

“I hope you always will.”

“Oh, I shall! Don’t worry.” But her attempt at gayety fell flat. She lighted a cigaret from the stand beside her and fell to studying his face.

“What’s happened to you?” she asked. “There’s a change in you, somehow. I’ve noticed it ever since you came home. You ought to be smug and contented, if any man should. But you’re not, are you?”

“I’m working hard. That’s all. I don’t want to talk about myself,” he added impatiently. “What about you? What are you going to do?”

“Sell my house, pay my debts and live on my own little bit of an income.”

“But, good heavens, Audrey! Chris has no right to cut off like this, and leave you. I don’t know the story, but at least he must support you. A man can’t just run away and evade every obligation. I think I’ll have to go after him and give him a talking to.”

“No!” she said, bending forward. “Don’t do that. He has had a bad scare. But he’s had one decent impulse, too. Let him alone, Clay.”

She placed the money on the stand, and rose. As she faced him, she impulsively placed her hands on his shoulders.

“I wish I could tell you, Clay,” she said, in her low, slightly husky voice, “how very, very much I admire you. You’re pretty much of a man, you know. And - there aren’t such a lot of them.”

For an uneasy moment he thought she was going to kiss him. But she let her hands fall, and smiling faintly, led the way downstairs. Once down, however, she voiced the under lying thought in her mind.

“If he comes out, Clay, he’ll never forgive me, probably. And if he is - if he doesn’t, I’ll never forgive myself. So I’m damned either way.”

But ten minutes later, with a man on either side of her, she was sitting at the piano with a cigaret tucked behind her ear, looking distractingly pretty and very gay and singing a slightly indecorous but very witty little French song.

Clayton Spencer, cutting in on the second rubber, wondered which of the many he knew was the real Audrey. He wondered if Chris had not married, for instance, the girl at the piano, only to find she was the woman upstairs. And he wondered, too, if that were true, why he should have had to clear out. So many men married the sort Audrey had been, in Chris’s little study, only to find that after all the thing they had thought they were getting was a pose, and it was the girl at the piano after all.

He missed her, somewhat later. She was gone a full half hour, and he fancied her absence had something to do with the money she had borrowed.

Two things helped greatly to restore Clayton to a more normal state of mind during the next few days. One of them undoubtedly was the Valentine situation. Beside Audrey’s predicament and Chris’s wretched endeavor to get away and yet prove himself a man, his own position seemed, if not comfortable, at least tenable. He would have described it, had he been a man to put such a thing into words, as that “he and Natalie didn’t exactly hit it off.”

There were times, too, during those next few days, when he wondered if he had not exaggerated their incompatibility. Natalie was unusually pleasant. She spent some evening hours on the arm of his big chair, talking endlessly about the Linndale house, and he would lean back, smiling, and pretend to a mad interest in black and white tiles and loggias.

He made no further protest as to the expense.

“Tell me,” he said once, “what does a fellow wear in this - er - Italian palace? If you have any intention of draping me in a toga and putting vine leaves in my hair, or whatever those wreaths were made of -!”

Natalie had no sense of humor, however. She saw that he meant to be amusing, and she gave the little fleeting smile one gives to a child who is being rather silly.

“Of course,” he went on, “we’ll have Roman baths, and be anointed with oil afterwards by lady Greek slaves. Perfumed oil.”

“Don’t be vulgar, Clay.” And he saw she was really offended.

While there was actually no change in their relationship, which remained as it had been for a dozen years, their surface life was pleasanter. And even that small improvement cheered him greatly. He was thankful for such a peace, even when he knew that he had bought it at a heavy price.

The other was his work. The directorate for the new munition plant had been selected, and on Thursday of that week he gave a dinner at his club to the directors. It had been gratifying to him to find how easily his past reputation carried the matter of the vast credits needed, how absolutely his new board deferred to his judgment. The dinner became, in a way, an ovation. He was vastly pleased and a little humbled. He wanted terribly to make good, to justify their faith in him. They were the big financial men of his time, and they were agreeing to back his judgment to the fullest extent.

When the dinner was over, a few of the younger men were in no mood to go home. They had dined and wined, and the night was young. Denis Nolan, who had been present as the attorney for the new concern, leaned back in his chair and listened to them with a sort of tolerant cynicism.

“Oh, go home, you fellows,” he said at last. “You make me sick. Enough’s enough. Why the devil does every dinner like this have to end in a debauch?”

In the end, however, both he and Clayton went along, Clayton at least frankly anxious to keep an eye on one or two of them until they started home. He had the usual standards, of course, except for himself. A man’s private life, so long as he was not a bounder, concerned him not at all. But this had been his dinner. He meant to see it through. Once or twice he had seen real tragedy come to men as a result of the recklessness of long dinners, many toasts and the instinct to go on and make a night of it.

Afterward they went to a midnight roof-garden, and at first it was rather dreary. Their youth was only comparative after all, and the eyes of the girls who danced and sang passed over them, to rest on boys in their twenties.

Nolan chuckled.

“Pathetic!” he said. “The saddest sight in the world! Every one of you here would at this moment give up everything he’s got to be under thirty.”

“Oh, shut up!” some one said, almost savagely.

“Of course, there are compensations,” he drawled. “At twenty you want to take the entire bunch home and keep ‘em. At thirty you know you can’t, but you still want to. At forty and over you don’t want them at all, but you think it’s damned curious they don’t want you.”

Clayton had watched the scene with a rather weary interest. He was, indeed, trying to put himself in Graham’s place, at Graham’s age. He remembered once, at twenty, having slipped off to see “The Black Crook,” then the epitome of wickedness, and the disillusionment of seeing women in tights with their accentuated curves and hideous lack of appeal to the imagination. The caterers of such wares had learned since then. Here were soft draperies instead, laces and chiffons. The suggestion was not to the eyes but to the mind. How devilishly clever it all was.

Perhaps there were some things he ought to discuss with Graham. He wondered how a man led up to such a thing.

Nolan bent toward him.

“I’ve been watching for a girl,” he said, “but I don’t see her. Last time I was here I came with Chris. She was his girl.”

“Chris!”

“Yes. It stumped me, at first. She came and sat with us, not a bad little thing, but - Good Lord, Clay, ignorant and not even pretty! And Chris was fastidious, in a way. I don’t understand it.”

The ancient perplexity of a man over the sex selections of his friends puckered his forehead.

“Damned if I understand it,” he repeated.

A great wave of pity for Audrey Valentine surged in Clayton Spencer’s heart. She had known it, of course; that was why Chris had gone away. How long had she known it? She was protecting Chris’s name, even now. For all her frivolity, there was something rather big in Audrey. The way she had held up at her dinner, for instance - and he rather fancied that the idea of his going into the army had come from her, directly or indirectly. So Chris, from being a fugitive, was already by way of being a hero to his friends.

Poor Audrey!

He made a mental note to send her some flowers in the morning.

He ordered them on his way down-town, and for some curious reason she was in his mind most of the day. Chris had been a fool to throw away a thing so worth having. Not every man had behind him a woman of Audrey’s sort.

That afternoon, accompanied by a rather boyishly excited elderly clergyman, he took two hours off from the mill and purchased a new car for Doctor Haverford.

The rector was divided between pleasure at the gift and apprehension at its cost, but Clayton, having determined to do a thing, always did it well.

“Nonsense,” he said. “My dear man, the church has owed you this car for at least ten years. If you get half the pleasure out of using it that I’m having in presenting it to you, it will be well worth while. I only wish you’d let me endow the thing. It’s likely to cost you a small fortune.”

Doctor Haverford insisted that he could manage that. He stood off, surveying with pride not unmixed with fear its bright enamel, its leather linings, the complicated system of dials and bright levers which filled him with apprehension.

“Delight says I must not drive it,” he said. “She is sure I would go too fast, and run into things. She is going to drive for me.”

“How is Delight?”

“I wish you could see her, Clayton. She - well, all young girls are lovely, but sometimes I think Delight is lovelier than most. She is much older than I am, in many ways. She looks after me like a mother. But she has humor, too. She has been drawing the most outrageous pictures of me arrested for speeding, and she has warned me most gravely against visiting road houses!”

“But Delight will have to be taught, if she is to run the car.”

“The salesman says they will send some one.”

“They give one lesson, I believe. That’s not enough. I think Graham could show her some things. He drives well.”

Flying uptown a little later in Clayton’s handsome car, the rector dreamed certain dreams. First his mind went to his parish visiting list, so endless, so never cleaned up, and now about to be made a pleasure instead of a penance. And into his mind, so strangely compounded of worldliness and spirituality, came a further dream - of Delight and Graham Spencer - of ease at last for the girl after the struggle to keep up appearances of a clergyman’s family in a wealthy parish.

Money had gradually assumed an undue importance in his mind. Every Sunday, every service, he dealt in money. He reminded his people of the church debt. He begged for various charities. He tried hard to believe that the money that came in was given to the Lord, but he knew perfectly well that it went to the janitor and the plumber and the organist. He watched the offertory after the sermon, and only too often as he stood waiting, before raising it before the altar, he wondered if the people felt that they had received their money’s worth.

He had started life with a dream of service, but although his own sturdy faith persisted, he had learned the cost of religion in dollars and cents. So, going up town, he wondered if Clayton would increase his church subscription, now that things were well with him.

“After all,” he reflected, “war is not an unmixed evil,” and outlined a sermon, to be called the Gains of War, and subsequently reprinted in pamphlet form and sold for the benefit of the new altar fund. He instructed Jackson to drive to the parish house instead of to the rectory, so that he might jot down the headings while they were in his mind. They ran like this: Spiritual growth; the nobility of sacrifice; the pursuit of an ideal; the doctrine of thy brother’s keeper.

He stopped to speak to Jackson from the pavement.

“I daresay we shall be in frequent difficulties with that new car of ours, Jackson,” he said genially. “I may have to ask you to come round and explain some of its mysterious interior to me.”

Jackson touched his cap.

“Thank you, sir, I’ll be glad to come. But I am leaving Mr. Spencer soon.”

“Leaving!”

“Going back to the army, sir.”

In the back of his mind the rector had been depending on Jackson, and he felt vaguely irritated.

“I’m sorry to hear it. I’d been counting on you.”

“Very sorry, sir. I’m not leaving immediately.”

“I sometimes think,” observed the rector, still ruffled, “that a man’s duty is not always what it appears on the surface. To keep Mr. Spencer - er - comfortable, while he is doing his magnificent work for the Allies, may be less spectacular, but it is most important.”

Jackson smiled, a restrained and slightly cynical smile.

“That’s a matter for a man’s conscience, isn’t it, sir?” he asked. And touching his cap again, moved off. Doctor Haverford felt reproved. Worse than that, he felt justly reproved. He did not touch the Gains of War that afternoon.

In the gymnasium he found Delight, captaining a basket-ball team. In her knickers and middy blouse she looked like a little girl, and he stood watching her as, flushed and excited, she ran round the long room. At last she came over and dropped onto the steps at his feet.

“Well?” she inquired, looking up. “Did you get it?”

“I did, indeed. A beauty, Delight.”