Dangerous Days: (42 page)

“It is very fine,” he said. “I rather think you have found yourself at last. There aren’t a lot of such women and I daresay they will be fewer all the time. But they exist, of course.”

She glowed under his approval.

There was, in all their meetings, a sub-current of sadness, that they must be so brief, that before long they must end altogether, that they could not put into words the things that were in their eyes and their hearts. After that first hour of her return to consciousness there had been no expressed tenderness between them. The nurse sat in the room, eternally knitting, and Clayton sat near Audrey, or read to her, or, like Terry, wandered about the room. But now and then Audrey, enthroned, like a princess on her pillows, would find his eyes on her, and such a hungry look in them that she would clench her hands. And after such times she always said: “Now, tell me about the mill.” Or about Washington, where he was being summoned with increasing frequency. Or about Graham. Anything to take that look out of his eyes. He told her all his plans; he even brought the blueprints of the new plant and spread them out on the bed. He was dreaming a great dream those days, and Audrey knew it. He was building again, this time not for himself, but for the nation.

After he had gone, looking boyish and reluctant, she would lie for a little while watching the door. Perhaps he had forgotten something, and would come back! One day he did, and was surprised to find her suddenly in tears.

“You came back!” she said half hysterically. “You came back.”

That was the only time in all those weeks that he kissed her. The nurse had gone out, and suddenly he caught her in his arms and held her to him. He put her back very gently, and she saw that he was pale.

“I think I’d better go now, and not come back,” he said.

And for two long and endless days he did not come. Then on the third he came, very stiff and formal, and with himself well in hand. Audrey, leaning back and watching him, felt what a boy he was after all, so determined to do the right thing, so obvious with his blueprints, and so self-conscious.

In June she left the hospital and went to the country. She had already made a little market for her work, and she wanted to carry it on. By that time, too, she knew that the break must come between Clayton and herself if it came at all.

“No letters, no anything, Clay,” she said, and he acquiesced quietly. But the night she left, the butler, coming downstairs to investigate a suspicious sound, found him restlessly pacing the library floor.

In August he went abroad, and some time about the middle of the month while he was in London, he received a cable from Graham. He had been commissioned a first lieutenant in the infantry. Clayton had been seeing war at first hand then, and for a few moments he was fairly terrified. On that first of August the Germans had used liquid fire for the first time, thus adding a new horror. Men in the trenches swept by it had been practically annihilated. Attacks against it were practically suicide. Already the year had seen the last of Kitchener’s army practically destroyed, and the British combing the country for new divisions.

In the deadly give and take of that summer, where gains and losses were measured by yards, the advantage was steadily on the German side, and it would be a year before the small force of American regulars could be augmented to any degree by the great new army. It was the darkest hour.

Following on the heels of Graham’s cable came a hysterical one from Natalie.

“Graham probably ordered abroad. Implore you use influence with Washington.”

He resorted to his old remedy when he was in trouble. He walked the streets. He tried to allow for Natalie’s lack of exaltation by the nature of her life. If she could have seen what he had seen, surely she would have felt, as he did, that no sacrifice could be too great to end this cancer of the world. But deep in his heart he knew that Natalie was - Natalie. Nothing would change her.

As it happened, he passed Graham on the Atlantic. There was a letter for him at the office, a boyish, exultant letter:

“Dad dear, I’m married!” it began. “Married and off for France. It is Delight, of course. It always was Delight, altho I know that sounds queer. And now I’m off to kill a Hun or two. More than that, I hope. I want two Germans for every poor devil they got at the works. That’s the minimum. The maximum - !

“You’ll look after Delight, I know. She has been perfectly bully, but it’s hard on her. We were married two days ago, and already I feel as though I’ve always been married. She’s going on with the canteen work, and I shall try not to be jealous. She’s popular! And if you’d seen the General when we were married you’d have thought he was losing a daughter.

“I wired Mother, but she was too cut up about my leaving to come. I wish she had, for it was a strange sort of wedding. The division was about to move, and at the last minute five girls turned up to be married to fellows who were leaving. They came from all over, and believe me there was some excitement. All day the General and Chaplain Haverford were fussing about licenses, and those girls sat around and waited, and looked droopy but sort of happy - you know what I mean.

“It was nine o’clock in the evening before everything was ready. Delight had trimmed up the little church which is in the camp and had a flag over the altar. Then we had a multiple wedding. Honestly! The organ played a squeaky wedding march, and we went in, six couples. The church was full of soldiers, and - I don’t mind saying I was ready to shed tears.

“We lined up, and Doctor Haverford married us. Delight says she is sure we are only one-sixth married. Quiet! You never heard such quiet - except for the General blowing his nose. I think myself he was weeping, and there was a rumor about the camp to that effect. You know - the flag over the altar, and all that. I tell you it made a fellow think.

“Well, I’m going over now. Quick work, isn’t it? And to think that a few months ago I was hanging around the club and generally making a mess of life. That’s all over now, thank God. I’m going to make good. Try to buck mother up. It’s pretty hard for her. It’s hard for all women, just waiting. And while I know I’m coming back, safe and sound, I’d like to feel that you are going to keep an eye on Delight. She’s the most important thing in the world to me now.”

Then scrawled in a corner he had added,

“You’ve been mighty fine with me always, dad. I was a good bit of a pup last winter. If I make anything of myself at all, it will be because I want to be like you.”

Clayton sat for a long time with the letter in his hand. The happiness and hope that fairly radiated from it cheered and warmed him. He was nearly happy. And it came to him then that, while every man had the right to happiness, only those achieved it who craved it for others, and having craved it for them, at last saw the realization of their longing.

Natalie had had a dull Spring. With Graham’s departure for camp she moved to the country house, carrying with her vast amounts of luggage, the innumerable thing, large and small, which were necessary for her comfort. The installing of herself in her new and luxurious rooms gave her occupation for several days. She liked her new environment. She liked herself in it. The rose-colored taffetas of her bedroom brought out the delicacy of her skin. The hangings of her bed, small and draped, reflected a faint color into her face, and the morning inspection with a hand-mirror, which always followed her coffee, showed her at her best instead of her worst.

Of her dressing-room she was not so sure. It’s ivory-paneled walls, behind whose sliding panels were hung her gowns, her silk and satin chiffon negligees, her wraps and summer furs - all the vast paraphernalia with which she armed herself, as a knight with armor - the walls seemed cold. She hated old-blue, but old-blue Rodney had insisted upon.

He had held a bit of the taffeta to her cheek.

“It is delicious, Natalie,” he said. “It makes your eyes as blue as the sea.”

“Always a decorator!” she had replied, smiling.

And, standing in her blue room, the first day of her arrival, and frowning at her reflection, she remembered his reply.

“Because I have no right, with you, to be anything else.” He had stopped for a moment, and had absently folded and refolded the bit of blue silk. Suddenly he said, “What do you think I am going to do, now that our work together is done? Have you ever thought about that, Natalie?”

“You are coming often to enjoy your handiwork?”

He had made an impulsive gesture.

“I’m not coming. I’ve been seeing too much of you as it is. If you want the truth, I’m just wretchedly unhappy, Natalie. You know I’m in love with you, don’t you?”

“I believe you think you are.”

“Don’t laugh.” He almost snarled. “I may laugh at my idiocy, but you haven’t any right to. I know I’m ridiculous. I’ve known it for months. But it’s pretty serious for me.”

He had meant it. There could be no doubt of that. It is the curious quality of very selfish women that they inspire a certain sort of love. They are likely to be loved often, even tho the devotion they inspire is neither deep nor lasting. Big and single-hearted women are loved by one man, and that forever.

Natalie had not laughed, but she had done what was almost as bad. She had patted him on the arm.

“Don’t talk like that,” she said, gently. “You are all I have now, Rodney, and I don’t want to lose you. I’m suffering horribly these days. You’re my greatest comfort.”

“I’ve heard you say that of a chair.”

“As for loving me, you must not talk like that. Under the circumstances, it’s indelicate.”

“Oh!” he had said, and looked at her quickly. “I can love you, but it’s indelicate to tell you about it!”

“I am married, Rodney.”

“Good God, do you think I ever forget it?”

There was a real change in their relationship, but neither of them understood it. The change was that Rodney was no longer playing. Little by little he had dropped his artistic posing for her benefit, his cynical cleverness, his adroit simulation of passion. He no longer dramatized himself, because rather often he forgot himself entirely. His passion had ceased to be spurious, and it was none the less real because he loved not a real woman, but one of his own artistic creation.

He saw in Natalie a misunderstood and suffering woman, bearing the burdens he knew of with dignity and a certain beauty. And behind her slightly theatrical silences he guessed at other griefs, nobly borne and only gently intimated. He developed, after a time, a certain suspicion of Clayton, not of his conduct but of his character. These big men were often hard. It was that quality which made them successful. They married tender, gentle girls, and then repressed and trampled on them.

Natalie became, in his mind, a crushed and broken thing, infinitely lonely and pathetic. And, without in the least understanding, Natalie instinctively knew it was when she was wistful and dependent that he found her most attractive, and became wistful and dependent to a point that imposed even on herself.

“I’ve been very selfish with you, Rodney, dear,” she said, lifting sad eyes to his. “I am going to be better. You must come often this summer, and I’ll have some nice girls for you to play with.”

“Thank you,” he said, stiffly.

“We’ll have to be as gay as we can,” she sighed. “I’m just a little dreary these days, you know.”

It was rather absurd that they were in a shop, and that the clerk should return just then with curtain cords, and that the discussion of certain shades of yellow made an anti-climax to it all. But in the car, later, he turned to her, roughly.

“You needn’t ask any girls for me,” he said. “I only want one woman, and if I can’t have her I don’t want any one.”

At first the very fact that he could not have her had been, unconsciously, the secret of her attraction. She was a perfect thing, and unattainable. He could sigh for her with longing and perfect safety. But as time went on, with that incapacity of any human emotion to stand still, but either to go on or to go back, his passion took on a more human and less poetic aspect. She satisfied him less, and he wanted more.

For one thing, he dreamed that strange dream of mankind, of making ice burn, of turning snow to fire. The old chimera of turning the cold woman to warmth through his own passion began to obsess him. Sometimes he watched Natalie, and had strange fancies. He saw her lit from within by a fire, which was not the reflection of his, but was recklessly her own. How wonderful she would be, he thought. And at those times he had wild visions of going away with her into some beautiful wilderness and there teaching her what she had missed in life.

But altho now he always wanted her, he was not always thinking of a wilderness. It was in his own world that he wanted her, to fit beautifully into his house, to move, exquisitely dressed, through ballrooms beside him. He wanted her, at those times, as the most perfect of all his treasures. He was still a collector!

The summer only served to increase his passion. During the long hot days, when Clayton was abroad or in Washington, or working late at night, as he frequently did how, they were much together. Natalie’s plans for gayety had failed dismally. The city and the country houses near were entirely lacking in men. She found it a real grievance.

“I don’t know what we are coming to,” she complained. “The country club is like a girl’s boarding-school. I wish to heaven the war was over, and things were sensible again.”

So, during his week-end visits, they spent most of the time together. There were always girls there, and now and then a few men, who always explained immediately that they had been turned down for the service, or were going in the fall.

“I’m sure somebody has to stay home and attend to things here,” she said to him one August night. “But even when they are in America, they are rushing about, pretending to do things. One would think to see Clayton that he is the entire government. It’s absurd.”

“I wish I could go,” he said unexpectedly.

“Don’t be idiotic. You’re much too old.”

“Not as old as Clay.”

“Oh, Clay! He’s in a class by himself.” She laughed lightly.