Dangerous Days Part 23

"She wants your money. That's all."

He had laughed then, an ugly laugh.

"There's a lot of it for her to want."

And Natalie had gone away to shed tears of fury and resentment in her own room.

She was really frightened. Bills for flowers sent to Marion were coming in, to lie unpaid on Graham's writing table. She had over-drawn once again to pay them, and other bills, for theater tickets, checks signed at restaurants, over-due club accounts.

So she went to the Haverfords alone, and managed very effectually to snub Mrs. Hayden before the rector's very eyes.

Mrs. Hayden thereupon followed an impulse.

"If it were not for Natalie Spencer," she said, following that lady's sables with malevolent eyes, "I should be very happy in something I want to tell you. Can we find a corner somewhere?"

And Doctor Haverford had followed her uneasily, behind some palms. She was a thin little woman with a maddening habit of drawing her tight veil down even closer by a contortion of her lower jaw, so that the rector found himself watching her chin rather than her eyes.

"I want you to know right away, as Marion's clergyman, and ours," she had said, and had given her jaw a particularly vicious wag and twist.

"Of course it is not announced--I don't believe even the Spencers know it yet. I am only telling you now because I know how dearly"--she did it again--"how dearly interested you are in all your spiritual children.

Marion is engaged to Graham Spencer."

The rector had not been a shining light for years without learning how to control his expression. He had a second, too, while she contorted her face again, to recover himself.

"Thank you," he said gravely. "I much appreciate your telling me."

Mrs. Hayden had lowered her voice still more. The revelation took on the appearance of conspiracy.

"In the early spring, probably," she said, "we shall need your services, and your blessing."

So that was the end of one dream. He had dreamed so many--in his youth, of spiritualizing his worldly flock; in middle life, of a bishopric; he had dreamed of sons, to carry on the name he had meant to make famous.

But the failures of those dreams had been at once his own failure and his own disappointment. This was different.

He was profoundly depressed. He wandered out of the crowd and, after colliding with a man from the caterer's in a dark rear hall, found his way up the servant's staircase to the small back room where he kept the lares and penates of his quiet life, his pipe, his fishing rods, a shabby old smoking coat, and back files of magazines which he intended some day to read, when he got round to it.

The little room was jammed with old furniture, stripped from the lower floor to make room for the crowd. He had to get down on his knees and crawl under a table to reach his pipe. But he achieved it finally, still with an air of abstraction, and lighted it. Then, as there was no place to sit down, he stood in the center of the little room and thought.

He did not go down again. He heard the noise of the arriving and departing motors subside, its replacement by the sound of clattering china, being washed below in the pantry. He went down finally, to be served with a meal largely supplemented by the left-overs of the afternoon refreshments, ornate salads, fancy ices, and an overwhelming table decoration that shut him off from his wife and Delight, and left him in magnificent solitude behind a pyramid of flowers.

Bits of the afternoon's gossip reached him; the comments on Delight's dress and her flowers; the reasons certain people had not come. But nothing of the subject nearest his heart. At the end of the meal Delight got up.

"I'm going to call up Mr. Spencer," she said. "He has about fifty dollars' worth of thanks coming to him."

"I didn't see Graham," said Mrs. Haverford. "Was he here?"

Delight stood poised for flight.

"He couldn't come because he had enough to do being two places at once.

His mother said he was working, and Mrs. Hayden said he had taken Marion to the Country Club. I don't know why they take the trouble to lie to me."

CHAPTER XIII

Christmas day of the year of our Lord, 1916, dawned on a world which seemed to have forgotten the Man of Peace. In Asia Minor the Allies celebrated it by the capture of a strong Turkish position at Maghdadah.

The Germans spent it concentrating at Dead Man's Hill; the British were ejected from enemy positions near Arras. There was no Christmas truce.

The death-grip had come.

Germany, conscious of her superiority in men, and her hypocritical peace offers unanimously rejected, was preparing to free herself from the last restraint of civilization and to begin unrestricted submarine warfare.

On Christmas morning Clayton received a letter from Chris. Evidently it had come by hand, for it was mailed in America.

"Dear Clay: I am not at all sure that you will care to hear from me. In fact, I have tried two or three times to write to you, and have given it up. But I am lonelier than Billy-be-d.a.m.ned, and if it were not for Audrey's letters I wouldn't care which sh.e.l.l got me and my little cart.

"I don't know whether you know why I got out, or not. Perhaps you don't.

I'd been a fool and a scoundrel, and I've had time, between fusses, to know just how rotten I've been. But I'm not going to whine to you. What I am trying to get over is that I'm through with the old stuff for good.

"G.o.d only knows why I am writing to you, anyhow--unless it is because I've always thought you were pretty near right. And I'd like to feel that now and then you are seeing Audrey, and bucking her up a bit. I think she's rather down.

"Do you know, Clay, I think this is a darned critical time. The press, hasn't got it yet, but both the British and the French are hard up against it. They'll fight until there is no one left to fight, but these d.a.m.ned Germans seem to have no breaking-point. They haven't any temperament, I daresay, or maybe it is soul they lack. But they'll fight to the last man also, and the plain truth is that there are too many of them.

"It looks mighty bad, unless we come in. And I don't mind saying that there are a good many eyes over here straining across the old Atlantic.

Are we doing anything, I wonder? Getting ready? The officers here say we can't expand an army to get enough men without a draft law. Can you see the administration endangering the next election with a draft law? Not on your life.

"I'm on the wagon, Clay. Honestly, it's funny. I don't mind telling you I'm darned miserable sometimes. But then I get busy, and I'm so blooming glad in a rush to get water that doesn't smell to heaven that I don't want anything else.

"I suppose they'll give us a good hate on Christmas. Well, think of me sometimes when you sit down to dinner, and you might drink to our coming in. If we have a principle to divide among us we shall have to."

Clayton read the letter twice.

He and Natalie lunched alone, Natalie in radiant good humor. His gift to her had been a high collar of small diamonds magnificently set, and Natalie, whose throat commenced to worry her, had welcomed it rapturously. Also, he had that morning notified Graham that his salary had been raised to five thousand dollars.

Graham had shown relief rather than pleasure.

"I daresay I won't earn it, Father," he had said. "But I'll at east try to keep out of debt on it."

"If you can't, better let me be your banker, Graham."

The boy had flushed. Then he had disappeared, as usual, and Clayton and Natalie sat across from each other, in their high-armed lion chairs, and made a pretense of Christmas gayety. True to Natalie's sense of the fitness of things, a small Nuremberg Christmas tree, hung with tiny toys and lighted with small candles, stood in the center of the table.

"We are dining out," she explained. "So I thought we'd use it now."

"It's very pretty," Clayton acknowledged. And he wondered if Natalie felt at all as he did, the vast room and the two men serving, with Graham no one knew where, and that travesty of Christmas joy between them. His mind wandered to long ago Christmases.

"It's not so very long since we had a real tree," he observed. "Do you remember the one that fell and smashed all the things on it? And how Graham heard it and came down?"

"Horribly messy things," said Natalie, and watched the second man critically. He was new, and she decided he was awkward.