Dangerous Days Part 5

He picked up the book from the table, and opened it casually.

"When first I loved I gave my very soul Utterly unreserved to Love's control, But Love deceived me, wrenched my youth away, And made the gold of life forever gray.

Long I lived lonely, yet I tried in vain With any other joy to stifle pain; There is no other joy, I learned to know, And so returned to love, as long ago, Yet I, this little while ere I go hence, Love very lightly now, in self defense."

"Twaddle," said Clayton Spencer, and put the book away. That was the sort of stuff men like Rodney lived on. In a mauve binding, too.

After he had put out the light he lay for a long time, staring into the darkness. It was not love he wanted: he was through with all that.

Power was the thing, integrity and power. To yield to no man, to achieve independence for one's soul--not that he put it that way. He formulated it, drowsily: 'Not to give a d.a.m.n for any one, so long as you're right.'

Of course, it was not always possible to know if one was right. He yawned. His conscious mind was drowsing, and from the depths below, released of the sentry of his waking hours, came the call of his starved imagination.

CHAPTER III

There was no moral to be adduced from Graham's waking the next morning.

He roused, reluctantly enough, but blithe and hungry. He sang as he splashed in his shower, chose his tie whistling, and went down the staircase two steps at a time to a ravenous breakfast.

Clayton was already at the table in the breakfast room, sitting back with the newspaper, his coffee at his elbow, the first cigarette of the morning half smoked. He looked rather older in the morning light. Small fine threads had begun to show themselves at the corners of his eyes.

The lines of repression from the nostrils to the corners of the mouth seemed deeper. But his invincible look of boyishness persisted, at that.

There was no awkwardness in Graham's "Morning, dad." He had not forgotten the night before, but he had already forgiven himself. He ignored the newspaper at his plate, and dug into his grapefruit.

"Anything new?" he inquired casually.

"You might look and see," Clayton suggested, good-naturedly.

"I'll read going down in the car. Can't stand war news on an empty stomach. Mother all right this morning?"

"I think she is still sleeping."

"Well, I should say she needs it, after last night. How in the world we manage, with all the interesting people in the world, to get together such a dreary lot as that--Lord, it was awful."

Clayton rose and folded his paper.

"The car's waiting," he said. "I'll be ready in five minutes."

He went slowly up the stairs. In her pink bedroom Natalie had just wakened. Madeleine, her elderly French maid, had brought her breakfast, and she was lying back among the pillows, the litter of the early mail about her and a morning paper on her knee. He bent over and kissed her, perfunctorily, and he was quick to see that her resentment of the evening before had survived the night.

"Sleep well?" he inquired, looking down at her. She evaded his eyes.

"Not particularly."

"Any plans for to-day?"

"I'll just play around. I'm lunching out, and I may run out with Rodney to Linndale. The landscape men are there today."

She picked up the newspaper as though to end the discussion. He saw then that she was reading the society news, and he rather more than surmised that she had not even glanced at the black headings which on the first page announced the hideous casualties of the Somme.

"Then you've given the planting contract?"

"Some things have to go in in the fall, Clay. For heaven's sake, don't look like a thunder cloud."

"Have you given the landscape contract?"

"Yes. And please go out. You make my head ache."

"How much is it to be?"

"I don't know. Ask Rodney."

"I'll do nothing of the sort, my dear. This is not Rodney's investment."

"Nor mine, I suppose!"

"All I want you to do, Natalie, is to consult me. I want you to have a free hand, but some one with a sense of responsibility ought to check up these expenditures. But it isn't only that. I'd like to have a hand in the thing myself. I've rather looked forward to the time when we could have the sort of country place we wanted."

"You don't like any of the strings to get out of your fingers, do you?"

"I didn't come up to quarrel, Natalie. I wish you wouldn't force it on me."

"I force it on you," she cried, and laughed in a forced and high-pitched note. "Just because I won't be over-ridden without a protest! I'm through, that's all. I shan't go near the place again."

"You don't understand," he persisted patiently. "I happen to like gardens. I had an idea--I told you about it--of trying to duplicate the old garden at home. You remember it. When we went there on our honeymoon--"

"You don't call that a garden?"

"Of course I didn't want to copy it exactly. It was old and out of condition. But there were a lot of old-fashioned flowers---However, if you intend to build an Italian villa, naturally--"

"I don't intend to build anything, or to plant anything." Her voice was frozen. "You go ahead. Do it in your own way. And then you can live there, if you like. I won't."

Which was what he carried away with him that morning to the mill. He was not greatly disturbed by her threat to keep her hands off. He knew quite well, indeed, that the afternoon would find her, with Rodney Page, picking her way in her high-heeled shoes over the waste that was some day to bloom, not like the rose of his desire but according to the formal and rigid blueprint which Rodney would be carrying. But in five minutes he had put the incident out of his mind. After all, if it gave her happiness and occupation, certainly she needed both. And his powers of inhibition were strong. For many years he had walled up the small frictions of his married life and its disappointments, and outside that wall had built up an existence of his own, which was the mill.

When he went down-stairs he found that Graham had ordered his own car and was already in it, drawing on his gloves.

"Have to come back up-town early, dad," he called in explanation, and drove off, going at the reckless speed he affected.

Clayton rode down alone in the limousine. He had meant to outline his plans of expansion to Graham, but he had had no intention of consulting him. In his own department the boy did neither better nor worse than any other of the dozens of young men in the organization. If he had shown neither special apt.i.tude for nor interest in the business, he had at least not signally failed to show either. Now, paper and pencil in hand, Clayton jotted down the various details of the new system in their sequence; the building of a forging plant to make the rough casts for the new Italian sh.e.l.ls out of the steel from the furnaces, the construction of a new spur to the little railway which bound the old plant together with its shining steel rails. There were questions of supplies and shipping and bank credits to face, the vast and complex problems of the complete new munition works, to be built out of town and involving such matters as the housing of enormous numbers of employees.

He scrawled figures and added them. Even with the size of the foreign contract their magnitude startled him. He leaned back, his mouth compressed, the lines from the nostrils to the corners deeper than ever.

He had completely forgotten Natalie and the country house.

Outside the gates to the mill enclosure he heard an early extra being called, and bought it. The Austrian premier had been a.s.sa.s.sinated. The successful French counter-attack against Verdun was corroborated, also. On the center of the front page was the first photograph to reach America of a tank. He inspected it with interest. So the Allies had at last shown same inventive genius of their own! Perhaps this was but the beginning. Even at that, enough of these fighting mammoths, and the war might end quickly. With the tanks, and the Allied offensive and the evidence of discontent in Austria, the thing might after all be over before America was involved.

He reflected, however, that an early peace would not be an unmixed blessing for him. He wanted the war to end: he hated killing. He felt inarticulately that something horrible was happening to the world. But personally his plans were premised on a war to last at least two years more, until the fall of 1918. That would let him out, cover the cost of the new plant, bring renewals of his foreign contracts, justify those stupendous figures on the paper in his hand.

He wondered, rather uncomfortably, what he would do, under the circ.u.mstances, if it were in his power to declare peace to-morrow.