Chapter 47
Very quietly Audrey had taken herself out of Clayton's life. She sent him a little note of farewell:
"We have had ten very wonderful months, Clay," she wrote. "We ought to be very happy. So few have as much. And we both know that this can't go on. I am going abroad. I have an opportunity to go over and see what Englishwomen are doing in the way of standing behind their men at war. Then I am to tell our women at home. Not that they need it now, bless them!
"I believe you will be glad to know that I am to be on the same side of the ocean with Graham. I could get to him, I think, if anything should go wrong. Will you send him the enclosed address?
"But, my dear, the address is for him, not for you. You must not write to me. I have used up every particle of moral courage I possess, as it is. And I am holding this in my mind, as you must. Time is a great healer of all wounds. We could have been happy together; oh, my dear, so very happy together! Now that I am going, let me be frank for once. I have given you the finest thing I am capable of. I am better for caring for you as I have, as I do.
"But those days in the hospital told me we couldn't go on. Things like that don't stand still. Maybe - we are only human, Clay - maybe if the old days were still here we might have compromised with life. I don't know. But I do know that we never will, now.
"After all, we have had a great deal, and we still have. It is a wonderful thing to know that somewhere in the world is some one person who loves you. To waken up in the morning to it. To go to sleep remembering it. And to have kept that love fine and clean is a wonderful thing, too.
"I am not always on a pinnacle. There have been plenty of times when the mere human want of you has sent me to the dust. Is it wrong to tell you that? But of course not. You know it. But you and I know this; Clay, dear. Love that is hopeless, that can not end in marriage, does one of two things. Either it degrades or it exalts. It leaves its mark, always, but that mark does not need to be a stain." Clayton lived, for a time after that, in a world very empty and very full. The new plant was well under way. Not only was he about to make shells for the government at a nominal profit, but Washington was asking him to assume new and wide responsibilities. He accepted. He wanted so to fill the hours that there would be no time to remember. But, more than that, he was actuated by a fine and glowing desire to serve. Perhaps, underlying it all was the determination to be, in every way, the man Audrey thought him to be. And there was, too, a square-jawed resolution to put behind Graham, and other boys like Graham, all the shells and ammunition they needed.
He worked hard; more than hard. Old Terry, meeting him one day in the winter that followed, was shocked at his haggard face.
"Better take a little time off, Clay," he suggested. "We're going to Miami next week. How about ten days or so? Fishing is good this year."
"Can't very well take a holiday just now. Too much to do, Terry." Old Terry went home and told his wife.
"Looks like the devil," he said. "He'll go down sick one of these days. I suppose it's no use telling Natalie."
"None whatever," said Mrs. Terry. "And, anyhow, it's a thing I shouldn't care to tell Natalie."
"What do you mean, not care to tell Natalie?”
"Hard work doesn't make a man forget how to smile.”
"Oh, come now. He's cheerful enough. If you mean because Graham's fighting?"
"That's only part of it," said Mrs. Terry, sagely, and relapsed into one of the poignant silences that drove old Terry to a perfect frenzy of curiosity.
Then, in January of 1918, a crisis came to Clayton and Natalie Spencer. Graham was wounded.
Clayton was at home when the news came. Natalie had been having one of her ill-assorted, meticulously elaborate dinner-parties, and when the guests had gone they were for a moment alone in the drawing-room of their town house. Clayton was fighting in himself the sense of irritation Natalie's dinners always left, especially the recent ones. She was serv-ng, he knew, too much food. In the midst of the agitation on conservation, her dinners ran their customary seven courses. There was too much wine, too. But it occurred to him that only the wine had made the dinner endurable.
Then he tried to force himself into better humor. Natalie was as she was, and if, in an unhappy, struggling, dying world she found happiness in display, God knew there was little enough happiness. He was not at home very often. He could not spoil her almost childish content in the small things that made up her life.
"I think it was very successful," she said, surveying herself in one of the corner mirrors. "Do you like my gown, Clay?"
"It's very lovely."
"It's new. I've been getting some clothes, Clay. You'll probably shriek at the bills. But all this talk about not buying clothes is nonsense, you know. The girls who work in the shops have to live."
"Naturally. Of course there is other work open to them now,"
"In munition plants, I daresay. To be blown up!"
He winced. The thought of that night the year before, when the plant went, still turned him sick.
"Don't buy too many things, my dear," he said, gently. "You know how things are."
"I know it's your fault that they are as they are," she persisted. "Oh, I know it was noble of you, and all that. The country's crazy about you. But still I think it was silly. Every one else is making money out of things, and you - a lot of thanks you'll get, when the war's over."
"I don't particularly want thanks."
Then the door-bell rang in the back of the house, and Buckham answered it. He was conscious at once that Natalie stiffened, and that she was watchful and a trifle pale. Buckham brought in a telegram on a tray.
"Give it to me, Buckham," Natalie said, in a strained voice. And held out her hand for it. When she saw it was for Clayton, however, she relaxed. As he tore it open, Clayton was thinking. Evidently Natalie had been afraid of his seeing some message for her. Was it possible that Natalie - He opened it. After what seemed a long time he looked up. Her eyes were on him.
"Don't be alarmed, my dear," he said. "It is not very bad. But Graham has been slightly wounded. Sit down," he said sharply, as he saw her sway.
"You are lying to me," she said in a dreadful voice.
"He's dead!”
"He is not dead, Natalie." He tried to put her into a chair, but she resisted him fiercely.
"Let me alone. I want to see that telegram."
And, very reluctantly, at last he gave it to her. Graham was severely wounded. It was from a man in his own department at Washington who had just seen the official list. The nature of his wounding had not been stated. Natalie looked up from the telegram with a face like a painted mask.
"This is your doing," she said. "You wanted him to go. You sent him into this. He will die, and you will have murdered him."
The thought came to him, in that hour of stress, that she was right. Pitifully, damnably right. He had not wanted Graham to go, but he had wanted him to want to go. A thousand thoughts flashed through his mind, of Delight, sleeping somewhere quietly after her day's work at the camp; of Graham himself, of that morning after the explosion, and his frank, pitiful confession. And again of Graham, suffering, perhaps dying, and with none of his own about him. And through it all was the feeling that he must try to bring Natalie to reason, that it was incredible that she should call him his own son's murderer.
"We must not think of his dying," he said. "We must only think that he is going to live, and to come back to us, Natalie dear."
She flung off the arm he put around her.
"And that," he went on, feeling for words out of the dreadful confusion in his mind, "if - the worst comes, that he has done a magnificent thing. There is no greater thing, Natalie."
"That won't bring him back to us," she said, still in that frozen voice. And suddenly she burst into hard, terrible crying.
All that night he sat outside her door, for she would not allow him to come in. He had had Washington on the telephone, but when at last he got the connection it was to learn that no further details were known. Toward dawn there came the official telegram from the War Department, but it told nothing more.
Natalie was hysterical. He had sent for a doctor, and with Madeleine in attendance the medical man had worked over her for hours. Going out, toward morning, he had found Clayton in the hall and had looked at him sharply.
"Better go to bed, Mr. Spencer," he advised. "It may not be as bad as you think. And they're doing fine surgery over there."
And, as Clayton shook his head:
"Mrs. Spencer will come round all right. She's hysterical, naturally. She'll be sending for you before long."
With the dawn, Clayton's thoughts cleared. If he and Natalie were ever to get together at all, it should be now, with this common grief between them. Perhaps, after all, it was not too late to re-build his house of life. He had failed. Perhaps they had both failed, but the real responsibility was his. Inside the room he could hear her moaning, a low, monotonous,