From the moment, the day before Christmas, when Graham had taken the
little watch from his pocket and fastened it on Anna's wrist, he was
rather uneasily aware that she had become his creature. He had had no
intention of buying Anna. He was certainly not in love with her. But he
found her amusing and at times comforting.
He had, of course, expected to lose her after the unlucky day when
Clayton had found them together, but Dunbar had advised that she be
kept on for a time at least. Mentally Graham figured that the first of
January would see her gone, and the thought of a Christmas present for
her was partly compounded of remorse.
He had been buying a cigaret case for Marion when the thought came to
him. He had not bought a Christmas present for a girl, except flowers,
since the first year he was at college. He had sent Delight one that
year, a half-dozen little leather-bound books of poetry. What a precious
young prig he must have been! He knew now that girls only pretended to
care for books. They wanted jewelry, and they got past the family with
it by pretending it was not real, or that they had bought it out of
their allowances. One of Toots' friends was taking a set of silver fox
from a man, and she was as straight as a die. Oh, he knew girls, now.
The next day he asked Anna Klein: “What would you like for Christmas?”
Anna, however, had insisted that she did not want a Christmas present.
Later on, however, she had seen a watch one of the girls on the hill
had bought for twelve dollars, and on his further insistence a day or so
later she had said:
“Do you really want to know?”
“Of course I do.”
“You oughtn't to spend money on me, you know.”
“You let me attend to that. Now, out with it!”
So she told him rather nervously, for she felt that twelve dollars was a
considerable sum. He had laughed, and agreed instantly, but when he went
to buy it he found himself paying a price that rather startled him.
“Don't you lose it, young lady!” he admonished her when, the day before
Christmas, he fastened it on her wrist. Then he had stooped down to kiss
her, and the intensity of feeling in her face had startled him. “It's
a good watch,” he had said, rather uneasily; “no excuse for your being
late now!”
All the rest of the day she was radiant.
He meant well enough even then. He had never pretended to love her. He
accepted her adoration, petted and teased her in return, worked off his
occasional ill humors on her, was indeed conscious sometimes that he was
behaving extremely well in keeping things as they were.
But by the middle of January he began to grow uneasy. The atmosphere at
Marion's was bad; there was a knowledge of life plus an easy toleration
of certain human frailties that was as insidious as a slow fever. The
motto of live and let live prevailed. And Marion refused to run away
with him and marry him, or to let him go to his father.
In his office all day long there was Anna, so yielding, so surely his to
take if he wished. Already he knew that things there must either end or
go forward. Human emotions do not stand still; they either advance or go
back, and every impulse of his virile young body was urging him on.
He made at last an almost frenzied appeal to Marion to marry him at
once, but she refused flatly.
“I'm not going to ruin you,” she said. “If you can't bring your people
round, we'll just have to wait.”
“They'd be all right, once it is done.”
“Not if I know your father! Oh, he'd be all right--in ten years or so.
But what about the next two or three? We'd have to live, wouldn't we?”
He lay awake most of the night thinking things over. Did she really care
for him, as Anna cared, for instance? She was always talking about their
having to live. If they couldn't manage on his salary for a while, then
it was because Marion did not care enough to try.
For the first time he began to question Marion's feeling for him. She
had been rather patronizing him lately. He had overheard her, once,
speaking of him as a nice kid, and it rankled. In sheer assertion of his
manhood he met Anna Klein outside the mill at the noon hour, the next
day, and took her for a little ride in his car. After that he repeatedly
did the same thing, choosing infrequented streets and roads, dining with
her sometimes at a quiet hotel out on the Freeland road.
“How do you get away with this to your father?” he asked her once.
“Tell him you're getting ready to move out to the new plant, and we're
working. He's not round much in the evenings now. He's at meetings, or
swilling beer at Gus's saloon. They're a bad lot, Graham, that crowd at
Gus's.”
“How do you mean, bad?”
“Well, they're Germans, for one thing, the sort that shouts about the
Fatherland. They make me sick.”
“Let's forget them, honey,” said Graham, and reaching under the
table-cloth, caught and held one of her hands.
He was beginning to look at things with the twisted vision of Marion's
friends. He intended only to flirt a little with Anna Klein, but he
considered that he was extremely virtuous and, perhaps, a bit of a fool
for letting things go at that. Once, indeed, Tommy Hale happened on them
in a road-house, sitting very quietly with a glass of beer before Graham
and a lemonade in front of Anna, and had winked at him as though he had
received him into the brotherhood of those who were seeing life.
Then, near the end of January, events took another step forward. Rudolph
Klein was discharged from the mill.
Clayton, coming down one morning, found the manager, Hutchinson, and
Dunbar in his office. The two men had had a difference of opinion, and
the matter was laid before him.
“He is a constant disturbing element,” Hutchinson finished; “I
understand Mr. Dunbar's position, but we can't afford to have the men
thrown into a ferment, constantly.”
“If you discharge him you rouse his suspicions and those of his gang,”
said Dunbar, sturdily.
“There is a gang, then?”
“A gang! My God!”
In the end, however, Clayton decided to let Rudolph go. Hutchinson was
insistent. Production was falling down. One or two accidents to the
machinery lately looked like sabotage. He had found a black cat crudely
drawn on the cement pavement outside his office-door that very
morning, the black cat being the symbol of those I.W.W.'s who advocated
destruction.
“What about the girl?” Dunbar asked, when the manager had gone.
“I have kept her, against my better judgment, Mr. Dunbar.”
For just a moment Dunbar hesitated. He knew certain things that Clayton
Spencer did not, things that it was his business to know. The girl might
be valuable one of these days. She was in love with young Spencer. The
time might come when he, Dunbar, would need to capitalize that love and
use it against Rudolph and the rest of the crowd that met in the little
room behind Shroeder's saloon. It was too bad, in a way. He was sorry
for this man with the strong, repressed face and kindly mouth, who sat
across from him. But these were strange times. A man could not be too
scrupulous.
“Better keep her on for a month or two, anyhow,” he said. “They're up to
something, and I miss my guess if it isn't directed against you.”
“How about Herman Klein?”
“Nothing doing,” stated Mr. Dunbar, flatly. “Our informer is tending bar
at Gus's. Herman listens and drinks their beer, but he's got the German
fear of authority in him. He's a beer socialist. That's all.”
But in that Mr. Dunbar left out of account the innate savagery that
lurked under Herman's phlegmatic surface.
“You don't think it would do if she was moved to another office?”
“The point is this.” Dunbar moved his chair forward. “The time may come
when we will need the girl as an informer. Rudolph Klein is infatuated
with her. Now I understand that she has a certain feeling of--loyalty
to Mr. Graham. In that case”--he glanced at Clayton--“the welfare of the
many, Mr. Spencer, against the few.”
For a long time after he was gone Clayton sat at his desk, thinking.
Every instinct in him revolted against the situation thus forced on him.
There was something wrong with Dunbar's reasoning. Then it flashed on
him that Dunbar probably was right, and that their points of view were
bitterly opposed. Dunbar would have no scruples, because he was not
quite a gentleman. But war was a man's game. It was not the time for
fine distinctions of ethics. And Dunbar was certainly a man.
If only he could talk it over with Natalie! But he knew Natalie too well
to expect any rational judgment from her. She would demand at once that
the girl should go. Yet he needed a woman's mind on it. In any question
of relationship between the sexes men were creatures of impulse, but
women had plotted and planned through the ages. They might lose their
standards, but never their heads. Not that he put such a thought into
words. He merely knew that women were better at such things than men.
That afternoon, as a result of much uncertainty, he took his problem to
Audrey. And Audrey gave him an answer.
“You've got to think of the mill, Clay,” she said. “The Dunbar man is
right. And all you or any other father of a boy can do is to pray in
season, and to trust to Graham's early training.”
And all the repressed bitterness in Clayton Spencer's heart was in his
answer.
“He never had any early training, Audrey. Oh, he had certain things. His
manners, for instance. But other things? I ought not to say that. It was
my fault, too. I'm not blaming only Natalie. Only now, when it is all we
have to count on--”
He was full of remorse when he started for home. He felt guilty of every
disloyalty. And in masculine fashion he tried to make up to Natalie for
the truth that had been wrung from him. He carried home a great bunch of
roses for her. But he carried home, too, a feeling of comfort and vague
happiness, as though the little room behind him still reached out and
held him in its warm embrace.