DANGEROUS DAYS

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DANGEROUS DAYS

by Mary Roberts Rinehart

CHAPTER I

Natalie Spencer was giving a dinner. She was not an easy hostess.
Like most women of futile lives she lacked a sense of proportion,
and the small and unimportant details of the service absorbed her.
Such conversation as she threw at random, to right and left, was
trivial and distracted.

Yet the dinner was an unimportant one. It had been given with an
eye more to the menu than to the guest list, which was characteristic
of Natalie's mental processes. It was also characteristic that when
the final course had been served without mishap, and she gave a sigh
of relief before the gesture of withdrawal which was a signal to the
other women, that she had realized no lack in it. The food had been
good, the service satisfactory. She stood up, slim and beautifully
dressed, and gathered up the women with a smile.

The movement found Doctor Haverford, at her left, unprepared and
with his coffee cup in his hand. He put it down hastily and rose,
and the small cup overturned in its saucer, sending a smudge of
brown into the cloth.

"Dreadfully awkward of me!" he said. The clergyman's smile of
apology was boyish, but he was suddenly aware that his hostess was
annoyed. He caught his wife's amiable eyes on him, too, and they
said quite plainly that one might spill coffee at home - one quite
frequently did, to confess a good man's weakness - but one did not
do it at Natalle Spencer's table. The rector's smile died into a
sheepish grin.

For the first time since dinner began Natalie Spencer had a clear
view of her husband's face. Not that that had mattered particularly,
but the flowers had been too high. For a small dinner, low flowers,
always. She would speak to the florist. But, having glanced at
Clayton, standing tall and handsome at the head of the table, she
looked again. His eyes were fixed on her with a curious intentness.
He seemed to be surveying her, from the top of her burnished hair to
the very gown she wore. His gaze made her vaguely uncomfortable.
It was unsmiling, appraising, almost - only that was incredible in
Clay - almost hostile.

Through the open door the half dozen women trailed out, Natalie in
white, softly rustling as she moved, Mrs. Haverford in black velvet,
a trifle tight over her ample figure, Marion Hayden, in a very brief
garment she would have called a frock, perennial debutante that she
was, rather negligible Mrs. Terry Mackenzie, and trailing behind the
others, frankly loath to leave the men, Audrey Valentine. Clayton
Spencer's eyes rested on Audrey with a smile of amused toleration,
on her outrageously low green gown, that was somehow casually
elegant, on her long green ear-rings and jade chain, on the cigaret
between her slim fingers.

Audrey's audacity always amused him. In the doorway she turned and
nonchalantly surveyed the room.

"For heaven's sake, hurry!" she apostrophized the table. "We are
going to knit - I feel it. And don't give Chris anything more to
drink, Clay. He's had enough."

She went on, a slim green figure, moving slowly and reluctantly
toward the drawing-room, her head held high, a little smile still
on her lips. But, alone for a moment, away from curious eyes, her
expression changed, her smile faded, her lovely, irregular face took
on a curious intensity. What a devilish evening! Chris drinking
too much, talking wildly, and always with furtive eyes on her.
Chris! Oh, well, that was life, she supposed.

She stopped before a long mirror and gave a bit of careless
attention to her hair. With more care she tinted her lips again
with a cosmetic stick from the tiny, diamond-studded bag she carried.
Then she turned and surveyed the hall and the library beyond. A new
portrait of Natalie was there, hanging on the wall under a shaded
light, and she wandered in, still with her cigaret, and surveyed it.
Natalie had everything. The portrait showed it. It was beautiful,
smug, complacent.

Mrs. Valentine's eyes narrowed slightly. She stood there, thinking
about Natalie. She had not everything, after all. There was
something she lacked. Charm, perhaps. She was a cold woman. But,
then, Clay was cold, too. He was even a bit hard. Men said that;
hard and ambitious, although he was popular. Men liked strong men.
It was only the weak they deplored and loved. Poor Chris!

She lounged into the drawing-room, smiling her slow, cool smile.
In the big, uncarpeted alcove, where stood Natalie's great painted
piano, Marion Hayden was playing softly, carefully posed for the
entrance of the men. Natalie was sitting with her hands folded, in
the exact center of a peacock-blue divan. The others were knitting.

"Very pretty effect, Toots!" Audrey called. And Miss Hayden gave
her the unashamed smile of one woman of the world to another.

Audrey had a malicious impulse. She sat down beside Natalie, and
against the blue divan her green gown shrieked a discord. She was
vastly amused when Natalie found an excuse and moved away, to
dispose herself carefully in a tall, old-gold chair, which framed
her like a picture.

"We were talking of men, my dear," said Mrs. Haverford, placidly
knitting.

"Of course," said Audrey, flippantly.

"Of what it is that they want more than anything else in the world."

"Children-sons," put in Mrs. Mackenzie. She was a robust, big
woman with kindly eyes, and she was childless.

"Women!" called Toots Hayden. She was still posed, but she had
stopped playing. Mrs. Haverford's eyes rested on her a moment,
disapprovingly.

"What do you say, Natalie?" Audrey asked.

"I hadn't thought about it. Money, probably."

"You are all wrong," said Audrey, and lighted a fresh cigaret.
"They want different things at different ages. That's why marriage
is such a rotten failure. First they want women; any woman will do,
really. So they marry - any woman. Then they want money. After
that they want power and place. And when they've got that they
begin to want - love."

"Good gracious, Audrey, what a cynical speech!" said Mrs. Mackenzie.
"If they've been married all that time - "

"Oh, tut!" said Audrey, rudely.

She had the impulse of the unhappy woman to hurt, but she was rather
ashamed of herself, too. These women were her friends. Let them go
on believing that life was a thing of lasting loves, that men were
true to the end, and that the relationships of life were fixed and
permanent things.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I was just being clever! Let's talk about
the war. It's the only thing worth talking about, anyhow."

In the dining-room Clayton Spencer, standing tall and erect, had
watched the women go out. How typical the party was of Natalie, of
her meticulous care in small things and her indifference or real
ignorance as to what counted. Was it indifference, really, or was
it supreme craftiness, the stupidity of her dinners, the general
unattractiveness of the women she gathered around her, the
ill-assortment of people who had little in themselves and nothing
whatever in common?

Of all the party, only Audrey and the rector had interested him
even remotely. Audrey amused him. Audrey was a curious mixture
of intelligence and frivolity. She was a good fellow. Sometimes
he thought she was a nice woman posing as not quite nice. He
didn't know. He was not particularly analytical, but at least she
had been one bit of cheer during the endless succession of courses.

The rector was the other, and he was relieved to find Doctor
Haverford moving up to the vacant place at his right.

"I've been wanting to see you, Clay," he said in an undertone.
"It's rather stupid to ask you how you found things over there.
But I'm going to do it."

"You mean the war?"

"There's nothing else in the world, is there?"

"One wouldn't have thought so from the conversation here to-night."

Clayton Spencer glanced about the table. Rodney Page, the
architect, was telling a story clearly not for the ears of the
clergy, and his own son, Graham, forced in at the last moment to
fill a vacancy, was sitting alone, bored and rather sulky, and
sipping his third cognac.

"If you want my opinion, things are bad."

"For the Allies? Or for us?"

"Good heavens, man, it's the same thing. It is only the Allies who
are standing between us and trouble now. The French are just
holding their own. The British are fighting hard, but they're
fighting at home too. We can't sit by for long. We're bound to
be involved."

The rector lighted an excellent cigar.

"Even if we are," he said, hopefully, "I understand our part of it
will be purely naval. And I believe our navy will give an excellent
account of itself."

"Probably," Clay retorted. "If it had anything to fight! But with
the German fleet bottled up, and the inadvisability of attempting
to bombard Berlin from the sea - "

The rector made no immediate reply, and Clayton seemed to expect
none. He sat back, tapping the table with long, nervous fingers,
and his eyes wandered from the table around the room. He surveyed
it all with much the look he had given Natalie, a few moments before,
searching, appraising, vaguely hostile. Yet it was a lovely room,
simple and stately. Rodney Page, who was by way of Deing decorator
for the few, as he was architect for the many, had done the room,
with its plainly paneled walls, the over-mantel with an old painting
inset, its lion chairs, its two console tables with each its pair of
porcelain jars. Clayton liked the dignity of the room, but there
were times when he and Natalie sat at the great table alone, with
only the candles for light and the rest of the room in a darkness
from which the butler emerged at stated intervals and retreated
again, when he felt the oppression of it. For a dinner party, with
the brilliant colors of the women's gowns, it was ideal. For
Natalie and himself alone, with the long silences between them that
seemed to grow longer as the years went on, it was inexpressibly
dreary.

He was frequently aware that both Natalie and himself were talking
for the butler's benefit.

>From the room his eyes traveled to Graham, sitting alone,
uninterested, dull and somewhat flushed. And on Graham, too, he
fixed that clear appraising gaze that had vaguely disconcerted
Natalie. The boy had had too much to drink, and unlike the group
across the table, it had made him sullen and quiet. He sat there,
staring moodily at the cloth and turning his glass around in
fingers that trembled somewhat.

Then he found himself involved in the conversation.

"London as dark as they say?" inquired Christopher Valentine. He
was a thin young man, with a small, affectedly curled mustache.
Clayton did not care for him, but Natalie found him amusing. "I
haven't been over - " he really said 'ovah'- "for ages. Eight
months or so."

"Very dark. Hard to get about."

"Most of the fellows I know over there are doing something. I'd
like to run over, but what's the use? Nobody around, street's
dark, no gayety, nothing."

"No. You'd better stay at home. They - don't particularly want
visitors, anyhow."

"Unless they go for war contracts, eh?" said Valentine pleasantly,
a way he had of taking the edge off the frequent impertinence of
his speech. "No, I'm not going over. We're not popular over
there, I understand. Keep on thinking we ought to take a hand in
the dirty mess."

Graham spoke, unexpectedly.

"Well, don't you think we ought?"

"If you want my candid opinion, no. We've been waving a red flag
called the Monroe Doctrine for some little time, as a signal that
we won't stand for Europe coming over here and grabbing anything.
If we're going to be consistent, we can't do any grabbing in
Europe, can we?"

Clayton eyed him rather contemptuously.

"We might want to 'grab' as you term it, a share in putting the
madmen of Europe into chains," he said. "I thought you were
pro-British, Chris."

"Only as to clothes, women and filet of sole," Chris returned
flippantly. Then, seeing Graham glowering at him across the table,
he dropped his affectation of frivolity. "What's the use of our
going in now?" he argued. "This Somme push is the biggest thing
yet. They're going through the Germans like a hay cutter through
a field. German losses half a million already."

"And what about the Allies? Have they lost nothing?" This was
Clayton's attorney, an Irishman named Denis Nolan. There had been
two n's in the Denis, originally, but although he had disposed of
a part of his birthright, he was still belligerently Irish. "What
about Rumania? What about the Russians at Lemberg? What about
Saloniki?"

"You Irish!" said the rector, genially. "Always fighting the world
and each other. Tell me, Nolan, why is it that you always have
individual humor and collective ill-humor?"

He felt that that was rather neat. But Nolan was regarding him
acrimoniously, and Clayton apparently had not heard at all.

The dispute went on, Chris Valentine alternately flippant and
earnest, the rector conciliatory, Graham glowering and silent.
Nolan had started on the Irish question, and Rodney baited him with
the prospect of conscription there. Nolan's voice, full and mellow
and strangely sweet, dominated the room.

But Clayton was not listening. He had heard Nolan air his views
before. He was a trifle acid, was Nolan. He needed mellowing, a
woman in his life. But Nolan had loved once, and the girl had died.
With the curious constancy of the Irish, he had remained determinedly
celibate.

"Strange race," Clayton reflected idly, as Nolan's voice sang on.
"Don't know what they want, but want it like the devil. One-woman
men, too. Curious!"

It occurred to him then that his own reflection was as odd as the
fidelity of the Irish. He had been faithful to his wife. He had
never thought of being anything else.

He did not pursue that line of thought. He sat back and resumed
his nervous tapping of the cloth, not listening, hardly thinking,
but conscious of a discontent that was beyond analysis.

Clayton had been aware, since his return from the continent and
England days before, of a change in himself. He had not recognized
it until he reached home. And he was angry with himself for feeling
it. He had gone abroad for certain Italian contracts and had
obtained them. A year or two, if the war lasted so long, and he
would be on his feet at last, after years of struggle to keep his
organization together through the hard times that preceded the war.
He would be much more than on his feet. Given three more years of
war, and he would be a very rich man.

And now that the goal was within sight, he was finding that it was
not money he wanted. There were some things money could not buy.
He had always spent money. His anxieties had not influenced his
scale of living. Money, for instance, could not buy peace for the
world; or peace for a man, either. It had only one value for a man;
it gave him independence of other men, made him free.

"Three things," said the rector, apropos of something or other, and
rather oratorically, "are required by the normal man. Work, play,
and love. Assure the crippled soldier that he has lost none of
these, and - "

Work and play and love. Well, God knows he had worked. Play? He
would have to take up golf again more regularly. He ought to play
three times a week. Perhaps he could take a motor-tour now and then,
too. Natalie would like that.

Love? He had not thought about love very much. A married man of
forty-five certainly had no business thinking about love. No, he
certainly did not want love. He felt rather absurd, even thinking
about it. And yet, in the same flash, came a thought of the violent
passions of his early twenties. There had been a time when he had
suffered horribly because Natalie had not wanted to marry him. He
was glad all that was over. No, he certainly did not want love.

He drew a long breath and straightened up.

"How about those plans, Rodney?" he inquired genially. "Natalie
says you have them ready to look over."

"I'll bring them round, any time you say."

"To-morrow, then. Better not lose any time. Building is going to
be a slow matter, at the best."

"Slow and expensive," Page added. He smiled at his host, but
Clayton Spencer remained grave.

"I've been away," he said, "and I don't know what Natalie and you
have cooked up between you. But just remember this: I want a
comfortable country house. I don't want a public library."

Page looked uncomfortable. The move into the drawing-room covered
his uneasiness, but he found a moment later on to revert to the
subject.

"I have tried to carry out Natalie's ideas, Clay," he said. "She
wanted a sizeable place, you know. A wing for house-parties, and
- that sort of thing."

Clayton's eyes roamed about the room, where portly Mrs. Haverford
was still knitting placidly, where the Chris Valentines were
quarreling under pretense of raillery, where Toots Hayden was
smoking a cigaret in a corner and smiling up at Graham, and where
Natalie, exquisite and precise, was supervising the laying out of
a bridge table.

"She would, of course," he observed, rather curtly,, and, moving
through a French window, went out onto a small bakony into the night.

He was irritated with himself. What had come over him? He shook
himself, and drew a long breath of the sweet night air. His tall,
boyishly straight figure dominated the little place. In the
half-light he looked, indeed, like an overgrown boy. He always
looked like Graham's brother, anyhow; it was one of Natalie's
complaints against him. But he put the thought of Natalie away,
along with his new discontent. By George, it was something to feel
that, if a man could not fight in this war, at least he could make
shells to help end it. Oblivious to the laughter in the room behind
him, the clink of glass as whiskey-and-soda was brought in, he
planned there in the darkness, new organization, new expansions
- and found in it a great content.

He was proud of his mills. They were his, of his making. The small
iron foundry of his father's building had developed into the colossal
furnaces that night after night lighted the down-town district like
a great conflagration. He was proud of his mills and of his men.
He liked to take men and see them work out his judgment of them. He
was not often wrong. Take that room behind him: Rodney Page,
dilettante, liked by women, who called him "Roddie," a trifle
unscrupuous but not entirely a knave, the sort of man one trusted
with everything but one's wife; Chris, too - only he let married
women alone, and forgot to pay back the money he borrowed. There
was only one man in the room about whom he was beginning to mistrust
his judgment, and that was his own son.

Perhaps it was because he had so recently come from lands where
millions of boys like Graham were pouring out their young lives
like wine, that Clayton Spencer was seeing Graham with a new vision.
He turned and glanced back into the drawing-room, where Graham, in
the center of that misfit group and not quite himself, was stooping
over Marion Hayden. They would have to face that, of course, the
woman urge in the boy. Until now his escapades had been boyish ones,
a few debts frankly revealed and as frankly regretted, some college
mischiefs, a rather serious gambling fever, quickly curbed. But
never women, thank God.

But now the boy was through with college, and already he noticed
something new in their relationship. Natalie had always spoiled
him, and now there were, with increasing frequency, small
consultations in her room when he was shut out, and he was beginning
to notice a restraint in his relations with the boy, as though
mother and son had united against him.

He was confident that Natalie was augmenting Graham's allowance
from her own. His salary, rather, for he had taken the boy into
the business, not as a partner - that would come later - but as the
manager of a department. He never spoke to Natalie of money. Her
house bills were paid at the office without question. But only
that day Miss Potter, his secretary, had reported that Mrs. Spencer's
bank had called up and he had made good a considerable overdraft.

He laid the cause of his discontent to Graham, finally. The boy
had good stuff in him. He was not going to allow Natalie to spoil
him, or to withdraw him into that little realm of detachment in
which she lived. Natalie did not need him, and had not, either as
a lover or a husband, for years. But the boy did.

There was a little stir in the room behind. The Haverfords were
leaving, and the Hayden girl, who was plainly finding the party
dull. Graham was looking down at her, a tall, handsome boy, with
Natalie's blonde hair but his father's height and almost insolent
good looks.

"Come around to-morrow," she was saying. "About four. There's
always a crowd about five, you know."

Clayton knew, and felt a misgiving. The Hayden house was a late
afternoon loafing and meeting place for the idle sons and daughters
of the rich. Not the conservative old families, who had developed
a sense of the responsibility of wealth, but of the second
generation of easily acquired money. As she went out, with Graham
at her elbow, he heard Chris, at the bridge table.

"Terrible house, the Haydens. Just one step from the Saturday night
carouse in Clay's mill district."

When Graham came back, Mrs. Haverford put her hand on his arm.

"I wish you would come to see us, Graham. Delight so often speaks
of you."

Graham stiffened almost imperceptibly.

"Thanks, I will." But his tone was distant.

"You know she comes out this winter."

"Really?"

"And - you were great friends. I think she misses you a little."

"I wish I thought so!"

Gentle Mrs. Haverford glanced up at him quickly.

"You know she doesn't approve of me."

"Why, Graham!"

"Well, ask her," he said. And there was a real bitterness under
the lightness of his tone. "I'll come, of course, Mrs. Haverford.
Thank you for asking me. I haven't a lot of time. I'm a sort of
clerk down at the mill, you know."

Natalie overheard, and her eyes met Clayton's, with a glance of
malicious triumph. She had been deeply resentful that he had not
made Graham a partner at once. He remembered a conversation they
had had a few months before.

"Why should he have to start at the bottom?" she had protested.
"You have never been quite fair to him, Clay." His boyish diminutive
had stuck to him. "You expect him to know as much about the mill
now as you do, after all these years."

"Not at all. I want him to learn. That's precisely the reason why
I'm not taking him in at once."

"How much salary is he to have?"

"Three thousand a year."

"Three thousand! Why, it will take all of that to buy him a car."

"There are three cars here now; I should think he could manage."

"Every boy wants his own car."

"I pay my other managers three thousand," he had said, still patient.
"He will live here. His car can be kept here, without expense.
Personally, I think it too much money for the service he will be
able to give for the first year or two."

And, although she had let it go at that, he had felt in her a keen
resentment. Graham had got a car of his own, was using it hard,
if the bills the chauffeur presented were an indication, and
Natalie had overdrawn her account two thousand five hundred dollars.

The evening wore on. Two tables of bridge were going, with Denis
Nolan sitting in at one. Money in large amounts was being written
in on the bridge scores. The air of the room was heavy with smoke,
and all the men and some of the women were drinking rather too much.
There were splotches of color under the tan in Graham's cheeks, and
even Natalie's laughter had taken on a higher note.

Chris's words rankled in Clayton Spencer's mind. A step from the
Saturday night carouse. How much better was this sort of thing?
A dull party, driven to cards and drink to get through the evening.
And what sort of home life were he and Natalie giving the boy?
Either this, or the dreary evenings when they were alone, with
Natalie sifting with folded hands, or withdrawing to her boudoir
upstairs, where invariably she summoned Graham to talk to him
behind closed doors.

He went into the library and shut the door. The room rested him,
after the babble across. He lighted a cigar, and stood for a
moment before Natalie's portrait. It had been painted while he
was abroad at, he suspected, Rodney's instigation. It left him
quite cold, as did Natalie herself.

He could look at it dispassionately, as he had never quite cared
to regard Natalie. Between them, personally, there was always the
element she never allowed him to forget, that she had given him a
son. This was Natalie herself, Natalie at forty-one, girlish,
beautiful, fretful and-selfish. Natalie with whom he was to live
the rest of his life, who was to share his wealth and his future,
and with whom he shared not a single thought in common.

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