The Blood Red Dawn Part 15

"Yes, and I can buy two cigars for a nickel, but I shouldn't want to smoke them."

She clicked the keys of her machine idly. "That is hardly a fair comparison. You can get any number of competent girls for three dollars."

He rested his chin on his upturned palm. "But, my dear Miss Robson, I happen to want _you_."

She thought of any number of cheap, obvious retorts that might have been flung back at his straightforward admission, but instead she said, with equal frankness:

"That's just what I don't understand."

He threw her a puzzled look and the usual placid light in his eyes quickened to resentful impatience.

"Is that a necessary part of the contract, Miss Robson?"

She caught her breath. His tone of annoyance was sharp and unexpected.

There was a suggestion of Flint's masculine arrogance in his voice. She felt how absurd was her cross-examination of him, of how absurd, under the circ.u.mstances, would have been her cross-examination of anybody ready and willing to give her work to do and an ample wage in the bargain, and yet, for all the force of his reply, she knew it to be a well-bred if not a deliberate evasion.

"You mean it is none of my business, don't you?" she contrived to laugh back at him.

His reply was a further surprise. "Yes, precisely," he said, with an ominous thinning of the lips.

She rose instinctively to meet this thrust and she was conscious that even Flint had never managed so to disturb her. She glanced about hastily as if measuring the room in a swift impulse toward escape.

Stillman had chosen the dining-room for a temporary office, and upon the polished surface of the antique walnut table the typewriter struck an incongruous note; indeed, it was all incongruous, particularly Stillman and his a.s.sumed business airs. Yes, it was absurd for her to either cross-examine or protest, but it was equally absurd for him to pay her such an outlandish sum for nine hours a week.

"He's doing it for me," she thought, not without a sense of triumph.

Then, turning to him, she said, a bit awkwardly:

"I guess there isn't any use to dissuade you, Mr. Stillman. If you say fifteen dollars a week, I sha'n't argue with you."

He smiled back at her, all his former suavity regained. She slid into her seat again. Her mind was recalling vividly the one other time in her life when she had grappled vigorously with the masculine spirit of domination, and come away victorious. This time she had been defeated and she had impulses toward relief and fear. She looked up suddenly and trapped a solicitous glance from Stillman that rather annoyed her. And it struck her, as she mentally compared Stillman with most of the men of her acquaintance, how far he could have loomed above them if he had had the will for such a performance. As it was he fell somewhat beneath them in a curious, indefinable way. Had he been too finely tempered by circ.u.mstances or had the flame of life lacked the proper heat for fusing his virtues effectively? For the moment she found Flint's forthright insolence more tolerable than Stillman's sterile deference. Suddenly she began to think of home, not with any sense of security, but as something unpleasant, dark, disquieting....

CHAPTER XII

Toward six o'clock one afternoon in late February Ned Stillman, making his way from the business district at California and Montgomery Streets toward his club, suddenly remembered a forgotten luncheon engagement for that day with Lily Condor.

"Well," he muttered at once, "I'm in for it now! I guess I might as well swing out and see her and get the thing over with."

It was curious of late how often he was given to muttering. Previously, petty annoyances had not moved him to these half-audible and solitary comments which he had always found contemptuously amusing in others. He wondered whether this new trick was the result of his business ventures, his sly charities, or his approach toward the suggestive age of forty.

a.s.sociating the name of Lily Condor with his covert charities, he was almost persuaded that they lay back of this preposterous habit. And the more he thought about it the more he muttered and became convinced that Lily Condor was usually the topic of these vocal self-communings.

Ned Stillman had always prided himself upon his sense of personal freedom concerning the trivial circ.u.mstances of life. Of course, like any man of sensibility, he was bound by the chains that deeper impulses forge, but he had never been hampered by any restraints directed at his ordinary uprisings and downsittings. In short, he had answered the beck and nod of no man, much less a woman, and he was not finding Lily Condor's growing presumptions along this line altogether agreeable.

He would not have minded so much if there was any personal gratification in yielding to the lady's whip-hand commands. There are certain delights in self-surrender which give a zest to slavery, but there is no joy in being held a hostage. Looking back, Stillman marveled at the indiscretion he had committed when he handed over not only his reserve, but Claire Robson's reputation into the safekeeping of Lily Condor. Had he ever had the simplicity to imagine that a woman of Mrs. Condor's stamp would const.i.tute herself a safe-deposit vault for h.o.a.rding secrets without exacting a price? Well, perhaps he had expected to pay, but a little less publicly. He had not looked to have the lady in question ring every coin audibly in full view and hearing of the entire market-place, and yet, if his experience had stood him in good stead, he must have known that this was precisely what she would do. Stillman's hidden grat.i.tude, his private beneficences, did not serve her purpose, but the spectacle of him in the role of her debtor was a sight that went a long way to establis.h.i.+ng a social credit impoverished by no end of false ventures.

Her command for him to take her to luncheon--and it had been a command, however suavely she had managed to veil it--bore also the stamp of urgency. Usually she was content to lay all her positive requests to the charge of mere caprice, but on this occasion she took the trouble to intimate that there was a particular reason for wanting to see him. It did not take him long to conclude that this particular reason had to do with Claire Robson. That was why he yielded with a better grace than he had been giving to his troublesome friend's disagreeable pressure.

Stillman knew that while Lily Condor was not precisely jealous of the younger woman, she was distinctly envious--with the impersonal but acrid envy of middle age for youth. The episode of the orchids still rankled.

He had to admit that in this instance his course had been tactless, but he had ignored Mrs. Condor as a challenge to the presumption which he had already begun to sense. She, while seeming definitely to evade the real issue, had answered the challenge and he had paid for his temerity a hundredfold. She had reminded him again and again in deft but none the less positive terms that she was keeping a finger on the mainspring of any advantage that came her way. Sometimes Stillman wondered whether she would really be cattish enough to betray his confidence and bring Claire Robson cras.h.i.+ng down under the weight of the questionable position into which his indiscretion had forced her. Would she really have the face to publish abroad the pregnant fact that Ned Stillman was providing what she had been pleased to designate as a meal-ticket for a young woman in difficulty? For himself he cared little, except that he always shrank instinctively from appearing ridiculous.

He had been thinking a great deal of late as to the best course to pursue in ridding himself and Claire of this menacing incubus. He had a feeling that Claire, having exhausted the novelties of her position as accompanist to Lily Condor, was beginning to find the affair irksome.

The business venture had progressed in quite another direction from his original intention. Suddenly, without knowing how it had all come about, he found his plans clearly defined. The government needed him. Somehow, it had never occurred to him that he could be of service at a point so far from the center of war activities. He had been a good deal of an idler, it was true, but the seeds of achievement were merely lying in fallow soil.

At first, he had been stung into action more by Claire's accusing att.i.tude than anything else. She used to come every other afternoon at the appointed time and almost challenge him by her reproachful silence to do something, if only to provide her with an illusion. It was as if she said:

"See, I have given in to you. I know that you are doing this for me, and I am deeply grateful. But won't you please make the situation a little less transparent? Won't you at least justify me in the eyes of those who are watching our little performance?..."

It had all ended by his offering his services to the Food Administration. He knew something of his father's business. He felt that he had a fair knowledge of beans, and he could learn more. He merely asked a trial, and it surprised him to find what a sense of humility suddenly possessed him. He was really overjoyed when a place was a.s.sured him. But he had to admit that his acceptance was not accorded any great enthusiasm. The newspapers mentioned it in a scant paragraph that was not even given a prominent place. He had received greater recognition for a brilliant play upon the golf-links! Well, in such stirring times he was n.o.body. He did not complain, even to himself, but the knowledge subconsciously rankled.

He hired an office down-town, joined the Commercial Club, religiously attended every meeting that had to do with food conservation, hunted out, absorbed, appropriated all the economic secrets that served his purpose.... Suddenly he found himself engrossed, enthusiastic, _busy_!

Finally Claire said to him one day:

"Don't you think I ought to come to you every afternoon?"

"If you can arrange it," he almost snapped back at her.

She did arrange it, how he took no pains to inquire, and a little later she said again:

"You ought to have some one here all day. I guess you will have to look for another stenographer."

He remembered how menacingly he had darted at her. She was dressed for the street, on her way home, and she had halted at the door.

"Do you want to desert the work that you've inspired?" he demanded.

"Inspired?... By _me_?" Her voice took on a note of triumph.

"You didn't fancy that _I_ inspired it, did you?" he sneered at her.

His vehemence confused her. "I hadn't thought.... Really, you know....

Well, as you say.... But, of course, it is absurd when you can get any number of girls to...."

"But suppose I want _you_?" he demanded of her for a second time.

She left without further reply.

When she was gone he found himself in a nasty panic. It was as if the lady who had called him to her lists had suddenly decided upon a new defender.

"Is she tired of it all ... or is there some one else? Can it be possible that Flint...."

He had stopped short, amazed to find his mind descending to such a vulgar level. What had come over him? And he began to fancy things as they once had been--empty, purposeless days, and nights that found him too bored to even sleep. It seemed incredible that he could go back to them again. What lay at the bottom of his sudden deep-breathed satisfaction with life? For an instant, the truth which he had kept at bay with his old trick of evasion swept toward him.

"No ... no," he muttered. "Oh no!... That would be too absurd!"

But when he had gone to the mirror to brush his hair before venturing on the street he found thick beads of perspiration on his forehead and his hand shook as he lifted the comb.

The next day he told Claire that in the future her salary would be twenty dollars a week. He stood expecting her to rail against the increase, to try to put him to rout by explaining that she had received less for a full day's work at Flint's. But to his surprise she thanked him and went on with her work.