The Classic Mystery Collection - Arthur Conan Doyle [4918]
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.
CHAPTER XXII
In the evening of the thirty-first of January Clayton and Graham were waiting for Natalie to come down to dinner when the bell rang, and Dunbar was announced. Graham welcomed the interruption. He had been vaguely uneasy with his father since that day in his office when Clayton had found him on Anna Klein's desk. Clayton had tried to restore the old friendliness of their relation, but the boy had only half-heartedly met his advances. Now and then he himself made an overture, but it was the almost timid advance of a puppy that has been beaten. It left Clayton discouraged and alarmed, set him to going back over the past for any severity on his part to justify it. Now and then he wondered if, in Graham's frequent closetings with Natalie, she did not covertly undermine his influence with the boy, to increase her own.
But if she did, why? What was going on behind the impassive, lovely mask that was her face.
Dunbar was abrupt, as usual.
"I've brought you some news, Mr. Spencer," he said. He looked oddly vital and alive in the subdued and quiet room. "They've shown their hand at last. But maybe you've heard it."
"I've heard nothing new."
"Then listen," said Dunbar, bending forward over a table, much as it was his habit to bend over Clayton's desk. "We're in it at last. Or as good as in it. Unrestricted submarine warfare! All merchant-ships bound to and from Allied ports to be sunk without warning! We're to be allowed - mark this, it's funny! - we're to be allowed to send one ship a week to England, nicely marked and carrying passengers only."
There was a little pause. Clayton drew a long breath.
"That means war," he said finally.
"Hell turned over and stirred up with a pitch-fork, if we have any backbone at all," agreed Dunbar. He turned to Graham. "You young fellows'll be crazy about this."
"You bet we will," said Graham.
Clayton slipped an arm about the boy's shoulders. He could not speak for a moment. All at once he saw what the news meant. He saw Graham going into the horror across the sea. He saw vast lines of marching men, boys like Graham, boys who had frolicked through their careless days, whistled and played and slept sound of nights, now laden like pack-animals and carrying the implements of death in their hands, going forward to something too terrible to contemplate.
And a certain sure percentage of them would never