Dangerous Days Part 77

"Well, well, that's all over now. We've just one thing to think of, and that's to beat those German devils back to Berlin. And then burn Berlin," he added, militantly.

The last Graham saw of him, he was dragging Elinor down the road, and a faint throaty humming came back, which sounded suspiciously like "Where do we go from here, boys? Where do we go from here?"

Candidate Spencer took great pains with his toilet that afternoon. He polished his shoes, and shaved, and he spent a half hour on some ten sadly neglected finger-nails. At retreat he stood at attention in the long line, and watched the flag moving slowly and majestically to the stirring bugle notes. Something swelled almost to bursting in his throat. That was his flag. He was going to fight for it. And after that was done he was going to find some girl, some nice girl--the sort, for instance, that would leave her home to work in a hostess house. And having found her, he would marry her, and love and cherish her all his life. Unless, of course, she wouldn't have him. He was inclined to think she wouldn't.

He ate very little supper that night, little being a comparative term, of course. And then he went to discover Delight. It appeared, however, that she had been already discovered. She was entirely surrounded by uniforms, and Graham furiously counted a colonel, two majors, and a captain.

"Pulling rank, of course!" he muttered, and retired to a corner, where he had at least the mild gratification of seeing that even the colonel could not keep Delight from her work.

"Silly a.s.ses!" said Graham, again, and then she saw him. There was no question about her being pleased. She was quite flushed with it, but a little uncomfortable, too, at Graham's att.i.tude. He was oddly humble, and yet he had a look of determination that was almost grim. She filled in a rather disquieting silence by trying to let him know, without revealing that she had ever been anything else, how proud she was of him. Then she realized that he was not listening, and that he was looking at her with an almost painful intensity.

"When can you get away, Delight?" he asked abruptly.

"From here?" She cast an appraising glance over the room. "Right away, I think. Why?"

"Because I want to talk to you, and I can't talk to you here."

She brought a bright colored sweater and he helped her into it, still with his mouth set and his eyes a trifle sunken. All about there were laughing groups of men in uniform. Outside, the parade glowed faintly in the dusk, and from the low barrack windows there came the glow of lights, the movement of young figures, voices, the thin metallic notes of a mandolin.

"How strange it all is," Delight said. "Here we are, you and father and myself--and even Jackson. I saw him to-day. All here, living different lives, doing different things, even thinking different thoughts. It's as though we had all moved into a different world."

He walked on beside her, absorbed in his own thoughts, which were yet only of her.

"I didn't know you were here," he brought out finally.

"That's because you've been burying yourself. I knew you were here."

"Why didn't you send me some word?"

She stiffened somewhat in the darkness.

"I didn't think you would be greatly interested, Graham."

And again, struggling with his new humility, he was silent. It was not until they had crossed the parade ground and were beyond the noises of the barracks that he spoke again.

"Do you mind if I talk to you, Delight? I mean, about myself? I--since you're here, we're likely to see each other now and then, if you are willing. And I'd like to start straight."

"Do you really want to tell me?"

"No. But I've got to. That's all."

He told her. He made no case for himself. Indeed, some of it Delight understood far better than he did himself. He said nothing against Marion; on the contrary, he blamed himself rather severely. And behind his honest, halting sentences, Delight read his own lack of understanding. She felt infinitely older than this tall, honest-eyed boy in his stained uniform--older and more sophisticated. But if she had understood the Marion Hayden situation, she was totally at a loss as to Anna.

"But I don't understand!" she cried. "How could you make love to her if you didn't love her?"

"I don't know. Fellows do those things. It's just mischief--some sort of a devil in them, I suppose."

When he reached the beating and Anna's flight, however, she understood a little better.

"Of course you had to stand by her," she agreed.

"You haven't heard it all," he said quietly. "When I'm through, if you get up and leave me, I'll understand, Delight, and I won't blame you."

He told her the rest of the story in a voice strained with anxiety.

It was as though he had come to a tribunal for judgment. He spared her nothing, the dinner at the road-house with Rudolph at the window, his visit to Anna's room, and her subsequent disappearance.

"She told the Department of Justice people that Rudolph found her that night, and, took her home. She was a prisoner then, poor little kid.

But she overheard her father and Rudolph plotting to blow up the mill.

That's where I came in, Delight. He was crazy at me. He was a German, of course, and he might have done it anyhow. But Rudolph told him a lot of lies about me, and--he did it. When I think about it all, and about Joey, I'm crazy."

She slipped her hand over his.

"Of course they would have done it anyhow," she said softly.

"You aren't going to get up and go away?"

"Why should I?" she asked. "I only feel--oh, Graham, how wretched you must have been."

Something in her voice made him sit up straighter. He knew now that it had always been Delight, always. Only she had been too good for him.

She had set a standard he had not hoped to reach. But now things were different. He hadn't amounted to much in other things, but he was a soldier now. He meant to be a mighty good soldier. And when he got his commission--

"You won't mind, then, if I come in to see you now and then?"

"Mind? Why, Graham!"

"And you don't think I'm quite hopeless, do you?"

There were tears in her eyes, but she answered bravely:

"I believe in you every minute. But then I think I always have."

"Like fun you have!" But although he laughed, it was a shaky laugh.

Suddenly he stood up and shook himself. He felt young and strong and extremely happy. There had been a bad time, but it was behind him now.

Ahead there lay high adventure, and here, beside him in the dusk, was the girl of his heart. She believed in him. Work to do and a woman who believed in a fellow--that was life.

"Aren't you cold?" he asked, and drew the gaudy sweater tenderly around her shoulders.

CHAPTER XLV

The fact that Audrey Valentine, conspicuous member of a conspicuous social group that she was, had been working in the machine-shop of the Spencer munitions works at the time of the explosion was in itself sufficient to rouse the greatest interest. When a young reporter, gathering human-interest stories about the event from the pitiful wreckage in the hospitals, happened on Clare Gould, he got a feature-story for the Sunday edition that made Audrey's own world, reading it in bed or over its exquisite breakfast-tables, gasp with amazement.

For, following up Clare's story, he found that Audrey had done much more than run toward the telephone. She had reached it, had found the operator gone, and had succeeded, before the roof fell in on her, in calling the fire department and in sending in a general alarm to all the hospitals.

The reporter found the night operator who had received the message. He got a photograph of her, too, and, from the society file, an old one of Audrey, very delicate and audacious, and not greatly resembling the young woman who lay in her bed and read the article aloud, between dismay and laughter, to old Terry Mackenzie.