Read Ebook: The Blood Red Dawn by Dobie Charles Caldwell

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Ebook has 622 lines and 39516 words, and 13 pages

Claire rose without replying. Mr. Flint left his seat and crossed over to her.

"I hope," he said, flicking a thread from her shoulder, "that you're game.... Some girls, of course, don't care a damn about getting on ... especially if there's a Johnny somewhere in sight with enough cash in his pocket for a marriage license."

"I am very much taken by surprise," Claire faltered. "You see, the change means a great deal to me."

Mr. Flint moved closer. His manner was intimate and distasteful. "Sometimes I think we business men ought to get more of a slant on our employees.... You know what I mean, not exactly bothering about how many lumps of sugar they take in their coffee, or their taste in after-dinner cheese ... but, well, just how often they have to resole their boots and turn the ribbons on their spring bonnets.... Now, in Miss Whitehead's case.... But of course you're not interested in Miss Whitehead."

"Why, I wouldn't say that," stammered Claire. Then, as she reached for her shorthand book she said, more confidently: "To be quite frank, Mr. Flint, I liked Miss Whitehead tremendously. She was so alive ... and vivid."

Flint beamed. "Do you know why I picked you instead of that Munch dame?... It's because you had all the frills of a woman and none of the nastiness. For instance, you wouldn't be bothered in the least if I took a notion to overload the office with another pretty girl.... I've watched you for some time. It has taken me six months to make up my mind to fire Miss Whitehead and boost you into her job."

He stood with an air of condescending arrogance, his thumbs bearing down heavily on his trousers pockets, his broad fingers beating a self-satisfied tattoo upon his thighs. Claire shrank nearer the table. "You mean, Mr. Flint, that you dismissed Miss Whitehead merely to give me her position?"

"Oh, Mr. Flint! I'm sorry!"

He gave a wide guffaw. "That only makes you all the more of a corker!" he answered, rubbing his hands together in narrow-eyed satisfaction.

She escaped into the outer office, flushed, but with her head thrown back in an attitude of instinctive defense, and the next instant she literally ran into the arm of a man.

She drew back. Mr. Stillman stood smiling before her.

Greetings and questions flowed with all the genial ease of one who is never quite taken unawares. Claire, outwardly calm, felt overcome with inner confusion. She passed rapidly to her desk and sat down.

Miss Munch was upon her almost instantly.

"Yes," replied Claire, with uncomfortable brevity.

"I have a cousin who was housekeeper for his wife's father.... You know about his wife, of course."

Claire lifted her clear eyes in a startled glance that was almost as instantly converted into a look of challenge.

"Yes," she lied.

Miss Munch hesitated, then plunged at once into the issue uppermost in her mind. "It's too bad you've had to be bothered with Flint's dictation, Miss Robson. It just happens I'm writing up a long home-office report, otherwise I'm sure he wouldn't have annoyed you."

Claire Robson fixed Miss Munch with a coldly polite stare. "You've made a mistake, Miss Munch. Mr. Flint has given me no dictation." The speech in itself was nothing, but Claire's tone gave it unmistakable point. Miss Munch grew white and then flushed. She turned away without a word, but Claire Robson knew that in a twinkling of an eye she had gained not only an enemy, but an uncommon one.

That night Claire took an unusually long way round on her walk home. Her path from the Falcon Insurance Company's office on California Street to the Clay Street flat was never a direct one, first, because there were hills to be avoided, and, second, because Claire found the streets at twilight too full of charm for a rapid homeward flight. The year was on the wane and the November days were coming to an early blackness. Claire reveled in the light-flooded dusk of these late autumn evenings. To her, the city became a vast theater, darkened suddenly for the purpose of throwing the performers into sharper relief. Most clerks made their way up Montgomery Street toward Market, but Claire climbed past the German Bank to Kearny Street. She liked this old thoroughfare, struggling vainly to pull itself up to its former glory. The Kearny Street crowd was a varying quantity, frankly shabby or flashily prosperous, as far south as Sutter Street, suddenly dignified and reserved for the two blocks beyond. To-night Claire missed the direct appeal of the streets lined with bright shops. They formed the proper background for her broodings, but they scarcely entered into her mood. She could not have said just what flight her mood was taking, or upon just which branch her thought would alight. She was confused and puzzled and vaguely uneasy. She had a sense that somehow, somewhere, a door had been opened and that a strong, devastating wind was clearing the air and bringing dead things to ground in a disorderly shower. She was stirred by twilights of uneasiness. It was almost as if the monotonous truce of noonday had been darkened by a huge, composite, masculine shadow, made up in some mysterious way of the ridiculous Serbian and his blood-red dawn, and this man Stillman, who had a wife, and Flint, with hands so ready to flick threads from her sloping shoulders. Yesterday her outlook had been peaceful and unhappy; to-day she felt stimulation of an impending struggle. She was afraid, and yet she would not have turned back for one swift moment. And suddenly the words of Mrs. Finnegan recurred, "I guess we women are all alike." Were they?

At which point she came upon a pastry-shop window and she went in and bought a half-dozen French pastries. The thought of her mother's pleasure at this unusual treat brought her in due time smiling to her threshold.

Mrs. Robson was not in her accustomed place at the head of the stairs; about half-way up the long flight her voice sounded triumphantly:

"Oh, Claire, do hurry and see what Gertrude has sent! Everything is perfectly lovely."

Claire quickened her pace and gained the cramped living-room. Thrown about in a sort of joyous disorder, Gertrude Sinclair's finery quite lit up the shabbiness. Hats, plumes, scraps of vivid silks, gilded slippers, a spangled fan--their unrelated vividness struck Claire as fantastic as a futurist painting. Her mother seemed suddenly young again. Claire wondered whether, after the toll of sixty-odd years, she could be moved to momentary youth by the mere sight of the prettiness that was quickening her mother's pulse.

Mrs. Robson held up a filmy evening gown of black net embroidered with a rich design of dull gold. "Isn't this heavenly?" she demanded. "And it will just fit you, Claire. I think Gertrude has spread herself this time."

"Yes, on finery, mother. But didn't she send anything sensible? What possessed her to load us up with a lot of things we can never possibly get a chance to wear?"

Claire had not meant to be disagreeable, but there was rancor in her voice. Mrs. Robson cast aside the dress with the carelessness of a spoiled favorite; she always adapted her manner to the tone of her background.

Claire handed her mother the package of pastries. "I heard about it to-day," she said, coldly.

"But Mrs. Towne knows the whole thing from A to Z," insisted Mrs. Robson, genially.

"I'm not interested in the details," Claire returned, doggedly.

Mrs. Robson's face wore a puzzled, almost a harried, expression. Claire moved away. Her mother gave a shrug and renewed her efforts to drag further finery from the mysterious depths of the treasure-box. Her daughter cast a last incurious glance back. The glow on Mrs. Robson's face, which Claire had mistaken for youth, seemed now a thing hectic and unpleasant, and gave an uncanny sense of a skeleton sitting among gauds and baubles.

A feeling of isolation swept Claire, such as she had never experienced. The person who should have been closest suddenly had become a stranger.... She went into her room and closed the door.

As Claire had scarcely said a half-dozen words to Mrs. Condor on the night of the Red Cross concert, this invitation seemed little short of extraordinary. But, as Claire thought it over, she recalled that there had been some general conversation about music, in which she had admitted a discreet passion for this form of entertainment, even going so far as to confess that she played the piano herself upon occasion. Her first impulse, clinched by the familiar feminine excuse that she had nothing suitable to wear, was to send her regrets. At once she thought of the scorned finery that Gertrude Sinclair had included in her last box, and the more she thought about it the more convinced she became that she had no real reason for refusing. But a swift, strange regret that her mother had been included in the invitation took the edge off her anticipations. She tried to dismiss this feeling, but it grew more definite as the morning progressed.

For days Claire had been striking at the shackles of habit with a rancor bred of disillusionment. She had been on tiptoe for new and vital experiences, and yet, for any outward sign, her life bid fair to escape the surge of any torrential circumstance. Particularly, at the office, things had gone on smoothly. The other clerks had accepted Claire's advancement without either protest or enthusiasm. Even Miss Munch had veiled her resentment behind the saving trivialities of daily intercourse. She had gone so far as to introduce Claire to her cousin, a Mrs. Richards, who had come in at the noon hour for a new tatting design. This cousin was a large, red-faced woman, with an aggressively capable manner. She had the quick, ferret-like eyes of Miss Munch and the loose mouth of a perpetual gossip.

Flint had been direct and business-like almost to the point of bruskness. But Claire knew that such moods were not unusual, so she took little stock in the ultimate significance of his restrained manner.

Perhaps the most indefinable change had come over Claire's home life. Her mother's unfailing string of trivial gossip, formerly not without a certain interest, now scarcely held her to even polite attention. Indeed, her self-absorbed silence, while Mrs. Robson poured out the latest news about Mrs. Finnegan's second sister's husband's mother--who was suddenly stricken with some incurable disease, made all the more mysterious by the fact that its nature was not divulged--was so apparent that her mother, goaded on to a mild exasperation, would ask, significantly:

"What's the matter, Claire? Have you a headache?"

Mrs. Robson was never so happy as in the discovery of some one with a mysterious disease, particularly if the victim's relatives were loath to discuss the issue.

"They think they fool me!" she would say, triumphantly, to Claire, "but I guess I know what ails her.... Didn't her mother, and her uncle, and her sister's oldest child die of consumption? I tell you it's in the family. The last time I saw her she nearly coughed her head off."

Not that Mrs. Robson was unsympathetic; brought face to face with suffering, she blossomed with every impulsive tenderness, but her experiences had confirmed her in pessimism, and every fresh tragedy testified to the soundness of her faith. Her pride at diagnosing people's ills and pronouncing their death-sentences was almost professional. And she had an irritating way of making comments such as this:

"Well, Claire, I see that old Mrs. Talbot is dead at last!... I knew she wouldn't live another winter. They'll feel terribly, no doubt; but, of course, it is a great relief."

Or:

This was the type of conversation that Claire was finding either empty of meaning or illuminating to the point of annoyance. What amazed her was the fact that she had remained blind so long to the slightest of the conversational food upon which she had been fed.

Claire did not tell her mother about the invitation to Mrs. Condor's musical evening.

"I'll wait," she said to herself. "Thursday will be time enough." Although why delay would prove advantageous was not particularly apparent.

On Wednesday night at the dinner-table, Mrs. Robson, as if still puzzled at her daughter's altered mood, said, rather cautiously:

"There's to be a reception at the church on Friday night."

"For whom?" inquired Claire, with pallid interest.

"I didn't quite catch the name.... Some woman back from France. She's been nursing in one of the British hospitals. She's to get Red Cross work started at the church. It seems San Francisco is a bit slow over taking up the work, but, then, you know, we're poked off here in a corner and I suppose we don't quite realize yet.... Anyway, Mrs. Towne wants us to help with the coffee. She says you should have been in the church-work long ago. You look so self-contained and efficient.... I told her we would be there at half past seven and get the dishes into shape."

Claire's heart beat violently. "Friday night? I'm sorry, mother; I have another engagement."

"Another engagement? Why, Claire, how funny! You never said anything about it. I don't know what to say to Mrs. Towne."

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