The Blood Red Dawn. Charles Caldwell Dobie
Claire's father had never entered very largely into her calculations, but to-night her readjusted vision included him. Stubborn, kind, a bit weak, and inclined to copying poetry in a red-covered album, he had been no match for the disillusionments of married life. Her mother's people had felt a sullen resentment at his downfall—he had taken to drink and died ingloriously when Claire was still in her seventh year. Claire, influenced by the family traditions, had shared this resentment. But now she found herself wondering whether there was not a word or two to be said in his behalf. Her father had been a cheap clerk in a wholesale house when he had married. The uncertain Carrol fortunes were waning swiftly at the time, and Emily Carrol had been thrown at him with all the panic that then possessed a public schooled in the fallacy that marriage was a woman's only career. The result was to have been expected. Extravagance, debts, too much family, drink, death—the sequence was complete. He had been captured, withered, cast aside, by a tribe that had not even had the decency to grant his memory the kindness of an excuse.
Wide-eyed and restless, Claire Robson felt a sudden pity for her father. Tears sprang to her eyes; it overwhelmed her to discover this new father so full of human failings and yet so full of human provocation. In her twenty-four years of life she had never shed a tear for him, or felt the slightest pang for his failure. If she had ever doubted the Carrol viewpoint, she had never given her lack of faith any scope. She had taken their cast-off prejudices and threadbare convictions as docilely as she had once received their stale garments. She had shrunk from spiritual independence with all the obsequious arrogance of a poor relation at a feast. Her diffidence, her self-consciousness, her timidity, were the outward forms of an inbred snobbery. It was curious how suddenly all this was made clear to her. …
At length she fell into a troubled sleep. … When she awoke the room's outlines were reviving before the advances of early morning. For the first time in her life she caught the poetry of the new day at first hand. For years she had reveled vicariously in the delights of morning. But it had always been to her a thing apart, a matter which the writers of romantic verse beheld and translated for the benefit of late sleepers. It never occurred to her that the day crawling into the light-well of her Clay Street flat was lit with precisely the same flame that colored the far-flung peaks of the poet's song. And instantly a phrase of the Serbian's harangue came to her—blood-red dawn! He had repeated these words over and over again, and somehow under the heat of his ardor and longing for his native land this hackneyed phrase took on its real and dreadful value. In the sudden sweep of this vital remembrance, Claire Robson rose for a moment above the fretful drip of circumstance. … Blood-red Dawn! … She threw herself back upon her bed and shuddered. …
She rose at seven o'clock, but already the morning had grown pallid and flecked with gray clouds.
An apologetic tap came at the door, and the voice of Mrs. Robson repeating a formula that she never varied:
"Better hurry, Claire. If you don't you'll be late for the office!"
CHAPTER II
As Claire stepped out into the cold sunlight of early November, she smiled bitterly at the exaggeration of last night's mood. After the first hectic flush of dawn there is nothing so sane and sweet and commonplace as morning. The spectacle of Mrs. Finnegan, who lodged in the flat below, slopping warm suds over the thin marble steps, added a final note of homeliness, which divorced Claire completely from heroics.
"Well, Miss Robson, so you really got home, last night," broke from the industrious neighbor as she straightened up and tucked her lifted skirts in more securely. "I thought you never would come! … A package came from New York for you. The man nearly banged your door down. I had Finnegan put it on your back stoop. … It's from that cousin of yours, I guess. I was so excited about it I kept wishing you'd get home early so that I could get a peep at all the pretty things. But I'll run up just as soon as I get through with the breakfast dishes."
Claire smiled wanly. "It was very good of you to take all that trouble, I'm sure, Mrs. Finnegan!"
"Oh, bother my trouble!" Mrs. Finnegan responded. "I just knew how crazy I'd be about a box. I guess we women are all alike, Miss Robson. Anyway, your mother and I are!"
Mrs. Finnegan bent over her task again with a quick exasperated movement, and Claire passed on. Her neighbor's abrupt rebuke gave Claire a renewed sense of exclusion. She had meant to be warmly appreciative, but she knew now that she had been only coldly polite. But, as a matter of fact, the prospect of delving through a box of Gertrude Sinclair's discarded finery moved her this morning to a dull fury. She felt suddenly tired of cast-offs, of compromise, of all the other shabby adjustments of genteel poverty. And by the time she reached the office of the Falcon Insurance Company her soul was seething with a curious and unreasonable revolt. The feminine office force seemed seething also, but with an impersonal, quivering excitement. Nellie Whitehead had been dismissed!
This Nellie Whitehead, the stenographer-in-chief, was big, vigorous, blond—vulgar, energetic, vivid; and Miss Munch, her assistant, a thin, hollow-chested spinster, who loafed upon her job so that she might save her sight for the manufacture of incredible yards of tatting, never missed an opportunity to lift her eyes significantly behind her superior's back.
"And what do you suppose?" Miss Munch was querying as Claire stepped into the dressing-room. "She told Mr. Flint to go to hell! … Yes, positively, she used those very words. And I must say he was a gentleman throughout it all. He told her gently but firmly that her example in the office wasn't what it should be and that in justice to the other girls. … "
Claire turned impatiently away. The fiction of Mr. Flint's belated interest in the morals of his feminine office force was unconvincing enough to be irritating. For a man who never missed an opportunity to force his attentions, he was showing an amazingly ethical viewpoint. On second thought, Claire remembered that Miss Munch was never the recipient of Mr. Flint's attentions, which to the casual eye might have seemed innocent enough—on rainy days gallantly bending his ample girth in a rather too prolonged attempt to slip on the girls' rubbers, insisting on the quite unnecessary task of incasing them in their jackets and smoothing the sleeves of their shirt-waists in the process, flicking imaginary threads where the feminine curves were most opulent. Not that Mr. Flint was a wolf in sheep's clothing; he played the part of sheep, but he needed no disguise for his performance; he merely lived up to a sort of flock-mind consciousness where women were concerned.
The group clustered about Miss Munch broke up at the approach of Mr. Flint, who gave a significant glance in the direction of Claire Robson, intent upon her morning work. But the excitement persisted in spite of the scattered auditors, and the fact was mysteriously communicated that Miss Munch's interest in the event was chargeable to her hopes. It seemed impossible to Miss Munch that any one but herself could succeed to the vacant post of stenographer-in-chief.
At precisely eleven o'clock the buzzer on Claire Robson's desk hummed three times. This announced that she was wanted by Mr. Flint. She gathered her note-book and pencils and answered the call.
Mr. Flint was busy at the telephone when Claire entered the private office. She seated herself at the flat oak table in the center of the room.
Mr. Flint's office bore all the conventional signs of business—commissions of authority from insurance companies, state licenses in oak frames, an oil-painting of Thomas Sawyer Flint, the founder of the firm, over a fireplace that maintained its useless dignity in spite of the steam-radiator near the window. On his desk was the inevitable picture of his wife framed in silver, a hand-illumined platitude of Stevenson, an elaborate set of desk paraphernalia in beaten brass that bore little evidence of service. In two green-glazed bowls of Japanese origin, roses from Mr. Flint's garden at Yolanda scattered faint pink petals on the Smyrna rug. These flowers were the only concession to esthetics that Mr. Flint indulged. In spite of a masculine distaste for carrying flowers, hardly a day went by when he did not appear at the office with a huge harvest of blossoms from his country home.
Claire was bending