CHAPTER XV

FROM “OVER THERE”

Ethel Clayton went away from her interview with Macon Hammerly cheered upon one particular point at least. His outlook upon the chance for Frank Barton’s continued safety, even if he was in France, was helpful. And she knew the old grain merchant had Barton’s well-being at heart.

Crabbed as he was with most people, Macon Hammerly had always betrayed his interest in the general manager of the Hapwood-Diller Manufacturing Company and his regard for him. He sometimes said, in his rough way, that he kept Frank’s welfare in mind because the young fellow did not know enough to look out for himself. Ethel knew, however, that Hammerly had not been speaking carelessly about the absent Barton.

The latter was over the sea in safety, and the girl was devoutly thankful for it. Indeed she added that thanksgiving to her prayers before retiring. But she longed to hear personally from Barton. She had already written him three letters since she had last seen him, all addressed as he had told her; but they had brought no replies.

As before, while he was in the training camp, her letters were mostly regarding office incidents which she knew he would be interested in. But she had said nothing about the threatened trouble and loss to the company through the mistake in the Kimberly Binding Company order. Let somebody else tell the absent soldier that misfortune. Ethel was determined to put nothing in her letters that was not cheerful.

She learned very quickly, as thousands of other people were learning just at that time, how particularly hard it is to write cheerfully to the men at war. The very fact of sitting down to write to a soldier on active duty calls up before the mind a picture too terrible to be ignored.

How do we know the letter will ever reach the one addressed? What peril may he not face before our written words reach France and be delivered to him?

In Ethel Clayton’s case, too, the pang of jealousy was not lacking. She realized that her feeling for Frank Barton was not reciprocated. He had never given her the least cause to believe that he had other than the merest feeling of comradeship for her. Whereas it was plain that for Grandon Fuller’s daughter he experienced a much deeper regard. Nevertheless Ethel was jealous of Helen Fuller.

Mrs. Clayton thought her daughter was working too hard, and that business worries depressed her. Benway Chase, too, noted her wan look and increasing pallor.

“You’re overdoing it, Ethel,” he said one bleak evening when they were walking home together.

“Overdoing _what_?” and her tone of voice admonished him that she did not welcome his interference. Yet he persevered:

“You needn’t get mad. You shoulder too much responsibility--and for that oaf, Jim Mayberry. Let him do some of his own work.”

She became gentler at once. Ben did not suspect why she so willingly took upon herself the extra tasks. It was for the absent Barton that she worked so hard, not for the manager _pro tem_. If he was spared to come back to Mailsburg and the Hapwood-Diller Company, Ethel was going to do all she could to hold his job for him!

“Somebody must do these things, Benway,” she said quietly. “I am in a responsible position. From the very fact I am a woman, more is expected of me if I would hold up my end of the work and satisfy everybody. And if I do not look after the tags of work in the office, who will?”

“‘Tags of work!’” quoted Benway with emphatic disgust. “If _that_ were only it! Oh, Ethel! I wish I could do it for you.”

“Thanks, Benway.”

“And you won’t even let me help,” he complained. “You don’t even talk to me about your troubles. Why Ethel! I seem even less your friend now that I am in the office with you than I used to be.”

“Goodness, Benway!” she exclaimed with renewed impatience, “you can’t expect to take my personal troubles or my work on your shoulders.”

“Why not?” he demanded tenderly. “You know it’s what I’d love to do. Oh, I wish I had a million and could take you out of all this! That’s what I wish, Ethel.”

“Why, I don’t want to give up my work, Benway. Nor do I want to be rich. At least, I never have thought of being wealthy. And a million----”

“Well, I’d get along with even less,” he admitted drolly. “All I really long for is a loaf, a jug of wine, a flivver, and thou.”

“My dear boy,” she declared briskly, “you’ll get your first three wishes much easier than you will your fourth. Leave me out of the category, please.

“I don’t want to go off in a flivver with any man and a loaf of bread and a wine jug. I am wedded to my work. I love it. It’s just as much my life as it is yours. I have never looked upon my work as a mere stop-gap between high school or college and the wedded state--as is so often the case with girls. _This is my job_, and I have no right to expect you, or anybody else, Benway, to ease it for me.”

He looked at her aggrieved. “Is it always going to be so, Ethel?”

“I expect it will be always so,” she returned with less vehemence. “I am not a marrying girl, Bennie. I wish you’d get that into your handsome head. Get interested in some other girl--do!”

“Pshaw! Who told you you were not a marrying girl?” he demanded, chuckling. “Wait till the right knock comes on the door.”

“I shan’t hear it. I shall be too busy.”

He was more serious for a moment.

“Perhaps there is danger of that. I’ve been knocking myself ever since I can remember, and I get mighty little response.”

“Don’t waste your time, Bennie,” she said bruskly. “I tell you frankly: Marriage is the last thing I expect to accomplish.”

“You’re wrong. It’s death that is the last thing for us all. But you can’t break down my hopes, Ethel. I shall continue to knock.”

Somehow this insistence of Benway’s irritated Ethel more than usual. She was almost sorry she had ever urged Mr. Barton to take him into the offices, for the young fellow too plainly betrayed his interest in her.

It was bad enough for Sydney and the others to note the fact that Benway was always ready to run her errands or otherwise be at her beck and call; but Jim Mayberry made his uncouth comments upon it too.

“You have him trained like a little curly dog, haven’t you?” the superintendent sneered one day, when Benway had anticipated some need of Ethel’s. “He fetches and carries better than a retriever. Is he good for anything else?”

“You had better ask Sydney if he does his work if you are afflicted with blindness yourself, Mr. Mayberry,” she said tartly.

“Oh, I’m not too blind to see there are a good many things going dead wrong in this office,” Mayberry growled. “But I’m not having my way here. We are under petticoat rule, it seems.”

Such hints as this had previously warned Ethel to keep still. Being unable to have his way with her, Jim Mayberry would be glad to find cause for bringing her before the Board of Directors for dismissal. She felt all the time that if he ever did have the backing of the Board members he would make quick changes in the office.

She knew herself to be in an uncertain situation. Really, she would have done better for her future perhaps if she had looked about for another position. Her record with the Hapwood-Diller Company, if she left of her own volition, would obtain her work elsewhere.

But she could not do this. Tacitly she had promised to remain “on the job.” Barton expected it of her. He had frankly said he felt secure in leaving the company and going away because she would be there. She was “the girl he left behind.” He depended upon her to keep things straight. And perhaps, more than Frank Barton suspected, it was Ethel who could hold his position for him until he returned from France.

If he ever did return! This thought scarified her mind continually. It seemed just as though every German gun and every German bayonet were pointed straight at the general manager of the Hapwood-Diller Company. How could he escape with his life?

And then the letter came--the letter she had longed for. When John tumbled it out of his bag upon her desk with the others, Ethel could not suppress a little scream, for she saw it first of all. Little Skinner and Josephine heard her and came running.

“What is it, Ethel?” demanded the latter.

“It’s a mouse, I bet!” said Skinner. “Some o’ them boys been playing a joke on you, Miss Clayton?”

“Why, is it only a letter?” queried the other stenographer. “How you startled me.”

“It’s enough to startle anybody,” declared Ethel, making the best of a bad matter. “It’s from Mr. Barton.”

At that announcement even Sydney left his desk to draw near. Ethel’s heart beat a warm alarm, but she could not get out of opening and reading the missive there and then. Of course he would say nothing in it that the office force could not safely hear. She knew it would be merely a kindly message for all. She wished--oh, how deeply!--that it might be of so intimate a nature that she could not read it aloud to them.

He was within sound of the guns at the Front already. No locality was particularized, for that would have been censored, but if he could hear the heavy cannonade from his training camp it would not be long before his battalion would be marching into the trenches.

No fear for the future was breathed through Barton’s chatty, friendly letter. He gave such a picture of the camp, and the boys in khaki, and the people about them, that even Sydney--his face working spasmodically--clenched his fist and muttered:

“By heaven! how I wish I was over there with him.”

Benway’s eyes shone, too; and Mabel Skinner expressed for the hundredth time the desire she had to be a boy.

“Why, I tell Boots that if I was him I’d run away and swear I was nineteen and enlist.”

“It’s tough on you, Skinner,” drawled Jim Mayberry, who chanced to be passing through and heard this outbreak. “Nothing but a pair of trousers between you and glory.”

Little Skinner remembered that it was in office hours, so she made no retort. Otherwise Mayberry would never have got away with it, as she declared afterward.

However, she was really trying to eschew rudeness, especially within the hearing of Benway Chase. Once or twice, as Ethel would not let him hang around for her after hours, Benway had walked along with Mabel. The girl had been delighted by these attentions. She began to dress more quietly and gradually the startled expression left her face, for she learned to arrange her hair more tastefully. Her improvement was marked enough for others besides Ethel to notice it.

“By jove!” ejaculated Sydney, “our Skinner is coming into her own. She looks more like a girl should and less like a boy dressed up in girl’s togs.”

It was only Ethel, however, who suspected why Mabel was changing both in manner and in appearance. That the girl worshiped Benway Chase from afar Ethel did not doubt; but at first she was not sure that she approved. Little Skinner came from such a very poor and “shiftless” family. Should Benway look on Mabel with favor, Ethel feared that his mother would be horror-stricken. Yet Ethel had told Benway she would be glad to see him interested in some other girl.

If Barton’s letter did not cheer Ethel in large measure it linked her more closely to the war and its activities. Hard as she had to work in the offices, she found time to be active in the local Red Cross chapter to which she belonged.

She insisted, too, in buying several of the second issue of Liberty Bonds, although Mrs. Clayton was not in favor of her so doing.

“We have all the stocks and bonds and such things we can afford,” the troubled woman declared. “If the Hapwood-Diller stock is going downhill (and they tell me the Board will really pass the next dividend) we’ll have to dig right into our little bank account, or else live as poor as church mice.”

“Oh, it’s not as bad as that, Mother,” the girl declared. “I have a steady income, you must remember--and that’s a good deal.”

“Yes, but not as much as it ought to be. I declare, in these times, with prices of everything going up, wages should be about doubled.”

“If we doubled on the wages, we’d have to close down.”

“But you didn’t have to take more bonds.”

“I thought it was our patriotic duty to do that.”

“Let them do it that have more than we have, Ethel.”

“I think everybody ought to do all he or she can.”

“Well, maybe. But it’s hard on poor folks. And there’s another thing,” added Mrs. Clayton suddenly.

“What is that?”

“I never did see such times! I couldn’t get sugar at all to-day; though that trouble’s ’most over, they say. And if we didn’t have coal in our cellar we’d go without a fire, I guess. You’d better hang on to what money you’ve got, Ethel.”

“I’d like to know who’s been talking to you again about the company being in difficulties!” her daughter said sharply. “It’s not so.”

“They tell me the shares are selling as low as seventy-five in Boston. Flory Diller’s all of a twitter about selling. She wants to buy a piano player, anyway; and if she sells her shares the money will belong to her and never mind what John says, she’ll have that player.”

“It is such foolish people as Flory that make all the trouble,” grumbled Ethel. “I wish you would not listen to them, Mother.”