CHAPTER VII

LEADING UP TO A CLIMAX

For Ethel Clayton the days that immediately followed the departure of the manager of the Hapwood-Diller Company were merely busy days. Positively nothing happened. The particular work that came to her was not different from that which had been her portion for some months; only in her oversight of things in general (and that oversight secretive) was she differently engaged.

She took her book and pencil into the private office each morning at the usual hour and took dictation from Jim Mayberry.

Mayberry was not the clear-headed, forceful thinker that Barton was. But his letters were brief and to the point nevertheless; he was not a numbskull. Nor did he lack a grasp of business details quite necessary to the carrying on of the affairs of the big concern. He worked faithfully, seemed to neglect nothing; and though he did not admit it, Ethel felt sure he was thankful to her when she smoothed the crudeness of his English, or brought out more clearly the points he desired to make in his correspondence.

To her satisfaction he did not at first show those amorous proclivities which had so annoyed her in the past. His thoughts seemed to be centered on the business of trying to fill both Barton’s and his own jobs. Or was it that Jim Mayberry had something on his mind other than the business affairs of the Hapwood-Diller Company to trouble him?

The office force, of course, buzzed at first because of the departure of Mr. Barton. But every individual was on his best behavior. They had all liked the general manager; and, perhaps, they had visions of his returning suddenly and taking them to task for sins of both omission and commission.

Mayberry left the people in the outer office strictly and entirely alone; even Sydney came to Ethel at times for advice, or to report some slight matter which needed to be “put up to the boss.” It had been so before Barton went away, although the girl had not then remarked it. She was still “the buffer” between the small annoyances of the office and the man at the head of affairs.

Grandon Fuller came in one day and had a somewhat extended conference with the manager _pro tem_. Ethel noted that the holder of so large a block of the company’s stock seemed to be very friendly with Mayberry, whereas when Mr. Macon Hammerly came in, as was his wont, he always timed his calls so as to miss Mayberry. The shrewd old grain dealer was frank to say that he did not like the present head of the Hapwood-Diller Company.

“Jim always looked to me like a well-fed fox,” grumbled Hammerly to Ethel. “I always wonder who’s pullet he’s just swallowed.”

Although Mayberry did not greatly disturb Ethel’s quiet pool of existence, Benway Chase seemed to have been an agitating pebble flung into it. Her old friend took hold of his duties with all the energy and keenness of perception that she knew he would display, once he was given a chance. Sydney and the rest of the office force liked him immensely.

On her own part, however, Ethel found him trying. He was promptly at her gate every morning to accompany her to work; and at night he escorted her home. It had been like that when they went to school together. But Ethel felt altogether different about it now. She did not like to be made conspicuous or to be appropriated in such a fashion. And when Benway undertook to go to lunch with her, she put her foot down firmly.

Yet, she could not hurt his feelings. Because of his affliction she had been all her life striving to be particularly kind to Benway. From her earliest remembrance, when she had felt spasms of pity and sympathy for her little playmate and had impulsively run to him to pat his cheek and say, “Poor, poor Bennie!” to this very chance she had begged for him with the Hapwood-Diller Manufacturing Company, Ethel Clayton had mothered the boy. Naturally and quite unconsciously he took advantage of her kindness.

She shrank from having the rest of the office force suspect any tender relation between herself and the boy. “Boy” was of course the term in which she thought of him. And when he undertook to time his absence from the office so as to accompany her to the restaurant which she usually patronized, she had to put a stop to that. She quietly inaugurated a system of “taking turn about” for lunch hour which pretty well put it out of Benway’s power to leave at the same time she did.

Likewise, she went farther away, to the Orleans Tea Room, instead of to the place at which it was the custom of most of the Hapwood-Diller office force to have their midday meal. The tea room was a more expensive place and was largely patronized by “up town” folk; and it was because of this change in her habits that Ethel chanced to learn, not two weeks after the manager’s departure for the training camp, something that she thought really did not concern her, but which interested her immensely, as it was connected with Frank Barton.

She saw one noon a gaily, though beautifully, dressed and unmistakable figure entering the tea room ahead of her--that of Helen Fuller. Her escort was Morrison Copley--one of those men whose names made Ethel’s lips involuntarily curl. And yet, as far as Ethel Clayton knew, there was nothing bad about Morry Copley.

She considered it a misfortune that the only empty table should be next the one occupied by those two from what Macon Hammerly called “the swagger part of town.” Miss Fuller looked the employee of the Hapwood-Diller Company over with a cold disdain which might have hurt cruelly a supersensitive soul. Ethel’s was too well balanced a nature to be disturbed by the ill breeding of the other girl.

“You boys are going to be _terribly_ put to it for styles this fall,” Helen was drawling, her elbows on the table and her hands cupped to hold her pretty chin. Somebody had told her that the pose became her. “Everything offered for masculine wear will have a military cut.”

“I don’t see why we’re to be put to it,” returned Morry, gazing at the girl before him with doglike devotion. “Belted things always did look well on me, you know, Nell. I’m slim waisted.”

“Slim in every way, Morry,” the girl said laughing. “Morrison Copley, S. S. quite fits you. Slim slacker. My! _I’d_ be ashamed if _I_ were a man----”

“Plenty of fellows are going. Those that like army life and--and all that,” complained Morry. “I don’t see why you should hound me, all the time, Nell. And mothaw really would make an awful row if I said I wanted to go.”

“If you even _said_ so, Morry?” she scoffed.

“Say, aren’t you satisfied?” demanded the young man with more energy than usual. “You say you made Frank Barton go to camp. How many scalps do you want to hang in your wigwam?”

“Your scalp, as you call it, would look pretty good to me,” she laughed. “I want to send all the fellows I can. Bradley’s half promised. He was in the Guard for two years, but got out because he was too lazy to drill, I suppose,” Miss Fuller said.

“Pooh, they’re only stalling,” grumbled Morry. “You know just about how far Brad will get at that training camp. And Barton’s only going for a show. They’ll never get to France, any of them.”

“Why don’t _you_ try it, then? If there’s no danger, that should suit _you_, Morry!”

“I tell you what!” exclaimed the young man indignantly and forgetting his drawl, “if I go into this thing I’ll go the whole figure, don’t forget that! If other fellows go to France I shall go. I won’t hunt me a soft job here where I can wear a uniform and never smell powder.”

Helen Fuller looked at him and thoughtfully.

“I wonder, Morry, if you really _would_,” she finally said.

Ethel could not help hearing this. Indeed, the heedlessness with which the two conversed on their private affairs in public made it imperative that all within earshot should know what they were talking about.

Slight as was Ethel’s interest in the two, and in their affairs, one point did not escape her. It could not fail to impress the girl’s mind and linger in her thoughts.

Had Frank Barton gone to the training camp because of the bite of Helen Fuller’s tart tongue? Miss Fuller was taking much commendation for inspiring the manager of the Hapwood-Diller Company with patriotism. Was Barton’s brand of patriotism of that character? How much influence did the girl really have over him?

These questions could not be stilled in Ethel’s mind. She reverted to them time and again. Helen’s claim that her influence drove her young men friends to patriotic service seemed to be believed by other people. Somebody told Ethel on Sunday at church that Charlie Bradley and young Copley had both gone to the officers’ camp.

“Of course, it’s more of a lark than anything else for most of those who go,” said the person who told Ethel. “Fancy Morry Copley trying to give orders in that squeaky voice of his!”

Ethel’s letters to Barton were strictly business, without being coldly formal. She allowed them to sound a note of cool friendliness in the beginning and at the close but nothing deeper. An expression of hope for his good health was as warm a phrase as entered into them. His polite, brief acknowledgments, addressed to her home, showed that he considered their correspondence nothing more than a business arrangement.

She realized that she was by no means the only person in Mailsburg interested in the absent ones in camp and barracks. The town was beginning to wake up to the exigencies of the war. The ministers prayed for the boys on Sunday, and every social and charitable organization in Mailsburg began to talk of work for the soldiers at least, whether or not any of them really did much at first.

At this time in her heart Ethel hated the idea of war so desperately that the many activities connected with the draft and the going away and the war itself seemed to her mind both futile and non-beneficial. If those young men really got as far as France, and into the trenches, they would be killed. They were merely “cannon fodder” in that case. And if they did not go--if the war ended, as some people said it would, before many of them got over there--then all this talk and planning was so much wasted breath and time and money.

It was a fact that, at this particular time, Ethel Clayton had little interest save in her work and in the affairs of the Hapwood-Diller Company--particularly in Frank Barton’s absence from his post and how it might affect the concern for which they both worked.

Just as she felt that there were plenty of other men to go to the war and that Barton might be spared, so she felt that there were already too many women, both foolish and wise, giving their time and thought to war work. The local papers began to be full of news of the various activities of the several organizations in this connection. In addition some of those desirous of notoriety were getting a heap of free advertising.

“I declare!” said Mrs. Clayton, busily clicking her knitting needles, “the _Clarion_ toots a loud note almost every day for that girl of Mehitable Fuller’s. She’s first into one thing and then another--like a spoiled kitten. And all this folderol about the war seems to give her more of a chance than ever to show off.”

“I wonder,” said Ethel, thoughtfully, “if we ought not to think more about it than we do, Mother? I sit here with my hands idle in the evening. I wonder if all this knitting I see going on hasn’t a basis of honest endeavor in it, after all?”

“Pshaw!” said her mother.

“I know it looks silly. Looks like a fad. One of the girls in the office brings her knitting bag. She’s at the switchboard and has more or less idle time. Instead of reading silly love stories as she used, she knits.”

“What does she knit?”

“Why, she says she hopes it will turn out to be a sweater when she gets it done; and if it is good enough she will give it to the Red Cross,” and Ethel laughed gently.

“Humph!” mumbled Mrs. Clayton. “I wonder if she has a good pattern?”

Thus grew the stirrings of general interest in Mailsburg in the war and in our preparations for entering it. Ethel realized amid her manifold office duties that the undercurrent of their life was becoming more strongly patriotic.

It was learned that at least one Mailsburg boy was already at the front. It was true he had disappeared from town some years before, and under a cloud; but his mother had always known where he was.

Now the _Clarion_ came out with a full page on Sunday, “Mailsburg’s First Boy in France.” Sergeant Willy O’Rourke of General Pershing’s forces had sent his mother several postal cards from “over there.” Here they were reproduced, with a tintype of the sergeant and a sympathetic wash-drawing of Mrs. O’Rourke--a little old woman living down by the docks who said to the reporter:

“Shure an’ th’ O’Rourkes was all fighters. ’Tis no wonder Willy got over there first. Them Garmans’ll have their own troubles now.”

And yet there was something in it that made the reader choke up. Macon Hammerly had his brusk comment to make:

“It may be that Bill O’Rourke left town just ahead of the constable. I remember well the red-headed gossoon. He wasn’t a mite better than this Boots Skinner is now. But, by the holy poker! he’s a _man_. There’s nothing soft and sissified about Bill. If Bill dies for his country he’ll be doing something better than a whole lot of these trifling, dawdling fellows will ever arrive at.”

If he dies for his country! That might be Frank Barton’s fate if he went “over there.” The thought more than once brought Ethel Clayton upright in bed at night. It sometimes wet her pillow with tears. Yet, if it was the truth that Helen Fuller’s influence had urged Barton away to the wars, Ethel was jealous of the other girl for it, and she realized the fact with shame.

Affairs in the Hapwood-Diller Company offices continued much as usual for several weeks. The directors seemed to think Jim Mayberry a satisfactory substitute manager. Having the details of the business at her finger tips as she had, Ethel was quite sure that the superintendent was attending to his additional duties in an exemplary manner.

Ethel checked up much of the work of the other members of the office staff, especially in the correspondence end of the business, and it was in looking over a schedule of stock to be ordered she made a discovery that puzzled her.

Mayberry had now, of course, the ordering of supplies of all kinds; but there was little in the manufacturing line that Ethel Clayton did not know about. Here were certain grades of stock which she had no idea were called for by any order then on the factory’s books already contracted for.

Had Mr. Barton been doing the ordering she would have felt quite free to hold up the schedule until she could speak to him about it. But she feared Mayberry might be touchy in any such matter. He was jealous of his rights, and she hesitated to give him a chance to say she was overstepping the borders of her field of employment.

She went to the files and spent some time in checking off the grades of supplies called for by the orders the factory already had contracted for. And suddenly--it was quite a startling discovery--she came upon the schedule of the Bogata Company’s order which she had every reason to believe had been declined.

She had a clear remembrance of the letter she had written, Mr. Barton’s approval of it, even the reason for the order being refused by the Hapwood-Diller Manufacturing Company. This reason was connected with the very purchase of these special supplies she had noted in the puzzling schedule in her hand.

It could not be overlooked. There was something wrong in what she had discovered.

Fearing she knew not what--a mistake on her own part, perhaps--she waited until she could find Mayberry disengaged. When she knew he was in the manager’s office and alone, Ethel ventured to knock upon the door.