Dangerous Days

The declaration of war found Graham desperately unhappy. Natalie held

him rigidly to his promise, but it is doubtful if Natalie alone could

have kept, him out of the army. Marion was using her influence, too! She

held him by alternating between almost agreeing to runaway marriage and

threats of breaking the engagement if he went to war. She had tacitly

agreed to play Natalie's game, and she was doing it.

Graham did not analyze his own misery. What he said to himself was that

he was making a mess of things. Life, which had seemed to be a simple

thing, compounded of work and play, had become involved, difficult and

wretched.

Some times he watched Clayton almost with envy. He seemed so sure of

himself; he was so poised, so calm, so strong. And he wondered if

there had been a tumultuous youth behind the quiet of his maturity.

He compared the even course of Clayton's days, his work, his club, the

immaculate orderliness of his life, with his own disordered existence.

He was hedged about with women. Wherever he turned, they obtruded

themselves. He made plans and women brushed them aside. He tried to live

his life, and women stepped in and lived it for him. His mother, Marion,

Anna Klein. Even Delight, with her friendship always overclouded with

disapproval. Wherever he turned, a woman stood in the way. Yet he could

not do without them. He needed them even while he resented them.

Then, gradually, into his self-engrossment there penetrated a conviction

that all was not well between his father and his mother. He had always

taken them for granted much as he did the house and the servants. In his

brief vacations during his college days they had agreed or disagreed,

amicably enough. He had considered, in those days, that life was a

very simple thing. People married and lived together. Marriage, he

considered, was rather the end of things.

But he was older now, and he knew that marriage was a beginning and not

an end. It did not change people fundamentally. It only changed their

habits.

His discovery that his father and mother differed about the war was

the first of other discoveries; that they differed about him; that they

differed about many matters; that, indeed, they had no common ground at

all on which to meet; between them, although Graham did not put it that

way, was a No-Man's Land strewn with dead happiness, lost desires, and

the wreckage of years of dissension.

It was incredible to Graham that he should ever reach the forties, but

he wondered some times if all of life was either looking forward or

looking back. And it seemed to him rather tragic that for Clayton, who

still looked like a boy, there should be nothing but his day at the

mill, his silent evening at home, or some stodgy dinner-party where the

women were all middle-aged, and the other men a trifle corpulent.