The Blood Red Dawn

by Charles Caldwell Dobie

She tossed aside her coat and her lace scarf, and her imprisoned hair came trembling in a wayward flood about her shoulders.

She sat down before the table and clasped her hands. In the dimness the holy image seemed to grow palpitant and alive. Hot tears were gathering in her eyelashes. She bowed her head.

The light in the lamp gave one brave flicker and went out. Claire Robson dropped her head upon the table and sobs shook her.

CHAPTER VI

At four o'clock in the morning Stillman turned his car about and began to return to San Francisco. He did not feel tired, but he was chilled through. About him, in the faint mist of early dawn, the prune-orchards of the Santa Clara Valley stretched out in faintly green lines toward the foothills.

He had a sudden longing for companionship. If only Danilo were there to flame him with vicarious enthusiasm! Danilo!... What was there about Danilo that never failed to melt the cold forms of indifference and weary contempt? Was it the man himself, his intensity for a cause, or the mere novelty of the unique atmosphere which he radiated that had tempted Stillman beyond the pale boundaries of a formal acquaintanceship? Last night's celebration, for instance, had held very little that was traditionally appealing to a man of Stillman's upbringing, and yet he had been tricked into accepting the curious forms through which a totally strange people expressed themselves. In his travels abroad he had always enjoyed the spectacle of foreign life, but he had scarcely felt any desire to enter into it. He found the position of onlooker agreeable, and he was not indifferent to the merit of other traditions, but he had lacked the naïveté to surrender to their spell. When he was with Danilo it was different; the Serbian seemed to be a crucible which fused the most diverse elements, investing everything in life with simplicity and coherence. In Danilo's presence Stillman found himself capable of the most amazing confidences. He could speak out boldly about his hopes, his fears, even his shortcomings. He could discuss the magnitude of his fortune, his carefully guarded indiscretions, his domestic tragedy.

And now, at this moment, as Stillman rode back to San Francisco in the faintly spreading dawn, he had a vague feeling that if Danilo had been at his side he would have poured out his soul and yielded up the most precious secret of his heart. Well, perhaps it was best that Danilo was safely out of range. It was not that he felt any precise mistrust concerning Danilo; all his uncertainty had to do with the strange, hard, coldly flaming Claire that he had glimpsed in that terrible moment when he had first come upon her, seated next to Lycurgus at the Café Ithaca. He had never felt so impotent, so helpless as he had felt at that moment. He remembered, now, every detail of her costume: the blue-green iridescence that ran through every palpitation of her figure, the black, sinister patch near her eye, the brilliant red of her lips. And against all this color the amazing whiteness of her tapering arms had stood out too clearly. He had seen her arms bared before, to the elbow, but never boldly stripped clear to the shoulders. And her hair—that hair which always had graced her head with such unaffected artlessness—she seemed suddenly to have found the need to overdo, to strain for effective simplicity. Her words to him had not helped matters. It was not the memory of her defiance that left him cold; it was the indifference in her voice that froze his heart. She was indifferent—she no longer cared!

He began now to feel not only cold, but weary. What had possessed him to leave the Café Ithaca and flee down the peninsula like a thief in the night? To ride ... ride furiously, madly, that had been his first impulse. Just motion! It seemed that he could find no other outlet for his tumult. But now the leaping flames of emotion had died. He was burned out.

The dawn grew rosier; meadowlarks began to sing; groups of blackbirds rose in ardent, wheeling flights. The mist upon the hills parted and revealed pastoral secrets. But all this full-blooded pageantry left him unmoved.