There was a wagon drawn up at the curb, and an earnest-eyed young clergyman was speaking. The crowd was attentive, mildly curious. The clergyman was emphatic without being convincing. Audrey watched the faces about her, standing in the crowd herself, and a sense of the futility of it all gripped her. All these men, and only a feeble cheer as a boy still in his teens agreed to volunteer. All this effort for such scant result, and over on the other side such dire need! But one thing cheered her. Beside her, in the crowd, a portly elderly Jew was standing with his hat in his hand, and when a man near him made some jeering comment, the Jew brought his hand down on his shoulder.
“Be still and listen,” he said. “Or else go away and allow others to listen. This is our country which calls.”
“It's amusing, isn't it?” Audrey heard a woman's voice near her, carefully inflected, slightly affected.
“It's rather stunning, in a way. It's decorative; the white faces, and that chap in the wagon, and the gasoline torch.”
“I'd enjoy it more if I'd had my dinner.”
The man laughed.
“You are a most brazen combination of the mundane and the spiritual, Natalie. You are all soul—after you are fed. Come on. It's near here.”
Audrey's hands were very cold. By the movement of the crowd behind her, she knew that Natalie and Rodney were making their escape, toward food and a quiet talk in some obscure restaurant in the neighborhood. Fierce anger shook her. For this she and Clayton were giving up the only hope they had of happiness—that Natalie might carry on a cheap and stealthy flirtation.
She made a magnificent appeal that night, and a very successful one. The lethargic crowd waked up and pressed forward. There were occasional cheers, and now and then the greater tribute of convinced silence. And on a box in the wagon the young clergyman eyed her almost wistfully. What a woman she was! With such a woman a man could live up to the best in him. Then he remembered his salary in a mission church of twelve hundred a year, and sighed.
He gained courage, later on, and asked Audrey if she would have some coffee with him, or something to eat. She looked tired.