It was the latter thought, scalding and unshakable, which held the man there for a long time, listening, considering. It was possible that Audrey was peering at him from the invisible room and that she could not wholly repress a wanton impulse to chuckle over his return. Or, perhaps, she had not observed him and was amused by his callow departure.
More likely, she was crying. He came to that conclusion. But, in the meanwhile, his impulse withered. He became afraid that he had been trapped by her resemblance to Ellen, by her audacity, by the interested esteem in which Mr. Corinth held her. Those dissensions quickly undid the blind violence of his back-running steps. He slunk diagonally from the house and vaulted the fence. His feet went along the pavement in a dirge-slow, authentic. Jimmie said nothing about that adventure to Mr. Corinth.
He hoped Audrey would recount it. In that event his boss would probably discuss the affair. But the chemist—busy with research, busy with problems of production—did not mention it; so Jimmie assumed, after a few days, that Audrey had kept it secret. Mr.
Corinth, indeed, seemed hourly to be aging; his white hair yellowed; his face shrank; the willowware blue of his eyes washed out; it was as if the fearsome chemicals with which he worked had entered his body and attacked it at every point except the one where his energy originated. Age had done nothing to his brain and nothing to the vigor that energized his long, restless routines. Jimmie threw himself into the job of helping the old man.
Such understanding had sprung up between them that they worked in a manner which suggested their activities had been ordained, or rehearsed elsewhere. They were like backfield men in a ferocious game—Corinth carrying the ball—Jimmie throwing passes, blocking, tackling, running interference. He became familiar with the main outlines of the plant operation, with the war orders and their filling, with the holdovers from what the old man called “peacetime” business.
Often they worked among the low buildings till late at night. Occasionally they slept there, on two cots, in the room the factory employees used by day for smoking.
When they talked it was always about chemistry or business. Jimmie knew this absolution of endeavor was, on his part, honest in one sense alone: he was willing to give every minute he could to the war. But the spare moments, afternoons off, evenings at home, he filled with work merely as an escape, an anesthetic.
He felt impelled to get away from the obsessive quality of his thoughts about Audrey. What she had done to him was bad enough; what she could do was so much worse that he persuaded himself he should avoid it at all costs. He decided that she must be, intrinsically, a destructive person; otherwise she would not have been so quick to attempt his conquest. That decision gave him no peace, however, so he fell back on the doubtful anodyne of overwork. He had other motives, little ones, that kept adding themselves to the constant factor in his work-mania.
One day he spoke to his mother about Sarah’s blighted love affair. He waited until what he thought was the right moment, a rainy afternoon, when his father was at the club—country or athletic, Jimmie did not ask which—and his sister had gone to the movies.
There was no comfort between mother and son, tolerance only, but, with the fire going, the radio playing decent music, and Jimmie ensconced in the living room, in a deep chair, with a book, the time seemed fit enough. Mrs. Bailey was knitting. She, and most of the other women, had taken to knitting this or that for refugees, soldiers, whatnot—in spite of their convictions—out of a habit entrenched by the first world conflict: war, whatever its ideology, meant knitting, and, probably, no sugar. Those two, mainly.