“Who are you?” she asked coolly. “I’m a little particular who I choose for my friends.”
“Oh, are you?” said Victor. “I hadn’t thought so, but that’s all right with me. I’m Victor Vandingham. Ever hear of me?”
“Why, yes,” said the girl, “I think I have. Are you related to V. C. Vandingham of the steel plant?”
“I sure am!” Victor said with a grin. “The very same. He’s my father.”
“Well, that’s interesting,” said the girl. “Sure, I’ll take lunch with you. What do I call you? Mr. Vandingham?”
“No, that’s too formal for the way we met. You’d better call me Van. That’s what I was called at college. And what do they call you, little one?” He smiled down into her face and sincerely hoped that someone in the Kingsley house was looking out the window to report this drama to Lisle. For Victor seldom put on an act without an eye to a possible audience.
The girl looked up nonchalantly and answered, “Oh, my name is Erda. That’s enough for the present, isn’t it? The rest wouldn’t mean a thing to you yet, anyway.” She turned with a smile, slipped her hand in Victor’s arm, and modulating her step to his, walked on up the street with him.
“We’ll take a taxi downtown,” said the young man, “and later if we decide to go somewhere else, I can phone to have the man bring my car down. Okay with you?”
“Perfectly okay with me,” said Erda, smiling. She stepped gaily on, entirely at her ease.
So that was what Victor Vandingham ended up doing instead of choosing a diamond for Lisle Kingsley’s engagement ring.
Chapter 7
When Lisle returned to the house about the middle of the afternoon, her mother had just come in. They sat down together to have a cup of tea and sandwiches, for neither had had time for lunch.
“Did Victor come for me this morning, Mother?” asked Lisle.
“Yes, and he certainly was angry that you were not here and more rude than I would ever have believed he could be. He said you promised to go shopping with him to buy a new dress for his party and to select your engagement ring, and you stood him up! Is that true, Lisle?”
“No! He asked me to go, but I told him I was not buying a new dress and that I didn’t want an engagement ring, for I wasn’t engaged and didn’t intend to be. He got very angry about the dress. Asked me if I was going to wear some dowdy old rag. He said you were old-fashioned and wouldn’t know how to select the right kind of a sophisticated dress, and a lot of stuff like that, just as he talked that day in the store. He said he and I were to be married right away, and he wanted the wedding date announced at the party and everybody invited. Oh, Mother, he was simply impossible! And then before I could do anything except to say I wouldn’t go and I didn’t want to be married or have an engagement ring, Mrs. Carlisle and her young people came in. You know how late they stayed and how he went home with them. There simply wasn’t anything I could do about it. I didn’t have a chance to explain to him that I had to go to a committee meeting, and I didn’t think it mattered anyway, since I told him I didn’t want him shopping with me. Oh, Mother, do you think I should have stayed at home for him after he had been so outrageous?”
“No, my dear, you were perfectly right to go, and besides, I explained to him that you had a committee meeting.”
“And Mother, do I have to go to that awful party? I know just how he will act. Just as if I was his property.”
“Well, we’ll see, my dear. I really think you could manage to keep somewhat in the background if you tried. Just be sweet and dignified, and don’t give him a chance to say unwelcome things. You must remember there will be a great many people there, and you wouldn’t need to be there too early, you know. I had hoped there wouldn’t be any party, but it seems it is to go through.”
“Yes, Mother, and did he tell you he is not going to war at all? He’s going into his father’s business.”
“Yes, he told me,” sighed the mother. “It’s rather disappointing. I think he needs the discipline of the army. But perhaps the responsibility of business will do the same for him.”
“I doubt it,” said Lisle sharply, and her mother gave her a quick look. Was Lisle deeply cut by all of this? Oh, she hoped her child would be saved from having a broken heart.
But Lisle, after her talk with her mother, seemed quite cheerful, as if her heart had been unburdened and she felt relieved. Her mother watched her carefully the next few days and drew a relieved breath whenever Lisle came in with a smile. Perhaps her daughter would escape sorrow. It had seemed so beautiful to have those two children grow up together and care for one another. But Lisle was by no means pining away, and her mother wondered. Had she some other interest that she had not told about? Some young man, perhaps, in her classes at her university. Perhaps that was it. She must keep a close watch, for sometimes when a natural friendship was broken, a girl would take to anyone who was good-looking and admired her. She must be careful that Lisle made no unwise contacts. That mustn’t happen twice to Lisle.
And what would she have said if she could have known that the only young man whose smile and merry eyes had lingered in her child’s memory she had seen working on the street with common workmen? Mrs. Kingsley wasn’t a snob. She would have been dismayed to find that she had been brought up with a firm belief in class distinction.
Lisle was happy and fully occupied with her war work now, and especially with the little nursery in which she and her friends were interested. And of course, her parents insisted that she finish her college course and be ready to graduate with her class.
Lisle was a good student, never neglected her studies, and arranged her hours so that she was able to carry out all the plans she had made for war work. So when Victor, after philandering a few evenings with the waitress Cherry and her ilk, and with Erda more than a few, concluded it was time to get back to Lisle and bring her to her senses, he found she was gone.
She had gone that evening to take the place of one of her older friends who was ill and who was the teacher of a Red Cross class in the lower end of the city. She was not familiar with that part of the city, but was at once interested in these new people and lingered afterward to answer eager questions put by some women who were both poor and ignorant. It was late before she started home. Because her family was being most careful about conserving gas and tires, she had gone to the class by bus. But when she arrived at the corner where she should take the return bus, no bus came along. She had probably missed the one she intended on taking. Or had she made a mistake about which corner she should wait on? Then suddenly, as she stood there uncertainly, looking at her watch, casting anxious glances in the direction from which she thought the bus should arrive, the sirens began to shriek for a blackout, and one by one the lights in the buildings and houses around her went out. Then all at once the street lights were gone, and there was utter darkness. It seemed to Lisle she had never seen such dense black darkness in her life. She turned this way and that in her bewilderment and realized that she was completely turned around. She did not know which way to go. She wanted to hurry, but how could she hurry in utter darkness, and in a region with which she was not familiar?
Then she saw a blue light flash from a doorway. A man was standing in the door with a flashlight in his hand, covered with blue cellophane! Perhaps it was an air warden! She stepped over to him and asked where she could go to telephone for a taxi. But he shook his head. There was no telephone nearby, and no taxis could be had during a blackout.
“Come inside,” he said pleasantly. “You will be perfectly safe in here until it is over. This is a rather tough neighborhood for a lady to be alone, you know, but this is a Bible class. You are Miss Kingsley, aren’t you? I’m John Sargent. You don’t know me, but I’ve seen you before. Come this way and I’ll put a chair for you just inside the classroom where you can listen. Sorry we’re all in the dark, but we haven’t got our blackout curtains up yet.”
He flashed his blue light, she got a glimpse of his f
ace, and suddenly she knew him. He was the man with the blue eyes she had seen working that day. She had never forgotten him. She looked at him in a daze of wonder. She felt as if she were among friends. A Bible class! Surely that would be all right. How wonderful that she had found a place like this, for now she realized that she had been frightened. She sat down and relaxed, conscious of the presence of other people in the room, a goodly number of them. How strange that she should meet that man again and in a place like this!
Then suddenly her attention was caught by the speaker, the teacher of the class.
“People are asking,” he said, “why doesn’t God stop this war? Why does He allow such awful things to go on? And we turn to the Bible for the answer. Has God ever done this before to the world? Allowed terrible things to sweep over a calm and prosperous people? Allowed whole cities to be destroyed, beautiful memorials laid waste, treasures of art utterly disfigured, human lives by the thousand, yes, by the million, cast off at a stroke? Has He ever allowed that before? The answer is yes. And why has He done it? Turn in your mind back to the first chapter of Isaiah and see how God sent word through the prophet to the kings of Judah of the calamities that were to befall them as a consequence of their sinfulness, their forgetting of the Lord. ‘A sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity,’ he calls them. He brings to their remembrance their great sin of forsaking the Lord, of provoking the Holy One of Israel.
“So the reason of those wars and that destruction that God sent to His people is not hard to find. And we, in this day, are we wondering why God is letting us see so much trouble? Why we are called a Christian nation, yet we have to give up our sugar and our coffee and most of our meat and butter, too, besides our gasoline and our tires. No more holiday rides. And some of us have to give up our sons and our own lives. Why should God let all this come upon us? Why should He be so cruel when we are a Christian nation? We are not sinful like Hitler or the Japanese! Oh, but we are forgetting all the time that sin, the main sin, the real root of all, is unbelief. ‘But we do believe in God,’ we cry out. ‘We join the church, we give to missions, we help the needy. Why, certainly we believe there is a God. We even believe in Jesus Christ and that He is God’s Son. Certainly we are believers. Why should all of this happen to us? We cannot believe that God would let such people as ourselves suffer this way. Some of our sons and brothers and sweethearts are even being killed.’ But you know, that is not belief, just accepting with your intellect all those doctrines. To really believe, we must individually accept what Christ did for us in taking all our sins upon Himself. He paid the penalty of death by shedding His own blood on the cross in our stead. A true believer accepts Christ as his own personal Savior.
“And it is not atheism, but unbelief, mere neglect of God, that is the great national sin. And it is to show the nations what their sin of unbelief has been that He has come to bring them through tribulations, that He has to let war come and kill their sons, destroy their homes, make desolate their goodly works, which their hands have wrought and of which they have been so proud. And God, through all this horror of war, is yearning over His people whom He has loved and who have forsaken Him and gone after strange gods, gods of silver and gold, the work of their own hands. Oh, those sins of the nations of the Old Testament, how they mock us with their similarity to our own times, our own world, and these sad days in which we are living now, with perils in the offing, and not so very far off either. God is calling His people today by the war which He is allowing.
“But some are thinking that wickedness is perhaps stronger than God, and the devil is getting away with it. No, never! Our God knows what He is doing. And these experiences we are having to live through are not things that Satan has sprung upon unprepared God. ‘Known unto God are all His works from the beginning of the world!’ Acts 15:18—nothing can take Him unaware. ‘Forever, O Lord, thy word is settled in heaven.’ Psalms 119:89. So God, before the foundation of the world, knew that you and I and our world today were going to have to go through all this turmoil and awfulness. He knew about your life, and my life, and how the war was going to make us suffer. But He knew also what it was going to do to us, how it would purify some of us. The important thing to Him is whether you and I shall come through it to know Him, our Savior, and to be like Him—be ‘conformed to the image of His Son.’ His object in all of this is that you and I shall be like Christ and ready for an eternity with Him.”
There was more of this. The speaker went on to tell of other wars in the Old Testament times, and of God’s allowance for wars, that through them evil should be punished. He showed how God often used one wicked nation to punish another and then punished the nation He used, because they were puffed up, thinking they had won the war by their own strength.
Lisle sat there in the dark listening, filled with wonder, startled into thinking, brought suddenly face-to-face with a living God whom she had never realized before, amazed that the Bible had truths like these for bewildered souls, in every perplexity of their human lives. She had never thought of the Bible before as anything more than a beautiful, inspirational book, filled with traditional stories and vaguely related to life. She supposed it to be in some way connected with God and salvation for the time that comes after this life. She believed it, of course, because she had been brought up to believe it, but more as a family precaution against lawlessness and ill-breeding than as something that involved any obligation from her personally. And now suddenly it seemed that it did, though she couldn’t have told just why. This teaching seemed somehow to destroy all the former steady foundations of her life and made her feel that she had been walking in a dangerous way. She didn’t understand why or what she ought to do now.
Vaguely she felt that someone had taken the chair beside her, and there was suddenly a sympathy in her heart for all the unknown people in the dark room who were listening with her to this most startling message. Then suddenly the blue light flashed just a wink and she realized that the person beside her must be John Sargent. The knowledge was strangely pleasant but did not distract her thoughts from the teacher’s words. Suddenly, there in the darkness, a figure shone out, a figure with divine light in His face, looking toward them all, with nail-pierced hands and a face that bore glory and love. She saw for the first time in her life who Jesus Christ was, and what He wanted to be to her. Did the speaker just tell all that? Could mere human words paint a picture like that in the dark, that brought a light to her soul she had never known before, a light of whose existence she had never before dreamed? Afterward, thinking back, she could not remember words, only truths, great new truths that she had not known before. Did other people besides this little group among whom she found herself tonight, know these things? Did her mother and father know them, and live their placid lives without ever speaking of them, not even now and then?
Then all too quickly the siren blasted forth, proclaiming the blackout was over, and the lights in the room sprang up. Gradually she could see the people around her and could watch the face of the teacher. He brought his lesson to a close with the great proclamation that this Jesus who was now in heaven, the Jesus who had died for them all and had risen from the dead and been caught up to heaven, was coming back to claim His own! Was coming soon! He had said so Himself. And all these people evidently believed it. Lisle looked from one to another of those about her, looked up to John Sargent, who had stepped away to see that the lights went on when the sirens blew, but had returned to the chair beside her.
So she looked up and met that same smile, those same blue eyes tender with reverence now, as he smiled. And her look of wonder filled him with a great ecstasy.
Then the little company burst into soft singing, started by a sweet voice:
I have seen the face of Jesus,
Tell me not of aught beside,
I have heard the voice of Jesus
And my soul is satisfied;
For He shed His blood on Calvary,
And He saves me by His grace,
&nbs
p; And I find my all in Jesus
My eternal resting place.
They sang it so tenderly with such clear voicing of the words, that they seemed to be wrought into her soul, and she tried to remember them, for when she would have to leave.
Then there followed a tender prayer, and when Lisle lifted her head and looked again at the young man beside her, it was as if his eyes told her that it was all true that she had been hearing. That he had tried it and he knew.
But he only said when they stood up and the group was beginning to go quietly away, “If you can wait five minutes, I’ll be glad to take you to wherever you want to go. You see, I’m janitor here tonight, and I’ll have to see that fire is right for the night and the door is locked.”
“Oh, thank you,” said Lisle, looking a little startled at the thought of going back into her world again. “I don’t know whether I would be able to find my way home or not. I got rather turned around in the blackout.”
“All right. I’ll be with you as soon as I can,” he said.
And then, unexpectedly, a plainly dressed girl with shy eyes came up to her and said, “Good evening,” and Lisle, taking a lesson from those she saw about her, put out her own hand and grasped the girl’s, which was held out awkwardly. Somehow she felt as if these people were almost kin to her in some strange, subtle way. How it would have amused Victor to know that she felt that way.
“You are a stranger here,” said the girl. “We hope you’ll come again.”
“I would like to,” said Lisle, giving her a warm smile. Then the teacher came by and stopped to speak to her cordially and others nodded good evening. How warm the world was growing since these war times had come. Or was it these people who studied the Bible that seemed so different from others? Lisle wondered if her mother had ever been to a Bible class like this one.
She could hear the furnace being shaken down beneath the thin flooring. That was John Sargent down there. He said he was janitor tonight. Did that mean only tonight, or was it his regular job? Could it be possible that being in this Bible study atmosphere had given his smile that rare quality?