The Blood Red Dawn
he pastor's announcement had been swallowed up in a hum of truant
inattention, and as the heralded speaker made his appearance upon the
platform Claire Robson, leaning forward, said to her mother:
"What?... Did you catch his name?"
"A foreigner of some sort " replied Mrs. Robson, with smug sufficiency.
For a moment the elder woman's sneer dulled the edge of Claire's anticipa-
tions, but presently the man began to speak, and at once she felt a sense of
power back of his halting words, a sudden bursting fort of bloom amid the
frozen assembly that sat ice-bound, refusing to be melted by the fires of an
alien enthusiasm. She could not help wondering whether he felt how hope-
less it would be to force a sympathetic response from his audience. In ordi-
nary times the Second Presbyterian Church of San Francisco could not pos-
sibly have had any interest in Serbia except as a field for foreign missionaries.
Now, with America in the war and speeding up the draft, these worthy peo-
ple were too much concerned with problems nearer their own hearthstones
to be swept off their feet by a specific and almost inarticulate appeal for an
obscure country, made only a shade less remote by the accident of being ac-
3 CHARLES CALDWELL DOBIE
counted an ally.
Claire, straining at attention, found it hard to follow him. He talked rapidly
and with unfamiliar emphasis, and he waved his hands. Frankly, people were
bored. They had come to hear a concert and incidentally swell the Red Cross
fund, but they had not reckoned on quite this type of harangue. Besides,
an appetizing smell of coffee from the church kitchen had begun to beguile
their senses. And yet, the man talked on and on, until quite suddenly Claire
Robson began to have a strange feeling of disquiet, an embarrassment for
him, such as one feels when an intimate friend or kinsman unconsciously
makes a spectacle of himself. She wished that he would stop. She longed to
rise from her seat and scream, to create an outlandish scene, to do anything,
in short, that would silence him. At this point he turned his eyes in her
direction, and she felt the scorch of an intense inner fire. Instinctively she
lowered her glance.... When she looked up again his gaze was still fixed upon
her. She felt her color rise. From that moment on she had a sense that she was
his sole audience. He was talking to her. The others did not matter. She still
did not have any very distinct idea what it was all about, but the manner of it
held her captive. But gradually the mists cleared, he became more coherent,
and slowly, imperceptibly, bit by bit, he won the others. Yet never for an
instant did he take his eyes fromher. When he finished, a momentary silence
blocked the final burst of applause. But Claire Robson's hands were locked
tightly together, and it was not until he had disappeared that she realized
that she had not paid him the tribute of even a parting glance.
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