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Young People's Pride: A Novel

by Stephen Vincent Benét · English · Gutenberg #8403 · 351,095 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Young People's Pride: A Novel

Author: Stephen Vincent Benét


        
Release date: July 1, 2005 [eBook #8403]
                Most recently updated: March 15, 2018

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK YOUNG PEOPLE'S PRIDE: A NOVEL ***




Produced by Eric Eldred, David Widger, and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team






YOUNG PEOPLE'S PRIDE

_A NOVEL_

By Stephen Vincent Benêt

Illustrations By Henry Raleigh

Copyright, 1922 By Henry Holt And Company

_First printing, August 1922_


TO ROSEMARY

  If I were sly, I'd steal for you that cobbled hill, Montmartre,
  Josephine's embroidered shoes, St. Louis' oriflamme,
  The river on grey evenings and the bluebell-glass of Chartres,
  And four sarcastic gargoyles from the roof of Notre Dame.

  That wouldn't be enough, though, enough nor half a part;
  There'd be shells because they're sorrowful, and pansies since
  they're wise,
  The smell of rain on lilac-bloom, less fragrant than your heart,
  And that small blossom of your name, as steadfast as your
  eyes.

  Sapphires, pirates, sandalwood, porcelains, sonnets, pearls,
  Sunsets gay as Joseph's coat and seas like milky jade,
  Dancing at your birthday like a mermaid's dancing curls
  --If my father'd only brought me up to half a decent trade!

  Nothing I can give you--nothing but the rhymes--
  Nothing but the empty speech, the idle words and few,
  The mind made sick with irony you helped so many times,
  The strengthless water of the soul your truthfulness kept true.

  Take the little withered things and neither laugh nor cry
  --Gifts to make a sick man glad he's going out like sand--
  They and I are yours, you know, as long as there's an I.
  Take them for the ages. Then they may not shame your
  hand.

  “... For there groweth in great abundance
  in this land a small flower, much blown about
  by winds, named 'Young People's Pride'...”

  DYCER'S _Herbal_





YOUNG PEOPLES PRIDE




I

It is one of Johnny Chipman's parties at the Harlequin Club, and as
usual the people the other people have been asked to meet are late
and as usual Johnny is looking hesitatingly around at those
already collected with the nervous kindliness of an absent-minded
menagerie-trainer who is trying to make a happy family out of a wombat,
a porcupine, and two small Scotch terriers because they are all very
nice and he likes them all and he can't quite remember at the moment
just where he got hold of any of them. This evening he has been making
an omelet of youngest. K. Ricky French, the youngest Harvard playwright
to learn the tricks of C43, a Boston exquisite, impeccably correct from
his club tie to the small gold animal on his watch-chain, is almost
coming to blows with Slade Wilson, the youngest San Francisco cartoonist
to be tempted East by a big paper and still so new to New York that no
matter where he tries to take the subway, he always finds himself buried
under Times Square, over a question as to whether La Perouse or Foyot's
has the best _hors-d'oeuvres_ in Paris.

The conflict is taking place across Johnny's knees, both of which are
being used for emphasis by the disputants till he is nearly mashed like
a sandwich-filling between two argumentative slices of bread, but he
is quite content. Peter Piper, the youngest rare-book collector in the
country, who, if left to himself, would have gravitated naturally toward
French and a devastating conversation in monosyllables on the pretty
failings of prominent débutantes, is gradually warming Clark Stovall,
the youngest star of the Provincetown Players out of a prickly silence,
employed in supercilious blinks at all the large pictures of celebrated
Harlequins by discreet, intelligent questions as to the probable future
of Eugene O'Neill.

Stovall has just about decided to throw Greenwich Village omniscience
overboard and admit privately to himself that people like Peter can
be both human and interesting even if they do live in the East Sixties
instead of Macdougal Alley when a page comes in discreetly for Johnny
Chipman. Johnny rises like an agitated blond robin who has just spied
the very two worms he was keeping room for to top off breakfast. “Well”
 he says to the world at large. “They're only fifteen minutes late apiece
this time.”

He darts out into the hall and reappears in a moment, a worm on either
side. Both worms will fit in easily with the youthful assortment already
gathered--neither can be more than twenty-five.

Oliver Crowe is nearly six feet, vividly dark, a little stooping,
dressed like anybody else in the Yale Club from hair parted in the
middle to low heavyish brown shoes, though the punctured patterns on
the latter are a year or so out of date. There is very little that is
remarkable about his appearance except the round, rather large head that
shows writer or pugilist indifferently, brilliant eyes, black as black
warm marble under heavy tortoise-shell glasses and a mouth that is not
weak in the least but somehow burdened by a pressure upon it like a
pressure of wings, the pressure of that kind of dream which will not
release the flesh it inhabits always and agonizes often until it is
given perfect body and so does not release it until such flesh has
ceased. At present he is not the youngest anything, except, according
to himself 'the youngest failure in advertising,' but a book of nakedly
youthful love-poetry, which in gloomy moments he wishes had never been
written, although the _San Francisco Warbler_ called it as 'tensely
vital as the Shropshire Lad,' brought him several column reviews and
very nearly forty dollars in cash at twenty-one and since then many
people of his own age and one or two editors have considered him “worth
watching.”

Ted Billett is dark too, but it is a ruddy darkness with high clear
color of skin. He could pass anywhere as a College Senior and though his
clothes seem to have been put on anyhow with no regard for pressing
or tailoring they will always raise a doubt in the minds of the
uninstructed as to whether it is not the higher carelessness that has
dictated them rather than ordinary poverty--a doubt that, in many cases,
has proved innocently fortunate for Ted. His hands are a curious mixture
of square executive ability and imaginative sensitiveness and his
surface manners have often been described as 'too snotty' by delicate
souls toward whom Ted was entirely unconscious of having acted with
anything but the most disinterested politeness. On the other hand a
certain even-tempered recklessness and capacity for putting himself
in the other fellow's place made him one of the few popularly lenient
officers to be obeyed with discipline in his outfit during the war. As
regards anything Arty or Crafty his attitude is merely appreciative--he
is finishing up his last year of law at Columbia.

Johnny introduces Oliver and Ted to everybody but Peter--the three were
classmates--shepherds his flock with a few disarmingly personal insults
to prevent stiffness closing down again over the four that have already
got to talking at the arrival of the two newcomers, and marshals them
out to the terrace where they are to have dinner. Without seeming
to try, he seats them so that Ted, Peter and Oliver will not form an
offensive-defensive alliance against the three who are strangers to them
by retailing New Haven anecdotes to each other for the puzzlement of
the rest and starts the ball rolling with a neat provocative attack on
romanticism in general and Cabell in particular.




II

“Johnny's strong for realism, aren't you, Johnny?”

“Well, yes, Ted, I am. I think 'Main Street' and 'Three Soldiers' are
two of the best things that ever happened to America. You can say it's
propaganda--maybe it is, but at any rate it's real. Honestly, I've
gotten so tired, we all have, of all this stuff about the small Middle
Western Town being the backbone of the country--”

“Backbone? Last vertebra!”

“As for 'Main Street,' it's--”

“It's the hardest book to read through without fallin' asleep where you
sit, though, that I've struck since the time I had to repeat Geology.”
 Peter smiles. “But, there, Johnny, I guess I'm the bone-head part of the
readin' public--”

“That's why you're just the kind of person that ought to read books like
that, Peter. The reading public in general likes candy laxatives, I'll
admit--Old Nest stuff--but you--”

“'Nobody else will ever have to write the description of a small Middle
Western Town'” quotes Oliver, discontentedly. “Well, who ever wanted to
write the description of a small Middle Western Town?” and from Ricky
French, selecting his words like flowers for a _boutonniere_.

“The trouble with 'Main Street' is not that it isn't the truth but that
it isn't nearly the whole truth. Now Sherwood Anderson--”

“Tennyson. Who _was_ Tennyson? He died young.”

“Well, if _that_ is Clara Stratton's idea of how to play a woman who
did.”

The two sentences seem to come from no one and arrive nowhere. They are
batted out of the conversation like toy balloons.

“Bunny Andrews sailed for Paris Thursday,” says Ted Billett longingly.
“Two years at the Beaux Arts,” and for an instant the splintering of
lances stops, like the hush in a tournament when the marshal throws down
the warder, at the shine of that single word.

“All the same, New York is the best place to be right now if you're
going to do anything big,” says Johnny uncomfortably, too much as if he
felt he just had to believe in it, but the rest are silent, seeing the
Seine wind under its bridges, cool as satin, grey-blue with evening,
or the sawdust of a restaurant near the quais where one can eat
Rabelaisiantly for six francs with wine and talk about anything at all
without having to pose or explain or be defensive, or the chimneypots of
La Cité branch-black against winter sky that is pallor of crimson when
the smell of roast chestnuts drifts idly as a student along Boulevard
St. Germain, or none of these, or all, but for each one nostalgic aspect
of the city where good Americans go when they die and bad ones while
they live--to Montmartre.

“New York _is_ twice as romantic, really,” says Johnny firmly.

“If you can't get out of it,” adds Oliver with a twisted grin.

Ted Billett turns to Ricky French as if each had no other friend in the
world.

“You were over, weren't you?” he says, a little diffidently, but his
voice is that of Rachel weeping for her children.

“Well, there was a little café on the Rue Bonaparte--I suppose you
wouldn't know--”




III

The party has adjourned to Stovall's dog-kennel-sized apartment on
West Eleventh Street with oranges and ice, Peter Piper having suddenly
remembered a little place he knows where what gin is to be bought is
neither diluted Croton water nor hell-fire. The long drinks gather
pleasantly on the table, are consumed by all but Johnny, gather again.
The talk grows more fluid, franker.

“Phil Sellaby?---oh, the great Phil's just had a child--I mean his wife
has, but Phil's been having a book all winter and it's hard not to get
'em mixed up. Know the girl he married?”

“Ran Waldo had a necking acquaintance with her at one time or another,
I believe. But now she's turned serious, I hear--_tres serieuse--tres
bonne femme_--”

“I bet his book'll be a cuckoo, then. Trouble with women. Can't do any
art and be married if you're in love with your wife. Instink--instinct
of creation--same thing in both cases--use it one way, not enough
left for other--unless, of course, like Goethe, you--” “Rats! Look at
Rossetti--Browning---Augustus John--William Morris--”

_“Browning!_ Dear man, when the public knows the _truth_ about the
Brownings!”

Ricky French is getting a little drunk but it shows itself only in a
desire to make every sentence unearthly cogent with perfect words.

“Unhappy marriage--ver' good--stimula-shion,” he says, carefully but
unsteadily, “other thing--tosh!”

Peter Piper jerks a thumb in Oliver's direction.

“Oh, beg pardon! Engaged, you told me? Beg pardon--sorry--very. Writes?”

“Uh-huh. Book of poetry three years ago. Novel now he's trying to sell.”

“Oh, yes, yes, yes. Remember. 'Dancers' Holiday'--he wrote that? Good
stuff, damn good. Too bad. Feenee. Why will they get married?”

The conversation veers toward a mortuary discussion of love. Being
young, nearly all of them are anxious for, completely puzzled by and
rather afraid of it, all at the same time. They wish to draw up one
logical code to cover its every variation; they look at it, as it is at
present with the surprised displeasure of florists at a hollyhock that
will come blue when by every law of variation it should be rose. It is
only a good deal later that they will be able to give, not blasphemy
because the rules of the game are always mutually inconsistent, but
tempered thanks that there are any rules at all. Now Ricky French
especially has the air of a demonstrating anatomist over an anesthetized
body. “Observe, gentlemen--the carotid artery lies here. Now, inserting
the scalpel at this point--”

“The trouble with Art is that it doesn't pay a decent living wage unless
you're willing to commercialize--”

“The trouble with Art is that it never did, except for a few chance
lucky people--”

“The trouble with Art is women.”

“The trouble with women is Art.”

“The trouble with Art--with women, I mean--change signals! What do I
mean?”




IV

Oliver is taking Ted out to Melgrove with him over Sunday for suburban
fresh-air and swimming, so the two just manage to catch the 12.53 from
the Grand Central, in spite of Slade Wilson's invitation to talk
all night and breakfast at the Brevoort. They spend the rattling,
tunnel-like passage to 125th Street catching their breath again, a
breath that seems to strike a florid gentlemen in a dirty collar ahead
of them with an expression of permanent, sorrowful hunger. Then Ted
remarks reflectively,

“Nice gin.”

“Uh-huh. Not floor varnish anyway like most of this prohibition stuff.
What think of the people?”

“Interesting but hardly conclusive. Liked the Wilson lad. Peter, of
course, and Johnny. The French person rather young Back Bay, don't you
think?”

Oliver smiles. The two have been through Yale, some of the war and much
of the peace together, and the fact has inevitably developed a certain
quality of being able to talk to each other in shorthand.

“Well, Groton plus Harvard--it always gets a little inhuman especially
Senior year--but gin had a civilizing influence. Lucky devil!”

“Why?”

“Baker's newest discovery--yes, it does sound like a patent medicine.
Don't mean that, but he has a play on the road--sure-fire, Johnny
says--Edward Sheldon stuff--Romance--”

“The Young Harvard Romantic. An Essay Presented to the Faculty of Yale
University by Theodore Billett for the Degree of--”

“Heard anything about your novel, Oliver?”

“Going to see my pet Mammon of Unrighteousness about it in a couple of
weeks. Oh _Lord!_”

“Present--not voting.”

“Don't be cheap, Ted. If I could only make some money.”

“Everybody says that there is money in advertising,” Ted quotes
maliciously. “Where _have_ I heard that before?”

_“That's_ what anybody says about anything till they try it. Well,
there is--but not in six months for a copy-writer at Vanamee and Co.
Especially when the said copy-writer has to have enough to marry on.”
 “And will write novels when he ought to be reading, 'How I Sold
America on Ossified Oats' like a good little boy. Young people are _so_
impatient.”

“Well, good Lord, Ted, we've been engaged eight months already and we
aren't getting any furtherer--”

“Remember the copybooks, my son. The love of a pure, good woman and the
one-way pocket--that's what makes the millionaires. Besides, look at
Isaac.”

“Well, I'm no Isaac. And Nancy isn't Rebekah, praises be! But it is
an--emotional strain. On both of us.”

“Well, all you have to do is sell your serial rights. After that--pie.”

“I know. The trouble is, I can see it so plain if everything happens
right--and then--well--”

Ted is not very consoling.

“People get funny ideas about each other when they aren't close by. Even
when they're in love,” he says rather darkly; and then, for no apparent
reason, “Poor Billy. See it?”

Oliver has, unfortunately--the announcement that the engagement between
Miss Flavia Marston of Detroit and Mr. William Curting of New York has
been broken by mutual consent was an inconspicuous little paragraph in
the morning papers. “That was all--just funny ideas and being away. And
then this homebred talent came along,” Ted muses.

“Well, you're the hell of a--”

Ted suddenly jerks into consciousness of what he has been saying.

“Sorry” he says, completely apologetic, “didn't mean a word I said,
just sorry for Billy, poor guy. 'Fraid it'll break him up pretty bad
at first.” This seems to make matters rather worse and he changes
the subject abruptly. “How's Nancy?” he asks with what he hopes seems
disconnected indifference.

“Nancy? All right. Hates St. Louis, of course.”

“Should think she might, this summer. Pretty hot there, isn't it?”

“Says it's like a wet furnace. And her family's bothering her some.”

“Um, too bad.”

“Oh, _I_ don't mind. But it's rotten for her. They don't see the point
exactly--don't know that I blame them. She could be in Paris, now--that
woman was ready to put up the money. My fault.”

“Well, she seems to like things better the way they are--God knows
why, my antic friend! If it were _my_ question between you and a year
studying abroad! Not that you haven't your own subtle attractions,
Ollie.” Ted has hoped to irritate Oliver into argument by the closing
remark, but the latter only accepts it with militant gloom.

“Yes, I've done her out of that, too,” he says abysmally, “as well as
sticking her in St. Louis while I stay here and can't even drag down
enough money to support her--”

“Oh, Ollie, snap out of it! That's only being dramatic. You know
darn well you will darn soon. I'll be saying 'bless you, my children,
increase and multiply,' inside a month if your novel goes through.”

“If! Oh well. Oh hell. I think I've wept on your shoulder long enough
for tonight, Ted. Tell me your end of it--things breaking all right?”

Ted's face sets into lines that seem curiously foreign and aged for the
smooth surface.

“Well--you know my trouble,” he brings out at last with some difficulty.
“You ought to, anyhow--we've talked each other over too much when we
were both rather planko for you not to. I'm getting along, I think. The
work--_ca marche assez bien_. And the restlessness--can be stood. That's
about all there is to say.”

Both are completely serious now.

“Bon. Very glad,” says Oliver in a low voice.

“I can stand it. I was awful afraid I couldn't when I first got back.
And law interests me, really, though I've lost three years because of
the war. And I'm working like a pious little devil with a new assortment
of damned and when you haven't any money you can't go on parties in New
York unless you raise gravy riding to a fine art. Only sometimes--well,
you know how it is--”

Oliver nods.

“I'll be sitting there, at night especially, in that little tin Tophet
of a room on Madison Avenue, working. I _can_ work, if I do say it
myself--I'm hoping to get through with school in January, now. But it
gets pretty lonely, sometimes when there's nobody to run into that you
can really talk to--the people I used to play with in College are out
of New York for the summer--even Peter's down at Southampton most of the
time or out at Star Bay--you're in Melgrove--Sam Woodward's married and
working in Chicago--Brick Turner's in New Mexico--I've dropped out of
the Wall Street bunch in the class that hang out at the Yale Club--I'm
posted there anyhow, and besides they've all made money and I haven't,
and all they want to talk about is puts and calls. And then you remember
things.

“The time my pilot and I blew into Paris when we thought we were hitting
somewhere around Nancy till we saw that blessed Eiffel Tower poking out
of the fog. And the Hotel de Turenne on Rue Vavin and getting up in the
morning and going out for a café cognac breakfast, and everything being
amiable and pleasant, and kidding along all the dear little ladies that
sat on the _terrasse_ when they dropped in to talk over last evening's
affairs. I suppose I'm a sensualist--”

“Everybody is.” from Oliver.

“Well, that's another thing. Women. And love. Ollie, my son, you don't
know how very damn lucky you are!”

“I think I do, rather,” says Oliver, a little stiffly.

“You don't. Because I'd give everything I have for what you've got and
all you can do is worry about whether you'll get married in six months
or eight.”

“I'm worrying about whether I'll ever get married at all,” from Oliver,
rebelliously.

“True enough, which is where I'm glowingly sympathetic for you, though
you may not notice it. But you're one of the few people I know--officers
at least--who came out of the war without stepping all through their
American home ideas of morality like a clown through a fake glass
window. And I'm--Freuded--if I see how or why you did.”

“Don't myself--unless you call it pure accident” says Oliver, frankly.
“Well, that's it--women. Don't think I'm in love but the other thing
pulls pretty strong. And I want to get married all right, but what girls
I know and like best are in Peter's crowd and most of them own their
own Rolls Royces--and I won't be earning even a starvation wage for two,
inside of three or four years, I suppose. And as you can't get away
from seeing and talking to women unless you go and live in a cave--well,
about once every two weeks or oftener I'd like to chuck every lawbook I
have out of the window on the head of the nearest cop--go across again
and get some sort of a worthless job--I speak good enough French to do
it if I wanted--and go to hell like a gentleman without having to worry
about it any longer. And I won't do that because I'm through with it and
the other thing is worth while. So there you are.”

“So you don't think you're in love--eh Monsieur Billett?” Oliver puts
irritatingly careful quotation marks around the verb. Ted twists a
little.

“It all seems so blamed impossible,” he says cryptically.

“Oh, I wouldn't call Elinor Piper _that_ exactly.” Oliver grins. “Even
if she is Peter's sister. Old Peter. She's a nice girl.”

“_A nice girl?_” Ted begins rather violently. “She's--why she's--” then
pauses, seeing the trap.

“Oh very well--that's all I wanted to know.”

“Oh don't look so much like a little tin Talleyrand, Ollie! I'm _not_
sure--and that's rather more than I'd even hint to anybody else.”

“Thanks, little darling.” But Ted has been stung too suddenly, even by
Oliver's light touch on something which he thought was a complete and
mortuary secret, to be in a mood for sarcasm.

“Oh, well, you might as well know. I suppose you do.”

“All I know is that you seem to have been visiting--Peter--a good deal
this summer.”

“Well, it started with Peter.”

“It does so often.”

“Oh Lord, now I've _got_ to tell you. Not that there's
anything--definite--to tell.” He pauses, looking at his hands.

“Well, I've just been telling you how I feel--sometimes. And other
times--being with Elinor--she's been so--kind. But I don't know, Ollie,
honestly I don't, and that's that.”

“You see,” he begins again, “the other thing--Oh, _Lord_, it's so
tangled up! But it's just this. It sounds--funny--probably--coming from
me--and after France and all that--but I'm not going to--pretend
to myself I'm in love with a girl--just because I may--want to get
married--the way lots of people do. I can't. And I couldn't with a girl
like Elinor anyway--she's too fine.”

“She is rather fine,” says Oliver appreciatively. “Selective
reticence--all that.”

“Well, don't you see? And a couple of times--I've been nearly sure. And
then something comes and I'm not again--not the way I want to be. And
then--Oh, if I were, it wouldn't be much--use--you know--”

“Why not?”

“Well, consider our relative positions--”

“Consider your grandmother's cat! She's a girl--you're a man. She's a
lady--you're certainly a gentleman--though that sounds like Jane Austen.
And--”

“And she's--well, she isn't the wealthiest young lady in the country,
but the Pipers _are_ rich, though they never go and splurge around
about it. And I'm living on scholarships and borrowed money from the
family--and even after I really start working I probably won't make
enough to live on for two or three years at least. And you can't ask a
girl like that--”

“Oh, Ted, this is the twentieth century! I'm not telling you to hang up
your hat and live on your wife's private income--” “That's fortunate,”
 from Ted, rather stubbornly and with a set jaw.

“But there's no reason on earth--if you both really loved each other and
wanted to get married--why you couldn't let her pay her share for
the first few years. You know darn well you're going to make money
sometime--”

“Well--yes.”

“Well, then. And Elinor's sporting. She isn't the kind that needs six
butlers to live--she doesn't live that way now. That's just pride, Ted,
thinking that--and a rather bum variety of pride when you come down to
it. I hate these people who moan around and won't be happy unless they
can do everything themselves--they're generally the kind that give their
wives a charge account at Lucile's and ten dollars a year pocket money
and go into blue fits whenever poor spouse runs fifty cents over her
allowance.”

Ted pauses, considering. Finally,

“No, Ollie--I don't think I'm quite that kind of a fool. And almost thou
convincest me--and all that. But--well--that isn't the chief difficulty,
after all.”

“Well, what _is_?” from Oliver, annoyedly.

Ted hesitates, speaking slowly.

“Well--after the fact that I'm not sure--France,” he says at last, and
his mouth shuts after the word as if it never wanted to open again.

Oliver spreads both hands out hopelessly.

“Are you _never_ going to get over that, you ass?”

“You didn't do the things I did,” from Ted, rather difficultly. “If you
had--”

“If I had I'd have been as sorry as you are, probably, that I'd knocked
over the apple cart occasionally. But I wouldn't spend the rest of
my life worrying about it and thinking I wasn't fit to go into decent
society because of what happened to most of the A.E.F. Why you sound as
if you'd committed the unpardonable sin. And it's nonsense.”

“Well--thinking of Elinor--I'm not too darn sure I didn't,” from Ted,
dejectedly.

“That comes of being born in New England and that's all there is to it.
Anyhow, it's over now, isn't it?”

“Not exactly--it comes back.”

“Well, kick it every time it does.”

“But you don't understand. That and--people like Elinor--” says Ted
hopelessly.

“I do understand.”

“You don't.” And this time Ted's face has the look of a burned man.

“Well--” says Oliver, frankly puzzled. “Well, that's it. Oh, it doesn't
matter. But if there was another war--”

“Oh, leave us poor people that are trying to write a couple of years
before you dump us into heroes' graves by the Yang tse Kiang!”

“Another war--and bang! into the aviation.” Ted muses, his face gone
thin with tensity. “It could last as long as it liked for me, providing
I got through before it did; you'd be living anyhow, living and
somebody, and somebody who didn't give a plaintive hoot how things
broke.”

He sighs, and his face smooths back a little.

“Well, Lord, I've no real reason to kick, I suppose,” he ends. “There
are dozens of 'em like me--dozens and hundreds and thousands all over
the shop. We had danger and all the physical pleasures and as much money
as we wanted and the sense of command--all through the war. And then
they come along and say 'it's all off, girls,' and you go back and
settle down and play you've just come out of College in peace-times
and maybe by the time you're forty you'll have a wife and an income if
another scrap doesn't come along. And then when we find it isn't as easy
to readjust as they think, they yammer around pop-eyed and say 'Oh, what
wild young people--what naughty little wasters! They won't settle down
and play Puss-in-the-corner at all--and, oh dear, oh dear, how they
drink and smoke and curse 'n everything!'”

“I'm awful afraid they might be right as to what's the trouble with us,
though,” says Oliver, didactically. “We _are_ young, you know.”

“Melgrove!” the conductor howls, sleepily. “Melgrove! Melgrove!”




V

The Crowe house was both small and inconveniently situated--it was
twenty full minutes walk from the station and though a little box of a
garage had been one of the “all modern conveniences” so fervidly painted
in the real estate agent's advertisement, the Crowes had no car. It was
the last house on Undercliff Road that had any pretense to sparse grass
and a stubbly hedge--beyond it were sand-dunes, delusively ornamented by
the signs of streets that as yet only existed in the brain of the owner
of the “development,” and, a quarter of a mile away, the long blue
streak of the Sound.

Oliver's key clicked in the lock--this was fortunately one of the
times when four-year-old Jane Ellen, who went about after sunset in a
continual, piteous fear of “black men wif masks,” had omitted to put
the chain on the door before being carried mutinously to bed. Oliver
switched on the hall light and picked up a letter and a folded note from
the card tray.

“Ted, Ollie and Dickie will share that little bijou, the sleeping porch,
unless Ted prefers the third-story bathtub,” the note read. “Breakfast
at convenience for those that can get it themselves--otherwise at nine.
And DON'T wake Dickie up.

“MOTHER.”


Oliver passed it to Ted, who read it, grinned, and saluted, nearly
knocking over the hatrack.

“For _God's_ sake!” said Oliver in a piercing whisper, “Jane Ellen will
think that's Indians!”

Both listened frantically for a moment, holding their breath. But there
was no sound from upstairs except an occasional soft rumbling. Oliver
had often wondered what would happen if the whole sleeping family
chanced to breathe in and out in unison some unlucky night. He could
see the papery walls blown apart like scraps of cardboard--Aunt Elsie
falling, falling with her bed from her little bird-house under the
eaves, giving vent to one deaf, terrified “Hey--what's that?” as she
sank like Lucifer cast from Heaven inexorably down into the laundry
stove, her little tight, white curls standing up on end....

Ted had removed his shoes and was making for the stairs with the
exaggerated caution of a burglar in a film.

“'Night!” called Oliver softly.

“G' night! Where's my bed--next the wall? Good--then I won't step
on Dickie. And if you fall over me when you come in, I'll bay like a
bloodhound!”

“I'll look out. Be up in a minute myself. Going to write a letter.”

“So I'd already deduced, Craig Kennedy, my friend. Well, give her my
love!”

He smiled like a bad little boy and disappeared round the corner. A
stair creaked--they were the kind of stairs that always creaked like old
women's bones, when you tried to go up them quietly. There was the
sound of something soft stubbing against something hard and a muffled
“_Sonofa--_”

“What's matter?”

“Oh, nothing. Blame near broke my toe on Jane Ellen's doll's porcelain
head. 'S all right. 'Night.”

“'Night.” Then in an admonitory sotto-voce, “Remember, if you wake
Dickie, you've got to tell him stories till he goes to sleep again, or
he'll wake up everybody else!”

“If he wakes, I'll garotte him. 'Night.”

“'Night.”




VI


Oliver paused for a few minutes, waiting for the crash that would
proclaim that Ted had stumbled over something and waked Dickie beyond
redemption. But there was nothing but a soft gurgling of water from the
bathroom and then, after a while, a slight but definite addition to
the distant beehive noises of sleep in the house. He smiled, moved
cautiously into the dining room, sat down at the small sharp-cornered
desk where all the family correspondence was carried on and from which
at least one of the family a day received a grievous blow in the side
while attempting to get around it; lit the shaded light above it and sat
down to read his letter.

It was all Nancy, that letter, from the address, firm and straight as
any promise she ever gave, but graceful as the curl of a vine-stem,
gracile as her hands, with little unsuspected curlicues of humor and
fancy making the stiff “t's” bend and twisting the tails of the “e's,”
 to the little scrunched-up “Love, Nancy” at the end, as if she had
squeezed it there to make it look unimportant, knowing perfectly that it
was the one really important thing in the letter to him. Both would take
it so and be thankful without greediness or a longing for sentimental
“x's,” with a sense that the thing so given must be very rich in little
like a jewel, and always newly rediscovered with a shiver of pure wonder
and thanking, or neither could have borne to have it written so small.

It was Nancy just as some of her clothes were Nancy, soft clear blues
and first appleblossom pinks, the colors of a hardy garden that has
no need for the phoenix-colors of the poppy, because it has passed the
boy's necessity for talking at the top of its voice in scarlet and
can hold in one shaped fastidious petal, faint-flushed with a single
trembling of one serene living dye, all the colors the wise mind knows
and the soul released into its ecstasy has taken for its body invisible,
its body of delight most spotless, as lightning takes bright body of
rapture and agony from the light clear pallor that softens a sky to
night.

Oliver read the letter over twice--it was with a satisfaction like that
when body and brain are fed at once, invisibly, by the same lustre of
force, that he put it away. One part of it, though, left him humanly
troubled enough.

“Miss Winters, the old incubus, came around and was soppy to mother as
usual yesterday--the same old business--I might be studying in Paris,
now, instead of teaching drawing to stupid little girls, if I hadn't
'formed' what she will call 'that unfortunate attachment.' Not that I
minded, really, though I was angry enough to bite her when she gave
a long undertaker's list of Penniless Authors' Brides. But it worries
mother--and that worries me--and I wish she wouldn't. Forgive me,
Ollie--and then that Richardson complex of mother's came up again--”

“Waiting hurts, naturally,--and I'm the person who used to wonder about
girls making such a fuss about how soon they got married--but, then,
Ollie, of course, I never really wanted to get married before myself
and somehow that seems to make a difference. But that's the way things
go--and the only thing I wish is that I was the only person to be hurt.
We will, sooner or later, and it will be all the better for our not
having grabbed at once--at least that's what all the old people with no
emotions left are always so anxious to tell you. But they talk about
it as if anybody under thirty-five who wanted to get married was acting
like a three-year-old stealing jam--and that's annoying. And anyhow, it
wouldn't be bad, if I weren't so silly, I suppose--”

“Waiting hurts, naturally,” and that casual sentence made him chilly
afraid. For to be in love, though it may force the lover to actions of
impossible courage does not make him in the least courageous of himself,
but only drives him by the one large fear of losing this love like a
soldier pricked from behind by a bayonet over the bodies of smaller
fears, or like a thief who has stolen treasure, and, hearing the cry
at his heels, scales a twenty foot wall with the agile gestures of a
madman. All the old-wives' and young men's club stories of everything
from broken engagements to the Generic and Proven Unfaithfulness of the
Female Sex brushed like dirty cobwebs for an instant across his mind.
They tightened about it like silk threads--a snaky web--and for one
scared instant he had a sense of being smothered in dusty feathers,
whispering together and saying, “When you're a little older and a great
deal wiser. When you've come to my age and know that all girls are
the same. When you realize that long engagements seldom mean marriage.
When--”

He put the cobwebs aside with a strain of will, for he was very tired in
body, and settled himself to write to Nancy. It was not the cobwebs that
hurt. The only thing that mattered was that she had been hurt on his
account--was being hurt now on his account--would be hurt, and still and
always on his account, not because he wanted to hurt her but because
it was not within his power, but Life's, to hurt her in that respect or
not.

“Oh, felicitous Nancy!” the pen began to scratch. “Your letter--”

Stupid to be so tired when he was writing to Nancy. Stupid not to find
the right things to say at once when you wanted to say them so much. He
dropped the pen an instant, sat back, and tried to evoke Nancy before
him like a small, clear picture seen in a lens, tried to form with his
will the lifeless air in front of him till it began to take on
some semblance and body of her that would be better than the tired
remembrances of the mind.

Often, and especially when he had thought about her intensely for a
long time, the picture would not come at all or come with tantalizing
incompleteness, apparently because he wanted it to be whole so much--all
he could see would be a wraith of Nancy, wooden as a formal photograph,
with none of her silences or mockeries about her till he felt like a
painter who has somehow let the devil into his paintbox so that each
stroke he makes goes a little fatally out of true from the vision in
his mind till the canvas is only a crazy-quilt of reds and yellows. Now,
perhaps, though, she might come, even though he was tired. He pressed
the back of a hand against his eyes. She was coming to him now. He
remembered one of their walks together--a walk they had taken some eight
months ago, when they had been only three days engaged. Up Fifth Avenue;
Forty-second Street, Forty-third, Forty-fourth, the crosstown glitter
of lights, the reflected glow of Broadway, spraying the sky with dim
gold-dust, begins to die a little behind them. Past pompous expensive
windows full of the things that Oliver and Nancy will buy when Oliver's
novel has gone into its first fifty thousand, content with the mere
touch of each other's hands, they are so sure of each other now. Past
people, dozens of people, getting fewer and fewer as Forty-sixth Street
comes, Forty-seventh, Forty-eighth, always a little arrogantly because
none of the automatic figures they pass have ever eaten friendly bread
together or had fire that can burn over them like clear salt water or
the knowledge that the only thing worth having in life is the hurt
and gladness of that fire. Buses pass like big squares of honeycomb on
wheels, crowded with pale, tired bees--the stars march slowly from the
western slope to their light viewless pinnacle in the center of the
heavens, walking brightly like strong men in silvered armor--the stars
and the buses, the buses and the stars, either and both of as little and
much account--it would not really surprise either Oliver or Nancy if
the next green bus that passes should start climbing into the sky like a
clumsy bird.

The first intoxication is still upon them--they have told nobody except
anyone who ever sees them together--they walk tactfully and never too
close, both having a horror of publicly amatory couples, but like the
king's daughter--or was it Solomon's Temple?--they are all glorious
within. Fifty-fifth, Fifty-sixth, Fifty-seventh--the square in front of
the Plaza--that tall chopped bulky tower lit from within like a model
in a toyshop window--motors purring up to its door like thin dark cats,
motors purring away. The fountain with the little statue--the pool a
cool dark stone cracked with the gold of the lights upon it, and near
the trees of the Park, half-hidden, gold Sherman, riding, riding,
Victory striding ahead of him with a golden palm.

Ahead of them too goes Victory, over fear, over doubt, over littleness,
her gold shoes ring like the noise of a sparkling sword, her steps are
swift. They stand for an instant, hands locked, looking back at the
long roller-coaster swoop of the Avenue, listening to the roll of tired
wheels, the faint horns, the loud horns. They know each other now--their
hands grip tighter--in the wandering instant the whole background of
streets and tall buildings passes like breath from a mirror--for the
instant without breath or clamor, they exist together, one being, and
the being has neither flesh to use the senses too clumsily, nor human
thoughts to rust at the will, but lives with the strength of a thunder
and the heedlessness of a wave in a wide and bright eternity of the
unspoken.

“All the same,” says Nancy, when the moment passes, lifting a shoe with
the concern of a kitten that has just discovered a thorn in its paw,
“New York pavements are certainly _hard_ on loving feet.”




VII

So the picture came. And other pictures like it. And since the living
that had made them was past for a little they were both fainter and in
a measure brighter with more elfin colors than even that living had been
which had made them glow at first. White memory had taken them into her
long house of silence where everything is cool with the silver of Spring
rain on leaves, she had washed from them the human pettiness, the human
separateness, the human insufficiency to express the best that must come
in any mortal relationship that lasts longer than the hour. They
were not better in memory than they had been when lived, for the best
remembrance makes only brilliant ghosts, but they were in their dim
measure nearer the soul's perfection, for the tricks of the sounding
board of the mind and the feckless instrument of the body had been put
away. “We've had infinites already--infinites,” thought Oliver, and
didn't care about the ludicrous ineptness of the words. He smiled,
turning back to the unwritten letter. If they hadn't had infinites
already--he supposed they wouldn't want more so badly right now. He
smiled, but this time without humor. It had all seemed so easy at first.

Nancy had been in Paris at fourteen before “business reverses” of the
kind that mild, capable-looking men like Mr. Ellicott seem to attract,
as a gingerbread man draws wasps, when they are about fifty, had reduced
him to a position as chief bookkeeper and taken Nancy out of her
first year in Farmington. Oliver had spent nine months on a graduate
scholarship in Paris and Provence in 1919. Both had friends there and
argued long playful hours planning just what sort of a magnificently
cheap apartment on the _Rive Gauche_ they would have when they went
back.

For they were going back--they had been brilliantly sure of it--Oliver
had only to finish his novel that was so much better already than any
novel Nancy had ever read--sell a number of copies of it that seemed
absurdly small in proportion to the population of America--and then they
could live where they pleased and Oliver could compose Great Works
and Nancy get ahead with her very real and delicate talent for etching
instead of having to do fashion-drawings of slinky simperers in Lucile
dresses or appetite-arousing paintings of great cans of tomato soup.
But that had been eight months ago. Vanamee and Company's--the neat
vice-president talking to Oliver--“a young hustler has every chance in
the world of getting ahead here, Mr. Crowe. You speak French? Well,
we have been thinking for some time of establishing branch-offices in
Europe.” The chance of a stop-gap job in St. Louis for Nancy, where she
could be with her family for a while--she really ought to be with them a
couple of months at least, if she and Oliver were to be married so soon.
The hopeful parting in the Grand Central--“But, Nancy, you're sure you
wouldn't mind going across second-class?”

“Why Ollie, dear, how silly! Why, what would it matter?” “All right,
then, and remember, I'll wire _just_ as soon as things really start to
break--”

And then for eight months, nothing at all but letters and letters,
except two times, once in New York, once in St. Louis, when both had
spent painful savings because they simply had to see each other again,
since even the best letters were only doll-house food you could look
at and wish you could eat--and both had tried so hard to make each
disappearing minute perfect before they had to catch trains again that
the effort left them tired as jugglers who have been balancing too
many plates and edgy at each other for no cause in the world except the
unfairness that they could only have each other now for so short a time.
And the people, the vast unescapable horde of the dull-but-nice or
the merely dull who saw in their meetings nothing either particularly
spectacular or pitiful or worth applause.

And always after the parting, a little crippled doubt tapping its
crutches along the alleys of either mind. “Do I _really?_ Because if I
do, how can I be so tired sometimes with her, with him? And why can't I
say more and do more and be more when he, when she? And everybody says.
And they're older than we are--mightn't it be true? And--” And then,
remorsefully, the next day, all doubt burnt out by the clear hurt of
absence. “Oh how could I! When it is real--when it is like that--when it
is the only thing worth while in the world!”

But absence and meetings of this sort told on them inescapably, and both
being, unfortunately, of a rather high-strung intelligence and youth,
recognized it, no matter how much consciousness might deny it, and
wondered sometimes, rather pitiably, why they couldn't be always at one
temperature, like lovers in poetry, and why either should ever worry
or hurt the other when they loved. Any middle-aged person could and
did tell them that they were now really learning something about
love--omitting the small fact that Pain, though he comes with the
highest literary recommendations is really not the wisest teacher of
all in such matters--all of which helped the constant nervous and
psychological strain on both as little as a Latin exorcism would help
a fever. For the very reason that they wished to be true in their love,
they said things in their letters that a spoken word or a gesture would
have explained in an instant but that no printed alphabet could; and
so they often hurt each other while meaning and trying to help all they
could.

Not quite as easy as it had seemed at first--oh, not on your life not,
thought Oliver, rousing out of a gloomy muse. And then there was the
writing he wanted to do--and Nancy's etching--“our damn careers” they
had called them--but those _were_ the things they did best--and neither
had had even tolerable working conditions recently--

Well, sufficient to the day was the evil thereof--that was one of those
safe Bible-texts you seemed to find more and more use for the older you
grew. Bible-texts. It was lucky tomorrow was Sunday when slaves of the
alarm-clock had peace. Oliver straightened his shoulders unconsciously
and turned back to the blank paper. He did love Nancy. He did love
Nancy. That was all that counted.

  “Oh, felicitous Nancy!
  Your letter was--”




VIII

The water was a broken glass of blue, sunstruck waves--there were few
swimmers in it where the two friends went in next morning, for the beach
proper with its bath-houses and float was nearly a quarter of a mile
down. Oliver could see Margaret's red cap bobbing twenty yards out as he
tried the water cautiously with curling toes, and, much farther out, a
blue cap and the flash of an arm going suddenly under. Mrs. Severance,
the friend Louise had brought out for the week-end, he supposed; she
swam remarkably for a woman. He swam well enough himself and couldn't
give her two yards in the hundred. Ted stood beside him, both tingling a
little at the fresh of the salt air. “Wow!” and they plunged.

A mock race followed for twenty yards--then Oliver curved off to duck
Margaret, already screaming and paddling at his approach, while Ted kept
on.

He swam face deep, catching short breaths under the crook of his arm,
burying himself in the live blue running sparkle, every muscle stretched
as if he were trying to rub all the staleness that can come to the mind
and the restless pricklings that will always worry the body clean from
him, like a snake's cast skin, against the wet rough hands of the water.
There--it was working--the flesh was compact and separate no longer--he
felt it dissolve into the salt push of spray--become one with that long
blue body of wave that stretched fluently radiant for miles and miles
till it too was no more identity but only sea, receiving the sun,
without thought, without limbs, without pain. He sprinted with the last
breath he had in him to annihilation in that light lustrous firmament.
Then his flung-out hand struck something firm and smooth. With the
momentary twinge of a jarred toe, he stopped in the middle of a stroke,
grabbed at the firm thing unthinkingly, felt it slip away from him, trod
water and came up gasping.

“Oh, I'm _horribly_ sorry!” Gurgle and choke at water gone the wrong
way. “Honestly--what a dumb-bell trick! but I didn't see you at _all_
and with the whole Sound to swim in I thought I was safe--”

He rubbed the water out of his eyes. A woman in a blue cap. Pretty,
too--not one of the pretty kind that look like drenched paper-dolls in
swimming.

“Don't apologize--it's all my fault, really. I should have heard you
coming, I suppose, but I was floating and my ears were under water--and
this cap! You did scare me a little, though; I didn't know there was
anyone else in miles--”

She smiled frankly. Ted got another look at her and decided that pretty
was hardly right. Beautiful, perhaps, but you couldn't tell with her
hair that way under her cap.

“You're Mr. Billett, aren't you? Louise said last night that her brother
was bringing a friend over Sunday. She also said that she'd introduce
us--but we seem to have done that.”

“Rather. Introduction by drowning. The latest cleverness in Newport
circles--see 'Mode.' And you're Mrs. Severance.”

“Yes. Nice water.”

“Perfect.”

A third look--a fairly long one--left Ted still puzzled. Age--thirty?
thirty-five? Swims perfectly. On “Mode.” Wide eyes, sea-blue,
sea-changing. An odd nose that succeeded in being beautiful in spite of
itself. A rather full small mouth, not loose with sense nor rigid with
things controlled, but a mouth that would suck like a bee at the last
and tiniest drop of any physical sweet which the chin and the eyes had
once decided to want. The eyes measure, the mouth asks, the cleft chin
finds the way. A face neither content, nor easily to be contented--in
repose it is neither happy nor unhappy but only matured. Louise's
friend--that was funny--Louise had such an ideal simplicity of mind.
Well--

“If you float--after a while you don't know quite where you're
floating,” said Mrs. Severance's voice detachedly.

Ted made no answer but turned over, spreading out his arms. For a few
moments they lay like corpses on the blue swelling round of the water
looking straight through infinite distance into the thin faint vapor of
the sky.

“Yes, I see what you mean.”

“We might be clouds, almost, mightn't we?” with a slow following note of
laughter.

Ted looked deeper into the sky, half-closing his eyelids. It seemed
to take his body from him completely, to leave him nothing but a naked
soothed consciousness, rising and falling, a petal on a swinging bough,
in the heart of blue quietude like the quiet of an open place in a
forest empty with evening.

“Clouds,” said Mrs. Severance's voice, turning the word to a sound
breathed lightly through the curled and husky gold of a forest-horn.

Through the midst of his sea-drowsiness a queer thought came to
Ted. This had happened before, in sleep perhaps, in a book he had
read--Oliver's novel, possibly, he thought and smiled. Lying alone on
a roof of blue water, and yet not lying alone, for there was that slow
warm voice that talked from time to time and came into the mind on
tiptoe like the creeping of soft-shoed, hasteless, fire. You stretched
your hands to the fire and let it warm you and soon your whole body was
warm and pleased and alive. That was when you were alive past measure,
when all of you had been made warm as a cat fed after being hungry,
and the cat arose from its warmth and went walking on velvet paws,
stretching sleek legs, sleek body, slowly and exquisitely under the
firelight, heavy with warmth, but ready at the instant signal of the
small burning thing in its mind to turn like a black butterfly and dance
a slow seeking dance with the shadows of the fire that flickered like
leaves in light wind, desirable, impalpable and wavering, never to be
quite torn down from the wall and eaten and so possessed. But there was
an odd thirsty satisfaction in trying to tear the shadows.

Fantastic. He had not been so fantastic for a long time.

“And tomorrow there's 'Mode.' And fashion-plates. _And_ Greenwich
Villagers,” said the voice of Mrs. Severance. He made some reply
impatiently, disliking the sound of his own voice--hers fitted with the
dream. When had he been this before?

The Morte d'Arthur--the two with a sword between.

He sank deeper, deeper, into the glow of that imagined firelight--the
flame was cooler than water to walk through--that time he had almost
taken a turning shadow into his hand. The sword between--only here there
was no sword. If he reached out his hand he knew just how the hand that
he touched would feel, cool and firm, like that flame. Cool and silent.

There must have been something, somewhere, to make him remember....

He remembered.

A minute later Oliver had splashed up to them, shouting “A rescue! A
rescue! Guests Drown While Host Looks On Smilingly! What's the matter,
Ted, you look as if you wanted to turn into a submarine? Got cramp?”




IX

Mrs. Crowe relaxed a little for the first tired minute of her day.
Sunday dinner was nearly over, and though, in one way, the best meal in
the week for her because all her children were sure to be at home,
it was apt to be pure purgatory on a hot day, with Sheba dawdling and
grumbling and Rosalind spilling pea-soup on her Sunday dress, and
Aunt Elsie's deafness increased by the weather to the point of mild
imbecility.

She had been a little afraid today, especially with two guests and the
grandchildren rampant after church, and the extra leaf in the table that
squeezed Colonel Crowe almost into the sideboard and herself nearly out
of the window and made the serving of a meal a series of passings of
over-hot plates from hand to hand, exposed to the piracies of Jane
Ellen. But it had gone off better than she could have hoped. Colonel
Crowe had not absent-mindedly begun to serve vegetables with a teaspoon,
Aunt Elsie had not dissolved in tears and tottered away from the table
at some imagined rudeness of Dickie's, and Jane Ellen had not once had a
chance to take off her drawers.

“Ice tea!” said the avid voice of Jane Ellen in her ear. “Ice tea!”

Mrs. Crowe filled the glass and submitted a request for “please”
 mechanically. She wondered, rather idly, if she would spend her time in
purgatory serving millions of Jane Ellens with iced tea.

“Ahem!” That was Colonel Crowe. “But you should have known us in the
days of our greatness, Mrs. Severance. When I was king of Estancia--”

“I'd rather have you like this, Colonel Crowe, really. I've always
wanted big families and never had one to live in--”

“Heard from Nancy recently, Oliver?” from Margaret, slightly satiric.

“Why yes, Margie, now and then. Not as often as you've heard from Stu
Winthrop probably but--”

“Motha, can I have some suga on my booberrish? Motha, can I have some
suga on my booberrish? Motha--_peesh!_”

“Oh, hush a minute, Rosalind dear. I don't know, Oliver. I'll speak
to Mr. Field about it if you like. I should think they'd take little
sketches like a couple of those Nancy showed you--though they aren't
quite smart-alecky enough for 'Mode'--” “Grandfather, Grandfather! How
old would you be if you were as old as Methusaleh? Are you older than he
is? _Grandfather!_”

Entrance and exit of a worried Sheba with the empty dish of blueberries,
marred only by Jane Ellen's sudden cries of “Stop thief!”

Mrs. Crowe tried to think a little ahead. Tomorrow. Ice. Butter.
Laundry. Oliver's breakfast early again. Louise--poor Louise--two years
and a half since Clifford Lychgate died. How curious life was; how
curious and careless and inconsecutive. The thought of how much she
hoped Oliver's novel would succeed and the question as to whether the
Thebes grocer who delivered by motor-truck would be cheaper than the
similar Melgrove bandit in the long run mixed uneasily in her mind.

Rosalind had seemed droopy that morning--more green crab-apples
probably. Aunt Elsie's gout. Oliver's marriage--she had been so relieved
about Nancy ever since she had met her, though it had been hard to
reconcile domestic virtues with Nancy's bobbed hair. She would make
Oliver happy, though, and that was the main thing. She was really
sweet--a sweet girl. Long engagements. Too bad, too bad. Something
_must_ be done about the stair carpet, the children were tearing it to
pieces. “Ice tea! Ice tea!”

“No, Jane Ellen.”

“Yash.”

“No, darling.”

“Peesh yash?”

“No. Now be a good little girl and run out and play quietly, not right
in the middle of the broiling sun.”

“And so Lizzie said, 'Very well, but if I do take that medicine my death
will be wholly on your responsibility!'” with a sense of climax.

“But I really would like to, Mrs. Severance, if you can ever spare the
time.”

Ted and Louise's friend seemed to be getting along very well. That was
nice--so often Oliver's friends and Louise's didn't. It seemed odd that
Mrs. Severance should be working on “Mode”--surely a girl of her obvious
looks and intelligence left with no children to support--some nice
man--A lady, too, by her voice, though there was a trifle of something--

She only hoped Mrs. Severance didn't think them all too crowded
and noisy. It was a little hard on the three children to have such
an--intimate--home when they brought friends.

“I think we'd better have coffee out on the porch, don't you?” That
meant argument with Sheba later but an hour's cool and talk without
having to shout across the dear little children was worth the argument.

Everybody got up, Ted being rather gallant to Mrs. Severance. Oliver
looked worried today, worried and tired. She hoped it wasn't about Nancy
and the engagement. What a miserable thing money was to make so much
difference.

“Mrs. Severance--”

“Mr. Billett--”

Louise's friend was certainly attractive. That wonderful red-gold
hair--“setter color” her sister had always called it of her own. She
must write her sister. Mrs. Severance--an odd name. She rather wished,
though, that her face wouldn't turn faintly hard like that sometimes.

“No, Dickie. No chocolate unless your mother says you can have it. No,
Rosalind, if mother says not, you _certainly_ cannot go over and play at
the Rogers',--they have a paralytic grandmother who is very nervous.”

Well, that was over. And now, for a few brief instants there would be
quiet and a chance to relax and really see something of Oliver. Mrs.
Crowe started moving slowly towards the door. Ted and Mrs. Severance
blocked the way, talking rather intimately, she thought, for people who
had only known each other a few hours; but then that was the modern way.
Then Ted saw her and seemed to wake up with a jump from whatever mild
dream possessed him, and Mrs. Severance turned toward her.

“It's so _comfortable_ being out here, always,” she said very naturally
and kindly, but Mrs. Crowe did not reply at once to the pretty speech.
Instead she flushed deeply and bent over something small and white on
the chair with the dictionary in it that had been next to hers. Jane
Ellen had finally succeeded in taking off her drawers.




X

Ted and Oliver were down at the beach at Southampton two Sundays
later--week-end guests of Peter Piper--the three had been classmates
at Yale and the friendship had not lapsed like so many because Peter
happened to be rich and Ted and Oliver poor. And then there was always
Elinor, Peter's sister--Ted seemed, to Oliver's amused vision, at least,
to be looking at Elinor with the hungry eyes of a man seeing a delicate,
longed-for dream made flesh just at present instead of a girl he had
known since she first put up her hair. How nice that would be if it
happened, thought Oliver, match-makingly--how very nice indeed! Best
thing in the world for Ted--and Elinor too--if Ted would only get away
from his curiously Puritan idea that a few minor lapses from New England
morality in France constituted the unpardonable sin, at least as far as
marrying a nice girl was concerned. He stretched back lazily, digging
elbows into the warm sand.

The day had really been too hot for anything more vigorous than “just
lying around in the sun like those funny kinds of lizards,” as Peter put
it, and besides, he and Oliver had an offensive-defensive alliance of
The Country's Tiredest Young Business Men and insisted that their only
function in life was to be gently and graciously amused. And certainly
the spectacle about them was one to provide amusement in the extreme for
even the most mildly satiric mind.

It was the beach's most crowded hour and the short strip of sand in
front of the most fashionable and uncomfortable place to bathe on Long
Island was gay as a patch of exhibition sweet-peas with every shade
of vivid or delicate color. It was a triumph of women--the whole
glittering, moving bouquet of stripes and patterns and tints that
wandered slowly from one striped parasol-mushroom to the next--the
men, in their bathing suits or white flannels seemed as unimportant if
necessary furniture as slaves in an Eastern court. The women dominated,
from the jingle of the bags in the hands of the dowagers and the faint,
protesting creak of their corsets as they picked their way as delicately
as fat, gorgeous macaws across the sand, to the sound of their
daughters' voices, musical as a pigeon-loft, as they chattered
catchwords at each other and their partners, or occasionally, very
occasionally, dipped in for a three-minute swim. Moreover, and
supremely, it was a triumph of ritual, and such ritual as reminded
Oliver a little of the curious, unanimous and apparently meaningless
movements of a colony of penguins, for the entire assemblage had arrived
around, twelve o'clock and by a quarter past one not one of them would
be left. That was law as unwritten and unbreakable as that law which
governs the migratory habits of wild geese. And within that little more
than an hour possibly one-third of them would go as far as wetting
their hands in the water--all the rest had come for the single reason of
seeing and being seen. It was all extremely American and, on the whole,
rather superb, Oliver thought as he and Peter moved over nearer to the
parasol that sheltered Elinor and Ted.

“I wish it was Egypt,” said Peter languidly. “Any more peppermints left,
El? No--well, Ted never could restrain himself when it came to food. I
wish it was Egypt,” he repeated, making Elinor's left foot a pillow for
his head.

“Well, it's hot enough,” from Oliver, dozingly. “Ah--oo--it's _hot_!”

“I know, but just think,” Peter chuckled. “Clothes,” he explained
cryptically, “Mrs. Willamette in a Cleopatra nightie--what sport! And
besides, I should make a magnificent Egyptian. Magnificent.” He yawned
immensely. “In the first place, of course, I should paint myself a
brilliant orange--”

The Egyptians. An odd wonder rose in Ted--a wonder as to whether one
of those stripped and hook-nosed slaves of the bondage before Moses had
ever happened to stand up for a moment to wipe the sweat out of his eyes
before he bent again to his task of making bricks without straw and seen
a princess of the Egyptians carried along past the quarries.

“Tell us a story, El,” from Oliver in the voice of one who is
sleep-walking. “A nice quiet story--the Three Bears or Giant the Jack
Killer--oh heaven, I _must_ be asleep--but you know, anything like
that--”

“You really want a story?” Elinor's voice was reticently mocking. “A
story for good little boys?”

“Oh, _yes!_” from Peter, his clasped hands stretched toward her in
an attitude of absurd supplication. “All in nice little words of one
syllable or we won't understand.”

“Well, once there were three little girls named Elsie, Lacie and Tillie
and they lived in the bottom of a well.”



[ILLUSTRATION: “WELL, ONCE THERE WERE THREE LITTLE GIRLS”] “What _kind_
of a well?” Oliver had caught the cue at once.

“A treacle well--”

       *       *       *       *       *

She went on with the Dormouse's Tale, but Ted, for once, hardly heard
her--his mind was too busy with its odd, Egyptological dream.

The princess who looked like Elinor. Her slaves would come first--a fat
bawling eunuch, all one black glisten like new patent-leather, striking
with a silver rod to clear dogs and crocodiles and Israelites out of the
way. Then the litter--and a flash between curtains blown aside for an
instant--and Hook Nose gazing and gazing--all the fine fighting curses
of David on the infidel, that he had muttered sourly under breath all
day, blowing away from him like sand from the face of a sphinx.

Pomp sounding in brass and cries all around the litter like the boasting
color of a trumpet--but in the litter not pomp but fineness passing.
Fineness of youth untouched, from the clear contrast of white skin and
crow-black hair to the hands that had the little stirrings of moon-moths
against the green robe. Fineness of mind that will not admit the
unescapable minor dirts of living, however much it may see them, a mind
temperate with reticence and gentleness, seeing not life itself but its
own delighted dream of it, a heart that had had few shocks as yet, and
never the ones that the heart must be mailed or masked to withstand. The
thing that passed had been continually sheltered, exquisitely guarded
from the stronger airs of life as priests might guard a lotus, and yet
it was neither tenderly unhealthy nor sumptuously weak. A lotus--that
was it--and Hook Nose stood looking at the lotus--and because it was
innocent he filled his eyes with it. And then it passed and its music
went out of the mind.

“_Ted_!”

“What? What? Oh, yeah--sorry, Elinor, I wasn't paying proper attention.”

“You mean you were asleep, you big cheese!” from Peter.

“I wasn't--just thinking,” and seeing that this only brought raucous
mirth from both Peter and Oliver, “Oh, shut up, you apes! Were you
asking me something, El?”

It was rather a change to come back from Elinor in scarab robes being
carried along in a litter to Elinor sitting beside him in a bathing
suit. But hardly an unpleasant change.

“I've forgotten how it goes on--the Dormouse--after 'Well in.' Do you
remember?”

“Nope. Look it up when we get back. And anyhow--” “What?”

“Game called for to-day. The Lirrups have started looking
important--that means it's about ten minutes of, they always leave on
the dot. Well--” and Peter rose, scattering sand. “We must obey our
social calendar, my prominent young friends--just think how awful it
would be if we were the last to go. Race you half-way to the float and
back, Ted.”

“You're on,” and the next few minutes were splashingly athletic.

Going back to the bath-house, though, Ted laughed at himself rather
whimsically. That extraordinary day-dream of the slave and the
Elinor Princess! It helped sometimes, to make pictures of the very
impossible--even of things as impossible as that. If Elinor had only
been older before the war came along and changed so much.

He saw another little mental photograph, the kind of photograph, he
mused, that sleekly shabby Frenchmen slip from under views of the
Vendome Column and Napoleon's Tomb when they are trying to sell tourists
picture post-cards outside the Café de la Paix. Judged by American
standards the work would be called rather frank. It was all
interior--the interior of a room in a Montmartre hotel--and there were
two people in it to help out the composition--and the face of one seemed
somehow to be rather deathly familiar--

That, and Elinor. Why, Hook Nose could “reform” all the rest of his
life in accordance with the highest dictionary standards--and still he
wouldn't be fit to look at his princess, even from inside a cage.

Also, if you happened to be of a certain analytic temperament you could
see what was happening to yourself all the while quite plainly--oh, much
too plainly!--and yet that seemed to make very little difference in its
going on happening. There was Mrs. Severance, for instance. He had been
seeing quite a good deal of Mrs. Severance lately.

“Oh, Ted!” from Peter next door. “Snap it up, old keed, or we'll all of
us be late for lunch.”

They had just sat down to lunch and Peter was complaining that
the whipped cream on the soup made him feel as if he were eating
cotton-batting, when a servant materialized noiselessly beside Oliver's
chair.

“Telephone for you, Mr. Crowe. Western Union calling.”

Oliver jumped up with suspicious alacrity. “Oh, love, love, love!”
 crooned Peter. “Oh, love, love, love!” Oliver flushed. “Don't swipe all
my butter, you simple cynic!” He knew what it was, of course.

“This is Oliver Crowe talking. Will you give me the telegram?”

Nancy and Oliver, finding Sunday mails of a dilatory unsatisfactoriness,
had made a compact to use the wire on that day instead. And even now
Oliver never listened to the mechanical buzz of Central's voice in his
ear without a little pulse of the heart. It seemed to bring Nancy nearer
than letters could, somehow. Nancy had an imperial contempt for boiling
down attractive sentences to the necessary ten or twenty words. This
time, though, the telegram was short.

“Mr. Oliver Crowe, care Peter Piper, Southampton,” clicked Central
dispassionately. “I hate St. Louis. I would give anything in the world
if we could only see each other for twenty-four hours. Love. Signed,
Nancy.”

And Oliver, after hanging up the receiver, went back to the dining-room
with worry barking and running around his mind like a spoiled puppy,
wondering savagely why so many rocking-chair people took a _crêpey_
pleasure in saying it was good for young people in love to have to wait.




XI

Tea for two at the Gondolier, that newest and quotation-marked
“Quaintest” of Village tea rooms. The chief points in the Gondolier's
“quaintness” seem to be that it is chopped up into as many little
partitions as a roulette wheel and that all food has to be carried up
from a cellar that imparts even to orange marmalade a faint persuasive
odor of somebody else's wash. Still, during the last eight months, the
Gondolier has been a radical bookstore devoted to bloody red pamphlets,
a batik shop full of strange limp garments ornamented with decorative
squiggles, and a Roumanian Restaurant called “The Brodska” whose menu
seemed to consist almost entirely of old fish and maraschino cherries.

The wispy little woman from Des Moines who conducts the Gondolier at
present in a series of timid continual flutters at actually leading the
life of the Bohemian untamed, and who gives all the young hungry-looking
men extra slices of toast because any one of them might be Vachel
Lindsay in disguise, will fail in another six weeks and then the
Gondolier may turn into anything from a Free Verse Tavern to a Meeting
Hall for the Friends of Slovak Freedom. But at present, the tea is much
too good for the price in spite of its inescapable laundry tang,
and there is a flat green bowl full of Japanese iris bulbs in the
window--the second of which pleases Mrs. Severance and the first Ted.

Besides like most establishments on the verge of bankruptcy, it is such
a quiet place to talk--the only other two people in it are a boy with
startled hair and an orange smock and a cigaretty girl called Tommy, and
she is far too busy telling him that that dream about wearing a necklace
of flying-fish shows a dangerous inferiority complex even to comment
caustically on strangers from uptown who _will_ intrude on the dear
Village.

“Funny stuff--dreams,” says Ted uneasily, catching at overheard phrases
for a conversational jumping-off place. His mind, always a little on
edge now with work and bad feeding, has been too busy since they came in
comparing Rose Severance with Elinor Piper, and wondering why, when one
is so like a golden-skinned August pear and the other a branch of winter
blackberries against snow just fallen, it is not as good but somehow
warmer to think of the first against your touch than the second, to
leave him wholly at ease.

“Yes--funny stuff,” Mrs. Severance's voice is musically quiet. “And
then you tell them to people who pretend to know all about what they
mean--and then--” She shrugs shoulders at the Freudian two across the
shoulder-high partition.

“But you don't believe in all this psycho-analysis tosh, do you?”

She hesitates. “A little, yes. Like the old woman and ghosts. I may not
believe in it but I'm afraid of it, rather.”

She gives him a steady look--her eyes go deep. It is not so much the
intensity of the look as its haltingness that makes warmth go over him.

“Shall we tell our dreams--the favorite ones, I mean? Play fair if we
do, remember,” she adds slowly.

“Not if you're really afraid.”

“I? But it's just because I am afraid that I really should, you know.
Like going into a dark room when you don't want to.”

“But they can't be as scary as _that_, surely.” Ted's voice is a little
false. Both are watching each other intently now--he with a puzzled
sense of lazy enveloping firelight.

“Well, shall I begin? After all this _is_ tea in the Village.”

“I should be very much interested indeed, Mrs. Severance,” says Ted
rather gravely. “Check!” “How official you sound--almost as if you had
a lot of those funny little machines all the modern doctors use and were
going to mail me off to your pet sanatorium at once because you'd asked
me what green reminded me of and I said 'cheese' instead of 'trees.'
And anyhow, I never have any startling dreams--only silly ones--much too
silly to tell--”

“Please go on.” Ted's voice has really become quite clinical.

“Oh very well. They don't count when you only have them once--just when
they keep coming back and back to you--isn't that it?”

“I believe so.”

Mrs. Severance's eyes waver a little--her mouth seeking for the proper
kind of dream.

“It's not much but it comes quite regularly--the most punctual,
old-fashioned-servant sort of a dream.

“It doesn't begin with sleep, you know--it begins with waking. At
least it's just as if I were in my own bed in my own apartment and then
gradually I started to wake. You know how you can feel that somebody
else is in the room though you can't see them--that's the feeling.
And, of course being a normal American business woman, my first idea
is--burglars. And I'm very cowardly for a minute. Then the cowardice
passes and I decide to get up and see what it is.

“It _is_ somebody else--or something--but nobody I think that I ever
really knew. And at first I don't want to walk toward it--and then I do
because it keeps pulling me in spite of myself. So I go to it--hands out
so I won't knock over things.

“And then I touch it--or him--or her--and I'm suddenly very, very happy.

“That's all.

“And now, Dr. Billett, what would you say of my case?”

Ted's eyes are glowing--in the middle of her description his heart has
begun to knock to a hidden pulse, insistent and soft as the drum of
gloved fingers on velvet. He picks words carefully.

“I should say--Mrs. Severance--that there was something you needed and
wanted and didn't have at present. And that you would probably have
it--in the end.”

She laughs a little. “Rather cryptic, isn't that, doctor? And you'd
prescribe?”

“Prescribe? 'It's an awkward matter to play with souls.'”

“'And trouble enough to save your own,'” she completes the quotation.
“Yes, that's true enough--though I'm sorry you can't even tell me to use
this twice a day in half a glass of water and that other directly after
each meal. I think I'll have to be a little more definite when it comes
to your turn--if it does come.”

“Oh it will.” But instead of beginning, he raises his eyes to her again.
This time there is a heaviness like sleep on both, a heaviness that
draws both together inaudibly and down, and down, as if they were
sinking through piled thickness on thickness of warm, sweet-scented
grass. Odd faces come into both minds and vanish as if flickered off a
film--to Rose Severance, a man narrow and flat as if he were cut out of
thin grey paper, talking, talking in a voice as dry and rattling as a
flapping windowblind of their “vacation” together and a house with
a little garden where she can sew and he can putter around,--to Ted,
Elinor Piper, the profile pure as if it were painted on water, passing
like water flowing from the earth in springs, in its haughty temperance,
its retired beauty, its murmurous quiet--other faces, some trembling
as if touched with light flames, some calm, some merely grotesque with
longing or too much pleasure--all these pass. A great nearness, fiercer
and more slumbrous than any nearness of body takes their place. It wraps
the two closer and closer, a spider spinning a soft web out of petals,
folding the two with swathes and swathes of its heavy, fragrant silk.

“Oh--mine--isn't anything,” says Ted rather unsteadily, after the
moment. “Only looking at firelight and wanting to take the coals in my
hands.”

Rose's voice is firmer than his but her mouth is still moved with
content at the thing it has desired being brought nearer.

“I really can't prescribe on as little evidence as that,” she says with
music come back to her voice in the strength of a running wave. “I can
only repeat what you told me. That there was something you needed--and
wanted”--she is mocking now--“and didn't have at present. And that you
would probably--what was it?--oh yes--have it, in the end.”

The wispy little woman has crept up to Ted's elbow with an illegible
bill. Rose has spoken slowly to give her time to get there--it is always
so much better to choose your own most effective background for really
affecting scenes.

“And now I really must be getting back,” she cuts in briskly, her
fingers playing with a hat that certainly needs no rearrangement, when
Ted, after absent-mindedly paying the bill, is starting to speak in the
voice of one still sleep-walking.

“But it _was_ delightful, Mr. Billett--I love talking about myself and
you were really very sweet to listen so nicely.” She has definitely
risen. Ted must, too. “We must do it again some time soon--I'm going to
see if there aren't any of those books with long German names drifting
around 'Mode' somewhere so that I'll be able to simply stun you with my
erudition the next time we talk over dreams.”

They are at the door now, she guiding him toward it as imperceptibly and
skillfully as if she controlled him by wireless.

“And it isn't fair of me to let you give all the parties--it
simply isn't. Couldn't you come up to dinner in my little apartment
sometime--it really isn't unconventional, especially for anyone who's
once seen my pattern of an English maid--”

Sunlight and Minetta Lane again--and whatever Ted may want to say out
of his walking trance--this is certainly no place where any of it can be
said.




XII

Oliver Crowe, at his desk in the copy-department of Vanamee and Co.'s,
has been spending most of the afternoon twiddling pencils and reading
and rereading two letters out of his pocket instead of righteously
thinking up layouts for the new United Steel Frame Pulley Campaign. He
realizes that the layouts are important--that has been brought to his
attention already by several pink memoranda from Mr. Délier, the head
of the department--but an immense distaste for all things in general and
advertising in particular has overwhelmed him all day. He looks
around the big, brightly lighted room with a stupefied sort of
loathing--advertising does not suit him--he is doing all he can at it
because of Nancy--but he simply does not seem to get the hang of the
thing even after eight months odd and he is conscious of the fact that
the Powers that be are already looking at him with distrustful eyes,
in spite of his occasional flashes of brilliance. If he could only get
_out_ of it--get into something where his particular kind of mind and
training would be useful--oh well--he grunts and turns back to his
private affairs.

The letter from Easten of Columbiac Magazines--kindly enough--but all
hope of selling the serial rights of his novel gone glimmering because
of it--Easten was the last chance, the last and the best. “If you could
see your way to making short stories out of the incidents I have named,
I should be very much interested--” but even so, two short stories
won't bring in enough to marry on, even if he can do them to Easten's
satisfaction--and the novel couldn't come out as a book now till late
spring--and Oliver has too many friends who dabble in writing to have
any more confidence in book royalties than he would have in systems for
beating the bank at roulette. Well, _that's_ over--and a year's work
with it--and all the dreams he and Nancy had of getting married at once.

Those pulley layouts have to be fixed up sometime. What can you say
about a pulley--what _can_ you say? “The United Steel Frame Pulley--Oh
Man, There's a Hog for Work!” Oliver turns the cheap phrase in his mind,
hating its shoddiness, hating the fact that such shoddiness is the only
stuff with which he can deal.

Sanely considered, he supposes he hasn't any business using up a month's
meagre savings and three small checks for poems that he has hoarded
since April in going out to St. Louis Friday. Mr. Alley wasn't too
pleased with letting him take Saturday and half Monday off to do it,
too. But then there was that telegram ten days ago. “I'd give anything
in the world if we could only see each other--” and after other letters
unsatisfactorily brief, the letter that came Monday “I have such grand
news, Ollie dear, at least it may be grand if it works out--but oh,
dear, I do want to see you about it without tangling it up in letters
that don't really explain. Can't you make it--even a few hours would be
long enough to talk it all over--and I do so want to see you and really
talk! Please wire me, if you can.”

Grand news--what kind he wondered--and dully thought that he couldn't
see her, of course, and then suddenly knew that he must. After all,
there didn't seem to be much use in saving for the sake of saving when
all the saving you could possibly do didn't bring you one real inch
nearer to what you really wanted. _Apres moi le deluge--apres ca
le deluge_--it might even come to that this time, they were both so
tired--and he viewed the prospect as a man mortally hurt might view the
gradual failing of sun and sky above him, with hopelessness complete
as a cloud in that sky, but with heart and brain too beaten now to be
surprised with either agony or fear. They must see each other--they
were neither of them quiet people who could love forever at a distance
without real hope. Great Lord, if he and Nancy could ever have one
definite basis to work on, one definite hope of money in the future no
matter how far off that was--But the present uncertainty--They couldn't
keep on like this--no two people in the world could be expected to keep
on.

Nancy. He is seeing Nancy, the way she half-lifts her head when she has
been teasing and suddenly becomes remorseful and wants him to know how
much she does love him instead.




XIII

A hot night in the Pullman---too hot to sleep in anything but a series
of uneasy drowsings and wakings. Smell of blankets and cinders and
general unwashedness--noise of clacketing wheels and a hysterical
whistle--anyhow each sweaty hour brings St. Louis and Nancy nearer.
St. _Nancy_, St. _Nancy_, St. _Nancy_, says the sleepless racket of the
wheels, but the peevish electric fan at the end of the corridor keeps
buzzing to itself like a fly caught in a trap. “And then I got married
you see--and then I got married you see--and when you get married you
aren't a free lance--you aren't a free lance--you're _settled_!”

It will have to be pretty grand news indeed that Nancy has to make up
for this last week and the buzz of the electric fan, thinks Oliver,
twisting from one side of his stuffy berth to the other like an uneasy
sardine.




XIV

“More beans, Oliver,” says Mrs. Ellicott in a voice like thin syrup,
her “generous” voice. The generous voice is used whenever Mrs. Ellicott
wants to show herself a person of incredibly scrupulous fairness before
that bodiless assemblage of old women in black that constitute the They
who Say--and so it is used to Oliver nearly all the time.

“No thank you, Mrs. Ellicott.” Oliver manages to look at her politely
enough as he speaks but then his eyes go straight back to Nancy and
stay there as if they wished to be considered permanent attachments.
All Oliver has been able to realize for the last two hours is the mere
declarative fact that she is _there_.

“Nancy!”

“No, thanks, mother.”

And Nancy in her turn looks once swiftly at her mother, sitting there
at the end of the table like a faded grey sparrow whose feathers make it
uncomfortable. It isn't feathers, though, really--its only Oliver.
Why can't mother get reconciled to Oliver--why _can't_ she--and if
she can't, why doesn't she come out and say so instead of trying to be
generous to Oliver when she doesn't want to while he's there and then
saying mean things when he's away because she can't help it?

“Stanley?”

“Why, no, my dear--no--yes, a few, perhaps--I might reconsider--only a
few, my dear,”--his voice does not do anything as definite as cease--it
merely becomes ineffectual as Mrs. Ellicott heaps his plate. He then
looks at the beans as if he hadn't the slightest idea where they came
from but supposes as long as they are there they must be got away with
somehow, and starts putting them into his mouth as mechanically as if
they were pennies and he a slot-machine.

It is hot in the Ellicotts' dining-room--the butter was only brought
in a little while ago, but already it is yellow mush. There are little
drops on the backs of Mr. Ellicott's hands. Oliver wants to help Nancy
take away the dishes and bring in the fruit--they have started to make a
game out of it already when Mrs. Ellicott's voice enforces order.

“No, Oliver. No, please. Please sit still. It is so seldom we have a
_guest_ that Nancy and I are apt to forget our _manners_--”

Oliver looks to Nancy for guidance, receives it and subsides into his
chair. That's just the trouble, he thinks rather peevishly--if only
Mrs. Ellicott would stop acting as if he were a guest--and not exactly
a guest by choice at that but one who must be the more scrupulously
entertained in public, the less he is liked in private.

The fruit. Mrs. Ellicott apologizing for it--her voice implies that she
is quite sure Oliver doesn't think it good enough for him but that
he ought to feel himself very lucky indeed that it isn't his deserts
instead. Mr. Ellicott absent-mindedly squirting orange juice up his
sleeve. Oliver and Nancy looking at each other.

“Are you the same?” say both kinds of eyes, intent, absorbed with the
wish that has been starved small through the last three months, but now
grows again like a smoke-tree out of a magicked jar, “Really the same
and really loving me and really glad to be here?” But they can get no
proper sort of answer now--there are too many other Ellicotts around,
especially Mrs. Ellicott.

Dinner is over with coffee and cigarettes that Mrs. Ellicott has bought
for Oliver because no one shall ever say she failed in the smallest
punctilio of hospitality, though she offers them to him with a gesture
like that of a missionary returning his baked-mud idol to a Bushman too
far gone in sin to reclaim. Mr. Ellicott smoked cigarettes before his
marriage. For twenty years now he has been a contributing member of the
Anti-Tobacco League.

And now all that Oliver knows is that unless he can talk to Nancy soon
and alone, he will start being very rude. It is not that he wants to be
rude--especially to Nancy's family--but the impulse to get everyone but
Nancy away by any means from sarcasm to homicidal mania is as reasonless
and strong as the wish to be born. After all he and Nancy have not seen
each other wakingly for three months--and there is still her “grand
news” to tell, the grandness of which has seemed to grow more and more
dubious the longer she looked at Oliver. Now is the time for Mr. and
Mrs. Ellicott to disappear as casually and completely as clouds over the
edge of the sky and first of all, not to mention the fact that they are
going. But Mrs. Ellicott has far too much tact ever to be understanding.

She puts Mr. Ellicott's hat on for him and takes his arm as firmly as
if she were police, and he accepts the grasp with the meekness of an
old offender who is not quite sure what particular crime he is being
arrested for this time but has an uncomfortable knowledge that it may be
any one of a dozen.

“Now we old people are going to leave you, children alone for a little
while” she announces, fair to the last, her voice sweeter than ever.
“We know you have such a great many important _affairs_ to talk
over--particularly the _splendid_ offer that has just come to Nancy--my
little girl hasn't told you about it yet, has she, Oliver?'

“No, Mrs. Ellicott.”

“Well, her father and myself consider it quite _remarkable_ and we have
been _urging_--very _strongly_--her acceptance, though of course” this
with a glacé smile, “we realize that we are only her _parents_. And,
as Nancy knows, it has always been our dearest wish to have her decide
matters affecting her happiness entirely _herself_. But I feel sure that
when both of you have talked it _well_ over, we can trust you both to
come to a most _reasonable_ decision.” She breathes heavily and moves
with her appurtenance to the door, secure as an ostrich in the
belief that Oliver thinks her impartial, even affectionate. Her
conscientiousness gives her a good deal of applause for leaving the two
young people so soon when they have all one evening and another morning
to be together--but subconsciously she knows that she has done her best
by her recent little speech to make this talking-it-over a walk through
a field full of small pestilent burrs, for both Oliver and Nancy.
They say _au revoir_ very politely--all four--the door shuts on Mr.
Ellicott's meek back.

Mrs. Ellicott is not very happy, going downstairs. She knows what has
undoubtedly happened the moment the door was shut--and a little twinge
of something very like the taste of sour grapes goes through her as she
thinks of those two young people so reprehensibly glad at being even for
the moment in each other's arms.




XV

An hour later and still the grand news hasn't been told. In fact very
little that Mrs. Ellicott would regard as either sensible or reasonable
has happened at all. Though they do not know it the conversation has
been oddly like that of two dried desert-travellers who have suddenly
come upon water and for quite a while afterwards find it hard to think
of anything else. But finally:

“Dearest, dearest, what was the grand news?” says Oliver half-drowsily.
“We must talk it over, dear, I suppose, I guess, oh, we must--oh, but
you're so sweet--” and he relapses again into speechlessness.

They are close together, he and she now. Their lips meet--and meet--with
a sweet touch--with a long pressure--children being good to each
other--cloud mingling with gleaming cloud.

“Ollie dear.” Nancy's voice comes from somewhere as far away and still
as if she were talking out of a star. “Stop kissing me. I can't think
when you kiss me, I can only feel you be close. If you want to hear
about that news, that is,” she adds, her lips hardly moving.

All that Oliver wants to do is to hold her and be quiet--to make out of
the stuffy room, the nervous rushing of noise under the window, the air
exhausted with heat, a place in some measure peaceful, in some measure
retired, where they can lie under lucent peace for a moment as shells
lie in clear water and not be worried about anything any more. But
again, the time they are to have is too short--Oliver really must be
back Monday afternoon--already he is unpleasantly conscious of the
time-table part of his mind talking trains at him. He takes his arms
from around Nancy--she sits up rubbing her eyes with the back of her
hand as if to take the dream that was so glittering in them away now she
and Oliver have to talk business-affairs.

“Oh, my _hair_--lucky it's bobbed, that's all--I'd have lost all the
hairpins I ever had in it by now--Well, Ollie--”

Her hand goes over to his uneasily, takes hold. For a moment the dream
comes back and she forgets entirely what she was going to say.

“Oh _dear_!”

“Nancy, Nancy, Nancy!”

But she will be firm about their talking. “No, we mustn't really, we
mustn't, or I can't tell you anything at all. Well, it's this.

“I didn't tell you about it at all--didn't even imagine it would come
to anything. But that old geology specimen Mrs. Winters knows the
art-editor of “The Bazaar” and she happened to say so once when she was
here being gloomy with mother, so I wormed a letter out of her to her
friend about me. And I sent some things in and the poor man seemed to be
interested--at least he said he wanted to see more--and then we started
having a real correspondence. Until finally--it was that Friday because
I wrote you the letter right away--he goes and sends me a letter saying
to come on to New York--that I can have a regular job with them if I
want to, and if they like my stuff well enough, after a couple of months
they'll send me to Paris to do fashions over there and pay me a salary I
can more than live on and everything!”

Nancy cannot help ending with a good deal of triumph, though there is
anxiety behind the triumph as well. But to Oliver it seems as if the
floor had come apart under his feet.

When he has failed so ludicrously and completely, Nancy has succeeded
and succeeded beyond even his own ideas of success. She can go to Paris
and have all they ever planned together, now; it has all bent down to
her like an apple on a swinging bough, all hers to take, from lunch at
Prunier's and sunset over the river to that perfect little apartment
they know every window of by heart--and he is no nearer it than he was
eight months ago. He has felt the pride in her voice and knows it as
most human and justified, but because he is young and unreasonable
that pride of hers hurts his own. And then there is something else. All
through what she was saying it was “I” that said, not “we.”

“That's fine, Nancy,” he says uncertainly. “That's certainly fine!”

But she knows by his voice in a second.

“Oh, Ollie, Ollie, of course I won't take it if it makes you feel that
way, dear. Why, I wouldn't do anything that would hurt you--but Ollie I
don't see how this can, how this could change things any way at all. I
only thought it would bring things nearer--both of us getting jobs and
my having a Paris one and--”

Her voice might be anything else in the world, but it is not wholly
convinced. And its being sure beyond bounds is the only thing that could
possibly help Oliver. He puts his hands on her shoulders.

“I couldn't do anything but tell you to take it, dearest, could I? When
it's such a real chance?” He is hoping with illogical but none the less
painful desperation that she will deny him. But she nods instead.

“Well then, Nancy dear, listen. If you take it, we've got to face
things, haven't we?”

She nods a little rebelliously.

“But why is it so _serious_, Ollie?” and again her voice is not true.

“You know. Because I've failed--God knows when I'll make enough money
for us to get married now--with the novel gone bust and everything.
And I haven't any right to keep you like this when I'm not sure of ever
being able to marry you--and when you've got a job like this and can
go right ahead on the things you've always been crazy to do. Nancy, you
_want_ to take it--even if it meant our not getting married for another
year and your being away--don't you, don't you? Oh, Nancy, you've _got_
to tell me--it'll only bust everything we've had already if you don't!”

And now they have come to a point of misunderstanding that only a trust
as unreasonable as belief in immortality will help. But that trust could
never be bothered with the truth of what it was saying at the
moment--it would have to reach into something deeper than any transitory
feeling--and they have an unlucky tradition of always trying to tell
each other what is exactly true. And so Nancy nods because she has to,
though she couldn't bear to put what that means into words.

“Well, you take it. And I'm awful sorry we couldn't make it go, dear.
I tried as hard as I could to make it go but I guess I didn't have the
stuff, that's all.”

He has risen now and his face seems curiously twisted--twisted as if
something hot and hurtful had passed over it and left it so that it
would always look that way. He can hardly bear to look at Nancy, but she
has risen and started talking hurriedly--fright, amazement, concern and
a queer little touch of relief all mixing in her voice.

“But Ollie, if you can't _trust_ me about something as little as that.”

“It isn't that,” he says beatenly and she knows it isn't. And knowing,
her voice becomes suddenly frightened--the fright of a child who has let
something as fragile and precious as a vessel of golden glass slip out
of her hands.

“But, Ollie dear! But, Ollie, I never meant it that way. But Ollie, I
love you!”

He takes her in his arms again and they kiss long. This time though
there is no peace in the kiss, only the lost passion of bodies tired
beyond speech. “Do you love me, Nancy?”

Again she has to decide--and the truth that will not matter for more
than the hour wins. Besides, he has hurt her.

“Oh, Ollie, Ollie, yes, but--”

“You're not sure any more?”

“It's different.”

“It's not being certain?”

“Not the way it was at first--but, Ollie, we're neither of us the
same--”

“Then you _aren't_ sure?”

“I can't--I haven't--oh, Ollie, I don't know, I don't know!”

“That means you know.”

Again the kiss but this time their lips only hurt against each
other--Oliver feels for a ghastly instant as if he were kissing Nancy
after she had died. It seems to him that everything in him has made
itself into a question as discordant and unanswered as the tearing cry
of a puppy baying the moon, struck out of his senses by that swimming
round silver above him, ineffably lustrous, ineffably removed, none of
it ever coming to touch him but light too pale to help at all. He is
holding a girl in his arms--he can feel her body against him--but it is
not Nancy he is holding--it never will be Nancy any more. He releases
her and starts walking up and down in a series of short, uneasy strides,
turning mechanically to keep out of the way of chairs. Words come out of
him, words he never imagined he could ever say, he thinks dizzily that
it would feel like this if he were invisibly bleeding to death--that
would come the same way in fiery spurts and pauses that tore at the
body.

“Don't you see, dear, don't you _see_? It's been eight months now and
we aren't any nearer getting married than we were at first and it isn't
honest to say we will be soon any more--I can't see any prospect--I've
failed in everything I thought would go--and we can't get married on
my job for _years_--I'm not good enough at it--and I _won't_ have you
hurt--I _won't_ have you tied to me when it only means neither of us
doing what we want and both of us getting, older and our work not done.
Oh, I love you, Nancy--if there was any hope at all I'd go down on my
knees to ask you to keep on but there isn't--they've beaten us--they've
beaten us--all the fat old people who told us we were too poor and
too young. All we do is go on like this both of us getting worked up
whenever we see each other and both of us hurting each other and nothing
happening--Oh, Nancy, I thought we could help each other always and now
we can't even [Illustration: AND THEN THE QUEER MAN HAD GONE OUT OF THE
DOOR] a little any more. You remember when we promised that if either of
us stopping loving each other we'd tell?”

Nancy is very silent and rather white.

“Yes, Ollie.”

“Well, Nancy?”

“Well--”

They look at each other as if they were watching each other burn.

“Good-by darling, darling, darling!” says Ollie through lips like a
marionette's.

Then Nancy feels him take hold of her again--the arms of somebody else
in Oliver's body--and a cold mouth hurting her cheek--and still she
cannot speak. And then the queer man who was walking up and down so
disturbingly has gone out of the door.




XVI

Oliver finds himself walking along a long street in a city. It is not a
distinguished street by any means--there are neither plate-glass shops
nor 'residences' on it--just an ordinary street of little stores and
small houses and occasionally an apartment building named for a Pullman
car. In a good many houses the lights are out already--it is nearly
eleven o'clock and this part of St. Louis goes to bed early--only the
drugstores and the moving-picture theatres are still flaringly awake.
His eyes read the sign that he passes mechanically, “Dr. Edwin K.
Buffinton--Chiropractor,” “McMurphy and Kane's,” “The Rossiter,” with
its pillars that look as if they had been molded out of marbled soap.

Thought. Memory. Pain. Pain pressing down on his eyeballs like an iron
thumb, twisting wires around his forehead tighter and tighter till it's
funny the people he passes don't see the patterns they make on his skin.

Somebody talking in his mind, quite steadily and flatly, repeating and
repeating itself like a piece of cheap music played over and over
again on a scratched phonograph record, talking in the voice that is
a composite of a dozen voices; a fat man comfortable on a club lounge
laying down the law as if he were carefully smearing the shine out
of something brilliant with a flaccid heavy finger; a thin sour woman
telling children playing together “don't, don't, don't,” in the whine of
a nasty nurse.

“All for the best, you know--all for the best, we're all of us sure of
that. Love doesn't last--doesn't last--doesn't last--as good fish in
the sea as ever were caught out of it--nobody's heart could break at
twenty-five. You think you're happy and proud--you think you're lovers
and friends--but that doesn't last, doesn't last, doesn't last--none of
it lasts at all.”

If he only weren't so _tired_ he could do something. But instead he
feels only as a man feels who has been drinking all day in the instant
before complete intoxication--his body is as distinct from him as if
it were walking behind him with his shadow--all the colors he sees seem
exaggeratedly dull or brilliant, he has little sense of distance, the
next street corner may be a block or a mile away, it is all the same,
his feet will take him there, his feet that keep going mechanically,
one after the other, one after the other, as if they marched to a clock.
There is no feeling in him that stays long enough to be called by any
definite word--there is only a streaming parade of sensations like blind
men running through mist, shapes that come out of fog and sink back to
it, without sight, without number, without name, with only continual
hurry of feet to tell of their presence.

A slinky man comes up at his elbow and starts to talk out of the side of
his mouth.

“Say, mister--”

“Oh, _go_ to hell!” and the man fades away again, without even looking
startled, to mutter “Well, you needn' be so damn peeved about
it--I'll say you needn' be so damn peeved--whatcha think you are,
anyhow--Marathon Mike?” as Oliver's feet take Oliver swiftly away from
him.

Nancy. The first time he ever kissed her when it was question and answer
with neither of them sure. And then getting surer and surer--and then
when they kissed. Never touching Nancy, never. Never seeing her again
never any more. That song the Glee Club used to harmonize over--what was
it?

  We won't go there any more,
  We won't go there any more
  We won't go there any mo-o-ore----

He lifts his eyes for a moment. A large blue policeman is looking at him
fixedly from the other side of the street, his nightstick twirling in a
very prepared sort of way. For an instant Oliver sees himself going over
and asking that policeman for his helmet to play with. That would be the
cream of the jest--the very cream--to end the evening in combat with a
large blue policeman after having all you wanted in life break under you
suddenly like new ice.

He had been walking for a very long time. He ought to go to bed. He
had a hotel somewhere if he could only think where. The policeman might
know.

The policeman saw a young man with staring eyes coming toward him,
remarked “hophead” internally and played with his nightstick a little
more. The nearer Oliver came the larger and more unsympathetic the
policeman seemed to him. Still, if you couldn't remember what your hotel
was yourself it was only sensible to ask guidance on the question. His
mind reacted suddenly toward grotesqueness. One had to be very polite
to large policemen. The politeness should, naturally, increase as the
square of the policeman.

“I wonder if you could tell me where my hotel is, officer?” Oliver
began. “What hotel?” said the policeman uninterestedly. Oliver noticed
with an inane distinctness that he had started to swirl his nightstick
as a large blue cat might switch its tail. He wondered if it would be
tactful to ask him if he had ever been a drum major. Then he realized
that the policeman had asked him a question--courtesy demanded a prompt
response.

“What?” said Oliver.

“I said 'What hotel?'” The policeman was beginning to be annoyed.

Oliver started to think of his hotel. It was imbecile not to remember
the name of your own hotel--even when your own particular material and
immaterial cosmos had been telescoped like a toy train in the last three
hours. The Rossiter was all that he could think of.

“The Rossiter,” he said firmly.

“No hotel Rossiter in _this_ town.” The policeman's nightstick was
getting more and more irritated. “Rossiter's a lotta flats. You live
there?”

“No. I live in a hotel.”

“Well, what hotel?”

“Oh, I tell you I don't remember,” said Oliver vaguely. “A big one with
a lot of electric lights.”

The policeman's face became suddenly very red.

“Well, you move on, buddy!” he said in a tone of hoarse displeasure.
“You move right on! You don't come around me with any of your funny
cracks--I know whatsa matter with you, all right, all right. I know
whatsa matter with you.”

“So do I.” Oliver was smiling a little now, the whole scene was so
arabesque. “I want to go to my hotel.”

“You move on. You move on _quick_!” said the policeman vastly. “It's a
long walk down to the hoosegow and _I_ don't want to take you there.”

“I don't want to go there,” said Oliver. “But my hotel--”

“_Quit arguin'”_! said the policeman in a bark like a teased bulldog.

Oliver turned and walked two steps away. Then he turned again. After all
why not? The important part of his life was over anyhow--and before the
rest of it finished he might be able to tell one large policeman just
what he thought of him.

“Why, you big blue boob,” he began abruptly with a sense of pleasant
refreshment better than drink, “You great heaving purple ice wagon--”
 and then he was stopped abruptly for the policeman was taking the
necessary breath away.




XVII

About which time Nancy had finished crying--raging at herself all the
time, she hated to cry so--and was sitting up straight on the couch
looking at the door which Oliver had shut as if by looking it very hard
indeed she could make it turn into Oliver.

It _couldn't_ end this way. If it did it just meant that all the
last year wasn't real--hadn't any more part in reality than charity
theatricals. And they'd both of them been so sure that it was the chief
reality that they had ever known.

He wasn't _reasonable_. She hadn't wanted the darned old job, she'd
wanted to marry him, but as long as they hadn't seemed to get very far
in the last eight months when he'd been trying to work it--why couldn't
_she_ try----

Then 'Oh Nancy, be honest!' to herself. No, that wasn't true.
She'd wanted the job, wanted to get it, hadn't thought about Oliver
particularly when she'd tried for it except to be a little impatient
with him for not using more judgment when he picked out his job. Did
that mean that she didn't love him? Oh Lord, it was all so mixed up.

Starting out so clearly at first and everything being so perfect--and
then the last four months and both getting tireder and tireder and all
the useless little misunderstandings that made you wonder how could you
if you really cared. And now this.

For an instant of mere relief from strain Nancy saw herself in Paris,
studying as she had always wanted to study, doing some real work, all
Paris hers to play with like a big gray stone toy, never having to worry
about loving, about being loved, about people you loved. Being free.
Like taking off your hot, hot clothes and lying in water when you were
too hot and tired even to think of sleeping. Oliver too--she'd leave him
free--he'd really work better without her--without having her to take
care of and make money for and worry about always----

The mind turned the other way. But what would doing anything be like
with Oliver out of it when doing things together had been all that
mattered all the last year?

They couldn't decide things like this on a prickly hot August night when
both of them were nearly dead with fatigue. It wasn't _real_. Even after
Oliver had shut the door she'd been sure he'd come back, though she
hoped he wouldn't just while she was crying; she never had been,
she thought viciously, one of those happy people who look like
rain-goddesses when they cry.

He must come back. She shut her eyes and told him to as hard as she
could. But he didn't.

All very well to be proud and dignified when both of you lived near each
other. But Oliver was going back to New York tomorrow--and if he went
back while they were still like this--She knew his train--the ten seven.

She tried being proud in a dozen different expressive attitudes for ten
minutes or so: Then she suddenly relaxed and went over to the telephone,
smiling rather ashamedly at herself.

“Hotel Rosario?”

“Yes.”

“Can I speak to Mr. Oliver Crowe? He is staying there isn't he?”

A pause full of little jingling sounds.

“Yes, he's staying here but he hasn't come in yet this evening. Do you
wish to leave a message?”

Nancy hesitates.

“N-no.” That would be just a little too humble.

“Or the name of the party calling?” He will know, of course. Still,
had she better say? Then she remembers the need of punishing him just
a little. After all--it is hardly fair she should go all the way toward
making up when he hasn't even started.

“No--no name. But tell him somebody called, please.”

“Very well.”

And Nancy goes back to wonder if the reason Oliver hasn't gone back
to the hotel is that he is returning here in an appropriate suit of
sackcloth. She hopes he _will_ come before mother and father get back.

But even while she is hoping it, the large blue policeman is saying
something about “'Sturbance of the peace” to the desk-sergeant, and
Oliver is going down on the blotter as Donald Richardson.




XVIII

“You simply must not worry yourself about it so, Nancy, my darling,”
 says Mrs. Ellicott brightly. “Lovers' quarrels are only lovers' quarrels
you know and they seem very small indeed to people a little older and
more experienced though I daresay they may loom terribly large just at
present. Why your father and myself used to have--ahem--our little times
over _trifles_, darling, mere _trifles _” and Mrs. Ellicott takes a
pinch of air between finger and thumb as if to display it as a specimen
of those mere trifles over which Mr. and Mrs. Ellicott used to become
proudly enraged at each other in the days before she had faded him so
completely.

Nancy, after a night of intensive sleeplessness broken only by dreams of
seeing Oliver being married to somebody else in the lobby of the Hotel
Rosario can only wonder rather dully when it could ever have been that
poor father was allowed enough initiative of his own to take even
the passive part in a quarrel over a trifle and why mother thinks the
prospect implied in her speech of her daughter's marriage being like
unto hers can be so comforting. Nancy made one New Year's resolution the
second day of her engagement, “If I ever find myself starting to act to
Ollie the way mother does to father I'll simply have to leave him and
never see him again.” But Mrs. Ellicott goes on.

“If Oliver is at all the sort of young man we must hope he is, he will
certainly come and apologize at once. And if he should not--well Nancy,
my little girl,” she adds hieroglyphically “there are many trials that
seem hard to bear at first which prove true blessings later when we see
of what false materials they were first composed.”

Mr. Ellicott thinks it is time for him to go to the office. It is five
minutes ahead of his usual time but Mrs. Ellicott has been looking at
him all the way through her last speech until he feels uneasily that he
must be composed of very false material indeed. He stops first though to
give an ineffective pat to Nancy's shoulder.

“Cheer up, Chick,” he says kindly. “Always sun somewhere you know, so
don't treat the poor boy too hard,” and he shuffles rapidly away before
his wife can look all the way through him for the vague heresy implicit
in his sentence.

“It is all very well for your father to say such things, but, Nancy,
darling, you shall not be put upon by Tramplers” proceeds Mrs. Ellicott
in her most cryptically perfect tones. “Oliver is a man--he must
apologize. A man, I say, though little more than a boy. And otherwise
you would now be pursuing your Art in Paris due to dear kind Mrs.
Winters who has always stood our truest friend and now this other
opportunity has come also but I would never be the first to say that
even such should not be sacrificed most gladly for the love of a true
kind husband and dear little children though marriage is but a lottery
at best and especially when affections are fixed upon their object in
early youth.”

All this without a pause, pouring over the numbed parts of Nancy's mind
like thin sweetish oil. Nancy considers wearily. Yes, Oliver should
apologize. Yes, it is only being properly dignified not to call up the
Rosario again to find if he is there. Yes, if he truly loves her, he
will call--he will come--and the clock hands are marching on toward
ten-seven and his train like stiff little soldiers and mother is
talking, talking--

“Not that I wish or have wished to influence your mind in any way, my
darling, but environment and propinquity count for mountains in such
first youthful attachments and sometimes when we are older to be looked
back upon with such regret. Nor would I ever have Words Spoken that
should seem to injure the choice of my daughter's heart--but when young
men cannot provide even Hovels for their _fiancées_ a reasonable time
having been given, it is only just that they should release them and you
looking like death all these last two months. Never wishing that my own
daughter should act in Ways dishonorable in the slightest but time is
the Test in such matters and if such tests are not to be survived it is
best they should end and no one can deny that the young man talks very
queerly and was often quite disrespectful to you though you may say that
was joking but it would not have been joking in my day and young men
with queer nervous eyes and hands I never have nor will quite trust--”

But it's Oliver that's doing this, Oliver who turned funny and white
when she cut her finger with the breadknife making sandwiches and wanted
her to put all sorts of things on it. Oliver who was always so sweet
when she was unreasonable and always the first to come looking unhappy
after they'd quarrelled even a little and say it was all his fault. Why
the very last letter she got from him was the one that said if she ever
stopped loving him he knew he'd die.

“And when things are ended it is better that such things should be
though doubtless not necessary to put an announcement in the paper yet
since God in his infinite wisdom arranges all things for the best.
And with such a splendid position opening before her it would be only
dignified to bring the young man to his senses for it would not be right
to let unreasonable young men stand in the way of advantages offered by
Foreign Travel and study and these things are soon forgotten, my dear,
and if nervous young men will not admit like gentlemen that they are in
the wrong when only engaged what kind of husbands will they make when
married forever? And is not a broken engagement better than lifelong
unhappiness when there are so many too many sinful people divorcing each
other every day and all men who write for their living use stimulants,
my dear, such is literary history and my dearest have your cry out on
mother's shoulder.”

The sweetish oil has risen about Nancy relentlessly--it is up to her
waist now and still it keeps talking and flowing and creeping higher.
Very soon when the fatter black soldier on the clock-face has only
hitched himself along a little, it will be over her head and the roving
Nancy, the sparkling Nancy, the Nancy that fell in love will be under it
like a calm body, never to rise or run or be kissed with light seeking
kisses on the soft of her throat again. There will only be a dignified
Nancy, a sensible Nancy, a Nancy going to Paris to study and be
successful, a Nancy who, sooner or later will marry “Some good, clean
man.”

A little tinkle of chimes from the clock. Six minutes more. The Nancy
that was stands on tiptoe, every eager and tameless bit of her hoping,
hoping. If mother weren't there that Nancy would have been at the
telephone an hour ago in spite of young people's pride and old people's
self-respect and all the thousand and one knife-faced fetishes that all
the correct and common-sensible people hug close and worship because
they hurt.

She can see the train sliding out of the station. Ollie is in it and
his face is stiff with surprise and unforgiveness like the face of some
horrible stranger you went up to and spoke to by mistake, thinking he
was your friend. By the time the train is well started he will have
begun talking to that fluffy girl in the other half of the Pullman--no,
that isn't worthy, he wouldn't--but oh Ollie, Ollie!

Half an hour later the telephone rings. Nancy is finishing the breakfast
dishes--her hands jump as she hears it--a slippery plate slops back into
the water and as she dives after it she realizes painfully that the new
water is much too hot.

“What _is_ it, mother?” For an instant the Nancy who has no real
self-respect is talking again.

“Just a minute, Isabella. Mrs. Winters, dear. Don't you want to speak to
her?”

“Oh.”

Then----

“Not right now. When I'm through with these. But will you ask her if
she's going to be in this afternoon--I want to tell her about my taking
the New York job.”

Satisfied oil pouring back into the telephone with a pleased, thin
chuckle.

“Yes, Nancy has decided. Well, dear, I think she had better tell you
herself--”

Nancy is looking dolefully down at her thumb. Foolish not to have cooled
off that water a little--she has really burned herself. For an instant
she hears Oliver's voice in her ears, low and concerned, sees Oliver
kissing it, making it well. But these things don't happen to sensible,
self-respecting modern girls with experienced mothers, especially when
all the former have now quite made up their own minds.




XIX

It was with some nightmare surprise that Oliver on waking regarded his
tidy cell. Then he remembered and in spite of the fact that yesterday
evening with all that belonged to it kept hurting wherever it was that
most of him lived with the stiff repeating ache of a nerve struck again
and again by the same soft hammer, he couldn't help laughing a little.
The popular college remedy for disprized love had always been an
instantaneous mingling of conflicting alcohols--calling a large
policeman a big blue boob seemed to produce the same desired result of
bringing one to one's senses by first taking one completely out of them
without the revolving stomach and fuzzed mind of the first instance. He
tried to think of yesterday evening airily. Silly children quarreling
about things that didn't matter at all. Of course Nancy should have the
job if she wanted--of course he'd apologize, apologize like Ecclesiastes
even for being alive at all if it was necessary--and then everything
would be _all_ right, just all right and fixed. But the airy attitude
somehow failed to comfort--it was a little too much like trying to
shuffle a soft-shoe clog on a new grave. Nancy _had_ been unreasonable.
Nancy _had_ said or hadn't denied that she wasn't sure she loved him any
more. He _had_ released her from the engagement and told her good-by.
He stared at the facts--they sprang up in front of him like choking
thorns--thorns he had to clear away with his hands before he could even
touch Nancy again. Was he sure--even now? All the airiness dropped from
him like a clown's false face. As he thought of what would happen if
Nancy had really meant it about not loving him, it seemed to him that
somebody had taken away the pit of his stomach and left nothing in its
place but air.

Anyhow the first thing to do was to get out of this place--he examined
the neat bars in the door approvingly and wondered how the devil you
acted when you wanted to be let out. There wasn't any way of opening
a conversation about it with no one to talk to--and the corridor was
merely a length of empty steel--and, damn it, his train left at Ten
Seven and he had to see Nancy and explain everything in the world before
it left--and if he didn't get back to New York in time he might lose his
job. There must be some way of explaining to the people in charge that
he hadn't done anything but kid a policeman--that he must get out.

He went over to the door and tried it tentatively--no inside doorknob,
of course, this wasn't a hotel. He looked through the bars--nothing but
corridor and the cell on the other side. Should he call? For an instant
the fantastic idea of crying “Waiter!” or “Please send up my breakfast!”
 tugged at him hard, but fantasy had got him into much too much trouble
as it was, he reflected savagely. It made you feel ridiculously
self-conscious, standing behind bars like this and shouting into
emptiness. Still he had to get out. He cleared his throat.

“Hey,” he remarked in a pleasant conversational tone. “Hey!”

No answer, he grew bolder.

_“Hey!”_ This time the conversational tone was italicized. A rustle of
voices somewhere rewarded him--that must be people talking. Well, if
they talked, they could listen.

“HEY!” and now his voice was emphatic enough for headline capitals.

The rustle of voices ceased. There was a moment of stupefied silence.
Then,

“SHUT UP!” came from the end of the corridor in a roar that made Oliver
feel as if he had been cooing. The roar irritated him--they might be a
little more mannerly. He clutched the bars and discovered to his pleased
surprise that they would rattle. He shook them as hard as he could like
a monkey asking for peanuts.

“Hey there! I want to get out!” and though he tried to make his voice as
impressive as possible it seemed to him to pipe like a canary's in that
long steel emptiness.

“I've got to catch a train!” he added desperately and then had to stuff
his coat sleeve into his mouth to keep from spoiling his dramatics with
most unseasonable mirth.

There were noises from the end of the corridor--the noises of strong men
at bitter war with something stronger than they, strange rumblings and
snortings and muffled whoops. Then the voice came again and this time
its words were slow and deliberately spaced so as to give it time to
master whatever rocked it between whiles.

“Say--you--_humorist_” said the voice and here it rose sharply
into an undignified squawk of laughter, “You--innercent
child--comedian--you--Charlie--Chaplin--of the--hoosegow--you
 _shut_ up--or I'll come down there and--bend--something--over--your
merry little face--_understand?_” “Yes sir,” said Oliver subduedly.

“Ah right. Now go bye-bye--mama'll call you when she's ready to take you
walking” then explosively “I got to catch a train! Oh Holy Mike!”

Oliver left the window and went back toward his bunk, considerably
chastened. As he did so a bundle of second-hand clothes on the floor
rolled over and disclosed a red and unshaven face.

“Wup!” said Oliver--he had almost stepped on it.

“Wha'?” said the bundle, opening sick eyes.

“Oh nothing. I only said good morning.”

“Wha'?”

“Good morning.”

“Wha'?”

“Good morning.”

After incredible difficulties, the bundle attained a sitting position.

“You kid'n me?” it demanded thickly, looking at Oliver with as much
surprise as if he had just grown up out of the floor like a plant.

“Oh no. No.”

“You're _nah_ kid'n me?”

“No.”

“Ah ri'. 'S countersign. Pass. Fren'.”

It attempted a military gesture but succeeded merely in hitting its
mouth with its hand. It then looked at the hand as if the latter had
done it on purpose and became sunk in profound cogitation.

“Not feeling very well today?” Oliver ventured.

It looked at him.

“_Well?_” it said briefly. Then, after a silence devoted to trying to
find where its hands were.

“Hoosh.”

“What?” said Oliver.

“_Hoosh_. Goo' hoosh. Gran' hoosh. Oh, _hoosh!_” and as if the mention
of the word had stricken it back into clothes again it slid slowly down
on its back, closed its eyes and began to snore.

Oliver, perched on his bunk for what comfort there was, sat and
considered. He looked at the bundle--the bars--the bars--the bundle. The
bundle wheezed apoplectically--no sound of footsteps came from beyond
the bars. Oliver wondered if Nancy loved him. He wondered if he would
ever catch that Ten Seven. But most of all he wondered why on earth he
had happened to get in here and how on earth he was ever going to get
out.




XX

The sky had been a blue steam all day, but at night it quieted, there
were faint airs. From the window of the apartment on Riverside Drive you
could see it grow gentle, fade from a strong heat of azure through gray
gauze into darkness, thick-soft as a sable's fur at first, then uneasily
patterned all at once with idle leopard-spottings and strokes of light.
The lights fell into the river and dissolved, the dark wash took them
and carried them into streaks of lesser, more fluid light. Even so, if
there could have been country silence for five minutes at a time, the
running river, the hills so disturbed with light beyond, might have worn
some aspect of peace. But even in the high bird's nest of the apartment
there was no real silence, only a pretending at silence, like the forced
quiet of a child told to keep still in a corner--the two people dining
together could talk in whispers, if they wanted, and still be heard,
but always at the back of the brain of either ran a thin pulsation of
mumbling sound like the buzz of a kettle-drum softly struck in a passage
of music where the orchestra talks full-voiced--the night sound of the
city, breathing and moving and saying words.

They must have been married rather contentedly for quite a while now,
they said so little of importance at dinner and yet seemed so quietly
pleased at having dinner together and so neat at understanding half
sentences without asking explanations. That would have been the first
conclusion of anybody who had been able to take out a wall and watch
their doll-house unobserved. Besides, though the short, decided man with
the greyish hair must be fifty at least, the woman who stood his own
height when she rose from the table was too slimly mature for anything
but the thirties. Not a highly original New York couple by any means--a
prospering banker or president of a Consolidated Toothpick Company with
a beautiful wife, American matron-without-children model, except for her
chin which was less dimpled than cleft with decisiveness and the wholly
original lustre of her hair, a buried lustre like the shine of “Murray's
red gold” in a Border ballad. A wife rather less society-stricken than
the run of such wives since she obviously preferred hot August in a New
York apartment with her husband's company to beach-picnics at Greenwich
or Southampton without it. Still the apartment, though compact as an
army mess-kit, was perfectly furnished and the maid who had served
the cool little dinner an efficient effacedness of the race that
housekeepers with large families and little money assert passed with the
Spanish War. Money enough, and the knowledge of how to use it without
blatancy or pinching--that would have been the second conclusion.

They were sitting in deep chairs in the living room now, a tall-stemmed
reading lamp glowing softly between them, hardly speaking. The tiredness
that had been in the man's face like the writing in a 'crossed' letter
began to leave it softly. He reached over, took the woman's hand and
held it--not closely or with greediness but with a firm clasp that had
something weary like appeal in it and something strong like a knowledge
of rest.

“Always like this, at home,” he said slowly.

“It _is_ rather sweet.” Her voice had the gentleness of water running
into water. Her eyes looked at him once and left him deliberately
but not as if they didn't care. It must have been a love-match in the
beginning then--her eyes seemed so infirm.

“You'll read a little?”

“Yes.”

“Home,” he said. He seemed queerly satisfied to say the word, queerly
moved as if even after so much reality had been lived through together,
he couldn't quite believe that it was reality.

“And I've been waiting for it--five days, six days, this time?”

She must have been at the seashore after all--tan or lack of it meant
little these days, especially to a woman who lived in this kind of an
apartment. The third conclusion might have been rather sentimental, a
title out of a moving picture--something about Even in the Wastes of the
Giant City the Weary Heart Will Always Turn To--Just Home.

A doll on a small table began to buzz mysteriously in its internals. The
man released the woman's hand--both looking deeply annoyed.

“I thought we had a private number here,” said the man, the tiredness
coming back into his face like scribbles on parchment.

She crossed to the telephone with a charming furtiveness--you could see
she was playing they had just been found behind the piano together in a
game of hide-and-seek. The doll was disembowelled of its telephone.

“No--No--Oh very well--”

“What was it?”

She smiled.

“Is this the Eclair Picture Palace?” she mimicked. [Illustration: THE
TIREDNESS THAT HAD BEEN IN THE MAN'S FACE BEGAN TO LEAVE IT] Both seemed
almost childishly relieved. So in spite of his successful-business-man
mouth, he wasn't the kind that is less a husband than a
telephone-receiver, especially at home. Still, she would have made a
difference even to telephone-receivers, that could be felt even without
the usual complement of senses.

“That was--bothersome for a minute.” His tone lent the words a quaint
accent of scare.

“Oh, well--if you have one at all--the way the service is now--”

“There won't be any telephone when we take our vacation together, that's
_settled_.”

She had been kneeling, examining a bookcase for books. Now she turned
with one in her hand, her hair ruddy and smooth as ruddy amber in the
reflected light.

“No, but _telegrams_. And wireless,” she whispered mockingly, the more
mockingly because it so obviously made him worried as a worried boy.
She came over and stood smoothing his ear a moment, a half-unconscious
customary gesture, no doubt, for he relaxed under it and the look of
rest came back. Then she went to her chair, sat down and opened the
book.

“No use borrowing trouble now, dear. Now listen. Cigar?” “Going.”

“Ashtray?”

“Yes.”

“And remember not to knock it over when you get excited. Promise?”

“Um.”

“Very well.”

Mrs. Severance's even voice began to flow into the stillness.

“As I was getting too big for Mr. Wopsle's great-aunt--”




XXI

“And that's the end of the chapter.” Mrs. Severance's voice trailed off
into silence. She closed the book with a soft sound. The man whom it
might be rather more convenient than otherwise to call Mr. Severance
opened his eyes. He had not been asleep, but he had found by a good deal
of experience that he paid more attention to Dickens if he closed his
eyes while she read.

“Thank you dear.”

“Thank you. You know I love it. Especially Pip.”

He considered.

“There was a word one of my young men used the other day about Dickens.
Gusto, I think--yes, that was it. Well, I find that, as I grow older,
that seems to be the thing I value rather more than most men of my age.
Gusto.” He smiled “Though I take it more quietly, perhaps,--than I did
when I was young,” he added.

“You _are_ young” said Mrs. Severance carefully.

“Not really, dear. I can give half-a-dozen youngsters I know four
strokes in nine holes and beat them. I can handle the bank in half
the time and with half the worry that some of my people take to one
department. And for a little while more, Rose, I may be able to satisfy
you. But” and he passed a hand lightly over his hair. “It's grey, you
know,” he ended.

“As if it mattered,” said Mrs. Severance, a little pettishly.

“It does matter, Rose.” His eyes darkened with memory--with the sort of
memory that hurts more to forget than even to remember. “Do you realize
that I am sixteen years older than you are?” he said a little hurriedly
as if he were trying to scribble the memory over with any kind of words.

“But my dear” and she smiled, “you were sixteen years older six years
ago--remember? There's less real difference between us now than there
was then.”

“Yes, I certainly wasn't as young in some ways--six years ago.” He
seemed to speak almost as if unconsciously, almost as if the words were
being squeezed out of him in sleep by a thing that had pressed for a
long time with a steady weight on his mind till the mind must release
itself or be broken. “But then nobody could be with you, for a month
even, and not feel himself turn younger whether he wanted to or not.”
 “So that's settled.” She was trying to carry it lightly, to take the
darkness out of his eyes. “And once you've bought our steamer tickets we
can leave it all behind at the wharf and by the time we land we'll be
so disgracefully young that no one will recognize us--just think--we can
keep going back and back till I'm putting my hair up for the first time
and you're in little short trousers--and then babies, I suppose and
the other side of getting born--” but her voice, for once, turned
ineffectually against his centeredness of gaze, that seemed now as if it
had turned back on itself for a struggling moment and regarded neither
what was nor what might be, but only what was past.

“Six years ago” he said with the same drowsy thoughtfulness. “Well,
Rose, I shall always be--most grateful--for those six years.”

She started to speak but he checked her.

“I think I would be willing to make a substantial endowment to any
Protestant Church that still really believed in hell,” he said, “because
that was very like hell--six years ago.”

Intensity began to come into his voice like a color of darkness, though
he still spoke slowly.

“You can stand nearly everything in life but being tired of yourself.
And six years ago I was tired--tired to death.”

Her hand reached over and touched him medicinally.

“I suppose I had no right” he began again and then stopped. “No, I think
the strong man tires less easily but more wholly than the weak one when
he does tire. And I was strong enough.

“I'd played a big game, you know. When my father died we hadn't much
left but position--and that was going. I don't blame my father--he
wasn't a business man--he should have been a literary critic--that
little book of essays of his still sells, you know; not much but there's
a demand for a dozen copies every year and that's a good deal for an
American who's been dead for thirty. Well, that's where the children get
their liking for things like that--I've got it too, a little--I could
have done something there if I'd had time. But I never had time.

“I could have done it when I got out of Harvard--drifted along like half
a dozen people I know, played at law, played at writing, played always
and forever at being a gentleman--ended up as an officer of the Century
Club with what little money I had in an annuity. But I couldn't stand
the idea of just scraping along. And for nearly ten years I put those
things aside.

“You know about my going West and the way I lived there. It wasn't
easy when I'd been at Harvard and gone everywhere in New York and
Boston--starting in so far below the bottom that you couldn't even see
the bottom unless you squinted your eyes. But I never took a job with
more money if I thought I could learn anything in a job with less--and
every place I went I stayed until I could handle the job of the man two
places ahead of me--and if I didn't get his job when I asked for it I
went somewhere else. I don't think I read a book except a technical one
for the first five years. And after that, when the chain-stores started
going they asked me back to New York--a big offer too--but it wasn't the
kind I wanted and I threw it down. I knew just how I wanted to come back
to New York and that's the way I came.

“I don't suppose my morals were too edifying those years. But they were
as good as the men I went with and I kept myself in hand. I saw men go
to pieces with drink--and I didn't drink. I saw men go to pieces over
women--and I kept away from that kind of woman. A man has to have women
in his life no matter how much you talk about it--but I took the kind
with the price-tag because when you paid them you were through. I could
have married a dozen times if I'd wanted but I didn't want--that old
hocus-pocus of tradition was still with me, stronger than death--I
thought I knew the kind of wife I wanted and she was in the East.

“Then the partnership with Jessup came and I took it. And after a year
I was made. I wasn't the last of one of the penniless old families
that give each other dinners once a month and pretend they're the
real society because they haven't money enough to trail in the present
society game--even by then I was--what did that last newspaper story
say? 'a figure of nation-wide importance.' Then it must be just about
time, I thought, that this figure of nation-wide importance began to
look around a little and married the wife he'd been waiting for and
started to pick up all the things he hadn't had for twelve years.

“Well--Mary. And I was so careful about Mary,” his lips twisted, half
whimsically, half painfully. “I was so damn sure. I was so damn sure I
knew everything about women.

“She had the qualities I'd said to myself I wanted--beauty, position,
breeding, a good enough mind, some common sense. She hadn't money, but
there I thought I could help her--the way she ran things for her father
on what they had showed what she could do with more. We weren't in
love with each other--oh dear no--but that I considered on the whole an
advantage--she attracted me and it's fair enough to say that beside most
of the men she'd been seeing my combination of having been Old New York
and being one of the young big coming men from the West dazzled her
rather. And anyhow I didn't want--passion--exactly. I thought it would
take too much time when I was only in the middle of my game and getting
as much real solid fun out of it as a kid gets out of cooking his own
dinner in camp. I wanted a partner and a home and children and somebody
to sit at the head of my table when I wanted to be--public--and yet
somebody you could be at home with when you wanted to be at home. And
I thought I had them all in Mary--I thought I was being about the most
sensible man in the world.

“Well, up till after both children were born I think I tried pretty
hard. I gave her all I could think of--materially at least. And then I
found out in spite of myself that you can't be married to a woman--even
bearably--and neither be lovers nor friends with her. And Mary and I
never got beyond the social acquaintance stage.

“It wasn't all Mary's fault either--I can see that now. A good deal was
in the way she'd been brought up--they weren't modern about the blisses
of ignorance in the nineties. But the rest of it was Mary and she
couldn't have changed it any more than she could have been rude to
a servant or raised her voice more than usual when she really wanted
something done.

“She'd been brought up never to be demonstrative--that was one thing.
But that wasn't the main trouble--the main trouble was her most curious,
most frigid self-sufficiency. Until her children came she was the most
wholly self-sufficient person I've ever known. She was really only happy
when she was entirely alone, always. It wasn't egotism exactly--she's
always had a very-well-mannered conviction of her own relative
unimportance--it was just that in spite of the fact that she seemed
so perfectly healthy and calm and composed whenever she was with other
people they'd be sure to hurt her a little somehow or other without
meaning to--the only person she could genuinely depend on never to hurt
her was herself.

“As for men, she'd formed one crystallized opinion of men in the first
weeks of our marriage and she's kept it ever since. She looks at them
as if they were a kind of tame wolf about the house--something you must
never show you're afraid of, something you must feed and look after and
be publicly amiable to because you must be just--but something you
never never would bring in the house of your own accord or touch without
feeling that you, that you had to preserve so jealously against all
the things that could possibly hurt it, start to shrink and be pained
inside.

“Then the children came--she did and does love them. She lives for them.
But they're part of herself too, you see, an essential part, and as she
can't give herself to anybody but herself, she can't give them to me
even in the easiest kind of partnership, really. You don't leave small
children alone with even the tamest kind of wolf--and she's the kind of
woman whose children are always six to her. And she's their mother--and
so she has her way.

“That's the way it got worse. Right up to six years ago.

“I'd done my job--I was President of the Commercial. And I'd made my
money, and the money still kept coming in as if it didn't make any
difference what I did with it. I'd won my game. And what was there in it
for me?

“I didn't have a home--I had a place where I ate and slept. I didn't
have a wife--I had an acquaintance who kept house for me. I had
children--at school and college. I didn't have real hobbies--I hadn't
had time for them. And I was forty-nine. All I could do was go on making
money till I died.

“Well, you changed that,” his voice shook a little.

“You came and I saw and knew and took you. And I'm not sorry. Because
you've made me alive again. And I'm going to be alive now till I die.

“Funny--I was never so anxious about anything happening as I have been
about--our approaching mutual disappearance. Especially the last six
months when I've been planning. But now that's settled.

“Mary will have more than enough and the children are grown. They won't
know--I still have brains enough to settle that and money will do nearly
everything. It'll be a nine days' wonder. 'Sudden Disappearance of
Prominent Financier--Foul Play Suspected' and that'll be all.

“As for the Commercial--I haven't come to my age without finding
out that nobody in the world is indispensable. If a taxi ran over me
tomorrow they'd have to do without me--and Harris and the young men can
handle things.

“But you know where there'll be an elderly gentleman retired from
business with a country house and a garden he can putter around in
all his worst clothes. And a wife that reads Dickens to him in the
evening--oh yes, Rose, we'll take Dickens along. And he'll be pretty
contented as things go--that retired old gentleman.”

The darkness had passed from his eyes--he was smiling now.

“Be nice--eh Rose?”

He took her hand--the warm touch was still strong, still reassuring.
Only the eyes that he was not looking at now seemed singularly unsure,
as if they had seen something they had pondered over lightly, as a mere
possibility, years ago, take on sudden impatient body and demand to be
heard.

She let her hand lie lightly in his for a moment. Then she rose.

“Half past twelve” she said a little stiffly. “Time for two such genuine
antiques as we are to think of being put away in our cases for the
night.”




XXII

It was three in the afternoon before Oliver walked into the Hotel
Rosario again and when he did it was with the feeling that the house
detective might come up at any moment, touch him quietly on the shoulder
and remark that his bag _might_ be sent down to the station after him
if he paid his bill and left quietly and at once. An appearance before a
hoarse judge who fined him ten dollars in as many seconds had not helped
his self-confidence though he kept wondering if there was a sliding
scale of penalties for improper language applied to the police of St.
Louis and just what would have happened if he had called the large blue
policeman anything out of his A.E.F. vocabulary. Also the desk, when he
called there for his key, reminded him twingingly of the dock, and the
clerk behind it looked at him so knowingly as he made the request that
Oliver began to construct a hasty moral defence of his whole life from
the time he had stolen sugar at eight, when he was reassured by the
clerk's merely saying in a voice like a wink. “Telephone call for you
last night, Mr. Crowe.”

_Nancy!_

With a horrible effort to keep impassive, “Yes? Who was it?”

“Party didn't leave a name.”

“Oh. When?”

“'Bout 'leven o'clock.”

“And she didn't leave any message?” Then Oliver turned pink at having
betrayed himself so easily.

“No-o--_she_ didn't.” The clerk's eyelid drooped a trifle. Those collegy
looking boys were certainly hell with women.

“Oh, well--” with a vast attempt to seem careless. “Thanks. Where's the
'phone?”

“Over there” and Oliver followed the direction of the jerked thumb to
shut himself up in a booth with his heart, apparently, bent upon doing
queer interpretative dances and his mind full of all the most apologetic
words in or out of the dictionary. “Hello. Hello. _Is this Nancy_?”

“This is Mrs. S. R. Ellicott.” The voice seems extremely detached.

“Oh, good morning, Mrs. Ellicott. This is Oliver--Oliver Crowe, you
know. Is Nancy there?”

Nor does it appear inclined toward lengthy conversation--the voice at
the other end. “No.”

“Well, when will she be in? I've got to take the five o'clock train Mrs.
Ellicott--I've simply got to--I may lose my job if I don't--but I've got
to talk to her first--I've got to explain--”

“There can be very little good, I think, in your talking to her Mr.
Crowe. She has told me that you both consider the engagement at an end.”

“But that's impossible, Mrs. Ellicott--that's too absurd” Oliver felt
too much as if he were fighting for life against something invisible to
be careful about his words. “I know we quarrelled last night--but it
was all my fault, I didn't mean anything--I was going to call her up the
first thing this morning but you see, they wouldn't let me out--”

Then he stopped with a grim realization of just what it was that he had
said. There was a long fateful pause from the other end of the wire.

“I'm afraid I don't quite understand, Mr. Crowe.”

“They wouldn't let me out. I was--er--detained--ah--kept in.”

“Detained?” The inflection is politely inquisitive.

“Yes, detained. You see--I--you--oh dammit, I was in jail.” This time
the pause that follows had to Oliver much of the quality of that little
deadly hush that will silence all earth and sky in the moment before
Last Judgment. Then--

“_In jail_,” said the voice with an accent of utter finality.

“Yes--yes--oh it wasn't anything--I could explain in five seconds if I
saw her--it was all a misunderstanding--I called the policeman a boob
but I didn't mean it--I don't see yet why he took offence--it was
just--”

He was stifling inside the airless booth--he trickled all over. This was
worse than being court-martialled. And still the voice did not speak.

“Can't you understand?” he yelled at last with more strength of lung
than politeness.

“I quite understand, Mr. Crowe. You were in jail. No doubt we shall read
all about it in tomorrow's papers.”

“No you won't--I gave somebody else's name.”

“Oh.” Mrs. Ellicott was ticking off the data gathered so far on
her fingers. The brutal quarrel with Nancy. The rush to the nearest
blind-tiger. The debauch. The insult to Law. The drunken struggle.
The prison. The alias. And now the attempt to pretend that nothing had
happened--when the criminal in question was doubtless swigging from a
pocket-flask at this very moment for the courage to support his flagrant
impudence in trying to see Nancy again. All this passed through Mrs.
Ellicott's mind like a series of colored pictures in a Prohibition
_brochure_.

“But I can explain that too. I can explain everything. Please, Mrs.
Ellicott--”

“Mr. Crowe, this conversation has become a very painful one. Would it
not be wiser to close it?”

Oliver felt as if Mrs. Ellicott had told him to open his bag and when he
did so had pointed sternly at a complete set of burglar's tools on top
of his dress-shirts.

“Can-I-see-Nancy?” he ended desperately, the words all run together:

But the voice that answered was very firm with rectitude.

“Nancy has not the slightest desire to see you, Mr. Crowe. Now or
ever.” Mrs. Ellicott asked pardon inwardly for the lie with a false
humility--if Nancy will not save herself from this young man whom she
has always disliked and who has just admitted to being a jailbird in
fact and a drunkard by implication, she will.

“I should think you would find it easier hearing this from me than you
would from her. She has found it easier to say.” “But, Mrs. Ellicott--”

“There are things that take a little too much explaining to explain, Mr.
Crowe.” The meaning seemed vague but the tone was doomlike enough. “And
in any case” the voice ended with a note of flat triumph, “Nancy will
not be home until dinnertime so you could not possibly telephone her
before the departure of your train.”

“Oh.”

“Good-by, Mr. Crowe,” and a click at the other end showed that Mrs.
Ellicott had hung up the receiver, leaving him to shriek “But listen--”
 pitiably into the little black mouthpiece in front of him until Central
cut in on him angrily with “Say, whatcha tryin' to do, fella? Break my
ear?”




XXIII

After cindery hours in a day coach--the fine and the loss of his Pullman
reservation have left him with less than three dollars in cash--Oliver
crawls into Vanamee and Company's about four in the afternoon. Everybody
but Mrs. Wimple and Mr. Tickler is out of Copy for the moment and the
former greets him with coy wit.

“Been taking your vacation at Newport, Crowie? Or didja sneak the Frisco
account away from Brugger's Service when you were out West?”

“Oh, no, got jugged--that was all,” says Oliver quite truthfully if
tiredly and Mrs. Wimple crows at the jest with high laughter. Oliver
marvels at the fact that everybody should seem to think it so humorous
to be jailed.

“Why, Crowie, you naughty little boy! Oh mischief, mischief!” and she
scrapes one index finger over the other at him in a try for errant
childishness. Then she and her perfume come closer and this time she
looks around before she speaks and there is some little real concern in
her voice.

“Listen, Crowie--you better watch your step, boy--I'm telling
you straight. Old Man Alley was real sore when you didn't blow in
yesterday--it was one of Vanamee's bad days when his eye gets twitchy
and he was rearing around cursing everybody out and giving an oration
on office discipline that'd a made a goat go laugh itself ill. And then
Alley got hold of Délier and they are both talking about you--I know
because Délier said 'Oh give him another chance' and Alley said 'What's
the use, Deller--he's been here eight months and he doesn't seem to
really get the hang of things,' in that snippy little way and then 'I
can't stand breaches of discipline like this.' You know how nervous
it gets him if as much as a fastener is out of place on his desk--and
Winslow's got a kid cousin he wants to put in here and if you don't act
like mama's darling for a while--”

She is ready to go on indefinitely, but Oliver thanks her
abstractedly--it is decent of the old girl after all--grunts “Guess I
better start in looking busy now, Mrs. Wimple!” and sits down at his
desk.

A note from Deller with five pencil sketches attached of the new trade
figures for Brittlekin--two bloated looking children with inkblot eyes
looking greedily at an enormous bar of peanut candy. “Dear Crowe: Will
you give me copy on these as soon as possible--something snappy this
time.--E. B. D.” A memorandum, “Mr. Piper called you 4 P.M. Monday.
Wishes you to call him as soon as possible.” The United Steel Frame
Pulley layouts and another note from Deller, “This is LATE. DO
something.” Back to pulleys again and the crowded sweat-box of the copy
room and twenty-five dollars a week with the raise gone glimmering now--

And Nancy is lost.

Oliver sits looking at the layouts for United Steel Frame Pulleys for
half-an-hour without really doing anything but sharpen and resharpen a
pencil. Mrs. Wimple wonders if he's sick--he ain't white or anything
but he looks just like Poppa did the time he came back and told Momma,
“Momma the bank has bust and our funds has went.” She watches him
eagerly--gee, it'd be exciting if he fainted or did anything queer! He
said he'd been in jail too--Mrs. Wimple shivers--but he's so comical you
never can tell what he really means--that way he looks may be just what
she saw in a movie once about “the pallid touch of the prison.” If it's
indigestion, though, he ought to try Pepsolax--that certainly eases you
up right--

Finally Oliver stacks all the layouts together in a careful pile and
goes in to see Mr. Alley. That precise and toothy little sub-deity does
not seem extremely enthusiastic over his return.

“Well, Mr. Crowe, so you got back? What detained you?”

“Police” says Oliver with a faint smile and Mr. Alley laughs dutifully
enough though rather in a “here, here, we must get down to business”
 way. Then he fusses with his pencil a little.

“I'm glad you came in, Crowe. I wanted to see you about that matter. It
is not so much that we begrudge--but in a place like this where
everyone must work shoulder to shoulder--and purely as a point of office
discipline--Mr. Vanamee is rather rigid in regard to that and your work
so far has really hardly justified--”

“Oh that's all right, Mr. Alley” breaks in Oliver, though not rudely,
he is much too fagged to be rude, “I'm leaving at the end of the week if
it's convenient to you.”

“Well, _really_, Mr. Crowe.” But in spite of his diplomatic surprise he
hardly seems distressfully perturbed. “I hope it is not because you
feel we have treated you unfairly--” he begins again a little
anxiously--under all his feathers of fussiness he is essentially kindly.

“Oh no, I'm just leaving.”

There are more diplomatic exchanges but when they have ended Oliver goes
back to Copy, remarks “Quitting Saturday, Mrs. Wimple,” gets his hat and
goes off a quarter of an hour earlier than he ever has before, leaving
the rest of Copy to match pennies and opinions till closing time on the
question as to whether he fired himself or was fired.




XXIV

Jane Ellen swayed back and forth in the porch hammock, hugging herself
with fat arms. All her dolls lay spread out wretchedly on the floor
beneath her, she had stripped them of every rag and they had the
dejected appearance of victims ready for sacrifice to Baal. “The
Choolies are mad!” she sang to herself, “The Choolies are mad!”

It had been a perfectly sensible idea to try and water the flowers on
the parlor carpet with her doll's watering pot--those flowers hadn't
had any water for an awful long time. But Mother had punished her in
the Third Degree which was by hairbrush and Aunt Elsie had taken the
watering-pot away and Rosalind and Dickie had put on such offensively
virtuous expressions as soon as they heard her being punished that
she was mad at them all. And not ordinarily mad--not mad just by
herself--the Choolies were divinely incensed as well.

“The Choolies are mad!” she hummed again like a battle-cry “Choolies are
dolls and all the Choolies are mad!”

The Choolies were only mad on rare occasions. It took something
genuinely out of the ordinary to turn an inoffensive pink celluloid doll
with one of its legs off into an angry Choolie. But when they were mad
the family had discovered by painful experience that the only thing to
do was to leave Jane Ellen quite entirely alone.

“The Choolies are mad, mad, mad!” she chanted end chanted, her plump
legs swinging, her mouth set like a prophet's calling down lightnings on
Babylon the splendid.

Then she stopped swinging. Somebody was coming up the path--any of the
people she was mad at?--no--only Uncle Ollie. Were the Choolies mad at
Uncle Ollie? She considered a moment.

“Hello, Jane Ellen, how goes it?”

The small mouth was full of rebellion.

“Um mad!”

“Oh--sorry. What about?”

Defiantly

“Um _mad_. And the Choolies are mad--they're mad--they're mad--”

Oliver looked at her a moment but was much too wise to smile.

“They aren't mad at you, but they're mad at Motha and Aunt Elsie and Ro
and Dickie and oh--evvabody!” Jane Ellen stated graciously.

“Well, as long as they aren't mad at me--Any letters for me, Jane
Ellen?” “Yash.”

Oliver found them on the desk, looked them over, once, twice. A letter
from Peter Piper. Two advertisements. A letter with a French stamp.
Nothing from Nancy.

He went out on the porch again to read his letters, to the accompaniment
of Jane Ellen's untirable chant. “The Choolies are mad” buzzed in his
ears, “The Choolies, the Choolies are mad.” For a moment he saw the
Choolies; they were all women like Mrs. Ellicott but they stood up in
front of him taller than the sky and one of them had hidden Nancy away
in her black silk pocket--put her somewhere, where he never would see
her again.

“Ollie, you look at me sternaly--_don't_ look at me so sternaly,
Ollie--the Choolies aren't mad at you--” said Jane Ellen anxiously. “Fy
do you look at me so sternaly?”

He grinned his best at her. “Sorry, Jane Ellen. But my girl's chucked me
and I've chucked my job--and consequently all _my_ choolies are mad--”




XXV

That night was distinguished by four uneasy meals in different
localities. The first was Oliver's and he ate it as if he were consuming
sawdust while the Crowes talked all around him in the suppressed voices
of people watching a military funeral pass to its muffled drums. Mrs.
Crowe was too wise to try and comfort him in public except by silence
and even Dickie was still too surprised at Oliver's peevish “Oh _get_
out, kid” when he tried to drag him into their usual evening boxing
match to do anything but confide despondently to his mother that he
doesn't see why Oliver has to act so _queer_ about any girl.

The second meal was infinitely gayer on the surface though a certain
kind of strainedness a little like the strainedness in the pauses of a
perfectly friendly football game when both sides are too evenly matched
to score ran through it. Still, whatever strainedness there was could
hardly have been Mrs. Severance's fault.

The impeccable Elizabeth showed no surprise at being told she could
have the day and needn't be back till breakfast tomorrow. She might have
thought that there seemed to be a good deal of rather perishable food
in the icebox to be wasted, if Mrs. Severance were going to have dinner
out. But Elizabeth had always been one of the rare people who took pride
in “knowing when they were suited” and the apartment on Riverside Drive
had suited her perfectly for four years. She was also a great deal too
clever to abstract any of those fragile viands to take to her widowed
sister on Long Island--Mrs. Severance is so good at finding uses for all
sorts of odd things--Elizabeth felt quite sure she would find some use
or other for these too.

Ted Billett certainly found a good deal of use for some of it, thought
Mrs. Severance whimsically. It had hardly been a Paolo and Francesca
_diner-a-deux_--both had been much too frankly hungry when they came to
it and Ted's most romantic remarks so far had been devoted to a vivid
appreciation of Mrs. Severance's housekeeping. But all men are very much
like hungry little boys every so often, Mrs. Severance reflected.

Ted really began to wonder around nine-thirty. At first there had been
only coming in and finding Rose just through setting the table and then
they had been too busy with dinner and their usual fence of talk to
allow for any unfortunate calculations as to how Mrs. Severance could
do it on her salary. But what a perfect little apartment--and even
supposing all the furniture and so forth were family inheritances, and
they fitted each other much too smoothly for that, the mere upkeep of
the place must run a good deal beyond any “Mode” salary. Mr. Severance?
Ted wasn't sure. Oh, well he was too comfortable at the moment to look
gift horses of any description too sternly in the mouth.

Rose _was_ beautiful--it was Ted and Rose by now. He would like to see
someone paint her sometime as Summer, drowsy and golden, passing through
fields of August, holding close to her rich warm body the tall sheaves
of her fruitful corn. And again the firelight crept close to him, and
under its touch all his senses stirred like leaves in light wind, glad
to be hurt with firelight and then left soothed and heavy and warm.

Only now he had a charm against what the firelight meant--what it had
been meaning more and more these last few weeks with Rose Severance. It
was not a very powerful-looking charm--a dozen lines of a letter from
Elinor Piper asking him to come to Southampton, but it began “Dear Ted”
 and ended “Elinor” and he thought it would serve.

That ought to be enough--that small thing only magical from what you
made it mean against what it really was--that wish that nobody could
even nickname hope--to keep you cool against the waves of firelight that
rose over you like the scent of a harvest meadow. It was, almost.

Rose had been telling him how unhappy she was all evening. Not
whiningly--and not, as he remembered later, with any specific
details--but in a way that made him feel as if he, as part of the world
that had hurt her, were partly responsible. And to want exceedingly to
help. And then the only way he could think of helping was to put himself
like kindling into the firelight, and he mustn't do that. “Elinor” he
said under his breath like an exorcism, but Rose was very breathing and
good to look at and in the next chair.

His fingers took a long time getting his watch.

“I've _got_ to go Rose, really.”

“Must you? What's the time--eleven?--why heavens, I've kept you here
ages, haven't I, and done nothing but moan about my troubles all the
time.”

“You know I liked it.” Ted's voice was curiously boyishly honest in a
way he hated but a way that was one of Rose's reasons why he was here
with her.

“Well, come again,” she said frankly. “It was fun. I loved it.” “I
will--Lord knows I thank you enough--after 252A Madison Avenue it was
simply perfect. And Rose--”

“Well?”

“I'm awful damn sorry. I wish I could help.”

He thought she was going to laugh. Instead she turned perfectly grave.

“I wish you could, Ted.”

They shook hands--it seemed to Ted with a good deal of effort to do only
that. Then they stood looking at each other.

There was so little between them--only a charm that nobody could say was
even partly real--but somewhere in Ted's brain it said “Elinor” and he
managed to shake hands again and get out of the door.

Mrs. Severance waited several minutes, listening, a faint smile curling
her mouth with intentness and satisfaction. No, this time he wouldn't
come back--nor next time, maybe--but there would be other times---

Then she went into the pantry and started heating water for the dishes
that she had explained reassuringly to Ted they were leaving for
Elizabeth. There was no need at all of Elizabeth's knowing any more than
was absolutely necessary.




XXVI

Mr. Severance--the courtesy title at least is due him--seems to be a
man with quite a number of costly possessions. At least here he is with
another house, a dinner-table, servants, guests, another Mrs. Severance
or somebody who seems to fill her place very adequately at the opposite
end of the table, all as if Rose and the Riverside Drive apartment and
reading Dickens aloud were only parts of a doll-house kept in one locked
drawer of his desk.

The dinner is flawless, the guests importantly jeweled or stomached,
depending on their sex, the other Mrs. Severance an admirable
hostess--and yet in spite of it all, Mr. Severance does not seem to be
enjoying himself as he should. But this may be due to a sort of minstrel
give-and-take of dialogue that keeps going on between what he says for
publication and what he thinks.

“Well, Frazee, I'll be ready to go into that loan matter with you
inside a month,” says his voice, and his mind “Frazee, you slippery old
burglar, it won't be a month before you'll be spreading the news that
my disappearance means suicide and that the Commercial is rotten, lock,
stock and barrel.”

“Yes, dear,” in answer to a relayed query from the other Mrs. Severance.
“The children took the small car to go to the dance.” “And, Mary, if
they'd ever been our children instead of your keeping them always
yours, there wouldn't be that little surprise in store for you that I've
arranged.”

“Cigar, Winthrop?” “Better take two, my friend--they won't be as good
after Mary has charge of that end of the house.”

So it goes--until Mr. Severance has dined very well indeed. And yet
Winthrop, chatting with Frazee, just before they go out of the door,
finds it necessary to whisper to him for some reason--half a dozen words
under cover of a discussion of what the Shipping Board's new move will
mean to the mercantile marine. “I told you so, George. See his hands?
The old boy's failing.”




XXVII

The fourth meal is Nancy's and it doesn't seem very happy. When it is
over and Mr. Ellicott has rustled himself away from intrusion behind the
evening paper.

“Nobody--'phoned today--did they, mother?”

“No, dear.” The voice is not as easy as it might be, but Nancy does not
notice.

“Oh.”

Nor does Nancy notice how hurriedly her mother's next question comes.

“Did you see Mrs. Winters, darling?”

“Oh yes--I saw her.”

“And you're going on to New York?”

“Yes--next week, I think.”

“With her. And going to stay with her?”

“I suppose so.”

Mrs. Ellicott sighs relievedly.

“That's so nice.”

Nancy will be safe now--as safe as if she were under an anesthetic. Mrs.
Winters will take care of that. She must have a little talk with dear
Isabella Winters. But that night Nancy is alone in her room--doing up
her engagement ring and Oliver's letters in a wobbly package. She is not
quite just, though, she keeps one letter--the first.




XXVIII

Margaret Crowe, who, having just come to her seventeenth birthday in
this present day and generation, felt it her official family duty
to season the general conversation with an appropriate pepper of
heartlessness, had really put it very well. She had said that while she
didn't suppose one house party over Labor Day would more than partially
rivet a broken heart, it honestly was a relief for everybody else to get
Oliver out of the house for a while, and mother needn't look at her that
way because she was as sorry as any of the rest of them for poor old
Oliver but when people went about like walking cadavers and nearly bit
you any time you mentioned anything that had to do with marriage, it was
time they went somewhere else for a while and stayed there till they got
over it.

And Mrs. Crowe, though dutifully rebuking her for her flippant treatment
of a brother's pain, agreed with the sense of her remarks, if not with
the wording. It had taken a good deal of quiet obstinacy on the part of
the whole family to get Oliver to accept Peter Piper's invitation--Mrs.
Crowe, who was understanding, knew at what cost--the cost of a man
who has lost a hand's first appearance in company with the stump
unbandaged--but anything would be better than the mopey Oliver of the
last two weeks and a half, and Mrs. Crowe had been taught by a good
deal of living the aseptic powers of having to go through the motions
of ordinary life in front of a casual audience, even when it seemed
that those motions were no longer of any account. So Oliver took clean
flannels and a bitter mind to Southampton on the last day of August,
and, as soon as he got off the train, was swung into a reel of
consecutive amusements that, fortunately, allowed him little time to
think.

When he did, it was only to wonder rather frigidly if this fellow with
glasses who played tennis and danced and swam and watched and commented
athletically on the Davis Cup finals, sitting between Elinor Piper and
Juliet Bellamy whom he had taken to dances off and on ever since he had
had his first pair of pumps, could really be he. The two people didn't
feel in the least the same.

The two Mr. Crowes, he thought. “Mr. Oliver Crowe--meet Mr. Oliver
Crowe.” “On our right, ladies and gentlemen, we have one of the
country's greatest curiosities--a young gentleman who insists upon going
on existing when there is nothing at all that makes his existence useful
or interesting or proud. A very realistic wax figure that will toddle,
shoot a line and play almost any sort of game until you might easily
believe it to be genuinely alive. Mr. Oliver Crowe.”

The house-party was to last a week, except for Ted Billett who would
have to go back after Labor Day--and before eight hours of it were over,
Oliver was watching Ted with grandmotherly interest, a little mordant
jealousy, and humor, that, at times, verged toward the hysterical.
Nancy--and especially the loss of her--had made him sensitive as
a skinless man to the winds and vagaries of other young people in
love--and while Ted could look at and talk with Elinor Piper and think
himself as safe as a turtle under its shell from the observations and
discoveries of the rest of the party he could no more hide himself or
his intentions from Oliver's painful scrutiny than he could have hidden
the fact that he had suddenly turned bright green. So Oliver, a little
with the sense of his own extreme generosity, but sincerely enough
in the main, began to play kind shepherd, confidante, referee
and second-between-the-rounds to Ted's as yet quite unexpressed
strivings--and since most of him was only too willing to busy itself
with anything but reminiscences of Nancy, he began to congratulate
himself shortly that under his entirely unacknowledged guidance things
really seemed to be getting along very well.

And here too his streak of ineradicable humor--that bright plaything
made out of knives that is so fine to juggle with light-handedly until
the hand meets it in its descent a fraction of a second too soon--came
often and singularly to his aid. He could see himself in a property
white beard stretching feeble hands in blessing over a kneeling and
respectful Elinor and Ted. “Bless you my dear, dear children--for
though my own happiness has gone with yester-year, at least I have made
you--find each other--and perhaps, when you sit at evening among the
happy shouts of your posterity--” but here Oliver broke off into a snort
of laughter.

Of course Ted had confided nothing formally as yet--but then, thought
Oliver sourly out of his own experience, he wouldn't; that was the way
you always felt; and Ted had never been a person of easy confidences.
The most he had done had been to take Oliver grimly aside from the dance
they had gone to last night and explain in one ferocious and muffled
sentence delivered half at Oliver and half at a large tree that if Hinky
Selvage didn't stop dancing with Elinor that way he, Ted, would carry
him unobtrusively behind a bush and force him to swallow most of his
own front teeth. And again Oliver, looking back as a man might to the
feverish details of a major operation, realized with cynic mirth that
that was a very favorable symptom indeed. Oh everything was going along
simply finely for Ted, if the poor fool only knew it. But that he would
no more believe of course than you would a dentist who told you
he wasn't going to hurt. People in love _were_ poor fools--damn
fools--unutterably lucky, unutterably perfect--fools.

Ted and Oliver must have one talk though before it all happened beyond
redemption and Ted started wearing that beautiful anesthetized smile and
began to concoct small kindly fatal conspiracies with Elinor and Oliver
and some nice girl. They hadn't had a real chance to talk since Oliver
came back from St. Louis, and shortly--oh very shortly indeed by the way
things looked--the only thing they would be able to talk about would be
Elinor and how wonderful she and requited love and young happy marriage
were--and however glad Oliver might be for Ted and his luck--he really
wouldn't be able to stand that, under the present circumstances, for
very long at a time. Ted would be gone into fortune--into a fortune that
Oliver would have to be the last person on earth to grudge him--but that
meant the end of eight years of fighting mockery and friendship together
as surely as if those years were marbles and Elinor were dropping them
down a well. They could pick it up later--after Ted had been married a
year say--but it would have changed then, it wouldn't be the same.

Oliver smiled rather wryly. He wondered if that was at all like what Ted
might have thought when he and Nancy--But that wasn't comparable in the
least. But Nancy and he were different. _Nancy_--and with that, the pain
came so dazzlingly for a minute that Oliver had to shut his eyes to
bear it--and something that wasn't just stupidly rude had to be said to
Juliet Bellamy in answer to her loud clear question as to whether he was
falling asleep.

All up to and through Labor Day Oliver bluffed and manoeuvered like the
head of a small but vicious Balkan State in an International Congress
for Ted and Elinor, and towards tea-time, decided sardonically that it
was quite time his adopted infants took any further responsibilities off
his shoulders. There was no use delaying conclusions any longer--Oliver
felt as he looked at his victims like a workmanlike god who simply must
finish the rough draft of the particular world he is fussing with before
sunset, in spite of all rebellious or slipshod qualities in its clay.
There would be a dance that evening. There would be, Oliver thought with
some proprietary pride, a large sentimental moon. A few craftily casual
words with Elinor before dinner--a real talk with Ted in one of the
intermissions of the dance--a watchdog efficiency in guarding the two
from intrusion while they got the business over with neatly in any one
of several very suitable spots that Oliver had picked out already in his
mind's eye. And then, having thoroughly settled Ted for the rest of his
years in such a solid and satisfactory way--perhaps the queer gods
that had everyone in charge, in spite of their fatal leaning toward
practical-joking where the literary were concerned, might find enough
applause in their little tin hearts for Oliver's acquired and vicarious
merit to give him in some strange and painful way another chance to be
alive again and not merely the present wandering spectre-of-body that
people who knew nothing about it seemed to take so unreasonably for
Oliver Crowe.

So he laid his snares, feeling quite like Nimrod the mighty, though
outwardly he was only kneeling on the Piper porch, waiting for the
dice to come around to him in a vociferous game of crap that Juliet
had organized--he seldom shot without winning now he noticed with
superstitious awe. And tea passed to a sound of muffled crumpets, and
everyone went up to dress for dinner.




XXIX

Mrs. Winters' little apartment on West 79th Street--she heads letters
from it playfully “The Hen Coop” for there is almost always some member
of her own sex doing time with the generous Mrs. Winters. Mrs. Winters
is quite celebrated in St. Louis for her personally-conducted tours of
New York with stout Middle-Western matrons or spectacled school girls
east for visits and clothes--Mrs. Winters has the perfectly-varnished
manners, the lust for retailing unimportant statistics and the
supercilious fixed smile of a professional guide. Mrs. Winters' little
apartment, that all the friends who come to her to be fed and bedded
and patronized tell her is so charmingly New Yorky because of her dear
little kitchenette with the asthmatic gas-plates, the imitation English
plate-rail around the dining-room wall, the bookcase with real books--a
countable number of them--and on top of it the genuine signed photograph
of Caruso for which Mrs. Winters paid the sum she always makes you guess
about, at a charity-bazaar.

Mrs. Winters herself--the Mrs. Winters who is _so_ interested in young
people as long as they will do exactly what she wants them to--every
inch of her from her waved white hair to the black jet spangles on
her dinner gown or the notes of her “cultivated” voice as frosted and
glittery and artificial as a piece of _glacé_ fruit. And with her,
Nancy, dressed for dinner too, because Mrs. Winters feels it to be one's
duty to oneself to dress for dinner always, no matter how much one's
guests may wish to relax--Nancy as much out of place in the apartment
whose very cushions seem to smell of that modern old-maidishness that
takes itself for superior feminist virtue as a crocus would be in an
exhibition of wool flowers--a Nancy who doesn't talk much and has faint
blue stains under her eyes.

“So everything went very satisfactorily indeed today, dear Nancy?”

Mrs. Winters' voice implies the uselessness of the question. Nancy is
staying with Mrs. Winters--it would be very strange indeed if even the
least important accompaniments of such a visit were not of the most
satisfactory kind.

“Yes, Mrs. Winters. Nothing particularly happened, that is--but they
like my work.”

“Yes, dear,” Mrs. Winters croons at her, she is being motherly. The
effect produced is rather that of a sudden assumption of life and
vicarious motherhood on the part of a small, brightly-painted porcelain
hen.

“Then they will be sending you over shortly, no doubt? Across the wide
wide sea--” adds Mrs. Winters archly, but Nancy is too tired-looking to
respond to the fancy.

“I suppose they will when they get ready,” she answers briefly and
returns to her chicken-croquette with the thought that in its sleekness,
genteelness, crumblingness, and generally unnourishing qualities it is
really rather like Mrs. Winters. An immense desire, after two weeks of
Mrs. Winters' mental and physical cuisine for something as hearty
and gross as the mere sight of a double planked steak possesses her
achingly--but Mrs. Winters was told once that she “ate like a bird.”

“Well, in that case, dear Nancy, you certainly must not leave New
York indefinitely without making the most of your opportunities,” Mrs.
Winters' tones are full of genteel decision. “I have made out a little
list, dear Nancy, of some things which I thought, in my funny old way,
might possibly be worth your while. We will talk it over after dinner,
if you like--”

“Thank you so much, dear Mrs. Winters” says Nancy with dutiful
hopelessness. She is only too well acquainted with Mrs. Winters' little
lists. “As an _artist_, as an _artist_, dear Nancy, especially.” Mrs.
Winters breathes somewhat heavily, “Things That Should Interest you.
Nothing Bizarre, you understand, Nothing Merely Freakish--but some of
the Things in New York that I, Personally, have found Worth While.”

The Things that Mrs. Winters Has Found Personally Worth While include
a great many public monuments. She will give Nancy a similar list of
Things Worth While in Paris, too, before Nancy sails--and Nancy smiles
acceptably as each one of them is mentioned.

Only Mrs. Winters cannot see what Nancy is thinking--for if she did she
might become startlingly human at once as even the most perfectly poised
of spinsters is apt to do when she finds a rat in the middle of her
neat white bed. For Nancy is thinking quite freely of various quaint and
everlasting places of torment that might very well be devised for Mrs.
Winters--and of the naked fact that once arrived in Paris it will
matter very little to anybody what becomes of her and least of all
to herself--and that Mrs. Winters doesn't know that she saw a chance
mention of Mr. Oliver Crowe, the author of “Dancer's Holiday” today in
the “Bookman” and that she cut it out because it had Oliver's name in
it and that it is now in the smallest pocket of her bag with his creased
and recreased first letter and the lucky piece she had from her nicest
uncle and a little dim photograph of Mr. Ellicott and half a dozen other
small precious things.




XXX

The dance is at the Piper's this time--the last Piper dance of the
Southampton season and the biggest--other people may give dances
after it but everybody who knows will only think of them as relatively
pleasant or useless addenda. The last Piper Dance has been the official
period to the Southampton summer ever since Elinor's _début_--and this
time the period is sure to be bigger and rounder than ever since it
closes the most successful season Southampton has ever had.

Nothing very original about its being a masquerade, from Mr. Piper
a courteously grey-haired mandarin in jade-green robes beside Mrs.
Piper--lovely Mary Embree that was--in the silks of a Chinese empress,
heavy and shining and crusted as the wings of a jeweler's butterfly,
her reticent eyes watching the bright broken patterns of the dancing as
impassively as if she were viewing men being tortured or invested with
honor from the Dragon Throne, to Oliver, a diffident Pierrot who has
discovered no even bearably comfortable way of combining spectacles and
a mask, and Peter who [Illustration: THE LAST PIPER DANCE HAS BEEN THE
OFFICIAL PERIOD TO THE SOUTHAMPTON SUMMER] is gradually turning purple
under the furs of a dancing bear. Nothing much out of the ordinary in
the tunes and the three orchestras and the fact that a dozen gentlemen
dressed as the Devil are finding their tails very inconvenient as
regards the shimmy and a dozen Joans of Arc are eying each other with
looks of dumb hatred whenever they pass. Nothing singular about the
light-heart throb of the music, the smell of powder and scent and heat
and flowers, the whole loose drifting garland of the dancers, blowing
over and around the floor in the idle designs of sand, floating like
scraps of colored paper through a smooth wind heavy with music as the
hours run away like light water through the fingers. But outside the
house the Italian gardens are open, little lanterns spot them like
elf-lights, shining on hedge-green, pale marble; the night is pallid
with near and crowded stars, the air warm as Summer water, sweet as dear
youth.

The unmasking is to take place at midnight and it is past eleven when
Oliver drops back into the stag line after being stuck for a dance and
a half with a leaden-footed human flower-basket who devoted the entire
time to nervous giggles and the single coy statement that she just knew
he never could guess who she was but she recognized him perfectly. He
starts looking around for Ted. There he is, scanning the clown's parade
with the eyes of an anxious hawk, disgruntled nervousness plain in every
line of his body. Then Oliver remembers that he saw a slim Chinese girl
in loose blue silks go off the floor ten minutes or so ago with a tall
musketeer. He goes over and touches Ted on a particolored arm--the
latter is dressed as a red and gilt harlequin--and feels the muscles he
touches twitch under his hand.

“Cigarette? It's getting hotter than cotton in here--they'll have to
open more windows--”

“What?” Then recognizing voice and glasses “Oh yeah--guess so--awful
mob, isn't it?” and they thread their way out into the cool.

They wander down from the porch and into the gardens, past benches where
the talk that is going on seems to be chiefly in throaty undertones and
halts nervously as their steps crunch past.

“The beautiful and damned!” says Oliver amusedly, then a little louder
_“Amusez vous bien, mes enfants_” at a small and carefully modulated
shriek that comes from the other side of the low hedge, “The night's
still young. But Good Lord, isn't there _any_ place in the whole works
where two respectable people can sit without feeling like chaperones?”

They find one finally--it is at the far end of the gardens--a seat the
only reason for whose obvious desertion seems to be, comments Oliver,
that some untactful person has strung a dim but still visible lantern
directly above it--and relapses upon it silently. It is not until the
first cigarettes of both are little red dying stars on the grass beside
them that either really starts to talk.

“Cool,” says Oliver, stretching his arms. The night lies over them light
as spray--a great swimming bath and quietness of soft black, hushed
silver--above them the whole radiant helmet of heaven is white with its
stars. From the house they have left, glowing yellow in all its windows,
unreal against the night as if it were only a huge flat toy made out
of paper with a candle burning behind it, comes music, blurred but
insistent, faint as if heard over water, dull and throbbing like
horse-hoofs muffled with leather treading a lonely road.

“Um. Good party.”

“Real Piper party, Ted. And, speaking of Pipers, friend Peter certainly
seems to be enjoying himself--”

“Really?”

“Third bench on the left as we came down. Never go to a costume-party
dressed as a dancing-bear if you want to get any quiet work in on the
side. Rule One of Crowe's Social Code for Our Own First Families.”

Ted chuckles uneasily and there is silence for another while as they
smoke. Both are in very real need of talking to each other but must feel
their way a little carefully because they are friends. Then--

“I,” says Ted and--

“You,” says Oliver, simultaneously. Both laugh and the little tension
that has grown up between them snaps at once.

“I suppose you know that Nancy's and my engagement went bust about three
weeks ago,” begins Oliver with elaborate calm, his eyes fixed on his
shoes.

Ted clears his throat.

“Didn't _know_. Afraid it was something like that though--way you were
looking,” he says, putting his words one after the other, as slowly as
if he were building with children's blocks. “What was it? Don't tell me
unless you want to, of course--_you_ know---”

“Want to, rather.” Ted knows that he is smiling, and how, though he is
not looking at his face. “After all--old friends, all that. My dear old
College chum,” but the mockery breaks down. “My fault, I guess,” he says
in a voice like metal.

“It was, Ted. Acted like a fool. And then, this waiting business--not
much use going over that, now. But it's broken. Got my--property--such
as it was all back in a neat little parcel two weeks ago. That's why I
quit friend Vanamee--you ought to have known from that.”

“Did, I suppose, only I hoped it wasn't. I'm damn sorry, Ollie.

“Thanks, Ted.”

They shake hands, but not theatrically.

“Oh well--oh hell--oh dammit, you know how blasted sorry I am. That's
all I can say, I guess--”

“Well, so am I. And it was my fault, chiefly. And that's all I can say.”

“Look here, though.” Ted's voice is doing its best to be logical in
spite of the fact that two things, the fact that he is unutterably
sorry for Oliver and the fact that he mustn't show it in silly ways, are
fighting in him like wrestlers. “Are you sure it's as bad as all that?
I mean girls---” Ted flounders hopelessly between his eagerness to
help and his knowledge that it will take ungodly tact. “I mean,
Nancy's different all right--but they change their minds--and they come
around--and--”

Oliver spreads out his hands. It is somehow queerly comforting not
to let himself be comforted in any degree. “What's the use? Tried
to explain--got her mother--Nancy was out but she certainly left a
message--easier if we never saw each other again--well--Then she
sent back everything--she knew I'd tried to phone her--tried to
explain--never a word since then except my name and address on the
package--oh it's over, Ted. Feenee. But it's pretty well smashed me. For
the present, at least.”

“But if you started it,” Ted says stubbornly.

“Oh I did, of course--gentlemanly supposition anyhow--that's why--don't
you see?”

“Can't say I do exactly.”

“Well?”

“Well?”

“We're both of us too proud, Ted. And too poor. And starting
again--can't you--visualize--it wouldn't be the way it was--only both
of us thinking about _that_ all the time--and _still_ we couldn't get
married. I've got less right than ever, now--oh, but how _could_ we
after what we've said--” and this time his voice has lost all the
attitudes of youth, it is singularly older and seems to come from the
center of a place full of pain.

“I wish I could help, though, Ollie. You know,” says Ted.

“Wish you could.” Then later, “Thanks.” “Welcome.”

Both smoke and are silent for a time, remembering small things out of
the last eight years.

“But what are you going to do, Ollie, now you've kissed the great god
Advertising a fond good-by?”

Ollie stirs uneasily.

“Dunno--exactly. I told you about those two short stories Easten wanted
me to take out of my novel? Well, I've done it and sent 'em in--and
he'll buy 'em all right.”

“That's fine!”

“It's a little money, anyhow. And then--remember Dick Lamoureux?”

“Yes.”

“Got a letter from him right after--I came back from St. Louis.
Well, he's got a big job with the American Express in Paris--European
Advertising Manager or something like that--he's been crazy to have
either of us come over ever since that idea of the three of us getting
an apartment on the _Rive Gauche_ fell through. Well, he says, if I can
come over, he'll get me some sort of a job--not much to go on at
first but they want people who are willing to stay--enough to live on
anyway--I want to get out of the country, Ted.”

“Should think you would. Good Lord--Paris! Why you lucky, lucky Indian!”
 says Ted affectionately. “When'll you leave?” “Don't know. He said cable
him if I really decided--think I will. They need men and I can get a
fair enough letter from Vanamee. I've been thinking it over ever since
the letter came--wondering if I'd take it. Think I will now. Well.”

“Well, I wish I was going along, Crowe.”

And this time Oliver is really able to smile.

“No, you don't.”

“Oh well--but, honestly--well, no, I suppose I don't. And I suppose
_that's_ something you know all about, too, you--private detective!”

“Private detective! Why, you poor ass, if you haven't noticed how I've
been playing godmother to you all the way through this house-party--”

“I have. I suppose I'd thank anybody else. Coming from you, though, I
can only say that such was both my hope and my expectation.”

“Oh, you _perfect_ ass!” Both laugh, a little unsteadily.

“Well, Ollie, what think?” says Ted, finding some difficulty with his
words for some reason or other.

“Think? Can't tell, my amorous child. Coldly considered, I think you've
got a good show--and I'm very strong for it, needless to say--and if you
don't go and put it over pretty soon I'll be intensely annoyed--one of
the pleasures I've promised myself for years and years has been getting
most disgracefully fried at your wedding, Ted.”

“Well, tonight is going to be zero hour, I think.” Ted proceeds with a
try at being flippant and Oliver cackles with mirth.

“I knew it. I knew it. Old Uncle Ollie, the Young Proposer's Guide and
Pocket Companion.” Then his voice changes. “Luck,” he says briefly.

“Thanks. Need it.”

“Of course I'm not worthy,” Ted begins diffidently but Oliver stops him.

“They never are. I wasn't. But that doesn't make any difference. You've
got to--_n'est-ce pas?_”

“You old bum! Yes. But when I think of it---”

“Don't”

“But leaving out everything else--it seems so damned _cheeky!_ When
Elinor's got everything, including all the money in the world, and I--”

“We talked that over a long time ago, remember? And remember what we
decided--that it didn't matter, in this year and world at least. Of
course I'm assuming that you're really in love with her--”

“I am,” from Ted very soberly. “Oh I am, all right.”

“Well then, go ahead. And, Theodore, I shall watch your antic motions
with the greatest sarcastic delight, both now and in the future--either
way it breaks. Moreover I'll take anybody out of the action that you
don't want around--and if there were anything else I could do--”

“Got to win off my own service,” says Ted. “You know. But thanks all the
same. Only when I think of--some incidents of Paris--and how awful near
I've come to making a complete fool of myself with that Severance woman
in the last month--well--”

“Look here, Ted.” Oliver is really worried. “You're not going to let
that--interfere--are you? Right now?”

“I've got to tell her.” Ted's smile is a trifle painful. “Got to, you
know. Oh not that. But France. The whole business.”

“But good heavens, man, you aren't going to make it the start of the
conversation?”

“Well--maybe not. But it's all got to be--explained. Only way I'll ever
feel decent--and I don't suppose I'll feel too decent then.”

“But Ted--oh it's your game, of course. Only I don't think it's
being--fair--to either of you to tell her just now.”

“Can't help it, Ollie.” Ted's face sets into what Oliver once christened
his “mule-look.” “I've thought it over backwards and sideways and
all around the block--and I can't squirm out of it because it'll be
incredibly hard to do. As a matter of fact,” he pauses, “it'll tell
itself, you know, probably,” he ends, more prophetically than he would
probably care to know.

“Well, I simply _don't_ see--”

“_Must_,” and after that Oliver knows there is very little good of
arguing the point much further. He has known Ted for eight years
without finding out that a certain bitter and Calvinistic penchant for
self-crucifixion is one of his ruling forces--and one of those least
easily deduced from his externals. Still he makes a last effort.

“Now don't start getting all tied up about that. Keep your mind on
Elinor.”

“That's not--hard.”

“Good--I see that you have all the proper reactions. And you'll excuse
me for saying that _I_ don't think she's too good for you--and even if
she were she'd have to marry somebody, you know--and when you put it,
put it straight, and let Paris and everything else you're worrying about
go plumb to hell! And that's good advice.”

“I know it. I'll tell you of course.”

“Well, I should _think_ you would!”

Oliver looks at his watch. “Great Scott--they'll be unmasking in twenty
minutes. And I've got to go back and cut Juliet out of the herd and take
her to supper--”

They rise and look at each other. Then

“Hope this is the last time, Ted, old fel--which isn't any reflection on
the last eight years odd,” says Oliver slowly, and their hands grip once
and hard. Then they both start talking fast as they walk back to the
house to cover the unworthy emotion. But just as they are going in the
door, Oliver hisses into Ted's ear, an advisory whisper,

“Now go and eat all the supper you can, you idiot--it always helps.”




XXXI

The parti-colored harlequin and the young Chinese lady in blue silks are
walking the Italian gardens, talking about nothing in particular.
Ted has managed to discuss the moon--it is high now, a round white
lustre--the night, which is warm--the art of garden decoration, French,
English and Italian--the pleasantness of Southampton after New York--all
with great nervous fluency but so completely as if he had met Elinor for
the first time ten minutes ago that she is beginning to wonder why,
if he dislikes her as much as that, he ever suggested leaving the
dance-floor at all.

Ted, meanwhile, is frantically conscious of the fact that they have
reached the end of the garden, are turning back, and still he is so
cripplingly tongue-tied about the only thing he really wishes to say
that he cannot even get the words out to suggest their sitting down. It
is not until he stumbles over a pebble while passing a small hard marble
seat set back in a nest of hedge that he manages to make his first
useful remark of the promenade.

“Ah--a bench!” he says brightly, and then, because that sounded so
completely imbecile, plunges on.

“Don't you want to sit down a minute, Elinor?--I--you--it's so cool--so
warm, I mean--” He closes his mouth firmly--what a _ghastly_ way to
begin!

But Elinor says “Yes” politely and they try to adapt themselves to the
backless ornamental bench, Ted nervously crossing and recrossing his
legs until he happens to think that Elinor certainly never would marry
anybody with St. Vitus' Dance.

“Can't tell you how nice it's been this time, Elinor. And you've been--”
 There, things are going better--at least, he has recovered his voice.

“Why, you know how much we love to have you, Ted,” says Elinor and Ted
feels himself turn hot and cold as he was certain you never really did
except in diseases. But then she adds, “You and Ollie and Bob Templar,
and, oh, all Peter's friends.”

He looks at her steadily for a long moment--the blue silks of her
costume suit her completely. She is there, black hair and clear eyes,
small hands and mouth pure as the body of a dream and elvish with
thoughts like a pansy--all the body of her, all that people call her.
And she is so delicately removed from him--so clean in all things where
he is not--that he knows savagely within him that there can be no real
justice in a 

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