Harper's Bazaar/Young People's Pride/Part 1
Part I
THE Crowe house at Scarsdale 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 was a long tangled field, hay-feverous with goldenrod and delusively ornamented by the signs of streets that as yet existed only in the brain of the owner of the “development”—but the Crowes were not fashionable people and nine of them managed to live somehow or other in their cramped quarters with a gaiety in genteel poverty that shocked as much as it astonished the very correct young married couple next door.
In fact they were even daring enough to ask friends out over the week-end—and though the accommodations provided for such guests were sketchy in the extreme, the guests always seemed to enjoy it with a pagan heartiness that went beyond the polite hypocrisies of bread-and-butter letters. All the same, the footsteps of Louis Crowe, the son of the house, seemed to falter just a trifle worriedly as he and Ted Billett, his best friend, marched up the path toward the door about twelve-thirty of a cool July evening in that annus mirabilis, 1921. He had forgotten until just now that Anne, his sister, had asked her desk-neighbor at Mode, a certain Mrs. Severance, out over this particular Sunday, and the prospect of a night among pillows in the bathtub did not appeal to him as much in reality as it might have in prospect. His mind went over the various rooms in the house like a chess-player moving pieces on a crowded board. Mother was really marvelous about things like that—but even so it was going to be difficult to the point of impropriety to arrange just where eleven people were actually going to sleep in a house that had been built for two maiden sisters with one servant and an Airedale. Oh, well, Mother could fix it somehow—Mother always did.
Louis' key clicked in the lock—this was fortunately one of the times when four-year-old Jane Ellen, widowed Anne's youngest daughter, 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. Louis switched on the hall light and picked up a letter and a folded note from the card tray.
“Ted, Louis 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.”
Louis passed it to Ted, who read it, grinned, and saluted, nearly knocking over the hat-rack.
“For God's sake!” said Louis 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 up-stairs except an occasional soft rumbling. Louis 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...
Then the queer man who was walking up and down so disturbingly went out the door.
Ted had removed his shoes and was making for the stairs with the exaggerated caution of a burglar in a film.
“Night,” called Louis 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. There was the sound of something soft stubbing against something hard and a muffled “Sonofa—” drifted down the stairs.
“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 garrote him. Night.”
“Night.”
Louis paused for a few moments, 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 noise 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, lit the shaded night light above it, and sat down to read his letter.
It was all Nancy, that letter, from the address, firm and straight as any promises 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 both.
It was Nancy just as some of her clothes were Nancy, soft clear blues and first apple-blossom 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, all the colors the soul, released into its ectasy, has taken for its body invisible, its body of delight most spotless, as lightning might take bright body of rapture and agony from the light clear pallor that softens a sky to night.
Louis read the letter over twice—it was with a satisfaction like that when body and brain are fed at once, invisibly, by the same luster 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, Louis—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, Louis, 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. And anyhow, it wouldn't be bad, if I weren't so silly, I suppose—”
“Waiting hurts, naturally,” and that casual sentence made Louis chillily afraid. 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.
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, still and always on his account
“Oh, felicitous Nancy!” the pen began to scratch. “Your letter—”
Stupid to be so tired when he was writing 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 bewitched, 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.
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 Louis and Nancy will buy when Louis' 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. 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 Louis or Nancy if the next green bus that passed should start climbing into the sky like a clumsy bird.
The first intoxication is still upon them—they have told nobody, except any one 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-filfth, Fifty-sixth, Fifty-seventh—the square in front of the Plaza—that tall chopped bulky tower lit from within like a model in a toy-shop window—motors purring up to its door like thin dark cats, motors purring away. The fountain with the little statue 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 goes Victory, over fear, doubt, over littleness; her gold shoes ring like the noise of a sword made out of moonlight, 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 clamor or sound, 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.
SO the picture came and was gone, like a cut-back flash in a film. And other pictures likewise. 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 Louis, 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 book-keeper and taken Nancy out of her first year in Farmington. Louis had spent nine months on a graduate scholarship in Paris and in 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 quite brilliantly sure of it—Louis 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 Louis 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 Louis—“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 Louis 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, Louis, 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 always after the parting came 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 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 him unescapably, and both being, unfortunately, of a rather high-strung intelligence and youth, recognized it, no matter how much consciousness might deny it.
Not quite so easy as it had seemed to be at first—oh, not on your life, thought Louis, 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 jovially—but those were the things they did best—and neither had certainly 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.
Louis 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
TED and Louis 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 Louis poor And then there was always Elinor, Peter's sister—Ted seemed to Louis' 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 Louis, 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 Louis had formed 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 the corsets as they picked their way as delicately as fat, gorgeous macaws across thy 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 reminded Louis 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 geese. And within that little more than an hour possibly one-third of them would go as far as wetting their hand—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, Louis 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, its hot enough,” from Louis, 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 I 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 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 Louis in the voice of one who is sleep-walking. “A nice quiet story—the Three Bears or Giant the Jack Killer—oh heavens, 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.”
“What kind of a well?” Louis 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 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 inescapable 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 strongest airs of life as priests might guard a lotus, and yet it was neither tenderly unhealthy nor sumptuously weak. A lotus—that is 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 Louis, “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 deathlily 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 Louis' chair.
“Telephone for you, Mr. Crowe. Western Union calling.”
Louis jumped up with suspicious alacrity. “Oh, love, love, love!” crooned Peter. “Oh, love, love, love!”
Louis flushed. “Don't swipe all my butter, you simple cynic!” He knew what it was, of course.
“This is Louis Crowe talking. Will you give me the telegram?”
Nancy and Louis. finding Sunday mails of a dilatory unsatisfactoriness, had made a compact to use the wire on the Sabbath instead. And even now Louis 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 can, somehow. Nancy had an imperial contempt for boiling down attractive sentences to the necessary ten or twenty words. This time, though, the telegram was shortish.
“Mr. Louis 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 Louis, after hanging up the receiver, went back to the dining-room with worry barking and running around his mind like a spoiled puppy.
BACK in town. 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 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 pervasive odor of somebody else wash. Still, during the last eight months, the Gondolier had been a radical bookstore devoted to bloody red pamphlets, a batik shop full of strange limp garments ornamented with decorative squiggles, garments that appear bloody when tried on to fit no part of any human body, and a Roumanian restaurant called “The Brodska,” whose menu seemed to consist of 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 gives all the 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 unescapable 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. The acquaintanceship between the subtle-tempered woman and the young, war-restless man has grown rapidly since their first chance meeting at the Crowes'—they have fallen into the habit of having tea or dinner together quite privately and often by now.
Besides, like most establishments on the verge of bankruptcy, it is such a quaint place to talk—the only other two people in it are a boy with startled hair and an orange smock and a cigarety 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 psychoanalysis 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 scarey 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 at you-—isn't that it?”
“I believe so.”
MRS. SEVERANCE'S eyes waver a little—her mouth seeking for the proper kind of dream.
“Its not much, but it comes quite regularly—the most punctual, old-fashioned-servant sort of a dream.”
“Well?”
“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 cant 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 this 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 gray paper, talking, talking in a voice as dry and rattling as a flapping window-blind 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—these pass. A great nearness, fiercer and more slumberous than any nearness of body takes their place. It wraps the two closer and closer, a spider pinning a soft web out of petals, folding the two with swaths and swaths 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.”
“I really can't prescribe on as little evidence as that,” Rose 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.
“And now I really must be getting back,” Rose 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 really must do it again sometime soon—I'm going to see if there aren't those books with long German names drifting around Folly 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 skilfully 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 any one 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 where any of it can be said.
LOUIS CROWE, at his desk in the copy department of Vanamee and Company, 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 United Steel Frame Pulley Campaign. He realizes that the layouts are important—that has been brought to attention already by several pink memoranda from the head of the department—but an immense distaste for all things in general and advertising in particular has overwhelmed him. He dawdles 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.
The letter is from Easten of Mammoth Magazines—kindly enough—but all hope of selling the serial rights of his novel so 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 Louis 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.
Sanely considered, he supposes he hasn't any business using up a month's meager savings and three small checks for poems that he has hoarded since April in going out to St. Louis Friday. The vice-president wasn't too pleased with letting him take Saturday and half Monday off to do it, either. 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, Louis dear, at least it may be grand if it works out—but, oh, dear, I do want to see how 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 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. Après moi le deluge—après ça 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 fading of sun and sky above him.
They must see each other—they were neither of them quiet people that could love forever at a distance without real hope.
Nancy. He is seeing Nancy, the way she half tilts her head when she has been teasing and suddenly becomes remorseful and wants him to know how much she does love him instead.
A HOT night in the Pullman, too hot to sleep in anything but a series of uneasy drowsings and wakings. Nothing to do but turn from one side to the other peevishly and remember unpleasant things—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 trap.
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 Louis, twisting from one side of his stuffy berth to the other like an uneasy sardine.
“MORE beans, Louis?” says Mrs. Ellicott in a voice like thin syrup, her “generous” voice.
“No, thank you, Ellicott.” Louis manages to look at her politely enough as he speaks, but then his eyes go straight back to Nancy and there as if they wished to be considered permanent attachments. All Louis 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 white sparrow whose feathers make it uncomfortable. It isn't feathers, though, really—it's only Louis. Why can't mother get reconciled to Louis—why can't she?
“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.
Louis wants to help Nancy take away the dishes, and bring in the fruit—they have started to make game out of it already when Mrs. Ellicott's voice enforces order.
“No, Louis. No, please. Please sit still. It is so seldom we have a guest that Nancy and I are apt to forget our manners—”
The fruit. Mrs. Ellicott apologizing for it—her voice implies that she is quite sure Louis doesn't think it good enough for him, but that he ought to feel himself very lucky indeed it isn't his deserts instead. Mr. Ellicott absent-mindedly squirting orange-juice up his sleeve. Louis 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 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 Louis because no one shall every 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 cigarets before his marriage. For twenty years now he has been a member of the Anti-Tobacco League.
And now all that Louis knows is that unless he can talk to Nancy alone, he will start being very rude. After all he and Nancy have not seen each other wakingly for three months—and there is still her “grand news” to tell. Now is the time for Mr. and Mrs. Ellicott to disappear.
MRS. ELLICOTT 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 little while,” she announces, fair to the last, her voice sweeter than ever. “We know you have a great 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, Louis?”
“No, Mrs. Ellicott.”
“Well, her father and myself consider it quite remarkable and we 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 reasonable decision.” She breathes heavily and moves with her appurtenance to the door, secure as an ostrich in the belief that Louis thinks her impartial, even affectionate. They say au revoir very politely—all four—the door shuts on Mr. Elliott's meek back.
Mrs. Ellicott is not very happy, going down-stairs. 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.
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 only like that of two dried desert-travelers 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 Louis half-drowsily.
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.
“Louis 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 her lips hardly moving.
All that Louis 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—Louis 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 Louis have to talk business affairs.
“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 Miss Winters knows the art editor of Harper's Bazar 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 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 Louis it seems as if the floor had come apart under his feet.
Where he has failed so ludicrously and completely, Nancy has 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 only as most human and justified, but because he is young and unreasonable that pride of hers hurts his own.
“That's fine, Nancy,” he says uncertainly. “That's certainly fine!”
But she knows by his voice in a second.
“Oh, Louis, Louis, of course I won't take it if it makes you feel that way, Louis dear. Why, I wouldn't do anything that would hurt you—but Louis, 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 Louis. 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, Louis?” 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 means 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 smash 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. 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 so awfully sorry we couldn't make it go, dear; I tried is hard as I could to make it go but I guess I didn't have the stuff, that's all. 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, Louis, 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, Louis, dear. But, Louis, I never meant it that way. But, Louis, 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, Louis, Louis, yes, but—”
“You're not sure any more?”
“It's different.”
“It's not being certain?”
“Not the way it was at first—but, Louis, we're neither of us the same.”
“Then you aren't sure?”
“I can't—I haven't—oh, Louis, 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—Louis feels a ghastly instant as if he were kissing Nancy after she had died. He is holding a girl in his arms—he can feel her body against him—but it is not Nancy he is holding—it 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 tear 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 a little any more. You remember when we promised that if either of us stopped loving each other we'd tell?”
Nancy is very silent and rather white.
“Yes, Louis.”
“Well, Nancy?”
“Well—”
They look at each other as if they were watching each other burn.
“Good-by, darling, darling, darling!” says Louis, through lips like a marionette's.
Then Nancy feels him take hold of her again—the arms of somebody else in Louis' 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.
LOUIS 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 like 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 drug stores and the moving-picture theaters are still flaringly awake. His eyes read the signs 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.
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.
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—”
Louis lifts his eyes for 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 Louis 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 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 Louis 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's weight.
“I wonder if you could tell me where my hotel is, officer?” Louis began.
“What hotel?” said the policeman uninterestedly. Louis 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 Louis.
“I said 'What hotel?'” The policeman was beginning to be annoyed.
Louis 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. Live in a hotel.”
“Well, what hotel?”
“Oh, I tell you I don't remember,” said Louis 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 what's a matter with you, all right, all right. I know what's a matter with you.”
“So do I.” Louis 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 Louis. “But my hotel—”
“Quit arguin'!” said the policeman in a bark like a teased bulldog.
Louis 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 blue 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.
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 Louis had shut, as if by looking at it very hard indeed she could make it turn into Louis.
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.
Louis 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 Louis 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 cleanly 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 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. Louis 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 Louis 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 July night when both of them were nearly dead with fatigue. It wasn't real. Even after Louis 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.
Louis 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 Louis was going back to New York to-morrow—and if he went back while they were still like this—she knew his train—the ten-six.
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. Louis 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?”
Louis 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 Louis 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 Louis is going down on the blotter as Donald Richardson.
“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 dare say 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 Louis 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 Louis the way mother does to father I'll simply have to leave him and never see him again.” But Mrs. Ellicott goes on.
“If Louis 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. “Louis is a man—Louis 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 Miss 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, Louis 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-six and his train like stiff little soldiers, and mother is talking, talking—
“Not that I ever 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 Louis that's doing this, Louis who, when she cut her finger with the bread-knife making sandwiches, turned funny and white and wanted her to put all sorts of things on it. Louis 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 Louis 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 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 the throat again. There will only be 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. Louis is in it and his face is stiff with surprise and unforgivene 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, Louis, Louis!
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. Miss Winters, dear. Don't you want to speak to her?”
“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—she has really burned herself. For an instant she hears Louis' voice in her ears, low and concerned, sees Louis 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.
IT was three in the afternoon before Louis 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 Louis began to construct a hasty moral defense 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 Louis 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 Louis 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 Louis—Louis Crowe, you know. Is Nancy there?”
Nor does it appear inclined toward lengthy conversation—that 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.” Louis felt too much as if he were fighting for life against something invisible to be careful about his words. “I know we quarreled 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 Louis 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 offense—it was just—”
LOUIS was stifling inside the airless booth—he trickled all over. This was worse than being court-martialed. 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 to-morrow'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?”
Louis 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 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 dinner-time, 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 Louis 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?”
LOUIS, hunched on a bench in the lower level of the Grand Central, regarded his opulent marble surroundings with eyes of bleak distaste. A cindery, seemingly interminable pilgrimage from St. Louis to New York by day-coach, in a car that seemed alive with box-lunches and peevish babies, had not improved his temper. Neither had the ten-minute interview with Vanamee and Company's sleek vice-president in which his resignation had been received with obvious if polite approval. The final irritation had been missing an express to Scarsdale by a matter of seconds—the next train was a local and he would have to wait half an hour for it, and, in the present raw state of his mind, that seemed the last, pettiest and most deliberate insult of all. It was only with a sense of minor refreshment that he now began to curse under his breath—to curse the entire railway system of the United States by individual lines, alphabetically beginning with the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe.
He checked the results of the last few days up on his fingers after consigning the New York, New Haven and Hartford to the depths of the bottomless pit. Index finger—Nancy. Gone. Second finger—job. Just kissed it good-by. Well, that was, after all, no ultimate calamity—he had always hated it and only taken it because it promised money enough to get married on—but even so, you had to have a job if you intended to eat over any considerable period of time. Ring-finger—writing. Crippled. All his writing for the last fifteen months had been for Nancy and more or less about her—take the oil out of a lamp and what was left? Little finger—Ted. Ted.
For a moment he felt very nearly normal. Ted was left. Old Ted. And Ted wouldn't give any sentimental sympathy, thank the Lord—he'd know. Even when everything else had popped to pieces like a string of firecrackers.
Then he frowned, worriedly. This Elinor Piper business.
That would simply have to come through—that was all there was to it. Come through if Elinor had to be hypnotized to make it come. It meant too much to Ted now—Louis had seen that with sympathetic clarity the last time they had been together—in Ted's present state of mind if things went wrong between him and Elinor it meant a smash. A complete one—Ted had never done things by halves.
He smiled without knowing it, remembering Ted and Elinor the last time at Southampton. What a fool he was—of course things would be all right. Everything had been going beautifully, as far as Louis had been able to notice—and rather rapidly, too. Ted was going to be safe. And happy, really happy, without any flourishes around the word. If only there wouldn't come that acrid little doubt as to Ted's capacity for planning a sensible campaign.
Ted was going to be all right. And he, Louis, was beaten. Well, that was all in the game. It was wholly without irony or posing, from something deep and painful in the heart that he thanked whatever bitter invisible lords had made his own mockery for leaving Ted alone. Ted. They had had a friendship. That would go on.
But even as he rose to go to his train he frowned again. That Mrs. Severance. That Mrs. Severance—and Ted?
(To be continued in the July issue)