CHAPTER IX
The war was over. Oliver October Baxter came through without a scratch. He saw two years of hard fighting with the glorious Canadians; when the United States went in, he gave up his hard-earned commission as first lieutenant and was transferred to the American Army. He learned a great deal about red tape before his transfer was effected, and he discovered to his disgust that he knew a great deal less about war than he might reasonably have been supposed to know after two years of slogging along at it under shot and shell from the German Armies. He had to go back to America and enter a training camp, and even then, to employ his own expression, he had the “devil of a time” getting a commission as second lieutenant.
There were so many able young business men and college graduates out for commissions that he just barely managed to scrape through “by the skin of his teeth” in the struggle for honors. The fact that he had had two years of actual experience at the front, part of that time as an officer, did not seem to help him very much with his studies at the “Camp,” nor with the intensive drilling that was supposed to make a soldier of him in three months. Two medals for distinguished service on the field of battle were of absolutely no service to him in the contest that was being waged in the training camp—in fact, he was advised by the major in command that he would better not even speak of them, much less expose them to view.
Then, to his intense chagrin, he was sent from one camp to another—a sort of floating officer—finally winding up in a mid-western division that did not go over seas until the spring of 1918, only a few months before the war ended. Once with the Army in France, however, things took a belated change for the better. Far-sighted and fair-minded officers in high places were not slow in transferring him from the camp far behind the lines to a veteran division up in the battle zone. He went through the Argonne and was close on the bloody heels of the German Army when the last guns in the great conflict were fired. He came out a captain.
In April, 1919, he sailed from Brest and on the tenth of May arrived in Rumley, discharged from the Army and jobless. On the way home he stopped over in Chicago to notify his employers that he would be ready to resume work after a month’s much-needed rest and quiet down in the old town. He was blandly informed that as soon as anything turned up they would be pleased and happy to take him back into the concern, but at present there wasn’t a vacancy in sight—in fact, they were cutting down the operating force wherever it was possible, and so on and so forth. Yes, they remembered perfectly that they had promised him his old place when he returned, but how in God’s name were they to know that the war was going to last as long as it did? He couldn’t expect them to hold a job open for him for nearly four years, could he? Only too glad to take you on again, Baxter, when things begin to pick up—and all that.
Being a captain in the Army and used to plain speaking, he told the astonished general manager what he thought of him and the whole works besides, and airily went his way.
The horrors of war had not affected his spirits. He went over in the first place full of cheer and enthusiasm; he came back without the latter, but indomitably possessed of the former. He had seen grim sights and sickened under the spectacle; he had stood by the side of dying comrades and wept as he would have wept over his own brother; he had known times when life was far harder to bear than the thought of death; and he had said what he believed to be his last prayer a hundred times or more. But when the guns ceased their everlasting roar and the smoke lifted to reveal a blue sky that smiled, he too smiled and was glad to be alive. He had lived on hope through the carnage of what seemed a thousand years; the hope which men, in their bewildered after-joy, were prone to call their luck. It was hope that went over the top with them, but it was luck that saw them through.
And so when he was turned away, empty-handed, from the place where he had proved his worth as a soldier of industry, he was not dismayed. He experienced a lively sense of indignation, he felt outraged, but he did not sit himself down over against the walls of Nineveh to devote a single hour to lamentation.
The injustice rankled. He had heard of other men coming back to find their places occupied by indispensables, but it had never occurred to him thathisbosses would “welch” on their promise. He had never for an instant doubted, and yet when he was turned away he was not surprised. It seemed odd to him that he was not surprised. Perhaps it was because he had reached the point where nothing could surprise him. In any case, he strode out of the old familiar offices with his chin high, enjoying a very good opinion of himself and an extremely poor one of his late employers. It did not occur to him to feel the slightest uneasiness about the future. He would be no time at all in landing a good job with any one of the half dozen big concerns that had tried in vain to get him away from the V—— Company. He would take his month or two of idleness down in the old town, where he could realize on the dreams and the longings that had never ceased to attend him, awake or asleep, through all the black ages spent in France.
This time there was no delegation at the station to meet him. Too many of Rumley’s young men had preceded him home from the war. He was no better than the rest of them and deserved no more. His father and Sammy Parr were waiting for him when the train pulled in.
“By thunder, Oliver, it beats the dickens how you work into my plans so neatly,” cried the latter. “You always seem to be coming home at the right minute. You couldn’t have timed it better if you’d—oh, excuse me, Mr. Baxter, I forgot you hadn’t—er, here’s your father, Oliver.”
Old Oliver came shuffling up from the background. He eyed his son narrowly.
“What’s this, I hear about them not taking you back on your old job?” he demanded. He extended his hand, which young Oliver gripped in both of his.
“Aren’t you glad to see me back, alive and well, dad?” he cried. “Not even scratched, or gassed or shell-shocked or anything. You act as though you—”
“Of course, I’m glad you’re back, sonny—of course, I am. I’ve been praying for this ever since you went away. I don’t see how on earth you ever escaped being killed. I—I guess it wasn’t meant for you to die that way. Seems so, at any rate. But what did I tell you about them holding your job for you? What did I tell you? Didn’t I tell you just what would happen? Didn’t I say you’d never get it back? Didn’t I say you were a fool for giving up a seven thousand dollar job to go over and mix up in a war that wasn’t any of our business? Well, you see what’s happened. Just what I said would happen. Here you are, a grown man, out of a job and probably won’t be able to get one in God knows how long. I—”
“Oh, I’m not down and out, you know, dad,” broke in young Oliver, slapping his father on the shoulder. “I’ve got quite a bunch of money in the bank and I’ve got my health and a few million dollars’ worth of brains left. So, cheer up! I’m not worrying. I learned a long time ago how to land on my feet—and that’s the way I’ll land this crack.”
“Course you’re not worrying,” was his father’s sour retort. “You’ve got me to fall back on, with a good home and grub and a darned fine business to drop into when I’m dead and gone. Four-fifths of the fellers who served in the army from this town alone are back here now, loafing and living off of their folks, and kicking like a bay steer because the government won’t do something for them. I hope you ain’t going to be one of that kind, Oliver. I hope to God you ain’t.”
His son could hardly believe his ears. He was bewildered, hurt.
“If you mean, dad, that I am counting on living off of you—of sponging on you—why, put it out of your mind. Nothing like that is going to happen. I did plan to stay a month or two, just for a rest and to be with you for a while—but if you’d rather have me beat it back to Chicago to look for a job, I’ll only hang around a few days.”
“I want you to stay here as long as you like, sonny,” cried old Oliver, melting. “I don’t want you ever to go away again. Maybe I sounded as if I did—but—but, I don’t. I’m getting purty old—seventy-four last month—and I guess I’m not good for much longer. Don’t you get it into your head that I don’t want you to stay here in Rumley. Nothing would suit me better than to turn the business over to you right now and let me retire, but I guess it’s not your idea to go into the retail hardware business.”
“If you need me, dad, I—I will stay,” said Oliver, swallowing hard.
“Oh, I don’t need you yet,” said his father, crusty once more. “I can get along, I guess. I’ve done it for a good many years, and I’m not all in yet, as the feller says. There was a time when I thought of selling out and moving into another state to live, but I’ve given that idea up.”
“Still living in dread of what that darned old fraud said the day I was born, eh? Well, the agony will soon be over. A year and a half more, isn’t it? That will end the tale, and I will live happily forever afterward.”
Sammy Parr was consulting his vest-pocket note book.
“Just one year, six months and twenty-one days,” said he.
“Good Lord, Sam! Haveyougone off your nut, too?”
“Vital statistics, old boy. It’s my business, you know. Come on; I’ve got my car out here. Your father’s Ford died last fall and he’s been an orphan ever since. Grab up some of this junk and I’ll bring the rest. Never mind, Mr. Baxter. We can manage it.”
“Drop me at the store,” said old Oliver crossly.
Sammy gave young Oliver a significant look. “All right, Mr. Baxter. We’ll wait outside for you. I’ve got nothing but time on my hands to-day, and besides I want to talk to Oliver about a—er—something private.”
As the two young men hurried across the platform with the bags and bundles, Sammy found opportunity to say to Oliver:
“He’ll be in a good humor in a minute or two. It’s just a habit he’s fallen into since you’ve been away. I guess it’s that infernal gypsy business. He’s as peevish as blazes a good part of the time.”
They stopped in front of the Baxter store and the old man reluctantly got out of the car. It was plain to be seen that he had not intended to stop there at all but was now obliged to do so to save his face.
“I won’t be a minute,” he said, affecting a briskness that was calculated to deceive his son. Then he darted into the store, where, from a shadowy corner in the stove section, he shifted his uneasy gaze from the clock on the wall to the car at the curb.
“How’s your wife, Sam?” inquired Oliver.
Sammy grinned. “Little premature, ain’t you?”
“Premature?”
“Sure. I’m not going to be married till next week.”
“Oh, I say, old chap, I’m sorry. I hadn’t heard of Laura’s death. Her namewasLaura, wasn’t it?”
“Yep. And it still is. But her last name isn’t Parr any longer. It’s Collins. We’ve been divorced for five or six months, Oliver. Don’t look so darned serious. I’m not sensitive. It’s the way things are done these days. Nobody gets married for keeps nowadays. It’s not supposed to be proper. The idea is to try it out for a year or so and if it doesn’t work, zing! You up and get divorced. Pretty much the same thing as an armistice. The war has changed everything. Quite a few old married people I know of are taking advantage of the new order of things. I’ve had to change the beneficiaries in four or five policies already. They’ve suddenly awoke to the fact that it’s easy. God knows where it will end. But I haven’t time now to tell you how Laura and I came to split up. Some other time, if you’ll just remind me of it. The question of the hour is, will you be best man again for me next week, old boy? I’m marrying the sweetest little woman that ever came down the pike, and this time it’s for keeps. No monkey business. Her first husband was a Lieutenant Higby—we were in the same camp for months and months. That’s where I met her. Well, he didn’t appreciate her. That’s the long and short of it. Got to running around after other women. She up and canned him. Long and short of it. Laura, God bless her, fell in love with a chap named Collins. I don’t blame her, mind you—not a bit of it. She’s as square as anything. Of course, it hurt my pride a little when she ran away with him—but it simplified matters. I’m sure you will like Muriel. She’s as fine as they make ’em. We’re to be married next Thursday afternoon. Up in the city. Her people live there. How about it? Will you repeat for me? I promise you it will be the last time, Oliver. Never again. We both know what we’re about this time. We’ve cut all our wisdom teeth—and, by Gosh, if you ask me, I’ve had a couple pulled.”
“We had a very jolly time at your first wedding, Sammy,” sighed Oliver. “Jane was maid-of-honor and—well, I would have sworn that you two were the kind who would stick.”
“So would I,” agreed Sammy cheerfully. “We can’t very well ask Jane to be maid-of-honor this time,” he went on. “Religious scruples, you see. Minister’s daughter. Wouldn’t look right. I mean, wouldn’t look right for her. But it’s different with you. You haven’t any religious scruples. What say? Will you do it?”
“Certainly. Rumley seems to be keeping up with the times, Sammy. When I was a kid, nobody ever dreamed of getting a divorce. It was looked upon as a—er—a sort of a crime.”
“Still is by some of the old-timers,” confessed Sammy. “Here comes your father. Don’t say anything about me being married next week. I’m closing up a deal to renew his fire insurance to-morrow or next day, and if he knew I was thinking of committing bigamy next week, he’d turn me down cold. He calls it bigamy, you see.”
“I see. By the way, where is Jane, Sammy?”
He remembered having asked that very question when he returned after a former protracted absence—and how many times had he asked it even before that? Every time he came home from college for a brief visit, every time he met Mr. Sage on the street—why, all his life he had been asking: “Where is Jane?”
“Jane Sage? Oh, she’s around, same as ever. Things are a lot easier for Mr. Sage now. I guess maybe you haven’t heard about his brother dying out in California and leaving him quite a bit of money. Yep. About a hundred thousand dollars, they say—safely invested, mostly at six per cent. The old boy still sticks to his job as preacher, though. He’s getting eighteen hundred a year now from the church. I’m glad of it. He gets a new suit of clothes every once in a while, and Jane doesn’t have to make her own dresses as she used to. It looks like a pretty serious affair between her and Doc Lansing. Been going on now for nearly a year.”
“What’s that?” demanded Oliver, startled.
“I guess it’s all happened since you went away. Why, sure it has. Doc’s only been practicing here since last summer. Got hurt over in France in 1917 and had to take his discharge. Went over early in ’Seventeen in the Medical Corps. Leg smashed. Limps. Fine feller, though.”
“I don’t seem to remember him,” said Oliver, dully.
“His father is president of the new bank here—that brick building down there at the corner of Clay and Pershing Streets.”
“Pershing Street?”
“Yep. Used to be Ridley’s Lane.”
“Oh.” Oliver was feeling a little like Rip Van Winkle. “You say she’s—er—in love with him?”
“Looks that way,” said Sammy, indifferently. “He’s dead gone on her, that’s sure. I had him in not long ago for the baby. He’s all right. I forgot to tell you that the court gave the kid to me for eight months every year—four months to Laura. All right, Mr. Baxter. Hop in. I’ll snake you home in no time. Hang on to your hat.”
The volatile, insouciant Mr. Parr employed the correct word when he said “snake,” for he wriggled a swift and serpentinous way through the traffic of Clay Street in his noisy red roadster, keeping up a running fire of conversation all the time, much of it being drowned by the louder fire of the muffler cut-out—which he used unsparingly in place of his horn in tight pinches.
“There’s Jane on ahead,” he sang out to Oliver as they whizzed across Pershing Street.
“Where?” cried Oliver, starting up.
“Back there,” replied Sammy, with a jerk of his head.
Oliver twisted in the seat and looked over his shoulder. Jane was standing in the middle of the sidewalk, staring after the red roadster. He half-rose and waved his hand to her. She did not respond at once. The car was swinging into a cross street before she recovered from her astonishment. Then she waved her hand—and the last he saw of her she was standing stock-still in the middle of the sidewalk.
“Say, what the—what’s the rush?” he roared. “I want to speak to Jane. Stop the damn thing, will you? Let me out. I’ll run back and—”
“Keep your shirt on,” chirped Sammy. “I’ll run you clear around the block and we’ll head her off. Quicker than backing and turning in this—”
“Go ahead!” commanded Mr. Baxter sharply. “Let’s get home. You can see Jane to-morrow or next day,” he shouted to his son.
“Oh, I say, dad!”
“If you’d sooner see her than me—all right. All right! Turn around, Sammy, and take him back. Let me out. I’ll walk the rest of the way home.”
“Drive on, Sam,” said Oliver, sinking back in the seat.
Presently Mr. Baxter cackled. He was in high good humor again. “Say,” he said, “I fooled the whole crowd of ’em. I told Joe and the rest of ’em you wouldn’t be coming down till to-morrow. Pretty smart trick, eh? Joe’ll be so mad he’ll pay me the twenty dollars he owes me, claiming he don’t want to have anything more to do with me. He-he-he!”
Oliver was silent. Sammy snorted and then got very red in the face.
“I had to tell Serepty Grimes,” went on Mr. Baxter, as if apologizing to himself. “She’s keeping house for me now, and so I had to tell her. I didn’t tell her till just about an hour ago, though. She was as mad as a wet hen.”
“Aunt Serepta keeping house for you?”
“Yes. Have you got any objections?”
“None whatever, dad. I think it’s great.”
“Well,” began the old man, slightly mollified, “I’m glad it suits you.”
“I wouldn’t have thought she’d give up her own nice little house to—Don’t tell she’s in financial difficulties, dad.”
“She’s better off than she ever was. She sold her house and lot and the Grimes sawmill two years ago, and now she’s living off the fat of the land. She was the one who proposed the housekeeper scheme, not me. I tried to argue her out of it. Wasn’t any use. I said that people would be sure to talk if she came over and lived at my house. Make a regular scandal out of it. But she just laughed and said nothing in the world would tickle her so much as to have people say complimentary things about her at her age. I was a long time figuring out what she meant. She’s sixty-nine. She says I ought to feel the same way about it, me being seventy-four. ‘Let ’em talk,’ says she, and after a while she got me to saying ‘let ’em talk.’ But the cussed part of it is, nobody thinks there’s anything scandalous about it. There hasn’t been a derned bit of talk. The only thing people say, far as I can make out, is that it’s a mighty nice arrangement. What the dickens are you laughing at, Sam?”
“I just ran over a hen,” lied Samuel promptly.
CHAPTER X
June was well along before Oliver began seriously to contemplate bringing his self-styled “vacation” to an end. May had been glorious. Not since the year he left college had he known what it was to be idle and, in a manner of speaking, independent. He revelled in privileges that had been denied him for years—such as lying abed in the morning till he felt good and ready to turn out; strolling aimlessly whither he wished without troubling himself over the thought that he had to get back at a given time; loafing;—Lord, he couldn’t remember that there ever had been a time when he actually enjoyed the dishonorable luxury of loafing!—on street corners, in Fry’s drug store, in the public library, on friendly lawns and front porches; fishing, tramping, motoring, reading—all the things he had dreamed of in the black days across the sea.
The country was green and fresh and sparkling with the glories of a summer just taking over the heritage of a blithe and bountiful spring. The dust and grit of jaded August were still far enough away to be unconsidered; the roadside bushes and hedges, the trees and the grass were without the coat of gray that settles down upon them as summer ages; the brooks and the creeks were cool and laughing in a world of plenty, disdainful of the drought that was sure to fall upon and suck them in the blistering “dog days.”
Even the sinister stretches of Death Swamp, across which he looked from the oak-shaded citadel that he would always call home, were not so repelling as they had been in days of yore. The pools, the hummocks, the patches of defiant reeds, the black shades of the quagmires seemed oddly to have lost much of their ugliness; the vastness that used to appall him was gone, just as the old church down the lane seemed to have shrunk from an immense, overpowering structure into a pitiful little shanty supporting a ridiculous little steeple. The swamp was green and almost kindly in its serenity; the wall of willows that surrounded it was greener still and no longer the horrifying barrier beyond which no man dared to tread; the soft blue of the June sky lay upon the still and supposedly bottomless pond in the middle of these useless acres.
But at night—ah, that was different! The swamp turned grim and dismal and forbidding. The grown man became once more the little boy as he looked out over the moonlit waste or tried to pierce its black shadows on a starless night; the same old creepy sensations of dread and terror stole over him, and he who knew not the meaning of fear shivered.
During the first week he spent many happy, care-free hours with Jane Sage. They took long walks through country lanes, visited the old haunts he had known as smuggler, pirate and brigand, and marveled to find that they were still boy and girl. It was hard for him to believe that this tall, beautiful, glowing creature was the Jane Sage of another day, hard for him to realize that this ripe, mature, fully developed woman with the calm, clear eyes of understanding and the soft, deep voice, had once been a spindling, giggling girl in pinafores and pigtails, and later a half-formed maid in unnoticeable shirt waists and ill-hanging skirts. She reminded him that she was twenty-five. Why shouldn’t she be grown-up at twenty-five? What was surprising in that? Everybody else grew up and got old, didn’t they?
“Yes,” said he, “but somehow you seem to have grown up differently from other people. As if magic had something to do with it.”
“I was as grown-up when you went off to France four years ago as I am now. A girl doesn’t change much between twenty-one and twenty-five, you know.”
“Why, you were just out of short dresses when I went to France.”
She laughed. “Shows what little notice you took of me,” she gurgled. “And all the time you were over there you were thinking of me as an overgrown schoolgirl, I suppose. That is, if you thought of me at all.”
“Oh, I thought of you a great deal. But you’re right. I did think of you as you were when I went to Chicago to work—just a pretty, big-eyed, high-school girl with bony elbows and skinny arms—and you were as flat as a board. Why, good Lord, Janie, hasn’t anybody ever told you that you’re old enough to be married?”
“I am not without confidential friends,” she replied demurely, a soft, warm flush spreading from throat to cheek.
This was in the first week of his visit. It was early evening and he lounged contentedly among cushions at the foot of the steps leading up to the parsonage veranda—an “improvement” that had followed close upon Mr. Sage’s windfall. Jane sat on an upper step, her back against the railing, her legs stretched out before her in graceful abandon. The porch light behind cast its quite proper glow down upon the tranquil picture; it fell upon the crown of Jane’s dark, wavy hair, scantily touching with shadowy softness the partly lowered face which, with seeming indifference, she kept turned away from him. She was looking pensively down the dim-lit, cottage-lined street that cut through what once had been the barren tract known as Sharp’s Field.
Oliver had fastened a sort of proprietory claim upon her as soon as he arrived in town. He took it for granted that old conditions had not been altered by the lapse of years nor by the transformations of nature; it did not occur to him that their relationship could or should be governed by a new set of laws.
And suddenly, on this quiet June evening, came the shock that put an end to the old order of things: the astonishing realization that Jane was old enough to be married! She was no longer a simple playmate. She was old enough to be somebody’s wife—aye, more than that, she was old enough to be the mother of children!
He looked up at her out of the corner of his eye, as if at some strange creature that baffled his understanding. A woman! Jane Sage a woman! Yes, there was the woman’s look in her thoughtful eyes, the woman’s mold of chin and cheek and temple, the graceful curves of a woman’s body, the round throat and the firm, shapely breast of glorious womanhood. A queer little thrill ran over him—the thrill of discovery. This was succeeded by a smarting sense of mortification which found expression in an apologetic murmur:
“And I’ve been behaving right along just as if you were still a blooming infant.”
“Instead of a withering old maid,” she remarked, affecting a lugubrious sigh.
“Oh, I say, you—why, hang it all, Jane, if you turn out to be an old maid I’ll—I swear I’ll not believe there’s a God or anything. It would be monstrous—inhuman.”
“Sometimes we can’t help it,” said she.
“It’s darned hard for me to think of you as a grown woman, but it’s even harder to conceive of you as an old maid.”
“You’re getting on in years yourself, old boy,” said she tauntingly. “Aren’t you afraid of becoming a crusty old bachelor?”
He did not answer. Apparently he had not heard her. He was deep in thought. After a long silence he spoke.
“What sort of a chap is Lansing, Jane?”
She started, and for a moment her eyes were fixed intently on his half-averted face. There was an odd, startled expression in them.
“He is very nice,” she answered.
“So everybody says. He struck me as an uncommonly decent, high-minded fellow. Knows a lot more to-day, of course, than he’ll know when he gets a little older. Just out of medical college, isn’t he?”
“He was overseas in 1917,” she replied, a trace of warmth in her voice. “He had been an interne for more than a year when he enlisted. He’s young, of course—but we are all young once, aren’t we? He is considered a very able—”
“Lord love you, Jane,” he broke in hastily, “I’m not questioning his ability or his record. He’s got a smashed leg to show for his work over there, and that’s more than I’ve got. As for his—”
“You have two or three medals,” she broke in softly. “You got them for bravery, didn’t you?”
“No,” he replied, shaking his head. “I got them for foolishness. Fools rush in where angels fear to tread! I had a fool’s luck, that’s all. The battlefields and trenches were full of dead men who ought to have had ten medals to my one. Lansing, for instance—wasn’t he hurt in an air raid over a field hospital a few kilometers back of the lines?”
“Yes.”
“I sometimes think, in fact, I know—that it takes more real courage to fight with your back to the enemy than it does to face him—if you see what I mean. It’s much easier to be brave in the light than it is in the dark. Besides,” he went on in his dry, whimsical manner, “you know which way to run if you can see the enemy coming toward you. And usually you run away from him a lot faster than you run toward him. I know I did.”
“You used to be a very good runner,” she said, smiling. “But that was ages ago.”
“Ages,” he agreed, and then both fell silent.
They watched the approach of an automobile along the tree-lined street. It slowed down as it neared the Sage home, coming to a stop at the front gate. Jane shifted her position quickly. She uncrossed her legs, drew them up into a less comfortable position, and attended to some slight though perhaps unnecessary rearrangement of her skirt. This action did not escape the notice of Oliver. It was significant. It established the line she drew between him and other men. She didn’t mind him and she did mind—well, say, Lansing, for it was the young doctor who clambered out of the car and came up the walk.
The house stood back a hundred feet or more from the street, so Oliver, recognizing the newcomer, had ample time to say to Jane, with a mischievous gleam in his eye as he looked up at her:
“Hullo! Here comes the doctor. Why didn’t you tell me some one was sick in the house?”
“Sh! He will hear you,” cautioned Jane, frowning at him.
“Bless your heart, Jane,” he whispered impulsively, and again she looked at him in stark surprise.
Young Lansing walked with a slight limp. He was a tall, shock-haired, good-looking chap of twenty-five or six. He had the manner of one absolutely cocksure of himself—no doubt an admirable trait in one of his calling—and there were people who did not quite approve of him because he seemed to know as much as if not more than the old and time-tried practitioners of the town. He had new-fangled ideas, new methods, and he never by any chance so far forgot himself as to allude to an ailment or remedy in terms other than profoundly scientific. After hearing him classify your symptoms, it was impossible for you to deny that he was a young man of superlative attainments. But when you rushed around to the drug store with your prescription, believing yourself to be in the grip of a strange and horrific malady, and found that you had an ordinary sore throat and were to let the same old potash tablets dissolve in your mouth just as you had always done, you somehow felt that young Dr. Lansing was a trifle over-educated. He was, at twenty-six, what you would call bumptious. Nevertheless, he was a fine, earnest, likeable fellow—and even the most ignorant of patients would just as soon be ill in Latin as in plain English so long as he pulls through.
“Good evening, Jane,” said he, as he came up to the steps. “How are you, Captain Baxter? Wonderful night, isn’t it?”
“Wonderful,” said Oliver, who wasn’t thinking at all of the physical aspects of the night.
“Don’t be a pig, Oliver,” cried Jane. “Hand over a couple of those cushions to Dr. Lansing. You look like a Sultan completely surrounded by luxury.”
“Don’t bother,” interposed Lansing hastily. “I shan’t mind sitting here on the step. Doctors get used to—Oh, thanks, Captain. Since you force them upon me.”
Twenty minutes later, Oliver looked at his wrist-watch, uttered an exclamation, and sprang to his feet.
“I must be going, Jane,” he said. “Due at Sammy Parr’s house half an hour ago. I’m standing up with him at his wedding to-morrow, Doctor. Marriage is a complaint you can have more than once, it seems. It’s Sammy’s second attack.”
“No cure for it, I believe,” said Lansing, arising. “Not necessarily fatal, however.”
“If taken in time it can be prevented,” quoth Oliver, airily. “The symptoms are unmistakable.”
“Haven’t you ever been exposed to it?” inquired Lansing, with a grin.
“Frequently. It takes two to catch it, though. That’s how I’ve managed to escape. So long, Jane. I shan’t see you again for a few days. Going up for the wedding to-morrow and expect to stay in the city for a day or two. Good night, Doctor.”
He took himself off in well-simulated haste. He had not been slow to size up the situation. He wasde trop. A certain constraint had fallen upon the young couple at the opposite side of the steps. He had sustained the brunt of conversation for some time, notwithstanding several determined efforts on Jane’s part to do her share. Lansing seemed to have become absolutely inarticulate.
As he strode off down the street he was conscious of an extremely uncomfortable feeling that they were glad to be rid of him. Indeed, now that he thought of it, Jane had not seemed especially pleased when he dropped in shortly after supper. He recalled her long silences and the way she kept her gaze fixed on the street. Yes, they were glad to be rid of him. Any one could see that with half an eye. He smarted a little. It hurt him to think that Jane didn’t want him around. Now that she was a woman she didn’t want him hanging around. She wanted somebody else. Somehow it didn’t seem natural.
But then, he philosophized, why wasn’t it natural? She was old enough to be thinking seriously of getting married, old enough to have been in love a half dozen times or more—only he couldn’t conceive of Jane being so silly and vacillating as all that—and she certainly had a right to be annoyed with him if he came meddling around—He stopped short in his tracks, a queer little chill of dismay striking in upon him. For a moment he felt utterly desolate and bewildered. He felt lost. Why, it meant that he and Jane couldn’t be playmates or chums any longer.
Without quite knowing what he was doing, he turned and looked back in the direction from which he had come. He saw the little red tail-light far up the street, standing guard, so to speak, in front of the parsonage. A red light signified danger. It means “steer clear,” “go slow,” “beware.”
Jamming his hands into his pockets he resumed his way homeward, but now he walked slowly, his head bent in thought. Presently his face began to brighten, and soon he was grinning delightedly.
“Bless her heart,” he was saying to himself. “It’s great! What a mucker I am to begrudge her anything. I hope this guy is good enough for her, that’s all. If he isn’t—” here his face darkened again—“if he doesn’t treat her right after he gets her, I’ll make him wish he’d never been born.” His cogitations became more expansive. After a while they led him to strong decisions. “It’s up to me to give him a clear field. No butting in as if I owned the house and Jane and everything. It’s all right for me to say I’m an old friend, and all that, but old friends can make damned nuisances of themselves. I know how I’d feel if I was in love with a girl and some idiotic old friend kept on horning in on everything. Why, I’ve been up at Jane’s every night since I got to town—most of the afternoons, too. Monopolizing her. Making her unhappy. Making him—Yes, I’ve got to cut it out. It isn’t fair. She’s in love with him—at least, it looks that way. It’s going to spoil my visit down here, but I’ve got to do it. The town won’t seem natural or like home if I can’t play around with Jane—but, my Lord, our play days are over. He seems like a decent chap. I wonder how Mr. Sage feels about it? Heigh-ho! It certainly does beat the devil the way the war has turned everything upside down. Nothing is the same. It never can be the same. Let’s see—what did I say I had to do? Oh, yes—see Sammy Parr about something or other.”
And yet, with the best intentions in the world, he was not allowed to carry them out. Jane had something to say about it. She met him face to face in the street three days after Sammy Parr’s wedding, and looking straight into his eyes, asked:
“What is the matter, Oliver?”
“Matter?”
“Yes. What have I done?”
“Done?”
“Don’t be stupid. Have I offended you? Why haven’t you been up to see me?”
He decided to be quite frank about it. “I guess you know the reason.”
“I don’t know of any reason why you shouldn’t come to see me, unless it’s because you don’t care to.”
“See here, Jane, we’ve always been pals. I know you like me just as much as you ever did, and I’d jump off of that building over there head first for your sake. I don’t know exactly how things stand with you and Lansing. I don’t think you are engaged to be married. If that were the case, I’m sure you would have told me so, but—”
“We are not engaged to be married,” she said quietly.
“I’m not going to ask whether you are in love with him. It’s none of my business. It’s pretty generally understood that he is in love with you. Let me finish. I will admit I’ve been making a few inquiries. I have found out that up to the time he came upon the field you had any number of young men calling on you—And I’ll bet my head they were all in love with you. According to gossip, he seems to have the inside track—so much so, in fact, that all of the others have dropped out of the running. You see hardly any one now but Lansing. And so, while I’m not a suitor, it’s only fair and square of me to keep out of the—”
Her free, joyous laugh interrupted him.
“Oh, you don’t know how relieved I am,” she cried. “I thought it was something really serious. Something I had done to offend you. So that’s the explanation, is it? You wanted to give me every chance in the world to catch a beau—and to keep him. It’s awfully kind of you, Oliver. Quixotic and silly and presumptuous—but kind. I am glad you’ve told me. As you say, it is none of your business. So I shan’t burden you with my affairs. There is no reason why you should make me miserable and unhappy, however, just because you want to be what you call fair and square. It’s just dirt mean of you, that’s what it is. So now you know how I feel. Why, suppose I were in love with some one—even suppose I were engaged—is that any reason why the oldest friend I have in the world should turn his back on me and—”
“Now, now! Don’t lose your temper, Jane!”
“I’m not angry. I’m hurt. You’ve been in love with loads of girls—heaven knows how many that I don’t know anything about—but has that ever made any difference in my friendship for you? Indeed it hasn’t. You—”
“Then youarein love with Lansing?” he broke in recklessly.
“I haven’t said so, have I? Besides there is only one person who has a right to ask me whether I’m in love with him or not and that is Doctor Lansing himself.”
“That was one straight to the point of the jaw,” cried he, with a grimace.
“So you needn’t feel you are doing me a good turn by avoiding me,” she went on. “On the contrary, you are putting me in an extremely unenviable position. What do you think people will say if you—of all persons—drop me like a hot potato and—”
“Now, listen, Jane,” he began defensively. “I thought I was doing the right thing. You see, it isn’t the same as it would be if I were a contender. Good Lord, can you see me standing aside in favor of another fellow if I was in love with you? I should say not! I’d stay him out if it took all nighteverynight for ten years. But I want to play the game. Why, if I keep on coming to see you morning, noon and night, I’ll scare Lansing off and he—he’ll take to drink or something like that,” he wound up whimsically.
“I don’t believe even as redoubtable a character as you could scare him off, my dear Oliver,” said she, not without a trace of irony.
“Well, anyhow—” began Oliver lamely—“anyhow, I’ve explained and it doesn’t seem to have done a particle of good.”
“Are you coming to see me?”
“Certainly. If you want me to.”
“Just as if there were no such person as Dr. Lansing?”
“He isn’t easy to overlook, you know.”
“I dare say if I were to ask him to overlook you, Oliver, he would do it for my sake—with pleasure.”
“Ouch!”
“When are you coming to see me?”
“This evening,” said he promptly. “Unless you have a previous engagement,” he hurriedly qualified in justice to his good intentions.
Jane smiled. “Doctor Lansing has quite an extensive practice,” she remarked dryly. “He can’t devote every evening to me, you know.”
And so June drew toward an end with Jane and Oliver back on the old footing—not quite the same as before, owing to the latter’s secret conviction that he was playing hob with the doctor’s peace of mind, although that young gentleman failed surprisingly to reveal any signs of an inward disturbance. On the contrary, he didn’t seem to mind Oliver at all—an attitude that was not without its irritations.
The “committee of three,” satisfied that he was safe for the time being, adopted the welcome policy of letting Oliver alone. Joseph Sikes was so vehemently concerned over the Eighteenth Amendment that he had little time for anything else—not, he insisted, because he was a drinking man or that he couldn’t get along without it, but because he had for once abandoned his own party and had weakly helped to elect men to a legislature that had betrayed the state into the hands of the “sissies.” He invariably spoke of the “dry” advocates as “sissies.”
Oliver’s otherwise agreeable and whilom stay in Rumley was marred by his father’s increasing despondency and irritation over the fact that he not only was out of a job but apparently was making no effort to obtain one. There were times when the old man’s scolding became unbearable, and but for the pleadings of Serepta Grimes and the counsel of Mr. Sage, Oliver would have packed his bags and departed.
“Don’t pay any attention to him, Oliver,” begged Serepta. “He’s cranky, that’s all. He don’t mean what he says. It would break his heart if you were to get mad and go off and leave him.”
“But I can’t stand being called a loafer, and a good-for-nothing, and a lazy hound, and—”
“You must overlook it, Oliver. He’s old and he has worried so terribly over what that gypsy said—”
“All right—all right, Aunt Serepta,” he would say, patiently. “I’ll put up with it. I know he’s fond of me. I wouldn’t hurt him for the world. But sometimes it gets on my nerves so I have an awful time keeping my temper. How would you like to be called a long-legged sponge?”
He grinned and so did she. “I think I’d like it,” chuckled dumpy little Serepta. “It would be stretchin’ something more than the imagination to give me a pair of long legs, my boy.”
“I’m not asking him for money,” grumbled Oliver. “I’ve got a little laid by. Enough to tide me over for quite a while. He seems to think I’m scheming to get my hands on some of his. In fact, he said so the other day when I merely mentioned that if I could scrape up a few extra thousand I could triple it in no time by draining all this end of the swamp and turning it into as fine pasture land as you’d find in the state. I even took him down to the swamp and showed him that it is possible and feasible. He called me a rattle-brained idiot.”
“Well,” said Serepta gently, “maybe you can carry out the plan after he is gone, Oliver. He’s pretty old. He will leave everything he has to you when he dies. He is a very thrifty man and he has prospered. So you will be pretty well off.”
“God knows I would like him to live to be a hundred, Aunt Serepta—so let’s not talk of his dying.”