Oliver paused for a few minutes, waiting for the crash that would proclaim that Ted had stumbled over something and waked Dickie beyond redemption. But there was nothing but a soft gurgling of water from the bathroom and then, after a while, a slight but definite addition to the distant beehive noises of sleep in the house. He smiled, moved cautiously into the dining room, sat down at the small sharp-cornered desk where all the family correspondence was carried on and from which at least one of the family a day received a grievous blow in the side while attempting to get around it; lit the shaded light above it and sat down to read his letter.
It was all Nancy, that letter, from the address, firm and straight as any promise she ever gave, but graceful as the curl of a vine-stem, gracile as her hands, with little unsuspected curlicues of humor and fancy making the stiff “t's” bend and twisting the tails of the “e's,” to the little scrunched-up “Love, Nancy” at the end, as if she had squeezed it there to make it look unimportant, knowing perfectly that it was the one really important thing in the letter to him. Both would take it so and be thankful without greediness or a longing for sentimental “x's,” with a sense that the thing so given must be very rich in little like a jewel, and always newly rediscovered with a shiver of pure wonder and thanking, or neither could have borne to have it written so small.
It was Nancy just as some of her clothes were Nancy, soft clear blues and first appleblossom pinks, the colors of a hardy garden that has no need for the phoenix-colors of the poppy, because it has passed the boy's necessity for talking at the top of its voice in scarlet and can hold in one shaped fastidious petal, faint-flushed with a single trembling of one serene living dye, all the colors the wise mind knows and the soul released into its ecstasy has taken for its body invisible, its body of delight most spotless, as lightning takes bright body of rapture and agony from the light clear pallor that softens a sky to night.
Oliver read the letter over twice—it was with a satisfaction like that when body and brain are fed at once, invisibly, by the same lustre of force, that he put it away. One part of it, though, left him humanly troubled enough.
“Miss Winters, the old incubus, came around and was soppy to mother as usual yesterday—the same old business—I might be studying in Paris, now, instead of teaching drawing to stupid little girls, if I hadn't 'formed' what she will call 'that unfortunate attachment.' Not that I minded, really, though I was angry enough to bite her when she gave a long undertaker's list of Penniless Authors' Brides. But it worries mother—and that worries me—and I wish she wouldn't. Forgive me, Ollie—and then that Richardson complex of mother's came up again—”
“Waiting hurts, naturally,—and I'm the person who used to wonder about girls making such a fuss about how soon they got married—but, then, Ollie, of course, I never really wanted to get married before myself and somehow that seems to make a difference. But that's the way things go—and the only thing I wish is that I was the only person to be hurt. We will, sooner or later, and it will be all the better for our not having grabbed at once—at least that's what all the old people with no emotions left are always so anxious to tell you. But they talk about it as if anybody under thirty-five who wanted to get married was acting like a three-year-old stealing jam—and that's annoying. And anyhow, it wouldn't be bad, if I weren't so silly, I suppose—”
“Waiting hurts, naturally,” and that casual sentence made him chilly afraid. For to be in love, though it may force the lover to actions of impossible courage does not make him in the least courageous of himself, but only drives him by the one large fear of losing this love like a soldier pricked from behind by a bayonet over the bodies of smaller fears, or like a thief who has stolen treasure, and, hearing the cry at his heels, scales a twenty foot wall with the agile gestures of a madman. All the old-wives' and young men's club stories of everything from broken engagements to the Generic and Proven Unfaithfulness of the Female Sex brushed like dirty cobwebs for an instant across his mind. They tightened about it like silk threads—a snaky web—and for one scared instant he had a sense of being smothered in dusty feathers, whispering together and saying, “When you're a little older and a great deal wiser. When you've come to my age and know that all girls are the same. When you realize that long engagements seldom mean marriage. When—”
He put the cobwebs aside with a strain of will, for he was very tired in body, and settled himself to write to Nancy. It was not the cobwebs that hurt. The only thing that mattered was that she had been hurt on his account—was being hurt now on his account—would be hurt, and still and always on his account, not because he wanted to hurt her but because it was not within his power, but Life's, to hurt her in that respect or not.
“Oh, felicitous Nancy!” the pen began to scratch. “Your letter—”
Stupid to be so tired when he was writing to Nancy. Stupid not to find the right things to say at once when you wanted to say them so much. He dropped the pen an instant, sat back, and tried to evoke Nancy before him like a small, clear picture seen in a lens, tried to form with his will the lifeless air in front of him till it began to take on some semblance and body of her that would be better than the tired remembrances of the mind.
Often, and especially when he had thought about her intensely for a long time, the picture would not come at all or come with tantalizing incompleteness, apparently because he wanted it to be whole so much—all he could see would be a wraith of Nancy, wooden as a formal photograph, with none of her silences or mockeries about her till he felt like a painter who has somehow let the devil into his paintbox so that each stroke he makes goes a little fatally out of true from the vision in his mind till the canvas is only a crazy-quilt of reds and yellows. Now, perhaps, though, she might come, even though he was tired. He pressed the back of a hand against his eyes. She was coming to him now. He remembered one of their walks together—a walk they had taken some eight months ago, when they had been only three days engaged. Up Fifth Avenue; Forty-second Street, Forty-third, Forty-fourth, the crosstown glitter of lights, the reflected glow of Broadway, spraying the sky with dim gold-dust, begins to die a little behind them. Past pompous expensive windows full of the things that Oliver and Nancy will buy when Oliver's novel has gone into its first fifty thousand, content with the mere touch of each other's hands, they are so sure of each other now. Past people, dozens of people, getting fewer and fewer as Forty-sixth Street comes, Forty-seventh, Forty-eighth, always a little arrogantly because none of the automatic figures they pass have ever eaten friendly bread together or had fire that can burn over them like clear salt water or the knowledge that the only thing worth having in life is the hurt and gladness of that fire. Buses pass like big squares of honeycomb on wheels, crowded with pale, tired bees—the stars march slowly from the western slope to their light viewless pinnacle in the center of the heavens, walking brightly like strong men in silvered armor—the stars and the buses, the buses and the stars, either and both of as little and much account—it would not really surprise either Oliver or Nancy if the next green bus that passes should start climbing into the sky like a clumsy bird.
The first intoxication is still upon them—they have told nobody except anyone who ever sees them together—they walk tactfully and never too close, both having a horror of publicly amatory couples, but like the king's daughter—or was it Solomon's Temple?—they are all glorious within. Fifty-fifth, Fifty-sixth, Fifty-seventh—the square in front of the Plaza—that tall chopped bulky tower lit from within like a model in a toyshop window—motors purring up to its door like thin dark cats, motors purring away. The fountain with the little statue—the pool a cool dark stone cracked with the gold of the lights upon it, and near the trees of the Park, half-hidden, gold Sherman, riding, riding, Victory striding ahead of him with a golden palm.
Ahead of them too goes Victory, over fear, over doubt, over littleness, her gold shoes ring like the noise of a sparkling sword, her steps are swift. They stand for an instant, hands locked, looking back at the long roller-coaster swoop of the Avenue, listening to the roll of tired wheels, the faint horns, the loud horns. They know each other now—their hands grip tighter—in the wandering instant the whole background of streets and tall buildings passes like breath from a mirror—for the instant without breath or clamor, they exist together, one being, and the being has neither flesh to use the senses too clumsily, nor human thoughts to rust at the will, but lives with the strength of a thunder and the heedlessness of a wave in a wide and bright eternity of the unspoken.
“All the same,” says Nancy, when the moment passes, lifting a shoe with the concern of a kitten that has just discovered a thorn in its paw, “New York pavements are certainlyhardon loving feet.”
So the picture came. And other pictures like it. And since the living that had made them was past for a little they were both fainter and in a measure brighter with more elfin colors than even that living had been which had made them glow at first. White memory had taken them into her long house of silence where everything is cool with the silver of Spring rain on leaves, she had washed from them the human pettiness, the human separateness, the human insufficiency to express the best that must come in any mortal relationship that lasts longer than the hour. They were not better in memory than they had been when lived, for the best remembrance makes only brilliant ghosts, but they were in their dim measure nearer the soul's perfection, for the tricks of the sounding board of the mind and the feckless instrument of the body had been put away. “We've had infinites already—infinites,” thought Oliver, and didn't care about the ludicrous ineptness of the words. He smiled, turning back to the unwritten letter. If they hadn't had infinites already—he supposed they wouldn't want more so badly right now. He smiled, but this time without humor. It had all seemed so easy at first.
Nancy had been in Paris at fourteen before “business reverses” of the kind that mild, capable-looking men like Mr. Ellicott seem to attract, as a gingerbread man draws wasps, when they are about fifty, had reduced him to a position as chief bookkeeper and taken Nancy out of her first year in Farmington. Oliver had spent nine months on a graduate scholarship in Paris and Provence in 1919. Both had friends there and argued long playful hours planning just what sort of a magnificently cheap apartment on theRive Gauchethey would have when they went back.
For they were going back—they had been brilliantly sure of it—Oliver had only to finish his novel that was so much better already than any novel Nancy had ever read—sell a number of copies of it that seemed absurdly small in proportion to the population of America—and then they could live where they pleased and Oliver could compose Great Works and Nancy get ahead with her very real and delicate talent for etching instead of having to do fashion-drawings of slinky simperers in Lucile dresses or appetite-arousing paintings of great cans of tomato soup. But that had been eight months ago. Vanamee and Company's—the neat vice-president talking to Oliver—“a young hustler has every chance in the world of getting ahead here, Mr. Crowe. You speak French? Well, we have been thinking for some time of establishing branch-offices in Europe.” The chance of a stop-gap job in St. Louis for Nancy, where she could be with her family for a while—she really ought to be with them a couple of months at least, if she and Oliver were to be married so soon. The hopeful parting in the Grand Central—“But, Nancy, you're sure you wouldn't mind going across second-class?”
“Why Ollie, dear, how silly! Why, what would it matter?” “All right, then, and remember, I'll wirejustas soon as things really start to break—”
And then for eight months, nothing at all but letters and letters, except two times, once in New York, once in St. Louis, when both had spent painful savings because they simply had to see each other again, since even the best letters were only doll-house food you could look at and wish you could eat—and both had tried so hard to make each disappearing minute perfect before they had to catch trains again that the effort left them tired as jugglers who have been balancing too many plates and edgy at each other for no cause in the world except the unfairness that they could only have each other now for so short a time. And the people, the vast unescapable horde of the dull-but-nice or the merely dull who saw in their meetings nothing either particularly spectacular or pitiful or worth applause.
And always after the parting, a little crippled doubt tapping its crutches along the alleys of either mind. “Do Ireally?Because if I do, how can I be so tired sometimes with her, with him? And why can't I say more and do more and be more when he, when she? And everybody says. And they're older than we are—mightn't it be true? And—” And then, remorsefully, the next day, all doubt burnt out by the clear hurt of absence. “Oh how could I! When it is real—when it is like that—when it is the only thing worth while in the world!”
But absence and meetings of this sort told on them inescapably, and both being, unfortunately, of a rather high-strung intelligence and youth, recognized it, no matter how much consciousness might deny it, and wondered sometimes, rather pitiably, why they couldn't be always at one temperature, like lovers in poetry, and why either should ever worry or hurt the other when they loved. Any middle-aged person could and did tell them that they were now really learning something about love—omitting the small fact that Pain, though he comes with the highest literary recommendations is really not the wisest teacher of all in such matters—all of which helped the constant nervous and psychological strain on both as little as a Latin exorcism would help a fever. For the very reason that they wished to be true in their love, they said things in their letters that a spoken word or a gesture would have explained in an instant but that no printed alphabet could; and so they often hurt each other while meaning and trying to help all they could.
Not quite as easy as it had seemed at first—oh, not on your life not, thought Oliver, rousing out of a gloomy muse. And then there was the writing he wanted to do—and Nancy's etching—“our damn careers” they had called them—but thosewerethe things they did best—and neither had had even tolerable working conditions recently—
Well, sufficient to the day was the evil thereof—that was one of those safe Bible-texts you seemed to find more and more use for the older you grew. Bible-texts. It was lucky tomorrow was Sunday when slaves of the alarm-clock had peace. Oliver straightened his shoulders unconsciously and turned back to the blank paper. He did love Nancy. He did love Nancy. That was all that counted.
“Oh, felicitous Nancy!Your letter was—”
The water was a broken glass of blue, sunstruck waves—there were few swimmers in it where the two friends went in next morning, for the beach proper with its bath-houses and float was nearly a quarter of a mile down. Oliver could see Margaret's red cap bobbing twenty yards out as he tried the water cautiously with curling toes, and, much farther out, a blue cap and the flash of an arm going suddenly under. Mrs. Severance, the friend Louise had brought out for the week-end, he supposed; she swam remarkably for a woman. He swam well enough himself and couldn't give her two yards in the hundred. Ted stood beside him, both tingling a little at the fresh of the salt air. “Wow!” and they plunged.
A mock race followed for twenty yards—then Oliver curved off to duck Margaret, already screaming and paddling at his approach, while Ted kept on.
He swam face deep, catching short breaths under the crook of his arm, burying himself in the live blue running sparkle, every muscle stretched as if he were trying to rub all the staleness that can come to the mind and the restless pricklings that will always worry the body clean from him, like a snake's cast skin, against the wet rough hands of the water. There—it was working—the flesh was compact and separate no longer—he felt it dissolve into the salt push of spray—become one with that long blue body of wave that stretched fluently radiant for miles and miles till it too was no more identity but only sea, receiving the sun, without thought, without limbs, without pain. He sprinted with the last breath he had in him to annihilation in that light lustrous firmament. Then his flung-out hand struck something firm and smooth. With the momentary twinge of a jarred toe, he stopped in the middle of a stroke, grabbed at the firm thing unthinkingly, felt it slip away from him, trod water and came up gasping.
“Oh, I'mhorriblysorry!” Gurgle and choke at water gone the wrong way. “Honestly—what a dumb-bell trick! but I didn't see you atalland with the whole Sound to swim in I thought I was safe—”
He rubbed the water out of his eyes. A woman in a blue cap. Pretty, too—not one of the pretty kind that look like drenched paper-dolls in swimming.
“Don't apologize—it's all my fault, really. I should have heard you coming, I suppose, but I was floating and my ears were under water—and this cap! You did scare me a little, though; I didn't know there was anyone else in miles—”
She smiled frankly. Ted got another look at her and decided that pretty was hardly right. Beautiful, perhaps, but you couldn't tell with her hair that way under her cap.
“You're Mr. Billett, aren't you? Louise said last night that her brother was bringing a friend over Sunday. She also said that she'd introduce us—but we seem to have done that.”
“Rather. Introduction by drowning. The latest cleverness in Newport circles—see 'Mode.' And you're Mrs. Severance.”
“Yes. Nice water.”
“Perfect.”
A third look—a fairly long one—left Ted still puzzled. Age—thirty? thirty-five? Swims perfectly. On “Mode.” Wide eyes, sea-blue, sea-changing. An odd nose that succeeded in being beautiful in spite of itself. A rather full small mouth, not loose with sense nor rigid with things controlled, but a mouth that would suck like a bee at the last and tiniest drop of any physical sweet which the chin and the eyes had once decided to want. The eyes measure, the mouth asks, the cleft chin finds the way. A face neither content, nor easily to be contented—in repose it is neither happy nor unhappy but only matured. Louise's friend—that was funny—Louise had such an ideal simplicity of mind. Well—
“If you float—after a while you don't know quite where you're floating,” said Mrs. Severance's voice detachedly.
Ted made no answer but turned over, spreading out his arms. For a few moments they lay like corpses on the blue swelling round of the water looking straight through infinite distance into the thin faint vapor of the sky.
“Yes, I see what you mean.”
“We might be clouds, almost, mightn't we?” with a slow following note of laughter.
Ted looked deeper into the sky, half-closing his eyelids. It seemed to take his body from him completely, to leave him nothing but a naked soothed consciousness, rising and falling, a petal on a swinging bough, in the heart of blue quietude like the quiet of an open place in a forest empty with evening.
“Clouds,” said Mrs. Severance's voice, turning the word to a sound breathed lightly through the curled and husky gold of a forest-horn.
Through the midst of his sea-drowsiness a queer thought came to Ted. This had happened before, in sleep perhaps, in a book he had read—Oliver's novel, possibly, he thought and smiled. Lying alone on a roof of blue water, and yet not lying alone, for there was that slow warm voice that talked from time to time and came into the mind on tiptoe like the creeping of soft-shoed, hasteless, fire. You stretched your hands to the fire and let it warm you and soon your whole body was warm and pleased and alive. That was when you were alive past measure, when all of you had been made warm as a cat fed after being hungry, and the cat arose from its warmth and went walking on velvet paws, stretching sleek legs, sleek body, slowly and exquisitely under the firelight, heavy with warmth, but ready at the instant signal of the small burning thing in its mind to turn like a black butterfly and dance a slow seeking dance with the shadows of the fire that flickered like leaves in light wind, desirable, impalpable and wavering, never to be quite torn down from the wall and eaten and so possessed. But there was an odd thirsty satisfaction in trying to tear the shadows.
Fantastic. He had not been so fantastic for a long time.
“And tomorrow there's 'Mode.' And fashion-plates.AndGreenwich Villagers,” said the voice of Mrs. Severance. He made some reply impatiently, disliking the sound of his own voice—hers fitted with the dream. When had he been this before?
The Morte d'Arthur—the two with a sword between.
He sank deeper, deeper, into the glow of that imagined firelight—the flame was cooler than water to walk through—that time he had almost taken a turning shadow into his hand. The sword between—only here there was no sword. If he reached out his hand he knew just how the hand that he touched would feel, cool and firm, like that flame. Cool and silent.
There must have been something, somewhere, to make him remember....
He remembered.
A minute later Oliver had splashed up to them, shouting “A rescue! A rescue! Guests Drown While Host Looks On Smilingly! What's the matter, Ted, you look as if you wanted to turn into a submarine? Got cramp?”
Mrs. Crowe relaxed a little for the first tired minute of her day. Sunday dinner was nearly over, and though, in one way, the best meal in the week for her because all her children were sure to be at home, it was apt to be pure purgatory on a hot day, with Sheba dawdling and grumbling and Rosalind spilling pea-soup on her Sunday dress, and Aunt Elsie's deafness increased by the weather to the point of mild imbecility.
She had been a little afraid today, especially with two guests and the grandchildren rampant after church, and the extra leaf in the table that squeezed Colonel Crowe almost into the sideboard and herself nearly out of the window and made the serving of a meal a series of passings of over-hot plates from hand to hand, exposed to the piracies of Jane Ellen. But it had gone off better than she could have hoped. Colonel Crowe had not absent-mindedly begun to serve vegetables with a teaspoon, Aunt Elsie had not dissolved in tears and tottered away from the table at some imagined rudeness of Dickie's, and Jane Ellen had not once had a chance to take off her drawers.
“Ice tea!” said the avid voice of Jane Ellen in her ear. “Ice tea!”
Mrs. Crowe filled the glass and submitted a request for “please” mechanically. She wondered, rather idly, if she would spend her time in purgatory serving millions of Jane Ellens with iced tea.
“Ahem!” That was Colonel Crowe. “But you should have known us in the days of our greatness, Mrs. Severance. When I was king of Estancia—”
“I'd rather have you like this, Colonel Crowe, really. I've always wanted big families and never had one to live in—”
“Heard from Nancy recently, Oliver?” from Margaret, slightly satiric.
“Why yes, Margie, now and then. Not as often as you've heard from Stu Winthrop probably but—”
“Motha, can I have some suga on my booberrish? Motha, can I have some suga on my booberrish? Motha—peesh!”
“Oh, hush a minute, Rosalind dear. I don't know, Oliver. I'll speak to Mr. Field about it if you like. I should think they'd take little sketches like a couple of those Nancy showed you—though they aren't quite smart-alecky enough for 'Mode'—” “Grandfather, Grandfather! How old would you be if you were as old as Methusaleh? Are you older than he is?Grandfather!”
Entrance and exit of a worried Sheba with the empty dish of blueberries, marred only by Jane Ellen's sudden cries of “Stop thief!”
Mrs. Crowe tried to think a little ahead. Tomorrow. Ice. Butter. Laundry. Oliver's breakfast early again. Louise—poor Louise—two years and a half since Clifford Lychgate died. How curious life was; how curious and careless and inconsecutive. The thought of how much she hoped Oliver's novel would succeed and the question as to whether the Thebes grocer who delivered by motor-truck would be cheaper than the similar Melgrove bandit in the long run mixed uneasily in her mind.
Rosalind had seemed droopy that morning—more green crab-apples probably. Aunt Elsie's gout. Oliver's marriage—she had been so relieved about Nancy ever since she had met her, though it had been hard to reconcile domestic virtues with Nancy's bobbed hair. She would make Oliver happy, though, and that was the main thing. She was really sweet—a sweet girl. Long engagements. Too bad, too bad. Somethingmustbe done about the stair carpet, the children were tearing it to pieces. “Ice tea! Ice tea!”
“No, Jane Ellen.”
“Yash.”
“No, darling.”
“Peesh yash?”
“No. Now be a good little girl and run out and play quietly, not right in the middle of the broiling sun.”
“And so Lizzie said, 'Very well, but if I do take that medicine my death will be wholly on your responsibility!'” with a sense of climax.
“But I really would like to, Mrs. Severance, if you can ever spare the time.”
Ted and Louise's friend seemed to be getting along very well. That was nice—so often Oliver's friends and Louise's didn't. It seemed odd that Mrs. Severance should be working on “Mode”—surely a girl of her obvious looks and intelligence left with no children to support—some nice man—A lady, too, by her voice, though there was a trifle of something—
She only hoped Mrs. Severance didn't think them all too crowded and noisy. It was a little hard on the three children to have such an—intimate—home when they brought friends.
“I think we'd better have coffee out on the porch, don't you?” That meant argument with Sheba later but an hour's cool and talk without having to shout across the dear little children was worth the argument.
Everybody got up, Ted being rather gallant to Mrs. Severance. Oliver looked worried today, worried and tired. She hoped it wasn't about Nancy and the engagement. What a miserable thing money was to make so much difference.
“Mrs. Severance—”
“Mr. Billett—”
Louise's friend was certainly attractive. That wonderful red-gold hair—“setter color” her sister had always called it of her own. She must write her sister. Mrs. Severance—an odd name. She rather wished, though, that her face wouldn't turn faintly hard like that sometimes.
“No, Dickie. No chocolate unless your mother says you can have it. No, Rosalind, if mother says not, youcertainlycannot go over and play at the Rogers',—they have a paralytic grandmother who is very nervous.”
Well, that was over. And now, for a few brief instants there would be quiet and a chance to relax and really see something of Oliver. Mrs. Crowe started moving slowly towards the door. Ted and Mrs. Severance blocked the way, talking rather intimately, she thought, for people who had only known each other a few hours; but then that was the modern way. Then Ted saw her and seemed to wake up with a jump from whatever mild dream possessed him, and Mrs. Severance turned toward her.
“It's socomfortablebeing out here, always,” she said very naturally and kindly, but Mrs. Crowe did not reply at once to the pretty speech. Instead she flushed deeply and bent over something small and white on the chair with the dictionary in it that had been next to hers. Jane Ellen had finally succeeded in taking off her drawers.
Ted and Oliver were down at the beach at Southampton two Sundays later—week-end guests of Peter Piper—the three had been classmates at Yale and the friendship had not lapsed like so many because Peter happened to be rich and Ted and Oliver poor. And then there was always Elinor, Peter's sister—Ted seemed, to Oliver's amused vision, at least, to be looking at Elinor with the hungry eyes of a man seeing a delicate, longed-for dream made flesh just at present instead of a girl he had known since she first put up her hair. How nice that would be if it happened, thought Oliver, match-makingly—how very nice indeed! Best thing in the world for Ted—and Elinor too—if Ted would only get away from his curiously Puritan idea that a few minor lapses from New England morality in France constituted the unpardonable sin, at least as far as marrying a nice girl was concerned. He stretched back lazily, digging elbows into the warm sand.
The day had really been too hot for anything more vigorous than “just lying around in the sun like those funny kinds of lizards,” as Peter put it, and besides, he and Oliver had an offensive-defensive alliance of The Country's Tiredest Young Business Men and insisted that their only function in life was to be gently and graciously amused. And certainly the spectacle about them was one to provide amusement in the extreme for even the most mildly satiric mind.
It was the beach's most crowded hour and the short strip of sand in front of the most fashionable and uncomfortable place to bathe on Long Island was gay as a patch of exhibition sweet-peas with every shade of vivid or delicate color. It was a triumph of women—the whole glittering, moving bouquet of stripes and patterns and tints that wandered slowly from one striped parasol-mushroom to the next—the men, in their bathing suits or white flannels seemed as unimportant if necessary furniture as slaves in an Eastern court. The women dominated, from the jingle of the bags in the hands of the dowagers and the faint, protesting creak of their corsets as they picked their way as delicately as fat, gorgeous macaws across the sand, to the sound of their daughters' voices, musical as a pigeon-loft, as they chattered catchwords at each other and their partners, or occasionally, very occasionally, dipped in for a three-minute swim. Moreover, and supremely, it was a triumph of ritual, and such ritual as reminded Oliver a little of the curious, unanimous and apparently meaningless movements of a colony of penguins, for the entire assemblage had arrived around, twelve o'clock and by a quarter past one not one of them would be left. That was law as unwritten and unbreakable as that law which governs the migratory habits of wild geese. And within that little more than an hour possibly one-third of them would go as far as wetting their hands in the water—all the rest had come for the single reason of seeing and being seen. It was all extremely American and, on the whole, rather superb, Oliver thought as he and Peter moved over nearer to the parasol that sheltered Elinor and Ted.
“I wish it was Egypt,” said Peter languidly. “Any more peppermints left, El? No—well, Ted never could restrain himself when it came to food. I wish it was Egypt,” he repeated, making Elinor's left foot a pillow for his head.
“Well, it's hot enough,” from Oliver, dozingly. “Ah—oo—it'shot!”
“I know, but just think,” Peter chuckled. “Clothes,” he explained cryptically, “Mrs. Willamette in a Cleopatra nightie—what sport! And besides, I should make a magnificent Egyptian. Magnificent.” He yawned immensely. “In the first place, of course, I should paint myself a brilliant orange—”
The Egyptians. An odd wonder rose in Ted—a wonder as to whether one of those stripped and hook-nosed slaves of the bondage before Moses had ever happened to stand up for a moment to wipe the sweat out of his eyes before he bent again to his task of making bricks without straw and seen a princess of the Egyptians carried along past the quarries.
“Tell us a story, El,” from Oliver in the voice of one who is sleep-walking. “A nice quiet story—the Three Bears or Giant the Jack Killer—oh heaven, Imustbe asleep—but you know, anything like that—”
“You really want a story?” Elinor's voice was reticently mocking. “A story for good little boys?”
“Oh,yes!” from Peter, his clasped hands stretched toward her in an attitude of absurd supplication. “All in nice little words of one syllable or we won't understand.”
“Well, once there were three little girls named Elsie, Lacie and Tillie and they lived in the bottom of a well.”
[ILLUSTRATION: “WELL, ONCE THERE WERE THREE LITTLE GIRLS”] “Whatkindof a well?” Oliver had caught the cue at once.
“A treacle well—”
She went on with the Dormouse's Tale, but Ted, for once, hardly heard her—his mind was too busy with its odd, Egyptological dream.
The princess who looked like Elinor. Her slaves would come first—a fat bawling eunuch, all one black glisten like new patent-leather, striking with a silver rod to clear dogs and crocodiles and Israelites out of the way. Then the litter—and a flash between curtains blown aside for an instant—and Hook Nose gazing and gazing—all the fine fighting curses of David on the infidel, that he had muttered sourly under breath all day, blowing away from him like sand from the face of a sphinx.
Pomp sounding in brass and cries all around the litter like the boasting color of a trumpet—but in the litter not pomp but fineness passing. Fineness of youth untouched, from the clear contrast of white skin and crow-black hair to the hands that had the little stirrings of moon-moths against the green robe. Fineness of mind that will not admit the unescapable minor dirts of living, however much it may see them, a mind temperate with reticence and gentleness, seeing not life itself but its own delighted dream of it, a heart that had had few shocks as yet, and never the ones that the heart must be mailed or masked to withstand. The thing that passed had been continually sheltered, exquisitely guarded from the stronger airs of life as priests might guard a lotus, and yet it was neither tenderly unhealthy nor sumptuously weak. A lotus—that was it—and Hook Nose stood looking at the lotus—and because it was innocent he filled his eyes with it. And then it passed and its music went out of the mind.
“Ted!”
“What? What? Oh, yeah—sorry, Elinor, I wasn't paying proper attention.”
“You mean you were asleep, you big cheese!” from Peter.
“I wasn't—just thinking,” and seeing that this only brought raucous mirth from both Peter and Oliver, “Oh, shut up, you apes! Were you asking me something, El?”
It was rather a change to come back from Elinor in scarab robes being carried along in a litter to Elinor sitting beside him in a bathing suit. But hardly an unpleasant change.
“I've forgotten how it goes on—the Dormouse—after 'Well in.' Do you remember?”
“Nope. Look it up when we get back. And anyhow—” “What?”
“Game called for to-day. The Lirrups have started looking important—that means it's about ten minutes of, they always leave on the dot. Well—” and Peter rose, scattering sand. “We must obey our social calendar, my prominent young friends—just think how awful it would be if we were the last to go. Race you half-way to the float and back, Ted.”
“You're on,” and the next few minutes were splashingly athletic.
Going back to the bath-house, though, Ted laughed at himself rather whimsically. That extraordinary day-dream of the slave and the Elinor Princess! It helped sometimes, to make pictures of the very impossible—even of things as impossible as that. If Elinor had only been older before the war came along and changed so much.
He saw another little mental photograph, the kind of photograph, he mused, that sleekly shabby Frenchmen slip from under views of the Vendome Column and Napoleon's Tomb when they are trying to sell tourists picture post-cards outside the Café de la Paix. Judged by American standards the work would be called rather frank. It was all interior—the interior of a room in a Montmartre hotel—and there were two people in it to help out the composition—and the face of one seemed somehow to be rather deathly familiar—
That, and Elinor. Why, Hook Nose could “reform” all the rest of his life in accordance with the highest dictionary standards—and still he wouldn't be fit to look at his princess, even from inside a cage.
Also, if you happened to be of a certain analytic temperament you could see what was happening to yourself all the while quite plainly—oh, much too plainly!—and yet that seemed to make very little difference in its going on happening. There was Mrs. Severance, for instance. He had been seeing quite a good deal of Mrs. Severance lately.
“Oh, Ted!” from Peter next door. “Snap it up, old keed, or we'll all of us be late for lunch.”
They had just sat down to lunch and Peter was complaining that the whipped cream on the soup made him feel as if he were eating cotton-batting, when a servant materialized noiselessly beside Oliver's chair.
“Telephone for you, Mr. Crowe. Western Union calling.”
Oliver jumped up with suspicious alacrity. “Oh, love, love, love!” crooned Peter. “Oh, love, love, love!” Oliver flushed. “Don't swipe all my butter, you simple cynic!” He knew what it was, of course.
“This is Oliver Crowe talking. Will you give me the telegram?”
Nancy and Oliver, finding Sunday mails of a dilatory unsatisfactoriness, had made a compact to use the wire on that day instead. And even now Oliver never listened to the mechanical buzz of Central's voice in his ear without a little pulse of the heart. It seemed to bring Nancy nearer than letters could, somehow. Nancy had an imperial contempt for boiling down attractive sentences to the necessary ten or twenty words. This time, though, the telegram was short.
“Mr. Oliver Crowe, care Peter Piper, Southampton,” clicked Central dispassionately. “I hate St. Louis. I would give anything in the world if we could only see each other for twenty-four hours. Love. Signed, Nancy.”
And Oliver, after hanging up the receiver, went back to the dining-room with worry barking and running around his mind like a spoiled puppy, wondering savagely why so many rocking-chair people took acrêpeypleasure in saying it was good for young people in love to have to wait.
Tea for two at the Gondolier, that newest and quotation-marked “Quaintest” of Village tea rooms. The chief points in the Gondolier's “quaintness” seem to be that it is chopped up into as many little partitions as a roulette wheel and that all food has to be carried up from a cellar that imparts even to orange marmalade a faint persuasive odor of somebody else's wash. Still, during the last eight months, the Gondolier has been a radical bookstore devoted to bloody red pamphlets, a batik shop full of strange limp garments ornamented with decorative squiggles, and a Roumanian Restaurant called “The Brodska” whose menu seemed to consist almost entirely of old fish and maraschino cherries.
The wispy little woman from Des Moines who conducts the Gondolier at present in a series of timid continual flutters at actually leading the life of the Bohemian untamed, and who gives all the young hungry-looking men extra slices of toast because any one of them might be Vachel Lindsay in disguise, will fail in another six weeks and then the Gondolier may turn into anything from a Free Verse Tavern to a Meeting Hall for the Friends of Slovak Freedom. But at present, the tea is much too good for the price in spite of its inescapable laundry tang, and there is a flat green bowl full of Japanese iris bulbs in the window—the second of which pleases Mrs. Severance and the first Ted.
Besides like most establishments on the verge of bankruptcy, it is such a quiet place to talk—the only other two people in it are a boy with startled hair and an orange smock and a cigaretty girl called Tommy, and she is far too busy telling him that that dream about wearing a necklace of flying-fish shows a dangerous inferiority complex even to comment caustically on strangers from uptown whowillintrude on the dear Village.
“Funny stuff—dreams,” says Ted uneasily, catching at overheard phrases for a conversational jumping-off place. His mind, always a little on edge now with work and bad feeding, has been too busy since they came in comparing Rose Severance with Elinor Piper, and wondering why, when one is so like a golden-skinned August pear and the other a branch of winter blackberries against snow just fallen, it is not as good but somehow warmer to think of the first against your touch than the second, to leave him wholly at ease.
“Yes—funny stuff,” Mrs. Severance's voice is musically quiet. “And then you tell them to people who pretend to know all about what they mean—and then—” She shrugs shoulders at the Freudian two across the shoulder-high partition.
“But you don't believe in all this psycho-analysis tosh, do you?”
She hesitates. “A little, yes. Like the old woman and ghosts. I may not believe in it but I'm afraid of it, rather.”
She gives him a steady look—her eyes go deep. It is not so much the intensity of the look as its haltingness that makes warmth go over him.
“Shall we tell our dreams—the favorite ones, I mean? Play fair if we do, remember,” she adds slowly.
“Not if you're really afraid.”
“I? But it's just because I am afraid that I really should, you know. Like going into a dark room when you don't want to.”
“But they can't be as scary asthat, 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 thisistea in the Village.”
“I should be very much interested indeed, Mrs. Severance,” says Ted rather gravely. “Check!” “How official you sound—almost as if you had a lot of those funny little machines all the modern doctors use and were going to mail me off to your pet sanatorium at once because you'd asked me what green reminded me of and I said 'cheese' instead of 'trees.' And anyhow, I never have any startling dreams—only silly ones—much too silly to tell—”
“Please go on.” Ted's voice has really become quite clinical.
“Oh very well. They don't count when you only have them once—just when they keep coming back and back to you—isn't that it?”
“I believe so.”
Mrs. Severance's eyes waver a little—her mouth seeking for the proper kind of dream.
“It's not much but it comes quite regularly—the most punctual, old-fashioned-servant sort of a dream.
“It doesn't begin with sleep, you know—it begins with waking. At least it's just as if I were in my own bed in my own apartment and then gradually I started to wake. You know how you can feel that somebody else is in the room though you can't see them—that's the feeling. And, of course being a normal American business woman, my first idea is—burglars. And I'm very cowardly for a minute. Then the cowardice passes and I decide to get up and see what it is.
“Itissomebody else—or something—but nobody I think that I ever really knew. And at first I don't want to walk toward it—and then I do because it keeps pulling me in spite of myself. So I go to it—hands out so I won't knock over things.
“And then I touch it—or him—or her—and I'm suddenly very, very happy.
“That's all.
“And now, Dr. Billett, what would you say of my case?”
Ted's eyes are glowing—in the middle of her description his heart has begun to knock to a hidden pulse, insistent and soft as the drum of gloved fingers on velvet. He picks words carefully.
“I should say—Mrs. Severance—that there was something you needed and wanted and didn't have at present. And that you would probably have it—in the end.”
She laughs a little. “Rather cryptic, isn't that, doctor? And you'd prescribe?”
“Prescribe? 'It's an awkward matter to play with souls.'”
“'And trouble enough to save your own,'” she completes the quotation. “Yes, that's true enough—though I'm sorry you can't even tell me to use this twice a day in half a glass of water and that other directly after each meal. I think I'll have to be a little more definite when it comes to your turn—if it does come.”
“Oh it will.” But instead of beginning, he raises his eyes to her again. This time there is a heaviness like sleep on both, a heaviness that draws both together inaudibly and down, and down, as if they were sinking through piled thickness on thickness of warm, sweet-scented grass. Odd faces come into both minds and vanish as if flickered off a film—to Rose Severance, a man narrow and flat as if he were cut out of thin grey paper, talking, talking in a voice as dry and rattling as a flapping windowblind of their “vacation” together and a house with a little garden where she can sew and he can putter around,—to Ted, Elinor Piper, the profile pure as if it were painted on water, passing like water flowing from the earth in springs, in its haughty temperance, its retired beauty, its murmurous quiet—other faces, some trembling as if touched with light flames, some calm, some merely grotesque with longing or too much pleasure—all these pass. A great nearness, fiercer and more slumbrous than any nearness of body takes their place. It wraps the two closer and closer, a spider spinning a soft web out of petals, folding the two with swathes and swathes of its heavy, fragrant silk.
“Oh—mine—isn't anything,” says Ted rather unsteadily, after the moment. “Only looking at firelight and wanting to take the coals in my hands.”
Rose's voice is firmer than his but her mouth is still moved with content at the thing it has desired being brought nearer.
“I really can't prescribe on as little evidence as that,” she says with music come back to her voice in the strength of a running wave. “I can only repeat what you told me. That there was something you needed—and wanted”—she is mocking now—“and didn't have at present. And that you would probably—what was it?—oh yes—have it, in the end.”
The wispy little woman has crept up to Ted's elbow with an illegible bill. Rose has spoken slowly to give her time to get there—it is always so much better to choose your own most effective background for really affecting scenes.
“And now I really must be getting back,” she cuts in briskly, her fingers playing with a hat that certainly needs no rearrangement, when Ted, after absent-mindedly paying the bill, is starting to speak in the voice of one still sleep-walking.
“But itwasdelightful, Mr. Billett—I love talking about myself and you were really very sweet to listen so nicely.” She has definitely risen. Ted must, too. “We must do it again some time soon—I'm going to see if there aren't any of those books with long German names drifting around 'Mode' somewhere so that I'll be able to simply stun you with my erudition the next time we talk over dreams.”
They are at the door now, she guiding him toward it as imperceptibly and skillfully as if she controlled him by wireless.
“And it isn't fair of me to let you give all the parties—it simply isn't. Couldn't you come up to dinner in my little apartment sometime—it really isn't unconventional, especially for anyone who's once seen my pattern of an English maid—”
Sunlight and Minetta Lane again—and whatever Ted may want to say out of his walking trance—this is certainly no place where any of it can be said.