Oliver Crowe, at his desk in the copy-department of Vanamee and Co.'s, has been spending most of the afternoon twiddling pencils and reading and rereading two letters out of his pocket instead of righteously thinking up layouts for the new United Steel Frame Pulley Campaign. He realizes that the layouts are important—that has been brought to his attention already by several pink memoranda from Mr. Délier, the head of the department—but an immense distaste for all things in general and advertising in particular has overwhelmed him all day. He looks around the big, brightly lighted room with a stupefied sort of loathing—advertising does not suit him—he is doing all he can at it because of Nancy—but he simply does not seem to get the hang of the thing even after eight months odd and he is conscious of the fact that the Powers that be are already looking at him with distrustful eyes, in spite of his occasional flashes of brilliance. If he could only getoutof it—get into something where his particular kind of mind and training would be useful—oh well—he grunts and turns back to his private affairs.
The letter from Easten of Columbiac Magazines—kindly enough—but all hope of selling the serial rights of his novel gone glimmering because of it—Easten was the last chance, the last and the best. “If you could see your way to making short stories out of the incidents I have named, I should be very much interested—” but even so, two short stories won't bring in enough to marry on, even if he can do them to Easten's satisfaction—and the novel couldn't come out as a book now till late spring—and Oliver has too many friends who dabble in writing to have any more confidence in book royalties than he would have in systems for beating the bank at roulette. Well,that'sover—and a year's work with it—and all the dreams he and Nancy had of getting married at once.
Those pulley layouts have to be fixed up sometime. What can you say about a pulley—whatcanyou say? “The United Steel Frame Pulley—Oh Man, There's a Hog for Work!” Oliver turns the cheap phrase in his mind, hating its shoddiness, hating the fact that such shoddiness is the only stuff with which he can deal.
Sanely considered, he supposes he hasn't any business using up a month's meagre savings and three small checks for poems that he has hoarded since April in going out to St. Louis Friday. Mr. Alley wasn't too pleased with letting him take Saturday and half Monday off to do it, too. But then there was that telegram ten days ago. “I'd give anything in the world if we could only see each other—” and after other letters unsatisfactorily brief, the letter that came Monday “I have such grand news, Ollie dear, at least it may be grand if it works out—but oh, dear, I do want to see you about it without tangling it up in letters that don't really explain. Can't you make it—even a few hours would be long enough to talk it all over—and I do so want to see you and really talk! Please wire me, if you can.”
Grand news—what kind he wondered—and dully thought that he couldn't see her, of course, and then suddenly knew that he must. After all, there didn't seem to be much use in saving for the sake of saving when all the saving you could possibly do didn't bring you one real inch nearer to what you really wanted.Apres moi le deluge—apres ca le deluge—it might even come to that this time, they were both so tired—and he viewed the prospect as a man mortally hurt might view the gradual failing of sun and sky above him, with hopelessness complete as a cloud in that sky, but with heart and brain too beaten now to be surprised with either agony or fear. They must see each other—they were neither of them quiet people who could love forever at a distance without real hope. Great Lord, if he and Nancy could ever have one definite basis to work on, one definite hope of money in the future no matter how far off that was—But the present uncertainty—They couldn't keep on like this—no two people in the world could be expected to keep on.
Nancy. He is seeing Nancy, the way she half-lifts her head when she has been teasing and suddenly becomes remorseful and wants him to know how much she does love him instead.
A hot night in the Pullman—-too hot to sleep in anything but a series of uneasy drowsings and wakings. Smell of blankets and cinders and general unwashedness—noise of clacketing wheels and a hysterical whistle—anyhow each sweaty hour brings St. Louis and Nancy nearer. St.Nancy, St.Nancy, St.Nancy, says the sleepless racket of the wheels, but the peevish electric fan at the end of the corridor keeps buzzing to itself like a fly caught in a trap. “And then I got married you see—and then I got married you see—and when you get married you aren't a free lance—you aren't a free lance—you'resettled!”
It will have to be pretty grand news indeed that Nancy has to make up for this last week and the buzz of the electric fan, thinks Oliver, twisting from one side of his stuffy berth to the other like an uneasy sardine.
“More beans, Oliver,” says Mrs. Ellicott in a voice like thin syrup, her “generous” voice. The generous voice is used whenever Mrs. Ellicott wants to show herself a person of incredibly scrupulous fairness before that bodiless assemblage of old women in black that constitute the They who Say—and so it is used to Oliver nearly all the time.
“No thank you, Mrs. Ellicott.” Oliver manages to look at her politely enough as he speaks but then his eyes go straight back to Nancy and stay there as if they wished to be considered permanent attachments. All Oliver has been able to realize for the last two hours is the mere declarative fact that she isthere.
“Nancy!”
“No, thanks, mother.”
And Nancy in her turn looks once swiftly at her mother, sitting there at the end of the table like a faded grey sparrow whose feathers make it uncomfortable. It isn't feathers, though, really—its only Oliver. Why can't mother get reconciled to Oliver—whycan'tshe—and if she can't, why doesn't she come out and say so instead of trying to be generous to Oliver when she doesn't want to while he's there and then saying mean things when he's away because she can't help it?
“Stanley?”
“Why, no, my dear—no—yes, a few, perhaps—I might reconsider—only a few, my dear,”—his voice does not do anything as definite as cease—it merely becomes ineffectual as Mrs. Ellicott heaps his plate. He then looks at the beans as if he hadn't the slightest idea where they came from but supposes as long as they are there they must be got away with somehow, and starts putting them into his mouth as mechanically as if they were pennies and he a slot-machine.
It is hot in the Ellicotts' dining-room—the butter was only brought in a little while ago, but already it is yellow mush. There are little drops on the backs of Mr. Ellicott's hands. Oliver wants to help Nancy take away the dishes and bring in the fruit—they have started to make a game out of it already when Mrs. Ellicott's voice enforces order.
“No, Oliver. No, please. Please sit still. It is so seldom we have aguestthat Nancy and I are apt to forget ourmanners—”
Oliver looks to Nancy for guidance, receives it and subsides into his chair. That's just the trouble, he thinks rather peevishly—if only Mrs. Ellicott would stop acting as if he were a guest—and not exactly a guest by choice at that but one who must be the more scrupulously entertained in public, the less he is liked in private.
The fruit. Mrs. Ellicott apologizing for it—her voice implies that she is quite sure Oliver doesn't think it good enough for him but that he ought to feel himself very lucky indeed that it isn't his deserts instead. Mr. Ellicott absent-mindedly squirting orange juice up his sleeve. Oliver and Nancy looking at each other.
“Are you the same?” say both kinds of eyes, intent, absorbed with the wish that has been starved small through the last three months, but now grows again like a smoke-tree out of a magicked jar, “Really the same and really loving me and really glad to be here?” But they can get no proper sort of answer now—there are too many other Ellicotts around, especially Mrs. Ellicott.
Dinner is over with coffee and cigarettes that Mrs. Ellicott has bought for Oliver because no one shall ever say she failed in the smallest punctilio of hospitality, though she offers them to him with a gesture like that of a missionary returning his baked-mud idol to a Bushman too far gone in sin to reclaim. Mr. Ellicott smoked cigarettes before his marriage. For twenty years now he has been a contributing member of the Anti-Tobacco League.
And now all that Oliver knows is that unless he can talk to Nancy soon and alone, he will start being very rude. It is not that he wants to be rude—especially to Nancy's family—but the impulse to get everyone but Nancy away by any means from sarcasm to homicidal mania is as reasonless and strong as the wish to be born. After all he and Nancy have not seen each other wakingly for three months—and there is still her “grand news” to tell, the grandness of which has seemed to grow more and more dubious the longer she looked at Oliver. Now is the time for Mr. and Mrs. Ellicott to disappear as casually and completely as clouds over the edge of the sky and first of all, not to mention the fact that they are going. But Mrs. Ellicott has far too much tact ever to be understanding.
She puts Mr. Ellicott's hat on for him and takes his arm as firmly as if she were police, and he accepts the grasp with the meekness of an old offender who is not quite sure what particular crime he is being arrested for this time but has an uncomfortable knowledge that it may be any one of a dozen.
“Now we old people are going to leave you, children alone for a little while” she announces, fair to the last, her voice sweeter than ever. “We know you have such a great many importantaffairsto talk over—particularly thesplendidoffer that has just come to Nancy—my little girl hasn't told you about it yet, has she, Oliver?'
“No, Mrs. Ellicott.”
“Well, her father and myself consider it quiteremarkableand we have beenurging—verystrongly—her acceptance, though of course” this with a glacé smile, “we realize that we are only herparents. And, as Nancy knows, it has always been our dearest wish to have her decide matters affecting her happiness entirelyherself. But I feel sure that when both of you have talked itwellover, we can trust you both to come to a mostreasonabledecision.” She breathes heavily and moves with her appurtenance to the door, secure as an ostrich in the belief that Oliver thinks her impartial, even affectionate. Her conscientiousness gives her a good deal of applause for leaving the two young people so soon when they have all one evening and another morning to be together—but subconsciously she knows that she has done her best by her recent little speech to make this talking-it-over a walk through a field full of small pestilent burrs, for both Oliver and Nancy. They sayau revoirvery politely—all four—the door shuts on Mr. Ellicott's meek back.
Mrs. Ellicott is not very happy, going downstairs. She knows what has undoubtedly happened the moment the door was shut—and a little twinge of something very like the taste of sour grapes goes through her as she thinks of those two young people so reprehensibly glad at being even for the moment in each other's arms.
An hour later and still the grand news hasn't been told. In fact very little that Mrs. Ellicott would regard as either sensible or reasonable has happened at all. Though they do not know it the conversation has been oddly like that of two dried desert-travellers who have suddenly come upon water and for quite a while afterwards find it hard to think of anything else. But finally:
“Dearest, dearest, what was the grand news?” says Oliver half-drowsily. “We must talk it over, dear, I suppose, I guess, oh, we must—oh, but you're so sweet—” and he relapses again into speechlessness.
They are close together, he and she now. Their lips meet—and meet—with a sweet touch—with a long pressure—children being good to each other—cloud mingling with gleaming cloud.
“Ollie dear.” Nancy's voice comes from somewhere as far away and still as if she were talking out of a star. “Stop kissing me. I can't think when you kiss me, I can only feel you be close. If you want to hear about that news, that is,” she adds, her lips hardly moving.
All that Oliver wants to do is to hold her and be quiet—to make out of the stuffy room, the nervous rushing of noise under the window, the air exhausted with heat, a place in some measure peaceful, in some measure retired, where they can lie under lucent peace for a moment as shells lie in clear water and not be worried about anything any more. But again, the time they are to have is too short—Oliver really must be back Monday afternoon—already he is unpleasantly conscious of the time-table part of his mind talking trains at him. He takes his arms from around Nancy—she sits up rubbing her eyes with the back of her hand as if to take the dream that was so glittering in them away now she and Oliver have to talk business-affairs.
“Oh, myhair—lucky it's bobbed, that's all—I'd have lost all the hairpins I ever had in it by now—Well, Ollie—”
Her hand goes over to his uneasily, takes hold. For a moment the dream comes back and she forgets entirely what she was going to say.
“Ohdear!”
“Nancy, Nancy, Nancy!”
But she will be firm about their talking. “No, we mustn't really, we mustn't, or I can't tell you anything at all. Well, it's this.
“I didn't tell you about it at all—didn't even imagine it would come to anything. But that old geology specimen Mrs. Winters knows the art-editor of “The Bazaar” and she happened to say so once when she was here being gloomy with mother, so I wormed a letter out of her to her friend about me. And I sent some things in and the poor man seemed to be interested—at least he said he wanted to see more—and then we started having a real correspondence. Until finally—it was that Friday because I wrote you the letter right away—he goes and sends me a letter saying to come on to New York—that I can have a regular job with them if I want to, and if they like my stuff well enough, after a couple of months they'll send me to Paris to do fashions over there and pay me a salary I can more than live on and everything!”
Nancy cannot help ending with a good deal of triumph, though there is anxiety behind the triumph as well. But to Oliver it seems as if the floor had come apart under his feet.
When he has failed so ludicrously and completely, Nancy has succeeded and succeeded beyond even his own ideas of success. She can go to Paris and have all they ever planned together, now; it has all bent down to her like an apple on a swinging bough, all hers to take, from lunch at Prunier's and sunset over the river to that perfect little apartment they know every window of by heart—and he is no nearer it than he was eight months ago. He has felt the pride in her voice and knows it as most human and justified, but because he is young and unreasonable that pride of hers hurts his own. And then there is something else. All through what she was saying it was “I” that said, not “we.”
“That's fine, Nancy,” he says uncertainly. “That's certainly fine!”
But she knows by his voice in a second.
“Oh, Ollie, Ollie, of course I won't take it if it makes you feel that way, dear. Why, I wouldn't do anything that would hurt you—but Ollie I don't see how this can, how this could change things any way at all. I only thought it would bring things nearer—both of us getting jobs and my having a Paris one and—”
Her voice might be anything else in the world, but it is not wholly convinced. And its being sure beyond bounds is the only thing that could possibly help Oliver. He puts his hands on her shoulders.
“I couldn't do anything but tell you to take it, dearest, could I? When it's such a real chance?” He is hoping with illogical but none the less painful desperation that she will deny him. But she nods instead.
“Well then, Nancy dear, listen. If you take it, we've got to face things, haven't we?”
She nods a little rebelliously.
“But why is it soserious, Ollie?” and again her voice is not true.
“You know. Because I've failed—God knows when I'll make enough money for us to get married now—with the novel gone bust and everything. And I haven't any right to keep you like this when I'm not sure of ever being able to marry you—and when you've got a job like this and can go right ahead on the things you've always been crazy to do. Nancy, youwantto take it—even if it meant our not getting married for another year and your being away—don't you, don't you? Oh, Nancy, you'vegotto tell me—it'll only bust everything we've had already if you don't!”
And now they have come to a point of misunderstanding that only a trust as unreasonable as belief in immortality will help. But that trust could never be bothered with the truth of what it was saying at the moment—it would have to reach into something deeper than any transitory feeling—and they have an unlucky tradition of always trying to tell each other what is exactly true. And so Nancy nods because she has to, though she couldn't bear to put what that means into words.
“Well, you take it. And I'm awful sorry we couldn't make it go, dear. I tried as hard as I could to make it go but I guess I didn't have the stuff, that's all.”
He has risen now and his face seems curiously twisted—twisted as if something hot and hurtful had passed over it and left it so that it would always look that way. He can hardly bear to look at Nancy, but she has risen and started talking hurriedly—fright, amazement, concern and a queer little touch of relief all mixing in her voice.
“But Ollie, if you can'ttrustme about something as little as that.”
“It isn't that,” he says beatenly and she knows it isn't. And knowing, her voice becomes suddenly frightened—the fright of a child who has let something as fragile and precious as a vessel of golden glass slip out of her hands.
“But, Ollie dear! But, Ollie, I never meant it that way. But Ollie, I love you!”
He takes her in his arms again and they kiss long. This time though there is no peace in the kiss, only the lost passion of bodies tired beyond speech. “Do you love me, Nancy?”
Again she has to decide—and the truth that will not matter for more than the hour wins. Besides, he has hurt her.
“Oh, Ollie, Ollie, yes, but—”
“You're not sure any more?”
“It's different.”
“It's not being certain?”
“Not the way it was at first—but, Ollie, we're neither of us the same—”
“Then youaren'tsure?”
“I can't—I haven't—oh, Ollie, I don't know, I don't know!”
“That means you know.”
Again the kiss but this time their lips only hurt against each other—Oliver feels for a ghastly instant as if he were kissing Nancy after she had died. It seems to him that everything in him has made itself into a question as discordant and unanswered as the tearing cry of a puppy baying the moon, struck out of his senses by that swimming round silver above him, ineffably lustrous, ineffably removed, none of it ever coming to touch him but light too pale to help at all. He is holding a girl in his arms—he can feel her body against him—but it is not Nancy he is holding—it never will be Nancy any more. He releases her and starts walking up and down in a series of short, uneasy strides, turning mechanically to keep out of the way of chairs. Words come out of him, words he never imagined he could ever say, he thinks dizzily that it would feel like this if he were invisibly bleeding to death—that would come the same way in fiery spurts and pauses that tore at the body.
“Don't you see, dear, don't yousee? 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 foryears—I'm not good enough at it—and Iwon'thave you hurt—Iwon'thave you tied to me when it only means neither of us doing what we want and both of us getting, older and our work not done. Oh, I love you, Nancy—if there was any hope at all I'd go down on my knees to ask you to keep on but there isn't—they've beaten us—they've beaten us—all the fat old people who told us we were too poor and too young. All we do is go on like this both of us getting worked up whenever we see each other and both of us hurting each other and nothing happening—Oh, Nancy, I thought we could help each other always and now we can't even [Illustration: AND THEN THE QUEER MAN HAD GONE OUT OF THE DOOR] a little any more. You remember when we promised that if either of us stopping loving each other we'd tell?”
Nancy is very silent and rather white.
“Yes, Ollie.”
“Well, Nancy?”
“Well—”
They look at each other as if they were watching each other burn.
“Good-by darling, darling, darling!” says Ollie through lips like a marionette's.
Then Nancy feels him take hold of her again—the arms of somebody else in Oliver's body—and a cold mouth hurting her cheek—and still she cannot speak. And then the queer man who was walking up and down so disturbingly has gone out of the door.
Oliver finds himself walking along a long street in a city. It is not a distinguished street by any means—there are neither plate-glass shops nor 'residences' on it—just an ordinary street of little stores and small houses and occasionally an apartment building named for a Pullman car. In a good many houses the lights are out already—it is nearly eleven o'clock and this part of St. Louis goes to bed early—only the drugstores and the moving-picture theatres are still flaringly awake. His eyes read the sign that he passes mechanically, “Dr. Edwin K. Buffinton—Chiropractor,” “McMurphy and Kane's,” “The Rossiter,” with its pillars that look as if they had been molded out of marbled soap.
Thought. Memory. Pain. Pain pressing down on his eyeballs like an iron thumb, twisting wires around his forehead tighter and tighter till it's funny the people he passes don't see the patterns they make on his skin.
Somebody talking in his mind, quite steadily and flatly, repeating and repeating itself like a piece of cheap music played over and over again on a scratched phonograph record, talking in the voice that is a composite of a dozen voices; a fat man comfortable on a club lounge laying down the law as if he were carefully smearing the shine out of something brilliant with a flaccid heavy finger; a thin sour woman telling children playing together “don't, don't, don't,” in the whine of a nasty nurse.
“All for the best, you know—all for the best, we're all of us sure of that. Love doesn't last—doesn't last—doesn't last—as good fish in the sea as ever were caught out of it—nobody's heart could break at twenty-five. You think you're happy and proud—you think you're lovers and friends—but that doesn't last, doesn't last, doesn't last—none of it lasts at all.”
If he only weren't sotiredhe could do something. But instead he feels only as a man feels who has been drinking all day in the instant before complete intoxication—his body is as distinct from him as if it were walking behind him with his shadow—all the colors he sees seem exaggeratedly dull or brilliant, he has little sense of distance, the next street corner may be a block or a mile away, it is all the same, his feet will take him there, his feet that keep going mechanically, one after the other, one after the other, as if they marched to a clock. There is no feeling in him that stays long enough to be called by any definite word—there is only a streaming parade of sensations like blind men running through mist, shapes that come out of fog and sink back to it, without sight, without number, without name, with only continual hurry of feet to tell of their presence.
A slinky man comes up at his elbow and starts to talk out of the side of his mouth.
“Say, mister—”
“Oh,goto hell!” and the man fades away again, without even looking startled, to mutter “Well, you needn' be so damn peeved about it—I'll say you needn' be so damn peeved—whatcha think you are, anyhow—Marathon Mike?” as Oliver's feet take Oliver swiftly away from him.
Nancy. The first time he ever kissed her when it was question and answer with neither of them sure. And then getting surer and surer—and then when they kissed. Never touching Nancy, never. Never seeing her again never any more. That song the Glee Club used to harmonize over—what was it?
We won't go there any more,We won't go there any moreWe won't go there any mo-o-ore——
He lifts his eyes for a moment. A large blue policeman is looking at him fixedly from the other side of the street, his nightstick twirling in a very prepared sort of way. For an instant Oliver sees himself going over and asking that policeman for his helmet to play with. That would be the cream of the jest—the very cream—to end the evening in combat with a large blue policeman after having all you wanted in life break under you suddenly like new ice.
He had been walking for a very long time. He ought to go to bed. He had a hotel somewhere if he could only think where. The policeman might know.
The policeman saw a young man with staring eyes coming toward him, remarked “hophead” internally and played with his nightstick a little more. The nearer Oliver came the larger and more unsympathetic the policeman seemed to him. Still, if you couldn't remember what your hotel was yourself it was only sensible to ask guidance on the question. His mind reacted suddenly toward grotesqueness. One had to be very polite to large policemen. The politeness should, naturally, increase as the square of the policeman.
“I wonder if you could tell me where my hotel is, officer?” Oliver began. “What hotel?” said the policeman uninterestedly. Oliver noticed with an inane distinctness that he had started to swirl his nightstick as a large blue cat might switch its tail. He wondered if it would be tactful to ask him if he had ever been a drum major. Then he realized that the policeman had asked him a question—courtesy demanded a prompt response.
“What?” said Oliver.
“I said 'What hotel?'” The policeman was beginning to be annoyed.
Oliver started to think of his hotel. It was imbecile not to remember the name of your own hotel—even when your own particular material and immaterial cosmos had been telescoped like a toy train in the last three hours. The Rossiter was all that he could think of.
“The Rossiter,” he said firmly.
“No hotel Rossiter inthistown.” The policeman's nightstick was getting more and more irritated. “Rossiter's a lotta flats. You live there?”
“No. I live in a hotel.”
“Well, what hotel?”
“Oh, I tell you I don't remember,” said Oliver vaguely. “A big one with a lot of electric lights.”
The policeman's face became suddenly very red.
“Well, you move on, buddy!” he said in a tone of hoarse displeasure. “You move right on! You don't come around me with any of your funny cracks—I know whatsa matter with you, all right, all right. I know whatsa matter with you.”
“So do I.” Oliver was smiling a little now, the whole scene was so arabesque. “I want to go to my hotel.”
“You move on. You move onquick!” said the policeman vastly. “It's a long walk down to the hoosegow andIdon't want to take you there.”
“I don't want to go there,” said Oliver. “But my hotel—”
“Quit arguin'”! said the policeman in a bark like a teased bulldog.
Oliver turned and walked two steps away. Then he turned again. After all why not? The important part of his life was over anyhow—and before the rest of it finished he might be able to tell one large policeman just what he thought of him.
“Why, you big blue boob,” he began abruptly with a sense of pleasant refreshment better than drink, “You great heaving purple ice wagon—” and then he was stopped abruptly for the policeman was taking the necessary breath away.
About which time Nancy had finished crying—raging at herself all the time, she hated to cry so—and was sitting up straight on the couch looking at the door which Oliver had shut as if by looking it very hard indeed she could make it turn into Oliver.
Itcouldn'tend this way. If it did it just meant that all the last year wasn't real—hadn't any more part in reality than charity theatricals. And they'd both of them been so sure that it was the chief reality that they had ever known.
He wasn'treasonable. 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'tshetry——
Then 'Oh Nancy, be honest!' to herself. No, that wasn't true. She'd wanted the job, wanted to get it, hadn't thought about Oliver particularly when she'd tried for it except to be a little impatient with him for not using more judgment when he picked out his job. Did that mean that she didn't love him? Oh Lord, it was all so mixed up.
Starting out so clearly at first and everything being so perfect—and then the last four months and both getting tireder and tireder and all the useless little misunderstandings that made you wonder how could you if you really cared. And now this.
For an instant of mere relief from strain Nancy saw herself in Paris, studying as she had always wanted to study, doing some real work, all Paris hers to play with like a big gray stone toy, never having to worry about loving, about being loved, about people you loved. Being free. Like taking off your hot, hot clothes and lying in water when you were too hot and tired even to think of sleeping. Oliver too—she'd leave him free—he'd really work better without her—without having her to take care of and make money for and worry about always——
The mind turned the other way. But what would doing anything be like with Oliver out of it when doing things together had been all that mattered all the last year?
They couldn't decide things like this on a prickly hot August night when both of them were nearly dead with fatigue. It wasn'treal. Even after Oliver had shut the door she'd been sure he'd come back, though she hoped he wouldn't just while she was crying; she never had been, she thought viciously, one of those happy people who look like rain-goddesses when they cry.
He must come back. She shut her eyes and told him to as hard as she could. But he didn't.
All very well to be proud and dignified when both of you lived near each other. But Oliver was going back to New York tomorrow—and if he went back while they were still like this—She knew his train—the ten seven.
She tried being proud in a dozen different expressive attitudes for ten minutes or so: Then she suddenly relaxed and went over to the telephone, smiling rather ashamedly at herself.
“Hotel Rosario?”
“Yes.”
“Can I speak to Mr. Oliver Crowe? He is staying there isn't he?”
A pause full of little jingling sounds.
“Yes, he's staying here but he hasn't come in yet this evening. Do you wish to leave a message?”
Nancy hesitates.
“N-no.” That would be just a little too humble.
“Or the name of the party calling?” He will know, of course. Still, had she better say? Then she remembers the need of punishing him just a little. After all—it is hardly fair she should go all the way toward making up when he hasn't even started.
“No—no name. But tell him somebody called, please.”
“Very well.”
And Nancy goes back to wonder if the reason Oliver hasn't gone back to the hotel is that he is returning here in an appropriate suit of sackcloth. She hopes hewillcome before mother and father get back.
But even while she is hoping it, the large blue policeman is saying something about “'Sturbance of the peace” to the desk-sergeant, and Oliver is going down on the blotter as Donald Richardson.
“You simply must not worry yourself about it so, Nancy, my darling,” says Mrs. Ellicott brightly. “Lovers' quarrels are only lovers' quarrels you know and they seem very small indeed to people a little older and more experienced though I daresay they may loom terribly large just at present. Why your father and myself used to have—ahem—our little times overtrifles, darling, meretrifles” and Mrs. Ellicott takes a pinch of air between finger and thumb as if to display it as a specimen of those mere trifles over which Mr. and Mrs. Ellicott used to become proudly enraged at each other in the days before she had faded him so completely.
Nancy, after a night of intensive sleeplessness broken only by dreams of seeing Oliver being married to somebody else in the lobby of the Hotel Rosario can only wonder rather dully when it could ever have been that poor father was allowed enough initiative of his own to take even the passive part in a quarrel over a trifle and why mother thinks the prospect implied in her speech of her daughter's marriage being like unto hers can be so comforting. Nancy made one New Year's resolution the second day of her engagement, “If I ever find myself starting to act to Ollie the way mother does to father I'll simply have to leave him and never see him again.” But Mrs. Ellicott goes on.
“If Oliver is at all the sort of young man we must hope he is, he will certainly come and apologize at once. And if he should not—well Nancy, my little girl,” she adds hieroglyphically “there are many trials that seem hard to bear at first which prove true blessings later when we see of what false materials they were first composed.”
Mr. Ellicott thinks it is time for him to go to the office. It is five minutes ahead of his usual time but Mrs. Ellicott has been looking at him all the way through her last speech until he feels uneasily that he must be composed of very false material indeed. He stops first though to give an ineffective pat to Nancy's shoulder.
“Cheer up, Chick,” he says kindly. “Always sun somewhere you know, so don't treat the poor boy too hard,” and he shuffles rapidly away before his wife can look all the way through him for the vague heresy implicit in his sentence.
“It is all very well for your father to say such things, but, Nancy, darling, you shall not be put upon by Tramplers” proceeds Mrs. Ellicott in her most cryptically perfect tones. “Oliver is a man—he must apologize. A man, I say, though little more than a boy. And otherwise you would now be pursuing your Art in Paris due to dear kind Mrs. Winters who has always stood our truest friend and now this other opportunity has come also but I would never be the first to say that even such should not be sacrificed most gladly for the love of a true kind husband and dear little children though marriage is but a lottery at best and especially when affections are fixed upon their object in early youth.”
All this without a pause, pouring over the numbed parts of Nancy's mind like thin sweetish oil. Nancy considers wearily. Yes, Oliver should apologize. Yes, it is only being properly dignified not to call up the Rosario again to find if he is there. Yes, if he truly loves her, he will call—he will come—and the clock hands are marching on toward ten-seven and his train like stiff little soldiers and mother is talking, talking—
“Not that I wish or have wished to influence your mind in any way, my darling, but environment and propinquity count for mountains in such first youthful attachments and sometimes when we are older to be looked back upon with such regret. Nor would I ever have Words Spoken that should seem to injure the choice of my daughter's heart—but when young men cannot provide even Hovels for theirfiancéesa reasonable time having been given, it is only just that they should release them and you looking like death all these last two months. Never wishing that my own daughter should act in Ways dishonorable in the slightest but time is the Test in such matters and if such tests are not to be survived it is best they should end and no one can deny that the young man talks very queerly and was often quite disrespectful to you though you may say that was joking but it would not have been joking in my day and young men with queer nervous eyes and hands I never have nor will quite trust—”
But it's Oliver that's doing this, Oliver who turned funny and white when she cut her finger with the breadknife making sandwiches and wanted her to put all sorts of things on it. Oliver who was always so sweet when she was unreasonable and always the first to come looking unhappy after they'd quarrelled even a little and say it was all his fault. Why the very last letter she got from him was the one that said if she ever stopped loving him he knew he'd die.
“And when things are ended it is better that such things should be though doubtless not necessary to put an announcement in the paper yet since God in his infinite wisdom arranges all things for the best. And with such a splendid position opening before her it would be only dignified to bring the young man to his senses for it would not be right to let unreasonable young men stand in the way of advantages offered by Foreign Travel and study and these things are soon forgotten, my dear, and if nervous young men will not admit like gentlemen that they are in the wrong when only engaged what kind of husbands will they make when married forever? And is not a broken engagement better than lifelong unhappiness when there are so many too many sinful people divorcing each other every day and all men who write for their living use stimulants, my dear, such is literary history and my dearest have your cry out on mother's shoulder.”
The sweetish oil has risen about Nancy relentlessly—it is up to her waist now and still it keeps talking and flowing and creeping higher. Very soon when the fatter black soldier on the clock-face has only hitched himself along a little, it will be over her head and the roving Nancy, the sparkling Nancy, the Nancy that fell in love will be under it like a calm body, never to rise or run or be kissed with light seeking kisses on the soft of her throat again. There will only be a dignified Nancy, a sensible Nancy, a Nancy going to Paris to study and be successful, a Nancy who, sooner or later will marry “Some good, clean man.”
A little tinkle of chimes from the clock. Six minutes more. The Nancy that was stands on tiptoe, every eager and tameless bit of her hoping, hoping. If mother weren't there that Nancy would have been at the telephone an hour ago in spite of young people's pride and old people's self-respect and all the thousand and one knife-faced fetishes that all the correct and common-sensible people hug close and worship because they hurt.
She can see the train sliding out of the station. Ollie is in it and his face is stiff with surprise and unforgiveness like the face of some horrible stranger you went up to and spoke to by mistake, thinking he was your friend. By the time the train is well started he will have begun talking to that fluffy girl in the other half of the Pullman—no, that isn't worthy, he wouldn't—but oh Ollie, Ollie!
Half an hour later the telephone rings. Nancy is finishing the breakfast dishes—her hands jump as she hears it—a slippery plate slops back into the water and as she dives after it she realizes painfully that the new water is much too hot.
“Whatisit, mother?” For an instant the Nancy who has no real self-respect is talking again.
“Just a minute, Isabella. Mrs. Winters, dear. Don't you want to speak to her?”
“Oh.”
Then——
“Not right now. When I'm through with these. But will you ask her if she's going to be in this afternoon—I want to tell her about my taking the New York job.”
Satisfied oil pouring back into the telephone with a pleased, thin chuckle.
“Yes, Nancy has decided. Well, dear, I think she had better tell you herself—”
Nancy is looking dolefully down at her thumb. Foolish not to have cooled off that water a little—she has really burned herself. For an instant she hears Oliver's voice in her ears, low and concerned, sees Oliver kissing it, making it well. But these things don't happen to sensible, self-respecting modern girls with experienced mothers, especially when all the former have now quite made up their own minds.