That night was distinguished by four uneasy meals in different localities. The first was Oliver's and he ate it as if he were consuming sawdust while the Crowes talked all around him in the suppressed voices of people watching a military funeral pass to its muffled drums. Mrs. Crowe was too wise to try and comfort him in public except by silence and even Dickie was still too surprised at Oliver's peevish “Ohgetout, kid” when he tried to drag him into their usual evening boxing match to do anything but confide despondently to his mother that he doesn't see why Oliver has to act soqueerabout any girl.
The second meal was infinitely gayer on the surface though a certain kind of strainedness a little like the strainedness in the pauses of a perfectly friendly football game when both sides are too evenly matched to score ran through it. Still, whatever strainedness there was could hardly have been Mrs. Severance's fault.
The impeccable Elizabeth showed no surprise at being told she could have the day and needn't be back till breakfast tomorrow. She might have thought that there seemed to be a good deal of rather perishable food in the icebox to be wasted, if Mrs. Severance were going to have dinner out. But Elizabeth had always been one of the rare people who took pride in “knowing when they were suited” and the apartment on Riverside Drive had suited her perfectly for four years. She was also a great deal too clever to abstract any of those fragile viands to take to her widowed sister on Long Island—Mrs. Severance is so good at finding uses for all sorts of odd things—Elizabeth felt quite sure she would find some use or other for these too.
Ted Billett certainly found a good deal of use for some of it, thought Mrs. Severance whimsically. It had hardly been a Paolo and Francescadiner-a-deux—both had been much too frankly hungry when they came to it and Ted's most romantic remarks so far had been devoted to a vivid appreciation of Mrs. Severance's housekeeping. But all men are very much like hungry little boys every so often, Mrs. Severance reflected.
Ted really began to wonder around nine-thirty. At first there had been only coming in and finding Rose just through setting the table and then they had been too busy with dinner and their usual fence of talk to allow for any unfortunate calculations as to how Mrs. Severance could do it on her salary. But what a perfect little apartment—and even supposing all the furniture and so forth were family inheritances, and they fitted each other much too smoothly for that, the mere upkeep of the place must run a good deal beyond any “Mode” salary. Mr. Severance? Ted wasn't sure. Oh, well he was too comfortable at the moment to look gift horses of any description too sternly in the mouth.
Rosewasbeautiful—it was Ted and Rose by now. He would like to see someone paint her sometime as Summer, drowsy and golden, passing through fields of August, holding close to her rich warm body the tall sheaves of her fruitful corn. And again the firelight crept close to him, and under its touch all his senses stirred like leaves in light wind, glad to be hurt with firelight and then left soothed and heavy and warm.
Only now he had a charm against what the firelight meant—what it had been meaning more and more these last few weeks with Rose Severance. It was not a very powerful-looking charm—a dozen lines of a letter from Elinor Piper asking him to come to Southampton, but it began “Dear Ted” and ended “Elinor” and he thought it would serve.
That ought to be enough—that small thing only magical from what you made it mean against what it really was—that wish that nobody could even nickname hope—to keep you cool against the waves of firelight that rose over you like the scent of a harvest meadow. It was, almost.
Rose had been telling him how unhappy she was all evening. Not whiningly—and not, as he remembered later, with any specific details—but in a way that made him feel as if he, as part of the world that had hurt her, were partly responsible. And to want exceedingly to help. And then the only way he could think of helping was to put himself like kindling into the firelight, and he mustn't do that. “Elinor” he said under his breath like an exorcism, but Rose was very breathing and good to look at and in the next chair.
His fingers took a long time getting his watch.
“I'vegotto go Rose, really.”
“Must you? What's the time—eleven?—why heavens, I've kept you here ages, haven't I, and done nothing but moan about my troubles all the time.”
“You know I liked it.” Ted's voice was curiously boyishly honest in a way he hated but a way that was one of Rose's reasons why he was here with her.
“Well, come again,” she said frankly. “It was fun. I loved it.” “I will—Lord knows I thank you enough—after 252A Madison Avenue it was simply perfect. And Rose—”
“Well?”
“I'm awful damn sorry. I wish I could help.”
He thought she was going to laugh. Instead she turned perfectly grave.
“I wish you could, Ted.”
They shook hands—it seemed to Ted with a good deal of effort to do only that. Then they stood looking at each other.
There was so little between them—only a charm that nobody could say was even partly real—but somewhere in Ted's brain it said “Elinor” and he managed to shake hands again and get out of the door.
Mrs. Severance waited several minutes, listening, a faint smile curling her mouth with intentness and satisfaction. No, this time he wouldn't come back—nor next time, maybe—but there would be other times—-
Then she went into the pantry and started heating water for the dishes that she had explained reassuringly to Ted they were leaving for Elizabeth. There was no need at all of Elizabeth's knowing any more than was absolutely necessary.
Mr. Severance—the courtesy title at least is due him—seems to be a man with quite a number of costly possessions. At least here he is with another house, a dinner-table, servants, guests, another Mrs. Severance or somebody who seems to fill her place very adequately at the opposite end of the table, all as if Rose and the Riverside Drive apartment and reading Dickens aloud were only parts of a doll-house kept in one locked drawer of his desk.
The dinner is flawless, the guests importantly jeweled or stomached, depending on their sex, the other Mrs. Severance an admirable hostess—and yet in spite of it all, Mr. Severance does not seem to be enjoying himself as he should. But this may be due to a sort of minstrel give-and-take of dialogue that keeps going on between what he says for publication and what he thinks.
“Well, Frazee, I'll be ready to go into that loan matter with you inside a month,” says his voice, and his mind “Frazee, you slippery old burglar, it won't be a month before you'll be spreading the news that my disappearance means suicide and that the Commercial is rotten, lock, stock and barrel.”
“Yes, dear,” in answer to a relayed query from the other Mrs. Severance. “The children took the small car to go to the dance.” “And, Mary, if they'd ever been our children instead of your keeping them always yours, there wouldn't be that little surprise in store for you that I've arranged.”
“Cigar, Winthrop?” “Better take two, my friend—they won't be as good after Mary has charge of that end of the house.”
So it goes—until Mr. Severance has dined very well indeed. And yet Winthrop, chatting with Frazee, just before they go out of the door, finds it necessary to whisper to him for some reason—half a dozen words under cover of a discussion of what the Shipping Board's new move will mean to the mercantile marine. “I told you so, George. See his hands? The old boy's failing.”
The fourth meal is Nancy's and it doesn't seem very happy. When it is over and Mr. Ellicott has rustled himself away from intrusion behind the evening paper.
“Nobody—'phoned today—did they, mother?”
“No, dear.” The voice is not as easy as it might be, but Nancy does not notice.
“Oh.”
Nor does Nancy notice how hurriedly her mother's next question comes.
“Did you see Mrs. Winters, darling?”
“Oh yes—I saw her.”
“And you're going on to New York?”
“Yes—next week, I think.”
“With her. And going to stay with her?”
“I suppose so.”
Mrs. Ellicott sighs relievedly.
“That's so nice.”
Nancy will be safe now—as safe as if she were under an anesthetic. Mrs. Winters will take care of that. She must have a little talk with dear Isabella Winters. But that night Nancy is alone in her room—doing up her engagement ring and Oliver's letters in a wobbly package. She is not quite just, though, she keeps one letter—the first.
Margaret Crowe, who, having just come to her seventeenth birthday in this present day and generation, felt it her official family duty to season the general conversation with an appropriate pepper of heartlessness, had really put it very well. She had said that while she didn't suppose one house party over Labor Day would more than partially rivet a broken heart, it honestly was a relief for everybody else to get Oliver out of the house for a while, and mother needn't look at her that way because she was as sorry as any of the rest of them for poor old Oliver but when people went about like walking cadavers and nearly bit you any time you mentioned anything that had to do with marriage, it was time they went somewhere else for a while and stayed there till they got over it.
And Mrs. Crowe, though dutifully rebuking her for her flippant treatment of a brother's pain, agreed with the sense of her remarks, if not with the wording. It had taken a good deal of quiet obstinacy on the part of the whole family to get Oliver to accept Peter Piper's invitation—Mrs. Crowe, who was understanding, knew at what cost—the cost of a man who has lost a hand's first appearance in company with the stump unbandaged—but anything would be better than the mopey Oliver of the last two weeks and a half, and Mrs. Crowe had been taught by a good deal of living the aseptic powers of having to go through the motions of ordinary life in front of a casual audience, even when it seemed that those motions were no longer of any account. So Oliver took clean flannels and a bitter mind to Southampton on the last day of August, and, as soon as he got off the train, was swung into a reel of consecutive amusements that, fortunately, allowed him little time to think.
When he did, it was only to wonder rather frigidly if this fellow with glasses who played tennis and danced and swam and watched and commented athletically on the Davis Cup finals, sitting between Elinor Piper and Juliet Bellamy whom he had taken to dances off and on ever since he had had his first pair of pumps, could really be he. The two people didn't feel in the least the same.
The two Mr. Crowes, he thought. “Mr. Oliver Crowe—meet Mr. Oliver Crowe.” “On our right, ladies and gentlemen, we have one of the country's greatest curiosities—a young gentleman who insists upon going on existing when there is nothing at all that makes his existence useful or interesting or proud. A very realistic wax figure that will toddle, shoot a line and play almost any sort of game until you might easily believe it to be genuinely alive. Mr. Oliver Crowe.”
The house-party was to last a week, except for Ted Billett who would have to go back after Labor Day—and before eight hours of it were over, Oliver was watching Ted with grandmotherly interest, a little mordant jealousy, and humor, that, at times, verged toward the hysterical. Nancy—and especially the loss of her—had made him sensitive as a skinless man to the winds and vagaries of other young people in love—and while Ted could look at and talk with Elinor Piper and think himself as safe as a turtle under its shell from the observations and discoveries of the rest of the party he could no more hide himself or his intentions from Oliver's painful scrutiny than he could have hidden the fact that he had suddenly turned bright green. So Oliver, a little with the sense of his own extreme generosity, but sincerely enough in the main, began to play kind shepherd, confidante, referee and second-between-the-rounds to Ted's as yet quite unexpressed strivings—and since most of him was only too willing to busy itself with anything but reminiscences of Nancy, he began to congratulate himself shortly that under his entirely unacknowledged guidance things really seemed to be getting along very well.
And here too his streak of ineradicable humor—that bright plaything made out of knives that is so fine to juggle with light-handedly until the hand meets it in its descent a fraction of a second too soon—came often and singularly to his aid. He could see himself in a property white beard stretching feeble hands in blessing over a kneeling and respectful Elinor and Ted. “Bless you my dear, dear children—for though my own happiness has gone with yester-year, at least I have made you—find each other—and perhaps, when you sit at evening among the happy shouts of your posterity—” but here Oliver broke off into a snort of laughter.
Of course Ted had confided nothing formally as yet—but then, thought Oliver sourly out of his own experience, he wouldn't; that was the way you always felt; and Ted had never been a person of easy confidences. The most he had done had been to take Oliver grimly aside from the dance they had gone to last night and explain in one ferocious and muffled sentence delivered half at Oliver and half at a large tree that if Hinky Selvage didn't stop dancing with Elinor that way he, Ted, would carry him unobtrusively behind a bush and force him to swallow most of his own front teeth. And again Oliver, looking back as a man might to the feverish details of a major operation, realized with cynic mirth that that was a very favorable symptom indeed. Oh everything was going along simply finely for Ted, if the poor fool only knew it. But that he would no more believe of course than you would a dentist who told you he wasn't going to hurt. People in lovewerepoor fools—damn fools—unutterably lucky, unutterably perfect—fools.
Ted and Oliver must have one talk though before it all happened beyond redemption and Ted started wearing that beautiful anesthetized smile and began to concoct small kindly fatal conspiracies with Elinor and Oliver and some nice girl. They hadn't had a real chance to talk since Oliver came back from St. Louis, and shortly—oh very shortly indeed by the way things looked—the only thing they would be able to talk about would be Elinor and how wonderful she and requited love and young happy marriage were—and however glad Oliver might be for Ted and his luck—he really wouldn't be able to stand that, under the present circumstances, for very long at a time. Ted would be gone into fortune—into a fortune that Oliver would have to be the last person on earth to grudge him—but that meant the end of eight years of fighting mockery and friendship together as surely as if those years were marbles and Elinor were dropping them down a well. They could pick it up later—after Ted had been married a year say—but it would have changed then, it wouldn't be the same.
Oliver smiled rather wryly. He wondered if that was at all like what Ted might have thought when he and Nancy—But that wasn't comparable in the least. But Nancy and he were different.Nancy—and with that, the pain came so dazzlingly for a minute that Oliver had to shut his eyes to bear it—and something that wasn't just stupidly rude had to be said to Juliet Bellamy in answer to her loud clear question as to whether he was falling asleep.
All up to and through Labor Day Oliver bluffed and manoeuvered like the head of a small but vicious Balkan State in an International Congress for Ted and Elinor, and towards tea-time, decided sardonically that it was quite time his adopted infants took any further responsibilities off his shoulders. There was no use delaying conclusions any longer—Oliver felt as he looked at his victims like a workmanlike god who simply must finish the rough draft of the particular world he is fussing with before sunset, in spite of all rebellious or slipshod qualities in its clay. There would be a dance that evening. There would be, Oliver thought with some proprietary pride, a large sentimental moon. A few craftily casual words with Elinor before dinner—a real talk with Ted in one of the intermissions of the dance—a watchdog efficiency in guarding the two from intrusion while they got the business over with neatly in any one of several very suitable spots that Oliver had picked out already in his mind's eye. And then, having thoroughly settled Ted for the rest of his years in such a solid and satisfactory way—perhaps the queer gods that had everyone in charge, in spite of their fatal leaning toward practical-joking where the literary were concerned, might find enough applause in their little tin hearts for Oliver's acquired and vicarious merit to give him in some strange and painful way another chance to be alive again and not merely the present wandering spectre-of-body that people who knew nothing about it seemed to take so unreasonably for Oliver Crowe.
So he laid his snares, feeling quite like Nimrod the mighty, though outwardly he was only kneeling on the Piper porch, waiting for the dice to come around to him in a vociferous game of crap that Juliet had organized—he seldom shot without winning now he noticed with superstitious awe. And tea passed to a sound of muffled crumpets, and everyone went up to dress for dinner.
Mrs. Winters' little apartment on West 79th Street—she heads letters from it playfully “The Hen Coop” for there is almost always some member of her own sex doing time with the generous Mrs. Winters. Mrs. Winters is quite celebrated in St. Louis for her personally-conducted tours of New York with stout Middle-Western matrons or spectacled school girls east for visits and clothes—Mrs. Winters has the perfectly-varnished manners, the lust for retailing unimportant statistics and the supercilious fixed smile of a professional guide. Mrs. Winters' little apartment, that all the friends who come to her to be fed and bedded and patronized tell her is so charmingly New Yorky because of her dear little kitchenette with the asthmatic gas-plates, the imitation English plate-rail around the dining-room wall, the bookcase with real books—a countable number of them—and on top of it the genuine signed photograph of Caruso for which Mrs. Winters paid the sum she always makes you guess about, at a charity-bazaar.
Mrs. Winters herself—the Mrs. Winters who issointerested in young people as long as they will do exactly what she wants them to—every inch of her from her waved white hair to the black jet spangles on her dinner gown or the notes of her “cultivated” voice as frosted and glittery and artificial as a piece ofglacéfruit. And with her, Nancy, dressed for dinner too, because Mrs. Winters feels it to be one's duty to oneself to dress for dinner always, no matter how much one's guests may wish to relax—Nancy as much out of place in the apartment whose very cushions seem to smell of that modern old-maidishness that takes itself for superior feminist virtue as a crocus would be in an exhibition of wool flowers—a Nancy who doesn't talk much and has faint blue stains under her eyes.
“So everything went very satisfactorily indeed today, dear Nancy?”
Mrs. Winters' voice implies the uselessness of the question. Nancy is staying with Mrs. Winters—it would be very strange indeed if even the least important accompaniments of such a visit were not of the most satisfactory kind.
“Yes, Mrs. Winters. Nothing particularly happened, that is—but they like my work.”
“Yes, dear,” Mrs. Winters croons at her, she is being motherly. The effect produced is rather that of a sudden assumption of life and vicarious motherhood on the part of a small, brightly-painted porcelain hen.
“Then they will be sending you over shortly, no doubt? Across the wide wide sea—” adds Mrs. Winters archly, but Nancy is too tired-looking to respond to the fancy.
“I suppose they will when they get ready,” she answers briefly and returns to her chicken-croquette with the thought that in its sleekness, genteelness, crumblingness, and generally unnourishing qualities it is really rather like Mrs. Winters. An immense desire, after two weeks of Mrs. Winters' mental and physical cuisine for something as hearty and gross as the mere sight of a double planked steak possesses her achingly—but Mrs. Winters was told once that she “ate like a bird.”
“Well, in that case, dear Nancy, you certainly must not leave New York indefinitely without making the most of your opportunities,” Mrs. Winters' tones are full of genteel decision. “I have made out a little list, dear Nancy, of some things which I thought, in my funny old way, might possibly be worth your while. We will talk it over after dinner, if you like—”
“Thank you so much, dear Mrs. Winters” says Nancy with dutiful hopelessness. She is only too well acquainted with Mrs. Winters' little lists. “As anartist, as anartist, dear Nancy, especially.” Mrs. Winters breathes somewhat heavily, “Things That Should Interest you. Nothing Bizarre, you understand, Nothing Merely Freakish—but some of the Things in New York that I, Personally, have found Worth While.”
The Things that Mrs. Winters Has Found Personally Worth While include a great many public monuments. She will give Nancy a similar list of Things Worth While in Paris, too, before Nancy sails—and Nancy smiles acceptably as each one of them is mentioned.
Only Mrs. Winters cannot see what Nancy is thinking—for if she did she might become startlingly human at once as even the most perfectly poised of spinsters is apt to do when she finds a rat in the middle of her neat white bed. For Nancy is thinking quite freely of various quaint and everlasting places of torment that might very well be devised for Mrs. Winters—and of the naked fact that once arrived in Paris it will matter very little to anybody what becomes of her and least of all to herself—and that Mrs. Winters doesn't know that she saw a chance mention of Mr. Oliver Crowe, the author of “Dancer's Holiday” today in the “Bookman” and that she cut it out because it had Oliver's name in it and that it is now in the smallest pocket of her bag with his creased and recreased first letter and the lucky piece she had from her nicest uncle and a little dim photograph of Mr. Ellicott and half a dozen other small precious things.
The dance is at the Piper's this time—the last Piper dance of the Southampton season and the biggest—other people may give dances after it but everybody who knows will only think of them as relatively pleasant or useless addenda. The last Piper Dance has been the official period to the Southampton summer ever since Elinor'sdébut—and this time the period is sure to be bigger and rounder than ever since it closes the most successful season Southampton has ever had.
Nothing very original about its being a masquerade, from Mr. Piper a courteously grey-haired mandarin in jade-green robes beside Mrs. Piper—lovely Mary Embree that was—in the silks of a Chinese empress, heavy and shining and crusted as the wings of a jeweler's butterfly, her reticent eyes watching the bright broken patterns of the dancing as impassively as if she were viewing men being tortured or invested with honor from the Dragon Throne, to Oliver, a diffident Pierrot who has discovered no even bearably comfortable way of combining spectacles and a mask, and Peter who [Illustration: THE LAST PIPER DANCE HAS BEEN THE OFFICIAL PERIOD TO THE SOUTHAMPTON SUMMER] is gradually turning purple under the furs of a dancing bear. Nothing much out of the ordinary in the tunes and the three orchestras and the fact that a dozen gentlemen dressed as the Devil are finding their tails very inconvenient as regards the shimmy and a dozen Joans of Arc are eying each other with looks of dumb hatred whenever they pass. Nothing singular about the light-heart throb of the music, the smell of powder and scent and heat and flowers, the whole loose drifting garland of the dancers, blowing over and around the floor in the idle designs of sand, floating like scraps of colored paper through a smooth wind heavy with music as the hours run away like light water through the fingers. But outside the house the Italian gardens are open, little lanterns spot them like elf-lights, shining on hedge-green, pale marble; the night is pallid with near and crowded stars, the air warm as Summer water, sweet as dear youth.
The unmasking is to take place at midnight and it is past eleven when Oliver drops back into the stag line after being stuck for a dance and a half with a leaden-footed human flower-basket who devoted the entire time to nervous giggles and the single coy statement that she just knew he never could guess who she was but she recognized him perfectly. He starts looking around for Ted. There he is, scanning the clown's parade with the eyes of an anxious hawk, disgruntled nervousness plain in every line of his body. Then Oliver remembers that he saw a slim Chinese girl in loose blue silks go off the floor ten minutes or so ago with a tall musketeer. He goes over and touches Ted on a particolored arm—the latter is dressed as a red and gilt harlequin—and feels the muscles he touches twitch under his hand.
“Cigarette? It's getting hotter than cotton in here—they'll have to open more windows—”
“What?” Then recognizing voice and glasses “Oh yeah—guess so—awful mob, isn't it?” and they thread their way out into the cool.
They wander down from the porch and into the gardens, past benches where the talk that is going on seems to be chiefly in throaty undertones and halts nervously as their steps crunch past.
“The beautiful and damned!” says Oliver amusedly, then a little louder“Amusez vous bien, mes enfants” at a small and carefully modulated shriek that comes from the other side of the low hedge, “The night's still young. But Good Lord, isn't thereanyplace in the whole works where two respectable people can sit without feeling like chaperones?”
They find one finally—it is at the far end of the gardens—a seat the only reason for whose obvious desertion seems to be, comments Oliver, that some untactful person has strung a dim but still visible lantern directly above it—and relapses upon it silently. It is not until the first cigarettes of both are little red dying stars on the grass beside them that either really starts to talk.
“Cool,” says Oliver, stretching his arms. The night lies over them light as spray—a great swimming bath and quietness of soft black, hushed silver—above them the whole radiant helmet of heaven is white with its stars. From the house they have left, glowing yellow in all its windows, unreal against the night as if it were only a huge flat toy made out of paper with a candle burning behind it, comes music, blurred but insistent, faint as if heard over water, dull and throbbing like horse-hoofs muffled with leather treading a lonely road.
“Um. Good party.”
“Real Piper party, Ted. And, speaking of Pipers, friend Peter certainly seems to be enjoying himself—”
“Really?”
“Third bench on the left as we came down. Never go to a costume-party dressed as a dancing-bear if you want to get any quiet work in on the side. Rule One of Crowe's Social Code for Our Own First Families.”
Ted chuckles uneasily and there is silence for another while as they smoke. Both are in very real need of talking to each other but must feel their way a little carefully because they are friends. Then—
“I,” says Ted and—
“You,” says Oliver, simultaneously. Both laugh and the little tension that has grown up between them snaps at once.
“I suppose you know that Nancy's and my engagement went bust about three weeks ago,” begins Oliver with elaborate calm, his eyes fixed on his shoes.
Ted clears his throat.
“Didn'tknow. Afraid it was something like that though—way you were looking,” he says, putting his words one after the other, as slowly as if he were building with children's blocks. “What was it? Don't tell me unless you want to, of course—youknow—-”
“Want to, rather.” Ted knows that he is smiling, and how, though he is not looking at his face. “After all—old friends, all that. My dear old College chum,” but the mockery breaks down. “My fault, I guess,” he says in a voice like metal.
“It was, Ted. Acted like a fool. And then, this waiting business—not much use going over that, now. But it's broken. Got my—property—such as it was all back in a neat little parcel two weeks ago. That's why I quit friend Vanamee—you ought to have known from that.”
“Did, I suppose, only I hoped it wasn't. I'm damn sorry, Ollie.
“Thanks, Ted.”
They shake hands, but not theatrically.
“Oh well—oh hell—oh dammit, you know how blasted sorry I am. That's all I can say, I guess—”
“Well, so am I. And it was my fault, chiefly. And that's all I can say.”
“Look here, though.” Ted's voice is doing its best to be logical in spite of the fact that two things, the fact that he is unutterably sorry for Oliver and the fact that he mustn't show it in silly ways, are fighting in him like wrestlers. “Are you sure it's as bad as all that? I mean girls—-” Ted flounders hopelessly between his eagerness to help and his knowledge that it will take ungodly tact. “I mean, Nancy's different all right—but they change their minds—and they come around—and—”
Oliver spreads out his hands. It is somehow queerly comforting not to let himself be comforted in any degree. “What's the use? Tried to explain—got her mother—Nancy was out but she certainly left a message—easier if we never saw each other again—well—Then she sent back everything—she knew I'd tried to phone her—tried to explain—never a word since then except my name and address on the package—oh it's over, Ted. Feenee. But it's pretty well smashed me. For the present, at least.”
“But if you started it,” Ted says stubbornly.
“Oh I did, of course—gentlemanly supposition anyhow—that's why—don't you see?”
“Can't say I do exactly.”
“Well?”
“Well?”
“We're both of us too proud, Ted. And too poor. And starting again—can't you—visualize—it wouldn't be the way it was—only both of us thinking aboutthatall the time—andstillwe couldn't get married. I've got less right than ever, now—oh, but howcouldwe after what we've said—” and this time his voice has lost all the attitudes of youth, it is singularly older and seems to come from the center of a place full of pain.
“I wish I could help, though, Ollie. You know,” says Ted.
“Wish you could.” Then later, “Thanks.” “Welcome.”
Both smoke and are silent for a time, remembering small things out of the last eight years.
“But what are you going to do, Ollie, now you've kissed the great god Advertising a fond good-by?”
Ollie stirs uneasily.
“Dunno—exactly. I told you about those two short stories Easten wanted me to take out of my novel? Well, I've done it and sent 'em in—and he'll buy 'em all right.”
“That's fine!”
“It's a little money, anyhow. And then—remember Dick Lamoureux?”
“Yes.”
“Got a letter from him right after—I came back from St. Louis. Well, he's got a big job with the American Express in Paris—European Advertising Manager or something like that—he's been crazy to have either of us come over ever since that idea of the three of us getting an apartment on theRive Gauchefell through. Well, he says, if I can come over, he'll get me some sort of a job—not much to go on at first but they want people who are willing to stay—enough to live on anyway—I want to get out of the country, Ted.”
“Should think you would. Good Lord—Paris! Why you lucky, lucky Indian!” says Ted affectionately. “When'll you leave?” “Don't know. He said cable him if I really decided—think I will. They need men and I can get a fair enough letter from Vanamee. I've been thinking it over ever since the letter came—wondering if I'd take it. Think I will now. Well.”
“Well, I wish I was going along, Crowe.”
And this time Oliver is really able to smile.
“No, you don't.”
“Oh well—but, honestly—well, no, I suppose I don't. And I supposethat'ssomething you know all about, too, you—private detective!”
“Private detective! Why, you poor ass, if you haven't noticed how I've been playing godmother to you all the way through this house-party—”
“I have. I suppose I'd thank anybody else. Coming from you, though, I can only say that such was both my hope and my expectation.”
“Oh, youperfectass!” Both laugh, a little unsteadily.
“Well, Ollie, what think?” says Ted, finding some difficulty with his words for some reason or other.
“Think? Can't tell, my amorous child. Coldly considered, I think you've got a good show—and I'm very strong for it, needless to say—and if you don't go and put it over pretty soon I'll be intensely annoyed—one of the pleasures I've promised myself for years and years has been getting most disgracefully fried at your wedding, Ted.”
“Well, tonight is going to be zero hour, I think.” Ted proceeds with a try at being flippant and Oliver cackles with mirth.
“I knew it. I knew it. Old Uncle Ollie, the Young Proposer's Guide and Pocket Companion.” Then his voice changes. “Luck,” he says briefly.
“Thanks. Need it.”
“Of course I'm not worthy,” Ted begins diffidently but Oliver stops him.
“They never are. I wasn't. But that doesn't make any difference. You've got to—n'est-ce pas?”
“You old bum! Yes. But when I think of it—-”
“Don't”
“But leaving out everything else—it seems so damnedcheeky!When Elinor's got everything, including all the money in the world, and I—”
“We talked that over a long time ago, remember? And remember what we decided—that it didn't matter, in this year and world at least. Of course I'm assuming that you're really in love with her—”
“I am,” from Ted very soberly. “Oh I am, all right.”
“Well then, go ahead. And, Theodore, I shall watch your antic motions with the greatest sarcastic delight, both now and in the future—either way it breaks. Moreover I'll take anybody out of the action that you don't want around—and if there were anything else I could do—”
“Got to win off my own service,” says Ted. “You know. But thanks all the same. Only when I think of—some incidents of Paris—and how awful near I've come to making a complete fool of myself with that Severance woman in the last month—well—”
“Look here, Ted.” Oliver is really worried. “You're not going to let that—interfere—are you? Right now?”
“I've got to tell her.” Ted's smile is a trifle painful. “Got to, you know. Oh not that. But France. The whole business.”
“But good heavens, man, you aren't going to make it the start of the conversation?”
“Well—maybe not. But it's all got to be—explained. Only way I'll ever feel decent—and I don't suppose I'll feel too decent then.”
“But Ted—oh it's your game, of course. Only I don't think it's being—fair—to either of you to tell her just now.”
“Can't help it, Ollie.” Ted's face sets into what Oliver once christened his “mule-look.” “I've thought it over backwards and sideways and all around the block—and I can't squirm out of it because it'll be incredibly hard to do. As a matter of fact,” he pauses, “it'll tell itself, you know, probably,” he ends, more prophetically than he would probably care to know.
“Well, I simplydon'tsee—”
“Must,” and after that Oliver knows there is very little good of arguing the point much further. He has known Ted for eight years without finding out that a certain bitter and Calvinistic penchant for self-crucifixion is one of his ruling forces—and one of those least easily deduced from his externals. Still he makes a last effort.
“Now don't start getting all tied up about that. Keep your mind on Elinor.”
“That's not—hard.”
“Good—I see that you have all the proper reactions. And you'll excuse me for saying thatIdon't think she's too good for you—and even if she were she'd have to marry somebody, you know—and when you put it, put it straight, and let Paris and everything else you're worrying about go plumb to hell! And that's good advice.”
“I know it. I'll tell you of course.”
“Well, I shouldthinkyou would!”
Oliver looks at his watch. “Great Scott—they'll be unmasking in twenty minutes. And I've got to go back and cut Juliet out of the herd and take her to supper—”
They rise and look at each other. Then
“Hope this is the last time, Ted, old fel—which isn't any reflection on the last eight years odd,” says Oliver slowly, and their hands grip once and hard. Then they both start talking fast as they walk back to the house to cover the unworthy emotion. But just as they are going in the door, Oliver hisses into Ted's ear, an advisory whisper,
“Now go and eat all the supper you can, you idiot—it always helps.”
The parti-colored harlequin and the young Chinese lady in blue silks are walking the Italian gardens, talking about nothing in particular. Ted has managed to discuss the moon—it is high now, a round white lustre—the night, which is warm—the art of garden decoration, French, English and Italian—the pleasantness of Southampton after New York—all with great nervous fluency but so completely as if he had met Elinor for the first time ten minutes ago that she is beginning to wonder why, if he dislikes her as much as that, he ever suggested leaving the dance-floor at all.
Ted, meanwhile, is frantically conscious of the fact that they have reached the end of the garden, are turning back, and still he is so cripplingly tongue-tied about the only thing he really wishes to say that he cannot even get the words out to suggest their sitting down. It is not until he stumbles over a pebble while passing a small hard marble seat set back in a nest of hedge that he manages to make his first useful remark of the promenade.
“Ah—a bench!” he says brightly, and then, because that sounded so completely imbecile, plunges on.
“Don't you want to sit down a minute, Elinor?—I—you—it's so cool—so warm, I mean—” He closes his mouth firmly—what aghastlyway to begin!
But Elinor says “Yes” politely and they try to adapt themselves to the backless ornamental bench, Ted nervously crossing and recrossing his legs until he happens to think that Elinor certainly never would marry anybody with St. Vitus' Dance.
“Can't tell you how nice it's been this time, Elinor. And you've been—” There, things are going better—at least, he has recovered his voice.
“Why, you know how much we love to have you, Ted,” says Elinor and Ted feels himself turn hot and cold as he was certain you never really did except in diseases. But then she adds, “You and Ollie and Bob Templar, and, oh, all Peter's friends.”
He looks at her steadily for a long moment—the blue silks of her costume suit her completely. She is there, black hair and clear eyes, small hands and mouth pure as the body of a dream and elvish with thoughts like a pansy—all the body of her, all that people call her. And she is so delicately removed from him—so clean in all things where he is not—that he knows savagely within him that there can be no real justice in a world where he can even touch her lightly, and yet he must touch her because if he does not he will die. All the things he meant to say shake from him like scraps of confetti, he does not worry any more about money or seeming ridiculous or being worthy, all he knows at all in the world is his absolute need of her, a need complete as a child's and so choosing any words that come.
“Listen—do you like me?” says the particolored harlequin and all the sharp leaves of the hedge begin to titter as wind runs over them at one of the oldest and least sensible questions in the world.
The young Chinese lady turns toward the harlequin. There is some laughter in her voice and a great deal of surprise.
“Why, Ted, of course—why, why shouldn't I?—You're Peter's friend and—”
“Oh, I don't meanthat!” The harlequin's hands twist at each other till the knuckles hurt, but he seems to have recovered most voluble if chaotic powers of speech.
“That was silly, asking that—but it's hard—when you care for anybody so much you can'tsee—when you love them till they're the only thing thereisyou care about—and you know you're not fit to touch them—not worthy of them—that they're thousands of times too good for you but—oh, Elinor, Elinor, I just can't stand it any more! Do you love me, Elinor, because I love you as I never loved anything else in the world?”
The young Chinese lady doesn't seem to be quite certain of just what is happening. She has started to speak three times and stopped each time while the harlequin has been waiting with the suspense of a man hanging from Heaven on a pack-thread. But then she does speak.
“I think I do, Ted—-oh, Ted, I know I do,” she says uncertainly—and then Oliver, if he were there, would have stepped forward to bow like an elegant jack-knife at the applause most righteously due him for perfect staging, for he really could not have managed better about the kiss that follows if he had spent days and days showing the principals how to rehearse it.
And then something happens that is as sudden as a bubble's going to pieces and most completely out of keeping with any of Oliver's ideas on how love should be set for the theatre. For “Oh, what am Idoing?” says the harlequin in the voice of a man who has met his airy double alone in a wood full of ghosts and seen his own death in its face, and he crumples into a loose bag of parti-colored silks, his head in his hands. [Illustration: The Young Chinese Lady is Shrinking Inside Her Silks] It would be nothing very much to any sensible person, no doubt—the picture that made itself out of cold dishonorable fog in the instant of peace after their double release from pain. It was only the way that Elinor looked at him after the kiss—and remembering the last time he saw his own diminished little image in the open eyes of a girl.
The young Chinese lady is shrinking inside her silks as if frost had touched her—all she knows is that she doesn't understand. And then there is the harlequin looking at her with his face gone suddenly pinched and odd as if he had started to torture himself with his own hands; and the fact that he will not touch her, and what he says.
“Oh, Elinor, darling. Oh, I can't tell you, I can't.”
“But whatisit, Ted?”
“It's this—it's what I meant to tell you before I ever told you I loved you—what I haven't any right not to tell you—and I guess that the fact I didn't, shows pretty well what sort of a fellow I am. Do you really think you know about me, dear—do you really think you do?”
“Why, of course, Ted.” The voice is still a little chill with the fright he gave her, but under that it is beautifully secure.
“Well, you don't. And, oh Lord, why couldn't it have happened before I went to France!—because then it would have been all different and I'd have had some sort of a right—not a right, maybe—but anyhow, I could have come to you—straight. I can't now, dear, that's all.”
The voice halts as if something were breaking to pieces inside of it.
“I can't bring you what you'd bring me. Oh, it isn't anything—physically—dangerous—that way—I—was—lucky.” The words space themselves as slowly as if each one of them burnt like acid as it came. “It's—just—that. Just that—while I was in France—I went over—all the hurdles—and then a few more, I guess—and I've got to—tell you about it—because I love you—and because I wouldn't dare love you, even—if I didn't—tell you the truth. You see. But, oh my God, I never thought it would—hurt so!” and the parti-colored body of the harlequin is shaken with a painful passion that seems ridiculously out of keeping with his motley. But all that the young Chinese lady feels is that for a single and brittle instant she and somebody else had a star in their hands that covered them with light clean silver, and that now the conjuror who made the star out of nothing and gave it to her is showing her just why there never was any star. Moreover, she has only known she was in love for the last five minutes—and that is hardly long enough for her to discover that love itself is too living to be very much like any nice girl's dreams of it—and the shock of what Ted has said has brought every one of her mother's reticent acid hints on the general uncleanliness of Man too prickling-close to her mind. And she can't understand—she never will understand, she thinks with dull pain.
“Oh howcouldyou, Ted? Howcouldyou?” she says as he waits as a man walking the plank might wait for the final gentle push that will send him overboard.
“Oh, I know it was fine of you to tell me—but it's just spoiled everything forever. Oh, Ted, howcouldyou?” and then she is half-running, half-walking, up the path toward the porch and all she knows is that she must get somewhere where she can be by herself. The harlequin does not follow her.