Oliver, in the middle of a painfully vivid dream in which he has just received in the lounge of a Yale Club crowded with whispering, pointing spectators the news that Miss Nancy Ellicott of St. Louis has eloped with the Prince of Wales, wakes, to hear someone stumbling around the room in the dark.
“That you, Ted?”
“Yes. Go to bed.”
“Can't—I'm there. What's time?”
“'Bout five, I guess.” Ted doesn't seem to want to be very communicative.
“Um.” A pause while Oliver remembers what it was he wanted to ask Ted about and Ted undresses silently.
“Well—congratulations?”
Ted's voice is very even, very controlled.
“Sorry, Ollie. Not even with all your good advice.”
“Honestly?”
“Uh-huh.” “Well, look here—better luck next time, anyway. It's all—”
“It's all over, Ollie. I'm getting out of here tomorrow before most of them are up. Special breakfast and everything—called back to town by urgent legal affairs.” He laughs, rather too barkingly for Oliver to like it.
“Oh, Hell!”
“Correct.”
“Well, she's—”
“She's an angel, Ollie. But I had to tell her—about France. That broke it. D'you wonder?”
“Oh, you poor, damn, honorable, simple-minded, blessed, blasted fool!Beforeyou'd really begun?”
Ted hesitates. “Y-yes.”
“Oh, hell!”
“Well, if all you can do is to lie back in bed there and call on your Redeemer when—-Sorry, Ollie. But I'm not feeling too pleasant tonight.”
“Well, I ought to know—”
“Forgot. You ought. Well—you do.”
“But I don't see anything yet that—”
“She does.”
“But—”
“Oh, Ollie, what's the use? We can both of us play Job's comforter to the other because we're pretty good friends. But you can see how my telling her would—oh well there isn't much percentage in hashing it over. I've done what I've done. If I'd known I'd have to pay for it this way, I wouldn't have—but there, we're all made like that. There's one thing I can't do—and that is get away with a thing like that on false pretences—I'd rather shoot the works on one roll and crap than use the sort of dice that behave. I went into the thing with my eyes open—now I've got to pay for it—well, what of it? It wouldn't make all the difference to a lot of girls, perhaps—a lot of the best—but it does to Elinor and she's the only person I want. If I can't have her, I don't want anything—but if I've made what all the Y.M.C.A. Christians that ever sold nickel bars of chocolate for a quarter would call a swine out of myself—well, I'm going to be a first-class swine. So put on my glad rags, Josie, I'm going to Rector's and hell!”
All this has been light enough toward the end but the lightness is not far from a very real desperation, all the same.
“Meaning by which?” Oliver queries uneasily.
“Meaning by which that some of my address for the next two-three weeks will be care of Mrs. Rose Severance, 4th floor, the Nineveh, Riverside Drive, New York—you know the place, I showed it to you once from a bus-top when we were talking the mysterious lady over. And that I don't think Mr. Theodore Billett will graduatecum laudefrom Columbia Law School. In fact, I think it very possible that Mr. Billett will join Mr. Oliver Crowe, the celebrated unpublished novelist on a pilgrimage to Paris for to cure their broken hearts and go to the devil like gentlemen. Eh, Ollie?”
“Well, that's all right forme,” says Oliver combatively. “And I always imagined we'd find each other in hell. I'm not trying to be inhospitable with my own pet red-hot gridiron, but all the same—”
“Now, Crowe, for Pete's sake, it's five o'clock in the morning and I'm catching the 7.12—”
And Oliver is too sleepy to argue the point. Besides he knows quite well that any arguments he can use will only drive Ted, in his present state of mind, a good deal farther and faster along the road he has so dramatically picked out for himself. So, between trying to think of some means of putting either sense or the fear of God into Elinor Piper, whatever Ted may say about it, and wondering how the latter would take a suggestion to come over to Melgrove for a while instead of starting an immoral existence with that beautiful but possessive friend of Louise's, he drops off to sleep.
Oliver had depended on Ted's noisy habits in dressing and packing to wake him and give them a chance to talk before Ted left—but when he woke it was to hear a respectful servantly voice saying “Ten o'clock, sir!” and his first look around the room showed him that Ted's bed was empty and Ted's things were gone. There was a scribbled note propped up against the mirror, though.
“Dear Ollie:“So long—and thanks for both good adviceand sympathy. The latter helped if the formerdidn't. Drop me a message at 252A as soonas you decide on this French proposition. I'mserious about it. TED.”
By the time he had read this through, Oliver began to feel rather genuinely alarmed.
He could not believe that the whole affair between Ted and Elinor Piper had gone so utterly wrong as the note implied—he had had a whimsical superstition that it must succeed because he was playing property man to it after his own appearance as Romeo had failed—but he knew Ted and the two years' fight against the struggling nervous restlessness and discontent with everything that didn't have either speed or danger in it that the latter, like so many in his position, had had to make. His mouth tightened—no girl on earth, even Nancy, could realize exactly what that meant—the battle to recover steadiness and temperance and sanity in a temperament that was in spite of its poised externals most brilliantly sensitive, most leapingly responsive to all strong stimuli—a temperament moreover that the war and the armistice between them had turned wholly toward the stimuli of fever—and Ted had made it with neither bravado nor bluster and without any particular sense of doing very much—and now this girl was going to smash it and him together as if she were doing nothing more important than playing with jackstones.
He remembered a crowd of them talking over suicide one snowy night up in Coblenz—young talk enough but Ted had been the only one who really meant it—he had got quite vehement on picking up your proper cue for exit when you knew that your part was through or you were tired of the part. He remembered café hangers-on in Paris—college men—men who could talk or write or teach or do any one of a dozen things—but men who had crumbled with intention or without it under the strain of the war and the snatches of easy living to excess, and now had about them in everything they said or wore a faint air of mildew; men who stayed in Paris on small useless jobs while their linen and their language verged more and more toward the soiled second-hand—who were always meaning to go home but never went. If Ted went to Paris—with his present mind. Why Ted was his best friend, Oliver realized with a little queer shock in his mind—it was something they had never just happened to say that way. And therefore. Far be it from Oliver to be rude to the daughter of his hostess, but some things were going to be explained to Miss Elinor Piper if they had to be explained by a public spanking in the middle of the Jacobean front hall.
But then there was breakfast, at which few girls appeared, and Elinor was not one of the few. And then Peter insisted on going for a swim before lunch—and then lunch with Elinor at the other end of the table and Juliet Bellamy talking like a mechanical piano into Oliver's ear so that he had to crane his neck to see Elinor at all. What he saw, however, reassured him a little—for he had always thought Elinor one of the calmest young persons in the world, and calm young persons do not generally keep adding spoonfuls of salt abstractedly to their clam-broth till the mixture tastes like the bottom of the sea.
But even at that it was not till just before tea-time that Oliver managed to cut her away from the vociferous rest of the house-party that seemed bent on surrounding them both with the noise and publicity of a private Coney Island. Peter has expressed a fond desire to motor over to a little tea-room he knows where you can dance and the others had received the suggestion with frantic applause. Oliver was just starting downstairs after changing his shoes, cursing house-party manners in general and Juliet Bellamy in particular all over his mind when Elinor's voice came up to him from below.
“No, really, Petey. No, I know it's rude of me but honestly I amtiredand if I'm going to feel like anything but limptullethis evening. No, I'mperfectlyall right, I just want to rest for a little while and I promise I'll be positively incandescent at dinner. No, Juliet dear, I wouldn't keep you or anybody else away from Peter's nefarious projects for the world—”
That was quite enough for Oliver—he tiptoed back and hid in his own closet—wondering mildly how he was going to explain his presence there if a search party opened the door. He heard a chorus of voices calling him from below, first warningly, then impatiently—heard Peter bounce up the stairs and yell “Ollie! Ollie, you slacker!” into his own room—and then finally the last motor slurred away and he was able to creep out of his shell.
He met Elinor on the stairs—looking encouragingly droopy, he thought.
“Why Ollie, what's the matter? The pack was howling for you all over the house—they've all gone over to the Sharley—look, I'll get you a car—” She went down a couple of steps toward the telephone.
Oliver immediately and without much difficulty put on his best expression of blight.
“Sorry, El—must have dropped off to sleep,” he said unblushingly. “Lay down on my bed to sort of think some things over—and that's what happens of course. But don't bother—”
“It's no trouble. I could take you over myself but I was so sort of fagged out—that's why I didn't go with them,” she added—a little uncertainly he noticed.
“And—oh it's just being silly and tired I suppose, but all of them together—”
“I know,” said Oliver and hoped his voice had sounded appropriately bitter. “No reflections on you or Peter, El, you both understand and you've both been too nice for words—but some of the others sometimes—”
“Oh I'msorry,” said Elinor contritely, and Oliver felt somewhat as if he were swindling her out of sympathy she probably needed for herself by deliberately calling attention to his own cut finger. But it had to be done—there wasn't any sense in both of them, he and Ted, walking crippled when one of them might be able to doctor the other up by just giving up a little pride. He went on.
“So I thought—I'd just stay around here with a book or something—get some tea from your mother, later, if she were here—”
“Why, I can do that much for you, Ollie, anyway. Let's have it now.”
“But look here, if you were going to do anything—” knowing that after that she could hardly say so, even if she were.
“Oh no. And besides, with both of us here and both of us blue it would be silly if we went and were melancholy at each other from opposite sides of the house.” She tried to be enthusiastic. “And there's strawberry jam and muffins somewhere—the kind that Peter makes himself such a pig about—”
“Well, Elinor, you certainly are a friend—”
A little later, in a quiet corner of the porch with the tea-steam floating pleasantly from the silver nose of its pot and a decorous scarlet and yellow still-life of muffins and jam between them, Oliver felt that so far things had slid along as well as could be expected. Elinor's manners in the first place and her genuine liking for him in the second had come to his help as he knew they would—she was too concerned now with trying to comfort him in small unobtrusive ways to be on her guard herself about her own troubles. All he had to do, he knew, was to sit there and look ostentatiously brokenhearted to have the conversation move in just the directions he wished and that, though it made him feel shameless was not exactly difficult—all he required was a single thought of the last three weeks to make his acting sour perfection itself. “Greater love hath no man than this,” he thought with a grotesque humor—he wondered if any of the celebrated story-book patterns of friendship from Damon and Jonathan on would have found things quite so easy if they had had to take not their lives but most of their most secret and painful inwards and put them down on a tea-table like a new species of currant bun under the eyes of a friendly acquaintance to help their real friends.
“I can't tell you how awfully decent it was of you and Peter,” he began finally after regarding a buttered muffin for several minutes as if it were part of the funeral decorations for dead young love. “Asking me out here, just now. Oh I'll write you a charming bread-and-butter letter of course—but I wanted to tell you really—” He stopped and let the sentence hang with malice aforethought. Elinor's move. Trust Elinor. And the trust was justified for she answered as he wanted her to, and at once.
“Why Ollie, as if it was anything—when we've all of us more or less grown up together, haven't we—and you and Peter—” She stopped—oh what was the use of being tactful! “I suppose it sounds—put on—and—sentimental and all that—saying it,” she laughed nervously, “but we—all of us—Peter and myself—we're so reallysorry—if you'll believe us—only it was hard to know if you wanted to have us say so—how awfully sorry we were. And then asking you out here with this howling mob doesn't seem much like it, does it? but Peter was going to be here—and Ted—and I knew what friends you'd been in college—I thought maybe—but I just didn't want you to think it was because we didn't care—”
“I know—and—and—thanks—and I do appreciate, Elinor.” Oliver noticed with some slight terror that his own voice seemed to be getting a little out of control. But what she had just said took away his last doubt as to whether she was really the kind of person Ted ought to marry—and in spite of feeling as if he were trapping her into a surgical operation she knew nothing about, he kept on.
“It gets pretty bad, sometimes,” he said simply and waited. Last night—if things came out right later—will have been just what Elinor needed most, he decided privately. She had always struck him as being a little too aloof to be quite human—but she was changing under his eyes to a very human variety of worried young girl.
“Well, isn't there something we can reallydo?” she said diffidently, then changing,
“Oh I mean it—if you don't think it's only—probing—asking that?” as she changed again.
“Not a thing I'm afraid, Elinor, though I really do thank you.” He hated his voice—it sounded so brave. “It's just finished, that's all. Can't kick very well. Oh no,” as she started to speak, “it doesn't hurt to talk about, really. Helps, more. And Peter and Ted help too—especially Ted.”
He watched her narrowly—changing color like that must mean a good deal with Elinor.
Then “Why Ted?” she said, almost as if she were talking to herself and then started to try and make him see that that didn't matter—a spectacle to which he remained gratifiedly blind. He addressed his next remarks at the dish of jam so that she wouldn't be able to catch his eye.
“Oh, I'm not slamming Peter's sympathetic soul, El, you know I'm not—but Ted and I just happened to go through such a lot of the war and after it together—and then Ted saw a good deal more of Nancy. Peter's delightful. And kind. But he does assume that because lots of people get engaged and disengaged again all over the lot these days as if they were cutting for bridge-partners there isn't anything particularly serious in things like that. Nothing to really make you make faces and bust, that is. Well, ours happened to be one of the other kind—that's the difference. And Peter, well, Peter isn't exactly the soul of constancy when it comes to such matters—”
“Peter—oh Peter—if you knew the millions of girls that Peter's kept pictures of—”
“Well, I've heard all about the last hundred thousand or so, I think. But there's perfect safety in thousands. It's when you start being so stalwart and sure and manly about one—”
Oliver spread out his hands. Elinor's color—the way it fluctuated at least—was most encouraging. So was the fact that she had tried to butter her last muffin with the handle of her knife. “But I don't seehowif a girl really cared about a man she could let anything—” she said and then stopped with a burning flush. And now Oliver knew that he had to be very careful. He looked over his tools and decided that infantile bitterness was best.
“Girls are girls,” he said shortly, stabbing a muffin. “They tell you they do and then they tell you they don't—that's them.”
“Oliver Crowe, I never heard such a nasty, childish seventeen-year-old idea from you in my whole life!” Oh what would calm Mrs. Piper say if she could see Elinor, eyes cloudy with anger, leaning across the tea-wagon and emphasizing her points by waves of a jammy knife as she defends constancy and romance! “They donot! When a girl cares for a man—and she knows he cares for her—she doesn't care aboutanythingelse, she—”
“That's what Nancy said,” remarked Oliver placidly out of his muffin. “And then—”
“Well, you know I'm sorry for you—you know I'm just as sorry for you as I can be,” went on Elinor excitedly. “But all the same, my dear Ollie, you have no right in the least to say that just because one girl has broken her engagement with you, all girls are the same. I know dozens of girls—” “So do I,” from Oliver, quietly. “Dozens. And they're just the same.”
“Theyaren't. And I haven't the slightest wish to suggest that it wasyourfault, Oliver—but no girl as sweet and friendly and darling as Nancy Ellicott, the little I knew of her that is, but other girls can tell, and she certainly thought you were the person that made all the stars come out in the sky and twinkle, would go and break her engagemententirelyof her own accord—youmusthave—”
And now Oliver looked at her with a good deal of sorrowful pity—she had delivered herself so completely into his hands.
“I never said it was her fault, Elinor,” he said gently, keeping the laughter back by a superb effort of will. “It was mine, I am sure,” and then he added most sorrowfully, “All mine.”
“Well!”
For a moment he forgot that he was there playing checkers with himself and Elinor for Ted.
“You've never been through it, have you?” he said rather fiercely. “You can't have—you couldn't talk like that if you had. When you've put everything you've got in mind or body or soul completely in one person's hands and then, just because of a silly misunderstanding we neither of us meant—they drop it—and you drop with it and the next thing you know you're nothing but amessand all you can wonder is if even the littlest part of you will ever feel whole again—” He realized that he was very nearly shouting, and then, suddenly, that if he kept on this way the game was over and lost. He must think about Ted, not Nancy. Ted, Ted. Mr. Theodore Billett, Jr.
“She'd forgiven me such a lot,” he ended rather lamely. “I thought she'd keep on.”
But his outburst had only made Elinor feel the sorrier for him—he felt like a burglar as he saw the kindness in her eyes.
“I don't imagine she ever had such an awful lot to forgive, Ollie,” she said gently.
Then the lie he had been leading up to all the way came at last, magnificently hesitant.
“She had, Elinor. I was in France you know.”
He was afraid when he had said it—it sounded so much like a title out of a movie—but he looked steadily at her and saw all the color go out of her face and then return to it burningly.
“Well, that wasn't anything to be—forgiven about exactly—was it?” she said unsteadily.
He spoke carefully, in broken sentences, only the knowledge that this was the only way he could think of to help things nerving his mind. “It wasn't being in France, Elinor. It was—the adjuncts. I don't suppose I was any worse than most of my outfit—but that didn't make it any easier when I had to tell her I hadn't been any better. I felt,” his voice rose, his literary trick of mind had come to his rescue now and made him know just how he would have felt if it had really happened, “I felt as if I were in hell. Really. But I had to tell her. And when she'd forgiven me that—and said that it was all right—that it didn't make any real difference now—I thought she was about the finest person in the world—for telling me such nice lies. And after that—I was so sure that it was all right—that because of her knowing and still being able to care—it would last—oh well—”
He stopped, waiting for Elinor but Elinor for a person so voluble a little while ago seemed curiously unwilling to speak.
“Lord knows why I'm telling you this—except that we started arguing and you're nice enough to listen. It's not tea-table conversation, or it wouldn't have been ten years ago—and if I've shocked you, I'm sorry. But after that, as I said—I didn't think there was anything that could separate us—really I didn't—and then just one little time when we didn't quite understand each other and—over. Sorry to spoil your illusions, Elinor, but that's the way people do.”
“But how could she?” and this time there was nothing but pure hurt questioning in Elinor's voice and the words seemed to hurt her as if she were talking needles. “Why Ollie—she couldn't possibly—if she really cared—”
All he wondered was which of them would break first.
“She could,” he said steadily, in spite of the fact that everything in his mind kept saying “No. No. No.” “Any girl could—easily. Even you, Elinor—if you'll excuse my being rude—”
For a moment he thought that his carefully plotted scenario was going to break up into melodrama with the reticent, composed and sympathetic Elinor's suddenly rising and slapping his face. Then he heard her say in a voice of utter anger,
“How can you say anything like that, how can you? You are being the most hateful person that ever lived. Why if I really cared for anyone—if I ever really cared—” and then she began to cry most steadily and whole-heartedly into her napkin and Oliver in spite of all the generous plaudits he was receiving from various parts of his mind for having carried delicate business successfully to a most dramatic conclusion, wondered what in the name of Hymen his cue was now. Some remnants of diplomacy however kept him from doing anything particularly obtrusive and, after he had received an official explanation of nervous headache with official detachment, the end of tea found them being quite cheerful together. Neither alluded directly to what both thought about most but in spite of that each seemed inwardly convinced of being completely if cryptically understood by the other and when the noise of the first returning motor brought a friendly plotter's “You talk to them—they mustn't see me this way,” from Elinor and a casual remark from Oliver that he felt sure he would have to run into town for dinner—family had forwarded a letter from an editor this morning—so if she wanted anything done—they seemed to comprehend each other very thoroughly.
He babbled with the returning jazzers for a quarter of an hour or so, tactfully circumvented Peter into offering him the loan of a car since he had to go into New York, and intimated that he would drop back and in at the Rackstraws' dance as soon as possible, after many apologies for daring to leave at all. Then he went slowly upstairs, humming loudly as he did so. Elinor met him outside his door.
“Ollie—as long as you're going in—I wonder if you'd mind—” Her tone was elaborately careless but her eyes were dancing as she gave him a letter, firmly addressed but unstamped.
“No, glad to—” And then he grinned. “You'll be at the Rackstraws'.”
“Yes, Ollie.”
“Well—we'll be back by ten thirty or try to. Maybe earlier,” he said at her back and she turned and smiled once at him. Then he went into his room.
“Mr. Theodore Billett,” said the address on the letter, “252A Madison Ave., N. Y. C.,” and down in the lower corner, “Kindness of Mr. Oliver Crowe.”
He thought he might very well ask for the latter phrase on Ted's and Elinor's wedding invitations. He passed a hand over his forehead—that had been harder than walking a tight-rope with your head in a sack—but the chasm had been crossed and nothing was left now but the fireworks on the other side. How easy it was to tinker other people's love-affairs for them—for oneself the difficulties were somehow a little harder to manage, he thought. And then he began considering how long it would take from Southampton to New York in the two-seater and just where Ted would most likely be.
A long-distance telephone conversation about six o'clock in the afternoon between two voices usually so even and composed that the little pulse of excitement beating through both as they speak now seems perilous, unnatural. One is Mr. Severance's thin cool speech and the other—most curious, that—seems by every obsequious without being servile, trained and impassive turn and phrase to be that of that treasure among household treasures, Elizabeth.
“My instructions were that I was to call you, sir, whenever I was next given an evening out.”
“Yes, Elizabeth. Well?”
“I have been given an evening out tonight, sir.”
“Yes.”
“Mrs. Severance has told me that I am on no account to return till tomorrow morning, sir.”
“Yes. Go on.”
“There are the materials of a small but quite sufficient meal for two persons in the refrigerator, sir. Mrs. Severance is dining out, sir—she said.” “Yes. Any further information?”
“Mrs. Severance received a telephone call this morning, sir, before she went out. It was after that that she told me I was to have the evening.”
“You did not happen to—overhear—the conversation, did you, Elizabeth?”
“Oh no, sir. Mrs. Severance spoke very low. The only words that I could catch were 'You' at the beginning and 'Please come' near the end. The words 'please come' were rather—affectionately—spoken if I might make so bold, sir.”
“You have done very well, Elizabeth.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“There is nothing else?”
“No, sir. Should you wish me to 'phone you again before tomorrow morning, sir?”
“No, Elizabeth.”
“Thank you, sir. Good-by, sir.”
“Good-by, Elizabeth.”
The rest of the party has scattered to the gardens or the porch—Oliver has wandered into the library alone to wait for Peter who is bringing around the two-seater himself. It is a big dim room with books all the way up to the ceiling and a comfortable leather lounge upon which he sinks, picks up a magazine from a little table beside it and starts ruffling the pages idly. The chirrup of a telephone bell that seems to come out of the wall beside him makes him jump.
Then he remembers—that must be Mr. Piper's office through the closed door there. He remembers, as well, Peter joking with his father once about his never getting away from business even in the country and pointing at the half dozen telephones on top of the big flat desk with a derisive gesture while detailing to Oliver the fondness that Sargent Piper has for secretive private wires and the absurd precautions he takes to keep them intensely private. “Why he went and had all his special numbers here changed once just because I found out one of them by mistake and called him up on it for a joke—the cryptic old person!” Peter had said with mocking affection.
The telephone chirrups again and Oliver gets up and goes toward the door of the office with a vague idea of answering it since there seem to be no servants about. Then he remembers something else—Peter's telling him that nothing irritates his father more than having anyone else answer one of his private wires—and stops with his hand on the door that has swung inward an inch or so already under his casual pressure. It doesn't matter anyhow—there—somebody has answered it—Mr. Piper probably, as there is another door to the office and both of them are generally kept locked. Mr. Piper like all great business men has his petty idiosyncrasies.
Oliver is just starting to turn away when a whisper of sound that seems oddly like “Mrs. Severance” comes to his ear by some trick of acoustics through the door. He hesitates—and stays where he is, wondering all the time why he is doing anything so silly and unguest-like—and also what on earth he could say if Mr. Piper suddenly flung open the door. But Ted has told him a good deal at various times of the more mysterious aspects of Mrs. Severance, and her name jumping out at him this way from the middle of Mr. Piper's private office makes it rather hard to act like a copybook gentleman—especially with his last conversation with Ted still plain in his mind.
The voices are too low for him to hear anything distinctly but again one of the speakers says “Mrs. Severance”—of that he is entirely sure. The receiver clicks back and Oliver regains the lounge in three long soft strides, thanking his carelessness that he is still wearing rubber-soled sport-shoes. He is very much absorbed in an article on “Fishing for Tuna” when Peter comes in.
“Well, Oliver, everything ready for you. Awfully sorry you have to rush in this way—”
“Yes, nuisance all right, but it's my one best editor and that may mean something real—terribly cheeky thing for me to do, Pete—bumming your car like this—”
“Oh rats, you know you're welcome—and anyhow I'm lending it to you because you'll have to bring it back, and that means you'll come back yourself—”
“Well look, Pete,pleasemake all the excuses you can for me to your mother. And I'll run back here and change and then go over to the Rackstraws', as soon as I can—Elinor told you about Ted?”
“Yes. Sounds sort of simple to me asking him back tonight for that beach picnic tomorrow when he absolutely had to leave this morning—but I never could keep all Elinor's social arrangements straight. Certainly hope he can get off.”
“So do I,” says Oliver non-committally and then the door of Mr. Piper's office opens and Mr. Piper comes out looking as well-brushed and courteous as usual but with a face that seems as if it had been touched all over lightly with a grey painful stain.
“Hello, Father? Anything up from Secret Headquarters?”
“No, boy,” and Oliver is surprised at the effort with which Mr. Piper smiles. “Winthrop called up a few minutes ago about those Hungarian bonds but it wasn't anything important—” and again Oliver is very much surprised indeed, though he does not show it.
“Is your mother here, Peter?”
“Upstairs dressing, I think, Father.”
Mr. Piper hesitates.
“Well, you might tell her—it's nothing of consequence but I must go in to town for a few hours—I shall have them give me a sandwich or so now and catch the 7.03, I think.”
“But look, Father, Oliver has to go in too, for dinner—he's taking the two-seater now. Why don't you let him take you too—that would save time—” “Perfectly delighted to, Mr. Piper, of course, and—”
Mr. Piper looks full at Oliver—a little strangely, Oliver thinks.
“That would be—” Mr. Piper begins, and then seems to change his mind for no apparent reason. “No, I think the train would be better, I do not wish to get in too early, though I thank you, Oliver,” he says with an old-fashioned bob of his head. “And now I must really—a little food perhaps”—and he escapes before either Oliver or Peter has time to argue the question. Oliver turns to Peter.
“Look here, Pete, if I'm—”
“You're not. OhI'dthink it'd be a lot more sensible of Father to let you take him in, but you never can tell about Father. Something must be up, though, in spite of what he says—he's supposed to be on a vacation and I haven't seen him look the way he does tonight since some of the tight squeezes in the war.”
It all started by having too much Mrs. Winters at a time, Nancy decided later. Mrs. Winters went down with comparative painlessness in homeopathic doses but Mrs. Winters day in and day out was too much like being forcibly fed with thick raspberry syrup. And then there had been walking up the Avenue from the Library alone the evening before—and remembering walks with Oliver—and coming across that copy of the “Shropshire Lad” in Mrs. Winters' bookcase and thinking just how Oliver's voice had sounded when he read it aloud to her—a process of some difficulty, she recalled, because he had tried to read with an arm around her. And then all the next day as she tried to work nothing but Oliver, Oliver, running through her mind softshoed like a light and tireless runner, crumbling all proper dignity and good resolutions away from her, little hard pebble by little hard pebble, till she had finally given up altogether, called up Vanamee and Company on the telephone and asked, with her heart in her mouth, if Mr. Oliver Crowe were there. The reply that came seemed unreal somehow—she had been so sure he would be and every nerve in her body had been so strung to wonder at what she was going to say or do when he finally answered, that the news that he had left three weeks before brought her down to earth as suddenly as if she had been tripped. All she could think of was that it must be because of her that Oliver had left the company—and illogically picture a starving Oliver painfully wandering the streets of New York and gazing at the food displayed in restaurant windows with lost and hopeless eyes.
Then she shook herself—what nonsense—he must be at Melgrove. She couldn't call him up at Melgrove, though, he mightn't be there when she 'phoned and then his family would answer and what his family must think of her now, when they'd been so perfectly lovely when she and Oliver were first engaged—she shivered a little—no, that wouldn't do. And letters never really said things—it mustn't be letters—besides, she thought, humbly, it would be so awful to have Oliver send letters back unopened. Two weeks of pure Mrs. Winters had chastened Nancy to an unusual degree.
For all that though, it was not until Mrs. Winters had left her alone for the evening after offering her an invitation to attend a little discussion group that met Wednesday evenings and read literary papers at each other, an invitation which Nancy somewhat stubbornly declined, that she finally made up her mind. Then she sighed and went to the telephone again.
“Mr. Oliver Crowe? He is away on a visit just at present but we expect him back tomorrow afternoon.” Margaret is pretending for her own satisfaction over the wire that the Crowes have a maid. “Who is calling, please?”
Rather shakily, “A f-friend.”
Briskly. “I understand. Well, he will be back tomorrow. Is that all that you wished to inquire? No message?”
“Good-by then,” and again Nancy thinks that things simply will not be dramatic no matter how hard she tries.
She decides to take a small walk however—small because she simply must get to bed before Mrs. Winters comes back and starts talking at her improvingly. The walk seems to take her directly to the nearest Subway—and so to the Pennsylvania Station, where, after she has acquired a timetable of trains to Melgrove, she seems to be a good deal happier than she has been for some time. At least as she is going up the cake-colored stairs to the Arcade again she cannot help taking the last one with an irrepressible skip.
Oliver had quite a little time to think things over as the two-seater purred along smooth roads toward New York. The longer he thought them over, the less amiable some few of the things appeared. He formed and rejected a dozen more or less incredible hypotheses as to what possible connection there could be between Mrs. Severance and Sargent Piper—none of them seemed to fit entirely and yet there must be something perfectly simple, perfectly easy to explain—only what on earth could it be?
He went looking through his mind for any scraps that might possibly piece together—of course he hadn't known Peter since College without finding out that in spite of their extreme politeness toward each other, Peter's mother and father really didn't get on. Club-stories came to him that he had tried to get away from—the kind of stories that were told about any prominent man, he supposed—a little leering paragraph in “Town Gossip”—a dozen words dropped with the easy assuredness of tone that meant the speakers were alluding to something that everyone knew by people who hadn't realized that he was Peter's friend. A caustically frank discussion of Mrs. Severance with Ted in one of Ted's bitter moods—a discussion that had given Oliver a bad half-hour later with Louise.
But things like that didn'thappen—people whose houses you stayed at—people your sister brought home over the week-end—the fathers of your own friends. And then Oliver winced as he remembered the afternoon when all the New Haven evening papers had screamed with headlines over the Witterly divorce suit—and Bob Witterly's leaving College because he couldn't stand it—that had been people you knew all right—and everyone had always had such a good time at the Witterlys' too.
It was all perfectly incredible of course—but he would have to find Ted just as soon as possible, no matter where he had to go to find him—and as the little reel of the speedometer began to hitch toward the left and into higher figures, Oliver felt very relieved indeed that he had the two-seater and that Mr. Piper wasn't coming into town till the 7.03.
He got into New York to find he hadn't made as good time as he'd thought—a couple of traffic blocks had kept him back for valuable minutes—though of course the minutes couldn't be valuable exactly when it was all bosh about his having to get in so quickly after all. He went first to 252A Madison Avenue, hoping most heartily that Ted would be there on the fifth floor with his eyeshade over his eyes and large law-books crowding his desk, but the door was locked and knockings brought no response except a peevish voice from the other side of the narrow hall requesting any gentleman that was a gentleman to shut up for Gawd's sake. The Yale Club next—there was just a chance that Ted might be there—
Oliver went through the Yale Club a good deal more thoroughly than most pages, from the lobby to the upstairs dining-room. He even invaded the library to the suspicious annoyance of some old uncle who was pretending to read a book held upside down in his lap in order to camouflage his pre-prandial nap. No Ted—though half-a-dozen acquaintances who insisted on saying hello and taking up time. Back to the street and a slight dispute with a policeman as regarded the place where Oliver had parked his car. He looked at his watch just before poking the self-starter—Mr. Piper's train must be halfway to New York by now. He set his lips and turned down 44th Street toward the Avenue.
Fourth floor Ted had said. The elevator went much too quickly for Oliver—he was standing in front of a most non-committal door-bell before he had arranged the racing tumult of thought in his mind enough to be in any measure sure of just what the devil he was going to say.
Moreover he was oppressed by a familiar and stomachless sensation—the sensation he always had when he tried to high-dive and stood looking gingerly down from a shaky platform at water that seemed a thousand miles away and as flat and hard as a blue steel plate. There wasn't any guide in any Manual of Etiquette he had ever heard of on What to Say When Interrupting a Tete-a-Tete between Your Best Friend and a Dangerous And Beautiful Woman. He wondered idly if Ted would ever speak to him again—Mrs. Severance certainly wouldn't—and he rather imagined that even if Ted and Elinor did get married he would hardly be the welcome guest he had always expected to be there.
Well, that was what you get for trying to pull a Jonathan when the Saul in question was behaving a good deal more like David in the affair with Uriah the Hittite's spouse—and it wasn't safe and Biblical and all done with a couple of thousand years ago but abashingly real and now happening directly under your own astonished eyes. He licked his lips a little nervously—they seemed to be rather dry. No use standing outside the door like a wooden statue of Unwelcome Propriety anyhow—the thing had to be done, that was all—and he pushed the bell-button with all the decision he could force into his finger.
The fact that it was not answered at once helped him a good deal by giving him a certain strength of annoyance. He pushed again.
It was Mrs. Severance who answered it finally—and the moment he saw her face he knew with an immense invisible shock of relief how right he had been, for it was composed as an idol's but under the composure there was emotion, and, the moment she saw him, anger, as strong and steady and impassive as the color of a metal that is only white because it has been possessed to extremity already with all the burning heat that its substance can bear. She was dressed in some stuff that moved with her and was part of her as wholly as if it and her body had been made together out of light and gilded cloud—he had somehow never imagined that she could be as—lustrous—as that—it gave him the sensation that he had only seen her before when she was unlighted like an empty lantern, and that now there was such fire of light in her that the very glass that contained it seemed to be burning of itself. And then he realized that she had given him good-evening with an exquisite politeness, shaken hands and now was obviously waiting, with a little tired look of surprise around her mouth, to find out exactly why he was there at all.
He gathered his wits—it wasn't fair, somehow, for her to be wearing that air of delicate astonishment at an unexpected call at dinner-time when he hadn't been invited—it forced him into being so casually polite.
“Sorry to break in on you like this, Mrs. Severance,” he said with a ghastly feeling that after all he might be entirely wrong, and another that it was queer to have to be so formal, in the afternoon tea sense, with his words when his whole mind was boiling with pictures of everything from Ted as a modern Tannhauser in a New York Venusberg to triangular murder. “I hope I'm not—disturbing you?”
“Oh no. No,” and he suddenly felt a most complete if unwilling admiration for the utter finish with which she was playing her side of the act.
“Only you see,” and this was Oliver doing his best at the ingenuous boy, “Ted Billett, you know—he said he might be having dinner with you this evening—and I've got a very important letter for him—awful nuisance—don't see why it couldn't have gone in the mail by itself—but the man was absolutely insistent on my delivering it by hand.” “A letter? Oh yes. And they want an answer right away?” Again Oliver realized grudgingly that whatever Mrs. Severance might be she was certainly not obvious. For “I'm so glad you came then,” she was saying with what seemed to be perfect sincerity. “Won't you come in?”
That little pucker that came and went in the white brow meant that she was sure that she could manage him, sure she could carry it off, Oliver imagined—and he was frank enough with himself to admit that he was not at all sure that she couldn't.
“Oh Ted—” he heard her say, very coolly but also with considerable distinctness, as if her voice had to carry, “there's a friend of yours here with a letter for you—”
And then she had brought him inside and was apologizing for having the front room so badly lighted but one had to economize on light-bills, didn't one, even for a small apartment, and besides didn't it give one a little more the real feeling of evening? And Oliver was considering why, when if as he pressed the bell, he had felt so much like a modern St. George and wholly as if he were doing something rather fine and perilous, he should feel quite so much like a gauche seventeen-year-old now. He thought that he would not enjoy playing chess with Mrs. Severance. She was one of those people who smiled inoffensively at the end of a game and then said they thought it would really be a little evener if they gave you both knights.
Ted reassured him though. Ted, stumbling out of the dining-room, with a mixture of would-be unconcern, compound embarrassment and complete though suppressed fury at Oliver on his face. It was hardly either just or moral, Oliver reflected, that Mrs. Severance should be the only one of them to seem completely at her ease.
“Hello, Ollie,” in the tone of “And if you'd only get the hell out as quickly as possible.” “Mrs. Severance—” a stumble over that. “You've got a letter for me?”
“Yes. It's important,” said Oliver as firmly as he could. He gave it, and, as Ted sat down near a lamp to read it, Oliver saw by one sudden momentary flash that passed over Mrs. Severance's face that she had seen the address and known instantly that the handwriting was not that of a man. And then Oliver began to think that he might have been right when he had thought of the present expedition as something rather perilous—he found that he had moved three steps away from Mrs. Severance without his knowing it, very much as he might have from an unfamiliar piece of furniture near which he was standing and which had instantaneously developed all the electric properties of a coil of live wire. Then he looked at Ted's face—and what he saw there made him want to kick himself for looking—because it is never proper for even the friendliest spectator to see a man's private soul stripped naked as a grass-stalk before his own eyes. It was horribly like watching Ted lose balance on the edge of a cliff that he had been walking unconcernedly and start to fall without crying out or any romantic gestures, with only that look of utter surprise struck into his face and the way his hands clutched as if they would tear some solid hold out of the air. Oliver kept his eyes on him in a frosty suspense while he read the letter all through three times and then folded it and put it carefully away in his breast pocket—and then when he looked at Mrs. Severance Oliver could have shouted aloud with immense improper joy, for he knew by the way Ted's hands moved that they were going back in the car together.
Ted was on his feet and his voice was as grave as if he were apologizing for having insulted Mrs. Severance in public, but under the meaninglessness of his actual words it was wholly firm and controlled.
“I'm awfully sorry—I've got to go right away. You'll think me immensely rude but it's something that's practically life-and-death.” “Really?” said Mrs. Severance and Oliver could have clapped his hands at her accent. Now that the battle had ended bloodlessly, he supposed he might be permitted to applaud, internally at least. And “I'm sorry—but this is over,” said every note in Ted's voice and “Lost have I? Well then—” every note in hers.
It occurred to Oliver that things were badly arranged—all this—and he was the only audience.
Life seemed sudden lavish in giving him benefit performances of other people's love-affairs—he supposed it was all part of the old and deathless jest.
And then, like a prickling of cold, there passed over him once more that little sense of danger. Mrs. Severance and Ted were both standing looking at each other and neither was saying anything—and Ted looked by his face as if he were walking in his sleep.
“The car's down below, old boy,” said Oliver helpfully, and then, a little louder “Peter's car, you know,” and whatever cobwebs had been holding Ted for the last instant broke apart. He went over to Mrs. Severance. “Good-by.”
“Good-by,” and he started making apologies again while she merely looked and Oliver was suddenly fretting like a weary hostess whose callers have stayed hours too long, to have him down in the car and the car pointed again with its nose toward Southampton.
And then he heard, through Ted's last apologia, the whir of a mounting elevator.
The elevator couldn't stop at the fourth floor—it couldn't. But it did, and there was the noise of the gate slung back and “What's that?” said Mrs. Severance sharply, her politeness broken to bits for the first time.
They were all standing near the door, and, with a complete disbelief in all that he was hearing and seeing, Oliver heard Mrs. Severance's voice in his ear, “The kitchen—fire-escape—” saw her push Ted toward him as if she were shifting a piece of cumbrous furniture, and obeyed her orders implicitly because he was too surprised to think of doing anything else.
He hurried himself and the still half-somnambulistic Ted through the dining-room curtains, just in time to catch a last glimpse of Mrs. Severance softly pressing with all her weight and strength against her side of the door of the apartment as a man's quick short footsteps crossed the hall in two strides, and after a second's pause, a key clicked into the lock.