Part 10

“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 how _could_ you, Ted? How _could_ you?” 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, how _could_ you?” 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.

XXXII

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! _Before_ you'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 graduate _cum laude_ from 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 for _me_,” 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.

XXXIII

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 advice and sympathy. The latter helped if the former didn't. Drop me a message at 252A as soon as you decide on this French proposition. I'm serious 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 am _tired_ and if I'm going to feel like anything but limp _tulle_ this evening. No, I'm _perfectly_ all 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'm _sorry_,” 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 really _sorry_--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 really _do_?” 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 see _how_ if 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 do _not_! When a girl cares for a man--and she knows he cares for her--she doesn't care about _anything_ else, 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.”

“They _aren't_. And I haven't the slightest wish to suggest that it was _your_ fault, 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 engagement _entirely_ of her own accord--you _must_ have--”

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 a _mess_ and 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.