Part 2

“She is rather fine,” says Oliver appreciatively. “Selective reticence--all that.”

“Well, don't you see? And a couple of times--I've been nearly sure. And then something comes and I'm not again--not the way I want to be. And then--Oh, if I were, it wouldn't be much--use--you know--”

“Why not?”

“Well, consider our relative positions--”

“Consider your grandmother's cat! She's a girl--you're a man. She's a lady--you're certainly a gentleman--though that sounds like Jane Austen. And--”

“And she's--well, she isn't the wealthiest young lady in the country, but the Pipers _are_ rich, though they never go and splurge around about it. And I'm living on scholarships and borrowed money from the family--and even after I really start working I probably won't make enough to live on for two or three years at least. And you can't ask a girl like that--”

“Oh, Ted, this is the twentieth century! I'm not telling you to hang up your hat and live on your wife's private income--” “That's fortunate,” from Ted, rather stubbornly and with a set jaw.

“But there's no reason on earth--if you both really loved each other and wanted to get married--why you couldn't let her pay her share for the first few years. You know darn well you're going to make money sometime--”

“Well--yes.”

“Well, then. And Elinor's sporting. She isn't the kind that needs six butlers to live--she doesn't live that way now. That's just pride, Ted, thinking that--and a rather bum variety of pride when you come down to it. I hate these people who moan around and won't be happy unless they can do everything themselves--they're generally the kind that give their wives a charge account at Lucile's and ten dollars a year pocket money and go into blue fits whenever poor spouse runs fifty cents over her allowance.”

Ted pauses, considering. Finally,

“No, Ollie--I don't think I'm quite that kind of a fool. And almost thou convincest me--and all that. But--well--that isn't the chief difficulty, after all.”

“Well, what _is_?” from Oliver, annoyedly.

Ted hesitates, speaking slowly.

“Well--after the fact that I'm not sure--France,” he says at last, and his mouth shuts after the word as if it never wanted to open again.

Oliver spreads both hands out hopelessly.

“Are you _never_ going to get over that, you ass?”

“You didn't do the things I did,” from Ted, rather difficultly. “If you had--”

“If I had I'd have been as sorry as you are, probably, that I'd knocked over the apple cart occasionally. But I wouldn't spend the rest of my life worrying about it and thinking I wasn't fit to go into decent society because of what happened to most of the A.E.F. Why you sound as if you'd committed the unpardonable sin. And it's nonsense.”

“Well--thinking of Elinor--I'm not too darn sure I didn't,” from Ted, dejectedly.

“That comes of being born in New England and that's all there is to it. Anyhow, it's over now, isn't it?”

“Not exactly--it comes back.”

“Well, kick it every time it does.”

“But you don't understand. That and--people like Elinor--” says Ted hopelessly.

“I do understand.”

“You don't.” And this time Ted's face has the look of a burned man.

“Well--” says Oliver, frankly puzzled. “Well, that's it. Oh, it doesn't matter. But if there was another war--”

“Oh, leave us poor people that are trying to write a couple of years before you dump us into heroes' graves by the Yang tse Kiang!”

“Another war--and bang! into the aviation.” Ted muses, his face gone thin with tensity. “It could last as long as it liked for me, providing I got through before it did; you'd be living anyhow, living and somebody, and somebody who didn't give a plaintive hoot how things broke.”

He sighs, and his face smooths back a little.

“Well, Lord, I've no real reason to kick, I suppose,” he ends. “There are dozens of 'em like me--dozens and hundreds and thousands all over the shop. We had danger and all the physical pleasures and as much money as we wanted and the sense of command--all through the war. And then they come along and say 'it's all off, girls,' and you go back and settle down and play you've just come out of College in peace-times and maybe by the time you're forty you'll have a wife and an income if another scrap doesn't come along. And then when we find it isn't as easy to readjust as they think, they yammer around pop-eyed and say 'Oh, what wild young people--what naughty little wasters! They won't settle down and play Puss-in-the-corner at all--and, oh dear, oh dear, how they drink and smoke and curse 'n everything!'”

“I'm awful afraid they might be right as to what's the trouble with us, though,” says Oliver, didactically. “We _are_ young, you know.”

“Melgrove!” the conductor howls, sleepily. “Melgrove! Melgrove!”

V

The Crowe house was both small and inconveniently situated--it was twenty full minutes walk from the station and though a little box of a garage had been one of the “all modern conveniences” so fervidly painted in the real estate agent's advertisement, the Crowes had no car. It was the last house on Undercliff Road that had any pretense to sparse grass and a stubbly hedge--beyond it were sand-dunes, delusively ornamented by the signs of streets that as yet only existed in the brain of the owner of the “development,” and, a quarter of a mile away, the long blue streak of the Sound.

Oliver's key clicked in the lock--this was fortunately one of the times when four-year-old Jane Ellen, who went about after sunset in a continual, piteous fear of “black men wif masks,” had omitted to put the chain on the door before being carried mutinously to bed. Oliver switched on the hall light and picked up a letter and a folded note from the card tray.

“Ted, Ollie and Dickie will share that little bijou, the sleeping porch, unless Ted prefers the third-story bathtub,” the note read. “Breakfast at convenience for those that can get it themselves--otherwise at nine. And DON'T wake Dickie up.

“MOTHER.”

Oliver passed it to Ted, who read it, grinned, and saluted, nearly knocking over the hatrack.

“For _God's_ sake!” said Oliver in a piercing whisper, “Jane Ellen will think that's Indians!”

Both listened frantically for a moment, holding their breath. But there was no sound from upstairs except an occasional soft rumbling. Oliver had often wondered what would happen if the whole sleeping family chanced to breathe in and out in unison some unlucky night. He could see the papery walls blown apart like scraps of cardboard--Aunt Elsie falling, falling with her bed from her little bird-house under the eaves, giving vent to one deaf, terrified “Hey--what's that?” as she sank like Lucifer cast from Heaven inexorably down into the laundry stove, her little tight, white curls standing up on end....

Ted had removed his shoes and was making for the stairs with the exaggerated caution of a burglar in a film.

“'Night!” called Oliver softly.

“G' night! Where's my bed--next the wall? Good--then I won't step on Dickie. And if you fall over me when you come in, I'll bay like a bloodhound!”

“I'll look out. Be up in a minute myself. Going to write a letter.”

“So I'd already deduced, Craig Kennedy, my friend. Well, give her my love!”

He smiled like a bad little boy and disappeared round the corner. A stair creaked--they were the kind of stairs that always creaked like old women's bones, when you tried to go up them quietly. There was the sound of something soft stubbing against something hard and a muffled “_Sonofa--_”

“What's matter?”

“Oh, nothing. Blame near broke my toe on Jane Ellen's doll's porcelain head. 'S all right. 'Night.”

“'Night.” Then in an admonitory sotto-voce, “Remember, if you wake Dickie, you've got to tell him stories till he goes to sleep again, or he'll wake up everybody else!”

“If he wakes, I'll garotte him. 'Night.”

“'Night.”

VI

Oliver paused for a few minutes, waiting for the crash that would proclaim that Ted had stumbled over something and waked Dickie beyond redemption. But there was nothing but a soft gurgling of water from the bathroom and then, after a while, a slight but definite addition to the distant beehive noises of sleep in the house. He smiled, moved cautiously into the dining room, sat down at the small sharp-cornered desk where all the family correspondence was carried on and from which at least one of the family a day received a grievous blow in the side while attempting to get around it; lit the shaded light above it and sat down to read his letter.

It was all Nancy, that letter, from the address, firm and straight as any promise she ever gave, but graceful as the curl of a vine-stem, gracile as her hands, with little unsuspected curlicues of humor and fancy making the stiff “t's” bend and twisting the tails of the “e's,” to the little scrunched-up “Love, Nancy” at the end, as if she had squeezed it there to make it look unimportant, knowing perfectly that it was the one really important thing in the letter to him. Both would take it so and be thankful without greediness or a longing for sentimental “x's,” with a sense that the thing so given must be very rich in little like a jewel, and always newly rediscovered with a shiver of pure wonder and thanking, or neither could have borne to have it written so small.

It was Nancy just as some of her clothes were Nancy, soft clear blues and first appleblossom pinks, the colors of a hardy garden that has no need for the phoenix-colors of the poppy, because it has passed the boy's necessity for talking at the top of its voice in scarlet and can hold in one shaped fastidious petal, faint-flushed with a single trembling of one serene living dye, all the colors the wise mind knows and the soul released into its ecstasy has taken for its body invisible, its body of delight most spotless, as lightning takes bright body of rapture and agony from the light clear pallor that softens a sky to night.

Oliver read the letter over twice--it was with a satisfaction like that when body and brain are fed at once, invisibly, by the same lustre of force, that he put it away. One part of it, though, left him humanly troubled enough.

“Miss Winters, the old incubus, came around and was soppy to mother as usual yesterday--the same old business--I might be studying in Paris, now, instead of teaching drawing to stupid little girls, if I hadn't 'formed' what she will call 'that unfortunate attachment.' Not that I minded, really, though I was angry enough to bite her when she gave a long undertaker's list of Penniless Authors' Brides. But it worries mother--and that worries me--and I wish she wouldn't. Forgive me, Ollie--and then that Richardson complex of mother's came up again--”

“Waiting hurts, naturally,--and I'm the person who used to wonder about girls making such a fuss about how soon they got married--but, then, Ollie, of course, I never really wanted to get married before myself and somehow that seems to make a difference. But that's the way things go--and the only thing I wish is that I was the only person to be hurt. We will, sooner or later, and it will be all the better for our not having grabbed at once--at least that's what all the old people with no emotions left are always so anxious to tell you. But they talk about it as if anybody under thirty-five who wanted to get married was acting like a three-year-old stealing jam--and that's annoying. And anyhow, it wouldn't be bad, if I weren't so silly, I suppose--”

“Waiting hurts, naturally,” and that casual sentence made him chilly afraid. For to be in love, though it may force the lover to actions of impossible courage does not make him in the least courageous of himself, but only drives him by the one large fear of losing this love like a soldier pricked from behind by a bayonet over the bodies of smaller fears, or like a thief who has stolen treasure, and, hearing the cry at his heels, scales a twenty foot wall with the agile gestures of a madman. All the old-wives' and young men's club stories of everything from broken engagements to the Generic and Proven Unfaithfulness of the Female Sex brushed like dirty cobwebs for an instant across his mind. They tightened about it like silk threads--a snaky web--and for one scared instant he had a sense of being smothered in dusty feathers, whispering together and saying, “When you're a little older and a great deal wiser. When you've come to my age and know that all girls are the same. When you realize that long engagements seldom mean marriage. When--”

He put the cobwebs aside with a strain of will, for he was very tired in body, and settled himself to write to Nancy. It was not the cobwebs that hurt. The only thing that mattered was that she had been hurt on his account--was being hurt now on his account--would be hurt, and still and always on his account, not because he wanted to hurt her but because it was not within his power, but Life's, to hurt her in that respect or not.

“Oh, felicitous Nancy!” the pen began to scratch. “Your letter--”

Stupid to be so tired when he was writing to Nancy. Stupid not to find the right things to say at once when you wanted to say them so much. He dropped the pen an instant, sat back, and tried to evoke Nancy before him like a small, clear picture seen in a lens, tried to form with his will the lifeless air in front of him till it began to take on some semblance and body of her that would be better than the tired remembrances of the mind.

Often, and especially when he had thought about her intensely for a long time, the picture would not come at all or come with tantalizing incompleteness, apparently because he wanted it to be whole so much--all he could see would be a wraith of Nancy, wooden as a formal photograph, with none of her silences or mockeries about her till he felt like a painter who has somehow let the devil into his paintbox so that each stroke he makes goes a little fatally out of true from the vision in his mind till the canvas is only a crazy-quilt of reds and yellows. Now, perhaps, though, she might come, even though he was tired. He pressed the back of a hand against his eyes. She was coming to him now. He remembered one of their walks together--a walk they had taken some eight months ago, when they had been only three days engaged. Up Fifth Avenue; Forty-second Street, Forty-third, Forty-fourth, the crosstown glitter of lights, the reflected glow of Broadway, spraying the sky with dim gold-dust, begins to die a little behind them. Past pompous expensive windows full of the things that Oliver and Nancy will buy when Oliver's novel has gone into its first fifty thousand, content with the mere touch of each other's hands, they are so sure of each other now. Past people, dozens of people, getting fewer and fewer as Forty-sixth Street comes, Forty-seventh, Forty-eighth, always a little arrogantly because none of the automatic figures they pass have ever eaten friendly bread together or had fire that can burn over them like clear salt water or the knowledge that the only thing worth having in life is the hurt and gladness of that fire. Buses pass like big squares of honeycomb on wheels, crowded with pale, tired bees--the stars march slowly from the western slope to their light viewless pinnacle in the center of the heavens, walking brightly like strong men in silvered armor--the stars and the buses, the buses and the stars, either and both of as little and much account--it would not really surprise either Oliver or Nancy if the next green bus that passes should start climbing into the sky like a clumsy bird.

The first intoxication is still upon them--they have told nobody except anyone who ever sees them together--they walk tactfully and never too close, both having a horror of publicly amatory couples, but like the king's daughter--or was it Solomon's Temple?--they are all glorious within. Fifty-fifth, Fifty-sixth, Fifty-seventh--the square in front of the Plaza--that tall chopped bulky tower lit from within like a model in a toyshop window--motors purring up to its door like thin dark cats, motors purring away. The fountain with the little statue--the pool a cool dark stone cracked with the gold of the lights upon it, and near the trees of the Park, half-hidden, gold Sherman, riding, riding, Victory striding ahead of him with a golden palm.

Ahead of them too goes Victory, over fear, over doubt, over littleness, her gold shoes ring like the noise of a sparkling sword, her steps are swift. They stand for an instant, hands locked, looking back at the long roller-coaster swoop of the Avenue, listening to the roll of tired wheels, the faint horns, the loud horns. They know each other now--their hands grip tighter--in the wandering instant the whole background of streets and tall buildings passes like breath from a mirror--for the instant without breath or clamor, they exist together, one being, and the being has neither flesh to use the senses too clumsily, nor human thoughts to rust at the will, but lives with the strength of a thunder and the heedlessness of a wave in a wide and bright eternity of the unspoken.

“All the same,” says Nancy, when the moment passes, lifting a shoe with the concern of a kitten that has just discovered a thorn in its paw, “New York pavements are certainly _hard_ on loving feet.”

VII

So the picture came. And other pictures like it. And since the living that had made them was past for a little they were both fainter and in a measure brighter with more elfin colors than even that living had been which had made them glow at first. White memory had taken them into her long house of silence where everything is cool with the silver of Spring rain on leaves, she had washed from them the human pettiness, the human separateness, the human insufficiency to express the best that must come in any mortal relationship that lasts longer than the hour. They were not better in memory than they had been when lived, for the best remembrance makes only brilliant ghosts, but they were in their dim measure nearer the soul's perfection, for the tricks of the sounding board of the mind and the feckless instrument of the body had been put away. “We've had infinites already--infinites,” thought Oliver, and didn't care about the ludicrous ineptness of the words. He smiled, turning back to the unwritten letter. If they hadn't had infinites already--he supposed they wouldn't want more so badly right now. He smiled, but this time without humor. It had all seemed so easy at first.

Nancy had been in Paris at fourteen before “business reverses” of the kind that mild, capable-looking men like Mr. Ellicott seem to attract, as a gingerbread man draws wasps, when they are about fifty, had reduced him to a position as chief bookkeeper and taken Nancy out of her first year in Farmington. Oliver had spent nine months on a graduate scholarship in Paris and Provence in 1919. Both had friends there and argued long playful hours planning just what sort of a magnificently cheap apartment on the _Rive Gauche_ they would have when they went back.

For they were going back--they had been brilliantly sure of it--Oliver had only to finish his novel that was so much better already than any novel Nancy had ever read--sell a number of copies of it that seemed absurdly small in proportion to the population of America--and then they could live where they pleased and Oliver could compose Great Works and Nancy get ahead with her very real and delicate talent for etching instead of having to do fashion-drawings of slinky simperers in Lucile dresses or appetite-arousing paintings of great cans of tomato soup. But that had been eight months ago. Vanamee and Company's--the neat vice-president talking to Oliver--“a young hustler has every chance in the world of getting ahead here, Mr. Crowe. You speak French? Well, we have been thinking for some time of establishing branch-offices in Europe.” The chance of a stop-gap job in St. Louis for Nancy, where she could be with her family for a while--she really ought to be with them a couple of months at least, if she and Oliver were to be married so soon. The hopeful parting in the Grand Central--“But, Nancy, you're sure you wouldn't mind going across second-class?”

“Why Ollie, dear, how silly! Why, what would it matter?” “All right, then, and remember, I'll wire _just_ as soon as things really start to break--”

And then for eight months, nothing at all but letters and letters, except two times, once in New York, once in St. Louis, when both had spent painful savings because they simply had to see each other again, since even the best letters were only doll-house food you could look at and wish you could eat--and both had tried so hard to make each disappearing minute perfect before they had to catch trains again that the effort left them tired as jugglers who have been balancing too many plates and edgy at each other for no cause in the world except the unfairness that they could only have each other now for so short a time. And the people, the vast unescapable horde of the dull-but-nice or the merely dull who saw in their meetings nothing either particularly spectacular or pitiful or worth applause.

And always after the parting, a little crippled doubt tapping its crutches along the alleys of either mind. “Do I _really?_ Because if I do, how can I be so tired sometimes with her, with him? And why can't I say more and do more and be more when he, when she? And everybody says. And they're older than we are--mightn't it be true? And--” And then, remorsefully, the next day, all doubt burnt out by the clear hurt of absence. “Oh how could I! When it is real--when it is like that--when it is the only thing worth while in the world!”

But absence and meetings of this sort told on them inescapably, and both being, unfortunately, of a rather high-strung intelligence and youth, recognized it, no matter how much consciousness might deny it, and wondered sometimes, rather pitiably, why they couldn't be always at one temperature, like lovers in poetry, and why either should ever worry or hurt the other when they loved. Any middle-aged person could and did tell them that they were now really learning something about love--omitting the small fact that Pain, though he comes with the highest literary recommendations is really not the wisest teacher of all in such matters--all of which helped the constant nervous and psychological strain on both as little as a Latin exorcism would help a fever. For the very reason that they wished to be true in their love, they said things in their letters that a spoken word or a gesture would have explained in an instant but that no printed alphabet could; and so they often hurt each other while meaning and trying to help all they could.