Part 3

Not quite as easy as it had seemed at first--oh, not on your life not, thought Oliver, rousing out of a gloomy muse. And then there was the writing he wanted to do--and Nancy's etching--“our damn careers” they had called them--but those _were_ the things they did best--and neither had had even tolerable working conditions recently--

Well, sufficient to the day was the evil thereof--that was one of those safe Bible-texts you seemed to find more and more use for the older you grew. Bible-texts. It was lucky tomorrow was Sunday when slaves of the alarm-clock had peace. Oliver straightened his shoulders unconsciously and turned back to the blank paper. He did love Nancy. He did love Nancy. That was all that counted.

“Oh, felicitous Nancy! Your letter was--”

VIII

The water was a broken glass of blue, sunstruck waves--there were few swimmers in it where the two friends went in next morning, for the beach proper with its bath-houses and float was nearly a quarter of a mile down. Oliver could see Margaret's red cap bobbing twenty yards out as he tried the water cautiously with curling toes, and, much farther out, a blue cap and the flash of an arm going suddenly under. Mrs. Severance, the friend Louise had brought out for the week-end, he supposed; she swam remarkably for a woman. He swam well enough himself and couldn't give her two yards in the hundred. Ted stood beside him, both tingling a little at the fresh of the salt air. “Wow!” and they plunged.

A mock race followed for twenty yards--then Oliver curved off to duck Margaret, already screaming and paddling at his approach, while Ted kept on.

He swam face deep, catching short breaths under the crook of his arm, burying himself in the live blue running sparkle, every muscle stretched as if he were trying to rub all the staleness that can come to the mind and the restless pricklings that will always worry the body clean from him, like a snake's cast skin, against the wet rough hands of the water. There--it was working--the flesh was compact and separate no longer--he felt it dissolve into the salt push of spray--become one with that long blue body of wave that stretched fluently radiant for miles and miles till it too was no more identity but only sea, receiving the sun, without thought, without limbs, without pain. He sprinted with the last breath he had in him to annihilation in that light lustrous firmament. Then his flung-out hand struck something firm and smooth. With the momentary twinge of a jarred toe, he stopped in the middle of a stroke, grabbed at the firm thing unthinkingly, felt it slip away from him, trod water and came up gasping.

“Oh, I'm _horribly_ sorry!” Gurgle and choke at water gone the wrong way. “Honestly--what a dumb-bell trick! but I didn't see you at _all_ and with the whole Sound to swim in I thought I was safe--”

He rubbed the water out of his eyes. A woman in a blue cap. Pretty, too--not one of the pretty kind that look like drenched paper-dolls in swimming.

“Don't apologize--it's all my fault, really. I should have heard you coming, I suppose, but I was floating and my ears were under water--and this cap! You did scare me a little, though; I didn't know there was anyone else in miles--”

She smiled frankly. Ted got another look at her and decided that pretty was hardly right. Beautiful, perhaps, but you couldn't tell with her hair that way under her cap.

“You're Mr. Billett, aren't you? Louise said last night that her brother was bringing a friend over Sunday. She also said that she'd introduce us--but we seem to have done that.”

“Rather. Introduction by drowning. The latest cleverness in Newport circles--see 'Mode.' And you're Mrs. Severance.”

“Yes. Nice water.”

“Perfect.”

A third look--a fairly long one--left Ted still puzzled. Age--thirty? thirty-five? Swims perfectly. On “Mode.” Wide eyes, sea-blue, sea-changing. An odd nose that succeeded in being beautiful in spite of itself. A rather full small mouth, not loose with sense nor rigid with things controlled, but a mouth that would suck like a bee at the last and tiniest drop of any physical sweet which the chin and the eyes had once decided to want. The eyes measure, the mouth asks, the cleft chin finds the way. A face neither content, nor easily to be contented--in repose it is neither happy nor unhappy but only matured. Louise's friend--that was funny--Louise had such an ideal simplicity of mind. Well--

“If you float--after a while you don't know quite where you're floating,” said Mrs. Severance's voice detachedly.

Ted made no answer but turned over, spreading out his arms. For a few moments they lay like corpses on the blue swelling round of the water looking straight through infinite distance into the thin faint vapor of the sky.

“Yes, I see what you mean.”

“We might be clouds, almost, mightn't we?” with a slow following note of laughter.

Ted looked deeper into the sky, half-closing his eyelids. It seemed to take his body from him completely, to leave him nothing but a naked soothed consciousness, rising and falling, a petal on a swinging bough, in the heart of blue quietude like the quiet of an open place in a forest empty with evening.

“Clouds,” said Mrs. Severance's voice, turning the word to a sound breathed lightly through the curled and husky gold of a forest-horn.

Through the midst of his sea-drowsiness a queer thought came to Ted. This had happened before, in sleep perhaps, in a book he had read--Oliver's novel, possibly, he thought and smiled. Lying alone on a roof of blue water, and yet not lying alone, for there was that slow warm voice that talked from time to time and came into the mind on tiptoe like the creeping of soft-shoed, hasteless, fire. You stretched your hands to the fire and let it warm you and soon your whole body was warm and pleased and alive. That was when you were alive past measure, when all of you had been made warm as a cat fed after being hungry, and the cat arose from its warmth and went walking on velvet paws, stretching sleek legs, sleek body, slowly and exquisitely under the firelight, heavy with warmth, but ready at the instant signal of the small burning thing in its mind to turn like a black butterfly and dance a slow seeking dance with the shadows of the fire that flickered like leaves in light wind, desirable, impalpable and wavering, never to be quite torn down from the wall and eaten and so possessed. But there was an odd thirsty satisfaction in trying to tear the shadows.

Fantastic. He had not been so fantastic for a long time.

“And tomorrow there's 'Mode.' And fashion-plates. _And_ Greenwich Villagers,” said the voice of Mrs. Severance. He made some reply impatiently, disliking the sound of his own voice--hers fitted with the dream. When had he been this before?

The Morte d'Arthur--the two with a sword between.

He sank deeper, deeper, into the glow of that imagined firelight--the flame was cooler than water to walk through--that time he had almost taken a turning shadow into his hand. The sword between--only here there was no sword. If he reached out his hand he knew just how the hand that he touched would feel, cool and firm, like that flame. Cool and silent.

There must have been something, somewhere, to make him remember....

He remembered.

A minute later Oliver had splashed up to them, shouting “A rescue! A rescue! Guests Drown While Host Looks On Smilingly! What's the matter, Ted, you look as if you wanted to turn into a submarine? Got cramp?”

IX

Mrs. Crowe relaxed a little for the first tired minute of her day. Sunday dinner was nearly over, and though, in one way, the best meal in the week for her because all her children were sure to be at home, it was apt to be pure purgatory on a hot day, with Sheba dawdling and grumbling and Rosalind spilling pea-soup on her Sunday dress, and Aunt Elsie's deafness increased by the weather to the point of mild imbecility.

She had been a little afraid today, especially with two guests and the grandchildren rampant after church, and the extra leaf in the table that squeezed Colonel Crowe almost into the sideboard and herself nearly out of the window and made the serving of a meal a series of passings of over-hot plates from hand to hand, exposed to the piracies of Jane Ellen. But it had gone off better than she could have hoped. Colonel Crowe had not absent-mindedly begun to serve vegetables with a teaspoon, Aunt Elsie had not dissolved in tears and tottered away from the table at some imagined rudeness of Dickie's, and Jane Ellen had not once had a chance to take off her drawers.

“Ice tea!” said the avid voice of Jane Ellen in her ear. “Ice tea!”

Mrs. Crowe filled the glass and submitted a request for “please” mechanically. She wondered, rather idly, if she would spend her time in purgatory serving millions of Jane Ellens with iced tea.

“Ahem!” That was Colonel Crowe. “But you should have known us in the days of our greatness, Mrs. Severance. When I was king of Estancia--”

“I'd rather have you like this, Colonel Crowe, really. I've always wanted big families and never had one to live in--”

“Heard from Nancy recently, Oliver?” from Margaret, slightly satiric.

“Why yes, Margie, now and then. Not as often as you've heard from Stu Winthrop probably but--”

“Motha, can I have some suga on my booberrish? Motha, can I have some suga on my booberrish? Motha--_peesh!_”

“Oh, hush a minute, Rosalind dear. I don't know, Oliver. I'll speak to Mr. Field about it if you like. I should think they'd take little sketches like a couple of those Nancy showed you--though they aren't quite smart-alecky enough for 'Mode'--” “Grandfather, Grandfather! How old would you be if you were as old as Methusaleh? Are you older than he is? _Grandfather!_”

Entrance and exit of a worried Sheba with the empty dish of blueberries, marred only by Jane Ellen's sudden cries of “Stop thief!”

Mrs. Crowe tried to think a little ahead. Tomorrow. Ice. Butter. Laundry. Oliver's breakfast early again. Louise--poor Louise--two years and a half since Clifford Lychgate died. How curious life was; how curious and careless and inconsecutive. The thought of how much she hoped Oliver's novel would succeed and the question as to whether the Thebes grocer who delivered by motor-truck would be cheaper than the similar Melgrove bandit in the long run mixed uneasily in her mind.

Rosalind had seemed droopy that morning--more green crab-apples probably. Aunt Elsie's gout. Oliver's marriage--she had been so relieved about Nancy ever since she had met her, though it had been hard to reconcile domestic virtues with Nancy's bobbed hair. She would make Oliver happy, though, and that was the main thing. She was really sweet--a sweet girl. Long engagements. Too bad, too bad. Something _must_ be done about the stair carpet, the children were tearing it to pieces. “Ice tea! Ice tea!”

“No, Jane Ellen.”

“Yash.”

“No, darling.”

“Peesh yash?”

“No. Now be a good little girl and run out and play quietly, not right in the middle of the broiling sun.”

“And so Lizzie said, 'Very well, but if I do take that medicine my death will be wholly on your responsibility!'” with a sense of climax.

“But I really would like to, Mrs. Severance, if you can ever spare the time.”

Ted and Louise's friend seemed to be getting along very well. That was nice--so often Oliver's friends and Louise's didn't. It seemed odd that Mrs. Severance should be working on “Mode”--surely a girl of her obvious looks and intelligence left with no children to support--some nice man--A lady, too, by her voice, though there was a trifle of something--

She only hoped Mrs. Severance didn't think them all too crowded and noisy. It was a little hard on the three children to have such an--intimate--home when they brought friends.

“I think we'd better have coffee out on the porch, don't you?” That meant argument with Sheba later but an hour's cool and talk without having to shout across the dear little children was worth the argument.

Everybody got up, Ted being rather gallant to Mrs. Severance. Oliver looked worried today, worried and tired. She hoped it wasn't about Nancy and the engagement. What a miserable thing money was to make so much difference.

“Mrs. Severance--”

“Mr. Billett--”

Louise's friend was certainly attractive. That wonderful red-gold hair--“setter color” her sister had always called it of her own. She must write her sister. Mrs. Severance--an odd name. She rather wished, though, that her face wouldn't turn faintly hard like that sometimes.

“No, Dickie. No chocolate unless your mother says you can have it. No, Rosalind, if mother says not, you _certainly_ cannot go over and play at the Rogers',--they have a paralytic grandmother who is very nervous.”

Well, that was over. And now, for a few brief instants there would be quiet and a chance to relax and really see something of Oliver. Mrs. Crowe started moving slowly towards the door. Ted and Mrs. Severance blocked the way, talking rather intimately, she thought, for people who had only known each other a few hours; but then that was the modern way. Then Ted saw her and seemed to wake up with a jump from whatever mild dream possessed him, and Mrs. Severance turned toward her.

“It's so _comfortable_ being out here, always,” she said very naturally and kindly, but Mrs. Crowe did not reply at once to the pretty speech. Instead she flushed deeply and bent over something small and white on the chair with the dictionary in it that had been next to hers. Jane Ellen had finally succeeded in taking off her drawers.

X

Ted and Oliver were down at the beach at Southampton two Sundays later--week-end guests of Peter Piper--the three had been classmates at Yale and the friendship had not lapsed like so many because Peter happened to be rich and Ted and Oliver poor. And then there was always Elinor, Peter's sister--Ted seemed, to Oliver's amused vision, at least, to be looking at Elinor with the hungry eyes of a man seeing a delicate, longed-for dream made flesh just at present instead of a girl he had known since she first put up her hair. How nice that would be if it happened, thought Oliver, match-makingly--how very nice indeed! Best thing in the world for Ted--and Elinor too--if Ted would only get away from his curiously Puritan idea that a few minor lapses from New England morality in France constituted the unpardonable sin, at least as far as marrying a nice girl was concerned. He stretched back lazily, digging elbows into the warm sand.

The day had really been too hot for anything more vigorous than “just lying around in the sun like those funny kinds of lizards,” as Peter put it, and besides, he and Oliver had an offensive-defensive alliance of The Country's Tiredest Young Business Men and insisted that their only function in life was to be gently and graciously amused. And certainly the spectacle about them was one to provide amusement in the extreme for even the most mildly satiric mind.

It was the beach's most crowded hour and the short strip of sand in front of the most fashionable and uncomfortable place to bathe on Long Island was gay as a patch of exhibition sweet-peas with every shade of vivid or delicate color. It was a triumph of women--the whole glittering, moving bouquet of stripes and patterns and tints that wandered slowly from one striped parasol-mushroom to the next--the men, in their bathing suits or white flannels seemed as unimportant if necessary furniture as slaves in an Eastern court. The women dominated, from the jingle of the bags in the hands of the dowagers and the faint, protesting creak of their corsets as they picked their way as delicately as fat, gorgeous macaws across the sand, to the sound of their daughters' voices, musical as a pigeon-loft, as they chattered catchwords at each other and their partners, or occasionally, very occasionally, dipped in for a three-minute swim. Moreover, and supremely, it was a triumph of ritual, and such ritual as reminded Oliver a little of the curious, unanimous and apparently meaningless movements of a colony of penguins, for the entire assemblage had arrived around, twelve o'clock and by a quarter past one not one of them would be left. That was law as unwritten and unbreakable as that law which governs the migratory habits of wild geese. And within that little more than an hour possibly one-third of them would go as far as wetting their hands in the water--all the rest had come for the single reason of seeing and being seen. It was all extremely American and, on the whole, rather superb, Oliver thought as he and Peter moved over nearer to the parasol that sheltered Elinor and Ted.

“I wish it was Egypt,” said Peter languidly. “Any more peppermints left, El? No--well, Ted never could restrain himself when it came to food. I wish it was Egypt,” he repeated, making Elinor's left foot a pillow for his head.

“Well, it's hot enough,” from Oliver, dozingly. “Ah--oo--it's _hot_!”

“I know, but just think,” Peter chuckled. “Clothes,” he explained cryptically, “Mrs. Willamette in a Cleopatra nightie--what sport! And besides, I should make a magnificent Egyptian. Magnificent.” He yawned immensely. “In the first place, of course, I should paint myself a brilliant orange--”

The Egyptians. An odd wonder rose in Ted--a wonder as to whether one of those stripped and hook-nosed slaves of the bondage before Moses had ever happened to stand up for a moment to wipe the sweat out of his eyes before he bent again to his task of making bricks without straw and seen a princess of the Egyptians carried along past the quarries.

“Tell us a story, El,” from Oliver in the voice of one who is sleep-walking. “A nice quiet story--the Three Bears or Giant the Jack Killer--oh heaven, I _must_ be asleep--but you know, anything like that--”

“You really want a story?” Elinor's voice was reticently mocking. “A story for good little boys?”

“Oh, _yes!_” from Peter, his clasped hands stretched toward her in an attitude of absurd supplication. “All in nice little words of one syllable or we won't understand.”

“Well, once there were three little girls named Elsie, Lacie and Tillie and they lived in the bottom of a well.”

[ILLUSTRATION: “WELL, ONCE THERE WERE THREE LITTLE GIRLS”] “What _kind_ of a well?” Oliver had caught the cue at once.

“A treacle well--”

* * * * *

She went on with the Dormouse's Tale, but Ted, for once, hardly heard her--his mind was too busy with its odd, Egyptological dream.

The princess who looked like Elinor. Her slaves would come first--a fat bawling eunuch, all one black glisten like new patent-leather, striking with a silver rod to clear dogs and crocodiles and Israelites out of the way. Then the litter--and a flash between curtains blown aside for an instant--and Hook Nose gazing and gazing--all the fine fighting curses of David on the infidel, that he had muttered sourly under breath all day, blowing away from him like sand from the face of a sphinx.

Pomp sounding in brass and cries all around the litter like the boasting color of a trumpet--but in the litter not pomp but fineness passing. Fineness of youth untouched, from the clear contrast of white skin and crow-black hair to the hands that had the little stirrings of moon-moths against the green robe. Fineness of mind that will not admit the unescapable minor dirts of living, however much it may see them, a mind temperate with reticence and gentleness, seeing not life itself but its own delighted dream of it, a heart that had had few shocks as yet, and never the ones that the heart must be mailed or masked to withstand. The thing that passed had been continually sheltered, exquisitely guarded from the stronger airs of life as priests might guard a lotus, and yet it was neither tenderly unhealthy nor sumptuously weak. A lotus--that was it--and Hook Nose stood looking at the lotus--and because it was innocent he filled his eyes with it. And then it passed and its music went out of the mind.

“_Ted_!”

“What? What? Oh, yeah--sorry, Elinor, I wasn't paying proper attention.”

“You mean you were asleep, you big cheese!” from Peter.

“I wasn't--just thinking,” and seeing that this only brought raucous mirth from both Peter and Oliver, “Oh, shut up, you apes! Were you asking me something, El?”

It was rather a change to come back from Elinor in scarab robes being carried along in a litter to Elinor sitting beside him in a bathing suit. But hardly an unpleasant change.

“I've forgotten how it goes on--the Dormouse--after 'Well in.' Do you remember?”

“Nope. Look it up when we get back. And anyhow--” “What?”

“Game called for to-day. The Lirrups have started looking important--that means it's about ten minutes of, they always leave on the dot. Well--” and Peter rose, scattering sand. “We must obey our social calendar, my prominent young friends--just think how awful it would be if we were the last to go. Race you half-way to the float and back, Ted.”

“You're on,” and the next few minutes were splashingly athletic.

Going back to the bath-house, though, Ted laughed at himself rather whimsically. That extraordinary day-dream of the slave and the Elinor Princess! It helped sometimes, to make pictures of the very impossible--even of things as impossible as that. If Elinor had only been older before the war came along and changed so much.

He saw another little mental photograph, the kind of photograph, he mused, that sleekly shabby Frenchmen slip from under views of the Vendome Column and Napoleon's Tomb when they are trying to sell tourists picture post-cards outside the Café de la Paix. Judged by American standards the work would be called rather frank. It was all interior--the interior of a room in a Montmartre hotel--and there were two people in it to help out the composition--and the face of one seemed somehow to be rather deathly familiar--

That, and Elinor. Why, Hook Nose could “reform” all the rest of his life in accordance with the highest dictionary standards--and still he wouldn't be fit to look at his princess, even from inside a cage.

Also, if you happened to be of a certain analytic temperament you could see what was happening to yourself all the while quite plainly--oh, much too plainly!--and yet that seemed to make very little difference in its going on happening. There was Mrs. Severance, for instance. He had been seeing quite a good deal of Mrs. Severance lately.

“Oh, Ted!” from Peter next door. “Snap it up, old keed, or we'll all of us be late for lunch.”

They had just sat down to lunch and Peter was complaining that the whipped cream on the soup made him feel as if he were eating cotton-batting, when a servant materialized noiselessly beside Oliver's chair.

“Telephone for you, Mr. Crowe. Western Union calling.”

Oliver jumped up with suspicious alacrity. “Oh, love, love, love!” crooned Peter. “Oh, love, love, love!” Oliver flushed. “Don't swipe all my butter, you simple cynic!” He knew what it was, of course.

“This is Oliver Crowe talking. Will you give me the telegram?”