Part 4

Nancy and Oliver, finding Sunday mails of a dilatory unsatisfactoriness, had made a compact to use the wire on that day instead. And even now Oliver never listened to the mechanical buzz of Central's voice in his ear without a little pulse of the heart. It seemed to bring Nancy nearer than letters could, somehow. Nancy had an imperial contempt for boiling down attractive sentences to the necessary ten or twenty words. This time, though, the telegram was short.

“Mr. Oliver Crowe, care Peter Piper, Southampton,” clicked Central dispassionately. “I hate St. Louis. I would give anything in the world if we could only see each other for twenty-four hours. Love. Signed, Nancy.”

And Oliver, after hanging up the receiver, went back to the dining-room with worry barking and running around his mind like a spoiled puppy, wondering savagely why so many rocking-chair people took a _crêpey_ pleasure in saying it was good for young people in love to have to wait.

XI

Tea for two at the Gondolier, that newest and quotation-marked “Quaintest” of Village tea rooms. The chief points in the Gondolier's “quaintness” seem to be that it is chopped up into as many little

## partitions as a roulette wheel and that all food has to be carried up

from a cellar that imparts even to orange marmalade a faint persuasive odor of somebody else's wash. Still, during the last eight months, the Gondolier has been a radical bookstore devoted to bloody red pamphlets, a batik shop full of strange limp garments ornamented with decorative squiggles, and a Roumanian Restaurant called “The Brodska” whose menu seemed to consist almost entirely of old fish and maraschino cherries.

The wispy little woman from Des Moines who conducts the Gondolier at present in a series of timid continual flutters at actually leading the life of the Bohemian untamed, and who gives all the young hungry-looking men extra slices of toast because any one of them might be Vachel Lindsay in disguise, will fail in another six weeks and then the Gondolier may turn into anything from a Free Verse Tavern to a Meeting Hall for the Friends of Slovak Freedom. But at present, the tea is much too good for the price in spite of its inescapable laundry tang, and there is a flat green bowl full of Japanese iris bulbs in the window--the second of which pleases Mrs. Severance and the first Ted.

Besides like most establishments on the verge of bankruptcy, it is such a quiet place to talk--the only other two people in it are a boy with startled hair and an orange smock and a cigaretty girl called Tommy, and she is far too busy telling him that that dream about wearing a necklace of flying-fish shows a dangerous inferiority complex even to comment caustically on strangers from uptown who _will_ intrude on the dear Village.

“Funny stuff--dreams,” says Ted uneasily, catching at overheard phrases for a conversational jumping-off place. His mind, always a little on edge now with work and bad feeding, has been too busy since they came in comparing Rose Severance with Elinor Piper, and wondering why, when one is so like a golden-skinned August pear and the other a branch of winter blackberries against snow just fallen, it is not as good but somehow warmer to think of the first against your touch than the second, to leave him wholly at ease.

“Yes--funny stuff,” Mrs. Severance's voice is musically quiet. “And then you tell them to people who pretend to know all about what they mean--and then--” She shrugs shoulders at the Freudian two across the shoulder-high partition.

“But you don't believe in all this psycho-analysis tosh, do you?”

She hesitates. “A little, yes. Like the old woman and ghosts. I may not believe in it but I'm afraid of it, rather.”

She gives him a steady look--her eyes go deep. It is not so much the intensity of the look as its haltingness that makes warmth go over him.

“Shall we tell our dreams--the favorite ones, I mean? Play fair if we do, remember,” she adds slowly.

“Not if you're really afraid.”

“I? But it's just because I am afraid that I really should, you know. Like going into a dark room when you don't want to.”

“But they can't be as scary as _that_, surely.” Ted's voice is a little false. Both are watching each other intently now--he with a puzzled sense of lazy enveloping firelight.

“Well, shall I begin? After all this _is_ tea in the Village.”

“I should be very much interested indeed, Mrs. Severance,” says Ted rather gravely. “Check!” “How official you sound--almost as if you had a lot of those funny little machines all the modern doctors use and were going to mail me off to your pet sanatorium at once because you'd asked me what green reminded me of and I said 'cheese' instead of 'trees.' And anyhow, I never have any startling dreams--only silly ones--much too silly to tell--”

“Please go on.” Ted's voice has really become quite clinical.

“Oh very well. They don't count when you only have them once--just when they keep coming back and back to you--isn't that it?”

“I believe so.”

Mrs. Severance's eyes waver a little--her mouth seeking for the proper kind of dream.

“It's not much but it comes quite regularly--the most punctual, old-fashioned-servant sort of a dream.

“It doesn't begin with sleep, you know--it begins with waking. At least it's just as if I were in my own bed in my own apartment and then gradually I started to wake. You know how you can feel that somebody else is in the room though you can't see them--that's the feeling. And, of course being a normal American business woman, my first idea is--burglars. And I'm very cowardly for a minute. Then the cowardice passes and I decide to get up and see what it is.

“It _is_ somebody else--or something--but nobody I think that I ever really knew. And at first I don't want to walk toward it--and then I do because it keeps pulling me in spite of myself. So I go to it--hands out so I won't knock over things.

“And then I touch it--or him--or her--and I'm suddenly very, very happy.

“That's all.

“And now, Dr. Billett, what would you say of my case?”

Ted's eyes are glowing--in the middle of her description his heart has begun to knock to a hidden pulse, insistent and soft as the drum of gloved fingers on velvet. He picks words carefully.

“I should say--Mrs. Severance--that there was something you needed and wanted and didn't have at present. And that you would probably have it--in the end.”

She laughs a little. “Rather cryptic, isn't that, doctor? And you'd prescribe?”

“Prescribe? 'It's an awkward matter to play with souls.'”

“'And trouble enough to save your own,'” she completes the quotation. “Yes, that's true enough--though I'm sorry you can't even tell me to use this twice a day in half a glass of water and that other directly after each meal. I think I'll have to be a little more definite when it comes to your turn--if it does come.”

“Oh it will.” But instead of beginning, he raises his eyes to her again. This time there is a heaviness like sleep on both, a heaviness that draws both together inaudibly and down, and down, as if they were sinking through piled thickness on thickness of warm, sweet-scented grass. Odd faces come into both minds and vanish as if flickered off a film--to Rose Severance, a man narrow and flat as if he were cut out of thin grey paper, talking, talking in a voice as dry and rattling as a flapping windowblind of their “vacation” together and a house with a little garden where she can sew and he can putter around,--to Ted, Elinor Piper, the profile pure as if it were painted on water, passing like water flowing from the earth in springs, in its haughty temperance, its retired beauty, its murmurous quiet--other faces, some trembling as if touched with light flames, some calm, some merely grotesque with longing or too much pleasure--all these pass. A great nearness, fiercer and more slumbrous than any nearness of body takes their place. It wraps the two closer and closer, a spider spinning a soft web out of petals, folding the two with swathes and swathes of its heavy, fragrant silk.

“Oh--mine--isn't anything,” says Ted rather unsteadily, after the moment. “Only looking at firelight and wanting to take the coals in my hands.”

Rose's voice is firmer than his but her mouth is still moved with content at the thing it has desired being brought nearer.

“I really can't prescribe on as little evidence as that,” she says with music come back to her voice in the strength of a running wave. “I can only repeat what you told me. That there was something you needed--and wanted”--she is mocking now--“and didn't have at present. And that you would probably--what was it?--oh yes--have it, in the end.”

The wispy little woman has crept up to Ted's elbow with an illegible bill. Rose has spoken slowly to give her time to get there--it is always so much better to choose your own most effective background for really affecting scenes.

“And now I really must be getting back,” she cuts in briskly, her fingers playing with a hat that certainly needs no rearrangement, when Ted, after absent-mindedly paying the bill, is starting to speak in the voice of one still sleep-walking.

“But it _was_ delightful, Mr. Billett--I love talking about myself and you were really very sweet to listen so nicely.” She has definitely risen. Ted must, too. “We must do it again some time soon--I'm going to see if there aren't any of those books with long German names drifting around 'Mode' somewhere so that I'll be able to simply stun you with my erudition the next time we talk over dreams.”

They are at the door now, she guiding him toward it as imperceptibly and skillfully as if she controlled him by wireless.

“And it isn't fair of me to let you give all the parties--it simply isn't. Couldn't you come up to dinner in my little apartment sometime--it really isn't unconventional, especially for anyone who's once seen my pattern of an English maid--”

Sunlight and Minetta Lane again--and whatever Ted may want to say out of his walking trance--this is certainly no place where any of it can be said.

XII

Oliver Crowe, at his desk in the copy-department of Vanamee and Co.'s, has been spending most of the afternoon twiddling pencils and reading and rereading two letters out of his pocket instead of righteously thinking up layouts for the new United Steel Frame Pulley Campaign. He realizes that the layouts are important--that has been brought to his attention already by several pink memoranda from Mr. Délier, the head of the department--but an immense distaste for all things in general and advertising in particular has overwhelmed him all day. He looks around the big, brightly lighted room with a stupefied sort of loathing--advertising does not suit him--he is doing all he can at it because of Nancy--but he simply does not seem to get the hang of the thing even after eight months odd and he is conscious of the fact that the Powers that be are already looking at him with distrustful eyes, in spite of his occasional flashes of brilliance. If he could only get _out_ of it--get into something where his particular kind of mind and training would be useful--oh well--he grunts and turns back to his private affairs.

The letter from Easten of Columbiac Magazines--kindly enough--but all hope of selling the serial rights of his novel gone glimmering because of it--Easten was the last chance, the last and the best. “If you could see your way to making short stories out of the incidents I have named, I should be very much interested--” but even so, two short stories won't bring in enough to marry on, even if he can do them to Easten's satisfaction--and the novel couldn't come out as a book now till late spring--and Oliver has too many friends who dabble in writing to have any more confidence in book royalties than he would have in systems for beating the bank at roulette. Well, _that's_ over--and a year's work with it--and all the dreams he and Nancy had of getting married at once.

Those pulley layouts have to be fixed up sometime. What can you say about a pulley--what _can_ you say? “The United Steel Frame Pulley--Oh Man, There's a Hog for Work!” Oliver turns the cheap phrase in his mind, hating its shoddiness, hating the fact that such shoddiness is the only stuff with which he can deal.

Sanely considered, he supposes he hasn't any business using up a month's meagre savings and three small checks for poems that he has hoarded since April in going out to St. Louis Friday. Mr. Alley wasn't too pleased with letting him take Saturday and half Monday off to do it, too. But then there was that telegram ten days ago. “I'd give anything in the world if we could only see each other--” and after other letters unsatisfactorily brief, the letter that came Monday “I have such grand news, Ollie dear, at least it may be grand if it works out--but oh, dear, I do want to see you about it without tangling it up in letters that don't really explain. Can't you make it--even a few hours would be long enough to talk it all over--and I do so want to see you and really talk! Please wire me, if you can.”

Grand news--what kind he wondered--and dully thought that he couldn't see her, of course, and then suddenly knew that he must. After all, there didn't seem to be much use in saving for the sake of saving when all the saving you could possibly do didn't bring you one real inch nearer to what you really wanted. _Apres moi le deluge--apres ca le deluge_--it might even come to that this time, they were both so tired--and he viewed the prospect as a man mortally hurt might view the gradual failing of sun and sky above him, with hopelessness complete as a cloud in that sky, but with heart and brain too beaten now to be surprised with either agony or fear. They must see each other--they were neither of them quiet people who could love forever at a distance without real hope. Great Lord, if he and Nancy could ever have one definite basis to work on, one definite hope of money in the future no matter how far off that was--But the present uncertainty--They couldn't keep on like this--no two people in the world could be expected to keep on.

Nancy. He is seeing Nancy, the way she half-lifts her head when she has been teasing and suddenly becomes remorseful and wants him to know how much she does love him instead.

XIII

A hot night in the Pullman---too hot to sleep in anything but a series of uneasy drowsings and wakings. Smell of blankets and cinders and general unwashedness--noise of clacketing wheels and a hysterical whistle--anyhow each sweaty hour brings St. Louis and Nancy nearer. St. _Nancy_, St. _Nancy_, St. _Nancy_, says the sleepless racket of the wheels, but the peevish electric fan at the end of the corridor keeps buzzing to itself like a fly caught in a trap. “And then I got married you see--and then I got married you see--and when you get married you aren't a free lance--you aren't a free lance--you're _settled_!”

It will have to be pretty grand news indeed that Nancy has to make up for this last week and the buzz of the electric fan, thinks Oliver, twisting from one side of his stuffy berth to the other like an uneasy sardine.

XIV

“More beans, Oliver,” says Mrs. Ellicott in a voice like thin syrup, her “generous” voice. The generous voice is used whenever Mrs. Ellicott wants to show herself a person of incredibly scrupulous fairness before that bodiless assemblage of old women in black that constitute the They who Say--and so it is used to Oliver nearly all the time.

“No thank you, Mrs. Ellicott.” Oliver manages to look at her politely enough as he speaks but then his eyes go straight back to Nancy and stay there as if they wished to be considered permanent attachments. All Oliver has been able to realize for the last two hours is the mere declarative fact that she is _there_.

“Nancy!”

“No, thanks, mother.”

And Nancy in her turn looks once swiftly at her mother, sitting there at the end of the table like a faded grey sparrow whose feathers make it uncomfortable. It isn't feathers, though, really--its only Oliver. Why can't mother get reconciled to Oliver--why _can't_ she--and if she can't, why doesn't she come out and say so instead of trying to be generous to Oliver when she doesn't want to while he's there and then saying mean things when he's away because she can't help it?

“Stanley?”

“Why, no, my dear--no--yes, a few, perhaps--I might reconsider--only a few, my dear,”--his voice does not do anything as definite as cease--it merely becomes ineffectual as Mrs. Ellicott heaps his plate. He then looks at the beans as if he hadn't the slightest idea where they came from but supposes as long as they are there they must be got away with somehow, and starts putting them into his mouth as mechanically as if they were pennies and he a slot-machine.

It is hot in the Ellicotts' dining-room--the butter was only brought in a little while ago, but already it is yellow mush. There are little drops on the backs of Mr. Ellicott's hands. Oliver wants to help Nancy take away the dishes and bring in the fruit--they have started to make a game out of it already when Mrs. Ellicott's voice enforces order.

“No, Oliver. No, please. Please sit still. It is so seldom we have a _guest_ that Nancy and I are apt to forget our _manners_--”

Oliver looks to Nancy for guidance, receives it and subsides into his chair. That's just the trouble, he thinks rather peevishly--if only Mrs. Ellicott would stop acting as if he were a guest--and not exactly a guest by choice at that but one who must be the more scrupulously entertained in public, the less he is liked in private.

The fruit. Mrs. Ellicott apologizing for it--her voice implies that she is quite sure Oliver doesn't think it good enough for him but that he ought to feel himself very lucky indeed that it isn't his deserts instead. Mr. Ellicott absent-mindedly squirting orange juice up his sleeve. Oliver and Nancy looking at each other.

“Are you the same?” say both kinds of eyes, intent, absorbed with the wish that has been starved small through the last three months, but now grows again like a smoke-tree out of a magicked jar, “Really the same and really loving me and really glad to be here?” But they can get no proper sort of answer now--there are too many other Ellicotts around, especially Mrs. Ellicott.

Dinner is over with coffee and cigarettes that Mrs. Ellicott has bought for Oliver because no one shall ever say she failed in the smallest punctilio of hospitality, though she offers them to him with a gesture like that of a missionary returning his baked-mud idol to a Bushman too far gone in sin to reclaim. Mr. Ellicott smoked cigarettes before his marriage. For twenty years now he has been a contributing member of the Anti-Tobacco League.

And now all that Oliver knows is that unless he can talk to Nancy soon and alone, he will start being very rude. It is not that he wants to be rude--especially to Nancy's family--but the impulse to get everyone but Nancy away by any means from sarcasm to homicidal mania is as reasonless and strong as the wish to be born. After all he and Nancy have not seen each other wakingly for three months--and there is still her “grand news” to tell, the grandness of which has seemed to grow more and more dubious the longer she looked at Oliver. Now is the time for Mr. and Mrs. Ellicott to disappear as casually and completely as clouds over the edge of the sky and first of all, not to mention the fact that they are going. But Mrs. Ellicott has far too much tact ever to be understanding.

She puts Mr. Ellicott's hat on for him and takes his arm as firmly as if she were police, and he accepts the grasp with the meekness of an old offender who is not quite sure what particular crime he is being arrested for this time but has an uncomfortable knowledge that it may be any one of a dozen.

“Now we old people are going to leave you, children alone for a little while” she announces, fair to the last, her voice sweeter than ever. “We know you have such a great many important _affairs_ to talk over--particularly the _splendid_ offer that has just come to Nancy--my little girl hasn't told you about it yet, has she, Oliver?'

“No, Mrs. Ellicott.”

“Well, her father and myself consider it quite _remarkable_ and we have been _urging_--very _strongly_--her acceptance, though of course” this with a glacé smile, “we realize that we are only her _parents_. And, as Nancy knows, it has always been our dearest wish to have her decide matters affecting her happiness entirely _herself_. But I feel sure that when both of you have talked it _well_ over, we can trust you both to come to a most _reasonable_ decision.” She breathes heavily and moves with her appurtenance to the door, secure as an ostrich in the belief that Oliver thinks her impartial, even affectionate. Her conscientiousness gives her a good deal of applause for leaving the two young people so soon when they have all one evening and another morning to be together--but subconsciously she knows that she has done her best by her recent little speech to make this talking-it-over a walk through a field full of small pestilent burrs, for both Oliver and Nancy. They say _au revoir_ very politely--all four--the door shuts on Mr. Ellicott's meek back.

Mrs. Ellicott is not very happy, going downstairs. She knows what has undoubtedly happened the moment the door was shut--and a little twinge of something very like the taste of sour grapes goes through her as she thinks of those two young people so reprehensibly glad at being even for the moment in each other's arms.

XV

An hour later and still the grand news hasn't been told. In fact very little that Mrs. Ellicott would regard as either sensible or reasonable has happened at all. Though they do not know it the conversation has been oddly like that of two dried desert-travellers who have suddenly come upon water and for quite a while afterwards find it hard to think of anything else. But finally:

“Dearest, dearest, what was the grand news?” says Oliver half-drowsily. “We must talk it over, dear, I suppose, I guess, oh, we must--oh, but you're so sweet--” and he relapses again into speechlessness.

They are close together, he and she now. Their lips meet--and meet--with a sweet touch--with a long pressure--children being good to each other--cloud mingling with gleaming cloud.

“Ollie dear.” Nancy's voice comes from somewhere as far away and still as if she were talking out of a star. “Stop kissing me. I can't think when you kiss me, I can only feel you be close. If you want to hear about that news, that is,” she adds, her lips hardly moving.