Part 6

“It is all very well for your father to say such things, but, Nancy, darling, you shall not be put upon by Tramplers” proceeds Mrs. Ellicott in her most cryptically perfect tones. “Oliver is a man--he must apologize. A man, I say, though little more than a boy. And otherwise you would now be pursuing your Art in Paris due to dear kind Mrs. Winters who has always stood our truest friend and now this other opportunity has come also but I would never be the first to say that even such should not be sacrificed most gladly for the love of a true kind husband and dear little children though marriage is but a lottery at best and especially when affections are fixed upon their object in early youth.”

All this without a pause, pouring over the numbed parts of Nancy's mind like thin sweetish oil. Nancy considers wearily. Yes, Oliver should apologize. Yes, it is only being properly dignified not to call up the Rosario again to find if he is there. Yes, if he truly loves her, he will call--he will come--and the clock hands are marching on toward ten-seven and his train like stiff little soldiers and mother is talking, talking--

“Not that I wish or have wished to influence your mind in any way, my darling, but environment and propinquity count for mountains in such first youthful attachments and sometimes when we are older to be looked back upon with such regret. Nor would I ever have Words Spoken that should seem to injure the choice of my daughter's heart--but when young men cannot provide even Hovels for their _fiancées_ a reasonable time having been given, it is only just that they should release them and you looking like death all these last two months. Never wishing that my own daughter should act in Ways dishonorable in the slightest but time is the Test in such matters and if such tests are not to be survived it is best they should end and no one can deny that the young man talks very queerly and was often quite disrespectful to you though you may say that was joking but it would not have been joking in my day and young men with queer nervous eyes and hands I never have nor will quite trust--”

But it's Oliver that's doing this, Oliver who turned funny and white when she cut her finger with the breadknife making sandwiches and wanted her to put all sorts of things on it. Oliver who was always so sweet when she was unreasonable and always the first to come looking unhappy after they'd quarrelled even a little and say it was all his fault. Why the very last letter she got from him was the one that said if she ever stopped loving him he knew he'd die.

“And when things are ended it is better that such things should be though doubtless not necessary to put an announcement in the paper yet since God in his infinite wisdom arranges all things for the best. And with such a splendid position opening before her it would be only dignified to bring the young man to his senses for it would not be right to let unreasonable young men stand in the way of advantages offered by Foreign Travel and study and these things are soon forgotten, my dear, and if nervous young men will not admit like gentlemen that they are in the wrong when only engaged what kind of husbands will they make when married forever? And is not a broken engagement better than lifelong unhappiness when there are so many too many sinful people divorcing each other every day and all men who write for their living use stimulants, my dear, such is literary history and my dearest have your cry out on mother's shoulder.”

The sweetish oil has risen about Nancy relentlessly--it is up to her waist now and still it keeps talking and flowing and creeping higher. Very soon when the fatter black soldier on the clock-face has only hitched himself along a little, it will be over her head and the roving Nancy, the sparkling Nancy, the Nancy that fell in love will be under it like a calm body, never to rise or run or be kissed with light seeking kisses on the soft of her throat again. There will only be a dignified Nancy, a sensible Nancy, a Nancy going to Paris to study and be successful, a Nancy who, sooner or later will marry “Some good, clean man.”

A little tinkle of chimes from the clock. Six minutes more. The Nancy that was stands on tiptoe, every eager and tameless bit of her hoping, hoping. If mother weren't there that Nancy would have been at the telephone an hour ago in spite of young people's pride and old people's self-respect and all the thousand and one knife-faced fetishes that all the correct and common-sensible people hug close and worship because they hurt.

She can see the train sliding out of the station. Ollie is in it and his face is stiff with surprise and unforgiveness like the face of some horrible stranger you went up to and spoke to by mistake, thinking he was your friend. By the time the train is well started he will have begun talking to that fluffy girl in the other half of the Pullman--no, that isn't worthy, he wouldn't--but oh Ollie, Ollie!

Half an hour later the telephone rings. Nancy is finishing the breakfast dishes--her hands jump as she hears it--a slippery plate slops back into the water and as she dives after it she realizes painfully that the new water is much too hot.

“What _is_ it, mother?” For an instant the Nancy who has no real self-respect is talking again.

“Just a minute, Isabella. Mrs. Winters, dear. Don't you want to speak to her?”

“Oh.”

Then----

“Not right now. When I'm through with these. But will you ask her if she's going to be in this afternoon--I want to tell her about my taking the New York job.”

Satisfied oil pouring back into the telephone with a pleased, thin chuckle.

“Yes, Nancy has decided. Well, dear, I think she had better tell you herself--”

Nancy is looking dolefully down at her thumb. Foolish not to have cooled off that water a little--she has really burned herself. For an instant she hears Oliver's voice in her ears, low and concerned, sees Oliver kissing it, making it well. But these things don't happen to sensible, self-respecting modern girls with experienced mothers, especially when all the former have now quite made up their own minds.

XIX

It was with some nightmare surprise that Oliver on waking regarded his tidy cell. Then he remembered and in spite of the fact that yesterday evening with all that belonged to it kept hurting wherever it was that most of him lived with the stiff repeating ache of a nerve struck again and again by the same soft hammer, he couldn't help laughing a little. The popular college remedy for disprized love had always been an instantaneous mingling of conflicting alcohols--calling a large policeman a big blue boob seemed to produce the same desired result of bringing one to one's senses by first taking one completely out of them without the revolving stomach and fuzzed mind of the first instance. He tried to think of yesterday evening airily. Silly children quarreling about things that didn't matter at all. Of course Nancy should have the job if she wanted--of course he'd apologize, apologize like Ecclesiastes even for being alive at all if it was necessary--and then everything would be _all_ right, just all right and fixed. But the airy attitude somehow failed to comfort--it was a little too much like trying to shuffle a soft-shoe clog on a new grave. Nancy _had_ been unreasonable. Nancy _had_ said or hadn't denied that she wasn't sure she loved him any more. He _had_ released her from the engagement and told her good-by. He stared at the facts--they sprang up in front of him like choking thorns--thorns he had to clear away with his hands before he could even touch Nancy again. Was he sure--even now? All the airiness dropped from him like a clown's false face. As he thought of what would happen if Nancy had really meant it about not loving him, it seemed to him that somebody had taken away the pit of his stomach and left nothing in its place but air.

Anyhow the first thing to do was to get out of this place--he examined the neat bars in the door approvingly and wondered how the devil you acted when you wanted to be let out. There wasn't any way of opening a conversation about it with no one to talk to--and the corridor was merely a length of empty steel--and, damn it, his train left at Ten Seven and he had to see Nancy and explain everything in the world before it left--and if he didn't get back to New York in time he might lose his job. There must be some way of explaining to the people in charge that he hadn't done anything but kid a policeman--that he must get out.

He went over to the door and tried it tentatively--no inside doorknob, of course, this wasn't a hotel. He looked through the bars--nothing but corridor and the cell on the other side. Should he call? For an instant the fantastic idea of crying “Waiter!” or “Please send up my breakfast!” tugged at him hard, but fantasy had got him into much too much trouble as it was, he reflected savagely. It made you feel ridiculously self-conscious, standing behind bars like this and shouting into emptiness. Still he had to get out. He cleared his throat.

“Hey,” he remarked in a pleasant conversational tone. “Hey!”

No answer, he grew bolder.

_“Hey!”_ This time the conversational tone was italicized. A rustle of voices somewhere rewarded him--that must be people talking. Well, if they talked, they could listen.

“HEY!” and now his voice was emphatic enough for headline capitals.

The rustle of voices ceased. There was a moment of stupefied silence. Then,

“SHUT UP!” came from the end of the corridor in a roar that made Oliver feel as if he had been cooing. The roar irritated him--they might be a little more mannerly. He clutched the bars and discovered to his pleased surprise that they would rattle. He shook them as hard as he could like a monkey asking for peanuts.

“Hey there! I want to get out!” and though he tried to make his voice as impressive as possible it seemed to him to pipe like a canary's in that long steel emptiness.

“I've got to catch a train!” he added desperately and then had to stuff his coat sleeve into his mouth to keep from spoiling his dramatics with most unseasonable mirth.

There were noises from the end of the corridor--the noises of strong men at bitter war with something stronger than they, strange rumblings and snortings and muffled whoops. Then the voice came again and this time its words were slow and deliberately spaced so as to give it time to master whatever rocked it between whiles.

“Say--you--_humorist_” said the voice and here it rose sharply into an undignified squawk of laughter, “You--innercent child--comedian--you--Charlie--Chaplin--of the--hoosegow--you _shut_ up--or I'll come down there and--bend--something--over--your merry little face--_understand?_” “Yes sir,” said Oliver subduedly.

“Ah right. Now go bye-bye--mama'll call you when she's ready to take you walking” then explosively “I got to catch a train! Oh Holy Mike!”

Oliver left the window and went back toward his bunk, considerably chastened. As he did so a bundle of second-hand clothes on the floor rolled over and disclosed a red and unshaven face.

“Wup!” said Oliver--he had almost stepped on it.

“Wha'?” said the bundle, opening sick eyes.

“Oh nothing. I only said good morning.”

“Wha'?”

“Good morning.”

“Wha'?”

“Good morning.”

After incredible difficulties, the bundle attained a sitting position.

“You kid'n me?” it demanded thickly, looking at Oliver with as much surprise as if he had just grown up out of the floor like a plant.

“Oh no. No.”

“You're _nah_ kid'n me?”

“No.”

“Ah ri'. 'S countersign. Pass. Fren'.”

It attempted a military gesture but succeeded merely in hitting its mouth with its hand. It then looked at the hand as if the latter had done it on purpose and became sunk in profound cogitation.

“Not feeling very well today?” Oliver ventured.

It looked at him.

“_Well?_” it said briefly. Then, after a silence devoted to trying to find where its hands were.

“Hoosh.”

“What?” said Oliver.

“_Hoosh_. Goo' hoosh. Gran' hoosh. Oh, _hoosh!_” and as if the mention of the word had stricken it back into clothes again it slid slowly down on its back, closed its eyes and began to snore.

Oliver, perched on his bunk for what comfort there was, sat and considered. He looked at the bundle--the bars--the bars--the bundle. The bundle wheezed apoplectically--no sound of footsteps came from beyond the bars. Oliver wondered if Nancy loved him. He wondered if he would ever catch that Ten Seven. But most of all he wondered why on earth he had happened to get in here and how on earth he was ever going to get out.

XX

The sky had been a blue steam all day, but at night it quieted, there were faint airs. From the window of the apartment on Riverside Drive you could see it grow gentle, fade from a strong heat of azure through gray gauze into darkness, thick-soft as a sable's fur at first, then uneasily patterned all at once with idle leopard-spottings and strokes of light. The lights fell into the river and dissolved, the dark wash took them and carried them into streaks of lesser, more fluid light. Even so, if there could have been country silence for five minutes at a time, the running river, the hills so disturbed with light beyond, might have worn some aspect of peace. But even in the high bird's nest of the apartment there was no real silence, only a pretending at silence, like the forced quiet of a child told to keep still in a corner--the two people dining together could talk in whispers, if they wanted, and still be heard, but always at the back of the brain of either ran a thin pulsation of mumbling sound like the buzz of a kettle-drum softly struck in a passage of music where the orchestra talks full-voiced--the night sound of the city, breathing and moving and saying words.

They must have been married rather contentedly for quite a while now, they said so little of importance at dinner and yet seemed so quietly pleased at having dinner together and so neat at understanding half sentences without asking explanations. That would have been the first conclusion of anybody who had been able to take out a wall and watch their doll-house unobserved. Besides, though the short, decided man with the greyish hair must be fifty at least, the woman who stood his own height when she rose from the table was too slimly mature for anything but the thirties. Not a highly original New York couple by any means--a prospering banker or president of a Consolidated Toothpick Company with a beautiful wife, American matron-without-children model, except for her chin which was less dimpled than cleft with decisiveness and the wholly original lustre of her hair, a buried lustre like the shine of “Murray's red gold” in a Border ballad. A wife rather less society-stricken than the run of such wives since she obviously preferred hot August in a New York apartment with her husband's company to beach-picnics at Greenwich or Southampton without it. Still the apartment, though compact as an army mess-kit, was perfectly furnished and the maid who had served the cool little dinner an efficient effacedness of the race that housekeepers with large families and little money assert passed with the Spanish War. Money enough, and the knowledge of how to use it without blatancy or pinching--that would have been the second conclusion.

They were sitting in deep chairs in the living room now, a tall-stemmed reading lamp glowing softly between them, hardly speaking. The tiredness that had been in the man's face like the writing in a 'crossed' letter began to leave it softly. He reached over, took the woman's hand and held it--not closely or with greediness but with a firm clasp that had something weary like appeal in it and something strong like a knowledge of rest.

“Always like this, at home,” he said slowly.

“It _is_ rather sweet.” Her voice had the gentleness of water running into water. Her eyes looked at him once and left him deliberately but not as if they didn't care. It must have been a love-match in the beginning then--her eyes seemed so infirm.

“You'll read a little?”

“Yes.”

“Home,” he said. He seemed queerly satisfied to say the word, queerly moved as if even after so much reality had been lived through together, he couldn't quite believe that it was reality.

“And I've been waiting for it--five days, six days, this time?”

She must have been at the seashore after all--tan or lack of it meant little these days, especially to a woman who lived in this kind of an apartment. The third conclusion might have been rather sentimental, a title out of a moving picture--something about Even in the Wastes of the Giant City the Weary Heart Will Always Turn To--Just Home.

A doll on a small table began to buzz mysteriously in its internals. The man released the woman's hand--both looking deeply annoyed.

“I thought we had a private number here,” said the man, the tiredness coming back into his face like scribbles on parchment.

She crossed to the telephone with a charming furtiveness--you could see she was playing they had just been found behind the piano together in a game of hide-and-seek. The doll was disembowelled of its telephone.

“No--No--Oh very well--”

“What was it?”

She smiled.

“Is this the Eclair Picture Palace?” she mimicked. [Illustration: THE TIREDNESS THAT HAD BEEN IN THE MAN'S FACE BEGAN TO LEAVE IT] Both seemed almost childishly relieved. So in spite of his successful-business-man mouth, he wasn't the kind that is less a husband than a telephone-receiver, especially at home. Still, she would have made a difference even to telephone-receivers, that could be felt even without the usual complement of senses.

“That was--bothersome for a minute.” His tone lent the words a quaint accent of scare.

“Oh, well--if you have one at all--the way the service is now--”

“There won't be any telephone when we take our vacation together, that's _settled_.”

She had been kneeling, examining a bookcase for books. Now she turned with one in her hand, her hair ruddy and smooth as ruddy amber in the reflected light.

“No, but _telegrams_. And wireless,” she whispered mockingly, the more mockingly because it so obviously made him worried as a worried boy. She came over and stood smoothing his ear a moment, a half-unconscious customary gesture, no doubt, for he relaxed under it and the look of rest came back. Then she went to her chair, sat down and opened the book.

“No use borrowing trouble now, dear. Now listen. Cigar?” “Going.”

“Ashtray?”

“Yes.”

“And remember not to knock it over when you get excited. Promise?”

“Um.”

“Very well.”

Mrs. Severance's even voice began to flow into the stillness.

“As I was getting too big for Mr. Wopsle's great-aunt--”

XXI

“And that's the end of the chapter.” Mrs. Severance's voice trailed off into silence. She closed the book with a soft sound. The man whom it might be rather more convenient than otherwise to call Mr. Severance opened his eyes. He had not been asleep, but he had found by a good deal of experience that he paid more attention to Dickens if he closed his eyes while she read.

“Thank you dear.”

“Thank you. You know I love it. Especially Pip.”

He considered.

“There was a word one of my young men used the other day about Dickens. Gusto, I think--yes, that was it. Well, I find that, as I grow older, that seems to be the thing I value rather more than most men of my age. Gusto.” He smiled “Though I take it more quietly, perhaps,--than I did when I was young,” he added.

“You _are_ young” said Mrs. Severance carefully.

“Not really, dear. I can give half-a-dozen youngsters I know four strokes in nine holes and beat them. I can handle the bank in half the time and with half the worry that some of my people take to one department. And for a little while more, Rose, I may be able to satisfy you. But” and he passed a hand lightly over his hair. “It's grey, you know,” he ended.

“As if it mattered,” said Mrs. Severance, a little pettishly.

“It does matter, Rose.” His eyes darkened with memory--with the sort of memory that hurts more to forget than even to remember. “Do you realize that I am sixteen years older than you are?” he said a little hurriedly as if he were trying to scribble the memory over with any kind of words.

“But my dear” and she smiled, “you were sixteen years older six years ago--remember? There's less real difference between us now than there was then.”

“Yes, I certainly wasn't as young in some ways--six years ago.” He seemed to speak almost as if unconsciously, almost as if the words were being squeezed out of him in sleep by a thing that had pressed for a long time with a steady weight on his mind till the mind must release itself or be broken. “But then nobody could be with you, for a month even, and not feel himself turn younger whether he wanted to or not.” “So that's settled.” She was trying to carry it lightly, to take the darkness out of his eyes. “And once you've bought our steamer tickets we can leave it all behind at the wharf and by the time we land we'll be so disgracefully young that no one will recognize us--just think--we can keep going back and back till I'm putting my hair up for the first time and you're in little short trousers--and then babies, I suppose and the other side of getting born--” but her voice, for once, turned ineffectually against his centeredness of gaze, that seemed now as if it had turned back on itself for a struggling moment and regarded neither what was nor what might be, but only what was past.

“Six years ago” he said with the same drowsy thoughtfulness. “Well, Rose, I shall always be--most grateful--for those six years.”

She started to speak but he checked her.

“I think I would be willing to make a substantial endowment to any Protestant Church that still really believed in hell,” he said, “because that was very like hell--six years ago.”

Intensity began to come into his voice like a color of darkness, though he still spoke slowly.

“You can stand nearly everything in life but being tired of yourself. And six years ago I was tired--tired to death.”

Her hand reached over and touched him medicinally.

“I suppose I had no right” he began again and then stopped. “No, I think the strong man tires less easily but more wholly than the weak one when he does tire. And I was strong enough.