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 b.o.o.b 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 att.i.tude 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, d.a.m.n 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 doork.n.o.b, 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 m.u.f.fled whoops. Then the voice came again and this time its words were slow and deliberately s.p.a.ced 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. Pa.s.s. 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 pa.s.sage 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 un.o.bserved. 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 l.u.s.tre of her hair, a buried l.u.s.tre 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 a.s.sert pa.s.sed 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.