XXVII

The fourth meal is Nancy's and it doesn't seem very happy. When it is over and Mr. Ellicott has rustled himself away from intrusion behind the evening paper.

"n.o.body--'phoned today--did they, mother?"

"No, dear." The voice is not as easy as it might be, but Nancy does not notice.

"Oh."

Nor does Nancy notice how hurriedly her mother's next question comes.

"Did you see Mrs. Winters, darling?"

"Oh yes--I saw her."

"And you're going on to New York?"

"Yes--next week, I think."

"With her. And going to stay with her?"

"I suppose so."

Mrs. Ellicott sighs relievedly.

"That's so nice."

Nancy will be safe now--as safe as if she were under an anesthetic. Mrs.

Winters will take care of that. She must have a little talk with dear Isabella Winters. But that night Nancy is alone in her room--doing up her engagement ring and Oliver's letters in a wobbly package. She is not quite just, though, she keeps one letter--the first.

XXVIII

Margaret Crowe, who, having just come to her seventeenth birthday in this present day and generation, felt it her official family duty to season the general conversation with an appropriate pepper of heartlessness, had really put it very well. She had said that while she didn't suppose one house party over Labor Day would more than partially rivet a broken heart, it honestly was a relief for everybody else to get Oliver out of the house for a while, and mother needn't look at her that way because she was as sorry as any of the rest of them for poor old Oliver but when people went about like walking cadavers and nearly bit you any time you mentioned anything that had to do with marriage, it was time they went somewhere else for a while and stayed there till they got over it.

And Mrs. Crowe, though dutifully rebuking her for her flippant treatment of a brother's pain, agreed with the sense of her remarks, if not with the wording. It had taken a good deal of quiet obstinacy on the part of the whole family to get Oliver to accept Peter Piper's invitation--Mrs.

Crowe, who was understanding, knew at what cost--the cost of a man who has lost a hand's first appearance in company with the stump unbandaged--but anything would be better than the mopey Oliver of the last two weeks and a half, and Mrs. Crowe had been taught by a good deal of living the aseptic powers of having to go through the motions of ordinary life in front of a casual audience, even when it seemed that those motions were no longer of any account. So Oliver took clean flannels and a bitter mind to Southampton on the last day of August, and, as soon as he got off the train, was swung into a reel of consecutive amus.e.m.e.nts that, fortunately, allowed him little time to think.

When he did, it was only to wonder rather frigidly if this fellow with gla.s.ses who played tennis and danced and swam and watched and commented athletically on the Davis Cup finals, sitting between Elinor Piper and Juliet Bellamy whom he had taken to dances off and on ever since he had had his first pair of pumps, could really be he. The two people didn't feel in the least the same.

The two Mr. Crowes, he thought. "Mr. Oliver Crowe--meet Mr. Oliver Crowe." "On our right, ladies and gentlemen, we have one of the country's greatest curiosities--a young gentleman who insists upon going on existing when there is nothing at all that makes his existence useful or interesting or proud. A very realistic wax figure that will toddle, shoot a line and play almost any sort of game until you might easily believe it to be genuinely alive. Mr. Oliver Crowe."

The house-party was to last a week, except for Ted Billett who would have to go back after Labor Day--and before eight hours of it were over, Oliver was watching Ted with grandmotherly interest, a little mordant jealousy, and humor, that, at times, verged toward the hysterical.

Nancy--and especially the loss of her--had made him sensitive as a skinless man to the winds and vagaries of other young people in love--and while Ted could look at and talk with Elinor Piper and think himself as safe as a turtle under its sh.e.l.l from the observations and discoveries of the rest of the party he could no more hide himself or his intentions from Oliver's painful scrutiny than he could have hidden the fact that he had suddenly turned bright green. So Oliver, a little with the sense of his own extreme generosity, but sincerely enough in the main, began to play kind shepherd, confidante, referee and second-between-the-rounds to Ted's as yet quite unexpressed strivings--and since most of him was only too willing to busy itself with anything but reminiscences of Nancy, he began to congratulate himself shortly that under his entirely unacknowledged guidance things really seemed to be getting along very well.

And here too his streak of ineradicable humor--that bright plaything made out of knives that is so fine to juggle with light-handedly until the hand meets it in its descent a fraction of a second too soon--came often and singularly to his aid. He could see himself in a property white beard stretching feeble hands in blessing over a kneeling and respectful Elinor and Ted. "Bless you my dear, dear children--for though my own happiness has gone with yester-year, at least I have made you--find each other--and perhaps, when you sit at evening among the happy shouts of your posterity--" but here Oliver broke off into a snort of laughter.

Of course Ted had confided nothing formally as yet--but then, thought Oliver sourly out of his own experience, he wouldn't; that was the way you always felt; and Ted had never been a person of easy confidences.

The most he had done had been to take Oliver grimly aside from the dance they had gone to last night and explain in one ferocious and m.u.f.fled sentence delivered half at Oliver and half at a large tree that if Hinky Selvage didn't stop dancing with Elinor that way he, Ted, would carry him un.o.btrusively behind a bush and force him to swallow most of his own front teeth. And again Oliver, looking back as a man might to the feverish details of a major operation, realized with cynic mirth that that was a very favorable symptom indeed. Oh everything was going along simply finely for Ted, if the poor fool only knew it. But that he would no more believe of course than you would a dentist who told you he wasn't going to hurt. People in love _were_ poor fools--d.a.m.n fools--unutterably lucky, unutterably perfect--fools.

Ted and Oliver must have one talk though before it all happened beyond redemption and Ted started wearing that beautiful anesthetized smile and began to concoct small kindly fatal conspiracies with Elinor and Oliver and some nice girl. They hadn't had a real chance to talk since Oliver came back from St. Louis, and shortly--oh very shortly indeed by the way things looked--the only thing they would be able to talk about would be Elinor and how wonderful she and requited love and young happy marriage were--and however glad Oliver might be for Ted and his luck--he really wouldn't be able to stand that, under the present circ.u.mstances, for very long at a time. Ted would be gone into fortune--into a fortune that Oliver would have to be the last person on earth to grudge him--but that meant the end of eight years of fighting mockery and friendship together as surely as if those years were marbles and Elinor were dropping them down a well. They could pick it up later--after Ted had been married a year say--but it would have changed then, it wouldn't be the same.

Oliver smiled rather wryly. He wondered if that was at all like what Ted might have thought when he and Nancy--But that wasn't comparable in the least. But Nancy and he were different. _Nancy_--and with that, the pain came so dazzlingly for a minute that Oliver had to shut his eyes to bear it--and something that wasn't just stupidly rude had to be said to Juliet Bellamy in answer to her loud clear question as to whether he was falling asleep.

All up to and through Labor Day Oliver bluffed and manoeuvered like the head of a small but vicious Balkan State in an International Congress for Ted and Elinor, and towards tea-time, decided sardonically that it was quite time his adopted infants took any further responsibilities off his shoulders. There was no use delaying conclusions any longer--Oliver felt as he looked at his victims like a workmanlike G.o.d who simply must finish the rough draft of the particular world he is fussing with before sunset, in spite of all rebellious or slipshod qualities in its clay.

There would be a dance that evening. There would be, Oliver thought with some proprietary pride, a large sentimental moon. A few craftily casual words with Elinor before dinner--a real talk with Ted in one of the intermissions of the dance--a watchdog efficiency in guarding the two from intrusion while they got the business over with neatly in any one of several very suitable spots that Oliver had picked out already in his mind's eye. And then, having thoroughly settled Ted for the rest of his years in such a solid and satisfactory way--perhaps the queer G.o.ds that had everyone in charge, in spite of their fatal leaning toward practical-joking where the literary were concerned, might find enough applause in their little tin hearts for Oliver's acquired and vicarious merit to give him in some strange and painful way another chance to be alive again and not merely the present wandering spectre-of-body that people who knew nothing about it seemed to take so unreasonably for Oliver Crowe.

So he laid his snares, feeling quite like Nimrod the mighty, though outwardly he was only kneeling on the Piper porch, waiting for the dice to come around to him in a vociferous game of c.r.a.p that Juliet had organized--he seldom shot without winning now he noticed with superst.i.tious awe. And tea pa.s.sed to a sound of m.u.f.fled crumpets, and everyone went up to dress for dinner.

XXIX

Mrs. Winters' little apartment on West 79th Street--she heads letters from it playfully "The Hen Coop" for there is almost always some member of her own s.e.x doing time with the generous Mrs. Winters. Mrs. Winters is quite celebrated in St. Louis for her personally-conducted tours of New York with stout Middle-Western matrons or spectacled school girls east for visits and clothes--Mrs. Winters has the perfectly-varnished manners, the l.u.s.t for retailing unimportant statistics and the supercilious fixed smile of a professional guide. Mrs. Winters' little apartment, that all the friends who come to her to be fed and bedded and patronized tell her is so charmingly New Yorky because of her dear little kitchenette with the asthmatic gas-plates, the imitation English plate-rail around the dining-room wall, the bookcase with real books--a countable number of them--and on top of it the genuine signed photograph of Caruso for which Mrs. Winters paid the sum she always makes you guess about, at a charity-bazaar.

Mrs. Winters herself--the Mrs. Winters who is _so_ interested in young people as long as they will do exactly what she wants them to--every inch of her from her waved white hair to the black jet spangles on her dinner gown or the notes of her "cultivated" voice as frosted and glittery and artificial as a piece of _glace_ fruit. And with her, Nancy, dressed for dinner too, because Mrs. Winters feels it to be one's duty to oneself to dress for dinner always, no matter how much one's guests may wish to relax--Nancy as much out of place in the apartment whose very cushions seem to smell of that modern old-maidishness that takes itself for superior feminist virtue as a crocus would be in an exhibition of wool flowers--a Nancy who doesn't talk much and has faint blue stains under her eyes.

"So everything went very satisfactorily indeed today, dear Nancy?"

Mrs. Winters' voice implies the uselessness of the question. Nancy is staying with Mrs. Winters--it would be very strange indeed if even the least important accompaniments of such a visit were not of the most satisfactory kind.

"Yes, Mrs. Winters. Nothing particularly happened, that is--but they like my work."

"Yes, dear," Mrs. Winters croons at her, she is being motherly. The effect produced is rather that of a sudden a.s.sumption of life and vicarious motherhood on the part of a small, brightly-painted porcelain hen.

"Then they will be sending you over shortly, no doubt? Across the wide wide sea--" adds Mrs. Winters archly, but Nancy is too tired-looking to respond to the fancy.

"I suppose they will when they get ready," she answers briefly and returns to her chicken-croquette with the thought that in its sleekness, genteelness, crumblingness, and generally unnourishing qualities it is really rather like Mrs. Winters. An immense desire, after two weeks of Mrs. Winters' mental and physical cuisine for something as hearty and gross as the mere sight of a double planked steak possesses her achingly--but Mrs. Winters was told once that she "ate like a bird."

"Well, in that case, dear Nancy, you certainly must not leave New York indefinitely without making the most of your opportunities," Mrs.

Winters' tones are full of genteel decision. "I have made out a little list, dear Nancy, of some things which I thought, in my funny old way, might possibly be worth your while. We will talk it over after dinner, if you like--"

"Thank you so much, dear Mrs. Winters" says Nancy with dutiful hopelessness. She is only too well acquainted with Mrs. Winters' little lists. "As an _artist_, as an _artist_, dear Nancy, especially." Mrs.

Winters breathes somewhat heavily, "Things That Should Interest you.

Nothing Bizarre, you understand, Nothing Merely Freakish--but some of the Things in New York that I, Personally, have found Worth While."

The Things that Mrs. Winters Has Found Personally Worth While include a great many public monuments. She will give Nancy a similar list of Things Worth While in Paris, too, before Nancy sails--and Nancy smiles acceptably as each one of them is mentioned.

Only Mrs. Winters cannot see what Nancy is thinking--for if she did she might become startlingly human at once as even the most perfectly poised of spinsters is apt to do when she finds a rat in the middle of her neat white bed. For Nancy is thinking quite freely of various quaint and everlasting places of torment that might very well be devised for Mrs.

Winters--and of the naked fact that once arrived in Paris it will matter very little to anybody what becomes of her and least of all to herself--and that Mrs. Winters doesn't know that she saw a chance mention of Mr. Oliver Crowe, the author of "Dancer's Holiday" today in the "Bookman" and that she cut it out because it had Oliver's name in it and that it is now in the smallest pocket of her bag with his creased and recreased first letter and the lucky piece she had from her nicest uncle and a little dim photograph of Mr. Ellicott and half a dozen other small precious things.