"Now, Crowe, for Pete's sake, it's five o'clock in the morning and I'm catching the 7.12--"

And Oliver is too sleepy to argue the point. Besides he knows quite well that any arguments he can use will only drive Ted, in his present state of mind, a good deal farther and faster along the road he has so dramatically picked out for himself. So, between trying to think of some means of putting either sense or the fear of G.o.d into Elinor Piper, whatever Ted may say about it, and wondering how the latter would take a suggestion to come over to Melgrove for a while instead of starting an immoral existence with that beautiful but possessive friend of Louise's, he drops off to sleep.

x.x.xIII

Oliver had depended on Ted's noisy habits in dressing and packing to wake him and give them a chance to talk before Ted left--but when he woke it was to hear a respectful servantly voice saying "Ten o'clock, sir!" and his first look around the room showed him that Ted's bed was empty and Ted's things were gone. There was a scribbled note propped up against the mirror, though.

"Dear Ollie:

"So long--and thanks for both good advice and sympathy. The latter helped if the former didn't. Drop me a message at 252A as soon as you decide on this French proposition. I'm serious about it. TED."

By the time he had read this through, Oliver began to feel rather genuinely alarmed.

He could not believe that the whole affair between Ted and Elinor Piper had gone so utterly wrong as the note implied--he had had a whimsical superst.i.tion that it must succeed because he was playing property man to it after his own appearance as Romeo had failed--but he knew Ted and the two years' fight against the struggling nervous restlessness and discontent with everything that didn't have either speed or danger in it that the latter, like so many in his position, had had to make. His mouth tightened--no girl on earth, even Nancy, could realize exactly what that meant--the battle to recover steadiness and temperance and sanity in a temperament that was in spite of its poised externals most brilliantly sensitive, most leapingly responsive to all strong stimuli--a temperament moreover that the war and the armistice between them had turned wholly toward the stimuli of fever--and Ted had made it with neither bravado nor bl.u.s.ter and without any particular sense of doing very much--and now this girl was going to smash it and him together as if she were doing nothing more important than playing with jackstones.

He remembered a crowd of them talking over suicide one snowy night up in Coblenz--young talk enough but Ted had been the only one who really meant it--he had got quite vehement on picking up your proper cue for exit when you knew that your part was through or you were tired of the part. He remembered cafe hangers-on in Paris--college men--men who could talk or write or teach or do any one of a dozen things--but men who had crumbled with intention or without it under the strain of the war and the s.n.a.t.c.hes of easy living to excess, and now had about them in everything they said or wore a faint air of mildew; men who stayed in Paris on small useless jobs while their linen and their language verged more and more toward the soiled second-hand--who were always meaning to go home but never went. If Ted went to Paris--with his present mind. Why Ted was his best friend, Oliver realized with a little queer shock in his mind--it was something they had never just happened to say that way.

And therefore. Far be it from Oliver to be rude to the daughter of his hostess, but some things were going to be explained to Miss Elinor Piper if they had to be explained by a public spanking in the middle of the Jacobean front hall.

But then there was breakfast, at which few girls appeared, and Elinor was not one of the few. And then Peter insisted on going for a swim before lunch--and then lunch with Elinor at the other end of the table and Juliet Bellamy talking like a mechanical piano into Oliver's ear so that he had to crane his neck to see Elinor at all. What he saw, however, rea.s.sured him a little--for he had always thought Elinor one of the calmest young persons in the world, and calm young persons do not generally keep adding spoonfuls of salt abstractedly to their clam-broth till the mixture tastes like the bottom of the sea.

But even at that it was not till just before tea-time that Oliver managed to cut her away from the vociferous rest of the house-party that seemed bent on surrounding them both with the noise and publicity of a private Coney Island. Peter has expressed a fond desire to motor over to a little tea-room he knows where you can dance and the others had received the suggestion with frantic applause. Oliver was just starting downstairs after changing his shoes, cursing house-party manners in general and Juliet Bellamy in particular all over his mind when Elinor's voice came up to him from below.

"No, really, Petey. No, I know it's rude of me but honestly I am _tired_ and if I'm going to feel like anything but limp _tulle_ this evening.

No, I'm _perfectly_ all right, I just want to rest for a little while and I promise I'll be positively incandescent at dinner. No, Juliet dear, I wouldn't keep you or anybody else away from Peter's nefarious projects for the world--"

That was quite enough for Oliver--he tiptoed back and hid in his own closet--wondering mildly how he was going to explain his presence there if a search party opened the door. He heard a chorus of voices calling him from below, first warningly, then impatiently--heard Peter bounce up the stairs and yell "Ollie! Ollie, you slacker!" into his own room--and then finally the last motor slurred away and he was able to creep out of his sh.e.l.l.

He met Elinor on the stairs--looking encouragingly droopy, he thought.

"Why Ollie, what's the matter? The pack was howling for you all over the house--they've all gone over to the Sharley--look, I'll get you a car--"

She went down a couple of steps toward the telephone.

Oliver immediately and without much difficulty put on his best expression of blight.

"Sorry, El--must have dropped off to sleep," he said unblushingly.

"Lay down on my bed to sort of think some things over--and that's what happens of course. But don't bother--"

"It's no trouble. I could take you over myself but I was so sort of f.a.gged out--that's why I didn't go with them," she added--a little uncertainly he noticed.

"And--oh it's just being silly and tired I suppose, but all of them together--"

"I know," said Oliver and hoped his voice had sounded appropriately bitter. "No reflections on you or Peter, El, you both understand and you've both been too nice for words--but some of the others sometimes--"

"Oh I'm _sorry_," said Elinor contritely, and Oliver felt somewhat as if he were swindling her out of sympathy she probably needed for herself by deliberately calling attention to his own cut finger. But it had to be done--there wasn't any sense in both of them, he and Ted, walking crippled when one of them might be able to doctor the other up by just giving up a little pride. He went on.

"So I thought--I'd just stay around here with a book or something--get some tea from your mother, later, if she were here--"

"Why, I can do that much for you, Ollie, anyway. Let's have it now."

"But look here, if you were going to do anything--" knowing that after that she could hardly say so, even if she were.

"Oh no. And besides, with both of us here and both of us blue it would be silly if we went and were melancholy at each other from opposite sides of the house." She tried to be enthusiastic. "And there's strawberry jam and m.u.f.fins somewhere--the kind that Peter makes himself such a pig about--"

"Well, Elinor, you certainly are a friend--"

A little later, in a quiet corner of the porch with the tea-steam floating pleasantly from the silver nose of its pot and a decorous scarlet and yellow still-life of m.u.f.fins and jam between them, Oliver felt that so far things had slid along as well as could be expected.

Elinor's manners in the first place and her genuine liking for him in the second had come to his help as he knew they would--she was too concerned now with trying to comfort him in small un.o.btrusive ways to be on her guard herself about her own troubles. All he had to do, he knew, was to sit there and look ostentatiously brokenhearted to have the conversation move in just the directions he wished and that, though it made him feel shameless was not exactly difficult--all he required was a single thought of the last three weeks to make his acting sour perfection itself. "Greater love hath no man than this," he thought with a grotesque humor--he wondered if any of the celebrated story-book patterns of friendship from Damon and Jonathan on would have found things quite so easy if they had had to take not their lives but most of their most secret and painful inwards and put them down on a tea-table like a new species of currant bun under the eyes of a friendly acquaintance to help their real friends.

"I can't tell you how awfully decent it was of you and Peter," he began finally after regarding a b.u.t.tered m.u.f.fin for several minutes as if it were part of the funeral decorations for dead young love. "Asking me out here, just now. Oh I'll write you a charming bread-and-b.u.t.ter letter of course--but I wanted to tell you really--" He stopped and let the sentence hang with malice aforethought. Elinor's move. Trust Elinor.

And the trust was justified for she answered as he wanted her to, and at once.

"Why Ollie, as if it was anything--when we've all of us more or less grown up together, haven't we--and you and Peter--" She stopped--oh what was the use of being tactful! "I suppose it sounds--put on--and--sentimental and all that--saying it," she laughed nervously, "but we--all of us--Peter and myself--we're so really _sorry_--if you'll believe us--only it was hard to know if you wanted to have us say so--how awfully sorry we were. And then asking you out here with this howling mob doesn't seem much like it, does it? but Peter was going to be here--and Ted--and I knew what friends you'd been in college--I thought maybe--but I just didn't want you to think it was because we didn't care--"

"I know--and--and--thanks--and I do appreciate, Elinor." Oliver noticed with some slight terror that his own voice seemed to be getting a little out of control. But what she had just said took away his last doubt as to whether she was really the kind of person Ted ought to marry--and in spite of feeling as if he were trapping her into a surgical operation she knew nothing about, he kept on.

"It gets pretty bad, sometimes," he said simply and waited. Last night--if things came out right later--will have been just what Elinor needed most, he decided privately. She had always struck him as being a little too aloof to be quite human--but she was changing under his eyes to a very human variety of worried young girl.

"Well, isn't there something we can really _do_?" she said diffidently, then changing,

"Oh I mean it--if you don't think it's only--probing--asking that?" as she changed again.

"Not a thing I'm afraid, Elinor, though I really do thank you." He hated his voice--it sounded so brave. "It's just finished, that's all. Can't kick very well. Oh no," as she started to speak, "it doesn't hurt to talk about, really. Helps, more. And Peter and Ted help too--especially Ted."

He watched her narrowly--changing color like that must mean a good deal with Elinor.

Then "Why Ted?" she said, almost as if she were talking to herself and then started to try and make him see that that didn't matter--a spectacle to which he remained gratifiedly blind. He addressed his next remarks at the dish of jam so that she wouldn't be able to catch his eye.

"Oh, I'm not slamming Peter's sympathetic soul, El, you know I'm not--but Ted and I just happened to go through such a lot of the war and after it together--and then Ted saw a good deal more of Nancy. Peter's delightful. And kind. But he does a.s.sume that because lots of people get engaged and disengaged again all over the lot these days as if they were cutting for bridge-partners there isn't anything particularly serious in things like that. Nothing to really make you make faces and bust, that is. Well, ours happened to be one of the other kind--that's the difference. And Peter, well, Peter isn't exactly the soul of constancy when it comes to such matters--"

"Peter--oh Peter--if you knew the millions of girls that Peter's kept pictures of--"

"Well, I've heard all about the last hundred thousand or so, I think.

But there's perfect safety in thousands. It's when you start being so stalwart and sure and manly about one--"

Oliver spread out his hands. Elinor's color--the way it fluctuated at least--was most encouraging. So was the fact that she had tried to b.u.t.ter her last m.u.f.fin with the handle of her knife. "But I don't see _how_ if a girl really cared about a man she could let anything--" she said and then stopped with a burning flush. And now Oliver knew that he had to be very careful. He looked over his tools and decided that infantile bitterness was best.

"Girls are girls," he said shortly, stabbing a m.u.f.fin. "They tell you they do and then they tell you they don't--that's them."

"Oliver Crowe, I never heard such a nasty, childish seventeen-year-old idea from you in my whole life!" Oh what would calm Mrs. Piper say if she could see Elinor, eyes cloudy with anger, leaning across the tea-wagon and emphasizing her points by waves of a jammy knife as she defends constancy and romance! "They do _not_! When a girl cares for a man--and she knows he cares for her--she doesn't care about _anything_ else, she--"

"That's what Nancy said," remarked Oliver placidly out of his m.u.f.fin.

"And then--"

"Well, you know I'm sorry for you--you know I'm just as sorry for you as I can be," went on Elinor excitedly. "But all the same, my dear Ollie, you have no right in the least to say that just because one girl has broken her engagement with you, all girls are the same. I know dozens of girls--" "So do I," from Oliver, quietly. "Dozens. And they're just the same."