Chapter 23

Dick, looking down upon Nan, had that congealed aspect she alone had the present power of freezing him into. She knew all the possibilities of that face. There was the angry look: that had reigned of late when she flouted or denied him. There was the sulky frown, index of his jealousy of Rookie, and there had been, what seemed a long time ago, before they went through this disintegrating turmoil of war, the look of a boy's devotion. Nan had prized him very much then, when he was not flaunting angry rights over her. Now she sat perversely staring into the fire, realizing that everything about her angered him: the childish vanity of her dress, assumed, he would be sure, to charm the Rookie of old days into renewed remembrance. But he had to be faced finally, since Rookie was gone so long, stirring up Charlotte to the task of a cold bite, and with a little shrug she lifted her eyes to face exactly the Dick she had expected to see: dignified reproach in every line. Nice boy! she had the honest impartiality to give him that grace only to wish he would let her enjoy him as she easily could. What a team he and she and Rookie would be if they could only eliminate this idea of marriage. How they could make the room ring, here by the fire, with all the quips of their old memories. Yet wouldn't Dick have been an interruption, even then? Wasn't the lovely glow of this one evening the amazing reality of her sitting by the fire with Rookie alone for the first time in many years, and, if he fell into the enchantment of Malaysia and the mysteries of an empty-headed Tira, the last? And now here she was dreaming off on Rookie when she must, at this very instant, to seize any advantage at all, be facing Dick. She began by laughing at him.

"Dick," she said, "how funny you are. I don't know much about Byron, but I kind of think you're trying to do the old melancholia act: Manfred or what d'you call 'em? You just stand there like old style opera, glowering; if you had a cloak you'd throw an end over your shoulder."

"Nan!" said he, and she was the more out of heart because the voice trembled with an honest supplication.

"There!" she hastened to put in, "that's it. You're 'choked with emotion.' Why do you want to sound as if you're speaking into a barrel? In another minute you'll be talking 'bitterly.'"

Dick was not particular about countering her gibes. That was unproductive. He had too much of his own to say.

"What do you suppose I'm here for?" he asked, as if, whatever it might be, it was in itself accusatory.

"Search me," said Nan, with the flippancy he hated.

She knew, by instinct as by long acquaintance, that one charm for him lay in her old-fashioned reticences and chiefly her ordered speech. Almost he would have liked her to be the girl Aunt Anne had tried to make her. That, she paused to note, in passing, was part of the general injustice of things. He could write free verse you couldn't read aloud without squirming (even in the company of the all-knowing young), but she was to lace herself into Victorian stays.

"I suppose," said she, "you came to see whether I mightn't be having the time of my life sitting here with Rookie by the fire."

"I did," he frankly owned. "Mother said you'd gone to New York. So she went on."

"Now what the dickens for? Haven't I a perfect right to go to New York without notice?"

"Why," said Dick, "you'd disappeared. You'd gone away from here, and you were lost, virtually lost. You weren't anywhere."

"If she thought I was in New York, why didn't that settle it? What did she have to go trailing on after me for?"

"Because," said Dick, "we didn't know. She wanted to telephone. I wouldn't let her. I couldn't have the Seaburys started up. I couldn't have you get into the papers."

"Into the papers!" said Nan. "Heavens! I suppose if I'm not in at curfew I'm to be arrested."

"I let her go," repeated Dick. "But I knew as well as I wanted to you'd doubled back here and you were with him."

"Then, for God's sake," said Nan, in a conversational tone, knowing the adjuration would be bitter to him, "if I wanted to be with him, as you put it--I'm glad I ain't a poet--why didn't you let me?"

"Because," said Dick promptly, "it's indecent."

She had no difficulty in facing him now. It was a cheap means of subjugating, but, being an advantage, she would not forego it. And, indeed, she was too angry.

"Dick," she said, "you're a sickening little whelp. More than that, you're a hypocrite. You write yards and yards of your free verse to tell us how bold and brave you are and how generally go-as-you-please we've got to be if we're going to play big Injun, and then you tell me it's indecent to sit here with Rookie, of all people in the world. My God! Rookie!"

Again she had invoked her Maker because Dick would shiver at the impropriety. "No violence," she thought satirically, remembering he was himself the instigator of violence in verse. But Dick was sorry. He had not chosen his word. It had lain in his angry mind and leaped to be used. It could not be taken back.

"You can't deny," said he, "you are perfectly happy here with him. Or you were a minute ago before I came."

"No," said Nan, "I don't deny it. Is that indecent?"

Now she had the whip hand, for he was not merely angry: he was plainly suffering. The boyish look had subtly taken possession of his face. This was the Dick she had loved always, next to Rookie. But his following words, honest as they were, lost him his advantage of the softened look. He was hanging to his point.

"Yes," he said. "He's old. You're young. So am I. We belong together. We can be awfully fond of him. We are. But it's got to be in the right way. He could live with us. We'd simply devote ourselves to him. But Nan, the world belongs to us. We're young."

At that instant Raven came in and set down his tray. Nan glanced up at him fearfully, but it was apparent he had not heard. She was no longer angry. The occasion was too big. Dick seemed to her to be speaking out of his ignorance and not from any wilful cruelty. She got up and went to Raven, as he stood there, put her hand through his arm and smiled up at him.

"Rookie," she said, with a half laugh that was really a caress, "darlingest Rookie! Charlotte never got that supper together in the world. You did it yourself, not to disturb her. I never saw so much food at one time, in all my life."

It was a monstrous feast, bread, butter, cheese, ham: very neatly assembled, but for a giant's appetite.

"We'll all have some," sad Raven. "Draw up, old son. Nan'll butter for us."

For the first minutes it seemed to Dick he could not eat, the lump in his throat had risen so. But Nan buttered and they did eat and felt better. Raven avoided looking at them, wondering what they were quarreling about now. It must, he thought, be the way of this new generation starting out avowedly "on its own."

XXIX

The blessed diversion of eating ended, a blank moment stared them in the face. What to say next? Were Nan and Dick, Raven wondered, to go on fighting? Was it the inevitable course of up-to-date courtship? Perhaps the new generation, from its outlook on elemental things, was taking to marriage by capture, clubbing the damsel and striding off, her limpness flung over a brawny arm. It seemed to him a singularly bare, unshaded way to the rose-leaf bowers his poets had been used to sing; but undoubtedly the roads were many, and this was one. Possibly the poets wouldn't say the same now. Dick ought to know. But at least there must be no warfare here in this warm patch of shelter snatched out of the cold and dark. His hand was on Old Crow's journal, Dick's inheritance, he thought, as well as his, and now a fortunate pretext to stave off an awkward moment.

"Run over this," he said. "Nan and I've been doing it. I don't believe we're in any hurry for bed."

Dick took it, with no show of interest. How should he have been interested, forced to switch his mind from the pulsating dreams of youth to worn mottled covers?

"What is it?" he asked indifferently.

Raven was rather curious now. What impression would Old Crow make, slipping in like this, unheralded?

"Never mind," he said. "Run over it and get on to it, if you can. I'd like to know what you think."

Dick, without much heart, began to read, and Raven lighted a pipe. First, a tribute to Nan's abstinence, he passed her the cigarettes, and when she shook her head, smiled back at her, as if he reminded her of secrets they had together. Presently she got up, and Dick, closing the book, threw it on the table.

"Bed?" Raven asked, also getting up, and Nan said good night and was gone.

The two men sat down, each with the certainty that here they were to stick until something determining had been said, Raven irritated by the prospect and Dick angrily ready.

"Well," said Raven, indicating the book, "what do you think?"

"That?" said Dick absently. "Oh, I don't know. Somebody trying to write without knowing how?"

Raven gave it up. Either he had not read far, or he had not hungered or battled enough to be moved by it.

"Now, look here," said Dick, "I may not be interested in that, but there's something I am interested in. And we've got to talk it out, on the spot."

"Well!" said Raven. He mended the fire which didn't need it, and then sat down and filled his pipe. He wasn't smoking so very much but, he thought, with a bored abandonment to the situation, gratefully taking advantage of a pipe's proneness to go out. While he attended to it he could escape the too evidently condemnatory gaze from those young eyes that never wavered, chiefly because they could not be deflected by a doubt of perfectly apprehending everything they saw.

"Now," said Dick, plunging, "what do you want to do this kind of thing for?"

"What kind of thing?" asked Raven, lighting up. "Smoke?"

Dick looked at him accusingly, sure of his own rightness and the clarity of the issue.

"You know," he said. "This business. Compromising Nan."

Raven felt that slight quickening of the blood, the nervous thrill along the spine a dog must feel when his hair rises in canine emergency. He smoked silently while he was getting himself in hand, and, in the space of it, he had time for a good deal of rapid thinking. The outrage and folly of it struck him first and then the irony. Here was Dick, who flaunted his right to leave nothing unsaid where realistic verse demanded it, and he was consigning Nan to the decorum Aunt Anne herself demanded. Was the young animal of the present day really unchanged from the first man who protected his own by a fettering seclusion, simply because it was his own? Was Dick's general revolt only the yeasty turmoil sure to take one form or another, being simply the swiftness of young blood? Was his general bravado only skin deep? Raven hardly knew how to take him. He wouldn't be angry, outwardly at least. The things Dick had said, the things he was prepared to say, he would be expected to resent, but he must deny himself. It was bad for the boy, and more, a subtle slur on Nan. They mustn't squabble over her, as if her sweet inviolateness could be in any way touched by either of them. Presently he took his pipe out, looked at it curiously as if it did not altogether please him and remarked:

"Dick, you're a fool."

"Oh, yes," said Dick, with a bitterness that curled his lip a little, "I'm a young fool, too, I suppose. Well, thank God for that. I am young, and I know it, and just what I'm getting out of it and what I've a right to get. You can't play that game with me, Uncle Jack. You simply can't do it. The old game's played out."

"And what," said Raven mildly, "is the old game? And what's the new one going to be? You'll have to tell me. I don't know."

"The old game," said Dick, "was precisely what it was in politics. The old men made the rules and the young were expected to conform. The old men made wars and the young fought 'em. The old men lied and skulked and the young had to pull them out of the holes they got into. I suppose you'd say the War was won at Chequers Court. Well, I shouldn't. I should say it was won by the young men who had their brains blown out, and lost their eyes and their legs."

"No," said Raven quietly, "I shouldn't say the War was won at Chequers Court. We needn't fight over that. The thing that gets me is why we need to fight at all. There's been a general armistice and Eastern Europe doesn't seem to have heard of it. They go on scrapping. You don't seem to have heard of it either. You come home here and find me peaceably retired to Charlotte and Jerry and my Sabine Farm, and you proceed to declare war on me. What the devil possesses you?"

"Yes," said Dick, the muscle twitching in his lip, "I do find you here. And Nan with you."

"Dick," said Raven sharply, "we'll leave Nan out of this."

Dick, though the tone was one that had called him to attention years ago, told himself he wasn't afraid of it now. Those old bugaboos wouldn't work.

"I am going," he said, "to marry Nan."

"Good for you," responded Raven. "No man could do better."

"Do you mean to tell me," countered Dick, "you're not bluffing? Or do you actually want to let her marry me and you--you'd continue this under my nose?"

Raven stared at him a full minute, and Dick angrily met him. "Stare away," Dick was thinking. "I'm in the right. I can look you down."

"Dick," said Raven finally, "I called you a fool. It isn't such a bad thing to be a fool. We're most of us fools, of one sort or another. But don't let me think you're a dirty-minded little cad. Now I don't want to bring Nan into this, but I rather think I've got to. What are you driving at? Come, out with it!"

To his wonderment, his pain amounting to a shock of perplexity and grief, he saw Dick's face redden and the tears spring to his eyes. How horribly the boy cared, perhaps up to the measure of Nan's deserts, and yet with what a childish lack of values! For he had no faith either in Nan or in old Jack. The ties of blood, of friendship, were not holding. He was as jealous as Othello, and no sane certainties were standing him in stead. Dick, feeling the painful tears, felt also the shame of them. He wanted to answer on the instant, now Raven had given him his chance; but so unused was he to the menace of betraying emotion that he was not even sure of not blubbering like a boy. He swallowed and came out with it:

"You've got some sort of hold on her nobody else has. You've hynotized her. She eats out of your hand."

Raven, in despair, sat looking at him. He ought, he felt, to be able to laugh it all away, but he was too bewildered and too sorry.

"Dick," said he finally, "I shall have to say it again. You're an awful fool. Nan and I were always the best of friends. I rather think I have known her in a way none of the rest of you have. But--hypnotized her! Look at me, Dick. Remember me plodding along while you grew up; think what sort of a chap I am. You won't find anything spectacular about me. Never has been, never will be. And Nan, of all people! little Nan!"

Dick forgot the imminence of a breaking voice and humid eyes. Raven, he felt, wasn't playing the game. He was skulking out of it.

"Do you deny," he said, in a voice so loud and hoarse that it startled him as it did Raven, "that you're in love with her?"

"Good God!" said Raven. He rose, laid his pipe on the mantel and stood, trembling, even in his clenched hands. "What is there to answer," he got out at length, "to a question like that? You've just reminded me I'm past my youth. Why don't you remember it yourself when it'll do you some good? I'm an old chap, and you----"

"You're as fit as ever you were in your life," said Dick, as if he grudged it to him. "And more fascinating, I suppose, to a girl like her. There's something pathetic about it. It's half pity, too! Nothing so dangerous in the world."

Raven swung round, walked to the window and, hands in his pockets, stood looking out. In love with Nan! well, he did love Nan better than any created thing. All the old tests, the old obediences, would be nothing to him if he could consecrate them to Nan, her happiness, her safety in this dark world. How about his life? Yes, he would give that, a small thing, if Nan needed the red current of it to quicken her own. But "in love" as Dick understood it! If you were to judge Dick's comprehension of it from his verse, love was a sex madness, a mortal lure for the earth's continuance, by the earth begot. And who had unconsciously held out that lure to him but the woman of mystery up there on the road in that desolate house with her brutal husband and her deficient child? He had seen the innocent lure, he had longed to put out his hand to the hand unconsciously beckoning. Through the chill wintry night the message came to him now. And only Nan could understand that the message might come and that it was a part of the earth and to be forgotten, like a hot wind or a thrilling song out of the dark--Nan, his darling, a part of him, his understanding mind, as well as the fiber of his heart. Suddenly he turned on Dick who was watching him, ready, it seemed, to pounce on his first change of look.

"Dick," he said, "I adore Nan."

"Yes," said Dick, "I know you do. I told you----"

"But," broke in Raven, "you don't know anything about it."

"Oh," said Dick, "then I don't adore her, too."

Raven reflected. No, his inner mind told him, there was no community of understanding between them. How should Dick traverse with him the long road of rebuff and downfall he had traveled? How should youth ever be expected to name the cup it has not tasted? For Dick, he thought again, what is known as love was a simple, however overwhelming, matter of the mounting blood, the growing year. For him it would be the ashes of forgotten fire, the strange alembic mixed of bitter with the sweet. In that moment he faced an acknowledged regret that he had not lived the normal life of marriage at the start, the quieting of foolish fevers, the witness of children. We are not, he reflected, quite solvent unless we pay tribute before we go. He mused off into the vista of life as it accomplishes itself not in great triumphal sweeps, but fitful music hushed at intervals by the crash of brutal mischance, and only, at the end, a solution of broken chords. Meantime Dick watched him, and Raven at last, feeling the boy's eyes on him, came awake with a start.

"Yes, Dick," he answered gently, "of course you love her. And it ought to do you good. It's a big thing to love Nan."

"Very well then," said Dick, his voice trembling a little in answer to that gentler tone, "you let her alone, can't you? Nan's a different girl when she's with you. It's no use denying it. You do hypnotize her."

"Dick," said Raven, "that's a beastly thing to say. If you mean it to be as offensive as it sounds, you ought to be booted for it."

"Oh," said Dick, with a simple certainty in what he knew, "I don't blame you as I should any other fellow that wasn't going through what you are. That would be a simple matter to deal with: a chap that knew what he was doing. You don't, old man. You may not know it, but you don't."

"For the land's sake!" said Raven, echoing Charlotte, "And what, again for the land's sake, am I going through?"

"You know," said Dick uneasily because he did hope to avoid putting it into words. "_Cafard._"

Raven had one of his moments of silence, getting hold of himself, taking the matter in, with its forgotten enormity.

"So," he said, "you've adopted your mother's word for it. I hadn't realized that."

"Oh, Mum's no such fool," said Dick. "She may be an aggravation and a curse--I'll own that--but she's up to date. Why, Jack, anybody that ever knew you'd know you're not yourself."

"No," thought Raven, "few of us are ourselves. We've been through the War, my son. So have you; but you didn't have such a brittle old world inside you to try to put together again after it was smashed. Your inner world was in the making. Whatever you might feel in its collision with the runaway planet of the mad human mind, it could right itself; its atoms might cohere."

"You needn't think," proceeded Dick generously if a trifle too magnificently, "I can't see. There's a lot of things I see that don't bear talking about. I've pitched into you about Nan, but you needn't suppose I don't know it's all a matter of hidden complexes."

Again recurring to Charlotte in this moment of need, Raven reflected that he didn't know whether he was afoot or a-horseback.

"You don't mind, I hope," he said, with humility before this perfectly equipped intelligence, "explaining a little."

"Why," said Dick, "there's all your previous life. It's a case of inhibition. There was Miss Anne."

"Stop," said Raven, his curiosity over the boy's mind dying in a crash. "Stop right there, Dick; you're making a fool of yourself. Now we'll go to bed."

He got up and waited, and Dick, sulkily, rose too.

"You needn't think," he began, and Raven broke in:

"You needn't think I shall stand another word of your half-baked psycho-deviltries. You can believe what you like. It'll harm nobody but yourself. But you don't talk it here, or out you go. Now!"

The last word meant he was waiting to put out the light and Dick, without another look at him, strode out of the room, snatched his suit-case and went up the stairs. Raven heard the decisive click of his door and, his own heart beating in a quick response to what he knew must happen, turned on the light again and stood there silent, waiting. It did happen. A soft rustle, like a breeze blowing down the stairs, and Nan came in. She had taken off her child's dress, as if to show him she had left their game behind her. The long braids were pinned up, and she wore her dark walking dress. She was paler, much older, and he was renewedly angry with Dick for banishing the Nan that was but an hour ago. Perhaps that Nan would never come back.

"Darling Rookie," she said, so softly that the sound of it could not have got half way up the stairs, "what's it all about?"

"About you, Nan," he answered, and denied himself the darling Nan he had for her. "And being in love. And Dick's wanting you."

"It's more than that," said Nan wistfully. "He's been at you somehow. He's dug ditches across your dear forehead and down your cheeks. What d'he say, Rookie? What d'you say to him?"

Raven shook his head. He had no idea of inviting her into the psycho-analytic ward of Dick's mind.

"Nan," he said, "the boy's unhappy. He's in love with you. No doubt about it."

Nan, on her part, had nothing to say to this.

"What made you change your dress?" asked Raven. "You give me a funny feeling, as if you'd put the little Nan to bed and come down here to say you're going, in a minute, and never coming back."

"I am going," said Nan, "only not in a minute. Charlotte says Jerry shall take me to the early train."

"Now, by George!" said Raven, so loudly she put her finger to her lip, "if that's what Dick's done, he shall go himself, and know the reason, too. Spoil my visit with you, break it all up? Why, I never had a visit from you before."

"It's broken," said Nan. "You couldn't put it together again." The red had come into her cheeks and her eyes showed a surface glitter he did not know. "I'm going to leave you to Tenney--and Tira--and your destiny--and Old Crow."

"Is this a part of your scheme?" asked Raven roughly. He was curiously dashed, almost shamed by her repudiating him. "You're as bad as Dick. He's been bringing all his psychopathic patter to bear on me, and you're deserting me. Oh, come! Let's be safe and sane, like the Fourth."