Chapter 4

I read _Vanity Fair_ late into the night, and the morning was coming on before I tried to sleep. I waked to find Nancy standing by my bed.

"His boat is gone."

"Gone?"

"Yes. It went an hour ago. I saw it from the roof."

"From the roof?"

"Yes. I got up--early. I--I could not sleep. And when I looked--it was gone--your glasses showed it almost out of sight."

She was wrapped in the blue cloak. Olaf had made her bring it with her. She had protested. But he had been insistent.

"I found this in the pocket," Nancy said, and held out a card on which Olaf had written, "When she lifted her arms, opening the door, a light shone on them from the sea, and the air and all the world were brightened for her."

"What does it mean, Elizabeth?"

"I think you know, my dear."

"That he cares?"

"What do you think?"

Her eyes were like stars. "But how can he? He has seen me--twice--"

"Some men are like that."

"If you only hadn't told him about Anthony."

"I am glad that I told him."

"Oh, but he might have stayed."

"Well?"

"And I might have loved him." She was still glowing with the fires that Olaf had lighted in her.

"But you are going to marry Anthony."

"Yes," she said, "I am going to marry Anthony. I am going to flirt and smoke cigarettes and let him--flirt--when I might have been a--goddess."

It was after breakfast on the same day that a letter came to me, delivered into my own hands by messenger. It was from Olaf, and he left it to me whether Nancy should see it. It covered many pages and it shook my soul, but I did not show it to Nancy.

There were nights after that when I found it hard to sleep, nights in which I thought of Olaf sailing toward the hidden land, holding in his heart a hope which it was in my power to crown with realization or dash to the ground. Yet I had Nancy's happiness to think of, and, in a sense, Anthony's. It seemed almost incredible that I must carry, too, on my heart, the burden of the happiness of Olaf Thoresen.

When Anthony came back, he and Nancy were caught in a net of engagements, and I saw very little of them. Of course they romped in now and then with their own particular crowd, and treated me, as it were, to a cross-section of modern life. Except for two things, I should have judged that Nancy had put away all thoughts of Olaf, but these two things were significant. She had stopped smoking, and she no longer touched her cheeks with artificial bloom.

Anthony's amazement, when he offered her a cigarette and she refused, had in it a touch of irritation. "But, my dear girl, why not?"

"Well, I have to think of my complexion, Tony."

I think he knew it was not that and was puzzled. "I never saw you looking better in my life."

She was wearing a girdle of blue with her clear, crisp white, and her fairness was charming. She had, indeed, the look which belongs to young Catholic girls dedicated to the Virgin who wear her colors.

It was not, however, until Anthony had been home for a week that he saw the blue cloak. We were all on the beach--Mimi Sears and Bob Needham and the Drakes, myself and Anthony. Nancy was late, having a foursome to finish on the golf grounds. She came at last, threading her way gayly through the crowd of bathers. She was without her cap, and her hair was wound in a thick braid about her head. I saw people turning to look at her as they had never turned to look when she had worn her shadowy gray.

"Great guns!" said a man back of me. "What a beauty!"

A deep flush stained Anthony's face, and I knew at once that he did not like it. It was as if, having attuned his taste to the refinement of a Japanese print, he had been called upon to admire a Fra Angelico. He hated the obvious, and Nancy's loveliness at this moment was as definite as the loveliness of the sky, the sea, the moon, the stars. Later I was to learn that Anthony's taste was for a sophisticated Nancy, a mocking Nancy, a slim, mysterious creature, with charms which were caviar to the mob.

But Bob Needham spoke from the depths of his honest and undiscriminating soul. "Heavens! Nancy. Where did you get it?"

"Get what?"

"That cloak."

"Do you like it?"

"Like it--! I wish Tony would run away while I tell you."

Anthony, forcing a smile, asked, "Where did you get it, Nan?"

"It was given to me." She sat down on the sand and smiled at him.

Mrs. Drake, feeling the thickness and softness, exclaiming over the embroidery, said finally: "It is a splendid thing. Like a queen's robe."

"You haven't told us yet," Anthony persisted, "where you got it."

"No? Well, Elizabeth will tell you. It's rather a long story. I am going into the water. Come on, Bob."

She left the cloak with me. Anthony followed her and the others. I sat alone under a great orange umbrella and wondered if Anthony would ask me about the cloak.

He did not, and when Nancy came back finally with her hair down and blowing in the wind to dry, Anthony was with her. The cloud was gone from his face, in the battle with the wares he had forgotten his vexation.

But he remembered when he saw the cloak. "Tell me about it, Nancy."

"I got it from Elizabeth's viking."

That was the calm way in which she put it.

"He isn't my viking," I told her.

"Well, you were responsible for him."

"Do you mean to say," Anthony demanded, "that you accepted a gift like that from a man you didn't know?"

Nancy, hugging herself in the cloak, said, "I felt that I knew him very well."

"How long was he here?"

"Three days. I saw him twice."

"I don't think I quite like the--idea--" Anthony began, then broke off. "Of course you have a right to do as you please."

"Of course," said Nancy, with a flame in her cheek.

"But it would please me very much if you would send it back to him."

"If I wanted to," she told him, "I couldn't."

"Why not?"

"Can you mail parcel post packages to the--Flying Dutchman? Or express things to--to Odin?"

"I don't in the least know what you are talking about, Nancy."

"Well, he sailed in and he sailed out. He didn't leave any address. He left the cloak--and a rather intriguing memory, Anthony."

That was all the satisfaction she would give him. And I am not sure that he deserved more at her hands. The agreement between them had been--absolute freedom.

I am convinced that if it had not been for the garden party I should never have shown Olaf's letter to Nancy. The garden party is an annual event. We always hold it in August, when the "off-islanders" crowd the hotels, and when money is more plentiful than at any other time during the year.

Nancy had charge of the fish pond. I had helped her to make the fish, which were gay objects of painted paper, numbered to indicate a corresponding prize package, and to be caught with a dangling line from a lily-wreathed artificial pool.

The day of the garden party was a glorious one--with the air so clear that the flying pennants of the decorated booths, and the gowns of the women, gained brilliancy and beauty from the shining atmosphere.

Nancy wore a broad blue hat which matched her eyes, one of her clear white dresses, and a silken scarf of the same blue as her hat. She loved children, and as she stood in a circle of them all the afternoon, untiring, eager--bending down to them, hooking the fish on the dangling line--handing out the prizes, smiling into the flushed eager faces, helping the very littlest ones to achieve a catch, I sat in a chair not far away from her and watched. I saw Anthony come and go, urging her to let some one else take her place, pressing a dozen reasons upon her for desertion of her task, and coming back, when she refused, to complain to me:

"Such things are a deadly bore."

"Not to Nancy."

"But they used to be. She's changed, Elizabeth."

"Beautifully changed."

"I am not sure. She was always such, a good sport."

"And isn't she now?"

"She is different," he caught himself up, "but of course--adorable."

Mimi Sears joined us, and she and Anthony went off together. Bob Needham hung around Nancy until she sent him away. At last the hour arrived for the open-air play which was a special attraction, and the crowds surged toward the inclosure. The booths were deserted, and only one rapturous child remained by the fish pond.

Nancy sat down and lifted the baby to her lap. She had taken off her hat, and her blue scarf fell about her. Something tugged at my heart as I looked at her. With that little head in the hollow of her arm she was the eternal mother.

I saw Anthony approaching. He stopped, and I caught his words. "You must come now, Nancy. I am saving a seat for you."

She shook her head, and looked down at the child. "I told his nurse to go and he is almost asleep."

He flung himself away from her and came over to me. "I have good seats for both of you in the enclosure. But Nancy won't go."

I rose and went with him, although I should have been content to sit there by the fish pond and feast my eyes on Nancy.

"It is perfectly silly of her to stay," Anthony fumed as we walked on together.

"But she loves the children."

"I hate children."

I am sure that he did not mean it. What he hated was the fact that the child had for the moment held Nancy from him. It was as if, looking forward into the future, he could see like moments, and set himself against the thought of any interruption of what might be otherwise an untrammeled and independent partnership. He had, I think, little jealousy where men were concerned. He was willing to give Nancy the reins and let her go, believing that she would inevitably come back to him. He was not, perhaps, so willing to trust her with ties which might prove more absorbing than himself.

If I had not had Olaf's letter, I might not have weighed Anthony's attitude so carefully, but against those burning words and their comprehension of the divinity and beauty of my Nancy's nature, Anthony's querulous complaint struck cold.

I think it was then, as we walked toward the inclosure, that I made up my mind to let Nancy hear what Olaf had to say to her.

She stayed out late that night--there was a dinner and a dance--and Anthony brought her home. I confess that I felt like a traitor as I heard the murmur of his voice in the hall.

But when he had gone, and Nancy passed my door on her way to her room, I called her, and she came in.

I was in bed, and I had the letter in my hand. "I want you to read it," I said. "It is from Olaf Thoresen."

She looked at it, and asked, "When did it come?"

"Two months ago. The day that he left."

"Why haven't you shown it to me?"

"I couldn't make up my mind. I do not know even now that I am right in letting you see it. But I feel that you have a right to see it. It is you who must answer it. Not I."

When she had gone, I turned to the chapter in my book where Becky weeps crocodile tears over poor Rawdon Crawley on the night before Waterloo. There is no scene in modern literature to match it. But I couldn't get my mind on it. Nancy was reading Olaf's letter!

I kept a copy of it, and here it is:

"I knew when I first saw her in the garden that she was the One Woman. I had wanted sea-blood, and when she came, ready for a dip in the sea, it seemed a sign. One knows these things somehow, and I knew. I shan't attempt to explain it.

"When you told me of her lover, I felt that Fate had played a trick on me. I could not now with honor pursue the woman who was promised to another. Yet I permitted myself that one day--the day on my boat.

"I learned in those hours that I spent with her that she had been molded by the man she is to marry and that in the years to come she will shrink to the measure of his demands upon her. She is feminine enough to be swayed by masculine will. That is at once her strength and her weakness. Loving a man who will love her for the wonder of her womanhood, she will fulfill her greatest destiny. Loving, on the other hand, one who aspires only to fit her into some attenuated social scheme, she will wither and fade. I think you know that this is true, that you will not accuse me of being unfair to any one.

"And now may I tell you what my dreams have been for her?

"I am not young. I mean I am past those hot and early years when men play--Romeo. The dream that is mine is one which has come to a man of thirty, who, having seen the world, has weighed it and wants--something more.

"I have told you of my house in that hidden land which is washed by the sea. I want to spend the rest of my days there, and I had hoped that some woman might be found whose love of life, whose love of adventure, whose love of me, might be so strong that she would see nothing strange in my demand that she forsake all others and cleave only to me.

"By forsaking all others, I mean, literally, what I say. I should want to cut her off entirely from all former ties. To let any one into our secret, to reveal that hidden land to a gaping world, would be to destroy it. We should be followed, tracked by the newspapers, written up, judged eccentric--mad. And I do not wish to be judged at all. My separation from my kind would have in it more than a selfish whim, an obsession for solitude. I want to get back to primitive civilization. I want my children to face a simpler world than the one I faced. Do you know what it means for a man to inherit money, with nothing back of it for two generations but hard work, although back of that there were, perhaps, kings? It means that I had, unaided, to fit myself into a social scheme so complex that I have not yet mastered its intricacies. I do not want to master them. I do not want my sons to master them. I want them to find life a thing of the day's work, the day's worship, the day's out-of-door delights. I want them to have time to think and to dream. And then some day they shall come back if they wish to challenge civilization--young prophets, perhaps, out of the wilderness--seeing a new vision of God and man because of their detachment from all that might have blinded them.

"I have a feeling that your Nancy might, if she knew this, dream with me of a new race, rising to the level of the needs of a new world. She might see herself as the mother of such a race--sheltered in my hidden land, sailing the seas with me, held close to my heart. I think I am a masterful man, but I should be masterful only to keep her to her best. If she faltered I should strengthen her. And I should make her happy. I know that I could make her happy. And for me there will never be another.

"I am leaving it to you to decide whether you will show her this. I want her to see it, because it seems to me that she has a right to decide between the life that I can offer her and the life she must live if she marries Anthony Peak. But it all involves a point of honor which I feel that I am not unprejudiced enough to decide. So to-morrow I shall go away. I shall sail far in the two months that I shall give myself before I come back. And when I come, you will let me know whether I am to turn once more to the trackless seas, or stay to find my happiness."

This letter when I had first read it had stirred me profoundly, as I think it must have stirred any man or woman who has yearned amid the complexities of modern existence to find some land of dreams. Even to my island, comparatively untouched by the problems of existence in crowded centers, come the echoes of discord, of social unrest, of political upheavals, of commercial greed. In this hidden land of Olaf's would be life stripped of its sordidness, love free from the blight of cynicism and disillusion--faith, firm in its nearness to God and the wonder of His works. I envied Olaf his hidden land as I envied Nancy her opportunity. My blood is the same as Nancy's, and I love the sea. And as we grow older our souls adventure!

When Nancy came in to me, she had put on her white _peignoir_, and she had Olaf's letter in her hand.

"Ducky," she said, and her voice shook, "I have read it twice--and--I shouldn't dare to think he was in earnest."

"Why not?"

"I should want to go, Elizabeth."

"And leave the world behind you?"

"Oh, I haven't any world. It might be different if mother were alive, or daddy. There'd be only you, Ducky, my dear, dear Ducky." She caught my hand and held it.

"And Anthony--"

"Anthony would get over it"--sharply. "Wouldn't he, Elizabeth? You know he would."

"My dear, I don't know."

"But I know. If I hadn't been in his life, Mimi Sears would have been, just as Bob Needham would have been in my life if it hadn't been for Anthony. There isn't any question between Anthony and me of--one woman for one man. You know that, Elizabeth. But with Olaf--if he doesn't have me, there will be no one else--ever. He--he will go sailing on--alone--"

"My dear, how do you know?"

She flung herself down beside me, a white rose, all fragrance. "I don't know"--she began to cry. "How silly I am," she sobbed against my shoulder. "I--I don't know anything about him, do I, Elizabeth--? But it would be wonderful to be loved--like that."

All through the night she slept on my arm, with her hand curled in the hollow of my neck as she had slept as a child. But I did not sleep. My mind leaped forward into the future, and I saw my world without her.

* * * * *

Nancy stayed with me through September. Anthony's holiday was up the day after the garden party, and he went back to Boston, keeping touch with Nancy in the modern way by wire, special delivery, and long-distance telephone.

It was on a stormy night with wind and beating rain that Nancy told me Anthony was insisting that she marry him in December.

"But I can't, Elizabeth. I am going to write to him to-night."

"When will it be?"

"Who knows? I--I'm not ready. If he can't wait--he can let me go."

She did not stay to listen to my comment on her mutiny--she swept out of the library and sat down at the piano in the other room, making a picture of herself between the tall white candles which illumined the dark mahogany and the mulberry brocades.

I leaned back in my chair and watched her, her white fingers straying over the keys, her thin blue sleeves flowing back from her white arms. Now and then I caught a familiar melody among the chords, and once I was aware of the beat and the swing of the waves in the song which Olaf had once sung.

She did not finish it. She rose and wandered to the window, parting the curtain and looking out into the streaming night.

"It's an awful storm, Ducky."

"Yes, my dear. On nights like this I always think of the old days when the men were on the sea, and the women waited."

"I'd rather think of my man on the sea, even if I had to wait for him, Ducky, than shut up in office, stagnating."

The door-bell rang suddenly. It was a dreadful night for any one to be out, but Anita, undisturbed and crisp in her white apron and cap, came through the hall. A voice asked a question, and the blood began to pound in my body. Things were blurred for a bit, and when my vision cleared--I saw Olaf in the shine of the candles in the room beyond, with Nancy crushed to him, his bright head bent, the sheer blue of her frock infolding him--the archway of the door framing them like the figures of saints in the stained glass of a church window!

I knew then that I had lost her. But she did not yield at once.

"I love him, of course. But a woman couldn't do a thing like that," was the way she put it to me the next morning.

I felt, however, that Olaf would master her. Will was set against will, mind against mind. And at last she showed him the way. "A thousand years ago you would have carried me off."

I can see him now as he caught the idea and laughed at her. "Whether you go of your own accord or I carry you, you will be happy." He lifted her in his strong hands as if she were a feather, held her, kissed her, and flashed a glance at me. "You see how easy it would be, and there's a chaplain on board."

There is not much more to tell. Nancy went down one morning to the beach for her bath--and the fog swallowed her up. I have often wondered whether she planned it, or whether, knowing that she would be there, he had come in his launch and had borne her away struggling, but not, I am sure, unwilling. However it happened, the cloak went with her, and I like to think that she was held in his arms, wrapped in it, when they reached the ship.

I like to think, too, of my Nancy in the glowing room with the wolfskins and the strange old tapestry--and the storms beating helpless against her happiness.

I like to think of her as safe in that hidden land, where most of us fain would follow her--the mistress of that guarded mansion, the wife of a young sea god, the mother of a new race.

But, most of all, I like to think of the children. And I have but one wish for a long life, which might otherwise weigh upon me, that the years may bring back to the world those prophets from a hidden land, those young voices crying from the wilderness--the children of Olaf and of Nancy Greer.

WHITE BIRCHES

I

A woman, who under sentence of death could plan immediately for a trip to the circus, might seem at first thought incredibly light-minded.

You had, however, to know Anne Dunbar and the ten years of her married life to understand. Her husband was fifteen years her senior, and he had few illusions. He had fallen in love with Anne because of a certain gay youth in her which had endured throughout the days of a dreadful operation and a slow convalescence. He had been her surgeon, and, propped up in bed, Anne's gray eyes had shone upon him, the red-gold curls of her cropped hair had given her a look of almost boyish beauty, and this note of boyishness had been emphasized by the straight slenderness of the figure outlined beneath the white covers.

Anne had married Ridgeley Dunbar because she loved him. And love to Anne had been all fire and flame and spirit. It did not take her long to learn that her husband looked upon love and life as matters of flesh and blood--and bones. By degrees his materialism imposed itself upon Anne. She admired Ridgeley immensely. She worshiped, in fact, the wonder of his day's work. He healed the sick, he cured the halt and blind, and he scoffed at Anne's superstitions--"I can match every one of your Bible miracles. There's nothing to it, my dear. Death is death and life is life--so make the most of it."

Anne tried to make the most of it. But she found it difficult. In the first place her husband was a very busy man. He seemed to be perfectly happy with his cutting people up, and his medical books, and the articles which he wrote about the intricate clockwork inside of us which ticks off the hours from birth to death. Now and then he went out to the theatre with his wife or to dine with friends. But, as a rule, she went alone. She had a limousine, a chauffeur, a low swung touring car--and an electric. Her red hair was still wonderful, and she dressed herself quite understanding in grays and whites and greens. If she did not wear habitually her air of gay youth, it was revived in her now and then when something pleased or excited her. And her eyes would shine as they had shone in the hospital when Ridgeley Dunbar had first bent over her bed.

They shone on Christopher Carr when he came home from the war. He was a friend of her husband. Or rather, as a student in the medical school, he had listened to the lectures of the older man, and had made up his mind to know him personally, and had thus, by sheer persistence, linked their lives together.