Chapter 11

Then she shook herself--what nonsense--he must be at Melgrove. She couldn't call him up at Melgrove, though, he mightn't be there when she 'phoned and then his family would answer and what his family must think of her now, when they'd been so perfectly lovely when she and Oliver were first engaged--she shivered a little--no, that wouldn't do. And letters never really said things--it mustn't be letters--besides, she thought, humbly, it would be so awful to have Oliver send letters back unopened. Two weeks of pure Mrs. Winters had chastened Nancy to an unusual degree.

For all that though, it was not until Mrs. Winters had left her alone for the evening after offering her an invitation to attend a little discussion group that met Wednesday evenings and read literary papers at each other, an invitation which Nancy somewhat stubbornly declined, that she finally made up her mind. Then she sighed and went to the telephone again.

“Mr. Oliver Crowe? He is away on a visit just at present but we expect him back tomorrow afternoon.” Margaret is pretending for her own satisfaction over the wire that the Crowes have a maid. “Who is calling, please?”

Rather shakily, “A f-friend.”

Briskly. “I understand. Well, he will be back tomorrow. Is that all that you wished to inquire? No message?”

“Good-by then,” and again Nancy thinks that things simply will not be dramatic no matter how hard she tries.

She decides to take a small walk however--small because she simply must get to bed before Mrs. Winters comes back and starts talking at her improvingly. The walk seems to take her directly to the nearest Subway--and so to the Pennsylvania Station, where, after she has acquired a timetable of trains to Melgrove, she seems to be a good deal happier than she has been for some time. At least as she is going up the cake-colored stairs to the Arcade again she cannot help taking the last one with an irrepressible skip.

XXXVII

Oliver had quite a little time to think things over as the two-seater purred along smooth roads toward New York. The longer he thought them over, the less amiable some few of the things appeared. He formed and rejected a dozen more or less incredible hypotheses as to what possible connection there could be between Mrs. Severance and Sargent Piper--none of them seemed to fit entirely and yet there must be something perfectly simple, perfectly easy to explain--only what on earth could it be?

He went looking through his mind for any scraps that might possibly piece together--of course he hadn't known Peter since College without finding out that in spite of their extreme politeness toward each other, Peter's mother and father really didn't get on. Club-stories came to him that he had tried to get away from--the kind of stories that were told about any prominent man, he supposed--a little leering paragraph in “Town Gossip”--a dozen words dropped with the easy assuredness of tone that meant the speakers were alluding to something that everyone knew by people who hadn't realized that he was Peter's friend. A caustically frank discussion of Mrs. Severance with Ted in one of Ted's bitter moods--a discussion that had given Oliver a bad half-hour later with Louise.

But things like that didn't _happen_--people whose houses you stayed at--people your sister brought home over the week-end--the fathers of your own friends. And then Oliver winced as he remembered the afternoon when all the New Haven evening papers had screamed with headlines over the Witterly divorce suit--and Bob Witterly's leaving College because he couldn't stand it--that had been people you knew all right--and everyone had always had such a good time at the Witterlys' too.

It was all perfectly incredible of course--but he would have to find Ted just as soon as possible, no matter where he had to go to find him--and as the little reel of the speedometer began to hitch toward the left and into higher figures, Oliver felt very relieved indeed that he had the two-seater and that Mr. Piper wasn't coming into town till the 7.03.

He got into New York to find he hadn't made as good time as he'd thought--a couple of traffic blocks had kept him back for valuable minutes--though of course the minutes couldn't be valuable exactly when it was all bosh about his having to get in so quickly after all. He went first to 252A Madison Avenue, hoping most heartily that Ted would be there on the fifth floor with his eyeshade over his eyes and large law-books crowding his desk, but the door was locked and knockings brought no response except a peevish voice from the other side of the narrow hall requesting any gentleman that was a gentleman to shut up for Gawd's sake. The Yale Club next--there was just a chance that Ted might be there--

Oliver went through the Yale Club a good deal more thoroughly than most pages, from the lobby to the upstairs dining-room. He even invaded the library to the suspicious annoyance of some old uncle who was pretending to read a book held upside down in his lap in order to camouflage his pre-prandial nap. No Ted--though half-a-dozen acquaintances who insisted on saying hello and taking up time. Back to the street and a slight dispute with a policeman as regarded the place where Oliver had parked his car. He looked at his watch just before poking the self-starter--Mr. Piper's train must be halfway to New York by now. He set his lips and turned down 44th Street toward the Avenue.

Fourth floor Ted had said. The elevator went much too quickly for Oliver--he was standing in front of a most non-committal door-bell before he had arranged the racing tumult of thought in his mind enough to be in any measure sure of just what the devil he was going to say.

Moreover he was oppressed by a familiar and stomachless sensation--the sensation he always had when he tried to high-dive and stood looking gingerly down from a shaky platform at water that seemed a thousand miles away and as flat and hard as a blue steel plate. There wasn't any guide in any Manual of Etiquette he had ever heard of on What to Say When Interrupting a Tete-a-Tete between Your Best Friend and a Dangerous And Beautiful Woman. He wondered idly if Ted would ever speak to him again--Mrs. Severance certainly wouldn't--and he rather imagined that even if Ted and Elinor did get married he would hardly be the welcome guest he had always expected to be there.

Well, that was what you get for trying to pull a Jonathan when the Saul in question was behaving a good deal more like David in the affair with Uriah the Hittite's spouse--and it wasn't safe and Biblical and all done with a couple of thousand years ago but abashingly real and now happening directly under your own astonished eyes. He licked his lips a little nervously--they seemed to be rather dry. No use standing outside the door like a wooden statue of Unwelcome Propriety anyhow--the thing had to be done, that was all--and he pushed the bell-button with all the decision he could force into his finger.

The fact that it was not answered at once helped him a good deal by giving him a certain strength of annoyance. He pushed again.

It was Mrs. Severance who answered it finally--and the moment he saw her face he knew with an immense invisible shock of relief how right he had been, for it was composed as an idol's but under the composure there was emotion, and, the moment she saw him, anger, as strong and steady and impassive as the color of a metal that is only white because it has been possessed to extremity already with all the burning heat that its substance can bear. She was dressed in some stuff that moved with her and was part of her as wholly as if it and her body had been made together out of light and gilded cloud--he had somehow never imagined that she could be as--lustrous--as that--it gave him the sensation that he had only seen her before when she was unlighted like an empty lantern, and that now there was such fire of light in her that the very glass that contained it seemed to be burning of itself. And then he realized that she had given him good-evening with an exquisite politeness, shaken hands and now was obviously waiting, with a little tired look of surprise around her mouth, to find out exactly why he was there at all.

He gathered his wits--it wasn't fair, somehow, for her to be wearing that air of delicate astonishment at an unexpected call at dinner-time when he hadn't been invited--it forced him into being so casually polite.

“Sorry to break in on you like this, Mrs. Severance,” he said with a ghastly feeling that after all he might be entirely wrong, and another that it was queer to have to be so formal, in the afternoon tea sense, with his words when his whole mind was boiling with pictures of everything from Ted as a modern Tannhauser in a New York Venusberg to triangular murder. “I hope I'm not--disturbing you?”

“Oh no. No,” and he suddenly felt a most complete if unwilling admiration for the utter finish with which she was playing her side of the act.

“Only you see,” and this was Oliver doing his best at the ingenuous boy, “Ted Billett, you know--he said he might be having dinner with you this evening--and I've got a very important letter for him--awful nuisance--don't see why it couldn't have gone in the mail by itself--but the man was absolutely insistent on my delivering it by hand.” “A letter? Oh yes. And they want an answer right away?” Again Oliver realized grudgingly that whatever Mrs. Severance might be she was certainly not obvious. For “I'm so glad you came then,” she was saying with what seemed to be perfect sincerity. “Won't you come in?”

That little pucker that came and went in the white brow meant that she was sure that she could manage him, sure she could carry it off, Oliver imagined--and he was frank enough with himself to admit that he was not at all sure that she couldn't.

“Oh Ted--” he heard her say, very coolly but also with considerable distinctness, as if her voice had to carry, “there's a friend of yours here with a letter for you--”

And then she had brought him inside and was apologizing for having the front room so badly lighted but one had to economize on light-bills, didn't one, even for a small apartment, and besides didn't it give one a little more the real feeling of evening? And Oliver was considering why, when if as he pressed the bell, he had felt so much like a modern St. George and wholly as if he were doing something rather fine and perilous, he should feel quite so much like a gauche seventeen-year-old now. He thought that he would not enjoy playing chess with Mrs. Severance. She was one of those people who smiled inoffensively at the end of a game and then said they thought it would really be a little evener if they gave you both knights.

Ted reassured him though. Ted, stumbling out of the dining-room, with a mixture of would-be unconcern, compound embarrassment and complete though suppressed fury at Oliver on his face. It was hardly either just or moral, Oliver reflected, that Mrs. Severance should be the only one of them to seem completely at her ease.

“Hello, Ollie,” in the tone of “And if you'd only get the hell out as quickly as possible.” “Mrs. Severance--” a stumble over that. “You've got a letter for me?”

“Yes. It's important,” said Oliver as firmly as he could. He gave it, and, as Ted sat down near a lamp to read it, Oliver saw by one sudden momentary flash that passed over Mrs. Severance's face that she had seen the address and known instantly that the handwriting was not that of a man. And then Oliver began to think that he might have been right when he had thought of the present expedition as something rather perilous--he found that he had moved three steps away from Mrs. Severance without his knowing it, very much as he might have from an unfamiliar piece of furniture near which he was standing and which had instantaneously developed all the electric properties of a coil of live wire. Then he looked at Ted's face--and what he saw there made him want to kick himself for looking--because it is never proper for even the friendliest spectator to see a man's private soul stripped naked as a grass-stalk before his own eyes. It was horribly like watching Ted lose balance on the edge of a cliff that he had been walking unconcernedly and start to fall without crying out or any romantic gestures, with only that look of utter surprise struck into his face and the way his hands clutched as if they would tear some solid hold out of the air. Oliver kept his eyes on him in a frosty suspense while he read the letter all through three times and then folded it and put it carefully away in his breast pocket--and then when he looked at Mrs. Severance Oliver could have shouted aloud with immense improper joy, for he knew by the way Ted's hands moved that they were going back in the car together.

Ted was on his feet and his voice was as grave as if he were apologizing for having insulted Mrs. Severance in public, but under the meaninglessness of his actual words it was wholly firm and controlled.

“I'm awfully sorry--I've got to go right away. You'll think me immensely rude but it's something that's practically life-and-death.” “Really?” said Mrs. Severance and Oliver could have clapped his hands at her accent. Now that the battle had ended bloodlessly, he supposed he might be permitted to applaud, internally at least. And “I'm sorry--but this is over,” said every note in Ted's voice and “Lost have I? Well then--” every note in hers.

It occurred to Oliver that things were badly arranged--all this--and he was the only audience.

Life seemed sudden lavish in giving him benefit performances of other people's love-affairs--he supposed it was all part of the old and deathless jest.

And then, like a prickling of cold, there passed over him once more that little sense of danger. Mrs. Severance and Ted were both standing looking at each other and neither was saying anything--and Ted looked by his face as if he were walking in his sleep.

“The car's down below, old boy,” said Oliver helpfully, and then, a little louder “Peter's car, you know,” and whatever cobwebs had been holding Ted for the last instant broke apart. He went over to Mrs. Severance. “Good-by.”

“Good-by,” and he started making apologies again while she merely looked and Oliver was suddenly fretting like a weary hostess whose callers have stayed hours too long, to have him down in the car and the car pointed again with its nose toward Southampton.

And then he heard, through Ted's last apologia, the whir of a mounting elevator.

The elevator couldn't stop at the fourth floor--it couldn't. But it did, and there was the noise of the gate slung back and “_What's that?_” said Mrs. Severance sharply, her politeness broken to bits for the first time.

They were all standing near the door, and, with a complete disbelief in all that he was hearing and seeing, Oliver heard Mrs. Severance's voice in his ear, “The kitchen--fire-escape--” saw her push Ted toward him as if she were shifting a piece of cumbrous furniture, and obeyed her orders implicitly because he was too surprised to think of doing anything else.

He hurried himself and the still half-somnambulistic Ted through the dining-room curtains, just in time to catch a last glimpse of Mrs. Severance softly pressing with all her weight and strength against her side of the door of the apartment as a man's quick short footsteps crossed the hall in two strides, and after a second's pause, a key clicked into the lock.

XXXVIII

Mrs. Severance, her whole weight against the door, felt it push at her fiercely without opening, and, even in the midst of her turmoil, smiled. Mr. Severance had never been exactly what one would call an athlete--

She slackened her pressure, little by anxious little. Her hand crept down to the knob, then she jerked it sharply and stood back and Mr. Piper came stumbling into the room, a little too fast for dignity. He had to catch to her to save himself from falling but as soon as he had recovered his balance he jerked his hands away from her as if they had taken hold of something that hurt him and when he stood up she saw that his face was grey all over and that his breath came in little hard sniffs through his nose.

“Sorry, Sargent,” she said easily. “I heard your key but that silly old door is sticking again. You didn't hurt yourself, did you?”

For an instant she thought that everything was going to be perfectly simple--his face had changed so, with an intensity of relief almost childish, at the sound of her accustomed voice. Then the greyness came back.

“Do you mind--introducing me--Rose--to the gentleman--you are dining with tonight?” he said with a difficulty of speech as if actual words were not things he was accustomed to using. “I merely--called--to be quite sure.”

She managed to look as puzzled as possible.

“The gentleman?”

“Oh yes, the gentleman.” He seemed neither to be particularly disgusted nor murderously angry--only so utterly tired in body and spirit that she thought oddly that it seemed almost as if any sudden gesture or movement might crumble him into pieces of fine grey paper at her feet.

“Oh, there isn't any use in pretending, Rose--any more. I have my information.”

“Yes? From whom?”

“What on earth does it matter? Elizabeth--since you choose to know.”

“Elizabeth,” said Mrs. Severance softly. She could not imagine how time, even when successfully played for and gained, could help the situation very much--but that was the only thing she could think of doing, and she did it, therefore, with every trick of deliberation she knew, as if any instant saved before he went into the dining-room might bring salvation.

“Do you know, I was always a little doubtful about Elizabeth. She was a little too beautifully incurious about everything to be quite real--and a little too well satisfied with her place, even on what we paid her. But of course is she has been supplementing her salary with private-detective work for you--”

She shrugged her shoulders.

“I suppose you were foolish enough to give her one of your private numbers,” she said a trifle acidly. “Which will mean that you will be paying her a modest blackmail all the rest of your life, and you'll probably have to provide for her in your will. Oh, I know Elizabeth! She'll be perfectly secret--if she's paid for it--she'll never make you willing to risk the scandal by asking for more than just enough. But if this is the way you carry on all your confidential investigations, Sargent--well, it's fortunate you have large means--”

“She doesn't know who I am.”

“Oh Sargent, Sargent! When all she has to do is to subscribe to 'Town and Country.' Or call up the number you gave her, some time, and ask where it is.”

“There are the strictest orders about nobody but myself ever answering the telephones in my private office.”

“And servants are always perfectly obedient--and there are no stupid ones--and accidents never happen. Sargent, really--”

“That doesn't matter. I didn't come here to talk about Elizabeth.” “Really? I should think you might have. I could have given you all the information you required a good deal less expensively--and now, I suppose, I'll have to think up some way of getting rid of Elizabeth as well. I can't pay her off with one of my new dresses this time--”

“_Who is he?_”

“Suppose we start talking about it from the beginning, Sargent--?”

“_Where_ is he?”

“In the dining-room, I imagine. It wouldn't be very well bred of anyone, would it, to come out and be introduced in the middle of this very loud, very vulgar quarrel that you are making with me--”

“I'm going to see.”

“No, Sargent.”

“Let me pass, Rose!”

“I will not. Sargent, I will not let you make an absolute fool of yourself before my friends before you give me a chance to explain--”

“I will, I tell you! I will! _Let me go!_”

They were struggling undignifiedly in the center of the room, her firm strong hands tight over his wrists as he pawed at her, trying to wrench himself away. Mr. Piper was a gentleman no longer--nor a business man--nor a figure of nation-wide importance--he was only a small furious figure with a face as grey and distorted as a fighting ape's who was clutching at the woman in front of him as if he would like to tear her with his hands. A red swimming had fallen over his eyes--all he knew was that the woman-person in front of him had fooled him more bitterly and commonly than anyone had been fooled since Adam--and that if he could not get loose in some way or other from the hateful strength that was holding him, he would burst into the disgusting tears of a vicious small boy who is being firmly held down and spanked by an older girl. Grammar, manners and sense had gone from him as completely as if he had never possessed them.

“Lemme go! oh damn you, damn you--you _woman_--you _devil--lemme_ go!”

“Be _quiet,_ Sargent! Oh shut up, you _fool, shut up!”_

A noise came from the kitchen--a noise like the sound of a man falling over boxes. Mr. Piper struggled furiously--Paris was crawling out of the window--Paris, the sleek, sly chamberer, the gay hateful cuckoo of his private nest was getting away! Mrs. Severance turned her head toward the noise a second. Mr. Piper fought like a crippled wrestler.

“Grr-ah! Ah, would you, would you?”

He had wrenched one hand free for an instant--it went to his pocket and came out of it with something that shone and was hard like a new metal toy.

_“Now_ will you lemme go?” But Mrs. Severance tried to grab for the hand with the revolver in it instead, and succeeded only in striking the barrel a little aside. There was a noise that sounded like a cannon-cracker bursting in Mr. Piper's face--it was so near--and then he was standing up, shaking all over, but free and a man ready to explain a number of very painful things to Paris as soon as he caught him. He took one step toward the dining-room, sheer rage tugging at his body as high wind tugs at a bough. Now that woman was out of the way----

And then he saw that she was out of the way indeed. She could not have fallen without his hearing her fall--how could she?--but she was lying on the floor in a crumple of clothes and one of her arms was thrown queerly out from her side as if it did not belong to her body any longer. He stood looking at her for what seemed one long endless wave of uncounted time and that firecracker noise he had heard kept echoing and echoing through his head like the sound of loud steps along a long and empty corridor. Then he suddenly dropped the pistol and knelt clumsily beside her.

“Rose! Rose!” he started calling huskily, his hands feeling with frantic awkwardness for her pulse and her heart, as Oliver Crowe ran into the room through the curtains.

XXXIX

Oliver thought that he had never been quite so sure of anything as he was that he must be insane. He was insane. Very shortly some heavy person in uniform would walk into the tidy kitchen where he and Ted were crouching like moving-picture husbands and remark with a kind smile that the Ahkoond of Whilom was giving a tea-party in the Mountains of the Moon that afternoon and that unless Oliver (or, as he was probable better known) St. Oliver, came back at once in the nice private car with the wire netting over its windows, everybody from God the Father Almighty to Carrie Chapman Catt would be highly displeased. For a moment Oliver thought of lunatic asylums almost lovingly--they had such fine high walls and smooth green lawns and you were so perfectly safe there from anything ever happening that was real. Then he jumped--that must be Mrs. Severance opening the door.

“What are we going to _do_?” he said to Ted in a fierce whisper.