Chapter 5

“I couldn't do anything but tell you to take it, dearest, could I? When it's such a real chance?” He is hoping with illogical but none the less painful desperation that she will deny him. But she nods instead.

“Well then, Nancy dear, listen. If you take it, we've got to face things, haven't we?”

She nods a little rebelliously.

“But why is it so _serious_, Ollie?” and again her voice is not true.

“You know. Because I've failed--God knows when I'll make enough money for us to get married now--with the novel gone bust and everything. And I haven't any right to keep you like this when I'm not sure of ever being able to marry you--and when you've got a job like this and can go right ahead on the things you've always been crazy to do. Nancy, you _want_ to take it--even if it meant our not getting married for another year and your being away--don't you, don't you? Oh, Nancy, you've _got_ to tell me--it'll only bust everything we've had already if you don't!”

And now they have come to a point of misunderstanding that only a trust as unreasonable as belief in immortality will help. But that trust could never be bothered with the truth of what it was saying at the moment--it would have to reach into something deeper than any transitory feeling--and they have an unlucky tradition of always trying to tell each other what is exactly true. And so Nancy nods because she has to, though she couldn't bear to put what that means into words.

“Well, you take it. And I'm awful sorry we couldn't make it go, dear. I tried as hard as I could to make it go but I guess I didn't have the stuff, that's all.”

He has risen now and his face seems curiously twisted--twisted as if something hot and hurtful had passed over it and left it so that it would always look that way. He can hardly bear to look at Nancy, but she has risen and started talking hurriedly--fright, amazement, concern and a queer little touch of relief all mixing in her voice.

“But Ollie, if you can't _trust_ me about something as little as that.”

“It isn't that,” he says beatenly and she knows it isn't. And knowing, her voice becomes suddenly frightened--the fright of a child who has let something as fragile and precious as a vessel of golden glass slip out of her hands.

“But, Ollie dear! But, Ollie, I never meant it that way. But Ollie, I love you!”

He takes her in his arms again and they kiss long. This time though there is no peace in the kiss, only the lost passion of bodies tired beyond speech. “Do you love me, Nancy?”

Again she has to decide--and the truth that will not matter for more than the hour wins. Besides, he has hurt her.

“Oh, Ollie, Ollie, yes, but--”

“You're not sure any more?”

“It's different.”

“It's not being certain?”

“Not the way it was at first--but, Ollie, we're neither of us the same--”

“Then you _aren't_ sure?”

“I can't--I haven't--oh, Ollie, I don't know, I don't know!”

“That means you know.”

Again the kiss but this time their lips only hurt against each other--Oliver feels for a ghastly instant as if he were kissing Nancy after she had died. It seems to him that everything in him has made itself into a question as discordant and unanswered as the tearing cry of a puppy baying the moon, struck out of his senses by that swimming round silver above him, ineffably lustrous, ineffably removed, none of it ever coming to touch him but light too pale to help at all. He is holding a girl in his arms--he can feel her body against him--but it is not Nancy he is holding--it never will be Nancy any more. He releases her and starts walking up and down in a series of short, uneasy strides, turning mechanically to keep out of the way of chairs. Words come out of him, words he never imagined he could ever say, he thinks dizzily that it would feel like this if he were invisibly bleeding to death--that would come the same way in fiery spurts and pauses that tore at the body.

“Don't you see, dear, don't you _see_? It's been eight months now and we aren't any nearer getting married than we were at first and it isn't honest to say we will be soon any more--I can't see any prospect--I've failed in everything I thought would go--and we can't get married on my job for _years_--I'm not good enough at it--and I _won't_ have you hurt--I _won't_ have you tied to me when it only means neither of us doing what we want and both of us getting, older and our work not done. Oh, I love you, Nancy--if there was any hope at all I'd go down on my knees to ask you to keep on but there isn't--they've beaten us--they've beaten us--all the fat old people who told us we were too poor and too young. All we do is go on like this both of us getting worked up whenever we see each other and both of us hurting each other and nothing happening--Oh, Nancy, I thought we could help each other always and now we can't even [Illustration: AND THEN THE QUEER MAN HAD GONE OUT OF THE DOOR] a little any more. You remember when we promised that if either of us stopping loving each other we'd tell?”

Nancy is very silent and rather white.

“Yes, Ollie.”

“Well, Nancy?”

“Well--”

They look at each other as if they were watching each other burn.

“Good-by darling, darling, darling!” says Ollie through lips like a marionette's.

Then Nancy feels him take hold of her again--the arms of somebody else in Oliver's body--and a cold mouth hurting her cheek--and still she cannot speak. And then the queer man who was walking up and down so disturbingly has gone out of the door.

XVI

Oliver finds himself walking along a long street in a city. It is not a distinguished street by any means--there are neither plate-glass shops nor 'residences' on it--just an ordinary street of little stores and small houses and occasionally an apartment building named for a Pullman car. In a good many houses the lights are out already--it is nearly eleven o'clock and this part of St. Louis goes to bed early--only the drugstores and the moving-picture theatres are still flaringly awake. His eyes read the sign that he passes mechanically, “Dr. Edwin K. Buffinton--Chiropractor,” “McMurphy and Kane's,” “The Rossiter,” with its pillars that look as if they had been molded out of marbled soap.

Thought. Memory. Pain. Pain pressing down on his eyeballs like an iron thumb, twisting wires around his forehead tighter and tighter till it's funny the people he passes don't see the patterns they make on his skin.

Somebody talking in his mind, quite steadily and flatly, repeating and repeating itself like a piece of cheap music played over and over again on a scratched phonograph record, talking in the voice that is a composite of a dozen voices; a fat man comfortable on a club lounge laying down the law as if he were carefully smearing the shine out of something brilliant with a flaccid heavy finger; a thin sour woman telling children playing together “don't, don't, don't,” in the whine of a nasty nurse.

“All for the best, you know--all for the best, we're all of us sure of that. Love doesn't last--doesn't last--doesn't last--as good fish in the sea as ever were caught out of it--nobody's heart could break at twenty-five. You think you're happy and proud--you think you're lovers and friends--but that doesn't last, doesn't last, doesn't last--none of it lasts at all.”

If he only weren't so _tired_ he could do something. But instead he feels only as a man feels who has been drinking all day in the instant before complete intoxication--his body is as distinct from him as if it were walking behind him with his shadow--all the colors he sees seem exaggeratedly dull or brilliant, he has little sense of distance, the next street corner may be a block or a mile away, it is all the same, his feet will take him there, his feet that keep going mechanically, one after the other, one after the other, as if they marched to a clock. There is no feeling in him that stays long enough to be called by any definite word--there is only a streaming parade of sensations like blind men running through mist, shapes that come out of fog and sink back to it, without sight, without number, without name, with only continual hurry of feet to tell of their presence.

A slinky man comes up at his elbow and starts to talk out of the side of his mouth.

“Say, mister--”

“Oh, _go_ to hell!” and the man fades away again, without even looking startled, to mutter “Well, you needn' be so damn peeved about it--I'll say you needn' be so damn peeved--whatcha think you are, anyhow--Marathon Mike?” as Oliver's feet take Oliver swiftly away from him.

Nancy. The first time he ever kissed her when it was question and answer with neither of them sure. And then getting surer and surer--and then when they kissed. Never touching Nancy, never. Never seeing her again never any more. That song the Glee Club used to harmonize over--what was it?

We won't go there any more, We won't go there any more We won't go there any mo-o-ore----

He lifts his eyes for a moment. A large blue policeman is looking at him fixedly from the other side of the street, his nightstick twirling in a very prepared sort of way. For an instant Oliver sees himself going over and asking that policeman for his helmet to play with. That would be the cream of the jest--the very cream--to end the evening in combat with a large blue policeman after having all you wanted in life break under you suddenly like new ice.

He had been walking for a very long time. He ought to go to bed. He had a hotel somewhere if he could only think where. The policeman might know.

The policeman saw a young man with staring eyes coming toward him, remarked “hophead” internally and played with his nightstick a little more. The nearer Oliver came the larger and more unsympathetic the policeman seemed to him. Still, if you couldn't remember what your hotel was yourself it was only sensible to ask guidance on the question. His mind reacted suddenly toward grotesqueness. One had to be very polite to large policemen. The politeness should, naturally, increase as the square of the policeman.

“I wonder if you could tell me where my hotel is, officer?” Oliver began. “What hotel?” said the policeman uninterestedly. Oliver noticed with an inane distinctness that he had started to swirl his nightstick as a large blue cat might switch its tail. He wondered if it would be tactful to ask him if he had ever been a drum major. Then he realized that the policeman had asked him a question--courtesy demanded a prompt response.

“What?” said Oliver.

“I said 'What hotel?'” The policeman was beginning to be annoyed.

Oliver started to think of his hotel. It was imbecile not to remember the name of your own hotel--even when your own particular material and immaterial cosmos had been telescoped like a toy train in the last three hours. The Rossiter was all that he could think of.

“The Rossiter,” he said firmly.

“No hotel Rossiter in _this_ town.” The policeman's nightstick was getting more and more irritated. “Rossiter's a lotta flats. You live there?”

“No. I live in a hotel.”

“Well, what hotel?”

“Oh, I tell you I don't remember,” said Oliver vaguely. “A big one with a lot of electric lights.”

The policeman's face became suddenly very red.

“Well, you move on, buddy!” he said in a tone of hoarse displeasure. “You move right on! You don't come around me with any of your funny cracks--I know whatsa matter with you, all right, all right. I know whatsa matter with you.”

“So do I.” Oliver was smiling a little now, the whole scene was so arabesque. “I want to go to my hotel.”

“You move on. You move on _quick_!” said the policeman vastly. “It's a long walk down to the hoosegow and _I_ don't want to take you there.”

“I don't want to go there,” said Oliver. “But my hotel--”

“_Quit arguin'”_! said the policeman in a bark like a teased bulldog.

Oliver turned and walked two steps away. Then he turned again. After all why not? The important part of his life was over anyhow--and before the rest of it finished he might be able to tell one large policeman just what he thought of him.

“Why, you big blue boob,” he began abruptly with a sense of pleasant refreshment better than drink, “You great heaving purple ice wagon--” and then he was stopped abruptly for the policeman was taking the necessary breath away.

XVII

About which time Nancy had finished crying--raging at herself all the time, she hated to cry so--and was sitting up straight on the couch looking at the door which Oliver had shut as if by looking it very hard indeed she could make it turn into Oliver.

It _couldn't_ end this way. If it did it just meant that all the last year wasn't real--hadn't any more part in reality than charity theatricals. And they'd both of them been so sure that it was the chief reality that they had ever known.

He wasn't _reasonable_. She hadn't wanted the darned old job, she'd wanted to marry him, but as long as they hadn't seemed to get very far in the last eight months when he'd been trying to work it--why couldn't _she_ try----

Then 'Oh Nancy, be honest!' to herself. No, that wasn't true. She'd wanted the job, wanted to get it, hadn't thought about Oliver particularly when she'd tried for it except to be a little impatient with him for not using more judgment when he picked out his job. Did that mean that she didn't love him? Oh Lord, it was all so mixed up.

Starting out so clearly at first and everything being so perfect--and then the last four months and both getting tireder and tireder and all the useless little misunderstandings that made you wonder how could you if you really cared. And now this.

For an instant of mere relief from strain Nancy saw herself in Paris, studying as she had always wanted to study, doing some real work, all Paris hers to play with like a big gray stone toy, never having to worry about loving, about being loved, about people you loved. Being free. Like taking off your hot, hot clothes and lying in water when you were too hot and tired even to think of sleeping. Oliver too--she'd leave him free--he'd really work better without her--without having her to take care of and make money for and worry about always----

The mind turned the other way. But what would doing anything be like with Oliver out of it when doing things together had been all that mattered all the last year?

They couldn't decide things like this on a prickly hot August night when both of them were nearly dead with fatigue. It wasn't _real_. Even after Oliver had shut the door she'd been sure he'd come back, though she hoped he wouldn't just while she was crying; she never had been, she thought viciously, one of those happy people who look like rain-goddesses when they cry.

He must come back. She shut her eyes and told him to as hard as she could. But he didn't.

All very well to be proud and dignified when both of you lived near each other. But Oliver was going back to New York tomorrow--and if he went back while they were still like this--She knew his train--the ten seven.

She tried being proud in a dozen different expressive attitudes for ten minutes or so: Then she suddenly relaxed and went over to the telephone, smiling rather ashamedly at herself.

“Hotel Rosario?”

“Yes.”

“Can I speak to Mr. Oliver Crowe? He is staying there isn't he?”

A pause full of little jingling sounds.

“Yes, he's staying here but he hasn't come in yet this evening. Do you wish to leave a message?”

Nancy hesitates.

“N-no.” That would be just a little too humble.

“Or the name of the party calling?” He will know, of course. Still, had she better say? Then she remembers the need of punishing him just a little. After all--it is hardly fair she should go all the way toward making up when he hasn't even started.

“No--no name. But tell him somebody called, please.”

“Very well.”

And Nancy goes back to wonder if the reason Oliver hasn't gone back to the hotel is that he is returning here in an appropriate suit of sackcloth. She hopes he _will_ come before mother and father get back.

But even while she is hoping it, the large blue policeman is saying something about “'Sturbance of the peace” to the desk-sergeant, and Oliver is going down on the blotter as Donald Richardson.

XVIII

“You simply must not worry yourself about it so, Nancy, my darling,” says Mrs. Ellicott brightly. “Lovers' quarrels are only lovers' quarrels you know and they seem very small indeed to people a little older and more experienced though I daresay they may loom terribly large just at present. Why your father and myself used to have--ahem--our little times over _trifles_, darling, mere _trifles _” and Mrs. Ellicott takes a pinch of air between finger and thumb as if to display it as a specimen of those mere trifles over which Mr. and Mrs. Ellicott used to become proudly enraged at each other in the days before she had faded him so completely.

Nancy, after a night of intensive sleeplessness broken only by dreams of seeing Oliver being married to somebody else in the lobby of the Hotel Rosario can only wonder rather dully when it could ever have been that poor father was allowed enough initiative of his own to take even the passive part in a quarrel over a trifle and why mother thinks the prospect implied in her speech of her daughter's marriage being like unto hers can be so comforting. Nancy made one New Year's resolution the second day of her engagement, “If I ever find myself starting to act to Ollie the way mother does to father I'll simply have to leave him and never see him again.” But Mrs. Ellicott goes on.

“If Oliver is at all the sort of young man we must hope he is, he will certainly come and apologize at once. And if he should not--well Nancy, my little girl,” she adds hieroglyphically “there are many trials that seem hard to bear at first which prove true blessings later when we see of what false materials they were first composed.”

Mr. Ellicott thinks it is time for him to go to the office. It is five minutes ahead of his usual time but Mrs. Ellicott has been looking at him all the way through her last speech until he feels uneasily that he must be composed of very false material indeed. He stops first though to give an ineffective pat to Nancy's shoulder.

“Cheer up, Chick,” he says kindly. “Always sun somewhere you know, so don't treat the poor boy too hard,” and he shuffles rapidly away before his wife can look all the way through him for the vague heresy implicit in his sentence.

“It is all very well for your father to say such things, but, Nancy, darling, you shall not be put upon by Tramplers” proceeds Mrs. Ellicott in her most cryptically perfect tones. “Oliver is a man--he must apologize. A man, I say, though little more than a boy. And otherwise you would now be pursuing your Art in Paris due to dear kind Mrs. Winters who has always stood our truest friend and now this other opportunity has come also but I would never be the first to say that even such should not be sacrificed most gladly for the love of a true kind husband and dear little children though marriage is but a lottery at best and especially when affections are fixed upon their object in early youth.”

All this without a pause, pouring over the numbed parts of Nancy's mind like thin sweetish oil. Nancy considers wearily. Yes, Oliver should apologize. Yes, it is only being properly dignified not to call up the Rosario again to find if he is there. Yes, if he truly loves her, he will call--he will come--and the clock hands are marching on toward ten-seven and his train like stiff little soldiers and mother is talking, talking--

“Not that I wish or have wished to influence your mind in any way, my darling, but environment and propinquity count for mountains in such first youthful attachments and sometimes when we are older to be looked back upon with such regret. Nor would I ever have Words Spoken that should seem to injure the choice of my daughter's heart--but when young men cannot provide even Hovels for their _fiancées_ a reasonable time having been given, it is only just that they should release them and you looking like death all these last two months. Never wishing that my own daughter should act in Ways dishonorable in the slightest but time is the Test in such matters and if such tests are not to be survived it is best they should end and no one can deny that the young man talks very queerly and was often quite disrespectful to you though you may say that was joking but it would not have been joking in my day and young men with queer nervous eyes and hands I never have nor will quite trust--”

But it's Oliver that's doing this, Oliver who turned funny and white when she cut her finger with the breadknife making sandwiches and wanted her to put all sorts of things on it. Oliver who was always so sweet when she was unreasonable and always the first to come looking unhappy after they'd quarrelled even a little and say it was all his fault. Why the very last letter she got from him was the one that said if she ever stopped loving him he knew he'd die.

“And when things are ended it is better that such things should be though doubtless not necessary to put an announcement in the paper yet since God in his infinite wisdom arranges all things for the best. And with such a splendid position opening before her it would be only dignified to bring the young man to his senses for it would not be right to let unreasonable young men stand in the way of advantages offered by Foreign Travel and study and these things are soon forgotten, my dear, and if nervous young men will not admit like gentlemen that they are in the wrong when only engaged what kind of husbands will they make when married forever? And is not a broken engagement better than lifelong unhappiness when there are so many too many sinful people divorcing each other every day and all men who write for their living use stimulants, my dear, such is literary history and my dearest have your cry out on mother's shoulder.”

The sweetish oil has risen about Nancy relentlessly--it is up to her waist now and still it keeps talking and flowing and creeping higher. Very soon when the fatter black soldier on the clock-face has only hitched himself along a little, it will be over her head and the roving Nancy, the sparkling Nancy, the Nancy that fell in love will be under it like a calm body, never to rise or run or be kissed with light seeking kisses on the soft of her throat again. There will only be a dignified Nancy, a sensible Nancy, a Nancy going to Paris to study and be successful, a Nancy who, sooner or later will marry “Some good, clean man.”

A little tinkle of chimes from the clock. Six minutes more. The Nancy that was stands on tiptoe, every eager and tameless bit of her hoping, hoping. If mother weren't there that Nancy would have been at the telephone an hour ago in spite of young people's pride and old people's self-respect and all the thousand and one knife-faced fetishes that all the correct and common-sensible people hug close and worship because they hurt.

She can see the train sliding out of the station. Ollie is in it and his face is stiff with surprise and unforgiveness like the face of some horrible stranger you went up to and spoke to by mistake, thinking he was your friend. By the time the train is well started he will have begun talking to that fluffy girl in the other half of the Pullman--no, that isn't worthy, he wouldn't--but oh Ollie, Ollie!

Half an hour later the telephone rings. Nancy is finishing the breakfast dishes--her hands jump as she hears it--a slippery plate slops back into the water and as she dives after it she realizes painfully that the new water is much too hot.

“What _is_ it, mother?” For an instant the Nancy who has no real self-respect is talking again.

“Just a minute, Isabella. Mrs. Winters, dear. Don't you want to speak to her?”

“Oh.”

Then----