Chapter 8

The fourth meal is Nancy's and it doesn't seem very happy. When it is over and Mr. Ellicott has rustled himself away from intrusion behind the evening paper.

“Nobody--'phoned today--did they, mother?”

“No, dear.” The voice is not as easy as it might be, but Nancy does not notice.

“Oh.”

Nor does Nancy notice how hurriedly her mother's next question comes.

“Did you see Mrs. Winters, darling?”

“Oh yes--I saw her.”

“And you're going on to New York?”

“Yes--next week, I think.”

“With her. And going to stay with her?”

“I suppose so.”

Mrs. Ellicott sighs relievedly.

“That's so nice.”

Nancy will be safe now--as safe as if she were under an anesthetic. Mrs. Winters will take care of that. She must have a little talk with dear Isabella Winters. But that night Nancy is alone in her room--doing up her engagement ring and Oliver's letters in a wobbly package. She is not quite just, though, she keeps one letter--the first.

XXVIII

Margaret Crowe, who, having just come to her seventeenth birthday in this present day and generation, felt it her official family duty to season the general conversation with an appropriate pepper of heartlessness, had really put it very well. She had said that while she didn't suppose one house party over Labor Day would more than partially rivet a broken heart, it honestly was a relief for everybody else to get Oliver out of the house for a while, and mother needn't look at her that way because she was as sorry as any of the rest of them for poor old Oliver but when people went about like walking cadavers and nearly bit you any time you mentioned anything that had to do with marriage, it was time they went somewhere else for a while and stayed there till they got over it.

And Mrs. Crowe, though dutifully rebuking her for her flippant treatment of a brother's pain, agreed with the sense of her remarks, if not with the wording. It had taken a good deal of quiet obstinacy on the part of the whole family to get Oliver to accept Peter Piper's invitation--Mrs. Crowe, who was understanding, knew at what cost--the cost of a man who has lost a hand's first appearance in company with the stump unbandaged--but anything would be better than the mopey Oliver of the last two weeks and a half, and Mrs. Crowe had been taught by a good deal of living the aseptic powers of having to go through the motions of ordinary life in front of a casual audience, even when it seemed that those motions were no longer of any account. So Oliver took clean flannels and a bitter mind to Southampton on the last day of August, and, as soon as he got off the train, was swung into a reel of consecutive amusements that, fortunately, allowed him little time to think.

When he did, it was only to wonder rather frigidly if this fellow with glasses who played tennis and danced and swam and watched and commented athletically on the Davis Cup finals, sitting between Elinor Piper and Juliet Bellamy whom he had taken to dances off and on ever since he had had his first pair of pumps, could really be he. The two people didn't feel in the least the same.

The two Mr. Crowes, he thought. “Mr. Oliver Crowe--meet Mr. Oliver Crowe.” “On our right, ladies and gentlemen, we have one of the country's greatest curiosities--a young gentleman who insists upon going on existing when there is nothing at all that makes his existence useful or interesting or proud. A very realistic wax figure that will toddle, shoot a line and play almost any sort of game until you might easily believe it to be genuinely alive. Mr. Oliver Crowe.”

The house-party was to last a week, except for Ted Billett who would have to go back after Labor Day--and before eight hours of it were over, Oliver was watching Ted with grandmotherly interest, a little mordant jealousy, and humor, that, at times, verged toward the hysterical. Nancy--and especially the loss of her--had made him sensitive as a skinless man to the winds and vagaries of other young people in love--and while Ted could look at and talk with Elinor Piper and think himself as safe as a turtle under its shell from the observations and discoveries of the rest of the party he could no more hide himself or his intentions from Oliver's painful scrutiny than he could have hidden the fact that he had suddenly turned bright green. So Oliver, a little with the sense of his own extreme generosity, but sincerely enough in the main, began to play kind shepherd, confidante, referee and second-between-the-rounds to Ted's as yet quite unexpressed strivings--and since most of him was only too willing to busy itself with anything but reminiscences of Nancy, he began to congratulate himself shortly that under his entirely unacknowledged guidance things really seemed to be getting along very well.

And here too his streak of ineradicable humor--that bright plaything made out of knives that is so fine to juggle with light-handedly until the hand meets it in its descent a fraction of a second too soon--came often and singularly to his aid. He could see himself in a property white beard stretching feeble hands in blessing over a kneeling and respectful Elinor and Ted. “Bless you my dear, dear children--for though my own happiness has gone with yester-year, at least I have made you--find each other--and perhaps, when you sit at evening among the happy shouts of your posterity--” but here Oliver broke off into a snort of laughter.

Of course Ted had confided nothing formally as yet--but then, thought Oliver sourly out of his own experience, he wouldn't; that was the way you always felt; and Ted had never been a person of easy confidences. The most he had done had been to take Oliver grimly aside from the dance they had gone to last night and explain in one ferocious and muffled sentence delivered half at Oliver and half at a large tree that if Hinky Selvage didn't stop dancing with Elinor that way he, Ted, would carry him unobtrusively behind a bush and force him to swallow most of his own front teeth. And again Oliver, looking back as a man might to the feverish details of a major operation, realized with cynic mirth that that was a very favorable symptom indeed. Oh everything was going along simply finely for Ted, if the poor fool only knew it. But that he would no more believe of course than you would a dentist who told you he wasn't going to hurt. People in love _were_ poor fools--damn fools--unutterably lucky, unutterably perfect--fools.

Ted and Oliver must have one talk though before it all happened beyond redemption and Ted started wearing that beautiful anesthetized smile and began to concoct small kindly fatal conspiracies with Elinor and Oliver and some nice girl. They hadn't had a real chance to talk since Oliver came back from St. Louis, and shortly--oh very shortly indeed by the way things looked--the only thing they would be able to talk about would be Elinor and how wonderful she and requited love and young happy marriage were--and however glad Oliver might be for Ted and his luck--he really wouldn't be able to stand that, under the present circumstances, for very long at a time. Ted would be gone into fortune--into a fortune that Oliver would have to be the last person on earth to grudge him--but that meant the end of eight years of fighting mockery and friendship together as surely as if those years were marbles and Elinor were dropping them down a well. They could pick it up later--after Ted had been married a year say--but it would have changed then, it wouldn't be the same.

Oliver smiled rather wryly. He wondered if that was at all like what Ted might have thought when he and Nancy--But that wasn't comparable in the least. But Nancy and he were different. _Nancy_--and with that, the pain came so dazzlingly for a minute that Oliver had to shut his eyes to bear it--and something that wasn't just stupidly rude had to be said to Juliet Bellamy in answer to her loud clear question as to whether he was falling asleep.

All up to and through Labor Day Oliver bluffed and manoeuvered like the head of a small but vicious Balkan State in an International Congress for Ted and Elinor, and towards tea-time, decided sardonically that it was quite time his adopted infants took any further responsibilities off his shoulders. There was no use delaying conclusions any longer--Oliver felt as he looked at his victims like a workmanlike god who simply must finish the rough draft of the particular world he is fussing with before sunset, in spite of all rebellious or slipshod qualities in its clay. There would be a dance that evening. There would be, Oliver thought with some proprietary pride, a large sentimental moon. A few craftily casual words with Elinor before dinner--a real talk with Ted in one of the intermissions of the dance--a watchdog efficiency in guarding the two from intrusion while they got the business over with neatly in any one of several very suitable spots that Oliver had picked out already in his mind's eye. And then, having thoroughly settled Ted for the rest of his years in such a solid and satisfactory way--perhaps the queer gods that had everyone in charge, in spite of their fatal leaning toward practical-joking where the literary were concerned, might find enough applause in their little tin hearts for Oliver's acquired and vicarious merit to give him in some strange and painful way another chance to be alive again and not merely the present wandering spectre-of-body that people who knew nothing about it seemed to take so unreasonably for Oliver Crowe.

So he laid his snares, feeling quite like Nimrod the mighty, though outwardly he was only kneeling on the Piper porch, waiting for the dice to come around to him in a vociferous game of crap that Juliet had organized--he seldom shot without winning now he noticed with superstitious awe. And tea passed to a sound of muffled crumpets, and everyone went up to dress for dinner.

XXIX

Mrs. Winters' little apartment on West 79th Street--she heads letters from it playfully “The Hen Coop” for there is almost always some member of her own sex doing time with the generous Mrs. Winters. Mrs. Winters is quite celebrated in St. Louis for her personally-conducted tours of New York with stout Middle-Western matrons or spectacled school girls east for visits and clothes--Mrs. Winters has the perfectly-varnished manners, the lust for retailing unimportant statistics and the supercilious fixed smile of a professional guide. Mrs. Winters' little apartment, that all the friends who come to her to be fed and bedded and patronized tell her is so charmingly New Yorky because of her dear little kitchenette with the asthmatic gas-plates, the imitation English plate-rail around the dining-room wall, the bookcase with real books--a countable number of them--and on top of it the genuine signed photograph of Caruso for which Mrs. Winters paid the sum she always makes you guess about, at a charity-bazaar.

Mrs. Winters herself--the Mrs. Winters who is _so_ interested in young people as long as they will do exactly what she wants them to--every inch of her from her waved white hair to the black jet spangles on her dinner gown or the notes of her “cultivated” voice as frosted and glittery and artificial as a piece of _glacé_ fruit. And with her, Nancy, dressed for dinner too, because Mrs. Winters feels it to be one's duty to oneself to dress for dinner always, no matter how much one's guests may wish to relax--Nancy as much out of place in the apartment whose very cushions seem to smell of that modern old-maidishness that takes itself for superior feminist virtue as a crocus would be in an exhibition of wool flowers--a Nancy who doesn't talk much and has faint blue stains under her eyes.

“So everything went very satisfactorily indeed today, dear Nancy?”

Mrs. Winters' voice implies the uselessness of the question. Nancy is staying with Mrs. Winters--it would be very strange indeed if even the least important accompaniments of such a visit were not of the most satisfactory kind.

“Yes, Mrs. Winters. Nothing particularly happened, that is--but they like my work.”

“Yes, dear,” Mrs. Winters croons at her, she is being motherly. The effect produced is rather that of a sudden assumption of life and vicarious motherhood on the part of a small, brightly-painted porcelain hen.

“Then they will be sending you over shortly, no doubt? Across the wide wide sea--” adds Mrs. Winters archly, but Nancy is too tired-looking to respond to the fancy.

“I suppose they will when they get ready,” she answers briefly and returns to her chicken-croquette with the thought that in its sleekness, genteelness, crumblingness, and generally unnourishing qualities it is really rather like Mrs. Winters. An immense desire, after two weeks of Mrs. Winters' mental and physical cuisine for something as hearty and gross as the mere sight of a double planked steak possesses her achingly--but Mrs. Winters was told once that she “ate like a bird.”

“Well, in that case, dear Nancy, you certainly must not leave New York indefinitely without making the most of your opportunities,” Mrs. Winters' tones are full of genteel decision. “I have made out a little list, dear Nancy, of some things which I thought, in my funny old way, might possibly be worth your while. We will talk it over after dinner, if you like--”

“Thank you so much, dear Mrs. Winters” says Nancy with dutiful hopelessness. She is only too well acquainted with Mrs. Winters' little lists. “As an _artist_, as an _artist_, dear Nancy, especially.” Mrs. Winters breathes somewhat heavily, “Things That Should Interest you. Nothing Bizarre, you understand, Nothing Merely Freakish--but some of the Things in New York that I, Personally, have found Worth While.”

The Things that Mrs. Winters Has Found Personally Worth While include a great many public monuments. She will give Nancy a similar list of Things Worth While in Paris, too, before Nancy sails--and Nancy smiles acceptably as each one of them is mentioned.

Only Mrs. Winters cannot see what Nancy is thinking--for if she did she might become startlingly human at once as even the most perfectly poised of spinsters is apt to do when she finds a rat in the middle of her neat white bed. For Nancy is thinking quite freely of various quaint and everlasting places of torment that might very well be devised for Mrs. Winters--and of the naked fact that once arrived in Paris it will matter very little to anybody what becomes of her and least of all to herself--and that Mrs. Winters doesn't know that she saw a chance mention of Mr. Oliver Crowe, the author of “Dancer's Holiday” today in the “Bookman” and that she cut it out because it had Oliver's name in it and that it is now in the smallest pocket of her bag with his creased and recreased first letter and the lucky piece she had from her nicest uncle and a little dim photograph of Mr. Ellicott and half a dozen other small precious things.

XXX

The dance is at the Piper's this time--the last Piper dance of the Southampton season and the biggest--other people may give dances after it but everybody who knows will only think of them as relatively pleasant or useless addenda. The last Piper Dance has been the official period to the Southampton summer ever since Elinor's _début_--and this time the period is sure to be bigger and rounder than ever since it closes the most successful season Southampton has ever had.

Nothing very original about its being a masquerade, from Mr. Piper a courteously grey-haired mandarin in jade-green robes beside Mrs. Piper--lovely Mary Embree that was--in the silks of a Chinese empress, heavy and shining and crusted as the wings of a jeweler's butterfly, her reticent eyes watching the bright broken patterns of the dancing as impassively as if she were viewing men being tortured or invested with honor from the Dragon Throne, to Oliver, a diffident Pierrot who has discovered no even bearably comfortable way of combining spectacles and a mask, and Peter who [Illustration: THE LAST PIPER DANCE HAS BEEN THE OFFICIAL PERIOD TO THE SOUTHAMPTON SUMMER] is gradually turning purple under the furs of a dancing bear. Nothing much out of the ordinary in the tunes and the three orchestras and the fact that a dozen gentlemen dressed as the Devil are finding their tails very inconvenient as regards the shimmy and a dozen Joans of Arc are eying each other with looks of dumb hatred whenever they pass. Nothing singular about the light-heart throb of the music, the smell of powder and scent and heat and flowers, the whole loose drifting garland of the dancers, blowing over and around the floor in the idle designs of sand, floating like scraps of colored paper through a smooth wind heavy with music as the hours run away like light water through the fingers. But outside the house the Italian gardens are open, little lanterns spot them like elf-lights, shining on hedge-green, pale marble; the night is pallid with near and crowded stars, the air warm as Summer water, sweet as dear youth.

The unmasking is to take place at midnight and it is past eleven when Oliver drops back into the stag line after being stuck for a dance and a half with a leaden-footed human flower-basket who devoted the entire time to nervous giggles and the single coy statement that she just knew he never could guess who she was but she recognized him perfectly. He starts looking around for Ted. There he is, scanning the clown's parade with the eyes of an anxious hawk, disgruntled nervousness plain in every line of his body. Then Oliver remembers that he saw a slim Chinese girl in loose blue silks go off the floor ten minutes or so ago with a tall musketeer. He goes over and touches Ted on a particolored arm--the latter is dressed as a red and gilt harlequin--and feels the muscles he touches twitch under his hand.

“Cigarette? It's getting hotter than cotton in here--they'll have to open more windows--”

“What?” Then recognizing voice and glasses “Oh yeah--guess so--awful mob, isn't it?” and they thread their way out into the cool.

They wander down from the porch and into the gardens, past benches where the talk that is going on seems to be chiefly in throaty undertones and halts nervously as their steps crunch past.

“The beautiful and damned!” says Oliver amusedly, then a little louder _“Amusez vous bien, mes enfants_” at a small and carefully modulated shriek that comes from the other side of the low hedge, “The night's still young. But Good Lord, isn't there _any_ place in the whole works where two respectable people can sit without feeling like chaperones?”

They find one finally--it is at the far end of the gardens--a seat the only reason for whose obvious desertion seems to be, comments Oliver, that some untactful person has strung a dim but still visible lantern directly above it--and relapses upon it silently. It is not until the first cigarettes of both are little red dying stars on the grass beside them that either really starts to talk.

“Cool,” says Oliver, stretching his arms. The night lies over them light as spray--a great swimming bath and quietness of soft black, hushed silver--above them the whole radiant helmet of heaven is white with its stars. From the house they have left, glowing yellow in all its windows, unreal against the night as if it were only a huge flat toy made out of paper with a candle burning behind it, comes music, blurred but insistent, faint as if heard over water, dull and throbbing like horse-hoofs muffled with leather treading a lonely road.

“Um. Good party.”

“Real Piper party, Ted. And, speaking of Pipers, friend Peter certainly seems to be enjoying himself--”

“Really?”

“Third bench on the left as we came down. Never go to a costume-party dressed as a dancing-bear if you want to get any quiet work in on the side. Rule One of Crowe's Social Code for Our Own First Families.”

Ted chuckles uneasily and there is silence for another while as they smoke. Both are in very real need of talking to each other but must feel their way a little carefully because they are friends. Then--

“I,” says Ted and--

“You,” says Oliver, simultaneously. Both laugh and the little tension that has grown up between them snaps at once.

“I suppose you know that Nancy's and my engagement went bust about three weeks ago,” begins Oliver with elaborate calm, his eyes fixed on his shoes.

Ted clears his throat.

“Didn't _know_. Afraid it was something like that though--way you were looking,” he says, putting his words one after the other, as slowly as if he were building with children's blocks. “What was it? Don't tell me unless you want to, of course--_you_ know---”

“Want to, rather.” Ted knows that he is smiling, and how, though he is not looking at his face. “After all--old friends, all that. My dear old College chum,” but the mockery breaks down. “My fault, I guess,” he says in a voice like metal.

“It was, Ted. Acted like a fool. And then, this waiting business--not much use going over that, now. But it's broken. Got my--property--such as it was all back in a neat little parcel two weeks ago. That's why I quit friend Vanamee--you ought to have known from that.”

“Did, I suppose, only I hoped it wasn't. I'm damn sorry, Ollie.

“Thanks, Ted.”

They shake hands, but not theatrically.

“Oh well--oh hell--oh dammit, you know how blasted sorry I am. That's all I can say, I guess--”

“Well, so am I. And it was my fault, chiefly. And that's all I can say.”

“Look here, though.” Ted's voice is doing its best to be logical in spite of the fact that two things, the fact that he is unutterably sorry for Oliver and the fact that he mustn't show it in silly ways, are fighting in him like wrestlers. “Are you sure it's as bad as all that? I mean girls---” Ted flounders hopelessly between his eagerness to help and his knowledge that it will take ungodly tact. “I mean, Nancy's different all right--but they change their minds--and they come around--and--”

Oliver spreads out his hands. It is somehow queerly comforting not to let himself be comforted in any degree. “What's the use? Tried to explain--got her mother--Nancy was out but she certainly left a message--easier if we never saw each other again--well--Then she sent back everything--she knew I'd tried to phone her--tried to explain--never a word since then except my name and address on the package--oh it's over, Ted. Feenee. But it's pretty well smashed me. For the present, at least.”

“But if you started it,” Ted says stubbornly.

“Oh I did, of course--gentlemanly supposition anyhow--that's why--don't you see?”

“Can't say I do exactly.”

“Well?”

“Well?”

“We're both of us too proud, Ted. And too poor. And starting again--can't you--visualize--it wouldn't be the way it was--only both of us thinking about _that_ all the time--and _still_ we couldn't get married. I've got less right than ever, now--oh, but how _could_ we after what we've said--” and this time his voice has lost all the attitudes of youth, it is singularly older and seems to come from the center of a place full of pain.

“I wish I could help, though, Ollie. You know,” says Ted.

“Wish you could.” Then later, “Thanks.” “Welcome.”

Both smoke and are silent for a time, remembering small things out of the last eight years.

“But what are you going to do, Ollie, now you've kissed the great god Advertising a fond good-by?”

Ollie stirs uneasily.

“Dunno--exactly. I told you about those two short stories Easten wanted me to take out of my novel? Well, I've done it and sent 'em in--and he'll buy 'em all right.”

“That's fine!”

“It's a little money, anyhow. And then--remember Dick Lamoureux?”

“Yes.”