Chapter 9

“Got a letter from him right after--I came back from St. Louis. Well, he's got a big job with the American Express in Paris--European Advertising Manager or something like that--he's been crazy to have either of us come over ever since that idea of the three of us getting an apartment on the _Rive Gauche_ fell through. Well, he says, if I can come over, he'll get me some sort of a job--not much to go on at first but they want people who are willing to stay--enough to live on anyway--I want to get out of the country, Ted.”

“Should think you would. Good Lord--Paris! Why you lucky, lucky Indian!” says Ted affectionately. “When'll you leave?” “Don't know. He said cable him if I really decided--think I will. They need men and I can get a fair enough letter from Vanamee. I've been thinking it over ever since the letter came--wondering if I'd take it. Think I will now. Well.”

“Well, I wish I was going along, Crowe.”

And this time Oliver is really able to smile.

“No, you don't.”

“Oh well--but, honestly--well, no, I suppose I don't. And I suppose _that's_ something you know all about, too, you--private detective!”

“Private detective! Why, you poor ass, if you haven't noticed how I've been playing godmother to you all the way through this house-party--”

“I have. I suppose I'd thank anybody else. Coming from you, though, I can only say that such was both my hope and my expectation.”

“Oh, you _perfect_ ass!” Both laugh, a little unsteadily.

“Well, Ollie, what think?” says Ted, finding some difficulty with his words for some reason or other.

“Think? Can't tell, my amorous child. Coldly considered, I think you've got a good show--and I'm very strong for it, needless to say--and if you don't go and put it over pretty soon I'll be intensely annoyed--one of the pleasures I've promised myself for years and years has been getting most disgracefully fried at your wedding, Ted.”

“Well, tonight is going to be zero hour, I think.” Ted proceeds with a try at being flippant and Oliver cackles with mirth.

“I knew it. I knew it. Old Uncle Ollie, the Young Proposer's Guide and Pocket Companion.” Then his voice changes. “Luck,” he says briefly.

“Thanks. Need it.”

“Of course I'm not worthy,” Ted begins diffidently but Oliver stops him.

“They never are. I wasn't. But that doesn't make any difference. You've got to--_n'est-ce pas?_”

“You old bum! Yes. But when I think of it---”

“Don't”

“But leaving out everything else--it seems so damned _cheeky!_ When Elinor's got everything, including all the money in the world, and I--”

“We talked that over a long time ago, remember? And remember what we decided--that it didn't matter, in this year and world at least. Of course I'm assuming that you're really in love with her--”

“I am,” from Ted very soberly. “Oh I am, all right.”

“Well then, go ahead. And, Theodore, I shall watch your antic motions with the greatest sarcastic delight, both now and in the future--either way it breaks. Moreover I'll take anybody out of the action that you don't want around--and if there were anything else I could do--”

“Got to win off my own service,” says Ted. “You know. But thanks all the same. Only when I think of--some incidents of Paris--and how awful near I've come to making a complete fool of myself with that Severance woman in the last month--well--”

“Look here, Ted.” Oliver is really worried. “You're not going to let that--interfere--are you? Right now?”

“I've got to tell her.” Ted's smile is a trifle painful. “Got to, you know. Oh not that. But France. The whole business.”

“But good heavens, man, you aren't going to make it the start of the conversation?”

“Well--maybe not. But it's all got to be--explained. Only way I'll ever feel decent--and I don't suppose I'll feel too decent then.”

“But Ted--oh it's your game, of course. Only I don't think it's being--fair--to either of you to tell her just now.”

“Can't help it, Ollie.” Ted's face sets into what Oliver once christened his “mule-look.” “I've thought it over backwards and sideways and all around the block--and I can't squirm out of it because it'll be incredibly hard to do. As a matter of fact,” he pauses, “it'll tell itself, you know, probably,” he ends, more prophetically than he would probably care to know.

“Well, I simply _don't_ see--”

“_Must_,” and after that Oliver knows there is very little good of arguing the point much further. He has known Ted for eight years without finding out that a certain bitter and Calvinistic penchant for self-crucifixion is one of his ruling forces--and one of those least easily deduced from his externals. Still he makes a last effort.

“Now don't start getting all tied up about that. Keep your mind on Elinor.”

“That's not--hard.”

“Good--I see that you have all the proper reactions. And you'll excuse me for saying that _I_ don't think she's too good for you--and even if she were she'd have to marry somebody, you know--and when you put it, put it straight, and let Paris and everything else you're worrying about go plumb to hell! And that's good advice.”

“I know it. I'll tell you of course.”

“Well, I should _think_ you would!”

Oliver looks at his watch. “Great Scott--they'll be unmasking in twenty minutes. And I've got to go back and cut Juliet out of the herd and take her to supper--”

They rise and look at each other. Then

“Hope this is the last time, Ted, old fel--which isn't any reflection on the last eight years odd,” says Oliver slowly, and their hands grip once and hard. Then they both start talking fast as they walk back to the house to cover the unworthy emotion. But just as they are going in the door, Oliver hisses into Ted's ear, an advisory whisper,

“Now go and eat all the supper you can, you idiot--it always helps.”

XXXI

The parti-colored harlequin and the young Chinese lady in blue silks are walking the Italian gardens, talking about nothing in particular. Ted has managed to discuss the moon--it is high now, a round white lustre--the night, which is warm--the art of garden decoration, French, English and Italian--the pleasantness of Southampton after New York--all with great nervous fluency but so completely as if he had met Elinor for the first time ten minutes ago that she is beginning to wonder why, if he dislikes her as much as that, he ever suggested leaving the dance-floor at all.

Ted, meanwhile, is frantically conscious of the fact that they have reached the end of the garden, are turning back, and still he is so cripplingly tongue-tied about the only thing he really wishes to say that he cannot even get the words out to suggest their sitting down. It is not until he stumbles over a pebble while passing a small hard marble seat set back in a nest of hedge that he manages to make his first useful remark of the promenade.

“Ah--a bench!” he says brightly, and then, because that sounded so completely imbecile, plunges on.

“Don't you want to sit down a minute, Elinor?--I--you--it's so cool--so warm, I mean--” He closes his mouth firmly--what a _ghastly_ way to begin!

But Elinor says “Yes” politely and they try to adapt themselves to the backless ornamental bench, Ted nervously crossing and recrossing his legs until he happens to think that Elinor certainly never would marry anybody with St. Vitus' Dance.

“Can't tell you how nice it's been this time, Elinor. And you've been--” There, things are going better--at least, he has recovered his voice.

“Why, you know how much we love to have you, Ted,” says Elinor and Ted feels himself turn hot and cold as he was certain you never really did except in diseases. But then she adds, “You and Ollie and Bob Templar, and, oh, all Peter's friends.”

He looks at her steadily for a long moment--the blue silks of her costume suit her completely. She is there, black hair and clear eyes, small hands and mouth pure as the body of a dream and elvish with thoughts like a pansy--all the body of her, all that people call her. And she is so delicately removed from him--so clean in all things where he is not--that he knows savagely within him that there can be no real justice in a world where he can even touch her lightly, and yet he must touch her because if he does not he will die. All the things he meant to say shake from him like scraps of confetti, he does not worry any more about money or seeming ridiculous or being worthy, all he knows at all in the world is his absolute need of her, a need complete as a child's and so choosing any words that come.

“Listen--do you like me?” says the particolored harlequin and all the sharp leaves of the hedge begin to titter as wind runs over them at one of the oldest and least sensible questions in the world.

The young Chinese lady turns toward the harlequin. There is some laughter in her voice and a great deal of surprise.

“Why, Ted, of course--why, why shouldn't I?--You're Peter's friend and--”

“Oh, I don't mean _that_!” The harlequin's hands twist at each other till the knuckles hurt, but he seems to have recovered most voluble if chaotic powers of speech.

“That was silly, asking that--but it's hard--when you care for anybody so much you can't _see_--when you love them till they're the only thing there _is_ you care about--and you know you're not fit to touch them--not worthy of them--that they're thousands of times too good for you but--oh, Elinor, Elinor, I just can't stand it any more! Do you love me, Elinor, because I love you as I never loved anything else in the world?”

The young Chinese lady doesn't seem to be quite certain of just what is happening. She has started to speak three times and stopped each time while the harlequin has been waiting with the suspense of a man hanging from Heaven on a pack-thread. But then she does speak.

“I think I do, Ted---oh, Ted, I know I do,” she says uncertainly--and then Oliver, if he were there, would have stepped forward to bow like an elegant jack-knife at the applause most righteously due him for perfect staging, for he really could not have managed better about the kiss that follows if he had spent days and days showing the principals how to rehearse it.

And then something happens that is as sudden as a bubble's going to pieces and most completely out of keeping with any of Oliver's ideas on how love should be set for the theatre. For “Oh, what am I _doing_?” says the harlequin in the voice of a man who has met his airy double alone in a wood full of ghosts and seen his own death in its face, and he crumples into a loose bag of parti-colored silks, his head in his hands. [Illustration: The Young Chinese Lady is Shrinking Inside Her Silks] It would be nothing very much to any sensible person, no doubt--the picture that made itself out of cold dishonorable fog in the instant of peace after their double release from pain. It was only the way that Elinor looked at him after the kiss--and remembering the last time he saw his own diminished little image in the open eyes of a girl.

The young Chinese lady is shrinking inside her silks as if frost had touched her--all she knows is that she doesn't understand. And then there is the harlequin looking at her with his face gone suddenly pinched and odd as if he had started to torture himself with his own hands; and the fact that he will not touch her, and what he says.

“Oh, Elinor, darling. Oh, I can't tell you, I can't.”

“But what _is_ it, Ted?”

“It's this--it's what I meant to tell you before I ever told you I loved you--what I haven't any right not to tell you--and I guess that the fact I didn't, shows pretty well what sort of a fellow I am. Do you really think you know about me, dear--do you really think you do?”

“Why, of course, Ted.” The voice is still a little chill with the fright he gave her, but under that it is beautifully secure.

“Well, you don't. And, oh Lord, why couldn't it have happened before I went to France!--because then it would have been all different and I'd have had some sort of a right--not a right, maybe--but anyhow, I could have come to you--straight. I can't now, dear, that's all.”

The voice halts as if something were breaking to pieces inside of it.

“I can't bring you what you'd bring me. Oh, it isn't anything--physically--dangerous--that way--I--was--lucky.” The words space themselves as slowly as if each one of them burnt like acid as it came. “It's--just--that. Just that--while I was in France--I went over--all the hurdles--and then a few more, I guess--and I've got to--tell you about it--because I love you--and because I wouldn't dare love you, even--if I didn't--tell you the truth. You see. But, oh my God, I never thought it would--hurt so!” and the parti-colored body of the harlequin is shaken with a painful passion that seems ridiculously out of keeping with his motley. But all that the young Chinese lady feels is that for a single and brittle instant she and somebody else had a star in their hands that covered them with light clean silver, and that now the conjuror who made the star out of nothing and gave it to her is showing her just why there never was any star. Moreover, she has only known she was in love for the last five minutes--and that is hardly long enough for her to discover that love itself is too living to be very much like any nice girl's dreams of it--and the shock of what Ted has said has brought every one of her mother's reticent acid hints on the general uncleanliness of Man too prickling-close to her mind. And she can't understand--she never will understand, she thinks with dull pain.

“Oh how _could_ you, Ted? How _could_ you?” she says as he waits as a man walking the plank might wait for the final gentle push that will send him overboard.

“Oh, I know it was fine of you to tell me--but it's just spoiled everything forever. Oh, Ted, how _could_ you?” and then she is half-running, half-walking, up the path toward the porch and all she knows is that she must get somewhere where she can be by herself. The harlequin does not follow her.

XXXII

Oliver, in the middle of a painfully vivid dream in which he has just received in the lounge of a Yale Club crowded with whispering, pointing spectators the news that Miss Nancy Ellicott of St. Louis has eloped with the Prince of Wales, wakes, to hear someone stumbling around the room in the dark.

“That you, Ted?”

“Yes. Go to bed.”

“Can't--I'm there. What's time?”

“'Bout five, I guess.” Ted doesn't seem to want to be very communicative.

“Um.” A pause while Oliver remembers what it was he wanted to ask Ted about and Ted undresses silently.

“Well--congratulations?”

Ted's voice is very even, very controlled.

“Sorry, Ollie. Not even with all your good advice.”

“_Honestly_?”

“Uh-huh.” “Well, look here--better luck next time, anyway. It's all--”

“It's all over, Ollie. I'm getting out of here tomorrow before most of them are up. Special breakfast and everything--called back to town by urgent legal affairs.” He laughs, rather too barkingly for Oliver to like it.

“Oh, Hell!”

“Correct.”

“Well, she's--”

“She's an angel, Ollie. But I had to tell her--about France. That broke it. D'you wonder?”

“Oh, you poor, damn, honorable, simple-minded, blessed, blasted fool! _Before_ you'd really begun?”

Ted hesitates. “Y-yes.”

“Oh, hell!”

“Well, if all you can do is to lie back in bed there and call on your Redeemer when---Sorry, Ollie. But I'm not feeling too pleasant tonight.”

“Well, I ought to know--”

“Forgot. You ought. Well--you do.”

“But I don't see anything yet that--”

“She does.”

“But--”

“Oh, Ollie, what's the use? We can both of us play Job's comforter to the other because we're pretty good friends. But you can see how my telling her would--oh well there isn't much percentage in hashing it over. I've done what I've done. If I'd known I'd have to pay for it this way, I wouldn't have--but there, we're all made like that. There's one thing I can't do--and that is get away with a thing like that on false pretences--I'd rather shoot the works on one roll and crap than use the sort of dice that behave. I went into the thing with my eyes open--now I've got to pay for it--well, what of it? It wouldn't make all the difference to a lot of girls, perhaps--a lot of the best--but it does to Elinor and she's the only person I want. If I can't have her, I don't want anything--but if I've made what all the Y.M.C.A. Christians that ever sold nickel bars of chocolate for a quarter would call a swine out of myself--well, I'm going to be a first-class swine. So put on my glad rags, Josie, I'm going to Rector's and hell!”

All this has been light enough toward the end but the lightness is not far from a very real desperation, all the same.

“Meaning by which?” Oliver queries uneasily.

“Meaning by which that some of my address for the next two-three weeks will be care of Mrs. Rose Severance, 4th floor, the Nineveh, Riverside Drive, New York--you know the place, I showed it to you once from a bus-top when we were talking the mysterious lady over. And that I don't think Mr. Theodore Billett will graduate _cum laude_ from Columbia Law School. In fact, I think it very possible that Mr. Billett will join Mr. Oliver Crowe, the celebrated unpublished novelist on a pilgrimage to Paris for to cure their broken hearts and go to the devil like gentlemen. Eh, Ollie?”

“Well, that's all right for _me_,” says Oliver combatively. “And I always imagined we'd find each other in hell. I'm not trying to be inhospitable with my own pet red-hot gridiron, but all the same--”

“Now, Crowe, for Pete's sake, it's five o'clock in the morning and I'm catching the 7.12--”

And Oliver is too sleepy to argue the point. Besides he knows quite well that any arguments he can use will only drive Ted, in his present state of mind, a good deal farther and faster along the road he has so dramatically picked out for himself. So, between trying to think of some means of putting either sense or the fear of God into Elinor Piper, whatever Ted may say about it, and wondering how the latter would take a suggestion to come over to Melgrove for a while instead of starting an immoral existence with that beautiful but possessive friend of Louise's, he drops off to sleep.

XXXIII

Oliver had depended on Ted's noisy habits in dressing and packing to wake him and give them a chance to talk before Ted left--but when he woke it was to hear a respectful servantly voice saying “Ten o'clock, sir!” and his first look around the room showed him that Ted's bed was empty and Ted's things were gone. There was a scribbled note propped up against the mirror, though.

“Dear Ollie:

“So long--and thanks for both good advice and sympathy. The latter helped if the former didn't. Drop me a message at 252A as soon as you decide on this French proposition. I'm serious about it. TED.”

By the time he had read this through, Oliver began to feel rather genuinely alarmed.

He could not believe that the whole affair between Ted and Elinor Piper had gone so utterly wrong as the note implied--he had had a whimsical superstition that it must succeed because he was playing property man to it after his own appearance as Romeo had failed--but he knew Ted and the two years' fight against the struggling nervous restlessness and discontent with everything that didn't have either speed or danger in it that the latter, like so many in his position, had had to make. His mouth tightened--no girl on earth, even Nancy, could realize exactly what that meant--the battle to recover steadiness and temperance and sanity in a temperament that was in spite of its poised externals most brilliantly sensitive, most leapingly responsive to all strong stimuli--a temperament moreover that the war and the armistice between them had turned wholly toward the stimuli of fever--and Ted had made it with neither bravado nor bluster and without any particular sense of doing very much--and now this girl was going to smash it and him together as if she were doing nothing more important than playing with jackstones.

He remembered a crowd of them talking over suicide one snowy night up in Coblenz--young talk enough but Ted had been the only one who really meant it--he had got quite vehement on picking up your proper cue for exit when you knew that your part was through or you were tired of the part. He remembered café hangers-on in Paris--college men--men who could talk or write or teach or do any one of a dozen things--but men who had crumbled with intention or without it under the strain of the war and the snatches of easy living to excess, and now had about them in everything they said or wore a faint air of mildew; men who stayed in Paris on small useless jobs while their linen and their language verged more and more toward the soiled second-hand--who were always meaning to go home but never went. If Ted went to Paris--with his present mind. Why Ted was his best friend, Oliver realized with a little queer shock in his mind--it was something they had never just happened to say that way. And therefore. Far be it from Oliver to be rude to the daughter of his hostess, but some things were going to be explained to Miss Elinor Piper if they had to be explained by a public spanking in the middle of the Jacobean front hall.

But then there was breakfast, at which few girls appeared, and Elinor was not one of the few. And then Peter insisted on going for a swim before lunch--and then lunch with Elinor at the other end of the table and Juliet Bellamy talking like a mechanical piano into Oliver's ear so that he had to crane his neck to see Elinor at all. What he saw, however, reassured him a little--for he had always thought Elinor one of the calmest young persons in the world, and calm young persons do not generally keep adding spoonfuls of salt abstractedly to their clam-broth till the mixture tastes like the bottom of the sea.

But even at that it was not till just before tea-time that Oliver managed to cut her away from the vociferous rest of the house-party that seemed bent on surrounding them both with the noise and publicity of a private Coney Island. Peter has expressed a fond desire to motor over to a little tea-room he knows where you can dance and the others had received the suggestion with frantic applause. Oliver was just starting downstairs after changing his shoes, cursing house-party manners in general and Juliet Bellamy in particular all over his mind when Elinor's voice came up to him from below.

“No, really, Petey. No, I know it's rude of me but honestly I am _tired_ and if I'm going to feel like anything but limp _tulle_ this evening. No, I'm _perfectly_ all right, I just want to rest for a little while and I promise I'll be positively incandescent at dinner. No, Juliet dear, I wouldn't keep you or anybody else away from Peter's nefarious projects for the world--”

That was quite enough for Oliver--he tiptoed back and hid in his own closet--wondering mildly how he was going to explain his presence there if a search party opened the door. He heard a chorus of voices calling him from below, first warningly, then impatiently--heard Peter bounce up the stairs and yell “Ollie! Ollie, you slacker!” into his own room--and then finally the last motor slurred away and he was able to creep out of his shell.

He met Elinor on the stairs--looking encouragingly droopy, he thought.

“Why Ollie, what's the matter? The pack was howling for you all over the house--they've all gone over to the Sharley--look, I'll get you a car--” She went down a couple of steps toward the telephone.

Oliver immediately and without much difficulty put on his best expression of blight.

“Sorry, El--must have dropped off to sleep,” he said unblushingly. “Lay down on my bed to sort of think some things over--and that's what happens of course. But don't bother--”

“It's no trouble. I could take you over myself but I was so sort of fagged out--that's why I didn't go with them,” she added--a little uncertainly he noticed.