I
John Raven sat in the library of his shabby, yet dignified Boston house,
waiting for Richard Powell, his nephew, whom he had summoned for an
intimate talk. He was sitting by the fire making a pretense of reading
the evening paper, but really he was prefiguring the coming interview,
dreading it a good deal, and chiefly for the reason that there was an
argument to be presented, and for this he was insufficiently prepared,
and must be, however long it might be delayed. When he telephoned Dick
to come he was at last armed with a bold conviction of being able to
proffer a certain case to him (his own case, in fact); but, as these
last moments went on, he weakened sensibly in any hope he might have had
that Dick would be able to meet him from any illuminating viewpoint of
his own. This was mid-winter, two years after the end of the War, where
Dick and his uncle had worked in the Ambulance Corps to the limit of
their capacities--Dick, no soldier, because of what seemed to him a
diabolic eccentricity of imperfect sight, and Raven, blocked by what he
felt to be the negligible disability of age. John Raven had, with the
beginning of the War--which, as early as 1914 he had decided to be his
war--made up his mind that although he was over forty and of a business
training with inconsiderable excursions into literature, he wanted
nothing so much as to get into the thick of it and the rough of it, so
far as a man might who was past his physical best, and now he was back
again, more fit than when he went, but at this present moment breathless
at the realization that he had been up against life as it actually is,
and that he found it a brute business and hated it. And this was not so
much the horror of life in the field where, however the human heart
cried out against the argument of desecrated flesh, the spirit could
call mightily upon God, challenging Him to grant the chrism of
fulfilment in return for this wild sacrifice of blood, as the horror of
life when peace was exercising her rights in unbelievable ways. This he
was going to explain to Dick, if he could manage it, while he set forth
also his need of retreating from the active scene and leaving some of
his formerly accepted duties on Dick's shoulders. As he sat there,
gaunt, long, lean man, with a thin brown face and the eagle's look, a
fineness of aquiline curve that made him significant in a dominant type,
he fitted his room as the room fitted him. The house was old; nothing
had been changed in it since the year when, in his first-won prosperity,
he persuaded his mother up from the country and let her furnish it with
her shyly modest taste, a sense of values that bade her keep within the
boundary of the atmosphere she brought with her in good old pieces
tenderly used. The room was dim, even by day, from these shadows of the
brooding past, and the dull blue draperies at the windows, while they
touched it to a more inspiriting tone, still spoke softly of the repose
a man wanted when he escaped from the outer world to the assuagement of
silence and his books.
To-night, when Raven had just about come to the conclusion that he could
not possibly enter upon certain things with Dick because, although Dick
elected to be a poet, there was no recognized form of words that would
make him understand, and he'd better telephone him to put the interview
off, he heard his voice in the hall, and, answering it, even breaking
over it, like bright bubbles of a vocal stream, the voice of the girl
they both loved, in ways becoming to their differences. Raven drew a
comfortable breath. The intimate conference with Dick would have to be
deferred, though he would quite as willingly have had Nan listen to it,
except for the chance of her carrying it away with her, in that
sympathetic tenderness of hers, to burden her young heart. Nan would
have made quick work of understanding. She translated you as you went,
and even ran ahead of you, in her haste, just as she sometimes cut in on
your speech, not rudely rebuking you for being too slow, but in her
eagerness to assure you she caught at the first toss. And then they came
in, she full of anticipatory delight at seeing Raven, and Dick so full
of her that he seemed not to know whether his uncle were there or not,
except as an habitual figure in the furnishing of the room.
We must pause a dull minute, while they were projecting themselves into
the scene, to find out how they looked and whether they also fitted the
room and Raven. Nan, known to her larger world as Annette Hamilton, was
a tall, slim, yet muscular girl, graced with as many physical
contradictions as you are likely to imagine. While she stood for an
instant before, puppy-like, precipitating herself upon Raven, her eyes
crinkled up like Mary Seraskier's, and she showed a line of milk-white
teeth. Altogether nature--for she had only the most inconsiderable help
from art--had done her exceedingly well. She had the hurling
impetuosities of the puppy when she found herself anywhere near persons
familiarly dear to her; but, unlike the puppy, she was a thing of grace.
Her hands and slim arms had a girl's loveliest contours, and yet, hidden
somewhere under that satin flesh with its rose and silver lustre, were
muscles serviceably strong. Her eyes were grey like Athena's, her hair
fine and thick and pale, and her face altogether too irregular to talk
about reasonably.
How is it possible to delineate Dick, even with all profuse generosity
of comment, without suggesting that he was not of the type to please
himself, or tagging him with a priggishness afar from him? He certainly
was not the sort of hero his dramatic poems described with a choppy
vigor of detail, and whom there is no doubt he would have chosen to
resemble. But nature had given him a slimness and an actual grace he
found, in his private self-scrutiny, almost girlish, nor could he wholly
outwit and supplement her by the athletic training he never intermitted.
Dick's face, too, he found much against him, being of a round solidity
with a nose too thick and a mouth a thought too small. How could such
despite have happened to him, he asked himself in moments of depression
when, confronting the mirror, he recognized the wrongs inheritance had
done him. But he knew. It was father's people, that was it. They were
all round and owlish, and they thickened up in middle life. If he could
have shared Uncle Jack's lean aquilinity, people would have looked at
him twice, as they did at Uncle Jack, which in itself would be a bore,
except that Nan also might look. Aware of these things and hiding them
in his soul, he held himself tight, shut his mouth close, and challenged
you with a spectacled eye, pinning you down as if to say: "I am born in
every particular as I didn't want to be, but take notice that I'll have
no light recognition of the hateful trick they did me. I am in training
for a husky fellow. I haven't let up on myself one instant since I found
out how horrible it was to be a good deal more of a fellow than I shall
ever look. I never shall let up. And don't you let me catch you letting
up either, in the way you treat me."
Nan, to go back to the minute of their entrance, made a swift assault
upon Raven. In the old days when he was a youngish man and she a little
girl, a growing thing, elongating like Alice, she used to hurl herself
into his arms and insist on staying there. Her aunt, Miss Anne Hamilton,
who had brought her up from babyhood, was always detaching her from
Raven; but Nan clung as persistently. Raven would look at Miss Anne,
over the girl's rumpled silk poll, with whimsically imploring eyes. Why
couldn't Nan be allowed to break upon him like a salty, fragrant wave of
the sea, he seemed to ask Miss Anne, bringing all sorts of floating
richness, the outcrop of her fancies and affections? Aunt Anne would
return the glance with her sweet, immovable deprecation and go on
detaching, while Nan, with an equal obstinacy--though hers was
protesting, vocable, sometimes shrill to the point of anguish--stuck to
her self-assumed rights. It was Raven himself who involuntarily stepped
over to Aunt Anne's side and finished the detaching process. When Nan
came back after her first term at the seminary Aunt Anne preferred to
college, and was running to him with her challenge of welcome, he was
taken aback by the nymph-like grace and beauty of her, the poise of the
small head with its braided crown--the girls at the seminary told her
she might have been a Victorian by the way she wore her hair--and he
instinctively caught her arms, about to enwreath his neck, held her
still and looked at her. She could not know what vision, overwhelming in
its suddenness, she brought before him, of childhood gone and maidenhood
come and the sacredness of this new state. Aunt Anne knew and frowned a
little to herself, from her silent, savage jealousy, realizing, though
she would never, in her proud integrity, allow herself to think it, that
this hushed veneration of Raven's was worse than the old tumultuous
intercourse. What Raven really might have said was:
"Darling, you're a woman and you're a beauty. You don't know it, but you
don't want to hug a jaded old reveler like me."
He was not, by any means, a reveler. His life had been little more than
a series of walks to business. But those were the words that came to
him, catching her adorable freshness of body and mind, and determining
to keep it untouched by dusty old pantaloons such as he saw himself. Nan
stood for a minute paling out under his eyes, and then drew away from
him and left the room, her braid-crowned head high. She had to meet him
at dinner, and he knew she had cried and Aunt Anne knew it and was hard
on her over the little things she could reprove her for, in a silky,
affectionate way, and Raven's heart swelled until he thought they both
must know its congestion, and tried to put round it another bond of
quiet, kind affection. Since that time, Nan had never kissed him; but
now, this two months since the death of Aunt Anne, she had adopted a
greeting of her own. She put her hands on his arm and bent her forehead
for a minute to his shoulder. The first time she did it, he wanted to
kiss the bright hair, but forbade himself, and the second time he said,
he was so curious over it:
"A rite?"
She was ready with her answer. He suspected she must have thought it out
ingeniously beforehand.
"It's because I'm sorry for you."
"Sorry?" he repeated.
"Yes," she said, "about Aunt Anne."
Then he realized she was sorry because Aunt Anne was dead, and he was
more and more conscious of the unbecoming lightness and freedom where he
found himself at the death of Aunt Anne. He had not dared acknowledge it
to himself. He couldn't, for shame. But whereas, in the past years, when
he ventured to formulate his own life a little and see what it had done
to him and how he could go on meeting it, he had had a sense of
harassment and of being driven too hard, after Aunt Anne's death he
began to recognize the stillness of the space she had left behind. Now
to-day, before Nan had accomplished the little rite of the bowed head on
his shoulder, something queer about it seemed to strike Dick, and he
said to her:
"He's your uncle, too, you know."
Raven took this with composure, as signifying the length as well as the
depth of his adoptive relation toward her, but Nan met it with
resentment. She left him and turned upon Dick.
"Now what," she said, "do you mean by that?"
"Why, Nan," said the poor youth, keeping a stiff upper lip, because he
recognized the signs of an approaching squabble, "I've told him. I'll
tell him again. Jack, we're engaged."
"We're nothing of the sort," said Nan, either in pure surprise or an
excellent simulation of it.
Dick met this doggedly.
"We are, too," he said. "You promised me."
"Maybe I did," Nan yielded. "But it was that awful night when you were
going out. We won't talk about that. I'd have promised you anything
then. I'd have promised anybody, just as I'd have given 'em coffee or a
smoke. But when we got back and you expected to begin from there, didn't
I tell you to shut up? I've told you to ever since. And I believe," she
added, with an acumen that struck him in the center, "you're only
dragging it out now to catch me--before him."
"I did shut up," said Dick, holding himself straight and using his mouth
tautly, "because your aunt was sick and then because she was worse. But
you needn't think I've shut up for good. Besides, it's only Jack I told.
He's nobody."
"No," said Raven mildly, "I'm nobody. Only I wish you wouldn't come here
to fight. Why can't you get it over on the steps, and then act like
Christians after you come in?"
Nan laughed. She was instantly and most obligingly sweet, as if wholly
bent on pleasing him. But Richard glowered. It was quite like her, he
thought, to sprinkle herself over with that May morning look of hers
when she knew she had the horrible advantage not only of being adorable
in herself, but a female to boot, within all the sanctities that still
do hedge the sex, however it behaves.
"You see," said Nan maternally, "in France we were living at high
pressure. Now everything's different. We mustn't be silly. Run away,
Dick, just as I told you, and leave me to talk to Rookie."
This was her name for Raven, saved over from childish days.
"All right then," said Dick. "But I sha'n't wait for you. I shall go to
Cambridge."
It was such an anticlimax of a threat, delivered in so determined a
voice, that he expected them to laugh, in a silly way they had of seeing
the merest foolishness always from the same angle. But, as he turned to
go, it was with the chill certainty that they had forgotten all about
him. Nan had settled herself by the fire and his uncle was bringing her
a footstool, an elderly attention, Dick floutingly thought, very well
suited to Aunt Anne, but pure silliness for a girl who flung herself
about all over the place. At any rate, he wasn't wanted, and he did go
to Cambridge and hunted up some of the fellows likely to talk sense; but
no sooner had he settled within their circle of geniality than he found
himself glooming over Nan and tempted to go back and break in on that
mysterious conclave.
It was mysterious. Nan herself had made it so. Her face, on Dick's
going, had fallen into a grave repose, and she turned at once to Raven,
saying:
"You see, Dick ran in on the way over here, and when he told me you'd
sent for him, I said I'd come along, because I'd got to see you instead.
Was that cheeky? I really have got to. Couldn't the other thing wait?"
"Perfectly well," said Raven, with a ready cheerfulness he was aware she
could not understand. How should she? He had not been in the habit of
troubling Dick, or indeed any one, with his vaporings. He had lived, of
late years, as a sedate, middle-aged gentleman should, with no
implication of finding the world any less roseate than his hopes had
promised. As to Dick, the very sight of him had shown him beyond a doubt
how little disposed he was to take the lad into that area of tumultuous
discontent which was now his mind. "Fire away," he bade her. "You in
trouble, dear? You want patriarchal advice?"
Nan might not have heard. She was looking, with a frowning gravity, into
the fire. How should she begin? He saw the question beating about in her
mind and hoped he could give her a lead. But she found the way for
herself. She turned to him with a sudden lovely smile.
"Aunt Anne," she said, "has done something beautiful."
He felt his heart shrinking within him as he combated the ungracious
feeling which, it seemed, would not down: that he was never to be done
with Aunt Anne's deeds, so often demanding, as they did, a reciprocal
action from him. What he wanted, he realized grimly, was to have his
cake and eat it, if he might use so homespun a simile for a woman who
had persistently lived for him and in him and then had made clear spaces
about him by going away in the dignity of death. He wanted to breathe in
the space she had left, and he also wanted to be spared the indecency of
recognizing his relief. But Nan, studying the fire persistently, to
allow his eyes all possible liberty of searching her face while she
generously avoided his, was going on in what was evidently a
preconceived task of breaking something to him.
"Yes, she's done something beautiful, and done it for you."
Raven's heart had shrunk so now that he wondered it could weigh so
heavily. How could a woman, his rebellious intelligence asked him,
manage to pursue a man with her benefits even from the grave? All his
grown-up life he had fought them, but still they hung about him him like
shackles. When he tore them off from one member--always wounding himself
only, and scrupulously sure of never, except by the inevitability of his
refusals, hurting her--they fastened on him somewhere else. When he was
under twenty--for he was fourteen years younger than she--had come the
question of her endowing him for the period of his apprenticeship to
literature, that he might write with a free mind. He had, tempting as
that was and safe as it seemed to his arrogant youth, found the decency
and prudence to refuse. He wondered now how he had been spared, saved
really by the prophetic gods from taking that guarantee, though he was
then so sure of his ability to justify the risk and pay it all back.
Perhaps his mother had helped him. She was a woman of rare sanity, and
though he could not remember her uttering a dissuading word, he was
sure, in the light of his own middle-aged vision, that she must have
been throwing the weight of her clear-mindedness into the scale.
Then there was the question of a college course and of European travel:
those were among the colossal gifts Anne Hamilton had sought to lavish
on him. But again he had saved himself, accepting one thing only, a
benefit that must have hurt her heart like a stone, she was so bent on
his beautiful, bright aptitude at writing taking its place as soon as
possible, and with no dimming from a prosaic drudgery, in the world as
she knew it: the Boston world, the New England world, the court of
judgment that sits across the Atlantic. This benefit he asked for and
received, from her father: a clerk's place in the mills--Hamilton was a
wool magnate--and a chance to earn steady money for himself and his
mother, who was every year, in spite of her stout heart, slipping into
the weakness of the chronic invalid. Raven wrote his books at the fag
end of days given to his dull industry, and he succeeded in calling
attention to himself as a classical scholar, and then, as he impatiently
hit out with what he called pot-boilers in dialect, he got a popular
hearing and more money as well. All the time he was advancing in the
mills, and, as he advanced, he never failed to see before him the
flutter of Anne's discreet draperies or hear the click of her determined
heel. She never appeared in the business at all, but he was perfectly
sure there wasn't a preferment offered him by her father for which he
wasn't indebted to her manipulation of Hamilton in long, skillful hours
beforehand. Hamilton had no slightest idea he was being influenced, but,
as the years went on, he grew in appreciation of young Raven's business
abilities to such a degree that John, reading his mind like a familiar
tongue, wondered whether after all it was true, and he hadn't a genius
for the affairs of wool. Was he doing the thing that seemed so dull to
him with such mechanical and yet consummate cleverness that he was worth
all this unripe advancement, or was it indeed Anne's white hand that was
turning the wheel of power, her wand that was keeping the augmented
vision of him ever before her father's credulous eyes? But he could not
retard the wheels of his progress without making a fool of himself, and
by the time his sister had prosperously married and his mother had died,
he was a partner in the business, and then Hamilton also died and Raven
was asking Dick, hoping all the time he would refuse, if he wanted to
come in. Dick did refuse, with an instant hearty decision for which his
uncle inwardly blessed him. Raven had got so restive by this time over
the position he had himself won through Anne's generalship that he felt
the curse was going down through the family, and that Dick, if he should
come in, would wake up at forty-odd and find himself under the too heavy
shade of the Hamilton benevolence.
"Not on your life," said Dick, when he was halfheartedly offered the
chance of battening on wool, "not while Mum's got the dough. There's
only one of me, and she's bound to keep me going."
"You couldn't marry on it," said Raven.
For that also Dick was cheerfully prepared.
"By the time Nan's ready," he said, having at that point asked her
intermittently for several years, "I shall be getting barrelfuls out of
my plays."
"'If,'" quoted Raven, "'Medina Sidonia had waited for the skin of the
bear that was not yet killed, he might have catched a great cold.'"
"That's all right," said Dick. "You needn't worry, not till it begins to
worry me. The only thing that gets me is not pinning Nan down."
"Yes," said Raven, "she's a difficult person to pin."
And saying it, he had a vision of a bright butterfly with "dye-dusty
wings" in stiff, glass-covered brittleness. He wondered if marrying
might pin Nan down like that.
Another thought troubled him a little: whether Dick had built even
obscurely in his own mind on the money Nan would have from Aunt Anne,
and the more modest sum she had now from her dead father and mother. He
concluded not. He hadn't got to worry about that. Dick had lived in the
atmosphere of money and he took its permanence for granted.
But we are keeping Nan looking at the fire and trying to get her news
out adequately, waiting a long time for these explanatory excursions
into past history. Raven also was waiting, a good deal excited and
conscious of his apprehensive heart. And when she spoke, in a studied
quietude, he found the words were the very last he expected to hear:
"I wanted to be the one to tell you. We've found her will."