The afternoon went off moderately well. Nan forgot the late
unpleasantness between her and Dick and assumed they were on their usual
terms, a fashion of making up more exasperating to him than the quarrel
itself. He was too often, he suspected, out of the picture of her
immediate mind. But it was most unproductive to sulk. When she forgot
and he reproached her for it, she forgot that also; and now when she
suggested a walk he got his cap with a degree of cheerfulness and they
went out, leaving Raven and his sister together by the fire, for what
proved to be one of the rich afternoons of Raven's life. Amelia sat down
at the hearth and put her perfectly shod feet to the blaze.
"Now, John," she said crisply, while he was fidgeting about, wondering
whether he dared offer her a book and take himself out of doors, "sit
down and tell me all about it."
Raven went to the fire, but stood commanding it and her. He might, he
thought, as well meet the issue at once.
"What?" he asked. "What do you want to know?"
"You mustn't think I can't sympathize," she informed him, in the clear
tone he recognized as the appropriate one for an advanced woman who sees
a task before her--"damned meddlers," he was accustomed to call them in
his sessions of silent thought--"you mustn't think I'm not prepared.
I've heard lectures on it, and since Dick sent me your letter I've read
more or less."
"My letter!" groaned Raven. "If ever a chap was punished for a minute's
drunkenness----"
"Drunkenness?" interrupted Amelia incisively.
"Oh, drunkenness of feeling--irresponsibility--don't you know? Didn't
you ever hear of a chap's killing himself in a minute of acute
discontent because he couldn't stand the blooming show an instant
longer? Well, I didn't kill myself. I did something worse. I wrote a
letter, and, by an evil chance, it was mailed, and Dick, like a fool,
sent it on to you."
"Dick did absolutely right," said Dick's mother conclusively. "We won't
discuss that. We'll go into the thing itself."
"What the deuce is the thing?" Raven inquired. "The letter, or my
bursting into tears, like a high-strung maiden lady, and calling Dick in
to be cried over?"
"Don't evade it," she charged him, with unabated gravity. "We mustn't,
either of us. You know what I mean--_cafard_."
"_Cafard!_" Then he remembered Dick also had caught up the word, like a
missile, and pelted him with it. He gulped. Ordinary speech wasn't going
to be adequate. She belonged to this infernal age that lived by phrases.
If he told her he was still of the opinion that the world was a
disordered place of torment you could only exist in by ignoring its real
complexion, she would merely consign him to a cell more scientifically
padded, and stand gazing at him through the bars, in solemn sympathy.
"So I've gone _cafard_," he said slowly, looking down at the fire and
wondering how to answer a fool according to her folly. Or was she
incredibly right? Had he some creeping sickness of the brain, the very
nature of which implied his own insensitiveness to it? "Or do you say
'got' _cafard_? And what's your personal impression of _cafard_,
anyway?"
She had her answer ready. From the little bag in her lap she took out a
small sheaf of folded papers, memorandum slips, they seemed to be, and
whirled them over in capable fingers.
"It ought to be here," she said absorbedly. "Yes, here it is. No, it
isn't either. It must be among my club notes. What Galsworthy says about
it, you know. He makes it so clear. Just what they mean by it, the
French, how you simply go to pieces. You know, John. Of course you
know."
"Yes," said Raven drily, "I heard of it remotely among the boys."
"No wonder it happened to you. Really, you know, John, you ought not to
have gone over there at all, not at your age. It was fine of you. I'm
not denying that. But there were lots of things you could have done at
home: dollar a year men and all that. However, we must take it as we
find it. You've got _cafard_, and we must make sure you have the best
thing done for you. Do you see?"
"And what," inquired Raven, curiously, "is the best thing?"
"My idea," she said, pelting on in her habitual manner of manipulation
without much regard to the material she was working on, "would be for
you to see an alienist."
"I thought," he was beginning mildly, and paused, with a sense of
danger. He must, he saw, forego the fun of chaffing her from his
awareness that the professional gentleman was to have been sprung on him
to-day, and that he knew equally the infliction could only be deferred.
But how, she would have questioned, did he get his news? Not, he would
have to convince her, through Nan. He amended his attack. "Why didn't
you scare one up and bring him along?"
She frowned. Amelia was always restive under raillery.
"We needn't," she said, "go into that. I did hope to arrange it, but
Dick upset things frightfully. He has behaved badly, very badly indeed.
I hope now to persuade you to call in Doctor Brooke yourself. I should
suppose he'd recommend your going into a sanitarium. However, we can't
judge till we see what he says. Only, John"--and here she looked at him
with some appearance of anxiety, as not knowing how he would take
it--"you must give yourself into our hands."
"Whose hands?" asked Raven. "Yours? Dick's?"
"Oh, dear, no, not Dick's." Again she mentally champed her bit.
Evidently Dick had exhausted her forbearance on the way up. "He's
behaved like a----" Invention failed her. "I do wish," she ended
plaintively, "the modern young man and woman had a vestige of respect
left--only a vestige--for their elders. They're queerness itself. Now
Nan! there's Nan. What's she posting off up here for and settling
herself in your house"--in the west chamber, Raven's inner mind
ironically supplied--"and acting as if you couldn't pry her out?"
"You can't," said Raven. "Nan's here and I'm going to keep her, all
winter, if she doesn't get bored."
Amelia gave a little staccato shriek.
"All winter? I can't stay here all winter."
"Dear old Milly, no," said Raven, with the utmost gentleness. "I
wouldn't have you for the world. It's Nan that's going to stay."
"Why," said Amelia, "it isn't decent. You're not an old man, John.
Sometimes you don't even look middle-aged."
"You said I was," he reminded her. "You said I was so old I went and got
_cafard_."
"Besides," said Amelia, clutching at her vanishing argument, "age has
nothing to do with it. The older you are the more ridiculous they get
over you, these romantic girls. And you'd cut in and take her away from
Dick, right under his nose."
Raven suddenly tired of it.
"Amelia," he said, "don't be a fool. And don't say that sort of odious
thing about Nan. I won't have it. Nan's a child."
"Oh, no," said Amelia, shaking her waved head with an air of doom.
"Nan's no child. Don't make any mistake about that. She's no child."
At this, Raven found he was so unreasonably tired of her that he had to
call himself to order and wonder if he really could be disgusted with
Amelia, old Milly who was such a sophisticated fool and yet meant so
well by everybody that you had to keep reproving yourself when you were
tempted to consign her--elsewhere.
"Milly," he said, in the tone he always had toward her at her worst, a
tone of recalling her, bidding her remember she was a nice ordinary
woman, not an arbiter of social destinies, "Milly, sometimes you're an
awful idiot. Don't you know you are? Don't you see it won't do to keep
hitting me on the raw? I sha'n't stand it, you know. I shall have to
take Nan under my arm and get out and leave you the house to yourself.
It's all very well for you to call down alienists on me, and get me to
put myself under restraint, but Nan's rather sacred to me. You can't
meddle with Nan, and if you weren't so wrapped up in your own conceit,
you'd see you couldn't."
Amelia seemed to be reflecting on something which resulted in shocking
her into a further uneasiness.
"And the thing she said! I heard it with my own ears. She adored you!
That's what she said, adored you. To Dick, too, of all people, Dick
she's virtually engaged to."
Raven remembered a scene in a play where a drunken man lifts a chair and
then, aware of his own possibilities, gently sets it down again. He
wanted to lift a chair. Only he wanted to complete the act and smash it.
"Milly," he said gently, "I tell you Nan is a child. Doesn't that show
she's a child--the pretty extravagance of it! Why, I'm 'old Rookie' to
Nan. What else do you think I could possibly be?"
"Heaven knows," said Amelia, tightening her lips. "I can't imagine what
her Aunt Anne would have said. John, wasn't it wonderful her leaving you
practically all her money? And just what might have been expected. She
was bound up in you."
"O Lord!" said Raven.
But Amelia, once started, knew no bounds.
"And that's what I say, John. If you take hold of yourself now and get
into shape again, you've a great many years before you, and Anne's money
with yours--well, I don't see why you shouldn't look forward to a great
deal."
Raven went over to the window and sat down there staring at the black
bare branches and the clear sky. It seemed to him unspeakably desolate
and even, in its indifference to his own mood, cruel. So was Amelia, he
thought. In spite of her platitudes about enjoying a great deal, she had
him dead and buried. He became absurdly conscious that he was afraid,
but of one thing only: to hear her voice again. Upon that, thinking how
it would actually sound, he turned about and ignominiously left the
room. And since there was no spot in the house where she might not
follow him he took his hat and jacket from the kitchen and went out
through the shed. Charlotte was washing dishes at the sink, but she did
not, according to her custom, look up to pass the time of day. A cloud
rested even on her brown hair and splendid shoulders. Amelia had brought
the cloud. She'd have to get out, even if he had to tell her so.
With no intention, but an involuntary desire to be where Amelia would
not find him (and also, it was possible, where that other quietest of
women could be found) he went down the road to the maples, and then
plunged into the woods and up the hill. He had first gone along the road
to mislead Amelia, if she chanced to be looking out. He couldn't have
her following, and she was equal to it, pumps and all. Halfway up the
hill, making his way through undergrowth where the snow packed heavily,
he turned off at his left and so got into the wood road. And then, his
breath coming quick from haste and the vexation of the clogged way, he
did not slacken to cool off in the relief of easier going, but,
breathless as he was, began to run, and got more breathless still. Tira
was up there in the hut. He was sure of it. And for those first hurried
minutes he forgot her presence there meant only added misery, but dwelt
upon his own need of such a spirit as hers; the strength, the poise, the
ready coolness.
At the door he felt rebuffed, it looked so inhospitable, so tight
against him. He tapped and waited. No one came. Then he tried it and
found it locked and the revulsion was bitter. He was about turning away
when it came to him that at least he might go in. The key would be under
the stone. He put his hand into the hollow and found it there, and only
when he was setting it in the lock realized that this meant a deeper
loneliness. It would be easier to think she was there, the key turned
against him, but still in his house, than to find the house itself void
of her presence. He shook himself, in anger at the incomprehensible way
the whole thing was moving him. Why should it move him? Then, finding it
cold, the deserted room, he made himself busy and laid the fire and set
the two chairs hospitably by the hearth. He did not light the fire. It
must be ready for her if she came. After it was in order (her house, it
seemed to him now, with a fatalism of belief he accepted and did not
dwell upon) he sat down by the cold hearth and tried to think. But never
of himself. He thought of her: beautiful, lustrous, caged bird with the
door of her prison open, and who yet would not go. His mind went back to
Milly, waiting there at home to apply scientific remedies to his
diseased spirit, and he laughed a little, Milly seemed of such small
consequence. But the thought of the misery of mind that had brought him
here gave him a new sense of the cruelty of the world. For it had been
the sad state of the whole world he had fled away from and here, as if
all misery had converged to a point, he had taken a straight path to the
direst tragedy of all: a mother trying against hope to save her child,
the most beautiful of women pursued by sex cruelty, the gentlest
threatened by brute force. How could he save her? He could not, for she
would not be saved. He sat there until the dark in the corners crept
toward him like fates, their mantles held up in shadowy hands, to
smother him, and then suddenly remembering Nan and hospitable duties
down below, he got up, chilled, went out, and locked the hut behind him.
The house he found was a blaze of windows. Charlotte had lighted lamps
and candles all over it. He was half amused by that, it gave such an air
of fictitious gayety. He did not know Nan had whispered her to make it
bright because he would see it, coming up the road.
The three were in the library by the fire. Amelia had dressed for supper
in chiffon absurdly thin and curtailed, neck and hem, so that Dick had,
without being told, brought her fur coat and put it about her shoulders.
That was just like her, Raven thought, as he went in upon them, to go by
the clock and, because winter evenings necessitated evening dress,
ignore the creeping cold of a country house. Nan wore her gown of the
morning, and her stout shoes. Indeed she had to, Raven reminded himself,
when he was about to commend her for good taste. She had brought only
her little bag. Nan was now sweet reasonableness itself. No sleepiest
kitten, claws in drawn, could have been softer. Amelia was baiting her,
asking her, with a reproving implication that she ought not to have been
in a position to know, about the life over seas, and Nan was answering
by the card, compliantly, sincerely.
She had determined, Raven could see, that there should be no more
ructions in his house. When he came in, they looked up at him, frankly
pleased, and Amelia as patently relieved.
"I'm so glad you've come back," she said, getting up so that Dick could
set another chair, and Raven join them in the conventional family
circle. "I've been trying to send Dick out after you, but he wouldn't
go. John, you mustn't get into the habit of wandering off alone like
that. You really mustn't."
Raven grimaced as he took the properly adjusted chair, and wondered
whether he'd got again to invite Milly to shut up. But Dick did it, in
an honest despair that seemed entirely adequate.
"Ain't mother the limit?" he remarked, to no one but perhaps his own
wondering mind.
Raven gave a little bark of laughter, and Amelia betrayed no sign of
having heard. But Raven caught the grateful tribute of Nan's tone.
"My hanky," she said, "Dickie, dear."
He saw it dropped, saw Dick dart for it, and Nan, accepting it, give his
fingers a little squeeze. Evidently Dick, who flushed red, was being
paid for having briefly illuminated mother. Supper was got through
successfully, Raven and Dick doing active service. Raven talked about
thinning out the lower woods and Dick played up beautifully, taking it
with the greatest attention and answering at length. Mother was to be
shunted imperceptibly from _cafard_. And when they had finished and
returned again to the library fire, Nan, after perhaps half an hour of
desultory talk, yawned rudely and asked if she might go to her bed.
Raven suspected her. He noted how she half closed the library door
behind her; so he took the chair she had lately left, commanding the
crack of it. In about the time he expected, he heard her in the hall.
She had come down the back stairs, he judged, and was now putting on her
hat and coat, with scarcely a rustle, the sly one!
"Draught from this door?" he suggested, got up and closed it.
At least Dick shouldn't know she was going. If anybody stole behind her
in the friendly "outdoors" it should be he, to guard her from her own
foolhardiness. These roads were paths of peace, but Nan was equal to
adventure more extended. She might have snatched snowshoes, in her
stealthy preparation, to go off wood wandering. She might brave the
darkness where, to country minds, lurked the recurring legend of the
"lucivee." There was no actual danger, but Pan might be wandering.
"These old windows are draughty, too," said Raven. He paused at one of
them, fumbling with the catch. Really he was watching the path. There
she was, at the left, going toward her own house. He pulled down the
shade and lounged back to his seat by the fire.
"You probably feel the cold," said Milly drowsily. The fur coat and
blazing logs were beginning to do their blessed work. "Your vitality is
low."
"Yes," said Raven piously. He would have sworn to anything. "Just so."
He went on talking to Dick, and Dick caught the ball neatly, so that
presently they could glance at each other in a community of
understanding. "She's off!" said Raven's face, and Dick's returned,
"Right you are!" while he droned on about "popple," the local word for
poplar, and the right month for peeling and whether it really paid to
cut it if you had to hire. Raven loved Dick at times like these, when he
was neither sulky over Nan's aloofness nor didactic about democracy and
free verse. Amelia choked and came awake.
"Did I," she ventured, fearing a too frank reply, "did I--make a noise?"
"No, dear," said Raven mellifluously.
If Milly had been cleverer she would have remembered that when he was
deceiving her he spoke, "as if butter wouldn't melt," as if his vocal
arrangements dropped oil and balm.
"Dick and I are talking out this lumber question. Don't you bother. You
don't know anything about popple."
Milly, reassured, dropped her cheek, with a little breath, and closed
her eyes. "Gone?" Dick telegraphed Raven, who nodded "Gone!" took a step
to the door, opened it, and was himself away. He snatched, haphazard, at
a hat and coat on the great chest in the hall. Dick had a way of
throwing things down and leaving them where they fell. Yes, they were
Dick's, and Raven hastily shoved himself into them, judging it was
better, if Dick decided to go roaming, to keep him looking for them.
Then he went out and down the path and along the road where Nan had
gone. He came to her house and stopped, interrogating it. There was no
light. Still she might be in the back part, hunting about for something
she perversely couldn't wait for over night. He went up the path and
tried the front door. It was fastened and he called to her. But there
was no Nan, and he went back to the road and walked up and down,
waiting. If she wanted a run alone in the dark, she must have it. After
he had been pacing for what seemed to him a long time, he heard voices
and the crunch of snow. One voice was hers, and he went on to meet it.
The other, a man's, short-syllabled, replied at intervals. Nan seemed to
be holding forth. They were coming on briskly, Nan and a tall figure at
the other side of the road. She had seen Raven and called, clearly,
though not with any implication of relief:
"That you, Rookie?"
He came up to them and saw, with a surprise out of all proportion to the
event, in this neighborhood where anybody might join anybody else in
familiar intercourse, that it was Tenney. They stopped, Tenney a step
behind her. It looked as if he understood he had fulfilled his civility
to her and could be dismissed.
"I've been calling on Mrs. Tenney," said Nan, "and I asked Mr. Tenney to
walk home with me. Thank you, Mr. Tenney. Good night. Think it over,
won't you?"
Tenney turned, without a word, and went back along the road, with his
habitual look, Raven had time to note, in the one glance he cast after
him, of being blown by a hurrying wind. Raven faced about with Nan and
asked at once, in the excess of his curiosity:
"Now what are you up to, calling on the Tenneys?"
Nan answered seriously. There was trouble in her voice.
"Well, I got thinking about them so I knew I shouldn't go to sleep, and
I just went up by, without any real plan, you know. The woman had such
an effect on me. I couldn't keep away from her."
Raven was struck with the inevitableness of this. Yes, she had that
effect. You couldn't keep away from her.
"I'd no idea of going in," said Nan. "And I did want a run. Isn't the
air heady? But just as I got to the house, she opened the door. She was
coming out, I suppose. She had the baby. The baby was all wrapped up.
She wasn't, though. She had just an apron on her head. And when the door
opened, I could hear him yelling inside. I don't know whether he was
driving her out or whether she'd started to run for it."
"Well?" prompted Raven harshly. Why should she be so slow about it?
"What then?"
"I went up the path," said Nan, in a half absent way, as if what she was
telling seemed far less important than the perplexing issues it had bred
in her. "I said good evening to her. I went by her: I think I did. I
must have got into the kitchen first. And there he was. He's a striking
fellow, isn't he, Rookie? Like a prophet out on the loose, foaming at
the mouth and foretelling to beat the band. He'd got something in his
hands. It was little and white; it might have been the baby's cap. He
was tearing it to rags. You ought to have seen him at it."
"You shouldn't have gone in," said Raven angrily. "The fellow's dotty.
Don't you know he is? Did he speak to you?"
Nan gave a little laugh. Suddenly the incongruity of it came over her.
"No," she said, "I spoke to him. Suddenly I seemed to see how Charlotte
would have spoken--that mother way, you know, men can't stand up
against. I said--I _think_ I said--'Mr. Tenney, what under the sun are
you carrying on like this for? I should think you were in liquor.'"
Raven, wondering if he should cry at the relief of having her safe out
of the ogre's den, had to laugh with her.
"It caught him," said Nan, beginning to enjoy it, "as grandsir used to
say, between wind and water. He looked down at the thing in his
hands--the rags, you know--and dropped them into the wood-box. You see
that was the real wiliness of the serpent, my telling him he was in
drink. He's full of spiritual pride, all eat up with it. Then I played
Charlotte some more. I told Mrs. Tenney to come in, and remarked that
she'd get her death o' cold; and she did come in and her eyes--what eyes
they are, Rookie!--they were big as bread and butter plates. I suspected
she regarded me as specially sent. And I lit on him and told him, in
good set terms, that if I knew of his driving his wife out of the house
in one of his sprees, I'd have him hauled up and testify myself. Then I
ordered him to get his hat and walk home with me."
"And he did!" cried Raven, in amazement at her. "Oh, yes, of course he
did. Go on."
"Yes, he came to heel with a promptness that would have surprised you.
And I didn't let up a minute. I discoursed all the way, on the whole
duty of man."
"Did he answer?"
"Yes. That is, he spoke twice, the only times I'd let him. Once he broke
in: 'I ain't a drinkin' man.' That rankled, you see."
"What did you say?"
"I said: 'Yes, you are, too. No decent man would act as you've been
acting, unless he was drunk. And probably,' I said, 'you've been brewing
it in the cellar, and selling it to the neighbors.'"
"That was a bliffer."
"It was. I had an idea he might drop dead in his tracks."
"That all he said?"
"Yes. Oh, no, there was one other thing. He asked me if I were saved."
"What did you say?"
"Told him not to be a fool."
Raven lifted up his voice and laughed.
They were opposite his own house, and Dick, who had just opened the
front door, heard him.
"Oh," said Dick icily, when they came up to him. "So that's where you
were. Uncle Jack"--for now he saw he had just cause for anger--"I'll
thank you to let my hat alone."
"Yes, Dick," said Raven meekly. "But I saw it and it's such a dandy
hat."
"Don't be rude to your only uncle," said Nan.
She was slipping off her coat and Raven judged, seeing her so calm, that
her evening pleased her.
"Mother in there?" Raven inquired of Dick.
He had hung up the pilfered coat and hat, with great nicety of care, in
the hall closet.
"No," said Dick. "She's gone to bed."
The implication was that she shouldn't have been allowed to get bored
enough to go to bed.
"I'm going, too," said Nan. She gave her hand to Raven. "'Night,
Rookie." Then she apparently remembered Dick, and shook her head at him.
"Silly!" she commented. "Nobody'll love you if you behave like that."
Dick did not answer. He turned about and went into the library, and
Raven following, after he had seen Nan at the top of the stairs, found
him reading a day-old paper with a studied absorption it was evident he
was far from feeling.