"What do I think?" Nan repeated. "About Old Crow, or his religion? It is
that, isn't it, Rookie? It is a religion."
"It's a religion, all right," said Raven. "And curiously, Nan, it's
given me a tremendous boost."
"Because you think----"
"Not because I think anything. I've an idea that with religions you'd
better not think. You'd better believe."
"If you can," said she.
"But don't you believe?" he asked her, out of an impetuosity like her
own. "I never thought to wonder what you believed. I remember though,
one time."
"Yes," said Nan. A deeper red ran into her cheeks, and her brows came
down a little over her eyes. Raven could see she was visualizing
something. "You're going back to the time when I wouldn't be confirmed."
"I remember. Mighty disagreeable, that was."
"Yes. I was in disgrace. She looked at me as if she'd been frozen. And
you brought me a peach. Do you remember that peach?"
He shook his head. But he did remember, though he said nothing, his mind
on the poor little girl chilled by Aunt Anne's frozen look.
"It was the most beautiful peach," said Nan, looking into the fire, and
continuing to hug her knees. "It wasn't that I didn't have peaches.
There were plenty to be eaten like a lady with a silver knife, or even
stolen off the sideboard and gobbled in the garden with the juice
squshing over your white frock. But this one--you slipped it into my
hand and I knew it was because you were sorry for me. And I took it out
of the room and went into the garden with it. And what do you s'pose I
did then, Rookie?"
"Ate it, I hope," said Raven. He felt his eyes hot with angry sorrow
over her. "That's the only thing I know of to do with a peach."
"I went round behind the lilacs, where the lily bed is, and stood there
and cried like--like a water spout, I guess, and I kissed the peach. I
kissed it and kissed it. It was like a rough check. And then I buried it
among the lilies because the dirt there looked so soft."
"Did it come up?"
He wanted, though so late, to turn it into childish comedy. Nan laughed
out.
"No," she said ruefully, "not the way you'd expect. It did come up. I
saw her troweling there the next morning. She'd called me to bring her
other gardening gloves. She'd found a hole in one she had on. You know
how exquisitely she kept her hands. And just as I came, she turned up
the peach, and looked at it as if it had done something disgraceful to
get there, and tossed it into her basket."
"Now," said Raven, "you can't make me think anybody"--he couldn't allow
himself to say Aunt Anne--"went hunting out your poor little peach."
"No," said Nan, bending on him a limpid gaze. "Of course not,
consciously. Only there was something----" But even she, with all her
recklessness, could not follow this out. To her own consciousness was
the certainty that deep in Aunt Anne, deep as the principle of life
itself, was an intuition which led her will to the evidence it needed
for its own victories. "And the queer thing about it was," she ended, "I
didn't refuse to be confirmed because I doubted things. I refused
because I believed. I believed in God; I believed so hard I was afraid."
"What of?"
"Afraid of standing in with what I didn't like. Afraid I couldn't carry
it through, and if I didn't, there'd be ginger for me somewhere. So
queer, Rookie, like all the things that keep happening to us. Little
ironies, you know, that sort of thing. For she thought I was behaving
shockingly toward God. And really, Rookie, it was because I was so
afraid of Him. I believed in Him so much I couldn't say I believed in a
way I didn't."
"Like Old Crow," said Raven. "Only you didn't go far enough. You didn't
say it's only a symbol."
"I tried not to think much about it, anyway," she owned. "I couldn't
believe what she did. But I couldn't go into it. I can't now. Don't you
know, Rookie, there are things you can't talk about? It's bad manners."
"I wish the learned divines thought so," said Raven. "Dear Nan!" he
added, his mind returning to her. "I didn't know you so very well, after
all. I must have seen you were having a beast of a time, or I mightn't
have butted in with the peach, but I didn't know how deep it went."
"Oh, it always goes deep with children," said Nan, carelessly, as if the
child he was pitying being snowed under by the years, it made no great
difference about her, anyway. "You get gashed to the bone and the scars
are like welts. But so far as I see, it has to be, coming into a world
you don't even know the rules of till they're banged into you."
"You wouldn't be willing," said Raven, spurred on by a mounting
curiosity over her, the inner mind of her he seemed never to have
touched before, "you wouldn't be willing to tell me what it was in the
church you didn't like?"
"Yes," said Nan decisively, "I should mind. Oh, I'd tell you, Rookie, if
I could anybody. But I can't. Maybe I could if I hadn't seen it working:
over there, you know--seen boys clinging to it so at the
end--confession--the crucifix. (The vestments, do you remember? over
that faded horizon blue!) I couldn't do it, Rookie, what they did, not
if I died this minute. Only," she added, struck by a thought, "I might
want it to remind me. I might touch the crucifix, you know, or look at
something or feel the holy water on my forehead. I might be too far gone
to think up to God but--yes, it might remind me."
"Symbols," said Raven, profoundly moved by the vision of the bright
spirit in her mortal beauty flickering out. "Old Crow."
"And when I said," she hesitated, anxious to give him everything he
asked of her, "the things I didn't like, I meant the things they tell
us, Rookie. You know: facts, details. And then you think of God and--no
use, Rookie, no use!"
"Yes," said Raven, "that's where Old Crow was up against it. But picture
writing, because it's the only kind of writing we can read--picture
writing, Nan, because we're savages--he could take that and not wince."
"Anyway," said Nan, "I'm happiest not thinking of it. I say my prayers:
God bless Rookie. God bless me. That's all."
"I don't believe it."
"Don't believe what? That I say 'God bless Rookie'? Course I do. Why
not?"
"Well, I'm blessed!" said Raven, at a loss. Then, recovering himself,
"Nan, I never've known you in the least. How am I getting at you now?"
"Because we're shut up here with the quiet and the snow," said Nan.
She looked at the fire, not at him. He thought, with a startled delight
in her, he had never seen a more contented figure and, the beauty of it
was, entirely oblivious of him. It made no demands.
"It's a fact," he reflected, "I've really never seen you since you grew
up. First you were a child, then you went over there. You had to take
life whole, as Old Crow took his religion."
"Yes," said Nan, "I guess we're all queer, we young ones, that have been
in service. You see we've had to take things as they are. You can't veil
them from us. We've seen 'em. We know." She laughed out. "Rookie, it's
queer, but I'm a good deal more like the old-fashioned girl we read
about than the rest of the crowd I run with."
"Why?" Raven ventured.
If Nan was in a mood to unveil her dear mind, he wanted her voice to
rush on and on in that sweet staccato. And her answer was in itself
surprising:
"Aunt Anne."
Raven sat looking at her, a slow smile dawning. There she was, "prim as
a dish," Charlotte would say, her two braids down her back, her hands
clasped about her knees. He had never, the undercurrent in his mind
still reminded him, been so alone with her since the days when they had,
with an unspoken sense of lawlessness, slipped away together for a day's
fishing or a breathless orchid hunt in the woods. The adventures had
been less and less frequent as time ran on and it had begun to dawn on
Raven that they were entirely contrary to Aunt Anne's sense of New
England decencies. After each occasion Nan would be mysteriously absent
for a half day, at least, and when she reappeared she was a little shyer
of him, more silent toward Aunt Anne. Had she been put to bed, or shut
up with tasks, to pay the tax on her stolen pleasures? He never knew. He
did know, however, that when he proposed taking her off to wild delights
that made her eyes glow with anticipation she always refused, unless he
acceded to her plea to slip away: always to slip away, not to tell.
Could it be she had known by a child's hard road to knowledge--of
observation, silence, unaided conclusion--that Aunt Anne would never
allow them to run away to play? Curious, pathetic, abnormal even, to
have been jealous of a child! Then he pulled himself up with the shocked
sense, now become recurrent, that he had never allowed himself to attack
Anne's fair dignity with the weapon of unsuppressed guesswork about her
inner motives. He had assumed, he had felt obliged to assume, they were
as fine as her white hands. All the more reason for not assailing them
now when she was withdrawn into her strange distance. Yet one source of
wonder might be allowed him to explore unhindered: the presence of Nan
here at his hearth, inviting him to know her to the last corner of her
honest mind. She was even eager in this loving hospitality. He would
hardly have seen how to define the closeness of their relation. She had
turned her eyes from the fire to meet his.
"Well?" she said. "What?"
"I was thinking how queer it is," said Raven, "we never've been alone
together very much--'all told' as Charlotte would say--and here we sit
as if we were going to be here forever and talk out all the things."
"What things?" asked Nan.
She was not looking at him now, but back into the fire and she had a
defensive air, as if she expected to find herself on her guard.
"Lots of 'em," said Raven. "The money." His voice sounded to her as if
he cursed it, and again he pulled himself up. "What are we going to do
with it?"
"Aunt Anne's," she said, not as a question but a confirmation.
"Yes. I can't refuse it. That means throwing it back on you. If I won't
decide, I'm simply making you do it for me. I don't see anything for it
but our talking the thing out and making up our minds together."
"No," said Nan. "I sha'n't help you."
"You won't?"
"I suppose it amounts to that."
"Now why the dickens not?"
Nan kept up her stare at the fire. She seemed to be debating deeply,
even painfully.
"Rookie," she said, at last, in a tumultuous rush, "I never meant to say
this. I don't know what'll come of saying it. But you've had a terrible
sort of life. It's almost worse than any life I know. You've been
smothered--by women." This last she said with difficulty, and Raven
reddened, in a reflecting shame. "You've done what they expected you to.
And it's all been because you're too kind. And too humble. You think it
doesn't matter very much what happens to you."
"You've hit it there," said Raven, with a sudden distaste for himself.
"It doesn't."
"And if I could clear your way of every sort of bugbear just by deciding
things for you, I wouldn't do it."
"Don't try to change my destiny," said Raven, plucking up spirit to
laugh at her and lead her away from this unexpected clarity of analysis
that could only mean pain for both of them. "I'm old, dear. I'm not very
malleable, very plastic. We're not, at forty-odd."
"And if," said Nan deliberately, "I loved you better, yes, even better
than I do (if I could!) I wouldn't tell you. It would be putting bonds
on you. It would be setting up the old slavery. The more I loved you,
the more I should be taking over the old tyranny: direct succession,
Rookie, don't you see?"
Here she laughed, though with some slight bitterness, and he did see.
Aunt Anne had ruled his life, to the drying up of normal springs in it.
Nan didn't mean to accept the inheritance. He was profoundly touched, by
her giving so much grave thought to it, at least.
"But, dearest child," he said, "what does it matter now? I'm rather a
meager person. You couldn't dress me up with attributes, out of your
dear mind. I shouldn't know how to wear 'em. I'm no end grateful to you
for wanting to. But if you gave me the earth for a football now I'm too
stiff to kick it. It's a curve, life is. Don't you know that? You're on
the up-grade, you and Dick. I may not have got very far, but I'm on the
down."
"And yet," said Nan, turning and laying a finger on the book at her
side, "you can read a thing like that, a man's life turned inside out
for you to see, and understand what he meant by it, and then say the
game's up. You make me tired."
If he made her tired, she made him unaffectedly surprised.
"But, Nan," he said, "I didn't know you caught on so tremendously to the
old chap. I didn't know it meant so very much to you."
"Of course it means things to me," she said. "Anyway because it does to
you. You came up here sick, sick at heart, sick in your mind, because
you've been through the War and you've seen what's underneath our
proprieties and our hypocrisies. You see we're still in the jungle. And
it's nearly killed you out, Rookie, the dear you inside you that's not
at home in the jungle. You wouldn't believe me if I told you what kind
of a Rookie you are. Things hurt you like blazes. And then here comes
Old Crow, just as if he rose out of his grave and pointed a finger at
you. And he says, 'Don't be afraid, even of the jungle.' And suddenly
you weren't afraid. And now you're afraid again, and talk about downward
curves, and all that. Why, Rookie, I'm older than you are, years and
years."
Raven's mouth and eyes were wide open in amazement at her.
"I'm damned!" said he conversationally. "The way you young things go on.
You put us in our places. Dick does, too. You've heard him. But, as I
remember, then you had a tendency to choke him off."
"We won't discuss Dick," said she, again prim as a dish. "And I'm not
putting you in your place because I belong to my own generation. It's
only because you fill up the foreground. I have to look at you. I can't
see anything else. I never could. And as a matter of fact, I don't
belong to this generation. I haven't got their conceit and their
swagger. Sometimes I wish I had. I can't even talk their slang. I can't
smoke a cigarette."
Then Raven remembered, as if she had invited a beam of light to throw up
what would appeal to him as her perfections, that she did seem to him an
alien among her youthful kind, and a shy alien at that, as if she hoped
they might not discover how different she was and put her through some
of those subtle tortures the young have in wait for a strange creature
in the herd.
"No," he said, "you're not like the rest of them. I should have said it
was because you're more beautiful. But it's something beyond that. What
is it?"
"Don't you know?" said Nan, turning to him, incredulous and even a
little accusatory, as if he should long ago have settled it for her
doubting mind whether it was a gain for her or irreparable loss. "No, I
see you don't. Well, it's Aunt Anne."
"Aunt Anne?"
"Yes. I never had the college life girls have now. When she sent me to
the seminary, it was the privatest one she could find. If she could have
exiled me to mid-Victorianism she would. I don't say I should have liked
college life. Maybe I shouldn't. Except the athletics. Anyhow, I can
hold my own there. I was enough of a tomboy to get into training and
keep fit. And Rookie--now don't tell--I never do--I see lots of girls,
perfectly nice girls, too, doing things Aunt Anne would have died before
she'd let me do. And what do you think? I don't envy them because
they're emancipated. I look at them, and I feel precisely what Aunt Anne
would feel, though I don't seem to get excited about it. The same word
comes into my mind, that word all the girls have run away from:
unladylike! Isn't that a joke, Rookie? Charlotte would say it's the
crowner."
"You're a sweet thing, Nan," said Raven, musing. He did wonder whether
she was really in revolt against Aunt Anne's immovable finger.
"Smoking!" said Nan, her eyebrows raised in humorous recollection. "I
used to be half dead over there, dog tired, keyed up to the last notch.
You know! I'd have given a year of life for a cigarette, when I saw what
the others got out of it. I was perfectly willing to smoke. I was eager
to. But I'd think of Aunt Anne, and I simply couldn't do it."
Then it seemed to him that, since Aunt Anne's steel finger had resulted
in such a superfine product of youth, they'd better not blame her too
radically. It was her tyranny, but it was a tyranny lineally sprung from
a stately past.
"I don't believe it was Aunt Anne alone," he said. "It was your
remembering a rather fine inheritance. Your crowd think they're very
much emancipated, but they've lost the sense of form, beauty, tradition.
You couldn't go all the way with them. You couldn't be rough-haired."
"At any rate," said Nan, "I can't be young: in the sense they're young.
I'm a 'strayed reveler,' that's all. But I don't know why I'm painting a
Sargent portrait of me. Yes, I do. I want to squeeze everything I can
out of this darling minute together, so when we don't have any more
minutes I can go back to this. And you can remember, in case you ever
need me, just what sort of an old Nan I am."
"And you suggest," said Raven, "my kidnaping a nice New England woman
and her baby and carting them off to the Malay Peninsula."
Nan turned upon him delightedly. He could not know what he did for her
by juggling the Tira myth into raillery.
"But think, Rookie," she said, "a woman so beautiful she's more than
that. She's mystery. Now, isn't she beautiful?"
"Beautiful," Raven agreed, and the picture of her, madonna-like, in the
woods, suddenly smote the eyes of his mind and blinded them to all but
Tira.
She saw him wince, and went on more falteringly, but still determined to
go all the way.
"Into a new world, Rookie, all ferns and palms."
"And snakes!"
"Perfectly honest, perfectly free, and no jungle except the kind that
grows up in a night."
"And you," said Raven, "with your New England traditions and your
inherited panic over a cigarette!"
They looked at each other across the length of the hearth, and it all
seemed delightfully funny to them--their solitude, their oneness of
mind--and they began to laugh. And at the combined shout of their
merriment (almost competitive it was, in the eagerness of each to
justify the particular preciousness of the moment) the door opened and
Dick came in, halted, stared, in a surprise that elicited one last hoot
at the unexpectedness of things, and indulged himself in a satirical
comment of greeting, far from what he had intended. Poor Dick! he was
always making sage resolutions on the chance of finding Raven and Nan
together, but the actuality as inevitably overthrew him.
"Oh," said he, "that's it, is it? So I thought."
If he thought it, he was none the less unwise in saying so. He knew
that, knew the effect he had produced, and yet was powerless to modify
it. Nan was plainly taken aback, and she knew why. He was destroying her
happy moment, snatching it out of any possible sequence of hours here
with Rookie. Dick had come and he would stay. Raven read the boy's face
and was bored. He had seen that look too much of late. But he rose and
went forward with the appropriate air of welcome.
"Well, old boy," said he, his hand on Dick's shoulder, "why didn't you
'phone up? There'd have been something ready for you. No matter. We'll
make a raid on the pantry."
"I don't want anything," said Dick morosely.
His eyes never left Nan. They traveled from her braids to her feet. Why,
his angry gaze demanded, was she sitting here in a beguiling
masquerade--silly, too! The masquerade was silly. But it made her into
something so unapproachable in the citadel of a childhood she had no
lien on any longer that his heart ached within him. Except for that one
kiss in France--a kiss so cruelly repudiated after (most cruelly because
she had made it seem as if it were only a part of her largess to the
War) he had found little pleasure in Nan. Yet there could be such
pleasure with her. The generous beauties of her mind and heart looked to
him a domain large enough for a life's exploring. But even the woman who
had given him the kiss in France had vanished, withdrawn into the little
girl Raven seemed to be forever wakening in her. He got out of his
driving coat and stepped into the hall to drop it. When he came back,
Nan had made room at the fire and Raven had drawn up another chair.
"Now," said Raven, "I'll forage for some grub."
At that, he left them, and Nan thought bitterly it was the cowardice of
man. Dick was in the sulks and she was to suffer them alone.