The blessed diversion of eating ended, a blank moment stared them in the
face. What to say next? Were Nan and Dick, Raven wondered, to go on
fighting? Was it the inevitable course of up-to-date courtship? Perhaps
the new generation, from its outlook on elemental things, was taking to
marriage by capture, clubbing the damsel and striding off, her limpness
flung over a brawny arm. It seemed to him a singularly bare, unshaded
way to the rose-leaf bowers his poets had been used to sing; but
undoubtedly the roads were many, and this was one. Possibly the poets
wouldn't say the same now. Dick ought to know. But at least there must
be no warfare here in this warm patch of shelter snatched out of the
cold and dark. His hand was on Old Crow's journal, Dick's inheritance,
he thought, as well as his, and now a fortunate pretext to stave off an
awkward moment.
"Run over this," he said. "Nan and I've been doing it. I don't believe
we're in any hurry for bed."
Dick took it, with no show of interest. How should he have been
interested, forced to switch his mind from the pulsating dreams of youth
to worn mottled covers?
"What is it?" he asked indifferently.
Raven was rather curious now. What impression would Old Crow make,
slipping in like this, unheralded?
"Never mind," he said. "Run over it and get on to it, if you can. I'd
like to know what you think."
Dick, without much heart, began to read, and Raven lighted a pipe.
First, a tribute to Nan's abstinence, he passed her the cigarettes, and
when she shook her head, smiled back at her, as if he reminded her of
secrets they had together. Presently she got up, and Dick, closing the
book, threw it on the table.
"Bed?" Raven asked, also getting up, and Nan said good night and was
gone.
The two men sat down, each with the certainty that here they were to
stick until something determining had been said, Raven irritated by the
prospect and Dick angrily ready.
"Well," said Raven, indicating the book, "what do you think?"
"That?" said Dick absently. "Oh, I don't know. Somebody trying to write
without knowing how?"
Raven gave it up. Either he had not read far, or he had not hungered or
battled enough to be moved by it.
"Now, look here," said Dick, "I may not be interested in that, but
there's something I am interested in. And we've got to talk it out, on
the spot."
"Well!" said Raven. He mended the fire which didn't need it, and then
sat down and filled his pipe. He wasn't smoking so very much but, he
thought, with a bored abandonment to the situation, gratefully taking
advantage of a pipe's proneness to go out. While he attended to it he
could escape the too evidently condemnatory gaze from those young eyes
that never wavered, chiefly because they could not be deflected by a
doubt of perfectly apprehending everything they saw.
"Now," said Dick, plunging, "what do you want to do this kind of thing
for?"
"What kind of thing?" asked Raven, lighting up. "Smoke?"
Dick looked at him accusingly, sure of his own rightness and the clarity
of the issue.
"You know," he said. "This business. Compromising Nan."
Raven felt that slight quickening of the blood, the nervous thrill along
the spine a dog must feel when his hair rises in canine emergency. He
smoked silently while he was getting himself in hand, and, in the space
of it, he had time for a good deal of rapid thinking. The outrage and
folly of it struck him first and then the irony. Here was Dick, who
flaunted his right to leave nothing unsaid where realistic verse
demanded it, and he was consigning Nan to the decorum Aunt Anne herself
demanded. Was the young animal of the present day really unchanged from
the first man who protected his own by a fettering seclusion, simply
because it was his own? Was Dick's general revolt only the yeasty
turmoil sure to take one form or another, being simply the swiftness of
young blood? Was his general bravado only skin deep? Raven hardly knew
how to take him. He wouldn't be angry, outwardly at least. The things
Dick had said, the things he was prepared to say, he would be expected
to resent, but he must deny himself. It was bad for the boy, and more, a
subtle slur on Nan. They mustn't squabble over her, as if her sweet
inviolateness could be in any way touched by either of them. Presently
he took his pipe out, looked at it curiously as if it did not altogether
please him and remarked:
"Dick, you're a fool."
"Oh, yes," said Dick, with a bitterness that curled his lip a little,
"I'm a young fool, too, I suppose. Well, thank God for that. I am young,
and I know it, and just what I'm getting out of it and what I've a right
to get. You can't play that game with me, Uncle Jack. You simply can't
do it. The old game's played out."
"And what," said Raven mildly, "is the old game? And what's the new one
going to be? You'll have to tell me. I don't know."
"The old game," said Dick, "was precisely what it was in politics. The
old men made the rules and the young were expected to conform. The old
men made wars and the young fought 'em. The old men lied and skulked and
the young had to pull them out of the holes they got into. I suppose
you'd say the War was won at Chequers Court. Well, I shouldn't. I should
say it was won by the young men who had their brains blown out, and lost
their eyes and their legs."
"No," said Raven quietly, "I shouldn't say the War was won at Chequers
Court. We needn't fight over that. The thing that gets me is why we need
to fight at all. There's been a general armistice and Eastern Europe
doesn't seem to have heard of it. They go on scrapping. You don't seem
to have heard of it either. You come home here and find me peaceably
retired to Charlotte and Jerry and my Sabine Farm, and you proceed to
declare war on me. What the devil possesses you?"
"Yes," said Dick, the muscle twitching in his lip, "I do find you here.
And Nan with you."
"Dick," said Raven sharply, "we'll leave Nan out of this."
Dick, though the tone was one that had called him to attention years
ago, told himself he wasn't afraid of it now. Those old bugaboos
wouldn't work.
"I am going," he said, "to marry Nan."
"Good for you," responded Raven. "No man could do better."
"Do you mean to tell me," countered Dick, "you're not bluffing? Or do
you actually want to let her marry me and you--you'd continue this under
my nose?"
Raven stared at him a full minute, and Dick angrily met him. "Stare
away," Dick was thinking. "I'm in the right. I can look you down."
"Dick," said Raven finally, "I called you a fool. It isn't such a bad
thing to be a fool. We're most of us fools, of one sort or another. But
don't let me think you're a dirty-minded little cad. Now I don't want to
bring Nan into this, but I rather think I've got to. What are you
driving at? Come, out with it!"
To his wonderment, his pain amounting to a shock of perplexity and
grief, he saw Dick's face redden and the tears spring to his eyes. How
horribly the boy cared, perhaps up to the measure of Nan's deserts, and
yet with what a childish lack of values! For he had no faith either in
Nan or in old Jack. The ties of blood, of friendship, were not holding.
He was as jealous as Othello, and no sane certainties were standing him
in stead. Dick, feeling the painful tears, felt also the shame of them.
He wanted to answer on the instant, now Raven had given him his chance;
but so unused was he to the menace of betraying emotion that he was not
even sure of not blubbering like a boy. He swallowed and came out with
it:
"You've got some sort of hold on her nobody else has. You've hynotized
her. She eats out of your hand."
Raven, in despair, sat looking at him. He ought, he felt, to be able to
laugh it all away, but he was too bewildered and too sorry.
"Dick," said he finally, "I shall have to say it again. You're an awful
fool. Nan and I were always the best of friends. I rather think I have
known her in a way none of the rest of you have. But--hypnotized her!
Look at me, Dick. Remember me plodding along while you grew up; think
what sort of a chap I am. You won't find anything spectacular about me.
Never has been, never will be. And Nan, of all people! little Nan!"
Dick forgot the imminence of a breaking voice and humid eyes. Raven, he
felt, wasn't playing the game. He was skulking out of it.
"Do you deny," he said, in a voice so loud and hoarse that it startled
him as it did Raven, "that you're in love with her?"
"Good God!" said Raven. He rose, laid his pipe on the mantel and stood,
trembling, even in his clenched hands. "What is there to answer," he got
out at length, "to a question like that? You've just reminded me I'm
past my youth. Why don't you remember it yourself when it'll do you some
good? I'm an old chap, and you----"
"You're as fit as ever you were in your life," said Dick, as if he
grudged it to him. "And more fascinating, I suppose, to a girl like her.
There's something pathetic about it. It's half pity, too! Nothing so
dangerous in the world."
Raven swung round, walked to the window and, hands in his pockets, stood
looking out. In love with Nan! well, he did love Nan better than any
created thing. All the old tests, the old obediences, would be nothing
to him if he could consecrate them to Nan, her happiness, her safety in
this dark world. How about his life? Yes, he would give that, a small
thing, if Nan needed the red current of it to quicken her own. But "in
love" as Dick understood it! If you were to judge Dick's comprehension
of it from his verse, love was a sex madness, a mortal lure for the
earth's continuance, by the earth begot. And who had unconsciously held
out that lure to him but the woman of mystery up there on the road in
that desolate house with her brutal husband and her deficient child? He
had seen the innocent lure, he had longed to put out his hand to the
hand unconsciously beckoning. Through the chill wintry night the message
came to him now. And only Nan could understand that the message might
come and that it was a part of the earth and to be forgotten, like a hot
wind or a thrilling song out of the dark--Nan, his darling, a part of
him, his understanding mind, as well as the fiber of his heart. Suddenly
he turned on Dick who was watching him, ready, it seemed, to pounce on
his first change of look.
"Dick," he said, "I adore Nan."
"Yes," said Dick, "I know you do. I told you----"
"But," broke in Raven, "you don't know anything about it."
"Oh," said Dick, "then I don't adore her, too."
Raven reflected. No, his inner mind told him, there was no community of
understanding between them. How should Dick traverse with him the long
road of rebuff and downfall he had traveled? How should youth ever be
expected to name the cup it has not tasted? For Dick, he thought again,
what is known as love was a simple, however overwhelming, matter of the
mounting blood, the growing year. For him it would be the ashes of
forgotten fire, the strange alembic mixed of bitter with the sweet. In
that moment he faced an acknowledged regret that he had not lived the
normal life of marriage at the start, the quieting of foolish fevers,
the witness of children. We are not, he reflected, quite solvent unless
we pay tribute before we go. He mused off into the vista of life as it
accomplishes itself not in great triumphal sweeps, but fitful music
hushed at intervals by the crash of brutal mischance, and only, at the
end, a solution of broken chords. Meantime Dick watched him, and Raven
at last, feeling the boy's eyes on him, came awake with a start.
"Yes, Dick," he answered gently, "of course you love her. And it ought
to do you good. It's a big thing to love Nan."
"Very well then," said Dick, his voice trembling a little in answer to
that gentler tone, "you let her alone, can't you? Nan's a different girl
when she's with you. It's no use denying it. You do hypnotize her."
"Dick," said Raven, "that's a beastly thing to say. If you mean it to be
as offensive as it sounds, you ought to be booted for it."
"Oh," said Dick, with a simple certainty in what he knew, "I don't blame
you as I should any other fellow that wasn't going through what you are.
That would be a simple matter to deal with: a chap that knew what he was
doing. You don't, old man. You may not know it, but you don't."
"For the land's sake!" said Raven, echoing Charlotte, "And what, again
for the land's sake, am I going through?"
"You know," said Dick uneasily because he did hope to avoid putting it
into words. "_Cafard._"
Raven had one of his moments of silence, getting hold of himself, taking
the matter in, with its forgotten enormity.
"So," he said, "you've adopted your mother's word for it. I hadn't
realized that."
"Oh, Mum's no such fool," said Dick. "She may be an aggravation and a
curse--I'll own that--but she's up to date. Why, Jack, anybody that ever
knew you'd know you're not yourself."
"No," thought Raven, "few of us are ourselves. We've been through the
War, my son. So have you; but you didn't have such a brittle old world
inside you to try to put together again after it was smashed. Your inner
world was in the making. Whatever you might feel in its collision with
the runaway planet of the mad human mind, it could right itself; its
atoms might cohere."
"You needn't think," proceeded Dick generously if a trifle too
magnificently, "I can't see. There's a lot of things I see that don't
bear talking about. I've pitched into you about Nan, but you needn't
suppose I don't know it's all a matter of hidden complexes."
Again recurring to Charlotte in this moment of need, Raven reflected
that he didn't know whether he was afoot or a-horseback.
"You don't mind, I hope," he said, with humility before this perfectly
equipped intelligence, "explaining a little."
"Why," said Dick, "there's all your previous life. It's a case of
inhibition. There was Miss Anne."
"Stop," said Raven, his curiosity over the boy's mind dying in a crash.
"Stop right there, Dick; you're making a fool of yourself. Now we'll go
to bed."
He got up and waited, and Dick, sulkily, rose too.
"You needn't think," he began, and Raven broke in:
"You needn't think I shall stand another word of your half-baked
psycho-deviltries. You can believe what you like. It'll harm nobody but
yourself. But you don't talk it here, or out you go. Now!"
The last word meant he was waiting to put out the light and Dick,
without another look at him, strode out of the room, snatched his
suit-case and went up the stairs. Raven heard the decisive click of his
door and, his own heart beating in a quick response to what he knew must
happen, turned on the light again and stood there silent, waiting. It
did happen. A soft rustle, like a breeze blowing down the stairs, and
Nan came in. She had taken off her child's dress, as if to show him she
had left their game behind her. The long braids were pinned up, and she
wore her dark walking dress. She was paler, much older, and he was
renewedly angry with Dick for banishing the Nan that was but an hour
ago. Perhaps that Nan would never come back.
"Darling Rookie," she said, so softly that the sound of it could not
have got half way up the stairs, "what's it all about?"
"About you, Nan," he answered, and denied himself the darling Nan he had
for her. "And being in love. And Dick's wanting you."
"It's more than that," said Nan wistfully. "He's been at you somehow.
He's dug ditches across your dear forehead and down your cheeks. What
d'he say, Rookie? What d'you say to him?"
Raven shook his head. He had no idea of inviting her into the
psycho-analytic ward of Dick's mind.
"Nan," he said, "the boy's unhappy. He's in love with you. No doubt
about it."
Nan, on her part, had nothing to say to this.
"What made you change your dress?" asked Raven. "You give me a funny
feeling, as if you'd put the little Nan to bed and come down here to say
you're going, in a minute, and never coming back."
"I am going," said Nan, "only not in a minute. Charlotte says Jerry
shall take me to the early train."
"Now, by George!" said Raven, so loudly she put her finger to her lip,
"if that's what Dick's done, he shall go himself, and know the reason,
too. Spoil my visit with you, break it all up? Why, I never had a visit
from you before."
"It's broken," said Nan. "You couldn't put it together again." The red
had come into her cheeks and her eyes showed a surface glitter he did
not know. "I'm going to leave you to Tenney--and Tira--and your
destiny--and Old Crow."
"Is this a part of your scheme?" asked Raven roughly. He was curiously
dashed, almost shamed by her repudiating him. "You're as bad as Dick.
He's been bringing all his psychopathic patter to bear on me, and you're
deserting me. Oh, come! Let's be safe and sane, like the Fourth."
"So we will be," said Nan. She was retreating toward the door. There
were simple natural things she wanted at that moment. She wanted to go
to him, put her arms about him, mother or child arms, as he might wish,
and bid him a good-by that would wrap him about like a cloak while they
were absent one from the other. He should have her lips as he had her
heart. Nan was an adventurer on the high seas of life. She cared very
little whether her boat rode the wave or sank, so it could unload the
gold and gems it carried on the sand of the world she loved. Rookie was
the home of her heart. The gold was all for him. But if he did not want
it--and meantime she was at the door. "Don't get up," she said, "to see
me off. If you do, he will, too, and there'll be more fireworks. No, no,
Rookie. Don't look like that. I'm not hateful about him, really, only he
has spoiled my fun."
"Why you should go," said Raven, advancing; "why you should leave this
house just because he's come!"
"No fun!" said Nan. "Do you see us, the three of us, sitting down to
meals together? No, Rookie. Can't be done. Good night."
Here she did turn definitely and went up the stairs, and Raven presently
followed. In his room he stood for a moment thinking, not of Dick, who
was troublesome, in an irritating way incident to biting young cubs just
aware of their teeth, but of the challenge that was Nan. Here she was,
all beauty, all wisdom, in the natal gifts of her, telling him, with
every breath, she loved him and only him. And yet, his knowledge of life
was quick to answer, it was the accretion of long hungers, the sum of
all desires since she was little and consigned to Aunt Anne's delicate
frigidities for nurture and, as the event proved, for penury. She had no
conception of a love as irresistible as hers was now abounding. In a
year or two, youth would meet her on the road of youth, and they would
kiss and old Rookie would become the dim duty of remembered custom. And
as he thought these things, his overwhelming revolt against earth and
its cruelty came over him, and he stood there gripping his hands into
their palms, again at open war with life. It was a question without an
answer, a hunger unfed, a promise broken. Eternal life was the soporific
distilled by man, in his pathetic cunning, to dull the anguish of
anticipated death. Standing there in the silence, he felt the waves of
loneliness going over him, and thought of Nan in her chamber across the
hall, angelic in her compassion, her arms ready for him as a mother is
ready for her child. The moonlight made arabesques on the walls, and he
walked to the window with an instinctive craving for the open. He stood
gripping the casing with both hands and looking up over the hillside
where also the light lay revealingly. Up there was the hut where Tira
might be now if Tenney had not wounded himself, fleeing in her turn from
earthly cruelty. Up there Old Crow had lived in his own revolt against
earth cruelty. And, with the thought, Old Crow seemed to be, not on the
hillside, but beside him, reading to him the testimony of the mottled
book, but more insistently, in a clearer voice. If it could be so, if
God had intention, not only toward his own colossal inventiveness, but
as touching the well-being of man--yes, and of the other creatures, too,
the pathetically oppressing and oppressed--if He had given man the
problem with no solution indicated, to work it out as he had worked out
pottery and fabrics, and light and talking over space--always in
conformity to law--it was stupendous. No matter how many million men
went to the building of the safeguarding reefs, no matter through what
blood and tears the garden of the earth was watered if the flower of
faith could grow at last.
"That is my legacy to the boy," he seemed to hear Old Crow repeating.
"He must not be afraid."
And as he was sinking off to sleep he had an idea he was praying,
perhaps to God; or was it to Old Crow? At any rate, he was saying:
"For God's sake look out for Nan. You don't need to make it so devilish
hard for Nan."
He was downstairs early. At the foot of the stairs stood Charlotte,
waiting. She looked--what? compassionate?
"She's gone," said Charlotte. "Jerry was up 'fore light."
"Gone?" echoed Raven. "At this time of day? What for? She'll have an
hour to wait."
"She would have it so," said Charlotte. "She was terrible anxious to git
off."
So, Raven thought, she didn't want to see either of them. She was tired
of them, of him with his stiff withdrawals and Dick's young puppyhood.
He ran upstairs, snatched some old riding breeches out of a closet, put
them on and, without a word to Charlotte, went to the barn. But her eye
was on him and she called out of the shed door:
"You took your saddle with you. Don't you know you did? There's nothin'
but your father's hangin' there, old as the hills."
Raven did not answer, or even turn his head. He went into the harness
room, found the old saddle hanging in its place, led out Nellie,
surprised at being expected to leave her oats, saddled her and rode
away. He was angry, with Nan, with all the childish trouble of the
business, and--as two neighbors agreed, seeing him gallop past--rode
like the devil, yet not coming upon Nan and Jerry until they were at the
station platform. Nan saw him first. She was gloriously glad, waving her
hand and laughing out. Jerry stood with mouth open, silent but
incurious, and Raven dismounted and threw him the reins.
"Hitch her behind," he said. "I'll go back with you. Got something extra
to blanket her?"
He came up to Nan, and they took hands and went into the waiting room
together. It was steaming hot from the monster stove and they retreated
again to the platform.
"Come out and walk," said Raven, "up to Pine Grove. You've got an hour,
you little simpleton. What did you run away for?"
The station is in a cluster of houses, awake early every morning when
the milk goes away. But the road across the track leads up a little rise
into Pine Grove, where church and sociables have picnics, the merrier
for the neighborliness of the few trains. Raven and Nan climbed the rise
almost at a run, and when they reached the shadowing pines, looked in at
the pure spaces, remembering, for the first time, the snow would bar
them out. They must keep to the road.
"Forty-eight minutes," said Raven. "We'll walk twenty and then cut back.
Come on."
They walked a little, raced a little, talked--not much--and laughed a
great deal. Raven was in the highest spirits, sure he was sending her
off happy, since she would go. Never afterward could they remember what
they talked about: only it seemed a fortunate moment stolen from the
penury of years. Again he took out his watch.
"Time's up!" he said, and they went back.
The station was alive with its small activities. Jerry was walking
Nellie up and down. The train came in and when Nan left him Raven
remembered they had not said good-by. There was a kind of permanence in
it; the moment had cemented something into bonds. When she had gone he
and Jerry got into the pung and drove away leading Nellie, and then
Raven remembered he had not breakfasted. They talked horse all the way
home, and when Dick, appearing on the porch, called to them:
"What you got Nellie for?"
Raven answered cheerfully:
"I took a notion."
Then he and Dick went in to breakfast, and Nan's name was not mentioned.
Charlotte, Raven concluded, had told the boy she was gone. He seemed to
detect in Dick some watchful kindness toward himself, the responsible
care attendants manifest toward the incapable. Dick was, he concluded,
bent on therapeutic measures.