XL

Raven, to his sorry amusement, discovered something. It was Milly, and

she had changed. Indubitably Milly regarded him with a mixture of wonder

and of awe. He had taken command of the situation in the house and

developed it rationally. The house itself had become a converging point

for all medical science could do for a man hit in a vital spot and

having little chance of recovery. But what Raven knew to be the common

sense of the measures he brought to pass, Milly, in her wildness of

anxiety, looked upon as the miracles of genius. She even conciliated

him, as the poor human conciliates his god. She brought him the burnt

offering of her expressed belief, her humility of admiration. And

whenever one of the family was allowed to supplement the nurses, by day

or night, she effaced herself in favor of Raven or Nan. Raven was the

magician who knew where healing lay. Nan was warmth and coolness, air

and light. Dick's eyes followed Nan and she answered them, comforting,

sustaining him, Raven and Milly fully believed, in his hold on earth.

But as to Milly, Raven had to keep on wondering over her as she wondered

at him. So implicit had been his belief in her acquired equipment for

applying accepted remedies to the mischances of life, that he was amazed

at seeing her devastated, overthrown. She was even less calm than the

women he remembered here in this country neighborhood. When sickness

entered their homes, they were, for the most part, models of efficient

calm. They had reserves of energy. He wondered if Milly had crumbled so

because she had not only to act but to decide how to seem to act. She

had to keep up the wearisome routine of fitting her feelings to her

behavior, her behavior to her feelings. There were not only things to be

done; there were also the social standards of what ought, in crises, to

be felt. She had to satisfy her gods. And she simply wasn't strong

enough. Her hold was broken. She knew it, clutched at him and hung on

him, a dead weight, while he buoyed her up. Were they all, he wondered,

victims of the War? Milly, as she said that night when she came to him

in her stark sincerity while Dick lay unconscious, had given him up

once. She had given him to the War, and done the act with the high

decorum suited to it. And the country had returned him to her. But now,

grotesque, bizarre beyond words, she had to surrender him to a fool

"shooting pa'tridges." For facing a travesty like that, she had no

decorum left.

Dick, too, was the victim of abnormal conditions. He had been summoned

to the great act of sacrifice to save the world, and the call had

challenged him to after judgments he was not ripe enough to meet. It had

beguiled him into a natural sophistry. For had not the world, in its

need, called mightily on the sheer strength and endurance of youth to

slay the dragon of brute strength in her enemies? Youth had done it.

Therefore there was no dragon, whether of the mind or soul, it could not

also slay. His fellows told him so, and because they were his fellows

and spoke the tongue he understood, he believed it with a simple honesty

that was Dick.

As to Nan, she seemed to Raven the one sane thing in a bewildered world;

and for himself: "I'm blest if I believe I'm so dotty, after all," he

mused. "What do you think about it?" And this last he addressed, not to

himself, but to the ever-present intelligence of Old Crow. He kept

testing things by what Old Crow would think. He spoke of him often, as

of a mind active in the universe, but only to Nan. And one night, late

enough in the spring for the sound of running water and a bitterness of

buds in the air, he said it to her when she came down the path to him

where he stood listening to the stillness broken by the ticking of the

season's clock--steady, familiar sounds, that told him winter had broken

and the heart of things was beating on to leaf and bloom. He had, if he

was not actually waiting for her, hoped she would come out, and now he

saw her coming, saw her step back into the hall for a scarf and appear

again, holding it about her shoulders. At last, firm as she was in

spirit, she had changed. She was thinner, with more than the graceful

meagerness of youth, and her eyes looked pathetically large from her

pale face. She had seen Dick go slipping down the slope, and now that

beneficent reactions were drawing him slowly back again, she was feeling

the waste of her own bodily fortitude.

"Where shall we go?" she asked him. "Been to the hut lately?"

No, Raven told her, he hadn't been there for days. They crossed the road

and began the ascent into the woods.

"So you don't know whether she's been there?" Nan asked. She stopped to

breathe in the wood fragrances, coming now like a surprise. She had

almost forgotten "outdoors."

"Yes," said Raven. "I know. Sometimes I fancy she won't need to go there

again. Tenney's a wreck. He sits there in the kitchen and doesn't speak.

He isn't thinking about her. He's thinking of himself."

"How do you know? You haven't been over?"

"Yes, I went over the morning after the shooting. I intended to tell

Tira to get her things on and come down to the house. But when I saw

him--saw them--I couldn't."

"You were sorry for him?" Nan prompted.

They had reached the hut, and Raven took out the key from under the

stone. Close by, there was a velvet fern frond ready to unfurl. He

unlocked the door and they went in. Her last question he did not answer

until he had thrown up windows and brought out chairs to the veranda at

the west. When they were seated, he went on probing for his past

impression and speaking thoughtfully.

"No, I don't know that I was particularly sorry for him. But somehow the

two of them there together, with that poor little devil between

them--well, it seemed to me I couldn't separate them. That's marriage, I

suppose. Anyhow it looked to me like it: something you couldn't undo

because they wouldn't have it undone."

Nan turned on him her old impetuous look.

"You simpleton!" she had it on her tongue to say. "She doesn't want it

undone because anybody that lifts a finger will get you--not her--deeper

into the mire." But she did say: "I don't believe you can even guess

what she wants, chiefly because she doesn't want anything for herself.

But if you didn't ask her to leave him, what did you do?"

"I told him to hold himself ready for arrest."

"You're a funny child," commented Nan. "You warn the criminal and give

him a chance to skip."

"Yes," said Raven unsmilingly. "I hoped he would. I thought I was giving

her one more chance. If he did skip, so much the better for her."

"How did she look?" asked Nan, and then added, tormenting herself,

"Beautiful?"

"Yes, beautiful. Not like an angel, as we've seen her. Like a saint:

haggard, with hungry eyes. I suppose the saints hunger, don't you? And

thirst." He was looking off through the tree boles and Nan, also

looking, found the distance dim and felt the sorrow of youth and spring.

"Everything," said Raven, "seems to be in waves. It has its climax and

goes down. Tenney's reached the climax of his jealousy. Now he's got

himself to think about, and the other thing will go down. Rather a big

price for Dick to pay, to make Tira safe, but he has paid and I fancy

she's safe." He turned to her suddenly. "Milly's very nice to you," he

asserted, half interrogatively.

He saw the corner of her mouth deepen a little as she smiled. Milly had

not, they knew, been always nice.

"Yes," she agreed, "very nice. She gives me all the credit she doesn't

give you about doctors and nurses and radiographs and Dick's hanging on

by his eyelids. She says I've saved him."

"So you have," said Raven. "You've kept his heart up. And now you're

tired, my dear, and I want you to go away."

"To go away?" said Nan. "Where?"

"Anywhere, away from us. We drain you like the deuce."

"No," said Nan, turning from him and speaking half absently, "I can't go

away."

"Why can't you?"

"He'd miss me."

"He'd know why you went."

Her old habit of audacious truth-telling constrained her.

"I should have to write to him," she said. "And I couldn't. I couldn't

keep it up. I can baby him all kinds of ways when he's looking at me

with those big eyes. But I couldn't write him as he'd want me to. I

couldn't, Rookie. It would be a promise."

"Milly thinks you have promised." This he ventured, though against his

judgment.

"No," said Nan. "No, I haven't promised. Do you want me to?"

"I don't know," Raven answered, without a pause, as if he had been

thinking about it interminably. "If it had some red blood in it, if you

were--well, if you loved him, Nan, I should be mighty glad. I'd like to

see you living, up to the top notch, having something you knew was the

only thing on earth you wanted. But these half and half things, these

falterings and doing things because somebody wants us to! God above us!

I've faltered too much myself. I'd rather have made all the mistakes a

man can compass, done it without second thought, than have ridden up to

the wall and refused to take it."

"Do you think of her all the time?" she ventured, in her turn, and

perversely wondered if he would think she meant Tira and not Aunt Anne.

But he knew. "No," he said, "I give you my word she's farther away from

me than she ever was in her life. For a while she was here, at my elbow,

asking me what I was going to do about her Palace of Peace. But

suddenly--I don't know whether it's because my mind has been on

Dick--suddenly I realized she was gone. It's the first time." Here he

stopped, and Nan knew he meant it was the first time since his boyhood

that he had felt definitely free from that delicate tyranny. And being

jealous for him and his dominance over his life, she wondered if another

woman had crowded out the memory of Aunt Anne. Had Tira done it?

"And you haven't decided about the money."

"I've decided," he surprised her by saying at once, "to talk it out with

Anne."

She could only look at him.

"One night," he continued, "when Dick was at his worst, I was there

alone with him, an hour or so, and I was pretty well keyed up. I seemed

to see things in a stark, clear way. Nothing mattered: not even Dick,

though I knew I never loved the boy so much as I did at that minute. I

seemed to see how we're all mixed up together. And the things we do to

help the game along, the futility of them. And suddenly I thought I

wouldn't stand for any futility I could help, and I believe I asked Old

Crow if I wasn't right. 'Would you?' I said. I knew I spoke out loud,

for Dick stirred. I felt a letter in my pocket--it was about the estate,

those bonds, you remember--and I knew I'd got to make up my mind about

Anne's Palace of Peace."

Nan's heart was beating hard. Was he going to follow Aunt Anne's

command, the poor, pitiful letter that seemed so generous to mankind and

was yet so futile in its emotional tyranny?

"And I made up my mind," he said, with the same simplicity of hanging to

the fact and finding no necessity for explaining it, "to get hold of

Anne, put it to her, let her see I meant to be square about it, but it

had got to be as I saw it and not as she did. Really because I'm here

and she isn't."

Her eyes filled with tears, and as she made no effort to restrain them,

they ran over and spilled in her lap. She had thought hard for him, but

never so simply, so sternly as this.

"How do you mean, Rookie," she asked humbly, in some doubt as to her

understanding. "How can you get hold of Aunt Anne?"

"I don't know," said he. "But I've got to. I may not be able to get at

her, but she must be able to get at me. She's got to. She's got to

listen and understand I'm doing my best for her and what she wants. Old

Crow understands me. And when Anne does--why, then I shall feel free."

And while he implied it was freedom from the tyranny of the bequest, she

knew it implied, too, a continued freedom from Aunt Anne. Would he ever

have set his face so fixedly toward that if he had not found Tira? And

what was Tira's silent call to him? Was it of the blood only, because

she was one of those women nature has manacled with the heaviness of the

earth's demands? Strangely, she knew, nature acts, sometimes sending a

woman child into the world with the seeds of life shut in her baby hand,

a wafer for men to taste, a perfume to draw them across mountain and

plain. The woman may be dutiful and sound, and then she suffers

bewildered anguish from its potency; or she may league herself with the

powers of darkness, and then she is a harlot of Babylon or old Rome. And

Tira was good. Whether or not Raven heard the call of her

womanhood--here Nan drew back as from mysteries not hers to touch--he

did feel to the full the extremity of her peril, the pathos of her

helplessness, the spell of her beauty. She was as strong as the earth

because it was the maternal that spoke in her, and all the forces of

nature must guard the maternal, that its purpose may be fulfilled. Tira

could not speak the English language with purity, but this was

immaterial. She was Tira, and as Tira she had innocently laid on Raven

the old, dark magic. Nan was under no illusion as to his present

abandonment of Tira's cause. That he seemed to have accepted the ebbing

of her peril, that he should speak of it with something approaching

indifference, did not mean that he had relaxed his vigilance over her.

He was not thinking of her with any disordered warmth of sympathy. But

he was thinking. Suddenly she spoke, not knowing what she was going to

say, but out of the unconscious part of her:

"Rookie, you don't want anything really, do you, except to stand by and

give us all a boost when we're down?"

Raven considered a moment.

"I don't know," he said, "precisely what I do want. If you told me Old

Crow didn't want anything but giving folks a boost, I'm with you there.

He actually didn't. You can tell from his book."

"I can't seem to bear it," said Nan. She was looking at the darkening

woods and her wet eyes blurred them more than the falling dusk. "It

isn't healthy. It isn't right. I want you to want things like fury, and

I don't know whether I should care so very much if you banged yourself

up pretty well not getting them. And if you actually got them! O Rookie!

I'd be so glad."

"You're a dear child," said Raven, "a darling child."

"That's it," said Nan. "If you didn't think I was a child, perhaps you'd

want me. O Rookie! I wish you wanted me!"

Into Raven's mind flashed the picture of Anne on her knees beside him

saying, in that sharp gasp of her sorrow, "You don't love me." This was

no such thing, yet, in some phase, was life going to repeat itself over

and over in the endless earth journeys he might have to make, futilities

of mismated minds, the outcry of defrauded souls? But at least this

wasn't his cowardly silence on the heel of Anne's gasping cry. He could

be honest here, for this was Nan.

"My darling," he said, "you're nearer to me than anything in this

world--or out of it. Don't you make any mistake about that. And if I

don't want things 'like fury,' as you say, it's a matter of the

calendar, that's all. Dick wants them like fury. So do you. I'm an old

chap, dear. You can't set back the clock."

But he had pushed her away, as his aloofness had pushed Anne. He had

thrown Anne back upon her humiliated self. He had tossed Nan forward

into Dick's generation and hers. But here was the difference. She wasn't

going to cry out, "You don't love me." Instead, she turned to him,

shivering a little and drawing her scarf about her shoulders.

"We'd better go down," she said. "It's getting cold. Dick'll be

wondering."

They got up and Raven set the chairs inside the hut and took his glance

about to see if all was in order: for he did not abandon the unwilling

hope that Tira might sometime come. As they went down the hill the talk

turned to the hylas and the spring, but when they reached the house Nan

did not go in to Dick. She went to her own room and lay down on her bed

and thought passionately of leaving Rookie free. How was it possible?

Could he be free while she was bound? Sometimes of late she had been so

tired that she could conceive of no refuge but wild and reckless outcry.

And what could he think she meant when she said: "I wished you wanted

me"?