IDLE DAYS
June was well along before Oliver began seriously to contemplate
bringing his self-styled “vacation” to an end. May had been glorious.
Not since the year he left college had he known what it was to be idle
and, in a manner of speaking, independent. He revelled in privileges
that had been denied him for years—such as lying abed in the morning
till he felt good and ready to turn out; strolling aimlessly whither he
wished without troubling himself over the thought that he had to get
back at a given time; loafing;—Lord, he couldn’t remember that there
ever had been a time when he actually enjoyed the dishonorable luxury of
loafing!—on street corners, in Fry’s drug store, in the public library,
on friendly lawns and front porches; fishing, tramping, motoring,
reading—all the things he had dreamed of in the black days across the
sea.
The country was green and fresh and sparkling with the glories of a
summer just taking over the heritage of a blithe and bountiful spring.
The dust and grit of jaded August were still far enough away to be
unconsidered; the roadside bushes and hedges, the trees and the grass
were without the coat of gray that settles down upon them as summer
ages; the brooks and the creeks were cool and laughing in a world of
plenty, disdainful of the drought that was sure to fall upon and suck
them in the blistering “dog days.”
Even the sinister stretches of Death Swamp, across which he looked from
the oak-shaded citadel that he would always call home, were not so
repelling as they had been in days of yore. The pools, the hummocks, the
patches of defiant reeds, the black shades of the quagmires seemed oddly
to have lost much of their ugliness; the vastness that used to appall
him was gone, just as the old church down the lane seemed to have shrunk
from an immense, overpowering structure into a pitiful little shanty
supporting a ridiculous little steeple. The swamp was green and almost
kindly in its serenity; the wall of willows that surrounded it was
greener still and no longer the horrifying barrier beyond which no man
dared to tread; the soft blue of the June sky lay upon the still and
supposedly bottomless pond in the middle of these useless acres.
But at night—ah, that was different! The swamp turned grim and dismal
and forbidding. The grown man became once more the little boy as he
looked out over the moonlit waste or tried to pierce its black shadows
on a starless night; the same old creepy sensations of dread and terror
stole over him, and he who knew not the meaning of fear shivered.
During the first week he spent many happy, care-free hours with Jane
Sage. They took long walks through country lanes, visited the old haunts
he had known as smuggler, pirate and brigand, and marveled to find that
they were still boy and girl. It was hard for him to believe that this
tall, beautiful, glowing creature was the Jane Sage of another day, hard
for him to realize that this ripe, mature, fully developed woman with
the calm, clear eyes of understanding and the soft, deep voice, had once
been a spindling, giggling girl in pinafores and pigtails, and later a
half-formed maid in unnoticeable shirt waists and ill-hanging skirts.
She reminded him that she was twenty-five. Why shouldn’t she be grown-up
at twenty-five? What was surprising in that? Everybody else grew up and
got old, didn’t they?
“Yes,” said he, “but somehow you seem to have grown up differently from
other people. As if magic had something to do with it.”
“I was as grown-up when you went off to France four years ago as I am
now. A girl doesn’t change much between twenty-one and twenty-five, you
know.”
“Why, you were just out of short dresses when I went to France.”
She laughed. “Shows what little notice you took of me,” she gurgled.
“And all the time you were over there you were thinking of me as an
overgrown schoolgirl, I suppose. That is, if you thought of me at all.”
“Oh, I thought of you a great deal. But you’re right. I did think of you
as you were when I went to Chicago to work—just a pretty, big-eyed,
high-school girl with bony elbows and skinny arms—and you were as flat
as a board. Why, good Lord, Janie, hasn’t anybody ever told you that
you’re old enough to be married?”
“I am not without confidential friends,” she replied demurely, a soft,
warm flush spreading from throat to cheek.
This was in the first week of his visit. It was early evening and he
lounged contentedly among cushions at the foot of the steps leading up
to the parsonage veranda—an “improvement” that had followed close upon
Mr. Sage’s windfall. Jane sat on an upper step, her back against the
railing, her legs stretched out before her in graceful abandon. The
porch light behind cast its quite proper glow down upon the tranquil
picture; it fell upon the crown of Jane’s dark, wavy hair, scantily
touching with shadowy softness the partly lowered face which, with
seeming indifference, she kept turned away from him. She was looking
pensively down the dim-lit, cottage-lined street that cut through what
once had been the barren tract known as Sharp’s Field.
Oliver had fastened a sort of proprietory claim upon her as soon as he
arrived in town. He took it for granted that old conditions had not been
altered by the lapse of years nor by the transformations of nature; it
did not occur to him that their relationship could or should be governed
by a new set of laws.
And suddenly, on this quiet June evening, came the shock that put an end
to the old order of things: the astonishing realization that Jane was
old enough to be married! She was no longer a simple playmate. She was
old enough to be somebody’s wife—aye, more than that, she was old
enough to be the mother of children!
He looked up at her out of the corner of his eye, as if at some strange
creature that baffled his understanding. A woman! Jane Sage a woman!
Yes, there was the woman’s look in her thoughtful eyes, the woman’s mold
of chin and cheek and temple, the graceful curves of a woman’s body, the
round throat and the firm, shapely breast of glorious womanhood. A queer
little thrill ran over him—the thrill of discovery. This was succeeded
by a smarting sense of mortification which found expression in an
apologetic murmur:
“And I’ve been behaving right along just as if you were still a blooming
infant.”
“Instead of a withering old maid,” she remarked, affecting a lugubrious
sigh.
“Oh, I say, you—why, hang it all, Jane, if you turn out to be an old
maid I’ll—I swear I’ll not believe there’s a God or anything. It would
be monstrous—inhuman.”
“Sometimes we can’t help it,” said she.
“It’s darned hard for me to think of you as a grown woman, but it’s even
harder to conceive of you as an old maid.”
“You’re getting on in years yourself, old boy,” said she tauntingly.
“Aren’t you afraid of becoming a crusty old bachelor?”
He did not answer. Apparently he had not heard her. He was deep in
thought. After a long silence he spoke.
“What sort of a chap is Lansing, Jane?”
She started, and for a moment her eyes were fixed intently on his
half-averted face. There was an odd, startled expression in them.
“He is very nice,” she answered.
“So everybody says. He struck me as an uncommonly decent, high-minded
fellow. Knows a lot more to-day, of course, than he’ll know when he gets
a little older. Just out of medical college, isn’t he?”
“He was overseas in 1917,” she replied, a trace of warmth in her voice.
“He had been an interne for more than a year when he enlisted. He’s
young, of course—but we are all young once, aren’t we? He is considered
a very able—”
“Lord love you, Jane,” he broke in hastily, “I’m not questioning his
ability or his record. He’s got a smashed leg to show for his work over
there, and that’s more than I’ve got. As for his—”
“You have two or three medals,” she broke in softly. “You got them for
bravery, didn’t you?”
“No,” he replied, shaking his head. “I got them for foolishness. Fools
rush in where angels fear to tread! I had a fool’s luck, that’s all. The
battlefields and trenches were full of dead men who ought to have had
ten medals to my one. Lansing, for instance—wasn’t he hurt in an air
raid over a field hospital a few kilometers back of the lines?”
“Yes.”
“I sometimes think, in fact, I know—that it takes more real courage to
fight with your back to the enemy than it does to face him—if you see
what I mean. It’s much easier to be brave in the light than it is in the
dark. Besides,” he went on in his dry, whimsical manner, “you know which
way to run if you can see the enemy coming toward you. And usually you
run away from him a lot faster than you run toward him. I know I did.”
“You used to be a very good runner,” she said, smiling. “But that was
ages ago.”
“Ages,” he agreed, and then both fell silent.
They watched the approach of an automobile along the tree-lined street.
It slowed down as it neared the Sage home, coming to a stop at the front
gate. Jane shifted her position quickly. She uncrossed her legs, drew
them up into a less comfortable position, and attended to some slight
though perhaps unnecessary rearrangement of her skirt. This action did
not escape the notice of Oliver. It was significant. It established the
line she drew between him and other men. She didn’t mind him and she did
mind—well, say, Lansing, for it was the young doctor who clambered out
of the car and came up the walk.
The house stood back a hundred feet or more from the street, so Oliver,
recognizing the newcomer, had ample time to say to Jane, with a
mischievous gleam in his eye as he looked up at her:
“Hullo! Here comes the doctor. Why didn’t you tell me some one was sick
in the house?”
“Sh! He will hear you,” cautioned Jane, frowning at him.
“Bless your heart, Jane,” he whispered impulsively, and again she looked
at him in stark surprise.
Young Lansing walked with a slight limp. He was a tall, shock-haired,
good-looking chap of twenty-five or six. He had the manner of one
absolutely cocksure of himself—no doubt an admirable trait in one of
his calling—and there were people who did not quite approve of him
because he seemed to know as much as if not more than the old and
time-tried practitioners of the town. He had new-fangled ideas, new
methods, and he never by any chance so far forgot himself as to allude
to an ailment or remedy in terms other than profoundly scientific. After
hearing him classify your symptoms, it was impossible for you to deny
that he was a young man of superlative attainments. But when you rushed
around to the drug store with your prescription, believing yourself to
be in the grip of a strange and horrific malady, and found that you had
an ordinary sore throat and were to let the same old potash tablets
dissolve in your mouth just as you had always done, you somehow felt
that young Dr. Lansing was a trifle over-educated. He was, at
twenty-six, what you would call bumptious. Nevertheless, he was a fine,
earnest, likeable fellow—and even the most ignorant of patients would
just as soon be ill in Latin as in plain English so long as he pulls
through.
“Good evening, Jane,” said he, as he came up to the steps. “How are you,
Captain Baxter? Wonderful night, isn’t it?”
“Wonderful,” said Oliver, who wasn’t thinking at all of the physical
aspects of the night.
“Don’t be a pig, Oliver,” cried Jane. “Hand over a couple of those
cushions to Dr. Lansing. You look like a Sultan completely surrounded by
luxury.”
“Don’t bother,” interposed Lansing hastily. “I shan’t mind sitting here
on the step. Doctors get used to—Oh, thanks, Captain. Since you force
them upon me.”
Twenty minutes later, Oliver looked at his wrist-watch, uttered an
exclamation, and sprang to his feet.
“I must be going, Jane,” he said. “Due at Sammy Parr’s house half an
hour ago. I’m standing up with him at his wedding to-morrow, Doctor.
Marriage is a complaint you can have more than once, it seems. It’s
Sammy’s second attack.”
“No cure for it, I believe,” said Lansing, arising. “Not necessarily
fatal, however.”
“If taken in time it can be prevented,” quoth Oliver, airily. “The
symptoms are unmistakable.”
“Haven’t you ever been exposed to it?” inquired Lansing, with a grin.
“Frequently. It takes two to catch it, though. That’s how I’ve managed
to escape. So long, Jane. I shan’t see you again for a few days. Going
up for the wedding to-morrow and expect to stay in the city for a day or
two. Good night, Doctor.”
He took himself off in well-simulated haste. He had not been slow to
size up the situation. He was _de trop_. A certain constraint had fallen
upon the young couple at the opposite side of the steps. He had
sustained the brunt of conversation for some time, notwithstanding
several determined efforts on Jane’s part to do her share. Lansing
seemed to have become absolutely inarticulate.
As he strode off down the street he was conscious of an extremely
uncomfortable feeling that they were glad to be rid of him. Indeed, now
that he thought of it, Jane had not seemed especially pleased when he
dropped in shortly after supper. He recalled her long silences and the
way she kept her gaze fixed on the street. Yes, they were glad to be rid
of him. Any one could see that with half an eye. He smarted a little. It
hurt him to think that Jane didn’t want him around. Now that she was a
woman she didn’t want him hanging around. She wanted somebody else.
Somehow it didn’t seem natural.
But then, he philosophized, why wasn’t it natural? She was old enough to
be thinking seriously of getting married, old enough to have been in
love a half dozen times or more—only he couldn’t conceive of Jane being
so silly and vacillating as all that—and she certainly had a right to
be annoyed with him if he came meddling around—He stopped short in his
tracks, a queer little chill of dismay striking in upon him. For a
moment he felt utterly desolate and bewildered. He felt lost. Why, it
meant that he and Jane couldn’t be playmates or chums any longer.
Without quite knowing what he was doing, he turned and looked back in
the direction from which he had come. He saw the little red tail-light
far up the street, standing guard, so to speak, in front of the
parsonage. A red light signified danger. It means “steer clear,” “go
slow,” “beware.”
Jamming his hands into his pockets he resumed his way homeward, but now
he walked slowly, his head bent in thought. Presently his face began to
brighten, and soon he was grinning delightedly.
“Bless her heart,” he was saying to himself. “It’s great! What a mucker
I am to begrudge her anything. I hope this guy is good enough for her,
that’s all. If he isn’t—” here his face darkened again—“if he doesn’t
treat her right after he gets her, I’ll make him wish he’d never been
born.” His cogitations became more expansive. After a while they led him
to strong decisions. “It’s up to me to give him a clear field. No
butting in as if I owned the house and Jane and everything. It’s all
right for me to say I’m an old friend, and all that, but old friends can
make damned nuisances of themselves. I know how I’d feel if I was in
love with a girl and some idiotic old friend kept on horning in on
everything. Why, I’ve been up at Jane’s every night since I got to
town—most of the afternoons, too. Monopolizing her. Making her unhappy.
Making him—Yes, I’ve got to cut it out. It isn’t fair. She’s in love
with him—at least, it looks that way. It’s going to spoil my visit down
here, but I’ve got to do it. The town won’t seem natural or like home if
I can’t play around with Jane—but, my Lord, our play days are over. He
seems like a decent chap. I wonder how Mr. Sage feels about it?
Heigh-ho! It certainly does beat the devil the way the war has turned
everything upside down. Nothing is the same. It never can be the same.
Let’s see—what did I say I had to do? Oh, yes—see Sammy Parr about
something or other.”
And yet, with the best intentions in the world, he was not allowed to
carry them out. Jane had something to say about it. She met him face to
face in the street three days after Sammy Parr’s wedding, and looking
straight into his eyes, asked:
“What is the matter, Oliver?”
“Matter?”
“Yes. What have I done?”
“Done?”
“Don’t be stupid. Have I offended you? Why haven’t you been up to see
me?”
He decided to be quite frank about it. “I guess you know the reason.”
“I don’t know of any reason why you shouldn’t come to see me, unless
it’s because you don’t care to.”
“See here, Jane, we’ve always been pals. I know you like me just as much
as you ever did, and I’d jump off of that building over there head first
for your sake. I don’t know exactly how things stand with you and
Lansing. I don’t think you are engaged to be married. If that were the
case, I’m sure you would have told me so, but—”
“We are not engaged to be married,” she said quietly.
“I’m not going to ask whether you are in love with him. It’s none of my
business. It’s pretty generally understood that he is in love with you.
Let me finish. I will admit I’ve been making a few inquiries. I have
found out that up to the time he came upon the field you had any number
of young men calling on you—And I’ll bet my head they were all in love
with you. According to gossip, he seems to have the inside track—so
much so, in fact, that all of the others have dropped out of the
running. You see hardly any one now but Lansing. And so, while I’m not a
suitor, it’s only fair and square of me to keep out of the—”
Her free, joyous laugh interrupted him.
“Oh, you don’t know how relieved I am,” she cried. “I thought it was
something really serious. Something I had done to offend you. So that’s
the explanation, is it? You wanted to give me every chance in the world
to catch a beau—and to keep him. It’s awfully kind of you, Oliver.
Quixotic and silly and presumptuous—but kind. I am glad you’ve told me.
As you say, it is none of your business. So I shan’t burden you with my
affairs. There is no reason why you should make me miserable and
unhappy, however, just because you want to be what you call fair and
square. It’s just dirt mean of you, that’s what it is. So now you know
how I feel. Why, suppose I were in love with some one—even suppose I
were engaged—is that any reason why the oldest friend I have in the
world should turn his back on me and—”
“Now, now! Don’t lose your temper, Jane!”
“I’m not angry. I’m hurt. You’ve been in love with loads of
girls—heaven knows how many that I don’t know anything about—but has
that ever made any difference in my friendship for you? Indeed it
hasn’t. You—”
“Then you _are_ in love with Lansing?” he broke in recklessly.
“I haven’t said so, have I? Besides there is only one person who has a
right to ask me whether I’m in love with him or not and that is Doctor
Lansing himself.”
“That was one straight to the point of the jaw,” cried he, with a
grimace.
“So you needn’t feel you are doing me a good turn by avoiding me,” she
went on. “On the contrary, you are putting me in an extremely unenviable
position. What do you think people will say if you—of all persons—drop
me like a hot potato and—”
“Now, listen, Jane,” he began defensively. “I thought I was doing the
right thing. You see, it isn’t the same as it would be if I were a
contender. Good Lord, can you see me standing aside in favor of another
fellow if I was in love with you? I should say not! I’d stay him out if
it took all night _every_ night for ten years. But I want to play the
game. Why, if I keep on coming to see you morning, noon and night, I’ll
scare Lansing off and he—he’ll take to drink or something like that,”
he wound up whimsically.
“I don’t believe even as redoubtable a character as you could scare him
off, my dear Oliver,” said she, not without a trace of irony.
“Well, anyhow—” began Oliver lamely—“anyhow, I’ve explained and it
doesn’t seem to have done a particle of good.”
“Are you coming to see me?”
“Certainly. If you want me to.”
“Just as if there were no such person as Dr. Lansing?”
“He isn’t easy to overlook, you know.”
“I dare say if I were to ask him to overlook you, Oliver, he would do it
for my sake—with pleasure.”
“Ouch!”
“When are you coming to see me?”
“This evening,” said he promptly. “Unless you have a previous
engagement,” he hurriedly qualified in justice to his good intentions.
Jane smiled. “Doctor Lansing has quite an extensive practice,” she
remarked dryly. “He can’t devote every evening to me, you know.”
And so June drew toward an end with Jane and Oliver back on the old
footing—not quite the same as before, owing to the latter’s secret
conviction that he was playing hob with the doctor’s peace of mind,
although that young gentleman failed surprisingly to reveal any signs of
an inward disturbance. On the contrary, he didn’t seem to mind Oliver at
all—an attitude that was not without its irritations.
The “committee of three,” satisfied that he was safe for the time being,
adopted the welcome policy of letting Oliver alone. Joseph Sikes was so
vehemently concerned over the Eighteenth Amendment that he had little
time for anything else—not, he insisted, because he was a drinking man
or that he couldn’t get along without it, but because he had for once
abandoned his own party and had weakly helped to elect men to a
legislature that had betrayed the state into the hands of the “sissies.”
He invariably spoke of the “dry” advocates as “sissies.”
Oliver’s otherwise agreeable and whilom stay in Rumley was marred by his
father’s increasing despondency and irritation over the fact that he not
only was out of a job but apparently was making no effort to obtain one.
There were times when the old man’s scolding became unbearable, and but
for the pleadings of Serepta Grimes and the counsel of Mr. Sage, Oliver
would have packed his bags and departed.
“Don’t pay any attention to him, Oliver,” begged Serepta. “He’s cranky,
that’s all. He don’t mean what he says. It would break his heart if you
were to get mad and go off and leave him.”
“But I can’t stand being called a loafer, and a good-for-nothing, and a
lazy hound, and—”
“You must overlook it, Oliver. He’s old and he has worried so terribly
over what that gypsy said—”
“All right—all right, Aunt Serepta,” he would say, patiently. “I’ll put
up with it. I know he’s fond of me. I wouldn’t hurt him for the world.
But sometimes it gets on my nerves so I have an awful time keeping my
temper. How would you like to be called a long-legged sponge?”
He grinned and so did she. “I think I’d like it,” chuckled dumpy little
Serepta. “It would be stretchin’ something more than the imagination to
give me a pair of long legs, my boy.”
“I’m not asking him for money,” grumbled Oliver. “I’ve got a little laid
by. Enough to tide me over for quite a while. He seems to think I’m
scheming to get my hands on some of his. In fact, he said so the other
day when I merely mentioned that if I could scrape up a few extra
thousand I could triple it in no time by draining all this end of the
swamp and turning it into as fine pasture land as you’d find in the
state. I even took him down to the swamp and showed him that it is
possible and feasible. He called me a rattle-brained idiot.”
“Well,” said Serepta gently, “maybe you can carry out the plan after he
is gone, Oliver. He’s pretty old. He will leave everything he has to you
when he dies. He is a very thrifty man and he has prospered. So you will
be pretty well off.”
“God knows I would like him to live to be a hundred, Aunt Serepta—so
let’s not talk of his dying.”