Oliver paused for a few minutes, waiting for the crash that would
proclaim that Ted had stumbled over something and waked Dickie beyond
redemption. But there was nothing but a soft gurgling of water from the
bathroom and then, after a while, a slight but definite addition to
the distant beehive noises of sleep in the house. He smiled, moved
cautiously into the dining room, sat down at the small sharp-cornered
desk where all the family correspondence was carried on and from which
at least one of the family a day received a grievous blow in the side
while attempting to get around it; lit the shaded light above it and sat
down to read his letter.
It was all Nancy, that letter, from the address, firm and straight as
any promise she ever gave, but graceful as the curl of a vine-stem,
gracile as her hands, with little unsuspected curlicues of humor and
fancy making the stiff “t's” bend and twisting the tails of the “e's,”
to the little scrunched-up “Love, Nancy” at the end, as if she had
squeezed it there to make it look unimportant, knowing perfectly that it
was the one really important thing in the letter to him. Both would take
it so and be thankful without greediness or a longing for sentimental
“x's,” with a sense that the thing so given must be very rich in little
like a jewel, and always newly rediscovered with a shiver of pure wonder
and thanking, or neither could have borne to have it written so small.
It was Nancy just as some of her clothes were Nancy, soft clear blues
and first appleblossom pinks, the colors of a hardy garden that has
no need for the phoenix-colors of the poppy, because it has passed the
boy's necessity for talking at the top of its voice in scarlet and
can hold in one shaped fastidious petal, faint-flushed with a single
trembling of one serene living dye, all the colors the wise mind knows
and the soul released into its ecstasy has taken for its body invisible,
its body of delight most spotless, as lightning takes bright body of
rapture and agony from the light clear pallor that softens a sky to
night.
Oliver read the letter over twice--it was with a satisfaction like that
when body and brain are fed at once, invisibly, by the same lustre of
force, that he put it away. One part of it, though, left him humanly
troubled enough.
“Miss Winters, the old incubus, came around and was soppy to mother as
usual yesterday--the same old business--I might be studying in Paris,
now, instead of teaching drawing to stupid little girls, if I hadn't
'formed' what she will call 'that unfortunate attachment.' Not that I
minded, really, though I was angry enough to bite her when she gave
a long undertaker's list of Penniless Authors' Brides. But it worries
mother--and that worries me--and I wish she wouldn't. Forgive me,
Ollie--and then that Richardson complex of mother's came up again--”
“Waiting hurts, naturally,--and I'm the person who used to wonder about
girls making such a fuss about how soon they got married--but, then,
Ollie, of course, I never really wanted to get married before myself
and somehow that seems to make a difference. But that's the way things
go--and the only thing I wish is that I was the only person to be hurt.
We will, sooner or later, and it will be all the better for our not
having grabbed at once--at least that's what all the old people with no
emotions left are always so anxious to tell you. But they talk about
it as if anybody under thirty-five who wanted to get married was acting
like a three-year-old stealing jam--and that's annoying. And anyhow, it
wouldn't be bad, if I weren't so silly, I suppose--”
“Waiting hurts, naturally,” and that casual sentence made him chilly
afraid. For to be in love, though it may force the lover to actions of
impossible courage does not make him in the least courageous of himself,
but only drives him by the one large fear of losing this love like a
soldier pricked from behind by a bayonet over the bodies of smaller
fears, or like a thief who has stolen treasure, and, hearing the cry
at his heels, scales a twenty foot wall with the agile gestures of a
madman. All the old-wives' and young men's club stories of everything
from broken engagements to the Generic and Proven Unfaithfulness of the
Female Sex brushed like dirty cobwebs for an instant across his mind.
They tightened about it like silk threads--a snaky web--and for one
scared instant he had a sense of being smothered in dusty feathers,
whispering together and saying, “When you're a little older and a great
deal wiser. When you've come to my age and know that all girls are
the same. When you realize that long engagements seldom mean marriage.
When--”
He put the cobwebs aside with a strain of will, for he was very tired in
body, and settled himself to write to Nancy. It was not the cobwebs that
hurt. The only thing that mattered was that she had been hurt on his
account--was being hurt now on his account--would be hurt, and still and
always on his account, not because he wanted to hurt her but because
it was not within his power, but Life's, to hurt her in that respect or
not.
“Oh, felicitous Nancy!” the pen began to scratch. “Your letter--”
Stupid to be so tired when he was writing to Nancy. Stupid not to find
the right things to say at once when you wanted to say them so much. He
dropped the pen an instant, sat back, and tried to evoke Nancy before
him like a small, clear picture seen in a lens, tried to form with his
will the lifeless air in front of him till it began to take on
some semblance and body of her that would be better than the tired
remembrances of the mind.
Often, and especially when he had thought about her intensely for a
long time, the picture would not come at all or come with tantalizing
incompleteness, apparently because he wanted it to be whole so much--all
he could see would be a wraith of Nancy, wooden as a formal photograph,
with none of her silences or mockeries about her till he felt like a
painter who has somehow let the devil into his paintbox so that each
stroke he makes goes a little fatally out of true from the vision in
his mind till the canvas is only a crazy-quilt of reds and yellows. Now,
perhaps, though, she might come, even though he was tired. He pressed
the back of a hand against his eyes. She was coming to him now. He
remembered one of their walks together--a walk they had taken some eight
months ago, when they had been only three days engaged. Up Fifth Avenue;
Forty-second Street, Forty-third, Forty-fourth, the crosstown glitter
of lights, the reflected glow of Broadway, spraying the sky with dim
gold-dust, begins to die a little behind them. Past pompous expensive
windows full of the things that Oliver and Nancy will buy when Oliver's
novel has gone into its first fifty thousand, content with the mere
touch of each other's hands, they are so sure of each other now. Past
people, dozens of people, getting fewer and fewer as Forty-sixth Street
comes, Forty-seventh, Forty-eighth, always a little arrogantly because
none of the automatic figures they pass have ever eaten friendly bread
together or had fire that can burn over them like clear salt water or
the knowledge that the only thing worth having in life is the hurt
and gladness of that fire. Buses pass like big squares of honeycomb on
wheels, crowded with pale, tired bees--the stars march slowly from the
western slope to their light viewless pinnacle in the center of the
heavens, walking brightly like strong men in silvered armor--the stars
and the buses, the buses and the stars, either and both of as little and
much account--it would not really surprise either Oliver or Nancy if
the next green bus that passes should start climbing into the sky like a
clumsy bird.
The first intoxication is still upon them--they have told nobody except
anyone who ever sees them together--they walk tactfully and never too
close, both having a horror of publicly amatory couples, but like the
king's daughter--or was it Solomon's Temple?--they are all glorious
within. Fifty-fifth, Fifty-sixth, Fifty-seventh--the square in front of
the Plaza--that tall chopped bulky tower lit from within like a model
in a toyshop window--motors purring up to its door like thin dark cats,
motors purring away. The fountain with the little statue--the pool a
cool dark stone cracked with the gold of the lights upon it, and near
the trees of the Park, half-hidden, gold Sherman, riding, riding,
Victory striding ahead of him with a golden palm.
Ahead of them too goes Victory, over fear, over doubt, over littleness,
her gold shoes ring like the noise of a sparkling sword, her steps are
swift. They stand for an instant, hands locked, looking back at the
long roller-coaster swoop of the Avenue, listening to the roll of tired
wheels, the faint horns, the loud horns. They know each other now--their
hands grip tighter--in the wandering instant the whole background of
streets and tall buildings passes like breath from a mirror--for the
instant without breath or clamor, they exist together, one being, and
the being has neither flesh to use the senses too clumsily, nor human
thoughts to rust at the will, but lives with the strength of a thunder
and the heedlessness of a wave in a wide and bright eternity of the
unspoken.
“All the same,” says Nancy, when the moment passes, lifting a shoe with
the concern of a kitten that has just discovered a thorn in its paw,
“New York pavements are certainly _hard_ on loving feet.”