Mrs. Crowe relaxed a little for the first tired minute of her day.
Sunday dinner was nearly over, and though, in one way, the best meal in
the week for her because all her children were sure to be at home,
it was apt to be pure purgatory on a hot day, with Sheba dawdling and
grumbling and Rosalind spilling pea-soup on her Sunday dress, and
Aunt Elsie's deafness increased by the weather to the point of mild
imbecility.
She had been a little afraid today, especially with two guests and the
grandchildren rampant after church, and the extra leaf in the table that
squeezed Colonel Crowe almost into the sideboard and herself nearly out
of the window and made the serving of a meal a series of passings of
over-hot plates from hand to hand, exposed to the piracies of Jane
Ellen. But it had gone off better than she could have hoped. Colonel
Crowe had not absent-mindedly begun to serve vegetables with a teaspoon,
Aunt Elsie had not dissolved in tears and tottered away from the table
at some imagined rudeness of Dickie's, and Jane Ellen had not once had a
chance to take off her drawers.
“Ice tea!” said the avid voice of Jane Ellen in her ear. “Ice tea!”
Mrs. Crowe filled the glass and submitted a request for “please”
mechanically. She wondered, rather idly, if she would spend her time in
purgatory serving millions of Jane Ellens with iced tea.
“Ahem!” That was Colonel Crowe. “But you should have known us in the
days of our greatness, Mrs. Severance. When I was king of Estancia--”
“I'd rather have you like this, Colonel Crowe, really. I've always
wanted big families and never had one to live in--”
“Heard from Nancy recently, Oliver?” from Margaret, slightly satiric.
“Why yes, Margie, now and then. Not as often as you've heard from Stu
Winthrop probably but--”
“Motha, can I have some suga on my booberrish? Motha, can I have some
suga on my booberrish? Motha--_peesh!_”
“Oh, hush a minute, Rosalind dear. I don't know, Oliver. I'll speak
to Mr. Field about it if you like. I should think they'd take little
sketches like a couple of those Nancy showed you--though they aren't
quite smart-alecky enough for 'Mode'--” “Grandfather, Grandfather! How
old would you be if you were as old as Methusaleh? Are you older than he
is? _Grandfather!_”
Entrance and exit of a worried Sheba with the empty dish of blueberries,
marred only by Jane Ellen's sudden cries of “Stop thief!”
Mrs. Crowe tried to think a little ahead. Tomorrow. Ice. Butter.
Laundry. Oliver's breakfast early again. Louise--poor Louise--two years
and a half since Clifford Lychgate died. How curious life was; how
curious and careless and inconsecutive. The thought of how much she
hoped Oliver's novel would succeed and the question as to whether the
Thebes grocer who delivered by motor-truck would be cheaper than the
similar Melgrove bandit in the long run mixed uneasily in her mind.
Rosalind had seemed droopy that morning--more green crab-apples
probably. Aunt Elsie's gout. Oliver's marriage--she had been so relieved
about Nancy ever since she had met her, though it had been hard to
reconcile domestic virtues with Nancy's bobbed hair. She would make
Oliver happy, though, and that was the main thing. She was really
sweet--a sweet girl. Long engagements. Too bad, too bad. Something
_must_ be done about the stair carpet, the children were tearing it to
pieces. “Ice tea! Ice tea!”
“No, Jane Ellen.”
“Yash.”
“No, darling.”
“Peesh yash?”
“No. Now be a good little girl and run out and play quietly, not right
in the middle of the broiling sun.”
“And so Lizzie said, 'Very well, but if I do take that medicine my death
will be wholly on your responsibility!'” with a sense of climax.
“But I really would like to, Mrs. Severance, if you can ever spare the
time.”
Ted and Louise's friend seemed to be getting along very well. That was
nice--so often Oliver's friends and Louise's didn't. It seemed odd that
Mrs. Severance should be working on “Mode”--surely a girl of her obvious
looks and intelligence left with no children to support--some nice
man--A lady, too, by her voice, though there was a trifle of something--
She only hoped Mrs. Severance didn't think them all too crowded
and noisy. It was a little hard on the three children to have such
an--intimate--home when they brought friends.
“I think we'd better have coffee out on the porch, don't you?” That
meant argument with Sheba later but an hour's cool and talk without
having to shout across the dear little children was worth the argument.
Everybody got up, Ted being rather gallant to Mrs. Severance. Oliver
looked worried today, worried and tired. She hoped it wasn't about Nancy
and the engagement. What a miserable thing money was to make so much
difference.
“Mrs. Severance--”
“Mr. Billett--”
Louise's friend was certainly attractive. That wonderful red-gold
hair--“setter color” her sister had always called it of her own. She
must write her sister. Mrs. Severance--an odd name. She rather wished,
though, that her face wouldn't turn faintly hard like that sometimes.
“No, Dickie. No chocolate unless your mother says you can have it. No,
Rosalind, if mother says not, you _certainly_ cannot go over and play at
the Rogers',--they have a paralytic grandmother who is very nervous.”
Well, that was over. And now, for a few brief instants there would be
quiet and a chance to relax and really see something of Oliver. Mrs.
Crowe started moving slowly towards the door. Ted and Mrs. Severance
blocked the way, talking rather intimately, she thought, for people who
had only known each other a few hours; but then that was the modern way.
Then Ted saw her and seemed to wake up with a jump from whatever mild
dream possessed him, and Mrs. Severance turned toward her.
“It's so _comfortable_ being out here, always,” she said very naturally
and kindly, but Mrs. Crowe did not reply at once to the pretty speech.
Instead she flushed deeply and bent over something small and white on
the chair with the dictionary in it that had been next to hers. Jane
Ellen had finally succeeded in taking off her drawers.
X
Ted and Oliver were down at the beach at Southampton two Sundays
later--week-end guests of Peter Piper--the three had been classmates
at Yale and the friendship had not lapsed like so many because Peter
happened to be rich and Ted and Oliver poor. And then there was always
Elinor, Peter's sister--Ted seemed, to Oliver's amused vision, at least,
to be looking at Elinor with the hungry eyes of a man seeing a delicate,
longed-for dream made flesh just at present instead of a girl he had
known since she first put up her hair. How nice that would be if it
happened, thought Oliver, match-makingly--how very nice indeed! Best
thing in the world for Ted--and Elinor too--if Ted would only get away
from his curiously Puritan idea that a few minor lapses from New England
morality in France constituted the unpardonable sin, at least as far as
marrying a nice girl was concerned. He stretched back lazily, digging
elbows into the warm sand.
The day had really been too hot for anything more vigorous than “just
lying around in the sun like those funny kinds of lizards,” as Peter put
it, and besides, he and Oliver had an offensive-defensive alliance of
The Country's Tiredest Young Business Men and insisted that their only
function in life was to be gently and graciously amused. And certainly
the spectacle about them was one to provide amusement in the extreme for
even the most mildly satiric mind.
It was the beach's most crowded hour and the short strip of sand in
front of the most fashionable and uncomfortable place to bathe on Long
Island was gay as a patch of exhibition sweet-peas with every shade
of vivid or delicate color. It was a triumph of women--the whole
glittering, moving bouquet of stripes and patterns and tints that
wandered slowly from one striped parasol-mushroom to the next--the
men, in their bathing suits or white flannels seemed as unimportant if
necessary furniture as slaves in an Eastern court. The women dominated,
from the jingle of the bags in the hands of the dowagers and the faint,
protesting creak of their corsets as they picked their way as delicately
as fat, gorgeous macaws across the sand, to the sound of their
daughters' voices, musical as a pigeon-loft, as they chattered
catchwords at each other and their partners, or occasionally, very
occasionally, dipped in for a three-minute swim. Moreover, and
supremely, it was a triumph of ritual, and such ritual as reminded
Oliver a little of the curious, unanimous and apparently meaningless
movements of a colony of penguins, for the entire assemblage had arrived
around, twelve o'clock and by a quarter past one not one of them would
be left. That was law as unwritten and unbreakable as that law which
governs the migratory habits of wild geese. And within that little more
than an hour possibly one-third of them would go as far as wetting
their hands in the water--all the rest had come for the single reason of
seeing and being seen. It was all extremely American and, on the whole,
rather superb, Oliver thought as he and Peter moved over nearer to the
parasol that sheltered Elinor and Ted.
“I wish it was Egypt,” said Peter languidly. “Any more peppermints left,
El? No--well, Ted never could restrain himself when it came to food. I
wish it was Egypt,” he repeated, making Elinor's left foot a pillow for
his head.
“Well, it's hot enough,” from Oliver, dozingly. “Ah--oo--it's _hot_!”
“I know, but just think,” Peter chuckled. “Clothes,” he explained
cryptically, “Mrs. Willamette in a Cleopatra nightie--what sport! And
besides, I should make a magnificent Egyptian. Magnificent.” He yawned
immensely. “In the first place, of course, I should paint myself a
brilliant orange--”
The Egyptians. An odd wonder rose in Ted--a wonder as to whether one
of those stripped and hook-nosed slaves of the bondage before Moses had
ever happened to stand up for a moment to wipe the sweat out of his eyes
before he bent again to his task of making bricks without straw and seen
a princess of the Egyptians carried along past the quarries.
“Tell us a story, El,” from Oliver in the voice of one who is
sleep-walking. “A nice quiet story--the Three Bears or Giant the Jack
Killer--oh heaven, I _must_ be asleep--but you know, anything like
that--”
“You really want a story?” Elinor's voice was reticently mocking. “A
story for good little boys?”
“Oh, _yes!_” from Peter, his clasped hands stretched toward her in
an attitude of absurd supplication. “All in nice little words of one
syllable or we won't understand.”
“Well, once there were three little girls named Elsie, Lacie and Tillie
and they lived in the bottom of a well.”
[ILLUSTRATION: “WELL, ONCE THERE WERE THREE LITTLE GIRLS”] “What _kind_
of a well?” Oliver had caught the cue at once.
“A treacle well--”
* * * * *
She went on with the Dormouse's Tale, but Ted, for once, hardly heard
her--his mind was too busy with its odd, Egyptological dream.
The princess who looked like Elinor. Her slaves would come first--a fat
bawling eunuch, all one black glisten like new patent-leather, striking
with a silver rod to clear dogs and crocodiles and Israelites out of the
way. Then the litter--and a flash between curtains blown aside for an
instant--and Hook Nose gazing and gazing--all the fine fighting curses
of David on the infidel, that he had muttered sourly under breath all
day, blowing away from him like sand from the face of a sphinx.
Pomp sounding in brass and cries all around the litter like the boasting
color of a trumpet--but in the litter not pomp but fineness passing.
Fineness of youth untouched, from the clear contrast of white skin and
crow-black hair to the hands that had the little stirrings of moon-moths
against the green robe. Fineness of mind that will not admit the
unescapable minor dirts of living, however much it may see them, a mind
temperate with reticence and gentleness, seeing not life itself but its
own delighted dream of it, a heart that had had few shocks as yet, and
never the ones that the heart must be mailed or masked to withstand. The
thing that passed had been continually sheltered, exquisitely guarded
from the stronger airs of life as priests might guard a lotus, and yet
it was neither tenderly unhealthy nor sumptuously weak. A lotus--that
was it--and Hook Nose stood looking at the lotus--and because it was
innocent he filled his eyes with it. And then it passed and its music
went out of the mind.
“_Ted_!”
“What? What? Oh, yeah--sorry, Elinor, I wasn't paying proper attention.”
“You mean you were asleep, you big cheese!” from Peter.
“I wasn't--just thinking,” and seeing that this only brought raucous
mirth from both Peter and Oliver, “Oh, shut up, you apes! Were you
asking me something, El?”
It was rather a change to come back from Elinor in scarab robes being
carried along in a litter to Elinor sitting beside him in a bathing
suit. But hardly an unpleasant change.
“I've forgotten how it goes on--the Dormouse--after 'Well in.' Do you
remember?”
“Nope. Look it up when we get back. And anyhow--” “What?”
“Game called for to-day. The Lirrups have started looking
important--that means it's about ten minutes of, they always leave on
the dot. Well--” and Peter rose, scattering sand. “We must obey our
social calendar, my prominent young friends--just think how awful it
would be if we were the last to go. Race you half-way to the float and
back, Ted.”
“You're on,” and the next few minutes were splashingly athletic.
Going back to the bath-house, though, Ted laughed at himself rather
whimsically. That extraordinary day-dream of the slave and the
Elinor Princess! It helped sometimes, to make pictures of the very
impossible--even of things as impossible as that. If Elinor had only
been older before the war came along and changed so much.
He saw another little mental photograph, the kind of photograph, he
mused, that sleekly shabby Frenchmen slip from under views of the
Vendome Column and Napoleon's Tomb when they are trying to sell tourists
picture post-cards outside the Café de la Paix. Judged by American
standards the work would be called rather frank. It was all
interior--the interior of a room in a Montmartre hotel--and there were
two people in it to help out the composition--and the face of one seemed
somehow to be rather deathly familiar--
That, and Elinor. Why, Hook Nose could “reform” all the rest of his
life in accordance with the highest dictionary standards--and still he
wouldn't be fit to look at his princess, even from inside a cage.
Also, if you happened to be of a certain analytic temperament you could
see what was happening to yourself all the while quite plainly--oh, much
too plainly!--and yet that seemed to make very little difference in its
going on happening. There was Mrs. Severance, for instance. He had been
seeing quite a good deal of Mrs. Severance lately.
“Oh, Ted!” from Peter next door. “Snap it up, old keed, or we'll all of
us be late for lunch.”
They had just sat down to lunch and Peter was complaining that
the whipped cream on the soup made him feel as if he were eating
cotton-batting, when a servant materialized noiselessly beside Oliver's
chair.
“Telephone for you, Mr. Crowe. Western Union calling.”
Oliver jumped up with suspicious alacrity. “Oh, love, love, love!”
crooned Peter. “Oh, love, love, love!” Oliver flushed. “Don't swipe all
my butter, you simple cynic!” He knew what it was, of course.
“This is Oliver Crowe talking. Will you give me the telegram?”
Nancy and Oliver, finding Sunday mails of a dilatory unsatisfactoriness,
had made a compact to use the wire on that day instead. And even now
Oliver never listened to the mechanical buzz of Central's voice in his
ear without a little pulse of the heart. It seemed to bring Nancy nearer
than letters could, somehow. Nancy had an imperial contempt for boiling
down attractive sentences to the necessary ten or twenty words. This
time, though, the telegram was short.
“Mr. Oliver Crowe, care Peter Piper, Southampton,” clicked Central
dispassionately. “I hate St. Louis. I would give anything in the world
if we could only see each other for twenty-four hours. Love. Signed,
Nancy.”
And Oliver, after hanging up the receiver, went back to the dining-room
with worry barking and running around his mind like a spoiled puppy,
wondering savagely why so many rocking-chair people took a _crêpey_
pleasure in saying it was good for young people in love to have to wait.