Margaret Crowe, who, having just come to her seventeenth birthday in
this present day and generation, felt it her official family duty
to season the general conversation with an appropriate pepper of
heartlessness, had really put it very well. She had said that while she
didn't suppose one house party over Labor Day would more than partially
rivet a broken heart, it honestly was a relief for everybody else to get
Oliver out of the house for a while, and mother needn't look at her that
way because she was as sorry as any of the rest of them for poor old
Oliver but when people went about like walking cadavers and nearly bit
you any time you mentioned anything that had to do with marriage, it was
time they went somewhere else for a while and stayed there till they got
over it.
And Mrs. Crowe, though dutifully rebuking her for her flippant treatment
of a brother's pain, agreed with the sense of her remarks, if not with
the wording. It had taken a good deal of quiet obstinacy on the part of
the whole family to get Oliver to accept Peter Piper's invitation--Mrs.
Crowe, who was understanding, knew at what cost--the cost of a man
who has lost a hand's first appearance in company with the stump
unbandaged--but anything would be better than the mopey Oliver of the
last two weeks and a half, and Mrs. Crowe had been taught by a good
deal of living the aseptic powers of having to go through the motions
of ordinary life in front of a casual audience, even when it seemed
that those motions were no longer of any account. So Oliver took clean
flannels and a bitter mind to Southampton on the last day of August,
and, as soon as he got off the train, was swung into a reel of
consecutive amusements that, fortunately, allowed him little time to
think.
When he did, it was only to wonder rather frigidly if this fellow with
glasses who played tennis and danced and swam and watched and commented
athletically on the Davis Cup finals, sitting between Elinor Piper and
Juliet Bellamy whom he had taken to dances off and on ever since he had
had his first pair of pumps, could really be he. The two people didn't
feel in the least the same.
The two Mr. Crowes, he thought. “Mr. Oliver Crowe--meet Mr. Oliver
Crowe.” “On our right, ladies and gentlemen, we have one of the
country's greatest curiosities--a young gentleman who insists upon going
on existing when there is nothing at all that makes his existence useful
or interesting or proud. A very realistic wax figure that will toddle,
shoot a line and play almost any sort of game until you might easily
believe it to be genuinely alive. Mr. Oliver Crowe.”
The house-party was to last a week, except for Ted Billett who would
have to go back after Labor Day--and before eight hours of it were over,
Oliver was watching Ted with grandmotherly interest, a little mordant
jealousy, and humor, that, at times, verged toward the hysterical.
Nancy--and especially the loss of her--had made him sensitive as
a skinless man to the winds and vagaries of other young people in
love--and while Ted could look at and talk with Elinor Piper and think
himself as safe as a turtle under its shell from the observations and
discoveries of the rest of the party he could no more hide himself or
his intentions from Oliver's painful scrutiny than he could have hidden
the fact that he had suddenly turned bright green. So Oliver, a little
with the sense of his own extreme generosity, but sincerely enough
in the main, began to play kind shepherd, confidante, referee
and second-between-the-rounds to Ted's as yet quite unexpressed
strivings--and since most of him was only too willing to busy itself
with anything but reminiscences of Nancy, he began to congratulate
himself shortly that under his entirely unacknowledged guidance things
really seemed to be getting along very well.
And here too his streak of ineradicable humor--that bright plaything
made out of knives that is so fine to juggle with light-handedly until
the hand meets it in its descent a fraction of a second too soon--came
often and singularly to his aid. He could see himself in a property
white beard stretching feeble hands in blessing over a kneeling and
respectful Elinor and Ted. “Bless you my dear, dear children--for
though my own happiness has gone with yester-year, at least I have made
you--find each other--and perhaps, when you sit at evening among the
happy shouts of your posterity--” but here Oliver broke off into a snort
of laughter.
Of course Ted had confided nothing formally as yet--but then, thought
Oliver sourly out of his own experience, he wouldn't; that was the way
you always felt; and Ted had never been a person of easy confidences.
The most he had done had been to take Oliver grimly aside from the dance
they had gone to last night and explain in one ferocious and muffled
sentence delivered half at Oliver and half at a large tree that if Hinky
Selvage didn't stop dancing with Elinor that way he, Ted, would carry
him unobtrusively behind a bush and force him to swallow most of his
own front teeth. And again Oliver, looking back as a man might to the
feverish details of a major operation, realized with cynic mirth that
that was a very favorable symptom indeed. Oh everything was going along
simply finely for Ted, if the poor fool only knew it. But that he would
no more believe of course than you would a dentist who told you
he wasn't going to hurt. People in love _were_ poor fools--damn
fools--unutterably lucky, unutterably perfect--fools.
Ted and Oliver must have one talk though before it all happened beyond
redemption and Ted started wearing that beautiful anesthetized smile and
began to concoct small kindly fatal conspiracies with Elinor and Oliver
and some nice girl. They hadn't had a real chance to talk since Oliver
came back from St. Louis, and shortly--oh very shortly indeed by the way
things looked--the only thing they would be able to talk about would be
Elinor and how wonderful she and requited love and young happy marriage
were--and however glad Oliver might be for Ted and his luck--he really
wouldn't be able to stand that, under the present circumstances, for
very long at a time. Ted would be gone into fortune--into a fortune that
Oliver would have to be the last person on earth to grudge him--but that
meant the end of eight years of fighting mockery and friendship together
as surely as if those years were marbles and Elinor were dropping them
down a well. They could pick it up later--after Ted had been married a
year say--but it would have changed then, it wouldn't be the same.
Oliver smiled rather wryly. He wondered if that was at all like what Ted
might have thought when he and Nancy--But that wasn't comparable in the
least. But Nancy and he were different. _Nancy_--and with that, the pain
came so dazzlingly for a minute that Oliver had to shut his eyes to
bear it--and something that wasn't just stupidly rude had to be said to
Juliet Bellamy in answer to her loud clear question as to whether he was
falling asleep.
All up to and through Labor Day Oliver bluffed and manoeuvered like the
head of a small but vicious Balkan State in an International Congress
for Ted and Elinor, and towards tea-time, decided sardonically that it
was quite time his adopted infants took any further responsibilities off
his shoulders. There was no use delaying conclusions any longer--Oliver
felt as he looked at his victims like a workmanlike god who simply must
finish the rough draft of the particular world he is fussing with before
sunset, in spite of all rebellious or slipshod qualities in its clay.
There would be a dance that evening. There would be, Oliver thought with
some proprietary pride, a large sentimental moon. A few craftily casual
words with Elinor before dinner--a real talk with Ted in one of the
intermissions of the dance--a watchdog efficiency in guarding the two
from intrusion while they got the business over with neatly in any one
of several very suitable spots that Oliver had picked out already in his
mind's eye. And then, having thoroughly settled Ted for the rest of his
years in such a solid and satisfactory way--perhaps the queer gods
that had everyone in charge, in spite of their fatal leaning toward
practical-joking where the literary were concerned, might find enough
applause in their little tin hearts for Oliver's acquired and vicarious
merit to give him in some strange and painful way another chance to be
alive again and not merely the present wandering spectre-of-body that
people who knew nothing about it seemed to take so unreasonably for
Oliver Crowe.
So he laid his snares, feeling quite like Nimrod the mighty, though
outwardly he was only kneeling on the Piper porch, waiting for the
dice to come around to him in a vociferous game of crap that Juliet
had organized--he seldom shot without winning now he noticed with
superstitious awe. And tea passed to a sound of muffled crumpets, and
everyone went up to dress for dinner.