Oliver had depended on Ted's noisy habits in dressing and packing to
wake him and give them a chance to talk before Ted left--but when he
woke it was to hear a respectful servantly voice saying “Ten o'clock,
sir!” and his first look around the room showed him that Ted's bed was
empty and Ted's things were gone. There was a scribbled note propped up
against the mirror, though.
“Dear Ollie:
“So long--and thanks for both good advice
and sympathy. The latter helped if the former
didn't. Drop me a message at 252A as soon
as you decide on this French proposition. I'm
serious about it. TED.”
By the time he had read this through, Oliver began to feel rather
genuinely alarmed.
He could not believe that the whole affair between Ted and Elinor Piper
had gone so utterly wrong as the note implied--he had had a whimsical
superstition that it must succeed because he was playing property man to
it after his own appearance as Romeo had failed--but he knew Ted and
the two years' fight against the struggling nervous restlessness and
discontent with everything that didn't have either speed or danger in
it that the latter, like so many in his position, had had to make. His
mouth tightened--no girl on earth, even Nancy, could realize exactly
what that meant--the battle to recover steadiness and temperance and
sanity in a temperament that was in spite of its poised externals
most brilliantly sensitive, most leapingly responsive to all strong
stimuli--a temperament moreover that the war and the armistice between
them had turned wholly toward the stimuli of fever--and Ted had made
it with neither bravado nor bluster and without any particular sense
of doing very much--and now this girl was going to smash it and him
together as if she were doing nothing more important than playing with
jackstones.
He remembered a crowd of them talking over suicide one snowy night up
in Coblenz--young talk enough but Ted had been the only one who really
meant it--he had got quite vehement on picking up your proper cue for
exit when you knew that your part was through or you were tired of the
part. He remembered café hangers-on in Paris--college men--men who could
talk or write or teach or do any one of a dozen things--but men who had
crumbled with intention or without it under the strain of the war
and the snatches of easy living to excess, and now had about them in
everything they said or wore a faint air of mildew; men who stayed in
Paris on small useless jobs while their linen and their language verged
more and more toward the soiled second-hand--who were always meaning to
go home but never went. If Ted went to Paris--with his present mind. Why
Ted was his best friend, Oliver realized with a little queer shock in
his mind--it was something they had never just happened to say that way.
And therefore. Far be it from Oliver to be rude to the daughter of his
hostess, but some things were going to be explained to Miss Elinor Piper
if they had to be explained by a public spanking in the middle of the
Jacobean front hall.
But then there was breakfast, at which few girls appeared, and Elinor
was not one of the few. And then Peter insisted on going for a swim
before lunch--and then lunch with Elinor at the other end of the table
and Juliet Bellamy talking like a mechanical piano into Oliver's ear
so that he had to crane his neck to see Elinor at all. What he saw,
however, reassured him a little--for he had always thought Elinor one
of the calmest young persons in the world, and calm young persons do not
generally keep adding spoonfuls of salt abstractedly to their clam-broth
till the mixture tastes like the bottom of the sea.
But even at that it was not till just before tea-time that Oliver
managed to cut her away from the vociferous rest of the house-party that
seemed bent on surrounding them both with the noise and publicity of a
private Coney Island. Peter has expressed a fond desire to motor over
to a little tea-room he knows where you can dance and the others had
received the suggestion with frantic applause. Oliver was just starting
downstairs after changing his shoes, cursing house-party manners in
general and Juliet Bellamy in particular all over his mind when Elinor's
voice came up to him from below.
“No, really, Petey. No, I know it's rude of me but honestly I am _tired_
and if I'm going to feel like anything but limp _tulle_ this evening.
No, I'm _perfectly_ all right, I just want to rest for a little while
and I promise I'll be positively incandescent at dinner. No, Juliet
dear, I wouldn't keep you or anybody else away from Peter's nefarious
projects for the world--”
That was quite enough for Oliver--he tiptoed back and hid in his own
closet--wondering mildly how he was going to explain his presence there
if a search party opened the door. He heard a chorus of voices calling
him from below, first warningly, then impatiently--heard Peter bounce up
the stairs and yell “Ollie! Ollie, you slacker!” into his own room--and
then finally the last motor slurred away and he was able to creep out of
his shell.
He met Elinor on the stairs--looking encouragingly droopy, he thought.
“Why Ollie, what's the matter? The pack was howling for you all over the
house--they've all gone over to the Sharley--look, I'll get you a car--”
She went down a couple of steps toward the telephone.
Oliver immediately and without much difficulty put on his best
expression of blight.
“Sorry, El--must have dropped off to sleep,” he said unblushingly.
“Lay down on my bed to sort of think some things over--and that's what
happens of course. But don't bother--”
“It's no trouble. I could take you over myself but I was so sort of
fagged out--that's why I didn't go with them,” she added--a little
uncertainly he noticed.
“And--oh it's just being silly and tired I suppose, but all of them
together--”
“I know,” said Oliver and hoped his voice had sounded appropriately
bitter. “No reflections on you or Peter, El, you both understand and
you've both been too nice for words--but some of the others sometimes--”
“Oh I'm _sorry_,” said Elinor contritely, and Oliver felt somewhat as if
he were swindling her out of sympathy she probably needed for herself by
deliberately calling attention to his own cut finger. But it had to
be done--there wasn't any sense in both of them, he and Ted, walking
crippled when one of them might be able to doctor the other up by just
giving up a little pride. He went on.
“So I thought--I'd just stay around here with a book or something--get
some tea from your mother, later, if she were here--”
“Why, I can do that much for you, Ollie, anyway. Let's have it now.”
“But look here, if you were going to do anything--” knowing that after
that she could hardly say so, even if she were.
“Oh no. And besides, with both of us here and both of us blue it would
be silly if we went and were melancholy at each other from opposite
sides of the house.” She tried to be enthusiastic. “And there's
strawberry jam and muffins somewhere--the kind that Peter makes himself
such a pig about--”
“Well, Elinor, you certainly are a friend--”
A little later, in a quiet corner of the porch with the tea-steam
floating pleasantly from the silver nose of its pot and a decorous
scarlet and yellow still-life of muffins and jam between them, Oliver
felt that so far things had slid along as well as could be expected.
Elinor's manners in the first place and her genuine liking for him
in the second had come to his help as he knew they would--she was too
concerned now with trying to comfort him in small unobtrusive ways to be
on her guard herself about her own troubles. All he had to do, he knew,
was to sit there and look ostentatiously brokenhearted to have the
conversation move in just the directions he wished and that, though it
made him feel shameless was not exactly difficult--all he required was
a single thought of the last three weeks to make his acting sour
perfection itself. “Greater love hath no man than this,” he thought
with a grotesque humor--he wondered if any of the celebrated story-book
patterns of friendship from Damon and Jonathan on would have found
things quite so easy if they had had to take not their lives but most of
their most secret and painful inwards and put them down on a tea-table
like a new species of currant bun under the eyes of a friendly
acquaintance to help their real friends.
“I can't tell you how awfully decent it was of you and Peter,” he began
finally after regarding a buttered muffin for several minutes as if it
were part of the funeral decorations for dead young love. “Asking me out
here, just now. Oh I'll write you a charming bread-and-butter letter
of course--but I wanted to tell you really--” He stopped and let the
sentence hang with malice aforethought. Elinor's move. Trust Elinor.
And the trust was justified for she answered as he wanted her to, and at
once.
“Why Ollie, as if it was anything--when we've all of us more or less
grown up together, haven't we--and you and Peter--” She stopped--oh
what was the use of being tactful! “I suppose it sounds--put
on--and--sentimental and all that--saying it,” she laughed nervously,
“but we--all of us--Peter and myself--we're so really _sorry_--if
you'll believe us--only it was hard to know if you wanted to have us say
so--how awfully sorry we were. And then asking you out here with this
howling mob doesn't seem much like it, does it? but Peter was going
to be here--and Ted--and I knew what friends you'd been in college--I
thought maybe--but I just didn't want you to think it was because we
didn't care--”
“I know--and--and--thanks--and I do appreciate, Elinor.” Oliver noticed
with some slight terror that his own voice seemed to be getting a little
out of control. But what she had just said took away his last doubt as
to whether she was really the kind of person Ted ought to marry--and in
spite of feeling as if he were trapping her into a surgical operation
she knew nothing about, he kept on.
“It gets pretty bad, sometimes,” he said simply and waited. Last
night--if things came out right later--will have been just what Elinor
needed most, he decided privately. She had always struck him as being a
little too aloof to be quite human--but she was changing under his eyes
to a very human variety of worried young girl.
“Well, isn't there something we can really _do_?” she said diffidently,
then changing,
“Oh I mean it--if you don't think it's only--probing--asking that?” as
she changed again.
“Not a thing I'm afraid, Elinor, though I really do thank you.” He hated
his voice--it sounded so brave. “It's just finished, that's all. Can't
kick very well. Oh no,” as she started to speak, “it doesn't hurt to
talk about, really. Helps, more. And Peter and Ted help too--especially
Ted.”
He watched her narrowly--changing color like that must mean a good deal
with Elinor.
Then “Why Ted?” she said, almost as if she were talking to herself
and then started to try and make him see that that didn't matter--a
spectacle to which he remained gratifiedly blind. He addressed his next
remarks at the dish of jam so that she wouldn't be able to catch his
eye.
“Oh, I'm not slamming Peter's sympathetic soul, El, you know I'm
not--but Ted and I just happened to go through such a lot of the war and
after it together--and then Ted saw a good deal more of Nancy. Peter's
delightful. And kind. But he does assume that because lots of people get
engaged and disengaged again all over the lot these days as if they were
cutting for bridge-partners there isn't anything particularly serious in
things like that. Nothing to really make you make faces and bust,
that is. Well, ours happened to be one of the other kind--that's the
difference. And Peter, well, Peter isn't exactly the soul of constancy
when it comes to such matters--”
“Peter--oh Peter--if you knew the millions of girls that Peter's kept
pictures of--”
“Well, I've heard all about the last hundred thousand or so, I think.
But there's perfect safety in thousands. It's when you start being so
stalwart and sure and manly about one--”
Oliver spread out his hands. Elinor's color--the way it fluctuated
at least--was most encouraging. So was the fact that she had tried to
butter her last muffin with the handle of her knife. “But I don't see
_how_ if a girl really cared about a man she could let anything--” she
said and then stopped with a burning flush. And now Oliver knew that
he had to be very careful. He looked over his tools and decided that
infantile bitterness was best.
“Girls are girls,” he said shortly, stabbing a muffin. “They tell you
they do and then they tell you they don't--that's them.”
“Oliver Crowe, I never heard such a nasty, childish seventeen-year-old
idea from you in my whole life!” Oh what would calm Mrs. Piper say
if she could see Elinor, eyes cloudy with anger, leaning across the
tea-wagon and emphasizing her points by waves of a jammy knife as she
defends constancy and romance! “They do _not_! When a girl cares for a
man--and she knows he cares for her--she doesn't care about _anything_
else, she--”
“That's what Nancy said,” remarked Oliver placidly out of his muffin.
“And then--”
“Well, you know I'm sorry for you--you know I'm just as sorry for you as
I can be,” went on Elinor excitedly. “But all the same, my dear Ollie,
you have no right in the least to say that just because one girl has
broken her engagement with you, all girls are the same. I know dozens of
girls--” “So do I,” from Oliver, quietly. “Dozens. And they're just the
same.”
“They _aren't_. And I haven't the slightest wish to suggest that it was
_your_ fault, Oliver--but no girl as sweet and friendly and darling as
Nancy Ellicott, the little I knew of her that is, but other girls can
tell, and she certainly thought you were the person that made all the
stars come out in the sky and twinkle, would go and break her engagement
_entirely_ of her own accord--you _must_ have--”
And now Oliver looked at her with a good deal of sorrowful pity--she had
delivered herself so completely into his hands.
“I never said it was her fault, Elinor,” he said gently, keeping the
laughter back by a superb effort of will. “It was mine, I am sure,” and
then he added most sorrowfully, “All mine.”
“_Well!_”
For a moment he forgot that he was there playing checkers with himself
and Elinor for Ted.
“You've never been through it, have you?” he said rather fiercely. “You
can't have--you couldn't talk like that if you had. When you've put
everything you've got in mind or body or soul completely in one person's
hands and then, just because of a silly misunderstanding we neither of
us meant--they drop it--and you drop with it and the next thing you
know you're nothing but a _mess_ and all you can wonder is if even the
littlest part of you will ever feel whole again--” He realized that he
was very nearly shouting, and then, suddenly, that if he kept on this
way the game was over and lost. He must think about Ted, not Nancy. Ted,
Ted. Mr. Theodore Billett, Jr.
“She'd forgiven me such a lot,” he ended rather lamely. “I thought she'd
keep on.”
But his outburst had only made Elinor feel the sorrier for him--he felt
like a burglar as he saw the kindness in her eyes.
“I don't imagine she ever had such an awful lot to forgive, Ollie,” she
said gently.
Then the lie he had been leading up to all the way came at last,
magnificently hesitant.
“She had, Elinor. I was in France you know.”
He was afraid when he had said it--it sounded so much like a title out
of a movie--but he looked steadily at her and saw all the color go out
of her face and then return to it burningly.
“Well, that wasn't anything to be--forgiven about exactly--was it?” she
said unsteadily.
He spoke carefully, in broken sentences, only the knowledge that this
was the only way he could think of to help things nerving his mind. “It
wasn't being in France, Elinor. It was--the adjuncts. I don't suppose I
was any worse than most of my outfit--but that didn't make it any easier
when I had to tell her I hadn't been any better. I felt,” his voice
rose, his literary trick of mind had come to his rescue now and made him
know just how he would have felt if it had really happened, “I felt
as if I were in hell. Really. But I had to tell her. And when she'd
forgiven me that--and said that it was all right--that it didn't make
any real difference now--I thought she was about the finest person in
the world--for telling me such nice lies. And after that--I was so sure
that it was all right--that because of her knowing and still being able
to care--it would last--oh well--”
He stopped, waiting for Elinor but Elinor for a person so voluble a
little while ago seemed curiously unwilling to speak.
“Lord knows why I'm telling you this--except that we started arguing
and you're nice enough to listen. It's not tea-table conversation, or
it wouldn't have been ten years ago--and if I've shocked you, I'm sorry.
But after that, as I said--I didn't think there was anything that could
separate us--really I didn't--and then just one little time when we
didn't quite understand each other and--over. Sorry to spoil your
illusions, Elinor, but that's the way people do.”
“But how could she?” and this time there was nothing but pure hurt
questioning in Elinor's voice and the words seemed to hurt her as if she
were talking needles. “Why Ollie--she couldn't possibly--if she really
cared--”
All he wondered was which of them would break first.
“She could,” he said steadily, in spite of the fact that everything in
his mind kept saying “No. No. No.” “Any girl could--easily. Even you,
Elinor--if you'll excuse my being rude--”
For a moment he thought that his carefully plotted scenario was going
to break up into melodrama with the reticent, composed and sympathetic
Elinor's suddenly rising and slapping his face. Then he heard her say in
a voice of utter anger,
“How can you say anything like that, how can you? You are being the most
hateful person that ever lived. Why if I really cared for anyone--if
I ever really cared--” and then she began to cry most steadily and
whole-heartedly into her napkin and Oliver in spite of all the generous
plaudits he was receiving from various parts of his mind for having
carried delicate business successfully to a most dramatic conclusion,
wondered what in the name of Hymen his cue was now. Some remnants of
diplomacy however kept him from doing anything particularly obtrusive
and, after he had received an official explanation of nervous headache
with official detachment, the end of tea found them being quite cheerful
together. Neither alluded directly to what both thought about most but
in spite of that each seemed inwardly convinced of being completely
if cryptically understood by the other and when the noise of the first
returning motor brought a friendly plotter's “You talk to them--they
mustn't see me this way,” from Elinor and a casual remark from Oliver
that he felt sure he would have to run into town for dinner--family
had forwarded a letter from an editor this morning--so if she wanted
anything done--they seemed to comprehend each other very thoroughly.
He babbled with the returning jazzers for a quarter of an hour or so,
tactfully circumvented Peter into offering him the loan of a car since
he had to go into New York, and intimated that he would drop back and in
at the Rackstraws' dance as soon as possible, after many apologies for
daring to leave at all. Then he went slowly upstairs, humming loudly as
he did so. Elinor met him outside his door.
“Ollie--as long as you're going in--I wonder if you'd mind--” Her tone
was elaborately careless but her eyes were dancing as she gave him a
letter, firmly addressed but unstamped.
“No, glad to--” And then he grinned. “You'll be at the Rackstraws'.”
“Yes, Ollie.”
“Well--we'll be back by ten thirty or try to. Maybe earlier,” he said
at her back and she turned and smiled once at him. Then he went into his
room.
“Mr. Theodore Billett,” said the address on the letter, “252A Madison
Ave., N. Y. C.,” and down in the lower corner, “Kindness of Mr. Oliver
Crowe.”
He thought he might very well ask for the latter phrase on Ted's and
Elinor's wedding invitations. He passed a hand over his forehead--that
had been harder than walking a tight-rope with your head in a sack--but
the chasm had been crossed and nothing was left now but the fireworks
on the other side. How easy it was to tinker other people's love-affairs
for them--for oneself the difficulties were somehow a little harder to
manage, he thought. And then he began considering how long it would take
from Southampton to New York in the two-seater and just where Ted would
most likely be.