Oliver had quite a little time to think things over as the two-seater
purred along smooth roads toward New York. The longer he thought them
over, the less amiable some few of the things appeared. He formed and
rejected a dozen more or less incredible hypotheses as to what possible
connection there could be between Mrs. Severance and Sargent Piper--none
of them seemed to fit entirely and yet there must be something perfectly
simple, perfectly easy to explain--only what on earth could it be?
He went looking through his mind for any scraps that might possibly
piece together--of course he hadn't known Peter since College without
finding out that in spite of their extreme politeness toward each other,
Peter's mother and father really didn't get on. Club-stories came to him
that he had tried to get away from--the kind of stories that were told
about any prominent man, he supposed--a little leering paragraph in
“Town Gossip”--a dozen words dropped with the easy assuredness of tone
that meant the speakers were alluding to something that everyone knew
by people who hadn't realized that he was Peter's friend. A caustically
frank discussion of Mrs. Severance with Ted in one of Ted's bitter
moods--a discussion that had given Oliver a bad half-hour later with
Louise.
But things like that didn't _happen_--people whose houses you stayed
at--people your sister brought home over the week-end--the fathers of
your own friends. And then Oliver winced as he remembered the afternoon
when all the New Haven evening papers had screamed with headlines over
the Witterly divorce suit--and Bob Witterly's leaving College because he
couldn't stand it--that had been people you knew all right--and everyone
had always had such a good time at the Witterlys' too.
It was all perfectly incredible of course--but he would have to find Ted
just as soon as possible, no matter where he had to go to find him--and
as the little reel of the speedometer began to hitch toward the left and
into higher figures, Oliver felt very relieved indeed that he had the
two-seater and that Mr. Piper wasn't coming into town till the 7.03.
He got into New York to find he hadn't made as good time as he'd
thought--a couple of traffic blocks had kept him back for valuable
minutes--though of course the minutes couldn't be valuable exactly when
it was all bosh about his having to get in so quickly after all. He went
first to 252A Madison Avenue, hoping most heartily that Ted would be
there on the fifth floor with his eyeshade over his eyes and large
law-books crowding his desk, but the door was locked and knockings
brought no response except a peevish voice from the other side of the
narrow hall requesting any gentleman that was a gentleman to shut up for
Gawd's sake. The Yale Club next--there was just a chance that Ted might
be there--
Oliver went through the Yale Club a good deal more thoroughly than most
pages, from the lobby to the upstairs dining-room. He even invaded the
library to the suspicious annoyance of some old uncle who was pretending
to read a book held upside down in his lap in order to camouflage his
pre-prandial nap. No Ted--though half-a-dozen acquaintances who insisted
on saying hello and taking up time. Back to the street and a slight
dispute with a policeman as regarded the place where Oliver had parked
his car. He looked at his watch just before poking the self-starter--Mr.
Piper's train must be halfway to New York by now. He set his lips and
turned down 44th Street toward the Avenue.
Fourth floor Ted had said. The elevator went much too quickly for
Oliver--he was standing in front of a most non-committal door-bell
before he had arranged the racing tumult of thought in his mind enough
to be in any measure sure of just what the devil he was going to say.
Moreover he was oppressed by a familiar and stomachless sensation--the
sensation he always had when he tried to high-dive and stood looking
gingerly down from a shaky platform at water that seemed a thousand
miles away and as flat and hard as a blue steel plate. There wasn't any
guide in any Manual of Etiquette he had ever heard of on What to Say
When Interrupting a Tete-a-Tete between Your Best Friend and a Dangerous
And Beautiful Woman. He wondered idly if Ted would ever speak to him
again--Mrs. Severance certainly wouldn't--and he rather imagined that
even if Ted and Elinor did get married he would hardly be the welcome
guest he had always expected to be there.
Well, that was what you get for trying to pull a Jonathan when the Saul
in question was behaving a good deal more like David in the affair with
Uriah the Hittite's spouse--and it wasn't safe and Biblical and all
done with a couple of thousand years ago but abashingly real and now
happening directly under your own astonished eyes. He licked his lips a
little nervously--they seemed to be rather dry. No use standing outside
the door like a wooden statue of Unwelcome Propriety anyhow--the thing
had to be done, that was all--and he pushed the bell-button with all the
decision he could force into his finger.
The fact that it was not answered at once helped him a good deal by
giving him a certain strength of annoyance. He pushed again.
It was Mrs. Severance who answered it finally--and the moment he saw her
face he knew with an immense invisible shock of relief how right he had
been, for it was composed as an idol's but under the composure there was
emotion, and, the moment she saw him, anger, as strong and steady and
impassive as the color of a metal that is only white because it has
been possessed to extremity already with all the burning heat that its
substance can bear. She was dressed in some stuff that moved with
her and was part of her as wholly as if it and her body had been made
together out of light and gilded cloud--he had somehow never imagined
that she could be as--lustrous--as that--it gave him the sensation
that he had only seen her before when she was unlighted like an empty
lantern, and that now there was such fire of light in her that the very
glass that contained it seemed to be burning of itself. And then
he realized that she had given him good-evening with an exquisite
politeness, shaken hands and now was obviously waiting, with a little
tired look of surprise around her mouth, to find out exactly why he was
there at all.
He gathered his wits--it wasn't fair, somehow, for her to be wearing
that air of delicate astonishment at an unexpected call at dinner-time
when he hadn't been invited--it forced him into being so casually
polite.
“Sorry to break in on you like this, Mrs. Severance,” he said with a
ghastly feeling that after all he might be entirely wrong, and another
that it was queer to have to be so formal, in the afternoon tea
sense, with his words when his whole mind was boiling with pictures of
everything from Ted as a modern Tannhauser in a New York Venusberg to
triangular murder. “I hope I'm not--disturbing you?”
“Oh no. No,” and he suddenly felt a most complete if unwilling
admiration for the utter finish with which she was playing her side of
the act.
“Only you see,” and this was Oliver doing his best at the ingenuous boy,
“Ted Billett, you know--he said he might be having dinner with you
this evening--and I've got a very important letter for him--awful
nuisance--don't see why it couldn't have gone in the mail by itself--but
the man was absolutely insistent on my delivering it by hand.” “A
letter? Oh yes. And they want an answer right away?” Again Oliver
realized grudgingly that whatever Mrs. Severance might be she was
certainly not obvious. For “I'm so glad you came then,” she was saying
with what seemed to be perfect sincerity. “Won't you come in?”
That little pucker that came and went in the white brow meant that she
was sure that she could manage him, sure she could carry it off, Oliver
imagined--and he was frank enough with himself to admit that he was not
at all sure that she couldn't.
“Oh Ted--” he heard her say, very coolly but also with considerable
distinctness, as if her voice had to carry, “there's a friend of yours
here with a letter for you--”
And then she had brought him inside and was apologizing for having the
front room so badly lighted but one had to economize on light-bills,
didn't one, even for a small apartment, and besides didn't it give one a
little more the real feeling of evening? And Oliver was considering why,
when if as he pressed the bell, he had felt so much like a modern
St. George and wholly as if he were doing something rather fine and
perilous, he should feel quite so much like a gauche seventeen-year-old
now. He thought that he would not enjoy playing chess with Mrs.
Severance. She was one of those people who smiled inoffensively at the
end of a game and then said they thought it would really be a little
evener if they gave you both knights.
Ted reassured him though. Ted, stumbling out of the dining-room, with
a mixture of would-be unconcern, compound embarrassment and complete
though suppressed fury at Oliver on his face. It was hardly either just
or moral, Oliver reflected, that Mrs. Severance should be the only one
of them to seem completely at her ease.
“Hello, Ollie,” in the tone of “And if you'd only get the hell out as
quickly as possible.” “Mrs. Severance--” a stumble over that. “You've
got a letter for me?”
“Yes. It's important,” said Oliver as firmly as he could. He gave it,
and, as Ted sat down near a lamp to read it, Oliver saw by one sudden
momentary flash that passed over Mrs. Severance's face that she had seen
the address and known instantly that the handwriting was not that of a
man. And then Oliver began to think that he might have been right
when he had thought of the present expedition as something rather
perilous--he found that he had moved three steps away from Mrs.
Severance without his knowing it, very much as he might have from an
unfamiliar piece of furniture near which he was standing and which had
instantaneously developed all the electric properties of a coil of live
wire. Then he looked at Ted's face--and what he saw there made him want
to kick himself for looking--because it is never proper for even the
friendliest spectator to see a man's private soul stripped naked as a
grass-stalk before his own eyes. It was horribly like watching Ted lose
balance on the edge of a cliff that he had been walking unconcernedly
and start to fall without crying out or any romantic gestures, with only
that look of utter surprise struck into his face and the way his hands
clutched as if they would tear some solid hold out of the air. Oliver
kept his eyes on him in a frosty suspense while he read the letter all
through three times and then folded it and put it carefully away in his
breast pocket--and then when he looked at Mrs. Severance Oliver could
have shouted aloud with immense improper joy, for he knew by the way
Ted's hands moved that they were going back in the car together.
Ted was on his feet and his voice was as grave as if he were
apologizing for having insulted Mrs. Severance in public, but under the
meaninglessness of his actual words it was wholly firm and controlled.
“I'm awfully sorry--I've got to go right away. You'll think me immensely
rude but it's something that's practically life-and-death.” “Really?”
said Mrs. Severance and Oliver could have clapped his hands at her
accent. Now that the battle had ended bloodlessly, he supposed he might
be permitted to applaud, internally at least. And “I'm sorry--but this
is over,” said every note in Ted's voice and “Lost have I? Well then--”
every note in hers.
It occurred to Oliver that things were badly arranged--all this--and he
was the only audience.
Life seemed sudden lavish in giving him benefit performances of other
people's love-affairs--he supposed it was all part of the old and
deathless jest.
And then, like a prickling of cold, there passed over him once more
that little sense of danger. Mrs. Severance and Ted were both standing
looking at each other and neither was saying anything--and Ted looked by
his face as if he were walking in his sleep.
“The car's down below, old boy,” said Oliver helpfully, and then, a
little louder “Peter's car, you know,” and whatever cobwebs had been
holding Ted for the last instant broke apart. He went over to Mrs.
Severance. “Good-by.”
“Good-by,” and he started making apologies again while she merely looked
and Oliver was suddenly fretting like a weary hostess whose callers have
stayed hours too long, to have him down in the car and the car pointed
again with its nose toward Southampton.
And then he heard, through Ted's last apologia, the whir of a mounting
elevator.
The elevator couldn't stop at the fourth floor--it couldn't. But it did,
and there was the noise of the gate slung back and “_What's that?_”
said Mrs. Severance sharply, her politeness broken to bits for the first
time.
They were all standing near the door, and, with a complete disbelief in
all that he was hearing and seeing, Oliver heard Mrs. Severance's voice
in his ear, “The kitchen--fire-escape--” saw her push Ted toward him
as if she were shifting a piece of cumbrous furniture, and obeyed
her orders implicitly because he was too surprised to think of doing
anything else.
He hurried himself and the still half-somnambulistic Ted through the
dining-room curtains, just in time to catch a last glimpse of Mrs.
Severance softly pressing with all her weight and strength against
her side of the door of the apartment as a man's quick short footsteps
crossed the hall in two strides, and after a second's pause, a key
clicked into the lock.