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Young People's Pride (Harper's Bazar serial)/Part 3

OUIS CROWE—Young, poor, proud, a dreamer, romantically in love but nervously worn by the stress of a long engagement—how was he to reconcile his dreams with Life's commonplace?

Nancy Ellicott—“Gay as a squirrel and wayward as a swallow,” but self-supporting since her school-days—modern without flapperisms—deliciously temperamental—she could not see why Louis and she, when they loved, must wait so long for marriage. But when she is tempted to consider a position in Paris, Louis's hurt pride separates them.

Theodore Billett—It was a double struggle that Ted Billett fought with himself in, day in, day out—the struggle to master his war-restlessness—the struggle to forget certain things he had done in France. On their outcome hung his making or marring as a man.

Elinor Piper—Daughter of American society—correct of the correct—her test came when all the ideals of her conventional upbringing clashed with her love for the Ted who had not been a plaster saint.

Rose Severance—Helen of Troy in a Riverside Drive apartment. Wide eyes, sea-blue, sea-changing, sea-mysterious. A full, small mouth. A chin cleft with decision. The eyes measure, the mouth asks, the cleft chin finds the way, a way that has always included a man.

HE parti-colored harlequin and the young Chinese lady in blue silks are walking the Italian gardens, talking about nothing in particular. Ted has managed to discuss the moon—it is high now, a round white luster—the night, which is warm—the art of garden decoration, French, English and Italian—-the pleasantness of Southampton after New York—all with great nervous fluency, but so completely as if he had met Elinor for the first time ten minutes ago, that she is beginning to wonder why, if he dislikes her as much as that, he ever suggested leaving the dance-floor at all.

Ted, meanwhile, is frantically conscious of the fact that they have reached the end of the garden, are turning back, and still he is so cripplingly tongue-tied about the only thing he really wishes to say that he cannot even get the words out to suggest their sitting down. It is not until he stumbles over a pebble while passing a small hard marble seat back in a nest of hedge that he manages to make his first useful remark of the promenade.

“Ah—a bench!” he says brightly, and then, because that sounded so completely imbecile, plunges on.

“Don't you want to sit down a minute, Elinor? I—you—it's so cool—so warm, I mean—” He closes his mouth firmly—what a ghastly way to begin!

But Elinor says “Yes” politely and they try to adapt themselves to the backless ornamental bench, Ted nervously crossing and recrossing his legs until he happens to think that Elinor certainly never would marry anybody with St. Vitus's dance.

“Can't tell you how nice it's been this time, Elinor. And you've been.” There, things are going better—at least, he has recovered his voice.

“Why, you know how much we love to have you, Ted,” says Elinor, and Ted feels himself turn hot and cold, as he was certain you never really did except in diseases. But then she adds, “You and Louis and Bob Templar and, oh, all Peter's friends.”

He looks at her steadily for a long moment—the blue silks of her costume suit her completely. She is there, black hair and clear eyes, small hands and mouth pure as the body of a dream and elfish with thoughts like a pansy—all the body of her, all that people call her. And she is so delicately removed from him—so clean in all things where he has not been quite clean—that he knows savagely within him that there can be no real justice in a world where he can even touch her lightly, and yet he must touch her because if he does not he will die. All the things he meant to say shake from him like scraps of confetti, he does not worry any more about money or seeming ridiculous or being worthy, all he knows at all in the world is his absolute need of her, a need complete as a child's, and so choosing any words that come.

“Listen—do you like me?” says the parti-colored harlequin, and all the sharp leaves of the hedge begin to titter as wind runs over them at one of the oldest and least sensible questions in the world.

HE young Chinese lady turns towards the harlequin. There is some laughter in her voice and a great deal of surprise

“Why, Ted, of course—why, why shouldn't I? You're Peter's friend and—”

“Oh, I don't mean that!” The harlequin's hands twist at each other till the knuckles hurt, but he seems to have recovered most voluble if chaotic powers of speech.

“That was silly, asking that—but it's hard—when you care for anybody so much you can't see—when you love them till they're the only thing there is you care about—and you know you're not fit to touch them—not worthy of them—that they're thousands of times too good for you, but—oh, Elinor, Elinor, I just can't stand it any more! Do you love me, Elinor? because I love you as I never loved anything else in the world?”

The young Chinese lady doesn't seem to be quite certain of just what is happening. She has started to speak three times and stopped each time, while the harlequin has been waiting with the suspense of a man hanging from Heaven on a packthread. But then she does speak.

THINK I do, Ted—oh, Ted, I know I do,” she says uncertainly and then Louis, if he were there, would have stepped forward to bow like an elegant jack-knife at the applause most righteously due him for perfect staging, for he really could not have managed better about the kiss that follows if he had spent days and days showing the principals how to rehearse it.

And then something happens that is as sudden as a bubble's going to pieces and most completely out of keeping with any of Louis's ideas on how love's young comedy should be set for the theater. For “Oh, what am I doing?” says the harlequin in the voice of a man who has met his airy double alone in a wood full of ghosts and seen his own death in its face, and he crumples into a loose bag of parti-colored silks, his head in his hands.

It would be nothing very much to any sensible person, no doubt—the picture that made itself out of cold dishonorable fog in the instant of peace after their double release from pain. It was only the way that Elinor looked at him after the kiss—and remembering the last time he saw his own diminished little image in the open eyes of a girl.

The young Chinese lady is shrinking inside her silks as if frost had touched her—all she knows is that she doesn't understand. And then there is the harlequin looking at her with his face gone suddenly pinched and odd, as if he had started to torture himself with his own hands; and the fact that he will not touch her, and what he says.

“Oh, Elinor darling. Oh, I can't tell you, I can't!”

“But what is it, Ted?”

“It's this—it's what I meant to tell you before I ever told you I loved you—what I haven't any right not to tell you—and I guess that the fact I didn't, shows pretty well what sort of a fellow I am. Do you really think you know about me, dear—do you really think you do?”

“Why, of course, Ted.” The voice is still a little chill with the fright he gave her, but under that it is beautifully secure.

“Well, you don't. And, oh Lord, why couldn't it have happened before I went to France!—because then it would have been all different and I'd have had some sort of a right—not a right, maybe—but, anyhow, I could have come to you straight. I can't now, dear, that's all.”

HE voice halts as if something were breaking to pieces inside of it.

“I can't bring you what you'd bring me. It's—just—that ... just that—while I was in France—I went over—all the hurdles—and then a few more, I guess—and Ive got to—tell you about it—because I love you—and I wouldn't dare love you, even—if I didn't—tell you the truth. You see. But, oh my God, I never thought it would—hurt so!” and the parti-colored body of that harlequin is shaken with a painful passion that seems ridiculously out of keeping with his motley. But all that the young Chinese lady feels is that for a single and brittle instant she and somebody else had a star in their hands that covered them with light clean silver, and that now the magician who made the  star out of nothing and gave it to her is showing her just why there never was any star.

Moreover, she has only known she was in love for the last five minutes—and that is hardly long enough for her to discover that love itself is too living to be very much like any nice girls dreams of it—and the shock of what Ted has said has brought every one of her mother's reticent acid hints on the general uncleanliness of man too prickling-close to her mind. And she can't understand—she never will understand, she thinks with dull pain.

“Oh, how could you, Ted? How could you?” she says, as he waits as a man walking the plank might wait for the final gentle push that will send him overboard.

Oh, I know it was fine of you to tell—but it's just spoiled everything forever. Oh, Ted, how could you?” and then she is half-running, half-walking up the path toward the porch and all she knows is that she must get somewhere where she can be by herself. The harlequin does not follow her.

OUIS, in the middle of a painfully vivid dream in which he has just received, in the lounge of a Yale Club crowded with whispering, pointing spectators, the news that Miss Nancy Ellicott of St. Louis has eloped with the Prince of Wales, wakes, to hear some one stumbling around the room in the dark.

“That you, Ted?”

“Yes. Go to bed.”

“Can't—I'm there. What's time?”

“'Bout five, I guess.” Ted doesn't seem to want to be very communicative.

“Um.” A pause while Louis remembers what it was he wanted to ask Ted about and Ted undresses silently.

“Well—congratulations?”

Ted's voice is very even, very controlled.

“Sorry, Caw. Not even with all your good advice.”

“Honestly?”

“Uh-huh.”

Well, look here—better luck next time, anyway. It's all—”

“It's all over, Caw. I'm getting out of here to-morrow before most of them are up. Special breakfast and everything—called back to town by urgent legal affairs.” He laughs, rather too barkingly for Louis to like it.

“Oh, wow!”

“Correct.”

“Well, she's—”

“She's an angel, Caw. But I had to tell her—about France. That broke it. D'you wonder?”

“Oh, you poor, damn, honorable, simple-minded, blessed, blasted fool! Before you'd really begun?”

Ted hesitates. “Y-yes.”

“Oh, wow!”

“Well, if all you can do is to lie back in bed there and call on your Redeemer when— Sorry, Caw. But I'm not feeling too pleasant to-night.”

“Well, I ought to know—”

“Forgot. You ought. Well—you do.”

“But I don't see anything yet that—”

“She does.”

“But—”

“Oh, Caw, what's the use? We can both of us play Job's comforter to the other because we're pretty good friends. but you can see how my telling her would—oh, well, there isn't much percentage in hashing it over. I've done what I've done. If I'd known I'd have to pay for it this way, I wouldn't have—but there, we're all made like that. There's one thing I simply can't do—and that is get away with a thing like that on false pretenses—I'd rather shoot the works on one roll and crap than use the sort of dice that behave. I went into the thing with my eyes open—now I've got to pay for it—well, what of it? It wouldn't make all the difference to a lot of girls, perhaps—a lot of the best—but it does to Elinor and she's the only person I want. If I can't have her, I don't want anything—but if I've made what all the Y. M. C. A. Christians that ever sold nickel bars of chocolate for a quarter would call a swine out of myself—well, I'm going to be a first-class swine. 'So put on my glad rags, Josie, I'm going to Rector's and hell!'”

All this has been light enough toward the end but the lightness is not far from a very real desperation, all the same.

“Meaning by which?” Louis queries uneasily.

“Meaning by which that some of my address for the next two-three weeks will be care of Mrs. Rose Severance, fourth floor, the Nineveh, Riverside Drive, New York—you know the place, I showed it to you on from a bus top when we were talking the mysterious lady over. And that I don't think Mr. Theodore Billett will graduate cum laude from Columbia Law School. In fact, I think it very possible that Mr. Billett will join Mr. Louis Crowe, the celebrated unpublished novelist, on a pilgrimage to Paris for to cure their broken hearts and go to the devil like gentlemen. Eh Louis?”

“Well, that's all right for me,” says Louis combatively. “And I always imagined we'd find each other in Hades. I'm not trying to be inhospitable with my own pet red-hot gridiron, but all the same—”

“Now, Crowe, for Pete's sake, it's five o'clock in the morning and I'm catching the 7:12—”

And Louis is too sleepy to argue the point. Besides, he knows quite well that any arguments he can use will only drive Ted, in his present state of mind, a good deal farther and faster along the road he has so dramatically picked out for himself. So, between trying to think of some means of putting either sense or the fear of God into Elinor Piper, whatever Ted may say about it, and wondering how the latter would take a suggestion to come over to Scarsdale for a while instead of starting an immoral existence with that beautiful but possessive friend of Anne's, he drops off to sleep.

OUIS had depended on Ted's noisy habit 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 Caw:

 * “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 the French proposition. I'm serious about it.

“Ted.”

By the time he had read this through, Louis 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 supposition 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 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 café hangers-on in Paris—college 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—and 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, Louis 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 Louis 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 came, with Elinor at the other end of the table and Juliet Bellamy talking like a mechanical piano into Louis'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 Louis 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 had expressed a fond desire to motor over to a little tea-room he knew where you could dance, and the others had received the suggestion with frantic applause. Louis was just starting down-stairs 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—”

HAT was quite enough for Louis—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 “Louis! Oh, Louis, you slacker!” into his 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, Louis, what was the matter? The pack was howling for you all over the house—they've all gone over to dance—look, I'll get you a car—” She went down a couple of steps toward the telephone.

Louis 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 am so sort of fagged out—that's why I didn't go with them,” she added—a little uncertainly Louis noticed.

“And—oh, it's just being silly and tired I suppose, but all of them together—”

“I know,” said Louis 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 Louis 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 away 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, Louis, 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 rather 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—”

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, Louis felt that so far things had slid along as well as could be expected. Elinor's breeding 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 broken-hearted 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 to Jonathan would have found things quite so easy if they had had to take not their lives but 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.

“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, Louis, 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 wasn't because we cared—”

“I know—and—and—thanks—and I do appreciate, Elinor.” Louis 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 come 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.” Louis 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—specially 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 Louis 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, you know. 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. 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—”

Louis 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 Louis 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.”

“Louis 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 Louis 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 Louis, 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 Louis, 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, Louis—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—”

ND now Louis 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 Louis 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 of broken bones and memories and all you can wonder is if even the littlest part of you will ever feel whole again—” He realized that he was 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, Louis,” she said gently.

HEN 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, Louis—she couldn't possibly—if she really cared—”

All Louis 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:

“Louis Crowe, how can you say anything like that, how can you? You are being the most hateful person that ever lived. Why. if I ever really cared for any one—if I ever really cared—” and then she began to cry most steadily and whole-heartedly into her napkin and Louis, in spite of all the generous plaudits he was receiving from various parts of his mind for having carried a 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 Louis 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.

Louis 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 up-stairs, humming loudly as he did so. Elinor met him outside his door.

“Oh, Louis—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, Louis.”

“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 Louis went into his room.

“Mr. Theodore Billett,” said the address on the letter, “252A Madison Avenue, N. Y. C.” and down in the lower corner, “Kindness of Mr. Louis Crowe.”

Louis 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 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 to tinker other people's love-affairs for them—for oneself the difficulties were somehow a little harder to manage, he thought. And would take from Southampton to New York in the two-seater and just where Ted would be most likely to be.

LONG-DISTANCE telephone conversation about six o'clock in the afternoon between two voices we know, two voices usually so even and composed that the little pulse of excitement beating through both as they speak now seems perilously unnatural. One is Mr. Severance's thin cool speech and the other—most curious, that—seems by every obsequious without being servile, trained and impassive turn and phrase to be that of that treasure among household treasures, Elizabeth.

“My instructions were that I was to call you, sir, whenever I was next given an evening out.”

“Yes, Elizabeth. Well?”

“I have been given an evening out to-night, sir.”

“Yes.”

“Mrs. Severance has told me that I am on no account to return till to-morrow morning, sir.”

“Yes. Go on.”

“There are the materials of a small but sufficient meal for two persons in the refrigerator, sir. Mrs. Severance is dining out, sir—she said.”

“Yes. Any further information?”

“Mrs. Severance received a telephone call this morning, sir, before she went out. It was after that that she told me I was to have the evening.”

“You did not happen to—overhear—the conversation, did you, Elizabeth?”

“Oh no, sir. Mrs. Severance spoke very low. The only words that I could catch were 'You' at the beginning and 'Please come' near the end. The words 'please come' were rather—affectionately—spoken if I might make so bold, sir.”

“You have done very well, Elizabeth.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“There is nothing else?”

“No, sir. Should you wish me to phone you again before to-morrow morning, sir?”

“No, Elizabeth.”

“Thank you, sir. Good-by, sir.”

“Good-by, Elizabeth.”

HE rest of the party has scattered to the gardens or the porch—Louis has wandered into the library alone to wait for Peter who is bringing around the two-seater himself. It is a big dim room with books all the way up to the ceiling and a comfortable leather lounge upon which  Louis sinks, picks up a magazine from a little table beside it and starts ruffling the pages idly. The chirrup of a telephone bell that seems to come out of the wall beside him makes him jump.

Then he remembers—that must be Mr. Piper's office through the closed door there. He remembers, as well, Peter joking with his father once about his never getting away from business even in the country and pointing at the half dozen telephones on top of the big flat desk with a derisive gesture while detailing to Louis the fondness that Sargent Piper has for secretive private wires and the absurd precautions he takes to keep them intensely private. “Why, he went and had all his special numbers here changed once just because I found out one of them by mistake and called him up on it for a joke—the cryptic old person!” Peter had said with mocking affection.

The telephone chirrups again and Louis gets up and goes toward the door of the office with a vague idea of answering it since there seem to be no servants about. Then he remembers something else—Peter's telling him that nothing irritates his father more than having any one else answer one of his private wires—and stops with his hand on the door that has swung inward an inch or so already under his casual pressure. It doesn't matter anyhow—there—somebody has answered it—Mr. Piper probably, as there is another door to the office and both of them are generally kept locked. Mr. Piper like all great business men has his petty idiosyncrasies.

Louis is just starting to turn away when a whisper of sound that seems oddly like “Mrs. Severance” comes to his ear by some trick of acoustics through the door. He hesitates—and stays where he is, wondering all the time why he is doing anything so silly and unguest-like—and also what on earth he could say if Mr. Piper suddenly flung open the door. But Ted has told him a good deal at various times of the more mysterious aspects of Mrs. Severance, and her name jumping out at him this way from the middle of Mr. Piper's private office makes it rather hard to act like a copybook gentleman—especial!y with his last conversation with Ted still plain in his mind.

HE voices are too low for him to hear anything distinctly, but again one of the the speakers says “Mrs. Severance”—of that he is entirely sure. The receiver clicks back and Louis regains the lounge in three long soft strides, thanking his carelessness that he is still wearing rubber-soled sport shoes. He is very much absorbed in an article on “Fishing for Tuna” when Peter comes in.

“Well, Louis, everything ready for you. Awfully sorry you have to rush in this way—”

“Yes, nuisance all right, but it's my one best editor and that may mean something real—terribly cheeky thing for me to do, Pete—bumming your car like this—”

“Oh, rats, you know you're welcome—and anyhow I'm lending it to you because you'll have to bring it back, and that means you'll come back yourself—”

“Well, look, Pete, please make all the excuses you can for me to your mother. And I'll run back here and change and then go over to the Rackstraws', as soon as I can—Elinor told you about Ted?”

“Yes. Sounds sort of simple to me asking him back to-night for that beach picnic to-morrow, when he absolutely had to leave this morning—but I never could keep all Elinor's social arrangements straight. Certainly hope he can get off.”

“So do I,” says Louis non-committally, and then the door of Mr. Piper's office opens and Mr. Piper comes out looking as well brushed and courteous as usual but with a face that seems as if it had been touched all over lightly with a gray painful stain.

“Hello, Father? Anything up from Secret Headquarters?”

“No, boy,” and Louis is surprised at the effort with which Mr. Piper smiles. “Winthrop called up a few minutes ago about those Hungarian bonds, but it wasn't anything important—” and again Louis is very much surprised indeed, though he does not show it.

“Is your mother here, Peter?”

“Up-stairs dressing, I think, Father.”

Mr. Piper hesitates.

“Well, you might tell her—it's nothing of consequence, but I must go into town for a few hours—I shall have them give me a sandwich now and catch the 7:03 I think.” “But look, Father, Louis has to go in, too, for dinner—he's taking the two-seater now. Why don't you let him take you too—that would save time—”

“Perfectly delighted to, Mr Piper, of course, and—”

Mr. Piper looks full at Louis—a little strangely, Louis thinks.

“That would be—” Mr. Piper begins, and then seems to change his mind for no apparent reason. “No, I think the train would be better. I do not wish to get in too early, though I thank you, Louis,” he says with old-fashioned bob of his head. “And now I must really—a little food perhaps—” and he escapes before either Louis or Peter has time to argue the question. Louis turns to Peter.

“Look here, Pete, if I'm—”

“You're not. Oh, I'd think it'd be a lot more sensible of Father to let you take him in, but you never can tell about Father. Something must be up, though, in spite of what he says—he's supposed to be on a vacation and I haven't seen him look the way he does to-night since some of the tight squeezes in the war.”

T all started by having too much Mrs. Winters at a time, Nancy decided later. Mrs. Winters went down with comparative painlessness in homeopathic doses, but Mrs. Winters day in and day out was too much like being forcibly fed with thick raspberry syrup. And then there had been walking up the Avenue from the Library alone the evening before—and remembering walks with Louis—and coming across that copy of the “Shropshire Lad” in Mrs. Winters' bookcase and thinking just how Louis' voice had sounded when he read it aloud to her—a process of some difficulty, she recalled, because he had tried to read with an arm around her. And then all the next day, as she tried to work, nothing but Louis, Louis, running through her mind soft-shoed like a light and tireless runner, crumbling all proper dignity and good resolutions away from her, little, hard pebble by little, hard pebble, till she had finally given up altogether, called up Vanamee and Company on the telephone and asked, with her heart in her mouth, if Mr. Louis Crowe were there.

The reply that came seemed unreal somehow—she had been so sure he would be and every nerve in her body had been so strung to wonder at what she was going to say or do when he finally answered, that the news that he had left three weeks before brought her down to earth as suddenly as if she had been tripped. All she could think of was that it must be because of her that Louis had left the company—and illogically picture a starving Louis painfully wandering the streets of New York and gazing at the food displayed in restaurant windows with lost and hopeless eyes.

Then she shook herself—what nonsense—he must be at Scarsdale. She couldn't call him up at Scarsdale, though; he mightn't be there when she phoned and then his family would answer and what his family must think of her now, when they'd been so perfectly lovely when she and Louis were first engaged—she shivered a little—no, that wouldn't do. And letters never really said things—it mustn't be letters—besides, she thought, humbly, it would be so awful to have Louis send letters back unopened. Two weeks of pure Mrs. Winters had chastened Nancy to an unusual degree.

For all that, though, it was not until Mrs. Winters had left her alone for the evening that she finally made up her mind. Then she sighed and went to the telephone again.

“Mr. Louis Crowe? He is away on a visit just at present, but we expect him back to-morrow afternoon.” Margaret is pretending for her own satisfaction over the wire that the Crowes have a maid. “Who is calling, please?”

Rather shakily, “A f-friend.”

Briskly. “I understand. Well, he will be back to-morrow. Is that all that you wished to inquire? No message?”

“Good-by, then,” and again Nancy thinks that things simply will not be dramatic no matter how hard she tries.

She decides to take a small walk, however—small because she simply must get to bed before Mrs. Winters comes back and starts talking at her improvingly. The walk seems to take her directly to the nearest subway—and so to the Grand Central where, after she has acquired a timetable of trains to Scarsdale, she seems to be a good deal happier than she has been for some time. At least, as she is going up the cake-colored stairs to the upper level again, she cannot help taking the last one with an irrepressible skip.

OUIS 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 every one 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 Louis a bad half-hour later with Anne.

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 Louis 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—they had been people you knew, all right—and every one had always had such a good time at the Witterlys', too. France—things like that in France—things you ran up against.

T 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 fragments, Louis 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 eye-shade over his eyes and large law book; 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 Caw's sake. The Yale Club next—there was just a chance that Ted might be there—

Louis went through the Yale Club a good deal more thoroughly than most pages, from the lobby to the up-stairs dining-room. No Ted—though half-a-dozen acquaintances who insisted on saying hello and taking up time. Back to Park Avenue and a slight dispute with a policeman as regarded the place where Louis had parked his car. Louis looked at his watch just before he poked the self-starter—Mr. Piper's train must be half-way 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 Louis—he was standing in front of a most non-committal door-bell before he had arranged the racing tumult of thought in his mind 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. There wasn't any guide in any Manual of Etiquette he had ever heard of on What to Say When Interrupting a Tête-à-Tête 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 got 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 and 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 hands.

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.

T 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 as 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 month, 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 Louis 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 myself—but the man was absolutely insistent on my delivering it by hand.”

“A letter? Oh, yes. And they want an answer right away?” Again Louis 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 she could manage him, sure she could carry it off, Louis 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 Louis 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 enragement at Louis on his face. It was hardly either just or moral, Louis reflected, that Mrs. Severance should be the only one of them to seem completely at her ease.

“Hello, Louis,” in the tone of “And if you'd only get to hell out as quickly possible.” “Mrs. Severance”—a stumble over that. “You've got a letter for me?”

“Yes. It's important,” said Louis, as firmly as he could. He gave it, and, as Ted sat down near a lamp to read it, Louis 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 Louis 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 horrible, like watching Ted lose balance on the edge of a cliff where 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. Louis 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, Louis 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.

ED 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 Louis 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 Louis that things were badly arranged—all this—and he was the only audience. Life seemed suddenly 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 Louis 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 Louis 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 “Whats 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 he was hearing and seeing, Louis 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 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 foot-steps crossed the hall—two strides, and after a second's pause, a key clicked into the lock.


text:
The Start

ICHARD STANTON had scarcely heard the warden's kindly words of exhortation and advice, although he had answered with perfunctory respect. All he could grasp was the fact of his freedom and, out of a clear sky, the edict that released him a full three weeks before the expected time. The warden had said something about exemplary conduct, about a mistake in the reckoning. Richard tried again to realize the whole significance of the announcement. He could not. It was as if a star had burst in his mind, and its four corners were cumbered with flashing, exploding, purple-and-gold fires. He followed the officer out of the warden's office, he changed from his prison-stripes to the clothes they had ready for him, he accepted the money they offered him. he made his brief farewells like a man in a dream.

Outside came his first sense of disillusionment. He had expected the world, when it came his turn to join it again, to have a visible welcoming hand, a palpable atmosphere of joy and tenderness. But there was no such significance to the look of everything about the Charlestown State Prison. Perhaps it was that the neighborhood was familiar—he had often caught wistful glimpses of it from the other side of the gray-stone walls; a sordid, dusty, dreary place it was, too. Perhaps it was Richard's feeling that everybody about, the children playing jump-rope in the court, the woman shaking a rug out of a near-by window, the very iceman staggering under the weight of the ponderous translucent cube that he so sturdily nipped in his enormous pincers, must all recognize him as a discharged prisoner. He hurried up Austin Street and away from the scene.

He came out onto Main Street at the first turn and, gradually, he began to master his self-consciousness, to look people and things boldly in the face. The elevated attracted his attention immediately, and he stood watching the progress of the cars for a few minutes. At first he thought he would take a train over to the city, then he decided to walk. He strolled leisurely across the bridge, staring interestedly at the passers-by. The draw was up, and he had to wait fifteen minutes or more.

A small crowd of people gathered there, workmen rushing back to work, women and girls, in couples, impatient for their shopping, small children on a Saturday exploring tour of the big city,—they all waited in varying degrees of impatience. Something happened to the machinery of the bridge, and there was a protracted delay. The crowd grew steadily. It became impatient, then vindictive, then philosophic and humorous. The men began to chaff the girls, and the latter did not disdain to answer them through the modest medium of remarks ostensibly directed to their companions. Richard leaned back against the fence, and drank it all in. His spirits were rising. He was beginning to enjoy everything. The warm sun and the softness of the clear spring day wrought a seductive enervation in his nerves, and the salt air worked a tangy stimulation in his muscles. He had to bite his lips to keep back meaningless smiles. He amused himself with studying the clothes of the people about him. Ten years, he decided, had made great changes in the fashions. It was obvious in the clothes the men wore. What made the difference with the women it was more difficult for him to find out.

Presently the draw-gates swung slowly apart. The released crowd surged forward and spread over the sidewalk, the more speedy shooting ahead.

Richard was among these. His buoyancy of spirit affected his look and his movements. He would walk over to the Tremont House, he decided, take the Brookline car, and burst upon them all at home suddenly. Home! That meant having about you the people that you loved, and being at liberty to talk with them whenever you wished. It meant silence only when you wanted silence, and it meant noise for as long as you wanted noise. It meant other lovely things, delicious food to eat, delicate china to eat it from, a wide, cool, soft bed in a big, airy room. It meant books, magazines, pictures, music. Oh, God, what did it not mean? Why had he delayed himself by walking over the bridge? He bounded forward as if shot from a cannon's mouth, and his stride became a feverish one.

There was his mother to see first. He had not seen her so often as his father or James in the last ten years. She had come as frequently as the others would let her. But Richard had himself realized that her visits to the prison were a frightful strain upon her, and he had, at last, begged them not to let her come again. He had not seen her for two years. On that last visit he noticed that the hair had begun to gray thickly about her sweet, middle-aged face. Her soft eyes were dim with tears, her mouth worked convulsively all the time she had stayed with him.

Then there would be Patia, his only sister. Patia had been a little girl of thirteen when he left. Now she was a woman. Patia, a woman! It seemed incredible. She had been a quiet little thing, deep in her studies and her books. At eighteen she had gone to college. She had taken her degree the previous June. Richard had not seen her once in the last ten years, and before that, he had had little chance to know her. But he had always felt that, in an odd, unexpresseed way, they understood each other. Patia and he were alike, and they were both different from James, and from their parents. James, the handsome, gifted one of the family, was a curious combination of father and mother. He had their mother's indecision of character, their father's laissez-faire temperament. The combination made him curiously lovable. Patia and himself, Richard reflected, had neither of these weaknesses, even if he, at least, had proved himself the possessor of greater ones.

He was on Washington Street by this time, walking swiftly, his head bent to the clamor of his thoughts.

“Hullo,” a voice called suddenly, “you're just the kind of fellow I'm looking for.”

Richard started violently, and stared hard at the man who blocked his progress.

It was little Willett. He had been discharged three months before. Everybody in the prison had been sorry to see him go. He was the comedian of their grim company. He was, moreover, a jolly companion and a pleasant work-mate. He was a little pasty-faced fellow with a complexion so deeply lined that it seemed to crack when he smiled. His profession was one not found in the curriculum of colleges, but a difficult one, nevertheless. Its requirements were a clear head, a strong arm, a soft step, and the ability to work quickly and quietly. Incidentally, members in good standing were owners of a set of curious but innocent-looking tools, not unlike, indeed, the slender, refined instruments employed by dentists.

“Oh, hullo, Wil—” Richard was beginning.

“Jones, please,” Willett interrupted; “the other fellow's skipped—had to go,” he continued, his eyes twinkling; “this town's no place for a decent man. Just out?”

“This morning.”

“Looking for a job?”

“Oh, no,” Richard said, “there's no need of that yet. I'm going home first. I suppose my father'll have some plans for me.”

“Going home!” Willett repeated, “Lord, you're an awful fool to do that. They don't want to see you. They may say they will, but they don't. I should think you'd have more sense than to go home and queer them.”

Richard flushed. “I know they'll be glad to see me. You—I—I don't think I shall queer them,” he ended humbly.

“Well, if it's the first time,” Willett conceded, “they'll try to make you think they're glad, but you'll see through the bluff easy enough. Now, listen to me, Stanton, I'm not going to stand here and watch you go up against it in that way. You'll get all the spunk jammed out of you. Here, have a cigar.”

Richard recalled with surprise that the first thing he had promised himself after his release was a good smoke. He had forgotten all about it.

“Thank you,” he said gratefully. It was a good cigar. Its first whiff transported him.

“I'll walk along with you, Stanton,” Willett went on. “The fact is, I've got a good thing, and I want to put you next. Of course, you can do as you please about it, but it's the chance of your life. There's two friends of mine that are wise to it besides me, and we want another man, someone that can put up a good appearance. You're just the man for us. There's no risk. It's a good thing—you can take my word for that. What do you say?”

Richard knew without further explanation what the character of the “good thing” was. “I can't do it,” he said, looking Willett steadily in the eye, “but I appreciate your kindness.” He held out his hand. “You see, I've made up my mind to keep straight. If I didn't feel that my people would stand behind me, it might be different—but they will.”

“Oh, don't make up your mind so soon,” Willett protested. “There's no hurry about it. See here, Stanton, you think this matter over. I tell you it's a big thing, and there's big money in it. You go home to-night if you want to. Lord, don't I know how you feel? But come in to-morrow and see me. Perhaps, by that time, you'll have changed your mind. I'll hold the question open until then, and you'll find me ready to talk business. I'll be on the Common, at the Joy Street end of the frog-pond, about three, say. How's that for you?”

“It's all right for me,” Richard said, “only I won't be there.”

“Oh, yes, you will,” Willett prophesied confidently. “Well, I turn up here. Don't forget. To-morrow at three. So long!”

Richard continued up Washington Street. Suddenly all his buoyancy of spirit had evaporated. His cigar, too, was smoked out. He threw the end away. He turned up Bromfield Street, meaning to take his car. The Tremont House had disappeared. There were no familiar car-tracks on Tremont Street.

“Where do you get a Brookline car?” he asked of a hurrying passer-by.

“In the subway,” the man responded without stopping.

The subway—of course. He remembered now. It was one of the first things that he had wanted to see. He walked over to the Common and studied the entrance. As he stood watching the flood of people disappearing into the bowels of the earth, suddenly a mood of deadly doubt and despair enveloped him. Mechanically he turned and walked up the Park Street Mall and took a seat under the arch of trees.

Was Willett right, he wondered. Of course he was. Who wanted a State prison-bird on his hands? They would be glad to see him at first, he knew. But afterward the situation would be embarrassing. There would be constant social friction, a thousand tiny personal smarts. Could any love survive that? Of course not. What was the use of putting it to the test when he knew it would fail? And he so much needed love and faith. Not alone to make up for his ten years of loneliness. There was the matter of his invention. The idea of that had come to him while he was in prison. He had thought it all out down to the minutest detail. It lay in his mind as clear and complete as his mother's face. He had made an idol, a fetich of it. It was a secret that he cherished with the jealous care that men show for the key to buried treasure. It was a key to him—the key to work, to wealth, to self-respect, to reinstated social position. Whether or no he could make a success of it all depended, he knew, upon the start, and the start depended on the home-coming. He had no doubts about the invention—but he would need money and sustaining hope for a little while at least. Once started, he could fight the whole world, but he required a start, and he knew that the start depended not on himself, but on others. What would the home-coming be like? He was afraid to let himself think. He cursed himself for a weakling, but his mood rode and rowelled him. All the afternoon he sat there mulling over his hopeless past, and his doubtful future, not daring to start homeward. Toward dusk he felt faint. He went into a restaurant and ordered dinner, but when it came he found that, although he was almost weak from hunger, he could not eat. He paid his bill and went out into the street again.

It had become dark. There were parallel rows of lights in all directions. There were more people than formerly, he observed, on the Boston streets at night. He walked back to the place he had left on the Common, sat down, and tried to think the matter out once more. His head ached, and his thoughts flew volatilely in all directions. Suddenly he jumped up, strode down the subway stairs, and flew into the Brookline car that seemed, providentially, to be waiting there.

The house was blazing with lights. They must be entertaining, he reflected. That seemed strange. The life had been a quiet one in his boyhood. He tiptoed across the velvet lawn, and peered in one of the front windows. The huge drawing-rooms were full of people, all seated, their chairs arranged in tiers, rows and rows of them, facing the further end of the room. There were dozens of pretty, bare-shouldered girls, laughing and talking. Here and there were matronly elderly women. There were groups of men standing at the back and in the aisles. Richard recognized nobody. It was like a dream. Suddenly his mother's face flashed out from a laughing group. The sight gave him courage. He walked to the back of the house, and went in at the kitchen door.

“Tell Mr. James that there is somebody here who would like to see him,” he said shortly to one of the surprised maids sitting there.

“I'm afraid he's too busy,” the girl began.

“Tell him,” Richard commanded. She disappeared.

He waited for several minutes, still standing. Then his brother appeared.

“Richard!” he exclaimed. “Good heavens!—come in here,” he ended with a quick glance at the curious faces of the two women. Richard followed him into the dining-room.

He was aware, even in the instant before his brother spoke, of a new look to the room, that was not entirely to be accounted for by the exquisite appointments of the many tiny tables that filled it and the adjacent hall, nor by the huge vases of blush-roses, and the pink-petticoated silver candlesticks that were everywhere. An inexplicable atmosphere hung about it. His brief glance into the drawing-rooms had surprised it there also. It was as if the big, old-fashioned house had suddenly grown younger.

James was holding out his hand to his brother. “I'm awfully glad to see you, Richard,” he said. “We did not expect you so soon, or we should have been prepared—you see, we're doing some entertaining to-night. I'm wondering—” he laughed embarrassedly.

Richard took his brother's hand. He was still standing.

“Tell Mr. Stanton to come here, please,” James called to a maid passing in the hall.

There was a pause. Richard looked at his brother, as handsome in his evening clothes as an illustration in a magazine. He caught a glimpse of his own figure in a mirror. He did not know himself at first. It seemed impossible to him that the ghastly mask, surmounting a thin figure, that almost looked as if it might rattle in its loose, bagging clothes, could be kin to the fresh-colored face across the table.

In the midst of this train of thought, his father came in.

“What's the matter, James?” he asked briskly. “Is—Richard, my poor boy! How does it happen that you're here? They told us three weeks later. If we'd only known. Now you must—come right up—” He stopped in perplexity. “The trouble is that every room and every bed in the house is filled up. We've a lot of out-of-town people on our hands. Now, where can we put you for the night, or until we've got rid of these people?”

“There's the hotel,” James suggested. There was an awkward pause. Richard said nothing. He was still standing.

“Tell Mrs. Stanton to come here,” Mr. Stanton ordered an invisible somebody in the hall.

Nobody spoke for a minute or two.

Mrs. Stanton came bustling in, soft and motherly; radiant, too, as Richard had never before seen her, in gray satin, lace, and pearls. “My boy, my boy,” she called from the doorway. She rushed over to Richard, and kissed him lovingly. “When—how—we didn't know—if we'd only been notified, dear, we'd have—tell me all about it. I'm so glad. Take Richard up—no, there's no—what are we going to do, Dick?” She turned to her husband. “Every corner in the house is taken. James is even going to sleep on the couch in the library, We could send Richard down to Cousin Amy's. I know she'd be lovely about it.”

Cousin Amy! Richard recalled her acid and vinegar aspect. Ten years ago she had always frozen him. What would she be like under the conditions of the present? Well, he wouldn't bother them. Willett was right. There was no place in the social scheme for the returned State-prison bird. He would stay at the hotel that night. And the next day at three he would keep his appointment with Willett. He must be doubly careful to call him Jones now—now that they were going to l)e pals. Jones had understood. How sure he had been that Richard would return.

“Don't bother about me, mother,” he said steadily. “I'll go to the hotel for the night. To-morrow I have a business engagement, but as soon as I have time”

“For goodness' sake! what are you doing out here?” a spirited voice interrupted. “It's so queer for you all to leave, and everybody's ready for the first tableau.”

A young girl stood in the doorway. It was Patia. Richard knew her at once. Her slender figure did not look her twenty-three years, but her earnest little face more than showed them. It was a beautiful face, Richard decided swiftly; proud in its poise on the slender neck, proud in the expression of the velvety eyes. These eyes were really black, but they were set in a skin as white as milk, its only other relieving color the satiny dark of her hair and eyebrows, and the curved scarlet of her delicious mouth.

“Oh,” she said uncertainly, “you've got—” She stared intently at Richard. “You're my brother Richard,” she burst out suddenly, rushing to his side. Her slender, bare arms went about his neck, and she kissed him again and again. “Oh, my dear, I'm so glad to have you here! It was all I needed to make my birthday-party a success. Oh, how I've longed to see you, Richard! But you must be tired and hungry. Sit down and let me bring you some wine.”

She pushed him into a chair at one of the little tables, making ruthless confusion of its dainty completeness. She brought a decanter from the sideboard, and poured him a glassful of wine. Richard drank, weakly obedient.

“We were just wondering what we should do,” her father was saying. “Where can we put Richard to-night, Patia? There seems to be no place in the house that we can think of.”

“I suggested the hotel,” James said perplexedly.

“Oh, no, not a hotel,” Mrs. Stanton protested. “I couldn't do that, and I am sure Cousin Amy will take Richard home for the night. But if she happens to have company I don't know what I'll do.”

Patia had stopped at her brother's side, her arm about his neck. She stared at them each in turn. “Well, I know what we'll do,” she said; “he'll stay here—he'll have my room.”

“But, Patia,” James expostulated, “how can we explain—what shall we say?”

Patia looked at him for a second. “I'll tell you what we'll say,” she said. “Listen.” She disappeared through the door-way.

“What is that crazy girl going to do?” James muttered. He walked over to the door that led to one of the drawing-rooms, and pulled its portière aside. His father and mother followed him and stood watching. Impelled, against his will, Richard joined the group.

He watched Patia enter from another door. She held her head high, and her eyes flamed. The delicate lace of her overdress, the muslin ruffles of her skirt, the ribbons at her belt, even the fluted hanging sleeves were floated out like banners by the haste of her progress. She looked neither to right nor left, and, the skirt-encumbered aisle was rapidly cleared for her until she reached the platform at the other end of the room. She mounted this, and for a second she stood silent, a slender, white figure that cut into the gloom of the green curtains. “Ladies and gentlemen,” she began. The buzz of conversation died out. “Before we go on with the tableaux,” she continued clearly, “I wish to make an announcement to you. My brother Richard has just come home. He is in the house now. You know—every one of you—what he has come home from, and what he comes home to. If there are any among you who do not wish to speak with him to-night, nor to receive him in your homes afterward, will you kindly leave our house now, before he comes in here to join us?”

She stopped, and there was an instant of dead silence. Then the room filled with tumultuous applause. It followed her as she went into the hall, and the walls seemed actually to rock with its violence when she returned, leaning on Richard's arm.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: The Start


text: Talk:The Start

title: Talk:The Start