Old Crow Part 44

"At any rate," said Nan, "I can't be young: in the sense they're young.

I'm a 'strayed reveler,' that's all. But I don't know why I'm painting a Sargent portrait of me. Yes, I do. I want to squeeze everything I can out of this darling minute together, so when we don't have any more minutes I can go back to this. And you can remember, in case you ever need me, just what sort of an old Nan I am."

"And you suggest," said Raven, "my kidnaping a nice New England woman and her baby and carting them off to the Malay Peninsula."

Nan turned upon him delightedly. He could not know what he did for her by juggling the Tira myth into raillery.

"But think, Rookie," she said, "a woman so beautiful she's more than that. She's mystery. Now, isn't she beautiful?"

"Beautiful," Raven agreed, and the picture of her, madonna-like, in the woods, suddenly smote the eyes of his mind and blinded them to all but Tira.

She saw him wince, and went on more falteringly, but still determined to go all the way.

"Into a new world, Rookie, all ferns and palms."

"And snakes!"

"Perfectly honest, perfectly free, and no jungle except the kind that grows up in a night."

"And you," said Raven, "with your New England traditions and your inherited panic over a cigarette!"

They looked at each other across the length of the hearth, and it all seemed delightfully funny to them--their solitude, their oneness of mind--and they began to laugh. And at the combined shout of their merriment (almost compet.i.tive it was, in the eagerness of each to justify the particular preciousness of the moment) the door opened and d.i.c.k came in, halted, stared, in a surprise that elicited one last hoot at the unexpectedness of things, and indulged himself in a satirical comment of greeting, far from what he had intended. Poor d.i.c.k! he was always making sage resolutions on the chance of finding Raven and Nan together, but the actuality as inevitably overthrew him.

"Oh," said he, "that's it, is it? So I thought."

If he thought it, he was none the less unwise in saying so. He knew that, knew the effect he had produced, and yet was powerless to modify it. Nan was plainly taken aback, and she knew why. He was destroying her happy moment, s.n.a.t.c.hing it out of any possible sequence of hours here with Rookie. d.i.c.k had come and he would stay. Raven read the boy's face and was bored. He had seen that look too much of late. But he rose and went forward with the appropriate air of welcome.

"Well, old boy," said he, his hand on d.i.c.k's shoulder, "why didn't you 'phone up? There'd have been something ready for you. No matter. We'll make a raid on the pantry."

"I don't want anything," said d.i.c.k morosely.

His eyes never left Nan. They traveled from her braids to her feet. Why, his angry gaze demanded, was she sitting here in a beguiling masquerade--silly, too! The masquerade was silly. But it made her into something so unapproachable in the citadel of a childhood she had no lien on any longer that his heart ached within him. Except for that one kiss in France--a kiss so cruelly repudiated after (most cruelly because she had made it seem as if it were only a part of her largess to the War) he had found little pleasure in Nan. Yet there could be such pleasure with her. The generous beauties of her mind and heart looked to him a domain large enough for a life's exploring. But even the woman who had given him the kiss in France had vanished, withdrawn into the little girl Raven seemed to be forever wakening in her. He got out of his driving coat and stepped into the hall to drop it. When he came back, Nan had made room at the fire and Raven had drawn up another chair.

"Now," said Raven, "I'll forage for some grub."

At that, he left them, and Nan thought bitterly it was the cowardice of man. d.i.c.k was in the sulks and she was to suffer them alone.

XXVIII

d.i.c.k, looking down upon Nan, had that congealed aspect she alone had the present power of freezing him into. She knew all the possibilities of that face. There was the angry look: that had reigned of late when she flouted or denied him. There was the sulky frown, index of his jealousy of Rookie, and there had been, what seemed a long time ago, before they went through this disintegrating turmoil of war, the look of a boy's devotion. Nan had prized him very much then, when he was not flaunting angry rights over her. Now she sat perversely staring into the fire, realizing that everything about her angered him: the childish vanity of her dress, a.s.sumed, he would be sure, to charm the Rookie of old days into renewed remembrance. But he had to be faced finally, since Rookie was gone so long, stirring up Charlotte to the task of a cold bite, and with a little shrug she lifted her eyes to face exactly the d.i.c.k she had expected to see: dignified reproach in every line. Nice boy! she had the honest impartiality to give him that grace only to wish he would let her enjoy him as she easily could. What a team he and she and Rookie would be if they could only eliminate this idea of marriage. How they could make the room ring, here by the fire, with all the quips of their old memories. Yet wouldn't d.i.c.k have been an interruption, even then? Wasn't the lovely glow of this one evening the amazing reality of her sitting by the fire with Rookie alone for the first time in many years, and, if he fell into the enchantment of Malaysia and the mysteries of an empty-headed Tira, the last? And now here she was dreaming off on Rookie when she must, at this very instant, to seize any advantage at all, be facing d.i.c.k. She began by laughing at him.

"d.i.c.k," she said, "how funny you are. I don't know much about Byron, but I kind of think you're trying to do the old melancholia act: Manfred or what d'you call 'em? You just stand there like old style opera, glowering; if you had a cloak you'd throw an end over your shoulder."

"Nan!" said he, and she was the more out of heart because the voice trembled with an honest supplication.

"There!" she hastened to put in, "that's it. You're 'choked with emotion.' Why do you want to sound as if you're speaking into a barrel?

In another minute you'll be talking 'bitterly.'"

d.i.c.k was not particular about countering her gibes. That was unproductive. He had too much of his own to say.

"What do you suppose I'm here for?" he asked, as if, whatever it might be, it was in itself accusatory.

"Search me," said Nan, with the flippancy he hated.

She knew, by instinct as by long acquaintance, that one charm for him lay in her old-fas.h.i.+oned reticences and chiefly her ordered speech.

Almost he would have liked her to be the girl Aunt Anne had tried to make her. That, she paused to note, in pa.s.sing, was part of the general injustice of things. He could write free verse you couldn't read aloud without squirming (even in the company of the all-knowing young), but she was to lace herself into Victorian stays.

"I suppose," said she, "you came to see whether I mightn't be having the time of my life sitting here with Rookie by the fire."

"I did," he frankly owned. "Mother said you'd gone to New York. So she went on."

"Now what the d.i.c.kens for? Haven't I a perfect right to go to New York without notice?"

"Why," said d.i.c.k, "you'd disappeared. You'd gone away from here, and you were lost, virtually lost. You weren't anywhere."

"If she thought I was in New York, why didn't that settle it? What did she have to go trailing on after me for?"

"Because," said d.i.c.k, "we didn't know. She wanted to telephone. I wouldn't let her. I couldn't have the Seaburys started up. I couldn't have you get into the papers."

"Into the papers!" said Nan. "Heavens! I suppose if I'm not in at curfew I'm to be arrested."

"I let her go," repeated d.i.c.k. "But I knew as well as I wanted to you'd doubled back here and you were with him."

"Then, for G.o.d's sake," said Nan, in a conversational tone, knowing the adjuration would be bitter to him, "if I wanted to be with him, as you put it--I'm glad I ain't a poet--why didn't you let me?"

"Because," said d.i.c.k promptly, "it's indecent."

She had no difficulty in facing him now. It was a cheap means of subjugating, but, being an advantage, she would not forego it. And, indeed, she was too angry.

"d.i.c.k," she said, "you're a sickening little whelp. More than that, you're a hypocrite. You write yards and yards of your free verse to tell us how bold and brave you are and how generally go-as-you-please we've got to be if we're going to play big Injun, and then you tell me it's indecent to sit here with Rookie, of all people in the world. My G.o.d!

Rookie!"

Again she had invoked her Maker because d.i.c.k would s.h.i.+ver at the impropriety. "No violence," she thought satirically, remembering he was himself the instigator of violence in verse. But d.i.c.k was sorry. He had not chosen his word. It had lain in his angry mind and leaped to be used. It could not be taken back.

"You can't deny," said he, "you are perfectly happy here with him. Or you were a minute ago before I came."

"No," said Nan, "I don't deny it. Is that indecent?"

Now she had the whip hand, for he was not merely angry: he was plainly suffering. The boyish look had subtly taken possession of his face. This was the d.i.c.k she had loved always, next to Rookie. But his following words, honest as they were, lost him his advantage of the softened look.

He was hanging to his point.

"Yes," he said. "He's old. You're young. So am I. We belong together. We can be awfully fond of him. We are. But it's got to be in the right way.

He could live with us. We'd simply devote ourselves to him. But Nan, the world belongs to us. We're young."

At that instant Raven came in and set down his tray. Nan glanced up at him fearfully, but it was apparent he had not heard. She was no longer angry. The occasion was too big. d.i.c.k seemed to her to be speaking out of his ignorance and not from any wilful cruelty. She got up and went to Raven, as he stood there, put her hand through his arm and smiled up at him.