_ IV
Oliver is taking Ted out to Melgrove with him over Sunday for suburban fresh-air and swimming, so the two just manage to catch the 12.53 from the Grand Central, in spite of Slade Wilson's invitation to talk all night and breakfast at the Brevoort. They spend the rattling, tunnel-like passage to 125th Street catching their breath again, a breath that seems to strike a florid gentlemen in a dirty collar ahead of them with an expression of permanent, sorrowful hunger. Then Ted remarks reflectively,
"Nice gin."
"Uh-huh. Not floor varnish anyway like most of this prohibition stuff. What think of the people?"
"Interesting but hardly conclusive. Liked the Wilson lad. Peter, of course, and Johnny. The French person rather young Back Bay, don't you think?"
Oliver smiles. The two have been through Yale, some of the war and much of the peace together, and the fact has inevitably developed a certain quality of being able to talk to each other in shorthand.
"Well, Groton plus Harvard--it always gets a little inhuman especially Senior year--but gin had a civilizing influence. Lucky devil!"
"Why?"
"Baker's newest discovery--yes, it does sound like a patent medicine. Don't mean that, but he has a play on the road--sure-fire, Johnny says--Edward Sheldon stuff--Romance--"
"The Young Harvard Romantic. An Essay Presented to the Faculty of Yale University by Theodore Billett for the Degree of--"
"Heard anything about your novel, Oliver?"
"Going to see my pet Mammon of Unrighteousness about it in a couple of weeks. Oh
Lord!"
"Present--not voting."
"Don't be cheap, Ted. If I could only make some money."
"Everybody says that there is money in advertising," Ted quotes maliciously. "Where
have I heard that before?"
"That's what anybody says about anything till they try it. Well, there is--but not in six months for a copy-writer at Vanamee and Co. Especially when the said copy-writer has to have enough to marry on." "And will write novels when he ought to be reading, 'How I Sold America on Ossified Oats' like a good little boy. Young people are
so impatient."
"Well, good Lord, Ted, we've been engaged eight months already and we aren't getting any furtherer--"
"Remember the copybooks, my son. The love of a pure, good woman and the one-way pocket--that's what makes the millionaires. Besides, look at Isaac."
"Well, I'm no Isaac. And Nancy isn't Rebekah, praises be! But it is an--emotional strain. On both of us."
"Well, all you have to do is sell your serial rights. After that--pie."
"I know. The trouble is, I can see it so plain if everything happens right--and then--well--"
Ted is not very consoling.
"People get funny ideas about each other when they aren't close by. Even when they're in love," he says rather darkly; and then, for no apparent reason, "Poor Billy. See it?"
Oliver has, unfortunately--the announcement that the engagement between Miss Flavia Marston of Detroit and Mr. William Curting of New York has been broken by mutual consent was an inconspicuous little paragraph in the morning papers. "That was all--just funny ideas and being away. And then this homebred talent came along," Ted muses.
"Well, you're the hell of a--"
Ted suddenly jerks into consciousness of what he has been saying.
"Sorry" he says, completely apologetic, "didn't mean a word I said, just sorry for Billy, poor guy. 'Fraid it'll break him up pretty bad at first." This seems to make matters rather worse and he changes the subject abruptly. "How's Nancy?" he asks with what he hopes seems disconnected indifference.
"Nancy? All right. Hates St. Louis, of course."
"Should think she might, this summer. Pretty hot there, isn't it?"
"Says it's like a wet furnace. And her family's bothering her some."
"Um, too bad."
"Oh,
I don't mind. But it's rotten for her. They don't see the point exactly--don't know that I blame them. She could be in Paris, now--that woman was ready to put up the money. My fault."
"Well, she seems to like things better the way they are--God knows why, my antic friend! If it were
my question between you and a year studying abroad! Not that you haven't your own subtle attractions, Ollie." Ted has hoped to irritate Oliver into argument by the closing remark, but the latter only accepts it with militant gloom.
"Yes, I've done her out of that, too," he says abysmally, "as well as sticking her in St. Louis while I stay here and can't even drag down enough money to support her--"
"Oh, Ollie, snap out of it! That's only being dramatic. You know darn well you will darn soon. I'll be saying 'bless you, my children, increase and multiply,' inside a month if your novel goes through."
"If! Oh well. Oh hell. I think I've wept on your shoulder long enough for tonight, Ted. Tell me your end of it--things breaking all right?"
Ted's face sets into lines that seem curiously foreign and aged for the smooth surface.
"Well--you know my trouble," he brings out at last with some difficulty. "You ought to, anyhow--we've talked each other over too much when we were both rather planko for you not to. I'm getting along, I think. The work--
ca marche assez bien. And the restlessness--can be stood. That's about all there is to say."
Both are completely serious now.
"Bon. Very glad," says Oliver in a low voice.
"I can stand it. I was awful afraid I couldn't when I first got back. And law interests me, really, though I've lost three years because of the war. And I'm working like a pious little devil with a new assortment of damned and when you haven't any money you can't go on parties in New York unless you raise gravy riding to a fine art. Only sometimes--well, you know how it is--"
Oliver nods.
"I'll be sitting there, at night especially, in that little tin Tophet of a room on Madison Avenue, working. I
can work, if I do say it myself--I'm hoping to get through with school in January, now. But it gets pretty lonely, sometimes when there's nobody to run into that you can really talk to--the people I used to play with in College are out of New York for the summer--even Peter's down at Southampton most of the time or out at Star Bay--you're in Melgrove--Sam Woodward's married and working in Chicago--Brick Turner's in New Mexico--I've dropped out of the Wall Street bunch in the class that hang out at the Yale Club--I'm posted there anyhow, and besides they've all made money and I haven't, and all they want to talk about is puts and calls. And then you remember things.
"The time my pilot and I blew into Paris when we thought we were hitting somewhere around Nancy till we saw that blessed Eiffel Tower poking out of the fog. And the Hotel de Turenne on Rue Vavin and getting up in the morning and going out for a cafe cognac breakfast, and everything being amiable and pleasant, and kidding along all the dear little ladies that sat on the
terrasse when they dropped in to talk over last evening's affairs. I suppose I'm a sensualist--"
"Everybody is." from Oliver.
"Well, that's another thing. Women. And love. Ollie, my son, you don't know how very damn lucky you are!"
"I think I do, rather," says Oliver, a little stiffly.
"You don't. Because I'd give everything I have for what you've got and all you can do is worry about whether you'll get married in six months or eight."
"I'm worrying about whether I'll ever get married at all," from Oliver, rebelliously.
"True enough, which is where I'm glowingly sympathetic for you, though you may not notice it. But you're one of the few people I know--officers at least--who came out of the war without stepping all through their American home ideas of morality like a clown through a fake glass window. And I'm--Freuded--if I see how or why you did."
"Don't myself--unless you call it pure accident" says Oliver, frankly. "Well, that's it--women. Don't think I'm in love but the other thing pulls pretty strong. And I want to get married all right, but what girls I know and like best are in Peter's crowd and most of them own their own Rolls Royces--and I won't be earning even a starvation wage for two, inside of three or four years, I suppose. And as you can't get away from seeing and talking to women unless you go and live in a cave--well, about once every two weeks or oftener I'd like to chuck every lawbook I have out of the window on the head of the nearest cop--go across again and get some sort of a worthless job--I speak good enough French to do it if I wanted--and go to hell like a gentleman without having to worry about it any longer. And I won't do that because I'm through with it and the other thing is worth while. So there you are."
"So you don't think you're in love--eh Monsieur Billett?" Oliver puts irritatingly careful quotation marks around the verb. Ted twists a little.
"It all seems so blamed impossible," he says cryptically.
"Oh, I wouldn't call Elinor Piper
that exactly." Oliver grins. "Even if she is Peter's sister. Old Peter. She's a nice girl."
"
A nice girl? " Ted begins rather violently. "She's--why she's--" then pauses, seeing the trap.
"Oh very well--that's all I wanted to know."
"Oh don't look so much like a little tin Talleyrand, Ollie! I'm
not sure--and that's rather more than I'd even hint to anybody else."
"Thanks, little darling." But Ted has been stung too suddenly, even by Oliver's light touch on something which he thought was a complete and mortuary secret, to be in a mood for sarcasm.
"Oh, well, you might as well know. I suppose you do."
"All I know is that you seem to have been visiting--Peter--a good deal this summer."
"Well, it started with Peter."
"It does so often."
"Oh Lord, now I've
got to tell you. Not that there's anything--definite--to tell." He pauses, looking at his hands.
"Well, I've just been telling you how I feel--sometimes. And other times--being with Elinor--she's been so--kind. But I don't know, Ollie, honestly I don't, and that's that."
"You see," he begins again, "the other thing--Oh,
Lord, it's so tangled up! But it's just this. It sounds--funny--probably--coming from me--and after France and all that--but I'm not going to--pretend to myself I'm in love with a girl--just because I may--want to get married--the way lots of people do. I can't. And I couldn't with a girl like Elinor anyway--she's too fine."
"She is rather fine," says Oliver appreciatively. "Selective reticence--all that."
"Well, don't you see? And a couple of times--I've been nearly sure. And then something comes and I'm not again--not the way I want to be. And then--Oh, if I were, it wouldn't be much--use--you know--"
"Why not?"
"Well, consider our relative positions--"
"Consider your grandmother's cat! She's a girl--you're a man. She's a lady--you're certainly a gentleman--though that sounds like Jane Austen. And--"
"And she's--well, she isn't the wealthiest young lady in the country, but the Pipers
are rich, though they never go and splurge around about it. And I'm living on scholarships and borrowed money from the family--and even after I really start working I probably won't make enough to live on for two or three years at least. And you can't ask a girl like that--"
"Oh, Ted, this is the twentieth century! I'm not telling you to hang up your hat and live on your wife's private income--" "That's fortunate," from Ted, rather stubbornly and with a set jaw.
"But there's no reason on earth--if you both really loved each other and wanted to get married--why you couldn't let her pay her share for the first few years. You know darn well you're going to make money sometime--"
"Well--yes."
"Well, then. And Elinor's sporting. She isn't the kind that needs six butlers to live--she doesn't live that way now. That's just pride, Ted, thinking that--and a rather bum variety of pride when you come down to it. I hate these people who moan around and won't be happy unless they can do everything themselves--they're generally the kind that give their wives a charge account at Lucile's and ten dollars a year pocket money and go into blue fits whenever poor spouse runs fifty cents over her allowance."
Ted pauses, considering. Finally,
"No, Ollie--I don't think I'm quite that kind of a fool. And almost thou convincest me--and all that. But--well--that isn't the chief difficulty, after all."
"Well, what
is?" from Oliver, annoyedly.
Ted hesitates, speaking slowly.
"Well--after the fact that I'm not sure--France," he says at last, and his mouth shuts after the word as if it never wanted to open again.
Oliver spreads both hands out hopelessly.
"Are you
never going to get over that, you ass?"
"You didn't do the things I did," from Ted, rather difficultly. "If you had--"
"If I had I'd have been as sorry as you are, probably, that I'd knocked over the apple cart occasionally. But I wouldn't spend the rest of my life worrying about it and thinking I wasn't fit to go into decent society because of what happened to most of the A.E.F. Why you sound as if you'd committed the unpardonable sin. And it's nonsense."
"Well--thinking of Elinor--I'm not too darn sure I didn't," from Ted, dejectedly.
"That comes of being born in New England and that's all there is to it. Anyhow, it's over now, isn't it?"
"Not exactly--it comes back."
"Well, kick it every time it does."
"But you don't understand. That and--people like Elinor--" says Ted hopelessly.
"I do understand."
"You don't." And this time Ted's face has the look of a burned man.
"Well--" says Oliver, frankly puzzled. "Well, that's it. Oh, it doesn't matter. But if there was another war--"
"Oh, leave us poor people that are trying to write a couple of years before you dump us into heroes' graves by the Yang tse Kiang!"
"Another war--and bang! into the aviation." Ted muses, his face gone thin with tensity. "It could last as long as it liked for me, providing I got through before it did; you'd be living anyhow, living and somebody, and somebody who didn't give a plaintive hoot how things broke."
He sighs, and his face smooths back a little.
"Well, Lord, I've no real reason to kick, I suppose," he ends. "There are dozens of 'em like me--dozens and hundreds and thousands all over the shop. We had danger and all the physical pleasures and as much money as we wanted and the sense of command--all through the war. And then they come along and say 'it's all off, girls,' and you go back and settle down and play you've just come out of College in peace-times and maybe by the time you're forty you'll have a wife and an income if another scrap doesn't come along. And then when we find it isn't as easy to readjust as they think, they yammer around pop-eyed and say 'Oh, what wild young people--what naughty little wasters! They won't settle down and play Puss-in-the-corner at all--and, oh dear, oh dear, how they drink and smoke and curse 'n everything!'"
"I'm awful afraid they might be right as to what's the trouble with us, though," says Oliver, didactically. "We
are young, you know."
"Melgrove!" the conductor howls, sleepily. "Melgrove! Melgrove!" _