"She absolutely forbade my going to France," said Nan, this with no special feeling, but as if she had dwelt on it until there was no emotion left to put into it. "She said it was notoriety I wanted. I told her I"d scrub floors over there, if they wanted me to. It proved I did, too, you know. I did it remarkably well. And then she said she forbade me, and I reminded her I was of age and had my own money. And I went."
Raven nodded. He thought they had said enough, but Nan"s calm impartiality did rest him. It was something he could not himself attain.
"And now," said Nan, "she wants you to keep on doing the fool things she"d have done then, if they"d let her. She probably wants to get up a big scheme of propaganda and put it into the schools. And every blessed boy and girl in this country is to be taught not to serve the truth and do his job but--safety first."
"Yes," said Raven, drearily "I suppose that"s about it."
"But actually," said Nan, suddenly aware that he had not told her, "what does she say? Does she specify? What does she say?"
"She says," Raven answered, in a toneless voice, glancing at the letter but making no movement toward sharing it with her more definitely, "that her money is to build a Palace of Peace--she doesn"t say where--for lectures, demonstrations of the sort I know she approves, all the activities possible in the lines she has been following--for the doctrine of non-resistance and the consequent abolishment of war."
Again he ended drearily.
"Well," said Nan, "what are you going to do about it? going to spend your life and the lives of a lot of more or less intelligent pacifists teaching children to compute the number of movies they could go to for the money spent on one battleship----"
"But, good G.o.d, Nan!" Raven broke in, "you and I don"t want to preach war."
"No," said Nan, "but we can"t let Aunt Anne preach peace: not her brand, as we"ve seen it. O Rookie! what"s the use of taking the world as it isn"t? Why don"t we see if we can"t make something of the old thing as it is and has been? and blest if I don"t believe as it always will be?"
Raven looked at her in a maze of interrogation. Was this the fragility of girlhood speaking, or was it womanhood, old as time itself, with the knowledge of good and evil? She answered the look.
"No," she said, "I"m not a kid. Don"t think it. I suppose it"s because I"ve seen--life."
The pause before the last word, the drop on the word itself was not from bitterness, he knew. But it was sad.
"Well," he said irrepressibly, "you"ve seen life, and what do you think of it?"
She hesitated. Then she put out her hand and touched the petal of a rose, one of a great dome of splendor in a bowl.
"I like--roses," she said whimsically.
She looked at him with that most moving look of a lovely face: the knitted brows of rueful questioning, the smiling lips. Raven, staring back at her, felt a sudden impulse to speak, to tell. It was the form of her reply that invited him.
"I don"t believe, Nan," he said, "I even care about roses. I don"t care about the whole infernal scheme. That"s what I sent for d.i.c.k for--to tell him. Practically, you know I should have to tell d.i.c.k. And I haven"t done it and now I"m telling you."
III
Nan sat looking at him with an air of patient alertness, ready, he saw, to meet what he had to say and do the best she could with it. He had an irritated apprehension that, as her work through the last few years had lain chiefly in meeting emergencies, so now he was an emergency. And as d.i.c.k, poet though the inner circle of journalism had listed him, might not understand in the least what he was driving at, so there was danger of Nan"s understanding too quickly and too much, with the resultant embarra.s.sment of thinking something could be done. And nothing could be done beyond the palliatives he meant to allow himself. He would try her.
He might see how far she would insist on going with him along his dreary way. What if she had Anne"s over-developed and thwarted maternity of helpfulness? What if she insisted on going all the way and never leaving him to the blessed seclusion of his own soul?
"You see, Nan," he adventured, "I"m sick of the whole show."
She nodded.
"Yes," she said, "I know. Coming back. Finding we aren"t any better than we were before we got frightened and said our prayers and promised G.o.d if He"d stop the War we"d be different forever and ever, amen. That"s it, Rookie, isn"t it?"
"Why, yes," said Raven, staring at her, she seemed so accurate, according to his own mental gauging, and so unmoved in her flippancy, "that"s pretty nearly it."
She nodded at him again, whether to hearten him or to a.s.sure him of their perfect unison he could not tell.
"It was an awful jolt, wasn"t it?" she inquired frankly. "You know, I should think it might make some of them laugh, the ones they say observe us from--where is it from? Mars? up in the heavens somewhere. It"s like reading a bitter sort of book. It is funny. Rookie, don"t you think it"s funny?"
Raven remembered a character in Mr. Owen Wister"s "Virginian," the hen crazed by her thwarted destiny.
"Well," he said, quoting "The Virginian," "not so d.a.m.ned funny either.
But how the d.i.c.kens did you know what I was going to say?"
"Because it"s what we"ve all come back to," said she, "and what everybody that stayed at home feels, or ought to if they"ve got anything inside their nuts. Just think, Rookie! we were like the great mult.i.tude in the Bible, somewhere, praising G.o.d. We broke our idols and--I don"t know what we didn"t do. And now we"re not scared any more, we"ve set "em up again: same old idols. Rookie, I bet you the only reason we ever sacrificed to G.o.d at all was because we thought He was the biggest joss and things were so desperate and all, we"d better make a sure thing of it. And now we think we aren"t in any particular danger, seems as if the little G.o.ds would do, same as they did before; and they"re not so expensive."
"Goodness, Nan!" said Raven, "how naughty you are. You didn"t use to run on so."
"I haven"t talked very much to you," said Nan drily, "not since I grew up."
He knew it was true, and knew also that the reason was, if she had allowed her lips to utter it, "Aunt Anne wouldn"t let me."
"But," she said, "I don"t understand altogether. I know you"re mad and discouraged and all the rest of it. But I don"t see what d.i.c.k has got to do with it."
"It"s simply this," said Raven. "I"m going away."
She looked at him in what seemed to be serious alarm.
"Relief work?" she asked. "Reconstruction?"
"No," said Raven. "I don"t believe I should be any good to them. There isn"t a blamed thing I can do, so far as I see, except for what money I"ve got. I"m no good, Nan. I shouldn"t sell for my hide and horns. And I hate the whole blamed show. I"m sick of it. I"m sick of the system, from the beasts that devour one another to the rest of us. And I"m simply going to desert. I"m going to run away."
"Where?" asked Nan. "You can"t run away from the earth."
"No," said Raven, "I can"t jump off. So I"m going to do the next convenient thing. I"m going up to Wake Hill and shovel snow with Jerry, and maybe get into the woods and do some thinning out and, if I remember anything about the millennium we"ve just shaved the edge of, just say to myself there ain"t a-going to be no millenium, so I can shut up."
"You"ve taken advice, haven"t you?" she concluded. "That"s what they"ve prescribed. I suppose it"s all right."
"Good G.o.d, no!" said Raven. "Do you think I"ve been to a doctor and turned myself inside out? I"m going because Wake Hill is as far out of the world as I can manage. If the whole earth hadn"t gone crazy, I"d cut stick for Tartary or some confounded place that isn"t on the map. But they"re all on the map. There isn"t an inch of ground that isn"t under some sort of moral searchlight. No, I"ll be hanged if it"s moral. It"s only the mites in the cheese getting busy and stirring up fermentation."
Nan laughed out and then looked up at him in her rueful apology.
"I couldn"t help it," she said. "I thought of d.i.c.k, your telling him.
d.i.c.k"s just got his book ready for the printer: Democracy, you know, in three-legged verse. And they"ll say it"s full of insight and prophecy.
That"s what they said about the other one: insight, prophecy! But d.i.c.k won"t have the least idea what you"re driving at."
"You see," said Raven, "he"s thinking of doing some stiff work and getting a degree: a sort of sop to his mother. She"s as wild as a hawk, you know, to get him to distinguish himself, doesn"t much care how. I"d meant to ask him to camp here with me this winter. I believe I did actually ask him, now I think of it."
"Yes, you did," said Nan. "It"ll make a lot of difference to him, your being away."
"I don"t think so," said Raven. "Anyhow, he"ll have to get used to it, especially as I"m not merely going away. I"m getting out, out of the business and all."