"Oh very well. They don"t count when you only have them once--just when they keep coming back and back to you--isn"t that it?"
"I believe so."
Mrs. Severance"s eyes waver a little--her mouth seeking for the proper kind of dream.
"It"s not much but it comes quite regularly--the most punctual, old-fashioned-servant sort of a dream.
"It doesn"t begin with sleep, you know--it begins with waking. At least it"s just as if I were in my own bed in my own apartment and then gradually I started to wake. You know how you can feel that somebody else is in the room though you can"t see them--that"s the feeling.
And, of course being a normal American business woman, my first idea is--burglars. And I"m very cowardly for a minute. Then the cowardice pa.s.ses and I decide to get up and see what it is.
"It _is_ somebody else--or something--but n.o.body I think that I ever really knew. And at first I don"t want to walk toward it--and then I do because it keeps pulling me in spite of myself. So I go to it--hands out so I won"t knock over things.
"And then I touch it--or him--or her--and I"m suddenly very, very happy.
"That"s all.
"And now, Dr. Billett, what would you say of my case?"
Ted"s eyes are glowing--in the middle of her description his heart has begun to knock to a hidden pulse, insistent and soft as the drum of gloved fingers on velvet. He picks words carefully.
"I should say--Mrs. Severance--that there was something you needed and wanted and didn"t have at present. And that you would probably have it--in the end."
She laughs a little. "Rather cryptic, isn"t that, doctor? And you"d prescribe?"
"Prescribe? "It"s an awkward matter to play with souls.""
""And trouble enough to save your own,"" she completes the quotation.
"Yes, that"s true enough--though I"m sorry you can"t even tell me to use this twice a day in half a gla.s.s of water and that other directly after each meal. I think I"ll have to be a little more definite when it comes to your turn--if it does come."
"Oh it will." But instead of beginning, he raises his eyes to her again.
This time there is a heaviness like sleep on both, a heaviness that draws both together inaudibly and down, and down, as if they were sinking through piled thickness on thickness of warm, sweet-scented gra.s.s. Odd faces come into both minds and vanish as if flickered off a film--to Rose Severance, a man narrow and flat as if he were cut out of thin grey paper, talking, talking in a voice as dry and rattling as a flapping windowblind of their "vacation" together and a house with a little garden where she can sew and he can putter around,--to Ted, Elinor Piper, the profile pure as if it were painted on water, pa.s.sing like water flowing from the earth in springs, in its haughty temperance, its retired beauty, its murmurous quiet--other faces, some trembling as if touched with light flames, some calm, some merely grotesque with longing or too much pleasure--all these pa.s.s. A great nearness, fiercer and more slumbrous than any nearness of body takes their place. It wraps the two closer and closer, a spider spinning a soft web out of petals, folding the two with swathes and swathes of its heavy, fragrant silk.
"Oh--mine--isn"t anything," says Ted rather unsteadily, after the moment. "Only looking at firelight and wanting to take the coals in my hands."
Rose"s voice is firmer than his but her mouth is still moved with content at the thing it has desired being brought nearer.
"I really can"t prescribe on as little evidence as that," she says with music come back to her voice in the strength of a running wave. "I can only repeat what you told me. That there was something you needed--and wanted"--she is mocking now--"and didn"t have at present. And that you would probably--what was it?--oh yes--have it, in the end."
The wispy little woman has crept up to Ted"s elbow with an illegible bill. Rose has spoken slowly to give her time to get there--it is always so much better to choose your own most effective background for really affecting scenes.
"And now I really must be getting back," she cuts in briskly, her fingers playing with a hat that certainly needs no rearrangement, when Ted, after absent-mindedly paying the bill, is starting to speak in the voice of one still sleep-walking.
"But it _was_ delightful, Mr. Billett--I love talking about myself and you were really very sweet to listen so nicely." She has definitely risen. Ted must, too. "We must do it again some time soon--I"m going to see if there aren"t any of those books with long German names drifting around "Mode" somewhere so that I"ll be able to simply stun you with my erudition the next time we talk over dreams."
They are at the door now, she guiding him toward it as imperceptibly and skillfully as if she controlled him by wireless.
"And it isn"t fair of me to let you give all the parties--it simply isn"t. Couldn"t you come up to dinner in my little apartment sometime--it really isn"t unconventional, especially for anyone who"s once seen my pattern of an English maid--"
Sunlight and Minetta Lane again--and whatever Ted may want to say out of his walking trance--this is certainly no place where any of it can be said.
XII
Oliver Crowe, at his desk in the copy-department of Vanamee and Co."s, has been spending most of the afternoon twiddling pencils and reading and rereading two letters out of his pocket instead of righteously thinking up layouts for the new United Steel Frame Pulley Campaign. He realizes that the layouts are important--that has been brought to his attention already by several pink memoranda from Mr. Delier, the head of the department--but an immense distaste for all things in general and advertising in particular has overwhelmed him all day. He looks around the big, brightly lighted room with a stupefied sort of loathing--advertising does not suit him--he is doing all he can at it because of Nancy--but he simply does not seem to get the hang of the thing even after eight months odd and he is conscious of the fact that the Powers that be are already looking at him with distrustful eyes, in spite of his occasional flashes of brilliance. If he could only get _out_ of it--get into something where his particular kind of mind and training would be useful--oh well--he grunts and turns back to his private affairs.
The letter from Easten of Columbiac Magazines--kindly enough--but all hope of selling the serial rights of his novel gone glimmering because of it--Easten was the last chance, the last and the best. "If you could see your way to making short stories out of the incidents I have named, I should be very much interested--" but even so, two short stories won"t bring in enough to marry on, even if he can do them to Easten"s satisfaction--and the novel couldn"t come out as a book now till late spring--and Oliver has too many friends who dabble in writing to have any more confidence in book royalties than he would have in systems for beating the bank at roulette. Well, _that"s_ over--and a year"s work with it--and all the dreams he and Nancy had of getting married at once.
Those pulley layouts have to be fixed up sometime. What can you say about a pulley--what _can_ you say? "The United Steel Frame Pulley--Oh Man, There"s a Hog for Work!" Oliver turns the cheap phrase in his mind, hating its shoddiness, hating the fact that such shoddiness is the only stuff with which he can deal.
Sanely considered, he supposes he hasn"t any business using up a month"s meagre savings and three small checks for poems that he has h.o.a.rded since April in going out to St. Louis Friday. Mr. Alley wasn"t too pleased with letting him take Sat.u.r.day and half Monday off to do it, too. But then there was that telegram ten days ago. "I"d give anything in the world if we could only see each other--" and after other letters unsatisfactorily brief, the letter that came Monday "I have such grand news, Ollie dear, at least it may be grand if it works out--but oh, dear, I do want to see you about it without tangling it up in letters that don"t really explain. Can"t you make it--even a few hours would be long enough to talk it all over--and I do so want to see you and really talk! Please wire me, if you can."
Grand news--what kind he wondered--and dully thought that he couldn"t see her, of course, and then suddenly knew that he must. After all, there didn"t seem to be much use in saving for the sake of saving when all the saving you could possibly do didn"t bring you one real inch nearer to what you really wanted. _Apres moi le deluge--apres ca le deluge_--it might even come to that this time, they were both so tired--and he viewed the prospect as a man mortally hurt might view the gradual failing of sun and sky above him, with hopelessness complete as a cloud in that sky, but with heart and brain too beaten now to be surprised with either agony or fear. They must see each other--they were neither of them quiet people who could love forever at a distance without real hope. Great Lord, if he and Nancy could ever have one definite basis to work on, one definite hope of money in the future no matter how far off that was--But the present uncertainty--They couldn"t keep on like this--no two people in the world could be expected to keep on.
Nancy. He is seeing Nancy, the way she half-lifts her head when she has been teasing and suddenly becomes remorseful and wants him to know how much she does love him instead.
XIII
A hot night in the Pullman---too hot to sleep in anything but a series of uneasy drowsings and wakings. Smell of blankets and cinders and general unwashedness--noise of clacketing wheels and a hysterical whistle--anyhow each sweaty hour brings St. Louis and Nancy nearer.
St. _Nancy_, St. _Nancy_, St. _Nancy_, says the sleepless racket of the wheels, but the peevish electric fan at the end of the corridor keeps buzzing to itself like a fly caught in a trap. "And then I got married you see--and then I got married you see--and when you get married you aren"t a free lance--you aren"t a free lance--you"re _settled_!"
It will have to be pretty grand news indeed that Nancy has to make up for this last week and the buzz of the electric fan, thinks Oliver, twisting from one side of his stuffy berth to the other like an uneasy sardine.
XIV
"More beans, Oliver," says Mrs. Ellicott in a voice like thin syrup, her "generous" voice. The generous voice is used whenever Mrs. Ellicott wants to show herself a person of incredibly scrupulous fairness before that bodiless a.s.semblage of old women in black that const.i.tute the They who Say--and so it is used to Oliver nearly all the time.
"No thank you, Mrs. Ellicott." Oliver manages to look at her politely enough as he speaks but then his eyes go straight back to Nancy and stay there as if they wished to be considered permanent attachments.
All Oliver has been able to realize for the last two hours is the mere declarative fact that she is _there_.
"Nancy!"
"No, thanks, mother."
And Nancy in her turn looks once swiftly at her mother, sitting there at the end of the table like a faded grey sparrow whose feathers make it uncomfortable. It isn"t feathers, though, really--its only Oliver.
Why can"t mother get reconciled to Oliver--why _can"t_ she--and if she can"t, why doesn"t she come out and say so instead of trying to be generous to Oliver when she doesn"t want to while he"s there and then saying mean things when he"s away because she can"t help it?
"Stanley?"
"Why, no, my dear--no--yes, a few, perhaps--I might reconsider--only a few, my dear,"--his voice does not do anything as definite as cease--it merely becomes ineffectual as Mrs. Ellicott heaps his plate. He then looks at the beans as if he hadn"t the slightest idea where they came from but supposes as long as they are there they must be got away with somehow, and starts putting them into his mouth as mechanically as if they were pennies and he a slot-machine.