It is hot in the Ellicotts" dining-room--the b.u.t.ter was only brought in a little while ago, but already it is yellow mush. There are little drops on the backs of Mr. Ellicott"s hands. Oliver wants to help Nancy take away the dishes and bring in the fruit--they have started to make a game out of it already when Mrs. Ellicott"s voice enforces order.
"No, Oliver. No, please. Please sit still. It is so seldom we have a _guest_ that Nancy and I are apt to forget our _manners_--"
Oliver looks to Nancy for guidance, receives it and subsides into his chair. That"s just the trouble, he thinks rather peevishly--if only Mrs. Ellicott would stop acting as if he were a guest--and not exactly a guest by choice at that but one who must be the more scrupulously entertained in public, the less he is liked in private.
The fruit. Mrs. Ellicott apologizing for it--her voice implies that she is quite sure Oliver doesn"t think it good enough for him but that he ought to feel himself very lucky indeed that it isn"t his deserts instead. Mr. Ellicott absent-mindedly squirting orange juice up his sleeve. Oliver and Nancy looking at each other.
"Are you the same?" say both kinds of eyes, intent, absorbed with the wish that has been starved small through the last three months, but now grows again like a smoke-tree out of a magicked jar, "Really the same and really loving me and really glad to be here?" But they can get no proper sort of answer now--there are too many other Ellicotts around, especially Mrs. Ellicott.
Dinner is over with coffee and cigarettes that Mrs. Ellicott has bought for Oliver because no one shall ever say she failed in the smallest punctilio of hospitality, though she offers them to him with a gesture like that of a missionary returning his baked-mud idol to a Bushman too far gone in sin to reclaim. Mr. Ellicott smoked cigarettes before his marriage. For twenty years now he has been a contributing member of the Anti-Tobacco League.
And now all that Oliver knows is that unless he can talk to Nancy soon and alone, he will start being very rude. It is not that he wants to be rude--especially to Nancy"s family--but the impulse to get everyone but Nancy away by any means from sarcasm to homicidal mania is as reasonless and strong as the wish to be born. After all he and Nancy have not seen each other wakingly for three months--and there is still her "grand news" to tell, the grandness of which has seemed to grow more and more dubious the longer she looked at Oliver. Now is the time for Mr. and Mrs. Ellicott to disappear as casually and completely as clouds over the edge of the sky and first of all, not to mention the fact that they are going. But Mrs. Ellicott has far too much tact ever to be understanding.
She puts Mr. Ellicott"s hat on for him and takes his arm as firmly as if she were police, and he accepts the grasp with the meekness of an old offender who is not quite sure what particular crime he is being arrested for this time but has an uncomfortable knowledge that it may be any one of a dozen.
"Now we old people are going to leave you, children alone for a little while" she announces, fair to the last, her voice sweeter than ever.
"We know you have such a great many important _affairs_ to talk over--particularly the _splendid_ offer that has just come to Nancy--my little girl hasn"t told you about it yet, has she, Oliver?"
"No, Mrs. Ellicott."
"Well, her father and myself consider it quite _remarkable_ and we have been _urging_--very _strongly_--her acceptance, though of course" this with a glace smile, "we realize that we are only her _parents_. And, as Nancy knows, it has always been our dearest wish to have her decide matters affecting her happiness entirely _herself_. But I feel sure that when both of you have talked it _well_ over, we can trust you both to come to a most _reasonable_ decision." She breathes heavily and moves with her appurtenance to the door, secure as an ostrich in the belief that Oliver thinks her impartial, even affectionate. Her conscientiousness gives her a good deal of applause for leaving the two young people so soon when they have all one evening and another morning to be together--but subconsciously she knows that she has done her best by her recent little speech to make this talking-it-over a walk through a field full of small pestilent burrs, for both Oliver and Nancy.
They say _au revoir_ very politely--all four--the door shuts on Mr.
Ellicott"s meek back.
Mrs. Ellicott is not very happy, going downstairs. She knows what has undoubtedly happened the moment the door was shut--and a little twinge of something very like the taste of sour grapes goes through her as she thinks of those two young people so reprehensibly glad at being even for the moment in each other"s arms.
XV
An hour later and still the grand news hasn"t been told. In fact very little that Mrs. Ellicott would regard as either sensible or reasonable has happened at all. Though they do not know it the conversation has been oddly like that of two dried desert-travellers who have suddenly come upon water and for quite a while afterwards find it hard to think of anything else. But finally:
"Dearest, dearest, what was the grand news?" says Oliver half-drowsily.
"We must talk it over, dear, I suppose, I guess, oh, we must--oh, but you"re so sweet--" and he relapses again into speechlessness.
They are close together, he and she now. Their lips meet--and meet--with a sweet touch--with a long pressure--children being good to each other--cloud mingling with gleaming cloud.
"Ollie dear." Nancy"s voice comes from somewhere as far away and still as if she were talking out of a star. "Stop kissing me. I can"t think when you kiss me, I can only feel you be close. If you want to hear about that news, that is," she adds, her lips hardly moving.
All that Oliver wants to do is to hold her and be quiet--to make out of the stuffy room, the nervous rushing of noise under the window, the air exhausted with heat, a place in some measure peaceful, in some measure retired, where they can lie under lucent peace for a moment as sh.e.l.ls lie in clear water and not be worried about anything any more. But again, the time they are to have is too short--Oliver really must be back Monday afternoon--already he is unpleasantly conscious of the time-table part of his mind talking trains at him. He takes his arms from around Nancy--she sits up rubbing her eyes with the back of her hand as if to take the dream that was so glittering in them away now she and Oliver have to talk business-affairs.
"Oh, my _hair_--lucky it"s bobbed, that"s all--I"d have lost all the hairpins I ever had in it by now--Well, Ollie--"
Her hand goes over to his uneasily, takes hold. For a moment the dream comes back and she forgets entirely what she was going to say.
"Oh _dear_!"
"Nancy, Nancy, Nancy!"
But she will be firm about their talking. "No, we mustn"t really, we mustn"t, or I can"t tell you anything at all. Well, it"s this.
"I didn"t tell you about it at all--didn"t even imagine it would come to anything. But that old geology specimen Mrs. Winters knows the art-editor of "The Bazaar" and she happened to say so once when she was here being gloomy with mother, so I wormed a letter out of her to her friend about me. And I sent some things in and the poor man seemed to be interested--at least he said he wanted to see more--and then we started having a real correspondence. Until finally--it was that Friday because I wrote you the letter right away--he goes and sends me a letter saying to come on to New York--that I can have a regular job with them if I want to, and if they like my stuff well enough, after a couple of months they"ll send me to Paris to do fashions over there and pay me a salary I can more than live on and everything!"
Nancy cannot help ending with a good deal of triumph, though there is anxiety behind the triumph as well. But to Oliver it seems as if the floor had come apart under his feet.
When he has failed so ludicrously and completely, Nancy has succeeded and succeeded beyond even his own ideas of success. She can go to Paris and have all they ever planned together, now; it has all bent down to her like an apple on a swinging bough, all hers to take, from lunch at Prunier"s and sunset over the river to that perfect little apartment they know every window of by heart--and he is no nearer it than he was eight months ago. He has felt the pride in her voice and knows it as most human and justified, but because he is young and unreasonable that pride of hers hurts his own. And then there is something else. All through what she was saying it was "I" that said, not "we."
"That"s fine, Nancy," he says uncertainly. "That"s certainly fine!"
But she knows by his voice in a second.
"Oh, Ollie, Ollie, of course I won"t take it if it makes you feel that way, dear. Why, I wouldn"t do anything that would hurt you--but Ollie I don"t see how this can, how this could change things any way at all. I only thought it would bring things nearer--both of us getting jobs and my having a Paris one and--"
Her voice might be anything else in the world, but it is not wholly convinced. And its being sure beyond bounds is the only thing that could possibly help Oliver. He puts his hands on her shoulders.
"I couldn"t do anything but tell you to take it, dearest, could I? When it"s such a real chance?" He is hoping with illogical but none the less painful desperation that she will deny him. But she nods instead.
"Well then, Nancy dear, listen. If you take it, we"ve got to face things, haven"t we?"
She nods a little rebelliously.
"But why is it so _serious_, Ollie?" and again her voice is not true.
"You know. Because I"ve failed--G.o.d knows when I"ll make enough money for us to get married now--with the novel gone bust and everything.
And I haven"t any right to keep you like this when I"m not sure of ever being able to marry you--and when you"ve got a job like this and can go right ahead on the things you"ve always been crazy to do. Nancy, you _want_ to take it--even if it meant our not getting married for another year and your being away--don"t you, don"t you? Oh, Nancy, you"ve _got_ to tell me--it"ll only bust everything we"ve had already if you don"t!"
And now they have come to a point of misunderstanding that only a trust as unreasonable as belief in immortality will help. But that trust could never be bothered with the truth of what it was saying at the moment--it would have to reach into something deeper than any transitory feeling--and they have an unlucky tradition of always trying to tell each other what is exactly true. And so Nancy nods because she has to, though she couldn"t bear to put what that means into words.
"Well, you take it. And I"m awful sorry we couldn"t make it go, dear.
I tried as hard as I could to make it go but I guess I didn"t have the stuff, that"s all."
He has risen now and his face seems curiously twisted--twisted as if something hot and hurtful had pa.s.sed over it and left it so that it would always look that way. He can hardly bear to look at Nancy, but she has risen and started talking hurriedly--fright, amazement, concern and a queer little touch of relief all mixing in her voice.
"But Ollie, if you can"t _trust_ me about something as little as that."
"It isn"t that," he says beatenly and she knows it isn"t. And knowing, her voice becomes suddenly frightened--the fright of a child who has let something as fragile and precious as a vessel of golden gla.s.s slip out of her hands.
"But, Ollie dear! But, Ollie, I never meant it that way. But Ollie, I love you!"
He takes her in his arms again and they kiss long. This time though there is no peace in the kiss, only the lost pa.s.sion of bodies tired beyond speech. "Do you love me, Nancy?"
Again she has to decide--and the truth that will not matter for more than the hour wins. Besides, he has hurt her.
"Oh, Ollie, Ollie, yes, but--"
"You"re not sure any more?"
"It"s different."