"So Nan came over," he began. It seemed the only way to pierce her reserve, at once, by a straight shaft. "You wouldn't do what she wanted you to."

She shook her head.

"Why wouldn't you?" he urged, and then she did answer, not ungraciously, but with a shy courtesy:

"I didn't feel to."

"It would be"—he hesitated for a word and found an ineffectual one—"nice, if you could talk to her. She wouldn't tell."

"I don't," said Tira, still with the same gentle obstinacy, "hold much with talkin'."

Raven, because he had her to himself and the time was short, determined not to spare her for lack of a searching word.

"Tira," he said, and she smiled a little, mysteriously to him but really because she loved to hear him use her name, "things aren't getting any better here. They're getting worse."

"Oh, no," she hastened to say. "They're better."

"Only last night you had to run away from him."

"Things are ever so much better," said Tira, smiling at him, with a radiance of conviction that lighted her face to a new sort of beauty. "They're all right. I've found the Lord."

What could he say? Old Crow had besought him, too, to abandon fear in the certainty of a safe universe speaking through the symbols man could understand. He tried to summon something that would reach and move her.

"What if I were drowning," he said. "Suppose I knew I should"—he sought for the accepted phrase—"go to heaven, if I drowned. Do you think I should be right in not trying to save myself?"

Tira knit her brows. It was only for an instant, though.

"No," she said. "Certain you'd have to save yourself. You'd have to try every way you knew. That's what I've done. I'm tryin' every way I know."

"I'm telling you another way," said Raven sharply. "I'm telling you you can't live with a crazy man——"

"Oh, no," she interrupted earnestly. "He ain't that. He has spells, that's all."

"I'm not even asking you to go away with me. I'm asking you to go with that good woman over there." Somehow he felt this was more appealing than the name of Nan. "I trust her as I do myself, more than myself. It's to save your life, Tira, your life and the baby's life."

She was looking at him out of eyes warm with the whole force of her worshiping love and gratitude.

"No," she said softly. "I can't go. I ain't got a word to say ag'inst her," she added eagerly. "She's terrible good. Anybody could see that. But I can't talk to folks. I can't let 'em know. Not anybody," she added softly, as if to herself, "but you."

Raven forbade himself to be moved by this.

"Then," he said, "you'll have to talk to other folks you may not like so well. I shall complain of him. I shall be a witness to what I've seen and what you've told me. I've threatened you with that before, but now it's got to be done."

"No," said Tira, trying, he could see, through every fiber of will in her to influence him. But never by her beauty: she was game there. "You wouldn't tell what I've said to you. You couldn't. 'Twas said to you an' nobody else. It couldn't ha' been said to anybody else on this livin' earth."

Here was a spark of passion, as if she struck it out unknowingly. But he must not be moved, and by every means he would move her.

"What is there," he said, in the roughness of an emotion she saw plainly, "what is there I wouldn't do to save your life? To save you from being knocked about, touched"—he was about to add "violated," the purity of her seemed so virginal, but he stopped and she went on:

"It's just as I told you before. If they asked me questions, I should say 'twa'n't so. I should say you thought 'twas so, but 'twa'n't. I should say you wrote books an' you got up things, I guessed. It made you wrong in your head."

Old Crow! The innocent observers of his life and Old Crow's were in a mysterious conspiracy to prove them both unsound. He laughed out suddenly and she looked at him, surprised.

"Do you know why I would?" she continued earnestly. "Because he never'd overlook it in this world. If they hauled him up before a judge, an' you testified, the minute they let him go he'd take it out o' you. You'd be in more danger'n I be now. Besides, I ain't in any danger. I tried it this mornin' an' I found out." He sat with knitted brows and dry lips waiting for her to go on. "Last night," she said, "after you went down from the shack, I couldn't sleep. I never closed my eyes. But I wa'n't lonesome nor afraid. I was thinkin' o' what you said. He was there. Jesus Christ was there. An' I knew 'twas so because you said so. Besides, I felt it. An' 'long about three I got up an' covered the coals an' took baby an' come down along home. For, I says, if He was there with me in the shack, He'll go with me when I go, an' my place is to home. An' there was a light in the kitchen, an' I looked in through the winder an' Isr'el was there. He was kneelin' before a chair, an' his head was on his hands an' through the winder I heard him groan. An' I stepped in an' he got up off his knees an' stood lookin' at me kinder wild, an' he says: 'Where you been?' An' I says: 'No matter where I been. Wherever I been He's come home with me.' An' he says, 'He? Who is it now?' An' I felt as if I could laugh, it was so pleasant to me, an' seemed to smooth everything out. An' I says, 'Jesus Christ. He's come home with me.' An' he looked at me kinder scairt, an' says: 'I should think you was out o' your head.' An' I went round the room an' kinder got it in order an' brashed up the fire an' he set an' looked at me. An' I begun to sing. I sung Coronation—it stayed in my mind from the meetin'—I dunno when I've sung before—an' he set an' watched me. An' I got us an early breakfast an' we eat, but he kep' watchin' me. I'd ketch him doin' it while he stirred his tea. 'Twas as if he was afraid. I wouldn't have him feel that way. You don't s'pose he is afraid o' me, do you?"

This she poured out in a haste unlike her usual halting utterance. But there was a steadiness in it, a calm. He shook his head.

"No," he said. "I wish he were afraid of you." He wanted to leave her the comfort of belief and at the same time waken her to the actual perils of her life. "Tira," he said, looking into her eyes and trying to impress her with the force of his will, "he isn't right, you know, not right in his head, or he never would behave to you as he does. Any man in his senses would know you were true to him. He doesn't, and that's why he's so dangerous."

A convulsive movement passed over her face, slight as a twitching of muscles could well be. The sweat broke out on her chin.

"No," she said, "any man wouldn't know. Because it's true. That man that come into this house last night an' set down side o' me—an' glad enough he was there happened to be that chair left, same as if I'd left it for him—he's bad all through, an' every man in this township knows it, an' they know how I know it, an' how I found it out." The drops on her forehead had wet the curling rings of her hair and she put up her hand and swept them impatiently away. Her eyes, large in their agonized entreaty, were on Raven's, and he suffered for her as it was when he had seen her at the moments of her flight into the woods. And now he seemed to see, not her alone, but Nan, not a shred of human pathos that had been tossed from hand to hot hand, but something childlike and inviolate. And that was how he let himself speak.

"But, dear child," he said, "Tenney knows how faithful you are. He knows if you hadn't loved him you wouldn't have married him. And he knows if you love anybody, you're true through everything."

"That's it," she said loudly, in a tone that echoed strangely in the great kitchen. "That's it."

He knew what she meant. If she loved the man, she could convince him, mad as he was. But she did not love him. She was merely clinging to him with all the strength of her work-toughened hands.

"But talk to him," he insisted. "Show him how well you mean toward him."

"I can't," she said. "I never've talked to anybody, long as I lived. I git"—she paused for a word and ended in a dash: "I git all froze up."

She sat staring at him, as if her mind were tied into knots, as if she could neither untie them, nor conceive of anybody's doing it. But he could not know just what sort of turmoil was in her nor how it was so strange to her that she felt no mental strength to meet it. In the instinct to talk to him, that new impulse born out of the first human companionship she had ever had, she felt strange troubles within her mind, an anguish of desire, formless and untrained. She was like a child who stretches out arms to something it dearly longs for and finds its fingers will not close on it. She had never, before knowing him, felt the least hunger to express anything that did not lie within the small circle of her little vocabulary. But her mind was waking, stretching itself toward another mind, and suffering from its own impotence.

"O God!" she said, in a low tone, and then clapped her hand over her mouth, because she had not meant to speak that name.

There came a knock at the door. Instantly the look of life ebbed from her face. It assumed at once its mask of stolid calm. She got up and went to the door and Raven, waiting for her to come back, remembered absently he had heard the clang of bells. Visualizing her face as she had talked to him, trying to understand her at every point, the more as she could not explain herself, he was suddenly and sharply recalled. He heard her voice.

"No," she cried, so distinctly that the sound came through the crack of the door she had left ajar. "No, no, I tell you. You never've stepped foot into this house by my will, an', so long as I'm in it, you never shall."

Raven rose and went to the door. He had not stopped to think what he should find, but at least it was, from her tone, a menace of some sort. There stood Eugene Martin, in his fur coat, his florid extravagance of scarf and pin, on his face the ironic smile adapted to his preconceived comedy with Tira. Martin, hearing the step behind her, started, unprepared. He had passed Tenney, slowly making his way homeward, and counted on a few minutes' speech with her and a quick exit, for his butt, the fool of a husband, to see. But as Raven appeared, the fellow's face broke up in a flouting amusement. Here was another, the satiric lips were ready to swear. Deepest distrust of Tira shone forth in the half smile; a low community of mean understanding was in his following glance at Raven. He burst into a loud laugh, took off his hat and made Tira an exaggerated bow.

"Don't mention it," he said. "Didn't know you had company. Wouldn't think o' comin' in."

He turned away, his shoulders shaking with ostentatious mirth. It was all in a minute, and Raven's following act, quite unreasoned, also occupied a minute. He put Tira aside, stepped out after Martin and walked behind him down the path. When Martin reached the sleigh, Raven was at his side. Martin had ceased shaking his shoulders in that fictitious mirth. Now in that last moment, it seemed, he took cognizance of Raven, and turned, apprehension, in spite of him, leaping to his face. Raven, still with no set purpose, grasped him by the collar with one hand and with the other reached for the whip in the sleigh. It was over quickly. Raven remembered afterward that the horse, startled by the swish of the blows, jumped aside and that he called out to him. He did not propose depriving Martin of the means of exit. The fellow did not meet judgment lying down. He did a wild feat of struggling, but he was soft in every muscle, a mean antagonist. The act over, Raven released him, with an impetus that sent him staggering, set the whip in the socket and turned back to the house. At that moment he saw Tenney coming along the road, not with his usual hurried stride, but slowly, his head lifted, his eyes upon the figures at his gate. Raven recoiled from the possibility of a three-cornered wrangle when Tenney also should reach the scene. It was an impossible predicament. Not for himself: he was never troubled by any hampering sense of personal dignity, but for Tira, who stood in silence watching them. She had advanced a few steps into the snowy path and waited, immovable, the light breeze lifting her rings of hair. To Raven, in the one glance he gave her, she was like a Fate, choosing neither good nor ill, but watching the even course of time. If Martin saw Tenney, he was not going to linger for any problematic issue. He stepped into the sleigh and, without drawing the fur robe over his knees, took up the reins. His face, turned upon Raven, was distorted with rage.

"That's assault," he called to him, "assault an' battery. I'll have the law on you an' she's my witness."

"Stop!" called Tira. She came down the path with long strides, her garments blowing back. At three paces from the sleigh she halted and called to him in a voice so clear and unrestrained that Raven thought Tenney, coming on with his jerky action, might also have heard it.

"You stir a step to git the law on him an' I'll tell what I know. What did I find out about you? The money stole out o' the box after they had the raffle for the War, the deed under old lady Blaisdell's feather bed, because it wa'n't recorded an' it left you with the right an' title to that forty feet o' land. Five counts!" She held up her left hand and told off one finger after the other. "I've got 'em all down in my mind, an' there they've been ever since I left you. What d' I leave you for? Not because you treated me like a dog, whenever the fit was on ye, but because you was meaner'n dirt."

He sat there, the reins gathered in his hand, staring at her, his face stiffened in a reflex of the cold passion of hers. Upon her last word, he called to the horse with an oath as if it had been the beast that offended him, turned the sleigh and drove off. Tenney, breathless, was now on the scene. His thin lips curled and drew back, the snarl of the angry feline.

"Two on ye," he said to Raven. "Come to blows over her, have ye? An' you're on top."

Raven turned to Tira.

"Go into the house," he said.

Tenney laughed. It was not the laugh of the man who had just left them. There was no light mockery in it, but a low intensity of misery, the cynical recognition of a man whose house has been destroyed and who asks his inner self how he could have expected anything different. But when he spoke it was jeeringly, to Tira.

"Go into the house," he mocked. "Didn't ye hear him? He tells ye to go into the house, into my house, so's he can fight it out ag'in same's he done with t'other one. You better go. He won't git no odds from me."

He set his dinner pail down beside him, and his hand moved a few inches along the helve of his axe. And Raven, like Tira, was sorry for him.

"No," said Tira, "I sha'n't go into the house. An' this to-do ain't so much about me as about you, Isr'el Tenney, because you're makin' a fool o' yourself. You'll be town talk, an' you deserve to be. You've brought it on yourself."

Raven, his eyes on the man's face, saw it change slightly: something tremulous had come into it, though it might have been only surprise. The hand on the axe helve shook perceptibly. Now it looked to Raven as if it might be his turn.

"I came up here this morning," he said, "to see her." Curiously, at the moment of saying "your wife," he balked at it. He would not, even by the sanction of the word, seem to give her over to him.

"Yes," said Tenney. The lividness of anger tautened his face. "You see me off to my work. You knew you'd find her here."

"Yes," said Raven. "I knew I should find her. I had to see her alone, because I wanted to ask her to leave you, go away from here, and be safe."

Tenney stared at him. The brusque fact was too much for him. Why should Raven have told it?

"You are known," Raven continued steadily, "to abuse your wife."

Tenney's lips again curled back.

"I ain't laid a finger on her," he snarled. "Anybody but a liar 'd tell you so."

"She has told me so," continued Raven. "I came to warn her I should complain of you and have you bound over to keep the peace. She said if I did that she would refuse to testify against you. She said she would rather"—here a slight bitterness came into his voice and, for an instant, he had a foolish satisfaction in reminding Tira of her unfriendliness in blocking him—"she would rather have me considered out of my mind than let you get your just deserts."

"Ah!" snarled Tenney. "I wa'n't born yesterday."

This interchange had had on Tira all the effect Raven could have wished. She started forward a step, with a murmured sound. But Tenney was unmoved.

"Now you know," said Raven, "you're not going to tell me I'm a liar. I draw the line at that. You'll have to drop your axe—that's a cowardly streak in you, Tenney, a mighty mean streak, that axe business—and I'll give you your punishment without waiting for judge or jury."

Tenney looked down at the axe frowningly, and the hand holding it sank to his side.

"Besides saying she wouldn't testify against you," Raven continued, "she refused to leave you. She is a foolish woman, but she's like most of them. They hang on to the beast that abuses 'em, God knows why. But the rest of us won't let you off so easy. Don't think it, for a minute. The next time she's seen wandering round the woods with her baby and you after her, yelling like a catamount, you're going to be hauled up and, even if she won't testify, there's enough against you to make it go hard with you."

Tenney ceased staring at the axe and looked up at Raven. Was it hatred in the eyes? The gleam in them flickered, in a curious way, cross currents of strange light. He tried to speak, gulped, and moistened his dry lips. Then he managed it:

"What business is it o' yourn?"

"It's every man's business," said Raven. "When you began running over the woods, yelling like a catamount"—he returned to this of set purpose, because it evidently bit—"I thought it was queer, that's all. Thought you were out of your head. But it got to be too much of a good thing. And it's one thing to make yourself a laughing-stock. It's another to be indicted for murder."

"I don't," said Tenney, "stan' any man's interferin' with me. I give ye fair warnin' not to meddle nor make."

"Then," said Raven, "we've both got our warning. I've had yours and you've had mine. You're a mighty mean man, Tenney. A mean cuss, that's what you are."

Tenney, in the surprise and mortification of this, barked out at him:

"Don't ye call me a cuss. I'm a professin' Christian."

"Stuff!" said Raven. "That's all talk. I wonder a man of your sense shouldn't see how ridiculous it is. You're not a Christian. When you stand up in meeting and testify, you're simply a hypocrite. No, I don't call you a Christian. I call you a scamp, on the way to being locked up."

Tenney's mind leaped back a space.

"You're tryin' to throw me off the track," he announced. "Ye can't do it. When I come up the road you an' Eugene Martin was out there an' you knocked him down. I see ye. You horsewhipped him. Now if it's anybody's business to horsewhip Eugene Martin, it's mine. What business is it o' yourn horsewhippin' a man that's hangin' round another man's wife unless——"

"Hold on there," said Raven. "I gave him his medicine because he was too fresh." Here he allowed himself a salutary instant of swagger. Tenney might as well think him a devil of a fellow, quick to act and hard to hold. "It happens to be my way. I don't propose taking back talk from anybody of his sort—or yours. He's a mean cuss, too, Tenney, ready to think every man's as bad as he is—a foul-mouthed fool. And"—he hesitated here and spoke with an emphasis that did strike upon Tenney's hostile attention—"he is the kind of cheap fellow that would like nothing better than to insult a woman. That was what he sat down by your wife for, last night. That was why I made an excuse to get him away from her. I wouldn't allow him within ten feet of a woman of my own family. You ought to be mighty glad I looked out for yours."

Tenney was in a coil of doubt. Suddenly he glanced round at Tira, standing there in the path, her eyes upon one and the other as they spoke. Raven would not willingly have looked at her. He felt her presence in his inmost heart; he knew how cold she must be in the wintry air with nothing about her shoulders and the breeze strong enough to stir those rings of hair about her forehead. But she must suffer it while he raked Tenney by the only language Tenney knew.

"But here be you," cried Tenney, as if his mind, unsatisfied, went back to one flaw after another in Raven's argument. "You see me go by to my work, an' you come up here to talk over my folks behind my back an' tole 'em off to run away with you."

"I have explained all that once," said Raven. "You'll have to take it or leave it."

At that instant Tira stepped forward. She gave a little cry.

"You've hurt your foot!"

Raven's glance followed hers to the ground and he saw a red stain creeping from Tenney's boot into the snow. Tenney also glanced at it indifferently. It was true that, although the cold was growing anguish to a numbing wound, he was hardly aware of it as a pain that could be remedied. This was only one misery the more.

"Course I've hurt my foot," he said savagely. "What d'ye s'pose I come home for, this time o' day?"

"Why," said Tira, in an innocent good faith, "I s'posed you come back to spy on me."

That did take hold of him. He looked at her in an almost childish reproach. Now he put the foot to the ground—he had been, though unconsciously, easing it—but at the first step winced and his face whitened.

"God A'mighty!" Raven heard him mutter, and was glad. He seemed more of a man invoking God in his pain than in waving deity like a portent before unbelievers.

Tira had gone to him.

"You put your hand on my shoulder," she said, something so sweetly thrilling in her voice that Raven wondered how Tenney could hear it and not feel his heart dissolve into water. For himself, he was relieved at the warming tone, but it mysteriously hurt him, it seemed so horrible that all the tenderness of which it was witness had to be dammed in her with no outlet save over the child who was "not right." Tenney paid no attention to her, and Raven took him by the arm. The snow was reddening thinly and Raven could see the cut in the boot.

"Open the door," he said to Tira. "I'll help him in."

Curiously, though Tenney had forgotten the hurt except as a part of his mental pain, now that his mind was directed toward it he winced, and made much of getting to the door. Yet it seemed to be in no sense to challenge sympathy. He was simply sorry for himself, bewildered at his misfortune, and so intently was his mind set on it now that he did not seem annoyed by Raven's supporting him. Tira hurried on in advance, and when they entered she was putting wood into the stove and opening drafts, to start up the neglected fire. Raven led him to the chair by the hearth, knelt, without paying any attention to his muttered remonstrance, and, with much difficulty of frequent easements, got off the boot and the soaked stocking. It was an ugly cut. Tenney, glancing down at it, groaned and looked away, and Tira brought a pillow and tucked it behind his head. Raven, glancing up at him, saw he was white and sick and Tira said:

"He never can stan' the sight o' blood."

Evidently the irony of it did not strike her at all, but Raven wrinkled his brows over it. He sent her here and there, for water to wash the wound and for clean cloth. He rolled a bandage and put it on deftly while Tenney stared.

"Now," said he, coming to his feet, "you'd better telephone the doctor. This is all I know."

Tira went to the telephone in the next room and Raven cleared away the confusion he had made and again Tenney watched him. At intervals he looked down at his bandaged foot as if he pitied it. Tira, having given her message, came back and reported that the doctor would be there shortly.

"Then," said Raven, "I'll be off. Telephone if you need anything. Perhaps I'd better come over anyway. He'll have to be got to bed. I'll call you up."

He felt a sudden easement of the strain between himself and Tira. Tenney himself, through his hurt, had cleared the way. Their intercourse, void of secrecy, was suddenly commonplace; at the moment there was nothing in it to light a flash of feeling. Tenney did not look at him. Then Raven, in a sudden mounting of desire to show Tira how sorry he was for her, said to her impetuously:

"I hate to leave you alone."

And again she surprised him as she had the night before in implicit acceptance of her new faith, something as tangible as divine. She spoke in a perfect simplicity.

"I ain't alone," she said.

Tenney had turned his head, to listen.

"We ain't alone, Isr'el, be we?" she challenged breathlessly.

"I dunno what you're talkin' about," said Tenney uneasily, and she laughed.

It was, Raven wonderingly thought, a light-hearted laugh, as if she had no longer anything to bear.

"Why," said she, "same as I told you. We ain't alone a minute o' the time, if we don't feel to be. He's with us, the Lord Jesus Christ."

The telephone bell rang and she went off to answer it. Tenney, as if with a hopeful conviction that another man would understand, turned his eyes upon Raven.

"What's anybody want to talk like that for?" he questioned irrepressibly.

"It's the way you talk yourself," said Raven. "That's precisely what you said last night."

"It's no kind of a way——" Tenney began, and then pulled himself up. Raven believed that he meant it was one thing to invoke the Founder of his religion in a sacerdotal sense, but not for the comforting certainty of a real Presence. "Seems if anybody's crazed. Seems if——" Here he broke off again, and Raven took satisfaction in the concluding phrase: "It's no way to talk when a man's lamed himself so's't he can't git round the room 'thout bleedin' to death."

By this Raven understood the man was, in an hysterical way, afraid of Tira and her surprising invocation. He judged things were looking rather better for her, and went off almost cheerfully, without waiting for her return.



XXVI

When Raven came to Nan's, he went in without knocking and found the house still. He called her name, and she answered from an upper distance. Presently she appeared, traveling bag in hand, and came down to him.

"You really want me, Rookie?" she asked him, pausing at the closet door where she had hung her hat and coat. "You want an unattached female, unchaperoned, very much at large?"

"I want her," said Raven, "more than anything else I'm likely to get in this frowsy world. As to chaperons, Charlotte will do very well, without legging it over here every night to keep you in countenance."

Nan put on her hat and coat, and he picked up the bag.

"Back door locked?" he asked.

She laughed.

"Yes," said she. "That shows I meant to come. Go ahead, Rookie. I'll lock this door." Mid-way down the path, she glanced at him and then ventured: "You look very much set up. What is it, Rookie? what happened?"

"The thing that's happened," said Raven, with a little reminiscent laugh, "is that Tenney's afraid of his wife. And he's cut his foot and can't get away from her. I call it the most ironical of time's revenges I've ever had the pleasure of seeing."

He went on and told her the story of Tenney's disabled foot. Nan, listening, did not take it in.

"But I don't see," she offered, "why it makes him afraid of her."

"It doesn't. Though it makes it more difficult for him to get at her. The thing that's bowled him over is that she's taken him at his word. He's told her the Founder of his religion is everywhere present, and now she's accepted it and assumes the Presence is there in the kitchen, it scares him. He assumes she's dotty. Hence he's afraid of her. You see, Nan, the Presence he's in the habit of invoking is something he conceives of as belonging to strictly sacerdotal occasions. Really, it's a form of words. But she believes it and that, as I told you, scares him. It's like raising a ghost. He's raised it and somebody's seen it and he's scared."

"Can't the queerest things happen," Nan asked him, in a discursiveness he found nevertheless relevant, "here in New England? There isn't a human trait or a morbid outcrop but we've got it. See! Charlotte's at the window. S'pose she'll want me?"

"She'll love it," said Raven. He lifted up his voice and called and Charlotte left the window to appear at the door. "I've got her, Charlotte," said Raven. "She's going to make us a visit. Give us almond pudding for dinner, can't you?"

It was too late for that, Charlotte told him indulgently, but she guessed there'd be suthin'. She lingered in the hall while Nan took off her coat, and volunteered information about the fire being lighted in the west chamber.

"I 'most thought you'd come," she said, in a way softly confidential. "You can settle right down now, you two, an' visit."

She put a hand for an instant on Nan's shoulder and Nan felt the glow of her beneficence. Did Charlotte know what it was to her to have even one evening alone with Rookie? Charlotte knew most things. Probably she knew that.

Nan and Raven had their noon dinner and went for a walk, up the road. That led them past Tenney's and when they reached the house Raven said:

"You wait a jiff and I'll ask how he is."

Tira came, in answer to his knock. She was gravely calm, not even disturbed in her secret mind, Raven concluded, not keyed up by inner apprehension, and keeping herself firm. Where, he wondered absently, at the same instant, did she get those clothes, blue, always worn to the exact point of soft loveliness, the very moral of her eyes? She glanced down the path at Nan, and Nan waved to her. Tira gave a serious little bow and turned her glance to Raven, who inquired:

"How's his foot?"

"It pains him a good deal," she said, with that softness he had noted in her voice while they dressed the hurt. "He has to set with it in a chair. It worries him to death not to git round."

"Good Lord!" said Raven. "You must think I'm a nice chap. Who's doing the barn work?"

"Oh," said Tira, "that's all right. I can see to that. I always do when he's gone for day's works."

"You can't water the stock."

"Oh, yes, I can." Now she smiled at him, beautifully, bewilderingly, for his kindness in asking. "I done it before dinner. That's nothin'. Besides, I like it: takes me out door."

"Don't do any more," said Raven. "We'll be over, 'long about four o'clock, Jerry or I." Then, for he had forgotten Tenney, in his awareness of her, he remembered to ask: "The doctor came, did he?"

She nodded gravely.

"Say anything?"

She shook her head, and then offered, it seemed unwillingly:

"He thought he might be laid up quite a spell."

To Raven, that seemed so desirable, that he wondered at the commiseration in her voice; evidently she could be sorry for Tenney without an admixture of relief at having him safely fettered for a while.

"Well," he said, "I'll be over. And if there's anything——" he stopped and looked her in the eyes, gravely authoritative. It was the first time their two inner selves had met in such unrestrained interchange. If there was anything he could do for her, the glance said, she was to know he would do it, to the very limit of allegiance. What did her own glance say? Was there acceptance in it? Not so much that as a grave understanding and gratitude. He was her refuge, her strength. She might still go winging brokenly about the obscurity that made her life, but he was the shelter where she might take cover if she would. Their gaze broke (it was locked there an instant only) and however she felt in turning from him, Raven had the sensation of dragging his eyes away.

"I'll be over," he said, "in time to fodder and milk."

He was leaving, but she called after him:

"No, don't you come. You send Jerry."

"I can do it as well as Jerry," he answered impatiently, and again she called:

"No, don't you come. I don't think best."

Immediately Raven knew, if she put it in that tone (the mother tone it was) he himself didn't "think best." He joined Nan and they walked on, not speaking. Suddenly he stopped for an instant, without warning, and she too stopped and looked at him. He took off his hat and was glad of the cold air on his forehead.

"Mystery of mysteries!" he said. There was bitterness in his tone, exasperation, revolt. Evidently he saw himself in a situation he neither invited nor understood. "Who'd think of finding a woman like that on a New England doorstep talking about foddering the cows?"

Nan considered the wisely circumspect thing to say and managed tamely:

"She's a good woman."

They went on.

"Yes," said Raven, after a while, "she's a good woman. But does she want to be? Or isn't there anything inside her to make her want to be anything else?"

"I have an idea," said Nan, going carefully, "most of the men she's known have wanted her to be something else."

"Now what do you mean by that?" said Raven irritably. "And what do you know about it anyway? You're nothing but a little girl."

"You keep saying that," said Nan, with composure, "because it gives you less responsibility."

He stared at her, forgetting Tira.

"Responsibility?" he repeated. "What responsibility is there I don't want to take—about you?"

"You don't want me to be a woman," said Nan. "You want me to be a little girl, always adoring you, just enough, not too much. You've been adored enough by women, Rookie."

They both knew she was talking in a hidden language. It was not women she meant; it was Aunt Anne.

"But," said she, persisting, "I'm quite grown up. I've been in the War, just as deep as you have, as deep as Dick. I've taken it all at a gulp—the whole business, I mean, life, things as they are. I couldn't any more go back to the Victorian striped candy state of mind I was taught to pattern by than you could yourself."

"You let the Victorians alone," growled Raven. "Much you know about 'em."

"They were darlings," said Nan. "They had more brains, any ten of 'em, than a million of us put together. But it does happen to be true they didn't see what human nature is, under the skin. We do. We've scratched it and we know. It's a horrible sight, Rookie."

"What is it?" said Raven. "What is under the skin?"

Nan considered.

"Well," she said finally, "there's something savage. Not strong, splendid savage, you know, but pretending to be big Injun and not fetching it. Wearing red blankets, and whooping, and tearing raw meat. O Rookie, how do folks talk? I can't, even to you. But the world isn't—well, it isn't as nice as I thought it: not so clean. You ought to know. You don't like it either."

"So," said Raven, meditatively, "you don't like it."

"It's no matter whether I like it or not," said Nan, in a chilly way he interpreted as pride. "I'm in it. And I'm going to play the game."

They went on for a while without speaking, and then Raven looked round at her, a whimsical look.

"So you give notice," he said, "you're grown up."

"I give notice," said Nan tersely. "I'm a very old lady really, older than you are, Rookie." Then she judged the moment had come for setting him right on a point that might be debatable. "If you think I was a little girl when I sat there and loved you the other night, you might as well know I wasn't. And I wasn't a woman either: not then. I was just a person, a creatur', Charlotte would say, that wanted you to get under your tough lonesome old hide there's somebody that loves you to death and believes in you and knows everything you feel."

"Am I lonesome, Nan?" he asked quickly, picking out the word that struck him deepest. "I don't know."

"I do," said Nan. "You haven't had any of the things men ought to have to keep them from growing into those queer he-birds stuck all over with ridiculous little habits like pin feathers that make you want to laugh—and cry, too. Old bachelors. Lord!"

"Look out," said Raven. "You'll get me interested in myself. I've gone too far that way already. The end of that road is Milly and psycho-analysis and my breaking everybody's head because they won't let me alone."

"Break 'em then," said Nan concisely. "And run away. Take this Tira with you and run off to the Malay Peninsula or somewhere. That sounds further away than most places. Or an island: there must be an island left somewhere, for a homesick old dear like you."

"Now, in God's name," said Raven, "what do you say that for?"

"Tira?" Nan inquired recklessly. "What do I tell you to take her for? Because I want to see you mad, Rookie, humanly mad. And she's got the look that makes us mad, men and women, too."

"What is it?" Raven asked thickly. "What is the look?"

"Mystery. It's beauty first, and then mystery spread over that. She's like—why, Rookie, she's like life itself—mystery."

"No," said Raven, surprising her, "you're not a little girl any more: that's true enough. I don't know you."

"Likely not," said Nan, undisturbed. "You can't have your cake and eat it. You can't have a little Nan begging for stories and a Nan that's on her job of seeing you get something out of life, if she can manage it, before it's too late."

There she stopped, on the verge, she suddenly realized, of blundering. He was not to guess she had too controlling an interest in that comprehensive mystery which was his life. How horrible beyond measure if she took over Aunt Anne's frantic task of beneficent guidance! Rookie should be free. He began to laugh, and, without waiting for the reason, she joined him.

"Maybe I will," he said, "the Malay prescription, half of it. But I should want you with me. You may not be little, but you're a great Nan to play with. We won't drag Tira's name into it," he added gravely. "Poor Tira's name! We'll take good care of it."

"Oh, I'll go," said Nan recklessly. "But we'll take Tira. And we'll build her a temple in a jungle and put her up on a pedestal and feed her with tropical fruits and sit cross-legged before her so many hours a day and meditate on her mystery."

"What would she say?" Raven wondered, and then laughed out in a quick conviction. "No, she wouldn't say anything. She'd accept it, as she does foddering the cows."

"Certainly," said Nan. "That's Tira."

"You've forgotten the baby."

"Yes," said Nan, soberly. "Poor little boy!"

They were serious and could play no more, and presently turned into the back road and so home. At supper they had a beautiful time, the lights soft, the fire purring, and the shades up so that the cold austerities of night could look in without getting them. Nan had done a foolish thing, one of those for which women can give no reason, for usually they do not know which one it is out of the braided strands of all the reasons that make emotion. She had unearthed a short pink crepe frock she used to wear in her childish days, and let her heavy hair hang in two braids tied with pink ribbons. Did she want to lull Rookie's new-born suspicion of her as a too mature female thing, by stressing the little girl note, or did she slip into the masquerading gown because it was restful to go back the long road that lay between the present and the days when there was no war? Actually she did not know. She did know she had flown wildly "up attic," the minute Rookie announced the daring plan of the visit, and flung open chest after chest, packed by Aunt Anne's exact hands, with this and that period of her clothes. Why had Aunt Anne kept them, she straightened herself to wonder, at one point, throwing them out in a disorderly pile, ginghams, muslins, a favorite China silk. Could it be Aunt Anne had loved her, not so much as she loved Rookie, but in the same hidden, inflexible way, and wanted to preserve the image of her as she grew to girlhood, in the clothes she had worn? It was not likely, she concluded, and was relieved to dismiss even the possibility. It would have made too much to live up to, a present loyalty of obedience which, if Aunt Anne in the heavenly courts had anything like her earthly disposition, would be the only thing to satisfy her. Nan didn't mean to do anything definitely displeasing, especially to Aunt Anne. She simply meant to enjoy to the full the ecstasy of living, just as if it were going on for a lifetime, under the same roof with Rookie and having him all to herself. Then she came on the pink crepe, with its black bows, and gave a tiny nod of satisfaction there in the attic dusk, and was all in a glow, though it was so cold.

When she came down to supper that night, Raven was reading his paper by the fire. He glanced up as if she came in so every night, Nan thought. She liked that. But she was a little awkward, conscious of her masquerade and so really adding to the illusion of girlhood, ill used to its own charm. Raven threw down his paper and got up.

"Lord!" said he. "Come here, you witch. Let me look at you."

Nan was actually shy now.

"Why, my darling," said Raven, in a tone so moved she was almost sorry she had brought it all about. It made too many responsibilities. Which Nan was she going to be? ("But no kissing!" she reminded herself.) "You've come back to me."

"I haven't been away," said Nan, recovering herself and treating him to a cool little nod, "not actually. Like it, Charlotte?" For Charlotte had come in with a platter, and Nan turned about, peacocking before her unsurprised gaze. "I found it up attic."

"It's real pretty," said Charlotte. "Them scant things they're wearin' now, they ain't to be thought of in the same day."

Then, having given the room a last glance (almost a caressing touch Charlotte had, a little anxious, too, because all comforts were so important) she went out, and Nan was sitting opposite Raven at the table, demure, self-contained, yet playing her wildest. It was a game she knew she was to have entirely alone. The game was that she and Rookie were living here in this house in some such potency of possessive bliss that nothing could separate them. She was careless over the terms of it. She was a child, she was a woman, she was everything Rookie wanted her to be. Here they were together, and the universe, finding the combination, Nan and Rookie, too strong to fight against, had given up the losing battle, turned sulkily and left them alone.

They were hungry and in high spirits, and they ate and talked a great deal. Nan meant to remember what they talked about. Even the words were so dear to her she would have liked to set them down in a book to keep for her old age that was to be as desolate as Aunt Anne's. But it shouldn't be as conventional. There should be waves on that sea. Then Charlotte had come in to clear the table and afterward, by Raven's invitation, sat ten minutes or so by the fire and talked of neighborhood things, and they were left alone again, and he was suddenly grave. Was the game over, Nan wondered, and then went on into a more unbridled speculation whether he was finding himself reminded of the old scruples, the old withholdings when Aunt Anne, unable to keep up with their galloping horses of fun, restrained them delicately but with what a hand of steel! And suddenly she realized he was not thinking of her. Was the grim house over the rise of the road calling to his anxious heart?

"Nan," he said, as if he had suddenly made up his mind, "I've got something to show you."

He left the room and she heard him running upstairs. Presently he was back, carrying the mottled book. Instantly it had a vivid interest for her, he held it so reverently and, it seemed, so tenderly. She was at the fire and he told her to get up and take the other chair. It would bring the light at her back. With the book still in his hand, he sat down before the fire and began to tell her the story of Old Crow. Nan had known it, in its outer eccentricities; but had Old Crow been unhappy? That was new to her. She had heard of him as queer, the country oddity who, being frenzied over God or love, had madly incarcerated himself in the loneliness of his own eccentricity.

"At odds with life as he found it," Raven concluded, "not actually able to bear it. That's how it looked to the rest of us. Now, this is how it looked to him."

"Is it a journal?" Nan asked.

She had forgotten her game. She was no child now, but a serious woman with an intensely frowning glance.

"Yes. This is his journal. Want to read it, or me read it to you?"

"Oh, you," said Nan.

"I'd better, I guess. His punctuation's queer, and so's his spelling sometimes. But I wish I could write as good a fist."

So he began. Nan sat perfectly still while the reading lasted. Once getting up to tend the fire, she went back to a higher chair and sat tense, her hands clasped about her knees. Old Crow seemed to have entered the room, a singularly vital figure with extraordinary things to say. Whether you believed the things or not, you had to listen, Old Crow believed them so tremendously. He was like a shock, an assault from the atmosphere itself. He affected Nan profoundly. Her perched attitude in the chair was, in an unreasoned way, her own tribute of strained attention. She was not combating him, but she had to tune herself up high not to be overwhelmed. When Raven had finished, he turned and laid the book on the table behind him, but lingeringly as if, Nan thought, he had an affection for it.

"Well," he asked, "what do you think?"



XXVII

"What do I think?" Nan repeated. "About Old Crow, or his religion? It is that, isn't it, Rookie? It is a religion."

"It's a religion, all right," said Raven. "And curiously, Nan, it's given me a tremendous boost."

"Because you think——"

"Not because I think anything. I've an idea that with religions you'd better not think. You'd better believe."

"If you can," said she.

"But don't you believe?" he asked her, out of an impetuosity like her own. "I never thought to wonder what you believed. I remember though, one time."

"Yes," said Nan. A deeper red ran into her cheeks, and her brows came down a little over her eyes. Raven could see she was visualizing something. "You're going back to the time when I wouldn't be confirmed."

"I remember. Mighty disagreeable, that was."

"Yes. I was in disgrace. She looked at me as if she'd been frozen. And you brought me a peach. Do you remember that peach?"

He shook his head. But he did remember, though he said nothing, his mind on the poor little girl chilled by Aunt Anne's frozen look.

"It was the most beautiful peach," said Nan, looking into the fire, and continuing to hug her knees. "It wasn't that I didn't have peaches. There were plenty to be eaten like a lady with a silver knife, or even stolen off the sideboard and gobbled in the garden with the juice squshing over your white frock. But this one—you slipped it into my hand and I knew it was because you were sorry for me. And I took it out of the room and went into the garden with it. And what do you s'pose I did then, Rookie?"

"Ate it, I hope," said Raven. He felt his eyes hot with angry sorrow over her. "That's the only thing I know of to do with a peach."

"I went round behind the lilacs, where the lily bed is, and stood there and cried like—like a water spout, I guess, and I kissed the peach. I kissed it and kissed it. It was like a rough check. And then I buried it among the lilies because the dirt there looked so soft."

"Did it come up?"

He wanted, though so late, to turn it into childish comedy. Nan laughed out.

"No," she said ruefully, "not the way you'd expect. It did come up. I saw her troweling there the next morning. She'd called me to bring her other gardening gloves. She'd found a hole in one she had on. You know how exquisitely she kept her hands. And just as I came, she turned up the peach, and looked at it as if it had done something disgraceful to get there, and tossed it into her basket."

"Now," said Raven, "you can't make me think anybody"—he couldn't allow himself to say Aunt Anne—"went hunting out your poor little peach."

"No," said Nan, bending on him a limpid gaze. "Of course not, consciously. Only there was something——" But even she, with all her recklessness, could not follow this out. To her own consciousness was the certainty that deep in Aunt Anne, deep as the principle of life itself, was an intuition which led her will to the evidence it needed for its own victories. "And the queer thing about it was," she ended, "I didn't refuse to be confirmed because I doubted things. I refused because I believed. I believed in God; I believed so hard I was afraid."

"What of?"

"Afraid of standing in with what I didn't like. Afraid I couldn't carry it through, and if I didn't, there'd be ginger for me somewhere. So queer, Rookie, like all the things that keep happening to us. Little ironies, you know, that sort of thing. For she thought I was behaving shockingly toward God. And really, Rookie, it was because I was so afraid of Him. I believed in Him so much I couldn't say I believed in a way I didn't."

"Like Old Crow," said Raven. "Only you didn't go far enough. You didn't say it's only a symbol."

"I tried not to think much about it, anyway," she owned. "I couldn't believe what she did. But I couldn't go into it. I can't now. Don't you know, Rookie, there are things you can't talk about? It's bad manners."

"I wish the learned divines thought so," said Raven. "Dear Nan!" he added, his mind returning to her. "I didn't know you so very well, after all. I must have seen you were having a beast of a time, or I mightn't have butted in with the peach, but I didn't know how deep it went."

"Oh, it always goes deep with children," said Nan, carelessly, as if the child he was pitying being snowed under by the years, it made no great difference about her, anyway. "You get gashed to the bone and the scars are like welts. But so far as I see, it has to be, coming into a world you don't even know the rules of till they're banged into you."

"You wouldn't be willing," said Raven, spurred on by a mounting curiosity over her, the inner mind of her he seemed never to have touched before, "you wouldn't be willing to tell me what it was in the church you didn't like?"

"Yes," said Nan decisively, "I should mind. Oh, I'd tell you, Rookie, if I could anybody. But I can't. Maybe I could if I hadn't seen it working: over there, you know—seen boys clinging to it so at the end—confession—the crucifix. (The vestments, do you remember? over that faded horizon blue!) I couldn't do it, Rookie, what they did, not if I died this minute. Only," she added, struck by a thought, "I might want it to remind me. I might touch the crucifix, you know, or look at something or feel the holy water on my forehead. I might be too far gone to think up to God but—yes, it might remind me."

"Symbols," said Raven, profoundly moved by the vision of the bright spirit in her mortal beauty flickering out. "Old Crow."

"And when I said," she hesitated, anxious to give him everything he asked of her, "the things I didn't like, I meant the things they tell us, Rookie. You know: facts, details. And then you think of God and—no use, Rookie, no use!"

"Yes," said Raven, "that's where Old Crow was up against it. But picture writing, because it's the only kind of writing we can read—picture writing, Nan, because we're savages—he could take that and not wince."

"Anyway," said Nan, "I'm happiest not thinking of it. I say my prayers: God bless Rookie. God bless me. That's all."

"I don't believe it."

"Don't believe what? That I say 'God bless Rookie'? Course I do. Why not?"

"Well, I'm blessed!" said Raven, at a loss. Then, recovering himself, "Nan, I never've known you in the least. How am I getting at you now?"

"Because we're shut up here with the quiet and the snow," said Nan.

She looked at the fire, not at him. He thought, with a startled delight in her, he had never seen a more contented figure and, the beauty of it was, entirely oblivious of him. It made no demands.

"It's a fact," he reflected, "I've really never seen you since you grew up. First you were a child, then you went over there. You had to take life whole, as Old Crow took his religion."

"Yes," said Nan, "I guess we're all queer, we young ones, that have been in service. You see we've had to take things as they are. You can't veil them from us. We've seen 'em. We know." She laughed out. "Rookie, it's queer, but I'm a good deal more like the old-fashioned girl we read about than the rest of the crowd I run with."

"Why?" Raven ventured.

If Nan was in a mood to unveil her dear mind, he wanted her voice to rush on and on in that sweet staccato. And her answer was in itself surprising:

"Aunt Anne."

Raven sat looking at her, a slow smile dawning. There she was, "prim as a dish," Charlotte would say, her two braids down her back, her hands clasped about her knees. He had never, the undercurrent in his mind still reminded him, been so alone with her since the days when they had, with an unspoken sense of lawlessness, slipped away together for a day's fishing or a breathless orchid hunt in the woods. The adventures had been less and less frequent as time ran on and it had begun to dawn on Raven that they were entirely contrary to Aunt Anne's sense of New England decencies. After each occasion Nan would be mysteriously absent for a half day, at least, and when she reappeared she was a little shyer of him, more silent toward Aunt Anne. Had she been put to bed, or shut up with tasks, to pay the tax on her stolen pleasures? He never knew. He did know, however, that when he proposed taking her off to wild delights that made her eyes glow with anticipation she always refused, unless he acceded to her plea to slip away: always to slip away, not to tell. Could it be she had known by a child's hard road to knowledge—of observation, silence, unaided conclusion—that Aunt Anne would never allow them to run away to play? Curious, pathetic, abnormal even, to have been jealous of a child! Then he pulled himself up with the shocked sense, now become recurrent, that he had never allowed himself to attack Anne's fair dignity with the weapon of unsuppressed guesswork about her inner motives. He had assumed, he had felt obliged to assume, they were as fine as her white hands. All the more reason for not assailing them now when she was withdrawn into her strange distance. Yet one source of wonder might be allowed him to explore unhindered: the presence of Nan here at his hearth, inviting him to know her to the last corner of her honest mind. She was even eager in this loving hospitality. He would hardly have seen how to define the closeness of their relation. She had turned her eyes from the fire to meet his.

"Well?" she said. "What?"

"I was thinking how queer it is," said Raven, "we never've been alone together very much—'all told' as Charlotte would say—and here we sit as if we were going to be here forever and talk out all the things."

"What things?" asked Nan.

She was not looking at him now, but back into the fire and she had a defensive air, as if she expected to find herself on her guard.

"Lots of 'em," said Raven. "The money." His voice sounded to her as if he cursed it, and again he pulled himself up. "What are we going to do with it?"

"Aunt Anne's," she said, not as a question but a confirmation.

"Yes. I can't refuse it. That means throwing it back on you. If I won't decide, I'm simply making you do it for me. I don't see anything for it but our talking the thing out and making up our minds together."

"No," said Nan. "I sha'n't help you."

"You won't?"

"I suppose it amounts to that."

"Now why the dickens not?"

Nan kept up her stare at the fire. She seemed to be debating deeply, even painfully.

"Rookie," she said, at last, in a tumultuous rush, "I never meant to say this. I don't know what'll come of saying it. But you've had a terrible sort of life. It's almost worse than any life I know. You've been smothered—by women." This last she said with difficulty, and Raven reddened, in a reflecting shame. "You've done what they expected you to. And it's all been because you're too kind. And too humble. You think it doesn't matter very much what happens to you."

"You've hit it there," said Raven, with a sudden distaste for himself. "It doesn't."

"And if I could clear your way of every sort of bugbear just by deciding things for you, I wouldn't do it."

"Don't try to change my destiny," said Raven, plucking up spirit to laugh at her and lead her away from this unexpected clarity of analysis that could only mean pain for both of them. "I'm old, dear. I'm not very malleable, very plastic. We're not, at forty-odd."

"And if," said Nan deliberately, "I loved you better, yes, even better than I do (if I could!) I wouldn't tell you. It would be putting bonds on you. It would be setting up the old slavery. The more I loved you, the more I should be taking over the old tyranny: direct succession, Rookie, don't you see?"

Here she laughed, though with some slight bitterness, and he did see. Aunt Anne had ruled his life, to the drying up of normal springs in it. Nan didn't mean to accept the inheritance. He was profoundly touched, by her giving so much grave thought to it, at least.

"But, dearest child," he said, "what does it matter now? I'm rather a meager person. You couldn't dress me up with attributes, out of your dear mind. I shouldn't know how to wear 'em. I'm no end grateful to you for wanting to. But if you gave me the earth for a football now I'm too stiff to kick it. It's a curve, life is. Don't you know that? You're on the up-grade, you and Dick. I may not have got very far, but I'm on the down."

"And yet," said Nan, turning and laying a finger on the book at her side, "you can read a thing like that, a man's life turned inside out for you to see, and understand what he meant by it, and then say the game's up. You make me tired."

If he made her tired, she made him unaffectedly surprised.

"But, Nan," he said, "I didn't know you caught on so tremendously to the old chap. I didn't know it meant so very much to you."

"Of course it means things to me," she said. "Anyway because it does to you. You came up here sick, sick at heart, sick in your mind, because you've been through the War and you've seen what's underneath our proprieties and our hypocrisies. You see we're still in the jungle. And it's nearly killed you out, Rookie, the dear you inside you that's not at home in the jungle. You wouldn't believe me if I told you what kind of a Rookie you are. Things hurt you like blazes. And then here comes Old Crow, just as if he rose out of his grave and pointed a finger at you. And he says, 'Don't be afraid, even of the jungle.' And suddenly you weren't afraid. And now you're afraid again, and talk about downward curves, and all that. Why, Rookie, I'm older than you are, years and years."

Raven's mouth and eyes were wide open in amazement at her.

"I'm damned!" said he conversationally. "The way you young things go on. You put us in our places. Dick does, too. You've heard him. But, as I remember, then you had a tendency to choke him off."

"We won't discuss Dick," said she, again prim as a dish. "And I'm not putting you in your place because I belong to my own generation. It's only because you fill up the foreground. I have to look at you. I can't see anything else. I never could. And as a matter of fact, I don't belong to this generation. I haven't got their conceit and their swagger. Sometimes I wish I had. I can't even talk their slang. I can't smoke a cigarette."

Then Raven remembered, as if she had invited a beam of light to throw up what would appeal to him as her perfections, that she did seem to him an alien among her youthful kind, and a shy alien at that, as if she hoped they might not discover how different she was and put her through some of those subtle tortures the young have in wait for a strange creature in the herd.

"No," he said, "you're not like the rest of them. I should have said it was because you're more beautiful. But it's something beyond that. What is it?"

"Don't you know?" said Nan, turning to him, incredulous and even a little accusatory, as if he should long ago have settled it for her doubting mind whether it was a gain for her or irreparable loss. "No, I see you don't. Well, it's Aunt Anne."

"Aunt Anne?"

"Yes. I never had the college life girls have now. When she sent me to the seminary, it was the privatest one she could find. If she could have exiled me to mid-Victorianism she would. I don't say I should have liked college life. Maybe I shouldn't. Except the athletics. Anyhow, I can hold my own there. I was enough of a tomboy to get into training and keep fit. And Rookie—now don't tell—I never do—I see lots of girls, perfectly nice girls, too, doing things Aunt Anne would have died before she'd let me do. And what do you think? I don't envy them because they're emancipated. I look at them, and I feel precisely what Aunt Anne would feel, though I don't seem to get excited about it. The same word comes into my mind, that word all the girls have run away from: unladylike! Isn't that a joke, Rookie? Charlotte would say it's the crowner."

"You're a sweet thing, Nan," said Raven, musing. He did wonder whether she was really in revolt against Aunt Anne's immovable finger.

"Smoking!" said Nan, her eyebrows raised in humorous recollection. "I used to be half dead over there, dog tired, keyed up to the last notch. You know! I'd have given a year of life for a cigarette, when I saw what the others got out of it. I was perfectly willing to smoke. I was eager to. But I'd think of Aunt Anne, and I simply couldn't do it."

Then it seemed to him that, since Aunt Anne's steel finger had resulted in such a superfine product of youth, they'd better not blame her too radically. It was her tyranny, but it was a tyranny lineally sprung from a stately past.

"I don't believe it was Aunt Anne alone," he said. "It was your remembering a rather fine inheritance. Your crowd think they're very much emancipated, but they've lost the sense of form, beauty, tradition. You couldn't go all the way with them. You couldn't be rough-haired."

"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 competitive it was, in the eagerness of each to justify the particular preciousness of the moment) the door opened and Dick 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 Dick! 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, snatching it out of any possible sequence of hours here with Rookie. Dick 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 Dick'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 Dick 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. Dick was in the sulks and she was to suffer them alone.



XXVIII

Dick, 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, assumed, 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 Dick 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 Dick 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 Dick. She began by laughing at him.

"Dick," 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.'"

Dick 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-fashioned 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 passing, 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 dickens for? Haven't I a perfect right to go to New York without notice?"

"Why," said Dick, "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 Dick, "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 Dick. "But I knew as well as I wanted to you'd doubled back here and you were with him."

"Then, for God'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 Dick 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.

"Dick," 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 God! Rookie!"

Again she had invoked her Maker because Dick would shiver at the impropriety. "No violence," she thought satirically, remembering he was himself the instigator of violence in verse. But Dick 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 Dick 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. Dick 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.

"Rookie," she said, with a half laugh that was really a caress, "darlingest Rookie! Charlotte never got that supper together in the world. You did it yourself, not to disturb her. I never saw so much food at one time, in all my life."

It was a monstrous feast, bread, butter, cheese, ham: very neatly assembled, but for a giant's appetite.

"We'll all have some," sad Raven. "Draw up, old son. Nan'll butter for us."

For the first minutes it seemed to Dick he could not eat, the lump in his throat had risen so. But Nan buttered and they did eat and felt better. Raven avoided looking at them, wondering what they were quarreling about now. It must, he thought, be the way of this new generation starting out avowedly "on its own."



XXIX

The blessed diversion of eating ended, a blank moment stared them in the face. What to say next? Were Nan and Dick, Raven wondered, to go on fighting? Was it the inevitable course of up-to-date courtship? Perhaps the new generation, from its outlook on elemental things, was taking to marriage by capture, clubbing the damsel and striding off, her limpness flung over a brawny arm. It seemed to him a singularly bare, unshaded way to the rose-leaf bowers his poets had been used to sing; but undoubtedly the roads were many, and this was one. Possibly the poets wouldn't say the same now. Dick ought to know. But at least there must be no warfare here in this warm patch of shelter snatched out of the cold and dark. His hand was on Old Crow's journal, Dick's inheritance, he thought, as well as his, and now a fortunate pretext to stave off an awkward moment.

"Run over this," he said. "Nan and I've been doing it. I don't believe we're in any hurry for bed."

Dick took it, with no show of interest. How should he have been interested, forced to switch his mind from the pulsating dreams of youth to worn mottled covers?

"What is it?" he asked indifferently.

Raven was rather curious now. What impression would Old Crow make, slipping in like this, unheralded?

"Never mind," he said. "Run over it and get on to it, if you can. I'd like to know what you think."

Dick, without much heart, began to read, and Raven lighted a pipe. First, a tribute to Nan's abstinence, he passed her the cigarettes, and when she shook her head, smiled back at her, as if he reminded her of secrets they had together. Presently she got up, and Dick, closing the book, threw it on the table.

"Bed?" Raven asked, also getting up, and Nan said good night and was gone.

The two men sat down, each with the certainty that here they were to stick until something determining had been said, Raven irritated by the prospect and Dick angrily ready.

"Well," said Raven, indicating the book, "what do you think?"

"That?" said Dick absently. "Oh, I don't know. Somebody trying to write without knowing how?"

Raven gave it up. Either he had not read far, or he had not hungered or battled enough to be moved by it.

"Now, look here," said Dick, "I may not be interested in that, but there's something I am interested in. And we've got to talk it out, on the spot."

"Well!" said Raven. He mended the fire which didn't need it, and then sat down and filled his pipe. He wasn't smoking so very much but, he thought, with a bored abandonment to the situation, gratefully taking advantage of a pipe's proneness to go out. While he attended to it he could escape the too evidently condemnatory gaze from those young eyes that never wavered, chiefly because they could not be deflected by a doubt of perfectly apprehending everything they saw.

"Now," said Dick, plunging, "what do you want to do this kind of thing for?"

"What kind of thing?" asked Raven, lighting up. "Smoke?"

Dick looked at him accusingly, sure of his own rightness and the clarity of the issue.

"You know," he said. "This business. Compromising Nan."

Raven felt that slight quickening of the blood, the nervous thrill along the spine a dog must feel when his hair rises in canine emergency. He smoked silently while he was getting himself in hand, and, in the space of it, he had time for a good deal of rapid thinking. The outrage and folly of it struck him first and then the irony. Here was Dick, who flaunted his right to leave nothing unsaid where realistic verse demanded it, and he was consigning Nan to the decorum Aunt Anne herself demanded. Was the young animal of the present day really unchanged from the first man who protected his own by a fettering seclusion, simply because it was his own? Was Dick's general revolt only the yeasty turmoil sure to take one form or another, being simply the swiftness of young blood? Was his general bravado only skin deep? Raven hardly knew how to take him. He wouldn't be angry, outwardly at least. The things Dick had said, the things he was prepared to say, he would be expected to resent, but he must deny himself. It was bad for the boy, and more, a subtle slur on Nan. They mustn't squabble over her, as if her sweet inviolateness could be in any way touched by either of them. Presently he took his pipe out, looked at it curiously as if it did not altogether please him and remarked:

"Dick, you're a fool."

"Oh, yes," said Dick, with a bitterness that curled his lip a little, "I'm a young fool, too, I suppose. Well, thank God for that. I am young, and I know it, and just what I'm getting out of it and what I've a right to get. You can't play that game with me, Uncle Jack. You simply can't do it. The old game's played out."

"And what," said Raven mildly, "is the old game? And what's the new one going to be? You'll have to tell me. I don't know."

"The old game," said Dick, "was precisely what it was in politics. The old men made the rules and the young were expected to conform. The old men made wars and the young fought 'em. The old men lied and skulked and the young had to pull them out of the holes they got into. I suppose you'd say the War was won at Chequers Court. Well, I shouldn't. I should say it was won by the young men who had their brains blown out, and lost their eyes and their legs."

"No," said Raven quietly, "I shouldn't say the War was won at Chequers Court. We needn't fight over that. The thing that gets me is why we need to fight at all. There's been a general armistice and Eastern Europe doesn't seem to have heard of it. They go on scrapping. You don't seem to have heard of it either. You come home here and find me peaceably retired to Charlotte and Jerry and my Sabine Farm, and you proceed to declare war on me. What the devil possesses you?"

"Yes," said Dick, the muscle twitching in his lip, "I do find you here. And Nan with you."

"Dick," said Raven sharply, "we'll leave Nan out of this."

Dick, though the tone was one that had called him to attention years ago, told himself he wasn't afraid of it now. Those old bugaboos wouldn't work.

"I am going," he said, "to marry Nan."

"Good for you," responded Raven. "No man could do better."

"Do you mean to tell me," countered Dick, "you're not bluffing? Or do you actually want to let her marry me and you—you'd continue this under my nose?"

Raven stared at him a full minute, and Dick angrily met him. "Stare away," Dick was thinking. "I'm in the right. I can look you down."

"Dick," said Raven finally, "I called you a fool. It isn't such a bad thing to be a fool. We're most of us fools, of one sort or another. But don't let me think you're a dirty-minded little cad. Now I don't want to bring Nan into this, but I rather think I've got to. What are you driving at? Come, out with it!"

To his wonderment, his pain amounting to a shock of perplexity and grief, he saw Dick's face redden and the tears spring to his eyes. How horribly the boy cared, perhaps up to the measure of Nan's deserts, and yet with what a childish lack of values! For he had no faith either in Nan or in old Jack. The ties of blood, of friendship, were not holding. He was as jealous as Othello, and no sane certainties were standing him in stead. Dick, feeling the painful tears, felt also the shame of them. He wanted to answer on the instant, now Raven had given him his chance; but so unused was he to the menace of betraying emotion that he was not even sure of not blubbering like a boy. He swallowed and came out with it:

"You've got some sort of hold on her nobody else has. You've hynotized her. She eats out of your hand."

Raven, in despair, sat looking at him. He ought, he felt, to be able to laugh it all away, but he was too bewildered and too sorry.

"Dick," said he finally, "I shall have to say it again. You're an awful fool. Nan and I were always the best of friends. I rather think I have known her in a way none of the rest of you have. But—hypnotized her! Look at me, Dick. Remember me plodding along while you grew up; think what sort of a chap I am. You won't find anything spectacular about me. Never has been, never will be. And Nan, of all people! little Nan!"

Dick forgot the imminence of a breaking voice and humid eyes. Raven, he felt, wasn't playing the game. He was skulking out of it.

"Do you deny," he said, in a voice so loud and hoarse that it startled him as it did Raven, "that you're in love with her?"

"Good God!" said Raven. He rose, laid his pipe on the mantel and stood, trembling, even in his clenched hands. "What is there to answer," he got out at length, "to a question like that? You've just reminded me I'm past my youth. Why don't you remember it yourself when it'll do you some good? I'm an old chap, and you——"

"You're as fit as ever you were in your life," said Dick, as if he grudged it to him. "And more fascinating, I suppose, to a girl like her. There's something pathetic about it. It's half pity, too! Nothing so dangerous in the world."

Raven swung round, walked to the window and, hands in his pockets, stood looking out. In love with Nan! well, he did love Nan better than any created thing. All the old tests, the old obediences, would be nothing to him if he could consecrate them to Nan, her happiness, her safety in this dark world. How about his life? Yes, he would give that, a small thing, if Nan needed the red current of it to quicken her own. But "in love" as Dick understood it! If you were to judge Dick's comprehension of it from his verse, love was a sex madness, a mortal lure for the earth's continuance, by the earth begot. And who had unconsciously held out that lure to him but the woman of mystery up there on the road in that desolate house with her brutal husband and her deficient child? He had seen the innocent lure, he had longed to put out his hand to the hand unconsciously beckoning. Through the chill wintry night the message came to him now. And only Nan could understand that the message might come and that it was a part of the earth and to be forgotten, like a hot wind or a thrilling song out of the dark—Nan, his darling, a part of him, his understanding mind, as well as the fiber of his heart. Suddenly he turned on Dick who was watching him, ready, it seemed, to pounce on his first change of look.

"Dick," he said, "I adore Nan."

"Yes," said Dick, "I know you do. I told you——"

"But," broke in Raven, "you don't know anything about it."

"Oh," said Dick, "then I don't adore her, too."

Raven reflected. No, his inner mind told him, there was no community of understanding between them. How should Dick traverse with him the long road of rebuff and downfall he had traveled? How should youth ever be expected to name the cup it has not tasted? For Dick, he thought again, what is known as love was a simple, however overwhelming, matter of the mounting blood, the growing year. For him it would be the ashes of forgotten fire, the strange alembic mixed of bitter with the sweet. In that moment he faced an acknowledged regret that he had not lived the normal life of marriage at the start, the quieting of foolish fevers, the witness of children. We are not, he reflected, quite solvent unless we pay tribute before we go. He mused off into the vista of life as it accomplishes itself not in great triumphal sweeps, but fitful music hushed at intervals by the crash of brutal mischance, and only, at the end, a solution of broken chords. Meantime Dick watched him, and Raven at last, feeling the boy's eyes on him, came awake with a start.

"Yes, Dick," he answered gently, "of course you love her. And it ought to do you good. It's a big thing to love Nan."

"Very well then," said Dick, his voice trembling a little in answer to that gentler tone, "you let her alone, can't you? Nan's a different girl when she's with you. It's no use denying it. You do hypnotize her."

"Dick," said Raven, "that's a beastly thing to say. If you mean it to be as offensive as it sounds, you ought to be booted for it."

"Oh," said Dick, with a simple certainty in what he knew, "I don't blame you as I should any other fellow that wasn't going through what you are. That would be a simple matter to deal with: a chap that knew what he was doing. You don't, old man. You may not know it, but you don't."

"For the land's sake!" said Raven, echoing Charlotte, "And what, again for the land's sake, am I going through?"

"You know," said Dick uneasily because he did hope to avoid putting it into words. "Cafard."

Raven had one of his moments of silence, getting hold of himself, taking the matter in, with its forgotten enormity.

"So," he said, "you've adopted your mother's word for it. I hadn't realized that."

"Oh, Mum's no such fool," said Dick. "She may be an aggravation and a curse—I'll own that—but she's up to date. Why, Jack, anybody that ever knew you'd know you're not yourself."

"No," thought Raven, "few of us are ourselves. We've been through the War, my son. So have you; but you didn't have such a brittle old world inside you to try to put together again after it was smashed. Your inner world was in the making. Whatever you might feel in its collision with the runaway planet of the mad human mind, it could right itself; its atoms might cohere."

"You needn't think," proceeded Dick generously if a trifle too magnificently, "I can't see. There's a lot of things I see that don't bear talking about. I've pitched into you about Nan, but you needn't suppose I don't know it's all a matter of hidden complexes."

Again recurring to Charlotte in this moment of need, Raven reflected that he didn't know whether he was afoot or a-horseback.

"You don't mind, I hope," he said, with humility before this perfectly equipped intelligence, "explaining a little."

"Why," said Dick, "there's all your previous life. It's a case of inhibition. There was Miss Anne."

"Stop," said Raven, his curiosity over the boy's mind dying in a crash. "Stop right there, Dick; you're making a fool of yourself. Now we'll go to bed."

He got up and waited, and Dick, sulkily, rose too.

"You needn't think," he began, and Raven broke in:

"You needn't think I shall stand another word of your half-baked psycho-deviltries. You can believe what you like. It'll harm nobody but yourself. But you don't talk it here, or out you go. Now!"

The last word meant he was waiting to put out the light and Dick, without another look at him, strode out of the room, snatched his suit-case and went up the stairs. Raven heard the decisive click of his door and, his own heart beating in a quick response to what he knew must happen, turned on the light again and stood there silent, waiting. It did happen. A soft rustle, like a breeze blowing down the stairs, and Nan came in. She had taken off her child's dress, as if to show him she had left their game behind her. The long braids were pinned up, and she wore her dark walking dress. She was paler, much older, and he was renewedly angry with Dick for banishing the Nan that was but an hour ago. Perhaps that Nan would never come back.