Old Crow Part 43

"I don't believe it."

"Don't believe what? That I say 'G.o.d 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 antic.i.p.ation 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 a.s.sumed, he had felt obliged to a.s.sume, they were as fine as her white hands. All the more reason for not a.s.sailing 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 d.i.c.kens 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 a.n.a.lysis 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 d.i.c.k. 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 d.a.m.ned!" said he conversationally. "The way you young things go on.

You put us in our places. d.i.c.k does, too. You've heard him. But, as I remember, then you had a tendency to choke him off."

"We won't discuss d.i.c.k," 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 emanc.i.p.ated. 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 emanc.i.p.ated, 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."