Old Crow Part 6

"n.o.body--not yet."

"Oh, then you've destroyed it already."

"No," said d.i.c.k miserably. "I've sent it off."

"Who to? Nan?"

"No. Mother."

Raven could hardly believe him. He did not remember any illuminating confidences from d.i.c.k on the subject of mother, but he made no doubt the boy looked upon her as he did, as a force too eccentrically irresponsible to be unloosed.

"Well!" he said. The state of things struck him as too bad to be taken otherwise than calmly. You couldn't spend on it the amount of emotion it deserved, so you might as well get the credit with yourself and your antagonist of an attack unexpectedly gentle. "Now, what did you think you were doing when you sent it off to your mother?"

"Uncle Jack," said d.i.c.k, rather awkwardly blundering about his mental armory for some reasonable defense, "she's your sister."

"Yes," said Raven, "Milly is my sister. What then?"

"Then, why, then," said d.i.c.k, "when a thing like this happens to you, she'd feel it, wouldn't she?"

"You're perfectly sure you know what has happened to me? You trust your own diagnosis?"

"Of course I trust it," d.i.c.k burst forth. "Your letter--why, your letter isn't normal. Sh.e.l.l shock's a perfectly legitimate thing. You know it is. You're just the one to be hit. You did perfectly crazy things over there, entirely beyond any man of your years. And I'm mighty thankful we can put our finger on it. For if it isn't sh.e.l.l shock, it's something worse."

"You mean," said Raven, "I've gone off my nut."

d.i.c.k did not answer, but there could be no doubt of his own mental excitement, and he was apprehensive in a measure that moved Raven to an amused compa.s.sion. Raven sat looking at him a long minute. Then he got up and took his newspaper from the table beside him.

"Come," he said. "We'll go into the library and see if we can get anywhere."

d.i.c.k followed him, and they sat down together by the fire, this after Raven had moved a third chair into the s.p.a.ce between them. He smiled at himself as he did it. It was the chair Nan had sat in the night before.

He had a foolish feeling that he was invoking her remembered presence, calling on her to help them out.

"Now, d.i.c.k," he began, when they were seated, "you said something about my letter's not being normal. What is normal, when you come to that?"

d.i.c.k frowned into the fire. This, he felt, had some hidden leading, and he wasn't going to be caught.

"What's the use of asking fool questions?" he inquired, in his turn.

"You know."

"Can't help it," said Raven. "I've got to be Socratic. Help me out, old man. Let me have my little game. What is normal?"

"Why," said d.i.c.k, floundering, "I suppose it's what the general run of people think--and do. It's keeping to the rules. It's trotting on the course. It isn't going off at some tangent of your own."

d.i.c.k felt rather proud of this, its fluency and general appositeness. He plucked up his spirits, thinking he might be going to manage Raven, after all.

"Now, see here," said Raven, suddenly leaning forward and looking at him in the friendliest community of feeling, "it means a good deal when a fellow of my years, as you say, gets a biff that sends him staggering."

"Just what I said," d.i.c.k a.s.sured him. "It's mighty serious. It's awful."

"Has it occurred to you," said Raven, "that I may be right?"

"Right? How right?"

Thereupon question and answer piled up fast.

"I've indicted the universe, as it were. How can you prove the universe hasn't laid herself open to it? How do you know the indictment of the creature she made and then ground under her heel isn't the very thing she's been waiting for all these millions of years?"

"Oh, come, Jack! the universe hasn't been waiting for you. That's a part of it, don't you see? You've got delusions, delusions of greatness, delusions----"

"Shut up. Don't use your spurious jargon on me. Just answer my questions. How do you know it isn't the healthiest thing that ever happened in this rotten tissue of pretense we call civilization for even one man--just one--to get up and swear at the whole system and swear again that, so far as his little midge's existence goes, he won't subscribe to it? What business have you to call that disease? How do you know it isn't health? How do you know I'm not one of the few normal atoms in the whole blamed carca.s.s?"

d.i.c.k felt himself profoundly shocked. He was having to reverse his conclusions. Uncle Jack had stood for a well ordered sanity, conversant with wool and books and mysteriously devoted to Miss Anne Hamilton, whose conventional perfections evidently held within their limit Uncle Jack's highest ideals. Uncle Jack had shown a neat talent with his pen.

He had grown middle-aged at an imperceptible and blameless pace, and now he was raging about like a sort of cave man with nothing less than the universe to bound his wild leaps and curvetings.

"But you know, Jack," he remonstrated feebly, "there isn't anything new in saying the nation's going to the dogs. The Britishers say it, we say it----"

"I don't say it," Raven a.s.serted. "We're not going to the dogs. We've gone. We're there. We're the dogs ourselves, and nothing worse could happen to a criminal--from Mars, for example--than to be sent to us. We ought to be the convict colony of the universe."

"Don't," said d.i.c.k, with an affectionate sweetness as exasperating as it was moving. "It only excites you. Come on out and have a tramp. We could motor out to----"

"O Lord!" groaned Raven. "Why don't you beguile me up to the Psychopathic?"

Then he was, for the first time, aghast at what he had set going. d.i.c.k was looking at him again with that suffused glance of an affection too great to mind disclosing itself in all its pathetic abnegation.

"I couldn't say it myself," he began brokenly. "But you've said it; you see yourself. If you would----"

There he stopped and Raven sat staring at him. He felt as if the words had got inside his body and were somehow draining his heart. When he spoke, his voice sounded hoa.r.s.e in his own ears.

"d.i.c.k, old man," he said, "I'm not--that."

"No! no!" d.i.c.k hastened to a.s.sure him, and somehow his hand had found Raven's and gripped it. "Only--O good G.o.d!" he ended, and got out of his chair and turned his back.

Raven, too, rose.

"d.i.c.k," said he quietly, "you go home now. And don't you speak about this to anybody, not to Nan even. You understand."

d.i.c.k nodded, still with his back turned, and got out of the room, and Raven thought he must have caught at his hat in the hall, and made one stride for the door. The door banged and Raven was alone.

VI

The next day Nan telephoned Raven that she was taking train for New York for perhaps a week's stay with the Seaburys. These were her nearest relatives, cousins at a remove Raven never really untangled, and of late they had been spending persuasive energy in trying to induce her to live with them. Since she had come home from France and Aunt Anne had died, they were always descending upon her for brief visits in the house where she succeeded Aunt Anne, and liking her so tumultuously, in her grown-up state, that they pelted her with arguments based on her presumable loneliness there and the silliness of carrying on the establishment really as a species of home for superannuated servants. Nan honestly liked the cousins, in a casual way, though it was as inconceivable to her that the Boston house might be given up as it would have been to Aunt Anne. There was, she felt, again in Aunt Anne's way, a certain continuity of things you didn't even think of breaking. Now she was seeking the Seaburys for reasons of her own. They had to be suitably told that Aunt Anne had left her money away from them as from her, and naturally, though ridiculously, to "that Raven she was always making a fool of herself about." They were ruthless of speech within family conclave, though any one of them would have thought more than twice about calling Aunt Anne any sort of fool, in her lifetime, even at a distance safely beyond hearing. Raven was not, if Nan could forestall the possibility, to be a.s.saulted by mounting waves of family animosity.

Raven was glad, for once, to get rid of her, to find she was removing herself from the domestic turmoil he had created. There could not be the triangular discussions inevitable if she and d.i.c.k fell upon him at once, nor should he have to bear the warmth of her tumultous sympathy. d.i.c.k had evidently told her nothing, and he even gathered that she was going without notice to d.i.c.k. Then Raven began a systematic and rapid onslaught on his immediate affairs, to put them in order. Mr. Whitney, Anne's lawyer, who had always seemed to regard him in a disconcerting way as belonging to Anne, or her belonging in some undefined fashion to him, opened out expansively on the provisions of the will. He most sincerely congratulated Raven. Of course it was to have been expected, but----! Raven kept miserably to the proprieties of the moment. He listened with all due reserve, silent on the subject of Anne's letter.

That was his affair, he thought, his and Nan's; unless, indeed, it was n.o.body's affair but Anne Hamilton's, and he was blindly to const.i.tute himself the unreasoning agent of her trust. That must be thought out later. If he undertook it now, piling it on the pack of unsubstantial miseries he was carrying, he would be swamped utterly. He could only drop it into a dark pocket of his mind where an ill-a.s.sorted medley of dreads and fear lay waiting--for what? For a future less confusing than this inscrutable present? At least, they could not be even glanced at now. He wrote Charlotte and Jerry, his caretakers on the place at Wake Hill, that he was coming for an indefinite stay. He instructed his housekeeper in Boston that the house was to be kept open; possibly Mr.