Old Crow Part 1

Old Crow.

by Alice Brown.

I

John Raven sat in the library of his shabby, yet dignified Boston house, waiting for Richard Powell, his nephew, whom he had summoned for an intimate talk. He was sitting by the fire making a pretense of reading the evening paper, but really he was prefiguring the coming interview, dreading it a good deal, and chiefly for the reason that there was an argument to be presented, and for this he was insufficiently prepared, and must be, however long it might be delayed. When he telephoned d.i.c.k to come he was at last armed with a bold conviction of being able to proffer a certain case to him (his own case, in fact); but, as these last moments went on, he weakened sensibly in any hope he might have had that d.i.c.k would be able to meet him from any illuminating viewpoint of his own. This was mid-winter, two years after the end of the War, where d.i.c.k and his uncle had worked in the Ambulance Corps to the limit of their capacities--d.i.c.k, no soldier, because of what seemed to him a diabolic eccentricity of imperfect sight, and Raven, blocked by what he felt to be the negligible disability of age. John Raven had, with the beginning of the War--which, as early as 1914 he had decided to be his war--made up his mind that although he was over forty and of a business training with inconsiderable excursions into literature, he wanted nothing so much as to get into the thick of it and the rough of it, so far as a man might who was past his physical best, and now he was back again, more fit than when he went, but at this present moment breathless at the realization that he had been up against life as it actually is, and that he found it a brute business and hated it. And this was not so much the horror of life in the field where, however the human heart cried out against the argument of desecrated flesh, the spirit could call mightily upon G.o.d, challenging Him to grant the chrism of fulfilment in return for this wild sacrifice of blood, as the horror of life when peace was exercising her rights in unbelievable ways. This he was going to explain to d.i.c.k, if he could manage it, while he set forth also his need of retreating from the active scene and leaving some of his formerly accepted duties on d.i.c.k's shoulders. As he sat there, gaunt, long, lean man, with a thin brown face and the eagle's look, a fineness of aquiline curve that made him significant in a dominant type, he fitted his room as the room fitted him. The house was old; nothing had been changed in it since the year when, in his first-won prosperity, he persuaded his mother up from the country and let her furnish it with her shyly modest taste, a sense of values that bade her keep within the boundary of the atmosphere she brought with her in good old pieces tenderly used. The room was dim, even by day, from these shadows of the brooding past, and the dull blue draperies at the windows, while they touched it to a more inspiriting tone, still spoke softly of the repose a man wanted when he escaped from the outer world to the a.s.suagement of silence and his books.

To-night, when Raven had just about come to the conclusion that he could not possibly enter upon certain things with d.i.c.k because, although d.i.c.k elected to be a poet, there was no recognized form of words that would make him understand, and he'd better telephone him to put the interview off, he heard his voice in the hall, and, answering it, even breaking over it, like bright bubbles of a vocal stream, the voice of the girl they both loved, in ways becoming to their differences. Raven drew a comfortable breath. The intimate conference with d.i.c.k would have to be deferred, though he would quite as willingly have had Nan listen to it, except for the chance of her carrying it away with her, in that sympathetic tenderness of hers, to burden her young heart. Nan would have made quick work of understanding. She translated you as you went, and even ran ahead of you, in her haste, just as she sometimes cut in on your speech, not rudely rebuking you for being too slow, but in her eagerness to a.s.sure you she caught at the first toss. And then they came in, she full of antic.i.p.atory delight at seeing Raven, and d.i.c.k so full of her that he seemed not to know whether his uncle were there or not, except as an habitual figure in the furnis.h.i.+ng of the room.

We must pause a dull minute, while they were projecting themselves into the scene, to find out how they looked and whether they also fitted the room and Raven. Nan, known to her larger world as Annette Hamilton, was a tall, slim, yet muscular girl, graced with as many physical contradictions as you are likely to imagine. While she stood for an instant before, puppy-like, precipitating herself upon Raven, her eyes crinkled up like Mary Seraskier's, and she showed a line of milk-white teeth. Altogether nature--for she had only the most inconsiderable help from art--had done her exceedingly well. She had the hurling impetuosities of the puppy when she found herself anywhere near persons familiarly dear to her; but, unlike the puppy, she was a thing of grace.

Her hands and slim arms had a girl's loveliest contours, and yet, hidden somewhere under that satin flesh with its rose and silver l.u.s.tre, were muscles serviceably strong. Her eyes were grey like Athena's, her hair fine and thick and pale, and her face altogether too irregular to talk about reasonably.

How is it possible to delineate d.i.c.k, even with all profuse generosity of comment, without suggesting that he was not of the type to please himself, or tagging him with a priggishness afar from him? He certainly was not the sort of hero his dramatic poems described with a choppy vigor of detail, and whom there is no doubt he would have chosen to resemble. But nature had given him a slimness and an actual grace he found, in his private self-scrutiny, almost girlish, nor could he wholly outwit and supplement her by the athletic training he never intermitted.

d.i.c.k's face, too, he found much against him, being of a round solidity with a nose too thick and a mouth a thought too small. How could such despite have happened to him, he asked himself in moments of depression when, confronting the mirror, he recognized the wrongs inheritance had done him. But he knew. It was father's people, that was it. They were all round and owlish, and they thickened up in middle life. If he could have shared Uncle Jack's lean aquilinity, people would have looked at him twice, as they did at Uncle Jack, which in itself would be a bore, except that Nan also might look. Aware of these things and hiding them in his soul, he held himself tight, shut his mouth close, and challenged you with a spectacled eye, pinning you down as if to say: "I am born in every particular as I didn't want to be, but take notice that I'll have no light recognition of the hateful trick they did me. I am in training for a husky fellow. I haven't let up on myself one instant since I found out how horrible it was to be a good deal more of a fellow than I shall ever look. I never shall let up. And don't you let me catch you letting up either, in the way you treat me."

Nan, to go back to the minute of their entrance, made a swift a.s.sault upon Raven. In the old days when he was a youngish man and she a little girl, a growing thing, elongating like Alice, she used to hurl herself into his arms and insist on staying there. Her aunt, Miss Anne Hamilton, who had brought her up from babyhood, was always detaching her from Raven; but Nan clung as persistently. Raven would look at Miss Anne, over the girl's rumpled silk poll, with whimsically imploring eyes. Why couldn't Nan be allowed to break upon him like a salty, fragrant wave of the sea, he seemed to ask Miss Anne, bringing all sorts of floating richness, the outcrop of her fancies and affections? Aunt Anne would return the glance with her sweet, immovable deprecation and go on detaching, while Nan, with an equal obstinacy--though hers was protesting, vocable, sometimes shrill to the point of anguish--stuck to her self-a.s.sumed rights. It was Raven himself who involuntarily stepped over to Aunt Anne's side and finished the detaching process. When Nan came back after her first term at the seminary Aunt Anne preferred to college, and was running to him with her challenge of welcome, he was taken aback by the nymph-like grace and beauty of her, the poise of the small head with its braided crown--the girls at the seminary told her she might have been a Victorian by the way she wore her hair--and he instinctively caught her arms, about to enwreath his neck, held her still and looked at her. She could not know what vision, overwhelming in its suddenness, she brought before him, of childhood gone and maidenhood come and the sacredness of this new state. Aunt Anne knew and frowned a little to herself, from her silent, savage jealousy, realizing, though she would never, in her proud integrity, allow herself to think it, that this hushed veneration of Raven's was worse than the old tumultuous intercourse. What Raven really might have said was:

"Darling, you're a woman and you're a beauty. You don't know it, but you don't want to hug a jaded old reveler like me."

He was not, by any means, a reveler. His life had been little more than a series of walks to business. But those were the words that came to him, catching her adorable freshness of body and mind, and determining to keep it untouched by dusty old pantaloons such as he saw himself. Nan stood for a minute paling out under his eyes, and then drew away from him and left the room, her braid-crowned head high. She had to meet him at dinner, and he knew she had cried and Aunt Anne knew it and was hard on her over the little things she could reprove her for, in a silky, affectionate way, and Raven's heart swelled until he thought they both must know its congestion, and tried to put round it another bond of quiet, kind affection. Since that time, Nan had never kissed him; but now, this two months since the death of Aunt Anne, she had adopted a greeting of her own. She put her hands on his arm and bent her forehead for a minute to his shoulder. The first time she did it, he wanted to kiss the bright hair, but forbade himself, and the second time he said, he was so curious over it:

"A rite?"

She was ready with her answer. He suspected she must have thought it out ingeniously beforehand.

"It's because I'm sorry for you."

"Sorry?" he repeated.

"Yes," she said, "about Aunt Anne."

Then he realized she was sorry because Aunt Anne was dead, and he was more and more conscious of the unbecoming lightness and freedom where he found himself at the death of Aunt Anne. He had not dared acknowledge it to himself. He couldn't, for shame. But whereas, in the past years, when he ventured to formulate his own life a little and see what it had done to him and how he could go on meeting it, he had had a sense of hara.s.sment and of being driven too hard, after Aunt Anne's death he began to recognize the stillness of the s.p.a.ce she had left behind. Now to-day, before Nan had accomplished the little rite of the bowed head on his shoulder, something queer about it seemed to strike d.i.c.k, and he said to her:

"He's your uncle, too, you know."

Raven took this with composure, as signifying the length as well as the depth of his adoptive relation toward her, but Nan met it with resentment. She left him and turned upon d.i.c.k.

"Now what," she said, "do you mean by that?"

"Why, Nan," said the poor youth, keeping a stiff upper lip, because he recognized the signs of an approaching squabble, "I've told him. I'll tell him again. Jack, we're engaged."

"We're nothing of the sort," said Nan, either in pure surprise or an excellent simulation of it.

d.i.c.k met this doggedly.

"We are, too," he said. "You promised me."

"Maybe I did," Nan yielded. "But it was that awful night when you were going out. We won't talk about that. I'd have promised you anything then. I'd have promised anybody, just as I'd have given 'em coffee or a smoke. But when we got back and you expected to begin from there, didn't I tell you to shut up? I've told you to ever since. And I believe," she added, with an ac.u.men that struck him in the center, "you're only dragging it out now to catch me--before him."

"I did shut up," said d.i.c.k, holding himself straight and using his mouth tautly, "because your aunt was sick and then because she was worse. But you needn't think I've shut up for good. Besides, it's only Jack I told.

He's n.o.body."

"No," said Raven mildly, "I'm n.o.body. Only I wish you wouldn't come here to fight. Why can't you get it over on the steps, and then act like Christians after you come in?"

Nan laughed. She was instantly and most obligingly sweet, as if wholly bent on pleasing him. But Richard glowered. It was quite like her, he thought, to sprinkle herself over with that May morning look of hers when she knew she had the horrible advantage not only of being adorable in herself, but a female to boot, within all the sanct.i.ties that still do hedge the s.e.x, however it behaves.

"You see," said Nan maternally, "in France we were living at high pressure. Now everything's different. We mustn't be silly. Run away, d.i.c.k, just as I told you, and leave me to talk to Rookie."

This was her name for Raven, saved over from childish days.

"All right then," said d.i.c.k. "But I sha'n't wait for you. I shall go to Cambridge."

It was such an anticlimax of a threat, delivered in so determined a voice, that he expected them to laugh, in a silly way they had of seeing the merest foolishness always from the same angle. But, as he turned to go, it was with the chill certainty that they had forgotten all about him. Nan had settled herself by the fire and his uncle was bringing her a footstool, an elderly attention, d.i.c.k floutingly thought, very well suited to Aunt Anne, but pure silliness for a girl who flung herself about all over the place. At any rate, he wasn't wanted, and he did go to Cambridge and hunted up some of the fellows likely to talk sense; but no sooner had he settled within their circle of geniality than he found himself glooming over Nan and tempted to go back and break in on that mysterious conclave.

It was mysterious. Nan herself had made it so. Her face, on d.i.c.k's going, had fallen into a grave repose, and she turned at once to Raven, saying:

"You see, d.i.c.k ran in on the way over here, and when he told me you'd sent for him, I said I'd come along, because I'd got to see you instead.

Was that cheeky? I really have got to. Couldn't the other thing wait?"

"Perfectly well," said Raven, with a ready cheerfulness he was aware she could not understand. How should she? He had not been in the habit of troubling d.i.c.k, or indeed any one, with his vaporings. He had lived, of late years, as a sedate, middle-aged gentleman should, with no implication of finding the world any less roseate than his hopes had promised. As to d.i.c.k, the very sight of him had shown him beyond a doubt how little disposed he was to take the lad into that area of tumultuous discontent which was now his mind. "Fire away," he bade her. "You in trouble, dear? You want patriarchal advice?"

Nan might not have heard. She was looking, with a frowning gravity, into the fire. How should she begin? He saw the question beating about in her mind and hoped he could give her a lead. But she found the way for herself. She turned to him with a sudden lovely smile.

"Aunt Anne," she said, "has done something beautiful."

He felt his heart shrinking within him as he combated the ungracious feeling which, it seemed, would not down: that he was never to be done with Aunt Anne's deeds, so often demanding, as they did, a reciprocal action from him. What he wanted, he realized grimly, was to have his cake and eat it, if he might use so homespun a simile for a woman who had persistently lived for him and in him and then had made clear s.p.a.ces about him by going away in the dignity of death. He wanted to breathe in the s.p.a.ce she had left, and he also wanted to be spared the indecency of recognizing his relief. But Nan, studying the fire persistently, to allow his eyes all possible liberty of searching her face while she generously avoided his, was going on in what was evidently a preconceived task of breaking something to him.

"Yes, she's done something beautiful, and done it for you."

Raven's heart had shrunk so now that he wondered it could weigh so heavily. How could a woman, his rebellious intelligence asked him, manage to pursue a man with her benefits even from the grave? All his grown-up life he had fought them, but still they hung about him him like shackles. When he tore them off from one member--always wounding himself only, and scrupulously sure of never, except by the inevitability of his refusals, hurting her--they fastened on him somewhere else. When he was under twenty--for he was fourteen years younger than she--had come the question of her endowing him for the period of his apprentices.h.i.+p to literature, that he might write with a free mind. He had, tempting as that was and safe as it seemed to his arrogant youth, found the decency and prudence to refuse. He wondered now how he had been spared, saved really by the prophetic G.o.ds from taking that guarantee, though he was then so sure of his ability to justify the risk and pay it all back.

Perhaps his mother had helped him. She was a woman of rare sanity, and though he could not remember her uttering a dissuading word, he was sure, in the light of his own middle-aged vision, that she must have been throwing the weight of her clear-mindedness into the scale.

Then there was the question of a college course and of European travel: those were among the colossal gifts Anne Hamilton had sought to lavish on him. But again he had saved himself, accepting one thing only, a benefit that must have hurt her heart like a stone, she was so bent on his beautiful, bright apt.i.tude at writing taking its place as soon as possible, and with no dimming from a prosaic drudgery, in the world as she knew it: the Boston world, the New England world, the court of judgment that sits across the Atlantic. This benefit he asked for and received, from her father: a clerk's place in the mills--Hamilton was a wool magnate--and a chance to earn steady money for himself and his mother, who was every year, in spite of her stout heart, slipping into the weakness of the chronic invalid. Raven wrote his books at the f.a.g end of days given to his dull industry, and he succeeded in calling attention to himself as a cla.s.sical scholar, and then, as he impatiently hit out with what he called pot-boilers in dialect, he got a popular hearing and more money as well. All the time he was advancing in the mills, and, as he advanced, he never failed to see before him the flutter of Anne's discreet draperies or hear the click of her determined heel. She never appeared in the business at all, but he was perfectly sure there wasn't a preferment offered him by her father for which he wasn't indebted to her manipulation of Hamilton in long, skillful hours beforehand. Hamilton had no slightest idea he was being influenced, but, as the years went on, he grew in appreciation of young Raven's business abilities to such a degree that John, reading his mind like a familiar tongue, wondered whether after all it was true, and he hadn't a genius for the affairs of wool. Was he doing the thing that seemed so dull to him with such mechanical and yet consummate cleverness that he was worth all this unripe advancement, or was it indeed Anne's white hand that was turning the wheel of power, her wand that was keeping the augmented vision of him ever before her father's credulous eyes? But he could not r.e.t.a.r.d the wheels of his progress without making a fool of himself, and by the time his sister had prosperously married and his mother had died, he was a partner in the business, and then Hamilton also died and Raven was asking d.i.c.k, hoping all the time he would refuse, if he wanted to come in. d.i.c.k did refuse, with an instant hearty decision for which his uncle inwardly blessed him. Raven had got so restive by this time over the position he had himself won through Anne's generals.h.i.+p that he felt the curse was going down through the family, and that d.i.c.k, if he should come in, would wake up at forty-odd and find himself under the too heavy shade of the Hamilton benevolence.

"Not on your life," said d.i.c.k, when he was halfheartedly offered the chance of battening on wool, "not while Mum's got the dough. There's only one of me, and she's bound to keep me going."

"You couldn't marry on it," said Raven.

For that also d.i.c.k was cheerfully prepared.

"By the time Nan's ready," he said, having at that point asked her intermittently for several years, "I shall be getting barrelfuls out of my plays."

"'If,'" quoted Raven, "'Medina Sidonia had waited for the skin of the bear that was not yet killed, he might have catched a great cold.'"

"That's all right," said d.i.c.k. "You needn't worry, not till it begins to worry me. The only thing that gets me is not pinning Nan down."

"Yes," said Raven, "she's a difficult person to pin."