The Gay Cockade
I live in the old Greer house on Orange Street, for it is mine by
inheritance, and was to have gone to Nancy at my death. But it will not
go to her now. Yet I sometimes wonder--will the ship which carried her
away ever sail back into the harbor? Some day, when she is old, will she
walk up the street and be sorry to find strangers in the house?
I remember distinctly the day when the yacht first anchored within the
Point. It was a Sunday morning and Nancy and I had climbed to the top of
the house to the Captain's Walk, the white-railed square on the roof
which gave a view of the harbor and of the sea.
Nancy was twenty-five, slim and graceful. She wore that morning a short
gray-velvet coat over white linen. Her thick brown hair was gathered
into a low knot and her fine white skin had a touch of artificial color.
Her eyes were a clear blue. She was really very lovely, but I felt that
the gray coat deadened her--that if she had not worn it she would not
have needed that touch of color in her cheeks.
She lighted a cigarette and stood looking off, with her hand on the
rail. "It is a heavenly morning, Ducky. And you are going to church?"
I smiled at her and said, "Yes."
Nancy did not go to church. She practiced an easy tolerance. Her people
had been, originally, Quakers. In later years they had turned to
Unitarianism. And now in this generation, Nancy, as well as Anthony
Peak, had thrown off the shackles of religious observance.
"But it is worth having the churches just for the bells," Nancy conceded
on Sunday mornings when their music rang out from belfry and tower.
It was worth having the churches for more than the bells. But it was
useless to argue with Nancy. Her morals and Anthony's were
irreproachable. That is, from the modern point of view. They played
cards for small stakes, drank when they pleased, and, as I have
indicated, Nancy smoked. She was, also, not unkissed when Anthony asked
her to marry him. These were not the ideals of my girlhood, but Anthony
and Nancy felt that such small vices as they cultivated saved them from
the narrow-mindedness of their forebears.
"Anthony and I are going for a walk," she said. "I will bring you some
flowers for your bowls, Elizabeth."
It was just then that the yacht steamed into the harbor--majestically,
like a slow-moving swan. I picked out the name with my sea-glasses, _The
Viking_.
I handed the glasses to Nancy. "Never heard of it," she said. "Did you?"
"No," I answered. Most of the craft which came in were familiar, and I
welcomed them each year.
"Some new-rich person probably," Nancy decided. "Ducky, I have a feeling
that the owner of _The Viking_ bought it from the proceeds of pills or
headache powders."
"Or pork."
I am not sure that Nancy and I were justified in our disdain--whale-oil
has perhaps no greater claim to social distinction than bacon and ham
or--pills.
The church bells were ringing, and I had to go down. Nancy stayed on the
roof.
"Send Anthony up if he's there," she said; "we will sit here aloft like
two cherubs and look down on you, and you will wish that you were with
us."
But I knew that I should not wish it; that I should be glad to walk
along the shaded streets with my friends and neighbors, to pass the
gardens that were yellow with sunlight, and gay with larkspur and
foxglove and hollyhocks, and to sit in the pew which was mine by
inheritance.
Anthony was down-stairs. He was a tall, perfectly turned out youth, and
he greeted me in his perfect manner.
"Nancy is on the roof," I told him, "and she wants you to come up."
"So you are going to church? Pray for me, Elizabeth."
Yet I knew he felt that he did not need my prayers. He had Nancy, more
money than he could spend, and life was before him. What more, he would
ask, could the gods give?
I issued final instructions to my maids about the dinner and put on my
hat. It was a rather superlative hat and had come from Fifth Avenue. I
spend the spring and fall in New York and buy my clothes at the smartest
places. The ladies of Nantucket have never been provincial in their
fashions. Our ancestors shopped in the marts of the world. When our
captains sailed the seas they brought home to their womenfolk the
treasures of loom and needle from Barcelona and Bordeaux, from Bombay
and Calcutta, London and Paris and Tokio.
And perhaps because of my content in my new hat, perhaps because of the
pleasant young pair of lovers which I had left behind me in the old
house, perhaps because of the shade and sunshine, and the gardens,
perhaps because of the bells, the world seemed more than ever good to me
as I went on my way.
My pew in the church is well toward the middle. My ancestors were
modest, or perhaps they assumed that virtue. They would have neither the
highest nor the lowest seat in the synagogue.
It happens, therefore, that strangers who come usually sit in front of
me. I have a lively curiosity, and I like to look at them. In the winter
there are no strangers, and my mind is, I fancy, at such times, more
receptive to the sermon.
I was early and sat almost alone in the great golden room whose
restraint in decoration suggests the primitive bareness of early days.
Gradually people began to come in, and my attention was caught by the
somewhat unusual appearance of a man who walked up the aisle preceded by
the usher.
He was rather stocky as to build, but with good, square military
shoulders and small hips. He wore a blue reefer, white trousers, and
carried a yachtsman's cap. His profile as he passed into his pew showed
him young, his skin slightly bronzed, his features good, if a trifle
heavy.
Yet as he sat down and I studied his head, what seemed most significant
about him was his hair. It was reddish-gold, thick, curled, and
upstanding, like the hair on the head of a lovely child, or in the
painting of a Titian or a Tintoretto.
In a way he seemed out of place. Young men of his type so rarely came to
church alone. Indeed, they rarely came to church at all. He seemed to
belong to the out-of-doors--to wide spaces. I was puzzled, too, by a
faint sense of having seen him before.
It was in the middle of the sermon that it all connected up. Years ago a
ship had sailed into the harbor, and I had been taken down to see it. I
had been enchanted by the freshly painted figurehead--a strong young god
of some old Norse tale, with red-gold hair and a bright blue tunic. And
now in the harbor was _The Viking_, and here, in the shadow of a
perfectly orthodox pulpit, sat that strong young god, more glorious even
than my memory of his wooden prototype.
He seemed to be absolutely at home--sat and stood at the right places,
sang the hymns in a delightful barytone which was not loud, but which
sounded a clear note above the feebler efforts of the rest of us.
It has always been my custom to welcome the strangers within our gates,
and I must confess to a preference for those who seem to promise
something more than a perfunctory interchange.
So as my young viking came down the aisle, I held out my hand. "We are
so glad to have you with us."
He stopped at once, gave me his hand, and bent on me his clear gaze.
"Thank you." And then, immediately: "You live here? In Nantucket?"
"Yes."
"All the year round?"
"Practically."
"That is very interesting." Again his clear gaze appraised me. "May I
walk a little way with you? I have no friends here, and I want to ask a
lot of questions about the island."
The thing which struck me most as we talked was his utter lack of
self-consciousness. He gave himself to the subject in hand as if it were
a vital matter, and as if he swept all else aside. It is a quality
possessed by few New Englanders; it is, indeed, a quality possessed by
few Americans. So when he offered to walk with me, it seemed perfectly
natural that I should let him. Not one man in a thousand could have made
such a proposition without an immediate erection on my part of the
barriers of conventionality. To have erected any barrier in this
instance would have been an insult, to my perception of the kind of man
with whom I had to deal.
He was a gentleman, individual, and very much in earnest; and more than
all, he was immensely attractive. There was charm in that clear blue
gaze of innocence. Yet it was innocence plus knowledge, plus something
which as yet I could not analyze.
He left me at my doorstep. I found that he had come to the island not to
play around for the summer at the country clubs and on the bathing
beach, but to live in the past--see it as it had once been--when its men
went down to the sea in ships. And because there was still so much that
we had to say to each other, I asked him to have a cup of tea with me,
"this afternoon at four."
He accepted at once, with his air of sweeping aside everything but the
matter in hand. I entered the house with a sense upon me of high
adventure. I could not know that I was playing fate, changing in that
moment the course of Nancy's future.
* * * * *
Dinner was at one o'clock. It seems an impossible hour to people who
always dine at night. But on the Sabbath we Nantucketers eat our
principal meal when we come home from church.
Nancy and Anthony protested as usual. "Of course you can't expect us to
dress."
Nancy sat down at the table with her hat on, and minus the velvet coat.
She was a bit disheveled and warm from her walk. She had brought in a
great bunch of blue vetch and pale mustard, and we had put it in the
center of the table in a bowl of gray pottery. My dining-room is in gray
and white and old mahogany, and Nancy had had an eye to its coloring
when she picked the flowers. They would not have fitted in with the
decorative scheme of my library, which is keyed up, or down, to an
antique vase of turquoise glaze, or to the drawing-room, which is in
English Chippendale with mulberry brocade.
We had an excellent dinner, served by my little Portuguese maid. Nancy
praised the lobster bisque and Anthony asked for a second helping of
roast duck. They had their cigarettes with their coffee.
Long before we came to the coffee, however, Anthony had asked in his
pleasant way of the morning service.
"Tell us about the sermon, Elizabeth."
"And the text," said Nancy.
I am apt to forget the text, and they knew it. It was always a sort of
game between us at Sunday dinner, in which they tried to prove that my
attention had strayed, and that I might much better have stayed at home,
and thus have escaped the bondage of dogma and of dressing up.
I remembered the text, and then I told them about Olaf Thoresen.
Nancy lifted her eyebrows. "The pills man? Or was it--pork?"
"It was probably neither. Don't be a snob, Nancy."
She shrugged her shoulders. "It was you who said 'pork,' Elizabeth."
"He is coming to tea."
"To-day?"
"Yes."
"Sorry," said Nancy. "I'd like to see him, but I have promised to drive
Bob Needham to 'Sconset for a swim."
Anthony had made the initial engagement--to play tennis with Mimi Sears,
"Provided, of course, that you have no other plans for me," he had told
Nancy, politely.
She had no plans, nor would she, under the circumstances, have urged
them. That was their code--absolute freedom. "We'll be a lot happier if
we don't tie each other up."
It was to me an amazing attitude. In my young days lovers walked out on
Sunday afternoons to the old cemetery, or on the moor, or along the
beach, and came back at twilight together, and sat together after
supper, holding hands.
I haven't the slightest doubt that Anthony held Nancy's hands, but there
was nothing fixed about the occasions. They had done away with billing
and cooing in the old sense, and what they had substituted seemed to
satisfy them.