The Gay Cockade
Anthony left about three, and I went up to get into something thin and
cool, and to rest a bit before receiving my guest. I heard Nancy at the
telephone making final arrangements with the Drakes. After that I fell
asleep, and knew nothing more until Anita came up to announce that Mr.
Thoresen was down-stairs.
Tea was served in the garden at the back of the house, where there were
some deep wicker chairs, and roses in a riot of bloom.
"This is--enchanting--" said Olaf. He did not sit down at once. He stood
looking about him, at the sun-dial, and the whale's jaw lying bleached
on a granite pedestal, and at the fine old houses rising up around us.
"It is enchanting. Do you know, I have been thinking myself very
fortunate since you spoke to me in church this morning."
After that it was all very easy. He asked and I answered. "You see," he
explained, finally, "I am hungry for anything that tells me about the
sea. Three generations back we were all sailors--my great-grandfather
and his fathers before him in Norway--and far back of that--the
vikings." He drew a long breath. "Then my grandfather came to America.
He settled in the West--in Dakota, and planted grain. He made money, but
he was a thousand miles away from the sea. He starved for it, but he
wanted money, and, as I have said, he made it. And my father made more
money. Then I came. The money took me to school in the East--to
college. My mother died and my father. And now the money is my own. I
bought a yacht, and I have lived on the water. I can't get enough of it.
I think that I am making up for all that my father and my grandfather
denied themselves."
I can't in the least describe to you how he said it. There was a
tenseness, almost a fierceness, in his brilliant blue eyes. Yet he
finished up with a little laugh. "You see," he said, "I am a sort of
Flying Dutchman--sailing the seas eternally, driven not by any sinister
force but by my own delight in it."
"Do you go alone?"
"Oh, I have guests--at times. But I am often my own--good company--"
He stopped and rose. Nancy had appeared in the doorway. She crossed the
porch and came down toward us. She was in her bathing suit and cap, gray
again, with a line of green on the edges, and flung over her shoulders
was a gray cloak. She was on her way to the stables--it was before the
day of motor-cars on the island, those halcyon, heavenly days. The door
was open and her horse harnessed and waiting for her. She could not, of
course, pass us without speaking, and so I presented Olaf.
Anita had brought the tea, and Nancy stayed to eat a slice of thin bread
and butter. "In this air one is always hungry," she said to Olaf, and
smiled at him.
He did not smile back. He was surveying her with a sort of frowning
intensity. She spoke of it afterward, "Does he always stare like that?"
But I think that, in a way, she was pleased.
She drove her own horse, wrapped in her cloak and with an utter
disregard to the informality of her attire. She would, I knew, gather up
the Drakes and Bob Needham, likewise attired in bathing costumes, and
they would all have tea on the other side of the island, naiad-like and
utterly unconcerned. I did not approve of it, but Nancy did not cut her
life to fit my pattern.
When she had gone, Olaf said to me, abruptly, "Why does she wear gray?"
"Oh, she has worked out a theory that repression in color is an evidence
of advanced civilization. The Japanese, for example--"
"Why should civilization advance? It has gone far enough--too far--And
she should wear a blue cloak--sea-blue--the color of her eyes--"
"And of yours." I smiled at him.
"Yes. Are they like hers?"
They were almost uncannily alike. I had noticed it when I saw them
together. But there the resemblance stopped.
"She belongs to the island?"
"She lives in New York. But every drop of blood in her is seafaring
blood."
"Good!" He sat for a moment in silence, then spoke of something else.
But when he was ready to go, he included Nancy in an invitation. "If you
and Miss Greer could lunch with me to-morrow on my yacht--"
I was not sure about Nancy's engagements, but I thought we might. "You
can call us up in the morning."
Nancy brought the Drakes and Bob Needham back with her for supper, and
Mimi Sears was with Anthony. Supper on Sunday is an informal
meal--everything on the table and the servants out.
Nancy, clothed in something white and exquisite, served the salad. "So
your young viking didn't stay, Elizabeth?"
"I didn't ask him."
It was then that she spoke of his frowning gaze. "Does he always stare
like that?"
Anthony, breaking in, demanded, "Did he stare at Nancy?"
I nodded. "It was her eyes."
They all looked at me. "Her eyes?"
"Yes. He said that her cloak should have matched them."
Anthony flushed. He has a rather captious code for outsiders. Evidently
Olaf had transgressed it.
"Is the man a dressmaker?"
"Of course not, Anthony."
"Then why should he talk of Nancy's clothes?"
"Well," Nancy remarked, "perhaps the less said about my clothes the
better. I was in my bathing suit."
Anthony was irritable. "Well, why not? You had a right to wear what you
pleased, but he did not have a right to make remarks about it."
I came to Olaf's defense. "You would understand better if you could see
him. He is rather different, Anthony."
"I don't like different people," and in that sentence was a summary of
Anthony's prejudices. He and Nancy mingled with their own kind.
Anthony's friends were the men who had gone to the right schools, who
lived in the right streets, belonged to the right clubs, and knew the
right people. Within those limits, humanity might do as it pleased;
without them, it was negligible, and not to be considered.
After supper the five of them were to go for a sail. There was a moon,
and all the wonder of it.
Anthony was not keen about the plan. "Oh, look here, Nancy," he
complained, "we have done enough for one day--"
"I haven't."
Of course that settled it. Anthony shrugged his shoulders and submitted.
He did not share Nancy's almost idolatrous worship of the sea. It was
the one fundamental thing about her. She bathed in it, swam in it,
sailed on it, and she was never quite happy away from it.
I heard Anthony later in the hall, protesting. I had gone to the library
for a book, and their voices reached me.
"I thought you and I might have one evening without the others."
"Oh, don't be silly, Anthony."
I think my heart lost a beat. Here was a lover asking his mistress for a
moment--and she laughed at him. It did not fit in with my ideas of young
romance.
Yet late that night I heard the murmur of their voices and looked out
into the white night. They stood together by the sun-dial, and his arm
was about her, her head on his shoulder. And it was not the first time
that a pair of lovers had stood by that dial under the moon.
I went back to bed, but I could not sleep. I lighted my bedside lamp,
and read _Vanity Fair_. I find Thackeray an excellent corrective when I
am emotionally keyed up.
Nancy, too, was awake; I could see her light shining across the hall.
She came in, finally, and sat on the foot of my bed.
"Your viking was singing as we passed his boat--"
"Singing?"
"Yes, hymns, Elizabeth. The others laughed, Anthony and Mimi, but I
didn't laugh. His voice is--wonderful--"
She had on a white-crepe _peignoir_, and there was no color in her
cheeks. Her skin had the soft whiteness of a rose petal. Her eyes were
like stars. As I lay there and looked at her I wondered if it was
Anthony's kisses or the memory of Olaf's singing which had made her eyes
shine like that.
I had heard him sing, and I said so, "in church."
Her arms clasped her knees. "Isn't it queer that he goes to church and
sings hymns?"
"Why queer? I go to church."
"Yes. But you are different. You belong to another generation,
Elizabeth, and he doesn't look it."
I knew what she meant. I had thought the same thing when I first saw him
walking up the aisle. "He has asked us to lunch with him to-morrow on
his boat."
It was the first time that I had mentioned it. Somehow I had not cared
to speak of it before Anthony.
She showed her surprise. "So soon? Doesn't that sound a
little--pushing?"
"It sounds as if he goes after a thing when he wants it."
"Yes, it does. I believe I should like to accept. But I can't to-morrow.
There's a clambake, and I have promised the crowd."
"He will ask you again."
"Will he? You can say 'yes' for Wednesday then. And I'll keep it."
"I am not sure that we had better accept."
"Why not?"
"Well, there's Anthony."
She slid from the bed and stood looking down at me. "You think he
wouldn't like it?"
"I am afraid he wouldn't. And, after all, you are engaged to him,
Nancy."
"Of course I am, but he is not my jailer. He does as he pleases and I do
as I please."
"In my day lovers pleased to do the same thing."
"Did they? I don't believe it. They just pretended, and there is no
pretense between Anthony and me"--she stooped and kissed me--"they just
pretended, Elizabeth, and the reason that I love Anthony is because we
don't pretend."
After that I felt that I need fear nothing. Nancy and Anthony--freedom
and self-confidence--why should I try to match their ideals with my own
of yesterday? Yet, as I laid my book aside, I resolved that Olaf should
know of Anthony.
I had my opportunity the next day. Olaf came over to sit in my garden
and again we had tea. He was much pleased when he knew that Nancy and I
would be his guests on Wednesday.
"Come early. Do you swim? We can run the launch to the beach--or, better
still, dive in the deeper water near my boat."
"Nancy swims," I told him. "I don't. And I am not sure that we can come
early. Nancy and Anthony usually play golf in the morning."
"Who is Anthony?"
"Anthony Peak. The man she is going to marry."
He hesitated a moment, then said, "Bring him, too." His direct gaze met
mine, and his direct question followed. "Does she love him?"
"Of course."
"It is not always 'of course.'" He stopped and talked of other things,
but in some subtle fashion I was aware that my news had been a shock to
him, and that he was trying to adjust himself to it, and to the
difference that it must make in his attitude toward Nancy.
* * * * *
When I told Nancy that Anthony had been invited, she demanded, "How did
Olaf Thoresen know about him?"
"I told him you were engaged."
"But why, Elizabeth? Why shout it from the housetops?"
"Well, I didn't want him to be hurt."
"You are taking a lot for granted."
I shrugged my shoulders. "We won't quarrel, and a party of four is much
nicer than three."
As it turned put, however, Anthony could not go. He was called back to
Boston on business. That was where Fate again stepped in. It was, I am
sure, those three days of Anthony's absence which turned the scale of
Nancy's destiny. If he had been with us that first morning on the boat
Olaf would not have dared....
Nancy wore her white linen and her gray-velvet coat, and a hat with a
gull's wing. She carried her bathing suit. "He intends, evidently, to
entertain us in his own way."
Olaf's yacht was modern, but there was a hint of the barbaric in its
furnishings. The cabin into which we were shown and in which Nancy was
to change was in strangely carved wood, and there was a wolfskin on the
floor in front of the low bed. The coverlet was of a fine-woven red-silk
cloth, weighed down by a border of gold and silver threads. On the wall
hung a square of tapestry which showed a strange old ship with sails of
blue and red and green, and with golden dragon-heads at stem and stern.