The Gay Cockade
I was in bed, and I had the letter in my hand. "I want you to read it,"
I said. "It is from Olaf Thoresen."
She looked at it, and asked, "When did it come?"
"Two months ago. The day that he left."
"Why haven't you shown it to me?"
"I couldn't make up my mind. I do not know even now that I am right in
letting you see it. But I feel that you have a right to see it. It is
you who must answer it. Not I."
When she had gone, I turned to the chapter in my book where Becky weeps
crocodile tears over poor Rawdon Crawley on the night before Waterloo.
There is no scene in modern literature to match it. But I couldn't get
my mind on it. Nancy was reading Olaf's letter!
I kept a copy of it, and here it is:
"I knew when I first saw her in the garden that she was the One
Woman. I had wanted sea-blood, and when she came, ready for a dip
in the sea, it seemed a sign. One knows these things somehow, and I
knew. I shan't attempt to explain it.
"When you told me of her lover, I felt that Fate had played a trick
on me. I could not now with honor pursue the woman who was promised
to another. Yet I permitted myself that one day--the day on my
boat.
"I learned in those hours that I spent with her that she had been
molded by the man she is to marry and that in the years to come she
will shrink to the measure of his demands upon her. She is feminine
enough to be swayed by masculine will. That is at once her strength
and her weakness. Loving a man who will love her for the wonder of
her womanhood, she will fulfill her greatest destiny. Loving, on
the other hand, one who aspires only to fit her into some
attenuated social scheme, she will wither and fade. I think you
know that this is true, that you will not accuse me of being unfair
to any one.
"And now may I tell you what my dreams have been for her?
"I am not young. I mean I am past those hot and early years when
men play--Romeo. The dream that is mine is one which has come to a
man of thirty, who, having seen the world, has weighed it and
wants--something more.
"I have told you of my house in that hidden land which is washed by
the sea. I want to spend the rest of my days there, and I had hoped
that some woman might be found whose love of life, whose love of
adventure, whose love of me, might be so strong that she would see
nothing strange in my demand that she forsake all others and cleave
only to me.
"By forsaking all others, I mean, literally, what I say. I should
want to cut her off entirely from all former ties. To let any one
into our secret, to reveal that hidden land to a gaping world,
would be to destroy it. We should be followed, tracked by the
newspapers, written up, judged eccentric--mad. And I do not wish to
be judged at all. My separation from my kind would have in it more
than a selfish whim, an obsession for solitude. I want to get back
to primitive civilization. I want my children to face a simpler
world than the one I faced. Do you know what it means for a man to
inherit money, with nothing back of it for two generations but hard
work, although back of that there were, perhaps, kings? It means
that I had, unaided, to fit myself into a social scheme so complex
that I have not yet mastered its intricacies. I do not want to
master them. I do not want my sons to master them. I want them to
find life a thing of the day's work, the day's worship, the day's
out-of-door delights. I want them to have time to think and to
dream. And then some day they shall come back if they wish to
challenge civilization--young prophets, perhaps, out of the
wilderness--seeing a new vision of God and man because of their
detachment from all that might have blinded them.
"I have a feeling that your Nancy might, if she knew this, dream
with me of a new race, rising to the level of the needs of a new
world. She might see herself as the mother of such a
race--sheltered in my hidden land, sailing the seas with me, held
close to my heart. I think I am a masterful man, but I should be
masterful only to keep her to her best. If she faltered I should
strengthen her. And I should make her happy. I know that I could
make her happy. And for me there will never be another.
"I am leaving it to you to decide whether you will show her this. I
want her to see it, because it seems to me that she has a right to
decide between the life that I can offer her and the life she must
live if she marries Anthony Peak. But it all involves a point of
honor which I feel that I am not unprejudiced enough to decide. So
to-morrow I shall go away. I shall sail far in the two months that
I shall give myself before I come back. And when I come, you will
let me know whether I am to turn once more to the trackless seas,
or stay to find my happiness."
This letter when I had first read it had stirred me profoundly, as I
think it must have stirred any man or woman who has yearned amid the
complexities of modern existence to find some land of dreams. Even to my
island, comparatively untouched by the problems of existence in crowded
centers, come the echoes of discord, of social unrest, of political
upheavals, of commercial greed. In this hidden land of Olaf's would be
life stripped of its sordidness, love free from the blight of cynicism
and disillusion--faith, firm in its nearness to God and the wonder of
His works. I envied Olaf his hidden land as I envied Nancy her
opportunity. My blood is the same as Nancy's, and I love the sea. And as
we grow older our souls adventure!
When Nancy came in to me, she had put on her white _peignoir_, and she
had Olaf's letter in her hand.
"Ducky," she said, and her voice shook, "I have read it twice--and--I
shouldn't dare to think he was in earnest."
"Why not?"
"I should want to go, Elizabeth."
"And leave the world behind you?"
"Oh, I haven't any world. It might be different if mother were alive, or
daddy. There'd be only you, Ducky, my dear, dear Ducky." She caught my
hand and held it.
"And Anthony--"
"Anthony would get over it"--sharply. "Wouldn't he, Elizabeth? You know
he would."
"My dear, I don't know."
"But I know. If I hadn't been in his life, Mimi Sears would have been,
just as Bob Needham would have been in my life if it hadn't been for
Anthony. There isn't any question between Anthony and me of--one woman
for one man. You know that, Elizabeth. But with Olaf--if he doesn't have
me, there will be no one else--ever. He--he will go sailing on--alone--"
"My dear, how do you know?"
She flung herself down beside me, a white rose, all fragrance. "I don't
know"--she began to cry. "How silly I am," she sobbed against my
shoulder. "I--I don't know anything about him, do I, Elizabeth--? But it
would be wonderful to be loved--like that."
All through the night she slept on my arm, with her hand curled in the
hollow of my neck as she had slept as a child. But I did not sleep. My
mind leaped forward into the future, and I saw my world without her.
* * * * *
Nancy stayed with me through September. Anthony's holiday was up the
day after the garden party, and he went back to Boston, keeping touch
with Nancy in the modern way by wire, special delivery, and
long-distance telephone.
It was on a stormy night with wind and beating rain that Nancy told me
Anthony was insisting that she marry him in December.
"But I can't, Elizabeth. I am going to write to him to-night."
"When will it be?"
"Who knows? I--I'm not ready. If he can't wait--he can let me go."
She did not stay to listen to my comment on her mutiny--she swept out of
the library and sat down at the piano in the other room, making a
picture of herself between the tall white candles which illumined the
dark mahogany and the mulberry brocades.
I leaned back in my chair and watched her, her white fingers straying
over the keys, her thin blue sleeves flowing back from her white arms.
Now and then I caught a familiar melody among the chords, and once I was
aware of the beat and the swing of the waves in the song which Olaf had
once sung.
She did not finish it. She rose and wandered to the window, parting the
curtain and looking out into the streaming night.
"It's an awful storm, Ducky."
"Yes, my dear. On nights like this I always think of the old days when
the men were on the sea, and the women waited."
"I'd rather think of my man on the sea, even if I had to wait for him,
Ducky, than shut up in office, stagnating."
The door-bell rang suddenly. It was a dreadful night for any one to be
out, but Anita, undisturbed and crisp in her white apron and cap, came
through the hall. A voice asked a question, and the blood began to pound
in my body. Things were blurred for a bit, and when my vision cleared--I
saw Olaf in the shine of the candles in the room beyond, with Nancy
crushed to him, his bright head bent, the sheer blue of her frock
infolding him--the archway of the door framing them like the figures of
saints in the stained glass of a church window!
I knew then that I had lost her. But she did not yield at once.
"I love him, of course. But a woman couldn't do a thing like that," was
the way she put it to me the next morning.
I felt, however, that Olaf would master her. Will was set against will,
mind against mind. And at last she showed him the way. "A thousand years
ago you would have carried me off."
I can see him now as he caught the idea and laughed at her. "Whether you
go of your own accord or I carry you, you will be happy." He lifted her
in his strong hands as if she were a feather, held her, kissed her, and
flashed a glance at me. "You see how easy it would be, and there's a
chaplain on board."
There is not much more to tell. Nancy went down one morning to the beach
for her bath--and the fog swallowed her up. I have often wondered
whether she planned it, or whether, knowing that she would be there, he
had come in his launch and had borne her away struggling, but not, I am
sure, unwilling. However it happened, the cloak went with her, and I
like to think that she was held in his arms, wrapped in it, when they
reached the ship.
I like to think, too, of my Nancy in the glowing room with the wolfskins
and the strange old tapestry--and the storms beating helpless against
her happiness.
I like to think of her as safe in that hidden land, where most of us
fain would follow her--the mistress of that guarded mansion, the wife of
a young sea god, the mother of a new race.
But, most of all, I like to think of the children. And I have but one
wish for a long life, which might otherwise weigh upon me, that the
years may bring back to the world those prophets from a hidden land,
those young voices crying from the wilderness--the children of Olaf and
of Nancy Greer.
WHITE BIRCHES
I
A woman, who under sentence of death could plan immediately for a trip
to the circus, might seem at first thought incredibly light-minded.
You had, however, to know Anne Dunbar and the ten years of her married
life to understand. Her husband was fifteen years her senior, and he had
few illusions. He had fallen in love with Anne because of a certain gay
youth in her which had endured throughout the days of a dreadful
operation and a slow convalescence. He had been her surgeon, and,
propped up in bed, Anne's gray eyes had shone upon him, the red-gold
curls of her cropped hair had given her a look of almost boyish beauty,
and this note of boyishness had been emphasized by the straight