Afternoon in April

Philip Wylie

PAPERBACK LIBRARY EDITION

First Printing; May, 1963

This Paperback Library Edition is published by arrangement with Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, Inc.

Copyright, 1938, by Philip Wylie Printed in the United States of America CHAPTER I

For ten days I had been wondering if she would kiss me. I had fervently hoped so, in spite of knowing that her kiss would hurt as much as the others had and for as long, which would be the length of my life. I had tried to guess her reactions in various possible places, so that I could be best assured of the poignant token, the touch of her lips, Virginia. I'd thought of meeting the steamer, but there would be the thundering baggage, the people, and she might overlook the gesture in her hurry to annex a customs inspector. I'd thought of the station platform-straight privet, and the blue rails that measured the distance between Reedy Cove and New York in minutes--eighty of them.

But I had decided upon our porch, because the big lilac was in bloom and because there was bustle at the station, also.

I hadn't admitted to myself that reason for waiting at home to greet her until the car came up the drive. I'd pretended my Ph.D. thesis had prevented the trip to town, and I'd feigned not to hear when John called up the stairs to say it was train time.

Of course, when I saw her, I knew I needn't have worried. She stood up in the roadster as John slowed it and she was out before it stopped moving. She detached herself, as if she were some bright ornament of the machine-or the reason for its being.

She was in my arms--and she kissed me four times.

She said, "Frankie!" She had one of those soft, deep voices that seem to exist in the air after they have been used. At least, such voices give a particular and lingering significance to all they express. She said, "It's grand to see you!"

I said, "Welcome home, Virginia! How was Europe?"

"Nasty! Hurry up, John! Look at the lilacs! Oh, Frankie, I'm glad to be here!

Where's Connie?"

Connie appeared, then, and kissed her daughter. They didn't look like sisters--but they looked near enough of an age to make their true relationship seem improbable. I thought of that, as I had a great many times before. But mostly I thought of Virginia's kisses. Enthusiastic, friendly--and never to be anything else. Perhaps she was fonder of me than of anyone except Connie and John--her mother and father--but if I ever allowed a hint of what I felt to appear in the return of those treasured kisses--

I never imagined what would follow that. I couldn't.

My life is full of such contradictions.

They went into the house--talking about Paris and the war in Spain and school--

and I followed, laughing in the right places and thinking about the contradictions.

I adored Virginia and she was fond of me and I could not speak of it to her. One of many strangenesses. I had every luxury and comfort on earth-except the luxury of knowing who I was and from where I had come. For my twenty-three years, I had a quite comfortable amount of fame, but the fame I coveted most I could never hope to have. I had a fortune the size of which sometimes astonished me, but I would have given all of it-

-ecstatically--for anyone of at least three things.

I thought that, and we were in the living room--a vast place with so many windows that it was part of the Sound and the evening. Shadows fell, the tide gathered back the sea, plates chinked in the dining room, we listened to Virginia's adventures, and I marveled remotely at the luck and lucklessness of my life. Possibly it was self-pity and yet--I was happy. In any case, my introspection kept me from seeing what had happened to Virginia until later that evening.

Self-pity. . . .

John and Connie Sheffield had adopted me to "round out" their affectionate and stimulating family--Larry and Ivan and--Virginia. I'd been left in a basket in front of a church. Those are baffling antecedents--a basket and a flight of stone steps. The abandoned infant had been ill--infantile paralysis. My right leg dragged a little when they took me, in a new suit of clothes, out to the house on Reedy Cove. I was four. I can still remember what impressed me most: the warmth of the house. Seventy degrees Fahrenheit had been ungermane to the orphanage budget. Virginia was six months old then; Ivan a year younger than I; Larry had just learned to walk.

I grew up with the name of Sheffield. "Francis" had been Connie's favorite uncle.

My adoption had never been a secret--John and Connie were forthright--and, in a sense, it had brought to me greater love and special attention. My lameness, never quite completely remedied, had further evoked particular sympathies. But the world's most accomplished physicians had restored me to the utmost of their abilities, so that I limped only a little.

I'd been "bright" in school. My penchant for writing, the compensation, doubtless, for a sedentary youth, had been ardently encouraged. I was nineteen when I wrote

"Chemin des Dames" and very much amazed to see the verse become a sort of Armistice Day classic. It led to several books of verse and a syndicate job and my ambition to teach English. Then--when Grandma Sheffield had died--closing her lovely blue eyes all too prematurely for us four kids-she had left a will that said there was already plenty for Larry and Ivan and Viginia and so, the bulk of her estate, when all debts were paid, would go--to me. John and Connie were delighted. So were my brothers. So was Virginia. Then--and always. That's the way the Sheffields were. We loved each other, and I belonged to the family. Only--I could never speak to Virginia, because she had forgotten, really, that I was not her brother.

And there were other things. A letter. My wants.

Anne called us for dinner. I could remember Anne when her front teeth were crooked and homely. Now she had a plate, and they were perfect. Anne was a retainer--

and typical of John and Connie. They could have had estates, a town house, a butler.

They preferred Reedy Cove and the meandering residence which had extended itself with family needs--a nursery, a game room, a studio for Virginia when she studied art. It was a house which could have included a blimp hangar and remained a home. The most recent addition had been a bar. John and Connie were "modern" even in the war years--we had never called them "father" and "mother," for example. Again, the bar. We were allowed to drink because of John's wise code: the only "thou shalt not" is "thou shalt not"--but every privilege carries its own responsibility. I have never seen a better or a more workable philosophy.

It was a special dinner--for Virginia. She'd been in France for eight months and we'd had debates on what she had missed most and what her favorite things were.

Tomato soup with whipped cream, corned beef hash, chili sauce, watermelon pickles, creamed onions, apple pie à la mode. Not, perhaps, a dietician's dream, but Virginia's.

Still, I thought I began to detect a cloud in the brightness of her eyes, or strain in the timbre of her voice, as she exclaimed over each dish.

"Who thought of corned beef hash?" she asked.

John grinned and took a bow. His grin always wrinkles his nose and moves muscles beneath the mixture of very black and very white hair on his temples. It's a dual purpose grin. I've seen him use it When his golf ball stopped rolling two hundred and eighty yards from the tee, and again, when news came to him that a couple of radicals had blown a wing out of his factory in Bridgeport. "I thought of corned beef," he answered. "It was the first thing you asked for when they put you on regular food after your appendectomy."

"And Connie decided on pie à la mode?"

Her mother nodded. "The taste is hereditary. From me you took blonde hair and imagination. You escaped my willfulness. You caught up again with the desserts. As for your methodical traits--they came from John. Why you like watermelon rind pickles, I cannot guess. There's no precedent for it in six generations. A clammy relish--"

Everyone was smiling. Virginia glanced at me and thereby acknowledged that I had suggested the pickles. Even glances such as that had the power to move me. It was kind of her and very percipient. But I try to balance such emotions by realising that most of the so-called handicapped people in the world are unusually sensitive. By their subtleties they can enslave the generous. Maybe that was what drove the deepest wedge between me and Virginia.

Pity--and self-pity.

They are words which most people do not often need to consider in relation to themselves. But in my life, they are constant enemies. Pity from others. Or from me-for me. Anyway, she looked and smiled and I winked.

"How's Larry?" she asked.

John grinned and Connie giggled. Larry was seventeen then and in prep school.

Virginia was nineteen. Her father undertook to describe his young son's general state.

"Larry is in a quandary. Or, maybe, I should say several. I've had six letters from him in the past ten days."

"Goodness! " Virginia was laughing. "That's about his usual total annual output, isn't it?"

"Surpasses it. Well--for one thing he told me that he had decided after Harvard to be either a racing driver or a paleontologist. Wanted advice. Then--he was campused for the rest of the term for making book on the Vanderbilt Cup Race this summer--and he wrote about that. The Headmaster was going to throw him out, but he found the bets were somewhat bizarre. The winners had to return after graduation and clean up the fraternity house--so Larry will get his diploma. Moreover--he has fallen in love."

Virginia looked up quickly. Her lips were apart and she was frowning a little.

So I knew.

"--with a motion picture actress. I forget which one. He has never seen her, but he wrote telling me he has seventeen autographed pictures of her and a piece of a handkerchief that she dropped in the lobby of a New York theatre on the opening night of

'Angel Face.' He said that there was still a clinging perfume on the fragment and that she was wonderful. He is also in love with a girl he has seen--too often, no doubt. Her name, insofar as I know it, is 'Wheezie' Bartell and he has spent a lot of time 'pitching woo' with her--a procedure the nature of which I can only guess. This young lady is five feet three and tips the beam at one hundred and eleven pounds. I didn't know they weighed them in, these days--"

I was beginning to choke. So was Virginia.

"Then," Connie continued, "he wrote saying he had been robbed. At the point of a gun. So would we please replace his monthly allowance. He might have been killed. He wrote all that and then ended the letter by saying that the George Washington in him compelled him to confess that he had spent all his money in a place called the 'Oak Towers'--"

"--presumably on 'Wheezie.' So that is how Larry is. And Ivan?" Virginia inquired, after a pause.

John looked happy. "He's going to start medicine in the Fall."

"I'm glad."

"We all are. Frankie went up to Cambridge last month and talked to him."

She looked at me again.

I was pretty proud about Ivan. He'd wanted to be a doctor all his life; he had everything for it--brilliance, personality, tenacity, intuition--but we had been afraid that some wealthy girl or a yacht of international racing proportions might truncate a potentially remarkable career. There were plenty of girls--and Ivan was lazy--or, rather--

he could easily have become so. Indeed, on the dripping April day when I reached Cambridge, he broke a dinner date with Martha Dow in order to accommodate me, and his greeting was, "I'm glad to see you, boy--and sorry you have that lecture on loafing in your eye. Why the devil shouldn't a man fish for salmon and let somebody else crystallize out the hormones?"

We'd talked till dawn that night and the next. I was reduced to my last resources.

Down to saying, "You won't study any more because you're afraid that you can't make good." It was kid stuff, but it worked. He walked around his dormitory room for a long time and finally said quietly, "Do you think that, Frankie?"

"You're a blowhard," I said. "A flash in the pan. Sure I think that."

He walked some more. Then he brought himself to the words I'd spent two nights trying to elicit: "You know what you're doing, don't you? You're making me give up a life full of fun. Travel. Dreams. Love, maybe. Everything that about half of me longs for.

All to make a liar out of you." Then he called me names for a while. After that he said,

"Listen, you fink. I'll study medicine. I'll stick the Sheffield label where it'll take a century to knock it off. I only ask one thing. When I'm awarded the Nobel Prize, some day--you've got to eat the cablegram announcing it."

At the time I'm about forty-five, I would guess, my alimentary canal is going to be subjected to the digestion of one medium-sized piece of paper. Because that particular mood in my foster family means business. They all have strong chins- -pere, mere, fils, and fille.

After dinner Virginia and I took a walk. She knew that I had caught sight of the shadow. And she had always talked to me when her horizons or her foregrounds were blurred. So had Ivan and Larry. John and Connie were our pals, and we trusted them and confided in them. But not absolutely. By very definition, being a parent excludes certain sorts of intimacy--and it should. John and Connie sensed the fact and respected it. My function had been that of an older brother. Among such people that was rare tribute. But in the very identification, I paid my own premium for the honor.

We walked down through the garden toward the sea--just as we had so many other times. The time Virginia was afraid to show her report card to John. The time she had broken the Wedgewood bowl. The time Johnny Matthews had grabbed her at Bigelow's Hallowe'en party. It was an immemorial custom and now, as so often, fireflies lighted the way to her intended confession and the crickets cheered her on.

We sat down on the flat rock. A glacier had cut into it a smooth back and set it facing Long Island Sound. She liked the sea--and I had always loved it as if it were part of myself.

"Cigarette?" I asked.

"Thanks. Might make it easier."

"Mm. Who, Virginia?"

"His name is Bill. Bill Bush."

"--and the trouble--?"

"Married."

I let the small incoming waves think for me a while.

' You were in love once, weren't you, Frankie? I mean. Jeanne--"

"I thought I was." It was curious. I'd forgotten Jeanne since I'd understood about Virginia. And yet--only two years before, I'd taken Jeanne to this very rock and sworn-the hell with it. While Virginia was in France that first year--I'd realized.

"I was jealous of Jeanne," she said suddenly.

"Really? That was nice of you."

"I hated her. Will you hate Bill?"

"Maybe you'd better tell me what he's like. If you love him--I'm afraid I'll be very fond of him--and very jealous--too."

She told me, then. He was dark. So was I, my mind said. He had a moustache--a romantic one. I could grow a moustache. I quit that sort of thing presently. She had met him in Lucerne and he'd followed her back to Paris. Then, her story became ordinary--

almost banal. Cute little restaurants and the Bois de Boulogne and the Left Bank. I could smell the jaunes burning and see the crimson aperitifs glinting in bistro lights and hear the taxi-horns. Bill Was a broker. But not just a ticker-tape worshipper, she said.

Whimsical and humorous--she told me all about him and I thought that I would like Bill.

"His wife--Frankie. She was hurt in an automobile accident. It-she wasn't right in the head afterward. So he can't divorce her. He wouldn't, if he could. It was five years ago." She caught a firefly and put her eye down to her thumbs to watch it illuminate the gentle prison of her palms. Then she tossed it into the evening air. "I love him, I can't help it. What shall I do, Frankie?"

"That's a tough one, isn't it?"

She nodded.

She leaned against the rock, listlessly. "He sailed from Bordeaux on the eighteenth of last December. It was a terrible Christmas for me. He's in New York. But I wanted to come home here first and see you. You and Connie and John."

December. This was May. "Do you think," she asked, "that if I went away with him for maybe a month or something--I'd get over it?"

"Do you?"

"No."

I said, "Neither do I." We waited for something to occur to us but nothing did, so I said,

"Let's shoot a little bridge with Connie and John. We'll talk tomorrow."

"Yes. I feel better now--having told you."

We stood up. I found a stone and tried to chuck it into the Sound but it fell short.

CHAPTER II

My room is Spartan. Writers are supposed to live in the midst of clutter--galactic clutter-that is mentally stimulating because only a gifted imagination could interpret it. A writer may choose his scenery as he wishes--stuffed owls, pin-studded maps, old books or cookie jars among his toilsome manuscripts--but scenery there must be. However, I have found that the majority of those writers whom I have met lead immaculate professional lives and a filing cabinet is a more usual prop that a Malay kriss. That night, as I opened my door, I wished that I had not been so neat. Objects capable of diverting my thoughts would have been welcome; the pale walls only turned me back into myself, and· I could not even use the windows, for they looked at the Sound and at Roger's Light periodically cracking the darkness in routine reminder of the sea Virginia .and I had watched together, and of danger, of disaster.

My coat and tie came off by themselves and a dressing gown replaced them. In the typewriter was a pale half written: ". . . the equivalent in the English language for tmesis, synechtache, handyadis, all unwitting correlatives produced by those Victorians whose early education shows a strong bent toward Latin. . . ."

Ah-phoo! A Ph.D., no doubt!

I would stand on the lecture platform. "This morning, gentlemen," I would say, "it is our fascinating purpose to follow in the somewhat errant footsteps of Alfred, Lord Byron." And all the time I would be wondering where she was, what she was doing, if she were happy. What was his name? Bush.

On my desk was an unfinished poem. I stared malignly at the last of what had been done upon it:

". . . no fugue.

Boleros! Tarantellas! Rigadoons

Storms of music, man! Monsoons!

Tempests! Avalanching tunes!"

Avalanching tunes. Terrible. But, then, I had written the thing in the morning.

Virginia was on her way home. Now she was here--and farther away than when the ocean lay between us. My effort to be boisterous even at the cost of good prosody no longer kept time to my heart. And since my room could not include the sea at night, it became a closet. A closet where soon I and my degree and my verses would hang like an old suit waiting to be dropped to the floor at the end of a race between rust and the moths.

That elaborate phantasy made me laugh at myself. One is scarcely an old suit at twenty-three--although it is, perhaps, the age when the feeling of moths and rust is strongest. I hope so, anyway. I laughed and then I stopped. For a moment I wished I hadn't thought about suits. Old suits.

Because that reminded me of the letter. I hadn't seen the letter for a long while.

Not since the night Jeanne had given me what she had afterwards described as "the air."

Those very syllables--that short pair--had cured my infatuation. The air, forsooth!

And now I had again rounded time to the letter. The only thing to do was to go through with it.

I unlocked my trunk.

It wasn't my letter. It had come into my possession when I was eleven, by an accident. It broke my heart and, mystically, it had heartened me, too.

At eleven I still limped pretty badly, but I was determined to cure myself. I was enterprising. Connie and John sent all of us to public school until we had finished the eighth grade. They had ideas about childhood and snobbery, ideas about Americanism and democracy. If country day school could damage us, they said, then we didn't deserve to journey through life unblighted. So our friends wept alone in the awful exile of private schools until they were assimilated and toughened or made neurotic--and we Sheffields had a wonderful time a half mile down the road.

At eleven, I was in the seventh grade. I had the nickname then of "One-Crutch"

and I was proud of it. "Ma," the kids used to say, "you ought to see that One-Crutch swim!" and "Hey! One-Crutch! You steer the bob-sled, willyuh?" Virginia was in the second grade and I ignored her. Ivan in the sixth. Larry in the fourth. I'd forgotten that I had not been born a Sheffield--or almost. Once in a while the school kids asked me what

'it was like to be adopted, but the question invariably baffled me. I could not see that it made any difference--except that you had an edge because you excited more curiosity than offspring arrived at normally.

One October afternoon when the bees were in the fallen apples, I discovered the junkman. His place was a paradise to visit--and things could be sold to him--bottles, scrap metal, garments. I hurried home and in the attic I found a pile of half-remembered old clothes. Suits that had belonged to John, for the most part. I made a proposition to Connie and she laughed and refused to be cut in, so I loaded the stuff on my wagon and started around the cove to the village.

It was pretty exciting and I was thinking in terms of dollars, and when I came opposite to the place where the oyster boats were hauled up in winter, a letter fell from one of the pockets in my cargo. I picked up the envelope and immediately reached a new apogee of pleasure. On the letter was a series of 1918, uncancelled, two center. I was collecting stamps, then, and this was quite a trophy for my modest album. I noticed only vaguely that the letter was addressed in John's hand to our Aunt Beatrice. But, little by little, an impulse to read it grew in me and I finally rationalized away my ethics by deciding that it was an awful old letter--so old, so to speak, that the statute of limitations had invalidated the code of privacy.

I opened it and read it. The junk man gave me three dollars. But if he had given me three million, it would not have mattered. . . .

Such is the first rite in the custom of reading that letter. I had lifted the lid of my trunk. I took the letter from the amateurishly constructed false bottom· I had made to hide it in. There was the uncancelled series of 1918 stamp and John's orthography smudged now. I opened it and I read it once again:

"Dear Beatrice--

"Connie and I have taken a step of which we are somewhat uncertain and before you come on to visit us, I thought I would explain it to you. As you know, we decided when Virginia was born to adopt a little girl baby to keep her company. The notion was Connie's and it seemed excellent. We can afford it and there are many deserving orphans of superb lineage who would profit by a home like ours.

"Unfortunately, it is more difficult to adopt a child than I had thought and we became involved in a protracted search for a suitable one. While we were examining candidates in an orphanage in New Haven, Connie was attracted to one in particular. You know the impulsiveness of her nature, and her unshakableness. So you can guess the rest.

We adopted him.

"Yes, him. And not an infant, as we had planned. Frankly, I am distressed about it. He is four years old-- older than Ivan--and crippled by infantile paralysis. Reasoning with Connie did no good. You will understand that. He is a foundling. Nothing is known of his origin and heritage, which may be criminal or besotted. There is no way to tell. I will say that he is an appealing and seemingly intelligent little fellow and his disposition is excellent.

"But it is all so foreign and depressing that I have trouble accustoming myself to the idea. He uses crutches--and I've always had a revolted feeling about them. He stumps about the house and good food does not seen to relieve his scrawniness. Naturally, I shall see that he has every advantage of medical attention. I presume that--in two or three years his life may be taken care of by schools and camps. But I am worried. Connie is almost more interested in him than in her new child.

"I would not write in this tone were it not for my deep feelings about it all. This sickly little stranger's handicaps may be a perpetual drag upon the whole family, and it is for my own children that I have a fear which explains these words. I want you to advise me after you have seen him. His name is Francis and we call him Frankie.

My love to you,

Distraughtly,

John."

That was the letter I had found when I was eleven. John had forgotten to mail it.

At first, of course, that letter made in me a continuous explosion which devastated my world to its outermost limits. How many of the ruins still remain, I cannot say.

Occasionally I stumble upon one of them--an ugly and ragged barrier in the midst of much reconstruction. I mean, I catch myself wondering whether or not John still bears me some of the same animus he expressed in his words to Beatrice. Or I look at Ivan and wonder if my miserable origin has in any way damaged his inward life. It scarcely seems so.

I went home from the junk yard that day because of habit or gravity or some other unknown force which acted in a ;situation where the commanding part of me had become helpless. I even ate my supper. Connie noticed that I was--silent. John suggested that I had consumed too many of the ripening apples.

I went up to bed. In my childish ache there was pride. To live with the Sheffields as a Sheffield was unthinkable after my discovery. All night I planned. In the morning, I ran away. It was an orderly and uncompromising departure. My wagon transported my belongings, which had been smuggled from the house: fishing tackle, a harmonica, a Scout knife and hatchet and cooking equipment, together with my sturdiest and warmest clothes. For funds I had my savings from my allowance--eighteen dollars and seventy-three cents--plus the money for the old suits which had contained the letter. My more elegant garments--Windsor ties and white linen knickerbockers--I left behind. Such things belonged to Sheffields and not to nameless persons like myself.

To forestall search, I left a note:

"Dear John, dear Connie--all of you--

"Since I have now passed my eleventh year and am practically grown I have gone into the world to make my way. I am terribly grateful to you all and if I happen to become a Success, I shall more than repay you for your millions of kindnesses to me.

"Yours truly,

Frankie--."

That blank after my first name was the nearest I ever came to revealing my reason for running away. I was gone for three days. They found me camping uncomfortably in the woods about two miles from the house and the time interval was long only because I had stayed so near Reedy Cove.

Seven states had been searched. The New York newspapers were carrying huge advertisements with my picture in them. John had hired a hundred special men and the services of two detective agencies. Connie had taken to her bed. A game warden had stumbled upon my bivouac while I was toasting a piece of bread over a can of solidified alcohol. There was a five thousand dollar reward for my safe return, so he would not listen to my bitter statement that I was a private citizen minding my own business. He grabbed me--and I bit him so badly that they had to take three stitches in his arm.

Some families--most, perhaps--might have greeted my homecoming with the rage that so often accompanies relief. But not the Sheffields. Connie kissed me easily a thousand times and she cried over me for weeks after that. John was summoned by phone. He came tearing up the drive in the red car of a police chief and there were tears in his eyes, too. They all assumed that a fierce feeling of humiliation over my leg and my origin had driven me to flight--and I couldn't tell them the truth in the presence of the welter of real love which was shown me.

John wooed me with small boy magic--and with hard allegory. He got me a ride on a hook and ladder to a real fire and another ride in a switch-yard locomotive's cab. I blew the whistle and rang the bell. At eleven!

A couple of nights after I had been A.W.O.L. John took me for a walk and told me the story of the stone road. He applied it to my circumstances--and I applied it to something else--but the story did me good and I have used it since in: moments of inescapable duress. The story was the foundation upon which I rebuilt my relations with the Sheffields--and the new structure became so strong that they never think of me now as other than one of them.

It wasn't really so much of a story and I'm sure he invented it. We walked in the drugged air of an Indian summer night--John and I. He had taken me on walks oftener than he took Ivan or Larry--which was a very shrewd sort of understanding. The idea of farming me out to schools and camps must have left him soon after he had written the letter to Aunt Beatrice.

He often told stories.

This one was about the Romans and a barbaric province which the legionaries had unsuccessfully attempted to subjugate. Finally they had decided that it would be necessary to build a road into the land in order to conquer it. John went into considerable detail about that road--its deep foundations, the colossal blocks of stone cut to give it eternal durability, the arched viaducts painfully lifted along its way, the months that became years, the feet that lengthened into miles, engineering problems met and solved, raids by bands of the natives--all the clank and glitter and death of ancient history.

Then he told me about the barbarians' leader--a man with bull horns tied on his head and a tiger skin around his loins. This man allowed the Romans to build on and on into the territory he considered his own not because he was afraid, but because he had a scheme. It was his plan to let the Romans build. He had no use for a road and did not want it. However, he perceived that some day the invaders would be far from their bases and ships, deep in hostile territory, and therefore easy victims of their own ambitious effort.

And that day arrived, at last. Two thousand soldiers and ten thousand slaves--I believe John called them "workmen"--found themselves exiled at the road-head, cut off from aid, and surrounded by a horde of screaming savages. They fought for days--

seventeen, according to John--and died one by one, piling the enemy around the road, slashing as they fell. But, in the end, they were all destroyed. Rome was swept from its own highway, the barbarian prevailed along it, and rain washed away the blood.

The enemy feasted and rejoiced and their leader was greatly extolled for his cunning.

(At that point, I had felt routed and wretched, for John had made certain poignant analogies, and it seemed that I was doomed.)

The scene next changed to Rome and the arrival of the ship which brought tidings of defeat. There was public sorrow and vast indignation. But--were the Romans resigned to their disaster? Not a bit of it! The savages could, indeed, massacre legions if they outnumbered them greatly. But there remained still--the road. The indestructible stone thoroughfare.

So a new army was sent into the dreadful dominion. But this was an army which did not have to hack footpaths through the forest. This army had a stone floor direct to the heart of the enemy's land. And over that floor horses could move-and elephants-they could bring up mighty engines to hurl a hundred arrows at a time--catapults--materials for forts--food, arms, reinforcements--all the heavy gear of battle. And now the enemy was beaten. Greater power and a superior guile made their crude tactics futile. The Romans moved in.

That was the story. And that, John said, is how a man is--inside himself. He can be licked for a while--but, if he has built for himself a road of stone--

There was that.

And there was the never-ending example of the Sheffields themselves. As pages snowed from the calendar of my life, as the years melted its cruelties, I began to see that I myself had been for John a beleaguring barbarian--and he had conquered his revulsion toward me. In so wise and generous an atmosphere, I could not sustain my own sneaking inhibitions--so I lost them one by one--or most of them. Now--when I sign "Francis Sheffield" to a verse or write it on a check, if I stop to reflect that my real name isn't Sheffield, it is only to have a flush of pride in the one which I have been loaned.

Such is the final rite of the letter. I fold it up and return it to the bottom of the trunk. Sometimes that last formality makes me smile. Sometimes it wets my eyes. But either mood is an expression of the same feeling--of courage given to me, of loving deeply and being deeply loved.

I put the letter away that night and thereby exorcised what bitterness I could from a dream relinquished. There was a great deal in my life that Fate had given with wanton generosity. To ask more was to tempt the Gods. How could I look at my rare estate and expect more? I who felt a sickening kinship to all the short, blunt bits at the bottoms of newspaper columns: Homeless man dies of malnutrition; Circus visits orphanage; Twelve year old boy robs delicatessen; Mother, two children found asphyxiated?

I closed my trunk and locked it and went down to the porch to watch the fireflies for a while--quietly so that none of the others would be wakened.

Virginia was there--in the swing--asleep. She, too, had come out of doors in search of the solace of sky and earth--and the very perplexities of her vigil had exhausted her, so she had fallen into a deep slumber. I bent over her, seeing her clearly. No matter how perfect a loved one may be, description is almost useless. For that which is tangible is commonplace--and that which one loves cannot be captured. I suppose nature produces thousands of external Virginias--though it's profligate--and I've even seen as fine and flaxen hair, a brow as moving, a nose as inquiring, such exquisite delicacy at the corners of lips, and forms combining as much sveltness with equal female proclamation--but I have never seen another Virginia, and I know I never shall.

She stirred a little as I looked at her and the movement let fall from the corner of her eye a solitary tear which glistened as it crossed her temple. The back of her hand pressed it away. She pulled the flimsy stuff she was wearing more closely to her and opened her eyes. She saw me at once, and smiled.

"Hello, Frankie."

"Hello."

"Have you a cigarette?"

"Yes."

I handed one to her and she sat up. My match showed her face and the place on it where the tear had been. Then I sat down in a rocker.

"Let's not talk," she said.

CHAPTER III

The next morning, by accident, we all had breakfast together. John and I were down first. Breakfast in bed was not tabu at what the family called "Fort Sheffield" or

"The Fort"-but it generally meant that the pabulo-cubicularist was sullen, piqued, introspective, or slightly hung over--so--since no Sheffield was ever very much hung over and none was often sullen--the luxury was frowned on not for its self but for its implications.

My mind was in Spain. A little town in which I had spent a great many afternoons watching grille shadows move across cobblestones, drinking earth-flavored sherry, and listening to a girl whose name was Mirabella sing ecstatically of disillusionment--a sweet, sun-latticed village--had been moved beyond all sun and song by a blizzard of bombs. That frightened me a little. Our world's so close together now that in the echo of distant wars is a harmonic Whispering, "Who next?"

John said, "Good morning, Frankie."

I looked up. I looked out of the window at the fallen rainbow in the garden and made out of those sententious responses. It was good here, I said, but with a few rocket-tailed canisters of t.n.t.--

John nodded. He liked mackerel in white wine sauce for breakfast and he had several mouthfuls before he said, "What's the matter with Virginia?"

"Why--" That was all I said, because that was all I was allowed to say.

He smiled in his other way--a grave and engaging way. "I shouldn't have mentioned it--should I?"

"I don't think there's anything the matter--really."

"Yeah. I asked, I guess--just to get your assurance that she wasn't in any sort of fix that needed my shoulder at the wheel."

"She'd have told you--in that case."

"Sure. Being a parent produces its own neuroses. All right.

She, can handle it herself it it's--" his eyes traveled idly through the window-- "--one of those things like falling in love with somebody too old, or somebody we wouldn't like, or somebody married--"

He was looking out of the window, still, but enough of his eyes were seeing me to permit him a good estimate of my blood pressure-or a positive statement about the color of my tie. I suppose John lives largely by intuition and that is no doubt why he is so able in business, but I'd had nineteen years of experience with his expert guesses, so I just grinned. "Maybe she's married a Turk," I said. "Or has a hankering that won't be put down for farming ostriches. Maybe she swam the English Channel and is afraid to tell you. Maybe she lost her year's allowance at Monte Carlo--"

His eyes twinkled. "Did you ever play poker? You'd be awful. She's in love.

That's her business. What is going on in Spain, anyhow?"

Virginia came in. She was wearing riding clothes. I watched John look at her and felt his realisation that she was a trifle too alert, a shade over-pleasant.

"Snail's gimpy," John said. "You'll have to ride western on Bog."

Snail was one of the best jumpers in the State. Bog was a stock horse that could manage her end of a fifteen second calf-roping. The inappropriate names were due to another family custom. When we had all been kids we had decided that we were weary of ponies and horses named flash and Comet and Dynamite. So, through the years, some of the finest and fastest had been known as Molasses, Lead, Tortoise, Low Gear and Wet Powder. Hence "Bog."

Virginia wasn't disappointed. "Swell. I'll see if I can find my rope. Remember the day in Phoenix when Ivan didn't think he could do it--and then roped a bee hive?"

John snorted softly. "And I remember a day right here at Reedy Cove when Ennui thought he couldn't jump the lettuce frames--and you were up--and Ennui was right."

She turned to me. "Shall we pursue this course?"

"Certainly. "

Her frown was exaggerated. "How about the time, John, when you had all your salesmen out here and you naturally served Scotch? Or was it tea? And you got into an argument with that man from Canton, Ohio, about jousting? Remember?"

"No," said John in a categorical tone.

"So you made a lance out of a curtain pole and a sofa pillow and--if I'm correct--

you missed the basket on the forsythia bush and hit the pantry wall so hard all Mother's homemade jelly fell from the shelf. Poor old Century! He was never a horse for tilting--"

"You may recall," said John, "that I got the basket the second time."

"Vividly," she answered. "Only--it was the eighth."

We were all giggling when Connie came in.

She contributed the time Ivan decided he could go skijoring on the beach and was very successful until his horse put out to sea.

And Virginia ate too much--which--in a way, is worse than not eating at all under such circumstances. She wasn't hungry and she was eating to cover up. That meant she felt the thing to be concealed was very serious. The Sheffields weren't secretive.

I batted my bacon with my fork and it broke into so many pieces it hardly seemed worth reassembling. Connie read the paper. We didn't talk; that also was an admission of a false note in our recent gaiety.

Suddenly I sank. Not about myself and not entirely about Virginia. But the sunshine and the garden lost their significance and a vague but apprehensive emotion anchored in the pit of my stomach. It was like the first half-realisation of becoming ill--a thing that is usually undiagnosed and remembered only later. I've had ample opportunity to examine such states--indulged myself in it, maybe. Some people would call them premonition. Others would say I was overwrought because I hadn't slept well. Some would treat it with sulphur and molasses.

I promenaded my gaze with a vain hopefulness. John was reading and Connie was turning pages in her paper. Virginia was humming ''There's a Lull in My Life." All normal--but it wasn't normal.

The ingredients of disaster, I thought to myself, are generally innocuous when separated. My mind hopped again to Spain. Nitrogen and oxygen make the air--give us life and blow boats around on the sea. Carbon is what diamonds are--what coal is. Mixed, though, with a shot of hydrogen--they are what is blasting those sherry-colored villages to smithereens.

Then Connie said, "John!" loudly.

He said, "Yorks," calmly.

"Who do you think landed in New York yesterday?"

"Who?" said John.

"You'd never guess!" Connie has that tantalising fault, in common with most long-married women, however superior they may be.

And John guesses, as a rule. "Who? Ali Baba? Lydia Pinkham? Paul Revere?

Buddha? Siamese Twins? Dominican Friars? Haven't I hit it?"

"Barney Colby!" She said it as if the person were more familiar than Santa Claus.

Virginia's voice was blank and badgering. "Oh? Let's see. Is he the man who painted Blue Boy? Or the 1932 hog calling champion?"

John turned from contemplating his wife. "Barney is the man who would be sitting here if your mother hadn't had good judgment."

"I believe," Connie said, "you're still jealous!"

He laughed.

So did Virginia. "Your childhood sweetheart! Why--that's wonderful! Was he waiting in the parlor when Father took you from a second story window on a ladder?"

Connie turned toward John and said more quietly, "It was almost like that--

remember?"

"Oh, well," Virginia said, "he'll have a beard now. Rheumatism. Or was he the gouty type? Probably a pinochle fiend. Sits in his slippers and reads the funnies all day Sunday. Fifty years old--"

"--forty-seven--"

"--anyway--he'll have that frozen dish water expression you see on most cabinet members--he's probably got five children who are all a little backward--"

Connie turned up her nose and tossed the paper so that it landed between Virginia and me. We bent over it.

Bernard Colby Returns from Dutch Guiana, it said.

Sought Native "Bone Bending" Secret--Narrowly Escaped Death.

Underneath that caption was a story and over it a photograph. The story, as Virginia murmured, was the kind ship· news reporters write when there's nobody worth interviewing aboard an incoming liner. And it was fairly purple. Full of phrases like,

"perilous and little frequented corners of the world" and "where he was made a member of the tribe and inducted to the native mysteries." Because of Connie's defensive edge and John's faint discomfort, Virginia kept the subject alive.

She gave her attention to the photograph. Mr. Colby resembled the motion picture samples of his prototype--curly hair, grizzled temples, broad shouders, penetrating eyes, hawk nose--everything. Even the crisp moustache. "He looks," she said, "the way a G-man should."

"Barney was handsome."

Virginia went on prodding. "Did he rush away into these far corners twenty-two years ago because he lost you?"

Her mother didn't answer.

John grinned and stood up. "As a matter of fact, he did." He kissed Connie, a little harder than usual. "I'm off."

"You're a little off," Virginia said in another antique Sheffield ritual. When he had gone, she regarded her mother with an expression that changed from teasing to sympathy.

In that change she revealed to me again a shadow of her own moody anxiousness. "You know, Connie, I think you would like to see him."

Connie started to shake her head, and laughed at herself instead. "I do believe I would."

"Why not, then?"

"I don't know." She thought of things twenty-two years in the past. She spoke an edited version of those thoughts. "Barney--was John's best friend. It all hurt--a lot-then."

"And why have you been keeping this red hot chapter of your life from us?"

Connie smiled slowly. "Well--when you were little you wouldn't have understood.

Later--we were out of the habit of recalling it."

"Or--maybe you never mentioned it because it still stung?"

''Both reasons." Connie reached for the paper and looked at the picture. "Funny. I can see Barney all right. But I don't believe I would have--if his name hadn't been there too. I used to worry a lot about having separated John and Barney. I suppose John still regrets it. Maybe I could bring them together--now--"

"Are you rationalizing, mother?"

"I'm thirty-nine," she replied. "I have four children--grown." She always had said she had four children. "Gray hairs don't show up much against butter-scotch--but I have my share. Virginia, you've been reading misleading advertisements."

"Now there's an idea!" Virginia took her crop out of her boot and waved it. "We invite this reckless nomad--" she was quoting the newspaper story --"who is unmarried and is staying at the Stafford Arms--to see his old sweetheart. We'll powder your hair and draw a few mascara wrinkles--have dim lights-get one of Grandmother's dresses out--and knock him cold. Dream girl to decrepitude--a tragedy in two decades. He'd fall for it.

Men haven't any perception in such things--"

"If I may speak with acrimony," I said, "men pretend to be oblivious in order to achieve the feminine level of behavior."

She ignored that. "Ask him."

Connie opened her mouth to say she would and changed her mind. "You ask John."

That wasn't like Connie. It contained an element of fear.

Fear in a woman whom I had thought to be incapable of it.

That ended breakfast.

There wasn't any poetry in the atmosphere that morning. There were no pedantic paragraphs for that Ph.D. Virginia was riding in the sun across the great fields that ran green through the brighter green of salt grass into the Sound. Head high, hair blowing, her feet lost in tapidillos. In Bridgeport, John was thundering through his dictation to shut from his mind the same perturbation which was intruding itself in Connie's grocery list.

I walked down to the flat rock.

From where I sat I could see the curved shell of a horseshoe crab slogging through marginal foam, and it made me think of the Time Traveller who had come to the border of that tideless sea where a big and cooling sun stood motionless. Man had vanished before that stasis of degenerate afternoon, life persisted only in fleshy globes that bounced along the beach, and all such passion as Virginia's, such regrets as Connie's, had become obliterate in the wan, universal exhaustion.

Hoofbeats crossed the turf. Bog saw me and took a six foot sideways jump, not because she was frightened, but just to make sure that Virginia hadn't lost her seat by riding no-account foreign nags. She said, "Bog, you disgust me," and hopped down and tied the gray pony to a cat tail. Bog could have pulled it up by nickering, and she knew it, but she wouldn't have budged for a ton of oats unless Virginia had given the word.

I said, "Following me?" and fished for my cigarettes.

"Yeah. I feel better. That Bog is elegant! She can turn on minus inches."

"Lower your voice when you say that. Connie flattered her take-off the other day and Bog got so cocky that she tossed Connie into some bull briars."

"That's a poor joke. You're nice, Frankie."

I didn't say anything.

"What's that out there?"

"Where?"

"That thing moving."

"Horseshoe crab."

"Oh. They're ugly--aren't they?"

"Sure. Ugly. But interesting."

"I've come to a decision."

"I know it."

"If I feel like this--a week from now--" There was a long silence.

"You're going to--"

"Well-- see Bill--anyhow."

CHAPTER IV

"Our womenfolk," John said, "are a bit haywire."

I cast. "It's the Spring. Try that log."

"Having a girl nineteen is a new experience. Ivan in his ukelele phase--I could understand--"

Something made me think that his mind was on Connie. Then, just south of my White Miller the water unfurled. I was busy for a few minutes and finally dropped a thirteen inch rainbow into my creel. "You married Connie when she was younger than Virginia is now."

"Do you suppose it was a mistake, Frankie? I mean--did I cheat her out of anything? Should we have waited?"

That thought gave me a moment of hope. Perhaps it would occur to Virginia.

Perhaps she would think nineteen was too young. But nobody ever thought that--nobody, at least, with a spirit like hers. The hope wavered, flickered out. John took a trout larger than mine. It was getting dark. A whip-poor-will ran through the single, ghostly phrase of his repertoire. Tree-frogs shrilled. "Are you worried, really, about anything, John?"

"Just--shadowy things. Things that don't happen and are there, nevertheless."

"If you don't want to see Colby-why not take an important business trip?"

I could feel him smiling in the dusk. "I'd like to see him. A lot. We played football together. Shared a .22 before that. Trapped up in Maine together. Roomed at Cambridge--

you know. All the old stuff. I--well, I suppose if I were candid--I'd say that some part of my narrow-gauge soul doesn't want Connie to see him."

"That's called jealousy. You're supposed to go to a psychiatrist for it, these days."

The smile was gone from his voice. He spoke softly. "I love--Connie."

"And she loves you."

"She's thirty-nine."

That was one I couldn't answer. At twenty-three, it was only my abnormal maturity and the deep understanding in the Sheffields which made a conversation such as this possible at all. "Why don't you tell Connie you don't want her to see him?"

His line sang thinly and settled on the water. He spoke with what was, for him, ascerbity. "I never told Connie to do anything. No matter what my reason might be--I wouldn't give her an order. And for this--I haven't any reason I can define. Just a feeling.

Hell of thing to go on. But it's a feeling I can't rid myself of. I look back over the days thinking about the idea--what is it--coming events cast their shadows before. Connie's been restless. Culminated in seeing that picture in the paper. Restless for months.

Noticed?"

I missed a nice rise. "Not really. She's energetic, John. In looking back, on that, a person with a predisposing worry might construe it as restlessness."

"Predisposing worry. Maybe it's that. But--She wanted to go abroad in April. Did the house over instead--and wasn't satisfied by that. Remember how she agitated for Bermuda last Winter? I tried to get her to go alone--tried to get you to take her. Well--all you saw when we three were there together was surface stuff. She used to say things to me that I ignored--then."

"What sort of things?"

He changed his stance and the stream gurgled around his waders. "Oh--that she was getting old. Wondered if she had been true to her real self in her life. Asked me if I was jealous of her. Said that sometimes she had feelings which made her understand why middle-aged women went dancing with gigolos. Things like that. Nonsense--if you will.

But there was a quality of faint wish in them--dissatisfaction."

It was much darker now. The almost-new moon had ceased being a pale decoration and its light was replacing the aftershine of the sun. I walked a few steps to draw nearer to John and stones turned beneath my feet, sending up sounds oddly modified by the water. "Just what are you afraid of, John? Suppose Colby does stir up a few old sentiments? Suppose Connie does flirt with him a bit? Suppose the whole new meeting is a fizzle? You and she had had an extraordinarily smooth and sympathetic life together. Can't you stand the prospect of unpleasantness--a rough spot? You know damn well you can. I think you're tired. There's nothing in this situation to cause alarm."

"Suppose I lost her?"

He said it slowly. But my reaction was quick. I laughed. I laughed heartily.

Because that supposition had revealed a childish spot in John's beautifully reserved mind.

He was tired and he had worried himself into a silly frame of mind. I presume that his integration had been damaged by the fact that Barney Colby had been a tabu--

unconsciously made--between them. If they had talked about him at all through those years, John would not have been so unfocused by the prospect of a reappearance of the man in person.

So that, I thought, is why he wanted to go trout fishing! Relieved, I expressed myself fully and in detail. Presently I had him laughing, too. We laughed a good deal, and perhaps we frightened the fish, because they stopped rising.

"I was worried over Virginia, as well," John said. "I guess I heaped all my anxieties together."

About that, I said nothing.

"She told me--this afternoon."

Another man might have used such a statement as a trick to pry out Virginia's secret. But not John. I knew that she had told her trouble to him and I was very happy. It lifted a fraction of my burden, and it meant that in a situation where I was prejudiced beyond advising, a much calmer and more detached counsel would be available. I said,

"I'm glad."

"Yes. What do you think?"

"Isn't this a place where what I think--or you--doesn't matter? A place where. one has to shut up and sit tight and let whatever Virginia is, and whatever she has been taught, work together to solve a problem of her--her instincts?"

"That's true." He took time out to light his pipe before he said, "What is she?"

My answer was pretty flat. "Connie's energy and personality. Your--do you mind if I say--spirituality? Plus a modern label."

He pondered that. "And the label is what she has been taught. What's that? You're closer to college--school--youth--"

"Not to kid herself."

That statement, as a credo, sounded inadequate even to me. John reflected on it.

"The trouble," he finally said, "in believing a thing like that as the center of yourself is that it's impossible. Of course, we've gotten to be scientists about everything. We accept only what we call facts. But the facts change. Einsteins--are forever making liars out of Euclids. You're kidding yourself when you say you won't kid yourself. You laugh at the things you thought were solemn truths a few years ago. You deprecate the people you admired. You show the world one facet of yourself and you're pretty likely to grow to regard that single facet as the whole works. You do things for what we might call

'obvious reason number one'--and a day or a week or a year later you realise that you really did those things for 'unacknowledged reason number two.' That's the way people are. They can't 'not kid' themselves--if they're going to be deliberate about it. The harder they try--the worse they'll fudge the effort.

"If a person were only what he thinks he is--and not also what he feels he is and what he has forgotten he was--why--he'd be killed by the first passing automobile he wasn't considering in relation to himself; he'd never have any fun because fun is a feeling and not a thought; he'd be a joke. No--if she's going to try to solve a powerful feeling about a married man by 'not kidding herself'--Virginia is out of luck."

"She thinks about her feelings."

"How?" There was a trace of scorn in his voice.

"Well--she--" I thought John was splitting hairs. It is difficult to describe to a hostile auditor how another person can think of feelings.

"You couldn't answer me in a thousand years, Frankie. She can think about feelings she has had in the past. She can think up feelings she'd like to have--or fears she'd like to avoid--in the future. But nobody can think about a feeling that's going on.

Nobody, that is, who isn't willing to admit that he may be kidding himself. Because that's what feelings are for--to make a louse out of the part of you that thinks. So that you'll pay as much attention to inward promptings as you do to the non-kiddable and highly unreliable organ you call your mind. See?"

I didn't see--exactly. And a moment later I saw a little--for I caught myself wondering what would happen if I listened to my feelings instead of the principles and tenets of my "non-kiddable" mind. For a flashing instant the idea held me spellbound.

Maybe that was the thing to do. Maybe there was a different order of behavior-and an equally moral one--a powerful and honest way of life--which did not entail endless internal argument, figurative picking at the coverlet, storm and stress, self-denial. But in merely revelling for a second over that concept I stepped out of bounds and I could hear my own voice whisper that such a notion was, indeed, the very substance of deceit.

We were close to the place where we had parked the car. I could see a chrome gleam beyond the nearest willow. John's reel purred as he wound in his line. "I asked her to invite Bush up here."

My feeling of lostness when Virginia had told me, became real and permanent. I wanted to yell a protest. And I knew, now, how he had felt about Connie and Colby. A long time passed before I could manage a proper response. "That was a good idea."

"She's been so much a part of the family--she ought to see whether he fits or not."

We were at the edge. I had hard going--boots weigh me down--and he took my arm.

"Suppose--John--she decided yes?"

His voice was clear and controlled. "Bush might be persuaded to divorce his wife-

-"

That hadn't entered my mind. It sealed what was already locked. I was glad when he went on talking. "At least--we'll know the answers soon."

"Soon?"

His pipe was spent and he tapped it against a tree. "She said she'd have him up as soon as Larry and Ivan got back from school."

"Oh."

"And I'll know whether my dilemma is real or imaginary--tonight."

"Tonight?"

"Didn't Connie tell you?"

"Colby's coming? No. She didn't say anything to me. She--" I stopped talking.

John had been stowing his rod as I had spoken. Now he stood still for an instant.

"That's odd--isn't it?"

I said the first thing that popped into my head. "There's a 'stone road' aspect to all this--isn't there, John?"

"Yes. For both of us."

I wondered about that and dismissed my wondering. "Is that why you stayed out here in the stream so late? Must be nearly nine."

He brought back his attention from somewhere. "Hunh? No. Dinner was to be late. Ten." He started the car. Then, before going, he leaned out and looked at the treetops, the moon, the water.

He and eleven other men had joined forces to buy the whole brook--from its source to the Sound--and all the land adjoining it. They had stocked it, now, for a decade and a half, and they fished it as they pleased. It was an expensive hobby to establish and fairly expensive to maintain. But I imagine that the cost was really small in view of the corporations which had been hatched in the limpid water, the plans contrived there, the strain relieved, and the refreshment given to the frightened, the fierce and the almost defeated.

The moon set while we drove back to Fort Sheffield. The house was big with lighted windows and we left our waders in the garage for Berry to clean. Then we walked up and around through the garden. Pebbles in the path pushed on our socks at myriad places and massaged our tired feet. A car drove under the porte-cochère as we passed it and Connie opened the front door. We saw a shimmer of white flannels in an athletic leap, and a doffed Panama hat. It was Colby and neither of us intended to be spying or eavesdropping, but we were in our stocking feet and that was not our fault. Anyway, it shouldn't have mattered. But it did. It's impossible to understand quite how.

I heard Colby say, "Connie! Connie!" in a rich and excited voice and I felt John move as if to call and then relax and watch. They kissed, but that didn't mean anything.

I've seen Connie kiss fifty men. Coquetry is part of her nature--but it's so obviously light and amused that nobody makes mistakes. Pity any man who did. This was a short kiss and they separated and held arms and looked at each other and kissed again. Still, there was nothing clandestine about it. He'd nearly won her, and they hadn't seen each other for more than twenty years. But I found myself thinking that she had behaved the way a woman would who had undertaken to perform a duty and performed it and was now free.

He said, "Just the same! No! More lovely!" And that was no source for dismay. A platitude, under the circumstances.

But Connie didn't reply. Not a word. She just stood and looked at him until he also stood rigidly. We couldn't see their expressions clearly from where we were, but there was that changing quality in their postures. Maybe it was her silence and his slow, gathering tenseness that mattered. John made a waving gesture and started forward, but before he spoke, Colby took Connie's arm and they went into the house. So John turned back to me.

"You saw," he said.

"I didn't see anything." My heart wasn't in that denial.

"Of course you didn't, Frankie." He said that gently.

"She was elated. Astonished. Pleased. Why shouldn't she be? Good Lord, John, your attitude will drive her from just playing romance into a real escapade of some sort.

Make her do it just to even up suspicion she doesn't deserve. This is an adventure for Connie! Let her have it! Golly--"

He looked at me. His large, square-shaped head arrested itself, facing me, but he took no cognisance of my suggestions. "To live with a woman," he said slowly, "you've got to be forever able to live without her." He walked along toward the porch. "Smell the lilacs," he said.

When he met Colby, in the big living room, in his stocking feet, Connie did not exist for either of them. The white knuckles of their grip, the hands on shoulders, reached strongly back to playing fields in gone years, to classrooms, to forgotten serenades and victory fires and winks that humanised arduous examinations. Barney Colby was a man who turned the mind to the language of measured prowess. He must weigh, I thought, a hundred and seventy. Lean. He had the deepest and certainly the evenest tan I have ever seen; it looked indelible.

"Hello, Barney!"

"Hello, John!"

Two strong figures in a man's world. Connie might split them--she had split them long ago--but she could not even enter the realm in which they lived as men. Whatever happened or had happened-made not the slightest difference in their meeting point. They picked up where they had left off. I knew John. And now, watching Barney, I understood why the ship news reporter had given him that gaudy write-up. He had the kind of eyes that had looked into every sort of danger and at every sort of death without becoming either chilly or mad. Fine eyes.

I knew that they would go into dinner with their arms around each other. I knew that Connie would be dashed by it. I knew, too, that where she was concerned, they were ready to forfeit that friendship. They had done it before. And I knew, finally, that she was concerned.

I went upstairs to change. I met Virginia on the way.

She was dressed for dinner and she had combed back her hair so that trouble was visible in all her features. The Sheffields are not preamble people.

"Bill just called," she said.

"Want to come in and talk to me?"

"No." She hesitated. "I--just feel badly--that's all. He was coming up here next week. But his wife is having--some sort of spell. That's--I mean--she does. He goes up and lives where she is--to be near. Sometimes for days. Once for two months. He--he loved her."

What could I say? She was looking into imaginary years wherein the man she loved might go to comfort the meaningless misery of a woman whom he had once loved.

It was a ghastly vista. "Your boyfriend has guts."

She smiled for that "Yes. He's a swell guy."

And Colby was a swell guy. And John. Connie was swell. Virginia was above praise. But being swell seemed only to make the burn deeper, the scars stiffer, the blood flow more often.

I took her hand and kissed it and went to dress.

CHAPTER V

John handed the telegram to me at the table and I read it and things seemed almost normal again. It was from Larry. "Translate," John said. It was an unusually tough one--

even for Larry:

FLUNG TOO MUCH WOO DEAN FLUNG WOE FALCONED ORANGE PEELED

TULIO NUVOLARI COULDNT HAVE AVOIDED LOCAL YOKEL THOUGH FIVE

CS EXCESSIVE FOR IDS RUSTY ORPHAN IN JAIL ROT OR REPRIEVE

QUESTION MARK LOVE LARRY

"It doesn't mean anything to me," Connie said anxiously,

"except--"

"--in jail," Virginia murmured over my shoulder. "Falcon," I said, "is the name of a roadhouse near Ridgely. We used to go there, too. I'm surprised that Repeal hasn't put it out of business." "I suppose," Connie muttered with venom, "you realise that you are tearing the heart of an anxious mother?"

I grinned. "You know Larry wouldn't have sent a wire like that if there were anything really wrong! Of course--it would have to be his idea of something wrong. Well, look. It means, 'Dear mother and father, I spent too much time with Wheezie--' I believe that was the girl's name--'and the dean flunked me.' He doesn't say in what subject or subjects. He then intimates he had a few drinks and was driving and spooning--a word you'll understand--when he ran into another car. Mr. Nuvolari is an international automobile racing champion, and Larry indicates that even he could not have avoided the accident. He goes on to say that the car with which he collided belonged to an oafish or loutish person who lived in the vicinity. The word 'orphan' refers to the car. It means that it was an obsolete make-one that is no longer on the market. It must have been severely damaged, not to say demolished, inasmuch as its owner wants five hundred dollars--"

I paused there a fraction of a second--"for it. Though the sum may be merely an over-all settlement asking--price to cover indignation as well as repairs. Larry concludes by saying that he is in jail and wishes to be advised whether he is to resign himself to a long term or to expect to be bailed out."

The telegram had reached us at breakfast. John, Connie and Virginia had listened to my extempore digest of it with varied and changing expressions. Now Connie chuckled. "I'll say one thing. Larry has mastered the telegram. He'd be invaluable as a foreign correspondent. A half dozen well chosen words would easily convey news of a fallen cabinet, a small war, and a scandal in high places."

Virginia agreed. "Not only that, but spies and competing correspondents wouldn't make anything of his cables. They'd baffle the Black Chamber at Washington. Editors would go mad--"

"The point is," said John, "something ought to be done. Shall I phone the headmaster now? I can't go up--with all hell brewing at the Bridgeport plant--"

I didn't want John to phone, for reasons of my own. "You go and sit on your troubles at the factory. I'll phone--and then I'll catch a Boston plane in New Haven--"

John nodded. His forehead was frowning and his lips were smiling. "I suppose,"

he said, "that a father who has told his sons all his own boyish misdemeanors--and with relish--can't complain about a thing of this sort. Not categorically. But five hundred bucks is a lot of money. I recall that my father made me work out an eighty-six dollar damage bill one summer. I had incurred the bill by experimenting with the fire hose system in a public school. The way the water cascaded down the staircases was worth the work--

almost. I think some such thing is indicated in Larry's case. Do you all agree with me?"

"He's just young and gay," Connie said.

"Sure. But in the same way that science is making war more terrible, it's making youth a bigger hazard--if you see what I mean. You can't skylark in a car."

"It's called orange peeling," Virginia reminded him.

John gestured an admission of the correction and rose from the table. "Right. And I think I'll put him behind a lathe or a drill press for about eight weeks this summer.

Otherwise he'd just sail his boat and wreck more cars and peel more oranges. Have we got five hundred dollars in the safe, Connie?"

"Easily. "

"Good. You go up, then, Frankie. Take a stern attitude. And break the news that he is going to hold down a job during July and August. A hard, hot job."

I finished my breakfast and went to my room to pack. For the past ten days I had allowed my anxieties to be lulled. Nothing had happened--and a helpless fool will embrace any paradise. The romantic Mr. Colby had dined and spent the evening, regaling us with bizarre stories, and he had gone into the silences I'd had a feeling while he talked that night that he was saying to Connie, 'I did all these things from loss of you; I wanted to die'--but telling her that indirectly had apparently satisfied him, and he had not presumed farther upon the emotionally descriptive meeting John and I had witnessed.

As the days had passed, I had even discounted that episode. And I had suggested to myself that Colby's instantaneous resumption of his friendship with John had erased most of his attachment for the former, remembered Connie.

Besides that, Virginia had heard no more from Bill Bush. At least, I had no knowledge of any communication, and I was--again--permitting myself to hope that the luckless necessities of Bush's life would demonstrate the uselessness of martyring her own. That hope--it was a selfish wish--seemed to be favored by her actions. She and Connie were preparing to compete in a flower show; she attended all of the country club dances; she swam and rode every day; she appeared, in short, to have reached a level where she could regard her problems with detachment.

But now Larry's telegram had sounded a new and unguess able alarm--and that alarm had wakened the others, so that I packed with a disheveled feeling. Perhaps the threats of May were still breathing and breeding in the background and June had not abolished them. I was thinking that and folding a tan silk dressing gown when Virginia knocked on my door. She came in and dumped everything from my suitcase. Then she started packing allover.

"Frankie?"

"Yeah."

"That telegram."

"You noticed, eh?"

"It couldn't have been accidental. He might have forgotten."

"Forgotten the 'Five C's'? Do you think so?"

"No."

"Neither do I." She stopped work for a moment. "What do you think is the matter that would make him unwilling to have John and Connie know?"

I grinned as much as I could. "How can I tell? He's seventeen. Capable of any sort of malfeasance. Capable, also, of getting in a terrible uproar over nothing. I judged by the telegram that it hadn't dampened his spirits--whatever it was--"

"And I judged it had."

Virginia looked at me solemnly and I looked at her--and we each knew that the other was worried. Because there had been more in the wire than I'd said. The Sheffields-

-especially Ivan, Virginia--and I--had gone through our early teens during the height of the gangster era. Our childhood had been colored by it. Cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians, the James brothers, and the northwest mounties--all the lore and gore of past generations of kids had been supplanted by a far more vivid and immediate melodrama detailed every day on the front pages and portrayed weekly in the motion picture theatres.

Naturally, we had formed a "mob" with the neighborhood kids. Ours was the Crimson Mob. There had been a long period when I was the "brains" of the organization-

-for two reasons: in get-aways I was handicapped, and there was a tradition that the leader of such secret and nefarious societies was generally a dwarf, or a one-armed man, or a fellow with a scarred face. Indeed, my affliction had become an asset. Known--

privately--up and down a couple of miles of the Connecticut shore as "The Spider," I was supposed to have come by my limp not through a filterable virus, but through the roaring choppers of a rival organization.

Of course, we had had a password. Our password served notice that the gang was to meet, or that its employer wanted a moment's secret conference. It was used frequently to protect members from adult surveillance. In those days, a "G" did not mean a federal man-it meant a thousand dollars. A "C" meant a hundred. And our password was, "Five C's." The "C," naturally, referred to century. We extended its use with puns in order to increase its variety and add to our own self-admiration, Thus we could give the password by referring to "five century plants" and by asking such questions as "Which of the five seas has the highest tide?" We would also whistle five identical notes--which were assumed to be middle "C" on the piano. Of such stuff is a great deal of childhood composed.

We had a "territory" and when we sneaked out of our beds at night we paid the gardener "protection." Our "racket" was largely swiping food and decorations and equipment for our "hide-out," and Virginia, I remember, was a "gun moll." But the password was sacred and it meant that whatever was coming next was to be kept an inviolable secret from our elders.

Larry had sent that long unused password in his wire. Virginia had spotted it, too.

That's what we had been discussing as she repacked my things.

"It means," she said after a while, "that what he said was the trouble--isn't. It means there is a lot more to it, maybe. Do you think he killed somebody in that accident?

Or that he's hurt, and won't say so? Will you please, please call us as soon as you find out?"

"You know I will."

"Don't you think you really ought to get somebody up there on the wire before you go?"

I shook my head. "Be there in four hours. And he used the password just so we wouldn't try to investigate at long range. He wanted you and me to keep Connie and John out of whatever it is. If he were hurt--if he'd hurt somebody--he'd kick through with the facts instanter. You know Larry--"

She let out half of a sigh and caught it. "But what else on earth could it be--"

"I don't know. And that's why I'm flying."

I patted the top of her head.

At the New Haven airport we shook hands. She sat in the roadster to watch the plane take off. I saw her wave.

It was a warm, cloudy day. The pilot took us above the murk and I grew tired staring down at a leaden floor that seemed solid enough to snowshoe on. He dove back through it on a beam, I suppose, and there was Boston, looking dirty and undignified from the air. There wasn't any train to Ridgely Heights till three P.M., so I took six dollars and eighty cents worth of rattling taxi and poor radio reception out to the school. I went past the grounds and on to the Court House. The jail was in the rear and I walked around to the entrance, looking for Hawkshaw. He was part policeman and part warden--

playing the latter role when there was a prisoner--and his name was really Twiffert. I'd made his acquaintance myself the year our football team had beaten Andover and Hill.

Twiffert was staring at a crossword puzzle when I came in, and he didn't remember me. I asked for Larry. "Lawrence Sheffield? Haven't anybody here by that name. Sure of that. Haven't anybody here at all, in fact."

That relieved me--and my relief was speedily compensated by a stab of fresh apprehension. Larry wouldn't have invented so elaborate a lie unless he'd had a forceful reason. Or--maybe--he was in some other jail.

I hurried from Hawkshaw's domain without giving him a four letter word for a part of a church beginning with an "a"--and my mind vexed itself as I walked because it kept on thinking. "Altar" had five letters, damn it. But--what was it?--apse. Apse was the word he'd wanted.

I went into Larry's dormitory and up the stairs and banged on the heavy oak door.

Larry let me in, and he was alone. He had a black eye, and there were cigarette ashes allover the rug--walked on.

Connie's maiden name was Porter, and there had been a great-grandfather Porter with the same sort of eyes and skin and hair that Larry had--all pale--his eyes greenish and translucent, his skin white, his hair the shade of a new penny. He was tall and angular. He had a sharp chin and a smile above it that was always warm and sympathetic.

In another family, a youngster like Larry might have become neurotic, but, on the one hand, Connie had gaily vaporised the nervous defenses he created for himself during his childhood, and on the other, John's steady nature had given him a perpetual example of sensitivity successfully combined with force.

Larry tossed a cigarette into the fireplace and said, "I knew you'd come. I don't know what I'd have done if it had been Father."

I dropped my bag on the floor and took off my hat and coat. Then my tie. He didn't say anything. There was a picture of a blonde over the mantel. She seemed terribly young and very sweet.

"Wheezie?" I asked.

"They call her that because of how she sings. But I like the way she sings."

He held a match for me.

"That's a fairish mouse," I said.

He felt it. "The guy I got it from is over in the infirmary. They thought he got a concussion when he fell--but he didn't. Only a headache. And I found out afterward that he was right."

"Oh?"

"Of course all that stuff about cracking up somebody's car was phoney. I did spend a lot of time with Wheezie, and I flunked plane geometry, but I can make it up next year. The headmaster knew about it because Wheezie is his daughter. He gave me a lecture. I just wired that wrecked car stuff so I could get in the 'Five C's.' See?"

"You might have figured out some less lavish way. Connie thinks that you are in prison, injured, and guilty of manslaughter or mayhem." "Well--I was in a hurry. I judged that if I sent a flippant telegram, the family would more or less think it was just another scrape-and you'd get the signal--and come up."

"And it isn't--just another scraper?"

"No."

"What is it?"

"It hasn't anything to do with me whatever," he said. And that was all he said for a full minute. I didn't prompt him or hurry him. I could see that he was abnormally agitated and that it was going to be hard enough for him to talk without being made self-conscious by me. He sat in a Morris chair and twisted the toe of his brown-saddled sports shoe with one hand.

Finally he spoke. "It's about--Connie."

"Connie!"

I was thunderstruck--and in another way at the same time, I wasn't surprised. No literal idea of what he was going to say about his mother had entered my head, but a liaison took place. The hidden tocsin in Larry's telegram had re-aroused my fears over Connie and Virginia. It did not seem strange, therefore, to learn that Larry, also, had a worry about one of them.

"There's a fellow here named Bates," Larry continued, after he had watched me absorb his first statement. "And there's an inn about forty miles south of here, near the Connecticut border, called the Colonial Elm. Bates is a smooth bird and a lush. He drives a tomato-colored model--I guess to camouflage the tomatoes he likes to pick up over in Lynn or Lowell. He's the factory girl's Romeo. And anybody else's he can get. He often snakes down to the Elm--though it's out of bounds. And the Elm could be made, driving fast, in maybe three hours or even less from Fort Sheffield."

Then the pieces fell together. Pieces I had ignored in the ten days I had enjoyed my idiot's Nirvana. Connie had made two trips to "town"--and she'd driven instead of taking the train. She occasionally did drive in. Connie was a passionate shopper. I hadn't thought anything of it.

"Bates knew Connie?"

Larry had been watching me tensely and speaking with a slowly fading voice. My question showed him that I was on the track of his painful theme--that I might even be able to add more to it--or explain it. "Met her last Commencement. Say--Frankie--"

I wiped out my cigarette on the cold hearth. "And Bates saw Connie with a man at the Inn. He reported the fact to you-with details and insinuations-and you sent him to the infirmary--at the cost of a mouse."

"I should have minded my own business," Larry responded.

"Am I right?"

He hesitated. "As far as you go."

CHAPTER VI

It was necessary for me now to hear the rest of Larry's story. And I didn't want to.

Learning that Connie had sneaked away from the Fort to keep a date with Barney Colby was like learning that she had cheated at bridge or embezzled from John's bank account.

She could have seen Colby as much as she wished and all the Sheffields would have been delighted. Colby would have fitted into their collective interests and temperaments. I couldn't imagine any reason for such behavior even if she were infatuated with him. The family was as modern as television. The keystone of their harmony was tolerance. And when I'd thought over John's moodiness on the night we went trout fishing together I'd been amazed that any Sheffield could be that much perturbed.

But here was the identical element--in Larry.

I told him to go ahead.

He did. "Bates came in here about four nights ago and said he'd seen Connie having lunch with a guy who looked like a movie actor down at the Elm. I said so what-though I was surprised she hadn't dropped in here-being so near. Then he went into a lot of stuff about how Connie had behaved toward the guy. The more he talked, the less I believed it and when he wouldn't stop, I advised him to take a powder. But he was enjoying it and that's how the fight started."

Larry looked across the room toward a table. "He hit that corner when he dropped. I brought him around and told him that if he said any more to anybody I'd really go to work on him. He was groggy, but he told me then to go and see for myself. Connie had made another date with this bird--and Bates had heard it."

Larry gazed at me numbly for a minute and went on. "The date was for yesterday.

Connie hadn't recognized Bates--he's the kind of rat who would take care not to be recognized when he had spotted a thing like that. Well--he'd banged his head a little and he talked pretty thickly so I dragged him over to the infirmary. We said we'd been rough-housing and they X-rayed him. He's still there--not because he needs to be-but it got him out of an exam--and he thinks he's making a hit with a brunette nurse named Mabel. He won't talk any more, because he knows I'll really fracture his skull the next time. Only--"

"Only--" I said--"you went to the Elm yesterday."

He crumpled a cigarette package, after looking into it, and then he tossed an empty carton into the grate. So I handed my pack to him.

"Yeah. I went. They have a big dining room down there, and they serve on the porch, too. The porch--one side of it--looks out over a pond. Connie is a sucker for water-

-the way you are--so I got a table inside the joint, by a window, on the lake end. I got there early and I had a newspaper to hide behind. I didn't need it. They came around one-the guy first--and they didn't look at anybody. Except each other. I couldn't hear much of what they said, and I didn't stay long after they arrived. But it was as plain as the end of a movie that Connie is nuts about him." Larry rose nervously and stood in front of me. He said three harsh, strained words. "Who is he?"

I told him.

When I had finished, he murmured, "So John knows about him?"

"Sure. And I kind of think you got in a tizzie too fast."

"You didn't see them together!"

He was calmer--but not satisfied. I knew that no amount of rhetoric would improve his emotions. I didn't try, much. I said, "Connie's flirted before-and maybe life got a little dull. In fact--that's the answer. All this clandestine stuff is just for fun. It's the trip to Massachusetts--not the guy--that she's enjoying. What harm is there in it? She was safe back home at six yesterday, and all we should do is nothing whatever."

"You know that's a lot of cabbage!"

"I don't. And--even if it is--can we do anything else?"

"We could go and see this Colby--!"

Larry was getting out of hand. "You've been reading too much Dumas," I said.

"What would you do? Slap him with gloves?"

Then he grinned and sighed and stretched. "Anyway, I'm glad you know about it."

"And I've got to phone your anguishing mother and sister and tell them--that there was no accident, no jail, no five hundred dollars--and all you wanted was somebody to put a poultice on your boyish fears--"

"You can do better than that."

I pondered. "Sure. John provided me with the cash presumably necessary to salvage you from the law. I can say I settled for fifty. You can get Wheezie and some of your friends and we'll blow in the fifty on a quick junket to Boston. Say, dinner and a show for about six of you?"

A spark had come back in his eye. "That's constructive."

"Where has Mike been, through all this, by the way?" Michael Duffy was Larry's roommate.

Larry grunted. "The cheap, weaseling grub, by sheer kowtowing and sycophancy sucked three A's in three courses and was exempted from three exams. He went down to Rhode Island to sell his damned boat--"

Mike was quarterback on the football team and less sycophantic than anybody his age I have ever met. But Larry's words showed that he was back in what he would have called his "groove." He was already deep in a closet, worrying vocally about a lipstick stain on his mess jacket. However, the matter of boats reminded me of something. I went to the closet.

I gave him the blow in two sentences. "John was a little riled at the idea of buying five hundred dollars worth of car just because you flung a bit of woo on a curve. He wanted me to tell you that he planned to put you to work in the Bridgeport factory this summer so you could reduce the debt and avoid the woo."

Shock and anathema of the most violent sort were what I had expected. Instead, Larry went on fumbling with hangers and coats and said briefly, "That's great! I was going to ask him for a job, anyhow. We of the corning generation need scope in our social outlook. Knowledge of the other half. Say. What do girls use to take their lipstick off their own clothes, do you know?"

It's wonderful to be seventeen. At seventeen, if someone says that you've been drafted to make the first voyage to the moon by rocket, you can reply, "Really? Where do we take off?" Even a year makes a difference. At eighteen, you'd reply, "I'm not so sure that flying to the moon would serve any valid human purpose." At nineteen you'd say,

"Nuts."

We managed the six o'clock to Boston--after some parley with the headmaster.

We had two Manhattans apiece at the Merry-go-round Bar in the Copley-Plaza. We saw a musical. We danced--even I got insisted into it--and we made the Owl to Ridgely by a bare three seconds. I had fun. A few of the kids tried to interest me in what they thought were suitable topics--Thackeray and termite control, among others--but I remembered too much Ridgely idiom to be left in the cold entirely by the six year gulf of seniority.

Besides, Wheezie, at seventeen, was a more worldly woman that her grandmother had been in her prime. In fact, if Larry hadn't doted upon her by incessantly insulting her, and if there had been no Virginia, I am not sure but that I would have followed Wheezie's evolution with more than casual interest.

I had phoned Connie an "all clear" before Larry and I had gone out for lunch-and I spent the night in the Alumni Annex. The next morning I had breakfast with Larry and we were scrupulous about ignoring the cause for my visit. He put me on the eight-fifty and beat it for an exam in Livy. All he said was, "I'll leave--that business we discussed--

up to you."

On the way back to Reedy Cove I thought about it. What could I do?

Because she'd driven me to the airport, I guess, I'd assumed that Virginia would meet me. But it was Connie who sat in the roadster in the station parking yard. I walked down the privet and through a clipped embrasure and put my bag in the rumble.

Connie was happy. "So it came to nothing, after all? And he wasn't in the wrong?"

"Nope." I leaned back and watched her drive. "He was O.K."

"I'm glad. Every time I read the annual accident statistics--I get a chill. According to statistics, at least one of us ought to be badly hurt in the next ten years. That's a cold and horrible way of looking at it--every one would say. But it's a simple fact. If we escape--then somebody else's family is certain to have two hurt."

"It's not like you to be morbid," I said.

She smiled a little. "No. But I heard a speech about auto accidents the other day.

And I got to thinking about how dangerous and short life is--"

I could read behind that. I went on looking at her. Connie is beautiful and alive.

She doesn't look her age. Most people don't--any more--if they have the sense to take care of themselves. And the chance. She has a figure that is mature, but swift-lined. She has long, intelligent hands and they sometimes express for her what she refuses to say with her eyes and lips. Dark blue eyes and a mouth very much like Virginia's. She has a luxurious amount of light-brown hair. Butterscotch is her name for the color, but that is not definite enough. Maple sugar would be more accurate, but not quite dark enough. I imagine that anyone in love with Connie would think a good deal about that color--

blowing in the wind, and fanned out in its heavy waves. It's bobbed, at the nape of her neck. She has an even and active disposition. She's impulsive, and compared to John, she's frivolous. But anyone who had known her for a year, witnessing her perceptions and thoughtfulnesses and her generosities, would have applied that word to her with reservation.

The road alternated land and seascapes and I wondered what she was thinking about. Then it suddenly entered my head that other people besides Bates might have been at the Colonial Elm. At any rate, she would go to inns where, sooner or later, there would be people. It was all a matter of time. And if I said something now--it might succeed where a later effort would be resisted.

Maybe that was rationalizing. Perhaps, even, I wanted to avenge the way she had hurt Larry--and John--and me. But I don't think so. I think I realized she hadn't let herself consider that possibility. She'd driven more than a hundred miles, to an obscure roadside restaurant, in another State--and she'd blinded herself to that constant belier of the law of averages, coincidence. Anyway, to be discovered, one must first hide. So I asked her if she'd go a bit more slowly.

"Did I make you nervous? I'm sorry."

"Lord, no. I wanted to talk to you, Connie."

She turned from the road to look at me speculatively. Her face was the same. But her fingers took a different grip on the wheel. "What's on your mind, Frankie?"

I wish I'd said nothing, then. But it was too late. She sensed what was coming. "A Ridgely kid named Bates was at the Colonial Elm the other day."

"Yes," she replied softly, after a moment. "The day before yesterday."

Her face went so white that I was on the point of reaching for the wheel. Then that draining tide turned and she slowly flushed a deep and deeper red--up to the roots of her hair -along her bare arms, even.

"No, Connie. Bates was there last week. Day before yesterday--Larry was there."

"Larry." She said it inconsolably.

I nodded.

"That's why--he sent that ridiculous telegram. He was--worrying about me--"

I told her, then, about Larry's black eye and the five C's. The part about the fight made her swallow hard--and she smiled when I described the origin of the password.

"I used to wonder why you youngsters went around whistling the way you did,"

she said. "And why you kept talking about century plants. There wasn't one in the whole of New England, as far as I knew." She stopped--and thought for a long time. "There isn't anything I can do--is there?"

That let coldness and fear into my veins. I've learned to behave as if I were thirty-

-most of the time. But there are occasional instances when I am made to know that I am twenty-three, and it is an inadequate age.

"You mean--you're going to keep on--see Barney--and--" It was inept.

"Right now--I think I'd rather be dead than know I'd never see him again. Later--

some day--I may get over it. I haven't done anything shameful, Frankie." Words burst from her passionately, torrentially. "It hit me like a bullet the instant he came up on the porch. Infatuation--maybe. Love? I don't know. Maybe it's just an event typical of my age. But it has some sort of tremendous significance I can't yet comprehend. When I married John--rather--when I agreed to--I hardly knew whether I loved him or Barney more. Then Barney went away and did all those crazy things. There was the War for him first, and I read his name in the papers more than once. John's too--but Barney's war was gay. John's was somber. After that--exploring and his anthropology--his African mines.

It's a kind of a dirty trick--isn't it--for the loser in a romance to make himself the more romantic figure? It was the same when John and Barney were there for dinner. John's commanding and steadying. Barney's commanding and--quickening. They were always like that. And perhaps, when' I married, I tried to be wise rather than honest. Plenty of people predicted a dramatic but rapidly-approaching end for Barney. Do you understand any of that?"

"All of it--I guess. Connie?"

"What?"

"Don't tell John--now."

"No."

"I'll write Larry. God knows, he won't say' anything. Neither will that unsanitary schoolmate of his. And if you see Barney again--I mean, when you see him--really hide, will you?"

"I feel like such a--such a beast."

"You are," I said. "Maybe it's worth it. That's what you've got to decide."

She turned into the driveway. She wasn't angry or wounded. "The Sheffields don't let themselves or each other off easily, do they? Perhaps it's a good thing. Perhaps my answer lies somewhere in there. And--thanks, Frankie."

I put the car up, leaving her under the porte cochère. Afterward, I started down to the fiat rock.

When I had gone half way, I was running as fast as I could, and tearing off my clothes as I went.

CHAPTER VII

At the same time I tried to run, to strip off as many clothes as possible, and to think. Because Virginia had fallen down in her canoe a couple of hundred yards off shore, hit her head, and vanished in the water as the craft went over. I paused once and turned. I yelled, "Connie! Help!" as loudly as I could. Then I was on the beach. I yanked off my shoes without untying them.

The surf was fairly high for the Sound. It was a sunny day, but the wind was off-shore and brisk. In the water, I'm pretty competent. Swimming is one of the things they make you learn for my trouble. I gave it everything I had. That was a mistake--but I'd seen her fall, as she tried to walk from the stern seat up to the bow so she could paddle without blowing around so much--and I wanted to get out there as fast as a human being could. She'd tripped on a thwart. If she had knocked herself out--then--

There were those fragments in my mind. I got a mouthful once that stopped me.

The salt water kept me pretty blind. And then I couldn't find the canoe. I think that the whole rest of my life seems shorter than the few minutes I was swimming there. Finally I had a glimpse of the keel and canvas turning aside a swell. I headed for it and grabbed it.

But Virginia wasn't there.

I yelled and looked. I put my face below the water but it was green and opaque.

Then I dove under the canoe and searched its length. The effort nearly burst my heart.

But she wasn't there. So I let go of the canoe and swam away and around it, looking.

There wasn't anybody else in that part of the bay. If there had been a boat on the beach, I'd have taken it, of course. But Larry's sloop hadn't been put in the water, the motor boat engine was all over the boathouse floor, and the rowboat hadn't been on the sand. Berry probably was using it to get killies from the clam man for week-end pickerel bait. So I'd had to swim.

Treading water and heaving up my shoulders to increase my view made visible only more empty breakers. So I kept on swimming aimlessly and in so doing I ran into her. Her dress struck my face, in fact. She was waterlogged, but sufficiently conscious to keep her mouth above the surface--or to get it there often enough for a breath. When I grabbed her, she turned toward me and there was a look of abject terror in her eyes. I realised with stupid clarity that she'd thought it was a shark.

She saw me, vaguely. And she winked.

I winked back.

Then I started with her toward the shore. She was bleeding; it made magenta filaments among the silver, floating strands of her hair, and for a moment I thought she was bleeding to death, but that was because her dress was cerise. I tried to hurry shoreward because I knew she ought not to stay in the water that way--but the shore didn't get any nearer and after fifty or a hundred strokes I realized that the tide was coming out toward us with more speed than I could muster against it.

If she could help a little, I thought, we might make it, but when I turned over and looked at her, I saw she couldn't. She had lost consciousness and her face was peaceful--

as if my appearance had settled everything.

That was when I really felt there wasn't any God.

Because what I was failing to do--Ivan or Larry or John could have accomplished without a thought of failure. Towing an inert person through the water is no trick if you have strong legs. Without them, no one should try. Because arms are next to worthless.

One arm is needed to hold the person--I couldn't use my teeth because the water was too rough--and the other cannot do work ordinarily performed by four coordinated limbs.

I gave up and just held her still, with her face out--except when a bucketful of foam churned over it. I cursed the sea and the sky and the day I was born. I cursed things that I didn't dream I had ever resented---or could. And pretty soon I was cursing merely against panic, because pain was beginning to creep up that inadequate leg of mine, and pain meant cramp and cramp meant that we'd both go down. It came on slowly, like a careful torture designed to combine the utmost physical agony with the maximum of spiritual frustration. I heard the beginning of a great roaring which I thought was the approach of my own unconsciousness and the pain went around like a stop-watch ticking for an execution, and then very suddenly there was a huge, mahogany-coloured bow almost in my face.

States of semi-consciousness always have peculiar effects on the mind: important things happen and cannot be recalled; trifles are retained with instrumental precision. I recall, for instance, that there was a triangular paint-chip missing on the NC letters which marked the underside of the wing of the hydroplane that had dropped down on us. I don't remember being thrown a rope, though I'm told that I caught it and hung on till they pulled us in. Anyway, they got us out.

Out and ashore and safe.

Half an hour later I woke. Doctor Kellog was in my room with Connie.

"Be quiet!" she said--dictatorially because of her anxiety.

"How's Virginia?"

Connie looked at the doctor. He told me. "She got pretty full of water--"

I tried to sit up--and changed my mind about that. "Bad?"

"Not bad. She'll have to stay in bed a couple of days. Needs good care--"

"That cut--"

"That wasn't anything. Look here, Frankie. Lie still and if you get cold, holler for more hot water bottles. You'll be all right." He doubled up his fist and gave me one of those take-it-easy taps on the jaw. He was a nice guy and he'd seen the Sheffields in and out of all their troubles.

I said, "Virginia's in danger."

The doctor nodded Connie out. Then he sat down beside me. "Virginia's in a slight amount of danger. She was about half drowned out there. But she has a dandy constitution and there's no reason to expect she won't be all right. We'll have to think a bit for a day or so about pneumonia, of course. Now. You wanted to know--there's the answer."

I could feel myself getting into one of those infantile slumps. I hated myself for it-

-but that didn't stop the slump.

He sat down on my bed. "I get it," he said slowly. "I'll be damned."

He did get it and I knew he had it.

"You're thinking that if you'd had normal pins--she wouldn't have gotten full of water."

"Which is true."

He shrugged slightly. "On the other hand--the fact that you had bum ones meant you swam a lot for therapy--and could swim. Maybe if you'd had a perfect pair--you wouldn't have been able to do anything but run up and down on the sand and yell."

"Larry. Ivan. John. They swim." That sick slump is a bad feeling and I guess as difficult for others to bear as for the one who has it. On the other hand, I presume old Doc Kellog had seen it come over millionaires who were known in Wall Street as wolves--so he wasn't particularly amazed to discover it in me.

"Yeah," he said slowly, "Larry and Ivan and John can swim better than you and they would have saved Virginia from enduring as much submersion. But they weren't there and the fact remains that you saved her. Isn't that hero enough to satisfy you?"

"No," I said. And then I didn't want to look at him. So I looked away. I asked how the airplane had spotted us.

He answered--but as if he were thinking about something else. "Why--who they spotted was Connie--running around in the front lawn so she'd attract them. They dipped down to see what made a woman run that way--and she pointed. When they didn't understand that--she dropped down on her knees and folded her hands to them--and then pointed--and finally ran toward the beach. Then they saw you two in the water and came down."

"Who was it?"

"The Millers--and a couple of house-guests."

"Thank God they were out flying--anyhow!"

"Yeah. Easy to see things on the water from the air." He touched me. "Frankie. I think I caught sight of something just now and I'm wondering if you know what I mean?"

"What?"

"You may be too weak to talk--"

"So long as I don't sit up---I'm fine."

"You're in love with Virginia, aren't you?"

I said the only thing I could, under the circumstances. "Look, Doc. Maybe I am.

Maybe not. But if you ever say anything about that notion to any living person--I'll walk all the red-hot road from hell to kill you."

That had no effect whatever on him. He went on thinking. "Let me make a suggestion, Frankie. When Virginia comes around, why don't you go calling on her in her room and tell her in a few simple words that--oh, well--you're a poet. You're supposed to know how to say it. Kiss her--then tell her you love her."

Maybe I was weak and more or less sick. But what he was saying did seem unutterably hard to endure. He offered me a cigarette. I took it. "She thinks I'm her brother. She thinks I think of her as a sister. Any other idea would--why--!"

He shrugged again. "The fact remains that you aren't--and you both know it. The fact remains that some thousands of the best marriages have come from just such--lucky accidents of association. You don't believe me?"

"Virginia just came to me a few days ago," I said finally, "to tell me that she's in love with another man. The advice she wanted was brotherly."

He began to put things back in his bag. His eyes held smiles--but whether they were sad or sardonic, I couldn't tell. He whistled softly as he packed. "Well, John Alden,"

he said, when he had finished.

Doctors make lousy jokes. That was his worst. It wasn't funny and it hurt. He went back to take another look at Virginia, and I continued, as I'd been for weeks, salting the sore of my own helplessness, thinking I should go away, feeling sure that Virginia and Connie also would need me in the months ahead, studying a thousand hypothetical calamities. It is not fun and it creates that kind of fatigue which poisons its own rest.

A game leg. That is the central symbol in my life. From it come my fears and humiliations and, I suppose, such courage and self-possession as I have achieved by struggling against those opposite effects. Often I think that all men have a similar deficiency but that in most it is not so obvious and hence goes unrecognized. Some are greedy and it makes them opulent but arrogant and stupid--vast fools puffing over their lobster bisque. Some are cowards and it makes them clever, but they are cruel for it and at night a street lamp and a blowing branch can undo them.

Perhaps it is impossible to be born without an Achilles' Heel. Mine has a thousand sharp, minute reminders, which show to what small things the senses will lend themselves. When people say, "He legged it for home!" I recollect my state. Or leg of mutton, two feet tall, limpets, limber, even limburger, and legs of chairs and tables, even, once, a man shouting, "leggo." There is no end to this vocabulary of punning self-consciousness. It is as if my inner being desired to call derision upon the outer by taking not only legitimate but also fantastic opportunities.

It's absurd to have to live by such stuff, yet we do. And part of my long meditation after the doctor had gone was nothing more than wishing against the jargon in my head.

There were pills to take that night, and I slept like the drunken until noon. Then, when I rang for the maid and she brought coffee to my room, I learned that Virginia was better and wanted to see me, that the doctor had come and gone leaving permission for it, and that Connie was in New York, making emergency purchases of a nature not specified.

That startled me, under the circumstances. But Virginia's improvement held my surprise in abeyance. I put on a dressing gown that I once saw in a store in Paris. It was of blue, heavily ribbed silk, with a rolled collar, but embroidered down the back in magnificent yellow characters was a Chinese poem the translation of which I had torn up as I read it. People were under the impression that I did not know what my gown said--

but I hoped the Sheffields would import no Chinese servants. There would be looks, to say the least.

Anyway, I put it on because it is elegant, because I felt better, and because Virginia did. Especially that. She was sitting with a tray on her lap and when I came in, her eyes were instantly tender.

"Frankie," she said--the way you'd want a girl to say it if you had one hour to live.

"Don't delude yourself," I answered. "A better man would have done a better job."

"Frankie. Come here."

"Nix. Leave sentiment to mobs, who have so much and such appalling sorts."

She shook her head. "No use. I remember when you swam up. They said we were out there for three quarters of an hour. And your poor--" She pulled me toward her and kissed me then and it was the way you would like to be kissed, if you had one hour to live. The doctor's advice ran into my mind. He'd said to do exactly this. And then, in a few well-chosen words--poetic, he had suggested--I would tell her about my feelings. But no intention could have been farther from me, in spite of the memory. I would not have changed her expression-- for my life.

"You're a darling," she said.

"And you--are exercising an embarrasing prerogative."

"Am I?"

"You are."

"The dialogue is getting silly."

"And you have made me feel silly."

She bowed, then, very formally. "Have some of my coffee?"

"I'll get some of my own." I yelled for Anne.

"Sit? At least be a polite hero."

"I'm no hero. I nearly bungled you."

She changed the subject, after that. My surprise over Connie had been shared by her--only--I knew the reason behind it. She suspected. Like everyone else in the family, she got to her point direct. "Frankie, do you think Mother sees Barney Colby in New York?"

"Good Lord, no!"

"No? Well, I do. And I think you do."

"Why--to both ideas?"

She leaned back and closed her eyes. "For one thing, you didn't deny my first question hard enough. Then--John has been too thoughtful around here for a mere strike at the plant. And Mother borrowed a pair of my shoes, a hat of mine, and my white suede handbag--not a shopping costume. Yesterday morning's society notes said Mr. Colby had leased his Bar Harbor house and was staying in New York indefinitely. Well?"

I mocked her attitude of concentration--leaning back in my chair and closing my eyes. I adopted her tone. "Well--I didn't bounce to your suggestion because I thought any violent reaction might make you fear you were losing your mind. A strike might not make a woman thoughtful, but it would a man. Especially a man like John. He gives his workers a square deal and he hates to see dopes trying to make them believe they're discontented. As for the borrowed clothes, she's done it before; in fact she loves to borrow your things because she wears them so beautifully--has what I believe you call youthful chic. About Mr. Colby's staying in New York--maybe he got a sudden Bar Harbor phobia--couldn't stand to hear the word Maine mentioned. Maybe he is doing business in New York. Maybe he wants to spend the summer lolling around on roof gardens. Maybe--"

She stopped me. "That's terrible poor kidding."

So I was silent.

"You see--she came in this morning early--and apologized for having to leave me today. I couldn't understand it and suddenly she said--'Is it possible for happily married people to fall in love?'" Virginia's eyes came up and hung on mine, steadily, like flame in a still place. "I know, Frankie, that's possible for an unhappily married person. Bill--isn't really married at all. But Connie said that--and I lay here in bed--dying inside myself. I guess she saw the look on my face--because she didn't say any more--just--went. So I thought. And I thought of Barney Colby right away."

"We're grown up," I said after a while. "We ought to be able to face the world the way it sometimes gets--"

Her head shook. "Not Connie and John--breaking up, or anything like it."

"Why?"

"I don't know. I feel scared."

So did I--and I tried not to show it. Of course, Virginia wasn't very ill. Connie could add nothing to her care in any case. But Connie was her mother--and she had run away.

CHAPTER VIII

It was one of those June days so beautiful that you could wake up into it with closed eyes and describe it without looking--the number of clouds, density of haze, strength of sun, temperature, everything down to the fact that the new white roses have at last opened. I wanted to be out in it more than anything on earth, but I had to work. It is my sometimes onerous and often ineffectual chore to write a daily verse for a newspaper syndicate. Letters come from the manager telling me from time to time how many million potential readers I have, and his word "potential" always gives me pause.

This day I had more than one to write, because I'd fallen behind. It was no day for deliberate composition, and besides, the perfection of the weather only heightened a feeling of things impending, of laughs too loud, of failures to laugh, which had become the constant background of affairs at Fort Sheffield. Nothing had happened--nothing at all--but I plugged along against that tentative incubus without much effect. A quasi-sonnet about ants was my third trespass on art. Something for those who find too many morals--those who are always "going to the root of the matter" and then forgetting the foliage and the flowers above. A thought for the day--heaven forbid!--called "Sonnet Against Ants." It is one of a thousand such on my conscience: When I survey the toiling of the ant--

His single-minded energy and zeal--

And when I hear my fellow-men appeal

To those who take it easy, to recant

And ape the striving insect, I will grant

No other earthly creature makes one feel

A greater sluggard--more a ne'er-do-weel,

But, as for heeding such advice--I shan't.

What brooks it any man to spend his life

In dull mechanics of communal strife

Unless some nobler culture is achieved

Or some distress eternally relieved?

What wise-guy's paradise consists of scenes

Where men at last have made themselves machines?

All that sort of thing could produce would be a letter from a lady in Syracuse or Baton Rouge who had a sweet, elderly mother to whom she read my poems every day and it did so brighten their lives, and my mood about that was--the hell with it. There are days for thinking of sweet old ladies and there are days when the unknown relatives of others seem a shade insipid.

It was at about that point in my travail and meditation that Virginia ran upstairs.

Her face was so white that I was out of my seat before she spoke.

"Bill's come," she said flatly. "What shall I do?"

So I had been right about the deceptive quality of the day--for me, anyway.

"Turn in the fire alarm," I suggested. "Get up a game of duckie-on-the rock. Bake a cake! What the deuce!"

Those bum jokes brought her down a bit and she laughed. "Come and meet him, will you? Everybody's out."

"Sure, I'll meet him. And I'll probably like him, which is worse."

We went down to the hall. He was standing there--alternating feet. Not as old as I'd expected--perhaps thirty-two or three. And not a matinee idol, but a dandy jaw and blistering gray eyes. A big guy who could take it--and had--and who looked as if he could dish it out, in the event of physical hazard or debate. America makes a lot of them--

England, too, I guess--and all human history hasn't anything superior to show.

Viriginia said, "This is Frankie--Bill. I've got to go and see about lunch for a minute--Anne'll take your bag--"

She went.

Bill took a long look at me. Then he said, "Virginia didn't have to see about lunch any more than she had to launch a battleship."

"No. She wanted us to be alone for a moment."

He nodded and grinned and so did I. We dived simultaneously for cigarettes and offered them to each other. We started to refuse each other's brands--and then thought that might be rude--so he took one of mine and I took one of his. That's what we did--and yet they say that women are more sensitive than men.

"She told me," Bill then said, "that she'd told you."

"Up to a point."

He nodded. "Exactly. The point of indecision. I shouldn't have come here. I wasn't strong enough not to. She invited me--had her mother postscript the note. Here I am."

He was pitching, I thought, over the plate. "Well," I said, "we Sheffields only have one hour a week for worrying--this isn't it--and we've got better places to stand than the hall."

He turned red. "I'm sorry," he said.

So I had to tell the poor devil it was meant as a joke and I could stand as long as a sentry without discomfort, and we went out on the sun porch and played boys till Virginia came back. We were getting along fine--we'd struck trout fishing in the first two minutes, and realized that there was plenty more for both of us when dry and wet flies ran out. I'd known it. I liked him. He could have slipped into the Sheffield ménage without displacing anybody at all.

Virginia was looking at me as she returned. It was asking a lot after ten or fifteen minutes--but I said "thumbs up" with my eyes.

So she coagulated.

"Connie's playing golf," she said, "and Larry's sailing his boat. John seldom gets home before dinner. Frankie has been writing poetry. Even if I hadn't seen you doing it, I'd know." She was ogling me.

I began polishing my brow with a handkerchief. When I write, it's my personal eccentricity to draw little ovals on my forehead with my pencil. I've started for luncheons and dances and garden parties with a First Grade penmanship exercises neatly tattooed from temple to temple. Can't break the habit. I tried to once by using ink-and that was disastrous.

"How about we should swim?"

Bill said, "Swell!"

I said I'd be down after finishing my work. And Virginia told me not to be long which wouldn't have been necessary, except that by so telling me, she meant I wasn't to hurry. I think that even if she had been my true sister and I hadn't been in love with her, that sort of casual evidence of ties going, old familiarity lost--would have seemed sad.

Half an hour later I was still lying on my bed, and my work was untouched. I hadn't even attempted to sit down at my desk. I'd spent part of that half hour hating my room. Things like that come over people suddenly and they are not always very conscious moods. I suppose it is part and parcel of the same emotional system that makes some people who have stubbed their toes, break them by kicking in revenge against the casual object--as if rooms or stones or furniture contained in themselves the power to offend.

I lay there, methodically despising the walls and pictures, my old trunk and the desk at which I work. I detested my clothes and the sonnet I had just written about ants. I knew why I was doing it, and I realized it was infantile, but I've found that if you try to restrict such feelings as that, you succeed only in driving them to a deeper place, where they can do more harm.

To cure such states of childish outrage, the reverse technique is better. "This room," I said to myself, "is hideous. It is the most ugly cell in cosmos. Spiders should tenant it. Stalactites should hang from the ceiling; there should be ooze on the carpet; and I should be lying here rat-gnawed and gangrenous. It is a penitentiary, a dungeon, a chamber of torture. Those framed paintings and drawings by my friends which have hung upon the walls are blasphemous and ill-gotten. Their decorative value is nil. They are the opposite of aesthetic--crass spectacles that I have masochistically maintained here to dig my sensibilities."

At the end of another fifteen minutes of that I got giggling. After all, it was a darn pretty room. I undressed and put on a bathing suit and beach robe and some sandals.

Virginia and Bill were lying on their backs in the sand in our cove, looking up at the sky. They weren't talking--and I was more envious of that silence than I would have been of any conversation. Words are so ambiguous that the silences we human beings share often have more meaning than our eloquence.

I sat down beside them, and we all smoked cigarettes. Bill said it was a perfect day, and looked at Virginia when he said it. She smiled, and after a while we swam out to the sand bar. It was neck-deep there, and Virginia dove from our shoulders. We'd hold her hands and crouch down in the green-foamed murk until we felt the touch of her feet.

Then we--Bill or I--would surge up and she'd dive--forward or backward or sideways, sometimes landing fiat, splashing and laughing. It was an effort for me--but Bill lunged clear of the water to his waist every time, bursting out like a sea animal and tossing Virginia high and clear.

We had lunch in the solarium. Then Bill drove off with Virginia to see, they said, the Old Stone House in Gilford, and Lyme, and Saybrook, where the Connecticut comes down to the Sound.

I finished my work that afternoon.

Connie came home from the country club at five and made me swim again with her. Before we left the beach, Larry sailed in slowly and moored his boat. He was spending all his time in it, because he was soon due to start work in the Bridgeport factory. We waited for him to furl his sails and row the dinghy from the buoy to the sand.

Then we went up to the house. John was there, and so were Virginia and Bill. They'd made rum drinks-three for themselves and three for us--and we changed in a hurry. It was when we came downstairs again, Connie in a tea gown, Larry and myself in flannels --

when we were holding cool, sweated glasses--that Larry reached a leaping identification of our guest.

"Say!" Excitement made his voice break-a humiliation he had still occasionally to bear. "Say, I know who you are! You're 'Flying Bill' Bush! I read about you in a book!"

Everybody looked at Bill, and he flushed.

Larry's enthusiasm took him out of the realm of ordinary conversation and he addressed us all, as if he were a public speaker, "I remember him from his picture! The book was called, 'Great Moments in Sport.' It was a long time ago--" that youthful presumptuousness scarcely made Larry falter, "--ten years, anyhow. He was playing against Harvard. He was captain--and fullback. They were in the middle of the field and Harvard was six points ahead. One of those terrific things--"

Bill tried to assuage his discomfort by murmuring, "Like the movies."

Virginia was smiling, and so were John and Connie.

But not Larry. He spilled a little of his drink, without noticing it. He made a broad sweep with his unencumbered hand. For him it had become Autumn. The afternoon was waning. The sky was blue and sharp. The stadium was packed. Harvard led. No one was breathing, a whistle blew, a hoarse and desperate quarterback slapped his knees and called signals. Ten white stripes lay between his gritty human machine and the goal posts: "It was one of those terrific things! They spread out for a pass, and Harvard spread to cover it. They gave the ball to 'Flying Bill' Bush. He cracked through the line. An end took out the quarterback. He reversed the whole field three times, and almost stepped over the side lines doing it, and he made a touchdown! Then he kicked the goal."

When he had finished his recital, he was left suspended. The hero worship died out in him. He realized that he had embarrassed Bill. He looked at us in a sort of panic, set down his glass and, muttering something about having to go to his room, he fled. It is difficult to be seventeen.

I thought Bill should have laughed then, but his discomfort had only grown greater. Virginia was looking at him. "You never told me about that."

"No."

John tried to exorcise his embarrassment. "Larry's a little dotty on the subject of football-not to say completely nuts."

Bill nodded. His chin had a curious set and his eyes were looking out through the window. "You see," he finally said, "nobody ever paid any attention to the facts about that touchdown. It was the first time we had beaten Harvard in eleven years and I carried the ball, so I got the credit."

Connie laughed. "It sounds as if you were entitled to a little."

"No." Bill took a cigarette from a box and lighted it. His hands were shaking. "I wasn't. Our left tackle that year was named Spofford. He was a good-humoured guy, with a heart as big as a beer barrel. He wasn't very bright, but he had a funny kind of off-handedness and an insulting smirk that invariably infuriated whoever played against him.

I'd never have gotten away for that run, if Spofford hadn't made the hole. He made it with five ribs broken from the play before. And his collarbone went when he hit the Harvard man. They forgot he was carried off after that play. I did myself. We were all pretty crazed. I got hoisted around on people's shoulders in a snake dance. That night everybody bought me drinks, and girls danced with me. Sunday morning I was allover the newspapers, and I didn't even know Spofford was in the infirmary until late in the afternoon. By that time the victory fire had burned out and the newspapers weren't interested. Spofford won the game and I got the glory." John tried again to heal the dissatisfaction in his eyes. "You both won the game."

Bill went on slowly, "Spoff was in the hospital for eight weeks. He never caught up with his work. It was his last year and he flunked out. Nobody knows where he is now."

"Maybe," Virginia said softly, "he's some place far away, winning some other kind of game where things are tough."

"Maybe. I hope he is."

Nobody said anything then. Ice tinkled as we took sips of our drinks. You could feel people--everybody, including myself--seated there, liking Bill for that recitation, and it made me understand my first impression of him, when I had met him in the hall--that impression of directed power, of strength and control. It would have been so easy for him not to have told all the truth--so simple for him to have accepted Larry's rhapsody as a lucky introduction to the Sheffields.

But he hadn't done it.

Dinner that night was very gay. Bill had made his expiation and thereby freed himself. He fell for the Sheffields, as almost anyone did who had intelligence and feeling.

He'd sailed boats--so he and Larry had a long and uninhibited conversation about matters of which I had by choice remained ignorant. Jibs, luffing and spinnakers, I think. His father had been a druggist and he was a broker, but Bill, nevertheless, had picked up somewhere a small stake of knowledge about brass manufacturing--so he met John interestingly and on his own grounds. With Connie he flirted just the right amount. And he knew one of my verses by heart. At first I thought Virginia had put him up to that, and I was sore. But there was a streak of naïvete in Bill Bush which made him accept at their face values just such sentiments as I had so often rhymed, sometimes cynically and sometimes, for all I know, sincerely.

After dinner he clinched his achievement of the Sheffields. He played the piano.

Not Bach or Brahms--I don't believe he'd have understood it--just jazz, but all the best jazz from all the last nostalgic twenty years--songs that woke in me people forgotten, and unremembered experiences all the way back to my childhood--to his own youth. And for those mnemonic purposes he was a superb pianist. Music came from the piano like a rush of water, like still water, like wind-driven rains--and I think Connie cried, and I know I wanted to.

When it was all over, I understood what Virginia felt about Bill and I knew that however much unhappiness he had brought me--her misery must be infinitely greater.

CHAPTER IX

Bill stayed with us that night. Everyone asked him simultaneously, when it became apparent that he was going to say goodnight. His brief hesitation was all the Sheffields needed for sensing that he could be prevailed upon--and when he said he had to go, they insisted. I insisted, too. For by that time I had forgotten--or submerged--my own lost feelings, and two others gripped me--a liking for Bill, and a devastating sympathy for Virginia.

Bill went out to his car and brought back his suitcase. I suppose he was on his way to see his wife, or had been spending some time with her, although he had said nothing about his own immediate place in his difficult destiny.

He talked about his wife, though--in a fashion that was shy and proud and defensive--in the helpless way adopted by determined people who have no false defenses.

Of course, John knew that he was married, and I suppose he had told Connie--although I have known them to keep secrets from each other--and I have also known them to share secrets, expertly pretending all the while that one of them was innocent. So only Larry could have been uninformed. And not even Larry could have missed guessing how Virginia felt. There were Virginia's eyes, there was the sound of her voice--the way she looked at Bill when he was talking to someone else--the way she looked down when he talked to her.

On the other hand, Bill did not know how much Virginia had told the family about him, and he brought the word "my wife" delicately into the conversation while he was telling an anecdote of business, of a prom at college, or a summer in the Adirondacks--one I have forgotten.

Those two words had cost him all his skill and all his deep integrity. After he had said them he looked at each of us. He must have been relieved to see that if the Sheffields felt concerned, they also possessed grace. So, when he finished his story, he talked about his wife deliberately. He looked at John most of the time, as if he felt that perhaps an older man and a kindly one might find the deepest root of sympathy among us all--or perhaps as if he feared John's censure more than ours. "Joyce--" he said quietly "--that's my wife--was hurt. Quite some time ago. A truck smashed into her car, and since then she's never been able to find the way back to herself. She's in a sanitarium." He amended it, "Sort of a sanitarium." Then he was afraid we wouldn't understand that. "It's very nice.

Beautiful and quiet."

Virginia's eyes were on him, admiring him for this. John and Connie were sad.

"Amnesia," John suggested.

"Something like it. And yet different from most cases. Sometimes she remembers things."

"Maybe surgery--"

Bill shook his head. "Nobody understands what it is. I've had the best neurologists, surgeons, psychiatrists--. Organically she's perfectly sound, now. Of course-

-for a long time--she was recovering, and we thought that her mind would get better--"

John looked steadily across the room at Bill. His voice was even and gentle. "I guess that's just about the worst tragedy that life can put on any body's shoulders. If you can carry that alone, then--maybe--you'll find others--some day--willing to share it with you."

That was a father speaking. Telling Bill the best he could what to do about Virginia. Telling Bill that he had confidence in him. Answering the pained interrogation in Bill's eyes.

It was difficult for Bill to speak at all then. He was still thinking about Joyce, living in the past--yet he was not unmindful of Virginia. So great a bond, expressed in such quiet words is unanswerable. Bill's gratitude for that understanding was like an aura in the room, but his face was still stern with responsibility. "I have a picture of her," he finally said. "If you'd like to see it? A miniature--"

"We'd love to see it," Connie replied softly.

He hadn't taken his suitcase upstairs. Not even left it in the hall. He'd brought it into the living room--the way people do when they're not thinking much about the props and objects surrounding them. Now he opened it--an untidily packed and somewhat shabby case. When he fumbled in it, a pair of socks rolled out on the floor, and he snatched at them and blushed.

We looked at the miniature. It was exquisitely painted. When my turn came, I presumed that even the artist's skill had scarcely done justice to his subject. Bill's Joyce was one of those sculptured, dark-haired girls, with blue eyes. Eyes like sapphire ink, which could write pages with a glance, and books, no doubt, with one slow gaze of mystical affection.

"She's lovely," Connie whispered.

John said, "Tough."

And Larry, "Golly."

Virginia didn't say anything at all. She gave back the painting with a sort of reluctance, meeting his eyes, smiling. All of us knew that he had paid us a tribute, strange perhaps, but very great.

I didn't want to stay in the room after that. Nobody did. We went away one by one and left them there. Virginia and Bill, and the portrait of a beautiful woman, face down against a soiled shirt.

I think I went to sleep without much difficulty. I think my sleep was serene. It was as if that for which I had yearned had finally eluded me, and forces of nature beyond my control had taken charge. To hope was no longer possible; to fear was futile. Under those circumstances, sleep ultimately becomes a necessary blessing.

I slept and do not know what woke me. But suddenly I was quite conscious, sitting up, looking through my window at the moon-powdered night. There was silence all around. But in that silence a sense of schism from normality as if images were walking or trees signalling to each other. Even the Sound was unmurmuring, and the fireflies stood still. It was a time for seeing ghosts. My flesh crept. I felt the presence of eerie vitality, beautiful and black, and I leaned and looked farther out of my window.

Then I saw the authors of my awakening, facing each other in the garden, holding hands. Her arms were bare and so darkened by days in the sun they seemed like shadows against her white dress. He had his back toward me--a square, desiring statue of deeper shadow. They stood that way for a long time. Archetypes of love anticipated, love denied, old love, love in crinolines--armor plate, maybe--and they kissed, slowly, completely, her whiteness confusing itself with his darkness. The flowers exhaled their sacramental and ecstatic attars, a tree frog trilled at the moonbeams, waves returned softly to the shore, and the fireflies recommenced their ceremonial dance in three dimensions.

I do not know how long they kissed. I sat there full of wonder.

If they spoke, I could not hear what they said.

But when they separated--white into white, darkness assuming shape again--she laughed. Her laughter was dulcet and mixed with night sounds.

But that laughter stopped my heart as surely as if a blade had been driven through it. And now I understood what part of the magic had been sinister. For it was not Virginia who had laughed. It was Connie. And I perceived that silhouette of demanding masculinity was Colby.

I lay back on my pillow, full of shock and immediate prescience. All of Connie's previous clandestine meetings had seemed experimental and tentative. One might have said about them that she had been playing with an old situation merely to show herself that it was not formidable. But the garden and the moonlight were too hallowed for any such interpretation, and the kiss had been a sacrilege.

To do anything was impossible, and yet as I lay there I was forced to struggle against any impulse toward activity. I thought of a dozen little things--banging my window down, turning on lights, moaning and pretending to be sick, lighting a cigarette and tossing it onto the lawn. But while I lay in an intentional paralysis, the mood of the night was changed.

A door opened and closed with a cautious creaking. I waited. There were footsteps on the stairs. A long time passed. Another door shut with a sound of much attention. Once more feet whispered. There were rustlings and the touch of toes on the porch. I heard the sound of gravel in the drive--then nothing--and at last the ululation of a motor starting at a distance from the house.

I knew what had happened, but I would not say it to myself. It must have been an hour later when I got up and turned on the light and smoked a cigarette. My pajamas were soaked in perspiration, and there were deep crescents in my palms where I'd pushed my nails. I wanted to wake John.

But I didn't. Instead, I went back to bed and waited for the infinitely laborious birth of daylight. Until the sky had become blue, I did not allow myself to rise.

Then I went to Connie's room and knocked on the door. For a fraction of a second I believed that I might awaken her--but there was no answer, so I went in. And I found the note. It wasn't sealed, and on the envelope was written: "John, Virginia, Ivan, Larry, Frankie."

I took out the folded page it contained.

"Darlings, we're going away together--Barney and I. I don't know where. In some ways I don't know why, but I know that I have to go. I could have done it by telling you all first, and it wasn't fear or shame that kept me from that course. That just isn't the way the Sheffields do things. All or nothing. I love you. You know it. Try to keep on loving me.

Goodbye now,

Connie."

I sat on the padded seat in front of her vanity--sick. A few hours before, there had been her brushes and combs, bright perfume bottles, her pretty jars of cosmetics. Now there was only a streak of talcum powder, pale dust, a symbol of hasty departure.

When the sun came up, I went to John's room and woke him. He opened his eyes and smiled a little bit. "Hello, Frankie." Then he must have seen my face, because he threw back the covers and said, "What's the matter?"

I'd intended to perform that impossible office called "breaking it gently." But as he threw the covers back I remembered what sort of man John was, and I realized its impossibility.

I said, "Connie."

He was puzzled for an instant, and then his color went away. It made his sleep-grown whiskers pathetically visible.

"Gone?"

"Yes."

He moved his head. "Did she--leave a note?"

I gave it to him. He read it.

He didn't say anything. By and by he lay down and shut his eyes. An interval passed. He swallowed once. And at last, with his eyes still shut, he reached out his left hand toward me.

I took it.

CHAPTER X

John and I were sitting in the dining room at eight o'clock. Virginia came down first. She said "Good morning" with that afterglow voice of hers. She smiled at us then and came to a stop before she reached her chair. I could see her grow frightened as she observed us, and her eyes showed that she was trying to guess what made us sit the way we did. She waited a second and had to clear her throat. "What is it?"

"It's Connie," I said. "She went away last night with Barney Colby."

Virginia didn't reply in words. She walked slowly to John, bent over his shoulder, and kissed him. Then she continued around the table to her place, touching my shoulders as she passed me.

John was watching her and he spoke next, carefully making his voice clear. "I think it would be better if we didn't say anything about it, don't you?"

Virginia shook her head. "I don't, John. We'll have to talk. It's better to."

He thought awhile, avoiding her eyes. "Yes."

From upstairs abruptly came the sound of Larry shouting lustily, "Four!--twenty-eight!--thirty-two!--six!--fifteen--let's go!" There was a smacking thud and the din of heavy, racing footsteps. I knew exactly what had happened. Larry had come out of his room just as Bill had emerged from his. There was an old upholstered chair opposite the stair-landing in the hall, and in front of it stood a small carpet-covered footstool. Larry had picked up the stool, called signals, and forward-passed it to Bill. The thud had occurred when Bill snared it.

They were descending the stairs together, laughing. It was a wrong entrance-and now inevitable.

As they came in, Larry was saying: "After I threw it, I was afraid you might rush me. I had visions of being straight-armed through the wall and over the garage."

Bill, of course, looked at Virginia first and kept his eyes on her as his smile faded.

But Larry was so carried away by the proximity of a football titan, even if he was historic--that he behaved less like a Sheffield and more like seventeen years old. "You guys all look mopier than a bunch of wet owls."

John understood it. He had even grinned slightly at Larry's exuberance. "Sit down, son. We've got trouble in the family." He needn't have added that. When John called one of us "son" instead of addressing us by our first names, it always meant that something was wrong. "You see, well--I don't know exactly how to tell you."

Virginia took charge. "It's going to be right on your chin, Larry," she said softly.

"And after it hits you, you've got to stand on your feet. Last night, while we were all asleep, Mother went away with Barney Colby."

Larry didn't move. His face paled and the veins came out his temples. After a moment, he ran his fingers through his gleaming hair two or three times. He turned toward John. "I was afraid she might."

John didn't answer.

"You knew she's been seeing him?" Virginia whispered it.

Larry began to break. He pushed his chair back from the table three or four inches. His face turned chalky; his eyes dilated and became very green. Suddenly he swung his fist in an arc and banged it on the table so that the silver danced. Our coffees splashed. "But I didn't think she really would!" His voice was loud and it broke.

John said, "Cut that!" He spoke quickly and quietly, with the voice of a man meeting a complicated emergency.

Larry gazed at him keenly for a moment, and then his eyes filled. He hitched his chair back in place without a word, and reached for the coffee pot. It chattered against the brim of his cup.

John turned to Bill, "You'll have to excuse--all of us."

Bill just said, "Yes." It was enough.

Nobody spoke for quite a while, and in the rising tension of that silence, I decided a conversation of some sort was necessary. "She may change her mind and come back."

Virginia shook her head at me. "She won't, Frankie. You know that."

"Yeah. I guess I do. All right, guys. She's gone. Let's face it. For one thing, people are going to find out that she isn't here. We've got to decide what we're going to do about that."

"We've got to lie!" Larry said sharply. "She's gone on a cruise! She's in Europe, or in a sanitarium, or sick or something." He looked at his father, hoping that John would be able to invent a story adequate for the situation.

But John nodded "No." He drank some coffee. "We can't do that."

Larry persisted. "Then what can we do? Connie's friends will miss her inside of twenty-four hours! Am I supposed to go around telling my pals that my mother ran away with another man? Just right and left to everybody: 'Mother eloped. Quite gay, isn't it?'"

His voice was rising again.

That stung John.

I said, "If you're going to be a heel, leave the table."

Larry flung down his napkin and ran from the room. He went up the steps, three at a time. We heard his door slam. That made me feel wretched and I started to go up to talk to him. I knew he'd be flat on his face on his bed, crying. He hadn't done such a thing since his childhood--but Larry's regard for his mother had always been fierce, as well as tender--and seventeen is a poignant age for disillusionment.

Virginia made me sit down. "Don't do it. He wants to be alone. He'll come down after a while and apologize. "That's what I want to stop. It'll just make him feel worse."

She regarded me patiently. "Sure. But it'll start him thinking about himself."

I understood what she meant by that. When the first torrent of his feelings had spent itself, Larry would remember that he had behaved badly. That would put him on his guard, and being on his guard would give him courage. Whenever I thought that I understood the Sheffields to the very marrow of their bones, Virginia would do or say something like that--a thing of subtler insight, of swifter recognition.

We had paid no attention to Bill's abashment--but now, as he reached for a piece of toast, John took friendly cognizance of it. "Don't eat that, old man. It's cold. I'll ring for some fresh."

He picked up the little modernistic glass bell from Connie's place.

Anne came in.

"Some fresh toast," John said.

The telephone rang.

We all looked at it--for the extension was beside another of Connie's places--the porch glider where she used to sit and swing and read novels and look at her flowers.

Finally, Virginia walked over and answered it. She said, "Hello," and then, "Oh hello, Martha."

That made me glance at John. His jaw muscles had tightened up. Martha Bigelow was president of the Garden Club, and executive secretary of the Woman's Club. Her family had lived in Reedy Cove for six generations. Martha was a spinster--long-legged, heavy-chinned, tennis-playing and curious. The Sheffields didn't hate anybody--but if they had been haters, Martha would have been high upon their list. I suppose it struck John and me at the same time, that the idea of people like Martha running Connie's name through what we used to call the "meat grinders" was intolerable.

While we were thinking that, Virginia was saying, "Why, no, Martha. Connie's not here. When will she be back?" The question echoed flatly. "I really couldn't say." She was looking at us speculatively now, with the instrument pressed against her ear and covering her mouth, and her free hand drawing nervously on the back of the glider.

She made some sort of decision. "As a matter of fact, Martha, I'm glad you called just now. A rather sad thing has happened, and I think you ought to know it first." John was shaking his head, but Virginia wouldn't look. "You're one of Connie's best friends, and you have a great deal of tact, so that you'll know how to deal with it." Then Virginia told her--simply and directly--who Colby was, and that we didn't know where they had gone.

Back across the wire, audible to us, but unintelligible, came the excited whack and clatter of Martha's voice. Virginia murmured, "I don't know," a couple of times, then said, "Yes, do call back. Good-bye." She hung up.

John had covered his face with his hands and was rubbing his cheeks with their palms. He spoke leadenly. "You shouldn't have done that. It'll be allover Reedy Cove--"

"--in half an hour." Virginia smiled sorrowfully. "I know it, John. That's why I did it. The telephone operators are going to be pretty busy this morning. People are going to call New York, and Greenwich, and half the towns in Westchester. Everybody will know.

I just thought that it would be better if we started it than if it seeped out. Suppose we tried to keep it quiet, and the first place we saw it was in somebody's column in a New York paper? By telling Martha the truth, I took three-quarters of the wind out of her sails. I don't like to have her broadcast it any more than you do, but we might as well go right straight through with it, beginning now."

John made a very slight motion of his head, as if he understood and agreed with her, but he didn't speak.

We weren't ourselves that morning. John least of all. He seemed to have lost his leadership. He was like an animal that had been struck a paralyzing blow. He was conscious of what was going on, but his body and his mind were in a transfixed state.

I think his helplessness increased our own abjection. We sat there for a long time without saying a thing. Then Larry came down the stairs. He walked back to his seat at the table. Everybody carefully avoided looking at him until he spoke. Virginia had been right. He was more restored than any of the rest of us. "Sorry I took it like such a baby, fellows. I've thought of something we've got to do right away."

We were all looking at him by that time.

"Get Ivan down here."

That seemed to bring John out of his blind stupefaction. It gave all of us a slight feeling of comfort. Ivan had finished his exams, but he was staying on for a couple of weeks to complete some work. John walked over to the telephone and asked for the long distance operator.

While he was waiting for the number, Bill spoke again. "There isn't anything I can say to any of you. I'll be leaving in a few minutes now."

John looked up at him. 'There's no need for you to go, Bill." He turned his head a little more. "And maybe Virginia would rather you'd stay."

I had one of those fugitive selfish wishes--that she would act in such a way as to make Bill depart. Instead, she looked at him for several seconds and answered. "I'd rather you would stay, Bill--if you don't mind too much."

He just shook his head.

Ivan arrived before one. He'd got the plane to New Haven and taken a taxi to Reedy Cove. Ivan looks much as John did in his youth. There were differences: his features had a regularity which John's didn't; he was even taller than John; and underlying his appearance of ruggedness, was something of Connie's glamour and dash. It was recklessness, perhaps--that very quality which had made us fear that he wouldn't study medicine. Now that he'd decided to do so, we knew that it would be transformed from a potential handicap to dynamic skillfulness.

He paid his driver, and came up on the porch, carrying a big cowhide bag which I knew was heavy, although he swung it as if it weren't. I'd been sitting there--waiting for him, I guess.

His face was very somber--like John's at breakfast. "Hello, Frankie. H'ya, keed?"

He dropped his bag. The porch trembled. He sat down and fished a cigarette from his pocket. "Anybody know this was coming up?"

"We knew she'd been seeing him. He appeared around here quite a while ago.

Connie once had a hard time choosing between John and Colby."

"I remember. Somebody told me. Aunt Beatrice, I guess."

"There's nothing to get sore about, Ivan."

"Isn't there?"

I saw there wasn't any use trying to talk to him then. ''They're all out on the flat rock. I think maybe they went swimming. I stayed here because I sort of felt I'd like to be alone for a little while."

His expression was barren. "I'd like to be alone, too. In a hole where I'd crawled.

Dead." He banged the screen and slammed the front door, forgetting to take his suitcase.

I brought it in about a half hour later. The Sheffields were still down on the beach.

Anne was setting the table and crying. I'd wanted to be alone--but not as much alone as I felt then.

CHAPTER XI

The days, the weeks that followed were jangled and febrile. Once, in the midst of their helplessness, of the humiliation, of the crumbs and tatters of the countless emotions which rose in all of us, I was reminded of the effect of a boyhood experiment Ivan and I had performed. We had taken a player piano roll, and, with razor blades and a ruler, cut into it random holes, slices, gashes, slots and rectangles. When we played back our handiwork, the result proved to be shocking: groups of juxtaposed keys were slammed down and held, there were miscellaneous runs, and discords of unbelievable violence; yet, emerging through it was an occasional suggestion of what had been the original melody.

Connie's departure similarly devastated the pattern of our lives at Fort Sheffield.

Furthermore, the outside world invaded our lives--senselessly and cruelly. John needed sympathy. But there were few people who gave him the sort for which he hungered. That sort is the sympathy implied in a smile, a handshake, a sturdy clap on the shoulder. Instead of it, he suffered from a smug, gloating egoism, that only disguised itself as sympathy. Such a disaster as ours, although it is common among human beings in the never-ending struggle between instincts and ideals, brings out in many persons opposing emotions, which they are unable to conceal: they feel self-righteous on one hand, and, on the other, they feel that a step like Connie's excuses their own ill-gotten wishes, their day dreams, or even their secret behavior.

There were plenty of them. And John needed all his reserve, all his patience.

I remember Martha on the afternoon of that first day, driving up to the house in a dither, but none the less able to force tears into her voice at the proper time. "You must keep your chin up, John! All of us loved Connie, but all of us knew there was something a little flighty about her. It's your tragic responsibility to yourself to realize that, to the extent you are sad, it is because you have always over-rated your wife. Be strong!"

As if anybody needed to tell John Sheffield to be strong.

I remember Clarabelle Evans, plump and pretty. Her husband was a Wall Street broker, very rich and apt to forget Clarabelle's existence for a month at a time. "John, poor baby! If I were you, I'd just cross her right out of my mind! I'd get right on a boat and go right over to Paris, that's what I'd do! Laugh and play and forget. You're a young man--really. Certainly you can't take Connie seriously when you see how she took you!

And that's not such a bad wisecrack, either!"

There was Orville Briggs, the president of the golf club--a great deal of fat supporting a waxed, amber moustache, as if the whole man existed only to balance the ornament on his upper lip. He walked across two fairways to interrupt a foursome which John and Larry and Ivan and I were playing together. "Rotten thing, old fellow! But, being something of a ladies' man myself, I must remind you that they are like trolley cars-

-another one along any minute. Sometimes the consolation prize is better than the cup!"

John didn't even wince. But I saw Ivan's nostrils dilate and his right hand clenched. He was going to hit Briggs--and he didn't know it. So I put my arm through his, and I said to Briggs, "Maybe you're a ladies' man, but it's pretty obvious that you've never met a lady."

That straightened things out more or less. Briggs turned as red as a Christmas wreath and started back across the two fairways. Larry giggled. John gave me a look--one of the kind you remember afterward and treasure. I van unclenched his hand, took a spoon from his caddy, and socked his golf ball with all his might. It carried two hundred yards, bounced, and rolled the rest of the way to the green.

Later on during that game John sliced into the woods and I put mine on the edge of the rough, so I went in to help him hunt. I suppose what I'd said to Briggs was the thing that made John speak at that time--but I like to think, too, that he talked because there were certain sorts of confidences in the family which he sometimes shared first with me.

He said he'd had a note from Connie.

I went on beating at sarsaparilla and poison ivy with my mashie. . . . Connie had been gone three or four days then, and none of us knew where she was.

"They've left for Bermuda."

I didn't answer.

"She wanted to know whether she should keep on writing to me and asked me to cable her 'yes' or 'no.'"

I had a hope so forceful that I was amazed--a hope that John had cabled "yes."

He stood still, peering around on the ground, but I think he had forgotten he was looking for his ball. His caddie came up and John said, "You hunt in that next little gully."

"I'm pretty sure it's right around here, Mr. Sheffield."

John was unusually curt--for him. "You take the next gully, Mike. We'll look here."

So Mike knew we wanted to talk privately, and he wandered away through the leaves.

"I cabled 'no.''

There wasn't anything to say about that. My heart became cold and heavy again. I threshed the brush and by sheer accident found the ball, for which neither of us had really searched.

"Here it is."

He walked up, nodding. "There's one thing I can't understand about Connie."

"What, John?"

' That note she left when she went away. Where she said she could have talked to us all about it, but that it wasn't like the Sheffields."

There was an inexpressible bewilderment in his voice. I tried to explain.

"I think I do, John. That 'all for one' business. We don't bicker in our family. We don't salt our wounds. When we decide to do things, we usually do them straight off--

abruptly--decisively."

He shook his head. "Not things like that. Connie was wholly wrong when she maintained that eloping in the night without a word to anybody was typical of what we've stood for. Look at Virginia and Bill. She's facing a dilemma--and what's she doing? She talked to you and she talked to me, and she brought Bill here." He sighed. "Nope. That's what made me cable Connie not to write. Some important part of her mind must have had a wrong slant on everything. And what's hardest for me to bear is not her going away with Barney--but how she did it."

I felt that his distress had taken possession of his habitual honest judgment.

"We're supposed to be modern in our family," I said. "Sophisticated--even a little gaudy.

Now we've been hit where we live-and we've found out that we're not quite so worldly-wise as we thought. Wife--mother--home--another man--they're more primitive factors than all our fancy polish. They go deeper. They're racial concepts. And when they're destroyed--or even disturbed--well, a man who wouldn't be rocked by it would be a pretty empty man."

My speech was sententious, I guess. Anyway, John seemed to have said all he wished. He picked up the ball and walked out of the woods.

It was the next day--or the day after, that one of the tabloids got the story. Larry brought a copy of the paper up to us when we were having a cocktail before dinner.

Virginia and Bill, John and Ivan and myself--sipping our drink, trying to make conversation, but actually hiding embattled silences. Fort Sheffield had now become a true fort, with all its defenders wounded, and the besieging world showering down fatuity, unkindness, and explosions of long-accumulated envy.

We knew that Larry had brought some fresh material of assault. His face took pallor easily, and his features were too fine to hide minute distortions. For some juvenile reason, he held the paper behind him as he came into the room--then threw it on the floor so that we could all read its headlines:

SOCIALITE MOTHER ELOPES

WITH EXPLORER

(Story on Page 3.)

Underneath, filling the rest of the front page, was a photograph of Connie, which had been taken at some benefit or other. She looked attractive and efficient, and not at all like a woman who would elope with an explorer, or anybody else.

Larry turned the page, and we saw the inside banner:

ABANDONS HOME FOR LOVE

Rich Mother of Four Pursues Romance

with Captain B. K. Colby

Former War Flier Is Famous Naturalist

Larry's Adam's apple worked and his voice was frenetic. "We ought to kill the guys that run this filthy sheet!"

John had taken out his pipe and was standing over the newspaper, looking at it.

On the third page, there was a picture of Colby, posed over a dead rhino, with a gun in his hands. It was a romantic picture all right. Colby looked strong and calm--which he was.

John turned from his scrutiny toward his younger son. "There isn't anything in that paper that isn't true, Larry."

"Just the same--!"

John shook his head. "It's only another of the things that Connie left in the deck for us."

Somehow that figure of speech made me feel extra badly. It suggested that John, unknowingly, believed Connie had stacked the deck against him, that she had cheated deliberately and meanly. And I knew it wasn't that. She'd reverted to something that she'd forgotten existed--she'd been swept away--she'd sacrificed all of us to whatever had consumed herself--but I knew something of what Connie must also at times be suffering, and it seemed to me that John had lost sight of that. All of them shared parts of that reaction, and sometimes I did myself, although I thought more about Connie than they did.

Perhaps my very detachment from the family in the fact of my birth gave me a better perspective. But I think that was not the reason. I think a peculiar bond between Connie and me had risen up from dim levels of my mind to cogency and strength. For it was Connie who had decided to adopt an unlikely little four-year-old suffering from the after-effects of poliomyelitis--instead of the little girl for whom the quest had been undertaken. That impulse of Connie's, almost twenty years ago, now brought out my loyalty--just as the fact that she was their wife and mother reduced the loyalties of the other Sheffields to dismay.

I hadn't talked to Virginia alone until that night, and I did it after supper. We walked down to the fiat rock together and sat there while she spoke in a dazed, fumbling way.

"I'm so mixed Frankie!"

"Of course you are. The thing to do is just to sit and wait."

"I can't help thinking--"

"Thinking what?"

She reached her bare arm through the dusk. "I never have any cigarettes, do I?

Just thinking. I guess I won't go into it."

But I knew. "I wouldn't draw any dopey analogies, if I were you."

"You've got a lot of intuition, haven't you?" she said softly. "I've seen it work a thousand times. So accurately. It's often made me wonder what your parents were like.

Particularly your mother. She must have been quite wonderful."

I couldn't say anything to that.

"How can I help drawing parallels, Frankie? Two men--one woman. Two women-

-one man. Is it so different?"

"Yes," I said. "It's different. As different as day from night." 78

"You're not telling the truth, Frankie. You're trying to kid me--or yourself."

"Why don't you just not think for a while? Sleep and eat and live on it? Nature has a way of dealing with all these things."

"Nature!" She sounded bitter. "God! The difference this has made, even in my memories of Connie--!"

"I wouldn't search through those memories, now. Wait. Wait a year."

"Do you think a year would make any change?" Then she relented. She took my hand for an instant. "You're sweet, Frankie. Let's go back to the house."

When we reached it, piano music was pouring through the open windows. I realized it was a duet. Ivan was the only one of us who had made anything of his music lessons, and he was playing with Bill. It was an exciting combination, for Ivan was very skillful, and what Bill lacked in a knowledge of counterpoint and harmony, he made up with feeling. They were playing "Moonlight on the Ganges," but, as we came into the room, they changed their melody. Bill began something unfamiliar. Ivan glanced at him with perplexity on his face, and then commenced to make occasional interpolations.

Virginia and I sat down and they rehearsed the unknown song until Ivan had caught it. "What is it?" he asked.

"A little thing," Bill answered, "that I ran up by myself."

"It's swell. Let's try it in three fiats. Okay?"

"That's an idea!"

They tried it in three flats.

I've said that those days and weeks in the Sheffield house were not unlike the monumental discords Ivan and I had once created for a player piano. But this duet added a new element of music that was real. Bill's composition got into my veins as I sat there.

It was a blues piece, both stirring and bizarre, and suddenly I jumped up with an idea.

"Look you guys! You've got something! You need words!"

They stopped playing, and Bill glanced up. "Elegant! What words?"

"I think," I said, "I could knock off a little thing called, 'You Can't Tell Time by an Elevator Dial Blues.'"

So we all went to work. That's how the song was written. And the song was the first of many rites that finally led us back toward normality.

It was a fine composition with a stirring chorus and it became our theme song. It made us laugh. Everybody wrote his own words for it, in the end. Larry had a number called, "You Can't Graze Cows in a Locomotive Cab Blues." Virginia's was, "A Peach Won't Grow on a Huckleberry Bush Blues" And even John suggested, "Way Down South with the Byrd Expedition Blues."

Days passed. Days and more days. Months.

Bill stayed a week that first time, and two weeks more in August. Larry went to work in the Bridgeport factory--where John had succeeded in settling his labor difficulties. I finished my thesis. A season came when even Anne was no longer red-eyed--when Barry, the gardener, ceased avoiding casual contacts with us--when our friends and acquaintances began to re-accept us with the unemotional regard in which they had held us before Connie went away from Reedy Cove.

We even knew something about her. She and Colby had spent a month in Bermuda. Then the Adirondacks. Then the Canadian Rockies. People had met them and written to us. H was a forlorn form of communication--but it was all we had. None of the other Sheffields listened voluntarily to any such second- or third-hand information, but I would seek out every informer alone and ask questions.

Autumn finally came. Ivan went off to medical school. I got my Ph.D. Larry made an unusually somber departure for his year at Ridgely. It was his last. John had an idea, bought some stock in an airplane company, watched its value drop to one-quarter of what he had paid, bought more, and found himself suddenly a director in a corporation that manufactured amphibians. So he began to talk to us about aerodynamics and foreign markets--and a beautiful little silver-colored model of a plane came to rest on our living room mantel.

I had intended to teach that year, and I had been corresponding with several schools. But I gave up the notion for the time being. My excuse was that I wanted to do some research in Early English and Anglo-Saxon--Beowulf, and so on. Nobody was completely fooled. They knew, at least, that I didn't want Virginia and John to be alone in that big house all Winter.

And I knew that it was Virginia.

One day in October I got a letter from Connie.

CHAPTER XII

Connie's letter was in a plain envelope and the address had been typewritten. She had also typed "Personal" on the envelope--and I had assumed it was a missive from someone· about my poetry. It was post-marked "Los Angeles, California," and I had kept it for several days unopened. I always let letters from nice old ladies and aspiring boys and girls accumulate until my conscience and a rainy day combine to get them answered.

Thus I found her note between the familiar, "I was deeply touched by your reference to the Cumberland Valley, having been born there in 1888," and the one which said, "I know it is presumptuous to ask a busy author to act as critic, but, nevertheless, I am enclosing herewith some of my verses, and would like to call your attention particularly to one entitled, 'Sweet Grass.''

It was very brief:

"Dear Frankie:

I have thought and hoped all these many weeks that somebody would somehow communicate with me, and now I know that I must ask for it.

Frankie, I can't bear not to hear once in a while, at least how you all are getting along. I can't bear, either, to write to any of my own children. But I thought that you, who are not my child, and yet in a sense even more mine, might understand, and, for the sake of old times and old things, send me a word now and then. Just a few lines about all of you every month or so would add so much to my life here with Barney. Not that we aren't happy.

I know this is a kind of blackmail, but I am blackmailing you gladly—

Will be at the Yucca Inn, Palm Springs, this winter,

Always,

Connie."

My first impulse was to rush with the letter to Virginia. But I didn't. Maybe that was wrong. However, Virginia had made an unspoken pact with the other Sheffields to avoid every vocal memory and reminder of Connie. I suppose I was afraid that Virginia wouldn't share the emotions which that pathetic note had given me. I was afraid that she would be unsympathetic toward me for allowing myself such emotions. So I burned the letter.

For two or three days I tried to make up my mind whether or not to answer it. I didn't want to be disloyal to the Sheffields. If they learned that I was in communication with Connie, their reactions toward me might make life with them no longer possible, and I dreaded that idea.

Most of all, I worried over the assumptions I made about Virginia--for her attitude toward her mother was not a mood. It had lasted all summer and into the Autumn without changing--unless, perhaps, it had strengthened. To think that she might turn upon me with unspoken invective, with negative silence, made those days of consideration sleepless and tormented. I could not be Virginia's lover. But I still treasured her friendship above everything else--in the world, I guess. On the other hand, if Connie had not reached out with her abundant affection toward that paralyzed four-year-old kid who had been myself, I would never have known those rich, ecstatic years.

In the end, I wrote to Connie fully. I told her the truth--all of it--how everyone was and how they felt about her and what they were doing and how well they were, and my own dilemma.

An answer came back by return mail. I suppose she would have sent it by air, but she had been afraid that she'd attract attention. The second letter had no formal salutation.

She wrote it all in one paragraph:

"Oh, Frankie, you darling, I have read your letter a hundred times, and you will never know what it has done for me and how much happier it has made me with Barney!

I sacrificed the respect of John and Virginia and Ivan and Larry, and that was the price I was willing to pay. A price I paid gladly. But I did not anticipate how dreadful it would be no longer to know anything about them. There is a wonderful company that re-mails letters from various points, and I'll use them when I write again, so that nobody will suspect that I am corresponding with you. Thanks, thanks, thanks. Love, Connie."

That letter I burned also. I did not hear from Connie again for some time, although I wrote to her twice to supplement my first information.

Then a letter came, full of the subtle seeds of anxiety--anxiety for me. There was nothing definite--no complaint, no dismay, no abnormal nostalgia--just an over-attention to minutiae both in Connie's speculations about the family and in her reports of herself.

She wanted to know if we'd had many colds and if Virginia had taken her annual

"shots" for them--what John had done about the bad heating in his office and whether or not there were chains in the garage for all the cars. She told of a dinner party which she and Barney had given for a half-dozen people in one of the hotels at Palm Springs; she listed the food and forgot to name the guests. She wondered if the rose beds had been thoroughly mulched and wrote a paragraph about the year in which the Tailsmans had been winter-killed. They'd had a picnic in Palm Canyon, and again she told me about the salad and the sandwiches--and they'd seen a big-horned sheep against the skyline back in the mountains. She wrote too about the weeks that followed my adoption--a number of little things she'd never told me--things I'd said that had won their affection--and even included a vague hint that at first John had been dubious about adding me to the family.

Detail was never Connie's forte, and such a melancholy medley of it was out of character. Some people are born to truckle with the trivia of their environment, but she lived above them. The letter meant that she had sunk spiritually--that she was trying, perhaps, to conceal from herself a great dissatisfaction by inventing ten thousand minor problems and responsibilities. The psychological effect was the same as that produced by a person counting repetitious patterns on the wallpaper. It made me nervous. And her guarded reminiscences about my early childhood were like an unconscious attempt to make me feel a duty debt to her.

As if I didn't already consider my very life a glad forfeit.

A forfeit I could not redeem in any part. I destroyed that letter and wrote some rhythmic claptrap for my syndicate--Iast-Ieaf-of-autumn stuf--

"Gingerly, boys, testing the thin new ice--

Shrill winter birds--a frost device

Upon the pane . . ."

The afternoon fell. Windows of a distant house turned red-gold, there were footsteps in the attic above my room--Virginia's footsteps--and I wondered what she was doing there. So I gave up trying to find a rhyme for "orange" and went to see.

A nude bulb swinging from the ceiling made the shadows of trunks and hatboxes swell and shrink and swell again. In the middle of the floor was a great pile of clothing, and Virginia was folding it away in the trunks. I walked across the bare floor, and of course Virginia recognized me without turning.

"Hello, Frankie. I'm glad you came up. I was getting tired. I need help. Putting away Connie's things."

"Yes, I see."

"Time somebody did it." She sounded conscientiously matter-of-fact. "Guess it is."

"I brought everything from all the closets downstairs." I picked up a light, faun-colored coat--one that was just the color of Connie's hair, and as I turned it inside out, shoulder to shoulder; and doubled it in the middle, I was stunned physically by remembrance of her.

Virginia knew what had happened--though I didn't at that instant. "It's the perfume she uses. On everything. I guess that's why nobody did this job before. You can't go into her room without--" Virginia touched a pile of shoes with her toe. "I know that we really should give these things away. People could use them. Plenty of people. But I can't bear to do it."

"No," I said, "we can't give them away." I was still submerged in the scent--in the memory of Connie. It was like having her walk into the room. And now my eyes began to pick out garments one by one. Mules, a dressing gown, an apron, a negligée, an old coat, and a beige summer suit, a pair of driving gloves--and some of them went back to long, long ago. There was one apron, in fact, that I had wet with my own tears over a tragedy I couldn't remember now, but I could see the very place in the embroidery where I had put my head.

Virginia kept watching me, and finally she said, "Cut that out! I don't enjoy this any more than you do, but somebody's got to be tough--tough enough to get through this life one way or another, at any rate. Got a cigarette?"

We sat down on a trunk and looked at the many-hued heap in front of us, holding our lighted cigarettes and not smoking. "Hell of a thing," I said after a while. "And I know what you mean by tough."

Virginia's shoulders moved in a slight shrug. "Clothes. I wonder what they do with people's clothes when they die? That must be awful too. Just think. Everybody dies and leaves behind clothes, and somebody has to do something about them, and usually the somebody knows every garment and its history and remembers pleasant things about it--happy things--funny things--and silly things, like when they spilled the lentil soup on that evening dress and a piece of sausage got lost down the front--it's more real to look at somebody's clothes sometimes than it is to look at the person. The person is immediate and full of what's going on, but the clothes are permanent and loaded down with just the same kind of ideas you maintain about an individual. I'd have asked Anne to do this, but I knew she'd break down and cry--"

"Sure."

"I almost did myself. Maybe I will yet. But I'm going to have Connie's room redecorated next week. New everything, from the paint on the woodwork to the spreads on the beds. Maybe that'll help. What do you say we fold?"

So we folded until the heap disappeared, and we put down the trunk lids and snapped the locks. Then we switched out the light. The trunks, the hatboxes, the suitcases--all the discarded impedimenta that uselessly exist in garrets--disappeared in the dark, and we went out of the room hurriedly--glad to shut the door and turn the key.

That night when I was undressing I changed "orange" in my verse to "yellow"--

which gave me mellow and fellow and bellow and even Jello, if I wanted it, and I was thinking such gibberish as, "He hurled the yellow Jello, and the fellow gave a bellow,"

when I reached into my pocket for a cigarette. It was a patch pocket on a tweed coat, and besides the cigarette I found a rhinestone ornament from the dress Connie had worn on the night Barney Colby had first called. It had apparently caught on the pocket that afternoon and dropped in, but since a good part of our lives impinges upon such accidents, maybe they are not accidents at all. For it meant that when Virginia and I had shut the attic door, we had Dot successfully banished the aromatic garments behind it. I put the glittering little object on my desk and stared at it until its artificial fires became hypnotic and like a crystal ball it produced pageants of things remote.

Over my gentle dreaming hung the incubus that had fallen on the house of Sheffield, blurring thoughts and blotting feelings: nobody was himself or herself any longer, and even Virginia was talking about the necessity of being tough. I felt emerging from within me some sensible factor that had been struggling for existence through the past many weeks. Connie had abandoned us and we had abandoned her--officially now, with the immolation of her clothes. We, her sons, her daughter, and her husband--I, who owed her the difference between all the love and all the opportunity of my life and, probably, a newsstand on a cold street corner.

Something was horribly wrong.

I knew what by-and-by. The rhinestones told me, winking in the lamplight. Or maybe it was the particular perfume she had had made ever since I could recall, seeping down from the attic, invisible and everlasting, romantic as gardenia, elusive as sound in a fog.

Somebody had to see Connie.

She had lived for us. She would still live through us. Her kind of existence was dependent upon vital actualities, upon the sun and body temperatures and smiles observed. Photographs were not for Connie-not even my words, sterilized by three thousand miles of flight.

And somebody, of course, meant me. It might have meant Virginia if Virginia had not been trying by cold observation of Connie's fates to determine her own. But in any case there would have been none but the two of us.

I felt frightened--and ecstatic. I put the rhinestone in the plush-lined box with my studs, to be the amulet for my future destiny, and I began to plan. Presently, also, I began to whistle--aimlessly but with determination.

It wasn't going to be easy. In the first place, I would have to alibi the journey so strongly that none of the Sheffields would suspect what I was doing, and in the second, upon my return, I would have to hide whatever I had discovered about Connie. I began to realize as I pondered that it would require extraordinary skill to deceive them. And yet in their present dejected state it might not be impossible. I would have to have some one invite me away and embark apparently for that person's abode. I would have to write letters to be mailed from that place during my absence. It would be best, perhaps, actually to spend some part of the time I was absent with whatever friend I chose to be my proxy host.

At first I thought that I would wait until after Christmas, and then it occurred to me that going away for Christmas would be more effective. I would say to John and Virginia that so-and-so had invited me here-or-there for a couple of weeks over the holidays--and the very abnormality of my acceptance (I'd never missed a Christmas at Fort Sheffield) would fit in with the unnaturalness of our present lives. They would understand my wish to be away during the season of so many former hilarities, and, while they could imagine that might some day be audacious enough to visit Connie, they would never conceive my audacity to be great enough to take me at that time to the source of all our wretchedness. Thus, by the very boldness of going to see Connie at Christmas, I might in a large part eliminate the suspicion of it.

That scheme relieved me a good deal, and I began to think of friends. Somebody en route. I'd fly of course. Flying is beautiful and exalting--and when the girl you love is going to marry another man, when you have already undergone some slight but sempiternal part of bodily destruction, you do not fidget with apprehension over the remote possibility of scattered duraluminum and blood on a snowy mountain. Somebody in Chicago or St. Louis or Kansas City.

I ruffled through a mental roster of classmates from the Middle West and settled finally on Jimmy and Isabella Weyburn. They had a ranch outside Cheyenne. They had a villa in Nice, too, and an apartment in New York, but they were lovers of the outdoors.

Not the mystic sort who find poetry in uncurling ferns and melodrama in the setting of the sun, but participators, who hunted out nature in her rawest parts and attacked there with glee, gusto, and myriad stirrup cups. They spent their lives on unmanageable moving things: skis, snowshoes, dog sleds, skates, aquaplanes, toboggans, decks of fishing boats, diving boards, the backs of horses, canoe seats--and possibly pogo sticks for quiet evenings at home. Cheerful people-and if they were never still, they were seldom out of equilibrium. For the Weyburns to be so generally meant a plaster cast or crutches at the least.

My selection of the Weyburns was a further inspiration. They always spent Christmas at the ranch. They'd often asked me to visit them there. They knew the other Sheffields only slightly.

So I decided. And that night I slept the first sweet sleep I'd had since Connie had walked in the garden with her lover.

In the morning I took the train to New York. Whether the Weyburns were in their apartment or abroad or in Wyoming I did not know, but I was sure that wherever they were I could reach them by telephone, and I was so eager to have my purpose kept a secret that I would not risk a call abroad or even to Wyoming from anywhere in Reedy Cove. The operator might talk.

Luckily they were still in their apartment--their western hegira imminent but not yet undertaken--and I found them chafing gaily at the stuffy unendurability of metropolitan existence, drink bourbon while the parlor maid put slip covers over the furniture, and tearing open huge packages from Spalding and Abercrombie and Fitch.

When I told them I was coming to visit them on their ranch, Isabella clapped me on the back so hard she broke a collar button and Jimmy promised that in a fortnight I would be chewing nails and spitting rust, parting my hair with a blow torch, picking my teeth with dynamite, or some such thing. I had to tear them from a catalog that showed a snowplow attachment for a tractor in order to explain my true intentions, but once they realized that there was trouble in the house of Sheffield and that I did not wish to play polo in the Northern Lights, they were filled with sympathy and suggestions.

Afterward I embarked upon the mission I had used as an explanation of my trip to town-Christmas shopping--and I thought amusedly, as I rode inch-meal by taxi from store to store, how one lie leads to another and a dozen others. The prospect of seeing Connie pleased me so deeply that everything pertaining to it became an adventure, and I imagined myself as a sort of Jimmy Valentine committing a technical crime for a philanthropic purpose and adroitly concealing each separate step of the deed.

It is difficult to shop for people like the Sheffields. I learned that long ago. They are provided with all the necessities; most of the luxuries are commonplace to them; the things which they would appreciate are sometimes trifling. On account of that, I have made it a practice through the years to note some little item that Virginia had desired and denied herself or some larger acquisition that Larry has not had the courage to request.

For him I went to my tailor and established a credit. I judged that Larry was as tall as he would ever be and that he would not gain much weight in the next ten years, so the credit covered full evening dress and all its accessories, a topper and white gloves, shirts made to measure, a chesterfield and even a cane with a gold head. In my day a dinner jacket and a gray felt hat excessively battered, together with a giant envelope of coonskin, was de rigeur. Now, however, I note our youth immaculate in "white tie"--even when indulging in that conniption called the "Big Apple" to the maniacal fanfare of Benny Goodman.

For Ivan, at an optical shop, a new fangled microscope, the name of which I had heard him mention wistfully. Its price was a shock to me, but I daresay that Ivan's scrutiny through it may someday repay his fellowman a million fold.

John and I had one paramount taste in common: fishing--and it was not limited to the taking of trout in his private brook. I had watched--him during the past summer as he read accounts of the international tuna-fishing tournament off Nova Scotia, and he had also kept track of the weights of individual fish caught off the Jersey Coast in late August and early September. John is a powerful man, and I could imagine nothing more satisfactory to his soul in the years ahead than the violent endurance necessary to lick a big bluefin tuna. I bought him a Stevens reel, a big beauty with two cranks, a winch.

really, and a thousand yards of line that would not snap wet with a strain of two hundred pounds.

That left Virginia. As usual. I could seldom decide what to buy for Virginia. It was easier when she had been a child. The whole family had solemnly added to her collection of china elephants. That in itself was an idea. Nobody had given her one for a long time. So I hunted around and discovered two that I liked--a Venetian glass beast with purple eyes and a modern one whose trunk was consolidated with his forelegs. Still, that was only a gesture. I had brought along a snapshot of Bill, filched from her vanity, and I arranged to have that enlarged and framed. Then I looked at bracelets, hostess gowns, a sable neckpiece, and cocker spaniels. I liked the dogs best, but I thought that if she ever ran away with Bill, John and I might inherit the cocker and there was already welzschmerz enough among us. That led me to wondering if she would ever go away with Bill, and I doubted it, but I realized another thing: she lived on a relatively small allowance--her bank account was generally down to zero at the end of every month--

perhaps that circumstance unconsciously prejudiced her freedom of action--and the whole estate of her grandmother had come to me. I knew she would never ask John for money if she decided to leave Fort Sheffield as Connie had left, and I presumed that a good part of Bill's income was required to maintain Joyce in comfort, so I wrote two checks--one for the family to see at Christmas time and one which I hoped she would accept privately.

That left the servants, and I had some fun. A new dress for Anne and a scandalous collection of anecdotes about high society. A pipe for Berry and a subscription to Ballyhoo. . . .

I caught the six o'clock and was late for dinner.

At dinner I broke the news:

' Whom do you think I ran into while I was in Saks this morning?"

Neither Virginia nor John could think of whom I ran into at Saks.

' The Weyburns!"

John made his demitasse say, "Who the devil are the Weyburns?"

Virginia supplied the data. "I know! He's your boy-scout classmate who married a girl scout! Remember, John? They week-ended here a couple of years ago with the Howards? Wore out all the horses, ate all our food, took ten years off the parquet in the living room teaching us how to truck, and went away with a hullabaloo that didn't die out until they reached Greenwich?"

I nodded. "That's the Weyburns."

"What people! I bet they don't turn out the electric lights when they go to bed. I bet they blow them out like candles! What were they doing in New York? Pushing over buildings?"

"Unh-unh. Getting ready to spend the holidays at their ranch in Wyoming. They asked me to go, and I said I would."

"For Christmas?" John's voice was startled.

This was the crucial moment. "For Christmas. I know it seems like abandoning ship--but I thought maybe you'd understand the impulse that made me accept. Larry and Ivan will be here and--"

John avoided my eyes. "Frankie, if you think what's happened is going to open up any schism here at home--"

"It's not that, John. I just felt that I couldn't stick it here around Christmas. It's selfish, but I want to get out and bust around in the snow with people who don't have anything on their minds more emotional than what's for dinner." I looked at Virginia.

"Bill will be here, too."

She glanced at her father and then at me. She spoke softly. "I understand that, don't you, John? Frankie's been sitting like a rock through all this, and we ought to give him a leave of absence."

"Hell," John said after a moment, "we'd give him a solid gold submarine if he wanted it." He turned to me and his face shone warmly. "We'll stock you up with buffalo robes and foot-heaters and Indian guides and send you off with our blessing."

It was as easy as that.

Five days later I was on my way.

I stayed along enough to establish my alibi. Then I started for California.

CHAPTER XIII

The Weyburns put me on the train. They would have liked to have "poured" me on, and they might well have carried me on, but I succeeded in dodging the majority of their stirrup-cups and I had been abstemious to some degree in the matter of outdoor sports. The word "sport," in fact, is an odd one to apply to activities which are always exhausting, generally dangerous, and frequently painful. It has been my observation that some people are made of tougher protoplasm than others--and that the nervous systems of the hardier few record only very grave injury. Thus I find myself quite conscious of such minor damages as bruises, wrenches, strains, abrasions, floor-burns, blisters, cuts, scratches, scrapes, bumps, black eyes, loosened teeth, broken nails, slivers, thorns, ivy poison, bee stings, spider bites, chilblains, frost bites, and also hangovers--but the Weyburns and others of their ilk suffer pain from nothing less than a compound fracture.

It is my hunch, furthermore, that a great many of those heroes who have carried important dispatches in their saddle-bags, and, at the same time, arrows in their loins, had ganglia like the Weyburns. I was worse for the wear, beyond peradventure, but I had had a pretty good time.

Perhaps I may have given a wrong impression of myself in these anfractuous memoirs. I've spoken often about my lameness and about its psychical effect upon me.

Then I've said that I swam well, and I was now on the point of recounting my adventures while skiing and snowshoeing with my Wyoming host and hostess. If I have implied a paradox, it was unintentional.

Maybe my consciousness of imperfection is overdetermined. If so, it is due, first, to memories of my youth, when I used crutches--and second, to my deep feeling for Virginia who is as near to perfection as a mortal may be. My right leg, which never completely recovered, is neither shorter nor smaller than my left, but it tires more easily and co-ordinates less exactly, so that, although many people insist that my limp has become negligible, and although it seldom inhibits my participation in any event, I am forever aware of it.

I note also that there are thousands of estimable people who would regard that self-consciousness as absurd--who would not only ignore such an affliction as mine but forget it. The attitude has often been forcefully urged on me, and my only answer is that I am different--my philosophy of life is different.

Anyway, the Weyburns put me aboard a Pullman and threw snowballs at my window when the train pulled out.

I shut the door of my compartment and went through the rite of transforming myself from a muffled nomad on the white Wyoming slopes to a tentative adventurer in human relations. My reservations at the Desert Flower Inn were under the name of Smith.

Naturally I would have to be incognito while I was in California. My face is not so familiar to the public that I was in any fear of being recognized, but my name is well enough known so that I would not dare register it at a hotel.

I had not told Connie that I was coming. I reached Palm Springs before dawn on the nineteenth of December.

It is a dramatic place. Above the patterned carpet of the surrounding desert--vast, vertical, frost-headed--rises Mount San Jacinto. Because its draws and gullies are lost in its immensity, the desert seems flat. And it is not bare--upon it grow greasewood, smoke trees, willows, palms, sagebrush, mesquite, and everywhere the tortured nodes and lumps of cacti. Beyond all those are lesser mountains which, at the two extremities of day, turn lavender, pink, purple, chocolate, beige--a tumultuous edge of the world, down which blue canyon systems run like the veins of leaves.

Between the chill of night and the first hot thrust of the sun there is no interval, and as I was driven from the train to the hotel, the transformation occurred. The lunar land around me had been cool, pungent, and pastel-colored. The sun came, and it was a crucible. We sped through the awakening town--a thousand red tile roofs, Spanish façades, a big bell in a white stucco tower, archways, water rushing from the mountain through an irrigation ditch with a sound like a vibraphone, eucalyptus smoke, and the smell of waffles and coffee, a bicycle bell, and jazz music from a radio in a house hanging high above the dusty road among henna boulders.

I liked it. It was stunningly beautiful; the air was charged and stimulating; the people looked friendly; and in spite of bicycle bells and waffle smells, it seemed raw and vivid--a jumping-off place--old, historic--and romantic as the devil.

My rooms in the Desert Flower Inn might well have stood upon a spot where eighty-five years ago some covered wagon expedition was scalped to a man or perished of thirst. But they contained, nevertheless, the quintessence of today's American elegance: many windows, thick carpets, tall mirrors, sleek and efficient bureaus and vanities, closets lined with cedar, beds that expressed sleep by their very touch, elaborate fixtures of chrome steel and colored vitreous materials, indirect lights, half-hidden vents for conditioned air--which was chilled when the sun blazed and warmed on crystalline nights, framed paintings bought in Mexico by a decorator who had taste and imagination, an open fireplace and a basket of prepared wood, a desk, tables, luggage racks, and telephones--all that is meant by modernity--the world waiting for a button-push.

I tipped the bellboy and went out on the balcony. Below me was a patio, full of flowers, flagstones, and little bridges which crossed a miniature arrangement of ornamental canals. A Jap was weeding the flowers. Two men with hoses were scrubbing the flagstones. A bellboy in a green and gold uniform was hurrying through the bright fragrance of the place.

I whistled and he looked up. "Can you get a waiter to bring me some orange juice and coffee?"

"You bet."

I grinned at that. You bet. It was, indeed, the West. When I had finished my coffee, I unpacked. Then I bathed. I dawdled over closets and bureau drawers and over my ablutions too. It was nine o'clock before I allowed myself to phone the Yucca Inn and ask for Barney Colby's apartment.

Connie answered the phone.

I said, "Hello, Connie. This is Frankie."

I could hear my heart beat.

She spoke after a long silence and in a whisper. "Frankie! Where are you? What's happened? What's wrong?"

I felt as expansive and as ecstatic inside myself as it was outdoors. "Nothing's wrong, Connie! And I'm in Palm Springs! At the Desert Flower Inn, under the name of Franklyn Smith. Same initials--"

"Frankie," she said softly, "you darling! Oh, you darling!"

"It's certainly a beautiful place you have out here. I hope Barney isn't going to mind this trick I've pulled--"

"--I thought sometimes you'd do something like this, and then I thought how silly I was to think it! You'll have to pardon me for being a little inarticulate, but I'm just this side of fainting! Of course Barney won't mind--he'll love it!--"

Then we got talking simultaneously, and neither made much sense of what the other said, but it didn't matter.

Ten minutes later we met at a restaurant on the main street for a second breakfast, both for them and for me. They had had their first meal at seven o'clock on a breakfast ride. I should have realized that an explorer would be an early riser. It would have saved a lot of that dawdling.

I was standing under a palm tree. They drove up in a yellow roadster. Connie just jumped out and grabbed me and cried. Barney parked the car and came up, holding out his right hand and smiling. I looked at that smile with attention, but it was all right.

When finally he had a chance to speak, his voice was as sound as a new dollar:

"This is just the thing Connie--and that means both of us--needed to make it all perfect!

Frankie, we're going to give you an honorary degree in heroic diplomacy and see what we can do about a post for you abroad."

"Tell me," Connie said, "everything."

So we sat while the sunshine became hotter and I told them everything. That is, almost everything. Not too much about Bill Bush and Virginia, and of course I didn't amplify what I had put in my letters about the attitudes of John and the others.

We sampled the waffles I had smelled and over them conducted one of those breathless, dactylic conversations which an outsider would have found incomprehensible.

An outsider would have known instantly, however, that the lovely woman involved in our talk was being made very happy by it. John's business, Larry's Wheezie, Ivan's enthusiasm about his professors of medicine, when Fall had come at Fort Sheffield, what Martha had to say about Connie's running away--we covered a hundred topics.

And for the time being, I just reported things and watched them. There wasn't a change in Connie superficially. Whether or not there was a deeper change I could decide only by longer observation. She had always been radiant; she was now. And Barney was his imperturbable self: I will never get out of my mind that picture of him standing over a dead rhinoceros. Even in slacks, a sport shirt, a homespun coat, and immaculate sport shoes, he looks as if he should be holding in his hand a high-powered rifle with telescopic sights and standing on something big and dead.

They were both as tan as prospectors.

It was nearly twelve when we stopped talking. . . .

Early afternoon found us sitting on a terrace beside a swimming pool. At one end a fountain played continually. At the other were steel cross-struts and horizontal diving boards, from which a succession of young men and women flung themselves into the air.

They whirled, twisted, arched, floated, and always entered the water with identically out-stretched hands and pointed toes. The luncheon concert being mellifluously rendered under the painted beams of the dining room in the Yucca Inn was rebroadcast over the tinkling monotone of the fountain. Waiters came up to the pool in diminutive motor trucks and served meals from hot aluminum containers. A plane circled and descended where, with only machetes, an airport had been made on the sand. San Jacinto glittered above us:--sun, snow, green trees against an inverse blue abyss.

"It's just like heaven," Connie said.

Barney grinned. "The first people that came across this desert must have thought the opposite."

' I'll bet they did. Imagine this without any water--"

"You don't need to imagine. All you need to do is drive about a mile out of town and you're in it. Then think of walking hundreds of miles through it."

"It's a wonder that they got here at all."

He picked up an iced raw carrot and bit it. "Most of them didn't."

"No." Connie shut her eyes and drew a breath and opened them again, erasing from her mind the picture of those who had failed to cross the desert--those whose bones were even now occasionally found in bleached testimony of disaster.

A child with a familiar face walked down the steps into the pool, tossed back a heavy curl, and threw herself gleefully into the water. For a moment I thought that I knew the child, and my memory began to search for parents to identify it. The same thing happened to Connie.

Then we realized with exclamations that the excited little girl in the water was not the daughter of a friend, but a famous moving picture star--familiar because her face laughed from a thousand billboards and looked charmingly from ten thousand advertisements. The child appeared to be alone, but presently we discovered her mother, watching and knitting. She was a woman with a quiet and somewhat humorous face, who kept a mother's eye upon the girl. We noticed more. Beside an orange tree, lounging in seeming indolence but actually alert, was a tall, thick-shouldered man--a bodyguard.

Connie explained the scene to Barney. And Barney did not believe it at first. But the little girl swam to the edge of the pool near us.

"Hello," she said.

We said, "Hello."

"You ought to come in swimming."

"We're just eating our lunch." Connie replied.

"Oh--but it's very late for that."

"I know. You see, we didn't get up until late."

The child nodded. She looked steadfastly at Barney, as any other child would look. "How did you get so very tan? I don't know what to call you. My name's Dorothy."

The naïvete and naturalness had brought sudden tears to Connie's eyes.

Barney answered. "Well, Dorothy, this tan of mine's a cumulative tan."

"Is that the darkest kind?"

His eyes twinkled. "In a sense. You see, I got one layer of it in Africa, and one in India, and another in a place called Komodo--"

Dorothy giggled. "That's a funny name! Africa's where lions come from. Did you see any lions?"

"Hundreds," Barney said off-handedly--as a man should say such a thing for such a little girl.

"Did you shoot any?"

"Several."

"I thought you did," Dorothy replied somewhat inexplicably. "Jim's got a gun, but I don't believe he ever shot a lion with it. Do you want to see Jim's gun?"

"Who's Jim?"

"My bodyguard," she said in a matter-of-fact way. "You see, I'm in moving pictures, and people might want to get too close to me, and I'm very little, so I have to have a bodyguard all the time. I didn't tell you I was in moving pictures, because most everybody guesses right away."

"How old are you?" Connie asked suddenly.

"Seven and a half." She looked at Barney. "What's your name?"

"Barney."

"Mr. Barney?"

"No, Barney Colby. Only we call everybody by their first names, pretty much.

This is Connie, Dorothy. And this is Frankie."

"That's a funny way for grown-up people to do!" The little girl realized that her statement had been rude. "I guess I'd like it, though. But I don't know if my mother would allow me to call you by your first names." She thought that over. Then a new idea came into her head. Rather, an old one returned. She yelled, "Hey, Jim! Come over here! I got some friends! They want to see your revolver."

Jim walked, somewhat embarrassedly, from under the orange-laden tree and said,

"How are you?" to us. Then he turned to Dorothy. "Don't you reckon these people have seen lots of revolvers, Dorothy?"

She was faintly disappointed. "Yes, I guess so, Jim."

An instant later, her eyes lighted up. "Barney's been to Africa. He's shot lions.

Will you tell me a story about lions some day, Barney? Do you shoot bullets clear through them, or do the bullets stop inside? Maybe if you'll come over to our villa at half-past four, Mother will give you a cocktail. I'll ask her. You can come, too, Connie. You also, Frankie." She swam away in the direction of her mother, saying in a loud voice,

"Lions and tigers! Lions and tigers! Lions and tigers!"

Connie turned toward the detective. "She's amazing! I don't know why, but I've always imagined that such a child would be hopelessly spoiled."

He nodded thoughtfully at her. "Some of 'em are. Depends on the parents, don't it?"

Her eyes strayed out over the golf course where men were murmuring and walking, and the click of a shot sometimes attracted one's gaze to a white speck, magically soaring above palm trees and cedars against the pale blue sky.

I knew what she was thinking: The child's bodyguard had said, "Depends on the parents, don't it?" It had made her wonder what sort of parent she had shown herself to be. I realized that all through Connie's future, she would encounter accidental mnemonics--inadvertent critiques--unlucky wounds.

Sometime after lunch, I began to feel drowsy and lay back in my chair with my eyes shut, thinking less about Connie and more about Barney. He seemed like a kindly and even gentle man, and I suppose Connie thought of him in that way. But behind his seeming, I could detect a harder personality--a personality that was dangerous because it was immature and therefore capable of excesses both generous and destructive. As if my thinking of him brought the devil up, an incident took place right at that moment which showed not a present function but a past act of Barney's in that very category of behavior.

A limousine stopped in the private road beyond the orange tree. Its chauffeur sprang out and opened a door. From it emerged a tall, loose-jointed man who was followed by a small, intimidated woman.

The man spoke nastily to his chauffeur. "I want you to be back in one hour. One hour consists of sixty minutes. Do you understand that? I don't like to wait five minutes, as I did yesterday, or ten as I did the day before. Now--carry those bathing suits to the dressing rooms!"

The chauffeur said, "Yes, Mr. Keller."

Barney said, "Hah!"

Connie looked at him. "Somebody you know?"

The couple was approaching us, and we could hear the woman say in a hopeless and plaintive manner, "Really, Rudolph, he does his very best. You make him so jumpy."

"He doesn't know what 'jumpy' means!"

Keller saw Barney. The arrogance oozed out of him. His big hands stopped swinging at his sides, his jaw dropped, and his voice was thick.

"Hello, Colby."

"Nice day." The words were like two arrows.

"Yes, isn't it?" The man and his wife walked on behind their hapless chauffeur.

"Who is it?" Connie asked.

"A bird I know."

He fell into silence. Connie eventually became a little nettled and very curious.

"Just--a bird--you know?" She said it teasingly.

Barney glanced at her. His smile made of his mouth a straight line which his moustache followed with precision. "You've been saying how sweet I am." He shrugged.

"Here's a place where I wasn't. His name is Rudolph Keller. He's rich. He's a director of the museum for which I went out on an expedition once. He was in charge of getting an airplane to us down in an especially God-forsaken chunk of tropics. He didn't do it. We were stuck there through the rainy season, and I lost three men with some kind of fever that not even the Rockefeller Foundation knows about yet. It practically shoved their bones through their skin."

"He looks like that sort of person," she answered.

"When I got back to New York, he lied about the thing, and I proved he was a liar at a directors' meeting. That threw him off his rocker. He wanted to fight. He'd prayed football and boxed and stroked his crew in college." Here Barney chuckled, but without amusement, and his eyes were seeing other things than those around us. "So I made him a deal: we'd meet barehanded at night in the middle of the George Washington Bridge. It must be two hundred feet down to the river. I suggested that we both write suicide notes, and whoever threw the other over the rail would tear up his own last precious words." He exhaled sharply. "Keller didn't show up!"

That was all there was to it. But it was enough. I had seen Connie wince toward the end of the recital, and Barney's last triumphant sentence was not shared triumphantly by her. She shut her eyes and looked away. No doubt she had often imagined him facing wild animals--or even bloodthirsty savages--with a kind of proud tranquility. But the idea of this man who she had chosen to take John's place violently challenging another man like himself to be pitched to death was not the same deed. There was bravado in it--

vainglory. It was in essence childish. It was also--to a civilized person--revolting. I perceived criticism and revolt in her.

But Connie did not want to think of the man for whom she had given up her former life as childish. She hid her revulsion. No doubt she had imagined all the melodrama in Barney's life as ascetic compensation--a masochistic substitute for herself.

But the event he had just described certainly fell outside that kind of behavior. It was murderous. It was diabolical. For all that, it was infantile. A man can strike another in self-defense or to protect individuals and ideas, but Barney's lethal challenge for revenge-

-and the mental picture conjured up of night, the high bridge, the black water, and the notes--

Her idol had feet of clay, I thought. And so would she if she had dared to be honest with herself.

Barney saw that she was discomfited and spoke again--cheerfully this time--as if some obscure appetite had been appeased. "That didn't upset you, did it?"

"No. You have a lot of nerve, haven't you?"

He laughed. "It wasn't nerve. Just plain rage. Here he comes. I'd still chuck him into the Hudson for a nickel."

Connie was going to say something, but I thought she had better not, so I asked a question. "Where do you ride around here?"

"Didn't know you were a horseman." There was in Barney's voice a tinge and no more of condescension.

Connie said, "Oh, Frankie's a peach of a rider. Been in the saddle ever since he was a kid."

She didn't say that for many years it had been a special saddle.

Barney told me the name of the man who ran the White Water Stables, and I went out there alone because they wanted to go to a cocktail party and I didn't.

CHAPTER XIV

I found the White Water Stables on the edge of town, and I got to know them well--a circle of one-story adobe buildings around a big corral, where sometimes a dozen head of horses watched with interest the coming and going of smart automobiles, and sometimes a fat millionaire from the East or a motion picture star rode egotistically and awkwardly, in response to the drawled instructions of a cowboy. There was a long bar in one of the buildings, and at night an orchestra played for dancing. Between numbers, bow-legged men, who had punched cattle in Idaho and Nevada and Texas and were now pushing dudes in Palm Springs, slung their hard fingers across the strings of guitars and sang in high voices about The Alamo, about wagon wheels, and Kit Carson, Bowie, the terrible night that comes down on the desert, and the little dogies smoking along toward butte rims. They sang about blood on the saddle and what they wouldn't do for a chaw of tobacco. Parisian evening gowns swept into the place and were danced in wide, exuberant circles by blue jeans, ten-gallon hats, and hand tooled high-heeled boots.

Sometimes from the White Water Stables, early in the morning, there filed a long procession of the hardier tenderfeet. Horses bearing people, and horses with packs, off for snow fields, dismal canyons, green forests, or rivers piled with raw earth which had been sluiced for gold. Indeed, some of those tenderfeet-debutantes, Hollywood directors, energetic rich men's sons--used their leisure to learn a bit of the hard trade of the cowhand. Their "Ahoos" broke the desert air shrilly-they could snatch their sombreros from the ground at full gallop--they could rope and throw and tie a baby steer in half a minute-some of them even, horse-familiar from Virginia or Westchester, shipped mounts of their own to California and taught the cowboys how to take a five-bar fence.

It was a fantastic place, where earthy individuals worked for wages and where the rich attempted to recapture that same earth.

I took a long ride that day--alone. Down washes in which were the bleached bones of dead cattle, and over long dunes where nothing grew and sand blew in the wind like snow from the edges of drifts--until the colors came up to their maximum intensity, blurred blue and purple, and went all together.

I couldn't figure out how Connie felt. I knew that Barney's story had somewhat annoyed her, but there is in every person much to annoy every other one. I knew she missed her family, but that I had already discounted. She seemed vital as always and perhaps more radiant than ever, but how much of that was due to her feeling for Barney--

and how much of it to a combination of deliberate acting and the mere flush of health from desert life, I could not determine. . . .

That night we dressed for dinner, and I met several people--the newly made intimate friends of Barney and my foster mother--people called Jack and Veronica Stokes, the Darlingtons, Lyman Wesley, Harrison McLeod, and Betty Somebody-orOther. They were the sort of people whom Hollywood extras try to imitate on dressy sets-

-people born to be part of backgrounds, but always of extravagant backgrounds. People who live in big cities but not New York--who spend time in London and Nice but not in English country-sides or Biarritz. People who played Mah Jong when Mah Jong was popular, miniature golf when it was a rage--who were doing "handies" two summers ago-

-and who played good bridge then and now. People who make the society page everywhere but in New York, who eat raw carrots and refuse desserts to keep from becoming fat, who buy Schiaparelli and Chanel but not in Paris--who keep in the know more carefully than those about whom they know so much.

They're fun-but you can never remember their names.

Of course, Connie let them in on the secret of who I was, and that merely added another nugget to their respective gold mines of private information.

We ate. We danced. We drove out across the desert to a gambling place and drank champagne and put silver dollars on our favorite numbers at roulette and came home late, playing the radios in our hired limousines and singing to that accompaniment, "Bei Mir Bis Du Schoen."

It was all gay and glamorous--delightful, I thought, as a vacation from an arduous routine--but, as a way of life to be carried unchanged from Palm Springs to Cape Cod to Sea Island to St. Tropez--futile.

A day or two later, Connie and Barney and I started out for the stables together for a ride. I had been wondering if I would get a chance during my necessarily short stay to talk with Connie alone, and Barney gave me such a chance that morning. He understood people all right. He was usually generous with them. But I had a feeling that his understanding was often accompanied by contempt or disagreement--that he would not let mere understanding change his own ideas and purposes. He helped Connie mount her horse and started over to aid me, so I jumped up before he got there.

"I'd sort of like to watch the calf-roping today," he said, "and I know you and Connie would like to get together without me--"

We protested, but not very much, and then rode away.

I suppose we'd covered a mile, alternately walking and trotting, before she said anything. I didn't open the conversation because I was so intent upon getting her own reactions unconditioned. What she said at first surprised me, not because it was unnatural but because I had been thinking only of her:

"Well, Frankie, how do you like him?"

The answer to that was easy. "I like him fine. Anybody would. He's interesting and he's sensitive. He knows how to play--"

"What don't you like about him?" I hesitated. "Why, there's nothing I don't like about him, I guess."

"Yes, there is! Otherwise you wouldn't have listed the things you do like." She turned in her saddle and smiled brightly. I smiled back because Connie's deduction was accurate beyond denial. "I'll tell you myself. The thing you don't like is a certain ruthlessness. You don't like that because it's foreign to your own character. To John's, too, if you wish, and Larry's and Virginia's. I won't add Ivans--because I think Ivan has something very much like it."

I grinned back at her. "I must say your Barney has run off a few deeds where he was at least--ultra-dashing."

"He's just a kid, you know. A grown-up kid. Some of the things he has done shock me a little bit--just the way things that children do shock you."

"They can hurt, too." She thought that over. "Are you trying to sabotage my--love for him, Frankie?"

"No. I don't think so." I tried to decide exactly what I was attempting to express.

"You're doing the best you can to be frank."

"Yes, I am."

"So I will. This, Connie. I'll be going back to Fort Sheffield after Christmas. I won't tell anybody about this visit. Maybe some day things will change, and I'll be able to tell them, but that time is far off. So I suppose I want to know most whether or not you're happy. Next I want to make the best guess I can about the future of your happiness. And finally I'd like to know as much as possible about your plans--if you've made any."

"Just vague ones."

"You're answering my last question?"

"I guess so. I think that sooner or later it's up to me to go to Reno or some place like that and get a divorce from John."

"Then you'll marry Barney."

She spoke quietly, so that I could barely hear her above the sound of the horses'

hoofs in the sand. "Why, yes. We haven't talked about it much. The present has been too perfect the way it is."

"And then what?"

"Why, I don't know. Then I'll be Mrs. Colby. This romantic adventure will be over. I'll be his wife and share his life."

"Trekking around in jungles? Shooting rifles at wild beasts? Jumping around on ice floes somewhere in the polar regions?"

It sounded mean, and I didn't intend to be mean. I explained that before I went on.

"You weren't meant for those things, Connie. If anybody was ever civilized from the standpoint of personal habits, you are. In fact, your psychical comfort stops far short of the reach of good roads--even." The thing was true, almost pathetically true, and I saw that--again--she knew it but wouldn't admit it. So I tried to be light about it. Sometimes kidding is better than all the rhetoric in the world. "What would you do without a shower bath, Connie? A hairdresser? Hot water? A drugstore on the corner? Fresh cream for your coffee in the morning? And a newspaper to read in bed while you drank it? Shops and all the things that are in them? Electric lights? A car to take you from where you are to some fresh spot nearby or far away? Suppose you ran out of lipstick?"

But it wasn't getting over. She stood up in her stirrups, and that was all her horse needed as a signal to break from a slow shuffle into a trot. When she sat back again and the horse automatically slowed, I gave my gelding a scratch with my heel so that he would pull alongside, and she said rather flatly, "You can't have a very high opinion of my character, Frankie."

I embarked on a favorite theme of mine: "Hell, Connie. People get thinking that they are their characters. Character is a little mechanism you set on top of what you yourself really are--and as long as things go all right, the mechanism works. But when things jam, your character stops cold, and what you yourself really are begins to function.

Character is just a bunch of good intentions. And nature isn't good or bad--it is just plain raw intention. I don't know what drove you away from Fort Sheffield--what terrible necessity inside yourself. But I do know that you weren't able to control whatever it was that drove you, any more than you would be able to control your internal feelings in some windswept, rain-soaked, dipped-in-malaria, jungle pesthole. What I mean--"

Connie interrupted me--and it was time, because I'd already decided my effort was wasted. "What's done," she said, "is done. It's too late."

We went on a while after that, and I finally said, "How about my first question then, Connie? Are you happy?"

She was more honest about that. "Not entirely, Frankie.

But I've learned something in these past months. No matter how happy one is, one is never wholly happy. Life isn't perfect. I can't explain why I left Fort Sheffield to you.

You're too young. You'd just go on assuming that I was luxury-loving and afraid of growing old, so I ran away to show myself that at nearly forty I was all that I had been at twenty."

I didn't answer for a while. I knew that all the other Sheffields believed exactly that and no more. I believed more about Connie. I believed that what she had done was the result of two things: one, in giving up a romantic man for a serious one at an early age, Connie had made an incomplete surrender, so that when the romantic figure reappeared she had fallen through a barrier she had never firmly built; and the other, that she was victim of a sort of hysterical psychic myopia--that she regarded part of her nature now as if it were all, that she concentrated every thought and feeling upon a fragment of herself and disclaimed the great, rich portions lying all about--portions which we, with a similar shortness of sight, had always felt to be all of Connie.

The very fact that Connie had never before defended herself or her actions to any of us was proof enough for me of the correctness of my assumptions, so I let up.

"Anyway, Connie, I hope that you're happier out here with Barney, and I hope that whatever happiness you have found will increase."

She answered, "So do I." Then, after a while she said, "See that clump of willows up the draw? Beat you to it!"

I gave my horse a good thump, picked up the reins, and sat back in the saddle. He was running with his first leap, and we passed Connie before we had covered half the distance to the willows. From there we walked again. Both horses were breathing hard, and so were we.

That's how we came upon Barney without being observed by him.

He was standing in the middle of the dry water-course, looking intently at something out of our range of view. Every now and then he would pick up a stone and throw it. We stopped our horses and watched him--realizing that he hadn't gone to the corral where the cowboys were chasing calves, and wondering what he was doing. His back was toward us. His shoulders were hunched up. His head was thrust forward. It was a strange and somehow sinister attitude, and presently he shouted. I do not know what there was in his voice--a note of gloating, perhaps, or taunting. Whatever it was, it had a curious effect on me: I wanted to kick my horse forward and tell him to cut it out--

although I had no idea of what he was doing.

"So you think you can get away that way!" he called. He threw a stone. "Aha! I thought that would change your mind! And now you're going to try hiding behind that cactus, eh?" He picked up another stone, aimed, and threw again. I saw a cactus branch quiver, and a little dust rose where the rock dropped.

Barney walked a few steps further forward. "And you can't out-run me, either, my fine friend! Are you getting the idea? Whenever I give the word, it won't be the ground in front of you or the cactus behind you! It'll be you, boy! You, personally, yourself!"

I glanced at Connie then. If I had been perplexed and horrified, she was much more so. She sat in her saddle, stiff and pale, listening to this grotesque harangue, and I guessed she thought Barney had gone mad, when, with shocking suddenness, we were made to understand the nature of his quarry in his vociferous game of cat and mouse.

Dry, shrill, and terrifying, came the rattle of a snake. I was still watching Connie, and I saw instant relief come in her features. Barney was only calling to a rattler which he was trying to kill. Boyish, no doubt--but the scene abruptly made sense to her.

To me it did not. Not the scene upon which we had arrived or what happened afterward. For at that moment I saw the snake. A big one, thirty feet or so beyond the place where Barney stood. It had turned and was coming fast toward the man who had harassed it.

And Barney yelled at it, "That's silly, my fine friend! The biggest mistake of your life--and the last!" He bent down and picked up another stone. He drew back his arm and waited--waited while the distance between him and the snake decreased to a few feet.

I knew that Barney was grinning, and, as if the snake also knew that there was something unnatural about the behavior of the man, it slowed down, stopped, coiled indecisively, and felt the air with the inadequate gauge of its tongue.

"Come on!" Barney yelled, and his voice was high.

The snake struck tentatively, seemingly trying not to hit Barney, but to frighten him because it was also frightened.

Barney laughed and the rattler coiled again and rattled again and finally became stock-still. Not the prey but the preyer seemed hypnotized.

Then Barney threw a stone. The snake's back snapped and it rolled over and over with a broken, corkscrew motion, showing alternately its diamond-marked back and its creamy-belly.

Our horses had quivered under us. Now mine plunged, and I almost fell. Barney turned and saw us. Whatever had been in his face fled quickly. But I guess Connie did not see what that had been, for she laughed weakly and slid down from her saddle and ran across to him, saying, "Oh, darling, I was petrified!"

Barney took her by the arms and kissed her and said, for my benefit, "Just having a little fun with astray diamondback! Bad customers to have around a place like this where kids ride, and people go on picnics."

Having a little too much fun, I thought.

And I wished that I could have ridden home alone, because I didn't want to talk to Barney Colby that morning. However, we made our way back together. It was nearing lunch time. Other cavalcades were riding in from the desert. The hot noonday was filled with hoofbeats. Smoke rose from the cookhouse chimney. The air around White Water Stables smelled of bacon. Song came from the barroom.

"When the round-up days are over

There'll be pastures white with clover

For you, old faithful pal of mine."

CHAPTER XV

All three of us had probably wondered and worried a good deal about Christmas. I know that I had--and I'd wished more than once that I had picked any other time of year to make my pilgrimage to Connie. Moreover, after that morning on the desert, Barney and I were unable to be as casual and as amiable with each other as we had been previously. He met the unhideable remnant of squeamishness in my occasional glance by robust mirth or by stalwart excursions and dangerous rides. But neither effort was real, and he knew it. And I knew it. And he knew that I did.

There was something pent up in him at all times. And the fact that he was free to come and go as he pleased, to do what he pleased, to act as he pleased, did not alter the frustrated look which I sometimes saw in his eyes. I suppose the wanderlust and the bloodlust, like all other lusts, is close to mania, or mania itself--only most of us have mild or negative subjects for our lusting, and that terrible force expresses itself in people like myself, for example, only as nostalgia--as longing unutterable for things to be different, for things that never were or could never be.

I do know that we were all three afraid of our Christmas because between us there had risen such a complexity of strains and stresses that it needed only one more quantum of pressure to burst the whole relationship. And Christmas--Barney's first with her--her first away from home--Christmas with my too-knowing interpolation had become a ponderable hazard, a dreaded day.

Then, to my surprise, Barney solved the dilemma. Or seemed to solve it. "Let's get the gang," he said one morning, "and go down to Mexico for the holidays. This place is growing stuffy, and I think a change is indicated. How about Ensenada?"

Connie sighed with relief. "It's the best idea since the invention of the cotton gin!"

We drove down a few days later. . . .

Everybody agreed that it was a hilarious Christmas Eve. Jack and Veronica Strokes, the Darlingtons, Lyman Wesley, and Harrison McLeod were in superlative form.

I enjoyed it. Barney was happy. Barney, indeed, had become the life of the party.

And certainly it was a magnificent setting for any occasion. A stupendous setting.

The hotel was like a palace in Valhalla. It faced the almost closed curve of the bay; there was, between the water and its arched terraces, a long stretch of sand; its gardens were bright enough to hurt the eyes; inside was luxury enough for half a dozen ocean liners--

paneled rooms, blue-tiled floors, frescoes, paintings in which the hot reds and yellows of Mexico were predominant colors, a vast dining hall that was like the inside of a cathedral, another imposing chamber dedicated to Chance, and everywhere music--the sound here of slow-exploding saxophones, pianos, violins, and in some other lush and subtle patio, the rhythm of maracas--swift, explicit.

Only Connie did not seem quite to succeed, like the others, in a complete submergence of herself. She said the electric glitter of the miniature Christmas tree upon our table was unreal to her. And that the giant tree which was the parent of all others in and around the hotel and which had been dyed white (a Mexican acceptance of a California practice--as if green were not good enough, as if all things were better when removed from nature) was a "damned lily-gilding." Besides, though the white tree was beautiful enough--though its ornaments were conventional--it was less a Christmas tree for being more. I watched her put out a cigarette and stare at the bubbles in her champagne, rising as smoothly as incense--perhaps to Comus, the god of revelry. Comus would have liked this place. So would Saturn. A Roman emperor might have designed it.

And I'm sure Connie did not exactly dislike it. She found it good, even amazing--

but inappropriate.

Maybe it was our drive down. The barren hills, the cliffs that looked craggy, and consisted, nevertheless, of crumbling materials. The cold thin air that had crept under the automobile rug, for California's atmosphere lacks body; it is a raw, unsatisfactory air. If the sun burns through it, then the sunshine is too hot, and when it is cold, its cold is acid and irresistible.

Maybe it had been Los Angeles on the night before--the sight of thousands of homes where other Christmas trees, glimpsed through broad bay windows, were made doubly magnificent by no bleakness out-of-doors, but competed instead with green palms, green lawns, roses, bursting blooms of hibiscus--all the rainbow regalia of the sub-tropic winter season. I knew seeing it made me think that the sleigh of Santa Claus would be as inconceivable in such surroundings as the celebration of the Fourth of July in a blizzard. The whole thing was anomalous and deceitful: it was not the Temperate Zone, nor yet the tropics. Perhaps--the intemperate zone.

"Oh, Connie!"

She looked up. Harry was standing there with a woman. My mind immediately found the word for her--one which over--use has made banal, one which fitted perfectly: the woman was gorgeous.

"Connie, I would like to introduce Leatrice Hardy."

"Hello!"

"Merry Christmas," the woman said. She held out her hand. She's older than she seems in the films, I thought. But not much older. Twenty-six. Looks a lot like Virginia.

The woman--the girl--was sitting down, saying, "Merry Christmas," as Harry introduced her to the rest of us. I realized that she did look like Virginia--more, even, than on the screen. People had often commented on that resemblance. She was like Virginia gone astray. Virginia lost. Virginia brought up in less careful surroundings. Like a Virginia who had been allowed to be petulant--or one whom circumstances had encouraged to be cruel.

I wished I hadn't thought of Virginia, and, in so wishing, I suddenly realized that the disharmony in Connie's spirit was due not to white-washed Christmas trees or the incongruity of gardens in December, but to names and faces and good times she longed to recollect.

Now, in the midst of orchestral fanfare, of showers of slowly circling colored light, I saw Connie fix her eyes upon the yellow coal of a fresh cigarette and I knew she was letting the tide engulf her: John and Virginia, Ivan and Larry. The whole weltering ache of them--and her own loneliness.

She became lonely-looking as she sat there.

"I'm going to call you Connie," said the blond alabaster girl. She smiled. "All right, Leatrice."

"Isn't it fun!" "

Isn't it."

"I couldn't stand it in Hollywood. Yesterday morning my own house rose us and bit me. I was born in Arkansas, you know. A one-horse town, but that one horse used to pull a sleigh in Winter and there were bells on it. I got so doggone homesick! If my studio had only been making 'Uncle Tom's Cabin,' I swear I'd have gone out to the set that had the ice cakes on it and spent the holidays there."

Connie chuckled. "I guess I was thinking something like that myself."

"Yup," said the actress. "We're in the loony bin. California isn't meant to be lived in. It isn't even meant to be looked at."

' Then, what's it for?" Barney asked jovially.

"It's meant solely to be heard about," Leatrice replied, and everybody laughed.

Connie had been regarding the girl with a great deal of interest. We'd all heard about the stupidity of picture stars--about their vacuity. Here was one who was bright, and if she had a deep, essential hardness, she carried it with gallantry and recognized it as a price. Connie was doubtless aware that Barney also was looking at the girl. He asked her to dance. They went away.

Jack Stokes ordered some champagne. "Bring a case," he said to the waiter. And when the waiter frowned, "Bringo anothero caso champagno."

The waiter went away dubiously. "Spanish is a very simple language," Jack said modestly to the company. Harry leaned towards Connie. I heard him say, "You like her?"

"Quite a lot. I was surprised."

His eyes came to rest on the dance floor; "So does Barney."

She turned quickly. So did I. They were dancing close together and laughing.

From above, people were throwing confetti so that it fell as thick as snow. I heard her respond. "I don't blame him."

And he must have realized it was unchivalrous to keep watching Connie at that moment. So he looked away and said something under his breath. It sounded to me like,

"Nice going!"

I was glad when the music stopped. But glad for only a moment. I could hear Barney's deep voice as he escorted Leatrice toward the table. "--so I heaved my hammer at him. It was the only thing I could do under the circumstances."

"Then?" The girl asked with excitement.

Barney jabbed his brow with his finger, and said expressively, "Clunk!"

I saw the flash of her eyes, admiring and measuring; I noticed how quickly those eyes moved from their appraisal of him toward Connie.

Then Barney said, "I'm going to swipe Miss Hardy for a few minutes. She's the ninth biggest box office attraction--so we're going to give number nine a whirl."

"Good luck!" Connie sounded casual--but I had an almost irrepressible impulse to add, "Try number thirteen, too."

"Want to dance?" Harry asked Connie then.

She nodded.

They moved diagonally through the flamboyant crowd. I kept watching them.

Something was going to happen--little or big, I did not know which. I knew only that all this had gone beyond human endurance; upon all of us sat an intolerable weight of variegated wrongnesses. I saw her lean away and smile and speak to Harry. He nodded, and they stopped dancing. She left him and fumbled through the crowd.

I got up from the table then and went after her. Under arches, through arcades and corridors, across deep-carpeted rooms where great logs flamed in cavernous fireplaces.

She hurried faster and faster--toward her own suite, I knew. She went in and closed the door without looking back.

I hastened up to it and put my hand on the knob. But I did not turn it, for on the other side of the door I heard her saying stupidly over and over, "Oh, Lord! It would be this! It would be! He would do this! So beautiful!" Then she began to laugh. It was bad laughter, and I clung to the doorknob, listening miserably until it changed to sobs and bedsprings squeaked beneath her weight as she fell upon them.

Then I turned the door handle. I thought that Connie was jealous. That she was crying about Leatrice. Leatrice and Barney.

That was ironic and pitiful enough, but when I slowly opened her door I also slowly saw that it was not about Leatrice that she had been talking, but about something far less provoking--and unimaginably worse.

In a great heap in the center of the bedroom was Barney's Christmas present to her--or rather, his Christmas presents. On top of the heap was a huge placard: "FOR

CONNIE FROM BARNEY WITH ALL HIs LOVE," and underneath it--luggage, a mountain of luggage. Matched suitcases and an overnight bag. A trunk that matched.

Hard, smooth leather dyed deep blue. And in brown cowhide, rifle cases, a shotgun case, cases for fishing rods. Laid out in boxes--leather breeches, leather puttees, a solar topee, shells, a revolver in a holster--all the accoutrements of future travel and safari.

Connie lay on the bed face down, shaken by sobs. And I knew exactly why. His Christmas present meant more hotels. More trains. Boats. Planes. Automobiles. More thousands of miles between herself and another bay on another ocean--a less resplendent bay called Reedy Cove.

Her lover had come from the ends of the earth and was carrying her back now to his dark dominion.

No wonder Connie wept.

She looked up when she heard me close the door, and there were tears in my eyes too, but Connie still would not accept sympathy. "I'm tired," she said. "Worn out, I guess."

"Connie--"

"I'm glad you came here, Frankie. I want to tell you something. I want you to go away and leave us. Your being here only makes things difficult. I know you'll understand.

It was simply magnificent of you to come all the way out here, and I'll never forget that you did it. But now--"

Words were boiling up in my mind, words of warning and exhortation, but I saw it would be useless to say them. So my answer was what she thought she wanted to hear.

"Of course I understand, Connie. I just--stayed a little too long."

"No hard feelings?"

"Never, Connie."

I said it was my work. Connie backed me up. Barney hardly noticed--he had just received a long telegram from some chap who was "jumping off" from Batavia in the Spring and would Barney go along. I tried to say goodbye, and he talked about komodo lizards. The others had bad hangovers and probably didn't realize I was performing my adieu.

I got a limousine and a driver and plane reservations. I telegraphed further instructions for my alibi to the Weyburns.

I rode over the icy prongs of the Sierras and the frozen vastnesses of the prairies--

east--toward Connecticut.

CHAPTER XVI

There is one thing wrong with transcontinental air travel which can never be rectified by mechanical improvement: it is too swift for the spirit. To leave Lower California--Mexico--in the morning--and to be in Manhattan on the following day is a scientific marvel. It is a great convenience. But it is a shock to some essential part of an animal which has spent millions of years footbound to earth, and only a few score travelling faster than feet will carry him. I cannot accustom myself to it.

Perhaps a generation born to the notion that the Atlantic and the Pacific are only a couple of meals apart will be reconciled to the phenomenon. But I watched air travel become possible, when I was a boy. And every time I voyaged through the overhead abysses I invariably leave a portion of myself behind. For days after a long flight, when I awaken, I cannot at once determine where I am. My mind dwells more with those whom I've left than those around me.

Besides, this speed of travel has destroyed the meaning of the seasons: they no longer belong to nature's rhythms--they have become regional instead of temporal. All that adds immeasurably to modern man's confusion--and nobody takes account of it. It infects those who stay on the ground almost as much as those who fly: when Columbus discovered the new world, it was not his opinions alone which were changed. It is alarming, I think.

And thus the visible me reached Reedy Cove some thirty hours after leaving Ensenada. But my thoughts and moods still were fixed on Connie; where I expected to see desert sand were snowdrifts; chili con carne still burned the tongue that tasted cereal in Grand Central; I had made the leap physically--psychologically I was still three thousand miles away.

Ivan--the most reserved of the Sheffields—was waiting for me at the station.

Not Virginia.

He waved and yelled. "Hi, Frankie!"

"Hi, Ivan! How is everybody?"

"Swell!" He was--as always--loading himself with my baggage. And I--as always-

-protested and let him do it. "Larry's ice boating. John's in Bridgeport. Virginia's out somewhere with Bill. He came down the day after Christmas and is going to be here for a week. So I got delegated to pick you up--and I'm glad because I want to thank you for that microscope. "

I said, "Hell," or something of the sort.

He slammed a trunk lid over the suitcases and we hopped into the sedan. The heater had been going and it was warm.

"No kidding!" It was unusual for Ivan to be so enthusiastic. "It's a beauty! When I get it back in school even the head of the lab will envy me! How in God's name did you know I wanted that gadget more than I want butter on my bread? You look great--!"

Then he stopped talking. For a quarter of a minute he stared carefully at me. His lips leveled. His dark hair looked black--because his color had diminished a little. I couldn't imagine what had happened until he spoke. "Pretty tan, aren't you, Frankie?"

I hadn't thought of that. It made me feel suddenly ill.

I tried to stall. "Pretty tan? Why--sure."

"I mean--for Wyoming--in the Winter."

I had to lick that. I wound down the window so that a little air would blow into the car. "You get snowburns. Sun's warm up there. Powerful. You often go skiing stripped to the waist."

He wasn't looking my way any more. He spoke quietly. "You better say you sat under a mercury--vapor light every day."

"Listen, Ivan--" I began.

He shrugged one shoulder. "You listen. I've always liked you a lot. For my money, you can do as you damned please. You're a poet. I'm a doctor--or going to be one. You're a sentimentalist. I'm a realist. The letters from the ranch came all right. Nobody else will guess. Not if you pull the ultra-violet light gag properly. I'll help you. But I know a genuine desert tan from the artificial job."

"Thanks."

"Skip it."

He reached out, after a while, and turned on the radio--although we weren't far from Fort Sheffield. Somebody began talking about a facial cream. He tried another station. A woman was discussing charm. He tried another. A politician. I supposed he wanted music--and I marvelled for a moment that millions of people could stand having others harangue them that way. Playing the radio is like having uninvited guests constantly around you--and guests who are usually offensive. It is the salesman's foot in your door raised to its millionth power. I was thinking things like that--because they thought themselves at a time when I did not want to be responsible for reasoning or imagining--and he found a jazz band. He made it loud.

We drove into the garage and he cut the motor and the radio at the same time. I opened my door and felt his hand on my arm, so I turned.

"How was she?"

I had an impulse to answer that my business was none of his--but I knew the question came not from Ivan's superficial hurt ego but his deep and sympathetic self.

"She's fine, Ivan."

Then I wondered why I had lied. Maybe she was fine--now. Now that I had gone.

She had seemed fine when I arrived. I'd been wondering all during the flight. Had it been me--and the memories I brought? Me--and the friction a third person automatically caused? Or was Connie's collapse on the bed that last night a commencement of despair for her? I couldn't be positive.

So I'd said she was fine.

"Happy?"

"In a way. A way I think she missed here. In some others--she's not. Just what you'd expect, I guess."

"She was putting on an act for you!" He sounded hurt--the way Larry would if he had made the discovery of where I'd been.

"Damn it, Ivan, sure! We're all putting on acts all the time. Everybody on earth.

We all live partly for the effect we believe our behavior will have on others. That's why every one always brightly imagines he understands everyone else: some of the acting is bound to be transparent. Sure, she acted. Only--she did it for my benefit. Now--you act for your own benefit. You are right now. You're your own best audience. How in hell can I tell exactly what she feels? How much bliss and how much regret she has? I can't. It's her life and she did what she wanted to do. She'll stand or fall on what she wants to do.

She lives by her feelings. She got feeling stuck and stifled and bored here. So she tried something else. I can tell you this--Connie never looked younger or brighter or more beautiful--or healthier--in her life. And she was having fun."

He'd taken my homily patiently. As John might have. "In a way," he said after a while, "I'm glad."

Suddenly I felt very sorry for him. I wasn't much older--and at his age most people topple backwards into childhood easily and unexpectedly, when crises of emotion occur. But I felt twice as old then, and a realization so familiar that its presence brought fatigue, filled my brain and sapped my nerves: crises of emotion had been the stuff of my childhood. Toppling backward was difficult nowadays. The slight gap in our ages was a broad chasm in spiritual comparison. I put my arm around him.

"However you look at it, Ivan, it's tough."

"Yeah, keed. And thanks for going out there."

"I had to."

He opened the door on his side. "Guess you did. A dirty job for somebody to do."

"Wish you didn't see it that way."

"Jesus," he.said absently. "She was my mother."

That got to me--so I didn't say any more.

It was just as well. When we came out of the garage, Bill and Virginia were walking toward it. They might have overheard a longer discourse. She yelled and ran up to me and kissed me. Only--now--it was Winter and there weren't any lilacs.

"Frankie!" She leaned back to peer at me. "You must have gone to Egypt!"

I was ready for it now. "Gloomy place, Wyoming," I said. "After an hour in the morning looking for postmen lost in drifts, I made it a rule to get under a sun lamp with a good book."

Bill had my hand. "Hello, boy. Place has seemed liturgical without you. Gibbons, I hope?"

"--and 'The Anatomy of Melancholy.' No fooling. The Weyburns have grooves on the soles of their feet! St. Peter will give them outboard motors instead of wings! They nearly killed me. You ought to try ski-joring with a motorcycle sometime."

"We read your letters," he answered. "Sounded gay. Especially the avalanche."

We were at the house. I ramified the avalanche yarn over rum toddies.

Everything looked the same--but it felt different. The Christmas tree was still standing, and it must have held for all the other Sheffields what it did for me: the Christmas tree was just as tall as all the other Christmas trees in all the other years had been, and it stood in the same place; there were ornaments on it that had been on our trees since I could recollect--each year we had unpacked them from excelsior with a sense of gay familiarity, but this year the unpacking must have been nostalgic and sad. Connie had always superintended the decoration of the tree, announcing annually her theories: that it must be gaudy--that the biggest globes must be put on the biggest branches--that a glittering star must go on top--that the light bulbs must be set deep in the tree--and that all people who had color schemes of blue and white or green and gold for Christmas trees were dopes. So each ornament was sad, and the very splendor of the tree itself an emphasis of our depression.

Larry came red-cheeked from racing on the ice and walloped me on the back.

John drove up from Bridgeport and said how much they had missed me and that my presents were still under the tree. I opened them and the family stood about in the half-embarrassed and half-delighted mood of givers sure of their gifts.

There was The New Oxford Dictionary from John, and from Virginia a new desk into which the volumes fitted, especially built for me with a place to write, copied from the battered favorite in my room. Besides that happy collaboration, a whole new set of trout flies from Larry--so many that it looked like an entomologist's collection--and from Ivan an autographed Keats. Anne had knitted the regular half dozen pair of socks, and from Barry came the standard carton of cigarettes. Presents that meant not only money invested but time spent, thought, affection, and understanding of me.

Having to open them up alone, instead of in the midst of the glee and gusto of a regular Sheffield Christmas morning, crystallized out my consciousness of how much they cared for me and how good they were. At the end I choked up and beat it for my room.

The Sheffields!

All that for nobody from nowhere.

Virginia caught me, later, in the hall. She had a habit of doing that--as if she listened for me from her room and then ran out to intercept me with an appearance of casualness. But she was generally dressed and ready for dinner on such occasions. This time she took my arm and turned me around, looked up and down the hall, and just said,

"Well?"

Again the blank feeling of frustration and dismay came over me--stirring my insides and making me curse myself for an overweaning fool. I didn't try this time to filibuster as I had with Ivan. "She's all right, Virginia. Reasonably happy and very well.

She intends to get divorced from John and marry Barney."

It was murky in the hall, and I couldn't see her expression. She let go of me and stood still for a little while. The wind blew outside and the window vibrated noisily.

Finally she said, "Of course I knew where you were going the minute you spoke about being away for Christmas, but I don't believe anybody else guessed at all."

"Ivan did."

She was silent again, and again the wind blew and the pane quivered. "Ivan. Odd.

Well, the others haven't--even Bill. Don't say anything to John or Larry, will you?"

"Of course not."

"Particularly Larry."

"Why particularly Larry?"

She shook her head. "I couldn't say. He's young, and he feels all this almost more than he can bear."

I didn't answer anything to that.

We stood there for another minute, and then she kissed me on the cheek. "You're a sweet guy, Frankie. And you've got what it takes. But don't ever say anything more to me about it, will you? You've told me all I wanted to know."

I found I'd been holding my breath, and I exhaled slowly. "All right, gal."

"Will you also--?"

"Will I what?"

"Nothing. Never mind."

"Will I what?" I repeated.

Virginia said, "Will you kiss me again?"

So I kissed her, and we went downstairs. I knew that the kiss had not been the subject of her original question. She had been going to say, Will you also come to see Bill and me.

We had a hilarious dinner, and afterward Bill and Ivan played an idiotic piano duet which they said was entitled, "Serenade to Frankie's Homecoming." Then Ivan produced a set of Extra-Sensory Perception cards, and we tried out our telepathic powers.

We went to bed with the firm conviction that all the Sheffields and Bill Bush, too, were practically mediums.

The next day it snowed.

The night after we collected a bunch of people, hired a sleigh loaded with hay, and went for a ride. Because of the season, we sang carols--twenty-five or thirty people raising their voices in "Hark the Herald Angels Sing" and "Good King Wenceslaus."

The stars were sharp. Our breaths streamed white in the moonlight, and, for a while, I had a feeling of exhilaration--as if my mind had at last conquered its sorrow about Connie and the denial of its wish for Virginia. I felt peacefulness in the world.

Glory and bounty and inexpressible beauty. The lighted houses and the chirruping sleigh runners and the voices were so rich with life, and so full of goodness that I could not resist the collective sentiment.

Then, as we rode over a hill, and the pale rays of the moon fell full into our sled, I saw Virginia in Bill's arms, her back bent stiffly, her lips pushed hard against his lips, their visible breaths united. I remembered Connie in the garden and the black sorcery of that summer night. I remembered the day Virginia had come back from Europe and I'd waited for her on the porch. Some sort of brash insanity seized hold of me.

There was a girl sitting near me in the big sleigh--a pretty girl named Nora Rutherford, whose mother owned the summer hotel in our town. She'd acted definitely, if coyly, partial to me in the fourth or fifth grades, and, later, when I'd inherited the money of Grandma Sheffield, her partiality had sometimes been a nuisance. She had black, curly hair and black eyes--a nice profile--she was a tropical sort of girl--and when she came home from Vassar she took up writing poetry, perhaps hoping that I would be interested.

It wasn't very good poetry, for, despite her education, Nora's mind was uncomplicated; in fact only physical desirableness camouflaged her stolidity.

But I took her hand and she edged toward me across hay that smelled anachronistically of August.

"It's a lovely night," I said.

"It's terrific, Frankie."

The demon was in me. "A night on which a man should kiss a girl."

"You think?"

"Don't you?"

"Not think," she replied with unconscious accuracy. "But I have a sort of feeling--"

So I aped Virginia and Bill and I was startled. For, when Nora's arms went around me and I found her lips were warm, her breath warmer still--I had a sudden picture of the sterility of my preoccupation with a hopeless love. There was vitality in this girl, and I enjoyed it. I thought--and laughed at myself--that there was some sense in rushing from our frustrated Nordic passions to the easier and more primitive blandishments of Tahiti or some other foreign beach. I thought again and was bemused.

Hence, I kissed Nora appreciatively. Virginia looked up and caught me doing it.

She remained for some time fixed in an unnatural position--and by that I knew she was surprised. But then, so was Nora--and so, indeed, was I.

About midnight we were dropped off by the sleigh--in twos, mostly. I walked with Nora to the door of her mother's house.

"It was fun," Nora said.

"It was fun."

"I've always liked you. I'm not a child any more. You seem to be alone a great deal. You ought to have a girl--whether you're in love with her or not--whether you marry her or not. Why don't you take me? I'd like it--and I'm nice."

It wasn't a speech that a girl would have made a generation ago--but this was not a generation ago. She was asking questions she had a right to ask. I doubted then, and I doubt now, if any man or woman is wise enough to answer them completely. "I'll think about it," I said.

She held up her face to be kissed again, and once more made her cogent self-definition: "It's so ridiculous to think about things that involve feelings."

"Maybe it is. Goodnight."

"Goodnight, Frankie."

There was her embrace, an instant of the perfume she wore, the sound of the door closing, the trodden, moonlit snow between her house and the gate--then the sleigh bells.

Bill and I paid the driver and waved him out of sight.

Inside Fort Sheffield it was warm. The light from the hall fell tentatively through the living room and upon our Christmas tree, making it sparkle in the gloom. Bill yawned, and grinned his apology.

"I'm not sleepy yet," Virginia said.

She was looking at me.

"Neither am I." I knew she wanted to talk--and it had been a long time since Virginia had wanted to talk to me--the way she had in the Summer, for instance, when we sat together on a flat rock.

"I'm for getting something to eat."

Bill looked at us and understood, and shook his head.

"I've got my beauty to consider. Besides, I had nightmares last night. I dreamt all night that I was trying to chop down a tree, and every time I got it almost cut through, it grew back. Finally, I stepped away from it to take a look at it and saw that it wasn't a tree at all, but a woman's ankle. It gave me what might be described as quite a turn. Tonight, I've promised myself to dream only about pleasant fields full of flowers, or something of the sort." He yawned again and started upstairs.

Virginia and I made two turkey sandwiches and poured two glasses of milk. Then we went back into the living room and turned on the Christmas tree. Its colored bulbs cast upon the ceiling shadows of branches in an extravaganza that was like the frost on window panes. Soft illumination pervaded the room, but the tree itself was glittering and hypnotic. We sat side by side on a divan and looked at it. Finally I turned away and allowed myself the still greater fascination of Virginia. The pale froth of her hair, the lines of her neck--and her lips, which had been modelled to meet exact and mystic specifications of my own imagination.

She was breathing slowly. She sipped her milk. "Why did you kiss Nora tonight?"

I had not expected any such inquiry as that, and it produced in me several quick changes of feeling--perplexity, amusement, introspection.

"I don't really know."

"She's terribly attractive in a way. Maybe alluring is a better word. When I saw you, it flashed into my mind that if I were a man, I would probably do what Larry calls,

'Go for her.''

That made me laugh a little bit. "I guess I don't 'go' for girls much."

"But why not Nora? It must be awfully dull for you this Winter."

Perhaps that hurt me. Perhaps I then assumed that Virginia entertained some blind intuition about me and wanted to divert from herself what she did not even realize she possessed. "Do you recommend it?"

She didn't answer for a long time. But she was thinking and I said no more. She had been sitting forward. Now she leaned back and turned her head toward me. "Is it so important? Does so much depend on things like that? Just what is the philosophy of denial, Frankie? What's the meaning of sublimation? What's the good? I need a lecture--

about love."

I was the--last person on earth to undertake that task--especially now that I knew she was thinking of herself and Bill and not of Nora Rutherford and me. I smiled and would have said something, but she went on.

"No, I don't. I've read all the books and studied people and it's too late for a lecture, anyway. I've made up my mind."

She said it sadly. She stopped looking at me then and lowered her voice.

"Remember the story John used to tell us about the stone road that the Romans built?"

Involuntarily, I glanced down at my game leg. "I remember."

"Well--I've got mine almost finished, Frankie." She paused. "I can't base my life today, upon tomorrow. I've thought, too, that some day there might be somebody else who would take Bill's place. But you see--there's only Bill now. There may never be anybody else. What is, means more than what might be, and it's some sort of completeness we want in our lives--not perfection."

"That's right, Virginia."

The lowest branch of the tree reached out to where we sat and from its tip there hung a crimson bell. Virginia pointed her toe and touched it, setting it rocking. "Bill's going down to Washington after New Year's to spend a month. I'm going too."

I had expected to hear that very decision but foreknowledge made it no less poignant. I could feel ache and paralysis in all my body. My throat choked, my eyes filled, I could not quite control my mouth. So I bent forward and tapped the crimson bell with my forefinger, swinging it back and forth as she had with her toe. It tinkled frailly. I told myself that now, above all other times, I must be in command of my emotions and I promised myself that at some later time I'd give them whatever compensation they demanded. So by and by I was able to talk.

"It's your life, Virginia. You've made up your mind." I had to clear my throat and I was still not able to face her. "I'm pretty proud of you. You've spent--seven months and more--as well as a long time abroad--thinking over-all this. I imagine you're worrying about John. And John still is in a pretty bad state of mind because of Connie. But I think he understands you better than he ever did her. And I'll--I'll take care of John."

She didn't answer.

I had a vision of John and myself alone now in Fort Sheffield--holding our outpost on that Roman road through the rest of a long and bitter Winter. Ivan would be away, and so would Larry. By one of Fate's experiments, I, who was not a Sheffield, would be left to represent a whole generation of Sheffields. Then, strangely enough, I thought of Nora. Would I, also, gradually desert the great house by the Sound? Was this only a cross section of all human life--and was all human life--thus subscribed to imperfection, compromise and dissolution? Perhaps.

When I turned around she was crying quietly. "I guess I'd better go to bed," she said.

"You'd better finish your sandwich and your milk."

I took a handkerchief from my breast pocket and wiped her eyes and held her nose while she blew it. Then we laughed and didn't say much more. Just before we started upstairs she took my arm. "Thank God for one thing, anyway," she said.

"What?"

' That somewhere in my life I'll always have you, Frankie."

She kissed me after that and ran upstairs.

An hour later, affairs in our family took a new and, to me, incredible course.

CHAPTER XVII

I had not gone to bed. I had lain half-undressed upon the settee in my room, smoking cigarettes, and not quite as sad as I had always expected I would be when finally Virginia reached those ultimate, positive words about herself and Bill.

Two things consoled me--that she'd thanked God I would always be in her life--

and, in a whimsical way, Nora.

After all, I'd long ago abandoned a hope I'd never really entertained about Virginia. We loved Bill, and I think we felt that there might be some rules for their particular code different from those limited regulations which most human beings are compelled to formulate. She'd shown that night--a certain depth of feeling for me about which I had a right to be proud. That feeling in some ways transcended what she felt towards Bill. It was enough--more than enough. It was so much that I could no longer view the months ahead with a gnawing at my viscera--with a future prospect of wretchedness and disenchantment.

What Nora had contributed to my mood was much more difficult to define. It might have worried me except that by some chance of insight I had understood it. My conscience did not make me think less of myself. It had been, after all, a gentle and a gingerly fervor. I had kissed the girl not to take revenge on Virginia, but because I had wanted to be kissed, and the desire had not represented fickleness of my inner devotion, but, rather, an announcement by some living part of my psyche that I was a man--that life must go on--that I was made of such stuff as would not wholly vanish because I had lost my true love.

That still seems inadequate as a definition. And I am sure that any member of the orthodox school of morals would have regarded my attitude at best as rationalizing and probably as sin. But I knew it was no sin. We are not made to be forever mournful, and the stern exigencies of nature contain warmth, as well as coldness and inexorableness. I did not need to carry my gesture with Nora any further. She had unintentionally reminded be of a neglected fragment of my manhood--and then, immediately afterward, Virginia had restored my soul.

I was ready afresh to face the winds, however they might blow.

I sprawled there thinking of that and the telephone rang downstairs. We'd got into the habit of shutting off our bedroom extensions. I thought at first that Larry or Ivan might be calling, and--like an anxious mother's--my mind leapt to automobile accidents.

But I remembered that their overcoats were in the hall. So they were both in bed.

I put on my dressing gown and hurried down the front stairway, tipping up switches that lighted my route in advance. And just before I picked up the phone I knew who was calling.

I said, "Hello."

Connie answered: "Hello. Frankie!"

Her voice was strangled and hysterical. I felt an iciness begin to creep over me but at the same time I remembered all I had just been thinking, and remembering thawed out that frigidity. In its place came a wave of compassion. "Hello, Connie. Where are you?"

"I'm in Palm Springs," she answered. "Can you hear me all right?"

"I can hear you as if you were across the street in Reedy Cove. How are you?"

"I'm not any good at all, Frankie." She stopped evidently to swallow. "Who's at home now? What time is it there?"

"It's about two o'clock. Everybody's home. Everybody was asleep but me."

There was a pause. "I'm glad I got you first. Look, Frankie. I don't need to tell you that I'm desperate. You can guess that by my voice. In a minute, I want you to go up and get John and put him on the wire. But I'll tell you first why. I'm going to ask him to take me back, Frankie. He'll probably say no. After he hangs up, maybe you can persuade him. Will you--will you try?"

Somehow I could answer her immediately and easily. It seemed all at once as if I'd expected this. "You bet I'll try, Connie! And I think maybe I'll succeed."

"Do you!" She drew in a long shuddering breath. "Then please hurry! Because I won't be able to hold myself together at all much longer! Barney's in Los Angeles. He's going to start on one of his expeditions pretty soon, and I'm supposed to sit for six months in Batavia, waiting for him. Now, get John, Frankie. Please!"

I turned on John's phone. I left the receiver down in the living room. I went up the front stairs three at a time--and I had seldom done that before. I burst into his room and he woke up quickly. He was very startled and thought I suppose--as I had--of bad roads and night and his three children.

I spoke as quietly as I could. "Look, John. There's nothing wrong. Wake yourself up. It's Connie, calling from California. She wants you to take her back, John. She's in dreadful distress. Don't say anything decisive to her now. At least, nothing that will upset her more. Be nice to her."

He gazed at me. "She wants me to take her back?"

I nodded.

He rubbed his face with his hands. He turned on the reading light.

"Your phone's connected."

He reached for it and his hand was shaking like the hand of an old man. When he put the instrument to his lips, he tried three times before he managed a gentle uneven,

"Hello, Connie." I sat down at the foot of his bed. I took a package of cigarettes from the pocket of my dressing gown. I had a hell of a time getting one lighted. This is what I heard John say:

"I'm in fine health, Connie. We all are . . . He what? . . . Batavia? . . . Oh, I see . . .

Well, yes. After you'd gone, I understood it. It was probably as much my fault as your own . . . I know." His voice was growing more tender and also steadier. Its pitch rose. He talked like a man on the verge of some unbelievable ecstasy. "You don't have to explain that . . . Barney was always just the opposite of me--he had all there is in a man that I didn't have . . . I know, darling . . . You mustn't cry so much--I can't hear what you're saying . . . I think I could tell you right now." His eyes met mine. I knew what he was about to say. He was on the point of telling her to come home at once. I tried passionately to add my will to his intention by just looking at him, but, as our gaze locked and I sat there breathlessly, I saw a doubt, a postponement gradually reduce the sublimity of his expression. He was listening to whatever Connie said in that little while and he waited for her to finish. Then he spoke again. "Of course, I'll call you back tomorrow. But I think I can give you all my part of the answer now, because it's just dawned on me, Connie, that only part of it is up to me. If I were alone in the world--darling, you must have known this all the time--I'd say, 'Charter a plane tonight!' I'd say 'Come home.' I'd say, I’ve always wanted you and I want you just as much now. Nothing matters. There's nothing to forgive. I love you.' But you see it isn't all just me. It's Virginia and Larry and Ivan, and Frankie, too. You've hurt them pretty badly. So I can't have what my own heart wishes until I've talked to them. I'll do that in the morning, and I'll let you know as soon as I know myself." That was about all he could say. There was a long pause again, and he finished simply. "Yes, as early as I can. Goodnight, Connie."

We did not sleep any more that night, of course. John hung up the phone and cried like a baby. I sat there on the bed and let him--not moving, not saying anything. When the last sob shook him for the last time and he was quiet, I kept on waiting.

Finally he said composedly, "I never knew I had an act like that in me. Did you?"

"Yeah," I answered. "You've got one for each kid in the family and one for Connie. All of us have."

"Give me a cigarette." We smoked a while and once I chuckled, just out of feeling relieved and dizzy with happiness. He didn't ask me why I was chuckling, because he didn't need to.

In fact, he didn't say anything at all until he had put out the cigarette. Then he looked at me for a time. "I sort of feel like waking up all the kids and putting it to them now--but I don't believe I will."

"No. Let 'em sleep."

He nodded and sighed. "What do you think?"

"About the kids?"

"Yes."

I paused to think about the kids. Because I didn't answer at once, he said my piece: "Either they'll say 'yes' right away, or they won't say anything." An anxious expression came slowly on his face. "What'll I do if they don't say anything, Frankie?"

I guess I shrugged. I went over to his closet and took out his dressing gown. I helped him into it. He was sitting up in his pajamas and his room was cold. "If that's their reaction--or the reaction of anyone of them--you'll just have to wait and give them a chance to think it over."

"Yes," he replied absent-mindedly. Then he grinned at me. "What do you say we go downstairs, build up a big fire, and maybe see if we can pick up some music on the short wave set? Or do you want to go to bed now?"

I put my arm around his shoulder and hugged him a little. "No, John. I don't want to go to bed. I want to listen to that music and watch you being happy for the first time in a long, long while, and feel what it's like to be happy myself."

"Yeah. That was my idea."

We went downstairs and made the fire roar in the chimney. We turned on the Christmas tree again. The night was clear and fine and one of Larry's hobbies had been radio. We picked up the Paris station that broadcasts all night long for the benefit of its colonies around the world, and we listened to news, jokes and music in French. Then we had Moscow for a while. And after that, half the stations in Europe, as they got busy with morning activity. By and by the sun, which had been on its way across the Atlantic, paled the perimeter of land and sea around Fort Sheffield, and it was dawn. We had enjoyed the music--it fitted somehow into our mood, which was cosmic.

I went upstairs--later--and brought down all of Connie's letters, together with those from Larry, and John read them--with what thoughts, what suffering, what delight, I could only imagine. But I shan't forget how he looked at me after he had folded the last one--looked and smiled and remembered.

I kept back the biggest surprise of all--my trip to Palm Springs. I told him about that completely and ended up by giving my ideas of what I thought were Connie's reasons for running away from the Fort. I said that Connie had always been youthful and glamorous to such a degree that she had found any other state impossible to accept. I said that life--had started inexorably to show her that she was approaching middle-age, and she had blamed the exhibition not on life but on Reedy Cove. John understood that, and I presume he always had. I hadn't finished talking when we began to hear noise upstairs, and we looked at our watches and saw that it was morning.

The Sheffields had always been pretty early risers, but on winter mornings darkness lingers late; I suppose it was between seven and eight when the sun actually touched the snow and the icicles and the water, making them all too bright to be endured.

Anne came down to discover us still sitting there in our bathrobes. We had decided to wait until everybody was on hand for breakfast before telling them--so we went upstairs and dressed.

Bill was the last one to appear, and no better evidence of the place he had taken in our family could possibly be shown than by the fact that John waited for him also. I tried to evaluate everybody's mood ahead of time. Virginia had given me a secret, telling smile-and started her prunes in a preoccupied manner. She was thinking about her decision--about Bill and about Washington. Larry came roaring in with a lot of vocal anticipation about bobsledding on Yankee Knob Hill. Ivan came down with a book on anatomy under his arm, but I could see that he was more interested in Larry's project than in the Latin names of nerves. Bill was just the same: his emotions always rose and fell more gradually than those of the Sheffields; they were consequently more stable, and they were just as deep.

That's the way they felt--when John cleared his throat two times and with such manifest tension that they looked at him. I had been wondering how he would put it.

He said, "Virginia--Larry--Ivan--I've got something that is more than just important to say this morning. I haven't any idea what effect it will have on you, and I want to know that effect more than anything else in the world. I want you to tell me the exact truth. For that reason I'm going to tell you what I think about it myself."

"It's something about Connie." I turned and saw that Virginia was taut, sure of her guess, and shaken by it." John nodded. "It's something about Connie. She telephoned last night after you were all in bed."

There was deathly silence. I should have known that John would state his case that way--impartially and without sentiment. It was like him to assume that justice depended upon bending backwards. I should have known it-and I should have advised him--but I hadn't.

"She wants to come back," John said. "I told her that I would put it up to you--

since all of you are as much affected by her wish as I am. I want to know your answer, so that I can tell her what it is."

I opened my mouth to speak. I wanted to say something about John's own feelings when Connie had called. Something about my feelings. But as I looked from Ivan to Larry and then to Virginia, I was frightened. Each in a separate way had recoiled at the announcement. Each face was creased by memories of the pain Connie had caused. So I said nothing then--for, since there was in each of them this powerful antagonistic element, it was better to know about it than to have it submerged--to creep out later, when and if Connie came home.

Virginia interrupted the voiceless interlude. "May I ask a question?"

I didn't like the way her words sounded.

John said, "Anybody may. Any questions."

"What's your wish?"

John smiled slightly. He wanted to tell them, but was determined neither to tell nor to reveal his wish. "Except that. I don't want any of you youngsters to be prejudiced by me."

Larry said, "Has she left that damn cowboy yet?"

His voice had broken into falsetto when he said "cowboy." The air burned with his repressed violence.

I decided I had to do something then. I said, "I answered the phone when Connie called last night." John shot an imploring glance at me. And I went on. I had already determined to be loyal to his way of presenting the problem. "I really think we should consider Connie's side of this, too. She knows what she's done to your pride and your feelings about her. She knows exactly the sort of mistake she's made. As far as her being alone is concerned, Barney has gone to Los Angeles and is about to start out on one of his expeditions. She was supposed to go along as far as Batavia with Barney--"

Larry interrupted me then. "I wish you'd keep Colby's name out of this, at least. It makes me sick at my stomach to hear you call him Barney, too, if you don't mind."

Larry's eyes were like wounds from which his soul was bleeding. I said as quietly as I could, "I'm sorry."

Again the long tick of frozen seconds. John swallowed audibly and moved in his chair. "Ivan?" It was almost a whisper.

Ivan ran his fingers through his dark hair a couple of times. He turned his more classic version of John's profile toward his father. He straightened his lips. "I don't know," he began heavily and sullenly. "I don't know. Some kind of rotten spot turned up in Connie. It doesn't seem right that she should be allowed to get away with all the pain she's caused--to humiliate everybody. To make our insides crawl for months. And then pop blithely back and be accepted without a murmur. It isn't right!" When he said that, he banged his fist down on the table and the dishes rang.

John shook his head a fraction of an inch. These slings and arrows had come upon him unprepared. All during the joyous night before, he had been opening the doors of his citadel. He had expected a rush of welcome and delight--but he still understood this. Inch by inch, he was nerving himself to bear it. He didn't speak when he looked toward Virginia.

She was watching Bill--watching him frantically--as if she expected some sign, some instruction in his demeanor. The implications of that searching stare, the knowledge of what she was asking, yanked at the very roots of my being. But Bill gave her no token of his thoughts. And, after all, that was right. If she was to live by her decisions, they must be her own. Bill kept his face flinty, his eyes fixed and far away.

Then she tried me and I could not hold myself against the supplication in her eyes.

I, too, looked away. So Virginia spoke. "John--what can any of us say? Do you believe we'd ever feel the same way about Connie again? Do you believe she'd mean the things we used to think she meant?" Deep-dwelling, fragile parts of Virginia were crashing and shattering as she went on. "We've all got to choose how we'll live these lives of ours. She chose. Can you renege, John? Can you go back? I'd hate to think of myself doing it."

She broke into tears. Larry got up and shoved his hands in his pockets and began to walk monotonously around and around the dining room table.

I didn't think John was able to speak, so I tried to say something for him. "Look, I don't believe any of us ought to give John a definite answer yet. I have a lot more that must be said before we do. I've been writing to Connie ever since early fall, and she's been writing to me. I would like it if both you guys would read her letters. Then--" I told them of my trip.

Larry had come up toward my chair, and, as I told them that, he stopped dead and looked at me. His stare was frenzied and very demoniac and very slowly he leaned forward. "You've been writing to her!" His voice was blistering. I suppose, behind his bitterness, was a great lost wish for his mother that he was fighting back. A moment later he could fight it no longer and he found another expression of that calamitous dilemma.

"You've been to see her! A slimy Sheffield you turned out to be!!"

I, too, was losing control of myself, for I answered less quietly. "Connie's more than just your mother. She's a woman. This is not an easy world--these are not easy times--for a woman to live."

His face twisted. His voice was hoarse. "Unless she's an easy woman!"

Ivan said nothing. John did not speak. Virginia hid her eyes in a handkerchief.

I had to. I could feel my teeth shut. "You shouldn't have said that!"

" I shouldn't have said that!" he cried. "What have you got to do with what I say!

You don't belong! You're a cripple! You haven't got a mother and father! You know what you are? You're a--"

"Shut up!" I said.

He hit me. His hand flashed out of his pocket and he drove it into my mouth. It knocked me out of my chair onto the floor. For a little eternity I wanted to get up and kill him, and I knew I couldn't. I knew with an awful and enervating certainty, not that rage was tragic here, but that I was too weak--that I was, indeed, a cripple. That Ivan was sitting still in his chair, that even John had been struck numb. After that instant of conscious impotence. I lay where I had fallen, tasting the blood that ran into my mouth.

Then fiercely and unexpectedly. Virginia leaped up and slapped him. She ran out of the room after that. Bill followed her.

Frenzy faded from Larry's eyes, and presently he spoke in a remote, dazed tone.

"I'm going to throw up," he said.

I stood then and got out my handkerchief and wiped my lips. Nobody was paying any attention to Larry. I turned toward Ivan and he looked coldly away from me. Then my eyes sought John, but he had covered his face with his hands.

So I walked out of the dining room. I think I was on my way upstairs to my own room when I happened to see my coat and hat in the hall. I put them on and went outdoors.

The snow between the house and the beach was unmarked, and I broke a trail through it all the way down to the flat rock. There was a high cushion of whiteness upon it, which I brushed aside. Around the bay there was a rim of ice. Beyond it, the water sparkled coldly.

I sat down, shaking.

CHAPTER XVIII

It was freezing out on the flat rock but I didn't notice that for a long while. It may have been half an hour--or five minutes--before I realized that my fingers were numb and my ears stinging. The first spasm of turbulence went away slowly and was replaced by fragments of thoughts. They were unrelated and a good many of them contained nothing but pity--for myself and the world. The sea water splashed against the fringe of ice and occasionally an invisible whorl of wind set up a jet of snow.

I saw it all--and didn't see it. I thought that I'd never sat on the flat rock in the midst of deep winter and that fact emphasized the uniqueness and the difference of all that was happening in my life.

I remembered the expression on Larry's face. It would leave a wound difficult or perhaps impossible to heal. He was seventeen--and sensitive. He would rub salt in the place. I reminded myself that Virginia was going away. As difficult to accept was the violence of my disappointment over the refusal of my foster brothers and sister to allow Connie to return. It had been a brutal shock, and I had no philosophy with which to bear it against the contrast of the preceding night--the ineffable and almost holy vigil I had passed with John.

It was disintegration. The break-up of the Sheffields. They had grown up and they were choosing their own ways of life. It clarified itself and bit into me. The very perfection of our youth meant that its end would be absolute. Strong bonds burst more devastatingly than weak ones. It was going to be so with us. Neither Connie's spontaneity nor John's serenity, when put to the test, had given the family sufficient morale to maintain even some part of itself through this succession of crises.

Virginia's announcement would snap the last strand of loyalty. She might defer it now, for a while. But she would not change her purpose. I'd sensed before, that she had studied her own code in the light of Connie's violations--but the parallel was not as real as it would have seemed. In Barney there was an element of recklessness and irresponsibility. He had loved the wilderness more than Connie, and if pursuit of adventure at the expense of love would hurt him, he would never show it. Bill was not like that. Once Virginia committed herself to him, he would be faithful to that trust forever and through anything. It was in his eyes and the tone of his voice. Then--Virginia was leaving behind no husband. If she hurt the family--if Larry stormed again and Ivan sat darkly silent--that sorry rage would be over attitudes and not such soul-deep images as mother, father, son, daughter.

We were older. This was spring--premature and tempestuous. It was ice exploding in the still river that had been our family existence. I could not see beyond it, however, to any green mistiness, any soft twilight, any thrilling ponds or April-scent. To me it was a spring that burst the bare ice only to uncover a barer earth.

But gradually I knew that I must play some part in the disintegration, whether I wished or not. And it seemed better to make my part voluntary. To dare to think beyond that took all my small store of courage, and I did it painfully. The years rolled back until I had recovered the exact feelings of the small boy who had read John's letter en route to the junk man and who decided forwith to run away. I felt that it was time for me to think again of going. And I gave that thought its full juvenile rein, carrying it so far as to consider ways and means of returning the money willed to me by grandma Sheffield. I was making a very good independent livelihood. I'd be all right. I could go to New York and find myself an apartment--comfortable and small, with a skyscraper cordillera around it--where I could live in solitude.

Then I thought of Nora--suddenly and without a discoverable reason. An apartment, I thought, and a wife like her as a gesture to life and being alive. There I could dwell in simple misery--tasting the fruits of life sparingly--writing--a man whose days had already been lived.

That was as far as I could carry such speculation. I found myself giggling. I had been looking into as much immaturity as could have been found in Larry's mind. Nora, indeed! I couldn't remember now, why I had kissed her. But I could recall that I had--and it had been pleasant. So lowed her something. A diamond bracelet, maybe--or an ice cream soda. I rather inclined toward the latter.

The fiat rock was chilling me upward and I rose from it. I kicked it. A deceitful perch, I thought. I've fooled myself whenever I sat down on it. I'll take no more girls here and come here no more to struggle with what I stupidly consider my soul.

With that, I started back toward the house, somewhat restored, but still in an exaggerated mood--one that tried to compensate for my loss of myself. I found out soon enough that it was only another mood. Perhaps I'd hoped to laugh the Sheffields back toward normalcy. I'd intended to see Larry immediately in order to make him feel that I did not hold any grudge against him. And I did see him as I came in.

"Look," I said, "We've got something to forget--and from where I sit--the sooner the better."

He pretended that he neither heard nor saw me and he walked away.

He'll get over it, I thought.

Ivan was in the library with a book. I went in. The mood ebbed further when he looked up. He opened his mouth to speak and was silent. I picked out a magazine and sat down. And a moment later he stood. "I might as well tell you," he said evenly, "that I'll never be able again to think of you the way I did."

"But--"

He tossed his book on a table and he, also, walked away. So I sat there alone for some time. I began to think again--not in a new pit of wretchedness nor again in a state of thin exaltation--but very soberly. When Virginia saw me and entered the room, I felt that I was calm. But she had her own particular thrust for me. She sighed and dropped on the divan and spoke after a long time.

"I've always been terribly afraid that the fact that you're different from the rest of us would come out in some ugly way like this."

It was a chilling statement. I couldn't say anything. She sat in silence and sighed again. "Why didn't you get up and hit Larry?" she asked.

That startled me. I was on the point of being noble and slow-spoken. Instead, I told her the truth--even enlarged it. "Because I was afraid. He would have beaten me. A man has to have two legs to fight on."

"That's what I thought. I felt sorry for you."

None of them had ever spoken to me--or, conversely, failed to speak to me--in that way. I couldn't believe that Virginia was doing it. I went obliquely to my own defense. "I'm not yellow, Virginia. Not that way, anyhow. But--it was futile. A sense of futility. It rushed over me. I had an impulse to get up--and I knew that it would only make the spectacle that much more ignominious and hateful."

She looked at me and her eyes were icy. "Don't you ever do what your first impulse tells you to do, Frankie?"

I thought that over. My last bit of spirit was gone again.

I said, "Cripples don't," and I was so beaten down that I didn't even regret that for minutes.

So she left too.

We stumbled through lunch without looking at each other. Dinner, we abandoned.

I went into the kitchen at five, after spending the intervening hours in my room, and Anne expected my excuse. "Don't tell me you won't be here for supper! Virginia and Mr. Bill have gone out. Mr. Sheffield's staying in Bridgeport. Larry and Ivan are dressing up to go out. What's wrong now, Frankie?"

"We had a family disagreement."

She rolled on a piece of pie crust. She swallowed. I had a sense of sadness in her, invisible, immense. "Birds flying from the nest," she said.

"Maybe it's nature."

"Not in this family. It's against nature." She looked up from the spreading dough.

"I'm never going to believe in anything any more, Frankie. You Sheffields can't kid me.

You've come to the end of this mess and you're too God-almighty high-spirited to stand it. So you're all running out. It makes me sick, to think of all the character you had just blazing up the flue like this!"

She was trying to be angry--and every word made the effort more difficult. I put my arm around her shoulder and hugged her and left her to have her good, old-fashioned cry alone.

That night I stayed awake telling myself that it would blow over.

But it didn't.

Larry stayed at home for four more days--and neither spoke to me nor sat down at the table when I was there. Ivan said only perfunctory things--and went back to medical school a week ahead of time. Virginia talked--listlessly. And Bill was gone. John scarcely appeared in the house until the two boys had left. Then he settled into his old schedule, but he was taciturn and unresponsive. I began to feel that I was a symbol of the cause for all of it. In less unhappy moments I could remember how bitterly John had been disappointed in his children, but during most of the time, I realized that by seeing Connie, I had precipitated this blank, impossible state upon them all.

A dismal New Year's had come and gone. Anne was in bed with a cold. Virginia was getting ready to go to Washington. She hadn't said so, but I knew. For one reason, she'd made three clothes--buying pilgrimages to New York. For another, she'd absently ringed a date in January on the library calendar. The twentieth. Connie had left Palm Springs and gone to Georgia, alone. Friends--a number of them--had been at pains to tell us that.

Usually they told us abruptly. "By the way," they liked to say, "I suppose you've heard that Connie is a true widow now?" Then they'd watch for the wince. Unfortunately for those friends--the Sheffields were poor wincers.

One night I decided to check out.

We--Virginia and John and I--ate in our now-habitual silence, taking food to sustain lives which were tasteless for John and me and in abeyance for Virginia. When he left the table, I said, "John, before you go to bed, I'd like to talk to you."

"Come up."

Virginia looked at me then. I thought I saw a shadow of dread in her eyes, but if I did, it was gone instantly. I folded my napkin and left my dessert. I was thinking about how she had told me that she was glad I'd always be in her life--and then, twenty-fours hours later--she had begun to behave as if I did not matter at all. I climbed upstairs.

Next to John's bedroom was his "study" and we went there. He jerked his head at a chair and picked a pipe from the rack. This was the first time we'd met alone since the night Connie had called, and he hadn't asked for the meeting, so I said what I had to say curtly.

"I'm leaving Fort Sheffield, John."

Probably I'd expected him to act as coldly as the others had. I must have, because when he dropped into his chair and familiarly covered his face with his hands and said,

"I've been expecting this for all these days," I was stunned.

"Have you?"

"--and hoping one of the kids--anyone of them--or all of them--would kick in and quit taking out their damned prides on you."

"Why didn't you say something?"

He shrugged. "Because I was doing it, too, Frankie. Don't you see that you've been made the whipping boy for all of us? You were the guy who stuck. You had the guts to stay loyal to Connie--even. And we all lay down and quit. Now--you're going away.

And I think you have the right to shake the dust of the Fort off your shoes when you leave."

My heart beat warmer then. I realized that in my own confusion I had lost sight of just what the others felt. He looked up and our eyes met. He seemed old and resigned. He smiled--at me. "Yeah. Go, Frankie. I guess you want to be away before Virginia--does what she has on her mind--don't you? I wish I could duck that too."

"She told you?"

He shook his head. "Virginia made her last confidence--in the summer. She didn't need to tell me. What's the matter with us Sheffields, Frankie? Is there some sort of rot in us somewhere? Haven't we got what it takes? Have all the years been just easy living?

Fool's paradise stuff?"

I shook my head. I was glad that John was himself with me again. And yet--he was asking me about his family--as if I were an outsider. I had become one.

"Bad luck," I said.

"Other people can stand bad luck."

I got out a cigarette and stalled with it. Finally I had to talk, because he wouldn't.

"There's another thing, John. Grandmother's money. I'd prefer to be without it." He bowed his head. "So we've succeeded in making you feel that low about us!"

It hadn't occurred to me that such an interpretation would be put on my reluctance to depend on a former generosity. And yet, the emotion implied by the gesture was exactly that. Nothing I could have suggested would have shown any more clearly than that an unconscious wish to wipe the slate clean of Sheffield allegiance. Of course, it was the opposite of what I really wanted. It was an emotional, juvenile thing. But I had told John, and I could not think of a way to explain what I really felt, or to say that I belatedly realized the implications of my words. I could see now, that from John's viewpoint, I might as well have estimated all the money that he had spent to bring me up, and offered to pay it back from my own earnings. He was hurt.

There was nothing to do. I muttered apologetic-sounding words. "It isn't that. Just-

-"

He took a deep breath. He stared straight at me for a long time. And I looked back. I was fuddled and depressed and I'd shown ideas I had not known were in me--

disappointments and indictments--but I was going and if it was all a mess--it was my mess. He stared, and finally shrugged and even smiled.

"All right, Frankie. I don't give a damn what you do with the money. Send it to some charity, if you'll feel better."

"I shouldn't have brought it up at all, John."

"Sure you should--if it was on your conscience. We don't need it. And what we do need--I cannot guess. You want to bolt. I don't blame you. I'd like to bolt myself. Chuck the works. I've run my life and my family with certain definite ideas. I had certain positive expectations about them. They were wrong. And I don't know whether it was the family--or the ideas. Something soured. But I think that maybe I was over-confident.

Maybe I took too much in my own hands. I'll quit doing that--at any rate. Beginning with you. You're kicking yourself for what you've just said. You've criticized us by saying it.

And we had that criticism coming--because we've let you out of the family. Larry with his fists--Ivan with his lips--me with my silence. And Virginia--maybe she let you down more than any of the rest of us. It's too late to remedy it. I suppose I've got to learn to get used to that. And I'm not going to linger over the fact that right now I respect you more than I do my own blood."

"They're kids, John."

"They're selfish. That's all you can say about it. A year ago, if anybody had told me Virginia could be hypocritical--I'd have laughed in their face."

"You can't say that she is."

He nodded. "No. Perhaps not." He looked at me some more, weighing unguessable thoughts. Then his tone changed. He touched on a subject he had never mentioned to me. "Frankie, when Connie and I adopted you, I was against it."

I didn't answer that.

"When you came to live here, I hated you. You looked like a bad bet. That gives me a glimpse of what may be my trouble now. You were imperfect--and I couldn't stand it. I've got a perfection complex, I guess. And that's not the way life is. Two or three years passed before I even liked you. Of course, you were too young then to know--"

He hesitated. He was still looking at me with speculation. And I had a hunch. I knew that he was on the verge of telling me some secret thing--some fact about myself. I began to tingle--as if I had a fabulous bit of the future in my grasp. I was frightened. I was hopeful. I was both unwilling and avid to go on. The moment had changed from one of difficult and retributive parley to one of confession. As if to urge from John the thing his eyes still withheld, I made a confidence of my own first.

"I know you hated me," I said.

He turned his head aside, sadly. "Did you? Sure. I suppose kids guess those things. Even babies--"

"I wasn't a baby when I found out. I was eleven." I told John about the letter. He sat still, and listened. Neither of us was very stable when I finished.

"You see," I finally said, "that's why--leaving here is so incredibly hard on me.

You--everybody--overcame a prejudice and made me one of you. That's why I've stuck out the past few days. You mean more in many ways--than any father. It's normal to love your own kids. But to take me the way you did--against the handicap--"

He thought about that. "You've put in a lot of tough hours--weeks--years--haven't you? I remember when you ran away. How sorry I felt. How we went out on the fire engine afterward--"

"And the locomotive."

"Yeah. The locomotive." He drew his upper lip beneath his lower. "Frankie, do you think it would have made a difference in your life if you had known who your parents were?"

I began to tremble--and yet, I had to remember my life. "I don't think I'd have been as happy--anywhere--as I have been here. The present doesn't matter. It would have made a difference--sure. Why, John?"

"Because--" he pushed the heels of both hands against his forehead--"because I've known who they were for fifteen years. And I never told even Connie."

That was what he had been deciding to say when he had stared at me.

My nerves congealed. My ears whined. I had an impulse to throw myself upon him--to shout--to do anything to relieve the hammering danger in the words I said next.

Yet I did not move and the question came in a remote, unfamiliar voice which was as calm as an object imprisoned in glass: "Who were they, John?"

He stood up slowly and spoke with gravity. "There have been many times in past years when I almost decided to tell you. Knowing all about your parents and not telling you was like playing God, I suppose--and I shouldn't have done it." He gazed at me and nodded in agreement with himself. "I can see that it was wrong. Probably Connie did something parallel to it when she decided to put her own desire ahead of what she thought was best for us--and go away. It would be odd if I had sinned as heavily against you. Could you forgive me for that?"

"Sure, John."

He began to walk back and forth. "You must understand why I did it. You must.

When first I detested you, I wanted to cast you out. When finally I came to love you, I wanted to possess you more even than my own children. I wrestled with myself over it often, and I convinced myself that it was better for you to believe as much as you could that you were a Sheffield than it was for you to know that you had another heritage and another name. I see now," he said heavily, "that it was all selfishness."

I swallowed.

"I should have let you know," he continued. "I should have let you know. I've been a cruel and bigoted fool. Some of the ways of your generation are better for this world than some of the ways of mine."

CHAPTER XIX

A single drop of cold perspiration ran down my spine. I couldn't stand it any longer--although I had a powerful feeling of sympathy for John and the sturdy quietude with which he had devoted himself to us. "For God's sake," I whispered, "tell me who they were and get it over with!"

He swore softly and enragedly at himself. "Frankie! They were all right! They were swell people! I'll show you what I know about them. Your father was a sea captain and his wife was a nurse--"

I felt myself falling toward darkness. I leaned against the chair's back. I shut my eyes and held my jaws together. The blackness cleared a little and I squeezed down with the muscles in my abdomen. They were all right. Swell people. Sea captain--married to a nurse. Married. I realized that I had almost fainted.

"Are they--still living, John?"

"No!" He sounded shocked. "If they were, I would have told you, of course!"

"Oh."

He stood up and took a key-ring from his waistcoat pocket. He walked across the room to the window-seat and threw off its cushion. He lifted the seat and held it up with his shoulder. I went over to help him. Under the seat was a heavy chest and at first I thought it had belonged to my father--for it was wooden and iron-bound and looked as if its place was the sea. But it was John's. The key opened it. Inside I saw neatly tied bundles of letters and documents--small boxes that contained things imaginable and unimaginable--childhood treasures, maybe--tops--Iove letters from dimly remembered girls--a Croix de Guerre, I knew--because we'd never seen John's medals. I thought that John also had a hiding place--a sanctuary of tangible memories--that corresponded to my trunk with its false bottom.

He fumbled for a moment and then he took out a particular bundle. The paper was time-bleached. He handed it to me--and from it came the scent of aged documents. "Your readoption papers--after I found out who you were. And a letter from a man named Elias Griggs, who knew your father. And your mother. Also the reports of the lawyers I hired to find out what relatives you had. There are some third cousins in Scotland, I believe--

and that's all we could trace. Your mother had one aunt and I took care of her when you were six and seven. She died before you were eight."

I had broken the string and I was shuffling the documents feverishly. The first thing I discovered was that my name had been Thomas Treat MacBurney.

Not Frankie. Tom.

I read hastily through a number of whereases. I saw the court order that had changed my name. It was dated May, 1922.

Then I came on the letter from Elias Griggs. It was in a fat envelope which bore a string of stamps I remembered dimly. The handwriting was round and regular-the writing of a man who had taken every advantage of a grammar school education because he had known that was all the schooling he would have--writing that lacked the affected individuality of a high school or a university.

"Sit down," John said. "Read it to me." I tried to read it out loud. But the first paragraph stopped me--so he took it.

"Dear Mr. Sheffield:

"Your letter informing me that you have adopted the son of Douglas and Sylvia MacBurney has reached me and I am grateful for it. I talked with Mr. Slavens, your attorney, and asked him in all frankness about you so that I would be satisfied in my years ahead and peaceful in my grave to know my friend's child was in the hands of upright and worthy people under loving care. I beg to assure you I am so satisfied, and I wish you God's blessing for taking Thomas. If I was interfering in so doing, I beg your excuse, but Douglas was a man all men loved and none will forget in this earth so I would have marched through burning brimstone to secure the proper upbringing for his child. The world is peopled with those who owe lives and happiness to Douglas MacBurney, who died a hero beyond mortal attainments and may the Lord rest his great spirit."

There I handed the letter to John, who went on reading it in a low, contemplative voice. I could imagine its author, a rough, religious mate--sitting under a swinging ship's light--composing this all too brief biography for a man he had never seen--and for me.

"'About myself there is little to say. I was born in the Faith in Penobscot, Maine, and shipped as a cabin boy in 1879. I was Douglas MacBurney's First Officer for eleven years on three vessels. I am now Third Officer on the Belinda, a cargo boat of thirty-six hundred tons, age and steam having somewhat depressed my station in life. But about Captain MacBurney volumes could and indeed should be written. He was a whale of a man. A bluenose--that is to say, his folks hailed from Nova Scotia--although he had been born in the United States and was a citizen. A more God-fearing man never lived, nor a stronger. I've seen him throw two insolent scoundrels clear over an anchor winch, one with each hand and at the same time. He stood six feet two in his socks and he was made of pure Bristol steel and teak.

"'Douglas knew half the Bible by heart and I guess all of Shakespeare. He was a lusty singer and I've seen him blasting a chanty into the wind to hearten men south of the Horn, or fetching mist into their eyes in the doldrums. He lived a bachelor and I thought he'd die one, for his lectures on women and grog would have turned Jonathan Edwards in his grave from jealousy. He was fifty-six when he fell in love with Sylvia Doremus and he married her between voyages to Africa.

"'I saw her only once. She was a fair-haired woman from the Hebrides, without kin in America, and she worked as a trained nurse in a hospital in Boston. She was as pretty as a cameo with the straightest gray eyes I've ever seen in a woman's head and not an ounce to fluffy-dove in her. Being married didn't change Douglas, as nothing could have, but no man was ever made happier by the sacrament and he spent a whole summer in Marblehead with his bride after the last African voyage.

"'When the Company put us on the China service, we took the Mabel Pruitt to Hong Kong and Shanghai and the island ports, in which latter Douglas lost his life during the 'quake at Lukubola. The island was a sweating jungle where two thousand natives worked a tin mine and we took off ingots once a year there. A hundred whites, mostly British and Dutch with some American missionaries, steamed out the long months between ships on Lukubola and there was a volcano in the middle as perfect as an ice cream cone, green, except for a couple of lava stripes down the side, which were black.

"'We put in there on our first trip and when we got home, Douglas had a son. He was named Thomas Treat after his father's father and his mother's mother, and when we sailed again we carried the proudest skipper in Boston. On our second trip to Lukubola we'd taken on half our ingots, which make as fine a ballast for a stout ship as you could want, and the blacks, which aren't like Africans, were swarming in and out of the hold, when there was a rumble of warning and the mountain blew up.

"'One minute it was sunny and so hot you could pour tar like tea and the next the sky was black, every soul was flattened, and half the island had heaved up into the sky.

The blast stood the ship on her beam ends. Men rolled overboard like peas. And a great chunk of mountain fell on the forecastle, mashing it the way a sledge would a peanut.

Douglas and I had been in the chart room when it started. We got one boat over and all the men left aboard were in her before the Mabel Pruitt went down. Douglas stepped off a flooded deck, the last man, and we picked up all we could before the tidal wave came in.

"'Lukubola was the name of the island and of the town there. Half the houses were mashed when we came ashore and hot mud was pouring from the sky. It would have been black as night then, but the whole center of the island was flickering and spewing so you could see the way you can in bad lightning, only this was yellowish light. Douglas sent his men ranging through the town and dragged everybody towards the fire and away from the sea, though some wouldn't go that way. The wave that came in took them, and most of the houses, and the docks and warehouses.

"'By six that night there were several hundred of us up the road toward the mine.

The lava was thundering down through the jungle and a party came up from the shore, about dead, saying that the whole island was settling into the sea. Douglas was still calm and he hadn't been hurt yet, and he looked at the poor devil who brought that news and said, "Then we'll have to get off the island." I can still remember how those words sounded and how I said to myself, though I was half-crazed, If Douglas MacBurney says we'll get off, we will.

"'We returned to the water and the condition of the people we passed was pitiful in the extreme. The harbor boiled like a kettle of porridge under the scalding muck that fell into it, sulphurous air rasped our lights and windpipes, men among us fell some from chunks of pumice and some from wounds they had received in the holocaust. But the great sweep of water had receded and the sea was again navigable if we could find anything wherewith to escape upon it. That the island was sinking could not be doubted, and as the water rose the earth ground and gyrated beneath us. At Douglas' command of,

"Rafts!" we fell to--using the abundance of flotsam along the changing shore.

"'I entered the raging tumult at his side. So vast an amount of volcanic matter had been spouted into the bay that the water was hot. Through it about forty of us swam for the junk, and some drowned on the way and stones fell on others, so that thirty-odd reached the dragging gear and twisted ropes at the vessel's side.

"'There we clung, gathering our resources to board her. Then the crew saw us and prepared not to receive us but at all costs to repel us. They were armed with dirks and long swords as well as poles and heavy objects of every description which they pitched down upon us. The awfulness of that circumstance may have exaggerated my memory, but I recall the scene even now with terror, and I believe that there were twice our number of grinning heathen at the rail when Douglas led us through the fallen shrouds and aboard.

"'From the first Chinee he encountered he received a slash that would have slain an ordinary man. But his assailant paid dearly. Douglas reached inside the arc of his sword and took it and split him through. We who followed soon had lost our lives or availed ourselves of arms at similar cost. It was a foul ship, its rigging wrecked, mud slimy now upon it, and over that we swiftly laid the red cloak of our blood. In that battle Douglas was a god such as the barbaric Romans worshipped in ancient times, invincible Mars himself, so that through the thick of it I saw him split men and hurl them overboard to clear his heathen's sword, using his two hands, and tossing them as if they were hay on a fork. Certainly he was no swordsman yet surely there has never been swordsmanship to equal it.

"'His monstrousness made up for a score of men and those Chinee we did not slay retreated like rats and finally threw themselves into the water, squealing and floundering.

We had won the ship, but when I came near to Douglas through the carnage we had made, I found him sitting on the deck with the handle of a knife protruding from his right breast. He would not draw it out, lest he bleed to death the more rapidly, but superintended the raising of a jury mast. With the heathen's sail, we made the turbulent shore and those who still lived came aboard, four hundred and sixty-three in all. Laden with human cargo, we put off from Lukubola and before dawn we reached clean water and a clear sky over the southern portion. To the north the smoke and flame of the island darkened the world.

"'I tended Douglas in those last hours. His agonies were severe but so great was his joy at having been instrumental in the rescue of so many souls he scarcely seemed to notice. To me he committed his wife and child. There were several frightful explosions before his death and I learned afterward that the entire island had gone down with them.

He seemed to know that, in his last moments, and to feel his titanic work had not been unnecessary, and even the killing of so many heathen justified. He succumbed murmuring the name of Our Lord.

"'Hardship attended us. Many of that company aboard the junk never saw land again. We drifted for eight days. Then another isle was sighted and though many feared to go upon it, we found sweet water there and made it our home. From it we were taken after eleven months in two parties to the Straits Settlements by the schooner Annabelle.

"'And even then, ill fortune was to follow me. On the return cruise we were dismasted and sorely delayed so that I did not reach Boston for nearly two years following that disastrous embarkation. I sought Sylvia MacBurney at once only to find that her babe had been smitten by paralysis and barely recovered. After that, and after assuming that her husband had been lost, she had gone to Chicago to a new position. I went there, and could not trace her.

"'Because she was the widow of a man so justly famous and celebrated, the police bent their energies and resources to the search. She was traced back to New York and then to the State of Connecticut. She had sickened with tuberculosis, and the shock over her husband had perhaps somewhat affected her mind. A family who had employed her as a domestic reported that she had lived in dread of an accident or mishap to her child. I spent two years more in searching. And finally I found the hospital in which she had died.

"'They had kept her effects, pathetic trifles, and in them a faded photograph of Douglas and herself taken that summer at Marblehead. Thus I identified her. But the child I could not follow. She had stumbled into the hospital on a winter night sick unto death and saying that she had left her baby where it would not be affected by her contagion.

The nurses and doctors assumed her talk of a child was mere delirium. And so a noble woman passed away, having done what she imagined was her best for her son.

"'This, dear sir, virtually concludes the story. I have, at your suggestion, waited upon Mr. Slavens in New York and examined the wrappings in which the child was left and they have lifted my last doubt, for among them was a blanket I myself presented to Douglas when the child was born, a small, soft thing, embroidered with the infant's monogram. Your foster son, is therefore, the true offspring of Douglas MacBurney and as such I send my well-wishes. He is the son of a great man.

"'I have assured myself that the child will be better reared in your home than in any which could be provided by myself or by his father's friends. Therefore I am content to leave him in the care of you, and of Our Lord. I am an old man and grateful. Rear the boy with studiousness, for his breed is rare. His father was the greatest man I have known on all the seven seas. If I can ever be of use, I shall gladly serve you. Whether or not you tell him of his origin will be for you to decide at some later time. And may God's Grace guide your judgement.

"'Your obedient servant,

"'Elias Griggs."

John folded the last page and put the letter back in its envelope. I had been sitting there with my eyes shut. There was nothing to say. I knew now why I'd always had strange feelings about the sea. I could not measure my emotions. I was free. I had a place on earth--a superb place. But what made my heart beat as if it would burst through my ribs was not that. It was a lurking reality, a fear I had never faced which had come to light only to be annihilated. Because I had not dealt with it, no one will understand the violence of my recognition of it, or the ecstasy of relief from it. For I knew now that if ever I had sons of my own they need not suffer my inadequateness of physique. I knew I had been miscast by circumstance, not misborn. My father was a giant. My sons might be. Then, indeed, my blood ran inside me proudly and I felt the stuff of immortality, courage, strength, joy.

"You can see that old man writing," John murmured. "His gray head, his weathered face, his seafaded eyes, his logbook locutions--"

But I didn't want to talk. I took the letter and went to my room. There would be time later to thank him. Meanwhile, I wanted to be alone to feel myself struck free from heavy fetters.

CHAPTER XX

The next morning I went to the Post Office to mail some verses. They were the best ones I'd ever written--and I'd done them between four and nine. I hadn't slept all night, but I was neither tired nor sluggish. A lost and astonishing part of myself had been born in those hours. My sadness had become a condition with which I could cope.

Doubtless it would always be with me. But that no longer mattered. It was still difficult to think of what Virginia was going to do. Now, though, I could face that squarely--and bear it. My weak leg meant nothing any longer. It would never mean anything again. I'd found my father and my mother--and my soul had found its home. I could work. There would be contentment for me.

Snow was falling that day. The air was dizzy with perpetual whiteness. Shovels rang. Tire chains banged mud guards. Voices were paradoxically hushed and cheerful.

I hopped into the little depot whistling to myself. I'm neurotic about mailing copy to my syndicate or to editors. Unless I address and post it myself I worry vaguely about it until I hear that it has been received. So I wrote carefully on my manila envelope with the bad pen and I underscored "First Class." Mrs. Weaver peered through the wicket and said, "Miserable weather."

I grinned and told her that it suited me.

Then Nora came in. She looked a little surprised and a little embarrassed. She wore a big plaid coat lined with rabbit's fur and the teleology of her figure was destroyed by it. Her eyes were luminous enough, and melting snow jeweled her hair, but her nose was buttonish.

I said, "Hi, Nora."

"Hello, Frankie. Thought you were coming to see me?"

"Maybe. Someday. If the mood recurs."

"You never will." She laughed.

"I guess. Too much moonlight."

Mrs. Weaver was listening conspicuously. I turned toward her and nodded at Nora. "Pretty, isn't she?"

"Oh, my!" said Mrs. Weaver.

Nora tossed two letters into the slot. She started toward the door. "Better hurry, Frankie. Or say good-bye. We're going south next week."

"Any rain checks?"

"Nope."

"Pity. Have fun, Nora."

"Maybe you think I won't!"

I laughed and the door slammed. But I really don't care much for girls who say,

"Maybe you think I won't."

I drove back to Fort Sheffield. Tomorrow, I thought, I'll go down to New York and hunt up a place. The idea brought no pain. There was a certain independence, an autonomy, about being Thomas Treat MacBurney instead of a Sheffield who was not really one. Berry was shovelling the drive. He waved his mitten as I went sluicing past, throwing snow and racing the motor. In my mind was a phantasy about my apartment. I'd have the model of a schooner on my mantel. I'd find out all I could about my father.

Maybe write his biography. His life was the very stuff of which Conrad had woven stupendous yarns.

Virginia was in the living room. She was wearing a suit. She had on a hat with a blue feather. Beside her, on the floor, were three suitcases and her mink coat lay across them. She was writing a note.

It wasn't necessary for her to explain. She saw me and flushed. Then her eyes looked away and her voice was like a child's full of determination--to conceal doubt. "I'm going away today. Bill just called. He said he had to see me at once. So I decided on the spot that I wouldn't make him wait any more and I told him I was coming--and packed--"

I answered, "Well--" Then I sat down. My new spirit was going to meet its hardest test before it had aged a day. "Well--" didn't seem to be adequate. I enlarged it.

"Since you've decided--it's better to act."

"You don't hate me, Frankie?" I shook my head. She stared bemusedly at the note, and crumpled it. "I was trying to sneak out--the way Connie did--wasn't I?"

"Not quite. She went at night, remember."

"Still--everyone was out. We--we won't cry--will we?"

"No."

"Want to drive me to the train?"

My lips opened to tell her that Berry would drive. But I said, "Sure, Virginia.

Anything you wish--"

I went back to the garage for my sedan. She had carried her own suitcases onto the porch. We put them in and started. Neither of us could think of what to say for a while. I glanced at her several times. She was so distraught that I tried to cheer her up.

"Anyway, child, you never looked more beautiful. "

"That isn't true. But I like it. I hope Bill thinks so."

"He will. He's an elegant guy."

"Yes." We drove on. "Frankie--I somehow didn't expect you to behave like this.

You're--strange. Has something happened?"

I'd made up my mind not to tell her when I'd seen her writing that note. I don't know why. My conscious reasoning had been that I didn't want to interfere with her feeling at such a time. Actually, I suppose I was jealous of my victorious news and jealous of Bill and I didn't want them to be sitting in a Pullman drawing room together saying, "We certainly left Frankie in a wonderful state of mind," and "Good old Frankie!"

and "Such a sweet guy," and things like that. The hell with it.

But, now, I told her. She listened and forgot all about herself and nearly threw us off the road by hugging and kissing me. "That's the most wonderful thing I ever heard in my life!" she said.

She meant exactly that.

She kept on talking and laughing and choking. "Oh, Frankie! How elegant! What a man he was! And your mother! I'm crying all inside myself!"

"So am I, rat."

"And all your worries--they'll all go now!"

"What worries?"

Virginia looked out at the snow. Her lips curved up. "Oh--about when you get married would your kids be--not so husky and healthy--things like that--"

"Whatever made you think I'd had such worries?" I tried to be nonchalant.

"Your eyes, nut, are easier to read than headlines."

I could grin, but I couldn't look at her. The station came in sight. We didn't have long to wait for the train, and we passed the time with the conventional fragments. If you want anything, write--and I'll ship it pronto. Do let me know as often as you can how everyone is. Keep us posted on yourself.

The whistle. The thunder. The spitting brakes. The yellow stools and white-jacketed porters. Her kiss, snow-cold and fire-warm. "Good-bye, Frankie. Always love me, won't you?"

Always love me. God!

The train went.

I ate lunch alone that day at Fort Sheffield.

Alone.

"Codfish balls," Anne said to me, "are brain food."

That, as I remember, was the sum of conversation during my meal. Afterward I went upstairs and began the first random steps that precede true packing. Collecting and organizing. Making separate heaps. Speculating on who would like that discarded suit and which village boy would be most deserving of my .22 and my surf rod. The snow outside fell harder. The wind blew. My thoughts veered in it, and I tried to keep them from Virginia and from Larry and Ivan, but grief, even though it was tolerable, whirled in my heart as thick as the flakes.

By the time my room was a veritable bazaar of junk, I'd found disfavor with New York at that season. Why, I thought, should I not take a cruise? People did, when their feelings were like mine. Cannes would be chilly and so would Rome. Tunis, Algeria, Morocco, Egypt. They'd be fine. And it would be fun to be on a boat--to ride the sea and think about my father. Marvelous fun. What about Old Panama--Guatemala City--

Guadalajara--Mazaltan? There was a name! . . . Mazatalan. Better still--

Then the phone rang downstairs, and Anne called up to me, "It's some kind of a sanitarium in Massachusetts. They're trying to get in touch with Mr. Bush, and they thought we might know where he was."

That frightened me, and I went down and picked up the receiver. I said unevenly,

"This is Mr. Francis Sheffield, and I may be able to get in touch with Mr. Bush more quickly than anybody else. Is it urgent?"

It was a Dr. Knowlton, head of the sanitarium. "It's not particularly urgent this time, in a sense," he answered. "And I'm doing it on my own responsibility--"

I had thought the cup of misery for the Sheffields had been full. But now, if Bill was to be called back from his trip to Washington by his stricken wife--if Virginia were to spend the first days of her bitter-sweet romance alone--that cup indeed would overflow.

I began to tremble. "I think I can get Mr. Bush before night," I said--although I was not sure that I could. "Quite so," Dr. Knowlton answered. "His place is really here--

with Mrs. Bush recovered--"

I said it automatically, "Recovered?"

There was in his voice both personal and professional enthusiasm. "Why, yes, Mr.

Sheffield. I assumed that you knew. For some time Mrs. Bush has been under treatment by a new member of our staff, Dr. Gale. It was his theory that a few special cases of traumatic insanity are essentially schizoid. He used the insulin-shock method which has recently been responsible for so many dramatic recoveries from dementia praecox. Late last night Mrs. Bush reacted favorably for the first time. This morning her condition was as near normal as one could expect under the circumstances. We reached Mr. Bush by phone, and he said that as soon as he attended to certain very important matters he would leave for here. When he didn't come, I took the liberty of calling you--inasmuch as your address and telephone number were given to us sometime ago by him. I thought maybe he had stopped on the way up."

"No," I said. "No," he didn't stop."

"Have you any idea where he might be reached?"

"It's possible that I may be able to get hold of him." I was thinking--the way a man thinks when he is the victim of a sudden and terrifying accident. Thinking the way a man might if he were pinned under the wreck of his burning automobile. "That's a wonderful--a marvelous piece of news, isn't it?" I had a quick, blistering hope that those words had sounded genuine. "Do you believe her recovery will be permanent?"

"From the results of other cases that have been observed in the last couple of years, and from the present clarity of Mrs. Bush's mind, I have every reason to hope that it will."

"I see. It's possible that I can reach Bill--Mr. Bush--around dinner time. I'll have him get in touch with you if I succeed."

"Thanks, Mr. Sheffield. Naturally, our patient's thoughts are all with her husband, and the sooner he gets to her side the better."

I hung up then and lighted a cigarette, jittering. Exactly what had Virginia said that morning? "Bill just called. He said he had to see me at once. So I decided then and there I wouldn't make him wait any longer, and I told him I was coming."

Bill had wanted Virginia to rush into town so that he could tell her about Joyce's recovery. But he had not said so over the phone, and Virginia had taken that moment to make her fateful decision. No doubt he said he was leaving town in a short time, and she had assumed he was leaving for Washington. I knew this had been about the time for his Washington trip. Now he would meet her train with the intention of breaking the news to her, only to find that she was packed and ready to go with him forever.

What would he do? Tell Virginia and leave for Massachusetts? Take her with him? Would he, or any man, be strong enough to accept such an ironic blow at the instant when his new love had made so great a sacrifice for him? I didn't think so. It wasn't human. He would probably say nothing about Joyce. He would probably go to Washington. He would, persuade himself that 'Joyce's present condition was doubtless temporary and that to risk the rest of his life because of a surprising clinical incident would be foolish. Or else. . . .

There it was.

I went back up to my room. The staircase seemed a thousand miles long. This was the final blow. Maybe the Sheffields were not important people. Maybe they were, in truth, the chaff which the wind driveth. Certainly they would give no imperishable dreams to all mankind. Theirs would not be heroes' deaths on battlefields. The ledgers of fame might never contain the Sheffield name. And yet they hardly deserved to be so cruelly treated.

I thought some more. It was the ancestors of people like the Sheffields who had made America. The Sheffields were proud of their country, proud of freedom, proud of their ideals and their tolerance. They and their sons and daughters would certainly maintain such standards for the future--maintain and heighten them. John had spent a lifetime doing nothing more important than making useful articles for his fellowman.

Larry would probably continue that business. Ivan--I remembered Ivan and my notion that he would some day win the Nobel Prize. Ivan was a truly valuable man. Then, there was Virginia--who was meant to be the mother of other Ivans and Larrys and Johns.

It didn't make sense. They lived gracefully--in a way, they were easy-going--but they did not deserve such cumulative disaster, such thick-sown suffering. They didn't deserve it!

I could not stand that thought.

I threw myself down on my bed.

John had lost Connie. Connie had lost everything. Larry and Ivan had lost their mother. I had lost Virginia. And now Virginia was going to lose her love--the bitter consummation of those various bitternesses.

What I did I should not describe, and I shall always hate myself a little for doing it. I bit the bed-clothing and raged out loud--laughed and cried and cursed with the most wounding phrases I could conceive.

Finally I knew that I must stop.

I had things to do. I could probably locate Bill in one of several hotels in Washington by late afternoon or early evening.

Bill's predicament was the worst of them all. Perhaps--but I wouldn't let myself think much about that--about the possibility of his telling her the truth and sending her back to Fort Sheffield. Far more likely that he would forsake the resurrected Joyce and go to Washington with Virginia when she appeared, packed and ready for the sacrifice.

But whatever happened--whatever he did, there was no possible result to Virginia's precipitate and uncomprehending departure but tragedy.

The more my mind gyrated through this new situation, the more hopeless I became. I did, indeed, check my hysteria. I compelled myself to try to concentrate. But what could I tell Bill if I did reach him in Washington? Would he have told Virginia about Joyce? Certainly not--because Virginia would have sent him away to her. Would my calling do any good? And what would happen when Virginia did learn the truth? She would surely give up Bill and come back to Reedy Cove to join John and me in the empty vigils ahead.

Then, out of this I might indeed have back Virginia. Virginia, knowing that I was Thomas MacBurney, might even someday think fondly of me as not her brother but a man. I could not bear that. I don't know why. To be second best or fifth best or tenth best in Virginia's eyes would have seemed a magical privilege in the past. It wasn't that. Some more profound element of human nature was asserting itself. It would be too easy-when finally a broken-hearted Virginia came home--to take advantage of propinquity, of her affection for me, of the new difference between us.

I went back finally to the place where I had been before I learned about the recovery of Bill's wife. That place had been the verge of a new thought. A thought about Connie. She was on Sea Island in Georgia, alone and sorrowful. I would go there and share a similar exile.

Then, whether Virginia came home in a week or a month, she would have an uncomplicated refuge for her grief and a strong father to share it. That would be far better. We who had always prided ourselves on doing things cleanly and bravely could at least maintain that pride in the face of all calamity.

What Bill did now or later was none of my business. What happened to Virginia was a fate with which I saw it would be unfair to tamper. Larry hated me. Ivan no longer loved me. John suffered in my company because he ceaselessly realized some part of the pain his long silence had caused me.

So what had happened to Joyce Bush and what effect it would have on Virginia's life could make no difference in the plan I had decided on.

I wouldn't call Bill after all. He knew about his wife. He was a man. It was up to him.

I would go away.

To Connie.

It took a long time for the people in Sea Island to find Connie. While they searched, I went on packing--and thinking. But my thoughts did not change my mind; and my spirit was filled with the dismal tides that dredge through all articulate people. The wind blew us, I thought. Blew us together and now it was blowing us apart. We were sand and shells, pebbles, snowflakes, flotsam. Without plan or destiny we were carried by forces so strong and so impersonal that we could never change our courses but only out attitudes toward the way we went. The stone road could never be a path. It was only a point of view. An optimism today--a cynicism tomorrow--chimerical--nonexistent. It was no signpost, but only a place name. A road that gave courage to the wanderer, but no detour around sorrow. A hard road after all. And I, like a fool, had been giving people directions along it without knowing where it led.

I could quit that folly.

Of such elaborate and painful nonsense was my thinking composed.

When the bell rang. I was determined. For Connie's benefit I even forced some gaiety into my voice. A detached sort of gaiety was possible to me-I had· put myself beyond the bounds of responsibility for what had happened to us all.

"Hello, Connie!"

"Hello, Frankie. I hope nothing's the matter--?" Her voice was far away, little, and without much life.

"No accidents or anything. Look, Connie. I'm coming down. To stay with you for a long time."

There was a wait. I could tell that she was overwhelmed. "I didn't think, Frankie, after that last fiasco--after all you did--after the way I sent you off--you'd ever try it again."

"It's different now, Connie. You're alone. It's all over--"

She tried to pull herself together. She laughed gently and said, "Wait till I get out my damn handkerchief." I heard her blow her nose. "There's more in this than meets the eye. Listen, Frankie, what has happened up at Reedy Cove that made you decide to come down here?"

"I can't explain all the machinations of a devious fellow over long distance!"

"Yes, you can. This time. Maybe you shouldn't come. I detect something in your voice--"

I laughed at her. "You're bats. One thing has happened; I've found out who I am!

Who my parents were."

"You did what, Frankie?"

I told that to her--jubilantly. "See? I'm Thomas MacBurney. I'm going around swelled up with pride. Like a frankfurter. And I especially want you to see me in my new personality. You took me blind--oh-hell--I don't feel a debt. I just feel that I've got to come down and share it with you. For fun--!"

"Where's Virginia?"

She asked that suddenly, interrupting the stream of information and excitement I had winged into the phone. I suppose I hesitated a moment and that my voice changed perceptibly before I said, "In town--at the moment--with Bill."

I should have told her the truth in the beginning, I suppose. Because she answered me softly, maternally. "I see, now. Frankie. She's gone away with Bill--"

"Maybe."

"Where?"

"Washington. "

"Where are they staying in Washington?"

"Hell, Connie. It won't do any good to get upset. I don't know."

"Well, I can guess. There aren't many places in that burg where they would go--

even for a honeymoon with a bar sinister across it. Damn it, Frankie, why didn't you shoot that Bush pup?"

That astonished me. Connie sounded furious. I said, "Hunh?"

"You've been in love with Virginia since you were old enough to pull her hair!

Why didn't you say so? I counted on you when the thing reached this point. And you took it lying down and now you want to come down here beach-combing with me. I won't have it! Virginia knows better--even if you don't. One Sheffield making a fool of herself for romance is sufficient for a dozen generations. I'm going to call up that mouse-witted schoolgirl and tell her to pack up and go back to Reedy Cove the minute you hang up!

I've been sitting here for some time now--thinking. And what I think is that we Sheffields are a bunch of sissies! My God, Frankie! Did you ever imagine for a minute that I didn't know how you and Virginia felt about each other? Do you think I'd have left my brood if I'd have even guessed that the moment my back was turned they'd go haywire? Virginia needed one of those deep flirtations for the good of her silly soul. Bill can take it--he wasn't getting hurt--and it's not my fault if life wasn't meant to be his rosebed. But I expected you to turn beast in the clinch--brain Bill--run off with Virginia--and--"

She stopped in what seemed like a mixture of dismay and fury and some kind of mirth. I began to talk. It shattered my picture of the past to know that Connie had perceived my feeling for Virginia. But it altered no important fact. I had to tell her--and I did.

"Connie! You've got to stop being facetious. I'm in deadly earnest. I admit I've always loved Virginia. I didn't always know it myself. When I learned--it was too late.

That was my tough luck. I loved her--" It wasn't as easy to explain as I had imagined it would be. "I always will. Adore her. Everything about her. But since you have such cosmic scrutiny, you must know that Virginia has never thought of me as anything but a brother! Older brother. 'Good old Frankie.' 'Sweet Frankie.' 'Frankie who talks to you when you feel blue--and helps you out of jams.' If she'd ever known in the last few months that all I wanted to do when we were having those familiar tête-à-têtes was to take her in my arms and make love to her--she'd have passed out with shame!"

I was getting angry, also. "I doubt if the fact that I'm male ever really goes through her head! Or ever will. When I did once kiss a girl in her sight, she thought it was amusing and odd--something that hadn't even occurred to her before as a remote possibility! It hasn't been all fun to live in that spot! Especially when a charming guy is stealing your girl from you. And I've been grateful, just the same, that I did have the chance to remain her brother and her friend. Now--she's gone. She's in a mess. I can't even explain that. I'm coming down, Connie--because I belong--with everyone but John and Ivan and Larry--to the outcast Sheffields! I belong to you! We both need consolation, Connie! Peace--"

She screamed faintly to stop that blast of words. "Lord, will you shut up! And hang up! I want to think! And I don't want to be confused by any more adolescence!"

Then I was altogether sore. And I did hang up.

I thought, probably, that I would be insane within another two hours. Even Connie, who was lonely and sad, had scornfully refused my companionship. It was too much. No world, no life could possibly produce so many successive debacles. I had nothing left to do. Nowhere to go. Nobody to help me. I sat looking at my green blotter, too perplexed and discouraged even to cry any more. There was perspiration on my forehead--left from the oratory and confession of my long distance call. I wiped it off.

Then I felt a hand on my shoulder.

I thought it was John. Maybe he had come in and stood behind me and heard it all. It didn't matter.

I looked up.

It was Virginia. She stood there in her coat and hat. Her face was very tender and quite frightened. I thought, at first, that she was unreal. The beginning of my madness. I just looked at her and she whispered, "Oh, Frankie!"

"You--came back?"

Her voice was vague and rambling. She seemed to see that she was still dressed for the outdoors and to realize she had eavesdropped. "I wanted to come up here right away and tell you something--so I didn't take off my wraps. I heard you talking and I came in anyhow. I'm sorry."

"Where's Bill?" I asked. I don't know why. I didn't know anything then.

She shook her head and still spoke softly. "I--didn't see Bill. I--well--I got off at 125th Street and took the next train back. I mean--I didn't go to Grand Central. I didn't meet him. I couldn't. I--couldn't do it."

"Oh."

She leaned toward me. "I couldn't--you see?"

There was no relief in me yet. No exultation. Just shock. I nodded as if I understood and said, "Why?"

She pointed at the telephone. I looked at it, comprehending nothing. "What you just said, Frankie. What I just heard you say to Connie. I--I--I--"

"Don't chatter. What do you mean?"

Her lips turned down. "I mean--about you. I always believed you only thought of me as a--a--a relative. I used to try. I--used to kiss you. I used to make you speculate about who you might be--to see if you could get to feel any other way about me. Oh, golly! Don't keep me standing here, Frankie! I'm going to bawl anyhow. You might as well hold me in your arms. You--you've got to hold me--all your life--!"

I reached toward her numbly, and then she stepped away. "Oh," she said sorrowfully, "why didn't you do something sooner! I hoped so much! I didn't give up and let Bill fall in love with me for such a long, long time. And now-- his life is going to be ruined because of me!" She could hardly speak. "Why does this terrible kind of love always have to spoil somebody's life? It could have been yours and mine. Now--it'll be his."

She swayed and I stood up. I kept her standing and we kissed. We kissed many times and I told her, when I could, about Bill's Joyce. Miracles, too, are hard to bear. And other miracles were in the making. First, though, we had to explore our love a little while.

Or what seemed a little while--

For she was still in my arms when it began to grow dark. The snow kept on falling, softly, magically. Our faces, no doubt, were streaked and sticky, and our voices were still uneven. She said, in that ecstatic eventide, "Right away we'll have to go and see Ivan and Larry. To tell them! Don't you think that maybe because we both were doing wrong--it made everyone else do wrong? Don't you think they'll change when they hear?

I know it! They'll be happy! And John! He'll burst! And maybe it'll be the first step toward getting Connie--maybe--anyway--they'll be so glad."

I didn't know. I hoped they would.

And we went, soon afterward, to tell them. They were glad. John came near to bursting--with joy and pride and new hope.

And we were married--on an April afternoon.

But I can't write any more about this.

THE END

Document Outline

- CHAPTER I

- CHAPTER II

- CHAPTER III

- CHAPTER IV

- CHAPTER V

- CHAPTER VI

- CHAPTER VII

- CHAPTER VIII

- CHAPTER IX

- CHAPTER X

- CHAPTER XI

- CHAPTER XII

- CHAPTER XIII

- CHAPTER XIV

- CHAPTER XV

- CHAPTER XVI

- CHAPTER XVII

- CHAPTER XVIII

- CHAPTER XIX

- CHAPTER XX