Temple Bailey - The Gay Cockade
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Temple Bailey >> The Gay Cockade
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"Oh, she has worked out a theory that repression in color is an evidence
of advanced civilization. The Japanese, for example--"
"Why should civilization advance? It has gone far enough--too far--And
she should wear a blue cloak--sea-blue--the color of her eyes--"
"And of yours." I smiled at him.
"Yes. Are they like hers?"
They were almost uncannily alike. I had noticed it when I saw them
together. But there the resemblance stopped.
"She belongs to the island?"
"She lives in New York. But every drop of blood in her is seafaring
blood."
"Good!" He sat for a moment in silence, then spoke of something else.
But when he was ready to go, he included Nancy in an invitation. "If you
and Miss Greer could lunch with me to-morrow on my yacht--"
I was not sure about Nancy's engagements, but I thought we might. "You
can call us up in the morning."
Nancy brought the Drakes and Bob Needham back with her for supper, and
Mimi Sears was with Anthony. Supper on Sunday is an informal
meal--everything on the table and the servants out.
Nancy, clothed in something white and exquisite, served the salad. "So
your young viking didn't stay, Elizabeth?"
"I didn't ask him."
It was then that she spoke of his frowning gaze. "Does he always stare
like that?"
Anthony, breaking in, demanded, "Did he stare at Nancy?"
I nodded. "It was her eyes."
They all looked at me. "Her eyes?"
"Yes. He said that her cloak should have matched them."
Anthony flushed. He has a rather captious code for outsiders. Evidently
Olaf had transgressed it.
"Is the man a dressmaker?"
"Of course not, Anthony."
"Then why should he talk of Nancy's clothes?"
"Well," Nancy remarked, "perhaps the less said about my clothes the
better. I was in my bathing suit."
Anthony was irritable. "Well, why not? You had a right to wear what you
pleased, but he did not have a right to make remarks about it."
I came to Olaf's defense. "You would understand better if you could see
him. He is rather different, Anthony."
"I don't like different people," and in that sentence was a summary of
Anthony's prejudices. He and Nancy mingled with their own kind.
Anthony's friends were the men who had gone to the right schools, who
lived in the right streets, belonged to the right clubs, and knew the
right people. Within those limits, humanity might do as it pleased;
without them, it was negligible, and not to be considered.
After supper the five of them were to go for a sail. There was a moon,
and all the wonder of it.
Anthony was not keen about the plan. "Oh, look here, Nancy," he
complained, "we have done enough for one day--"
"I haven't."
Of course that settled it. Anthony shrugged his shoulders and submitted.
He did not share Nancy's almost idolatrous worship of the sea. It was
the one fundamental thing about her. She bathed in it, swam in it,
sailed on it, and she was never quite happy away from it.
I heard Anthony later in the hall, protesting. I had gone to the library
for a book, and their voices reached me.
"I thought you and I might have one evening without the others."
"Oh, don't be silly, Anthony."
I think my heart lost a beat. Here was a lover asking his mistress for a
moment--and she laughed at him. It did not fit in with my ideas of young
romance.
Yet late that night I heard the murmur of their voices and looked out
into the white night. They stood together by the sun-dial, and his arm
was about her, her head on his shoulder. And it was not the first time
that a pair of lovers had stood by that dial under the moon.
I went back to bed, but I could not sleep. I lighted my bedside lamp,
and read _Vanity Fair_. I find Thackeray an excellent corrective when I
am emotionally keyed up.
Nancy, too, was awake; I could see her light shining across the hall.
She came in, finally, and sat on the foot of my bed.
"Your viking was singing as we passed his boat--"
"Singing?"
"Yes, hymns, Elizabeth. The others laughed, Anthony and Mimi, but I
didn't laugh. His voice is--wonderful--"
She had on a white-crepe _peignoir_, and there was no color in her
cheeks. Her skin had the soft whiteness of a rose petal. Her eyes were
like stars. As I lay there and looked at her I wondered if it was
Anthony's kisses or the memory of Olaf's singing which had made her eyes
shine like that.
I had heard him sing, and I said so, "in church."
Her arms clasped her knees. "Isn't it queer that he goes to church and
sings hymns?"
"Why queer? I go to church."
"Yes. But you are different. You belong to another generation,
Elizabeth, and he doesn't look it."
I knew what she meant. I had thought the same thing when I first saw him
walking up the aisle. "He has asked us to lunch with him to-morrow on
his boat."
It was the first time that I had mentioned it. Somehow I had not cared
to speak of it before Anthony.
She showed her surprise. "So soon? Doesn't that sound a
little--pushing?"
"It sounds as if he goes after a thing when he wants it."
"Yes, it does. I believe I should like to accept. But I can't to-morrow.
There's a clambake, and I have promised the crowd."
"He will ask you again."
"Will he? You can say 'yes' for Wednesday then. And I'll keep it."
"I am not sure that we had better accept."
"Why not?"
"Well, there's Anthony."
She slid from the bed and stood looking down at me. "You think he
wouldn't like it?"
"I am afraid he wouldn't. And, after all, you are engaged to him,
Nancy."
"Of course I am, but he is not my jailer. He does as he pleases and I do
as I please."
"In my day lovers pleased to do the same thing."
"Did they? I don't believe it. They just pretended, and there is no
pretense between Anthony and me"--she stooped and kissed me--"they just
pretended, Elizabeth, and the reason that I love Anthony is because we
don't pretend."
After that I felt that I need fear nothing. Nancy and Anthony--freedom
and self-confidence--why should I try to match their ideals with my own
of yesterday? Yet, as I laid my book aside, I resolved that Olaf should
know of Anthony.
I had my opportunity the next day. Olaf came over to sit in my garden
and again we had tea. He was much pleased when he knew that Nancy and I
would be his guests on Wednesday.
"Come early. Do you swim? We can run the launch to the beach--or, better
still, dive in the deeper water near my boat."
"Nancy swims," I told him. "I don't. And I am not sure that we can come
early. Nancy and Anthony usually play golf in the morning."
"Who is Anthony?"
"Anthony Peak. The man she is going to marry."
He hesitated a moment, then said, "Bring him, too." His direct gaze met
mine, and his direct question followed. "Does she love him?"
"Of course."
"It is not always 'of course.'" He stopped and talked of other things,
but in some subtle fashion I was aware that my news had been a shock to
him, and that he was trying to adjust himself to it, and to the
difference that it must make in his attitude toward Nancy.
* * * * *
When I told Nancy that Anthony had been invited, she demanded, "How did
Olaf Thoresen know about him?"
"I told him you were engaged."
"But why, Elizabeth? Why shout it from the housetops?"
"Well, I didn't want him to be hurt."
"You are taking a lot for granted."
I shrugged my shoulders. "We won't quarrel, and a party of four is much
nicer than three."
As it turned put, however, Anthony could not go. He was called back to
Boston on business. That was where Fate again stepped in. It was, I am
sure, those three days of Anthony's absence which turned the scale of
Nancy's destiny. If he had been with us that first morning on the boat
Olaf would not have dared....
Nancy wore her white linen and her gray-velvet coat, and a hat with a
gull's wing. She carried her bathing suit. "He intends, evidently, to
entertain us in his own way."
Olaf's yacht was modern, but there was a hint of the barbaric in its
furnishings. The cabin into which we were shown and in which Nancy was
to change was in strangely carved wood, and there was a wolfskin on the
floor in front of the low bed. The coverlet was of a fine-woven red-silk
cloth, weighed down by a border of gold and silver threads. On the wall
hung a square of tapestry which showed a strange old ship with sails of
blue and red and green, and with golden dragon-heads at stem and stern.
Nancy, crossing the threshold, said to Olaf, who had opened the door for
us, "It is like coming into another world; as if you had set the stage,
run up the curtain, and the play had begun."
"You like it? It was a fancy of mine to copy a description I found in
an old book. King Olaf, the Thick-set, furnished a room like this for
his bride."
Olaf, the Thick-set! The phrase fitted perfectly this strong, stocky,
blue-eyed man, who smiled radiantly upon us as he shut the door and left
us alone.
Nancy stood in the middle of the room looking about her. "I like it,"
she said, with a queer shake in her voice. "Don't you, Elizabeth?"
I liked it so much that I felt it wise to hide my pleasure in a pretense
of indifference. "Well, it is original to say the least."
But it was more than original, it was poetic. It was--Melisande in the
wood--one of Sinding's haunting melodies, an old Saga caught and fixed
in color and carving.
In this glowing room Nancy in her white and gray was a cold and
incongruous figure, and when at last she donned her dull cap, and the
dull cloak that she wore over her swimming costume, she seemed a ghostly
shadow of the bright bride whom that other Olaf had brought--a thousand
years before--to his strange old ship.
I realize that what comes hereafter in this record must seem to the
unimaginative overdrawn. Even now, as I look back upon it, it has a
dream quality, as if it might never have happened, or as if, as Nancy
had said, it was part of a play, which would be over when the curtain
was rung down and the actors had returned to the commonplace.
But the actors in this drama have never returned to the commonplace. Or
have they? Shall I ever know? I hope I may never know, if Nancy and Olaf
have lost the glamour of their dreams.
Well, we found Olaf on deck waiting for us. In a sea-blue tunic, with
strong white arms, and the dazzling fairness of his strong neck, he was
more than ever like the figurehead on the old ship that I had seen in my
childhood. He carried over his arm a cloak of the same sea-blue. It was
this cloak which afterward played an important part in the mystery of
Nancy's disappearance.
His quick glance swept Nancy--the ghostly Nancy in gray, with only the
blue of her eyes, and that touch of artificial pink in her cheeks to
redeem her from somberness. He shook his head with a gesture of
impatience.
"I don't like it," he said, abruptly. "Why do you deaden your beauty
with dull colors?"
Nancy's eyes challenged him. "If it is deadened, how do you know it is
beauty?"
"May I show you?" Again there was that tense excitement which I had
noticed in the garden.
"I don't know what you mean," yet in that moment the color ran up from
her neck to her chin, the fixed pink spots were lost in a rush of lovely
flaming blushes.
For with a sudden movement he had snatched off her cap, and had thrown
the cloak around her. The transformation was complete. It was as if he
had waved a wand. There she stood, the two long, thick braids, which she
had worn pinned close under her cap, falling heavily like molten metal
to her knees, the blue cloak covering her--heavenly in color, matching
her eyes, matching the sea, matching the sky, matching the eyes of Olaf.
I think I must have uttered some sharp exclamation, for Olaf turned to
me. "You see," he said, triumphantly, "I have known it all the time. I
knew it the first time that I saw her in the garden."
Nancy had recovered herself. "But I can't stalk around the streets in a
blue cloak with my hair down."
He laughed with her. "Oh, no, no. But the color is only a symbol. Modern
life has robbed you of vivid things. Even your emotions. You
are--afraid--" He caught himself up. "We can talk of that after our
swim. I think we shall have a thousand things to talk about."
Nancy held out her hand for her cap, but he would not give it to her.
"Why should you care if your hair gets wet? The wind and the sun will
dry it--"
I was amazed when I saw that she was letting him have his way. Never for
a moment had Anthony mastered her. For the first time in her life Nancy
was dominated by a will that was stronger than her own.
I sat on deck and watched them as they swam like two young sea gods,
Nancy's bronze hair bright under the sun. Olaf's red-gold crest....
The blue cloak lay across my knee. Nancy had cast it off as she had
descended into the launch. I had examined it and had found it of soft,
thick wool, with embroidery of a strange and primitive sort in faded
colors. Yet the material of the cloak had not faded, or, if it had,
there remained that clear azure, like the Virgin's cloak in old
pictures.
I knew now why Olaf had wanted Nancy on board, why he had wanted to swim
with her in the sea which was as blue as her eyes and his own. It was to
reveal her to himself as the match of the women of the Sagas. I found
this description later in one of the old books in the ship's library:
* * * * *
Then Hallgerd was sent for, and came with two women. She wore a blue
woven mantle ... her hair reached down to her waist on both sides, and
she tucked it under her belt.
And there was, too, this account of a housewife in her "kyrtil":
The dress-train was trailing,
The skirt had a blue tint;
Her brow was brighter,
Her neck was whiter
Than pure new fallen snow.
In other words, that one glance at Nancy in the garden, when he had
risen at her entrance, had disclosed to Olaf the fundamental in her. He
had known her as a sea-maiden. And she had not known it, nor I, nor
Anthony.
* * * * *
Luncheon was served on deck. We were waited on by fair-haired, but very
modern Norsemen. The crew on _The Viking_ were all Scandinavians. Most
of them spoke English, and there seemed nothing uncommon about any of
them. Yet, in the mood of the moment, I should have felt no surprise had
they served us in the skins of wild animals, or had set sail like
pirates with the two of us captive on board.
I will confess, also, to a feeling of exaltation which clouded my
judgment. I knew that Olaf was falling in love with Nancy, and I half
guessed that Nancy might be falling in love with Olaf, yet I sat there
and let them do it. If Anthony should ever know! Yet how can he know? As
I weigh it now, I am not sure that I have anything with which to
reproach myself, for the end, at times, justifies the means, and the
Jesuitical theory had its origin, perhaps, in the profound knowledge
that Fate does not always use fair methods in gaining her ends.
I can't begin to tell you what we talked about. Nancy had dried her
hair, and it was wound loosely, high on her head. The blue cloak was
over her shoulders, and she was the loveliest thing that I ever hope to
see. By the flame in her cheeks and the light in her eyes, I was made
aware of an exaltation which matched my own. She, too, was caught up
into the atmosphere of excitement which Olaf created. He could not take
his eyes from her. I wondered what Anthony would have said could he have
visioned for the moment this blue-and-gold enchantress.
When coffee was served there were no cigarettes or cigars. Nancy had her
own silver case hanging at her belt. I knew that she would smoke, and I
did not try to stop her. She always smoked after her meals and she was
restless without it.
It was Olaf who stopped her. "You will hate my bad manners," he said,
with his gaze holding hers, "but I wish you wouldn't."
She was lighting her own little wax taper and she looked her surprise.
"My cigarette?"
He nodded. "You are too lovely."
"But surely you are not so--old-fashioned."
"No. I am perhaps so--new-fashioned that my reason might take your
breath away." He laughed but did not explain.
Nancy sat undecided while the taper burned out futilely. Then she said,
"Of course you are my host--"
"Don't do it for that reason. Do it because"--he stopped, laughed again,
and went on--"because you are a goddess--a woman of a new race--"
With parted lips she looked at him, then tried to wrench herself back to
her attitude of light indifference.
"Oh, we've grown beyond all that."
"All what?"
"Goddess-women. We are just nice and human together."
"You are nice and human. But you are more than that."
Nancy put her unlighted cigarette back in its case. "I'll keep it for
next time," she said, with a touch of defiance.
"There will be no next time," was his secure response, and his eyes held
hers until, with an effort, she withdrew her gaze.
Then he rose, and his men placed deep chairs for us in a sheltered
corner, where we could look out across the blue to the low hills of the
moor. There was a fur rug over my chair, and I sank gratefully into the
warmth of it.
"With a wind like this in the old days," Olaf said, as he stood beside
me looking out over the sparkling water, "how the sails would have been
spread, and now there is nothing but steam and gasoline and
electricity."
"Why don't you have sails then," Nancy challenged him, "instead of
steam?"
"I have a ship. Shall I show you the picture of it?"
He left to get it, and Nancy said to me, "Ducky, will you pinch me?"
"You mean that it doesn't seem real?"
She nodded.
"Well, maybe it isn't. He said he was a sort of Flying Dutchman."
"I should hate to think that he wasn't real, Elizabeth. He is as alive
as a--burning coal."
Olaf came back with the pictures of his ship, a clean-cut, beautiful
craft, very up-to-date, except for the dragon-heads at prow and stem.
"If I could have had my way," he told us, "I should have built it like
the ship on the tapestry in there--but it wasn't practical--we haven't
manpower for the oars in these days."
He had other pictures--of a strange house, or, rather, of a collection
of buildings set in the form of a quadrangle, and inclosed by low walls.
There were great gateways of carved wood with ironwork and views of the
interior--a wide hall with fireplaces--a raised platform, with carved
seats that gave a throne-like effect. The house stood on a sort of high
peninsula with a forest back of it, and the sea spreading out beyond.
"The house looks old," Olaf said, "but I planned it."
He had, he explained, during one of his voyages, come upon a hidden
harbor. "There is only a fishing village and a few small boats at the
landing place, but the people claim to be descendants of the vikings.
They are utterly isolated, but a God-fearing, hardy folk.
"It is strangely cut off from the rest of the world. I call it 'The
Hidden Land.' It is not on any map. I have looked and have not found
it."
"But why," was Nancy's demand, "did you build there?"
It was a question, I think, for which he had waited. "Some day I may
tell you, but not now, except this--that I love the sea, and I shall end
my days where, when I open my gates, my eyes may rest upon it ... where
its storms may beat upon my roof, and where the men about me shall sail
it, and get their living from it.
"I have told your cousin," he went on, "something of the life of my
grandfather and of my father. With all of their sea-blood, they were
shut away for two generations from the sea. Can you grasp the meaning of
that to me?--the heritage of suppressed longings? I think my father must
have felt it as I did, for he drank heavily before he died. My
grandfather sought an outlet in founding the family fortunes. But when I
came, there was not the compelling force of poverty to make me work, and
I had before me the warning of my father's excesses. But this
sea-madness! It has driven me on and on, and at last it has driven me
here." He stopped, then took up the theme again in his tense, excited
fashion, "It will drive me on again."
"Why should it drive you on?"
When Nancy asked that question, I knew what had happened. The thrill of
her voice was the answer of a bird to its mate. When I think of her, I
see her always as she was then, the blue cloak falling about her, her
hair blowing, her cheeks flaming with lovely color.
I saw his fingers clench the arm of his chair as if in an effort of
self-control. Then he said: "Perhaps I shall tell you that, too. But not
now." He rose abruptly. "It is warmer inside, and we can have some
music. I am sure you must be tired of hearing me talk about myself."
He played for us, in masterly fashion, the Peer Gynt suite, and after
that a composition of his own. At last he sang, with all the swing of
the sea in voice and accompaniment, and the song drew our hearts out of
us.
Nancy was very quiet as we drove from the pier, and it was while I was
dressing for dinner that she came into my room.
"Elizabeth," she said, "I am not sure whether we have been to a
Methodist revival or to a Wagner music-drama--"
"Neither," I told her. "There's nothing artificial about him. You asked
me back there if he was real. I believe that he is utterly real, Nancy.
It is not a pose. I am convinced that it is not a pose."
"Yes," she said, "that's the queer thing. He's not--putting it
on--and he makes everybody else seem--stale and shallow--like
ghosts--or--shadow-shapes--"
* * * * *
I read _Vanity Fair_ late into the night, and the morning was coming on
before I tried to sleep. I waked to find Nancy standing by my bed.
"His boat is gone."
"Gone?"
"Yes. It went an hour ago. I saw it from the roof."
"From the roof?"
"Yes. I got up--early. I--I could not sleep. And when I looked--it was
gone--your glasses showed it almost out of sight."
She was wrapped in the blue cloak. Olaf had made her bring it with her.
She had protested. But he had been insistent.
"I found this in the pocket," Nancy said, and held out a card on which
Olaf had written, "When she lifted her arms, opening the door, a light
shone on them from the sea, and the air and all the world were
brightened for her."
"What does it mean, Elizabeth?"
"I think you know, my dear."
"That he cares?"
"What do you think?"
Her eyes were like stars. "But how can he? He has seen me--twice--"
"Some men are like that."
"If you only hadn't told him about Anthony."
"I am glad that I told him."
"Oh, but he might have stayed."
"Well?"
"And I might have loved him." She was still glowing with the fires that
Olaf had lighted in her.
"But you are going to marry Anthony."
"Yes," she said, "I am going to marry Anthony. I am going to flirt and
smoke cigarettes and let him--flirt--when I might have been a--goddess."
It was after breakfast on the same day that a letter came to me,
delivered into my own hands by messenger. It was from Olaf, and he left
it to me whether Nancy should see it. It covered many pages and it shook
my soul, but I did not show it to Nancy.
There were nights after that when I found it hard to sleep, nights in
which I thought of Olaf sailing toward the hidden land, holding in his
heart a hope which it was in my power to crown with realization or dash
to the ground. Yet I had Nancy's happiness to think of, and, in a sense,
Anthony's. It seemed almost incredible that I must carry, too, on my
heart, the burden of the happiness of Olaf Thoresen.
When Anthony came back, he and Nancy were caught in a net of
engagements, and I saw very little of them. Of course they romped in now
and then with their own particular crowd, and treated me, as it were,
to a cross-section of modern life. Except for two things, I should have
judged that Nancy had put away all thoughts of Olaf, but these two
things were significant. She had stopped smoking, and she no longer
touched her cheeks with artificial bloom.
Anthony's amazement, when he offered her a cigarette and she refused,
had in it a touch of irritation. "But, my dear girl, why not?"
"Well, I have to think of my complexion, Tony."
I think he knew it was not that and was puzzled. "I never saw you
looking better in my life."
She was wearing a girdle of blue with her clear, crisp white, and her
fairness was charming. She had, indeed, the look which belongs to young
Catholic girls dedicated to the Virgin who wear her colors.
It was not, however, until Anthony had been home for a week that he saw
the blue cloak. We were all on the beach--Mimi Sears and Bob Needham and
the Drakes, myself and Anthony. Nancy was late, having a foursome to
finish on the golf grounds. She came at last, threading her way gayly
through the crowd of bathers. She was without her cap, and her hair was
wound in a thick braid about her head. I saw people turning to look at
her as they had never turned to look when she had worn her shadowy gray.
"Great guns!" said a man back of me. "What a beauty!"
A deep flush stained Anthony's face, and I knew at once that he did not
like it. It was as if, having attuned his taste to the refinement of a
Japanese print, he had been called upon to admire a Fra Angelico. He
hated the obvious, and Nancy's loveliness at this moment was as definite
as the loveliness of the sky, the sea, the moon, the stars. Later I was
to learn that Anthony's taste was for a sophisticated Nancy, a mocking
Nancy, a slim, mysterious creature, with charms which were caviar to the
mob.
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