"Yes," said Nan calmly, rising, "the man I'm going to marry. Only"—her face, as she turned it to him, brimmed over with a childish sort of fun—"don't tell him that, Rookie. It's perfectly true I haven't promised him. And I don't mean to—yet."
"Quite right," said Raven, rising. He felt a distinct relief. He, too, wanted to see what Dick would make of himself. "You do your own telling."
"There he is," said Nan, "just as it is in a play. We've got to a climax and he comes in at the door. But, Rookie——" She stopped, for Dick was nearing in the hall, and Raven knew what she would have said. It was in both their minds. They hadn't finished their talk. It had merely strayed into another channel, or bolted and run away there. Aunt Anne's money and her Palace of Peace still stared them in the face. Dick put his head in at the door. He looked rather sheepish, as if his dignified going had been invalidated by this impetuous coming back, as if he couldn't live without Nan and she was bound to see through it.
"Well?" he said gruffly. "Talked out?"
They both laughed, with the sudden absurdity of it. How should they, their eyes questioned each other, ever be talked out, what with Aunt Anne and the universe and France?
"Absolutely," said Nan. "Good night, Rookie. Going to write your letter? Come on, Dick."
IV
Raven sat down at the table and began his letter. He was wrestling with it at once, to give himself no time to argue over the point of its being no ordinary letter such as he had been accustomed to write to Dick. He began with the succinct statement of what he meant to do. He had made all his arrangements for getting out of the business. They could be concluded in short order. As to the business itself, he had no complaint to make. The old man—he permitted himself this indulgence as he never could have in Anne's lifetime, as touching her father—the old man had been square all through. He was as good as they make 'em. But there was nothing for him, Raven, in the concern except its cumulative capacity for making money. He'd no traditional pride in it, as the old man had. He'd worked for all he was worth, to squeeze every drop he could out of it so that his mother—"your grandmother, you know, Dick"—might have every last luxury she wanted. Well, she'd had 'em, though one of the ironical things about it was that she didn't want so very many, and he needn't have worked so hard or so long. However, that's neither here nor there. What's done is done. The War's done—they say—and the thing that would please Raven best would be——Here he brought up with a full stop. He was running into dangerous revelations, going back to a previous state of mind, one he had begun cherishing as soon as his mother died, and even caressed, with a sort of denied passion, when Anne also died, and he felt so shamefacedly free. All his life he had wanted to wander, to explore, to bruise himself against the earth and pick himself up and go on and get bruised again. He loved the earth, he wanted her, in her magnificence and cruelty, wanted to write about her, and make the portrait of her for stay-at-homes who weren't adventurous and were content with reading about her in the blank moments after the office grind. Yet he was a stay-at-home himself. Why? in God's name why?
He asked himself the question, as he sat with lifted pen, almost the words dropping off it, to tell Dick the things it would be simply disconcerting to know. Raven saw, with a sad clearness, why he hadn't written the books he wanted to about the earth. They would have been rough books, full of rock and clay and the tumbling of rivers and thunder grumbling in the clouds. If he had been really afraid of Anne and her ordered ambitions for him, he could have printed them under an assumed name. She need never have known at all. They wouldn't have been the books he could have written if he had been foot-loose and gone blundering along in strange trails over the earth, but they might have held something of the sort his inner man wanted to fashion. And if the secret of them had been kept, they needn't have interfered with his smug little folk stories Anne and her women's clubs prized so much. Had he been actually afraid of Anne? Was he one of the men who are shamefully under the feminine finger, subject to mother, subject to wife, without the nerve—scarcely the wish, indeed—to break away? He was not afraid of his mother, or, if he had been, it was the fear of hurting her who had been so hurt already. Ever since he could remember, he saw himself, even as a little boy, trying to get her away from his father who had a positive cast of mind, a perfect certainty of being right and a confirmed belief that robust measures always were the thing. If you did wrong, you were to be punished, promptly and effectually. If you were afraid of the dark, and came downstairs in your nightgown upon the family sitting by the lamp, you were whaled for it, to teach you there was something worse than bed even in the dark. If you said your head ached and you couldn't eat bacon and greens, which father elected to consider a normal dish, you were made to eat a lot with no matter what dire result, because there wasn't a physical ill which couldn't be mended by treating it robustly. He was God. He knew. And he was perfectly well and had never once for half a minute entered into those disordered cells of bodily ill where the atom cries to its Creator in an anguish of bewilderment and pain. And when his body met the fate appointed for its destruction, as all bodies must, and he was brought home broken after the runaway that made him a thing almost too terrible to look upon, except by eyes so full of compassion that they love the more, Raven, then a very little John, found himself wondering how it seemed to father now. Even runaways, father had appeared to think, could always be governed, if you kept your head.