Chapter 5

"I feel," said Jane, "like a murderer." Tommy and O-liver had stopped at her front gate to leave her some books.

"Why?" It was O-liver who asked it.

"Come and see." She led them round the house. Death and destruction reigned.

"I poured gasoline into the ants' nests and set them on fire—and now look at them!"

There were a few survivors toiling among the ruins.

"They are taking out the dead bodies," Jane explained. "It's so human that it's tragic. I'll never do it again."

"You can't let them eat you up."

"I know. It's one of the puzzles." She sat looking down at them. "How busy they are!"

"Too busy," O-liver stated. "They are worse than bees. There are at least some drones in the hive."

"Poor drones," said Jane.

"Why?" quickly.

"To miss the best."

"Is work the best?"

She said "Yes," adding after a little: "I don't just mean making sandwiches. That's just a beginning. There's everything ahead."

She said it as if the world were hers. O-liver, in spite of himself, was thrilled. "How do you know that everything is ahead?"

"I shall make it come"—securely.

They sat in silence for a while; then O-liver said: "I have brought you a book."

It was an old copy of Punch.

"I shall like it," she said. "Sometimes the evenings are dull when my work is over."

"Dullness comes for me when work begins."

Her straight gaze met his. "You say that with your lips; you don't mean it."

"How do you know?"

"I'm not sure how I know. But you haven't found the thing yet that you like—the incentive."

"Tommy wants me to go into politics. He and Henry Bittinger. Henry says I ought to be President." O-liver chuckled.

But she took it seriously. "Why not? You've the brains and the magnetism. Can't you see how the crowd draws to you on Saturday nights?"

"Like bees round a honey pot? Yes." His face grew suddenly stern. "But so will mosquitoes buzz round a stagnant pool."

"You're not a stagnant pool and you know it."

"What am I?"

She made a sudden gesture as if she gave him up. "Sometimes I think you are like the sea—on a lazy day—with a storm brewing."

He wondered as he went home—what storm?

He had seen a good deal of Jane since that Saturday night when he had championed her cause. It had been fall then, with the hills brown and the berries red on the pepper trees. It was spring now, with all the world green and growing.

She had spoken of him to Tommy, and Tommy had been a faithful go-between. He had played upon their mutual love of books. At first O-liver had sent her books, then he had taken them. He had met her mother, had seen her in her home doing feminine things, sewing on lengths of pink and blue—filling the vases with the flowers that he brought.

And as they had met and talked his veins had been filled with new wine. He had never known intimately such a woman. His mother transplanted from the East by her marriage to a Western man had turned her eyes always backward. Her son had been born in the East, he had spent his holidays and vacations with his Eastern relatives. He had gone to an Eastern school to prepare for an Eastern college. Except for this one obsession with regard to her son's education his mother was self-centered. She was an idolized wife, a discontented woman— she had shown O-liver no heights to which to aspire.

And so he had not aspired. He had spent his days in what might be termed, biblically, riotous living. His mother had hoped for an aristocratic and Eastern marriage. When he married Fluffy Hair she had allowed him three thousand a year and had asked him not to bring his wife to see her. His father had refused to give him a penny. O-liver's wild oats and wilfulness cut him off, he ruled, from parental consideration. "You are not my son," he had said sternly. "If the time ever comes when you can say you are sorry, I'll see you."

O-liver having married Fluffy Hair had found her also self-centered—not a lady like his mother, but fundamentally of the same type. Neither of them had made him feel that he might be more than he was. They had always shrunk him to their own somewhat small patterns.

Jane's philosophy came to him therefore like a long-withheld stimulant. "You might be President of the United States."

When Henry or Atwood or Tommy had said it to him he had laughed. When Jane said it he did not laugh.