Young Peoples Pride | Page 7

liked for me, providing I got
through before it did; you'd be living anyhow, living and somebody,
and somebody who didn't give a plaintive hoot how things broke."
He sighs, and his face smooths back a little.
"Well, Lord, I've no real reason to kick, I suppose," he ends. "There are
dozens of 'em like me--dozens and hundreds and thousands all over the
shop. We had danger and all the physical pleasures and as much money
as we wanted and the sense of command--all through the war. And then
they come along and say 'it's all off, girls,' and you go back and settle
down and play you've just come out of College in peace-times and
maybe by the time you're forty you'll have a wife and an income if
another scrap doesn't come along. And then when we find it isn't as
easy to readjust as they think, they yammer around pop-eyed and say
'Oh, what wild young people--what naughty little wasters! They won't
settle down and play Puss-in-the-corner at all--and, oh dear, oh dear,
how they drink and smoke and curse 'n everything!'"
"I'm awful afraid they might be right as to what's the trouble with us,
though," says Oliver, didactically. "We are young, you know."
"Melgrove!" the conductor howls, sleepily. "Melgrove! Melgrove!"

V
The Crowe house was both small and inconveniently situated--it was
twenty full minutes walk from the station and though a little box of a
garage had been one of the "all modern conveniences" so fervidly
painted in the real estate agent's advertisement, the Crowes had no car.
It was the last house on Undercliff Road that had any pretense to sparse
grass and a stubbly hedge--beyond it were sand-dunes, delusively
ornamented by the signs of streets that as yet only existed in the brain
of the owner of the "development," and, a quarter of a mile away, the
long blue streak of the Sound.
Oliver's key clicked in the lock--this was fortunately one of the times
when four-year-old Jane Ellen, who went about after sunset in a
continual, piteous fear of "black men wif masks," had omitted to put
the chain on the door before being carried mutinously to bed. Oliver
switched on the hall light and picked up a letter and a folded note from
the card tray.

"Ted, Ollie and Dickie will share that little bijou, the sleeping porch,
unless Ted prefers the third-story bathtub," the note read. "Breakfast at
convenience for those that can get it themselves--otherwise at nine.
And DON'T wake Dickie up.
MOTHER."
Oliver passed it to Ted, who read it, grinned, and saluted, nearly
knocking over the hatrack.
"For _God's_ sake!" said Oliver in a piercing whisper, "Jane Ellen will
think that's Indians!"
Both listened frantically for a moment, holding their breath. But there
was no sound from upstairs except an occasional soft rumbling. Oliver
had often wondered what would happen if the whole sleeping family
chanced to breathe in and out in unison some unlucky night. He could
see the papery walls blown apart like scraps of cardboard--Aunt Elsie
falling, falling with her bed from her little bird-house under the eaves,
giving vent to one deaf, terrified "Hey--what's that?" as she sank like
Lucifer cast from Heaven inexorably down into the laundry stove, her
little tight, white curls standing up on end....
Ted had removed his shoes and was making for the stairs with the
exaggerated caution of a burglar in a film.
"'Night!" called Oliver softly.
"G' night! Where's my bed--next the wall? Good--then I won't step on
Dickie. And if you fall over me when you come in, I'll bay like a
bloodhound!"
"I'll look out. Be up in a minute myself. Going to write a letter."
"So I'd already deduced, Craig Kennedy, my friend. Well, give her my
love!"
He smiled like a bad little boy and disappeared round the corner. A
stair creaked--they were the kind of stairs that always creaked like old
women's bones, when you tried to go up them quietly. There was the
sound of something soft stubbing against something hard and a muffled
"_Sonofa--_"
"What's matter?"
"Oh, nothing. Blame near broke my toe on Jane Ellen's doll's porcelain
head. 'S all right. 'Night."
"'Night." Then in an admonitory sotto-voce, "Remember, if you wake
Dickie, you've got to tell him stories till he goes to sleep again, or he'll

wake up everybody else!"
"If he wakes, I'll garotte him. 'Night."
"'Night."
Oliver paused for a few minutes, waiting for the crash that would
proclaim that Ted had stumbled over something and waked Dickie
beyond redemption. But there was nothing but a soft gurgling of water
from the bathroom and then, after a while, a slight but definite addition
to the distant beehive noises of sleep in the house. He smiled, moved