“No,” said Jeff. “Now wait a minute, Sir.”
“This is Friday,” Oliver went on calmly, “and the arrangement was thirty dollars for a seven-day week, wasn’t it? That would be five-sevenths of thirty—well, let’s say roughly twenty-one dollars as a flat sum. You don’t mind a check, do you? I’m a little short on cash.”
Jeff stood up. “I don’t want any money,” he said.
Oliver raised his eyebrows. “Why not?” he asked. “You took it each week from Mrs. Crown, didn’t you?”
“Yes. But …”
“Why should this week be any different?” Oliver sounded good-tempered and reasonable. “Except that it’s two days short?”
“I don’t want it,” Jeff said.
Oliver purposely misunderstood him. “Things being as they are,” he said, “you don’t think that you ought to stay on any longer, do you?”
“No,” Jeff said, mumbling so low that Oliver could hardly hear him.
“Of course not,” Oliver said, in a fatherly tone. He gave Jeff the check. “Here, take it. You’ve earned it. I remember when I was your age I could always use twenty dollars. It can’t be so different today.”
Jeff looked down unhappily at the check in his hand and started toward the door. Then he turned back. “I suppose I ought to say I’m sorry or ashamed or something like that. I suppose it would make you feel better.”
Oliver smiled warmly. “Not necessarily,” he said.
“Well, I’m not,” Jeff said defiantly. “It’s the greatest thing that ever happened to me.”
Oliver nodded. “It always is,” he said. “At the age of twenty.”
“You don’t know,” Jeff said incoherently. “You don’t know her.”
“Perhaps not,” Oliver said.
“She’s pure,” Jeff said. “Delicate. You mustn’t blame her. I did it. It’s all my fault.”
“I don’t want to take any of the glory away from you,” Oliver said pleasantly, “but I must say that when a thirty-five-year-old woman takes up with a twenty-year-old boy I can’t give him credit for anything more than being—present.”
“You …” said Jeff bitterly, confronting the older man. “You’re so sure of yourself. I know all about you. She’s told me. Sitting back. Telling everybody what they’re to do. What they’re to think. The people who work for you. Your child. Your wife. Having everything your own way. Being polite and frozen and ruthless. God, even now you don’t even have the grace to be angry. You come up here and find out I’m in love with your wife and what do you do? You sign a check.” With a melodramatic gesture he crumpled the check and threw it on the floor.
Oliver’s air of indulgence, of amusement, did not change. “It’s one of the arguments you always hear,” he said, “against hiring the sons of wealthy families. They don’t have the proper respect for money.”
“I hope she leaves you,” Jeff said. “And if she does, I’ll marry her.”
“Bunner,” Oliver said, repressing a smile, “if I may say so, you’re behaving like a fool. You’re being sentimental. You use words like love, marriage, delicacy, purity, and I know why, and I even admire you for it. You’re not a brute. You want to have a high opinion of yourself. You want to think of yourself as passionate, exceptional. Well, it’s natural enough, and I don’t blame you for it—but I have to tell you that it doesn’t square with the facts.”
“What do you know about the facts?” Jeff asked bitterly.
“This much,” Oliver said. “You haven’t had a love affair. You’ve had a work of the imagination. You’ve imagined a woman who doesn’t exist, an emotion that doesn’t exist.”
“Don’t tell me,” Jeff started to interrupt.
“Please let me finish.” Oliver waved his hand. “You’ve taken something that’s routine and casual and you’ve larded it with roses and moonlight. You’ve mistaken a season for a lifetime. You’ve mistaken a silly, childish woman’s easy conscience for passion, and finally, you’ll be the one who gets hurt the worst because of it.”
“If that’s the way you feel about her,” Jeff said, almost stuttering in his anger and confusion, “you have no right to talk about her. You don’t respect her, you don’t admire her, you don’t love her …”
Oliver sighed. “When you get older,” he said, “you’ll find out that love very often has almost nothing to do with respect and admiration. Anyway, I didn’t come all the way up here to talk about me. Jeff,” he said, “let me ask you to do something fairly hard—look at things as they really are. Look at the summertime, Jeff. Look at all the hotels like this one. All the clapboard palaces with thin walls and bad dance bands and postcard lakes and lazy, thoughtless, vacationing women separated from their husbands for the hot months. Women who lie out in the sun all day, bored, restless, drinking too much, looking for amusement and finding it in traveling salesmen, waiters, hired athletes, trumpet players, college boys. The whole tribe of cheap, available males with only that to recommend them. That, and the fact that they conveniently vanish when the cold weather comes. By the way,” Oliver said conversationally, “have you talked to Mrs. Crown on the subject of marriage?”
“Yes. I did.”
“What did she say?”
“She laughed,” Jeff admitted.
“Of course.” Oliver was friendly and sympathetic. “The same thing happened to me when I was just past twenty. Except that it was on a boat, on the way to France. Actually it was perhaps even more romantic than this …” He waved his arm to indicate the cottage, the lake, the surrounding forest. “Boats being what they are and France being what it was right after the war. And the lady was wise enough to leave her children at home, since she was perhaps more practiced than Mrs. Crown. It was very intense. It even included a two-week trip to the Italian lakes and adjoining cabins on the old Champlain and I made speeches to her on the boatdeck on the way back to America that I imagine were very much like some of the speeches you must have been making here on moonlit nights. And we were luckier, too. The husband never knew anything. Never appeared until we docked. Even so,” Oliver laughed reflectively, “it took two hours to get through customs and by the time we were through the gate she was having trouble remembering my name.”
“Why are you trying to make it so ugly?” said Jeff. “Why does that make it better for you?”
“Not ugly,” Oliver said, “merely ordinary. Pleasant—that summer in Europe is one of the most agreeable memories I have—but ordinary. Don’t be so unhappy because at a certain age you happen to have gone through an experience that other young men have had before you.” He bent down and picked up the crumpled check from the floor. “You’re sure you don’t want this check?” He held it out, offering it to the boy.
“No,” said Jeff.
Oliver shrugged. “Whatever you say. As you get older, you learn to treat money more carefully, too.” He smoothed out the check, looked at it absently, then with a sudden movement threw it into the fireplace. “Incidentally—that phonograph is yours, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” said Jeff.
“I think you’d better take it with you,” Oliver said. “Now. And anything else around here that belongs to you.”
“That’s all there is,” said Jeff.
Oliver went over to the phonograph and snapped out the plug. He wrapped the cord neatly around the instrument and tucked the plug firmly through the twist of wire. “I think you’d better stay away from here from now on, don’t you?”
“I’m not making any promises.”
Oliver shrugged. “It makes no difference to me. I was merely thinking of your own peace of mind.” He tapped the phonograph. “Here we are.” He waited, smiling pleasantly. Jeff, his face set, came over and put the machine under his arm and started out. As he got to the door it opened and Lucy came in.