The summer darkness rustled with the approach of dawn. At the foot of the lane below the Tracys’ Vance Weston felt the stir as if it were one with the noise in his own temples: a web of sounds too tenuous to be defined or isolated, but something so different from the uniform silence which had enveloped the world an hour earlier that every blade of grass and feather of bird now seemed sighing and ruffling in the darkness.
Vance had crept unheard out of the sleeping house, and now, in the obscurity of the lane, sat on a stone under a twisted thorn tree and listened for the splutter of the Eaglewood motor. Miss Spear might forget him again, as she had forgotten him (how he liked her for owning it!) the day before; or the car, which she had said was going on one leg, might fall dead lame, and leave her stranded before she could get down the mountain. But he did not really believe that either of these things would happen. There are days which give you, in the very moment of waking, the assurance that they were born for you, are yours to do as you please with; this was one of them for Vance.
He had been, not offended, but hurt and a little bewildered, at Miss Spear’s failure to come to the Willows the previous afternoon, after sending him word that if he met her there she would let him spend a long afternoon with the books. She had taken the trouble to ask for Upton at the nursery, where she had called to pick up a basket of plants for her mother, and had instructed him to tell his cousin Vance to be at the Willows punctually at three, and to let her know in case he could not come. It was the tenth day after Vance’s arrival, and that very morning he had made up his mind to go to New York. He was going alone, for Upton could only get away on Sundays; moreover, Vance knew by this time that as a guide his cousin would be of little use. All that Upton seemed to know of the metropolis was where the wholesale seedmen and nurserymen had their offices; as a means of introducing Vance to the world of journalism Laura Lou would have been about as helpful. Vance therefore meant to go alone, not with any hope of arriving within speaking distance of an editor, but to slake his curiosity with a sight of the outside of some of the big newspaper offices, and get an impression of the general aspect of the city. He had waited for over a week, partly because of the oppressive heat (his mother was right, it was worse than Chicago) and his own lingering physical weakness, but chiefly because his afternoon in the library at the Willows, and the brief apparition there of the girl who might have been old Miss Lorburn’s reincarnation, had thrown him into a sort of prolonged daydream, which was broken only by intervals of frenzied composition.
When the summons came from Miss Spear to meet Miss Spear again at the Willows he threw New York to the winds, and lived through the next twenty-four hours in a tremor of expectation. Long before three he was unlocking the gate of the deserted place and pushing his bicycle through the grass and clover of the drive. The day was cooler — it would have been a good day for New York — and the green air under the willows trembled with a delicious freshness. Vance sat down on the doorstep. From where he sat he could get a glimpse of the gate through the shimmering branches, and watch the shadows of the trees wheel slowly across the lawn. The air was rich with the smell of syringas, that smell which is so like the sound of bees on a thundery day. Vance leaned his head back against a pillar of the porch and waited . . . .
He had been sincere in saying to Miss Spear that while he waited he had not been impatient or angry. He had always had a habit of rumination unusual at his age, and everything in this new life was so strange, so unreal, that even in its disappointments and denials he found food for his imagination. The spell of Miss Lorburn’s house was stronger now than on his first visit, because in the interval he had lived among people, plain unimaginative people, who nevertheless took old houses for granted, took age and permanence for granted, seemed in fact to live with one foot in the grave of the past, like the people pushing back their tombstones in a queer stiff sculpture of the Last Judgment that he had seen reproduced in some illustrated travel paper. The fact that the Tracys, who never thought of anything but the present, were yet so tacitly imbued with the past, so acquiescent in its power and its fatality, that they attached such a ritual significance to phrases like “a very long time ago,” and “it’s always been so,” and “nothing will be changed as long as any of the family are alive,” had completely altered Vance’s perspective, transforming his world from the staring flatness of a movie “close-up” to a many-vistaed universe reaching away on all sides from this empty and silent house. Even the thought of the books inside the house, so close yet inaccessible, did not long tantalize him. It was enough to sit there waiting, listening for the noise of the motor, and in the intervals straining his ear to catch the secret coming and going of the Past behind the barred threshold.
It was only when dusk fell that he roused himself to the fact that Miss Spear had failed him. Then his boyish pride reasserted itself, and for a moment he felt sore and humiliated. He remembered things Upton had said: “She never stays anywhere more than five minutes. . . . A gentleman friend called for her in his car . . . .” and subsequent allusions picked up from Mrs. Tracy, who had been speechless with surprise when she learned that Miss Spear intended to devote an afternoon to showing Vance the books at the Willows. “Well, I never! Anyhow, she’s got the right to — I guess some day the place will be hers,” was one of the things Mrs. Tracy had said; and Laura Lou, breaking her habitual silence, had added in her quick fluttering way: “I don’t believe she’ll ever live at Paul’s Landing. She says she means to travel all the time when she’s married . . . .”
All this wove itself into Vance’s own picture of the pale dark~haired young woman who had appeared to him so suddenly, and taken up the verse of “Kubla Khan” in her rich chanting voice. He had assumed her to be some years older than himself, and at nineteen, and to a mind as ignorant of class distinctions as his, such a difference of age put a much greater distance between them than the fact that Miss Spear lived at “the big house” (as the Tracys called Eaglewood), or even that she was to inherit the Willows, or meant to travel all the time when she was married. . . . Vance thought of her as goddesslike and remote, mistress of the keys of knowledge and experience; her notice had flushed him with pride, but it seemed a part of the mysterious unreality of everything in this new world. As he got to his feet and walked back to the gate of the Willows he felt his first pang of wounded pride. She had forgotten him; forgotten him because he was too young and insignificant to be remembered; because fellows called for her and carried her off in their cars; because she never stayed anywhere more than five minutes . . . .
Ah, how differently he thought of her now! Since her breathless arrival at the Tracy house on the previous evening, her summoning him out to the porch to accuse and excuse herself, the goddess had become woman again, and he was sure that the woman was to be trusted. She still seemed to him a good deal older than himself, but that now gave him a happy sense of ease and freedom, instead of the feverish excitement which the advances of a girl of his own age would have occasioned . . . .
As he waited in the darkness the early noises of awakening life began to stir. He heard the long eerie scream of a train far away; then the rumble of a motor truck down the turnpike at the foot of the hill, followed by the jolt of a lame farm horse coming in with garden produce; and lastly, close by, the cluck-cluck of the Eaglewood motor — and she was there.
“Vance!” she called gaily, half under her breath, as though instinctively adapting her voice to the whispered sounds of the hour. He had his hand on the door of the car, and in a moment was sitting at her side. “Now if she’ll only start!” the girl sighed. The car kicked and jibbed and stood stock still, as it had the evening before; then it was off with a rush, as if aware of the challenge to its powers, and amused at so unusual an adventure.
Vance was too full of happy emotion to speak. When Miss Spear said: “Did you think I was going to forget you again?” he merely answered: “No,” and she laughed, as if the simplicity of the answer pleased her, and then fell silent too.
When they started up the wooded road to the mountain there still lingered so much of night under the branches that she had to turn on the headlights, and the white stretch of illumination on each side of the motor was filled with layer upon layer of delicately drawn motionless leaves, between which the ruts of the road seemed to Vance to rise up and meet them as they climbed. All these details burnt themselves into his brain with a curious precision, as if he had been crawling at a snail’s pace through an eternity of overarching foliage, while at the same time the wheezy car seemed to be whirling him breathlessly to unknown distances; so that when the headlights painted the sudden picture of two gateposts of gray stone flanking a drive he was startled to hear Miss Spear say: “There’s Eaglewood,” for he thought they must long since have reached the ridge of the mountain above it.
They still mounted; the air was growing cooler; at last it was almost cold. The headlights paled gradually in the imperceptible growth of dawn, and when Miss Spear remembered to turn them out the road was scarcely less distinct, though everything appeared farther away and softer to the eye. At last the motor came out of the woodland, high up on a stretch of rough country road between fields. The sky arched overhead dim and pallid, with here and there a half-drowned star like a petal in gray water. They passed once more under trees, the world grew all dark again, and Miss Spear, stopping the motor, said: “Here.”
They were in a tree-shadowed trail leading from the road to the foot of a steep overhanging rock. “There’s Thundertop,” Miss Spear said. She jumped out, and Vance after her. They scrambled up from ledge to ledge and finally reached a projecting rocky spur from which they saw, far below and around, the outspread earth, its lonely mountain masses and habitable slopes, and hollows still indistinct, all waiting inanimate for the light.
“If it shouldn’t happen!” Miss Spear exclaimed. Vance turned to her in wonder. She had spoken his very thought; and to youth such coincidences are divine.
“Or if it had never happened before — if we were actually looking at the very first. . . . Ah!” she broke off on a deep breath; for a faint vibration, less of light than of air, a ripple of coming life, had begun to flow over the sky and the opposite mountains, hushing every incipient sound. There was a lull after that first tremor; a lull lasting so long that it seemed as if, after all, nothing in the landscape had moved or altered. Then Miss Spear, laying her hand on Vance’s shoulder, turned him about toward a break in the swarthy fell of the eastern mountains; and through it came the red edge of the sun. They watched in silence as it hung there apparently unmoving; then they glanced away for a moment, and when they looked back they saw that it had moved; saw the forerunning glow burn away the ashen blur in the forest hollows, the upper sky whiten, and daylight take possession of the air. Again they turned westward, looking toward the Hudson, and now the tawny suffusion was drawing down the slopes of the farther shore, till gradually, very gradually, the river hollows also were washed of their mists, and the great expanse of the river shone bright as steel in the clear shadow.
Vance drew a deep breath. His lips were parted, but no word came. He met Miss Spear’s smiling eyes with a vague stare. “Kubla Khan?” she said. He nodded.
“You’d never seen one of our sunrises?”
“No, only over the prairies.”
“Well, that must be rather splendid too. But very different — like seeing it over the sea.”
He made no response, for he had never seen the sea, and there was no room in his soul for more new visions.
“It’s less of an effort to see the sun rise in Illinois, I suppose?” Miss Spear continued. “You only have to look out of your window. Here it involves mountaineering, and it’s given me a mountaineer’s appetite; hasn’t it you?”
He didn’t know; he supposed so; but he hardly heard what she said. His whole sentient self was still away from him, in the blue and gold of the uprolling. He would have liked to lie down there on the edge of Thundertop between the misty splendours below and the pure light above, and let the hours drift by while the chariot of the day described its great circuit before him. At such moments he was almost disembodied.
“Come along, Vance! I’m ravening. Ham and eggs over a gipsy fire!” She slipped a comrade-arm through his, and they started to scramble down from their eminence, leaving at each step a fragment of the mighty spectacle behind them. Vance, reluctantly following, thought to himself: “She never stays anywhere more than five minutes — ”
But by the time they had reached the motor hunger had seized him too, and he was laughing with her while she made sure that the lunch basket and thermos were somewhere among the odds and ends under the seat, and thinking he had never met anybody who made things so easy, yet was somehow so gaily aloof. With a fresh expenditure of persuasion and violence she got the motor going, and they backed out of the trail, and started down the mountain. About halfway of the descent Miss Spear turned into another trail, deeply shadowed, and they took out their provisions, and began to climb through the forest. Presently the little woodland noises, twitter of birds and stir of leaf, were all merged in the tinkle of an unseen brook, and a little farther on they met the brook itself, leaping down wet ledges in a drip of ferns and grasses, till it led them to the rocky pool encircled with turf of which Miss Spear had told him. There she unpacked the basket, and Vance brought two stones, and some twigs to lay across them; but they could find no dry fuel in that mossy dripping place, and had to eat their eggs raw, and munch the ham between slices of stale bread. Luckily the coffee was piping hot, and when Vance had drained his cup his tongue was loosened, and there poured from him all that he had been revolving in his mind, and thirsting to utter, since his first encounter with Miss Spear at the Willows. He could hardly keep the thread of the talk in his hands, so quickly did one idea tumble out after another, and so many new trains of thought did Miss Spear’s answers start in the coverts of his mind.
Afterward, in looking back at the adventure, he wondered at the fact that he had hardly been conscious of his companion’s age or sex, hardly aware of the grave beauty of her face, had felt her only as the mysterious vehicle of all the new sensations pouring into his soul — as if she had been the element harmonizing the scene, or a being born of the sunrise and the forest.
Yet afterward he saw nothing ethereal or remote about her; to his memory she became again a dark-haired girl with thoughtful eyes and animated lips, who leaned back, her hat tossed off, her bare arms folded behind her head, and plied him with friendly questions. The trouble was that every one of the questions, though to her so evidently simple and matter-of-course for him, called a new vision out of the unknown, as the car’s headlights, while they climbed the mountain, had kept on painting pictures on the darkness. The simplest things she said presupposed a familiarity with something or other that he was ignorant of: allusions to people and books, associations of ideas, images and metaphors, each giving an electric shock to his imagination, and making him want to linger and question before she hurried him on to the next point.
What she wanted, for her part, was evidently just to be helpful and friendly. She had guessed, perhaps, that there was not much nourishment for him in life at the Tracys’, and wondered what direction he would take when that interval was over, as she assumed it would be soon. He acknowledged that he had accepted his parents’ proposal to send him to his cousins for his convalescence because it was a way of being brought nearer New York, which at the moment was the place he most wanted to get to; and when she asked why — whether just as a big sight, or with some special object? he answered, feeling himself hot from feet to forehead at the confession, yet unable to hold it back, that, yes, what he wanted was to live in New York and be a writer.
“A writer? I see. But that’s interesting.” Miss Spear raised herself on her elbow and reached for a cigarette, while her eyes continued to rest on his crimson countenance. “Tell me more about it. What do you want to write?”
He threw back his head and gave back her look with a thumping heart. “Poetry.”
Her face lit up. “Oh, but that’s splendid! You’ve written a lot already, I suppose?”
“Not a lot. Some.” How flat the monosyllables sounded! And all the while his brain rustled with rich many-branching words that were too tangled up with each other to be extricated. Miss Spear smiled, and said: “This is just the place for poetry, isn’t it? Do repeat something of yours.”
Vance’s heart dropped back to silence. No one had ever before asked him to recite his verses. The inside of his mouth grew parched and there was a buzzing in his head. This girl had commanded him, here in this magical place, to recite to her something he had written! His courage began to ebb away now that he was confronted with this formidable opportunity.
He moistened his dry lips, closed his mind’s eyes as if preparing to leap into space, and said: “‘Trees.’”
“Is that the title?”
“Yes. They were the first things that struck me when I got here — the trees. They’re different from ours, thicker, there are more of them . . . I don’t know . . .”
“Yes, and so — ”
He began: “Arcane, aloof, and secret as the soul . . .”
She sat motionless, resting her chin on her lifted hand. Her cigarette went out, and dropped to the damp mosses of the poolside. “Secret as the soul,” she murmured. “Yes.” She nodded softly, but did not speak again, and at times, as he went on, he forgot her presence and seemed alone with his own imagination; then again he felt her so close that her long meditative face, drooping slightly, seemed to interpose itself between his eyes and what he was saying, and he was chilled by the thought that when, in a moment, he ceased reciting, the face would be there, unescapable, rhadamanthine, like death at the end of life. He poured out the last words of the poem in a rush, and there was a long silence, an endless silence, it seemed to the poet, before his hearer spoke.
“You recite too fast; you swallow half the words. Oh, why aren’t people in our country taught —? But there are beautiful things . . .” She paused, and seemed to muse discriminatingly upon them. “That about the city of leaves . . . I wish you’d write it out for me, will you? Then I can read it over to myself. If you have a bit of paper, do write it now.”
Vance had the inevitable bit of paper, and the fountain pen from which he was never parted. He pulled out the paper, spread it on a stone, and began to write. He was mortified that she thought his reading so bad, and his hand shook so that he feared she would hardly find the poem more intelligible than when he had recited it. At last he handed her the paper, and she held it to her short~sighted eyes during another awful interval of silence.
“Yes — there are beautiful things in it. That image of the city of leaves . . . and the soul’s city being built of all the murmurs and rustlings of our impressions, emotions, instincts . . .” She laid the page down, and lifted her head, drawing her eyelids together meditatively. “By the way, do you know what the first temple at Delphi was built of?” She paused, smiling in expectation of his enjoyment. “Of birds’ feathers and honey. Singing and humming! Sweetness and lightness! Isn’t that magical?”
Vance gazed at her, captivated but bewildered. Did he understand — or did he not? Birds’ feathers and honey? His heart beat with the strange disturbing beauty of the metaphor — for metaphor it must be, of course. Yet bodying forth what? In his excitement over the phrase, his perplexity at the question, he felt himself loutish and unresponsive for not answering. But he could not think of anything to say.
“The First Church of Christ at Delphi? Christian Science, you mean? I’m afraid I don’t understand,” he stammered at length.
She stared as if she didn’t either; then she gave a little laugh. “Well, no, nothing quite so recent. The legend is about the first temple of Delphi — (I mean the GREEK Delphi, the famous shrine, where Apollo’s oracle was) — well, the legend is that the first temple was only a hut of feathers and honey, built in that uninhabited place by the bees and birds, who knew there was a god there long before man came and discovered him . . . .” She broke off, and folded up the paper. “That’s a subject for another poem, isn’t it? . . . But this one,” she added, rousing herself, and turning again to Vance with her look of eager encouragement, “this I do like immensely. You’ll let me keep it? I have a great friend who really cares for poetry, and I want to show it to him. And won’t you repeat another? Please do. I love lying here and listening to beautiful words all mixed up with the sound of water and leaves . . . Only you know, Vance,” she added, fixing him suddenly with a piercing humorous glance, “I should leave ‘urge’ as a noun to the people who write blurbs for book jackets; and ‘dawn’ and lorn’ do NOT rhyme in English poetry, not yet . . . .”
A silence followed. The girl’s praise and understanding — above all, her understanding — had swung Vance so high above his everyday self that it was as if, at her touch, wings had grown from him. And now, abruptly, her verbal criticism, suggesting other possibilities of the same kind, hinting at abysses of error into which he might drop unawares at any moment, brought him down like a shot bird. He hardly understood what she meant, did not know what there was to find fault with in the English of the people who wrote for book jackets — it was indeed the sort of thing he aspired to excel in some day himself — and still less understood what she meant when she attacked the validity of rhymes as self-evident to the ear as “lorn” and “dawn.” Perverse and arbitrary as she evidently was — and sound-deaf, probably — she might as well have said (very likely would, if challenged) that “morn” and “gone” did not rhyme in English poetry! He was so passionately interested in everything concerning the material and the implements of his art that at another time he would have welcomed a discussion of the sort; but in this hour of creative exaltation, when his imagination was still drenched with the wonder of the adventure, and the girl’s praise, as she listened, had already started a twitter of new rhythms and images in his brain, it was like falling from a mortal height to have such praise qualified by petty patronizing comments, which were all the more disturbing because he found no answer to them.
“Don’t rhyme — in English poetry?” he stammered, paling under the blow. But Miss Spear had sprung to her feet and stood looking down on him with the sportive but remote radiance of some woodland spirit.
“Oh, but what does all that matter? I don’t know what made me even speak of it.” She continued to look at him, and as she did so, the anxious groping expression of her short-sighted eyes, as she tried to read his, suddenly humanized her face and brought her close again. “It was just my incurable mania for taking everything to pieces. Gilding the lily — who was the fool who said THAT wasn’t worth doing? . . . But I shouldn’t have spoken, you know, Vance, if I didn’t believe you have the gift . . . the real gift . . . ‘the sublime awkwardness that belittles talent,’ as George Frenside calls it . . .”
His heart swelled as he listened. How she knew how to bind up the hurts she made! “The sublime awkwardness . . .” He trembled with the shock of the phrase. Who talked or wrote like that, he wondered? Was it anyone he could see, or whose books he could get hold of — in the Willows library, perhaps? “Who’s that you spoke of?” he asked breathlessly.
“The man who can talk to you better than anybody else about English poetry.”
“Oh, do you know him? Can I see him? Is he alive?”
To each question Miss Spear, still looking down on him, nodded her assent. “He’s the friend I spoke of just now. He’s staying at Eaglewood. He’s the literary critic of The Hour.” She watched the effect of this announcement with her sleepy narrowed glance. “I’ll bring him down to see you some day — the day I show you the Willows library,” she said.
Vance had never heard of Frenside, or the paper called The Hour; but the assurance with which she pronounced the names stamped them with immediate importance. His heart was beating furiously; but such shining promises were no longer enough for him. Upton’s allusions to Miss Spear’s unreliability and elusiveness came back to him; and he remembered with a new resentfulness his hours of waiting at Miss Lorburn’s door. Perhaps something of this incredulity showed in his eyes, for Miss Spear added, with one of her sudden touches of gentleness: “I can’t tell you now just what day; but I’ll leave word with Upton at the nursery, I promise I will. And now come, Vance, we must pack up and start. Our sunrise isn’t ours any longer. It belongs to the whole stupid world . . . .”
Waking near noon that day from the sleep into which she had fallen after the vigil on Thundertop, Hélo?se Spear sat up in bed and thought: “What’s wrong?”
She stretched her arms above her head, pushed back her hair from her sleepy eyes, and looked about her room, which was cooled by the soft green light filtered through the leaves of the ancient trumpet creeper above her window. For a moment or two the present was drowned in the remembered blaze of the sunrise, and the enjoyment of the hunger satisfied beside the pool; but already she knew that — as was almost invariable in her experience — something disagreeable lurked in the heart of her memories: as if every enjoyment in life had to be bought by a bother.
“That boy has eyes — I was right,” she thought; and then, immediately: “Oh, I know, the motor!” For she had remembered, in the act of re-evoking young Weston, that on the way home the car had stopped suddenly, a mile or more above Eaglewood, and that, after a long struggle (during which he had stood helplessly watching her, seemingly without an idea as to how he might come to her aid,) they had had to abandon it by the roadside, and she had parted with her companion at the Eaglewood gates after telling him how to find his way home on foot. She herself had meant to take a couple of hours of sleep, and then slip out early to catch the man~of-all-work before the household was up, and persuade him to get the delinquent motor home somehow. But as soon as she had undressed, and thrown herself on her bed, she sank into the bottomless sleep of youth; and here it was nearly lunchtime, and everybody downstairs, and the absence of the motor doubtless already discovered! And, with matters still undecided between herself and Lewis Tarrant, she had not especially wanted him to know that she had been out without him to see the sunrise — the more so as he would never believe she had gone up to Thundertop unaccompanied.
Ah, how she envied the girls of her age who had their own cars, who led their own lives, sometimes even had their own bachelor flats in New York! Except as a means to independence riches were nothing to her; and to acquire them by marriage, and then coldly make use of them for her own purposes, was as distasteful to her as anything in her present life. And yet she longed for freedom, and saw no other way to it. If only her eager interest in life had been matched by some creative talent! She could half paint, she could half write — but her real gift (and she knew it) was for appreciating the gifts of others. Even had discipline and industry fostered her slender talents they would hardly have brought her a living. She had measured herself and knew it — and what else was there for her but marriage? “Oh, well,” she thought, for the thousandth time, “something may turn up . . .” which meant, as she knew, that her mother’s cousin, old Tom Lorburn, might drop off at any moment and leave her the Willows, with enough money to get away from it, and from Paul’s Landing, forever.
She heard her mother’s fluttering knock, and Mrs. Spear came in, drooping, distressed, and dimly beautiful.
“Oh, Halo — asleep still? I’m sorry to disturb you, darling, but it’s after eleven” (“I know, I know,” grumbled Hélo?se, always impatient of the obvious), “and something so tiresome has happened. The motor has disappeared. Jacob says somebody must have got into the garage in the night. The cook says she saw a dreadful-looking man hanging about yesterday evening; but the trouble is that the garage lock wasn’t broken open — only it so seldom is locked, as I told your father. Your father says it’s Lorry again; he’s made such a dreadful scene before Lewis. . . . It’s not so much the fact of Lorry’s being out all night; but your father thinks he’s sold the car. And if he HAS we shall never see a penny of the money,” Mrs. Spear added, confusedly struggling to differentiate the causes of her distress, of which fear about the money was clearly by far the most potent.
Hélo?se sat up in bed and gazed at her mother’s troubled countenance. “Even now,” she thought, “her eyes are beautiful; and she doesn’t screw them up in the ugly way that I do.” Then she roused herself to reality. “What nonsense — nobody stole the motor,” she said.
“It WAS Lorry, then? He’s told you —?”
“He’s told me nothing.” She paused, letting her imagination toy for a moment with the temptation to be silent; then she said: “The motor’s a mile up the road, toward Thundertop. It broke down, and I left it there myself early this morning.” The idea of allowing Lorry to bear the brunt of the storm had lasted no more than the taking of breath between two words; but it had stirred in her an old residuum of self-disgust. Yet she did wish she had got the car safely under cover before all this fuss!
Her mother stood staring at her with astonished eyes. “You, Halo? You had the car out in the middle of the night?”
“Yes. I had the car out. I went up to Thundertop to see the sunrise.”
“With Lewis, darling?” Mrs. Spear’s face brightened perceptibly; then it fell again. “But no, he was there just now when your father scolded poor Lorry, and of course if he’d been with you — ”
“He wasn’t with me. He doesn’t know anything about it.”
“Halo!” her mother moaned, “And you chose this time — when he’d just arrived!” She paused with a gesture of despair. “Who WAS with you?”
Halo, sliding out of bed, got her feet into her flopping Moroccan slippers, and began to gather up her sponge and towels preparatory to an advance to the bathroom. “Oh, nobody in particular. Just that young boy from the Tracys’ — ”
Mrs. Spear gasped out her perplexity. “Boy from Tracys’? You don’t mean Upton?”
“Of course not. How ridiculous! I mean the cousin from the West that they’ve got staying there — the boy who’s had typhoid fever. Didn’t I tell you about him? He’s rather extraordinary; full of talent, I believe; and starving to death for want of books, and of people he can talk to. I promised to spend an afternoon with him at the Willows, and let him browse in the library, and then I forgot all about it, and to make up for having chucked him I slipped out early this morning and ran him up to Thundertop to see the sunrise. It was glorious. And he read me some of his poems — he means to be a poet. I do believe there’s something in him, Mother.”
While Mrs. Spear listened the expression of her beautiful eyes passed from anxiety to a sympathetic exaltation. As her daughter was aware, one could never speak to Mrs. Spear of genius without kindling in her an irrepressible ardour to encourage and direct it.
“But, my dear, how interesting! Why didn’t you tell me about him before? Couldn’t George Frenside do something to help him? Couldn’t he publish his things in The Hour? I do hope you asked him to come back to lunch?”
Hélo?se laughed. Her mother’s enthusiasms always amused her. To hear of the presence, within inviting distance, of a young man of talent (talent was always genius to Mrs. Spear) was instantly to make her forget her family and financial cares, however pressing, and begin to wonder anxiously what the cook could scrape together for lunch — a sincere respect for good food being one of the anomalies of her oddly assorted character, and a succulent meal her instinctive homage to celebrity. “What time did you tell him to come — one or half-past? I believe Susan could still manage a cheese soufflé — but it’s nearly twelve now.”
“Yes; I know it is — and you must give me a chance to take my bath. And how could I ask him to lunch? It wouldn’t be decent, when he’s staying with the Tracys, who, after all, are distant connections of ours, and whom we certainly don’t want to invite — do we?”
Mrs. Spear, at this reminder, clasped her long expressive hands self-reproachfully. “Oh, those poor Tracys! Yes, they ARE distant relations. But if Lorburn Tracy, who was a poor sort of man anyhow, and less than nobody on his father’s side, chose to marry the gardener’s daughter at the Willows, we could hardly be expected, could we . . .? Not that that sort of thing really matters in the least. Why should it? Only — well, perhaps we’ve been snobbish about the Tracys, darling. Do you think we have? There’s nothing I hate so much as being snobbish. Do you think we ought to send Jacob down now with a note, and ask them ALL up to lunch with this young novelist you speak of? Not a novelist — a poet? What a head I’ve got! My dear, I really believe we ought to. Is there any notepaper here? There so seldom is, in your room . . . but if you can find a scrap, do write a line to Mrs. Tracy, and say . . . say . . . well, put it as nicely as you can . . . and say that Jacob is at their door, with the car, waiting to bring them up; oh, with the young man, of course! Remind me again of the young man’s name, my dear.”
“Well, if I said all that, Mother, part of it would hardly be true, as the car’s a mile or more up the Thundertop road at this minute, and refuses to budge.” Hélo?se let her mother’s outcries evaporate, and continued quietly: “Besides, you know perfectly well that we can’t ask the Tracys to lunch. We never have, and why should we now? They’d hate it as much as we should. They’re plain working people, and they have nothing on earth to say to us, or we to them. Why should we suddenly pretend the contrary?”
“Oh, Halo, how VULGAR of you! I wonder how you can even think such things. All human beings ought to have things to say to each other, if only they meet on the broad basis of humanity and . . . and . . .”
“Well, the Tracys wouldn’t; how could they? They’ve never heard of the broad basis of humanity. If we had them here with Lewis and George Frenside, or any of our other friends, what on earth should we find to say to each other? They talk another language, and it can’t be helped. But this boy is different, and I’ve promised to take him to the Willows to go through the books, and to bring George down to see him there some day. So let’s let it go at that . . . .” And Hélo?se, followed by her mother’s reproaches and ejaculations, made a dive for the door and dashed down the passage to the bathroom.
When she descended the worn shallow steps of the old staircase the lunch gong was sounding, and Mr. Spear was pacing the hall in a state of repressed excitement. Halo and Lorry, as children, had found in a popular natural history book a striking picture of a bristling caterpillar sitting upright on its tail, with the caption: “The male Puss-Moth when irritated after a full meal.” They instantly christened their progenitor the Puss-Moth, but modified the legend by explaining to strangers that he was more often irritated BEFORE a full meal than after — especially when kept waiting for it. Today Mr. Spear was unusually perpendicular and bristling, and his small, rather too carefully modeled features were positively grimacing with anger. To his daughter long habit made the sight more comic than impressive; but she was vexed that the question of the motor had to be dealt with.
“Halo, I suppose you know the car was taken out of the garage last night, WITHOUT THE DOOR LOCK’S BEING BROKEN, and that it has not since been seen? Your mother tells me — ”
Halo nodded. “Mother knows. I’ve explained.”
“Explained! I don’t know what you call — ”
“Hullo, Lewis — good morning.” Halo interrupted her father’s diatribe to greet Lewis Tarrant, who came lounging in from the verandah, followed by George Frenside munching his eternal cigar. “Good morning, Frenny — if it’s still morning? Are you all coming to assist at my execution?” she laughed.
“We want to hear the argument for the defence,” Frenside retorted, in his deep voice with the queer crack in it.
“Isn’t any. I plead guilty. I had the car out in the small hours, and busted her coming down the Thundertop road. I had to get home on my own feet, and that’s all.”
“All — all? You say it was you who was out in the car in the middle of the night?” Mr. Spear swung round on young Tarrant. “Lewis — was she?”
Lewis Tarrant’s fair complexion, which so curiously matched his very fair and very clear light gray eyes, grew sallow with surprise and embarrassment.
“I— why, of course, sir, if she says so,” he stammered.
“‘Says so’? Were you with her — or weren’t you? If you weren’t she’s only shielding her brother for the hundredth time; and God knows where the car’s gone to, by this time.”
“Send Jacob up the road to see,” Hélo?se interrupted impatiently. She had meant to carry the thing off with a light hand, laughing at them all, turning the affair into a good story to be served up to future guests; they were great, at Eaglewood, on collecting good stories for social purposes. But she had been put off her balance by the expression of Lewis Tarrant’s face, the intonation of his voice. Evidently he too supposed she was lying to shield her brother, and like the gentleman he was he was going to shield her; and the business was not in the least to his liking. (“Well, he knows what we’re like; why does he keep on coming here?” she thought, almost putting the question aloud to him.) She swung away from both men with one of her quick rebellious movements.
“And now, for goodness’ sake, Father, don’t go on keeping everybody waiting for lunch. Their interest in this affair is purely one of politeness. They don’t care a hang who had the car out last night, and they know it’s not the first time she’s broken down, especially when I’ve been driving her.”
“No — as to that, sir, Halo’s right, you know,” Tarrant corroborated laughingly, and at the same moment Mrs. Spear appeared, her face brightening as she caught the echo of the laugh. But her exhilaration did not last. “I do think, Halo, we ought to have invited the Tracys here long ago,” she began, the lines forming again about her eyes and mouth.
“The Tracys — the Tracys — who on earth do you mean by the Tracys?” Mr. Spear broke in, glad of a new vent for his irritation. “Not Tom Lorburn’s caretakers at the Willows, I take it?”
“Why, you know, Harold, the Tracys really are related to Tom Lorburn and me, and I’m afraid we’ve been dreadfully distant to them, never going near them except to see whether they’d looked after the Willows properly — and now Halo says they have a young cousin from the West staying there — a painter, no, I mean a poet, who’s really a genius. And so I thought . . .”
Mrs. Spear’s confused explanation was interrupted by the convulsive splutter and angry pause of a motor outside of the house. So familiar were the sounds to all present that Hélo?se merely said with a shrug: “What did I tell you?” and turned toward the dining room door, in the hope that the sight of food would cut short the investigation of her nocturnal trip.
“Well, Jacob?” Mr. Spear exclaimed, pausing halfway across the hall; and his daughter, turning, met the reproachful gaze of the family factotum, who stood in the doorway mopping the moisture from his perpetually puzzled wrinkles.
“Well, I’ve got her,” Jacob said. He glanced about him somewhat apprehensively, and then, fixing his eyes again on Hélo?se: “I found a fellow sitting in her. He said he’d lost his way and gone to sleep. He was going to cut and run, but I told him he’d have to come here with me and tell you folks what he was doing in the car anyhow.”
Jacob fell back, and over his shoulder Hélo?se caught sight of a slim boyish figure with white face and rumpled hair, and deep eyes still bewildered with sleep.
“Is this Eaglewood?” Vance Weston asked of the assembled company; then he saw Miss Spear behind the others, and his pallor turned to crimson.
Halo came forward. “Vance — how wonderful. Mother was just asking why I hadn’t brought you back to lunch; and here you are!”
He looked at her as if only half understanding. “I couldn’t find my way home, so I came back up the road, and when I saw the car was still there I got into it to wait until somebody came along — and I guess I must have fallen asleep.”
“Well, that’s all right; it’s even providential. You’ve saved Jacob the trouble of going all the way down the hill to get you. Mother, Father, this is Vance Weston, who’s staying at Paul’s Landing with the Tracys. Mother, can’t we have something to eat? You’ve no idea how inhumanly hungry sunrises make people — don’t they, Vance? Oh, and this is Mr. Frenside, whom I’ve told you about: who writes for The Hour. And this is Mr. Lewis Tarrant — and here’s my brother Lorburn. I suppose you’re our cousin, too, aren’t you, Vance? Lorry, this is our new cousin, Vance Weston.”
As she performed this rapid ceremony Halo’s eyes dwelt a moment longer on Lewis Tarrant’s face than on the others. Ah, he was taking his dose now — a nasty brew! “Shielding” her again; much she cared about being shielded! He would know now that she really had been out in the car in the night, that this unknown boy had been with her, that she didn’t care a fig who knew it, and that the escapade had taken place at the very moment when he, Lewis Tarrant, had come to Eaglewood for the weekend, on her express promise that she would tell him definitely, before the end of his visit, if she were going to marry him or not . . . .
Lorry Spear was the first to break the silence which had followed on young Weston’s entrance. “I see that our new cousin has done us the doubtful service of preventing that rotten old car from being stolen. At least we might have collected the insurance on her. . . . Glad to see you all the same, Weston; don’t bear you the least grudge.” He held out his hand to the increasingly bewildered Vance.
“How absurd, Lorry . . . as if anybody had really thought . . .” Mrs. Spear broke in, the cloud lifting from her brow as she saw that her son was helping to carry the thing off (he didn’t always; but when he did he was masterly).
“And all this time, my dear Vance,” Mrs. Spear continued turning her beautiful eyes on her guest, “you must be wondering what we’re all talking about, and why lunch is so late. But it’s providential, as Halo says; for we shouldn’t have had the pleasure of having you with us if that stupid old motor hadn’t broken down. Now come into the dining room, my dear boy, this way. I’m going to put you next to Mr. Frenside, our great critic, whom you know by reputation — of course you read The Hour? George, this is Halo’s friend, the young novelist . . . no, poet . . . poet, isn’t it, Vance? You happy being!” Mrs. Spear laid her urgent hand on his shoulder and drew him toward the luncheon table.
It was so still in the dim book-lined room that had the late Miss Lorburn reappeared upon the scene she might have mistaken for a kindred ghost the young man in possession of her library.
Vance, for the last few days, had been going over the books at the Willows, wiping them with a soft towel and carefully putting one after another back in its proper place. Halo Spear, in one of her spasmodic bursts of energy, had swooped down from Eaglewood the first morning to show him how to do it; for in the reverent and orderly treatment of books (handling them, Mrs. Weston might have put it, as gingerly as if they were “the best china”!) Vance was totally untaught. Miss Spear, with those swift and confident hands of hers, had given him one of her hurried demonstrations, accompanied by a running commentary of explanation. “Don’t SHAKE the books as if they were carpets, Vance; they’re not. At least they’re only magic carpets, some of them, to carry one to the other side of the moon. But they won’t stand banging and beating. You see, books have souls, like people: that is, like a few people. . . . No, I wouldn’t ask the Tracys to help; they don’t know much about books. You and I will manage it by ourselves. Look: wipe the edges gently, like this, and then flutter the pages ever so lightly — as if you were a bee trying to shake open a flower — just to get the dust out. . . . Ah, but how lovely this is! Listen:
“‘Ah, what avails the sceptred race,
And what the form divine?
What every virtue, every grace?
Rose Aylmer, all were thine . . .’”
And then, in the midst of her dusting and reading (the former frequently interrupted by the latter), she had glanced abruptly at her wristwatch, exclaiming: “Oh, Lord, there’s Lewis waiting — I’d forgotten!” and had dashed out of the house, crying back advice, instructions and adieux.
Vance scarcely noticed her departure. It was exciting — almost too exciting — to have her there; but he did not want more excitement just then. What he wanted was in some way to be kept outside of time and space till his fury of intellectual hunger was, not indeed sated, but at least calmed. The mere sense of all those books about him, silent witnesses of an unknown and unsuspected past, was almost more agitating than he could bear. From every side their influences streamed toward him, drawing him this way and that as if he had been in the centre of a magnetic circle. To continue the work he was there to do soon became manifestly impossible. Why, even Miss Spear had broken off every few minutes to read and admire, often dropping the book in her hand while she darted on to another, oblivious, in her hummingbird greed, of the principles of order she was inculcating. And yet to her these volumes, or the greater number of them, were old friends. She must long since have surmounted the shock of surprises with which Vance was tingling; while to him nearly all the books were new and unknown, and the rest bore names just familiar enough to sharpen his hunger. How could he attempt to remember from which shelf he had taken one book or the other, once it had opened its golden vistas to him?
He did not try for long. He already had a fairly definite sense of values, and could not delude himself with the idea that dusting a dead woman’s books was, for him or anybody else, a more vital and necessary act than reading them. This was his chance, and he was going to take it.
If only he had known better how to! The pressure of this weight of wisdom on his ignorance was suffocating: he felt like a girl Miss Spear had told him about, the girl who was so greedy for gold that she betrayed Rome, and the fellows she betrayed it to despised her so that they crushed her under their golden shields. These books were crushing Vance like that. If only there were some way of climbing the slippery trunk of the Tree which dangled its fruit so far above him!
He turned to the corner from which Miss Spear had taken the books, and his hand lit on a shabby volume: Specimens of English Dramatic Poets contemporary with Shakespeare. He settled himself in Miss Lorburn’s Gothic armchair and read:
“Is this the face that launched a thousand ships
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?”
My God! Who wrote it? Who could have? Not any of the big fellows he knew about . . . this was another note: he knew it instinctively. And the man’s name? Marlowe . . . and he’d lived, why, ever so long ago, two or three hundred years before this old house of Miss Lorburn’s was built, or the funny old mouldy Half Hours book published — and the English language, in this Marlowe’s hands, was already a flower and a flame. . . . Vance rambled on from glory to glory, slowly, amazedly, and then, out of sheer gluttony, pushed the book under his chair, like a dog hiding a bone, and wandered back to the magic shelves for more.
“When she moves, you see
Like water from a crystal overflowed,
Fresh beauty tremble out of her, and lave
Her fair sides to the ground . . .”
Vance dropped the little volume, and pressing his hands against his eyes let the frail music filter through him. This poetry had another quality of newness quite its own — something elusive as the shy beauty of a cold spring evening. Beddoes . . . that was the name. Another unknown! Was he a contemporary of those others, Marlowe and Ford, who lived so long before the Willows was built, almost before the Hudson River had a name? Or was he not, rather with an exquisite new note, trying to lure back the earlier music? How could a boy from Euphoria hope to find his way through this boundless forest of English poetry, called hither and thither by all these wild-winged birds pouring down their music on him?
As he stood groping and gazing, in the litter and confusion of the ravaged shelves, his eyes fell on a title which seemed to hold out help. Half Hours with the Best Authors — stoutish volumes in worn black cloth, with queer pinnacled gilt lettering. Well, at least they would tell him who were supposed to be the best authors when the book was written — put him wise on that, anyhow. He reached for a volume, and settled himself down again.
The book was not, as Vance had expected, a series of “half hour” essays on the best authors. Charles Knight (that was the man’s name) had simply ranged through a library like Miss Lorburn’s, about eighty years ago, gathered this bloom and that, and bound them together with the fewest words. Vance, accustomed to short~cuts to culture, had expected an early version of the “five-foot shelf”; he found, instead, the leisurely selections of an anthologist to whom it had obviously not occurred that he might have readers too hurried to dwell on the more recondite beauties of English literature. The choice of the poetry did not greatly interest Vance, after Lamb’s Specimens and the Beddoes volume; but as his eye travelled on he found himself receiving for the first time — except when he had first read his Bible as literature — the mighty shock of English prose.
For the moment it affected him almost more powerfully than the poetry, such a sense it gave of endlessly subtle intricacies of rhythm and movement, such a great tidal pressure as he could feel only, and not define. “Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks; methinks I see her as an eagle nursing her mighty youth, and kindling her undazzled eyes at the full mid-day beam; purging and unsealing her long abused sight at the fountain itself of heavenly radiance . . . .” “The light of the world in the turning of the creation was spread abroad like a curtain, and dwelt nowhere, but filled the expansum with a dissemination great as the unfoldings of the air’s looser garment, or the wilder fringes of the fire, without knots, or order, or combination; but God gathered the beams in his hand, and united them into a globe of fire, and all the light of the world became the body of the sun.”
What a fellow could say, if he had the chance, and the habit of words and sentences like that!
Vance shut the volume and sat gazing ahead of him. The blood was beating in his temples. The walls of dark musty books seemed to sway and dissolve, letting him into that new world of theirs — a world of which he must somehow acquire the freedom. “I must find out — I must find out.” He repeated the words chantingly, unmeaningly, as if they had been an incantation. Then slowly his mind began to clear, to become again able to follow its own movements. What he needed, no doubt, to enter that world, was EDUCATION— the very thing he thought he already had!
It was not only the books into which he had been dipping that told him of his need. Every word, every allusion caught at the Eaglewood lunch table had opened new vistas of conjecture. Of course each human agglomeration, down to the smallest village, had its local idioms, its own range of allusions, its stock of jokes and forms of irony. At the Tracys’, for instance, you heard the Paul’s Landing vernacular, as you heard that of Euphoria at Vance’s family table; but all that was different. Vance had known instantly that the language, the intonations, the allusions of Eaglewood did not belong peculiarly to Paul’s Landing, were indeed hardly concerned with it, but embraced, though so lightly flitting, great areas extending not only to New York and beyond, but backward through this mysterious past which was so much newer to Vance than any present. These easy affable people could talk — did talk — about everything! Everything, that is, but the exclusively local matters which had formed the staple of the only conversation Vance had ever heard. What they talked of was simply ALL THE REST; and he could see that they did it without the least intention of showing-off, the least consciousness that their scope was wider than other people’s — did it naturally, carelessly, just as his mother talked about electric cookers, his father about local real estate, Mrs. Tracy about Laura Lou’s school picnics and Upton’s job at the nursery. The inference was, not that the Spears and their friends were an isolated group, parading their superior attainments before each other, but that they belonged to a class, a society, a type of people, who naturally breathed this larger air, possessed this privilege of moving freely backward and forward in time and space, and were so used to it all that they took the same faculty for granted in others — even in a boy like Vance Weston.
Well, there was no reason why a boy like Vance Weston shouldn’t, some day or other, acquire a like faculty. He had been brought up in the creed that there was nothing a fellow from Euphoria, the cradle of all the Advantages, couldn’t attain to. Only — how? It seemed to him that the gulf was untraversable. If only he could have been left alone in that library, left there for half a year, perhaps. . . . But even so, he felt that he needed some kind of tuition to prepare him for the library. The Past was too big, too complicated, too aloof, to surrender its secrets so lightly.
College again? College meant to him sports and more sports, secret societies, class scraps and fraternity rushing, with restricted intervals of mechanical cramming, and the glib unmeaning recital of formulas — his courses provided a formula for everything! But all that had nothing to do with all THIS . . . .
Besides, thinking about college was a waste of time. Even had he been willing to submit again to the same routine, he hadn’t the means to re-educate himself, and he could not ask his father to pay his expenses twice over. Mr. Weston, Vance knew, regarded him as an investment which ought already to be bringing in something. After the boy’s illness his father had recognized the necessity of his taking a holiday; and being a man who always did things handsomely when his doing so was visible to others, he had agreed, besides paying the trip to New York and back, and Vance’s board at the Tracys’, to allow him a hundred dollars a month for four months. Vance had received half the sum before starting, with a warning to be careful and not make a fool of himself; and his father’s gesture, which became generally known on Mapledale Avenue, was thought very liberal, and worthy of Lorin Weston.
But Vance, at the same time, was given to understand that as soon as his summer’s rest was over he was to “make good.” His father, having reluctantly come round to the idea of his going into journalism instead of real estate, had obtained the promise of a job for him on the Free Speaker, and was already swaggering at club meetings about the nuisance of having a literary fellow in the family. “Problem most of you fellows aren’t up against, I guess? Fact is, Mrs. Weston has a way-back culture complex in her family, and it’s a microbe you can’t seem to eradicate.” This was all very well — and nobody liked swaggering better than the silent Lorin Weston; but Vance knew that he liked to have his swagger justified with the least possible delay.
The only hope lay in returning as often as he could to this silent room, and trying to hack a way through the dense jungle of the past. But he was not sure it would be possible. He was aware that Mrs. Tracy, though she made no comment, wondered at his meetings with Miss Spear at the Willows, and at the permission given him to range among the books. He had spent two whole days there since his lunch at Eaglewood, and on this second day no one had come down from the “big house,” as Mrs. Tracy called it, to let him in, and he had been obliged to go back to Paul’s Landing and ask her for the keys. “I don’t know as I ought to,” Mrs. Tracy had said as she handed them over; and then: “Oh, well, I suppose it’s all right if THEY say so.” She referred to the Spears as “they,” with a certain tartness, since she had learned of Vance’s having lunched at Eaglewood. “Well, I never! Mebbe some time they’ll remember that Upton and Laura Lou are related to them too.” Vance felt that in asking for the keys he had vaguely offended her, and he was sorry; but he could not give up the books.
New York had completely vanished from his thoughts. He had the sense to understand that, to a boy like himself, New York could offer no opportunity comparable to this. He must learn something first — then try his luck there. When he had found himself, at the Eaglewood lunch table, seated next to the literary critic whose name, in his confusion, he had not caught, he had acted at once on the deep instinct which always made him seize on what was meant for his own nourishment, in however new and unfamiliar surroundings. Here, at least, he said to himself, was an editor — a journalist! He had no idea if The Hour were a daily (as its name seemed to imply), or some kind of highbrow review (as he feared); but whatever it was, it might give him his chance — and here he was sitting next to the very man who had the power to open its columns to him.
But he found it less easy than he had imagined. The great man (whom they all addressed simply as “George” or “Frenny”) was evidently trying to be friendly, in his dry sardonic way; but he paid no heed to Mrs. Spear’s allusions to “our young poet,” and his remarks to Vance were merely perfunctory questions as to his life in the West, and his present sojourn at the Tracys’. Once indeed he asked, blinking absently at the boy through his glasses: “And what’s the next move to be?” but on Vance’s answering: “I want to get onto a newspaper,” his interest seemed to flag. “Oh, of course,” he merely said, as who should imply; “What’s the use of expecting anything different in a world of sameness?” and the blood which had rushed to Vance’s face ebbed back to his heart. A few hours earlier, as he talked of his poetry with Halo Spear by the mountain pool, everything had seemed possible; now he thought bitterly: “When it comes down to hardpan girls don’t know anything anyhow.” And it gave him a grim satisfaction to class his mountain nymph in the common category.
But when she reminded him of his promise to help her with the books his feeling veered to adoration, and her appearance at the Willows, vivid and inspiring, instantly lifted him to the brow of Thundertop. “She carries that pool everywhere with her,” he thought, and was seized by the desire to embody the fancy in a new poem; and when she, broke off in her dusting and sorting to say: “I gave your poetry to George Frenside to read last night,” he was too much agitated to thank her, or to put a question. A moment later, she seemed to forget what she had said, carried away by a dip into Andrew Marvell (What — he didn’t know “The Coy Mistress”? Oh, but he must just listen to this!); and finally, after whirling him on from one book to another for an hour or so, she vanished as suddenly as she had come to join the mysterious “Lewis,” the fellow she was going to marry, Vance supposed.
She came back the next day, and the next. On the fourth she promised to leave her keys with him and to meet him again at the Willows the next morning; but she carried the keys off with her, and he had to get the hired man, who scrutinized him sulkily, to lock up. And the fifth day there had been no sign of her . . . and now twilight would soon be falling, and it was time to go.
Show his poetry to George Frenside (if that was the man’s name)? Much chance he’d ever hear of that again . . . likely as not she’d never even done it; just meant to, and forgotten. For if she had, wouldn’t she have had something to report — even if unfavourable? It wasn’t likely she’d stick at telling him a few more home truths, after the stiff dose she’d already administered! Perhaps on second thoughts she’d decided the stuff wasn’t worth showing. And yet, hadn’t she told him in so many words that she HAD shown it? No, what she had said, literally, was: “I gave Frenside your poetry to read.” Well, the great critic probably hadn’t taken advantage of his opportunity — perhaps she’d put him off in advance with her comments. “Urge” not a noun! And that nonsense about “dawn” and “lorn” not being good rhymes! God, to see a tone-deaf woman laying down the law — and all Eaglewood kowtowing! Well, he had to laugh at the thought of those stuffed oracles sitting up there and telling each other what was what. . . . What the hell’d he care for their opinion, anyhow — of his poetry, or of himself? Lot of self-opiniated amateurs . . . he had to laugh. . . . Well, he’d go to New York the next day, and look round on his own, and see what the professionals thought about him. . . . After all, he could describe himself as being on the staff of the Free Speaker.
Suddenly a shadow cut off the western sunlight slanting on his book, and he saw one of the young men from Eaglewood leaning on the window and looking in at him — not the fair dissatisfied-looking one they called “Lewis,” but the other: Halo’s brother Lorburn. Lorburn Spear put his hand on the sill, said “Hullo — still at it?” and vaulted into the room. In the middle of the floor he paused, his hands in his pockets, and gazed about with an amused smile and ironically lifted brows. He was slim and dark, like Halo, with the same carefully drawn features as his father, but more height and less majesty than Mr. Spear. An easy accessible sort of fellow; a fellow Vance felt he could have taken a liking to if only — if what? Perhaps it was that his eyes were too close together. Grandma Scrimser always used to say: “Don’t you ever trust a man whose eyes are near enough to be always whispering to each other.” And then she went and trusted everybody — even Grandpa! Fact was, Grandma liked axioms the way you like olives; it never occurred to her they were meant for anything but to roll under your tongue . . . .
“Well,” said Lorry Spear pleasantly, “this is luck, finding you still in the mausoleum. I suppose Halo set you the job and then chucked you? Thought so. She promised to pick me up by and by, but will she? Have you made any amusing finds? Cigarette? No?” He drew out his own, lit one, and dropped into the chair nearest Vance’s. “There ought to be things here, you know,” he went on sending his eyes sharply about him while his attention still seemed to be centred on Vance.
“Things?” Vance echoed excitedly: “I should say so! See here — do you know this?” He pushed across the table the volume of Half Hours, open at Beddoes. Lorry Spear stared, took the book up, glanced at the title page and threw it down. “Well — I don’t believe there’d be any bids for that unless it took the ragpicker’s fancy.”
“The ragpicker —?”
The young men stared at each other, and Lorry laughed.
“Oh, I see: you’re a reader. Halo told me. It’s a conceivable branch of the business, of course.”
“Business —?”
“Business of book-collecting. That’s what books are for, isn’t it? Even people who read ’em have to collect them. But personally I’ve never thought they were meant to be read. You can get all the talk you want — and too much — from live people; I never could see the point of dragging in the dead. The beauty of books is their makeup: like a woman’s. What’s a woman without clothes and paint? Next to nothing, believe me, after you’ve worn off the first surprise. . . . And a book without the right paper, the right type, the right binding, the right date on the title page; well, it’s a blank to me, that’s all.” He got up again, cigarette in hand, and lounged across the room. “Don’t suppose there’s much here, anyhow. I’ve always meant to take a look, and never had time. . . . There might be some Americana — never can tell. The best thing about these ancestors was that they never threw anything away. Didn’t value things; didn’t know about them; but just hung on to them. I shouldn’t wonder — Oh, see here! HULLO!” He stretched his long arm toward an upper shelf, reached down a volume, and stood absorbed.
Vance watched him curiously. He had never seen anyone so easy, self-assured, and yet careless as this brother of Miss Spear’s. “Thought you didn’t care about reading,” he remarked at length, amused at his visitor’s absorption. Young Spear gave a start, and laid the book down. “Oh, I was turning out paradoxes — they madden my family, but amuse me. Trouble about reading at Eaglewood is that whatever you get hold of everybody’s been there before you. No discoveries to be made. But YOU don’t read, do you — you write? You’ll find nobody can do both. What’s your line? Poetry?”
Vance was trembling with excitement, as he always did when anyone touched on his vocation. But his recent experiences had caused a sort of protective skin to grow over his secret sensibilities — or was it that really the eyes of this good-looking young man were too close together? Vance could imagine having all kinds of a good time with him, but not talking to him of anything that lay under that skin. “Oh, I guess there’ll be time for me to choose a line later,” he said. “I’m in the reading stage still. And this old house interests me. Where I come from everything’s bran’ new — houses and books and everything. We throw ’em out when they get shabby. And I like looking at all these things that folks have kept right along — hung onto, as you say.”
Lorburn Spear looked at him with interest, with sympathy even, Vance thought. For a second his smile had the fugitive radiance of his sister’s. “Why, yes, I see your point: what you might call the novelty of permanence. And this place certainly has character, though old Tom Lorburn is too stupid to see it. And our Cousin Elinor had character too! Good head, eh?” He glanced up at the portrait, still with that odd air of keeping hold of Vance while he looked away from him. “You know she did a good deal to the house when she inherited it. This room expresses one side of her; her maturity, her acceptance. But when she did the drawing rooms she was frivolous, she still dreamed of dancing — she’d read Byron on the waltz, poor girl! What an appetizer it must have been to those women to have so many things forbidden! Seen the rest of the rooms? No? Oh, but they’re worth it. Come along before it gets too dark.”
Gaily, with his long free step, he led the way across the patterned parquet, and Vance followed, captivated by the image of a young Miss Lorburn who still dreamed of dancing, and to whom so many things were sweet because forbidden. “Yet she ended in her library . . . .” he thought.
Lorry Spear was a stimulating guide. His quick touches woke the dumb rooms to life, lit the dusky wax candles in chandeliers and wall brackets, drew a Weber waltz from the slumbering piano, peopled the floor with gaily circling couples, even made Vance see the dotted muslins and billowy tarlatans looped with camellias of the young women with their ringlets and sandalled feet. He found the cleverest words, made it all visible and almost tangible, knew even what flowers there would have been in the ornate porcelain vases: mignonette and pinks, with heavy pink roses, he decided: “Yes — I ought to have been a theatrical decorator; would be, if only the boss would put up the cash. But to do that they’d have to sell Eaglewood — or marry Halo to a millionaire,” he added with an impatient laugh.
Upstairs he took Vance over the funny bedrooms, so big and high~ceilinged, with beds of mahogany or rosewood, and the lace-looped toilet tables (like the ladies’ ball-dresses) with gilt mirror frames peeping through the festoons, and big marble-topped washstands that carried carafes and goblets of cut glass, porcelain basins and ewers with flower garlands. In one of the dressing rooms (Miss Lorburn’s) there was a specially ornate toilet set, with a ewer in the shape of a swan with curving throat and flattened wings, and a basin like a nest of rushes. “Poor Elinor — I supposed she dreamed of a Lohengrin before the letter, and hoped to find a baby in the bulrushes,” Lorry commented; and Vance, understanding the allusions, felt a pang of sympathy for the lonely woman. At the end of the passage, in one of the freakish towers, was a circular room with blue brocade curtains and tufted furniture, the walls hung with large coloured lithographs of peasant girls dancing to tambourines, and young fellows in breeches and velvet jackets who drove oxcarts laden with ripe grapes. “The Italy of her day,” Lorry smiled. “She must have done this boudoir in the Lohengrin stage. And she ended in spectacles, cold and immaculate, reading Coleridge all alone. Brr!” He broke off, and turned to the window. “Hullo! Isn’t that Halo?”
The hoarse bark of the Eaglewood motor sounded at the gate. “Come along down,” Lorry continued. “You’d better take advantage of the lift home. Besides, it’s too dark to do much more here.”
They started down the stairs, but in the hall Vance hesitated. “I’ve left the books piled up anyhow. Guess I’d better go back and put them on the shelves.” He realized suddenly that for the last two days he had done neither dusting nor sorting, and wondered what Miss Spear would say if she saw the havoc he had created.
“Not on your life!” Lorry enjoined him. “You could hardly see a yard before your nose in the library by this time, and lighting up is strictly forbidden. Might set the old place on fire. If it was mine I’d do it, and collect the insurance; but old Tom don’t need to, curse him.” He stopped short, and clapped his hand on his waistcoat pocket. “I must have left my cigarette case in there. Yes, I remember. You wait here — ”
He spun down the polished floor of the drawing-rooms and disappeared. Vance waited impatiently. Although the June sky outside was still full of daylight it was dark already in the hall with its sombre panelling and heavy oak stairs. Now and then he heard the croak of the Eaglewood motor and he wondered how much longer Miss Spear would deign to wait. Between the motor calls the silence was oppressive. What could young Spear have done with his cigarette case? Once Vance thought he heard the banging of a window in the distance. Could it be that he had forgotten to close the windows in the library? But he was sure he had not; and the sound took on the ghostly resonance of unexplained noises. Perhaps that silly Laura Lou was right to be scared — as dusk fell it became easier to believe that the Willows might be haunted. Vance started back across the echoing parquet to the library; but halfway he met Lorry returning.
“Couldn’t find the damn thing,” he grumbled. “Got the keys, eh?” Vance said he had, and they moved toward the door. On the threshold Lorry paused, and turned to him again with Halo’s smile. “You haven’t got ten dollars you don’t know what to do with? Like a fool I let Lewis and Frenside keep me up half the night playing poker. . . . Well, that’s white of you. Thanks. Settle next week. And don’t mention it to Halo, will you? The old people are down on poker . . . and on everything else I want to do.” Vance turned the key in the front door, and the two walked through the long grass to the gate.
Vance felt grown-up and important. It put him at his ease with Lorry’s sister to have a secret between men to keep from her.
Vance turned over slowly, opened his eyes, pushed back his rumpled hair, and did not at first make out where he was.
He thought the bed was a double one, black walnut with carved ornaments and a pink mosquito net, on the wall facing him a large photograph of a fat man with a Knights of Pythias badge and a stiff collar, and a gramophone shrieking out the Volga Boat Song somewhere below.
Then the vision merged into the more familiar one of his neat little room at Euphoria, of college photographs and trophies on the walls, and the sound of early splashing in the white-tiled bathroom at the end of the passage. But this picture also failed to adapt itself to his clearing vision, and gradually he thought: “Why, I’m back at Paul’s Landing,” and the sloping ceiling, the flies banging against the pane, the glimpse, outside, of a patch of currant bushes backed by sultry blue woods, came to him with mingled reassurance and alarm. “What the hell — ” he thought.
Oh — he knew now. That baseball game over in New Jersey had been Upton’s idea. It was a Saturday, the day after Lorry Spear’s visit to the Willows. When Vance got back to the Tracys’ Upton had been waiting at the gate, his eyes bursting out of his head. A fellow had given him tickets: Bunty Hayes, a reporter on the Paul’s Landing paper. They could leave next morning by the first train, take a look round in New York, and reach the field in good time. As it was a Saturday there would be no difficulty in Upton’s getting off. Vance was struck by the change in him: his pale face flushed, his shy evasive eyes burning with excitement, his very way of moving and walking full of a swagger and self-importance which made him seem years older.
Indoors, under Mrs. Tracy’s eyes, he relapsed at once into the shy shambling boy with callous hands and boots covered with mud from the nursery. Mrs. Tracy did not oppose the plan, or did so only on the ground of Vance’s health. They had a long hot day before them, and could not get home till ten or eleven o’clock at night. He must remember that he was just getting over a bad illness. . . . But Vance refused to be regarded as an invalid, or even as a convalescent. He was well again, he declared, and equal to anything. Mrs. Tracy could not but acknowledge how much he had gained during his fortnight at Paul’s Landing; and she finally gave a colourless assent to the expedition, on condition that the two youths should take the earliest possible train home, and keep out of bad company — like that Bunty Hayes, she added. Vance and Upton knew it was not her way to acquiesce joyfully in any suggestion which broke the routine of life, and after giving her the requisite assurances they began their preparations lightheartedly.
In the morning, when they came down to gulp the cold coffee and sandwiches she had laid out overnight, Vance was astonished to find Laura Lou in the kitchen, in her refurbished yellow muslin, with a becoming shade-hat on her silvery-golden head. “You’re going to take me, aren’t you? I’ve warmed the coffee and boiled some eggs for you,” she said to Vance in her childish way; and it caused him a pang when Upton, with a brother’s brutality, reminded her that she knew Bunty’d only given him two tickets. Her lower lip began to tremble, her big helpless gray eyes to fill: Vance asked himself with inward vexation whether he ought to surrender his ticket to this tiresome child. But before he had made up his mind Upton cut short his sister’s entreaties. “We’re going with a lot of fellows: you know Mother wouldn’t hear of it. What’s all the fuss about anyway? You’ve got that school picnic this afternoon. That’s what you were doing up your dress for yesterday. Don’t you take any notice of her, Vance.” She ran from the room, crimson and half crying; and Vance ate his eggs with compunction and relief. He didn’t want any girl on his hands the first day he saw New York . . . .
They were there only a couple of hours, and there was no use trying to hunt up an editor. The most he could achieve was a distant view of the most notable skyscrapers, a gasp at Fifth Avenue and a dip into Broadway, before dashing to the Pennsylvania Station for the Jersey train. From that moment they were caught up in the baseball crowd, a crowd of which he had never seen the like. Life became a perspiring struggle, a struggle for air, for a foothold, for a sight of anything but the hot dripping napes and shoulder blades that hemmed them in. Finally, somehow, they had reached the field, got through the gates, found their places, discovered Bunty Hayes nearby with a crowd of congenial spirits, and settled down to the joys of spectatorship — or such glimpses of it as their seats permitted. It was a comfort to Vance to reflect that he had been right not to give his ticket to Laura Lou; such a frail creature could hardly have come alive out of the battle.
The oddest thing about the adventure was the transformation of Upton. Vance would have imagined Upton to be almost as unfitted as his sister for such a test of nerve and muscle; but the timorous youth of Paul’s Landing developed, with the donning of his Sunday clothes, an unforeseen audacity and composure. The fact that Vance didn’t know the ropes seemed to give Upton a sense of superiority; he said at intervals: “Come right along; stick to me; don’t let ’em put it over on you,” in a tone of almost patronizing reassurance. And when they joined Bunty Hayes, who was one of the free spirits of Paul’s Landing, Vance was struck by the intimacy of his greeting of Upton, and by the “Hullo, Uppy boy” — “Say, that the Tracy kid?” of his companions. It was evident that Upton had already acquired the art of the double life, and that the sheepish boy who went about his job at the Paul’s Landing nursery, and clumped home for supper with mud and manure on his boots, was the pale shade of the real Upton, a dashing blade with his straw hat too far back on his pale blond hair, and a fraternity ribbon suddenly budding in his buttonhole. “Wonder if Laura Lou knows?” Vance speculated, and concluded that she did, and that brother and sister carried on their own lives under Mrs. Tracy’s unsuspecting eye. He was rather sorry now that they hadn’t brought Laura Lou after all; it would have been curious to see her blossom out like her brother. But Vance soon forgot her in the exhilaration of watching the game. It was his first holiday for months; for the dull business of convalescence had nothing to do with holiday~making. The noise and excitement about him were contagious, and he cheered and yelled with the rest, exchanged jokes with Bunty Hayes and his friends, and felt himself saturated with the vigour of all the young and vigorous life about him. But when the game was over, and the crowd began to scatter, the vitality seemed to ebb out of him as the spectators ebbed out of the stadium. It was still very hot; he had shouted himself hoarse; they had ahead of them the struggle at the station, the struggle to get into a train, the stifling journey home — and Vance began to feel that he was still a convalescent, with no reserves of strength. At Euphoria, after a ball game, a dozen people would have been ready to give him a lift home; but here he knew no one, Upton seemed to have no acquaintances but Bunty Hayes and his crowd, and Paul’s Landing, where they all came from, was a long way off.
“See here — you look sick,” said Bunty Hayes, touching him on the shoulder.
Vance flushed up. “Sick? I’m hot and thirsty, that’s all.” He wasn’t going to have any of that lot of Upton’s treating him like a sissy.
“Well, that’s easy. Come round with us and have a cool-off. We’re all going to look in at the Crans’, close by here. This is their car: jump in, sonny.”
Suddenly a motor stood there: Vance remembered piling into it with Upton, Bunty Hayes, and some other fellows; they sat on each other’s laps and on the hood. A girl who laughed very much and had blown-back hair, dyed red, was at the wheel. Where were they going? Who was she? Vance didn’t care. As the motor began to move the wind stirred in his own hair, driving it back like the girl’s, and life flowed through him again. He began to laugh, and tried to light a cigarette, but couldn’t, because there wasn’t enough elbow-room for a sardine. The others laughed at his ineffectual attempt, and another girl, perched somewhere behind him, lit a cigarette and leaned forward to push it between his lips. They were going to the Crans’, and he found out, he didn’t know how, that these two were the Cran girls — Cuty with the dyed hair at the wheel, and the younger, ‘Smeralda they called her, sitting behind him on the hood between two fellows, so that his head rested against her knees, and he felt, through his hair, the warm flesh where her scant skirt had slipped up. Once or twice, after they had left the state highway, the overloaded motor nearly stuck in the deep ruts of the country road, and everybody laughed and cheered and gave college yells till Cuty somehow got them going again.
Ah, how good the cool drinks were when they got to the Crans’! It was at the back of the house, he remembered, under an arbour of scarlet runners that looked out on a long narrow yard where clothes were drying. Some of the clothes were funny little garments with lace edgings and holes for ribbon, and there was a good deal of joking about that, and he remembered Cuty Cran crying out: “No, it ain’t! No, I don’t! Mine are crepp-de-sheen. . . . Well, you come upstairs and see, then . . . .” But Cuty was not the one he fancied; and anyhow, since Floss he’d never . . . and he had young Upton to look after . . . .
As the shadows lengthened it grew quiet and almost cool under the arbour. The girls had the house to themselves, it appeared, Mr. and Mrs. Cran having been called away that morning to the bedside of a grandmother who had been suddenly taken sick somewhere upstate. “Real accommodating of the old lady to develop stomach trouble the day before the game,” Bunty commented to the sisters, who responded with shrieks of appreciation. “Not the first time either,” he continued, winking at his admiring audience, and the sisters shrieked afresh. The redhaired one was the current type of brazen minx — but the younger, ‘Smeralda, with her smouldering eyes and her heavy beauty of chin and throat — ah, the younger, for his undoing, reminded Vance of Floss Delaney. She had the same sultry pallor, the same dark penthouse of hair . . . .
Presently some other girls turned up, and there were more drinks and more jokes about Mr. and Mrs. Cran being away. “Guess some of us fellows ought to stay and act watchdog for you two kiddies,” Bunty humorously suggested. “Ain’t you scared nights, all alone in this great big house?” A general laugh hailed this, for the Cran homestead was of the most modest proportions. But it stood apart in the fields, with a little wood behind it and the girls had to admit that it WAS lonesome at night, particularly since somebody’d poisoned the dog. . . . More laughs, and a burlesque confession from Bunty that he’d poisoned the dog for his own dark ends, which evoked still shriller cries of amusement. . . . Bunty always found something witty and unexpected to say . . . .
There was a young moon, and it glinted through the dusk of the bean leaves and silvered their edges as darkness fell. Bunty and Cuty, and the other girls and fellows, wandered off down into the wood. Vance meant to follow, but he was very tired and sleepy, and a little befuddled with alcohol, and his broken-down rocking chair held him like a cradle.
“You’re dead beat aren’t you?” he heard one of the girls say, and felt a soft hand push back his hair. He opened his eyes and ‘Smeralda’s were burning into his.
“Come right upstairs, and you can lay down on Mother’s bed,” she continued persuasively.
He remembered saying: “Where’s Upton?” with a last clutch at his vanishing sense of responsibility, and she answered: “Oh, he’s down in the woods with Cuty and the others,” and pulled Vance to his feet. He followed her upstairs through the darkening house, and at the top of the landing she slid a burning palm in his . . . .
As his vision readjusted itself and he found that he was in a narrow iron bedstead, instead of a wide one of black walnut, with a portrait of Mr. Cran facing him, he began to wonder how he had got from the one couch to the other, and how much time had elapsed in the transit. . . . But the effort of wondering was too much for him; his aching head dropped back . . . .
The recollection of Upton shot through him rebukingly; but he said to himself that Upton hadn’t needed any advice, and would probably have rejected it if offered. “He ran the show — it was all fixed up beforehand between him and the Hayes fellow. . . . I wonder if his mother knows?” The thought of Mrs. Tracy was less easy to appease. He remembered her warning against Hayes, her adjuration that they should avoid bad company and come home before night; and he would have given the world to be in his own bed at Euphoria, with no difficulties to deal with but such as could be settled between himself and his family. “If I only knew the day of the week it is!” he thought, feeling more and more ashamed of the part he had played, and more and more scared of its probable consequences. “She’ll cry — and I shall hate that,” he reflected squeamishly.
At last he tumbled out of bed, soused his head in cold water, got into his clothes, and shuffled downstairs. The house was quiet, the hour evidently going toward sunset. In the back porch Mrs. Tracy sat shelling peas. There was no sign of emotion on her face, which was sallow and stony. She simply remarked, without meeting his eyes: “You’ll find some fried liver left out on the table,” and bent again to her task.
“Oh, I don’t want anything — I’m not hungry,” he stammered, longing to question her, to find out from her all that remained obscure in his own history, to apologize and to explain — if any explanation should occur to him! But she would not look up, and he found it impossible to pour out his excuses to her bent head, with the tired~looking hair drawn thinly over the skin, like the last strands of cotton round one of his mother’s spools. “Funny women should get to look like that,” he thought with a shiver of repulsion. To cut the situation short, he wandered into the dining room, looked at the fried liver and sodden potatoes, tried in vain to guess of what meal they were the survival, and turned away with the same sense of disgust with which the top of Mrs. Tracy’s head had inspired him.
In the passage he wavered, wondering if he should go up again to his room or wander out in the heat. If Mrs. Tracy had not been in the porch his preference would have been to return there and go to sleep again in the hammock. Then he determined to go back and have it out with her.
“Can’t I help with those peas?” he asked, sitting down beside her. She lifted her head and looked at him with eyes of condemnation. “No, I don’t want any help with the peas. Or any help from you, anyhow. You’d better go upstairs and sleep off your drunk before Miss Spear and Mr. Lorburn come round again — ”
“My drunk?” Vance flushed crimson. “I don’t know what you mean — ”
“The words are English, I guess. And you’ll want all your wits about you when you see Mr. Lorburn.”
“Who’s Mr. Lorburn? Why should he want to see me?”
“He’s the owner of the Willows. He’ll tell you soon enough why he wants to see you.”
Vance felt a sinking of the heart. “I don’t know what Mr. Lorburn’s got to say to me,” he muttered, but he did.
“Well, I presume HE does.” Mrs. Tracy pushed aside the basket of peas and stood up. Her face was a leaden white and her lower lip twitched. “Not as I care,” she continued, in a level voice as blank as her eyes, “what he says to you, or what you feel about it. What’s a few old books, one way or another? I don’t care if you did take his books — ”
“Take his books?” Vance gasped; but she paid no heed.
“ — When what you took from me was my son. I trusted him with you, Vance; I thought you’d had enough kindness in this house to feel some obligation. I said to you: ‘Well, go to that game if you’re a mind to. But swear to me you’ll be back the same night, both of you; and keep away from that Hayes and his rough crowd.’ And you swore to me you would. And here I sat and waited and waited — the first time Upton was ever away from me for a night, and not so much as knowing where he was. And then a second night, and no sign of you. I thought I’d go mad then. I began life grand enough, as your folks’ll tell you; and now everything’s gone from me except my children. And when you crawled in yesterday evening, the two of you, I knew right away where you’d been, and what you’d been doing — and leading Upton into. It’s not the first time you’ve been out all night since you came here, Vance Weston; but I wasn’t going to say anything about the other time, if only you’d have let Upton alone. Now I guess you’d better tell your folks the air here don’t agree with you. And here’s the money your father sent me for your first fortnight. Take it.”
She held out the money in a twitching hand, and Vance took it because at that moment he would not have dared to disobey any injunction she laid on him. And, besides, he could understand her hating that money. There was something much more alarming to him in the wrath of this mild creature than in the explosions of the choleric. When Mr. Weston was angry Vance knew it bucked him up like a cocktail; but Mrs. Tracy’s anger clearly caused her suffering instead of relief, was only one more misery in a life made up of them. “If it hurts her to keep that money I’d better take it,” he thought vaguely.
“You mean I’d better go?” he asked.
“You’d better go,” she flung back with white lips.
“I’m sorry,” was all he could think of saying. It was awfully unjust about Upton, but the boy WAS his junior by two or three years, and of course, if his mother didn’t know . . .
“All right, I’ll go if you say so. Is this Monday or Tuesday?”
“It’s Tuesday, and near suppertime,” said Mrs. Tracy contemptuously. “I trust you’ve enjoyed your sleep.” She gathered up the basket of pods and the bowl of shelled peas, and walked into the kitchen. Vance stood gazing after her with a mind emptied of all willpower. It seemed incredible that three nights should have passed since he and Upton had set out so lightheartedly for the ball game. He had always hated the idea of drunken bouts — had never been in one like this since his freshman year. His self-disgust seemed to cling to every part of him, like a bad taste in the mouth or a smell of stale tobacco in the clothes. He didn’t know what had become of the Vance of the mountain pool and of the library at the Willows . . . .
The Willows! The name suddenly recalled Mrs. Tracy’s menacing allusion. What had she meant by saying that he had taken old Mr. Lorburn’s books? She must have lost her head, worrying over Upton. He HAD left the books in a mess, the evening before the ball game; he remembered that. He had wanted to go back and straighten them out, and Lorry Spear had dissuaded him; said it was too dark, and it wouldn’t do, in that old house, to light a candle. And now it would seem that the absentee owner of the place, who, according to Miss Spear, never came there, had turned up unexpectedly, and found things in disorder. Well, Vance had to own that the fault was his; he would have liked to see Miss Spear, and tell her so, before leaving. But the pale hostility of Mrs. Tracy’s face seemed to thrust him out of her door, out of Paul’s Landing. He thought to himself that the easiest thing would be to pack up and go at once — he did not want to sit at the table again with that face opposite to him. And Upton, the dirty sneak, would be afraid, he felt sure, to say a word in his defence . . . to tell his mother that the Hayes gang, and the Cran girls, were old acquaintances. . . . “No, I’ll go now,” Vance thought.
He went up to his room, packed up his clothes, and jammed his heap of scribbled papers in on top of them; then he leaned for a moment in the window and looked out to the hills. Up there, behind that motionless mask of trees, lived the girl with whom he had wandered in another world. He would have liked to see her again, to be with her just once on those rocks facing the sunrise. . . . Well . . . and how was he going to get his things down to the station? He guessed he was strong enough by this time to lug them down the lane to the trolley . . . He started downstairs with the suitcase and the unwieldy old bag into which his mother, at the last moment, had crammed a lot of useless stuff. The sound of the bags bumping against the stairs brought Mrs. Tracy to the kitchen door. She stared at Vance, surprised: “Where are you going?”
Vance said he was going to New York. She looked a little frightened. “Oh, but you must wait till tomorrow. I didn’t mean — ”
“I’d rather go today,” he answered coldly.
She wiped her hands on her apron. “There’s no one to help you to carry your things to the trolley. I didn’t mean — ”
“I guess I’ll go,” Vance repeated. He walked a little way down the garden path and then turned back to Mrs. Tracy. “I’d like to thank you for your kindness while I’ve been here,” he said; and she stammered again: “But you don’t understand . . . I didn’t mean . . .”
“But I do,” said Vance. He shouldered his bags and walked to the gate. Mrs. Tracy stood crying in the porch, and then hurried in and shut the door behind her. Vance trudged along the rutty lane, measuring his weakness by the way the weight of his bags increased with every step. The perspiration was streaming down his face when he reached the corner of the turnpike, and he sat down under the same thorn tree where, so short a time ago, he had waited in the summer darkness for Halo Spear. Even the memory of that day was obscured for him by what had happened since. He did not even like to think of Miss Spear’s touch on his arm as she turned him toward the sunrise, or of the way she had looked as she sat by the pool leaning her head on her hand and listening while he recited his poems to her. All that seemed to belong to the far-off world of the hills, the world he had voluntarily forsaken, he didn’t know why . . . .
The trolley came, and he scrambled in and was carried to the station. When he got there he found that the next train for New York was not leaving for an hour and a half. He deposited his property in the baggage room and, wandering out again, stood aimlessly in the square, where the same tired horses with discoloured manes were swinging their heads to and fro under the thin shade of the locust boughs. It seemed months since he had first got out of the train, and seen that same square and those old~fashioned vehicles and languid horses. He remembered his shock of disappointment, and was surprised to find that he now felt a choking homesickness at the idea of looking at it all for the last time. Suddenly it occurred to him that he might still be able to walk as far as the Willows and have a last glimpse at its queer bracketed towers and balconies. He could not have told why he wanted to do this: the impulse was involuntary. Perhaps it was because his hours in that shadowy library had lifted him to other pinnacles, higher even than Thundertop.
He walked from the station to the main street, and at the corner was startled by the familiar yelp of the Eaglewood motor. His heart turned over at the thought that it might be Miss Spear. He said to himself: “Perhaps if she sees me she’ll stop and tell me she’s sorry for what’s happened”; and he softened at the memory of her lavish atonements. But when the motor disengaged itself from the traffic he found there was no one in it but Jacob. Vance was about to walk on, but he saw Jacob signalling. The thought started up: “He may have a message — a letter,” and his heart beat in that confused way it had since his illness. Jacob drew up. “See here, I was looking for you. I’ve been round to the Tracys’. You get right in here with me.”
“Get in with you — why?”
“‘Cos the folks’ve sent me to bring you over to the Willows. They’re waiting for you there now. They said I was to go to your place and tell you you was to come right off.”
The blood rushed to Vance’s forehead, and his softened mood gave way to resistance. Who were these people, to order him about in this way? Did they really suppose that he was at their beck and call? “Waiting for me? What for? I’m leaving for New York. Mrs. Tracy has the keys of the Willows. I’ve got nothing to do with it.”
Jacob took off his straw hat and scratched his head perplexedly. “Miss Halo she said you was to come. She said: ‘You’ve got to bring him, dead or alive.’”
Jacob’s face expressed nothing; neither curiosity nor comprehension disfigured its supreme passiveness. His indifference gave Vance time to collect himself. He burst into a laugh. “Dead or alive — ” the phrase was so like her! “Oh, I’m alive enough. And I’ll come along with you if she says so.” In his heart he knew Miss Spear was right: it was his business to see her again, to explain, to excuse himself. He had failed her shamefully . . . he hadn’t done the job she had entrusted him with . . . he had left the books in disorder. “All right — I’ll go,” he repeated. He knew there was a train for New York later in the evening. “Anyhow,” he thought, “I’m done with the Tracys . . . .”
The door of the house stood wide. The afternoon radiance gilded the emerald veil of willows, shot back in fire from the unshuttered windows, rifled the last syringas of their inmost fragrance. Vance, even through his perturbation, felt again the spell of the old house. That door had first admitted him into the illimitable windings of the Past; and as he approached the magic threshold compunction and anger vanished.
“Oh, Vance!” he heard Miss Spear exclaim. He caught in her rich voice a mingling of reproach and apology — yes, apology. She was atoning already — for what? — but she was also challenging. “I knew you’d come.” She put her hand on his arm with her light coercive touch. “Our cousin Mr. Tom Lorburn is here — he arrived unexpectedly on Sunday to see the Willows. It’s years and years since he’s been here . . . .”
“A surprise visit,” came a voice, an old cracked fluty voice, querulous and distinguished, from the drawing room. “And I WAS surprised. . . . But perhaps you’ll bring the young man in here, Halo. . . . Whatever you have to say to him may as well be said in my presence, since I am here . . .”
The little tirade ended almost in a wail, as the speaker, drooping in the doorway, looked down on Vance from the vantage of his narrow shoulders and lean brown throat. Vance looked up, returning the gaze. He had hardly ever seen anyone as tall as Mr. Lorburn, and no one, ever, as plaintively and unhappily handsome. A chronic distress was written on the narrow beautiful face condescending to his, with its perfectly arched nose, and the sensitive lips under a carefully trimmed white moustache; and the distress was repeated in the droop of Mr. Lorburn’s shoulders under their easily fitting homespun, in the hollowing of his chest, and the clutch of his long expressive brown hand (so like Mrs. Spear’s) on the bamboo stick which supported him.
“Since unhappily I AM here,” Mr. Lorburn repeated.
Miss Spear met this with a little laugh. “Oh, Cousin Tom — why unhappily? After all, since you’ve come, it was just as well you should arrive when we were all napping.”
Mr. Lorburn bent his grieved eyes upon her. “Just as well?”
“That you should know the worst.”
“Ah, THAT we never know, my child; there’s always something worse behind the worst . . . .” Mr. Lorburn, shaking his head, turned back slowly through the drawing room. “There’s my health, to begin with, which no one but myself ever appears to think of. A shock of this kind, in this heat . . .”
“Well, here’s Vance Weston, who has come, as I knew he would, to clear things up.”
Mr. Lorburn considered Vance again in the light of this fresh introduction. “I should be glad if he could do that,” he said.
“Then,” said Miss Spear briskly, “let’s begin by transporting ourselves to the scene of the crime, as they say in the French law reports.”
She slipped her arm in Mr. Lorburn’s, and led him through the two drawing rooms, his long wavering stride steadied by her firm tread. Vance followed, wondering.
In the library the shutters were open, and the western sun streamed in on the scene of disorder which Vance had left so lightheartedly three days before. He wondered at his own callousness. In the glare of the summer light the room looked devastated, dishonoured; and the long grave face of Miss Elinor Lorburn, with its chalky highlights on brow and lappets, seemed to appeal to her cousin and heir for redress. “See how they have profaned my solitude — that, at least, my family always respected!”
Mr. Lorburn let himself down by cautious degrees into the Gothic armchair. “At least,” he echoed, as if answering the look, “if I never came here, I gave strict orders that nothing should be touched . . . that everything should remain absolutely as she left it.”
The words were dreadful to Vance. His eyes followed Mr. Lorburn’s about the room, resting on the books pitched down on chairs and tables, on the gaping spaces of the shelves, and the lines of volumes which had collapsed for lack of support. Then he looked at the cigarette ashes which Lorry Spear had scattered irreverently on the velvet table cover, and his gaze turned back to Mr. Lorburn’s scandalized countenance. He felt too crushed to speak. But Miss Spear spoke for him:
“Now, Cousin Tom, that all sounds very pretty; but just consider what would have happened if we’d obeyed you literally. The place would have been a foot deep in dust. Everything in it would have been ruined; and if the house hadn’t been regularly aired your precious books would have been covered with green mould. So what’s the use — ”
Vance lifted his head eagerly, reassured by her voice. “The books did need cleaning,” he said. “But I was wrong not to put them back after I’d wiped them, the way you told me to. Fact is, I’d never had a chance at real books before, and I got reading, and forgot everything . . . .” He looked at Miss Spear. “I’m sorry,” he said.
Mr. Lorburn, leaning on his stick, emitted a faint groan. “The young man, as he says himself, appears to have forgotten everything — even to return the books he has taken from here.”
Again Mrs. Tracy’s accusation! Vance turned his eyes on Miss Spear; but to his bewilderment her eloquence seemed to fail her. She met his glance, but only for a moment; then hers was averted. At last she said in a low voice: “I’m sure he’ll tell you the books are at Mrs. Tracy’s . . . that he took them away to finish reading something that interested him . . . without realising their value . . . .”
“I’m waiting to hear what he has to tell me,” Mr. Lorburn rejoined. “But I must remind you, Halo, that, according to your own statement, Mrs. Tracy has looked everywhere for the books, and been forced to the conclusion — as you were — that when the young man disappeared from her house he took them with him. Perhaps he will now say if he has been obliging enough to bring them back.”
Mr. Lorburn revolved his small head on his long thin neck and fixed his eyes on Vance.
Vance felt the muscles of his face contracting. His lips were so stiff that he could hardly move them. These people were suggesting that he had taken away books from the Willows — valuable books! This Mr. Lorburn, apparently, was almost accusing him of having stolen them! What else could he mean by the phrase “When he disappeared from Mrs. Tracy’s he took them with him”? Vance felt as defenceless as a little boy against whom a schoolmate had trumped up a lying charge; in his first bewilderment he did not know what to say, or what tone to take. Then his anger rushed to his lips.
“What’s this about taking books away and disappearing? I never disappeared. I went with Upton to a ball game.” He felt himself redden at the memory. “I never took a single book away from here, not one.”
Miss Spear interrupted eagerly: “I told you so, Cousin Tom . . . I was sure . . . .”
Mr. Lorburn leaned more heavily on his stick. “Where are they then?” Her head drooped, and she turned from him with an appealing gesture. “Vance? — ”
“What books?” Vance asked again.
Mr. Lorburn drew himself to his feet and began to move across the room with shaking sideway steps, his stick pointed first at one shelf, then at another. As he did so he reeled off a succession of long titles, all too unfamiliar to Vance for his ear to hold them. He heard “rare Americana,” and did not know if it were the name of a book or a reference to some literary category he had never met with. At last he said: “I never even heard of the names of any of those books. Why on earth should I have taken them?”
“Never heard of them?” Mr. Lorburn spluttered. “Then some accomplished bibliophile must have given you a list.” He looked pale and gasping, like a fish agonizing for water. “Oh, my heart — I should never have let myself to be drawn into this.” Sitting down again, he closed his lids and leaned his head against the knobby carving of the armchair.
Vance was alarmed by his appearance; but he noticed that it did not affect Miss Spear. She continued to fix her anxious gaze upon himself. “Just try to remember exactly what happened.” She spoke as if reassuring a child. Her voice was too kind, too compassionate; his own caught in his throat, and he felt the tears swelling.
“Of course I didn’t take any books,” he repeated. “And I didn’t disappear — I went with Upton . . . .”
“Of course,” she said. “But the books are gone. There’s the point. Very valuable ones, unluckily.”
(“The most valuable,” Mr. Lorburn interjected, his eyes still closed.)
“Think, Vance; when you left last Saturday night, didn’t you forget to shut this window?” She pointed to the window near which she stood.
The definiteness of the question cleared Vance’s mind.
“No, I didn’t. I fastened all the shutters and windows before I left.”
She paused, and he saw a look of uncertainty in her face. “Think again, please. On Sunday morning this one was found open, and the shutter had been unhooked from the inside. Someone must have got in after you left, and taken the books, for they’re really gone. We’ve hunted everywhere.”
Vance repeated: “I fastened all the shutters; I’m sure I did. And I locked the front door.” He stopped, and then remembered that when he left the house Lorburn Spear had been with him. “Ask your brother; I guess he’ll remember.”
As he spoke, there came back to him the sensation he had experienced as he waited in the dusk of the hall for Lorry Spear, who had gone back to the library to find his cigarette case. He had been a long time finding it, and while Vance waited he had heard that mysterious sound somewhere in the distance: a sound like a window opening or a shutter swinging loose. He had thought of Laura Lou’s childish fears, smiled them away, and nevertheless turned back to see . . . .
“My brother? Yes, I know he was with you,” Miss Spear said, almost irritably. Her face looked expressionless, cold. “He says it was you who attended to closing the house.”
“Well, doesn’t he say I closed everything?”
“He says he doesn’t remember.” She paused, and then began, in a hasty authoritative tone: “Someone must have broken in. Someone has taken the books. Try to remember what happened when you were leaving — try again, Vance,” she urged, more gently.
Mr. Lorburn still sat with closed eyes, and the gasping fishlike expression. He murmured again: “I ought not to have let myself be drawn into this — ” and then was silent.
Vance looked resolutely at Miss Spear. Her eyes wavered, as if trying to escape from him; then they bathed him in a fluid caress. The caress poured over him, enveloping, persuading. The words were on his lips: “But after we left the library your brother went back to it alone — while he was there I heard a window opened . . . or thought I did . . . .” THOUGHT YOU DID? But only THOUGHT, her smile whispered back, silencing him. How can you suggest (it said) . . . and anyhow, what use would it be? Don’t you see that I can’t let you touch my brother? Vance felt himself subdued and mastered. . . . He couldn’t hurt her . . . he couldn’t. He had the sense of being shut in with her in a hidden circle of understanding and connivance.
“Of course a burglar broke in somehow and stole the books,” he heard her begin again with renewed energy. “Come, Cousin Tom; why should we stay any longer? It’s just upsetting you. . . . This is a job for the police.”
She held out her hand to Vance. “I’m sorry — but I had to ask you to come.”
He said of course she had to . . . he understood; but the only thing he really understood was that she had bound him fast in a net of unspoken pledges. As they reached the door she turned back. “We’ll see you again soon — at Eaglewood? Promise . . . .”
But he had given her his last promise. “I don’t know. I’m going to New York. . . . Maybe I’ll have to go back home . . . .”
Mr. Lorburn had descended the steps and was walking unsteadily along the drive. Miss Spear looked at Vance. “Yes, go,” she said quickly, “but come back someday.” Her face was sunned over with relief; for a moment she reminded him of the girl of the mountaintop. “Don’t forget me,” she said, and pressed his hand. She unlocked the gate and sprang into the car after Mr. Lorburn. Vance watched them drive away. Then he walked slowly down the lane without once looking back at the old house. He felt sick at heart, diminished and ashamed, as he had at Crampton the day he had seen his grandfather prowling by the river.
Vance Weston had started from Euphoria with two hundred dollars; and to what was left of that sum there was added the money Mrs. Tracy had thrust back at him as they started. After he had sat for a while in the train, dazed from the shock of his last hour at the Willows, he remembered that henceforth he must subsist on the balance of his funds, and he drew the money out and counted it. He had bought a ten-dollar wristwatch for Upton in New York, the day they went to the ball game, and a rainbow-coloured scarf for Laura Lou, to console her for not coming; the scarf, he thought, had cost about three-seventy-five. On the eve of their ill-fated expedition he had lent ten dollars to Lorburn Spear; and at the ball game, and afterward at the Crans’, had stood drinks, soft and hard, a good many times. He remembered also that the fellows, with a lot of laughing and joking, had clubbed together to buy the Cran girls a new watchdog; and good watchdogs, it appeared, came pretty high. Still, it gave him an unpleasant shock of surprise to find that he had only ninety-two dollars left, including the money returned by Mrs. Tracy. He could not recall where the rest had gone; his memory of what had happened at the Crans’ was too vague.
Ninety dollars would have carried him a long way at Euphoria. In New York he didn’t know how far it would go — much less, assuredly. And he didn’t even know where to turn when he got out of the train, where to find a lodging for the night. In the car there were people who could no doubt have told him, friendly experienced~looking people; but no familiar face was among them, and a rustic caution kept him from questioning strangers on the approach to a big city. As the train entered the Grand Central he hurriedly consulted the black porter, and the latter, after looking him over with a benevolent eye, gave him an address near the station. He found a narrow brick hotel squeezed in between tall buildings, with a dingy black-and-gold sign over the door. It looked dismal and unappetizing enough; but his bed there, and his coffee next morning, cost him so much that he decided he must not remain for another night, and wandered out early in search of a rooming house.
The noise and rush of traffic, the clamour of the signboards, the glitter of the innumerable shops distracted him from his purpose, and hours passed as he strayed on curiously from street to street. Some faculty separate from mind or heart, something detached and keen, was roused in him by this tumult of life and wealth and energy, this ceaseless outpour of more people, more noises, more motors, more shopfuls of tempting and expensive things. He thought what fun it would be to write a novel of New York and call it Loot — and he began to picture how different life would have seemed that morning had he had the typescript of the finished novel under his arm, and been on his way to the editorial offices of one of the big magazines. The idea for a moment swept away all his soreness and loneliness, and made his heart dilate with excitement. “Well, why not? . . . I’ll stay here till I’ve done it,” he swore to himself in a fever of defiance.
He halted before a shop window displaying flowers in gilt baskets, or mounted in clusters tied with big pink bows. The money Mrs. Tracy had returned was burning in his pocket, and he said to himself that he could not keep it another minute. In one corner of the window was an arrangement which particularly took his fancy: a stuffed dove perched on the gilt handle of a basket of sweet peas and maidenhair fern. It recalled to him Miss Spear’s description of that temple to Apollo, somewhere in Greece, which had been built by the birds and bees; and looking at the burnished neck of the dove he thought: “That might have been one of the birds.” There was a good-natured-looking woman in the shop, and he ventured to ask her the price of the object he coveted. She smiled a little, as if surprised. “Why, that’s twenty-five dollars.”
Vance crimsoned. “I was looking for something for thirty.”
“Oh, were you?” said the woman, still smiling. “Well, there’s those carnations over there.”
Vance didn’t care for the carnations; the bird on the basket handle was what attracted him. “Laura Lou’ll like it anyhow,” he thought. And suddenly an idea occurred to him, and he asked the woman whether, for thirty dollars, she would have the basket carried for him that very morning to the house of a lady at Paul’s Landing. She looked still more surprised, and then amused, and after they had hunted up Paul’s Landing in the telephone book, she said, yes, she guessed she could, and Vance, delighted, pulled out thirty dollars, and his pen to write the address. She pushed a card toward him, and after a moment’s perplexity he wrote: “I thank you, Cousin Lucilla,” addressed the envelope, and walked out with a lighter step. The woman was already wrapping up the dove.
He was beginning to feel hungry, and the instinct of clinging to the relatively familiar drew him back to the Grand Central, where he knew he could lunch. As he entered he almost ran into a motherly-looking woman with a large yellowish face and blowsy gray hair, who wore a military felt hat with a band inscribed: “The Travellers’ Friend.” Vance went up to her, and her smile of welcome reassured him before he had spoken. He wanted to know of a nice quiet rooming house? Why, surely — that was just what she was there for. Country boy, she guessed? Well, why wouldn’t he bring his things right round to Friendship House, just a little way off, down in East Fiftieth — she fumbled in her bag and handed him the address on a card with: “Bring your friend along — always room for one more,” in red letters across the top. That, she explained, was the men’s house; she herself was in the station to look after women and girls, and there was another house for them not far off; but Vance had only to mention her name to Mr. Jakes and they’d find a room for him, and give him the addresses of some respectable rooming houses. She shook his hand, beamed on him maternally, and turned away to deal with a haggard bewildered-looking woman who was saying: “My husband said he’d sure be at the station to meet me, but I can’t find him, and the baby’s been sick in the cars all night . . . .”
At Friendship House Vance was received by an amiable man with gold teeth, given supper of coffee and bread and butter, and assigned to a spotless cubicle. Not till he was falling asleep did it occur to him that Mrs. Tracy had a row of sweet peas in her own garden, and that a stuffed dove could hardly compensate her for the cost of his fortnight’s board. He felt ashamed of his stupidity, and was haunted all night by the vision of the dreary smile with which she would receive his inappropriate tribute. Probably even Laura Lou would not know what to do with a stuffed dove. Yet that basket, with the lustrous bird so lightly poised on it, had seemed all poetry when he chose it . . . .
The weeks passed. After Vance’s regulation twenty-four hours at Friendship House he was recommended to a rooming house which was certainly as respectable as they had promised, but offered few other attractions, at least in hot weather. During those first lonely suffocating days and nights Vance’s weak body and sore spirit yearned for his neat room at home, the glitter of the bath, the shade of the Mapledale Avenue trees. But since he was determined to hold on till he got a job he dared not risk taking a better room; and the thought of going home was more hateful than his present misery. Yet loneliness was the core of that misery; incessant gnawing loneliness of mind and heart. He was benumbed by the feeling that in the huge wilderness of people about him not one had ever heard of him, or would take the least interest in his case if he should appeal for understanding; not one would care a straw that within him all the forces of the universe were boiling. He felt the same desolation, the sense of life being over for him, as when he had staggered down the passage to his parents’ room and groped for the absent revolver . . . .
But the returning tide of vitality did not mount as rapidly as it had then. The situation was different. Then he had made up his mind to wait till life gave him another chance; and life had given him that chance — magnificently — and what had he made of it? His rage against Mrs. Tracy, against Upton and the Spears, was a mere passing flare-up; it soon gave place to a lasting sense of failure. He had been at fault, and he only. Upton was a sly little fool, but he, Vance, was the older of the two, and being the more experienced should have been the stronger. He should have resisted the temptation to loaf and drink with those wasters and flashy girls, should have remembered his promise to Mrs. Tracy to come home with Upton after the game. If he had, everything might have been different, for early the next morning he would have hurried back to the Willows, have noticed that the books were gone, and perhaps prevented his own disgrace and Miss Spear’s unhappiness. . . . He could not forget how unhappy she had looked when it first flashed on her that her brother had probably taken the books. Vance ached with that more than his own wretchedness. His only comfort was that he had seen at once what was passing through her mind, had caught her signal and obeyed it. He knew she had perceived this, and been grateful; and the fact that she had sacrificed him to her brother did not offend him — it seemed to create a new tie between them . . . .
All this worked out gradually in his mind, and meanwhile he waited, and reflected on his situation. His first impulse had been not to let his whereabouts be known to anyone. He lived in dread of being dragged back to Euphoria when his parents learned that he had left the Tracys. What he longed for was to vanish into space, to get off into a universe of his own where nothing associated with his former life could reach him. It was what he had tried to do after he had seen his grandfather and Floss Delaney by the river; only this time his suicide would have taken the form of losing himself in a big city, to re-emerge from it when he had made himself a new existence. But he soon came to his senses and realized that Mrs. Tracy, frightened by his departure, would be sure to write to his family, and that, if he gave them no sign, they would be frightened also, and would set all the machinery of police research in motion. It was not easy for a fellow with an anxious family to lose himself in these times; and Vance had not had the presence of mind to give a fictitious name at his lodgings.
He wrote briefly to his mother, telling her he was doing well; and wouldn’t his folks please let him alone and give him a show in New York, now he’d got there? He said he’d left Paul’s Landing because he felt quite strong enough to take a job on a paper, and didn’t care to loaf around any longer at the Tracys’, where it was a good deal hotter than in the city, anyhow. He added that he had money enough left, and had already made the acquaintance of a famous editor (and so he had, though he would rather have starved than appeal to George Frenside); and he arranged with the good-natured secretary at Friendship House to receive his letters, so that his family should be reassured by the address.
Accident favoured him. His sister Mae wrote that his father had just left for a Realtors’ Congress at Seattle and would not return for a month or more; and that though Mrs. Weston was upset and anxious at the idea of his being alone in New York she had been persuaded by Grandma Scrimser not to interfere, but to let him try his luck, at any rate till his father got back. This being settled, Vance turned his mind to the means of holding out — for he was sure that, until he got a job, his father would not think of sending him more money. His promised allowance had been meant to see him through his convalescence at Paul’s Landing; if he didn’t choose to stay there, and was strong enough to work — well, let him.
Meanwhile he had New York to himself, and his first business was to collect his wits and try not to miss this chance as he had the other. The main thing was to see how long he could make his remaining dollars last; and he bent his mind on this, foregoing all amusements which had to be paid for, eating at the cheapest places he could find, often going without a midday meal, and wandering about the streets for hours staring at the strange confused spectacle which remained so mockingly unaware of him.
But all his moments were not lonely. A few days after his arrival he happened to emerge upon Fifth Avenue just opposite the public library. Awed by its rhetorical fa?ade, so unlike a haunt of studious peace, he stood wondering if it were one of the swell hotels he’d heard about — the Ritz or the St. Regis — till looking more closely he read its designation. Instantly he dashed up the vast steps, entered the doors unabashed, and asked the first official he met if he could go in and read. . . . He could, it appeared, and without paying a cent, and for many hours of the day. At first he was perplexed as to his next step; but where books were concerned some instinct seemed to guide him, and presently he had been made free of a series of card catalogues, and was lost in them as in the murmurs of a forest. . . . True, the place lacked the magic of the Willows, since the reader had to know beforehand what he wanted, and could not roam at will from shelf to shelf, subject to the mysterious, the almost physical appeal of books actually visible and accessible. That joy was one he could not hope to find again till — well, till he had made money enough to have his own library. But meanwhile it was wonderful enough to sit in a recess of a quiet room, with a pile of volumes in front of him, his elbows on the table, his hands plunged in his hair, his soul immersed in a new world . . . .
The weeks passed, and though his hours at the public library cost him nothing, those spent in his rooming house were using up his funds. In spite of what he had written to his mother he had not as yet looked up a newspaper job. He wanted first to acquaint himself a little more with New York, its aspect, its ways, its language; to appear less of a hayseed and an ignoramus. That, at least, was what he told himself; but in reality his hours at the library were so engrossing, and his ignorance had revealed itself on a scale so unsuspected and overwhelming, that each day drew him back to the lion-guarded gates of knowledge. To cheat himself into thinking that he could live thus indefinitely he began to plan his novel of New York; nor did it strike him till afterward that a raw boy whose experience was bounded by a rooming house and a library would find it even harder to weave a tale out of the millions of strands of a great city’s activities than to evolve copy for a newspaper. Everything that appealed to his creative instinct always seemed to become a part of his experience, and he sat down with a passionate eagerness to block out his dream. But he knew that this novel, even if he could do it, would take an immense time in the doing; and meanwhile he must find the means to live.
Drifting from dream to dream, eating daily less, studying daily for longer hours, he entered into the state of strange illumination which comes to ardent youth when the body hungers while the intelligence is fed. His shaking fingers filled page after page with verse and prose; it seemed as though every difficulty of thought and language were overcome, and he could conceive and formulate whatever his restless intellect willed. The veil of matter had grown so transparent that the light of eternity shone through it, and in that pure radiance he could see with supernatural clearness the images of gods walking among men, and angels going up and down the heavenly ladder. But Jacob’s pillow is a hard one for a young head still weak from fever; and one morning when after a night of tossing misery he crawled to his table and pulled out his papers, his mind was a blank, and he could hardly decipher what he had written the day before. He looked up and saw in the blotched looking glass a face so bloodless and shrunken that he thought he must be on the verge of another illness; and when he counted his money he found he could not hold out, even on a starvation diet, for more than a week.
The world grew light and dizzy about him, as if the air had turned into millions of shimmering splinters. He managed to dress and get out to the nearest eating house, and for the first time in days he ordered hot coffee and a couple of eggs. After eating he felt better, but so tired and heavy that he crawled home and threw himself on his unmade bed; and there he slept dreamlessly for hours. When he woke he understood that he must have more food, and that the only way to get it was to try for a job. He felt too weak to think much more than that; but he gave himself another good meal, and the next day started out on his round. He went from one newspaper to another, was received either civilly or the reverse, was asked to state his qualifications, and saw his name and address taken down; but no one showed any interest in him, and he turned away hopeless from the last threshold. With no one to recommend him, and no past experience of newspaper work, what chance was there of his getting a job? The only alternative was Euphoria; but he was too disheartened to let his mind dwell on that.
There was just one other chance; that Mr. Frenside, in spite of his gruff sneering way, had not been unfriendly. He knew of Vance’s aspirations, and perhaps would be willing to advise him — unless unfavourable rumours had reached him from Eaglewood. But Vance remembered Halo Spear’s kindly glance when she took leave of him, heard her say: “Go now — but come back some day,” and guessed that, however bent she was on screening her brother, she would not let Vance suffer unjustly. He had found out by this time that The Hour, as he had suspected, was a mere highbrow review, and therefore not to his purpose; but Frenside must have relations with the newspaper world, and would be able to tell him where there was hope of an opening for an untrained outsider. At any rate, it was the only thing left to try.
The Hour was modestly housed on an upper floor of a shabby exprivate house; no noiseless lift, plate-glass doors or silver~buttoned guardians led to its threshold. But the typewriter girl in the outer office, who said, no, Mr. Frenside wasn’t the editor, but only literary adviser, added that she guessed he was there that morning, and presently returned to show Vance into a stuffy cell full of cigar smoke where Frenside leaned on an ink-spattered table and fixed Vance with his unencouraging stare.
“Oh, yes — Weston your name is? Well, sit down.”
He smoked and stared for a while; then he exclaimed: “By George, I saw you up at Eaglewood, didn’t I? Why, yes — that business of the books. . . . Miss Spear’ll be glad I’ve run across you. The books were found, she wanted you to know . . . .”
“The books?” Vance looked at him vaguely. In this shimmering dubious world in which he had lately lived the story of the books at the Willows had become as forgotten and far-off a thing as the song in one of those poems Miss Spear had read to him; Miss Spear herself was only a mist among mists; all Vance could think of now was that he must get this taciturn man behind the cigar to find him a job.
“Why, yes, the books turned up,” Frenside repeated.
“How?” Vance asked with an effort.
“I don’t know the particulars. It seems Lewis Tarrant — you remember that fair young man who’s always up at Eaglewood? — well, he managed to buy them back . . . advertised, I believe . . . offered a reward. . . . They never caught the thief; but that didn’t so much matter. The main thing was to get the books. So that question’s closed.”
“Well, I’m glad,” Vance forced himself to say. And he knew he would be, in the other world of solid matter, if ever he got back to it . . . .
He felt that Frenside was looking at him more attentively. “That’s not what you came for, though? Well, let’s hear.” He settled back in his chair, listening in silence to what Vance had to say, and drumming on the table as if he were rapping out his secret thoughts on a typewriter.
Vance stammered through the tale of his vain quest, and wondered if perhaps Mr. Frenside could recommend him to a newspaper — but the other cut him short. He hadn’t any pull of that sort; sorry; but Vance had better go straight home if he had an opening on a newspaper there. Vance turned pale and made no answer; he cursed himself inwardly for having appealed, against his better judgment, to this man who cared nothing for him and was perhaps prejudiced by what had happened at the Willows.
“All right, sir, thank you,” he said, getting to his feet, and turning to the door. As he did so, Frenside spoke. “See here — going home’s a nasty dose to swallow sometimes, isn’t it? I remember . . . at your age. . . . Why do you want to go on a newspaper, anyhow?”
Vance, leaning against the doorway, answered: “I want to learn to be a writer.”
“And that’s the reason — ” Frenside gave a gruff laugh.
Vance looked at him curiously. “Is there any other way?”
“There’s only one way. Buckle down and write. Newspapers won’t help you.”
Vance felt the blood rush to his forehead. “I have . . . I have . . . tried to write . . . .”
Frenside reached for a match, relit his cigar, and once more said: “Sit down.” Vance obeyed. “What have you written? Got it in your pocket, I suppose? Let’s see.”
Vance, with a feverish hand, pulled out a bundle of papers — the poems he had written at Paul’s Landing, and some of the stuff which had poured from his pen in the long hungry hours at the rooming house. He laid them on the desk, and Frenside adjusted his eyeglasses. It seemed to Vance as if he were fitting his eyes to an exceptionally powerful microscope.
“H’m — poetry. All poetry?”
“Most of what I’ve written is.”
“Well, poetry won’t earn your keep: it’s pure luxury. Like keeping a car.”
Silence followed. At intervals it was broken by what sounded to Vance like the roar of the sea, but was in reality the scarce audible rustle as Frenside unfolded one sheet after another. He was doubtless not accustomed to reading manuscript, and to Vance’s agony of apprehension was added the mortification of not having been able to type his poems before submitting them. In most editorial offices, he knew, they wouldn’t look at handwritten things; presenting the poems to Frenside in this shape would probably do away with their one chance. Vance thought of offering to read them aloud, remembered Miss Spear’s comment on his enunciation, and dared not.
The roar of unfolding pages continued.
“H’m,” said Frenside again. He spread the papers out before him, and puffed in silence.
“Well, you’re at the sedulous age,” he continued after a pause. (What did that mean?) “Can’t be helped, of course. Here’s the inevitable Shakespeare sonnet: ‘What am I but the shape your love has made me?’ — and the Whitman: ‘Vast enigmatic reaches of ocean beyond me’ — just so. It IS beyond you, my dear fellow, at least at present. Ever seen the ocean?”
Vance could hardly find his voice. He shook his head.
“Not even at Coney Island?” Frenside shrugged. “Not that that matters. Look here; this is all Poets’ Corner stuff. Try it on your hometown paper. That’s my advice. There are pretty things here and there, of course; you like the FEEL of words, don’t you? But poetry, my son, is not a halfway thing. I remember once asking a book-learned friend if he cared for poetry, and he answered cautiously: ‘Yes, up to a certain point.’ Well, the devil of it is that real poetry doesn’t begin till beyond that certain point. . . . See?”
Vance signed that he saw: somehow he liked that definition of poetry, even at the cost of having to sacrifice his own to it.
“How about prose; never written any?”
The unexpectedness of the question jerked Vance out of the clouds. “I— I’m writing a novel.”
“Hullo — are you? What about.”
“About life in New York.”
“I thought so,” said Frenside grimly. There was another silence. “Never tried an article or a short story?”
“Never anything — good enough.” Vance got wearily to his feet. “I guess I’ll take these things and burn ’em,” he said, putting out his hands for the poems.
“No, don’t do that. Keep ’em, and reread ’em in a couple of years. That requires more courage, and courage is about the most useful thing in an artist’s outfit.” Vance was beginning to think it must be.
“Well,” Frenside continued, “if ever you try a short essay, or a story, bring them along. Don’t forget.” He smiled a little, as if to bind up the wounds he had inflicted. “You never can tell,” he concluded cryptically.
He held out his hand. The interview was over.
The interview was over; but when Vance reached the foot of the stairs he perceived its repercussions were only just beginning. He wandered on through a street or two, found himself in Union Square, and sat down under the meagre shade of its starved trees. The other people on the bench with him, listless sodden-looking men, collarless and perspiring, seemed like companions in misery who had preceded him a flight or two down the steep stairs of failure. Perhaps they too — or at least one among them — had tried for the impossible, as he was doing. He shivered a little at the sense of such kinship.
But gradually a luminous point emerged out of the enveloping fog. “Newspapers won’t help you,” Frenside had said; and Vance was suddenly aware that the dictum chimed with his own deep inward conviction. It had always seemed to him that newspapers, as he knew them, were totally unrelated to literature as he had always dreamed of it, and as he now knew that it existed. Yet was Frenside right — was he himself right? Everyone always said: “Nothing like newspaper work as a training if a fellow wants to write. Teaches you not to waste time, to go straight to the point, to put things in a bright snappy way that won’t bore people . . . .” Ugh, how he hated all the qualities thus commended! What a newspaper man like Bunty Hayes, for instance, would have called wasting time seemed to Vance one of the fundamental needs of the creative process. He could not imagine putting down on paper anything that had not risen slowly to the verge of his consciousness, that had not to be fished for and hauled up with infinite precautions from some secret pool of being as to which he knew nothing as yet but the occasional leap, deep down in it, of something alive but invisible. . . . And this Frenside, whom he did not like, whose manner offended him, whose views awoke his instinctive antagonism, had yet, in that one phrase, summed up his own obscure feeling. “Buckle down and write”; yes — he had always felt that to be the only way. But to do it a fellow must be quiet, must have enough to eat, must be fairly free from material anxieties; and how was he to accomplish that? He didn’t know — but he was so grateful for the key word furnished by Frenside that nothing else seemed much to matter; not the disparagement of his poems, the shrug at his novel, or the assumption that his aspirations were bound to be exactly like those of any other young fool who presented himself to an editor with a first bundle of manuscript. He walked slowly back to his rooming house, uncertain what to do next, but feeling that at least the darkness was not total.
His first impulse was to go through all his accumulated papers, to resee them in this new faint ray. He skimmed over the pages of his novel, found it shapeless, helpless — more so even than he had feared — and remembered another tonic phrase of Frenside’s: the curt “I thought so,” in reply to Vance’s confession that he was attempting a novel, and then the injunction: “If ever you try a short story send it along.” What a pity he hadn’t tried one, instead of this impossible unwieldy novel! And then, as he sat there, fumbling with fragments of dead prose, his hand lit on a dozen typed pages, clipped together, and a little frayed at the edges. He’d forgotten he had that with him. . . . “One Day” — the thing he’d written in a kind of frenzy, after his fever, when he couldn’t find his father’s revolver. How long ago all that seemed! There had been weeks when he couldn’t have looked at those pages, could barely have touched them; and now he was turning on them an eye almost as objective as George Frenside’s . . . .
You couldn’t call it a short story, he supposed. It was just the headlong outpouring of what he had felt and suffered during those few hours — like a fellow who’d been knocked down and run over trying to tell you what it felt like. That was all. But somehow the sentences moved, the words seemed alive — if he’d had to do it again he didn’t know that he’d have done it very differently. It didn’t amount to much, but still he felt as if it was his own, not the work of two or three other fellows, like the novel. A sudden impulse seized him: he wrapped up the manuscript, addressed it to Frenside, put his own name and address below, and carried the packet back to the office of The Hour. He hadn’t the courage to go in with it, but slipped it into the letter box and walked away.
Three days afterward — the last but two of his week — he came in one afternoon and found that a letter had been pushed under his door. On the corner of the envelope was stamped The Hour. Vance’s hands turned cold. He stood for a few seconds looking at that portentous name; then he tore open the envelope and read: “Dear Sir, The editor of The Hour asks me to say that he will be glad to take your story, ‘One Day,’ though The Hour does not usually publish short stories. I enclose a cheque for $50.” There followed a vague secretarial signature, and underneath, untidily scrawled with a blunt pencil: “Better go back home and write more like it. Frenside.” Vance stood a long time motionless, the letter in his hand. At first he was not aware of any sensation at all; and when it did come it seemed too strong for joy. It was more as if he had been buffeted in a crowd and had the wind knocked out of him, as he had on the day when he and Upton fought their way to the Crans’ car after the ball game . . . .
“I want to go and see the ocean,” he suddenly said aloud. He didn’t know where the words had come from, but the force of the impulse was overwhelming. Perhaps he had unconsciously recalled Frenside’s sneer: “Ever seen the ocean? Not even from Coney Island?” Well, he thought, he was going to see it now. . . . He put the cheque in his pocket and went out again. With that talisman on his breast he felt strong enough to conquer the world. What might it not have bought for him? Well, first of all it was going to buy him one of the greatest things in the universe. . . . He went round to Friendship House, found the friendly manager, and got his cheque cashed. Then he decided to leave the money in the manager’s safe; it was no use risking it in crowded trains. And he meant to take a train that very minute, and get down to the Atlantic shore before it grew dark. He didn’t know where — but he asked, and the manager said, smiling: “Why, we’ve got a camp of our own down on Long Island, not far from Rockaway. It’s pretty near empty in the middle of the week; you might as well go down there, I guess. I’ll give you a line to the man in charge — you look as if a good swim would pick you up . . . .” He scribbled a card. “Don’t forget to come for your money, though,” he said.
It was nearly sunset when the train reached the little station where Vance was to get out. He saw only a cluster of frame houses among scrubby sandhills, and a skyline crisscrossed by telephone and telegraph wires, like the view across the fields from Crampton. The man at the station said the camp was some way down the road. Vance followed the indication. The road, little better than a sandy trail, ran level for a bit, drifted past a colony of shacks and bathhouses, and then lifted him to a ridge of sand and left him face to face with the unknown. Before him more sandhills, sparsely tufted, sloped down imperceptibly to bare sand. The sand spread to a beach which seemed to stretch away right and left without end, and beyond the beach was another surface, an unknown element, steel gray in the cloudy twilight, and breathing and heaving, and swaying backward and forth with a shredding and rending of white yeasty masses ceaselessly torn off from that smooth immensity. Vance stood and gazed, and felt for the first time the weight of the universe upon him. Even the open sky of the plains, bending to the horizon on all sides, and traceried and buttressed, up aloft, with the great structure of the stars, seemed less huge, less immemorial, less incomprehensible to the finite mind than this expanse which rested not yet moved not, except in a rhythmic sway as regular as the march of the heavens. Vance sat down on a hillock and gazed and gazed as twilight fell; then in the last light he scrambled across the dunes to the sands, reached the stones of the beach, knelt close to that long incoming curve, and plunged his hands into it, as if in dedication.
Halo Spear in a world of shifting standards, had always held fast to her own values. Such and such things were worth so much! a great deal, perhaps; yet no more than so much. It was good, for instance — necessary, indeed — to have a comfortable amount of money; enough to grease the machinery of life, to prevent recurring family wrangles, or worse; but even for that there was a price not worth paying. That price was herself; her personality, as the people about her would have called it; the something which made Halo Spear and no other. Of that something, she often told herself, she would never surrender the least jot.
Looking back now, after three years, she remembered old Tom Lorburn’s perturbed face as she left the Willows with him, the day the loss of the books was discovered. She had said to herself then: “This business about the books is going to make him change his will,” and, immediately afterward: “Well, it won’t make me change my mind about Lewis.” For even if her hopes of an inheritance were gone she was not going to offset the disappointment by marrying Lewis Tarrant. She was sure she would make life unbearable to any man she married for such a reason, and Lewis was too good a fellow to be her victim. It was a pity, of course — for Cousin Tom did die within a few months, and did change his will, leaving the Willows to a distant relative who knew no more what to do with it than he had; and the blow was a bad one for Mr. and Mrs. Spear. Lorry being predestined to ruin them, they had always regarded it as Halo’s r?le to restore their fortunes; they would never have asked her to sacrifice her happiness to do so, but they told her (always in reference to other couples) that when it came to marriage a community of tastes and interests — well, such as there was between herself and Lewis, say — was the only guarantee of happiness, once the first rapture was over. “I know, but I want the first rapture,” Halo would answer them inwardly; and to Lewis she said with a smiling firmness: “If I married you you’d want to murder me in a month.”
Yet she had been his wife for nearly three years now, and they had not only spared each other’s lives, but arrived at some kind of mutual understanding, so that, had she been suddenly called on to leave her husband’s roof and return to the precarious existence at Eaglewood she would have hesitated, and not only on his account. Habit had wound its benumbing web about her, and she was no more the girl she had been than he was the man she had imagined . . . .
“Happy?” she said one day to Frenside, with her quick smile. “No, I’ve never been happy; but I’m content. And being content is so jolly that I sometimes think I couldn’t have stood being happy . . . .”
“Ah, it’s a destructive experience,” Frenside agreed.
Not for a moment would she have admitted to anyone else that her marriage had not brought her happiness, for no one but Frenside would understand, as she did, that life may be “strengthened and fed without the aid of joy.” But the relief of saying it to him was deep; it took her out of a world of suffocating dissimulations into a freer air. She looked at him curiously, at his bumpy tormented forehead above the thick blunt nose and ironic mouth, the eyes barricaded by his eternal glasses, the heavy shabby figure. “Yet he speaks about happiness as if he’d known it — poor old George.” Her impulse was to say: “Oh, Frenny, tell me what it’s like!” But though she had once gone up so boldly to every new riddle she shrank from this one. “I suppose we each of us have our different Sphinx,” she thought. She had grown a coward, no doubt.
“Life’s so full of things anyhow, isn’t it?” she continued evasively. “I’ve often thought I shouldn’t have time to crowd in anything more . . . even happiness . . . .” She laughed a little, and getting up out of her deep armchair by the fire walked across the library and stood looking out at the sweep of the East River glittering far below through the autumn haze in its forest of roofs and spires and chimneys. The Tarrant flat was high up in one of the new buildings overhanging the mighty prospect on which New York had till so lately turned its back. A wide low window filled almost the whole eastern wall of the room; the other three were of a sober grayish-green wherever they were revealed by a break in the bookshelves. Halo Tarrant’s association with the sturdy old house at Eaglewood had saved her from the passing extravagances of fashion. Her room depended for its character on the view from its window, the books on its walls, and the friendly grouping of its lamps and chairs. It seemed neither to exclude experiment nor invite it, but to remain outside the flux of novelty like some calm natural object, tree or field.
Frenside said nothing more, and Halo wandered across the room, pausing absently to straighten a paper cutter on the big table laden with books; then her glance travelled to an oil sketch of her husband which Vuillard had done in Paris, the first year of their marriage: just the head, half averted, with the thin sensitive nose, the dissatisfied mouth — dissatisfied still — and that excessive fairness of hair and complexion which singled Tarrant out in any group, even before the delicacy of his features was perceptible. Halo stood in front of the picture, her hands clasped behind her, retravelling the way that he and she had come.
“Well? — ” Frenside queried.
She turned back to him. “I was thinking how lucky it is that The Hour happened to be for sale, and that I had the nerve to urge Lewis to buy it. It’s going to be exactly the kind of job he likes. I only wish you’d stayed on it, Frenny.”
Frenside shook his head. “Better not. I’m always available as an adviser, if he needs one. But new blood all round was what was wanted. And now we’ll see — ”
Halo looked up at him a little sharply. “See —?”
“What he’s going to make of it.”
Her lips parted, as if on a quick retort; then they closed again, and with a slight shrug she dropped back into her chair. “Of course he’ll make mistakes — ”
“Of course. But that’s sometimes stimulating.”
She interrupted: “The great thing for a man like Lewis, with rather too much money, and decidedly too many talents, is to canalize both — isn’t it? He’s never before been able to make up his mind, to find anything that entirely suited him. I believe this does; I believe it’s going to group his scattered interests, and hold him to his job as no . . . no vague sense of duty would . . . .”
“Bless you, the sense of duty is prehistoric; even that idea of our first duty being to ourselves, which seemed so mad and bad in the ‘nineties, wouldn’t interest a baby nowadays. But I daresay Tarrant’ll take hold — for a while — ”
“Ah, you underrate him!” Halo flashed out, rising again nervously. People were right, after all, when they said Frenside’s way of encouraging you was like a doctor’s saying: “Nothing will make any difference now.”
But she was vexed with herself as soon as the words were spoken. She held no brief for her husband; she didn’t have to. Everyone knew Lewis was brilliantly clever — even those who were put off by his indifference, his lack of enthusiasm, recognized his superiority. “A fellow who’ll make his mark, my son-in-law,” Mr. Spear described him, leaning back comfortably in an armchair of the cosy little flat provided by Lewis for his parents-in-law, and puffing at a Corona of the thousand Lewis had sent him for Christmas. Being able to escape from Eaglewood for the winter months had singularly softened Mr. Spear’s view of human nature, and lent an added lustre to his admiration for Halo’s husband. “Anyone who doesn’t recognize Tarrant’s ability is simply envious of it, that’s all . . . .” Ah, how Halo loved her father for saying that! Poor Frenside’s congenital lack of generosity always prevented his predicting for others the success he himself had missed; but Mr. Spear, now that he and his wife had their own little nook in New York, and could gather about them the dowdy middle-aged conformists whom Mrs. Spear still called revolutionaries — Mr. Spear had become tolerant and even benignant. He still wrote to the papers to denounce what he called crying evils, such as the fact that the consumption of whole wheat bread was not made compulsory (“If I may cite my own humble experience,” that kind of letter always said), or that no method had been devised for automatically disinfecting the tin cups attached to public fountains. (“An instance of this criminal negligence may actually be found within a hundred feet of my own door,” was the formula in such cases — thus revealing to his readers that Mr. Spear HAD a New York door.) But all this was rather by way of a literary exercise than to relieve a burning indignation; now that his life had been reshaped to his satisfaction Mr. Spear was disposed to let others do their own protesting. “After all, there’s something to be said for the constituted authorities,” he had been known to declare, smiling indulgently across his daughter’s dinner table; and if Mrs. Spear’s short-haired satellites (women, Mr. Spear now called them, who had been sexually underfed) had not been forever challenging him to take up his pen in denunciation of one outrage or another — “you really ought to, Mr. Spear, with your marvellous way of putting things” — the ink would have coagulated in his Waterman.
Prosperity had affected Mrs. Spear differently. It had made her more indignant, more agitated, more emaciatedly beautiful; while a rising plumpness rounded Mr. Spear’s waistcoat his wife’s garments hung more slackly from her drooping shoulders and restless arms. While there was so much misery in the world, how was it possible, she asked her daughter, for those in happier circumstances not to strain every nerve . . .?
“But you strained yours to a frazzle long ago, mother; and the world still goes on in its old juggernaut way.”
“Halo! I hate to hear you echo that cheap cynicism of George Frenside’s. As long as I have a voice left to protest with I shall cry out against human savagery in all its forms.” Mrs. Spear had just discovered from a humanitarian leaflet that the truffle~hunting pigs of southwestern France perform their task in muzzles, and are never permitted the least morsel of the delicacies they unearth. (“Well, I should hope not,” murmured Mr. Spear, unfolding his napkin at the approach of a crab-mayonnaise, “and anyhow, in the raw state in which the poor animals would eat them, they’d probably taste like old india-rubber.”) And George Frenside added, with a malicious glint behind his glasses: “What seems to me a good deal worse is the fate of the cormorants in the China seas. . . . You know the Chinese train them to catch fish . . . carry ’em on their wrists like hawks . . . .” “Well?” Mrs. Spear gasped, in anguished anticipation. “No cormorant is ever allowed to taste a fish — much less a mayonnaise of crab,” Frenside grinned, with a side-glance at Halo.
The recollection of the little scene flashed through Halo’s mind as she looked up at Vuillard’s sketch of her husband. It was for the sake of her parents that she had married him; she was too honest to disguise it from herself; and whenever she saw Mr. Spear sipping his champagne critically but complacently, and Mrs. Spear, in black velvet and old lace, bending her beautiful shortsighted eyes above an appetizing dish, or lifting them to heaven in protest at some newly discovered cruelty to pigs or cormorants, Halo said to herself that it had been worthwhile. For Mrs. Spear’s woes had become as purely a luxury as Mr. Spear’s cigars and champagne. They could treat their indignations like pet animals, feeding them on the fat of the land till they became too bloated to be disturbing; and Halo, looking back on the hard rasping years when her parents’ furious concern for the public welfare had been perpetually fed by personal worries and privations, reflected that there could hardly be a pleasnter life than that of retired reformers. “And at least now,” she added, “they’ve stopped borrowing from Lewis; I’m almost sure they have.”
The extent of their borrowings (discovered suddenly, at the precise moment when she had decided to break her engagement) had in fact been the direct cause of Halo’s marriage. Tarrant had stepped into the breach more often than she had guessed; had not only bought back the books so mysteriously lost from the Willows, but had helped Lorry Spear to start as a theatrical decorator, besides filling in the ever-widening gap in the Spear budget. And he had done it all so quietly that when the facts became known to Halo her first movement of exasperation was followed by an unexpected feeling of admiration. If he were like that, she thought, she ought to be able to love him; at any rate, she knew she could never willingly cause him any pain. And on this basis they were married . . . .
The years that followed had represented the interest on her husband’s advances. He was far too much of a gentleman to let her feel that she, or any of hers, was in his debt; but there the fact loomed, the more oppressively because of his studied ignoring of it. She had gradually found out that it had not altered his real nature; but it had imposed on her the obligation to view him always in the light of an accidental magnanimity. It was dreadful, she thought in her rebellious moods, to know exactly what one would have to think of one’s husband till one’s dying day. But these rebellions were rare with her. Every morning she told herself anew that he had been incredibly generous to her people, and that the only return she could make was to throw herself with ardour into every new scheme which attracted, and reject with promptitude any enterprise which ceased to please him. Some day, perhaps, he would find his line — and THEN people would see, then even Frenside would have to confess . . .
Poor Frenside! It was natural, she thought, that his own inability to stick to a job should add venom to his comments on the instability of others. “Everything I touch turns cold on my hands,” he had once confessed; and that had been the fate of The Hour. After a dazzling start it had grown querulous, faddish, and then dull; one could feel the creeping chill of inanition as one turned its pages. Subscribers fell off, and the owners, discouraged, offered the paper for sale. Frenside, understanding his own share in the failure, resigned, and went back to free-lance articles for various newspapers and reviews. It was nonsense, he said, his acting as literary adviser to anybody, when his honest advice would almost always be: “To the wastepaper basket.” The Hour languished along, unread and unbought, for another year; then it occurred to Tarrant to pick it up as a bargain, and once purchased it acquired in his eyes the importance inherent in anything that belonged to him. “Funny — perhaps what I was really meant for was to be an editor,” he said to his wife, with depreciatory smile which disguised such a fervour of self-esteem. “Not a very dazzling career — I suppose I might have looked rather higher; but it may give me the chance to make myself known . . . .”
“Of course, Lewis; it’s what I’ve always wanted for you.”
“It is? You’ve thought —?” he began with his look of carefully suppressed avidity.
“Why, for a man who wants a hearing, and has something new to say, I can’t imagine a better chance than an open arena like The Hour.” She could reel off things like that as long as he wanted them; and besides, she did think, had forced herself to think, after his various unsuccessful experiments, first in architecture, then in painting, that letters might really be his field. Not creative work, probably (though she knew he aspired to be a novelist), but literary criticism, literary history, perhaps — provided he had the patience to pursue any line of investigation far enough. “If only he hadn’t any money!” she sometimes found herself reflecting, confronted with the bewildering discovery that abundance may hamper talent as much as privation does. “But what is talent made of, then?” she wondered. “Is it really like some shoddy material that can’t stand either rain or sun?”
Frenside still mused by the fire. “Yes; I shouldn’t wonder if Tarrant made something out of The Hour, if only he gets the right people for the routine work.” It was unusually generous of Frenside to say that; yet Halo tingled with resentment.
“You mean he’ll never have the perseverance himself?”
“My dear child, don’t make me out worse than I am. I mean exactly what I say. Every business enterprise is built on drudgery — ”
“Yes, and he’s too brilliant. He is brilliant, Frenny.” She stood looking at her old friend with confident insistent eyes; it always fortified her faith in her husband to impress it on others. And really she did believe in The Hour, and in what he and she were going to make of it . . . .
The door opened, and there he was, slender, distinguished, handsomer than ever, she thought, as her eyes challenged the calm face under which she knew such a hunger for approbation burned.
“Hallo, Frenside — ” Lewis Tarrant nodded to his wife and strolled up to the fireplace with his unhurried step. “Cold as the devil outdoors.” He bent over the flame, stretching his nervous transparent hands to it. (“With hands like that,” Halo mused, “why isn’t he a poet?”)
Tarrant dropped into an armchair near the tea-table. “No — a cocktail, please. I’m frozen to the marrow. Cursed climate!”
She handed him the cocktail, and in passing laid her hand on his shoulder. “You’re tired, Lewis — you’ve been overworking.” It did her good to be able, in all sincerity, to rebuke him for that!
“Well, it IS hard work — straightening things out. But I think I begin to see my way.” He spoke with the cold sparkle of voice and face which was his nearest approach to enthusiasm. “By the way, though — it wasn’t all just hacking and hewing. I’ve made a find.” He picked up a bundle of papers he had thrown down, and extracted from them a copy of The Hour.
“What about this, Frenside? I never heard of it before — it must have come out while we were honeymooning, Halo.”
The word startled her, on his lips. Was it all so long ago that he seemed to be speaking a dead language? She shook off the chill and put out her hand for the review — an old number, as Lewis said, battered from long kicking about in the office. “What? Oh — this: ‘One Day’? A story, is it?” She wrinkled her brows over her shortsighted eyes. “Lewis! Why, it’s by that boy: the Tracys’ cousin. The one . . .” She broke off, and felt the colour rising to her temples. Vance Weston — she had not thought of Vance Weston since her marriage. Yet what a score he had against her! She had never been able to acquit herself of that; if ever the chance to do so arose, how gladly she would seize it! She bent above the page, curious, excited, with the little half articulate murmurs of the born reader. “How queer that I never heard of this. . . . Yes, it came out the winter we were in Egypt.” (Her chronology of her married life was more topographic than sentimental.) She looked up at Frenside. “I suppose he sent it to you, Frenny, after that time you met him at Eaglewood?”
Frenside seemed to be groping in a heap of dusty recollections. “Yes — sure enough. It comes back to me. He turned up at the office one day, and unloaded a lot of fool poetry.” (Halo remembered too, and winced.) “Then, when I told him the stuff wouldn’t do, he pulled this out. Let me see: yes, that’s it. I thought it better than most things of the kind; and anyhow the boy looked so starved and scared that I took it. Never saw him but that once, as well as I can remember.”
Halo was no longer listening: she had plunged again into her reading. Yes; Frenside was right — the poetry, though it had possibilities (or seemed to, by that mountain pool at sunrise) was a poor parrotlike effort compared to this blunt prose, almost telegraphic in its harsh directness. She read on, absorbed.
“Well —?” Lewis queried, triumphant.
She came back to him from a long way. “What a strange thing it is — how terrible!”
“Fine, though? That fellow ought to be watched. Don’t you think so, Frenny?”
Frenside rose, throwing his cigar end into the embers. “Well, it’s a toss-up. This is the early morning ‘slice-of-life’; out of the boy’s own experience, most likely. Wait and see what happens when he tackles something outside of himself. That’s where the test comes in.”
Halo asked: “Didn’t he send anything else?” and Frenside, rummaging among more faded memories, thought that, yes, he had — articles and stories, all raw stuff, unusable. That was the general rule; any chap with a knack could usually pull off one good thing at the start . . . .
“This shows more than knack.”
Frenside shrugged, said he hoped so, wished them goodbye, and shuffled out into the hall, getting grumblingly into his overcoat with the help of Tarrant, who came back rubbing his hands and smiling. “Well, my dear, there’s your great critic: couldn’t even remember when and how he’d got hold of a thing like this, or whether the boy had sent him anything else as good! No knowing what we’ve lost — or how to get hold of him now. Not a trace of his address on the books. The way that paper was run —!” He sank down by the fire with a dry wrinkling of lips and nostrils. “I rather flatter myself things will go differently now . . .”
“Oh, Lewis! But of course — with your flair.”
He stroked his slight moustache lingeringly, using his hand, as she knew, to mask a satisfaction that might have appeared too crude. “Well, I suppose one HAS the instinct or one hasn’t . . . .” he murmured.
“I’m so glad, dear, that you have it. You saw at once what this was worth, didn’t you? But we must get at the boy — a young man now, I suppose,” she mused. “How long ago it all seems! I wonder how we can run him down? Why, through the Tracys, of course! I’ll write to Mrs. Tracy now.”
She started up and went to the writing table, pulling out paper and pen with an impatience doubled by her husband’s. “Oh, we’ll wire,” he said in a tone of authority; “I’ll get it off at once. We want something from him for our New York number.” And she thought, deep in herself: “Nothing will be too good for Vance Weston now that he’s Lewis’s own discovery,” and then tingled with shame at her lucidity. She dashed off the telegram at her husband’s dictation, and while Tarrant went out to send it, dropped down again into her armchair.
“If my boy had lived — ” she said to herself, covering under that elliptical sweep of regret all the things she might have judged differently, all the things she might have forborne to judge, if between her and her husband there had been a presence, warm and troublesome and absorbing, to draw them closer yet screen them a little from each other.