One raw autumn evening when Vance came in, tired and dispirited, from the office of the Free Speaker, his elder sister, Pearl, who was always prying and investigating, bounced out into the hall with: “Here’s a letter for you from a New York magazine.”
Vance followed her into the overheated room where the family were waiting for Mr. Weston to go in to supper. Mr. Weston was generally late nowadays: real estate was in a slack phase at Euphoria, and he was always off somewhere, trying to get hold of a good thing, to extend his activities, especially to get a finger into the pie at Swedenville, which had recently started an unforeseen boom of its own.
There seemed to be a great many people in the brightly lit room, with its large pink-mouthed gramophone on a table with a crochet lace cover, its gold-and-gray wallpaper hung with the “Mona Lisa” (Mae’s contribution), “The Light of the World” (Grandma’s), and the palm in a congested pink china pot on a stained oak milking stool.
On chilly evenings the radiator was the centre of the family life, and the seat nearest it was now always occupied by a very old man with a yellowish waxen face and a heavy shock of black hair streaked with gray, who sat with a helpless left arm stretched on the shawl that covered his knees, and said at intervals, in a slow thick voice: “Feels . . . good . . . here . . . after . . . Crampton . . . .”
Grandpa and Grandma Scrimser had moved into Mapledale Avenue after Grandpa’s first stroke. The house out at Crampton was too cold, and the Nordic help, always yearning for Euphoria or Swedenville, could not be persuaded to wait on a paralytic old man and his unwieldy wife. Lorin Weston had accepted the charge without a murmur: he was a great respecter of family ties. But the presence of the old couple had not made things easier at Mapledale Avenue. It was an ever-recurring misery to Mrs. Weston to have the precise routine of her household upset by Mrs. Scrimser’s disorderly ways; she did not mind nursing her father nearly as much as “picking up” after her mother. But the crowning grievance was the invasion of her house by Grandma’s followers — all the “inspirational” faddists, the prophets, seers, and healers who, having long enjoyed the happy~go-lucky hospitality of the Scrimser table, now thronged to Mrs. Weston’s, ostensibly to pray with Grandma and over Grandpa, but always managing, as Mrs. Weston remarked, to drop in round about mealtimes.
Grandpa’s stroke had come within the year after Vance’s return to Euphoria. Vance had not seen much of Mr. Scrimser during the months preceding the latter’s illness. Going out to Crampton was something the young man still shrank from. Everything in Euphoria, when he returned there from New York, seemed so small and colourless that he strayed about in it like a ghost in limbo; but the first time he walked out to see his grandmother, the old nausea caught him as he passed the field path leading to the river; and when his grandfather mounted the steps of the porch where Vance and Mrs. Scrimser were sitting, stiff-jointed but jaunty as ever, his hat tilted back from his black curls, his collar rolled away from his sinewy throat, the boy felt himself harden to a stone. . . . And then, one evening at the Free Speaker, a voice at the telephone had summoned Vance to the Elkington — and there in the glaring bar lolled the old man, like a marionette with its wires cut, propped on the sofa to which they had hurriedly raised him . . . .
The accident did not reawaken Vance’s love for his grandfather, but it effaced the hate. If this was what a few years brought us to, the sternness of the moral law seemed cruelly out of proportion to the brevity of life; he acknowledged the grinning truth of the old man’s philosophy. Hitherto Vance had never regretted having written, or sold for publication, the tale into which he had poured all his youthful indignation; but now, though he felt sure that no one at Euphoria had ever heard of The Hour, or would have connected his tale with any actual incident, yet he would have been glad to wipe those pages out of existence, and still more glad to blot from his memory the money they had brought him . . . .
“Well, I guess your father’s going to be later than ever tonight, and that Slovak girl says she won’t stay another week if she don’t ever know what time to dish up for meals,” Mrs. Weston murmured, looking up from her towel-hemming as her son entered.
“Well, Vance’s got a letter from a New York magazine,” Pearl exulted, disregarding her mother.
Mrs. Scrimser looked yearningly from the corner where she sat by her husband, the last number of Spirit Light on her knee. (“What your grandmother wastes, subscribing to all those come-to-Jesus papers, is something that passes me. She could hire a nurse with the money,” Mrs. Weston frequently lamented to her children.)
“Oh, Vanny, open it quick!” his grandmother besought. “I wonder if it’s from Spirit Light? I was just reading to Grandpa about a twenty-five dollar prize they’re offering for a five-hundred-word appreciation of Jesus Christ, to be sent in before the last of the month. What are we now?”
No one answered, and Vance went up to the lamp and opened his letter. Below the letterhead of The Hour a rush of words poured out at him. “Another story on the lines of ‘One Day’ . . . Review in new hands . . . editor would like to have first call on anything you may turn out during the coming year . . . Liberal terms . . . first story if possible in time for January number . . . wants to know if any chance of your being in New York within few weeks to consider possibility of permanent connection with review . . .”
Another story on the lines of “One Day” — that was what first struck him. He read the phrase over several times; then, involuntarily, he turned and glanced at the marionette with its wires cut that cowered in the armchair by the radiator. How strange it was, Vance mused — that poor creature had first taught him the meaning of pain, and out of the terrible lesson the means of deliverance had come!
His future . . . here was his future secure. And the people at The Hour regretted having lost sight of him for so long — and the review was in new hands! He glanced back at the letterhead, and saw: “Editor: Lewis Tarrant.” But surely that was the blond fellow who was always hanging about Miss Spear and going off in the motor with her? Correspondence between Paul’s Landing and Mapledale Avenue had ceased after a somewhat acrimonious exchange of letters at the time of Vance’s departure from the Tracys’; since then he had heard nothing of the household at Eaglewood. Two or three curt notes from the editorial office of The Hour, rejecting the tales and essays he had sent at Frenside’s suggestion, had been the last of his communications with New York; and for nearly two years now his horizon had been so shut in by Euphoria that he was beginning to feel as if he had never left there.
“IS it about the Spirit Light competition, Vanny?” Mrs. Scrimser asked; and Pearl ejaculated: “Father may be late, but I guess he’ll be here before Vance condescends to tell us!”
“Tell us what?” Vance’s father questioned, banging the front door shut, and dropping his outer garments in the ingle-nook before joining his family.
“His news from New York,” Pearl snapped.
Lorin Weston came in, casting his cautious tired eyes about the room. His son suddenly noticed how much older and thinner he looked; his dapper business suit hung on him. “Well, what’s your news, son?”
“I’ve got a job in New York,” Vance announced, hardly believing that the voice he heard was his own.
“Feels . . . good . . . here . . . after . . . Crampton . . . .” the marionette crooned from its corner.
On the train to New York Vance had the same sense of detachment as when he had gone thither three years before. Again it was as though, in leaving his home, he took his whole self with him, like a telephone receiver unhooked and carried on a long cord into another room. The years at Euphoria had taught him something, he supposed; he felt infinitely older, felt mature, “hardboiled” as the new phrase was: he smiled with pity at the defenceless infant he had been when he made his first assault on the metropolis.
But how had the process of maturing been effected? He had felt himself an alien from the moment of his return to Euphoria; there had been no retightening of loosened links, no happy boyish sense of homecoming. He could imagine that a fellow might feel that, getting back to one of those old Lorburn houses, so impregnated with memories, so thick with tangible tokens of the past; but his own recollections could only travel back through a succession of new houses, each one a little larger and with a better bathroom and a neater garage than the last, but all without any traces of accumulated living and dying: shells shed annually, almost, like a crab’s. He even felt, as he sat in the spick-and-span comfort of Mapledale Avenue, the incongruity of an old man’s presuming to die there. “Seems like there’s no past here but in the cemeteries,” he mused one day, looking pityingly at his grandfather . . . .
And now he was getting away from it again, getting back into an atmosphere which to him seemed charged with the dust of ages. When he had been in New York before he had hardly noticed the skyscrapers, which were merely higher than those he already knew; but on one of his last days before leaving he had gone down to Trinity Church, and slowly, wonderingly, had roamed about the graveyard, brooding over names and dates. . . . The idea that there had been people so near his own day who had lived and died under the same roof, and worshipped every Sunday in the same church as their forebears, appealed in an undefinable way to his craving for continuity. And when he entered the church, and read the epitaphs on the walls above the very seats where the men and women commemorated had sat, it was like feeling a heart beating through the grave wrappings of one of the mummies he had seen in the museum. The ocean and Old Trinity — those were the two gifts New York had given him . . . .
And now he was going back full of hope to the place which seemed to have become his spiritual home. The long cold weight of discouragement had fallen from him at the first word of the summons from The Hour. This time he knew he could make good. Never in journalism: his experience on the Free Speaker had taught him that. If his father hadn’t owned stock in the newspaper Vance knew he could never have held down even his insignificant job there. But there was nothing to regret in all that. He was going to be a writer now: a novelist. A New York review had opened its doors to him; he had only to reread the editorial letter for his brain to hum with new projects and ambitions. “A big novel — I’ll do a big novel yet,” he thought; but meanwhile he would give them all the short stories they wanted. Subjects were swarming about him, opening paragraphs writing themselves on the curtains of his sleeper. All night he lay awake in an ecstasy of invention, rocked by the rhythm of the train as if the great Atlantic rollers were sweeping him forward to his fate.
This mild November day was all jewelled with sunlight as Vance pushed his way out of the Grand Central. Grip in hand, he was starting for the rooming house where he had lodged before. He did not know where else to go; but no doubt at The Hour he would find someone to advise him. Meanwhile he would just drop his bags (they were bulging with manuscripts), and get a quick wash-up before presenting himself at the office. It was nearly ten o’clock, and he had wired announcing his visit for that day at eleven.
It was the day after Thanksgiving, and the huge station was humming with the arrivals and departures of weekend crowds. Outside, close to the curb, a row of long “rubberneck” cars was drawn up, and with an absent eye Vance watched a band of sightseers, mostly girls, scrambling into one of them. He thought he had never seen so many happy unconcerned faces: certainly the mere air of New York seemed to wake people up, make them sparkle like the light on this balmy day. Vance, always amused by thronged streets and pleasurable activities, lingered to watch; and as he stood there he saw a girl in a close-fitting blue hat spring into the car in front of him. Her movement was so light and dancing that no term less romantic could describe it. She was absorbed into a giggling group, and under the blue brim Vance caught only a glimpse of cropped straw~coloured hair and a face so translucent that the thin brown eyebrows looked dark as the velvet crescents on a butterfly. His sense of bouyant renewal seemed to find embodiment in this morning vision, and he forgot his bag, forgot The Hour, forgot even his healthy morning hunger. All he wanted was to know if there was a seat left in that car. A man in a long light ulster, a lettered band on his cap, stood near the driver’s seat, giving orders or instructions. Vance touched his arm. “See here — ” The man turned, and Vance was face to face with Bunty Hayes, the former reporter of the Paul’s Landing paper.
Bunty Hayes had not changed; he was the same trim tight-featured fellow with impudent eyes and a small mouth with a childlike smile; but he had thickened a little, and the black-and-gold lettering on his cap gave him an air of authority.
“Say — why, if it ain’t Vance Weston!” he exclaimed.
If anything could have troubled Vance in his present mood, it would have been an encounter with Bunty Hayes. The name had only disastrous associations, and he had always thought the man contemptible. But the tide which was sweeping him forward could not be checked by anything as paltry as Bunty Hayes; and Vance, with no more than a moment’s hesitation, put his hand into the other’s, and made one of his abrupt plunges to the point. “Say — you going for a ride in this car?”
“Going for a ride in her?” Bunty echoed with his easy laugh. “Looks like as if I was. Say, why I’m the barker for her, sonny. Thought I was still up at Paul’s Landing, did you, doing write-ups for that cemetery of a paper? No, sir, that was in the far away and long ago. I been showing New York for nearly two years now. Hop right in — got a capacity load, but I guess the girls’ll make room for you. (I’m taking round Saint Elfrida’s select boarding school, from Peapack — yes, sir; six front rows; bunch of lookers, ain’t they? Primarily an art trip; we take in the Lib’ry, the Metropolitan, the Cathedral and the Palisades.) See here, pile in, Vance; never mind about your grip. ‘Gainst the rules, I know; but shove it under the seat while the chauffeur’s looking at her appendix. There — in you go; this row. Say, there’s a girl at the other end that’ll give you a squeeze-in next to her; there, the one with the blue hat.”
The barker caught Vance under the elbow to launch him on his way; and then, as he moved forward, called after him stentorianly: “Say, Vance, I want you to meet my feean-CEE; yes, that’s her in the blue hat. Laura Lou, meet Mr. Weston. . . . Gee, Vance, but ain’t you Laura Lou’s cousin? Say, well, if I didn’t clean forget you and me’d got acquainted at the Tracys’. . . . Laura Lou, here’s your cousin Vance Weston, come all the way from Illinois to see you. Now then, ladies and gentlemen, all aboard, PLEASE!”
Vance found himself climbing past a row of exposed pink knees. A flutter of girlish exclamations greeted him, and he slipped into a crack between a stout Jewish-looking young woman in rimless glasses and the girl under the blue hat, whose flexible young body seemed to melt against his own as she made room for him.
“Laura Lou!” he exclaimed as the car swayed out into the street. He could hardly believe that this little face with the pale rosy mouth and the delicately traced eyebrows could be that of the sulky flapper of Paul’s Landing. Yet he remembered that one evening when she came in for supper, late and a little flushed, in a faded yellow muslin the colour of her hair, he had thought her almost pretty. ALMOST PRETTY— crude fool that he’d been, craving only such coarse fare as Floss Delaney and ‘Smeralda Cran! Time had refined his taste as it had his cousin’s features; and he looked at her with new eyes . . . .
“Vance!” she said, in her shy drawling voice, but without a trace of shyness in her own eyes, which rested on him with a sort of affectionate curiosity.
The eyes too were different; instead of being like blurred gray glasses they were luminous as spring water; and they met his with full awareness of the change. It seemed as if, without self~consciousness or fatuity, she knew herself lovely and was glad, as simply as a flower might be. The sight absorbed Vance’s senses; he hardly heard what she was saying, was conscious only of her nearness, burning and radiant, yet so frail, immaterial almost, that she might vanish at a rash word or motion.
“Why, Vance, isn’t it funny? I didn’t know you were in New York,” she said; and he thought: “I used to think her cheekbones too high; and now the little shadow under them is what makes her look like those marble heads of Greek priestesses with the smile under their lids . . . .” (He had seen photographs of them in some book on ancient art, in the Euphoria college library.)
“It’s three years since I was here; you’re grown-up now, aren’t you?” he said; and she conceded: “Why, I s’pose I am,” with a laugh that made her mouth break open on her teeth like a pink pod on pearly seeds.
“Three years — ” he echoed; and suddenly he remembered her bending over him as he lay in the hammock, on his first evening at the Tracy’s, and snatching from his buttonhole the spray of lilac he had found on his pillow that morning. “Why, it was you that put the lilac on my pillow before I was awake!” he exclaimed, the words breaking from him before he knew it. He was looking at her intently and she did not avert her gaze; but a light like a rosy reflection stole from her throat to her temples. “Of course it was,” he triumphed. “Why, you’re like a tropical shell with the sun shining through it,” he cried; and she answered: “Oh, Vance, you always did say such killing things. I’ll die laughing if you don’t quit . . . .” It was only when she drew away her soft bare hand that he realized he had held it clutched ever since he had pushed his way to her . . . .
“This vacant lot on your right,” Bunty Hayes was bellowing as the car rolled up Fifth Avenue, “was formerly the site of Selfridge B. Merry’s five-million-dollar marble mansion, lately sold to the Amalgamated Searchlight Company, who are about to erect on it a twenty-five-million-dollar skyscraper of fifty stories, with roof gymnasium, cabaret terrace, New Thought church and airplane landing. . . . The artistic Gothic church on your left is the Reformed Methodist . . . .”
Vance caught back Laura Lou’s hand and pressed it in both of his. “For God’s sake . . . that’s all a joke about your being engaged to him, isn’t it?”
She cast down her lashes, which were of the same velvet texture as her eyebrows, but a darker brown, the colour of brown pansy petals. Her hand still lay confidingly in Vance’s. “Why, I guess he kinder thinks I am . . . .” she said.
“Oh, LET him!” cried Vance derisively. He took a quick glance at the Jewish girl in rimless glasses, saw that she had turned away to pass a box of Fuller’s marshmallows down the line, and flinging his arm about Laura Lou, kissed her fervently.
She paled a little and shrank back, but so submissively, with such an air of leaving herself on his lips even though she withdrew her own, that he thought exultantly: “She knows she belongs to me,” and had there been room in his breast for any feeling but rapture it would have been pity for the tight-faced young man bellowing through his megaphone: “We are now approaching the only remaining private residence on Fifth Avenue, belonging to one of the old original society leaders known throughout the world as the Four Hundred.”
The next day, when Vance got out of the train at Paul’s Landing, the old horses in the broken-down carry-alls were still standing in the station square, shaking their heads despondently.
He jumped on board a passing trolley and was carried out of the town. At the foot of a familiar lane overhung by bare maple boughs he got out and began to climb to the Willows. Laura Lou had said she would bring the key of the gate with her. She couldn’t let him into the house, she explained: since the theft of the books (which had been brought back, as she supposed Vance knew) Mrs. Tracy had kept the house key hidden away where no one could get it. But Vance was determined at least to see the garden and the outside of the house again, and the day was so windless and mild that they would be able to sit in the sun on the verandah. He wanted to relive his first visit to the Willows, when he had accompanied Laura Lou and Upton, and had lingered spellbound in the library while Laura Lou, her hair covered with a towel, went off with Upton to dust and air the rooms. That day Vance had hardly noticed her, had felt her presence only as that of a tiresome schoolgirl, butting in where she wasn’t wanted, like his own sisters, Pearl and Mae — especially Pearl. And now —!
She was at the gate already; he caught sight of her through the branches, in the powdery gold of the autumn light. She waved to him, and opened the gate; and he followed her in. “No, you mustn’t!” she whispered, as his arms went out, and added, laughing: “With all the leaves off the bushes — and that hired man around.”
“Curse the hired man! Can’t we go and talk quietly somewhere?”
He was looking at her as though to store up the sight against a coming separation, and yet he knew already that he never meant to leave her again. “Can’t I hold your hand, at least?” he asked, awed by something so tender and immature in her that it curbed his impetuousness.
“Oh, well — ” she conceded; and hand in hand, like two children, they began to walk toward the house. Barely screened by its tracery of leafless willows it stood out more prominent and turreted than he had remembered; but if less romantic, it still seemed to him as mysterious. Treading noiselessly on the rain~flattened yellowish grass they passed around to the other front, where the projecting verandah and obliquely set balconies, clutched in the bare gnarled arms of the wistaria, stood out like the torso of an old Laoco?n.
A few oaks still held their foliage, and the evergreen clumps stood out blue-black and solid. But the fall of the leaves revealed, at the end of a path, a rickety trellised arbour which Vance had never before noticed. “Let’s go and sit there.” They crossed the wet cobwebby lawn and entered the arbour. The old hired man was nowhere to be seen, and Vance drew Laura Lou to him and laid his lips on her eyelids. “Ever since yesterday I’ve wanted to kiss your eyes.” She laughed under her breath, and they sat close to each other on the mouldy bench.
“You never used to take any notice of me in old times,” she said; and he answered: “I was nothing but a blind puppy then. Puppies are all born blind . . . .” He wanted to let his kiss glide down to her lips, but she put him from her. The gentleness of her touch controlled him; but he whispered rebelliously: “Why — why?”
She answered that all she had promised was to come and talk things over with him, and he mustn’t tease, or she’d have to go away; and why couldn’t they just sit there quietly, when there was so much to say and so little time? He hardly heard what she said, but there was a power in her softness — or in her beauty, perhaps — which held him subdued. “Your hand, then —?” “Yes.” She gave it back, with one of those smiles which made her mouth like the inside of a flower. Oh, idle metaphors! . . .
“Now tell me.” And she told him how upset her mother had been when he went away so suddenly (“She never meant you to, Vance — but she got frightened . . . .”), and how surprised they were when the basket of flowers with the dove was brought the next day, and how Mrs. Tracy had first been angry, and said: “Is he crazy?” and then cried, and said: “But he must have spent all the money I gave him back,” and then been angry again because she was so sure he’d be the cause of their losing their job at the Willows — and they did lose it, and only got it back after Miss Halo had intervened, and the books were returned, and old Mr. Lorburn had been quieted down again. (“But the dove was lovely, Vance. I’ve got it over my looking glass . . . .”) And at the thought of this miraculous reward he had to clench her hand hard to keep himself from warmer endearments. How little he had dreamed, when he bought it, that the dove would be Venus’s messenger!
She went on to say that things had been very hard for a time, because they had been out of their job for six months. It wasn’t so much the money, though they needed that too; he gathered that Mrs. Tracy’s pride had been wounded, and that she had declared, when Miss Halo tried to fix it up, that it was no use, as she would never let her children go back to the Willows if they had forfeited their cousin’s confidence. But Miss Halo always somehow managed to put things right, and had finally persuaded Mrs. Tracy to relent; and she had continued to help them after that, and had found a fine situation for Upton as undergardener with some friends of hers who had a big place at Tarrytown. So everything was going better now; and she, Laura Lou, was at Saint Elfrida’s School, at Peapack, for a six months’ course, to learn French and literature and a little music — because her mother wanted her to be educated, like her father’s folks were . . . .
Laura Lou was not endowed with the narrative gift; only bit by bit, in answer to Vance’s questions (when he was not too absorbed in her to put any) did she manage, in fragmentary communications, to bridge over the interval which had turned the gawky girl into the miracle of young womanhood before him.
When she wanted to hear what had happened to him since they had parted he found it even harder to tell his story than to piece hers together. While she talked he could spin about her a silken cocoon of revery, made out of her soft drawl, the throb of her hand, the fruitlike curve of her cheeks and eyelids; but when he tried to withdraw his attention from her long enough to put his words in order he lost himself in a blur. . . . Really, he said, nothing much had happened to him, nothing that he specially remembered. He’d been a reporter in the principal Euphoria newspaper, and hated it; and he had taken a post-graduate course in philosophy and literature at the state college; but the lecturers somehow didn’t get hold of him. Reading in a library was what suited him, he guessed. (Her lashes were planted like the double row of microscopic hummingbird feathers in a South American embroidery he’d seen somewhere . . . .) But Euphoria was over and done with; he’d got a job in New York . . . a job on a swell magazine, a literary review they called it, but they published short stories too, they’d already published one of his, and wanted as many more as he could write . . . and the editor, Lewis Tarrant, had written to him to come to New York . . . .
“Lewis Tarrant! But he’s the one Miss Halo married!” Laura Lou exclaimed.
“Did she?” Vance absently rejoined. All his attention was on her hands now; he was separating the fingers one by one, lifting them up and watching them drop back, as though he were playing on some fairy instrument. He hardly noticed the mention of Halo Spear.
“Why, didn’t you know? They were married the year you went away, I guess. I know it was ever so long ago.”
“Does it seem to you ever so long since I went away?”
“Oh, Vance, I’ve told you you mustn’t . . . or I’ll have to go . . . .”
He drew back, dropping her hands, and restricting himself to the more delicate delight of looking at her. “What’s the use of trying to write poetry, when she IS?” he mused. Yet in another moment he was again seeking rhymes and metaphors for her. He tried to explain to himself what it was that kept him thus awestruck and submissive, as if there were a latent majesty in her sweetness. With that girl on Thundertop it had been different; the shock of ideas, the stimulus of the words she used, the allusions she made, the sense of an unknown world of beauty and imagination widening about him as she talked — all this had subdued his blood while it set his brain on fire. But when Laura Lou spoke she became a child to him again. His allusions to his literary plans and ambitions filled her eyes with a radiant sympathy, but evoked nothing more definite than: “Isn’t that too lovely, Vance?” Yet his feeling for her was not the sensual hunger excited by girls like Floss Delaney. It was restrained by something new in this tender creature; as if the contending elements of body and soul were so harmonized in her that to look at her was almost to clasp her.
But the air grew chilly; Vance noticed that she had turned paler; she coughed once or twice. The instinct of protection woke in him. “See here, we mustn’t go on sitting here till you catch cold. Where’ll we go? Why don’t we walk back to the town to warm ourselves up, and have a cup of hot coffee before I catch my train?” She assented, and they turned toward the gate. As Laura Lou stooped to the padlock Vance looked back yearningly at the old house. “We’ll come here often now, won’t we?”
The gate had closed on them, and Laura Lou walked on a few steps before answering. “Oh, I don’t know about coming again, Vance. I had hard work getting the key out of Mother’s drawer without her seeing me. . . . Besides, I’m not here weekdays; I’m at school.”
“Your mother can’t object to our coming here after we’re married,” Vance tranquilly rejoined.
“Married?” she stood still in the lane and looked at him with wide incredulous eyes. Her pale pink lips began to tremble. “Why, how can we be, Vance?”
“Why can’t we be, I’d like to know? I’ll be earning enough soon.” (He was sincerely convinced of it.) “See here, Laura Lou, I want to begin life in New York married to you. I’m coming out to tell your mother and Upton about it tomorrow. You won’t go back to school till Monday, will you? Can I come out early tomorrow, and have dinner with you?”
A shade of apprehension crossed her face. “Oh, Vance darling — not tomorrow.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s Sunday, and Sunday’s Bunty’s day.” She made the statement with a sort of tragic simplicity, as a fact to be neither disguised nor eluded.
“Bunty’s day?” Wrath descended on him like a thunderclap. “How dare you, after this afternoon — how dare you speak to me as if you belonged to that fellow and not to me? Don’t you know we’re each other’s forever, Laura Lou? Say you do — say you’ve always known it!” he commanded her.
“Well, I WAS engaged to him,” she murmured, with her gentle obstinacy.
“If you were, you’re not now. How could your mother ever have let you go with a fellow like that anyhow? She thought poorly enough of him when I was with you.”
“Well, she didn’t fancy him at first; she thought he was a bad companion for Upton. But you don’t know how changed he is, Vance. He helped Mother when she lost her job here; and it’s him who’s paying for my year at Saint Elfrida’s. You see, he’s real cultured himself, and he wants I should be cultured too, so that by and by we can take those personally conducted parties to Europe for one of the big travel bureaus, and earn a lot of money. That’s what first reconciled Mother to him, I guess, his being so cultured. She’s always wanted I should marry somebody in the same class as Father’s.”
Vance stood listening in a tumult of anger and amazement. He had never heard her say as much at one time, and every word she spoke was pure anguish to him. He had the same sense of the world’s essential vileness as had swept over him that day by the Crampton riverside. Life tasted like cinders on his lips. At length his indignation broke out in a burst of scattered ejaculations. “He’s been paying for you at school — that lowdown waster? Laura Lou, you don’t know what you’re saying! Culture — him? In your father’s class? Oh, God! You’d make me laugh if it wasn’t so sickening. . . . I’m coming back to see your mother tomorrow whether you want me or not — understand? And if that Hayes fellow wants to come too, let him. I’ll be there to talk to him. And I’ll work day and night till I pay him back what he’s paid your mother for you. And you’ve got to leave that school tomorrow, Laura Lou . . . do you hear me?”
“No, no, Vance.” Her little pale face had grown curiously resolute, and her voice too. “You mustn’t come tomorrow — it would kill me if you did. You must give me time . . . you must do as I tell you . . . .”
“What ARE you telling me? That I’m not to see you till it suits this gentleman’s convenience? Is that it?”
Her head drooped, and there was a glitter of tears on her lashes; but in a moment she looked up, and her gaze rested full on his. “Vance, if you’ll give me your promise not to come tomorrow I’ll promise to go and see you next week in New York. I’ll slip off somehow. . . . Because now, Vance,” she cried, “whatever happens, I’ll never marry anybody but you — never, never, not even if we have to wait for each other years and years.”
Dizzy with joy, he stood looking at her as if he were looking into the sun; then he caught her to him, and their youth and passion flowed together like spring streams. “Laura Lou . . . Laura Lou . . . Only we won’t wait any years and years,” he cried; for at that moment it really seemed to him that achievement lay in his hand.
Three years of marriage had not been needed to teach Halo Tarrant that when her husband came home to lunch it was generally because something had gone wrong. She had long known that if he sought her out at that hour it was not to be charmed but to be tranquillized, as a man with a raging headache seeks a pillow and a darkened room. This need had been less frequent with him since he had bought The Hour and started in on the exciting task of reorganizing it. Usually he preferred to lunch near the office, at one of the Bohemian places affected by Frenside and his group; probably it was not indifferent to him, as he made his way among the tables, to hear: “That’s the fellow who’s bought The Hour. Lewis Tarrant; tall fair chap; yes — writes himself . . . .” Every form of external recognition, even the most casual and unimportant, was needed to fortify his self-confidence. Halo remembered how she had laughed when Frenside, long before her marriage, had once said: “Young Tarrant? Clever boy — but can’t rest unless the milkman knows it.” Nowadays she would not have tolerated such a comment, even from Frenside; and if she made it inwardly she tempered it by reminding herself that an exaggerated craving for recognition often proceeds from a morbid modesty. Morbid — that was what poor Lewis was at bottom. She must never forget, when she was inclined to criticize him, that her faculty of rebounding, of drawing fresh energy from discouragement, had been left out of his finer organization — for her own support she had to call it finer.
And now, on the very Friday when he was expecting his new discovery — the Tracys’ young cousin from the West — Tarrant had suddenly turned up for lunch. When his wife heard his latchkey she supposed he had brought young Weston back with him, and she had been pleased, and rather surprised, since it would have been more like him to want to parade his new friend among his colleagues. Possibly Weston had not turned out to be the kind to parade — though his young poet’s face and profound eyes had lingered rather picturesquely in her memory. Still, it was three years since they’d met, three years during which he’d been reporter on a smalltown newspaper. Perhaps the poetry had not survived . . . .
Her husband came in alone, late, and what she called “rumpled~looking,” though no outward disorder was ever visible in his carefully brushed person, and the signs she referred to lurked only about his mouth and eyes.
“Any lunch left? I hope there’s something hot — never mind what.” And, as he dropped into his seat, and the parlourmaid disappeared with hurried orders, he added, unfolding his napkin with a sardonic deliberation: “Well, your infant prodigy never turned up.”
Ah, how well she knew that law of his nature! Plans that didn’t come off were almost always ascribed (in all good faith) to others; and the prodigy who had failed him became hers. She smiled a little to see him so ridiculously ruffled by so small a contretemps. “Genius is proverbially unpunctual,” she suggested.
“Oh, GENIUS— ” He shrugged the epithet away. She might have that too, while she was about it. “After all, he may never do anything again. One good story doesn’t make a summer.”
“No, and mediocrity is apt to be unpunctual as genius.”
“UNPUNCTUAL? The fellow never came at all. Fixed his own hour — eleven. I put off two other important appointments and hung about the office waiting till after half-past one. I’d rather planned to take him round to the Café Jacques for lunch. A young fellow like that, from nowhere, often thaws out more easily if you feed him first, and encourage him to talk about himself. Vanity,” said Tarrant, as the maid approached with a smoking dish, “vanity’s always the first button to press. . . . EGGS? Good Lord, Halo, hasn’t that cook learnt yet that eggs are slow death to me? Oh, well, I’ll eat the bacon — What else? A chop she can grill? The inevitable chop! Oh, of course it’ll DO.” He turned to his wife with the faint smile which etched little dry lines at the corners of his mouth. “I can’t say you’ve your mother’s culinary imagination, Halo.”
“No, I haven’t,” she answered good-humouredly; but a touch of acerbity made her add: “It would be rather wasted on a digestion like yours.”
Her husband paled a little. She so seldom said anything disagreeable that he was doubly offended when she did. “I might answer that if I had better food I should digest better,” he said.
“Yes, and I might answer that if your programme weren’t so limited I could provide more amusing food for you. But I’d sooner admit at once that I never did have Mother’s knack about things to eat, and I don’t wonder my menus bore you.” It was the way their small domestic squabbles usually ended — by her half contemptuously throwing him the sop he wanted.
He said, with the note of sulkiness that often marred his expiations: “No doubt I’m less easy to provide for than a glutton like Frenside — ” then, furtively abstracting an egg from the dish before him: “It’s a damned nuisance, having all my plans upset this way. . . . And a fellow I was hoping I might fit into the office permanently . . . .”
Halo suggested that perhaps the young man’s train had been delayed or run into — that perhaps at that very moment he was lying dead under a heap of wreckage; but Tarrant grumbled: “When people break appointments it’s never because they’re dead” — a statement her own experience bore out.
“He’s sure to turn up this afternoon,” she said, as one comforts a child for a deferred treat; but the suggestion brought no solace to Tarrant. He reminded her with a certain tartness (for he liked her to remember his engagements, if he happened to have mentioned them to her) that he was taking the three o’clock train for Philadelphia, where he had an important appointment with a firm of printers who were preparing estimates for him. There was no possibility of his returning to the office that day; he might even decide to take a night train from Philadelphia to Boston, where he would probably have to spend Saturday morning, also on business connected with the review. He didn’t know when he was going to be able to see Weston — and it was all a damned nuisance, especially as the young fool had given no New York address, and they had hoped to rush a Weston story into their coming number.
Time was when Halo, as a matter of course, would have offered to interview the delinquent. Now she knew better. She had learned that in such matters she could be of use to her husband only indirectly. The very tie she had most counted on in the early days of their marriage — a community of ideas and interests — had been the first to fail her. She knew now that the myth of his intellectual isolation was necessary to Tarrant’s pride. Nothing would have annoyed him more than to have her suggest that she might take a look at young Weston’s manuscripts. “Of course you could, my dear; it would be the greatest luck for the boy if you would — only, you know, I must reserve my independence of judgment. And if you were to raise false hopes in the poor devil — let yourself be carried away, as I remember you were once by his poetry — it would be a beastly job for me to have to turn him down afterward.” She could hear him saying that, and she knew that the satisfaction of asserting his superiority by depreciating what she had praised would outweigh any advantage he might miss by doing so. “Oh, young Weston will keep,” she acquiesced indifferently, as Tarrant got up to go.
The door closed on him, and she sat there with the golden afternoon on her hands. She said to herself: “There has never been such a beautiful November — ” and her imagination danced with visions of happy people, young, vigorous, self-confident, draining with eager lips the last drops of autumn sunshine. Always in twos they were, the people she pictured. It used not to be so; she had often had her solitary dreams. But now that she was hardly ever alone she was so often lonely. Lonely! It was a word she did not admit in her vocabulary — but the sensation was there, cold and a little sickening, gnawing at the roots of her life. . . . What nonsense! Why, she was actually robbing poor Lewis of the proud prerogative of isolation! As if a girl with her resources and her spirits hadn’t always more than enough to pack the hours with! She leaned in the wide window of the library and looked over the outspread city, and thought how when she had first stood there all its myriad pulses seemed to be beating in her blood. . . . “Am I tired? What’s wrong lately?” she wondered. . . . Should she call up the garage where her Chrysler was kept and dash out for the night to Paul’s Landing, where her family had lingered on over Thanksgiving? It would be rather jolly, arriving at Eaglewood long after dark, in the sharp November air, seeing the glitter of lights come out far ahead along the Hudson, and entering, muffled in furs, the shabby drawing room where Mr. and Mrs. Spear would be sitting over the fire, placidly denouncing outrages in distant lands. . . . No, not that . . . It was sweet to sit in New York dreaming of Eaglewood; but to return there now was always a pang . . . .
She began to muse on the woods in late summer, HER woods, when their foliage was heaviest, already yellowing a little here and there, with premature splashes of scarlet and wine colour on a still-green maple, like the first white lock in a young woman’s hair . . . Of days on Thundertop, sunrise dips in the forest pool, long hours of dreaming on the rocky summit above the Hudson — how beautiful it had been that morning when she had stood there with young Weston, and they had watched light return to the world with a rending of vapours, a streaming of radiances, like the first breaking of life out of chaos! “He felt it too — I could see it happening all over again in his eyes,” she thought; those eyes had seen it with hers. Perhaps that was why, when he recited his poetry to her, in spite of his shyness and his dreadful drawl, she had fancied she heard the authentic note. . . . Had she been mistaken? She didn’t know. But surely not about the story Lewis had brought home the other day. She was sure that was the real thing; and she was glad Lewis had felt it too, felt it at once — she was always glad when they saw things together. Perhaps the boy WAS going to be a great discovery; a triumph for Lewis, a triumph for The Hour! She remembered that as she leaned back against the mossy edge of the pool the pointed leaf shadows flickered across his forehead and seemed to crown it like a poet’s. . . . Poor little raw product of a standardized world, perhaps never to be thus laurelled again! . . .
She turned and wandered back to the fire, gazing, as she went, at the books her own hands had arranged and catalogued with such eager care. “What I want today is the book that’s never been written,” she thought; and then: “No, my child, what you really want is an object in life . . . .” She was grimly amused to find that she was talking to herself as so often, mentally, she talked to her husband . . . .
Oh, well — it was nearly dusk already; one more day to tick off the calendar; and at five there was a concert at the Vanguard Club — something new and exotic, of course; she’d mislaid the programme. . . . She went to her room and pulled out her smart black coat with the gray fur, and the close black turban that made her face look long and narrow and interesting. There were sure to be amusing people at the concert . . . .
The concert was dull; the amusing people were as boring as only the amusing can be; Halo came home late and out of sorts to find a long~distance from her husband saying he was going to Boston that night, and she was to notify the office that he would not reappear till Monday . . . .
Next morning she rang up the office and gave her message; then, after a pause, she added: “By the way, did Mr. Weston turn up yesterday — Vance Weston, the storywriter, you know?” Yes; they knew; they were expecting him. But he had not appeared, and there had been no message from him. No; they hadn’t his address. . . . She thought: “After all I was a fool not to go out to Eaglewood last night.” Another radiant day — the last before winter, perhaps! Why shouldn’t she dash out now, just for a few hours? A tramp in the woods would do her more good than anything. . . . But she lacked the energy to get into country clothes and call for the Chrysler. . . . “Besides, very likely that boy will turn up . . . .” Not that she meant to see him; but she could at least report to Lewis if he called at the office, and give whatever message he left. . . . It was rather petty of Lewis, she thought, not to have told her to see young Weston . . . .
Before twelve she rang up the office again. No; no sign of Weston; no message. How very queer. . . . Yes, it WAS queer. . . . Well, look here — that’s you, Mr. Rauch? Yes. Well, if he should turn up today after the office was closed — supposing he’d forgotten it was a Saturday — would Mr. Rauch leave word with the janitor to tell him to come to see her? Yes, at the flat; she’d be in all the afternoon. He was just to be told to ask for Mrs. Tarrant. (In the end, Lewis would probably be grateful — though he’d never go as far as acknowledging it.)
“I think I’ll try and do some painting,” she said to herself as she hung up. Lewis had fitted up a rather jolly room on the roof — a sort of workshop-study, in which he had reserved a corner for her modelling and painting. He always encouraged her in the practice of the arts he had himself abandoned, and while gently disparaging her writing was increasingly disposed to think there was “something in” her experiments with paint and clay. But it was months now since she had attempted either. . . . She mounted to the roof studio, pulled a painting apron over her shoulders, rummaged among canvases, fussed with her easel, and got out a bunch of paper flowers which she had manufactured after reading somewhere that Cézanne’s flowers were always done from paper models. “Now for a Cézanne!” she mocked.
Whenever she could persuade herself to work she still had the faculty of becoming engrossed in what she was doing, and the hours hurried by as she struggled with the mystery of mass and values. At that moment, really, she believed she was on the eve of learning how to paint. “Perhaps Lewis is right,” she thought.
Just as the light was failing the maid appeared. There was a gentleman downstairs — young gentleman, yes; his name was Weston. Halo dropped her brushes and wiped her hands hurriedly. She had forgotten all about young Weston! But she was glad that, now it was too dark to paint, he was there to fill in the end of the day.
Would she find him the same? Or had he changed? Would she still catch the shadow of the laurel on his forehead? As she entered the library her first impression was that he was shorter — smaller, altogether — than she had remembered; but then she had lived in the interval with a man of dominating height. This youth — how young he still looked! — met her eyes on a level. He had broadened a little; his brown hair with the slight wave in it had grown darker, she thought. This was all she had time to note, for before she could even greet him he had exclaimed: “There must be more books here than at the Willows!” Ah, how that brought him back — that way of going straight to his object, dashing through all the customary preliminaries, yet so quietly, so simply, that it seemed the natural thing to do.
She looked at him with a faint smile. “You care for books as much as ever?”
Instead of answering he said: “Can I borrow some of these, do you think? I’ve got to buckle down to work at once. I see they’re classed by subjects; ah, here’s philosophy . . . .” Half annoyed, half amused at being treated like a librarian (an assistant librarian, she ironically corrected herself) she asked him if philosophy were what he was studying, and he said, yes, chiefly; that and Italian — so as to be able to read Dante.
“Dante?” she exclaimed. “We lived in Italy a good deal when I was a child. Perhaps I could help you with Dante.”
His face lit up. “Oh, could you? Say, could I come round evenings, three or four times a week, and read him with you after supper?”
A little taken aback she said she was not sure she could be free as often as that in the evening. They went out a good deal, she and her husband, she explained — to the theatre, to concerts . . . in a big place like New York there were always so many things to do in the evening. She forbore to mention that frequent dining-out was among them. Couldn’t he, she suggested, come in the early afternoon instead — she was often free till four. But he shook his head, obviously disappointed. “No, I couldn’t do that. I’ve got to stick to my own writing in the daytime.”
Ah, to be sure — his own writing! That was what he’d come about, she supposed, to see her husband? Her husband unluckily was away on business. He had expected Mr. Weston at the office the morning of the day before; she believed Mr. Weston had fixed his own hour for coming. And her husband had waited all the morning, and he hadn’t turned up. Her tongue stumbled over the “Mr. Weston”; it sounded stiff and affected; she remembered having called him “Vance” as a matter of course the first time she had seen him, at the Willows. But something made her feel that she was no longer in his confidence, or perhaps it was that he had simply forgotten what friends they had been. . . . The idea disconcerted her, and made her a little shy. It was as if their parts in the conversation had been reversed. “My husband expected you, but you never came,” she repeated, gently reproachful.
No, he said, he hadn’t come. He’d meant to, the day before, as soon as his train got to New York; but he hadn’t been able to. He stated the fact simply, without embarrassment or regret, and left it at that. Halo felt a slight flatness, an uncertainty as to how to proceed.
“And this morning —?”
“This morning I couldn’t either. I called round at the office half an hour ago, but it was closed, and the janitor told me to come here instead.”
“Yes, I left word — as my husband’s away.”
She suddenly perceived that they were still in the middle of the room, exchanging their explanations on the particular figure of the rug where he had been standing when she entered. She signed to him to take one of the armchairs by the fireplace, and herself sank into the other. Twilight had gathered in the corners of the bookwalled room, and the fire flowed more deeply for the shadows. Her visitor leaned to it. “I never saw such a beautiful fire — why, that’s real wood!” he exclaimed, and fell on his knees on the hearth, as if to verify the strange discovery.
“Of course. We never burn anything else.”
This seemed to surprise him, and he lifted his firelit face to hers. “Because it’s so much more beautiful?”
“Because it’s alive.”
His gaze returned to the hearth. “That’s so; it’s alive . . . .” He stretched his hands to the flame, and as she watched him she remembered, a few days before, looking at Lewis’s hands as he held them out in the same way, and thinking: “Why isn’t he a poet?”
This boy’s hands were different: sturdier, less diaphanous, with blunter fingertips, though the fingers were long and flexible. A worker’s hand, she thought; a maker’s hand. She wondered what he would make.
The thought reminded her once more of the object of his visit — or at least of hers in sending for him, and she said: “But you’ve brought a lot of things with you, haven’t you? I hope so. I want so much to see them.”
“Manuscripts?” He shook his head. “No, not much. But I’m going to write a lot of new stuff here.” He got to his feet and stood leaning against the mantelshelf, looking down at her with eyes which, mortifyingly enough, seemed to include her as merely part of the furniture. “What is he REALLY seeing at this moment?” she wondered. Aloud she said: “But my husband wrote you were to be sure to bring everything you’d written. He’s so much interested . . . we both think ‘One Day’ so wonderful. I understood he’d asked you to bring all the stories and articles The Hour had rejected. You see it’s in new hands — my husband’s — and he means to pursue a much broader policy . . . .” (Why was she talking like a magazine prospectus? she asked herself.)
Vance Weston shook his head. “I didn’t bring any of those old things; they’re no good. The Hour was dead right to refuse them.”
“Oh — ” she exclaimed, surprised and interested. It was a new sound in that room — the voice of honest self-disparagement! She looked at him with a rising eagerness, noting again the breadth of his forehead, and the bold upward cut of the nostrils, and the strong planting of his thickish nose between the gray eyes, set so deeply and widely apart.
“Authors are not always the best judges. Perhaps what you think no good might be just what a critic would admire.”
“No, that man Frenside’s a critic, isn’t he? Anyhow, the objections he made were right every time; I know they were.” He spoke firmly, but without undue humility. “My head’s always full of subjects, of course. But he said I hadn’t accumulated enough life-stuff to build ’em with; and I know that’s right. And I know I can do a lot better now. That’s why I want to get to work at once.”
She felt disappointed, foreseeing her husband’s disappointment. It would have given him such acute satisfaction to reverse one of Frenside’s judgments! “You think by this time you’ve accumulated the life-stuff?” Her tone was faintly ironical.
“Well,” he said with simplicity, “I guess time keeps on doing that — the months and years. They ought to. I’m three years older, and things have happened to me. I can see further into my subjects now.”
She noticed the lighting up of his eyes when he began to speak of his writing, and felt herself more remote from him than ever. She longed to know if he remembered nothing of their talks and she rejoined more gently: “I suppose it seems a long time to you since you read your poems to me on Thundertop.”
“Yes, it does,” he said. “But you taught me a lot that day that I haven’t forgotten — and at the Willows too.” He paused, as if groping for the right phrase. “I guess you were the first to show me what there was in books.”
The joyous colour rushed to her face. At last he had recovered the voice of the other Vance! “Ah, I was young then too,” she said with a wistful laugh.
“Young? I guess you’re young still.” Relapsing into friendly bluntness, he added: “I’m only twenty-two.”
“And I’m old enough to be your mother!”
“Say — I guess you’re about twenty-five, aren’t you?”
She shook her head with a mournful grimace. “You must add one whole year to that. And such heaps and heaps of useless experience! I don’t even know how to turn it into stories. But tell me — haven’t you at least brought one with you today?”
“A story? No, I haven’t brought anything.”
She sat silent, inconceivably disappointed. “Shall I make a confession? I hoped you’d want me to see something of yours . . . after all our talks . . . .”
“Well, I do; but I want to be sure it’s good enough.” He moved away from the fire and held out his hand. “I want to go right home now and write something. This is generally my best hour.”
She put her hand reluctantly in his. “I suppose I mustn’t keep you then. But you’ll come back? Come whenever you feel that I might help.”
“Surely,” he said with his rare smile; she was not sure she had ever seen him smile before. It made him look more boyish than ever. “I suppose I can see your husband on Monday?” he added.
Yes, she thought he could; but she repeated severely that he must be sure to telephone and make an appointment. “Editors are busy people, you know, Vance,” she added rather maternally, slipping back into her old way of addressing him. “If you make another appointment you must be sure to keep it — be on the stroke, I mean. My husband was rather surprised at your not coming yesterday, at your not even sending word. His time is — precious.”
He met this with a youthful seriousness. “Yes, I presume he would be annoyed; but he won’t be when I’ve explained. I couldn’t help it, you see; I had to see the girl I’m going to marry before I did anything else.”
Halo drew back a step and looked at him with startled eyes. She felt as if something she had been resting on had given way under her. “You’re going to marry?”
“Yes,” he said, with illuminated eyes. “That’s the reason I’ve got to get to work as quick as I can. I guess your husband’ll understand that. And I’ll be sure to be at the office whatever time he wants me on Monday.”
When he had gone Hélo?se Tarrant sat down alone and looked into the fire.
Tarrant did not reappear till Monday evening. He had telephoned to his wife from Boston that on returning to New York he would go straight to the office of The Hour, and that she was not to expect him till dinner. They were dining alone at home, and she had already got into her tea gown and was waiting to hear his latchkey before ringing for dinner. She knew that Lewis, who liked to arrive late when he chose, also liked his food to be as perfectly cooked as when he was on time; and she sometimes felt despairingly that only her mother could have dealt with such a problem.
He came in, hurried and animated, with the slight glow which took the chill from his face when things were prospering. “All he wants to make him really handsome,” his wife mused, “is to have real things to do.”
“Hullo, my dear; not late, am I? Well, put off dinner a bit, will you? I’ve been on the jump ever since I left. Here’s something to amuse you while I’m changing.” He threw a manuscript into her lap, and she saw Vance Weston’s name across the page.
“Oh, Lewis! He turned up, then?”
“He condescended to, yes — about an hour ago.”
“Well — is it good? You’ve had time to read it?”
Little non-committal wrinkles formed themselves about his smile as he stood looking down at her. “Yes, I’ve read it; but I’d rather wait till you have before I tell you what I think. I want your unbiassed opinion — and I also want to jump into my bath.” The door closed on him, and she sat absently fingering the pages on her knee. How well she knew that formula: “Your unbiassed opinion.” What it meant was, invariably, that he wasn’t sure of himself, that he wanted someone else to support his view, or even to provide him with one. After that his judgments would ring out with such authority that people said: “One good thing about Tarrant is that he always knows his own mind.”
Hélo?se sent the cook a disarming message — she knew how long it took Lewis to dress. Then she drew her armchair to the lamp. She was aware, as she began to read, of a certain listlessness. Was it possible that her opinion would not be as unbiassed as her husband supposed? Had she felt an interest in Vance’s literary career only because she hoped to renew her old relation with the eager boy who had touched her imagination, to resume the part of monitress and muse which she had played during their long sessions at the Willows? When he had said: “You were the first to show me what there was in books,” her contracted heart had glowed and unfolded; when, a moment later, he told her he was engaged, and she had seen an unknown figure intrude between them, something in her shrank back, a door was closed. Well, why not? She was lonely; she had looked forward to the possibility of such comradeship as he might give her. But though she had been fated to disappointment that was surely not a reason for feeling less interest in his work. . . . As she took up the manuscript she tried to arouse in herself the emotion she had felt a few days earlier, when her eyes lit on the opening paragraph of “One Day.”
The new tale was different; less vehement, less emotional, above all less personal. Was he already arriving at an attitude of detachment from his subject? If so, Halo knew, Frenside would see a future novelist in him. “If he goes on retailing the successive chapters of his own history, as they happen to him, they’ll be raw autobiography, or essays disguised as novels; but not real novels. And he probably won’t be able to keep it up long.” That would be what Frenside would say in such a case. It was his unalterable conviction that the “me-book,” as he called it, however brilliant, was at best sporadic, with little reproductive power. Well, the charge of subjectivity could hardly be brought against the tale she had just read. Boy as he was, the writer had moved far enough away from his subject to see several sides of it. And it was an odd story to have interested a beginner. It was called “Unclaimed,” and related an episode brought about by the sending home of the bodies of American soldiers fallen in France. Myra Larcom, the beauty of her prairie village, had become engaged in 1917 to Ben Purchase, a schoolmate and neighbour. Ben Purchase was killed at the front, and Myra became the heroine as well as the beauty of Green Lick, which happened to have no other fallen son to mourn. When the government offered to restore its dead soldiers to their families for burial, Myra of course accepted. Her Ben was an orphan, with no relations near enough to assume the expense of his translation; and besides, she said, she would never have allowed anyone else to have the privilege. . . . But the dead heroes were slow in returning. Months passed, and before there was any news of the warrior’s approach, another hero — and alive — had come back and won her. It appeared that her engagement to Ben Purchase had been a last-minute affair, the result of a moonlight embrace the night he started; indeed, she was no longer very sure that there had been an actual engagement; and when at length his body reached New York there was no one to claim it; and no one to pay for its transport, much less for the funeral and gravestone. But Tullia Larcom, Myra’s elder sister, had always been secretly in love with Ben, though he had never given her a glance. She was a plain girl, a predestined old maid, the drudge and butt of the family. She had put by a little money as the village seamstress, but not much — there were so many demands on her. And it turned out to be an expensive business — a terribly expensive business — to bring home and bury a dead hero. And the longer you left him in the care of his grateful government the more expensive it became. . . . “Unclaimed” was the simple and unsentimental relation of how Tullia Larcom managed to bring Ben Purchase’s body back to Green Lick and give him a grave and a headstone. . . . When Halo finished reading she had forgotten about her husband, forgotten about the cook, forgotten even about her own little emotional flutter over Vance Weston. . . . All her thoughts were with Tullia at Ben Purchase’s grave . . . .
“How did he know . . . how did he know?” she murmured to herself. And the fact that he did know seemed warrant of future achievement.
“Halo, are you never coming?” her husband’s voice called from the dining room. “You seem to forget that a hard day’s work makes a fellow hungry . . . .”
At dinner he went into all sorts of details about his new printing contract, and his interviews in Boston, where he had gone to secure various literary collaborations. All that he said was interesting to Halo. She began to see that The Hour would bring a new breath of life into her world as well as her husband’s. It would be exciting to get hold of the budding geniuses; and once she had let Lewis discover them, she knew they would be handed over to her to be tamed and amused. She had inherited her mother’s liking for the company of clever people, people who were doing things and making things, and she saw the big room in which she now spent so many solitary hours peopled by a galaxy of new authors and artists, gathered together under the banner of The Hour.
“If only nobody calls it a SALON Lewis won’t mind,” she thought.
There was so much to hear and to say that Vance Weston was not mentioned again till dinner was over and they returned to the library. Tarrant lit his cigar and settled down in his own particular easy chair, which had a broad shelf for his coffee cup and ashtray. “Well, how does it strike you?” he said, nodding in the direction of the manuscript.
“Oh, Lewis, you’ve discovered a great novelist!” She prided herself on the tactfulness of the formula; but enthusiasm for others was apt to excite her husband’s suspicions, even when it implied praise for himself.
“Novelist? Well — we’ll let the future take care of itself. But this particular thing — ”
“I think it’s remarkable. The simplicity, the unselfconsciousness . . . .”
“H’m.” He puffed at his cigar and threw back his head in meditation. “To begin with, war stories are a drug in the market.”
She flashed back: “Whose market?” and he replied, with a hint of irritation: “You know perfectly well that we can’t afford to disregard entirely what the public wants.”
“I thought you were going to teach it what it ought to want.”
As this phrase was taken from his own prospectus it was too unanswerable to be welcome, and his frown deepened. “Little by little — certainly. But anyhow, doesn’t it strike you that this story — which has its points, of course — is . . . well, rather lacking in relief? A trifle old-fashioned . . . humdrum? The very title tells you what it’s about.”
“And you want to have it called ‘What Time Chronos?’ or ‘Ants and Archangels’?” She broke off, remembering the risk of accusing him of wanting anything but the rarest and highest. “Of course I know what you mean . . . but isn’t there another point of view? I mean for a review like The Hour? Why not try giving your readers the exact opposite of what all the other on-the-spot editors are straining to provide? Something quiet, logical, Jane Austen-y . . . obvious, almost? A reaction from the universal paradox? At the very moment when even Home and Mother is feeding its million readers with a novel called Jerks and Jazzes, it strikes me that the newest note to sound might be the very quiet — something beginning: ‘In the year 1920 there resided in the industrial city of P—— a wealthy manufacturer of the name of Brown . . . .’ That’s one of the reasons why I’ve taken such a fancy to Vance’s story.”
Adroitly as she had canalized her enthusiasm, she did not expect an immediate response. She knew that what she had said must first be transposed and become his own. He laughed at her tirade, and said he’d make a note of her titles anyhow — they were too good to be lost; but the fact remained that, for the opening number of The Hour under its new management, he thought they ought to have something rather more showy. But he’d think it over . . . he’d told Weston to come back in a day or two. “Queer devil — says he wrote the thing white hot, in forty-eight hours after getting here; must be about ten thousand words. . . . And it jogs along so soberly.”
The bell rang, and Halo said: “That must be Frenny.” Frenside was incapable of spending an evening alone. His life of unsettled aspirations and inconsecutive work made conversation a necessity to him as soon as he had shaken off the daily task, and he often drifted in to sit with Halo for an hour after his club or restaurant dinner.
He entered with his usual dragging step, stooping and somewhat heavier, but with the same light smouldering under the thick lids behind his eyeglasses.
“Hallo, Lewis — didn’t know you were back,” he grumbled as Tarrant got up to welcome him.
“There’s a note of disappointment in your voice,” his host bantered. “If you were led to think you’d find Halo alone I advise you to try another private enquiry man.”
“Would, if they weren’t so expensive,” Frenside bantered back, settling down into the armchair that Tarrant pushed forward. “But never mind — let’s hear about the new Hour. (Why not rechristen it that, by the way?) Have you come back with an argosy?”
“Well, I’ve done fairly well.” Tarrant liked to dole out his news in guarded generalities. “But I’m inclined to think the best of my spoils may be here at your elbow. Remember how struck I was by that story, ‘One Day,’ by the boy from the West whose other things you turned down so unmercifully?”
“Not unmercifully — lethally. What about him?”
“Only that I rather believe he’s going to make people sit up. I’ve got something of his here that strikes an entirely new note — ”
“ANOTHER?” Frenside groaned.
Tarrant’s lips narrowed; but after a moment he went on: “Yes, the phrase is overworked. But I don’t use it in the blurb sense. This boy has had the nerve to go back to a quiet, almost old-fashioned style: no jerks, no paradoxes — not even afraid of lingering over his transitions; why, even the title . . .”
Halo, mindful of Frenside’s expectation of a whiskey and soda, rose and went into the dining room to remind the maid. She reflected, not ill-humouredly, that it would be easier for Lewis to get through with the business of appropriating her opinions if she stayed out of hearing while he was doing it; and she lingered a few minutes, musing pleasurably over the interest of their editorial venture, and of the part Vance Weston might be going to play in it. She had believed in him from the first; and her heart exulted at the thought that he was already fulfilling his promise.
“If he keeps up to this standard he may be the making of The Hour; and when he finds himself an important literary figure he’ll take a different view of his future. We’re not likely ever to hear of his engagement again,” she thought, irresistibly reassured; and she decided that she must manage, as often as possible, to keep an evening free for their Dante readings. When Lewis went to his men’s dinners it would be easy . . . .
As she re-entered the library she heard Frenside’s gruff laugh, and her husband saying: “Damned cheek, eh? Just told me in so many words he couldn’t come to the office that day because he had to go and see his girl. . . . Seems the poor devil’s going to be married; and who do you suppose she is? Why, one of those down-at~the-heel Tracys at Paul’s Landing. . . . Halo, my dear, did you know you were going to have your new genius for a cousin?”
“Where are we going? You’ll see,” Vance said with a confident laugh.
He stood with Laura Lou on the doorstep of a small gingerbread~coloured house in a rustic-looking street bordered with similar habitations. Her bare hand lay on his sleeve, and the gold band on her fourth finger seemed to catch and shoot back all the fires of the morning.
It was one of those windless December days when May is in the air, and it seems strange not to see grass springing and buds bursting. The rutty street lay golden before Vance and Laura Lou, and as they came out of the Methodist minister’s house they seemed to be walking straight into the sun.
Vance had made all his plans, but had imparted them to no one, not even to his bride. The religious ceremony, it was true, had been agreed on beforehand, as a concession to her prejudices, and to her fear of her mother. When Mrs. Tracy learned of the marriage it must appear to have been performed with proper solemnity. Not that Vance had become irreligious; but, since his elementary course in philosophy had shown him that the religion he thought he had invented was simply a sort of vague pantheism, and went back in its main lines to the dawn of metaphysics, he had lost interest in the subject, or rather in his crude vision of it. What he wanted now was to learn what others had imagined, far back in the beginnings of thought; and he could see no relation between the colossal dreams and visions amid which his mind was moving and the act of standing up before a bilious-looking man with gold teeth, in a room with a Rogers statuette on the sideboard, and repeating after him a patter of words about God and Laura Lou — and having to pay five dollars for it.
Well, it was over now, and didn’t much matter anyhow; and everything to come after was still his secret. Laura Lou had not been inconveniently curious: she had behaved like a good little girl before the door opens on the Christmas tree. It was enough for her, Vance knew, to stand there looking up at him, her hand on his arm, his ring on her finger; from that moment everything she was, or wanted, was immersed and lost in himself. But his own plans had been elaborately worked out; he was in the state of lucid ecstasy when no material detail seems too insignificant to be woven into the pattern of one’s bliss.
“Come,” he said, “there’s just time to catch the train.” They hurried along the straggling streets of the little Long Island town, and reached the station as the last passengers were scrambling to their places. They found two seats at one end of the car, where they could sit, hand locked in hand, while the train slid through interminable outskirts and finally reached an open region of trees and fields. For a while neither spoke. Laura Lou, her head slightly turned toward the window, was watching the landscape slip by with a wide-eyed attention, so that Vance caught only the curve of her cheek and the light shining through the curls about her ear. There was something almost rigidly attentive in her look and attitude, as though she were a translucent vessel so brimming with happiness that she feared to move or speak lest it should overflow. The fear communicated itself to him, and as they sat there, hand in hand, he felt as if they were breathlessly watching a magic bird poised just before them, which the least sound might put to flight. “My dove,” he thought, “we’re watching my dove . . . .”
At length she turned and said in a whisper (as if not to frighten the dove): “Mother’ll come home soon and find the letter.”
He pressed her hand more tightly. The letter was the one she had written to tell Mrs. Tracy that she was not going to marry Bunty Hayes — that she would already be married to Vance when her mother opened the letter. She had been utterly unable to find words to break the news, and Vance had had to tell her what to say. In the note he had put a hundred-dollar bill, on which was pinned a slip of paper with the words: “On account of B. Hayes’s loan.” For the idea of the thousand-dollar loan, which Bunty Hayes had made to poor Mrs. Tracy to enable her to send Laura Lou to school, was a torture to Vance. The Hour had paid two hundred dollars for “Unclaimed,” and he had instantly enclosed half the amount in Laura Lou’s letter. It was perhaps not exactly the moment to introduce the question of money; but Vance could suffer no delay. He hoped to wipe out the debt within two or three months; then the last shadow would be lifted from his happiness. Meanwhile it had tranquillized him to do what he could.
“Oh, look — the sea!” cried Laura Lou; and there it was, beyond scrub oak and sandhills, a distant flash of light under a still sky without clouds. Vance’s heart swelled; but he turned his eyes back to Laura Lou, and said, with seeming indifference: “That’s nothing . . . .”
The gleam vanished; the train jogged on again between trees and fields. Houses cropped up, singly, then in groups, then in streets; the train slowed down by rural platforms, people got in and out. An hour later, as the usual clanking and jarring announced another halt, Vance said: “Here!” He reached for their joint suitcase, took Laura Lou by the arm, and pushed her excitedly toward the door. A minute later they were standing on a shabby platform, while the train swung off again and left them alone in a world of shanties and sandhills. “We’ll have to walk,” Vance explained, picking up the suitcase, which seemed to him to weigh no more than a feather. As soon as they had left the station every rut of the road, every tussock of grass and hunched-up scrub oak cowering down against the wind, started up familiarly before him. If he lived to be a thousand, he thought, he would never forget an inch of that road.
Laura Lou seemed to have cast aside her apprehensions. She swung along beside him, saying now and then: “Where are we going?” and laughing contentedly at his joyous: “You’ll see.” There was no sense of winter in the air; but as they advanced a breath of salt and seaweed made their faces tingle, and Vance, drawn by it, started into a run. “There’s not a minute to lose!” he called back; and Laura Lou raced after him, stumbling on her high heels among the sandy ruts. They scrambled on, speechless with haste, drunk with sun and air and their own hearts; and presently he dragged her up the last hillock, and there lay the ocean. He had sworn to himself that one day he would come back and see it with the girl he loved; but he had not known that the girl would be Laura Lou. He felt a little awed to think that the hand of Destiny had been on his shoulder even then; and as he gazed at the heaving silver reaches he wondered if they had known all the while where he was going, and if now they saw the path that lay ahead.
When, three years earlier, he had come down in summer to that same beach, lonely, half starved, dazed with discouragement, fevered from overwork, the sea had been a gray tumult under a sunless sky; now, on this December day, it flashed with summer fires. “Like my life,” he thought, putting out his arm to draw Laura Lou to the ridge on which he sat. “There,” he said, his cheek on hers, “there’s where our bird’s mother was born.”
Her bewildered eyes turned to him under their hummingbird lashes. “Our bird’s mother?”
“Venus, darling. Didn’t you know the dove belonged to Venus? Didn’t you know Venus was our goddess, and that she was born out of the waves, and came up all over foam? And that you look so like her that I feel as if you’d just been blown in on one of those silver streamers, and they might pull you back any minute if I didn’t hold tight onto you?” He suited the act to the words with a vehemence that made her laugh out in rosy confusion: “Vance, I never did hear such things as you make up about people.”
He laughed back and held her fast; but already his thoughts had wandered again to the ever-heaving welter of silver. “God, I wish a big gale would blow up this very minute — I’d give anything to see all those millions and millions of waves rear up and wrestle with each other.”
Laura Lou shivered. “I guess we’d be frozen if they did.”
“Why — are you cold?” he wondered, remembering how, as afternoon fell, she had grown pale and shivered in the garden of the Willows.
She shook her head, nestling down against him. “No — but I’m hungry, I believe.”
“Hungry? Ye gods! So am I. You bright child, how did you find out?” He caught her close again, covering with kisses her eyes and lips and her softly beating throat.
He had pitched the suitcase down at their feet, and he stooped to open it, and pulled out a greasy-looking parcel. “What about picnicking here? I’ve always wanted to have the wild waves at my wedding party.” He was unwrapping, and spreading out on the sand, beef sandwiches, slices of sausage and sticky cake, cheese, a bunch of grapes and a custard pie, all more or less mixed up with each other; and he and Laura Lou fell on them with hungry fingers. At last she declared: “Oh, Vance, we mustn’t eat any more — oh, no, no, I COULDN’T . . .” but he continued to press the food on her, and as her lips opened to morsel after morsel the returning glow whipped her cheeks to carmine. Then he dug again into the suitcase, extracted a half bottle of champagne and a corkscrew — and looked about him desperately for glasses. “Oh, hell, what’ll I do? Oh, child, there’s nothing for us to drink it out of!”
Rocking with laughter, she followed the pantomime of his despair. But suddenly he sprang up, slid down the hillock, and running along the beach came back with a big empty shell. “Here — our goddess sends you this! She sailed ashore in a shell, you know.” He flourished it before her, and then bade her hold it in both hands, while she laughed and laughed at his vain struggles with the corkscrew and the champagne bottle. Finally he gave up and knocked off the neck of the bottle, and the golden foam came spiring and splashing into the shell and over their hands. “Oh, Vance . . . oh, Vance . . .” She tilted her head back and put her lips to the fluted rim, and he thought he had never seen anything lovelier than the pulse beat in her throat when the wine ran down. “Ever taste anything like that?” he asked, licking his fingers; and she giggled: “No, nothing, only ginger ale,” and sat and watched while he refilled their chalice and drank from it, carefully putting his lips where hers had been. “It’s like a gale of wind and with the sun in it — that’s what it’s like,” he declared. He did not confess to her that it was also his first taste of champagne; unconsciously he had already decided that part of his duty as a husband was to be older and stronger than she was, and to know more than she did about everything.
“Here’s our house,” Vance said, swinging her hand to cheer her up. He knew by her dragging step that the walk had seemed long to her. To him it had appeared, all the way from the beach to the cluster of deserted buildings they were approaching, as if the racing waves had carried him. But he forced himself to walk slowly, taking his first lesson in the duty of keeping step.
The house, a mere shanty, had a projecting porch roof which gave it a bungalow look. When Vance, bitten with the idea of spending his honeymoon by the sea, had hunted up the kindly manager at Friendship House, the latter, amazed and then diverted at the idea — “Land alive — in December?” — had said, why yes, he didn’t know why Vance shouldn’t have the keys of the bungalow where the camp manager and his wife stayed when the camp was open. The camp had been run up near a farm, for the convenience of being in reach of milk and country produce, and he guessed the farmer’s wife would put some fuel in the bungalow, and see if the old stove would draw. They could get milk from her too, he thought, and maybe they could take their meals at the farm. She was pretty good-natured, and at that time of year she might like a little company for a change.
Once in most lives things turn out as the dreamer dreamed them. This was Vance’s day, and when he pushed open the door there was the stove, with a pile of wood and some scraps of coal ready for lighting, and a jug of milk and loaf of bread on the table. The bare boarded room, which looked like the inside of a bathhouse, was as clean as if it had been recently scoured, and the drift of sand and crinkled seaweed on the floor merely suggested that a mermaid might have done the cleaning. Vance laughed aloud for joy. “Oh, Laura Lou, isn’t it great?”
She stood on the threshold, looking shyly about her, and he turned and drew her in. The table bearing the provisions carried also a candle in a tin candlestick; and against the wall stood a sort of trestle bed with two pillows and a coarse brown blanket. Two kitchen chairs, a handful of broken crockery on a shelf, a cracked looking glass, and a pile of old baskets and cracker boxes in a corner completed the furniture. Over the bed hung a tattered calendar, of which the last page to be uncovered was dated September 15, and bore the admonition: Little Children, Love One Another.
Vance burst out laughing; then, seeing a faint tremor about Laura Lou’s lips, he said: “See here, you sit down while I get at the fire.” He began to fear their frail shanty might be too cold for her as night fell; and he dropped on his knees and set to work cramming fuel into the stove. Decidedly it was his day; the fire lit, the stovepipe drew. But as he knelt before it he felt a faint anxiety. Laura Lou sat behind him. She had not spoken since they had entered the shanty, and he wondered if she had felt a shock of disappointment. Perhaps she had expected a cosy overheated room in a New York or Philadelphia hotel, with white sheets on the bed and running water — oh, God, he thought suddenly, how the hell were they going to get washed? There wasn’t a basin or pitcher, much less soap or towel. In summer, no doubt, the manager and his wife just ran down to the sea for a dip. . . . Vance began to be afraid to look around. At length he heard a sound behind him and felt Laura Lou’s hands on his shoulders. He turned without rising, and her face, flushed and wet with tears, hung close over him.
“Why, what is it, darling? The place too rough for you — too lonely? You’re sorry we came?” he cried remorsefully.
She gave him a rainbow smile. “I’ll never be sorry where you are.”
“Well, then — ”
“Only I’m so tired,” she said, her voice grown as small as a child’s.
“Of course you are, sweet. Here — wait till I make the bed comfortable and you can lie down.” He shook up the meagre pillows, and after she had taken off her shoes he covered her with her coat and knelt down to chafe her cold feet. She looked so small and helpless, so uncomprehending and utterly thrown on his mercy, that his passion was held in check, and he composed her on the bed with soft fraternal hands. “There — the fire’ll warm the place up in no time; and while you’re resting I’ll step across to the farm and see what I can bring back for supper.”
“Oh, Vance, I don’t want any supper.”
“But I do — and piping hot,” he called back with a factitious gaiety, wondering that he had not guessed the place to take her to would have been a hotel with an imitation marble restaurant, and a good movie next door where she could read her own romance into the screen heroine’s.
He grimaced at the thought, and then, lighting the candle, so that the place might look as cheerful as possible, went out and walked across a stubbly field to the farm. The farmer’s wife, a big good~natured Swedish woman, received him with friendly curiosity. She’d known one or two young fellows to come down as late as December, she said, but she’d never had a honeymoon before. The idea amused her, and she started at once warming up a can of tomato soup, and offered Vance a saucepan to heat the milk for breakfast. While she warmed the soup he sat in the window of the kitchen and looked out to the sea. What a place to live in always — solitude and beauty, and that great unresting Presence calling out night and day with many voices! (“Many voices” — where’d he read that?) There, the woman said; she guessed the soup was good and hot; maybe he’d like some crackers with it? Oh, he could settle when he went away — that was all right. She even rummaged out a tin of prepared coffee, left there with some of the camp stores; he could have that too, and a couple of towels. Soap was more difficult to come by, but she decided that they could have her youngest boy’s, as he was off clamdigging for a week, and no great hand at washing anyhow. Carrying the pot of hot soup carefully, his other supplies in his pockets, Vance walked back through the twilight . . . .
Outside of the door he said softly: “Lou!” There was no answer, and he lifted the latch and went in. The room was dark, except for the cloudy glow through the stove-door and the unsteady candle flicker; at first he had a sense of entering on emptiness. Then he saw that Laura Lou was lying as he had left her, except that she had flung one bare arm above her head. Shading the candle he went up to the bed. Her little face, flushed with the sea wind, and tumbled over with rumpled straw-coloured hair, lay sideways in the bend of her arm. She was sound asleep, the hummingbird lashes resting darkly on her clear cheek with the hollow under it, and her breath coming as softly as if she were in her own bed at home. For the first time Vance felt a faint apprehension at what he had done, at his own inexperience as well as hers, and the uncertainty of the future. He had bound himself fast to this child, he, hardly more than a child himself in knowledge of men and in the mysterious art of getting on . . . and for one stricken instant he asked himself why he had done it. The misgiving just flashed through him; but it left an inward chill. With those other girls he had been tangled up with there had been no time for such conjectures; they sucked him down to them like quick-sands. But now he seemed to be bending over a cool moonlit pool . . . .
“What shall I say,” he thought, “when she wakes?” And, at that moment her lids lifted, and her eyes looked into his. The candle slanted in his shaking hand; but Laura Lou’s face was still. “Oh, Vance . . . I was dreaming about you,” she said, with a little sleep-fringed smile.
About dawn he woke and got up from her side. He moved with infinite caution lest he should disturb her, drawing on his clothes and socks, and picking up his shoes to put them on outside in the porch. From the threshold he looked back. In the pale winter light she lay like a little marble image; the serenity of her attitude seemed to put the whole weight of the adventure on his shoulders, and again he thought: “Why did I do it? What can come of it?” and stood dazed before the locked mystery of his own mind. In those short hours of passion the little girl who had seemed so familiar to him had suddenly become mysterious too; closest part of himself henceforth, yet utterly remote and inexplicable; a woman with a sealed soul, but with a body that clung to his. . . . The misgiving which had passed in a flash the night before now fastened on him with a cold tenacity. “What do I know about her? What does she know about me?” he questioned in a terror of self-scrutiny. He looked at her again, and the startled thought: “What if she were lying there dead?” flashed through his mind. How could such a horrible idea have come to him? In an instant his wild imagination had seized on it, and he saw himself maimed, desolate, crushed — but free. Free to open that door and go out, straight back to his life of two days before, without the awful burden of responsibility he had madly shouldered. . . . The vision lasted but the flicker of a lid, but like lightning at night in an unknown landscape it lit up whole tracts of himself that he had never seen. The horror was so strong that he half turned back to wake her up and dispel it. The faint stir of her breast under her thin nightdress reassured him, and he unlatched the door and went out. . . . Instantly the horror vanished, and as he saw before him the great motionless curves of sea and sky, and thought that all the while they had been there, hushed and secret, encircling his microscopic adventure, a sense of unifying power took possession of him, as it used to in his boyhood. “And all the time there was THAT!” he thought.
He pulled on his shoes and raced down to the sea. The air was still mild, and he stood by the fringe of little waves and looked eastward at the bar of light reddening across the waters. As he stood there, all the shapes of beauty which had haunted his imagination seemed to rise from the sea and draw about him. They swept him upward into the faint dapplings of the morning sky, and he caught, as in a mystic vision, the meaning of beauty, the secret of poetry, the sense of the forces struggling in him for expression. How could he ever have been afraid — afraid of Laura Lou, of fate, of himself? She was the vessel from which he had drunk this divine reassurance, this moment of union with the universe. Whatever happened, however hard and rough the road ahead, he would carry her on his heart like the little cup of his great communion . . . .
For two more balmy days they lingered, ecstatic children, by the sea; but on the third the air freshened. Laura Lou began to cough, and Vance, frightened, packed up their possessions and carried her back to civilization. He had made up his mind to give her twenty~four hours at a New York hotel, with a good evening at the movies or a cabaret show (should her imagination soar so high), after which — though he had not confessed it — he knew no more than she where they were going.
He had no pressing anxiety about money. His mind was teeming with visions, and in his state of overwrought bliss every dream seemed easy to capture and interpret. His preference would have been to sit down by the sea and write an immensely long poem; but he knew that Laura Lou, the inspirer of this desire, was also the insuperable obstacle to its fulfilment. He would write stories instead; after the acceptance of “Unclaimed” he felt no doubt that he could sell as many as he chose. And he had promised, as soon as possible after his marriage, to call on Tarrant, and talk over the plan of becoming a regular contributor to The Hour. Still, to live in New York with Laura Lou would be a costly if not impossible undertaking. She was as much of a luxury as an exotic bird or flower: that she might help him in wage earning or housekeeping had never entered his mind. He had simply wanted her past endurance, and now he had her; and exquisite as the possession was, he was abruptly faced with the cost of it.
He found a hotel showy enough to dazzle her without being too exorbitantly dear; and they had dinner in a sham marble restaurant where every masculine eye was turned to them, and she glowed in innocent enjoyment of the warmth and light, and the glory of sitting with him, as his wife, at a pink-candle-shaded table. Afterward, with a charming assumption of superiority, she decided on a theatre rather than the pictures. It was a good deal more expensive — but, hang it, he’d write another story: it was wonderful, how the unwritten stories were accumulating on the shelves of his mental library. It was he who selected the play: Romeo and Juliet, with a young actress, tragically lovely, as Juliet; and presently they were seated in the fashionable audience, Vance with mind and eye riveted on the stage, Laura Lou obviously puzzled by the queer words the actors used and the length of their speeches, and stealing covert glances (when what was going on became too incomprehensible) at the fashionable clothes and exquisitely waved heads all about them. Between the acts she sat silent, brimming with a happy excitement, her hand close in her husband’s, as if that contact were the only clue to life. As at the restaurant, many glances were drawn to her small head with its silvery-blonde ripples and the tender moulding of brow and cheek; but Vance saw that she was wholly unaware of attracting attention, and enclosed in his nearness as in a crystal world of her own.
Gradually this barrier was penetrated by what was happening on the stage: the beauty of the young actress, the compelling music of the words, seemed to stir in Laura Lou some confused sense of doom, and Vance felt her anguished clutch on his arm. “Oh, Vanny, I’m sure it’s going to end bad,” she whispered, and a tear formed on her lashes and trembled down.
“You darling — ” he breathed back, wondering why on earth he had chosen Romeo and Juliet for a honeymoon outing; but when the tragedy rose and broke on them he saw that even her tears, now flowing in a silver stream, were part of the happiness in which she was steeped to the weeping lashes. “It’s too dreadful . . . it’s too lovely . . .” she moaned alternately as the play moved deathward, and with a furtive movement she dried her wet cheek against his sleeve. And brooding on those beautiful dead lovers they went home to another night of love.
The next morning Vance presented himself at the office of The Hour. As he sprang up the stairs he almost ran into Frenside, who was coming slowly down. The older man stopped and looked at him curiously.
“Going up to settle about your job?”
“Well, I hope so, sir.”
“All right. Good luck.” Frenside nodded and passed on. From a lower step he turned to call back: “I wouldn’t tie yourself up too far ahead — especially your fiction.”
Vance, new at such transactions, stared a moment, not quite understanding.
“Keep free — keep free as long as you can,” Frenside repeated, hobbling down with a heavy rap of his stick on each step. And Vance turned in to the office.
He found a cordial welcome from Tarrant. Everybody on the staff had read “Unclaimed,” and great hopes were founded on its appearance in the coming number. Tarrant produced cigarettes and cocktails, and introduced Eric Rauch, the assistant editor. Eric Rauch was a glib young Jew with beautiful eyes and a responsive smile, who had published an obscure volume of poetry: Voodoo, and a much talked-of collection of social studies: Say When. For the first time Vance found himself talking with an author, and treated by him as one of the tribe. When Rauch said: “You’ve struck out on a new line,” the praise rushed through Vance like fire, and he longed to hurry back to the hotel and tell Laura Lou. But what would it have meant to her?
After these agreeable preliminaries Tarrant looked at his watch, said: “Half-past one, by Jove — and I’m due at the Century, to lunch with old Willsdon.” Willsdon, the historian, had promised The Hour an article on “A New Aspect of Benjamin Franklin,” and Tarrant hurried off, saying: “You and Eric’ll be able to fix up details. Come round again soon, won’t you?”
Eric Rauch proposed that Vance should lunch with him at the Cocoanut Tree, a nearby lunchroom, and they walked there, Vance’s steps dancing down the street as if the dull pavement were the seashore. Talking to a fellow like Rauch was something as new to him as his first sight of the ocean, and almost as exciting . . . .
At the Cocoanut Tree they met other fellows who were writing or painting, or doing something with the arts. To Vance, whose horizon had greatly widened in the interval since his first visit to New York, the names of two or three of the older men were familiar; but the ones Rauch took most seriously — vanguard fellows, he explained — who looked as youthful as Vance himself, the latter had never heard of. They all greeted him good-humouredly, and one, a critic named Redman, said: “See here, when are you going to give us a novel?”
“The Hour’s going to see to that,” Rauch rejoined briskly; and another young man, with bruised eyelids in a sallow illumined face, and a many-syllabled name ending in “ovsky,” adjured Vance with ardent Slav gestures: “For God’s sake tackle something big — colossal — cosmic — get away from the village pump . . .” while a shabbily dressed girl with a greasy mop of black hair and bold gay eyes pushed up to the table, exclaiming: “Eric, why don’t you introduce me? I’m the sculptress Rebecca Stram, and I want to do your head one of these days,” she explained to Vance.
“Well, I guess you will, if you want to,” said Rauch humorously; “only let the poor devil have something to eat before you begin to feel his bumps.”
It all sent a novel glow through Vance, and he thought how wonderful life would be, spent among these fellows who talked of art as freely and familiarly as his father did of real estate deals. Eric Rauch explained who they were, what they had written or painted or carved (“That Stram girl — she’s a regular headhunter; bright idea, doing all the newcomers . . .”), and which ones were likely to “get there.” For the first time Vance was inducted into the world of literary competitions and rewards. Eric Rauch said there was a big campaign on already for this year’s Pulsifer Prize; hadn’t Vance heard of it? Best short story of the year . . . Two thousand dollars; and of course The Hour was going to try for it for “Unclaimed.” “And, by the way, what have you got on the stocks now?” And then the business talk began.
Rauch said he had been charged by Tarrant to come to an understanding with Weston. They believed in him at The Hour — their policy was forward-looking; they wanted to make their own discoveries, not to butt in where somebody else had already staked out a claim. Weston, now — he wouldn’t mind Rauch’s saying frankly that as a writer he was utterly unknown? Because, unluckily, owing to muddle-headed mismanagement, his first story, “One Day,” had been allowed to fall flat, drop out of sight as completely as if it had never been written. And they would have to build up his reputation all over again with “Unclaimed,” which, they thought, was quite as remarkable as the other; though of course they couldn’t guarantee the public’s taking to it, with the silly prejudice there was against war stories. Anyhow, it was a good gamble, and they were glad to risk it. And to prove their faith in Weston, they were willing to go farther; willing to take an option on his whole output, articles, short stories and novels, for the next three years. Rauch didn’t know if Weston realized what a chance that was for a beginner, who — well, wasn’t in a position, let’s say, to order himself an eight-cylinder Cadillac . . . for the present, anyhow . . . .
But Tarrant wanted to do more. He understood that Weston was just married, and he knew that when a man takes on domestic responsibilities there’s nothing like a steady job, even a small one, for making his mind easy. The Hour therefore proposed to let Vance try his hand at a monthly article on current literary events. They’d find a racy title, and let him have full swing — no editorial interference if the first articles took. A fresh eye and personal views were what they were after — none of the old mummified traditions. And for those twelve articles they would guarantee him a salary of fifteen hundred a year for three years, without prejudice to what he earned by his fiction: say a hundred and fifty for the next two stories after “Unclaimed,” and double that for the following year, if he would guarantee three stories a year, or possibly four. Only, of course, he was to pledge himself not to write for any other paper or publisher — no other publisher, because The Hour’s solicitude included an arrangement for book publication with their own publishers, Dreck and Saltzer. Tarrant had gone into all that so that Weston should be able to get to work at once, free from business worries. He’d had some difficulty in getting a publisher to look at it that way and sign for three years, but he’d fought it out with them, and as Dreck and Saltzer were great believers in The Hour they’d finally agreed, and had the contract ready. “So now all you’ll have to do is to lie back and turn out masterpieces,” Rauch cheerfully concluded, lighting a final cigarette. “Say though, it’s pretty near time to get back to the office,” he added, with a glance at his watch. “Shall we go now and settle things on the spot?”
Vance sat flushed and brooding, his brows drawn together in the effort to calculate his yearly income on the basis suggested. Figures always puzzled him, and a fortnight earlier he would have acquiesced at once, to get rid of troublesome preliminaries. But with Laura Lou in the background it was different. . . . He tried writing out the figures mentally on the tablecloth, but when it came to adding them up they became blurred and vanished . . . .
“Well, I guess that wouldn’t total up to much over two thousand dollars a year, would it?” he ventured, trying to give his voice a businesslike sound.
Erich Rauch arched his eyebrows in a way that signified: “Well — for a beginner? For a gamble?” Then, as Vance was silent, he threw off: “There’s nothing to prevent your writing a novel, you know.”
“What would you give me for a novel?” Vance asked.
Eric Rauch’s eyebrows flattened themselves out meditatively. “What sort of a novel would you give us?” Then, with a laugh: “See here, I don’t see that we need look as far ahead just yet. . . . A novel takes time; but meanwhile there’s the Pulsifer Prize, don’t forget. We’re going to put up a big fight to get that for you.”
Vance looked at him, perplexed. The Pulsifer Prize — two thousand dollars for the best short story of the year! He could pay off Bunty Hayes at a stroke, and live on Easy Street with the balance . . . buy Laura Lou some pretty clothes, and have time to think over subjects, and look round. . . . His heart beat excitedly. . . . But what could The Hour do about it? he asked.
“Why, boom you for all we’re worth. You can get even a short story into the limelight nowadays with money. And we mean to spend money on ‘Unclaimed.’”
“But I don’t understand. Who gives this Pulsifer Prize anyhow?”
“Oh, a rich society woman: widow of old Pulsifer, the railroad man. It’s the event of her life — ”
“Why, does she award the prize herself?”
“Bless you, no: it’s done the usual way. Bunch of highbrows as judges.” Rauch paused, and added with his exquisite smile: “Even judges are human . . . .” He let the rest of the smile drift away through his cigarette spirals.
Vance understood and winced. The use of the business vocabulary was what he recoiled from. That there should be “deals,” transactions, compromises in business was a matter of course to him. That WAS business, as he understood it; his father’s life was a labyrinth of such underground arrangements. But Vance had never taken any interest in business, or heard applied to it the standards of loyalty which are supposed to regulate men’s private lives, and which he had always thought of as prevailing in the republic of letters. To him an artist’s work was essentially a part of the private life, something closer than the marrow to the bone. Any thing that touched the sanctity, the incorruptibility, of the creative art was too contemptible to be seriously considered. As well go back to doing write-ups for the Free Speaker. . . . Vance looked at the clever youth behind the smoke wreaths, and thought: “Queer that a fellow who writes poetry can care for that sort of success . . .” for the poets seemed to him hardly lower than the angels.
He said curtly that he didn’t care a darn for prizes, and Eric rejoined: “Not for two-thousand-dollar ones?”
Vance, a little dizzy, nevertheless echoed: “Not a darn — ”
“Well, The Hour does, then. It’s something you owe us if we take you on — see? A beginner . . . Everything’s a question of give and take . . . fair play. Not that I mean . . . of course little O’Fallery may pull off the prize anyhow, with ‘Limp Collars.’ Shouldn’t wonder if he did. His publisher’s hustling round for him — I know that. And we don’t guarantee anything . . . See?”
The last phrase brought a vague reassurance to Vance. Of course they couldn’t guarantee anything . . . of course little O’Fallery might get the prize. Vance had read “Limp Collars,” and thought it well-named . . . pretty poor stuff. . . . Seemed a pity. . . . Anyhow, he saw with relief that he must have misunderstood Rauch. Of course The Hour wasn’t going to try to corrupt the judges — what an absurdity! They were simply going to direct public opinion: that was what “limelight” meant. Any fellow’s publisher had a right to commend his goods . . . .
Laura Lou had been captivated by a girl who sat near them at the theatre in a peach-coloured silk . . . or lace, or something . . . not a patch on Laura Lou, the girl wasn’t, but even Vance could see there was a look about the dress. . . . His Laura Lou! There wouldn’t be one of ’em could touch her if only he could give her togs like that . . . .
“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 . . .”
He shut his eyes on the vision and thought: “And yet even the ones that look like that want finery!”
“Of course I’d like that prize first-rate,” he mumbled.
“Well, I guess it’s yours — on the merit of the story alone. Only, our job is to get that merit known,” Eric Rauch explained patiently, as they rose to get their hats and coats. They walked back together to the office, and before Vance left he had signed the two contracts which lay ready for him on Tarrant’s desk: one surrendering to The Hour all his serial rights for three years, the other pledging him for the same period of time to Dreck and Saltzer for book publication.
On the way downstairs, late in the afternoon, he remembered meeting Frenside coming down the same stairs in the morning, and recalled his warning: “Keep free.”
“Oh, well,” Vance said to himself, “what’s he made of his life, anyway?” For Frenside already seemed to him as remote as old age and failure. His head was brimming with ideas for his article, and for others to follow, and it was agreed (at his suggestion) that the series should appear under the caption of “The Cocoanut Tree,” in memory of the spot where the bargain had been struck. “I want a tree to climb, to get a bird’s-eye view from,” Vance had said, laughing; and Rauch replied that he was sure the title would take Tarrant’s fancy. He pressed a copy of his poems on Vance, and the latter set off, his heart beating high at the thought of announcing to Laura Lou that he was a member of the editorial staff of The Hour, had signed a three years’ contract with a big publisher. “She won’t understand what it’s all about, but it’ll sound good to her,” he thought. And so it did to him.
Laura Lou showed the radiant incomprehension he had foreseen. “Oh, Vance, isn’t it great?” She clung to him and worshipped; then, loosening her arms, drew back and lifted ineffable eyes to his. “Oh, Vanny — ”
He laughed and recaptured her. “Guess you’re thinking already what show we’ll pick for tonight, aren’t you?” He grew reckless. “And, say, darling, if there’s anything particular you want to buy . . .” He knew there would be no pay till the end of the coming month, but time seemed as negligible as age while she lifted her trembling smile to him.
“Oh, Vanny . . . I wonder, could we go out and buy something to take back to Mother?”
“Sure.” He laughed with relief. Mrs. Tracy’s wants could be more inexpensively supplied than her daughter’s; and besides, he liked Laura Lou’s not instantly asking for something for herself. Then he looked again and noticed a shadow of anxiety on her radiance. He saw that she WAS asking for something for herself, but inwardly, because she dared not speak it. “What is it, sweet? Anything bothering you?”
Yes, something was: her mother. They’d been gone four days now, she reminded Vance, and Mrs. Tracy didn’t even know where they were, and must have been fretting dreadfully over that letter her daughter had left; and what Laura Lou wanted, oh, beyond anything, was to start right off for Paul’s Landing — oh, Vance, truly, couldn’t they? — and surprise her mother with the splendid news, and make everything all right that very day. Oh, wouldn’t Vance help her to pack up at once, and maybe they could catch the five o’clock express, and pop in on Mrs. Tracy just as she was clearing away supper?
Their hotel was close to the train, their packing was soon done. Secretly, Vance was relieved by his wife’s suggestion. The rush of his happiness had swept away all resentment against Mrs. Tracy, and he felt obscurely in the wrong in having persuaded Laura Lou to marry without her mother’s knowledge. Only the certainty of Mrs. Tracy’s opposition had made him do so; but he could not shake off his compunction, for he knew her life had been full of disappointments, and that Laura Lou’s flight would be the bitterest. Now it was all different; with his two contracts in his pocket he could face his mother-in-law with head erect. She would surely rather see Laura Lou married to the assistant editor of The Hour than to the barker of a sightseeing car; and if Vance should capture the Pulsifer Prize the Hayes debt would be cancelled at once. They paid in haste and hurried to the station, finding time on the way to select for Mrs. Tracy a black silk bag mounted in imitation amber. “She never has anything pretty,” Laura Lou explained, as if excusing so frivolous a choice; and Vance, remembering the basket of sweet peas with the stuffed dove, mused once more on the mysterious utility of the useless.
Mrs. Tracy’s forgiveness turned out harder to win than they had imagined. When they came on her that evening clearing away her lonely supper, as Laura Lou had predicted, their arrival provoked a burst of tears and an embrace in which Vance managed to get included. But the rousing of Mrs. Tracy’s emotions did not affect her judgment. The exchange of acrimonious letters between Paul’s Landing and Euphoria, at the time when she had ordered Vance out of her house, had sown ineradicable seeds. Even had her son-in-law’s prospects impressed her as much as he had hoped, her view would not have changed; but, as Vance soon perceived, she remained unimpressed by the documents so proudly spread before her. “I guess newspaper work’s more reliable than magazines,” she merely remarked, no doubt mindful of the dizzy heights to which journalism had lifted Bunty Hayes.
But these were secondary considerations; for she now regarded Vance as the corrupter of both her children. Vance had taken Upton to a “bad house” (so Upton, the sneak, had never shouldered his part of the blame!); Vance had made Laura Lou deceive her mother and break her promise to Bunty Hayes, the promise on the strength of which Mrs. Tracy had accepted a loan that it might take years to repay. Vance had wounded her in her pride and her affection; and the double humiliation was not effaced by this vague talk about a review that was going to give him a hundred dollars a piece for articles he hadn’t even written.
“Mr. Hayes wanted she should be brought up like a lady, as her father’s daughter ought to be,” Mrs. Tracy said over and over again, during her first private talk with Vance, on the day after their return to Paul’s Landing.
“She doesn’t have to be in Hayes’s pay to learn to be a lady — I guess God made her that,” Vance retorted. Mrs. Tracy, with a cold patience, said he knew well enough what she meant — she meant, educated like a lady, the way all the Lorburns had been; the way she couldn’t afford to educate her children because of her husband’s misfortunes, and his dying just when things were going against them. . . . Mr. Hayes had understood, and had wanted to help them, and had acted as a gentleman would . . . .
“Well, I guess you can trust me to act as well as he did,” Vance said, too happy not to be generous, and feeling how poor a case he could make out for his own behaviour. But Mrs. Tracy only answered that, whatever she might feel about the matter, Laura Lou was not free to break her engagement till that thousand dollars was paid back.
“Why, see here, there’s been a law in the United States for some years now against trading in flesh and blood,” Vance broke out, his irritation rising again; but the resentment in Mrs. Tracy’s eyes showed him the uselessness of irony.
“I guess I understand well enough how you feel,” he began humbly. “But Laura Lou loved me, and didn’t love Hayes; that’s about the only answer. Anyhow, I’ve told you I mean to pay back that loan as soon as ever I can. I’ve got the promise of a salary of fifteen hundred dollars, and I’m going to get right to work earning it, and as much over it as I can; and every cent I can put by each month will go to paying off Hayes. You couldn’t seriously expect Laura Lou and me to let a thousand dollars separate us, could you?”
Mrs. Tracy replied, obliquely, that she supposed he knew by this time what his own folks intended to do for him; and this brought Vance up with a jerk, for he had not yet told his parents of his marriage. He stood before Mrs. Tracy flushed and irresolute while she added: “I guess a thousand dollars isn’t the mountain to them it is to me. But maybe they don’t fancy your getting married so young.”
“I— I haven’t heard yet,” Vance stammered, and she said, evidently perceiving her advantage, and enjoying the chance to exercise a grim magnanimity: “Well, I guess you and Laura Lou’d better stay here till you hear what your family mean to do.”
Vance and Laura Lou knew she was secretly thankful to have them there. Upton’s new job made it impossible for him to live at Paul’s Landing, and his mother was nervous alone in the house, yet reluctant to leave because of her monthly allowance for the care of the Willows; so that, her resentment once expressed, she found it easier to keep the offenders than to send them away.
Vance, when he carried off Laura Lou, had never thought of the possibility of having to live at Paul’s Landing. Vague visions of life in a New York boarding house had flitted through his mind, or rather lurked scarce-visible on its edge; but till he had persuaded Laura Lou to come to him nothing had seemed real or near at hand save the bliss he craved, and before four days of that bliss were over he understood that he lacked the experience and the money to make any sort of home for her. They were lucky to have Mrs. Tracy to turn to; her conditional forgiveness, and the shelter of her tumbledown roof, were the best they could expect — unless Mapledale Avenue should intervene. But Vance had small expectation of help from home. He had been startled back to a sense of reality by Mrs. Tracy’s question; for he had not meant to conceal his marriage from his parents, but had simply forgotten all about them. From the very moment — less than a fortnight ago — when he had stepped out of the Grand Central and seen Laura Lou in the rubberneck car, he had thought of nothing else — hardly even of his art. The sight of her, the sound of her voice, the touch of her hand had rapt him away from common values and dimensions into that mystic domain to which he sometimes escaped from the pressure of material things. To that domain Laura Lou at the moment held the key, as hitherto great poetry had held it, the sunrise from Thundertop, his first sight of the sea, his plunge into the past in the library at the Willows, or any of the other imaginative shocks that flung open the gates of wonder. But the world to which Laura Lou admitted him seemed to comprise all the others, and it was not till he woke from his first ecstasy that he saw she herself was not an extra-terrestrial joy but a solid earthly fact, capable of apprehending only the earthly bounds out of which her beauty had lifted him. Laura Lou, dispenser of raptures, was merely a human being to be fed, clothed, cherished — what was it the minister had said? — in sickness and in health, till death should them part. And as long as they were together it could be only (to her at least) in the world of food, clothes, salary, sickness or health, prosperity or failure, mothers~in-law or boarding houses. As Vance went up to bed, after a drawn battle in the cold dimly lit dining room with his first “Cocoanut Tree” article, he reflected: “Well, anyway, I know it makes her happy to be back here,” and bent his impetuous neck to the yoke.
At first the yoke proved less heavy than he had expected. While he was at work Laura Lou had her mother’s companionship. During their brief days alone his wife’s tenderness had begun to frighten him, not its ardour but its submissiveness. He had not imagined that one human life could be so swiftly and completely absorbed into another. It was like a blood transfusion: body and soul, he seemed to have taken her into himself; whenever he returned, after an absence of a few hours, only her lovely ghost awaited him, and his presence had to warm her back to life. Now it was different. Her love was quieted by the return to the daily routine in familiar surroundings. She, who had formerly done so little to help her mother, was now eager to share in the household labours; Vance guessed that she was trying to learn how to make a home for him. Already she sternly defended his working hours, and had once or twice reproved Mrs. Tracy for asking him to bring up the coal or clear out the roof gutter. Luckily, if clumsy he was willing, and had no objection to undertaking the tasks which had been Upton’s, if only the women would let him alone while he wrote. This was not very difficult, since he worked in the afternoon and after they had gone to bed; and the first weeks at Paul’s Landing passed peacefully.
One day Upton came over. He had grown broader and stronger, and his new job had given him an air of importance which at first amused and then irritated Vance, to whom he was still the shifty boy of three years ago. Upton did not appear much more pleased with Laura Lou’s marriage than his mother, nor more impressed by Vance’s literary credentials. While the women were in the kitchen he followed Vance back to the dining room, where the latter had been given a corner for his desk and papers, shut the door solemnly, and asked: What about Bunty Hayes? Vance laughed, and said he guessed Bunty Hayes wasn’t going to bother them much, and anyhow he’d had three weeks now to stir things up, and they hadn’t heard from him.
“Oh, but you will,” Upton said, a little apprehensively. “He was in California when Laura Lou and you went off, and I don’t believe he knows anything yet. His job in New York ended after Thanksgiving, and the firm that employs him sent him West to look over some winter and spring routes. I guess he’ll be back any day,” he added.
Vance laughed again. “Well, what do you think he’ll do?” Upton coloured uncomfortably, and said: “I’d feel better if Mother hadn’t taken the money.” Vance rejoined that he would too, but as it had been taken the only thing was to pay it back. He understood Saint Elfrida’s School wouldn’t refund an advance if the pupil had taken part of the course, and he was going to do his best to get the loan paid off as quickly as his earnings permitted. He was getting bored with the subject, and tried to change it, but Upton, scratching his head, insisted dubiously: “I wish’t you could have raised the whole thousand right away. He’s the kind to turn ugly.”
“Oh, I thought he was a friend of yours,” Vance rapped back, exasperated; but Upton answered: “Well, I guess you’d better try and stay friends with him too, if you don’t want him coming round and raising hell.”
Vance would have been angry if he had not seen that Upton, under his commanding manner, was still the scared boy of old. The discovery made him smile, and rejoin: “Well, I guess I’d better get to work right now, and try to earn some money for him,” — at which Upton sulkily withdrew.
Vance became aware, after this, that the only thing to restore his credit with Mrs. Tracy would be the approval of his family. If they were pleased with his marriage they would do something handsome; and the something handsome would help to wipe out the Hayes loan. Vance shared her view, but not her hope; he knew what his family would think. The exchange of acrimonious letters had left traces no less deep in Mapledale Avenue than at Paul’s Landing. His people would regard it as folly for him to marry at his age, and be indignant with him for marrying the Tracy girl after the way the Tracys had treated him. These considerations weighted his pen when he wrote home to announce his marriage; and he was less surprised than Mrs. Tracy at the time which elapsed before he had an answer.
The first sign came from Grandma Scrimser, who sent him a beautiful letter, a Bible, and a year’s subscription to Spirit Light, to which she and her daughter Saidie Toler were now regular contributors. Grandma thought it lovely and brave of him to get married right off. She hoped that Laura Lou was as pretty and high~minded as her mother, when Mrs. Tracy had come out to see them years ago, on her wedding tour, and that Vanny would bring his bride to Euphoria right away, and that their married life would be full of spiritual benedictions.
A few days later Mrs. Weston wrote. She said they had been so taken aback by Vance’s news that they didn’t know what to say. They’d all supposed Vance would have too much pride ever to set foot in Mrs. Tracy’s house again, and now first thing they knew he’d married her daughter, without even telling them, or asking their advice or approval. His father had been so hurt and upset that at first she didn’t know how she’d ever bring him round, and even now he couldn’t make up his mind to write; but she, Mrs. Weston, had finally persuaded him to let her do so, and he had told her to say that if Vance chose to bring his wife out to Euphoria and get a job there, the couple would be welcome to the spare room to live in, and Mr. Weston would see what he could do to get Vance taken back on the Free Speaker, though of course he couldn’t guarantee anything — only Vance might be able to do something if he was on the spot, so Mrs. Weston thought they’d better come out as soon as they could. She added in a postscript that Mr. Weston had showed the terms of Vance’s contract with The Hour to the celebrated authoress, Yula Marphy, who was over from Dakin visiting with friends at Euphoria, and Miss Marphy had said, why it looked to her like a downright swindle, for she could get five hundred dollars any day for a story in the big magazines, and she’d never heard of The Hour anyhow, and she guessed it was one of those highbrow papers that run at a loss for a year or so, and then fizzle out. And what she advised was for Vance to come straight back West, where he belonged, and take up newspaper work again, and write pure manly stories about young fellows prospecting in the Yukon, or that sort of thing, because the big reading public was fed up with descriptions of corrupt society people, like there was a demand for in the East. Mrs. Weston added that his sisters sent him their love, and hoped his marriage would make him very happy; and would he be sure and telegraph when to expect him, as they presumed Mrs. Tracy was still without a telephone?
The sting of this did not escape Vance. The social classifications of Euphoria were based on telephones and bathtubs; but he had already guessed that elsewhere other categories prevailed. His irritation made it easier to answer than if the letter had been more cordial. He wrote that he didn’t suppose his father would seriously advise him, even if he were willing to break his contract, to give up a good opening in New York for a problematic job at Euphoria. He thanked his parents for offering his wife and himself a room, but added that his mother-in-law had already given them a home at Paul’s Landing. And he posted this letter without telling either Mrs. Tracy or Laura Lou that he had heard from his mother. To his grandmother he wrote affectionately; he knew that a Bible and a year’s subscription to Spirit Light were the best she could afford, and the tone of her letter touched him. She was the one human being at Euphoria who had dimly guessed what he was groping for: their souls had brushed wings in the twilight . . . .
The weeks passed. He took his first article — “Coleridge Today” — to The Hour, and Eric Rauch was enthusiastic, but said Vance must tackle a contemporary next time. Rauch suggested his own volume of poems, Voodoo, and Vance reddened and mumbled at the suggestion. The little book had interested and puzzled him; he was surprised to watch, under its modern bluster, so many half-familiar notes. He said he didn’t believe he was ready yet to tackle the new poetry; hadn’t read enough or understood enough of it; Eric Rauch rejoined, with his compelling smile: “Why, that’s just what we’re after for The Hour: a fellow’s first reactions, BEFORE he’s ready. We want to wipe out the past and get a fresh eye on things. We can get standardized reviewing by the bushel.” Vance travelled home heavyhearted, trying on the way to distract his thoughts by thinking up subjects for his next story.
Not subjects: they abounded — swarmed like bees, hummed in his ears like mosquitoes. There were times when he could hardly see the real world for his crowding visions of it. What he sought was rather the development of these visions; to discover where they led to. His imagination worked slowly, except in the moments of burning union with the power that fed it. In the intervals he needed time to brood on his themes, to let them round themselves within him. And he felt also increasingly, as his life widened, how small his provision of experience was. He needed time for himself — time to let his mind ripen, to have things happen to himself, and watch them happen about him, without being in haste to interpret or develop what he saw. He did not want to cut down all his trees for firewood. All this was still confused and unexpressed in him; he felt it most clearly when, after his imagination had seized on a subject and was preparing to plunge to its heart, he was brought up short by inexperience, by his inability to relate the thing he had fastened on to the rest of the world. Experiences, for him, were not separable entities; everything he saw, and took into himself, came with a breaking away of tendrils, a rending of filaments to which the soil of life still clung — and he was familiar, as yet, with so few inches of that soil. The rest was alien territory. He never seemed able to get to the heart of his subjects. . . . And then, when he got out of the train at Paul’s Landing, there was Laura Lou in the winter dusk, a little pinched by the cold, but with eyes of blue fire, lips that burned on his — and he wondered if he hadn’t been meant to be a poet . . . .
Two or three times a week he went up to the office of The Hour. Tarrant would have liked him to come every day; but that would have put an end to his writing. He had never been able to work except in solitude; and besides, the journey back and forth was a clear waste of time and money.
He soon found that even these absences preyed on Laura Lou. She did not reproach him; she simply pined when he was not there. When he got back he had to tell her everything that had happened to him, describe the people he had met, repeat everything that everyone had said or done; and in doing so he measured again her mental limits, and saw that the things which counted for him would never count for her. She smiled them away as oddities, like a wise little wife humouring a cranky husband; and her smile almost made him feel that endearments were enough for a soul to live on. Almost, not quite. From his childhood there had been in him an irreducible core of selfness (he found no other word for it), a hidden cave in which he hoarded his secretest treasures as a child hoards stony dead starfish and dull shells of which he has once seen the sea glitter, though he can make no one else believe in it. Even Laura Lou’s ignorance, even Laura Lou’s embraces, could not cheapen that treasure.
He had been coming and going in this way for about three weeks when one evening, on his return from town, not finding his wife below stairs, he ran up to her. She lay on the bed, asleep, in the attitude of trustful composure which had moved him on their first wedded morning. Near the bed he saw a crumpled paper on the floor. Laura Lou’s sleep was so sound that he picked up the paper and smoothed it out under the lamp without waking her. It was a letter, bearing the address of a drummer’s hotel at Seattle, and it began: “Well, in a few more days now, little sweet, I’ll be back home again, and I guess we’ll have some good times round about Christmas, if Bunty Hayes is the man I take him for. Say, honey, how long do they let you off that school for the holidays . . .?”
Vance read no further. He stood motionless, looking at his wife. She had not told Bunty Hayes; Mrs. Tracy had not told him. Vance saw that both women had been afraid, and pity and wrath struggled in him, the wrath mostly for Mrs. Tracy, the pity — well, yes, the pity for Bunty Hayes. The women hadn’t treated him squarely. . . . Vance let the letter fall where he had found it . . . .
The next day — his last at the office before Christmas — he handed in his article on Eric Rauch’s Voodoo. He wasn’t satisfied with it; he knew it wasn’t good. And he hated it because it was part of what he was expected to do for The Hour in return for the salary he had to have.
Tarrant, evidently, didn’t care for the article either; though he was prepared to do so later, Vance suspected, if good reasons were forthcoming. Vance had already learned that his chief’s opinions were always twenty-four hours late. At first he had thought it was because they matured as slowly as his own; but he had begun to suspect a different reason. Somebody, not always immediately available, did Tarrant’s thinking for him — Vance wondered if it were his wife. He had not had much time to think of Mrs. Tarrant since his encounter with her on the afternoon when she had offered to read Dante with him. He had heard no more of her since; she never came to the office, and he had no time to go and see her, even had the idea occurred to him — which it never did. At most, he thought enviously now and then of the rows and rows of books in the room where she had received him . . . .
“Of course,” Tarrant said, “there are things about it . . . certainly. . . . Only, perhaps . . . well, I see you’re a traditionalist at heart . . . .” He wavered. “Not a bad thing, perhaps . . . the tabula rasa’s getting to be an old story, eh? Well, I don’t deny . . .”
“Somebody asking for Mr. Weston,” a voice came through the door of the editorial retreat. Tarrant looked relieved at not being obliged to commit himself farther, and Vance, surprised at the summons, went back to the outer office.
Bunty Hayes stood there. He was crimson and shiny in the face, as if from cold or drink, and looked larger than life in the cramped space. He glared at Vance furiously. “That you, is it? Doing the highbrow act, eh? Call yourself a magazine editor, do you? Well, I’ll tell you what I call you.” He did so, in a rush of oaths and imprecations.
Vance received them in silence, and his silence had the effect of increasing the other’s exasperation. “Well, haven’t you got anything to say, take it all lying down, will you? Well, I’ll give you something that’ll keep you from getting up again . . . .” His fist, red and shiny as his face, flew out and caught Vance under the ear. . . . The blow was violent but unsteady — Vance noticed that at once. The fellow was half drunk — drunk enough to be pitiable, though not (Vance also perceived) to be undangerous. But to Vance he would have been pitiable even if he had been sober.
“You damn dirty thief, you . . . Steal women, do you?” Vance saw him squaring himself for another blow, and his own fighting instinct flamed up. By this time Bunty’s denunciations had summoned the slender staff of The Hour to the outer office. The typewriter girl wailed, “It’s a holdup,” but the men laughed and reassured her. . . . “Let ’em alone — it’s their funeral,” Vance heard, as Bunty’s fist leapt out at him again. His own was raised to parry it. He was the lighter and swifter, and he was sober — he had all the advantages. His arm dropped, and he drew back against the wall. “Better go home now — I’ll see you wherever you want,” he said, his hands in his pockets, the welt of his first blow spreading up his cheek like fire.
“Ho, a coward too, are you? Standing there to take your licking as if you were sitting for your portrait? I’ll make a portrait of you, by God. . . . See me do it, boys . . . .”
Tarrant’s door opened and he came out. He was very pale, and his thin lips were drawn together in a narrow line of disdain.
“Weston — what’s all this? I’ll thank you to do your fighting elsewhere . . . .”
Bunty Hayes broke into a rusty laugh. “Fighting? He won’t fight. This is a licking he’s going to get . . . .” Somebody echoed the laugh, and Tarrant’s cold eyes turned again to Vance. “Do you know this man?”
“Yes,” said Vance.
“Know me? God, that’s the trouble with him. And I’ve given him a chance at a stand-up fight, and he won’t take it. That so?” he challenged Vance. Vance, his hands in his pockets, repeated: “That’s so.” He saw the disdain on Tarrant’s lips turn to contempt, and his blood leapt up again. But inwardly he still knew that, even if Hayes had been completely sober, he would not have fought him.
Tarrant turned toward the intruder. “You get out of here,” he said.
“Get out of here? I’ll see you to hell first — I’ll . . .”
Eric Rauch, who had not been in the office, came running up the stairs. He glanced about the group, bewildered, and turned to Vance. “What’s up?” he asked. Bunty shouted back: “He’s taken my girl and he won’t fight me for her,” and there was another snicker among the lookers-on. It was manifest that sympathy was veering away from Vance.
Vance felt Rauch’s luminous eyes rest curiously and not unkindly on his white face with the burning welt. Rauch smiled a little and put his hand on Hayes’s arm. “If you’ll step this way,” he said, with a faint wink at the spectators, “I’ll take you down to my private office, and you can tell me what it’s all about.” He drew Hayes across the threshold, with a quick sign to the office boy to follow. But Hayes had already collapsed — the tears were running down his face, and he was putting his arm about Rauch’s neck as the door closed on them.
Tarrant turned back to his private room. His hand on the door he paused to say to Vance: “I don’t care for any explanation. But you understand, of course, that if this sort of thing happens again . . . I can’t have . . .”
“Oh, of course not,” Vance stammered, half dazed.
In a few moments Rauch came back, unconcerned, and lighting a cigarette. His eloquent eyes rested again on Vance. “You must have been reading the Russians lately,” he said with his soft incisiveness. He nodded and passed on to his desk.
Vance sat down at his, and began to write furiously. But he was merely making meaningless scratches on the paper. These people had of course realized that Hayes was half drunk, and would no doubt think he had been unwilling to fight him at a disadvantage. And on the whole, they would regard this as being to his credit. But Vance knew that the real reason was different: he had refused to fight Hayes because he had read his letter. And that was something he would never be able to explain.
On his desk lay a bundle of galleys — the proofs of “Coleridge Today.” He spread them out before him and tried to set to work revising. An hour ago each word, each syllable, would have been subjected to the most searching scrutiny; but now the page danced meaninglessly before him. . . . Suddenly he laid down his pen. Something of dominating importance had steadied his shaking nerves. What had Eric Rauch meant when he said: “You must have been reading the Russians lately”? Who WERE “the Russians,” and how was it that Vance had never read or even heard of them? At the mere thought, his mind felt firm ground under it again, and Bunty Hayes and his bluster were swept away like chaff on the wind.
“I’ll find out who they are before night,” Vance resolved, and settled down again to his work.
Tarrant, that evening, got home late and out of humor. His lateness ought in reason to have annoyed his wife, for they were off to Eaglewood the next day for Christmas, and many holiday questions were still unsettled; but she met him with her vague short-sighted smile and the air of one whom nothing in the world can annoy.
At dinner she ascribed his sulkiness and taciturnity to strained nerves and the effort not to betray himself before the maid. The first number of the New Hour — they had accepted Frenside’s rechristening — was to appear on the second of January, and the intervening week was a bad time for readjustments. No wonder the editor was on edge.
Over coffee and his cigar he broke out. What did she suppose? That damned protégé of Frenside’s — that Middle-Western yahoo . . . Weston, yes . . . had been turning the office into a beer garden. . . . Yes, this very afternoon. Outrageous . . . Why, a drunken fellow came in and tried to fight him . . . and, well, the fact was Weston funked it . . . luckily, or they might have had the police there . . . and the other man would have made mincemeat of him. . . . Disgusting business . . . he’d told Weston what he thought of it. . . . Over a woman, of course . . .
“A woman?” Halo echoed, startled. “Why, he’s only just married, isn’t he?” Well — there you had it, her husband’s shrug emphasized. He was that sort, was Frenside’s little pet. . . . Messing about with women before his honeymoon was over . . . The cigar drew less well than usual; Tarrant stood up and paced the floor angrily. Disgusting . . . he wouldn’t have it, he repeated. Good mind to sack the fool on the spot . . . a coward too, that was the worst of it. He threw the cigar into the fire, and groped nervously for another . . . .
Halo, leaning back in her deep armchair, looked up at him with indolent curiosity. “Lewis, aren’t you just simply overworked — overwrought?” she suggested.
“Just simply —?”
“I mean haven’t you let your nerves get the better of you? You look dead beat.” She made a friendly gesture toward the opposite armchair. “Sit down and light your cigar. Who told you this preposterous yarn anyhow?”
“Preposterous yarn?” He paled with anger, and she saw her mistake. “No one told me — no one had to. I was there. In the front row — saw the ruffian slap Weston’s face, and Weston turn the other cheek. Precisely.”
Halo mused, perplexed but still unperturbed. “But the fact that the ruffian was drunk — isn’t that the reason?”
“Why Weston wouldn’t fight?”
“Not in your office, at any rate. Put yourself in his place.”
But Tarrant knew of few places worthy to put himself in. “Thank you, my dear. I don’t happen to have lowdown blackguards trying to fight me.”
“I should have thought any man might, accidentally.” She paused and reflected. “Anyhow, it doesn’t seem to have bothered young Weston much,” she let drop with a retrospective smile.
Through Tarrant’s fresh cloud of cigar smoke she saw his suspicious flush. “I don’t know how much it bothered him; but he looked pretty thoroughly ashamed of himself.”
“He got over it quickly then. He’d forgotten all about it when he was here just now.”
Tarrant swung round in surprise, and she continued, in the tone of leisurely narrative: “About an hour ago. He dashed in on his way to the train, staggering under his mother-in-law’s Christmas bundles. He’d called on very particular business. You’ll never guess . . .”
“Why should I?” Tarrant growled.
“Try — ”
He answered by another shrug — this time of indifference.
“Well, he wanted to borrow Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. He’d never heard of them till today. Or of Tchehov or the moderns, of course . . . It appears someone in the office said something about ‘the Russians,’ and as soon as he’d finished his work he rushed to the public library; but it was closed, so he came here. Rather sweet of him, I thought. He didn’t say how d’ye do, or any of the useless things. He just said: ‘Who are the Russians? I want to read them. Have you got them?’ And went off with his arms full.” She sank back in her cushions, and closed her lids on the picture. The fire crackled companionably, and Tarrant’s cigar smoke wove its soothing cloud about their silence. Even with her eyes shut she could guess that something was slowly breaking down the hard crust of his resentment. Expediency . . . uncertainty . . . it didn’t matter. . . . After an interval he said, more to himself than her: “Well, I suppose he WAS right not to let that blackguard raise hell in the office. . . . Only it goes against me when a man seems to show the white feather . . . .”
“Ah, but YOU . . .” his wife murmured; and opened her eyes to meet his gratified smile.
But his face was not the one on which her gaze rested. Her vision was turned inward. There had happened to her, suddenly, what may happen at any stage, however late, in the acquaintance, even the intimacy, between two people: she had seen Vance Weston that afternoon — really, literally seen him — for the first time. Before that, her glance — curious, then interested, then admiring — had merely brushed him with a glowworm spark. She had caught, as it were, glimpses of him in the blur of himself; rifts and gleams; a bit here, a bit there, of the outward accidents of his appearance. Now, all at once, she possessed him as a whole, seemed to discern behind his fluid features the power which had built them. Uneven, untrue to itself, as his face appeared, with its queer mixture of maturity and boyishness, instability and power, she suddenly beheld it in the something which harmonized these contradictions and bound him together like a strong outline. Was that perhaps what genius was? And this boy with the tumbled brown hair, the resolute lines of brow and nose, the brooding impulsive lips and the strident untutored voice — was this the way genius was cut? . . . Her heart missed a beat, as if it had paused with her mind to consider him. “It’s like seeing him dead,” she thought — so entirely had his face been stripped to the essentials. And she reminded herself, with a shiver, that one never forgot a single lineament of a face one had seen dead. . . . “It’s more than I bargained for,” she murmured, and then: “Coward!”
She pulled herself up to the surface of her eyes, and gave her husband back his smile.
The first number of the New Hour made a hit. The New York publishing world rang with the figures of its sale; and the crown of its success was “Unclaimed,” the quiet story by the young author no one had heard of. A war story too — fatal handicap! But everyone agreed that it sounded a new note. The public was fed up with new notes, yet dared not praise anything without applying that epithet to it (so Frenside explained). “But it is a new note; I saw it at once when he brought me the thing,” Tarrant grumbled, adding impatiently: “If it depended on you to give a new author a start —!”
“Where’s my lantern?” Frenside mocked; but the sting of his mockery was submerged in the warm tide of praise which met Tarrant wherever he went. He was acutely proud of his first editorial achievement, and his gratified pride transformed him in his wife’s eyes. “I’ve always known he was cleverer than anybody else — all he needed was a chance to show it,” she thought, her hungry imagination clutching at every substitute for belief in him. Yet in an inner fold of her heart something whispered: “How much I would rather believe in him against everybody!”
Tarrant had said one day, in a burst of satisfaction: “I think you ought to invite that Weston boy here; we ought to have a party for the New Hour’s first birthday. People are beginning to ask about him; they’re already wondering about the Pulsifer Prize — ” and Halo, rousing herself from an indolence she could hardly explain, had echoed: “Oh, if you think so — certainly.” In reality, she had relegated the thought of Vance to the back of her mind. After all, it was her husband who had resuscitated The Hour, not Vance Weston. But that was the way of the world: people fastened on one good thing in a review — a new review especially — and talked as if that were the principal, if not the only, reason for its popularity. Whereas the real credit belonged to the editor, the guiding and selecting mind, in this case to the man who had discovered Vance Weston and made him known, as he would in future discover and make known many others. Halo flamed with impatience at the public’s obtuseness . . . .
“Oh, but of course you must . . . you must let me introduce him. . . . Of course he won’t think anything of the kind . . . .” Mrs. Tarrant, slim and animated in her black dress, with lacy wings floating with the motions of her arms, moved away from the hearth, where she had been standing beside an exaggeratedly tall young woman whose little head drooped sideways from a long throat, and whose lids were cast down in deprecation on the rich glitter of her gold brocade.
“Oh, Halo, no . . . I don’t know . . . Won’t he think . . .? I do want to be so utterly aloof and impartial . . . .”
“Well, but you will, my dear. You don’t suppose every young writer who’s introduced to you in the course of the winter will imagine you’re sampling him for the Pulsifer Prize?”
“How absurd, Halo! When of course it’s ALL in the hands of the committee. . . . But I do so want to preserve my complete serenity, my utter detachment . . . .” Mrs. Pulsifer flung the words after her in a series of staccato cries.
Halo laughed, and moved through the groups of guests scattered about her library to the corner where Vance Weston, his back to the company, stood in absorbed contemplation of the bookshelves. Until he had entered the room a few minutes earlier she had not seen him since he had come to borrow her Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, and now, in the noise and sparkle of her first evening party for the New Hour, he had become once more an exterior, episodical figure, not the being whose soul had touched hers that other evening. She even reflected, as she approached him: “He’s shorter than I remembered; his shoulders are too heavy . . . he gets into fights about women . . . .” as if retouching an idealized portrait abruptly confronted with the reality.
“Vance,” she said, and he turned with a start of surprise, as though he had imagined himself alone. Halo smiled: “This isn’t the Willows, you know — I mean,” she hurried on, fearing he might misinterpret the allusion, “you’re at a party, and lots of the people here want to know you; first of all, Mrs. Pulsifer.”
“Mrs. Pulsifer —?” he echoed, his eyes coming back from a long way off and resting on his hostess in slow recognition.
“The prize-giver. Over there, in the gold-coloured dress. Come — poor Jet’s not alarming; she’s alarmed.”
“Alarmed?”
Halo slipped her arm through his. “Frightfully shy, really. Isn’t it funny? She’s in terror lest every author who’s introduced to her should ask for the prize — yet she wants them all introduced!”
“But isn’t the prize given by a committee?”
“Yes. Only she likes to look the candidates over. Come!”
It amused her to introduce Vance to people. It was the first time she had seen him in a worldly setting, and she was interested in watching the effect he produced — especially the effect on Mrs. Pulsifer. On the whole, giving parties for the New Hour might turn out to be great fun. She was only sorry that her young lion, in his evening clothes, looked unexpectedly heavy and common . . . .
Vance hung back. “What’s she like?” he asked, as if his decision depended on that.
“Like? I don’t know . . . .” Halo hesitated. “You see, she’s not an actual person: she’s a symptom. That’s what Frenny and I call the people who are everything in turn. They catch things from another kind that we call germ-carriers, people who get every new literary and artistic disease and hand it on. But come: she’s awfully nice, really.”
Vance still hesitated. “Do you think I’ll like her?” he asked oddly; and Halo laughed and wrinkled her shortsighted eyes. “Does one have to — at parties?”
“I don’t know, I’ve never been to a party before — like this.”
“Well, the important thing is that she should like you.”
“Why?”
She gave a slight shrug, and at that moment the golden lady swayed across the room and came up to them. “He hates the very idea, Halo — I knew he would!” she cried.
“Vance, this is Mrs. Pulsifer. Jet, be good to him — he’s my particular friend. Take her over to that quiet corner under the Buddha, Vance, and tell her how you write your stories.” She swept away to her other guests, and Vance found himself seated on a divan in a dim recess, with this long golden woman, half frightened and half forthcoming, and swaying toward him like a wind-swept branch. For a moment he had been annoyed at his hostess’s request. As soon as he had entered he had gone straight back to the shelves from which, a few weeks earlier, Halo had taken down Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. Near them, he remembered noticing, were the Gogols, and there was one, “The Cloak,” which he heard the fellows at the Cocoanut Tree talking about (“All Tolstoy and Tchehov came out of ‘The Cloak,’” the advanced ones said. Well, he must read “The Cloak” then — ) As soon as his eyes lit on that shelf he forgot where he was, and that there were other people about. He stood running his hands along the backs of the volumes in the happy agitation produced by the sight of unexplored bookshelves; and then Mrs. Tarrant came and spoilt it all . . . .
But now a new wave of sensation swept over him. The nearness of this strange Mrs. Pulsifer, her small feverish face, the careless splendour of her dress, the perfume it gave out, had caught his restless imagination. She interested and excited him as part of the unfamiliar setting which he had hardly noticed on his arrival because the books had thrust themselves between, but which now stole on him with the magic of low lights, half tints, easy greetings, allusive phrases, young women made for leisure and luxury, young men moving among them lightly and familiarly. The atmosphere was new to Vance — and this woman, neither young nor old, beautiful nor ugly, but curious, remote, like a picture or a statue come down from some storied palace wall, seemed to embody everything in the scene that was unintelligible and captivating.
“Oh, but I’m sure you oughtn’t,” she murmured, drooping away but leaving her eyes close to his.
“Oughtn’t what?” he stammered, entangled in his confusion.
“To tell me how you write your stories; or anything at all about them. Halo’s so reckless — she doesn’t stop to consider. And of course I’m burning to know. But people might think . . . you see, I simply MUST preserve my aloofness, my entire impartiality . . . or they’d say I was interfering. . . . And I’m sure I shall never like another story as much as yours. Oh, Mr. Weston, it’s a dreadful responsibility,” she wailed.
Vance was watching her curiously. He noticed the way her wandering eyes were set guardedly under a small contracted brow (“as if they were peering out of prison,” he thought, “and reckoning up the chances of escape”). The idea amused him, and he had to rouse himself to answer: “You mean giving the prize is a responsibility? But you don’t, do you? I thought there was a committee?”
“Of course, of course, but that’s the reason. If it should be suspected that I tried to influence them . . . and yet I do so worship what you write!” She swayed nearer, enveloping him in a golden network of smiles and shimmers, imparting in confidential murmurs common-places that might have been published on the housetops, telling him what a burden her money was, how much she needed sympathy, how few people she could talk to as she was talking to him, how the moment she had read the first lines of “Unclaimed” she had felt that THERE was someone who would understand her — and how she envied his heroine for being able, even at the cost of her last penny, to be herself, to proclaim her love openly, to starve herself in order to build a monument to the man who had never known she loved him. “How you do know women!” she murmured, swaying and gazing and retreating. “How in the world did you ever guess . . .? Several of my friends have told me your Tullia was my living portrait. . . . But I mustn’t talk of that now. Won’t you come and see me some day? Yes — that would be better. I’m so alone, Mr. Weston — I do so need advice and encouragement! Sometimes I wish I’d never undertaken this prize business; but wealth has its duties, hasn’t it?”
She had rambled on for a long time, yet not long enough to satisfy his curiosity, when suddenly she started back. “Oh, but I mustn’t keep you any longer. . . . Why, there’s Fynes over there staring at us!” she exclaimed in agitation. “He’s one of our committee, you know. And he never goes to evening parties — not respectable ones, I mean. I daresay he’s come here just to look you over . . . .” She stood up nervously.
“Tristram Fynes? Who wrote The Corner Grocery?”
Vance interrupted with a shock of excitement.
“Yes, over there. That dreary little man by the door. You think him so wonderful?”
“It’s a big book.”
“Oh, I daresay, but the people are so dreadfully unsympathetic. I suppose you’ll call me very old-fashioned; but I don’t think our novelists ought to rob us of all hope, all belief. . . . But come, everybody’s waiting to talk to you. Fynes sees that, and he hates it. Oh, I do hope I haven’t spoilt your chance of the prize!” She held out her hand. “You WILL come to see me, won’t you? Yes — at six some day. Will you come tomorrow?” she insisted, and drew him after her across the room.
Vance, in following, had his eyes on the small dreary man by the door. Of the many recent novels he had devoured very few had struck him as really important; and of these The Corner Grocery was easily first. Among dozens of paltry books pushed into notoriety it was the only one entitled to such distinction. Readers all over the country had felt its evident sincerity, and its title had become the proverbial epithet of the smalltown atmosphere. It did not fully satisfy Vance; he thought the writer left untouched most of the deeper things the theme implied; if he himself had been able to write such a book he would have written it differently. But it was fearless, honest, preternaturally alive; and these qualities, which to Vance seemed the foundation of the rest, were those he most longed to acquire. “First stand your people on their feet,” Frenside had once enjoined him; “there’ll be time enough afterward to tell us where they went.” If only Tristram Fynes should be moved to say that the people in “Unclaimed” stood on their feet!
Vance’s heart thumped furiously as Mrs. Pulsifer paused near the great man. If it should really turn out that Fynes had read “Unclaimed,” and was here because of it!
“Oh, Mr. Fynes — what a surprise! I didn’t know you ever condescended . . . Oh, but you mustn’t say you’re going — not before I’ve introduced Mr. Weston! Vance Weston; yes; who wrote ‘Unclaimed.’ He’s simply dying to talk to you about . . .”
Mr. Fynes’s compressed lips snapped open. “About The Corner Grocery, eh? Well, there’s a good deal to be said about it that hasn’t been said yet,” he rejoined energetically, fixing his eyes on Vance. “You’re one of the new reviewers, aren’t you? Do ‘The Cocoanut Tree’ in the New Hour? Yes — I believe I saw something of yours the other day. Well, see here; this is no place for a serious talk, but I’d be glad if you’d come round some day and just let me tell you exactly what I want said about The Corner Grocery. . . . Much the best way, you know. The book’s a big book; no doubt about that. What I want people told is WHY it’s big. . . . Come round tomorrow, will you? I’m going to cut it now . . . .”
He vanished, and Vance stood dazed. But not for long. Others claimed his attention, people who wanted to talk to him not about themselves but about “Unclaimed.” The room was not crowded; there were probably not more than thirty guests in the library and the dining room beyond, into which they wandered in quest of sandwiches and cocktails, coming back refreshment in hand, or lingering about the dining table. But to Vance the scene was so new that he seemed to be in a dense throng; and the fact of being in it not as an observer, but as the centre of attention and curiosity, filled him with the same heady excitement as when he had tossed off his first shellful of champagne.
These easy affable people wanted to know him and talk to him because he had written “Unclaimed,” because they had even heard (some of them) of his other story, that old thing Tarrant had fished out of a back number and spoke of republishing; they wanted to know what else he had written, what he was doing now, when he was going to start in on a novel, when he would have enough short stories for a volume, whether he had thought up any new subjects lately, whether he found it easier to write in a big city or in his own quiet surroundings at home, whether Nature inspired him or he had to be with people to get a stimulus, what his best working hours were, whether he could force himself to write so many hours a day, whether he didn’t find that regular work led to routine, whether he didn’t think a real artist must always be a law unto himself (this from the two or three of the younger women), and whether he found he could dictate, or had to type out his own things . . . .
Vance had never before been confronted with so many exciting and stimulating questions. At first he tried to answer each in turn, going into the matter as fully as he felt it deserved, and seizing by the way on the new ideas it developed; but by the time he had said, with his slow shy drawl: “Why, I guess I haven’t got far enough yet to have worked out any regular rules, but I seem to find . . .” or: “Well, sometimes I feel as if I had to have a lot of new faces and sights to start me going, and then again other times . . .” he noticed that his questioners either lost interest, or else, obeying some rule of behaviour unknown to him, felt they ought to give way to others with other riddles to propound. The result was that he had soon run the whole gauntlet of introductions, and found himself at a little table in the dining room, voraciously consuming cocktails and foie gras, and surrounded at last by familiar faces — as though he had swum through a bright tossing sea to a shore where old friends awaited him. Frenside was there, gruffly smoking and sipping, Eric Rauch, glossy and vivid in evening clothes, and Mrs. Spear, white-haired and affectionately wistful, murmuring: “How wonderful, Vance! To think the Willows should have led to this . . .” while Halo, flitting by, paused to introduce a new arrival, or to say, with a hand on his shoulder: “How does it feel to be It?”
Best of all was it, when everyone had gone but a few familiars, to draw up to the library fire, replenished with crackling logs, and listen to Tarrant and Rauch discussing the future of the New Hour, Frenside dropping his comments into the rifts of the talk, and Mrs. Spear saying, from the drowsy depths of her armchair: “But you simply mustn’t do what they tell you, Vance — you must just drop EVERYTHING and give yourself up to your novel. What’s it to be called? Loot — ah, there’s a whole panorama in that! Lewis, you must really give him his head; you mustn’t tie him down to dates. Let him have all the time he wants. Remember, the Spirit bloweth where it listeth . . . and genius IS the Spirit, isn’t it, Frenside?”
It was past one in the morning when Vance sprang to his feet in comic anguish. “Oh, say, what about my last train home?” They all laughed, and Tarrant said, glancing at his watch: “No hurry, my boy — it left an hour ago, and there’s no other till six-thirty,” whereat the group about the fire vanished from Vance’s eyes, displaced by Laura Lou’s white face peering through her window into the icy darkness. . . . “What a place to live in, anyhow!” he thought, exasperated at being thus forced back into reality; and when the party finally broke up he accepted Eric Rauch’s invitation to go on with him to “The Loafers’ Club,” an all-night affair where they could talk and drink till the dismal hour when the first train started for Paul’s Landing. After all, it wasn’t Vance’s fault if he had to live in the wilderness, and the minute he’d cleared off that Hayes debt he was going to bring Laura Lou back to New York, where there were people a fellow could talk to, and who understood what he was trying for. It filled him with sudden despair to think that of all he had heard and said that evening not a syllable would mean anything to his wife.