At the “Loafers’” Vance had felt the relief of a familiar atmosphere. In the low-ceilinged noisy room he found several of the fellows to whom Rauch had introduced him at the Cocoanut Tree, and with them the sculptress girl, Rebecca Stram, in a dirty yellow sweater and a cloud of smoke. They all hailed him joyfully, the Stram girl besought him anew to sit for his bust, and the talk rambled on, much as it did in his father’s office at Euphoria on idle winter afternoons, go as you please, leaning back with your feet up and developing what you had in your mind while the others smoked and swung their legs and listened: all as easy and intelligible as could be.
Yet that was not the impression that lasted. What Vance carried back to Paul’s Landing was his bewildering adventure at the Tarrants’, where everybody talked and nobody listened, or said anything particularly worth hearing, if you thought it over — but where the look of the rooms and the people had something harmonious and long-related, suggesting a mysterious intelligence between persons and things, an atmosphere as heavy with the Past as that of the library at the Willows.
Vance couldn’t, for the moment, define it more clearly; but it was something impossible to shake off, close and haunting as a scent or a cadence, like the perfume in Mrs. Pulsifer’s clothes, or her curious unfinished ejaculations. It made him want to lie and stare at the sky and dream, or else start up and write poetry; not a big sweeping thing, such as he had dreamed of by the winter ocean, but the wistful fragments that used to chant in his brain during his solitary sessions at the Willows. Yes . . . poetry: that was what was stirring and murmuring in him again.
When these impulses came they were overmastering. As he walked through the still-torpid town and out to Mrs. Tracy’s, lines and images rose in his glowing mind like sea gods out of a summer sea. He had forgotten where he was, or to whom he was returning. The morning was gray and cold, and when he got out of the town he started on a run, and reached the house out of breath. At the door he was met by Laura Lou, wide-eyed and trembling a little, but forcing a smile of welcome. “Oh, Vanny — ” He caught her to him, and cried out: “Give me some coffee quick, darling, and fix it up so I won’t be bothered for the rest of the day, can’t you? I’ve got to write a poem straight off . . . a long one . . . before the light fades.”
“Light fades? Why, it’s early morning,” she rejoined with bewildered eyes.
“Yes, but not that light,” he said, loosening her arms and smiling at her as if she were a remote memory, and not a sentient creature on his breast.
Mrs. Tracy emerged from the kitchen. “I’ll get your coffee for you. I guess you’ll need it, after one of your nights,” she said severely. “Laura Lou, you better go straight up now and try and get a little sleep,” she added in the same tone to her daughter.
They had not understood; they would never understand, these women. Mrs. Tracy, he was sure, was recalling that other night, his night of dissipation with Upton after the ball game; and Laura Lou perhaps had the same suspicion, though she would never own to it. And he knew he could never make either of them understand that what he was drunk with now was poetry. . . . Mrs. Tracy brought his coffee into the dining room (piping hot, he had to admit); then she poked up the fire, and left him at his writing table. His head dropped between his hands, and he murmured to himself: “Gold upon gold, like trumpets in the sunrise . . . .” It had sounded glorious as he crooned it over, drowsing in the train; but now he was not so sure. . . . When Mrs. Tracy, four hours later, came in to set the table for the midday dinner he started up out of a deep sleep on the springless divan. “No — she’s more beautiful than that . . . .” he stammered; and his mother-in-law admonished him, as she set down the plates: “Well, I guess you better not say anything more about that; and I’ll hold my tongue if you do.”
Vance stared and pushed back his rumpled hair. “It was somebody — in a poem . . . .” he said; and Mrs. Tracy responded with her mirthless laugh: “That what they call it in New York? I guess you better go up and get washed now,” she added; and looking at the blank sheets scattered over his desk, Vance saw that he must have fallen asleep directly after she had left him, without writing a line of his poem.
He had no difficulty in reassuring Laura Lou. She saw that, as one of the staff of the New Hour, he had to be present at the Tarrants’ party; he even coaxed a laugh from her about his having missed his train. She wanted to know where he had gone after leaving the Tarrants’, and whether he wasn’t worn out, waiting around so long in the station; and he said evasively, no, he hadn’t minded, feeling that the mention of the “Loafers’” would only unsettle her again. His own mind was unsettled enough. He was tormented with the poem he wanted to write, and exasperated at the thought of being chained up to his next monthly article (they had to be ready a month ahead), and then to a short story, and eventually to a novel, none of which, at the moment, he felt the least desire to write. How could he ever have been fool enough to run his head into such a noose? He remembered Frenside’s warning, and cursed himself for not having heeded it. What he earned at the New Hour (supposing he were able to fulfill his contract) wasn’t enough to keep him and his wife, if ever they had to leave Paul’s Landing — and to leave Paul’s Landing had become his overmastering desire. He wanted, worse than ever, to be back in New York, back among all those fellows he could talk to. He wanted to be able to spend an evening at the Tarrants’ — or at the “Loafers’,” for that matter — without being confronted at dawn by two haggard women who thought themselves magnanimous because they didn’t cross-examine him like a truant schoolboy. He wanted to see whom he pleased, go where he chose, write what he wanted — be free, free, free, in body as well as mind, yes, and in heart as well as soul. That was the worst of it: if life went on like this much longer his love for Laura Lou would fade to a pitying fondness, and then there would be no meaning in anything.
The afternoon trailed on. Vance could not write; the poem had vanished like a puff of mist. He sat staring at the paper, and smoking one cigarette after another. Suddenly he remembered that he had promised, that very afternoon, to call on Mrs. Pulsifer and on Tristram Fynes. And here he sat in Mrs. Tracy’s dining room, looking out on her frozen garden patch and the cold purple of the hills, and doing nothing and seeing no light ahead. Toward dusk he was seized with the impulse to sprint down to the station, jump into the first train for New York, and pay his two visits. Then he remembered that city people were always full of engagements, and could not be found without an appointment — or might be annoyed if a fellow barged in when he wasn’t expected. Besides, he didn’t particularly want to see either Fynes or the Pulsifer woman — what he really wanted was to breathe the atmosphere they breathed. But that was another difference that Laura Lou would never understand . . . .
The next morning was his regular day at the office. But an obscure reluctance kept him from going back to New York. When he got there Eric Rauch would ask him for his next article, of which he hadn’t written the first line, the subject of which he hadn’t yet chosen. And Tarrant would call him in to his sanctum, and want to know if they couldn’t announce the title of his next short story while “Unclaimed” was fresh in people’s minds. And he hadn’t even settled on a subject for his story either — there were so many to choose from, and none that he felt ready to tackle. Poetry . . . poetry was what he was full of now . . . .
He got up early from Laura Lou’s side, flung open the window, and leaned out quaffing the wintry gold and scarlet of the sunrise. The sky looked immeasurably far-off, pure and cold above the hills; but against their edge the gold and scarlet bubbled up in plumy clouds like the down from a fabulous bird’s breast. What had the city to give compared with that? Vance recalled the summer sunrise seen from Thundertop with Halo Spear. Then he had stood so high that he had seen the new day flood the earth below him in all its folds and depths and dimmest penetralia; and beauty had brimmed his soul with the same splendour. But now he could only look out through the narrow opening of a cottage window to a patch of currant bushes and a squat range of hills behind which the sun seemed imprisoned — as he himself was imprisoned by fate. Fate? Nonsense — by his own headlong folly. Only, when the sirens sang, could a fellow help listening? And how could he distinguish between the eternal beauty and its false images, the brief creatures it lit up in passing? Something whispered: “Create the eternal beauty yourself — then you’ll know . . .” and he shut the window and turned back into the low-ceilinged room where his life belonged.
But life was not always such a baffled business. The second night after Vance’s return there was a belated snowfall, and the next morning when he opened the shutters he looked out on a world of white ablaze under a spring sun. It was a Saturday, thank heaven, and there could be no question of going to the office. For forty~eight hours he and Laura Lou could range as they willed through this new world. The winter, so far, had been harsh but almost snowless; now, in early March, with the smell of buds in the air, Vance was seeing for the first time the magic of a snowstorm on the Hudson. If only they could climb to Thundertop! Was it possible, he wondered? The snow was not so deep, after all; it would be melting soon, under such a sun. What did Laura Lou think? She thought as he did: anything that seemed possible to him always seemed so to her. She had never before regarded a snowstorm as something to be admired, but merely as an opportunity for fun; staying away from school, sleighing, snowballing, and coasting. But now that he pointed out its beauties he could see she was ashamed of having looked upon them as created for her own amusement — as if she had stripped the hangings from a sanctuary to dress herself up in. Vance was touched by her compliance, her passionate eagerness to see what he saw, hear what he heard — and then, in spite of himself, irritated by her inability to be more than his echo. But today the glory was so searching and miraculous that he was sure she must feel it. “Come, wrap up warm and we’ll take some hot coffee and sandwiches, and see how high we can scramble up the mountain.” Mrs. Tracy had gone off to spend a night with Upton, and they had the freedom of the little house, and felt like lovers honeymooning again. Laura Lou filled the thermos with boiling coffee, made some sandwiches with the cold meat Mrs. Tracy had left for dinner, and got into her rubber boots and her thickest coat. Vance wanted to hire their neighbour’s cutter; but Laura Lou was frightened lest her mother should hear of this extravagance, so they set out on foot, laughing and swinging their joined hands like schoolchildren. The snow was soft — too soft for easy walking. But Vance’s feet were winged, as they had been when he first saw the sea; and Laura Lou sprang on after him, exulting and admiring. “Oh, Vanny — do look! Isn’t it just like powdered sugar? Or one of those lovely Christmas cards with the stuff that sparkles?” Luckily he hardly heard her, saw only the radiant oval of her face under the shaggy knitted cap pulled down over crimson ear-tips.
The snow clung downy to the hemlocks, rolled blinding white over meadow and pasture, gloomed indigo blue on the edges of the forest, flashed with prismatic lights where a half-caught brook fringed it with icicles. And bordering the lane, as they climbed, how each shoot of bracken, each bramble and dry branch glittered and quivered with white fire! How the blue air, purified by all the whiteness, soared over them on invisible wings! How the far-off sky curved a clear dome above an earth with all its sins and uglinesses blotted out, an earth renewed, redeemed in some great final absolution!
A man passed in a sleigh and offered them a lift. He was going to a farm up Thundertop way; and presently they were gliding by the gateposts of Eaglewood, and Vance remembered how he had passed them for the first time with Miss Spear, motoring up the mountain in the summer dawn. The sight of the padlocked gates, the snow-choked drive, the hemlocks trailing white branches with sapphire shadows, swept him back into that world to which Halo Spear had given him the key: the world of beauty, poetry, knowledge, of all the marvels now forever shut off from him. He was glad when they mounted higher, and the man, turning in at a farmyard, left them to scramble on alone. . . . “Better make the most of it — there’ll be a thaw by night!” he called back, his runners cutting black grooves in the whiteness.
They climbed on, laughing and chattering. It was so good to look at Laura Lou, and feel her warm hand in his, that Vance, as was his way when he was enjoying anything she could share, glowed with a sense of well-being. At length their ascent brought them to a deserted shed standing on a sunny ledge by the roadside. There was some hay on its dry floor, and in this shelter they unpacked their lunch, and comforted themselves with hot coffee. Laura Lou, curling up against the hay in the warmest corner, tossed off her cap, and Vance, stretched out at her feet, watched the sun turn her hair to golden filigree, and her lips to jewels. “Happy?” he queried; and her eyes rained down acquiescence . . . .
He had never spoken to her of Bunty Hayes’ visit; she had never spoken to him of the letter he had picked up and read. She had doubtless answered it, or in some way made the truth known to Hayes; that was probably the cause of the scene in the office. . . . Vance, as he looked up at her, was obscurely troubled by the thought that behind that low round forehead with its straying curls there lurked a whole hidden world. This little creature, who seemed as transparent as a crystal cup (his little cup, he had once called her) — this Laura Lou, like all her kind, was a painted veil over the unknown. And to her no doubt he was the same; and she knew infinitely less of him than he of her, if only because there was so much more to know. As he lay and brooded on these mysteries he wondered if this were not the moment to speak. He was not in the least sorry for what they had done to Bunty Hayes. In that respect neither Vance nor Laura Lou had been at fault; the pressure of destiny had been too strong for them. But the way they had treated him since was not pleasant to remember. Vance had never been able to get that poor love letter out of his head; and he wanted to find out if Laura Lou remembered it too. If he could have been sure that her silence was due to the same feeling as his, and not to some mean instinct of concealment, it would have drawn them so much closer. . . . But as he continued to lie there and to drink her drowsy smile, he felt in himself the same reluctance that he suspected in her . . . a reluctance to mar the perfect hour. Why not suffer the episode to bury itself? There were things in the lives of the most decent people that left raw edges, that gave you the feeling you had when you’d abandoned a wounded bird in a thicket . . . .
“Come along!” Vance cried, jumping up. “I’d like to get to the next ridge, wouldn’t you? We’d see all the world from there. . . . Let’s try.” And she sprang to her feet echoing joyfully: “Yes — let’s!”
After that the day seemed to rush by on silver wings. Such sparkling tumultuous hours, sunlit, shadow-flecked, whirling past like the spray of racing waves. . . . Vance could hardly believe it when the twilight shut in without a warning, the twilight with its bleak shadows and the deathlike pallor of unlit snow . . . .
Not till then did it occur to him that Laura Lou must be dreadfully tired. He ought to have thought of it before. He was dismayed to see how high they had climbed; but as they set out on the long descent her gay voice kept on assuring him that, no, she was feeling first-rate, that she’d loved every minute of it, she had, really . . . and, oh, Vanny, look, there was the new moon: did he see it? Like a diamond brooch, up in the branches there — and over their right shoulders too! What luck! . . . Her tone reassured him, and he laughed and kissed her, slipping his arm about her to help her down the endless windings. It was dark night when they reached the cottage, cold and hungry. Vance fumbled under the mat for the key and pushed her into the passage. How black the inside of the house was, and how cold! It had been fun, having the place all to themselves that morning; but now even Mrs. Tracy’s dry disapproval would have been bearable, for the sake of a fire and supper.
Vance struck a match and reached for the hall lamp. As he turned back after lighting it he saw on the floor a telegram which had been thrust under the door in their absence. Laura Lou bent to pick it up. “I guess it’s from Mother, to say what train she’ll be back by.” She opened the telegram, and stood looking at it with a puzzled frown. Then she read aloud: “‘Dreadfully upset not seeing you yesterday what happened waited till nine must see you count on you same hour Monday. Please telegraph. Jet.’ What a funny name!” she commented.
Vance put his hand out hastily. “Say — I guess that’s mine.”
“Who’s it from?”
“Oh, just somebody I had an appointment with. I guess I forgot.” She looked relieved, and he added: “Say — it’s colder than blazes. I guess I forgot to make up the fire too, before we went out.” He laughed at his own joke as he drew her into the kitchen. “There — you sit down and I’ll fix things up in no time.”
He pushed her into Mrs. Tracy’s rocking chair, lit the lamp, raked out the stove, shook in coal and kindlings, and rummaged for milk, while she leaned back and watched him with dusky burning eyes. She looked little and frail in the faint light, and the returning heat brought out on her cheekbones those scarlet spots which made the hollows underneath so wan. Why was it that whenever she and Vance attempted to do anything jolly together she got tired? That she seemed fated never to keep step with him? He poured out the milk and brought it to her. “Here — swallow this down quick. The matter with you is, you’re hungry,” he tried to jolly her; but she shook her head, and the smile on her gaunt little face turned into a grimace of weariness. “I guess I’m just tired — ” Always the same wistful refrain! “She’s sick,” Vance thought with sudden terror. Aloud he said: “Wait till I heat the milk up; then maybe it’ll tempt you.” He thought with a shiver of the cold bed upstairs, their fireless room, the time it would take to warm the house — and where on earth could he find a brick to heat and put at her feet when he got her undressed? He warmed the milk, pressed it to her lips again — but she pushed it away with feverish hands, and the eyes she lifted were dark with a sort of animal fright. “Vanny — I’m so tired. Darling, carry me upstairs!” She wound her arms about his neck, and her cheek burned on his. . . . Halfway up she clutched him closer, and he felt her whisper in his ear. “It wasn’t a woman who telegraphed you, Vanny?” “Woman? Hell no! The idea!” he lied back, stumbling up the steps, pressing her tight, and shrinking from the touch of her tears . . . .
He had had the vision of a big poem up there on the mountain — yes, he knew it was big. Line after line had sprung up like great snow eagles challenging the sun, soaring in inaccessible glory: he had only to lie back and wait, and one by one they planed down and shut their wings in his breast. And now, stumbling up the stairs in the darkness with this poor child, getting her undressed, trying to find something warm to wrap her feet in, wondering why her eyes were so fixed, her cheeks so scarlet, wondering how you felt a pulse, how you knew if anybody had fever . . . all the while, with another sense, he watched the crystal splinters of his poem melt away one after another, as the spring icicles were melting from the roof.
Mrs. Tracy was not expected back till the following evening, and for twenty-four hours Vance struggled alone against the dark mystery of illness. As he watched through the night beside Laura Lou, watched her burning face and hollow eyes, and sought to quiet her tossings and soothe her incessant cough, he tried to recall what had been done for him during his own illness. He too had been consumed with fever day and night, week after week; and his mother and sisters had been always there, with cooling drinks, soft touches, ingenious ways of easing his misery — and here he sat by his wife, his hands all thumbs, his shoes creaking, his brain in a fog, unable to imagine what he ought to do for her.
At one moment her eyes, which had clung to his so anxiously, always asking for something he could not guess, suddenly became the eyes of a stranger. She looked at him in terror, and sitting up thrust him back. “Oh, go away — go away! You shan’t take Vanny from me . . . I say you shan’t!” For a while she rambled on, battling against the obduracy of some invisible presence; then she sank back, and tears of weakness forced their way through the lids she had shut against her husband . . . Vance threw himself down by her and held her in beseeching arms. “Laura Lou . . . Laura Lou . . . Vanny’s here; love, it’s Vanny holding you . . . .” With passionate murmurs he smoothed the hair from her forehead, and gradually her contracted face relaxed, and she opened her lids, and tried to smile. “Is it you, Vanny? Don’t go . . . you’ll never leave me any more, will you?” . . . She dozed off on his shoulder for a few minutes before the cough woke her again . . . .
When morning came she refused to touch the milk he had warmed, and lay tossing and coughing in parched misery. What was it? Bronchitis? His heart sank: what was it people did for bronchitis? There was no telephone, and no nearby neighbour except an old deaf woman who would probably not be of much use — even if Vance could absent himself long enough to summon her. He decided to run across to the deaf woman’s house, and bribe her grandson, a lazy fellow who was not on good terms with Mrs. Tracy, to bicycle to Paul’s Landing for a doctor; but whenever he tried to creep out of the room his shoes creaked or a board cried, and Laura Lou started up. “Don’t leave me, Vanny — you mustn’t leave me . . .” and the heavy hours dragged on . . . Vance rummaged out an old bottle of cough mixture, and gave her some; but it did not relieve her, and the hands she wound about his neck grew drier and more burning. It was as if the fever were visibly consuming her, so small and shrunken had her restless body become. As he sat there and watched it was her turn to become a stranger: this haggard changeling was not the tender creature whom he loved. This discovery of the frail limits of personality, of the transformation of what seemed closest and most fixed in the flux of life, dragged his brain down into a labyrinth of conjecture. What was she, this being so beloved and so unknown? Something in her craved for him and clung to him, yet when he tried to reach that something it was not there. Unknown forces possessed her, she was wandering in ways he could not follow. . . . Now and then he got up and replenished the stove; now and then he wet a handkerchief with cologne water and put it on her forehead, or clumsily shook up her pillows. . . . But he did it all automatically, as if he too were elsewhere, in ways as lonely as those she walked. . . . Was this why we were all so fundamentally alone? Because, as each might blend with another in blissful fusion, so, at any moment, the empty eyes of a stranger might meet us under familiar brows? But then, where was the real primordial personality, each man’s indestructible inmost self? Where did it hide, what was it made of, what laws controlled it? What WAS the Vance Weston who must remain himself though sickness and sorrow and ruin destroyed the familiar surface of his being? Or was there no such unchangeable nucleus? Would he and Laura Lou and all their kind flow back finally into that vast impersonal Divinity which had loomed in his boyish dreams? . . . But, oh, those little hands with twining fingers, the deep-lashed eyes, the hollows under the cheekbones — those were Laura Lou’s and no other’s, they belonged to the body he worshipped, whose lovely secrets were his . . . .
He started up with blinking eyes. The room was dark — the fire out. Had he fallen asleep in trying to soothe his wife to rest? He became dimly conscious of someone’s having come in; someone who groped about, struck a match, and held a candle in his face. “For God’s sake, Vance! Why are you here in the dark? What’s happened to my child?” Mrs. Tracy cried; and Vance, stumbling to his feet, brushed back his hair and stared at her.
But she had no time to deal with him. In a trice she had lit the lamp, revived the fire, thrust a thermometer between Laura Lou’s lips, and piled more blankets on her. “What is she taking? What does the doctor say?” she whispered over her shoulder.
“She hasn’t seen the doctor.”
“Not seen him? You mean he hasn’t been?”
“No.”
“How long’s she been like this?”
“Since last night.”
“Last night? And she’s seen no doctor? When did you go for him?” She drew closer, deserting her daughter to approach her fierce whisper to his ear.
“I didn’t go. She wouldn’t let me leave her . . . .”
The withering twitch of Mrs. Tracy’s lips simulated a laugh. “I guess it’d be luckier for her if you’d leave her and never come back. And now,” she added scornfully, “go and get the doctor as quick as you can; and don’t show yourself here without him. It’s pneumonia . . . .”
Five anxious days passed before Vance could think of his writing or of the office. Mrs. Tracy had given him to understand that he’d better go back to work, for all the use he was to her or Laura Lou: cluttering up the house, and no more help to anybody than a wooden Indian. . . . But it seemed part of his expiation to sit there and let her say such things. He suspected that, though she railed at him for being in the way, it was a relief to have him there, to be scolded and found fault with; besides, now and then there was something for him to do: coals to carry up, provisions or medicines to fetch, tasks not requiring much quickness of wit or hand. . . . He knew that Mrs. Tracy was justified in blaming him for Laura Lou’s illness. The doctor said he had been crazy to drag her up the mountain through the snow, and expose her to the night air when her strength was lowered by fatigue. She hadn’t much stamina anyway; and the long climb had affected her heart. The doctor took Vance aside to tell him that this sort of thing mustn’t happen again; and Vance saw Mrs. Tracy gloating over the admonishment. Well, let her . . . he deserved it.
During those days it seemed to him that he had at last grown from a boy into a man. He was not quick in practical matters; such lessons came to him slowly; but this one sank deep. He was frightened to think how completely, when Beauty called, that celestial Beauty which haunted earth and sky, and the deeps of his soul, he forgot everything else, and rushed after the voice unheeding. When that happened, his two worlds were merged in one, or rather the world of daily duties vanished under a more overwhelming reality. But this would no longer be so. He would school himself to keep the two apart . . . .
At length, when Laura Lou, propped against her pillows, first looked at him with reassured eyes, he decided to go to New York. He arrived empty-handed at the office, for he had not been able to write a line in the interval. He hoped to see Eric Rauch first and explain to him; but Rauch was out, and Vance was told that Mr. Tarrant was expecting him. Rauch was pliant and understanding; but his chief, to Vance, was a riddle. You could never tell if he was going to turn his nervous brilliant smile on you or meet you with a face of stone. He greeted Vance with a surprise in which the latter scented irony, and when told of Laura Lou’s illness uttered the proper sentiments and at once jerked back to business. “Too bad . . . too bad . . . yes, of course. . . . My wife would have been glad to do anything . . . Well, now the anxiety’s over I hope you’ll take hold again. So much time’s been lost that you really owe it to us . . .” and so on. Vance listened in silence. What could he say? At length he began: “You wouldn’t care to have me change ‘round and write some poetry for you?” Tarrant’s face expressed a mixture of dismay and resentment. Poetry? Good God, everybody wanted to write poetry for them: magazine poetry was the easiest thing on earth to turn out. And here was a fellow who could do something else; who had a real gift as a short-story writer; as a novelist, perhaps — and wanting to throw away a chance like that to join the anonymous crowd in the Poets’ Corner! Really, now, didn’t Weston understand? He was bound to them; bound to do a certain thing; had signed a contract to that effect. Contracts weren’t one-sided affairs, after all. . . . Tarrant’s frown relaxed, and he laid his hand on his contributor’s shoulder. “See here; you’ve had a bad shake-up. It’s liable to happen to any of us. Only, once a fellow’s formed the habit of work he keeps straight at it . . . through everything . . . .” Tarrant straightened his shoulders, as though discreetly offering himself as an object lesson. “Now then, Weston, better get back home as quick as you can, and tie up to your next short story. If ‘Unclaimed’ doesn’t pull off the Pulsifer Prize, who knows but you’ve got something up your sleeve that will? I understand that Fynes asked you for an article on The Corner Grocery. The sale of his book has fallen off lately, and he counts on us to buck it up. If you’d made a hit with the article it would have given you a big boost for the prize. But I’ve had to turn Rauch onto it because there was no time to wait. So you can put that out of your mind anyhow, and just tackle your story,” Tarrant ended on a note of affability.
“All right,” Vance mumbled, glad to be gone.
He had a couple of hours to spare before his train, and began to wander through the streets, as he had during his first dark days in New York. Then he had been unknown and starving; now he had a name, had friends, a roof over his head, and a wife who adored him; yet his inner solitude was deeper than ever. Was the fault his, or was it latent in this dreadful system of forcing talent, trying to squeeze every drop out of it before it was ripe; the principle of the quick turnover applied to brains as it was to real estate? As he walked, the old dream of the New York novel recurred to him: the jostling crowds, the swarm of motors, the huge arrogant masses of masonry, roused his imagination, and he thought to himself: “Tarrant’s right; what a fool I was to talk poetry to him!” He stood on a corner of Fifth Avenue while the motors crawled up and down in endless procession, and looking into one slowly moving carriage after another he wondered what sort of a life each of these women (they were almost all women) led, where they were going, what they were thinking of, what other lives were interwoven with theirs. Oh, to have a year to dream of it all, without putting pen to paper! But even a year would not be enough; what he needed was to immerse himself in life without so much as remembering that it must some day bring him in a return, to live as carelessly as all these women rolling past him in their motors . . . .
Mrs. Pulsifer — she was that kind, he supposed. The thought reminded him of her telegram. He hadn’t answered it because he hadn’t known what to say. But now that he was in town, why not try to see her? Funny woman — she’d signed the wire “Jet,” as if he and she were old friends! Lucky she had such a queer name; if she’d been called Mabel, or any real woman’s name, he’d never have heard the end of it from Laura Lou. . . . He remembered her address: she lived only a few streets off, he had plenty of time to call before catching his train. She’d be out, probably; but then he could write and say he’d been. . . . He reached the street and identified the number as that of an impressive wide-fronted house, the kind he had often curiously gazed at in wandering about the city, but never imagined himself entering. He rang the bell, and instantly, as if he had been expected, the heavy double door of glass and wrought iron flew open, and a tall young man in a dark coat with silver buttons barred the threshold.
Mrs. Pulsifer? No — she wasn’t in, the young man said in surprise, as if Vance had asked something almost too ridiculous to be worth answering. But as he spoke, at the far end of a perspective of marble and dusky rugs and majestic stairway Vance saw a figure flit forward and hesitate. “Oh, Mr. Weston — it IS Mr. Weston? Why, I AM out, really . . . I’m due at the other end of nowhere at this very instant . . . .” Mrs. Pulsifer stood before him, wrapped in furs, her long jade earrings making her face narrower and more anxious than ever under the swathings of her close little hat. “But do come in all the same — just for a minute, won’t you?” Her tone was half aggrieved, half entreating, she seemed to want him to say yes, yet not to forget that she had just cause for resentment.
Vance was looking curiously about him; at that moment the house interested him more than its owner. “Well go upstairs — you really don’t mind walking?” she queried, implying that of course there was a lift if he did; and he followed her across the many-coloured paving of the hall, up the wide staircase with its ornate rail of steel and gilding, across another hall and through a great room with shadowy hangings full of figures and trees and colonnaded architecture. Vance had never been in a house so big and splendid, never even imagined one. From the room of the tapestries they passed to another, all in dark wood, with pictures on the panels, and great gilt standards bearing lights; and finally came to a small circular apartment where there were forced flowers in porcelain bowls, more pictures, books, and low wide armchairs covered with dove-coloured silk. Vance gazed at it all, enchanted. “Do you live here all alone?” he asked.
She looked at him in surprise. “Do I—? Why, of course, yes. How funny of you! What did you think —?”
“I thought maybe the house was divided up into apartments, it’s so big.”
“Well, it might be,” she admitted, sighing. “Sometimes I wish it were. It’s horribly lonely, having it all to myself.” She sighed again. “I HATE big houses, don’t you?”
His captivated eyes were still scanning the long vista of rooms. “No; I think they’re great — when they’re like this . . . all the space and the height and the quietness . . . .”
She gave a little conscious laugh and instantly adopted his view. “Oh, you like it? I’m so glad; because, you see, these big rooms were really rather my doing. I insisted on the architect’s carrying out my own ideas — giving me all the elbowroom I wanted. They have so little imagination.” The tall young man with the silver buttons presented himself, as if noiselessly summoned, and she dropped her furs on his arm, said: “Yes — tea, I think; and I’m at home to no one,” tossed off her hat, and sank into one of the dove-coloured chairs. The tall young man closed the door behind him, and shut Vance and his hostess into flower-scented privacy. Mrs. Pulsifer turned her anxious eyes on her visitor. “I suppose you were horrified at my telegraphing?”
“Horrified; no, why?”
“I was afraid you thought I oughtn’t to ask you to come here at all, because of that wretched prize; that you were afraid of what people might think. . . . But I really wanted most desperately to see you about Fynes. You see, practically he has the casting vote; the others just cringe to him. And I knew he’d told you to come and see him about an article or something, and was very huffy because you didn’t; and I wanted to warn you, and to beg you to do whatever he asks. And when you didn’t answer and didn’t come I was perfectly miserable. . . . I know I’m a goose, I know what you’ll think. . . . But I can’t help it; I do so want you to get the prize,” she said, suddenly leaning forward and laying her hand on his.
Her touch startled him, for he was still absorbed in contemplation of the room. “Oh, that’s ever so kind of you,” he stammered, feeling he ought to take her hand; but it had already slipped from him, and she had drawn back with one of her uncertain movements. “It’s all wrong, I know,” she insisted. “I oughtn’t to care about it, I oughtn’t to have any opinion; you’d think ever so much better of me if I stood aloof and let the committee decide.” For a moment a wistful smile gave her thin face the contour of youth. “But the first moment I saw you I felt . . .” She stood up, moving away with her long step. “Should you like to see the rooms? Do you care for pictures?”
Yes, Vance said, he’d like first-rate to look round. He explained eagerly that he’d seen hardly any pictures, and wanted to get hold of some good books on the history of painting . . . maybe she could lend him some? But he was checked by the perception that Mrs. Pulsifer was no longer listening, and that this was not the sort of thing she wanted to hear. He was dimly aware that he had missed his chance, that had he imprisoned her hand the prize would have been his. “Rauch would never have let her go,” he thought, half amused. But she was too unlike the other women with whom he had exchanged easy caresses. She seemed bloodless, immaterial, as if she were a part of her splendid and unfamiliar setting, and might at any moment recede into one of the great gilt frames at which he stood gazing. She poured out a glib patter about the pictures, HER pictures; her Constable, HER Rembrandt, HER Ver Meer, other names he didn’t catch in his excitement; and then led him to another room to show him her “moderns,” bewildering things with unknown names, but all alluded to in the same proprietary tone, as if the artists, whoever they were, had worked, like her architect, only for her and under her direction. Some painters, not represented on her walls, she spoke of with contempt, said she wouldn’t have them at any price though other people fought for them — she was determined to be herself, to be independent, no matter how hard people tried to influence her. Didn’t he think she was right, she challenged him? Her nervous chatter disturbed his enjoyment of the pictures, and prevented the isolation of soul in which great impressions reached him. What a pity, he thought! His heart was beating and murmuring with new harmonies; but perhaps another day, when he got to know her better, and they felt more at ease with each other, he could ask her to let him come back. And he thought how different it would have been if the woman at his side had been Halo Tarrant, who always made him see beautiful things more clearly instead of blurring them.
“Ah — here’s tea. But you’d rather have a cocktail?” Mrs. Pulsifer said. They had returned to the circular room; by the fire stood a table with cups of thin porcelain around a shining urn. Vance said he’d rather have tea. No one had ever offered it to him at that hour, and it amused him to watch her slim hands moving over the tray, shaking the tea into the teapot, regulating the flame of the urn. It reminded him of a scene in an English novel he had read at the Willows. He began to think of his own novel again, and had to rouse himself to hear what Mrs. Pulsifer was saying — something hurried and confused about being lonely, and hating her riches because they shut her off from the only people she cared to see . . . and worshipping genius, and wondering if he wouldn’t promise to be her great great friend, and come often to see her, and tell her all her faults, and let her talk to him about herself — which, it seemed to Vance, was just what she had been doing for the last hour. . . . He mumbled that he was ever so grateful, and would be glad if she’d let him come back for another look at the pictures; but she said if it was only to see the pictures that he wanted to come he was like everybody else, and didn’t care for her but for her house, and what she wanted was a friend who would feel the same about her if she lived in a hovel; but she supposed she wasn’t clever enough to interest the only kind of people who interested her, and must just make the best of this dreadful loneliness that her money seemed to condemn her to. . . . Her eyes filled, and for a moment she seemed to break her unreality and become human. “Oh, don’t say that — you mustn’t, you know — ” he began, putting down his cup and moving nearer; but as he did so he caught sight of a clock over her shoulder, and exclaimed: “God, I’ve only just got time to catch my train — Sorry . . . I’ve got to run for it . . . .” Her face changed again, narrowing into distrust and resentment. Why did he have to catch that particular train? Weren’t there plenty of others? She forced a smile to add that people always made excuses like that when they were bored with you, and she supposed she’d bored him . . . or else why wouldn’t he stay? But Vance remembered a promise to get back with a new tonic for Laura Lou. No, he couldn’t, he said; there was no train till much later, and he had his work. . . . “Ah, your work; how I envy people with work, work like yours, I mean . . . .” Her face softened, she left her hand in his. “You’ll really come again soon, won’t you? You’ll come next week? You shall have the pictures all to yourself; I’ll hide away, and you won’t even see me,” she assured him laughingly; and he thanked her and fled.
By the time he reached Paul’s Landing the whole episode had faded into unreality. Were there houses like that, women like that, pictures like that? The chief impression that remained was that she had said he could come back and see the pictures . . . .
Mrs. Tracy was waiting on the threshold, and he handed her the tonic with the satisfaction he felt when he had managed not to forget an errand. How was Laura Lou? Had the day been good? Pretty good — yes; but she was a little tired. He’d better not go up: she was sleeping. He turned in to the dining room and went over to his desk, his mind full of things he wanted to put down while they were hot. But Mrs. Tracy followed, and after straightening the plates on the dinner table came and stood by the desk. “There was someone called to see you,” she said.
“Someone — who?”
“Bunty Hayes.”
The blood rushed to Vance’s forehead. Hayes — the cheek of the fellow’s having followed him here! “I’ll have to fight it out with him after all,” he thought.
“He’s been after me already, at the office. He says he wants to fight me.”
Mrs. Tracy smiled coldly. “He didn’t want to fight you today. What he wanted was his money.”
Vance’s anger exploded. “His money? I’m doing all I can to earn it for him. If I could do it quicker I would.”
“That’s what I told him,” she agreed, still coldly.
“Well, did he go away after that?”
Mrs. Tracy hesitated, and wiped her wasted hands on her apron. “Not right off.”
“Why — what else did he want?”
“To see Laura Lou.”
“Laura Lou? The fellow’s impudence!” Vance laughed indignantly.
“He wasn’t impudent. He was sorry she was so sick. I could see how bad he felt.”
Vance found nothing to say. The remembrance of the crumpled letter on the floor of his wife’s room shot through him with the same pang as before.
“Well, I’ve got to get to work,” he said.
Laura Lou’s convalescence was slow, her illness expensive. Upton, appealed to by Mrs. Tracy, said all his savings had gone into buying a Ford, and he could do nothing for them for the present. Vance knew that his mother-in-law expected his family to come to his aid. She ascribed Laura Lou’s illness to his imprudence, and felt that, since his endless scribbling brought in so little, he ought to get help from home. But Vance could not bring himself to ask for money, and his reports of Laura Lou’s illness produced only letters of sympathy from his mother and grandmother, and knitted bed jackets from the girls. His father wrote that times were bad in real estate, and offered again to try and get him a job on the Free Speaker if he would come back to live at Euphoria. And there the matter ended.
At odds with himself, he ground out a dull article on “The New Poetry,” the result of random reading among the works of the Cocoanut Tree poets; but it satisfied neither him nor the poets. He tried to make a plan for Loot, but it crumbled to nothing. He was too ignorant of that tumultuous metropolitan world to picture it except through other eyes. If he could have lived in it for a while, if somebody like Mrs. Tarrant had let him into its secrets, perhaps he could have made a book of it; but anything he did unaided would have to be borrowed from other books. Besides, he did not want to denounce or to show up, as most of the “society” novelists did, but to take apart the works of the machine, and find out what all those people behind the splendid house fronts signified in the general scheme of things. Until he understood that, he couldn’t write about them. He brought his difficulty to Eric Rauch. “Unless I can think their thoughts it’s no use,” he said. Rauch looked puzzled, and seemed to regard the difficulty as an imaginary one. “Funny to me you can’t get hold of a subject,” he said; and Vance rejoined: “Oh, but I can — hundreds; they swarm. Only they’re all subjects I don’t know enough about to tackle them.” “Well, I guess you’re in the doldrums,” Rauch commented; and the talk ended.
One day someone related in Vance’s presence a tragic episode which had happened in a group of strolling actors. The picturesqueness of it seized on his imagination, and he tried to bring it to life; but here again he lacked familiarity with the conditions, and his ardour flagged. Fellows at the Cocoanut Tree talked a lot about working up a subject, about documentation and so forth; but Vance obscurely felt that he could not go out on purpose to hunt for local colour, and that inspiration must come to him in other ways. Perhaps a talk with a man like Tristram Fynes would given him his clue. He wrote and asked Fynes for an appointment; but he received no answer to his letter.
Mrs. Pulsifer did write again. She asked why he hadn’t been back to see her, and suggested his coming to dine, giving him the choice of two evenings. The letter reached him on the day when he had taken his watch and his evening clothes to a pawnbroker. He wrote that he couldn’t come to dine, but would call some afternoon; and she wired naming the next day. When he presented himself he found the great drawing rooms empty, and while he waited he wandered from one to another, gazing and dreaming. Art had hitherto figured in his mind as something apart from life, inapplicable to its daily uses; something classified, catalogued, and buried in museums. Here for the first time it became a breathing presence, he saw its relation to life, and caught a glimpse of the use of riches and leisure — advanced even to the assumption that it might be the task of one class to have these things and preserve them, to live like a priestly caste isolated for the purpose. The stuffed dove on the gilt basket, he thought, reverting again to his old symbol of the mysterious utility of the useless. . . . Mrs. Pulsifer’s arrival interrupted his musings, and gave him a surprised sense of the incongruity between the treasures and their custodian.
She looked worried and excited; drew him at once into the circular sitting room, and impetuously accused him of being sorry she’d come back, because now he’d have to talk to her instead of looking at the pictures. Vance had no conversational parries; he could only have kissed her or questioned her about her possessions; the latter course he saw would be displeasing, and he felt no temptation to the former, for she had a cold, and her face, in the spring light, looked sallow and elderly. “I do like wandering about this house first-rate,” he confessed.
“Well, then, why don’t you come oftener? I know I’m not clever; I can’t talk to you; but if you’d come and dine I’d have just a few of the right people; brilliant people — Frenside, and Lewis and Halo Tarrant, and Sibelius, from the Metropolitan, who’d tell you ever so much more than I can about my pictures.” She became pathetic in her self-effacement, and when she repeated: “Why won’t you come? Why do you always refuse?” he lost his head, and stammered: “I . . . no. . . . I can’t — I can’t dine with you.”
“You mean you’ve got more amusing things to do?” she insinuated; and he answered: “Lord, no, not that. It’s — I’m too poor,” he finally blurted out.
There was a silence.
“Too poor —?” she echoed, with an uncomprehending look.
He laughed. “For one thing I’ve got no evening clothes. I’ve had to pawn them.”
Mrs. Pulsifer, who was sitting near him, and leaning forward in her solicitous way, involuntarily drew back. “Oh — ” she faltered, and he divined that her embarrassment was greater than his. The discovery somehow put him at his ease.
“Oh, you don’t need to look so frightened. It’s a thing that happens to people,” he joked. She murmured: “I’m so sorry,” and her lips seemed shaping themselves for the expression of further sympathy. She leaned nearer again, and he saw she was feverishly wondering what she ought to say. Her helplessness touched him; in her place he would have known so well! She seemed a creature whose impulses of pity had become atrophied, and who was vainly trying to give him a sign of human feeling across the desert waste of her vast possessions. “I’m so sorry,” she began again, in a whisper, as if her voice was unable to bridge the distance. Vance stood up and took a few steps across the room. If she WAS sorry, really — as sorry as all that. . . . He stopped in front of her, and began to speak in a low confused voice. “Fact is, I’m down and out — oh just temporarily, of course; I’ve had unexpected expenses . . . .” He paused, wondering desperately why he had ever begun. Mrs. Pulsifer sat before him without moving. Even her eyes were motionless, and her startled hands. He wondered if no one had ever spoken to her of such a thing as poverty. “Look here,” he broke out, “if you really believe in me, will you lend me two thousand dollars?”
His question echoed through the room as if he had shouted it. A slight tremor passed over Mrs. Pulsifer’s face; then her immobility became rigid. The situation clearly had no parallel in her experience, and she felt herself pitifully unequal to it. The fact exasperated Vance. It was all wrong that these people, the chosen custodians of knowledge and beauty, should be so stupid, so unfitted for their task. He hung before her irresolute, angry with himself and her. “I’d better go,” he muttered at length.
She looked up, disconcerted. “Oh, no . . . please don’t. I’m so sorry . . . .”
The meaningless repetition irritated him. “I don’t suppose you ever before met a fellow who was dead broke, did you? I suppose that young man who opens the door has orders not to let them in,” he jeered, flushed with his own humiliation.
She grew pale, and her hands moved uneasily. “I— oh, you don’t understand; you don’t. I try to . . . to live up to my responsibilities. . . . These things . . . I have advisers . . . a most efficient staff who deal with them. . . . Every case is — is conscientiously investigated.” She seemed to be quoting a social service report.
“Oh, I’m not a case,” Vance interrupted drily. “I thought you acted as if you wanted me for a friend — that’s all.”
“I did — I do. I only mean . . . .” She lifted horrified eyes to his. “You see, there’s the prize. . . . If anyone knew that . . . that you’d come to me for assistance . . . that I . . . .”
“Oh, damn the prize! Excuse me; I’m sorry for my blunder. There are times when a man sees a big ditch in front of him and doesn’t know how he’s going to get across. I’m that man — and I spoke without thinking.”
Her eyes, still on his, grew moist with tears. “It’s so dreadful — your being in such trouble. I had no idea . . . .” She glanced about her, almost furtively, as if the efficient staff who dealt with her “cases” might be listening behind a screen. “I do want to help you if I can,” she went on, hardly above a whisper. “If you’ll give me time I . . . I think I could arrange . . . but of course it would have to be quite privately . . . .”
He softened at the sight of her distress. “You’re very kind. But I guess we won’t talk of it anymore. I’ve been tired and worried and I started thinking out loud.”
“But it’s so wrong, so cruel, that you, with your genius, should have such worries. I don’t understand.” She drew her brows together in anxious conjecture. “I thought there was such a demand for what you write, and that you had a permanent job in the New Hour.”
“Yes, I have. But they’re just starting and can’t pay much. And I’m pledged to give them whatever I write. But I’d have pulled through all right if other things hadn’t gone wrong. And I will anyhow.” He held his hand out. “You’ve helped me a lot, just letting me look at those pictures. Thank you for it. Good-bye.”
The decision of his manner seemed to communicate itself to her, and she stood up also, pale and almost beautiful under the stress of an unknown emotion. “No, no, not goodbye, I do want to help you — I want you to tell me what it is that’s wrong. . . . I know young men are sometimes foolish.” She laid on his arm a bejewelled hand of which one ring would have bought his freedom.
Vance gave an impatient laugh. “Foolish? Is that what you people call not having enough money to keep alive on? What’s wrong with me is that my wife’s been desperately sick . . . sick for weeks. That costs.”
There was a silence. Mrs. Pulsifer’s hand slipped away. She drew back a step and slowly repeated: “Your wife? You mean to say you’re married?” Vance made a gesture of assent.
“But I don’t understand. You never told me . . . .”
“Didn’t I? Maybe I didn’t.”
She continued to look at him uncertainly. “How could I know? I never thought . . . you never spoke. . . . But perhaps,” she faltered, a curious light of expectancy in her tired eyes, “it’s because your marriage is — unhappy?”
Vance coloured hotly. “God, no! I’m only unhappy because I can’t do all I want for her.” He thought afterward that he had never loved Laura Lou as he did at that moment.
“Oh. . . . I see . . . .” he heard Mrs. Pulsifer murmur; and he was vaguely conscious of the fading of the light from her eyes.
“Well, good-bye,” he repeated. She seemed about to speak, to make some sign to detain him; but her narrowed lips let pass only a faint echo of his good-bye. It drifted mournfully after him as he walked down the endless perspective of tapestried and gilded emptiness to the hall below, where the tall young man in dark clothes and silver buttons was waiting with a perfectly matched twin to throw back the double doors. Vance wondered ironically whether they added to their other mysterious duties that of investigating Mrs. Pulsifer’s cases; but he knew that his own, at any rate, would never be brought up for examination.
One of the fellows at the Cocoanut Tree gave him the name of a moneylender; and a few days later he had a thousand dollars in his pocket. He told Mrs. Tracy he had enough to pay off Hayes, and asked for his address. She gave it without comment, and Vance, thankful to avoid explanations, returned to New York the next day to discharge his debt. He had no idea how he was going to meet the interest on the loan; but he put that out of his mind with the ease of an inexperienced borrower.
The address led to a narrow office building in an uptown street, where, across the front of an upper floor, he read: “STORECRAFT,” and underneath: “Supplies Taste and saves Money.” He was admitted to a small room with roughcast walls, a sham Marie Laurencin, slender marquetry chairs, and a silvered mannequin in a Spanish shawl. There he waited till a fluffy-headed girl in a sports suit introduced him to an inner office, where Bunty Hayes, throned at a desk, was explaining to another girl: “Chanel, six almond-green Engadines: Vionnet, duplicate order apricot charmeuse pyjamas . . . .” He broke off and sat staring. “Patou, six pastel-blue Rivieras — ” he went on automatically; then, with a change of tone: “All right, Gladys; we’ll finish up later.” The girl vanished, and he turned to Vance. “Say, I didn’t see it was you, first off.”
“Maybe you’re too busy,” Vance began.
“No, but I was expecting a fellow with a new style of bust~restrainer. Never mind; sit down.” He pushed a chair forward. His manner was curt and businesslike, but not unfriendly; and Vance felt less at ease than if he had not been met with anathemas.
“You’re on a new job,” he said tentatively.
Bunty Hayes leaned back, swung around in his swivel chair, and thrust out his legs, displaying perfectly creased trousers. He had grown stouter, and had large yellow horn spectacles and carefully varnished hair. “Why, yes,” he said. “Fact is, there’s more in it. Folks want to tour in the holidays; but they want to shop all the year round, and they all want to shop in New York. Hundred and fifty million of ’em do. Storecraft’s the answer to that. Here: seen one of our cards? We’re going to move to Fifth Avenue next year. If you want to DO big, you got to SEE big. That’s my motto. See here, now; you live in the suburbs: well, we’re the commuter’s Providence. Supply you with everything you like, from your marketing to a picture gallery. We’re going to have an art guild next year: buy your old masters for you, and all you got to do is to drive the hooks into your parlour wall and invite the neighbours.”
Vance had not seated himself. He drew out the money and laid it on the desk. “Here’s what we owe you,” he said.
“Oh, hell — ” said Hayes. The two men faced each other uneasily. At length Hayes nodded and said: “A’right,” and put his hand out toward the money. “Who’ll I make the receipt out to?” he asked, evidently not knowing what to say next. Vance said to Mrs. Tracy, and stood with his hands in his pockets leaning against the door. Hayes wrote the receipt rapidly, blotted and handed it to Vance. “Well, that’s over,” he remarked with an attempt at ease. Vance put the paper in his pocket. As he was turning to go Hayes stood up, and began, in an embarrassed voice: “See here — ”
“Yes?”
“I— your wife was sick when I called the other day. I was real sorry. Wish you’d tell her.”
“Sure,” said Vance, nodding and swinging out of the door. On the stairs, it came over him that he had behaved like an oaf, and he was half minded to turn back and tell Hayes — Tell him what? He didn’t know. But he vaguely felt there was a score between them which the money, after all, hadn’t wiped out . . . .
He had never yet spoken to Laura Lou about Hayes. On his return that evening, when he went to her room, he made up his mind to do so. The room looked pleasant. There was a fire in the stove and a bunch of spring flowers on the table. Laura Lou’s bed was neatly made, and she lay on the old steamer chair which he had brought up from the porch. Mrs. Tracy was below, preparing supper, and the house, sometimes so dreary and repellent to him, seemed peaceful and homelike. Laura Lou’s face lit up at his entrance. “Here — I brought you these. They’re good and juicy,” he said, pulling a couple of oranges out of his overcoat pockets. He bent to kiss her, and she pressed her cheek against his. “Oh, they’re beauties, Vanney; but you oughtn’t to have spent all that money.”
He sat down beside her, laughed, and said: “I’ve spent a lot more; I’ve paid off what was owing to Hayes.”
She flushed a tender rose colour. “Oh, Vanny! The whole of it? Isn’t that great?” Her hands tightened in his. “Mother’ll be crazy glad. But it’s such a lot of money; how in the world did you manage?”
“Oh I . . . I fixed it up. It was easy enough. I got an advance.”
The vague answer seemed to satisfy her, and she rested her head against his shoulder and stroked the oranges with her free hand. “Well, that’s just great. I guess they must think the world of you at the office,” she said placidly.
Vance held her to him. After a pause he said: “I always felt sorry for the fellow, somehow.”
Through her deep lashes she looked up, as though wondering a little. “Well, you don’t have to any longer, do you?”
Vance felt as if she had moved away from him; but in reality her light body was pressed more closely to his. “Why, I don’t know,” he said, “I guess we didn’t act any too square to him, apart from the money. I wish now we’d given him warning . . . or something . . .”
She gave a little wriggle of contentment. “Well, yes, I wish we had too; but I guess it was safer, the way we did it.” For her, at least, the old score had been completely wiped out. He wondered, as he clasped her, if anyone would ever feel about the deep invisible things as he did.
To stifle conjecture he bent down and kissed her lids shut, one after the other. That funny lonely woman in the big house, who had imagined he was unhappily married . . .!
Next morning the expressman deposited at the door a big basket with the “Storecraft” label, full of perfumed grapefruit and polished mandarins and boxes of Californian delicacies.
Vance stopped short. It was three years since he had seen the Willows.
June sunlight lay on the weed-grown lawn. Turrets and balconies showed in uncertain glimpses through layer on layer of overlapping lilac fringes. A breath of sweetness, which would have been imperceptible but for the million of calyxes exhaling it, enveloped the old house as faintly but pervasively as the colour of the wistaria flowers. As he stood there other perfumes stole to him: the purple burden of lilacs, the warm drip of white laburnums, and that haunting syringa smell which was like the noise of bees on a thundery day. On the fluctuations of the breeze they came now from one corner, now another, of the deserted shrubberies, waylaying Vance with their loveliness. But inside the house was that magical room, and all the shadowy power of the past.
He had not been near the Willows since the day when the late Mr. Lorburn had accused him of stealing the books. The place lay on the farther side of Paul’s Landing, and his daily tramp to and from Mrs. Tracy’s took him nowhere near it. He had been forbidden to return there, and if he disobeyed it might cost his mother-in-law her job. Yet there were days when he could hardly trust himself not to scramble over the gate and try for a loose shutter or a broken latch. Those unused books, row on row in the darkness, drew him unbearably; so he walked in other directions.
Mrs. Tracy, some days earlier, had been seized with inflammatory rheumatism. Laura Lou had to wait on her and do the cooking and washing; besides, she had never got back her strength since her illness, and it would have been imprudent to expose her to the cold of an uninhabited house. For two weeks the Willows remained unvisited; and the thought was misery to Mrs. Tracy, who was sure another caretaker would supersede her. Laura Lou said: “Mother, it’s too silly not to send Vanny,” and Vance added jocosely: “Even if I HAD stolen those books, it would be too risky trying it on again.” Mrs. Tracy, turning her face from him, said: “The keys are under the pincushion in the upper right-hand drawer . . . .” And there he stood.
Laura Lou had charged him not to forget what he was there for. He was to open windows and shutters, air the rooms thoroughly, and make sure that no harm had come to the house since Mrs. Tracy’s last visit. The two women prudently refrained from laying other duties on him: for the present the house must go undusted. “Just you tell him to take a good look round, so’t that hired man’ll see somebody’s got his eye on him, and then come straight back here,” was Mrs. Tracy’s injunction to her daughter; who interpreted it: “Darling, all you got to do is to walk round, and tell her everything’s all right.”
Vance decided to begin by a general inspection. He passed from room to room, letting light and warmth into one melancholy penumbra after another, wakening the ghosts in old mirrors, watching the live gold of the sun reanimate the dead gold of picture frames and candelabra. Under the high ceilings of the bedrooms, with their carved bedsteads and beruffled dressing tables, he had now and then an elusive sense of life, of someone slipping through doors just ahead, of a whisper of sandals across flowered carpets, as if his approach had dispersed a lingering congress of memories. In Miss Lorburn’s dressing room he paused before the ornate toilet set with the porcelain swan in a nest of rushes. “She dreamed of Lohengrin, and saw a baby in the bulrushes.” Lorry Spear’s comment came back to him. Funny — he’d never seen Lorry Spear since that day; the fellow owed him ten dollars, too. Vance wondered what had become of him. . . . In the circular boudoir, with the upholstered blue satin armchairs and those gay lithographs of peasants dancing and grape-gathering, he lingered again, trying to imagine the lady in her youth, when the rooms were bright and dustless, and she wore one of those ruffled dresses looped with camellias. . . . “And she ended reading Coleridge all alone . . . .”
He sat down in a blue armchair and closed his eyes. If he should open them on the young Elinor — pale and eager, the dark braids looped along her cheeks! As he sat there, Halo Tarrant’s face substituted itself for the other. Slim and dark-braided, with flowing draperies and sandalled feet, she leaned in the window, looking out through the wistaria fringes for something, for someone. . . . Vance stood up, brushing away the vision. Weren’t we all like Elinor Lorburn, looking out, watching for what never came? Ah, but there were the books — the books that had sufficed her, after all! He moved away, as if with her hand in his — that shy compelling virgin hand — moved through the rooms, down passages and stairs, and across the patterned parquet of the drawing rooms to the library. He reached out to open the shutters, and as he did so Miss Lorburn’s hand slipped from his, and he knew that when he turned she would no longer be beside him, young and wistful, but withdrawn into her frame above the mantelpiece, the mature resigned woman with the chalk lights on forehead and lappets. The woman who read Coleridge alone . . . .
An orderly hand had effaced the traces of his former passage. The books he had taken down were back in their places, the furniture had been straightened. But on the fringed table cover of green velvet the Coleridge still lay open at “Kubla Khan,” the gold~rimmed spectacles across the page. A touch of Halo’s piety . . . .
In the three-year interval much else had happened. Vance had read and studied, new avenues of knowledge had opened to him, linking together many unrelated facts, and Miss Lorburn’s library was now less interesting in itself than because of the sad woman who had lived there. Sad, but not shrunken. He looked up at her, and she looked down with her large full-orbed eyes, the eyes of one who has renounced but not repined. . . . What a subject, if he could do it! He dropped again into the highbacked armchair where he had sat on that first day. “This is the Past — if only I could get back into it . . . .” She must have been lovely when she was young, with a sharp austere loveliness like Halo’s; her long thin hands full of gifts for someone, or else stretched out empty to receive. No one, apparently, had wanted to give her anything, or to receive what she offered; yet instead of withering she had ripened. Her books, and some inner source of life, had kept her warm — he wondered how? And suddenly a queer idea came to him: the idea that Halo Tarrant knew. Was the fancy suggested by some resemblance in their features, or a likeness in expression, something about the eyes and hands? Halo had those same hands, long, like her face, and opening wide when she held them out to you, as if ready to receive or give, while her eyes questioned which it was to be. Yet Halo was married, had presumably fulfilled her destiny. . . . And so, perhaps, had the other woman in her different way. That was what explained the likeness — or else made it all the more obscure. . . . The afternoon shadows wheeled unnoticed across the lawn. Vance continued to sit motionless, letting the secret forces move within him. Whenever he could surrender to his creative fervour it always ended by carrying him to the mysterious point where effort ceased, and he seemed just to have to hold his breath and watch.
He watched . . . .
When he got home, Laura Lou said why’d he been gone so long, and her mother was fretting, and would he go upstairs right away and tell her everything was all right? He stared at her out of his dream, as if she had spoken an unknown language. “Oh, yes — all right . . . everything’s all right . . . .” That night he sat up late, writing, writing . . . .
Mrs. Tracy’s recovery was slow, and she got into the habit of entrusting to Vance the weekly inspection of the Willows. The new owner, old Miss Louisa Lorburn, never came, never asked questions; and the Spear family, since Halo’s marriage, were either in New York, or too busy with weekend parties at Eaglewood to think of policing the Willows. Sometimes Laura Lou went with Vance, accompanied by the woman who helped with the Tracys’ washing: they left Vance in the library, and Laura Lou sang out to him to join her when the cleaning was over. On other days he went by himself; and before long the keys were in his pocket instead of being under Mrs. Tracy’s pincushion . . . .
During those long summer hours in the library he was conscious, for the first time, of a sort of equilibrium between the rush of his words and images and the subject they were to clothe. At first he did not write regularly; he was feeling his way. Much of his time was spent in a state of rich passivity; but the inner travail never ceased. . . . On the days when he had to report at the office he seemed to be walking in his sleep. New York had become a shadow, a mirage, the fermenting activities of his comrades of the Cocoanut Tree as meaningless as dancing to which one cannot hear the music. A subtle transposition had situated his only reality in that silent room among the books. He told Rauch he had started a novel, and on his next visit he was uncomfortably aware of editorial curiosity and impatience; but as yet he could show nothing to satisfy them. “I guess the book’ll be called Instead,” he merely stated; on which Rauch remarked: “Well, it don’t sound exactly incandescent . . . .” Vance drew a breath of relief when, toward the end of the month, he learned that the Tarrants were starting for London and Paris to pick up new stuff for the review . . . .
Rauch had said the title didn’t sound incandescent. Well, the book, if it was ever written, wouldn’t be incandescent either. Vance was more and more conscious of some deep-seated difference that cut him off from the circumambient literary “brightness,” or rather left him unsatisfied by it. Perhaps he could have written like those other clever fellows whose novels and stories he devoured as they appeared. He was quick at picking up tricks of language and technique; and his reading had taught him what Frenside had meant by saying he was at the sedulous age. Ape these fellows — yes, he knew he could! He’d tried his hand at it, not always quite consciously; but though he was sometimes rather pleased with the result he always ended by feeling that it wasn’t his natural way of representing things. These brilliant verbal gymnastics — or the staccato enumeration of a series of physical aspects and sensations — they all left him with the sense of an immense emptiness underneath, just where, in his own vision of the world, the deep forces stirred and wove men’s fate. If he couldn’t express that in his books he’d rather chuck it, and try real estate or reporting. . . . Some of the novels people talked about most excitedly — Price of Meat, say, already in its seventieth thousand, or Egg Omelette, which had owed its start to pulpit denunciations and the quarrel of a Prize Committee over its exact degree of indecency — well, he had begun both books with enthusiasm, as their authors appeared to have; and then, at a certain point, had felt the hollowness underfoot, and said to himself: “No, life’s not like that, people are not like that. The real stuff is way down, not on the surface.” When he got hold of Faust at the Willows, and came to the part about the mysterious Mothers, moving in subterranean depths among the primal forms of life, he shouted out: “That’s it — the fellows that write those books are all Motherless!” And Laura Lou, hurrying down duster in hand, rushed in exclaiming: “Oh, Vanny, I thought there were burglars!”
He got into the way of going oftener and oftener to the Willows. He knew that he risked little in doing so. The Tarrants were in Europe, and nobody else was likely to bother him. If he could have carried off the books he wanted the temptation would have been less great; but even so he would have been drawn back by the contrast between the house at Paul’s Landing, where there was neither beauty nor privacy nor peace and this tranquil solitude. On his second visit he brought with him a supply of paper and notebooks. They remained on Miss Lorburn’s table, beside her Coleridge; and the temptation to return was doubled by the knowledge that he would always find them there, not tidied away or mixed up by interfering hands, but orderly and receptive, as he had left them. As soon as he was seated at the table his mind became clear and free, accidental preoccupations fell from it, and he was face to face with his vision.
To explain his daily absences he told Laura Lou that he was needed at the office. Tarrant, he mentioned, had been called to Europe on business, and they were shorthanded. . . . A few months ago he would have been ashamed of deceiving her; now, since her illness, prevarication seemed wiser as well as safe. She mustn’t be worried . . . she wouldn’t understand. . . . He was beginning to see that there might be advantages in a wife who didn’t understand . . . .
Curiously enough, since he had settled down to this view his tenderness for her had increased. It was as though at first he had expected too much of her, and of himself in his relation to her. Since her illness he had learnt to know her better, had found her limitations easier to accept; and now that his intellectual hunger was appeased she satisfied the rest of his nature. The fact that he had so nearly lost her made her more precious, more vividly present to him; he felt in her a new quality which not only enchanted his senses but fed his imagination — if indeed there were any dividing line between the two. For Laura Lou seemed to belong equally to his body and soul — it was only his intelligence that she left unsatisfied. Into the world of his mind, with its consuming curiosities, its fervid joys, she would never enter — would never even discover that it existed. Sometimes, when a new idea grew in him like a passion, he ached to share it with her, but not for long. He had never known that kind of companionship, had just guessed at it through the groping wonder of his first talks with Halo Spear, when every word she spoke was a clue to new discoveries. He knew now that he and she might have walked those flaming ramparts together; but the path he had chosen was on a lower level. And he was happy there, after all; intellectual solitude was too old a habit to weigh on him . . . .
Meanwhile the tale called Instead was taking shape. It began by a description of the Willows, and was to deal with the mysterious substitution of one value for another in a soul which had somehow found peace. The beginning went quickly; he had only to let the spirit of the place work in him, the picture shape itself under his attentive pen. And this justified his daily escape to the Willows — he had to do the novel as quickly as he could to pay off the interest on his loan . . . .
One day he put his pen down, dismayed to find that — as so often before — he did not know his subject well enough to go on. His mind wandered back to his first sight of the Willows, when he had come there with Laura Lou and Upton. He had recalled, then, waking in the night years before at Euphoria, as a little boy, and hearing the bell of the Roman Catholic church toll the hour. That solemn reverberation, like the note of Joshua’s trumpet, had made the walls of the present fall, and the little boy had reached back for the first time into the past. His first sight of the Willows had renewed that far-off impression; he had felt that the old house was full of muffled reverberations which his hand might set going if he could find the rope. . . . Since then the years had passed, and he had learned many things. His hand was nearer the rope — he was “warm,” as the children said. But when he tried to evoke the Elinor Lorburn who had waltzed in the ballroom and wreathed her hair with flowers before her tilted toilet mirror the dumb walls remained dumb . . . he could not wake them . . . .
The meagreness of his inherited experience, the way it had been torn off violently from everything which had gone before, again struck him with a pang of impoverishment. On the Fourth of July, at Advance and then at Euphoria, the orators of the day (and Grandpa Scrimser foremost among them) had been much given to dilating on the priceless qualities the pioneers had brought with them into the wilderness. To Vance it sometimes seemed that they had left the rarest of all behind . . . .
He fancied he heard a step in the shadows and glanced up from his writing. “Vance!” Halo Tarrant exclaimed. She was standing there, in the doorway of the drawing room, with a look so amazed that Vance, jumping to his feet, lost his own sense of surprise in the shock of hers. “Why I thought you were in Europe!” he said.
“I was to have been.” She coloured slightly. “And then, at the last minute, I didn’t go.” She moved a step nearer. “You hadn’t heard I was at Eaglewood?”
“No. I didn’t know.”
She smiled a little. “Well, I didn’t know you were at the Willows. But just now, in passing the gate, I saw it was open — ” (Oh, curse it, Vance thought — how could he have forgotten the padlock?) “and as I knew it wasn’t Mrs. Tracy’s day I came in to see who was here.”
Her eyes were fixed on him with a looked which seemed to call for an explanation, and he mumbled: “Mrs. Tracy’s been sick . . . .”
“I know; I’m sorry. And you’re replacing her?”
“There was no one else. At first I came only on Saturdays, just to see that things were all right. Then — ” he lifted his head, and returned her look, “then the books pulled me back. I couldn’t help it. And I got in the way of coming oftener.”
“I see. Very often?”
“Every day, I guess. But they don’t know it at home,” he added hastily.
“I know that too,” she said, and, in answer to his glance of interrogation: “I’ve just come from there. I heard Mrs. Tracy was ill, and I looked in to see if there was anything I could do.” She went on, a gleam of irony beneath her lashes: “Laura Lou seemed to think you were in New York.”
The blood rose to Vance’s face and burned its way slowly to his temples. “I . . . she’s been sick too. . . . I knew she’d just get fretting if she thought I came here often . . . like this . . . .”
Halo Tarrant stood before him pale and grave as a young judge; he felt that his fate trembled in the balance. “She’ll despise me for it, too,” he thought, with a pang which blotted out his other apprehensions. She made no answer, but presently she said: “I hadn’t seen Laura Lou for a year. How very beautiful she’s grown.”
Vance, in his surprise, could produce only an inarticulate murmur. There was no answer in his vocabulary to such amenities, especially when they were unexpected; and he stood abashed and awkward. At length he faltered out: “I guess you think I oughtn’t to be here at all.”
“Well, I won’t betray you,” she rejoined, still gravely. For a moment or two neither spoke; then she moved toward the table, and resting her long hand on it (yes, he thought, it was certainly like the hands in the picture), she bent over his manuscript. “You do your work here?”
“Yes. Down home there’s no place but the dining room. And they’re always coming in and disturbing me.”
Mrs. Tarrant tossed off her hat, and seated herself in the carven armchair. The severity of her gaze had softened. Vance leaned with folded arms in the window recess. From where he stood her head, with its closely folded hair and thin cheeks, was just below that of the portrait, and though the eyes were different he felt again the subtle resemblance between the two women. “You do look like her!” he exclaimed.
She glanced up, narrowing her short-sighted eyes. “Like poor Cousin Elinor? I suppose you and she are getting to be great friends, aren’t you?”
“Yes.” He laid his hand on the page at her elbow. “This is about her.”
“About Elinor?”
He nodded excitedly. “I’m writing her life — trying to.”
His visitor looked at him with astonishment. “Her life — Elinor Lorburn’s?”
“I mean, the way I imagine it. How things were in the days when this house was built. I don’t know how to explain . . . but I think I see a big subject for a novel — different from the things the other fellows are trying for. What interests me would be to get back into the minds of the people who lived in these places — to try and see what we came out of. Till I do I’ll never understand why we are what we are . . . .” He paused, breathless with the attempt to formulate his problem. “But I guess it won’t do,” he began again. “I don’t know enough about those old times. I think there are good things in what I’ve done, though . . . the beginning’s good, anyway. See here,” he broke out, “I wish you’d let me read it to you; will you?”
Hesitations and scruples had fallen from him. He forgot that he had been found where he had no right to be, and the probable consequences — forgot the possibility of Halo Tarrant’s disapproval, was hardly aware of her presence even, save as a listener to what he thirsted to have heard. She nodded and leaned back in her chair; and gathering up the sheets he began.
His elocution was probably not much better than when he had recited his poems to her on Thundertop. But he did not think of that till he had started; and after the first paragraph he was swept on by the new emotion of watching his vision take shape in another mind. Such a thing had never happened to him, and before he had read a page he was vibrating with the sense of her exquisite participation. What his imagination had engendered was unfolding and ripening in hers; whatever her final judgment was, it would be as if his own mind had judged him.
As his self-possession returned, the enjoyment of her actual presence was added to the intellectual excitement. Everything about her seemed to be listening and understanding, from the attentive droop of her lids to the repressed eagerness of her lips and the hands folded quietly on her knee. When he had ended he turned away abruptly, as though she might see even the heart thumping in his throat. He threw the manuscript down, and his self~confidence crumbled.
Mrs. Tarrant did not speak. She merely unclasped her hands, and then laid one over the other again, without otherwise moving. To Vance the silence seemed abysmal. He turned back and almost shouted at her: “Well, it’s no earthly good, is it?”
She looked up. “It’s going to be by far the best thing you’ve done.” Her voice sounded rich with restrained emotion. “I can’t tell you how strange the feeling is — all those dull familiar things with their meaning given back to them . . . .”
“Oh, is that what I’ve done? You see — you DO see?”
“Of course — I see with your eyes, and with mine too. That’s the strangeness — and the beauty. Oh, Vance, how did you do it? I’m so glad!” She stood up and drew nearer. It was as if achievement were shining down on him. “You must go on — you must give up everything to finish this.” He nodded, speechless, and she stood looking about the shadowy room. “And of course you must do your work here. You’ve made this place yours, you know. And you must be quiet and undisturbed. I’ll arrange it for you.” She sat down again, leaning toward him across the table. “But this is only a beginning; tell me how you mean to go on.”
Halo Tarrant’s eleventh-hour decision not to sail with her husband was due to a trifling domestic quarrel; so most people would no doubt have called it — though she sometimes wondered how it was possible, in any given case, to say in advance what would turn out trifling and what ominous in the world of sentiment.
She had, or imagined she had, been looking forward eagerly to the trip; to the interesting people they would see, the excitement of playing even a small part in the literary world of London and Paris, and all the inducements which change offers to the young and the unsatisfied. Then, suddenly, a link had snapped in the chain holding her to Tarrant, and they stood miles apart, hardly visible to each other.
Queer that life should be at the mercy of such accidents! But in this case circumstances had been tending for some time to unsettle her husband’s moral atmosphere, which was not at best a stable one. The New Hour was not taking hold as they had hoped. Subscriptions were not increasing. That, they were told, was natural: the first year of a new periodical is always critical. More disquieting was the fact that book shops and newsstands were not sending in heavier orders. There had even been a falling off in the sale of the last numbers, and the editorial programme for the rest of the year was hardly brilliant enough to revive the demand. The situation was not unusual; but that was precisely what made it mortifying to Tarrant. Halo had already learned that in her husband’s scheme of life half successes were almost worse than failures. He had taken hold of the moribund journal and put new life into it; and if it were to languish again in his hands — if somebody else’s failure were to become HIS— the situation would be much more humiliating (and more difficult for his vanity to account for) than if he had started a new enterprise and not made it a success.
Frenside, at this juncture, had the happy thought of suggesting that Tarrant should go over to London and Paris and look about him: personal contact with editors and authors abroad might lead, he thought, to something interesting. Tarrant, always exhilarated by any new plan, at once became buoyant and masterful. He declared he had always thought he ought to go; he was glad that, for once, his wife and Frenside had come round to his view. He was prepared, Halo knew, to face a pecuniary loss on the review for the first year or two, but not a loss of prestige. Being his review, it must be brilliant or vanish: a slow decline would be unbearable. But he was confident that great things would result from this journey, and that he would come home with a glittering list of contributors.
Whenever his faith in himself returned, his wife’s revived with it, and the two hurried joyfully through their preparations. But on the evening before they were to sail Tarrant came home in a different humour. He and Halo were alone, and when they returned to the library after dinner he broke out at once: “Well, we’re dished this time; I don’t see that there’s much use in sailing.”
Halo roused herself out of her happy preoccupation. Hurry, confusion, sudden preparations of any sort, always amused and stimulated her; but they made Lewis nervous — and so did the mere reaction from optimism. She had learned to allow for that, and only echoed absently: “No use sailing?” while her real self remained absorbed in luggage labels, passports and deck chairs. At length her husband’s silence told her that something more was expected of her, and still absently she added: “Why?”
As if her delay had reached to the extreme limit of his patience, his answer sprang back: “The Pulsifer Prize. That fool Weston has gone and lost it.”
Halo shook off her travel dream with a start. What on earth, she wondered, could have set Lewis fretting about the Pulsifer Prize? But what was the use of wondering? She supposed that, after two or three years of marriage, there were times when most husbands seemed to their wives like harmless lunatics (when it wasn’t the other way round, or perhaps reciprocal), and she answered, in a tone of good~humoured reminder: “Lost it? How could he, when it’s not given until next November?”
Tarrant, with a shrug, threw himself back wearily in his chair, and she remembered, too late, that there was nothing he so loathed as being humoured. “My dear,” he said, “what’s the sense of that sort of talk? You’re not really as simple as all that: you know perfectly well that the prize is given the minute Jet Pulsifer takes a shine to one of the candidates. And she had taken a shine to that silly ass.”
Halo’s indifference was giving way to a sense of counter~irritation. Where would he go to dig up his next grievance, she wondered? And just as she ought to be writing out the labels —! “Oh, if that’s all — ” The whole subject of the Pulsifer Prize, with its half-confessed background of wire-pulling and influencing, was particularly distasteful to her, and she was really thankful there was no time to deal with it.
“All?” Tarrant echoed. “It’s everything. She fell for Weston the minute she laid eyes on him — that evening at the party here. It was rather what we’d planned the thing for — you remember? And she’s been awfully nice to him ever since . . . seeing him very often, and encouraging him a good deal, I imagine. You know what she is.”
Halo murmured reluctantly: “Well —?”
“Well, what does the infernal fool do? Goes there the other day and holds her up for a loan.”
“A loan?”
“A loan. And how much, do you suppose? The exact amount of the prize. Two thousand dollars — not a copper less!” Tarrant started up angrily and began to pace the floor. “She sent for me today; I never saw a woman so upset. She says he talked as if he were merely asking for an advance — as if his getting the prize was a sure thing, and she might as well hand the cash over at once, as long as he was bound to get it.”
Thoughts of luggage labels and deck chairs vanished from Halo’s mind. Into their place there stole a cold insidious dread of what was coming, of what her husband was going to say, and she was going to feel about it. “Nonsense, Lewis,” she exclaimed. “I don’t believe he ever said anything like that.”
Tarrant laughed. “We all know you think he can’t do wrong. But I suppose you’ll admit he did ask for the money, if she says so?”
Halo pondered. She had forgotten herself and Tarrant in the shock of a new distress. “Poor fellow — I wonder why he wanted it so badly.”
“Well, I own I’m less interested in that. What I care about is that he’s fairly dished us, and that we were banking on the prize to give us a boost at the end of the year. With a new review it would have made a lot of difference. But the idea of considering US is the last that would enter his head.”
“I suppose it is, if he wanted the money as much as that; and he must have, to dream of asking Jet Pulsifer.”
“Oh, I don’t know. I daresay it’s rather in his line. That kind of man, when he sees a woman’s gone on him . . .”
“He’s not that kind of man!” Halo exclaimed. She also stood up, trembling with an unaccountable dismay. “What reason did he give — didn’t she tell you?”
“Oh, the usual one, I believe. Hard up — wife ill, or something — they always tell the same story. To think the fool had only to sit tight and let her go on admiring him!”
There was a long silence. Tarrant stopped his nervous pacing and returned to his armchair, throwing himself into it with a groan of impatience. “That prize was ours!”
“Ours?”
“Well — isn’t he our discovery?” He laughed. “Yours, if you prefer. You’re welcome to it. I hold no brief for blackmailers.”
She looked at him with astonishment. He had suddenly crowded Vance Weston out of her mind and taken possession of its centre himself. “Blackmailers?” she repeated. She said the word over slowly, once or twice. Then: “But, Lewis, if he’s that, what are we? What’s the New Hour?”
Tarrant threw back his handsome head and returned her look with faintly raised brows of interrogation, and a glance which declared resignedly: “Ah, now I give up!”
“What are we,” his wife went on, “who knew what Jet was, and put the boy in her way, and worked up her imagination about him, all to . . .” She broke off, vexed with her own exaggerated emotion, yet unable to control it.
Tarrant’s tone, in contrast, grew profoundly quiet. “All to — what?”
“Steal the prize for our paper.”
He looked at her, still with arched ironic brows. “That’s what you call it? Stealing?”
“Don’t you? We began to throw that boy in Jet’s way months ago — began in this very house, and at your suggestion.” (Oh, of course, he interjected, he knew she’d end by putting all the blame on him.) “No, I don’t,” Halo continued. “I keep my share; and it’s a big one. But I see now that we ought both to be ashamed — far more ashamed than Vance. And I AM— I’m revolted. If that’s the way literature is produced, it had better cease altogether. If it has to be shoved down people’s throats like Beauty Products and patent collar buttons it shows our people don’t really want it; that’s all!”
Tarrant leaned back, and stretched his hand out for a cigar. “Did you ever really think they did?”
Her colour rose. “I suppose I didn’t think at all — I just rushed ahead with the crowd. But now . . .”
“Well — now?”
“Now it seems to me there’s only one thing we can do to save our souls — we must lend the boy that money.”
Tarrant paused attentively in the lighting of his cigar. “WE—?”
“You,” she corrected herself, crimsoning. Something, perhaps involuntary, in the inflexion of his voice seemed to imply that, where there was a question of bestowing money, the plural pronoun could hardly be current between them. But his next retort brushed aside the implication.
“We — I? Lend him the money? What on earth are you talking about? He gets us into a damned mess, and we reward him for it?” She was silent. “Is that your idea of it?” he insisted.
She murmured with a shrug: “I suppose it’s your idea of my idea.”
“Ah, and what is yours, if I’ve misinterpreted it?”
“That the fault is all ours, and that we ought to expiate.”
“Expiate!” He smiled. “You talk like an old-fashioned Russian novel . . . .” He paused a moment, and then added: “I had no idea you were such an idealist. . . . Well, it’s getting late,” he continued, standing up with a shake of his long body. “I’ve got to throw some last things into my trunk, and we’ll postpone this discussion till we’re on board.”
Halo felt a sudden blur before her eyes. “Lewis!” she exclaimed.
He turned back, irritated, impatient to make an end, and as the two stood looking at each other Halo saw, in a revealing flash, how immeasurably far apart they were — had always been, perhaps. It was as if she had been walking in her sleep, and had now abruptly opened her eyes on the edge of a sheer drop. Yet what was there in this paltry wrangle to throw such a glare into the depths?
Tarrant stood waiting. He looked drawn, tired, exasperated. It was no time for reasonable explanations; he hated tactlessness, and she was being tactless. Yet speak she must — speak (she said to herself) before they were so far apart that he was out of hearing . . . .
“Well?” he repeated.
“Lewis . . . you’re not going to understand . . . .”
“Understand what?”
“Why I say what I’m going to say — ”
“Lord! How portentous! What are you going to say?”
“That our talk has made me feel I want to be by myself for a while — away from you, I mean . . . .”
“Oh, is that all? All right. I’m off to bed this minute,” he said, strangling a yawn.
“I don’t mean that. I mean . . . I’d rather not sail with you tomorrow.”
“Not sail?” He swung round and mustered her incredulously. “What in God’s name are you driving at now?”
“Just what I say. I’d rather not go . . . .”
He leaned in the doorway, waiting. She said nothing more, and he broke into the thin laugh which often preceded his outbursts of anger. “May I ask what all the fuss is about anyhow?”
She gave back his look almost timidly. She had not known she meant to say just those words till they were uttered; but now she knew it was her inmost self which had said them, and she could not take back what was spoken. Yet how was she to explain? “Because I . . . because I feel I want to be alone for a while . . . .”
“That’s why you’re not going?”
“I don’t feel as if — I could . . . .”
“You’re not serious, are you?”
“Yes. I’m serious.”
There was another silence. She saw that he was baffled and mortified, and yet too proud to argue with her or entreat her.
“Oh, all right — if you say so,” he muttered. Then, after a pause: “All the same, though, I’m curious to know why.”
She hesitated, still caught in the hopeless difficulty of finding words. “It’s because . . . I suddenly see that we feel too differently about things, and I want to have time to think . . . to go away and think by myself . . . .”
Tarrant’s lips narrowed, and his cold eyes seemed to draw closer together. “If you mean that we feel differently about lending Vance Weston money, we certainly do. I rather wonder, though, that you should pick that out as a grievance. I should have thought you might have remembered that as a rule I’m not backward about lending money.”
There was a long pause. Halo leaned against the chair from which she had risen, and the eyes resting on her husband filled with tears. Her resentment had died at the very moment when he had found the taunt most calculated to quicken it. She would have given the world if he had not said those particular words, because they laid bare to her the corner of his mind where old grudges and rancours were stored, the corner into which she had always refused to look. But now that the words were spoken she felt only pity for him — and for herself. It seemed to her that he and she merited equally such humiliation as the moment involved. “Oh, Lewis,” she began, “please don’t . . . .”
“I don’t want to — all I want is to make myself clear.”
“You have,” she murmured. She straightened herself and took a step back. He still leaned in the door and looked at her.
“All right,” he said, again with his thin laugh. “Then we may call the matter settled?”
She made no answer, and after waiting a moment he went out of the room. When the door had closed she sat down and leaned back in her chair with closed eyes.
To justify her appearance at Eaglewood on the day when she was supposed to be sailing with her husband, Halo told her parents that at the last minute she had decided he would do his job better without her. Dragging a wife about on such a hurried expedition — what a nuisance! Of course he couldn’t tell her so; but his beautifully simulated distress, when she had announced her decision, had shown her how relieved he felt. “You know how he is: never so polite as when he wishes you were dead and buried,” she reminded her father and mother; and smilingly watched their incredulity melt into reassurance. It was easy now to reassure the Spears! Since their own wants were provided for they had grown less exacting for others. With a comforting word or two you could put Mr. Spear’s mind to rest about the treatment of live bait, or Mrs. Spear’s about the future of democracy. And so with the case of their daughter. Mrs. Spear, who still needed to be told at intervals that all was right with the world, instantly seized on the idea that Halo had given up sailing because she had “hopes” again — at last! — had perhaps been advised by the doctor . . . though the poor child, after her previous disappointments, was naturally reticent. And Mr. Spear smoked his good cigars, and said, well, no doubt his daughter knew her business better than they did, and he rather admired the way the modern young people had of respecting each other’s independence. Halo knew that her parents were enchanted to have her to themselves; Tarrant rather intimidated them, and it was easier to praise him behind his back than to humour him to his face. The easy happy-go-lucky quarrelsome atmosphere of Eaglewood was always chilled by his presence; and there were so many of their friends whom he regarded as bores or cranks, and whom they couldn’t invite when he was there . . . .
Halo did not care what her parents thought of her sham reasons, as long as they feigned to accept them; she was too busy examining the real ones. She knew that she had at last emerged into the bald light of day from the mist of illusion she had tried to create about her marriage. That talk with Lewis had been a turning point: the inevitable stocktaking. Never again would she see him save as he was; but she would also, as inevitably, see herself as chained to him for life.
The fact that he had reminded her of her obligation would make it perpetually present to her. The new carpets at Eaglewood, the Spear flat in New York, Mrs. Spear’s black velvet, Mr. Spear’s cigars, the funds for Lorry’s theatrical enterprise — these were the links of her chain. They held her as tight as if divorce had never existed. For she knew now that all Lewis’s generosity (yes, yes, he WAS generous!) had proceeded not from the heart but from the head. He wanted her; she suited him; he had bought her. It was no more romantic than that. And being a gentleman, he punctiliously paid the annual tax on his acquisition, and would continue to as long as she continued to suit him. And it was her business to go on suiting him, since, the day she ceased to, the Spear household would fall to pieces . . . .
The idea frightened her, and as soon as he was safely at sea she began to think how to conciliate him. Everything seemed easy when he was not there. His cold unreasonableness always silenced her at the moment, and then stung her to resistance; but she could make her submission in writing because, escape being impossible, common sense warned her to make the best of her fate. And something higher than common sense whispered that, after all, she was only paying her dues . . . .
She sent him, by the next steamer, a simple friendly letter, telling him that she knew she’d been stupid, but she’d been feeling dreadfully nervous and overtired, and he must forgive her, and not think of their disagreement. It was really providential, she added, that she hadn’t gone with him, because the doctor found she was rather rundown and anaemic, and badly in need of a rest, and she would just have been a drag on him, and unable to keep up the pace. But to show she was forgiven he must send her long cable letters with all his news and the review’s . . . .
She had written that her not going with him had been providential; but how true it was she did not dream till she heard those first chapters of Vance Weston’s.
Under his touch the familiar setting of the Willows became steeped in poetry. It was his embodiment of the Past: that strange and overwhelming element had entered into his imagination in the guise of these funny turrets and balconies, turgid upholsteries and dangling crystals. Suddenly lifted out of a boundless contiguity of Euphorias, his mind struck root deep down in accumulated layers of experience, in centuries of struggle, passion, and aspiration — so that this absurd house, the joke of Halo’s childhood, was to him the very emblem of man’s long effort, was Chartres, the Parthenon, the Pyramids.
It was extraordinary, how this new vision of it reanimated the dusty scene. Countless details that Halo had taken for granted, or dismissed as negligible, were now ripe with meaning. The mere discovery that there were people who had been born and died in the same house was romance and poetry to Vance. It gave to all these anonymous particles a relief and a substance she had never guessed in them. And the fact that she could help him in his magical evocation, provide him with countless necessary details about these people who were so near yet so remote, so trivial yet so significant, could tell him how they spoke and felt and lived and died, made her feel of use again in the world.
Every day at the same hour she came back to the Willows to meet him, so that there should be no break in his inspiration. Ah, now, indeed, the New Hour was to have its masterpiece!
Mrs. Tracy had recovered. The keys of the Willows were safely back in her drawer, and she and Laura Lou began again going to the house on stated days. On those days Vance usually stayed at home to write in the stuffy little dining room; or, if the stuffiness was too oppressive, wandered off up the mountain, past the gates of Eaglewood, past the highest-lying farms, to the open ridges below Thundertop.
Mrs. Tracy’s day was Saturday. On her first return to the Willows she apparently discovered nothing unusual or out of order; if she had, Vance would certainly have heard of it. She had never thrown off the worry of having to entrust the keys to him, and had manifestly expected to find books dislodged and cigarette ends lying about, if nothing worse.
“I told Mother you’d be ever so careful,” Laura Lou reported afterward with a little smile of triumph; and Vance, pushing his manuscript aside, smiled back absently: “After the scare I had in that house —!”
He was not afraid of scares now. He knew that on the days when he went to the Willows he was still supposed by his wife and mother-inlaw to be “at the office.” And so, technically, he was. After all, he had simply transferred his papers from a precarious desk corner at the New Hour to the sanctuary of Miss Lorburn’s library. He no longer needed Mrs. Tracy’s keys (those damned keys!) for Halo Tarrant had her own, and was always there before him. He did not remember how that tacit arrangement had been established, nor at whose suggestion he and she, when the afternoon’s work was over, invariably restored every book to its place, locked up the manuscript in a cupboard below the bookshelves, and buried their cigarette ends in the border outside of the window. On the day when Mrs. Tarrant had first surprised him in the library Vance had confessed that his wife and mother-in-law did not know of his coming to the Willows to work, and had told her his reasons for keeping his visits secret. She had understood in a flash — when did she not? — and all their subsequent precautions had grown out of that brief avowal, without any comment or question that he could remember.
That was one of her rare qualities, to him perhaps the rarest: the way she took things for granted, didn’t forever come harping back on them. That, and her not asking questions — personal questions. In the world of Euphoria and the Tracys the women did nothing but ask questions. They never stopped asking questions. The only things that seemed to interest them unfailingly were the things a man might conceivably want to keep to himself. They had noses like shooting dogs for those particular things, whatever they were; a good part of the time a man spent away from his women had to be devoted to inventing prevarications as to how he spent it. If a fellow had only strolled down to the station to see the Chicago express come in, he would invent something else from the mere force of habit. . . . With Mrs. Tarrant it was different. She had a way of dashing straight at the essentials. And anyhow, she didn’t seem to care how Vance spent his time when he was away from her, an indifference as surprising to him in a woman friend as in wife or sweetheart. No one had ever cross-questioned him more searchingly than his own sisters; yet here was a woman with whom he was on terms of fraternal intimacy — who shared with him almost daily the long hushed midsummer afternoons, yet seemed interested only in the hours they lived together in fervid intellectual communion. The truth was that, both as Halo Spear and as Halo Tarrant, she had always appeared to Vance less as a simple human creature than as the mysterious custodian of the unknown, a being who held the keys of knowledge and could render it accessible and lovely to him. The first day she had found him at work on his new tale she had plunged into his enchanted world with him, and there they met again each afternoon. She had entered instantly into his idea of evoking the old house and its dwellers, and as he advanced in his task she was there at each turn, her hands full of treasure, like a disciple bringing refreshment to an artist too engrossed to leave his work. Only it was he who was the disciple, not she: he who, at each stage, had something new to learn of her. He had brought his fresh untouched imagination to the study of the old house and the lives led in it — a subject which to her had seemed too near to be interesting, but to him was remote and poetic as the Crusades or the wars of Alexander. And he saw that, as she supplied him with the quaint homely details of that past, she was fascinated by the way in which they were absorbed into his vision, woven into his design. “I don’t see how you can feel as those people must have felt. I suppose it’s because they’re already history to you. . . . Don’t forget that Alida” (Elinor Lorburn had become Alida Thorpe) “would always have had her handkerchief in her hand: with a wide lace edge, like the one I brought down from Eaglewood to show you yesterday. . . . It’s important, because it made them use their hands differently. . . . And their minds too, perhaps . . . like the old gentlemen I remember when I was a child, who always carried their hat and gloves into the drawing room when they called. And her wedding dress” (for their Alida was to have had the hope of marriage) “would, I think, have been like my great-great~grandmother’s: India mull, embroidered at Madras, and brought back on one of her grandfather’s merchantmen. For of course all their finery would have been stored away for generations in those old chests we found in the attic. Elinor really was an epitome of six or seven generations — the last chapter of a long slowly moving story.”
“Ah — slowly moving! That’s it! If I could get the pace the way you seem to give it to me when you tell me all those things . . .”
He leaned his elbows on the scattered pages and stared at her across the table. The long folds of the green velvet table cover drooped to the floor between them, and from her shadowy place above the mantel Miss Lorburn looked down meditatively on the young pair who were trying to call her back to life. Halo Tarrant, facing him, her dark hair parted on her temples, her thin face full of shadowy hollows, seemed in the shuttered summer light, almost as ghostly as Miss Lorburn. “I wonder — ” Vance broke out, laying down his pen to look at her. “Have you had to give up things too . . .?”
“Give up things . . .?”
“I mean: a vision of life.”
“Oh, THAT—!” She gave a faint laugh. “Who doesn’t? Luckily one can recapture it sometimes — in another form.” She pointed to the manuscript. “That’s exactly your theme, isn’t it?”
He nodded. The allusion sent him back to his work. He did not know why he had strayed from it to ask her that question — the first personal question he had ever put to her. But there were moments when the shape of her face, the curves of her hair and brows, reminded him so startlingly of the thwarted lady above the mantel that the comparison sent a pang through him. And then Mrs. Tarrant would burst into banter and laughter, would flame with youthful contradictions and enthusiasms, and he would wonder how he could have seen in her any resemblance to the sad spinster who had leaned on winter evenings on the green velvet table, reading Coleridge.
“Yes — but it was Coleridge; don’t forget that! It wasn’t The Saints’ Rest or The Book of Martyrs.” That had been one of Halo’s first admonitions. Vance was not to make a predestined old maid or a pious recluse out of his Alida. She must be a creature apt for love, but somehow caught in the cruel taboos and inhibitions of her day, and breaking through them too late to find compensation except under another guise: the guise of poetry, dreams, visions. . . . That was how they saw her.
His work had always been engrossing to Vance — something he was driven to by an irresistible force. But hitherto it had been laborious, thankless, full of pitfalls and perplexities, as much a weariness as a joy, and always undertaken tentatively, hazardously, with a dread lest the rich fields through which it beckoned should turn into a waterless desert. Now he felt at ease with his subject, assurance grew in him as he advanced. For beside him was that other consciousness which seemed an extension of his own, in which every inspiration, as it came, instantly rooted and flowered, and every mistake withered and dropped out of sight. He was tasting for the first time the creator’s supreme joy, the reflection of his creation in a responsive intelligence; and young as he was, and used to snatching what came to him as recklessly as a boy breaking the buds from a fruit tree, he was yet deeply aware of the peculiar quality of this experience.
“That about the handkerchief always in her hand — that’s the kind of thing that gives me the pace . . . .” He leaned back, rumpling his hair and looking straight ahead of him into his dream. He had been reading aloud the afternoon’s work, and Halo, as her way was, sat silent, letting the impression of the reading penetrate her.
“You see, from the first day I set foot in this house I got that sense of continuity that we folks have missed out of our lives — out where I live, anyway — and it gave me the idea of a different rhythm, a different time beat: a movement without jerks and breaks, flowing down from ever so far off in the hills, bearing ships to the sea. . . . I don’t say one method’s better than another; only I see this is mine . . . for the subjects I want to do, anyhow. . . . And so even a handkerchief in a woman’s hand counts . . . .”
She nodded: “Of course.”
“And those are the things I never could have found out if you hadn’t told me.”
“Oh, yes, you would. . . . You were destined to . . . .”
“I guess I was destined to YOU,” he rejoined, half laughing.
She echoed the laugh; then she pushed back her chair with a sigh. “It’s late — I must be going. But you’re all right now; you’ve got all the material you need, and you know what to do with it. I’m glad to go away feeling certain of that.”
Still deep in his dream, he protested: “But you’re not going away? It’s not late, really; and there are two or three things more . . .”
She stood up with a gesture of negation. “Oh, you’ll have to write me about those, or drop in some day when you come to New York — ”
He sat crouched over the table, his chin sunk in his locked hands, and stared up uncomprehendingly. “Write to you? What do you mean? Can’t you come back tomorrow?”
“No, nor the next day. Our holiday’s over, Vance — didn’t you know?”
“Over — why?”
“Because my husband’s arriving; I’m going back to New York to join him.”
The words fell on his excited brain like little blows from some deadly instrument. At first he hardly felt them — then his head reeled with the shock, and for a moment he found no word to say.
“But you’re all right now; I mean the book’s all right — you can see your way ahead; can’t you, Vance?”
He still looked up at her incredulously. “I can’t see anything but you.”
“Oh — ” she murmured, and sat down once more, facing him across the familiar table. “Well, no wonder: we’ve looked at each other like this nearly every day for two months now . . . .”
Vance was not listening. He had reached the same degree of absorption which, the day he had met Laura Lou in the rubberneck car, had made it impossible to fix his attention on what she was saying. He sat looking at Halo Tarrant with a concentration as remote as possible from that April ecstasy, yet as intense. “I feel as if I’d never looked at you before,” he blundered out.
“I don’t believe you ever did!” she said. Her lips began a smile; then they became grave, and her slow colour mounted. She sat motionless, giving him back his gaze so steadfastly that hers seemed to enter into his eyes and slip down their long windings to his very soul. She dropped her lids after a while, and made a motion to rise again. “But you’ll know me now, won’t you, the next time we meet?”
He made no answer. Her banter hung in a meaningless dazzle somewhere outside of him; all his real self was within, centred in the effort of holding her image fast, of tracing it, line by line, curve by curve, with the passionate hands of memory. She who had seemed to him but a disembodied intelligence was now stealing into every vein and fibre like wine, like wind, like all the seed~bearing currents of spring. He looked at her hands, which lay folded before her on the table, and wondered what their hidden palms were like, and the dimpled recess of her inner arm at the elbow. “No, I’ve never known you,” he repeated stupidly.
“Oh, but we’ve been . . . but we’ve been . . . .” She broke off, and began again, in a more decided tone: “Your book has reached a point now when it will be all the better for you to go on with it alone. A writer oughtn’t to get too dependent on anybody’s advice. If I’ve been able to help you . . .”
“Oh, curse the book,” he broke in, burying his face in his hands. The tears choked in his throat and burnt his close-pressed eyeballs. He hadn’t known — why hadn’t he known? — that it would be like this. . . . The room grew still. He heard a fly bang against the window and drop to the sill from the shock of its own impact. Outside was the confused murmur of the summer afternoon. Presently Mrs. Tarrant moved. She walked around the table, he felt the stir of her nearness, her hand rested on his shoulder. “Vance — don’t. Remember, you’ve got your job; and you belong to it.”
He did not move lest he should lose the shock of her light touch running through him like his blood. But to himself he groaned: “It’s always the same way with you, you fool. You see only one thing at a time, and get into a frenzy about that, and nine times out of ten it’s not the real thing you’re chasing after but only something your brain has faked up.”
Mrs. Tarrant went on in the same even tone. “Vance, are you listening to me? You must listen. Of course you must go on with your work here. You mustn’t be disturbed — and you must have this atmosphere about you; I’ll see to that — I’ll arrange it.” Still he did not answer; did not drop his hands or turn his head when he heard a slight click on the table at his elbow. “See, Vance, I’m leaving you the keys. Don’t forget them. You can return them to me in New York when you bring me the finished book.”
He did not move. She too was silent for a moment; then her hand was withdrawn. “Come — we must say good-bye, Vance.”
He dropped his hands and leaned back, looking up at her. “I never thought about its ending,” he muttered.
“But it isn’t ending; why should it? You must stick to your job and carry it through; and then, when it’s done, you’ll be coming back regularly to the office — and I shall see you often, I hope . . . .”
“Not like this.”
“This had been good, hasn’t it? But when your book’s done, that will be lots better; that will be the best that could happen . . . .”
“I don’t care a curse about the book.”
She stood looking down at him, and a faint smile stole to her lips. “You ought to, if you say we’ve done it together.”
Again the tone of banter! She was determined to force that tone on him then. She was teasing him, ridiculing him, condescending to him from the height of all her superiorities: age, experience, education, worldly situation; and he, this raw boy, had sat there, forgetting these differences, and imagining that because he had suddenly discovered what she was to him, he could hope to be as much to her! He ached with the blow to his vanity, and a fierce pride forced him to feel no other ache. If she thought of him as a blundering boy, to be pitied and joked with, to hell with dreams and ambitions, and all he had believed himself to be!
“I guess I don’t know how to talk,” he grumbled out. “Better tie up to my writing — that your idea?”
She sat down beside him again, and while he covered his eyes from the glare of his own blunder he heard her, on another plane of consciousness, with other ears, as it were — heard her talking to him reasonably, wisely, urgently of his work, of the opportunities ahead of him, of what he was justified in hoping, of what his effort and ambition ought to be: all in an affectionate “older friend” voice, a voice so cool and measured that every syllable fell with a little hiss on the red-hot surface of his humiliation.
“You know how I’ve always believed in you, Vance. Oh, but that’s nothing . . . I’m nobody. But my husband believes in you too . . . believed in you from the first, before I’d read anything of yours; he’s proved his belief, hasn’t he? And Frenside — Frenside, who’s never pleased, never satisfied . . . And when they see what you’ve done now they’ll feel they were justified — I know they will. . . . Vance, you know artists always have these fits of discouragement . . . often just when they’ve done their best; it’s the reaction after successful effort. And this is your best so far, oh, so much your best! I’m sure something still bigger and better will follow; but meanwhile, dear boy, for your soul’s sake you must believe in this, you must believe in yourself . . . .”
For his soul’s sake he could not have looked up or changed his attitude. Her friendly compassion crushed him to earth, her incomprehension held him there. “If she’d only go,” he thought, “if only it was over . . . .”
The stillness was broken by the scraping of her pushed-back chair. He felt a stir of air as she moved, and heard, through interlocked hands, her footfall sink into the bottomless silence of the old house. A door closed. She had gone; it was over . . . .
Vance continued to sit there. He had imagined he had suffered on the day when he had seen his grandfather down by the river with Floss Delaney: poor simpleton! That was a wound to his raw senses. He had escaped from it by writing it out and selling it to an editor. But now there was not a vein of his body, not a cell of his brain, not a dream or a vision of his soul, that was not hurt, disabled. . . . This woman who had kindled in him the light by which he lived had sat there complacently telling him that she believed in his work, that her husband and old Frenside believed in it . . . and had thought she was leaving him comforted!
But did she really think so? Or was all she had said only a protective disguise, the conscientious effort to repress emotions corresponding to his own? He had an idea she would be very conscientious, full of scruples he wasn’t sure he wholly understood. For if she hadn’t cared as much as he did, why should she have devoted all those hours to helping him? If it was just for the good of the New Hour, she was indeed the ideal wife for an editor! But no: those afternoons had been as full for her as for him. What was that phrase she had pointed out, in the volume of Keats’s Letters she had given him — about loading every rift with gold? That was what they had done to their hours together: both of them.
Suddenly, as he sat brooding, he heard a door open: then, after a moment’s delay, a step coming through the empty rooms. The carpets muffled it, the stealing twilight seemed to envelop it; but it was hers, hers surely — who else would have business there? She was returning, coming back to say all the things that were surging in his heart. . . . He sat still, not daring to look up.
The step drew nearer, reached the threshold, clicked on the parquet of the library. He started up and saw Mrs. Tracy. In the faint light her face looked so drawn and wretched that he thought she had been taken ill again, and went toward her hurriedly.
“Why, what’s the matter?”
“Matter? It IS a woman you come to meet here then!” She had reached the table, and with a quick pounce picked up a glove which lay there. “That’s what you call your literary work, is it?” she triumphed venomously.
Vance stood silent. His mind was still so charged with ardent and agonizing thoughts that he could not grasp what she was saying. What was she talking about, what was she trying to insinuate, what had she come for? Once more he caught in her face the gleam of animosity he had been conscious of, just below the surface, ever since he had gone with Upton to the ball game.
“Well, haven’t you got anything to say? No, I don’t suppose you have!” Mrs. Tracy taunted him.
“I don’t know what you expect me to say. I don’t know what you’re talking about. That glove is Mrs. Tarrant’s — she left here only a few minutes ago.”
Mrs. Tracy’s sallow face grew sallower. He saw that she was unprepared for the answer and not wholly inclined to believe it. “Mrs. Tarrant — what was she doing here?”
“She came to see me.”
“And what were you doing here?”
“Writing, as you see.”
Mrs. Tracy was silent for a moment, her eyes fixed incredulously on the piled-up pages before her. “I’d like to know who it is lets you in,” she said at length.
“Why, Mrs. Tarrant let me in today, of course.”
“Today! Maybe she did. I’m not talking only about today. It’s not the only day you’ve been here.”
Vance hesitated. He had expected to silence his mother-in-law, and dispel her suspicions, by naming Mrs. Tarrant — one of the few persons who had the undisputed right to come and go in that house. But it would be a different matter, he instantly felt, to let Mrs. Tracy associate Halo’s name with the frequent and clandestine visits of which she evidently suspected him. He was convinced now that she had come on purpose to surprise him, as the result of information received; and he was never ready-witted in emergencies.
“Well, I don’t know’s I need ask who lets you in,” she pursued. “You had plenty of time to have duplicate keys made while I was sick.”
“Certainly I had — if it had occurred to me to do anything so low~down.”
“Low-down? I guess it isn’t that would have prevented you, if you’d been set on coming here, whether it was to steal books or to meet women . . . maybe both . . .” she flung back, trembling.
Her agitation had a steadying effect on Vance. “Why not both, as you say?” he rejoined impartially, beginning to gather up his papers. He was sure she was not there without a definite purpose, and it was obviously safer to leave the burden of explanation on her shoulders. After all, he had nothing to reproach himself with but the venial wrong of concealing from Laura Lou that he did his writing at the Willows, and not at the New Hour office. He had been slaving all summer to pay off the money Mrs. Tracy had accepted from Bunty Hayes, and the women had better leave him alone, or he’d know why. . . . Silently he crammed his papers into their usual storing-place and walked toward the door.
Mrs. Tracy stepped in front of him. “Where are you going?”
“Home.”
“Home? It’s a place you don’t often trouble. Why don’t you do your writing there — if it’s writing you say you come here for?”
“Because I’m never left alone,” he said, his anger rising again. Mrs. Tracy saw her chance and laughed. “Not with the right woman, you mean?”
Vance halted in front of her. After all, if there was a scene coming — and he saw she was not to be cheated out of it — better have it out here than wait and risk Laura Lou’s being drawn in. “What is it you’re driving at? I can’t answer till I know,” he said sullenly.
“Well, answer me this, then. Who’s the woman you come here to meet?”
The blood rose to his face. “Nonsense. I told you Mrs. Tarrant came here today. You’d better give me her glove and I’ll take it back to her.”
Mrs. Tracy paid no attention to this. She hesitated a moment; then she said: “You haven’t answered my question yet. It’s no good beating round the bush. The neighbours all know about what’s been going on here. Laura Lou’s had a letter warning her. You say, what am I driving at? Well, I’m here to find out what you propose to do, now we’ve caught you. That’s plain enough, isn’t it?” She flung the words out in a kind of shrill monotone, as if she had learned them from someone else and were afraid of not getting them in the right order.
Vance was speechless. His mind had seized on one phrase: “Laura Lou’s had a letter,” and he turned sick with an unformed apprehension. “What nonsense are you talking? What kind of letter? I’ve got nothing to hide and nothing to explain. If you have the letter with you, you’d better let me see it, and if I can find the sneak who wrote it I’ll go and break his neck.”
Mrs. Tracy laughed. “Well, you’ll have some trouble doing that, I guess. But the letter isn’t here — it’s locked up at home. It’s done enough harm to my poor child already — ”
“Who wrote it?” Vance interrupted.
“It’s not signed.”
“I thought as much. That kind never is. And you’ve come here to spy on me on the strength of a rag of paper with God knows what anonymous slander on it?” He took his hat up again, and as he did so, his eye lit on the keys which Halo, in leaving, had laid beside him. They were no good to him now; he would never use them again, never come back here without her. He would take them back to Eaglewood this very night, with the glove . . . .
He put them in his pocket and turned again to his mother-in-law. “I come here to work, not to meet women.” This sounded impressive, and in a way was true — yet he didn’t care for the ring of it. He cleared his throat, and began again: “If you’ll give me Mrs. Tarrant’s glove I’ll send it back.”
For all answer Mrs. Tracy opened her handbag (it was the very one the bridal couple had bought for her on their return to Paul’s Landing), and put the glove in it, snapping shut the imitation ivory clasp.
“See here — give me that glove,” Vance burst out; then crimsoned at his blunder. Mrs. Tracy tucked the bag under her arm. “I’ll see to returning it,” she said.
He affected indifference. “Oh, very well — ” There was a pause, and then he added. “If that’s all, I’ll be off.”
Mrs. Tracy, however, continued to oppose him from the threshold. “It’s not all — nothing like. I guess it’s for me to decide about that.”
Vance waited a moment: angry as he was, he had the sense to want to check Mrs. Tracy’s recriminations. “If there’s anything else to be said, I guess it’s for Laura Lou to say it. I’m going back home now to give her the chance,” he declared.
Mrs. Tracy raised her hand in agitation. “No, Vance — no! You won’t do that. The letter’s half killed her, anyway. And you know she can’t stand anything that excites and worries her . . . .” She paused a moment, and added with a certain dignity: “That’s why I came here — it was to spare her.”
Vance pondered. “Was it her idea that you should come?”
“No, she doesn’t even know I’m here. I told her we’d have to take steps to find out — but she was so upset she wouldn’t listen. My child’s a nervous wreck, Vance. That’s what you’ve made of her.”
“If I’ve made her a nervous wreck, is it your idea that it’s going to quiet her if you go back and report — as you apparently mean to do — that I come here to meet other women?”
The reasoning of this was a little too close for Mrs. Tracy’s flurried brain. She considered it for a while, and then said: “I didn’t come here to go back and report to her.”
Vance looked at her in astonishment. “Then what on earth did you come for? Your imagination is so worked up against me that all my denials wouldn’t convince you — I see that. But if Laura Lou’s to be left out of the question — ”
His mother-in-law moved nearer to him, with a look of appeal in her face that made it human again. “It all depends on you, Vance.”
“Well, you don’t suppose — ”
“I don’t suppose you want to hurt Laura Lou more than you can help — any more than I do,” she continued, with an effort at persuasiveness. “And what I’m here for is to ask you to spare her . . . give her a chance . . . before it’s too late . . . .” She lifted her hands entreatingly. “For God’s sake, Vance, let her go without a fight. It’s her chance now, and I mean she shall take it; but if you’ll let it be easy for her, I’ll let it be easy for you — on my sacred word. Vance . . . See here; I’ve got you where I can make my own terms with you . . . I’ve got my proofs . . . I’ve got the whip hand of as they say . . .” She broke off, and went on in an altered voice: “But that’s not the way I want to talk to you, Vance. I just want to say: Why not recognize it’s all been a failure and a mistake from the first, and set my child free before it’s too late?”
“Too late for what?”
“For her to get back her health — to enjoy her youth as she ought to . . . .”
Vance’s brain was still so confused with the shock of Mrs. Tarrant’s abrupt leave-taking that this fresh assault on his emotions left him dazed. Mrs. Tracy hated him; had always hated him. He had long been carelessly aware of that, and had instantly seen how eagerly she must have caught at this chance of getting the whip hand of him, as she called it; of finding herself justified in all her disappointments and resentments. But he had not suspected that she might have a more practical object in mind, that what she wanted was not to injure him but to free Laura Lou. It was dull of him, no doubt, it was incomprehensible even, that, having lived all his life in a world of painless divorce, where a change of mate was often a mere step in social advancement, it should never have occurred to him that he and Laura Lou could part. But though he had often chafed at the bondage of his unconsidered marriage, though he had long since ceased to think of his wife as the companion of his inner life, and had stooped to subterfuges to escape her fond solicitude . . . yet now her mother’s proposal filled him with speechless wrath. He and Laura Lou divorced! . . . He turned to Mrs. Tracy. “Are you talking seriously?”
Of course she was, she said. Wouldn’t he try and understand her and listen to her, and not get all worked up, and make her so nervous she couldn’t get out what she had to say . . .?
“HAVE to say?” he interrupted. “Who obliges you? You say Laura Lou doesn’t know you’re here.”
Mrs. Tracy’s embarrassment increased. When Vance flew out at her like that, she said, she couldn’t keep her wits together; and what was to be gained by making a fuss, anyhow? She was determined, whatever he said, that her child should be free to make a fresh start, and get back her health and spirits. . . . She talked on and on in the same half scared yet obstinate tone. They’d been married too young, she said; that had always been her chief objection to the match. And Vance with no fixed prospects . . . or not enough to support a wife on, anyhow . . . and his parents doing nothing . . . and Laura Lou’s health so delicate, and her lungs threatened since that crazy climb up the mountain in the snow, and no way, as far as her mother knew, for her to get to a mild climate for the winter, as the doctor said she ought to, if she was to get her lungs healed. . . . Mrs. Tracy paused, breathless and drawn. “It all depends on you, Vance,” she began again, still panting a little. “You’ve got your own life — your own ambitions. I don’t say but what you’ll go a great way yet, and maybe get onto a big newspaper job some day. But meantime, how are you going to get ahead with a sick wife on your hands — and your own family not doing anything to help? . . . Let her go, Vance; I say it in your own interest as well as hers; for pity’s sake, let her go. Think what it would be to you to be free yourself.”
He stood with bent head, her last words resounding strangely in his ears. “Think what it would be to be free yourself.” He had not thought of that.
“Let her go — go where?”
South, Mrs. Tracy hurriedly explained — to California somewhere. That was what the doctor said. She’d worked it all out with Upton. Upton had had the offer of a job in a big California nursery, and he would make up his mind to take it if his mother would go out and keep house for him; and Mrs. Tracy would sell the little place at Paul’s Landing for whatever it would bring, if only they could get Laura Lou away before the cold weather. . . . And out there, in some of those western states, folks said you could get a divorce as easy as you get a cake of yeast at the grocer’s. Just walk in and ask for it; and nothing said against either party . . . no question about other women or anything . . . so that if Vance wanted to marry again he’d have a clean slate . . . absolutely. . . . “Oh, Vance, if you only would — if you’d only agree to part as friends, and let my child have her chance!” Mrs. Tracy broke off in a spasm of dry sobbing.
Vance did not afterward recall how the discussion ended. He only knew that dusk had fallen when he and Mrs. Tracy at length left the house. As they turned down the lane they saw the lights of the high road, and the illuminated trolleys jogging by. Mrs. Tracy got into one and disappeared.
Vance sat down under a road lamp and pulled a scrap of paper from his pocket. He wrote on it: “I don’t want these; I’ll never go back there,” wrapped the keys in the paper, and addressed it to Mrs. Tarrant. Then he caught the next trolley, and was carried as far as it went in the direction of Eaglewood. He meant to walk up there and leave the keys for her; after that he would see. The late August night was hushed but not oppressive; the stars already seemed to hang higher than in midsummer, as if receding to autumn altitudes; as he climbed there was a stir of air in the upper branches. The walk might help to clear the confusion from his brain; at any rate, it was out of the question to follow Mrs. Tracy home. First of all he had to be by himself, and in the open . . . .
The Eaglewood gate was unlatched, and he walked along the drive to the house. It lay low and spreading under mysterious tree shadows, and he thought of the day when he had been caught asleep in the broken-down motor, and brought there, a bewildered culprit, by the scandalized Jacob. Every step was thick with memories which in the making had worn no special look of happiness, but were now steeped in it. He remembered how ashamed and angry he had been when Jacob had shoved him into the hall among those unknown people . . . .
Through the canopy of foliage one or two lights peeped from the upper panes, but the lower floor was dark, the shutters were not closed. Perhaps everybody was still out. Silence and night seemed stealing unnoticed into the empty rooms, and Vance would have liked to open one of the windows and enter too. . . . But as he stood on the lawn, a little way off, a light appeared in one of the drawing room windows, and he heard a few chords struck on the piano, and voices rising and falling. Without looking to see who was in the room he hurried back into the shade of the drive, and dropped the keys into the letter box by the front door. They were all strangers to him, those people — he did not belong up there, in the light and music and ease, any more than he did in the dismal Tracy house below. He walked away heavy with that sense of inexorable solitude which sometimes oppresses young hearts. From all the glorious worlds he could imagine he seemed equally shut out . . . .
Where did he belong then? Why, with himself! The idea came like a flash of light. What did he want with other people’s worlds when he would create universes of his own? What he wanted was independence, freedom, solitude — and they cost less than houses and furniture, and much less than human ties. Mrs. Tracy’s words came back to him: “Think what it would be to you to be free yourself.”
Out in the lane again, he continued to climb. Through pearly clouds the moon of late summer climbed with him, lighting the way capriciously, as it had been lit by Halo’s motor lamps that morning before daylight when they had mounted to Thundertop. He had been free then, the world had lain before him in all its conquerable glory. And a few months of discouragement and the unexpected sight of a fresh face had annihilated everything, and reduced him to the poor thing he now was. He walked and walked, unconscious of the way, driven by the need of being alone and far from the realities to which he must so soon come back. At length he threw himself down on a ledge from which he could catch a first twist of the moon~silvered Hudson, remote and embosomed in midnight forest.
“Think what it would be to you to be free.” That was what they were offering him . . . the return to that other world, the world he had looked down on from Thundertop.
He tried to clear his mind of anger and confusion and look at his case dispassionately. The Tracy case was plain enough; from the first, very likely, Mrs. Tracy had been bent on getting rid of him, on giving Laura Lou what she called her chance. But she was not a woman of initiative, and would probably have ended by resigning herself if some persistent influence had not pushed her forward. Upton’s —? Vance shrugged away the thought of Upton . . . Hayes, of course! The blood rushed to his forehead. He could hear Bunty Hayes rehearsing the scene with Mrs. Tracy. Very likely they had cooked up the anonymous letter between them. And now they were going to turn him out like a boarder whose room was wanted . . . that was about the way they looked at it. . . . “Nothing easier . . . slick as a button . . .” Hayes would say . . . .
Well, why not?
He lay there, stretched out on the ledge, and looked down into the nocturnal depths. In the contemplation of that widespread beauty calmer thoughts came back, little things fell away. . . . What had he been able to do for Laura Lou? What had she done for him? The tie between them had so quickly become a habit, an aquiescence, nothing more. Perhaps Laura Lou had been conscious of that too, perhaps she too had chafed and longed for freedom — or simply for relief from worry, for material well-being, a home of her own — all that he could never give her. His eyes filled. . . . What was there to prevent their both trying again?
He could not find the answer to this question. He had never heard of any reason why married people shouldn’t agree to part and begin life again if they wanted to . . . only he could not picture its happening to himself and Laura Lou. Whenever he tried to, it was as if a million delicate tendrils, of which he was unconscious when he and she were together, tightened about his heart and held it fast to hers, in a strange bondage closer than that of love or desire. He lay and lay there, and tried to puzzle it out, but in vain. His last conclusion was: “Of course if she really wants to be free, she shall be — ” and for an instant his soul blazed again with the rekindled light of opportunity. . . . After that, worn out, he fell asleep on his ledge . . . .
It was broad daylight when he woke up, aching and hungry. His watch had stopped, but from the position of the sun he judged it must be after eight o’clock. His first craving was that of a ravenous boy — for a cup of Mrs. Tracy’s hot coffee. What was all the fuss about, anyhow? How different things looked by daylight, with the same old sun lighting up the same old daily road of duty. There was the office, there was his wife — and, oh hallelujah, there was his work! He sprang down from rock to rock, reached the road, and hurried homeward.
When he got to Mrs. Tracy’s door he ran up the steps calling out Laura Lou’s name. What nonsense it all seemed now, that ranting scene of last night! But to his astonishment the door was locked. He called again, shook the handle, banged on the panel — but no one answered. He walked around to the back of the house, expecting to find his mother-in-law among the currant bushes. “Laura Lou is sound asleep still, I suppose?” he would begin jokingly. But there was no one among the vegetables either, and the door of the back porch was also locked. Vance stepped back and threw a handful of pebbles at his wife’s window, calling out to her again. Again there was no answer.
He returned to the front door, shook and rattled it without result, and finally, disheartened, sat down on the doorstep and wondered . . . .
All the way down the mountain conciliatory phrases, jokes, words of endearment had crowded to his lips — anything to smooth the way back to the old life. And now he was confronted by this silent hostile house, which seemed to know nothing of him, but stared down from blank forbidding windows as if on an intruder.
An intruder? Was it possible that he was already that? By God, no! His smouldering wrath against Mrs. Tracy blazed up again. It was all her doing, whatever had happened. She wouldn’t rest till she had separated him from Laura Lou. . . . He was beginning to feel a sort of terror at the silent house and the unknown behind it. He saw the son of a neighbour walking down the lane, and stood up and hailed him. “See here — I’m just home, and I guess I’m locked out. Seen my womenfolk round anywhere?” he asked facetiously.
Yes, the youth said, he had; he’d met them up the lane. They were going to see if they could get Dixon’s team to take them to the station, they told him; he guessed they were taking some baggage with them, for a stay. . . . He grinned and loafed on, and Vance stood and looked after him without moving. It had all been planned in advance, then; they were going to the city — going straight to Bunty Hayes, no doubt! He would have secured rooms for them, where they could stay till they started for California . . . .
Vance walked dizzily back to the porch. It was true, then — it had really happened, this thing which was still inconceivable to him. He stood there staring about him like a man waking out of sleep; and as he did so, he noticed a suitcase and two or three insecurely tied bundles in a corner of the porch. They had already packed, then; they would come back presently to pick up their belongings.
It was all as queer and telescopic as things piled up in a nightmare. Yesterday morning this house had been his home and Laura Lou’s — now it was shut, empty, unrelated to them. That phase of its existence and theirs was over. . . . His eye lit casually on the suitcase, and he recognized it as the one which had accompanied him and Laura Lou on their honeymoon. He sat down beside it on the floor of the porch, and recalled how he had unpacked it on the beach on their wedding day and pulled out their sticky oozing wedding breakfast. And how Laura Lou had had her first taste of champagne out of a seashell! And it had been his first taste, too — only he had got out of the way remembering that . . . .
His eyes filled, and he was overcome by the sudden boyish craving to see something belonging to her and touch it. It seemed to him now that he and she had really parted long ago; that the laughing child who had helped him to unpack the lunch from that suitcase had for months past been farther from him than there were miles between Paul’s Landing and California. He had not meant it to be so; had not been aware that it was so — but now it came over him that perhaps, for Laura Lou, the knot had long since been untied, that the anonymous letter had been a pretext long waited for, perhaps provoked. At the thought, the physical sense of her stole back on him; it was clinging and potent, like the perfume of a garden in June. Vance bent over the suitcase, and hardly knowing what he did, pushed open the lock and lifted the lid. Her poor little possessions had been crammed in carelessly and in haste, and on top, flattened out and disjointed, lay the old stuffed dove from the gilt basket he had sent to her mother.
The sight caught him by the throat. He knelt for a long time, clutching the limp moth-eaten bird in both hands. He had not thought of the dove for ages — but he remembered now having noticed that she had fastened it by a wire above the little looking glass on her chest of drawers. It had hung there, a little crooked, with one wing limp, ever since they had come back from their honeymoon.
He had hardly noticed it; but she had remembered, in the haste and grief of her going, to unfasten it from its perch and cram it into her bursting suitcase. “But if she feels like that, why is she going?” The thought rushed through him like a burst of warm rain in spring, softening, vivifying. He was afraid of nothing now, with the old stuffed dove in his hand! He stood up, pressing it to him, as the wheels of Dixon’s carryall halted before the gate.
“Under a waning moon the little fleet stood out from Pondicherry . . .”
Vance sat lost in his vision. The phrase had murmured in his brain all day. Pondicherry — where was it? He didn’t even know. Memories of the movies furnished the vague exoticism of the scene: clustered palms, arcaded houses, dusky women with baskets of tropical fruit. But lower than this surface picture, of which the cinema had robbed him, the true Pondicherry — HIS— hung before him like a mirage, remote, rare and undefiled. . . . Pondicherry! What a name! Its magic syllables concealed the subject of his new tale, as flower petals curve over the budding fruit. . . . He saw a harbour lit by a heavy red moon, the dusty cobblestones of the quay, a low blue-white house with a terrace over the water . . . .
“Vance WESTON— wake up, for the Lord’s sake! Don’t look as if you were trying to listen in at a gas pump . . . .”
He roused himself to the fact that he was in Rebecca Stram’s studio, perched on a shaky platform, and leaning sideways in the attitude the sculptress had imposed on him. . . . “I must have been asleep . . . .” he mumbled.
The studio was an attic, self-consciously naked and untidy. Somebody had started to paint maps of the four quarters of the globe on the bare walls, but had got bored after Africa, and the fourth quarter was replaced by a gigantic Cubist conundrum which looked like a railway junction after a collision between excursion trains but was cryptically labelled: “Tea and Toast for One.”
A large black stove stood out from one wall, and about it were gathered, that December afternoon, a group of young men as self~consciously shabby as the room. The only exception was Eric Rauch, whose dapperness of dress seemed proof against Bohemian influences, and who smoked cigarettes undauntedly among a scornful cluster of pipes. He, and everybody else, knew that he was there only on sufferance, because he was one of the New Hour fellows, and might come in useful any day, and because Vance Weston, the literary hero of the hour, belonged — worse luck! — to the New Hour. Eric Rauch, in spite of his little volume of esoteric poetry, was regarded as a Philistine by the group about Rebecca’s stove, the fellows who wrote for the newest literary reviews and the latest experimental theatres. But they knew it was all in the day’s work for Rebecca to portray the last successful novelist, and as poor Weston was owned by the New Hour, they had to suffer Rauch as his bear leader.
Above the stove they were discussing This Globe, Gratz Blemer’s new novel, and Vance, roused out of his dream of Pondicherry, indolently listened. At first these literary symposia had interested and stimulated him; he felt as if he could not get enough of the cryptic wisdom distilled by these young men. But after ten or fifteen sittings to Rebecca, about whose stove they were given to congregating, he had gone the round of their wisdom, and come back still hungry.
He knew exactly, beforehand, what they were going to say about This Globe, and was bewildered and discouraged because he did not see how they could possibly admire it as much as they professed to if they also admired Instead. And of that fact there could be no doubt. Instead had taken as much with the Cocoanut Tree crowd as with what they contemptuously called the parlour critics. It was one of those privileged books which somehow contrive to insinuate themselves between the barriers of coterie and category, and are as likely to be found in the hands of the commuter hurrying to his office as of the wild-haired young men in gaudy pullovers theorizing in the void about Rebecca’s stove.
Rebecca Stram, clothed to the chin in dirty linen, stepped back with screwed-up eyes, gave a dab at the clay, and sighed: “If you’d only fall in love with me I’d make a big thing out of this . . . .”
Vance heard her, but drew a mask of vacancy over his face. Love — falling in love! Were there any words in the language as hateful to him, or as void of meaning? His love, he thought, was like his art — something with a significance so different from the current one that when the word was spoken before him a door flew shut in his soul, closing him in with his own groping ardours. Love! Did he love Laura Lou — had he ever loved her? What other name could he give to the upwelling emotion which had flung him back in her arms when she had driven up to the door that day in Dixon’s carryall? It was over a year since then; and he did not yet understand why the passion which had shaken him that day to the roots of his being had not transformed and renewed both their lives. The mere thought that she was leaving him — and leaving him because he had unwittingly wounded, neglected her — had opened an abyss at his feet. That was what life would be to him without her: a dark pit into which he felt himself crashing headlong, like falling in an aeroplane at night. . . . It hadn’t taken five minutes to break up Mrs. Tracy’s plan, win back Laura Lou, and laugh away all the bogies bred of solitude and jealousy — poor child, she’d actually been jealous of him! And he had been young enough (a year ago) to imagine that one can refashion life in five minutes — remould it, as that man Fitzgerald said, nearer to the heart’s desire! . . . God — the vain longing of the soul of man for something different, when everything in human relations is so eternally alike, unchanging and unchangeable!
They had broken up at Paul’s Landing. Mrs. Tracy, embittered and resentful, had sold the house and gone to California with Upton. But Laura Lou had remained, reconciled, enraptured, and Vance had brought her to New York to live. . . . Could anything be more different, to all appearances? And yet, in a week, he had known that everything was going to be exactly the same — and that the centre and source of all the sameness were Laura Lou and her own little unchangeable self . . . .
“What you feel about Blemer’s book” (one of the fellows was haranguing between pipe-puffings) “is that it’s so gorgeously discontinuous, like life — ” (life discontinuous? Oh, God! Vance thought.) “Not a succession of scenes fitting into each other with the damned dead logic of a picture puzzle, but a drunken orgy of unrelatedness . . . .”
“Not like Fynes, eh?” (Vance thought: “Last year Tristram Fynes was their idol,” and shivered a little for his own future.) “Poor old Fynes,” another of them took it up; “sounded as if he’s struck a new note because he made his people talk in the vernacular. Nothing else new about HIM— might have worked up his method out of Zola. Probably did.”
“Zola — who’s he?” somebody yawned.
“Oh, I dunno. The French Thackeray, I guess.”
“See here, fellows, who’s read Thackeray, anyhow?”
“Nobody since Lytton Strachey, I guess.”
“Well, anyway, This Globe is one great big book. Eh, Vance, that the way you see it?”
Vance roused himself and looked at the speaker. “Not the way I see life. Life’s continuous.”
“Gee! I guess you’re confusing life with Rebecca. Let him get down and stretch his legs a minute, Becka, or he’ll be writing books like The Corner Grocery.”
Under shelter of the general laugh Vance shifted his position and lit a cigarette. “Oh, well — ” Rebecca Strain grumbled, laying down her modelling tool and taking a light from his match.
“Life continuous — continuous? Why, it’s a series of jumps in the dark. That’s Mendel’s law, anyhow,” another budding critic took up the argument.
“Gee! Who’s Mendel? Another new novelist?”
“Mendel? No. He’s the guy that invented the principle of economy of labour. That’s what Mendelism is, isn’t it?”
“Well, I’m shattered! Why, you morons, Mendel was the Victorian fellow that found out about Nature’s proceeding by jumps. He worked it out that she’s a regular kangaroo. Before that all the Darwins and people thought she planned things out beforehand, like a careful mother — or the plot of a Fynes novel.”
Fynes had become their recognized butt, and this was greeted by another laugh. Rebecca threw herself full length on the broken~springed divan, grumbling: “Well, it’s too dark to go on. When’ll you come back, Vance — tomorrow?”
Vance hesitated. Laura Lou was beginning to object to the number of sittings — beginning, he fancied, to suspect that they were a pretext; just as, under her mother’s persuasion, she had suspected that his work at the Willows was a pretext for meeting Mrs. Tarrant. Oh, hell — to give one big shake and be free! “Yes, tomorrow,” he rang out resolutely, as if Laura Lou could hear him, and resent his challenge. . . . When the sittings began he had begged her to accompany him to the studio. “When the Stram girl sees you she’ll do you and not me,” he had joked; and the glow of gratified vanity had flown to her cheeks. But she had gone with him, and nobody had noticed her — neither Rebecca nor any of the young men. The merely beautiful was not in demand in Rebecca’s crowd — was in fact hardly visible to them. Or rather, they had forced beauty into a new formula, into which Laura Lou’s obvious loveliness did not fit. And when she had murmured: “Why, you don’t SAY . . .” or: “See here, I guess you’re quizzing me,” her conversational moves were at an end, and she could only sit, lovely and unperceived, in a cloud of disappointment. She never went back to Rebecca’s.
Eric Rauch walked away with Vance, and as they reached the street Vance’s bruised soul spoke out. “Hearing those fellows talk I don’t see what they can find in my book.”
“Why, they have a good time reading it. They crack their teeth over their own conundrums, and now and then they just indulge in the luxury of lying back and reading a real book.”
“But they believed in Fynes last year.”
“Sure. And they believed in you till Gratz Blemer came along. What you’ve got to do now is to go Blemer one better — do your big New York novel in his style,” Rauch ended with a laugh, as their ways parted.
Vance was going home; but he felt within himself a dammed-up flood of talk, and as he reached Washington Square it occurred to him that Frenside lived nearby, and might sometimes be found at that hour. Vance did not often see Frenside nowadays. The latter seldom came to the New Hour, and Vance as seldom went to Mrs. Tarrant’s, where the old critic was most often to be met. Vance’s relation with the Tarrants had shrunk — by his own choice — to business intercourse with Tarrant at the office. Some native clumsiness had made it impossible for him, after he came to New York, to work out a manner, an attitude, toward Halo Tarrant. Other fellows knew how; took that sort of thing in their stride; but he couldn’t. The art of social transitions was still a mystery to him. He remembered once hearing his grandmother (rebuked by Mrs. Weston for bad management and extravagance) say plaintively: “Why, daughter, I presume I can go without — BUT I CAN’T ECONOMIZE.” Vance understood that: morally and materially, he had never known how to economize. But he could go without — at least he supposed he could . . . .
Halo, who had heard of their arrival in New York from her husband, had written a friendly little note to Laura Lou, asking her and Vance to lunch; and Laura Lou, after a visible struggle between her irrepressible jealousy and the determination to prove to Vance that she had never been jealous (how could he have thought so, darling?) — Laura Lou had decided that they must accept.
They did, and the result was disastrous. From the first moment everything had bewildered Laura Lou and roused her inarticulate resentment. She was used to Halo — didn’t care a straw what SHE thought of anybody or anything. . . . Hadn’t she seen her, for years, coming and going at the Willows? They were distant cousins too — Halo needn’t have reminded her of that in her note! But she had never seen Mrs. Tarrant in this setting of New York luxury and elegance; she had never met Tarrant, who at once struck her as heartless and sardonic; she had never seen people like the other guests, men young and elderly, all on a footing of intimacy with their hosts, and talking carelessly, allusively, easily, of people and things that Laura Lou had never heard of. . . . She did not confess a word of this to Vance; she did not have to. Her face was like a clear pool reflecting every change in a shifting sky. He could measure, partly from his own memories, partly from his knowledge of her, the impact of every allusion, every unexpected gesture or turn of phrase of the people about her. The mere way in which the lunch was served was something to marvel at and be resented — didn’t he know? (“Caviar? That what you call it — that nasty gray stuff that smelt like motor grease? No, I didn’t touch it . . . When I watched you eating it I thought you’d be sick, sure . . . .” and so on.) For the rest, she took the adventure as something completely matter-of-course and not worth discussing, and remained coldly surprised, faintly ironic, and indifferent. IS THAT ALL? her attitude seemed to say. But how well he knew what was under it!
Since then he had never been back to Mrs. Tarrant’s. What was the use? Not to see her at all was less of a privation seeing her like that. . . . She had sent him, a few days later, a note asking how the novel was getting on, and when he was coming to read the next chapters to her; and he had not answered. He did not know how to excuse himself from going to see her, and was resolved to avoid the torment of renewing their friendship. So the months passed, and they did not meet . . . .
He cared only for his work now, or so he told himself. It was his one refuge from material and moral conditions so stifling and embittering that but for that other world to escape to he would have borrowed a revolver and made an end. . . . But his work too was becoming a perplexity. By the time he had finished Instead forty subjects were storming at the gates of his imagination and clamouring for embodiment. But his first encounter with the perplexing contradictory theories of the different literary groups to which the success of his book introduced him, all the wild currents and whirlpools of critical opinion in New York, had shaken his faith in himself; not in his powers of exposition and expression, which seemed to grow more secure with every page he wrote, but in his choice of a theme, a point of view, what the politicians called a “platform.” It had never before occurred to him that the artist needed any, except that to which his invisible roots struck down, in the depths ruled by The Mothers; but these fellows with their dogmas and paradoxes, their contradictory pronouncements and condemnations, though all they said seemed so on the surface, excited his imagination and yet unsettled it. “What I need is a good talk with somebody outside of it all,” he thought, his mind instinctively turning to Halo Tarrant; but it turned from her again abruptly, and he concluded: “A talk with a man — much older, and with a bigger range. Somebody who’ll listen to me, anyhow — ” for that was what his contemporaries would never do.
He read “In” on the dingy card under Frenside’s doorbell, and ran upstairs to his door. Frenside, in a haze of pipe smoke, let him in, and Vance found himself in a small shabby room. A green-shaded lamp made a studious circle of light on a big table untidily stacked with books and reviews, and an old steamer chair with a rug on it was drawn up to a smouldering fire. Frenside looked surprised, and then said: “Glad you’ve come,” and signed to Vance to take the seat opposite him. “Well, how are you standing your success?” he enquired, settling down into his deck chair.
“Oh, I don’t think much about what’s done,” Vance answered. “It’s the thing ahead that bothers me.” He paused, and then asked: “Can I talk to you?” and the other pushed out his thorny eyebrows and answered: “Try.”
“Well — it’s this way. I’m not a bit like that fellow in the hymn. One step isn’t enough for me. And I can’t seem to see beyond; I’m in a fog that gets thicker and thicker.”
Frenside leaned back with half-closed lids and seemed to take counsel of his pipe. “Creative or doctrinal?”
Vance smiled. “Oh, chiefly doctrinal, I guess.”
“Well, that’s not mortal. Out with your symptoms.” And Vance began.
It was his first opportunity for a quiet talk with Frenside, and he saw at once that there was nothing to fear if one really had something to say to him. Vance had plenty to say; the difficulty was that he did not quite know where to begin. But before he had done floundering Frenside had taken the words out of his mouth and was formulating his problem for him, clearly, concisely. He did not harangue him, but put a series of questions and helped Vance to answer them, so that even when Frenside was talking Vance seemed to be listening to himself.
“Yes — it’s a bad time for a creator of any sort to be born, in this after-war welter, with its new recipe for immortality every morning. And I suppose, for one thing, you’re torn between the demands of your publishers, who want another Instead, and your own impulse, which is to do something quite different — outside it, beyond it, away from it. And when you add to that all the critics (I believe they call themselves) knocking down their own standards once a day, and building up others to suit their purblind necessities — God, yes, it’s a tough old vocation that will force its way through that yelping crowd, and I don’t wonder a youngster like you is dazed by it.”
Vance listened attentively. “I’m not dazed, though, not exactly. I said I couldn’t see around me and outside of me. But there’s a steady light somewhere inside of me . . . .”
“Yes, I believe there is,” Frenside nodded. He drew at his pipe, crossed one leg over another, and finally said: “I’d have given a gold mine to have that light, at your age.”
The blood rushed to Vance’s forehead. “Oh, but you — ”
“No, not that. But I’m straying from the subject: which is, plainly, what had you better do next?”
“Well, yes, that’s so.”
“And the obvious answer: ‘Follow your impulse,’ is no use when you have a hundred impulses tugging at you from the inside, and all that clatter of contradictory opinion from the outside, eh?” Frenside considered again. “The trouble with you is that you’re suffering from the self-distrust produced by success. Nothing is as disintegrating as success: one blurb on a book jacket can destroy a man’s soul more surely than the Quarterly killed Keats. And to young fellows like you, after you’ve made your first hit, the world is all one vast blurb. Well, you’ve got to stuff cotton in your ears and go ahead . . . .”
“Ahead, you say? But where? Well, Nature abhors a void, and to fill it she’s wasteful — wildly wasteful. In the abstract, my advice would be: follow her example. Be as wasteful as she is. Her darlings always are. Chase after one impulse and another; try your hand at this and that; let your masterpieces die off by the dozen without seeing the light . . . But what’s the use of such talk nowadays? Besides, you’ve got to earn your living, haven’t you? Well, that’s not a bad thing either. You don’t want to risk getting lost in the forest of dreams. It happens. And if you once went to sleep under the deadly Tree of Alternatives you might never wake up again. So — ” He paused, relit his pipe, and blinked at Vance meditatively.
“As far as I can see, one trouble is this. The thing you’ve just done (yes, I’ve read it; Halo made me) well, it’s a pretty thing, exquisite, in fact, and a surprise, a novelty nowadays, as its popularity has proved. But it’s a thing that leads nowhere. An evocation — an emanation — something you wrought with enchantments, eh? Well, now take hold of life as it lies around you; you remember Goethe: ‘Wherever you take hold of it, it’s interesting’? So it is — but only in proportion as YOU are. There’s the catch. The artist has got to feed his offspring out of his own tissue. Enrich that, day and night — perpetually. How? . . . Ah, my dear fellow, that’s the question! What does the tortoise stand on . . .?”
Vance sat silent. Perhaps his adviser was right. Perhaps the only really fruitful field for the artist was his own day, his own town or country, a field into which he could plunge both hands and pluck up his subjects with their live roots. Instead had charmed his readers by its difference — charmed them because they were unconsciously tired of incoherence and brutality; but the spell would soon break because, as Frenside said, his tale had been an “emanation,” not a reality. He had given very little of what Frenside called his “tissue” to its making. And now his thoughts reverted to Loot, the old theme which had haunted him since his first days in New York — it seemed a century ago — and his imagination instantly set to work on it.
“I suppose you go out a good deal these days — see a good many people? A novelist ought to, at one time or another,” Frenside continued. “Manners are your true material, after all.”
Vance hesitated. “I don’t go out much.” He could not add that Laura Lou made it impossible; but he said, with equal truth: “Fact is, I can’t afford it. I mean, the time — or the money either . . .”
“The money?” Frenside looked surprised. “Why, you ought to be raking in royalties by now. I don’t suppose you got much out of the New Hour for your serial? No, I thought not. The highbrow papers can’t pay. But the book; why it’s been out three or four months, hasn’t it? It was a good deal talked about while it was coming out in the review, and you ought to have had a handsome sum on the advance sales, and another instalment after three months. I understand that’s the regular arrangement for fiction — I wish it was for book-reviewing,” he added mournfully.
Vance was glad of the opening; but for Frenside’s question he would never have had the courage to mention his material difficulties, though it was partly with that object that he had called. But he felt the friendliness under the old man’s gruff interrogations, and his anxiety burst from him. No, he said, he’d had no such privileges. The publishers, Dreck and Saltzer, to whom Tarrant had bound him for three years for all book publication, had been visibly disappointed by Instead. They didn’t think the subject would take, and even if it did, they said the book was too short for big sales. There’s nothing a publisher so hates to handle as a book — especially a novel — that doesn’t fit into the regulation measures. Instead was only forty-five thousand words long, and Mr. Dreck told Vance he didn’t know a meaner length. He’d rather have an elephant to handle like Ulysses or American Tragedy, than a mouthful like that. When readers have paid their money they like to sit down to a square meal. An oyster cocktail won’t satisfy ’em. They want their money’s worth; and that’s at least a hundred thousand. And if you try charging ’em less, they say: “Hell, what’s wrong with the book for it to sell so cheap? Not an hour’s reading in it, most likely.” So Dreck and Saltzer had halved the percentage previously agreed on, on the plea that the book wasn’t a novel anyhow — nothing under ninety thousand is; and there had been no advance royalties, and there would be no payment at all till June. Of course, they said, if Vance had pulled off the Pulsifer Prize it would have been different. As it was, there was nothing in it for them, and they took the book only to oblige Tarrant.
Frenside listened attentively. When Vance had ended, he said: “From a business point of view I suppose they were right — before the book came out. But now? It’s had a big sale, or so they say in their advertisements; and they wouldn’t keep on advertising it if it hadn’t. Can’t you ask them to make you an advance, even if it’s not in the bond?”
Vance reddened as he said that he had asked and been turned down. The publishers claimed that they were advertising the book at a dead loss, that the sales hadn’t been much bigger than they had expected; but that they “believed” in Vance’s future, and were ready to risk some money on it — a pure speculation, they declared. So they really couldn’t do more.
Frenside gave a contemptuous wave of his pipe. “That’s what the small publishers call ‘business,’ and why they never get to be big ones. Pity you’re tied up to them. However — ” He paused, and Vance felt that he was being searchingly scrutinized from under those jutting brows. “And you’d be glad of a loan, I gather? Have you — put the matter before Tarrant?”
“Oh, no — I couldn’t,” Vance interrupted in a thick voice.
Frenside nodded, as if that were not wholly a surprise. “See here, young fellow, I believe you’ve got the stuff in you, and I’d like to help you. I’m never very flush myself; I daresay my appearance and my surroundings make that fairly obvious. But if a hundred would be any good — ”
He made a motion to pull himself up out of his chair; but Vance raised a hand to check him. A hundred dollars — any good? God . . . his mouth watered . . . But somehow he didn’t want to take the money; didn’t want their inspiriting talk to end in the awkwardness of pocketing a cheque; didn’t, above all, want to overshadow the possibility of future talks by an obligation he might be unable to meet. He must keep this spiritual sanctuary clear of the moneylenders’ booths.
“Thank you,” he stammered. “But no, honest, I couldn’t . . . I mean, I guess I can make out . . . .” He stood up, and looked Frenside in the eyes. “When I get the chance to talk to you I’d rather it was about my work. Nothing else matters, after all . . . .”
Frenside rose also. “Well, I’ve got to pack you off now and get into harness myself.” He pointed to the papers on his desk. “But come back when you can,” he added. “And wait a minute — let me give you a cocktail . . . I daresay you can operate the shaker better than I can. . . . Here’s to your next.”