Vance, when he left the quay, had meant to turn homeward. He liked strolling at twilight through the Luxembourg quarter, where great doorways opened on courtyards with mouldering plaster statues, where the tall garden walls were looped with bunches of blueish ivy, and every yard of the way, behind those secretive walls, a story hung like fruit for him to gather. But he found it harder than ever to leave the Seine. Each moment, as night fell, and the lights came out, the face of the river grew more changing and mysterious. Where the current turned under the slopes of Passy a prodigal sunset flooded the brown waves with crimson and mulberry; at the point where he stood the dusky waters were already sprinkled with fluctuating lights from barges and steamboats; but toward the Louvre and Notre-Dame all was in the uncertainty of night.
Tolby and Savignac were to come that afternoon to hear him read the first chapters of his new novel: “Colossus”. After pouring out to them, the night before, his large confused vision of the book, Vance had suggested their hearing what he had already written; but he regretted it now, for in the discussion which had followed they had raised so many questions that he would have preferred not to show the first pages till he had worked over them a little longer. Besides, in the excitement of talking over his project, he had forgotten that if they came for the promised reading Halo would find out for the first time that he was at work on a new novel. Vance had not meant to keep his plan a secret from her; in such matters his action was always instinctive. His impulse was simply to talk over what he was doing with whichever listener was most likely to stimulate the dim creative process; and that listener was no longer Halo. Vance was sure that he loved her as much as ever, was as happy as ever in her company; it was not his fault or hers if the deep workings of his imagination were no longer roused by her presence.
This did not greatly trouble him; he took his stimulus where he found it, as a bee goes to the right flower. But since Halo’s outburst at Granada, when he had gone to the old Marquesa’s without her, he had felt in her a jealous vigilance which was perhaps what checked his confidences. She seemed to resent whatever excluded her from his pursuits; but though it troubled him to hurt her he could not give up the right to live his inner life in his own way, and the conflict disquieted and irritated him. Of late he had forgotten such minor problems. When he was planning a new book the turmoil of his mind was always enclosed in a great natural peace, and during those weeks of mysterious brooding he had not once thought of what Halo would think or say; but now he felt she would be hurt at his having told Tolby and Savignac of the new book before she knew of it.
His first idea was to get hold of his friends and put off the reading; but a glance at his watch showed that they must already be at the studio awaiting him. The worst of it was that they had probably told Halo what they had come for . . . “Oh, hell,” Vance groaned. He stood still on the crowded pavement, thinking impatiently: “If only I could cut it all — .” Well, why shouldn’t he? This book possessed him. What he wanted above everything was to be alone with it, and away from everybody for a day or two, till he could clear his mind and get the whole thing back into its right perspective — just to lie somewhere on a grass-bank in the sun, and think and think.
He looked up and down the quays, and then turned and signed to a taxi. “Gare de Lyon!” he called out. He felt suddenly hungry, and remembered that somebody had said you could get a first-rate meal at the Gare de Lyon. Dining at a great terminus, in the rush of arrivals and departures, would give him the illusion of escape; and the quarter was so remote that by the time he got home his friends would probably have left, and Halo have gone to bed . . . and the explanation could be deferred till the next day.
In the station restaurant a crowd of people were eating automatically in a cold glare of light. He had meant to order a good dinner, and then wander aimlessly about the streets, as he liked to do at night when ideas were churning in him. But the sight of all those travellers with their hand-luggage stacked at their feet, and something fixed and distant in their eyes, increased his desire to escape, and again he thought: “Why not?” He snatched a sandwich from the buffet, and hurried to the telegraph office to send a message to Halo; then, his conscience eased, he began to stroll from one platform to another, consulting the signboards with the names of the places for which the trains were leaving . . . Dijon . . . Lyons . . . Avignon . . . Marseilles . . . Ventimiglia . . . every name woke in him a different sonority, the deeper in proportion to the mystery. Lyons, Marseilles — the great cities — called up miles of streets lined with closely packed houses, and in every house innumerable rooms full of people, all strange and remote from him, yet all moved by the common springs of hunger, lust, ambition . . . That vision of miles and miles of unknown humanity packed together in stifling propinquity, each nucleus revolving about its own tiny orbit, with passions as intractable as those that govern heroes and overthrow kingdoms, always seized him when he entered a new city. But other names — Avignon, Ventimiglia, Spezia — sang with sweeter cadences, made him yearn for their mysterious cliffs and inlets (he pictured them all as encircled by summer seas). His geography was as vague as that of a mediaeval mapmaker; but he was sure those places must be at least as far off as Cadiz or Cordova, and he turned reluctantly from the enchanted platform.
On a signboard farther on he saw a familiar name: Fontainebleau. Though it was so near he had never been there; but he knew there was a forest there, and he felt that nothing would so fit in with his mood as to wander endlessly and alone under trees. He saw that a train was starting in ten minutes; he bought his ticket and got in.
A man in the compartment, who said he was an American painter, told Vance of an inn on the edge of the forest where he would be away from everybody — especially from the painters, his adviser ironically added. He himself was going on to Sens, where they didn’t bother you much as yet . . . Vance got out at Fontainebleau, woke up the keeper of the inn, and slept in a hard little bed the dreamless sleep of the runaway schoolboy.
The next morning he was up early, and as soon as he could coax a cup of coffee from the landlady he started off into the forest. He did not know till then that he had never before seen a forest. In America he had seen endless acres of trees; but they were saplings, the growth of yesterday. Here at last was an ancient forest, a forest with great isolated trees, their branches heavy with memory, gazing in meditative majesty down glades through which legendary cavalcades came riding. For miles he walked on under immense low~spreading beeches; then a trail through the bracken led him out on a white sandy clearing full of fantastic rocks, where birch-trees quivered delicately above cushions of purplish heather. Still farther, in another region, he came on hollows of turf brooded over by ancient oaks, on pools from which waterbirds started up crying, and grass-drives narrowing away to blue-brown distances like the background of tapestries. The forest seemed endless; it enclosed him on every side. He could not imagine anything beyond it. In its all-embracing calm his nervous perturbations ceased. Face to face with this majesty of nature, this great solitude which had stood there, never expecting him yet always awaiting him, he felt the same deep union with earth that once or twice in his life he had known by the seashore.
After a while he grew tired of walking, and lay down to ponder on his book. In that immemorial quiet the voice of his thoughts came to him clear of the other voices entangling it. He had tried to explain the book to his two friends, and he knew he had failed, perhaps because he could not detach his own ideas from the dense thicket of ideas which flourished in the air of Paris. Or perhaps his friends’ minds were too well-ordered and logical to tolerate the amorphous mass he had tried to force into them. “Colossus” — he had pitched on the title as expressing that unwieldy bulk.
The endless talks about the arts of expression which went on in the circle presided over by Lorry and Jane Meggs had roused in Vance a new tendency to self-analysis. Especially when they discussed the writing of fiction — one of their most frequent themes — he felt that he had been practising blindly, almost automatically, what these brilliant and intensely aware young people regarded as the most self-conscious of arts. Their superior cultivation made it impossible to brush aside their theories and pronouncements as he had the outpourings of the young men in Rebecca Stram’s studio; he felt compelled to listen and to examine their arguments, fallacious as some of them seemed.
When they said that fiction, as the art of narrative and the portrayal of social groups, had reached its climax, and could produce no more (citing Raphael and Ingres as analogous instances in painting) — that unless the arts were renewed they were doomed, and that in fiction the only hope of renewal was in the exploration of the subliminal, his robust instinct told him that the surface of life was rich enough to feed the creator’s imagination. But though he resisted the new theories they lamed his creative impulse, and he began to look back with contempt on what he had already done. The very popularity of “The Puritan in Spain” confirmed his dissatisfaction. A book that pleased the public was pretty sure not to have been worth writing. He remembered Frenside’s saying that “Instead” was a pretty fancy, but not to be repeated, and he knew that “The Puritan” was simply a skilful variation on “Instead”. Evidently he was on the wrong tack, and his clever new friends must be right. . .
But what was the alternative they proposed? A microscopic analysis of the minute in man, as if the highest imaginative art consisted in decomposing him into his constituent atoms. And at that Vance instantly rebelled. The new technique might be right, but their application of it substituted pathology for invention. Man was man by virtue of the integration of his atoms, not of their dispersal. It was not when you had taken him apart that you could realize him, but when you had built him up. The fishers in the turbid stream-of~consciousness had reduced their fictitious characters to a bundle of loosely tied instincts and habits, borne along blindly on the current of existence. Why not reverse the process, reduce the universe to its component dust, and set man whole and dominant above the ruins? What landmarks were there in the wilderness of history but the great men rising here and there above the herd? And was not even the average man great, if you pictured him as pitted against a hostile universe, and surviving, and binding it to his uses? It was that average man whom Vance wanted to depict in his weakness and his power. “Colossus” — the name was not wholly ironic; it symbolized the new vision, the great firm outline, that he wanted to project against the petty chaos of Jane Meggs’s world. Only, how was it to be done?
He tried to carry over his gray theory into the golden world of creation; but the scents and sounds of the forest made him drowsy, and he lay on a warm slope, gazing upward, and letting the long drifts of blue sky and snowy cumulus filter between his eyelids.
Presently he grew hungry, and remembered that before starting he had stuffed his pockets with sandwiches and a flask of wine. He made his meal, and continued to lie on the grass-bank, smoking and dozing, and murmuring over snatches of sylvan poetry, from Faust’s Walpurgis ride to the branch-charmed oaks of Hyperion.
At last he got up, shook the tufts of grass from his coat, and wandered on. The afternoon was perfect. The sun poured down from a sky banked with still clouds, and the air smelt of fading bracken and beech-leaves, and the spice of heather bloom. Why couldn’t he always live near a forest, have this populous solitude at his door? What were cities and societies for but to sterilize the imagination? People were of no use to him, even the cleverest, when it came to his work — what he needed was this tireless renewal of earth’s functions, the way of a forest with the soul. . .
He pulled off his coat and swung along in his shirtsleeves, glowing with the afternoon warmth of the woods. It seemed impossible that outside of those enchanted bounds winds blew, rain fell, and the earth plunged on toward a decaying year. He thought of purple grapes on hot trellises, of the amber fires of Poussin’s “Poet and the Muse”, of Keats’s mists and mellow fruitfulness, and the blue lightning-lit windows in the nameless church. He had lost all sense of direction, and did not know whether he was near the edge of the forest, or far from it, when suddenly he came on an open space flooded with sun, and a bank where a girl lay asleep. At least he supposed she was asleep, from the relaxed lines of her body; but he could not be sure, for she had opened her sunshade and planted it slantwise in the ground, so that its dome roofed her in, and hid her face.
Vance stood and looked at her. She was as sunlit and mysterious as his mood. A dress of some thin stuff modelled the long curves of her body; her ankles were crossed, and the slim arched feet, in sandal-like shoes, looked as if feathers might grow from them when she stirred. But she lay still, apparently unaware of him and of all the world.
He gazed at the picture in a mood of soft excitement. He wanted to lift the sunshade and surprise the wonder in her eyes. But would she be surprised? No; only a little amused, he thought. Dryads must be used to such encounters, and she would simply fit him into her dreams, and put her arms around his neck and her lips to his.
Perhaps every man had his Endymion-hour — only what if Diana, instead of vanishing in a silver mist, should say: “Let’s go off together,” and give Endymion her address? No . . . she must remain a part of his dream, a flicker of light among the leaves. . .
He turned away, still in the nymph’s toils. As he walked on he saw coming toward him a stoutish common-looking young man with a straw hat tilted back on his head, and a self-satisfied smile on a coarse lip. He wore a new suit of clothes and walked jauntily, swinging his stick and glancing ahead as if in pleasant expectation — an ordinary, not unkindly-looking youth, evidently satisfied with himself and what awaited him. Was he on his way to meet the roadside dryad? Had she fallen asleep as she lay in the sun and waited? Vance was annoyed by the thought; in looking at the man’s face he seemed to have seen the girl’s, and the world of earthly things re-entered the forest. He did not scorn those earthly things; a common good-natured man kissing a flushed girl under a tavern arbour was a pleasant enough sight. But he wanted something rarer in his memory of the forest, and he turned indifferently from the meeting of Diana and Endymion.
He got back late to the inn, and after dining went to bed, and to sleep — the sleep of a young body replete with exercise, and a mind heavy with visions. But in the middle of the night, he sat up suddenly awake. The moon streamed across his bed and fringed with a blueish halo the chair and table between himself and the window. “Diana after all!” he thought, his brain starting into throbbing activity. He seemed to be in the forest road again, watching the sleeping girl; and he asked himself how he could have left her and gone on. There she had lain, mysterious goddess of the cross~roads, one of the wandering divinities a man meets when he is young, and never afterward; yet he had turned from her, afraid of disenchantment. What cowardice — what lack of imagination! Because he had seen a common-looking man coming toward her, and had concluded that she must be like him, he had run away from the magic of the unknown, the possibilities that lie in the folded hour. And now it was too late, and he would never see her again, or recapture his vanished mood. . .
It was not the fear of hurting Halo which had held him back. At the moment he had not even thought of her. But now he suddenly saw that, should he ever drift into a casual love-affair, she would probably suffer far more than poor Laura Lou with all her uncontrollable fits of suspicion and resentment. The idea was new to him; he had always pictured Halo as living above such turmoils, in the calm upper sphere of reason. But now he understood that her very calmness probably intensified her underlying emotions. There swept back upon him the physical and mental torture of his jealousy of Floss Delaney, the girl who had taught him the extremes of joy and pain, and he was oppressed by the thought that he might have made Halo suffer in the same way.
He wondered now how he, who vibrated to every pang of the beings he created, could have been so unperceiving and unfeeling. His imagination had matured, but in life he had remained a blundering boy. He had left Paris abruptly, without warning or excuse, he had not even followed up his vague telegram by a letter of explanation. But how explain, when the explanation would have been: “Darling, I love you, but I want to get away from you”? — After all, he mused, they were both free, and Halo knew that there are times when a man needs his liberty . . . But what if “liberty”, in such cases, means the license to do what would cause suffering if found out? License to wound, and escape the consequences? He lay on his bed, and stared into the future. How did two people who had once filled each other’s universe manage to hold together as the tide receded? Why, by the world-old compulsion of marriage, he supposed. Marriage was a trick, a sham, if you looked at it in one way; but it was the only means man had yet devised for defending himself from his own frivolity.
He was struck by something august and mysterious in the fact of poor humanity’s building up this barrier against itself. To the Catholic church marriage was a divine institution; but it seemed to him infinitely more impressive as an emanation of the will of man . . . He fell asleep muttering: “That’s it . . . we must be married . . . must be married at once . . .” and when he woke, Diana and the moon were gone, and the autumn rain clouded his window.
He woke in a mood of quiet. It was almost always so: after a phase of agitation and uncertainty, in which he seemed to have frittered away his powers in the useless effort to reconcile life and art, at the moment when he felt his creative faculty slipping away from him forever, there it stood at his side, as though in mockery of his self-distrust. So it had been when Laura Lou was dying, so no doubt it would be whenever life and art fought out their battle in him. He dressed and called for his coffee; then he sat down to write.
That girl in the forest! He knew now why she had been put there. To make his first chapter out of — glorious destiny! He laughed, lit a cigarette, and wrote on. Oh, the freedom, the quiet, the blessed awayness from all things! One by one the pages fell from table to floor, noiseless and regular as the fall of leaves in the forest. His isolation seemed invulnerable. Even the rain on his window was in the conspiracy, and hung its veil between his too~eager eyes and the solicitations of the outer world, shutting him into a magic-making solitude. . .
The day passed in that other-dimensional world of the imagination. His pen drove on and on. The very fact that Halo was not there to pick up the pages, and transfer them to the cool mould of her Remington, gave a glorious freedom to his periods. There they lay on the floor, untrammelled and unwatched as himself. He recalled the old days of his poverty and obscurity in New York, when he had sat alone in his fireless boarding-house room, pouring out prose and poetry till his brain reeled with hunger and fatigue; and he knew now that those hours had been the needful prelude to whatever he had accomplished since. “You have to go plumb down to the Mothers to fish up the real thing,” he thought exultantly.
Night came, and he turned on the weak electric light and continued to write. To his strong young eyes the page was as clear as by day. But at last the pen slipped from his hand, and sleep overcame him.
When he woke he felt chilly and hungry, his wrist was stiff, his eyes and forehead ached. The scribbled-over sheets lay at his feet in a heap — dead leaves indeed! He had come back to reality, and the world where he had spent those fervid hours had vanished in mist. He thought of Halo, of Paris, of all the interwoven threads of his life; he felt weak and puzzled as a child. “I must get back,” he said to himself; and he gathered up his papers.
It was late when he reached Paris; but he took his way home on foot through the drizzle, down the Boulevard Sebastopol to the Seine, and through the old streets of the left bank to the Luxembourg. He was trying to put off his home-coming; not because he was troubled by the excuses and explanations he might have to offer, but because he dreaded the moment when the last frail shreds of his dream should detach themselves. After one of these plunges into the depths he always rose to the surface sore and bewildered; it was a relief to know that at that hour Halo would probably be in bed and asleep, and explanations could be deferred till the morrow. “Unless,” he reflected, “she’s out — at the theatre, perhaps — or dancing.” It was the first time since they had been together that he had pictured Halo as having a life of her own, a personality of her own, plans, arrangements, perhaps interests and sympathies unknown to him. “Funny . . .” he reflected . . . “when I go away anywhere I always shut up the idea of her in a box, as if she were a toy; or turn her to the wall, like an unfinished picture. . .” And he recalled the distant days in New York, when he saw her so seldom, and when, in their long hours of separation, his feverish imagination followed her through every moment of her life, stored up every allusion to her friends, her engagements, hunted out the addresses of the people she had said she was lunching or dining with, and tried to picture the houses in which she was being entertained, what she was saying to the persons about her, and how her voice sounded when it was not to him that she was speaking. . .
He found his latchkey, and entered the narrow hall. The door leading to the studio was half-open. Through it he saw the lamp on his desk, a cluster of red dahlias in the brown jar, and a table near the fire with wineglasses, chafing-dish and a bottle of white wine. Such an intimate welcome emanated from the scene that he drew back with the shyness of an intruder. She was out; he had been right; but before starting she had prepared this little supper for her return. Supper for two; probably for Tolby and herself. She had always liked Tolby — the young Englishman was more like the type of man she had been used to in her own circle of friends. He had Tarrant’s social ease, the cool bantering manner which Vance had long since despaired of acquiring. Yes; she was probably with Tolby . . . The thought was curiously distasteful.
A door opened, and from the bedroom Halo came out. She had flung a crimson silk dressing-gown over her shoulders, and her dark hair fell about her temples in soft disordered curls. She looked sleepy, happy and unsurprised. “I thought you’d be back tonight.” She put her arm about his neck, and he plunged with all his senses into the familiar atmosphere of her perfume, her powder, the mossy softness of her hair. “I knew you’d be as hungry as a wolf,” she laughed, drawing him to the table by the fire. “Do you remember that night at Cordova? Come and see if I’ve provided the right things.”
He looked about him with a low satisfied laugh. “It’s good to get back,” he said, laying a kiss on her bare nape as she stooped above the chafing-dish. She turned her face, and he saw that it was all his, from trembling lashes to parted lips. “Well, how did the work go?” she asked, putting him aside while she bent to break the eggs into the dish; and he answered: “Oh, great — but the best of going away is the coming back. . .”
“Look! Fresh mushrooms!” she cried, uncovering another dish; and as the warm savour of the cooking filled the air he threw himself back into his armchair, folding his arms luxuriously behind his head and said, half-laughing, half-seriously: “Do you know I could have sworn I saw you yesterday in the forest, asleep under a white umbrella? But your face was hidden, so I couldn’t be sure.”
“And you didn’t look?”
“No, I didn’t look.”
She tossed him the corkscrew, scooped the smoking mess of eggs and mushrooms into their two plates, and said laughingly: “Come.”
He uncorked the Chablis, drew his chair up, and fell joyfully upon the feast. How she knew how to take a man, to ease off difficult moments, what to take for granted, what to leave unsaid! What he had told her was true; a home-coming like this was even better than the going away. A bright hearth, good food, good wine; the sense of ease, of lifted burdens, and a great inner exhilaration at the thought of work to come — this was how love repaid him for his escapade. He looked at Halo, and surprised her eyes fixed on his; and suddenly he felt that at the very heart of their intimacy the old problem lurked, and that never, even in their moments of closest union, would they really understand each other. But the sensation barely brushed his soul. The next moment it was expanding in the glow of fire and wine, and Halo’s eyes shone with the old confiding tenderness. He filled his glass and began to talk to her about the new book.
How easy it was now to pour out what he had so jealously guarded before! The fruit was ripe, and it was sweet to heap it at her feet as she sat listening in the old way, her lids lowered, her chin propped in her hand. Nothing escaped her — she listened with every faculty, as she used to in the long summer days at the Willows. She said little, put few questions; but when she spoke it was always to single out what he knew was good, or touch interrogatively on some point still doubtful. The night was nearly over when he gathered up his pages. “Lord — what an hour! I’ve tired you out; and I’ve never even asked what you’ve been up to while I was away.” With sudden compunction he put his arm about her.
“What I’ve been up to? Accepting dinner invitations for you, for one thing! You won’t mind? Lorry wants you to dine at the studio tomorrow: a big blowout for Mrs. Glaisher, who has developed a sudden interest in theatrical art and may possibly — he thinks probably — help him to produce his ballet. You know how hard he’s been trying for it.”
“Mrs. Glaisher? Who on earth’s Mrs. Glaisher?”
“Why, don’t you remember? One of the principal characters in your next-but-one-novel: ‘Park Avenue’. She’s waiting to sit to you: a Museum specimen of the old New York millionairess. If only she would subsidize ‘Factories’ Lorry’s future would be assured — or so he thinks. And he implores you on his knees to come and help him out. Mrs. Glaisher’s very particular; she’s named her guests, and the author of ‘The Puritan in Spain’ was first on the list. I’m sorry for you, darling — but you’ve got to go.”
“Oh, shucks,” Vance growled. “I don’t believe she ever heard of me.”
“How little you know of the world you’re trying to write about! Mrs. Glaisher has found out that it’s the thing for the rich to patronize the arts, and she means to eclipse Mrs. Pulsifer. Suppose she should found a prize for the longest novel ever written — just at the moment when ‘Colossus’ appears?” She put her arms about Vance’s neck and laughed up at him. “You’ll go, dear — just for Lorry?”
“Oh, all right; but don’t let’s think of boring things now.” He brushed her hair from her forehead, and looked deeply into her eyes; then, when she slipped away, he sank into his chair and abandoned himself to the joy of re-reading the words freshly illuminated by her praise.
When he pulled himself out of his brooding, and went to bed, Halo was asleep. He had carried in the lamp from the studio, and stood shading it with his hand while he looked down on her. Usually, when she slept, her features regained their girlish clearness; and she was once more the Halo Spear who had lit up the dark old library at the Willows; but now youth and laughter were gone, her face was worn and guarded. “This is the real Halo,” he thought; and he knew it was the effort to hide her anxiety behind a laughing welcome which had left those furrows between her eyes.
“If only,” he mused in a burst of contrition, “I could remember beforehand not to make her unhappy. . .”
From the moment of entering Lorry Spear’s studio Mrs. Glaisher dominated it. Vance was not the only guest conscious of her prepotency. She was one of the powerful social engines he had caught a glimpse of in the brief months of his literary success in New York, three years earlier; but at that moment his life had been so packed with anxieties and emotions that he could hardly take separate note of the figures whirling past him.
The only woman he had known who vied in wealth and worldly importance with Mrs. Glaisher was the lady who had invited him to her huge museum-like house, shown him her pictures and tapestries, and failed, at the last moment, to give him the short-story prize on which all his hopes depended. But Mrs. Pulsifer was a shadowy figure compared with Mrs. Glaisher, a mere bundle of uncertainties and inhibitions. Mrs. Glaisher was of more robust material. She was as massive as her furniture and as inexhaustible as her bank~account. Mrs. Pulsifer’s scruples and contradictions would have been unintelligible to a woman who, for forty years, had hewed her way toward a goal she had never even faintly made out.
After a long life devoted to the standardized entertaining of the wealthy, Mrs. Glaisher had suddenly discovered that Grand Opera, paté de foie gras, terrapin and Rolls-Royces were no longer the crowning attributes of her class; and undismayed and unperplexed she had begun to buy Picassos and Modiglianis, to invite her friends to hear Stravinsky and Darius Milhaud, to patronize exotic dancers, and labour privately (it was the hardest part of her task) over the pages of “Ulysses”.
As Vance watched her arrival he guessed in how many strange places that unblenching satin slipper had been set, and read, in the fixity of her smile, and the steady gaze of her small inquisitive eyes, her resolve to meet without wavering any shock that might await her. He thought of Halo’s suggestion for his next novel, and was amused at the idea of depicting this determined woman who, during an indefatigable life-time, had seen almost everything and understood nothing.
Lorry’s studio had been hastily tidied up, as Jane Meggs and her friend understood the job; but Vance saw Mrs. Glaisher’s recoil from the dusty floor and blotched walls, and the intensity of her resolve to behave as if Mimi Pinson’s garret were her normal dwelling. Electric lamps dangling in uncertain garlands lit up a dinner-table contrived out of drawing-boards and trestles, and the end of the room was masked by a tall clothes’-horse hung with a Cubist rug, from behind which peeped the competent face of the restaurateur charged with the material side of the entertainment; for Lorry had seen to it that, whatever else lacked, wine and food should be up to the Park Avenue standard.
With Mrs. Glaisher was a small sharp-elbowed lady, whose lavishly exposed anatomy showed the most expensive Lido glaze. Her quick movements and perpetual sidelong observance of her friend reminded Vance of a very intelligent little dog watching, without interfering with, the advance of a determined blind man. “Oh, don’t you know? That’s Lady Pevensey — the one they all call ‘Imp’,” Jane Meggs explained to Vance as Lorry led him toward Mrs. Glaisher. The others all seemed to know Lady Pevensey, and she distributed handshakes, “darlings”, and “I haven’t seen you in several ages”, with such impartial intimateness that Vance was surprised when Savignac, to whom she had just cried out: “Tiens, mon vieux, comme tu es en beauté ce soir!” enquired in a whisper who she was.
The party consisted of Lorry’s trump cards — the new composer, Andros Nevsky, who, as soon as he could be persuaded to buckle down to writing the music of “Factories”, was to reduce Stravinsky and “The Six” to back numbers; the poet, Yves Tourment, who, after an adolescence of over twenty years, still hung on the verge of success; Sady Lenz, the Berlin ballerina, who was to create the chief part in Lorry’s spectacle; Hedstrom, the new Norse novelist, and Brank Heff, the coming American sculptor, whom the knowing were selling their Mestrovics to collect; and, to put a little fluency and sparkle into this knot of international celebrities, such easy comrades and good talkers as Tolby, Savignac, and others of their group.
Vance was so much amused and interested that he had forgotten his own part in the show, and was surprised when Lorry called him up to be introduced to Mrs. Glaisher, and he heard that lady declare: “I told Mr. Spear I wouldn’t dine with him unless he invited you, not even to meet all the other celebrities in Paris.”
“Ah, no: Nosie’s so headstrong we couldn’t do anything with her,” Lady Pevensey intervened, startling Vance by putting her arm through his, and almost as much by revealing that Mrs. Glaisher was known to her intimates as “Nosie”. “Nosie’s been simply screaming to everybody: ‘I MUST have the man who wrote “The Puritan”’, and when Lorry found you’d disappeared without leaving an address Nosie couldn’t be pacified till she heard that you’d turned up. Lorry, darling, you’ve put Vance next to her at table, haven’t you? Oh, Jane, love, tell him he MUST! I know she idolizes Nevsky, and she’s been dying for years to meet darling Yves — but she won’t be able to speak a word of French to them, much less Norwegian to Hedstrom,” (this in a tragic whisper to Lorry) “so for God’s sake pacify the Polar Lions somehow, and let Nosie have her Puritan.”
But with foreigners as his guests Lorry protested that he could hardly seat his young compatriot next to the chief guest of the evening, and Vance was put opposite to Mrs. Glaisher, who sat between Lorry and the silent and bewildered Norse novelist. Vance was amused to see that Lorry had chosen the most inarticulate man in the room as Mrs. Glaisher’s neighbour. In this way he kept her to himself, while Lady Pevensey, on his right, was fully engaged between Yves Tourment and Savignac’s sallies from across the table.
Lorry had done his job well. The food was excellent, the champagne irreproachable; he had dressed up in the gay rags of Bohemia an entertainment based on the most solid gastronomic traditions, and Mrs. Glaisher, eating truffled poularde and langouste à l’Américaine, was convinced that she was sharing the daily fare of a band of impecunious artists.
Down the table, Nevsky, in fluent Russian French, was expounding to Jane Meggs his theory of the effect of the new music on glandular secretions in both sexes, and Brank Heff, the American sculptor, stimulated by numerous preliminary cocktails, broke his usual heavy silence to discuss with Fr?ulein Sady Lenz her merits as a possible subject for his chisel. “What I want is a woman with big biceps and limp breasts. I guess you’d do first rate . . . How about your calves, though? They as ugly as your arms? I guess you haven’t danced enough yet to develop the particular deformity I’m after. . .”
When the conversation flagged Jane Meggs started it up again with a bilingual scream; and above the polyglot confusion rose Lorry’s masterful voice, proclaiming to Mrs. Glaisher: “What we want is to break the old moulds, to demolish the old landmarks . . . When Clémenceau pulled down the Colonne Vend?me the fools thought he was doing it for political reasons . . . the Commune, or some such drivel. Pure rot, of course! He was merely obeying the old human instinct of destruction . . . the artist’s instinct: destroying to renew. Why, didn’t Christ Himself say: ‘I will make all things new’? Quite so — and so would I, if I could afford to buy an axe. Just picture to yourself the lack of imagination there is in putting up with the old things — things made to please somebody else, long before we were born, to please people who would have bored us to death if we’d known them. Who ever consulted you and me when the Pyramids were built — or Versailles? Why should we be saddled with all that old dead masonry? Ruins are what we want — more ruins! Look what an asset ruins are to the steamship companies and the tourist agencies. The more ruins we provide them with the bigger their dividends will be. And so with the other arts — isn’t every antiquary simply running a Cook’s tour through the dead débris of the past? The more old houses and furniture and pictures we scrap, the more valuable what’s left will be, and the happier we’ll make the collectors . . . If only the lucky people who have the means to pull down and build up again had the imagination to do it. . .”
“Ah, that’s it: we MUST have imagination,” Mrs. Glaisher announced in the same decisive tone in which, thirty years ago, she might have declared: “We MUST have central heating.”
“If you say so, dear lady, we shall have it — we shall have it already!” cried Lorry in an inspired tone, lifting his champagne glass to Mrs. Glaisher’s; while Yves Tourment shrilled in his piercing falsetto: “Vive Saint Hérode, roi des iconoclastes!”
Mrs. Glaisher, who had paled a little at her host’s Scriptural allusion, recovered when she saw that the words were not meant to deride but to justify; and at Yves Tourment’s apostrophe she exclaimed, with beaming incomprehension: “Who’s that whose health they’re drinking? I don’t want to be left out of anything.”
Presently the improvised dinner-table was cleared and demolished, and the guests scattered about the studio, at the farther end of which a stage had been prepared for Fr?ulein Lenz. Mrs. Glaisher, slightly flushed by her libations to the iconoclasts, and emboldened by her evident success with the lights of Montparnasse, stood smilingly expectant while Lorry and Lady Pevensey brought up the notabilities of the party; but linguistic obstacles on both sides restricted the exchange of remarks, and Vance, who had stood watching, and wishing Halo were there to share his amusement, soon found it his turn to be summoned.
“You’re the person she’s really come for, you know; do tell her everything you can think of,” Lady Pevensey prompted him: “about how you write, I mean, and what the publishers pay you — she’s particularly keen about that — and whether you’re having an exciting love-affair with anybody; she adores a dash of heart-interest,” she added, as she pushed Vance toward the divan on which Mrs. Glaisher throned.
Vance remembered a far-off party at the Tarrants’, the first he had ever been to, and how Halo had dragged him from the book-shelf where he had run to earth his newly-discovered Russian novelists, and carried him off to be introduced to Mrs. Pulsifer. That evening had been a mere bright blur, to which he was astonished to find himself contributing part of the dazzle; whereas now he looked on without bewilderment or undue elation. But he did think it a pity that Halo, on the pretext of a headache (though really, she owned, because such occasions bored her) had obstinately refused to accompany him.
Mrs. Glaisher’s greeting betrayed not only her satisfaction at capturing a rising novelist but the relief of being able to talk English, and of knowing his name and the title of one of his books. She began at once to tell him that on the whole her favourite among his novels was “Instead”, because of its beautiful idealism. She owned, however, that “The Puritan in Spain” was a more powerful work, though there were some rather unpleasant passages in it; but she supposed that couldn’t be avoided if the author wanted to describe life as it really was. She understood that novelists always had to experience personally the . . . the sensations they described, and she wanted to know if his heroine was somebody he’d really known, and if he’d been through all those love scenes with her. It was ever so much more exciting to know that the characters in a novel were taken from real people, and that the things described had actually happened; even, Mrs. Glaisher added, wrinkling up her innocent eyes, if they were such naughty things as Mr. Weston wrote about.
Vance’s friends had accustomed him to subtler praise, and he only stared and laughed; but seeing Mrs. Glaisher’s bewilderment he said: “Well, I suppose we do mix up experience and imagination without always knowing which is which.”
Mrs. Glaisher gave him a coy glance. “You won’t tell me, then? You mean to leave us all guessing? What’s the use of making a mystery, as long as you’re a free man? I know all about you; do you suppose I’d be half as interested in your books if I didn’t? I know the kind of life you young men lead; and your ideas about love, and the rest of it. We society women are not quite such simpletons as you think. We go around and see — that’s what makes it so exciting to meet you. I know all about your adventures in Spain . . . or at least just enough to make me want to hear more. . .”
Vance reddened uncomfortably. What did she know, what was she trying to insinuate? Her stupidity was so prodigious that it struck him that it might be feigned . . . but a second glance at her candid countenance reassured him. “I’ve had plenty of castles in Spain, but no adventures there,” he said.
Mrs. Glaisher shook her head incredulously. “When anybody’s as much in the lime-light as you it’s no use thinking you can fool people . . . But I see the dancing’s beginning . . . I’m coming!” she signalled to her host, advancing to the armchair he had pushed forward for her. Half-way she turned back to Vance. “I do delight in these Bohemian parties, don’t you? Won’t you give me one some day? Not a big affair, like this; but Imp and I would love it if you’d let us pop in to tea alone, and see how a famous novelist lives when he’s at home.”
Vance hesitated. Halo always gave him to understand that she was weary of the world she had grown up in, and particularly of the New York in which she had figured as Mrs. Lewis Tarrant; but he had promised her to help out Lorry’s party, and he knew the success of “Factories” might depend on Mrs. Glaisher’s enjoyment of her evening. No doubt Halo would be willing to offer a cup of tea in such a case; she might even reproach Vance if he made her miss the chance of doing her brother a good turn.
“I’m sure Mrs. Weston will be very glad . . . she’ll send you a note,” he stammered, embarrassed by the memory of his former blunders, and of the pain they had caused her.
Mrs. Glaisher swept his face with an astonished eyeglass. “Mrs. Weston? Really —? I’d no idea . . . I supposed you were living alone. . .”
“No,” said Vance curtly.
“Do excuse me. I’m too sorry. I was told you were a widower . . . But perhaps you’ve remarried lately?”
What was the answer to that, Vance wondered, tingling with the memory of Halo’s reproaches. “I supposed of course Spear must have told you . . . I’m to be married to his sister . . . She and I . . .” he stopped, his ideas forsaking him under Mrs. Glaisher’s frigid gaze.
“His sister? But he has only one, and she’s married already. Her name is Mrs. Lewis Tarrant. Her husband is in Paris. He’s an old friend of mine; he came to see me only yesterday. Poor fellow — in spite of all he’s been through I understand he has a horror of divorce . . . and I don’t suppose,” Mrs. Glaisher concluded, rising from the divan with a pinched smile, “that even in your set a woman can be engaged to one man while she’s still married to another . . . But please forget my suggestion . . . SUCH a pity, young man, with your talent,” Mrs. Glaisher sighed, as she turned to enthrone herself in the armchair facing the stage.
Jane Meggs, Lady Pevensey and Kate Brennan grouped themselves about her, and the rest of the guests crouched on cushions or squatted cross-legged on the floor. Nevsky, at the piano, preluded with a flourish of discords, and Sady Lenz suddenly leapt from behind parted curtains in apparel scant enough to enlighten the American sculptor as to her plastic possibilities. Vance heard Mrs. Glaisher give a little gasp; then he turned and slipped toward the door. As he reached it Lorry Spear’s hand fell on his shoulder.
“Vance. Not going? What’s up? This dancing’s rather worth while; and Mrs. Glaisher wanted me to arrange a little party with you somewhere next week — I could lend you this place, if you like.”
“Thank you. Mrs. Glaisher has already invited herself to our quarters; but she backed out when she found she might meet Halo.”
Lorry’s brows darkened; then he gave a careless laugh. “Oh, well, what of that? You know the kind of fool she is. The sort that runs after déclassée women in foreign countries, and are scared blue when they meet somebody from home who doesn’t fit into the conventions. Why did you tell her about Halo?”
Vance stood with his hands in his pockets, staring down at the dusty studio floor. He raised his head and looked into Lorry’s handsome restless eyes. “You asked Halo to send me here tonight, didn’t you — to help you to amuse Mrs. Glaisher?”
“Of course I did. You don’t seem to realize that you’re one of our biggest cards. I’m awfully grateful to you — ”
“And you told Halo you’d rather she didn’t come?”
“Lord, no; I didn’t have to. Halo knows how women like Mrs. Glaisher behave. I’d have been sorry to expose her to it. Not that she cares — she wouldn’t have chucked everything for you if she had. But see here, Vance, you can’t go back on me like this. For the Lord’s sake see me through. Halo promised you would. And Imp Pevensey wants to talk to you about going to London next spring and getting launched among the highbrows. You need a London boom for your books, my dear boy. Damn — what’s wrong with the lights? That fool Heff swore to me he knew how to manage them. . .”
Lorry dashed back toward the stage, where Fr?ulein Lenz’s posturing had been swallowed up in darkness. Vance continued to stand motionless, his mind a turmoil. At length the lights blazed up, and under cover of the applause at Fr?ulein Lenz’s re-embodiment he made his way out.
In the courtyard he stood and looked about him. A cold drizzle was falling, but he hardly noticed it. His resentment had dropped. It was no use being angry with Lorry, who took his advantage where he found it, and thought no harm. What was really wrong was the situation between Vance and Halo — the ambiguity of a tie which, apparently, he could neither deny nor affirm without offending her. What else, for instance, could he have said to Mrs. Glaisher? How could he have pretended that he was living alone without seeming to deny his relation with Halo? Yet, by not doing so, he had subjected her — and himself — to a worse humiliation.
Such questions would not have arisen if she had obtained her divorce at once, as they had expected when they left America. But the months had passed, and Vance (as he now became aware) had hardly given the matter another thought, had in fact been reminded of it only at the moment of the scene provoked by his going alone to the old Marquesa’s. He had asked Halo then if they could not marry soon; she had turned the question with a laugh, and he had carelessly dismissed it from his mind.
Since then he could not remember having thought of it again till the night before, in his midnight musings at Fontainebleau. He had always considered himself as much pledged to Halo as if the law had bound them, and would have had a short answer for any one who hinted the contrary; and the question of marriage or non-marriage had seemed subsidiary. In Lorry Spear’s group, and that of the writers and artists who came to Vance’s studio, such questions were seldom raised, since the social rules they implied hardly affected the lives of these young people. But now Vance saw, as he had for a brief instant at Granada, and again at Fontainebleau, that Halo would never really think and feel as these people did. She had sacrificed with a light heart her standing among her own kind; but something deeper than her prejudices or her convictions, something she could sacrifice to no one because it was closer to her than reason or passion, made it impossible for her to feel at ease in the new life she had chosen. Only yesterday Vance had imagined that jealousy might be the cause of her disquietude; now he saw it was something far harder to dispel. Whatever he might do to persuade her of his devotion, to convince her that no other woman had come between them, her loneliness would subsist; in their happiest and most confiding moments it would be there, she would be conscious, between herself and him, of a void the wider because she knew he could not measure it.
A word of Mrs. Glaisher’s had enlightened him. She had said that Tarrant (whom she evidently knew well) had a horror of divorce; and she had doubtless heard this from him recently, since she had mentioned that he was in Paris, and had been with her the day before. Tarrant unwilling to divorce — this, then, must be one of the sources of Halo’s preoccupation! Vance wondered why she had kept it from him; perhaps, poor child, because she had feared he might feel himself less bound to her if he knew there was no prospect of their marrying. But that was not like Halo. More probably she had kept her secret because she was resolved to let nothing cloud their happiness. It would be like her to want him to know only the joys of her love, without its burdens.
Vance had been astonished to hear from Mrs. Glaisher that Tarrant was in Paris. The situation was full of perplexity. Halo had often told him that she would never have asked her husband to set her free, that it was he who had begged her to divorce him, presumably that he might marry Mrs. Pulsifer. She had never alluded to any alteration in Tarrant’s view; she had never once referred to the question. No doubt she knew of the change; her lawyers must surely have advised her of it; and if she had concealed the fact from Vance it was probably because she knew its cause, and was herself in some way connected with it. At the idea the blood rushed to Vance’s forehead. Was it not likely that this man, who was still Halo’s husband, had come to Paris purposely to see her, to try to persuade her to go back to him? Moody and unstable as he was, he might well have wearied of the idea of marrying another woman, and begun to pine for Halo, once he knew he had lost her.
For a moment Vance’s heart sank; then he reflected that Mrs. Glaisher’s statement might have been based on the merest hearsay. Why should Tarrant have confided his views to her? The delay in the divorce might have been caused by a mere legal technicality, some point in dispute between opposing lawyers. And to attach any particular significance to Tarrant’s arrival in Paris was absurd. He belonged to the type of Europeanized American who is equally at home on both sides of the Atlantic and accustomed to come and go continually, for pleasure, for business, or simply from the force of habit.
Vance wandered down Lorry’s street and turned into the Boulevard Raspail. The more he considered the question the less probable he thought it that Tarrant’s presence in Paris had to do with his divorce. Tarrant never intervened personally when he could get any one to replace him; whatever his purpose was, he would probably not wish to meet Halo. . . . But what had he come for? Vance was seized with a sudden determination to find out. The time had come when Halo’s situation and his own must be settled, and Tarrant held the key to it.
He walked on through the rain, musing on these problems, and wishing he could meet Tarrant at once — this very night, before going home and seeing Halo. If only he had asked Mrs. Glaisher where Tarrant was staying! It would be easy enough to find out the next day; but Vance’s blood was beating too violently for delay. He wanted to bring Halo some definite word as to her divorce; and he determined to try to run Tarrant down at once and plead with him to release her, if it were really true that he was no longer disposed to.
As he walked on, wondering where he was likely to come across Tarrant, Vance recalled Halo’s pointing out the hotel where she and her husband had always stayed in Paris. It was one of the quiet but discreetly fashionable houses patronized by people who hate the promiscuity of “Palaces” but cannot do without their comforts. The hotel, Vance remembered, was not far from the Boulevard Raspail, and he decided to go there and enquire. He knew Tarrant’s tendency to slip into a rut and shrink from new contacts, and thought it likely that the hotel people might know of his whereabouts even if he were not under their roof.
The drizzle had turned to a heavy rain, and when he reached the street he was in search of the fa?ade of the hotel was reflected from afar in the wet pavement. But within a few yards of the door Vance paused. Even if Tarrant were staying there, and were actually there at the moment (it was long past midnight), he would most probably refuse to receive a visitor. And should Vance leave a note asking for an appointment, if answered at all, it would certainly be answered by a refusal. He had worked long enough under Tarrant in the office of the “New Hour” to be familiar with his chiefs tactics. It was Tarrant’s instinct to retreat from the unknown, the unexpected, to place the first available buffer between himself and any incident likely to unsettle his nerves or alter his plans; and if Vance should ask to be received, the obvious buffer would be his lawyers.
Vance stood irresolute. How on earth was he to get at the man? If he waited till chance brought them together he knew the other’s adroitness would find a way out. He would cut the scene short and turn on his heel. . . . The uselessness of any attempt to reach him seemed so obvious that Vance turned and walked back toward the Boulevard. He had almost reached it when a taxi passed, approaching from the opposite direction. As it came abreast of him a lamp flashed into it, and he saw Tarrant inside. Vance turned and raced back toward the hotel. The taxi stopped at the door and Tarrant got out and opened his umbrella before he began to hunt for his fare. He was in evening dress, and as perfectly appointed as usual, but in the rainy light he looked paler and older. Vance hung back till the carefully counted fare was in the chauffeur’s hand; then he went toward the door.
“Tarrant!” he said, “I— I want to speak to you . . . I must.”
Tarrant turned under his umbrella, and surveyed him with astonishment. “I don’t — ” he began; then Vance saw the colour rush to his pale face. “YOU?” he said. “I’ve nothing to say to you.” He started to enter the hotel.
Vance stepped in front of him. “You must let me see you — now, at once. Do you suppose I’d ask it if it wasn’t necessary? Please listen to me, Tarrant — ”
Tarrant paused a moment. Under the umbrella Vance could hardly see his face, but he caught a repressed tremor in his voice. “You can write. You can write to my lawyers,” he said.
“No! Not to you, and not to your lawyers. You’d turn me down every time. I’ve only two words to say, but I’m going to say them now. I’ll say them out here in the street if you don’t want me to come in.”
The rain by this time was falling heavily. Vance had no umbrella, and his thin overcoat was already drenched. Tarrant looked down nervously at his own glossy evening shoes. “It’s impossible,” he said.
“What’s impossible? You can’t refuse me — ”
He saw Tarrant glance toward the illuminated doors of the hotel, and meet the eyes of the night porter, whose dingy face peered out at them with furtive curiosity.
“I don’t know why you come here at this hour to make a scene in the street . . .” Tarrant grumbled over his shoulder.
“I won’t make it in the street if you’ll let me come in. I don’t want to make a scene anyhow. I only want a few minutes’ talk with you; I’ve got to have it, so we may as well get it over.”
Tarrant looked again at his feet, which were splashed with mud. “I can’t stay out here in this deluge,” he began. “If you insist, you’d better come in; but your forcing yourself on me is useless . . . and intolerable. . .”
He walked up the steps, and Vance followed. The revolving doors swung open and the two men entered the warm brightly lit lounge. A few people, evidently just back from the theatre, sat at little tables, absorbing drinks from tall glasses. Tarrant turned to the porter. “Is there anybody in the reading-room?” The porter glanced in, and came back to say that there was a gentleman there writing letters.
Tarrant seemed to hesitate; then he turned and walked toward the lift. Vance followed. Tarrant did not look back at him or speak to him. They entered the lift and stood side by side in silence while it slowly ascended; when it stopped they got out, and, still in silence, walked down the dim corridor to a door which Tarrant unlocked. He turned an electric switch and lit up a small sitting~room with pale walls and brocaded curtains. Vance entered after him and shut the door.
Tarrant put down his umbrella. He stood for a moment with his back to Vance, staring down at the empty hearth. Then he turned and said: “Well?”
His thin high-nosed face with the sharply cut nostrils was drawn with distress, and the furrows in his forehead had deepened; but his gray eyes were now quiet and unwavering. Vance knew that he had gone through the inevitable struggle with his impulse of evasion and flight, and that, finding escape impossible, he had mastered his nerves, and was prepared to play his part fittingly. Vance felt a secret admiration for the man whose worldly training had given him this discipline; he knew what mental and physical distress Tarrant underwent after such an effort of the will. “Poor devil,” he thought . . . “we’re all poor devils. . .”
“Well?” Tarrant repeated.
“Well — I want to speak to you about Halo. I want you to tell me what you intend to do.”
Tarrant’s face darkened; but in a moment he recovered his expression of rather disdainful indifference. He took off his hat and overcoat, and laid them carefully on a table in the corner of the room; then he turned toward the fireplace and threw himself down in an armchair. “You’d better sit down,” he said, glancing coldly toward the chair facing him.
Vance paid no heed; not that he resented the invitation, but because, in his state of acute inner tension, he was hardly aware that it was addressed to him. Tarrant waited for a moment; then, as his visitor did not move: “I supposed,” he said, “it was for something of this sort that you’d come, and I can only say again that it’s no use. I should have thought you’d have understood that what you have to say had better be said to my lawyers.”
Vance flushed. “I suppose you think you’re bound to answer in this way; but what use is that either? I’ve got nothing to say to your lawyers — or to hear from them. I’m not here to make a row or a scene. I only want to put you a straight question. I’ve heard you’ve changed your mind about letting Halo divorce you, and I want to know if it’s true. Is it?”
Tarrant sat with his long, delicately-jointed fingers twisted about the arms of his chair. After a moment he turned slightly, reached out toward a table near by, and took up a packet of cigarettes. He drew out a gold-mounted lighter, lit a cigarette, puffed at it once or twice, and rested his head thoughtfully against the back of the chair. Vance stood leaning against the wall, watching every movement of Tarrant’s with a sort of fascinated admiration. He knew that each of those quiet and seemingly careless gestures was the mask of an inner agitation, and envied the schooling which had put Tarrant in command of such a perfectly disciplined set of motions.
At length Tarrant spoke. “When my wife left my house to join you she must have known that her doing so would make me change my mind about letting her divorce me.”
Vance gave an impatient shrug. It was the tone he had heard so often at the office, when Tarrant was trying to shake off an importunate visitor. But he reflected that it was only a protective disguise assumed to hide the moral disarray of the real man — as his lighting a cigarette had been done to occupy his hands, lest Vance should notice their nervous twining about the chair~arms. And again Vance was filled with a queer pity for his antagonist.
“You mean to say that, as she’s put herself in what’s called the wrong, you’re going to refuse to let her get a divorce against you? Well, it’s your technical right, of course. But there’s nothing to prevent your getting a divorce against HER; there’ll be no difficulty — ” Vance broke off, but Tarrant made no answer. He sat in the same attitude of resigned attention, his gaze engrossed with the cigarette-smoke curling up from his lips. “That’s what I came here to ask you; do you mean to divorce her?” Vance continued.
Tarrant bent forward to shake the ashes of his cigarette onto the hearth. “Is this — ” he began, and then broke off. “Are you here at — at her request?”
“No. She had no idea I was coming.”
“But you think she wished you to?”
“On the contrary — she would probably have done all she could to stop me. That’s why I didn’t tell her.”
During this interrogatory Tarrant’s profile was turned toward Vance, and the latter noticed that the edge of his thinly cut nostril was white and drawn up, like that of a man in pain. “After all, I suppose he did love her once,” Vance thought.
Tarrant straightened himself, and moved about so that he faced Vance. “You might have spared me this intrusion. I can’t see what good you thought it would do. My wife knows I’ve given up all idea of divorcing her.”
“Or letting her divorce you?”
Tarrant gave a barely audible laugh.
Vance stood silent, still leaning against the wall. The wetness of his overcoat began to penetrate to his skin, and he shivered slightly, and pulled the overcoat off. As he did so he saw Tarrant’s colour rise.
“I really don’t see,” Tarrant said, as though answering Vance’s unconscious gesture in removing his coat, “what can be gained by any more talk. I’ve told you what you wanted to know.”
Vance shook his head. “No; it’s not enough. You say you don’t want to get a divorce. But I don’t suppose you’ve forgotten that not much more than a year ago it was you who asked your wife to set you free? It was then that she left you; not till then.”
Tarrant stood up, and took a few steps across the room and back. His eyes fell on Vance’s wet overcoat, and on the shoulder-blades to which his dress-coat damply clung. “You’re wet through,” he remarked.
“Never mind that. I want to talk this thing out with you. You admit that when Halo left you it was because you asked her to; because you wanted to be free. And now you turn round and say you don’t want to be free any longer, and therefore won’t let her be either. Isn’t that it?”
Tarrant went to a small upright cabinet between the windows. He took from it a bottle of brandy and a glass, and pouring water into the glass added some brandy and drank it down. “I’m subject to chills; my feet are very wet.” He turned to Vance with a cold smile. “I’m not as young as you are. . .” The restless colour rose to his face again and he added, with a hesitating gesture toward the bottle: “Will you —?”
Vance made a sign of refusal, and Tarrant, as though regretting his suggestion, drew his lips together, and stood upright, his hands thrust into his pockets.
“And now you say you don’t want to be free, and won’t let her be,” Vance persisted. “Is that so, or isn’t it?”
Tarrant cleared his throat. “It is so — as far as the external facts go. As to my private motives . . . you’ll excuse my keeping them to myself. . .”
Vance uttered a despairing sigh. Again and again in his short life he had come upon this curious human inability, in moments of the deepest stress, to shake off the conventional attitude and the accepted phrase. The man opposite him, whose distress he recognized and could not help pitying, seemed to be struggling in vain to express his real self, in its helpless vanity, humiliation and self-deception. The studied attitude of composure which gave him a superficial advantage over an untutored antagonist was really only another bondage. When a man had disciplined himself out of all impulsiveness he stood powerless on the brink of the deeper feelings. If only, Vance thought, he could help Tarrant to break through those bonds! There must be a word that would work this miracle, if he could find it. Above all, he reminded himself, he must try not to be angry or impatient.
“I suppose,” he began, “you feel you’ve got a right to talk like that. From the point of view of society, or civilized behavior, or whatever you call it, you may be right. But what’s the use of it? I’m not trying to offend you, or to butt in where I don’t belong. Your wife has left you; she’s under my care; how can you blame me for wanting to make things easier for her? When she came to me she thought you wanted to marry another woman . . . .”
“If I did,” Tarrant broke in, “it may have been because she had made my home . . . no longer what it should have been. . .”
Vance felt a new wave of discouragement. There they were, back again in the old verbal entanglements. “I wonder how many people — husbands or wives either — make their homes what they should have been? It doesn’t seem as if they often pulled it off. But I don’t pretend it’s my business to come here and talk to you about your wife. . .”
“Ah, you admit that?” Tarrant sneered.
“Certainly. I’m here to talk to you about the woman I want to take for a wife myself. There’s a big gap between the two. Whoever made the gap, or whatever made it, what does it matter now?” He paused a moment to control his voice, and then added: “See here, Tarrant, it’s hell to see a woman suffering because you can’t give her the place in your life that she ought to have . . . That’s what I came here to tell you. . .”
Tarrant walked away again, and then came back to the hearth. He raised his elbow against the mantelpiece.
“In my opinion she ought to suffer,” he said.
“Why — because you do?” Tarrant was silent, and Vance pressed on: “There’s such a lot of suffering everywhere; what’s the use of adding to it? For God’s sake, can’t we both put aside the personal question and tackle this as if it was just any ordinary human predicament? The happiest people, somehow, aren’t any too happy . . . and I can’t see that making them more miserable ever made things pleasanter for the other party . . . at least not beyond the minute when he’s doing it.”
Tarrant’s face had whitened. He did not immediately reply; but at last he said, in a tone of elaborate politeness: “I suppose I ought to be very much obliged to you for your advice — though I didn’t ask for it.”
“Oh, all right. You can turn what I say into a sermon, and try to laugh me out of it, if you choose. Only I don’t see the use of that either.”
“Exactly,” said Tarrant. “Neither do I see the use of your forcing yourself in on me.”
“But, my God, all the use in the world — if only I can make you understand! Can’t you see the misery it is not to be able to give Halo the standing and the name she’s got a right to? That woman tonight — that Mrs. Glaisher — insulted her. How can I stand by and see her treated as if she wasn’t fit to be touched by the very people who used to grovel to get asked to her house?”
“MY house,” Tarrant interrupted ironically.
Vance’s hopes sank. Up to that moment it had seemed to him that he might yet find a crack in the surface of the other’s icy pride; now he had exhausted his last argument and knew that he had made no impression. “That’s all you’ve got to say to me?”
Tarrant remained silent; Vance saw his lips twitch with the effort to control his temper. “I’ve never had anything to say to you,” he replied.
Vance continued to lean against the door-jamb. The growing distress in Tarrant’s face seemed to belie the bravado of his words. He knew all the accepted formulas; but as he recited them Vance saw that they no longer corresponded with what he was feeling — with the agony of envy, jealousy and resentment battling together in his soul. And Vance, who knew exactly what he himself wanted to say, did not know how to say it because he was ignorant of the language in which men of Tarrant’s world have been schooled to disguise their thoughts. Here they stood, he reflected, two poor devils caught in the coil of human incomprehension; but the fact that he felt the pity of it, and that Tarrant did not, gave him an advantage over the other. From the moment when Vance understood this he became sure of himself, and unperturbed. “God,” he thought, “when I go away and leave him how cold he’ll feel inside of himself!”
He moved impulsively toward Tarrant. “See here, I daresay I don’t know how to put things the right way . . . the way you’re used to . . . But don’t let that count against me. Don’t think of you and me; think only of Halo. If there’s anything I can do to persuade you to give her her freedom, tell me, and I’ll try to do it. I suppose I haven’t got what people in your crowd call pride; anyhow, the kind I have got don’t count at a time like this. If there’s anything I can say or do — short of giving her up — that would make you change your feelings about her, I’ll do it now, this very minute. God, Tarrant — don’t let me go away feeling I’ve done no good! Why should people go on hating each other because once in their lives their wants and wishes may have crossed? If you send me away now it isn’t me you’ll hate afterward — it’s yourself.”
Tarrant had moved to the farther end of the hearth. As if to give a motive to his withdrawal he took the packet of cigarettes from the mantel and lit another. “I really haven’t anything more to say,” he repeated.
“Except that you won’t divorce.”
“Certainly I won’t divorce.”
“Not on any condition?”
“Not on any condition.”
Vance stood in the middle of the room and looked at him. “I can remember when I used to think he was a great fellow,” he thought.
He turned away and picked up his drenched overcoat. It had left a dark pool of moisture on the light damask of the chair he had thrown it on, and the velvet pile of the carpet beneath. Tarrant looked gray and ghastly, standing alone between the illuminated wall-brackets of that frivolous room.
“Ah — you poor man,” Vance thought, as he turned and left him.
Halo, after Vance’s return from Fontainebleau, felt the reaction that follows on a period of inward distress. When she recalled the desperate paths her imagination had travelled she shivered; but looking back at them from safety made the future seem more radiant.
How unworthy, she thought, for the lover and comrade of an artist to yield to such fears — and a comrade was what she most wanted to be. Women who cast in their lot with great men, with geniuses, even with the brilliant dreamers whose dreams never take shape, should be armed against emotional storms and terrors. Over and over again she told herself that her joys were worth the pain, that the pain was part of the rapture; but such theories shrivelled to nothing in the terror that had threatened her very life. If she were going to lose her lover — if she had already lost him — she could only tremble and suffer like other women. Everybody was reduced to the same abject level by the big primitive passions, love and jealousy and hunger; the delicate distinctions and differences with which security adorned them vanished in the storm of their approach.
Then Vance came back; and as soon as he appeared her fear was lifted. He had not been with another woman; he had gone off to think over his book. Her first look in his eyes convinced her that he had not deceived her; and instantly she swore to herself that never again, by word or glance, would she betray resentment or curiosity concerning his comings and goings. Whenever he wanted to get away she would accept his disappearance without surprise. Her yoke should be so light, her nearness so pleasant, that when he came back it should never be because he felt obliged to, but because he was happier with her than elsewhere. New strength and cunning seemed to grow in her as she held him in her arms that night.
The morning after Lorry’s banquet Vance went out early; he had already left the house when Halo woke. She was not sorry to be alone; she had not yet finished typing the manuscript he had brought back from Fontainebleau, and as soon as she had dressed, and given the bonne the orders for the day, she returned to her task. The hours passed in a flash, and she was still trying to unravel the tangled manuscript when she heard his latchkey.
“What — lunch already?” she exclaimed, without lifting her head. He made no answer, and when she stopped typing and looked up at him she was startled by the change in his face.
“Why, Vance, how tired you look — aren’t you well?” she exclaimed. And instantly the little serpent of jealousy reared its sharp head again in her breast. Through her sleep, in the small hours, she had heard Vance unlock the door, coming back from Lorry’s feast, as she supposed; but after all, how did she know? It was nearly daylight when the sound of his latchkey had waked her. What more likely than that one of the women at Lorry’s had taken him home with her after the party? Would there never again be any peace for her heart, Halo wondered?
Vance stood silently looking down on her. At length he came up and laid his arm over her shoulder. “Look here, Halo — ” he said in a constrained voice.
“Yes?” she questioned, her own voice sounding to her as odd and uncertain as his. “NOW—!” she thought with a tremor of apprehension. . .
Vance continued to look at her. “I know why you sent me alone to Lorry’s last night. It was because you knew those New York women would be rude to you. Wasn’t that it?”
She returned his look in surprise; then the weight slipped from her heart, and she almost laughed. “Why, darling, how absurd! I’ve always hated big dinners . . . and I’m so fed up with that crowd at Lorry’s.”
“Yes; so am I.”
“Well, then, you can’t blame me for not going.”
“I blame you for not telling me why you wouldn’t go. Lorry told me. He said Mrs. Glaisher didn’t want to meet you because you’ve left your husband and are living with me.”
Halo drew back from his arm to smile up at him. “Why, you ridiculous boy! I daresay he’s right. Mrs. Glaisher cut me the other day when I met her at Lorry’s door. Oh, deliberately — it was such a funny sensation! It amused me so much that I meant to tell you; but I forgot all about it.”
“It doesn’t amuse me,” said Vance with lowering forehead. “Do you suppose I want to associate with people who think you’re not good enough for them? She asked if she could come here to tea with some of her precious friends, and when I told her you were with me she had the impudence to say she hadn’t known, and of course in that case she couldn’t come. Before I left I told Lorry what I thought about his asking me without you.”
Halo was still laughing and looking up into his eyes. “But, Vanny, it was I who urged Lorry to ask you, because he said the Glaisher and Lady Pevensey were dying to meet the author of ‘The Puritan in Spain’; and I thought if he got you to come it might induce Mrs. Glaisher to help him with his ballet.”
“I don’t care a damn about Lorry’s ballet — ”
“Well, I do; and I’m very sorry you didn’t invite Mrs. Glaisher here. Think what fun for me to hide behind the curtains, and hear what fashionable ladies say to a rising novelist! I begin to think you’ve lost your sense of humour. . .”
But she saw that such pleasantries only perplexed him. For a long while he had not understood her sensitiveness about her position; but now that some one had taken advantage of it to slight her he was ablaze with resentment. She put her hand over his. “Vance — as if anything mattered but you and me!”
“Everything matters to me that’s about you. I should think you’d see how I feel.” He walked up and down the room with agitated steps. “I don’t understand your being so offended about that old woman in Granada whom you’d never seen; and now, when your own brother, and people you used to know, behave as if it was a disgrace to meet you, you just sit and laugh.”
Her eyes followed him tenderly. “But don’t you see that it’s simply because being with you has made everything else seem of no consequence?”
He came back and sat down by her, his brow still gloomy. “That’s it . . . that’s why it makes my blood boil to think that when people treat you like that I have to sit by and hold my tongue. I thought of course we should have been married by this time. And I want you to know I’ve done all I could.”
Halo felt a tremor of joy rush through her. “But I know, darling . . . of course I know. . .”
“I went to see Tarrant last night — ” Vance continued.
She interrupted him with an exclamation of astonishment. “Lewis? Do you mean to say Lewis is in Paris?”
“Yes. I thought perhaps you knew. That Glaisher woman told me. And she said he’d never let you have a divorce; he didn’t approve of divorce, she said. I didn’t believe her, because you’d always told me he wanted to get married himself, and I thought she just said it to spite me. But I was bound I’d get at the truth, and so I hunted him down at his hotel last night, and made him listen to me.”
“Last night? You mean to say you were with Lewis last night?”
He nodded silently, and the unexpectedness of the announcement struck Halo silent also. She had not heard that Lewis Tarrant was in Paris, or indeed in Europe; and the shock of learning that he was in the same place as herself, and that only a few hours earlier, all unsuspected by her, her husband and her lover had been talking her over, silenced every other emotion. The vision of that scene — which, a moment ago, would have appeared too improbable to call up any definite picture — seized painfully on her imagination. It seemed to her that she was gazing at herself stripped and exposed, between these two men who were disputing for her possession.
“See here, Halo — you’re not angry with me, are you? I couldn’t help trying to see him,” she heard Vance pleading; and dropping the hands she had raised to her face she turned to him.
“Vanny! Angry? How could I be? Only I don’t see . . . what in the world made you think. . .”
“I don’t believe I did think. I felt I had to see him.” Her eyes filled, and he hurried on nervously: “Yes, but it was no good. I suppose I ought to have known it wouldn’t be. He and I never could talk to each other long without one of us getting mad, or both.”
She looked up in alarm. “You don’t mean to say you had a quarrel?”
“Oh, no; that isn’t his way. We just kept on getting politer and politer.”
“Ah — ” she breathed, and covered her eyes again. If only the pressure of her hands could blot out the vision he called up, the vision of Tarrant rigid and sneering, of Vance bewildered, passionate and helpless! She thought: “My darling — he’s wrecked my last chance of freedom . . . and how I love him for it!”
But in a moment she recovered her self-control. “You must tell me just what happened, dear.” She drew him down to the chair beside her, and quietly, her hand in his, listened to what he told her, weighing every phrase, every syllable, the meaning of which she knew he had only half-guessed, while to her it lay bare to the roots. She had seen at once that any influence she might still have had over Tarrant must have been forfeited by Vance’s rash intervention. Tarrant would never believe that she had not known of it, and his disgust at a proceeding so tactless and indelicate would be aggravated by the idea that she had connived at it, perhaps even prompted it. She could hear him say, with the lift of the nostril that marked his strongest disapproval: “Things aren’t done in that way between civilized people.” It was his final form of condemnation.
She knew that Tarrant never forgave any one who wounded his vanity and tortured his nerves by forcing from him a definite statement on a question he was tacitly determined to ignore, and when Vance ended she sat silent, overcome by the probable consequences of his blunder. But she felt that he might misinterpret her silence, and she faltered out: “I suppose of course he thought I’d sent you.”
“Well, he did at first; but I told him you didn’t know anything about my coming.”
She gave a nervous laugh. “Naturally he didn’t believe that.”
“Why shouldn’t he believe it?”
Her impulse was to say: “Because he wanted a better reason for hating me — ” but she suppressed the retort. “When he’s angry he never listens to what any one says,” she answered vaguely.
“But why is he so angry? He wouldn’t answer me when I asked him that.”
“You asked him —?”
“I reminded him that it was he who originally wanted you to divorce him.”
“Ah — but there’s nothing he hates so much as to be reminded of things he’s finished with!”
Vance, who had stood looking down on her with gathering perplexity, turned away, and began to wander up and down the room. “I see you think I’ve made a colossal blunder,” he said at length. She could not think of anything to say, and he went on: “I ought to have consulted you first, I suppose.”
She took his hand. “If you had I certainly wouldn’t have let you expose yourself to anything so painful.”
“And so useless? I know what you’re thinking. There might have been a chance of his coming round if I’d let things alone . . . and now there’s none. That’s it, isn’t it?”
“I suppose so. For the present, at any rate. But what does it matter? Do you mind, dearest — our not being married?” she asked suddenly, laying her hands beseechingly on his shoulders.
“Yes; I hate it — I hate it every minute!” he burst out. “At first I didn’t see what it meant for you — it was enough for me that you and I were together. But now I wouldn’t for the world have you go through again what you’ve had to endure this last year.”
She drew back, wrinkling up her eyes in the way she knew he liked, and smiling up into his face. “How do you know, dearest, that all I’ve endured hasn’t been a part of our happiness?”
“Not mine — not mine!” he exclaimed impatiently. “It’s poisoned everything for me; and last night that woman made me wild. That’s why I couldn’t wait another minute. And now I see my doing what I did was all a monstrous mistake.” He turned away and resumed his agitated pacing of the room. She wondered if he still had something on his mind, and what it could be; but after the shock of what he had told her she had no heart to question him further. After all, she knew the worst now, and must try to come to terms with that first. . .
Presently he came and sat down beside her. “Halo — there’s one thing I’ve got to ask you. You’ll hate it, maybe; but I want you to give me a straight answer. Tarrant says you’ve known all along about his having refused to get a divorce. Is that so?”
She made a sign of assent, and he went on: “Then — then; this is what I want you to tell me. Hasn’t he refused because he’s trying to get you back?”
She gave a start of surprise, and the blood rushed to her forehead. “Why, Vance, what an idea! You must be crazy. . .”
“Why not? I thought of it the minute I’d left him. The man was in agony; I could see that. He couldn’t have hated me so if he hadn’t still been in love with you.”
“But, darling, I swear to you — ”
He gave a shrug. “Oh, I daresay he hasn’t said anything yet. He’s feeling his way . . . trying to think of some dodge that’ll save his face . . . But I’m sure of it, Halo, I’m sure of it!”
She smiled at his boyish violence. “Well — and what of it?”
“What of it? Nothing, of course. Unless — Look here, Halo, we’ve been together over a year now. When we went away I thought we’d be married in a few months; I wouldn’t have dared to urge you to come if I hadn’t been sure of it. And now there seems no hope of your being free; and I see what a bad turn I did you, persuading you to go off before things were settled. It’s too late to mend that; the harm’s done. But what I want to say is this — ”
Halo sprang up, a new apprehension catching at her heart. “Yes . . . yes . . . you want to say . . .?”
“I want to say that you’re free . . . free as air. . .”
She gave him a long look, and then broke into a little laugh. “Free to go back to Lewis if he’ll have me? Is that what you mean? I’m much obliged to you!”
His head drooped, and he looked away from her. “I mean, of course, free to do what you like.”
There was a silence, during which neither looked at the other.
“If it comes to that, we’re both free,” Halo said at last, in a low voice. Vance was still silent, and she repeated insistently: “We’re both free. Is that what you’re trying to tell me? I’ve always understood it, I assure you!” The words were hardly spoken when she saw how they betrayed the dread she had determined to hide from him; but already she was being swept away on its current. “Ah, you make me too unhappy — too unhappy!” she burst out, and suddenly her hard anguish was loosened, and she fell with long sobs on his breast. “Vanny, Vanny . . . I’ve never loved you as I do now!” she heard herself crying; and felt far off, through the streaming flood of her fears, his hand quietly pushing back her hair.
From the balcony of the little pink house Vance Weston looked out over a shabby garden and a barrier of palms to a bay between plum~blue headlands.
On this particular day the bay palpitated with glittering cubes of purple and azure that the waves tossed back and forth like mermaids playing with their jewels. To Vance these games of wind and water were a ceaseless joy. He was always leaving his work to watch the waves race in from the open sea, dodge past the guardian promontories, and fall crying on the beach below his balcony — those unquiet waves, perpetually escaping from something; cloud-shadows and sun-javelins, the silver bullets of the rain, the steady drive of the west wind’s flails. There were other days, very different, when they were not in flight, but like immense grazing flocks moved backward and forward over their smooth pastures to a languid secret rhythm; when a luminous indistinctness falsified the distances, and the wild bay became a placid land-locked sheet of water. Divine days too; but not as inspiriting as those of flight and pursuit, or as exciting as those when the storm caught the frightened waves and turned their hollows livid as the olive trees along the shore.
Vance laid down his pen and went out on the balcony. Coming up the path of the adjoining Pension Britannique, between untrimmed tea~roses and tough-leaved yuccas, was the perpendicular form of the eldest Miss Plummet. Her hand, cased in a black glove worn blue at the seams, clutched a string bag, through the interstices of which were visible some books from the English Chapel library, a bottle from the chemist’s, a handful of mandarins and a tiny bunch of faded anemones. Miss Plummet was almost as fascinating to Vance as the sea and the headlands. She represented, in all its angular purity, a vision as new and exotic: the English maiden lady whose life is spent in continental pensions kept by English landladies, and especially recommended by the local English chaplain. The type was familiar to Halo, so much of whose girlhood had been lived in continental pensions; but to Vance it was more novel and exciting than anything that Montparnasse could offer. “She’s got an outline, an edge; she’s representative. And what she represents is so colossal,” he would explain to Halo, pressing her for further elucidations about the kind of life that Miss Plummet’s family probably led at home, the kind of house she came out of, her background, her conception of the universe.
The passing of Miss Plummet always told Vance what time it was. Precisely at three every afternoon she returned from her shopping in the one narrow street of Oubli-sur-Mer, the little Mediterranean town curving its front of blotched pink-and-yellow houses along the harbour crammed with fishing-boats and guarded by a miniature jetty. Oubli-sur-Mer (Halo had explained, when she proposed to him that they should go there for the winter) was a queer survival: a pocket past which, since the war, fashion and money, jazz and cinemas, had swept eastward, leaving stranded in this dent of the coast, hemmed in by rusty pine-clad hills, the remnant of an old~fashioned English colony. The colonists were annually fewer, a dying race; but though the group had dwindled it held the more jealously to its habits and traditions, its English chaplain, English doctor, chemist, parish library, its sacred horror of “French ways”, and inability to understand the humour of “what French people call funny”.
But Vance never could give the proper amount of attention to Miss Plummet, for almost immediately after she had vanished into the interior of the Pension Britannique there always emerged from it Mrs. Dorman, the chaplain’s wife. Mrs. Dorman was spreading where Miss Plummet was vertical, ambling where the other was brisk. She belonged to the generation which had known the south of France to possess a warm winter climate, and her large mild face looked forth astonished under a spreading straw hat wreathed with a discouraged dust-coloured feather, while she grasped a sun-umbrella in one hand and with the other tightened her fur tippet. Vance called her the regional divinity because her dual precautions against the weather so aptly symbolized the extremes of temperature experienced at Oubli-sur-Mer in passing from sun to shade.
“I’m afraid the winter climate of the Riviera is not what it used to be; in old times we never DREAMED of covering up the Bougainvilleas,” Mrs. Dorman would invariably proclaim to new arrivals at the pension, to the distress of her landlady, Madame Fleuret, who was the widow of a French Protestant pasteur, but herself unassailably English. “If only,” Madame Fleuret privately complained, “she’d leave the new people alone till they’ve settled down, and made up their minds to have their letters sent here” — a view in which the Reverend Mr. Dorman heartily concurred. “But you know, dear Madame Fleuret, the Bishop DID agree with me,” Mrs. Dorman would gently protest, thereby recalling to Madame Fleuret’s irritated memory the disastrous visit of the Bishop of Drearbury. His lordship, having been ordered south by his physicians for a rest, and having singled out the Pension Britannique after protracted correspondence with Lady Dayes-Dawes, had arrived on a mistral day, when the olive trees were turned inside out, the gale screaming down the chimneys, and the fire smoking furiously in what Madame Fleuret had lately been trained to call the “lounge”; and it was at that disastrous moment that Mrs. Dorman had put her stereotyped question: “We do so hope you’re going to like the Riviera?” to which the Bishop, whom Mr. Dorman had just brought back from a good long walk in the teeth of the gale, had hissed out: “I’m afraid I don’t like your foliage.” (“If at least,” Madame Fleuret said afterward confidentially to the other ladies, “Mrs. Dorman would give them time to get used to the olives! It took me YEARS, I know; and there’s no use trying to hurry people.”)
Mrs. Dorman, Vance knew, was on her way to sit with Mrs. Churley, the wife of the retired Indian cavalry officer who lived up the hill. Colonel Churley, a long melancholy mahogany-coloured man with a drooping white moustache, and white rings under his pale blue eyes, walked past the pink house every morning to fetch his letters from the post office, and every afternoon to take a long tramp by himself along the shore or among the hills. He walked slowly, his arms clasped behind his back, his walking stick dragging through the dust, and looked neither to right nor left, but kept his stern eyes, under projecting shaggy brows, fixed steadily ahead of him, as if to avoid being accosted by acquaintances. Only when he met the Reverend Mr. Dorman, the short round chaplain, whose face was as rubicund as the other’s was dark, did Colonel Churley stop for a few words before resuming his mournful tramp. Mrs. Churley, crippled with rheumatism and half blind, lay all day on her sofa at Les Mimosas, the dismal-looking house up the hill, and Mrs. Dorman and Miss Plummet took turns to sit with her during her husband’s solitary rambles. Halo had offered to share their task, but Mrs. Dorman had explained, with some embarrassment, that the Churleys were very shy and unsociable, and perhaps it would be best . . . though Mrs. Weston was so very kind . . . and she would of course give the message . . . but Mrs. Weston mustn’t think it odd . . . even dear Lady Dayes-Dawes had never been allowed to call. . .
There was a Churley son, it appeared, a youth also said to be invalidish and unsociable; Vance had not yet seen him, but at times he was haunted by the thought that a young fellow, perhaps younger than himself, lived in that dreary house up the lane, in a place as lacking in youthful life as Oubli-sur-Mer. Mrs. Dorman had told Halo that young Churley was said to be “literary,” and the ladies of the Pension Britannique shook their heads when he was mentioned, as if small good was to be hoped of any one with such tendencies. The ladies had been shy of Vance too when they learned he was an author; but Halo had had the happy thought of giving the parish library a copy of “Instead”, his romantic early novel, and Miss Pamela Plummet, the invalid, who ranked as the leading literary critic of Oubli-sur-Mer, had pronounced it very pretty; after which, reassured, the Pension Britannique had taken “Mr. and Mrs. Weston” to its bosom.
The pension had made the acquaintance of the newcomers through the accident of their sudden arrival. Halo and Vance, after the latter’s encounter with Lewis Tarrant, had both felt the desire to get away from Paris; and Halo, with her usual promptness, had remembered the obsolete charms of Oubli-sur-Mer, got hold of some one who knew a house-agent there, and secured the little pink house after one glance at its fly-blown photograph. A week later they had packed up and evacuated the Paris flat; but their arrival in the south had been too precipitate for Halo to engage servants in advance. The restaurants on the quay were too far off, and the nearness of the Pension Britannique prompted her to seek its hospitality. It was against Madame Fleuret’s principles to receive boarders from outside; she was opposed to transients of any kind. Her established clients, she explained, did not like to be brought in contact with strangers, people you couldn’t tell anything about, and who might turn out to be “foreigners”, or even “peculiar”. But Halo’s persuasiveness, and the good looks and good humour of the young couple, had broken down her rule, and for a week Vance and Halo had been suffered to lunch and dine at the pension. It was then that Vance had laid in his store of impressions; had listened, fascinated, to the literary judgments of the invalid Miss Plummet on “The First Violin” and “Ships that Pass in the Night” (her favourite works of fiction); had gazed spell-bound on the mushroom hats and jet-beaded mantle of old Lady Dayes-Dawes, the baronet’s widow, who knew more knitting and crochet stitches than any one else at Oubli, and whose first cousin was a Colonial Governor; had hung delighted on the conversation of the Honourable Ginevra Hipsley, who kept white mice on whose sensibilities she experimented by means of folk-songs accompanied by the accordion, and about whom she wrote emotional letters to “Nature” and the “Spectator”; had followed the Reverend Mr. Dorman’s discreet attempts to ascertain if “Mr. and Mrs. Weston” belonged to the American branch of the Church of England (as their distinguished appearance made him hope) and would therefore be disposed to assist in the maintenance of the Bougainvillea-draped chapel in which he officiated, or whether they were members of one of the innumerable sects which so deplorably diversify the religious life of the States; and had gathered various items of information about the melancholy Churley family and the other British residents of Oubli-sur-Mer.
It was a little world seemingly given over to illness, poverty and middle-age; and the contrast between the faded faces and vanished hopes of its inhabitants and the boisterous setting of sun and gale that framed their declining days would have been depressing if Vance had not felt in them a deep-down solidarity of tastes and principles. It was enough that they all read the “Times”, and did not like vegetables cooked in the French way; in the rootless drifting world into which Vance had been born he had never (even among Halo’s friends and family) come across such a solid coral~isle of convictions. This little handful of people, elderly, disappointed and poor, forced by bad health or lack of means to live away from their country, drifting from pension to pension, or from one hired villa to another, with interests limited to the frugal and the trivial, yet managed by sheer community of sentiment to fit into the pattern of something big and immemorial. The sense of the past awakened in Vance by his first sight of the Willows, that queer old house on the Hudson which embodied a past so recent, now stirred in him more deeply at the sight of these detached and drifting fragments of so great a whole. It was odd, he thought, looking back: he hadn’t felt Chartres, yet he felt Miss Plummet and Colonel Churley. Perhaps even Halo wouldn’t have understood how it was that, seen from Euphoria, these human monuments seemed the more venerable.
Vance stood on the balcony and lit a cigarette. Behind him was his writing-table, scattered with the loose sheets of “Colossus”; before him, the joyous temptation of sun and sea. In the next room he heard the diligent click of Halo’s Remington, re-copying the third version of Chapter VII. The work wasn’t going as well as he had hoped; he thought enviously of the pace at which he had reeled off “The Puritan in Spain” the previous winter at Cadiz. What he was at now, of course, was a different matter; no glib tale, but a sort of compendium of all that life had given him — and received from him. He was attempting to transcribe the sum total of his experience, to do a human soul, his soul, in the round. At times, when his inspiration flagged, he told himself ironically that it looked as though he hadn’t had enough experience to fill many pages. Yet there were days when a grain of mustard-seed, like an Indian conjuror’s tree, would suddenly shoot up and scale the sky. He stood on the balcony, thinking restlessly of the sound of the wind in the pines along the shore, of the smell of lavender and sage on the hot slopes behind the town, and watching for the figure of Colonel Churley, gloomily silhouetted against the dazzling bay. If Miss Plummet were a moment late Vance could always put his watch right by Colonel Churley.
“Ready for the next!” Halo called.
“Yes. All right. . .” Ah, there the Colonel was, dragging his stick along behind him, punctual and desolate as a winter night. In another moment he would probably meet Mr. Dorman, and Vance would watch their two faces, one blankly melancholy, the other a~twitter with animation. But today Mr. Dorman was not visible, and Colonel Churley strode on, aiming for the hills. Vance shivered and turned indoors.
“All right. Only I’m afraid there’s nothing more coming,” he said.
As Halo looked up he saw a shade of disappointment cross her face and transform itself into a smile. “Another holiday?”
“Looks like it. I believe it’s the sea,” he said with a shrug.
“Well, you’d better go out and spend the rest of the day with it.”
He stood in the doorway, irresolute. “Come along?”
“I don’t believe I will. I want to go over the first chapters again.”
“What a life for you!”
She laughed. “Do I look as if I minded?”
“No. That’s what’s so trying about you. . .”
They laughed together, and Vance swung joyously down the stairs.
The little house was full of a friendly shabby gaiety. Halo always managed to give that air to their improvised habitations. On the ground floor, where the kitchen and dining-room were, she had hidden the dingy papering of the hall under a gay striped cotton, and had herself repainted and cushioned the tumbledown chairs in the verandah. Vance’s craving for order and harmony was always subtly gratified by this exercise of her skill. He recalled with a shudder the chronic disorder in which he had struggled through the weary years of his marriage, the untidy lair into which poor Laura Lou converted every room she lived in, the litter of unmended garments, half-empty medicine bottles and leaking hot-water bags that accumulated about her as lavender-scented linen, fresh window~curtains, flowers and books did about Halo — poor Laura Lou, who could never touch a fire without making it smoke, while Halo’s clever hands could coax a flame from the sulkiest log.
Vance, thinking of all this, and of the golden freedom awaiting him outside, recalled another day as bright and beckoning, when he had fled from the squalid Westchester bungalow, and the monotony of Laura Lou’s companionship, to wander in the woods and dream of a book he was never to write. He thought of the incredible change in his fortunes since then, of the love and understanding and success which had come to him together, and wondered why mercies of which he was so exquisitely aware had never yet stifled his old aching interrogation of life. He was glad to be at Oubli-sur-Mer, away from the incessant stimulus of Paris, in the country quiet which seemed a necessity to his creative mood. The queer little community, so self-contained and shut off from his own agitated world, gave him the sense of aloofness which his spirit needed; yet somehow — as so often before — the fulness of the opportunity seemed to oppress him, his work lagged under the very lack of obstacles.
He picked up his stick and cap, and was just emerging from the verandah when a young man who walked with a slight limp pushed open the garden gate. The visitor, a stranger to Vance, came toward him with an air of rather jaunty self-confidence. He had a narrow dusky face, with an unexpected crop of reddish hair streaked with amber tumbling over a broad forehead, and dark eyes with the look of piercing wistfulness that sometimes betrays spinal infirmity. A brilliant crimson tie, and a loudly patterned, but faded pull-over above a pair of baggy flannel trousers, completed his studied make~up.
“Mr. Weston? Would you give me an interview? I don’t mean for a newspaper,” the young man began abruptly, in a cultivated but slightly strident voice. “I’ve been asked to do an article for the ‘Windmill’, and I’d be awfully glad if you’d let me talk with you for a few minutes.”
Vance stood still in the path considering his visitor. He was not particularly interested in the idea of being interviewed or reviewed. From the outset of his literary career he had been unusually indifferent to the notoriety attained by personal intervention. He remembered the shock he had received, when he was reviewing for Lewis Tarrant on the “New Hour”, on discovering the insatiable greed for publicity of such successful novelists as Gratz Blemer. It was not that Vance was indifferent to success, but because its achievement seemed to him so entirely independent of self-advertising. Halo abounded in this view, partly (he suspected) from disgust at what she had seen of the inner workings of the “New Hour”, partly from an inborn disdain of any sort of cheap popularity. She wanted him to be the greatest novelist who had ever lived, and was still (Vance felt sure) gloriously certain of his eventually reaching that pinnacle; but she cared not a rush for the fame cooked up in editorial kitchens. As for Vance, though he had to the full the artist’s quivering sensitiveness to praise, and anguished shrinking from adverse criticism, he felt neither praise or blame unless it implied recognition of what he had been striving for. Random approbation had never, even in the early days, perceptibly raised his pulse; and his first taste of popularity had only made him more fastidious.
But the young man in the faded pull-over interested him for other reasons. That eager dark face, with its strange shock of bright hair tossed back from a too prominent forehead, was full of intellectual excitement.
“I hate interviews — don’t see any sense in them,” Vance began, but in a tone so friendly that his visitor rejoined with a laugh: “Oh, you’re thinking of the heart-to-heart kind, probably. With a snap~shot of yourself looking at the first crocus in your garden; or smoking a pipe, with your arm round a Great Dane.”
“Well . . .” Vance acknowledged. “Transposed into ‘Windmill’ terms. . .”
“Yes; I know. But that’s not my line. Honest to God, it isn’t, as you say in the States.” The young man looked at Vance with a whimsical smile. “I wish it were — for my bank-account. The human touch is worth its weight in gold, and outlives all the fashions. But all I care about is ideas; or else the world in which they are completely non-existent. And I prefer the latter, only it’s too expensive for me.” He paused, and then added: “My name’s Christopher Churley, by the way.”
“Oh — you live up the hill, then?”
“Well, if you call it living. I say, can I have my talk now? The ‘Windmill’ people are rather in a hurry. But of course if it’s not convenient — ”
Vance was looking at him with compassionate interest. This was the sombre Colonel’s son. The sombreness was there — Vance perceived it instantly, under a surface play of chaff and self-derision that was sadder than the father’s open gloom; but the youth’s look of flaming intelligence had no counterpart in the Colonel’s heavy stare.
“I was going for a tramp. But if you’d rather come in now and have a talk — ”
“Thanks a lot. You’ll let me, then?” Chris Churley’s eyes were illuminated. “But I don’t mind walking, you know; not if I can take it easy, on account of my limp; and if you’ll let me take the landscape for granted.”
“Oh, you can, can you? Take all this for granted?” Vance interrupted.
“Yes. Rather a pity, I suppose. I daresay there are lots of poor devils looking at cats on a tin roof through a fog who’d expand in this Virgilian setting. But I can’t. Give me the tin roof and the cats, if they’re in a metropolis. Though what I really prefer is artifice and luxury. I revel in a beautiful landscape transformed by the very rich; not just the raw material, like this. . .” He waved a contemptuous hand toward the bright sea and fretted coast~line. “What I care about, you see, is the landscape of the mind; the intellectual Alps. Or else cocottes and oil kings round a baccarat table.”
“Well, you’ve a wide range,” said Vance, somewhat distressingly reminded of the stale paradoxes dear to Rebecca Stram’s familiars and the satellites of Lorry’s studio.
Young Churley flushed up, and Vance saw his eyes darken as if in physical pain. “I suppose this sort of talk bores you. I daresay you’ve had everything. . .”
“Oh, have I? Look here,” said Vance good-naturedly, “come upstairs, and we’ll talk shop as much as you like, since Oubli doesn’t provide the other alternatives.” He pulled out his cigarettes, and offered them to young Churley. Decidedly the sight of the Colonel had not prepared him for the Colonel’s son.
On the threshold of the low-ceilinged study, with its rough yellow~washed walls, Chris Churley stopped to glance curiously about at the books and papers; the blossoming almond-branch in a big jar, the old brown Bokhara with the help of which Halo had contrived a divan piled with brown cushions. “I say — this is jolly!”
“Not much luxury,” Vance grinned, always gratified at the admiration provoked by Halo’s upholstery.
The other shrugged. “I wish you could see Les Mimosas — no, I don’t,” he corrected himself hastily; and immediately drew from his pocket a letter which he handed to Vance. It was in a girl’s hand, dated from London, under the letter-head: “Zélide Spring, Literary Agent and Adviser.” It ran: “Darling Chris, the ‘Windmill’ people have just rung up to say they hear Vance Weston, who wrote ‘The Puritan in Spain,’ is at Oubli, and they’d like an article about him if you can get it done in time for the next number. Some one has failed them, and they want to shove this in at once. Of course that means doing it in a rush. Now, Chris, please, you simply MUST, or I’ll never speak to you again — ” and then: “P.S. You must see him, of course, and get him to talk to you about his books. How frightfully exciting for you! Get me an autograph, darling.”
Vance laughed as he returned the letter. “This means, I suppose, that you don’t like doing things in a rush.”
“Do YOU?” said young Churley, looking enviously at the divan. “The very word makes me want to go and stretch out over there.”
“Well, do,” said Vance, tossing a fresh packet of cigarettes in the direction of the divan.
“Honestly? You don’t mind? Sprawling here while you’re sitting in a chair makes me feel like a vamp in a talkie. But then that’s the way I really like to feel — luxurious and vicious,” Churley confessed, shaking up the cushions before he plunged his glowing head into them. “Match? Oh, thanks! Now, then — I suppose I ought to begin by asking you about ‘The Puritan in Spain’.”
“No, don’t,” said Vance, lighting a cigarette, and dropping into the chair by his writing-table. He was beginning to be interested and stirred by this vivid youth, who set his ideas tumbling about excitedly, as Savignac had in the early days in Paris. Sometimes he felt that he needed a sort of padded cell of isolation to work in, and then again, when a beam of understanding flashed through his shuttered solitude, a million sparks of stimulation rushed in with it.
“Oh, but I’ve got to! You said I might,” Churley protested.
“I didn’t say I’d answer. Not about ‘The Puritan’, anyhow.”
Young Churley, with a glance of curiosity, raised himself on his elbow. “No? Why?”
“Because I hate it,” said Vance carelessly.
“Oh, good! I mean — well, hang it, now I’ve seen you, I begin to wonder . . .”
“Why I did it? Yes . . . If I only knew —! What’s that thing in Tennyson, about ‘little flower in the crannied wall’, if I knew what put you there, I’d know all there is to know; or something of that sort. Well, I was in Spain, and the subject caught me. What I call one of the siren-subjects . . . I never stir now without cotton in my ears.”
Churley laughed. “Righto! Glad I don’t have to ask you solemn questions about the book. I’m in rather a difficulty about you American novelists. Your opportunity’s so immense, and . . . well, you always seem to write either about princesses in Tuscan villas, or about gaunt young men with a ten-word vocabulary who spend their lives sweating and hauling wood. Haven’t you got any subject between the two? There’s really nothing as limited as the primitive passions — except perhaps those of the princesses. I believe the novelist’s richest stuff is in the middle class, because it lies where its name says, exactly in the middle, and reaches out so excitingly and unexpectedly in both directions. But I suppose you haven’t a middle class in America, though you do sometimes have princesses — ”
“I rather think we’ve got a middle class too. But no one wants to admit belonging to it, because we all do. It’s not so picturesque — ”
“Just so! There’s its immense plastic advantage. Absolute safety from picturesqueness — you don’t even have to be on your guard against it. Why don’t you write a novel about the middle class, and call it ‘Meridian’?” cried young Churley, with an inspired wave of his hand, which closed on the packet of cigarettes.
“Because I’m writing one about all mankind called: ‘Colossus’.”
“You’re not? I say . . . where have those matches gone? Thanks. But that IS a subject! Does it bore you to talk about your things while they’re on the stocks?”
“N— no,” said Vance, hesitatingly. All at once he felt the liberating thrill of the question. Of course it wouldn’t bore him to talk about “Colossus” to anybody with those eager eyes and that lightning up-take. Here was a fellow with whom you could argue and theorize by the hour, and so develop the muscles of your ideas. It was queer he should ever have imagined he could grind out a big book in a smiling desert like Oubli-sur-Mer. But the desert animated by one responsive intelligence became exactly what his mood required. And he began to talk. . .
Churley listened avidly, his head thrown back, his eyes fixed, through the curl of incessant cigarettes, on the luminous glitter beyond the windows. As Vance talked on he was aware, in his listener, of a curious mental immaturity combined with flashes of precocious insight. Compared with his friend Savignac, in whose disciplined intelligence there were so few gaps and irregularities, this youth’s impatient brain was as uncertain as the sea; but it had the sea’s bright sallies and sudden irresistible onslaughts. Arguing with him about “Colossus” reminded Vance of the hour he had spent in the unknown church during a thunderstorm, when the obscurity was torn by flashes that never lasted long enough for him to do more than guess at what they lit up.
Chris Churley was probably not more than three or four years younger than himself; yet a world seemed to divide them. Churley still lived on the popular catchwords of which Vance had already wearied; yet he appeared to have discarded many of the ideas which were the very substance of Vance’s mind.
They talked on and on, till the radiance faded into dusk and Halo came with a lamp and the suggestion of tea or cocktails. Churley, in her presence, was as easy and natural as with Vance. “I’ve come to make an article out of Mr. Weston for the ‘Windmill’,” he explained, smiling; “it’s a tremendous chance for me,” and Vance saw that Halo felt, as he had, the happy simplicity of the youth’s manner. In the last few months he had grown more observant of Halo’s changes of expression, and quicker in divining her response to the persons they were thrown with. She was going to like Chris Churley, Vance thought, listening to her friendly questions, and to their easy interchange of talk. The mere fact that the newcomer was going to write an article about Vance in a review of such standing as the “Windmill” was a sufficient recommendation to Halo; but, apart from that, Vance saw that she and Churley talked the same language, and would always be at ease with each other.
“I was wondering whether you were going to take to that chap or not,” he said, when Churley, roused to the lateness of the hour, had sprung up exclaiming that he must hurry home and get to work. “I’ll bring the article in a couple of days if I may,” he called back from the threshold. “It’s my chance, you know; if this thing suits them I hope they’ll take me on regularly; and it’s just conceivable that in time that might mean: London!” He pronounced the word with a mystical stress that lit up his whole face.
“Of course I take to him,” Halo responded to Vance’s question. “Poor boy! What life at Les Mimosas must be! I could see how he shied away from questions, about his family . . . I suppose they’re miserably poor, and gloomy and ill. We must have him here as much as possible; you must do all you can to help him with the article.”
Young Churley reappeared punctually in two days; but he did not bring the article. It had taken, he explained, more thinking over than he had foreseen. And, if Weston didn’t mind, there were just a few more questions he’d like to put.
This was the prelude to another long and exhilarating talk. The actual questions were not, as far as Vance could recall, ever put, either then or later; but the big psychological panorama which he was attempting in “Colossus” was the point of departure for an absorbing discussion of the novelist’s opportunities and limitations. Young Churley seemed to have read everything, and thought about most things, without ever reaching any intellectual conclusions; the elasticity of his judgments was as startling to Vance as his uncanny quickness of apprehension. Good talk was doubtless a rare luxury to him, and he was evidently determined to make the most of his opportunity. Day after day he returned to the pink villa, at first apologetically, soon as a matter of course; and while he lolled on the brown divan, or lay outstretched on the sand of one of the rocky coves along the bay, every allusion that Vance made, every point on which he touched, started a new hare for young Churley’s joyful pursuit. At one moment he seemed full of interest in Vance’s idea of celebrating the splendour and misery of the average man, and produced a great Pascalian aphorism for his title-page; but the next he was declaring that the only two things in the world he really loathed were Oubli-sur-Mer and the Categorical Imperative, and urging Vance to write a novel about a wealthy, healthy and perfectly happy young man who murders his best friend simply to show he is above middle-class prejudices.
Halo, as her way was with Vance’s friends, came and went about her daily occupations, sometimes joining the two on their picnics, sometimes finding a pretext for remaining at home. Young Churley continued to amuse and stimulate her, and she often urged him to come to dine, and sat late with the young men over the fire of olive-wood; but Vance noticed that she seemed increasingly anxious, as the months passed, to make him feel that he was free to come and go without consulting her, or seeking her company. Even where his work was concerned she had relaxed her jealous vigilance. She no longer asked how the book was getting on, or playfully clamoured for fresh copy; she waited till he brought her his manuscript, betraying neither impatience nor disappointment if the intervals of waiting were protracted. At times her exquisite detachment almost made it seem as if she were quietly preparing for a friendly parting; once or twice, with a start of fear, he wondered if, as he had once imagined, her husband were not trying to persuade her to come back; but whenever she and Vance were alone together she was so entirely her old self, so simply and naturally the friend and lover of always, that the possibility became inconceivable.
Meanwhile the days passed, and no more was said of Churley’s article. Vance himself, in the rapid growth of his new friendship, had already lost sight of its first occasion; it was Halo who, a fortnight or so after the youth’s first appearance, said one night, as he took leave: “Aren’t we to be allowed to see the article, after all?”
“The article — the article?” Churley’s brilliant eyes met hers in genuine perplexity. “Oh, that ‘Windmill’ thing? Glad you reminded me! It ought to have been done long ago, oughtn’t it?” he added, in a tone of disarming confidence.
“Well, you told us it might be a chance — an opening; that if you could secure a regular job with the ‘Windmill’ you might be able to get away.”
“Oh — if I could! If I only could! You’re perfectly right; I DID say so. I was all on fire to do the article. . .” He hesitated, wrinkling his brows, his eyes still wistfully on hers. “But the fact is — I wonder if you’ll understand? — I’m in a frightful dilemma. I can’t write here; and I can’t make enough money to get away unless I do write. Can you suggest a way out, I wonder?”
Halo laughed. “The only one, I should say, is that you should want to get away badly enough to force yourself to write, whether you want to or not.”
His eyes widened. “Oh, you really think one can force one’s self to write? That’s interesting. Do you think so too, Weston?” he asked, turning toward Vance a smile of elfin malice.
Vance reddened. Halo’s answer seemed to him inconceivably stupid. If only outsiders wouldn’t give advice to fellows who were trying to do things! But probably you could never cure a woman of that. All his sympathy, at the moment, was with Churley. . .
“That remark of Halo’s was meant for me,” he said, laughing. “But I suppose if you were to shut yourself up and set your teeth . . . that is, if you still feel you want to do the article,” he added, remembering that Churley might affect inertia as a pretext for dropping a subject he was tired of. The other seemed to guess his idea.
“Want to do it? I’ve got it all blazing away in my head at this very minute! I never wanted to do a thing more. But when I look out at this empty grimacing sea . . . or think of Miss Pamela Plummet reading ‘Ships That Pass In The Night’ for the hundredth time, or Mrs. Dorman picking up knitting stitches for Lady Dayes~Dawes — for heaven’s sake, Weston, how can a fellow do anything in this place but lie on his back and curse his God?” He looked from one to the other with a comic plaintiveness. “But there; you think me a poor thing, both of you. And so I am — pitiable. Only, hang it all, even the worm can turn — can turn out an article! And so can I. You’ll see. Now that I think of it, I had a desperate wire from Zélide this morning. The ‘Windmill’ people say they MUST have something about you, and they offer to give me till the end of this week if I’ll produce it. When IS the end of this week? I had an idea today was already the beginning of next . . . but that’s just a dastardly pretext for not doing the article . . . By Jove, I’ll go home and start tonight — and finish it too! Or at least, I’ll do it this morning, because it’s already morning. I say, Weston, can I drop in with it tomorrow after dinner?”
Churley did not drop in that evening, nor for the two days following. “He’s really buckled down to it,” Halo hopefully prophesied; but on the third day he reappeared, and said he had started writing the article and then torn up the beastly thing because it read so precisely like what every other literary critic had already said about every other novelist. “If only there was a new language perhaps we’d have new thoughts; if there was a new alphabet, even! When I try to harness together those poor broken~winded spavined twenty-six letters, and think of the millions and millions of ways they’ve already been combined into platitudes, my courage fails me, and I haven’t the heart to thrash them onto their shaky old legs again. Why on earth don’t you inventive fellows begin by inventing a new language?”
Vance shrugged. “I guess there’d be people turning out platitudes in it the very first week.”
“Oh, I know what comes next. You’re going to tell me that all the big geniuses have managed to express themselves in new ways with the old material. But, after all, history does show that every now and then culture has reached a dead level of stagnation, and then . . .”
“Well, go home now, and write that down!” Vance laughingly proposed; but Churley laughed too, and said he wasn’t in the mood for writing, and if they were going on a picnic, as Mrs. Weston had suggested, was there any objection to his going with them?
Late that night Vance, as he often did at that hour, sat on his balcony looking out over the darkening waters. He liked these southern nights without a moon, when the winter constellations ruled in a dark blue heaven and rained their strong radiance on the sea. His inspiration, which had begun to flag before Chris Churley’s appearance, now flowed with a strong regular beat. The poor boy’s talk had done for Vance what Vance’s society had failed to do for him. Vance knew that his creative faculty had grown strong enough to draw stimulus from contradiction instead of being disturbed by it. To the purely analytical intelligence such questions as their talks had raised might be unsettling and sterilizing; but, as always in the full tide of invention, he felt himself possessed by a brooding spirit of understanding, some mystic reassurance which sea and sky and the life of men transmitted from sources deeper than the reason. He had never been able to formulate it, but he had caught, in the pages of all the great creative writers, hints of that mysterious subjection and communion, impossible to define, but clear to the initiated as the sign exchanged between members of some secret brotherhood. Ah, they were the happy people — the only happy people, perhaps — these through whom the human turmoil swept not to ravage but to fertilize. He leaned on the balcony, looking out at the sea, and pondered on his task, and blessed it.
A few days later, after one of the unproductive mornings which often followed on his stretches of feverish work, Vance said to Halo: “When you said that the other day to Churley about a man’s forcing himself to write, I suppose you were thinking of me, and the endless time I’m taking to do this book.”
There had been a day when Halo would have protested, and he would have been sorry that he had spoken; but a new Halo, with steadier nerves and smoother temper, had replaced the pleasing anxious spirit of last year, and she only rejoined, with a glance of good~natured surprise: “Why, Vance, how absurd! With a book on the scale of this one you’re bound to take a long time to get to the top of the hill.”
That was sensible enough; but Vance was in the mood to feel that a sensible answer could only be a transparent attempt to humour him. “Oh, well — climbing’s not bad exercise. But what you said has frightened away poor Churley. . .”
“Frightened him — why?”
“Writers don’t much care to be told by outsiders to buckle down to their work. They generally get enough of that sort of advice in their own families.”
“Oh, poor boy! I’m sorry! But how could he have minded? He’s always joking about his own laziness.”
“That’s different,” Vance retorted; and Halo, without appearing to notice his tone, suggested that he should go and hunt up his young friend. “Perhaps he may have stayed away because he’s ill; he looks spectral at times. I’m sure it would please him if you looked him up.”
Churley had never suggested his friend’s coming to see him, and Vance thought he might interpret an unsought visit as an attempt to remind him of the article he perhaps no longer wished to write. To a youth so acutely self-conscious it would seem natural that an author should attach great importance to being reviewed by him. But the possibility that he might be lying ill in that dreary house made Vance decide to follow Halo’s advice. As he mounted the hill, the house, rising above him in its neglected garden with windows shuttered against the sun, seemed to take the warmth out of the air, and he felt half inclined to turn back. While he stood there the blistered front door was jerked open and Colonel Churley came out. The Colonel looked at him with astonishment, and said: “Oh — ” in a voice as sombre as his countenance, but somehow less forbidding; and on Vance’s asking for his son, replied unexpectedly: “Ah — you’re a friend of his, are you?”
Vance hesitated. “Well, a literary friend . . . yes . . . We both write, sir. . .”
The Colonel considered him thoughtfully. “Ah — you write? Indeed? I wish you’d persuade my son to do as much. But I’ve no idea where he is at present; none whatever. I seldom have any idea where he is,” the Colonel concluded, in a voice more sorrowful than angered; and he lifted his hat with a gesture which implied that he expected Vance to precede him to the gate. If Chris were within his father evidently did not mean the visitor to know it. He did not even ask Vance’s name. At the gate he turned with another bow, and strode away through the olives.
That evening Chris Churley reappeared. He looked drawn and colourless, and flinging himself down on the divan plunged his hand into Vance’s box of cigarettes. For a while they talked of a new book that Vance had lent him (and which he had promised to return, and hadn’t); then, when Halo left the room for a moment, he said abruptly: “I suppose it was you who looked me up this afternoon.”
“Yes. I met your father at the door. He said he didn’t know where you were.”
“And you told him you were a literary pal?” Churley laughed. “He didn’t for a minute believe that. He thought you were one of my waster friends come to carry me off on a spree. My father and mother always think that, when anybody they don’t know comes to see me.”
“Wasters? I shouldn’t think there were many in this place,” said Vance, smiling.
“THEY do. They think they’re everywhere where I am. My mother’s convinced there’s a private gambling hell in one of the houses on the quay. I daresay there is — and a filthy hole it must be. What my family can’t understand is that riotous living, unless it’s on the grand scale, appeals to me no more than getting drunk on cheap wine at a bistro. What I want to make me go astray is marble halls and millions; and Oubli is fairly safe from both.” He sat up and clutched his tossed red hair in his brown hands. “Oh, God, Weston, if I could get away! If only I could get away!”
Vance was moved at the cry. Well, why couldn’t he get away? And where would he go, and what would he do, if he could?
“Go? Straight to London, by God!” Churley swung around on the divan, his eyes dark with excitement under his flaming hair. “London, of course. If I could have a month there, with nobody to nag me, or ask me when I was going to get to work again (I know what my father told you — I know); if I could have a fortnight, even, I could write that article about you, and a couple of others that have occurred to me during our talks; and with those articles I’d go to the ‘Windmill’, and from what Zélide says I’m practically certain they’d take me on permanently. But what am I to do, without a penny in my pocket? That’s what my people can’t be got to see. You must have found, haven’t you, that there are places where a man can work, and places where he can’t, though nobody but an artist can understand, and other people imagine you can say to a writer: ‘Well, how is it you haven’t turned out your thousand words this morning?’ as they’d say to a child in the nursery: ‘Now, then, down with that cod-liver oil, or I’ll know why’.”
The appeal reminded Vance of his own ineffectual efforts, the hours of agonizing inability to express what was in him, and the intervals when even the craving for expression failed because there was only emptiness within. Remembering his good fortune, the difficulties surmounted, the distinction achieved, the tenderness and understanding that had silently fostered his talent, he felt ashamed of the contrast between his fate and Churley’s.
“Oh, see here; things may not be as bad as you think; we’ll see what can be done . . .” he began, laying his hand on the other’s shoulder; and at the terrible light in Churley’s eyes Vance understood that he was already pledged to help the flight to London.
He had been rather afraid of Halo’s disapproval when she learned what he had done. His earnings from “The Puritan in Spain” had not been large, for the book had been more fashionable than popular; and Halo’s means were cramped by the necessity of helping her parents. Mr. and Mrs. Spear had always been a costly luxury, and Vance suspected that Lorry had taken advantage of his sister’s being in Paris to extract from her a share of the spoils. But Halo was full of sympathy for poor Churley. “Of course you couldn’t do anything else. I daresay he’s right in saying he can do you better when he gets you in some sort of perspective.” (This had been Churley’s explanation to Halo, when she had returned to the study and found the two young men discussing Chris’s departure.) “A ‘close-up’ must be horribly difficult, unless you’re a Boswell; and I don’t believe poor Chris will ever be anybody’s Boswell but his own. Anyhow, I can see that his only chance is to get into another atmosphere. It’s just like you, dear, to understand. . .”
The loan, they agreed, could not be less than twenty pounds; with the trip to London deducted that would barely leave him a carefree month. After he had gone Vance said to Halo: “I wish I’d told him straight off that I wanted to give him that money. There are times when it paralyzes a man to know that the money he’s sweating to earn has got to be passed straight over to somebody else.” He was thinking of his own early struggles, and of what it would have meant, at the moment of Laura Lou’s illness, to have a friend guess his distress and help him out. Churley had already started — he had caught the first train the morning after his appeal to Vance; but Vance and Halo decided that as soon as he sent them his London address Vance should write that he wished the money to be regarded as a gift.
It was a surprise that the days passed without further news. After Chris’s jubilant farewells Halo had expected a post-card from Toulon or Marseilles; but Vance, better acquainted with young men’s ways, pointed out that Chris’s chief difficulty seemed to be an inability to use his pen. “He’ll send his address in time; but he may not even do that till he’s finished the article. I think he felt rather uncomfortable at having talked so much about it, and then not having put a line on paper. Poor devil — I owe him more than he does me, for our talks seem to have given me a fresh start.”
And so it proved. Churley had stirred up many ideas in the course of their long debates, and Vance’s acceleration of energy rushed at once into the channels of his work. The weeks passed rapidly between ardent hours of writing and long loiterings on hill and shore. When Vance’s brain was in full activity his hours of idleness acquired a new quality. It was as though he looked at everything through the powerful lens of his creative energy, so that the least detail of the landscape, the faintest fugitive play of cloud and sun, sufficed to enrich his dream.
With the end of January the southern spring began; clouds of translucent almond-bloom on rough red terraces, blue patches of borage in stony fields, the celandine shining in wet leafy hollows, blackthorn and tamarisk along the lanes; and a few weeks later, among the hills and above the sea, under the olives and through the vines, the miraculous snowfall of the daffodils.
Vance and Halo went off daily, staff in hand, prolonging their wanderings more and more, exploring secret valleys, mounting to granite mountain-crests or wading and scrambling along miles of red rock and amber sand, with a peacock sea glittering through the pine~trunks when they climbed or, when they dropped down to it, lapping their feet with silver. Sometimes, when they had planned a long excursion, Vance was up before sunrise, and got in two or three hours of writing before they started; and when they came back, at sunset or under a cool wintry moon, it was good to lie on the divan, fagged and happy, and dream of tomorrow’s work.
The day came when Vance, looking back, understood that at that moment the Furies had slept, and life given him all it could. Even at the time he felt a singular peace and plenitude. His work was going well; his heart was quiet, and the sameness of his days seemed their most exquisite quality. One evening in particular when, looking up, he had seen Halo bending over to stir the fire, her dark head outlined against the flame, he had felt in his breast a new emotion, clear as that flame, as if out of their loving and quarrelling, the uneasy blazing and smouldering of their passion, something winged and immortal had sprung, and brooded over them.
He gave a chuckle of contentment, and Halo’s smile questioned him. “What is it, dear?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Perhaps the peace that passeth understanding . . . Poor Churley,” he added, “I was just thinking of the way he has of using up things after one look at them. As if beauty weren’t eternally different every morning.”
“Perhaps it is to him, in London,” Halo mused; then their talk, veering from Churley, wandered back to the day’s excursion, and to their plans for the morrow.
Since they had left Paris neither Halo nor Vance had reverted to the subject of the latter’s talk with Lewis Tarrant. Vance shrank from touching again on the question of the divorce, and if Halo had any news to impart she seemed reluctant to communicate it. The quiet weeks at Oubli had been a sort of truce of God, a magic interval of peace which neither ventured to disturb. But one day, not long after their happy evening by the fire, Halo, who sat going over the letters they had found on their return from a long tramp, uttered an exclamation of surprise.
“What’s up?” Vance questioned; and she went over to his desk and laid before him a cutting from a New York paper. Vance read: “Prize-giving Millionairess Announces Marriage to Gratz Blemer. Mrs. Pulsifer Privately Weds Novelist Who Won Her Ten Thousand Dollar Best-Novel Prize”; and beneath this headline: “Society and literary circles were electrified last night by the announcement that Mrs. Pulsifer, the wealthy New York fashion-leader and giver of numerous literary prizes, was privately married two months ago at Pinehurst, N.C., to Gratz Blemer, the novelist, famous as the author of ‘This Globe’, and whose last novel, ‘The Rush Hour’, was awarded a few months ago the new Pulsifer Best-Novel prize, recently founded by the bride. Mr. and Mrs. Blemer are spending their honeymoon on the bride’s steam-yacht in the Mediterranean.”
Halo and Vance looked at each other in silence; then Halo said with a faint smile: “That accounts for a great deal.”
Vance nodded. He tried to smile too; but the brief paragraph had called up a vision of his midnight talk with Tarrant. He felt as if the world with its treacheries, shocks and torments had once again broken into the charmed circle of their lives; and looking up at Halo he saw the same distress in her eyes. “Well, we needn’t bother; it’s all outside of us, anyhow,” he said defiantly; and she bent over to lay a kiss on his forehead.
The next day it rained. Vance, who had given himself a week’s idleness, sat down before “Colossus”, and Halo with equal heroism descended to the verandah to clean the oil lamps. She was deep in her task when Mrs. Dorman came up the path, sheltering her bedraggled straw hat under a dripping umbrella.
It was long since any one from the Pension Britannique had called at the pink house; Halo concluded that the chaplain’s wife had come to ask for a contribution to the church bazaar, or a subscription to renew the matting in the porch, and hurriedly calculated what could be spared from their month’s income, already somewhat depleted by the gift to Chris Churley.
Mrs. Dorman, when she had disposed of her umbrella, and been led indoors, did not immediately disclose the object of her visit. She hoped they were not in for a rainy spring, she said; but she had warned the new arrivals at Madame Fleuret’s that, after the fine weather they’d had all winter, they must expect a change. “I saw dear Madame Fleuret making signs to me to stop,” Mrs. Dorman continued complacently, “but Major Masterman, who was thinking of hiring a motor-cycle by the month, said he was thankful I’d warned him, and very likely if the bad weather continued he and Mrs. Masterman would dash over to the Balearics instead of staying on at the pension; and they telegraphed to some friends for whom they’d asked Madame Fleuret to reserve rooms that they’d better go elsewhere. So it was really a kindness to tell them, wasn’t it? . . . But, dear Mrs. Weston, what I’ve come for is to bring you a message . . . a private message. . .” Mrs. Dorman continued, her cheeks filling out and growing pink, as they did when she had anything painful to impart. “It’s just this: you were kind enough, some weeks since, to offer to call on Mrs. Churley. At the time she couldn’t see any one; but she’s asked me to say that she’d be so glad if you’d come up this afternoon . . . at once, if you could, as the Colonel is rather opposed to her receiving visits, and she’d like to be sure of his not getting back from his walk while you’re there. And she begs you, please, not to mention that I’ve asked you. . .”
Mrs. Dorman’s lowered voice and roseate flush gave her words an ominous air; and Halo at once thought: “Chris!” Her first impulse was to ask the reason of the summons; but respect for Mrs. Churley’s reserve, whatever it might conceal, made her answer: “Very well; I’ll wash the oil off and come.”
As she and Mrs. Dorman climbed the hill, Mrs. Dorman remarked that the mason had told her the roof of Les Mimosas was certain to fall in the next time there were heavy rains, and that when she had notified Colonel Churley he had said those fellows were always after a job; but thereafter she relapsed into silence, as though the first glimpse of that barricaded house-front had checked even her loquacity.
In the vestibule the heavy smell of an unaired house met the two women. A crumpled dishcloth trailed on the stairs, and in a corner stood a broken-handled basket full of rusty garden tools festooned with cobwebs. It must have been years since they had been used, Halo reflected, remembering the untended garden. Mrs. Dorman, who had tiptoed up ahead, leaned over and signed to her to follow. A door opened, letting out a sickly waft of ether, and Halo found herself pushed into a darkened room, and heard Mrs. Dorman whisper: “There she is. Mind the footstool. I’ll slip down and mount guard in case he should come back.”
Halo paused, trying to make her way among the uncertain shapes of the furniture; then a shawled figure raised itself from a lounge, and a woman’s voice exclaimed: “Mrs. Weston, what do you know of my son?”
Halo’s eyes were growing used to the dimness and she saw a small muffled-up body, and a hollow-cheeked face with tossed white hair and burning eyes like Chris’s. “She must have been very beautiful — oh, poor thing!” Halo thought; and the thin plaintive voice went on: “Do sit down. There’s a chair there, isn’t there? Please clear off anything that’s on it. I’m nearly blind — and so unused to visitors. And the only thing I can think of is my boy.”
“I’m so sorry. We’ve been wondering why there’s no news of him,” said Halo, taking the chair.
“Then you’ve heard nothing either?” Mrs. Churley, propped up among her cushions, gazed with a sort of spectral timidity at her visitor; as though, Halo thought, she were a ghost who feared to look at the living.
“No; nothing since he left for London.”
“For London?” Mrs. Churley echoed, stressing the word. “Ah, he told you London too?”
Halo, surprised, said yes; and Mrs. Churley went on: “My poor boy . . . it was the only way to get his father to let him go.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “He told us he’d been offered a permanent position on a well-known review — the ‘Windmill’, I think they call it — and that the editor wanted him at once, and had sent him an advance of five pounds. It was a great opportunity — and of course his father had to let him go.”
“Of course — ” Halo murmured.
“And so I said nothing,” the mother continued in her distressful whisper, “though I was sure editors don’t often send advances to beginners; for I suspected that your husband had been generous enough . . . to . . . you understand. . .”
“Yes . . .”
“And I was so grateful, and so happy at my boy’s having a job, because I hoped — my husband and I hoped — that it would make him settle down. You DO think he has talent?”
“I think he’s full of talent; we both do. Though as it happens we’ve never actually seen anything he’s written. . .”
“Ah — ” Mrs. Churley interjected in a stricken murmur, sinking back against the cushions.
“Only now, I’m sure — with such an opening, and the discipline of an editorial office . . . You’ll see . . .” Halo went on reassuringly.
“Yes; that’s what we thought. We felt so hopeful; I’ve never before seen my husband hopeful.”
“Well, you must go on hoping. You’ll hear from Chris as soon as he’s settled.”
Mrs. Churley again raised herself on her elbow, her face twisted with pain by the effort. “Mrs. Weston,” she brought out, “my son hasn’t gone to London.” She paused, watching Halo with startled dilated eyes. “I’ve just heard, from a friend who saw him the other day, that he’s at Nice!” The words fell into the silence of the muffled room as if every one rang out the knell of a hope. “At Nice, Mrs. Weston — NICE!”
It was an anti-climax, certainly; and Halo, after a first start of surprise, could not repress a smile.
“But are you sure? Was your friend sure, I mean? Did he actually speak to your son?”
“He didn’t speak to him; but he saw him going into a night-club with a party of dreadfully fast-looking people.” Mrs. Churley clasped her emaciated hands. “Mrs. Weston, I’m speaking in the deepest confidence. My husband would be very angry if he knew. He’s convinced that Chris is in London, and if he were to find out that we’ve been deceived again I dread to think what would happen. My husband has never understood that people may be unable to resist temptation — he says: why should they let themselves be tempted? The artist’s nature is incomprehensible to him. . .” She leaned forward, and caught Halo’s wrist. “It was from me that my poor boy inherited that curse. I used to write poetry — but my husband thought it unsuitable in an officer’s wife . . . Oh, if you knew how we’d struggled and fought to keep Chris out of temptation . . . When my husband was retired we came to Oubli, in the hope that here our boy would be safe. He has a real love of literature; he’s always wanted to write. But something invariably seems to prevent him . . . the least little thing puts him off. We hoped he would choose a steadier profession; but when we saw that was useless we decided to come here, where there are so few distractions. . .”
“But don’t you think that may be the reason?” Halo interposed. “Young men need distractions — they’re part of the artist’s training.”
“Part of his training? Oh, Mrs. Weston! Forgive my asking: are those your husband’s ideas?”
Halo smiled. “His idea is that the sooner Chris settles down to work the better.”
“Ah, just so — just so! You’re sure Mr. Weston didn’t intend him to use the money to go to Nice?”
In spite of her pity for the unhappy mother Halo felt a growing impatience. “If you wish to know the truth, we did give your son a — a small sum, but on the understanding that he was going to London to secure the job he had been promised.”
“Oh, my poor Chris — my poor Chris! And now what is to become of him? For years I’ve been dreading lest he should get money and escape from us again. It happened once before.” Mrs. Churley hid her face in her hands, and broke into stifled sobbing.
Halo knelt down by the lounge. “Mrs. Churley, please don’t be so distressed. After all, we must all follow our bent . . . artists especially . . . It may be best in the end for Chris to work out his own salvation. . .”
“Salvation? Among those dreadful people? And weak as he is — and with no health? When I think it was I who laid on him the curse of the artist’s nature! Oh, promise me that Mr. Weston will help to find him, and bring him back before his father knows.”
“What is it his father’s not to know?” came a tremulous bass voice, and Colonel Churley stepped into the room, with Mrs. Dorman wailing in the rear: “But, dear Colonel Churley, do wait! I assure you it may not be as bad as we fear!”
Halo discerned in the Colonel’s frowning countenance the same quiver of distress as in his voice. “He minds it even more than she does,” she thought, looking from the threatening jut of his white eyebrows to the troubled blue of his eyes. “This is an unexpected honour — my wife is able to see so few people.” The Colonel bowed stiffly to Halo with a questioning side-glance at Mrs. Churley, whose eyes were anxiously fixed on him. “Mrs. Weston has been so kind. I wanted to thank her. . .” Her voice faded into silence.
“And knowing that visitors are too fatiguing for you, you took advantage of my absence to do so,” the Colonel interposed, lifting his lean brown forefinger in an attempt at playfulness.
“Oh, Colonel Churley, really . . . there’s been no bad news as yet,” Mrs. Dorman protested.
The Colonel turned with a frightened frown; his purplish lips trembled. “No bad news? Has there been any news? Has Mrs. Weston brought us news of my son?”
“No, no . . . it was only my idea that dear Mrs. Churley should ask her if she and Mr. Weston hadn’t heard anything,” Mrs. Dorman faltered, her round face red with fright.
The Colonel again bowed. “Most kind — most thoughtful. I’m extremely obliged to all our friends for their interest. Mrs. Weston may not know that Chris has gone to London to take up an editorial position; in the rush of his new duties he has delayed to write.” He addressed himself to Halo with an apologetic smile. “My wife is an invalid; I’m afraid the time sometimes hangs heavily on her, in spite of the kindness you ladies show her — especially so when her son’s away. She doesn’t realize that young men are often bad correspondents; and knowing that you and Mr. Weston were kind enough to receive Chris, she fancied you might have heard from him.”
“No,” said Halo, “we’ve heard nothing.”
“There, my dear,” pursued the Colonel, “you see we’ve not been less favoured than others. The boy will write when he has time.” Mrs. Churley’s weeping had subsided into a little clucking murmur. The Colonel turned to Halo.
“I’m sorry you should have come when my wife is more than usually unequal to receiving company.” He stood looking almost plaintively at Halo, who thought:
“What he hates most of all is my seeing this untidy neglected house, and that poor creature in her misery.” She understood, and wishing Mrs. Churley goodbye turned toward the door. Colonel Churley opened it with a shaking hand, and Halo and Mrs. Dorman went from the room and down the stairs. Following them as they descended came the low clucking sound of Mrs. Churley’s weeping.