Halo had been so moved by the sight of the ailing woman and the angry ineffectual old man, left alone in that dismal house to heap each other with recriminations, that she communicated her emotion to Vance; and when he proposed going to look for Chris she welcomed the suggestion. “The boy haunts me. To do anything so dishonest he must be in a bad way; and I feel as if we ought to do what we can.”
“Oh, he never meant to be dishonest. When he got to Toulon he probably saw a train starting for Nice, and was tempted by the idea of a night’s fun.”
“A night’s fun! But it’s a month since he went away, and it was only a day or two ago that Mrs. Churley’s friend saw him.”
“Well, it’s pretty smart of him to have made the money last as long as that,” Vance rejoined with a laugh; but in reality he too felt a vague pang at the thought of the irresponsible boy caught in that sordid whirlpool.
In the train his reflexions grew less emotional. It was obviously none of his business to find and reclaim Chris, even supposing the latter had deliberately deceived them, and used Vance’s money to offer himself a few weeks’ amusement; but there was something so droll in this act of defiance that Vance, in spite of his pity for the parents, was amused at the idea of being confronted with the son.
He was also acutely interested in the prospect of seeing for the first time the pleasure-seeking end of the Riviera. The contrast between Oubli-sur-Mer and the succession of white cities reflected in azure waters emphasized the narrowness and monotony of the life he had been leading. Slipping past towering palace hotels, and villas girt with lawns and pergolas, he recalled the mouldy blistered fronts of the pink house and the Pension Britannique; when, at the stations, flower-girls thrust up great sheaves of freesias and carnations, he saw the handful of wizened anemones bargained for by Miss Plummet at the market, and brought home to her invalid sister; and the motors pouring along wide dustless roads to inviting distances evoked the lurching omnibus crowded with garlicky peasants which, through clouds of suffocating dust, carried Oubli-sur-Mer to Toulon or Marseilles. A few hours earlier the quiet of Oubli had seemed a spiritual necessity; but already the new scenes were working their old spell.
These alternations of mood, which he had once ascribed to instability of aim, no longer troubled him. He knew now that they were only the play of the world of images on his creative faculty, and that his fundamental self remained unchanged under such shifting impulses. By the time the train reached Nice he was so lost in the visionary architecture of his inner world that the other had become invisible. He gazed at the big station packed with gaily dressed people and busy flower-sellers without remembering that it was there he should have got out; and now the guard was crying “Monte Carlo”, and above the station glittered the minarets and palms of the Casino.
“Well — why not?” Vance thought. Chris was as likely to be at Monte Carlo as at Nice; it was not probable that he would restrict his pleasure-seeking to one spot. Vance picked up his suit-case and jumped out. . .
Past sloping turf, palms imprisoned in bright blue or glaring magenta cinerarias, borders of hyacinths and banks of glossy shrubs, he climbed gaily to the polychrome confusion of the Casino. Stretching up from it to a stern mountain-background were villas and restaurants, and café-terraces where brightly dressed people sipped cocktails under orange-and-white umbrellas. Nearer by were tall hotels with awninged and flowered balconies; rows of taxis and private motors between the lawns and flower-beds before the Casino; young men in tennis flannels and young women in brilliant sports~suits, and strollers lounging along the balustraded walks. Among half-tropical trees a band played a gipsy tune of de Falla’s, and children with lovely flying hair raced ahead of nurses in long blue veils, who gossiped on the benches or languidly pursued their charges.
Halo would have called it a super-railway poster. She always spoke scornfully of the place, resenting such profanation of the gray mountain giants above it. In certain moods Vance might have agreed; but today the novelty and brightness struck his fancy, and the trimness of lawns, flowers, houses, satisfied his need of order and harmony. Everything wore the fairy glitter of a travelling circus to a small child in a country town, and the people who passed him looked as unreal, as privileged and condescending, as the spangled athletes of his infancy. He sat down on a bench and watched them.
The passing faces were not all young or beautiful; the greater number were elderly, many ugly, some painful or even repulsive; but almost all wore the same hard glaze of prosperity. Vance tried to conjecture what the inner lives of such people could be; he pictured them ordering rare delicacies in restaurants, buying costly cigars and jewels in glittering shops, stepping in and out of deeply-cushioned motors, ogling young women or painted youths, as sex and inclination prompted. “Chris’s ideal,” he murmured. He decided to take a look at the gambling-rooms; but it was luncheon~time, and people were coming out of the Casino, descending the steps to their motors or the near-by restaurants. As he stood there he suddenly caught sight of Lorry Spear; and at the same instant Lorry recognized him.
“Hullo, Vance — you? Halo here? I suppose she’s a peg above all this. Sent you off on your own, has she? Very white of her. Not staying here, though? Of course not; nobody does. I’m over from Cannes with a party, to lunch on the Gratz Blemers’ yacht — the biggest of her kind, I believe. You knew Blemer had carried off Jet Pulsifer under Tarrant’s very nose? Sharp fellow, Blemer . . . they were secretly married two or three months ago. That accounts for Tarrant’s turning down the divorce, I suppose,” Lorry rattled on, his handsome uncertain eyes rambling from Vance’s face to search the passing throng. “I say, though — why not come off to the yacht with us? When I say ‘us,’ I mean Mrs. Glaisher and Imp Pevensey, with whom I’m staying at Cannes. Mrs. Glaisher has taken a villa there, and we’re working over the final arrangements for ‘Factories’; at least I hope we are,” Lorry added with a dubious grin. “With the super-rich you never can tell; at the last minute they’re so darned scared of being done. But if Imp Pevensey can get Mrs. Blemer to take an interest she’s sure that’ll excite Mrs. Glaisher, and make her take the final step. Almost all their philanthropy’s based on rivalry . . . Well, so much the better for us . . . See here, my boy, come along; they’ll jump at the chance of seeing you . . . Ah, there’s the very young woman I’m on the look out for!” he exclaimed, darting toward a motor which had stopped before an hotel facing the Casino.
It was wonderful how Lorry fitted into the scene. In Montparnasse he had been keen, restless, careless in dress and manner; here he wore the same glossy veneer as all the rest. The very cut of his hair and his clothes had been adapted to his setting, and as he slipped through the crowd about the hotel Vance was struck by his resemblance to the other young men strolling in and out of its portals.
He had been amused by Lorry’s invitation. He had no intention of joining Mrs. Glaisher’s party, but that Lorry should propose it after what had passed between them was too characteristic to surprise him. Lorry had obviously forgotten the Glaisher episode, though it had occurred under his own roof; on seeing Vance he had remembered only that the latter was a good fellow whose passing celebrity had once been useful to him, and might be again. As Vance waited on the curb he thought how jolly it would be to go and lunch at one of those little terrace-restaurants over the sea that he had marked down from the train. After that he would return to Nice, and devise a way of running down Chris.
“Look here, Vance; you will come?” Lorry, rejoining him, grasped his arm with a persuasive hand. “No? It’s a pity — the yacht’s a wonder. Not to speak of Blemer and Jet! As a novelist you oughtn’t to miss them . . . Well, so long . . . Oh, by the way; won’t you dine at Cannes tonight instead? At Mrs. Glaisher’s — Villa Mirifique. I’ve just been arranging with that young woman over there to meet us here on our way back from the yacht. She’s coming over to spend a day or two with Mrs. Glaisher, and I’m sure she’d be delighted to drive you to Cannes. Come along and I’ll introduce you.” Lorry, as he spoke, swept Vance across to the hotel door, where a young lady who stood with her back to them was giving an order to her chauffeur. The motor drove off, and she turned and faced them.
“Floss,” Lorry cried, “here’s a friend of mine, a celebrated novelist, who wants a lift to Mrs. Glaisher’s this evening. Of course you’ve heard of Vance Weston — and read ‘The Puritan in Spain’?”
The girl, who had been looking at Lorry, turned interrogatively to Vance. Her movements had a cool deliberateness which seemed to single her out from the empty agitation around her. She lifted her dusky eyelids, and for a few seconds she and Vance looked at each other without speaking; then: “Why, old Van!” she said, in a warm voice flattened by the Middle Western drawl.
Vance stood staring. As through a mist of wine he saw this woman, become a stranger to his eyes yet so familiar to his blood. She was very dark; yes, he remembered; a warm dusky pallor, like the sound of her voice; glints of red under her skin, and in the gloom of her hair. She rarely smiled — he remembered that too — when she did it was like a fruit opening to the sun. His veins kept the feeling of that sultriness. . .
“Hullo! Old friends, are you? First-rate! Monte Carlo’s the place where nobody ever comes any more, yet where you meet everybody you know. All right — coming!” Lorry cried, gesticulating to a group on the other side of the square. “So long — Villa Mirifique; bring him along, Floss.”
“Oh, I’ll bring him,” said the girl in her indifferent drawl; and Lorry vanished.
Vance continued to look at Floss Delaney. It was not till afterward that he noticed the quiet elegance of her dress, or remembered that he had seen her getting out of a private motor and giving an order to the chauffeur. He knew that late in life the shiftless Harrison Delaney of Euphoria had stumbled into wealth as accidentally, almost, as, years before, he had sunk into poverty. When Vance had gone home after Laura Lou’s death Euphoria was still ringing with the adventure; Vance remembered the bitterness with which his father, the shrewd indefatigable little man who had failed to secure the fortune so often in his grasp, spoke of the idle Delaney’s rise. “A loafer like that — it’s enough to cure a man of ever wanting to do an honest day’s work,” Lorin Weston had growled. It all came back to Vance afterward; at the moment he was half-dazed by the encounter with this girl who had been the vehicle of his sharpest ecstasy and his blackest anguish. A vehicle; that was what she’d been; all she’d ever been. “The archway to the infinite” — who was it who had called woman that? It was true of a boy’s first love. In the days when Floss Delaney had so enraptured and tortured him she had never had any real identity to his untaught heart and senses; she had been simply undifferentiated woman; now for the first time he saw her as an individual, and perceived her peculiar loveliness. He gave a little laugh.
“What are you laughing at?” she asked.
“I was thinking I’d nearly shot myself on your account once. Funny, isn’t it?”
“Oh, ‘nearly’ — that’s not much! If you do it again you must aim better,” she said coolly; but he caught the glitter of pleasure in her eyes. “Old Van — only to think of coming across you here!” She slipped her hand through his arm, and they walked across the square and sat down on a bench under overhanging shrubs. “So you’re a celebrity,” she said, her full upper lip lifting in a smile.
“Well, so are you, aren’t you?”
“Because father’s made all that money?” She looked at him doubtfully. “It’s very pleasant,” she said, with a defiant tilt of her chin.
“And what are you going to do with it all?”
“I don’t know. Just go round, I suppose.”
“Where’s your father? Is he here with you?”
Yes, she told him; she was travelling with her father; they were staying at the hotel to which Vance had just seen her driving up. They had been going around Europe for over a year now: Rome, Paris, Egypt, St. Moritz — all the places they thought might amuse them. But her father wasn’t easy to amuse. He was as lazy as ever; he didn’t so much mind travelling, provided they went to places where he could have a game of cards; but he didn’t care to go round with new people. She would have preferred to be at Cannes, where most of her friends were, and everything was ever so much smarter; but her father had found at Monte Carlo some old cronies whom he had met the winter before at Luxor, and he liked to be with them, or else to play baccarat at the Casino. That day he had gone over to Nice with some of his crowd; she didn’t believe they’d be back till morning. He’d be so surprised to see Vance when he got back. “He’s read your books,” she added, almost ingratiatingly.
“That means you haven’t?”
“Well — I will now.” She glanced about her, and then down at the little jewelled watch on her wrist. “I’m on my own today. Can’t you take me off somewhere to lunch?”
Vance sprang up joyfully. He felt ravenous for food, and as happy as a schoolboy on a holiday. He thought of the terrace-restaurants he had seen from the train, and wondered if they would be grand enough for her. “Let’s go somewhere right over the sea,” he suggested, trying to describe the kind of place he meant. “Not swell, you know — not a crowd. Just a little terrace with a few tables.” Yes, that was exactly what she wanted; away from the noise, and those awful bands — she knew the very place. It wasn’t far off; a little way down the road toward Cap Martin; but she was too hungry to walk. They took a taxi.
The scene suited her indolent beauty. She was made for the sunlit luxury to which she affected such indifference. At Oubli she would have been a false note; here she seemed to justify the general futility by the way it became her. As he looked at her, the memory of the Floss Delaney of his boyhood came back to him, struggling through the ripened and polished exterior of the girl at his side. After all her face had not changed; it had the same midsummer afternoon look, as though her penthouse hair were the shade of a forest, her eyes its secret pools. A still windless face, suggesting the note of stock-doves, the hum of summer insects. Vance had always remembered it so. She hardly ever smiled; and when she laughed, her laugh was a faint throat note that did not affect the repose of her features. But her body had grown slenderer yet rounder. Before it had been slightly heavy, its movements slow and awkward; now it was as light as a feather. Halo had fine lines, but was too thin, the bones in her neck were too visible; this girl, who must have been about the same age, and had the same Diana-like curve from shoulder to hip, was more rounded, and her hands were smaller and plumper than Halo’s, though not so subtle and expressive.
Vance was glad that he could take note of all this, could even calmly compare Floss Delaney’s appearance with that of the woman he loved; it proved his emotional detachment, and made him feel safe and at his ease.
They sat under a gay awning, before a red-and-white table-cloth, and ate Proven?al dishes, and drank a fresh native wine. Floss, wrinkling her brows against the sun, stole curious glances at him. “You’ve changed a lot; you’ve grown handsome,” she said suddenly.
He laughed, and flushed to the roots of his hair; but she went on: “I heard you were married; are you?”
He wished she had not put the question; yet a moment later he was glad she had. It was best that everything should be clear between them.
“No; I’m not married — yet. But I expect to be. To Lorry Spear’s sister.”
“Oh,” she murmured, with ironic eye-brows. “She’s heard about Halo and me,” he thought; and cursed Mrs. Glaisher.
“Well, I suppose I’ll be married too some day,” she went on, her attention wandering back to herself, as it always did after a moment; and he felt an abrupt shock of jealousy.
“I suppose you’ve got lots of fellows after you.”
“Oh, I don’t know. Anyhow, I’m not going to make up my mind yet; I like my freedom.” She stressed the word voluptuously, bending her lips to her glass of pale yellow wine, and as he watched her he broke out, from some unconscious depth of himself: “God — how you made me suffer!”
She looked at him with a sort of amused curiosity. “You’re thinking of Euphoria?” He nodded.
“Yes; I was a bad girl, I know — but you were a bad boy; and silly.” Her eyes lingered on him. “I used to love to kiss you. Didn’t you love it? But you didn’t understand — ”
“What?”
“A girl like me had to look out for herself. There was nobody to do it for me. But let’s talk about what we are NOW; what’s the use of going back? This is ever so much more fun. Don’t you like being famous?” She leaned across and laid her brown hand on his. He looked at the polished red nails, and remembered her blunt dirty finger-tips, the day he had picked her up in the road after her bicycle accident. Even then, he thought, she used to spend every cent she could get on paint and perfume. He smiled at himself and her.
Over the coffee he proposed their going back to the Casino to gamble; but she refused. “Father gambles; that’s enough for one family. I mean to keep what I’ve got,” she said; and in her hardening eyes and narrowed lips he detected the reflection of the lean years at Crampton, and at Dakin, where she had gone (so his family had told him) as saleswoman in a dry-goods’ shop. Those days had once been a tormenting mystery; but now he only pitied her for the background of dark memories overshadowing her brilliant present.
He had told her he would not go with her to Mrs. Glaisher’s, and had been secretly gratified by her pout of disappointment. “I think you might.”
“No; I don’t like those people. And anyway, I’ve got to stop off at Nice tonight.”
Her eyes grew curious. “I wonder what you’ve got to do at Nice?”
Half-laughing, he confessed his reason, telling her what he could of Chris Churley’s story without betraying the secret of the boy’s escapade. “His family are worried; they don’t know where he is. The other day some friend of theirs said he’d seen him at Nice, in a nightclub; so they asked me if I’d hunt him up.”
“Well, that’s funny — ”
“I know; but they’re poor, and sick — at least his mother’s sick — and he’s all they’ve got.”
“I don’t see how you can find him, rummaging round Nice without an address.”
“Neither do I; but I’ll have to try.”
She sat with lowered lids, meditating. “Tell me again what his name is.”
“Chris Churley.”
“That’s it. I heard Alders talking about him yesterday.”
“Alders?”
“Mrs. Glaisher’s secretary. He always knows about everybody.”
“A little man who looks like a freckle?”
“Well — I guess so,” she said hesitatingly, as if analogies were unfamiliar to her.
“Come to think of it, Alders is sure to be Mrs. Glaisher’s secretary. It’s absolutely predestined. You’re certain you heard him mention Chris Churley?”
She still hesitated, and he recalled that she had never had a good memory for anything that did not directly concern herself, or hold out some possible advantage. “Well, it was something like Churley. But I hear so many names. Is he a newspaper man? There was some fellow I heard Alders talking about, who wanted to get introduced to Gratz Blemer, and write about him; Alders was going to fix it up.” Vance laughed, and she added: “Do you think that’s it?”
“Sounds like it,” he said, picturing to himself the bewilderment of Blemer, who was used to “straight” interviewing, under the cross~fire of Chris’s literary confidences.
They strolled back toward Monte Carlo. The distance was not great, and Miss Delaney had declared that she would like to walk; but she hailed the first taxi. “I guess I’m through with walking — as long as there’s money enough left to go on wheels,” she said; and Vance thought of her struggling four times a day on her bicycle through the frozen ruts or the bottomless mud between Euphoria and Crampton. He understood why the aspirations of the newly rich were so often what Halo would have called vulgar.
He was still resolved not to go to Mrs. Glaisher’s, but he finally agreed to join Miss Delaney at her hotel, and motor with her as far as Nice; and she promised to telephone him if Alders knew where Chris Churley was to be found.
Vance went to the gambling rooms, risked a small sum, and carried away enough to pay for his outing. He was too much engrossed in the thought of Floss Delaney to lose his head over the game; but before leaving he made the round of the rooms, and assured himself that, for the moment, Chris was not in them.
When he came out he remembered that on arriving he had left his suit-case at the station. Oh, well, he thought, Floss was sure not to be on time; he could easily run down the hill and be back before she was ready to start. But when he returned to the hotel the hall porter, after an inspection of the lounge, and a consultation with the concierge, announced that Miss Delaney had gone.
Vance felt a moment of vexation. It was only half-past seven. Had she left no message? Not as far as the porter knew. Vance repeated the enquiry at the desk. He thought he detected a faint smile on the face of the gold-braided functionaries. How many times a day must that question be put to them! “Oh, well — .” He was relieved to find that after all he didn’t much care, though a twinge of vanity shot through his affected indifference.
On the threshold he was detained by a page-boy with a visiting~card. “The concierge thinks perhaps this is for you.”
On the back of the card, in an untidily pencilled scrawl, Vance read: “Tell him to come after us.” He guessed this cryptic scribble to be Floss’s way of ordering the concierge to send him in pursuit of her; but, as he had declined to go, the message had no particular point. He laughed, and absently turned the card over. On the back was engraved: Duca di Spartivento.
“Is it meant for you, sir?” the page asked; and Vance, with a shrug, pocketed the card and went out.
The Duke of Spartivento! What faint memory-waves did those sonorous syllables set rippling? Granada — Alders? But of course! This trumpet of a name was that of the young Italian cousin — or nephew? — of the old Marquesa to whose tertulia Vance had gone with Alders. He remembered that the latter, the day he had come to bid Halo and Vance goodbye, had spoken with his deprecating smirk of being about to join his Spanish friends for a shooting party in their cousin’s honour, at the Marquesa’s castle in Estremadura . . . it was then that the splendid name had shot before him up like a rocket. “Or like a line from the ‘Song to David’,” he remembered thinking.
Floss’s having written her message on the back of that particular card seemed part of the fairy-tale enveloping him. Since his meeting with her, and their hour in the little restaurant, nothing that could happen seemed impossible, or even unlikely. Amusement conquered his vexation . . . it was all part of the fairy-tale. In the darkness already sparkling with lights, he stood wondering whether he should take the next train to Nice, or treat himself to a taxi out of his winnings. He decided on the taxi.
He was about to hail one when he felt another touch on his arm, and saw at his side a chauffeur in dark livery. “Are you the gentleman —?” Vance stared, and the chauffeur continued in fluent English: “Going to Cannes with Miss Delaney, sir? That’s right. Here’s her car. She’s gone on with the others; but she told me to wait and bring you.” He had his hand on the shining panel of the motor from which Vance had seen Floss descend that morning; and Vance obediently got in. Let the fairy-tale go on as long as it would. When he got to Nice he’d tell the fellow to drop him at some quiet hotel. . .
He had no notion which way they were going. From the train he had seen the road only in uncertain glimpses, climbing between garden walls or dropping to the sea; and now darkness made the scene strange. They ascended between illuminated houses; then the streets ceased, and he found himself high up, flashing past dark wooded heights and looking across a sea of verdure to the other sea below, its shore thrust forth in black headlands or ravelled into long sinuous inlets. The moon had not risen, but the evening star hung in the sky like a lesser moon, and the early constellations pushed upward, deepening the night. But only for a moment; almost at once they paled and vanished in the spreading of artificial lights that festooned the coast, crested the headlands, flowed in golden streamers across bays and harbours, and flashed and revolved from unseen lighthouses, binding the prone landscape in a net of fire.
Overhead rose a continuous cliff, wooded and sombre; below a continuous city sparkled and twisted. Vance hung over the scene entranced. He had no thought of places or distances; as the motor climbed, descended and rose again, he felt like a bird floating above the earth, like an errant Perseus swooping down to free this dark Andromeda from her jewelled chains. Visions and images pressed on him. They mingled with the actual scene, so that what his eyes saw, and what his fancy made of it, flowed into one miracle of night and fire. And now the motor had dropped to the shore again, and the sea, dim and unbound, swayed away into blackness. Vance longed to jump out and dash over the sands into that moving obscurity; but he felt that the incessant shifting of the scene was the very source of its magic, and leaned back satisfied.
Suddenly he was aware that the motor was manoeuvring at a sharp turn. They were out in the country again, or in a leafy suburb, with gate-ways and house-fronts seen through foliage. “See here — what about Nice?” he called to the chauffeur.
“Nice?” the latter echoed, busy with his backing; “this is the way up to Mrs. Glaisher’s. Damned bad corner — ”
“Oh, but it’s all a mistake. I meant to get out at Nice. Can’t you take me back there?”
“Back to Nice? You never said anything about Nice, sir.” The chauffeur turned his head reproachfully. “What time do you suppose it is? Nearly half-past nine; and I haven’t had no dinner yet. Have YOU?” His tone was respectful but aggrieved. “It’s here Miss Delaney said I was to bring you. . .” The motor rolled between illuminated gate-posts and along a drive to a white-pillared portico. “This way,” said a footman, who seemed to have been waiting for Vance from the beginning of time; and Vance followed his suit-case up a broad flight of marble steps. It was true — he had forgotten to tell the chauffeur that he wanted to get out at Nice.
In a hall paved with coloured marbles he saw, redoubled in tall mirrors, a tired parched-looking self in faded flannel suit and shabby hat. Other footmen appeared, eyeing him expectantly yet uncertainly; had it depended on them, their look implied, he would never have been included in the party. Then a familiar falsetto exclaimed: “Here he is! D’you remember Alders? My dear fellow, how are you? Mrs. Glaisher’s in the loggia with the others. Never mind about not being dressed. . .” It was the same old Alders, more brushed-up and sleek in his new evening clothes, but still timid yet familiar, putting Vance at his ease, gently steering him in the way he should go. Vance smilingly submitted.
The loggia was a sort of open-air dining-room. Arcaded bays of plate-glass looked out over a dim garden. In the diffused candle~glow Vance saw, at a long table, Mrs. Glaisher, Lady Pevensey, Lorry, and a dozen others: young women with shining shoulder-blades in soft-coloured dresses, men in evening clothes with bald or glossily-brushed heads. He recalled the evening parties to which the Tarrants used to take him, when he was planning a novel called “Loot”, and absorbed in the faces and fashions of successful worldlings. But here the background supplied the element of poetry for lack of which the theme had ceased to interest him. The same trivial, over-dressed and over-fed people acquired a sort of Titianesque value from the sheer loveliness of their setting; grouped about the table with its fruit and flowers, framed in the pink marble shafts of the loggia, above gardens sloping away to the illuminated curve of the shore, they became as pictorial as their background, and Vance’s first thought was: “If they only knew enough not to speak!”
But a plaintive lady in pearls was just declaring: “What I always say is: If you’re going to buy a Rolls-Royce, buy TWO . . . it pays in the end”; and a flushed bald gentleman across the table affirmed emphatically: “We’ve run down a little place AT LAST where you can really count on the caviar. . .”
Mrs. Glaisher, from the head of the table, shed an untroubled welcome on Vance. She too had clearly forgotten that anything had clouded their previous meeting. “Mr. Weston! This is too delightful.” She held out a fat hand corseted with rings. “No, no, of course you mustn’t dress . . . Sit down just as you are — this is pot-luck with a friend or two . . . Imp, where’s Mr. Weston to sit? Floss, darling, can you make room for him?”
He sat down beside her, dizzy and excited. “I didn’t know you when I first came in,” he said. He had never before seen her in evening dress. For a moment she had been merged in the soft glitter of the other young women; but now they were all shadowy beside her, she alone seemed like some warm living substance in a swaying dream. “I never meant to come,” he mumbled, half-laughing. His throat was dry with excitement; he emptied the glass of champagne beside his plate. “It was all your chauffeur’s mistake.”
“I’m sorry you think it was a mistake,” she said, with a little lift of her chin; and he laughed back: “Oh, but I didn’t say it was MINE!”
Alders beamed over at them in his oblique and furtive way. Vance felt that Alders regarded him as his property, and the idea added to the humour of the situation. But in Floss Delaney’s nearness nothing else seemed real or important, and while he ate and drank, and now and then touched her hand, or drew into his eyes the curve of her round throat as she tilted back her head, the chatter about them grew vague as the buzz of insects — as though the other guests had been great heavy bees gathering to loot the piled-up fruit and flowers.
Now and then a fragment of talk detached itself; Lorry haranguing about the future of the ballet, or Lady Pevensey shrilling out: “Duke, we won’t let you carry off Miss Delaney on the Blemers’ yacht unless you’ll promise to land her in London next June. We’ve got to show her London, you know.”
Vance did not know who the Duke was. The dark lean young man on Mrs. Glaisher’s right (of whom Vance was just becoming faintly aware) gave a dry chuckle, and a large pale man opposite said, rather self-consciously: “What London wants is to be shown Miss Delaney.” Vance concluded that this gentleman was the Duke, and wished he had looked more like one of the family portraits at the Marquesa’s.
Miss Delaney seemed to think a faint laugh a sufficient answer to these comments. Her inarticulateness, which used to make her seem sullen, had acquired an aesthetic grace. It suited her small imperial head, the low brow, the heavily-modelled lids and mouth; and her silence suggested not lack of ease but such self-confidence that effort was unnecessary.
“It’s funny — you’re just the way you used to be, yet being so makes you so different,” he said, with small hope of her understanding; but she replied with a murmur of amusement: “I don’t believe anybody really changes.”
“You might have waited for me this evening.”
“You said nothing would induce you to come.”
He laughed: “I guess you had me abducted, didn’t you?” and she rejoined serenely: “No; I knew I didn’t have to.”
“Oh, look — ” he exclaimed, laying his hand on her warm brown arm.
Slowly the full moon was lifting her silver round above the trees. With her rising a subtle alteration transformed the landscape. The lights along the shore waned and grew blurred, and the indistinct foreground of the garden began to detach itself in sculptural masses: wide-branching trees built up like heavy marble candelabra, alabaster turf edged with silver balustrades, a jewelled setting of precious metals that framed the moving silver of the sea.
The talk about the table was struck silent as Mrs. Glaisher’s guests stared at the miracle; but presently some one broke out: “By Jove, but tonight’s the Fête of the Fireworks at the Casino; who’s going down to see it?”
There was stir among the company, like the replete diner’s uneasy effort not to miss the culminating dish; then Lorry Spear broke in with a laugh: “Going down to the Casino to see fireworks? I should have thought this terrace was the best proscenium we could find.”
The others joined in the laugh, and the diners, when wraps had been brought, wandered out onto the terrace. The night was mild and windless; the younger women, rejecting the suggestion of fur cloaks, stood about in luminous groups of mother-of-pearl. Vance had followed Floss Delaney, but two or three other men joined her, and he drew back, content to watch her as she leaned on the balustrade of the terrace, a gauze scarf silvering her shoulders, her arms shining through it like pale amber. The beauty of the night purged his mind of the troubled thoughts his meeting with her had stirred, and he felt her presence only as part of the general harmony.
A long “Oh-h” broke from the watchers. Far below the villa sea and horizon became suddenly incandescent; then a dawn-like radiance effaced the fires, and when that vanished every corner of the night was arched with streamers and rainbows of flashing colour. Through them, as they shot up and crossed each other in celestial trellisings, the moon looked down in wonder. Now she seemed a silver fish caught in a golden net, now a great orange on a tree full of blossoms, or a bird of Paradise in a cage of sapphires and rubies — yet so aloof, so serenely remote, that she seemed to smile down goddess-like at the tangle of earthly lights, as though she were saying: “Are those multi-coloured sparks really what the people on that little planet think the stars are like? Funny earth~children, amusing themselves down there with a toy-sky while up here we gods of the night are fulfilling our round unnoticed.” Yet while she mused, he saw that she too changed colour with the change of lights, turning now blush-red, now gold, now pearl, like a goddess who reddens and pales because Actaeon has looked at her . . . Somehow that wondering moon, going her cool way alone, yet blushing and faltering in the tangle of earth-lights, suddenly reminded him of Halo.
“It’s getting as cold as Greenland out here,” one of the women exclaimed. “What’s the matter with indoors and bridge?”
The guests trailed back, chattering and laughing, and through the windows Vance saw the footmen opening the card-tables and laying out the cards. He was about to follow when the thin dark young man who had sat at Mrs. Glaisher’s right strolled up, holding out a cigar-case in a lean family-portrait-like hand. “Have one?” Vance’s acceptance called to the other’s narrow vertical face a smile lit up by perfect teeth: one would have supposed that in taking a cigar Vance had done him a quite exceptional favour. The smile persisted. “You make a good deal of money out of your books, I presume?” the young man continued, speaking English with a foreign accent to which a marked nasal twang was oddly super-added. The question jolted Vance out of his dream, and before he could answer the other continued earnestly: “Pardon ME if I ask. Of course I know of your celebrity; your sales must be colossal — not? But very often you successful brilliant artists don’t know how to invest your earnings. If that is your case I should be most happy to offer you expert advice. There are a number of opportunities on the market today for any one who’s got the nerve to get in on the ground floor. . .”
“Duke — Duke! We’re waiting for you to make up Mrs. Glaisher’s table,” Imp Pevensey’s voice shrilled out across the terrace.
“Oh, hell — ” remarked the dark young man, in an untroubled voice; adding, as he drew a card from his pocket: “If you require advice I guess we can fix you up as good as anybody. What my firm is after is to cater to the élite, social and artistic. So long!” He pressed the card in Vance’s hand, and the latter read on it, wondering:
DUCA DI SPARTIVENTO
With
ROSENZWEIG AND BLEMP
Members New York Stock Exchange
New York and Paris
When Vance came down the next morning none of Mrs. Glaisher’s other guests were visible. Even Alders, no doubt engrossed in secretarial business, did not show himself; but the night before, when Vance had questioned him about Chris Churley, he had said instantly: “Ah, you know Chris? So much the better. I was going to ask if you wouldn’t give him an interview — for an article in the ‘Windmill’, you know.”
Vance laughed. “Yes, I do know; and I gave him the interview a good many weeks ago.”
Alders wrinkled his brows deprecatingly. “Ah — there it is! No results, I suppose? A genius — certainly a touch of genius, eh? But can’t be pinned down. He begged me to get him a chance to see Gratz Blemer, and though Blemer’s shy of publicity at present (or SHE is, rather) I did persuade them that ‘The Rush Hour’ ought to be written about in the ‘Windmill’, and Chris spent an afternoon on the yacht — enjoying it immensely, by the way; but as for the article, nothing came of it. Blemer keeps on asking me when he’s to see the copy; and what can I answer, when I can’t even get hold of Churley?”
“Ah — you can’t get hold of him?”
“Vanished — like an absconding cashier. Some fellow saw him playing in the baccarat room at Monte Carlo; but I’ve looked in two or three times without finding him. And of course I don’t know his address. I daresay, though, he’ll bob up when he hears you’re here.”
Vance had good reasons for not thinking so; but there seemed nothing to do but to prosecute his search at Monte Carlo, since it was there that Chris had last been seen. A confidential enquiry at the police-station might possibly give some result; but in a big city like Nice the boy would be harder to trace.
Vance was still dizzy with the translation from Oubli-sur-Mer to the Villa Mirifique. Floss Delaney, unreal as the setting in which he had found her, seemed the crowning improbability of the adventure. But the villa, at any rate, was substantial. The morning sun, robbing it of its magic, merely turned it into an expensive-looking house from which splendour and poetry had fled. As he paced the terrace above the over-ornamented gardens Vance asked himself if he should have the same disillusionment when he saw Miss Delaney again. On the very spot where he now paused to light his cigarette he had stood beside her the night before while the moon turned her bare arms to amber. He had promised to meet her, with the rest of the party, that evening at Monte Carlo; they were to dine, he didn’t remember where, with the fat pale man he had taken for the Duke of Spartivento, and who turned out to be somebody infinitely more important, an oil or railway king, Alders explained.
Vance had had only a short exchange of words with Alders when the party broke up, for the secretary had to hurry away to arrange for the morrow. Alders had undergone a curious transformation. In spite of all that the best tailoring could do he was as mothlike and furtive as ever; but under his apologetic manner Vance felt a new assurance, perhaps founded on financial security. Alders’s literary earnings, he explained to Vance (who wondered by what they were produced), had become too precarious; in these uncertain times his publishers would give him no promise regarding the big book he had long been planning (Vance would remember?) on Ignatius Loyola . . . no, on El Greco; and his own small income having unfortunately diminished, he had accepted the post of secretary to Mrs. Glaisher rather than become a burden on his friends. He added that his wide range of acquaintances enabled him to be of some service to his employer, who, like the illustrious women of the Renaissance (“there’s something of the Sforzas about her, I always think,”) wanted to know every one eminent in rank or talent, and had shown herself very appreciative of his guidance. “Of course,” Alders explained, in the same tone of timid fastidiousness in which Vance had heard him dilate on the Valencian primitives, or the capitals of Santo Domingo de Silos — “of course it’s easy, even for women of Mrs. Glaisher’s discernment, to be taken in by the flashy adventurers who are always trying to force their way into rich people’s houses; and I do my best to protect her. As you see, the set she has about her would be distinguished anywhere . . . Sir Felix Oster (the stout pale man on her left at dinner; a Napoleonic head, I often say) — Sir Felix very seldom troubles himself to go to other people’s houses. We’re all dining with him tonight, at the new restaurant up at La Turbie; and as for my old friend, the Duke of Spartivento — he was tremendously excited at meeting you, my dear Weston — told me he’d heard all about your books; well, in the Duke’s case,” Alders summed up with his faint sketch of a smile, “I begin to think that in introducing him here I may have done him an even bigger service than I have his hostess.” Alders laid his hands together with the devotional gesture Vance had seen him make in the presence of works of art. “An Italian Duke and a grandee of Spain . . . all I can say is, the prize is worthy of the effort.”
At Alders’s words a pang shot through Vance. What was the prize, and whose was to be the effort? Instantly he imagined that he had seen Alders’s Duke watching Floss Delaney between his narrowed lids. And what was it that Lady Pevensey had said about the Duke’s carrying Floss off for a cruise with the Gratz Blemers? A wave of jealousy buzzed in Vance’s ears. Jealousy could outlive love, then, cling to it like a beast of prey to a carcase for which it no longer hungered? He had never loved Floss, in the sense in which he now understood loving; and he imagined that his fugitive passion had long since turned to loathing. Yet that night, while he tossed between the scented sheets of Mrs. Glaisher’s guest-room, he could not shake off the torment. Floss Delaney — she was less than nothing to him! But the idea that other men coveted her made his flesh burn though his heart was cold . . . Why subject himself to further misery? What had he and she to do with each other? If he had not pledged himself to find Chris Churley he would have jumped into the first train for Oubli. Instead, when he had taken leave of Floss he had agreed to dine the next night with Alders’s railway king in order to have another chance of meeting her. In the morning light, after coffee, and a stroll on Mrs. Glaisher’s terrace, the situation seemed less lurid. He decided that if he spent the day hunting for Chris he had the right to an amusing evening, and that there was no reason why Floss’s presence should prevent his taking it. She was only one pretty woman among the many at Mrs. Glaisher’s; it was long since he had been among the flower-maidens, and now that the chance had come why should he fly from them?
He took the first train to Nice and went to the Préfecture de Police. Chris’s name was unknown there, but Vance’s description was noted down, and the sergeant said that they might have some information the next day. Vance continued his journey to Monte Carlo, where he made the same enquiries; then he decided that, the lunch hour being at hand, his best chance of finding Chris was to look for him in the fashionable restaurants. If he had carried away any winnings he was pretty sure to be spending them where caviar and new asparagus were to be had; if not, to be enjoying these delicacies at the expense of others. Vance went first to the restaurant which Floss had pointed out as the most sought after.
It was so full that the guests, overflowing onto the terrace, sat wedged under bright awnings and umbrellas; but Vance scanned the crowd in vain for a dark face with a mop of orange-coloured hair. He was about to seek out a more modest ordinary for himself when an elderly gentleman in smartly-cut homespun and a carefully assorted tie began to wave the carte du jour in his direction.
This gentleman, before whom head-waiter and sommelier were obsequiously drawn up, had a sallow complexion, weak handsome features and tremulous lids above eyes of the same gray as his thinnish hair and moustache. He might have been a long-since~retired American diplomatist, or the gentlemanly man in a bank who explains to flustered ladies why they mustn’t draw a cheque when there’s nothing to draw against. He looked either part to perfection, and Vance was wavering between the two when he heard himself hailed in a slow southern drawl. “Why, for the Lord’s sake, if it isn’t young Weston! Come right over here, my son, and let’s open a bottle of wine to celebrate our escape from Crampton!”
It was Harrison Delaney, looking up at him with the same slow ironic twinkle that was like the reflection of his voice. Vance saw him lounging in the dreary room of the little house at Crampton, between his whisky-bottle, his dog-eared copy of Pope, and the ledger which lack of use had kept immaculate. As a real~estate agent Delaney had been Euphoria’s most famous failure. Lorin Weston used to say that if there hadn’t been any other way for him to lose his money he’d have dug a hole in the ground and buried it — that is, if he’d ever had the guts to dig. By the time Vance was meeting Floss down the lane her father had long since abandoned the struggle, and Euphoria remembered him only when there was a distinguished stranger to be received or an oration to be delivered. Then, shaved, pomaded and tall-hatted for the occasion, Delaney was drawn from his obscurity by a community dimly conscious that, freely as it applied the title, he was in reality its only gentleman. After all, a man who quoted Pope and Horace the way Lorin Weston quoted prices on the Stock Exchange did give his home town a sort of proprietary satisfaction; and when a fortune suddenly fell into Delaney’s lap the people who were not envious of him said: “Well, he’ll know how to spend it anyhow.”
Apparently he did; at any rate in a way to impress some of the most eminent head-waiters in Europe. In the act of discussing the relative merits of oeufs aux truffes blanches and demoiselles de Caen he paused and waved Vance to the seat facing him. “Here, waiter — where’s that wine card? You choose for yourself, young fellow. My palate’s too burnt out by whisky to be much good in selecting Bordeaux or Burgundies. But champagne, now — what, no champagne? Well, this fellow here recommends a white Musigny — what’d you say the year was, waiter?”
These details being settled in a leisurely and emphatic style, Mr. Delaney leaned back and scrutinized Vance thoughtfully over his cocktail. The impression Vance received was of a man who had merely transposed the terms of his inactivity. He had leaned back in just the same way in his rocking-chair at Crampton, or among his cronies at the Elkington House or Mandel’s grocery, the thumb of one long distinguished-looking hand thrust into the armhole of his waistcoat, and a cigar meditatively twirled in the other. The only difference was that the hands were now carefully manicured, that the waistcoat was cut by a master, the cigar heavily belted with gold. Mr. Delaney looked out on the world with the same ironic and disenchanted eye. He told Vance he was having a good time, but not as good a time as he’d expected. Now that they had plenty of money Floss would insist on dragging him around from one country to another, though he guessed she found all the places they’d been to were pretty much the same when you got there; he was sure he did. He guessed nowadays you could see all there was to see in the world if you just took a season ticket at the nearest movie-show. The only difference he could make out between all the places he’d seen was the way the barman mixed the cocktails — and the way some of ’em did it made you think they’d never tasted anything stronger than their mother’s milk.
Florence (Mr. Delaney continued) seemed to think you ought to go round and see the real places. When she got to them he didn’t believe she got much of a kick out of it; not unless there were a lot of fellows for her to dance with; but after the bad time she’d had when she was growing up he felt he owed it to her to let her have her way. As for him, when their tour was over he was going home to buy back one of the old Delaney farms near Richmond, and settle down there. The kind of life he wanted to lead was just what his father and grandfather had led before him: breed a few trotting-horses, and have a little shooting behind a couple of good dogs. He guessed that was as far as he’d ever got in the way of ambition. . .
Vance listened curiously. This man, who had been so familiar a part of his early memories, now detached himself as an alien being, never really identified with Euphoria, and nursing an indolent contempt for place and people even when these most righteously looked down on him. “Funny — I never could get any kick out of all that moral urge,” he said with a reminiscent smile.
Vance laughed, and Delaney, his tongue loosened by the Burgundy he affected not to appreciate, went on more confidentially: “Fact is, I see now that I enjoy money as much as any of your model citizens; the only difference is that I never thought it worth sweating for. Floss, now — well, she wouldn’t agree. She says money’s her god, and I guess it is . . . She says it’s the only thing that’ll get her what she wants; and what she wants is the earth, or pretty near. Anything that stands out, that sticks up so that you can see it from way off — brains or titles or celebrity. I guess there’s nothing on God’s earth as undemocratic as a good-looking American girl.” Mr. Delaney paused to go through the agreeable operation of cutting and lighting a fresh Corona. “Sometimes I feel like saying to all these grandees she’s got round her: You think she’s all impulse, do you? Got to get things the very minute she wants ’em? Well . . . you wait and see her stow away those impulses if they interfere with any of her plans. Sometimes, you know, Weston, I think the inside of my daughter is a combination of a ticker and a refrigerator. Of course I don’t say this for her old friends . . . but when I see these Counts and Marquises getting worked up about her, well, I have to lean back and laugh.”
He did lean back and laugh, fixing his watery eyes on Vance. Floss, it appeared, the very day he’d made his unexpected turn~over, had taken command of it — and of him. Why, Vance wouldn’t believe it maybe, but she’d invested and re-invested that money so that the capital had already doubled. And when she brought him the result of the first year’s earnings she made him buy an annuity for himself, and draw up a deed turning over all the rest to her. Well, perhaps he’d been a little rash . . . but, as Vance knew, a quiet life was all he’d ever asked for. And Floss was a good daughter — a devoted daughter — if only you let her have her way. She’d try to break him of his bad habits — whisky and poker — and when she found she couldn’t she just read the riot act, and before he knew it he’d signed the papers, and now they were on the best of terms, and she was glad enough to have him around with her. “Says it looks better — besides, you know, damn it, the child’s fond of me,” Mr. Delaney concluded emotionally.
Vance listened under a painful fascination. He could not reconcile Mr. Delaney’s picture — or, rather, perhaps, he did not want to — with the capricious girl, cynical yet passionate, who had set him aflame in a past already so remote. But he reflected that Delaney’s was probably a one-sided version. Floss, aware of her father’s failings, had naturally wanted to put their suddenly acquired wealth out of his reach, and Delaney, for all his affected indifference, doubtless resented her domination. But Vance could not talk of her with her father. Too many memories stirred in him; and when he had finished his coffee he got up and took his leave. His host seemed surprised and disappointed. “Off already? Why, what’s your hurry?” he said plaintively. “I never know how to get through these blamed everlasting days. Nothing doing in the baccarat rooms before five.” But happily two middle-aged gentlemen with expensive clothes and red innocent-looking faces came up and hailed him, and Mr. Delaney, explaining that they were two fellows from Buffalo that he’d made friends with in Egypt, moved on with them contentedly to the nearest bar.
Vance had promised Floss to be at her hotel at eight. She had told him she would stop there to pick him up on her way from Cannes to Sir Felix Oster’s dinner at La Turbie. “Unless,” she mocked, “you’d rather go with Mrs. Glaisher?”
“Well, I would, unless you’ll promise to have nobody else with you.” As he spoke, the blood rushed to his temples, and he thought: “You fool — what did you say that for?” But she returned, in her cool unsmiling way: “Come and see,” and at the challenge his blood hummed. After all, if she didn’t turn up, or if she had some of the other men with her, he would just turn on his heel and go off and dine by himself. This decision made him feel extraordinarily resolute and self-confident.
His self-confidence waned during the unavailing search for Chris. He had decided, in any case, to return to Oubli the next morning, leaving the quest to the police; and to fortify his resolve had telegraphed the hour of his arrival to Halo. But meanwhile the sense of depending on Floss Delaney’s whim made the time weigh on him as heavily as it did on her father, and long before eight he was in the lounge of her hotel.
The hour came and passed; but twenty minutes later her motor drove up, and Vance saw that she was alone. He was astonished at his own excitement as he plunged down the steps to meet her. He saw her lean forward to wave to him, the porter opened the door, he was at her side, and they were driving away. “It won’t last ten minutes,” the pulses in his temples kept dinning into his brain. He had found out where La Turbie was, had looked up at the new restaurant from the Casino square. On its towering cliff it glittered close above them like a giant light-house — a few turns of the wheels, and the motor would be there. And the next morning he would be on his way back to Oubli — what a trifle to have made all this fuss about!
“Well — am I a good girl?” his companion said, touching his arm as the motor began to work its way through the crowd about the Casino.
“When you asked me to go with you I didn’t know the place we’re going to was just up that hill,” he growled. “We’ll be there before we can turn round.”
“Well, I can’t help that, can I?”
“If there’d been a longer way to go you’d have taken one of the other fellows . . . Why didn’t you wait last night, and drive me to Mrs. Glaisher’s, as you said you would?”
“Why, I wanted to — honest I did. But Spartivento said I’d promised to try out his new Bugatti racer with him.”
“Promising don’t cost you much — never did. You’d promised me.”
“I’ll promise now to go off with you tomorrow for the whole afternoon — just you and me: we’ll go wherever you like. Will that satisfy you?”
He laughed impatiently. “It won’t make any difference one way or the other. I’ve got to go home tomorrow morning.”
“Oh, — HOME,” she mimicked, with an undefinable accent in which irony seemed blent with a just perceptible resentment.
“Yes; home,” he repeated with insistence.
She gave a low laugh. “Why, Van, your voice sounds just the way it did the days I was late, when we used to meet down by the river. But I guess you’re so celebrated now you don’t remember.”
“So celebrated —!” He felt a lump in his throat. She ought not to have reminded him of those meetings — she ought not to. . .
“Well, you are celebrated, aren’t you? Everybody’s talking about you. I don’t know why you should remember me; but I want you to.” She leaned nearer, her hand on his. “Van, don’t be cross. I was the first, wasn’t I? Say you remember.”
“I remember well enough the day I saw you down there with — somebody else,” he said in a choking voice.
“Oh, Van — ” She swung suddenly round on him. “All I remember is the days I was there with you. Those first days . . . how hot it was that summer . . . and there was a weed or grass that smelt so good . . . Van, say you remember!” Her bare arms were about him, her lips on his. The old glory flooded him, and everything was full of bells chiming, and stars dancing through wind-swayed trees. “Tomorrow,” she said against his lips.
The illuminated room, the many faces, whirled about Vance. Ahead of him Floss Delaney’s brown shoulders flashed like the dryad’s in the Fontainebleau woods; he heard familiar voices, saw Mrs. Glaisher armoured in diamonds, Lady Pevensey’s dry sparkle (“She looks like a cocktail,” the novelist in him noted), and the dull enigma of Sir Felix Oster’s full-moon countenance.
“We thought you two were lost,” Mrs. Glaisher simpered; and Alders, fluttering up, whispered: “He’s here, you know . . . such luck! I do hope you’ll persuade him to do that Blemer article before they leave. . .”
And there was Chris.
Clearly he had not expected to meet Vance. He turned pale under his sallowness, then flushed to the roots of his orange-tawny hair. But his disturbance was only skin-deep; his eye remained cool, his smile undaunted. This was a new Chris, the man-of-the-world twin of the unhappy changeling of Oubli: evening clothes, sleeked hair, the lustre of his linen, transformed him into the ornamental frequenter of fashionable entertainments. “We always try to secure an author or two: Mr. Churley’s one of the new literary critics, isn’t he — on the ‘Owl’, or the ‘Windmill’, or something?” Lady Pevensey threw off, catching Vance’s signal to Chris.
“Well — so you’re here?” said Vance, laughing; and the other responded glibly: “Such luck! When I heard you were coming tonight I chucked another engagement. . .” (“Liar!” thought Vance, more amused than indignant). “Fact is, you’re the very man I want to get hold of,” Chris continued on a tidal rush of assurance. “You know Blemer, I suppose? Just as I was starting for London the ‘Windmill’ wired me that he was at Cannes, and told me to try to pick up an interview before I left the Riviera. Lucky job, getting the wire just as I was shaking the dust of Oubli from my feet,” he grinned complacently. “But now that I’ve seen Blemer I— well, frankly, you might just as well ask a fellow to write an article about a fountain-pen. That’s all Blemer appears to be: his own fountain-pen. Where’s the man behind it? Haven’t an idea! Have you? Alders says you know him, and it’s a God-send my running across you, for I was just going to chuck the whole thing and start for London. If you’ll let me go home with you tonight we might talk Blemer over, and I could get an inkling of what to say about him.”
Vance was tempted to retort: “Have you got an inkling from Blemer of what to say about me?” — but the party was moving toward the lamp~hung loggia where the tables were set. “All right — come in tonight.” He turned to follow his host, and Churley was absorbed in the group about another table.
Vance was with Lady Pevensey, and a pretty young woman on his right was soon deluging him with literary raptures. He had to listen again to all the old questions: were his novels inspired by things that had really happened, or did they just “come to him”? And his characters — would he mind telling her who the people really were? Of course she knew novelists always pretended they invented their characters — but wouldn’t he be a darling, and just whisper to her some of the real names of the people in his books? And the love~scenes — she did so long to know how far the novelist had to LIVE his love-scenes; in “The Puritan in Spain”, for instance, there was that marvellous chapter in Valencia — oh, yes, she knew some people called it morbid, but she just adored it — where, after being with the dancer all night, the hero comes out into the street at daylight, just as the funeral of the woman who’d really loved him is passing . . . Had anything as tremendous as that actually happened in his own life? Because she’d heard people say that a novelist couldn’t describe such things unless . . .
Across the lights and flowers Vance caught sight of Floss. She was at Sir Felix’s table with Mrs. Glaisher. Next to her sat the Duke of Spartivento; her lids were lowered as he spoke to her. She wore a dress of some thin silver tissue, against which her arms and shoulders looked like sun-warmed marble. There was a bowl of silver-white gardenias in the middle of the table, and her neighbour reached over to it and drew out a cluster which she fastened on her breast. At another table Chris, flushed and handsome, was discoursing to Alders about the art of interviewing. As Sir Felix’s Pommery circulated the spirits of the guests bubbled up with it, and talk and laughter drowned the pulsations of the harp and violin in the balcony. Outside, modelled by the rising moon, the couchant landscape stretched its Sphinx-like paws upon the sea.
Vance was seized by the longing to be alone with Floss — chatter silenced, lights extinguished, only he and she lifted above the world on a moon-washed height. But the dinner went on: more truffles, more champagne, more noise; and when it was over, and the party trailed out onto the terrace, as they had the night before at Mrs. Glaisher’s, some one exclaimed: “Oh, but there are no fireworks tonight, are there? Don’t let’s stay out here in the cold for nothing. . .”
Floss was one of the first to re-enter the illuminated room. Bridge-tables were being set out where the party had feasted, and part of the floor had been cleared for dancing. Two cabaret professionals were already weaving their arabesques in the centre of the spectators, and others awaited their turn in the background. Vance went up to Floss, who stood watching the dancers.
“Don’t you hate this? Aren’t you fed up with it? Why won’t you come away with me now?”
She turned with slightly-lifted brows. “Why, aren’t we all going away presently? There’s a cabaret down at Monte, something fearfully exciting, with the new Bali dancers. You must come along, of course. . .”
“That’s not what I mean. Come off with me now, up here on the mountain. It’s heaven out there with the moon — ” Sir Felix was advancing toward them with a dapper gentleman wearing a single eye~glass. “Miss Delaney, may I introduce the Marquis d’Apremont?” “Well, give me one of those gardenias then,” Vance persisted boyishly as she turned with a smile to the newcomer. She shrugged her brown shoulders, and he walked away and wandered out alone onto the terrace. What was he doing in that rubbishy crowd, and why didn’t he dash down the mountain and take the first train to Oubli? What a fool he had been to imagine that Floss would leave in the middle of a party to go out with him alone into the wilderness! The night air was sharp at that height, and he re-entered the restaurant, determined to leave as soon as he had had a final word with Chris. But Chris was dancing with the pretty woman who was interested in novelists, and Mrs. Glaisher executing a slow fox~trot under the accomplished guidance of the Duke of Spartivento. Vance leaned in the doorway and watched the revolving couples. Floss was not dancing; she sat in a corner, a group of men about her; from where Vance stood he noticed that she spoke little, smiled even more rarely, but sat there, composed, almost indifferent, while the faces about her shone with curiosity and admiration. And he had been fatuous enough to think that she would exchange that homage for a moonlight ramble with an obscure scribbler!
When the party began to break up he roused himself to look for Chris. “You’ll come down to my hotel now?” he suggested; but Chris gave a deprecating gesture. “Straight away? Awfully sorry; but Mrs. Glaisher’s taking us on to the cabaret. You’re not coming? I say, that’s too bad. What’s your hotel? Do you mind if I drop in on you tonight rather latish? If you’re turned in I won’t disturb you — ”
“I shan’t have turned in; come up, no matter how late it is,” Vance insisted; and the other rejoined with his bright plausibility: “Thanks a lot! It’ll be the greatest help; somehow or other I’ve got to grind out that article . . . There’s Mrs. Glaisher wig~wagging at us. Who’s driving you down? Miss Delaney?”
But Vance, plunging out through the swinging doors, strode away alone. At the stream of motors flowed by in the moonlight he recognized Floss Delaney’s, and for a mad moment thought she had seen him and was signing to her chauffeur to stop; but she was only lifting her little mirror with one hand while with the other she retouched her lips. In the shadow he caught the gleam of a shirt~front, the outline of a man’s head; then the motor swept on.
Vance waited in vain for Chris Churley. He left his door unlocked, and sat in the darkness smoking and listening; but Chris’s was not among the footsteps passing down the hotel corridor in the small hours, and toward daylight Vance undressed and fell asleep.
He woke late and gloomily. The sun, pouring in at his unshuttered window, roused him to a violent contact with reality. What had he hoped and imagined the night before? A feverish escapade with this girl who had sent through him the same shock as when he had first known her? Only a few hours ago her lips had been on his, her arms about him, her whole body breathing promises; an hour or two later she had turned from him with a shrug, without even an allusion to her own proposal that they should spend the next afternoon together. She would never think of that promise again; she had not even told him where they were to meet, had seen him go without a word of reminder. Once she was back at the Villa Mirifique, and caught up in the old round of pleasure, he would pass out of her life as he had before.
But while reason argued thus, the thought that his real self was pursuing was simply: “Who was the man she drove back with her from La Turbie?” At one moment that question was gnawing him, at another he was saying to himself: “Well, what of it, and what business is it of mine? There’s no novelty in finding out again what she is — I knew it well enough before. And supposing I’d been the man she went off with, should I have felt any differently about her?” The residue of it all was a sick disgust, a revolt from life such as he had felt when he had seen her down by the river with his grandfather. She seemed to distil a poison such as no other woman secreted; his veins were so heavy with it that he felt like a man recovering from a long illness. “Oh, well, I must get up and get home,” he thought, and dragged himself unwillingly out of bed.
It was not till then that he remembered Chris — Chris, who had not come the night before, whose address, like a fool, he had forgotten to take, and who had doubtless given him the slip again. He dressed in a cold rage against himself, against the world and against Chris — and was just turning to leave his room when the culprit entered.
He was not the brilliant Chris of the previous night, but a down~cast being whose pale face and heavy eyes seemed to reflect Vance’s own distress. He held out his hand in silence, and Vance asked if he had breakfasted.
Chris grimaced a refusal. “But a brandy-and-soda? Thanks. Shall I telephone the order?”
He did so without waiting for the answer; then he threw himself into the one armchair in the room, lit a cigarette, and looked absently about him, as though hardly conscious of Vance’s presence. “Not a bad place you’ve got here.” He puffed at his cigarette, and added suddenly: “Funny chap, that Duke of Spartivento. Who do you suppose he’s out to marry?”
“I don’t know — nor much care,” Vance replied, with a quick twinge of apprehension.
“Well — Mrs. Glaisher! Didn’t you see him dancing with her last night? I suppose he noticed I was rather chummy with Alders, and might be likely to know something about the lady’s affairs; so he got me off into a corner to ask about her investments — of course on the pretext that he represents a stock-broking firm. Up-to-date fellow, the Duke. Naturally I told him I knew all about it; you ought to have seen his eyes as I piled up the millions! I wouldn’t have missed it for a good deal.” Chris’s own eyes brightened with the appearance of the brandy-and-soda, and he reached out to pour himself a stiff draught.
Vance watched him impatiently. At the moment the boy inspired him only with contempt. “Well, suppose we get down to business now,” he suggested, as Chris leaned back in silent enjoyment of his drink.
The word seemed to strike a tender nerve. The blood flooded up under Chris’s sallow skin, as it had the night before when he caught sight of Vance. “Business —?”
“Didn’t you tell me you wanted me to help you with your article on Blemer?”
“Oh — THAT?” Vance caught his look of relief. “Why, yes, of course . . . Blemer. . .” With pleasurable deliberation Chris helped himself to another brandy-and-soda. “I haven’t written the first line of that article on Blemer.”
“No?”
“Nor of the article on you — ”
“No?”
“No — no — no! Damn it, Weston, I suppose you knew from the beginning that I never would.” Chris jumped up and began to move uneasily about the room. He halted before Vance. “And it was all a yarn, you know, what I told you last night about the ‘Windmill’ having wired me to come here and interview Blemer. The purest kind of a lie. Much the ‘Windmill’ cares! They washed their hands of me long ago. I daresay you guessed that too. You knew I’d taken the money you lent me to go to London with, and come here to blow it in — didn’t you?”
Vance was silent, and Chris rushed on with twitching lips: “I daresay you heard of my being here from Alders or somebody, and came to look me up and see how I’d invested your loan, eh?” He gave a laugh. “Well, the last penny of it went up the spout last night.”
“It wasn’t a loan,” said Vance.
Chris broke off with a stare. “It wasn’t —?”
“I hate loans — to myself or others. The day after you told me you wanted to go to London I looked you up to tell you so. You’d already gone, and I didn’t know where to write; but the money was a present, so there’s an end of it. It’s your own look-out how you spent it; you don’t even owe me an explanation.”
Chris received this in silence. He had grown very pale, and his lower lip trembled. “I say, Weston — .” He turned away and throwing himself down sideways in the armchair buried his face in his crossed arms. “Oh, God, oh, God!” It was such an explosion of misery as had burst from him when he had confessed to Vance his desperate desire to get away from Oubli. Vance’s contempt gave way to pity; but he hardly knew how to put it into words without touching on a live nerve. Chris looked up again. “Well, I don’t suppose you’re much surprised, are you? I daresay you knew from the first that I wasn’t serious about the ‘Windmill’.”
“No; I didn’t. And I still believe you meant to go to London.”
“You do?” The mockery in Chris’s eyes vanished in a look of boyish compunction. “Well, you’re right; I did. But just as I was getting my ticket there was a fellow next to me taking his for Nice. And the sun was shining . . . and I hate fog and cold . . . they shrivel me up . . . Oh, Weston, what am I to do? I can’t write — I CAN’T. I can only dream of it. I knew I’d never earn enough in London to pay back your twenty pounds, and that with any kind of luck I might give myself a month’s holiday here and settle my debt besides. So I came . . . and I did make money enough, or nearly; only like a fool I blew in part of it the day before yesterday. And last night I went back to try and recoup, and come to you with the cash in my pocket; and I struck my first run of bad luck, and got cleaned out.” He gave another of his shrill laughs, stood up and limped across to the mirror over the mantel. “Pretty sight I am . . . I look like an old print of ‘The Gamester’. By God, I wish I was an old print — I might sell myself for a pound or two!” He turned toward Vance. “The fact is, I was meant to be a moment’s ornament, and you all insist on my being a permanent institution,” he said with a whimsical grin.
“Well, you’ve ornamented several moments by this time,” said Vance. “The best thing you can do now is to pack up and come back with me.”
“Back — to Oubli?”
“Of course. All that rot about not writing — why, nobody can write who doesn’t set his teeth and dig himself in. Your mistake was ever imagining it was fun. Come along; you’ll write fast enough when you have to.”
Chris stood twirling a cigarette between his fingers. His hands shook like an old man’s. “I say, Weston — you’ve been awfully decent. And I wonder if you won’t understand — if you won’t help me out this once . . . Not a big loan; just a few pounds. It’ll be the last time . . . After that I’ll go back.”
“You’ll come back now. Your mother’s out of her senses worrying about you; it’s not fair to keep her in suspense.”
Chris dropped down into the chair again, limp and expressionless as a marionette with broken wires. “Look here,” Vance began — but the other interrupted him. He knew all that Vance was going to say, he declared; hadn’t he said it to himself a thousand times? But he was sick of pretending that he ought to buckle down to work, that he oughtn’t to borrow money, that he ought to be kind to his parents, and not worry them out of their senses. What was the good of it all, when he didn’t happen to be made that way? Talk of ineffectual angels — there were ineffectual devils too, and he was one of them. Didn’t Vance suppose he knew what he was made for — to talk well, and make people laugh, and get asked out where there was jazz and fun and cards? Some millionaire’s hanger-on — that was what he was meant to be; and yet he wasn’t either, because he couldn’t stand being ordered about, or pretend to be amused by stupid people, or dazzled by vulgar asses, or any of the things you were expected to do in return for your keep. In his heart of hearts he’d rather slave in an editor’s office than nigger for rich morons as poor Alders did — an educated fellow, not half stupid, but who didn’t know how else to earn his living. For his part, he’d rather give himself a hypo and be done with it. . .
“You might try slaving in an editor’s office before you plump for the hypo,” Vance answered. His compassion was cooling off. The perpetual spring of energy bubbling up in him made such weakness and self-pity almost incomprehensible. He could understand the rich morons getting themselves privately electrocuted, he said; after a day or two in their company he always wondered why they didn’t. But to a man like Chris, with eyes and a brain, the mere everyday spectacle of life ought to. . .
“The wind on the heath?” Chris interpolated drily.
“Well, yes, damn it — the wind. . .” But the argument died on Vance’s lips. Life wasn’t like that to Chris’s decomposing intelligence. His eyes and his brain seemed to drain the beauty out of daily things; there was the bitter core of the enigma.
Vance laid his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Listen, old man; your people are awfully unhappy. Come home; we’ll see what can be done afterward.”
Chris looked up with heavy eyes. “Now — today?”
“By the next train. I can’t think why you’re not fed up with this sort of thing. I am.”
Chris sat staring down at his idle trembling hands. “You’re a brick, Weston — ”
“Oh, stow all that. Where’s your hotel? Go along and pack up, and I’ll call for you in half an hour.” But suddenly Vance reflected: “If I let him go, ten to one I’ll never find him again. — Look here,” he said, “just wait till I pitch my things into my bag and we’ll go together. It won’t take me ten minutes.”
Chris sank more deeply into the armchair. A look of utter weariness stole over him. “Oh, all right — what’s the odds?” His eyes followed Vance listlessly till the lids closed and he leaned back in a sort of doze. Vance, moving about noiselessly, collected his belongings and jammed them into his suit-case. He was consumed with the longing to get away — as much on his own account as on Chris’s. The glare of the sun, the sparkle of flowers and foliage outside his window, the strains of Puccini coming up from the Casino Gardens, all the expensiveness and artificiality of the place, made him think longingly of Oubli, of the fishermen mending their nets on the beach, the shabby houses, the peasants ploughing and pruning. “Real people in a real place,” he mused; and his heart warmed as he thought of Halo waiting at the station at Toulon, and their all jogging home in the old omnibus over the rough dusty roads. . .
As the porter came in to take the things down Chris roused himself. “Look here, Weston — I know what a worm I am. But I’m afraid there’s something owing at my hotel. If you’d lend me enough to go on with, and I could stay another day, I might come out ahead after all.”
“Come along. I’ll settle with the hotel,” Vance retorted, nervously wondering if his own funds would hold out. He slipped his arm through Chris’s, and the latter let himself be led to the lift, and out of the hotel. As they emerged into the street a hotel porter came up to Vance with a letter. “Mr. Weston?”
Vance recognized the untidy scrawl in which Floss Delaney had written her message on the back of the Duke of Spartivento’s card. “Wait a minute,” he said unsteadily. He turned back into the hotel and opened the envelope. There was nothing inside but a bruised discoloured gardenia. He stared at the livid flower; then he pushed it into his pocket, and went out to rejoin Chris. It meant goodbye, no doubt. . .
He paid Chris’s bill, which was more moderate than he had expected, helped the youth with his packing, and led him firmly to a waiting taxi. “The station!” he ordered.
Chris sat passive. Vance tried to think of something to say, but his own brain was in a whirl . . . That flower — why the devil had she sent it? It must mean something, convey some kind of message. She was always lazy about writing; hardly capable of turning more than a bald phrase or two . . . shaky about her spelling too, probably. But, after all, why should she have written? She had made an engagement — a positive engagement — with him for that afternoon: it had been made at her own suggestion, she had sealed it with a kiss. What perversity of self-torture made him suppose that she would forget it? She had even remembered his asking her for the flower she was wearing — and here it was, to remind him of her promise. The flower didn’t mean “goodbye” — if it meant anything it meant “remember”. . .
But how could he keep the engagement? And did he even want to now? The vision of Halo at the Toulon station had quickened other impulses — at least until the faded gardenia stifled them. Something within him whispered, half hypocritically, half cynically: “I must see this thing through first.”
At the station Chris again hung back. “Look here, Weston . . . just till tomorrow. . .”
“Tomorrow and tomorrow! Come, get out, old man. . .” In dragging Chris along the platform he seemed to be dragging himself too. The train rolled into the station. They followed the porter.
The train was crowded. Vance pushed Chris and his bag into a compartment; but there was no other vacant seat. “Never mind — I’ll run along and jump in wherever I can.” But as he spoke he felt another resolution forming in him. “If I can’t find a place,” he called out, his hand on Chris’s door, “I’ll take a later train. Let Halo know, will you? I’ll taxi over from Toulon.” He waved his hand and feigned a dash down the platform. But the train was moving; he was left behind. After all, he had done his duty in shipping Chris off.
He left his suit-case at the station and went back to the hotel where Floss had been staying with her father. From her having sent him the gardenia he inferred that her visit to Mrs. Glaisher was over and that she had returned to Monte Carlo and was awaiting an answer to her message.
The concierge told him she was expected back, but had not yet arrived. Vance’s spirits rose. He wrote her name on an envelope, scribbled on a sheet of paper: “Where — and when?” and added the address of his own hotel. Then he went back there to lunch. But he was too much excited to eat, and leaving the restaurant he paced up and down the narrow lounge, smoking and watching the door. An answer was sure to come soon; she had not sent that flower for nothing. . .
The minutes and the half-hours passed. It was three o’clock now; then in a flash it was half-past. The hours of his precious afternoon were being blown by him like the petals of a flower dropping before it can be gathered. Unable to endure the suspense he hurried out and walked back to Floss’s hotel. He saw her motor at the door. The interior was piled up with bags, and at first he thought she must have just arrived from Cannes; then he saw a man in shirt-sleeves lifting a motor-trunk into the trunk-carrier. He went up to the chauffeur. “Is Miss Delaney here?”
The chauffeur said he supposed so. She hadn’t come down yet; but they were starting in a minute for the harbour.
“The harbour?”
“Yes, sir; for the yacht. I believe Miss Delaney’s going on a cruise.”
Vance did not wait to hear the end. He pushed past the porters, and as he re-entered the hotel the door of the lift opened and Floss stepped out. She carried a little bag of scarlet morocco with polished steel mountings and had a fur-collared coat hung over her arm. Behind her was a young woman carrying more wraps. Vance went toward the lift and Floss stopped and looked at him with lifted brows and a faint smile. “Why, Van — ”
“Am I late?” he began quickly.
She continued to gaze at him, not embarrassed but merely in gentle surprise. “Late — for what?”
“For our engagement. I came before, but you weren’t here. Are you coming with me now?”
Her lovely eyebrows still questioned him. “But, Van, I don’t — ”
He broke in with a bitter laugh. “Are you trying to tell me you’ve forgotten?”
“What I HAD forgotten was that this is the day I start for a cruise with the Blemers. I can never remember the day of the week. We’re going to Sicily,” she explained gently.
“No!” he burst out.
“NO?”
“I say no. Last night you swore to me — ”
She turned and threw her cloak over the maid’s arm. “Put that into the car. And my bag.” The girl disappeared, and Floss laid her hand on Vance’s arm. “Come.” He followed her into the empty writing-room behind the lounge. Between two of the little mahogany writing-desks with green-shaded lamps she paused and stood smiling up at him. “Darling — it’s such a stupid mistake.”
“What’s a mistake?”
“About the date. I’m sorry. I thought the Blemers weren’t starting till tomorrow. Honestly I did.”
“Well — can’t you follow them tomorrow, if you’re so bent on going with them? You owe me this one day.”
She laughed. “Charter a yacht and give chase? That’s an idea! But I’m afraid I couldn’t find anything fast enough to catch up with them.”
“Why need you go with them at all? You swore to me — ”
Her lids drooped, and her lips also, dangerously. “Yes; I know. But please don’t be a bore, Vance.”
“A bore —?” He felt his heart stand still. Her face was as smooth as marble. “Why did you send me that flower, then?”
“That flower? Why — for goodbye. . .” She held out her hand with a smile. “Not for long, though . . . You’ll be in London next summer? Father and I are going there in June. — Yes; COMING!” she called out in a gay voice, signalling to some one in the door behind him.
Fierce impulses raged in him; he wanted to pinion her by the arms, to hold her fast. He caught at her wrist; but she laughed and shook herself free. “So long, dear. — Com-ING!” she cried in the same gay voice as she swept past him into the hall.
It had been raining steadily for the three days since Vance’s return to Oubli. A soft regular rain; it came down on the roof of the Anglican chapel with a rapping like the rattle of palm-fronds in an African oasis. Why had that occurred to him? He had never been to Africa, never seen an oasis; but he had heard some one say: “In the dry season the rattle of palms in the wind sounds just like rain. God, it gets up a fellow’s thirst!” Like drift on a swollen river, all sorts of unrelated thoughts and images jostled each other in his brain. He could not clear his mind of them, or fix it, for more than a moment or two, on the sombre words that Mr. Dorman, distant and surpliced, was speaking from the chancel.
“Thou makest his beauty to consume away, like as it were a moth fretting a garment. . .
“As soon as Thou scatterest them they are even as sheep . . . For when Thou art angry all our days are gone . . . O spare me a little that I may recover my strength, before I go hence and be no more seen. . .”
Ah, cruel implacable God of Israel, Who, among all the generations of men, sufferest so few to recover their strength before they go! What mockery to apply to this poor broken boy the stupendous words that shake the bones of the saints!
There he lay, under the pall and the wreaths, “turned to destruction”, as Mr. Dorman told them — voluntarily turned to it, as Vance secretly believed. The shabby wreath of anemones and stocks was, of course, Miss Plummet’s. Lady Dayes-Dawes had sent arums. There was a hideous cushion of white immortelles with “Chris” on it in yellow — how he would have laughed at it! Halo had managed to find violets, heaps and heaps of them, though they were nearly over — with a spray of cherry-blossom, the first of the year. Ah, implacable God of Israel! But now — listen:
“It is sown in corruption; it is raised in incorruption; it is sown in dishonour; it is raised in glory. . .” What martial music the Prayer-book made out of the old cry of human mourning! This sorrow sown in dishonour, was it indeed to be raised in glory? A sob from one of the black-muffled figures in front seemed to ask the same question. Then silence again; the rattle of rain; and “Lead, Kindly Light” from the volunteer choir, with Miss Plummet, in tears, at the harmonium.
When they came out the rain had stopped. The coffin was lifted into the old weak-springed hearse, with its moth-eaten tufts of black feathers all bent one way. (How he would have laughed at the feathers too!) The procession straggled off. Oubli could not provide enough mourning coaches, and its two wheezy Fords closed the line, noisily resisting their drivers’ attempts to keep them in step with the heavy black horses. In the English corner of the hard bare cemetery cypresses and laurestinus had been planted, green things trained over the graves. But to get there the mourners had to walk two by two (Mrs. Churley’s weak swollen feet setting the uncertain pace) through arid rows of French graves with wreaths of wire and painted tin-foil, and china saints under glass bells. Vance remembered Chris’s saying that French funeral wreaths always reminded him of the once-for-all thoughts that the living think of the dead: rigid indestructible opinions that there is never any need to renew.
“Inasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God to take out of this world the soul of our deceased brother — ” Mr. Dorman was saying across the yawning grave.
“Out of the world”; with all its laughing and crying and vain tumult . . . “The wind on the heath, brother — ” How Chris had shrugged away Vance’s facile admonitions! Wind on the heath, wind in the palms, all the multiple murmurs of life — Chris Churley’s ears were forever closed to them.
Yes; he had been Vance’s brother; and how had Vance dealt with him? “What hast thou done with this thy brother?” Why, deserted him at the last moment, shoved him into the train and left him alone with his self-derision, his bitter consciousness of futility and failure. Vance knew well enough what it felt like to be alone in such a mood, without friends, without hope, without future; he had been through it all in the early days in New York. Yet he had not given it a thought when he shoved Chris into the train and dashed away on his own crazy errand. What had he done with his brother?
“Ashes to ashes — dust to dust — ” As Chris was today, so would he be in his turn, nailed up with his withered dreams. . .
The earth fell on the coffin; somebody piled the wreaths on the mound. The sun came out, as if curious to see what this little group of bowed-down people were about; and in the dazzle of the indifferent day they crawled back to the carriages.
In the taxi Halo burst into tears. Vance put his arm about her. She seldom wept, and her grief moved him, and made him feel ashamed of his own dry eyes. But though his soul was heavy he could get no relief. Halo wiped away her tears and looked up at him. “You still think it wasn’t an accident?”
“I’m sure it wasn’t.”
“But they said he didn’t see the other train coming when he got out. The people in the other train said so.”
“Yes.”
“All the same, you think —?”
“Oh, what does it matter?” Vance groaned.
“I’m glad Mr. Dorman was convinced it was an accident. Otherwise there couldn’t have been a proper funeral. . .”
“I know. . .”
“It would have killed Mrs. Churley if he’d refused.”
“Sorrow don’t kill people. It seems to give them a sort of kick. Look how she walked all the way to the grave and back.”
Silence again; she pressed his hand tight. “Promise me, dearest, you won’t go on thinking yourself to blame.”
Vance laughed drearily. “People have got to think what they can. I ought to have come back with him. . .”
“What folly! You put him in the train.”
“I ought to have come back,” Vance repeated, as if to himself. The taxi stopped before the pink house and they got out.
At first Mrs. Churley had refused to see Vance; but two or three days after the funeral she deputed Mrs. Dorman to ask him to come up to the villa. Halo wanted to go instead; she seemed to dread the meeting between Vance and the Churleys. Vance, she argued, was still suffering from the shock of the dreadful news; he had told her what little there was to tell. Why not let Mrs. Dorman explain this to the Churleys, and suggest that Halo should go to them instead?
Mrs. Dorman pursed up her lips, and her cheeks reddened, as they did when she saw a chance of imparting unpleasant news. “It was Mr. Weston that Mrs. Churley asked for.”
“Of course I’ll go,” Vance roused himself to answer.
When he came back from the Churleys’ he went upstairs to the study and threw himself down on the old divan where Chris had so often sprawled during the long evenings full of laughter and discussion. Vance, on his way back from Monte Carlo, had thought longingly of that room; his old life seemed to hold out healing arms to him. Then, on his threshold, he had heard the stupefying news of Chris Churley’s death — the accident which had flung him under the wheels of an incoming express as he was getting out of his own train at Toulon; and from that moment Oubli and everything about it had become as hateful to Vance as the scenes from which he had just fled.
He lay with his eyes shut, reliving the hours since his return, and feeling as if he too had been flung out of the security and peace of his life and crushed under the sudden wheels of disaster. In the next room Halo was moving about. She would not come in and torment him with questions, as another woman might; she would merely let him know by an occasional sound or movement — the pushing back of a chair, the click of the Remington — that she wanted him to be aware of her nearness, and of the silent participation it implied.
The Remington . . . If only he could have got back to work! In the first horror of seeing Floss Delaney down by the river with his grandfather his anguish, he remembered, had crystallized itself in words; the shock had forced his first story out of him. And all through the dark weeks before Laura Lou’s death he had known the same mysterious heightening of creative power: as if his talent were an ogre, and lived on human suffering. But now he felt only an inner deadness; he seemed faced by a blank wall against which he might dash his brains out. Everything was stale and withered, without and within; he could almost taste the corruption — the same, no doubt, that Chris had tasted. . .
He got up and wandered into Halo’s room. She turned as he entered, feigning surprise. “Back already? — Well?”
Vance stood beside her, drumming on the lid of the typewriter. “She knows — ”
“Mrs. Churley? Knows what?”
“That it wasn’t an accident.”
“Vance! Did she tell you —?”
“No. He was there. But she didn’t have to — ”
Halo put out her hand and imprisoned his restless fingers. “Dear, aren’t you just imagining —?”
“God! I don’t have to imagine — ”
“Tell me just what she said.”
“She said she couldn’t bear to have me there. It didn’t last five minutes.”
“Poor, poor woman!”
“I could see she hated the very sight of me. She thinks I killed him.”
“But what folly — when it was you who gave him his best chance!”
“Did I? Perhaps they’re right and we were wrong. Anyhow I ought to have come back with him.”
“But surely you told them you couldn’t find a place in the train?”
“Yes — I told them.”
“Well, dear?” She lifted her grave eyes to his, and he thought: “If I told her the truth, would it make any difference?” For he knew well enough that what he was suffering from was not so much the shock of poor Chris’s suicide as the dark turmoil in his own heart. It was his vanity that was aching, and his pride; in a sudden craving for self-abasement he longed to cry out his miserable secret.
“I wish you could get back to work,” Halo said.
He made a derisive gesture. “Get back to work — that was what I used to tell Chris. I see now there wasn’t much point in it.” He turned away and threw himself again on the divan. What was the use of making some one else unhappy? His misery was his own; he had no right to ask any one to share it — least of all this woman who loved him.
The days dragged by. Vance, in spite of his curt retort to Halo, did try to take up his writing; but he could not. His imagination was dormant, his fingers seemed almost literally benumbed. The weather remained unsettled; day after day raw gales swept the sullen skies and rain burst from them with fitful violence. Every spring, the peasants told him, it stormed at Oubli in cherry~blossom time; and if the rain persisted it destroyed the fruit crop, and if it ceased the drought spoilt the early peas.
Vance resumed his long daily tramps. Halo had caught cold at the funeral, and in spite of her disregard for wind and weather he would not let her go with him. In truth he was glad to be alone. Some spring in him was broken; he felt like a man driving a motor with a disabled steering-gear. When he was with Halo he lived in dread of not being able to keep himself from some foolish burst of self-betrayal. When she said: “You mustn’t let Chris’s death make you so unhappy,” he had to fight his impulse to burst out: “It’s not Chris who’s torturing me.” He hardly knew the exact source of his pain. Since he had returned to Oubli, and slipped back into the old familiar life with Halo, everything about the interlude of Cannes and Monte Carlo had become as unreal as the scenery of a stage-setting. He seemed to have been moving in a world of flippant spectres; only Floss Delaney kept her mordant reality. And the strange thing was that, from the very moment of their meeting, she had produced no illusions in him, excited no surprise. She had appeared, in that opulent environment, neither rarer nor lovelier than when, as a raw boy, he had worshipped and loathed her in the maple-grove at Crampton. It was true that she had not changed; perhaps, as she had said, no one DOES change; and for that very reason the common unimaginative girl who had captivated the untried boy exercised the same spell over the young man from whom a world of experience divided her. That was the dangerpoint. No alteration of setting or of ideas — not even the profound shock of Chris Churley’s suicide — could shake him out of his unwilling subjection. It was because he saw her as she was, and was still drawn to her, that his plight was hopeless. Whenever he shut his eyes there was her bare arm, like amber in the moonlight; the touch of it burned in him. It was useless to tell himself that now that he knew the world he could place her without difficulty, could class her as the trivial beauty whom any intelligent man would weary of in a week. Intelligence had nothing to do with it. You might as well say that an intelligent man would weary in a week of the scent of a certain flower, when there are flower-scents that all through life work the same magic. Vance knew there were selves under selves in him, and that one of the undermost belonged to Floss Delaney.
Again and again he was tempted to confess himself to Halo; to do so might break the spell and tranquillize him. And perhaps it would not be so difficult. When his story, “One Day”, had been discovered and published by Lewis Tarrant, and Vance, in an hour of expansion, had told Halo that he had written it to rid himself of his first sorrow, he had described Floss to her, and she had shuddered and sympathized. He would only have to say: “You remember that girl at Euphoria that I told you about?” to have her sympathy spring up. Ah — but would it? That other tale, when he had told it, already belonged to a distant past; neither he nor Halo could have dreamed that Floss Delaney would ever reappear in their lives. Now it was different. Intelligent though Halo was, could he hope to make her understand that a man may love one woman with all his soul while he is perishing for the nearness of another? Some day he might put that story in a novel; fitfully, even now, the idea came to him, he felt its richness and complexity — but only for a moment. The next he was back in the dark coil of his misery; and he knew that the impulse to confess himself was due not to any belief that confession would break the spell, but only to his monstrous craving to talk of Floss to any one, to every one, even to the woman he might wound to the heart in naming her. He thought: “I’ve hurt her so often without meaning to. At least I can keep myself from doing it with my eyes open.”
Since Vance’s visit no sign had come from the Churleys. He suspected that Halo resented their silence, resented the poor mother’s harsh dismissal of Vance after she had sent for him. It was cruel, certainly, for they knew that Vance had tried to befriend Chris, that Vance’s comradeship had been the one brightness in the boy’s last months. But perhaps that was what they resented, though Halo refused to admit it. “They can’t be so wickedly unjust — .” But that was precisely what great sorrow made of people — didn’t Vance know? Perhaps it even comforted them, the poor creatures, to have some one against whom they could cherish a bitter resentment. Well, let them —!
One day, coming in from a solitary ramble, he found a letter awaiting him. He broke the seal and read: “Dear Mr. Weston, I have only just learned that my son’s visit to Monte Carlo was brought about by your having lent him twenty pounds. Pray excuse my involuntary delay in sending you the enclosed cheque, which I beg you to accept with my thanks. Yours very truly, Augustine Churley.”
Vance uttered an angry exclamation. Halo, who was sorting the papers on his desk, looked up. “Oh, Vance — it’s Colonel Churley?” He tossed the letter over to her.
“It wasn’t a loan — and Chris knew it!” Vance fumed. It seemed as though these people had divined how he hated himself for having left Chris, and were seizing on every pretext to increase his misery.
“But how did they know the amount? Chris must have told them — or have left a letter.”
“Well, I won’t take it,” said Vance nervously. “They’ll end by poisoning my memory of him. I daresay they think my giving him that money was the cause of his death.”
Halo reflected. “No; you can’t take it. Give it to me; I’ll go and see Mrs. Churley.”
“She won’t see you.”
“I think she will. Mrs. Dorman will arrange for me to go when her husband’s out. She couldn’t talk to you the other day because he was there. But you’ll see — ”
Vance drew a breath of relief. He was so used to Halo’s smoothing out the asperities of life that he felt almost as certain as she did of her ability to cope with Mrs. Churley. And at least the question of the money would be effaced from his mind.
The next day he did not get back till late from his walk. As he mounted the stairs he caught Halo’s voice: she was speaking excitedly, in a tone of irritation unusual to her. The study door was ajar, and he heard Mrs. Dorman replying, in the conciliatory voice in which she communicated anything likely to give pain: “I’m so sorry, Mrs. — Mrs. — . You must really tell me, you know, what I ought to call you,” she interrupted herself with a faint cough.
Vance strode in. Halo was standing, her head high, her face pale; Mrs. Dorman confronted her with excited spots of red on her round innocent-looking cheeks. “You mustn’t really take it so hard,” she was protesting.
Halo turned to Vance. Her lips were as pale as her face, and her arm trembled slightly as she rested it on the desk; but her voice was quiet. “Mrs. Dorman tells me that Mrs. Churley would rather not see me.”
Vance guessed instantly what had happened. Ireful words sprang to his lips; but Halo’s glance checked him. How right she was — always! It would have been a pity to gratify Mrs. Dorman by any sign of discomfiture. “Since Mrs. Churley doesn’t want to receive either of us,” he rejoined, in a voice as quiet as Halo’s, “I don’t see that there’s anything more to be said.”
Mrs. Dorman looked undefinably disappointed. “But I didn’t mean that, Mrs. Weston. On the contrary. Mrs. Churley’s very sorry she was so overcome when you came the other day; she’d be glad to see you again. The message I brought was for Mrs . . . Mrs. . .”
“My name’s Weston,” Vance interrupted.
“Exactly.” Mrs. Dorman’s face grew rounder and rosier. “And at first we all supposed . . . naturally. . .”
“Mrs. Dorman,” Halo intervened, “has just told me that Mrs. Churley’s reason for not wishing to see me is that she’s heard we were not married.”
“I told her I’d always understood that in the States you attach comparatively little importance to being married . . . that perhaps we oughtn’t to judge you by our standards. But naturally that’s not the general feeling in England; at least not among Church people — and Mrs. Churley was dreadfully upset. You know she always dreaded any . . . any demoralizing influence on that poor boy; and I’m afraid she’s taken it into her head that his friendship with Mrs. — Mrs. — ”
The red rushed to Vance’s forehead. “This lady’s name is Mrs. Tarrant; but it will be Weston soon. Please say to Mrs. Churley — ”
Halo laid her hand on his arm. “No, dear; there’s nothing more to say. Except that we both loved Chris, and that we feel for his mother with all our hearts.”
Mrs. Dorman stared with the bewildered look of one who has lost her cue. “But you will come to see her, Mr. Weston?”
“There’d be no object in it. Mrs. Tarrant has told you all we have to say.”
Mrs. Dorman uttered a baffled sigh. “It’s so very sad,” she murmured. She gathered up her boa, and Vance opened the door and silently saw her down the stairs.
“It all falls on you — always!” he broke out indignantly as he returned to Halo.
She surprised him by a gesture of appeal. “That poor mother — oh, Vance, don’t be angry with her! If only there was anything we could do! I feel as if you and I were the real debtors — everybody’s debtors; as if, to be as happy as we are, we must have stolen too many other people’s happiness. Darling, do you suppose we have?” she burst out, her arms stretched to him.
The days passed heavily. Vance and Halo held no further communication with the Pension Britannique. Vance returned the cheque to Colonel Churley, with a note saying that the twenty pounds had been a gift to Chris, and that Chris was aware of it; and the following week a copy of Mr. Dorman’s parish bulletin was left at the pink villa, with an underscored paragraph announcing that Colonel Churley, in memory of his son, had given twenty pounds to the Church library (Purchasing Committee: the Chaplain, Lady Dayes-Dawes, Miss Plummet.) Vance was diverted at the thought of the works which would be acquired with this fund; he amused himself and Halo by drawing up a probable list, and they smiled over the brilliant additions that Chris would have made to it.
But Vance was still full of disquietude. Everything in his life seemed to have gone wrong, to have come to grief. He asked Halo, the day after Mrs. Dorman’s visit, if she would not like to leave Oubli; but she said with a smile that she didn’t see why they should alter their plans to suit the Pension Britannique. They had taken the villa for a year, and she wanted him to have a taste of the summer life, the boating and bathing, the long hot days on the sands. “There’ll be nobody to be scandalized then — the Pension Britannique closes in summer. If you suppose I mind what those poor women say,” she added carelessly; and he understood that nothing could be more distasteful to her than to seem aware that she was the subject of gossip and criticism.
Vance himself had no feelings of the sort. He resented furiously any slight to Halo, but saw no reason for appearing to ignore such slights. He supposed it was what he called the “Tarrant pride” in her; the attitude of all her clan; the same which had helped Tarrant to stiffen himself against the moral torture of his talk with Vance, and affect indifference when every nerve was writhing. It all seemed an obsolete superstition, as dead as duelling; yet there were moments when Vance admired the stoicism. He could think of girls — straight, loyal, decent girls — who, if they loved a man, and lived with him, would have gloried in the fact, and laughed at social slights and strictures. But Halo suffered acutely from every slight and stricture, yet bore herself with the gayest indifference. “All those old institutions — I suppose there was something in them, a sort of scaffolding, an armour,” he thought. He felt how often his own undisciplined impulses needed the support of some principle that would not have to be thought out each time.
But if Halo did not want to leave Oubli, he did; and she was not long in divining it. There was no longer any question of his working; the manuscript lay untouched. If he were ever to finish “Colossus” he must get away — get away at once. When he had lectured Chris on the evils of idleness he had little imagined that within a few weeks he would be exemplifying them. “I told him he’d be able to work fast enough if he had to — such rot! Look at me now!” he said bitterly.
“But it’s just because of Chris that you can’t work. You’re still suffering too much.”
“A good many books have been made out of suffering.”
“Perhaps; but not out of tattered nerves. You’ve got to get away.” He was silent. “Why not go to London?” she suggested suddenly. “It’s time you saw your publishers about ‘Colossus’. Go now; it’s just what you need. You could stay with Tolby, who’s so often invited you.”
Vance felt a rush of life in his veins. London — London! He remembered the look in Chris Churley’s eyes when he had heard the magic suggestion. “I wonder if my eyes look like that to Halo,” Vance thought with a twinge of compunction; but the twinge was fleeting. London, Madrid, Constantinople — it hardly mattered which. Freedom was what they all meant — change and freedom! And how good to see old Tolby again, and drop back into the current of their endless talks. Everything connected with the idea of departure seemed suddenly easy and inviting.
“You’d really rather stay here?” he faltered.
“I’d rather,” she smiled.
In the train, on the boat, and now in Tolby’s snug smoky quarters, Vance felt the same glow of liberation. With his first step on English soil had come the sense of being at home and at ease. The feeling of sureness and authority underlying the careless confidence with which life was conducted, soothed his nerves, and put him quietly yet not unironically in his place — a strangely small one, he perceived, yet roomy and comfortable as one of Tolby’s armchairs.
Tolby lived off the King’s Road, on top of a house divided into old~fashioned flats. Attached to his studio were two bedrooms, a kitchenette and a slit of a bathroom, with a geyser which had to be managed like a neurasthenic woman. “When you get to know her it’ll be all right; she’ll get tired of trying on her tricks. She’s always a bit nervous at first,” Tolby explained. No one else in the flat was nervous. From the kitchen, at stated intervals, a broad calm woman (who removed a black bonnet with strings when she entered the flat), appeared with crisp bacon, kippered herring, cold beef and large placid puddings. To Vance the diet was ambrosial. He delighted also in the tidiness of the studio, where everything was shabby and paintless, but neat and orderly, with a handful of spring flowers on the breakfast table, a pleasant fire in the grate, and a general seemliness that reminded him of Halo. “You must be glad to get back to this from Montparnasse,” he said with a sigh of satisfaction.
“Yes; when I’ve had enough talk.”
“Isn’t there any talk in London?”
“Yes; but it’s not a sport or a career. It’s done in corners — furtively.”
“At any rate,” Vance thought, “I’m not likely to hear any of that drivel that poor Chris ran after.”
Little by little the social immensities of London began to dawn on him, its groups within groups, each, in spite of all the broad~casting and modern fluidity, so walled in by silence and indifference, and he became more and more sure that there was no risk of any communication between Tolby’s group and Sir Felix Oster’s. Among the young painters and writers who came to the studio he found himself already known, but not what Floss Delaney would have called celebrated. These young people had read his books, and were interested in them but not overwhelmed. The discovery roused his slumbering energy, and he said to himself in a burst of creative enthusiasm: “They’re dead right about what I’ve done so far; but wait till they see ‘Colossus’ — I’ll show them!”
His first days were spent in wandering about the streets, alert yet dreaming, letting the panorama of churches, museums, galleries, stream through his attentive senses. Tolby, himself hard at work, seldom joined him till the evening, and then they either supped (since dining, in Tolby’s group, was out of fashion) with other pleasant busy people, chiefly writers or painters, or went to hear old music or to see new dancing. But by the end of the first week the desire to write had once more mastered Vance, and he shut himself up at his desk for long hours of the day.
On Saturdays he and his host went off on their bicycles to some quiet leafy place where there was an inn with a garden full of lilacs and tulips, or else they stayed with friends of Tolby’s in low-studded village cottages transformed into bungalows, with black cross-beams and windows latticed with roses. But as Vance grew more absorbed in his work even such outings became disturbing, and he asked to be left behind when Tolby went away for the next week~end.
Tolby took this as a matter of course (the blessed way they had in England of taking things like that!), and the following Saturday Vance, after his friend’s departure, turned with a grin of joy to his work.
Toward evening the opening of the door broke in on a happy cadence. The placid woman who purveyed the kippered herrings pronounced: “Mr. Fane”, and Vance’s memory added: “Of the ‘Amplifier’.” It was in fact Derek Fane, the young critic whom Vance had met at Savignac’s the previous autumn, and to whom he had given a verbal outline of “Colossus”. The book had undergone such changes that Vance was glad to see Fane again, and allowed the talk to be led to his work with more affability than he usually showed to interviewers. He knew his publishers were anxious that the “Amplifier” should make the most of his visit to London, and a talk with a critic like Derek Fane would be very different from the “third degree” applied by newspaper reporters. Fane was one of the quietest men Vance had ever met, even in England. Everything about him was muffled and pianissimo; he did his interviewing by listening. Vance could hardly recall his having put a question; but his silence was not only benevolent but acute. After Vance’s summing-up of the new “Colossus” he merely said: “It sounds as if you’d pulled it into shape”; but the remark carried such conviction that a glow of encouragement rushed through Vance.
The next morning the “Amplifier” had a brilliant survey of Vance’s past work, and a discerning account of his projected book, inserted into a picturesque impression of the King’s Road studio. Henceforth all literary and fashionable London, if it cared to know, would be aware of Vance’s presence.
The first result was a shower of invitations; one from Lady Pevensey headed the list. She besought Vance to climb to her little flat on the roof of a new West End sky-scraper for the most informal of after-theatre suppers. He would find just the people he liked, and must of course bring his friend Mr. Tolby, whose pictures everybody was beginning to talk about. Tolby urged Vance to accept. “It’s one of the penalties of your profession; you must go and film the animals in their native habitat. I can sit still and wait till they come to be painted — but it’s your job to snap them at their games.”
Vance hardly needed urging. It was not so much the novelty of the scene that attracted him as its atmosphere. Being in England felt like coming back to something known in a happier state, and, as the hymn said, “lost awhile”. There was nothing like it in his conscious experience, yet it seemed nearer to him than his actual life. He discovered that the sense of security and solidarity emanating from the group of dowdy exiles at Oubli was the very air of England. Wherever he went it looked out of calm eyes and sounded in calm voices. Ah, those calm voices, their rich organ~tones, their still depths of sound! Vance never tired of them. Halo’s way of speaking, and that of her group, was a thin reminder of those rich notes; but how staccato and metallic compared with the brooding English intonations! “It’s the way your voices handle the words,” Vance explained, struggling for a definition. “The way a collector touches gems or ivories, not fussily or mincingly, but surely and softly. Or the way a girl in a poultry-yard picks up downy chickens.” Tolby laughed and said he liked the last analogy best.
The next day a voice with a different cadence broke in on his toil. “I’m Margot Crash,” it shrilled, and Vance found himself confronting a slender young lady with a face adorned by movie-star teeth and eyelashes. Miss Crash’s job, though brilliant, was probably less lucrative than if she had used her gifts on the screen: she represented in London the literary page of the Des Moines “Daily Ubiquity”. Vance started up to protest at the intrusion; but the teeth and eyelashes mollified him, and in another moment their owner, snugly ensconced in Tolby’s deepest armchair, was confessing that she was a beginner, and desperately in earnest about her job. “If I can get a good write-up off of you I’m made forever,” she declared; “but I’m so scared I guess you’ll have to do it for me. I’m too crazy about your novels to know how to talk about them to their author.”
“Oh, well,” said Vance, “the ones I’ve already written are still measurable by human instruments.”
She lifted her long lashes with a vague laugh. “Well, what I want is to find out all about them — how you write them, I mean, and how you began writing anyhow. What made you think of it? Did you take a course?”
“A course —?”
“Why, I mean at college. Or did the idea just come to you? Did you educate yourself to be a writer? Did you begin by studying your contemporaries? That’s the way they make you do in some courses.”
“No; I believe I began with Mother Goose.”
Her lovely stare widened; allusiveness was evidently as unintelligible to her as irony. “Oh, do you mean you started by writing children’s books?” She drew out a little note-book in which Vance could almost see her inscribing: “Began by writing for children.” “Like the Pollyannas, for instance?” she helped him out enthusiastically.
“Well — something.”
She clapped it down. “But what I want to know is — how did you learn to write for adults? Did you pick one of your contemporaries and work out your style on his, or did you take one of the longer courses — the ones that go way back to the classics?”
“It depends on what you call the classics.”
That puzzled her again, and provoked a lovely frown. “Well — Galsworthy, I suppose,” she triumphed.
“Oh, no; not as far back as that.” Her face fell, but she wrote on ardently till he signified to her, as humanely as possible, that there was really no more to tell, and that he must get back to his work.
“Oh — your WORK!” she breathed, in awed acquiescence; and then, putting out her hand: “You see, I’m trying to write novels myself, and it just means everything to me to find out from somebody up at the top what you have to do to get there. But I don’t believe I’ll ever have time to go way back to those old classics,” she sighed.
The next day the London edition of the Des Moines “Daily Ubiquity” brought out a heavily head-lined article on the celebrated young American novelist who was visiting London for the first time, and who had acquired mastery in his art by writing children’s stories and taking a college course in adult fiction. Well, why not?
To any one not chained by association to the old low-fronted London there was magic in looking down from Lady Pevensey’s sky-terrace over the lawns of the Green Park and the distant architectural masses discerned through shadowy foliage. In the transparent summer night Vance leaned there, lost in the unreal beauty, and recalling another night-piece, under a white moon-washed sky, when the Mediterranean lay at his feet, and Floss Delaney’s bare arm burned into his.
The momentary disappointment over, he had been glad that Floss was not among Lady Pevensey’s guests. At first, among those white shoulders and small luminous heads, he had imagined he felt her presence; but he was mistaken. Tonight he was in another of Lady Pevensey’s many sets, and apparently it had not occurred to his hostess that she might have given him pleasure by inviting Floss. Did she even remember that the two had met at Cannes? Vance was beginning to learn that in this rushing oblivious world one must jump onto the train in motion, and look about at the passengers afterward. As soon as he entered Lady Pevensey’s drawing-room he found himself surrounded, as in old days at the Tarrants’, by charming people who made much of him. Then he had imagined that they were throwing open the door of their lives to him; now he knew they were simply adding a new name to their lists. They marked him down as the entomologist does a rare butterfly, and he found the process not unpleasant, for he was experienced enough to enjoy watching them while they were observing him, and he liked the atmosphere of soft-voiced cordiality and disarming simplicity in which the chase went on. He recalled with a smile the days when he had supposed that people in society wanted to hear the answer to their questions, or to listen to the end of a sentence. He had learned that they were really indifferent to every one and everything outside of their own circle; but he did not care. They were a part of the new picture he was studying, and he wanted them to be as characteristic and self-sufficing as his conception of them, just as they wanted him to be the young genius with rumpled hair who says unexpected things and forgets to note down his engagements.
“But of course you know Octavius, don’t you, Vance?” It was Lady Pevensey’s voice, rousing him from his nocturnal vision to introduce a small quiet man with a bulging brow, who looked at him, through the bow-windows of immense horn-rimmed spectacles, with the expression of an anxious child.
Vance, lost in the tangle of Christian names which were the only sign-posts of Lady Pevensey’s London, tried to make his smile speak for him. “By name at least — ” Lady Pevensey added, throwing him a lifebelt as she drifted off to other rescues.
“It’s the only way of knowing each other that we have time for nowadays — knowing each other’s Christian names,” said the little man rather sadly, aligning his elbows next to Vance’s on the parapet. “I know you write books, though,” he added benevolently. “Novels, are they — or popular expositions of the Atom? It’s no use telling me, for I shouldn’t remember. There’s no time for that either — for remembering what other people write. Much less for reading their books. And if one does, it isn’t always easy to tell if they’re novels or biochemistry. So I stick to my own — my own writing. I’m buried in that up to the chin; buried alive, I trust. But even that one can’t be sure of. It may be that already I’m just a rosy corpse preserved in a glacier.” He glanced tentatively at Vance, as if hoping for a protest, but Vance was silenced by the impossibility of recalling any one named Octavius who had written a book. He hedged.
“Why should you call your books a glacier?” he said politely.
The other winced. “Not my BOOKS; my Book. One’s enough, in all conscience. Even with the irreproachable life I lead, and only one slice of grilled meat three times a week — all the rest vegetarian — one is always at the mercy of accidents, culinary or other; and I need a clear stretch of twenty years ahead of me.” Again he fixed Vance solemnly. “The day I’m assured of that I’ll sit down and finish my book. Meanwhile I hope we shall meet again. Tell Imp to bring you to Charlie’s — I’m nearly always there after midnight.” He nodded and was lost in the throng.
A young lady with a small enamelled face and restless eyes came up to Vance. “Was Octavius WONDERFUL? We’re longing to know,” she said breathlessly, indicating a group of young men and damsels in her wake. One of the latter interrupted: “He’s never as good anywhere as he is at Charlie’s,” but the young lady said curtly: “Not to YOU perhaps, darling; but he’s sure to have been wonderful to Mr. Weston — ” at which her young followers looked properly awed.
Vance turned on them with a burst of candour. “How can I tell if he was wonderful, when I don’t know who he is? It all depends on that, doesn’t it?” The others looked their astonishment and incredulity, and the leading lady exclaimed indignantly: “But didn’t that idiot tell you you were talking to Octavius?”
To confess that this meant nothing to him, Vance perceived, would lower him irretrievably in the estimation of these ardent young people; and he was struggling for a subterfuge when the group was joined by a tall bronzed young man whose face was disturbingly familiar.
“Remember me, Mr. Weston? Spartivento. Yes: with Rosenzweig and Blemp. We met, I think, at Mrs. Glaisher’s.” The Duke turned his Theocritan eyes on the young lady who had challenged Vance. “See here, I guess you folks don’t know that in the U.S. people call each other by all the names they’ve got. I presume Mr. Weston’s heard of Octavius Alistair Brant — isn’t it?” He shone softly on his interlocutor, and then turned back to Vance. “Mrs. Glaisher is demanding to see you; she asked me to remind you that she is one of your most admirative readers. She has taken Lanchester House for the season. You will call up, and give her the pleasure to dine? So long, — happy to meet you; I am going-gon with Lady Cynthia,” said the Duke with his perfect smile, eclipsing himself before Vance could detain him.
The encounter woke such echoes that for the moment the identity of Octavius Alistair Brant became a minor matter, and it was not till the next day that Vance, reporting on the party to Tolby, found himself obliged to confess that he still failed to associate Mr. Brant’s name with any achievement known to fame.
Tolby seemed amused. “Yes. How village-pump we all are, after all! Brant’s a little god; but his reign is circumscribed. It extends from Bloomsbury to Chelsea. He’s writing a big book about some thing or other — I can’t remember what. But everybody agrees it’s going to be cataclysmic — there’ll be nothing left standing but Octavius. You know his Prime Minister, Charlie Tarlton? Oh, well, he’s worth while — they both are. Get Lady Pevensey to take you to one of Charlie’s evenings.”
Vance was only half listening. Mrs. Glaisher had a house in London! She wanted him to call her up! If only he had had the courage to ask the Duke if Floss Delaney were with her. But he had not been able to bring himself to put the question. And even now, as he sat looking at Tolby’s telephone, he could not make the decisive gesture. “If she’s here we’re sure to meet,” he thought; and he got up and went back to his work. But it was one thing to seat himself at his desk, and another to battle against the stream of associations pouring in on him. Write? What did he care about writing? The sound of any name connected with Floss Delaney’s set all his wires humming. He got up again uneasily and strolled back into the studio, where Tolby sat at his canvas, in happy unconsciousness of all else. Vance stood and watched him.
“How do you manage to shut out life when you want to work?” he questioned.
Tolby glanced up at him, “Life — work? Where’s the antithesis?” He touched his canvas with the brush. “This IS Life; the rest’s simply hygienics,” he said carelessly. Vance returned to his desk and continued to stare at the blank page. What a cursed tangle of impulses he was! Would he ever achieve the true artist’s faculty of self-isolation? “Not until I learn to care less about everything,” he thought despondently.
The next night, at the Honourable Charles Tarlton’s little dove~gray house in Westminster, where everybody sat on the floor, and people came and went in a casual yet intimate way, without giving their large rosy host any particular attention, or receiving any from him, Vance had to acknowledge how good Octavius was.
His predominance over the rest of the company made itself felt in the quietest yet most unmistakeable way. He was the only person who did not sit on the floor. His legs were too short, he explained; when he got up it was mortifying to see that people expected him to go ever so much farther. He was provided with a horrible sculptured armchair, which had been known to his host’s grandparents as “the Abbotsford”, and from this throne Octavius poured out his wisdom on the disciples at his feet. Vance thought with a pang of Chris Churley. His talk, as it matured, would probably have been almost as good. And so, perhaps, would his unwritten book. The chief difference was that Octavius had known how to come to an agreement with life; also that he philosophized on barley-water, and had the minimum of material needs. Thus he had been able to adjust himself comfortably to failure, and make himself a warm nest in it, like a mouse in a cupboard.
But it was not as a failure that his disciples thought of him; nor even, in the first instance, as a brilliant talker. As Tolby had said, talk was not a career in England, and Octavius Brant had to be something besides, and preferably an author. The big book was his pretext and his justification, and the excuse of his audience for hanging on his words. Nobody seemed quite clear as to what it was to be, and Vance discovered that while there were those who resented being asked if it were a novel, others, perhaps the more sophisticated, retorted to his question: “Why, yes, a novel, of course! It’s the only formula that’s still malleable — ” in which he recognized a dictum of Octavius’s. In fact, according to Charlie Tarlton, if the book didn’t at first seem like a novel, that would simply mean that Octavius had renewed the formula; that in future what HE chose to call a novel would BE a novel, whether you liked it or not. Charlie Tarlton did not speak often; in Octavius’s presence he was just rosily silent, dispensing cocktails and cigarettes; but when the great man was late in arriving — and his hours were incalculable — Charlie, to keep the disciples in a good humour, would sometimes drop an oracle on the subject of his work.
“You’ve read it, then?” Vance one evening blundered into asking; and the elect looked grieved, and Mr. Tarlton slightly irritated. “Read it? Read it? What exactly does reading a book consist in? Reading the original manuscript — Octavius writes out every word with his own hand — or the typescript copy, or the proofs, or the published book? Every one of these versions is a different thing, has its own impact, produces its specific set of reactions. But what I’ve read is better than any of them — the author’s brain. There’s where you get the quintessential stuff. As Octavius says, it’s the butterfly before the colours are brushed off.” Mr. Tarlton leaned back satisfied, resting comfortable elbows on his cushiony knees.
“Well — exactly!” murmured a devout disciple, with a glance of reproof at Vance.
“Exactly what?” questioned Octavius, entering in his hat and overcoat, and removing his scarf with a leisurely hand. Charlie’s rosy face became tomato-coloured and he scrambled uneasily to his feet.
“He was saying that the quintessence of your book is in your brain,” exclaimed another imprudent devotee. Octavius’s small face withered, and he looked more than ever like an anxious child. His glance swept over Charlie, searing him like flame. “Is that by way of apology for the book’s not being finished?” he exclaimed, his voice rising to a high falsetto. “If so, I can only say that I prefer to do my own apologizing — when I find it necessary.”
A pall of silence fell on the fervent group; Charlie stammered: “I didn’t mean anything of the sort,” and Vance, squatting on a cushion at the great man’s feet, ventured boldly: “You know you haven’t yet told me exactly what it’s about.”
Octavius’s countenance softened. There was nothing he liked better than toying with his theme before a newcomer. “Ah, rash youth,” he murmured, dropping into his armchair, and leaning his little head back among the knobby heraldic ornaments. “Rash — rash!” His eyes glittered behind their sheltering panes, and his short-fingered hands caressed each other softly, as if his hearer’s hand lay between them. But suddenly he shook his head. “No — no; I won’t yield to the temptation. The lovely creature is there, swimming to and fro in the deepest deeps of my consciousness, shimmering like a chamaeleon, unfolding like a flower. How can you expect me to drag it up brutally into the air, to throw it at your feet, limp and discoloured, and say: ‘This is my book!’ when it wouldn’t be, when I should be the first to disown it? My dear fellow — ” he leaned forward, and laid his little hand on Vance’s shoulder. “My dear fellow, WAIT. It’s worth it.”
Vance looked up at him with renewed interest. “In a way,” he thought, “he’s right. His book is written and I daresay it’s as good as he thinks. It’s the agony of exteriorizing that he dodges away from. And meanwhile his creation lives on inside of him, and is nourished by him and grows more and more beautiful.” At the thought he felt the stealing temptation to dream his own books instead of writing them. What a row of masterpieces they would be! They die in the process of being written, he mused. And he thought what his life might have been if he could have drifted from one fancy to another, letting each scatter its dolphin-colours unseen as another replaced it. “If I’d called up Mrs. Glaisher the other day, for instance — ” and suddenly he was seized with a terrible fear. Supposing Floss Delaney had already left England? Supposing she had been there, within reach of him, the night he had seen the Duke of Spartivento at Lady Pevensey’s, and had now vanished again, heaven knew whither? But surely if she had been in London she would have heard of his being there, would have telephoned him, or written. His world turned ashen at the thought. What was he doing in this atmosphere of literary humbug, among the satellites of a poor fatuous dreamer? Life, real life, was a million miles away from these ephemeral word-spinners . . . The scene crumbled as if a sorcerer’s wand had touched it. And then, just as he was getting to his feet, there was a stir on the landing outside, and the sound of a small high voice saying ingratiatingly to a parlour-maid who seemed doubtful of the speaker’s credentials: “Mr. Alders — if you’ll please simply say it’s MR. ALDERS— ”
“Oh, Alders,” murmured Charlie Tarlton, with an explanatory hand~wave to his guests. “Who was it he’d promised to bring, Octavius?” The question was answered by the parlour-maid’s throwing open the door. On the threshold stood Alders, more dust-coloured and negative than ever, and behind him, like a beacon in the night, Floss Delaney. She moved forward with her light unhurried step and looked about her composedly, as if never doubting that it was she whom Mr. Tarlton’s guests had assembled to behold.
“This is Floss Delaney,” some one said, leading her up to Octavius. For a moment the little man’s face took on the drowned look of the superseded; then pleasure lit it up, and holding out his hand he murmured: “Flos florum — I don’t know how to say it in this week’s American slang.”
Miss Delaney scrutinized him with the cautious friendliness of a visitor at the Zoo caressing an unknown animal. She laid her hand on his arm, as if he and she were facing an expectant camera, and looked about at the assembled company. “Isn’t he GOR-geous?” she said in her deep drawl.
Lady Guy Plunder said that if you wanted to hear Octavius talk you went to Charlie’s; but if you wanted to talk yourself you came, sooner or later, to her.
There was a good deal of truth in it. Her little house in Mayfair — even smaller than Charlie’s, and mouse-coloured instead of dove — was packed to the doorstep for her cocktail suppers. Lady Guy (one of the rich Blessoms of Birmingham) had started her married career in a big house with tessellated floors and caryatid mantelpieces; but when taxes and overproduction had contracted the Blessom millions she had moved light-heartedly into the compactest habitation to be found, and Lord Guy had abandoned lawn-tennis championships for a job in the city.
Lady Guy, Vance had learned, headed one of the numerous groups within groups that made London such a labyrinthine adventure. Lady Pevensey commanded the big omnivorous throng of the rich, the idle and nomadic. Her name was known round the world to the echoes of palace-hotels, and was a sure key to sensational first-nights, theatrical or pugilistic. She was the woman who could always get you a seat for a coronation, a prizefight, a murder trial or a show proscribed by the censorship; who juggled with movie-stars, millionaires and musicians, and to whom all were interchangeable values in the social market. Lady Guy said that Imp had a social ticker, and could quote prices in celebrities at any hour. That she could float them and boost them there was no denying; but could she also manufacture them? No; it took Charlie and Lady Guy to do that, and at times the rivalry was hot between them. Lady Guy, a small woman with quick eyes and a tranquil manner, had, it was true, failed to capture Octavius, who was admittedly the biggest haul of post-war London. Charlie said it was because her atmosphere was too restless; she retorted that she wasn’t going to be stagnant to oblige anybody. But the two remained on fairly good terms, Charlie because he needed Lady Guy’s finds to entertain Octavius, and Lady Guy because she did not despair of luring Octavius away from him.
It was at Charlie’s that she had discovered Vance, and immediately she had guessed his value. To the people in Imp Pevensey’s set he was merely the clever new American novelist who had written “The Puritan in Spain”, which was modern enough to make one feel in the movement, yet full of lovely scenery and rather sticky love-making. But that would not do for Lady Guy. She found out about “Colossus” from Derek Fane, and instantly, whenever Vance was mentioned, the Plunder set said: “Oh, ‘The Puritan in Spain’? Y-yes — that belongs to his pretty-pretty period. But of course you know about ‘Colossus’? Hasn’t Gwen Plunder asked you for next Friday? He’s promised to read us some fragments . . .” and Vance was immediately known as the author of “Colossus”, that unfinished masterpiece of which the elect were already cognizant, and which was perhaps to surpass Octavius’s gigantic creation, and probably to appear before it.
That this was clever of Gwen even her detractors had to admit. If she should succeed in deflating Octavius he might have to become one of her habitués, if only in order to be reinflated. And meanwhile there was Vance at her disposal, young, good-looking, fresh, a novelty to the London palate — while Octavius was already a staple diet. Instantly Vance became the most sought-after figure in literary and artistic London, and certain disdainful personages who had affected indifference to Lady Guy’s previous celebrities now overwhelmed her with attentions and invitations, all of which she smilingly accepted without committing herself with regard to the Friday reading.
Lady Pevensey used her artists and writers as bait for millionaires, and her millionaires (and especially their females) as baits for Bohemia. If a budding society novelist wanted to know what sort of gowns and jewels were being worn at small dinners that year, or what young Lord Easterbridge and the Duke of Branksome really talked about when they were with their own little crowd, Lady Pevensey instantly arranged a meeting between best-sellers and best-dressers. For her parties women put on their emeralds, and the budding novelist had to come in a white tie. Lady Guy’s policy was the reverse. The first inducement she offered you was that you needn’t dress; in fact she besought you not to. There were few idlers at her parties, and people were urged to drop in “just as they were”. The men could wear city clothes, or sweaters and plus~fours, the women come straight from their studios, old-furniture shops, manicuring establishments, dress-makers’ salons or typists’ desks. She had thus captured some of Bloomsbury’s wildest birds, and maddened the wearers of tiaras with the unappeased longing to be invited.
Vance, as he took off his overcoat, and straightened the dark brown tie which had been carefully chosen to set off his gray striped flannel, examined his reflection curiously in the glass at the foot of Lady Guy’s stairs. His selves, as he had long since discovered, were innumerable, and there were times when each in turn had something interesting to say to him. But at the moment only two were audible: the ironic spectator who stood aside and chuckled, and the hero of the evening, whose breast was bursting with triumph. Lady Guy had run over, carelessly, the names of some of the people who had asked to be asked; among them were a few for whose approbation and understanding Vance would have given every facile success he had ever enjoyed. And they were awaiting him now, they wanted to hear what he had to tell them, they believed in him and in his future. The ironic spectator shrank into the background as the laughing hero, besieged by smiles and invitations, sprang upstairs to greet his hostess.
With the unfolding of the manuscript both these light puppets were brushed aside, and Vance was the instrument to which the goddess laid her lips. He forgot where he was, who was listening, what judgment this or that oracle was preparing to pronounce on him, and remembered only that each syllable he spoke had been fed with his life, and was a part of him. At first he was aware of reading too fast, of slurring his words in the way that Halo reproved; then his voice freed itself and spread wings, and he seemed to hang above his creation, and to see that it was good.
For the most part he was listened to in silence, but he thought he felt a subtle current of understanding flowing between him and his audience, and now and then it escaped in a murmur of approbation that was like wind in his sails. Thus urged, he sped on. The pages seemed to take life, his figures arose and walked, and he felt that dizzy sense of power which eternally divides the creator from the rest of mankind.
As he laid his manuscript down Lady Guy’s guests gathered around him. Every one had something to say, and at once he divined that for all of them the important thing was not what he had written but the epithets they had found to apply to it. The disenchantment was immediate. “It’s the same everywhere,” he thought, recalling the literary evenings at the Tarrants’, where the flower of New York culture had praised him for the wrong reasons. He had learned then how short a way into an artist’s motives the discernment of the cleverest ever penetrated. How his visions had dwindled under their touch — how he had hated them for admiring him for the wrong reasons, and despised himself for imagining that their admiration was worth having!
Now it was just the same. These brilliant sophisticated people, who had seemed so stimulating and discriminating when they talked of other people’s books — how wide of the mark they went in dealing with his! He felt ashamed of his dissatisfaction, which resembled a voracious appetite for praise, though it was only a timid craving for such flashes of insight as Frenside and Tolby had once and again shed on his work. One or two men — not more; and not one woman. Not even Halo, he thought ungratefully. . .
Awkwardly he gathered up his pages. The cessation of the reading restored him to self-consciousness, and he wished he could have escaped at once, like an actor slipping behind the wings. But his audience was clustering about him, showering compliments, putting foolish questions, increasing his longing to be back among the inarticulate and the unself-conscious. And suddenly, as he stood there, accepting invitations and stammering thanks, the door opened and Floss Delaney came in.
He had met her only once since their chance encounter at Charlie Tarlton’s. She had urged him, then, to come and see her, and had named the day and hour; but when he presented himself at the hotel where she and her father were staying he found her absent-minded and indifferent, distracted by telephone-calls, by notes to be answered, and dress-makers to be interviewed, and abandoning him to the society of her father and Alders. He swore then that it should be the end, and assured himself that he was thankful to have had his lesson. But when Floss appeared in Lady Guy’s drawing-room he felt a difference in her before which all his resolutions crumbled; for he knew at once that she had come for him, and him only.
She glanced about her in the cool critical way which always made it seem as if any entertainment at which she appeared had been planned in her honour; and to Lady Guy’s expression of regret that she should have missed the reading, she replied lightly: “Oh, I’m glad it’s over. I never was much on books.”
Her hostess gave a slightly acid laugh. “That’s why I hadn’t meant to invite you, my dear.”
“Oh, I know; but it’s the reason why I wanted to come. I mean, your not wanting me,” said Miss Delaney, with her grave explicitness. “I always like to see what’s going on. Besides,” she added, “I’ve known Vance a good while longer than any of you people, and it would have been no use pretending to him that I understood a word of what he was reading.” She went toward him, and held out her hand. “You’ll have to make the best of it, Vanny. I came to see you and not your book.”
It was as if the crowded room had been magically emptied, and she and Vance were alone. He looked at her with enchanted eyes. Who else in the world would have known exactly what he longed to have said to him at that particular moment? Ah, this was what women were for — to feel the way to one’s heart just when the Preacher’s vanity weighed on it most heavily!
Lady Guy’s guests were pouring down the stairs to the dining-room; as Floss turned to follow she threw a smile at Vance and caught his hand. “We’ll go down together. I’m ravenous, aren’t you? Get me something to eat as quick as you can, darling.”
Vance had never seen her so radiant, so sure of herself. Her very quietness testified to her added sense of power. Her dark hair, parted in a new fashion, clasped her low forehead in dense folds which a thread of diamonds held in place, and she wore something light and shining, that seemed an accident of her own effulgence. In the crowded little dining-room the mere force of that inner shining — he didn’t know how else to describe it — drew the men from the other women, who were so much quicker and cleverer, and knew so much what to say. Vance found himself speedily separated from her by eager competitors; but he had no feeling of unrest. For this one evening he knew she belonged to him, she was not going to forget him or desert him.
And when the party broke up he found himself again at her side, found that, as a matter of course, he had her cloak on his arm, and was following her out into the thin summer night. He got into the motor beside her, and the chauffeur looked back for orders.
“Oh, how hot it was in there! I’m suffocating, aren’t you?” She lowered the front window. “We’ll drive straight down to Brambles,” she commanded, and the chauffeur nodded, apparently unsurprised. They sped away.
“Brambles? Where’s that?” Vance asked, not in the least caring to know, but merely wanting to fit the new name into his dream.
“It’s a little place father’s hired for week-ends; somewhere under Hindhead, I think they call it. You go over the top of everything. Don’t you think it would be lovely to see the sunrise from the top of a big hill? I believe we can make it; there’s not much traffic at this hour. I’m dead sick of crowds, aren’t you?” Her head sank back against the cushioned seat. “I wasn’t going to have all those people think you and I’d never done anything together but talk high~brow!” she exclaimed, with her low unexpected laugh. She turned and kissed him, and then shook him off to light a cigarette. “Don’t bother me — I just want to doze and dream.”
They flew on through empty streets, through lamplit suburbs and dark bosky lanes. They sped under park walls overhung with heavy midsummer foliage, past gates with guardian lodges just glimmering into sight, through villages asleep about their duck-ponds, their shaded commons and sturdy church-towers. The road wound and wound, then rose and breasted a wide stretch of open heath, soaring, soaring. Vance’s heart rose with it, swinging upward to the light. He sat still, clasping her to him. She had fallen asleep, and her little head lay on his shoulder. As they reached the summit of the ridge the chauffeur lowered his speed, but without stopping, and slowly they glided along above shadowy sweeping distances, vales studded with scattered trees, villages and towns with a spire or tower starting up into the light from the gray crouching roofs.
“Oh, look, look!” Vance cried out, as far away to the east the day woke in fire through trails of Channel mist.
Floss opened her eyes reluctantly. “I’m cold.” She shivered and drew her cloak about her. “We must be nearly there,” she said contentedly, and her head fell back on Vance’s shoulder. She had seen nothing, felt nothing, of the beauty and mystery of the dawn. There flashed through him the memory of another sunrise, seen from Thundertop at Halo’s side, when he and she were girl and youth, and their hearts held the same ecstasy. All that was over — such ecstasies are seldom shared, and he had grown used to tasting his sunrises and his poetry alone. But he felt the beat of life in his arms, and told himself that thus only can a man reach out of his solitude and be warm.
And now they were winding down again into the blue night of the lanes. The motor turned in at a gate and drew up before a low house among dewy flowerbeds. There was a scent of old-fashioned roses; a lily-pool slept under a gray wall. Everything had the gliding smoothness and unreality of a dream.
“I wonder if there’ll be anybody up to let us in? I telephoned; at least I think I did; but I don’t believe they expected us before daylight. Oh, boy, aren’t the roses just too heavenly? And what’s that blue stuff that smells so sweet?” Floss, suddenly awake, sprang out of the motor and darted across the wet grass to a long pool edged with lavender. She knelt and plunged her bare arms among the sleeping water-lilies. “I want to wash off London, don’t you? But I guess a hot bath would do it better.” She jumped up again and caught him by the hand. “Come along; we’ll come out again by and by, and pick millions and millions of roses. . .”
A rumpled but respectful housemaid stood at the door. Another was hurriedly lighting a fire in the chimney of the low-raftered hall; and Floss stood on the hearth, laughing and drying her wet arms.
“We didn’t expect you, Miss, not till luncheon,” the housemaid said; and Floss retorted gaily: “Oh, you’ll have to get used to that. My watch never keeps the same time as other people’s. I suppose we can have some coffee or something? And then I want to go to bed and sleep for hours — ” She stretched her arms above her head with a happy yawn.
Coffee and toast, bacon and jam, invited them to a table near the fire, and they feasted there in the early sunshine streaming through low windows hung with roses.
Floss, it appeared, had meant to come off alone for two days. She was exhausted by London hours and the London rush, she wanted to get away by herself and think; she was like that sometimes, she explained. And then, seeing Vance again at Lady Guy’s, she had said to herself how much jollier it would be to have him come with her — “and just for once pretend it’s old times. Shall we, Vanny?” She leaned to him with one of her swift caressing touches, and he sprang up and bent over her, covering her neck and shoulders with impatient kisses. But she pushed him back. “Darling — I’m fagged out and simply dead with sleep. I’m going up to my room to bathe and go to bed. They’ll give you a bed somewhere; and I daresay they can find some things of father’s for you. Come down at one and we’ll have lunch; and then there’ll be the whole heavenly afternoon . . . the English afternoons are as long as whole days, aren’t they?” She slipped through his arms, and ran singing up the stairs. The appearance of the housemaid on the upper landing prevented pursuit, and Vance, heavy with well-being, eager yet content, stood waiting before the fire. As she said, the English afternoons were as long as days — and it was hardly an hour after sunrise. He followed the housemaid sleepily to the room assigned to him.
Yes, that afternoon of late July was as long as a whole day; but to Vance it passed in a flash. She trailed down late for lunch, in a pale yellow cotton, a sun-hat on her arm, the heels of her red sandals clicking on the smooth oak stairs. They lunched in a thatched porch, its oak posts hung with clematis; and after coffee and cigarettes wandered out to explore the garden. It was full of bright midsummer flowers against dark hedges, of clumps and cones of shining holly. From an upper slope overhung by ancient Scotch firs they caught, between hills, a glimpse of the wide dappled country stretching southward. Then they came down again, and strolled along a lane to the village, with its low houses hunched about a duck-pond, and its square-towered church of slaty stone. The gardens before the houses were brimming with flowers, farm~horses waded in the pond, geese waddled in a regimental line across the common. All else slept in the peace of afternoon.
They came back and sat on a bench under an old mulberry tree, the long lily-pool before them. The air was full of the noise of midsummer insects. “Summer afternoon — summer afternoon,” Vance murmured, the words humming in his ears like insect-music.
“Darling, you mustn’t — they can see us perfectly from the windows,” Floss exclaimed, slipping from his embrace.
“Let’s go where they can’t, then,” he muttered, trying to draw her to her feet.
“No; not yet. It’s so lovely here. Tonight — ” she laid her hand on his arm. “By and by we’ll go in and have tea in the porch. They have such lovely things for tea in England.”
He looked at her without knowing what she said; now she wavered in the summer light like an apparition, now her nearness burned into his flesh.
She talked on ramblingly, in her level drawl, always about herself, telling him of her London experiences, her future plans, the difficulty she had in managing her father. “He’s getting fidgety — he wants to go home. He says he’s fed up with swell society. I guess he’s told you about that old family place down south he wants to buy back. Sounds nice from here, don’t it — an old family place! You’d think it was Windsor Castle. But I know what it would mean when he got there. A tumble-down house, and trotting-horses, and cards and racing, and everybody borrowing from him and swindling him, and the boys dropping in at all hours for drinks. And this is no time to sell out stocks, anyway . . . I’d have to go back and look after him.”
She leaned her head against her crossed arms, and Vance’s eyes followed the smooth amber of the underarms detaching themselves in an amphora-curve from her light sleeveless dress. “I’d rather get married at once than do that,” she grumbled.
But when he asked her, with a forced laugh, whom she thought of marrying, she said she hadn’t made up her mind yet which of the royal princes she’d settle on; but she’d be sure to let Vance know in time for him to choose a handsome wedding-present. “For you’re certain to make a fortune out of your books after your London success, aren’t you, Vanny? How much do you expect to make out of this new book? Forty thousand? They say Kipling gets fifty. Who looks after your money for you, darling?”
Tea was brought out to them under the mulberry, and she fell into ecstasies over the thick yellow cream, the buttered scones, the pyramid of late raspberries with a purple bloom on them. “Didn’t I tell you it would be wicked to miss anything so heavenly?” She held one of the raspberries against her neck. “Wouldn’t they make a lovely necklace — like dark coral?” She laughed at the crimson stain on her skin. But as Vance was bending over to kiss it away the parlour-maid advanced, a black-coated figure halting discreetly in her wake.
“The Vicar, please, Miss.”
“The Vicar? Mercy, what’s a Vicar?” Floss whispered hastily. “Oh, the minister of that church in the village, I suppose.” She rose with sudden cordiality. “How lovely of you to call! Yes — I’m Miss Delaney. My father’s taken this place for the summer. This is my cousin, Vance Weston — the famous American novelist. I guess you know him by name, anyhow. They’re wild about his books in London.” As she called Vance her cousin she slid a glance at him under her lashes.
The Vicar, an elderly man with a long purplish face and shy eyes, melted under her affability, and sat down on the edge of a garden chair. He looked timidly at Vance, and then away from him, as if famous novelists were too far out of his range to be communicated with. Then he remarked to Miss Delaney that the day was warm. She replied that he wouldn’t think that if he’d been reared in Euphoria; and as this statement visibly deepened his perplexity she explained that it was the name of the town where she and her cousin had been brought up. She liked the English climate better, she added, because when you did get a hot day it stood right out from the others, and you felt it must have cost a lot of money to make.
The conversation rambled on slumberously till the Vicar, with some circumlocution, put in a modest plea for his parochial organizations. Would Miss Delaney perhaps take an interest in them? The tenants of Brambles had usually allowed him to hold the annual parish festival in the gardens. To Vance’s surprise Floss listened with edifying attention, sitting in one of her quiet sculptural attitudes while the parochial plans were haltingly and laboriously set forth. It almost seemed to Vance that she was prolonging the conversation with the malicious intent of defrauding him of what was left of the day, and he got up and walked away, hoping the Vicar might take the hint and follow. But from the farther end of the orchard the intruder could be seen settling himself with deliberation before a dish of fresh scones, and another towering pile of raspberries, and Vance, exasperated, wandered out of the gate and down the lane.
When he returned the garden was empty, and he went into the low~ceilinged hall, where the light was beginning to fade, though the day was still so bright outside. From the armchair in which she lolled Floss stretched out her hand.
“Darling, why did you run away? Didn’t you think the Vicar was lovely? He told me all about School Treats and Mothers’ Meetings.” She drew Vance down and wound her arms around his neck. “I guess the girls are at supper now, and you can kiss me,” she whispered, laughing.
He knelt beside her, pressing her fast, and throbbing with her heart-beats. With other women — even with his poor little wife — golden strands of emotion had veined the sombre glow; but to hold Floss Delaney was to plunge into a dark night, a hurrying river. It was as if her blood and his were the tide sweeping them away. Everything else was drowned in that wild current.
She freed herself and leaned back. “Why, Vanny, what a baby you are! It’s like old times. Do you remember, down by the river? Do you like me better than any of those girls you’ve been going with up in London?”
“She’s mine — I must keep her!” was his only thought. But suddenly the telephone shrilled through their absorption, and Floss started to her feet. Vance tightened his hold. “Don’t go . . . don’t go . . . What does it matter? Let the thing be damned, can’t you?”
She shook him off. “No, don’t stop me. I must see what it is.” In an instant everything about her was changed: she looked alert and hard, her lips narrowed to a thin line. “I’m expecting a message,” she threw back, hurrying across the hall to the passage where the telephone hung.
Vance sank into the chair she had left; his head felt the warmth where hers had rested. He smiled at her veering moods. At that moment nothing that she said or did could break the spell; and they still had the end of the long afternoon, and then the night, before them.
Through the door into the passage he caught snatches of question and ejaculation. “Yes — yes: Floss Delaney. Yes; I’m listening. . . . Oh . . . why, yes. . . . She did? She IS? . . . Oh, gracious! . . . You’re SURE? . . . Yes . . . Yes. . . . I hear . . .” The door swung shut, and only the indistinct ups and downs of her voice came to him. He was not trying to listen; what she was saying did not interest him. His ears were full of their own music. “In a minute,” he thought, “she’ll be back . . .” His eyes closed on the vision.
“Well!” she exclaimed, suddenly standing before him. “Vance, are you asleep? Well, what on earth do you think —?” She dropped down on a stool before the hearth, and burst into a queer exultant laugh. Her eyes shone in the twilight like jewels. “Well, I know somebody who’s down and out — and serve him right too!” Her laughter continued, in short irregular bursts, as if it were an exercise she was not used to. “Spartivento! Our darling Duke’s got left! Why, yes . . . didn’t you know he thought he was going to marry Mrs. Glaisher? I supposed Alders had told you. I thought everybody knew. He made a big enough fool of himself — going round asking everybody about her investments. I warned him she’d be sure to hear about it, but he only said: ‘Well, what if she did?’ Those Italians, even if they’re the biggest swells in their own country, don’t understand our ideas of delicacy . . . Well, and what do you suppose? Alders telephones that she’s announced her engagement to the Grand Duke Basil! I had a bet with Spartivento — I told him I knew he wouldn’t pull it off. I guess I’m a hundred dollars to the good on this; or would be, if he had the money to pay me — poor old Spart!”
She threw back her head, and in a leap of firelight Vance saw the laugh issuing from her throat like stamens from a ruby flower. He felt revolted and fascinated. She was like some one starting up out of a lethargy; he had never seen her so vivid, so passionate. What could this sordid story of Mrs. Glaisher and Spartivento matter to her? He sprang up and pulled her to her feet. “What do I care about those rubbishy people? Are you trying to tell me you’re in love with the man yourself, and that you thought you’d lost him?” he burst out, pressing her wrists angrily. He knew his anger was ridiculous, yet he could not master it.
“Vance — let me go, Vance! You hurt — let me go!” She twisted furiously in his hold. “Me in love with Sparti? Well, you think of good ones! Much obliged!” He dropped her hands, and instantly she came up and laid her head on his breast. “You’re a nice boy, you are, when a girl’s carried you off with her like this, to accuse her of being in love with another fellow. Have I acted as if I was?” She lifted her heavy lids and gave him a long look. He put his arms about her, trembling with joy. “Then, darling — come.”
“Yes — yes.” She leaned on him a moment; then she drew back softly. “We can’t behave exactly as if there was nobody but us in the house, can we? They’ll be bringing in dinner soon, and I want to go to my room first, and have a rest. I’m beginning to feel that we started our elopement somewhere about three A.M. — aren’t you?” She rested her warm sleepy gaze on his. “He was cross with me, was he, because he thought I wanted mother Glaisher’s leavings? Looks that way, don’t it? Why, I guess I could have bought her Grand Duke for myself easily enough if I’d wanted to! What I DO want, the worst way, is a hot bath, and a good sleep before dinner.” She slipped out of his arms, and paused half way up the stairs to wave back at him. “So long, darling!”
Well — if she chose to play her old game, let her. Vance smiled with the security of the happy lover. Even her childish excitement over the Glaisher-Spartivento episode amused him. It was a mind in which everything was exactly on the same level of importance. Hadn’t he discovered that long ago? One didn’t ask for intelligence or sensibility in women of her sort. He felt light, detached, pleased with his own objectivity. What danger was there in wasting a few hours over her when his judgment remained so unaffected?
He strolled out into the garden. The lengthening shadows seemed to have brought out new scents in the still air. He looked back and saw a curtain sway out from an upper window — hers no doubt. His heart stirred; the warmth of her beauty seemed to envelop him.
He went out of the gate, and roamed through a network of hushed lanes. The softness of the air entered into his veins. He met a farm-wagon driving homeward with its load; the hot flanks of the big slow-footed horses brushed him as they passed. Farther on, he heard the soft padding of a flock of sheep, and scrambled up in the bracken to let them pass. Mounting upward he reached a stretch of open moor, where the clear daylight hung as if perpetually suspended, and threw himself down in the rough heather.
As he lay there his mind wandered back over the day. From that height it seemed to lie spread out before him, clear yet distant, as if its incidents had befallen some one else. Queer that the girl’s power over him could co-exist with such lucidity! An hour or two ago everything had been blurred in his brain; now each fantastic episode detached itself, standing out in beauty or absurdity. The absurdity, of course, was provided by Floss’s excitement at the report of Mrs. Glaisher’s betrothal. Humiliating as the admission was, Vance had to own that the news had instantly put him out of her mind. And why, unless, as he had jokingly suggested, it gave her the hope of capturing Spartivento? He had joked at the moment; but as the scene came back to him he winced. Yet why was he suddenly measuring poor Floss by standards he had never before thought of applying to her? He had always known that money, flattery and excitement were all she cared for; to make her forget them for a moment was probably the most he could hope. Luckily, he reflected, he was still clear-sighted enough not to sentimentalize the situation.
He sprang up with a laugh. “Well, it’s up to me now. If I can’t get her away from the other fellow I’m no good!” He began to scramble down the hillside in the gathering darkness as if he had been racing his rival back to Floss’s feet.
When he got down into the shade of the lanes, he was bewildered by the sign-posts with names of unknown villages, and taking a wrong turning, wasted half an hour in getting back to the point he had missed. Under the thick branches the velvet dusk was beginning to gather, altering the look of things; but as soon as he was on the right trail again he began to run, and before long he saw the first roofs of the village, and beyond them the trees of Brambles. He pushed open the white gate. The low windows still stood open; their welcome streamed out across the lawn. Vance ran toward them like a breathless schoolboy. She might belong to Spartivento tomorrow, but tonight she was his. He gave a happy laugh.
At the door he met the parlour-maid who had received them that morning. With her black dress and afternoon cap she seemed to have regained her professional superiority, and he fancied she looked at him coldly.
“Oh, it’s you, sir?” She seemed surprised. “Miss Delaney thought you’d taken the train back.”
Vance returned her look blankly. “The train —?”
“But she said, if not,” the parlour-maid continued with manifest disapproval, “we was to serve dinner for you just as if she’d been here.”
Vance continued to stare at her. At first her words conveyed no meaning to him; then his heart gave a dizzy drop. “What’s the matter? Isn’t she coming down? Is she — I suppose she’s too tired?”
The parlour-maid stared in her turn. She did so with an icy respectfulness. “Down to dinner, sir? Miss Delaney left for London an hour ago.”
Vance stood motionless. The dizziness seemed to have got into his throat: it was so dry that he could hardly speak. He repeated: “London?”
The parlour-maid pursed up her lips and drew aside to let him enter. “You’ll dine here, then, sir?”
“Left — but why did she leave? What’s happened?”
“I couldn’t say, sir. I was to give you this if you came back.” She took a note from the table, and Vance carried it to the light and tore it open.
“Don’t be cross, Vanny. I’ve had a hurry call back to London and couldn’t wait for you to come in. Didn’t we have a lovely day? The girl will tell you about the trains. Love and goodbye. Floss.
“P.S. No use trying to see me. I’m not going to be in town for some days.”
He read the note over slowly. Then he crumpled it up and stood looking straight ahead of him. He thought: “Well, I must go and pack up my things”; then he remembered that he had come down only that morning, and had brought nothing with him. That gave him a fugitive sense of relief.
“Which way is the station?”
The maid explained that it was about a mile beyond the village, and that you took the first turn to the left. “But there’s no train now till eleven.”
He had already turned away and was walking down the drive. He swung along, the gravel crunching under his feet in the silence. Now he had passed the pool, then skirted the deep shadows of the holly-garden; now the gate glimmered white before him. He went out of it and turned toward the village. It was nearly a mile away, and the dusky lane that led to it was deserted. A little owl called wistfully in the twilight. He walked on to the village, across the common, past the duck-pond and out onto the road that led to the station. That road too was deserted.
Vance walked along at a good pace until he reached the last turn before the station; then he sat down under the hedgerow and began to cry.