Halo Tarrant was at work in the garden of the pink house. The seeds she had sown in the spring — phlox, zinnia, larkspur, poppy — contended in a bonfire of bloom. As she knelt over it, weeding, snipping and staking, her shoulder-blades ached and the afternoon sun burnt through her broad hat-brim and lay like burning lead on the nape of her neck.
She liked the muscular fatigue and the slight dizziness caused by the sun; liked, at the end of each long silent day, to stagger back into the empty house so stupefied by heat and labour that she hardly knew where she was, and sleep came down on her like a fit of drunkenness. In that way the days and the weeks passed, and the calendar had almost ceased to exist — except when she started up at the postman’s ring. She supposed she would never be able to cure herself of that start, or of knowing instinctively when letters were due, though she was so careful to leave her wrist-watch in her drawer upstairs.
She had heard from Vance only twice since he had left — a telegram on arriving (“Everything fine quartered with Tolby”), and about a week later a short word, in which he apologized for haste and brevity, explaining that his head was surging with new ideas, that he had settled down at Tolby’s to a long spell of work, and that she mustn’t mind if he didn’t write often. She didn’t mind at all — at first. She was too thankful to know that he had got back into the creative mood; there could be no better proof that he was rid of morbid memories of Chris Churley. But gradually, as the days passed, and the silence closed in on her, she felt herself too cruelly shut out from his adventures and experiences. Not a word of how the work was going, no acknowledgement of her letters and telegrams (all so studiously cheerful and comrade-like), no hint of regret at her not being with him, no briefest allusion to Oubli — or to herself! He had shed all that, had entered on another phase. Was it just the intoxication of the return to creative activity, of contact with new people, tapping fresh sources of admiration (there were times when he liked that more than he was willing to acknowledge), or was it — was it a new woman?
She remembered her agony of jealousy in Paris, when he had vanished so unaccountably for three or four days, and had then reappeared with a stack of manuscript. She was not going to let herself suffer such torture again. It had been unwarranted then, and would probably prove to be so now. From time to time he needed a change of place and people to set the creative engine going: was she still narrow-minded enough to grudge it him?
No; only the days were so long, and in his place she would have found it so easy to write a short letter now and then . . . Well, men were different. She couldn’t help jumping each time she heard the postman’s step; but she had forced herself not to count the days since the one letter had come, and really, thanks to hard work and stupefying sun, she now no longer remembered whether it was days or weeks since she had heard from him.
She paused in her work, and looked attentively at one of the flowers. How exquisitely imagined, how subtly wrought! What patient and elaborate artifice had gone to the inventing of its transient loveliness! Not so long ago she had scattered seed in little boxes, and later, dibble in hand, had moved each tiny plant to its own place. Other seeds she had sown in the beds, in even furrows, and watched the plants sprout through the light soil. Between them now, under their spreading foliage, the brown leaves of the spring bulbs were decaying and turning into mould. Season followed season in blossom and decline; the fresh leaf drooped and fell, the young face of the flower withered and grew old, the endless function unrolled its cruel symbolism unheeded by those it might have warned.
“If only it wasn’t for the caterpillars!” Halo groaned, lifting a riddled leaf against the light. She knew well enough what the caterpillars symbolized too: the mean cares, the gnawing anxieties, that crawl over the fair face of life. She stood up and stamped vindictively on a writhing green body. And then there were the seeds that failed — and the young shoots the slugs devoured . . . To the general rhythm of rise and fall the heart might have adapted itself; but the accidental ravages, snail-tracks, caterpillar slime, the disenchantment and failure . . . “I suppose I’ve been too long alone,” she mused, suddenly sick of her work and her thoughts.
Her solitude was self-imposed; for though the Pension Britannique and the little cluster of villas belonging to the pre-war colony were, as usual, closed for the summer, life was active on the farther side of the town, where the long sand beach, once so lonely, had begun to be fringed with tin-roofed “dancings”, cheap restaurants and mushroom bungalows. Halo could once have found plenty of entertainment among the literary and artistic Bohemians who were already populating this new settlement. If Vance had been there it would have amused her to swim and drink cocktails, to sun~bathe and discuss life and the arts with these boisterous friendly people who flashed by her in rattling Citro?ns or strowed the sands with naked silhouettes. But by herself it was different. Paris had cured her of artistic Bohemia, and as soon as she was alone she felt how deeply rooted in her were the old instincts of order and continuity. In Vance too they existed — had they not first drawn him to her out of the sordid confusion of his life with Laura Lou? But he was young (she had long since discarded the epithet in thinking of herself), he was impressionable and inexperienced, above all he had the artist’s inexhaustible appetite for “material”. What more natural than that he should still crave what for her had lost its savour? “If you wanted to do the same thing every day at the same hour for the rest of your life,” she told herself, “you ought to have married a teller in a bank, or a statistician who had to live within a five minutes’ walk of the British Museum, and not a live-wire novelist.” But the argument, from frequent reiteration, had lost its force. “We are what we are,” she thought, “and that’s the end of it. At least I suppose this time it’s the end. . .”
She heard a step in the path, and her heart gave a jump. It was not the postman’s hour; she needed no watch to tell her that. But it might be a telegram, or a registered letter — if he had something extra-important to tell her — or it might even . . .
She turned quickly, and the garden-scissors dropped from her hand. It was over two years since she had seen that short thick figure, always in a dark “business suit” of the same citified cut, and the blunt Socratic face with its shrewd sceptical eyes guarded by old~fashioned American pince-nez. Over two years? A life-time! George Frenside came to her out of a dead world.
“Frenny — oh, Frenny!” She ran to him with outstretched arms. The sense of her loneliness rushed over her; the words choked in her throat. Her work-roughened hands sank into her friend’s, and they stood and looked at each other.
“Well, it looks to me like the same old Halo,” said Frenside with his short laugh; and she slipped her hand through his arm and drew him up the path to the house.
She was too surprised and excited to ask him whence or how he had come. It was only afterward that she remembered, vaguely, his alluding to an unexpected holiday in Europe, and to his having been unable to notify her in advance because his plans depended on those of a friend with whom he was making a dash to the Mediterranean. “So I just jumped over from Marseilles on the chance of finding you,” she remembered his ending. She did not ask his friend’s name; her mind could not fix itself on what he was telling her. She felt only the comforting warmth of his nearness, the nearness of an old friend whose memories were so interwoven with hers that his voice and smile and turns of phrase started up countless fragments of experience, scenes of her nursery days, of her girlhood with its fervours and impatiences, and the cold gray years of marriage. Through all those phases his shrewd eyes had followed her; he was the one being who had understood her revolts and her submissions, her vain sacrifices and her final clutch at happiness. To see him sitting there in the half-darkened room, his head slanted back against the shabby armchair, his short legs stretched out before him, his everlasting cigar between his lips, was to become again the Halo of Eaglewood and New York, and to measure the distance between that eager ghost and her new self. “I wonder which is the ghostliest,” she thought, as she bent over to mix a lemon-squash for her friend.
He was waiting for her to speak, to give an account of herself; but how could she? She had not put her spiritual house in order, she hardly knew what she was feeling or whither she was drifting. Solitude had woven its magic passes about her, pouring a blessed numbness into her veins. And now, at this sudden contact with the past, every nerve awoke.
“So you’ve liked it pretty well down here?” Frenside asked, looking up at her as he took the glass.
She rallied her scattered wits. “Oh, immensely. You see, I was here in old times with father and mother, and always wanted to come back. And we had the luck to find this darling little house — don’t you think it’s a darling? Did you notice the big mulberry at the door, and the flagging around it? That was the old threshing~floor. They used to make oil here too. Wouldn’t you like to come down and see the old oil-press in the cellar?” She chattered on, smothering him in trivialities, yet knowing all the while that he would presently emerge from them as alert as ever, and as determined to have her tell him whatever he wanted to know.
“Thanks. But I’m too well off here. I don’t think I’ll go down and see the oil-press. I really came to see you.”
“Oh, ME?” She laughed. “There’s not much novelty about me.”
“I didn’t come to see a new Halo. I came to find out if the old one survived.”
“Survived what?” she said captiously.
“Why, the storm and stress.”
She gave a little laugh. “Dear Frenny, you’re incorrigibly romantic! Being happy is much simpler than people think.”
“Well, most of us have to take it on hearsay, so it’s excusable if we’re misinformed. You might give a poor devil some lights on the subject.”
She laughed again, but found no answer. Under the banter she felt his thoughts searching hers, and she was frightened, and for the first time in her life wanted to shut him out, and could not. To break the silence she said: “But at least you’ll stay till tomorrow, won’t you? I can make you very comfortable in Vance’s room.”
“I wish I could, my dear; but I’ve got to get back to Marseilles. We’re off tomorrow.”
There was another silence. Then he went on: “You said: ‘Vance’s room’. He’s away, then?”
Suddenly she became fluent. “Oh, yes; I forgot to tell you; he’s in London. I packed him off to see his publishers and talk to people about his new book. He’s got a big thing under way; you’ll like it better than ‘The Puritan in Spain’. I know without asking that you didn’t care much about that. It had a good deal of success . . . but that’s no reason . . . This new book is going to be — well, rather immense in its way: a sort of primitive torso. A fragment of experience dug up out of the sub-conscious. . .” She felt that she was talking into the void, and stopped. “But it’s no use telling you, when you have to take it all on faith.”
“But you believe in it yourself?”
“Of course I do!” she cried with angry fervour.
Frenside seemed not to notice the energy of her reply. The worst thing about talking with him was that he never did notice the screens you hung up in front of things.
“Has he been away long?”
“Oh, no; only a few weeks. I can’t remember just how long . . . It’s too hot here to remember dates . . . He’ll be so sorry when he hears he’s missed you.”
“And you haven’t felt lonely down here all by yourself?”
She paused a moment; then she said quietly: “I stopped being lonely two years ago.”
“I see.” It was the first time he had taken any notice of her answers. For a while he was silent, busy with the relighting of his cigar. After a while he said: “Why didn’t you go to London with him? You could have helped him to find his way about.”
“He doesn’t need to have any one find his way about for him. And I hate that sort of life.”
“Seeing intelligent people, and breathing in ideas? You didn’t use to.” He threw his cigar impatiently onto the hearth. He was visibly embarrassed and irresolute. “Look here, child; you and I used to say things straight out, no matter how unpalatable they were, and this fencing’s a waste of time. I wish to God you and Weston were married; that’s what I came to tell you.”
The blood rushed to her forehead; she hoped that in the shaded light he would not notice it. “It’s so dear of you, Frenny. But you know as well as anybody why we’re not.”
“I know Tarrant has blundered. Weston went to see him; and I’m afraid that didn’t help.”
She lifted her head quickly. “It ought to have!”
“Certainly, in an ideal world. It was a fine gesture. But you must take into account men’s passions and weaknesses.”
She was silent for a moment; then she said wearily: “If you knew how little it all seems to matter now.”
“It ought to matter, child. At least if I understand the case. You ought to be Weston’s wife.”
“Oh, Frenny, don’t go on!” She started to her feet, the need of avowal overmastering her. The frozen depths were broken up; she must lay her troubled heart in a friend’s hands. “You see — it’s not as simple as I said. Being happy, I mean. That was bluff.” She gave a faint laugh. “I used to think marrying him would be the solution. I used to think: if only Lewis would set me free! But now I don’t know — I don’t seem to care. I suppose it’s too late; or perhaps it never would have made any difference. Perhaps I wasn’t meant for storm and stress, though I was so sure they were my element!” She sat down on the arm of his chair and hid her face, while her old friend’s arm embraced her.
“I’ll tell you the only thing that’s too late in this business,” Frenside began abruptly. “It’s your marriage. We most of us need a frame-work, a support — the maddest lovers do. Marriage may be too tight a fit — may dislocate and deform. But it shapes life too; prevents growing lopsided, or drifting. I know you’ve both felt that, I know it’s not your fault if you’re still at loose ends. I’ve done my best — ”
She bent down and pressed her lips on his frowning forehead. “Frenny, my darling friend — don’t go on.”
“How can I help it? I know it hurts; but let’s have the bandage off — do!”
She sprang up. “If you mean talking of ways and means, planning to coax Lewis — I forbid you! I forbid you to say a word to any one!”
Frenside took off his glasses, rubbed them, put them on again, and examined her anxiously. “Take care, Halo! Don’t defy opportunity. She’s a resentful jade.”
“What opportunity?”
“The fact of Tarrant’s realizing he’s been in the wrong, and wanting to make amends — as soon as possible.”
Halo gave a short laugh. This was so like life that she somehow felt she had always been expecting it. “I suppose you’re his ambassador?”
“Well, I suppose so — with the proviso of being disavowed if I don’t succeed.”
She threw back her head and closed her eyes as the possibilities he suggested went rushing through her.
Then she looked at him through eyes screwed up with amusement. “How you must have hated the job!”
“Not for you.”
“Good old Frenny! Isn’t it enough that I’m endlessly grateful?”
“No, it’s not.”
“Well, then — ” She paused. “Fren, you remember that old story we used to like, of Firdusi and the gifts from the Sultan? They were magnificent when they finally came; but he was dead.”
Frenside nodded. He took off his glasses, and wiped them again. “Yes; but it’s not really a good allegory, because we never DO know when we’re dead. I thought I was, years ago; and here I am aching all over again with your aches.”
“Oh, my aches are not bad enough for that. Only, it’s no use your pleading my cause with Lewis now.”
“I’m not here for that. I’m here to plead Tarrant’s cause with you. He regrets his attitude; he’s honestly sorry to have created such a situation for you. That’s what I’m here to say.”
She threw herself down on the divan, and sat for a while with her face hidden. She no longer wanted to conceal anything from Frenside, but she did not quite know how to put her feeling into words. “Even if he were to give me my freedom tomorrow I shouldn’t tell Vance,” she murmured.
“Not tell him — for God’s sake, why?”
“Because the only thing I care for is HIS freedom. I want him to feel as free as air.”
“H’m — free as air. The untrammelled artist. Well, I don’t believe it’s the ideal state for the artist, any more than it is for the retail grocer. We all of us seem to need chains — and wings.”
She laughed. “All right — only in Vance’s case I’d rather be the wing-giver.”
“How do you know you’re not chaining him up all the tighter? The defenceless woman, and all that. If you were his wife, you and he’d be on a level.”
“The defenceless woman? Bless you, he never thinks of me as that! He thinks only of his work — and his genius.”
“Well, you wanted him to, didn’t you?”
“Of course I did. And I want it still — with all my soul!”
“Then settle your own situation first. Let me tell Tarrant you’ll bring proceedings at once. I can almost promise he won’t make any difficulty.”
She mused again, something deep down in her still resisting this belated charity from either husband or lover. “It would be such a mockery. . .”
“What would be?”
“The whole business. If I had my divorce my people would expect me to marry Vance. And I can’t — I can’t. If there were a divorce I couldn’t prevent his hearing of it, and if he did he’d feel he ought to marry me — and that might ruin his life, and ruin mine too.” She forced a faint smile. “If being happy is simple, being happy with an artist isn’t. It’s been a beautiful adventure, but, to adopt your bold metaphor, I want it to end before the wings turn into chains.”
She stood up, and Frenside also got to his feet. They stood and looked at each other like people signalling out of hearing across a hurrying river. At length Frenside spoke. “There’s one thing more. You say Weston doesn’t worry about your situation — doesn’t think of it at all. Yet he did his best to get Tarrant to yield about the divorce.”
She returned to the present with a start. Was it possible, she thought, that Vance had done that? It sent a flush of triumph through her — yet how far away and improbable it all seemed!
“Oh, yes. He did it because some one had spoken to him rudely about me. But he forgot all about it when I pretended I didn’t care.”
“Ah — you pretended?”
She shrugged. “What’s loving but pretending?”
Frenside stood looking at her with angry compassionate eyes. “My poor girl — if it’s come to that, why not crown the affair by the biggest pretense of all? Let Weston think you want to be free. He won’t make any difficulty, will he?”
Halo stood silent, her head sunk, her eyes fixed on the ground. This cruel surgeon of a Frenside — how straight he had probed to the central pain!
“Let him think I want to leave him?”
“It’s the logical conclusion, isn’t it? The one towering generosity that will justify the rest?”
She stood before him motionless. He was speaking to her with her own inward voice, but she could not bear the words when another spoke them. “He may be back now — any day,” she brought out.
“And then you’ll begin the patching-up business all over again?”
“I suppose so.”
Frenside was silent. The travelling-clock on Vance’s desk ticked with sudden sonority, and she thought: “For how many weeks now have I wound it up for him every Saturday?”
Frenside seemed to hear it also. He pulled out his watch. “By Jove, I’ve got to be off. My taxi’s waiting down by the hotel. I’ve just got time to make my train.”
She stood rooted to the ground, feeling that with the least word or movement her great loneliness would break in tears. He held out his hand. “I hate to leave you here, child.”
“Thank you, Fren. But I’ve got to stay.”
He turned away, and she listened to his short steps rapping their way down the stairs and along the path to the gate.
When Frenside had left her Halo tried to collect her thoughts; but his visit had shaken her too deeply. He had roused her out of her self-imposed torpor into a state of hyper-acute sensibility, and detaching her from the plight in which she was entangled had compelled her to view it objectively. What was her present relation to Vance — what was their future together likely to be? They had never quarrelled since the day at Granada when she had reproached him for having gone to the party from which the old Marquesa had excluded her. A mere honeymoon flurry; and since then there had been unbroken outward harmony between them. Yet how far they were from each other — much farther than the couples who quarrelled and kissed again once a week, and to whom quarrelling and kissing were all in the day’s work. It was her fault, no doubt. She had wanted the absolute — and life had handed her one of its usual shabby compromises, and she had not known what to do with it.
She shivered at the recollection of Frenside’s advice. Perhaps, as he said, true magnanimity would consist in leaving Vance; but she had not strength for it, and the only alternative was the patching~up business, as he called it. The patching-up would have to begin all over again, and this time with little faith, on her part, in the durability of the repairs. Was it not unfair to Vance, and deteriorating to herself, to cling to a relation that had grown less real than the emptiest marriage? Ah, marriage — she understood now! The maddest of us need a frame-work; perhaps the maddest most of all . . . Well, what of it? Vance would marry her as soon as she was free; and an hour ago she had received Tarrant’s offer to release her!
At the thought all her doubts and scruples seemed like so much morbid hair-splitting. Why should she and Vance not marry and take their chance with other ordinary people? They might have a child, and then there would be something about which to build the frame~work. They would become a nucleus, their contradictory cravings would meet in a common purpose, their being together and belonging to each other would acquire a natural meaning. Her heart swelled with the emotion she had suppressed during her talk with Frenside — the healing tears ran over.
She sat down and wrote out a telegram to Vance. Then she tore it up, and wrote another: this time to Tolby. Vance had not answered any of her previous letters and telegrams, he might not answer this one; it was safer to apply to his friend. “Fear have lost a letter from Vance. If no longer with you please send me his present address.” She winced at the pretense of the lost letter; but what did it matter? Her one object was to have news.
She carried her telegram to the post office, and as she walked along the glaring sea-front, past the sun-bathers sprawling on the sand, and the light boats skimming before the breeze that always sprang up toward sunset, the familiar scene grew suddenly gay and inviting. How natural that these young people should be enjoying it all! She felt young again herself, her heart beat in tune with theirs. As long as one was alert and sound, and could show a fresh face to one’s glass, the world was a holiday place after all. Tomorrow she was sure to hear from Vance. . .
The morrow, however, brought only a note from Frenside, despatched from the station at Marseilles. Apparently, during his visit, he had told her all his plans, though she had remembered nothing of the first part of their talk except that he had given her good news of her parents, and had said something about a trip to Corsica or Sicily — she didn’t know which. What an unnatural monster she must have become, to have ears and memory only for her own concerns! She had been brooding over them too long alone.
Frenside gave an address at Palermo, and added that he would be returning in a month to Paris, where, if she wished to write, she could do so in care of his bankers. She hastily noted both addresses, and wondered sadly if she would ever see him again. Suddenly it occurred to her that he was probably travelling with Tarrant, and that the latter might have been at Marseilles awaiting her answer, or even — who knows? — at the hotel at Oubli. She flushed up at the thought; but it was soon crowded out by anxious speculations as to Tolby’s reply. That evening seemed the longest and loneliest she had spent since Vance had gone. . .
The next morning Tolby’s telegram came. It read: “Vance left England a fortnight ago. Gave me no address. Sorry.” She sat and puzzled over it till her eyes ached, as if it had been a cipher of which she had forgotten the key. “Left England — left England: no address.” He had vanished into space again, and this time for how long? Had it never occurred to him that in his absence something might happen to her: that she might fall ill, or be suddenly called home by illness in her family, or, for one reason or another, need his presence — or at least require to communicate with him?
Idle questions! The truth was that he had simply forgotten her. But it is almost unbearable to be forgotten. The victim invents a thousand pretexts rather than admit that one fact. Halo smiled at her own credulity. The night Vance had gone off to Fontainebleau without telling her that he was leaving she had imagined that he might have had an accident, had thought of applying to the police to have him traced. Luckily common-sense had prevailed on that occasion, and she meant that it should on this. She would simply wait and see. But meanwhile Frenside’s counsel returned to her. This man whom she could no longer make happy, who needed her so little that he could disappear for weeks without giving her a sign — how much longer was she going to burden him with her unwanted devotion? Had they not reached the hour for a magnanimous farewell?
She turned the problem over and over, too agitated to examine it, too possessed by it to think of anything else. She tried to rehearse the farewell scene (or the farewell letter — since there was no knowing when he would come back); she tried to visualize her solitary return to America, her meeting with her parents, the painful effort of adapting herself to the new lonely life before her: a woman without a lover, without a husband, without a child. But her imagination shrank from the picture, and she lay all day on the divan in Vance’s study, her mind a formless darkness.
Toward evening came the postman’s ring, and she dashed out before the bonne could extricate herself from her saucepans. Letters? Yes, there were letters. Several for Vance, as usual: from publishers, from news agencies, from his tailor, his dentist. But none for her from Vance. She took the letters up to the study and added them to the pile already awaiting him. He had asked her to forward only his personal correspondence and that was small: most of the letters were obviously concerned with his work, and these lay in orderly stacks on his desk. Many of the envelopes bore the names of newspaper-cutting agencies. Vance subscribed to none, but for that very reason they bombarded him with appeals and tempted him with specimen paragraphs. She could never bear to be long idle, and it occurred to her to go through these envelopes, and select any cuttings that might interest him, though she knew he would probably pitch them all in the scrap-basket without a glance.
She went through them one by one, and gradually they built up a picture of his London life: a much more worldly one than she had imagined. While she had thought of him as chained to “Colossus” he had been ranging from Mayfair to Bloomsbury, spending his week-ends at fashionable country-houses, and even condescending to let himself be interviewed. She smiled at the change in him. The Vance she thought she knew would have loathed such publicity. . .
She was more familiar than he with the intricate pattern of social London, and it began to amuse her to trace his ascent from the small chafing-dish parties with Tolby’s painters and art-critics to Lady Pevensey’s gilded promiscuities, the gathering of the elect at Charlie Tarlton’s, and the final apotheosis of the reading at Lady Guy Plunder’s. Halo knew all about Lady Guy Plunder and her rivalry with Charlie Tarlton. She thought how happy Vance’s publishers would be at the battle the two were waging over the new celebrity. How funny to think of Vance as a fashionable novelist! He had read fragments of “Colossus” at Lady Guy’s; the party had apparently been given for that purpose. Halo found an account of it in one of the “society” papers, ran over the list of names, all well-known, many distinguished, and lit on the closing paragraph: “Among Mr. Weston’s most enthusiastic hearers on this very exclusive and privileged occasion was his lovely compatriot Miss Floss Delaney, whose father, Colonel Harrison Delaney of Virginia, has lately bought back the old Delaney estate, ‘Court Pride’, on the James River. Miss Delaney, who was a childhood friend of the brilliant novelist’s, had the luck to carry him off after the party to Brambles, the enchanting little place in Surrey which Colonel Delaney, who is said to lavish millions on his only child, has hired for her for the summer. Many were the rival hostesses who envied her for capturing the author of ‘Colossus’ for a week-end.”
She laid the paper down. Suddenly, among the other names, familiar but indifferent, this one glared out at her. Floss Delaney —? Halo blinked and tried to see the syllables more clearly. Her mind ran back over the rambling distances of Vance’s early recollections. He had poured them out so profusely during the first days of their friendship in New York, when talking with her was his one refuge from loneliness, that she did not immediately connect any definite association with this particular name. Then, abruptly, a memory woke. Floss Delaney: it was the name of the girl he had been infatuated with as a boy, the girl he had surprised one day with his disreputable old grandfather, at the spot where his own trysts with her had been held. This girl . . . this vile creature who had given him his first bitter insight into life . . . How his voice had choked as he stammered out the shabby tale! Yes; it must be the same. It was difficult to account for her sudden transformation into a fashionable London figure; but Halo remembered that the girl’s father was said to have come of a good southern family, and she also recalled that Vance, returning from Euphoria just before he and she had left for Europe, had brought back the fairy-tale of the Delaneys’ sudden rise to wealth. Halo had been too much absorbed in her own happiness to pay much heed at the time; but gradually the story came back to her, even to Lorin Weston’s resentful comment on it: “And now the Delaneys have gone to Europe to blow it all in Gay Paree!”
Yes; it all fitted into the pattern. Floss Delaney — Vance’s “childhood friend”! The idea was revolting. While Halo was wearing out her soul for him he was spending his days in such company! She felt as if she were puzzling over the actions of a stranger. The Vance she loved would have recoiled with disgust from such an encounter. It was bitter to think that these were the companions he had chosen, the people who had been sharing his pleasures, listening to his talk, perhaps receiving his confidences and laughing at his inflammable enthusiasms, while she, who had given him her life, sat alone, forgotten, as utterly cut off from him as if she had never had any share in his existence.
The crowning pretense! Yes: Frenside was right; it was time to make it. She got up, and went into her own room. She would pack her things and go — it was so easy: perhaps easier than she had imagined. Why not begin at once? She would wind up everything decently: pay off the servant, put the house in order, leave the key with the agent — the old instinct of order reasserted itself even at such a moment — and then pile her bags into a taxi, and drive to the station. It was all perfectly easy. . .
She stood looking about, wondering how to begin. Her mind was too tired — she couldn’t think. After all it might be simpler to write. She would certainly have to leave a letter; she would not appear to retaliate by walking off without a word. And it might be less difficult to take the final step after she had put her reasons on paper. . .
She went back to Vance’s desk and sat with her pen suspended over a sheet of paper. Tell Vance that she was leaving him? It was unthinkable! It would be easier to go away than to explain her going. She would pack, and take the train to Paris, and just before sailing she would leave a letter at his bank. She must get away before her courage failed her . . . She crossed the room to the bookshelves where Vance’s few works were ranged, and drew out the volume of short stories containing the tale he had written after the discovery of Floss Delaney’s betrayal. “One Day” — Halo remembered the evening when Tarrant had brought it home, and she had read it in a rush, her heart beating at the thought that Lewis had discovered a new genius. Now the crudeness and awkwardness of the story struck her; but she was mastered again by the power of the presentation. Yes — it must have happened exactly in that way. And how he must have suffered! There were phrases like the cries of a trapped animal . . . She shut her eyes, unable to read on. He had suffered thus agonizingly — as she was suffering now — but by pouring his suffering into a story he had been able to cleanse his soul of it. Ah, happy artists! No wonder they were careless of other people’s wounds, when they were born with the power to heal their own so easily. . .
She must have fallen asleep. The room was dark when she awoke, roused by a sound in the still house. The book fell to the floor and she sat upright, brushing back the hair from her forehead.
A ray of light was advancing up the stairway; behind it she heard the bonne clumping up, lamp in hand.
“Monsieur wants to know if Madame will have dinner out-of-doors — there’s a moon. . .”
“Monsieur?” Halo stared confusedly at the woman, whose coarse good~natured features were grotesquely foreshortened by the upward slant of the light. To Halo the goblin figure seemed a part of her dream. What was it saying to her? Monsieur —?
“Monsieur got back an hour ago. When I told him that Madame seemed very tired and had fallen asleep he said not to disturb her, and he’d go first for a swim. But he’ll be back now, hungry for his dinner, so I had to wake Madame . . . There’s not much in the house, but I think I can manage a soufflé. Shall I carry the table out into the garden — yes?”
She put the lamp on the desk and clumped down again to her kitchen. Halo continued to sit on the edge of the divan, only half wakened out of her exhausting sleep. She got to her feet at last, looking about her vaguely. Then she lifted the lamp and carried it into her bedroom. She put it down on a corner of her dressing-table, and peered at her reflection in the glass. Her face was almost as grotesquely illuminated as the servant’s; her eyes looked swollen with sleep, her cheeks drawn and sallow. “I’m an old woman,” she thought. “How can he ever care for me again?”
She heard a familiar call from the garden. “Halo — Ha-LO!” and jumped up, quivering, one happy heart-beat from head to foot.
“Oh, Vanny! Coming!”
Vance stood in the little study and looked about him. He had been gone only a few weeks, yet he felt like a grown man revisiting the house he has lived in as a child, and finding that the rooms he thought he had remembered so vividly are unfamiliar, and different from his recollection. He looked at Halo, and she too seemed strange. Had she always been so pale, with such shadows in the hollows of her lids? At the corners of her mouth there were little lines he had never before noticed.
“You haven’t been ill, have you?” he asked with sudden anxiety.
“Ill? No. Do I look so? I suppose the heat’s been rather wearing . . . But I loved it,” she added, as though to quiet his fears.
“But Sidonie said you’d been lying down all day, and that you don’t eat anything.”
“What nonsense! She’s bored because you haven’t been here to devour her bouillabaisse and sea-urchins.”
Vance continued to scrutinize her. “I oughtn’t to have left you so long alone,” he said, as if he were speaking to himself.
“Why, Van, how absurd! You needed the change — and I wanted to stay. Now tell me all about ‘Colossus’.”
It was curious, how strange their voices sounded; his own no less then hers. He seemed to be moving in a mist of strangeness, through which he barely discerned her, remote and ghostly, though his arm was about her and her shoulder against his. “This closeness,” he thought desperately, “I suppose it’s the only real distance. . .”
She drew him toward the stairs. “Come, darling, let’s go down. Sidonie has put the table outside, under the old mulberry.”
“Under the mulberry?” At the word he was again in the garden at Brambles, assailed by the rush of images against which he had been battling for three desperate weeks. He felt tired, bruised, inarticulate. Would he ever again learn to fit into this forgotten life?
“Yes, come; it’ll be terribly jolly,” he agreed, his arm in hers.
She leaned close, her face lifted, wrinkling her eyes in the way he liked. “Oh, Van, you ARE glad to be back?”
“Glad? You old darling!” They went down into the garden together.
During his miserable wanderings since he had left England he had imagined that the healing springs would flow as soon as he got back to the pink house. There were days when the longing to be there, when the blind animal craving for Halo’s nearness, was so strong that only a vague sense of shame and unworthiness kept him away. He had wanted, in some dim way, to suffer more before he brought his sufferings to be comforted. And now he and she were sitting together under the mulberry in the moonlight, the lights of the little house blinking out at them, the old whisper of the sea in their ears, and he was not really there, and the woman opposite to him was as strange and far away as the scene.
The mere fact that she was so patient with him, didn’t nag, didn’t question, didn’t taunt, somehow added to the sense of her remoteness. Did that curious tolerance make her less woman, less warm to the touch? He had been bracing himself for a struggle, holding himself on the defensive, dreaming of reproaches that should end in tears and kisses; and her quiet unquestioning tenderness was like a barrier. “I shall be better when I get back to work,” he thought.
After dinner they sat on in the garden, under the great warm moon, and fragments of talk floated between them on a dividing sea of silence. At length she asked him if he wasn’t tired, and he said he was, and got up to help her carry the table in under the glazed porch. Sidonie had gone to bed, and Halo stayed below to clear away the dishes while Vance went up to the study. When he reentered it alone the room seemed more familiar, the sense of constraint and strangeness fell away. How orderly and welcoming it all looked — the flowers in the brown jar, the quiet circle of lamplight on the letters and papers neatly sorted for his inspection, his old armchair, and the divan where Chris Churley used to sprawl. . .
Vance began to turn over his correspondence. He was not in the mood for letters, but his glance lingered on a bunch of newspaper~cuttings held together by a clip. Evidently Halo had sorted them, and kept those that she thought might interest him. This proof of her care gave him a soothing sense of warmth and ease. He didn’t give a fig for newspaper cuttings, but he liked the thought that she had prepared them for him.
He detached the clip and his eyes ran over the articles. He was still looking at them when she came upstairs, and bent above his shoulder. He looked up at her. “You picked these out for me?”
“Yes. I know you don’t care for them as a rule, but I thought these few might amuse you.”
He continued to look at her. “They were about the only news you had of me, weren’t they? I ought to have written oftener — I meant to.”
“What does it matter, now you’re back?”
“Yes. That’s the great thing, isn’t it?” He laughed, and pressed her hand against his cheek.
“Don’t sit up too late, Van. You look awfully tired.”
“No. I’ll just go through the rest.” Her hand slipped from his shoulder, and he heard her cross the floor and go into her own room. The sound of her moving about there, as she prepared for the night, was pleasant to him, like the purr of a fire on the hearth, the blink of a light through a familiar window. He turned back to the articles, and read on, unwilling to admit that they interested him more than he had suspected. Formerly, when life and his work were in harmony, he had been indifferent to this kind of publicity, contemptuous of it; but now it helped to restore his shaken self~confidence. After all, when people talk about a fellow as these papers did he’s not exactly a nonentity, is he?
He read on to the last cutting. It was the account of his evening at Lady Guy Plunder’s. The report was cleverly done, and it amused and excited him to reconstitute the scene. Halo had read the notice too, he reflected, and no doubt her pride in him had been flattered. He glowed secretly with the reflection of that pride. And then he came to the last paragraph, that which recounted his departure for Brambles. Who could have given that information, he wondered? Why, Alders, of course — it was Alders who had telephoned to Floss.
The blood rushed to Vance’s temples. He concluded instantly that Halo must have read this article, must have seen his name coupled with that of the girl of whom he had spoken with such scorn and self-loathing . . . He felt mortified at what her judgment of him must be, and resentful, almost, that she should have exposed him to divining it. Had she put that particular cutting there on purpose? No doubt it was to attract his notice that she had filed it under the others, let them lead him up to it unsuspectingly. He felt a rush of anger at the idea that she knew his weaknesses and was concealing her real thoughts about him. He wasn’t going to be pitied by anybody, least of all by her. . .
Hitherto he had never found either consolation or excitement in drink. He had seen too much drunkenness all his life to be shocked, or even actively disgusted, by the sight of it in others; but he felt a cold contempt for the fools who could blur their minds and besot their bodies when life was so short, and every minute of it so packed with marvels. The sheer waste of drunkenness was what revolted him. But now he felt a sudden longing to blot out at a stroke all the tormenting memories of the last weeks, and the exasperating sense of his own weakness. “It’s all a failure — everything I touch is a failure,” he thought. He went to the cupboard in which Halo kept the bottles of spirits, and cocktail ingredients, and poured himself out a stiff measure of gin~and-soda. He drank it down, and felt better. He filled another glass, and drank that too; then he threw himself onto the divan, heavy with fatigue and sleep. But in another moment he was sitting up again, his brain tingling with excitement. Halo had ceased to move about in her room; the house had become intensely silent, and the silence frightened him. He felt the same awful loneliness as when, after Laura Lou’s death, he had sat in the tumbledown bungalow while she lay on the other side of the closed door. He began to tremble at the memory. If Halo were dead! If he were to open that door and go in, and find her on the bed white and waxen, like Laura Lou. He started up, and went to her door and opened it. She was in bed; over the chair beside her hung her old red silk dressing-gown, the one she had thrown over her when she had met him on the night of his return from Fontainebleau. The hair lay loose on her forehead, as it had then, and she sat propped against her pillows, a candle faintly lighting her pale face.
“Not asleep?” he said in a sheepish voice, sitting down by her and furtively stroking the folds of the dressing gown.
“No; it’s too hot.” She looked at him. “Aren’t you going to bed?”
He got up restlessly, and wandered to the window. “This light’ll bring in mosquitoes.”
She blew out the candle and he came back and knelt down beside her. “Halo, I’m a damned fool — a damned worthless fool.” He hid his face against the sheet, and felt her hand in his hair. He melted at the reassurance of her touch, the feeling that it was drawing him out of himself and back into the old warm shelter of habit.
“I’d have come back sooner — only I wasn’t fit to,” he muttered.
“Silly Van!”
“But now I want to get back; take up our old life. It’s not too late, is it? Some time I’ll tell you — don’t ask me to now, will you? Just say if it’s possible still — if you’re not done with me . . . If you are, tell me that too — straight out. I can’t sleep till I know if it’s really you here, or only a ghost of you, who’s sorry for me. I don’t want that either . . . I’d rather get out now, and go on. . .” He hardly knew what he was saying; the words tumbled out as they could.
He felt her lean over and lay her arm on his neck. She did not attempt to draw him to her; her arm trembled a little as it touched him. “I’m here,” she said, so low that he hardly heard. He buried his head against her, and was still.
The days that followed passed quietly. Halo was nervously conscious of every word and look of Vance’s, yet determined that he should not see she was watching him. After his outburst of remorse and tenderness on the night of his return he seemed to have slipped back into his usual attitude toward her, except that she was aware of something shy and dependent in him, something that besought her compassion yet would have resented her showing it. The thing to do, she told herself again and again, was just to be natural, to behave as if nothing were changed; and gradually she felt that he was becoming used to her, and to the life out of which some mysterious influence had abruptly wrenched him.
She refrained from questioning him about his weeks in England, and he never spoke of them except, now and then, to allude to an encounter with some critic or writer whom she knew he had wished to meet. To the social side of the adventure he never referred; nor did he mention the interval which had elapsed between his taking leave of Tolby and his reappearance at Oubli.
Tolby thought he had left England — or said so. But did he know? Perhaps Vance had simply vanished from Tolby’s ken without revealing his plans. Why should he have been so secretive about them unless he had wished to conceal his whereabouts, and what motive for concealment could he have had except that he had gone away with some woman? The riddle continued to revolve in Halo’s brain, but she tried to ignore it; and as the days slipped by, and she saw Vance gradually settling down into his old habits of work, the whole matter seemed less important. Whatever had happened, it was probably over; he had passed through a phase, and come back to her — and that was all that mattered.
The summer was coming to an end; the tumultuous sun-bathers were vanishing from bungalows and restaurants, scattering with their wireless sets and shrieking motors to all the points of the compass, and leaving Oubli to the quietness of autumn. Already the great arched avenues of planes had turned into golden tunnels, the kindled vineyards were flushing to flame and embers, the figs purpling through their fanlike foliage. The pink house was almost the only one that had not barred its shutters for the dead interval between the seasons. When Halo and Vance went down to bathe they had the bay almost to themselves; in their rambles through the olive terraces and among the pine-woods they met no more “hikers”, and the cry of Ford and Citro?n grew remoter through the sylvan hush.
Vance was more silent than of old; but though he had no explosions of enthusiasm he seemed as sensitive as ever to the beauty about him. To Halo he was like some one recovering from a long illness, and yielding gradually to the returning spell of life; there were moments when she could hardly help lowering her voice and treading as if in a sick-room — yet she knew nothing would irritate him more than any sign of exaggerated sympathy. “Be natural, be natural,” she kept repeating to herself, wondering if there were any lesson in the world as hard to learn.
Sooner than she could have hoped he returned to his work; there were days when he threw himself into it with such sombre ardour that she feared for his health and urged him not to write for too many hours at a stretch. But he received the suggestion irritably, and she saw that she must adapt herself to these days and nights of furious labour, which alternated with others of heavy lassitude. After a while she noticed that he had begun to drink to make up for the exhaustion following on his long bouts of writing. The discovery was a shock, and half-jokingly she tried to hint her surprise. In former times, she knew, Vance would have been humiliated by any allusion to such a weakness; but he received her hints with a sort of bantering indifference. “I know — you women think God created the universe on lemonade and lettuce sandwiches. Well, maybe He did; but I can’t. Don’t be frightened — you haven’t acquired an habitual drunkard. But I’ve got to get this book off my chest somehow, and I can’t do it without being bucked up now and then. I wish you’d tell Sidonie to make me a good thermos-ful of black coffee every night, will you? She can leave it on my desk when she goes to bed.”
Hitherto he had not spoken of the progress of his book; but Halo was used to that now. Since the old days at the Willows he had never really taken her into his confidence while his work was in hand. Even when he was writing “The Puritan in Spain”, in the solitude of their long tête-à-tête at Cadiz, he had used her as an ear to listen, not as an intelligence to criticize. And since he had been in England he had taken to doing his own typing, so that even her services on the Remington were no longer required, and his book was a secret garden into which he shut himself away from her as he might have done into a clandestine love-affair. But one afternoon, as they lay under the olives on the hillside, he turned to her with a half-shy half-whimsical smile. “See here; I’m beginning to wonder whether you’re going to take to ‘Colossus’.”
She smiled back at him. “So am I!”
“Well, I suppose it’s about time we tried it out. I want to know how it strikes you.”
She tried to repress her eagerness, to look friendly yet not too flattered. “I want to know too, dear — whenever you feel like it.” As they scrambled down the hill through the golden twilight she seemed to be carried on wings. “He’s come back to me — he’s come back to me!” she exulted, as if this need of her intellectual help were a surer token of his return to her than any revival of passion.
The book had advanced much farther than she had expected. In spite of the social distractions of London, Vance had got on with his writing more rapidly there than during the quiet months at Oubli, and as Halo looked at the heaped-up pages she asked herself whether a change of scene — figurative as well as actual — might not be increasingly necessary to him, and at more frequent intervals. On the night of his return he had confessed to her that he had been a fool, that he would have come back sooner if he had not been ashamed of his folly; but perhaps the experience he had in mind, whatever it was, had roused his intellectual activity and fed the creative fires. It was all mysterious and unintelligible to Halo, whose own happiness was so dependent on stability and understanding; but her intelligence could divine what perplexed her heart. At any rate, she thought with secret triumph, he hasn’t found any one to replace me as a listener.
That very evening he began to read the book aloud. They had meant to take the chapters in instalments; Halo had stipulated for time to reflect, and to get the work into its proper perspective. But when Vance was in the mood for reading aloud the excitement of getting a new view of what he had written always swept him on from page to page, and the joy of listening, and the sense that for the first time since the writing of “Instead” he needed her not only as audience but as critic, kept Halo from interrupting him. By the time he had finished they were both exhausted, Vance almost voiceless, and Halo in a state of nervous agitation that made it difficult for her to speak, though she knew he was impatient for what she had to say. He waited a moment; then he gave an uneasy laugh. “Well —?”
“Van — ” she began; but she broke off, embarrassed.
He was gathering the pages together with affected indifference. “No reaction — that about it?”
“No; oh, no! Only — you remember that time I took you to Chartres?” She smiled, but there was no answering light in his face. He was looking down sullenly at the manuscript.
“I remember I was as dead as a mummy. Couldn’t see or feel anything. I suppose you’re in the same state now?” he suggested ironically.
“Nonsense; you weren’t dead, you were stunned, bewildered. And so am I— just at first. I want more time — I want to re-read it quietly.”
“Oh, the critic who asks for a reprieve has already formed his opinion.” He laughed again. “Come — out with it! What’s wrong with the book? I don’t know why you take me for such a thin~skinned idiot that I can’t bear to be told.”
She saw that his lips were twitching, and suddenly suspected that he himself was not wholly satisfied with what he had written, and had feared in advance that she might share his dissatisfaction.
“I wish you’d let me sleep over it,” she urged good-humouredly. “I really don’t know yet what I think.”
“You mean you don’t know how to sugar-coat it,” he interrupted. “Well, don’t try! Just say straight out how the book strikes you. Remember that an artist is never much affected by amateur judgments, anyway.”
She flushed up at the sneer. “In that case, mine can surely wait.”
“Oh, it doesn’t have to! I know already what you think. You don’t understand what I’m after, and so you assume that I’ve muddled it. That’s about it, isn’t it?”
The taunt was too great a strain on her patience. If he had to be praised at all costs she felt that he was lost; he must be shaken out of this lethargy of self-appreciation. “Isn’t it rather too easy to conclude that if your critics are not altogether pleased it’s because they’re incapable of understanding you?”
He swung round with an ironic smile. “Which simply means that you’re not al-to-gether pleased yourself?” he mimicked her.
“No; I’m not. But I don’t think the reason you suggest is the right one.”
“Naturally!” He caught himself up, and went on more quietly: “Well, then, what IS the reason?”
Halo’s heart was beating apprehensively. Why was she thus deliberately risking their newly-recovered understanding? Was it worth while to put his literary achievement above her private happiness — and perhaps his? She was not sure; but she had to speak as her mind moved her. “I’ll tell you as well as I can. I’m a little bewildered still; but I have an idea you haven’t found yourself — expressed your real self, I mean — in this book as you did in the others. You’re not . . . not quite as free from other influences . . . echoes . . .” As the words formed themselves she knew they were the most fatal to the artist’s self-love, the hardest for wounded vanity to recover from. But if she spoke at all she must speak as truth dictated; she could not tamper with her intellectual integrity, or with his.
Vance had dropped back into his chair. “Echoes!” he said with a curt laugh. “That’s all you see — all you hear, rather? What sort of echoes?”
“Of books you’ve been reading, I suppose; or the ideas of the people you’ve been talking to. I can’t speak more definitely, because I’ve been with you so little lately, and it’s so long since you’ve talked to me of your work. But I feel that you may have let yourself be too much guided, directed — drawn away from your own immediate vision.”
“In other words, if I’d submitted the book to you page by page I should have been more likely to preserve what you call my immediate vision? Is that it?”
The outbreak was so childish that it restored her balance, and she smiled. “I can’t tell about that, of course; but if you think such a consideration would really affect my opinion, I wonder at your ever caring to hear it.”
Vance gave a shrug. “My dear child — shall I give you the cold truth, as you’ve given it to me? It’s simply this: that the artist asks other people’s opinions to please THEM and not to help himself. There’s only one critic who can help us — that’s life! As for the rest, it’s all bunk . . .” He pushed the pages into their folder, and got up, stretching his arms above his head. “You’re right, anyhow, about our both being too dog-tired to keep up the discussion now. It was brutal of me to put you through the third degree at two in the morning. . .”
Halo’s heart sank. She did not resent his tone; she knew he was overwrought, and was talking with his nerves and not with his intelligence; but again she was frightened by the idea that her over-scrupulous sincerity might check his impulse to turn to her for advice and sympathy. “And after all,” she reflected, “it’s only sympathy that matters. He’s right, in a sense, when he says it’s about the only thing an artist requires of his friends. As for the work itself, self-criticism is all that counts.” She looked at him gaily.
“It’s not two in the morning yet; but I AM tired, and so are you. I wish you hadn’t made me feel that I can’t help you. If only by listening, by giving you my whole mind, I believe I can; but you’ll be able to tell better tomorrow. At any rate, you must give me the chance to explain a little more clearly what I feel.”
He looked embarrassed, and half-ashamed of his outburst. “Of course, child. We’ll talk it all over when our heads are a little clearer. Now I believe I’ll go to bed.” He went up to the cupboard and poured himself out a glass of whisky. As he emptied it he turned to her with a laugh and a toss of his head above the tilted glass. “Here’s to my next book — a best-seller, to be written under your guidance.” He tapped her on the shoulder and turned her face toward his for a kiss.
One day he said to her: “Well, the book’s finished.” He spoke in a low apprehensive voice, as if he had been putting off the announcement as long as possible, and now that it was made, did not know what to say next.
Since the night, weeks before, when Halo had ventured her criticism he had never again proposed to show her what he was doing, never even asked her to take his dictation or to copy out his manuscript; he had definitely excluded the subject of “Colossus” from their talks. The intellectual divorce between them was increasingly bitter to Halo. That the veil of passion must wear through was life’s unescapable lesson; but if no deeper understanding underlay it, what was left? Had not Frenside’s advice been the only answer? In the joy of Vance’s return, and the peaceful communion of their first days, when the mere fact of being together seemed to settle every doubt and lay every ghost, it had been easy to smile at her old friend’s suggestion, and to reflect how little any one could know of lovers’ hearts except the lovers. But now she understood on what unstable ground she had rebuilt her happiness, and trembled.
Vance stood in the window looking out over the bay. The palms were wrestling in dishevelled fury with the first autumn gale; rain striped the panes, and beyond the headlands a welter of green waters stretched away to the low pall of clouds. Halo saw him give a discouraged shrug. “Good Lord — Miss Plummet!”
The Pension Britannique had reopened its shutters the previous week, and after a prelude of carpet-shaking and tile-scrubbing Madame Fleuret’s lodgers were taking possession of their old quarters. The Anglican chapel was to resume its offices on the following Sunday; already Halo had encountered Mrs. Dorman, cordial though embarrassed, and eager to tell her that after the first rains a bad leak had shown itself in Lady Dayes-Dawes’s room, and that the mason was afraid they would have to rebuild the chimney of the lounge.
Halo stood by Vance watching Miss Plummet swept homeward by the south-easterly blast, her umbrella bellying like a black sail. After she had passed there was an interval during which the promenade remained empty, like a stage-setting before the leading actor’s entrance; then, punctually as of old, Colonel Churley stalked into view, his mackintosh flapping, his stick dragging in the mud, his head thrust out angrily to meet the gale. Vance followed his struggling figure with fascinated eyes. “I suppose they all think they’re alive!” he groaned.
Halo laid her arm on his shoulder. She knew what thoughts the sight of Colonel Churley had stirred in him. “Why should we stay here any longer?” she said.
Vance drummed on the pane without answering. His eyes still followed the bent figure lessening between the palm-trunks.
“Now that your book’s finished — ”
“Oh, my book! I don’t believe it is a book — just a big dump of words. And not mine, anyhow; you’ve made that clear enough!” He gave an irritated laugh.
“I have? But you only let me hear a few chapters.”
“Exactly. And on those you gave me your judgment of the finished book. Without a moment’s hesitation. Look here, child,” he added abruptly, “don’t think I was surprised, or that I minded. Not in the least. It’s the sign of the amateur critic that he must always conclude, never leave an opinion in solution.”
Halo’s arm dropped from his shoulder. “Then it can’t much matter to the author what the conclusion is.”
Vance stood uneasily shifting from one foot to the other, his eyes bent to the ground. “If only it didn’t matter! The devil of it is that when a book’s growing the merest stupidest hint may deflect its growth, deform it . . . The artist loses confidence, ceases to visualize . . . Oh, what’s the use of trying to explain?”
“Don’t try, dear. You’re too tired, for one thing.”
“Tired — tired? When a man’s at the end of his tether a woman always thinks he’s tired. Why don’t you suggest a bottle of tonic?”
“If you’re at the end of your tether it would be more to the point to suggest new pastures. Why shouldn’t we try some other place?”
He moved away and began his restless pacing; then he came back and paused before her. “It’s the landscape of the soul I’m fed up with,” he broke out.
She stood silent. The landscape of the soul! But that must mean his nearest surroundings — must mean herself, she supposed. She tried to steady the smile on her trembling lips. “I wish you’d let me help you as I used to,” she began. “But if I’m of no use to you in your work, and only in the way at other times, perhaps . . .” She felt a blur in her eyes, and hurried on. “Perhaps the real change you need — ” and now she achieved a little laugh — “is not a new place but a new woman.”
The words dropped into a profound silence. Was he never going to speak, to deny, to protest at the monstrousness of her suggestion? He stood in the window, looking out into the rain, for a time that seemed to her interminable; and when he turned back his face was expressionless, closed. She felt as if a door had been shut against her. She essayed her little laugh again. “Is that it? Don’t be afraid to tell me!”
“That?” He looked at her vaguely. “Oh — another woman?” He stopped, and then began, in a hard embarrassed voice: “I suppose you put that newspaper cutting on my desk on purpose the night I came back? You wanted me to understand that you knew?”
She returned his look in genuine bewilderment. The weeks since his return had been crowded with so many emotions and agitations that for the moment she had forgotten the paragraph in which Floss Delaney figured. Suddenly the memory rushed back on her, and she stood speechless. It was that, then — her first instinct had been right, had led her straight to his secret! She stiffened herself, trying to thrust back the intolerable truth. “What cutting? You mean — about that girl?”
“Yes; that girl.”
“Oh, Vance . . . you don’t . . . you don’t mean that it’s for her . . .?” There was another silence. “You mean that when you left London it was to go away with her?”
He gave an angry laugh. “It was to go away FROM her — as far as I could go! Now do you understand?”
Halo’s eyes clung to his labouring face. Did she understand — dared she? She spoke very low. “To get away from her . . . because you realized . . .? Because it was all over — like a bad dream? Is that it?”
“A bad dream, yes; but not over. I’d rather you knew everything now . . . I didn’t run away from her. . .”
“Then —?”
“She kicked me out. Can’t you see? Do I have to put everything in words of one syllable?”
Halo looked away from him. “No; you don’t have to.” Suddenly her contracted heart seemed to expand a very little. “Then those weeks after you left London — when Tolby said he didn’t know what had become of you — she wasn’t with you all that time?”
“Merciful heaven — she? No!”
“Then where were you, Vance?”
“Somewhere in hell. I believe they call it Belgium.”
“All alone there, all that time?” she cried pityingly. He mistook her intonation.
“Do you suppose that as fast as one woman throws me over I hook on to another — like a sort of limpet?”
“I wasn’t thinking of another woman. I hoped you’d had one of your friends with you.”
“A man’s got no friends when he’s going through a thing like that . . .” He stopped, and then a rush of words broke from him. “You don’t know — how should you? She threw me out; and I trailed back after her to London; and she threw me out again. That time I had my lesson.”
He dropped into his armchair and leaned back, looking up at the ceiling. She thought how young his face looked in spite of its drawn misery, and said to herself: “He’ll get over it and I shan’t. He’ll use it up in a story, and it will go on living in me and feeding on me.” Aloud she said: “I’m very sorry for you, Vance. I shouldn’t have thought — ”
“No! I understand. You’d have thought it would be any other woman — only not that one. Well, it’s the other way round. I’m pitiably constant.” He continued to lean back, his arms crossed behind his head. He no longer looked at her, seemed hardly to know she was there; yet every word he spoke cut like a blade sharpened to wound her. She leaned against the desk, her arms stretched behind her for support. She felt a kind of inner rigidity that almost seemed like strength. While it lasted, she thought, she must speak. “If you feel like that you must marry her. You’re free, dear — you know that.”
He started up with a choking sound in his throat. “Marry her? She’s going to marry somebody else.” He buried his face in his hands and sat a long while without speaking. He was not weeping; his shoulders did not stir; he just sat there in dark communion with his grief. Halo did not move either till she felt a stiffness in the muscles of her arms; then she turned from the desk and stood looking out of the window at the storm-darkened world. As she stood there Colonel Churley went by, driven back by the storm from his solitary tramp. How she had pitied him last winter, when she and Vance, from the safe shelter of their love, had looked out on his lonely figure!
Night was falling; soon the lamp-lighter would come along and the gas-lamps along the promenade flicker into life. They said the streets would be lit by electricity next year. Their landlord had even spoken of putting in an electric cooker . . . That reminded Halo that if they meant to leave Oubli she ought to write at once and give notice. You sent your landlord a registered letter, and then he couldn’t say that he hadn’t been notified, because there was his signature.
She turned back into the room, which was already dark, groped for matches, and lit the two candles in the brass candlesticks on the chimney. The fibres of her heart were wound about every object in that homely friendly room. How many evenings she and Vance had sat there, between fire and candles, joking and planning! One flesh — they had been one flesh. And now they were to be divided. She felt like some one facing a surgical operation: the kind of which the surgeons say to the family: “There HAVE been cases in which it has proved successful; and if it’s not done we refuse to answer for the consequences.”
She tried to picture what her future would be — what she herself would be — if the operation were to be successful. Perhaps in the end she would marry somebody else, have children, live on as a totally different being, preoccupied about ordering another man’s dinner and bringing up his family, though the same face continued to look back at her from her mirror. How odd if in years to come she should meet Vance somewhere — in the street, in a train — and they should not recognize each other, and some one, perhaps her husband, should say afterward: “You didn’t know? Why, that’s the man who wrote ‘Colossus’. I thought you used to know him. That handsome common-looking woman was his wife.”
Vance stood up, shook himself and passed his hand over his forehead. “I think I’ll go out.”
Halo moved toward him. She must make use of her factitious energy before it flickered out. “Vance — just a minute. I want to tell you . . .”
He stopped unwillingly. “Yes?”
“You’re free as air. You understand that, don’t you?”
He lifted his eyes and looked at her heavily. “You mean — you want to make an end?”
Her voice was hardly audible, even to her own ears. “Hadn’t we better?”
He still looked at her in a wounded suffering way. “All right, then; I understand.”
“Vance — it’s better, isn’t it?”
“It’s all I’m worth.”
She went closer to him. “Oh, not that — don’t say that! I only want you to feel that if there’s any hope . . . any happiness for you . . . elsewhere . . . I want you . . .” Her voice grew suddenly louder, and then broke into a sob. The tide of her tears rushed over her. She dropped down on the divan and wept as if she were weeping away all the accumulated agony of the last weeks. How brief a way her strength had carried her! She fought back her tears, straightened herself, and lifted her face to his. “This is nothing — just nervousness. I suppose I’ve been alone too long . . .”
He knelt down at her side, and she felt his arms about her. Their treacherous warmth melted her resistance away. “Oh, Van . . . my Van . . .” while he held her thus, could any other woman come between them?
From the window of every English bookshop in Paris “Colossus” stared at Halo. The book had appeared a few weeks after its last pages were written, the chapters having been set up as they were finished, in order to hasten publication. Otherwise the winter sales would be missed, and “Colossus” was obviously not a work for the summer holidays. Halo suspected that the publishers, while proud to associate their name with it, were not sanguine as to pecuniary results. “Colossus” had most of the faults disquieting to the book-seller; it was much too long, nothing particular happened in it, and few people even pretended to know what it was about.
No reviews had as yet appeared when Halo saw the first copies in the rue de Rivoli windows, where they must have flowered over night. She stood hesitatingly outside the shop; there had come to be something slow and hesitating in her slightest decisions, in her movements even. She found it more and more difficult to make up her mind even about trifles — more so about trifles than about the big decisive acts. The spring of enthusiasm that used to give a momentary importance to the least event seemed to have run dry in her.
She went in and asked for a magazine. While it was being brought she glanced at the copies of “Colossus” conspicuously aligned on the New Book counter, and asked the clerk how it was going.
“We’ve sold a good many already. Anything by the author of ‘The Puritan in Spain’, you understand . . . Can I do up a copy for you?”
It was the answer she had expected. The book would benefit for a while by its predecessor’s popularity; but when that flagged — what? She paid for the magazine she had asked for, and went out.
It was a cold day of early winter, and Paris, once like home to her, seemed empty and unfriendly. She had seen no one since her arrival. Lorry, she had learned at his studio, was away. Both Mrs. Glaisher and Mrs. Blemer had failed in the end to regard “Factories” as a profitable venture, and he was negotiating for its production with a Berlin impresario. Halo had not the heart to look up Savignac — again her stealing inertia held her back; and Tolby, whom she would have been glad to see, was still in London. Paris had been a feverish desert to her before; now it was a freezing one.
She walked back through the Tuileries gardens, and across the Seine to the quiet hotel on the left bank where she was staying. She had lingered on alone in Paris for a week or ten days — ever since she had come there to see Vance off, when he had hurriedly sailed for New York — and she had a queer feeling that there was no use in trying to make any further plans, that any change, any new decision, must be imposed on her from the outside. It was as though her central spring were broken . . . yet, in a way, she knew that her future had already been settled for her.
At her hotel she asked the porter if there were any letters. She was sure he would say no; of course there would be none; and when, after a hunt through the pigeon-holes behind his desk, he handed her an envelope, she felt suddenly dizzy, and had to sit down on the nearest chair and leave the letter unopened. How strange, how incredible, to see herself addressed as “Mrs. Tarrant” in her husband’s writing! It reminded her that in spite of all that had happened she was still Mrs. Tarrant, still his wife — and it was by his own choice that it was so. That was the strangest part of it, the part she could not yet understand.
She had learned of Tarrant’s presence in Paris by seeing his name among the hotel arrivals in a daily paper. That was two days ago; and after twenty-four hours of incoherent thinking she had abruptly decided to move to another hotel, and register there under her real name — her husband’s. That night she had written to him. That night; and here, the very next morning, was his answer! One might almost have supposed that he had been waiting for some sign from her . . . She sat with her cold hands folded over the letter till her strength returned; when she could trust herself to her feet she rose and went up to her room.
The variableness of Tarrant’s moods had made her fear that he might reply harshly, or perhaps not at all. Even now she thought it likely that, if he should agree to see her, he would propose their meeting at his lawyer’s; and that would paralyze her, deprive her of all power to plead her cause. Over three months had passed since he had sent Frenside to her on that unsuccessful mission; and as she looked back on her own attitude at the time it seemed hard and ungrateful. In her self-absorption she had forgotten to send Tarrant a word of thanks, a conciliatory message; and she knew the importance he attached to such observances. For her sake he had humbled his pride, and she had seemed unaware of it. With his sensitiveness to rebuffs, and the uncertainty of his impulses, what chance was there of finding him in the same frame of mind as when he had made his advance and she had rejected it? He had a horror of reopening any discussion which he regarded as closed; might he not justly say that the message she had sent through Frenside had been final? She looked at the unopened envelope and wondered at her courage — or her folly — in writing to him.
At length she opened the letter, and read the few words within. In the extremity of her relief she felt weak again, and had to sit down and cover her face. There was no mention of lawyers; there was nothing curt or vindictive in the tone of the letter. Tarrant simply said that he would be glad to see her that afternoon at his hotel. The sheet trembled in her hand, and she found herself suddenly weeping.
The porter said that Mr. Tarrant was expecting her, and the lift carried her up to a velvet-carpeted corridor. It was the hotel where he and she had stayed whenever they were in Paris together; the narrow white-panelled corridor was exactly like the one leading to the rooms they usually had. At its end she was shown into a stiffly furnished white and gray sitting-room, and Tarrant stood up from the table at which he had been pretending to write. He was extremely pale, and catching her own reflection in the mirror behind him, she thought: “We look like two ghosts meeting . . .”
She said: “Lewis,” and held her hand out shyly. He touched it with his cold fingers, and stammered: “You’ll have tea?” as though he had meant to say something more suitable, and had forgotten what it was.
She shook her head, and he pushed an armchair forward. “Sit down.” She sat down, and for a few moments he stood irresolutely before her; then he pulled up a chair for himself and reached out for the cigarettes on the table. “You don’t mind?” She shook her head again.
Suddenly it came over her that this was perhaps the very room in which, on that unhappy night, Vance had so imprudently pleaded for her release; and the thought deepened her discouragement. But she must conquer these tremors and find herself again.
“Thank you for letting me come,” she said at length. “I ought to have thanked you before.”
He raised his eyebrows with the ironic movement habitual to him when he wanted to ward off emotional appeals. “Oh, why — ?”
“Because you sent Frenny to me with that offer. And I didn’t thank you properly.”
The blood rose under his sensitive skin. “Oh, that, really . . . I understood that you . . . that at the time you were undecided about your own future. . .”
“Yes; I was. But I want to tell you that I was very grateful, though I may not have seemed so; and that now — now I accept.”
Tarrant was silent. He had regained control of his features, but Halo could measure the intensity of the effort, and the inward perturbation it denoted. After all, he and she had the same emotional reactions, though his range was so much more limited; in moments of stress she could read his mind and his heart as she had never been able to read Vance’s. The thought cast back a derisive light on her youthful illusions.
After the first months of burning intimacy with Vance, and the harrowing extremes of their subsequent life, Tarrant had become a mere shadow to her, and she had not foreseen that his presence would rouse such searching memories. But she was one of the women on whom successive experiences stamp themselves without effacing each other; and suddenly, in all her veins and nerves, she felt that this cold embarrassed man, having once been a part of her life, could never quite cease to be so. No wonder she had never been able to adapt herself to the amorous code of Lorry’s group! She sat waiting, her heart weighed down with memories, while Tarrant considered her last words.
“You accept —?” he repeated at length.
“I— yes. The divorce, I mean . . . I understand that you . . .”
“You’ve decided that you want a divorce?” She nodded.
He sat with bent head, his unlit cigarette between his fingers. “You’re quite certain . . . now . . . that this is really what you wish?”
“I— oh, yes, yes,” she stammered.
Tarrant continued in contemplation of her words, and she began to fear that, after all, he might have let her come only for the bitter pleasure of refusing what she asked. She had nearly cried out, appealed to him to shorten her suspense; but she controlled herself and waited. He got up, and stood before her.
“I ask the question because — if Frenside gave me a correct account of your talk — you took the opposite view at that time: you didn’t want to take proceedings because you thought that if you did so Weston might feel obliged to marry you.” He brought out the words with difficulty; she felt sorry for the effort it was costing him to get through this scene, which she might have spared him if she had accepted Frenside’s intervention. “Are you positively sure now?” he insisted.
“Yes.”
“You wish to divorce me in order to marry your lover?”
“Lewis —!”
He smiled faintly. “You object to the word?”
“No; but it seems so useless to go into all this again.”
He took no notice, but pursued, in the same level voice: “You and Weston have come together again, and wish to marry? Is that it?”
She lowered her eyes, and paused a moment before answering. “I am not sure — that we shall ever marry. I want my freedom.”
“Freedom? Freedom to live without a name, or any one to look after you? What sort of a life do you propose to lead if you don’t marry him? Have you thought of that?”
She hesitated again. She might have resented his questioning; but his tone, though cold, was not unkind. And she knew him so well that she could detect the latent sympathy behind those measured phrases.
“I haven’t thought of the future yet. I only know it seems best that I should take back my own name.”
“If you’re not to take his — is that what you mean?”
“I’m not sure . . . about anything. But I want to be free.”
He went and leaned against the mantelshelf, looking down on her with dubious eyes. “The situation, then, is much the same as when you saw Frenside; it’s only your own attitude that has changed?”
“Well . . . yes . . . I suppose so. . .”
There was a silence which she measured by the nervous knocking of her heart. At that moment her knowledge of her husband seemed of no avail. She could not guess what his secret motive was; but she felt dimly that something deep within him had been renewed and transformed, and that it was an unknown Tarrant who confronted her. He twisted the cigarette incessantly between his fingers. “I heard you’d been unhappy — ” he began abruptly.
She flushed and lifted her head. “No!”
He smiled again. “You wouldn’t admit it, I suppose. At any rate, you’re alone — at present. Don’t you think that — in the circumstances — my name is at least a sort of protection?”
The question surprised her so much that she could find no words to reply; and he hurried on, as if anxious to take advantage of her silence: “I’ve no doubt my attitude, all along, has been misrepresented to you. Perhaps it was partly my own fault. I’m not good at explaining — especially things that touch me closely. But for a long time now I’ve felt that some day you might be glad to have kept my name . . . It was my chief reason for not agreeing to a divorce. . .” He spoke in the low indifferent tone which always concealed his moments of deepest perturbation. “You never thought of that, I suppose?” he ended, as if reproachfully.
“No — I hadn’t.”
“H’m,” he muttered with a dry laugh. “Well, it doesn’t matter. My pride sometimes gets in my way . . . particularly when I think I haven’t been fairly treated. But that’s all over. I want to help you. . .”
“Oh, Lewis, thank you.”
“No matter about that. The thing is — look here, can’t we talk together openly?”
She felt her colour rise again; and again her knowledge of him gave her no clue to what might be coming. “Certainly — it will be much better.”
“Well, then — .” He broke off, as if the attempt were more difficult than he had foreseen. Suddenly he resumed: “If you and Weston have parted, as I understand you have . . .” In the interval that followed she felt that he was waiting for her to confirm or deny the assertion.
“He went to America ten days ago — to his own people. He felt that he ought to go and see them. Beyond that we’ve made no plans. . .”
“You mean that there’s no understanding between you as to his coming back — or as to your future relations?”
“I don’t wish that there should be! He’s free — perfectly free. That’s our only understanding,” she exclaimed hastily.
“Well — that’s what I wanted to be sure of. If it’s that way, I’m ready to wipe out the past . . . let it be as if nothing had happened. It’s nobody’s business but yours and mine, anyhow . . . You understand? I’m ready to take you back.”
She sat looking up at him without finding any words; but the weight in her breast lifted a little — she felt less lonely. “Thank you, Lewis . . . thank you . . .” she managed to say.
His lips narrowed; evidently it was not the response he had expected. But he went on: “Of course, at first . . . I can understand . . . You might feel that you couldn’t come back at once, take up our life where it broke off — at any rate not in the old surroundings. I’ve thought of that; I shouldn’t ask it. I should be ready to travel, if you preferred. For a year — for longer even. The world’s pretty big. We could go to India . . . or to East Africa. As far as you like. Explore things . . . I don’t care what. By the time we got back people would have forgotten.” He straightened himself, as though the last words had slipped out of a furtive fold of his thoughts. “Not that that matters. If I choose, nobody else has a word to say. And nobody will! I— I’ve missed you, Halo. I ask you to come back.”
She stood silent, oppressed. On Tarrant’s lips, she knew, such an appeal meant complete surrender. If he owned that he had missed her — HOW he must have missed her! Under all her cares and perplexities she felt a little quiver of feminine triumph, and it trembled in her voice as she answered. “Thank you, Lewis . . . for saying that . . . I wish things could have been different. Please believe that I do.”
She caught the gleam of hope in his eyes. “Well, then — let it be as if they had been different. Won’t you?”
The talk had led them so far from the real object of her visit that she began to fear for the result. If Tarrant, in refusing to divorce her, had really had in mind the hope of her return, what chance was there now of his yielding? It had never been in his nature to give without taking. She felt bewildered and at a loss.
“Can things ever be as if they’d never been? Life would be too easy!” she said timidly.
His face darkened and the nervous frown gathered between his eyes. “Is that your answer?”
“I suppose it must be.”
“Must be? Not unless you still expect to marry Weston. Is that it? You owe the truth to me.”
She saw instantly that if she said yes her doing so might provoke a refusal to divorce her; and that if she said no he would go on insisting, and her final rejection of his offer would be all the more mortifying to him. She reflected wearily that the Tarrant she knew was already coming to the surface.
“I’ve told you the truth; I don’t know any more than you do what my future will be. I’m bound to no one . . . But if I agreed to what you suggest, how could we avoid unhappiness? You would always remember . . . and the differences in our characters probably haven’t grown less. . .” She went toward him with outstretched hands. “Lewis — please! Let me have my freedom, and let us say goodbye as friends.”
Without noticing her gesture he continued to look at her somberly. “How easily you settle my future for me! Your character at any rate hasn’t changed. Here I’ve waited for you — waited and waited for this hour; for I was sure from the first that your crazy experiment wouldn’t last. And now you tell me it’s over, and that your future’s not pledged to anybody else — which means that you’re alone in the world, a woman deserted by her lover (you know as well as I do that that’s what people will say). And yet you continue to let your pride stand between us . . . or if it isn’t pride, what is it? Some idea that things can’t be as they were before? Well, perhaps they can’t — entirely. Perhaps we can neither of us forget . . . But if I assure you of my friendship . . . my devotion . . . God, Halo, what I’m proposing shows how I feel . . . there’s no use talking . . .”
She caught the cry under his pondered syllables, and saw that he was struggling with emotions deeper than he had ever known. The sight woke her pity, and she thought: “Am I worth anything better than this? Shall I ever be wanted in this way again?”
“Lewis, if you knew how sorry I am! I AM grateful — I do feel your generosity. It’s true that I’m alone, and that the future’s rather blank. But all that can’t be helped; nothing can change it now. You must give me my freedom.”
“What I feel is nothing to you, then?”
“No. It’s a great deal.” She looked at him gravely. “It’s because I might end by being tempted that I mustn’t listen to you; that you must let me go.”
“Let you go — when you’ve confessed that you’re tempted? Listen, Halo. You see now how right I was to refuse to divorce you; to wait; to believe that you’d come back. Now that you’re here, how can you ask me to give you up?”
She stood motionless, her heart trembling with the weight of his pleading. His words piled themselves up on her like lead. “How can you, Halo?” he repeated.
“Because I’m going to have a child,” she said.
“Oh — ” he exclaimed. He drew back, and lifted his hands to his face. Then he turned from her and walked up to the mantelpiece. He must have caught sight of his own disordered features in the mirror, for he moved away, and stood in the middle of the room, livid and silent.
Halo could think of nothing to say. He forced a little laugh. “I see. And you want a divorce at once, because now you think he’ll have to marry you?”
“I have never thought anything of the sort. I don’t want him to marry me — I don’t want him to know what I’ve told you . . . I want to be free and to shift for myself . . . that’s all.”
He looked down with knotted brows. “Then this divorce business — what’s your object? If what you tell me is true, I don’t see what you want — or why you should care about a divorce, one way or the other.”
She flushed. “I’ve no right to give your name to another man’s child. Isn’t that reason enough? Can’t you understand that a woman should want to be free, and alone with her child?” she burst out passionately.
She saw the reflection of her flush in his face. When the blood rose under his fair skin it burned him to the temples, and then ebbed at once, leaving him ash-coloured. He moved about the room vaguely, and then came back to her.
“I had no idea — ”
“No; of course. But now you must see . . .”
He lifted his eyes to hers. “There are women who wouldn’t have been so honest — ”
“Are there? I don’t know. Please think of what I’ve asked you, Lewis.”
She saw that he was no longer listening to what she said. All his faculties were manifestly concentrated on some sudden purpose that was struggling to impose itself on his will. He spoke again. “Some women, if only for their child’s sake — ”
“Would lie? Is that what you mean?”
“Well — isn’t it perhaps your duty? I mean, to think first of your child’s future? Consider what I’ve said from that point of view if you can . . .”
She returned his gaze with a frightened stare. What was he hinting at, trying to offer her? Her heart shrank from the possibility, and then suddenly melted. Lewis — poor Lewis! What were these depths she had never guessed in him? Had she after all known him so little? Her eyes filled, and she stood silent.
“Halo — you see, don’t you? I . . . I want you to realize . . . to think of it in that way. You’ll need help more than ever now. Halo, why don’t you answer? I’d be good to the child,” he said brokenly.
She went up to him and took his hand. It was cold and shook in her touch. “Thank you for that — most of all. It can’t be as you wish; but I’ll never forget. Words are stupid — I don’t know what to say.”
“To say — to say? There’s nothing to say. The child . . . the child would be mine, you understand.”
She shook her head. “I understand. And I shall always feel that you’re my best friend. But I can’t go back to you and be your wife. You’d be the first to regret it if I did. Don’t think me hard or ungrateful. Only let me go my way.”
He turned and rested his elbows on the mantelpiece, and his head on his clasped hands. She saw that he was struggling to recover his composure before he spoke again. “Ah, your pride — your pride!” he broke out bitterly. She was silent, and he turned back to her with a burst of vehemence. “I suppose, though you won’t acknowledge it even to yourself, you really hope Weston will come back and marry you when he hears of this?”
“If he hears of it he will certainly offer to marry me. But for that very reason I don’t want him to know — not at present. I don’t want him to feel under any sort of obligation. . .”
“Has he made you as unhappy as that?”
“Don’t we all make each other unhappy, sooner or later — often without knowing it? I sometimes think I’ve got beyond happiness or unhappiness — I don’t feel as if I were made for them any more. I have nothing to complain of — or to regret. But I want to be alone; to go my own way, without depending on anybody. I want to be Halo Spear again — that’s all.”
Tarrant listened with bent head. She saw that he was bewildered at the depth of his own failure. He had been prepared — perhaps — to regret his offer; but not to have it refused. It had never occurred to him that such an extreme of magnanimity could defeat itself. “Is that really all — all you’ve got to say?”
“Since I can’t say what you wish, Lewis — what else is there?”
His white lips twitched. “No; you’re right. I suppose there’s nothing.” He had grown guarded and noncommittal again; she saw that to press her point at that moment was impossible. She held out her hand.
“It’s goodbye, then. But as friends — as true friends, Lewis?”
“Oh, as friends,” he echoed rigidly.
He did not seem to notice her extended hand. She saw that he hardly knew where he was, or what he was doing; but some old instinct of conformity made him precede her to the door, open it for her, walk silently at her side down the passage to the lift.
“I’d rather walk downstairs,” she said; but he insisted gravely: “It’s four flights. You’d better wait. In a moment; it will be here in a moment.”
They stood by each other in silence, miles of distance already between them, while they waited for the preliminary rattle and rumble from below; then the mirror-lined box shot up, opened its door, and took her in.
The Euphoria “Free Speaker” had expended its biggest head-lines on the illustrious novelist’s return, and Vance, the morning after his arrival, woke to find himself besieged by reporters, autograph~collectors, photographers, prominent citizens and organizers of lecture-tours.
He had forgotten how blinding and deafening America’s greeting to the successful can be, and his first impulse was to fly or to lie concealed; but he saw that his parents not only took the besieging of the house for granted, but would have felt there was something lacking in their son’s achievement had it not called forth this tribute. Even Grandma Scrimser — now rooted to her armchair by some paralyzing form of rheumatism — shone on him tenderly and murmured “The college’ll have to give him an honorary degree now,” as he jumped up to receive the fiftieth interviewer, or to answer the hundredth telephone call.
“You remember, darling, that summer way back, when we sat one day on the porch at Crampton, and you told me you’d had a revelation of God — a God of your own was the way you put it? A sort of something in you that stretched out and out, and upward and upward, and took in all time and all space? I remember it so well, although my words are not as beautiful as yours. At the time I was sure it meant you had a call to the ministry. But now, sitting here and reading in the papers what all the big folks say about your books, I’ve begun to wonder if it wasn’t your Genius speaking in you, and maybe spreading its wings to carry you up by another way to the One God — who is Jesus?” Her great blue eyes, paler but still so beautiful, filled with the easy tears of the old as she drew Vance down to her. And after that she advised him earnestly not to refuse to address his fellow-citizens from the platform of the new Auditorium Theatre. “They’ve got a right to see you and hear you, Vanny; they expect it. It’s something you privileged people owe to the rest of the world. And besides, it’s good business; nothing’ll make your books sell better than folks being able to see what you look like, and go home and say: ‘Vance Weston? Why, sure I know him. I heard him lecture the other day out at Euphoria. Of course I’m going to buy his new book’. It’s the human touch you see, darling.”
The human touch, artfully combined with a regard for the main chance, still ruled in Mrs. Scrimser’s world, and her fading blue eyes shone with the same blend of other-worldliness and business astuteness as when she had started on her own successful career as preacher and reformer. All the family had been brought up in the same school, without even suspecting that there might be another; and they ascribed Vance’s reluctance to be made a show of to ill~health and private anxieties.
“It’s all that woman’s doing. He’s worn to a bone, and I can hardly get him to touch his food,” Mrs. Weston grumbled to her mother; and Vance, chancing to overhear her, knew that the woman in question was Halo. He understood that his life with Halo was something to be accounted for and explained away, and that the pride the family had felt in his prospective marriage (“a Park Avenue affair”, as Mrs. Weston had boasted) increased the mortification of having to own that it had not taken place. “Some fuss about a divorce — don’t they HAVE divorce in the Eastern States, anyhow?” she enquired sardonically, as if no lack of initiative would surprise her in the original Thirteen. The explanation was certainly unsatisfactory; and sooner than have it supposed that Vance might have been thrown over, she let slip that he and the young woman were living together — “society queen and all the rest of it. Of course she won’t let him go. . .” That had not been quite satisfactory either. It had arrayed against him the weightiest section of Mapledale Avenue, and excited in the other, and more youthful, half, an unwholesome curiosity as to his private affairs, stimulated by the conviction that the family were “keeping back” something discreditable, and perhaps unmentionable; since it was obvious that two people who wanted to live together had only to legalize their caprice by a trip to Reno.
All this Vance had learned from his sister Mae during a midnight talk the day after his arrival. His eldest sister, Pearl, who was small and plain, and had inherited her mother’s sturdy common~sense, had married well and gone to live at Dakin; but Mae, who was half-pretty and half-artistic and half-educated, and had thought herself half engaged to two or three young men who had not shared her view, had remained at home and grown disillusioned and censorious. She did not understand Vance any better than the rest of the family, and he knew it; but the spirit of opposition caused her to admire in him whatever the others disapproved of, and for want of an intelligent ear he had to turn to a merely sympathetic one.
“The Auditorium’s sold out already for your reading; and I know they’re crazy to invite you to the Saturday night dinner-dance at the new Country Club. But some of the old cats want to know what this is about your living abroad with a married woman — that Mrs. Dayton Alsop, who was divorced twice before she caught old Alsop, is one of the worst ones, I guess.” Vance laughed, and said he didn’t give a damn for dinner-dances at the Country Club, and Mae, with sudden bitterness, rejoined: “I suppose there’s nothing out here you do give a damn for, as far as society goes. But of course if you don’t go they’ll say it’s because they wouldn’t ask you. . .”
The next day his grandmother seized the opportunity of Mrs. Weston’s morning marketing to ask Vance to come to her room for a talk; and after the exchange of reminiscences, always so dear to the old, she put a gentle question about his marriage. He told her that he didn’t believe he was going to get married, and seeing the pain in those eyes he could never look at with indifference, he added: “It’s all my fault; but you mustn’t let it fret you, because Halo, who’s awfully generous, understands perfectly, and agrees that the experiment has probably lasted long enough. So that’s all there is to it.”
“All?” She returned his look anxiously. “It seems to me just a beginning. A bad beginning, if you like; but so many are. That don’t mean much. I understood the trouble was she couldn’t get her divorce — the husband wouldn’t let her. Is that so?”
“Yes. But I suppose she’d have ended by going out to Reno, though the crowd she was brought up in hate that kind of thing worse than poison.”
“Hate it — why?” Mrs. Scrimser looked surprised. “Isn’t it better than going against God’s commandments?”
“Well, maybe. But they think out there in New York — Halo’s kind do — that when one of the parties has put himself or herself in the wrong, they’ve got no right to lie about it in court, and Halo would have loathed getting a divorce on the pretext that her husband had deserted her, when the truth was she’d left him because she wanted to come and live with me.”
This visibly increased Mrs. Scrimser’s perplexity, but Vance saw that her native sense of fairness made her wish to understand his side of the case.
“Well, I always say it’s a pity the young people don’t bear with each other a little longer. I don’t think they ought to rush out and get a divorce the way you’d buy a package of salts of lemon. It ain’t such a universal cure either . . . But as long as you and she had decided you couldn’t get along without each other — ”
“But now we see we can, so it don’t matter,” Vance interrupted. His grandmother gave an incredulous laugh.
“Nonsense, child — how can you tell, when you haven’t been married? All the rest’s child-play, jokes; the only test is getting married. It’s the daily wear and tear, and the knowing-it’s-got-to-be-made~to-do, that keeps people together; not making eyes at each other by the moonlight. And when there’s a child to be worried over, and looked after, and sat up nights with, and money put by for it — oh, then. . .” Mrs. Scrimser leaned back with closed eyes and a reminiscent smile. “I’d almost say it’s the worries that make married folks sacred to each other — and what do you two know of all that?”
Vance’s eyes filled. He had a vision of the day when Laura Lou’s mother had entreated him to set her daughter free, when release had shone before him like a sunrise, and he had turned from it — why? Perhaps because, as Mrs. Scrimser said, worries made married folks sacred to each other. He hadn’t known then — he didn’t now. He merely felt that, in Laura Lou’s case, the irritating friction of familiarity had made separation unthinkable, while in regard to himself and Halo, their perpetual mutual insistence on not being a burden to each other, on scrupulously respecting each other’s freedom, had somehow worn the tie thin instead of strengthening it. This was certainly the case as far as he was concerned, and Halo appeared to share his view. Splendid and generous as she had been when he had come to her with his unhappy confession, their last weeks at Oubli seemed to have made it as clear to her as to him that their experiment had reached its term. It was she who had insisted on his going to America to see his family and his publishers; she who had expressly stipulated that they should separate as old friends, but without any project of reunion. But it was useless to try to explain this to his grandmother, whose experience had been drawn from conditions so much more primitive that Halo’s fine shades of sentiment would have been unintelligible to her.
Suddenly Mrs. Scrimser laid her hand on his. “Honour bright, Van — is it another woman?”
He flushed under her gaze. “It’s a whole complex of things — it’s me as the Lord made me, I suppose: a bunch of ill-assorted odds and ends. I couldn’t make any woman happy — so what’s the use of worrying about it?”
Mrs. Scrimser put her old withered hands on his shoulders and pushed him back far enough to scrutinize his face. “You young fool, you — as if being happy was the whole story! It’s only the preface: any woman worth her salt’ll tell you that.”
He bent over and kissed her. “The trouble is, Gran, I’m not worth any woman’s salt.”
She shook her head impatiently. “Don’t you go running yourself down, either. It’s the quickest shortcut to losing your self~respect. And all your fine writing won’t help you if you haven’t got that.” She stretched out her hand for her spectacles, and took up the last number of “Zion’s Spotlight”. “I guess there’ll be an article about you in here next week. They’re sure to send somebody over to hear your talk at the Auditorium,” she called after him proudly as he left the room.
Vance walked slowly down Mapledale Avenue, and through the centre of the town to the Elkington House. The aspect of Euphoria had changed almost as much as his father’s boasts has led him to expect. The fabulous development of the Shunts motor industry, and the consequent growth of the manufacturing suburb at Crampton, had revived real estate speculation, and the creation of the new Country Club on the heights across the river was rapidly turning the surrounding district into a millionaire suburb. The fashionable, headed by the Shuntses, were already selling their Mapledale Avenue houses to buy land on the heights; and a corresponding spread of luxury showed itself in the development of the shopping district, the erection of the new Auditorium Theatre, and the cosmopolitan look of cinemas, garages, and florists’ and jewellers’ windows. Even the mouldy old Elkington House had responded by turning part of its ground floor into a plate-glass~fronted lobby with theatre agency, tobacconist and newspaper stall. Vance paused to study the renovated fa?ade of the hotel; then he walked up the steps and passed through the revolving doors. On the threshold a sudden recoil checked him. Memory had evoked the night when, hurriedly summoned from the office of the “Free Speaker”, he had found Grandpa Scrimser collapsed under the glaring electrolier of the old bar, his legs dangling like a marionette’s, his conquering curls flat on his damp forehead. Vance heard the rattle of the ambulance down the street, and saw the men carrying Grandpa’s limp body across the lobby to the door — and it was hateful to him that, at this moment, the scene should return with such cruel precision. It was as if, all those years, Grandpa had kept that shaft up his ghostly sleeve.
Vance turned to the reception clerk. “Miss Delaney?” he asked, his voice sounding thick in his throat.
The clerk took the proper time to consider. He was showy but callow, and a newcomer since Vance’s last visit to Euphoria. “I guess you’re Mr. Weston, the novelist?” he queried, his excitement overcoming his professional dignity. “Why, yes, Miss Delaney said she was expecting you. Will you step right into the reception room? You won’t be disturbed there. But perhaps first you’ll do me a great favour —? Fact is, I’m a member of the Mapledale Avenue Autograph Club, and your signature in this little book. . .”
Vance’s hand shook so that he could hardly form the letters of his name. He followed the grateful clerk, who insisted on conducting him in person to a heavily-gilded reception room with three layers of window curtains and a sultry smell of hot radiators. “Why, this is where the old bar was!” Vance exclaimed involuntarily. The reception clerk raised his eyebrows in surprise. “That must have been a good while ago,” he said disdainfully, as if the new Elkington did not care to be reminded of the old; and Vance echoed: “Yes — a good while.”
He stood absently contemplating the richly-bound volumes of hotel and railway advertisements on the alabaster centre-table, the blood so loud in his ears that he did not hear a step behind him. “Why, Van!” Floss Delaney’s voice sounded, and he turned with a start. “Is it really you?” he stammered, looking at her like a man in a trance.
“Of course it’s me. Do I look like somebody else?”
“No . . . I only meant . . . I didn’t ever expect to see you again.” He paused, and she stood listening with her faint smile while his eyes felt their way slowly over her face.
“But didn’t you get my note?” she asked.
“Yes. I got it. I only landed last week. I meant to stay in New York and see about my new book — the one that’s just out. And then I saw in the New York papers that you were out here; and so I came.”
She took this halting avowal as if it were her due, but remained silent, not averted or inattentive but simply waiting, as her way was, to see what he would say next. He paused too, finding no words to utter what was struggling in him. “The paper I saw said you’d come out on business.”
Her face took on the eager look it had worn at Brambles when Alders had called her to the telephone. “Yes, I have. There’s a big deal going on in that new Country Club district; I guess you’ve heard about it from your father. I got wind of it last summer — just after that time you were down in the country with me, it must have been — and I cabled right home, and bought up all the land I could. And now I’ve had two or three big offers, and I thought I’d better come and look over the ground myself. I’ve got the Shunts interests against me; they’re trying to buy all the land that’s left, and I stand to make a good thing out of it if I keep my nerve,” she ended, a lovely smile animating her tranquil lips.
Vance looked at her perplexedly. When he had lit on that paragraph the day after landing, the idea of seeing her again swept away every other consideration, and he had thrown over his New York engagements and hurried out to Euphoria lest he should get there too late to find her. But on his arrival a note reassured him; she had gone to Dakin for two or three days with her lawyer, on some real-estate business, but would soon be back at the Elkington, where she asked him to call. And there she stood in her calm beauty, actually smiling about that day at Brambles, as if to her it were a mere happy midsummer memory, and she assumed it to be no more to him! Probably the assumption was genuine; she had forgotten the end of that day, forgotten his desperate attempts to see her and plead with her in London — as she had no doubt forgotten the remoter and crueller memories roused by seeing her again at Euphoria. It was perhaps the contrast between her statue-like calm and his own inward turmoil that drew him back to her. There was something exasperating and yet mysteriously stimulating in the thought that she recalled the day when she had deserted him at Brambles only because it was that on which she had first heard of a promising real-estate deal.
“Do you know what this room is?” he exclaimed with sudden bitterness. “It’s the old bar of the hotel.”
She lifted her delicately curved eyebrows. “Oh, is it —? What of it?” her look seemed to add.
“Yes; and the last time I was here it was in the middle of the night, when they rang me up at the ‘Free Speaker’ to say that my grandfather’d had a stroke. There’s where the sofa stood where I saw him lying.” He pointed to a divan of stamped velvet under an ornate wall-clock.
Her glance followed his. “I don’t believe it’s the same sofa — they seem to have done the whole place up,” she said indifferently; and Vance saw from her cloudy brow that she was annoyed with him for bringing up such memories. “I hate to hear about people dying,” she confessed with a slight laugh; “let’s talk about you, shall we?” But he knew it was herself and her own affairs that she wanted to discourse upon; and merely to hear her voice again, and watch the faint curve of her lips as she spoke, was so necessary to him that he stammered: “No — tell me first what you’ve been doing. That’s what I want to know.”
She gave a little murmur of pleasure and dropped down on the divan under the clock. Probably she had already forgotten that it was there that Vance had seen his grandfather lying, as she had also forgotten, long since, that for her anything painful was associated with the old man’s name. A soft glow of excitement suffused her. “Well, I have got heaps to tell you — oceans! Why do you stand off there? Here; come and sit by me . . . So much seems to have happened lately, don’t it? So you’ve got a new book coming out?” She made way for him on the divan, and shrinking a little at his own thoughts he sat down at her side, her arm brushing his. “And if I can get ahead of the Shuntses, and pull this off . . . See here, Van,” she interrupted herself, with a glance at the jewelled dial at her wrist, “I’m afraid I can’t let you stay much longer now; young Honoré Shunts, the son of the one who’s trying to buy up the heights, has asked me to run out with him to the Country Club presently, and of course it’s very important for me to be on good terms with that crowd just now. You see that, don’t you?”
The dizzy drop of his disappointment left Vance silent. “Now, at once? You’re sacking me already?”
“Only for a little while, dear. Everything depends on this deal. If I can get young Shunts so I can do what I want with him. . .” She smiled down mystically on her folded hands.
“Get him to think you’re going to marry him, you mean? I thought you were engaged to Spartivento when I saw you in London?”
She gathered her brows in the effort to explore those remote recesses of the past. “Was I, darling? Being engaged don’t count much, anyhow — does it? What I’ve got to do first is to get this deal through. Then we’ll see. But I’m not going to think about marrying anybody till then.” She looked at her watch again. “There’s somebody coming round from the bank too, with some papers for me to sign . . . But couldn’t we dine together somewhere, darling? Isn’t there some place where there’s a cabaret, and we could have a good long talk afterward? I’m off to New York tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow? And of course every minute’s filled up with business till then — ” he interrupted bitterly.
“Well, business is what I came for. Anyhow, why can’t we dine together tonight?”
“Because it’s just the one night I can’t. I’m engaged to give a lecture at the Auditorium, with readings from my book.” Black gloom filled him as he spoke; but her eyes brightened with interest. “You are? Why, Van, how splendid! Why didn’t you tell me so before? I’ve never been inside the Auditorium, have you? They say it seats two thousand people. Do you think you’ll be able to fill it? But of course you will! Look at the way the smart set rushed after you in London. And they told me over there that this new book was going to be a bigger seller than anything you’ve done yet. Oh, Van, don’t it feel GREAT to come back here and have everybody crowding round because you’re so famous? Do you suppose there’s a seat left — do you think you can get one for me, darling? Let’s go out and ask the ticket-agent right off — ” She was on her feet, alive and radiant as when they had driven up to Brambles and she had sprung out to plunge her arms into the lily-pool.
“Oh, I can get you a ticket all right. I’ll get you a box if you like. But you hate readings — why on earth should you want to come? Besides, what does all that matter? If you’re going away tomorrow, how can I see you again — and when?”
He remembered her talent for eluding her engagements, and was fiercely resolved to hold her fast to this one. He had something to say to her — something that he now felt must be said at any cost, and without delay. After that — . “You must tell me now, before I go, how I can see you,” he insisted.
She drooped her lids a little, and smiled up under them. “Why, I guess we can manage somehow. Can’t you bring me back after the reading? That would be lovely . . . I’ll wait for you in the lobby at the Auditorium. I’ve got my own sitting-room here, and I think I can fix it up with the reception clerk to have some supper sent up. He was fearfully excited when I told him who you were.” She looked at him gaily, putting her hands on his shoulders. “I guess I owe you that after Brambles — don’t I, Van?”
When he got back to the house, his brain reeling with joy, Mae pounced out at him with a large silver-gray envelope crested with gold.
“There! You say you won’t fill the Auditorium! And I told you myself that Mrs. Dayton Alsop was dead against you on account of — well, the things we talked about the other night. And here’s what it is to be a celebrity! She’s invited you to a supper-party after the reading — she’s invited us all. Mother says she won’t go; she’s got no clothes, to begin with. And I guess father won’t, if she don’t. But I’ve got my black lace with paillettes. You won’t be ashamed to be seen with me in that, will you, Van? I never thought I’d see the inside of the Alsop house — did you?” Her sallow worried face was rejuvenated by excitement and coquetry.
Vance stood gloomily examining the envelope. “Supper — tonight?” He thrust the invitation back into her hand. “Sorry — I can’t go. I’ve got another engagement. You’ll have to coax father to take you.”
Mae grew haggard again. “Vance! Another engagement — tonight? You can’t have! Why, the supper’s given for you; don’t you understand? Mrs. Dayton Alsop — ”
“Oh, damn Mrs. Dayton Alsop!”
His sister’s eyes filled. “I think you’re crazy, perfectly crazy . . . the supper’s GIVEN FOR YOU,” she repeated plaintively.
“I’ve told you I’m sorry. I was never told anything about this supper . . . I’ve got another engagement.”
Mae looked at him with searching insistence. “You can’t have an engagement with anybody that matters as much as Mrs. Dayton Alsop. Everybody’ll say — ”
He burst into an irritated laugh. “Let ’em say what they like! My engagement happens to matter to me more than a thousand Mrs. Alsops.”
“You say that just to show how you despise us all!” his sister reproached him.
“Put it on any ground you please. The plain fact is that an engagement’s an engagement. Write and tell her so, will you? Tell her I’m awfully sorry, but her invitation came too late.”
“But she explains that in her letter. She got the party up at the last minute because she wasn’t sure if she could get the right band. She wanted to make sure of the Dakin Blackbirds. She always wants the best of everything at her parties . . . You’ll have to write to her yourself, Vance.”
“Oh, very well.” He flung away and went up to his room. He knew that to refuse this invitation would be not only a discourtesy to Euphoria’s ruling hostess but a bitter blow to the family pride. How could he account to them for his mysterious midnight engagement? An evasion which would have passed unnoticed in a big city would be set all Euphoria buzzing. Everybody in the place would know that no other party was being given that evening; it would be assumed at once that he was going off on a drinking bout with some low associates, and the slight to his hostess and his family would be all the greater. But at that moment he could not conceive of any inducement or obligation that could have kept him from meeting Floss after the reading, and going back to the hotel with her. It was not only his irresistible longing for her that impelled him. He wanted something decisive, final, to come out of this encounter. He had reached a point in his bewildered course when the need to take a definite step, to see his future shape itself before him in whatever sense, was almost as strong as his craving for her nearness. A phrase of his grandmother’s: “Nothing counts but marriage” returned unexpectedly to his mind, and he thought: “It ought to have been Halo — but that’s not to be. And anyhow I’m not fit for her.” With Floss Delaney it would be different. Certain obscure fibres in both their natures seemed inextricably entangled. There was a dumb subterranean power in her that corresponded with his own sense of the forces by which his inventive faculty was fed. He did not think this out clearly; he merely felt that something final, irrevocable, must come out of their meeting that night. He took up his pen, and began: “My dear Mrs. Alsop — ”
Three days later, in the New York train, Vance sat trying to piece together the fragments of his adventure. Everything about it was still so confused and out of focus that he could only put his recollections together in broken bits, brooding over each, and waiting for the missing ones to fit themselves in little by little, and make a picture.
The theatre: gigantic, opening before him light and glaring as the Mouth of Hell in a medi?val fresco he and Halo had seen in a church somewhere . . . Rows and rows of faces, all suddenly individual and familiar, centered on him in their intense avidity, as if his name were written in huge letters over each of them . . . Then, as he settled his papers on the little table in front of him — in the hush following the endless rounds of applause which pulled his head forward at rhythmic intervals, like an invisible wire jerking a marionette — the sudden stir in a stage box, Mrs. Alsop’s box (that heavy over-blown figure was hers, he supposed, and at her side, slim and amber-warm, Floss standing up, looking calmly about the house while her dusky furs slipped from her. . .)
Yes, it was God’s own luck, he saw it now, that before he could get that cursed letter to Mrs. Alsop written Floss had summoned him to the telephone (ah, Mae’s face as she brought the message!) to announce peremptorily that she couldn’t meet him in the lobby after the theatre because Mrs. Alsop had invited her to the party, and she was to go to the theatre in Mrs. Alsop’s box, and young Honoré Shunts was going with them . . . and oh, PLEASE, Vance wasn’t to make a fuss, and the party wouldn’t last all night, would it, and afterward what was to prevent —? And wouldn’t he be very very sweet, and give her just one look — the very last — before he began his lecture? . . . Well, no, the party wouldn’t last all night, he supposed. . .
And now he was speaking: “Ladies and gentlemen, if anybody had told me in the old days — ” God! What a flat beginning! He didn’t pretend to be a professional speaker . . . But at last the preliminaries were over, and he found himself in the middle of “Colossus.” First he read them the fragment about the buried torso in the desert — the episode which symbolized all that was to follow . . . How attentive they were, how hushed! As usual, the wings of his imagination lifted him above mortal contingencies, and his voice soared over the outspread silence. But gradually he began to be conscious of the dense nonconductive quality of that silence, of the fact that not a word he said traversed its impenetrable medium. The men were fidgeting in their seats like children in church; the women were openly consulting their pocket-mirrors. A programme dropped from the gallery, and every head was turned to see it fall. Vance could hear his voice flagging and groping as he hurried on from fragment to fragment . . . Which was it now? Ah: the descent to the Mothers, the crux, the centre of the book. He had put the whole of himself into that scene — and his self had come out of Euphoria, been conceived and fashioned there, made of the summer heat on endless wheat-fields, the frozen winter skies, the bell of the Roman Catholic church ringing through the stillness, on nights when he couldn’t sleep, after the last trolley-rattle had died out; the plants budding along the ditches on the way to Crampton, the fiery shade of the elm-grove down by the river . . . he had been made out of all this, had come out of all this, and there, in rows before him, sat his native protoplasm, and wriggled in its seats, and twitched at its collar-buttons, and didn’t understand him . . . And at last it was over, and the theatre rang and rang with the grateful applause of the released. . .
And at Mrs. Alsop’s, with champagne sparkling and the right band banging, and flowers and pretty women and white shirt-fronts, how quickly the boredom was forgotten, the flagging ardour rekindled, how proud they all were of their home-made genius, how they admired him and were going to swagger about him — how the President of the College hinted playfully at an Honorary Degree, and the pretty women palpitated, and the members of the Culture Club joked about the bewilderment of the Philistines: “You’ve given them something to take home and think about this time!” And after that everything melted again into a golden blur of heat and wine and crowding, out of which Floss Delaney detached herself, firm and vivid, and while Mrs. Alsop’s guests scattered in a sudden snow-fall, and the Dakin Blackbirds scuttled away with raised coat-collars under the leafless elms, Vance had found himself in a motor at her side, twisting down the new road from the heights, crossing the bridge, gliding through the snow-white streets to the hotel, and descending there at a mysterious side-door. (“I gave the reception clerk my ticket for the lecture — and here’s his private key,” she said with a little laugh.)
He had meant to stay at Euphoria for a week or two longer. He knew the bitter disappointment that his hurried departure was causing his family, and especially his grandmother and Mae, one of whom had dreamed of further ovations for the genius, the other of opportunities to be invited to the new houses on the heights. But he could not put off seeing Floss again, could not leave the tormenting ecstasy of their last hours together without a sequel. Everything drew him on to a dark future shot with wild lightnings of hope.
Floss had not realized till then what a public figure he was. The way people had crowded around him at Mrs. Alsop’s seemed to have struck her even more than his popularity in London. She admitted it herself. “It does feel funny, don’t it, Van — you and I being in the spotlight out here at Euphoria? In Europe it’s different — don’t you suppose I know that not one of the big people over there care a hoot where we come from as long as we amuse them? If we’d served a term they wouldn’t care . . . But out here in Euphoria, where they know us inside out, and yet have got to kotow to us, and get up parties for us, and everybody fighting to be introduced, and people who’ve only been here since the boom pretending they played with us when we were children . . . Yes, I guess that ‘dough~face’, as you call him, who was following me round everywhere, WAS young Shunts. Looks as if I’d got him running, don’t it? But he’s not half as crazy about me as the President of the College — did you notice? Oh, Van, I’d love to make them all feel that way in New York, wouldn’t you? And I guess it would be a lot easier than at Euphoria.”
Yes; New York was what she wanted now. And she was sure of it if only she could pull off her deal, and force the Shuntses to buy her out at a big figure. If she could get round that young Shunts, who knew what might happen? At daylight, when they parted, she made Vance promise with her last kiss to come to New York as soon as he could. She said she didn’t dare try her luck there without an old friend to back her up; and in a flash of joy and irony he understood that she was already calculating on the social value of his young celebrity, on the fact that he could probably “place” her in New York, get her more quickly into the inaccessible houses that were the only ones she cared about. “You will, darling, darling?” . . . And now he was on his way to keep his promise.
He remembered thinking, before the reading, that when he met Floss again that night, something final, irrevocable, must come of it. He meant to make her understand that this was no mere lovers’ tryst without a morrow, but a turning-point in his life, a meeting on which his whole future depended. It was as if he could justify his break with Halo only by creating for himself a new tie, more binding, more unescapable. He would have felt ashamed to admit that anything but the need to stabilize his life, to be in harmony again with himself and his work, could have forced him to such a step. Halo had seen that, he was sure; she had understood it. If he was to follow his calling he must be protected from the sterile agitation of these last years. Marriage and a home; normal conditions; that was what he craved and needed. And Floss Delaney seemed to personify the strong emotional stimulant on which his intellectual life must feed. Intellectual comradeship between lovers was unattainable; that was not the service women could render to men. But the old mysterious bond of blood which seemed to exist between certain human beings, which youth sought for blindly, and maturity continued restlessly to crave — that must be the secret soil in which alone the artist’s faculty could ripen. He saw it all now, looked on it with the wide-open eyes of passion and disillusionment. A few years ago he would have plunged into the adventure blindly, craving only the repetition of its dark raptures. But now it seemed to him that while his senses flamed his intelligence remained cool. He knew that Floss would always be what she was — he could no more influence or shape her than he could bend or shape a marble statue. But he needed her, and perhaps she needed him, though for reasons so different; and out of that double need there might come a union so deep-rooted and instinctive that neither, having once known it, could do without it. Perhaps that was what his grandmother had in mind when she said marriage made people sacred to each other. If, after a life-time with Grandpa Scrimser, she could still believe in the sanctifying influence of wedlock, then the real unbreakable tie between bodies and soul must have its origin in depths of which the average man and woman were hardly conscious, but which the poet groped for and fed on with all his hungry tentacles.
All this he had meant to make Floss understand — not in the poet’s speech, which would mean nothing to her, but in the plain words of his passion. He must make her see that they belonged to each other, that they were necessary to each other, that their future meetings could not be left to depend on chance or whim. He meant to plead with her, reason with her, dominate her with the full strength of his will . . . And all that had come of it was that, as her arms slipped from his shoulders, and her last kiss from his lips, he had promised to follow her to New York.
During the two months since Vance’s return to New York “Colossus” had taken the high seas of publicity, and was now off full sail on its adventurous voyage. Where would the great craft land? It had been reviewed from one end of the continent to the other, and from across the seas other reviews were pouring in. The first notices, as usual in such cases, were made largely out of left-over impressions of “The Puritan in Spain”; but a few, in the literary supplements of the big papers, and in the high-brow reviews, were serious though somewhat bewildered attempts to analyze the new book and relate it to the author’s previous work, and in two or three of these articles Vance caught a hint of the doubt which had so wounded him on Halo’s lips. Was this novel, the critics asked — in spite of the many striking and admirable qualities they recognized in it — really as original, as personal as, in their smaller way, its two predecessors had been? “Instead” and “The Puritan in Spain”, those delicate studies of a vanished society, had an individual note that the more ambitious “Colossus” lacked . . . And the author’s two striking short stories — “One Day” and “Unclaimed” — showed that his touch could be vigorous as well as tender, that his rendering of the present was as acute and realistic as his evocations of the past were suffused with poetry . . . Of this rare combination of qualities what use had he made in “Colossus”? On this query the critics hung their reserves and their regrets. The author’s notable beginnings had led them to hope that at last a born novelist had arisen among the self-conscious little essayists who were trying to substitute the cold processes of the laboratory for the lightning art of creation. (The turn of this made Vance wonder if Frenside had not come back to fiction reviewing.)
It was a pity, they said, that so original a writer had been influenced by the fashion of the hour (had he then, he wondered, flushing?) at the very moment when the public, not only the big uncritical public but the acute and cultivated minority, were rebelling against these laborious substitutes for the art of fiction, and turning with recovered appetite to the exquisite freshness and spontaneity of such books as David Dorr’s “Heavenly Archer”, the undoubted triumph of the year. (David Dorr? A new name to Vance. He sent out instantly for “Heavenly Archer”, rushed through it, and flung it from him with a groan.)
Some books fail slowly, imperceptibly, as though an insidious disease had undermined them; others plunge from the heights with a crash, and thus it was with “Colossus “. Halo had been right — slowly he was beginning to see it. “Colossus” was not his own book, brain of his brain, flesh of his flesh, as it had seemed while he was at work on it, but a kind of hybrid monster made out of the crossing of his own imaginings with those imposed on him by the literary fashions and influences of the day. He could have borne the bitterness of this discovery, borne the adverse criticisms and the uncomfortable evidence of sales steadily diminishing, as the book, instead of gathering momentum, flagged and wallowed in the general incomprehension. All that would have meant nothing but for two facts; first that in his secret self he had to admit the justice of the more enlightened strictures, to recognize that his masterpiece, in the making, had turned into a heavy lifeless production, had literally died on his hands; and secondly that its failure must inevitably affect his relations with Floss Delaney. He had always known that she would measure his achievement only by the material and social advantages it brought her, and that she wanted only the successful about her. And he was discovering how soon the green mould of failure spreads over the bright surface of popularity, how eagerly the public turns from an idol to which it has to look up to one exactly on its level. (”‘Heavenly Archer’ — oh, God!” he groaned, and kicked the pitiful thing across the floor.)
Had he gone back to his old New York world — to Rebecca Stram’s studio and the cheap restaurants where the young and rebellious gathered — he might have had a different idea of the impression produced by his book. These young men, though they had enjoyed his early ardours and curiosities, had received his first novels with a shrug; but “Colossus” appealed to them by its very defects. Like most artistic coteries they preferred a poor work executed according to their own formula to a good one achieved without it; and they would probably have championed Vance and his book against the world if he had shown himself among them. But there was no hope of meeting Floss Delaney at Rebecca Stram’s or the Cocoanut Tree, and Vance cared only to be where she was, and among the people she frequented. His return to the New York he had known when he was on “The Hour” was less of a personal triumph than he had hoped. In certain houses where he knew that Floss particularly wanted to be invited he was less known as the brilliant author of “The Puritan in Spain” than as the obscure young man with whom Halo Tarrant had run away, to the scandal of her set; and in groups of more recent growth, where scandals counted little, celebrity was a shifting attribute, and his sceptre had already passed to David Dorr.
David Dorr was a charming young man with smooth fair hair and gentle manners. He told Vance with becoming modesty what an inspiration the latter’s lovely story “Instead” had been to him, and asked if he mightn’t say that he hoped Vance would some day return to that earlier vein; and none of the strictures on “Colossus” made Vance half as miserable as this condescending tribute. “If any of my books are the kind of stuff that fellow admires — ” he groaned inwardly, while he watched Dorr surrounded by enraptured ladies, and imagined him saying in his offensively gentle voice: “Oh, but you know you’re not fair to Weston — really not. That first book of his — what was it called? — really did have something in it. . .”
But there were moments when the mere fact of being in the same room with Floss, of watching her enjoyment and the admiration she excited, was enough to satisfy him. Mrs. Glaisher had reappeared in New York as a Russian Grand Duchess, with Spartivento and the assiduous Alders in her train, and Floss, under the grandducal wing, was beginning to climb the glittering heights of the New York world, though certain old-fashioned doors were still closed to her. “I told you it’d be harder to get on here than in London. They always begin by wanting to know who you are,” she complained one day to Vance. “I guess I’m as good as any of them; but the only way to make them believe it is to have something, or to be somebody, that they’ve got a use for. And I mean to pull that off too; but it takes time.” She had these flashes of dry philosophy, which reminded Vance of her father’s definition of her character. Mr. Delaney was not in New York with his daughter. He had been prudently shipped off to Virginia to negotiate for the re-purchase of one of the Delaney farms. “It’ll keep him busy,” Floss explained — “and out of the way,” her tone implied, though she did not say it. But she added reflectively: “I’ve told him I’ll buy the place for him if he can get it for a reasonable price. He’ll want somewhere to go when I’m married.”
Vance forced a laugh. “When are we going to be married?” he wanted to ask; but he had just enough sense left to know that the moment for putting that question had not come. “Have you decided on the man?” he asked, his heart giving a thump.
She frowned, and shook her head. “Business first. Do you suppose I’m going to risk having to hang round some day and whine for alimony? Not me. I’ve told you already I’ll never marry till I’m independent of everybody. Then I’ll begin to think about it.” She looked at him meditatively. “I wish your new novel wasn’t so dreadfully long,” she began. “I’ve tried to read it but I can’t. The Grand Duchess told me people thought it was such a pity you hadn’t done something more like your first books — why didn’t you? As long as you’d found out what people wanted, what was the use of switching off on something different? You needn’t think it’s only because I’m not literary . . . Gratz Blemer said the other night he couldn’t think what had struck you. He says you could have been a best-seller as easy as not if you’d only kept on doing things like ‘The Puritan in Spain’. He doesn’t think that Dorr boy’s book is in it with your earlier things.”
“Oh, doesn’t he? That’s something to be thankful for,” Vance retorted mockingly.
The renewal of his acquaintance with Gratz Blemer had also been a disappointment. Vance had always respected Blemer’s robust and patient realism, and his gift of animating and differentiating the characters of his densely populated works; Vance recalled the shock he had received when he had first met the novelist at the Tarrants’, and heard him speak of his books as if they were mere business enterprises. Now, Vance thought, his greater literary experience might enable him to learn more from the older man, and to make allowances for his frank materialism. No one could do work of that quality without some secret standard of excellence; perhaps Blemer was so sick of undiscriminating gush that he talked as he did to protect himself from silly women and sillier disciples, and it would be interesting to break through his banter and get a glimpse of his real convictions.
Vance had seen Blemer one night at the Opera, at the back of his wife’s box, and had been struck by the change in his appearance. He had always been thick-set, but now he was fat and almost flabby; he hated music (Vance remembered), and sat with his head against the wall of the box, his eyes closed, his heavy mouth half open. They met a few nights afterward in a house where the host was old~fashioned enough to take the men into a smoking-room after dinner; and here Blemer, of his own accord, came and sat down by Vance. “Well,” he said heavily, “so you’ve got a book out.”
Vance reddened. “I’m afraid it’s no good,” he began nervously.
“Why — isn’t it selling?” Blemer asked. Without waiting for an answer he continued in a querulous tone: “I wish to God I’d brought my own cigars. I ought to have remembered the kind of thing they give you in this house.” He waved a fat contemptuous hand toward the gold-belted rows in their shining inlaid cabinet. “The main thing is to get square with the reviewers first,” he continued wearily. “And generally by the time a fellow’s enough authority to do that, he doesn’t give a damn what they say.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever cared,” Vance flashed out.
Blemer drew his thick lids together. “You don’t think they affect sales, one way or the other? Well, that’s one view — ”
“I didn’t mean that. I only care for what I myself think of my work.” As he spoke, Vance believed this to be true. But Blemer’s attention had already wandered back to himself. “I wish I could get away somewhere. I hate this New York business — dinners and dinners — a season that lasts five months! I’d like to go up the Nile — clear away to Abyssinia. Or winter sports — ever tried ’em? Of course the Engadine’s the only place . . . Write better there?” he interrupted himself, replying to a question of Vance’s. He gave a little grumbling laugh. “Why, I can’t write anywhere any more. Not a page or a line. That’s the trouble with me.” He laughed again. “Not that it matters much, as far as the shekels go. I guess my old age is provided for . . . Only — God, the days are long! Well, I suppose they’re waiting for us to begin bridge.” He got up with a nod to Vance. “I wish I was young enough to read your book — but I hear it’s eight hundred pages,” he said as he lumbered back to the drawing-room.
As the weeks passed Vance became aware that he was no nearer the object for which he had come to New York. He continued to meet Floss Delaney frequently, and in public she seemed as glad as ever to see him. But on the rare occasions when he contrived to be alone with her she was often absent-minded, and sometimes impatient of his attempts at tenderness. After all, she explained, he was the only old friend she had in New York, and it did seem hard if she couldn’t be natural with him, and not bother about how she looked or what she said. This gave him a momentary sense of advantage, and made him try to be calm and reasonable; but he knew he was only one in the throng of young men about her, and not even among the most favoured. At first she had made great play of the fact that he and she came from the same place, and had romped together as children (a vision of their early intimacy that he was himself beginning to believe); but she presumably found this boast less effective than she had hoped, for though she continued to treat him with sisterly freedom he saw that she was on the verge of being bored by his importunities, and in his dread of a rebuff he joined in her laugh against himself.
For a time she talked incessantly about the Euphoria deal, and boasted of her determination to outwit the Shuntses and make them buy her out at her own price. Though Vance had grown up in an atmosphere of real-estate deals the terminology of business was always confusing to him, but he saw that she was trying to gain her end by captivating young Shunts; they were even reported to be engaged, though the fact was kept secret owing to the opposition of the young man’s family. But Vance bore with this too, knowing that, even if the rumour were true, she was not likely to regard a secret engagement as binding, and trying to believe that in the long run he was sure to cut out so poor a creature as young Shunts. Of late she had ceased to speak about Euphoria, and had even (judging from the youth’s lovelorn countenance) lost interest in Shunts; and this strengthened Vance’s hope. She had said she would never marry till she had secured her independence; but once that was done, why should she not marry him sooner than one of the other men who were hanging about her?
He had always instinctively avoided the street in which the Tarrants used to live. He did not know if Tarrant still occupied the same flat, or even if he were in New York. He seemed to have vanished from the worldly circles which Vance frequented, and the latter had not even heard his name mentioned. “The Hour”, he knew, had changed hands, and under a more efficient management had kept just a touch of “highbrow”, skilfully combined with a popular appeal to cinema and sartorial interests. All this part of Vance’s life had fallen in ruins, and he wished he had not been so haunted by the fear of stumbling upon them; but his visual associations were so acute that he had to go out of his way to avoid the sight of that tall fa?ade with the swinging glass doors and panelled stone vestibule that used to be the way to bliss. One night, however, returning from a dinner where Floss had promised to meet him, and had failed to come, he was driven along on such a tide of resentment and bitterness that, without knowing where he was, he turned a corner and found himself before the Tarrant door. He was on the farther side of the street, and looking up he saw a light in the high window of the library. It gave him a sharp twist, and he was standing motionless, without strength to turn away, when the doors swung open and George Frenside’s short clumsy figure issued from between the plate-glass valves. Frenside paused, as if looking for a taxi; then he crossed to Vance’s side of the street, and the two men suddenly faced each other under a lamp. Vance noticed Frenside’s start of surprise, and the backward jerk of his lame body; but a moment later he held out his hand. “Ah, Weston — I heard you were in New York.”
Vance looked at him hesitatingly. “I’m going home soon — to my own home, at Euphoria,” he explained. “I’ve got to be alone and write,” he added, without knowing why.
He saw the ironic lift of Frenside’s shaggy brows. “Already? You’ve brought out a magnum opus just lately, haven’t you?”
“Yes. But it’s not what I wanted it to be.”
“No,” said Frenside bluntly. “I didn’t suppose it was.”
“So he’s read it!” Vance thought, with a sudden flush of excitement; but Frenside’s tone did not encourage further discussion. Both men stood silent, as if oppressed by each other’s presence; but just as Frenside was turning away with a gesture of farewell, Vance brought out precipitately: “I suppose you see Halo’s people. Can you tell me how she is?”
Frenside’s face seemed to grow harsher and more guarded. “Quite well, I believe.”
“She . . . I haven’t heard lately . . . She’s not here . . . is she?”
“In New York? Not that I’m aware of.” Frenside hesitated and then said hurriedly: “If there’s any message — ”
Vance felt the blood rush to his forehead and then ebb. His heart shook against his breast. “Thank you . . . yes . . . I’ll ask you. . .”
The two men nodded to each other and separated.
Vance walked away with his thoughts in a turmoil. The meeting with Frenside had stirred up deep layers of sleeping associations. It was only three months since he had said goodbye to Halo in Paris, but the violent emotional life he had plunged into after their parting made those days seem infinitely distant. Gradually, almost unconsciously, his memories of Halo had taken on the mournful serenity of death; they lay in the depths of his consciousness, with closed lips and folded hands, as though to say that they would never trouble him again. But his few words with Frenside, and the mere speaking of Halo’s name to some one who had perhaps been with her or heard from her lately, disturbed the calm of these memories, and brought Halo back to him as a living suffering creature. Yes — suffering, he knew; and by his fault. For months he had been trying to shut his eyes and ears to that fact, as sometimes, in camp as a boy, when he heard a trapped animal crying at night far off in the woods, he would bury his head under the blankets and try to think the wail had ceased because he had closed his ears against it . . . Ah, well, no use going back to all that now. It was over and done, and he must hide his head again, and try to make himself believe the sound had ceased because he did not want to hear it. . .
Why had Floss not come to the dinner? His hostess, visibly annoyed, said she had called up at the last moment, excusing herself on the plea of a cold; but Vance suspected her of having found something more amusing to do — where, and with whom? The serpent-doubts reared their heads again, hissing in his ears; even if he had tried to listen for that other faint cry they would have drowned it. A cold? He didn’t believe it for a minute . . . But it would be a pretext for calling at her hotel to ask. The hour was not late, and he would go straight to her sitting-room, without sending his name up first. Very likely she would not be there; almost certainly not. But he would leave a note for her and then go away . . . It seemed to him that even if she were out (as he was certain she would be) it would quiet him to sit in her room for a little while, among the things that belonged to her and had her scent.
The lift shot him up, and in answer to his knock he was surprised to hear her voice call out: “Come in.” She lay curled up on a lounge, in a soft velvet wrapper, her hair tossed back, her feet, in gossamer stockings and heelless sandals, peeping out under a Spanish shawl. The room looked untidy yet unlived in: her fur cloak, a withered cluster of orchids pinned to it, had been flung across the piano beside an unwatered and half-dead azalea from which the donor’s card still dangled; and on a gilt table stood an open box of biscuits, some dried-up sandwiches and an empty cup. Perhaps it was the fact that he had been thinking of Halo that made the scene seem so squalid in its luxury. Floss had none of Halo Tarrant’s gift for making a room seem a part of herself — unless indeed this cold disorder did reflect something akin to itself in her own character.
She smiled up at Vance through rings of smoke; but she seemed too lost in her musings to be either surprised, or otherwise affected, by his appearance. “Hullo, Van,” she greeted him in a happy purr.
“All that smoke’s not the best thing for your throat, is it?” he said, bending over her; and she answered: “Throat? What’s the matter with my throat?”
“Mrs. Stratton said you’d telephoned you couldn’t dine with her because you had a cold — ”
“Oh, to be sure — it was the Stratton dinner tonight.” She gave a little laugh. “How was it? Who was there? Did I miss anything?”
“What were you doing instead?” he retorted; and she pointed toward an armchair at her elbow. “Oh, boy — sit down and I’ll tell you.” She tossed away her cigarette, and crossing her arms behind her, sank her head into the nest they made, and lay brooding, a faint tremor on lips and eyelids. Vance looked at her as if he were looking for the first time; there was a veiled radiance in her face which he had seen in it only once or twice, in moments of passionate surrender. “Van,” she said slowly, as though the words were so sweet that she could hardly part with them, “Van, I’ve pulled it off. The cheque’s locked up in my bank. The Shuntses have bought me out at my own price — I knew they would. I didn’t knock off a single dollar.” She laughed again and waited, as if for the approval which was her due.
Vance stood looking at her, his heart in a tumult. If she were free, if she were independent, as she called it, perhaps his moment had come! He moved forward to snatch her to him, to entreat, reason, smother her replies against his heart — but something checked him, warned him it was not yet the moment. She wanted to go on talking about herself and her triumph, and if he thwarted her with his clumsy declaration his last chance might be lost.
He dropped back into the armchair. “Tell me all about it.”
The smile lingered softly on her lips. “Oh, darling, what a fight it’s been! I’m half dead with it. That poor boy’s only just left. I did feel sorry for him — I couldn’t help it.”
“What poor boy?” Van echoed, his tongue feeling dry in his throat. But he knew the answer before she made it.
“Why, Honoré Shunts, of course. That’s why I had to throw over the Stratton dinner. I had to go out and dine with him — and then he came back here. He wouldn’t listen to reason; but he had to. I never saw anybody cry so. I told him I couldn’t stand it — it was unmanly of him, don’t you think it was? And I couldn’t keep his letters, could I, when the family were so set on getting them away from me? I thought I’d never make him understand . . . But now I guess I can take a holiday.” She sank more deeply into her cushions, her lids drooping, her lips slightly parted, as though with the first breathings of sleep. “I’m dead tired, dead. . .”
Vance sat with his eyes fixed on her. Every word she spoke burned itself slowly into his consciousness. He wanted to cry out, to question her — to fling his indignation and horror into her face. It was all as clear as day. She had held the socially ambitious Shuntses through the boy’s letters; she had forced them to buy up her land at her own price through their dread lest the heir to their millions should marry her. By this simple expedient she had attained fortune and liberty at a stroke — there had been nothing difficult about it but the boy’s crying. She had thought that unmanly; an obvious warning to Vance not to repeat the same mistake. Floss always liked the people about her to be cheerful; he knew that. And after all perhaps she was right. Was a poor half-wit like young Shunts worth wasting a pang over? Yes; but the boy had cried — that was the worst of it. Vance seemed to feel those tears in his own throat; it was so thick with them that he could hardly bring out his next question. “Didn’t you hate the job — seeing that poor devil all broken up, I mean?”
“Of course I hated it. I’ve told you I did. It was horrid of him, not being willing to see how I was placed. But he’s just a spoilt baby, and I told him so.”
“Ah — you told him so.” He stood looking down on her, remarking for the first time that her cheek-bones were a little too high, that they gave her a drawn and grimacing look he had never before noticed. He thought: “This is the way she talked about me to the fellow who kept her at Dakin.” For he no longer believed in the legend of her having gone to Dakin to get a job in a dry-goods store. He felt his strength go from him, and Honoré Shunts’s tears under his lids. She was not really like that — he couldn’t endure the thought that she was like that. She must instantly say something, do something to disprove it, to drag him up out of the black nightmare of his contempt for her.
He flung himself down beside the lounge. “Floss, you’re joking, aren’t you, about those letters?”
“What do you call joking? As long as the family wanted them back, what was I to do with them?”
“Oh, God — not that. Not that! You must see . . . I suppose I haven’t understood . . . You can’t mean you’ve used his letters that way . . . not that?”
She lay looking up at him, half-amused, half-ironic; but as she saw the change in his face her own grew suddenly blank and cold. “I don’t know what you mean by using them. It wasn’t my fault if he wrote them; you wouldn’t have had me keep them, would you, when his people wanted them so badly? I did my duty, that’s all. It isn’t always a pleasant job — and you men don’t generally make it easier for us.”
He hardly distinguished the words; her voice poured over him like an icy flood. It seemed as if he and she were drowning in it together. “Dearest, you’re not like that, you’re not like that, say you’re not like that,” he besought her blindly.
She gave a slight laugh and drew back from his imploring arms. “I’m dead tired; I’ve told you so before. I like people who can take a hint; don’t you, darling?” She sat up and stretched out her hand for a cigarette. “Look here — you needn’t look so cross,” she said. “I’m not throwing you out for good. You can come back tomorrow, if you’ll try to treat me a little more politely. But I’m rather fed up with scenes just now, and I’m going to tumble straight into bed. So long, dear.”
She reached for her cigarette-lighter and he heard its dry snap as he got to his feet and turned away from her.
On the table in his room, when he re-entered it that night, he saw a telegram; but he left it lying. Whoever it was from, whatever it contained, could hardly matter at that moment. He dropped into a chair and sat staring ahead of him down a long tunnel of darkness. Nothing mattered — nothing would ever again matter. He felt like a man who has tried to hang himself because life was too hideous to be faced, and has been cut down by benevolent hands — and left to face it. He thought of the day when he had staggered into his parents’ room at Euphoria to find his father’s revolver and make an end — and the revolver had not been there, and he had been thrown back on life as he was thrown back on it now. He felt again the weakness of his legs, the blur in his sick brain, as he staggered down the passage from one room to the other, groped about among the familiar furniture like a thief in a strange house, found the drawer empty, and crawled back again to his own room. It was dreadful, the way old memories of pain fed their parasitic growth on new ones, and dead agonies woke and grew rosy when the Furies called. . .
The winter daylight came in at the window before he thought of the telegram again. Then something struck him about the way it lay there, alone, insistent, in the smoky dawn, and he reached out and tore it open. The message was from his sister Mae and read: “Grandma has pneumonia wants you badly come as soon as you can.”
In the train that was hurrying him homeward it occurred to him for the first time that the telegram might have been from Halo. He wondered why that possibility had never presented itself to his mind before; but in the moral wreckage of the last hours he had not seen her struggling and sinking. She seemed to be hidden away in some safe shelter, like the Homeric people when a cloud hides them from mortal peril. But now the thought of her stole back, he felt her presence in his distracted soul. He seemed to lie watching her between closed lids, as a man on a sick bed watches the gliding movements of his nurse, and weaves them into the play of light on the ceiling. . .
At the door of the Mapledale Avenue house, where Mae and his father met him, some one said: “She’s conscious . . . she’ll know you . . .” and some one added: “You’d better come into the dining~room and have some coffee first — or did you get it on the train?”
On the landing upstairs he met his mother. Mrs. Weston was a desiccated frightened figure. They were not used to death at the Westons’, it did not seem to belong to the general plan of life at Euphoria, it had no language, no ritual, no softening conventions to envelop it. Mrs. Weston’s grief was dry and stammering. “The minister’s been with her, but he’s gone away. She says she won’t see anybody now but you,” she whispered.
Mrs. Scrimser’s room was full of crisp winter sunlight and its brightness lay across her bed. She sat up against her smooth pillows, small but sublime. All her great billowing expanse of flesh seemed to have contracted and solidified, as though everything about her that had roamed and reached out was gathered close for the narrow passage. She was probably the only person in the house who knew anything about death, and Vance felt that she had already come to an understanding with it. He knelt down and pressed his face against the bed. “Van,” she said, “my little boy. . .” Her fingers wandered feebly through his hair. He remembered that only two nights before he had been kneeling in the same way, his arms stretched out to snatch at another life that was slipping from him, not into death but into something darker and more final; and that other scene lost its tragic significance, became merely pitiful and trivial. He put away the memory, pressing his lips to the wise old hands, trying to exclude from his mind everything but what his grandmother had been, and still was to him. For a long time they held each other in silence; then she spoke softly. “I’ve been with you so often lately. At Crampton, on the porch. . .”
Yes; to him too those hours were still living. In some ways she had been nearer to him than any one else, though he knew it only as their souls met for goodbye. He buried his face in those tender searching hands, feeling the warm current of old memories pass from her body to his, as if it were she who, in some mystical blood~transfusion, was calling him back to life. A door opened, and some one looked in and stole away. The clock ticked quietly. She lay still. “Van,” she said after a while, in a weaker voice. He lifted his head. “There’s something I wanted to say to you. Stoop over, darling.” He stood up and bent down so that his ear was close to her lips. “Maybe we haven’t made enough of pain — been too afraid of it. Don’t be afraid of it,” she whispered.
Apparently it was her final message, for after that she lay back, quiet and smiling, and though he knew she was conscious of his presence the only sign she gave him was, now and then, the hardly audible murmur of his name. Gradually he became aware that even he was growing remote to her. She began to move in the bed uneasily, with the automatic agitation of the dying, and he rose to call his mother. He noticed then that his aunt Sadie Toler had crept in, and was sitting, a dishevelled stricken figure, in a corner waiting. She came to her mother.
When Vance returned to his grandmother’s room, twilight had fallen and the room was quieter than ever. But now a short convulsive breathing seemed struggling to keep time with the tick of the clock. Some one whispered: “Oxygen”; some one else stole out and came back with a heavy bag. The doctor came, and Vance wandered out of the room again. He joined his father, and the two men sat, aimless and vacant-minded, in Mrs. Weston’s bedroom across the passage. Mr. Weston said with a nervous laugh: “That was a big turnover those Delaneys made the other day — ” but Vance was silent. His father drummed on the table, stealthily drew a cigar from his pocket, fixed on it a look of longing, and put it back. “You’d better go and lie down on the bed and try and have a nap,” he suggested to his son. To cut short the talk Vance obeyed, and almost immediately fell into a black pit of sleep. He seemed to have lain plunged in it for hours when he was roused by steps in the room and the flash of electric light in his eyes. Mae stood before him. “Do you want to see her?”
“See her? Has she asked for me —?” But before the phrase was ended he understood, and as he stumbled to his feet he remembered the agony it had been to go into Laura Lou’s room after she was dead, and look down on the smooth empty shell which some clever craftsman seemed to have made and put there in her place. “No, no!” he cried, and threw himself back on the bed.
Vance sat in the Mapledale Avenue dining-room the day after his grandmother’s funeral. For a while he had been separated from her by the long-drawn horror of the burial service, with its throng of mourners gathered from every field of her beneficence, the white~haired orators pressing on the vox humana, the bright eye-glassed women stressing uplift and service, and the wrong it would do their leader’s memory to think of her as dead and not passed over, the readings from Isaiah and James Whitcomb Riley, intermingled by a practised hand.
Now the house was silent and deserted, and she could come to him again. The strange people who assemble at the call of death had vanished, the neighbours had called and gone away, the women were upstairs, busy with their mourning, and Lorin Weston had gone back to the office. He had wanted Vance to go with him, had suggested their running over in the Ford to see the land the Shuntses had just bought from Floss Delaney; he had evidently been a little hurt at his son’s declining to accompany him.
After Mr. Weston had left the house Vance sat alone and stared into his future. He could not stay another day at Euphoria; too many memories, bitter or sorrowful, started up from every corner of that featureless place. But where should he go, how deal with the days to come? All thought of returning to New York had vanished. Those hours in his grandmother’s room seemed to have washed his soul of its evil accretions. He felt no heroic inspiration to take up life again, but only a boundless need to deal with himself, cut a way through the jungle of his conflicting purposes, work out some sort of plan from the dark muddle of things. “Pain — perhaps we haven’t made enough of it.” Those last words of his grandmother’s might turn out to be the clue to his labyrinth. He didn’t want to expiate — didn’t as yet much believe in the possibility or the usefulness of it; he wanted first of all to measure himself with his pain, to wrestle alone with the dark angel and see how he came out of that conflict.
It was Mae who came to his rescue. He told her he wanted to get away from everything and everybody, and try to do some work — though at the moment he didn’t believe he would ever write another line. Mae was impressed, as he intended she should be, by the urgent call of his genius, and immediately exclaimed: “That Camp of Hope up at Lake Belair always has somebody to look after it in winter. I guess they’d take you in up there.”
The solitude of the northern woods in winter! A wild longing to be there at once possessed him. But he wanted to make sure that there were no hotels near by, no winter sports, nothing but stark woods and frozen waters. Mae knew the man who lived there, and could reassure him. He was a poor fellow who, having developed tuberculosis, had had to give up his career as a school-teacher and accept this care-taker’s job for the sake of the air and the out~door life. He had been cured, and might have gone back to his work; but he had turned into a sort of hermit, and would only take a summer class in natural history at the camp, returning to his frozen solitude in winter. Mae proposed to telegraph to find out if he would receive Vance as a boarder, or make some other arrangement for him, and Vance accepted.
Two days later he was on his way to Lake Belair. After a day’s journey the train left him at dusk at a wayside station, and as he got out the icy air caught him by the throat and then suddenly swung him up on wings. He heard sleigh-bells approaching in the dark, and a few minutes later the cutter was gliding off with him into the unknown.
The ex-schoolmaster, Aaron Brail, a thin slow man of halting speech, seemed neither surprised nor unduly interested by Vance’s coming. He explained that he sometimes took a boarder in winter to replenish his scanty funds, and said he hoped Vance wouldn’t be dissatisfied with the food, which was supplied by the wife of one of the lumbermen from the near-by camp. Vance was given a small bare room with a window looking out on vastnesses of snow and hemlock forest, and Brail and he seldom met except at meals, and when they smoked their pipes after supper about the living-room stove. There was a rough book-shelf against the wall, with a row of third-rate books on various subjects, chiefly religion and natural history. Brail was a half-educated naturalist, and spent his evenings making laborious excerpts from the books he was reading. He was too shortsighted to be a good field-observer, and his memory was so uncertain that when he was not mislaying the notes he had made the night before he was hunting for the spectacles without which he could not re-read them. But though he was not interesting the solitude of his life in that austere setting of hills and forests had given him a kind of primitive dignity, and his company was not uncongenial.
Every morning early Vance started off on a tramp of exploration with one of the lumbermen, but he soon dispensed with his guide, and spent the white-and-gold hours in long lonely rambles. Sometimes he would pick up a meal in a lumberman’s house, but oftener he carried his provisions with him and ate them on a warm ledge in the sun. The hours flowed by with the steady beat of the sea — there were days when he almost imagined himself lying again on the winter sands and watching the shoreward march of the waves, as he had done during his honeymoon with Laura Lou. His mind travelled back to his first adventures and discoveries, which already seemed so remote; he felt like a very old man whose memory, blurring the intervening years, illuminates the smallest incidents of youth. Sometimes he came home so drunk with sunlight and cold that sleep struck him down in the doorway, and he would throw himself on his hard bed and not wake till Brail called him to supper.
At first he paid for these bouts of sleep by lying awake all night, his brain whirling and buzzing like a gigantic loom. It was as though he were watching some obscure creative process, the whirl and buzz of the cosmic wheels. The fatigue was maddening, and when sleep finally came there was no rest in his brief unconsciousness. Two women peopled these agitated vigils; the one that his soul rejected and his body yearned for, the other who had once seemed the answer to all he asked of life, but had now faded to a reproach and a torment. The whole question of woman was the agelong obstacle to peace of spirit and fruitfulness of mind; to get altogether away from it, contrive a sane and productive life without it, became the obsession of his sleepless midnights. All he wanted was to be himself, solely and totally himself, not tangled up in the old deadly nets of passion and emotion.
But solitude and hard exercise gradually worked their spell. His phases of excited insomnia gave place to a quiet wakefulness, and he would lie and watch the night skies wheel past his unshuttered window, and recover again his old sense of the rhythmic beat of the universe. The feeling brought a kind of wintry quietude, a laying on of heavenly hands, and he would fall asleep like a child who knows that his nurse is near.
On stormy days he lingered in the lumbermen’s huts, talking with them and their families, and he felt refreshed by the contact with their simple monotonous lives. But they lived unconsciously in those cosmic hands in which he felt himself cradled, and as vigour of mind and body returned he began to crave for a conscious intelligence, an intelligence not complicated or sophisticated but moulded on the large quiet lines of the landscape. He tried to think that Brail might satisfy this need; but Brail was not so much uncommunicative as lacking in anything to communicate. He was not hostile to Vance, he seemed even, as the weeks passed, to find a mild pleasure in their evening talks. But he had a small slack mind, to which his rudimentary studies as a naturalist had given no precision; and Vance suspected that his flight to the woods had been not toward something but away from something. It was the same with Vance himself: but as his nerves grew steadier he understood that he would never be able to rest long in evasion or refusal, that something precise and productive must come out of each step in his life. He began to think of himself less as a small unsatisfied individual than as an instrument in some mighty hand; and one day he was seized by the desire to put this rush of returning energy into words. On starting for the woods he had snatched up a few old books left at Euphoria since his college days — an Odyssey and a Greek grammar among them — and during his sleepless nights he had laboured over the grammar and refreshed his spirit with glimpses of the sunlit Homeric world, which was spacious and simple like the scenes about him. But with the revival of the desire to write his studies slackened, and the books lay untouched, with two others which Mae had taken from the shelf by his grandmother’s bed, and handed to him as he was leaving. These he had not even looked into — the mood for books had passed. He must write, write, write. But to his dismay he found he had brought no paper with him. This would have been a small misfortune at a season when the general store was open and the mails came regularly; but a succession of snowstorms had interrupted the postal service from the nearest point on the railway, and nobody at the camp had any paper. Even Brail could produce only a few sheets of letter-paper, and this absurd obstacle aggravated Vance’s fury to begin. At length he coaxed some torn sheets of packing paper from one of the lumbermen’s wives, and set himself to work. The fact of having only these coarse crumpled pages at his disposal seemed to stimulate his imagination, and in those first days he felt nearer than ever before to the hidden sources of inspiration.
The return to work steadied his nerves, and his tramps over the frozen hills carried him back into that world of ecstasy from which he had been so long shut out. He had written “Colossus” in a fever, but his new book was shaping itself in a mood of deep spiritual ardour such as his restless intelligence had never before attained, and these weeks outside of time gave him his first understanding of the magic power of continuity.
Now that his energies were all engaged he could let his thoughts return to his grandmother’s death. At first that misery, so meaningless in its suddenness, had been unendurable; but now he could think about her calmly, recognizing that her course was run and that she would not have wished to outlive herself. In her way she had been happy, in spite of ups and downs of fortune, in spite of Grandpa Scrimser, and of blows (not infrequent, he suspected) to her pride as an orator and evangelist. She was too intelligent not to be aware of her own ignorance, too impulsive to remember it for long; but he felt that all these contradictions were somehow merged in a deep central peace. Vance had always ascribed this to the optimism he found so irritating in her; but her last word had been a warning against optimism. “Maybe we haven’t made enough of pain — ” that had been her final discovery, and it completed his image of her.
One evening, as he brooded over these memories, feeling the warmth of her soul in his, he remembered the two books that Mae had brought him as he was leaving Euphoria. They stood on his table with the others, and he took them up and glanced at them. One was a thumbed anthology of “Daily Pearls”, collected by the editor of “Zion’s Spotlight”; the kind of book from which pressed pansies and scraps of pious verse drop in a shower when they are opened. The other volume had obviously been less often consulted. Vance opened it and slowly turned the pages. In a few minutes they had possession of him, and he read on deep into the night, read till his oil-lamp had sputtered out and his candle followed it; and when sunrise came he was sitting up in bed in his old leather coat, still reading. “The Confessions of Saint Augustine” — though the title was familiar the book had never come his way, and he had only a vague idea of its date and origin. But before he had read a dozen pages he saw that it was one of the timeless books with which chronology is unconcerned. Who was this man who reached out across the centuries to speak to him as never man had spoken before? He felt his whole life summed up in each of these piercing phrases. “Come, Lord, and work: arouse us and incite; kindle us, sweep us onward; teach us to love and to run. . .
“I said: ‘Give me chastity and self-control — BUT NOT JUST YET. . .’ I was shaken with a gust of indignation because I could not enter into Thy Will, yet all my bones were crying out that this was the way, and no ship is needed for that way, nor chariot, no, nor feet; for it is not as far from me as from the house to the spot where we are seated. . .
“And Thou didst beat back my weak sight, dazzling me with Thy splendour, and I perceived that I was far from Thee, in the land of unlikeness, and I heard Thy voice crying to me: ‘I am the Food of the full-grown. Become a man and thou shalt feed on Me’.”
The food of the full-grown — of the full-grown! That was the key to his grandmother’s last words. “Become a man and thou shalt feed on Me” was the message of experience to the soul; and what was youth but the Land of Unlikeness?
Night after night he returned to those inexhaustible pages, again and again after that first passionate encounter he re-read them slowly, broodingly, weighing them phrase by phrase in the light of his brief experience, feeling his soul expand to receive them, and carrying away each day some fragment of concentrated spiritual food to nourish him in his lonely rambles.
The thaw came early, with rainy winds and intervals of frost; and on one of his excursions Vance was caught in a storm of sleet, lost his way when night fell, and got back to camp exhausted and shivering. That night he flamed in fever and shook with coughing, and the doctor who came over from the nearest town muttered in a corner with Brail, who looked frightened and bewildered. Vance was aware that he must be seriously ill, and that Brail would have liked him to be taken away; but it was evidently thought unadvisable to move him, and he felt weakly thankful when he understood that he was to be left where he was. Brail and the lumberman’s wife nursed him to the best of their ability, but the woman was ignorant and clumsy, and Brail in a state of chronic bewilderment, always mislaying his spectacles, and totally unable to remember any instructions the doctor had neglected to write down. In spite of all this Vance gradually worked his way back to health, and the weeks wore on slowly but not unhappily till a day came when he got to his feet again and shambled a little way along the wet path in the mild spring sun.
After that the time passed pleasantly enough. The subdued ecstasy of convalescence was in his veins, and he looked out with eyes cleansed by solitude on a new world in which everything was beautiful and important, and seemed to have been created for his special use. His physical suffering and helplessness seemed to have matured his mind, and detached it from the things of the past like a ripe fruit from the tree. Saint Augustine’s words came back to him: “Become a man and thou shalt feed on Me”; and he felt that at last he was ready to taste of the food of the full-grown, however bitter to the lips it might be.
He had thought vaguely of staying on at Belair till the Camp of Hope reopened, and then of hiring a bungalow higher up in the hills and settling down to his new book. He had not yet worked out any plan beyond that, though a plan there must be if he were to regain a hold on himself. He wanted first to secure a few months of quiet for his book, and to watch the advance of spring, and the sudden blazing up of summer, in that powerful untamed landscape; but he saw that to recover his bodily strength he must get away to better care and more food. It was queer how even a touch of pneumonia did you in — his legs still rambled away from him like a baby’s when he attempted his daily walk. . .
His family did not know of his illness; he had sworn Brail to secrecy on the first day, and the timid creature had obeyed, no doubt privately relieved at not having to provide for other visitors. Vance had been touched by Brail’s awkward devotion during his illness. He had found out that Brail had tramped twenty miles through the snow to get the doctor, and that his reluctance to keep Vance at the camp was due merely to the fear of not being able to give him proper care. The men had grown to feel more at ease with each other, and one day Brail, in a burst of confidence, confessed to Vance that his great desire had been to enter the ministry, but that he had been discouraged by the difficulties of theological study. He had been unable, after repeated attempts, to pass his examination, and his failure had been a lasting mortification. “I never could seem to take to any other profession, not even zoology,” he said mournfully, wiping the mist from his spectacles.
“Was that what made you decide to stay up here?” Vance questioned idly; and to his surprise he saw the blood rise under the other’s sallow skin.
“Oh, no,” said Brail hastily, turning away to fumble for his spectacle-case.
Vance lay back in his chair and looked up at the low smoke~blackened ceiling. There was a long silence, and his mind had wandered away to other matters when he became aware that Brail was still standing before him, his hands in his pockets, his narrow forehead anxiously wrinkled, “I’ve been wanting to tell you for some time,” said Brail, through a cough of embarrassment.
“Tell me what?”
Brail bowed his head and spoke low. “It was a woman,” he said. “I met her when I was observing animals at a circus. She was a lion~tamer,” he added with another cough.
Vance stared up at him, convulsed with sudden laughter; but he saw the other’s tortured face, and mastered his muscles in time. “Well — isn’t that what they all are?” he said.
Brail stared back, blinking down through his spectacles. “Er — lion~tamers? Ah, yes — I see!” he exclaimed, his cautious wrinkled smile suddenly responding to the pleasantry. “But I meant it literally,” he jerked out, and turned in haste from the room. Vance, lying back, saw him pass in front of the window and walk away with mournful strides through the mud. “The food of the full-grown,” he murmured to himself as Brail disappeared among the hemlocks.
Yes, it was time to eat of that food; time to grow up; time to fly from his shielded solitude and go down again among the lion-tamers. He was glad that his possessions were already packed, and that he was to leave the next morning; but when the cutter stood at the door, and his bags were stowed under the seat, he turned to Brail with a final pang of reluctance. “Well, goodbye. You may see me back yet.”
Brail blinked and shook his head. “You’ll think so, maybe; but you won’t come,” he answered, and stood watching Vance drive away.
The first night in Chicago nearly made Brail’s prophecy come true. Vance had gone there straight from the camp. Now that his grandmother was dead he could not face the idea of returning to Euphoria; and he meant to stay a few days in Chicago and try to think out some plan for the next months. But the sudden transition from the winter silence of the hills to the tumult of the streets was more than his shaken nerves could bear. These millions of little people rushing about their business and pleasure in an endless uproar of their own making were like strange insects driven by unintelligible instincts; and he was too tired to be interested in observing them. Ah, how tired he was — how unutterably tired! All the factitious energy accumulated during his last days at Belair had been lost in the descent to the heavy atmosphere of the city. He felt will-less and adrift, and the food of the full-grown seemed too strong a fare for him.
The next morning he got as far as the telegraph office in the lobby of the hotel. He inscribed Brail’s name on a telegraph blank, and was about to write under it: “Can I come back?” when he was checked by a vision of the poor man shambling off alone down the muddy path to the camp, spectrally followed by the limping figure of Chris Churley. There went the two deniers, the two fugitives — poor Chris, poor Brail! No — that was not the solution to Vance’s difficulty; it lay somewhere ahead of him, in the crowd and the struggle. At present he couldn’t see just where; but a weak longing overcame him to be again among familiar faces and in scenes associated with his past. It occurred to him that he might have gone back to Laura Lou’s mother if she had still lived at Paul’s Landing, in the tumble-down house above the Hudson where he had been so happy and so miserable; but doubtless she was still in California with her son, who had gone out there to work as a nurseryman. Vance went up to his room and lay down on the bed. He felt too weary to think, or to want anything, or to make any fresh resolves, since he knew they would be broken . . . The next morning he took a ticket for Paul’s Landing.