XLII + 

Just outside the cottage window an apple branch crossed the pane. For a long time Vance had sat there, seeing neither it nor anything else, in the kind of bodily and spiritual blindness lately frequent with him; and now suddenly, in the teeming autumn sunlight, there the branch was, the centre of his vision. + 

It was a warped unsightly branch on a neglected tree, but so charged with life, so glittering with fruit, that it looked like a dead stick set with rubies. The sky behind was of the densest autumnal blue, a solid fact of a sky. Against it the shrunken rusty leaves lay like gilt bronze, each fruit carved in some hard rare substance. It might have been the very Golden Bough he had been reading about in one of the books he had carried off when he and Laura Lou left New York. + 

Whatever happened to Vance on the plane of practical living, in the muddled world where bills must be paid, food provided, sick or helpless people looked after, there still came to him this mute swinging wide of the secret doors. He never knew when or how it would happen: it sometimes seemed that he was no more than the latch which an unseen hand raised to throw open the gates of Heaven.⁠ ⁠… + 

And here he was, inside! No mere latch, after all, but the very king for whom the gates had been lifted up.⁠ ⁠… It was utterly improbable, inexplicable, yet the deepest part of him always took it for granted, and troubled no more over the how and why than a child let loose in an unknown garden. In truth it was the only human experience that was perfectly intelligible to him, though he was so powerless to account for it.⁠ ⁠… + 

As usual with him now, the sudden seeing of the apple branch coincided with the intensely detailed inner vision of a new book. In the early days that flash of mysterious light used to blot out everything else; but with the growing mastery of his craft he noticed, on the contrary, that when the gates swung open the illumination fell on his daily foreground as well as on the heavenly distances. Mental confusion ceased for him from the moment when the inner lucidity declared itself, and this sense of developing power gave him a feeling of security, of an inviolable calm in the heart of turmoil.⁠ ⁠… + 

The quarrel with Tarrant had ended vaguely, lamely, as business disputes most often do. Vance was beginning to understand that only intellectual differences, battles waged in the abstract for absolute ends, can have heroic conclusions. The tearing-up of his manuscript had been the result of a passionate impulse, but it had neither bettered his situation nor made it appreciably worse. Eric Rauch told him that Tarrant would never have let him off anyhow: “it wasn’t his way.” Rauch advised Vance to rewrite the lost chapters, and was genuinely surprised to hear him pronounce this an impossibility. Rauch’s own conception of the products of the creative arts was as purely businesslike (in spite of his volume of poems) as if they had been standardized like motor parts. But Vance could only say that the book was gone past recovery.⁠ ⁠… + 

Finally it was agreed that Tarrant should give him time to write another novel, and that the New Hour should meanwhile continue his slender salary. Soon afterward the first instalment of the royalties on Instead fell due. It was slightly above Dreck and Saltzer’s expectations, and Vance was able to pay back half of the money he had borrowed, and to clear off the interest and his other debts. He had thought long and painfully over the future after his last talk with his grandmother, and had finally concluded that he would leave to Laura Lou the decision as to her future and his. He refrained from telling her of Mrs. Scrimser’s offer, and of his resolve not to share the money she hoped to make on her lecturing tour. To speak of this might raise hopes that he would have to disappoint without being able to make his wife see why. The alternatives he put before her were the offer of a home with his family, or the possibility of her joining Mrs. Tracy and Upton in California. It went hard with him to suggest the latter, for it meant the avowal of his failure to make her happy or comfortable. But he said to himself, with a gambler’s shrug: “If she chooses to go to her mother it will mean she wants to be free⁠—and if she does, I ought to let her.” He still did not understand why he resented this idea instead of welcoming it, or how much there was of memory, and how much of mere pride, in his dogged determination to keep her with him as long as she was willing. + 

Hardly less distasteful was the idea of going back to his family. The offer had been renewed by Mr. Weston, who, though his ill-advised speculations had checked his career in real estate, was ready to take his son and his son’s wife into his house, and find a job for Vance (he thought there would still be a chance on the Free Speaker). But Vance’s few hours with his grandmother had put Euphoria before him in merciless perspective. In every allusion, every turn of her speech, every image that came to her, he saw how far he had travelled from Mapledale Avenue. With cruel precision he evoked the mental atmosphere of the place; the slangy dingy days at the Free Speaker, the family evenings about the pink-throated gramophone; and he knew he could not face it. Yet he was determined not to let Laura Lou suspect his reluctance. His business was to do his best for her, and perhaps, according to her lights, his best was this. He put the case for Mapledale Avenue first, without betraying his own feelings; he even exaggerated the advantages of his father’s offer. But, to his surprise, Laura Lou rejected it. She was never good at giving reasons or analysing her instinctive reluctances, and he suspected that the fear of hurting his feelings benumbed her. But she seemed to feel that he ought to be near New York, and not have to go back to newspaper work, at least not at Euphoria.⁠ ⁠… “I know you’d be doing it just for me,” she tried to explain. + 

“Well, we’ve got to live,” he rejoined, not unkindly; and she said, in her disjointed way: “If we were somewhere where I could cook⁠ ⁠… and nobody interfere.⁠ ⁠…” If they had a home of their own! He knew that was what she meant. But he said, still more gently: “See here, Laura Lou, till I can give you a place where nobody’ll interfere, how about going out to your mother and Upton? You know that climate⁠—” + 

She flushed, this time with pleasure; then her eyes grew dusky, as they did when she was troubled. “But I guess California’d be a good way farther from your work than Euphoria even; and we’d have more expenses.⁠ ⁠…” She looked at him with a little practical smile. Oh, Lord⁠—how was he to tell her? Yes, he said, he supposed he’d have to stick on here in New York, on his job; what he meant was⁠—“For me to go out alone?” she completed, and added immediately: “Oh, Vanny, it isn’t what you want, is it? You’re not trying to tell me it would be easier for you if I went back to Mother? If that’s it, I’d rather you.⁠ ⁠…” She ended desperately: “If we could only find some little place where I could do the cooking⁠ ⁠…” and as he kissed away her tears he swore he would find a way, if she was really sure she didn’t want to leave him.⁠ ⁠… “I’d mend for you too, better than I have,” she sobbed out, rapturous and repentant; and the search for the little place began. It was anxious and arduous; the friendly settlement manager was consulted, but could suggest nothing within Vance’s means. Other enquiries failed; and at last it was Rebecca Stram who, oddly enough, came to the rescue. She had an old Jewish mother who lived out on the fringes of the Bronx, and a brother in real estate who picked up unlikely bargains, and waited; and among them they found a shaky bungalow containing some rattan chairs, a divan and a kitchen range. It stood alone on a bit of bedraggled farmland, in the remains of an orchard, with a fragment of woodland screening it from flathouses and chimneys. Not far off, the outskirts of the metropolis whirled and rattled and smoked; but in this sylvan hollow nature still worked her untroubled miracles, and Vance had to walk through deep ruts, and past a duck pond and an ancient pump, to pick up turnpike and trolley. Behind the house the land rose in a wooded ridge, and beyond that was real country, still untouched; it was heaven to dwellers at Mrs. Hubbard’s, and for the first weeks the mere sense of peace and independence gave Vance the illusion that all was well. He consolidated the divan, and bought a stove, a couple of lamps, some linen, a jute rug; he managed their simple marketing, and rigged up shelves and hooks; and the house being made habitable, Laura Lou began the struggle to keep it going. At first it did not much trouble Vance. He took his fountain pen and his pad and wandered off along the ridge, where there were still shady hollows in which you could stretch out and dream, and watch the clouds travel, and the birds; it was enough to be in this green solitude, and he did not much care what food, or lack of it, he came back to. But for a good many weeks he did little more than dream. The foundations of his being had been shaken; he was full of warfare and alarms. What he wrote he tore up, and he read more than he wrote; the few books he had picked up at a cheap sale, as they were leaving New York, were devoured before the summer was half over. But all the while he was rebuilding his soul; he found no other term for the return of the inner stability which was like a landing field for his wide-pinioned dreams. And then one day he looked out of the window and saw the apple bough, and his new book hanging on it. He held his breath and watched.⁠ ⁠… + 

He had no idea of reviving Loot. All desire to treat the New York spectacle was gone. The tale he saw shaping itself was simpler, nearer to his own experience. It was to be about a fellow like himself, about two or three people whose spiritual lives were as starved as his own had been. He sat for a long time penetrating his mind with the strange hard beauty created by that bit of crooked apple bough against a little square of sky. Such ordinary material to make magic out of⁠—and that should be his theme. As he meditated, a thousand mysterious activities began to hum in him, his mind felt like that bit of rustling woodland above the cottage, so circumscribed yet so packed with the frail and complicated life of birds, insects, ferns, grasses, bursting buds, falling seeds, all the incessantly unfolding procession of the year. He had only to watch himself, to listen to himself, to try and set down the million glimmers and murmurs of the inner scene. “See here, Laura Lou,” he cried out, pushing back his chair to go and tell her⁠—and then remembered that nothing he could tell would be intelligible to her. He stood still, picturing the instant shock of thought if it had been Halo he had called, Halo who had hurried in from the kitchen.⁠ ⁠… He sat down at the desk and hid his face in his hands. “God,” he thought. “When I was beginning to forget.⁠ ⁠…” He pulled his pen out, and wrote a few lines; then he was struck by Laura Lou’s not having responded to his shout⁠—she who always flew to him at the least pretext. A minute or two ago he had heard her busying herself with the preliminary assembling of food fragments which she called getting dinner. It was funny she hadn’t answered; he thought he would go and see.⁠ ⁠… + 

She was in the kitchen, over the range. He thought he saw her push something into it⁠—a white rag or paper, it seemed⁠—and a moment later he caught the smoky acrid smell of burning linen. She turned with a face as white as the rag, and a smile which showed her teeth too much, as if her lips had shrunk away. “Yes⁠ ⁠… yes⁠ ⁠… coming⁠ ⁠…” she said nervously. + 

“Why, what’s that queer smell? What are you burning?” + 

She gave the same death’s-head smile. “I can’t get the fire to draw⁠—I just stuffed in anything.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“I should say you did. What a stench! I guess you’ve put it out now⁠—” + 

She went and sat down on the chair by the kitchen table without making any answer. + 

“I don’t see the joke,” he grumbled, exasperated at being shaken out of his dream. + 

“I guess there’s something wrong with the range⁠—you’ll have to get somebody to mend it,” she brought out in a queer thin voice, as if she had been running. On the table was her untidy work basket, and near it were more white rags, or handkerchiefs or something, in a dirty heap. She crammed them into the basket, looking at him sideways. “Baby clothes?⁠—” he thought, half dismayed, half exultant. He stood a moment irresolute, finding no words; but suddenly she spoke again, in the same breathless reedy voice. “You better go and find somebody to repair it.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“Oh, Lord. I’ll see first if I can’t do it myself,” he grumbled, remembering the cost of the last repairs to the range. + 

“No, no, you can’t. You better go out somewhere and get your dinner today,” she added. + 

“What’ll you eat then?” + 

She gave the same grin, which so unnaturally bared the edges of her pale pink gums. “Oh, I’ll take some milk. You better go out for your dinner. Then I’ll lie down,” she insisted breathlessly. + 

He stood doubtful, his book palpitating in him. The glorious blue air invited him⁠—very likely she’d be glad to have a rest. He noticed the purplish rings about her eyes, and thought again: “It might be that,” recalling the scenes in fiction in which blushing wives announce their coming motherhood. But Laura Lou did not seem to want to announce anything, and he was too shy to force her silence. “Want to get rid of me today, do you?” he joked; and she nodded, without other acquiescence than that of her queer fixed smile. + 

He rummaged in the cupboard for bread, and a piece of the cheese they had had for supper; with an apple from the magic tree it would be all he wanted. He would go on a long tramp, to a wonderful swampy wood he knew of, the first to catch fire from the autumn frosts. A sense of holiday freedom flamed through him. “Well, so long,” he called out, nodding back from the door. Her fixed smile answered. “She looks sick,” he thought⁠—and then forgot her. + 

“Magic”⁠—why not call the book that? The air was full of it today. All the poetry which the American imagination rejects seemed to have taken refuge in the American landscape, like a Daphne not fleeing from Apollo but awaiting his call to resume her human loveliness. Vance felt the dumb entreaty of that trembling beauty with arms outstretched to warmth and light from the slope of the descending year. As the mood grew on him the blood of the earth seemed to flow in his veins, his own to burn in red maple branch and golden shreds of traveller’s joy. It was all part of that mysteriously interwoven texture of the universe, in the thought of which a man could lie down as in his bed.⁠ ⁠… + 

He tramped on and on, humming snatches of poetry, or meaningless singsongs of his own invention, feeling as happy as if he had been taken into the divine conspiracy and knew the solution of all the dissonances. It was as wonderful and secret as birth.⁠ ⁠… The word turned his mind to Laura Lou. How queer if she were going to have a child! He tried to imagine how life would arrange itself, with two people to feed, nurse, clothe, provide for⁠—oh, curse that everlasting obstacle! He didn’t even know how Laura Lou and he were going to face the winter alone. If she were to have a child he supposed they must humble their pride and accept his father’s hospitality. But he did not want to dwell on that. Things were so right as they were. The bungalow in the apple orchard was just the place for him to dream and work in, and as for Laura Lou, she was happy, she was herself, for the first time since their marriage. Her domestic training had been rudimentary, and she was heedless and improvident, and sometimes⁠—often⁠—too tired to finish what she had begun. But now that she had her husband and her house to herself she atoned for every deficiency by a zeal that outran her strength and a good-humour that never flagged. In New York she used to sit for hours by the chilly radiator without speaking or moving, too listless to tidy up, leaving her clothes unmended, shelves and drawers in a litter; now she was always stirring about, sweeping, mending, washing. She even began to concern herself with the adornment of the rooms, wheedled out of Vance embroidered covers for their pillows and surprised him one evening by a bunch of wild flowers on the supper table. “I guess that was the way the table was fixed the day we lunched with the Tarrants,” she said, with a reminiscent smile; and Vance laughed and declared: “Their flowers weren’t anything like as pretty.” Often now he heard her singing at her work, till her silence told him she had interrupted it to drop down in the kitchen rocker while the wave of weariness swept over her.⁠ ⁠… Poor Laura Lou! These months in the bungalow had made her intelligible to him, and turned his pity back to tenderness. After all, perhaps she was the kind of wife an artist ought to have.⁠ ⁠… + 

He reached the wood, climbed to a ledge from which he could catch the distant blue of the Sound, and stretched out in the sun with his bread and cheese and his dream.⁠ ⁠… Certainly the book must be called Magic.⁠ ⁠… + 

The curtain went up on his inner stage⁠—one by one his characters came on, first faintly outlined, then more clearly, at last in full illumination. The outer world vanished, love, grief, poverty, sickness, debt, the long disappointments and the little daily torments, even the consoling landscape which enveloped him, all shrivelled up like the universe in the Apocalypse, with nothing left in an unlit void but that one small luminous space. The phenomenon was not new, but he had never before been detached enough to observe it in its mysterious acuity. Of all the myriad world nothing was left but this tiny centre of concentrated activity, in which creatures born without his will lived out their complicated and passionate lives. At such moments his most vivid personal experiences paled with the rest of reality, and some mysterious transfusion of spirit made him no longer himself but the life element of these beings evoked from nowhere. They were there, they were real, they were the sole reality, and he who was the condition of their existence was yet apart from them, and empowered to be their chronicler.⁠ ⁠… Tramping back after dark, hungry and happy under the sharp autumn stars, he stood still suddenly and thought: “God, if I could tell her⁠—” But even that pang was a passing one. These people were his people, he held the threads of their lives, it was to him the vision had been given⁠—for the time that seemed enough, seemed all his straining consciousness could hold.⁠ ⁠… + 

From the bungalow a light winked through the apple branch on which his book had hung. The gleam gave him a feeling of homely reassurance. He saw the supper table in the kitchen, his desk with the beckoning lamp. As soon as he had eaten something he would get to work under that lamp, with the great shadowy night looking on him.⁠ ⁠… + 

Under the apple tree he halted and listened. Perhaps he would hear Laura Lou singing, and see her shadow moving on the drawn-down blind. But the house was silent. He walked up to the door and went in. The table was laid with a box of sardines, potatoes, and pickles. All was orderly and inviting; but Laura Lou was not there. The remembrance of her pale face with that queer drawn smile returned disquietingly, and he pushed open the door of their room. It was dark, and he went back for the lamp. Laura Lou lay on the bed, the blankets drawn up. She was motionless; she did not turn as he entered. Lamp in hand he bent over, half afraid; but as the light struck her lids they lifted, and she looked at him calmly, as she had on their wedding night when he had come back with provisions from the farm and found her sleeping. His anxiety fell from him. “Hullo⁠—I guess I woke you up,” he said. + 

She smiled a little, not painfully but naturally. “Yes.” + 

“You’re not sick, child?” + 

“Oh, no, no,” she assured him. + 

“Only a little bit tired?” + 

“Yes. A little bit.” + 

He sat down on the edge of the bed. “I guess we’ll have to get a woman in to help you.” + 

“Yes. Maybe just for the washing⁠ ⁠…” + 

“You think it was the washing that tired you?” + 

“Maybe.” She shut her eyes peacefully and turned her head away. + 

“All right. Have you had anything to eat?” + 

“Yes. I had some milk.” + 

“And now you want to go to sleep again?” + 

Out of her sleep she murmured: “Yes,” and he stooped to kiss her and stole away. + 

As he sat down to his supper he reflected: “Certainly I must get a woman in to wash for her.” Then his thoughts wandered away again to his book. After he had eaten he heated a cup of coffee, and carried that and the lamp back to his desk. + 

For the next few days Laura Lou was weak and languid, and he had to get a woman in daily to do the work. But after that she was up and about, looking almost well, and singing in the kitchen while he sat at his desk. The golden October days followed each other without a break; and when the housework was done he would drag one of the rattan armchairs out under the apple tree, and Laura Lou would sit in the sun, well wrapped up, and busy herself with the mending, while every now and then he called out through the window: “To hell with the damned book⁠—it won’t go!” or: “Child⁠—I believe I’ve found what I was after!” + 