XXXV
“Storecraft” had lodged itself on the summit of a corner building in Fifth Avenue, with a “roof patio” (the newest architectural hybrid) surrounded by showrooms and a cabaret. This fresh stage in its development was to be inaugurated by the Tomorrowist Show, and when Vance and Laura Lou shot up to the patio in the crowded lift the rooms were already beginning to fill with the people whose only interest in exhibitions is to visit them on their opening day.
Laura Lou, at the last moment, had decided to accompany her husband. The day was radiant, and treacherously warm for March, and she had put on a little blue hat, of the same blue as the one she had worn that fatal day in the rubberneck car, and a coat with a collar of fluffy amber fur. Between cerulean hat brim and blond fur her face looked as tender as a wild rose, and the shadow of fatigue under her eyes turned them to burning sapphire. Vance looked at her in wonder. What did she do with all this loveliness in their everyday life? It seemed to appear suddenly, on particular occasions, as if she had pulled it out of the trunk under their bed with her “good” coat; and he knew it would vanish again as quickly, leaving her the pale heavy-eyed ghost of her old self. Some inner stimulus, now almost lacking in her life, seemed required to feed that precarious beauty. He noticed how people turned their heads as she entered the gallery, as they had done in the fashionable restaurant, and at the theatre, on their wedding journey. Masculine pride flushed through him, and he slipped his arm possessively in hers. “Take me right to where it is,” she enjoined him with a little air of power, as if instantly conscious of his feeling.
They worked their way into the second room, and there, aloft on a central pedestal, Vance caught a half glimpse of himself as embodied in the clay of Rebecca Stram. The conspicuous placing of the bust astonished him—he hadn’t supposed that Rebecca’s artistic standing, even in her own little group, was of such importance.
“Gee—for a beginner they’ve given her a good place,” he said to his wife.
“Oh, Vanny, it isn’t her—it’s you!”
He laughed a little sheepishly, in genuine surprise. He had forgotten that for anyone but himself and Laura Lou his features could be of interest.
“Shucks,” he growled self-consciously.
“Why, just look! We can’t get up to it—I can’t see it, even!” she exulted.
The bust was in fact enclosed in a dense circle of people, some few of whom were looking at it, while the greater number hung on the vibrant accents of a showily dressed man whose robust back was turned to Vance and Laura Lou.
“Know him? Know Vance Weston?” they heard Bunty Hayes ring out in megaphone tones. “Why, I should say so. Ever since he was a little kiddie. Why, him and me were raised together, way down on the Hudson River, as the old song says. Born out West?” (This is evident response to the comment of one of his auditors.) “That’s so—Illinois, I guess it was, or maybe Arizona. But he came east as a little fellow, to live with his mother’s relatives—don’t I remember the day he arrived? Why, I met him when he stepped off the train. Even then you could see the little genius in him. ‘Bunty,’ he says to me, ‘where’s the public library?’ (First thing!). ‘I want to consult the Encyclopaedia Britannica,’ he says. Couldn’t ha’ been more’n sixteen, I guess—thinking of his writing even then! Well, I was on a newspaper in those days myself, and I walked him right round to the office, and I said: “What you want to study isn’t encyclopaedias, it’s Life.’ And I guess, if I do say so, that was the turning point in his career; and I claim it was my advice and help that landed him where he is today: at the head of the world’s fiction writers, and in the place of honour at ‘Storecraft’s’ first art exhibit. Proud of it? Well, I guess I’ve got a right to be. …”
He swung suddenly round, mustering the crowd with an eye trained to the estimation of numbers; and his glance met Vance’s. The latter expected to see signs of discomfiture on the orator’s compact countenance; but he did not yet know Bunty Hayes. The showman’s eye instantly lit up, and he elbowed his way toward Vance with extended hand.
“Well, ladies and gentlemen, I see it’s time for me to pack up my goods and step down off the platform. Here’s the great man himself. Now, then, Mr. Weston, step up here and give your admirers the chance to compare the living features with the artist’s inspiration!”
Vance stood paralysed with rage; but he had no time to express it, for friends and acquaintances were pressing about him, and Bunty Hayes was swept aside by their approach. Vance found himself the centre of a throng of people, all eager to say a word, all determined to have one in return; and his only conscious desire was to be rid of it all, and of them, and let his rage against Hayes take breath. He managed to mumble his wife’s name to the first comers, but presently her hand slipped from his arm, and he saw her drawn away by a tall sable-draped figure whose back he recognized as Mrs. Pulsifer’s. Mrs. Pulsifer and Laura Lou—he wished there had been time to be furious at that too! But perhaps it was better to laugh at it—to laugh even at Bunty Hayes, whose showman’s instinct so confidently triumphed over every personal awkwardness. “Why,” Vance thought, “if I was to collar him now and give him the licking he deserves, he’d use that to advertise ‘Storecraft.’ No wonder he gets on, and ‘Storecraft’ too.” And instantly he began to weave the whole scene into Loot, his heart beating excitedly as he felt himself swept along on the strong current of the human comedy. … If only he could tell Halo Tarrant, he thought! He turned, and there she stood beside him, with Frenside.
“Yes, we’ve come. I hate these performances; but I wanted to see you battling with the waves, and I made Frenny come too.” How fine and slender and aloof she managed to look among them all, and how his blood instantly caught step with hers! “Well, this is fame—how do you like it?” she bantered him.
He shrugged. “I guess it’s a good page for Loot.”
She nodded delightedly. “You see I was right! I told you you must see it all. But where’s Laura Lou? Surely she was with you a minute ago?”
“Yes. But she’s gone.”
“Gone?”
“With Mrs. Pulsifer. I think they’re in the other room.”
Their eyes met, and Mrs. Tarrant laughed. “I’ve noticed signs of uneasiness in Jet lately. She realizes that she made a bad mistake last year about your short story, and I hear she now talks of founding a First Novel prize. She’s probably telling Laura Lou all about it.”
Vance laughed too; and then they turned together to the bust, which Mrs. Tarrant had not yet seen. She studied it thoughtfully for a long time; then, as other visitors crowded her away, she turned back to Vance. “I didn’t think that Stram girl had it in her. She has caught a glimpse of you, Vance—a glimpse of what you’re going to be. Don’t you think so, Frenny?”
“Well, I’m sorry to think that our young friend’s going to have a goitre,” said Frenside gloomily.
“Oh, dear—what a pity you can’t like anything that isn’t photographic! Artistically, you know,” she explained to Vance, “Frenny’s never got beyond the enlarged photograph of the ’eighties, when people used to have their dear ones done twice the size of life, with the whiskers touched up in crayon.”
Vance echoed her laugh. He echoed it because certain inflections of her voice were always laughter-provoking to him, and he would have thought anything funny if her eyes and her dimple had told him it was. But in reality he did think the bust queer, and had never understood why Rebecca had given him a swollen throat, and big lumps on his forehead, as if he’d been in a fight and got the worst of it. And he remembered too, with a pang, the colossal photograph which Grandma Scrimser had had made of Grandpa after his death, with the hyacinthine curls and low-necked collar of his prime, a photograph which the family had all thought so “speaking” that even Mrs. Weston dared not grumble at the expense. … Still, Vance, since then, had had a glimpse of other standards, and as he studied through Halo’s eyes the rough clay head with tumbled hair and heavy brooding forehead he began to see that under her surface mannerisms Rebecca Stram had reached down to his inner self, that the image seemed, as Halo said, to body forth what he was trying to be.
“It oughtn’t to have been done till after I’ve pulled off Loot,” he said, trying to hide his satisfaction under a joke.
“Oh, but it’s a proof that you will pull it off,” Halo rejoined; and then other people came up to them both, and swept them apart. He found her again at last, seated alone in a corner, and as he sat down beside her she said: “Who was that ridiculous man who was bragging about having known you when you were a boy?”
Vance’s dormant indignation against Bunty Hayes flamed up again. “Oh, he’s the manager of ‘Storecraft.’ He was just doing a blurb for the show.”
“Obviously. But where on earth did you know him?”
Vance hesitated. “I ran across him at Paul’s Landing. He used to go round with Upton Tracy.”
“Oh, I see.” She made a little grimace and rose to her feet. “Well, I’m going. I only came here to see you. I mean Rebecca’s you,” she corrected herself with a smile.
“Not yours?” he asked, flushing.
“No, I’d rather see him some evening quietly at home. When are you going to bring me your next chapters?”
“Any time,” he stammered, whirling with the joy of it; and she named a date which he of course accepted, as he would have accepted any other, at the cost of breaking no matter what other engagements. His head was light and dizzy with anticipation as he watched her vanish with Frenside in the throng.
When he roused himself from the spell he remembered that Laura Lou was somewhere in the gallery. He went back to look for her, but she was nowhere to be found, and at last he concluded, though half incredulously, that she must have gone off with Mrs. Pulsifer. It was very unlike her—but he had discovered that Laura Lou was often unlike herself, and that he really knew next to nothing of the secret springs of her actions and emotions. He did not think of this for long; his heart and brain were still full of the thought of Mrs. Tarrant. He was to see her again in two days: “a quiet evening,” she had said. That meant, he and she alone under the lamp, in that still meditative room which was like no other that he knew: a room of which the very walls seemed to think. And they would sit there alone together, while the logs crackled and fell, and he would read his new stuff to her, and she would sit motionless and silent, her chin on her lifted hand, her long arm modelled by the lamplight; and even while his eyes were on the page he would see her hand and arm, and her nearness would burn itself at the same time into his body and brain.
He slipped out of the gallery and found himself below in the street. The weather had changed, it had grown very cold, and the skyscrapers flung down a rough wind into the tunnel-like thoroughfares at their base. Vance remembered the March snowstorm on the Hudson, which had come after just such a mild spell; and that led him to wonder if Laura Lou had got safely home before the change. Her pretty coat with the blond fur was only a summer garment, put on because it was her best; and she mustn’t catch another cold, he reflected. But his mind was too full of excited thoughts for that one to dominate it. He was at once too happy and too anxious to dwell for long on anything; and he turned westward and struck into the park, to try to walk his jostling ideas into order.
The encounter with Bunty Hayes had disgusted him profoundly. That kind of slovenly good-nature was merely a caricature of the superficial tolerance, the moral apathy, of most of the people he came in contact with. Nothing mattered to any of them except to get on, to shove a way through and crowd out the others. There was Hayes, a man who had reason to hate him—or thought so—who loved his wife, and must therefore be jealous of him, and yet in whom the primitive emotions were so worn down by the perpetual effort to get on, to gain an inch or two in the daily struggle, that they could be silenced at will whenever it was to his interest. As Vance tramped on against the stinging wind his anger subsided also, but for a different reason. Hayes, the human fact, was being gradually absorbed, transubstantiated, into the stuff of his book; was turning from a vulgar contemptible man into a grotesque symbol of the national futility. … And then Vance began to examine his own case. He had not complied, he had tried to stand on his feet, to defend his intellectual integrity. And where was he? What was he? The flattered and envied author of the newest craze, a successful first novel; yet in himself an unhappy powerless creature, poor, hungry, in debt, the bewildered bondslave of the people he despised, the people who sacrifice everything and everybody to getting on.
And in thus summing up his case he had left out the central void: the blank enigma of his marriage. He could hardly remember now the gleams of joy which Laura Lou’s presence had shed on their early days. He had imagined that she shared all his ideas, whereas she was merely the sounding board of his young exuberance. Now the delusions and raptures were all gone. If he and she could have had a house of their own, instead of having to live in one room, how often would he have sought her out? All that remained of his flaming dream was a cold half-impatient pity. He supposed, vaguely, that the real meaning of marriage, the need that upheld it as an institution in spite of all revolts and ironies, was man’s primitive craving for a home, children, a moral anchorage. Marriage had brought him none of these. What sense was there in living in one room with an idle childless woman whom he had long since forgotten though she was always there? He despised himself for yielding to their enforced propinquity, and giving her what her soft endearments asked as carelessly as if she had been the casual companion of a night.
He sat on a bench in the park and revolved these world-old riddles till the cold drew him to his feet, and he turned homeward, heavy and confused as when he had started.
Laura Lou must have got back long before him. She would be waiting at home, perhaps resenting the fact of his not having stayed with her at the gallery. He swung along impatiently, trying to put out of his mind the secret well of joy that fed him: the thought of the quiet evening with Mrs. Tarrant and his book. … Since he had rung her up that evening, more than a month ago, he had been with her perilously often, meeting her at dinners, at informal studio parties, sometimes going with her to the theatre or to a symphony concert. To be with her nearly every day, to share with her all his artistic and intellectual joys, to carry to her every new experience, every question, every curiosity, had become an irresistible need. She had drawn him back to the frank footing of friendship, and skilfully kept him there. But they had not yet had another long evening alone by the lamp, and now he felt that he must pour out his whole soul to her or have no peace.
Laura Lou was huddled up close to the radiator, which gave out but little warmth on Mrs. Hubbard’s third floor. She had tossed her hat and coat on the bed, and wrapped her stooping shoulders in the bedquilt.
“Well,” Vance said, with hollow gaiety, “where the devil did you run away to? I hunted for you all over the place.”
She lifted a face in which triumph struggled with resentment. He saw that for some reason she was annoyed with him, yet for another pleased. “Oh, I got tired staying round there with all those strange people; and I couldn’t bear to look any longer at that hateful thing.”
“What hateful thing?”
“That awful bust. How could you let them show such a thing? It made me sick to see it.”
“Didn’t you like it? It’s been a good deal admired,” he muttered, piqued by her tone.
“Why, Vanny, can’t you see they’re only laughing at you when they tell you that?”
“Who’s ‘they’?”
“Why, all your fashionable friends. That Mrs. Pulsifer, for instance. And even she wasn’t sure. She said: ‘Do you suppose we ought to admire it, Mrs. Weston?’ And when I said: ‘I never saw anything so awful,’ I could see she was kind of relieved. Oh, Vanny,” she continued, her face brightening, “I think you ought to see more of her. She says she was the first one to recognize your talent, and she wanted ever so much to help you, but she never sees you any more because you won’t go with anybody but those Tarrants.”
His blood leapt up. “Nonsense—that fool of a woman! The biggest humbug …”
“It’s not humbug to say you always go with the Tarrants. … You never left her at the gallery. …”
“He’s my employer. I’ve told you a hundred times …” His voice rose angrily, but he checked himself, resolved not to let her draw him into another wrangle over that threadbare grievance. She might think what she pleased—explaining anything to her was useless. To divert her attention he questioned ironically: “I suppose you talked me over with Hayes too?”
Her colour rose quickly, painting her cheekbones with the familiar feverish patches. “I never talk you over with anybody—not the way you mean.”
“Well, you did talk with Hayes, didn’t you?”
She looked at her husband half furtively, half in resentment. “He was almost the only person I knew in the place. Of course I talked with him. I didn’t know you wouldn’t want me to.”
Vance was silent. Since the reconciliation at Paul’s Landing he had never spoken to his wife of Hayes. At that time, in answer to his brief questioning, she had sobbingly admitted that Hayes was ready to marry her if he, Vance, didn’t want her any longer. Hayes, it appeared, had arranged it all with Mrs. Tracy, and Laura Lou had been on the point of acquiescing because she was convinced that her husband no longer loved her and had been unfaithful to her with “that other woman.”
Feeling her then so soft and surrendered on his breast, seeing her despair, and conscious of his own shortcomings, Vance had brushed aside these negligible intrigues, and sworn to her that they would begin a new life together. And from that day he had never questioned her about Hayes, had purposely avoided pronouncing his name. He had the feeling that the tie between himself and Laura Lou was even then too frail to stand the slightest strain. … But now the instinct of self-protection stirred him to cruelty; he, who was never cruel, desired to hurt his wife. “Do you see Hayes often? Does he come here? He’s just the kind to sneak round after you when he knows I’m at the office. …” How stupid the words sounded when he had spoken them! How little bearing they had on the intrinsic flaw in his relation with Laura Lou!
She hesitated a moment; then she said simply: “I’ve never talked with him but once since we’ve been here, one day when I met him in the street.”
“Oh, that’s all right; I didn’t mean—I’m no gaoler: you can see him here at the house all you want to,” he grumbled, irresolute and half ashamed.
“When I spoke to him just now at the gallery,” she continued, “all I did was to thank him for the lovely things he said about you when we first came in.”
“The lovely—?” Vance echoed, forgetting, in his blank amazement, what had gone before.
She looked surprised. “Why, didn’t you think what he said about you was lovely?” She smiled a little; her tone was confident and yet conciliatory. “Sometimes I think you don’t realize you’re celebrated, Vanny. He said you were—he told all those people so. I thought what he said was fine.”
For a moment Vance thought she must be making fun of him, avenging herself by this clumsy pleasantry for his supposed neglect. But she was incapable of irony; he saw that she had really taken Hayes’s oratory as a tribute to her husband’s genius.
“What he said of me—that blithering rubbish? It was an insult, that’s all! And that heap of lies; blowing that way before all those people about having known me since I was a kid! Good God—you didn’t thank him for making an everlasting fool of me?”
Her lower lip began to tremble, and a mist of distress dimmed her face. “Nothing I ever do is right. I didn’t know you didn’t even want me to speak to him when we met.”
“I’ve told you you can speak to him as much as you like. What beats me is your not seeing that he was publicly holding me up to ridicule.”
Her mouth grew narrow and vindictive. “I thought the bust did that. I was grateful to him for doing the best he could so that people would look at you and not at the bust.”
“Oh, God,” Vance groaned. He turned away, and began to fumble with the papers on the rickety little table between bed and window where he had to do his writing. He had meant to buckle down to a hard evening’s work, to get his chapters into final shape before submitting them to Mrs. Tarrant. But Laura Lou had a genius for putting him into a mood which made work or meditation equally impossible. … As he stood there sullenly, with his back to her, he heard a low sound like a child’s whimper, and turned around, irritated with himself and with her.
“Oh, see here, child! Don’t cry—what’s the use? I didn’t mean … all I meant was …”
“You hurt me so,” she sobbed.
“Nonsense, Laura Lou. Listen … Don’t be a goose. …” He caught her to him and felt the fever on her lips. Pressed each to each, they clung fast, groping for one another through the troubled channels of the blood.