XLVI
It was Vance’s last day but one. He was going back to his family at Euphoria.
He had lingered on at the bungalow to try to sleep off his lethargy before seeing people again, and taking up the daily round. He would have liked to go on living there alone, watching the approach of spring, tramping in the woods, writing, dreaming, trying to adjust himself to life again. The solitude of the place, so dreadful to him during the last days of Laura Lou’s illness, had become soothing now that he was alone. But practical reasons made it impossible to remain; and for the present the simplest thing was to return to his parents.
He was beginning to shake off the state of apathy which had overcome him as soon as the strain was over; but even now he could not have said how the days had passed since Laura Lou’s death. All he was certain of was that, after all, no great inner change had befallen him. He remembered how once before, after he had carried her off to New York, reconquering her from her mother and Bunty Hayes, he had expected that everything in their lives would be new and different and how he had gradually come to see that nothing was changed. And it was the same now: life could not change Laura Lou, and neither had death changed her. At first he had imagined that death, the great renewer, would renew his blurred vision of her, set her before him in a completeness he had somehow always missed. But death did nothing of the kind. It left him only that larval image among the white roses, with which his imagination could do nothing. Behind that uncommunicative mask the face of the real Laura Lou was as he had always known it. How could death give people anything they had not had in life, except the pathos of the thwarted destiny? And that he had always felt in Laura Lou. He had always thought of her as someone thwarted and unfulfilled; had often imagined her life with another man—with Bunty Hayes even—as more likely to have given her the chance to express what was in her. But fate had made her choose him instead; and in spite of the incompleteness of their life together he knew, to the very last, that it was what she wanted. It had not needed death to show him that. It was because he knew that he was her choice, and that she would certainly have chosen rather to be unhappy with him than comfortable and contented with anyone else, that the tie between them was sacred. Death had altered nothing in his vision of her, and added nothing to it. Death had simply closed the book in which he had long ago read the last word. …
When these thoughts first came they frightened him. It seemed as though he could never have loved Laura Lou; yet this was not so. And she had never been so dear to him as during their last months together. But since he had honestly tried to give her all that she was capable of receiving from him, how was he to blame if her going had left the live forces in him untouched? It was as if a door had quietly opened and shut in a room in which he was working—and when he looked up from his work he saw no change. Someone had gone out, but the room was not more empty. …
He had not seen a human being for the last three or four days. The hired woman, ashamed of her desertion, had offered to come back and help him, but he had refused; the doctor had made him promise to telephone if he needed anything; Hayes had wanted him to come and stay in his flat in town. Vance felt a great kindness toward them all—even toward the frightened hired woman he had no resentment. But what they could not any of them understand was how much he wanted to be alone. … He had broken into a laugh when, the day after the funeral, he had surprised Hayes and the doctor furtively hunting for his revolver when they thought he was out of sight. …
Now that the time to leave had come, he was sorry he had not decided to go on camping alone in the bungalow. It was a soft day at the end of March; the air was full of the smell of wet earth and new grass; and he sat on the porch and smoked his pipe, and thought of what that swampy wood of his would be in a week or two. He had grown into harmony with his solitary life; the thought of his book was reviving, the characters were emerging again, gathering about him unhindered, like friends banished by some intimate preoccupation and now stealing back to their familiar places. …
He was disturbed by the sound of a motor horn, and got to his feet impatiently. Whoever his visitors were, they were unwanted. He turned to slip out at the back of the house, and scramble over a fence into the wood lot. But the sound was not repeated—probably it came from a passing car on the turnpike. He sat down, leaning his head contentedly against the post of the porch, and gazing up at the pools of spring sky between the crooked arms of the apple tree. Lost in those ethereal depths, he was aware of nothing nearer earth till he heard his name; then he started up and saw Halo Tarrant a little way off, under the apple-tree. She looked very pale, but his eyes, full of the sunlit sky, seemed to see her through a mist of gold.
“Vance—I’ve found you!” She came toward him with her quick impetuous step, and as she drew near he saw that the radiance was not caused by the sun dazzle in his eyes but by some inner light in hers. He thought: “It’s funny I was thinking about that wood—I’d like to show it to her. …” Then the reality of things rushed back on him, and he stood tongue-tied.
She glanced past him at the dilapidated bungalow. “This is where you’ve been living all these months?”
“All these months—yes.”
Her eyes had travelled on to the background of bare woodland on the ridge. She screwed her lips up in her shortsighted way, and the little lines about her eyes made her seem nearer to him, and more real. “It must be lovely over there,” she said.
“Oh, there’s a wood beyond, with a gold and purple swamp in the middle—I wish I could take you there!”
“Well, why not?” She smiled. “I have so much to say to you. … We might go there now, if it’s not too far. …”
He said thoughtfully: “It’s too far for this afternoon. We’d have to make a long day of it.”
“Oh, that would be glorious!” She glanced about her again. “But I like it here too. …” She looked at him hesitatingly: “Are you living here all alone?”
“Yes.”
She still seemed to hesitate. “May I come in and see what it’s like?”
Vance felt his colour rise. He did not want her to see the shabbiness of the dismantled bungalow, with his few possessions stacked up for departure, and the untidy divan on which he had slept since Laura Lou’s death. “Oh, it’s a poor sort of place. It’s a good deal pleasanter out here in the sun.”
“I daresay. It’s lovely here,” she agreed. “But everything’s lovely to me … I’m a little drunk with the spring—and finding you. … Shall I sit down here beside you? You mustn’t smuggle away your pipe—please don’t!”
He pulled out his pipe and relit it. “Wait till I get you a cushion or something.” He fetched a blanket off the divan and laid it on the upper step, and they sat down side by side. “It’s good here in the sun,” he said, his voice trembling.
“Yes, it’s good.”
They sat silent for a minute or two, and he could feel that she was penetrated by the deep well-being that steeped his soul.
“You said you had a great deal to tell me,” he began at last, half reluctant to break the silence.
“Yes, a great deal.” She paused again, and met his eyes with another little smile, half shy, half challenging. “But it’s a long story—and perhaps you won’t understand after all.”
He was silent, not knowing what to say, and wondering why they needed to tell each other anything, instead of just basking in the fullness of their mutual intelligence. But he saw that she expected an answer. “What makes you think I won’t understand?”
She laughed nervously. “Because I want you to so much.”
“Well—try.”
She stood up, walked away under the apple trees, and came back and sat down beside him. “Vance—you remember that night when you brought me the first chapters of Loot to read?” He nodded.
“And you remember what you said afterward—and what I said?” He nodded again.
“That night when I saw you go I thought I couldn’t bear it.”
“No—”
She turned and looked at him. “You too—?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, then—then I can tell you.” He noticed, with that odd detachment which sometimes came to him in emotional moments, that her eyelids trembled slightly, as people’s lips tremble when they are agitated. She seemed conscious of it, for she turned her head away without speaking.
“You were going to tell me,” he reminded her.
She looked at him again, gently, attentively, as if her eyes were feeling the way for her words. “It begins so far back—the day we went up Thundertop. That day I made up my mind I must marry Lewis.” She stopped. It was the first time Vance had ever heard her allude to her marriage. He had poured out all his secret misery to her on the night when he had sought her out to reproach her for having forced her way into Laura Lou’s room. She knew the whole history of his married life, but no allusion to hers had ever escaped her, and he had imagined that she avoided the subject lest her confidences should complicate Vance’s relations with her husband.
After a moment she continued: “But what’s the use? People do what they must—what they think they must. It’s all bound up with my family history—it’s too long to tell. But Lewis was generous to them at a time when I couldn’t be, and that held me fast. … You understand?”
Vance understood. He thought of the generosity of Laura Lou, who had lavished her all on him, and had held him fast.
“Life’s such a perplexity and a waste,” she pursued—“or at the time it seems so. There were so many times when I knew I was utterly useless to Lewis, and when I imagined I could have helped you if I’d been free. And now, all of a sudden, everything’s changed. …” She put her hand on his. “Could I help you still—?”
“Yes.”
“Vance!” She sat silent, and he laid his other hand on hers. At length she began to speak more connectedly, to tell him of two almost simultaneous events in her life—the sudden death of the old Miss Lorburn of Stuyvesant Square, who had left her the Willows, with more money than she could have hoped for, and the discovery that the tie between Tarrant and herself had become as irksome to her husband as to her. The latter announcement was no surprise to Vance, for at the New Hour office the jokes about the Pulsifer First Novel Prize had been coupled with a good deal of gossip about the donor and Tarrant. Vance recalled his own experience with Mrs. Pulsifer, and felt a recoil of disgust.
“And you see I had to tell you first of all—you do see that, Vance? Because it seemed to me that life had slipped back again to that night when you said—oh, Vance, I could repeat to you every word you said! And I knew how you loved me and hated me while you said them—yet I was held fast. But now it’s all over, and I’m free, free, free!” She sprang to her feet again. “What a child I must seem to you! And I’m older than you—and you let me go on talking all this nonsense. …”
He had tried his best to listen attentively to what she was saying; but it was drowned under a surge of joy. It was curious, how hard it was for him to follow the words of anyone too close to his soul for words to be needed. He wondered she did not feel that too—feel that the spring sunshine, and their sitting in it together, was enough for her as it was for him. He caught himself speculating whether, after all, they might not have made a dash for that bit of woodland—and then fixing his thoughts curiously on the long slender hands on her knee. He thought perhaps it was because, for so long, his mind had been all darkness and confusion, that the sudden clarity blinded him, made him want more time before he groped his way back to her. But no—the real trouble, he thought, was that most people took so long to discover the essential; wasted such precious moments clearing away rubbish before they got to the heart of a thing. All women were like that, he supposed—but what did it matter? Presently she would understand—would stop talking, and just let her hand lie in his. “It’s so good, sitting here with you,” he said. “I never thought we should.”
“Oh, Vance …”
By and by, he reflected, there would be a thousand things to tell her; now he could only think of that spring wood, and the Fifth Symphony, and dawn over Thundertop. …
She seemed to understand; she sat down beside him again and gave him back her hand. But after a while the sun waned from the porch, and the chill of the afternoon air fell on them. She gave a shiver and stood up. “It will be dark soon—I must be going.”
He looked at her in surprise; it was bewildering to him that the passing hour should still have rights over them. “Why can’t you stay with me?” he said.
“Stay—now?” She drew back a step, and looked at him, and then over his shoulder at the little house. “Oh, Vance—you must know what I want. If only we could be back together at the Willows. I should be so content if I could help you as I used to. You remember the things we found together when you were doing Instead—the ideas you said might not have come to you if we hadn’t talked it all over? Well, that’s what I want … that you should come back to the Willows, now it’s mine, and let me help you. Oh, Vance, say yes—say we can go back and begin again. …” She leaned toward him with a gesture of entreaty. “Don’t you understand that what I want is all you can give me without having to hurt anybody else?”
He was silent, trying to take in her words. But the old difficulty persisted—she was too near, he was too much submerged by her nearness. “You don’t see—” he began.
She interrupted passionately: “But I do—I do. How can you think I don’t. Can’t you see that I know it’s different with you—perhaps always must be? All I want is that we should try to renew our friendship … that you should let me help you as I used to. … Don’t you think I could make Laura Lou understand that?”
The sound of the name shook him abruptly out of his trance. “Laura Lou? She’s dead,” he said.
Halo Tarrant moved back a step and stood staring at him in dumb bewilderment. Then she began to tremble. Her face twitched, and she lifted her hands to hide it. Vance saw that she was crying; and presently her tears broke into sobs. She was suffering terribly; he saw that she was horrified and did not know how to express her dismay. He supposed that she thought him to blame for not telling her at once—perhaps regarded him as brutal, unfeeling. But he could not imagine why. All that belonged to another plane, to another life, almost … his mind refused to relate it to what he and she had in common. But how explain this to her, if she could not feel for herself the difference between that shadow and this burning reality?
“Vance—Vance—you ought to have told me,” she sobbed reproachfully.
“I know,” he said. “I was going to. …”
“What must you think of me? How could you let me go on talking like that?”
“I liked just to listen to your voice. …”
“Don’t—don’t say such things to me now!” She broke off to ask in a whisper. “How long ago was it?”
He had to make an effort of the memory. “It was a week ago yesterday.”
“Only a week ago—oh, what must you think of me?”
“I wish you wouldn’t cry,” he pleaded.
“Oh, Vance—can you ever forgive me?”
“Yes.”
“It seems so dreadful—but how was I to know?”
“You couldn’t have known.”
“Oh, poor little Laura Lou! I shall never forgive myself—but you must say that you forgive me!”
It was curious: he had to reason with her as if she were a child. It was almost as if he were reasoning with Laura Lou. He felt himself calling upon the same sort of patience—as if he were sitting down on the floor to comfort a child that had hurt itself. … And when at last he drew her arm through his and walked beside her in the darkness to the corner where she had left her motor, he wondered if at crucial moments the same veil of unreality would always fall between himself and the soul nearest him, if the creator of imaginary beings must always feel alone among the real ones.