XXXIII
Vance walked away with a conquering step. Frenside had set his blood circulating. “I believe you’ve got the stuff in you”—when a man like Frenside said it, all the depths cried out in answer. “Loot—Loot—Loot—a big American novel; that’s what I’ve got to do,” Vance sang, almost shouted to himself, as he trudged homeward in the dusk.
He had spoken the plain truth when he told Frenside that nothing mattered but his work. When that possessed him it swept away all material miseries, poverty, debt, the uncertainty of the future, the dull dissatisfactions of the present. He felt that he could go without food, money, happiness—even happiness—as long as the might within drove him along the creative way. … “That’s a man to talk to,” he thought, tingling with the glow of Frenside’s rude sincerity. He was dead right, too, about a thing like Instead being a sideshow, about the necessity of coming to grips with reality, with the life about him. Vance brushed aside the vision of his East Indian novel—the result of a casual glance at a captivating book called The French in India—and said to himself: “He’s right, again, when he says I ought to go into society, see more people, study—what’s the word he used?—manners. I read too much, and don’t brush up against enough people. If I’m going to write Loot I’ve got to get my store clothes out of pawn.” He laughed at the idea. …
His dream was cut short by the vision of Laura Lou waiting for him in the dismal bedroom of the place where they boarded. They had begun life in New York in a decent rooming house, recommended by Vance’s old friend, the manager of Friendship House. It was clean, hygienic, not too dear; in fact, would have suited them exactly if, as cold weather came on, Laura Lou’s colds had not so often prevented her going out for her meals. She tried preparing their food on an electric cooker, but the dishes she produced were unpalatable and indigestible, and the woman who kept the house objected to the mess that resulted. So they had moved to their present quarters, far over on the West Side, in a leprous brownstone survival of an earlier world. When Vance entered the greasy hall a smell of canned soup and stale coffee told him that dinner had begun. “I do wish Laura Lou would go down without waiting for me,” he thought impatiently; but she never would, and on the days when he was late, and she had to eat her food cold, she always ended up with a sick headache. He reflected with a grin, as he sprang up the stairs, that the people he was going to describe in Loot—the dress-clothes people—were at that hour still dawdling over tea and cocktails, as he and Mrs. Pulsifer had done, in that circular panelled room with the flowers and the dove-coloured armchairs, to which he had never again been admitted. … Dinner, in that world, was two or three hours off, down the vista of a brilliant night. …
In the letter rack Vance found some letters, and pocketed them without a glance. He guessed at once what they were: offers from editors and publishers tempted by the success of Instead and making proposals which, hard up as he was, he would have to refuse. Neither Tarrant nor the publishers Tarrant had imposed on him would consent to let him off his bargain, or to increase by a dollar the contracts made with him. He couldn’t see what there was “in it” for them; his indifference to his own work, once it was finished and he had turned to something else, made him underrate the prestige that Instead had conferred on the New Hour, and he ascribed to editorial obstinacy Tarrant’s natural desire to make the best of his opportunity. For another two years every line that Vance wrote was tariffed in advance and belonged to the New Hour, and then to Dreck and Saltzer. Yet write he must, without a pause, or he and Laura Lou would starve. For himself he would have preferred starvation; but for Laura Lou he must at least provide such sustenance as Mrs. Hubbard’s table offered. Mrs. Hubbard, his landlady (for obvious reasons called “Mother” by her boarders), was very particular about the character and antecedents of the guests she received; the latter understood that the social fastidiousness entailed by her being the widow of a southern colonel made it impossible for her to be equally particular as to the food she provided. “If I have to overlook a blemish I’d rather it was in the mutton than in the moràl of the ladies and gentlemen I receive in my home—in the late Colonel Hubbard’s home,” said Mrs. Hubbard, who was persuaded that “moràl,” a word she often used, was French for morals. The late colonel had been vice-consul in a French colonial port, and Mrs. Hubbard prided herself on her French.
Vance, springing upstairs, pushed open the door of the room into which he and Laura Lou and their humble possessions (including the fetish dove) were crowded. “Hullo,” he flung ahead of him gaily. “Sorry I’m late; I’ve been working out a big new idea for a novel.”
As he spoke he remembered how often of late he had given the same reason for his unpunctuality, and how slight a spark of interest it roused in her. Did she believe him, even? Very likely not. She was becoming more and more resentful of the hours he devoted to Rebecca Stram; unless, indeed, she suspected him of using the sculptress as a screen, and secretly giving his time to “that woman”—who to her was still, and perhaps always would be, Halo Tarrant. For whatever cause, he saw at a glance that she nursed a grievance, a fact confirmed by her not replying to his remark. It was always a proof of resentment in Laura Lou to ignore what he said, and meet each of his conversational attempts by a totally irrelevant reply.
“The dinner bell rang ever so long ago,” she said, rising listlessly from her rocking chair.
“I could smell that fact as soon as I opened the front door,” he returned, his eagerness driven back on itself by her indifference. “Just let me wash my hands—” and he began to throw down on the floor a pile of linen stacked in the washbasin.
“Oh don’t, Vance—it’s the laundry, just come home,” she exclaimed, stooping to pick up the scattered garments. “And this floor’s so dirty—”
“Well, you’ve got a closet to keep things in,” he retorted, exasperated, as he always was, by her growing inertia, her way of letting their clothes lie about and accumulate in the cramped untidy room, rather than take the trouble of putting them where they belonged. But he was always ashamed of himself when he spoke to her impatiently, and to efface his retort he added, while he dried his hands: “Been out any this afternoon, old lady?”
“No.”
“Why not? A little walk would have done you good.”
“I didn’t feel like walking.”
It was their eternal daily dialogue. Why didn’t she ever feel like walking? In the early days she used to spring up the hillsides with him like a young deer—but now, day after day, she just sat in her chair, and rocked and brooded. He suspected her of thinking—not unnaturally—that in a city there was no object in going out unless you had money for shopping or the movies. She had never said so—she never complained of their lack of money; but she could not understand what else there was to do in a place like New York.
“Then you’ve stuck indoors again all day and not spoken to a human being? I hate your being always alone like that,” he said, dashing the brush irritably through his hair.
“I wasn’t alone.” She paused, and then brought out: “Not this afternoon, at least. I had a visitor.”
“A visitor? Well, that’s good.” He supposed it was one of Mrs. Hubbard’s other “guests,” though he knew that Laura Lou did not encourage their neighbourly advances, partly through shyness, partly, he suspected, through some fierce instinct of self-protection, the desire to keep him and their two lives absolutely to herself.
“Come along down. … Who was it?” he continued absently, passing his arm through hers.
She stood still. “It was Mrs. Tarrant.”
He stopped short also, in astonishment. “Mrs. Tarrant? She came to see you?”
“Yes.”
“Was the parlour empty? Could you see her there?” he questioned, evoking in a flash the strange unlikely scene, and the possibility of Mrs. Hubbard’s other ladies watchfully clustered about the unknown visitor.
“I don’t know. I sent word by the girl I was sick—and the first thing I knew she came up here.”
“Here—Mrs. Tarrant did?” Vance stood gazing about him, as if brutally awakened to the sight of the room, its blistered faded paper with patches of a different design, their scanty possessions untidily tossed about, the slovenly intimacies of bed and washstand and night table.
“Well, why shouldn’t she? I didn’t ask her to.”
“I only meant, I should have thought you’d rather have seen her downstairs.”
Laura Lou’s lips narrowed. “I’d rather not have seen her at all.” When she spoke in that tone, between those level lips, the likeness to her mother, which had already peeped out at him now and again, suddenly took possession of her whole face. Vance looked at her attentively. It was no doubt because she had grown thinner in the last months, and lost her colour, that the resemblance affirmed itself in this startling way. Vance remembered what his grandmother had said about Mrs. Tracy’s prettiness and her pink silk flounces, when, on her bridal tour, she had visited her western relatives at Advance. He was chilled by the sense of life perpetually slipping by, and leaving its stealthy disfigurement on spirit and flesh. … What was the use of anything, with this decrepitude at the core?
“I didn’t ask her to come up,” Laura Lou repeated querulously.
“Oh, well, no matter. … What did she come for?”
“To ask us to a party.”
“A party—?”
“She wants to give you a party. She says lots of people are crazy to see you. She said I oughtn’t to keep you so shut up. … She asked me to pick an evening. …” There was a curious ring of gratified pride under the affected indifference of Laura Lou’s voice.
“Well, did you?” Vance asked ironically.
“I said she’d better see you. I said I didn’t care about parties, but I’d never kept you from going.” She paused, and added rigidly: “I told her there was no use coming here to see you because you were always out.”
Vance received this in silence. What was there to say? Mrs. Tarrant had come to invite them to a party—had delivered her invitation in that room! Did she really think parties were a panacea for such a plight as theirs? Or had she been moved by another impulse which had been checked on her lips by Laura Lou’s manifest hostility? The dreary ironic light of failure lay on everything, as it had on that far-off day at Euphoria when Vance, recovering from his fever, had poured out his bitterness in his first tale. Perhaps life would never again be bearable to him except as material for his art. In itself it seemed persistently ugly and uncontrollable, a horror one could neither escape from nor master—as if one should be forever battling in the dark with a grimacing idiot.
“See here—there’ll be nothing left to eat if we don’t go down,” he reminded his wife.
“I don’t want anything. I’m not hungry. Besides, it’s too late … you’re always too late. …”
At that he snatched up his hat and coat in sudden anger. The likeness to Mrs. Tracy was not in his wife’s face alone. “Oh, all right. Just as you like. I’m hungry, if you’re not. If dinner’s over I’ll go out and get a bite somewhere.”
“You better,” she rejoined, in the same lifeless tone; and without looking back at her he flung the door shut and ran downstairs and out of the house.
In the first chophouse that he passed he found a table, ordered sausage and potatoes, with a cup of coffee, and devoured them ravenously. He was still young enough for anger and grief to make him hungry. … There was no one he knew in the place, and after he had satisfied his hunger he pulled out his letters and glanced over them. As he had expected, they were all on literary business. One important publisher, who wanted his next novel, asked him to call and see if, in the course of a talk, they could not devise some plan of adjustment with Dreck and Saltzer. Though Vance had no hope of this he was encouraged by the urgency of the request. How easy it would have been, he thought, to work his way through his two remaining years of bondage if only Laura Lou had not weighed down every endeavour—if only he had been free and alone! But there was no use in going through that weary round again. He had had the chance of freeing himself and had refused it. How could a fellow tell beforehand where each act would lead, and what would be the next to grow out of it? Perhaps they were right, those chaps at Rebecca Stram’s, who said it was all a blind labyrinth, a disconnected muddle. …
The despair of youth overcame him. He felt a sudden loss of faith in himself, in his powers, in the intrinsic interest of things, in his capacity to drag through these next two years of poverty, drudgery, and mental hunger.
He asked the waitress if he could telephone. She said yes, and led him to the back of the room. He looked up a number and rang. … Suddenly he heard an answering voice, and repeated the number. “Yes,” the voice said. He stammered: “I want to speak to Mrs. Tarrant,” and the same voice, with a note of reproach, came back: “Why, Vance, don’t you know me? Yes … I’m here. … Yes, come … come at once … do.” He hung up, and turned back dizzily to the door. She was there, she was so close that he seemed to feel her light touch on his shoulder. … And she had been there, so near to him, all these months, and he had never once tried to see her. It seemed incredible, preposterous, the very core and centre of his folly. Why had he gone on starving when the banquet was spread and within his reach?
At the door of the Tarrants’ apartment house his morbid sensitiveness to the visible world and its implications produced in him an abrupt change of view. It was long since he had entered one of those quiet commodious buildings, where everything bespoke conditions so different from those which imprisoned him. He recalled with compunction his outburst against Laura Lou. No wonder she had resented Mrs. Tarrant’s visit—no wonder any advance from people living in ease and amenity seemed to the poor child like a deliberate condescension. Poor Laura Lou! If he could have given her a little cottage in a pleasant suburb, something of her own to be proud of and fuss over, it might have altered everything … As he stepped into the panelled lift and swung up to the top story he felt a gnawing anger against the unfairness of life, the cruelty of social conditions. He no longer remembered that when he had called up Mrs. Tarrant the thought of her had been a means of escape from his misery, that he had yielded to the urgent need of talking over his new book with her, and plunging once more into the healing springs of her sympathy. Now that he was on her threshold he felt only the blind desire to punish her—punish her for her tactless intrusion on his wife, for living as she lived, for being what she was, for not leaving him and Laura Lou alone to live and to be as they were doomed to, with or without her interference. …
The door opened on the softly lit anteroom. A maid took his hat and coat, and said: “This way;” and there she sat, by the fire in the library, alone. She wore something dark and lacy, through which her upper arms showed; and the sober book-lined room, with its shaded lamps, and a few lilylike crimson flowers in a tall jar, seemed a part of her, the necessary background to her aloof and reticent grace. Vance recalled the room in which he had left Laura Lou, and at the same moment, joined to that evocation, came the vision of this woman turning from him, with a careless pleasantry, in that other room at the Willows where he had cast his soul at her feet. … No, there could be no common meeting ground for him and Halo Tarrant; the conditions of life divided them too sharply. Material well-being, security from hunger and debt, made people callous and unfeeling, perhaps without any fault of their own. But he had been right in deciding not to see her again, and wrong in yielding to the impulse which had led him to her tonight.
“Vance—how glad I am!” she said, rising and holding out her two hands in the old friendly way.
He stood near the door, bound hand and foot in coils of awkwardness and resentment. “You went to see my wife today,” he began, and stopped, not knowing how to go on.
Mrs. Tarrant raised her eyebrows slightly. “Yes. It was so long since I’d had any news of either of you. I thought she was not looking well the day she lunched here … and I wanted to see if there was anything I could do. …”
“No. There’s nothing you can do.”
He felt the surprise and pain in her eyes without daring to meet them. “I’m sorry,” she rejoined simply. “But I’m glad you’ve come this evening. Sit down, won’t you, Vance? I’m all alone—Lewis is at a man’s dinner, and I thought I’d snatch a quiet evening with my books.”
Vance still hung in the middle of the wide space between the door and the fireplace. “I guess I won’t interrupt you then,” he said, still at a loss for his next phrase.
“Interrupt me? How can you say that? You know I’ve wanted a talk with you for a long time.”
“No, I didn’t know … I mean …” He broke off suddenly. “My wife wasn’t well when you called. You oughtn’t to have gone up into her room without her asking you,” he blurted out.
“Vance!”
“Can’t you see how people feel,” he continued passionately, “when somebody like you, coming out of this—” he took in the room with a gesture of reproach, “when you come into the kind of place we have to live in, and try to pretend that there can ever be anything in common between our lives and yours?”
Mrs. Tarrant, resting one hand on the back of her chair, still gazed at him in perplexity. “Vance—I don’t understand. Did Laura Lou object to my visit?”
“She felt about it the way I do. We know you mean to be kind. But it’s no use. We don’t belong to your kind of people—never will. And it just complicates things for me if you …” He checked himself, conscious that he was betraying what he had meant to conceal.
“I see,” she murmured in a low voice. There was an interval of silence; then she said: “I’m sorry to have done anything stupid. You know I’m impulsive, and not used to standing on ceremony. I went to see Laura Lou because I wanted to have news of you both, and because I particularly want you to come here some evening to meet a few people who really care for your book, and would talk to you intelligently about it. You ought to see more people of that sort—give them a chance to know you and talk with you. It would stimulate you, I’m sure, and be good for your work.”
Vance felt his colour rising. It was difficult to reply in a spirit of animosity to words so simple and kindly. But the suggestion of the evening party recalled Laura Lou’s resentment.
“Thank you—but that’s no use either. Evening parties, I mean. They’re not for people like us. …”
She did not answer immediately; then she said: “Won’t you sit down, Vance? I hoped you’d come for a long talk. …”
He replied, without noticing her request: “I came to say we’re much obliged to you for thinking of us, but it’s no use your bothering—really no use.”
She moved nearer and laid her hand on his. “Vance—what’s wrong? What has happened? How can you speak to a friend of ‘bothering’ about you? If you don’t want to meet people, I won’t invite them; but that seems no reason why you and I shouldn’t talk together sometimes in the old way. Perhaps you haven’t missed our talks as much as I have—perhaps they didn’t count as much in your life as they did in mine. …”
She paused, and suddenly he flung up his hands and hid his face in them. “Not count—not count in my life?”
He felt her fingers gently slipped through his, drawing his hands down so that his face was uncovered to her scrutiny and his eyes were forced to look into hers. “Not count … not count?” He stared at her through a blur of tears.
“They did, Vance? I’m so glad. Then why try to deny it? Why shouldn’t we just go back to where we were before? I’m sure you’ve got lots to tell me about your new plans. …”
He snatched his hands away and hid his face again, struggling to choke back his sobs. What would she think—what would she suppose? But it was no use fighting against the surge of joy and agony that caught him and shook him like a young tree in a spring gale. He stammered out: “I’m a fool. … You mustn’t mind me. … I’ve been through hell lately. … Just let me sit here a little while without talking, till I get used to you again. …” and without a word she went back to her chair and sat there silently, the shaded lamplight on her quiet head.