XLIII + 

The golden days began to be tarnished with rain; but the air remained mild, and life at the bungalow followed its quiet course. Vance, plunged in his imaginary world, hardly noticed that in the real one the hours of daylight were rapidly shortening, and that in the mornings there was a white hoarfrost in the orchard. + 

Laura Lou seemed to have recovered; but she was still easily tired, and the woman who came for the washing had still to be summoned almost daily to help with the housework. Then the weather turned cold, and the coal bill went up with a rush. The bungalow was not meant for winter, and Vance had to buy a couple of stoves and have the stovepipes pushed up through the roof. But in spite of these cares he was still hardly conscious of the lapse of time, and might have drifted on unaware to the end of the year if the old familiar money problem had not faced him. What with the coal and the stoves and the hired woman, and buying more blankets and some warm clothes, the monthly expenses had already doubled; what would it be when winter set in? Still, they had the derelict place for a song, and it would perhaps cost less to stay on there than to move. + 

About a month after his grandmother’s departure from New York a letter came from her. She reported the success of her lecture tour, and was loud in praise of “Storecraft’s” management. She spoke enthusiastically of the way in which the publicity was organized, and said it was bringing many souls to Jesus; and she reminded Vance affectionately of her offer to provide him and Laura Lou with a home. She would be ready to do so, she said, as soon as she paid off her debt to Mr. Weston; and that would be before long, judging from her present success. To justify her optimism she enclosed one of the advance circulars with which “Storecraft” was flooding the country, together with laudatory articles from local papers and a paean from her own special organ, Spirit Life, (which was now serializing her religious experiences). She said ingenuously that she guessed she had a right to be proud of such results, and added that anyhow they would show Vance there were plenty of cultured centres in the United States where the spiritual temperature was higher than in the Arctic circles of Park Avenue. + 

The letter touched Vance. It came at a moment when the problem of the winter was upon him, and he might have yielded to Mrs. Scrimser’s suggestion⁠—if only she had not enclosed the newspaper articles. But there they were, in all their undisguised blatancy, and her pride in them showed her to have been completely unaffected by her grandson’s arguments and entreaties, or at any rate blind to their meaning. And after all, that very blindness exonerated her. If she really believed herself a heaven-sent teacher, why should she not live on what she taught? Where there was no fraud there was no dishonour. She was only giving these people what they wanted, and what she sincerely believed they ought to have. + 

Yes, but it was all based on the intellectual laziness that he abhorred. It was because she was content with a shortcut to popularity, and her hearers with words that sounded well and put no strain on their attention, that, as one paper said, she could fill three-thousand-seat auditoriums all the way from Maine to California. The system was detestable, the results were pitiable.⁠ ⁠… But his grandmother had to have the money, and her audiences had to have the particular blend of homemade religiosity that she knew how to brew. “Another form of bootlegging,” Vance growled, and pitched the newspapers to the floor. The fraud was there, it was only farther back, in the national tolerance of ignorance, the sentimental plausibility, the rush for immediate results, the get-rich-quick system applied to the spiritual life.⁠ ⁠… The being he loved with all the tenacity of childish affection was exactly on a level with her dupes. + 

He did not answer the letter, and his grandmother did not write again. + 

Vance thought he had thrown all the “Storecraft” documents into the stove; but one day he came back and found Laura Lou with one of the advance circulars smoothed out before her on the kitchen table. She looked up with a smile. + 

“Oh, Vanny, why didn’t you show me this before? Did your grandmother send it to you?” + 

He shrugged his acquiescence, and she sat gazing at the circular. “I guess it was Bunty who wrote it himself⁠—don’t you believe so?” + 

Vance’s work had not gone well that day, and he gave an irritated laugh. “Shouldn’t wonder. But you probably know his style better than I do.” + 

The too-quick blood rushed to her cheeks, and ebbed again with the last word of his taunt. She looked at him perplexedly. “You don’t like it, then⁠—you don’t think it makes enough of your grandmother?” + 

“Lord, yes! It makes too much⁠—that’s the trouble.” He picked the leaflet up and read it slowly over, trying, out of idle curiosity, to see it from Laura Lou’s point of view, which doubtless was exactly that of his grandmother. But every word nauseated him, and his sense of irony was blunted by the fact that the grotesque phrases were applied to a being whom he loved and admired. He threw the paper down contemptuously. “I suppose I could make a good living myself writing that kind of thing.⁠ ⁠…” + 

Laura Lou’s face lit up responsively. “I’m sure you could, Vanny. I’ve always thought so. Bunty told me once that a good publicity writer could earn every bit as much as a best seller.” + 

He laughed. “Pity I didn’t choose that line, isn’t it? Since I don’t look much like being a best seller, anyhow.” + 

She scented the sarcasm and drew back into herself, as her way was when he stung her with something unanswerable. Vance picked up the paper, tore it in bits, and walked away majestically to his desk. These women⁠—!⁠ ⁠… Of course his work had been going badly of late⁠—how could it be otherwise, with the endless interruptions and worries he was subjected to? A man who wanted to write ought to be free and unencumbered, or else in possession of an independent income and of a wife who could keep house without his perpetual intervention. Other fellows he knew⁠ ⁠… The thought of the other fellows woke a sudden craving in him, that craving for change, talk, variety, a general freshening-up of the point of view, which seizes upon the creative artist after a long unbroken stretch of work. He wanted the Coconut Tree again, and the “Loafers’,” and a good talk with Frenside.⁠ ⁠… He wanted above all to get away from Laura Lou and the bungalow.⁠ ⁠… + 

“See here⁠—I’ve got an appointment in town. I guess if I sprint for the elevated I can make it before one o’clock,” he announced abruptly; and before she could question or protest he had got into his hat and overcoat, and was hurrying down the lane to the turnpike. + 

It was weeks since he had been to New York, and then he had stayed only long enough to persuade Dreck and Saltzer to give him a small advance on his royalties. Today, as the huge roar of the streets enveloped him, he felt his heart beating in time with it. He hadn’t known how much he had missed the bracing air of the multitude. He avoided the New Hour, but turned in for lunch at the Coconut Tree, where it was bewildering and stimulating, after those endless weeks of country solitude and laborious routine, to find the old idlers and workers, the old jokes, the old wrangles, the old welcome again. Eric Rauch met him amicably, and seemed glad to hear that the novel was growing so fast. “Queer, though, if you were to get away the Pulsifer Novel Prize from the boss,” he chuckled in Vance’s ear. Vance stared, and had to be told, in deepest confidence, that Tarrant was also at work on a novel⁠—his first⁠—and that the few intimates who had seen it predicted that it would pull off the Pulsifer Prize, though perhaps not altogether on its merits. + 

“Luckily, though,” Rauch ended, “it’s a First Novel Prize, and that rules you out, because of Instead.” He seemed to derive intense amusement from the narrowly averted drama of a conflict between the editor of the New Hour and its most noted contributor. + 

When Vance left the Coconut Tree, rather later than he had meant to, he went to Frenside’s lodgings, but found a card with “Away” above the latter’s name in the vestibule. Then he recalled the real object of his trip: he must try to get another two or three hundred out of Dreck and Saltzer. His reluctance to ask for a second advance was manifest, and theirs to accord it no less so. The cashier reminded him affably that it wasn’t so very long since his last application. That sort of thing was contrary to their rules; but if he’d look in after the first of the year, possibly Mr. Dreck would see what he could do.⁠ ⁠… Vance turned away, and walking back to Fifth Avenue stood for a while watching the stream of traffic pour by⁠—the turbid flood which had never ceased to press its way through those perpetually congested arteries since he had first stood gazing at it, hungry and lightheaded, or the later day when, desperate with anxiety for Laura Lou and the need for money, he had breasted the tide to make his way to Mrs. Pulsifer’s and beg for a loan. + 

He stood there idly on the curbstone, smiling at his past illusions and at the similarity of his present plight. He was as poor as ever, with the same wants to meet, the same burden to bear, and none of his illusions left. Nothing had changed in his life except his easy faith in the generosity of his fellows. There was his grandmother, indeed, whose generosity was no illusion⁠—at a word she would shoulder all his difficulties. But that word he could not speak. And in all the rest of the world he knew of no one ready to take on the burden of an unsuccessful novelist.⁠ ⁠… + 

He wandered up Fifth Avenue, letting the noise and the tumult drug him to insensibility. The cold brief daylight had vanished in a blaze of nocturnal illumination. Vance crossed over to Broadway and tramped on aimlessly till a call flamed out at him from among all the other flaming calls. Beethoven⁠—The Fifth Symphony⁠ ⁠… He had heard it for the first and only time with Halo Tarrant, the previous winter.⁠ ⁠… Well, he was going to hear it again, to hear it by himself that very evening. He turned in at the concert hall, secured the last seat in the highest gallery, and wandered away again to pick up a sandwich and a cup of coffee before the concert began. The night was cold, and the hot coffee set all his veins singing. Music and heat and love⁠ ⁠… they were what a fellow needed who was young and hungry and a poet.⁠ ⁠… + 

From his corner of the upper heaven he could lean over and catch sight of the orchestra stalls where he and Halo had sat on that divine night. He remembered, vaguely, her having said something about their being subscription seats⁠—about her husband’s always having them for the Beethoven cycle⁠—and his heart began to beat at the thought that she might actually be sitting there, far below him, that he might presently discover her small dark head and white shoulders standing out from the indifferent throng. But he had come early; nearly all the orchestra seats were still empty, and it was impossible to identify the two they had occupied. With a painful fixity he sat watching as the great auditorium gradually filled up. He had forgotten all about the music in his agonized longing to see Mrs. Tarrant again. He did not mean to try to speak to her⁠—what was the use?⁠—but to see her would be a bitter ecstasy; and he was in pursuit of all the ecstasies that night.⁠ ⁠… + 

And then, abruptly, the music began. Unperceived by him the orchestra had noiselessly filed in, filling the stage tier by tier; the conductor’s gesture broken the hush, and in the deep region of the soul the echo of the fateful chords awoke. + 

Vance listened in the confused rapture of those to whom the world of tone is an inexplicable heaven. When Halo Tarrant had first introduced him to it he had resented his inability to analyse this new emotion. It seemed as though great poetry, the science of Number, should be the clue of the mathematically definite laws underlying this kindred art; and when he found it was not so, that the ear most acutely taunted to verbal harmonies may be dull in the dissection of pure sound, he felt baffled and humbled. But gradually he came to see that for the creative artist two such fields of emotion could hardly overlap without confusion. He needed all his acuteness and precision of sensibility for his own task; it was better that his particular domain should lie surrounded by the great golden haze of the other arts, like a tiny cultivated island in the vagueness of a sunset ocean.⁠ ⁠… A sunset ocean: that was it! The inarticulate depths in him woke to this surge of sound as they did to the surge of the waves, or to that murmur of the blood which the lips of lovers send back to their satisfied hearts.⁠ ⁠… And that was enough. + 

When the first interval came he sat for a while with his eyes covered, as though the accumulated impress must escape if he opened them. Then he roused himself, and look down at the stalls. They were filling fast; he was able to distinguish definitely the two seats which he and Mrs. Tarrant had occupied. They were empty, and that seemed to establish their identity, and to put a seal on the memory of that other evening. But now he did not greatly care if she came or not⁠—she was his in the plenitude of the music. He shut his eyes again and the multitudinous seas poured over him.⁠ ⁠… + 