XV + 

The Hour was modestly housed on an upper floor of a shabby ex-private house; no noiseless lift, plate-glass doors or silver-buttoned guardians led to its threshold. But the typewriter girl in the outer office, who said, no, Mr. Frenside wasn’t the editor, but only literary adviser, added that she guessed he was there that morning, and presently returned to show Vance into a stuffy cell full of cigar smoke where Frenside leaned on an ink-spattered table and fixed Vance with his unencouraging stare. + 

“Oh, yes⁠—Weston your name is? Well, sit down.” + 

He smoked and stared for a while; then he exclaimed: “By George, I saw you up at Eaglewood, didn’t I? Why, yes⁠—that business of the books.⁠ ⁠… Miss Spear’ll be glad I’ve run across you. The books were found, she wanted you to know.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“The books?” Vance looked at him vaguely. In this shimmering dubious world in which he had lately lived the story of the books at the Willows had become as forgotten and far-off a thing as the song in one of those poems Miss Spear had read to him; Miss Spear herself was only a mist among mists; all Vance could think of now was that he must get this taciturn man behind the cigar to find him a job. + 

“Why, yes, the books turned up,” Frenside repeated. + 

“How?” Vance asked with an effort. + 

“I don’t know the particulars. It seems Lewis Tarrant⁠—you remember that fair young man who’s always up at Eaglewood?⁠—well, he managed to buy them back⁠ ⁠… advertised, I believe⁠ ⁠… offered a reward.⁠ ⁠… They never caught the thief; but that didn’t so much matter. The main thing was to get the books. So that question’s closed.” + 

“Well, I’m glad,” Vance forced himself to say. And he knew he would be, in the other world of solid matter, if ever he got back to it.⁠ ⁠… + 

He felt that Frenside was looking at him more attentively. “That’s not what you came for, though? Well, let’s hear.” He settled back in his chair, listening in silence to what Vance had to say, and drumming on the table as if he were rapping out his secret thoughts on a typewriter. + 

Vance stammered through the tale of his vain quest, and wondered if perhaps Mr. Frenside could recommend him to a newspaper⁠—but the other cut him short. He hadn’t any pull of that sort; sorry; but Vance had better go straight home if he had an opening on a newspaper there. Vance turned pale and made no answer; he cursed himself inwardly for having appealed, against his better judgment, to this man who cared nothing for him and was perhaps prejudiced by what had happened at the Willows. + 

“All right, sir, thank you,” he said, getting to his feet, and turning to the door. As he did so, Frenside spoke. “See here⁠—going home’s a nasty dose to swallow sometimes, isn’t it? I remember⁠ ⁠… at your age.⁠ ⁠… Why do you want to go on a newspaper, anyhow?” + 

Vance, leaning against the doorway, answered: “I want to learn to be a writer.” + 

“And that’s the reason⁠—” Frenside gave a gruff laugh. + 

Vance looked at him curiously. “Is there any other way?” + 

“There’s only one way. Buckle down and write. Newspapers won’t help you.” + 

Vance felt the blood rush to his forehead. “I have⁠ ⁠… I have⁠ ⁠… tried to write.⁠ ⁠…” + 

Frenside reached for a match, relit his cigar, and once more said: “Sit down.” Vance obeyed. “What have you written? Got it in your pocket, I suppose? Let’s see.” + 

Vance, with a feverish hand, pulled out a bundle of papers⁠—the poems he had written at Paul’s Landing, and some of the stuff which had poured from his pen in the long hungry hours at the rooming house. He laid them on the desk, and Frenside adjusted his eyeglasses. It seemed to Vance as if he were fitting his eyes to an exceptionally powerful microscope. + 

“H’m⁠—poetry. All poetry?” + 

“Most of what I’ve written is.” + 

“Well, poetry won’t earn your keep: it’s pure luxury. Like keeping a car.” + 

Silence followed. At intervals it was broken by what sounded to Vance like the roar of the sea, but was in reality the scarce audible rustle as Frenside unfolded one sheet after another. He was doubtless not accustomed to reading manuscript, and to Vance’s agony of apprehension was added the mortification of not having been able to type his poems before submitting them. In most editorial offices, he knew, they wouldn’t look at handwritten things; presenting the poems to Frenside in this shape would probably do away with their one chance. Vance thought of offering to read them aloud, remembered Miss Spear’s comment on his enunciation, and dared not. + 

The roar of unfolding pages continued. + 

“H’m,” said Frenside again. He spread the papers out before him, and puffed in silence. + 

“Well, you’re at the sedulous age,” he continued after a pause. (What did that mean?) “Can’t be helped, of course. Here’s the inevitable Shakespeare sonnet: ‘What am I but the shape your love has made me?’⁠—and the Whitman: ‘Vast enigmatic reaches of ocean beyond me’⁠—just so. It is beyond you, my dear fellow, at least at present. Ever seen the ocean?” + 

Vance could hardly find his voice. He shook his head. + 

“Not even at Coney Island?” Frenside shrugged. “Not that that matters. Look here; this is all Poets’ Corner stuff. Try it on your hometown paper. That’s my advice. There are pretty things here and there, of course; you like the feel of words, don’t you? But poetry, my son, is not a halfway thing. I remember once asking a book-learned friend if he cared for poetry, and he answered cautiously: ‘Yes, up to a certain point.’ Well, the devil of it is that real poetry doesn’t begin till beyond that certain point.⁠ ⁠… See?” + 

Vance signed that he saw: somehow he liked that definition of poetry, even at the cost of having to sacrifice his own to it. + 

“How about prose; never written any?” + 

The unexpectedness of the question jerked Vance out of the clouds. “I⁠—I’m writing a novel.” + 

“Hullo⁠—are you? What about.” + 

“About life in New York.” + 

“I thought so,” said Frenside grimly. There was another silence. “Never tried an article or a short story?” + 

“Never anything⁠—good enough.” Vance got wearily to his feet. “I guess I’ll take these things and burn ’em,” he said, putting out his hands for the poems. + 

“No, don’t do that. Keep ’em, and reread ’em in a couple of years. That requires more courage, and courage is about the most useful thing in an artist’s outfit.” Vance was beginning to think it must be. + 

“Well,” Frenside continued, “if ever you try a short essay, or a story, bring them along. Don’t forget.” He smiled a little, as if to bind up the wounds he had inflicted. “You never can tell,” he concluded cryptically. + 

He held out his hand. The interview was over. + 

The interview was over; but when Vance reached the foot of the stairs he perceived its repercussions were only just beginning. He wandered on through a street or two, found himself in Union Square, and sat down under the meagre shade of its starved trees. The other people on the bench with him, listless sodden-looking men, collarless and perspiring, seemed like companions in misery who had preceded him a flight or two down the steep stairs of failure. Perhaps they too⁠—or at least one among them⁠—had tried for the impossible, as he was doing. He shivered a little at the sense of such kinship. + 

But gradually a luminous point emerged out of the enveloping fog. “Newspapers won’t help you,” Frenside had said; and Vance was suddenly aware that the dictum chimed with his own deep inward conviction. It had always seemed to him that newspapers, as he knew them, were totally unrelated to literature as he had always dreamed of it, and as he now knew that it existed. Yet was Frenside right⁠—was he himself right? Everyone always said: “Nothing like newspaper work as a training if a fellow wants to write. Teaches you not to waste time, to go straight to the point, to put things in a bright snappy way that won’t bore people.⁠ ⁠…” Ugh, how he hated all the qualities thus commended! What a newspaper man like Bunty Hayes, for instance, would have called wasting time seemed to Vance one of the fundamental needs of the creative process. He could not imagine putting down on paper anything that had not risen slowly to the verge of his consciousness, that had not to be fished for and hauled up with infinite precautions from some secret pool of being as to which he knew nothing as yet but the occasional leap, deep down in it, of something alive but invisible.⁠ ⁠… And this Frenside, whom he did not like, whose manner offended him, whose views awoke his instinctive antagonism, had yet, in that one phrase, summed up his own obscure feeling. “Buckle down and write”; yes⁠—he had always felt that to be the only way. But to do it a fellow must be quiet, must have enough to eat, must be fairly free from material anxieties; and how was he to accomplish that? He didn’t know⁠—but he was so grateful for the key word furnished by Frenside that nothing else seemed much to matter; not the disparagement of his poems, the shrug at his novel, or the assumption that his aspirations were bound to be exactly like those of any other young fool who presented himself to an editor with a first bundle of manuscript. He walked slowly back to his rooming house, uncertain what to do next, but feeling that at least the darkness was not total. + 

His first impulse was to go through all his accumulated papers, to resee them in this new faint ray. He skimmed over the pages of his novel, found it shapeless, helpless⁠—more so even than he had feared⁠—and remembered another tonic phrase of Frenside’s: the curt “I thought so,” in reply to Vance’s confession that he was attempting a novel, and then the injunction: “If ever you try a short story send it along.” What a pity he hadn’t tried one, instead of this impossible unwieldy novel! And then, as he sat there, fumbling with fragments of dead prose, his hand lit on a dozen typed pages, clipped together, and a little frayed at the edges. He’d forgotten he had that with him.⁠ ⁠… “One Day”⁠—the thing he’d written in a kind of frenzy, after his fever, when he couldn’t find his father’s revolver. How long ago all that seemed! There had been weeks when he couldn’t have looked at those pages, could barely have touched them; and now he was turning on them an eye almost as objective as George Frenside’s.⁠ ⁠… + 

You couldn’t call it a short story, he supposed. It was just the headlong outpouring of what he had felt and suffered during those few hours⁠—like a fellow who’d been knocked down and run over trying to tell you what it felt like. That was all. But somehow the sentences moved, the words seemed alive⁠—if he’d had to do it again he didn’t know that he’d have done it very differently. It didn’t amount to much, but still he felt as if it was his own, not the work of two or three other fellows, like the novel. A sudden impulse seized him: he wrapped up the manuscript, addressed it to Frenside, put his own name and address below, and carried the packet back to the office of The Hour. He hadn’t the courage to go in with it, but slipped it into the letter box and walked away. + 

Three days afterward⁠—the last but two of his week⁠—he came in one afternoon and found that a letter had been pushed under his door. On the corner of the envelope was stamped The Hour. Vance’s hands turned cold. He stood for a few seconds looking at that portentous name; then he tore open the envelope and read: “Dear Sir, The editor of The Hour asks me to say that he will be glad to take your story, ‘One Day,’ though The Hour does not usually publish short stories. I enclose a cheque for $50.” There followed a vague secretarial signature, and underneath, untidily scrawled with a blunt pencil: “Better go back home and write more like it. Frenside.” Vance stood a long time motionless, the letter in his hand. At first he was not aware of any sensation at all; and when it did come it seemed too strong for joy. It was more as if he had been buffeted in a crowd and had the wind knocked out of him, as he had on the day when he and Upton fought their way to the Crans’ car after the ball game.⁠ ⁠… + 

“I want to go and see the ocean,” he suddenly said aloud. He didn’t know where the words had come from, but the force of the impulse was overwhelming. Perhaps he had unconsciously recalled Frenside’s sneer: “Ever seen the ocean? Not even from Coney Island?” Well, he thought, he was going to see it now.⁠ ⁠… He put the cheque in his pocket and went out again. With that talisman on his breast he felt strong enough to conquer the world. What might it not have bought for him? Well, first of all it was going to buy him one of the greatest things in the universe.⁠ ⁠… He went round to Friendship House, found the friendly manager, and got his cheque cashed. Then he decided to leave the money in the manager’s safe; it was no use risking it in crowded trains. And he meant to take a train that very minute, and get down to the Atlantic shore before it grew dark. He didn’t know where⁠—but he asked, and the manager said, smiling: “Why, we’ve got a camp of our own down on Long Island, not far from Rockaway. It’s pretty near empty in the middle of the week; you might as well go down there, I guess. I’ll give you a line to the man in charge⁠—you look as if a good swim would pick you up.⁠ ⁠…” He scribbled a card. “Don’t forget to come for your money, though,” he said. + 

It was nearly sunset when the train reached the little station where Vance was to get out. He saw only a cluster of frame houses among scrubby sandhills, and a skyline crisscrossed by telephone and telegraph wires, like the view across the fields from Crampton. The man at the station said the camp was some way down the road. Vance followed the indication. The road, little better than a sandy trail, ran level for a bit, drifted past a colony of shacks and bathhouses, and then lifted him to a ridge of sand and left him face to face with the unknown. Before him more sandhills, sparsely tufted, sloped down imperceptibly to bare sand. The sand spread to a beach which seemed to stretch away right and left without end, and beyond the beach was another surface, an unknown element, steel gray in the cloudy twilight, and breathing and heaving, and swaying backward and forth with a shredding and rending of white yeasty masses ceaselessly torn off from that smooth immensity. Vance stood and gazed, and felt for the first time the weight of the universe upon him. Even the open sky of the plains, bending to the horizon on all sides, and traceried and buttressed, up aloft, with the great structure of the stars, seemed less huge, less immemorial, less incomprehensible to the finite mind than this expanse which rested not yet moved not, except in a rhythmic sway as regular as the march of the heavens. Vance sat down on a hillock and gazed and gazed as twilight fell; then in the last light he scrambled across the dunes to the sands, reached the stones of the beach, knelt close to that long incoming curve, and plunged his hands into it, as if in dedication. + 