Hudson River Bracketed quotes

As to these joys she professed a contemptuous incredulity. What she wanted was to reform the world; and beauty and passion were but hindrances to her purpose.

She wanted to reform everything⁠—it didn’t particularly matter what: cooking, marriage, religion (of course religion), dentistry, saloons, corsets⁠—even Grandpa.

Grandpa used to complain that in cooking she had never got very far on the way to Perfection—only just far enough to give him dyspepsia.

Indeed, she made no secret of it herself—why should she, when she regarded it only as an inconvenient accident, a troublesome singularity, and (she had been known to admit in confidential moments) an obstacle to Grandpa Scrimser’s advance to Perfection?

Perfection was Grandma’s passion⁠—ladies were Grandpa’s.

While his wife was young her beauty might have served to circumscribe his yearnings if only she had chosen to make use of it.

Inspired by such considerations, he developed a pretty taste in suburban architecture, and was often consulted by builders and decorators as to some fancy touch in hall or sleeping porch, while Mrs. Weston’s advice was invaluable in regard to kitchen and linen closet.

Between them they served their trade like a religion, Mrs. Weston putting into it her mother’s zeal for souls and Mr. Weston making clients come to the suburbs as his mother-in-law made them come to Jesus.

The Mapledale suburb, which was entirely Mr. Weston’s creation, was Euphoria’s chief source of pride, and always the first thing shown to distinguished visitors after the Alsop Building, the Dental College, and the Cedarcrest cemetery;

“I should like to give everything its right name, and to know why that name was the right one,” he thought; the names of things had always seemed to him as closely and mysteriously a part of them as his skin or eyelashes of himself.

What was the use of all he had been taught in college if the commonest objects on this familiar earth were so remote and inexplicable?

There were botany manuals, and scientific books on the shapes and action of clouds; but what he wanted to get at was something deeper, something which must have belonged to flowers and clouds before ever man was born to dissect them.

Vance shook his head. It wasn’t much fun arguing with his grandmother about God, but it was better than hearing eternally about new electric cleaners from his mother, or about real estate from Mr. Weston, or the reorganization of school grades from his sister Pearl.

Vance respected efficiency, and even admired it; but of late he had come to feel that as a diet for the soul it was deficient in nourishment.

He wondered that Mrs. Weston, who was such an authority on diet, had never thought of applying the moral equivalent of the vitamin test to the life they all led at Mapledale. He had an idea they were starving to death there without knowing it.

She took off her moist spectacles and wiped them.

“Well, I guess God created women so’s to give the men somebody to say that to,” she remarked, with a philosophic smile.

Her grandson smiled also. He never failed to appreciate her humour; but today he was still quivering from his vain effort at expression, and her misunderstanding of it; and he had nothing more to say.

But it was hard, at nineteen, and on a spring evening, to know this, and to feel himself forever excluded from the fellowship of the young and the happy. He supposed other fellows had been through it and survived—in books they told you so.

But this evening his soul was like a desert.

He’d never looked at a girl since Floss—never meant to. Taken it out in writing poetry instead. Sometimes, for a few moments, doing that almost replaced her caresses, seemed to bring her as close as if words were warm and palpable like flesh.

The little boy had instantly guessed that something was wrong when his mother, instead of exclaiming: “Why, there’s Grandpa!” had abruptly remembered that, good gracious, she’d never ordered the yeast from Sproul’s Bakery, and had jerked Vance back there without seeming to notice Mr. Scrimser.

Such subterfuges are signposts on the road to enlightenment.

Vance continued to smile sardonically at the remembrance of this episode, and the thought of how far behind him his guileless infancy lay. For a moment he felt inclined to hail his grandfather;

She sat down among them in the sleeping porch, where Vance now took his daily rest cure, listened to their perplexity, and said with her dreamy prophetic smile:

“There’s only once in a life when anybody wants one particular thing so bad that nothing else on earth’ll do instead. I wouldn’t wonder if wanting a thing that way wasn’t about the nearest we ever get to happiness.”

She turned her softly humorous eyes on her grandson. “I guess Vanny’ll have to go East.”

“Dear me, don’t it take you right back to Historic Times, hearing about things like that?” Grandma glowed reminiscently; but Mrs. Weston shivered a little at the opening of such interminable vistas.

She liked to think of everybody living compactly and thrivingly, as she did herself, hemmed in by a prosperous present, and securely shut off from the icy draughts of an unknown past.

“I guess the family’s going way back like that don’t always help the children to go forward,” she said sententiously; and at that very moment her husband reappeared with an announcement which seemed to confirm her worst suspicions.

More trees—trees everywhere, trees taller, fuller and more heavy-branched, he thought, than those of his native prairies.

Up the hillside they domed themselves in great bluish masses, one against the other, like the roofs of some mysterious city built of leaves.

Vance was pleased with that fancy too, and would have liked to stop and put it into verse, as well as his grandmother’s idea about the lilacs.

Secret as the soul. There were times when his own soul was like a forest, full of shadows and murmurs—arcane, aloof—a place to lose one’s way in, a place fearsome, almost, to be alone in. And then: secret. That too was true.

He often felt as if his own soul were a stranger inside of him, a stranger speaking a language he had never learned, or had forgotten.

And there again was a good idea; the idea of the mysterious stranger within one’s self, closer than one’s bones and yet with a face and speech forever unknown to one.

Words for one poem, then for the other, continued to surge up, mingling, confused and exciting, in his half-awakened brain.

Sometimes he lingered on one for the sake of its own beauty, and suddenly a new poem would bud from it, as if the word had been a seed plunged into the heated atmosphere of his imagination.

Disconnected, unmeaning, alluring, they strung themselves out on one bit of paper after another, till he threw down his pen and buried his rumpled head in his hands.

Tracy, who had a stock set of questions ready (Vance perceived) for both of her children, and had learned how to interrogate Upton about his horticultural experiments, and Laura Lou about her studies, without understanding their answers, or even affecting to.

She struck Vance as a woman who had lived all her life among people whose language she could not speak, and had learned to communicate with them by signs, like a deaf-mute, while ministering watchfully to their material needs.

Having settled Vance in the hammock she went off with a slatternly woman who came in from one of the next houses to help with the washing; and Vance lay in the warm shade, and dozed, or let his mind wander over his half-written poems.

It all seemed part of the incomprehensible past to which she and the house belonged, a past so remote, so full of elusive mystery, that Vance’s first thought was:

“Why wasn’t I ever told about the Past before?”

He turned from the portrait and looked about the room, trying vainly to picture what this woman’s life had been, in her solemn high-ceilinged house, alone among her books.

Vance reluctantly followed his cousin. As they left the house he realized that, instead of seizing the opportunity to explore every nook of it, he had sat all the afternoon in one room, and merely dreamed of what he might have seen in the others.

But that was always his way: the least little fragment of fact was enough for him to transform into a palace of dreams, whereas if he tried to grasp more of it at a time it remained on his hands as so much unusable reality.

“Ah, Whitman was a very old man when I knew him—immobilized at Camden. He never came here in my time. But from something he once said I gathered that Eaglewood undoubtedly … yes, I must really jot it all down one of these days. …”

Mr. Spear’s past was full of the dateless blur of the remarkable things he had not jotted down.

Slim, dark, well-preserved, with his wavy grayish hair and cleverly dyed moustache, he was the type of the busy dreamer who is forever glancing at his watch, calling impatiently for timetables and calendars (two articles never to be found in the Spear household), calculating and …

The sunset and the woodlands were nothing to him if they had not fed a poet or a painter—a poet preferably. Frenside had often said to Halo:

“No, my child; remember I’m not a vegetarian⁠—never could digest raw landscape.”

But that did not mean that he did not see it, did not parcel it out into its component parts with those cool classifying eyes. George Frenside was aware of most things; little escaped him of the cosmic spectacle.

His short stocky figure, his brooding Socratic head, his cigar and eyeglasses, figured among Halo’s earliest recollections, and she had always seen him as she saw him now: elderly, poor, unsuccessful, and yet more masterful, more stimulating, than anyone else she had known.

“A fire that warms everything but itself,” she had once defined him; but he had snapped back: “I don’t warm, I singe.”

Not a bad description of his relation to most people; but she, who knew him so well, knew also the communicative glow he could give out, and often wondered why it had never lit up his own path.

and he sat paralyzed by the completeness of the opportunity. One day he found a title which amused him—The Art of Imparting Ignorance—and that was the only line of the book he ever wrote.

“It’s one of the surest signs of genius to do your best when you’re working for money,” he told Halo.

“I have only talent—and the idea of doing a book to order simply benumbed me. What the devil can I do but keep on hack-writing?” But even that he did only intermittently.

Old it was, for an American possession. Lorburns had lived there for considerably over two hundred years: the present house had been built in 1680.

It was too long, perhaps, for Americans to live in any one place; and the worst of it was that, when they had, it became a sort of tribal obligation to go on doing so.

Sell Eaglewood? Which one of them would have dared to?

As it happened, no such danger threatened, for fashion had passed them by; but had the peril been imminent, Mr. Spear would have opposed it with all the force of his eloquence.

Mr. Spear regarded Eaglewood with the veneration of the parvenu for a recently acquired ancestor.

When he married the beautiful Miss Lorburn, New York said: “He’s very clever, of course; but still, who would have expected to see a Spear at Eaglewood?”

Emily Lorburn, brought up in an atmosphere of rigid social conformity, had become passionately nonconforming; her husband, educated after the strict rule of Episcopalian orthodoxy, had read Strauss and Renan in secret before going over openly to Darwin and Haeckel.

The young people, dazzled by each other’s audacities, had perhaps expected, by pooling them, to form a nucleus of intellectual revolt; but the world had revolted without waiting for them.

Their heresies were too mild to cause any excitement outside of their own circle, and their house, instead of being the centre of incendiarism they had imagined, was merely regarded as one where one was likely to meet agreeable people.

Jacob stared, but without protesting. “You won’t get back, very likely,” he merely observed, and Halo scrambled into the motor with a laugh and a shrug.

The motor, she said to herself, was like life in general at Eaglewood: it was always breaking down, but it always managed to keep on going.

“Tied together with string and patched up with court plaster: that’s been the way with everything in the family ever since I can remember.” She gave a little sigh as she slipped down the overgrown drive, heading for the stone pillars of the gateway.

I’ll run you up to Thundertop first, and we’ll have a picnic breakfast by the pool. Does that tempt you? Only you’ll have to get up—when? Half-past two, I suppose!

And we’ll see the stars fade like flowers, and a new world born⁠—don’t you feel it’s a new world every morning?

And it will be all ours, with no one to interfere, or spoil it—Oh, Vance,” she broke off, lifting her wrist to her shortsighted eyes. “I do believe my watch has stopped! The brute! Can you tell me the time?

The summer darkness rustled with the approach of dawn.

At the foot of the lane below the Tracys’ Vance Weston felt the stir as if it were one with the noise in his own temples:

the day before; or the car, which she had said was going on one leg, might fall dead lame, and leave her stranded before she could get down the mountain. But he did not really believe that either of these things would happen.

There are days which give you, in the very moment of waking, the assurance that they were born for you, are yours to do as you please with; this was one of them for Vance.

He had been, not offended, but hurt and a little bewildered, at Miss Spear’s failure to come to the Willows the previous afternoon, after sending him word that if he met her there she would let him spend a long afternoon with the books.

Vance sat down on the doorstep. From where he sat he could get a glimpse of the gate through the shimmering branches, and watch the shadows of the trees wheel slowly across the lawn.

The air was rich with the smell of syringas, that smell which is so like the sound of bees on a thundery day.

Vance leaned his head back against a pillar of the porch and waited. …

At last the motor came out of the woodland, high up on a stretch of rough country road between fields.

The sky arched overhead dim and pallid, with here and there a half-drowned star like a petal in gray water.

They passed once more under trees, the world grew all dark again, and Miss Spear, stopping the motor, said: “Here.”

“If it shouldn’t happen!” Miss Spear exclaimed. Vance turned to her in wonder.

She had spoken his very thought; and to youth such coincidences are divine.

“Or if it had never happened before—if we were actually looking at the very first. … Ah!” she broke off on a deep breath;

She continued to look at him, and as she did so, the anxious groping expression of her shortsighted eyes, as she tried to read his, suddenly humanized her face and brought her close again. “It was just my incurable mania for taking everything to pieces.

Gilding the lily⁠—who was the fool who said that wasn’t worth doing?

… But I shouldn’t have spoken, you know, Vance, if I didn’t believe you have the gift … the real gift … ‘the sublime awkwardness that belittles talent,’ as George Frenside calls it …”

“I can’t tell you now just what day; but I’ll leave word with Upton at the nursery, I promise I will. And now come, Vance, we must pack up and start.

Our sunrise isn’t ours any longer. It belongs to the whole stupid world.

…”

Vance was totally untaught. Miss Spear, with those swift and confident hands of hers, had given him one of her hurried demonstrations, accompanied by a running commentary of explanation. “Don’t shake the books as if they were carpets, Vance; they’re not.

At least they’re only magic carpets, some of them, to carry one to the other side of the moon.

But they won’t stand banging and beating. You see, books have souls, like people: that is, like a few people. … No, I wouldn’t ask the Tracys to help; they don’t know much about books. You and I will manage it by ourselves. Look:

“Don’t shake the books as if they were carpets, Vance; they’re not. At least they’re only magic carpets, some of them, to carry one to the other side of the moon. But they won’t stand banging and beating.

You see, books have souls, like people: that is, like a few people.

… No, I wouldn’t ask the Tracys to help; they don’t know much about books. You and I will manage it by ourselves. Look:

If only he could have been left alone in that library, left there for half a year, perhaps. … But even so, he felt that he needed some kind of tuition to prepare him for the library.

The Past was too big, too complicated, too aloof, to surrender its secrets so lightly.

College again? College meant to him sports and more sports, secret societies, class scraps and fraternity rushing, with restricted intervals of mechanical cramming, and the glib unmeaning recital of formulas—his courses provided a formula for everything!

Perhaps it was that his eyes were too close together. Grandma Scrimser always used to say: “Don’t you ever trust a man whose eyes are near enough to be always whispering to each other.” And then she went and trusted everybody—even Grandpa!

Fact was, Grandma liked axioms the way you like olives; it never occurred to her they were meant for anything but to roll under your tongue.

…

Even people who read ’em have to collect them. But personally I’ve never thought they were meant to be read. You can get all the talk you want—and too much—from live people; I never could see the point of dragging in the dead.

The beauty of books is their makeup: like a woman’s.

What’s a woman without clothes and paint? Next to nothing, believe me, after you’ve worn off the first surprise. … And a book without the right paper, the right type, the right binding, the right date on the title page;

But since he was determined to hold on till he got a job he dared not risk taking a better room; and the thought of going home was more hateful than his present misery.

Yet loneliness was the core of that misery; incessant gnawing loneliness of mind and heart.

He was benumbed by the feeling that in the huge wilderness of people about him not one had ever heard of him, or would take the least interest in his case if he should appeal for understanding;

and the thought of going home was more hateful than his present misery. Yet loneliness was the core of that misery; incessant gnawing loneliness of mind and heart.

He was benumbed by the feeling that in the huge wilderness of people about him not one had ever heard of him, or would take the least interest in his case if he should appeal for understanding; not one would care a straw that within him all the forces of the universe were boiling.

He felt the same desolation, the sense of life being over for him, as when he had staggered down the passage to his parents’ room and groped for the absent revolver. …

But he knew that this novel, even if he could do it, would take an immense time in the doing; and meanwhile he must find the means to live.

Drifting from dream to dream, eating daily less, studying daily for longer hours, he entered into the state of strange illumination which comes to ardent youth when the body hungers while the intelligence is fed.

His shaking fingers filled page after page with verse and prose; it seemed as though every difficulty of thought and language were overcome, and he could conceive and formulate whatever his restless intellect willed.

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. …”

“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.

“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.

…” 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.

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.

yet no more than so much. It was good, for instance—necessary, indeed—to have a comfortable amount of money; enough to grease the machinery of life, to prevent recurring family wrangles, or worse; but even for that there was a price not worth paying.

That price was herself; her personality, as the people about her would have called it; the something which made Halo Spear and no other.

Of that something, she often told herself, she would never surrender the least jot.

“Yet he speaks about happiness as if he’d known it—poor old George.” Her impulse was to say: “Oh, Frenny, tell me what it’s like!” But though she had once gone up so boldly to every new riddle she shrank from this one.

“I suppose we each of us have our different Sphinx,” she thought.

She had grown a coward, no doubt.

“Oh, Frenny, tell me what it’s like!” But though she had once gone up so boldly to every new riddle she shrank from this one. “I suppose we each of us have our different Sphinx,” she thought. She had grown a coward, no doubt.

“Life’s so full of things anyhow, isn’t it?” she continued evasively. “I’ve often thought I shouldn’t have time to crowd in anything more⁠ ⁠… even happiness.⁠ ⁠…”

She laughed a little, and getting up out of her deep armchair by the fire walked across the library and stood looking out at the sweep of the East River glittering far below through the autumn haze in its forest of roofs and spires and …

Always in twos they were, the people she pictured. It used not to be so; she had often had her solitary dreams.

But now that she was hardly ever alone she was so often lonely.

Lonely! It was a word she did not admit in her vocabulary—but the sensation was there, cold and a little sickening, gnawing at the roots of her life. … What nonsense! Why, she was actually robbing poor Lewis of the proud prerogative of isolation!

She turned and wandered back to the fire, gazing, as she went, at the books her own hands had arranged and catalogued with such eager care.

“What I want today is the book that’s never been written,” she thought; and then: “No, my child, what you really want is an object in life.⁠ ⁠…”

She was grimly amused to find that she was talking to herself as so often, mentally, she talked to her husband. …

“Yes, it does,” he said. “But you taught me a lot that day that I haven’t forgotten—and at the Willows too.” He paused, as if groping for the right phrase.

“I guess you were the first to show me what there was in books.”

The joyous colour rushed to her face. At last he had recovered the voice of the other Vance! “Ah, I was young then too,” she said with a wistful laugh.

For a while neither spoke. Laura Lou, her head slightly turned toward the window, was watching the landscape slip by with a wide-eyed attention, so that Vance caught only the curve of her cheek and the light shining through the curls about her ear.

There was something almost rigidly attentive in her look and attitude, as though she were a translucent vessel so brimming with happiness that she feared to move or speak lest it should overflow.

The fear communicated itself to him, and as they sat there, hand in hand, he felt as if they were breathlessly watching a magic bird poised just before them, which the least sound might put to flight. “My dove,” he thought, “we’re watching my dove.

They could get milk from her too, he thought, and maybe they could take their meals at the farm. She was pretty good-natured, and at that time of year she might like a little company for a change.

Once in most lives things turn out as the dreamer dreamed them.

This was Vance’s day, and when he pushed open the door there was the stove, with a pile of wood and some scraps of coal ready for lighting, and a jug of milk and loaf of bread on the table.

The misgiving just flashed through him; but it left an inward chill. With those other girls he had been tangled up with there had been no time for such conjectures; they sucked him down to them like quicksands.

But now he seemed to be bending over a cool moonlit pool.⁠ ⁠…

“What shall I say,” he thought, “when she wakes?” And, at that moment her lids lifted, and her eyes looked into his. The candle slanted in his shaking hand; but Laura Lou’s face was still.

For the first time Vance felt a faint apprehension at what he had done, at his own inexperience as well as hers, and the uncertainty of the future.

He had bound himself fast to this child, he, hardly more than a child himself in knowledge of men and in the mysterious art of getting on⁠ ⁠… and for one stricken instant he asked himself why he had done it.

The misgiving just flashed through him; but it left an inward chill. With those other girls he had been tangled up with there had been no time for such conjectures; they sucked him down to them like quicksands.

As he stood there, all the shapes of beauty which had haunted his imagination seemed to rise from the sea and draw about him.

They swept him upward into the faint dapplings of the morning sky, and he caught, as in a mystic vision, the meaning of beauty, the secret of poetry, the sense of the forces struggling in him for expression.

How could he ever have been afraid—afraid of Laura Lou, of fate, of himself? She was the vessel from which he had drunk this divine reassurance, this moment of union with the universe.

Still, to live in New York with Laura Lou would be a costly if not impossible undertaking. She was as much of a luxury as an exotic bird or flower: that she might help him in wage earning or housekeeping had never entered his mind.

He had simply wanted her past endurance, and now he had her; and exquisite as the possession was, he was abruptly faced with the cost of it.

He found a hotel showy enough to dazzle her without being too exorbitantly dear;

Tarrant produced cigarettes and cocktails, and introduced Eric Rauch, the assistant editor. Eric Rauch was a glib young Jew with beautiful eyes and a responsive smile, who had published an obscure volume of poetry: Voodoo, and a much talked-of collection of social studies: Say When.

For the first time Vance found himself talking with an author, and treated by him as one of the tribe.

When Rauch said: “You’ve struck out on a new line,” the praise rushed through Vance like fire, and he longed to hurry back to the hotel and tell Laura Lou. But what would it have meant to her?

“Well, I guess you will, if you want to,” said Rauch humorously; “only let the poor devil have something to eat before you begin to feel his bumps.”

It all sent a novel glow through Vance, and he thought how wonderful life would be, spent among these fellows who talked of art as freely and familiarly as his father did of real estate deals.

Eric Rauch explained who they were, what they had written or painted or carved (“That Stram girl—she’s a regular headhunter; bright idea, doing all the newcomers …”), and which ones were likely to “get there.”

But Vance had never taken any interest in business, or heard applied to it the standards of loyalty which are supposed to regulate men’s private lives, and which he had always thought of as prevailing in the republic of letters.

To him an artist’s work was essentially a part of the private life, something closer than the marrow to the bone.

Anything that touched the sanctity, the incorruptibility, of the creative art was too contemptible to be seriously considered. As well go back to doing write-ups for the Free Speaker. … Vance looked at the clever youth behind the smoke wreaths, and thought:

so that, her resentment once expressed, she found it easier to keep the offenders than to send them away.

Vance, when he carried off Laura Lou, had never thought of the possibility of having to live at Paul’s Landing.

Vague visions of life in a New York boarding house had flitted through his mind, or rather lurked scarce-visible on its edge;

At first the yoke proved less heavy than he had expected. While he was at work Laura Lou had her mother’s companionship. During their brief days alone his wife’s tenderness had begun to frighten him, not its ardour but its submissiveness.

He had not imagined that one human life could be so swiftly and completely absorbed into another.

It was like a blood transfusion: body and soul, he seemed to have taken her into himself; whenever he returned, after an absence of a few hours, only her lovely ghost awaited him, and his presence had to warm her back to life.

The sting of this did not escape Vance.

The social classifications of Euphoria were based on telephones and bathtubs; but he had already guessed that elsewhere other categories prevailed.

His irritation made it easier to answer than if the letter had been more cordial.

Tracy or Laura Lou that he had heard from his mother. To his grandmother he wrote affectionately; he knew that a Bible and a year’s subscription to Spirit Light were the best she could afford, and the tone of her letter touched him.

She was the one human being at Euphoria who had dimly guessed what he was groping for: their souls had brushed wings in the twilight.

…

He needed time for himself—time to let his mind ripen, to have things happen to himself, and watch them happen about him, without being in haste to interpret or develop what he saw.

He did not want to cut down all his trees for firewood.

All this was still confused and unexpressed in him;

Not subjects: they abounded—swarmed like bees, hummed in his ears like mosquitoes.

There were times when he could hardly see the real world for his crowding visions of it.

What he sought was rather the development of these visions; to discover where they led to. His imagination worked slowly, except in the moments of burning union with the power that fed it.

She smiled them away as oddities, like a wise little wife humouring a cranky husband; and her smile almost made him feel that endearments were enough for a soul to live on. Almost, not quite.

From his childhood there had been in him an irreducible core of selfness (he found no other word for it), a hidden cave in which he hoarded his secretest treasures as a child hoards stony dead starfish and dull shells of which he has once seen the sea glitter, though he can make no one else believe in it.

Even Laura Lou’s ignorance, even Laura Lou’s embraces, could not cheapen that treasure.

“Not in your office, at any rate. Put yourself in his place.”

But Tarrant knew of few places worthy to put himself in.

“Thank you, my dear. I don’t happen to have low-down blackguards trying to fight me.”

and the crown of its success was “Unclaimed,” the quiet story by the young author no one had heard of. A war story too—fatal handicap! But everyone agreed that it sounded a new note.

The public was fed up with new notes, yet dared not praise anything without applying that epithet to it (so Frenside explained).

“But it is a new note; I saw it at once when he brought me the thing,” Tarrant grumbled, adding impatiently: “If it depended on you to give a new author a start—!”

“Like? I don’t know. …” Halo hesitated. “You see, she’s not an actual person: she’s a symptom. That’s what Frenny and I call the people who are everything in turn.

They catch things from another kind that we call germ-carriers, people who get every new literary and artistic disease and hand it on.

But come: she’s awfully nice, really.”

“Like? I don’t know. …” Halo hesitated. “

You see, she’s not an actual person: she’s a symptom.

That’s what Frenny and I call the people who are everything in turn. They catch things from another kind that we call germ-carriers, people who get every new literary and artistic disease and hand it on. But come: she’s awfully nice, really.”

… But as he continued to lie there and to drink her drowsy smile, he felt in himself the same reluctance that he suspected in her … a reluctance to mar the perfect hour. Why not suffer the episode to bury itself?

There were things in the lives of the most decent people that left raw edges, that gave you the feeling you had when you’d abandoned a wounded bird in a thicket.

…

now and then he wet a handkerchief with cologne water and put it on her forehead, or clumsily shook up her pillows. … But he did it all automatically, as if he too were elsewhere, in ways as lonely as those she walked. …

Was this why we were all so fundamentally alone? Because, as each might blend with another in blissful fusion, so, at any moment, the empty eyes of a stranger might meet us under familiar brows?

But then, where was the real primordial personality, each man’s indestructible inmost self? Where did it hide, what was it made of, what laws controlled it?

“I’m so sorry,” and her lips seemed shaping themselves for the expression of further sympathy. She leaned nearer again, and he saw she was feverishly wondering what she ought to say. Her helplessness touched him; in her place he would have known so well!

She seemed a creature whose impulses of pity had become atrophied, and who was vainly trying to give him a sign of human feeling across the desert waste of her vast possessions.

“I’m so sorry,” she began again, in a whisper, as if her voice was unable to bridge the distance. Vance stood up and took a few steps across the room. If she was sorry, really—as sorry as all that.

As he sat there, Halo Tarrant’s face substituted itself for the other. Slim and dark-braided, with flowing draperies and sandalled feet, she leaned in the window, looking out through the wistaria fringes for something, for someone. … Vance stood up, brushing away the vision.

Weren’t we all like Elinor Lorburn, looking out, watching for what never came?

Ah, but there were the books—the books that had sufficed her, after all!

That was what explained the likeness—or else made it all the more obscure. … The afternoon shadows wheeled unnoticed across the lawn. Vance continued to sit motionless, letting the secret forces move within him.

Whenever he could surrender to his creative fervour it always ended by carrying him to the mysterious point where effort ceased, and he seemed just to have to hold his breath and watch.

When he got home, Laura Lou said why’d he been gone so long, and her mother was fretting, and would he go upstairs right away and tell her everything was all right?

For she knew now that all Lewis’s generosity (yes, yes, he was generous!) had proceeded not from the heart but from the head. He wanted her; she suited him; he had bought her. It was no more romantic than that.

And being a gentleman, he punctiliously paid the annual tax on his acquisition, and would continue to as long as she continued to suit him.

And it was her business to go on suiting him, since, the day she ceased to, the Spear household would fall to pieces. …

It was extraordinary, how this new vision of it reanimated the dusty scene. Countless details that Halo had taken for granted, or dismissed as negligible, were now ripe with meaning.

The mere discovery that there were people who had been born and died in the same house was romance and poetry to Vance.

It gave to all these anonymous particles a relief and a substance she had never guessed in them.

He made no answer. Her banter hung in a meaningless dazzle somewhere outside of him; all his real self was within, centred in the effort of holding her image fast, of tracing it, line by line, curve by curve, with the passionate hands of memory.

She who had seemed to him but a disembodied intelligence was now stealing into every vein and fibre like wine, like wind, like all the seed-bearing currents of spring.

He looked at her hands, which lay folded before her on the table, and wondered what their hidden palms were like, and the dimpled recess of her inner arm at the elbow. “No, I’ve never known you,” he repeated stupidly.

For his soul’s sake he could not have looked up or changed his attitude.

Her friendly compassion crushed him to earth, her incomprehension held him there.

“If she’d only go,” he thought, “if only it was over. …”

It lay low and spreading under mysterious tree shadows, and he thought of the day when he had been caught asleep in the broken-down motor, and brought there, a bewildered culprit, by the scandalized Jacob.

Every step was thick with memories which in the making had worn no special look of happiness, but were now steeped in it.

He remembered how ashamed and angry he had been when Jacob had shoved him into the hall among those unknown people. …

He walked away heavy with that sense of inexorable solitude which sometimes oppresses young hearts.

From all the glorious worlds he could imagine he seemed equally shut out.

…

Where did he belong then? Why, with himself! The idea came like a flash of light.

What did he want with other people’s worlds when he would create universes of his own?

What he wanted was independence, freedom, solitude—and they cost less than houses and furniture, and much less than human ties. Mrs. Tracy’s words came back to him: “Think what it would be to you to be free yourself.”

“When the Stram girl sees you she’ll do you and not me,” he had joked; and the glow of gratified vanity had flown to her cheeks. But she had gone with him, and nobody had noticed her—neither Rebecca nor any of the young men.

The merely beautiful was not in demand in Rebecca’s crowd⁠—was in fact hardly visible to them.

Or rather, they had forced beauty into a new formula, into which Laura Lou’s obvious loveliness did not fit. And when she had murmured: “Why, you don’t say …” or:

Some native clumsiness had made it impossible for him, after he came to New York, to work out a manner, an attitude, toward Halo Tarrant. Other fellows knew how; took that sort of thing in their stride; but he couldn’t.

The art of social transitions was still a mystery to him.

He remembered once hearing his grandmother (rebuked by Mrs. Weston for bad management and extravagance) say plaintively: “Why, daughter, I presume I can go without—but I can’t economize.” Vance understood that: morally and materially, he had never known how to economize.

Frenside considered again. “The trouble with you is that you’re suffering from the self-distrust produced by success.

Nothing is as disintegrating as success: one blurb on a book jacket can destroy a man’s soul more surely than the Quarterly killed Keats.

And to young fellows like you, after you’ve made your first hit, the world is all one vast blurb. Well, you’ve got to stuff cotton in your ears and go ahead. …”

Besides, you’ve got to earn your living, haven’t you? Well, that’s not a bad thing either. You don’t want to risk getting lost in the forest of dreams. It happens.

And if you once went to sleep under the deadly Tree of Alternatives you might never wake up again.

So—” He paused, relit his pipe, and blinked at Vance meditatively.

An evocation—an emanation—something you wrought with enchantments, eh? Well, now take hold of life as it lies around you; you remember Goethe: ‘Wherever you take hold of it, it’s interesting’? So it is—but only in proportion as you are. There’s the catch.

The artist has got to feed his offspring out of his own tissue.

Enrich that, day and night—perpetually. How? … Ah, my dear fellow, that’s the question! What does the tortoise stand on … ?”

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.

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. …

… 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.

Blemer was blunt but affable. “I guess we can’t read each other—anyway, you’ll never flounder through a morass like my last book—but I’m glad of the chance of a talk.

Writing’s always a mannerism; talk’s the only real thing, isn’t it?

” He spoke with a slight German accent, oiled by Jewish gutturals, and Vance, while attracted by his good-nature and simplicity, wondered for the thousandth time why American novels were so seldom written by Americans.

… had seen the last play at the Yiddish Theatre, had heard the new Stravinsky symphony, had visited the Czechoslovakian painters’ show, and were eager to discuss the Tomorrowists’ coming exhibition, at which they all knew that Vance’s bust by Rebecca Stram was to be shown.

The air was electrical, if not with ideas at least with phrases and allusions which led up to them.

To Vance the background of education and travel implied by this quick flashing back and forth of names, anecdotes, references to unseen places, unheard-of people, works of art, books, plays, was intoxicating in its manifold suggestions.

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 …

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.

“Even before, I guess.

The first time I read poetry or looked at a sunset you must have been mixed up with it.

I didn’t have to wait to see you.”

Other fellows, he felt, would have known how to break through the barrier; he had no such arts, and probably no experience of life would instruct him. There was an absoluteness in his love which benumbed him, now that his exaltation had fallen.

It had always seemed to him that on the pinnacles there was just room to kneel and be mute.

Halo Tarrant dropped her hands and looked up at him between narrowed lids. She was excessively pale; her face looked haggard, almost old. “Oh, Vance,” she murmured, “take care. …”

“

Only, what we’ve got to do is to choose⁠—take what we may, and leave the rest.

”

He made his way across to the Pennsylvania Station, and asked about trains. There was one just going out: he found himself in it as it began to move.

The haste of getting in and the mystery of gliding out so easily into darkness and the unknown reduced his private tumult to something like peace.

He recalled the same sensation, humbling yet satisfying, when he had gone out on the morning after his wedding, and felt so awed yet safe in the sight of the immensities.

He dropped down on the beach and lay there, letting the night and the sea sweep through him on the wings of the passionate gale.

He felt like a speck in those vast elemental hands, yet sure of himself and his future as a seed being swept to the cleft where it belonged.

And after a while he ceased to feel anything except that he was obscurely, infinitesimally a part of this great nocturnal splendour. …

It was not religious zeal alone which had started her on her lecturing tour. In the West, she told Vance, she had spoken without pay; but now that she understood her pecuniary obligations she was impatient to make money by her lectures.

No one was more scrupulously anxious not to be a burden on others; the difficulty was that for her, to whom no fellow creature could ever be a burden, it was an effort to remember that she might be one herself.

Vance was moved by the candour and humility of her avowal. He too knew what it felt like to be dragged down from the empyrean just as the gates of light were swinging open;

He knew it was only a postponement: he had already decided that he could not live on his grandmother’s earnings.

Everything in his life seemed a postponement nowadays: morally as well as materially he was living from hand to mouth.

But his intelligence still refused to bow to expediency; it was impossible for him to think of living on the money which Mrs. Scrimser’s own ignorance was prepared to extract from that of others.

All this Halo marked with the lucid second sight of married experience.

As long as she had continued to be fond of her husband she had seen him incompletely and confusedly; but under the X-ray of her settled indifference every muscle and articulation had become visible.

At times she was almost frightened by the accuracy with which she could calculate the movements of his mind and plot out his inevitable course of action. Because really she no longer cared to do so.

And she hoped he would feel the same longing, the same urgent necessity, and would come back to her soon for more companionship, more encouragement. … Perhaps she had not encouraged him enough, that last evening, about his work, that is.

It was well to remember that authors, even the least fatuous and the most intelligent of them, were nervous, irritable, self-conscious: the slightest unfavourable criticism flayed them alive.

In that respect certainly (she smiled) Tarrant seemed qualified to join the brotherhood. But poor Vance’s sensitiveness was of a different kind, the result of inexperience and humility. Under it she always felt an inarticulate awareness of his powers;

“

Creative writers can’t rewrite themselves. It would be mental torture if they could⁠ ⁠… and they can’t.

”

She fancied the inanimate things assisted in the search, beckoning to the light, and whispering: Here, here! in their wistful striving for reanimation.

There was no amount of psychic sensibility one could not read into the walls and furniture of an old empty house.

…

Hers was one of the undifferentiated natures which ask that all the faculties shall share in its adventures; she must love with eyes, ears, soul, imagination—must feel every sense and thought impregnated together.

And either the young men who pleased her eye chilled her imagination, or else the responsive intelligences were inadequately housed. She wanted a companion on the flaming ramparts; and New York had so far failed to find her one.

Lewis Tarrant came the nearest. He was agreeable to look at; she liked his lounging height, the sharp thinness and delicate bony structure of his face, and she was impressed by the critical aloofness of mind, which unbent only for her.

For a long time Vance had sat there, seeing neither it nor anything else, in the kind of bodily and spiritual blindness lately frequent with him; and now suddenly, in the teeming autumn sunlight, there the branch was, the centre of his vision.

It was a warped unsightly branch on a neglected tree, but so charged with life, so glittering with fruit, that it looked like a dead stick set with rubies.

The sky behind was of the densest autumnal blue, a solid fact of a sky. Against it the shrunken rusty leaves lay like gilt bronze, each fruit carved in some hard rare substance.

The quarrel with Tarrant had ended vaguely, lamely, as business disputes most often do.

Vance was beginning to understand that only intellectual differences, battles waged in the abstract for absolute ends, can have heroic conclusions.

The tearing-up of his manuscript had been the result of a passionate impulse, but it had neither bettered his situation nor made it appreciably worse. Eric Rauch told him that Tarrant would never have let him off anyhow: “it wasn’t his way.”

As the mood grew on him the blood of the earth seemed to flow in his veins, his own to burn in red maple branch and golden shreds of traveller’s joy.

It was all part of that mysteriously interwoven texture of the universe, in the thought of which a man could lie down as in his bed.

…

“Magic”—why not call the book that? The air was full of it today.

All the poetry which the American imagination rejects seemed to have taken refuge in the American landscape, like a Daphne not fleeing from Apollo but awaiting his call to resume her human loveliness.

Vance felt the dumb entreaty of that trembling beauty with arms outstretched to warmth and light from the slope of the descending year.

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.

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.