Hudson River Bracketed · Book IV · Chapter 21 (2/2)

He grimaced at the thought, and then, lighting the candle, so that the place might look as cheerful as possible, went out and walked across a stubbly field to the farm. The farmer’s wife, a big good-natured Swedish woman, received him with friendly curiosity. She’d known one or two young fellows to come down as late as December, she said, but she’d never had a honeymoon before. The idea amused her, and she started at once warming up a can of tomato soup, and offered Vance a saucepan to heat the milk for breakfast. While she warmed the soup he sat in the window of the kitchen and looked out to the sea. What a place to live in always⁠—solitude and beauty, and that great unresting Presence calling out night and day with many voices! (“Many voices”⁠—where’d he read that?) There, the woman said; she guessed the soup was good and hot; maybe he’d like some crackers with it? Oh, he could settle when he went away⁠—that was all right. She even rummaged out a tin of prepared coffee, left there with some of the camp stores; he could have that too, and a couple of towels. Soap was more difficult to come by, but she decided that they could have her youngest boy’s, as he was off clamdigging for a week, and no great hand at washing anyhow. Carrying the pot of hot soup carefully, his other supplies in his pockets, Vance walked back through the twilight.⁠ ⁠…

Outside of the door he said softly: “Lou!” There was no answer, and he lifted the latch and went in. The room was dark, except for the cloudy glow through the stove-door and the unsteady candle flicker; at first he had a sense of entering on emptiness. Then he saw that Laura Lou was lying as he had left her, except that she had flung one bare arm above her head. Shading the candle he went up to the bed. Her little face, flushed with the sea wind, and tumbled over with rumpled straw-coloured hair, lay sideways in the bend of her arm. She was sound asleep, the hummingbird lashes resting darkly on her clear cheek with the hollow under it, and her breath coming as softly as if she were in her own bed at home. 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. 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. “Oh, Vance⁠ ⁠… I was dreaming about you,” she said, with a little sleep-fringed smile.

About dawn he woke and got up from her side. He moved with infinite caution lest he should disturb her, drawing on his clothes and socks, and picking up his shoes to put them on outside in the porch. From the threshold he looked back. In the pale winter light she lay like a little marble image; the serenity of her attitude seemed to put the whole weight of the adventure on his shoulders, and again he thought: “Why did I do it? What can come of it?” and stood dazed before the locked mystery of his own mind. In those short hours of passion the little girl who had seemed so familiar to him had suddenly become mysterious too; closest part of himself henceforth, yet utterly remote and inexplicable; a woman with a sealed soul, but with a body that clung to his.⁠ ⁠… The misgiving which had passed in a flash the night before now fastened on him with a cold tenacity. “What do I know about her? What does she know about me?” he questioned in a terror of self-scrutiny. He looked at her again, and the startled thought: “What if she were lying there dead?” flashed through his mind. How could such a horrible idea have come to him? In an instant his wild imagination had seized on it, and he saw himself maimed, desolate, crushed⁠—but free. Free to open that door and go out, straight back to his life of two days before, without the awful burden of responsibility he had madly shouldered.⁠ ⁠… The vision lasted but the flicker of a lid, but like lightning at night in an unknown landscape it lit up whole tracts of himself that he had never seen. The horror was so strong that he half turned back to wake her up and dispel it. The faint stir of her breast under her thin nightdress reassured him, and he unlatched the door and went out.⁠ ⁠… Instantly the horror vanished, and as he saw before him the great motionless curves of sea and sky, and thought that all the while they had been there, hushed and secret, encircling his microscopic adventure, a sense of unifying power took possession of him, as it used to in his boyhood. “And all the time there was that!” he thought.

He pulled on his shoes and raced down to the sea. The air was still mild, and he stood by the fringe of little waves and looked eastward at the bar of light reddening across the waters. 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. Whatever happened, however hard and rough the road ahead, he would carry her on his heart like the little cup of his great communion.⁠ ⁠…