Hudson River Bracketed · Book IV · Chapter 23 (2/2)

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. In the intervals he needed time to brood on his themes, to let them round themselves within him. And he felt also increasingly, as his life widened, how small his provision of experience was. 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; he felt it most clearly when, after his imagination had seized on a subject and was preparing to plunge to its heart, he was brought up short by inexperience, by his inability to relate the thing he had fastened on to the rest of the world. Experiences, for him, were not separable entities; everything he saw, and took into himself, came with a breaking away of tendrils, a rending of filaments to which the soil of life still clung⁠—and he was familiar, as yet, with so few inches of that soil. The rest was alien territory. He never seemed able to get to the heart of his subjects.⁠ ⁠… And then, when he got out of the train at Paul’s Landing, there was Laura Lou in the winter dusk, a little pinched by the cold, but with eyes of blue fire, lips that burned on his⁠—and he wondered if he hadn’t been meant to be a poet.⁠ ⁠…

Two or three times a week he went up to the office of The Hour. Tarrant would have liked him to come every day; but that would have put an end to his writing. He had never been able to work except in solitude; and besides, the journey back and forth was a clear waste of time and money.

He soon found that even these absences preyed on Laura Lou. She did not reproach him; she simply pined when he was not there. When he got back he had to tell her everything that had happened to him, describe the people he had met, repeat everything that everyone had said or done; and in doing so he measured again her mental limits, and saw that the things which counted for him would never count for her. 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.

He had been coming and going in this way for about three weeks when one evening, on his return from town, not finding his wife below stairs, he ran up to her. She lay on the bed, asleep, in the attitude of trustful composure which had moved him on their first wedded morning. Near the bed he saw a crumpled paper on the floor. Laura Lou’s sleep was so sound that he picked up the paper and smoothed it out under the lamp without waking her. It was a letter, bearing the address of a drummer’s hotel at Seattle, and it began: “Well, in a few more days now, little sweet, I’ll be back home again, and I guess we’ll have some good times round about Christmas, if Bunty Hayes is the man I take him for. Say, honey, how long do they let you off that school for the holidays⁠ ⁠… ?”

Vance read no further. He stood motionless, looking at his wife. She had not told Bunty Hayes; Mrs. Tracy had not told him. Vance saw that both women had been afraid, and pity and wrath struggled in him, the wrath mostly for Mrs. Tracy, the pity⁠—well, yes, the pity for Bunty Hayes. The women hadn’t treated him squarely.⁠ ⁠… Vance let the letter fall where he had found it.⁠ ⁠…

The next day⁠—his last at the office before Christmas⁠—he handed in his article on Eric Rauch’s Voodoo. He wasn’t satisfied with it; he knew it wasn’t good. And he hated it because it was part of what he was expected to do for The Hour in return for the salary he had to have.

Tarrant, evidently, didn’t care for the article either; though he was prepared to do so later, Vance suspected, if good reasons were forthcoming. Vance had already learned that his chief’s opinions were always twenty-four hours late. At first he had thought it was because they matured as slowly as his own; but he had begun to suspect a different reason. Somebody, not always immediately available, did Tarrant’s thinking for him⁠—Vance wondered if it were his wife. He had not had much time to think of Mrs. Tarrant since his encounter with her on the afternoon when she had offered to read Dante with him. He had heard no more of her since; she never came to the office, and he had no time to go and see her, even had the idea occurred to him⁠—which it never did. At most, he thought enviously now and then of the rows and rows of books in the room where she had received him.⁠ ⁠…

“Of course,” Tarrant said, “there are things about it⁠ ⁠… certainly.⁠ ⁠… Only, perhaps⁠ ⁠… well, I see you’re a traditionalist at heart.⁠ ⁠…” He wavered. “Not a bad thing, perhaps⁠ ⁠… the tabula rasa’s getting to be an old story, eh? Well, I don’t deny⁠ ⁠…”

“Somebody asking for Mr. Weston,” a voice came through the door of the editorial retreat. Tarrant looked relieved at not being obliged to commit himself farther, and Vance, surprised at the summons, went back to the outer office.

Bunty Hayes stood there. He was crimson and shiny in the face, as if from cold or drink, and looked larger than life in the cramped space. He glared at Vance furiously. “That you, is it? Doing the highbrow act, eh? Call yourself a magazine editor, do you? Well, I’ll tell you what I call you.” He did so, in a rush of oaths and imprecations.

Vance received them in silence, and his silence had the effect of increasing the other’s exasperation. “Well, haven’t you got anything to say, take it all lying down, will you? Well, I’ll give you something that’ll keep you from getting up again.⁠ ⁠…” His fist, red and shiny as his face, flew out and caught Vance under the ear.⁠ ⁠… The blow was violent but unsteady⁠—Vance noticed that at once. The fellow was half drunk⁠—drunk enough to be pitiable, though not (Vance also perceived) to be undangerous. But to Vance he would have been pitiable even if he had been sober.

“You damn dirty thief, you⁠ ⁠… Steal women, do you?” Vance saw him squaring himself for another blow, and his own fighting instinct flamed up. By this time Bunty’s denunciations had summoned the slender staff of The Hour to the outer office. The typewriter girl wailed, “It’s a holdup,” but the men laughed and reassured her.⁠ ⁠… “Let ’em alone⁠—it’s their funeral,” Vance heard, as Bunty’s fist leapt out at him again. His own was raised to parry it. He was the lighter and swifter, and he was sober⁠—he had all the advantages. His arm dropped, and he drew back against the wall. “Better go home now⁠—I’ll see you wherever you want,” he said, his hands in his pockets, the welt of his first blow spreading up his cheek like fire.

“Ho, a coward too, are you? Standing there to take your licking as if you were sitting for your portrait? I’ll make a portrait of you, by God.⁠ ⁠… See me do it, boys.⁠ ⁠…”

Tarrant’s door opened and he came out. He was very pale, and his thin lips were drawn together in a narrow line of disdain.

“Weston⁠—what’s all this? I’ll thank you to do your fighting elsewhere.⁠ ⁠…”

Bunty Hayes broke into a rusty laugh. “Fighting? He won’t fight. This is a licking he’s going to get.⁠ ⁠…” Somebody echoed the laugh, and Tarrant’s cold eyes turned again to Vance. “Do you know this man?”

“Yes,” said Vance.

“Know me? God, that’s the trouble with him. And I’ve given him a chance at a stand-up fight, and he won’t take it. That so?” he challenged Vance. Vance, his hands in his pockets, repeated: “That’s so.” He saw the disdain on Tarrant’s lips turn to contempt, and his blood leapt up again. But inwardly he still knew that, even if Hayes had been completely sober, he would not have fought him.

Tarrant turned toward the intruder. “You get out of here,” he said.

“Get out of here? I’ll see you to hell first⁠—I’ll⁠ ⁠…”

Eric Rauch, who had not been in the office, came running up the stairs. He glanced about the group, bewildered, and turned to Vance. “What’s up?” he asked. Bunty shouted back: “He’s taken my girl and he won’t fight me for her,” and there was another snicker among the lookers-on. It was manifest that sympathy was veering away from Vance.

Vance felt Rauch’s luminous eyes rest curiously and not unkindly on his white face with the burning welt. Rauch smiled a little and put his hand on Hayes’s arm. “If you’ll step this way,” he said, with a faint wink at the spectators, “I’ll take you down to my private office, and you can tell me what it’s all about.” He drew Hayes across the threshold, with a quick sign to the office boy to follow. But Hayes had already collapsed⁠—the tears were running down his face, and he was putting his arm about Rauch’s neck as the door closed on them.

Tarrant turned back to his private room. His hand on the door he paused to say to Vance: “I don’t care for any explanation. But you understand, of course, that if this sort of thing happens again⁠ ⁠… I can’t have⁠ ⁠…”

“Oh, of course not,” Vance stammered, half dazed.

In a few moments Rauch came back, unconcerned, and lighting a cigarette. His eloquent eyes rested again on Vance. “You must have been reading the Russians lately,” he said with his soft incisiveness. He nodded and passed on to his desk.

Vance sat down at his, and began to write furiously. But he was merely making meaningless scratches on the paper. These people had of course realized that Hayes was half drunk, and would no doubt think he had been unwilling to fight him at a disadvantage. And on the whole, they would regard this as being to his credit. But Vance knew that the real reason was different: he had refused to fight Hayes because he had read his letter. And that was something he would never be able to explain.

On his desk lay a bundle of galleys⁠—the proofs of “Coleridge Today.” He spread them out before him and tried to set to work revising. An hour ago each word, each syllable, would have been subjected to the most searching scrutiny; but now the page danced meaninglessly before him.⁠ ⁠… Suddenly he laid down his pen. Something of dominating importance had steadied his shaking nerves. What had Eric Rauch meant when he said: “You must have been reading the Russians lately”? Who were “the Russians,” and how was it that Vance had never read or even heard of them? At the mere thought, his mind felt firm ground under it again, and Bunty Hayes and his bluster were swept away like chaff on the wind.

“I’ll find out who they are before night,” Vance resolved, and settled down again to his work.