Hudson River Bracketed · Book V · Chapter 24 (2/2)

“Of course, of course, but that’s the reason. If it should be suspected that I tried to influence them⁠ ⁠… and yet I do so worship what you write!” She swayed nearer, enveloping him in a golden network of smiles and shimmers, imparting in confidential murmurs commonplaces that might have been published on the housetops, telling him what a burden her money was, how much she needed sympathy, how few people she could talk to as she was talking to him, how the moment she had read the first lines of “Unclaimed” she had felt that there was someone who would understand her⁠—and how she envied his heroine for being able, even at the cost of her last penny, to be herself, to proclaim her love openly, to starve herself in order to build a monument to the man who had never known she loved him. “How you do know women!” she murmured, swaying and gazing and retreating. “How in the world did you ever guess⁠ ⁠… ? Several of my friends have told me your Tullia was my living portrait.⁠ ⁠… But I mustn’t talk of that now. Won’t you come and see me some day? Yes⁠—that would be better. I’m so alone, Mr. Weston⁠—I do so need advice and encouragement! Sometimes I wish I’d never undertaken this prize business; but wealth has its duties, hasn’t it?”

She had rambled on for a long time, yet not long enough to satisfy his curiosity, when suddenly she started back. “Oh, but I mustn’t keep you any longer.⁠ ⁠… Why, there’s Fynes over there staring at us!” she exclaimed in agitation. “He’s one of our committee, you know. And he never goes to evening parties⁠—not respectable ones, I mean. I daresay he’s come here just to look you over.⁠ ⁠…” She stood up nervously.

“Tristram Fynes? Who wrote The Corner Grocery?”

Vance interrupted with a shock of excitement.

“Yes, over there. That dreary little man by the door. You think him so wonderful?”

“It’s a big book.”

“Oh, I daresay, but the people are so dreadfully unsympathetic. I suppose you’ll call me very old-fashioned; but I don’t think our novelists ought to rob us of all hope, all belief.⁠ ⁠… But come, everybody’s waiting to talk to you. Fynes sees that, and he hates it. Oh, I do hope I haven’t spoilt your chance of the prize!” She held out her hand. “You will come to see me, won’t you? Yes⁠—at six some day. Will you come tomorrow?” she insisted, and drew him after her across the room.

Vance, in following, had his eyes on the small dreary man by the door. Of the many recent novels he had devoured very few had struck him as really important; and of these The Corner Grocery was easily first. Among dozens of paltry books pushed into notoriety it was the only one entitled to such distinction. Readers all over the country had felt its evident sincerity, and its title had become the proverbial epithet of the smalltown atmosphere. It did not fully satisfy Vance; he thought the writer left untouched most of the deeper things the theme implied; if he himself had been able to write such a book he would have written it differently. But it was fearless, honest, preternaturally alive; and these qualities, which to Vance seemed the foundation of the rest, were those he most longed to acquire. “First stand your people on their feet,” Frenside had once enjoined him; “there’ll be time enough afterward to tell us where they went.” If only Tristram Fynes should be moved to say that the people in “Unclaimed” stood on their feet!

Vance’s heart thumped furiously as Mrs. Pulsifer paused near the great man. If it should really turn out that Fynes had read “Unclaimed,” and was here because of it!

“Oh, Mr. Fynes⁠—what a surprise! I didn’t know you ever condescended⁠ ⁠… Oh, but you mustn’t say you’re going⁠—not before I’ve introduced Mr. Weston! Vance Weston; yes; who wrote ‘Unclaimed.’ He’s simply dying to talk to you about⁠ ⁠…”

Mr. Fynes’s compressed lips snapped open. “About The Corner Grocery, eh? Well, there’s a good deal to be said about it that hasn’t been said yet,” he rejoined energetically, fixing his eyes on Vance. “You’re one of the new reviewers, aren’t you? Do ‘The Coconut Tree’ in the New Hour? Yes⁠—I believe I saw something of yours the other day. Well, see here; this is no place for a serious talk, but I’d be glad if you’d come round some day and just let me tell you exactly what I want said about The Corner Grocery.⁠ ⁠… Much the best way, you know. The book’s a big book; no doubt about that. What I want people told is why it’s big.⁠ ⁠… Come round tomorrow, will you? I’m going to cut it now.⁠ ⁠…”

He vanished, and Vance stood dazed. But not for long. Others claimed his attention, people who wanted to talk to him not about themselves but about “Unclaimed.” The room was not crowded; there were probably not more than thirty guests in the library and the dining room beyond, into which they wandered in quest of sandwiches and cocktails, coming back refreshment in hand, or lingering about the dining table. But to Vance the scene was so new that he seemed to be in a dense throng; and the fact of being in it not as an observer, but as the centre of attention and curiosity, filled him with the same heady excitement as when he had tossed off his first shellful of champagne.

These easy affable people wanted to know him and talk to him because he had written “Unclaimed,” because they had even heard (some of them) of his other story, that old thing Tarrant had fished out of a back number and spoke of republishing; they wanted to know what else he had written, what he was doing now, when he was going to start in on a novel, when he would have enough short stories for a volume, whether he had thought up any new subjects lately, whether he found it easier to write in a big city or in his own quiet surroundings at home, whether Nature inspired him or he had to be with people to get a stimulus, what his best working hours were, whether he could force himself to write so many hours a day, whether he didn’t find that regular work led to routine, whether he didn’t think a real artist must always be a law unto himself (this from the two or three of the younger women), and whether he found he could dictate, or had to type out his own things.⁠ ⁠…

Vance had never before been confronted with so many exciting and stimulating questions. At first he tried to answer each in turn, going into the matter as fully as he felt it deserved, and seizing by the way on the new ideas it developed; but by the time he had said, with his slow shy drawl: “Why, I guess I haven’t got far enough yet to have worked out any regular rules, but I seem to find⁠ ⁠…” or: “Well, sometimes I feel as if I had to have a lot of new faces and sights to start me going, and then again other times⁠ ⁠…” he noticed that his questioners either lost interest, or else, obeying some rule of behaviour unknown to him, felt they ought to give way to others with other riddles to propound. The result was that he had soon run the whole gauntlet of introductions, and found himself at a little table in the dining room, voraciously consuming cocktails and foie gras, and surrounded at last by familiar faces⁠—as though he had swum through a bright tossing sea to a shore where old friends awaited him. Frenside was there, gruffly smoking and sipping, Eric Rauch, glossy and vivid in evening clothes, and Mrs. Spear, white-haired and affectionately wistful, murmuring: “How wonderful, Vance! To think the Willows should have led to this⁠ ⁠…” while Halo, flitting by, paused to introduce a new arrival, or to say, with a hand on his shoulder: “How does it feel to be It?”

Best of all was it, when everyone had gone but a few familiars, to draw up to the library fire, replenished with crackling logs, and listen to Tarrant and Rauch discussing the future of the New Hour, Frenside dropping his comments into the rifts of the talk, and Mrs. Spear saying, from the drowsy depths of her armchair: “But you simply mustn’t do what they tell you, Vance⁠—you must just drop everything and give yourself up to your novel. What’s it to be called? Loot⁠—ah, there’s a whole panorama in that! Lewis, you must really give him his head; you mustn’t tie him down to dates. Let him have all the time he wants. Remember, the Spirit bloweth where it listeth⁠ ⁠… and genius is the Spirit, isn’t it, Frenside?”

It was past one in the morning when Vance sprang to his feet in comic anguish. “Oh, say, what about my last train home?” They all laughed, and Tarrant said, glancing at his watch: “No hurry, my boy⁠—it left an hour ago, and there’s no other till six-thirty,” whereat the group about the fire vanished from Vance’s eyes, displaced by Laura Lou’s white face peering through her window into the icy darkness.⁠ ⁠… “What a place to live in, anyhow!” he thought, exasperated at being thus forced back into reality; and when the party finally broke up he accepted Eric Rauch’s invitation to go on with him to “The Loafers’ Club,” an all-night affair where they could talk and drink till the dismal hour when the first train started for Paul’s Landing. After all, it wasn’t Vance’s fault if he had to live in the wilderness, and the minute he’d cleared off that Hayes debt he was going to bring Laura Lou back to New York, where there were people a fellow could talk to, and who understood what he was trying for. It filled him with sudden despair to think that of all he had heard and said that evening not a syllable would mean anything to his wife.