Hudson River Bracketed · Book V · Chapter 29 (2/2)

To justify her appearance at Eaglewood on the day when she was supposed to be sailing with her husband, Halo told her parents that at the last minute she had decided he would do his job better without her. Dragging a wife about on such a hurried expedition⁠—what a nuisance! Of course he couldn’t tell her so; but his beautifully simulated distress, when she had announced her decision, had shown her how relieved he felt. “You know how he is: never so polite as when he wishes you were dead and buried,” she reminded her father and mother; and smilingly watched their incredulity melt into reassurance. It was easy now to reassure the Spears! Since their own wants were provided for they had grown less exacting for others. With a comforting word or two you could put Mr. Spear’s mind to rest about the treatment of live bait, or Mrs. Spear’s about the future of democracy. And so with the case of their daughter. Mrs. Spear, who still needed to be told at intervals that all was right with the world, instantly seized on the idea that Halo had given up sailing because she had “hopes” again⁠—at last!⁠—had perhaps been advised by the doctor⁠ ⁠… though the poor child, after her previous disappointments, was naturally reticent. And Mr. Spear smoked his good cigars, and said, well, no doubt his daughter knew her business better than they did, and he rather admired the way the modern young people had of respecting each other’s independence. Halo knew that her parents were enchanted to have her to themselves; Tarrant rather intimidated them, and it was easier to praise him behind his back than to humour him to his face. The easy happy-go-lucky quarrelsome atmosphere of Eaglewood was always chilled by his presence; and there were so many of their friends whom he regarded as bores or cranks, and whom they couldn’t invite when he was there.⁠ ⁠…

Halo did not care what her parents thought of her sham reasons, as long as they feigned to accept them; she was too busy examining the real ones. She knew that she had at last emerged into the bald light of day from the mist of illusion she had tried to create about her marriage. That talk with Lewis had been a turning point: the inevitable stocktaking. Never again would she see him save as he was; but she would also, as inevitably, see herself as chained to him for life.

The fact that he had reminded her of her obligation would make it perpetually present to her. The new carpets at Eaglewood, the Spear flat in New York, Mrs. Spear’s black velvet, Mr. Spear’s cigars, the funds for Lorry’s theatrical enterprise⁠—these were the links of her chain. They held her as tight as if divorce had never existed. 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.⁠ ⁠…

The idea frightened her, and as soon as he was safely at sea she began to think how to conciliate him. Everything seemed easy when he was not there. His cold unreasonableness always silenced her at the moment, and then stung her to resistance; but she could make her submission in writing because, escape being impossible, common sense warned her to make the best of her fate. And something higher than common sense whispered that, after all, she was only paying her dues.⁠ ⁠…

She sent him, by the next steamer, a simple friendly letter, telling him that she knew she’d been stupid, but she’d been feeling dreadfully nervous and overtired, and he must forgive her, and not think of their disagreement. It was really providential, she added, that she hadn’t gone with him, because the doctor found she was rather rundown and anaemic, and badly in need of a rest, and she would just have been a drag on him, and unable to keep up the pace. But to show she was forgiven he must send her long cable letters with all his news and the review’s.⁠ ⁠…

She had written that her not going with him had been providential; but how true it was she did not dream till she heard those first chapters of Vance Weston’s.

Under his touch the familiar setting of the Willows became steeped in poetry. It was his embodiment of the Past: that strange and overwhelming element had entered into his imagination in the guise of these funny turrets and balconies, turgid upholsteries and dangling crystals. Suddenly lifted out of a boundless contiguity of Euphorias, his mind struck root deep down in accumulated layers of experience, in centuries of struggle, passion, and aspiration⁠—so that this absurd house, the joke of Halo’s childhood, was to him the very emblem of man’s long effort, was Chartres, the Parthenon, the Pyramids.

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. And the fact that she could help him in his magical evocation, provide him with countless necessary details about these people who were so near yet so remote, so trivial yet so significant, could tell him how they spoke and felt and lived and died, made her feel of use again in the world.

Every day at the same hour she came back to the Willows to meet him, so that there should be no break in his inspiration. Ah, now, indeed, the New Hour was to have its masterpiece!