Hudson River Bracketed · Book V · Chapter 31 (2/2)

The Eaglewood gate was unlatched, and he walked along the drive to the house. 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.⁠ ⁠…

Through the canopy of foliage one or two lights peeped from the upper panes, but the lower floor was dark, the shutters were not closed. Perhaps everybody was still out. Silence and night seemed stealing unnoticed into the empty rooms, and Vance would have liked to open one of the windows and enter too.⁠ ⁠… But as he stood on the lawn, a little way off, a light appeared in one of the drawing room windows, and he heard a few chords struck on the piano, and voices rising and falling. Without looking to see who was in the room he hurried back into the shade of the drive, and dropped the keys into the letter box by the front door. They were all strangers to him, those people⁠—he did not belong up there, in the light and music and ease, any more than he did in the dismal Tracy house below. 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.”

Out in the lane again, he continued to climb. Through pearly clouds the moon of late summer climbed with him, lighting the way capriciously, as it had been lit by Halo’s motor lamps that morning before daylight when they had mounted to Thundertop. He had been free then, the world had lain before him in all its conquerable glory. And a few months of discouragement and the unexpected sight of a fresh face had annihilated everything, and reduced him to the poor thing he now was. He walked and walked, unconscious of the way, driven by the need of being alone and far from the realities to which he must so soon come back. At length he threw himself down on a ledge from which he could catch a first twist of the moon-silvered Hudson, remote and embosomed in midnight forest.

“Think what it would be to you to be free.” That was what they were offering him⁠ ⁠… the return to that other world, the world he had looked down on from Thundertop.

He tried to clear his mind of anger and confusion and look at his case dispassionately. The Tracy case was plain enough; from the first, very likely, Mrs. Tracy had been bent on getting rid of him, on giving Laura Lou what she called her chance. But she was not a woman of initiative, and would probably have ended by resigning herself if some persistent influence had not pushed her forward. Upton’s⁠—? Vance shrugged away the thought of Upton⁠ ⁠… Hayes, of course! The blood rushed to his forehead. He could hear Bunty Hayes rehearsing the scene with Mrs. Tracy. Very likely they had cooked up the anonymous letter between them. And now they were going to turn him out like a boarder whose room was wanted⁠ ⁠… that was about the way they looked at it.⁠ ⁠… “Nothing easier⁠ ⁠… slick as a button⁠ ⁠…” Hayes would say.⁠ ⁠…

Well, why not?

He lay there, stretched out on the ledge, and looked down into the nocturnal depths. In the contemplation of that widespread beauty calmer thoughts came back, little things fell away.⁠ ⁠… What had he been able to do for Laura Lou? What had she done for him? The tie between them had so quickly become a habit, an aquiescence, nothing more. Perhaps Laura Lou had been conscious of that too, perhaps she too had chafed and longed for freedom⁠—or simply for relief from worry, for material well-being, a home of her own⁠—all that he could never give her. His eyes filled.⁠ ⁠… What was there to prevent their both trying again?

He could not find the answer to this question. He had never heard of any reason why married people shouldn’t agree to part and begin life again if they wanted to⁠ ⁠… only he could not picture its happening to himself and Laura Lou. Whenever he tried to, it was as if a million delicate tendrils, of which he was unconscious when he and she were together, tightened about his heart and held it fast to hers, in a strange bondage closer than that of love or desire. He lay and lay there, and tried to puzzle it out, but in vain. His last conclusion was: “Of course if she really wants to be free, she shall be⁠—” and for an instant his soul blazed again with the rekindled light of opportunity.⁠ ⁠… After that, worn out, he fell asleep on his ledge.⁠ ⁠…

It was broad daylight when he woke up, aching and hungry. His watch had stopped, but from the position of the sun he judged it must be after eight o’clock. His first craving was that of a ravenous boy⁠—for a cup of Mrs. Tracy’s hot coffee. What was all the fuss about, anyhow? How different things looked by daylight, with the same old sun lighting up the same old daily road of duty. There was the office, there was his wife⁠—and, oh hallelujah, there was his work! He sprang down from rock to rock, reached the road, and hurried homeward.

When he got to Mrs. Tracy’s door he ran up the steps calling out Laura Lou’s name. What nonsense it all seemed now, that ranting scene of last night! But to his astonishment the door was locked. He called again, shook the handle, banged on the panel⁠—but no one answered. He walked around to the back of the house, expecting to find his mother-in-law among the currant bushes. “Laura Lou is sound asleep still, I suppose?” he would begin jokingly. But there was no one among the vegetables either, and the door of the back porch was also locked. Vance stepped back and threw a handful of pebbles at his wife’s window, calling out to her again. Again there was no answer.

He returned to the front door, shook and rattled it without result, and finally, disheartened, sat down on the doorstep and wondered.⁠ ⁠…

All the way down the mountain conciliatory phrases, jokes, words of endearment had crowded to his lips⁠—anything to smooth the way back to the old life. And now he was confronted by this silent hostile house, which seemed to know nothing of him, but stared down from blank forbidding windows as if on an intruder.

An intruder? Was it possible that he was already that? By God, no! His smouldering wrath against Mrs. Tracy blazed up again. It was all her doing, whatever had happened. She wouldn’t rest till she had separated him from Laura Lou.⁠ ⁠… He was beginning to feel a sort of terror at the silent house and the unknown behind it. He saw the son of a neighbour walking down the lane, and stood up and hailed him. “See here⁠—I’m just home, and I guess I’m locked out. Seen my womenfolk round anywhere?” he asked facetiously.

Yes, the youth said, he had; he’d met them up the lane. They were going to see if they could get Dixon’s team to take them to the station, they told him; he guessed they were taking some baggage with them, for a stay.⁠ ⁠… He grinned and loafed on, and Vance stood and looked after him without moving. It had all been planned in advance, then; they were going to the city⁠—going straight to Bunty Hayes, no doubt! He would have secured rooms for them, where they could stay till they started for California.⁠ ⁠…

Vance walked dizzily back to the porch. It was true, then⁠—it had really happened, this thing which was still inconceivable to him. He stood there staring about him like a man waking out of sleep; and as he did so, he noticed a suitcase and two or three insecurely tied bundles in a corner of the porch. They had already packed, then; they would come back presently to pick up their belongings.

It was all as queer and telescopic as things piled up in a nightmare. Yesterday morning this house had been his home and Laura Lou’s⁠—now it was shut, empty, unrelated to them. That phase of its existence and theirs was over.⁠ ⁠… His eye lit casually on the suitcase, and he recognized it as the one which had accompanied him and Laura Lou on their honeymoon. He sat down beside it on the floor of the porch, and recalled how he had unpacked it on the beach on their wedding day and pulled out their sticky oozing wedding breakfast. And how Laura Lou had had her first taste of champagne out of a seashell! And it had been his first taste, too⁠—only he had got out of the way remembering that.⁠ ⁠…

His eyes filled, and he was overcome by the sudden boyish craving to see something belonging to her and touch it. It seemed to him now that he and she had really parted long ago; that the laughing child who had helped him to unpack the lunch from that suitcase had for months past been farther from him than there were miles between Paul’s Landing and California. He had not meant it to be so; had not been aware that it was so⁠—but now it came over him that perhaps, for Laura Lou, the knot had long since been untied, that the anonymous letter had been a pretext long waited for, perhaps provoked. At the thought, the physical sense of her stole back on him; it was clinging and potent, like the perfume of a garden in June. Vance bent over the suitcase, and hardly knowing what he did, pushed open the lock and lifted the lid. Her poor little possessions had been crammed in carelessly and in haste, and on top, flattened out and disjointed, lay the old stuffed dove from the gilt basket he had sent to her mother.

The sight caught him by the throat. He knelt for a long time, clutching the limp moth-eaten bird in both hands. He had not thought of the dove for ages⁠—but he remembered now having noticed that she had fastened it by a wire above the little looking glass on her chest of drawers. It had hung there, a little crooked, with one wing limp, ever since they had come back from their honeymoon.

He had hardly noticed it; but she had remembered, in the haste and grief of her going, to unfasten it from its perch and cram it into her bursting suitcase. “But if she feels like that, why is she going?” The thought rushed through him like a burst of warm rain in spring, softening, vivifying. He was afraid of nothing now, with the old stuffed dove in his hand! He stood up, pressing it to him, as the wheels of Dixon’s carryall halted before the gate.