Hudson River Bracketed · Book VI · Chapter 37 (1/2)

XXXVII

Vance stood in the street and looked up into the night sky. The star-strewn darkness, though blotched with the city’s profaning flare, recalled that other sky he had looked up at from the beach, when he had crept out at dawn from his wife’s side.

The sea⁠—he had never seen it since! Could he get to it now? he wondered. Its infinite tides seemed to be breaking over him; its sound was in his breast. The craving to stand on that beach swept over him again, vehement, uncontrollable, surging up from the depths which held the source of things. He stood staring at his vision till it mastered him. He must see the sea again, must see it this very night. One in the morning⁠ ⁠… a March morning. But he must get there somehow; get there before dawn, waylay the miracle.⁠ ⁠…

He made his way across to the Pennsylvania Station, and asked about trains. There was one just going out: he found himself in it as it began to move. The haste of getting in and the mystery of gliding out so easily into darkness and the unknown reduced his private tumult to something like peace. He recalled the same sensation, humbling yet satisfying, when he had gone out on the morning after his wedding, and felt so awed yet safe in the sight of the immensities.⁠ ⁠… The train passed on between islands of masonry and endless streets strung with lights, then through the hush of dimly glimpsed trees and pastures; it stopped at sleepy stations, pulled out again, groped on in dreamlike confusion under a black sky full of stars. At last a little station stood out dark against pallid sandhills⁠ ⁠… and Vance, alone on the platform, watched the train clank on again uncertainly, as if groping out a new trail for itself. Then he turned and began to grope for his own way. A worn-off slip of moon hung in the west, powerless against the immensity of darkness; but when he reached the last line of dunes they were edged with a trembling of light which gradually widened out into the vast pallor of the Atlantic.

There it was at last: the sea at night, a windy March night tossing black cloud trails across the stars and shaking down their rainy glitter onto the hurried undulations of the waves. The wind was cold, but Vance did not feel it. The old affinity woke in him, the sense of some deep complementary power moving those endless surges as it swayed his listening self. He dropped down on the beach and lay there, letting the night and the sea sweep through him on the wings of the passionate gale. He felt like a speck in those vast elemental hands, yet sure of himself and his future as a seed being swept to the cleft where it belonged. And after a while he ceased to feel anything except that he was obscurely, infinitesimally a part of this great nocturnal splendour.⁠ ⁠…

At five in the morning, through dying lights and dead streets, he made his way back to Mrs. Hubbard’s. All the glory had vanished; his brain was sick with the forced inrush of reality. A last glimpse of the impossible swept through him. Halo had said: “Because I will never leave my husband for my lover⁠ ⁠…” and that meant⁠—what else could it mean?⁠—that she would have come to him if there had been no obstacle between them. For one moment it seemed almost enough to feel that there, out of his sight but in his soul, the great reaches of her love lay tossing and silvering.⁠ ⁠… But as he drew near his own door the ugliness of the present blotted out the vision. At the corner of Sixth Avenue a half-tipsy girl solicited him. At Mrs. Hubbard’s door, a gaunt cat shot out of the area. That was his world, his street, his house.⁠ ⁠… He knew now that he and she would never be free, either of them. She would never come to him; it was all a fading blur of unreality.⁠ ⁠… He put his key into the lock, and went upstairs with the feet of an old man.

The next day Laura Lou was in bed with one of her feverish colds. She had caught a chill the day of the “Storecraft” show, in her thin summer coat. These colds were frequent with her now, and each seemed to leave her a little weaker. Vance did not dare to send for the doctor again; he had been several times lately, and there had been no money to pay him. Vance did what he could to make her comfortable, and explained to Mrs. Hubbard⁠—whose manner, as the weeks passed, though still oppressively ladylike, had grown more distant⁠—the food must be carried up, milk heated, the cough mixture measured out. Then, having put a quarter into the hand of the dishevelled Swedish servant girl, who seldom understood his instructions and never carried them out, he took his way to the office.

There had been no word from Lambart & Co., the publishers who had been so confident about detaching him from Dreck and Saltzer; probably the subject of his novel had made them lukewarm. In his letter box he found a letter from his grandmother; there was no time to read it then, but the sight of her writing brought up a vision of Euphoria, of the comfortable Maplewood Avenue house, the safety and decency of home. What if he were to accept his father’s suggestion and take Laura Lou out there to live? If he took on a newspaper job, and wrote no novels or literary articles, he supposed his contracts with Dreck and Saltzer and the New Hour would lapse of themselves. He would simply go back to being the old Vance Weston again, and it would be as if the New York one had never existed.⁠ ⁠…

At the office he found neither Tarrant nor Eric Rauch. He had brought his work with him, and installed himself at his desk with the idea of going over his last chapters, and at least trying to eliminate the resemblances to The Corner Grocery. But the sight of the pages suddenly evoked the library where he had sat the night before with Halo Tarrant, and the floor on which he and she had knelt together to pick up the scattered sheets. The paper burned with her touch. He shut his eyes and pushed it aside.⁠ ⁠… Euphoria was the only way out.⁠ ⁠…

He opened his grandmother’s letter. She always wrote affectionately, and the careless freedom of her phrases would call her up to him in the flesh, with her velvety voice and heavy rambling body. The livest person he’d ever known, he thought, smiling. Then he read: “Vance, child, I’m coming to New York⁠—be there next week with Saidie Toler⁠ ⁠…” (she always wrote of her daughters by their full names)⁠ ⁠… “I guess you’re not as surprised as I am; and I feel as if God Himself must be a little mite surprised too⁠ ⁠…” She went on to explain that, since Grandpa’s death, she had been able to give more time to spiritual things, and had been rewarded by the invitation to preach in various churches, not only at Euphoria, New Swedenborg, and Swedenville, but way beyond Chicago, at big places like Dakin and Lakeshore⁠—only she didn’t call it preaching (he could be sure of that!) but “Meeting God”; didn’t he think that was a good phrase? Her “Meeting God” talks had been published in Spirit Life, and the paper’s circulation had gone up so much that they’d already contracted with her for another series; and suddenly she’d got an invitation from a group of intellectual people in New York, who called themselves “The Seekers”⁠—a beautiful name, wasn’t it? It appeared they’d come across some of her talk in Spirit Life, and been so much struck that they wanted her to come over to New York for a week, and speak in private houses, and give the “Seekers” a chance to submit their personal doubts and difficulties to her. (“You know,” she added, dropping into her old humorous tone, “it’s holiday work telling other folks what’s wrong with them.”) Of course, she said, she couldn’t help but see God’s hand in all this, and when Spirit Life offered to pay her fare and Saidie’s out and back she telegraphed to the “Seekers” that she’d come at once⁠—and Vance needn’t trouble about her, because she and Saidie were going to stay with a Mrs. Lotus Mennenkoop, a lovely woman who lived at Bronxville and was one of the “Seekers”⁠—but of course she must see her boy as soon as she arrived, and get acquainted with her new granddaughter; and would Vance be sure and call her up right off at Mrs. Mennenkoop’s?

Vance stared at the big wavering script, so like his grandmother’s ungirt frame. For the “Seekers” he cared not a fig; but the springs of boyhood welled up in him at the prospect of seeing Mrs. Scrimser. She was the only human being he had really loved in the days when his universe was enclosed in the few miles between Euphoria and Crampton; the others, parents, sisters even, were just the more or less comfortable furniture of life; but his grandmother’s soul and his had touched.⁠ ⁠… He thought himself back onto the porch at Crampton, smelt the neglected lilacs, heard the jangle of the Euphoria trolley, and his grandmother saying: “Don’t a day like this make you feel as if you could get to God right through that blue up there?” He remembered having answered, rather petulantly, that he didn’t feel as if anything would take him near God; but now he was at least nearer to understanding what she had meant. Perhaps what she called “God” was the same as what he called “The Mothers”⁠—that mysterious Sea of Being of which the dark reaches swayed and rumoured in his soul⁠ ⁠… perhaps one symbol was as good as another to figure the imperceptible point where the fleeting human consciousness touches Infinity.⁠ ⁠…

Curious, that this should happen just as he was facing the idea of going back to Euphoria. His grandmother’s letter, the prospect of seeing her in a few days, made the return home appear easier and more natural. As soon as she and Laura Lou had met he would decide.⁠ ⁠… He was sure those two would take a liking to each other.

Mrs. Scrimser bade him call her up at six on the day when she was to arrive, and he hoped to persuade her to come down that very morning to see Laura Lou, who was still too feverish to leave her bed. Laura Lou was excited and happy at the prospect of the visit; he saw from her eagerness how much she had felt the enforced solitude of her life in New York. “I guess maybe she’ll go round with me a little when I’m better,” she said with her drawn smile.

“Why, I’d go round with you myself if you wanted me to,” Vance rejoined, with conscious hypocrisy; but she said evasively: “Why, how can you, with all your work?”

The day came, and Vance was waiting at the office to call up Mrs. Mennenkoop’s flat when he was told that Mrs. Spear was on the telephone. It was some time since he had seen Mrs. Spear, and he wondered, somewhat nervously, if she could be the bearer of a message from her daughter. The blood began to buzz in his ears, and he could hardly catch the words which tumbled out excitedly from the receiver. But presently, to his surprise, he heard his grandmother’s name. “Only think, Vance, of my not knowing that Mrs. Scrimser⁠—the great Mrs. Scrimser⁠—was your grandmother! She’s just told me so herself, over the telephone.⁠ ⁠… Why, yes⁠—didn’t you know? She’s coming to speak in our drawing room this very evening.⁠ ⁠… Of course you knew I was one of the ‘Seekers’? No⁠—you didn’t?” Mrs. Spear was always genuinely surprised when she found that anything concerning herself or her family had not been trumpeted about by rumour. “Why, yes⁠—it’s my life, Vance, my only real life⁠ ⁠… so marvellous⁠ ⁠… and now I’m to have the privilege of having this wonderful being under my roof.⁠ ⁠… You must be with us, of course; you and Laura Lou.⁠ ⁠… Your grandmother wanted me to tell you not to go out to Bronxville: she’d rather meet you here. Her train was late; there’s barely time for her to take a rest and withdraw into herself⁠—you know they always do, before a meeting.⁠ ⁠… So she wants you to come here early instead. She says she’s sure you’ll understand.⁠ ⁠…”

The announcement filled Vance with astonishment. He had had glimpses of some of Mrs. Spear’s hobbies and enthusiasms, and had heard others humorously reported by Halo⁠—but the idea of any connection between the Spear milieu and his grandmother was so unexpected that he began to wonder if, all unconsciously, he had spent his youth with an illustrious woman. Mrs. Spear was in touch with the newest that New York was thinking and saying; Frenside’s decomposing irony was her daily fare; clever and cultivated people of all kinds frequented her house; she was always on the track of the new movements. Did the “Seekers” then represent a movement important enough to attract those whose lead she followed? And was his grandmother actually the prophetess of a new faith? He recalled the religion he had himself “invented” in his boyhood⁠—the creed whose originality had crumbled away with his first glimpse of the old philosophies⁠—and wondered if his grandmother had stumbled on the revelation he had missed. It was all so confounding that he hardly found voice to stammer out his thanks, and his excuses for Laura Lou.⁠ ⁠… And the Tarrants, he wondered⁠—would they be there? And what did Halo think of the “Seekers”? Above all, what would she think of Mrs. Scrimser?

He had not wished to see Halo again⁠—not for some time, not till the storm in him should subside. Had she been right when she had warned him the other night not to “spoil something perfect”? In his unsatisfied anguish, he had half believed her; but in the interval he had come to know that this anguish was worth all the rest. Friendship⁠—love? How vain such restricting words now seemed! In reality, his feeling for her included friendship, passion, love, desire, whatever thought or emotion, craving of sight and touch, a woman can excite in a man. All were merged in a rich deep communion; it was the element in which everything else in him lived. “All thoughts, all motions, all delights, Whatever stirs this mortal frame⁠—” the poet whom Elinor Lorburn loved had summed it up long ago.⁠ ⁠…

When he got to Mrs. Spear’s the maid showed him into a little study. The room was so small that it made his grandmother, who was waiting there, seem immense, like a great spreading idol. But she managed to get to her feet; her arms engulfed him; he sank into her warmth as into a tepid sea. If he’d been a child he would have burst out crying, she smelt so like home and the Mapledale Avenue soap!

“Oh, Vanny, Vanny⁠—my little Vance⁠ ⁠… this is God’s Hand,” she said, and hugged him.

He thought, with a quick recoil: “She wouldn’t have dragged God in that way, in old times⁠—” and suddenly heard an emotional murmur at his back, and became aware that his grandmother, as she clasped him, had seen Mrs. Spear enter the room.

Vance’s recoil was only momentary; yet the impression left a faint smirch on the freshness of Mrs. Scrimser’s spontaneity. She had become a prophetess now, conscious of her audience.

“Dear Mrs. Scrimser, you’ll forgive me? I felt I must see the meeting between you two!” Mrs. Spear sighed out with eloquent eyes and a hand affectionately extended to Vance.

But already there were sounds of arrival in the hall; the sense of the little apartment becoming more and more packed with people; the door of the study opening to admit Saidie Toler, straight and colourless as usual, and accompanied by a large battered blonde, Mrs. Lotus Mennenkoop, who declared emotionally that she must see Vance before the speaker took her place on the platform.⁠ ⁠…