Crampton, unfinished, sulky, and indifferent, continued to languish outside the circle of success. The trolley ran out there now, but few settlers had followed it. Yet Lorin Weston, who was by common consent the brightest realtor in Drake County, still believed in Crampton, and kept up the hopes of the investors he had lured there. On the strength of his belief, a row of cheap cottages was springing up along the road to Euphoria, and already the realtor’s eye saw garages and lawn mowers in the offing.
One warm spring day, Vance Weston strode along between the ruts, past squares of Swedish market-gardening and raw pastures waiting for the boom. These were the days when he liked the expectancy of Crampton better than the completeness of Euphoria — days of the sudden prairie spring, when the lilacs in his grandmother’s dooryard were bursting, and the maples by the river fringing themselves with rosy keys, when the earth throbbed with renewal and the heavy white clouds moved across the sky like flocks of teeming ewes. In a clump of trees near the road a bird began over and over its low tentative song, and in the ditches a glossy-leaved weed, nameless to Vance, spangled the mud with golden chalices. He felt a passionate desire to embrace the budding earth and everything that stirred and swelled in it. He was irritated by the fact that he did not know the name of the bird, or of the yellow flowers. “I should like to give everything its right name, and to know why that name WAS the right one,” he thought; the names of things had always seemed to him as closely and mysteriously a part of them as his skin or eyelashes of himself. What was the use of all he had been taught in college if the commonest objects on this familiar earth were so remote and inexplicable? There were botany manuals, and scientific books on the shapes and action of clouds; but what he wanted to get at was something deeper, something which must have belonged to flowers and clouds before ever man was born to dissect them. Besides, he wasn’t in the mood for books, with this spring air caressing him . . . .
A little way down a lane to his right stood the tumbledown house in which Harrison Delaney, Floss’s father, lived. Though Harrison Delaney, like Mr. Weston, was in the real estate business, his career had differed in every respect from his rival’s, and Mr. Weston had been known to say, in moments of irritation, that the fact of Delaney’s living at Crampton was enough to keep the boom back. Harrison Delaney was in fact one of the Awful Warnings which served to flavour the social insipidity of thousands of Euphorias. There wasn’t a bright businessman in the place who couldn’t put his finger on the exact causes of his failure. It had all come, they pointed out, of his never being on the spot, missing real estate transactions, missing business opportunities, deals of every sort and kind — just sort of oversleeping himself whenever there was anything special to get up for.
Almost every family in Vance Weston’s social circle could point to an Awful Warning of this type; but few were as complete, as singularly adapted for the purpose, as Harrison Delaney at fifty. You felt, the minute you set eyes on him, that nothing more would ever happen to him. He had wound his life up, as a man might wind up an unsuccessful business, and was just sitting round with the unexpectant look of a stockbroker on a country vacation, out of reach of the ticker. There — that was the very expression! Harrison Delaney always looked as if he was out of reach of the ticker. Only he wasn’t worried or fretful, as most men are in such a case — he was just indifferent. No matter what happened he was indifferent. He said he guessed his making a fuss wouldn’t alter things — it never had. So, when everybody was talking about Floss’s going with that married drummer from Chicago, who turned up at Euphoria every so often in the year, and hired a car, and went off with her on long expeditions — well, her father just acted as if he didn’t notice; and when the Baptist minister called, and dropped a hint to him, Harrison Delaney said he supposed it was Nature speaking, and he didn’t believe he was the size to interfere with Nature, and anyhow he thought maybe one of these days the drummer would get a divorce and marry Floss — which of course he never did.
It was in going out to see his grandparents that Vance had first met Floss Delaney. That was before the trolley was running. Their bicycles used to flash past each other along the rutty road, and one day he found her down in the mud, with a burst tire and a sprained ankle, and helped her home. At first it was not the girl who interested him, but her father. Vance knew all about Delaney, the byword of Euphoria; but something in the man’s easy indifferent manner, his way of saying: “Oh, come in, Weston, won’t you?” instead of hailing his visitor as “Vance,” his few words of thanks for the help rendered to his daughter, the sound of his voice, his very intonation — all differentiated him from the bright businessman he had so signally failed to be, and made Vance feel that failure also had its graces. Euphoria, he knew, felt this, however obscurely; it had to admit that he had the manners and address of a man born to make his mark. Even when he was finally down and out he was still put on committees to receive distinguished visitors. Somebody would lend him a black coat and somebody else a new hat, because there was a general though unexpressed sentiment that on such occasions he was more at ease than their most successful men, including even the president of the college and the minister of the Alsop Avenue church. But all this could not do away with the fact that he was a failure, and could serve the rising community of Euphoria only as the helots served the youth of Sparta. A fellow ought to be up on Society and Etiquette, and how to behave at a banquet, and what kind of collar to wear, and what secret societies to belong to; but the real business of life was to keep going, to get there — and “There” was where money was, always and exclusively.
These were the axioms that Vance had been brought up on; but when, after Floss’s accident, he dropped in from time to time to ask how she was, he found a strange attraction in listening to Harrison Delaney’s low, slightly drawling speech, and noticing the words he used — always good English words, rich and expressive, with hardly a concession to the local vernacular, or the passing epidemics of slang.
It was only when Floss began to get about again that she exercised her full magic. One day when Vance called he found her alone; and after that, instead of seeking out Harrison Delaney, he avoided him, and the pair met outside of the house. . . . His body and soul still glowed with the memory of it. But there was no use in thinking of that now. She’d been going with another fellow all the time . . . he KNEW it . . . and how she’d lied to him! He’d been a fool; and luckily it was all over. But he still averted his eyes from the house down the lane, where, only a few short months ago, he used to hang about after dark till she came out. On summer evenings they would go down to the maples by the river; there was a clump of bushes where you could lie hidden, breast to breast, and watch the moon and the white cloud reflections sail by, and the constellations march across the sky on their invisible bridges . . . .
The Scrimsers’ house had a Colonial porch, an open fireplace in the hall, and a view over the river. The door yard was always rather untidy; Mrs. Scrimser had planting plans, and meant some day to carry them out. But she would first have had to cut down a lot of half-dead bushes, and there never seemed to be anybody to do it, what with Grandpa’s sciatica, and the hired man’s coming so irregularly, and Grandma being engaged in tidying up everybody else’s door yard, materially and morally.
When Vance reached the porch she was sitting there in her rocking chair, her blown hair tossed back from her broad yellowish forehead, and her spectacles benevolently surveying the landscape. A lawn mower straddled the path and she called out to her grandson: “It’s the hired man’s day, but he’s gone to a big camp meeting at Swedenville, and your grandfather began to cut the grass so that we’d have everything looking nice when your father and mother come out on Sunday; but then he remembered he had an appointment at Mandel’s grocery, so I don’t see how it’ll get done.”
“Well, perhaps I’ll do it when I cool off,” said Vance, sitting down.
They all knew about Grandpa’s appointments. As soon as he was asked to put his hand to a domestic job he either felt a twinge of sciatica, or remembered that he’d promised to meet a man at Mandel’s grocery, or at the Elkington Hotel at Euphoria.
Mrs. Scrimser turned her eloquent gray eyes on her grandson. “Don’t a day like this almost make you feel as if you could get to God right through that blue up there?” she said, pointing heavenward with a big knotted hand. She had forgotten already about the abandoned lawn mower, and the need of tidying up. Whenever she saw her grandson all the groping aspirations in her unsatisfied nature woke and trembled into speech. But Vance did not care to hear about her God, who, once you stripped Him of her Biblical verbiage, was merely the Supreme Moralist of a great educational system in which Mrs. Scrimser held an important job.
“No, I don’t feel as if anything would take me near God. And I don’t exactly want to get near Him anyhow; what I want is to get way out beyond Him, out somewhere where He won’t look any bigger than a speck, and the god in ME can sort of walk all round Him.”
Mrs. Scrimser glowed responsively: all the audacities enchanted her. “Oh, I see what you mean, Vanny,” she cried. All her life she had always been persuaded that she saw what people meant; and the conviction had borne her triumphantly from one pinnacle of credulity to another. But her grandson smiled away her enthusiasm. “No, you don’t; you don’t see MY god at all; I mean, the god in me.”
His grandmother flushed up in her disappointment. “Why don’t I, Vanny? I know all about the Immanence of God,” she objected, almost resentfully.
Vance shook his head. It wasn’t much fun arguing with his grandmother about God, but it was better than hearing eternally about new electric cleaners from his mother, or about real estate from Mr. Weston, or the reorganization of school grades from his sister Pearl. Vance respected efficiency, and even admired it; but of late he had come to feel that as a diet for the soul it was deficient in nourishment. He wondered that Mrs. Weston, who was such an authority on diet, had never thought of applying the moral equivalent of the vitamin test to the life they all led at Mapledale. He had an idea they were starving to death there without knowing it. But old Mrs. Scrimser at least knew that she was hungry, and his mind wandered back more indulgently to what she was saying.
“The trouble is,” he began, groping about in his limited vocabulary, “I don’t seem to want anybody else’s God. I just want to give mine full swing.” And at this point he forgot his grandmother’s presence, and his previous experience of her incomprehension, and began to develop his own dream for his own ears. “And I don’t even want to know what HE is — not by reasoning him out, I mean. People didn’t have to wait to learn about oxygen, and the way the lungs work, before they began to breathe, did they? And that’s the way I feel about what I call MY god — the sort of something in me that was there before I’d ever thought about it, and that stretches out and out, and takes in the stars and the ages, and very likely doesn’t itself know why or how. What I want is to find out how to release that god, fly him up like a kite into the Infinite, way beyond creeds and formulas, and try to relate him to all the other . . . the other currents . . . that seem to be circling round you, a day like this . . . so that you get caught up in them yourself . . . and carried beyond Time and Space, and Good and Bad, to where the whole blamed thing is boiling over . . . Oh, hell take it, I don’t know!” he groaned, and flung his head back despairingly.
Mrs. Scrimser listened, beaming, benedictory, her arms extended. “Oh Vanny, when you talk like that I do feel your call so clearly! You surely have inherited your grandfather’s gift for speaking. You could fill the Alsop Avenue church clear away under the gallery, right now. ‘The boy preacher’ — they can often reach right down into the soul where the older men can’t get a hearing. Don’t you think, dear, such a gift ought to make you decide to go straight to Jesus?” She lifted her clasped hands with a “Nunc dimittis” gesture full of devotional sublimity. “If I could only hear you in the pulpit once I’d lay me down so peacefully,” she murmured.
Vance’s dream dropped with a crash to the floor of the porch, and lay there between them in rainbow splinters. The Alsop Avenue church! The pulpit! The ministry! This familiar way of talking about “Jesus” as if He were somebody waiting round the corner at Mandel’s grocery for a telephone call — and this woman, who had listened for forty years to her husband’s windy eloquence and sanctimonious perfidies, and who was still full of faith in the power of words and the magic attributes of Biblical phraseology! It almost made Vance hate the Bible to hear her, though its haunting words and cadences were the richest of his mental possessions. . . . But why had he again let himself go, trying to carry her up with him to the dizzy heights of speculation, as if some tiny winged insect should struggle to lift the lawn mower down there in the path? Vance looked sulkily away at the straggling unkempt distances from which she had managed to brush all the magic, so that where he had seen flowers and heard birds he now beheld only a starved horizon imprisoned behind crooked telegraph poles, and partly blotted out by Mandel’s grocery.
“Vance — I haven’t said anything to offend you?” his grandmother questioned, laying her big hand on his.
He shook his head. “No. Only you don’t understand.”
She took off her moist spectacles and wiped them. “Well, I guess God created women so’s to give the men somebody to say that to,” she remarked, with a philosophic smile.
Her grandson smiled also. He never failed to appreciate her humour; but today he was still quivering from his vain effort at expression, and her misunderstanding of it; and he had nothing more to say.
“Well, I guess I’ll go along,” he said, getting up.
Mrs. Scrimser never argued with her own family, and she walked with him in silence down the path and halted at the barricade of the mowing-machine. From there they could look across a few vacant lots and, dodging Mandel’s grocery, bathe their eyes in the liquid gold of the sunset beyond the river.
“I used to think heaven was down THERE— on summer nights!” the boy broke out, pointing toward the budding maples by the river. In his own ears his words sounded sardonic, incredibly old and embittered; but the mention of heaven could evoke no such sensations in his grandmother’s soul.
“I guess heaven is wherever we love Nature and our fellow beings enough,” she said, laying her arm about his shoulder. It occurred to neither of them to remove the mower from the path, and they parted there, casually but fondly, as the habit was in Euphoria households, Vance bestriding the machine while his grandmother, arrested by it, stood gazing after him. “Only remember that, Vanny — that Love is everywhere!” she called after him. Large and full of benediction she stood between the lilac bushes and waved farewell.
Vance walked on in a fog of formless yearnings. His own words had loosened them, as the spring air and the yellow blossoms in the ditch had loosened his words. Twilight fell and the old spell of Crampton fell with it. He passed by the lane that led to Harrison Delaney’s, but when he came to the field path descending to the river he paused, caught back into his early dream. Everything which had bound him to that scene was over and done with — he had served his sentimental apprenticeship and paid the price. But it was hard, at nineteen, and on a spring evening, to know this, and to feel himself forever excluded from the fellowship of the young and the happy. He supposed other fellows had been through it and survived — in books they told you so. But this evening his soul was like a desert.
He’d never looked at a girl since Floss — never meant to. Taken it out in writing poetry instead. Sometimes, for a few moments, doing that almost replaced her caresses, seemed to bring her as close as if words were warm and palpable like flesh. Then that illusion passed, and he was out again in the desert. . . . Once in a while, by way of experiment, he would give himself a kind of mental pinch where the ache had been, just to be sure he felt nothing — literally nothing. But when the trees by the river budded, and the buds were black against a yellow sky, the ache would spring back and catch him in the heart as you see lumbago suddenly catch a man between the shoulders. For a long time he stood gazing across the field and remembering how he used to go and hide down by the river, and spy out through the bushes for Floss. Or, oftener, she’d be there first, and her strong young arms would pull him down to her. . . . There was no danger now in remembering these things. She had left Euphoria; he had heard she had a job in a department store at Dakin, on the other side of Chicago. He suspected his father of having managed that. . . . The scene of their brief passion was deserted, and for him it would always remain so. That was life, he supposed. His bitterness gradually passed; he remembered her kisses and forgave her. Leaning on the fence, he pulled out a cigarette and thought big manly thoughts about her, and about Woman in general.
“Well,” he interrupted himself suddenly, “I don’t suppose you expected to be the only fellow to meet a girl down under those bushes, did you, Vance Weston?” The remark was provoked by the sight of a man sauntering across lots to the edge of the maple grove. Even at that distance he had the air of someone who would as soon not be seen, but is doing all he can not to betray the fact. The sight instantly altered Vance’s mood, and he continued to lean on the fence, puffing ironically at his cigarette and whistling a vaudeville tune. The light was growing faint, the man was almost too far away to be recognized; but as he approached, Vance saw a tall spare figure moving with the jauntiness of an elderly man trying to look young who is jerked back at every step by his stiff joints. The gait was familiar; so, as the figure drew still nearer, was the frock coat flung open from a crumpled waistcoat, and the sombrero brim of the felt hat. Presently he lifted the hat and wiped his forehead; and the last slant of sunset lit up his swarthy face, the dominant nose and weak handsome mouth, and the white-and-black mane tossed back from his forehead. Vance, amused and vaguely curious, stood staring at the apparition of his grandfather.
You never could tell about Grandpa — they all knew it in the family, and put up with the fact as you put up with the weather. Still, to come on him here, slinking along on the edge of the grove, and mopping his forehead as if he had been running to catch the trolley; well, it was funny. Something at once dashing and furtive about his air made Vance remember an occasion when, as a small boy, he had gone Christmas shopping with his mother, and they had run into Grandpa, mopping his forehead in the same way, and hurrying toward them round the corner of a certain street that Vance and his schoolmates were always forbidden to play in. The little boy had instantly guessed that something was wrong when his mother, instead of exclaiming: “Why, there’s Grandpa!” had abruptly remembered that, good gracious, she’d never ordered the yeast from Sproul’s Bakery, and had jerked Vance back there without seeming to notice Mr. Scrimser. Such subterfuges are signposts on the road to enlightenment.
Vance continued to smile sardonically at the remembrance of this episode, and the thought of how far behind him his guileless infancy lay. For a moment he felt inclined to hail his grandfather; then something about the old man’s air and movements made him decide to turn away. “Guess it’s about time to step round to Sproul’s for the yeast,” he chuckled to himself; but as he averted his glance it was arrested by the approach of another figure. The light was failing fast and Vance was a good hundred yards from the river; but in the thickest dusk, and at a greater distance, he would have known the quick movements, the light outline, of the girl slipping through the trees toward Mr. Scrimser. . . . “But she isn’t here . . . she isn’t here . . . I know she isn’t!” stormed through the boy in a rush of useless denial. He stood rooted to the earth while everything she had ever been to him, every look and intonation, every scent and breath and touch that had bound him to her, and made them one, flooded over him in fiery remembrance. He had never been able to imagine what excruciating physical pain was like, the kind you felt when you were smashed under a train, or torn by a whirling engine in a factory — but he knew, he found out in the glare of that blinding instant, that when the soul is smitten deeply enough it seems to become one with the body, to share all the body’s capacity for suffering a distinct and different anguish in each nerve and muscle. He saw — or thought he saw — the two figures come together in the dimness, just where, so often, he had caught Floss Delaney to his first embrace; then he stumbled away, unseeing. A trolley swung along, making for the lights of Euphoria. He hailed it and got on board.