The summer darkness rustled with the approach of dawn. At the foot of the lane below the Tracys’ Vance Weston felt the stir as if it were one with the noise in his own temples: a web of sounds too tenuous to be defined or isolated, but something so different from the uniform silence which had enveloped the world an hour earlier that every blade of grass and feather of bird now seemed sighing and ruffling in the darkness.
Vance had crept unheard out of the sleeping house, and now, in the obscurity of the lane, sat on a stone under a twisted thorn tree and listened for the splutter of the Eaglewood motor. Miss Spear might forget him again, as she had forgotten him (how he liked her for owning it!) the day before; or the car, which she had said was going on one leg, might fall dead lame, and leave her stranded before she could get down the mountain. But he did not really believe that either of these things would happen. There are days which give you, in the very moment of waking, the assurance that they were born for you, are yours to do as you please with; this was one of them for Vance.
He had been, not offended, but hurt and a little bewildered, at Miss Spear’s failure to come to the Willows the previous afternoon, after sending him word that if he met her there she would let him spend a long afternoon with the books. She had taken the trouble to ask for Upton at the nursery, where she had called to pick up a basket of plants for her mother, and had instructed him to tell his cousin Vance to be at the Willows punctually at three, and to let her know in case he could not come. It was the tenth day after Vance’s arrival, and that very morning he had made up his mind to go to New York. He was going alone, for Upton could only get away on Sundays; moreover, Vance knew by this time that as a guide his cousin would be of little use. All that Upton seemed to know of the metropolis was where the wholesale seedmen and nurserymen had their offices; as a means of introducing Vance to the world of journalism Laura Lou would have been about as helpful. Vance therefore meant to go alone, not with any hope of arriving within speaking distance of an editor, but to slake his curiosity with a sight of the outside of some of the big newspaper offices, and get an impression of the general aspect of the city. He had waited for over a week, partly because of the oppressive heat (his mother was right, it was worse than Chicago) and his own lingering physical weakness, but chiefly because his afternoon in the library at the Willows, and the brief apparition there of the girl who might have been old Miss Lorburn’s reincarnation, had thrown him into a sort of prolonged daydream, which was broken only by intervals of frenzied composition.
When the summons came from Miss Spear to meet Miss Spear again at the Willows he threw New York to the winds, and lived through the next twenty-four hours in a tremor of expectation. Long before three he was unlocking the gate of the deserted place and pushing his bicycle through the grass and clover of the drive. The day was cooler — it would have been a good day for New York — and the green air under the willows trembled with a delicious freshness. Vance sat down on the doorstep. From where he sat he could get a glimpse of the gate through the shimmering branches, and watch the shadows of the trees wheel slowly across the lawn. The air was rich with the smell of syringas, that smell which is so like the sound of bees on a thundery day. Vance leaned his head back against a pillar of the porch and waited . . . .
He had been sincere in saying to Miss Spear that while he waited he had not been impatient or angry. He had always had a habit of rumination unusual at his age, and everything in this new life was so strange, so unreal, that even in its disappointments and denials he found food for his imagination. The spell of Miss Lorburn’s house was stronger now than on his first visit, because in the interval he had lived among people, plain unimaginative people, who nevertheless took old houses for granted, took age and permanence for granted, seemed in fact to live with one foot in the grave of the past, like the people pushing back their tombstones in a queer stiff sculpture of the Last Judgment that he had seen reproduced in some illustrated travel paper. The fact that the Tracys, who never thought of anything but the present, were yet so tacitly imbued with the past, so acquiescent in its power and its fatality, that they attached such a ritual significance to phrases like “a very long time ago,” and “it’s always been so,” and “nothing will be changed as long as any of the family are alive,” had completely altered Vance’s perspective, transforming his world from the staring flatness of a movie “close-up” to a many-vistaed universe reaching away on all sides from this empty and silent house. Even the thought of the books inside the house, so close yet inaccessible, did not long tantalize him. It was enough to sit there waiting, listening for the noise of the motor, and in the intervals straining his ear to catch the secret coming and going of the Past behind the barred threshold.
It was only when dusk fell that he roused himself to the fact that Miss Spear had failed him. Then his boyish pride reasserted itself, and for a moment he felt sore and humiliated. He remembered things Upton had said: “She never stays anywhere more than five minutes. . . . A gentleman friend called for her in his car . . . .” and subsequent allusions picked up from Mrs. Tracy, who had been speechless with surprise when she learned that Miss Spear intended to devote an afternoon to showing Vance the books at the Willows. “Well, I never! Anyhow, she’s got the right to — I guess some day the place will be hers,” was one of the things Mrs. Tracy had said; and Laura Lou, breaking her habitual silence, had added in her quick fluttering way: “I don’t believe she’ll ever live at Paul’s Landing. She says she means to travel all the time when she’s married . . . .”
All this wove itself into Vance’s own picture of the pale dark~haired young woman who had appeared to him so suddenly, and taken up the verse of “Kubla Khan” in her rich chanting voice. He had assumed her to be some years older than himself, and at nineteen, and to a mind as ignorant of class distinctions as his, such a difference of age put a much greater distance between them than the fact that Miss Spear lived at “the big house” (as the Tracys called Eaglewood), or even that she was to inherit the Willows, or meant to travel all the time when she was married. . . . Vance thought of her as goddesslike and remote, mistress of the keys of knowledge and experience; her notice had flushed him with pride, but it seemed a part of the mysterious unreality of everything in this new world. As he got to his feet and walked back to the gate of the Willows he felt his first pang of wounded pride. She had forgotten him; forgotten him because he was too young and insignificant to be remembered; because fellows called for her and carried her off in their cars; because she never stayed anywhere more than five minutes . . . .
Ah, how differently he thought of her now! Since her breathless arrival at the Tracy house on the previous evening, her summoning him out to the porch to accuse and excuse herself, the goddess had become woman again, and he was sure that the woman was to be trusted. She still seemed to him a good deal older than himself, but that now gave him a happy sense of ease and freedom, instead of the feverish excitement which the advances of a girl of his own age would have occasioned . . . .
As he waited in the darkness the early noises of awakening life began to stir. He heard the long eerie scream of a train far away; then the rumble of a motor truck down the turnpike at the foot of the hill, followed by the jolt of a lame farm horse coming in with garden produce; and lastly, close by, the cluck-cluck of the Eaglewood motor — and she was there.
“Vance!” she called gaily, half under her breath, as though instinctively adapting her voice to the whispered sounds of the hour. He had his hand on the door of the car, and in a moment was sitting at her side. “Now if she’ll only start!” the girl sighed. The car kicked and jibbed and stood stock still, as it had the evening before; then it was off with a rush, as if aware of the challenge to its powers, and amused at so unusual an adventure.
Vance was too full of happy emotion to speak. When Miss Spear said: “Did you think I was going to forget you again?” he merely answered: “No,” and she laughed, as if the simplicity of the answer pleased her, and then fell silent too.
When they started up the wooded road to the mountain there still lingered so much of night under the branches that she had to turn on the headlights, and the white stretch of illumination on each side of the motor was filled with layer upon layer of delicately drawn motionless leaves, between which the ruts of the road seemed to Vance to rise up and meet them as they climbed. All these details burnt themselves into his brain with a curious precision, as if he had been crawling at a snail’s pace through an eternity of overarching foliage, while at the same time the wheezy car seemed to be whirling him breathlessly to unknown distances; so that when the headlights painted the sudden picture of two gateposts of gray stone flanking a drive he was startled to hear Miss Spear say: “There’s Eaglewood,” for he thought they must long since have reached the ridge of the mountain above it.
They still mounted; the air was growing cooler; at last it was almost cold. The headlights paled gradually in the imperceptible growth of dawn, and when Miss Spear remembered to turn them out the road was scarcely less distinct, though everything appeared farther away and softer to the eye. At last the motor came out of the woodland, high up on a stretch of rough country road between fields. The sky arched overhead dim and pallid, with here and there a half-drowned star like a petal in gray water. They passed once more under trees, the world grew all dark again, and Miss Spear, stopping the motor, said: “Here.”
They were in a tree-shadowed trail leading from the road to the foot of a steep overhanging rock. “There’s Thundertop,” Miss Spear said. She jumped out, and Vance after her. They scrambled up from ledge to ledge and finally reached a projecting rocky spur from which they saw, far below and around, the outspread earth, its lonely mountain masses and habitable slopes, and hollows still indistinct, all waiting inanimate for the light.
“If it shouldn’t happen!” Miss Spear exclaimed. Vance turned to her in wonder. She had spoken his very thought; and to youth such coincidences are divine.
“Or if it had never happened before — if we were actually looking at the very first. . . . Ah!” she broke off on a deep breath; for a faint vibration, less of light than of air, a ripple of coming life, had begun to flow over the sky and the opposite mountains, hushing every incipient sound. There was a lull after that first tremor; a lull lasting so long that it seemed as if, after all, nothing in the landscape had moved or altered. Then Miss Spear, laying her hand on Vance’s shoulder, turned him about toward a break in the swarthy fell of the eastern mountains; and through it came the red edge of the sun. They watched in silence as it hung there apparently unmoving; then they glanced away for a moment, and when they looked back they saw that it had moved; saw the forerunning glow burn away the ashen blur in the forest hollows, the upper sky whiten, and daylight take possession of the air. Again they turned westward, looking toward the Hudson, and now the tawny suffusion was drawing down the slopes of the farther shore, till gradually, very gradually, the river hollows also were washed of their mists, and the great expanse of the river shone bright as steel in the clear shadow.
Vance drew a deep breath. His lips were parted, but no word came. He met Miss Spear’s smiling eyes with a vague stare. “Kubla Khan?” she said. He nodded.
“You’d never seen one of our sunrises?”
“No, only over the prairies.”
“Well, that must be rather splendid too. But very different — like seeing it over the sea.”
He made no response, for he had never seen the sea, and there was no room in his soul for more new visions.
“It’s less of an effort to see the sun rise in Illinois, I suppose?” Miss Spear continued. “You only have to look out of your window. Here it involves mountaineering, and it’s given me a mountaineer’s appetite; hasn’t it you?”
He didn’t know; he supposed so; but he hardly heard what she said. His whole sentient self was still away from him, in the blue and gold of the uprolling. He would have liked to lie down there on the edge of Thundertop between the misty splendours below and the pure light above, and let the hours drift by while the chariot of the day described its great circuit before him. At such moments he was almost disembodied.
“Come along, Vance! I’m ravening. Ham and eggs over a gipsy fire!” She slipped a comrade-arm through his, and they started to scramble down from their eminence, leaving at each step a fra............