Waking near noon that day from the sleep into which she had fallen after the vigil on Thundertop, Hélo?se Spear sat up in bed and thought: “What’s wrong?”
She stretched her arms above her head, pushed back her hair from her sleepy eyes, and looked about her room, which was cooled by the soft green light filtered through the leaves of the ancient trumpet creeper above her window. For a moment or two the present was drowned in the remembered blaze of the sunrise, and the enjoyment of the hunger satisfied beside the pool; but already she knew that — as was almost invariable in her experience — something disagreeable lurked in the heart of her memories: as if every enjoyment in life had to be bought by a bother.
“That boy has eyes — I was right,” she thought; and then, immediately: “Oh, I know, the motor!” For she had remembered, in the act of re-evoking young Weston, that on the way home the car had stopped suddenly, a mile or more above Eaglewood, and that, after a long struggle (during which he had stood helplessly watching her, seemingly without an idea as to how he might come to her aid,) they had had to abandon it by the roadside, and she had parted with her companion at the Eaglewood gates after telling him how to find his way home on foot. She herself had meant to take a couple of hours of sleep, and then slip out early to catch the man~of-all-work before the household was up, and persuade him to get the delinquent motor home somehow. But as soon as she had undressed, and thrown herself on her bed, she sank into the bottomless sleep of youth; and here it was nearly lunchtime, and everybody downstairs, and the absence of the motor doubtless already discovered! And, with matters still undecided between herself and Lewis Tarrant, she had not especially wanted him to know that she had been out without him to see the sunrise — the more so as he would never believe she had gone up to Thundertop unaccompanied.
Ah, how she envied the girls of her age who had their own cars, who led their own lives, sometimes even had their own bachelor flats in New York! Except as a means to independence riches were nothing to her; and to acquire them by marriage, and then coldly make use of them for her own purposes, was as distasteful to her as anything in her present life. And yet she longed for freedom, and saw no other way to it. If only her eager interest in life had been matched by some creative talent! She could half paint, she could half write — but her real gift (and she knew it) was for appreciating the gifts of others. Even had discipline and industry fostered her slender talents they would hardly have brought her a living. She had measured herself and knew it — and what else was there for her but marriage? “Oh, well,” she thought, for the thousandth time, “something may turn up . . .” which meant, as she knew, that her mother’s cousin, old Tom Lorburn, might drop off at any moment and leave her the Willows, with enough money to get away from it, and from Paul’s Landing, forever.
She heard her mother’s fluttering knock, and Mrs. Spear came in, drooping, distressed, and dimly beautiful.
“Oh, Halo — asleep still? I’m sorry to disturb you, darling, but it’s after eleven” (“I know, I know,” grumbled Hélo?se, always impatient of the obvious), “and something so tiresome has happened. The motor has disappeared. Jacob says somebody must have got into the garage in the night. The cook says she saw a dreadful-looking man hanging about yesterday evening; but the trouble is that the garage lock wasn’t broken open — only it so seldom is locked, as I told your father. Your father says it’s Lorry again; he’s made such a dreadful scene before Lewis. . . . It’s not so much the fact of Lorry’s being out all night; but your father thinks he’s sold the car. And if he HAS we shall never see a penny of the money,” Mrs. Spear added, confusedly struggling to differentiate the causes of her distress, of which fear about the money was clearly by far the most potent.
Hélo?se sat up in bed and gazed at her mother’s troubled countenance. “Even now,” she thought, “her eyes are beautiful; and she doesn’t screw them up in the ugly way that I do.” Then she roused herself to reality. “What nonsense — nobody stole the motor,” she said.
“It WAS Lorry, then? He’s told you —?”
“He’s told me nothing.” She paused, letting her imagination toy for a moment with the temptation to be silent; then she said: “The motor’s a mile up the road, toward Thundertop. It broke down, and I left it there myself early this morning.” The idea of allowing Lorry to bear the brunt of the storm had lasted no more than the taking of breath between two words; but it had stirred in her an old residuum of self-disgust. Yet she did wish she had got the car safely under cover before all this fuss!
Her mother stood staring at her with astonished eyes. “You, Halo? You had the car out in the middle of the night?”
“Yes. I had the car out. I went up to Thundertop to see the sunrise.”
“With Lewis, darling?” Mrs. Spear’s face brightened perceptibly; then it fell again. “But no, he was there just now when your father scolded poor Lorry, and of course if he’d been with you — ”
“He wasn’t with me. He doesn’t know anything about it.”
“Halo!” her mother moaned, “And you chose this time — when he’d just arrived!” She paused with a gesture of despair. “Who WAS with you?”
Halo, sliding out of bed, got her feet into her flopping Moroccan slippers, and began to gather up her sponge and towels preparatory to an advance to the bathroom. “Oh, nobody in particular. Just that young boy from the Tracys’ — ”
Mrs. Spear gasped out her perplexity. “Boy from Tracys’? You don’t mean Upton?”
“Of course not. How ridiculous! I mean the cousin from the West that they’ve got staying there — the boy who’s had typhoid fever. Didn’t I tell you about him? He’s rather extraordinary; full of talent, I believe; and starving to death for want of books, and of people he can talk to. I promised to spend an afternoon with him at the Willows, and let him browse in the library, and then I forgot all about it, and to make up for having chucked him I slipped out early this morning and ran him up to Thundertop to see the sunrise. It was glorious. And he read me some of his poems — he means to be a poet. I do believe there’s something in him, Mother.”
While Mrs. Spear listened the expression of her beautiful eyes passed from anxiety to a sympathetic exaltation. As her daughter was aware, one could never speak to Mrs. Spear of genius without kindling in her an irrepressible ardour to encourage and direct it.
“But, my dear, how interesting! Why didn’t you tell me about him before? Couldn’t George Frenside do something to help him? Couldn’t he publish his things in The Hour? I do hope you asked him to come back to lunch?”
Hélo?se laughed. Her mother’s enthusiasms always amused her. To hear of the presence, within inviting distance, of a young man of talent (talent was always genius to Mrs. Spear) was instantly to make her forget her family and financial cares, however pressing, and begin to wonder anxiously what the cook could scrape together for lunch — a sincere respect for good food being one of the anomalies of her oddly assorted character, and a succulent meal her instinctive homage to celebrity. “What time did you tell him to come — one or half-past? I believe Susan could still manage a cheese soufflé — but it’s nearly twelve now.”
“Yes; I know it is — and you must give me a chance to take my bath. And how could I ask him to lunch? It wouldn’t be decent, when he’s staying with the Tracys, who, after all, are distant connections of ours, and whom we certainly don’t want to invite — do we?”
Mrs. Spear, at this reminder, clasped her long expressive hands self-reproachfully. “Oh, those poor Tracys! Yes, they ARE distant relations. But if Lorburn Tracy, who was a poor sort of man anyhow, and less than nobody on his father’s side, chose to marry the gardener’s daughter at the Willows, we could hardly be expected, could we . . .? Not that that sort of thing really matters in the least. Why should it? Only — well, perhaps we’ve been snobbish about the Tracys, darling. Do you think we have? There’s nothing I hate so much as being snobbish. Do you think we ought to send Jacob down now with a note, and ask them ALL up to lunch with this young novelist you speak of? Not a novelist — a poet? What a head I’ve got! My dear, I really believe we ought to. Is there any notepaper here? There so seldom is, in your room . . . but if you can find a scrap, do write a line to Mrs. Tracy, and say . . . say . . . well, put it as nicely as you can . . . and say that Jacob is at their door, with the car, waiting to bring them up; oh, with the young man, of course! Remind me again of the young man’s name, my dear.”
“Well, if I said all that, Mother, part of it would hardly be true, as the car’s a mile or more up the Thundertop road at this minute, and refuses to budge.” Hélo?se let her mother’s outcries evaporate, and continued quietly: “Besides, you know perfectly well that we can’t ask the Tracys to lunch. We never have, and why should we now? They’d hate it as much as we should. They’re plain working people, and they have nothing on earth to say to us, or we to them. Why should we suddenly pretend the contrary?”
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