It was so still in the dim book-lined room that had the late Miss Lorburn reappeared upon the scene she might have mistaken for a kindred ghost the young man in possession of her library.
Vance, for the last few days, had been going over the books at the Willows, wiping them with a soft towel and carefully putting one after another back in its proper place. Halo Spear, in one of her spasmodic bursts of energy, had swooped down from Eaglewood the first morning to show him how to do it; for in the reverent and orderly treatment of books (handling them, Mrs. Weston might have put it, as gingerly as if they were “the best china”!) Vance was totally untaught. Miss Spear, with those swift and confident hands of hers, had given him one of her hurried demonstrations, accompanied by a running commentary of explanation. “Don’t SHAKE the books as if they were carpets, Vance; they’re not. At least they’re only magic carpets, some of them, to carry one to the other side of the moon. But they won’t stand banging and beating. You see, books have souls, like people: that is, like a few people. . . . No, I wouldn’t ask the Tracys to help; they don’t know much about books. You and I will manage it by ourselves. Look: wipe the edges gently, like this, and then flutter the pages ever so lightly — as if you were a bee trying to shake open a flower — just to get the dust out. . . . Ah, but how lovely this is! Listen:
“‘Ah, what avails the sceptred race,
And what the form divine?
What every virtue, every grace?
Rose Aylmer, all were thine . . .’”
And then, in the midst of her dusting and reading (the former frequently interrupted by the latter), she had glanced abruptly at her wristwatch, exclaiming: “Oh, Lord, there’s Lewis waiting — I’d forgotten!” and had dashed out of the house, crying back advice, instructions and adieux.
Vance scarcely noticed her departure. It was exciting — almost too exciting — to have her there; but he did not want more excitement just then. What he wanted was in some way to be kept outside of time and space till his fury of intellectual hunger was, not indeed sated, but at least calmed. The mere sense of all those books about him, silent witnesses of an unknown and unsuspected past, was almost more agitating than he could bear. From every side their influences streamed toward him, drawing him this way and that as if he had been in the centre of a magnetic circle. To continue the work he was there to do soon became manifestly impossible. Why, even Miss Spear had broken off every few minutes to read and admire, often dropping the book in her hand while she darted on to another, oblivious, in her hummingbird greed, of the principles of order she was inculcating. And yet to her these volumes, or the greater number of them, were old friends. She must long since have surmounted the shock of surprises with which Vance was tingling; while to him nearly all the books were new and unknown, and the rest bore names just familiar enough to sharpen his hunger. How could he attempt to remember from which shelf he had taken one book or the other, once it had opened its golden vistas to him?
He did not try for long. He already had a fairly definite sense of values, and could not delude himself with the idea that dusting a dead woman’s books was, for him or anybody else, a more vital and necessary act than reading them. This was his chance, and he was going to take it.
If only he had known better how to! The pressure of this weight of wisdom on his ignorance was suffocating: he felt like a girl Miss Spear had told him about, the girl who was so greedy for gold that she betrayed Rome, and the fellows she betrayed it to despised her so that they crushed her under their golden shields. These books were crushing Vance like that. If only there were some way of climbing the slippery trunk of the Tree which dangled its fruit so far above him!
He turned to the corner from which Miss Spear had taken the books, and his hand lit on a shabby volume: Specimens of English Dramatic Poets contemporary with Shakespeare. He settled himself in Miss Lorburn’s Gothic armchair and read:
“Is this the face that launched a thousand ships
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?”
My God! Who wrote it? Who could have? Not any of the big fellows he knew about . . . this was another note: he knew it instinctively. And the man’s name? Marlowe . . . and he’d lived, why, ever so long ago, two or three hundred years before this old house of Miss Lorburn’s was built, or the funny old mouldy Half Hours book published — and the English language, in this Marlowe’s hands, was already a flower and a flame. . . . Vance rambled on from glory to glory, slowly, amazedly, and then, out of sheer gluttony, pushed the book under his chair, like a dog hiding a bone, and wandered back to the magic shelves for more.
“When she moves, you see
Like water from a crystal overflowed,
Fresh beauty tremble out of her, and lave
Her fair sides to the ground . . .”
Vance dropped the little volume, and pressing his hands against his eyes let the frail music filter through him. This poetry had another quality of newness quite its own — something elusive as the shy beauty of a cold spring evening. Beddoes . . . that was the name. Another unknown! Was he a contemporary of those others, Marlowe and Ford, who lived so long before the Willows was built, almost before the Hudson River had a name? Or was he not, rather with an exquisite new note, trying to lure back the earlier music? How could a boy from Euphoria hope to find his way through this boundless forest of English poetry, called hither and thither by all these wild-winged birds pouring down their music on him?
As he stood groping and gazing, in the litter and confusion of the ravaged shelves, his eyes fell on a title which seemed to hold out help. Half Hours with the Best Authors — stoutish volumes in worn black cloth, with queer pinnacled gilt lettering. Well, at least they would tell him who were supposed to be the best authors when the book was written — put him wise on that, anyhow. He reached for a volume, and settled himself down again.
The book was not, as Vance had expected, a series of “half hour” essays on the best authors. Charles Knight (that was the man’s name) had simply ranged through a library like Miss Lorburn’s, about eighty years ago, gathered this bloom and that, and bound them together with the fewest words. Vance, accustomed to short~cuts to culture, had expected an early version of the “five-foot shelf”; he found, instead, the leisurely selections of an anthologist to whom it had obviously not occurred that he might have readers too hurried to dwell on the more recondite beauties of English literature. The choice of the poetry did not greatly interest Vance, after Lamb’s Specimens and the Beddoes volume; but as his eye travelled on he found himself receiving for the first time — except when he had first read his Bible as literature — the mighty shock of English prose.
For the moment it affected him almost more powerfully than the poetry, such a sense it gave of endlessly subtle intricacies of rhythm and movement, such a great tidal pressure as he could feel only, and not define. “Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks; methinks I see her as an eagle nursing her mighty youth, and kindling her undazzled eyes at the full mid-day beam; purging and unsealing her long abused sight at the fountain itself of heavenly radiance . . . .” “The light of the world in the turning of the creation was spread abroad like a curtain, and dwelt nowhere, but filled the expansum with a dissemination great as the unfoldings of the air’s looser garment, or the wilder fringes of the fire, without knots, or order, or combination; but God gathered the beams in his hand, and united them into a globe of fire, and all the light of the world became the body of the sun.”
What a fellow could say, if he had the chance, and the habit of words and sentences like that!
Vance shut the volume and sat gazing ahead of him. The blood was beating in his temples. The walls of dark musty books seemed to sway and dissolve, letting him into that new world of theirs — a world of which he must somehow acquire the freedom. “I must find out — I must find out.” He repeated the words chantingly, unmeaningly, as if they had been an incantation. Then slowly his mind began to clear, to become again able to follow its own movements. What he needed, no doubt, to enter that world, was EDUCATION— the very thing he thought he already had!
It was not only the books into which he had been dipping that told him of his need. Every word, every allusion caught at the Eaglewood lunch table had opened new vistas of conjecture. Of course each human agglomeration, down to the smallest village, had its local idioms, its own range of allusions, its stock of jokes and forms of irony. At the Tracys’, for instance, you heard the Paul’s Landing vernacular, as you heard that of Euphoria at Vance’s family table; but all that was different. Vance had known instantly that the language, the intonations, the allusions of Eaglewood did not belong peculiarly to Paul’s Landing, were indeed hardly concerned with it, but embraced, though so lightly flitting, great areas extending not only to New York and beyond, but backward through this mysterious past which was so much newer to Vance than any present. These easy affable people could talk — did talk — about everything! Everything, that is, but the exclusively local matters which had formed the staple of the only conversation Vance had ever heard. What they talked of was simply ALL THE REST; and he could see that they did it without the least intention of showing-off, the least consciousness that their scope was wider than other people’s — did it naturally, carelessly, just as his mother talked about electric cookers, his father about local real estate, Mrs. Tracy about Laura Lou’s school picnics and Upton’s job at the nursery. The inference was, not that the Spears and their friends were an isolated group, parading their superior attainments before each other, but that they belonged to a class, a society, a type of people, who naturally breathed this larger air, possessed this privilege of moving freely backward and forward in time and space, and were so used to it all that they took the same faculty for granted in others — even in a boy like Vance Weston.
Well, there was no reason why a boy like Vance Weston shouldn’t, some day or other, acquire a like faculty. He had been brought up in the creed that there was nothing a fellow from Euphoria, the cradle of all the Advantages, couldn’t attain to. Only — how? It seemed to him that the gulf was untraversable. If only he could have been left alone in that library, left there for half a year, perhaps. . . . But even so, he felt that he needed some kind of tuition to prepare him for the library. The Past was too big, too complicated, too aloof, to surrender its secrets so lightly.
College again? College meant to him sports and more sports, secret societies, class scraps and fraternity rushing, with restricted intervals of mechanical cramming, and the glib unmeaning recital of formulas — his courses provided a formula for everything! But all that had nothing to do with all THIS . . . .
Besides, thinking about college was a waste of time. Even had he been willing to submit again to the same routine, he hadn’t the means to re-educate himself, and he could not ask his father to pay his expenses twice over. Mr. Weston, Vance knew, regarded him as an investment which ought already to be bringing in something. After the boy’s illness his father had recognized the necessity of his taking a holiday; and being a man who always did things handsomely when his doing so was visible to others, he had agreed, besides paying the trip to New York and back, and Vance’s board at the Tracys’, to allow him a hundred dollars a month for four months. Vance had received half the sum before starting, with a warning to be careful and not make a fool of himself; and his father’s gesture, which became generally known on Mapledale Avenue, was thought very liberal, and worthy of Lorin Weston.
But Vance, at the same time, was given to understand that as soon as his summer’s rest was over he was to “make good.” His father, having reluctantly come round to the idea of his going into journalism instead of real estate, had obtained the promise of a job for him on the Free Speaker, and was already swaggering at club meetings about the nuisance of having a literary fellow in the family. “Problem most of you fellows aren’t up against, I guess? Fact is, Mrs. Weston has a way-back culture complex in her family, and it’s a microbe you can’t seem to eradicate.” This was all very well — and nobody liked swaggering better than the silent Lorin Weston; but Vance knew that he liked to have his swagger justified with the least possible delay.
The only hope lay in returning as often as he could to this silent room, and trying to hack a way through the dense jungle of the past. But he was not sure it would be possible. He was aware that Mrs. Tracy, though she made no comment, wondered at his meetings with Miss Spear at the Willows, and at the permission given him to range among the books. He had spent two whole days there since his lunch at Eaglewood, and on this second day no one had come down from the “big house,” as Mrs. Tracy called it, to let him in, and he had been obliged to go back to Paul’s Landing and ask her for the keys. “I don’t know as I ought to,” Mrs. Tracy had said as she handed them over; and then: “Oh, well, I suppose it’s all right if THEY say so.” She referred to the Spears as “they,” with a certain tartness, since she had learned of Vance’s having lunched at Eaglewood. “Well, I never! Mebbe some time they’ll remember that Upton and Laura Lou are related to them too.” Vance felt that in asking for the keys he had vaguely offended her, and he was sorry; but he could not give up the books.
New York had completely vanished from his thoughts. He had the sense to understand that, to a boy like himself, New York could offer no opportunity comparable to this. He must learn something first — then try his luck there. When he had found himself, at the Eaglewood lunch table, seated next to the literary critic whose name, in his confusion, he had not caught, he had acted at once on the deep instinct which always made him seize on what was meant for his own nourishment, in however new and unfamiliar surroundings. Here, at least, he said to himself, was an editor — a journalist! He had no idea if The Hour were a daily (as its name seemed to imply), or some kind of highbrow review (as he feared); but whatever it was, it might give ............