One raw autumn evening when Vance came in, tired and dispirited, from the office of the Free Speaker, his elder sister, Pearl, who was always prying and investigating, bounced out into the hall with: “Here’s a letter for you from a New York magazine.”
Vance followed her into the overheated room where the family were waiting for Mr. Weston to go in to supper. Mr. Weston was generally late nowadays: real estate was in a slack phase at Euphoria, and he was always off somewhere, trying to get hold of a good thing, to extend his activities, especially to get a finger into the pie at Swedenville, which had recently started an unforeseen boom of its own.
There seemed to be a great many people in the brightly lit room, with its large pink-mouthed gramophone on a table with a crochet lace cover, its gold-and-gray wallpaper hung with the “Mona Lisa” (Mae’s contribution), “The Light of the World” (Grandma’s), and the palm in a congested pink china pot on a stained oak milking stool.
On chilly evenings the radiator was the centre of the family life, and the seat nearest it was now always occupied by a very old man with a yellowish waxen face and a heavy shock of black hair streaked with gray, who sat with a helpless left arm stretched on the shawl that covered his knees, and said at intervals, in a slow thick voice: “Feels . . . good . . . here . . . after . . . Crampton . . . .”
Grandpa and Grandma Scrimser had moved into Mapledale Avenue after Grandpa’s first stroke. The house out at Crampton was too cold, and the Nordic help, always yearning for Euphoria or Swedenville, could not be persuaded to wait on a paralytic old man and his unwieldy wife. Lorin Weston had accepted the charge without a murmur: he was a great respecter of family ties. But the presence of the old couple had not made things easier at Mapledale Avenue. It was an ever-recurring misery to Mrs. Weston to have the precise routine of her household upset by Mrs. Scrimser’s disorderly ways; she did not mind nursing her father nearly as much as “picking up” after her mother. But the crowning grievance was the invasion of her house by Grandma’s followers — all the “inspirational” faddists, the prophets, seers, and healers who, having long enjoyed the happy~go-lucky hospitality of the Scrimser table, now thronged to Mrs. Weston’s, ostensibly to pray with Grandma and over Grandpa, but always managing, as Mrs. Weston remarked, to drop in round about mealtimes.
Grandpa’s stroke had come within the year after Vance’s return to Euphoria. Vance had not seen much of Mr. Scrimser during the months preceding the latter’s illness. Going out to Crampton was something the young man still shrank from. Everything in Euphoria, when he returned there from New York, seemed so small and colourless that he strayed about in it like a ghost in limbo; but the first time he walked out to see his grandmother, the old nausea caught him as he passed the field path leading to the river; and when his grandfather mounted the steps of the porch where Vance and Mrs. Scrimser were sitting, stiff-jointed but jaunty as ever, his hat tilted back from his black curls, his collar rolled away from his sinewy throat, the boy felt himself harden to a stone. . . . And then, one evening at the Free Speaker, a voice at the telephone had summoned Vance to the Elkington — and there in the glaring bar lolled the old man, like a marionette with its wires cut, propped on the sofa to which they had hurriedly raised him . . . .
The accident did not reawaken Vance’s love for his grandfather, but it effaced the hate. If this was what a few years brought us to, the sternness of the moral law seemed cruelly out of proportion to the brevity of life; he acknowledged the grinning truth of the old man’s philosophy. Hitherto Vance had never regretted having written, or sold for publication, the tale into which he had poured all his youthful indignation; but now, though he felt sure that no one at Euphoria had ever heard of The Hour, or would have connected his tale with any actual incident, yet he would have been glad to wipe those pages out of existence, and still more glad to blot from his memory the money they had brought him . . . .
“Well, I guess your father’s going to be later than ever tonight, and that Slovak girl says she won’t stay another week if she don’t ever know what time to dish up for meals,” Mrs. Weston murmured, looking up from her towel-hemming as her son entered.
“Well, Vance’s got a letter from a New York magazine,” Pearl exulted, disregarding her mother.
Mrs. Scrimser looked yearningly from the corner where she sat by her husband, the last number of Spirit Light on her knee. (“What your grandmother wastes, subscribing to all those come-to-Jesus papers, is something that passes me. She could hire a nurse with the money,” Mrs. Weston frequently lamented to her children.)
“Oh, Vanny, open it quick!” his grandmother besought. “I wonder if it’s from Spirit Light? I was just reading to Grandpa about a twenty-five dollar prize they’re offering for a five-hundred-word appreciation of Jesus Christ, to be sent in before the last of the month. What are we now?”
No one answered, and Vance went up to the lamp and opened his letter. Below the letterhead of The Hour a rush of words poured out at him. “Another story on the lines of ‘One Day’ . . . Review in new hands . . . editor would like to have first call on anything you may turn out during the coming year . . . Liberal terms . . . first story if possible in time for January number . . . wants to know if any chance of your being in New York within few weeks to consider possibility of permanent connection with review . . .”
Another story on the lines of “One Day” — that was what first struck him. He read the phrase over several times; then, involuntarily, he turned and glanced at the marionette with its wires cut that cowered in the armchair by the radiator. How strange it was, Vance mused — that poor creature had first taught him the meaning of pain, and out of the terrible lesson the means of deliverance had come!
His future . . . here was his future secure. And the people at The Hour regretted having lost sight of him for so long — and the review was in new hands! He glanced back at the letterhead, and saw: “Editor: Lewis Tarrant.” But surely that was the blond fellow who was always hanging about Miss Spear and going off in the motor with her? Correspondence between Paul’s Landing and Mapledale Avenue had ceased after a somewhat acrimonious exchange of letters at the time of Vance’s departure from the Tracys’; since then he had heard nothing of the household at Eaglewood. Two or three curt notes from the editorial office of The Hour, rejecting the tales and essays he had sent at Frenside’s suggestion, had been the last of his communications with New York; and for nearly two years now his horizon had been so shut in by Euphoria that he was beginning to feel as if he had never left there.
“IS it about the Spirit Light competition, Vanny?” Mrs. Scrimser asked; and Pearl ejaculated: “Father may be late, but I guess he’ll be here before Vance condescends to tell us!”
“Tell us what?” Vance’s father questioned, banging the front door shut, and dropping his outer garments in the ingle-nook before joining his family.
“His news from New York,” Pearl snapped.
Lorin Weston came in, casting his cautious tired eyes about the room. His son suddenly noticed how much older and thinner he looked; his dapper business suit hung on him. “Well, what’s your news, son?”
“I’ve got a job in New York,” Vance announced, hardly believing that the voice he heard was his own.
“Feels . . . good . . . here . . . after . . . Crampton . . . .” the marionette crooned from its corner.
On the train to New York Vance had the same sense of detachment as when he had gone thither three years before. Again it was as though, in leaving his home, he took his whole self with him, like a telephone receiver unhooked and carried on a long cord into another room. The years at Euphoria had taught him something, he supposed; he felt infinitely older, felt mature, “hardboiled” as the new phrase was: he smiled with pity at the defenceless infant he had been when he made his first assault on the metropolis.
But how had the process of maturing been effected? He had felt himself an alien from the moment of his return to Euphoria; there had been no retightening of loosened links, no happy boyish sense of homecoming. He could imagine that a fellow might feel that, getting back to one of those old Lorburn houses, so impregnated with memories, so thick with tangible tokens of the past; but his own recollections could only travel back through a succession of new houses, each one a little larger and with a better bathroom and a neater garage than the last, but all without any traces of accumulated living and dying: shells shed annually, almost, like a crab’s. He even felt, as he sat in the spick-and-span comfort of Mapledale Avenue, the incongruity of an old man’s presuming to die there. “Seems like there’s no past here but in the cemeteries,” he mused one day, looking pityingly at his grandfather . . . .
And now he was getting away from it again, getting back into an atmosphere which to him seemed charged with the dust of ages. When he had been in New York before he had hardly noticed the skyscrapers, which were merely higher than those he already knew; but on one of his last days before leaving he had gone down to Trinity Church, and slowly, wonderingly, had roamed about the graveyard, brooding over names and dates. . . . The idea that there had been people so near his own day who had lived and died under the same roof, and worshipped every Sunday in the same church as their forebears, appealed in an undefinable way to his craving for continuity. And when he entered the church, and read the epitaphs on the walls above the very seats where the men and women commemorated had sat, it was like feeling a heart beating through the grave wrappings of one of the mummies he had seen in the museum. The ocean and Old Trinity — those............