“Where are we going? You’ll see,” Vance said with a confident laugh.
He stood with Laura Lou on the doorstep of a small gingerbread~coloured house in a rustic-looking street bordered with similar habitations. Her bare hand lay on his sleeve, and the gold band on her fourth finger seemed to catch and shoot back all the fires of the morning.
It was one of those windless December days when May is in the air, and it seems strange not to see grass springing and buds bursting. The rutty street lay golden before Vance and Laura Lou, and as they came out of the Methodist minister’s house they seemed to be walking straight into the sun.
Vance had made all his plans, but had imparted them to no one, not even to his bride. The religious ceremony, it was true, had been agreed on beforehand, as a concession to her prejudices, and to her fear of her mother. When Mrs. Tracy learned of the marriage it must appear to have been performed with proper solemnity. Not that Vance had become irreligious; but, since his elementary course in philosophy had shown him that the religion he thought he had invented was simply a sort of vague pantheism, and went back in its main lines to the dawn of metaphysics, he had lost interest in the subject, or rather in his crude vision of it. What he wanted now was to learn what others had imagined, far back in the beginnings of thought; and he could see no relation between the colossal dreams and visions amid which his mind was moving and the act of standing up before a bilious-looking man with gold teeth, in a room with a Rogers statuette on the sideboard, and repeating after him a patter of words about God and Laura Lou — and having to pay five dollars for it.
Well, it was over now, and didn’t much matter anyhow; and everything to come after was still his secret. Laura Lou had not been inconveniently curious: she had behaved like a good little girl before the door opens on the Christmas tree. It was enough for her, Vance knew, to stand there looking up at him, her hand on his arm, his ring on her finger; from that moment everything she was, or wanted, was immersed and lost in himself. But his own plans had been elaborately worked out; he was in the state of lucid ecstasy when no material detail seems too insignificant to be woven into the pattern of one’s bliss.
“Come,” he said, “there’s just time to catch the train.” They hurried along the straggling streets of the little Long Island town, and reached the station as the last passengers were scrambling to their places. They found two seats at one end of the car, where they could sit, hand locked in hand, while the train slid through interminable outskirts and finally reached an open region of trees and fields. For a while neither spoke. Laura Lou, her head slightly turned toward the window, was watching the landscape slip by with a wide-eyed attention, so that Vance caught only the curve of her cheek and the light shining through the curls about her ear. There was something almost rigidly attentive in her look and attitude, as though she were a translucent vessel so brimming with happiness that she feared to move or speak lest it should overflow. The fear communicated itself to him, and as they sat there, hand in hand, he felt as if they were breathlessly watching a magic bird poised just before them, which the least sound might put to flight. “My dove,” he thought, “we’re watching my dove . . . .”
At length she turned and said in a whisper (as if not to frighten the dove): “Mother’ll come home soon and find the letter.”
He pressed her hand more tightly. The letter was the one she had written to tell Mrs. Tracy that she was not going to marry Bunty Hayes — that she would already be married to Vance when her mother opened the letter. She had been utterly unable to find words to break the news, and Vance had had to tell her what to say. In the note he had put a hundred-dollar bill, on which was pinned a slip of paper with the words: “On account of B. Hayes’s loan.” For the idea of the thousand-dollar loan, which Bunty Hayes had made to poor Mrs. Tracy to enable her to send Laura Lou to school, was a torture to Vance. The Hour had paid two hundred dollars for “Unclaimed,” and he had instantly enclosed half the amount in Laura Lou’s letter. It was perhaps not exactly the moment to introduce the question of money; but Vance could suffer no delay. He hoped to wipe out the debt within two or three months; then the last shadow would be lifted from his happiness. Meanwhile it had tranquillized him to do what he could.
“Oh, look — the sea!” cried Laura Lou; and there it was, beyond scrub oak and sandhills, a distant flash of light under a still sky without clouds. Vance’s heart swelled; but he turned his eyes back to Laura Lou, and said, with seeming indifference: “That’s nothing . . . .”
The gleam vanished; the train jogged on again between trees and fields. Houses cropped up, singly, then in groups, then in streets; the train slowed down by rural platforms, people got in and out. An hour later, as the usual clanking and jarring announced another halt, Vance said: “Here!” He reached for their joint suitcase, took Laura Lou by the arm, and pushed her excitedly toward the door. A minute later they were standing on a shabby platform, while the train swung off again and left them alone in a world of shanties and sandhills. “We’ll have to walk,” Vance explained, picking up the suitcase, which seemed to him to weigh no more than a feather. As soon as they had left the station every rut of the road, every tussock of grass and hunched-up scrub oak cowering down against the wind, started up familiarly before him. If he lived to be a thousand, he thought, he would never forget an inch of that road.
Laura Lou seemed to have cast aside her apprehensions. She swung along beside him, saying now and then: “Where are we going?” and laughing contentedly at his joyous: “You’ll see.” There was no sense of winter in the air; but as they advanced a breath of salt and seaweed made their faces tingle, and Vance, drawn by it, started into a run. “There’s not a minute to lose!” he called back; and Laura Lou raced after him, stumbling on her high heels among the sandy ruts. They scrambled on, speechless with haste, drunk with sun and air and their own hearts; and presently he dragged her up the last hillock, and there lay the ocean. He had sworn to himself that one day he would come back and see it with the girl he loved; but he had not known that the girl would be Laura Lou. He felt a little awed to think that the hand of Destiny had been on his shoulder even then; and as he gazed at the heaving silver reaches he wondered if they had known all the while where he was going, and if now they saw the path that lay ahead.
When, three years earlier, he had come down in summer to that same beach, lonely, half starved, dazed with discouragement, fevered from overwork, the sea had been a gray tumult under a sunless sky; now, on this December day, it flashed with summer fires. “Like my life,” he thought, putting out his arm to draw Laura Lou to the ridge on which he sat. “There,” he said, his cheek on hers, “there’s where our bird’s mother was born.”
Her bewildered eyes turned to him under their hummingbird lashes. “Our bird’s mother?”
“Venus, darling. Didn’t you know the dove belonged to Venus? Didn’t you know Venus was our goddess, and that she was born out of the waves, and came up all over foam? And that you look so like her that I feel as if you’d just been blown in on one of those silver streamers, and they might pull you back any minute if I didn’t hold tight onto you?” He suited the act to the words with a vehemence that made her laugh out in rosy confusion: “Vance, I never did hear such things as you make up about people.”
He laughed back and held her fast; but already his thoughts had wandered again to the ever-heaving welter of silver. “God, I wish a big gale would blow up this very minute — I’d give anything to see all those millions and millions of waves rear up and wrestle with each other.”
Laura Lou shivered. “I guess we’d be frozen if they did.”
“Why — are you cold?” he wondered, remembering how, as afternoon fell, she had grown pale and shivered in the garden of the Willows.
She shook her head, nestling down against him. “No — but I’m hungry, I believe.”
“Hungry? Ye gods! So am I. You bright child, how did you find out?” He caught her close again, covering with kisses her eyes and lips and her softly beating throat.
He had pitched the suitcase down at their feet, and he stooped to open it, and pulled out a greasy-looking parcel. “What about picnicking here? I’ve always wanted to have the wild waves at my wedding party.” He was unwrapping, and spreading out on the sand, beef sandwiches, slices of sausage and sticky cake, cheese, a bunch of grapes and a custard pie, all more or less mixed up with each other; and he and Laura Lou fell on them with hungry fingers. At last she declared: “Oh, Vance, we mustn’t eat any more — oh, no, no, I COULDN’T . . .” but he continued to press the food on her, and as her lips opened to morsel after morsel the returning glow whipped her cheeks to carmine. Then he dug again into the suitcase, extracted a half bottle of champagne and a corkscrew — and looked about him desperately for glasses. “Oh, hell, what’ll I do? Oh, child, there’s nothing for us to drink it out of!”
Rocking with laughter, she followed the pantomime of his despair. But suddenly he sprang up, slid down the hillock, and running along the beach came back with a big empty shell. “Here — our goddess sends you this! She sailed ashore in a shell, you know.” He flourished it before her, and then bade her hold it in both hands, while she laughed and laughed at his vain struggles with the corkscrew and the champagne bottle. Finally he gave up and knocked off the neck of the bottle, and the golden foam came spiring and splashing into the shell and over their hands. “Oh, Vance . . . oh, Vance . . .” She tilted her head back and put her lips to the fluted rim, and he thought he had never seen anything lovelier than the pulse beat in her throat when the wine ran down. “Ever taste anything like that?” he asked, licking his fingers; and she giggled: “No, nothing, only ginger ale,” and sat and watched while he refilled their chalice and drank from it, carefully putting his lips where hers had been. “It’s like a gale of wind and with the sun in it — that’s what it’s like,” he declared. He did not confess to her that it was also his............