“Storecraft” had lodged itself on the summit of a corner building in Fifth Avenue, with a “roof patio” (the newest architectural hybrid) surrounded by showrooms and a cabaret. This fresh stage in its development was to be inaugurated by the Tomorrowist Show, and when Vance and Laura Lou shot up to the patio in the crowded lift the rooms were already beginning to fill with the people whose only interest in exhibitions is to visit them on their opening day.
Laura Lou, at the last moment, had decided to accompany her husband. The day was radiant, and treacherously warm for March, and she had put on a little blue hat, of the same blue as the one she had worn that fatal day in the rubberneck car, and a coat with a collar of fluffy amber fur. Between cerulean hat brim and blond fur her face looked as tender as a wild rose, and the shadow of fatigue under her eyes turned them to burning sapphire. Vance looked at her in wonder. What did she do with all this loveliness in their everyday life? It seemed to appear suddenly, on particular occasions, as if she had pulled it out of the trunk under their bed with her “good” coat; and he knew it would vanish again as quickly, leaving her the pale heavy-eyed ghost of her old self. Some inner stimulus, now almost lacking in her life, seemed required to feed that precarious beauty. He noticed how people turned their heads as she entered the gallery, as they had done in the fashionable restaurant, and at the theatre, on their wedding journey. Masculine pride flushed through him, and he slipped his arm possessively in hers. “Take me right to where it is,” she enjoined him with a little air of power, as if instantly conscious of his feeling.
They worked their way into the second room, and there, aloft on a central pedestal, Vance caught a half glimpse of himself as embodied in the clay of Rebecca Stram. The conspicuous placing of the bust astonished him — he hadn’t supposed that Rebecca’s artistic standing, even in her own little group, was of such importance.
“Gee — for a beginner they’ve given her a good place,” he said to his wife.
“Oh, Vanny, it isn’t her — it’s YOU!”
He laughed a little sheepishly, in genuine surprise. He had forgotten that for anyone but himself and Laura Lou his features could be of interest.
“Shucks,” he growled self-consciously.
“Why, just look! We can’t get up to it — I can’t see it, even!” she exulted.
The bust was in fact enclosed in a dense circle of people, some few of whom were looking at it, while the greater number hung on the vibrant accents of a showily dressed man whose robust back was turned to Vance and Laura Lou.
“Know him? Know Vance Weston?” they heard Bunty Hayes ring out in megaphone tones. “Why, I should SAY so. Ever since he was a little kiddie. Why, him and me were raised together, way down on the Hudson River, as the old song says. Born out West?” (This is evident response to the comment of one of his auditors.) “That’s so — Illinois, I guess it was, or maybe Arizona. But he came east as a little fellow, to live with his mother’s relatives — don’t I remember the day he arrived? Why, I met him when he stepped off the train. Even then you could see the little genius in him. ‘Bunty,’ he says to me, ‘where’s the public library?” (First thing!). I want to consult the Encyclopaedia Britannica,’ he says. Couldn’t ha’ been more’n sixteen, I guess — thinking of his writing even then! Well, I was on a newspaper in those days myself, and I walked him right round to the office, and I said: “What you want to study isn’t encyclopaedias, it’s Life.’ And I guess, if I do say so, that was the turning point in his career; and I claim it was my advice and help that landed him where he is today: at the head of the world’s fiction writers, and in the place of honour at ‘Storecraft’s’ first art exhibit. Proud of it? Well, I guess I’ve got a right to be . . . .”
He swung suddenly round, mustering the crowd with an eye trained to the estimation of numbers; and his glance met Vance’s. The latter expected to see signs of discomfiture on the orator’s compact countenance; but he did not yet know Bunty Hayes. The showman’s eye instantly lit up, and he elbowed his way toward Vance with extended hand.
“Well, ladies and gentlemen, I see it’s time for me to pack up my goods and step down off the platform. Here’s the great man himself. Now, then, Mr. Weston, step up here and give your admirers the chance to compare the living features with the artist’s inspiration!”
Vance stood paralysed with rage; but he had no time to express it, for friends and acquaintances were pressing about him, and Bunty Hayes was swept aside by their approach. Vance found himself the centre of a throng of people, all eager to say a word, all determined to have one in return; and his only conscious desire was to be rid of it all, and of them, and let his rage against Hayes take breath. He managed to mumble his wife’s name to the first comers, but presently her hand slipped from his arm, and he saw her drawn away by a tall sable-draped figure whose back he recognized as Mrs. Pulsifer’s. Mrs. Pulsifer and Laura Lou — he wished there had been time to be furious at that too! But perhaps it was better to laugh at it — to laugh even at Bunty Hayes, whose showman’s instinct so confidently triumphed over every personal awkwardness. “Why,” Vance thought, “if I was to collar him now and give him the licking he deserves, he’d use THAT to advertise ‘Storecraft.’ No wonder he gets on, and ‘Storecraft’ too.” And instantly he began to weave the whole scene into Loot, his heart beating excitedly as he felt himself swept along on the strong current of the human comedy. . . . If only he could tell Halo Tarrant, he thought! He turned, and there she stood beside him, with Frenside.
“Yes, we’ve come. I hate these performances; but I wanted to see you battling with the waves, and I made Frenny come too.” How fine and slender and aloof she managed to look among them all, and how his blood instantly caught step with hers! “Well, this is fame — how do you like it?” she bantered him.
He shrugged. “I guess it’s a good page for Loot.”
She nodded delightedly. “You see I was right! I told you you must see it all. But where’s Laura Lou? Surely she was with you a minute ago?”
“Yes. But she’s gone.”
“Gone?”
“With Mrs. Pulsifer. I think they’re in the other room.”
Their eyes met, and Mrs. Tarrant laughed. “I’ve noticed signs of uneasiness in Jet lately. She realizes that she made a bad mistake last year about your short story, and I hear she now talks of founding a First Novel prize. She’s probably telling Laura Lou all about it.”
Vance laughed too; and then they turned together to the bust, which Mrs. Tarrant had not yet seen. She studied it thoughtfully for a long time; then, as other visitors crowded her away, she turned back to Vance. “I didn’t think that Stram girl had it in her. She HAS caught a glimpse of you, Vance — a glimpse of what you’re going to be. Don’t you think so, Frenny?”
“Well, I’m sorry to think that our young friend’s going to have a goitre,” said Frenside gloomily.
“Oh, dear — what a pity you can’t like anything that isn’t photographic! Artistically, you know,” she explained to Vance, “Frenny’s never got beyond the enlarged photograph of the ‘eighties, when people used to have their dear ones done twice the size of life, with the whiskers touched up in crayon.”
Vance echoed her laugh. He echoed it because certain inflexions of her voice were always laughter-provoking to him, and he would have thought anything funny if her eyes and her dimple had told him it was. But in reality he did think the bust queer, and had never understood why Rebecca had given him a swollen throat, and big lumps on his forehead, as if he’d been in a fight and got the worst of it. And he remembered too, with a pang, the colossal photograph which Grandma Scrimser had had made of Grandpa after his death, with the hyacinthine curls and low-necked collar of his prime, a photograph which the family had all thought so “speaking” that even Mrs. Weston dared not grumble at the expense. . . . Still, Vance, since then, had had a glimpse of other standards, and as he studied through Halo’s eyes the rough clay head with tumbled hair and heavy brooding forehead he began to see that under her surface mannerisms Rebecca Stram had reached down to his inner self, that the image seemed, as Halo said, to body forth what he was trying to be.
“It oughtn’t to have been done till after I’ve pulled off Loot,” he said, trying to hide his satisfaction under a joke.
“Oh, but it’s a proof that you will pull it off,” Halo rejoined; and then other people came up to them both, and swept them apart. He found her again at last, seated alone in a corner, and as he sat down beside her she said: “Who was that ridiculous man who was bragging about having known you when you were a boy?”
Vance’s dormant indignation against Bunty Hayes flamed up again. “Oh, he’s the manager of ‘Storecraft.’ He was just doing a blurb for the show.”
“Obviously. But where on earth did you know him?”
Vance hesitated. “I ran across him at Paul’s Landing. He used to go round with Upton Tracy.”
“Oh, I see.” She made a little grimace and rose to her feet. “Well, I’m going. I only came here to see you. I mean Rebecca’s YOU,” she corrected herself with a smile.
“Not yours?” he asked, flushing.
“No, I’d rather see him some evening quietly at home. When are you going to bring me your next chapters?”
“Any time,” he stammered, whirling with the joy of it; and she named a date which he of course accepted, as he would have accepted any other, at the cost of breaking no matter what other engagements. His head was light and dizzy with anticipation as he watched her vanish with Frenside in the throng.
When he roused himself from the spell he remembered that Laura Lou was somewhere in the gallery. He went back to look for her, but she was nowhere to be found, and at last he concluded, though half incredulously, that she must have gone off with Mrs. Pulsifer. It was very unlike her — but he had discovered that Laura Lou was often unlike herself, and that he really knew next to nothing of the secret springs of her actions and emotions. He did not think of this for long; his heart and brain were still full of the thought of Mrs. Tarrant. He was to see her again in two days: “a quiet evening,” she had said. That meant, he and she alone under the lamp, in that still meditative room which was like no other that he knew: a room of which the very walls seemed to think. And they would sit there alone together, while the logs crackled and fell, and he would read his new stuff to her, and she would sit motionless and silent, her chin on her lifted hand, her long arm mod............