The golden days began to be tarnished with rain; but the air remained mild, and life at the bungalow followed its quiet course. Vance, plunged in his imaginary world, hardly noticed that in the real one the hours of daylight were rapidly shortening, and that in the mornings there was a white hoarfrost in the orchard.
Laura Lou seemed to have recovered; but she was still easily tired, and the woman who came for the washing had still to be summoned almost daily to help with the housework. Then the weather turned cold, and the coal bill went up with a rush. The bungalow was not meant for winter, and Vance had to buy a couple of stoves and have the stovepipes pushed up through the roof. But in spite of these cares he was still hardly conscious of the lapse of time, and might have drifted on unaware to the end of the year if the old familiar money problem had not faced him. What with the coal and the stoves and the hired woman, and buying more blankets and some warm clothes, the monthly expenses had already doubled; what would it be when winter set in? Still, they had the derelict place for a song, and it would perhaps cost less to stay on there than to move.
About a month after his grandmother’s departure from New York a letter came from her. She reported the success of her lecture tour, and was loud in praise of “Storecraft’s” management. She spoke enthusiastically of the way in which the publicity was organized, and said it was bringing many souls to Jesus; and she reminded Vance affectionately of her offer to provide him and Laura Lou with a home. She would be ready to do so, she said, as soon as she paid off her debt to Mr. Weston; and that would be before long, judging from her present success. To justify her optimism she enclosed one of the advance circulars with which “Storecraft” was flooding the country, together with laudatory articles from local papers and a paean from her own special organ, Spirit Life, (which was now serializing her religious experiences). She said ingenuously that she guessed she had a right to be proud of such results, and added that anyhow they would show Vance there were plenty of cultured centres in the United States where the spiritual temperature was higher than in the Arctic circles of Park Avenue.
The letter touched Vance. It came at a moment when the problem of the winter was upon him, and he might have yielded to Mrs. Scrimser’s suggestion — if only she had not enclosed the newspaper articles. But there they were, in all their undisguised blatancy, and her pride in them showed her to have been completely unaffected by her grandson’s arguments and entreaties, or at any rate blind to their meaning. And after all, that very blindness exonerated her. If she really believed herself a heaven-sent teacher, why should she not live on what she taught? Where there was no fraud there was no dishonour. She was only giving these people what they wanted, and what she sincerely believed they ought to have.
Yes, but it was all based on the intellectual laziness that he abhorred. It was because she was content with a shortcut to popularity, and her hearers with words that sounded well and put no strain on their attention, that, as one paper said, she could fill three-thousand-seat auditoriums all the way from Maine to California. The system was detestable, the results were pitiable. . . . But his grandmother had to have the money, and her audiences had to have the particular blend of homemade religiosity that she knew how to brew. “Another form of bootlegging,” Vance growled, and pitched the newspapers to the floor. The fraud was there, it was only farther back, in the national tolerance of ignorance, the sentimental plausibility, the rush for immediate results, the get-rich-quick system applied to the spiritual life. . . . The being he loved with all the tenacity of childish affection was exactly on a level with her dupes.
He did not answer the letter, and his grandmother did not write again.
Vance thought he had thrown all the “Storecraft” documents into the stove; but one day he came back and found Laura Lou with one of the advance circulars smoothed out before her on the kitchen table. She looked up with a smile.
“Oh, Vanny, why didn’t you show me this before? Did your grandmother send it to you?”
He shrugged his acquiescence, and she sat gazing at the circular. “I guess it was Bunty who wrote it himself — don’t you believe so?”
Vance’s work had not gone well that day, and he gave an irritated laugh. “Shouldn’t wonder. But you probably know his style better than I do.”
The too-quick blood rushed to her cheeks, and ebbed again with the last word of his taunt. She looked at him perplexedly. “You don’t like it, then — you don’t think it makes enough of your grandmother?”
“Lord, yes! It makes too much — that’s the trouble.” He picked the leaflet up and read it slowly over, trying, out of idle curiosity, to see it from Laura Lou’s point of view, which doubtless was exactly that of his grandmother. But every word nauseated him, and his sense of irony was blunted by the fact that the grotesque phrases were applied to a being whom he loved and admired. He threw the paper down contemptuously. “I suppose I could make a good living myself writing that kind of thing . . . .”
Laura Lou’s face lit up responsively. “I’m sure you could, Vanny. I’ve always thought so. Bunty told me once that a good publicity writer could earn every bit as much as a best seller.”
He laughed. “Pity I didn’t choose that line, isn’t it? Since I don’t look much like being a best seller, anyhow.”
She scented the sarcasm and drew back into herself, as her way was when he stung her with something unanswerable. Vance picked up the paper, tore it in bits, and walked away majestically to his desk. These women —! . . . Of course his work had been going badly of late — how could it be otherwise, with the endless interruptions and worries he was subjected to? A man who wanted to write ought to be free and unencumbered, or else in possession of an independent income and of a wife who could keep house without his perpetual intervention. Other fellows he knew . . . The thought of the other fellows woke a sudden craving in him, that craving for change, talk, variety, a general freshening-up of the point of view, which seizes upon the creative artist after a long unbroken stretch of work. He wanted the Cocoanut Tree again, and the “Loafers’,” and a good talk with Frenside. . . . He wanted above all to get away from Laura Lou and the bungalow . . . .
“See here — I’ve got an appointment in town. I guess if I sprint for the elevated I can make it before one o’clock,” he announced abr............