The snow lay so deep outside the bungalow that Vance had had to interrupt his work (he seemed to be always interrupting it nowadays) to clear a path from the door to the lane. The shovelling of heavy masses of frozen snow put a strain on muscles relaxed by long hours at his desk, and he stood still in the glittering winter sunshine, leaning on his shovel, while the cold and the hard exercise worked like a drug in his brain.
Weeks had gone by since his last visit to New York. He had not returned there since the evening of the Beethoven concert. His talk with his friends at the Cocoanut Tree and his long evening of musical intoxication had set his imagination working, and he had come home as from an adventure in far countries, laden with treasure to be transmuted into the flesh and blood of his creations. He had often noticed how small a spark of experience or emotion sufficed to provoke these explosions of activity, and with his booty in his breast he hurried back to his solitude as impatiently as he had left it.
But though he came home full of spiritual treasure, it was without material results. He had found no way of raising money, and he knew he must have some before the end of the month. For a fortnight past the woman who came to help Laura Lou had not shown herself. She lived some distance away, and when Vance went to hunt her up she excused herself on the plea of the cold weather and the long snowy walk down the lane from the trolley terminus. But Vance knew it was because he owed her several weeks’ wages, and when she said: “I’d never have come all that way, anyhow, if it hadn’t been I was sorry for your wife,” he received the rebuke meekly, conscious that it was a way of reminding him of his debt.
With the coming of the dry cold Laura Lou seemed to revive, and for a while she and Vance managed to carry on the housekeeping between them, though the meals grew more and more sketchy, and it became clear even to Vance’s inattentive eyes that the house was badly in need of cleaning. Carrying in the bags of coal (which he now had to fetch from the end of the lane) left on the floors a trail of black dust that Laura Lou had not the strength to scrub away, and the soil was frozen so hard that Vance could no longer bury the daily refuse at the foot of the orchard, but had to let it accumulate in an overflowing barrel. All that mattered little when she began to sing again about the house; but his nerves were set on edge by the continual interruptions to his work while he was still charged with creative energy, and often, when he got back to his desk, he would sit looking blankly at the blank page, frightened by the effort he knew his brain would refuse to make.
But today, after his labour in the snow, brain and nerves were quiescent. He would have liked to put more coal on the stove and then stretch out on the broken-down divan for a long sleep. But he knew he had to get the kitchen ready for Laura Lou, and after that . . . there was always an “after” to every job, he mused impatiently. He leaned the shovel against the door, stamped the snow off his feet, and went in.
Laura Lou was not in the kitchen. The fire was unlit, and no preparations had been made for their simple breakfast. He called out her name. She did not answer; and thinking somewhat resentfully of his hard work in the snow while she slept warm between the sheets, he opened the bedroom door. She lay where he had left her; her head was turned away, facing the wall, and the blankets and his old overcoat were drawn up to her chin.
“Laura Lou!” he called again. She stirred and slowly turned to him.
“What’s the matter? Are you sick?” he exclaimed; for her face wore the same painful smile which had struck him on the day when he had found her pushing the mysterious rags into the kitchen fire.
“Time to get up?” she asked in a scarcely audible whisper.
He sat down on the bed and took her hand; it was dry and trembling. His heart began to beat with apprehension. “Do you feel as if you were too tired to get up?”
“Yes, I’m tired.”
“See here, Laura Lou — ” He slipped down on his knees, and slid his arm under her thin back. “Why is it you always feel so tired?” Her eyes, which were fixed on his, widened like a suspicious animal’s, and he drew her closer to whisper: “Is it — it isn’t because you’re going to have a baby?”
She started in his arms, and drew back a little instead of yielding to his embrace. Her tongue ran furtively over her dry lips, as if to moisten them before she spoke. “A baby —?” she echoed. Vance pressed her tighter.
“I’d — we’ll manage somehow; you’ll see! I guess it would be great, wouldn’t it? Wouldn’t you be less lonely, sweet?” he hurried on, stringing random words together to hide the confused rush of his feelings.
She drew her head back, and her free hand, slipping from under the blankets, pushed the hair off his forehead. “Poor old Vanny,” she whispered.
“Were you afraid I’d be bothered if you told me? Is that why —?” She made a faint negative motion.
“What was it then, dear? Why didn’t you tell me?”
The painful smile drew up her lip again. “It’s not that.” She looked at him with an expression so strangely, lucidly maternal, that he felt as he sometimes had when, as a little boy, he brought his perplexities to his mother. It was the first time that Laura Lou had ever seemed to stoop to him from heights of superior understanding, and he was queerly awed by the mystery of her gaze. “Not that, darling?” he echoed.
Her hand was still moving in his hair. “Wouldn’t you have liked it, dear?” he repeated.
“I might have — only I’m too tired.” Her hand dropped back to her side. It was always the same old refrain: “I’m too tired.” Yet she did not cough any longer, she ate with appetite, she had seemed lately to do her work with less fatigue.
“What makes you so tired, do you suppose?” But he felt the futility of the question. “I’ll run down to the grocer’s and call up the doctor,” he said energetically, clutching at the idea of doing something definite. But Laura Lou sat up in bed and stretched her thin arms out to him. “No, no, no — Vanny, no!”
“But why not, darling?”
“Because I’m not sick — because I don’t want him — because there’d be nothing to tell him . . .” He knew it was on her lips to add: “Because there’d be nothing to pay him with.”
“Nonsense, Laura Lou. You must see a doctor.”
“What would he say? He’d tell me to take a tonic. I’m all right, Vanny — I’ll be up and have breakfast ready in half an hour. . . . Can’t you give me till then?” she pleaded, sobbing; and full of contrition and perplexity he hurried back to the bed. “There, there, child; don’t cry . . . .”
“You’ll promise not?”
“I promise . . . .”
He left her to go and make up the kitchen fire, and get out the condensed milk and the tin of prepared coffee. Inwardly he said to himself: “As soon as she’s up I’ll go to New York and not come home till I’ve raised money enough to get back the hired woman and pay the doctor. She’s probably right; it’s nothing but worry and fatigue that’s the matter with her.” He fastened his mind on this conviction like a shipwrecked man clinging to a bit of wreckage. “She’s anaemic, that’s what she is. . . . What she needs is good food and rest, and a tonic.” The more he repeated it to himself the stronger his conviction grew. He felt instinctively that he could not get on with his work without reassurance, and yet his work must be got on with to buy the reassurance. . . . The last gleam of inner light faded from his brain as it struggled with this dilemma. For a moment a vision brushed his eyes of the long summer afternoons at the Willows, with the sound of the bees in the last wistaria flowers, and Halo Tarrant sitting silent on the other side of the green velvet table, waiting for the pages as he passed them over. . . . But he dragged his thoughts away from the picture. . . . As soon as Laura Lou was up they breakfasted together; then he hurried off to the trolley . . . .
At “Storecraft” they told him the manager was in his office, and Vance flew up in the mirror-lined lift. He had not been in the place since he had taken Laura Lou there to see his bust at the “Tomorrowists’” exhibition. In the distorted vista of his life all that seemed to be years away from him. The lift shot him out on the manager’s floor and he was shown into an office where Bunty Hayes throned before a vast desk of some rare highly polished wood. Vance was half aware of the ultramodern fittings, the sharp high lights and metallic glitter of the place; then he saw only Bunty Hayes, stout and dominant behind a shining telephone receiver and a row of electric bells.
“I want to know if you’ve got a job for me,” Vance said.
Bunty Hayes rested both his short arms on the desk.
With a stout hairy hand he turned over a paperweight two or three times, and his round mouth framed the opening bar of an inaudible whistle.
“See here — take a seat.” He leaned forward, fixing his attentive eyes on his visitor. “Fact is, I’ve been thinking we ought to start a publishing department of our own before long — if it was only to show the old fossils how literature ought to be handled. But I haven’t had time to get round to it yet. Seems as if Providence had sent you round to help me get a move on. My idea is that we might begin with a series of translations of the snappiest foreign fiction, in connection with our Foreign Fashions’ Department . . . .” He leaned forward eagerly, no longer aware of Vance except as a recipient intelligence. “Get my idea, do you? We say to the women: ‘Read that last Geed or Morant novel in our “Storecraft” Series? Well, if you want to know the way the women those fellows write about are dressed, and the scents they use, and the facial treatment they take, all you got to do is to step round to our Paris Department’ — you see my idea? Of course translations would be just a beginning; after we got on our legs we’d give ’em all the best in our own original fiction, and then I’d be glad to call on you for anything you wanted to dispose ............