Vance, when he left the quay, had meant to turn homeward. He liked strolling at twilight through the Luxembourg quarter, where great doorways opened on courtyards with mouldering plaster statues, where the tall garden walls were looped with bunches of blueish ivy, and every yard of the way, behind those secretive walls, a story hung like fruit for him to gather. But he found it harder than ever to leave the Seine. Each moment, as night fell, and the lights came out, the face of the river grew more changing and mysterious. Where the current turned under the slopes of Passy a prodigal sunset flooded the brown waves with crimson and mulberry; at the point where he stood the dusky waters were already sprinkled with fluctuating lights from barges and steamboats; but toward the Louvre and Notre–Dame all was in the uncertainty of night.
Tolby and Savignac were to come that afternoon to hear him read the first chapters of his new novel: “Colossus”. After pouring out to them, the night before, his large confused vision of the book, Vance had suggested their hearing what he had already written; but he regretted it now, for in the discussion which had followed they had raised so many questions that he would have preferred not to show the first pages till he had worked over them a little longer. Besides, in the excitement of talking over his project, he had forgotten that if they came for the promised reading Halo would find out for the first time that he was at work on a new novel. Vance had not meant to keep his plan a secret from her; in such matters his action was always instinctive. His impulse was simply to talk over what he was doing with whichever listener was most likely to stimulate the dim creative process; and that listener was no longer Halo. Vance was sure that he loved her as much as ever, was as happy as ever in her company; it was not his fault or hers if the deep workings of his imagination were no longer roused by her presence.
This did not greatly trouble him; he took his stimulus where he found it, as a bee goes to the right flower. But since Halo’s outburst at Granada, when he had gone to the old Marquesa’s without her, he had felt in her a jealous vigilance which was perhaps what checked his confidences. She seemed to resent whatever excluded her from his pursuits; but though it troubled him to hurt her he could not give up the right to live his inner life in his own way, and the conflict disquieted and irritated him. Of late he had forgotten such minor problems. When he was planning a new book the turmoil of his mind was always enclosed in a great natural peace, and during those weeks of mysterious brooding he had not once thought of what Halo would think or say; but now he felt she would be hurt at his having told Tolby and Savignac of the new book before she knew of it.
His first idea was to get hold of his friends and put off the reading; but a glance at his watch showed that they must already be at the studio awaiting him. The worst of it was that they had probably told Halo what they had come for . . . “Oh, hell,” Vance groaned. He stood still on the crowded pavement, thinking impatiently: “If only I could cut it all — .” Well, why shouldn’t he? This book possessed him. What he wanted above everything was to be alone with it, and away from everybody for a day or two, till he could clear his mind and get the whole thing back into its right perspective — just to lie somewhere on a grass-bank in the sun, and think and think.
He looked up and down the quays, and then turned and signed to a taxi. “Gare de Lyon!” he called out. He felt suddenly hungry, and remembered that somebody had said you could get a first-rate meal at the Gare de Lyon. Dining at a great terminus, in the rush of arrivals and departures, would give him the illusion of escape; and the quarter was so remote that by the time he got home his friends would probably have left, and Halo have gone to bed . . . and the explanation could be deferred till the next day.
In the station restaurant a crowd of people were eating automatically in a cold glare of light. He had meant to order a good dinner, and then wander aimlessly about the streets, as he liked to do at night when ideas were churning in him. But the sight of all those travellers with their hand-luggage stacked at their feet, and something fixed and distant in their eyes, increased his desire to escape, and again he thought: “Why not?” He snatched a sandwich from the buffet, and hurried to the telegraph office to send a message to Halo; then, his conscience eased, he began to stroll from one platform to another, consulting the signboards with the names of the places for which the trains were leaving . . . Dijon . . . Lyons . . . Avignon . . . Marseilles . . . Ventimiglia . . . every name woke in him a different sonority, the deeper in proportion to the mystery. Lyons, Marseilles — the great cities — called up miles of streets lined with closely packed houses, and in every house innumerable rooms full of people, all strange and remote from him, yet all moved by the common springs of hunger, lust, ambition . . . That vision of miles and miles of unknown humanity packed together in stifling propinquity, each nucleus revolving about its own tiny orbit, with passions as intractable as those that govern heroes and overthrow kingdoms, always seized him when he entered a new city. But other names — Avignon, Ventimiglia, Spezia — sang with sweeter cadences, made him yearn for their mysterious cliffs and inlets (he pictured them all as encircled by summer seas). His geography was as vague as that of a mediaeval mapmaker; but he was sure those places must be at least as far off as Cadiz or Cordova, and he turned reluctantly from the enchanted platform.
On a signboard farther on he saw a familiar name: Fontainebleau. Though it was so near he had never been there; but he knew there was a forest there, and he felt that nothing would so fit in with his mood as to wander endlessly and alone under trees. He saw that a train was starting in ten minutes; he bought his ticket and got in.
A man in the compartment, who said he was an American painter, told Vance of an inn on the edge of the forest where he would be away from everybody — especially from the painters, his adviser ironically added. He himself was going on to Sens, where they didn’t bother you much as yet . . . Vance got out at Fontainebleau, woke up the keeper of the inn, and slept in a hard little bed the dreamless sleep of the runaway schoolboy.
The next morning he was up early, and as soon as he could coax a cup of coffee from the landlady he started off into the forest. He did not know till then that he had never before seen a forest. In America he had seen endless acres of trees; but they were saplings, the growth of yesterday. Here at last was an ancient forest, a forest with great isolated trees, their branches heavy with memory, gazing in meditative majesty down glades through which legendary cavalcades came riding. For miles he walked on under immense low~spreading beeches; then a trail through the bracken led him out on a white sandy clearing full of fantastic rocks, where birch-trees quivered delicately above cushions of purplish heather. Still farther, in another region, he came on hollows of turf brooded over by ancient oaks, on pools from which waterbirds started up crying, and grass-drives narrowing away to blue-brown distances like the background of tapestries. The forest seemed endless; it enclosed him on every side. He could not imagine anything beyond it. In its all-embracing calm his nervous perturbations ceased. Face to face with this majesty of nature, this great solitude which had stood there, never expecting him yet............