Halo Tarrant was at work in the garden of the pink house. The seeds she had sown in the spring — phlox, zinnia, larkspur, poppy — contended in a bonfire of bloom. As she knelt over it, weeding, snipping and staking, her shoulder-blades ached and the afternoon sun burnt through her broad hat-brim and lay like burning lead on the nape of her neck.
She liked the muscular fatigue and the slight dizziness caused by the sun; liked, at the end of each long silent day, to stagger back into the empty house so stupefied by heat and labour that she hardly knew where she was, and sleep came down on her like a fit of drunkenness. In that way the days and the weeks passed, and the calendar had almost ceased to exist — except when she started up at the postman’s ring. She supposed she would never be able to cure herself of that start, or of knowing instinctively when letters were due, though she was so careful to leave her wrist-watch in her drawer upstairs.
She had heard from Vance only twice since he had left — a telegram on arriving (“Everything fine quartered with Tolby”), and about a week later a short word, in which he apologized for haste and brevity, explaining that his head was surging with new ideas, that he had settled down at Tolby’s to a long spell of work, and that she mustn’t mind if he didn’t write often. She didn’t mind at all — at first. She was too thankful to know that he had got back into the creative mood; there could be no better proof that he was rid of morbid memories of Chris Churley. But gradually, as the days passed, and the silence closed in on her, she felt herself too cruelly shut out from his adventures and experiences. Not a word of how the work was going, no acknowledgement of her letters and telegrams (all so studiously cheerful and comrade-like), no hint of regret at her not being with him, no briefest allusion to Oubli — or to herself! He had shed all that, had entered on another phase. Was it just the intoxication of the return to creative activity, of contact with new people, tapping fresh sources of admiration (there were times when he liked that more than he was willing to acknowledge), or was it — was it a new woman?
She remembered her agony of jealousy in Paris, when he had vanished so unaccountably for three or four days, and had then reappeared with a stack of manuscript. She was not going to let herself suffer such torture again. It had been unwarranted then, and would probably prove to be so now. From time to time he needed a change of place and people to set the creative engine going: was she still narrow-minded enough to grudge it him?
No; only the days were so long, and in his place she would have found it so easy to write a short letter now and then . . . Well, men were different. She couldn’t help jumping each time she heard the postman’s step; but she had forced herself not to count the days since the one letter had come, and really, thanks to hard work and stupefying sun, she now no longer remembered whether it was days or weeks since she had heard from him.
She paused in her work, and looked attentively at one of the flowers. How exquisitely imagined, how subtly wrought! What patient and elaborate artifice had gone to the inventing of its transient loveliness! Not so long ago she had scattered seed in little boxes, and later, dibble in hand, had moved each tiny plant to its own place. Other seeds she had sown in the beds, in even furrows, and watched the plants sprout through the light soil. Between them now, under their spreading foliage, the brown leaves of the spring bulbs were decaying and turning into mould. Season followed season in blossom and decline; the fresh leaf drooped and fell, the young face of the flower withered and grew old, the endless function unrolled its cruel symbolism unheeded by those it might have warned.
“If only it wasn’t for the caterpillars!” Halo groaned, lifting a riddled leaf against the light. She knew well enough what the caterpillars symbolized too: the mean cares, the gnawing anxieties, that crawl over the fair face of life. She stood up and stamped vindictively on a writhing green body. And then there were the seeds that failed — and the young shoots the slugs devoured . . . To the general rhythm of rise and fall the heart might have adapted itself; but the accidental ravages, snail-tracks, caterpillar slime, the disenchantment and failure . . . “I suppose I’ve been too long alone,” she mused, suddenly sick of her work and her thoughts.
Her solitude was self-imposed; for though the Pension Britannique and the little cluster of villas belonging to the pre-war colony were, as usual, closed for the summer, life was active on the farther side of the town, where the long sand beach, once so lonely, had begun to be fringed with tin-roofed “dancings”, cheap restaurants and mushroom bungalows. Halo could once have found plenty of entertainment among the literary and artistic Bohemians who were already populating this new settlement. If Vance had been there it would have amused her to swim and drink cocktails, to sun~bathe and discuss life and the arts with these boisterous friendly people who flashed by her in rattling Citro?ns or strowed the sands with naked silhouettes. But by herself it was different. Paris had cured her of artistic Bohemia, and as soon as she was alone she felt how deeply rooted in her were the old instincts of order and continuity. In Vance too they existed — had they not first drawn him to her out of the sordid confusion of his life with Laura Lou? But he was young (she had long since discarded the epithet in thinking of herself), he was impressionable and inexperienced, above all he had the artist’s inexhaustible appetite for “material”. What more natural than that he should still crave what for her had lost its savour? “If you wanted to do the same thing every day at the same hour for the rest of your life,” she told herself, “you ought to have married a teller in a bank, or a statistician who had to live within a five minutes’ walk of the British Museum, and not a live-wire novelist.” But the argument, from frequent reiteration, had lost its force. “We are what we are,” she thought, “and that’s the end of it. At least I suppose this time it’s the end. . .”
She heard a step in the path, and her heart gave a jump. It was not the postman’s hour; she needed no watch to tell her that. But it might be a telegram, or a registered letter — if he had something extra-important to tell her — or it might even . . .
She turned quickly, and the garden-scissors dropped from her hand. It was over two years since she had seen that short thick figure, always in a dark “business suit” of the same citified cut, and the blunt Socratic face with its shrewd sceptical eyes guarded by old~fashioned American pince-nez. Over two years? A life-time! George Frenside came to her out of a dead world.
“Frenny — oh, Frenny!” She ran to him with outstretched arms. The sense of her loneliness rushed over her; the words choked in her throat. Her work-roughened hands sank into her friend’s, and they stood and looked at each other.
“Well, it looks to me like the same old Halo,” said Frenside with his short laugh; and she slipped her hand through his arm and drew him up the path to the house.
She was too surprised and excited to ask him whence or how he had come. It was only afterward that she remembered, vaguely, his alluding to an unexpected holiday in Europe, and to his having been unable to notify her in advance because his plans depended on those of a friend with whom he was making a dash to the Mediterranean. “So I just jumped over from Marseilles on the chance of finding you,” she remembered his ending. She did not ask his friend’s name; her mind could not fix itself on what he was telling her. She felt only the comforting warmth of his nearness, the nearness of an old friend whose memories were so interwoven with hers that his voice and smile and turns of phrase started up countless fragments of experience, scenes of her nursery days, of her girlhood with its fervours and impatiences, and the cold gray years of marriage. Through all those phases his shrewd eyes had followed her; he was the one being who had understood her revolts and her submissions, her vain sacrifices and her final clutch at happiness. To see him sitting there in the half-darkened room, his head slanted back against the shabby armchair, his short legs stretched out before him, his everlasting cigar between his lips, was to become again the Halo of Eaglewood and New York, and to measure the distance between that eager ghost and her new self. “I wonder which is the ghostliest,” she thought, as she bent over to mix a lemon-squash for her friend.
He was waiting for her to speak, to give an account of herself; but how could she? She had not put her spiritual house in order, she hardly knew what she was feeling or whither she was drifting. Solitude had woven its magic passes about her, pouring a blessed numbness into her veins. And now, at this sudden contact with the past, every nerve awoke.
“So you’ve liked it pretty well down here?” Frenside asked, looking up at her as he took the glass.
She rallied her scattered wits. “Oh, immensely. You see, I was here in old times with father and mother, and always wanted to come back. And we had the luck to find this darling little house — don’t you think it’s a darling? Did you notice the big mulberry at the door, and the flagging around it? That was the old threshing~floor. They used to make oil here too. Wouldn’t you like to come down and see the old oil-press in the cellar?” She chattered on, smothering him in trivialities, yet knowing all the while that he would presently emerge from them as alert as ever, and as determined to have her tell him whatever he wanted to know.
“Thanks. But I’m too well off here. I don’t think I’ll go down and see the oil-press. I really came to see you.”
“Oh, ME?” She laughed. “There’s not much novelty about me.”
“I didn’t come to see a new Halo. I came to find out if the old one survived.”
“Survived what?” she said captiously.
“Why, the storm and stress.”
She gave a little laugh. “Dear Frenny, you’re incorrigibly romantic! Being happy is much simpler than people think.”
“Well, most of us have to take it on hearsay, so it’s excusable if we’re misinformed. You might give a poor devil some lights on the subject.”
She laughed again, but found no answer. Under the banter she felt his thoughts searching hers, and she was frightened, and for the first time in her life wanted to shut him out, and could not. To break the silence she said: “But at least you’ll stay till tomorrow, won’t you? I can make you very comfortable in Vance’s room.”
“I wish I could, my dear; but I’ve got to get back to Marseilles. We’re off tomorrow.”
There was another silence. Then he............