The Euphoria “Free Speaker” had expended its biggest head-lines on the illustrious novelist’s return, and Vance, the morning after his arrival, woke to find himself besieged by reporters, autograph~collectors, photographers, prominent citizens and organizers of lecture-tours.
He had forgotten how blinding and deafening America’s greeting to the successful can be, and his first impulse was to fly or to lie concealed; but he saw that his parents not only took the besieging of the house for granted, but would have felt there was something lacking in their son’s achievement had it not called forth this tribute. Even Grandma Scrimser — now rooted to her armchair by some paralyzing form of rheumatism — shone on him tenderly and murmured “The college’ll have to give him an honorary degree now,” as he jumped up to receive the fiftieth interviewer, or to answer the hundredth telephone call.
“You remember, darling, that summer way back, when we sat one day on the porch at Crampton, and you told me you’d had a revelation of God — a God of your own was the way you put it? A sort of something in you that stretched out and out, and upward and upward, and took in all time and all space? I remember it so well, although my words are not as beautiful as yours. At the time I was sure it meant you had a call to the ministry. But now, sitting here and reading in the papers what all the big folks say about your books, I’ve begun to wonder if it wasn’t your Genius speaking in you, and maybe spreading its wings to carry you up by another way to the One God — who is Jesus?” Her great blue eyes, paler but still so beautiful, filled with the easy tears of the old as she drew Vance down to her. And after that she advised him earnestly not to refuse to address his fellow-citizens from the platform of the new Auditorium Theatre. “They’ve got a right to see you and hear you, Vanny; they expect it. It’s something you privileged people owe to the rest of the world. And besides, it’s good business; nothing’ll make your books sell better than folks being able to see what you look like, and go home and say: ‘Vance Weston? Why, sure I know him. I heard him lecture the other day out at Euphoria. Of course I’m going to buy his new book’. It’s the human touch you see, darling.”
The human touch, artfully combined with a regard for the main chance, still ruled in Mrs. Scrimser’s world, and her fading blue eyes shone with the same blend of other-worldliness and business astuteness as when she had started on her own successful career as preacher and reformer. All the family had been brought up in the same school, without even suspecting that there might be another; and they ascribed Vance’s reluctance to be made a show of to ill~health and private anxieties.
“It’s all that woman’s doing. He’s worn to a bone, and I can hardly get him to touch his food,” Mrs. Weston grumbled to her mother; and Vance, chancing to overhear her, knew that the woman in question was Halo. He understood that his life with Halo was something to be accounted for and explained away, and that the pride the family had felt in his prospective marriage (“a Park Avenue affair”, as Mrs. Weston had boasted) increased the mortification of having to own that it had not taken place. “Some fuss about a divorce — don’t they HAVE divorce in the Eastern States, anyhow?” she enquired sardonically, as if no lack of initiative would surprise her in the original Thirteen. The explanation was certainly unsatisfactory; and sooner than have it supposed that Vance might have been thrown over, she let slip that he and the young woman were living together — “society queen and all the rest of it. Of course she won’t let him go. . .” That had not been quite satisfactory either. It had arrayed against him the weightiest section of Mapledale Avenue, and excited in the other, and more youthful, half, an unwholesome curiosity as to his private affairs, stimulated by the conviction that the family were “keeping back” something discreditable, and perhaps unmentionable; since it was obvious that two people who wanted to live together had only to legalize their caprice by a trip to Reno.
All this Vance had learned from his sister Mae during a midnight talk the day after his arrival. His eldest sister, Pearl, who was small and plain, and had inherited her mother’s sturdy common~sense, had married well and gone to live at Dakin; but Mae, who was half-pretty and half-artistic and half-educated, and had thought herself half engaged to two or three young men who had not shared her view, had remained at home and grown disillusioned and censorious. She did not understand Vance any better than the rest of the family, and he knew it; but the spirit of opposition caused her to admire in him whatever the others disapproved of, and for want of an intelligent ear he had to turn to a merely sympathetic one.
“The Auditorium’s sold out already for your reading; and I know they’re crazy to invite you to the Saturday night dinner-dance at the new Country Club. But some of the old cats want to know what this is about your living abroad with a married woman — that Mrs. Dayton Alsop, who was divorced twice before she caught old Alsop, is one of the worst ones, I guess.” Vance laughed, and said he didn’t give a damn for dinner-dances at the Country Club, and Mae, with sudden bitterness, rejoined: “I suppose there’s nothing out here you do give a damn for, as far as society goes. But of course if you don’t go they’ll say it’s because they wouldn’t ask you. . .”
The next day his grandmother seized the opportunity of Mrs. Weston’s morning marketing to ask Vance to come to her room for a talk; and after the exchange of reminiscences, always so dear to the old, she put a gentle question about his marriage. He told her that he didn’t believe he was going to get married, and seeing the pain in those eyes he could never look at with indifference, he added: “It’s all my fault; but you mustn’t let it fret you, because Halo, who’s awfully generous, understands perfectly, and agrees that the experiment has probably lasted long enough. So that’s all there is to it.”
“All?” She returned his look anxiously. “It seems to me just a beginning. A bad beginning, if you like; but so many are. That don’t mean much. I understood the trouble was she couldn’t get her divorce — the husband wouldn’t let her. Is that so?”
“Yes. But I suppose she’d have ended by going out to Reno, though the crowd she was brought up in hate that kind of thing worse than poison.”
“Hate it — why?” Mrs. Scrimser looked surprised. “Isn’t it better than going against God’s commandments?”
“Well, maybe. But they think out there in New York — Halo’s kind do — that when one of the parties has put himself or herself in the wrong, they’ve got no right to lie about it in court, and Halo would have loathed getting a divorce on the pretext that her husband had deserted her, when the truth was she’d left him because she wanted to come and live with me.”
This visibly increased Mrs. Scrimser’s perplexity, but Vance saw that her native sense of fairness made her wish to understand his side of the case.
“Well, I always say it’s a pity the young people don’t bear with each other a little longer. I don’t think they ought to rush out and get a divorce the way you’d buy a package of salts of lemon. It ain’t such a universal cure either . . . But as long as you and she had decided you couldn’t get along without each other — ”
“But now we see we can, so it don’t matter,” Vance interrupted. His grandmother gave an incredulous laugh.
“Nonsense, child — how can you tell, when you haven’t been married? All the rest’s child-play, jokes; the only test is getting married. It’s the daily wear and tear, and the knowing-it’s-got-to-be-made~to-do, that keeps people together; not making eyes at each other by the moonlight. And when there’s a child to be worried over, and looked after, and sat up nights with, and money put by for it — oh, then. . .” Mrs. Scrimser leaned back with closed eyes and a reminiscent smile. “I’d almost say it’s the worries that make married folks sacred to each other — and what do you two know of all that?”
Vance’s eyes filled. He had a vision of the day when Laura Lou’s mother had entreated him to set her daughter free, when release had shone before him like a sunrise, and he had turned from it — why? Perhaps because, as Mrs. Scrimser said, worries made married folks sacred to each other. He hadn’t known then — he didn’t now. He merely felt that, in Laura Lou’s case, the irritating friction of familiarity had made separation unthinkable, while in regard to himself and Halo, their perpetual mutual insistence on not being a burden to each other, on scrupulously respecting each other’s freedom, had somehow worn the tie thin instead of strengthening it. This was certainly the case as far as he was concerned, and Halo appeared to share his view. Splendid and generous as she had been when he had come to her with his unhappy confession, their last weeks at Oubli seemed to have made it as clear to her as to him that their experiment had reached its term. It was she who had insisted on his going to America to see his family and his publishers; she who had expressly stipulated that they should separate as old friends, but without any project of reunion. But it was useless to try to explain this to his grandmother, whose experience had been drawn from conditions so much more primitive that Halo’s fine shades of sentiment would have been unintelligible to her.
Suddenly Mrs. Scrimser laid her hand on his. “Honour bright, Van — is it another woman?”
He flushed under her gaze. “It’s a whole complex of things — it’s me as the Lord made me, I suppose: a bunch of ill-assorted odds and ends. I couldn’t make any woman happy — so what’s the use of worrying about it?”
Mrs. Scrimser put her old withered hands on his shoulders and pushed him back far enough to scrutinize his face. “You young fool, you — as if being happy was the whole story! It’s only the preface: any woman worth her salt’ll tell you that.”
He bent over and kissed her. “The trouble is, Gran, I’m not worth any woman’s salt.”
She shook her head impatiently. “Don’t you go running yourself down, either. It’s the quickest shortcut to losing your self~respect. And all your fine writing won’t help you if you haven’t got that.” She stretched out her hand for her spectacles, and took up the last number of “Zion’s Spotlight”. “I guess there’ll be an article about you in here next week. They’re sure to send somebody over to hear your talk at the Auditorium,” she called after him proudly as he left the room.
Vance walked slowly down Mapledale Avenue, and through the centre of the town to the Elkington House. The aspect of Euphoria had changed almost as much as his father’s boasts has led him to expect. The fabulous development of the Shunts motor industry, and the consequent growth of the manufacturing suburb at Crampton, had revived real estate speculation, and the creation of the new Count............