When he got back to the house, his brain reeling with joy, Mae pounced out at him with a large silver-gray envelope crested with gold.
“There! You say you won’t fill the Auditorium! And I told you myself that Mrs. Dayton Alsop was dead against you on account of — well, the things we talked about the other night. And here’s what it is to be a celebrity! She’s invited you to a supper-party after the reading — she’s invited us all. Mother says she won’t go; she’s got no clothes, to begin with. And I guess father won’t, if she don’t. But I’ve got my black lace with paillettes. You won’t be ashamed to be seen with me in that, will you, Van? I never thought I’d see the inside of the Alsop house — did you?” Her sallow worried face was rejuvenated by excitement and coquetry.
Vance stood gloomily examining the envelope. “Supper — tonight?” He thrust the invitation back into her hand. “Sorry — I can’t go. I’ve got another engagement. You’ll have to coax father to take you.”
Mae grew haggard again. “Vance! Another engagement — tonight? You can’t have! Why, the supper’s given for you; don’t you understand? Mrs. Dayton Alsop — ”
“Oh, damn Mrs. Dayton Alsop!”
His sister’s eyes filled. “I think you’re crazy, perfectly crazy . . . the supper’s GIVEN FOR YOU,” she repeated plaintively.
“I’ve told you I’m sorry. I was never told anything about this supper . . . I’ve got another engagement.”
Mae looked at him with searching insistence. “You can’t have an engagement with anybody that matters as much as Mrs. Dayton Alsop. Everybody’ll say — ”
He burst into an irritated laugh. “Let ’em say what they like! My engagement happens to matter to me more than a thousand Mrs. Alsops.”
“You say that just to show how you despise us all!” his sister reproached him.
“Put it on any ground you please. The plain fact is that an engagement’s an engagement. Write and tell her so, will you? Tell her I’m awfully sorry, but her invitation came too late.”
“But she explains that in her letter. She got the party up at the last minute because she wasn’t sure if she could get the right band. She wanted to make sure of the Dakin Blackbirds. She always wants the best of everything at her parties . . . You’ll have to write to her yourself, Vance.”
“Oh, very well.” He flung away and went up to his room. He knew that to refuse this invitation would be not only a discourtesy to Euphoria’s ruling hostess but a bitter blow to the family pride. How could he account to them for his mysterious midnight engagement? An evasion which would have passed unnoticed in a big city would be set all Euphoria buzzing. Everybody in the place would know that no other party was being given that evening; it would be assumed at once that he was going off on a drinking bout with some low associates, and the slight to his hostess and his family would be all the greater. But at that moment he could not conceive of any inducement or obligation that could have kept him from meeting Floss after the reading, and going back to the hotel with her. It was not only his irresistible longing for her that impelled him. He wanted something decisive, final, to come out of this encounter. He had reached a point in his bewildered course when the need to take a definite step, to see his future shape itself before him in whatever sense, was almost as strong as his craving for her nearness. A phrase of his grandmother’s: “Nothing counts but marriage” returned unexpectedly to his mind, and he thought: “It ought to have been Halo — but that’s not to be. And anyhow I’m not fit for her.” With Floss Delaney it would be different. Certain obscure fibres in both their natures seemed inextricably entangled. There was a dumb subterranean power in her that corresponded with his own sense of the forces by which his inventive faculty was fed. He did not think this out clearly; he merely felt that something final, irrevocable, must come out of their meeting that night. He took up his pen, and began: “My dear Mrs. Alsop — ”
Three days later, in the New York train, Vance sat trying to piece together the fragments of his adventure. Everything about it was still so confused and out of focus that he could only put his recollections together in broken bits, brooding over each, and waiting for the missing ones to fit themselves in little by little, and make a picture.
The theatre: gigantic, opening before him light and glaring as the Mouth of Hell in a medi?val fresco he and Halo had seen in a church somewhere . . . Rows and rows of faces, all suddenly individual and familiar, centered on him in their intense avidity, as if his name were written in huge letters over each of them . . . Then, as he settled his papers on the little table in front of him — in the hush following the endless rounds of applause which pulled his head forward at rhythmic intervals, like an invisible wire jerking a marionette — the sudden stir in a stage box, Mrs. Alsop’s box (that heavy over-blown figure was hers, he supposed, and at her side, slim and amber-warm, Floss standing up, looking calmly about the house while her dusky furs slipped from her. . .)
Yes, it was God’s own luck, he saw it now, that before he could get that cursed letter to Mrs. Alsop written Floss had summoned him to the telephone (ah, Mae’s face as she brought the message!) to announce peremptorily that she couldn’t meet him in the lobby after the theatre because Mrs. Alsop had invited her to the party, and she was to go to the theatre in Mrs. Alsop’s box, and young Honoré Shunts was going with them . . . and oh, PLEASE, Vance wasn’t to make a fuss, and the party wouldn’t last all night, would it, and afterward what was to prevent —? And wouldn’t he be very very sweet, and give her just one look — the very last — before he began his lecture? . . . Well, no, the party wouldn’t last all night, he supposed. . .
And now he was speaking: “Ladies and gentlemen, if anybody had told me in the old days — ” God! What a flat beginning! He didn’t pretend to be a professional speaker . . . But at last the preliminaries were over, and he found himself in the middle of “Colossus.” First he read them the fragment about the buried torso in the desert — the episode which symbolized all that was to follow . . . How attentive they were, how hushed! As usual, the wings of his imagination lifted him above mortal contingencies, and his voice soared over the outspread silence. But gradually he began to be conscious of the dense nonconductive quality of that silence, of the fact that not a word he said traversed its impenetrable medium. The men were fidgeting in their seats like children in church; the women were openly consulting their pocket-mirrors. A programme dropped from the gallery, and every head was turned to see it fall. Vance could hear his voice flagging and groping as he hurried on from fragment to fragment . . . Which was it now? Ah: the descent to the Mothers, the crux, the centre of the book. He............