XXI

“Where are we going? You’ll see,” Vance said with a confident laugh.

He stood with Laura Lou on the doorstep of a small gingerbread-coloured house in a rustic-looking street bordered with similar habitations. Her bare hand lay on his sleeve, and the gold band on her fourth finger seemed to catch and shoot back all the fires of the morning.

It was one of those windless December days when May is in the air, and it seems strange not to see grass springing and buds bursting. The rutty street lay golden before Vance and Laura Lou, and as they came out of the Methodist minister’s house they seemed to be walking straight into the sun.

Vance had made all his plans, but had imparted them to no one, not even to his bride. The religious ceremony, it was true, had been agreed on beforehand, as a concession to her prejudices, and to her fear of her mother. When Mrs. Tracy learned of the marriage it must appear to have been performed with proper solemnity. Not that Vance had become irreligious; but, since his elementary course in philosophy had shown him that the religion he thought he had invented was simply a sort of vague pantheism, and went back in its main lines to the dawn of metaphysics, he had lost interest in the subject, or rather in his crude vision of it. What he wanted now was to learn what others had imagined, far back in the beginnings of thought; and he could see no relation between the colossal dreams and visions amid which his mind was moving and the act of standing up before a bilious-looking man with gold teeth, in a room with a Rogers statuette on the sideboard, and repeating after him a patter of words about God and Laura Lou⁠—and having to pay five dollars for it.

Well, it was over now, and didn’t much matter anyhow; and everything to come after was still his secret. Laura Lou had not been inconveniently curious: she had behaved like a good little girl before the door opens on the Christmas tree. It was enough for her, Vance knew, to stand there looking up at him, her hand on his arm, his ring on her finger; from that moment everything she was, or wanted, was immersed and lost in himself. But his own plans had been elaborately worked out; he was in the state of lucid ecstasy when no material detail seems too insignificant to be woven into the pattern of one’s bliss.

“Come,” he said, “there’s just time to catch the train.” They hurried along the straggling streets of the little Long Island town, and reached the station as the last passengers were scrambling to their places. They found two seats at one end of the car, where they could sit, hand locked in hand, while the train slid through interminable outskirts and finally reached an open region of trees and fields. For a while neither spoke. Laura Lou, her head slightly turned toward the window, was watching the landscape slip by with a wide-eyed attention, so that Vance caught only the curve of her cheek and the light shining through the curls about her ear. There was something almost rigidly attentive in her look and attitude, as though she were a translucent vessel so brimming with happiness that she feared to move or speak lest it should overflow. The fear communicated itself to him, and as they sat there, hand in hand, he felt as if they were breathlessly watching a magic bird poised just before them, which the least sound might put to flight. “My dove,” he thought, “we’re watching my dove.⁠ ⁠…”

At length she turned and said in a whisper (as if not to frighten the dove): “Mother’ll come home soon and find the letter.”

He pressed her hand more tightly. The letter was the one she had written to tell Mrs. Tracy that she was not going to marry Bunty Hayes⁠—that she would already be married to Vance when her mother opened the letter. She had been utterly unable to find words to break the news, and Vance had had to tell her what to say. In the note he had put a hundred-dollar bill, on which was pinned a slip of paper with the words: “On account of B. Hayes’s loan.” For the idea of the thousand-dollar loan, which Bunty Hayes had made to poor Mrs. Tracy to enable her to send Laura Lou to school, was a torture to Vance. The Hour had paid two hundred dollars for “Unclaimed,” and he had instantly enclosed half the amount in Laura Lou’s letter. It was perhaps not exactly the moment to introduce the question of money; but Vance could suffer no delay. He hoped to wipe out the debt within two or three months; then the last shadow would be lifted from his happiness. Meanwhile it had tranquillized him to do what he could.

“Oh, look⁠—the sea!” cried Laura Lou; and there it was, beyond scrub oak and sandhills, a distant flash of light under a still sky without clouds. Vance’s heart swelled; but he turned his eyes back to Laura Lou, and said, with seeming indifference: “That’s nothing.⁠ ⁠…”

The gleam vanished; the train jogged on again between trees and fields. Houses cropped up, singly, then in groups, then in streets; the train slowed down by rural platforms, people got in and out. An hour later, as the usual clanking and jarring announced another halt, Vance said: “Here!” He reached for their joint suitcase, took Laura Lou by the arm, and pushed her excitedly toward the door. A minute later they were standing on a shabby platform, while the train swung off again and left them alone in a world of shanties and sandhills. “We’ll have to walk,” Vance explained, picking up the suitcase, which seemed to him to weigh no more than a feather. As soon as they had left the station every rut of the road, every tussock of grass and hunched-up scrub oak cowering down against the wind, started up familiarly before him. If he lived to be a thousand, he thought, he would never forget an inch of that road.

Laura Lou seemed to have cast aside her apprehensions. She swung along beside him, saying now and then: “Where are we going?” and laughing contentedly at his joyous: “You’ll see.” There was no sense of winter in the air; but as they advanced a breath of salt and seaweed made their faces tingle, and Vance, drawn by it, started into a run. “There’s not a minute to lose!” he called back; and Laura Lou raced after him, stumbling on her high heels among the sandy ruts. They scrambled on, speechless with haste, drunk with sun and air and their own hearts; and presently he dragged her up the last hillock, and there lay the ocean. He had sworn to himself that one day he would come back and see it with the girl he loved; but he had not known that the girl would be Laura Lou. He felt a little awed to think that the hand of Destiny had been on his shoulder even then; and as he gazed at the heaving silver reaches he wondered if they had known all the while where he was going, and if now they saw the path that lay ahead.

When, three years earlier, he had come down in summer to that same beach, lonely, half starved, dazed with discouragement, fevered from overwork, the sea had been a gray tumult under a sunless sky; now, on this December day, it flashed with summer fires. “Like my life,” he thought, putting out his arm to draw Laura Lou to the ridge on which he sat. “There,” he said, his cheek on hers, “there’s where our bird’s mother was born.”

Her bewildered eyes turned to him under their hummingbird lashes. “Our bird’s mother?”

“Venus, darling. Didn’t you know the dove belonged to Venus? Didn’t you know Venus was our goddess, and that she was born out of the waves, and came up all over foam? And that you look so like her that I feel as if you’d just been blown in on one of those silver streamers, and they might pull you back any minute if I didn’t hold tight onto you?” He suited the act to the words with a vehemence that made her laugh out in rosy confusion: “Vance, I never did hear such things as you make up about people.”

He laughed back and held her fast; but already his thoughts had wandered again to the ever-heaving welter of silver. “God, I wish a big gale would blow up this very minute⁠—I’d give anything to see all those millions and millions of waves rear up and wrestle with each other.”

Laura Lou shivered. “I guess we’d be frozen if they did.”

“Why⁠—are you cold?” he wondered, remembering how, as afternoon fell, she had grown pale and shivered in the garden of the Willows.

She shook her head, nestling down against him. “No⁠—but I’m hungry, I believe.”

“Hungry? Ye gods! So am I. You bright child, how did you find out?” He caught her close again, covering with kisses her eyes and lips and her softly beating throat.

He had pitched the suitcase down at their feet, and he stooped to open it, and pulled out a greasy-looking parcel. “What about picnicking here? I’ve always wanted to have the wild waves at my wedding party.” He was unwrapping, and spreading out on the sand, beef sandwiches, slices of sausage and sticky cake, cheese, a bunch of grapes and a custard pie, all more or less mixed up with each other; and he and Laura Lou fell on them with hungry fingers. At last she declared: “Oh, Vance, we mustn’t eat any more⁠—oh, no, no, I couldn’t⁠ ⁠…” but he continued to press the food on her, and as her lips opened to morsel after morsel the returning glow whipped her cheeks to carmine. Then he dug again into the suitcase, extracted a half bottle of champagne and a corkscrew⁠—and looked about him desperately for glasses. “Oh, hell, what’ll I do? Oh, child, there’s nothing for us to drink it out of!”

Rocking with laughter, she followed the pantomime of his despair. But suddenly he sprang up, slid down the hillock, and running along the beach came back with a big empty shell. “Here⁠—our goddess sends you this! She sailed ashore in a shell, you know.” He flourished it before her, and then bade her hold it in both hands, while she laughed and laughed at his vain struggles with the corkscrew and the champagne bottle. Finally he gave up and knocked off the neck of the bottle, and the golden foam came spiring and splashing into the shell and over their hands. “Oh, Vance⁠ ⁠… oh, Vance⁠ ⁠…” She tilted her head back and put her lips to the fluted rim, and he thought he had never seen anything lovelier than the pulse beat in her throat when the wine ran down. “Ever taste anything like that?” he asked, licking his fingers; and she giggled: “No, nothing, only ginger ale,” and sat and watched while he refilled their chalice and drank from it, carefully putting his lips where hers had been. “It’s like a gale of wind and with the sun in it⁠—that’s what it’s like,” he declared. He did not confess to her that it was also his first taste of champagne; unconsciously he had already decided that part of his duty as a husband was to be older and stronger than she was, and to know more than she did about everything.

“Here’s our house,” Vance said, swinging her hand to cheer her up. He knew by her dragging step that the walk had seemed long to her. To him it had appeared, all the way from the beach to the cluster of deserted buildings they were approaching, as if the racing waves had carried him. But he forced himself to walk slowly, taking his first lesson in the duty of keeping step.

The house, a mere shanty, had a projecting porch roof which gave it a bungalow look. When Vance, bitten with the idea of spending his honeymoon by the sea, had hunted up the kindly manager at Friendship House, the latter, amazed and then diverted at the idea⁠—“Land alive⁠—in December?”⁠—had said, why yes, he didn’t know why Vance shouldn’t have the keys of the bungalow where the camp manager and his wife stayed when the camp was open. The camp had been run up near a farm, for the convenience of being in reach of milk and country produce, and he guessed the farmer’s wife would put some fuel in the bungalow, and see if the old stove would draw. They could get milk from her too, he thought, and maybe they could take their meals at the farm. She was pretty good-natured, and at that time of year she might like a little company for a change.

Once in most lives things turn out as the dreamer dreamed them. This was Vance’s day, and when he pushed open the door there was the stove, with a pile of wood and some scraps of coal ready for lighting, and a jug of milk and loaf of bread on the table. The bare boarded room, which looked like the inside of a bathhouse, was as clean as if it had been recently scoured, and the drift of sand and crinkled seaweed on the floor merely suggested that a mermaid might have done the cleaning. Vance laughed aloud for joy. “Oh, Laura Lou, isn’t it great?”

She stood on the threshold, looking shyly about her, and he turned and drew her in. The table bearing the provisions carried also a candle in a tin candlestick; and against the wall stood a sort of trestle bed with two pillows and a coarse brown blanket. Two kitchen chairs, a handful of broken crockery on a shelf, a cracked looking glass, and a pile of old baskets and cracker boxes in a corner completed the furniture. Over the bed hung a tattered calendar, of which the last page to be uncovered was dated September 15, and bore the admonition: Little Children, Love One Another.

Vance burst out laughing; then, seeing a faint tremor about Laura Lou’s lips, he said: “See here, you sit down while I get at the fire.” He began to fear their frail shanty might be too cold for her as night fell; and he dropped on his knees and set to work cramming fuel into the stove. Decidedly it was his day; the fire lit, the stovepipe drew. But as he knelt before it he felt a faint anxiety. Laura Lou sat behind him. She had not spoken since they had entered the shanty, and he wondered if she had felt a shock of disappointment. Perhaps she had expected a cosy overheated room in a New York or Philadelphia hotel, with white sheets on the bed and running water⁠—oh, God, he thought suddenly, how the hell were they going to get washed? There wasn’t a basin or pitcher, much less soap or towel. In summer, no doubt, the manager and his wife just ran down to the sea for a dip.⁠ ⁠… Vance began to be afraid to look around. At length he heard a sound behind him and felt Laura Lou’s hands on his shoulders. He turned without rising, and her face, flushed and wet with tears, hung close over him.

“Why, what is it, darling? The place too rough for you⁠—too lonely? You’re sorry we came?” he cried remorsefully.

She gave him a rainbow smile. “I’ll never be sorry where you are.”

“Well, then⁠—”

“Only I’m so tired,” she said, her voice grown as small as a child’s.

“Of course you are, sweet. Here⁠—wait till I make the bed comfortable and you can lie down.” He shook up the meagre pillows, and after she had taken off her shoes he covered her with her coat and knelt down to chafe her cold feet. She looked so small and helpless, so uncomprehending and utterly thrown on his mercy, that his passion was held in check, and he composed her on the bed with soft fraternal hands. “There⁠—the fire’ll warm the place up in no time; and while you’re resting I’ll step across to the farm and see what I can bring back for supper.”

“Oh, Vance, I don’t want any supper.”

“But I do⁠—and piping hot,” he called back with a factitious gaiety, wondering that he had not guessed the place to take her to would have been a hotel with an imitation marble restaurant, and a good movie next door where she could read her own romance into the screen heroine’s.

He grimaced at the thought, and then, lighting the candle, so that the place might look as cheerful as possible, went out and walked across a stubbly field to the farm. The farmer’s wife, a big good-natured Swedish woman, received him with friendly curiosity. She’d known one or two young fellows to come down as late as December, she said, but she’d never had a honeymoon before. The idea amused her, and she started at once warming up a can of tomato soup, and offered Vance a saucepan to heat the milk for breakfast. While she warmed the soup he sat in the window of the kitchen and looked out to the sea. What a place to live in always⁠—solitude and beauty, and that great unresting Presence calling out night and day with many voices! (“Many voices”⁠—where’d he read that?) There, the woman said; she guessed the soup was good and hot; maybe he’d like some crackers with it? Oh, he could settle when he went away⁠—that was all right. She even rummaged out a tin of prepared coffee, left there with some of the camp stores; he could have that too, and a couple of towels. Soap was more difficult to come by, but she decided that they could have her youngest boy’s, as he was off clamdigging for a week, and no great hand at washing anyhow. Carrying the pot of hot soup carefully, his other supplies in his pockets, Vance walked back through the twilight.⁠ ⁠…

Outside of the door he said softly: “Lou!” There was no answer, and he lifted the latch and went in. The room was dark, except for the cloudy glow through the stove-door and the unsteady candle flicker; at first he had a sense of entering on emptiness. Then he saw that Laura Lou was lying as he had left her, except that she had flung one bare arm above her head. Shading the candle he went up to the bed. Her little face, flushed with the sea wind, and tumbled over with rumpled straw-coloured hair, lay sideways in the bend of her arm. She was sound asleep, the hummingbird lashes resting darkly on her clear cheek with the hollow under it, and her breath coming as softly as if she were in her own bed at home. For the first time Vance felt a faint apprehension at what he had done, at his own inexperience as well as hers, and the uncertainty of the future. He had bound himself fast to this child, he, hardly more than a child himself in knowledge of men and in the mysterious art of getting on⁠ ⁠… and for one stricken instant he asked himself why he had done it. The misgiving just flashed through him; but it left an inward chill. With those other girls he had been tangled up with there had been no time for such conjectures; they sucked him down to them like quicksands. But now he seemed to be bending over a cool moonlit pool.⁠ ⁠…

“What shall I say,” he thought, “when she wakes?” And, at that moment her lids lifted, and her eyes looked into his. The candle slanted in his shaking hand; but Laura Lou’s face was still. “Oh, Vance⁠ ⁠… I was dreaming about you,” she said, with a little sleep-fringed smile.

About dawn he woke and got up from her side. He moved with infinite caution lest he should disturb her, drawing on his clothes and socks, and picking up his shoes to put them on outside in the porch. From the threshold he looked back. In the pale winter light she lay like a little marble image; the serenity of her attitude seemed to put the whole weight of the adventure on his shoulders, and again he thought: “Why did I do it? What can come of it?” and stood dazed before the locked mystery of his own mind. In those short hours of passion the little girl who had seemed so familiar to him had suddenly become mysterious too; closest part of himself henceforth, yet utterly remote and inexplicable; a woman with a sealed soul, but with a body that clung to his.⁠ ⁠… The misgiving which had passed in a flash the night before now fastened on him with a cold tenacity. “What do I know about her? What does she know about me?” he questioned in a terror of self-scrutiny. He looked at her again, and the startled thought: “What if she were lying there dead?” flashed through his mind. How could such a horrible idea have come to him? In an instant his wild imagination had seized on it, and he saw himself maimed, desolate, crushed⁠—but free. Free to open that door and go out, straight back to his life of two days before, without the awful burden of responsibility he had madly shouldered.⁠ ⁠… The vision lasted but the flicker of a lid, but like lightning at night in an unknown landscape it lit up whole tracts of himself that he had never seen. The horror was so strong that he half turned back to wake her up and dispel it. The faint stir of her breast under her thin nightdress reassured him, and he unlatched the door and went out.⁠ ⁠… Instantly the horror vanished, and as he saw before him the great motionless curves of sea and sky, and thought that all the while they had been there, hushed and secret, encircling his microscopic adventure, a sense of unifying power took possession of him, as it used to in his boyhood. “And all the time there was that!” he thought.

He pulled on his shoes and raced down to the sea. The air was still mild, and he stood by the fringe of little waves and looked eastward at the bar of light reddening across the waters. As he stood there, all the shapes of beauty which had haunted his imagination seemed to rise from the sea and draw about him. They swept him upward into the faint dapplings of the morning sky, and he caught, as in a mystic vision, the meaning of beauty, the secret of poetry, the sense of the forces struggling in him for expression. How could he ever have been afraid⁠—afraid of Laura Lou, of fate, of himself? She was the vessel from which he had drunk this divine reassurance, this moment of union with the universe. Whatever happened, however hard and rough the road ahead, he would carry her on his heart like the little cup of his great communion.⁠ ⁠…