“That about the handkerchief always in her hand—that’s the kind of thing that gives me the pace. …” He leaned back, rumpling his hair and looking straight ahead of him into his dream. He had been reading aloud the afternoon’s work, and Halo, as her way was, sat silent, letting the impression of the reading penetrate her.
“You see, from the first day I set foot in this house I got that sense of continuity that we folks have missed out of our lives—out where I live, anyway—and it gave me the idea of a different rhythm, a different time beat: a movement without jerks and breaks, flowing down from ever so far off in the hills, bearing ships to the sea. … I don’t say one method’s better than another; only I see this is mine … for the subjects I want to do, anyhow. … And so even a handkerchief in a woman’s hand counts. …”
She nodded: “Of course.”
“And those are the things I never could have found out if you hadn’t told me.”
“Oh, yes, you would. … You were destined to. …”
“I guess I was destined to you,” he rejoined, half laughing.
She echoed the laugh; then she pushed back her chair with a sigh. “It’s late—I must be going. But you’re all right now; you’ve got all the material you need, and you know what to do with it. I’m glad to go away feeling certain of that.”
Still deep in his dream, he protested: “But you’re not going away? It’s not late, really; and there are two or three things more …”
She stood up with a gesture of negation. “Oh, you’ll have to write me about those, or drop in some day when you come to New York—”
He sat crouched over the table, his chin sunk in his locked hands, and stared up uncomprehendingly. “Write to you? What do you mean? Can’t you come back tomorrow?”
“No, nor the next day. Our holiday’s over, Vance—didn’t you know?”
“Over—why?”
“Because my husband’s arriving; I’m going back to New York to join him.”
The words fell on his excited brain like little blows from some deadly instrument. At first he hardly felt them—then his head reeled with the shock, and for a moment he found no word to say.
“But you’re all right now; I mean the book’s all right—you can see your way ahead; can’t you, Vance?”
He still looked up at her incredulously. “I can’t see anything but you.”
“Oh—” she murmured, and sat down once more, facing him across the familiar table. “Well, no wonder: we’ve looked at each other like this nearly every day for two months now. …”
Vance was not listening. He had reached the same degree of absorption which, the day he had met Laura Lou in the rubberneck car, had made it impossible to fix his attention on what she was saying. He sat looking at Halo Tarrant with a concentration as remote as possible from that April ecstasy, yet as intense. “I feel as if I’d never looked at you before,” he blundered out.
“I don’t believe you ever did!” she said. Her lips began a smile; then they became grave, and her slow colour mounted. She sat motionless, giving him back his gaze so steadfastly that hers seemed to enter into his eyes and slip down their long windings to his very soul. She dropped her lids after a while, and made a motion to rise again. “But you’ll know me now, won’t you, the next time we meet?”
He made no answer. Her banter hung in a meaningless dazzle somewhere outside of him; all his real self was within, centred in the effort of holding her image fast, of tracing it, line by line, curve by curve, with the passionate hands of memory. She who had seemed to him but a disembodied intelligence was now stealing into every vein and fibre like wine, like wind, like all the seed-bearing currents of spring. He looked at her hands, which lay folded before her on the table, and wondered what their hidden palms were like, and the dimpled recess of her inner arm at the elbow. “No, I’ve never known you,” he repeated stupidly.
“Oh, but we’ve been … but we’ve been. …” She broke off, and began again, in a more decided tone: “Your book has reached a point now when it will be all the better for you to go on with it alone. A writer oughtn’t to get too dependent on anybody’s advice. If I’ve been able to help you …”
“Oh, curse the book,” he broke in, burying his face in his hands. The tears choked in his throat and burnt his close-pressed eyeballs. He hadn’t known—why hadn’t he known?—that it would be like this. … The room grew still. He heard a fly bang against the window and drop to the sill from the shock of its own impact. Outside was the confused murmur of the summer afternoon. Presently Mrs. Tarrant moved. She walked around the table, he felt the stir of her nearness, her hand rested on his shoulder. “Vance—don’t. Remember, you’ve got your job; and you belong to it.”
He did not move lest he should lose the shock of her light touch running through him like his blood. But to himself he groaned: “It’s always the same way with you, you fool. You see only one thing at a time, and get into a frenzy about that, and nine times out of ten it’s not the real thing you’re chasing after but only something your brain has faked up.”
Mrs. Tarrant
