It was all as queer and telescopic as things piled up in a nightmare. Yesterday morning this house had been his home and Laura Lou’s—now it was shut, empty, unrelated to them. That phase of its existence and theirs was over. … His eye lit casually on the suitcase, and he recognized it as the one which had accompanied him and Laura Lou on their honeymoon. He sat down beside it on the floor of the porch, and recalled how he had unpacked it on the beach on their wedding day and pulled out their sticky oozing wedding breakfast. And how Laura Lou had had her first taste of champagne out of a seashell! And it had been his first taste, too—only he had got out of the way remembering that. …
His eyes filled, and he was overcome by the sudden boyish craving to see something belonging to her and touch it. It seemed to him now that he and she had really parted long ago; that the laughing child who had helped him to unpack the lunch from that suitcase had for months past been farther from him than there were miles between Paul’s Landing and California. He had not meant it to be so; had not been aware that it was so—but now it came over him that perhaps, for Laura Lou, the knot had long since been untied, that the anonymous letter had been a pretext long waited for, perhaps provoked. At the thought, the physical sense of her stole back on him; it was clinging and potent, like the perfume of a garden in June. Vance bent over the suitcase, and hardly knowing what he did, pushed open the lock and lifted the lid. Her poor little possessions had been crammed in carelessly and in haste, and on top, flattened out and disjointed, lay the old stuffed dove from the gilt basket he had sent to her mother.
The sight caught him by the throat. He knelt for a long time, clutching the limp moth-eaten bird in both hands. He had not thought of the dove for ages—but he remembered now having noticed that she had fastened it by a wire above the little looking glass on her chest of drawers. It had hung there, a little crooked, with one wing limp, ever since they had come back from their honeymoon.
He had hardly noticed it; but she had remembered, in the haste and grief of her going, to unfasten it from its perch and cram it into her bursting suitcase. “But if she feels like that, why is she going?” The thought rushed through him like a burst of warm rain in spring, softening, vivifying. He was afraid of nothing now, with the old stuffed dove in his hand! He stood up, pressing it to him, as the wheels of Dixon’s carryall halted before the gate.
Book VI
XXXII
“Under a waning moon the little fleet stood out from Pondicherry …”
Vance sat lost in his vision. The phrase had murmured in his brain all day. Pondicherry—where was it? He didn’t even know. Memories of the movies furnished the vague exoticism of the scene: clustered palms, arcaded houses, dusky women with baskets of tropical fruit. But lower than this surface picture, of which the cinema had robbed him, the true Pondicherry—his—hung before him like a mirage, remote, rare and undefiled. … Pondicherry! What a name! Its magic syllables concealed the subject of his new tale, as flower petals curve over the budding fruit. … He saw a harbour lit by a heavy red moon, the dusty cobblestones of the quay, a low blue-white house with a terrace over the water. …
“Vance Weston—wake up, for the Lord’s sake! Don’t look as if you were trying to listen in at a gas pump. …”
He roused himself to the fact that he was in Rebecca Stram’s studio, perched on a shaky platform, and leaning sideways in the attitude the sculptress had imposed on him. … “I must have been asleep. …” he mumbled.
The studio was an attic, self-consciously naked and untidy. Somebody had started to paint maps of the four quarters of the globe on the bare walls, but had got bored after Africa, and the fourth quarter was replaced by a gigantic Cubist conundrum which looked like a railway junction after a collision between excursion trains but was cryptically labelled: “Tea and Toast for One.”
A large black stove stood out from one wall, and about it were gathered, that December afternoon, a group of young men as self-consciously shabby as the room. The only exception was Eric Rauch, whose dapperness of dress seemed proof against Bohemian influences, and who smoked cigarettes undauntedly among a scornful cluster of pipes. He, and everybody else, knew that he was there only on sufferance, because he was one of the New Hour fellows, and might come in useful any day, and because Vance Weston, the literary hero of the hour, belonged—worse luck!—to the New Hour. Eric Rauch, in spite of his little volume of esoteric poetry, was regarded as a Philistine by the group about Rebecca’s stove, the fellows who wrote for the newest literary reviews and the latest experimental theatres. But they knew it was all in the day’s work for Rebecca to portray the last successful novelist, and as poor Weston was owned by the New Hour, they had to suffer Rauch as his bear leader.
Above the stove they were discussing This Globe, Gratz Blemer’s new novel, and Vance, roused out of his dream of Pondicherry, indolently listened. At first these literary symposia had interested and stimulated him; he felt as if he could not get enough of the cryptic wisdom distilled by these young men. But after ten or fifteen sittings to Rebecca, about whose stove they were given to congregating, he had gone the round of their wisdom, and come back still hungry.
He knew exactly, beforehand, what they were going to say
