Rebecca Stram, clothed to the chin in dirty linen, stepped back with screwed-up eyes, gave a dab at the clay, and sighed: “If you’d only fall in love with me I’d make a big thing out of this. …”
Vance heard her, but drew a mask of vacancy over his face. Love—falling in love! Were there any words in the language as hateful to him, or as void of meaning? His love, he thought, was like his art—something with a significance so different from the current one that when the word was spoken before him a door flew shut in his soul, closing him in with his own groping ardours. Love! Did he love Laura Lou—had he ever loved her? What other name could he give to the upwelling emotion which had flung him back in her arms when she had driven up to the door that day in Dixon’s carryall? It was over a year since then; and he did not yet understand why the passion which had shaken him that day to the roots of his being had not transformed and renewed both their lives. The mere thought that she was leaving him—and leaving him because he had unwittingly wounded, neglected her—had opened an abyss at his feet. That was what life would be to him without her: a dark pit into which he felt himself crashing headlong, like falling in an aeroplane at night. … It hadn’t taken five minutes to break up Mrs. Tracy’s plan, win back Laura Lou, and laugh away all the bogies bred of solitude and jealousy—poor child, she’d actually been jealous of him! And he had been young enough (a year ago) to imagine that one can refashion life in five minutes—remould it, as that man Fitzgerald said, nearer to the heart’s desire! … God—the vain longing of the soul of man for something different, when everything in human relations is so eternally alike, unchanging and unchangeable!
They had broken up at Paul’s Landing. Mrs. Tracy, embittered and resentful, had sold the house and gone to California with Upton. But Laura Lou had remained, reconciled, enraptured, and Vance had brought her to New York to live. … Could anything be more different, to all appearances? And yet, in a week, he had known that everything was going to be exactly the same—and that the centre and source of all the sameness were Laura Lou and her own little unchangeable self. …
“What you feel about Blemer’s book” (one of the fellows was haranguing between pipe-puffings) “is that it’s so gorgeously discontinuous, like life—” (life discontinuous? Oh, God! Vance thought.) “Not a succession of scenes fitting into each other with the damned dead logic of a picture puzzle, but a drunken orgy of unrelatedness. …”
“Not like Fynes, eh?” (Vance thought: “Last year Tristram Fynes was their idol,” and shivered a little for his own future.) “Poor old Fynes,” another of them took it up; “sounded as if he’s struck a new note because he made his people talk in the vernacular. Nothing else new about him—might have worked up his method out of Zola. Probably did.”
“Zola—who’s he?” somebody yawned.
“Oh, I dunno. The French Thackeray, I guess.”
“See here, fellows, who’s read Thackeray, anyhow?”
“Nobody since Lytton Strachey, I guess.”
“Well, anyway, This Globe is one great big book. Eh, Vance, that the way you see it?”
Vance roused himself and looked at the speaker. “Not the way I see life. Life’s continuous.”
“Gee! I guess you’re confusing life with Rebecca. Let him get down and stretch his legs a minute, Becka, or he’ll be writing books like The Corner Grocery.”
Under shelter of the general laugh Vance shifted his position and lit a cigarette. “Oh, well—” Rebecca Strain grumbled, laying down her modelling tool and taking a light from his match.
“Life continuous—continuous? Why, it’s a series of jumps in the dark. That’s Mendel’s law, anyhow,” another budding critic took up the argument.
“Gee! Who’s Mendel? Another new novelist?”
“Mendel? No. He’s the guy that invented the principle of economy of labour. That’s what Mendelism is, isn’t it?”
“Well, I’m shattered! Why, you morons, Mendel was the Victorian fellow that found out about Nature’s proceeding by jumps. He worked it out that she’s a regular kangaroo. Before that all the Darwins and people thought she planned things out beforehand, like a careful mother—or the plot of a Fynes novel.”
Fynes had become their recognized butt, and this was greeted by another laugh. Rebecca threw herself full length on the broken-springed divan, grumbling: “Well, it’s too dark to go on. When’ll you come back, Vance—tomorrow?”
Vance hesitated. Laura Lou was beginning to object to the number of sittings—beginning, he fancied, to suspect that they were a pretext; just as, under her mother’s persuasion, she had suspected that his work at the Willows was a pretext for meeting Mrs. Tarrant. Oh, hell—to give one big shake and be free! “Yes, tomorrow,” he rang out resolutely, as if Laura Lou could hear him, and resent his challenge. … When the sittings began he had begged her to accompany him to the studio. “When the Stram girl sees you she’ll do you and not me,” he had joked; and the glow of gratified vanity had flown to her cheeks. But she had gone with him, and nobody had noticed her—neither Rebecca nor any of the young men. The merely beautiful was not in demand
