“I could smell that fact as soon as I opened the front door,” he returned, his eagerness driven back on itself by her indifference. “Just let me wash my hands—” and he began to throw down on the floor a pile of linen stacked in the washbasin.
“Oh don’t, Vance—it’s the laundry, just come home,” she exclaimed, stooping to pick up the scattered garments. “And this floor’s so dirty—”
“Well, you’ve got a closet to keep things in,” he retorted, exasperated, as he always was, by her growing inertia, her way of letting their clothes lie about and accumulate in the cramped untidy room, rather than take the trouble of putting them where they belonged. But he was always ashamed of himself when he spoke to her impatiently, and to efface his retort he added, while he dried his hands: “Been out any this afternoon, old lady?”
“No.”
“Why not? A little walk would have done you good.”
“I didn’t feel like walking.”
It was their eternal daily dialogue. Why didn’t she ever feel like walking? In the early days she used to spring up the hillsides with him like a young deer—but now, day after day, she just sat in her chair, and rocked and brooded. He suspected her of thinking—not unnaturally—that in a city there was no object in going out unless you had money for shopping or the movies. She had never said so—she never complained of their lack of money; but she could not understand what else there was to do in a place like New York.
“Then you’ve stuck indoors again all day and not spoken to a human being? I hate your being always alone like that,” he said, dashing the brush irritably through his hair.
“I wasn’t alone.” She paused, and then brought out: “Not this afternoon, at least. I had a visitor.”
“A visitor? Well, that’s good.” He supposed it was one of Mrs. Hubbard’s other “guests,” though he knew that Laura Lou did not encourage their neighbourly advances, partly through shyness, partly, he suspected, through some fierce instinct of self-protection, the desire to keep him and their two lives absolutely to herself.
“Come along down. … Who was it?” he continued absently, passing his arm through hers.
She stood still. “It was Mrs. Tarrant.”
He stopped short also, in astonishment. “Mrs. Tarrant? She came to see you?”
“Yes.”
“Was the parlour empty? Could you see her there?” he questioned, evoking in a flash the strange unlikely scene, and the possibility of Mrs. Hubbard’s other ladies watchfully clustered about the unknown visitor.
“I don’t know. I sent word by the girl I was sick—and the first thing I knew she came up here.”
“Here
—Mrs. Tarrant did?” Vance stood gazing about him, as if brutally awakened to the sight of the room, its blistered faded paper with patches of a different design, their scanty possessions untidily tossed about, the slovenly intimacies of bed and washstand and night table.
“Well, why shouldn’t she? I didn’t ask her to.”
“I only meant, I should have thought you’d rather have seen her downstairs.”
Laura Lou’s lips narrowed. “I’d rather not have seen her at all.” When she spoke in that tone, between those level lips, the likeness to her mother, which had already peeped out at him now and again, suddenly took possession of her whole face. Vance looked at her attentively. It was no doubt because she had grown thinner in the last months, and lost her colour, that the resemblance affirmed itself in this startling way. Vance remembered what his grandmother had said about Mrs. Tracy’s prettiness and her pink silk flounces, when, on her bridal tour, she had visited her western relatives at Advance. He was chilled by the sense of life perpetually slipping by, and leaving its stealthy disfigurement on spirit and flesh. … What was the use of anything, with this decrepitude at the core?
“I didn’t ask her to come up,” Laura Lou repeated querulously.
“Oh, well, no matter. … What did she come for?”
“To ask us to a party.”
“A party—?”
“She wants to give you a party. She says lots of people are crazy to see you. She said I oughtn’t to keep you so shut up. … She asked me to pick an evening. …” There was a curious ring of gratified pride under the affected indifference of Laura Lou’s voice.
“Well, did you?” Vance asked ironically.
“I said she’d better see you. I said I didn’t care about parties, but I’d never kept you from going.” She paused, and added rigidly: “I told her there was no use coming here to see you because you were always out.”
Vance received this in silence. What was there to say? Mrs. Tarrant had come to invite them to a party—had delivered her invitation in that room! Did she really think parties were a panacea for such a plight as theirs? Or had she been moved by another impulse which had been checked on her lips by Laura Lou’s manifest hostility? The dreary ironic light of failure lay on everything, as it had on that far-off day at Euphoria when Vance, recovering from his fever, had poured out his bitterness in his first tale. Perhaps life would never again be bearable to him except as material for his art. In itself it seemed persistently ugly and uncontrollable, a horror one could neither escape from nor master—as if one should be forever battling in the dark with a grimacing idiot.
“See here—there’ll be nothing left to eat if we don’t go down,” he reminded his wife.
“I don’t want anything. I’m not hungry. Besides, it’s too late … you’re always too late. …”
At that he snatched up his hat and coat in sudden anger. The likeness to Mrs. Tracy was not in his wife’s face alone. “Oh, all right. Just as you like. I’m hungry, if you’re not. If dinner’s over I’ll go out and get a bite somewhere.”
“You better,” she rejoined, in the same lifeless tone; and without looking back at her he flung the door shut and ran downstairs and out of the house.
In the first chophouse that he
