She said nothing, and his words were flung back at him from the dead wall of her silence. He didn’t give a curse for her friendship! He had said that! When her friendship had been all of life to him, the breath of his nostrils, the sight of his eyes—well, and it was true nevertheless that he wanted no more of it, or rather that it had ceased to exist for him, and that henceforth she must be the world’s length away from him, or else in his arms.
“You don’t understand—I want to kiss you,” he stammered, looking at her with desperate eyes.
“That’s why I say—we can’t go on.”
“Can’t—why?”
She hesitated, and he saw that the hand resting on the back of her chair trembled a little.
“Because you don’t want to?” he burst out.
“Because I won’t take a lover while I have a husband—or while my lover has a wife,” she said precipitately.
Vance stood motionless. A moment before his thoughts had enveloped her in a million caressing touches, soul had seemed to clasp soul as body would presently embrace body, the distance between them had vanished in the hallucinating fusion of sight and touch. There had been no other world than that which the quiet room built in about them, no human beings in it but themselves. And now, abruptly thrust across the plane on which they stood, the other crowded grimacing world had pushed itself in, and between them stood Laura Lou and the sordid boarding house room, the moneylenders and the unfinished book, Mrs. Hubbard and the washing bills, and the account that Laura Lou was always running up at the druggist’s …
“And because I can’t leave my husband—any more than you can leave your wife. …”
He was not sure if it was Halo who had completed the sentence, or if it was the echo of his own thought.
Leave Laura Lou? No, of course he couldn’t. What nonsense! There was nobody else to look after her. He had chosen to have it so—and it was so. His world had closed in on him again, he was handcuffed and chained to it. He felt like a man in a railway smash who has come suddenly back to consciousness and finds himself pinned down under a dead weight. The sluggish current of reality was forcing itself once more into his veins, and he was faint with agony.
From a long way off he seemed to hear her saying: This mustn’t be the end, Vance. Someday … ?
(Oh, yes—someday!)
“I have been able to help you, haven’t I? … and I want, I do so want to go on …”
(What were women made of? He wondered.)
“You’ll promise me, won’t you?”
(Oh, he’d promise anything, if only a rescue party would come along and hoist up this dead weight off his chest. Couldn’t she see what he was suffering … ?)
“Yes, I’ll promise.”
(You had to be everlastingly promising things to women … even with your life blood running out of you, they’d make you promise. …)
“Well, goodbye.”
“Goodbye, Vance.”
He turned to go, and heard a little exclamation behind him. He looked back from the doorway and saw that she had stooped down and was gathering up the sheets of manuscript he had left scattered about the floor.
He came back, stammering: “Here … don’t you trouble … I’ll do it …” and knelt down on the floor beside her. The pages seemed innumerable; they had fluttered away on all sides, he had to reach out right and left to recover them. One had even flown over the brass fender onto the hearth. Yet in a second they were all gathered up again: there were no normal time measures in this world of fever.
She held out the pages she had put together; his hand touched hers as he took them. Then he turned away and the door shut on him. That was over.
XXXVII
Vance stood in the street and looked up into the night sky. The star-strewn darkness, though blotched with the city’s profaning flare, recalled that other sky he had looked up at from the beach, when he had crept out at dawn from his wife’s side.
The sea—he had never seen it since! Could he get to it now? he wondered. Its infinite tides seemed to be breaking over him; its sound was in his breast. The craving to stand on that beach swept over him again, vehement, uncontrollable, surging up from the depths which held the source of things. He stood staring at his vision till it mastered him. He must see the sea again, must see it this very night. One in the morning … a March morning. But he must get there somehow; get there before dawn, waylay the miracle. …
He made his way across to the Pennsylvania Station, and asked about trains. There was one just going out: he found himself in it as it began to move. The haste of getting in and the mystery of gliding out so easily into darkness and the unknown reduced his private tumult to something like peace. He recalled the same sensation, humbling yet satisfying, when he had gone out on the morning after his wedding, and felt so awed yet safe in the sight of the immensities. … The train passed on between islands of masonry and endless streets strung with lights, then through the hush of dimly glimpsed trees and pastures; it stopped at sleepy stations, pulled out again, groped on in dreamlike confusion under a black sky full of stars. At last a little station stood out dark against pallid sandhills … and Vance, alone on the platform, watched the train clank on again uncertainly, as if groping out a new trail for itself. Then he turned and began to grope for his own way. A worn-off slip of moon hung in the west, powerless against the immensity of
