There it was at last: the sea at night, a windy March night tossing black cloud trails across the stars and shaking down their rainy glitter onto the hurried undulations of the waves. The wind was cold, but Vance did not feel it. The old affinity woke in him, the sense of some deep complementary power moving those endless surges as it swayed his listening self. He dropped down on the beach and lay there, letting the night and the sea sweep through him on the wings of the passionate gale. He felt like a speck in those vast elemental hands, yet sure of himself and his future as a seed being swept to the cleft where it belonged. And after a while he ceased to feel anything except that he was obscurely, infinitesimally a part of this great nocturnal splendour. …
At five in the morning, through dying lights and dead streets, he made his way back to Mrs. Hubbard’s. All the glory had vanished; his brain was sick with the forced inrush of reality. A last glimpse of the impossible swept through him. Halo had said: “Because I will never leave my husband for my lover …” and that meant—what else could it mean?—that she would have come to him if there had been no obstacle between them. For one moment it seemed almost enough to feel that there, out of his sight but in his soul, the great reaches of her love lay tossing and silvering. … But as he drew near his own door the ugliness of the present blotted out the vision. At the corner of Sixth Avenue a half-tipsy girl solicited him. At Mrs. Hubbard’s door, a gaunt cat shot out of the area. That was his world, his street, his house. … He knew now that he and she would never be free, either of them. She would never come to him; it was all a fading blur of unreality. … He put his key into the lock, and went upstairs with the feet of an old man.
The next day Laura Lou was in bed with one of her feverish colds. She had caught a chill the day of the “Storecraft” show, in her thin summer coat. These colds were frequent with her now, and each seemed to leave her a little weaker. Vance did not dare to send for the doctor again; he had been several times lately, and there had been no money to pay him. Vance did what he could to make her comfortable, and explained to Mrs. Hubbard—whose manner, as the weeks passed, though still oppressively ladylike, had grown more distant—the food must be carried up, milk heated, the cough mixture measured out. Then, having put a quarter into the hand of the dishevelled Swedish servant girl, who seldom understood his instructions and never carried them out, he took his way to the office.
There had been no word from Lambart & Co., the publishers who had been so confident about detaching him from Dreck and Saltzer; probably the subject of his novel had made them lukewarm. In his letter box he found a letter from his grandmother; there was no time to read it then, but the sight of her writing brought up a vision of Euphoria, of the comfortable Maplewood Avenue house, the safety and decency of home. What if he were to accept his father’s suggestion and take Laura Lou out there to live? If he took on a newspaper job, and wrote no novels or literary articles, he supposed his contracts with Dreck and Saltzer and the New Hour would lapse of themselves. He would simply go back to being the old Vance Weston again, and it would be as if the New York one had never existed. …
At the office he found neither Tarrant nor Eric Rauch. He had brought his work with him, and installed himself at his desk with the idea of going over his last chapters, and at least trying to eliminate the resemblances to The Corner Grocery. But the sight of the pages suddenly evoked the library where he had sat the night before with Halo Tarrant, and the floor on which he and she had knelt together to pick up the scattered sheets. The paper burned with her touch. He shut his eyes and pushed it aside. … Euphoria was the only way out. …
He opened his grandmother’s letter. She always wrote affectionately, and the careless freedom of her phrases would call her up to him in the flesh, with her velvety voice and heavy rambling body. The livest person he’d ever known, he thought, smiling. Then he read: “Vance, child, I’m coming to New York—be there next week with Saidie Toler …” (she always wrote of her daughters by their full names) … “I guess you’re not as surprised as I am; and I feel as if God Himself must be a little mite surprised too …” She went on to explain that, since Grandpa’s death, she had been able to give more time to spiritual things, and had been rewarded by the invitation to preach in various churches, not only at Euphoria, New Swedenborg, and Swedenville, but way beyond Chicago, at big places like Dakin and Lakeshore—only she didn’t call it preaching (he could be sure of that!) but “Meeting God”; didn’t he think that was a good phrase? Her “Meeting God” talks had been published in Spirit Life, and the paper’s circulation had gone up so much that they’d already contracted with her for another series; and suddenly she’d got an invitation from a group of intellectual people in New York, who called themselves “The Seekers”—a beautiful name, wasn’t it? It appeared they’d come across some of her talk in Spirit Life, and been so much struck that they wanted her to come over to New York for
