Not that Vance was a “softy”; he would have been indignant at the suggestion. Holiday camping in the backwoods had not only made him familiar with a rough life in the open but given him a passionate taste for it. When America had entered the war, Euphoria, true to her slogan—“Me for the Front Row”—had also entered it with energy, and Vance, aged fifteen, had drilled, shouted, and scouted with all the other boys. Two or three times since then he had gone with his father prospecting in remote districts, in search of real estate ventures of a speculative kind, and they had lodged in the roughest of farmhouses, miles away from telephone or city water, and Vance had gloried in the discomfort and enjoyed his morning wash under the pump. But that was in the wilderness, the new country not yet captured and tamed by business enterprise; whereas Paul’s Landing was like a place that enterprise of every sort had passed by, as if all its inhabitants had slept through the whole period of industrial development which Vance Weston had been taught to regard as humanity’s supreme achievement. If Euphoria values were the right ones—and he had no others to replace them with—then the people who did not strive for them were predestined down-and-outers, as repugnant to the religion of business as the thief and the adulterer to the religion of Christianity. And here, in the very part of his immense country which represented all that western wealth strove for and western ambition dreamed of, Vance found himself in a community apparently unaware that such strivings and ambitions existed. “Seems as if they’d all slept right round the clock,” Vance thought, remembering the torpid look of the main street, its draggled awnings and horse-drawn vehicles, and beginning to feel as if the Tracy house were not an isolated phenomenon but part of some huge geological accident. “As if they’d been caught centuries ago under a landslide, and just gone on living there, like those toads they find alive inside a stone—” and on this confused analogy the young traveller fell asleep.
V
Vance slept nearly as long as he had metaphorically accused the inhabitants of Paul’s Landing of doing. When he woke he saw a pattern of rippling foliage on the ceiling of his room, and a bar of sunlight lying across the floor. The air that came in through the window was sultry with heat, and flies buzzed against the pane. Looking about him at the streaked and faded wallpaper, his clothes heaped up on a broken-down verandah chair, and the water jug with a chipped spout on the old-fashioned washstand, he felt a qualm of homesickness, and thought longingly of the spring sunsets across the fields at Crampton, and the perfume of his grandmother’s neglected lilacs. So strong was the impression that the perfume was actually in his nostrils. He raised himself on his elbow, and there, on the pillow, lay a spray of white lilac, filling the room with June.
“Well, that’s nice of them,” Vance thought, burying his face in the ivory-coloured clusters. He remembered his grandmother’s once saying, as they sat on the Crampton porch on a hot June evening: “I guess that box of ointment Mary Magdalen broke over our Lord’s feet must have been made out of lilacs,” and he had liked the fancy, and wished he knew how to make a poem out of it, rich and heavy with perfumed words. His grandmother’s random fancies often stirred his imagination in this way.
Upton, he supposed, or perhaps Mrs. Tracy, must have come in while he was asleep, and dropped the flower on his pillow because he had told them there were lilacs at Grandma Scrimser’s. “Upton most likely,” he mused. “Good little fellow—seems to have gardens on the brain.” He took another deep whiff of the flower, tumbled out of bed, filled the cracked basin with water, and plunged his head into it. After that the currents of activity reawoke, and he hurried through his washing and dressing, impatient to be down, for his watch told him it was after midday, and he was ashamed to be so late on his first morning.
His window looked out on the back of the house. Close to it were the trees which had drawn their fitful pencillings on the ceiling above his bed; and beyond was a small patch of vegetables, divided in oblongs by currant and gooseberry bushes, and fenced off from other vegetable gardens which sloped up the hillside to the irregular fringes of a wood. More trees—trees everywhere, trees taller, fuller and more heavy-branched, he thought, than those of his native prairies. Up the hillside they domed themselves in great bluish masses, one against the other, like the roofs of some mysterious city built of leaves. Vance was pleased with that fancy too, and would have liked to stop and put it into verse, as well as his grandmother’s idea about the lilacs. The rhyming faculty, long abeyant, stirred in him again under the spell of the unfamiliar scene, and the caress of the summer morning, and he forgot about his haste to leave his room, and his scruples lest breakfast should have been kept for him, and sat down at the table in the window, pulling his pen and a scrap of paper from his pocket. Since his little-boyhood his pockets had never been without scraps of paper.
“Arcane, aloof, and secret as the soul
—” He liked that, for the first line of the poem about the city built of leaves, which was of course a forest. Secret as the soul.
There were times when his own soul was like a forest, full of shadows and murmurs—arcane, aloof
—a place to lose one’s way in, a place fearsome, almost, to be
