secret. That too was true. He often felt as if his own soul were a stranger inside of him, a stranger speaking a language he had never learned, or had forgotten. And there again was a good idea; the idea of the mysterious stranger within one’s self, closer than one’s bones and yet with a face and speech forever unknown to one. His heart was beating with a rush of inarticulate eloquence, words and waves of feeling struggling to fit into each other and become thought and music.
“Heavy with all the scent of summers gone
—” how would that do for the lilac? No, too heavy. He wanted to say that the mere scent of the lilac was rich enough for bees to make honey out of it; to say that lightly, whirringly, like bees humming about before they settle. And then one organ note at the close, where the box of ointment is broken, and Christ likens the Magdalen’s gesture to the perfume of holiness, the lovely fragrance it should give out, but so often does not. Scentless holiness
… there too was something to write about. How one image beckoned another! And he couldn’t stop them, often couldn’t detain them long enough to trace their lineaments before they vanished. …
He scribbled on in the stuffy untidy room, beside his tumbled bed, the flies banging against the windowpane, the bar of hot sunlight wheeling slowly across the wall, scribbled on oblivious of time and place, of his wholesome morning hunger, of the fact that he was in a strange household where his nonappearance might be inconvenient or perplexing. Words for one poem, then for the other, continued to surge up, mingling, confused and exciting, in his half-awakened brain. Sometimes he lingered on one for the sake of its own beauty, and suddenly a new poem would bud from it, as if the word had been a seed plunged into the heated atmosphere of his imagination. Disconnected, unmeaning, alluring, they strung themselves out on one bit of paper after another, till he threw down his pen and buried his rumpled head in his hands.
Through his dream he heard a knock, and started up. It was Mrs. Tracy coming in with a cup of coffee. He mustn’t mind about having slept so long, she told him at once—it was the best thing for him, after his illness and the long journey. “Sleep is the young people’s best doctor,” she said with one of her sad smiles. “But you didn’t eat much last night, and you’d better drink this coffee right off, while it’s hot. It won’t keep you from wanting your dinner by and by, I hope.” She put the tray down beside him while he stammered his excuses, and went on, in the same friendly tone, with a glance at the litter of paper at his elbow: “If you’ve got any work to get through, I guess you’ll be cooler down on the back porch than here; there’s a little breeze from the river. We always get one of these heat waves in June.”
Vance thanked her, and said he would come down at once, and she added, designating the lilac blossom in his coat: “But I see you’ve been down already, haven’t you? You’re like me—you love lilacs.”
“Then it wasn’t she who brought it,” he thought; and answered, colouring, that, yes, he thought they had the best smell of any flower he knew, but he hadn’t been down yet, and he guessed Upton must have brought the flower in while he was sleeping.
Mrs. Tracy, he thought, coloured a little too; there was a hint of surprise in her eyes. “Why, maybe he did,” she acquiesced; and slid away on her soft soles, leaving him to his belated coffee.
The day passed uneventfully. In spite of his long sleep Vance still felt the weariness of convalescence, and the excitement of his changed surroundings. Disappointment also, the feeling that he was somehow being cheated out of hoped-for experiences, oppressed his tired nerves and left him for the moment without initiative, so that after dinner he was glad to accept Mrs. Tracy’s suggestion that he should return to the back porch and stretch out in the hammock.
Upton had hurried home for dinner, the nursery where he was employed not being far away; but Laura Lou’s seat was empty. Mrs. Tracy explained that she usually returned from school for the midday meal, but that she had accepted an invitation from a friend that day, and would not be back till evening.
Upton, his shyness worn off, talked eagerly about his work; his employer was hybridizing gladioluses, he explained, and also experimenting in crosses between Japanese and European tree-peonies. All this evidently meant nothing to Mrs. Tracy, who had a stock set of questions ready (Vance perceived) for both of her children, and had learned how to interrogate Upton about his horticultural experiments, and Laura Lou about her studies, without understanding their answers, or even affecting to. She struck Vance as a woman who had lived all her life among people whose language she could not speak, and had learned to communicate with them by signs, like a deaf-mute, while ministering watchfully to their material needs.
Having settled Vance in the hammock she went off with a slatternly woman who came in from one of the next houses to help with the washing; and Vance lay in the warm shade, and dozed, or let his mind wander over his half-written poems. But whenever he tried to write poetry nowadays the same thing happened: after the first few lines, which almost wrote themselves, the inspiration died out, or rather he felt that he didn’t know what to say next—that if his mind had contained more of the stuff of experience, words would have flocked of their own accord for its expression. He supposed it must take a good deal of experience to furnish the material for even a few lines of poetry; and though he was not prepared
