“I want to go and see the ocean,” he suddenly said aloud. He didn’t know where the words had come from, but the force of the impulse was overwhelming. Perhaps he had unconsciously recalled Frenside’s sneer: “Ever seen the ocean? Not even from Coney Island?” Well, he thought, he was going to see it now. … He put the cheque in his pocket and went out again. With that talisman on his breast he felt strong enough to conquer the world. What might it not have bought for him? Well, first of all it was going to buy him one of the greatest things in the universe. … He went round to Friendship House, found the friendly manager, and got his cheque cashed. Then he decided to leave the money in the manager’s safe; it was no use risking it in crowded trains. And he meant to take a train that very minute, and get down to the Atlantic shore before it grew dark. He didn’t know where—but he asked, and the manager said, smiling: “Why, we’ve got a camp of our own down on Long Island, not far from Rockaway. It’s pretty near empty in the middle of the week; you might as well go down there, I guess. I’ll give you a line to the man in charge—you look as if a good swim would pick you up. …” He scribbled a card. “Don’t forget to come for your money, though,” he said.
It was nearly sunset when the train reached the little station where Vance was to get out. He saw only a cluster of frame houses among scrubby sandhills, and a skyline crisscrossed by telephone and telegraph wires, like the view across the fields from Crampton. The man at the station said the camp was some way down the road. Vance followed the indication. The road, little better than a sandy trail, ran level for a bit, drifted past a colony of shacks and bathhouses, and then lifted him to a ridge of sand and left him face to face with the unknown. Before him more sandhills, sparsely tufted, sloped down imperceptibly to bare sand. The sand spread to a beach which seemed to stretch away right and left without end, and beyond the beach was another surface, an unknown element, steel gray in the cloudy twilight, and breathing and heaving, and swaying backward and forth with a shredding and rending of white yeasty masses ceaselessly torn off from that smooth immensity. Vance stood and gazed, and felt for the first time the weight of the universe upon him. Even the open sky of the plains, bending to the horizon on all sides, and traceried and buttressed, up aloft, with the great structure of the stars, seemed less huge, less immemorial, less incomprehensible to the finite mind than this expanse which rested not yet moved not, except in a rhythmic sway as regular as the march of the heavens. Vance sat down on a hillock and gazed and gazed as twilight fell; then in the last light he scrambled across the dunes to the sands, reached the stones of the beach, knelt close to that long incoming curve, and plunged his hands into it, as if in dedication.
Book IV
XVI
Halo Spear, in a world of shifting standards, had always held fast to her own values. Such and such things were worth so much! a great deal, perhaps; yet no more than so much. It was good, for instance—necessary, indeed—to have a comfortable amount of money; enough to grease the machinery of life, to prevent recurring family wrangles, or worse; but even for that there was a price not worth paying. That price was herself; her personality, as the people about her would have called it; the something which made Halo Spear and no other. Of that something, she often told herself, she would never surrender the least jot.
Looking back now, after three years, she remembered old Tom Lorburn’s perturbed face as she left the Willows with him, the day the loss of the books was discovered. She had said to herself then: “This business about the books is going to make him change his will,” and, immediately afterward: “Well, it won’t make me change my mind about Lewis.” For even if her hopes of an inheritance were gone she was not going to offset the disappointment by marrying Lewis Tarrant. She was sure she would make life unbearable to any man she married for such a reason, and Lewis was too good a fellow to be her victim. It was a pity, of course—for Cousin Tom did die within a few months, and did change his will, leaving the Willows to a distant relative who knew no more what to do with it than he had; and the blow was a bad one for Mr. and Mrs. Spear. Lorry being predestined to ruin them, they had always regarded it as Halo’s role to restore their
