But how had the process of maturing been effected? He had felt himself an alien from the moment of his return to Euphoria; there had been no retightening of loosened links, no happy boyish sense of homecoming. He could imagine that a fellow might feel that, getting back to one of those old Lorburn houses, so impregnated with memories, so thick with tangible tokens of the past; but his own recollections could only travel back through a succession of new houses, each one a little larger and with a better bathroom and a neater garage than the last, but all without any traces of accumulated living and dying: shells shed annually, almost, like a crab’s. He even felt, as he sat in the spick-and-span comfort of Mapledale Avenue, the incongruity of an old man’s presuming to die there. “Seems like there’s no past here but in the cemeteries,” he mused one day, looking pityingly at his grandfather. …
And now he was getting away from it again, getting back into an atmosphere which to him seemed charged with the dust of ages. When he had been in New York before he had hardly noticed the skyscrapers, which were merely higher than those he already knew; but on one of his last days before leaving he had gone down to Trinity Church, and slowly, wonderingly, had roamed about the graveyard, brooding over names and dates. … The idea that there had been people so near his own day who had lived and died under the same roof, and worshipped every Sunday in the same church as their forebears, appealed in an undefinable way to his craving for continuity. And when he entered the church, and read the epitaphs on the walls above the very seats where the men and women commemorated had sat, it was like feeling a heart beating through the grave wrappings of one of the mummies he had seen in the museum. The ocean and Old Trinity—those were the two gifts New York had given him. …
And now he was going back full of hope to the place which seemed to have become his spiritual home. The long cold weight of discouragement had fallen from him at the first word of the summons from The Hour. This time he knew he could make good. Never in journalism: his experience on the Free Speaker had taught him that. If his father hadn’t owned stock in the newspaper Vance knew he could never have held down even his insignificant job there. But there was nothing to regret in all that. He was going to be a writer now: a novelist. A New York review had opened its doors to him; he had only to reread the editorial letter for his brain to hum with new projects and ambitions. “A big novel—I’ll do a big novel yet,” he thought; but meanwhile he would give them all the short stories they wanted. Subjects were swarming about him, opening paragraphs writing themselves on the curtains of his sleeper. All night he lay awake in an ecstasy of invention, rocked by the rhythm of the train as if the great Atlantic rollers were sweeping him forward to his fate.
This mild November day was all jewelled with sunlight as Vance pushed his way out of the Grand Central. Grip in hand, he was starting for the rooming house where he had lodged before. He did not know where else to go; but no doubt at The Hour he would find someone to advise him. Meanwhile he would just drop his bags (they were bulging with manuscripts), and get a quick wash-up before presenting himself at the office. It was nearly ten o’clock, and he had wired announcing his visit for that day at eleven.
It was the day after Thanksgiving, and the huge station was humming with the arrivals and departures of weekend crowds. Outside, close to the curb, a row of long “rubberneck” cars was drawn up, and with an absent eye Vance watched a band of sightseers, mostly girls, scrambling into one of them. He thought he had never seen so many happy unconcerned faces: certainly the mere air of New York seemed to wake people up, make them sparkle like the light on this balmy day. Vance, always amused by thronged streets and pleasurable activities, lingered to watch; and as he stood there he saw a girl in a close-fitting blue hat spring into the car in front of him. Her movement was so light and dancing that no term less romantic could describe it. She was absorbed into a giggling group, and under the blue brim Vance caught only a glimpse of cropped straw-coloured hair and a face so translucent that the thin brown eyebrows looked dark as the velvet crescents on a butterfly. His sense of bouyant renewal seemed to find embodiment in this morning vision, and he forgot his bag, forgot The Hour, forgot even his healthy morning hunger. All he wanted was to know if there was a seat left in that car. A man in a long light ulster, a lettered band on his cap, stood near the driver’s seat, giving orders or instructions. Vance touched his arm. “See here—” The man turned, and Vance was face to face with Bunty Hayes, the former reporter of the Paul’s Landing paper.
Bunty Hayes had not changed; he was the same trim tight-featured fellow with impudent eyes and a small mouth with a childlike smile; but he had thickened a
