“Oh, Vance, I don’t want any supper.”
“But I do—and piping hot,” he called back with a factitious gaiety, wondering that he had not guessed the place to take her to would have been a hotel with an imitation marble restaurant, and a good movie next door where she could read her own romance into the screen heroine’s.
He grimaced at the thought, and then, lighting the candle, so that the place might look as cheerful as possible, went out and walked across a stubbly field to the farm. The farmer’s wife, a big good-natured Swedish woman, received him with friendly curiosity. She’d known one or two young fellows to come down as late as December, she said, but she’d never had a honeymoon before. The idea amused her, and she started at once warming up a can of tomato soup, and offered Vance a saucepan to heat the milk for breakfast. While she warmed the soup he sat in the window of the kitchen and looked out to the sea. What a place to live in always—solitude and beauty, and that great unresting Presence calling out night and day with many voices! (“Many voices”—where’d he read that?) There, the woman said; she guessed the soup was good and hot; maybe he’d like some crackers with it? Oh, he could settle when he went away—that was all right. She even rummaged out a tin of prepared coffee, left there with some of the camp stores; he could have that too, and a couple of towels. Soap was more difficult to come by, but she decided that they could have her youngest boy’s, as he was off clamdigging for a week, and no great hand at washing anyhow. Carrying the pot of hot soup carefully, his other supplies in his pockets, Vance walked back through the twilight. …
Outside of the door he said softly: “Lou!” There was no answer, and he lifted the latch and went in. The room was dark, except for the cloudy glow through the stove-door and the unsteady candle flicker; at first he had a sense of entering on emptiness. Then he saw that Laura Lou was lying as he had left her, except that she had flung one bare arm above her head. Shading the candle he went up to the bed. Her little face, flushed with the sea wind, and tumbled over with rumpled straw-coloured hair, lay sideways in the bend of her arm. She was sound asleep, the hummingbird lashes resting darkly on her clear cheek with the hollow under it, and her breath coming as softly as if she were in her own bed at home. For the first time Vance felt a faint apprehension at what he had done, at his own inexperience as well as hers, and the uncertainty of the future. He had bound himself fast to this child, he, hardly more than a child himself in knowledge of men and in the mysterious art of getting on … and for one stricken instant he asked himself why he had done it. The misgiving just flashed through him; but it left an inward chill. With those other girls he had been tangled up with there had been no time for such conjectures; they sucked him down to them like quicksands. But now he seemed to be bending over a cool moonlit pool. …
“What shall I say,” he thought, “when she wakes?” And, at that moment her lids lifted, and her eyes looked into his. The candle slanted in his shaking hand; but Laura Lou’s face was still. “Oh, Vance … I was dreaming about you,” she said, with a little sleep-fringed smile.
About dawn he woke and got up from her side. He moved with infinite caution lest he should disturb her, drawing on his clothes and socks, and picking up his shoes to put them on outside in the porch. From the threshold he looked back. In the pale winter light she lay like a little marble image; the serenity of her attitude seemed to put the whole weight of the adventure on his shoulders, and again he thought: “Why did I do it? What can come of it?” and stood dazed before the locked mystery of his own mind. In those short hours of passion the little girl who had seemed so familiar to him had suddenly become mysterious too; closest part of himself henceforth, yet utterly remote and inexplicable; a woman with a sealed soul, but with a body that clung to his. … The misgiving which had passed in a flash the night before now fastened on him with a cold tenacity. “What do I know about her? What does she know about me?” he questioned in a terror of self-scrutiny. He looked at her again, and the startled thought: “What if she were lying there dead?” flashed through his mind. How could such a horrible idea have come to him? In an instant his wild imagination had seized on it, and he saw himself maimed, desolate, crushed—but free. Free to open that door and go out, straight back to his life of two days before, without the awful burden of responsibility he had madly shouldered. … The vision lasted but the flicker of a lid, but like lightning at night in an unknown landscape it lit up whole tracts of himself that he had never seen. The horror was so strong
