“Maybe you’re too busy,” Vance began.
“No, but I was expecting a fellow with a new style of bust-restrainer. Never mind; sit down.” He pushed a chair forward. His manner was curt and businesslike, but not unfriendly; and Vance felt less at ease than if he had not been met with anathemas.
“You’re on a new job,” he said tentatively.
Bunty Hayes leaned back, swung around in his swivel chair, and thrust out his legs, displaying perfectly creased trousers. He had grown stouter, and had large yellow horn spectacles and carefully varnished hair. “Why, yes,” he said. “Fact is, there’s more in it. Folks want to tour in the holidays; but they want to shop all the year round, and they all want to shop in New York. Hundred and fifty million of ’em do. Storecraft’s the answer to that. Here: seen one of our cards? We’re going to move to Fifth Avenue next year. If you want to do big, you got to see big. That’s my motto. See here, now; you live in the suburbs: well, we’re the commuter’s Providence. Supply you with everything you like, from your marketing to a picture gallery. We’re going to have an art guild next year: buy your old masters for you, and all you got to do is to drive the hooks into your parlour wall and invite the neighbours.”
Vance had not seated himself. He drew out the money and laid it on the desk. “Here’s what we owe you,” he said.
“Oh, hell—” said Hayes. The two men faced each other uneasily. At length Hayes nodded and said: “A’right,” and put his hand out toward the money. “Who’ll I make the receipt out to?” he asked, evidently not knowing what to say next. Vance said to Mrs. Tracy, and stood with his hands in his pockets leaning against the door. Hayes wrote the receipt rapidly, blotted and handed it to Vance. “Well, that’s over,” he remarked with an attempt at ease. Vance put the paper in his pocket. As he was turning to go Hayes stood up, and began, in an embarrassed voice: “See here—”
“Yes?”
“I—your wife was sick when I called the other day. I was real sorry. Wish you’d tell her.”
“Sure,” said Vance, nodding and swinging out of the door. On the stairs, it came over him that he had behaved like an oaf, and he was half minded to turn back and tell Hayes—Tell him what? He didn’t know. But he vaguely felt there was a score between them which the money, after all, hadn’t wiped out. …
He had never yet spoken to Laura Lou about Hayes. On his return that evening, when he went to her room, he made up his mind to do so. The room looked pleasant. There was a fire in the stove and a bunch of spring flowers on the table. Laura Lou’s bed was neatly made, and she lay on the old steamer chair which he had brought up from the porch. Mrs. Tracy was below, preparing supper, and the house, sometimes so dreary and repellent to him, seemed peaceful and homelike. Laura Lou’s face lit up at his entrance. “Here—I brought you these. They’re good and juicy,” he said, pulling a couple of oranges out of his overcoat pockets. He bent to kiss her, and she pressed her cheek against his. “Oh, they’re beauties, Vanney; but you oughtn’t to have spent all that money.”
He sat down beside her, laughed, and said: “I’ve spent a lot more; I’ve paid off what was owing to Hayes.”
She flushed a tender rose colour. “Oh, Vanny! The whole of it? Isn’t that great?” Her hands tightened in his. “Mother’ll be crazy glad. But it’s such a lot of money; how in the world did you manage?”
“Oh I … I fixed it up. It was easy enough. I got an advance.”
The vague answer seemed to satisfy her, and she rested her head against his shoulder and stroked the oranges with her free hand. “Well, that’s just great. I guess they must think the world of you at the office,” she said placidly.
Vance held her to him. After a pause he said: “I always felt sorry for the fellow, somehow.”
Through her deep lashes she looked up, as though wondering a little. “Well, you don’t have to any longer, do you?”
Vance felt as if she had moved away from him; but in reality her light body was pressed more closely to his. “Why, I don’t know,” he said, “I guess we didn’t act any too square to him, apart from the money. I wish now we’d given him warning … or something …”
She gave a little wriggle of contentment. “Well, yes, I wish we had too; but I guess it was safer, the way we did it.” For her, at least, the old score had been completely wiped out. He wondered, as he clasped her, if anyone would ever feel about the deep invisible things as he did.
To stifle conjecture he bent down and kissed her lids shut, one after the other. That funny lonely woman in the big house, who had imagined he was unhappily married … !
Next morning the expressman deposited at the door a big basket with the “Storecraft” label, full of perfumed grapefruit and polished mandarins and boxes of Californian delicacies.
XXVIII
Vance stopped short. It was three years since he had seen the Willows.
June sunlight lay on the weed-grown lawn. Turrets and balconies showed in uncertain glimpses through layer on layer of overlapping lilac fringes. A breath of sweetness, which would have been imperceptible but for the million of calyxes exhaling it, enveloped the old house as faintly but
