HE went to the bank, and found that nothing more had been heard from Welsh. There was nothing doing; even his partner was out of town. The city was empty. Vane’s first act was to send to Doctor Kérouec a sum sufficient to endow liberally and for all time all the sociétés de consommation that there were in Rennes. It did not cost much; and the money was thriftily invested by the doctor, with a most gratifying increase in the annual statistics of soup. This he quarterly reported to his young friend with as much satisfaction as if the statistics were of souls saved for heaven; but there was a note of sadness now in the old doctor’s letters which had not been noticeable before.
The city was a mass of undistinguished humanity. Vane rather liked this; and found much satisfaction in going to Coney Island and similar places where the people asserted themselves with frankness and sincerity. One’s fellow-man is always interesting, when not factitious.
But after a very few weeks of New York, he wearied of it. He could not bring himself to take so much interest in his business, now that it was so very successful. The labor did not seem to him so healthy, so satisfying as of old; it could hardly be termed his daily bread, even by a stretch of metaphor. Moreover, one’s daily bread is got for one by wholesale in America; machine-raised, by the thousand bushels, in Minnesota, and brought ready to hand for the million, like the other raw materials of life.
Vane was tired of the raw material of life—he felt a want for something that was not ground out by the wholesale. But the only finished product he had yet seen was Miss Winifred Thomas. She was a product of the city—perhaps he ought to go further afield. Wemyss had once said that people only got the means of living in New York. They went elsewhere to live.
And the young man was anxious, above all things, to live, to find in life what was earnest and genuine: not the mere means, like money, nor the makeshifts, like fashion. Vane wanted happiness, not pleasure; like most young men, he felt injured if he did not get it.
It may have been this craving for humanity that made the city unendurable to him, or it may have been the heat, which, late in September, was most intense. Whatever it was, he felt restless and uneasy in the city, and cast about him where he could best go for seclusion and fresh air. Some acquaintance suggested Cinerea Lake. It was at that time crowded with people, which would make seclusion easy; and it was a “popular summer resort,” which, he thought, would be a novelty to him, coming from Carcassonne and the monasteries of Monserrat. Moreover, Cinerea was one of the places in America which people visited solely in search of happiness.
Cinerea Lake was formerly known as Butternut Pond; it belonged to a Mr. Sabin; and the village was Sabin’s simply. But the pond is really a lake, and it lies near a spur of the Appalachian Mountains. The place had originally been marked by a farmhouse only, to which some popular preacher had betaken himself for the summer months. In an evil moment he had come back, one autumn, and written a book about the delights of the hills; the delights that he found in the hills. In the next year seven-eighths of the ladies in his parish, and their friends, had settled upon the country, in search, they too, of the delights of the hills; they occupied the farmhouses within a radius of several miles, and crocheted. The year after that had witnessed, at only a few weeks’ interval, the foundation and the completion of the Butternut Grand Hotel. And now the place was beginning to be known to that world which calls itself society, and which the rest of society calls fashionable. Little of all this was known to Vane, however. He understood that it was cool and crowded, and thither he accordingly went.
Vane had his days of self-gratulation, like another; and it was in one of them that he left town for his vacation. He felt that soon a fortune, and a large one, would be assured him. He was an independent and successful citizen of America, with all his country before him, and the chances in his favor. He had lately seen something of a friend or two also in town for the summer; and had had an occasional little dinner with John or some other man, in the club, or by the sea; Vane was sociable enough, though not gregarious, and he felt rich in acquaintances with half a dozen or so. They were most of them still in the city; and Vane felt a sense of freedom, of adventure, as he left it, which became stronger every moment as the train flew northward. But the journey was one of many hours, and it was late in the twilight of the next afternoon before he alighted at Cinerea Lake—called Cinerea by the ladies who had looked in the lexicon to christen it anew.