Vance walked away with a conquering step. Frenside had set his blood circulating. “I believe you’ve got the stuff in you” — when a man like Frenside said it, all the depths cried out in answer. “Loot — Loot — Loot — a big American novel; that’s what I’ve got to do,” Vance sang, almost shouted to himself, as he trudged homeward in the dusk.
He had spoken the plain truth when he told Frenside that nothing mattered but his work. When that possessed him it swept away all material miseries, poverty, debt, the uncertainty of the future, the dull dissatisfactions of the present. He felt that he could go without food, money, happiness — even happiness — as long as the might within drove him along the creative way. . . . “That’s a man to talk to,” he thought, tingling with the glow of Frenside’s rude sincerity. He was dead right, too, about a thing like Instead being a sideshow, about the necessity of coming to grips with reality, with the life about him. Vance brushed aside the vision of his East Indian novel — the result of a casual glance at a captivating book called The French in India — and said to himself: “He’s right, again, when he says I ought to go into society, see more people, study — what’s the word he used? — manners. I read too much, and don’t brush up against enough people. If I’m going to write Loot I’ve got to get my store clothes out of pawn.” He laughed at the idea . . . .
His dream was cut short by the vision of Laura Lou waiting for him in the dismal bedroom of the place where they boarded. They had begun life in New York in a decent rooming house, recommended by Vance’s old friend, the manager of Friendship House. It was clean, hygienic, not too dear; in fact, would have suited them exactly if, as cold weather came on, Laura Lou’s colds had not so often prevented her going out for her meals. She tried preparing their food on an electric cooker, but the dishes she produced were unpalatable and indigestible, and the woman who kept the house objected to the mess that resulted. So they had moved to their present quarters, far over on the West Side, in a leprous brownstone survival of an earlier world. When Vance entered the greasy hall a smell of canned soup and stale coffee told him that dinner had begun. “I do wish Laura Lou would go down without waiting for me,” he thought impatiently; but she never would, and on the days when he was late, and she had to eat her food cold, she always ended up with a sick headache. He reflected with a grin, as he sprang up the stairs, that the people he was going to describe in Loot — the dress-clothes people — were at that hour still dawdling over tea and cocktails, as he and Mrs. Pulsifer had done, in that circular panelled room with the flowers and the dove-coloured armchairs, to which he had never again been admitted. . . . Dinner, in that world, was two or three hours off, down the vista of a brilliant night . . . .
In the letter rack Vance found some letters, and pocketed them without a glance. He guessed at once what they were: offers from editors and publishers tempted by the success of Instead and making proposals which, hard up as he was, he would have to refuse. Neither Tarrant nor the publishers Tarrant had imposed on him would consent to let him off his bargain, or to increase by a dollar the contracts made with him. He couldn’t see what there was “in it” for them; his indifference to his own work, once it was finished and he had turned to something else, made him underrate the prestige that Instead had conferred on the New Hour, and he ascribed to editorial obstinacy Tarrant’s natural desire to make the best of his opportunity. For another two years every line that Vance wrote was tariffed in advance and belonged to the New Hour, and then to Dreck and Saltzer. Yet write he must, without a pause, or he and Laura Lou would starve. For himself he would have preferred starvation; but for Laura Lou he must at least provide such sustenance as Mrs. Hubbard’s table offered. Mrs. Hubbard, his landlady (for obvious reasons called “Mother” by her boarders), was very particular about the character and antecedents of the guests she received; the latter understood that the social fastidiousness entailed by her being the widow of a southern colonel made it impossible for her to be equally particular as to the food she provided. “If I have to overlook a blemish I’d rather it was in the mutton than in the moràl of the ladies and gentlemen I receive in my home — in the late Colonel Hubbard’s home,” said Mrs. Hubbard, who was persuaded that “moràl,” a word she often used, was French for morals. The late colonel had been vice-consul in a French colonial port, and Mrs. Hubbard prided herself on her French.
Vance, springing upstairs, pushed open the door of the room into which he and Laura Lou and their humble possessions (including the fetish dove) were crowded. “Hullo,” he flung ahead of him gaily. “Sorry I’m late; I’ve been working out a big new idea for a novel.”
As he spoke he remembered how often of late he had given the same reason for his unpunctuality, and how slight a spark of interest it roused in her. Did she believe him, even? Very likely not. She was becoming more and more resentful of the hours he devoted to Rebecca Stram; unless, indeed, she suspected him of using the sculptress as a screen, and secretly giving his time to “that woman” — who to her was still, and perhaps always would be, Halo Tarrant. For whatever cause, he saw at a glance that she nursed a grievance, a fact confirmed by her not replying to his remark. It was always a proof of resentment in Laura Lou to ignore what he said, and meet each of his conversational attempts by a totally irrelevant reply.
“The dinner bell rang ever so long ago,” she said, rising listlessly from her rocking chair.
“I could smell that fact as soon as I opened the front door,” he returned, his eagerness driven back on itself by her indifference. “Just let me wash my hands — ” and he began to throw down on the floor a pile of linen stacked in the washbasin.
“Oh don’t, Vance — it’s the laundry, just come home,” she exclaimed, stooping to pick up the scattered garments. “And this floor’s so dirty — ”
“Well, you’ve got a closet to keep things in,” he retorted, exasperated, as he always was, by her growing inertia, her way of letting their clothes lie about and accumulate in the cramped untidy room, rather than take the trouble of putting them where they belonged. But he was always ashamed of himself when he spoke to her impatiently, and to efface his retort he added, while he dried his hands: “Been out any this afternoon, old lady?”
“No.”
“Why not? A little walk would have done you good.”
“I didn’t feel like walking.”
It was their eternal daily dialogue. Why didn’t she ever feel like walking? In the early days she used to spring up the hillsides with him like a young deer — but now, day after day, she just sat in her chair, and rocked and brooded. He suspected her of thinking — not unnaturally — that in a city there was no object in going out unless you had money for shopping or the movies. She had never said so — she never complained of their lack of money; but she could not understand what else there was to do in a place like New York.
“Then you’ve stuck indoors again all day and not spoken to a human being? I hate your being always alone like that,” he said, dashing the brush irritably through his hair.
“I wasn’t alone.” She paused, and then brought out: “Not this afternoon, at least. I had a visitor.”
“A visitor? Well, that’s good.” He supposed it was one of Mrs. Hubbard’s other “guests,” though he knew that Laura Lou did not encourage their neighbourly advances, partly through shyness, partly, he suspected, through some fierce instinct of self~protection, the desire to keep him and their two lives absolutely to herself.
“Come along down. . . . Who was it?” he continued absently, passing his arm through hers.
She stood still. “It was Mrs. Tarrant.”
He stopped short also, in astonishment. “Mrs. Tarrant? She came to see you?”
“Yes.”
“Was the parlour empty? Could you see her there?” he questioned, evoking in a flash the strange unlikely scene, and the possibility of Mrs. Hubbard’s other ladies watchfully clustered about the unknown visitor.
“I don’t know. I sent word by the girl I was sick — and the first thing I knew she came up here.”
“HERE— Mrs. Tarrant did?” Vance stood gazing about him, as if brutally awakened to the sight of the room, its blistered faded paper with patches of a different design, their scanty possessions untidily tossed about, the slovenly intimacies of bed and washstand and night table.
“Well, why shouldn’t she? I didn’t ask her to.”
“I only meant, I should have thought you’d rather have seen her downstairs.”
Laura Lou’s lips narrowed. “I’d rather not have seen her at all.” When she spoke in that tone, between those level lips, the likeness to her mother, which had already peeped out at him now and again, suddenly took possession of her whole face. Vance looked at her attentively. It was no doubt because she had grown thinner in the last months, and lost her colour, that the resemblance affirmed itself in this startling way. Vance remembered what his grandmother had said about Mrs. Tracy’s prettiness and her pink silk flounces, when, on her bridal tour, she had visited her western relatives at Advance. He was chilled by the sense of life perpetually slipping by, and leaving its stealthy disfigurement on spirit and flesh. . . . What was the use of anything, with this decrepitude at the core?
“I didn’t ask her to come up,” Laura Lou repeated querulously.
“Oh, well, no matter. . . . What did she come for?”
‘To ask us to a party.”
“A party —?”
“She wants to give you a party. She says lots of people are crazy to see you. She said I oughtn’t to keep you so shut up. . . . She asked me to pick an evening . . . .” There was a curious ring of gratified pride under the affected indifference of Laura Lou’s voice.
“Well, did you?” Vance asked ironically.
“I said she’d better see you. I said I didn’t care about parties, but I’d never kept you from going.” She paused, and added rigidly: “I told her there was no use coming here to see you because you were always out.”
Vance received this in silence. What was there to say? Mrs. Tarrant had come to invite them to a party — had delivered her invitation in that room! Did she really think parties were a panacea for such a plight as theirs? Or had she been moved by another impulse which had been checked on her lips by Laura Lou’s manifest hostility? The dreary ironic light of failure lay on everything, as it had on that far-off day at Euphoria when Vance, recovering from his fever, had poured out his bitterness in his first tale. Perhaps life would never again be bearable to him except as material for his art. In itself it seemed persistently ugly and uncontrollable, a horror one could neither escape from nor master — as if one should be forever battling in the dark with a grimacing idiot.
“See here — there’ll be nothing left to eat if we don’t go down,” he reminded his wife.
“I don’t want anything. I’m not hungry. Besides, it’s too late . . . you’re always too late . . . .”
At that he snatched up his hat and coat in sudden anger. The likeness to Mrs. Tracy was not in his wife’s face alone. “Oh, all right. Just as you like. I’m hungry, if you’re not. If dinner’s over I’ll go out and get a bite somewhere.”
“You better,” she rejoined, in the same lifeless tone; and without looking back at her he flung the door shut and ran downstairs and out of the house.
In the first chophouse that he passed he found a table, ordered sausage and potatoes, with a cup of coffee, and devoured them ravenously. He was still young enough for anger and grief to make him hungry. . . . There was no one he knew in the place, and after he had satisfied his hunger he pulled out his letters and glanced over them. As he had expected, they were all on literary business. One important publisher, who wanted his next novel, asked him to call and see if, in the course of a talk, they could not devise some plan of adjustment with Dreck and Saltzer. Though Vance had no hope of this he was encouraged by the urgency of the request. How easy it would have been, he thought, to work his way through his two remaining years of bondage if only Laura Lou had not weighed down every endeavour — if only he had been free and alone! But there was no use in going through that weary round again. He had had the chance of freeing himself and had refused it. How could a fellow tell beforehand where each act would lead, and what would be the next to grow out of it? Perhaps they were right, those chaps at Rebecca Stram’s, who said it was all a blind labyrinth, a disconnected muddle . . . .
The despair of youth overcame him. He felt a sudden loss of faith in himself, in his powers, in the intrinsic interest of things, in his capacity to drag through these next two years of poverty, drudgery, and mental hunger.
He asked the waitress if he could telephone. She said yes, and led him to the back of the room. He looked up a number and rang. . . . Suddenly he heard an answering voice, and repeated the number. “Yes,” the voice said. He stammered: “I want to speak to Mrs. Tarrant,” and the same voice, with a note of reproach, came back: “Why, Vance, don’t you know me? Yes . . . I’m here. . . . Yes, come . . . come at once . . . do.” He hung up, and turned back dizzily to the door. She was there, she was so close that he seemed to feel her light touch on his shoulder. . . . And she had been there, so near to him, all these months, and he had never once tried to see her. It seemed incredible, preposterous, the very core and centre of his folly. Why had he gone on starving when the banquet was spread and within his reach?
At the door of the Tarrants’ apartment house his morbid sensitiveness to the visible world and its implications produced in him an abrupt change of view. It was long since he had entered one of those quiet commodious buildings, where everything bespoke conditions so different from those which imprisoned him. He recalled with compunction his outburst against Laura Lou. No wonder she had resented Mrs. Tarrant’s visit — no wonder any advance from people living in ease and amenity seemed to the poor child like a deliberate condescension. Poor Laura Lou! If he could have given her a little cottage in a pleasant suburb, something of her own to be proud of and fuss over, it might have altered everything . . . As he stepped into the panelled lift and swung up to the top story he felt a gnawing anger against the unfairness of life, the cruelty of social conditions. He no longer remembered that when he had called up Mrs. Tarrant the thought of her had been a means of escape from his misery, that he had yielded to the urgent need of talking over his new book with her, and plunging once more into the healing springs of her sympathy. Now that he was on her threshold he felt only the blind desire to punish her — punish her for her tactless intrusion on his wife, for living as she lived, for being what she was, for not leaving him and Laura Lou alone to live and to be as they were doomed to, with or without her interference . . . .
The door opened on the softly lit anteroom. A maid took his hat and coat, and said: “This way;” and there she sat, by the fire in the library, alone. She wore something dark and lacy, through which her upper arms showed; and the sober book-lined room, with its shaded lamps, and a few lilylike crimson flowers in a tall jar, seemed a part of her, the necessary background to her aloof and reticent grace. Vance recalled the room in which he had left Laura Lou, and at the same moment, joined to that evocation, came the vision of this woman turning from him, with a careless pleasantry, in that other room at the Willows where he had cast his soul at her feet. . . . No, there could be no common meeting ground for him and Halo Tarrant; the conditions of life divided them too sharply. Material well-being, security from hunger and debt, made people callous and unfeeling, perhaps without any fault of their own. But he had been right in deciding not to see her again, and wrong in yielding to the impulse which had led him to her tonight.
“Vance — how glad I am!” she said, rising and holding out her two hands in the old friendly way.
He stood near the door, bound hand and foot in coils of awkwardness and resentment. “You went to see my wife today,” he began, and stopped, not knowing how to go on.
Mrs. Tarrant raised her eyebrows slightly. “Yes. It was so long since I’d had any news of either of you. I thought she was not looking well the day she lunched here . . . and I wanted to see if there was anything I could do . . . .”
“No. There’s nothing you can do.”
He felt the surprise and pain in her eyes without daring to meet them. “I’m sorry,” she rejoined simply. “But I’m glad you’ve come this evening. Sit down, won’t you, Vance? I’m all alone — Lewis is at a man’s dinner, and I thought I’d snatch a quiet evening with my books.”
Vance still hung in the middle of the wide space between the door and the fireplace. “I guess I won’t interrupt you then,” he said, still at a loss for his next phrase.
“Interrupt me? How can you say that? You know I’ve wanted a talk with you for a long time.”
“No, I didn’t know . . . I mean . . .” He broke off suddenly. “My wife wasn’t well when you called. You oughtn’t to have gone up into her room without her asking you,” he blurted out.
“Vance!”
“Can’t you see how people feel,” he continued passionately, “when somebody like you, coming out of this — ” he took in the room with a gesture of reproach, “when you come into the kind of place we have to live in, and try to pretend that there can ever be anything in common between our lives and yours?”
Mrs. Tarrant, resting one hand on the back of her chair, still gazed at him in perplexity. “Vance — I don’t understand. Did Laura Lou object to my visit?”
“She felt about it the way I do. We know you mean to be kind. But it’s no use. We don’t belong to your kind of people — never will. And it just complicates things for me if you . . .” He checked himself, conscious that he was betraying what he had meant to conceal.
“I see,” she murmured in a low voice. There was an interval of silence; then she said: “I’m sorry to have done anything stupid. You know I’m impulsive, and not used to standing on ceremony. I went to see Laura Lou because I wanted to have news of you both, and because I particularly want you to come here some evening to meet a few people who really care for your book, and would talk to you intelligently about it. You ought to see more people of that sort — give them a chance to know you and talk with you. It would stimulate you, I’m sure, and be good for your work.”
Vance felt his colour rising. It was difficult to reply in a spirit of animosity to words so simple and kindly. But the suggestion of the evening party recalled Laura Lou’s resentment.
“Thank you — but that’s no use either. Evening parties, I mean. They’re not for people like us . . . .”
She did not answer immediately; then she said: “Won’t you sit down, Vance? I hoped you’d come for a long talk . . . .”
He replied, without noticing her request: “I came to say we’re much obliged to you for thinking of us, but it’s no use your bothering — really no use.”
She moved nearer and laid her hand on his. “Vance — what’s wrong? What has happened? How can you speak to a friend of ‘bothering’ about you? If you don’t want to meet people, I won’t invite them; but that seems no reason why you and I shouldn’t talk together sometimes in the old way. Perhaps you haven’t missed our talks as much as I have — perhaps they didn’t count as much in your life as they did in mine . . . .”
She paused, and suddenly he flung up his hands and hid his face in them. “Not count — not count in my life?”
He felt her fingers gently slipped through his, drawing his hands down so that his face was uncovered to her scrutiny and his eyes were forced to look into hers. “Not count . . . not count?” He stared at her through a blur of tears.
“They did, Vance? I’m so glad. Then why try to deny it? Why shouldn’t we just go back to where we were before? I’m sure you’ve got lots to tell me about your new plans . . . .”
He snatched his hands away and hid his face again, struggling to choke back his sobs. What would she think — what would she suppose? But it was no use fighting against the surge of joy and agony that caught him and shook him like a young tree in a spring gale. He stammered out: “I’m a fool. . . . You mustn’t mind me. . . . I’ve been through hell lately. . . . Just let me sit here a little while without talking, till I get used to you again . . . .” and without a word she went back to her chair and sat there silently, the shaded lamplight on her quiet head.
It was long past midnight when he cautiously pushed open his door on Mrs. Hubbard’s third story. The light from a street lamp, shining through the shutterless window, showed him Laura Lou in bed, asleep or pretending to be; and he undressed as noiselessly as he could and lay down beside her. He was used to her ways now: he knew she would not begin questioning him till the next morning, and he lay there, his arms crossed under his head, staring up at the cracked and blotched ceiling, and reliving with feverish vividness the hours he had spent with Halo Tarrant. He did not mean to tell Laura Lou where he had been; to do so would only grieve her. Besides, she would never believe him when he told her that all those hours had been spent in talk: the absorbing, illuminating, inexhaustible exchange of confidences and ideas. Laura Lou could not imagine what anybody could have to say that would take that length of time. . . . And Vance himself could hardly believe that this woman, without whom life was so lame and incomplete a business, this woman whom he had so missed and longed for, and thought he hated, could have calmed his vehemence, cast a spell over his throbbing senses, and kept him with her, enriched and satisfied, by the mere magic of her attentive understanding . . . .
He had told her everything — tumbled out all his distresses and anxieties, the misery of his marriage, the material cares that made his work so difficult, his secret resentment of what had appeared to him her hardness and indifference when they had parted at the Willows. Nothing had been farther from his intention than to speak to her in this way: he had sought her out as the one confidante of his literary projects, had imagined that pride and loyalty forbade any personal confession. But once his reserve had broken down there rushed through the breach all the accumulated distress of the long months since he had seen her. The exquisite solace of confessing everything effaced all scruples and reserves. He was as powerless as ever to conceal his soul from her . . . and with every word he felt her understanding reaching out to him, soothing the way for what he had to tell. Instead of the resistance against which he was always instinctively arming himself, which made him involuntarily deform every phrase to fit it to a mind so different from his own that there was not one point where they dovetailed, or even touched — instead of that he felt the relief of knowing that his clumsiest word, his lamest statement, would be smoothed out, set upright, and drawn in across the threshold of a perpetually welcoming mind . . . .
And then, when he began to talk about his work (“the only thing worthwhile,” he passionately repeated) — ah, then it seemed as if they were in the library of the Willows again, in the green summer twilight, while he read and she listened, taking in his meaning with every line of lids and lips, and the quietness of that head supported statuelike on her smooth bare arm. . . . It was curious, though, how some substitution of values of which she held the secret caused this spiritual communion to bring them nearer than the embraces he had hungered for at the Willows. Or perhaps his recoil from the idea of combining physical endearments with such a communion was due to Laura Lou’s persistent suspicion. He would have to dissociate sensual passion from all that had debased and cheapened it before it could blend with his vision of this woman who had understood and pitied him. . . . Next morning, when the questioning began, Vance told his wife that he had stopped in at the “Loafers’,” and stayed late talking about his book with a lot of fellows. “And that Stram woman, I suppose?” she suggested; and he retorted, plunging his angry face into the basin: “Oh, yes, and half the vaudeville stage of New York.” Laura Lou was brushing her hair before the looking glass. He caught the reflection of the small pale oval, the reddened lids, the ripe lips crumpled up with distress, and turning to her he passed his wet hand through her hair, tumbling it forward over her eyes. “You little goose, you . . .” She caught his hand and flung herself against him. “I don’t care a single scrap, darling, as long as you didn’t go and see Mrs. Tarrant,” she whispered, her lips on his. “Oh, hell,” he laughed, jerking away from her to finish his dressing . . . .
He had given Mrs. Tarrant a rough outline of Loot, and had been troubled, for a moment, by her hesitation, her reluctance to express an opinion. She thought the subject too big for him — was that it? No, not too big . . . she had confidence in his range . . . and she agreed with Frenside that he must above all not attempt another Instead. That had been a radiant accident; it would be disastrous to try to repeat it. When he murmured: “Pondicherry,” and spoke of the vision the word evoked, she shook her head, and said: “The publishers would jump at it; but take care!” No, Frenside was right; he must try his hand now at reality, the reality that lay about him. For the novelist, fantasy was a sterile bloom, after all. Only (she wondered) was he sufficiently familiar with the kind of life he was going to describe? Vance laughed and said that Frenside had put the same question. He ought to go out more, Frenside said, rub up against New York in its various phases, especially the social ones — oh, none of your damned documentation, that corpse-dissecting, as Frenside called it — Vance must just let himself live, go about among people, let the place and the people work themselves into his pores. . . . Excellent advice, but not so easy, when a fellow . . .
Here she interrupted him, leaning forward with her drawn-up scrutinizing gaze. “Vance, what is it? What’s wrong? Why do you persist in burying yourself instead of taking advantage of your success?”
“Well, I guess it’s because I’m not used to society, for one thing . . . .”
“Don’t think of it as ‘society,’ but just as a few friendly people who admire your work and want to know you. . . . Come here and see them,” she urged; and when he confessed that he had no evening clothes she laughed, and asked if he supposed she meant to invite him to formal entertainments, and if he didn’t know that Frenside never could be coaxed out on tailcoat occasions? Later, she added, when Vance had got more used to it all, he must go to some of the big shows too — the opera, musical parties, millionaire dinners, the whole stupid round — just to see how “the other half lived”; but meanwhile all she suggested was that he should not cut himself off from the small group of the cultivated and intelligent, who might stimulate him and enlarge his point of view — not, at least, she added, if he meant to go on writing novels . . . .
Of course he agreed with her; of course he said he would come on whatever evening she named. The mere sound of her voice made the creative ardour beat in him, and when she asked him if he couldn’t soon bring her his first chapter he answered joyfully that she should have it before the end of the week . . . .
After breakfast he hurried off to Lambart & Co., the publishers whose letter he had received the previous day. In the inner office where the great Mr. Lambart himself awaited him he heard fresh praises of Instead, and the hope that he was already starting “on another just like it; it’s what your public wants of you, Mr. Weston”; and finally the crucial question: “Will you leave it to us to see if we can come to an understanding with Dreck and Saltzer? Between ourselves (and quite confidentially, of course) their financial situation isn’t sound enough to let them give their authors a chance. They can’t advertise properly, they can’t — ” Oh, yes, Vance interrupted; he knew all that. The trouble was that his contract with them was tied up with his New Hour contract . . . and he didn’t see . . .
The publisher smiled the faint secret smile of initiation. That was just it: the New Hour wasn’t in any too healthy a state either. There too there might be something to be done: negotiations . . . If Mr. Weston would simply authorize him to act . . .
Vance hardly heard the suggestion. The statement with regard to the New Hour, coming to him with a shock of surprise, suddenly recalled the look on Mrs. Tarrant’s face when, the night before, he had blurted out that he was imprisoned by his contract with her husband. She had not answered; had not spoken at all: but her eager eyes and lips seemed drawn back, immobilized, and for the only time in their talk he felt between them an impenetrable barrier. . . . It was that, then! She knew the review was in a bad way, but pride, or perhaps loyalty to her husband, forbade her to admit it. She had merely said, after a moment: “The two years that are left will soon be over; then you’ll be free . . .” with a smile which seemed half ironic and half sympathizing. And they had passed on to other matters.
Yes, Vance said, rousing himself to answer Mr. Lambart, yes, of course he would authorize any attempt to buy him off . . . only, he added, Tarrant was a queer-tempered fellow . . . you never knew . . . The publisher’s smile flicked Tarrant away like a straw. “Gifted amateur . . . They can’t edit reviews . . .” He promised to let Vance know the result as soon as possible. “And now about the next novel,” he said, a ring of possessorship in his voice. The terms proposed (a third in advance, if Mr. Weston chose) made Vance’s blood drum in his ears; but there was a change of tone when he began to outline Loot. A big novel of modern New York? What — ANOTHER? Tempting subject, yes — tremendous canvas — but there’d been so many of them! The public was fed up with skyscrapers and niggers and bootleggers and actresses. Fed up equally with Harlem and with the opera, with Greenwich Village and the plutocrats. What they wanted was something refined — something to appeal to the heart. Couldn’t Mr. Weston see that by the way his own book had been received? Why not follow up the success of Instead by another novel just like it? The quaintness of the story — so to speak — had taken everybody’s fancy. Why not leave the New York show to fellows like Fynes, and the new man Gratz Blemer, who couldn’t either of them do anything else, didn’t even suspect there was anything else to do? This Gratz Blemer: taking three hundred thousand words to tell the story of a streetwalker and a bootblack, and then calling it This Globe! Why, you could get round the real globe nowadays a good deal quicker than you could dig your way through that book! No, no, the publisher said — if Mr. Weston would just listen to HIM, and rely on his long experience . . . Well, would he think it over, anyhow? A book just like Instead, only about forty thousand words longer. If Instead had a blemish, it was being what the dry-goods stores called an “outsize”; the public did like to get what they were used to. . . . And if a novelist had had the luck to hit on something new that they took a shine to, it was sheer suicide not to give them more of it . . . .
It was an odd sensation for Vance, after so many months of seclusion, to find himself again in the harmonious setting of the Tarrants’ library, with friendly faces pressing about him and adulation filling the air like a shower of perfumed petals. . . . There were fewer people than at his former party at Mrs. Tarrant’s; there was no Mrs. Pulsifer, there were no ladies in gold brocade to startle and captivate. The men were mostly in day clothes, the few women in simple half-transparent dresses such as Mrs. Tarrant had worn that other evening when he had called her up and found her alone over the fire. Those women dressed like that when they were sitting at home alone in the evening! The fact impressed Vance more than all Mrs. Pulsifer’s brocades and jewels — made the distance seem greater between the world of Mrs. Hubbard’s third story and that in which a sort of quiet beauty and order were an accepted part of life.
Vance had tried to induce Laura Lou to come with him, but had not been altogether sorry when he failed. He had not forgotten their disastrous lunch at the Tarrants’, and he told himself that he hated to see his wife at a disadvantage among people who seemed blind to her beauty, and conscious only of her lack of small talk. But in fact it was only in her absence that he was really himself. Every situation in which she figured instantly became full of pitfalls. The Vance Weston who was her husband was a nervous, self~conscious, and sometimes defiant young man, whereas the other, the real one, was disposed to take things easily, to meet people halfway, and to forget himself completely in the pursuit of any subject that interested him. And here at the Tarrants’, as always, the air was full of such subjects, and of a cordiality which instantly broke down his lingering resentments. He felt this even in Tarrant’s handshake on the threshold. Tarrant, at the office, was an enigma to Vance. What he had heard of the difficulties of the New Hour had prepared him to find them reflected in his host’s manner; but apparently among these people business concerns were left behind after business hours, and Tarrant had never been so friendly and fraternal. He detained Vance for a few moments in talk about the new book (“my wife tells me it’s really on the stocks”), and then effaced himself, declaring: “But it’s the author of Instead that people want to see; come along to my wife, and she’ll introduce you.”
Halo, at the farther end of the library, was talking to a short, heavily built young man with a head cropped like a German Bursche, whom she introduced as Gratz Blemer. Blemer was blunt but affable. “I guess we can’t read each other — anyway, you’ll never flounder through a morass like my last book — but I’m glad of the chance of a talk. Writing’s always a mannerism; talk’s the only real thing, isn’t it?” He spoke with a slight German accent, oiled by Jewish gutturals, and Vance, while attracted by his good-nature and simplicity, wondered for the thousandth time why American novels were so seldom written by Americans. He would have liked to go off into a corner with Blemer and put a series of questions about his theory of his art; but other people came up. There was little O’Fallery, whose short story, “Limp Collars,” had taken the Pulsifer Prize on which Tarrant had counted for Vance; Frenside, gruffly benevolent, Rebecca Stram (who was exhibiting Vance’s bust in the clay at a show of “Tomorrowists” got up by that enterprising industry, “Storecraft”), and others, men and women, unknown to Vance, or known only by reputation, but all sounding the same note of admiring interest and intelligent comprehension . . . .
Comprehension? At the moment it seemed so; yet as the hours passed, and the opportunity came for one after another to capture the new novelist, and start a literary conversation of which he was himself the glowing centre, Vance felt, again and again, how random praise can isolate and discourage. All that made his work worthwhile, all that made the force of his vocation, was apparently invisible or incomprehensible to others. He longed to learn more about this mysterious craft, the instruments of which some passing divinity had carelessly dropped into his hands, leaving him to puzzle out their use; but the intelligent and admiring people to whom he strove to communicate his curiosities seemed unable to follow him. “Oh, you’re too modest,” one cordial critic assured him; and another: “I suppose when you start a story you don’t always know yourself how it’s going to end . . . .” Not know how it’s going to end! Then these people had never heard that footfall of Destiny which, for Vance, seemed to ring out in the first page of all the great novels, as compelling as the knock of Macbeth’s gates, as secret as the opening measures of the Fifth Symphony? Gratz Blemer, even, whom he managed to corner later in the evening, and whose book gave him so great a sense of easy power — Gratz Blemer, good-natured and evidently ready to be communicative, twisted a cigar between his thick lips, stared at the ceiling, and returned from it to say: “Novel-writing? Why, I don’t know. You have a story you want to tell, and instead of buttonholing a fellow and pouring it out — which is the only natural way — you shut yourself up and reel it off on a Remington, and send it to the publisher, so that more fellows can hear it. That’s the only difference, I guess — that and the cash returns,” he added with a well-fed chuckle.
“Yes, but — ” Vance gasped, disheartened.
“Well, what?”
“I mean, how does the thing germinate, spread itself above and below the surface? There’s something so treelike, so preordained. . . . I came across something in Blake the other day that made me think of it: ‘Man is born like a garden ready planted and sown. This world is too poor to produce one seed.’ That just hints at the mystery . . . but I can’t make it all out — can you?”
Blemer gave his jovial laugh. “Never tried to,” he said, reaching with a plump hairy hand for a passing cocktail. And after a moment he added good-naturedly: “See here, young man, don’t you go and read the Prophets and get self-conscious about your work, or you’ll take to writing fifty pages about a crack in the ceiling — and then the Cocoanut Tree’ll grovel before you, but your sales’ll go down with a rush.” No, evidently Blemer did not know how or why he wrote his novels, and could not even conceive the existence of the problems which were Vance’s passion and despair. . . . The footfall of Destiny would never keep him from his sleep . . . and yet he had written a good book.
But if Vance was disappointed by his talks with the literary lights, he was stimulated by the atmosphere at the Tarrants’, by the flattering notice of these enviable people who spoke freely and familiarly of so many things he was aching to know about, who took for granted that you had seen the last play at the Yiddish Theatre, had heard the new Stravinsky symphony, had visited the Tcheko~Slovakian painters’ show, and were eager to discuss the Tomorrowists’ coming exhibition, at which they all knew that Vance’s bust by Rebecca Stram was to be shown.
The air was electrical, if not with ideas at least with phrases and allusions which led up to them. To Vance the background of education and travel implied by this quick flashing back and forth of names, anecdotes, references to unseen places, unheard-of people, works of art, books, plays, was intoxicating in its manifold suggestions. Even more so, perhaps, was the sense of the unhampered lives of the people who seemed so easily able to satisfy all their curiosities — people who took as a matter of course even the noble range of books in the Tarrant library, the deep easy chairs, the skilfully disposed lamps and flowers, and the music which, toward the end of the evening, a dreaming hand drew from the Steinway in its shadowy corner. As in every one of his brief contacts with this world, Vance felt a million currents of beauty and vitality pouring through him. If the life of a great city had such plastic and pictorial qualities, why not seize on them? Why not make the most of his popularity with these people who had so many ways of feeding his imagination? Before the party broke up he had accepted a dozen invitations to dine, to sup, to hear new music or look at old pictures. What a world it was going to be to dig into and then write about!
“Storecraft” had lodged itself on the summit of a corner building in Fifth Avenue, with a “roof patio” (the newest architectural hybrid) surrounded by showrooms and a cabaret. This fresh stage in its development was to be inaugurated by the Tomorrowist Show, and when Vance and Laura Lou shot up to the patio in the crowded lift the rooms were already beginning to fill with the people whose only interest in exhibitions is to visit them on their opening day.
Laura Lou, at the last moment, had decided to accompany her husband. The day was radiant, and treacherously warm for March, and she had put on a little blue hat, of the same blue as the one she had worn that fatal day in the rubberneck car, and a coat with a collar of fluffy amber fur. Between cerulean hat brim and blond fur her face looked as tender as a wild rose, and the shadow of fatigue under her eyes turned them to burning sapphire. Vance looked at her in wonder. What did she do with all this loveliness in their everyday life? It seemed to appear suddenly, on particular occasions, as if she had pulled it out of the trunk under their bed with her “good” coat; and he knew it would vanish again as quickly, leaving her the pale heavy-eyed ghost of her old self. Some inner stimulus, now almost lacking in her life, seemed required to feed that precarious beauty. He noticed how people turned their heads as she entered the gallery, as they had done in the fashionable restaurant, and at the theatre, on their wedding journey. Masculine pride flushed through him, and he slipped his arm possessively in hers. “Take me right to where it is,” she enjoined him with a little air of power, as if instantly conscious of his feeling.
They worked their way into the second room, and there, aloft on a central pedestal, Vance caught a half glimpse of himself as embodied in the clay of Rebecca Stram. The conspicuous placing of the bust astonished him — he hadn’t supposed that Rebecca’s artistic standing, even in her own little group, was of such importance.
“Gee — for a beginner they’ve given her a good place,” he said to his wife.
“Oh, Vanny, it isn’t her — it’s YOU!”
He laughed a little sheepishly, in genuine surprise. He had forgotten that for anyone but himself and Laura Lou his features could be of interest.
“Shucks,” he growled self-consciously.
“Why, just look! We can’t get up to it — I can’t see it, even!” she exulted.
The bust was in fact enclosed in a dense circle of people, some few of whom were looking at it, while the greater number hung on the vibrant accents of a showily dressed man whose robust back was turned to Vance and Laura Lou.
“Know him? Know Vance Weston?” they heard Bunty Hayes ring out in megaphone tones. “Why, I should SAY so. Ever since he was a little kiddie. Why, him and me were raised together, way down on the Hudson River, as the old song says. Born out West?” (This is evident response to the comment of one of his auditors.) “That’s so — Illinois, I guess it was, or maybe Arizona. But he came east as a little fellow, to live with his mother’s relatives — don’t I remember the day he arrived? Why, I met him when he stepped off the train. Even then you could see the little genius in him. ‘Bunty,’ he says to me, ‘where’s the public library?” (First thing!). I want to consult the Encyclopaedia Britannica,’ he says. Couldn’t ha’ been more’n sixteen, I guess — thinking of his writing even then! Well, I was on a newspaper in those days myself, and I walked him right round to the office, and I said: “What you want to study isn’t encyclopaedias, it’s Life.’ And I guess, if I do say so, that was the turning point in his career; and I claim it was my advice and help that landed him where he is today: at the head of the world’s fiction writers, and in the place of honour at ‘Storecraft’s’ first art exhibit. Proud of it? Well, I guess I’ve got a right to be . . . .”
He swung suddenly round, mustering the crowd with an eye trained to the estimation of numbers; and his glance met Vance’s. The latter expected to see signs of discomfiture on the orator’s compact countenance; but he did not yet know Bunty Hayes. The showman’s eye instantly lit up, and he elbowed his way toward Vance with extended hand.
“Well, ladies and gentlemen, I see it’s time for me to pack up my goods and step down off the platform. Here’s the great man himself. Now, then, Mr. Weston, step up here and give your admirers the chance to compare the living features with the artist’s inspiration!”
Vance stood paralysed with rage; but he had no time to express it, for friends and acquaintances were pressing about him, and Bunty Hayes was swept aside by their approach. Vance found himself the centre of a throng of people, all eager to say a word, all determined to have one in return; and his only conscious desire was to be rid of it all, and of them, and let his rage against Hayes take breath. He managed to mumble his wife’s name to the first comers, but presently her hand slipped from his arm, and he saw her drawn away by a tall sable-draped figure whose back he recognized as Mrs. Pulsifer’s. Mrs. Pulsifer and Laura Lou — he wished there had been time to be furious at that too! But perhaps it was better to laugh at it — to laugh even at Bunty Hayes, whose showman’s instinct so confidently triumphed over every personal awkwardness. “Why,” Vance thought, “if I was to collar him now and give him the licking he deserves, he’d use THAT to advertise ‘Storecraft.’ No wonder he gets on, and ‘Storecraft’ too.” And instantly he began to weave the whole scene into Loot, his heart beating excitedly as he felt himself swept along on the strong current of the human comedy. . . . If only he could tell Halo Tarrant, he thought! He turned, and there she stood beside him, with Frenside.
“Yes, we’ve come. I hate these performances; but I wanted to see you battling with the waves, and I made Frenny come too.” How fine and slender and aloof she managed to look among them all, and how his blood instantly caught step with hers! “Well, this is fame — how do you like it?” she bantered him.
He shrugged. “I guess it’s a good page for Loot.”
She nodded delightedly. “You see I was right! I told you you must see it all. But where’s Laura Lou? Surely she was with you a minute ago?”
“Yes. But she’s gone.”
“Gone?”
“With Mrs. Pulsifer. I think they’re in the other room.”
Their eyes met, and Mrs. Tarrant laughed. “I’ve noticed signs of uneasiness in Jet lately. She realizes that she made a bad mistake last year about your short story, and I hear she now talks of founding a First Novel prize. She’s probably telling Laura Lou all about it.”
Vance laughed too; and then they turned together to the bust, which Mrs. Tarrant had not yet seen. She studied it thoughtfully for a long time; then, as other visitors crowded her away, she turned back to Vance. “I didn’t think that Stram girl had it in her. She HAS caught a glimpse of you, Vance — a glimpse of what you’re going to be. Don’t you think so, Frenny?”
“Well, I’m sorry to think that our young friend’s going to have a goitre,” said Frenside gloomily.
“Oh, dear — what a pity you can’t like anything that isn’t photographic! Artistically, you know,” she explained to Vance, “Frenny’s never got beyond the enlarged photograph of the ‘eighties, when people used to have their dear ones done twice the size of life, with the whiskers touched up in crayon.”
Vance echoed her laugh. He echoed it because certain inflexions of her voice were always laughter-provoking to him, and he would have thought anything funny if her eyes and her dimple had told him it was. But in reality he did think the bust queer, and had never understood why Rebecca had given him a swollen throat, and big lumps on his forehead, as if he’d been in a fight and got the worst of it. And he remembered too, with a pang, the colossal photograph which Grandma Scrimser had had made of Grandpa after his death, with the hyacinthine curls and low-necked collar of his prime, a photograph which the family had all thought so “speaking” that even Mrs. Weston dared not grumble at the expense. . . . Still, Vance, since then, had had a glimpse of other standards, and as he studied through Halo’s eyes the rough clay head with tumbled hair and heavy brooding forehead he began to see that under her surface mannerisms Rebecca Stram had reached down to his inner self, that the image seemed, as Halo said, to body forth what he was trying to be.
“It oughtn’t to have been done till after I’ve pulled off Loot,” he said, trying to hide his satisfaction under a joke.
“Oh, but it’s a proof that you will pull it off,” Halo rejoined; and then other people came up to them both, and swept them apart. He found her again at last, seated alone in a corner, and as he sat down beside her she said: “Who was that ridiculous man who was bragging about having known you when you were a boy?”
Vance’s dormant indignation against Bunty Hayes flamed up again. “Oh, he’s the manager of ‘Storecraft.’ He was just doing a blurb for the show.”
“Obviously. But where on earth did you know him?”
Vance hesitated. “I ran across him at Paul’s Landing. He used to go round with Upton Tracy.”
“Oh, I see.” She made a little grimace and rose to her feet. “Well, I’m going. I only came here to see you. I mean Rebecca’s YOU,” she corrected herself with a smile.
“Not yours?” he asked, flushing.
“No, I’d rather see him some evening quietly at home. When are you going to bring me your next chapters?”
“Any time,” he stammered, whirling with the joy of it; and she named a date which he of course accepted, as he would have accepted any other, at the cost of breaking no matter what other engagements. His head was light and dizzy with anticipation as he watched her vanish with Frenside in the throng.
When he roused himself from the spell he remembered that Laura Lou was somewhere in the gallery. He went back to look for her, but she was nowhere to be found, and at last he concluded, though half incredulously, that she must have gone off with Mrs. Pulsifer. It was very unlike her — but he had discovered that Laura Lou was often unlike herself, and that he really knew next to nothing of the secret springs of her actions and emotions. He did not think of this for long; his heart and brain were still full of the thought of Mrs. Tarrant. He was to see her again in two days: “a quiet evening,” she had said. That meant, he and she alone under the lamp, in that still meditative room which was like no other that he knew: a room of which the very walls seemed to think. And they would sit there alone together, while the logs crackled and fell, and he would read his new stuff to her, and she would sit motionless and silent, her chin on her lifted hand, her long arm modelled by the lamplight; and even while his eyes were on the page he would see her hand and arm, and her nearness would burn itself at the same time into his body and brain.
He slipped out of the gallery and found himself below in the street. The weather had changed, it had grown very cold, and the skyscrapers flung down a rough wind into the tunnel-like thoroughfares at their base. Vance remembered the March snowstorm on the Hudson, which had come after just such a mild spell; and that led him to wonder if Laura Lou had got safely home before the change. Her pretty coat with the blond fur was only a summer garment, put on because it was her best; and she mustn’t catch another cold, he reflected. But his mind was too full of excited thoughts for that one to dominate it. He was at once too happy and too anxious to dwell for long on anything; and he turned westward and struck into the park, to try to walk his jostling ideas into order.
The encounter with Bunty Hayes had disgusted him profoundly. That kind of slovenly good-nature was merely a caricature of the superficial tolerance, the moral apathy, of most of the people he came in contact with. Nothing mattered to any of them except to get on, to shove a way through and crowd out the others. There was Hayes, a man who had reason to hate him — or thought so — who loved his wife, and must therefore be jealous of him, and yet in whom the primitive emotions were so worn down by the perpetual effort to get on, to gain an inch or two in the daily struggle, that they could be silenced at will whenever it was to his interest. As Vance tramped on against the stinging wind his anger subsided also, but for a different reason. Hayes, the human fact, was being gradually absorbed, transubstantiated, into the stuff of his book; was turning from a vulgar contemptible man into a grotesque symbol of the national futility. . . . And then Vance began to examine his own case. He had not complied, he had tried to stand on his feet, to defend his intellectual integrity. And where was he? What was he? The flattered and envied author of the newest craze, a successful first novel; yet in himself an unhappy powerless creature, poor, hungry, in debt, the bewildered bondslave of the people he despised, the people who sacrifice everything and everybody to getting on.
And in thus summing up his case he had left out the central void: the blank enigma of his marriage. He could hardly remember now the gleams of joy which Laura Lou’s presence had shed on their early days. He had imagined that she shared all his ideas, whereas she was merely the sounding board of his young exuberance. Now the delusions and raptures were all gone. If he and she could have had a house of their own, instead of having to live in one room, how often would he have sought her out? All that remained of his flaming dream was a cold half-impatient pity. He supposed, vaguely, that the real meaning of marriage, the need that upheld it as an institution in spite of all revolts and ironies, was man’s primitive craving for a home, children, a moral anchorage. Marriage had brought him none of these. What sense was there in living in one room with an idle childless woman whom he had long since forgotten though she was always there? He despised himself for yielding to their enforced propinquity, and giving her what her soft endearments asked as carelessly as if she had been the casual companion of a night.
He sat on a bench in the park and revolved these world-old riddles till the cold drew him to his feet, and he turned homeward, heavy and confused as when he had started.
Laura Lou must have got back long before him. She would be waiting at home, perhaps resenting the fact of his not having stayed with her at the gallery. He swung along impatiently, trying to put out of his mind the secret well of joy that fed him: the thought of the quiet evening with Mrs. Tarrant and his book. . . . Since he had rung her up that evening, more than a month ago, he had been with her perilously often, meeting her at dinners, at informal studio parties, sometimes going with her to the theatre or to a symphony concert. To be with her nearly every day, to share with her all his artistic and intellectual joys, to carry to her every new experience, every question, every curiosity, had become an irresistible need. She had drawn him back to the frank footing of friendship, and skilfully kept him there. But they had not yet had another long evening alone by the lamp, and now he felt that he must pour out his whole soul to her or have no peace.
Laura Lou was huddled up close to the radiator, which gave out but little warmth on Mrs. Hubbard’s third floor. She had tossed her hat and coat on the bed, and wrapped her stooping shoulders in the bedquilt.
“Well,” Vance said, with hollow gaiety, “where the devil did you run away to? I hunted for you all over the place.”
She lifted a face in which triumph struggled with resentment. He saw that for some reason she was annoyed with him, yet for another pleased. “Oh, I got tired staying round there with all those strange people; and I couldn’t bear to look any longer at that hateful thing.”
“What hateful thing?”
“That awful bust. How could you let them show such a thing? It made me sick to see it.”
“Didn’t you like it? It’s been a good deal admired,” he muttered, piqued by her tone.
“Why, Vanny, can’t you see they’re only laughing at you when they tell you that?”
“Who’s ‘they’?”
“Why, all your fashionable friends. That Mrs. Pulsifer, for instance. And even SHE wasn’t sure. She said: ‘Do you suppose we OUGHT to admire it, Mrs. Weston?’ And when I said: ‘I never saw anything so awful,’ I could see she was kind of relieved. Oh, Vanny,” she continued, her face brightening, “I think you ought to see more of her. She says she was the first one to recognize your talent, and she wanted ever so much to help you, but she never sees you any more because you won’t go with anybody but those Tarrants.”
His blood leapt up. “Nonsense — that fool of a woman! The biggest humbug . . .”
“It’s not humbug to say you always go with the Tarrants. . . . You never left her at the gallery . . . .”
“He’s my employer. I’ve told you a hundred times . . .” His voice rose angrily, but he checked himself, resolved not to let her draw him into another wrangle over that threadbare grievance. She might think what she pleased — explaining anything to her was useless. To divert her attention he questioned ironically: “I suppose you talked me over with Hayes too?”
Her colour rose quickly, painting her cheekbones with the familiar feverish patches. “I never talk you over with anybody — not the way you mean.”
“Well, you did talk with Hayes, didn’t you?”
She looked at her husband half furtively, half in resentment. “He was almost the only person I knew in the place. Of course I talked with him. I didn’t know you wouldn’t want me to.”
Vance was silent. Since the reconciliation at Paul’s Landing he had never spoken to his wife of Hayes. At that time, in answer to his brief questioning, she had sobbingly admitted that Hayes was ready to marry her if he, Vance, didn’t want her any longer. Hayes, it appeared, had arranged it all with Mrs. Tracy, and Laura Lou had been on the point of acquiescing because she was convinced that her husband no longer loved her and had been unfaithful to her with “that other woman.”
Feeling her then so soft and surrendered on his breast, seeing her despair, and conscious of his own shortcomings, Vance had brushed aside these negligible intrigues, and sworn to her that they would begin a new life together. And from that day he had never questioned her about Hayes, had purposely avoided pronouncing his name. He had the feeling that the tie between himself and Laura Lou was even then too frail to stand the slightest strain. . . . But now the instinct of self-protection stirred him to cruelty; he, who was never cruel, desired to hurt his wife. “Do you see Hayes often? Does he come here? He’s just the kind to sneak round after you when he knows I’m at the office . . . .” How stupid the words sounded when he had spoken them! How little bearing they had on the intrinsic flaw in his relation with Laura Lou!
She hesitated a moment; then she said simply: “I’ve never talked with him but once since we’ve been here, one day when I met him in the street.”
“Oh, that’s all right; I didn’t mean — I’m no gaoler: you can see him here at the house all you want to,” he grumbled, irresolute and half ashamed.
“When I spoke to him just now at the gallery,” she continued, “all I did was to thank him for the lovely things he said about you when we first came in.”
“The lovely —?” Vance echoed, forgetting, in his blank amazement, what had gone before.
She looked surprised. “Why, didn’t you think what he said about you was lovely?” She smiled a little; her tone was confident and yet conciliatory. “Sometimes I think you don’t realize you’re celebrated, Vanny. He said you were — he told all those people so. I thought what he said was fine.”
For a moment Vance thought she must be making fun of him, avenging herself by this clumsy pleasantry for his supposed neglect. But she was incapable of irony; he saw that she had really taken Hayes’s oratory as a tribute to her husband’s genius.
“What he said of me — that blithering rubbish? It was an insult, that’s all! And that heap of lies; blowing that way before all those people about having known me since I was a kid! Good God — you didn’t thank him for making an everlasting fool of me?”
Her lower lip began to tremble, and a mist of distress dimmed her face. “Nothing I ever do is right. I didn’t know you didn’t even want me to speak to him when we met.”
“I’ve told you you can speak to him as much as you like. What beats me is your not seeing that he was publicly holding me up to ridicule.”
Her mouth grew narrow and vindictive. “I thought the bust did that. I was grateful to him for doing the best he could so that people would look at you and not at the bust.”
“Oh, God,” Vance groaned. He turned away, and began to fumble with the papers on the rickety little table between bed and window where he had to do his writing. He had meant to buckle down to a hard evening’s work, to get his chapters into final shape before submitting them to Mrs. Tarrant. But Laura Lou had a genius for putting him into a mood which made work or meditation equally impossible. . . . As he stood there sullenly, with his back to her, he heard a low sound like a child’s whimper, and turned around, irritated with himself and with her.
“Oh, see here, child! Don’t cry — what’s the use? I didn’t mean . . . all I meant was . . .”
“You hurt me so,” she sobbed.
“Nonsense, Laura Lou. Listen . . . Don’t be a goose . . . .” He caught her to him and felt the fever on her lips. Pressed each to each, they clung fast, groping for one another through the troubled channels of the blood.
After Vance had finished reading, Halo Tarrant sat silent. The library was very still. Only one lamp was lit, on a low table near Vance’s armchair; the rest of the room hung remote and shadowy about them, except when a dart of flame from the hearth woke up a row of books here and there, or made the flanks of a bronze vase glitter like a wet rock.
Vance’s heart was beating hurriedly. His voice was hoarse with excitement; he could not have read any longer without breaking down. In his agitation he did not dare to lift his eyes to his listener’s, but sat fumbling mechanically among the pages on his knee. Since the first paragraph he had been more and more certain that her verdict would be unfavourable.
“Well —?” he questioned at length, with an uneasy laugh. He could hardly endure the interval that elapsed before she answered. His throat was parched, and little prickles ran all over his skin. He felt as if she would never speak.
“I think you ought to take more time over it,” she said. “The canvas is much bigger than you’re used to — and the subject is so new. There are things in it that I like very much; but there are bits that seem incomplete, undigested. . . . I’m sure you can do the book; but you must give yourself time . . . lots of time. Can’t you put it away for a few months and turn to something else?”
Her verdict was exactly what he had expected, yet it filled him with unreasonable discouragement. She always lit instantly on the flaws of which he himself was half conscious, even in the heat of composition, the flaws he hoped she would overlook, but knew in advance that she would detect; and for this reason he lost his critical independence in her presence, and swung uneasily between elation and despondency.
“Yes, I know. It’s a failure,” he muttered.
“How can you tell, when only a few chapters are written? And in them there’s so much that’s good. That first impression of the heartless overwhelmingness of New York — it’s been done so often, but no one has seen it and felt it exactly as you have. . . . And the opening scene in the little western town — all that’s good too, except that perhaps — ” she paused, lifting her eyes doubtfully to his, “perhaps when you did that part you’d been reading The Corner Grocery a little too attentively,” she concluded with her hesitating smile.
He smiled too: it felt like a dry contraction of the muscles. “Too much of the sedulous ape, you mean?”
“Well, you seem to be struggling against crosscurrents of influence. But you’ll work out of them when you really get into your subject.”
“Trouble is it’s not my subject,” he broke in nervously; but she continued: “Not yet, perhaps; but it will be if you’ll only give yourself more time.” He looked up and met her scrutinizing eyes. “You look terribly tired, Vance. Can’t you drop the book for a few months?”
She made the suggestion gently, appealingly, in her most tranquil and compassionate voice. Yes, he thought, stirred by sudden exasperation: that was the way with people to whom material ease was as much a matter of course as the air they breathed. It was always an unwholesome business for the rich and poor to mix; the poor ought to keep to their own kind.
“Drop it?” he echoed with a laugh. “Well, that wouldn’t be exactly easy. Your husband has agreed to let me off my monthly article so that I can keep all my time for the novel; and now you advise me to drop the novel! What I’ve got to do is to finish it as quickly as I can, and let it take its chance. I’m doomed to write potboilers — if ever I can learn the trick!”
She paled a little. He saw that his words had hurt her, and he was glad they had. She continued to look at him earnestly, with her narrowed wistful gaze.
“You never WILL learn the trick; I’m not afraid for you.”
He laughed again — she was preposterous! “Oh, well, I didn’t come here to talk business,” he said irritably. “What I wanted was your opinion — now I’ve got it. And as it’s exactly the same as mine I’d throw the book into the fire if I could.”
She received this in silence, sitting quite still, as her way was when she was turning over anything in her mind. “Vance,” she said abruptly, “when you brought me these last chapters you didn’t feel like that about them. You had faith in them an hour ago. You mustn’t let my chance suggestions influence you; no artist should care so much for what people say . . . .”
He jumped up, the pages on his knee scattering to the floor. “Care what people say? I don’t care a damn what people say. . . . It’s only what you say,” he broke out with sudden vehemence.
A little flash of light ran over her face: her only way of blushing was this luminous glow on her pallor. “But that’s even more unreasonable . . .” she began.
“Oh, God, what’s reason got to do with it? You’ve been the breath of life to me all these months. If you cut off a fellow’s oxygen he collapses. . . . Don’t talk to me about not caring what you say! There’d be nothing left to me then.”
The silence of the dusky room seemed to receive and reverberate his words as the shadows caught and intensified the wavering gleams of the fire. Vance leaned against the mantel and stared down with blind eyes at the scattered pages of his manuscript. For a while — a long while, it seemed to him — Mrs. Tarrant did not move or look up.
“There’d be your genius left to you,” she said, still motionless in her corner.
He laughed. “I sometimes think my genius is a phantasm we’ve manufactured between us. When I’m not with you I don’t believe in it — I don’t believe in anything when I’m not with you.”
“Oh, Vance, don’t — don’t blaspheme!”
“Blaspheme! The only blasphemy would be to say that you’re not the whole earth to me!”
Still she did not move; and her immobility held him spellbound on the hearth. “That’s too much to be to anyone,” he heard her murmur, and immediately afterward: “All I’ve wanted was to help you with your books . . . .”
“My books? My books?” He moved a step or two nearer to her, and then stood checked again by her immobility. “What do you suppose books are made of?” he cried. “Paper and ink, or the marrow of a man’s bones and the blood of his brain? But you’re in my books, you’re part of them, whether you want to be or not, whether you believe in them or despise them, whether you believe in me or despise me; and you’re in me, in my body and blood, just as you’re in my books, and just as fatally. It’s done now and you can’t get away from me, you can’t undo what you’ve done: you’re the thoughts I think, and the visions I see, and the air I breathe, and the food I eat — and everything, everything, in the earth and over it . . . .”
He broke off, startled by his own outburst. He who was in general so tongue-tied, to whom eloquence came only with the pen, what power had driven this rush of words from him? Some fiery fusion of his whole being, the heightening and merging of every faculty, seemed to have unloosed his tongue. And it was all as he had said. He and his art and this woman were one, indissolubly one in a passionate mutual understanding. He and she understood each other — didn’t she know it? — with their intelligences and their emotions, with their eyes, their hands, their lips. Ah, her lips! All he could see now was the shape of her lips, that mouth haunted by all the smiles that had ever played over it, as if they were gathered up in her like shut flowerbuds.
“Didn’t you know — didn’t you know?” he stammered.
She had risen and stood a little way off from him. “About you —?”
“About you and me. There’s no difference. IS there any difference?”
He moved closer and caught her hands in his. They lay there like birds with their wings folded; birds that are frightened, and then suddenly lie still, with little subsiding palpitations. He was trying to see her face, to trace it line by line. “One of your eyebrows is a little higher than the other — I never noticed it before!” he cried exultantly, as if he had made an earthshaking discovery. She laughed a little and slipped her hands out of his.
“Oh, stop exploring me — you frighten me,” she murmured.
“Frighten you? I mean to. And you frighten me. It’s because we’re so close . . . leaning over into the gulfs of each other. . . . Don’t you like it, don’t you WANT it? Don’t you see there’s no difference anymore between you and me?”
She drew away from him. “My poor Vance — I see only what is. It’s my curse.”
His heart fell with a thump. All of a sudden she seemed hopelessly far away, spectral and cold. Inexperienced as he was, he knew this was no clever feint, that she was not playing with him. There was a fearless directness in her voice.
“You mean to tell me,” he cried, “that you’re all right? That your life is full enough without me?” She made no answer, and he burst out: “I shouldn’t believe you if you did!”
The exclamation brought a faint smile to her lips. “I won’t then. What would be the use? And what difference would it make? I’m here — you’re THERE. It’s not our nearness to each other that frightens me; it’s the leagues and leagues between — that is, when you begin to talk like this . . . .”
“Haven’t you always known I was going to talk like this?” he interrupted her.
“I suppose I have . . . but I hoped it wouldn’t be for a long time . . . .”
“Well, it’s been a long time since I began to love you.” Again she was silent. “You remember Thundertop?”
“Oh, Vance — even then?”
“Even before, I guess. The first time I read poetry or looked at a sunset you must have been mixed up with it. I didn’t have to wait to see you.”
She had sunk back into her armchair and sat there with her hands over her eyes. He wanted to snatch them away, to kiss her on the lids and lips; but there hung between them the faint awe of her presence. She was the woman his arms longed for, but she was also the goddess, the miracle, the unattainable being who haunted the peaks of his imagination.
“She’s sorry for me, that’s all,” he thought bitterly.
Other fellows, he felt, would have known how to break through the barrier; he had no such arts, and probably no experience of life would instruct him. There was an absoluteness in his love which benumbed him, now that his exaltation had fallen. It had always seemed to him that on the pinnacles there was just room to kneel and be mute.
Halo Tarrant dropped her hands and looked up at him between narrowed lids. She was excessively pale; her face looked haggard, almost old. “Oh, Vance,” she murmured, “take care . . . .”
“Take care?”
“Not to spoil something perfect. This free friendship. It’s been so — exquisite.”
The blood rushed back to his heart, and his eyes were blurred with happy tears. They choked in his throat, and he stood looking at her with a kind of desperate joy.
“I’ve never once called you by your name, even,” he stammered out.
“Well, call me by it now,” she answered, still smiling. She stood up and moved toward him. “Friends do that, don’t they? But we can’t go beyond friendship — ”
“This has got nothing to do with friendship.”
“Oh, what a mistake, Vance! It includes friendship — ” She spoke very low, as if what she had to say were difficult; but her eyes did not leave him. “It includes everything,” she said.
“Well, then — if it does?”
“Only, what we’ve got to do is to choose — take what we may, and leave the rest.”
“Never, never! I can’t leave it.” He was looking at her almost sternly. “Can you?” he challenged her.
“Yes,” she said, facing him resolutely.
“Ah — then you don’t care!”
“Call it that, then. At least I’ve cared for our friendship . . . .”
“Friendship! Friendship! If that means seeing you for a few minutes every now and then, and talking to you this way, with half the room between us, when what I want is nothing else than all of you — all your time, all your thoughts, all yourself — then I don’t give a curse for your friendship.”
She said nothing, and his words were flung back at him from the dead wall of her silence. He didn’t give a curse for her friendship! He had said that! When her friendship had been all of life to him, the breath of his nostrils, the sight of his eyes — well, and it was true nevertheless that he wanted no more of it, or rather that it had ceased to exist for him, and that henceforth she must be the world’s length away from him, or else in his arms.
“You don’t understand — I want to kiss you,” he stammered, looking at her with desperate eyes.
“That’s why I say — we can’t go on.”
“Can’t — why?”
She hesitated, and he saw that the hand resting on the back of her chair trembled a little.
“Because you don’t want to?” he burst out.
“Because I won’t take a lover while I have a husband — or while my lover has a wife,” she said precipitately.
Vance stood motionless. A moment before his thoughts had enveloped her in a million caressing touches, soul had seemed to clasp soul as body would presently embrace body, the distance between them had vanished in the hallucinating fusion of sight and touch. There had been no other world than that which the quiet room built in about them, no human beings in it but themselves. And now, abruptly thrust across the plane on which they stood, the other crowded grimacing world had pushed itself in, and between them stood Laura Lou and the sordid boarding house room, the moneylenders and the unfinished book, Mrs. Hubbard and the washing bills, and the account that Laura Lou was always running up at the druggist’s . . .
“And because I can’t leave my husband — any more than you can leave your wife . . . .”
He was not sure if it was Halo who had completed the sentence, or if it was the echo of his own thought.
Leave Laura Lou? No, of course he couldn’t. What nonsense! There was nobody else to look after her. He had chosen to have it so — and it was so. His world had closed in on him again, he was handcuffed and chained to it. He felt like a man in a railway smash who has come suddenly back to consciousness and finds himself pinned down under a dead weight. The sluggish current of reality was forcing itself once more into his veins, and he was faint with agony.
From a long way off he seemed to hear her saying: This mustn’t be the end, Vance. Someday . . .?
(Oh, yes — someday!)
“I HAVE been able to help you, haven’t I? . . . and I want, I do so want to go on . . .”
(What were women made of? He wondered.)
“You’ll promise me, won’t you?”
(Oh, he’d promise anything, if only a rescue party would come along and hoist up this dead weight off his chest. Couldn’t she SEE what he was suffering . . .?)
“Yes, I’LL promise.”
(You had to be everlastingly promising things to women . . . even with your life blood running out of you, they’d make you promise . . . .)
“Well, good-bye.”
“Good-bye, Vance.”
He turned to go, and heard a little exclamation behind him. He looked back from the doorway and saw that she had stooped down and was gathering up the sheets of manuscript he had left scattered about the floor.
He came back, stammering: “Here . . . don’t you trouble . . . I’ll do it . . .” and knelt down on the floor beside her. The pages seemed innumerable; they had fluttered away on all sides, he had to reach out right and left to recover them. One had even flown over the brass fender onto the hearth. Yet in a second they were all gathered up again: there were no normal time measures in this world of fever.
She held out the pages she had put together; his hand touched hers as he took them. Then he turned away and the door shut on him. That was over.
Vance stood in the street and looked up into the night sky. The star-strewn darkness, though blotched with the city’s profaning flare, recalled that other sky he had looked up at from the beach, when he had crept out at dawn from his wife’s side.
The sea — he had never seen it since! Could he get to it now? he wondered. Its infinite tides seemed to be breaking over him; its sound was in his breast. The craving to stand on that beach swept over him again, vehement, uncontrollable, surging up from the depths which held the source of things. He stood staring at his vision till it mastered him. He must see the sea again, must see it this very night. One in the morning . . . a March morning. But he must get there somehow; get there before dawn, waylay the miracle . . . .
He made his way across to the Pennsylvania Station, and asked about trains. There was one just going out: he found himself in it as it began to move. The haste of getting in and the mystery of gliding out so easily into darkness and the unknown reduced his private tumult to something like peace. He recalled the same sensation, humbling yet satisfying, when he had gone out on the morning after his wedding, and felt so awed yet safe in the sight of the immensities. . . . The train passed on between islands of masonry and endless streets strung with lights, then through the hush of dimly glimpsed trees and pastures; it stopped at sleepy stations, pulled out again, groped on in dreamlike confusion under a black sky full of stars. At last a little station stood out dark against pallid sandhills . . . and Vance, alone on the platform, watched the train clank on again uncertainly, as if groping out a new trail for itself. Then he turned and began to grope for his own way. A worn-off slip of moon hung in the west, powerless against the immensity of darkness; but when he reached the last line of dunes they were edged with a trembling of light which gradually widened out into the vast pallor of the Atlantic.
There it was at last: the sea at night, a windy March night tossing black cloud trails across the stars and shaking down their rainy glitter onto the hurried undulations of the waves. The wind was cold, but Vance did not feel it. The old affinity woke in him, the sense of some deep complementary power moving those endless surges as it swayed his listening self. He dropped down on the beach and lay there, letting the night and the sea sweep through him on the wings of the passionate gale. He felt like a speck in those vast elemental hands, yet sure of himself and his future as a seed being swept to the cleft where it belonged. And after a while he ceased to feel anything except that he was obscurely, infinitesimally a part of this great nocturnal splendour . . . .
At five in the morning, through dying lights and dead streets, he made his way back to Mrs. Hubbard’s. All the glory had vanished; his brain was sick with the forced inrush of reality. A last glimpse of the impossible swept through him. Halo had said: “Because I will never leave my husband for my lover . . .” and that meant — what else could it mean? — that she would have come to him if there had been no obstacle between them. For one moment it seemed almost enough to feel that there, out of his sight but in his soul, the great reaches of her love lay tossing and silvering. . . . But as he drew near his own door the ugliness of the present blotted out the vision. At the corner of Sixth Avenue a half-tipsy girl solicited him. At Mrs. Hubbard’s door, a gaunt cat shot out of the area. That was his world, his street, his house. . . . He knew now that he and she would never be free, either of them. She would never come to him; it was all a fading blur of unreality. . . . He put his key into the lock, and went upstairs with the feet of an old man.
The next day Laura Lou was in bed with one of her feverish colds. She had caught a chill the day of the “Storecraft” show, in her thin summer coat. These colds were frequent with her now, and each seemed to leave her a little weaker. Vance did not dare to send for the doctor again; he had been several times lately, and there had been no money to pay him. Vance did what he could to make her comfortable, and explained to Mrs. Hubbard — whose manner, as the weeks passed, though still oppressively ladylike, had grown more distant — the food must be carried up, milk heated, the cough mixture measured out. Then, having put a quarter into the hand of the dishevelled Swedish servant girl, who seldom understood his instructions and never carried them out, he took his way to the office.
There had been no word from Lambart & Co., the publishers who had been so confident about detaching him from Dreck and Saltzer; probably the subject of his novel had made them lukewarm. In his letter box he found a letter from his grandmother; there was no time to read it then, but the sight of her writing brought up a vision of Euphoria, of the comfortable Maplewood Avenue house, the safety and decency of home. What if he were to accept his father’s suggestion and take Laura Lou out there to live? If he took on a newspaper job, and wrote no novels or literary articles, he supposed his contracts with Dreck and Saltzer and the New Hour would lapse of themselves. He would simply go back to being the old Vance Weston again, and it would be as if the New York one had never existed . . . .
At the office he found neither Tarrant nor Eric Rauch. He had brought his work with him, and installed himself at his desk with the idea of going over his last chapters, and at least trying to eliminate the resemblances to The Corner Grocery. But the sight of the pages suddenly evoked the library where he had sat the night before with Halo Tarrant, and the floor on which he and she had knelt together to pick up the scattered sheets. The paper burned with her touch. He shut his eyes and pushed it aside. . . . Euphoria was the only way out . . . .
He opened his grandmother’s letter. She always wrote affectionately, and the careless freedom of her phrases would call her up to him in the flesh, with her velvety voice and heavy rambling body. The livest person he’d ever known, he thought, smiling. Then he read: “Vance, child, I’m coming to New York — be there next week with Saidie Toler . . .” (she always wrote of her daughters by their full names) . . . “I guess you’re not as surprised as I am; and I feel as if God Himself must be a little mite surprised too . . .” She went on to explain that, since Grandpa’s death, she had been able to give more time to spiritual things, and had been rewarded by the invitation to preach in various churches, not only at Euphoria, New Swedenborg, and Swedenville, but way beyond Chicago, at big places like Dakin and Lakeshore — only she didn’t call it preaching (he could be sure of that!) but “Meeting God”; didn’t he think that was a good phrase? Her “Meeting God” talks had been published in Spirit Life, and the paper’s circulation had gone up so much that they’d already contracted with her for another series; and suddenly she’d got an invitation from a group of intellectual people in New York, who called themselves “The Seekers” — a beautiful name, wasn’t it? It appeared they’d come across some of her talk in Spirit Life, and been so much struck that they wanted her to come over to New York for a week, and speak in private houses, and give the “Seekers” a chance to submit their personal doubts and difficulties to her. (“You know,” she added, dropping into her old humorous tone, “it’s holiday work telling other folks what’s wrong with them.”) Of course, she said, she couldn’t help but see God’s hand in all this, and when Spirit Life offered to pay her fare and Saidie’s out and back she telegraphed to the “Seekers” that she’d come at once — and Vance needn’t trouble about her, because she and Saidie were going to stay with a Mrs. Lotus Mennenkoop, a lovely woman who lived at Bronxville and was one of the “Seekers” — but of course she must see her boy as soon as she arrived, and get acquainted with her new granddaughter; and would Vance be sure and call her up right off at Mrs. Mennenkoop’s?
Vance stared at the big wavering script, so like his grandmother’s ungirt frame. For the “Seekers” he cared not a fig; but the springs of boyhood welled up in him at the prospect of seeing Mrs. Scrimser. She was the only human being he had really loved in the days when his universe was enclosed in the few miles between Euphoria and Crampton; the others, parents, sisters even, were just the more or less comfortable furniture of life; but his grandmother’s soul and his had touched. . . . He thought himself back onto the porch at Crampton, smelt the neglected lilacs, heard the jangle of the Euphoria trolley, and his grandmother saying: “Don’t a day like this make you feel as if you could get to God right through that blue up there?” He remembered having answered, rather petulantly, that he didn’t feel as if anything would take him near God; but now he was at least nearer to understanding what she had meant. Perhaps what she called “God” was the same as what he called “The Mothers” — that mysterious Sea of Being of which the dark reaches swayed and rumoured in his soul . . . perhaps one symbol was as good as another to figure the imperceptible point where the fleeting human consciousness touches Infinity . . . .
Curious, that this should happen just as he was facing the idea of going back to Euphoria. His grandmother’s letter, the prospect of seeing her in a few days, made the return home appear easier and more natural. As soon as she and Laura Lou had met he would decide. . . . He was sure those two would take a liking to each other.
Mrs. Scrimser bade him call her up at six on the day when she was to arrive, and he hoped to persuade her to come down that very morning to see Laura Lou, who was still too feverish to leave her bed. Laura Lou was excited and happy at the prospect of the visit; he saw from her eagerness how much she had felt the enforced solitude of her life in New York. “I guess maybe she’ll go round with me a little when I’m better,” she said with her drawn smile.
“Why, I’d go round with you myself if you wanted me to,” Vance rejoined, with conscious hypocrisy; but she said evasively: “Why, how can you, with all your work?”
The day came, and Vance was waiting at the office to call up Mrs. Mennenkoop’s flat when he was told that Mrs. Spear was on the telephone. It was some time since he had seen Mrs. Spear, and he wondered, somewhat nervously, if she could be the bearer of a message from her daughter. The blood began to buzz in his ears, and he could hardly catch the words which tumbled out excitedly from the receiver. But presently, to his surprise, he heard his grandmother’s name. “Only think, Vance, of my not knowing that Mrs. Scrimser — the GREAT Mrs. Scrimser — was your grandmother! She’s just told me so herself, over the telephone. . . . Why, yes — didn’t you know? She’s coming to speak in our drawing room this very evening. . . . Of course you knew I was one of the ‘Seekers’? No — you didn’t?” Mrs. Spear was always genuinely surprised when she found that anything concerning herself or her family had not been trumpeted about by rumour. “Why, yes — it’s my LIFE, Vance, my only real life . . . so marvellous . . . and now I’m to have the privilege of having this wonderful being under my roof. . . . You must be with us, of course; you and Laura Lou. . . . Your grandmother wanted me to tell you not to go out to Bronxville: she’d rather meet you here. Her train was late; there’s barely time for her to take a rest and withdraw into herself — you know they always do, before a meeting. . . . So she wants you to come here early instead. She says she’s sure you’ll understand . . . .”
The announcement filled Vance with astonishment. He had had glimpses of some of Mrs. Spear’s hobbies and enthusiasms, and had heard others humorously reported by Halo — but the idea of any connection between the Spear milieu and his grandmother was so unexpected that he began to wonder if, all unconsciously, he had spent his youth with an illustrious woman. Mrs. Spear was in touch with the newest that New York was thinking and saying; Frenside’s decomposing irony was her daily fare; clever and cultivated people of all kinds frequented her house; she was always on the track of the new movements. Did the “Seekers” then represent a movement important enough to attract those whose lead she followed? And was his grandmother actually the prophetess of a new faith? He recalled the religion he had himself “invented” in his boyhood — the creed whose originality had crumbled away with his first glimpse of the old philosophies — and wondered if his grandmother had stumbled on the revelation he had missed. It was all so confounding that he hardly found voice to stammer out his thanks, and his excuses for Laura Lou. . . . And the Tarrants, he wondered — would they be there? And what did Halo think of the “Seekers”? Above all, what would she think of Mrs. Scrimser?
He had not wished to see Halo again — not for some time, not till the storm in him should subside. Had she been right when she had warned him the other night not to “spoil something perfect”? In his unsatisfied anguish, he had half believed her; but in the interval he had come to know that this anguish was worth all the rest. Friendship — love? How vain such restricting words now seemed! In reality, his feeling for her included friendship, passion, love, desire, whatever thought or emotion, craving of sight and touch, a woman can excite in a man. All were merged in a rich deep communion; it was the element in which everything else in him lived. “All thoughts, all motions, all delights, Whatever stirs this mortal frame — ” the poet whom Elinor Lorburn loved had summed it up long ago . . . .
When he got to Mrs. Spear’s the maid showed him into a little study. The room was so small that it made his grandmother, who was waiting there, seem immense, like a great spreading idol. But she managed to get to her feet; her arms engulfed him; he sank into her warmth as into a tepid sea. If he’d been a child he would have burst out crying, she smelt so like home and the Mapledale Avenue soap!
“Oh, Vanny, Vanny — my little Vance . . . this IS God’s Hand,” she said, and hugged him.
He thought, with a quick recoil: “She wouldn’t have dragged God in that way, in old times — ” and suddenly heard an emotional murmur at his back, and became aware that his grandmother, as she clasped him, had seen Mrs. Spear enter the room.
Vance’s recoil was only momentary; yet the impression left a faint smirch on the freshness of Mrs. Scrimser’s spontaneity. She had become a prophetess now, conscious of her audience.
“Dear Mrs. Scrimser, you’ll forgive me? I felt I must see the meeting between you two!” Mrs. Spear sighed out with eloquent eyes and a hand affectionately extended to Vance.
But already there were sounds of arrival in the hall; the sense of the little apartment becoming more and more packed with people; the door of the study opening to admit Saidie Toler, straight and colourless as usual, and accompanied by a large battered blonde, Mrs. Lotus Mennenkoop, who declared emotionally that she must see Vance before the speaker took her place on the platform . . . .
The two little drawing rooms had been thrown into one, and they were already crowded when Vance slipped in at the back. Before him, rank on rank, the packed heads of the “Seekers” stretched up to an improvised platform, with wax lights and a table covered with old brocade. Vance did not recognize many people; most of those present seemed to belong to other regions of Mrs. Spear’s rambling activities. But he was sure they were representative of their kind; Mrs. Spear was not the woman to have anything but the newest, even in religion. This world of spiritual investigation was unfamiliar to him; there were no “Seekers” in the Tarrant group, much less at the Cocoanut Tree or Rebecca Stram’s. The audience seemed mainly composed of elderly men with beards and gold-rimmed glasses, pallid youths, and ladies of indeterminate age, in black silk or Greek draperies. He was surprised to see among them Mrs. Pulsifer, with Tarrant at her side, and in another part of the room the sleek heads and jewelled arms of a cluster of smart young women who belonged to the Tarrant set. Such a mixture was unexpected, and still more so the earnest and attentive expression of the fashionable members of the audience, who appeared to have come in good faith, and not to scoff, as he had feared.
Vance forgot to wonder if Halo Tarrant were in the room; forgot everything but his passionate curiosity to see what impression his grandmother would make on an audience so strangely blent, and so new to her. Whoever they were, he knew the “Seekers” would test Mrs. Scrimser by standards other and more searching than those of Euphoria, or even of Dakin and Lakeshore; and his heart was up in arms to defend her.
And now here she was, in the soft illumination of the little platform. As he gazed at her across the fervent backs of the “Seekers” she seemed to him to have grown still larger. Saidie Toler, seated at one elbow, looked like a shadow, Mrs. Mennenkoop, at the other, like a shrivelled virgin. Womanhood, vast and dominant, billowed out between them.
Mrs. Scrimser rose to her feet. Mrs. Lotus Mennenkoop had spoken a few words of introduction; phrases about a “new message,” “our spiritual leader,” “the foremost exponent of the new psychical ethics,” had drifted by unheeded; the “Seekers” wanted Mrs. Scrimser.
She swayed to them across the table and began. “Meet God,” she said, spacing her syllables impressively; then she paused. Her voice sounded richer, more resonant than ever; but Vance’s unaccustomed ear was shocked by her intonation. Had she always had those hideous drawling gutturals?
“Meet God — that’s what I want all you dear people here with me this evening to do . . . I presume some of you know ABOUT God already; and all of you at least know OF Him,” she urged, caressing her italics. She paused again, reaching out toward her audience. “The way we know about folks in the next street.” (“New Yorkers don’t,” her grandson reflected.) “Or the way we know of famous people in the past: great heroes or splendid noble-hearted women. That’s not the way I want you to know about God. I want you to know Him Himself — to get acquainted with Him, the way you would if He was living in the house next door, and you sent round to borrow the lawn mower. I want you to get to know Him so well that you’re always borrowing, and He’s always lending; so that finally you don’t hardly know what belongs to you and what belongs to Him — and I guess maybe He don’t either. That’s the reason I say to you all: MEET GOD! Because, oh, you dear beloved people sitting here listening to me, I’ve met Him; and I know what it’s like!”
She stood silent, her face illumined, as Vance had seen it when she looked up to the sky from the porch at Crampton. She was certainly a beautiful old woman, he thought; and he felt that the people about him thought so too. But what did they make of her exordium? They were silent; he felt that their judgment was suspended. But there was the hideous slur of her pronunciation, blurring and soiling every word . . . .
She was hurrying on now, swept along on the full flood of revelation, pleading with them to see what to her was so plain, so divinely visible. The point was, she argued, that God wasn’t just here or there, in lecture halls, in churches, and on the lips of preachers. He wasn’t even just up in the sky, as holy people used to think. They knew now that the marvellous star-jewelled heavens were just atoms, like all the rest of the universe . . . all those wonderful stars that people in old times used to believe were the crowns of the angels! They knew now that God was a million times greater and bigger than all that, because He was in men’s souls; He was always creating, but also He was always being created. The quaint old idea of the Mass, of the priest turning bread into God, that seemed to enlightened modern minds so ignorant and barbarous, had something in it after-all, if you looked at it as the symbol of the wonderful fact that man is always creating God; that wherever a great thought is born, or a noble act performed, there God is created. THAT is the real Eucharist, the real remaking of Divinity. If you knew God, you knew that: you knew you had in your soul the power to make Him . . . that every one of us, in the old Bible phrase, may be a priest after the Order of Melchizedek. . . . Talk of the equality of man with man! Why, we’d got way past that. The new Revelation wasn’t going to rest till it had taught the equality of man with God . . . .
But how, she pressed on, was this wonderful equality, this God~making, to be achieved? Why, in the simplest way in the world: just by loving enough. Love was Christ’s law; and Christ was just one of the great God-makers. And what she wanted of everybody was to be like Christ: to BE Christ. What the world needed was Christs by the million — for the millions. What it needed was a standardized God. No caste religions any more! No limited God for the privileged and cultured, no priesthood, no preaching for rich pew-owners. Why, you could all of you go home now and be your own Christ, and make your own God, just by the simple recipe of loving enough. You didn’t even have to . . .
The flood of words poured on and on over Vance’s bent head. He did not want to look at her now: her prophetic gestures, her persuasive smiles, repelled him. Her intonations were unctuous, benedictory; she had become identified with her apostolic role. Behind the swaying surging prophetess he still felt the rich-hearted woman in whose warmth his childhood had unfolded; it was bitter to him that the people about him would never know her as she really was. He was already prepared to hate them for smiling at her rambling periods. He could have smiled at them himself if his heart had been less sore; but no one else should do so. He looked about him suspiciously, trembling to detect derision; but he saw only a somewhat blank expectancy. It was all very well, the faces about him seemed to say; but they had heard that kind of thing before. Something else must surely be coming. This inspired teacher was going to tell them the secret they yearned for. But apparently there was no other secret; nothing came but a crescendo of adjurations to love everybody and everything, to be all love, all Christ-likeness, all God-creativeness . . . .
Mrs. Scrimser paused. The room was pervaded by the peculiar sense of uncertainty of an audience which has lost touch with the speaker. The silence seemed to ask: What next? Vance knew. Though he had never before heard his grandmother speak in public he had often gone with her to the meetings which she frequented in her incessant quest for new religious sensations, and he knew the exact moment at which the orator’s appeal, having reached its culmination, held itself ready for an emotional response. It was the moment when here and there someone stood up and gasped out devout ejaculations; when a hymn burst spontaneously from hundreds of throats; when the listeners fell on their knees in audible prayer.
Nothing of all this happened. Mrs. Scrimser stood motionless. The weight of her heavy body bearing on her outspread palms, as she rested them on the table before her, she watched for the tide of emotion to rise. It did not rise, but the audience did. There was an uncomfortable lull, followed by a discreet rustling of chairs. A “very beautiful,” launched by Mrs. Spear from the platform, drifted languidly down the room. A very few of the more determined “Seekers” pressed back against the tide to Mrs. Scrimser; the others, somewhat too hastily, poured through the doors of the dining room toward the glimpse of a buffet supper. . . . As Vance passed out, he caught sight of Mr. Spear’s alert head between two retreating backs, and heard him say in his thin crackling voice: “Isn’t there some mistake about this? Seems to me I’ve met Mrs. Scrimser’s God before — and Mrs. Scrimser too.”
The next morning Vance went early to Mrs. Mennenkoop’s. He wanted to see his grandmother before she began to be besieged by the prophets and seers who had been such a trial to Mrs. Weston when the Scrimsers came to live under her roof. All night he had lain awake, torn between his disillusionment and his wrath against those who had shared it. . . . Those damned unsatisfied people who always had to have some new sensation to batten on! Why had they dragged his grandmother out of Euphoria, where she belonged, persuaded her that New York was in need of her, that she had a “message” for them, as her jargon called it? Such wrath as he had felt against the rich after Mrs. Pulsifer’s rebuff now blazed up in him against these ridiculous “Seekers” — seekers of new sensations, new catchwords, new fads to take up or to turn to ridicule! At Euphoria Mrs. Scrimser had her place in the social order. She was more persuasive than the ministers of the rival churches, better educated than their congregations. She had an authority which no one questioned — except Mrs. Weston, who saw no sense in telling people how to run their lives when you couldn’t manage your own hired girl.
Here in New York everything was different — and Vance himself, in the interval, had grown different. The world had come to have a perspective for him, and Euphoria was a hardly perceptible dot far off between two narrowing lines. But in proportion as he understood this, and suffered for his grandmother, his tenderness for her increased. It became defensive and fierce; he would have jumped at the chance of doing battle for her against all the Frensides and Spears. After all, wasn’t his own case precisely hers? He too was the raw product of a Middle-Western town, trying to do something beyond his powers, to tell the world about things he wasn’t really familiar with; his pride winced at the exactness of the analogy, and it moved him to acuter sympathy. If only he could persuade his grandmother to give up this crazy crusade; to go back to Euphoria, and take him and Laura Lou with her! He made up his mind, on the way out to Bronxville, that he would propose to her to break her lecturing engagements and go back at once.
His aunt Saidie Toler, who received him, did not share his apprehensions. She said she had never seen her mother more inspired than on the previous evening. Evidently New York audiences were less responsive at first than those in the western cities where Mrs. Scrimser had hitherto spoken; but Mrs. Mennenkoop had prepared them for that. She thought quite a number of converts would seek out Mrs. Scrimser in the course of the day, and was sure that in Brooklyn, where that evening’s meeting was to be held, there would be more of an emotional surrender . . . .
Vance had always hated his aunt Saidie’s jargon. She reminded him of a salesman retailing goods, and repeating automatically what was on their labels. . . . He wanted to know if he couldn’t go in and see his grandmother; but Mrs. Toler said there was somebody with her on business: a man who organized lecture tours. He wanted to take Mrs. Scrimser right through the country, he said. . . . He’d answer for it that upstate she’d get the response she was accustomed to. . . . In New York it was a fashion to sit back and pretend you knew everything.
Vance’s heart sank. He asked if he couldn’t go in at once, while the man was there — and at the same moment a door opened, and Mrs. Scrimser came out into the hall. “I thought I heard my boy’s voice,” she said, coming to him with open arms. She begged him to step in and see the gentleman who had called about a lecture tour — he had made a very interesting proposal. Vance followed her, and found himself being named to Bunty Hayes, who held out his hand with undiminished cordiality. “Why, yes,” he said, with an explanatory glance between grandmother and grandson, “‘Storecraft’ aims to handle all the human interests. We can’t leave out religion, any more’n we could art or plumbing. And the minute I heard about this grand new religious movement of Mrs. Scrimser’s, I said: ‘That’s exactly our line of goods, and there’s nobody but “Storecraft” can do it justice.’ If only she’d of got in touch with me before she came to New York I’d of had her addressing three thousand human people in Steinway Hall instead of trying to get a kick out of a few society highbrows from Park Avenue.”
Vance stood silent between the two. His grandmother looked more aged in the morning light. In spite of her increasing bulk she seemed smaller: as if Fate had already traced on her, in deep lines and folds, her future diminution. But Bunty Hayes’s flesh was taut and hard; he shone with a high varnish of prosperity. And he looked at Vance with a bright unwinking cordiality, as if their encounter were merely a happy incident in an old friendship. “On’y to think she’s your grandmother; seems as if you’d got a corner in celebrity in your family,” he said.
“Oh, Vanny’s our REAL celebrity,” Mrs. Scrimser murmured, her tired eyes filling as they rested on her grandson.
“Well, I guess there’s enough of it to go round,” Hayes encouraged them both. “What I say is . . .”
Mrs. Scrimser’s gaze was still caressing Vance. She took his hand. “I guess he’ll be lecturing all over the United States before long,” she said.
“Well, when he does, ‘Storecraft’ ‘ll be all ready to handle him too — we’ll feature you both on the same progrum,” Mr. Hayes joked back.
Mrs. Scrimser answered humorously that she guessed that would depend on how well “Storecraft” handled HER; and he challenged her to take a good look round and see if any other concern was prepared to do it better. It was agreed that she was to think over his proposition and give him an answer the next day; and thereupon he took his leave.
Mrs. Scrimser, when they were alone, held her grandson fast for a minute saying only: “Vanny boy, Mapledale Avenue’s been like the grave since you went away,” and he felt the contagion of her tenderness and a great longing to lay his cares in those capacious arms. She asked about Laura Lou, and why Vance hadn’t brought her the night before, or today; and when he said she was ill in bed, exclaimed reproachfully at his not telling her sooner, and said she would go straight down to Mrs. Hubbard’s after lunch. She began to question Vance about how they lived, and whether Laura Lou was comfortable and well looked after, and if the food was nourishing, and he was satisfied with the doctor; and gradually he was drawn into confessing his financial difficulties, and the impossibility of giving his wife such a home as she ought to have. Mrs. Scrimser’s ideas of money were even vaguer than her grandson’s, but her sympathy was the more ardent because she could not understand why a successful novelist, who knew all the publishers and critics in New York, shouldn’t be making a big income. She was indignant at such injustice; but she implored Vance not to worry, since the “Storecraft” offer would enable her to help him and Laura Lou as soon as she’d paid back what she owed his father. From her confused explanations Vance gathered that Mr. Scrimser’s long illness, and his widow’s unlimited hospitality, had been a heavy strain on Mr. Weston, who, besides having to support his family-inlaw, had been crippled by one or two unlucky gambles in real estate. Vance guessed that Mrs. Scrimser’s attention had finally been called to these facts (no doubt by his mother), and that in a tardy rush of self-reproach she had resolved to wipe out her debt. It was not religious zeal alone which had started her on her lecturing tour. In the West, she told Vance, she had spoken without pay; but now that she understood her pecuniary obligations she was impatient to make money by her lectures. No one was more scrupulously anxious not to be a burden on others; the difficulty was that for her, to whom no fellow creature could ever be a burden, it was an effort to remember that she might be one herself. Vance was moved by the candour and humility of her avowal. He too knew what it felt like to be dragged down from the empyrean just as the gates of light were swinging open; how happy it would have made him to relieve this old dreamer of her cares, and leave her to pursue her vision! “I daresay when she came here she thought I’d be able to help her out,” he reflected bitterly, and regretted that he had mentioned his own troubles. But Mrs. Scrimser’s optimism was irrepressible; already she was planning, with the proceeds of her tour, to hire a little house in Euphoria and take Vance and Laura Lou to live with her. “Saidie Toler’ll take all the housekeeping bothers off our hands, and you can do your writing, and I’ll go on speaking in public if God’s got any more use for me; and in the good clean prairie air Laura Lou’ll get all the poison of New York out of her in no time.” Her face was as radiant as if she were enumerating the foundations of the Heavenly City.
“Don’t you think you and Laura Lou could be happy, making your home with me?” she pleaded.
Yes, Vance said, he was sure they could; it was long since his eyes had rested on anything as soothing as the vision of that little house. “I’d have a big kitchen table, six feet long, for my writing,” he mused voluptuously; and then roused himself to his grandmother’s summary of the “Storecraft” offer for a three months’ tour, for which she was to be featured as: “God’s Confidant, Mrs. Loraine Scrimser,” who was to “tell the world about her New Religion.”
“You see, Vanny, Saidie Toler’s been all over the figures with him, and she says I ought to clear twenty or thirty thousand dollars. And perhaps that would be only a beginning . . . .” Her face glowed with tenderness, and Vance, trembling a little, took her large warm hand and pressed it against his cheek.
“Why, Van darling, don’t — don’t cry! You mustn’t! I guess your troubles are all over now.”
He sat silent, holding her hand. How could he tell her what was in his mind? Perhaps the inertness of his hand betrayed the lack of response in his thoughts; for she questioned him with eyes softened by perplexity. “Maybe you don’t care for the way he’s featured me?” she suggested timidly. “I guess you could find something more striking yourself — only I wouldn’t want to bother you.” He shook his head, and she went on, still more timidly: “Or is it the way I was received last night among those fashionable people? Don’t suppose I didn’t see it, Vanny; I was a failure; I know it as well as you do. My message didn’t get over to them . . . it was a terrible disappointment to me. But Mrs. Mennenkoop says that in that set they’re dreadfully inexperienced in the spiritual life . . . infants wailing in the dark . . . and that maybe what I gave them was too startling, too new . . . .”
“Oh, no, that’s not it,” Vance interrupted with sudden vehemence. “It was NOT new to them — that’s the trouble.”
“Not new —?” Her hand began to tremble in his, and she drew back a little. “Do you mean to say, Vanny, that every profound and personal spiritual adventure is NOT new, is NOT different . . .?”
“No, it’s not. That’s the point. Lots of people have thought they’d had spiritual adventures that were personal to them, and then, if they’ve taken the time to study, to look into the religious experiences of the past — ”
“But what does the past matter? What I bring is a forward-looking faith, a new revelation — something God’s given to ME.”
“No, it’s not,” Vance repeated vehemently. He felt now that he must speak out, at whatever cost to her feelings and his. “Those people last night were mostly well-educated, cultivated — some of the men were students of theology, scholars. They were there because they take an intellectual interest in religious ideas . . . .” He hurried on, trying to explain that, to such an audience, there was no novelty in what Mrs. Scrimser had to say, that her “revelation” belonged to a long-classified category of religious emotionalism. People had thought for centuries that God had given them a particular message, he went on. But supposing any direct access to the Divine to be possible, it was one of the great services of the organized churches to have maintained an authorized channel of communication between the Deity and men, and not to recognize any other.
“But, Vanny, that’s the way the old tyrannical religions talked. All that’s got nothing to do with the modern world. What people want nowadays is a new religion — ”
Well, he interrupted her, if that was it, what she called her religion wasn’t new; it had been in the air for centuries; and anyhow, even if it had been new, that was no particular recommendation. The greatest proof of the validity of a religion was its age, its duration, its having stood through centuries of change, as something that people had to have, couldn’t in any age get on without. Couldn’t she feel the beauty of continuity in the spiritual world, when the other was being pulled down and rebuilt every morning? Couldn’t she see that, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, it was sheer ignorance and illiteracy that made people call things new — that even in the brick-and-mortar world that was being forever pulled down and rebuilt, the old materials and the old conceptions had to be used again in the rebuilding? Who wanted a new religion, anyhow, when the old one was there, so little exhausted or even understood, in all its age-long beauty?
He pressed on, so possessed by his subject that the words came of themselves, as they had when he had poured out his soul to Halo Tarrant: all unconsciously, he had yielded again to the boyish hope that his grandmother would be able to follow his reasoning.
She listened with bent head, and then lifted a face humbled yet admiring. “Yes, yes, I see what you mean, Vanny,” she began eagerly — and even as she spoke he remembered that she had always said that, had always believed that she saw what people meant; but whereas in his boyhood he had retorted brutally: “No, you don’t!” now he only mumbled: “Oh, well, I don’t know that it matters so much about seeing . . . .”
Her face lit up. “No; that’s it. Feeling’s everything, isn’t it, dear?”
“Well, I didn’t mean that, either. I only meant — ”
She raised her tired eyes and fixed them on his. “You meant that I’d better not try any more of my talks on your clever literary friends? But I don’t intend to, Vanny; I’m sure you’re right. My message is for the plain folks who want to be told how to get to God. . . . I know they’ll come to me in their hundreds. I don’t mean to give up or lose courage because I can’t reach the hearts of a few super-cultivated intellectuals. . . . All that doesn’t matter, as long as I can make money enough for us all to live on — does it?”
Vance got up and bent over to kiss her. He could not tell her at the moment that what he really wanted was to make her give up her lecturing tour altogether. Their talk had carried him back to the old days when she had been his only listener, had understood him with her heart if not with her mind; he could not bear, just then, to say anything that would bring the anxious humbled look into her eyes. He must be off, he explained, he had to hurry down to the office; but he promised to be waiting for her when she called after lunch to see Laura Lou.
He knew it was only a postponement: he had already decided that he could not live on his grandmother’s earnings. Everything in his life seemed a postponement nowadays: morally as well as materially he was living from hand to mouth. But his intelligence still refused to bow to expediency; it was impossible for him to think of living on the money which Mrs. Scrimser’s own ignorance was prepared to extract from that of others. His long hours of study and meditation at the Willows had made any kind of intellectual imposture seem the lowest form of dishonesty.
His grandmother’s hour with Laura Lou nearly undermined his resolution. Seeing them thus — Laura Lou in one of her strange moments of loveliness, her head resting contentedly against the pillows, her willing hand yielded to Mrs. Scrimser’s, and the latter settled in the rocking chair by the bed, her great person giving out an aura of good-humour and reassurance — it seemed to Vance that nothing mattered except that these two should understand each other. If only the conditions had been reversed, and he had been able to provide a home for his grandmother! He saw all his difficulties solved; Laura Lou soothed and sustained, the housekeeping somehow managed, and he himself with a free corner in which to go on undisturbed with his work. . . . This was precisely what Mrs. Scrimser and “Storecraft” were offering him; and the irony of the contrast burnt itself into him. He made up his mind to see that very day the publisher who had made him such tempting proposals. Perhaps there was still some hope of readjustment with the New Hour and Dreck and Saltzer.
On the way downstairs Mrs. Scrimser laid her hand on his arm. “Is there anywhere that I can speak to you for a minute alone, Vanny?”
He pushed open the parlour door and found its desert spaces untenanted. Mrs. Scrimser seated herself on one of the antimacassared sofas and drew him down beside her. She looked at him tenderly, and before she spoke he knew what she was going to say. “You think Laura Lou looks sick?” he broke out. “She was a little excited at seeing you — I guess it sent her temperature up. But she’s all right, really . . . .”
“Who looks after her when you’re at the office?” his grandmother asked.
“Well — the hired girl goes up every now and then. And Mrs. Hubbard — that’s our landlady — has been very nice to her . . . until just lately . . . .”
“Just lately?”
He reddened. “Well, I’ve been behindhand about paying — I suppose that’s the reason.”
“Vanny, you must take that child away from here.”
He gave an impatient laugh. “Take her away? Where to? To begin with, she wouldn’t go anywhere without me . . . .”
She looked at him gravely. “You must go with her then. Young eyes don’t recognize sickness the way old ones do. . . . No, dear, I don’t want to frighten you; she’ll get well; she just wants nursing and feeding — and comforting, I guess. Isn’t she fretting about you and your affairs? Maybe thinking she’s a burden to you? Poor child — I thought so. . . . Well, Vanny, all that’s got to stop. It MUST stop!” She stood up with sudden resolution. “I’ll send for that ‘Storecraft’ man — I could see they were anxious to get me; he was fairly scared that I’d fall into the hands of another manager. I’ll see him tonight, Vanny; I’ll get a good big advance out of him. . . . Saidie Toler’ll manage that for me . . . you’ll see!”
She stood beaming on him with such ample reassurance that his resolution wavered. Wasn’t she right, after all? What business was it of his if (in perfect good faith, he was sure) she chose to sell her hazy rhetoric to audiences more ignorant than herself? After all, it was probable that her teaching could do only good . . . why try it by standards of intellectual integrity that none of her hearers would think of applying? He was frightened by her tone in speaking of Laura Lou; he knew that, unless he could raise a little money at once, he and his wife could not stay on at Mrs. Hubbard’s; and to his grandmother’s question as to where he intended to take Laura Lou he could find no answer.
“See here, Vanny, don’t you look so discouraged. You’ll see, I’ll pull it off in the big towns upstate. And then — ”
“No, no,” he broke out uncontrollably. “You don’t understand me; you must listen. I can’t take your money — no matter how much of it you make. I want you to give up lecturing; to give it up at once. I want you to go back home now — tomorrow. Don’t you see, Granny, we can’t either of us live on money that isn’t honestly got?”
Mrs. Scrimser stood listening with a face of gentle bewilderment. He felt the uselessness of his words; no argument of that sort could penetrate through the close armour of her conviction. Under her genuine personal humility there was a spiritual pride, the sense of a “call,” of the direct mandate of the Unseen. The word “honestly” had not even caught her attention, and she evidently attributed Vance’s scruples to the pride of a young man unwilling to be helped out of money difficulties by an old woman. He did not know what to say next; and for a minute or two they stood and faced each other in an embarrassed silence. Then he saw a tremor cross her face, followed by a look of painful enlightenment.
“Vanny,” she said, laying her hand on his shoulder, “perhaps, as you say, I haven’t understood what you meant. But you’ve got to tell me. Is it because you’re afraid I’ll hurt your reputation — a foolish old woman going about telling people about things she doesn’t half understand? I know that’s the way it struck you and your fashionable friends last night — and maybe you don’t want them to go round saying: ‘Who’d ever have thought that old evangelist woman with her Salvation Army talk was Vance Weston’s grandmother — the NOVELIST’S grandmother?’” She paused, and let her eyes rest on his. “That it, Vanny? You see I’m not so stupid, after all.” She smiled a little, and drew him closer. “If you do feel that, sonny, I guess I’ll have to give up after all.”
Vance could find no reply. The words choked in his throat. “It’s not that — how could you . . .?” he mumbled, answering her embrace. She groped in a big silk bag, drew out a crumpled handkerchief, and wiped her spectacles. When she had put them back, she plunged again into the deeper recesses of her reticule, and finally produced a hundred-dollar bill. She smoothed it out and pressed it into her grandson’s hand. “No, it’s not for you — it’s for Laura Lou. And you can let her take it, Vanny” — a whimsical twinkle crept into her eyes — “because I didn’t earn a dollar of it lecturing. I made every cent baking gingerbread for charity sales last winter — and see here, Vanny, it’s twice the work it is coaxing folks back to Jesus . . . .”
Vance had not seen Lewis Tarrant for a long time. Tarrant was at the office less often than formerly; the practical administration of the New Hour was entrusted to Eric Rauch, who ran it according to his own ideas save when his chief, unexpectedly turning up, upset existing arrangements and substituted new plans of his own. This state of things did not escape the notice of the small staff. It was rumoured that Tarrant was losing interest — then again that he was absorbed in the writing of a novel; it was agreed that, in any case, something was wrong with his nerves. Handling Tarrant had always been a gingerly business; Rauch was the only man supple enough to restore his good-humour without yielding to him; and even Rauch (as he told Vance) never knew beforehand whether he was going to pull it off or not. “The trouble is, he’s got enough ideas to run a dozen reviews; and he wants to apply them all to this one poor rag.” The result was that the rag was drooping; and as soon as an enterprise gave the least sign of failure it was Tarrant’s instinct to disclaim all responsibility for it.
His frequent absences had been a relief to Vance. When the two did meet, though usually it was only to exchange a few words, Vance felt unhappy in the other’s presence. To any one less simplehearted it might have been easier to despise the husband of the woman he worshipped than to be on friendly terms with him; but his opinion of Tarrant added to Vance’s general distress of mind. It made him utterly wretched to think of Halo Tarrant’s life being spent with a man for whom she must feel the same contempt that Tarrant excited in him; and since his last talk with her — since she had uttered that “I won’t take a lover while I have a husband” which still filled him with its poignant music — his feeling for her husband had hardened to hatred. His own grievance against Tarrant played little part in this, except insofar as it showed him the kind of man she was chained to; but he wondered bitterly how she could consider the tie binding. In his own case it was different; he was bound to Laura Lou by her helplessness and his own folly, and the bond seemed to him so sacred that he had at once acknowledged the force of Halo’s argument. He knew he could not abandon his wife for the woman he loved; he owned the impossibility and bowed to it. But Halo’s case was different. Tarrant was not an object of pity; and what other feeling could hold her to him?
It was a strange and desperate coil, but one on which his immediate domestic problem left him no time to brood. He was still determined to do all he could to prevent his grandmother from continuing her lecturing tour; even if he could not prevail with her, and she did continue it, he was determined that his wife and he should not live on her earnings. Whatever the alternative might be — and all seemed hopeless — that resolve was fixed in him.
As soon as his grandmother had gone he decided to look up the publisher who had made him such urgent proposals. He carried the hundred dollars up to Laura Lou, and let his heart be warmed for an instant by her cry of surprise, and the assurance that she’d never seen anybody as lovely as his grandmother; then he hurried off on his errand. But at the door he ran into a messenger from the New Hour, with a line from Rauch saying that Tarrant wished to see him about something important. “Better come along as quick as you can,” a postscript added; and Vance unwillingly turned toward the office.
He had not realized till that moment how deeply distasteful it would be to him to see Tarrant again. He had no time to wonder what the object of the summons might be; the mere physical reluctance to stand in the man’s presence overcame all conjecture, filled him to the throat with disgust at being at his orders. “That’s got to end too,” he thought — and then it occurred to him that the Mr. Lambart’s negotiations might have been successful, and that Tarrant, as conscious as himself of the friction between them, had decided to give him his release.
This carried him to the office on lighter feet, and he entered the editorial retreat with a feeling almost of reassurance. It would be hateful, being near Tarrant, seeing him, hearing him — but the ordeal would doubtless soon be over.
Tarrant looked up quickly from his desk: it was one of the days when his face was like a perfectly symmetrical but shuttered housefront. “Sit down,” he sighed; and then: “Look here, Weston, I’m afraid you’ll have to move to some place where I can reach you by telephone. It’s the devil and all trying to get at you; and your hours at the office are so irregular — ”
Vance’s heart sank. That dry even voice was even more detestable to listen to than he had expected. He hardly knew which part of Tarrant’s challenge to answer first; but finally he said, ineffectively: “I can work better away from the office.” This was not true, for he did most of his writing there; but he was too bewildered to remember it.
Tarrant smiled drily. “Well, that remains to be seen. It’s so long since any of your script has been visible here that I’ve no means of knowing how much of the new book you’ve turned out.”
Vance’s blood was up. “I don’t understand. It was with your consent that I dropped the monthly articles to give all my time to my novel — ”
“Oh, just so,” Tarrant interrupted suavely. “And I presume you’ve got along with it fairly well, as I understand you’ve been negotiating privately to sell it to Lambart.”
“It was Lambart who came to me. He offered to fix it up with Dreck and Saltzer. The price I had contracted for with them is so much below what I understand I have a right to expect that I couldn’t afford to refuse.”
“Refuse what? Are you under the impression that you can sell the same book twice over, to two different publishers? You signed a contract some time ago with Dreck and Saltzer for all your literary output for four years — and that contract has over two years more to run. Dreck and Saltzer have asked me for an explanation because it was through me that the New Hour was able to put you in the way of securing a publisher. They’re not used to this way of doing business; neither am I, I confess.”
Vance was silent. The blood was beating angrily in his temples; but, put thus baldly, he could not but feel that his action seemed underhand, if not actually dishonourable. Of course he ought not to have concealed from Tarrant and his publishers that he had authorized Lambart to negotiate for him. He saw clearly that what he had done was open to misconstruction; but his personal antagonism toward Tarrant robbed him of his self-control. “The price I was to get from Dreck and Saltzer wasn’t a living wage — ”
Tarrant leaned back in his chair, and drummed on the desk with long impatient fingers. His hands were bloodless but delicately muscular: he wore a dark red seal ring on his left fourth finger. With those fingers he had pushed back his wife’s hair from the temples, where Vance had so often watched the pulses beat . . . had traced the little blue veins that netted them. . . . Vance’s eyes were blurred with rage.
“Why did you sign the contract if you weren’t satisfied with it?” Tarrant continued, in his carefully restrained voice. It was evident that he was very angry, but that the crude expression of his wrath would have given him no more pleasure than an unskilful stroke gives a good tennis player. His very quietness increased Vance’s sense of inferiority.
“I signed because I was a beginner, because I had to . . . .”
Tarrant paused and stretched his hand toward a cigarette. “Well, you’re a beginner still . . . you’ve got to remember that. . . . You missed the Pulsifer Prize for your short story: for that blunder you’ll agree we’re not responsible; but it did us a lot more harm than it did you. We were counting on the prize to give you a boost, to make you a more valuable asset, as it were. And there was every reason to think you would have got it if you hadn’t tried to extract the money out of Mrs. Pulsifer in advance.” Vance crimsoned, and stammered out: “Oh, see here — ”; but Tarrant ignored the interruption. “After that you dropped doing the monthly articles you’d contracted to supply us with, in order to have more time for this new novel. In short, as far as the New Hour is concerned, ever since the serial publication of Instead came to an end we’ve been, so to speak, keeping you as a luxury.” He paused, lit the cigarette, and proffered the box to Vance, who waved it impatiently aside. “Oh, you understand; we accepted the situation willingly. It has always been our policy to make allowances for the artistic temperament — to give our contributors a free hand. But we rather expect a square deal in return. If any of our authors are dissatisfied we prefer to hear of it from themselves; and so do Dreck and Saltzer. We don’t care to find out from outsiders that the books promised to us — and of which the serial rights are partly paid in advance — are being hawked about in other publishers’ offices without our knowledge. That sort of thing does no good to an author — and a lot of harm to us.” He ended his statement with a slight cough, and paused for Vance’s answer.
Vance was trembling with anger and mortification. He knew that Tarrant had made out a case for himself, and yet that whatever wrong he, Vance, had done in the matter, came out of the initial wrong perpetrated against him by his editor and publisher. But he could not find words in which to put all this consecutively and convincingly. The allusion to his attempt to borrow money from Mrs. Pulsifer, the discovery of her having betrayed the fact, were so sickening that he hardly noticed Tarrant’s cynical avowal that, but for this, they could have captured the prize for him. His head was whirling with confused arguments, but he had sense enough left to reflect: “I mustn’t let go of myself. . . . I must try and look as cool as he does . . . .”
Finally he said: “You say you and Dreck and Saltzer want to be fair to your authors. Well, the contract you advised me to make with them wasn’t a fair one. Instead was a success, and they’ve wriggled out of paying the royalties they’d agreed on on the ground that they’ve lost money on the book because it’s not a full-length novel.”
“But didn’t your contract with them specify that the scale of royalties that you accepted applied only to a full-length novel?”
“Well, I suppose it did. I guess I didn’t read it very carefully. But they must have made a lot more money on Instead than they expected.”
Tarrant leaned back in his chair and laid his fingertips together, with the gently argumentative air of one who reasons with the unreasonable. “My dear Weston,” he began; and Vance winced at the apostrophe. All authors, Tarrant went on — young authors, that is — thought there was nothing easier than to decide exactly how much money their editors and publishers were making out of them. And they always worked out the account to their own disadvantage — naturally. In reality it wasn’t as simple as that, and editors and publishers often stood to lose the very sums the authors accused them of raking in. A book might have a lot of fuss made about it in a small circle — Instead was just such a case — and yet you couldn’t get the big public to buy it. And unluckily it was only the favour of the big public that made a book pay. As a matter of fact, Instead was a loss to Dreck and Saltzer. If Weston would write another book just like it, but of the proper length, very likely they’d make up their deficit on that; a highbrow success on a first book often helped the sales of the next, provided it was the right length. Dreck and Saltzer knew this, and though they were actually out of pocket they were ready to have another try. . . . Publishing was just one long gamble. . . . And perhaps it wasn’t unfair to remind Weston that, both to the New Hour and to Dreck and Saltzer, he’d so far been, from the business point of view, rather a heavy load to carry . . . .
Vance had controlled himself by a violent effort of the will; but at this summing-up of the case he broke out. “Well, I daresay I have — but why not let me off our contract, if it’s been as much of a disappointment to you as to me?”
Tarrant’s slow blood rose to his cheeks. “I’m curious to know why you consider yourself disappointed.”
“Why, for the reasons I’ve told you. My articles haven’t been a success — I know that as well as you. But my book has, and under our agreement it’s brought me no more than if it had been a failure. I can’t live, and keep my wife alive, on the salary you give me, and if you’ll let me off I can earn three times the money tomorrow.”
Tarrant was silent. He began to drum again on the desk, and the dull red of anger still coloured his pale skin. “My dear fellow, you’ve had plenty of opportunities to complain to me of our contract, and it never seems to have occurred to you to do so till that pirate Lambart came along. Even then, if you’d come straight to me and stated your case frankly, I don’t say . . . But I’m not in the habit of letting my contributors be bribed away behind my back, and neither are Dreck and Saltzer. You signed a contract with us, and that contract holds.”
“Why do you want it to hold?”
Tarrant continued his nervous drumming. “That’s our own business.”
“Well, if you won’t answer, I’ll answer for you. It’s because I’ve given you one success at a bargain, and you feel you may miss another if you set me free. And it pays you to hang on to me on that chance.”
Tarrant’s lips moved slowly before his answer became audible. “Yes — I suppose that’s the view certain people might take. . . . It’s one that doesn’t enter into our way of doing business. Besides, before knowing whether the chance you speak of was worth gambling on, as you assert, I should have had to see the book you’re at work on now; it doesn’t always happen that beginners follow up a first success with a second. Rather the other way round.”
“Then why won’t you let me go?”
Tarrant, instead of replying, lit another cigarette, puffed at it for a moment, and then said: “By the way, is your manuscript here?”
“Yes.”
“I should like to have a look at it . . . only for an hour or two. So far I haven’t much idea of what it’s about.”
Vance pulled the manuscript out of his pocket. “If you don’t like it, will you let me off?” he repeated doggedly.
“No, certainly not. I shall ask you to make an effort to give us something more satisfactory, as I have every right to.”
There was another pause. The air between the two men seemed to Vance to become suddenly rarefied, as if nothing intervened to deflect the swift currents of their antagonism.
“You won’t like it,” Vance insisted with white lips.
“I daresay not. No doubt you’ve seen to that.”
The sneer struck Vance like a blow. He felt powerless with wrath and humiliation.
“It’s no use your reading it anyhow,” he exclaimed, no longer knowing what he was saying. He leaned across the desk, snatched up the pages, and tore them to bits before Tarrant’s astonished eyes. He could not stop tearing — it seemed as if the bits would never be small enough to ensure the complete annihilation of his work.
He was conscious that Tarrant, after the first shock of surprise, was watching him with a sort of cold disgust; and also that, when the work of destruction was over, their relative situations would be exactly what they had been before. But this cool appreciation of the case was far below the surface of his emotions. He could not resist the sombre physical satisfaction of destroying under that man’s eyes what he had made . . . .
The last scrap dropped to the floor, and Tarrant said quietly: “I’m afraid now you’ll have to send round and get the copy you have at home.”
“I’ve no other copy,” Vance retorted.
“That’s a pity. You’ve given yourself a lot of unnecessary work — and I’m damned if I see why. What’s the sense of having to begin the thing all over again?”
“I shall never begin it over again.”
“Well, if you weren’t satisfied with it, or thought it wouldn’t suit our purpose, I daresay you’re right. But in that case I’ll have to ask you to buckle down and turn out something else in the shortest possible time. We’ve been a good many months now without getting any return for our money . . . .”
“I shall never write anything for you again,” said Vance slowly.
Tarrant did not speak for a moment or two. His colour had faded to its usual ivory-like sallowness, and the furrow deepened between his ironically lifted eyebrows. He had the immense advantage over his antagonist that anger made him cold instead of hot.
“Never? You’d better think that over, hadn’t you? You understand, of course, that your not writing for us won’t set you free to write for anybody else till the four years are over.”
Vance looked at him with something of the other’s own chill contempt. His wrath had dropped; he felt only immeasurably repelled.
“You mean, then,” he said, “that even if I don’t write another line for you you’ll hold onto me?”
“I’m afraid you’ve left me no alternative,” Tarrant answered coldly. He rang the bell on his desk, and said to the office boy who appeared: “Clear up those papers, will you?”
In the street Vance drew a long breath. He did not know what would happen next — could not see a fraction of an inch into the future. But in destroying the first chapters of Loot he felt as if he had torn the claws of an incubus out of his flesh. He had no idea that he had hated the book so much — or was it only Tarrant he was hating when he thought of it? He flung on, flushed, defiant. He felt like a balloonist who has thrown out all his ballast: extraordinarily light and irresponsible, he bounded up toward the zenith . . . .
As he turned the corner of his street he came upon a pedlar beating his horse. Horses were rare nowadays in New York streets, pedlars almost obsolete; but in this forgotten district both were still occasionally to be seen. . . . Vance stopped and looked at the load and the horse. The load was not very heavy: the horse was thin but not incapable of effort. He was not struggling against an overload, but simply balking, thrusting his shabby forelegs obstinately against the asphalt. Unknown to his driver, something was offending or torturing him somewhere — he had the lifted lip and wild-rolling eye of a horse in pictures of battlefields. And the human fool stood there stupidly belabouring him. . . . Vance’s anger leapt up. “Here, you damned fool, let that horse alone, will you . . . .”
The man, astonished and then furious, cursed back copiously in Italian and struck the horse again. “Ah, that’s it, is it?” Vance shouted. He caught the man by the arm, and remembering his Dante, cried out joyously: “Lasciate ogni speranza!” as he fell on him. The tussle was brief. He struck the whip out of the pedlar’s hand, punched him in the face, and then, seeing the loafers assembling, and a policeman in the distance, suddenly remembered that it was Tarrant he had been thrashing, and shamefacedly darted away down the street to the shelter of Mrs. Hubbard’s door.
It was one of Tarrant’s accomplishments to be able to go imperturbably through a scene where his advantage depended on his keeping his temper; but it was one of his weaknesses to collapse afterward, his overtaxed self-control abandoning him to womanish tremors, damp hands, and brittle nerves.
When he turned up that evening, his wife knew at once that he was in the throes of one of these reactions. Something had gone wrong again at the office. Of late, on such occasions, he had taken to seeking comfort in the society of Mrs. Pulsifer. Halo knew this and was faintly amused. She knew also that he was losing interest in the New Hour because it had not succeeded as he had hoped, and that he had begun to write a novel — probably under Mrs. Pulsifer’s inspiration. An important Pulsifer Prize for First Novels was to be added to the one already established for the Best Short Story; and it was like Tarrant, to whom the money was utterly indifferent, to be tempted to compete for the sake of publicity. His restless vanity could never find sufficient pasturage, and as the years passed without the name of Lewis Tarrant becoming a household word on two continents (or even figuring in the English Who’s Who), his wife noticed that his appetite for praise grew coarser.
All this Halo marked with the lucid second sight of married experience. As long as she had continued to be fond of her husband she had seen him incompletely and confusedly; but under the X ray of her settled indifference every muscle and articulation had become visible. At times she was almost frightened by the accuracy with which she could calculate the movements of his mind and plot out his inevitable course of action. Because really she no longer cared to do so. . . . She would have been glad enough to impart the unneeded gift to Mrs. Pulsifer; and one day when Mrs. Spear, after various tentative approaches, had put a maternal arm about her and asked ever so gently: “Darling, has it never occurred to you that Lewis is being seen about rather too much with Jet Pulsifer?” Halo had burst into hysterical laughter, and caught her bewildered parent to her bosom . . . .
But no. There was no escape that way. Lewis still needed her, and she knew it. Mrs. Pulsifer ministered to his thirsting egotism, but Halo managed his life for him, and that was even more important. Some day, perhaps . . . But she shook off the insinuating vision. Penny by penny, hour by hour, she was still paying back the debt she had assumed when she found out that, all through his courtship, her family had been secretly and shamelessly borrowing from him. And since then the debt had gone on increasing much faster than she could possibly reduce it. The comfort he had given to Mr. and Mrs. Spear since he had become their son-in-law, the peace and security assured to them by his lavish allowance — how many years of wifely devotion and fidelity would it take to wipe out such a score?
Musing fruitlessly on these things she sat alone, waiting for her husband to join her and go in to dinner. She had refused several invitations for that evening, thinking that Lewis would probably dine out (as he did nowadays on most nights), and hoping rather absurdly that Vance Weston might come in and see her . . . .
The poor boy must have calmed down by this time; it would be safe to see him; and she was eager to hear more of the novel. Her sympathy with him, she told herself again and again, was all intellectual; she was passionately in love with his mind. It was a pity that he had not understood this; had tried to mix up “the other thing” with their intellectual ardours. And yet — no, certainly, she did not want him to make love to her; but would it not have mortified her to be treated forever like a disembodied intelligence? She had to confess to herself that she could not wish undone that foolish scene of the other evening . . . that the incident in it she most obstinately remembered was his despairing boy’s cry: “I want to kiss you . . . .”
Oh, but what folly! Of course, if she was really to help him with his work, all those other ideas must be put aside and forgotten. And she did so want to help him; it was her greatest longing, the need of her blood. The thought of it fed her lonely hours, filled her empty life — or nearly filled it. And she hoped he would feel the same longing, the same urgent necessity, and would come back to her soon for more companionship, more encouragement. . . . Perhaps she had not encouraged him enough, that last evening, about his work, that is. It was well to remember that authors, even the least fatuous and the most intelligent of them, were nervous, irritable, self-conscious: the slightest unfavourable criticism flayed them alive. In that respect certainly (she smiled) Tarrant seemed qualified to join the brotherhood. But poor Vance’s sensitiveness was of a different kind, the result of inexperience and humility. Under it she always felt an inarticulate awareness of his powers; his doubts, she was sure, concerned only his aptitude for giving those powers full expression. She could almost picture him, in some glorious phase of future achievement, flinging down his pen to cry out like a great predecessor: “My God, but this is genius —!”
She was thus softly pondering, in a mood of moral beatitude, when Tarrant turned up with his usual nervous: “I’m not late, am I? Well, put off dinner a few minutes, will you?” And now here he was again, fresh from his dressing room, brushed, glossy, physically renovated, but nervously on edge and obviously in need of consolation. . . . Goodbye to her moral beatitude!
Since their one quarrel about Vance Weston — the quarrel which had resulted in Halo’s deciding not to accompany her husband to Europe — the young man’s name had seldom figured in their talk. The unexpected success of Instead had been balm to Tarrant’s editorial vanity, and Halo had not suspected that there had been a subsequent difference between the two men till the evening, a few months previously, when Vance had told her of his asking Tarrant to raise his salary or annul their contract. She had suffered bitterly on hearing of this, but she had suffered in silence. She could not give Vance the clandestine help she would have wished to; she had neither money of her own, nor means of raising any. And she knew it would only injure him if she betrayed his confession and appealed to her husband’s generosity. Tarrant had no generosity of that kind; he would simply have said: “I suppose he’s been trying to borrow of YOU now, after failing to pull it off with Mrs. Pulsifer”; and if he had said that she thought she would have got up and walked out of his house — forever.
No; that was not the way to help Vance. Her only intervention on his behalf had been a failure. All she could do was to hold her tongue, and do what she could to contribute to the success of his new book. It flattered her (far more than she knew) to feel that in that way she really could be of use to him. To be his Muse, his inspiration — then there really was some meaning in the stale old image! She knew she had had a real share in the making of Instead, and she wore the secret knowledge like a jewel . . . .
“Well? — ” she questioned her husband, when they had returned to the library after dinner. She knew it was necessary for his digestion (an uncertain function) that he should unburden himself of the grievance she read in every look and intonation. And sometimes, when she rendered him this service, she felt as impersonal as a sick nurse smoothing out a fractious invalid.
Tarrant gave his short retrospective laugh — like the scratch of a match throwing back a brief flare on his grievance. “Oh, it’s only your protégé again — ”
She felt a little shiver of apprehension. Usually a cool harmony reigned between Tarrant and herself. Since the day of her great outburst, when she had refused to accompany him to Europe, she had carefully avoided anything approaching a disagreement. She had learned her lesson that day; and futile wrangles were humiliating to her. But whenever Vance Weston’s name was pronounced between them the air seemed to become electric. Was it her husband’s fault or hers? She was always on the alert to defend Vance, she hardly knew from what. Or was it herself she was defending . . .?
“What protégé?” she asked carelessly.
“I didn’t know you had more than one. Weston, of course — yes, he’s been treating me to another of his scenes. Really, the fellow’s not housebroken. And a sneak too . . . can’t run straight . . . .”
“Lewis!”
“Dirty sneak. He’s after more money, as usual, and he’s been trying to get Lambart to buy his book from Dreck and Saltzer without first consulting me. Buy up our double contract with him . . . behind my back! But women can never see the enormity of these things . . . .”
He paused, and stirred his coffee angrily. “I daresay you see nothing in it,” he challenged her.
Halo’s heart had subsided to a more regular measure. It was not what she had feared . . . she was ashamed to think how much! She assured herself hastily that her fears had been for Vance, and not for herself. If he had lost his head and betrayed his feeling for her to her husband it would have meant ruin for him. She knew the deadly patience of Tarrant’s retaliations.
“Of course,” Tarrant continued, “things aren’t done that way between men. But the fact is I know only one woman who has a man’s sensitiveness in money matters” — he paused — “and that is Jet Pulsifer . . . .” He brought the name out with a touch of defiance which amused his wife.
“Oh, yes,” she murmured, with increasing relief.
“You don’t see anything in it yourself?” he insisted.
“I see what I always have — that your contract’s not fair to Vance; I’ve told you so before.”
“That’s neither here nor there — ”
“Surely it’s very much HERE, if the poor boy’s in want of money.”
“Ah, he’s been whining to you again about money, has he?”
She shook her head and her eyes filled with tears. She remembered the uselessness of her previous intervention in Vance’s behalf, and wondered again by what curious coincidence it happened that his name always brought to a climax the latent tension between herself and Tarrant.
“Look here, Halo — I can see you still think I’ve treated him badly.”
“I think you’ve treated him — indifferently. What you call business is essentially an affair of indifference, isn’t it? It’s designed to exclude the emotions.”
“Do you want me to be emotional about Weston?”
“I want you to be generous, Lewis — as you know how to be . . . .” She paused to let this take effect. “He’s young and unhappy and bewildered. Perhaps he did make a mistake in going to Lambart about his book without telling you.” (Tarrant snorted.) “But surely you can afford to overlook that. He’s given the New Hour one good book — and I believe he’s going to give you another. This last novel is a very fine thing — ”
Tarrant shifted his position slightly, and looked at his wife. “Ah — so you’ve read it, then?” he said, a sudden jealous edge in his voice.
“The first chapters — yes.”
“Well, there are no more first chapters — or last ones, either.” He saw her startled movement, and laughed. “When I refused to let the young gentleman off his bargain he tore up the manuscript before my eyes and said he’d never write another line for any of us. Good old-fashioned melodrama, eh?” He waited, and then added with a touch of flatness: “He swore he had no other copy — but I wouldn’t trust him about that.”
Halo sat speechless. The scene had evidently been more violent than she had imagined. She knew Tarrant’s faculty for provoking violent scenes — his cool incisiveness cutting into the soul like a white-hot blade into flesh. The pound of flesh nearest the heart — that was what he always exacted. And she knew too that Vance had spoken the truth: to her also he had said that he had no duplicate of those first chapters. He still kept to his boyish habit of scribbling the pages with his own hand, and usually did not trouble to type them out till the book he was doing was well advanced. The mechanical labour of copying his own work was hateful to him, and he had never been able to pay for having it done. In the first months Laura Lou had tried to act as amanuensis; but she found his writing hard to decipher, her spelling drove him frantic, and she had nearly destroyed his Remington. Since her illness there had been no question of her continuing to render these doubtful services. The doctor said that stooping over was bad for her, and the manuscripts piled themselves up uncopied, in spite of Halo’s frequent protests. Why, she thought, had she not insisted on typing his work for him herself? But it was too late now; she could only try to swallow back the useless tears.
“Well, what do you think of that?” Tarrant insisted. It always annoyed him to have his climaxes fall flat, and he behaved like a conscientious actor whose careless partner had missed the cue. “You don’t seem to have heard what I’ve been saying,” he insisted.
“Oh, yes. And I’m sorry — dreadfully sorry.”
“Well, that’s not much use.” She saw that he was reaching the moment of reaction. It was the moment when, after he had produced his effect, brought out and aired his grievance, his taut nerves gave way, and he secretly asked himself what to do next, like a naughty child after a tantrum. The hour always came when he had to pay for the irresistible enjoyment of making somebody angry and unhappy, and there was something at once ludicrous in his surprise when it arrived, and slightly pitiful in his distress. “These things take it out of me,” he said, and drew his handkerchief across his damp forehead.
Usually Halo had some murmur of reassurance ready; but on this occasion none came. Vance had destroyed his manuscript — those pages in which she had indeed found things to criticise, but so much more to praise! She remembered now only what was admirable in them, and felt helplessly indignant at the cruelty which had driven him to such an act.
“The fact is, I’m not used to treating with people of that kind,” Tarrant went on, with rising self-pity.
“No — you’re not!” she retorted, carried away by sudden indignation. “It’s your only excuse,” she added ironically.
He stopped short, and looked at her with the injured eyes of a child who had expected compassion and gets a box on the ear.
“You’ve destroyed a fine thing — a great thing, perhaps. It’s an act of vandalism, as much as slashing a picture or breaking a statue — things people get arrested for,” she continued recklessly.
“I— I? Destroyed —? But, Halo, you haven’t even been listening. You think I tore up the manuscript? It was that damned fool who — ”
“Yes, because you hurt him, wounded his pride as an artist. You don’t know what it is to respect other people’s work, the creation of their souls. . . . You don’t know anything about anything, unless it happens to yourself!”
She saw the beads of perspiration come out again on his forehead, and while he felt for his handkerchief she knew he was anxiously asking himself how he was to go through another painful discussion so soon after the previous one. Usually he required twenty-four hours to recover after he had given somebody hell — and here was his own wife, who knew better than anyone else how sensitive he was, how heavily he had to pay for every nervous strain, and who was ruthlessly forcing him into a second scene before he had recovered from the first!
But Halo felt no pity. The sight of her husband’s discomfiture only exasperated her. Often and often she had helped him back to self-esteem after one of his collapses; to do so was almost as necessary to her pride as to his, as long as they were to go on living together. But she was far past such considerations now, and pushed on without heeding. “You’ve destroyed something rare . . . something beautiful . . . .” She could only uselessly go over the same words.
Suddenly Tarrant’s face became attentive. “You thought as well of the book as all that?”
“I thought great things of it — ” The only thing that relieved her indignation was to rub into him the value of what he had lost. He should at least feel it commercially, if there was no other way of making him suffer.
He was looking at her rather shamefacedly. “Really, you might have dropped a hint of all this before . . . .”
“I read the chapters only a little while ago; and Vance didn’t want me to form an opinion till he’d got on further, or to say anything about it.”
“Saying anything about it hardly applies to telling me — your husband, and his editor.”
“I’ve no doubt he would have shown it to you if you’d asked him.”
“I did ask him, just now; and his answer was to tear the thing up.” There was a long pause, during which the two opponents rested rather helplessly on their resentment. Halo was still too angry to speak, and her husband, she knew, was beginning to ask himself if he had made a mistake — if there were times when even the satisfaction of bullying someone who depended on one had better be foregone. He said sullenly: “After all, it only means the loss of the time it’ll take him to rewrite the thing. I don’t believe there were more than sixty pages.”
“Creative writers can’t rewrite themselves. It would be mental torture if they could . . . and they can’t.”
“Oh, well, we’ll see.”
“Do you mean to say he told you he’d try?”
“Lord, no. On the contrary. He said he’d never write another line for us. . . . But of course he will — he’ll have to. He belongs to the review for another two years, as I reminded him.”
Halo pondered. At length she said, in a quieter tone: “You can’t make him write if he doesn’t choose to.”
“I can threaten him with a lawsuit.”
“Oh, Lewis — ”
“Well, what about it? Here’s a fellow who’s destroyed something beautiful — pricelessly beautiful. You tell me artists can’t do the same thing twice over. Well, that makes it unique. And that unique thing that he’s destroyed belonged to me — belonged to the New Hour, and to Dreck and Saltzer. As I told him, it was partly paid for already — and how’s he going to make it up to us now, I ask you? I could see the young ass had never even thought of that.”
Halo suddenly felt ashamed of her own impotent anger. She could have rendered Vance no worse service than by harping to her husband on his blunder. For the sake of satisfying a burst of temper as useless as Tarrant’s she had risked what little hope there was of bringing him around to a kindlier view. But it was almost impossible for her to be adroit and patient when she dealt with anything near to her heart. Then generosity and frankness were her only weapons — and they were about as availing as bows and arrows against a machine-gun. At length she said: “I can understand Dreck and Saltzer taking this stand — I suppose, from a business point of view, it’s all right. But with you it’s so different, isn’t it? Fellow artists surely ought to look at the question from the same angle. Vance is terribly poor . . . his wife is ill . . . in some respects his collaboration hasn’t been of much use to the review, and I should think you’d be glad, if the New Hour can’t afford to raise his pay, to let him off his bargain, and get Dreck and Saltzer to do the same. What harm can it do either of you? And at any rate you’ll have given him the chance of trying his luck elsewhere. . . . I daresay he was stupid, and even rude, in his talk with you — he’s got no tact, no cleverness of that kind — but you, who’ve got all the social experience he lacks, you ought to be generous . . . you can afford to be . . . .” Her lips were so parched that she had to stop. To go on talking like that was like chewing sawdust. And when she paused she understood in a flash the extent of her miscalculation. It is too easy to think that vain people are always stupid — and this was the mistake she had made. Yet she ought to have known that her husband, though he was vain, was not stupid . . . or at least not always so; and that flattery administered at the wrong time will not deceive even those who most thirst for it. Tarrant stood up and looked down on her with a faintly ironic smile.
“What you really think,” he said, “is that I’m a fool — but I’m not quite as an egregious one as all that. I leave that superiority to your young friend. Besides,” he added, “I ought not to forget that you’ve never understood anything about business. It was the only gift your fairy godmothers left out. I’m awfully obliged for your advice; but really, in matters of this kind, you must leave me to deal with our contributors myself . . . .”