Hudson River Bracketed · Book IV · Chapter 16 (2/2)

“Why, for a man who wants a hearing, and has something new to say, I can’t imagine a better chance than an open arena like The Hour.” She could reel off things like that as long as he wanted them; and besides, she did think, had forced herself to think, after his various unsuccessful experiments, first in architecture, then in painting, that letters might really be his field. Not creative work, probably (though she knew he aspired to be a novelist), but literary criticism, literary history, perhaps⁠—provided he had the patience to pursue any line of investigation far enough. “If only he hadn’t any money!” she sometimes found herself reflecting, confronted with the bewildering discovery that abundance may hamper talent as much as privation does. “But what is talent made of, then?” she wondered. “Is it really like some shoddy material that can’t stand either rain or sun?”

Frenside still mused by the fire. “Yes; I shouldn’t wonder if Tarrant made something out of The Hour, if only he gets the right people for the routine work.” It was unusually generous of Frenside to say that; yet Halo tingled with resentment.

“You mean he’ll never have the perseverance himself?”

“My dear child, don’t make me out worse than I am. I mean exactly what I say. Every business enterprise is built on drudgery⁠—”

“Yes, and he’s too brilliant. He is brilliant, Frenny.” She stood looking at her old friend with confident insistent eyes; it always fortified her faith in her husband to impress it on others. And really she did believe in The Hour, and in what he and she were going to make of it.⁠ ⁠…

The door opened, and there he was, slender, distinguished, handsomer than ever, she thought, as her eyes challenged the calm face under which she knew such a hunger for approbation burned.

“Hallo, Frenside⁠—” Lewis Tarrant nodded to his wife and strolled up to the fireplace with his unhurried step. “Cold as the devil outdoors.” He bent over the flame, stretching his nervous transparent hands to it. (“With hands like that,” Halo mused, “why isn’t he a poet?”)

Tarrant dropped into an armchair near the tea-table. “No⁠—a cocktail, please. I’m frozen to the marrow. Cursed climate!”

She handed him the cocktail, and in passing laid her hand on his shoulder. “You’re tired, Lewis⁠—you’ve been overworking.” It did her good to be able, in all sincerity, to rebuke him for that!

“Well, it is hard work⁠—straightening things out. But I think I begin to see my way.” He spoke with the cold sparkle of voice and face which was his nearest approach to enthusiasm. “By the way, though⁠—it wasn’t all just hacking and hewing. I’ve made a find.” He picked up a bundle of papers he had thrown down, and extracted from them a copy of The Hour.

“What about this, Frenside? I never heard of it before⁠—it must have come out while we were honeymooning, Halo.”

The word startled her, on his lips. Was it all so long ago that he seemed to be speaking a dead language? She shook off the chill and put out her hand for the review⁠—an old number, as Lewis said, battered from long kicking about in the office. “What? Oh⁠—this: ‘One Day’? A story, is it?” She wrinkled her brows over her shortsighted eyes. “Lewis! Why, it’s by that boy: the Tracys’ cousin. The one⁠ ⁠…” She broke off, and felt the colour rising to her temples. Vance Weston⁠—she had not thought of Vance Weston since her marriage. Yet what a score he had against her! She had never been able to acquit herself of that; if ever the chance to do so arose, how gladly she would seize it! She bent above the page, curious, excited, with the little half articulate murmurs of the born reader. “How queer that I never heard of this.⁠ ⁠… Yes, it came out the winter we were in Egypt.” (Her chronology of her married life was more topographic than sentimental.) She looked up at Frenside. “I suppose he sent it to you, Frenny, after that time you met him at Eaglewood?”

Frenside seemed to be groping in a heap of dusty recollections. “Yes⁠—sure enough. It comes back to me. He turned up at the office one day, and unloaded a lot of fool poetry.” (Halo remembered too, and winced.) “Then, when I told him the stuff wouldn’t do, he pulled this out. Let me see: yes, that’s it. I thought it better than most things of the kind; and anyhow the boy looked so starved and scared that I took it. Never saw him but that once, as well as I can remember.”

Halo was no longer listening: she had plunged again into her reading. Yes; Frenside was right⁠—the poetry, though it had possibilities (or seemed to, by that mountain pool at sunrise) was a poor parrotlike effort compared to this blunt prose, almost telegraphic in its harsh directness. She read on, absorbed.

“Well⁠—?” Lewis queried, triumphant.

She came back to him from a long way. “What a strange thing it is⁠—how terrible!”

“Fine, though? That fellow ought to be watched. Don’t you think so, Frenny?”

Frenside rose, throwing his cigar end into the embers. “Well, it’s a toss-up. This is the early morning ‘slice-of-life’; out of the boy’s own experience, most likely. Wait and see what happens when he tackles something outside of himself. That’s where the test comes in.”

Halo asked: “Didn’t he send anything else?” and Frenside, rummaging among more faded memories, thought that, yes, he had⁠—articles and stories, all raw stuff, unusable. That was the general rule; any chap with a knack could usually pull off one good thing at the start.⁠ ⁠…

“This shows more than knack.”

Frenside shrugged, said he hoped so, wished them goodbye, and shuffled out into the hall, getting grumblingly into his overcoat with the help of Tarrant, who came back rubbing his hands and smiling. “Well, my dear, there’s your great critic: couldn’t even remember when and how he’d got hold of a thing like this, or whether the boy had sent him anything else as good! No knowing what we’ve lost⁠—or how to get hold of him now. Not a trace of his address on the books. The way that paper was run⁠—!” He sank down by the fire with a dry wrinkling of lips and nostrils. “I rather flatter myself things will go differently now⁠ ⁠…”

“Oh, Lewis! But of course⁠—with your flair.”

He stroked his slight moustache lingeringly, using his hand, as she knew, to mask a satisfaction that might have appeared too crude. “Well, I suppose one has the instinct or one hasn’t.⁠ ⁠…” he murmured.

“I’m so glad, dear, that you have it. You saw at once what this was worth, didn’t you? But we must get at the boy⁠—a young man now, I suppose,” she mused. “How long ago it all seems! I wonder how we can run him down? Why, through the Tracys, of course! I’ll write to Mrs. Tracy now.”

She started up and went to the writing table, pulling out paper and pen with an impatience doubled by her husband’s. “Oh, we’ll wire,” he said in a tone of authority; “I’ll get it off at once. We want something from him for our New York number.” And she thought, deep in herself: “Nothing will be too good for Vance Weston now that he’s Lewis’s own discovery,” and then tingled with shame at her lucidity. She dashed off the telegram at her husband’s dictation, and while Tarrant went out to send it, dropped down again into her armchair.

“If my boy had lived⁠—” she said to herself, covering under that elliptical sweep of regret all the things she might have judged differently, all the things she might have forborne to judge, if between her and her husband there had been a presence, warm and troublesome and absorbing, to draw them closer yet screen them a little from each other.