XXIX
Halo Tarrant’s eleventh-hour decision not to sail with her husband was due to a trifling domestic quarrel; so most people would no doubt have called it—though she sometimes wondered how it was possible, in any given case, to say in advance what would turn out trifling and what ominous in the world of sentiment.
She had, or imagined she had, been looking forward eagerly to the trip; to the interesting people they would see, the excitement of playing even a small part in the literary world of London and Paris, and all the inducements which change offers to the young and the unsatisfied. Then, suddenly, a link had snapped in the chain holding her to Tarrant, and they stood miles apart, hardly visible to each other.
Queer that life should be at the mercy of such accidents! But in this case circumstances had been tending for some time to unsettle her husband’s moral atmosphere, which was not at best a stable one. The New Hour was not taking hold as they had hoped. Subscriptions were not increasing. That, they were told, was natural: the first year of a new periodical is always critical. More disquieting was the fact that bookshops and newsstands were not sending in heavier orders. There had even been a falling off in the sale of the last numbers, and the editorial programme for the rest of the year was hardly brilliant enough to revive the demand. The situation was not unusual; but that was precisely what made it mortifying to Tarrant. Halo had already learned that in her husband’s scheme of life half successes were almost worse than failures. He had taken hold of the moribund journal and put new life into it; and if it were to languish again in his hands—if somebody else’s failure were to become his—the situation would be much more humiliating (and more difficult for his vanity to account for) than if he had started a new enterprise and not made it a success.
Frenside, at this juncture, had the happy thought of suggesting that Tarrant should go over to London and Paris and look about him: personal contact with editors and authors abroad might lead, he thought, to something interesting. Tarrant, always exhilarated by any new plan, at once became buoyant and masterful. He declared he had always thought he ought to go; he was glad that, for once, his wife and Frenside had come round to his view. He was prepared, Halo knew, to face a pecuniary loss on the review for the first year or two, but not a loss of prestige. Being his review, it must be brilliant or vanish: a slow decline would be unbearable. But he was confident that great things would result from this journey, and that he would come home with a glittering list of contributors.
Whenever his faith in himself returned, his wife’s revived with it, and the two hurried joyfully through their preparations. But on the evening before they were to sail Tarrant came home in a different humour. He and Halo were alone, and when they returned to the library after dinner he broke out at once: “Well, we’re dished this time; I don’t see that there’s much use in sailing.”
Halo roused herself out of her happy preoccupation. Hurry, confusion, sudden preparations of any sort, always amused and stimulated her; but they made Lewis nervous—and so did the mere reaction from optimism. She had learned to allow for that, and only echoed absently: “No use sailing?” while her real self remained absorbed in luggage labels, passports and deck chairs. At length her husband’s silence told her that something more was expected of her, and still absently she added: “Why?”
As if her delay had reached to the extreme limit of his patience, his answer sprang back: “The Pulsifer Prize. That fool Weston has gone and lost it.”
Halo shook off her travel dream with a start. What on earth, she wondered, could have set Lewis fretting about the Pulsifer Prize? But what was the use of wondering? She supposed that, after two or three years of marriage, there were times when most husbands seemed to their wives like harmless lunatics (when it wasn’t the other way round, or perhaps reciprocal), and she answered, in a tone of good-humoured reminder: “Lost it? How could he, when it’s not given until next November?”
Tarrant, with a shrug, threw himself back wearily in his chair, and she remembered, too late, that there was nothing he so loathed as being humoured. “My dear,” he said, “what’s the sense of that sort of talk? You’re not really as simple as all that: you know perfectly well that the prize is given the minute Jet Pulsifer takes a shine to one of the candidates. And she had taken a shine to that silly ass.”
Halo’s indifference was giving way to a sense of counter-irritation. Where would he go to dig up his next grievance, she wondered? And just as she ought to be writing out the labels—! “Oh, if that’s all—” The whole subject of the Pulsifer Prize, with its half-confessed background of wire-pulling and influencing, was particularly distasteful to her, and she was really thankful there was no time to deal with it.
“All?” Tarrant echoed. “It’s everything. She fell for Weston the minute she laid eyes on him—that evening at the party here. It was rather what we’d planned the thing for—you remember? And she’s been awfully nice to him ever since … seeing him very often, and encouraging him a good deal, I imagine. You know what she is.”
Halo murmured reluctantly: “Well—?”
“Well, what does the infernal fool do? Goes there the other day and holds her up for a loan.”
“A loan?”
“A loan. And how much, do you suppose? The exact amount of the prize. Two thousand dollars—not a copper less!” Tarrant
