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
