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
