“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. …”
Book VII
XLI
The summer light lay so rightly on the lawn and trees of the Willows that Halo Tarrant understood more clearly than ever before the spell the place had cast on Vance Weston.
She had gone there to take a look, for the first time in months. The present owner, the old and infirm Miss Lorburn, sat in her house in Stuyvesant Square and fretted about her inability to keep an eye on the place; she always said what a pity it was that poor Tom hadn’t left it to poor Halo instead of to her. Miss Lorburn’s world was peopled with friends and relatives who seemed to her best described by the epithet “poor”; what with one thing or another, she thought them all objects of pity. It was only of herself, old, heavy, with blurred eyes, joints knotted by rheumatism, legs bloated by varicose veins, and her good ear beginning to go, that she never spoke with compassion. She merely said it was a pity poor Halo would have to wait so long for the Willows … not that it would be much use to the poor child when she did get it, if the value of property at Paul’s Landing continued to decline at its present rate.
Since Mrs. Tracy’s departure for California the Willows, for the first time, had been entrusted to hands unconnected with its past, and as Miss Lorburn feared the new caretakers might
