Frenside looked at her shrewdly. “Dare—suggest—insist. Get him to let you see what he’s done; tell him it’s a darned sight better than any of Weston’s stuff. If he can be got to believe that—and you ought to know how to make him—he may stop bothering about Weston.”
She remained silent while Frenside got up to go. “Look here, my child; get him to read his book to you, and try to think it’s a masterpiece. Perhaps it is.” But seek as she would she could find no answering pleasantry. She sat helpless, benumbed, while her old friend emptied his pipe, pushed it into his pocket, and reached out for his stick. But as he got to the door she started up and broke out, with a little sob: “All the help I wanted to give him has turned to harm. Oh, Frenny, how am I going to bear it?” Frenside limped back to her and laid his hand for a moment on her shoulder. Then he took off his glasses to give her one deep look. “Bravely,” he said, and turned to go.
All that had happened three months ago; and she was glad now that she had said what she had to Frenside, and also that he had guessed what she left unsaid. It made her world less lonely to think of that solitary spark of understanding burning in another mind like a little light in an isolated house. But that was the only help he had been able to give. As far as she could bring herself to do so, she followed his advice with respect to Tarrant. But though she refrained from all further reference to Vance, and behaved to her husband as though the bitter scene between them had never happened, she found it impossible to question him about his work. When she tried to do so her throat grew dry, and every phrase she thought of sounded false and hollow. Some premonition told her that his novel would be an amateurish performance, and that if it were she would not be able to conceal her real opinion of it. For days she tried to think of a method of approaching the subject, of flattering his hypersensitive need of praise without running the subsequent risk of wounding it; but she found no way. “I know he can’t write a good novel—and if it’s bad he’ll find out at once that I think it is. … What he wants is an audience like Jet Pulsifer. …” She smiled a little at the picture of their two ravenous vanities pressing reciprocal praises on each other; yet even now it wounded her to think that the man she had chosen was perhaps really made for Mrs. Pulsifer. …
XLII
Just outside the cottage window an apple branch crossed the pane. For a long time Vance had sat there, seeing neither it nor anything else, in the kind of bodily and spiritual blindness lately frequent with him; and now suddenly, in the teeming autumn sunlight, there the branch was, the centre of his vision.
It was a warped unsightly branch on a neglected tree, but so charged with life, so glittering with fruit, that it looked like a dead stick set with rubies. The sky behind was of the densest autumnal blue, a solid fact of a sky. Against it the shrunken rusty leaves lay like gilt bronze, each fruit carved in some hard rare substance. It might have been the very Golden Bough he had been reading about in one of the books he had carried off when he and Laura Lou left New York.
Whatever happened to Vance on the plane of practical living, in the muddled world where bills must be paid, food provided, sick or helpless people looked after, there still came to him this mute swinging wide of the secret doors. He never knew when or how it would happen: it sometimes seemed that he was no more than the latch which an unseen hand raised to throw open the gates of Heaven. …
And here he was, inside! No mere latch, after all, but the very king for whom the gates had been lifted up. … It was utterly improbable, inexplicable, yet the deepest part of him always took it for granted, and troubled no more over the how and why than a child let loose in an unknown garden. In truth it was the only human experience that was perfectly intelligible to him, though he was so powerless to account for it. …
As usual with him now, the sudden seeing of the apple branch coincided with the intensely detailed inner vision of a new book. In the early days that flash of mysterious light used to blot out everything else; but with the growing mastery of his craft he noticed, on the contrary, that when the gates swung open the illumination fell on his daily foreground as well as on the heavenly distances. Mental confusion ceased for him from the moment when the inner lucidity declared itself, and this sense of developing power gave him a feeling of security, of an inviolable calm in the heart of turmoil. …
The quarrel with Tarrant had ended vaguely, lamely, as business disputes most often do. Vance was beginning to understand that only intellectual differences, battles waged in the abstract for absolute ends, can have heroic conclusions. The tearing-up of his manuscript had been the result of a passionate impulse, but it had neither bettered his situation nor made it appreciably worse. Eric Rauch told him that Tarrant would never have let him off anyhow: “it wasn’t his way.” Rauch advised Vance to rewrite the lost chapters, and was genuinely surprised to hear him pronounce this an impossibility. Rauch’s own conception of the products of the creative arts was as purely businesslike (in spite of his volume of poems) as if they had been standardized like motor parts. But Vance
