XV
The Hour was modestly housed on an upper floor of a shabby ex-private house; no noiseless lift, plate-glass doors or silver-buttoned guardians led to its threshold. But the typewriter girl in the outer office, who said, no, Mr. Frenside wasn’t the editor, but only literary adviser, added that she guessed he was there that morning, and presently returned to show Vance into a stuffy cell full of cigar smoke where Frenside leaned on an ink-spattered table and fixed Vance with his unencouraging stare.
“Oh, yes—Weston your name is? Well, sit down.”
He smoked and stared for a while; then he exclaimed: “By George, I saw you up at Eaglewood, didn’t I? Why, yes—that business of the books. … Miss Spear’ll be glad I’ve run across you. The books were found, she wanted you to know. …”
“The books?” Vance looked at him vaguely. In this shimmering dubious world in which he had lately lived the story of the books at the Willows had become as forgotten and far-off a thing as the song in one of those poems Miss Spear had read to him; Miss Spear herself was only a mist among mists; all Vance could think of now was that he must get this taciturn man behind the cigar to find him a job.
“Why, yes, the books turned up,” Frenside repeated.
“How?” Vance asked with an effort.
“I don’t know the particulars. It seems Lewis Tarrant—you remember that fair young man who’s always up at Eaglewood?—well, he managed to buy them back … advertised, I believe … offered a reward. … They never caught the thief; but that didn’t so much matter. The main thing was to get the books. So that question’s closed.”
“Well, I’m glad,” Vance forced himself to say. And he knew he would be, in the other world of solid matter, if ever he got back to it. …
He felt that Frenside was looking at him more attentively. “That’s not what you came for, though? Well, let’s hear.” He settled back in his chair, listening in silence to what Vance had to say, and drumming on the table as if he were rapping out his secret thoughts on a typewriter.
Vance stammered through the tale of his vain quest, and wondered if perhaps Mr. Frenside could recommend him to a newspaper—but the other cut him short. He hadn’t any pull of that sort; sorry; but Vance had better go straight home if he had an opening on a newspaper there. Vance turned pale and made no answer; he cursed himself inwardly for having appealed, against his better judgment, to this man who cared nothing for him and was perhaps prejudiced by what had happened at the Willows.
“All right, sir, thank you,” he said, getting to his feet, and turning to the door. As he did so, Frenside spoke. “See here—going home’s a nasty dose to swallow sometimes, isn’t it? I remember … at your age. … Why do you want to go on a newspaper, anyhow?”
Vance, leaning against the doorway, answered: “I want to learn to be a writer.”
“And that’s the reason—” Frenside gave a gruff laugh.
Vance looked at him curiously. “Is there any other way?”
“There’s only one way. Buckle down and write. Newspapers won’t help you.”
Vance felt the blood rush to his forehead. “I have … I have … tried to write. …”
Frenside reached for a match, relit his cigar, and once more said: “Sit down.” Vance obeyed. “What have you written? Got it in your pocket, I suppose? Let’s see.”
Vance, with a feverish hand, pulled out a bundle of papers—the poems he had written at Paul’s Landing, and some of the stuff which had poured from his pen in the long hungry hours at the rooming house. He laid them on the desk, and Frenside adjusted his eyeglasses. It seemed to Vance as if he were fitting his eyes to an exceptionally powerful microscope.
“H’m—poetry. All poetry?”
“Most of what I’ve written is.”
“Well, poetry won’t earn your keep: it’s pure luxury. Like keeping a car.”
Silence followed. At intervals it was broken by what sounded to Vance like the roar of the sea, but was in reality the scarce audible rustle as Frenside unfolded one sheet after another. He was doubtless not accustomed to reading manuscript, and to Vance’s agony of apprehension was added the mortification of not having been able to type his poems before submitting them. In most editorial offices, he knew, they wouldn’t look at handwritten things; presenting the poems to Frenside in this shape would probably do away with their one chance. Vance thought of offering to read them aloud, remembered Miss Spear’s comment on his enunciation, and dared not.
The roar of unfolding pages continued.
“H’m,” said Frenside again. He spread the papers out before him, and puffed in silence.
“Well, you’re at the sedulous age,” he continued after a pause. (What did that mean?) “Can’t be helped, of course. Here’s the inevitable Shakespeare sonnet: ‘What am I but the shape your love has made me?’—and the Whitman: ‘Vast enigmatic reaches of ocean beyond me’—just so. It is beyond you, my dear fellow, at least at present. Ever seen the ocean?”
Vance could hardly find his voice. He shook his head.
“Not even at Coney Island?” Frenside shrugged. “Not that that matters. Look here; this is all Poets’ Corner stuff. Try it on your hometown paper. That’s my advice. There are pretty things here and there, of course; you like the feel of words, don’t you? But poetry, my son, is not a halfway thing. I remember once asking a book-learned friend if he cared for poetry, and he answered cautiously: ‘Yes, up to a certain point.’ Well, the devil of it is that real poetry doesn’t begin till beyond
