Hudson River Bracketed

of the cosy little flat provided by Lewis for his parents-in-law, and puffing at a Corona of the thousand Lewis had sent him for Christmas. Being able to escape from Eaglewood for the winter months had singularly softened Mr. Spear’s view of human nature, and lent an added lustre to his admiration for Halo’s husband. “Anyone who doesn’t recognize Tarrant’s ability is simply envious of it, that’s all.⁠ ⁠…” Ah, how Halo loved her father for saying that! Poor Frenside’s congenital lack of generosity always prevented his predicting for others the success he himself had missed; but Mr. Spear, now that he and his wife had their own little nook in New York, and could gather about them the dowdy middle-aged conformists whom Mrs. Spear still called revolutionaries⁠—Mr. Spear had become tolerant and even benignant. He still wrote to the papers to denounce what he called crying evils, such as the fact that the consumption of whole wheat bread was not made compulsory (“If I may cite my own humble experience,” that kind of letter always said), or that no method had been devised for automatically disinfecting the tin cups attached to public fountains. (“An instance of this criminal negligence may actually be found within a hundred feet of my own door,” was the formula in such cases⁠—thus revealing to his readers that Mr. Spear had a New York door.) But all this was rather by way of a literary exercise than to relieve a burning indignation; now that his life had been reshaped to his satisfaction Mr. Spear was disposed to let others do their own protesting. “After all, there’s something to be said for the constituted authorities,” he had been known to declare, smiling indulgently across his daughter’s dinner table; and if Mrs. Spear’s short-haired satellites (women, Mr. Spear now called them, who had been sexually underfed) had not been forever challenging him to take up his pen in denunciation of one outrage or another⁠—“you really ought to, Mr. Spear, with your marvellous way of putting things”⁠—the ink would have coagulated in his Waterman.

Prosperity had affected Mrs. Spear differently. It had made her more indignant, more agitated, more emaciatedly beautiful; while a rising plumpness rounded Mr. Spear’s waistcoat his wife’s garments hung more slackly from her drooping shoulders and restless arms. While there was so much misery in the world, how was it possible, she asked her daughter, for those in happier circumstances not to strain every nerve⁠ ⁠… ?

“But you strained yours to a frazzle long ago, mother; and the world still goes on in its old juggernaut way.”

“Halo! I hate to hear you echo that cheap cynicism of George Frenside’s. As long as I have a voice left to protest with I shall cry out against human savagery in all its forms.” Mrs. Spear had just discovered from a humanitarian leaflet that the truffle-hunting pigs of southwestern France perform their task in muzzles, and are never permitted the least morsel of the delicacies they unearth. (“Well, I should hope not,” murmured Mr. Spear, unfolding his napkin at the approach of a crab-mayonnaise, “and anyhow, in the raw state in which the poor animals would eat them, they’d probably taste like old india-rubber.”) And George Frenside added, with a malicious glint behind his glasses: “What seems to me a good deal worse is the fate of the cormorants in the China seas.⁠ ⁠… You know the Chinese train them to catch fish⁠ ⁠… carry ’em on their wrists like hawks.⁠ ⁠…” “Well?” Mrs. Spear gasped, in anguished anticipation. “No cormorant is ever allowed to taste a fish⁠—much less a mayonnaise of crab,” Frenside grinned, with a side-glance at Halo.

The recollection of the little scene flashed through Halo’s mind as she looked up at Vuillard’s sketch of her husband. It was for the sake of her parents that she had married him; she was too honest to disguise it from herself; and whenever she saw Mr. Spear sipping his champagne critically but complacently, and Mrs. Spear, in black velvet and old lace, bending her beautiful shortsighted eyes above an appetizing dish, or lifting them to heaven in protest at some newly discovered cruelty to pigs or cormorants, Halo said to herself that it had been worthwhile. For Mrs. Spear’s woes had become as purely a luxury as Mr. Spear’s cigars and champagne. They could treat their indignations like pet animals, feeding them on the fat of the land till they became too bloated to be disturbing; and Halo, looking back on the hard rasping years when her parents’ furious concern for the public welfare had been perpetually fed by personal worries and privations, reflected that there could hardly be a pleasanter life than that of retired reformers. “And at least now,” she added, “they’ve stopped borrowing from Lewis; I’m almost sure they have.”

The extent of their borrowings (discovered suddenly, at the precise moment when she had decided to break her engagement) had in fact been the direct cause of Halo’s marriage. Tarrant had stepped into the breach more often than she had guessed; had not only bought back the books so mysteriously lost from the Willows, but had helped Lorry Spear to start as a theatrical decorator, besides filling in the ever-widening gap in the Spear budget. And he had done it all so quietly that when the facts became known to Halo her first movement of exasperation was followed by an unexpected feeling of admiration. If he were like that, she thought, she ought to be able to love him; at any rate, she knew she could never willingly cause him any pain. And on this basis they were married.⁠ ⁠…

The years that followed had represented the interest on her husband’s advances. He was far too much of a gentleman to let her feel that she, or any of hers, was in his debt; but there the fact loomed, the more oppressively because of his studied ignoring of it. She had gradually found out that it had not altered his real nature; but it