Frenside seemed to be groping in a heap of dusty recollections. “Yes—sure enough. It comes back to me. He turned up at the office one day, and unloaded a lot of fool poetry.” (Halo remembered too, and winced.) “Then, when I told him the stuff wouldn’t do, he pulled this out. Let me see: yes, that’s it. I thought it better than most things of the kind; and anyhow the boy looked so starved and scared that I took it. Never saw him but that once, as well as I can remember.”
Halo was no longer listening: she had plunged again into her reading. Yes; Frenside was right—the poetry, though it had possibilities (or seemed to, by that mountain pool at sunrise) was a poor parrotlike effort compared to this blunt prose, almost telegraphic in its harsh directness. She read on, absorbed.
“Well—?” Lewis queried, triumphant.
She came back to him from a long way. “What a strange thing it is—how terrible!”
“Fine, though? That fellow ought to be watched. Don’t you think so, Frenny?”
Frenside rose, throwing his cigar end into the embers. “Well, it’s a toss-up. This is the early morning ‘slice-of-life’; out of the boy’s own experience, most likely. Wait and see what happens when he tackles something outside of himself. That’s where the test comes in.”
Halo asked: “Didn’t he send anything else?” and Frenside, rummaging among more faded memories, thought that, yes, he had—articles and stories, all raw stuff, unusable. That was the general rule; any chap with a knack could usually pull off one good thing at the start. …
“This shows more than knack.”
Frenside shrugged, said he hoped so, wished them goodbye, and shuffled out into the hall, getting grumblingly into his overcoat with the help of Tarrant, who came back rubbing his hands and smiling. “Well, my dear, there’s your great critic: couldn’t even remember when and how he’d got hold of a thing like this, or whether the boy had sent him anything else as good! No knowing what we’ve lost—or how to get hold of him now. Not a trace of his address on the books. The way that paper was run—!” He sank down by the fire with a dry wrinkling of lips and nostrils. “I rather flatter myself things will go differently now …”
“Oh, Lewis! But of course—with your flair.”
He stroked his slight moustache lingeringly, using his hand, as she knew, to mask a satisfaction that might have appeared too crude. “Well, I suppose one has the instinct or one hasn’t. …” he murmured.
“I’m so glad, dear, that you have it. You saw at once what this was worth, didn’t you? But we must get at the boy—a young man now, I suppose,” she mused. “How long ago it all seems! I wonder how we can run him down? Why, through the Tracys, of course! I’ll write to Mrs. Tracy now.”
She started up and went to the writing table, pulling out paper and pen with an impatience doubled by her husband’s. “Oh, we’ll wire,” he said in a tone of authority; “I’ll get it off at once. We want something from him for our New York number.” And she thought, deep in herself: “Nothing will be too good for Vance Weston now that he’s Lewis’s own discovery,” and then tingled with shame at her lucidity. She dashed off the telegram at her husband’s dictation, and while Tarrant went out to send it, dropped down again into her armchair.
“If my boy had lived—” she said to herself, covering under that elliptical sweep of regret all the things she might have judged differently, all the things she might have forborne to judge, if between her and her husband there had been a presence, warm and troublesome and absorbing, to draw them closer yet screen them a little from each other.
XVII
One raw autumn evening when Vance came in, tired and dispirited, from the office of the Free Speaker, his elder sister, Pearl, who was always prying and investigating, bounced out into the hall with: “Here’s a letter for you from a New York magazine.”
Vance followed her into the overheated room where the family were waiting for Mr. Weston to go in to supper. Mr. Weston was generally late nowadays: real estate was in a slack phase at Euphoria, and he was always off somewhere, trying to get hold of a good thing, to extend his activities, especially to get a finger into the pie at Swedenville, which had recently started an unforeseen boom of its own.
There seemed to be a great many people in the brightly lit room, with its large pink-mouthed gramophone on a table with a crochet lace cover, its gold-and-gray wallpaper hung with the “Mona Lisa” (Mae’s contribution), “The Light of the World” (Grandma’s), and the palm in a congested pink china pot on a stained oak milking stool.
On chilly evenings the radiator was the centre of the family life, and the seat nearest it was now always occupied by a very old man with a yellowish waxen face and a heavy shock of black hair streaked with gray, who sat with a helpless left arm stretched on the shawl that covered his knees, and said at intervals, in a slow thick voice: “Feels … good … here … after … Crampton. …”
Grandpa and Grandma Scrimser had moved into Mapledale Avenue after Grandpa’s first stroke. The house out at Crampton was too cold, and the Nordic help, always yearning for Euphoria or Swedenville, could not be persuaded to wait on a paralytic old man and his unwieldy wife. Lorin Weston had accepted the charge without a murmur: he was a great respecter of family ties. But the presence of the old couple had not made things easier at Mapledale Avenue. It was an ever-recurring misery to Mrs. Weston to have the precise routine of her household
