Halo Spear in a world of shifting standards, had always held fast to her own values. Such and such things were worth so much! a great deal, perhaps; yet no more than so much. It was good, for instance — necessary, indeed — to have a comfortable amount of money; enough to grease the machinery of life, to prevent recurring family wrangles, or worse; but even for that there was a price not worth paying. That price was herself; her personality, as the people about her would have called it; the something which made Halo Spear and no other. Of that something, she often told herself, she would never surrender the least jot.
Looking back now, after three years, she remembered old Tom Lorburn’s perturbed face as she left the Willows with him, the day the loss of the books was discovered. She had said to herself then: “This business about the books is going to make him change his will,” and, immediately afterward: “Well, it won’t make me change my mind about Lewis.” For even if her hopes of an inheritance were gone she was not going to offset the disappointment by marrying Lewis Tarrant. She was sure she would make life unbearable to any man she married for such a reason, and Lewis was too good a fellow to be her victim. It was a pity, of course — for Cousin Tom did die within a few months, and did change his will, leaving the Willows to a distant relative who knew no more what to do with it than he had; and the blow was a bad one for Mr. and Mrs. Spear. Lorry being predestined to ruin them, they had always regarded it as Halo’s r?le to restore their fortunes; they would never have asked her to sacrifice her happiness to do so, but they told her (always in reference to other couples) that when it came to marriage a community of tastes and interests — well, such as there was between herself and Lewis, say — was the only guarantee of happiness, once the first rapture was over. “I know, but I want the first rapture,” Halo would answer them inwardly; and to Lewis she said with a smiling firmness: “If I married you you’d want to murder me in a month.”
Yet she had been his wife for nearly three years now, and they had not only spared each other’s lives, but arrived at some kind of mutual understanding, so that, had she been suddenly called on to leave her husband’s roof and return to the precarious existence at Eaglewood she would have hesitated, and not only on his account. Habit had wound its benumbing web about her, and she was no more the girl she had been than he was the man she had imagined . . . .
“Happy?” she said one day to Frenside, with her quick smile. “No, I’ve never been happy; but I’m content. And being content is so jolly that I sometimes think I couldn’t have stood being happy . . . .”
“Ah, it’s a destructive experience,” Frenside agreed.
Not for a moment would she have admitted to anyone else that her marriage had not brought her happiness, for no one but Frenside would understand, as she did, that life may be “strengthened and fed without the aid of joy.” But the relief of saying it to him was deep; it took her out of a world of suffocating dissimulations into a freer air. She looked at him curiously, at his bumpy tormented forehead above the thick blunt nose and ironic mouth, the eyes barricaded by his eternal glasses, the heavy shabby figure. “Yet he speaks about happiness as if he’d known it — poor old George.” Her impulse was to say: “Oh, Frenny, tell me what it’s like!” But though she had once gone up so boldly to every new riddle she shrank from this one. “I suppose we each of us have our different Sphinx,” she thought. She had grown a coward, no doubt.
“Life’s so full of things anyhow, isn’t it?” she continued evasively. “I’ve often thought I shouldn’t have time to crowd in anything more . . . even happiness . . . .” She laughed a little, and getting up out of her deep armchair by the fire walked across the library and stood looking out at the sweep of the East River glittering far below through the autumn haze in its forest of roofs and spires and chimneys. The Tarrant flat was high up in one of the new buildings overhanging the mighty prospect on which New York had till so lately turned its back. A wide low window filled almost the whole eastern wall of the room; the other three were of a sober grayish-green wherever they were revealed by a break in the bookshelves. Halo Tarrant’s association with the sturdy old house at Eaglewood had saved her from the passing extravagances of fashion. Her room depended for its character on the view from its window, the books on its walls, and the friendly grouping of its lamps and chairs. It seemed neither to exclude experiment nor invite it, but to remain outside the flux of novelty like some calm natural object, tree or field.
Frenside said nothing more, and Halo wandered across the room, pausing absently to straighten a paper cutter on the big table laden with books; then her glance travelled to an oil sketch of her husband which Vuillard had done in Paris, the first year of their marriage: just the head, half averted, with the thin sensitive nose, the dissatisfied mouth — dissatisfied still — and that excessive fairness of hair and complexion which singled Tarrant out in any group, even before the delicacy of his features was perceptible. Halo stood in front of the picture, her hands clasped behind her, retravelling the way that he and she had come.
“Well? — ” Frenside queried.
She turned back to him. “I was thinking how lucky it is that The Hour happened to be for sale, and that I had the nerve to urge Lewis to buy it. It’s going to be exactly the kind of job he likes. I only wish you’d stayed on it, Frenny.”
Frenside shook his head. “Better not. I’m always available as an adviser, if he needs one. But new blood all round was what was wanted. And now we’ll see — ”
Halo looked up at him a little sharply. “See —?”
“What he’s going to make of it.”
Her lips parted, as if on a quick retort; then they closed again, and with a slight shrug she dropped back into her chair. “Of course he’ll make mistakes — ”
“Of course. But that’s sometimes stimulating.”
She interrupted: “The great thing for a man like Lewis, with rather too much money, and decidedly too many talents, is to canalize both — isn’t it? He’s never before been able to make up his mind, to find anything that entirely suited him. I believe this does; I believe it’s going to group his scattered interests, and hold him to his job as no . . . no vague sense of duty would . . . .”
“Bless you, the sense of duty is prehistoric; even that idea of our first duty being to ourselves, which seemed so mad and bad in the ‘nineties, wouldn’t interest a baby nowadays. But I daresay Tarrant’ll take hold — for a while — ”
“Ah, you underrate him!” Halo flashed out, rising again nervously. People were right, after all, when they said Frenside’s way of encouraging you was like a doctor’s saying: “Nothing will make any difference now.”
But she was vexed with herself as soon as the words were spoken. She held no brief for her husband; she didn’t have to. Everyone knew Lewis was brilliantly clever — even those who were put off by his indifference, his lack of enthusiasm, recognized his superiority. “A fellow who’ll make his mark, my son-in-law,” Mr. Spear described him, leaning back comfortably in an armchair 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 M............