Three years of marriage had not been needed to teach Halo Tarrant that when her husband came home to lunch it was generally because something had gone wrong. She had long known that if he sought her out at that hour it was not to be charmed but to be tranquillized, as a man with a raging headache seeks a pillow and a darkened room. This need had been less frequent with him since he had bought The Hour and started in on the exciting task of reorganizing it. Usually he preferred to lunch near the office, at one of the Bohemian places affected by Frenside and his group; probably it was not indifferent to him, as he made his way among the tables, to hear: “That’s the fellow who’s bought The Hour. Lewis Tarrant; tall fair chap; yes — writes himself . . . .” Every form of external recognition, even the most casual and unimportant, was needed to fortify his self-confidence. Halo remembered how she had laughed when Frenside, long before her marriage, had once said: “Young Tarrant? Clever boy — but can’t rest unless the milkman knows it.” Nowadays she would not have tolerated such a comment, even from Frenside; and if she made it inwardly she tempered it by reminding herself that an exaggerated craving for recognition often proceeds from a morbid modesty. Morbid — that was what poor Lewis was at bottom. She must never forget, when she was inclined to criticize him, that her faculty of rebounding, of drawing fresh energy from discouragement, had been left out of his finer organization — for her own support she had to call it finer.
And now, on the very Friday when he was expecting his new discovery — the Tracys’ young cousin from the West — Tarrant had suddenly turned up for lunch. When his wife heard his latchkey she supposed he had brought young Weston back with him, and she had been pleased, and rather surprised, since it would have been more like him to want to parade his new friend among his colleagues. Possibly Weston had not turned out to be the kind to parade — though his young poet’s face and profound eyes had lingered rather picturesquely in her memory. Still, it was three years since they’d met, three years during which he’d been reporter on a smalltown newspaper. Perhaps the poetry had not survived . . . .
Her husband came in alone, late, and what she called “rumpled~looking,” though no outward disorder was ever visible in his carefully brushed person, and the signs she referred to lurked only about his mouth and eyes.
“Any lunch left? I hope there’s something hot — never mind what.” And, as he dropped into his seat, and the parlourmaid disappeared with hurried orders, he added, unfolding his napkin with a sardonic deliberation: “Well, your infant prodigy never turned up.”
Ah, how well she knew that law of his nature! Plans that didn’t come off were almost always ascribed (in all good faith) to others; and the prodigy who had failed him became hers. She smiled a little to see him so ridiculously ruffled by so small a contretemps. “Genius is proverbially unpunctual,” she suggested.
“Oh, GENIUS— ” He shrugged the epithet away. She might have that too, while she was about it. “After all, he may never do anything again. One good story doesn’t make a summer.”
“No, and mediocrity is apt to be unpunctual as genius.”
“UNPUNCTUAL? The fellow never came at all. Fixed his own hour — eleven. I put off two other important appointments and hung about the office waiting till after half-past one. I’d rather planned to take him round to the Café Jacques for lunch. A young fellow like that, from nowhere, often thaws out more easily if you feed him first, and encourage him to talk about himself. Vanity,” said Tarrant, as the maid approached with a smoking dish, “vanity’s always the first button to press. . . . EGGS? Good Lord, Halo, hasn’t that cook learnt yet that eggs are slow death to me? Oh, well, I’ll eat the bacon — What else? A chop she can grill? The inevitable chop! Oh, of course it’ll DO.” He turned to his wife with the faint smile which etched little dry lines at the corners of his mouth. “I can’t say you’ve your mother’s culinary imagination, Halo.”
“No, I haven’t,” she answered good-humouredly; but a touch of acerbity made her add: “It would be rather wasted on a digestion like yours.”
Her husband paled a little. She so seldom said anything disagreeable that he was doubly offended when she did. “I might answer that if I had better food I should digest better,” he said.
“Yes, and I might answer that if your programme weren’t so limited I could provide more amusing food for you. But I’d sooner admit at once that I never did have Mother’s knack about things to eat, and I don’t wonder my menus bore you.” It was the way their small domestic squabbles usually ended — by her half contemptuously throwing him the sop he wanted.
He said, with the note of sulkiness that often marred his expiations: “No doubt I’m less easy to provide for than a glutton like Frenside — ” then, furtively abstracting an egg from the dish before him: “It’s a damned nuisance, having all my plans upset this way. . . . And a fellow I was hoping I might fit into the office permanently . . . .”
Halo suggested that perhaps the young man’s train had been delayed or run into — that perhaps at that very moment he was lying dead under a heap of wreckage; but Tarrant grumbled: “When people break appointments it’s never because they’re dead” — a statement her own experience bore out.
“He’s sure to turn up this afternoon,” she said, as one comforts a child for a deferred treat; but the suggestion brought no solace to Tarrant. He reminded her with a certain tartness (for he liked her to remember his engagements, if he happened to have mentioned them to her) that he was taking the three o’clock train for Philadelphia, where he had an important appointment with a firm of printers who were preparing estimates for him. There was no possibility of his returning to the office that day; he might even decide to take a night train from Philadelphia to Boston, where he would probably have to spend Saturday morning, also on business connected with the review. He didn’t know when he was going to be able to see Weston — and it was all a damned nuisance, especially as the young fool had given no New York address, and they had hoped to rush a Weston story into their coming number.
Time was when Halo, as a matter of course, would have offered to interview the delinquent. Now she knew better. She had learned that in such matters she could be of use to her husband only indirectly. The very tie she had most counted on in the early days of their marriage — a community of ideas and interests — had been the first to fail her. She knew now that the myth of his intellectual isolation was necessary to Tarrant’s pride. Nothing would have annoyed him more than to have her suggest that she might take a look at young Weston’s manuscripts. “Of course you could, my dear; it would be the greatest luck for the boy if you would — only, you know, I must reserve my independence of judgment. And if you were to raise false hopes in the poor devil — let yourself be carried away, as I remember you were once by his poetry — it would be a beastly job for me to have to turn him down afterward.” She could hear him saying that, and she knew that the satisfaction of asserting his superiority by depreciating what she had praised would outweigh any advantage he might miss by doing so. “Oh, young Weston will keep,” she acquiesced indifferently, as Tarrant got up to go.
The door closed on him, and she sat there with the golden afternoon on her hands. She said to herself: “There has never been such a beautiful November — ” and her imagination danced with visions of happy people, young, vigorous, self-confident, draining with eager lips the last drops of autumn sunshine. Always in twos they were, the people she pictured. It used not to be so; she had often had her solitary dreams. But now that she was hardly ever alone she was so often lonely. Lonely! It was a word she did not admit in her vocabulary — but the sensation was there, cold and a little sickening, gnawing at the roots of her life. . . . What nonsense! Why, she was actually robbing poor Lewis of the proud prerogative of isolation! As if a girl with her resources and her spirits hadn’t always more than enough to pack the hours with! She leaned in the wide window of the library and looked over the outspread city, and thought how when she had first stood there all its myriad pulses seemed to be beating in her blood. . . . “Am I tired? What’s wrong lately?” she wondered. . . . Should she call up the garage where her Chrysler was kept and dash out for the night to Paul’s Landing, where her family had lingered on over Thanksgiving? It would be rather jolly, arriving at Eaglewood long after dark, in the sharp November air, seeing the glitter of lights come out far ahead along the Hudson, and entering, muffled in furs, the shabby drawing room where Mr. and Mrs. Spear would be sitting over the fire, placidly denouncing outrages in distant lands. . . . No, not that . . . It was sweet to sit in New York dreaming of Eaglewood; but to return there now was always a pang . . . .
She began to muse on the woods in late summer, HER woods, when their foliage was heaviest, already yellowing a little here and there, with premature splashes of scarlet and wine colour on a still-green maple, like the first white lock in a young woman’s hair . . . Of days on Thundertop, sunrise dips in the forest pool, long hours of dreaming on the rocky summit above the Hudson — how beautiful it had been that morning when she had stood there with young Weston, and they had watched light return to the world with a rending of vapours, a streaming of radiances, like the first breaking of life out of chaos! “He felt it too — I could see it happening all over again in his eyes,” she thought; those eyes had seen it with hers. Perhaps that was why, when he recited his poetry to her, in spite of his shyness and his dreadful drawl, she had fancied she heard the authentic note. . . . Had she been mistaken? She didn’t know. But surely not about the story Lewis had brought home the other day. She was sure that was the real thing; and she was glad Lewis had felt it too, felt it at once — she was always glad when they saw things together. Perhaps the boy WAS going to be a great discovery; a triumph for Lewis, a triumph for The Hour! She remembered that as she leaned back against the mossy edge of the pool the pointed leaf shadows flickered across his forehead and seemed to crown it like a poet’s. . . . Poor little raw product of a standardized world, perhaps never to be thus laurelled again! . . .
She turned and wandered back to the fire, gazing, as she went, at the books her own hands had arranged and catalogued with such eager care. “What I want today is the book that’s never been written,” she thought; and then: “No, my child, what you really want is an object in life . . . .” She was grimly amused to find that she was talking to herself as so often, mentally, she talked to her husband . . . .
Oh, well — it was nearly dusk already; one more day to tick off the calendar; and at five there was a concert at the Vanguard Club — something new and exotic, of course; she’d mislaid the programme. . . . She went to her room and pulled out her smart black coat with the gray fur, and the close black turban that made her face look long and narrow and interesting. There were sure to be amusing people at the concert . . . .
The concert was dull; the amusing people were as boring as only the amusing can be; Halo came home late and out of sorts to find a long~distance from her husband saying he was going to Boston that night, and she was to notify the office that he would not reappear till Monday . . . .
Next morning she rang up the office and gave her message; then, after a pause, she added: “By the way, did Mr. Weston turn up yesterday — Vance Weston, the storywriter, you know?” Yes; they knew; they were expecting him. But he had not appeared, and there had been no message from him. No; they hadn’t his address. . . . She thought: “After all I was a fool not to go out to Eaglewood last night.” Another radiant day — the last before winter, perhaps! Why shouldn’t she dash out now, just for a few hours? A tramp in the woods would do her more good than anything. . . . But she lacked the energy to get into country clothes and call for the Chrysler. . . . “Besides, very likely that boy will turn up . . . .” Not that she meant to see him; but she could at least report to Lewis if he called at the office, and give whatever message he left. . . . It was rather petty of Lewis, she thought, not to have told her to see young Weston . . . .............