Tarrant did not reappear till Monday evening. He had telephoned to his wife from Boston that on returning to New York he would go straight to the office of The Hour, and that she was not to expect him till dinner. They were dining alone at home, and she had already got into her tea gown and was waiting to hear his latchkey before ringing for dinner. She knew that Lewis, who liked to arrive late when he chose, also liked his food to be as perfectly cooked as when he was on time; and she sometimes felt despairingly that only her mother could have dealt with such a problem.
He came in, hurried and animated, with the slight glow which took the chill from his face when things were prospering. “All he wants to make him really handsome,” his wife mused, “is to have real things to do.”
“Hullo, my dear; not late, am I? Well, put off dinner a bit, will you? I’ve been on the jump ever since I left. Here’s something to amuse you while I’m changing.” He threw a manuscript into her lap, and she saw Vance Weston’s name across the page.
“Oh, Lewis! He turned up, then?”
“He condescended to, yes — about an hour ago.”
“Well — is it good? You’ve had time to read it?”
Little non-committal wrinkles formed themselves about his smile as he stood looking down at her. “Yes, I’ve read it; but I’d rather wait till you have before I tell you what I think. I want your unbiassed opinion — and I also want to jump into my bath.” The door closed on him, and she sat absently fingering the pages on her knee. How well she knew that formula: “Your unbiassed opinion.” What it meant was, invariably, that he wasn’t sure of himself, that he wanted someone else to support his view, or even to provide him with one. After that his judgments would ring out with such authority that people said: “One good thing about Tarrant is that he always knows his own mind.”
Hélo?se sent the cook a disarming message — she knew how long it took Lewis to dress. Then she drew her armchair to the lamp. She was aware, as she began to read, of a certain listlessness. Was it possible that her opinion would not be as unbiassed as her husband supposed? Had she felt an interest in Vance’s literary career only because she hoped to renew her old relation with the eager boy who had touched her imagination, to resume the part of monitress and muse which she had played during their long sessions at the Willows? When he had said: “You were the first to show me what there was in books,” her contracted heart had glowed and unfolded; when, a moment later, he told her he was engaged, and she had seen an unknown figure intrude between them, something in her shrank back, a door was closed. Well, why not? She was lonely; she had looked forward to the possibility of such comradeship as he might give her. But though she had been fated to disappointment that was surely not a reason for feeling less interest in his work. . . . As she took up the manuscript she tried to arouse in herself the emotion she had felt a few days earlier, when her eyes lit on the opening paragraph of “One Day.”
The new tale was different; less vehement, less emotional, above all less personal. Was he already arriving at an attitude of detachment from his subject? If so, Halo knew, Frenside would see a future novelist in him. “If he goes on retailing the successive chapters of his own history, as they happen to him, they’ll be raw autobiography, or essays disguised as novels; but not real novels. And he probably won’t be able to keep it up long.” That would be what Frenside would say in such a case. It was his unalterable conviction that the “me-book,” as he called it, however brilliant, was at best sporadic, with little reproductive power. Well, the charge of subjectivity could hardly be brought against the tale she had just read. Boy as he was, the writer had moved far enough away from his subject to see several sides of it. And it was an odd story to have interested a beginner. It was called “Unclaimed,” and related an episode brought about by the sending home of the bodies of American soldiers fallen in France. Myra Larcom, the beauty of her prairie village, had become engaged in 1917 to Ben Purchase, a schoolmate and neighbour. Ben Purchase was killed at the front, and Myra became the heroine as well as the beauty of Green Lick, which happened to have no other fallen son to mourn. When the government offered to restore its dead soldiers to their families for burial, Myra of course accepted. Her Ben was an orphan, with no relations near enough to assume the expense of his translation; and besides, she said, she would never have allowed anyone else to have the privilege. . . . But the dead heroes were slow in returning. Months passed, and before there was any news of the warrior’s approach, another hero — and alive — had come back and won her. It appeared that her engagement to Ben Purchase had been a last-minute affair, the result of a moonlight embrace the night he started; indeed, she was no longer very sure that there had been an actual engagement; and when at length his body reached New York there was no one to claim it; and no one to pay for its transport, much less for the funeral and gravestone. But Tullia Larcom, Myra’s elder sister, had always been secretly in love with Ben, though he had never given her a glance. She was a plain girl, a predestined old maid, the drudge and butt of the family. She had put by a little money as the village seamstress, but not much — there were so many demands on her. And it turned out to be an expensive business — a terribly expensive business — to bring home and bury a dead hero. And the longer you left him in the care of his grateful government the more expensive it became. . . . “Unclaimed” was the simple and unsentimental relation of how Tullia Larcom managed to bring Ben Purchase’s body back to Green Lick and give him a grave and a headstone. . . . When Halo finished reading she had forgotten about her husband, forgotten about the cook, forgotten even about her own little emotional flutter over Vance Weston. . . . All her thoughts were with Tullia at Ben Purchase’s grave . . . .
“How did he know . . . how did he know?” she murmured to herself. And the fact that he did know seemed warrant of future achievement.
“Halo, are you never coming?” her husband’s voice called from the dining room. “You seem to forget that a hard day’s work makes a fellow hungry . . . .”
At dinner he went into all sorts of details about his new printing contract, and his interviews in Boston, where he had gone to secure various literary collaborations. All that he said was interesting to Halo. She began to see that The Hour would bring a new breath of life into her world as well as her husband’s. It would be exciting to get hold of the budding geniuses; and once she had let Lewis discover them, she knew they would be handed over to her to be tamed and amused. She had inherited her mother’s liking for the company of cl............