XXXIX
Vance had not seen Lewis Tarrant for a long time. Tarrant was at the office less often than formerly; the practical administration of the New Hour was entrusted to Eric Rauch, who ran it according to his own ideas save when his chief, unexpectedly turning up, upset existing arrangements and substituted new plans of his own. This state of things did not escape the notice of the small staff. It was rumoured that Tarrant was losing interest—then again that he was absorbed in the writing of a novel; it was agreed that, in any case, something was wrong with his nerves. Handling Tarrant had always been a gingerly business; Rauch was the only man supple enough to restore his good-humour without yielding to him; and even Rauch (as he told Vance) never knew beforehand whether he was going to pull it off or not. “The trouble is, he’s got enough ideas to run a dozen reviews; and he wants to apply them all to this one poor rag.” The result was that the rag was drooping; and as soon as an enterprise gave the least sign of failure it was Tarrant’s instinct to disclaim all responsibility for it.
His frequent absences had been a relief to Vance. When the two did meet, though usually it was only to exchange a few words, Vance felt unhappy in the other’s presence. To anyone less simplehearted it might have been easier to despise the husband of the woman he worshipped than to be on friendly terms with him; but his opinion of Tarrant added to Vance’s general distress of mind. It made him utterly wretched to think of Halo Tarrant’s life being spent with a man for whom she must feel the same contempt that Tarrant excited in him; and since his last talk with her—since she had uttered that “I won’t take a lover while I have a husband” which still filled him with its poignant music—his feeling for her husband had hardened to hatred. His own grievance against Tarrant played little part in this, except insofar as it showed him the kind of man she was chained to; but he wondered bitterly how she could consider the tie binding. In his own case it was different; he was bound to Laura Lou by her helplessness and his own folly, and the bond seemed to him so sacred that he had at once acknowledged the force of Halo’s argument. He knew he could not abandon his wife for the woman he loved; he owned the impossibility and bowed to it. But Halo’s case was different. Tarrant was not an object of pity; and what other feeling could hold her to him?
It was a strange and desperate coil, but one on which his immediate domestic problem left him no time to brood. He was still determined to do all he could to prevent his grandmother from continuing her lecturing tour; even if he could not prevail with her, and she did continue it, he was determined that his wife and he should not live on her earnings. Whatever the alternative might be—and all seemed hopeless—that resolve was fixed in him.
As soon as his grandmother had gone he decided to look up the publisher who had made him such urgent proposals. He carried the hundred dollars up to Laura Lou, and let his heart be warmed for an instant by her cry of surprise, and the assurance that she’d never seen anybody as lovely as his grandmother; then he hurried off on his errand. But at the door he ran into a messenger from the New Hour, with a line from Rauch saying that Tarrant wished to see him about something important. “Better come along as quick as you can,” a postscript added; and Vance unwillingly turned toward the office.
He had not realized till that moment how deeply distasteful it would be to him to see Tarrant again. He had no time to wonder what the object of the summons might be; the mere physical reluctance to stand in the man’s presence overcame all conjecture, filled him to the throat with disgust at being at his orders. “That’s got to end too,” he thought—and then it occurred to him that the Mr. Lambart’s negotiations might have been successful, and that Tarrant, as conscious as himself of the friction between them, had decided to give him his release.
This carried him to the office on lighter feet, and he entered the editorial retreat with a feeling almost of reassurance. It would be hateful, being near Tarrant, seeing him, hearing him—but the ordeal would doubtless soon be over.
Tarrant looked up quickly from his desk: it was one of the days when his face was like a perfectly symmetrical but shuttered housefront. “Sit down,” he sighed; and then: “Look here, Weston, I’m afraid you’ll have to move to some place where I can reach you by telephone. It’s the devil and all trying to get at you; and your hours at the office are so irregular—”
Vance’s heart sank. That dry even voice was even more detestable to listen to than he had expected. He hardly knew which part of Tarrant’s challenge to answer first; but finally he said, ineffectively: “I can work better away from the office.” This was not true, for he did most of his writing there; but he was too bewildered to remember it.
Tarrant smiled drily. “Well, that remains to be seen. It’s so long since any of your script has been visible here that I’ve no means of knowing how much of the new book you’ve turned out.”
Vance’s blood was up. “I don’t understand. It was with your consent that I dropped the monthly articles to give all my time to my novel—”
“Oh, just so,” Tarrant interrupted suavely. “And I presume you’ve got along with it fairly well, as I understand you’ve been negotiating privately to sell it to Lambart.”
“It was Lambart who came to me. He offered to fix it up with Dreck and Saltzer. The price I had contracted for with them is so much below what I understand I have a right to expect that I couldn’t afford to refuse.”
“Refuse what? Are you under the impression that you can sell the same book twice over, to two different publishers? You signed a contract some time ago with Dreck and Saltzer for all your literary output for four years—and that contract has over two years more to run. Dreck and Saltzer have asked me for an explanation because it was through me that the New Hour was able to put you in the way of securing a publisher. They’re not used to this way of doing business; neither am I, I confess.”
Vance was silent. The blood was beating angrily in his temples; but, put thus baldly, he could not but feel that his action seemed underhand, if not actually dishonourable. Of course he ought not to have concealed from Tarrant and his publishers that he had authorized Lambart to negotiate for him. He saw clearly that what he had done was open to misconstruction; but his personal antagonism toward Tarrant robbed him of his self-control. “The price I was to get from Dreck and Saltzer wasn’t a living wage—”
Tarrant leaned back in his chair, and drummed on the desk with long impatient fingers. His hands were bloodless but delicately muscular: he wore a dark red seal ring on his left fourth finger. With those fingers he had pushed back his wife’s hair from the temples, where Vance had so often watched the pulses beat … had traced the little blue veins that netted them. … Vance’s eyes were blurred with rage.
“Why did you sign the contract if you weren’t satisfied with it?” Tarrant continued, in his carefully restrained voice. It was evident that he was very angry, but that the crude expression of his wrath would have given him no more pleasure than an unskilful stroke gives a good tennis player. His very quietness increased Vance’s sense of inferiority.
“I signed because I was a beginner, because I had to. …”
Tarrant paused and stretched his hand toward a cigarette. “Well, you’re a beginner still … you’ve got to remember that. … You missed the Pulsifer Prize for your short story: for that blunder you’ll agree we’re not responsible; but it did us a lot more harm than it did you. We were counting on the prize to give you a boost, to make you a more valuable asset, as it were. And there was every reason to think you would have got it if you hadn’t tried to extract the money out of Mrs. Pulsifer in advance.” Vance crimsoned, and stammered out: “Oh, see here—”; but Tarrant ignored the interruption. “After that you dropped doing the monthly articles you’d contracted to supply us with, in order to have more time for this new novel. In short, as far as the New Hour is concerned, ever since the serial publication of Instead came to an end we’ve been, so to speak, keeping you as a luxury.” He paused, lit the cigarette, and proffered the box to Vance, who waved it impatiently aside. “Oh, you understand; we accepted the situation willingly. It has always been our policy to make allowances for the artistic temperament—to give our contributors a free hand. But we rather expect a square deal in return. If any of our authors are dissatisfied we prefer to hear of it from themselves; and so do Dreck and Saltzer. We don’t care to find out from outsiders that the books promised to us—and of which the serial rights are partly paid in advance—are being hawked about in other publishers’ offices without our knowledge. That sort of thing does no good to an author—and a lot of harm to us.” He ended his statement with a slight cough, and paused for Vance’s answer.
Vance was trembling with anger and mortification. He knew that Tarrant had made out a case for himself, and yet that whatever wrong he, Vance, had done in the matter, came out of the initial wrong perpetrated against him by his editor and publisher. But he could not find words in which to put all this consecutively and convincingly. The allusion to his attempt to borrow money from Mrs. Pulsifer, the discovery of her having betrayed the fact, were so sickening that he hardly noticed Tarrant’s cynical avowal that, but for this, they could have captured the prize for him. His head was whirling with confused arguments, but he had sense enough left to reflect: “I mustn’t let go of myself. … I must try and look as cool as he does. …”
Finally he said: “You say you and Dreck and Saltzer want to be fair to your authors. Well, the contract you advised me to make with them wasn’t a fair one. Instead was a success, and they’ve wriggled out of paying the royalties they’d agreed on on the ground that they’ve lost money on the book because it’s not a full-length novel.”
“But didn’t your contract with them specify that the scale of royalties that you accepted applied only to a full-length novel?”
“Well, I suppose it did. I guess I didn’t read it very carefully. But they must have made a lot more money on Instead than they expected.”
Tarrant leaned back in his chair and laid his fingertips together, with the gently argumentative air of one who reasons with the unreasonable. “My dear Weston,” he began; and Vance winced at the apostrophe. All authors, Tarrant went on—young authors, that is—thought there was nothing easier than to decide exactly how much money their editors and publishers were making out of them. And they always worked out the account to their own disadvantage—naturally. In reality it wasn’t as simple as that, and editors and publishers often stood to lose the very sums the authors accused them of raking in. A book might have a lot of fuss made about it in a small circle—Instead was just such a case—and yet you couldn’t get the big public to buy it. And unluckily it was only the favour of the big public that made a book pay. As a matter of fact, Instead was a loss to Dreck and Saltzer. If Weston would write another book just like it, but of the proper length, very likely they’d make up their deficit on that; a highbrow success on a first book often helped the sales of the next, provided it was the right length. Dreck and Saltzer knew this, and though they were actually out of pocket they were ready to have another try. … Publishing was just one long gamble. … And perhaps it wasn’t unfair to remind Weston that, both to the New Hour and to Dreck and Saltzer, he’d so far been, from the business point of view, rather a heavy load to carry. …
Vance had controlled himself by a violent effort of the will; but at this summing-up of the case he broke out. “Well, I daresay I have—but why not let me off our contract, if it’s been as much of a disappointment to you as to me?”
Tarrant’s slow blood rose to his cheeks. “I’m curious to know why you consider yourself disappointed.”
“Why, for the reasons I’ve told you. My articles haven’t been a success—I know that as well as you. But my book has, and under our agreement it’s brought me no more than if it had been a failure. I can’t live, and keep my wife alive, on the salary you give me, and if you’ll let me off I can earn three times the money tomorrow.”
Tarrant was silent. He began to drum again on the desk, and the dull red of anger still coloured his pale skin. “My dear fellow, you’ve had plenty of opportunities to complain to me of our contract, and it never seems to have occurred to you to do so till that pirate Lambart came along. Even then, if you’d come straight to me and stated your case frankly, I don’t say … But I’m not in the habit of letting my contributors be bribed away behind my back, and neither are Dreck and Saltzer. You signed a contract with us, and that contract holds.”
“Why do you want it to hold?”
Tarrant continued his nervous drumming. “That’s our own business.”
“Well, if you won’t answer, I’ll answer for you. It’s because I’ve given you one success at a bargain, and you feel you may miss another if you set me free. And it pays you to hang on to me on that chance.”
Tarrant’s lips moved slowly before his answer became audible. “Yes—I suppose that’s the view certain people might take. … It’s one that doesn’t enter into our way of doing business. Besides, before knowing whether the chance you speak of was worth gambling on, as you assert, I should have had to see the book you’re at work on now; it doesn’t always happen that beginners follow up a first success with a second. Rather the other way round.”
“Then why won’t you let me go?”
Tarrant, instead of replying, lit another cigarette, puffed at it for a moment, and then said: “By the way, is your manuscript here?”
“Yes.”
“I should like to have a look at it … only for an hour or two. So far I haven’t much idea of what it’s about.”
Vance pulled the manuscript out of his pocket. “If you don’t like it, will you let me off?” he repeated doggedly.
“No, certainly not. I shall ask you to make an effort to give us something more satisfactory, as I have every right to.”
There was another pause. The air between the two men seemed to Vance to become suddenly rarefied, as if nothing intervened to deflect the swift currents of their antagonism.
“You won’t like it,” Vance insisted with white lips.
“I daresay not. No doubt you’ve seen to that.”
The sneer struck Vance like a blow. He felt powerless with wrath and humiliation.
“It’s no use your reading it anyhow,” he exclaimed, no longer knowing what he was saying. He leaned across the desk, snatched up the pages, and tore them to bits before Tarrant’s astonished eyes. He could not stop tearing—it seemed as if the bits would never be small enough to ensure the complete annihilation of his work.
He was conscious that Tarrant, after the first shock of surprise, was watching him with a sort of cold disgust; and also that, when the work of destruction was over, their relative situations would be exactly what they had been before. But this cool appreciation of the case was far below the surface of his emotions. He could not resist the sombre physical satisfaction of destroying under that man’s eyes what he had made. …
The last scrap dropped to the floor, and Tarrant said quietly: “I’m afraid now you’ll have to send round and get the copy you have at home.”
“I’ve no other copy,” Vance retorted.
“That’s a pity. You’ve given yourself a lot of unnecessary work—and I’m damned if I see why. What’s the sense of having to begin the thing all over again?”
“I shall never begin it over again.”
“Well, if you weren’t satisfied with it, or thought it wouldn’t suit our purpose, I daresay you’re right. But in that case I’ll have to ask you to buckle down and turn out something else in the shortest possible time. We’ve been a good many months now without getting any return for our money. …”
“I shall never write anything for you again,” said Vance slowly.
Tarrant did not speak for a moment or two. His colour had faded to its usual ivory-like sallowness, and the furrow deepened between his ironically lifted eyebrows. He had the immense advantage over his antagonist that anger made him cold instead of hot.
“Never? You’d better think that over, hadn’t you? You understand, of course, that your not writing for us won’t set you free to write for anybody else till the four years are over.”
Vance looked at him with something of the other’s own chill contempt. His wrath had dropped; he felt only immeasurably repelled.
“You mean, then,” he said, “that even if I don’t write another line for you you’ll hold onto me?”
“I’m afraid you’ve left me no alternative,” Tarrant answered coldly. He rang the bell on his desk, and said to the office boy who appeared: “Clear up those papers, will you?”
In the street Vance drew a long breath. He did not know what would happen next—could not see a fraction of an inch into the future. But in destroying the first chapters of Loot he felt as if he had torn the claws of an incubus out of his flesh. He had no idea that he had hated the book so much—or was it only Tarrant he was hating when he thought of it? He flung on, flushed, defiant. He felt like a balloonist who has thrown out all his ballast: extraordinarily light and irresponsible, he bounded up toward the zenith. …
As he turned the corner of his street he came upon a pedlar beating his horse. Horses were rare nowadays in New York streets, pedlars almost obsolete; but in this forgotten district both were still occasionally to be seen. … Vance stopped and looked at the load and the horse. The load was not very heavy: the horse was thin but not incapable of effort. He was not struggling against an overload, but simply balking, thrusting his shabby forelegs obstinately against the asphalt. Unknown to his driver, something was offending or torturing him somewhere—he had the lifted lip and wild-rolling eye of a horse in pictures of battlefields. And the human fool stood there stupidly belabouring him. … Vance’s anger leapt up. “Here, you damned fool, let that horse alone, will you. …”
The man, astonished and then furious, cursed back copiously in Italian and struck the horse again. “Ah, that’s it, is it?” Vance shouted. He caught the man by the arm, and remembering his Dante, cried out joyously: “Lasciate ogni speranza!” as he fell on him. The tussle was brief. He struck the whip out of the pedlar’s hand, punched him in the face, and then, seeing the loafers assembling, and a policeman in the distance, suddenly remembered that it was Tarrant he had been thrashing, and shamefacedly darted away down the street to the shelter of Mrs. Hubbard’s door.