Halo Tarrant, when she and Vance decided to come to Paris, had looked forward to the adventure with dread. Free love, she found, was not the simple experiment she had imagined. The coast of Bohemia might be pleasant to land on for a picnic, yet the interior of the country prove disappointing. She had fancied that in the tolerant air of her brother’s studio she would shake off this feeling. She knew it was not based on moral scruples (morally speaking the business was still a labyrinth to her) but on a sort of inherited dislike of being unclassified, and out of the social picture. The social picture, as understood in the Lorburn tradition, had never existed for Lorry; or so he had led his sister to suppose. It had probably never occurred to him to marry Miss Jane Meggs, or to Miss Meggs to expect or wish that he should. Almost all the young men of the group stood in the same unfettered relation to one or more young women; and the few married couples among them tried to excuse their inferior state by the show of a larger liberty.
Among such people, Halo told herself, she would certainly lose the last of her old prejudices. After the cramping hypocrisy of her life with Lewis Tarrant it would be refreshing to be among people who laughed at the idea that there could be any valid tie between young men and women except that of a passing attraction. But from the first she had felt herself an outsider in this world which was to set her free. She liked some of the people she met at her brother’s, she was amused and interested by nearly all of them, and she tried to cultivate a friendly tolerance toward the few she found least sympathetic. But she had dropped out of her own picture without yet fitting into this one. Just as she imagined herself to be growing happy and at home among those harum-scarum people with their hysterical good-nature and their verbal enormities, she became suddenly aware that her real self was still ruled by other ideas, and that her new companions all knew it. Beauty, order and reasonableness grew more and more dear to her in the noisy anarchy of Lorry’s circle, and the audacities she risked, instead of making her new friends feel that she was one of them, only caused them a vague embarrassment. She had wanted Bohemianism on her own terms, as a momentary contrast to convention; and finding its laws no less irksome that the others, she bore them less philosophically because she did not believe in them.
The delay about her divorce did not trouble her greatly. In that easy-going world such matters seemed irrelevant, and she smiled to think how bitterly she had resented Vance’s going without her to the party at Granada. Since then she had put away childish things, and whether she and Vance married, or remained as they were, seemed of no consequence compared to the one vital point: would he weary of her, or would she be able to hold him? Sometimes she thought that if they could be married before he grew tired, their marriage might consolidate the bond. But in Lorry’s world it would have occurred to no one that marriage was in itself more permanent than a casual love-affair; the new generation argued that it was easier to separate if you were married, since divorce formalities were easier than a sentimental break.
Nevertheless she clung to the thought of marriage; and soon after their arrival in Paris she wrote to ask her lawyer the reason of the delay, and to repeat that, if Tarrant would not let her divorce him, she hoped he would take proceedings against her at once. The answer was not what she had expected. The lawyer wrote that Tarrant no longer wished for a divorce. He not only refused to take proceedings, but declined on any terms to set Halo free. No reasons were given; but the lawyer was satisfied that, for the present, any appeal against this decision would only harden Tarrant’s resolve. He advised Halo to wait, in the hope that her husband’s mood might change; and her knowledge of Tarrant made her accept the advice.
From Frenside and her mother she learned soon afterward that Tarrant’s projected marriage with Mrs. Pulsifer was off, and she suspected that this wound to his vanity had been the cause of his sudden opposition.
This new obstacle was a blow to her; but she did not speak of it to Vance. She had resolved not to make any allusion to their marriage unless he raised the question; and since their talk at Granada, when he had asked her about the delay in her divorce, he seemed to have dismissed the matter from his mind. Probably it made no difference to him if they were married or not; perhaps, even, it was a relief to feel that the tie between them depended only on their pleasure. Whatever happened, she could not tell Vance about that letter. . .
There were moments when such questions weighed little in the balance of her daily joys; but these joys became more necessary because of what they had to replace. She had to love Vance more passionately, and to believe in his genius more fervently and continuously, because she had staked so much on her love and her faith. Vance as a lover still filled her life with radiance, and her tenderness grew with the sense of his eager longing to make her happy; but it was in the region of thought and imagination that she had dreamed of a lasting hold over him, and it was in this region that she found herself least wanted.
She did not begrudge the hours he spent with his new friends. Men with quick discerning minds, like Arthur Tolby and young Savignac, interested her as much as they did Vance, and she was proud of their appreciation of her lover. They would never have encouraged him, as Alders had, to repeat himself by writing an other novel like “Instead” — a “costume piece” which drew its chief effects from a tricky use of local colour. Savignac had told her privately what he thought of the book; it was ever so pretty — ever so clever — but what business had a man of Weston’s quality to be doing novels like ladies’ fancy-work, or an expensive perfume? He ought to be tackling new difficulties, not warming up old successes. Yes; Halo knew it all; she did not need to have it pointed out, and there was a sting in the fact that this clever young man thought that her affections blinded her, or that her literary standards were less exacting than his. She had always known that Alder’s cheap enthusiasms were misleading Vance; but her hints had been wasted. And now, after an evening with his new friends, he could come back and say, quite unconsciously: “Of course I know ‘The Puritan’ is just pretty wall-paper — something pasted over the rough stuff of reality. Tolby called it that yesterday. Not an ounce of flesh~and-blood in it, not a breath of real air. Don’t I know? Why didn’t you have the nerve to tell me so? A fellow gets balled up in his subject, and doesn’t see which way he’s going. You might have told me that I was just re-writing ‘Instead’ in a new setting.”
A year ago she could hardly have refrained from saying: “But, darling, I did tell you, and you wouldn’t listen!” She was too wise for that now, and she merely replied: “I’m so glad you’ve had these talks with Savignac and Tolby. A fresh eye is always such a help — ”
“Oh, I oughtn’t to need any eye but my own,” Vance grumbled jealously: and she went away smiling to put on her newest hat for an out-of-door dinner in the Bois. “The next book — the next book,” she thought, “will show them all what he really is.” There were times when she caught herself praying for that next book as lonely wives pray for a child. . .
All this passed through her mind as she sat one afternoon in her brother’s studio, encumbered with half-finished stage-settings and models of famous theatres, and waited for him to come in. She envied Lorry the place he had made for himself in the busy experimental world of the arts. From an idle and troublesome youth he had turned into a hard-working man, absorbed in his task, confident of his powers, and preoccupied only by the eternal problem of getting money enough to execute his costly schemes. The last of these, she knew, was a great musical spectacle, to be expressed entirely in terms of modern industrialism, with racing motors, aeroplanes and sub-marines as the protagonists, prodigies of electric lighting, and stage effects of unprecedented complication. For the present there was little hope of carrying out this apocalyptic plan, and only the providential appearance of a rich American with a craving to be ?sthetically up-to-date could make the dream come true. Lorry, deserting his impecunious friends of Montparnasse, had taken to haunting fashionable hotels and millionaire nightclubs; but hitherto his possible patrons had shied away from his scheme, and as Halo sat waiting she noticed that the stage-settings and models for “Factories,” which filled the working~table in the middle of the room, were already gray with dust.
Waiting for Lorry was always an uncertain affair, but Halo seldom had any engagements, and her unoccupied hours weighed on her less heavily away from home. If any one had told her, a year ago, that a young woman living with her lover in Paris could be lonely, and find the time long, she would have smiled at the idea as Vance did at her hints about his work; but now she had given up trying to conceal the truth from herself. Before long, perhaps, Vance would want to begin to write again, and then she would be happy; but meanwhile even love and Paris were not enough.
At last the door opened, and she heard Lorry’s step. Luckily he was alone, and they would be able to have a talk before the afternoon crowd turned up. He came in whistling a negro spiritual, said: “Hullo, child — you there?” and walked with an absent eye toward the model of the last scene of “Factories”. He stood before it for a long time, passing from spirituals to the latest Revue catch, and screwing up his eyes in meditation. As his sister watched him she thought how changed he was since he had found the job he was meant for. He would always be unreliable about money, careless as to other people’s feelings, sweetly frivolous, gaily unfeeling; but where his work was concerned he was a rock. He had found the right ballast for his flighty nature, and would no doubt have said that the rest didn’t matter. Halo looked at him with envy.
“Lorry,” she said, “can’t you find me a job?”
He swung around and scrutinized her with those handsome ironic eyes which were a shade too near together for security.
“A job? Why, I thought you had one! I thought you’d chucked everything else for it.”
She was on the point of answering, with a touch of bitterness: “I thought so too — ” but she checked herself.
“Don’t be a goose! What I want is some sort of occupation while Vance is working. I’ve never learnt to be lazy, and I feel at a loose end, with all the rest of you absorbed in your village industries. Why can’t I have one too? Won’t Jane take me on as an apprentice in her book-shop?”
Lorry Spear pulled his hands out of his pockets and ceased his whistling. “It’s you who are the goose, my dear,” he said. “When are you going to get married?”
She looked at him in surprise. It was the last question she had expected; but she rejoined with a laugh: “Is that your idea of an occupation?”
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