As she unlocked her door Halo heard animated talk in the studio. The voices were Savignac’s and Tolby’s; they were speaking with great vivacity, as if the subject under discussion provoked curiosity and amusement. Still humming to herself: “I’ve been cut by Mrs. Glaisher — Mrs. Glaisher — ” Halo thought: “How I shall make Vance laugh over it!” and she tried to catch his voice among the others. But if he were there he was doubtless listening in silence, stretched out on the brown Bokhara of the divan, his arms folded under his head, and watching between half-shut lids his cigarette smoke spiral upward. “Shall I tell him before the others?” she thought, with an impulse of bravado.
“Well —!” she cried out gaily from the threshold. Only Tolby and Savignac were there; as she turned the door-handle they ceased talking and her “Well!” rang out in the silence. Savignac rose, and Tolby, who was bending over the fire, continued to poke it. “They were talking of me!” she thought, and Lorry’s phrase flashed through her mind: “The fellows are saying to themselves: ‘His sister? Oh, anybody can have her the day her novelist chucks her’.”
That was what these young men, whom she liked, and who were sitting over her fire waiting for her to come in, were probably saying. If not, why should they stop talking so suddenly, and lift such embarrassed faces? It had been very comic to be cut by Mrs. Glaisher; it seemed to put things in their right perspective, and rid Halo of her last scruples. But the idea that her lover’s friends had fallen silent on her entrance because they had been caught discussing her situation did not strike her as comic, and she felt a sudden childish ache to be back in the accustomed frame~work of her life.
She came in and shook hands with the young men. “What have you done with Vance?” she asked lightly.
Tolby gave a laugh. “Why, we were talking about him — if that’s what you mean.”
“Oh — about VANCE?” In her relief she could not help stressing the name. “Is that why you both look so guilty?”
Tolby laughed again, and Savignac rejoined: “Yes, it is. But for my part I’m going to confess. I don’t like his book — at least not as much as I want to.”
“Oh, I know you don’t. And Tolby doesn’t either. But he had the courage to tell me so.” Inwardly Halo was thinking: “What an idiot I am! As if these young fellows cared whether Vance and I are married or not! They know we love each other, and for them that’s all that counts. These are the kind of people I want to live among.” She sat down by the fire, and said: “One of you might find the cocktail shaker. I’m too lazy.”
Tolby made the necessary effort, and while they sipped, and lit their cigarettes, Halo continued gaily: “But, you know, Vance doesn’t really care for the Spanish novel himself. Has he shown you ‘Magic’, the one he began two years ago?”
“No,” Tolby rejoined. “He said it was no use showing it because it was definitely discarded; but last night at Savignac’s he read us an outline of this big new thing he’s planning. Derek Fane, of the ‘Amplifier’, was there, and Weston wanted his opinion. That’s the book we were talking about.”
“Oh — ” Halo murmured. There was a big new book, then; and Vance hadn’t yet seen fit to speak to her about it, much less to read her the outline with which the young English critic had been favoured. Why did he no longer talk to her about his work? The idea that it must be her fault made her spirits droop again; but she thought: “I mustn’t let them see that I haven’t heard of it.” She leaned back and puffed at her cigarette. “Well — how does it strike you?”
Tolby gave a shrug. “Not my job — I’m no critic.”
Halo laughed. “Savignac can’t get out of it on that pretext.”
“No,” Savignac admitted. “But I can say that I’m a critic only within certain limits.”
“Is this out of your limits?”
“It’s out of my scale. Too big — ”
“For human nature’s daily food,” Tolby interpolated. “That’s my trouble. I think the proper measure of mankind is man.”
“Well —?”
“Well — did you ever read Maeterlinck on the Bee — or, rather, I should say, on THE BEE? Rather before your day, but — you have? Well, then you’ll understand. When I began to read that book I had imagined the bee was a small animal — insect, in fact; something to be spoken of in a whisper, written of in airy monosyllables — an idea justified by the dimensions of the hives in which, I’m assured by competent authorities, a whole swarm can be comfortably lodged, and carry on their complicated civic and domestic affairs . . . Well, as I read Maeterlinck, the bee grew and grew — like Alice after eating the cake. With each adjective — and they rained like hailstones — that bee grew bigger. Maeterlinck, in his admiration for the creature’s mental capacity, had endowed it with a giant’s physical proportions. The least epithet he applied to it would have fitted a Roman emperor — or an elephant. That’s what the creature became: a winged elephant. That bee was afflicted with giantism, as they say in French. You didn’t know that giantism was a glandular disease? Certainly! And Maeterlinck didn’t give his thyroid piq?res in time — he let the creature swell and swell till it turned into an earth-shaking megatherium among whose legs rogue elephants could have romped. . .” Tolby laughed, refilled his pipe, and stretched his contented ankles to the fire. “That’s what I told Weston, in my untutored language.”
Halo echoed his laugh; then she said tentatively: “But I don’t quite see how I’m to apply your analogy.” She was trying to conceal from them that Vance had never breathed a word to her of the new book.
Tolby raised himself on an elbow. “Savignac’s the man to give you the reasons; it’s his trade. But he won’t; he’s too polite. I’m just a blundering brute of a painter, who can’t explain himself in anything but pigments. And I don’t know why I don’t like Goliaths, except that they’ve always proved so much less paintable than the Davids.”
“But is it the subject you think too big? Or the characters?”
Savignac plunged in. “It’s the scale of the pattern. It’s all part of a pattern, subject and characters. It’s to be an attempt to deal microscopically, with the infinitely little of human experience, incalculably magnified, like those horrid close-ups of fever microbes, when you don’t know whether you’re looking at a streptococcus or the villain of a Chinese drama. Till I can find a reason why the meanest physical reflexes should have an ?sthetic value equal to the windows of Chartres, or the final scenes of Faust, I shall refuse to believe that they may be legitimately treated as if they had.”
“I should refuse even if I found the reason — but then I’m a mere empirical Briton,” Tolby rejoined.
Halo sat silent, trying to piece together these comments. She began to guess why Vance had not talked to her of the book. He had evidently caught the literary infection of Jane Meggs’s back shop, and was trying to do a masterpiece according to the new recipe; and he had guessed that Halo would warn him against the danger of sacrificing his individuality to a fashion or a school. Vance was curiously wary about guarding the secrets of his work from premature exposure; but hitherto he had seemed to feel that with her they ran no risk. Now, instinctively, he had anticipated her disapproval; and in a certain way it proved her power over him.
For a while she reflected; then she said: “But if Vance’s elephants are winged, like Maeterlinck’s, and use their wings, won’t that justify his subject and his scale?”
Savignac nodded. “Perfectly.”
“Then I suppose all we can do is to wait and see.”
“Manifestly. And in the meantime all we can do is to wait for Vance,” Tolby interrupted. “He told us to be here by six — we were to hear the first chapters. And it’s nearly eight now. Have you any idea where he is?”
“Not the least.” Halo got up, lit a lamp, drew the heavy linen curtains. The studio, as she shut out the dusk, grew smaller and more intimate. Tolby threw another log on the hearth, and the rising flame reminded her of the New York winter evenings when she and Vance had sat over the library fire, wandering from book to book, from vision to vision. “We were nearer to each other then,” she thought.
Half-past eight struck, and the two young men said they would go off to dine, and drop in afterward to see if Vance had turned up. They tried to persuade Halo to accompany them to the restaurant which the group frequented; but she said she would wait, and join them later with Vance. She drew a breath of relief when they left; she wanted to sit down quietly and think over what they had said of this new book.
The first chapters were finished, apparently, since Vance had convoked his friends to hear them read. She knew where he kept his papers when he was working; it would have been easy to open a drawer in the old cabinet against the wall and rummage for the manuscript. She longed to see it, to assure herself that Vance’s treatment of his subject would justify itself — that she would discover in it a promise which Savignac and Tolby had missed. Their literary judgment, to which she had attached so much importance, suddenly seemed open to question. After all, they were both very young, they belonged to a little clan like the others, a number of indirect causes might unconsciously affect their opinion. “Perhaps he’s doing something that’s beyond their measure,” she thought, fastening on the idea with immediate conviction. But much as she desired to confirm it by reading the manuscript she could not bring herself to open the drawer where she was sure it lay. It was the first time that Vance had not taken her into his confidence; and whatever his reasons were, she meant to respect them. If there had been a letter from a woman in that drawer, she reflected, it would have been almost easier to resist looking at it. The relation between herself and Vance had hitherto been so complete that her imagination was lazy about picturing its disturbance. She could not think of him as desiring another woman; but she suffered acutely from the fact that, for the first time, he had not sought her intellectual collaboration.
It was the maid’s evening out, and there was no food in the house; but Halo did not feel hungry. She thought: “When he turns up, we’ll go............