I cautioned myself: “My good woman, don’t be partisan. At every
opportunity, you’ve stated that there are two sides to a question.
Why not, with your always well explained inquisitiveness, look into
Eva’s husband’s side?” He was not so reticent as I had anticipated. Or
rather, I imagined the truth lay between his inherited reserve and the
trick of ready confidences which to a certain extent he could not have
avoided catching from his wife’s crowd as if it were the measles. He
must have been bewildered. Nothing of his mother’s training could have
prepared him for Eva.
As we would say, I wanted his slant on Eva.
If one waited long enough, Eva played into one’s hands. I demurred at
one of her demands to see me at once; I must, I told her, see an editor
who was more immediately important. She suggested that I meet her at
her publisher’s where, if I insisted on putting business in her head,
she remembered she should go. She again asseverated the urgency of
seeing me without delay.
I had no intention of meeting her; but I went--possibly from a fear
that otherwise I should miss the key note. I went from a magazine
editor’s office--where there were gay curtains at outside windows and
gayer flowers on the desk--to the inner cubicle of all publishers:
the waiting-room nicely calculated to break the nerve of the most
recalcitrant. I found Nicholas Van Suydam already in waiting on Eva. He
was seated on a comfortable sofa, but he looked half his usual size;
even his long legs were shorter. The atmosphere of the cubicle was
heavy with the suspended breathing of those on the rack, and Nicholas
glanced furtively at persons whom he did not recognize but whom he
assumed to be authors in various stages of expectancy. A young fellow
clutched to his breast a manuscript that could only be his first. A
frowsy female, by the force of her determination, held down a reluctant
secretary while she pointed out the best passages in her book which
was still in the relatively happy state of not having been rejected.
The bored head of a department shared a corner with a gentleman who
preached on the excellencies of a work that so far was in his head
and on charts which he spread over their united knees. A small though
firm woman said: “I insist on speaking to the young man who changed my
commas in my last book.” Over the partition separating the cubicle from
the main office there came the high-pitched irritation of typewriters.
The activity of book publishing leapt the partition, and fell upon
the heads of those who wrote books and weakened their stamina by its
superior organization.