The Swing of the Pendulum by Adriana Spadoni

Whenever Jean looked back on that night she could remember every detail of the dinner, everything that had been said, almost the order of its saying. Thrilled by the happiness and vitality of Jean and of the emotional response Dr. Mary had waked in her, Herrick let himself go in the delight of answering completely to her mood. Something of the sensation of flying entered them both, as if they were skimming all discord, all the petty misunderstanding of ordinary intercourse. Long after, Jean smiled as she remembered how strongly this feeling had held her and how sure she had been of it.

It was a gay dinner and they sat on in the little restaurant until almost nine. Whenever Jean found a good phrase or Herrick had an illuminating idea on the structure of the article they jotted it down. When they finished there was quite a sheaf of these notes.

"It's a shame to let them cool off. We ought to whip the thing into final shape to-night, lock it up forever in typing. Besides, if you're not used to working in a racket, you may not be able to do it in the office to-morrow. And if you put it over you've got the job cinched."

"I know. I'll sit up all night, I suppose, and it can't be so bad just to have to copy it in the office."

"I'll tell you a better scheme than that. We'll go up to my place and type it now."

Jean had never been to Herrick's rooms and for a moment she hesitated. Then the absurdity of her convention struck her. She had been alone in Flop's when she scarcely knew Herrick at all, and for hours in the hills.

"Fine."

Herrick paid the sleepy waiter and tipped him so generously that he woke with the suddenness of a marionette. They departed, laughing under his effusive thanks.

Like Flop's, Herrick's room was the top floor of a dilapidated building that had once been a place of business but was now filled with cheap studios. It was large and barely furnished, with a long table, a desk, a couch and a few chairs. There were no curtains at the windows, and a tall office building, like a back-drop, cut into the night sky. It had never occurred to Herrick to think about the bareness of his room until he saw Jean's look of approval.

"A real workroom, in which we are going to write the hit of the Sunday edition."

He uncovered his typewriter and pulled the drop-light over the desk.

As Jean laid her things on the couch and took the chair Herrick drew up for her at the table, she thought: "It's like a large cell. In another age he might have been a monk."

They worked rapidly and well together. Jean dictated and Herrick typed. When it was done he read it aloud.

"That's great stuff. I'll see that Thompson stands me a drink for finding him such a prodigy."

"But it isn't all mine. I could never have done it alone. I should probably have blurbed all over the place but for your restraining influence, or become disgusted and given it up."

"You see, it's not easy to do things alone, even when we're very full of them and want to very much. Is it?"

He looked up suddenly and Jean saw the loneliness that she had glimpsed so often below Herrick's moods. The loneliness of the small boy in the bare fields and of the grown man with The Bunch.

"No -- I don't suppose it is."

There was a long silence and then Herrick said, as if they had often spoken of it before:

"Do you know, sometimes I have felt that you think I am weak or that I don't want to do the novel very much, and it hurts to have you think that. I suppose if I were a genius, or had the will of I don't know what, I would sit up here and write and write and write. But I'm not made that way. To go week after week, month after month, alone, believing in yourself, fighting through those horrible moods of depression when all your work seems piffling and insincere, beginning again -- ugh. " Herrick shivered as if his own words had opened a window through which blew a cold blast of memory. "I don't doubt there are people who could. But I can't."