The Real Thing and Other Tales
by Henry James · English · Gutenberg #2715 · 400,307 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Real Thing and Other Tales
Author: Henry James
Release date: July 1, 2001 [eBook #2715]
Most recently updated: February 14, 2015
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2715
Credits: Transcribed from 1893 Macmillan and Co. edition by David Price. Proofed by Nina Hall, Mohua Sen, Bridie, Francine Smith and David
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE REAL THING AND OTHER TALES ***
Transcribed from 1893 Macmillan and Co. edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org. Proofed by Nina Hall, Mohua Sen, Bridie, Francine
Smith and David.
_This Edition is intended for circulation only in India_
_and the British Colonies_
* * * * *
Macmillan’s Colonial Library
* * * * *
THE REAL THING
AND OTHER TALES
BY
HENRY JAMES
* * * * *
London
MACMILLAN AND CO.
AND NEW YORK
1893
* * * * *
COPYRIGHT, 1892,
BY MACMILLAN & CO.
* * * * *
Norwood Press:
J. S. Cushing & Co.—Berwick & Smith
Boston, Mass, U.S.A.
* * * * *
NOTE.
THE second of the following tales bore, on its first appearance, in _The
Cosmopolitan_, a different title.
* * * * *
CONTENTS.
PAGE
THE REAL THING 1
SIR DOMINICK FERRAND 45
NONA VINCENT 131
THE CHAPERON 181
GREVILLE FANE 249
THE REAL THING.
I.
WHEN the porter’s wife (she used to answer the house-bell), announced “A
gentleman—with a lady, sir,” I had, as I often had in those days, for the
wish was father to the thought, an immediate vision of sitters. Sitters
my visitors in this case proved to be; but not in the sense I should have
preferred. However, there was nothing at first to indicate that they
might not have come for a portrait. The gentleman, a man of fifty, very
high and very straight, with a moustache slightly grizzled and a dark
grey walking-coat admirably fitted, both of which I noted
professionally—I don’t mean as a barber or yet as a tailor—would have
struck me as a celebrity if celebrities often were striking. It was a
truth of which I had for some time been conscious that a figure with a
good deal of frontage was, as one might say, almost never a public
institution. A glance at the lady helped to remind me of this
paradoxical law: she also looked too distinguished to be a “personality.”
Moreover one would scarcely come across two variations together.
Neither of the pair spoke immediately—they only prolonged the preliminary
gaze which suggested that each wished to give the other a chance. They
were visibly shy; they stood there letting me take them in—which, as I
afterwards perceived, was the most practical thing they could have done.
In this way their embarrassment served their cause. I had seen people
painfully reluctant to mention that they desired anything so gross as to
be represented on canvas; but the scruples of my new friends appeared
almost insurmountable. Yet the gentleman might have said “I should like
a portrait of my wife,” and the lady might have said “I should like a
portrait of my husband.” Perhaps they were not husband and wife—this
naturally would make the matter more delicate. Perhaps they wished to be
done together—in which case they ought to have brought a third person to
break the news.
“We come from Mr. Rivet,” the lady said at last, with a dim smile which
had the effect of a moist sponge passed over a “sunk” piece of painting,
as well as of a vague allusion to vanished beauty. She was as tall and
straight, in her degree, as her companion, and with ten years less to
carry. She looked as sad as a woman could look whose face was not
charged with expression; that is her tinted oval mask showed friction as
an exposed surface shows it. The hand of time had played over her
freely, but only to simplify. She was slim and stiff, and so
well-dressed, in dark blue cloth, with lappets and pockets and buttons,
that it was clear she employed the same tailor as her husband. The
couple had an indefinable air of prosperous thrift—they evidently got a
good deal of luxury for their money. If I was to be one of their
luxuries it would behove me to consider my terms.
“Ah, Claude Rivet recommended me?” I inquired; and I added that it was
very kind of him, though I could reflect that, as he only painted
landscape, this was not a sacrifice.
The lady looked very hard at the gentleman, and the gentleman looked
round the room. Then staring at the floor a moment and stroking his
moustache, he rested his pleasant eyes on me with the remark:
“He said you were the right one.”
“I try to be, when people want to sit.”
“Yes, we should like to,” said the lady anxiously.
“Do you mean together?”
My visitors exchanged a glance. “If you could do anything with _me_, I
suppose it would be double,” the gentleman stammered.
“Oh yes, there’s naturally a higher charge for two figures than for one.”
“We should like to make it pay,” the husband confessed.
“That’s very good of you,” I returned, appreciating so unwonted a
sympathy—for I supposed he meant pay the artist.
A sense of strangeness seemed to dawn on the lady. “We mean for the
illustrations—Mr. Rivet said you might put one in.”
“Put one in—an illustration?” I was equally confused.
“Sketch her off, you know,” said the gentleman, colouring.
It was only then that I understood the service Claude Rivet had rendered
me; he had told them that I worked in black and white, for magazines, for
story-books, for sketches of contemporary life, and consequently had
frequent employment for models. These things were true, but it was not
less true (I may confess it now—whether because the aspiration was to
lead to everything or to nothing I leave the reader to guess), that I
couldn’t get the honours, to say nothing of the emoluments, of a great
painter of portraits out of my head. My “illustrations” were my
pot-boilers; I looked to a different branch of art (far and away the most
interesting it had always seemed to me), to perpetuate my fame. There
was no shame in looking to it also to make my fortune; but that fortune
was by so much further from being made from the moment my visitors wished
to be “done” for nothing. I was disappointed; for in the pictorial sense
I had immediately _seen_ them. I had seized their type—I had already
settled what I would do with it. Something that wouldn’t absolutely have
pleased them, I afterwards reflected.
“Ah, you’re—you’re—a—?” I began, as soon as I had mastered my surprise.
I couldn’t bring out the dingy word “models”; it seemed to fit the case
so little.
“We haven’t had much practice,” said the lady.
“We’ve got to _do_ something, and we’ve thought that an artist in your
line might perhaps make something of us,” her husband threw off. He
further mentioned that they didn’t know many artists and that they had
gone first, on the off-chance (he painted views of course, but sometimes
put in figures—perhaps I remembered), to Mr. Rivet, whom they had met a
few years before at a place in Norfolk where he was sketching.
“We used to sketch a little ourselves,” the lady hinted.
“It’s very awkward, but we absolutely _must_ do something,” her husband
went on.
“Of course, we’re not so _very_ young,” she admitted, with a wan smile.
With the remark that I might as well know something more about them, the
husband had handed me a card extracted from a neat new pocket-book (their
appurtenances were all of the freshest) and inscribed with the words
“Major Monarch.” Impressive as these words were they didn’t carry my
knowledge much further; but my visitor presently added: “I’ve left the
army, and we’ve had the misfortune to lose our money. In fact our means
are dreadfully small.”
“It’s an awful bore,” said Mrs. Monarch.
They evidently wished to be discreet—to take care not to swagger because
they were gentlefolks. I perceived they would have been willing to
recognise this as something of a drawback, at the same time that I
guessed at an underlying sense—their consolation in adversity—that they
_had_ their points. They certainly had; but these advantages struck me
as preponderantly social; such for instance as would help to make a
drawing-room look well. However, a drawing-room was always, or ought to
be, a picture.
In consequence of his wife’s allusion to their age Major Monarch
observed: “Naturally, it’s more for the figure that we thought of going
in. We can still hold ourselves up.” On the instant I saw that the
figure was indeed their strong point. His “naturally” didn’t sound vain,
but it lighted up the question. “_She_ has got the best,” he continued,
nodding at his wife, with a pleasant after-dinner absence of
circumlocution. I could only reply, as if we were in fact sitting over
our wine, that this didn’t prevent his own from being very good; which
led him in turn to rejoin: “We thought that if you ever have to do people
like us, we might be something like it. _She_, particularly—for a lady
in a book, you know.”
I was so amused by them that, to get more of it, I did my best to take
their point of view; and though it was an embarrassment to find myself
appraising physically, as if they were animals on hire or useful blacks,
a pair whom I should have expected to meet only in one of the relations
in which criticism is tacit, I looked at Mrs. Monarch judicially enough
to be able to exclaim, after a moment, with conviction: “Oh yes, a lady
in a book!” She was singularly like a bad illustration.
“We’ll stand up, if you like,” said the Major; and he raised himself
before me with a really grand air.
I could take his measure at a glance—he was six feet two and a perfect
gentleman. It would have paid any club in process of formation and in
want of a stamp to engage him at a salary to stand in the principal
window. What struck me immediately was that in coming to me they had
rather missed their vocation; they could surely have been turned to
better account for advertising purposes. I couldn’t of course see the
thing in detail, but I could see them make someone’s fortune—I don’t mean
their own. There was something in them for a waistcoat-maker, an
hotel-keeper or a soap-vendor. I could imagine “We always use it” pinned
on their bosoms with the greatest effect; I had a vision of the
promptitude with which they would launch a table d’hôte.
Mrs. Monarch sat still, not from pride but from shyness, and presently
her husband said to her: “Get up my dear and show how smart you are.”
She obeyed, but she had no need to get up to show it. She walked to the
end of the studio, and then she came back blushing, with her fluttered
eyes on her husband. I was reminded of an incident I had accidentally
had a glimpse of in Paris—being with a friend there, a dramatist about to
produce a play—when an actress came to him to ask to be intrusted with a
part. She went through her paces before him, walked up and down as Mrs.
Monarch was doing. Mrs. Monarch did it quite as well, but I abstained
from applauding. It was very odd to see such people apply for such poor
pay. She looked as if she had ten thousand a year. Her husband had used
the word that described her: she was, in the London current jargon,
essentially and typically “smart.” Her figure was, in the same order of
ideas, conspicuously and irreproachably “good.” For a woman of her age
her waist was surprisingly small; her elbow moreover had the orthodox
crook. She held her head at the conventional angle; but why did she come
to _me_? She ought to have tried on jackets at a big shop. I feared my
visitors were not only destitute, but “artistic”—which would be a great
complication. When she sat down again I thanked her, observing that what
a draughtsman most valued in his model was the faculty of keeping quiet.
“Oh, _she_ can keep quiet,” said Major Monarch. Then he added, jocosely:
“I’ve always kept her quiet.”
“I’m not a nasty fidget, am I?” Mrs. Monarch appealed to her husband.
He addressed his answer to me. “Perhaps it isn’t out of place to
mention—because we ought to be quite business-like, oughtn’t we?—that
when I married her she was known as the Beautiful Statue.”
“Oh dear!” said Mrs. Monarch, ruefully.
“Of course I should want a certain amount of expression,” I rejoined.
“Of _course_!” they both exclaimed.
“And then I suppose you know that you’ll get awfully tired.”
“Oh, we _never_ get tired!” they eagerly cried.
“Have you had any kind of practice?”
They hesitated—they looked at each other. “We’ve been photographed,
_immensely_,” said Mrs. Monarch.
“She means the fellows have asked us,” added the Major.
“I see—because you’re so good-looking.”
“I don’t know what they thought, but they were always after us.”
“We always got our photographs for nothing,” smiled Mrs. Monarch.
“We might have brought some, my dear,” her husband remarked.
“I’m not sure we have any left. We’ve given quantities away,” she
explained to me.
“With our autographs and that sort of thing,” said the Major.
“Are they to be got in the shops?” I inquired, as a harmless pleasantry.
“Oh, yes; hers—they used to be.”
“Not now,” said Mrs. Monarch, with her eyes on the floor.
II.
I COULD fancy the “sort of thing” they put on the presentation-copies of
their photographs, and I was sure they wrote a beautiful hand. It was
odd how quickly I was sure of everything that concerned them. If they
were now so poor as to have to earn shillings and pence, they never had
had much of a margin. Their good looks had been their capital, and they
had good-humouredly made the most of the career that this resource marked
out for them. It was in their faces, the blankness, the deep
intellectual repose of the twenty years of country-house visiting which
had given them pleasant intonations. I could see the sunny
drawing-rooms, sprinkled with periodicals she didn’t read, in which Mrs.
Monarch had continuously sat; I could see the wet shrubberies in which
she had walked, equipped to admiration for either exercise. I could see
the rich covers the Major had helped to shoot and the wonderful garments
in which, late at night, he repaired to the smoking-room to talk about
them. I could imagine their leggings and waterproofs, their knowing
tweeds and rugs, their rolls of sticks and cases of tackle and neat
umbrellas; and I could evoke the exact appearance of their servants and
the compact variety of their luggage on the platforms of country
stations.
They gave small tips, but they were liked; they didn’t do anything
themselves, but they were welcome. They looked so well everywhere; they
gratified the general relish for stature, complexion and “form.” They
knew it without fatuity or vulgarity, and they respected themselves in
consequence. They were not superficial; they were thorough and kept
themselves up—it had been their line. People with such a taste for
activity had to have some line. I could feel how, even in a dull house,
they could have been counted upon for cheerfulness. At present something
had happened—it didn’t matter what, their little income had grown less,
it had grown least—and they had to do something for pocket-money. Their
friends liked them, but didn’t like to support them. There was something
about them that represented credit—their clothes, their manners, their
type; but if credit is a large empty pocket in which an occasional chink
reverberates, the chink at least must be audible. What they wanted of me
was to help to make it so. Fortunately they had no children—I soon
divined that. They would also perhaps wish our relations to be kept
secret: this was why it was “for the figure”—the reproduction of the face
would betray them.
I liked them—they were so simple; and I had no objection to them if they
would suit. But, somehow, with all their perfections I didn’t easily
believe in them. After all they were amateurs, and the ruling passion of
my life was the detestation of the amateur. Combined with this was
another perversity—an innate preference for the represented subject over
the real one: the defect of the real one was so apt to be a lack of
representation. I liked things that appeared; then one was sure.
Whether they _were_ or not was a subordinate and almost always a
profitless question. There were other considerations, the first of which
was that I already had two or three people in use, notably a young person
with big feet, in alpaca, from Kilburn, who for a couple of years had
come to me regularly for my illustrations and with whom I was
still—perhaps ignobly—satisfied. I frankly explained to my visitors how
the case stood; but they had taken more precautions than I supposed.
They had reasoned out their opportunity, for Claude Rivet had told them
of the projected _édition de luxe_ of one of the writers of our day—the
rarest of the novelists—who, long neglected by the multitudinous vulgar
and dearly prized by the attentive (need I mention Philip Vincent?) had
had the happy fortune of seeing, late in life, the dawn and then the full
light of a higher criticism—an estimate in which, on the part of the
public, there was something really of expiation. The edition in
question, planned by a publisher of taste, was practically an act of high
reparation; the wood-cuts with which it was to be enriched were the
homage of English art to one of the most independent representatives of
English letters. Major and Mrs. Monarch confessed to me that they had
hoped I might be able to work _them_ into my share of the enterprise.
They knew I was to do the first of the books, “Rutland Ramsay,” but I had
to make clear to them that my participation in the rest of the
affair—this first book was to be a test—was to depend on the satisfaction
I should give. If this should be limited my employers would drop me
without a scruple. It was therefore a crisis for me, and naturally I was
making special preparations, looking about for new people, if they should
be necessary, and securing the best types. I admitted however that I
should like to settle down to two or three good models who would do for
everything.
“Should we have often to—a—put on special clothes?” Mrs. Monarch timidly
demanded.
“Dear, yes—that’s half the business.”
“And should we be expected to supply our own costumes?”
“Oh, no; I’ve got a lot of things. A painter’s models put on—or put
off—anything he likes.”
“And do you mean—a—the same?”
“The same?”
Mrs. Monarch looked at her husband again.
“Oh, she was just wondering,” he explained, “if the costumes are in
_general_ use.” I had to confess that they were, and I mentioned further
that some of them (I had a lot of genuine, greasy last-century things),
had served their time, a hundred years ago, on living, world-stained men
and women. “We’ll put on anything that fits,” said the Major.
“Oh, I arrange that—they fit in the pictures.”
“I’m afraid I should do better for the modern books. I would come as you
like,” said Mrs. Monarch.
“She has got a lot of clothes at home: they might do for contemporary
life,” her husband continued.
“Oh, I can fancy scenes in which you’d be quite natural.” And indeed I
could see the slipshod rearrangements of stale properties—the stories I
tried to produce pictures for without the exasperation of reading
them—whose sandy tracts the good lady might help to people. But I had to
return to the fact that for this sort of work—the daily mechanical
grind—I was already equipped; the people I was working with were fully
adequate.
“We only thought we might be more like _some_ characters,” said Mrs.
Monarch mildly, getting up.
Her husband also rose; he stood looking at me with a dim wistfulness that
was touching in so fine a man. “Wouldn’t it be rather a pull sometimes
to have—a—to have—?” He hung fire; he wanted me to help him by phrasing
what he meant. But I couldn’t—I didn’t know. So he brought it out,
awkwardly: “The _real_ thing; a gentleman, you know, or a lady.” I was
quite ready to give a general assent—I admitted that there was a great
deal in that. This encouraged Major Monarch to say, following up his
appeal with an unacted gulp: “It’s awfully hard—we’ve tried everything.”
The gulp was communicative; it proved too much for his wife. Before I
knew it Mrs. Monarch had dropped again upon a divan and burst into tears.
Her husband sat down beside her, holding one of her hands; whereupon she
quickly dried her eyes with the other, while I felt embarrassed as she
looked up at me. “There isn’t a confounded job I haven’t applied
for—waited for—prayed for. You can fancy we’d be pretty bad first.
Secretaryships and that sort of thing? You might as well ask for a
peerage. I’d be _anything_—I’m strong; a messenger or a coalheaver. I’d
put on a gold-laced cap and open carriage-doors in front of the
haberdasher’s; I’d hang about a station, to carry portmanteaus; I’d be a
postman. But they won’t _look_ at you; there are thousands, as good as
yourself, already on the ground. _Gentlemen_, poor beggars, who have
drunk their wine, who have kept their hunters!”
I was as reassuring as I knew how to be, and my visitors were presently
on their feet again while, for the experiment, we agreed on an hour. We
were discussing it when the door opened and Miss Churm came in with a wet
umbrella. Miss Churm had to take the omnibus to Maida Vale and then walk
half-a-mile. She looked a trifle blowsy and slightly splashed. I
scarcely ever saw her come in without thinking afresh how odd it was
that, being so little in herself, she should yet be so much in others.
She was a meagre little Miss Churm, but she was an ample heroine of
romance. She was only a freckled cockney, but she could represent
everything, from a fine lady to a shepherdess; she had the faculty, as
she might have had a fine voice or long hair.
She couldn’t spell, and she loved beer, but she had two or three
“points,” and practice, and a knack, and mother-wit, and a kind of
whimsical sensibility, and a love of the theatre, and seven sisters, and
not an ounce of respect, especially for the _h_. The first thing my
visitors saw was that her umbrella was wet, and in their spotless
perfection they visibly winced at it. The rain had come on since their
arrival.
“I’m all in a soak; there _was_ a mess of people in the ’bus. I wish you
lived near a stytion,” said Miss Churm. I requested her to get ready as
quickly as possible, and she passed into the room in which she always
changed her dress. But before going out she asked me what she was to get
into this time.
“It’s the Russian princess, don’t you know?” I answered; “the one with
the ‘golden eyes,’ in black velvet, for the long thing in the
_Cheapside_.”
“Golden eyes? I _say_!” cried Miss Churm, while my companions watched
her with intensity as she withdrew. She always arranged herself, when
she was late, before I could turn round; and I kept my visitors a little,
on purpose, so that they might get an idea, from seeing her, what would
be expected of themselves. I mentioned that she was quite my notion of
an excellent model—she was really very clever.
“Do you think she looks like a Russian princess?” Major Monarch asked,
with lurking alarm.
“When I make her, yes.”
“Oh, if you have to _make_ her—!” he reasoned, acutely.
“That’s the most you can ask. There are so many that are not makeable.”
“Well now, _here’s_ a lady”—and with a persuasive smile he passed his arm
into his wife’s—“who’s already made!”
“Oh, I’m not a Russian princess,” Mrs. Monarch protested, a little
coldly. I could see that she had known some and didn’t like them.
There, immediately, was a complication of a kind that I never had to fear
with Miss Churm.
This young lady came back in black velvet—the gown was rather rusty and
very low on her lean shoulders—and with a Japanese fan in her red hands.
I reminded her that in the scene I was doing she had to look over
someone’s head. “I forget whose it is; but it doesn’t matter. Just look
over a head.”
“I’d rather look over a stove,” said Miss Churm; and she took her station
near the fire. She fell into position, settled herself into a tall
attitude, gave a certain backward inclination to her head and a certain
forward droop to her fan, and looked, at least to my prejudiced sense,
distinguished and charming, foreign and dangerous. We left her looking
so, while I went down-stairs with Major and Mrs. Monarch.
“I think I could come about as near it as that,” said Mrs. Monarch.
“Oh, you think she’s shabby, but you must allow for the alchemy of art.”
However, they went off with an evident increase of comfort, founded on
their demonstrable advantage in being the real thing. I could fancy them
shuddering over Miss Churm. She was very droll about them when I went
back, for I told her what they wanted.
“Well, if _she_ can sit I’ll tyke to bookkeeping,” said my model.
“She’s very lady-like,” I replied, as an innocent form of aggravation.
“So much the worse for _you_. That means she can’t turn round.”
“She’ll do for the fashionable novels.”
“Oh yes, she’ll _do_ for them!” my model humorously declared. “Ain’t
they had enough without her?” I had often sociably denounced them to Miss
Churm.
III.
IT was for the elucidation of a mystery in one of these works that I
first tried Mrs. Monarch. Her husband came with her, to be useful if
necessary—it was sufficiently clear that as a general thing he would
prefer to come with her. At first I wondered if this were for
“propriety’s” sake—if he were going to be jealous and meddling. The idea
was too tiresome, and if it had been confirmed it would speedily have
brought our acquaintance to a close. But I soon saw there was nothing in
it and that if he accompanied Mrs. Monarch it was (in addition to the
chance of being wanted), simply because he had nothing else to do. When
she was away from him his occupation was gone—she never _had_ been away
from him. I judged, rightly, that in their awkward situation their close
union was their main comfort and that this union had no weak spot. It
was a real marriage, an encouragement to the hesitating, a nut for
pessimists to crack. Their address was humble (I remember afterwards
thinking it had been the only thing about them that was really
professional), and I could fancy the lamentable lodgings in which the
Major would have been left alone. He could bear them with his wife—he
couldn’t bear them without her.
He had too much tact to try and make himself agreeable when he couldn’t
be useful; so he simply sat and waited, when I was too absorbed in my
work to talk. But I liked to make him talk—it made my work, when it
didn’t interrupt it, less sordid, less special. To listen to him was to
combine the excitement of going out with the economy of staying at home.
There was only one hindrance: that I seemed not to know any of the people
he and his wife had known. I think he wondered extremely, during the
term of our intercourse, whom the deuce I _did_ know. He hadn’t a stray
sixpence of an idea to fumble for; so we didn’t spin it very fine—we
confined ourselves to questions of leather and even of liquor (saddlers
and breeches-makers and how to get good claret cheap), and matters like
“good trains” and the habits of small game. His lore on these last
subjects was astonishing, he managed to interweave the station-master
with the ornithologist. When he couldn’t talk about greater things he
could talk cheerfully about smaller, and since I couldn’t accompany him
into reminiscences of the fashionable world he could lower the
conversation without a visible effort to my level.
So earnest a desire to please was touching in a man who could so easily
have knocked one down. He looked after the fire and had an opinion on
the draught of the stove, without my asking him, and I could see that he
thought many of my arrangements not half clever enough. I remember
telling him that if I were only rich I would offer him a salary to come
and teach me how to live. Sometimes he gave a random sigh, of which the
essence was: “Give me even such a bare old barrack as _this_, and I’d do
something with it!” When I wanted to use him he came alone; which was an
illustration of the superior courage of women. His wife could bear her
solitary second floor, and she was in general more discreet; showing by
various small reserves that she was alive to the propriety of keeping our
relations markedly professional—not letting them slide into sociability.
She wished it to remain clear that she and the Major were employed, not
cultivated, and if she approved of me as a superior, who could be kept in
his place, she never thought me quite good enough for an equal.
She sat with great intensity, giving the whole of her mind to it, and was
capable of remaining for an hour almost as motionless as if she were
before a photographer’s lens. I could see she had been photographed
often, but somehow the very habit that made her good for that purpose
unfitted her for mine. At first I was extremely pleased with her
lady-like air, and it was a satisfaction, on coming to follow her lines,
to see how good they were and how far they could lead the pencil. But
after a few times I began to find her too insurmountably stiff; do what I
would with it my drawing looked like a photograph or a copy of a
photograph. Her figure had no variety of expression—she herself had no
sense of variety. You may say that this was my business, was only a
question of placing her. I placed her in every conceivable position, but
she managed to obliterate their differences. She was always a lady
certainly, and into the bargain was always the same lady. She was the
real thing, but always the same thing. There were moments when I was
oppressed by the serenity of her confidence that she _was_ the real
thing. All her dealings with me and all her husband’s were an
implication that this was lucky for _me_. Meanwhile I found myself
trying to invent types that approached her own, instead of making her own
transform itself—in the clever way that was not impossible, for instance,
to poor Miss Churm. Arrange as I would and take the precautions I would,
she always, in my pictures, came out too tall—landing me in the dilemma
of having represented a fascinating woman as seven feet high, which, out
of respect perhaps to my own very much scantier inches, was far from my
idea of such a personage.
The case was worse with the Major—nothing I could do would keep _him_
down, so that he became useful only for the representation of brawny
giants. I adored variety and range, I cherished human accidents, the
illustrative note; I wanted to characterise closely, and the thing in the
world I most hated was the danger of being ridden by a type. I had
quarrelled with some of my friends about it—I had parted company with
them for maintaining that one _had_ to be, and that if the type was
beautiful (witness Raphael and Leonardo), the servitude was only a gain.
I was neither Leonardo nor Raphael; I might only be a presumptuous young
modern searcher, but I held that everything was to be sacrificed sooner
than character. When they averred that the haunting type in question
could easily _be_ character, I retorted, perhaps superficially: “Whose?”
It couldn’t be everybody’s—it might end in being nobody’s.
After I had drawn Mrs. Monarch a dozen times I perceived more clearly
than before that the value of such a model as Miss Churm resided
precisely in the fact that she had no positive stamp, combined of course
with the other fact that what she did have was a curious and inexplicable
talent for imitation. Her usual appearance was like a curtain which she
could draw up at request for a capital performance. This performance was
simply suggestive; but it was a word to the wise—it was vivid and pretty.
Sometimes, even, I thought it, though she was plain herself, too
insipidly pretty; I made it a reproach to her that the figures drawn from
her were monotonously (_bêtement_, as we used to say) graceful. Nothing
made her more angry: it was so much her pride to feel that she could sit
for characters that had nothing in common with each other. She would
accuse me at such moments of taking away her “reputytion.”
It suffered a certain shrinkage, this queer quantity, from the repeated
visits of my new friends. Miss Churm was greatly in demand, never in
want of employment, so I had no scruple in putting her off occasionally,
to try them more at my ease. It was certainly amusing at first to do the
real thing—it was amusing to do Major Monarch’s trousers. They _were_
the real thing, even if he did come out colossal. It was amusing to do
his wife’s back hair (it was so mathematically neat,) and the particular
“smart” tension of her tight stays. She lent herself especially to
positions in which the face was somewhat averted or blurred; she abounded
in lady-like back views and _profils perdus_. When she stood erect she
took naturally one of the attitudes in which court-painters represent
queens and princesses; so that I found myself wondering whether, to draw
out this accomplishment, I couldn’t get the editor of the _Cheapside_ to
publish a really royal romance, “A Tale of Buckingham Palace.”
Sometimes, however, the real thing and the make-believe came into
contact; by which I mean that Miss Churm, keeping an appointment or
coming to make one on days when I had much work in hand, encountered her
invidious rivals. The encounter was not on their part, for they noticed
her no more than if she had been the housemaid; not from intentional
loftiness, but simply because, as yet, professionally, they didn’t know
how to fraternise, as I could guess that they would have liked—or at
least that the Major would. They couldn’t talk about the omnibus—they
always walked; and they didn’t know what else to try—she wasn’t
interested in good trains or cheap claret. Besides, they must have
felt—in the air—that she was amused at them, secretly derisive of their
ever knowing how. She was not a person to conceal her scepticism if she
had had a chance to show it. On the other hand Mrs. Monarch didn’t think
her tidy; for why else did she take pains to say to me (it was going out
of the way, for Mrs. Monarch), that she didn’t like dirty women?
One day when my young lady happened to be present with my other sitters
(she even dropped in, when it was convenient, for a chat), I asked her to
be so good as to lend a hand in getting tea—a service with which she was
familiar and which was one of a class that, living as I did in a small
way, with slender domestic resources, I often appealed to my models to
render. They liked to lay hands on my property, to break the sitting,
and sometimes the china—I made them feel Bohemian. The next time I saw
Miss Churm after this incident she surprised me greatly by making a scene
about it—she accused me of having wished to humiliate her. She had not
resented the outrage at the time, but had seemed obliging and amused,
enjoying the comedy of asking Mrs. Monarch, who sat vague and silent,
whether she would have cream and sugar, and putting an exaggerated simper
into the question. She had tried intonations—as if she too wished to
pass for the real thing; till I was afraid my other visitors would take
offence.
Oh, _they_ were determined not to do this; and their touching patience
was the measure of their great need. They would sit by the hour,
uncomplaining, till I was ready to use them; they would come back on the
chance of being wanted and would walk away cheerfully if they were not.
I used to go to the door with them to see in what magnificent order they
retreated. I tried to find other employment for them—I introduced them
to several artists. But they didn’t “take,” for reasons I could
appreciate, and I became conscious, rather anxiously, that after such
disappointments they fell back upon me with a heavier weight. They did
me the honour to think that it was I who was most _their_ form. They
were not picturesque enough for the painters, and in those days there
were not so many serious workers in black and white. Besides, they had
an eye to the great job I had mentioned to them—they had secretly set
their hearts on supplying the right essence for my pictorial vindication
of our fine novelist. They knew that for this undertaking I should want
no costume-effects, none of the frippery of past ages—that it was a case
in which everything would be contemporary and satirical and, presumably,
genteel. If I could work them into it their future would be assured, for
the labour would of course be long and the occupation steady.
One day Mrs. Monarch came without her husband—she explained his absence
by his having had to go to the City. While she sat there in her usual
anxious stiffness there came, at the door, a knock which I immediately
recognised as the subdued appeal of a model out of work. It was followed
by the entrance of a young man whom I easily perceived to be a foreigner
and who proved in fact an Italian acquainted with no English word but my
name, which he uttered in a way that made it seem to include all others.
I had not then visited his country, nor was I proficient in his tongue;
but as he was not so meanly constituted—what Italian is?—as to depend
only on that member for expression he conveyed to me, in familiar but
graceful mimicry, that he was in search of exactly the employment in
which the lady before me was engaged. I was not struck with him at
first, and while I continued to draw I emitted rough sounds of
discouragement and dismissal. He stood his ground, however, not
importunately, but with a dumb, dog-like fidelity in his eyes which
amounted to innocent impudence—the manner of a devoted servant (he might
have been in the house for years), unjustly suspected. Suddenly I saw
that this very attitude and expression made a picture, whereupon I told
him to sit down and wait till I should be free. There was another
picture in the way he obeyed me, and I observed as I worked that there
were others still in the way he looked wonderingly, with his head thrown
back, about the high studio. He might have been crossing himself in St.
Peter’s. Before I finished I said to myself: “The fellow’s a bankrupt
orange-monger, but he’s a treasure.”
When Mrs. Monarch withdrew he passed across the room like a flash to open
the door for her, standing there with the rapt, pure gaze of the young
Dante spellbound by the young Beatrice. As I never insisted, in such
situations, on the blankness of the British domestic, I reflected that he
had the making of a servant (and I needed one, but couldn’t pay him to be
only that), as well as of a model; in short I made up my mind to adopt my
bright adventurer if he would agree to officiate in the double capacity.
He jumped at my offer, and in the event my rashness (for I had known
nothing about him), was not brought home to me. He proved a sympathetic
though a desultory ministrant, and had in a wonderful degree the
_sentiment de la pose_. It was uncultivated, instinctive; a part of the
happy instinct which had guided him to my door and helped him to spell
out my name on the card nailed to it. He had had no other introduction
to me than a guess, from the shape of my high north window, seen outside,
that my place was a studio and that as a studio it would contain an
artist. He had wandered to England in search of fortune, like other
itinerants, and had embarked, with a partner and a small green handcart,
on the sale of penny ices. The ices had melted away and the partner had
dissolved in their train. My young man wore tight yellow trousers with
reddish stripes and his name was Oronte. He was sallow but fair, and
when I put him into some old clothes of my own he looked like an
Englishman. He was as good as Miss Churm, who could look, when required,
like an Italian.
IV.
I THOUGHT Mrs. Monarch’s face slightly convulsed when, on her coming back
with her husband, she found Oronte installed. It was strange to have to
recognise in a scrap of a lazzarone a competitor to her magnificent
Major. It was she who scented danger first, for the Major was
anecdotically unconscious. But Oronte gave us tea, with a hundred eager
confusions (he had never seen such a queer process), and I think she
thought better of me for having at last an “establishment.” They saw a
couple of drawings that I had made of the establishment, and Mrs. Monarch
hinted that it never would have struck her that he had sat for them.
“Now the drawings you make from _us_, they look exactly like us,” she
reminded me, smiling in triumph; and I recognised that this was indeed
just their defect. When I drew the Monarchs I couldn’t, somehow, get
away from them—get into the character I wanted to represent; and I had
not the least desire my model should be discoverable in my picture. Miss
Churm never was, and Mrs. Monarch thought I hid her, very properly,
because she was vulgar; whereas if she was lost it was only as the dead
who go to heaven are lost—in the gain of an angel the more.
By this time I had got a certain start with “Rutland Ramsay,” the first
novel in the great projected series; that is I had produced a dozen
drawings, several with the help of the Major and his wife, and I had sent
them in for approval. My understanding with the publishers, as I have
already hinted, had been that I was to be left to do my work, in this
particular case, as I liked, with the whole book committed to me; but my
connection with the rest of the series was only contingent. There were
moments when, frankly, it _was_ a comfort to have the real thing under
one’s hand; for there were characters in “Rutland Ramsay” that were very
much like it. There were people presumably as straight as the Major and
women of as good a fashion as Mrs. Monarch. There was a great deal of
country-house life—treated, it is true, in a fine, fanciful, ironical,
generalised way—and there was a considerable implication of
knickerbockers and kilts. There were certain things I had to settle at
the outset; such things for instance as the exact appearance of the hero,
the particular bloom of the heroine. The author of course gave me a
lead, but there was a margin for interpretation. I took the Monarchs
into my confidence, I told them frankly what I was about, I mentioned my
embarrassments and alternatives. “Oh, take _him_!” Mrs. Monarch murmured
sweetly, looking at her husband; and “What could you want better than my
wife?” the Major inquired, with the comfortable candour that now
prevailed between us.
I was not obliged to answer these remarks—I was only obliged to place my
sitters. I was not easy in mind, and I postponed, a little timidly
perhaps, the solution of the question. The book was a large canvas, the
other figures were numerous, and I worked off at first some of the
episodes in which the hero and the heroine were not concerned. When once
I had set _them_ up I should have to stick to them—I couldn’t make my
young man seven feet high in one place and five feet nine in another. I
inclined on the whole to the latter measurement, though the Major more
than once reminded me that _he_ looked about as young as anyone. It was
indeed quite possible to arrange him, for the figure, so that it would
have been difficult to detect his age. After the spontaneous Oronte had
been with me a month, and after I had given him to understand several
different times that his native exuberance would presently constitute an
insurmountable barrier to our further intercourse, I waked to a sense of
his heroic capacity. He was only five feet seven, but the remaining
inches were latent. I tried him almost secretly at first, for I was
really rather afraid of the judgment my other models would pass on such a
choice. If they regarded Miss Churm as little better than a snare, what
would they think of the representation by a person so little the real
thing as an Italian street-vendor of a protagonist formed by a public
school?
If I went a little in fear of them it was not because they bullied me,
because they had got an oppressive foothold, but because in their really
pathetic decorum and mysteriously permanent newness they counted on me so
intensely. I was therefore very glad when Jack Hawley came home: he was
always of such good counsel. He painted badly himself, but there was no
one like him for putting his finger on the place. He had been absent
from England for a year; he had been somewhere—I don’t remember where—to
get a fresh eye. I was in a good deal of dread of any such organ, but we
were old friends; he had been away for months and a sense of emptiness
was creeping into my life. I hadn’t dodged a missile for a year.
He came back with a fresh eye, but with the same old black velvet blouse,
and the first evening he spent in my studio we smoked cigarettes till the
small hours. He had done no work himself, he had only got the eye; so
the field was clear for the production of my little things. He wanted to
see what I had done for the _Cheapside_, but he was disappointed in the
exhibition. That at least seemed the meaning of two or three
comprehensive groans which, as he lounged on my big divan, on a folded
leg, looking at my latest drawings, issued from his lips with the smoke
of the cigarette.
“What’s the matter with you?” I asked.
“What’s the matter with _you_?”
“Nothing save that I’m mystified.”
“You are indeed. You’re quite off the hinge. What’s the meaning of this
new fad?” And he tossed me, with visible irreverence, a drawing in which
I happened to have depicted both my majestic models. I asked if he
didn’t think it good, and he replied that it struck him as execrable,
given the sort of thing I had always represented myself to him as wishing
to arrive at; but I let that pass, I was so anxious to see exactly what
he meant. The two figures in the picture looked colossal, but I supposed
this was _not_ what he meant, inasmuch as, for aught he knew to the
contrary, I might have been trying for that. I maintained that I was
working exactly in the same way as when he last had done me the honour to
commend me. “Well, there’s a big hole somewhere,” he answered; “wait a
bit and I’ll discover it.” I depended upon him to do so: where else was
the fresh eye? But he produced at last nothing more luminous than “I
don’t know—I don’t like your types.” This was lame, for a critic who had
never consented to discuss with me anything but the question of
execution, the direction of strokes and the mystery of values.
“In the drawings you’ve been looking at I think my types are very
handsome.”
“Oh, they won’t do!”
“I’ve had a couple of new models.”
“I see you have. _They_ won’t do.”
“Are you very sure of that?”
“Absolutely—they’re stupid.”
“You mean _I_ am—for I ought to get round that.”
“You _can’t_—with such people. Who are they?”
I told him, as far as was necessary, and he declared, heartlessly: “_Ce
sont des gens qu’il faut mettre à la porte_.”
“You’ve never seen them; they’re awfully good,” I compassionately
objected.
“Not seen them? Why, all this recent work of yours drops to pieces with
them. It’s all I want to see of them.”
“No one else has said anything against it—the _Cheapside_ people are
pleased.”
“Everyone else is an ass, and the _Cheapside_ people the biggest asses of
all. Come, don’t pretend, at this time of day, to have pretty illusions
about the public, especially about publishers and editors. It’s not for
_such_ animals you work—it’s for those who know, _coloro che sanno_; so
keep straight for _me_ if you can’t keep straight for yourself. There’s
a certain sort of thing you tried for from the first—and a very good
thing it is. But this twaddle isn’t _in_ it.” When I talked with Hawley
later about “Rutland Ramsay” and its possible successors he declared that
I must get back into my boat again or I would go to the bottom. His
voice in short was the voice of warning.
I noted the warning, but I didn’t turn my friends out of doors. They
bored me a good deal; but the very fact that they bored me admonished me
not to sacrifice them—if there was anything to be done with them—simply
to irritation. As I look back at this phase they seem to me to have
pervaded my life not a little. I have a vision of them as most of the
time in my studio, seated, against the wall, on an old velvet bench to be
out of the way, and looking like a pair of patient courtiers in a royal
ante-chamber. I am convinced that during the coldest weeks of the winter
they held their ground because it saved them fire. Their newness was
losing its gloss, and it was impossible not to feel that they were
objects of charity. Whenever Miss Churm arrived they went away, and
after I was fairly launched in “Rutland Ramsay” Miss Churm arrived pretty
often. They managed to express to me tacitly that they supposed I wanted
her for the low life of the book, and I let them suppose it, since they
had attempted to study the work—it was lying about the studio—without
discovering that it dealt only with the highest circles. They had dipped
into the most brilliant of our novelists without deciphering many
passages. I still took an hour from them, now and again, in spite of
Jack Hawley’s warning: it would be time enough to dismiss them, if
dismissal should be necessary, when the rigour of the season was over.
Hawley had made their acquaintance—he had met them at my fireside—and
thought them a ridiculous pair. Learning that he was a painter they
tried to approach him, to show him too that they were the real thing; but
he looked at them, across the big room, as if they were miles away: they
were a compendium of everything that he most objected to in the social
system of his country. Such people as that, all convention and
patent-leather, with ejaculations that stopped conversation, had no
business in a studio. A studio was a place to learn to see, and how
could you see through a pair of feather beds?
The main inconvenience I suffered at their hands was that, at first, I
was shy of letting them discover how my artful little servant had begun
to sit to me for “Rutland Ramsay.” They knew that I had been odd enough
(they were prepared by this time to allow oddity to artists,) to pick a
foreign vagabond out of the streets, when I might have had a person with
whiskers and credentials; but it was some time before they learned how
high I rated his accomplishments. They found him in an attitude more
than once, but they never doubted I was doing him as an organ-grinder.
There were several things they never guessed, and one of them was that
for a striking scene in the novel, in which a footman briefly figured, it
occurred to me to make use of Major Monarch as the menial. I kept
putting this off, I didn’t like to ask him to don the livery—besides the
difficulty of finding a livery to fit him. At last, one day late in the
winter, when I was at work on the despised Oronte (he caught one’s idea
in an instant), and was in the glow of feeling that I was going very
straight, they came in, the Major and his wife, with their society laugh
about nothing (there was less and less to laugh at), like
country-callers—they always reminded me of that—who have walked across
the park after church and are presently persuaded to stay to luncheon.
Luncheon was over, but they could stay to tea—I knew they wanted it. The
fit was on me, however, and I couldn’t let my ardour cool and my work
wait, with the fading daylight, while my model prepared it. So I asked
Mrs. Monarch if she would mind laying it out—a request which, for an
instant, brought all the blood to her face. Her eyes were on her
husband’s for a second, and some mute telegraphy passed between them.
Their folly was over the next instant; his cheerful shrewdness put an end
to it. So far from pitying their wounded pride, I must add, I was moved
to give it as complete a lesson as I could. They bustled about together
and got out the cups and saucers and made the kettle boil. I know they
felt as if they were waiting on my servant, and when the tea was prepared
I said: “He’ll have a cup, please—he’s tired.” Mrs. Monarch brought him
one where he stood, and he took it from her as if he had been a gentleman
at a party, squeezing a crush-hat with an elbow.
Then it came over me that she had made a great effort for me—made it with
a kind of nobleness—and that I owed her a compensation. Each time I saw
her after this I wondered what the compensation could be. I couldn’t go
on doing the wrong thing to oblige them. Oh, it _was_ the wrong thing,
the stamp of the work for which they sat—Hawley was not the only person
to say it now. I sent in a large number of the drawings I had made for
“Rutland Ramsay,” and I received a warning that was more to the point
than Hawley’s. The artistic adviser of the house for which I was working
was of opinion that many of my illustrations were not what had been
looked for. Most of these illustrations were the subjects in which the
Monarchs had figured. Without going into the question of what _had_ been
looked for, I saw at this rate I shouldn’t get the other books to do. I
hurled myself in despair upon Miss Churm, I put her through all her
paces. I not only adopted Oronte publicly as my hero, but one morning
when the Major looked in to see if I didn’t require him to finish a
figure for the _Cheapside_, for which he had begun to sit the week
before, I told him that I had changed my mind—I would do the drawing from
my man. At this my visitor turned pale and stood looking at me. “Is
_he_ your idea of an English gentleman?” he asked.
I was disappointed, I was nervous, I wanted to get on with my work; so I
replied with irritation: “Oh, my dear Major—I can’t be ruined for _you_!”
He stood another moment; then, without a word, he quitted the studio. I
drew a long breath when he was gone, for I said to myself that I
shouldn’t see him again. I had not told him definitely that I was in
danger of having my work rejected, but I was vexed at his not having felt
the catastrophe in the air, read with me the moral of our fruitless
collaboration, the lesson that, in the deceptive atmosphere of art, even
the highest respectability may fail of being plastic.
I didn’t owe my friends money, but I did see them again. They
re-appeared together, three days later, and under the circumstances there
was something tragic in the fact. It was a proof to me that they could
find nothing else in life to do. They had threshed the matter out in a
dismal conference—they had digested the bad news that they were not in
for the series. If they were not useful to me even for the _Cheapside_
their function seemed difficult to determine, and I could only judge at
first that they had come, forgivingly, decorously, to take a last leave.
This made me rejoice in secret that I had little leisure for a scene; for
I had placed both my other models in position together and I was pegging
away at a drawing from which I hoped to derive glory. It had been
suggested by the passage in which Rutland Ramsay, drawing up a chair to
Artemisia’s piano-stool, says extraordinary things to her while she
ostensibly fingers out a difficult piece of music. I had done Miss Churm
at the piano before—it was an attitude in which she knew how to take on
an absolutely poetic grace. I wished the two figures to “compose”
together, intensely, and my little Italian had entered perfectly into my
conception. The pair were vividly before me, the piano had been pulled
out; it was a charming picture of blended youth and murmured love, which
I had only to catch and keep. My visitors stood and looked at it, and I
was friendly to them over my shoulder.
They made no response, but I was used to silent company and went on with
my work, only a little disconcerted (even though exhilarated by the sense
that _this_ was at least the ideal thing), at not having got rid of them
after all. Presently I heard Mrs. Monarch’s sweet voice beside, or
rather above me: “I wish her hair was a little better done.” I looked up
and she was staring with a strange fixedness at Miss Churm, whose back
was turned to her. “Do you mind my just touching it?” she went on—a
question which made me spring up for an instant, as with the instinctive
fear that she might do the young lady a harm. But she quieted me with a
glance I shall never forget—I confess I should like to have been able to
paint _that_—and went for a moment to my model. She spoke to her softly,
laying a hand upon her shoulder and bending over her; and as the girl,
understanding, gratefully assented, she disposed her rough curls, with a
few quick passes, in such a way as to make Miss Churm’s head twice as
charming. It was one of the most heroic personal services I have ever
seen rendered. Then Mrs. Monarch turned away with a low sigh and,
looking about her as if for something to do, stooped to the floor with a
noble humility and picked up a dirty rag that had dropped out of my
paint-box.
The Major meanwhile had also been looking for something to do and,
wandering to the other end of the studio, saw before him my breakfast
things, neglected, unremoved. “I say, can’t I be useful _here_?” he
called out to me with an irrepressible quaver. I assented with a laugh
that I fear was awkward and for the next ten minutes, while I worked, I
heard the light clatter of china and the tinkle of spoons and glass.
Mrs. Monarch assisted her husband—they washed up my crockery, they put it
away. They wandered off into my little scullery, and I afterwards found
that they had cleaned my knives and that my slender stock of plate had an
unprecedented surface. When it came over me, the latent eloquence of
what they were doing, I confess that my drawing was blurred for a
moment—the picture swam. They had accepted their failure, but they
couldn’t accept their fate. They had bowed their heads in bewilderment
to the perverse and cruel law in virtue of which the real thing could be
so much less precious than the unreal; but they didn’t want to starve.
If my servants were my models, my models might be my servants. They
would reverse the parts—the others would sit for the ladies and
gentlemen, and _they_ would do the work. They would still be in the
studio—it was an intense dumb appeal to me not to turn them out. “Take
us on,” they wanted to say—“we’ll do _anything_.”
When all this hung before me the _afflatus_ vanished—my pencil dropped
from my hand. My sitting was spoiled and I got rid of my sitters, who
were also evidently rather mystified and awestruck. Then, alone with the
Major and his wife, I had a most uncomfortable moment, He put their
prayer into a single sentence: “I say, you know—just let _us_ do for you,
can’t you?” I couldn’t—it was dreadful to see them emptying my slops; but
I pretended I could, to oblige them, for about a week. Then I gave them
a sum of money to go away; and I never saw them again. I obtained the
remaining books, but my friend Hawley repeats that Major and Mrs. Monarch
did me a permanent harm, got me into a second-rate trick. If it be true
I am content to have paid the price—for the memory.
SIR DOMINICK FERRAND.
I.
“THERE are several objections to it, but I’ll take it if you’ll alter
it,” Mr. Locket’s rather curt note had said; and there was no waste of
words in the postscript in which he had added: “If you’ll come in and see
me, I’ll show you what I mean.” This communication had reached Jersey
Villas by the first post, and Peter Baron had scarcely swallowed his
leathery muffin before he got into motion to obey the editorial behest.
He knew that such precipitation looked eager, and he had no desire to
look eager—it was not in his interest; but how could he maintain a
godlike calm, principled though he was in favour of it, the first time
one of the great magazines had accepted, even with a cruel reservation, a
specimen of his ardent young genius?
It was not till, like a child with a sea-shell at his ear, he began to be
aware of the great roar of the “underground,” that, in his third-class
carriage, the cruelty of the reservation penetrated, with the taste of
acrid smoke, to his inner sense. It was really degrading to be eager in
the face of having to “alter.” Peter Baron tried to figure to himself at
that moment that he was not flying to betray the extremity of his need,
but hurrying to fight for some of those passages of superior boldness
which were exactly what the conductor of the “Promiscuous Review” would
be sure to be down upon. He made believe—as if to the greasy
fellow-passenger opposite—that he felt indignant; but he saw that to the
small round eye of this still more downtrodden brother he represented
selfish success. He would have liked to linger in the conception that he
had been “approached” by the Promiscuous; but whatever might be thought
in the office of that periodical of some of his flights of fancy, there
was no want of vividness in his occasional suspicion that he passed there
for a familiar bore. The only thing that was clearly flattering was the
fact that the Promiscuous rarely published fiction. He should therefore
be associated with a deviation from a solemn habit, and that would more
than make up to him for a phrase in one of Mr. Locket’s inexorable
earlier notes, a phrase which still rankled, about his showing no symptom
of the faculty really creative. “You don’t seem able to keep a character
together,” this pitiless monitor had somewhere else remarked. Peter
Baron, as he sat in his corner while the train stopped, considered, in
the befogged gaslight, the bookstall standard of literature and asked
himself whose character had fallen to pieces now. Tormenting indeed had
always seemed to him such a fate as to have the creative head without the
creative hand.
It should be mentioned, however, that before he started on his mission to
Mr. Locket his attention had been briefly engaged by an incident
occurring at Jersey Villas. On leaving the house (he lived at No. 3,
the door of which stood open to a small front garden), he encountered the
lady who, a week before, had taken possession of the rooms on the ground
floor, the “parlours” of Mrs. Bundy’s terminology. He had heard her, and
from his window, two or three times, had even seen her pass in and out,
and this observation had created in his mind a vague prejudice in her
favour. Such a prejudice, it was true, had been subjected to a violent
test; it had been fairly apparent that she had a light step, but it was
still less to be overlooked that she had a cottage piano. She had
furthermore a little boy and a very sweet voice, of which Peter Baron had
caught the accent, not from her singing (for she only played), but from
her gay admonitions to her child, whom she occasionally allowed to amuse
himself—under restrictions very publicly enforced—in the tiny black patch
which, as a forecourt to each house, was held, in the humble row, to be a
feature. Jersey Villas stood in pairs, semi-detached, and Mrs.
Ryves—such was the name under which the new lodger presented herself—had
been admitted to the house as confessedly musical. Mrs. Bundy, the
earnest proprietress of No. 3, who considered her “parlours” (they were a
dozen feet square), even more attractive, if possible, than the second
floor with which Baron had had to content himself—Mrs. Bundy, who
reserved the drawing-room for a casual dressmaking business, had threshed
out the subject of the new lodger in advance with our young man,
reminding him that her affection for his own person was a proof that,
other things being equal, she positively preferred tenants who were
clever.
This was the case with Mrs. Ryves; she had satisfied Mrs. Bundy that she
was not a simple strummer. Mrs. Bundy admitted to Peter Baron that, for
herself, she had a weakness for a pretty tune, and Peter could honestly
reply that his ear was equally sensitive. Everything would depend on the
“touch” of their inmate. Mrs. Ryves’s piano would blight his existence
if her hand should prove heavy or her selections vulgar; but if she
played agreeable things and played them in an agreeable way she would
render him rather a service while he smoked the pipe of “form.” Mrs.
Bundy, who wanted to let her rooms, guaranteed on the part of the
stranger a first-class talent, and Mrs. Ryves, who evidently knew
thoroughly what she was about, had not falsified this somewhat rash
prediction. She never played in the morning, which was Baron’s
working-time, and he found himself listening with pleasure at other hours
to her discreet and melancholy strains. He really knew little about
music, and the only criticism he would have made of Mrs. Ryves’s
conception of it was that she seemed devoted to the dismal. It was not,
however, that these strains were not pleasant to him; they floated up, on
the contrary, as a sort of conscious response to some of his broodings
and doubts. Harmony, therefore, would have reigned supreme had it not
been for the singularly bad taste of No. 4. Mrs. Ryves’s piano was on
the free side of the house and was regarded by Mrs. Bundy as open to no
objection but that of their own gentleman, who was so reasonable. As
much, however, could not be said of the gentleman of No. 4, who had not
even Mr. Baron’s excuse of being “littery” (he kept a bull-terrier and
had five hats—the street could count them), and whom, if you had listened
to Mrs. Bundy, you would have supposed to be divided from the obnoxious
instrument by walls and corridors, obstacles and intervals, of massive
structure and fabulous extent. This gentleman had taken up an attitude
which had now passed into the phase of correspondence and compromise; but
it was the opinion of the immediate neighbourhood that he had not a leg
to stand upon, and on whatever subject the sentiment of Jersey Villas
might have been vague, it was not so on the rights and the wrongs of
landladies.
Mrs. Ryves’s little boy was in the garden as Peter Baron issued from the
house, and his mother appeared to have come out for a moment, bareheaded,
to see that he was doing no harm. She was discussing with him the
responsibility that he might incur by passing a piece of string round one
of the iron palings and pretending he was in command of a “geegee”; but
it happened that at the sight of the other lodger the child was seized
with a finer perception of the drivable. He rushed at Baron with a
flourish of the bridle, shouting, “Ou geegee!” in a manner productive of
some refined embarrassment to his mother. Baron met his advance by
mounting him on a shoulder and feigning to prance an instant, so that by
the time this performance was over—it took but a few seconds—the young
man felt introduced to Mrs. Ryves. Her smile struck him as charming, and
such an impression shortens many steps. She said, “Oh, thank you—you
mustn’t let him worry you”; and then as, having put down the child and
raised his hat, he was turning away, she added: “It’s very good of you
not to complain of my piano.”
“I particularly enjoy it—you play beautifully,” said Peter Baron.
“I have to play, you see—it’s all I can do. But the people next door
don’t like it, though my room, you know, is not against their wall.
Therefore I thank you for letting me tell them that you, in the house,
don’t find me a nuisance.”
She looked gentle and bright as she spoke, and as the young man’s eyes
rested on her the tolerance for which she expressed herself indebted
seemed to him the least indulgence she might count upon. But he only
laughed and said “Oh, no, you’re not a nuisance!” and felt more and more
introduced.
The little boy, who was handsome, hereupon clamoured for another ride,
and she took him up herself, to moderate his transports. She stood a
moment with the child in her arms, and he put his fingers exuberantly
into her hair, so that while she smiled at Baron she slowly, permittingly
shook her head to get rid of them.
“If they really make a fuss I’m afraid I shall have to go,” she went on.
“Oh, don’t go!” Baron broke out, with a sudden expressiveness which made
his voice, as it fell upon his ear, strike him as the voice of another.
She gave a vague exclamation and, nodding slightly but not unsociably,
passed back into the house. She had made an impression which remained
till the other party to the conversation reached the railway-station,
when it was superseded by the thought of his prospective discussion with
Mr. Locket. This was a proof of the intensity of that interest.
The aftertaste of the later conference was also intense for Peter Baron,
who quitted his editor with his manuscript under his arm. He had had the
question out with Mr. Locket, and he was in a flutter which ought to have
been a sense of triumph and which indeed at first he succeeded in
regarding in this light. Mr. Locket had had to admit that there was an
idea in his story, and that was a tribute which Baron was in a position
to make the most of. But there was also a scene which scandalised the
editorial conscience and which the young man had promised to rewrite.
The idea that Mr. Locket had been so good as to disengage depended for
clearness mainly on this scene; so it was easy to see his objection was
perverse. This inference was probably a part of the joy in which Peter
Baron walked as he carried home a contribution it pleased him to classify
as accepted. He walked to work off his excitement and to think in what
manner he should reconstruct. He went some distance without settling
that point, and then, as it began to worry him, he looked vaguely into
shop-windows for solutions and hints. Mr. Locket lived in the depths of
Chelsea, in a little panelled, amiable house, and Baron took his way
homeward along the King’s Road. There was a new amusement for him, a
fresher bustle, in a London walk in the morning; these were hours that he
habitually spent at his table, in the awkward attitude engendered by the
poor piece of furniture, one of the rickety features of Mrs. Bundy’s
second floor, which had to serve as his altar of literary sacrifice. If
by exception he went out when the day was young he noticed that life
seemed younger with it; there were livelier industries to profit by and
shop-girls, often rosy, to look at; a different air was in the streets
and a chaff of traffic for the observer of manners to catch. Above all,
it was the time when poor Baron made his purchases, which were wholly of
the wandering mind; his extravagances, for some mysterious reason, were
all matutinal, and he had a foreknowledge that if ever he should ruin
himself it would be well before noon. He felt lavish this morning, on
the strength of what the Promiscuous would do for him; he had lost sight
for the moment of what he should have to do for the Promiscuous. Before
the old bookshops and printshops, the crowded panes of the
curiosity-mongers and the desirable exhibitions of mahogany “done up,” he
used, by an innocent process, to commit luxurious follies. He
refurnished Mrs. Bundy with a freedom that cost her nothing, and lost
himself in pictures of a transfigured second floor.
On this particular occasion the King’s Road proved almost unprecedentedly
expensive, and indeed this occasion differed from most others in
containing the germ of real danger. For once in a way he had a bad
conscience—he felt himself tempted to pick his own pocket. He never saw
a commodious writing-table, with elbow-room and drawers and a fair
expanse of leather stamped neatly at the edge with gilt, without being
freshly reminded of Mrs. Bundy’s dilapidations. There were several such
tables in the King’s Road—they seemed indeed particularly numerous today.
Peter Baron glanced at them all through the fronts of the shops, but
there was one that detained him in supreme contemplation. There was a
fine assurance about it which seemed a guarantee of masterpieces; but
when at last he went in and, just to help himself on his way, asked the
impossible price, the sum mentioned by the voluble vendor mocked at him
even more than he had feared. It was far too expensive, as he hinted,
and he was on the point of completing his comedy by a pensive retreat
when the shopman bespoke his attention for another article of the same
general character, which he described as remarkably cheap for what it
was. It was an old piece, from a sale in the country, and it had been in
stock some time; but it had got pushed out of sight in one of the upper
rooms—they contained such a wilderness of treasures—and happened to have
but just come to light. Peter suffered himself to be conducted into an
interminable dusky rear, where he presently found himself bending over
one of those square substantial desks of old mahogany, raised, with the
aid of front legs, on a sort of retreating pedestal which is fitted with
small drawers, contracted conveniences known immemorially to the knowing
as davenports. This specimen had visibly seen service, but it had an
old-time solidity and to Peter Baron it unexpectedly appealed.
He would have said in advance that such an article was exactly what he
didn’t want, but as the shopman pushed up a chair for him and he sat down
with his elbows on the gentle slope of the large, firm lid, he felt that
such a basis for literature would be half the battle. He raised the lid
and looked lovingly into the deep interior; he sat ominously silent while
his companion dropped the striking words: “Now that’s an article I
personally covet!” Then when the man mentioned the ridiculous price
(they were literally giving it away), he reflected on the economy of
having a literary altar on which one could really kindle a fire. A
davenport was a compromise, but what was all life but a compromise? He
could beat down the dealer, and at Mrs. Bundy’s he had to write on an
insincere card-table. After he had sat for a minute with his nose in the
friendly desk he had a queer impression that it might tell him a secret
or two—one of the secrets of form, one of the sacrificial
mysteries—though no doubt its career had been literary only in the sense
of its helping some old lady to write invitations to dull dinners. There
was a strange, faint odour in the receptacle, as if fragrant, hallowed
things had once been put away there. When he took his head out of it he
said to the shopman: “I don’t mind meeting you halfway.” He had been
told by knowing people that that was the right thing. He felt rather
vulgar, but the davenport arrived that evening at Jersey Villas.
II.
“I DARESAY it will be all right; he seems quiet now,” said the poor lady
of the “parlours” a few days later, in reference to their litigious
neighbour and the precarious piano. The two lodgers had grown regularly
acquainted, and the piano had had much to do with it. Just as this
instrument served, with the gentleman at No. 4, as a theme for
discussion, so between Peter Baron and the lady of the parlours it had
become a basis of peculiar agreement, a topic, at any rate, of
conversation frequently renewed. Mrs. Ryves was so prepossessing that
Peter was sure that even if they had not had the piano he would have
found something else to thresh out with her. Fortunately however they
did have it, and he, at least, made the most of it, knowing more now
about his new friend, who when, widowed and fatigued, she held her
beautiful child in her arms, looked dimly like a modern Madonna. Mrs.
Bundy, as a letter of furnished lodgings, was characterised in general by
a familiar domestic severity in respect to picturesque young women, but
she had the highest confidence in Mrs. Ryves. She was luminous about her
being a lady, and a lady who could bring Mrs. Bundy back to a gratified
recognition of one of those manifestations of mind for which she had an
independent esteem. She was professional, but Jersey Villas could be
proud of a profession that didn’t happen to be the wrong one—they had
seen something of that. Mrs. Ryves had a hundred a year (Baron wondered
how Mrs. Bundy knew this; he thought it unlikely Mrs. Ryves had told
her), and for the rest she depended on her lovely music. Baron judged
that her music, even though lovely, was a frail dependence; it would
hardly help to fill a concert-room, and he asked himself at first whether
she played country-dances at children’s parties or gave lessons to young
ladies who studied above their station.
Very soon, indeed, he was sufficiently enlightened; it all went fast, for
the little boy had been almost as great a help as the piano. Sidney
haunted the doorstep of No. 3 he was eminently sociable, and had
established independent relations with Peter, a frequent feature of which
was an adventurous visit, upstairs, to picture books criticised for not
being _all_ geegees and walking sticks happily more conformable. The
young man’s window, too, looked out on their acquaintance; through a
starched muslin curtain it kept his neighbour before him, made him almost
more aware of her comings and goings than he felt he had a right to be.
He was capable of a shyness of curiosity about her and of dumb little
delicacies of consideration. She did give a few lessons; they were
essentially local, and he ended by knowing more or less what she went out
for and what she came in from. She had almost no visitors, only a decent
old lady or two, and, every day, poor dingy Miss Teagle, who was also
ancient and who came humbly enough to governess the infant of the
parlours. Peter Baron’s window had always, to his sense, looked out on a
good deal of life, and one of the things it had most shown him was that
there is nobody so bereft of joy as not to be able to command for
twopence the services of somebody less joyous. Mrs. Ryves was a
struggler (Baron scarcely liked to think of it), but she occupied a
pinnacle for Miss Teagle, who had lived on—and from a noble nursery—into
a period of diplomas and humiliation.
Mrs. Ryves sometimes went out, like Baron himself, with manuscripts under
her arm, and, still more like Baron, she almost always came back with
them. Her vain approaches were to the music-sellers; she tried to
compose—to produce songs that would make a hit. A successful song was an
income, she confided to Peter one of the first times he took Sidney,
blasé and drowsy, back to his mother. It was not on one of these
occasions, but once when he had come in on no better pretext than that of
simply wanting to (she had after all virtually invited him), that she
mentioned how only one song in a thousand was successful and that the
terrible difficulty was in getting the right words. This rightness was
just a vulgar “fluke”—there were lots of words really clever that were of
no use at all. Peter said, laughing, that he supposed any words he
should try to produce would be sure to be too clever; yet only three
weeks after his first encounter with Mrs. Ryves he sat at his delightful
davenport (well aware that he had duties more pressing), trying to string
together rhymes idiotic enough to make his neighbour’s fortune. He was
satisfied of the fineness of her musical gift—it had the touching note.
The touching note was in her person as well.
The davenport was delightful, after six months of its tottering
predecessor, and such a re-enforcement to the young man’s style was not
impaired by his sense of something lawless in the way it had been gained.
He had made the purchase in anticipation of the money he expected from
Mr. Locket, but Mr. Locket’s liberality was to depend on the ingenuity of
his contributor, who now found himself confronted with the consequence of
a frivolous optimism. The fruit of his labour presented, as he stared at
it with his elbows on his desk, an aspect uncompromising and
incorruptible. It seemed to look up at him reproachfully and to say,
with its essential finish: “How could you promise anything so base; how
could you pass your word to mutilate and dishonour me?” The alterations
demanded by Mr. Locket were impossible; the concessions to the platitude
of his conception of the public mind were degrading. The public mind!—as
if the public _had_ a mind, or any principle of perception more
discoverable than the stare of huddled sheep! Peter Baron felt that it
concerned him to determine if he were only not clever enough or if he
were simply not abject enough to rewrite his story. He might in truth
have had less pride if he had had more skill, and more discretion if he
had had more practice. Humility, in the profession of letters, was half
of practice, and resignation was half of success. Poor Peter actually
flushed with pain as he recognised that this was not success, the
production of gelid prose which his editor could do nothing with on the
one side and he himself could do nothing with on the other. The truth
about his luckless tale was now the more bitter from his having managed,
for some days, to taste it as sweet.
As he sat there, baffled and sombre, biting his pen and wondering what
was meant by the “rewards” of literature, he generally ended by tossing
away the composition deflowered by Mr. Locket and trying his hand at the
sort of twaddle that Mrs. Ryves might be able to set to music. Success
in these experiments wouldn’t be a reward of literature, but it might
very well become a labour of love. The experiments would be pleasant
enough for him if they were pleasant for his inscrutable neighbour. That
was the way he thought of her now, for he had learned enough about her,
little by little, to guess how much there was still to learn. To spend
his mornings over cheap rhymes for her was certainly to shirk the
immediate question; but there were hours when he judged this question to
be altogether too arduous, reflecting that he might quite as well perish
by the sword as by famine. Besides, he did meet it obliquely when he
considered that he shouldn’t be an utter failure if he were to produce
some songs to which Mrs. Ryves’s accompaniments would give a circulation.
He had not ventured to show her anything yet, but one morning, at a
moment when her little boy was in his room, it seemed to him that, by an
inspiration, he had arrived at the happy middle course (it was an art by
itself), between sound and sense. If the sense was not confused it was
because the sound was so familiar.
He had said to the child, to whom he had sacrificed barley-sugar (it had
no attraction for his own lips, yet in these days there was always some
of it about), he had confided to the small Sidney that if he would wait a
little he should be intrusted with something nice to take down to his
parent. Sidney had absorbing occupation and, while Peter copied off the
song in a pretty hand, roamed, gurgling and sticky, about the room. In
this manner he lurched like a little toper into the rear of the
davenport, which stood a few steps out from the recess of the window,
and, as he was fond of beating time to his intensest joys, began to bang
on the surface of it with a paper-knife which at that spot had chanced to
fall upon the floor. At the moment Sidney committed this violence his
kind friend had happened to raise the lid of the desk and, with his head
beneath it, was rummaging among a mass of papers for a proper envelope.
“I say, I say, my boy!” he exclaimed, solicitous for the ancient glaze of
his most cherished possession. Sidney paused an instant; then, while
Peter still hunted for the envelope, he administered another, and this
time a distinctly disobedient, rap. Peter heard it from within and was
struck with its oddity of sound—so much so that, leaving the child for a
moment under a demoralising impression of impunity, he waited with quick
curiosity for a repetition of the stroke. It came of course immediately,
and then the young man, who had at the same instant found his envelope
and ejaculated “Hallo, this thing has a false back!” jumped up and
secured his visitor, whom with his left arm he held in durance on his
knee while with his free hand he addressed the missive to Mrs. Ryves.
As Sidney was fond of errands he was easily got rid of, and after he had
gone Baron stood a moment at the window chinking pennies and keys in
pockets and wondering if the charming composer would think his song as
good, or in other words as bad, as he thought it. His eyes as he turned
away fell on the wooden back of the davenport, where, to his regret, the
traces of Sidney’s assault were visible in three or four ugly scratches.
“Confound the little brute!” he exclaimed, feeling as if an altar had
been desecrated. He was reminded, however, of the observation this
outrage had led him to make, and, for further assurance, he knocked on
the wood with his knuckle. It sounded from that position commonplace
enough, but his suspicion was strongly confirmed when, again standing
beside the desk, he put his head beneath the lifted lid and gave ear
while with an extended arm he tapped sharply in the same place. The back
was distinctly hollow; there was a space between the inner and the outer
pieces (he could measure it), so wide that he was a fool not to have
noticed it before. The depth of the receptacle from front to rear was so
great that it could sacrifice a certain quantity of room without
detection. The sacrifice could of course only be for a purpose, and the
purpose could only be the creation of a secret compartment. Peter Baron
was still boy enough to be thrilled by the idea of such a feature, the
more so as every indication of it had been cleverly concealed. The
people at the shop had never noticed it, else they would have called his
attention to it as an enhancement of value. His legendary lore
instructed him that where there was a hiding-place there was always a
hidden spring, and he pried and pressed and fumbled in an eager search
for the sensitive spot. The article was really a wonder of neat
construction; everything fitted with a closeness that completely saved
appearances.
It took Baron some minutes to pursue his inquiry, during which he
reflected that the people of the shop were not such fools after all.
They had admitted moreover that they had accidentally neglected this
relic of gentility—it had been overlooked in the multiplicity of their
treasures. He now recalled that the man had wanted to polish it up
before sending it home, and that, satisfied for his own part with its
honourable appearance and averse in general to shiny furniture, he had in
his impatience declined to wait for such an operation, so that the object
had left the place for Jersey Villas, carrying presumably its secret with
it, two or three hours after his visit. This secret it seemed indeed
capable of keeping; there was an absurdity in being baffled, but Peter
couldn’t find the spring. He thumped and sounded, he listened and
measured again; he inspected every joint and crevice, with the effect of
becoming surer still of the existence of a chamber and of making up his
mind that his davenport was a rarity. Not only was there a compartment
between the two backs, but there was distinctly something _in_ the
compartment! Perhaps it was a lost manuscript—a nice, safe,
old-fashioned story that Mr. Locket wouldn’t object to. Peter returned
to the charge, for it had occurred to him that he had perhaps not
sufficiently visited the small drawers, of which, in two vertical rows,
there were six in number, of different sizes, inserted sideways into that
portion of the structure which formed part of the support of the desk.
He took them out again and examined more minutely the condition of their
sockets, with the happy result of discovering at last, in the place into
which the third on the left-hand row was fitted, a small sliding panel.
Behind the panel was a spring, like a flat button, which yielded with a
click when he pressed it and which instantly produced a loosening of one
of the pieces of the shelf forming the highest part of the
davenport—pieces adjusted to each other with the most deceptive
closeness.
This particular piece proved to be, in its turn, a sliding panel, which,
when pushed, revealed the existence of a smaller receptacle, a narrow,
oblong box, in the false back. Its capacity was limited, but if it
couldn’t hold many things it might hold precious ones. Baron, in
presence of the ingenuity with which it had been dissimulated,
immediately felt that, but for the odd chance of little Sidney Ryves’s
having hammered on the outside at the moment he himself happened to have
his head in the desk, he might have remained for years without suspicion
of it. This apparently would have been a loss, for he had been right in
guessing that the chamber was not empty. It contained objects which,
whether precious or not, had at any rate been worth somebody’s hiding.
These objects were a collection of small flat parcels, of the shape of
packets of letters, wrapped in white paper and neatly sealed. The seals,
mechanically figured, bore the impress neither of arms nor of initials;
the paper looked old—it had turned faintly sallow; the packets might have
been there for ages. Baron counted them—there were nine in all, of
different sizes; he turned them over and over, felt them curiously and
snuffed in their vague, musty smell, which affected him with the
melancholy of some smothered human accent. The little bundles were
neither named nor numbered—there was not a word of writing on any of the
covers; but they plainly contained old letters, sorted and matched
according to dates or to authorship. They told some old, dead story—they
were the ashes of fires burned out.
As Peter Baron held his discoveries successively in his hands he became
conscious of a queer emotion which was not altogether elation and yet was
still less pure pain. He had made a find, but it somehow added to his
responsibility; he was in the presence of something interesting, but (in
a manner he couldn’t have defined) this circumstance suddenly constituted
a danger. It was the perception of the danger, for instance, which
caused to remain in abeyance any impulse he might have felt to break one
of the seals. He looked at them all narrowly, but he was careful not to
loosen them, and he wondered uncomfortably whether the contents of the
secret compartment would be held in equity to be the property of the
people in the King’s Road. He had given money for the davenport, but had
he given money for these buried papers? He paid by a growing
consciousness that a nameless chill had stolen into the air the penalty,
which he had many a time paid before, of being made of sensitive stuff.
It was as if an occasion had insidiously arisen for a sacrifice—a
sacrifice for the sake of a fine superstition, something like honour or
kindness or justice, something indeed perhaps even finer still—a
difficult deciphering of duty, an impossible tantalising wisdom.
Standing there before his ambiguous treasure and losing himself for the
moment in the sense of a dawning complication, he was startled by a
light, quick tap at the door of his sitting-room. Instinctively, before
answering, he listened an instant—he was in the attitude of a miser
surprised while counting his hoard. Then he answered “One moment,
please!” and slipped the little heap of packets into the biggest of the
drawers of the davenport, which happened to be open. The aperture of the
false back was still gaping, and he had not time to work back the spring.
He hastily laid a big book over the place and then went and opened his
door.
It offered him a sight none the less agreeable for being unexpected—the
graceful and agitated figure of Mrs. Ryves. Her agitation was so visible
that he thought at first that something dreadful had happened to her
child—that she had rushed up to ask for help, to beg him to go for the
doctor. Then he perceived that it was probably connected with the
desperate verses he had transmitted to her a quarter of an hour before;
for she had his open manuscript in one hand and was nervously pulling it
about with the other. She looked frightened and pretty, and if, in
invading the privacy of a fellow-lodger, she had been guilty of a
departure from rigid custom, she was at least conscious of the enormity
of the step and incapable of treating it with levity. The levity was for
Peter Baron, who endeavoured, however, to clothe his familiarity with
respect, pushing forward the seat of honour and repeating that he
rejoiced in such a visit. The visitor came in, leaving the door ajar,
and after a minute during which, to help her, he charged her with the
purpose of telling him that he ought to be ashamed to send her down such
rubbish, she recovered herself sufficiently to stammer out that his song
was exactly what she had been looking for and that after reading it she
had been seized with an extraordinary, irresistible impulse—that of
thanking him for it in person and without delay.
“It was the impulse of a kind nature,” he said, “and I can’t tell you
what pleasure you give me.”
She declined to sit down, and evidently wished to appear to have come but
for a few seconds. She looked confusedly at the place in which she found
herself, and when her eyes met his own they struck him as anxious and
appealing. She was evidently not thinking of his song, though she said
three or four times over that it was beautiful. “Well, I only wanted you
to know, and now I must go,” she added; but on his hearthrug she lingered
with such an odd helplessness that he felt almost sorry for her.
“Perhaps I can improve it if you find it doesn’t go,” said Baron. “I’m
so delighted to do anything for you I can.”
“There may be a word or two that might be changed,” she answered, rather
absently. “I shall have to think it over, to live with it a little. But
I like it, and that’s all I wanted to say.”
“Charming of you. I’m not a bit busy,” said Baron.
Again she looked at him with a troubled intensity, then suddenly she
demanded: “Is there anything the matter with you?”
“The matter with me?”
“I mean like being ill or worried. I wondered if there might be; I had a
sudden fancy; and that, I think, is really why I came up.”
“There isn’t, indeed; I’m all right. But your sudden fancies are
inspirations.”
“It’s absurd. You must excuse me. Good-by!” said Mrs. Ryves.
“What are the words you want changed?” Baron asked.
“I don’t want any—if you’re all right. Good-by,” his visitor repeated,
fixing her eyes an instant on an object on his desk that had caught them.
His own glanced in the same direction and he saw that in his hurry to
shuffle away the packets found in the davenport he had overlooked one of
them, which lay with its seals exposed. For an instant he felt found
out, as if he had been concerned in something to be ashamed of, and it
was only his quick second thought that told him how little the incident
of which the packet was a sequel was an affair of Mrs. Ryves’s. Her
conscious eyes came back to his as if they were sounding them, and
suddenly this instinct of keeping his discovery to himself was succeeded
by a really startled inference that, with the rarest alertness, she had
guessed something and that her guess (it seemed almost supernatural), had
been her real motive. Some secret sympathy had made her vibrate—had
touched her with the knowledge that he had brought something to light.
After an instant he saw that she also divined the very reflection he was
then making, and this gave him a lively desire, a grateful, happy desire,
to appear to have nothing to conceal. For herself, it determined her
still more to put an end to her momentary visit. But before she had
passed to the door he exclaimed: “All right? How can a fellow be
anything else who has just had such a find?”
She paused at this, still looking earnest and asking: “What have you
found?”
“Some ancient family papers, in a secret compartment of my
writing-table.” And he took up the packet he had left out, holding it
before her eyes. “A lot of other things like that.”
“What are they?” murmured Mrs. Ryves.
“I haven’t the least idea. They’re sealed.”
“You haven’t broken the seals?” She had come further back.
“I haven’t had time; it only happened ten minutes ago.”
“I knew it,” said Mrs. Ryves, more gaily now.
“What did you know?”
“That you were in some predicament.”
“You’re extraordinary. I never heard of anything so miraculous; down two
flights of stairs.”
“_Are_ you in a quandary?” the visitor asked.
“Yes, about giving them back.” Peter Baron stood smiling at her and
rapping his packet on the palm of his hand. “What do you advise?”
She herself smiled now, with her eyes on the sealed parcel. “Back to
whom?”
“The man of whom I bought the table.”
“Ah then, they’re not from _your_ family?”
“No indeed, the piece of furniture in which they were hidden is not an
ancestral possession. I bought it at second hand—you see it’s old—the
other day in the King’s Road. Obviously the man who sold it to me sold
me more than he meant; he had no idea (from his own point of view it was
stupid of him), that there was a hidden chamber or that mysterious
documents were buried there. Ought I to go and tell him? It’s rather a
nice question.”
“Are the papers of value?” Mrs. Ryves inquired.
“I haven’t the least idea. But I can ascertain by breaking a seal.”
“Don’t!” said Mrs. Ryves, with much expression. She looked grave again.
“It’s rather tantalising—it’s a bit of a problem,” Baron went on, turning
his packet over.
Mrs. Ryves hesitated. “Will you show me what you have in your hand?”
He gave her the packet, and she looked at it and held it for an instant
to her nose. “It has a queer, charming old fragrance,” he said.
“Charming? It’s horrid.” She handed him back the packet, saying again
more emphatically “Don’t!”
“Don’t break a seal?”
“Don’t give back the papers.”
“Is it honest to keep them?”
“Certainly. They’re yours as much as the people’s of the shop. They
were in the hidden chamber when the table came to the shop, and the
people had every opportunity to find them out. They didn’t—therefore let
them take the consequences.”
Peter Baron reflected, diverted by her intensity. She was pale, with
eyes almost ardent. “The table had been in the place for years.”
“That proves the things haven’t been missed.”
“Let me show you how they were concealed,” he rejoined; and he exhibited
the ingenious recess and the working of the curious spring. She was
greatly interested, she grew excited and became familiar; she appealed to
him again not to do anything so foolish as to give up the papers, the
rest of which, in their little blank, impenetrable covers, he placed in a
row before her. “They might be traced—their history, their ownership,”
he argued; to which she replied that this was exactly why he ought to be
quiet. He declared that women had not the smallest sense of honour, and
she retorted that at any rate they have other perceptions more delicate
than those of men. He admitted that the papers might be rubbish, and she
conceded that nothing was more probable; yet when he offered to settle
the point off-hand she caught him by the wrist, acknowledging that,
absurd as it was, she was nervous. Finally she put the whole thing on
the ground of his just doing her a favour. She asked him to retain the
papers, to be silent about them, simply because it would please her.
That would be reason enough. Baron’s acquaintance, his agreeable
relations with her, advanced many steps in the treatment of this
question; an element of friendly candour made its way into their
discussion of it.
“I can’t make out why it matters to you, one way or the other, nor why
you should think it worth talking about,” the young man reasoned.
“Neither can I. It’s just a whim.”
“Certainly, if it will give you any pleasure, I’ll say nothing at the
shop.”
“That’s charming of you, and I’m very grateful. I see now that this was
why the spirit moved me to come up—to save them,” Mrs. Ryves went on.
She added, moving away, that now she had saved them she must really go.
“To save them for what, if I mayn’t break the seals?” Baron asked.
“I don’t know—for a generous sacrifice.”
“Why should it be generous? What’s at stake?” Peter demanded, leaning
against the doorpost as she stood on the landing.
“I don’t know what, but I feel as if something or other were in peril.
Burn them up!” she exclaimed with shining eyes.
“Ah, you ask too much—I’m so curious about them!”
“Well, I won’t ask more than I ought, and I’m much obliged to you for
your promise to be quiet. I trust to your discretion. Good-by.”
“You ought to _reward_ my discretion,” said Baron, coming out to the
landing.
She had partly descended the staircase and she stopped, leaning against
the baluster and smiling up at him. “Surely you’ve had your reward in
the honour of my visit.”
“That’s delightful as far as it goes. But what will you do for me if I
burn the papers?”
Mrs. Ryves considered a moment. “Burn them first and you’ll see!”
On this she went rapidly downstairs, and Baron, to whom the answer
appeared inadequate and the proposition indeed in that form grossly
unfair, returned to his room. The vivacity of her interest in a question
in which she had discoverably nothing at stake mystified, amused and, in
addition, irresistibly charmed him. She was delicate, imaginative,
inflammable, quick to feel, quick to act. He didn’t complain of it, it
was the way he liked women to be; but he was not impelled for the hour to
commit the sealed packets to the flames. He dropped them again into
their secret well, and after that he went out. He felt restless and
excited; another day was lost for work—the dreadful job to be performed
for Mr. Locket was still further off.
III.
TEN days after Mrs. Ryves’s visit he paid by appointment another call on
the editor of the Promiscuous. He found him in the little wainscoted
Chelsea house, which had to Peter’s sense the smoky brownness of an old
pipebowl, surrounded with all the emblems of his office—a litter of
papers, a hedge of encyclopædias, a photographic gallery of popular
contributors—and he promised at first to consume very few of the moments
for which so many claims competed. It was Mr. Locket himself however who
presently made the interview spacious, gave it air after discovering that
poor Baron had come to tell him something more interesting than that he
couldn’t after all patch up his tale. Peter had begun with this, had
intimated respectfully that it was a case in which both practice and
principle rebelled, and then, perceiving how little Mr. Locket was
affected by his audacity, had felt weak and slightly silly, left with his
heroism on his hands. He had armed himself for a struggle, but the
Promiscuous didn’t even protest, and there would have been nothing for
him but to go away with the prospect of never coming again had he not
chanced to say abruptly, irrelevantly, as he got up from his chair:
“Do you happen to be at all interested in Sir Dominick Ferrand?”
Mr. Locket, who had also got up, looked over his glasses. “The late Sir
Dominick?”
“The only one; you know the family’s extinct.”
Mr. Locket shot his young friend another sharp glance, a silent retort to
the glibness of this information. “Very extinct indeed. I’m afraid the
subject today would scarcely be regarded as attractive.”
“Are you very sure?” Baron asked.
Mr. Locket leaned forward a little, with his fingertips on his table, in
the attitude of giving permission to retire. “I might consider the
question in a special connection.” He was silent a minute, in a way that
relegated poor Peter to the general; but meeting the young man’s eyes
again he asked: “Are you—a—thinking of proposing an article upon him?”
“Not exactly proposing it—because I don’t yet quite see my way; but the
idea rather appeals to me.”
Mr. Locket emitted the safe assertion that this eminent statesman had
been a striking figure in his day; then he added: “Have you been studying
him?”
“I’ve been dipping into him.”
“I’m afraid he’s scarcely a question of the hour,” said Mr. Locket,
shuffling papers together.
“I think I could make him one,” Peter Baron declared.
Mr. Locket stared again; he was unable to repress an unattenuated “You?”
“I have some new material,” said the young man, colouring a little.
“That often freshens up an old story.”
“It buries it sometimes. It’s often only another tombstone.”
“That depends upon what it is. However,” Peter added, “the documents I
speak of would be a crushing monument.”
Mr. Locket, hesitating, shot another glance under his glasses. “Do you
allude to—a—revelations?”
“Very curious ones.”
Mr. Locket, still on his feet, had kept his body at the bowing angle; it
was therefore easy for him after an instant to bend a little further and
to sink into his chair with a movement of his hand toward the seat Baron
had occupied. Baron resumed possession of this convenience, and the
conversation took a fresh start on a basis which such an extension of
privilege could render but little less humiliating to our young man. He
had matured no plan of confiding his secret to Mr. Locket, and he had
really come out to make him conscientiously that other announcement as to
which it appeared that so much artistic agitation had been wasted. He
had indeed during the past days—days of painful indecision—appealed in
imagination to the editor of the Promiscuous, as he had appealed to other
sources of comfort; but his scruples turned their face upon him from
quarters high as well as low, and if on the one hand he had by no means
made up his mind not to mention his strange knowledge, he had still more
left to the determination of the moment the question of how he should
introduce the subject. He was in fact too nervous to decide; he only
felt that he needed for his peace of mind to communicate his discovery.
He wanted an opinion, the impression of somebody else, and even in this
intensely professional presence, five minutes after he had begun to tell
his queer story, he felt relieved of half his burden. His story was very
queer; he could take the measure of that himself as he spoke; but
wouldn’t this very circumstance qualify it for the Promiscuous?
“Of course the letters may be forgeries,” said Mr. Locket at last.
“I’ve no doubt that’s what many people will say.”
“Have they been seen by any expert?”
“No indeed; they’ve been seen by nobody.”
“Have you got any of them with you?”
“No; I felt nervous about bringing them out.”
“That’s a pity. I should have liked the testimony of my eyes.”
“You may have it if you’ll come to my rooms. If you don’t care to do
that without a further guarantee I’ll copy you out some passages.”
“Select a few of the worst!” Mr. Locket laughed. Over Baron’s
distressing information he had become quite human and genial. But he
added in a moment more dryly: “You know they ought to be seen by an
expert.”
“That’s exactly what I dread,” said Peter.
“They’ll be worth nothing to me if they’re not.”
Peter communed with his innermost spirit. “How much will they be worth
to _me_ if they _are_?”
Mr. Locket turned in his study-chair. “I should require to look at them
before answering that question.”
“I’ve been to the British museum—there are many of his letters there.
I’ve obtained permission to see them, and I’ve compared everything
carefully. I repudiate the possibility of forgery. No sign of
genuineness is wanting; there are details, down to the very postmarks,
that no forger could have invented. Besides, whose interest could it
conceivably have been? A labor of unspeakable difficulty, and all for
what advantage? There are so many letters, too—twenty-seven in all.”
“Lord, what an ass!” Mr. Locket exclaimed.
“It will be one of the strangest post-mortem revelations of which history
preserves the record.”
Mr. Locket, grave now, worried with a paper-knife the crevice of a
drawer. “It’s very odd. But to be worth anything such documents should
be subjected to a searching criticism—I mean of the historical kind.”
“Certainly; that would be the task of the writer introducing them to the
public.”
Again Mr. Locket considered; then with a smile he looked up. “You had
better give up original composition and take to buying old furniture.”
“Do you mean because it will pay better?”
“For you, I should think, original composition couldn’t pay worse. The
creative faculty’s so rare.”
“I do feel tempted to turn my attention to real heroes,” Peter replied.
“I’m bound to declare that Sir Dominick Ferrand was never one of mine.
Flashy, crafty, second-rate—that’s how I’ve always read him. It was
never a secret, moreover, that his private life had its weak spots. He
was a mere flash in the pan.”
“He speaks to the people of this country,” said Baron.
“He did; but his voice—the voice, I mean, of his prestige—is scarcely
audible now.”
“They’re still proud of some of the things he did at the Foreign
Office—the famous ‘exchange’ with Spain, in the Mediterranean, which took
Europe so by surprise and by which she felt injured, especially when it
became apparent how much we had the best of the bargain. Then the
sudden, unexpected show of force by which he imposed on the United States
our interpretation of that tiresome treaty—I could never make out what it
was about. These were both matters that no one really cared a straw
about, but he made every one feel as if they cared; the nation rose to
the way he played his trumps—it was uncommon. He was one of the few men
we’ve had, in our period, who took Europe, or took America, by surprise,
made them jump a bit; and the country liked his doing it—it was a
pleasant change. The rest of the world considered that they knew in any
case exactly what we would do, which was usually nothing at all. Say
what you like, he’s still a high name; partly also, no doubt, on account
of other things his early success and early death, his political ‘cheek’
and wit; his very appearance—he certainly was handsome—and the
possibilities (of future personal supremacy) which it was the fashion at
the time, which it’s the fashion still, to say had passed away with him.
He had been twice at the Foreign Office; that alone was remarkable for a
man dying at forty-four. What therefore will the country think when it
learns he was venal?”
Peter Baron himself was not angry with Sir Dominick Ferrand, who had
simply become to him (he had been “reading up” feverishly for a week) a
very curious subject of psychological study; but he could easily put
himself in the place of that portion of the public whose memory was long
enough for their patriotism to receive a shock. It was some time
fortunately since the conduct of public affairs had wanted for men of
disinterested ability, but the extraordinary documents concealed (of all
places in the world—it was as fantastic as a nightmare) in a “bargain”
picked up at second-hand by an obscure scribbler, would be a calculable
blow to the retrospective mind. Baron saw vividly that if these relics
should be made public the scandal, the horror, the chatter would be
immense. Immense would be also the contribution to truth, the
rectification of history. He had felt for several days (and it was
exactly what had made him so nervous) as if he held in his hand the key
to public attention.
“There are too many things to explain,” Mr. Locket went on, “and the
singular _provenance_ of your papers would count almost overwhelmingly
against them even if the other objections were met. There would be a
perfect and probably a very complicated pedigree to trace. How did they
get into your davenport, as you call it, and how long had they been
there? What hands secreted them? what hands had, so incredibly, clung to
them and preserved them? Who are the persons mentioned in them? who are
the correspondents, the parties to the nefarious transactions? You say
the transactions appear to be of two distinct kinds—some of them
connected with public business and others involving obscure personal
relations.”
“They all have this in common,” said Peter Baron, “that they constitute
evidence of uneasiness, in some instances of painful alarm, on the
writer’s part, in relation to exposure—the exposure in the one case, as I
gather, of the fact that he had availed himself of official opportunities
to promote enterprises (public works and that sort of thing) in which he
had a pecuniary stake. The dread of the light in the other connection is
evidently different, and these letters are the earliest in date. They
are addressed to a woman, from whom he had evidently received money.”
Mr. Locket wiped his glasses. “What woman?”
“I haven’t the least idea. There are lots of questions I can’t answer,
of course; lots of identities I can’t establish; lots of gaps I can’t
fill. But as to two points I’m clear, and they are the essential ones.
In the first place the papers in my possession are genuine; in the second
place they’re compromising.”
With this Peter Baron rose again, rather vexed with himself for having
been led on to advertise his treasure (it was his interlocutor’s
perfectly natural scepticism that produced this effect), for he felt that
he was putting himself in a false position. He detected in Mr. Locket’s
studied detachment the fermentation of impulses from which, unsuccessful
as he was, he himself prayed to be delivered.
Mr. Locket remained seated; he watched Baron go across the room for his
hat and umbrella. “Of course, the question would come up of whose
property today such documents would legally he. There are heirs,
descendants, executors to consider.”
“In some degree perhaps; but I’ve gone into that a little. Sir Dominick
Ferrand had no children, and he left no brothers and no sisters. His
wife survived him, but she died ten years ago. He can have had no heirs
and no executors to speak of, for he left no property.”
“That’s to his honour and against your theory,” said Mr. Locket.
“I _have_ no theory. He left a largeish mass of debt,” Peter Baron
added. At this Mr. Locket got up, while his visitor pursued: “So far as
I can ascertain, though of course my inquiries have had to be very rapid
and superficial, there is no one now living, directly or indirectly
related to the personage in question, who would be likely to suffer from
any steps in the direction of publicity. It happens to be a rare
instance of a life that had, as it were, no loose ends. At least there
are none perceptible at present.”
“I see, I see,” said Mr. Locket. “But I don’t think I should care much
for your article.”
“What article?”
“The one you seem to wish to write, embodying this new matter.”
“Oh, I don’t wish to write it!” Peter exclaimed. And then he bade his
host good-by.
“Good-by,” said Mr. Locket. “Mind you, I don’t say that I think there’s
nothing in it.”
“You would think there was something in it if you were to see my
documents.”
“I should like to see the secret compartment,” the caustic editor
rejoined. “Copy me out some extracts.”
“To what end, if there’s no question of their being of use to you?”
“I don’t say that—I might like the letters themselves.”
“Themselves?”
“Not as the basis of a paper, but just to publish—for a sensation.”
“They’d sell your number!” Baron laughed.
“I daresay I should like to look at them,” Mr. Locket conceded after a
moment. “When should I find you at home?”
“Don’t come,” said the young man. “I make you no offer.”
“I might make _you_ one,” the editor hinted. “Don’t trouble yourself; I
shall probably destroy them.” With this Peter Baron took his departure,
waiting however just afterwards, in the street near the house, as if he
had been looking out for a stray hansom, to which he would not have
signalled had it appeared. He thought Mr. Locket might hurry after him,
but Mr. Locket seemed to have other things to do, and Peter Baron
returned on foot to Jersey Villas.
IV.
ON the evening that succeeded this apparently pointless encounter he had
an interview more conclusive with Mrs. Bundy, for whose shrewd and
philosophic view of life he had several times expressed, even to the good
woman herself, a considerable relish. The situation at Jersey Villas
(Mrs. Ryves had suddenly flown off to Dover) was such as to create in him
a desire for moral support, and there was a kind of domestic
determination in Mrs. Bundy which seemed, in general, to advertise it.
He had asked for her on coming in, but had been told she was absent for
the hour; upon which he had addressed himself mechanically to the task of
doing up his dishonoured manuscript—the ingenious fiction about which Mr.
Locket had been so stupid—for further adventures and not improbable
defeats. He passed a restless, ineffective afternoon, asking himself if
his genius were a horrid delusion, looking out of his window for
something that didn’t happen, something that seemed now to be the advent
of a persuasive Mr. Locket and now the return, from an absence more
disappointing even than Mrs. Bundy’s, of his interesting neighbour of the
parlours. He was so nervous and so depressed that he was unable even to
fix his mind on the composition of the note with which, on its next
peregrination, it was necessary that his manuscript should be
accompanied. He was too nervous to eat, and he forgot even to dine; he
forgot to light his candles, he let his fire go out, and it was in the
melancholy chill of the late dusk that Mrs. Bundy, arriving at last with
his lamp, found him extended moodily upon his sofa. She had been
informed that he wished to speak to her, and as she placed on the
malodorous luminary an oily shade of green pasteboard she expressed the
friendly hope that there was nothing wrong with his ’ealth.
The young man rose from his couch, pulling himself together sufficiently
to reply that his health was well enough but that his spirits were down
in his hoots. He had a strong disposition to “draw” his landlady on the
subject of Mrs. Ryves, as well as a vivid conviction that she constituted
a theme as to which Mrs. Bundy would require little pressure to tell him
even more than she knew. At the same time he hated to appear to pry into
the secrets of his absent friend; to discuss her with their bustling
hostess resembled too much for his taste a gossip with a tattling servant
about an unconscious employer. He left out of account however Mrs.
Bundy’s knowledge of the human heart, for it was this fine principle that
broke down the barriers after he had reflected reassuringly that it was
not meddling with Mrs. Ryves’s affairs to try and find out if she struck
such an observer as happy. Crudely, abruptly, even a little blushingly,
he put the direct question to Mrs. Bundy, and this led tolerably straight
to another question, which, on his spirit, sat equally heavy (they were
indeed but different phases of the same), and which the good woman
answered with expression when she ejaculated: “Think it a liberty for you
to run down for a few hours? If she do, my dear sir, just send her to me
to talk to!” As regards happiness indeed she warned Baron against
imposing too high a standard on a young thing who had been through so
much, and before he knew it he found himself, without the responsibility
of choice, in submissive receipt of Mrs. Bundy’s version of this
experience. It was an interesting picture, though it had its
infirmities, one of them congenital and consisting of the fact that it
had sprung essentially from the virginal brain of Miss Teagle.
Amplified, edited, embellished by the richer genius of Mrs. Bundy, who
had incorporated with it and now liberally introduced copious
interleavings of Miss Teagle’s own romance, it gave Peter Baron much food
for meditation, at the same time that it only half relieved his curiosity
about the causes of the charming woman’s underlying strangeness. He
sounded this note experimentally in Mrs. Bundy’s ear, but it was easy to
see that it didn’t reverberate in her fancy. She had no idea of the
picture it would have been natural for him to desire that Mrs. Ryves
should present to him, and she was therefore unable to estimate the
points in respect to which his actual impression was irritating. She had
indeed no adequate conception of the intellectual requirements of a young
man in love. She couldn’t tell him why their faultless friend was so
isolated, so unrelated, so nervously, shrinkingly proud. On the other
hand she could tell him (he knew it already) that she had passed many
years of her life in the acquisition of accomplishments at a seat of
learning no less remote than Boulogne, and that Miss Teagle had been
intimately acquainted with the late Mr. Everard Ryves, who was a “most
rising” young man in the city, not making any year less than his clear
twelve hundred. “Now that he isn’t there to make them, his mourning
widow can’t live as she had then, can she?” Mrs. Bundy asked.
Baron was not prepared to say that she could, but he thought of another
way she might live as he sat, the next day, in the train which rattled
him down to Dover. The place, as he approached it, seemed bright and
breezy to him; his roamings had been neither far enough nor frequent
enough to make the cockneyfied coast insipid. Mrs. Bundy had of course
given him the address he needed, and on emerging from the station he was
on the point of asking what direction he should take. His attention
however at this moment was drawn away by the bustle of the departing
boat. He had been long enough shut up in London to be conscious of
refreshment in the mere act of turning his face to Paris. He wandered
off to the pier in company with happier tourists and, leaning on a rail,
watched enviously the preparation, the agitation of foreign travel. It
was for some minutes a foretaste of adventure; but, ah, when was he to
have the very draught? He turned away as he dropped this interrogative
sigh, and in doing so perceived that in another part of the pier two
ladies and a little boy were gathered with something of the same
wistfulness. The little boy indeed happened to look round for a moment,
upon which, with the keenness of the predatory age, he recognised in our
young man a source of pleasures from which he lately had been weaned. He
bounded forward with irrepressible cries of “Geegee!” and Peter lifted
him aloft for an embrace. On putting him down the pilgrim from Jersey
Villas stood confronted with a sensibly severe Miss Teagle, who had
followed her little charge. “What’s the matter with the old woman?” he
asked himself as he offered her a hand which she treated as the merest
detail. Whatever it was, it was (and very properly, on the part of a
loyal _suivante_) the same complaint as that of her employer, to whom,
from a distance, for Mrs. Ryves had not advanced an inch, he flourished
his hat as she stood looking at him with a face that he imagined rather
white. Mrs. Ryves’s response to this salutation was to shift her
position in such a manner as to appear again absorbed in the Calais boat.
Peter Baron, however, kept hold of the child, whom Miss Teagle artfully
endeavoured to wrest from him—a policy in which he was aided by Sidney’s
own rough but instinctive loyalty; and he was thankful for the happy
effect of being dragged by his jubilant friend in the very direction in
which he had tended for so many hours. Mrs. Ryves turned once more as he
came near, and then, from the sweet, strained smile with which she asked
him if he were on his way to France, he saw that if she had been angry at
his having followed her she had quickly got over it.
“No, I’m not crossing; but it came over me that you might be, and that’s
why I hurried down—to catch you before you were off.”
“Oh, we can’t go—more’s the pity; but why, if we could,” Mrs. Ryves
inquired, “should you wish to prevent it?”
“Because I’ve something to ask you first, something that may take some
time.” He saw now that her embarrassment had really not been resentful;
it had been nervous, tremulous, as the emotion of an unexpected pleasure
might have been. “That’s really why I determined last night, without
asking your leave first to pay you this little visit—that and the intense
desire for another bout of horse-play with Sidney. Oh, I’ve come to see
you,” Peter Baron went on, “and I won’t make any secret of the fact that
I expect you to resign yourself gracefully to the trial and give me all
your time. The day’s lovely, and I’m ready to declare that the place is
as good as the day. Let me drink deep of these things, drain the cup
like a man who hasn’t been out of London for months and months. Let me
walk with you and talk with you and lunch with you—I go back this
afternoon. Give me all your hours in short, so that they may live in my
memory as one of the sweetest occasions of life.”
The emission of steam from the French packet made such an uproar that
Baron could breathe his passion into the young woman’s ear without
scandalising the spectators; and the charm which little by little it
scattered over his fleeting visit proved indeed to be the collective
influence of the conditions he had put into words. “What is it you wish
to ask me?” Mrs. Ryves demanded, as they stood there together; to which
he replied that he would tell her all about it if she would send Miss
Teagle off with Sidney. Miss Teagle, who was always anticipating her
cue, had already begun ostentatiously to gaze at the distant shores of
France and was easily enough induced to take an earlier start home and
rise to the responsibility of stopping on her way to contend with the
butcher. She had however to retire without Sidney, who clung to his
recovered prey, so that the rest of the episode was seasoned, to Baron’s
sense, by the importunate twitch of the child’s little, plump, cool hand.
The friends wandered together with a conjugal air and Sidney not between
them, hanging wistfully, first, over the lengthened picture of the Calais
boat, till they could look after it, as it moved rumbling away, in a
spell of silence which seemed to confess—especially when, a moment later,
their eyes met—that it produced the same fond fancy in each. The
presence of the boy moreover was no hindrance to their talking in a
manner that they made believe was very frank. Peter Baron presently told
his companion what it was he had taken a journey to ask, and he had time
afterwards to get over his discomfiture at her appearance of having
fancied it might be something greater. She seemed disappointed (but she
was forgiving) on learning from him that he had only wished to know if
she judged ferociously his not having complied with her request to
respect certain seals.
“How ferociously do you suspect me of having judged it?” she inquired.
“Why, to the extent of leaving the house the next moment.”
They were still lingering on the great granite pier when he touched on
this matter, and she sat down at the end while the breeze, warmed by the
sunshine, ruffled the purple sea. She coloured a little and looked
troubled, and after an instant she repeated interrogatively: “The next
moment?”
“As soon as I told you what I had done. I was scrupulous about this, you
will remember; I went straight downstairs to confess to you. You turned
away from me, saying nothing; I couldn’t imagine—as I vow I can’t imagine
now—why such a matter should appear so closely to touch you. I went out
on some business and when I returned you had quitted the house. It had
all the look of my having offended you, of your wishing to get away from
me. You didn’t even give me time to tell you how it was that, in spite
of your advice, I determined to see for myself what my discovery
represented. You must do me justice and hear what determined me.”
Mrs. Ryves got up from her scat and asked him, as a particular favour,
not to allude again to his discovery. It was no concern of hers at all,
and she had no warrant for prying into his secrets. She was very sorry
to have been for a moment so absurd as to appear to do so, and she humbly
begged his pardon for her meddling. Saying this she walked on with a
charming colour in her cheek, while he laughed out, though he was really
bewildered, at the endless capriciousness of women. Fortunately the
incident didn’t spoil the hour, in which there were other sources of
satisfaction, and they took their course to her lodgings with such
pleasant little pauses and excursions by the way as permitted her to show
him the objects of interest at Dover. She let him stop at a
wine-merchant’s and buy a bottle for luncheon, of which, in its order,
they partook, together with a pudding invented by Miss Teagle, which, as
they hypocritically swallowed it, made them look at each other in an
intimacy of indulgence. They came out again and, while Sidney grubbed in
the gravel of the shore, sat selfishly on the Parade, to the
disappointment of Miss Teagle, who had fixed her hopes on a fly and a
ladylike visit to the castle. Baron had his eye on his watch—he had to
think of his train and the dismal return and many other melancholy
things; but the sea in the afternoon light was a more appealing picture;
the wind had gone down, the Channel was crowded, the sails of the ships
were white in the purple distance. The young man had asked his companion
(he had asked her before) when she was to come back to Jersey Villas, and
she had said that she should probably stay at Dover another week. It was
dreadfully expensive, but it was doing the child all the good in the
world, and if Miss Teagle could go up for some things she should probably
be able to manage an extension. Earlier in the day she had said that she
perhaps wouldn’t return to Jersey Villas at all, or only return to wind
up her connection with Mrs. Bundy. At another moment she had spoken of
an early date, an immediate reoccupation of the wonderful parlours.
Baron saw that she had no plan, no real reasons, that she was vague and,
in secret, worried and nervous, waiting for something that didn’t depend
on herself. A silence of several minutes had fallen upon them while they
watched the shining sails; to which Mrs. Ryves put an end by exclaiming
abruptly, but without completing her sentence: “Oh, if you had come to
tell me you had destroyed them—”
“Those terrible papers? I like the way you talk about ‘destroying!’ You
don’t even know what they are.”
“I don’t want to know; they put me into a state.”
“What sort of a state?”
“I don’t know; they haunt me.”
“They haunted me; that was why, early one morning, suddenly, I couldn’t
keep my hands off them. I had told you I wouldn’t touch them. I had
deferred to your whim, your superstition (what is it?) but at last they
got the better of me. I had lain awake all night threshing about,
itching with curiosity. It made me ill; my own nerves (as I may say)
were irritated, my capacity to work was gone. It had come over me in the
small hours in the shape of an obsession, a fixed idea, that there was
nothing in the ridiculous relics and that my exaggerated scruples were
making a fool of me. It was ten to one they were rubbish, they were
vain, they were empty; that they had been even a practical joke on the
part of some weak-minded gentleman of leisure, the former possessor of
the confounded davenport. The longer I hovered about them with such
precautions the longer I was taken in, and the sooner I exposed their
insignificance the sooner I should get back to my usual occupations.
This conviction made my hand so uncontrollable that that morning before
breakfast I broke one of the seals. It took me but a few minutes to
perceive that the contents were not rubbish; the little bundle contained
old letters—very curious old letters.”
“I know—I know; ‘private and confidential.’ So you broke the other
seals?” Mrs. Ryves looked at him with the strange apprehension he had
seen in her eyes when she appeared at his door the moment after his
discovery.
“You know, of course, because I told you an hour later, though you would
let me tell you very little.”
Baron, as he met this queer gaze, smiled hard at her to prevent her
guessing that he smarted with the fine reproach conveyed in the tone of
her last words; but she appeared able to guess everything, for she
reminded him that she had not had to wait that morning till he came
downstairs to know what had happened above, but had shown him at the
moment how she had been conscious of it an hour before, had passed on her
side the same tormented night as he, and had had to exert extraordinary
self-command not to rush up to his rooms while the study of the open
packets was going on. “You’re so sensitively organised and you’ve such
mysterious powers that you re uncanny,” Baron declared.
“I feel what takes place at a distance; that’s all.”
“One would think somebody you liked was in danger.”
“I told you that that was what was present to me the day I came up to see
you.”
“Oh, but you don’t like me so much as that,” Baron argued, laughing.
She hesitated. “No, I don’t know that I do.”
“It must be for someone else—the other person concerned. The other day,
however, you wouldn’t let me tell you that person’s name.”
Mrs. Ryves, at this, rose quickly. “I don’t want to know it; it’s none
of my business.”
“No, fortunately, I don’t think it is,” Baron rejoined, walking with her
along the Parade. She had Sidney by the hand now, and the young man was
on the other side of her. They moved toward the station—she had offered
to go part of the way. “But with your miraculous gift it’s a wonder you
haven’t divined.”
“I only divine what I want,” said Mrs. Ryves.
“That’s very convenient!” exclaimed Peter, to whom Sidney had presently
come round again. “Only, being thus in the dark, it’s difficult to see
your motive for wishing the papers destroyed.”
Mrs. Ryves meditated, looking fixedly at the ground. “I thought you
might do it to oblige me.”
“Does it strike you that such an expectation, formed in such conditions,
is reasonable?”
Mrs. Ryves stopped short, and this time she turned on him the clouded
clearness of her eyes. “What do you mean to do with them?”
It was Peter Baron’s turn to meditate, which he did, on the empty asphalt
of the Parade (the “season,” at Dover, was not yet), where their shadows
were long in the afternoon light. He was under such a charm as he had
never known, and he wanted immensely to be able to reply: “I’ll do
anything you like if you’ll love me.” These words, however, would have
represented a responsibility and have constituted what was vulgarly
termed an offer. An offer of what? he quickly asked himself here, as he
had already asked himself after making in spirit other awkward dashes in
the same direction—of what but his poverty, his obscurity, his attempts
that had come to nothing, his abilities for which there was nothing to
show? Mrs. Ryves was not exactly a success, but she was a greater
success than Peter Baron. Poor as he was he hated the sordid (he knew
she didn’t love it), and he felt small for talking of marriage.
Therefore he didn’t put the question in the words it would have pleased
him most to hear himself utter, but he compromised, with an angry young
pang, and said to her: “What will you do for me if I put an end to them?”
She shook her head sadly—it was always her prettiest movement. “I can
promise nothing—oh, no, I can’t promise! We must part now,” she added.
“You’ll miss your train.”
He looked at his watch, taking the hand she held out to him. She drew it
away quickly, and nothing then was left him, before hurrying to the
station, but to catch up Sidney and squeeze him till he uttered a little
shriek. On the way back to town the situation struck him as grotesque.
V.
IT tormented him so the next morning that after threshing it out a little
further he felt he had something of a grievance. Mrs. Ryves’s
intervention had made him acutely uncomfortable, for she had taken the
attitude of exerting pressure without, it appeared, recognising on his
part an equal right. She had imposed herself as an influence, yet she
held herself aloof as a participant; there were things she looked to him
to do for her, yet she could tell him of no good that would come to him
from the doing. She should either have had less to say or have been
willing to say more, and he asked himself why he should be the sport of
her moods and her mysteries. He perceived her knack of punctual
interference to be striking, but it was just this apparent infallibility
that he resented. Why didn’t she set up at once as a professional
clairvoyant and eke out her little income more successfully? In purely
private life such a gift was disconcerting; her divinations, her evasions
disturbed at any rate his own tranquillity.
What disturbed it still further was that he received early in the day a
visit from Mr. Locket, who, leaving him under no illusion as to the
grounds of such an honour, remarked as soon as he had got into the room
or rather while he still panted on the second flight and the smudged
little slavey held open Baron’s door, that he had taken up his young
friend’s invitation to look at Sir Dominick Ferrand’s letters for
himself. Peter drew them forth with a promptitude intended to show that
he recognised the commercial character of the call and without
attenuating the inconsequence of this departure from the last
determination he had expressed to Mr. Locket. He showed his visitor the
davenport and the hidden recess, and he smoked a cigarette, humming
softly, with a sense of unwonted advantage and triumph, while the
cautious editor sat silent and handled the papers. For all his caution
Mr. Locket was unable to keep a warmer light out of his judicial eye as
he said to Baron at last with sociable brevity—a tone that took many
things for granted: “I’ll take them home with me—they require much
attention.”
The young man looked at him a moment. “Do you think they’re genuine?”
He didn’t mean to be mocking, he meant not to be; but the words sounded
so to his own ear, and he could see that they produced that effect on Mr.
Locket.
“I can’t in the least determine. I shall have to go into them at my
leisure, and that’s why I ask you to lend them to me.”
He had shuffled the papers together with a movement charged, while he
spoke, with the air of being preliminary to that of thrusting them into a
little black bag which he had brought with him and which, resting on the
shelf of the davenport, struck Peter, who viewed it askance, as an object
darkly editorial. It made our young man, somehow, suddenly apprehensive;
the advantage of which he had just been conscious was about to be
transferred by a quiet process of legerdemain to a person who already had
advantages enough. Baron, in short, felt a deep pang of anxiety; he
couldn’t have said why. Mr. Locket took decidedly too many things for
granted, and the explorer of Sir Dominick Ferrand’s irregularities
remembered afresh how clear he had been after all about his indisposition
to traffic in them. He asked his visitor to what end he wished to remove
the letters, since on the one hand there was no question now of the
article in the Promiscuous which was to reveal their existence, and on
the other he himself, as their owner, had a thousand insurmountable
scruples about putting them into circulation.
Mr. Locket looked over his spectacles as over the battlements of a
fortress. “I’m not thinking of the end—I’m thinking of the beginning. A
few glances have assured me that such documents ought to be submitted to
some competent eye.”
“Oh, you mustn’t show them to anyone!” Baron exclaimed.
“You may think me presumptuous, but the eye that I venture to allude to
in those terms—”
“Is the eye now fixed so terribly on _me_?” Peter laughingly interrupted.
“Oh, it would be interesting, I confess, to know how they strike a man of
your acuteness!” It had occurred to him that by such a concession he
might endear himself to a literary umpire hitherto implacable. There
would be no question of his publishing Sir Dominick Ferrand, but he
might, in due acknowledgment of services rendered, form the habit of
publishing Peter Baron. “How long would it be your idea to retain them?”
he inquired, in a manner which, he immediately became aware, was what
incited Mr. Locket to begin stuffing the papers into his bag. With this
perception he came quickly closer and, laying his hand on the gaping
receptacle, lightly drew its two lips together. In this way the two men
stood for a few seconds, touching, almost in the attitude of combat,
looking hard into each other’s eyes.
The tension was quickly relieved however by the surprised flush which
mantled on Mr. Locket’s brow. He fell back a few steps with an injured
dignity that might have been a protest against physical violence.
“Really, my dear young sir, your attitude is tantamount to an accusation
of intended bad faith. Do you think I want to steal the confounded
things?” In reply to such a challenge Peter could only hastily declare
that he was guilty of no discourteous suspicion—he only wanted a limit
named, a pledge of every precaution against accident. Mr. Locket
admitted the justice of the demand, assured him he would restore the
property within three days, and completed, with Peter’s assistance, his
little arrangements for removing it discreetly. When he was ready, his
treacherous reticule distended with its treasures, he gave a lingering
look at the inscrutable davenport. “It’s how they ever got into that
thing that puzzles one’s brain!”
“There was some concatenation of circumstances that would doubtless seem
natural enough if it were explained, but that one would have to remount
the stream of time to ascertain. To one course I have definitely made up
my mind: not to make any statement or any inquiry at the shop. I simply
accept the mystery,” said Peter, rather grandly.
“That would be thought a cheap escape if you were to put it into a
story,” Mr. Locket smiled.
“Yes, I shouldn’t offer the story to _you_. I shall be impatient till I
see my papers again,” the young man called out, as his visitor hurried
downstairs.
That evening, by the last delivery, he received, under the Dover
postmark, a letter that was not from Miss Teagle. It was a slightly
confused but altogether friendly note, written that morning after
breakfast, the ostensible purpose of which was to thank him for the
amiability of his visit, to express regret at any appearance the writer
might have had of meddling with what didn’t concern her, and to let him
know that the evening before, after he had left her, she had in a moment
of inspiration got hold of the tail of a really musical idea—a perfect
accompaniment for the song he had so kindly given her. She had scrawled,
as a specimen, a few bars at the end of her note, mystic, mocking musical
signs which had no sense for her correspondent. The whole letter
testified to a restless but rather pointless desire to remain in
communication with him. In answering her, however, which he did that
night before going to bed, it was on this bright possibility of their
collaboration, its advantages for the future of each of them, that Baron
principally expatiated. He spoke of this future with an eloquence of
which he would have defended the sincerity, and drew of it a picture
extravagantly rich. The next morning, as he was about to settle himself
to tasks for some time terribly neglected, with a sense that after all it
was rather a relief not to be sitting so close to Sir Dominick Ferrand,
who had become dreadfully distracting; at the very moment at which he
habitually addressed his preliminary invocation to the muse, he was
agitated by the arrival of a telegram which proved to be an urgent
request from Mr. Locket that he would immediately come down and see him.
This represented, for poor Baron, whose funds were very low, another
morning sacrificed, but somehow it didn’t even occur to him that he might
impose his own time upon the editor of the Promiscuous, the keeper of the
keys of renown. He had some of the plasticity of the raw contributor.
He gave the muse another holiday, feeling she was really ashamed to take
it, and in course of time found himself in Mr. Locket’s own chair at Mr.
Locket’s own table—so much nobler an expanse than the slippery slope of
the davenport—considering with quick intensity, in the white flash of
certain words just brought out by his host, the quantity of happiness, of
emancipation that might reside in a hundred pounds.
Yes, that was what it meant: Mr. Locket, in the twenty-four hours, had
discovered so much in Sir Dominick’s literary remains that his visitor
found him primed with an offer. A hundred pounds would be paid him that
day, that minute, and no questions would be either asked or answered. “I
take all the risks, I take all the risks,” the editor of the Promiscuous
repeated. The letters were out on the table, Mr. Locket was on the
hearthrug, like an orator on a platform, and Peter, under the influence
of his sudden ultimatum, had dropped, rather weakly, into the seat which
happened to be nearest and which, as he became conscious it moved on a
pivot, he whirled round so as to enable himself to look at his tempter
with an eye intended to be cold. What surprised him most was to find Mr.
Locket taking exactly the line about the expediency of publication which
he would have expected Mr. Locket not to take. “Hush it all up; a barren
scandal, an offence that can’t be remedied, is the thing in the world
that least justifies an airing—” some such line as that was the line he
would have thought natural to a man whose life was spent in weighing
questions of propriety and who had only the other day objected, in the
light of this virtue, to a work of the most disinterested art. But the
author of that incorruptible masterpiece had put his finger on the place
in saying to his interlocutor on the occasion of his last visit that, if
given to the world in the pages of the Promiscuous, Sir Dominick’s
aberrations would sell the edition. It was not necessary for Mr. Locket
to reiterate to his young friend his phrase about their making a
sensation. If he wished to purchase the “rights,” as theatrical people
said, it was not to protect a celebrated name or to lock them up in a
cupboard. That formula of Baron’s covered all the ground, and one
edition was a low estimate of the probable performance of the magazine.
Peter left the letters behind him and, on withdrawing from the editorial
presence, took a long walk on the Embankment. His impressions were at
war with each other—he was flurried by possibilities of which he yet
denied the existence. He had consented to trust Mr. Locket with the
papers a day or two longer, till he should have thought out the terms on
which he might—in the event of certain occurrences—be induced to dispose
of them. A hundred pounds were not this gentleman’s last word, nor
perhaps was mere unreasoning intractability Peter’s own. He sighed as he
took no note of the pictures made by barges—sighed because it all might
mean money. He needed money bitterly; he owed it in disquieting
quarters. Mr. Locket had put it before him that he had a high
responsibility—that he might vindicate the disfigured truth, contribute a
chapter to the history of England. “You haven’t a right to suppress such
momentous facts,” the hungry little editor had declared, thinking how the
series (he would spread it into three numbers) would be the talk of the
town. If Peter had money he might treat himself to ardour, to bliss.
Mr. Locket had said, no doubt justly enough, that there were ever so many
questions one would have to meet should one venture to play so daring a
game. These questions, embarrassments, dangers—the danger, for instance,
of the cropping-up of some lurking litigious relative—he would take over
unreservedly and bear the brunt of dealing with. It was to be remembered
that the papers were discredited, vitiated by their childish pedigree;
such a preposterous origin, suggesting, as he had hinted before, the
feeble ingenuity of a third-rate novelist, was a thing he should have to
place himself at the positive disadvantage of being silent about. He
would rather give no account of the matter at all than expose himself to
the ridicule that such a story would infallibly excite. Couldn’t one see
them in advance, the clever, taunting things the daily and weekly papers
would say? Peter Baron had his guileless side, but he felt, as he
worried with a stick that betrayed him the granite parapets of the
Thames, that he was not such a fool as not to know how Mr. Locket would
“work” the mystery of his marvellous find. Nothing could help it on
better with the public than the impenetrability of the secret attached to
it. If Mr. Locket should only be able to kick up dust enough over the
circumstances that had guided his hand his fortune would literally be
made. Peter thought a hundred pounds a low bid, yet he wondered how the
Promiscuous could bring itself to offer such a sum—so large it loomed in
the light of literary remuneration as hitherto revealed to our young man.
The explanation of this anomaly was of course that the editor shrewdly
saw a dozen ways of getting his money back. There would be in the
“sensation,” at a later stage, the making of a book in large type—the
book of the hour; and the profits of this scandalous volume or, if one
preferred the name, this reconstruction, before an impartial posterity,
of a great historical humbug, the sum “down,” in other words, that any
lively publisher would give for it, figured vividly in Mr. Locket’s
calculations. It was therefore altogether an opportunity of dealing at
first hand with the lively publisher that Peter was invited to forego.
Peter gave a masterful laugh, rejoicing in his heart that, on the spot,
in the _repaire_ he had lately quitted, he had not been tempted by a
figure that would have approximately represented the value of his
property. It was a good job, he mentally added as he turned his face
homeward, that there was so little likelihood of his having to struggle
with that particular pressure.
VI.
WHEN, half an hour later, he approached Jersey Villas, he noticed that
the house-door was open; then, as he reached the gate, saw it make a
frame for an unexpected presence. Mrs. Ryves, in her bonnet and jacket,
looked out from it as if she were expecting something—as if she had been
passing to and fro to watch. Yet when he had expressed to her that it
was a delightful welcome she replied that she had only thought there
might possibly be a cab in sight. He offered to go and look for one,
upon which it appeared that after all she was not, as yet at least, in
need. He went back with her into her sitting-room, where she let him
know that within a couple of days she had seen clearer what was best; she
had determined to quit Jersey Villas and had come up to take away her
things, which she had just been packing and getting together.
“I wrote you last night a charming letter in answer to yours,” Baron
said. “You didn’t mention in yours that you were coming up.”
“It wasn’t your answer that brought me. It hadn’t arrived when I came
away.”
“You’ll see when you get back that my letter is charming.”
“I daresay.” Baron had observed that the room was not, as she had
intimated, in confusion—Mrs. Ryves’s preparations for departure were not
striking. She saw him look round and, standing in front of the fireless
grate with her hands behind her, she suddenly asked: “Where have you come
from now?”
“From an interview with a literary friend.”
“What are you concocting between you?”
“Nothing at all. We’ve fallen out—we don’t agree.”
“Is he a publisher?”
“He’s an editor.”
“Well, I’m glad you don’t agree. I don’t know what he wants, but,
whatever it is, don’t do it.”
“He must do what _I_ want!” said Baron.
“And what’s that?”
“Oh, I’ll tell you when he has done it!” Baron begged her to let him
hear the “musical idea” she had mentioned in her letter; on which she
took off her hat and jacket and, seating herself at her piano, gave him,
with a sentiment of which the very first notes thrilled him, the
accompaniment of his song. She phrased the words with her sketchy
sweetness, and he sat there as if he had been held in a velvet vise,
throbbing with the emotion, irrecoverable ever after in its freshness, of
the young artist in the presence for the first time of “production”—the
proofs of his book, the hanging of his picture, the rehearsal of his
play. When she had finished he asked again for the same delight, and
then for more music and for more; it did him such a world of good, kept
him quiet and safe, smoothed out the creases of his spirit. She dropped
her own experiments and gave him immortal things, and he lounged there,
pacified and charmed, feeling the mean little room grow large and vague
and happy possibilities come back. Abruptly, at the piano, she called
out to him: “Those papers of yours—the letters you found—are not in the
house?”
“No, they’re not in the house.”
“I was sure of it! No matter—it’s all right!” she added. She herself
was pacified—trouble was a false note. Later he was on the point of
asking her how she knew the objects she had mentioned were not in the
house; but he let it pass. The subject was a profitless riddle—a puzzle
that grew grotesquely bigger, like some monstrosity seen in the darkness,
as one opened one’s eyes to it. He closed his eyes—he wanted another
vision. Besides, she had shown him that she had extraordinary senses—her
explanation would have been stranger than the fact. Moreover they had
other things to talk about, in particular the question of her putting off
her return to Dover till the morrow and dispensing meanwhile with the
valuable protection of Sidney. This was indeed but another face of the
question of her dining with him somewhere that evening (where else should
she dine?)—accompanying him, for instance, just for an hour of Bohemia,
in their deadly respectable lives, to a jolly little place in Soho. Mrs.
Ryves declined to have her life abused, but in fact, at the proper
moment, at the jolly little place, to which she did accompany him—it
dealt in macaroni and Chianti—the pair put their elbows on the crumpled
cloth and, face to face, with their little emptied coffee-cups pushed
away and the young man’s cigarette lighted by her command, became
increasingly confidential. They went afterwards to the theatre, in cheap
places, and came home in “busses” and under umbrellas.
On the way back Peter Baron turned something over in his mind as he had
never turned anything before; it was the question of whether, at the end,
she would let him come into her sitting-room for five minutes. He felt
on this point a passion of suspense and impatience, and yet for what
would it be but to tell her how poor he was? This was literally the
moment to say it, so supremely depleted had the hour of Bohemia left him.
Even Bohemia was too expensive, and yet in the course of the day his
whole temper on the subject of certain fitnesses had changed. At Jersey
Villas (it was near midnight, and Mrs. Ryves, scratching a light for her
glimmering taper, had said: “Oh, yes, come in for a minute if you
like!”), in her precarious parlour, which was indeed, after the
brilliances of the evening, a return to ugliness and truth, she let him
stand while he explained that he had certainly everything in the way of
fame and fortune still to gain, but that youth and love and faith and
energy—to say nothing of her supreme dearness—were all on his side. Why,
if one’s beginnings were rough, should one add to the hardness of the
conditions by giving up the dream which, if she would only hear him out,
would make just the blessed difference? Whether Mrs. Ryves heard him out
or not is a circumstance as to which this chronicle happens to be silent;
but after he had got possession of both her hands and breathed into her
face for a moment all the intensity of his tenderness—in the relief and
joy of utterance he felt it carry him like a rising flood—she checked him
with better reasons, with a cold, sweet afterthought in which he felt
there was something deep. Her procrastinating head-shake was prettier
than ever, yet it had never meant so many fears and pains—impossibilities
and memories, independences and pieties, and a sort of uncomplaining ache
for the ruin of a friendship that had been happy. She had liked him—if
she hadn’t she wouldn’t have let him think so!—but she protested that she
had not, in the odious vulgar sense, “encouraged” him. Moreover she
couldn’t talk of such things in that place, at that hour, and she begged
him not to make her regret her good-nature in staying over. There were
peculiarities in her position, considerations insurmountable. She got
rid of him with kind and confused words, and afterwards, in the dull,
humiliated night, he felt that he had been put in his place. Women in
her situation, women who after having really loved and lost, usually
lived on into the new dawns in which old ghosts steal away. But there
was something in his whimsical neighbour that struck him as terribly
invulnerable.
VII.
“I’VE had time to look a little further into what we’re prepared to do,
and I find the case is one in which I should consider the advisability of
going to an extreme length,” said Mr. Locket. Jersey Villas the next
morning had had the privilege of again receiving the editor of the
Promiscuous, and he sat once more at the davenport, where the bone of
contention, in the shape of a large, loose heap of papers that showed how
much they had been handled, was placed well in view. “We shall see our
way to offering you three hundred, but we shouldn’t, I must positively
assure you, see it a single step further.”
Peter Baron, in his dressing-gown and slippers, with his hands in his
pockets, crept softly about the room, repeating, below his breath and
with inflections that for his own sake he endeavoured to make humorous:
“Three hundred—three hundred.” His state of mind was far from hilarious,
for he felt poor and sore and disappointed; but he wanted to prove to
himself that he was gallant—was made, in general and in particular, of
undiscourageable stuff. The first thing he had been aware of on stepping
into his front room was that a four-wheeled cab, with Mrs. Ryves’s
luggage upon it, stood at the door of No. 3. Permitting himself, behind
his curtain, a pardonable peep, he saw the mistress of his thoughts come
out of the house, attended by Mrs. Bundy, and take her place in the
modest vehicle. After this his eyes rested for a long time on the
sprigged cotton back of the landlady, who kept bobbing at the window of
the cab an endlessly moralising old head. Mrs. Ryves had really taken
flight—he had made Jersey Villas impossible for her—but Mrs. Bundy, with
a magnanimity unprecedented in the profession, seemed to express a belief
in the purity of her motives. Baron felt that his own separation had
been, for the present at least, effected; every instinct of delicacy
prompted him to stand back.
Mr. Locket talked a long time, and Peter Baron listened and waited. He
reflected that his willingness to listen would probably excite hopes in
his visitor—hopes which he himself was ready to contemplate without a
scruple. He felt no pity for Mr. Locket and had no consideration for his
suspense or for his possible illusions; he only felt sick and forsaken
and in want of comfort and of money. Yet it was a kind of outrage to his
dignity to have the knife held to his throat, and he was irritated above
all by the ground on which Mr. Locket put the question—the ground of a
service rendered to historical truth. It might be—he wasn’t clear; it
might be—the question was deep, too deep, probably, for his wisdom; at
any rate he had to control himself not to interrupt angrily such dry,
interested palaver, the false voice of commerce and of cant. He stared
tragically out of the window and saw the stupid rain begin to fall; the
day was duller even than his own soul, and Jersey Villas looked so
sordidly hideous that it was no wonder Mrs. Ryves couldn’t endure them.
Hideous as they were he should have to tell Mrs. Bundy in the course of
the day that he was obliged to seek humbler quarters. Suddenly he
interrupted Mr. Locket; he observed to him: “I take it that if I should
make you this concession the hospitality of the Promiscuous would be by
that very fact unrestrictedly secured to me.”
Mr. Locket stared. “Hospitality—secured?” He thumbed the proposition as
if it were a hard peach.
“I mean that of course you wouldn’t—in courtsey, in gratitude—keep on
declining my things.”
“I should give them my best attention—as I’ve always done in the past.”
Peter Baron hesitated. It was a case in which there would have seemed to
be some chance for the ideally shrewd aspirant in such an advantage as he
possessed; but after a moment the blood rushed into his face with the
shame of the idea of pleading for his productions in the name of anything
but their merit. It was as if he had stupidly uttered evil of them.
Nevertheless be added the interrogation:
“Would you for instance publish my little story?”
“The one I read (and objected to some features of) the other day? Do you
mean—a—with the alteration?” Mr. Locket continued.
“Oh, no, I mean utterly without it. The pages you want altered contain,
as I explained to you very lucidly, I think, the very _raison d’être_ of
the work, and it would therefore, it seems to me, be an imbecility of the
first magnitude to cancel them.” Peter had really renounced all hope
that his critic would understand what he meant, but, under favour of
circumstances, he couldn’t forbear to taste the luxury, which probably
never again would come within his reach, of being really plain, for one
wild moment, with an editor.
Mr. Locket gave a constrained smile. “Think of the scandal, Mr. Baron.”
“But isn’t this other scandal just what you’re going in for?”
“It will be a great public service.”
“You mean it will be a big scandal, whereas my poor story would be a very
small one, and that it’s only out of a big one that money’s to be made.”
Mr. Locket got up—he too had his dignity to vindicate. “Such a sum as I
offer you ought really to be an offset against all claims.”
“Very good—I don’t mean to make any, since you don’t really care for what
I write. I take note of your offer,” Peter pursued, “and I engage to
give you to-night (in a few words left by my own hand at your house) my
absolutely definite and final reply.”
Mr. Locket’s movements, as he hovered near the relics of the eminent
statesman, were those of some feathered parent fluttering over a
threatened nest. If he had brought his huddled brood back with him this
morning it was because he had felt sure enough of closing the bargain to
be able to be graceful. He kept a glittering eye on the papers and
remarked that he was afraid that before leaving them he must elicit some
assurance that in the meanwhile Peter would not place them in any other
hands. Peter, at this, gave a laugh of harsher cadence than he intended,
asking, justly enough, on what privilege his visitor rested such a demand
and why he himself was disqualified from offering his wares to the
highest bidder. “Surely you wouldn’t hawk such things about?” cried Mr.
Locket; but before Baron had time to retort cynically he added: “I’ll
publish your little story.”
“Oh, thank you!”
“I’ll publish anything you’ll send me,” Mr. Locket continued, as he went
out. Peter had before this virtually given his word that for the letters
he would treat only with the Promiscuous.
The young man passed, during a portion of the rest of the day, the
strangest hours of his life. Yet he thought of them afterwards not as a
phase of temptation, though they had been full of the emotion that
accompanies an intense vision of alternatives. The struggle was already
over; it seemed to him that, poor as he was, he was not poor enough to
take Mr. Locket’s money. He looked at the opposed courses with the
self-possession of a man who has chosen, but this self-possession was in
itself the most exquisite of excitements. It was really a high revulsion
and a sort of noble pity. He seemed indeed to have his finger upon the
pulse of history and to be in the secret of the gods. He had them all in
his hand, the tablets and the scales and the torch. He couldn’t keep a
character together, but he might easily pull one to pieces. That would
be “creative work” of a kind—he could reconstruct the character less
pleasingly, could show an unknown side of it. Mr. Locket had had a good
deal to say about responsibility; and responsibility in truth sat there
with him all the morning, while he revolved in his narrow cage and,
watching the crude spring rain on the windows, thought of the dismalness
to which, at Dover, Mrs. Ryves was going back. This influence took in
fact the form, put on the physiognomy of poor Sir Dominick Ferrand; he
was at present as perceptible in it, as coldly and strangely personal, as
if he had been a haunting ghost and had risen beside his own old
hearthstone. Our friend was accustomed to his company and indeed had
spent so many hours in it of late, following him up at the museum and
comparing his different portraits, engravings and lithographs, in which
there seemed to be conscious, pleading eyes for the betrayer, that their
queer intimacy had grown as close as an embrace. Sir Dominick was very
dumb, but he was terrible in his dependence, and Peter would not have
encouraged him by so much curiosity nor reassured him by so much
deference had it not been for the young man’s complete acceptance of the
impossibility of getting out of a tight place by exposing an individual.
It didn’t matter that the individual was dead; it didn’t matter that he
was dishonest. Peter felt him sufficiently alive to suffer; he perceived
the rectification of history so conscientiously desired by Mr. Locket to
be somehow for himself not an imperative task. It had come over him too
definitely that in a case where one’s success was to hinge upon an act of
extradition it would minister most to an easy conscience to let the
success go. No, no—even should he be starving he couldn’t make money out
of Sir Dominick’s disgrace. He was almost surprised at the violence of
the horror with which, as he shuffled mournfully about, the idea of any
such profit inspired him. What was Sir Dominick to him after all? He
wished he had never come across him.
In one of his brooding pauses at the window—the window out of which never
again apparently should he see Mrs. Ryves glide across the little garden
with the step for which he had liked her from the first—he became aware
that the rain was about to intermit and the sun to make some grudging
amends. This was a sign that he might go out; he had a vague perception
that there were things to be done. He had work to look for, and a
cheaper lodging, and a new idea (every idea he had ever cherished had
left him), in addition to which the promised little word was to be
dropped at Mr. Locket’s door. He looked at his watch and was surprised
at the hour, for he had nothing but a heartache to show for so much time.
He would have to dress quickly, but as he passed to his bedroom his eye
was caught by the little pyramid of letters which Mr. Locket had
constructed on his davenport. They startled him and, staring at them, he
stopped for an instant, half-amused, half-annoyed at their being still in
existence. He had so completely destroyed them in spirit that he had
taken the act for granted, and he was now reminded of the orderly stages
of which an intention must consist to be sincere. Baron went at the
papers with all his sincerity, and at his empty grate (where there lately
had been no fire and he had only to remove a horrible ornament of
tissue-paper dear to Mrs. Bundy) he burned the collection with infinite
method. It made him feel happier to watch the worst pages turn to
illegible ashes—if happiness be the right word to apply to his sense, in
the process, of something so crisp and crackling that it suggested the
death-rustle of bank-notes.
When ten minutes later he came back into his sitting-room, he seemed to
himself oddly, unexpectedly in the presence of a bigger view. It was as
if some interfering mass had been so displaced that he could see more sky
and more country. Yet the opposite houses were naturally still there,
and if the grimy little place looked lighter it was doubtless only
because the rain had indeed stopped and the sun was pouring in. Peter
went to the window to open it to the altered air, and in doing so beheld
at the garden gate the humble “growler” in which a few hours before he
had seen Mrs. Ryves take her departure. It was unmistakable—he
remembered the knock-kneed white horse; but this made the fact that his
friend’s luggage no longer surmounted it only the more mystifying.
Perhaps the cabman had already removed the luggage—he was now on his box
smoking the short pipe that derived relish from inaction paid for. As
Peter turned into the room again his ears caught a knock at his own door,
a knock explained, as soon as he had responded, by the hard breathing of
Mrs. Bundy.
“Please, sir, it’s to say she’ve come back.”
“What has she come back for?” Baron’s question sounded ungracious, but
his heartache had given another throb, and he felt a dread of another
wound. It was like a practical joke.
“I think it’s for you, sir,” said Mrs. Bundy. “She’ll see you for a
moment, if you’ll be so good, in the old place.”
Peter followed his hostess downstairs, and Mrs. Bundy ushered him, with
her company flourish, into the apartment she had fondly designated.
“I went away this morning, and I’ve only returned for an instant,” said
Mrs. Ryves, as soon as Mrs. Bundy had closed the door. He saw that she
was different now; something had happened that had made her indulgent.
“Have you been all the way to Dover and back?”
“No, but I’ve been to Victoria. I’ve left my luggage there—I’ve been
driving about.”
“I hope you’ve enjoyed it.”
“Very much. I’ve been to see Mr. Morrish.”
“Mr. Morrish?”
“The musical publisher. I showed him our song. I played it for him, and
he’s delighted with it. He declares it’s just the thing. He has given
me fifty pounds. I think he believes in us,” Mrs. Ryves went on, while
Baron stared at the wonder—too sweet to be safe, it seemed to him as
yet—of her standing there again before him and speaking of what they had
in common. “Fifty pounds! fifty pounds!” she exclaimed, fluttering at
him her happy cheque. She had come back, the first thing, to tell him,
and of course his share of the money would be the half. She was rosy,
jubilant, natural, she chattered like a happy woman. She said they must
do more, ever so much more. Mr. Morrish had practically promised he
would take anything that was as good as that. She had kept her cab
because she was going to Dover; she couldn’t leave the others alone. It
was a vehicle infirm and inert, but Baron, after a little, appreciated
its pace, for she had consented to his getting in with her and driving,
this time in earnest, to Victoria. She had only come to tell him the
good news—she repeated this assurance more than once. They talked of it
so profoundly that it drove everything else for the time out of his
head—his duty to Mr. Locket, the remarkable sacrifice he had just
achieved, and even the odd coincidence, matching with the oddity of all
the others, of her having reverted to the house again, as if with one of
her famous divinations, at the very moment the trumpery papers, the
origin really of their intimacy, had ceased to exist. But she, on her
side, also had evidently forgotten the trumpery papers: she never
mentioned them again, and Peter Baron never boasted of what he had done
with them. He was silent for a while, from curiosity to see if her fine
nerves had really given her a hint; and then later, when it came to be a
question of his permanent attitude, he was silent, prodigiously,
religiously, tremulously silent, in consequence of an extraordinary
conversation that he had with her.
This conversation took place at Dover, when he went down to give her the
money for which, at Mr. Morrish’s bank, he had exchanged the cheque she
had left with him. That cheque, or rather certain things it represented,
had made somehow all the difference in their relations. The difference
was huge, and Baron could think of nothing but this confirmed vision of
their being able to work fruitfully together that would account for so
rapid a change. She didn’t talk of impossibilities now—she didn’t seem
to want to stop him off; only when, the day following his arrival at
Dover with the fifty pounds (he had after all to agree to share them with
her—he couldn’t expect her to take a present of money from him), he
returned to the question over which they had had their little scene the
night they dined together—on this occasion (he had brought a portmanteau
and he was staying) she mentioned that there was something very
particular she had it on her conscience to tell him before letting him
commit himself. There dawned in her face as she approached the subject a
light of warning that frightened him; it was charged with something so
strange that for an instant he held his breath. This flash of ugly
possibilities passed however, and it was with the gesture of taking still
tenderer possession of her, checked indeed by the grave, important way
she held up a finger, that he answered: “Tell me everything—tell me!”
“You must know what I am—who I am; you must know especially what I’m not!
There’s a name for it, a hideous, cruel name. It’s not my fault! Others
have known, I’ve had to speak of it—it has made a great difference in my
life. Surely you must have guessed!” she went on, with the thinnest
quaver of irony, letting him now take her hand, which felt as cold as her
hard duty. “Don’t you see I’ve no belongings, no relations, no friends,
nothing at all, in all the world, of my own? I was only a poor girl.”
“A poor girl?” Baron was mystified, touched, distressed, piecing dimly
together what she meant, but feeling, in a great surge of pity, that it
was only something more to love her for.
“My mother—my poor mother,” said Mrs. Ryves.
She paused with this, and through gathering tears her eyes met his as if
to plead with him to understand. He understood, and drew her closer, but
she kept herself free still, to continue: “She was a poor girl—she was
only a governess; she was alone, she thought he loved her. He did—I
think it was the only happiness she ever knew. But she died of it.”
“Oh, I’m so glad you tell me—it’s so grand of you!” Baron murmured.
“Then—your father?” He hesitated, as if with his hands on old wounds.
“He had his own troubles, but he was kind to her. It was all misery and
folly—he was married. He wasn’t happy—there were good reasons, I
believe, for that. I know it from letters, I know it from a person who’s
dead. Everyone is dead now—it’s too far off. That’s the only good
thing. He was very kind to me; I remember him, though I didn’t know
then, as a little girl, who he was. He put me with some very good
people—he did what he could for me. I think, later, his wife knew—a lady
who came to see me once after his death. I was a very little girl, but I
remember many things. What he could he did—something that helped me
afterwards, something that helps me now. I think of him with a strange
pity—I _see_ him!” said Mrs. Ryves, with the faint past in her eyes.
“You mustn’t say anything against him,” she added, gently and gravely.
“Never—never; for he has only made it more of a rapture to care for you.”
“You must wait, you must think; we must wait together,” she went on.
“You can’t tell, and you must give me time. Now that you know, it’s all
right; but you had to know. Doesn’t it make us better friends?” asked
Mrs. Ryves, with a tired smile which had the effect of putting the whole
story further and further away. The next moment, however, she added
quickly, as if with the sense that it couldn’t be far enough: “You don’t
know, you can’t judge, you must let it settle. Think of it, think of it;
oh you will, and leave it so. I must have time myself, oh I must! Yes,
you must believe me.”
She turned away from him, and he remained looking at her a moment. “Ah,
how I shall work for you!” he exclaimed.
“You must work for yourself; I’ll help you.” Her eyes had met his eyes
again, and she added, hesitating, thinking: “You had better know,
perhaps, who he was.”
Baron shook his head, smiling confidently. “I don’t care a straw.”
“I do—a little. He was a great man.”
“There must indeed have been some good in him.”
“He was a high celebrity. You’ve often heard of him.”
Baron wondered an instant. “I’ve no doubt you’re a princess!” he said
with a laugh. She made him nervous.
“I’m not ashamed of him. He was Sir Dominick Ferrand.”
Baron saw in her face, in a few seconds, that she had seen something in
his. He knew that he stared, then turned pale; it had the effect of a
powerful shock. He was cold for an instant, as he had just found her,
with the sense of danger, the confused horror of having dealt a blow.
But the blood rushed back to its courses with his still quicker
consciousness of safety, and he could make out, as he recovered his
balance, that his emotion struck her simply as a violent surprise. He
gave a muffled murmur: “Ah, it’s you, my beloved!” which lost itself as
he drew her close and held her long, in the intensity of his embrace and
the wonder of his escape. It took more than a minute for him to say over
to himself often enough, with his hidden face: “Ah, she must never, never
know!”
She never knew; she only learned, when she asked him casually, that he
had in fact destroyed the old documents she had had such a comic caprice
about. The sensibility, the curiosity they had had the queer privilege
of exciting in her had lapsed with the event as irresponsibly as they had
arisen, and she appeared to have forgotten, or rather to attribute now to
other causes, the agitation and several of the odd incidents that
accompanied them. They naturally gave Peter Baron rather more to think
about, much food, indeed, for clandestine meditation, some of which, in
spite of the pains he took not to be caught, was noted by his friend and
interpreted, to his knowledge, as depression produced by the long
probation she succeeded in imposing on him. He was more patient than she
could guess, with all her guessing, for if he was put to the proof she
herself was not left undissected. It came back to him again and again
that if the documents he had burned proved anything they proved that Sir
Dominick Ferrand’s human errors were not all of one order. The woman he
loved was the daughter of her father, he couldn’t get over that. What
was more to the point was that as he came to know her better and
better—for they did work together under Mr. Morrish’s protection—his
affection was a quantity still less to be neglected. He sometimes
wondered, in the light of her general straightness (their marriage had
brought out even more than he believed there was of it) whether the
relics in the davenport were genuine. That piece of furniture is still
almost as useful to him as Mr. Morrish’s patronage. There is a
tremendous run, as this gentlemen calls it, on several of their songs.
Baron nevertheless still tries his hand also at prose, and his offerings
are now not always declined by the magazines. But he has never
approached the Promiscuous again. This periodical published in due
course a highly eulogistic study of the remarkable career of Sir Dominick
Ferrand.
NONA VINCENT.
I.
“I WONDERED whether you wouldn’t read it to me,” said Mrs. Alsager, as
they lingered a little near the fire before he took leave. She looked
down at the fire sideways, drawing her dress away from it and making her
proposal with a shy sincerity that added to her charm. Her charm was
always great for Allan Wayworth, and the whole air of her house, which
was simply a sort of distillation of herself, so soothing, so beguiling
that he always made several false starts before departure. He had spent
some such good hours there, had forgotten, in her warm, golden
drawing-room, so much of the loneliness and so many of the worries of his
life, that it had come to be the immediate answer to his longings, the
cure for his aches, the harbour of refuge from his storms. His
tribulations were not unprecedented, and some of his advantages, if of a
usual kind, were marked in degree, inasmuch as he was very clever for one
so young, and very independent for one so poor. He was eight-and-twenty,
but he had lived a good deal and was full of ambitions and curiosities
and disappointments. The opportunity to talk of some of these in
Grosvenor Place corrected perceptibly the immense inconvenience of
London. This inconvenience took for him principally the line of
insensibility to Allan Wayworth’s literary form. He had a literary form,
or he thought he had, and her intelligent recognition of the circumstance
was the sweetest consolation Mrs. Alsager could have administered. She
was even more literary and more artistic than he, inasmuch as he could
often work off his overflow (this was his occupation, his profession),
while the generous woman, abounding in happy thoughts, but unedited and
unpublished, stood there in the rising tide like the nymph of a fountain
in the plash of the marble basin.
The year before, in a big newspapery house, he had found himself next her
at dinner, and they had converted the intensely material hour into a
feast of reason. There was no motive for her asking him to come to see
her but that she liked him, which it was the more agreeable to him to
perceive as he perceived at the same time that she was exquisite. She
was enviably free to act upon her likings, and it made Wayworth feel less
unsuccessful to infer that for the moment he happened to be one of them.
He kept the revelation to himself, and indeed there was nothing to turn
his head in the kindness of a kind woman. Mrs. Alsager occupied so
completely the ground of possession that she would have been condemned to
inaction had it not been for the principle of giving. Her husband, who
was twenty years her senior, a massive personality in the City and a
heavy one at home (wherever he stood, or even sat, he was monumental),
owned half a big newspaper and the whole of a great many other things.
He admired his wife, though she bore no children, and liked her to have
other tastes than his, as that seemed to give a greater acreage to their
life. His own appetites went so far he could scarcely see the boundary,
and his theory was to trust her to push the limits of hers, so that
between them the pair should astound by their consumption. His ideas
were prodigiously vulgar, but some of them had the good fortune to be
carried out by a person of perfect delicacy. Her delicacy made her play
strange tricks with them, but he never found this out. She attenuated
him without his knowing it, for what he mainly thought was that he had
aggrandised _her_. Without her he really would have been bigger still,
and society, breathing more freely, was practically under an obligation
to her which, to do it justice, it acknowledged by an attitude of
mystified respect. She felt a tremulous need to throw her liberty and
her leisure into the things of the soul—the most beautiful things she
knew. She found them, when she gave time to seeking, in a hundred
places, and particularly in a dim and sacred region—the region of active
pity—over her entrance into which she dropped curtains so thick that it
would have been an impertinence to lift them. But she cultivated other
beneficent passions, and if she cherished the dream of something fine the
moments at which it most seemed to her to come true were when she saw
beauty plucked flower-like in the garden of art. She loved the perfect
work—she had the artistic chord. This chord could vibrate only to the
touch of another, so that appreciation, in her spirit, had the added
intensity of regret. She could understand the joy of creation, and she
thought it scarcely enough to be told that she herself created happiness.
She would have liked, at any rate, to choose her way; but it was just
here that her liberty failed her. She had not the voice—she had only the
vision. The only envy she was capable of was directed to those who, as
she said, could do something.
As everything in her, however, turned to gentleness, she was admirably
hospitable to such people as a class. She believed Allan Wayworth could
do something, and she liked to hear him talk of the ways in which he
meant to show it. He talked of them almost to no one else—she spoiled
him for other listeners. With her fair bloom and her quiet grace she was
indeed an ideal public, and if she had ever confided to him that she
would have liked to scribble (she had in fact not mentioned it to a
creature), he would have been in a perfect position for asking her why a
woman whose face had so much expression should not have felt that she
achieved. How in the world could she express better? There was less
than that in Shakespeare and Beethoven. She had never been more generous
than when, in compliance with her invitation, which I have recorded, he
brought his play to read to her. He had spoken of it to her before, and
one dark November afternoon, when her red fireside was more than ever an
escape from the place and the season, he had broken out as he came
in—“I’ve done it, I’ve done it!” She made him tell her all about it—she
took an interest really minute and asked questions delightfully apt. She
had spoken from the first as if he were on the point of being acted,
making him jump, with her participation, all sorts of dreary intervals.
She liked the theatre as she liked all the arts of expression, and he had
known her to go all the way to Paris for a particular performance. Once
he had gone with her—the time she took that stupid Mrs. Mostyn. She had
been struck, when he sketched it, with the subject of his drama, and had
spoken words that helped him to believe in it. As soon as he had rung
down his curtain on the last act he rushed off to see her, but after that
he kept the thing for repeated last touches. Finally, on Christmas day,
by arrangement, she sat there and listened to it. It was in three acts
and in prose, but rather of the romantic order, though dealing with
contemporary English life, and he fondly believed that it showed the hand
if not of the master, at least of the prize pupil.
Allan Wayworth had returned to England, at two-and-twenty, after a
miscellaneous continental education; his father, the correspondent, for
years, in several foreign countries successively, of a conspicuous London
journal, had died just after this, leaving his mother and her two other
children, portionless girls, to subsist on a very small income in a very
dull German town. The young man’s beginnings in London were difficult,
and he had aggravated them by his dislike of journalism. His father’s
connection with it would have helped him, but he was (insanely, most of
his friends judged—the great exception was always Mrs. Alsager)
_intraitable_ on the question of form. Form—in his sense—was not
demanded by English newspapers, and he couldn’t give it to them in
_their_ sense. The demand for it was not great anywhere, and Wayworth
spent costly weeks in polishing little compositions for magazines that
didn’t pay for style. The only person who paid for it was really Mrs.
Alsager: she had an infallible instinct for the perfect. She paid in her
own way, and if Allan Wayworth had been a wage-earning person it would
have made him feel that if he didn’t receive his legal dues his palm was
at least occasionally conscious of a gratuity. He had his limitations,
his perversities, but the finest parts of him were the most alive, and he
was restless and sincere. It is however the impression he produced on
Mrs. Alsager that most concerns us: she thought him not only remarkably
good-looking but altogether original. There were some usual bad things
he would never do—too many prohibitive puddles for him in the short cut
to success.
For himself, he had never been so happy as since he had seen his way, as
he fondly believed, to some sort of mastery of the scenic idea, which
struck him as a very different matter now that he looked at it from
within. He had had his early days of contempt for it, when it seemed to
him a jewel, dim at the best, hidden in a dunghill, a taper burning low
in an air thick with vulgarity. It was hedged about with sordid
approaches, it was not worth sacrifice and suffering. The man of
letters, in dealing with it, would have to put off all literature, which
was like asking the bearer of a noble name to forego his immemorial
heritage. Aspects change, however, with the point of view: Wayworth had
waked up one morning in a different bed altogether. It is needless here
to trace this accident to its source; it would have been much more
interesting to a spectator of the young man’s life to follow some of the
consequences. He had been made (as he felt) the subject of a special
revelation, and he wore his hat like a man in love. An angel had taken
him by the hand and guided him to the shabby door which opens, it
appeared, into an interior both splendid and austere. The scenic idea
was magnificent when once you had embraced it—the dramatic form had a
purity which made some others look ingloriously rough. It had the high
dignity of the exact sciences, it was mathematical and architectural. It
was full of the refreshment of calculation and construction, the
incorruptibility of line and law. It was bare, but it was erect, it was
poor, but it was noble; it reminded him of some sovereign famed for
justice who should have lived in a palace despoiled. There was a fearful
amount of concession in it, but what you kept had a rare intensity. You
were perpetually throwing over the cargo to save the ship, but what a
motion you gave her when you made her ride the waves—a motion as rhythmic
as the dance of a goddess! Wayworth took long London walks and thought
of these things—London poured into his ears the mighty hum of its
suggestion. His imagination glowed and melted down material, his
intentions multiplied and made the air a golden haze. He saw not only
the thing he should do, but the next and the next and the next; the
future opened before him and he seemed to walk on marble slabs. The more
he tried the dramatic form the more he loved it, the more he looked at it
the more he perceived in it. What he perceived in it indeed he now
perceived everywhere; if he stopped, in the London dusk, before some
flaring shop-window, the place immediately constituted itself behind
footlights, became a framed stage for his figures. He hammered at these
figures in his lonely lodging, he shaped them and he shaped their
tabernacle; he was like a goldsmith chiselling a casket, bent over with
the passion for perfection. When he was neither roaming the streets with
his vision nor worrying his problem at his table, he was exchanging ideas
on the general question with Mrs. Alsager, to whom he promised details
that would amuse her in later and still happier hours. Her eyes were
full of tears when he read her the last words of the finished work, and
she murmured, divinely—
“And now—to get it done, to get it done!”
“Yes, indeed—to get it done!” Wayworth stared at the fire, slowly rolling
up his type-copy. “But that’s a totally different part of the business,
and altogether secondary.”
“But of course you want to be acted?”
“Of course I do—but it’s a sudden descent. I want to intensely, but I’m
sorry I want to.”
“It’s there indeed that the difficulties begin,” said Mrs. Alsager, a
little off her guard.
“How can you say that? It’s there that they end!”
“Ah, wait to see where they end!”
“I mean they’ll now be of a totally different order,” Wayworth explained.
“It seems to me there can be nothing in the world more difficult than to
write a play that will stand an all-round test, and that in comparison
with them the complications that spring up at this point are of an
altogether smaller kind.”
“Yes, they’re not inspiring,” said Mrs. Alsager; “they’re discouraging,
because they’re vulgar. The other problem, the working out of the thing
itself, is pure art.”
“How well you understand everything!” The young man had got up,
nervously, and was leaning against the chimney-piece with his back to the
fire and his arms folded. The roll of his copy, in his fist, was
squeezed into the hollow of one of them. He looked down at Mrs. Alsager,
smiling gratefully, and she answered him with a smile from eyes still
charmed and suffused. “Yes, the vulgarity will begin now,” he presently
added.
“You’ll suffer dreadfully.”
“I shall suffer in a good cause.”
“Yes, giving _that_ to the world! You must leave it with me, I must read
it over and over,” Mrs. Alsager pleaded, rising to come nearer and draw
the copy, in its cover of greenish-grey paper, which had a generic
identity now to him, out of his grasp. “Who in the world will do it?—who
in the world _can_?” she went on, close to him, turning over the leaves.
Before he could answer she had stopped at one of the pages; she turned
the book round to him, pointing out a speech. “That’s the most beautiful
place—those lines are a perfection.” He glanced at the spot she
indicated, and she begged him to read them again—he had read them
admirably before. He knew them by heart, and, closing the book while she
held the other end of it, he murmured them over to her—they had indeed a
cadence that pleased him—watching, with a facetious complacency which he
hoped was pardonable, the applause in her face. “Ah, who can utter such
lines as _that_?” Mrs. Alsager broke out; “whom can you find to do
_her_?”
“We’ll find people to do them all!”
“But not people who are worthy.”
“They’ll be worthy enough if they’re willing enough. I’ll work with
them—I’ll grind it into them.” He spoke as if he had produced twenty
plays.
“Oh, it will be interesting!” she echoed.
“But I shall have to find my theatre first. I shall have to get a
manager to believe in me.”
“Yes—they’re so stupid!”
“But fancy the patience I shall want, and how I shall have to watch and
wait,” said Allan Wayworth. “Do you see me hawking it about London?”
“Indeed I don’t—it would be sickening.”
“It’s what I shall have to do. I shall be old before it’s produced.”
“I shall be old very soon if it isn’t!” Mrs. Alsager cried. “I know one
or two of them,” she mused.
“Do you mean you would speak to them?”
“The thing is to get them to read it. I could do that.”
“That’s the utmost I ask. But it’s even for that I shall have to wait.”
She looked at him with kind sisterly eyes. “You sha’n’t wait.”
“Ah, you dear lady!” Wayworth murmured.
“That is _you_ may, but _I_ won’t! Will you leave me your copy?” she
went on, turning the pages again.
“Certainly; I have another.” Standing near him she read to herself a
passage here and there; then, in her sweet voice, she read some of them
out. “Oh, if _you_ were only an actress!” the young man exclaimed.
“That’s the last thing I am. There’s no comedy in _me_!”
She had never appeared to Wayworth so much his good genius. “Is there
any tragedy?” he asked, with the levity of complete confidence.
She turned away from him, at this, with a strange and charming laugh and
a “Perhaps that will be for you to determine!” But before he could
disclaim such a responsibility she had faced him again and was talking
about Nona Vincent as if she had been the most interesting of their
friends and her situation at that moment an irresistible appeal to their
sympathy. Nona Vincent was the heroine of the play, and Mrs. Alsager had
taken a tremendous fancy to her. “I can’t _tell_ you how I like that
woman!” she exclaimed in a pensive rapture of credulity which could only
be balm to the artistic spirit.
“I’m awfully glad she lives a bit. What I feel about her is that she’s a
good deal like _you_,” Wayworth observed.
Mrs. Alsager stared an instant and turned faintly red. This was
evidently a view that failed to strike her; she didn’t, however, treat it
as a joke. “I’m not impressed with the resemblance. I don’t see myself
doing what she does.”
“It isn’t so much what she _does_,” the young man argued, drawing out his
moustache.
“But what she does is the whole point. She simply tells her love—I
should never do that.”
“If you repudiate such a proceeding with such energy, why do you like her
for it?”
“It isn’t what I like her for.”
“What else, then? That’s intensely characteristic.”
Mrs. Alsager reflected, looking down at the fire; she had the air of
having half-a-dozen reasons to choose from. But the one she produced was
unexpectedly simple; it might even have been prompted by despair at not
finding others. “I like her because _you_ made her!” she exclaimed with
a laugh, moving again away from her companion.
Wayworth laughed still louder. “You made her a little yourself. I’ve
thought of her as looking like you.”
“She ought to look much better,” said Mrs. Alsager. “No, certainly, I
shouldn’t do what _she_ does.”
“Not even in the same circumstances?”
“I should never find myself in such circumstances. They’re exactly your
play, and have nothing in common with such a life as mine. However,”
Mrs. Alsager went on, “her behaviour was natural for _her_, and not only
natural, but, it seems to me, thoroughly beautiful and noble. I can’t
sufficiently admire the talent and tact with which you make one accept
it, and I tell you frankly that it’s evident to me there must be a
brilliant future before a young man who, at the start, has been capable
of such a stroke as that. Thank heaven I can admire Nona Vincent as
intensely as I feel that I don’t resemble her!”
“Don’t exaggerate that,” said Allan Wayworth.
“My admiration?”
“Your dissimilarity. She has your face, your air, your voice, your
motion; she has many elements of your being.”
“Then she’ll damn your play!” Mrs. Alsager replied. They joked a little
over this, though it was not in the tone of pleasantry that Wayworth’s
hostess soon r
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