“I LAID THE SCENE AT LAKEWOOD” _Frontispiece_
“AM I A MERE MARIONETTE?” 28
A REBELLIOUS HEROINE 38
HE WENT INTO ONE OF HIS TRANCES 56
“THE DARK EYES OF COUNT BONETTI FLASHED” 92
THE WALK OF THE CLIFF 136
“I AM NOT GOING TO TELL THE WHOLE STORY” 222
“THEY THOUGHT I OUGHT TO GIVE UP HUMOR” 224
I
STUART HARLEY: REALIST
“—_if a word could save me_, _and that word were not the Truth_,
_nay_, _if it did but swerve a hair’s-breadth from the Truth_, _I
would not say it_!”
—LONGFELLOW.
STUART HARLEY, despite his authorship of many novels, still considered
himself a realist. He affected to say that he did not write his books;
that he merely transcribed them from life as he saw it, and he insisted
always that he saw life as it was.
“The mission of the novelist, my dear Professor,” he had once been heard
to say at his club, “is not to amuse merely; his work is that of an
historian, and he should be quite as careful to write truthfully as is
the historian. How is the future to know what manner of lives we
nineteenth century people have lived unless our novelists tell the
truth?”
“Possibly the historians will tell them,” observed the Professor of
Mathematics. “Historians sometimes do tell us interesting things.”
“True,” said Harley. “Very true; but then what historian ever let you
into the secret of the every-day life of the people of whom he writes?
What historian ever so vitalized Louis the Fourteenth as Dumas has
vitalized him? Truly, in reading mere history I have seemed to be
reading of lay figures, not of men; but when the novelist has taken hold
properly—ah, then we get the men.”
“Then,” objected the Professor, “the novelist is never to create a great
character?”
“The humorist or the mere romancer may, but as for the novelist with a
true ideal of his mission in life he would better leave creation to
nature. It is blasphemy for a purely mortal being to pretend that he can
create a more interesting character or set of characters than the
Almighty has already provided for the use of himself and his brothers in
literature; that he can involve these creations in a more dramatic series
of events than it has occurred to an all-wise Providence to put into the
lives of His creatures; that, by the exercise of that misleading faculty
which the writer styles his imagination, he can portray phases of life
which shall prove of more absorbing interest or of greater moral value to
his readers than those to be met with in the every-day life of man as he
is.”
“Then,” said the Professor, with a dexterous jab of his cue at the
pool-balls—“then, in your estimation, an author is a thing to be led
about by the nose by the beings he selects for use in his books?”
“You put it in a rather homely fashion,” returned Harley; “but, on the
whole, that is about the size of it.”
“And all a man needs, then, to be an author is an eye and a type-writing
machine?” asked the Professor.
“And a regiment of detectives,” drawled Dr. Kelly, the young surgeon, “to
follow his characters about.”
Harley sighed. Surely these men were unsympathetic.
“I can’t expect you to grasp the idea exactly,” he said, “and I can’t
explain it to you, because you’d become irreverent if I tried.”
“No, we won’t,” said Kelly. “Go on and explain it to us—I’m bored, and
want to be amused.”
So Harley went on and tried to explain how the true realist must be an
inspired sort of person, who can rise above purely physical limitations;
whose eye shall be able to pierce the most impenetrable of veils; to whom
nothing in the way of obtaining information as to the doings of such
specimens of mankind as he has selected for his pages is an
insurmountable obstacle.
“Your author, then, is to be a mixture of a New York newspaper reporter
and the Recording Angel?” suggested Kelly.
“I told you you’d become irreverent,” said Harley; “nevertheless, even in
your irreverence, you have expressed the idea. The writer must be
omniscient as far as the characters of his stories are concerned—he must
have an eye which shall see all that they do, a mind sufficiently
analytical to discern what their motives are, and the courage to put it
all down truthfully, neither adding nor subtracting, coloring only where
color is needed to make the moral lesson he is trying to teach stand out
the more vividly.”
“In short, you’d have him become a photographer,” said the Professor.
“More truly a soulscape-painter,” retorted Harley, with enthusiasm.
“Heavens!” cried the Doctor, dropping his cue with a loud clatter to the
floor. “Soulscape! Here’s a man talking about not creating, and then
throws out an invention like soulscape! Harley, you ought to write a
dictionary. With a word like soulscape to start with, it would sweep the
earth!”
Harley laughed. He was a good-natured man, and he was strong enough in
his convictions not to weaken for the mere reason that somebody else had
ridiculed them. In fact, everybody else might have ridiculed them, and
Harley would still have stood true, once he was convinced that he was
right.
“You go on sawing people’s legs off, Billy,” he said, good-naturedly.
“That’s a thing you know about; and as for the Professor, he can go on
showing you and the rest of mankind just why the shortest distance
between two points is in a straight line. I’ll take your collective and
separate words for anything on the subject of surgery or mathematics, but
when it comes to my work I wouldn’t bank on your theories if they were
endorsed by the Rothschilds.”
“He’ll never write a decent book in his life if he clings to that
theory,” said Kelly, after Harley had departed. “There’s precious little
in the way of the dramatic nowadays in the lives of people one cares to
read about.”
Nevertheless, Harley had written interesting books, books which had
brought him reputation, and what is termed genteel poverty—that is to
say, his fame was great, considering his age, and his compensation was
just large enough to make life painful to him. His income enabled him to
live well enough to make a good appearance among, and share somewhat at
their expense in the life of, others of far greater means; but it was too
small to bring him many of the things which, while not absolutely
necessities, could not well be termed luxuries, considering his tastes
and his temperament. A little more was all he needed.
“If I could afford to write only when I feel like it,” he said, “how
happy I should be! But these orders—they make me a driver of men, and
not their historian.”
In fact, Harley was in that unfortunate, and at the same time happy,
position where he had many orders for the product of his pen, and such
financial necessities that he could not afford to decline one of them.
And it was this very situation which made his rebellious heroine of whom
I have essayed to write so sore a trial to the struggling young author.
It was early in May, 1895, that Harley had received a note from Messrs.
Herring, Beemer, & Chadwick, the publishers, asking for a story from his
pen for their popular “Blue and Silver Series.”
“The success of your _Tiffin-Talk_,” they wrote, “has been such that we
are prepared to offer you our highest terms for a short story of 30,000
words, or thereabouts, to be published in our ‘Blue and Silver Series.’
We should like to have it a love-story, if possible; but whatever it is,
it must be characteristic, and ready for publication in November. We
shall need to have the manuscript by September 1st at the latest. If you
can let us have the first few chapters in August, we can send them at
once to Mr. Chromely, whom it is our intention to have illustrate the
story, provided he can be got to do it.”
The letter closed with a few formalities of an unimportant and
stereotyped nature, and Harley immediately called at the office of
Messrs. Herring, Beemer, & Chadwick, where, after learning that their
best terms were no more unsatisfactory than publishers’ best terms
generally are, he accepted the commission.
And then, returning to his apartment, he went into what Kelly called one
of his trances.
“He goes into one of his trances,” Kelly had said, “hoists himself up to
his little elevation, and peeps into the private life of _hoi polloi_
until he strikes something worth putting down and the result he calls
literature.”
“Yes, and the people buy it, and read it, and call for more,” said the
Professor.
“Possibly because they love notoriety,” said Kelly, “and they think if
they call for more often enough, he will finally peep in at their
key-holes and write them up. If he ever puts me into one of his books
I’ll waylay him at night and amputate his writing-hand.”
“He won’t,” said the Professor. “I asked him once why he didn’t, and he
said you’d never do in one of his books, because you don’t belong to real
life at all. He thinks you are some new experiment of an enterprising
Providence, and he doesn’t want to use you until he sees how you turn
out.”
“He could put me down as I go,” suggested the Doctor.
“That’s so,” replied the other. “I told him so, but he said he had no
desire to write a lot of burlesque sketches containing no coherent idea.”
“Oh, he said that, did he?” observed the Doctor, with a smile.
“Well—wait till Stuart Harley comes to me for a prescription. I’ll get
even with him. I’ll give him a pill, and he’ll disappear—for ten days.”
Whether it was as Kelly said or not, that Harley went into a trance and
poked his nose into the private life of the people he wrote about, it was
a fact that while meditating upon the possible output of his pen our
author was as deaf to his surroundings as though he had departed into
another world, and it rarely happened that his mind emerged from that
condition without bringing along with it something of value to him in his
work.
So it was upon this May morning. For an hour or two Harley lay
quiescent, apparently gazing out of his flat window over the uninspiring
chimney-pots of the City of New York, at the equally uninspiring Long
Island station on the far side of the East River. It was well for him
that his eye was able to see, and yet not see: forgetfulness of those
smoking chimney-pots, the red-zincked roofs, the flapping under-clothing
of the poorer than he, hung out to dry on the tenement tops, was
essential to the construction of such a story as Messrs. Herring, Beemer,
& Chadwick had in mind; and Harley successfully forgot them, and, coming
back to consciousness, brought with him the _dramatis personæ_ of his
story—and, taken as a whole, they were an interesting lot. The hero was
like most of those gentlemen who live their little lives in the novels of
the day, only Harley had modified his accomplishments in certain
directions. Robert Osborne—such was his name—was not the sort of man to
do impossible things for his heroine. He was not reckless. He was not a
D’Artagnan lifted from the time of Louis the Fourteenth to the dull,
prosaic days of President Faure. He was not even a Frenchman, but an
essentially American American, who desires to know, before he does
anything, why he does it, and what are his chances of success. I am not
sure that if he had happened to see her struggling in the ocean he would
have jumped in to rescue the young woman to whom his hand was plighted—I
do not speak of his heart, for I am not Harley, and I do not know whether
or not Harley intended that Osborne should be afflicted with so
inconvenient an organ—I am not sure, I say, that if he had seen his
best-beloved struggling in the ocean Osborne would have jumped in to
rescue her without first stopping to remove such of his garments as might
impede his progress back to land again. In short, he was not one of
those impetuous heroes that we read about so often and see so seldom;
but, taken altogether, he was sufficiently attractive to please the
American girl who might be expected to read Harley’s book; for that was
one of the stipulations of Messrs. Herring, Beemer, & Chadwick when they
made their verbal agreement with Harley.
“Make it go with the girls, Harley,” Mr. Chadwick had said. “Men haven’t
time to read anything but the newspapers in this country. Hit the girls,
and your fortune is made.”
Harley didn’t exactly see how his fortune was going to be made on the
best terms of Messrs. Herring, Beemer, & Chadwick, even if he hit the
girls with all the force of a battering-ram, but he promised to keep the
idea in mind, and remained in his trance a trifle longer than might
otherwise have been necessary, endeavoring to select the unquestionably
correct hero for his story, and Osborne was the result. Osborne was
moderately witty. His repartee smacked somewhat of the refined comic
paper—that is to say, it was smart and cynical, and not always suited to
the picture; but it wasn’t vulgar or dull, and his personal appearance
was calculated to arouse the liveliest interest. He was clean shaven and
clean cut. He looked more like a modern ideal of infallible genius than
Byron, and had probably played football and the banjo in college—Harley
did not go back that far with him—all of which, it must be admitted, was
pretty well calculated to assure the fulfilment of Harley’s promise that
the man should please the American girl. Of course the story was
provided with a villain also, but he was a villain of a mild type. Mild
villany was an essential part of Harley’s literary creed, and this
particular person was not conceived in heresy. His name was to have been
Horace Balderstone, and with him Harley intended to introduce a lively
satire on the employment, by certain contemporary writers, of the
supernatural to produce dramatic effects. Balderstone was of course to
be the rival of Osborne. In this respect Harley was commonplace; to his
mind the villain always had to be the rival of the hero, just as in opera
the tenor is always virtuous at heart if not otherwise, and the baritone
a scoundrel, which in real life is not an invariable rule by any means.
Indeed, there have been many instances in real life where the villain and
the hero have been on excellent terms, and to the great benefit of the
hero too. But in this case Balderstone was to follow in the rut, and
become the rival of Osborne for the hand of Marguerite Andrews—the
heroine. Balderstone was to write a book, which for a time should so
fascinate Miss Andrews that she would be blind to the desirability of
Osborne as a husband-elect; a book full of the weird and thrilling,
dealing with theosophy and spiritualism, and all other “Tommyrotisms,” as
Harley called them, all of which, of course, was to be the making and the
undoing of Balderstone; for equally of course, in the end, he would
become crazed by the use of opium—the inevitable end of writers of that
stamp. Osborne would rescue Marguerite from his fatal influence, and the
last chapter would end with Marguerite lying pale and wan upon her
sick-bed, recovering from the mental prostration which the influence over
hers of a mind like Balderstone’s was sure to produce, holding Osborne’s
hand in hers, and “smiling a sweet recognition at the lover to whose
virtues she had so long been blind.” Osborne would murmur, “At last!”
and the book would close with a “first kiss,” followed closely by six or
eight pages of advertisements of other publications of Messrs. Herring,
Beemer, & Chadwick. I mention the latter to show how thoroughly
realistic Harley was. He thought out his books so truly and so fully
before he sat down to write them that he seemed to see each written,
printed, made and bound before him, a concrete thing from cover to cover.
Besides Osborne and Balderstone and Miss Andrews—of whom I shall at this
time not speak at length, since the balance of this little narrative is
to be devoted to the setting forth of her peculiarities and charms—there
were a number of minor characters, not so necessary to the story perhaps
as they might have been, but interesting enough in their way, and very
well calculated to provide the material needed for the filling out of the
required number of pages. Furthermore, they completed the picture.
“I don’t want to put in three vivid figures, and leave the reader to
imagine that the rest of the world has been wiped out of existence,” said
Harley, as he talked it over with me. “That is not art. There should be
three types of character in every book—the positive, the average, and the
negative. In that way you grade your story off into the rest of the
world, and your reader feels that while he may never have met the
positive characters, he has met the average or the negative, or both, and
is therefore by one of these links connected with the others, and that
gives him a personal interest in the story; and it’s the reader’s
personal interest that the writer is after.”
So Miss Andrews was provided with a very conventional aunt—the kind of
woman you meet with everywhere; most frequently in church squabbles and
hotel parlors, however. Mrs. Corwin was this lady’s name, and she was to
enact the rôle of chaperon to Miss Andrews. With Mrs. Corwin, by force
of circumstances, came a pair of twin children, like those in the
_Heavenly Twins_, only more real, and not so Sarah Grandiose in their
manners and wit.
These persons Harley booked for the steamship _New York_, sailing from
New York City for Southampton on the third day of July, 1895. The action
was to open at that time, and Marguerite Andrews was to meet Horace
Balderstone on that vessel on the evening of the second day out, with
which incident the interest of Harley’s story was to begin. But Harley
had counted without his heroine. The rest of his cast were safely stowed
away on ship-board and ready for action at the appointed hour, but the
heroine _missed the steamer by three minutes_, _and it was all Harley’s
own fault_.
II
A PRELIMINARY TRIAL
“_I’ll not be made a soft and dull-eyed fool_
_To shake the head_, _relent_, _and sigh_, _and yield_.”
—“Merchant of Venice.”
THE extraordinary failure of Miss Andrews, cast for a star rôle in Stuart
Harley’s tale of _Love and Villany_, to appear upon the stage selected by
the author for her débût, must be explained. As I have already stated at
the close of the preceding chapter, it was entirely Harley’s own fault.
He had studied Miss Andrews too superficially to grasp thoroughly the
more refined subtleties of her nature, and he found out, at a moment when
it was too late to correct his error, that she was not a woman to be
slighted in respect to the conventionalities of polite life, however
trifling to a man of Harley’s stamp these might seem to be. She was a
stickler for form; and when she was summoned to go on board of an ocean
steamship there to take part in a romance for the mere aggrandizement of
a young author, she intended that he should not ignore the proprieties,
even if in a sense the proprieties to which she referred did antedate the
period at which his story was to open. She was willing to appear, but it
seemed to her that Stuart Harley ought to see to it that she was escorted
to the scene of action with the ceremony due to one of her position.
“What does he take me for?” she asked of Mrs. Corwin, indignantly, on the
eve of her departure. “Am I a mere marionette, to obey his slightest
behest, and at a moment’s notice? Am I to dance when Stuart Harley pulls
the string?”
[Picture: Am I a mere marionette?]
“Not at all, my dear Marguerite,” said Mrs. Corwin, soothingly. “If he
thought that, he would not have selected you for his story. I think you
ought to feel highly complimented that Mr. Harley should choose you for
one of his books, and for such a conspicuous part, too. Look at me; do I
complain? Am I holding out for the proprieties? And yet what is my
situation? I’m simply dragged in by the hair; and my poor children,
instead of having a nice, noisy Fourth of July at the sea-shore, must
needs be put upon a great floating caravansary, to suffer seasickness and
the other discomforts of ocean travel, so as to introduce a little
juvenile fun into this great work of Mr. Harley’s—and yet I bow my head
meekly and go. Why? Because I feel that, inconspicuous though I shall
be, nevertheless I am highly honored that Mr. Harley should select me
from among many for the uses of his gifted pen.”
“You are prepared, then,” retorted Marguerite, “to place yourself
unreservedly in Mr. Harley’s hands? Shall you flirt with the captain if
he thinks your doing so will add to the humorous or dramatic interest of
his story? Will you permit your children to make impertinent remarks to
every one aboard ship; to pick up sailors’ slang and use it at the
dining-table—in short, to make themselves obnoxiously clever at all
times, in order that Mr. Harley’s critics may say that his book fairly
scintillates with wit, and gives gratifying evidence that ‘the rising
young author’ has made a deep and careful analysis of the juvenile
heart?”
“Mr. Harley is too much of a gentleman, Marguerite, to place me and my
children in a false or ridiculous light,” returned Mrs. Corwin, severely.
“And even if he were not a gentleman, he is too true a realist to make me
do anything which in the nature of things I should not do—which disposes
of your entirely uncalled-for remark about the captain and myself. As
for the children, Tommie would not repeat sailors’ lingo at the table
under any circumstances, and Jennie will not make herself obnoxiously
clever at any time, because she has been brought up too carefully to fail
to respect her elders. Both she and Tommie understand themselves
thoroughly; and when Mr. Harley understands them, which he cannot fail to
do after a short acquaintance, he will draw them as they are; and if
previous to his complete understanding of their peculiarities he
introduces into his story something foreign to their natures and
obnoxious to me, their mother, I have no doubt he will correct his error
when he comes to read the proofs of his story and sees his mistake.”
“You have great confidence in Stuart Harley,” retorted Miss Andrews,
gazing out of the window with a pensive cast of countenance.
“Haven’t you?” asked Mrs. Corwin, quickly.
“As a man, yes,” returned Marguerite. “As an author, however, I think he
is open to criticism. He is not always true to the real. Look at Lord
Barncastle, in his study of English manners! Barncastle, as he drew him,
was nothing but a New York society man with a title, living in England.
That is to say, he talked like an American, thought like one—there was no
point of difference between them.”
“And why should there be?” asked Mrs. Corwin. “If a New York society man
is generally a weak imitation of an English peer—and no one has ever
denied that such is the case—why shouldn’t an English peer be represented
as a sort of intensified New York society man?”
“Besides,” said Miss Andrews, ignoring Mrs. Corwin’s point, “I don’t care
to be presented too really to the reading public, especially on board a
ship. I never yet knew a woman who looked well the second day out, and
if I were to be presented as I always am the second day out, I should die
of mortification. My hair goes out of curl, my face is the color of an
unripe peach, and if I do go up on deck it is because I am so thoroughly
miserable that I do not care who sees me or what the world thinks of me.
I think it is very inconsiderate of Mr. Harley to open his story on an
ocean steamer; and, what is more, I don’t like the American line. Too
many Americans of the brass-band type travel on it. Stuart Harley said
so himself in his last book of foreign travel; but he sends me out on it
just the same, and expects me to be satisfied. Perhaps he thinks I like
that sort of American. If he does, he’s got more imagination than he
ever showed in his books.”
“You must get to the other side in some way,” said Mrs. Corwin. “It is
at Venice that the trouble with Balderstone is to come, and that Osborne
topples him over into the Grand Canal, and rescues you from his baleful
influence.”
“Humph!” said Marguerite, with a scornful shrug of her shoulders.
“Robert Osborne! A likely sort of person to rescue me from anything! He
wouldn’t have nerve enough to rescue me from a grasshopper if he were
armed to the teeth. Furthermore, I shall not go to Venice in August.
It’s bad enough in April—damp and hot—the home of malaria—an asylum for
artistic temperaments; and insecty. No, my dear aunt, even if I overlook
everything else to please Mr. Harley, he’ll have to modify the Venetian
part of that story, for I am determined that no pen of his shall force me
into Italy at this season. I wouldn’t go there to please Shakespeare,
much less Stuart Harley. Let the affair come off at Interlaken, if it is
to come off at all, which I doubt.”
“There is no Grand Canal at Interlaken,” said Mrs. Corwin, sagely; for
she had been an omnivorous reader of Baedeker since she had learned the
part she was to play in Harley’s book, and was therefore well up in
geography.
“No; but there’s the Jungfrau. Osborne can push Balderstone down the
side of an Alp and kill him,” returned Miss Andrews, viciously.
“Why, Marguerite! How can you talk so? Mr. Harley doesn’t wish to have
Balderstone killed,” cried Mrs. Corwin, aghast. “If Osborne killed
Balderstone he’d be a murderer, and they’d execute him.”
“Which is exactly what I want,” said Miss Andrews, firmly. “If he lives,
it pleases the omnipotent Mr. Harley that I shall marry him, and I
positively—Well, just you wait and see.”
There was silence for some minutes.
“Then I suppose you will decline to go abroad altogether?” asked Mrs.
Corwin after a while; “and Mr. Harley will be forced to get some one
else; and I—I shall be deprived of a pleasant tour—because I’m only to be
one of the party because I’m your aunt.”
Mrs. Corwin’s lip quivered a little as she spoke. She had anticipated
much pleasure from her trip.
“No, I shall not decline to go,” Miss Andrews replied. “I expect to go,
but it is entirely on your account. I must say, however, that Stuart
Harley will find out, to his sorrow, that I am not a doll, to be worked
with a string. I shall give him a scare at the outset which will show
him that I know the rights of a heroine, and that he must respect them.
For instance, he cannot ignore my comfort. Do you suppose that because
his story is to open with my beautiful self on board that ship, I’m to be
there without his making any effort to get me there? Not I! You and the
children and Osborne and Balderstone may go down any way you please. You
may go on the elevated railroad or on foot. You may go on the
horse-cars, or you may go on the luggage-van. It is immaterial to me
what you do; but when it comes to myself, Stuart Harley must provide a
carriage, or I miss the boat. I don’t wish to involve you in this. You
want to go, and are willing to go in his way, which simply means turning
up at the right moment, with no trouble to him. From your point of view
it is all right. You are anxious to go abroad, and are grateful to Mr.
Harley for letting you go. For me, however, he must do differently. I
have no particular desire to leave America, and if I go at all it is as a
favor to him, and he must act accordingly. It is a case of carriage or
no heroine. If I’m left behind, you and the rest can go along without
me. I shall do very well, and it will be Mr. Harley’s own fault. It may
hurt his story somewhat, but that is no concern of mine.”
[Picture: A rebellious heroine]
“I suppose the reason why he doesn’t send a carriage is that that part of
your life doesn’t appear in his story,” explained Mrs. Corwin.
“That doesn’t affect the point that he ought to send one,” said
Marguerite. “He needn’t write up the episode of the ride to the pier
unless he wants to, but the fact remains that it’s his duty to see me
safely on board from my home, and that he shall do, or I fail him at the
moment he needs me. If he is selfish enough to overlook the matter, he
must suffer the consequences.”
All of which, I think, was very reasonable. No heroine likes to feel
that she is called into being merely to provide copy for the person who
is narrating her story; and to be impressed with the idea that the moment
she is off the stage she must shift entirely for herself is too
humiliating to be compatible with true heroism.
Now it so happened that in his meditations upon that opening chapter the
scene of which was to be placed on board of the _New York_, Stuart
realized that his story of Miss Andrews’s character had indeed been too
superficial. He found that out at the moment he sat down to describe her
arrival at the pier, as it would be in all likelihood. What would she
say the moment she—the moment she what?—the moment she “emerged from the
perilous stream of vehicles which crowd West Street from morning until
night,” or the moment “she stepped out of the cab as it drew up at the
foot of the gangway”? That was the point. How would she arrive—on foot
or in a cab? Which way would she come, and at what time must she start
from home? Should she come alone, or should Mrs. Corwin and the twins
come with her?—or would a woman of her stamp not be likely to have an
intimate friend to accompany her to the steamer? Stuart was a rapid
thinker, and as he pondered over these problems it did not take him long
to reach the conclusion that a cab was necessary for Miss Andrews; and
that Mrs. Corwin and the twins, with Osborne and Balderstone, might get
aboard in their own way. He also decided that it would be an excellent
plan to have Marguerite’s old school friend Mrs. Willard accompany her to
the steamer. By an equally rapid bit of thought he concluded that if the
cab started from the Andrews apartment at Fifty-ninth Street and Central
Park at 9.30 A.M., the trip to the pier could easily be made in an hour,
which would be in ample time, since the sailing hour of the _New York_
was eleven. Unfortunately Harley, in his hurry, forgot two or three
incidents of departures generally, especially departures of women, which
he should not have overlooked. It was careless of him to forget that a
woman about to travel abroad wants to make herself as stunning as she
possibly can on the day of departure, so that the impression she will
make at the start shall be strong enough to carry her through the dowdy
stage which comes, as Marguerite had intimated, on the second and third
days at sea; and to expect a woman like Marguerite Andrews, who really
had no responsibilities to call her up at an early hour, to be ready at
9.30 sharp, was a fatal error, unless he provided his cab with an
unusually fast horse, or a pair of horses, both of which Harley neglected
to do. Miss Andrews was twenty minutes late at starting the first time,
and just a half-hour behind schedule time when, having rushed back to her
rooms for her gloves, which in the excitement of the moment she had
forgotten, she started finally for the ship. Even then all would have
been well had the unfortunate author not overlooked one other vital
point. Instead of sending the cab straight down Fifth Avenue, to
Broadway, to Barclay Street, he sent it down Sixth, and thence through
Greenwich Village, emerging at West Street at its junction with
Christopher, and then the inevitable happened.
_The cab was blocked_!
“I had no idea it was so far,” said Marguerite, looking out of the cab
window at the crowded and dirty thoroughfare.
“It’s a good mile farther yet,” replied Mrs. Willard. “I shall have just
that much more of your society.”
“It looks to me,” said Marguerite, with a short laugh, as the cab came
suddenly to a halt—“it looks to me as if you were likely to have more
than that of it; for we are in an apparently inextricable, immovable
mixture of trucks, horse-cars, and incompetent policemen, and nothing
short of a miracle will get us a mile farther along in twenty minutes.”
“I do believe you are right,” said Mrs. Willard, looking at her watch
anxiously. “What will you do if you miss the steamer?”
“Escape a horrid fate,” laughed Marguerite, gayly.
“Poor Mr. Harley—why, it will upset his whole story,” said Mrs. Willard.
“And save his reputation,” said Marguerite. “It wouldn’t have been real,
that story,” she added. “In the first place, Balderstone couldn’t write
a story that would fascinate me; he could never acquire a baleful
influence over me; and, finally, I never should marry Robert Osborne
under any circumstances. He’s not at all the style of man I admire. I’m
willing to go along and let Mr. Harley try to work it out his way, but he
will give it up as a bad idea before long—if I catch the steamer; and if
I don’t, then he’ll have to modify the story. That modified, I’m willing
to be his heroine.”
“But your aunt and the twins—they must be aboard by this time. They will
be worried to death about you,” suggested Mrs. Willard.
“For a few moments—but Aunt Emma wanted to go, and she and the rest of
them will have a good time, I’ve no doubt,” replied Miss Andrews, calmly;
and here Stuart Harley’s heroine actually chuckled. “And maybe Mr.
Harley can make a match between Aunt Emma and Osborne, which will suit
the publishers and please the American girl,” she said, gleefully. “I
almost hope we do miss it.”
And miss it they did, as I have already told you, by three minutes. As
the cab entered the broad pier, the great steamer moved slowly but surely
out into the stream, and Mrs. Willard and Mr. Harley’s heroine were just
in time to see Mrs. Corwin wildly waving her parasol at the captain on
the bridge, beseeching him in agonized tones to go back just for a
moment, while two separate and distinct twins, one male and one female,
peered over the rail, weeping bitterly. Incidentally mention may be made
of two young men, Balderstone and Osborne, who sat chatting gayly
together in the smoking-room.
“Well, Osborne,” said one, lighting his cigar, “she didn’t arrive.”
“No,” smiled the other. “Fact is, Balderstone, I’m glad of it. She’s
too snippy for me, and I’m afraid I should have quarrelled with you about
her in a half-hearted, unconvincing manner.”
“I’m afraid I’d have been the same,” rejoined Balderstone; “for, between
us, there’s a pretty little brunette from Chicago up on deck, and
Marguerite Andrews would have got little attention from me while she was
about, unless Harley violently outraged my feelings and his own
convictions.”
And so the _New York_ sailed out to sea, and Marguerite Andrews watched
her from the pier until she had faded from view.
As for Stuart Harley, the author, he sat in his study, wringing his hands
and cursing his carelessness.
“I’ll have to modify the whole story now,” he said, impatiently, “since
it is out of my power to bring the _New York_ back into port, with my
hero, villain, chaperon, and twins; but whenever or wherever the new
story may be laid, Marguerite Andrews shall be the heroine—she interests
me. Meantime let Mrs. Willard chaperon her.”
And closing his manuscript book with a bang, Harley lit a cigarette, put
on his hat, and went to the club.
III
THE RECONSTRUCTION BEGINS
“_Then gently scan your brother man_,
_Still gentler sister woman_;
_Tho’ they may gang a kennin wrang_,
_To step aside is human_.”—BURNS.
WHEN, a few days later, Harley came to the reconstruction of his story,
he began to appreciate the fact that what had seemed at first to be his
misfortune was, on the whole, a matter for congratulation; and as he
thought over the people he had sent to sea, he came to rejoice that
Marguerite was not one of the party.
“Osborne wasn’t her sort, after all,” he mused to himself that night over
his coffee. “He hadn’t much mind. I’m afraid I banked too much on his
good looks, and too little upon what I might call her independence; for
of all the heroines I ever had, she is the most sufficient unto herself.
Had she gone along I’m half afraid I couldn’t have got rid of Balderstone
so easily either, for he’s a determined devil as I see him; and his
intellectual qualities were so vastly superior to those of Osborne that
by mere contrast they would most certainly have appealed to her strongly.
The baleful influence might have affected her seriously, and Osborne was
never the man to overcome it, and strict realism would have forced her
into an undesirable marriage. Yes, I’m glad it turned out the way it
did; she’s too good for either of them. I couldn’t have done the tale as
I intended without a certain amount of compulsion, which would never have
worked out well. She’d have been miserable with Osborne for a husband
anyhow, even if he did succeed in outwitting Balderstone.”
Then Harley went into a trance for a moment. From this he emerged almost
immediately with a laugh. The travellers on the sea had come to his
mind.
“Poor Mrs. Corwin,” he said, “she’s awfully upset. I shall have to give
her some diversion. Let’s see, what shall it be? She’s a widow, young
and fascinating. H’m—not a bad foundation for a romance. There must be
a man on the ship who’d like her; but, hang it all! there are those
twins. Not much romance for her with those twins along, unless the man’s
a fool; and she’s too fine a woman for a fool. Men don’t fall in love
with whole families that way. Now if they had only been left on the pier
with Miss Andrews, it would have worked up well. Mrs. Corwin could have
fascinated some fellow-traveller, won his heart, accepted him at
Southampton, and told him about the twins afterwards. As a test of his
affection that would be a strong situation; but with the twins along,
making the remarks they are likely to make, and all that—no, there is no
hope for Mrs. Corwin, except in a juvenile story—something like ‘Two
Twins in a Boat, not to Mention the Widow,’ or something of that sort.
Poor woman! I’ll let her rest in peace, for the present. She’ll enjoy
her trip, anyhow; and as for Osborne and Balderstone, I’ll let them fight
it out for that dark-eyed little woman from Chicago I saw on board, and
when the best man wins I’ll put the whole thing into a short story.”
Then began a new quest for characters to go with Marguerite Andrews.
“She must have a chaperon, to begin with,” thought Harley. “That is
indispensable. Herring, Beemer, & Chadwick regard themselves as
conservators of public morals, in their ‘Blue and Silver Series,’ so a
girl unmarried and without a chaperon would never do for this book. If
they were to publish it in their ‘Yellow Prism Series’ I could fling all
such considerations to the winds, for there they cater to stronger
palates, palates cultivated by French literary cooks, and morals need not
be considered, provided the story is well told and likely to sell; but
this is for the other series, and a chaperon is a _sine qua non_.
Marguerite doesn’t need one half as much as the girls in the ‘Yellow
Prism’ books, but she’s got to have one just the same, or the American
girl will not read about her: and who is better than Dorothy Willard, who
has charge of her now?”
Harley slapped his knee with delight.
“How fortunate I’d provided her!” he said. “I’ve got my start already,
and without having to think very hard over it either.”
The trance began again, and lasted several hours, during which time Kelly
and the Professor stole softly into Harley’s rooms, and, perceiving his
condition, respected it.
“He’s either asleep or imagining,” said the Professor, in a whisper.
“He can’t imagine,” returned the Doctor. “Call it—realizing. Whatever
it is he’s up to, we mustn’t interfere. There isn’t any use waking him
anyhow. I know where he keeps his cigars. Let’s sit down and have a
smoke.”
This the intruders did, hoping that sooner or later their host would
observe their presence; but Harley lay in blissful unconsciousness of
their coming, and they finally grew weary of waiting.
[Picture: He went into one of his trances]
“He must be at work on a ten-volume novel,” said the Doctor. “Let’s go.”
And with that they departed. Night came on, and with it darkness, but
Harley never moved. The fact was he was going through an examination of
the human race to find a man good enough for Marguerite Andrews, and it
speaks volumes for the interest she had suddenly inspired in his breast
that it took him so long to find what he wanted.
Along about nine o’clock he gave a deep sigh and returned to earth.
“I guess I’ve got him,” he said, wearily, rubbing his forehead, which
began to ache a trifle. “I’ll model him after the Professor. He’s a
good fellow, moderately good-looking, has position, and certainly knows
something, as professors go. I doubt if he is imposing enough for the
American girl generally, but he’s the best I can get in the time at my
disposal.”
So the Professor was unconsciously slated for the office of hero; Mrs.
Willard was cast for chaperon, and the Doctor, in spite of Harley’s
previous resolve not to use him, was to be introduced for the comedy
element. The villain selected was the usual poverty-stricken foreigner
with a title and a passion for wealth, which a closer study of his
heroine showed Harley that Miss Andrews possessed; for on her way home
from the pier she took Mrs. Willard to the Amsterdam and treated her to a
luncheon which nothing short of a ten-dollar bill would pay for, after
which the two went shopping, replenishing Miss Andrews’s wardrobe—most of
which lay snugly stored in the hold of the _New York_, and momentarily
getting farther and farther away from its fair owner—in the course of
which tour Miss Andrews expended a sum which, had Harley possessed it,
would have made it unnecessary for him to write the book he had in mind
at all.
“It’s good she’s rich,” sighed Harley. “That will make it all the easier
to have her go to Newport and attract the Count.”
At the moment that Harley spoke these words to himself Mrs. Willard and
Marguerite, accompanied by Mr. Willard, entered the mansion of the latter
on Fifth Avenue. They had spent the afternoon and evening at the Andrews
apartment, arranging for its closing until the return of Mrs. Corwin.
Marguerite meanwhile was to be the guest of the Willards.
“Next week we’ll run up to Newport,” said Dorothy. “The house is ready,
and Bob is going for his cruise.”
Marguerite looked at her curiously for a moment.
“Did you intend to go there all along?” she asked.
“Yes—of course. Why do you ask?” returned Mrs. Willard.
“Why, that very idea came into my mind at the moment,” replied
Marguerite. “I thought this afternoon I’d run up to Riverdale and stay
with the Hallidays next week, when all of a sudden Newport came into my
mind, and it has been struggling there with Riverdale for two hours—until
I almost began to believe somebody was trying to compel me to go to
Newport. If it is your idea, and has been all along, I’ll go; but if
Stuart Harley is trying to get me down there for literary purposes, I
simply shall not do it.”
“You had better dismiss that idea from your mind at once, my dear,” said
Mrs. Willard. “Mr. Harley never compels. No compulsion is the
corner-stone of his literary structure; free will is his creed: you may
count on that. If he means to make you his heroine still, it will be at
Newport if you are at Newport, at Riverdale if you happen to be at
Riverdale. Do come with me, even if he does impress you as endeavoring
to force you; for at Newport I shall be your chaperon, and I should
dearly love to be put in a book—with you. Bob has asked Jack Perkins
down, and Mrs. Howlett writes me that Count Bonetti, of Naples, is there,
and is a really delightful fellow. We shall have—”
“You simply confirm my fears,” interrupted Marguerite. “You are to be
Harley’s chaperon, Professor Perkins is his hero, and Count Bonetti is
the villain—”
“Why, Marguerite, how you talk!” cried Mrs. Willard. “Do you exist
merely in Stuart Harley’s brain? Do I? Are we none of us living
creatures to do as we will? Are we nothing more than materials
pigeon-holed for Mr. Harley’s future use? Has Count Bonetti crossed the
ocean just to please Mr. Harley?”
“I don’t know what I believe,” said Miss Andrews, “and I don’t care much
either way, as long as I have independence of action. I’ll go with you,
Dorothy; but if it turns out, as I fear, that we are expected to act our
parts in a Harley romance, that romance will receive a shock from which
it will never recover.”
“Why do you object so to Mr. Harley, anyhow? I thought you liked his
books,” said Mrs. Willard.
“I do; some of them,” Marguerite answered; “and I like him; but he does
not understand me, and until he does he shall not put me in his stories.
I’ll rout him at every point, until he—”
Marguerite paused. Her face flushed. Tears came into her eyes.
“Until he what, dearest?” asked Mrs. Willard, sympathetically.
“I don’t know,” said Marguerite, with a quiver in her voice, as she rose
and left the room.
“I fancy we’d better go at once, Bob,” said Mrs. Willard to her husband,
later on. “Marguerite is quite upset by the experiences of the day, and
New York is fearfully hot.”
“I agree with you,” returned Willard. “Jerrold sent word this afternoon
that the boat will be ready Friday, instead of Thursday of next week; so
if you’ll pack up to-morrow we can board her Friday, and go up the Sound
by water instead of by rail. It will be pleasanter for all hands.”
Which was just what Harley wanted. The Willards were of course not
conscious of the fact, though Mrs. Willard’s sympathy with Marguerite led
her to suspect that such was the case; for that such was the case was
what Marguerite feared.
“We are being forced, Dorothy,” she said, as she stepped on the yacht two
days later.
“Well, what if we are? It’s pleasanter going this way than by rail,
isn’t it?” Mrs. Willard replied, with some impatience. “If we owe all
this to Stuart Harley, we ought to thank him for his kindness. According
to your theory he could have sent us up on a hot, dusty train, and had a
collision ready for us at New London, in order to kill off a few
undesirable characters and give his hero a chance to distinguish himself.
I think that even from your own point of view Mr. Harley is behaving in a
very considerate fashion.”
“No doubt you think so,” returned Marguerite, spiritedly. “But it’s
different with you. You are settled in life. Your husband is the man of
your choice; you are happy, with everything you want. You will do
nothing extraordinary in the book. If you did do something extraordinary
you would cease to be a good chaperon, and from that moment would be cast
aside; but I—I am in a different position altogether. I am a single
woman, unsettled as yet, for whom this author in his infinite wisdom
deems it necessary to provide a lover and husband; and in order that his
narrative of how I get this person he has selected—without consulting my
tastes—may interest a lot of other girls, who are expected to buy and
read his book, he makes me the object of an intriguing fortune-hunter
from Italy. I am to believe he is a real nobleman, and all that; and a
stupid wiseacre from the York University, who can’t dance, and who thinks
of nothing but his books and his club, is to come in at the right moment
and expose the Count, and all such trash as that. I know at the outset
how it all is to be. You couldn’t deceive a sensible girl five minutes
with Count Bonetti, any more than that Balderstone man, who is now making
a useless trip across the Atlantic with my aunt and her twins, could have
exerted a ‘baleful influence’ over me with his diluted spiritualism. I’m
not an idiot, my dear Dorothy.”
“You are a heroine, love,” returned Mrs. Willard.
“Perhaps—but I am the kind of heroine who would stop a play five minutes
after the curtain had risen on the first act if the remaining four acts
depended on her failing to see something that was plain to the veriest
dolt in the audience,” Marguerite replied, with spirit. “Nobody shall
ever write me up save as I am.”
“Well—perhaps you are wrong this time. Perhaps Mr. Harley isn’t going to
make a book of you,” said Mrs. Willard.
“Very likely he isn’t,” said Marguerite; “but he’s trying it—I know that
much.”
“And how, pray?” asked Mrs. Willard.
“That,” said Marguerite, her frown vanishing and a smile taking its
place—“that is for the present my secret. I’ll tell you some day, but
not until I have baffled Mr. Harley in his ill-advised purpose of
marrying me off to a man I don’t want, and wouldn’t have under any
circumstances. Even if I had caught the _New York_ the other day his
plans would have miscarried. I’d never have married that Osborne man;
I’d have snubbed Balderstone the moment he spoke to me; and if Stuart
Harley had got a book out of my trip to Europe at all, it would have been
a series of papers on some such topic as ‘The Spinster Abroad, or How to
be Happy though Single.’ No more shall I take the part he intends me to
in this Newport romance, unless he removes Count Bonetti from the scene
entirely, and provides me with a different style of hero from his
Professor, the original of whom, by-the-way, as I happen to know, is
already married and has two children. I went to school with his wife,
and I know just how much of a hero he is.”
And so they went to Newport, and Harley’s novel opened swimmingly. His
description of the yacht was perfect; his narration of the incidents of
the embarkation could not be improved upon in any way. They were
absolutely true to the life.
But his account of what Marguerite Andrews said and did and thought while
on the Willards’ yacht was not realism at all—it was imagination of the
wildest kind, for she said, did, and thought nothing of the sort.
Harley did his best, but his heroine was obdurate, and the poor fellow
did not know that he was writing untruths, for he verily believed that he
heard and saw all that he attributed to her exactly as he put it down.
So the story began well, and Harley for a time was quite happy. At the
end of a week, however, he had a fearful set-back. Count Bonetti was
ready to be presented to Marguerite according to the plan, but there the
schedule broke down.
Harley’s heroine took a new and entirely unexpected tack.
IV
A CHAPTER FROM HARLEY, WITH NOTES
“_Good-bye_, _proud world_, _I’m going home_.
_Thou art not my friend_, _and I’m not thine_.”
—EMERSON.
I THINK the reader will possibly gain a better idea of what happened at
the Howlett dance, at which Count Bonetti was to have been presented to
Miss Andrews, if I forego the pleasure of writing this chapter myself,
and produce instead the chapter of Stuart Harley’s ill-fated book which
was to have dealt with that most interesting incident. Having
relinquished all hope of ever getting that particular story into shape
without a change of heroine, and being unwilling to go to that extreme,
Mr. Harley has very kindly placed his manuscript at my disposal.
“Use it as you will, my dear fellow,” he said, when I asked him for it.
“I can’t do anything with it myself, and it is merely occupying space in
my pigeon-holes for which I can find better use. It may need a certain
amount of revision—in fact, it is sure to, for it is unconscionably long,
and, thanks to the persistent failure of Miss Andrews to do as I thought
she would, may frequently seem incoherent. For your own sake revise it,
for the readers of your book won’t believe that you are telling a true
story anyhow; they will say that you wrote this chapter and attributed it
to me, and you will find yourself held responsible for its shortcomings.
I have inserted a few notes here and there which will give you an idea of
what I suffered as I wrote on and found her growing daily less and less
tractable, with occasionally an indication of the point of divergence
between her actual behavior and that which I expected of her.”
To a fellow-workman in literary fields this chapter is of pathetic
interest, though it may not so appear to the reader who knows little of
the difficulties of authorship. I can hardly read it myself without a
feeling of most intense pity for poor Harley. I can imagine the
sleepless nights which followed the shattering of his hopes as to what
his story might be by the recalcitrant attitude of the young woman he had
honored so highly by selecting her for his heroine. I can almost feel
the bitter sense of disappointment, which must have burned to the very
depths of his soul, when he finally realized how completely overturned
were all his plans, and I cannot forego calling attention to the
constancy to his creed of Stuart Harley, in sacrificing his opportunity
rather than his principles, as shown by his resolute determination not to
force Miss Andrews to do his bidding, even though it required merely the
dipping of his pen into the ink and the resolution to do so.
I cannot blame her, however. Granting to Harley the right to a creed,
Miss Andrews, too, it must be admitted, was entitled to have views as to
how she ought to behave under given circumstances, and if she found her
notions running counter to his, it was only proper that she should act
according to the dictates of her own heart, or mind, or whatever else it
may be that a woman reasons with, rather than according to his wishes.
As to all questions of this kind, however, as between the two, the reader
must judge, and one document in evidence is Harley’s chapter, which ran
in this wise: