“Is that the costume you wore”—I was going to say, “when you rejected
Parker?” but I fortunately caught my error in time to pass it off—“at
Newport?” I finished, with a half gasp at the narrowness of my escape;
for, it must be remembered, I was supposed as yet to know nothing of that
episode.
“How do you know what I wore at Newport?” she asked, quickly—so quickly
that I almost feared she had found me out, after all.
“Why—ah—I read about you somewhere,” I stammered. “Some newspaper
correspondent drew a picture of the scene on the promenade in the
afternoon, and—ah—he had you down.”
“Oh!” she replied, arching her eyebrows; “that was it, was it? And do
you waste your valuable time reading the vulgar effusions of the society
reporter?”
Wasn’t I glad that I had not come as a man with a nose to project into
the affairs of others—as a newspaper reporter!
“No, indeed,” I rejoined, “not generally; but I happened to see this
particular item, and read it and remembered it. After all,” I added, as
we came to the sylvan path that leads to the Lake—“after all, one might
as well read that sort of stuff as most of the novels of the present day.
The vulgar reporter may be ignorant or a boor, and all that is
reprehensible in his methods, but he writes about real flesh and blood
people; and, what is worse, he generally approximates the truth
concerning them in his writing, which is more than can be said of the
so-called realistic novel writers of the day. I haven’t read a novel in
three years in which it has seemed to me that the heroine, for instance,
was anything more than a marionette, with no will of her own, and ready
to do at any time any foolish thing the author wanted her to do.”
Again those eyes of Miss Andrews rested on me in a manner which gave me
considerable apprehension. Then she laughed, and I was at ease again.
“You are very amusing,” she said, quietly. “The most amusing of them
all.”
The remark nettled me, and I quickly retorted:
“Then I have not lived in vain.”
“You do really live, then, eh?” she asked, half chaffingly, gazing at me
out of the corners of her eyes in a fashion which utterly disarmed me.
“Excuse me, Miss Andrews,” I answered, “but I am afraid I don’t
understand you.”
“I am afraid you don’t,” she said, the smile leaving her lips. “The fact
that you are here on the errand you have charged yourself with proves
that.”
“I am not aware,” I said, “that I have come on any particularly
ridiculous errand. May I ask you what you mean by the expression ‘most
amusing of them all’? Am I one among many, and, if so, one what among
many what?”
“Your errand is a good one,” she said, gravely, “and not at all
ridiculous; let me assure you that I appreciate that fact. Your question
I will answer by asking another: Are you here of your own volition, or
has Stuart Harley created you, as he did Messrs. Osborne, Parker, and the
Professor? Are you my new hero, or what?”
The question irritated me. This woman was not content with interfering
seriously with my friend’s happiness: she was actually attributing me to
him, casting doubts upon my existence, and placing me in the same
category with herself—a mere book creature. To a man who regards himself
as being the real thing, flesh and blood, and, well, eighteen-carat flesh
and blood at that, to be accused of living only a figmentary existence is
too much. I retorted angrily.
“If you consider me nothing more than an idea, you do not manifest your
usual astuteness,” I said.
Her reply laid me flat.
“I do not consider you anything of the sort. I never so much as
associated you with anything resembling an idea. I merely asked a
question,” she said. “I repeat it. Do you or do you not exist? Are you
a bit of the really real or a bit of Mr. Harley’s realism? In short, are
you here at Profile Lake, walking and talking with me, or are you not?”
A realizing sense of my true position crept over me. In reality I was
not there talking to her, but in my den in New York writing about her. I
may not be a realist, but I am truthful. I could not deceive her, so I
replied, hesitatingly:
“Well, Miss Andrews, I am—no, I am not here, except in spirit.”
“That’s what I thought,” she said, demurely. “And do you exist
somewhere, or is this a ‘situation’ calculated to delight the American
girl—with pin-money to spend on Messrs. Herring, Beemer, & Chadwick’s
publications?”
“I do exist,” I replied, meekly; for, I must confess it, I realized more
than ever that Miss Andrews was too much for me, and I heartily wished I
was well out of it. “And I alone am responsible for this. Harley is off
fishing at Barnegat—and do you know why?”
“I presume he has gone there to recuperate,” she said.
“Precisely,” said I.
“After his ungentlemanly, discourteous, and wholly uncalled-for
interference with my comfort at Newport,” she said, her face flushing and
tears coming into her eyes, “I don’t wonder he’s prostrated.”
“I do not know to what you refer,” said I.
“I refer to the episode of the runaway horse,” she said, in wrathful
remembrance of the incident. “Because I refuse to follow blindly his
will, he abuses his power, places me in a false and perilous situation,
from which I, a defenceless woman, must rescue myself alone and unaided.
It was unmanly of him—and I will pay him the compliment of saying wholly
unlike him.”
I stood aghast. Poor Stuart was being blamed for my act. He must be set
right at once, however unpleasant it might be for me.
“He—he didn’t do that,” I said, slowly; “it was I. I wrote that bit of
nonsense; and he—well, he was mad because I did it, and said he’d like to
kill any man who ill-treated you; and he made me promise never to touch
upon your life again.”
“May I ask why you did that?” she asked, and I was glad to note that
there was no displeasure in her voice—in fact, she seemed to cheer up
wonderfully when I told her that it was I, and not Stuart, who had
subjected her to the misadventure.
“Because I was angry with you,” I answered. “You were ruining my friend
with your continued acts of rebellion: he was successful; now he is
ruined. He thinks of you day and night—he wants you for his heroine; he
wants to make you happy, but he wants you to be happy in your own way;
and when he thinks he has discovered your way, he works along that line,
and all of a sudden, by some act wholly unforeseen, and, if I may say so,
unforeseeable, you treat him and his work with contempt, draw yourself
out of it—and he has to begin again.”
“And why have you ventured to break your word to your friend?” she asked,
calmly. “Surely you are touching upon my life now, in spite of your
promise.”
“Because I am willing to sacrifice my word to his welfare,” I retorted;
“to try to make you understand how you are blocking the path of a mighty
fine-minded man by your devotion to what you call your independence. He
will never ask you to do anything that he knows will be revolting to you,
and until he has succeeded in pleasing you to the last page of his book
he will never write again. I have done this in the hope of persuading
you, at the cost even of some personal discomfort, not to rebel against
his gentle leadership—to fall in with his ideas until he can fulfil this
task of his, whether it be realism or pure speculation on his part. If
you do this, Stuart is saved. If you do not, literature will be called
upon to mourn one who promises to be one of its brightest ornaments.”
I stopped short. Miss Andrews was gazing pensively out over the
mirror-like surface of the Lake. Finally she spoke.
“You may tell Mr. Harley,” she said, with a sigh, “that I will trouble
him no more. He can do with me as he pleases in all save one particular.
He shall not marry me to a man I do not love. If he takes the man I love
for my hero, then will I follow him to the death.”
“And may I ask who that man is?”
“You may ask if you please,” she replied, with a little smile. “But I
won’t answer you, except to say that it isn’t you.”
“And am I forgiven for my runaway story?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. “You wouldn’t expect me to condemn a man for loyalty to
his friend, would you?”
With which understanding Miss Andrews and I continued our walk, and when
we parted I found that the little interview I had started to write had
turned into the suggestion of a romance, which I was in duty bound to
destroy—but I began to have a glimmering of an idea as to who the man was
that Marguerite Andrews wished for a hero, and I regretted also to find
myself convinced of the truth of her statement that that man did not bear
my name.
VIII
HARLEY RETURNS TO THE FRAY
“_I will be master of what is mine own_:
_She is my goods_, _my chattels_.”
—“Taming of the Shrew.”
AT the end of ten days Harley returned from Barnegat, brown as a berry
and ready for war, if war it was still to be. The outing had done him a
world of good, and the fish stories he told as we sat at dinner showed
that, realist though he might be, he had yet not failed to cultivate his
imagination in certain directions. I may observe in passing, and in this
connection, that if I had a son whom it was my ambition to see making his
mark in the world as a writer of romance, as distinguished from the real,
I should, as the first step in his development, take care that he became
a fisherman. The telling of tales of the fish he caught when no one else
was near to see would give him, as it has given many another, a good
schooling in the realms of the imagination.
I was glad to note that Harley’s wonted cheerfulness had returned, and
that he had become more like himself than he had been at any time since
his first failure with Miss Andrews.
“Your advice was excellent,” he said, as we sipped our coffee at the club
the night of his return. “I have a clear two weeks in which to tackle
that story, and I feel confident now that I shall get it done.
Furthermore, I shall send the chapters to Herring, Beemer, & Chadwick as
I write them, so that there must be no failure. I shall be compelled to
finish the tale, whatever may happen, and Miss Andrews shall go through
to the bitter end, willy-nilly.”
“Don’t be rash, Harley,” I said; for it seemed to me that Miss Andrews,
having consented at my solicitation to be a docile heroine for just so
long as Harley did not insist upon her marrying the man she did not love,
it was no time for him to break away from the principles he had so
steadfastly adhered to hitherto and become a martinet. He struck me as
being more than likely to crack the whip like a ring-master in his
present mood than to play the indulgent author, and I felt pretty
confident that the instant the snap of the lash reached the ears of
Marguerite Andrews his troubles would begin again tenfold, both in
quality and in quantity, with no possible hope for a future
reconciliation between them.
“I’m not going to be rash,” said Harley. “I never was rash, and I’m not
going to begin now, but I shall use my nerve. That has been the trouble
with me in the past. I haven’t been firm. I have let that girl have her
own way in everything, and I’m very much afraid I have spoiled her. She
behaves like a child with indulgent parents. In the last instance, the
Parker proposal, she simply ran her independence into the ground. She
was not only rebellious to me, but she was impertinent to him. Her
attitude toward him was not nature at all; it was not realism, because
she is a woman of good breeding, and would naturally be the last to treat
any man, distasteful or not, with such excessive rudeness. I compelled
him to go on and propose to her, though after he had been at it for five
minutes I could see that he wished he was well out of it. I should have
taken her in hand and controlled her with equal firmness, declining to
permit her to speak so openly. Frankness is good enough, especially in
women, among whom you rarely find it; but frankness of the sort she
indulged in has no place in the polite circle in which she moves.”
“Nevertheless, she spoke that way—you said yourself she did,” I said,
seeing that he was wrathful with Marguerite, and wishing to assuage his
anger before it carried him to lengths he might regret. “And you’ve got
to take her as she is or drop her altogether.”
“She did—I repeat that she did speak that way, but that was no reason why
I should submit to it,” Harley answered. “It was the fault of her mood.
She was nervous, almost hysterical—thanks to her rebellious spirit. The
moment I discovered how things were going I should have gone back and
started afresh, and kept on doing so until I had her submissive. A
hunter may balk at a high fence, but the rider must not give in to him
unless he wishes to let the animal get the better of him. If he is wise
he will go back and put the horse to it again and again, until he finally
clears the topmost bar. That I should have done in this instance, and
that I now intend to do, until that book comes out as I want it.”
I had to laugh in my sleeve. On the whole, Harley was very like most
other realists, who pretend that they merely put down life as it is, and
who go through their professional careers serenely unconscious of the
truth that their fancies, after all, serve them when their facts are
lacking. Even that most eminent disciple of the Realistic Cult, Mr.
Darrow, has been known to kill off a hero in a railroad accident that
owed its being to nothing short of his own imagination, in order that the
unhappy wight might not offend the readers of the highly moral magazine,
in which the story first appeared, by marrying a widow whom he had been
forced by Mr. Darrow to love before her husband died. Mr. Darrow
manufactured, with five strokes of his pen, an engine and a tunnel to
crush the life out of the poor fellow, whom an immoral romancer would
have allowed to live on and marry the lady, and with perfect propriety
too, since the hero and the heroine were both of them the very models of
virtue, in spite of the love which they did not seek, and which Mr.
Darrow deliberately and almost brutally thrust into their otherwise happy
lives. Of course the railway accident was needed to give the climax to
the story, which without it might have run through six more numbers of
the magazine, to the exclusion of more exciting material; but that will
not relieve Mr. Darrow’s soul of the stain he has put upon it by
deserting Dame Realism for a moment to flirt with Romance, when it comes
to the Judgment Day.
“As I want it to be, so must it be,” quoth Harley.
“Good,” thought I. “It will no doubt be excellent; but be honest, and
don’t insist that you’ve taken down life as it is; for you may have an
astigmatism, for all you know, and life may not be at all what it has
seemed to you while you were putting it down.”
“Yes, sir,” said Harley, leaning back in his chair and drawing a long
breath, which showed his determination, “to the bitter end she shall go,
through such complications as I choose to have her, encountering whatever
villains I may happen to find most convenient, and to complete her story
she shall marry the man I select for my hero, if he is as commonplace as
the average salesman in a Brooklyn universal dry-goods emporium.”
Imagine my feelings if you can! Having gone as a self-appointed
ambassador to the enemy to secure terms of peace, to return to find my
principal donning his armor and daubing his face with paint for a renewal
of the combat, was certainly not pleasant. What could I say to
Marguerite Andrews if I ever met her in real life? How could I look her
in the eye? The situation overpowered me, and I hardly knew what to say.
I couldn’t beg Harley to stick to his realism and not indulge in
compulsion, because I had often jeered at him for not infusing a little
more of the dramatic into his stories, even if it had to be “lugged in by
the ears,” as he put it. Nor was he in any mood for me to tell him of my
breach of faith—the mere knowledge that she had promised to be docile out
of charity would have stung his pride, and I thought it would be better,
for the time, at least, to let my interview remain a secret. Fortune
favored me, however. Kelly and the Professor entered the dining room at
this moment, and the Professor held in his hand a copy of the current
issue of The Literary Man, Messrs. Herring, Beemer, & Chadwick’s
fortnightly publication, a periodical having to do wholly with things
bookish.
“Who sat for this, Stuart?” called out the Professor, tapping the
frontispiece of the magazine.
“Who sat for what?” replied Stuart, looking up.
“This picture,” said the Professor.
“It’s a picture of a finely intellectual-looking person with your name
under it, Harley,” put in the Doctor.
“Oh—that,” said Harley. “It does flatter me a bit.”
“So does the article with it,” said Kelly. “Says you are a great man—man
with an idea, and all that. Is that true, or is it just plain libel?
Have you an idea?”
Harley laughed good-naturedly. “I had one once, but it’s lost,” he said.
“As to that picture, they’re bringing out a book for me,” he added,
modestly. “Good ad., you know.”
“When you are through with that, Professor,” I put in, “let me have it,
will you? I want to see what it says about Harley.”
“It’s a first-rate screed,” replied the Professor, handing over the
publication. “It hits Harley right on the head.”
“I don’t know as that’s pleasant,” said Harley.
“What I mean, my dear boy,” said the Professor, “is that it does you
justice.”
And it really did do Harley justice, although, as he had suggested, it
was written largely to advertise the forthcoming work. It spoke nicely
of Harley’s previous efforts, and judiciously, as it seemed to me. He
had not got to the top of the ladder yet, but he was getting there by a
slow, steady development, and largely because he was a man with a fixed
idea as to what literature ought to be.
“Mr. Harley has seen clearly from the outset what it was that he wished
to accomplish and how to accomplish it,” the writer observed. “He has
swerved neither to the right nor to the left, but has progressed
undeviatingly along the lines he has mapped out for himself, and keeping
constantly in mind the principles which seemed to him at the beginning of
his career to be right. It has been this persistent and consistent
adherence to principle that has gained for Mr. Harley his hearing, and
which is constantly rendering more certain and permanent his position in
the world literary. Others may be led hither and yon by the fads and
follies of the scatter-brained, but Realism will ever have one steadfast
champion in Stuart Harley.”
“Read that,” I said, tossing the journal across the table.
He read it, and blushed to the roots of his ears.
“This is no time to desert the flag, Harley,” said I, as he read. “Stick
to your colors, and let her stick to hers. You’d better be careful how
you force your heroine.”
“Ha, ha!” he laughed. “I should think so, and for more reasons than one.
I never really intended to do horrible things with her, my boy. Trust
me, if I do lead her, to lead her gently. My persuasion will be
suggestive rather than mandatory.”
“And that hero—from the Brooklyn dry-goods shop?” I asked, with a smile.
“I’d like to see him so much as—tell her the price of anything,” cried
Harley. “A man like that has no business to live in the same hemisphere
with a woman like Marguerite Andrews. When I threatened her with him I
was conversing through a large and elegant though wholly invisible hat.”
I breathed more freely. She was still sacred and safe in his hands.
Shortly after, dinner over, we left the table, and went to the theatre,
where we saw what the programme called the “latest London realistic
success,” in which three of the four acts of an intensely exciting
melodrama depended upon a woman’s not seeing a large navy revolver, which
lay on the table directly before her eyes in the first. The play was
full of blood and replete with thunder, and we truly enjoyed it, only
Harley would not talk much between the acts. He was unusually moody.
After the play was over his tongue loosened, however, and we went to the
Players for a supper, and there he burst forth into speech.
“If Marguerite Andrews had been the heroine of that play she’d have seen
that gun, and the audience would have had to go home inside of ten
minutes,” he said. Later on he burst out with, “If my Miss Andrews had
been the heroine of that play, the man who falls over the precipice in
the second act would have been alive at this moment.” And finally he
demanded: “Do you suppose a heroine like Marguerite Andrews would have
overlooked the comma on the postal card that woman read in the third act,
and so made the fourth act possible? Not she. She’s a woman with a
mind. And yet they call that the latest London realistic success!
Realistic! These Londoners do not seem to understand their own language.
If that play was realism, what sort of a nightmare do you suppose a
romantic drama would be?”
“Well, maybe London women in real life haven’t any minds,” I said,
growing rather weary of the subject. I admired Miss Andrews myself, but
there were other things I could talk about—“like lemonade and elephants,”
as the small boy said. “Let it go at that. It was an interesting play,
and that’s all plays ought to be. Realism in plays is not to be
encouraged. A man goes to the theatre to be amused and entertained, not
to be reminded of home discomforts.”
Stuart looked at me reproachfully, ordered a fresh cigar, and suggested
turning in for the night. I walked home with him and tried to get him
interested in a farce I was at work on, but it was of no use. He had
become a monomaniac, and his monomania was his rebellious heroine.
Finally I blurted out:
“Well, for Heaven’s sake, Stuart, get the woman caged, will you? For,
candidly, I’d like to talk about something else, and until Marguerite
Andrews is disposed of I don’t believe you’ll be able to.”
“I’ll have half the work done by this time to-morrow night,” said he.
“I’ve got ten thousand words of it in my mind now.”
“I’ll bet you there are only two words down in your mind,” said I.
“What are they?” he asked.
“Marguerite and Andrews,” said I.
Stuart laughed. “They’re the only ones I’m sure of,” said he. And then
we parted.
But he was right about what he would have accomplished by that time the
next night; for before sundown he had half the story written, and, what
is more, the chapters had come as easily as any writing he ever did. For
docility, Marguerite was a perfect wonder. Not only did she follow out
his wishes; she often anticipated them, and in certain parts gave him a
lead in a new direction, which, Stuart said, gave the story a hundred per
cent. more character.
In short, Marguerite Andrews was keeping her promise to me nobly. The
only thing I regretted about it, now that all seemed plain sailing, was
its effect on Stuart. Her amiability was proving a great attraction to
his susceptible soul, and I was beginning to fear that Stuart was slowly
but surely falling in love with his rebellious heroine, which would never
do, unless she were really real, on which point I was most uncertain.
“It would be a terrible thing,” said I confidentially to myself, “if
Stuart Harley were to fall in love with a creation of his own realism.”
IX
A SUMMONS NORTH
“PORTIA. _A quarrel_, _ho_, _already_? _What’s the matter_?
“GRATIANO. _About a hoop of gold_, _a paltry ring_.”
—“Merchant of Venice.”
THE events just narrated took place on the 15th of August, and as
Harley’s time to fulfil his contract with Messrs. Herring, Beemer, &
Chadwick was growing very short—two weeks is short shrift for an author
with a book to write for waiting presses, even with a willing and helpful
cast of characters—so I resolved not to intrude upon him until he himself
should summon me. I knew myself, from bitter experience, how unwelcome
the most welcome of one’s friends can be at busy hours, having had many a
beautiful sketch absolutely ruined by the untimely intrusion of those who
wished me well, so I resolutely kept myself away from his den, although I
was burning with curiosity to know how he was getting on.
On occasions my curiosity would get the better of my judgment, and I
would endeavor, with the aid of my own muses, to hold a moment’s chat
with Miss Andrews; but she eluded me. I couldn’t find her at all—as,
indeed, how should I, since Harley had not taken me into his confidence
as to his intentions in the new story? He might have laid the scene of
it in Singapore, for aught I knew, and, wander where I would in my fancy,
I was utterly unable to discover her whereabouts, until one evening a
very weird thing happened—a thing so weird that I have been pinching
myself with great assiduity ever since in order to reassure myself of my
own existence. I had come home from a hard day’s editorial work, had
dined alone and comfortably, and was stretched out at full length upon
the low divan that stands at the end of my workshop—the delight of my
weary bones and the envy of my friends, who have never been able to find
anywhere another exactly like it. My cigar was between my lips, and
above my head, rising in a curling cloud to the ceiling, was a mass of
smoke. I am sure I was not dreaming, although how else to account for it
I do not know. What happened, to put it briefly, was my sudden
transportation to a little mountain hotel not far from Lake George, where
I found myself sitting and talking to the woman I had so futilely sought.
“How do you do?” said she, pleasantly, as I materialized at her side.
“I am as well as a person can be,” I replied, rubbing my eyes in
confusion, “who suddenly finds himself two hundred and fifty miles away
from the spot where, a half-hour before, he had lain down to rest.”
Miss Andrews laughed. “You see how it is yourself,” she said.
“See how what is myself?” I queried.
“To be the puppet of a person who—writes,” she answered.
“And have I become that?” I asked.
“You have,” she smiled. “That’s why you are here.”
The idea made me nervous, and I pinched my arm to see whether I was there
or not. The result was not altogether reassuring. I never felt the
pinch, and, try as I would, I couldn’t make myself feel it.
“Excuse me,” I said, “for deviating a moment from the matter in hand, but
have you a hat-pin?”
“No,” she answered; “but I have a brooch, if that will serve your
purpose. What do you want it for?”
“I wish to run it into my arm for a moment,” I explained.
“It won’t help you any,” she answered, smiling divinely. “I must have a
word with you; all the hat-pins in the world shall not prevent me, now
that you are here.”
“Well, wait a minute, I beg of you,” I implored. “You intimated a moment
ago that I was a puppet in the hands of some author. Whose? I’ve a
reputation to sustain, and shall not give myself up willingly, unless I
am sure that that person will not trifle with my character.”
“Exactly my position,” said she. “As I said, you can now understand how
it is yourself. But I will tell you in whose hands you are now—you are
in mine. Surely if you had the right to send me tearing down Bellevue
Avenue at Newport behind a runaway horse, and then pursue me in spirit to
the Profile House, I have the right to bring you here, and I have
accordingly done so.”
For a woman’s, her logic was surprisingly convincing. She certainly had
as much right to trifle with my comfort as I had to trifle with hers.
“You are right, Miss Andrews,” I murmured, meekly. “Pray command me as
you will—and deal gently with the erring.”
“I will treat you far better than you treated me,” she said. “So have no
fear—although I have been half minded at times to revenge myself upon you
for that runaway. I could make you dreadfully uncomfortable, for when I
take my pen in hand my imagination in the direction of the horrible is
something awful. I shall be merciful, however, for I believe in the
realistic idea, and I will merely make use of the power my pen possesses
over you to have you act precisely as you would if you were actually
here.”
“Then I am not here?” I queried.
“What do you think?” she asked, archly.
I was about to say that if I weren’t, I wished most heartily that I were;
but I remembered fortunately that it would never do for me to flirt with
Stuart Harley’s heroine, so I contented myself with saying, boldly, “I
don’t know what to think.”
Miss Andrews looked at me for a moment, and then, reaching out her hand,
took mine, pressed it, and relinquished it, saying, “You are a loyal
friend indeed.”
There was nothing flirtatious about the act; it was a simple and highly
pleasing acknowledgment of my forbearance, and it made me somewhat more
comfortable than I had been at any time since my sudden transportation
through the air.
“You remember what I said to you?” she resumed. “That I would cease to
rebel, whatsoever Mr. Harley asked me to do, unless he insisted upon
marrying me to a man I did not love?”
“I do,” I replied. “And, as far as I am aware, you have stuck by your
agreement. Stuart, I doubt not, has by this time got ready for his
finishing-touches.”
“Your surmise is correct,” she answered, sadly; and then, with some
spirit, she added: “And they are finishing-touches with a vengeance. I
have been loyal to my word, in spite of much discomfort. I have
travelled from pillar to post as meekly as a lamb, because it fitted in
with Stuart Harley’s convenience that I should do so. He has taken me
and my friend Mrs. Willard to and through five different summer resorts,
where I have cut the figure he wished me to cut without regard to my own
feelings. I have discussed all sorts of topics, of which in reality I
know nothing, to lend depth to his book. I have snubbed men I really
liked, and appeared to like men I profoundly hated, for his sake. I have
wittingly endured peril for his sake, knowing of course that ultimately
he would get me out of danger; but peril is peril just the same, and to
that extent distracting to the nerves. I have been upset in a canoe at
Bar Harbor, and lost on a mountain in Vermont. I have sprained my ankle
at Saratoga, and fainted at a dance at Lenox; but no complaint have I
uttered—not even the suggestion of a rebellion have I given. Once, I
admit, I was disposed to resent his desire that I should wear a certain
costume, which he, man as he is, could not see would be wofully
unbecoming. Authors have no business to touch on such things. But I
overcame the temptation to rebel, and to please him wore a blue and pink
shirt-waist with a floral silk skirt at a garden-party—I suppose he
thought floral silk was appropriate to the garden; nor did I even show my
mortification to those about me. Nothing was said in the book about its
being Stuart Harley’s taste; it must needs be set down as mine; and while
the pages of Harley’s book contain no criticism of my costume, I know
well enough what all the other women thought about it. Still, I stood
it. I endured also without a murmur the courtship and declaration of
love of a perfect booby of a man; that is to say, he was a booby in the
eyes of a woman—men might like him. I presume that as Mr. Harley has
chosen him to stand for the hero of his book, he must admire him; but I
don’t, and haven’t, and sha’n’t. Yet I have pretended to do so; and
finally, when he proposed marriage to me I meekly answered ‘yes,’ weeping
in the bitterness of my spirit that my promise bound me to do so; and
Stuart Harley, noting those tears, calls them tears of joy!”
“You needn’t have accepted him,” I said, softly. “That wasn’t part of
the bargain.”
“Yes, it was,” she returned, positively; “that is, I regarded it so, and
I must act according to my views of things. What I promised was to
follow his wishes in all things save in marriage to a man I didn’t love.
Getting engaged is not getting married, and as he wished me to get
engaged, so I did, expecting of course that the book would end there, as
it ought to have done, and that therefore no marriage would ever come of
the engagement.”
“Certainly the book should end there, then,” said I. “You have kept to
the letter of your agreement, and nobly,” I added, with enthusiasm, for I
now saw what the poor girl must have suffered. “Harley didn’t try to go
further, did he?”
“He did,” she said, her voice trembling with emotion. “He set the time
and place for the wedding, issued the cards, provided me with a
trousseau—a trousseau based upon his intuitions of what a trousseau ought
to be, and therefore about as satisfactory to a woman of taste as that
floral silk costume of the garden-party; he engaged the organist, chose
my bridesmaids—girls I detested—and finally assembled the guests. The
groom was there at the chancel rail; Mr. Willard, whom he had selected to
give me away, was waiting outside in the lobby, clad in his frock-coat, a
flower in his button-hole, and his arm ready for the bride to lean on;
the minister was behind the rail; the wedding-march was sounding—”
“And you?” I cried, utterly unable to contain myself longer.
“I was speeding past Yonkers on the three-o’clock Saratoga express—bound
hither,” she answered, with a significant toss of her head. “No one but
yourself knows where I am, and I have summoned you to explain my action
before you hear of it from him. I do not wish to be misjudged. Stuart
Harley had his warning, but he chose to ignore it, and he can get out of
the difficulty he has brought upon himself in his own way—possibly he
will destroy the whole book; but I wanted you to know that while he did
not keep the faith, I did.”
I suddenly realized the appalling truth. My own weakness was responsible
for it all. I had not told Harley of my interview and her promise,
feeling that it was not necessary, and fearing its effect upon his pride.
“I may add,” she said, quietly, “that I am bitterly disappointed in your
friend. I was interested in him, and believed in him. Most of my acts
of rebellion—if you can call me rebellious—were prompted by my desire to
keep him true to his creed; and I will tell you what I have never told to
another: I regarded Stuart Harley almost as an ideal man, but this has
changed it all. If he was what I thought him, he could not have acted
with so little conscience as to try to force this match upon me, when he
must have known that I did not love Henry Dunning.”
“He didn’t know,” I said.
“He should have been sure before providing for the ceremony, after
hearing what I had promised you I would and would not do,” said
Marguerite.
“But—I never told him anything about your promise!” I shouted,
desperately. “He has done all this unwittingly.”
“Is that true? Didn’t you tell him?” she cried, eagerly grasping my
hand. Her manner left no doubt in my mind as to who the hero of her
choice would be—and again I sighed to think that it was not I.
“As true as that I stand here,” I said. “I never told him.”
She shrugged her shoulders.
“Oh, well, you know what I mean!” I said, excitedly. “Wherever I do
stand, it’s as true as that I stand there.”
The phrase was awkward, but it fulfilled its purpose.
“Why didn’t you tell him?” she asked.
“Because I didn’t think it necessary. Fact is,” I added, “I had a sort
of notion that if you married anybody in one of Harley’s books, if Harley
had his own way it would be to the man who—who tells the sto—”
A loud noise interrupted my remark and I started up in alarm, and in an
instant I found myself back in my rooms in town once more. The little
mountain house near Lake George, with its interesting and beautiful
guest, had faded from sight, and I realized that somebody was hammering
with a stick upon my door.
“Hello there!” I cried. “What’s wanted?”
“It’s I—Harley,” came Stuart’s voice. “Let me in.”
I unlocked the door and he entered. The brown of Barnegat had gone, and
he was his broken self again.
“Well,” I said, trying to ignore his appearance, which really shocked me,
“how’s the book? Got it done?”
He sank into a chair with a groan.
“Hang the book!—it’s all up with that; I’m going to Chadwick to-morrow
and call the thing off,” he said. “She won’t work—two weeks’ steady
application gone for nothing.”
“Oh, come!” I said; “not as bad as that.”
“Precisely as bad as that,” he retorted. “What can a fellow do if his
heroine disappears as completely as if the earth had opened and swallowed
her up?”
“Gone?” I cried, with difficulty repressing my desire to laugh.
“Completely—searched high and low for her—no earthly use,” he answered.
“I can’t even imagine where she is.”
“All of which, my dear Stuart,” I said, adopting a superior tone for the
moment, “shows that an imagination that is worth something wouldn’t be a
bad possession for a realist, after all. I know where your heroine is.
She is at a little mountain house near Lake George, and she has fled
there to escape your booby of a hero, whom you should have known better
than to force upon a girl like Marguerite Andrews. You’re getting
inartistic, my dear boy. Sacrifice something to the American girl, but
don’t sacrifice your art. Just because the aforesaid girl likes her
stories to end up with a wedding is no reason why you should try to
condemn your heroine to life-long misery.”
Stuart looked at me with a puzzled expression for a full minute.
“How the deuce do you know anything about it?” he asked.
I immediately enlightened him. I told him every circumstance—even my
suspicion as to the hero of her heart, and it seemed to please him.
“Won’t the story go if you stop it with the engagement?” I asked, after
it was all over.
“Yes,” he said, thoughtfully. “But I shall not publish it. If it was
all so distasteful to her as you say, I’d rather destroy it.”
“Don’t do that,” I said. “Change the heroine’s name, and nobody but
ourselves will ever be the wiser.”
“I never thought of that,” said he.
“That’s because you’ve no imagination,” I retorted.
Stuart smiled. “It’s a good idea, and I’ll do it; it won’t be the truest
realism, but I think I am entitled to the leeway on one lapse,” he said.
“You are,” I rejoined. “Lapse for the sake of realism. The man who
never lapses is not real. There never was such a man. You might change
that garden-party costume too. If you can’t think of a better
combination than that, leave it to me. I’ll write to my sister and ask
her to design a decent dress for that occasion.”
“Thanks,” said Stuart, with a laugh. “I accept your offer; but, I say,
what was the name of the little mountain house where you found her?”
“I don’t know,” I replied. “You made such an infernal row battering down
my door that I came away in a hurry and forgot to ask.”
“That is unfortunate,” said Stuart. “I should have liked to go up there
for a while—she might help me correct the proofs, you know.”
That’s what he said, but he didn’t deceive me. He loved her, and I began
again to hope to gracious that Harley had not deceived himself and me,
and that Marguerite Andrews was a bit of real life, and not a work of the
imagination.
At any rate, Harley had an abiding faith in her existence, for the
following Monday night he packed his case and set out for Lake George.
He was going to explore, he said.
X
BY WAY OF EPILOGUE
“_Let_, _down the curtain_, _the farce is done_.”
—RABELAIS.
I SUPPOSE my story ought to end here, since Harley’s rebellious heroine
has finally been subdued for the use of his publishers and the consequent
declaration of dividends for the Harley exchequer; but there was an
epilogue to the little farce, which nearly turned it into tragedy, from
which the principals were saved by nothing short of my own ingenuity.
Harley had fallen desperately in love with Marguerite Andrews, and
Marguerite Andrews had fallen in love with Stuart Harley, and Harley
couldn’t find her. She eluded his every effort, and he began to doubt
that he had drawn her from real life, after all. She had become a
Marjorie Daw to him, and the notion that he must go through life
cherishing a hopeless passion was distracting to him. His book was the
greatest of his successes, which was an additional cause of discomfort to
him, since, knowing as he now did that his study was not a faithful
portrayal of the inner life of his heroine, he felt that the laurels that
were being placed upon his brow had been obtained under false pretences.
“I feel like a hypocrite,” he said, as he read an enthusiastic review of
his little work from the pen of no less a person than Mr. Darrow, the
high-priest of the realistic sect. “I am afraid I shall not be able to
look Darrow in the eye when I meet him at the club.”
“Never fear for that, Stuart,” I said, laughing inwardly at his plight.
“Brazen it out; keep a stiff upper lip, and Darrow will never know. He
has insight, of course, but he can’t see as far in as you and he think.”
“It’s a devilish situation,” he cried, impatiently striding up and down
the room, “that a man of my age should be so hopelessly in love with a
woman he can’t find; and that he can’t find her is such a cruel sarcasm
upon his literary creed! What cursed idiosyncrasy of fate is it that has
brought this thing upon me?”
“It’s the punishment that fits your crime, Harley,” I said. “You’ve been
rather narrow minded in your literary ideas. Possibly it will make a
more tolerant critic of you hereafter, when you come to flay fellows like
Balderstone for venturing to think differently from you as to the sort of
books it is proper to write. He has as much right to the profits he can
derive from his fancy as you have to the emoluments of your insight.”
“I’d take some comfort if I thought that she really loved me,” he said,
mournfully.
“Have no doubt on that score, Stuart,” I said. “She does love you. I
know that. I wish she didn’t.”
“Then why can’t I find her? Why does she hide from me?” he cried,
fortunately ignoring my devoutly expressed wish, which slipped out before
I knew it.
“Because she is a woman,” I replied. “Hasn’t your analytical mind told
you yet that the more a woman loves a man, the harder he’s got to work to
find it out and—and clinch the bargain?”
“I suppose you are right,” he said, gloomily. “But if I were a woman,
and knew I was killing a man by keeping myself in hiding, I’d come out
and show myself at any cost, especially if I loved him.”
“Now you are dealing in imagination, Harley,” I said; “and that never was
your strong point.”
Nevertheless, he was right on one point. The hopelessness of his quest
was killing Harley—not physically exactly, but emotionally, as it were.
It was taking all the heart out of him, and his present state of mind was
far more deplorable than when he was struggling with the book, and
constantly growing worse. He tried every device to find her—the Willards
were conjured up, and knew nothing; Mrs. Corwin and the twins were
brought back from Europe, and refused to yield up the secret; all the
powers of a realistic pen were brought to bear upon her, and yet she
refused utterly to materialize.
Finally, I found it necessary to act myself. I could not stand the sight
of Harley being gradually eaten up by the longing of his own soul, and I
tried my hand at exploration. I had no better success for several weeks;
and then, like an inspiration, the whole thing came to me. “She won’t
come when he summons her, because she loves him. She won’t summon him to
come to her, for the same reason. Why not summon both of them yourself
to a common ground? Embalm them in a little romance of your own. Force
them if need be, but get them there, and so bring them together, and let
them work out their own happiness,” said I to myself. The only
difficulty that presented itself was as to whether or not Marguerite
would allow herself to be forced. It was worth the trial, however, and
fortune favored me. I found her far from rebellious. My pen had hardly
touched paper when she materialized, more bewilderingly beautiful than
ever. I laid the scene of my little essay at Lake-wood, and I found her
sitting down by the water, dreamily gazing out over the lake. In her lap
was Stuart Harley’s book, and daintily pasted on the fly-leaf of this was
the portrait which had appeared in the August issue of _The Literary
Man_, which she had cut out and preserved.
Having provided the heroine with a spot conducive to her comfort, I
hastened to transport Harley to the scene. It was easy to do, seeing how
deeply interested I was in my plot and how willing he was. I got him
there looking like a Greek god, only a trifle more interesting, because
of his sympathy-arousing pallor—the pallor which comes from an undeserved
buffeting at the hands of a mischievous Cupid. I know it well, for I
have observed it several times upon my own countenance. The moment
Harley appeared upon the scene I chose to have Marguerite hastily clasp
the book in her hands, raise it to her lips, and kiss the picture—and it
must have been intensely true to life, for she did it without a moment’s
hesitation, almost anticipating my convenience, throwing an amount of
passion into the act which made my pen fairly hiss as I dipped it into
the ink. Of course Harley could not fail to see it—I had taken care to
arrange all that—and equally of course he could not fail to comprehend
what that kiss meant; could not fail to stop short, with a convulsive
effort to control himself—heroes always do that; could not fail thereby
to attract her attention. After this nothing was more natural than that
she should spring to her feet, “the blushes of a surprised love mantling
her cheeks”; it was equally natural that she should try to run, should
slip, have him catch her arm and save her from falling, and—well, I am
not going to tell the whole story. I have neither the time, the
inclination, nor the talent to lay bare to the world the love-affairs of
my friend. Furthermore, having got them together, I discreetly withdrew,
so that even if I were to try to write up the rest of the courtship, it
would merely result in my telling you how I imagined it progressed, and I
fancy my readers are as well up in matters of that sort as I am. Suffice
it to say, therefore, that in this way I brought Stuart Harley and
Marguerite Andrews together, and that the event justified the means: and
that the other day, when Mr. and Mrs. Harley returned from their
honeymoon, they told me they thought I ought to give up humor and take to
writing love-stories.
[Picture: I am not going to tell the whole story]
“That kissing the picture episode,” said Stuart, looking gratefully at
me, “was an inspiration. To my mind, it was the most satisfactory thing
you’ve ever done.”
“I like that!” cried his wife, with a mischievous twinkle in her eye.
“He didn’t do it. It was I who kissed the picture. He couldn’t have
made me do anything else to save his life.”
“Rebellious to the last!” said I, with a sigh to think that I must now
write the word “Finis” to my little farce.
“Yes,” she answered. “Rebellious to the last. I shall never consent to
be the heroine of a book again, until—”
She paused and looked at Stuart.
“Until what?” he asked, tenderly.
“Until you write your autobiography,” said she. “I have always wanted of
be the heroine of that.”
And throwing down my pen, I discovered I was alone.
* * * * *