(From _The Smart Set_)
When I sit down to write of Shelby--Lucien Atterwood Shelby, the author,
whose romantic books you must have read, or at least heard of--I find
myself at some difficulty to know where to begin. I knew him so well at
one time--so little at another; and men, like houses, change with the
years. Today's tenant in some old mansion may not view the garden as you
did long ago; and the friend of a man's later years may not hold the
same opinions the acquaintance of an earlier period once formed.
I think it best to begin with the time I met Shelby on the newspaper
where we both, as cub reporters, worked. That was exactly twenty years
ago.
The boys didn't take to Shelby. He was too dapper, too good-looking, and
he always carried a stick, as he called it; we were unregenerate enough
to say cane. And, most loathsome of all, he had an English
accent--though he was born in Illinois, we afterwards learned. You can
imagine how this accent nettled us, for we were all unassuming
lads--chaps, Shelby would have called us--and we detested "side."
But how this new acquisition to the staff could write! It bothered us to
see him hammer out a story in no time, for most of us had to work over
our copy, and we made Hanscher, the old managing editor, raving mad
sometimes with our dilatoriness. I am afraid that in those sadly distant
days we frequented too many bars, and no doubt we wasted some of our
energy and decreased our efficiency. But every young reporter drank more
or less; and when Shelby didn't mix with us, and we discovered that he
took red wine with his dinner at Mouqin's--invariably alone--we hated
him more than ever.
I remember well how Stanton, the biggest-hearted fellow the Lord ever
let live, announced one night in the copy room that he was going to get
Shelby tight or die in the attempt, and how loud a laugh went up at his
expense.
"It can't be done," was the verdict.
The man hadn't enough humanity, we figured. He was forever dramatizing
himself, forever attitudinizing. And those various suits of his--how
they agonized us! We were slouches, I know, with rumpled hair and, I
fear not overparticular as to our linen during the greater part of the
week. Some of us had families to support, even in those young days--or
at least a father or a mother up the State to whom we had to send a
monthly cheque out of our meagre wages.
I can't say that we were envious of Shelby because of his
single-blessedness--he was only twenty-two at that time; but it hurt us
to know that he didn't really have to work in Herald Square, and that he
had neat bachelor quarters down in Gramercy Park, and a respectable club
or two, and week-ended almost where he chose. His blond hair was always
beautifully plastered over a fine brow, and he would never soil his
forehead by wearing a green shade when he bent over his typewriter late
at night. That would have robbed him of some of his dignity, made him
look anything but the English gentleman he was so anxious to appear.
I think he looked upon us as just so much dust beneath his feet. He
would say "Good evening" in a way that irritated every one of us--as
though the words had to be got out somehow, and he might as well say
them and get them over with, and as though he dreaded any reply. You
couldn't have slapped him on the back even if you had felt the impulse;
he wasn't the to-be-slapped kind. And of course that means that he
wouldn't have slapped any of us, either. And he was the type you
couldn't call by his first name.
Looking back, I sometimes think of all that he missed in the way of
good-fellowship; for we were the most decent staff in New York, as
honest and generous and warmly human a bunch as anyone could hope to
find. We were ambitious, too, mostly college men, and we had that
passion for good writing, perhaps not in ourselves, but in others, which
is so often the newspaper man's special endowment. We were swift to
recognize a fine passage in one another's copy; and praise from old
Hanscher meant a royal little dinner at Engel's with mugs of cream ale,
and an hour's difference in our arrival at the office next day. Oh,
happy, vanished times! Magic moments that peeped through the grayness of
hard work, and made the whole game so worth while.
Well, Stanton won out. He told us about it afterwards.
On the pretext that he wanted to ask Shelby's advice about some
important personal matter, he urged him to let him give him as good a
meal as Mouqin could provide, with a certain vintage of French wine
which he knew Shelby was fond of. There were cocktails to begin with,
though Shelby had intimated more than once that he abominated the
bourgeois American habit of indulging in such poison. And there was an
onion soup _au gratin_, a casserole, and artichokes, and special coffee,
and I don't know what else.
"He got positively human," Stanton put it, later, as we clustered round
him in the copy room. (Shelby hadn't turned up.) "I don't like him, you
know; and at first it was hard to get through the soup; but I acted up,
gave him a song and dance about my mythical business matter--I think he
feared I was going to 'touch him'--and finally got a little tipsy
myself. From then on it was easy. It was like a game."
It seems that afterwards, arm in arm, they walked out into Sixth Avenue
in the soft snow--it was winter, and the Burgundy had done the
trick--and Shelby, his inhibitions completely gone, began to weep.
"Why are you crying?" Stanton asked, his own voice thick.
"Because you fellers don't like me!" Shelby choked out.
The accent and the stick went together into the gutter, Stanton
laughingly told us. An immortal moment! The poseur with his mask off, at
last! Beneath all that grease-paint and charlatanism there was a solid,
suffering, lonely man; and even in his own dazed condition Stanton was
quick to recognize it, and to rejoice in the revelation.
Moreover, he was flattered, as we always are, when our judgments have
proved right. Stanton had deliberately set out to find the real
Shelby--and he had.
"A man who can write as he can has something in him--that I know," he
had said generously more than once. He made us see that he had not been
wrong.
But it was not the real Shelby that returned to the office. That is
where he missed his great opportunity. Back strutted the pompous,
stained-glass, pitiful imitation of an Englishman, in a louder suit than
ever, and with a big new cane that made the old one look flimsy.
We despised him more than ever. For we would have taken him within our
little circle gladly after Stanton's sure report; and there would have
been chance after chance for him to make good with us. But no; he
preferred the pose of aloofness, and his face betrayed that he was
ashamed of that one night's weakness. He never alluded to his evening
with Stanton; and when Minckle, who was certain the ice had been broken,
put his arm around his shoulder the next day, he looked and drawled,
"I say, old top, I wish you wouldn't."
Of course that finished him with us.
"He can go to the devil," we said.
We wanted him fired, obliterated; but the very next evening there was a
murder in Harlem, and old Hanscher sent Shelby to cover it, and his
first-page story was the talk of the town. We were sports enough to tell
him what a wonderful thing he had done. He only smiled, said "Thanks,"
and went on at his typewriter.