It was shortly after this that Marguerite Davis assailed New York with
her beauty--a young actress with a wealth of hair and the kind of eyes
you dream of. She captured the critics and the public alike. Her name
was on every lip and the Broadway theater where she starred in "The
Great Happiness" was packed to the doors. Such acclaim was never
received by any young woman. We heard that Shelby went every night for a
week to see some part of the play--he couldn't, because of his
assignments, view the entire performance; and it was Minckle who, after
the piece had been running a month in New York, found a photograph of
the star in the top drawer of Shelby's desk. He had gone there for a
match--you know how informal we newspaper men are. Moreover, the picture
had been autographed.
"I wish you wouldn't touch that." It was Shelby's voice. Of course he
had come in at the very moment poor Minckle made his startling
discovery.
With quiet dignity, and with a flush on his cheeks, Shelby took the
photograph from Minckle's hand, and replaced it in the drawer.
"I always keep matches on top of my desk--when I have any," he said, in
a voice like ice.
There was no denying his justified anger. No man likes to have his heart
secrets disclosed; and Shelby knew that even the Associated Press could
not give more publicity to the discovery than Minckle could. He
dreaded--and justly, I think--the wagging of heads that would be noticed
from now on, the pitiless interest in his amour.
Stanton was the only one of us, except myself, later, who ever was
privileged, if you care to put it that way, to visit Shelby's
apartment--diggings, Shelby always called them. There, on the walls, he
told us, were innumerable photographs of Miss Davis, in every
conceivable pose. They looked out at one from delicate and heavy frames;
and some were stuck informally in the mirror of his dresser, as though
casually placed there to lighten up the beginning of each day, or
perhaps because there was no other space for them.
"You must know her awfully well," Stanton ventured once.
"I have never met the lady," was all Shelby said; and Stanton told me
there was a sigh that followed the remark.
"What!" this full-blooded young American reporter cried, astounded.
"You've never met this girl, and yet you have all these--all these
pictures of her?"
"I don't want to lose my dream, my illusion," was Shelby's answer.
A man who would not meet the toast of Broadway--and Fifth Avenue, for
that matter--if he could, was, to Stanton and the rest of us,
inconceivable.
It was at the close of that winter that Shelby left us. Some there were
who said he was suffering from a broken heart. At any rate, he began to
free-lance; and the first of those fascinating romantic short stories
that he did so well appeared in one of the magazines. There was always a
poignant note in them. They dealt with lonely men who brooded in secret
on some unattainable woman of dreams. This sounds precious; but the
tales were saved from utter banality by a certain richness of style, a
flow and fervour that carried the reader on through twenty pages without
his knowing it. They struck a fresh note, they were filled with the fire
of youth, and the scenes were always laid in some far country, which
gave them, oddly enough, a greater reality. Shelby could pile on
adjectives as no other writer of his day, I always thought, and he could
weave a tapestry, or create an embroidery of words that was almost
magical.
He made a good deal of money, I believe, during those first few months
after he went away from Herald Square. Apparently he had no friends,
and, as I have said, invariably he seemed to dine alone at Mouqin's, at
a corner table. Afterwards, he would go around to the Café Martin, then
in its glory, where Fifth Avenue and Broadway meet, for his coffee and a
golden liqueur and a cigarette. That flaming room, which we who were
fortunate enough to have our youth come to a glorious fruition in 1902,
attracted us all like a magnet. Here absinthe dripped into tall glasses,
and the seats around the sides, the great mirrors and the golden
curtains, which fluttered in summer and remained austerely in place in
winter, made a little heaven for us all, and life one long cry of joy.
Here women, like strange flowers that bloomed only at night, smiled and
laughed the hours away; and the low whirr of Broadway drifted in, while
the faint thunder of Fifth Avenue lent an added mystery to the place, as
though the troubled world were shut out but could be reached again in an
instant, if you wished to reach it.
Shelby liked to be seen in such places. He said he felt that he was on
the Continent, and he liked to get nervously excited over a liqueur and
a mazagan of coffee, and then flee to his cozy lodgings in Gramercy Park
and produce page after page of closely written manuscript.
The pictures of Marguerite Davis remained a part of the furnishings of
those rooms of his--that we heard; and I knew it directly shortly after
this. For I, too, left the newspaper, and went into the magazine-editing
game. I found a berth on that same popular periodical to which Shelby
was then contributing his matchless stories; and part of my job was to
see him frequently, take him to luncheon or dinner, talk over his future
plans with him, discuss the possibility of his doing a novelette which
later he could expand into a full-sized volume and thereby gain an added
vogue.
It was during this period that I came to know him so well--came to know
him, that is, as intimately as he wished to be known. Always there was a
cloak of reserve which he put on with me, as with every one. I tried to
broaden his horizon, to have him meet other men--and women. He would go
with me once or twice to some party, for he was clever enough to see
that he must not offend me, just as he knew that I must not offend him.
We were too valuable to each other, and in that odd mixing up of our
affairs in this world here we were, after so brief an interval, in the
relationship of editor and contributor.
He knew, however, that I had always admired his literary gifts; but I
confess that the feet of clay began to creep into view when he told me,
one night at the Martin, that his favorite novelist of all time
was--Marion Crawford! That explained so much to me that I had not
understood before. I smiled tolerantly, for my own taste ran much
higher; and I seemed from then on to sense a certain cheapness in
Shelby's mind, as if I had lifted the cloth over a chair and discovered
cherrywood where I had hoped to find Chippendale. It is through such
marginalia that we come to know people. I could not reconcile Shelby's
delicate style with so forlorn a taste for other literary dishes. I said
then that he would never become a great writer. He would simply mark
time, artistically speaking, after reaching a certain point. Thereafter
everything he produced would be but repetition.
I was right. His virgin novel proved a rank failure. The man could do
nothing sustained. He was essentially a person of brilliant flashes. The
book, called, as you may remember, "The Shadow and the Substance," was a
_tour de force_ in vapid writing, and it almost severed his literary
jugular vein. All the reviewers, delighted with a chance to play upon
his title, said it contained far more shadow than substance.
Shelby had had easy sailing up till that time. His pride was hurt by the
reception of the book; and he told me he was going to flee to
London--which he straightway did. Then I heard of him in his beloved
England; and from there he sent me several short manuscripts filled with
his old grace and charm of style--a sort of challenge to his critics.
But always we waited for the story with a punch; for the story that
would show there was a soul in the fellow. These pale blossoms were all
very well--as magazine bait to capture the young girl reader of our
smart periodical; but too many of them cloyed. It was as though you
served a banquet and made _hors d'oeuvres_ the main dish.
Yet his popularity with our readers was tremendous. Letters, addressed
in feminine handwriting, came to him in our care every day, from all
over the land; and he was no doubt flattered by silly women who were
fascinated even more by his fiction after we printed his romantic
photograph. For he had a profile that captivated many a girl, eyes that
seemed to speak volumes; and no doubt there were numerous boudoirs that
contained his picture, just as his rooms contained so many likenesses of
Marguerite Davis.
I next heard of him in Egypt, where he said he was gathering colour for
a new romance. He stayed away several months, and then blew in one
morning, better-looking than ever, brown and clear-eyed. He had been all
over the Orient, and he said his note-book was full of material. Now he
could sit down quietly and write. He had so much to put on paper, he
told me.
But he hadn't. He dreamed adventure, he craved adventure; but nothing
ever happened to him. His trips were invariably on glassy seas. He
traveled by himself--he hadn't even one chum whom he cared to have share
his joys; and though he penetrated the jungles of Africa at one time,
the lions remained mysteriously in hiding, and the jaguars didn't even
growl.
I remember that this came out one night at a dinner party he and I went
to at the home of a friend of mine. A Captain Diehart was there--a most
delightful man of fifty or so, who had just returned from a trip around
the world; and he fascinated us all by his lively recounting of certain
dramatic happenings in the Far East. Zulus had captured him once, and he
had come perilously close to death on so many occasions that it was a
miracle that he should be sitting here now, sipping his champagne and
smoking his cigarette.
On the way home--I had a habit of seeing Shelby to his doorstep during
this period--he turned to me and said:
"Isn't it strange, Allison, that nothing of that kind has ever happened
to me? I move about all the while, I look eagerly for excitement, I hope
always for the supreme adventure--and I never find it. Yet I love
romance. Why does it never come to me?"
I was silent for a few paces. I felt so sorry for him. For once he had
told me what was in his heart.
"You're in love with love," I said finally. "That's what's the matter
with your work, Shelby, if you'll let me say so. I wonder if you have
really loved a woman--or a friend, even? If the great thing should come
into your life, wouldn't it illuminate your whole literary expression?
Wouldn't you write eighty per cent better. Wouldn't everything you do be
sharpened splendidly alive? Why don't you meet--Miss Davis?"
"My God, man!" he let out. "Won't you allow me to keep at least one
dream?"
He tried to be tragic right there in the street; but I read him like a
book.
"Don't be an ass, old fellow. You're not a poet, you know--you're a
happy dabbler in prose; but you've got to wake up--you've got to have
some vital experience before you can hope to reach the top. This
vicarious loving isn't worth a tin whistle. You're like a soldier in the
barracks compared to one who's in the thick of the fight. Wake up, shake
yourself, get out of your shell, and see how much greater you'll be!"
He didn't like that. He never liked the truth. How few of us do!
The next thing I knew he was off for Japan, and he sent me pretty
post-cards of geisha-girls, and tried to indicate that he was having the
time of his life, at last. But there was something false--I cannot quite
express it--about his messages. They didn't ring true at all. He knew
it, and he knew that I knew it.