I
GEOFFREY BETTON woke rather late--so late that the winter sunlight
sliding across his warm red carpet struck his eyes as he turned on the
pillow.
Strett, the valet, had been in, drawn the bath in the adjoining
dressing-room, placed the crystal and silver cigarette-box at his side,
put a match to the fire, and thrown open the windows to the bright
morning air. It brought in, on the glitter of sun, all the shrill crisp
morning noises--those piercing notes of the American thoroughfare
that seem to take a sharper vibration from the clearness of the medium
through which they pass.
Betton raised himself languidly. That was the voice of Fifth Avenue
below his windows. He remembered that when he moved into his rooms
eighteen months before, the sound had been like music to him: the
complex orchestration to which the tune of his new life was set. Now it
filled him with horror and weariness, since it had become the symbol of
the hurry and noise of that new life. He had been far less hurried in
the old days when he had to be up by seven, and down at the office sharp
at nine. Now that he got up when he chose, and his life had no fixed
framework of duties, the hours hunted him like a pack of blood-hounds.
He dropped back on his pillows with a groan. Yes--not a year ago there
had been a positively sensuous joy in getting out of bed, feeling
under his bare feet the softness of the sunlit carpet, and entering the
shining tiled sanctuary where his great porcelain bath proffered its
renovating flood. But then a year ago he could still call up the horror
of the communal plunge at his earlier lodgings: the listening for other
bathers, the dodging of shrouded ladies in “crimping”-pins, the cold
wait on the landing, the reluctant descent into a blotchy tin bath, and
the effort to identify one’s soap and nail-brush among the promiscuous
implements of ablution. That memory had faded now, and Betton saw only
the dark hours to which his blue and white temple of refreshment formed
a kind of glittering antechamber. For after his bath came his breakfast,
and on the breakfast-tray his letters. His letters!
He remembered--and _that_ memory had not faded!--the thrill with which
he had opened the first missive in a strange feminine hand: the letter
beginning: “I wonder if you’ll mind an unknown reader’s telling you all
that your book has been to her?”
_ Mind?_ Ye gods, he minded now! For more than a year after
the publication of “Diadems and Faggots” the letters, the inane
indiscriminate letters of condemnation, of criticism, of interrogation,
had poured in on him by every post. Hundreds of unknown readers had told
him with unsparing detail all that his book had been to them. And the
wonder of it was, when all was said and done, that it had really been so
little--that when their thick broth of praise was strained through the
author’s anxious vanity there remained to him so small a sediment of
definite specific understanding! No--it was always the same thing, over
and over and over again--the same vague gush of adjectives, the same
incorrigible tendency to estimate his effort according to each writer’s
personal preferences, instead of regarding it as a work of art, a thing
to be measured by objective standards!
He smiled to think how little, at first, he had felt the vanity of it
all. He had found a savour even in the grosser evidences of popularity:
the advertisements of his book, the daily shower of “clippings,” the
sense that, when he entered a restaurant or a theatre, people nudged
each other and said “That’s Betton.” Yes, the publicity had been sweet
to him--at first. He had been touched by the sympathy of his fellow-men:
had thought indulgently of the world, as a better place than the
failures and the dyspeptics would acknowledge. And then his success
began to submerge him: he gasped under the thickening shower of letters.
His admirers were really unappeasable. And they wanted him to do such
preposterous things--to give lectures, to head movements, to be tendered
receptions, to speak at banquets, to address mothers, to plead for
orphans, to go up in balloons, to lead the struggle for sterilized milk.
They wanted his photograph for literary supplements, his autograph for
charity bazaars, his name on committees, literary, educational,
and social; above all, they wanted his opinion on everything: on
Christianity, Buddhism, tight lacing, the drug-habit, democratic
government, female suffrage and love. Perhaps the chief benefit of this
demand was his incidentally learning from it how few opinions he really
had: the only one that remained with him was a rooted horror of all
forms of correspondence. He had been unutterably thankful when the
letters began to fall off.
“Diadems and Faggots” was now two years old, and the moment was at hand
when its author might have counted on regaining the blessed shelter of
oblivion--if only he had not written another book! For it was the
worst part of his plight that his first success had goaded him to
the perpetration of this particular folly--that one of the incentives
(hideous thought!) to his new work had been the desire to extend and
perpetuate his popularity. And this very week the book was to come out,
and the letters, the cursed letters, would begin again!
Wistfully, almost plaintively, he contemplated the breakfast-tray with
which Strett presently appeared. It bore only two notes and the morning
journals, but he knew that within the week it would groan under its
epistolary burden. The very newspapers flung the fact at him as he
opened them.