THE deluge began punctually on the Thursday, and Vyse, arriving as
punctually, had an impressive pile of letters to attack. Betton, on his
way to the Park for a ride, came into the library, smoking the cigarette
of indolence, to look over his secretary’s shoulder.
“How many of ‘em? Twenty? Good Lord! It’s going to be worse than
‘Diadems.’ I’ve just had my first quiet breakfast in two years--time
to read the papers and loaf. How I used to dread the sight of my
letter-box! Now I sha’n’t know I have one.”
He leaned over Vyse’s chair, and the secretary handed him a letter.
“Here’s rather an exceptional one--lady, evidently. I thought you might
want to answer it yourself--”
“Exceptional?” Betton ran over the mauve pages and tossed them down.
“Why, my dear man, I get hundreds like that. You’ll have to be pretty
short with her, or she’ll send her photograph.”
He clapped Vyse on the shoulder and turned away, humming a tune. “Stay
to luncheon,” he called back gaily from the threshold.
After luncheon Vyse insisted on showing a few of his answers to the
first batch of letters. “If I’ve struck the note I won’t bother you
again,” he urged; and Betton groaningly consented.
“My dear fellow, they’re beautiful--too beautiful. I’ll be let in for a
correspondence with every one of these people.”
Vyse, at this, meditated for a while above a blank sheet. “All
right--how’s this?” he said, after another interval of rapid writing.
Betton glanced over the page. “By George--by George! Won’t she _see_
it?” he exulted, between fear and rapture.
“It’s wonderful how little people see,” said Vyse reassuringly.
The letters continued to pour in for several weeks after the appearance
of “Abundance.” For five or six blissful days Betton did not even have
his mail brought to him, trusting to Vyse to single out his personal
correspondence, and to deal with the rest according to their agreement.
During those days he luxuriated in a sense of wild and lawless freedom;
then, gradually, he began to feel the need of fresh restraints to break,
and learned that the zest of liberty lies in the escape from specific
obligations. At first he was conscious only of a vague hunger, but in
time the craving resolved into a shame-faced desire to see his letters.
“After all, I hated them only because I had to answer them”; and he told
Vyse carelessly that he wished all his letters submitted to him before
the secretary answered them.
At first he pushed aside those beginning: “I have just laid down
‘Abundance’ after a third reading,” or: “Every day for the last month
I have been telephoning my bookseller to know when your novel would be
out.” But little by little the freshness of his interest revived, and
even this stereotyped homage began to arrest his eye. At last a day came
when he read all the letters, from the first word to the last, as he had
done when “Diadems and Faggots” appeared. It was really a pleasure to
read them, now that he was relieved of the burden of replying: his new
relation to his correspondents had the glow of a love-affair unchilled
by the contingency of marriage.
One day it struck him that the letters were coming in more slowly and in
smaller numbers. Certainly there had been more of a rush when “Diadems
and Faggots” came out. Betton began to wonder if Vyse were exercising
an unauthorized discrimination, and keeping back the communications
he deemed least important. This sudden conjecture carried the
novelist straight to his library, where he found Vyse bending over the
writing-table with his usual inscrutable pale smile. But once there,
Betton hardly knew how to frame his question, and blundered into an
enquiry for a missing invitation.
“There’s a note--a personal note--I ought to have had this morning. Sure
you haven’t kept it back by mistake among the others?”
Vyse laid down his pen. “The others? But I never keep back any.”
Betton had foreseen the answer. “Not even the worst twaddle about my
book?” he suggested lightly, pushing the papers about.
“Nothing. I understood you wanted to go over them all first.”
“Well, perhaps it’s safer,” Betton conceded, as if the idea were new to
him. With an embarrassed hand he continued to turn over the letters at
Vyse’s elbow.
“Those are yesterday’s,” said the secretary; “here are to-day’s,” he
added, pointing to a meagre trio.
“H’m--only these?” Betton took them and looked them over lingeringly.
“I don’t see what the deuce that chap means about the first part of
‘Abundance’ ‘certainly justifying the title’--do you?”
Vyse was silent, and the novelist continued irritably: “Damned cheek,
his writing, if he doesn’t like the book. Who cares what he thinks about
it, anyhow?”
And his morning ride was embittered by the discovery that it was
unexpectedly disagreeable to have Vyse read any letters which did not
express unqualified praise of his books. He began to fancy there was
a latent rancour, a kind of baffled sneer, under Vyse’s manner; and he
decided to return to the practice of having his mail brought straight to
his room. In that way he could edit the letters before his secretary saw
them.
Vyse made no comment on the change, and Betton was reduced to
wondering whether his imperturbable composure were the mask of complete
indifference or of a watchful jealousy. The latter view being more
agreeable to his employer’s self-esteem, the next step was to conclude
that Vyse had not forgotten the episode of “The Lifted Lamp,” and would
naturally take a vindictive joy in any unfavourable judgments passed on
his rival’s work. This did not simplify the situation, for there was
no denying that unfavourable criticisms preponderated in Betton’s
correspondence. “Abundance” was neither meeting with the unrestricted
welcome of “Diadems and Faggots,” nor enjoying the alternative of an
animated controversy: it was simply found dull, and its readers said so
in language not too tactfully tempered by regretful comparisons with its
predecessor. To withhold unfavourable comments from Vyse was, therefore,
to make it appear that correspondence about the book had died out; and
its author, mindful of his unguarded predictions, found this even more
embarrassing. The simplest solution would be to get rid of Vyse; and to
this end Betton began to address his energies.
One evening, finding himself unexpectedly disengaged, he asked Vyse
to dine; it had occurred to him that, in the course of an after-dinner
chat, he might delicately hint his feeling that the work he had offered
his friend was unworthy so accomplished a hand.
Vyse surprised him by a momentary hesitation. “I may not have time to
dress.”
Betton stared. “What’s the odds? We’ll dine here--and as late as you
like.”
Vyse thanked him, and appeared, punctually at eight, in all the
shabbiness of his daily wear. He looked paler and more shyly truculent
than usual, and Betton, from the height of his florid stature, said to
himself, with the sudden professional instinct for “type”: “He might be
an agent of something--a chap who carries deadly secrets.”
Vyse, it was to appear, did carry a deadly secret; but one less
perilous to society than to himself. He was simply poor--inexcusably,
irremediably poor. Everything failed him, had always failed him:
whatever he put his hand to went to bits.
This was the confession that, reluctantly, yet with a kind of
white-lipped bravado, he flung at Betton in answer to the latter’s
tentative suggestion that, really, the letter-answering job wasn’t worth
bothering him with--a thing that any type-writer could do.
“If you mean you’re paying me more than it’s worth, I’ll take less,”
Vyse rushed out after a pause.
“Oh, my dear fellow--” Betton protested, flushing.
“What _do_ you mean, then? Don’t I answer the letters as you want them
answered?”
Betton anxiously stroked his silken ankle. “You do it beautifully,
too beautifully. I mean what I say: the work’s not worthy of you. I’m
ashamed to ask you--”
“Oh, hang shame,” Vyse interrupted. “Do you know why I said I shouldn’t
have time to dress to-night? Because I haven’t any evening clothes. As
a matter of fact, I haven’t much but the clothes I stand in. One thing
after another’s gone against me; all the infernal ingenuities of chance.
It’s been a slow Chinese torture, the kind where they keep you alive to
have more fun killing you.” He straightened himself with a sudden blush.
“Oh, I’m all right now--getting on capitally. But I’m still walking
rather a narrow plank; and if I do your work well enough--if I take your
idea--”
Betton stared into the fire without answering. He knew next to nothing
of Vyse’s history, of the mischance or mis-management that had brought
him, with his brains and his training, to so unlikely a pass. But a pang
of compunction shot through him as he remembered the manuscript of “The
Lifted Lamp” gathering dust on his table for half a year.
“Not that it would have made any earthly difference--since he’s
evidently never been able to get the thing published.” But this
reflection did not wholly console Betton, and he found it impossible, at
the moment, to tell Vyse that his services were not needed.