The sun shines alike upon the just and the unjust, and it would seem to
follow that all men should be judged by the same measure in the more
important actions and emotions of their lives. To apply the principle of
a double standard to mankind is to run the risk of producing some very
curious results in morality. And yet, there are undoubtedly cases in
which a man has a claim to special consideration and, as it were, to a
trial by a special jury. There have been many great statesmen whose
private practice in regard to financial transactions has been more than
shady, and there have been others whose private lives have been
spotless, but whose political doings have been unscrupulous in the
extreme. There are professions and careers in which it is sufficient to
act precisely as all others engaged in the same occupation would act,
and in which the most important element of success is a happy faculty of
keeping the brain power at the same unvarying pressure, neither high nor
low, but always ready to be used, and in such a state that it may always
be relied upon to perform the same amount of work in a given time. There
are other occupations in which there are necessarily moments of enormous
activity at uncertain intervals, followed by periods of total relaxation
and rest. One might divide all careers roughly into two classes, and
call the one the continuous class and the other the intermittent. The
profession of the novelist falls within the latter division. Very few
men or women who have written well have succeeded in reducing the
exercise of their art to a necessary daily function of the body. Very
few intellectual machines can be made to bear the strain of producing
works of imagination in regular quantities throughout many years at an
unvarying rate, day after day. Neither the brain nor the body will bear
it, and if the attempt be made either the one or the other, or both,
will ultimately suffer. Without being necessarily spasmodic, the
storyteller’s activity is almost unavoidably intermittent. There are men
who can take up the pen and drive it during seven, eight and even nine
hours a day for six weeks or two months and who, having finished their
story, either fall into a condition of indolent apathy until the next
book has to be written, or return at once to some favourite occupation
which produces no apparent result, and of which the public has never
heard. There are many varieties of the genus author. There is the sailor
author, who only comes ashore to write his book and puts to sea again as
soon as it is in the publisher’s hands. There is the hunting author, who
as in the case of Anthony Trollope, keeps his body in such condition
that he can do a little good work every day of the year, a great and
notable exception to the rule. There is the student author, whose
laborious work of exegesis will never be heard of, but who interrupts it
from time to time in order to produce a piece of brilliant fiction,
returning to his Sanscrit each time with renewed interest and industry.
There is the musical author, whose preference would have led him to be a
professional musician, but who had not quite enough talent for it, or
not quite enough technical facility or whose musical education began a
little too late. There is the adventurous author, who shoots in Africa
or has a habit of spending the winter in eastern Siberia. There is the
artistic author, who may be found in out-of-the-way towns in Italy,
patiently copying old pictures, as though his life depended upon his
accuracy, or sketching ragged boys and girls in very ragged
water-colour. There is the social author—and he is not always the least
successful in his profession—who is a favourite everywhere, who can
dance and sing and act, and who regards the occasional production of a
novel as an episode in his life. There is the author who prepares
himself many months beforehand for what he intends to do by frequenting
the society, whether high or low, which he wishes to depict, who writes
his book in one month of the year and spends the other eleven in
observing the manners and customs of men and women. There is the author
who lives in solitary places and evolves his characters out of his inner
consciousness and who occasionally descends, manuscript in hand, from
his inaccessible fastnesses and ravages all the coasts of Covent Garden,
Henrietta Street and the Strand, until he has got his price and
disappears as suddenly as he came, taking his gold with him, no man
knows whither. There is the author whom no man can boast of having ever
seen, who never answers a letter, nor gives an autograph, nor lets any
one but his publisher know where he lives, but whose three volumes
appear punctually twice a year and whose name is familiar in many
mouths. Unless he is to be found described in an encyclopædia you will
never know whether he is old or young, black or grey, good-looking or
ugly, straight or hunchbacked. He is to you a vague, imaginary
personage, surrounded by a pillar of cloud. In reality he is perhaps a
fat little man of fifty, who wears gold-rimmed spectacles and has
discovered that he can only write if he lives in one particular
Hungarian village with a name that baffles pronunciation, and whose
chief interest in life lies in the study of socialism or the cholera
microbe. Then again, there is the fighting author, grim, grey and tough
as a Toledo blade, who has ridden through many a hard-fought field in
many lands and has smelled more gunpowder in his time than most great
generals, out of sheer love for the stuff. There is also the pacific
author, who frequents peace congresses and makes speeches in favour of a
general disarming of all nations. There are countless species and
varieties of the genus. There is even the poet author, who writes
thousands of execrable verses in secret and produces exquisite romances
in prose only because he can do nothing else.
If we admit that novels, on the whole, are a good to society at large,
as most people, excepting authors themselves, are generally ready to
admit, we grant at the same time that they must be produced by
individuals possessing the necessary talents and characteristics of
intelligence. And if it is shown that a majority of these individuals do
their work in a somewhat erratic fashion, and behave somewhat
erratically while they are doing it, such defects must be condoned, at
least, if not counted to them for positive righteousness. With many of
them the appearance of a new idea within the field of their mental
vision is equivalent to a command to write, which they are neither able
nor anxious to resist; and, if they are men of talent, it is very hard
for them to turn their attention to anything else until the idea is
expressed on paper. Let them not be thought heartless or selfish if they
sometimes seem to care nothing for what happens around them while they
are subject to the imperious domination of the new idea. They are
neither the one nor the other. They are simply unconscious, like a man
in a cataleptic trance. The plainest language conveys no meaning to
their abstracted comprehension, the most startling sights produce no
impression upon their sense; they are in another world, living and
talking with unseen creations of their own fancy and for the time being
they are not to be considered as ordinary human beings, nor judged by
the standard to which other men are subject.
It would not therefore be just to say that during the days which
followed the breaking off of his engagement with Mamie Trimm, George
Wood was cruel or unfeeling because he was wholly unconscious of her
existence throughout the greater part of each twenty-four hours. By a
coincidence which he would certainly not have invoked, a train of
thought had begun its course in his brain within an hour or two of the
catastrophe, and he was powerless to stop himself in the pursuit of it
until he had reached the end. During nine whole days he never left the
house, and scarcely went out of his room except to eat his meals, which
he did in a summary fashion without wasting time in superfluous
conversation. On the morning of the tenth day he knew that he was at the
last chapter and he sat down at his table in that state of mind to which
a very young author is brought by a week and a half of unceasing fatigue
and excitement. The room swam with him, and he could see nothing
distinctly except his paper, the point of his pen, and the moving
panorama in his brain, of which it was essential to catch every detail
before it had passed into the outer darkness from which ideas cannot be
brought back. His hand was icy cold, moist and unsteady and his face was
pale, the eyelids dark and swollen, and the veins on the temples
distended. He moved his feet nervously as he wrote, shrugged his left
shoulder with impatience at the slightest hesitation about the use of a
word, and his usually imperturbable features translated into expression
every thought, as rapidly as he could put it into words with his pen.
The house might have burned over his head, and he would have gone on
writing until the paper under his hand was on fire. No ordinary noise
would have reached his ears, conscious only of the scratching of the
steel point upon the smooth sheet. He could have worked as well in the
din of a public room in a hotel, or in the crowded hall of a great
railway station, as in the silence and solitude of his own chamber. He
had reached the point of abstraction at which nothing is of the
slightest consequence to the writer provided that the ink will flow and
the paper will not blot. Like a skilled swordsman, he was conscious only
of his enemy’s eye and of the state of the weapons. The weapons were
pen, ink and paper, and the enemy was the idea to be pursued, overtaken,
pierced and pinned down before it could assume another shape, or escape
again into chaos. The sun rose above the little paved brick court below
his window, and began to shine into the window itself. Then a storm came
up and the sky turned suddenly black, while the wind whistled through
the yard with that peculiarly unnatural sound which it makes in great
cities, so different from its sighing and moaning and roaring amongst
trees and rocks. The first snowflakes were whirled against the panes of
glass and slid down to the frame in half-transparent patches. The wind
sank again, and the snow fluttered silently down like the unwinding of
an endless lace curtain from above. Then, the flakes were suddenly
illuminated by a burst of sunshine and melted as they fell and turned to
bright drops of water in the air, and then vanished again, and the small
piece of sky above the great house on the other side of the yard was
once more clear and blue, as a sapphire that has been dipped in pure
water. It was afternoon, and George was unconscious of the many changes
of the day, unconscious that he had not eaten nor drunk since morning,
and that he had even forgotten to smoke. One after another the pages
were numbered, filled and tossed aside, as he went on, never raising his
head nor looking away from his work lest he should lose something of the
play upon which all his faculties were inwardly concentrated, and of
which it was his business to transcribe every word, and to note every
passing attitude and gesture of the actors who were performing for his
benefit.
Some one knocked at the door, gently at first and then more loudly.
Then, receiving no answer, the person’s footsteps could be heard
retreating towards the landing. The firing of a cannon in the room would
hardly have made George turn his head at that moment, much less the
rapping of a servant’s knuckles upon a wooden panel. Several minutes
elapsed, and then heavier footsteps were heard again, and the latch was
turned and the door moved noiselessly on its hinges. Jonah Wood’s
iron-grey head appeared in the opening. George had heard nothing and
during several seconds the old gentleman watched him curiously. He had
the greatest consideration for his son’s privacy when at work, though he
could not readily understand the terribly disturbing effect of an
interruption upon a brain so much more sensitively organised than his
own. Now, however, the case was serious, and George must be interrupted,
cost what it might. He was evidently unconscious that any one was in the
room, and his back was turned as he sat. Jonah Wood resolved to be
cautious.
“George!” he whispered, rather hoarsely. But George did not hear.
There was nothing to be done but to cross the room and rouse him. The
old man stepped as softly as he could upon the uncarpeted wooden floor,
and placed himself between the light and the writer. George looked up
and started violently, so that his pen flew into the air and fell upon
the boards. At the same time he uttered a short, sharp cry, neither an
oath nor exclamation, but a sound such as a man might make who is
unexpectedly and painfully wounded in battle. Then he saw his father and
laughed nervously.
“You frightened me. I did not see you come in,” he said quickly.
“I am sorry,” said his father, not understanding at all how a man
usually calm and courageous could be so easily startled. “It is rather
important, or I would not interrupt you. Mr. Sherrington Trimm is down
stairs.”
“What does he want?” George asked vaguely and looking as though he had
forgotten who Sherrington Trimm was.
“He wants you, my boy. You must go down at once. It is very important.
Tom Craik was buried yesterday.”
“Buried!” exclaimed George. “I did not know he was dead.”
“I understand that he died several days ago, in consequence of that fit
of anger he had. You remember? What is the matter with you, George?”
“Cannot you see what is the matter?” George cried a little impatiently.
“I am just finishing my book. What if the old fellow is dead? He has had
plenty of leisure to change his will—in all this time. What does Sherry
want?”
“He did not change his will, and Mr. Trimm wants to read it to you.
George, you do not seem to realise that you are a very rich man, a very,
very rich man,” repeated Jonah Wood with weighty emphasis.
“It will do quite as well if he reads the confounded thing to you,” said
George, picking up his pen from the floor beside him, examining the
point and then dipping it into the ink.
He was never quite sure how much of his indifference was assumed and how
much of it was real, resulting from his extreme impatience to finish his
work. But to Jonah Wood, it had all the appearance of being genuine.
“I am surprised, George,” said the old gentleman, looking very grave.
“Are you in your right mind? Are you feeling quite well? I am afraid
this good news has upset you.”
George rose from the table with a look of disgust, bent down and looked
over the last lines he had written, and then stood up.
“If nothing else will satisfy anybody, I suppose I must go down,” he
said regretfully. “Why did not the old brute leave the money to you
instead of to me? You do not imagine I am going to keep it, do you? Most
of it is yours anyhow.”
“I understand,” answered Jonah Wood, pushing him gently towards the
door, “that the estate is large enough to cover what I lost four or five
times over, if not more. It is very important——”
“Do you mean to say it is as much as that?” George asked in some
surprise.
“That seems to be the impression,” answered his father with an odd
laugh, which George had not heard for many years. Jonah Wood was ashamed
of showing too much satisfaction. It was his principle never to make any
exhibition of his feelings, but his voice could not be altogether
controlled, and there was an unusual light in his eyes. George, who by
this time had collected his senses, and was able to think of something
besides his story, saw the change in his father’s face and understood
it.
“It will be jolly to be rich again, won’t it, father?” he said,
familiarly and with more affection than he generally showed by manner or
voice.
“Very pleasant, very pleasant indeed,” answered Jonah Wood with the same
odd laugh. “Mr. Trimm tells me he has left you the house as it stands
with everything in it, and the horses—everything. I must say, George,
the old man has made amends for all he did. It looks very like an act of
conscience.”
“Amends? Yes, with compound interest for a dozen years or more, if all
this is true. Well, here goes the millionaire,” he exclaimed as they
left the room together.
It would be hard to imagine a position more completely disagreeable than
that in which Sherrington Trimm was placed on that particular afternoon.
It was bad enough to have to meet George at all after what had happened,
but it was most unpleasant to appear as the executor of the very will
which had caused so much trouble, to feel that he was bringing to the
heir the very document which his wife had stolen out of his own office,
and handing over to him the fortune which his wife had tried so hard to
bring into his own daughter’s hands. But Sherrington Trimm’s reputation
for honesty and his courageous self-possession had carried him through
many difficult moments in life, and he would never have thought of
deputing any one else to fulfil the repugnant task in his stead.
Jonah Wood left his son at the door of the sitting-room and discreetly
disappeared. George went in and found the lawyer standing before the
fire with a roll of papers in his hands. He was a little pale and
careworn, but his appearance was as neat and dapper and brisk as ever.
“George,” he said frankly as he took his hand, “poor Tom has left you
everything, as he said he would. Now, I can quite imagine that the sight
of me is not exactly pleasant to you. But business is business and this
has got to be put through, so just consider that I am the lawyer and
forget that I am Sherry Trimm.”
“I shall never forget that you are Sherry Trimm,” George answered. “You
and I can avoid unpleasant subjects and be as good friends as ever.”
“You are a good fellow, George. The best proof of it is that not a word
has been breathed about this affair. We have simply announced that the
engagement is broken off.”
“Then Mamie has refused to change her mind,” observed George, wondering
how he could ever have been engaged to marry her, and how he could have
forgotten that at his last meeting with Sherry Trimm he had still left
the matter open, refusing to withdraw his promise. But between that day
and this he had lived through many emotions and changing scenes in the
playhouse of his brain, and his own immediate past seemed immensely
distant from his present.
“Mamie would not change her mind, if I would let her,” Trimm answered
briefly. “Let us get to business. Here is the will. I opened it
yesterday after the funeral in the presence of the family and the
witnesses as usual in such cases.”
“Excuse me,” George said. “I am very glad that I was not present, but
would it not have been proper to let me know?”
“It would have been, of course. But as there was no obligation in the
matter, I did not. I supposed that you would hear of the death almost as
soon as it was known. You and your father were known to be on bad terms
with Tom and if you had been sent for it would have looked as though we
had all known what was in the will. People would have supposed in that
case that you must have known it also, and you would have been blamed
for not treating the old gentleman with more consideration than you did.
I have often heard you say sharp things about him at the club. This is a
surprise to you. There is no reason for letting anybody suppose that it
is not. A lot of small good reasons made one big good one between them.”
“I see,” said George. “Thank you. You were very wise.”
He took the document from Trimm’s hands and read it hastily. The touch
of it was disagreeable to him as he remembered where he had last seen
it.
“I had supposed that he would make another after what I said to him,”
George remarked. “You are quite sure he did not?”
“Positive. He never allowed it to be out of his sight after he found it.
It was under his pillow when he died. The last words that anybody could
understand were to the effect that you should have the money, whether
you wanted it or not. It was a fixed idea with him. I suppose you know
why. He felt that some of it belonged to your father by right. The
transaction by which he got it was legal—but peculiar. There are
peculiarities in my wife’s family.”
Sherry Trimm looked away and pulled his grizzled moustache nervously.
“There will be a good many formalities,” he continued. “Tom owned
property in several different States. I have brought you the schedule.
You can have possession in New York immediately, of course. It will take
some little time to manage the rest, proving the will half a dozen times
over. If you care to move into the house to-morrow, there is no
objection, because there is nobody to object.”
“I have a proposition to make,” said George. “My father is a far better
man of business than I. Could you not tell me in round numbers about
what I have to expect, and then go over these papers with him?”
“In round numbers,” repeated Trimm thoughtfully. “The fact is, he
managed a great deal of his property himself. I suppose I could tell you
within a million or two.”
“A million or two!” exclaimed George. Sherry Trimm smiled at the
intonation.
“You are an enormously rich man,” he said quietly. “The estate is worth
anywhere from twelve to fifteen millions of dollars.”
“All mine?”
“Look at the will. He never spent a third of his income, so far as I
could find out.”
George said nothing more, but began to walk up and down the room
nervously. He detested everything connected with money, and had only a
relative idea of its value, but he was staggered by the magnitude of the
fortune thus suddenly thrown into his hands. He understood now the
expression he had seen on his father’s face.
“I had no conception of the amount,” he said at last. “I thought it
might be a million.”
“A million!” laughed Trimm scornfully. “A man does not live, as he
lived, on forty or fifty thousand a year. It needs more than that. A
million is nothing nowadays. Every man who wears a good coat has a
million. There is not a man living in Fifth Avenue who has less than a
million.”
“I wonder how it looks on paper,” said George. “I will try and go
through the schedule with you myself.”
An hour later George was once more in his room. For a few moments he
stood looking through the window at the old familiar brick wall and at
the windows of the house beyond, but his reflections were very vague and
shapeless. He could not realise his position nor his importance, as he
drummed a tattoo on the glass with his nails. He was trying to think of
the changes that were inevitable in the immediate future, of his life in
another house, of the faces of his old acquaintances and of the
expression some of them would wear. He wondered what Johnson would say.
The name, passing through his mind, recalled his career, his work and
the unfinished chapter that lay on the table behind him. In an instant
his brain returned to the point at which he had been interrupted. Tom
Craik, Sherry Trimm, the will and the millions vanished into darkness,
and before he was fairly aware of it he was writing again.
The days were short and he was obliged to light the old kerosene lamp
with the green shade which had served him through so many hours of
labour and study. The action was purely mechanical and did not break his
train of thought, nor did it suggest that in a few months he would think
it strange that he should ever have been obliged to do such a thing for
himself. He wrote steadily on to the end, and signed his name and dated
the manuscript before he rose from his seat. Then he stretched himself,
yawned and looked at his watch, returned to the table and laid the
sheets neatly together in their order with the rest and put the whole
into a drawer.
“That job is done,” he said aloud, in a tone of profound satisfaction.
“And now, I can think of something else.”
Thereupon, without as much as thinking of resting himself after the
terrible strain he had sustained during ten days, he proceeded to dress
himself with a scrupulous care for the evening, and went down stairs to
dinner. He found his father in his accustomed place before the fire,
reading as usual, and holding his heavy book rigidly before his eyes in
a way that would have made an ordinary man’s hand ache.
“I have finished my book!” cried George as he entered the room.
“Ah, I am delighted to hear it. Do you mean to say that you have been
writing all the afternoon since Mr. Trimm went away?”
“Until half an hour ago.”
“Well, you have exceptionally strong nerves,” said the old gentleman,
mechanically raising his book again. Then as though he were willing to
make a concession to circumstances for once in his life, he closed it
with a solemn clapping sound and laid it down.
“George, my boy,” he said impressively, “you are enormously wealthy. Do
you realise the fact?”
“I am also enormously hungry,” said George with a laugh. “Is there any
cause or reason in the nature of the cook or of anything else why you
and I should not be fed?”
“To tell the truth, I had a little surprise for you,” answered his
father. “I thought we ought to do something to commemorate the event, so
I went out and got a brace of canvas-backs from Delmonico’s and a bottle
of good wine. Kate is roasting the ducks and the champagne is on the
ice. It was a little late when I got back—sorry to keep you waiting, my
boy.”
“Sorry!” cried George. “The idea of being sorry for anything when there
are canvas-backs and champagne in the house. You dear old man! I will
pay you for this, though. You shall live on the fat of the land for the
rest of your days!”
“Enough is as good as a feast,” observed Jonah Wood with great gravity.
“What roaring feasts we will have—or what stupendously plentiful
enoughs, if you like it better! Father, you are better already. I heard
you laugh to-day as you used to laugh when I was a boy.”
“A little prosperity will do us both good,” said the old gentleman, who
was rapidly warming into geniality.
“I say,” suggested George. “I have finished my book, and you have
nothing to do. Let us pack up our traps and go to Paris and paint the
town a vivid scarlet.”
“What?” asked Jonah Wood, to whom slang had always been a mystery.
“Paint the town red,” repeated George. “In short, have a spree, a lark,
a jollification, you and I.”
“I would like to see Paris again, well enough, if that is what you mean.
By the way, George, your heart does not seem to trouble you much, just
at present.”
“Why should it? I sometimes wish it would, in the right direction.”
“You have your choice now, George, you have your choice, now, of the
whole female population of the globe——”
“Of all the girls beside the water, From Janeiro to Gibraltar, as the
old song says,” laughed George.
“Precisely so. You can have any of them for the asking. Money is a great
power, my boy, a great power. You must be careful how you use it.”
“I shall not use it. I shall give it all to you to spend because it will
amuse you, and I will go on writing books because that is the only thing
I can do approximately well. Do you know? I believe I shall be
ridiculous in the character of the rich man.”