Few things, of the many contradictory things of this world, are more
mysterious than the occasional certainty of sceptical men. Marion was
one of the most sceptical of sceptical novelists; the instinct that
nothing really depended upon its supposed or official cause, that
nothing ever produced its supposed or official effect, that all things
were always infinitely more important or unimportant than represented,
that nothing is much use to anything, and the world a mystery and
a muddle; this instinct, so natural to the psychologist, regularly
honeycombed his existence, making it into a mere shifting sand, quite
unfit to carry the human weight. Yet at this particular moment, Marion
firmly believed that if only Lady Atalanta could be turned into a
tolerable novelist, the whole problem of Lady Atalanta's existence would
be satisfactorily solved, if only she could be taught construction,
style, punctuation, and a few other items; if only one could get into
her head the difference between a well-written thing, and an ill-written
thing, then, considering her undoubted talent----for Marion's opinion
of Lady Tal's talent had somehow increased with a bound. Why he should
think _Christina_ a more remarkable performance now that he had been
tinkering at it for six weeks, it is difficult to perceive. He seemed
certainly to see much more in it. Through that extraordinary difficulty
of expression, he now felt the shape of a personality, a personality
contradictory, enigmatical, not sure of itself, groping, as it were,
to the light. _Christina_ was evidently the real Lady Tal, struggling
through that overlaying of habits and prejudices which constituted the
false one.
So, _Christina_ could not be given too much care; and certainly no novel
was ever given more, both by its author and by its critic. There was
not a chapter, and scarcely a paragraph, which had not been dissected
by Marion and re-written by Lady Tal; the critical insight of the one
being outdone only by the scribbling energy of the other. And now, it
would soon be finished. There was only that piece about Christina's
reconciliation with her sister-in-law to get into shape. Somehow or
other the particular piece seemed intolerably difficult to do; the more
Lady Tal worked at it, the worse it grew; the more Marion expounded his
views on the subject, the less did she seem able to grasp them.
They were seated on each side of the big deal table, which, for the
better development of _Christina_, Lady Tal had installed in her
drawing-room, and which at this moment presented a lamentable confusion
of foolscap, of mutilated pages, of slips for gumming on, of gum-pots,
and scissors. The scissors, however, were at present hidden from view,
and Lady Tal, stooping over the litter, was busily engaged looking for
them.
"Confound those beastly old scissors!" she exclaimed, shaking a heap of
MS. with considerable violence.
Marion, on his side, gave a feeble stir to the mass of paper, and said,
rather sadly: "Are you sure you left them on this table?"
He felt that something was going wrong. Lady Tal had been unusually
restive about the alterations he wanted her to make.
"You are slanging those poor scissors because you are out of patience
with things in general, Lady Tal."
She raised her head, and leaning both her long, well-shaped hands on the
table, looked full at Marion:
"Not with things in general, but with things in particular. With
_Christina_, in the first place; and then with myself; and then with
you, Mr. Marion."
"With me?" answered Marion, forcing out a smile of pseudo-surprise. He
had felt all along that she was irritated with him this morning.
"With you"--went on the lady, continuing to rummage for the scissors--"with
you, because I don't think you've been quite fair. It isn't fair to put
it into an unfortunate creature's head that she is an incipient George
Eliot, when you know that if she were to slave till doomsday, she couldn't
produce a novel fit for the _Family Herald_. It's very ungrateful of me
to complain, but you see it is rather hard lines upon me. You can do all
this sort of thing as easy as winking, and you imagine that everyone
else must. You put all your own ideas into poor _Christina_, and you
just expect me to be able to carry them out, and when I make a hideous
hash, you're not satisfied. You think of that novel just as if it were
you writing it--you know you do. Well, then, when a woman discovers at
last that she can't make the beastly thing any better; that she's been
made to hope too much, and that too much is asked of her, you understand
it's rather irritating. I am sick of re-writing that thing, sick of
every creature in it."
And Lady Tal gave an angry toss to the sheets of manuscript with the
long pair of dressmaker's scissors, which she had finally unburied.
Marion felt a little pang. The pang of a clever man who discovers
himself to be perpetrating a stupidity. He frowned that little frown
of the tight boots.
Quite true. He saw, all of a sudden, that he really had been
over-estimating Lady Tal's literary powers. It appeared to him
monstrous. The thought made him redden. To what unjustifiable lengths
had his interest in the novel--the novel in the abstract, anybody's
novel; and (he confessed to himself) the interest in one novel in
particular, his own, the one in which Lady Tal should figure--led him
away! Perceiving himself violently to be in the wrong, he proceeded
to assume the manner, as is the case with most of us under similar
circumstances (perhaps from a natural instinct of balancing matters)
of a person conscious of being in the right.
"I think," he said, dryly, "that you have rather overdone this novel,
Lady Tal--worked at it too much, talked of it too much too, sickened
yourself with it."
"--And sickened others," put in Lady Atalanta gloomily.
"No, no, no--not others--only yourself, my dear young lady," said Marion
paternally, in a way which clearly meant that she had expressed the
complete truth, being a rude woman, but that he, being a polite man,
could never admit it. As a matter of fact, Marion was not in the least
sick of _Christina_, quite the reverse.
"You see," he went on, playing with the elastic band of one of the
packets of MS., "you can't be expected to know these things. But no
professed novelist--no one of any experience--no one, allow me to say
so, except a young lady, could possibly have taken such an overdose of
novel-writing as you have. Why, you have done in six weeks what ought to
have taken six months! The result, naturally, is that you have lost all
sense of proportion and quality; you really can't see your novel any
longer, that's why you feel depressed about it."
Lady Tal was not at all mollified.
"That wasn't a reason for making me believe I was going to be George
Eliot and Ouida rolled into one, with the best qualities of Goethe and
Dean Swift into the bargain," she exclaimed.
Marion frowned, but this time internally. He really had encouraged Lady
Tal quite unjustifiably. He doubted, suddenly, whether she would ever
get a publisher; therefore he smiled, and remarked gently:
"Well, but--in matters of belief, there are two parties, Lady Tal.
Don't you think you may be partly responsible for this--this little
misapprehension?"
Lady Tal did not answer. The insolence of the Ossian was roused. She
merely looked at Marion from head to foot; and the look was ineffably
scornful. It seemed to say: "This is what comes of a woman like me
associating with Americans and novelists."
"I've not lost patience," she said after a moment; "don't think that.
When I make up my mind to a thing I just do it. So I shall finish
_Christina_, and print her, and publish her, and dedicate her to you.
Only, catch me ever writing another novel again!--and"--she added,
smiling with her closed teeth as she extended a somewhat stiff hand to
Marion--"catch you reading another novel of mine again either, now that
you've made all the necessary studies of me for _your_ novel!"
Marion smiled politely. But he ran downstairs, and through the narrow
little paved lane to the ferry at San Vio with a bent head.
He had been a fool, a fool, he repeated to himself. Not, as he had
thought before, by exposing Lady Tal to disappointment and humiliation,
but by exposing himself.
Yes, he understood it all. He understood it when, scarcely out of Lady
Tal's presence, he caught himself, in the garden, looking up at her
windows, half expecting to see her, to hear some rather rough joke
thrown at him as a greeting, just to show she was sorry---- He
understood it still better, when, every time the waiter knocked in the
course of the day, he experienced a faint expectation that it might be a
note from Lady Tal, a line to say: "I was as cross as two sticks, this
morning, wasn't I?" or merely: "don't forget to come to-morrow."
He understood. He and the novel, both chucked aside impatiently by
this selfish, capricious, imperious young aristocrat: the two things
identified, and both now rejected as unworthy of taking up more of her
august attention! Marion felt the insult to the novel--her novel--almost
more than to himself. After all, how could Lady Tal see the difference
between him and the various mashers of her acquaintance, perceive that
he was the salt of the earth? She had not wherewithal to perceive it.
But that she should not perceive the dignity of her own work, how
infinitely finer that novel was than herself, how it represented all
her own best possibilities; that she should be ungrateful for the
sensitiveness with which he had discovered its merit, _her_ merits, in
the midst of that confusion of illiterate fashionable rubbish----
And when that evening, having his coffee at St. Mark's, he saw Lady
Tal's stately figure, her white dress, amongst the promenaders in the
moonlight, a rabble of young men and women at her heels, it struck him
suddenly that something was over. He thought that, if Lady Tal came to
London next spring, he would not call upon her unless sent for; and he
was sure she would not send for him, for as to _Christina_, _Christina_
would never get as far as the proof-sheets; and unless _Christina_
re-appeared on the surface, he also would remain at the bottom.
Marion got up from his table, and leaving the brightly illuminated
square and the crowd of summer-like promenaders, he went out on to the
Riva, and walked slowly towards the arsenal. The contrast was striking.
Out here it looked already like winter. There were no chairs in front of
the cafes, there were scarcely any gondola-lights at the mooring places.
The passers-by went along quickly, the end of their cloak over their
shoulder. And from the water, which swished against the marble landings,
came a rough, rainy wind. It was dark, and there were unseen puddles
along the pavement.
This was the result of abandoning, for however little, one's principles.
He had broken through his convictions by accepting to read a young
lady's MS. novel. It did not seem a very serious mistake. But through
that chink, what disorderly powers had now entered his well-arranged
existence!
What the deuce did he want with the friendship of a Lady Tal? He had
long made up his mind to permit himself only such friendship as could
not possibly involve any feeling, as could not distress or ruffle him
by such incidents as illness, death, fickleness, ingratitude. The
philosophy of happiness, of that right balance of activities necessary
for the dispassionate student of mankind, consisted in never having
anything that one could miss, in never wanting anything. Had he not long
ago made up his mind to live contemplative only of external types, if
not on a column like Simon Stylites, at least in its meaner modern
equivalent, a top flat at Westminster?
Marion felt depressed, ashamed of his depression, enraged at his shame;
and generally intolerably mortified at feeling anything at all, and
still more, in consequence, at feeling all this much.
As he wandered up and down one of the stretches of the Riva, the
boisterous wind making masts and sails creak, and his cigar-smoke fly
wildly about, he began, however, to take a little comfort. All this,
after all, was so much experience; and experience was necessary for the
comprehension of mankind. It was preferable, as a rule, to use up other
people's experience; to look down, from that top flat at Westminster,
upon grief and worry and rage _in corpore vili_, at a good five storeys
below one. But, on reflection, it was doubtless necessary occasionally
to get impressions a little nearer; the very recognition of feeling in
others presupposed a certain minimum of emotional experience in oneself.
Marion had a sense of humour, a sense of dignity, and a corresponding
aversion to being ridiculous. He disliked extremely having played the
part of the middle-aged fool. But if ever he should require, for a
future novel, a middle-aged fool, why, there he would be, ready to hand.
And really, unless he had thus miserably broken through his rules of
life, thus contemptibly taken an interest in a young lady six-foot
high, the daughter of a bankrupt earl, with an inexpressive face and a
sentimental novel, he would never, never have got to fathom, as he now
fathomed, the character of the intelligent woman of the world, with
aspirations ending in frivolity, and a heart entirely rusted over by
insolence.
Ah, he _did_ understand Lady Tal. He had gone up to his hotel; and shut
his window with a bang, receiving a spout of rain in his face, as he
made that reflection. Really, Lady Tal might be made into something
first-rate.
He threw himself into an arm-chair and opened a volume of the
correspondence of Flaubert.