"THE ENGLISH SHAKESPEARE."
By a thorough knowledge of the natural laws which govern the operations
of human nature and by a careful application of the fine properties of
well-selected men, and a judicious use of every available instrument of
log-rolling, the Mutual Depreciation Society gradually built up a
constitution strong enough to defy every tendency to disintegration.
Hundreds of subtle malcontents floated round, ready to attack wherever
there was a weak point, but foiled by ignorance of the Society's
existence, and the members escaped many a fatal shaft by keeping
themselves entirely to themselves. The idea of the Mutual Depreciation
Society was that every member should say what he thought of the others.
The founders, who all took equal shares in it, were
Tom Brown,
Dick Jones,
Harry Robinson.
Their object in founding the Mutual Depreciation Society was of course
to achieve literary success, but they soon perceived that their phalanx
was too small for this, and as they had no power to add to their number
except by inviting strangers from without, they took steps to induce
three other gentlemen to solicit the privileges of membership. The
second batch comprised,
Taffy Owen,
Andrew Mackay,
Patrick Boyle.
[Illustration: _Tom Brown, the Supreme Thinker._]
These six gentlemen being all blessed with youth, health and
incompetence, resolved to capture the town. Their tactics were very
simple, though their first operations were hampered by their ignorance
of one another's. Thus, it was some time before it was discovered that
Andrew Mackay, who had been deployed to seize the _Saturday Slasher_,
had no real acquaintance with the editor's fencing-master, while Dick
Jones, who had undertaken to bombard the _Acadæum_, had started under
the impression that the eminent critic to whom he had dedicated his
poems (by permission) was still connected with the staff. But these
difficulties were eliminated as soon as the Society got into working
order. Everything comes to him who will not wait, and almost before they
had time to wink our six gentlemen had secured the makings of an
Influence. Each had loyally done his best for himself and the rest, and
the first spoils of the campaign, as announced amid applause by the
Secretary at the monthly dinner, were
Two Morning Papers,
Two Evening Papers,
Two Weekly Papers.
They were not the most influential, nor even the best circulated, still
it was not a bad beginning, though of course only a nucleus. By putting
out tentacles in every direction, by undertaking to write even on
subjects with which they were acquainted, they gradually secured a more
or less tenacious connection with the majority of the better journals
and magazines. On taking stock they found that the account stood thus:
Three Morning Papers,
Four Evening Papers,
Eleven Weekly Papers,
Thirteen London Letters,
Seven Dramatic Columns,
Six Monthly Magazines,
Thirteen Influences on Advertisements,
Nine Friendships with Eminent Editors,
Seventeen ditto with Eminent Sub-editors,
Six ditto with Lady Journalists,
Fifty-three Loans (at two-and-six each) to Pressmen,
One hundred and nine Mentions of Editor's Womenkind at
Fashionable Receptions.
It showed what could be achieved by six men, working together shoulder
to shoulder for the highest aims in a spirit of mutual good-will and
brotherhood. They were undoubtedly greatly helped by having all been to
Oxford or Cambridge, but still much was the legitimate result of their
own manoeuvres.
By the time the secret campaign had reached this stage, many
well-meaning, unsuspecting men, not included in the above inventory, had
been pressed into the service of the Society, with the members of which
they were connected by the thousand and one ties which spring up
naturally in the intercourse of the world, so that there was hardly any
journal in the three kingdoms on which the Society could not, by some
hook or the other, fasten a paragraph, if we except such publications as
the _Newgate Calendar_ and _Lloyds' Shipping List_, which record history
rather than make it.
Indeed, the success of the Society in this department was such as to
suggest the advisability of having themselves formally incorporated
under the Companies' Acts for the manufacture and distribution of
paragraphs, for which they had unequalled facilities, and had obtained
valuable concessions, and it was only the publicity required by law
which debarred them from enlarging their home trade to a profitable
industry for the benefit of non-members. For, by the peculiar nature of
the machinery, it could only be worked if people were unaware of its
existence. They resolved, however, that when they had made their pile,
they would start the newspaper of the future, which any philosopher with
an eye to the trend of things can see will be a journal written by
advertisers for gentlemen, and will contain nothing calculated to bring
a blush to the cheek of the young person except cosmetics.
Contemporaneously with the execution of one side of the Plan of
Campaign, the Society was working the supplementary side. Day and night,
week-days and Sundays, in season and out, these six gentlemen praised
themselves and one another, or got themselves and one another praised by
non-members. There are many ways in which you can praise an author, from
blame downwards. There is the puff categorical and the puff allusive,
the lie direct and the eulogy insinuative, the downright abuse and the
subtle innuendo, the exaltation of your man or the depression of his
rival. The attacking method of log-rolling must not be confounded with
depreciation. In their outside campaign, the members used every variety
of puff, but depreciation was strictly reserved for their private
gatherings. For this was the wisdom of the Club, and herein lay its
immense superiority over every other log-rolling club, that whereas in
those childish cliques every man is expected to admire every other, or
to say so, in the Mutual Depreciation Society the obligation was all the
other way. Every man was bound by the rules to sneer at the work of his
fellow-members and, if he should happen to admire any of it, at least to
have the grace to keep his feelings to himself. In practice, however,
the latter contingency never arose, and each was able honestly to
express all he thought, for it is impossible for men to work together
for a common object without discovering that they do not deserve to get
it. Needless to point out how this sagacious provision strengthened them
in their campaign, for not having to keep up the tension of mutual
admiration, and being able to relax and breathe (and express themselves)
freely at their monthly symposia, as well as to slang one another in the
street, they were able to write one another up with a clear conscience.
It is well to found on human nature. Every other basis proves shifting
sand. The success of the Mutual Depreciation Society justified their
belief in human nature.
Not only did they depreciate one another, but they made reparation to
the non-members they were always trying to write down during business
hours, by eulogizing them in the most generous manner in those blessed
hours of leisure when knife answers fork and soul speaks to soul. At
such times even popular authors were allowed to have a little merit.
It was at one of these periods of soul-expansion, when the most
petty-souled feels inclined to loosen the last two buttons of his
waistcoat, that the idea of the English Shakespeare was first mooted.
But we are anticipating, which is imprudent, as anticipations are seldom
realized.
One of the worst features of prosperity is that it is cloying, and when
the first gloss of novelty and adventure had worn off, the free lances
of the Mutual Depreciation Society began to bore one another. You can
get tired even of hearing your own dispraises; and the members were
compelled to spice their mutual adverse criticism in the highest manner,
so as to compensate for its staleness. The jaded appetite must needs be
pampered if it is to experience anything of that relish which a natural
healthy hunger for adverse criticism can command so easily.
This was the sort of thing that went on at the dinners:
"I say, Tom," said Andrew Mackay, "what in Heaven's name made you
publish your waste-paper basket under the name of 'Stray Thoughts?' For
utter and incomprehensible idiocy they are only surpassed by Dick's last
volume of poems. I shouldn't have thought such things could come even
out of a lunatic asylum, certainly not without a keeper. Really you
fellows ought to consider me a little----"
"We do. We consider you as little as they make them," they interrupted
simultaneously.
"It isn't fair to throw all the work on me," he went on. "How can I go
on saying that Tom Brown is the supreme thinker of the time, the deepest
intellect since Hegel, with a gift of style that rivals Berkeley's, if
you go on turning out twaddle that a copy-book would boggle at? How can
I keep repeating that for sure and consummate art, for unfailing
certainty of insight, for unerring visualization, for objective
subjectivity and for subjective objectivity, for Swinburnian sweep of
music and Shakespearean depth of suggestiveness, Dick Jones can give
forty in a hundred (spot stroke barred) to all other contemporary poets,
if you continue to spue out rhymes as false as your teeth, rhythms as
musical as your voice when you read them, and words that would drive a
drawing-room composer mad with envy to set them? I maintain, it is not
sticking to the bargain to expose me to the danger of being found out.
You ought at least to have the decency to wrap up your fatuousness in
longer words or more abstruse themes. You're both so beastly
intelligible that a child can understand you're asses."
"Tut, tut, Andrew," said Taffy Owen, "it's all very well of you to talk
who've only got to do the criticism. And I think it's deuced ungrateful
of you after we've written you up into the position of leading English
critic to want us to give you straw for your bricks! Do we ever complain
when you call us cataclysmic, creative, esemplastic, or even epicene? We
know it's rot, but we put up with it. When you said that Robinson's last
novel had all the glow and genius of Dickens without his humor, all the
ripe wisdom of Thackeray without his social knowingness, all the
imaginativeness of Shakespeare without his definiteness of
characterization, we all saw at once that you were incautiously allowing
the donkey's ears to protrude too obviously from beneath the lion's
skin. But did anyone grumble? Did Robinson, though the edition was sold
out the day after? Did I, though you had just called me a modern
Buddhist with the soul of an ancient Greek and the radiant fragrance of
a Cingalese tea-planter? I know these phrases take the public and I try
to be patient."
"Owen is right," Harry Robinson put in emphatically. "When you said I
was a cross between a Scandinavian skald and a Dutch painter, I bore my
cross in silence."
"Yes, but what else can a fellow say, when you give the public such
heterogeneous and formless balderdash that there is nothing for it but
to pretend it's a new style, an epoch-making work, the foundation of a
new era in literary art? Really I think you others have out and away the
best of it. It's much easier to write bad books than to eulogize their
merits in an adequately plausible manner. I think it's playing it too
low upon a chap, the way you fellows are going on. It's taking a mean
advantage of my position."
"And who put you into that position, I should like to know?" yelled Dick
Jones, becoming poetically excited. "Didn't we lift you up into it on
the point of our pens?"
"Fortunately they were not very pointed," ejaculated the great critic,
wriggling uncomfortably at the suggestion. "I don't deny that, of
course. All I say is, you're giving me away now."
"You give yourself away," shrieked Owen vehemently, "with a pound of
that Cingalese tea. How is it Boyle managed to crack up our plays
without being driven to any of this new-fangled nonsense?"
"Plays!" said Patrick, looking up moodily. "Anything is good enough for
plays. You see I can always fall back on the acting and crack up that. I
had to do that with Owen's thing at the _Lymarket_. My notice read like
a gushing account of the play, in reality it was all devoted to the
players. The trick of it is not easy. Those who can read between the
lines could see that there were only three of them about the piece
itself, and yet the outside public would never dream I was shirking the
expression of an opinion about the merits of the play or the pinning
myself to any definite statement. The only time, Owen, I dare say, that
your plays are literature is when they are a frost, for that both
explains the failure and justifies you. But, an you love me, Taffy, or
if you have any care for my reputation, do not, I beg of you, be enticed
into the new folly of printing your plays."
"But things have come to that stage I _must_ do it," said Owen, "or
incur the suspicion of illiterateness."
"No, no!" pleaded Patrick in horror. "Sooner than that I will damn all
the other printed plays _en bloc_, and say that the real literary
playwrights, conscious of their position, are too dignified to resort to
this cheap method of self-assertion."
"But you will not carry out your threat? Remember how dangerously near
you came to exposing me over your _Naquette_."
The Club laughed. Everyone knew the incident, for it was Patrick's stock
grievance against the dramatist. Patrick being out of town, had written
his eulogy of this play of Owen's from his inner consciousness. On the
fourth night in deference to Owen's persuasions he had gone to see
_Naquette_.
After the tragedy, Owen found him seated moodily in the stalls, long
after the audience had filed out.
"Knocked you, old man, this time, eh?" queried Owen laughing
complacently.
[Illustration: "_Knocked you, old man, this time, eh?_"]
"Yes, all to pieces!" snarled Patrick savagely. "I shall never believe
in my critical judgment again. I dare not look my notice in the face.
When I wrote _Naquette_ was a masterpiece, I thought at least there
would be some merit in it--I didn't bargain for such rot as this."
In this wise things would have gone on--from bad to worse--had Heaven
not created Cecilia nineteen years before.
Cecilia was a tall, fair girl, with dreamy eyes and unpronounced
opinions, who longed for the ineffable with an unspeakable yearning.
Frank Grey loved her. He always knew he was going to and one day he did
it. After that it was impossible to drop the habit. And at last he went
so far as to propose. He was a young lawyer, with a fondness for manly
sports and a wealth of blonde moustache.
"Cecilia," he said, "I love you. Will you be mine?"
He had a habit of using unconventional phrases.
"No, Frank," she said gently, and there was a world and several
satellites of tenderness in her tremulous tones. "It cannot be."
"Ah, do not decide so quickly," he pleaded. "I will not press you for an
answer."
"I would press you for an answer, if I could," replied Cecilia, "but I
do not love you."
"Why not?" he demanded desperately.
"Because you are not what I should like you to be?"
"And what would you like me to be?" he demanded eagerly.
"If I told you, you would try to become it?"
"I would," he said, enthusiastically. "Be it what it may, I would leave
no stone unturned. I would work, strive, study, reform--anything,
everything."
"I feared so," she said despondently. "That is why I will not tell you.
Don't you understand that your charm to me is your being just
yourself--your simple, honest, manly self? I will not have my enjoyment
of your individuality spoilt by your transmogrification into some
unnatural product of the forcing house. No, Frank, let us be true to
ourselves, not to each other. I shall always remain your friend, looking
up to you as to something stanch, sturdy, stalwart, coming to consult
you (unprofessionally) in all my difficulties. I will tell you all my
secrets, Frank, so that you will know more of me than if I married you.
Dear friend, let it remain as I say. It is for the best."
So Frank went away broken-hearted, and joined the Mutual Depreciation
Society. He did not care what became of him. How they came to let him in
was this. He was the one man in the world outside who knew all about
them, having been engaged as the Society's legal adviser. It was he who
made their publishers and managers sit in an erect position. In applying
for a more intimate connection, he stated that he had met with a
misfortune, and a little monthly abuse would enliven him. The Society
decided that, as he was already half one of themselves, and as he had
never written a line in his life, and so could not diminish their
takings, nothing but good could ensue from the infusion of new blood. In
fact, they wanted it badly. Their mutual recriminations had degenerated
into mere platitudes. With a new man to insult and be insulted by,
something of the old animation would be restored to their proceedings.
The wisdom of the policy was early seen, for the first fruit of it was
the English Shakespeare, who for a whole year daily opened out new and
exciting perspectives of sensation and amusement to a _blasé_ Society.
Andrew Mackay had written an enthusiastic article in the so-called
_Nineteenth Century_ on "The Cochin-China Shakespeare," and set all
tongues wagging about the new literary phenomenon with whose verses the
boatmen of the Irrawady rocked their children to sleep on the cradle of
the river, and whose dramas were played in eight hours slices in the
strolling-booths of Shanghai. Andrew had already arranged with Anyman to
bring out a translation from the original Cochin-Chinese, for there was
no language he could not translate from, provided it were sufficiently
unknown.
"Cochin-Chinese Shakespeare, indeed!" said Dick Jones, at the next
symposium. "Why, judging from the copious extracts you gave from his
greatest drama, Baby Bantam, it is _the_ most tedious drivel. You might
have written it yourself. Where is the Shakespearean quality of this,
which is, you say, the whole of Act Thirteen?
"'Hang-ho: Out, Fu-sia, does your mother know you are?
"'Fu-sia: I have no mother, but I have a child.'"
"Where is the Shakespearean quality?" repeated Andrew. "Do you not feel
the perfect pathos of those two lines, the infiniteness of incisive
significance? To me they paint the whole scene in two strokes of
matchless simplicity, strophe and anti-strophe. Fu-sia the repentant
outcast and Hang-ho whose honest love she rejected, stand out as in a
flash of lightning. Nay, Shakespeare himself never wrote an act of such
tragic brevity, packed so full of the sense of anagke. Why, so far from
it being tedious drivel, a lady in whose opinion I have great confidence
and to whom I sent my article, told me afterwards that she couldn't
sleep till she had read it."
[Illustration: "_She told me she couldn't sleep till she had read it._"]
The Mutual Depreciation Society burst into a roar of laughter and Andrew
realized that he had put his foot into it.
"Don't you think it a shame," broke in Frank Grey, "that we English
are debarred from having a Shakespeare. There's been one discovered
lately in Belgium, and we have already a Dutch Shakespeare, a French
Shakespeare, a German Shakespeare, and an American Shakespeare. English
is the only language in which we can't get one. It seems cruel that we
should be just the one nation in the world to be cut off from having a
nineteenth century Shakespeare. Every patriotic Briton must surely
desire that we could discover an English Shakespeare to put beside these
vaunted foreign phenomena."
"But an English Shakespeare is a bull," said Patrick Boyle, who had a
keen eye for such.
"Precisely. A John Bull," replied Frank.
"Peace. I would willingly look out for one," said Andrew Mackay,
thoughtfully. "But I cannot venture to insinuate yet that Shakespeare
did not write English. The time is scarcely ripe, though it is maturing
fast. Otherwise the idea is tempting."
"But why take the words in their natural meaning?" demanded Tom Brown,
the philosopher, in astonishment. "Is it not unapparent that an English
Shakespeare would be a great writer more saturated with Anglo-Saxon
spirit than Shakespeare, who was cosmic and for all time and for every
place? Hamlet, Othello, Lady Macbeth--these are world-types, not English
characters. Our English Shakespeare must be more autochthonic, more
chauviniste; or more provincial and more _borné_, if you like to put it
that way. His scenes must be rooted in English life, and his personages
must smack of British soil." There was much table-thumping when the
philosopher ceased.
"Excellent!" said Andrew. "He must be found. It will be the greatest
boom of the century. But whom can we discover?"
"There is John P. Smith," said Tom Brown.
"No, why John P. Smith? He has merit," objected Taffy Owen. "And then he
has never been in our set."
"And besides he would not be satisfied," said Patrick Boyle.
"That is true," said Andrew Mackay reflectively. "I know, Owen, _you_
would like to be the subject of the discovery. But I am afraid it is too
late. I have taken your measurements and laid down the chart of your
genius too definitely to alter now. You are permanently established in
business as the dainty neo-Hellenic Buddhist who has chosen to express
himself through farcical comedy. If you were just starting life, I could
work you into this English Shakespeardom--I am always happy to put a
good thing in the way of a friend--but at your age it is not easy to go
into a new line."
"Well, but," put in Harry Robinson, "if none of us is to be the English
Shakespeare, why should we give over the appointment to an outsider?
Charity begins at home."
"That _is_ a difficulty," admitted Andrew, puckering his brow. "It
brings us to a standstill. Seductive, therefore, as the idea is, I am
afraid it has occurred to us too late."
They sat in thoughtful silence. Then suddenly Frank Grey flashed in with
a suggestion that took their breath away for a moment and restored it to
them, charged with "Bravos" the moment after.
"But why should he exist at all?"
Why indeed? The more they pondered the matter, the less necessity they
saw for it.
"'Pon my word, Grey, you are right," said Andrew. "Right as Talleyrand
when he told the thief who insisted that he must live: _Mais, monsieur,
je n'en vois pas la nécessité_."
"It's an inspiration!" said Tom Brown, moved out of his usual apathy.
"We all remember how Whateley proved that the Emperor Napoleon never
existed--and the plausible way he did it. How few persons actually saw
the Emperor? How did even these know that what they saw _was_ the
Emperor? Conversely, it should be as easy as possible for us six to put
a non-existent English Shakespeare on the market. You remember what
Voltaire said of God--that if there were none it would be necessary to
invent Him. In like manner patriotism calls upon us to invent the
English Shakespeare."
"Yes, won't it be awful fun?" said Patrick Boyle.
The idea was taken up eagerly--the _modus operandi_ was discussed, and
the members parted, effervescing with enthusiasm and anxious to start
the campaign immediately. The English Shakespeare was to be named
Fladpick, a cognomen which once seen would hook itself on to the memory.
The very next day a leading article in the _Daily Herald_ casually
quoted Fladpick's famous line:
"Coffined in English yew, he sleeps in peace."
And throughout the next month, in the most out-of-the-way and unlikely
quarters, the word Fladpick lurked and sprang upon the reader. Lines and
phrases from Fladpick were quoted. Gradually the thing worked up,
gathering momentum on its way, and going more and more of itself, like
an ever-swelling snowball which needs but the first push down the
mountain-side. Soon a leprosy of Fladpick broke out over the journalism
of the day. The very office-boys caught the infection, and in their book
reviews they dragged in Fladpick with an air of antediluvian
acquaintance. Writers were said not to possess Fladpick's imagination,
though they might have more sense of style, or they were said not to
possess Fladpick's sense of style, though they might have more
imagination. Certain epithets and tricks of manner were described as
quite Fladpickian, while others were mentioned as extravagant and as
disdained by writers like, say, Fladpick. Young authors were paternally
invited to mould themselves on Fladpick, while others were
contemptuously dismissed as mere imitators of Fladpick. By this time
Fladpick's poetic dramas began to be asked for at the libraries, and the
libraries said that they were all out. This increased the demand so much
that the libraries told their subscribers they must wait till the new
edition, which was being hurried through the press, was published. When
things had reached this stage, queries about Fladpick appeared in the
literary and professionally inquisitive papers, and answers were given,
with reference to the editions of Fladpick's book. It began to leak out
that he was a young Englishman who had lived all his life in Tartary,
and that his book had been published by a local firm and enjoyed no
inconsiderable reputation among the English Tartars there, but that the
copies which had found their way to England were extremely scarce and
had come into the hands of only a few _cognoscenti_, who being such were
enabled to create for him the reputation he so thoroughly deserved. The
next step was to contradict this, and the press teemed with biographies
and counter-biographies. _Dazzler_ also wired numerous interviews, but
an authoritative statement was inserted in the _Acadæum_, signed by
Andrew Mackay, stating that they were unfounded, and paragraphs began to
appear detailing how Fladpick spent his life in dodging the
interviewers. Anecdotes of Fladpick were highly valued by editors of
newspapers, and very plenteous they were, for Fladpick was known to be a
cosmopolitan, always sailing from pole to pole and caring little for
residence in the country of which he yet bade fair to be the laureate.
These anecdotes girdled the globe even more quickly than their hero, and
they returned from foreign parts bronzed and almost unrecognizable, to
set out immediately on fresh journeys in their new guise.
A parody of one of his plays was inserted in a comic paper, and it was
bruited abroad that Andrew Mackay was collaborating with him in
preparing one of his dramas for representation at the Independent
Theatre. This set the older critics by the ears, and they protested
vehemently in their theatrical columns against the infamous ethics
propagated by the new writer, quoting largely from the specimens of his
work given in Mackay's article in the _Fortnightly Review_. Patrick, who
wrote the dramatic criticism for seven papers, led the attack upon the
audacious iconoclast. Journalesia was convulsed by the quarrel, and even
young ladies asked their partners in the giddy waltz whether they were
Fladpickiets or Anti-Fladpickiets. You could never be certain of
escaping Fladpick at dinner, for the lady you took down was apt to take
you down by her contempt of your ignorance of Fladpick's awfully sweet
writings. Any amount of people promised one another introductions to
Fladpick, and those who had met him enjoyed quite a reflected reputation
in Belgravian circles. As to the Fladpickian parties, which brother
geniuses like Dick Jones and Harry Robinson gave to the great writer, it
was next to impossible to secure an invitation to them, and
comparatively few boasted of the privilege. Fladpick reaped a good deal
of _kudos_ from refusing to be lionized and preferring the society of
men of letters like himself, during his rare halting moments in England.
Long before this stage Mackay had seen his way to introducing the
catch-word of the conspiracy, "The English Shakespeare." He defended
vehemently the ethics of the great writer, claiming they were at core
essentially at one with those of the great nation from whence he sprang
and whose very life-blood had passed into his work. This brought about a
reaction, and all over the country the scribblers hastened to do justice
to the maligned writer, and an elaborate analysis of his most subtle
characters was announced as having been undertaken by Mr. Patrick Boyle.
And when it was stated that he was to be included in the Contemporary
Men of Letters Series, the advance orders for the work were far in
advance of the demand for Fladpick's actual writings. "Shakespearean,"
"The English Shakespeare," was now constantly used in connection with
his work, and even the most hard-worked reviewers promised themselves to
skim his book in their next summer holidays. About this time, too,
_Dazzler_ unconsciously helped the Society by announcing that Fladpick
was dying of consumption in a snow-hut in Greenland, and it was felt
that he must either die or go to a warmer climate, if not both. The news
of his phthisic weakness put the seal upon his genius, and the great
heart of the nation went out to him in his lonely snow-hut, but returned
on learning that the report was a _canard_. Still, the danger he had
passed through endeared him to his country, and within a few months
Fladpick, the English Shakespeare, was definitely added to the glories
of the national literature, founding a whole school of writers in his
own country, attracting considerable attention on the Continent, and
being universally regarded as the centre of the Victorian Renaissance.
But this was the final stage. A little before it was reached Cecilia
came to Frank Grey to pour her latest trouble into his ear, for she had
carefully kept her promise of bothering him with her most intimate
details, and the love-sick young lawyer had listened to her petty
psychology with a patience which would have brought him in considerable
fees if invested in the usual way. But this time the worry was genuine.
"Frank," she said, "I am in love."
The young man turned as white as a sheet. The sword of Damocles had
fallen at last, sundering them forever.
"With whom?" he gasped.
"With Mr. Fladpick!"
"The English Shakespeare?"
"The same!"
"But you have never seen him!"
"I have seen his soul. I have divined him from his writings. I have
studied Andrew Mackay's essays on him. I feel that he and I are _en
rapport_."
"But this is madness!"
"I know it is. I have tried to fight against it. I have applied for
admission to the Old Maids' Club, so as to stifle my hopeless passion.
Once I have joined Miss Dulcimer's Society, I shall perhaps find peace
again."
"Great Heavens! Think; think before you take this terrible step. Are you
sure it is love you feel, not admiration?"
"No, it is love. At first I thought it was admiration, and probably it
was, for I was not likely to be mistaken in the analysis of my feelings,
in which I have had much practice. But gradually I felt it efflorescing
and sending forth tender shoots clad in delicate green buds, and a sweet
wonder came upon me, and I knew that love was struggling to get itself
born in my soul. Then suddenly the news came that he I loved was ill,
dying in that lonely snow-hut in grim Greenland, and then in the tempest
of grief that shook me I knew that my life was bound up with his.
Watered by my hot tears, the love in my heart bourgeoned and blossomed
like some strange tropical passion-flower, and when the reassuring
message that he was strong and well flashed through the world, I felt
that if he lived not for me, the universe were a blank and next year's
daisies would grow over my early grave."
[Illustration: "_He I loved was dying in Greenland._"]
She burst into tears. "A great writer has always been the ideal which I
would not tell you of. It is the one thing I have kept from you. But oh,
Frank, Frank, he can never be mine. He will probably never know of my
existence and the most I can ever hope for is his autograph. To-morrow I
shall join the Old Maids' Club, and then all will be over." A paroxysm
of hopeless sobs punctuated her remarks.
It was a terrible position. Frank groaned inwardly.
How was he to explain to this fair young thing that she loved nobody and
could never hope to marry him? There was no doubt that with her intense
nature and her dreamy blue eyes she would pine away and die. Or worse,
she would live to be an old maid.
He made an effort to laugh it off.
"Tush!" he said, "all this is mere imagination. I don't believe you
really love anybody!"
"Frank!" She drew herself up, stony and rigid, the warm tears on her
poor white face frozen to ice. "Have you nothing better than this to say
to me, after I have shown you my inmost soul?"
The wretched young lawyer's face returned from white to red. He could
have faced a football team in open combat, but these complex psychical
positions were beyond the healthy young Philistine.
"For--or--give me," he stammered. "I--I am--I--that is to say,
Fladpick--oh how can I explain what I mean?"
Cecilia sobbed on. Every sob seemed to stick in Frank's own throat. His
impotence maddened him. Was he to let the woman he loved fret herself to
death for a shadow? And yet to undeceive her were scarcely less fatal.
He could have cut out the tongue that first invented Fladpick. Verily,
his sin was finding him out.
"Why can you not explain what you mean?" wept Cecilia.
"Because I--oh, hang it all--because I am the cause of your grief."
"You?" she said. A strange, wonderful look came into her eyes. The
thought shot from her eyes to his and dazzled them.
Yes! why not? why should he not sacrifice himself to save this delicate
creature from a premature tomb? Why should he not become "the English
Shakespeare?" True, it was a heavy burden to sustain, but what will a
man not dare or suffer for the woman he loves? Moreover, was he not
responsible for Fladpick's being, and thus for all the evil done by his
Frankenstein? He had employed Fladpick for his own amusement and the
Employers' Liability Act was heavy upon him. The path of abnegation, of
duty, was clear. He saw it and he went for it then and there--went, like
a brave young Englishman, to meet his marriage.
"Yes," he said, "I am glad you love Mr. Fladpick."
"Why?" she murmured breathlessly.
"Because I love you."
"But--I--do--not--love--you," she said slowly.
"You will, when I tell you it is I who have provoked your love."
"Frank, is this true?"
"On my word of honor as an Englishman."
"You are Fladpick?"
"If I am not, he does not exist. There is no such person."
"Oh, Frank, this is no cruel jest?"
"Cecilia, it is the sacred truth. Fladpick is nobody, if he is not Frank
Grey."
"But you never lived in Tartary?"
"Of course not. All that about Fladpick is the veriest poetry. But I did
not mind it, for nobody suspected me. I'll introduce you to Andrew
Mackay himself, and you shall hear from his own lips how the newspapers
have lied about Fladpick."
"My noble, modest boy! So this was why you were so embarrassed before!
But why not have told _me_ that you were Fladpick?"
"Because I wanted you to love me for myself alone."
She fell into his arms.
"Frank--Frank--Fladpick, my own, my English Shakespeare," she sobbed
ecstatically.
At the next meeting of the Mutual Depreciation Society, a bombshell in a
stamped envelope was handed to Mr. Andrew Mackay. He tore open the
envelope and the explosion followed--as follows:
"GENTLEMEN,
"I hereby beg to tender the resignation of my membership in your
valued Society, as well as to anticipate your objections to my
retaining the post of legal adviser I have the honor to hold. I
am about to marry--the cynic will say I am laying the foundation
of a Mutual Depreciation Society of my own. But this is not the
reason of my retirement. That is to be sought in my having
accepted the position of the English Shakespeare which you were
good enough to open up for me. It would be a pity to let the
pedestal stand empty. From the various excerpts you were kind
enough to invent, especially from the copious extracts in Mr.
Mackay's articles, I have been able to piece together a
considerable body of poetic work, and by carefully collecting
every existing fragment, and studying the most authoritative
expositions of my aims and methods, I have constructed several
dramas, much as Professor Owen re-constructed the mastodon from
the bones that were extant. As you know I had never written a
line in my life before, but by the copious aid of your excellent
and genuinely helpful criticism I was enabled to get along
without much difficulty. I find that to write blank verse you
have only to invert the order of the words and keep on your
guard against rhyme. You may be interested to know that the last
line in the last tragedy is:
'Coffined in English yew he sleeps in peace.'
When written, I got my dramas privately printed with a Tartary
trademark, after which I smudged the book and sold the copyright
to Makemillion & Co. for ten thousand pounds. Needless to say I
shall never write another book. In taking leave of you I cannot
help feeling that, if I owe you some gratitude for the lofty
pinnacle to which you have raised me, you are also not
unindebted to me for finally removing the shadow of apprehension
that must have dogged you in your sober moments--I mean the fear
of being found out. Mr. Andrew Mackay, in particular, as the
most deeply committed, I feel owes me what he can never hope to
repay for my gallantry in filling the mantle designed by him,
whose emptiness might one day have been exposed, to his
immediate downfall.
"I am, gentlemen,
"Your most sincere and humble Depreciator,
"THE ENGLISH SHAKESPEARE."