As soon as Deborah came out of college she made fresh literary
attempts; she was not successful. Now, frequent and continuous failures
are depressing, but they usually have the good effect of weeding out
the unfit and leaving only the strong. However, she was beginning to
feel dispirited. She had tried tragedy, comedy, mixtures, satires,
ghost stories, and myths, and everything had failed and been returned.
Each rejection had come like a dull thump on the top of her heart, but
none perhaps for some years had had quite the same dispiriting effect
as the first. Still she had hoped that when once out of college, and
with more time to give to writing, she would manage better; but that
was not so, the failures still continued. When she had been in the
country about a year she went to London for a week’s holiday.
Susan was there and they had a very enjoyable time.
“Do you know, I have a most irresistible longing to have my fortune
told,” Deborah said one day during this holiday. “It has been growing
on me for some time.”
“I thought you didn’t believe in that kind of thing,” remarked Susan.
“No, I don’t. But I want to try to find out something. Will you come?”
“Oh, yes,” Susan answered; she rather liked the idea.
There was a nurse staying in the same house who believed implicitly
in such things, and she furnished them with the name and address of
a woman who, according to her accounts, had much fame as a truthful
fortune-teller.
It was a hot Friday afternoon when they went, and the next day Deborah
was returning to the country.
The woman had a fine face and a pleasing manner.
She first of all told Susan’s hand—and she really did contrive to tell
it marvellously well. She told her a great deal too, and all that she
said was true. By this time it was getting very dark, and there was
every appearance of a thunder-storm—the heat all day had been intense.
When she came to read Deborah’s hand she had exhausted her supply of
words. But after a while she said,—
“You are unfair in your prejudices. You take strong likes and dislikes
without any good foundation for them.”
“There now,” said Susan. “That is you to a ‘T,’ Deborah.”
After that the lady was some time casting about in her mind as to what
she should say next, till suddenly Susan queried,—
“Has she any particular gift for writing?”
That rather startled Deborah; she had not expected it, although it was
the one thing and the only thing she wanted to know.
The fortune-teller looked very minutely at both hands and then declared
very decidedly,—
“No. There is not the slightest indication of any gift that way—not in
the slightest.”
There was a short silence, during which Deborah had the most curious
feeling of baffled anger she had ever felt in her life.
“I told you so,” said a voice in her ear far plainer than any human
voice. “How many times do you want telling? You may be quite sure if
this woman saw the least signs of anything that way she would tell you
at once.”
By this time the fortune-teller had begun to speak again.
“You have a gift though, and that is for acting. You should go on the
stage. You would make an excellent actress.”
Deborah laughed, and she might be excused the rudeness of it: a more
unlikely person for an actress was never born.
It was she who had always been told to sit down in college when she got
up to recite, and who had invariably been placed in the lowest class
for reading. Moreover, she was short and insignificant in appearance,
and by no means understood the art of dressing to advantage. Besides,
another word for being an actress, in Deborah’s mind, was being “fast,”
and she knew she was very far from being that. Again, she was not fond
of actresses nor acting, though that was probably due to ignorance.
There were only three of the few she had seen whom she had ever really
liked, and those were Ellen Terry, Winifred Emery, and Annie Hughes.
Yes, and one other—Amy Roselle; but she was dead.
Ellen Terry had entranced her. She had only seen her once, but that
once to her had been a perfect dream. She watched her almost with the
absorbed interest she gave to the people in her other world, and when
the play was over had felt an intense longing to go and put her arms
round her neck and kiss her.
To return to the fortune-teller.
After she had delivered the last shot, as it were, she had no more to
say, and they took their leave.
Deborah was so angry and so disappointed that she could scarcely eat
any tea, but was actress enough not to show it; so perhaps there was an
ironical truth in the lady’s statements after all.
“Fancy her telling you you could act,” said Susan.
“Oh, yes, they always tell you something like that, or they think your
vanity will be wounded,” Deborah replied, and hoped the thunder-storm
would pass off before they went into the street again.
They visited the theatre that night, and the fortune-teller passed
completely out of Deborah’s mind, not to return for nearly two years.
As she sat in the theatre and watched a great actor she began thinking
of the curious interest she had always taken in him ever since the
hanging of the little picture, long before she knew there was such a
man in reality at all.
“I wonder if, supposing I tried very hard with my writing, I might some
day just be allowed to shake hands with him,” she thought. “I’d rather
be spoken to by him than any other celebrity in the whole world.” She
sighed.
“I’d never be able to make a great enough name. I try hard enough now,
and it never has the least effect.”
When she went home she wrote another story, and pocketed all her pride
and sent it to a very inferior novelette series. But they returned it.
Deborah then made up her mind.
“I will write nothing more till I am thirty,” she thought. “I’ve spent
all my life so far in nothing but rejections, and after a certain point
I don’t think they’re good for people. Besides, it’s waste of time.”
The truth was that she had been thoroughly disheartened and did not
like to own up to it.
So she began to study for matriculation, but she was not fond of
this kind of study, and it took all her strength of mind to keep it
up. Perseverance, however, will do much, and when she had worked
successfully through a book on mechanics she felt almost as if she had
worked successfully through the examination itself.
Still, as time went on she began to grow low-spirited. Never in all her
life before had she stuck persistently to books. Never had she let more
than four months at most pass without writing some story or other; it
had seemed a part and a necessity of her life.
Now month followed month, and one year lengthened almost into two, and
still she stuck to the lesson books.
Low spirits were natural to her, but this was a place which would never
dispel them. The unkindnesses, the unpleasant quarrels weighed on her
just as much as her failures, and no amount of not-caring could ever
take the sting away.
Besides, there were other troubles, flimsy skeletons in the cupboard
that one never mentions, sending out at times their unwholesome odour
from between the narrow chinks.
The wish to pray, to cast this heavy, darkening burden on to other
shoulders grew. Deborah prayed to Christ, as she had never prayed for
anything before, except her father, to give her faith and light to
throw off the gloom.
She might just as well have prayed to a stone wall; to pray was simply
to increase the gloom, an empty mirage that on approach mocked at the
struggling traveller’s pain.
All the time she could spare from lessons she spent in that other
world; it was the one bright spot in her life, the thing for which she
was ineffably thankful.
One day at the beginning of the last year of the old century she sat
down to work out a problem in mechanics.
She never solved it. Indefinitely she began to scribble on the paper as
in the olden time.
“Oh, God!” she cried, “give me a man who can resist temptation for the
sake of good, and not because he is bound in by tradition or the world.”
And straightway she left this world and flew to that other. There she
found the man she wanted, him who had gone there so strangely long ago
as it seemed from the printed picture.
And Deborah began to write, and having once taken up the pen had not
the power to lay it down.