I
IN the intervals of running from hotel to hotel--for Robert Grimshaw
had taken it for granted that Ellida was right, and that Katya had gone
either to the old hotel where she had stayed with Mrs. Van Husum, and
where they knew she had left the heavier part of her belongings--Robert
Grimshaw looked in to tell Pauline that he hadn’t yet been able to fix
things up with Katya Lascarides, but that he was certainly going to
do so, and would fetch her along that afternoon. In himself he felt
some doubt of how he was going to find Katya. At the Norfolk Street
hotel he had heard that she had called in for two or three minutes the
night before in order to change her clothes--he remembered that she was
wearing her light grey dress and a linen sun-hat--and that then she had
gone out, saying that she was going to a patient’s, and might or might
not come back.
“This afternoon,” he repeated, “I’ll bring her along.”
Pauline looked at his face attentively.
“Don’t you know where she is?” she said incredulously, and then she
added, as if with a sudden desolation: “Have you quarrelled as much as
all that?”
“How did you know I don’t know where she is?” Grimshaw answered
swiftly. “She hasn’t been attacking you?”
Her little hands fell slowly open at her sides; then she rested one of
them upon the white cloth that was just being laid for lunch.
The horn of an automobile sounded rather gently outside, and the wheels
of a butcher’s cart rattled past.
“Oh, Robert,” she said suddenly, “it wasn’t about me you quarrelled?
Don’t you understand she’s here in the house now? That was Sir William
Wells who just left.”
“She hasn’t been attacking you?” Grimshaw persisted.
“Oh, she wouldn’t, you know,” Pauline answered. “She isn’t that sort.
It’s you she would attack if she attacked anybody.”
“Oh, well, yes,” Robert Grimshaw answered. “It was about you we
quarrelled--about you and Dudley, about the household: it occupies too
much of my attention. She wants me altogether.”
“Then what’s she here for?” Pauline said.
“I don’t know,” Grimshaw said. “Perhaps because she’s sorry for you.”
“Sorry for me!” Pauline said, “because I care.... But then she ... Oh,
where do we stand?”
“What has she done?” Robert Grimshaw said. “What does she say?”
“About you?” Pauline said.
“No, no--about the case?”
“Oh,” Pauline said, “she says that if we can only find out who it was
rang up that number it would be quite likely that we could cure him.”
Grimshaw suddenly sat down.
“That means ...” he said, and then he stopped.
Pauline said: “What? I couldn’t bear to cause her any unhappiness.”
“Oh,” Robert Grimshaw answered, “is that the way to talk in our day
and--and--and our class? We don’t take things like that.”
“Oh, my dear,” she said painfully, “how are we taking this?” Then she
added: “And in any case Katya isn’t of our day or our class.”
She came near, and stood over him, looking down.
“Robert,” she said gravely, “who is of our day and our class? Are you?
Or am I? Why are your hands shaking like that, or why did I just now
call you ‘my dear’? We’ve got to face the fact that I called you ‘my
dear.’ Then, don’t you see, you can’t be of our day and our class. And
as for me, wasn’t it really because Dudley wasn’t faithful to me that
I’ve let myself slide near you? I haven’t made a scandal or any outcry
about Dudley Leicester. That’s our day and that’s our class. But look
at all the difference it’s made in our personal relations! Look at the
misery of it all! That’s it. We can make a day and a class and rules
for them, but we can’t keep any of the rules except just the gross ones
like not making scandals.”
“Then, what Katya’s here for,” Robert Grimshaw said, “is to cure
Dudley. She’s a most wonderful sense, and she knows that the only way
to have me altogether is to cure him.”
“Oh, don’t put it as low down as that,” Pauline said. “Just a little
time ago you said that it was because she was sorry for me.”
“Yes, yes,” Grimshaw answered eagerly; “that’s it; that’s the motive.
But it doesn’t hinder the result from being that, when Dudley’s cured,
we all fly as far apart as the poles.”
“Ah,” she said slowly, and she looked at him with the straight,
remorseless glance and spoke with the little, cold expressionless voice
that made him think of her for the rest of his life as if she were the
unpitying angel that barred for our first parents the return into Eden,
“you see that at least! That is where we all are--flying as far apart
as the poles.”
Grimshaw suddenly extended both his hands in a gesture of mute agony,
but she drew back both her own.
“That again,” she said, “is our day and our class. And that’s the best
that’s to be said for us. We haven’t learned wisdom: we’ve only learned
how to behave. We cannot avoid tragedies.”
She paused and repeated with a deeper note of passion than he had ever
heard her allow herself:
“Tragedies! Yes, in our day and in our class we don’t allow ourselves
easy things like daggers and poison-bowls. It’s all more difficult.
It’s all more difficult because it goes on and goes on. We think we’ve
made it easier because we’ve slackened old ties. You’re in and out of
the house all day long, and I can go around with you everywhere. But
just because we’ve slackened the old ties, just because marriage is
a weaker thing than it used to be--in our day and in our class”--she
repeated the words with deep bitterness and looked unflinchingly into
his eyes--“we’ve strengthened so immensely the other kind of ties. If
you’d been married to Miss Lascarides you’d probably not have been
faithful to her. As it is, just because your honour’s involved you find
yourself tied to her as no monk ever was by his vow.”
She looked down at her feet and then again at his eyes, and in her
glance there was a cold stream of accusation that appeared incredible,
coming from a creature so small, so fragile, and so reserved. Grimshaw
stood with his head hanging forward upon his chest: the scene seemed
to move with an intolerable slowness, and to him her attitude of
detachment was unspeakably sad. It was as if she spoke from a great
distance--as if she were a ghost fading away into dimness. He could not
again raise his hands towards her: he could utter no endearments: her
gesture of abnegation had been too absolute and too determined. With
her eyes full upon him she said:
“You do not love Katya Lascarides: you are as cold to her as a stone.
You love me, and you have ruined all our lives. But it doesn’t end, it
goes on. We fly as far asunder as the poles, and it goes on for good.”
She stopped as suddenly as she had begun to speak, and what she had
said was so true, and the sudden revelation of what burned beneath the
surface of a creature so small and apparently so cold--the touch of
fierce hunger in her voice, of pained resentment in her eyes--these
things so overwhelmed Robert Grimshaw that for a long time, still he
remained silent. Then suddenly he said:
“Yes; by God, it’s true what you say! I told Ellida long ago that my
business in life was to wait for Katya and to see that you had a good
time.” He paused, and then added quickly: “I’ve lived to see you in
hell, and I’ve waited for Katya till”--he moved one of his hands in a
gesture of despair--“till all the fire’s burned out,” he added suddenly.
“So that now,” she retorted with a little bitter humour, “what you’ve
got to do is to give Katya a good time and go on waiting for me.”
“Till when?” he said with a sudden hot eagerness.
“Oh,” she said, “till all the ships that ever sailed come home; till
all the wild-oats that were ever sown are reaped; till the sun sets in
the east and the ice on the poles is all melted away. If you were the
only man in all the world, my dear, I would never look at you again.”
Grimshaw looked at the ground and muttered aimlessly:
“What’s to be done? What’s to be done?”
He went on repeating this like a man stupified beyond the power of
speech and thought, until at last it was as if a minute change of light
passed across the figure of Pauline Leicester--as if the softness faded
out of her face, her colour and her voice, as if, having for that short
interval revealed the depths of her being, she had closed in again,
finally and irrevocably. So that it was with a sort of ironic and
business-like crispness that she said:
“All that’s to be done is the one thing that you’ve got to do.”
“And that?” Robert Grimshaw asked.
“That is to find the man who rang up that number. You’ve got to do that
because you know all about these things.”
“I?” Robert Grimshaw said desolately. “Oh yes, I know all about these
things.”
“You know,” Pauline continued, “she’s very forcible, your Katya. You
should have seen how she spoke to Sir William Wells, until at last he
positively roared with fury, and yet she hadn’t said a single word
except, in the most respectful manner in the world, ‘Wouldn’t it have
been best the very first to discover who the man on the telephone was?”
“How did she know about the man on the telephone?” Grimshaw said. “You
didn’t. Sir William told me not to tell you.”
“Oh, Sir William!” she said, with the first contempt that he had ever
heard in her voice. “He didn’t want anybody to know anything. And when
Katya told him that over there they always attempt to cure a shock of
that sort by a shock almost exactly similar, he simply roared out:
‘Theories! theories! theories!’ That was his motor that went just now.”
They were both silent for a long time, and then suddenly Robert
Grimshaw said:
“It was I that rang up 4,259 Mayfair.”
Pauline only answered: “Ah!”
And looking straight at the carpet in front of him, Robert Grimshaw
remembered the March night that had ever since weighed so heavily on
them all. He had dined alone at his club. He had sat talking to three
elderly men, and, following his custom, at a quarter past eleven he
had set out to walk up Piccadilly and round the acute angle of Regent
Street. Usually he walked down Oxford Street, down Park Lane; and so,
having taken his breath of air and circumnavigated, as it were, the
little island of wealth that those four streets encompass, he would lay
himself tranquilly in his white bed, and with Peter on a chair beside
his feet, he would fall asleep. But on that night, whilst he walked
slowly, his stick behind his back, he had been almost thrown down by
Etta Stackpole, who appeared to fall right under his feet, and she was
followed by the tall form of Dudley Leicester, whose face Grimshaw
recognized as he looked up to pay the cabman. Having, as one does on
the occasion of such encounters, with a military precision and an
extreme swiftness turned on his heels--having turned indeed so swiftly
that his stick, which was behind his back, swung out centrifugally and
lightly struck Etta Stackpole’s skirt, he proceeded to walk home in
a direction the reverse of his ordinary one. And at first he thought
absolutely nothing at all. The night was cold and brilliant, and he
peeped, as was his wont, curiously and swiftly into the faces of the
passers-by. Just about abreast of Burlington House he ejaculated:
“That sly cat!” as if he were lost in surprised admiration for Dudley
Leicester’s enterprise. But opposite the Ritz he began to shiver. “I
must have taken a chill,” he said, but actually there had come into
his mind the thought--the thought that Etta Stackpole afterwards so
furiously upbraided him for--that Dudley Leicester must have been
carrying on a long intrigue with Etta Stackpole. “And I’ve married
Pauline to that scoundrel!” he muttered, for it seemed to him that
Dudley Leicester must have been a scoundrel, if he could so play fast
and loose, if he could do it so skilfully as to take in himself, whilst
appearing so open about it.
And then Grimshaw shrugged his shoulders: “Well, it’s no business of
mine,” he said.
He quickened his pace, and walked home to bed; but he was utterly
unable to sleep.
Lying in his white bed, the sheets up to his chin, his face dark in the
blaze of light, from above his head--the only dark object, indeed, in
a room that was all monastically white--his tongue was so dry that he
was unable to moisten his lips with it. He lay perfectly still, gazing
at Peter’s silver collar that, taken off for the night, hung from
the hook on the back of the white door. His lips muttered fragments
of words with which his mind had nothing to do. They bubbled up from
within him as if from the depths of his soul, and at that moment Robert
Grimshaw knew himself. He was revealed to himself for the first time
by words over which he had no control. In this agony and this prickly
sweat the traditions--traditions that are so infectious--of his English
public-school training, of his all-smooth and suppressed contacts in
English social life, all the easy amenities and all the facile sense of
honour that is adapted only to the life of no strain, of no passions;
all these habits Were gone at this touch of torture. And it was of
this intolerably long anguish that he had been thinking when he had
said to Etta Stackpole that in actual truth he was only a Dago. For
Robert Grimshaw, if he was a man of many knowledges, was a man of no
experiences at all, since his connection with Katya Lascarides, her
refusal of him, her shudderings at him, had been so out of the ordinary
nature of things that he couldn’t make any generalizations from them at
all. When he had practically forced Dudley Leicester upon Pauline, he
really had believed that you can marry a woman you love to your best
friend without enduring all the tortures of jealousy. This sort of
marriage of convenience that it was, was, he knew, the sort of thing
that in their sort of life was frequent and successful enough, and
having been trained in the English code of manners never to express any
emotion at all, he had forgotten that he possessed emotions. Now he was
up against it.
He was frightfully up against it. Till now, at least, he had been able
to imagine that Dudley Leicester had at least a devouring passion for,
a quenchless thirst to protect, his wife. It had been a passion so
great and commencing so early that Grimshaw could claim really only
half the credit of having made the match. Indeed, his efforts had been
limited to such influence as he had been able to bring to bear upon
Pauline’s mother, to rather long conversations in which he had pointed
out how precarious, Mrs. Lucas being dead, would be Pauline’s lot in
life. And he had told her at last that he himself was irretrievably
pledged, both by honour and by passion, to Katya Lascarides. It was on
the subsequent day that Pauline had accepted her dogged adorer.
His passion for Katya Lascarides! He hadn’t till that moment had any
doubt about it. But by then he knew it was gone; it was dead, and
in place of a passion he felt only remorse. And his longing to be
perpetually with Pauline Leicester--as he had told Ellida Langham--to
watch her going through all her life with her perpetual tender smile,
dancing, as it were, a gentle and infantile measure; this, too, he
couldn’t doubt. Acute waves of emotion went through him at the thought
of her--waves of emotion so acute that they communicated themselves
to his physical being, so that it was as if the thought of Katya
Lascarides stabbed his heart, whilst the thought of Pauline Leicester
made his hands toss beneath the sheets. For, looking at the matter
formally, and, as he thought, dispassionately, it had seemed to him
that his plain duty was to wait for Katya Lascarides, and to give
Pauline as good a time as he could. That Pauline would have this with
Dudley Leicester he hadn’t had till the moment of the meeting in Regent
Street the ghost of a doubt, but now ...
He said: “Good God!” for he was thinking that only the Deity--if even
He--could achieve the impossible, could undo what was done, could
let him watch over Pauline, which was the extent of the possession
of her that he thought he desired, and wait for Katya, which also
was, perhaps, all that he had ever desired to do. The intolerable
hours ticked on. The light shone down on him beside the bed. At the
foot Peter slept, coiled up and motionless. At the head the telephone
instrument, like a gleaming metal flower, with its nickel corolla and
black bell, shone with reflected light. He was accustomed on mornings
when he felt he needed a rest to talk to his friends from time to
time, and suddenly his whole body stirred in bed. The whites of his
eyes gleamed below the dark irises, his white teeth showed, and as he
clasped the instrument to him he appeared, as it were, a Shylock who
clutched to his breast his knife and demanded of the universe his right
to the peace of mind that knowledge at least was to give him.
He must know; if he was to defend Pauline, to watch over her, to
brood over her, to protect her, he must know what was going on. This
passionate desire swept over him like a flood. There remained nothing
else in the world. He rang up the hotel which, tall, white, and cold,
rises close by where he had seen Etta Stackpole spring from the cab. He
rang up several houses known to him, and, finally, with a sort of panic
in his eyes he asked for Lady Hudson’s number. The little dog, aroused
by his motions and his voice, leapt on to the bed, and pattering up,
gazed wistfully at his face. He reached out his tongue to afford what
consolation he could to the master, whom he knew to be perturbed,
grieved, and in need of consolation, and just before the tinny sound
of a voice reached Grimshaw’s ears Grimshaw said, his lips close to
the mouthpiece, “Get down.” And when, after he had uttered the words,
“Isn’t that Dudley Leicester speaking?” there was the click of the
instrument being rung off, Robert Grimshaw said to himself grimly, “At
any rate, they’ll know who it was that rung them up.”
But Dudley Leicester hadn’t known; he was too stupid, and the tinny
sound of the instrument had destroyed the resemblance of any human
voice.
Thus, sitting before Pauline Leicester in her drawing-room, did Robert
Grimshaw review his impressions. And, looking back on the whole affair,
it seemed to present himself to him in those terms of strong light, of
the unreal sound of voices on the telephone, and of pain, of unceasing
pain that had never “let up” at any rate from the moment when, having
come up from the country with Katya’s kisses still upon his lips,
he had found Pauline in his dining-room, and had heard that Dudley
Leicester didn’t know.
He remained seated, staring, brooding at the carpet just before
Pauline’s feet, and suddenly she said: “Oh, Robert, what did you
_do_ it for?”
He rose up suddenly and stood over her, and when he held both her small
hands between his own, “You’d better,” he said--“it’ll be better for
both you and me--put upon it the construction that shows the deepest
concern for you.”
And suddenly from behind their backs came the voice of Katya Lascarides.
“Well,” she said, “Robert knows everything. Who is the man that rang up
4,259 Mayfair?”
Robert Grimshaw hung his head for a moment, and then:
“I did,” he said.
Katya only answered, “Ah!” Then, very slowly, she came over and put one
hand on Pauline’s shoulder. “Oh, you poor dear,” she exclaimed, and
then to Robert: “Then you’d better come and tell him so. I’ll stake my
new hat to my professional reputation that it’ll put him on to his legs
at once.”
And with an air of taking him finally under her wing, she conducted him
down the passage to Dudley Leicester’s room.
In the dining-room Pauline stood for a long time looking down at her
fingers that rested upon the tablecloth. The air was full of little
noises--the clitter of milk-cans, the monotonous sound of water
pulsing continuously from the mains, the voices of two nurses as they
wheeled their charges home from the Park. The door-bell rang, but no
one disturbed her. With the light falling on her hair, absolutely
motionless, she looked down at her fingers on the white cloth and
smiled faintly.
II
IN the long, dark room where Dudley Leicester still sprawled in his
deep chair, Katya stopped Robert Grimshaw near the door.
“I’ll ask him to ask you his question,” she said, “and you’ll answer it
in as loud a voice as you can. That’ll cure him. You’ll see. I don’t
suppose you expected to see me here.”
“I didn’t expect it,” he answered, “but I know why you have come.”
“Well,” she said, “if he isn’t cured, you’ll be hanging round him for
ever.”
“Yes, I suppose I shall be hanging round him for ever,” he answered.
“And more than that, you’ll be worrying yourself to death over it. I
can’t bear you to worry, Toto,” she said. She paused for a long minute
and then she scrutinized him closely.
“So it was you who rang him up on the telephone?” she said. “I thought
it was, from the beginning.”
“Oh, don’t let’s talk about that any more,” Grimshaw said; “I’m very
tired; I’m very lonely. I’ve discovered that there are things one can’t
do--that I’m not the man I thought I was. It’s you who are strong and
get what you want, and I’m only a meddler who muddles and spoils.
That’s the moral of the whole thing. Take me on your own terms and make
what you can of me. I am too lonely to go on alone any more. I’ve come
to give myself up. I went down to Brighton to give myself up to you on
condition that you cured Dudley Leicester. Now I just do it without any
conditions whatever.”
She looked at him a little ironically, a little tenderly.
“Oh, well, my dear,” she said, “we’ll talk about that when he’s cured.
Now come.”
She made him stand just before Leicester’s sprawled-out feet, and going
round behind the chair, resting her hands already on Leicester’s hair
in preparation for bending down to make, near his ear, the suggestion
that he should put his question, she looked up at Robert Grimshaw.
“You consent,” she said, with hardly a touch of triumph in her voice,
“that I should live with you as my mother lived with my father?” And
at Robert Grimshaw’s minute gesture of assent: “Oh, well, my dear,”
she continued quite gently, “it’s obvious to me that you’re more than
touched by this little Pauline of ours. I don’t say that I resent it.
I don’t suggest that it makes you care for me any less than you should
or did, but I’m sure, perfectly sure, of the fact such as it is, and
I’m sure, still more sure, that she cares extremely for you. So that
...” She had been looking down at Dudley Leicester’s forehead, but she
looked up again into Robert Grimshaw’s eyes. “I think, my dear,” she
said slowly, “as a precaution, I think you cannot have me on those
terms; I think you had better”--she paused for the fraction of a
minute--“marry me,” and her fingers began to work slowly upon Dudley
Leicester’s brows. There was the least flush upon her cheeks, the least
smile round the corners of her lips, she heaved the ghost of a sigh.
“So that you get me both ways,” Robert Grimshaw said; and his hands
fell desolately open at his side.
“Every way and altogether,” she answered.
EPISTOLARY EPILOGUE
“IT was a summer evening four years later when, upon the sands of
one of our most fashionable watering-places, a happy family group,
consisting of a buxom mother and several charming children, might have
been observed to disport itself. Who can this charming matron be, and
who these lovely children, designated respectively Robert, Dudley,
Katya, and Ellida?
“And who is this tall and robust gentleman who, wearing across the
chest of his white cricketing flannel the broad blue ribbon of His
Majesty’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, bearing in one hand negligently
the _Times_ of the day before yesterday and in the other a
pastoral rake, approaches from the hayfields, and, with an indulgent
smile, surveys the happy group? Taking from his mouth his pipe--for in
the _dolce far niente_ of his summer vacation, when not called
upon by his duties near the Sovereign at Windsor, he permits himself
the relaxation of the soothing weed--he remarks:
“‘The Opposition fellows have lost the by-election at Camber.’
“Oblivious of his pipe, the charming matron casts herself upon his
neck, whilst the children dance round him with cries of congratulation,
and the trim nurses stand holding buckets and spades with expressions
of respectful happiness upon their countenances. Who can this be?
“And who, again, are these two approaching along the sands with happy
and contented faces--the gentleman erect, olive-skinned, and, since his
wife has persuaded him to go clean-shaven, appearing ten years younger
than when we last saw him; the lady dark and tall, with the first signs
of matronly plumpness just appearing upon her _svelte_ form? They
approach and hold out their hands to the happy Cabinet Minister with
attitudes respectively of manly and ladylike congratulation, whilst
little Robert and little Katya, uttering joyful cries of ‘Godmama’
and ‘Godpapa!’ dive into their pockets for chocolates and the other
presents that they are accustomed to find there.
“Who can these be? Our friend the reader will have already guessed. And
so, with a moisture at the contemplation of so much happiness bedewing
our eyes, we lay down the pen, pack up the marionettes into their box,
ring down the curtain, and return to our happy homes, where the wives
of our bosoms await us. That we may meet again, dear reader, is the
humble and pious wish of your attached friend, the writer of these
pages.”
Thus, my dear ----, you would have me end this book, after I have taken
an infinite trouble to end it otherwise. No doubt, also, you would have
me record how Etta Hudson, as would be inevitably the case with such a
character, eventually became converted to Roman Catholicism, and ended
her days under the direction of a fanatical confessor in the practice
of acts of the most severe piety and mortification, Jervis, the butler
of Mr. Dudley Leicester, you would like to be told, remained a humble
and attached dependent in the service of his master; whilst Saunders,
Mr. Grimshaw’s man, thinking himself unable to cope with the duties of
the large establishment in Berkeley Square which Mr. Grimshaw and Katya
set up upon their marriage, now keeps a rose-clad hostelry on the road
to Brighton. But we have forgotten Mr. Held! Under the gentle teaching
of Pauline Leicester he became an aspirant for Orders in the Church
of England, and is now, owing to the powerful influence of Mr. Dudley
Leicester, chaplain to the British Embassy at St. Petersburg.
But since, my dear ----, all these things appear to me to be
sufficiently indicated in the book as I have written it, I must confess
that these additions, inspired as they are by you--but how much better
they would have been had you actually written them! these additions
appear to me to be ugly, superfluous, and disagreeable.
The foxes have holes, the birds of the air have nests, and you,
together with the great majority of British readers, insist upon having
a happy ending, or, if not a happy ending, at least some sort of an
ending. This is a desire, like the desire for gin-and-water or any
other comforting stimulant, against which I have nothing to say. You go
to books to be taken out of yourself, I to be shown where I stand. For
me, as for you, a book must have a beginning and an end. But whereas
for you the end is something arbitrarily final, such as the ring of
wedding-bells, a funeral service, or the taking of a public-house, for
me--since to me a novel is the history of an “affair”--finality is
only found at what seems to me to be the end of that “affair.” There
is in life nothing final. So that even “affairs” never really have an
end as far as the lives of the actors are concerned. Thus, although
Dudley Leicester was, as I have tried to indicate, cured almost
immediately by the methods of Katya Lascarides, it would be absurd to
imagine that the effects of his short breakdown would not influence the
whole of his after-life. These effects may have been to make him more
conscientious, more tender, more dogged, less self-centred; may have
been to accentuate him in a great number of directions. For no force is
ever lost, and the ripple raised by a stone, striking upon the bank of
a pool, goes on communicating its force for ever and ever throughout
space and throughout eternity. But for our vision its particular
“affair” ends when, striking the bank, it disappears. So for me the
“affair” of Dudley Leicester’s madness ended at the moment when Katya
Lascarides laid her hands upon his temple. In the next moment he would
be sane, the ripple of madness would have disappeared from the pond of
his life. To have gone on farther would have been, not to have ended
this book, but to have begun another, which--the fates being good--I
hope to write. I shall profit, without doubt, by your companionship,
instruction, and great experience. You have called me again and
again an Impressionist, and this I have been called so often that I
suppose it must be the fact. Not that I know what an Impressionist is.
Personally, I use as few words as I may to get any given effect, to
render any given conversation. You, I presume, do the same. You don’t,
I mean, purposely put in more words than you need--more words, that is
to say, than seem to you to satisfy your desire for expression. You
would probably render a conversation thus:
“Extending her hand, which was enveloped in creamy tulle, Mrs. Sincue
exclaimed, ‘Have another cup of tea, dear?’ ‘Thanks--two lumps,’ her
visitor rejoined. ‘So I hear Colonel Hapgood has eloped with his wife’s
French maid!’”
I should probably set it down:
“After a little desultory conversation, Mrs. Sincue’s visitor, dropping
his dark eyes to the ground, uttered in a voice that betrayed neither
exultation nor grief, ‘Poor old Hapgood’s cut it with Nanette. Don’t
you remember Nanette, who wore an apron with lace all round it and
those pocket things, and curled hair?’”
This latter rendering, I suppose, is more vague in places, and in other
places more accentuated, but I don’t see how it is more impressionist.
It is perfectly true you complain of me that I have not made it plain
with whom Mr. Robert Grimshaw was really in love, or that when he
resigned himself to the clutches of Katya Lascarides, whom personally
I extremely dislike, an amiable but meddlesome and inwardly conceited
fool was, pathetically or even tragically, reaping the harvest of his
folly. I omitted to add these comments, because I think that for a
writer to intrude himself between his characters and his reader is to
destroy to that extent all the illusion of his work. But when I found
that yourself and all the moderately quick-minded, moderately sane
persons who had read the book in its original form failed entirely to
appreciate what to me has appeared as plain as a pikestaff--namely,
that Mr. Grimshaw was extremely in love with Pauline Leicester, and
that, in the first place, by marrying her to Dudley Leicester, and, in
the second place, by succumbing to a disagreeable personality, he was
committing the final folly of this particular affair--when I realized
that these things were not plain, I hastened to add those passages
of explicit conversation, those droppings of the eyelids and tragic
motions of the hands, that you have since been good enough to say have
made the book.
Heaven knows, one tries enormously hard to be simple, to be even
transparently simple, but one falls so lamentably between two stools.
Thus, another reader, whom I had believed to be a person of some
intellect, has insisted to me that in calling this story “A Call” I
must have had in my mind something mysterious, something mystical; but
what I meant was that Mr. Robert Grimshaw, putting the ear-piece to
his ear and the mouthpiece to his mouth, exclaimed, after the decent
interval that so late at night the gentleman in charge of the exchange
needs for awaking from slumber and grunting something intelligible--Mr.
Grimshaw exclaimed, “Give me 4259 Mayfair.” This might mean that Lady
Hudson was a subscriber to the Post Office telephone system, but it
does not mean in the least that Mr. Grimshaw felt religious stirrings
within him or “A Call” to do something heroic and chivalrous, such as
aiding women to obtain the vote.
So that between those two classes of readers--the one who insist upon
reading into two words the whole psychology of moral revivalism, and
the others who, without gaining even a glimpse of meaning, will read
or skip through fifty or sixty thousand words, each one of which is
carefully selected to help on a singularly plain tale--between these
two classes of readers your poor Impressionist falls lamentably
enough to the ground. He sought to point no moral. His soul would
have recoiled within him at the thought of adorning by one single
superfluous word his plain tale. His sole ambition was to render
a little episode--a small “affair” affecting a little circle of
people--exactly as it would have happened. He desired neither to
comment nor to explain. Yet here, commenting and explaining, he
takes his humble leave, having packed the marionettes into the case,
having pulled the curtain down, and wiping from his troubled eyes the
sensitive drops of emotion. This may appear to be an end, but it isn’t.
He is, still, your Impressionist, thinking what the devil--what the
_very_ devil--he shall do to make his next story plain to the most
mediocre intelligence!
THE END