in America also--there were practically two educational worlds and
two traditions of intellectual culture side by side. There was all
this vast fermenting hullabaloo of the new publishing, the new press,
the cinema theatres and so forth, a crude mental uproar arising out
of the new elementary schools of the nineteenth century, and there
was the old aristocratic education of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, which had picked up its tradition from the Augustan age of
Rome. They didn't mix. On the one hand were these office-boy
fellows with the intellectual courage and vigour--oh! of Aristotle
and Plato, whatever the quality of their intellectual equipment might
be; on the other the academic man, affectedly Grecian, like the
bought and sold learned man of the days of Roman slavery. He had the
gentility of the household slave; he had the same abject respect for
patron, prince and patrician; he had the same meticulous care in
minor matters, and the same fear of uncharted reality. He criticised
like a slave, sneering and hinting, he quarrelled like a slave,
despised all he dared despise with the eagerness of a slave. He was
incapable of serving the multitude. The new reading-crowd, the
working masses, the 'democracy' as we used to call it, had to get its
knowledge and its wisdom without him.
"Crane, our founder, had had in his day some inkling of the
educational function such businesses as his were bound to serve in
the world, but Sir Peter Newberry had been a hard tradesman, intent
only on recovering the prosperity that the newer popular publishers
had filched away from our firm. He was a hard-driving man; he drove
hard, he paid in niggardly fashion and he succeeded. He had been
dead now for some years and the chief shareholder and director of the
firm was his son Richard. He was nicknamed the Sun; I think because
someone had quoted Shakespeare about the winter of our discontent
being made summer by this Sun of York. He was by contrast a very
genial and warming person. He was acutely alive to the moral
responsibility that lay behind the practical irresponsibility of a
popular publisher. If anything, he drove harder than his father, but
he paid generously; he tried to keep a little ahead of the new public
instead of a little behind; the times moved in his favour and he
succeeded even more than his father had done. I had been employed by
Crane & Newberry for many weeks before I saw him, but in the first
office I entered in Thunderstone House I saw the evidences of his
personality in certain notices upon the wall. They were printed in
clear black letters on cards and hung up. It was his device for
giving the house a tone of its own.
"I remember 'We lead; the others imitate,' and 'If you are in any
doubt about its being too good put it in.' A third was: 'If a man
doesn't know what you know that's no reason for writing as if he was
an all-round fool. Rest assured there is something he knows better
than you do.'"
§ 9
"It took me some time to get from the yard of Thunderstone House to
the office in which these inscriptions were displayed. Fanny had
told me to ask for Mr. Cheeseman, and when I had discovered and
entered the doorway up a flight of steps, which had at first been
masked by two large vans, I made this demand of an extremely small
young lady enclosed in a kind of glass cage. She had a round face
and a bright red button of a nose. She was engaged, I realised
slowly, in removing a foreign stamp from a fragment of envelope by
licking the back of the paper. She did not desist from this
occupation but mutely asked my business with her eyes.
"'Oran-amoiment?' she asked, still licking.
"'Pardon?'
"'Oran-amoiment?'
"'I'm sorry,' I said, 'I don't get it quite.'
"'Mus' be deaf,' she said, putting down the stamp and taking a
sufficient breath for slow loud speech. ''Ave you
_gottonappointment_?'
"'Oh!' I said. 'Yes. I was told to come here to-day and see Mr.
Cheeseman between ten and twelve.'
She resumed her struggle with the stamp for a time. 'S'pose you
don't c'lect stamps?' she asked. ''Sintresting 'obby. Mr.
Cheeseman's written a little 'andbook about it. Looking for a job, I
suppose? May 'ave to wait a bit. Will you fill up that bit of paper
there? Formality we 'ave to insist on. Pencil....'
"The paper demanded my name and my business and I wrote that the
latter was 'literary employment.'
"'Lordy,' said the young lady when she read it. 'I thought you was
in for the ware'ouse. I say, Florence,' she said to another
considerably larger girl who had appeared on the staircase, 'look at
'im. 'E's after litry emplyment.'
"'Cheek!' said the second young lady after one glance at me, and sat
down inside the glass box with a piece of chewing gum and a novelette
just published by the firm. The young lady with the button nose
resumed her stamp damping. They kept me ten minutes before the
smaller one remarked: 'Spose I better take this up to Mr. Cheeseman,
Flo,' and departed with my form.
"She returned after five minutes or so. 'Mr. Cheeseman says 'E can
see you now for one minute,' she said, and led the way up a staircase
and along a passage that looked with glass windows into a printer's
shop and down a staircase and along a dark passage to a small
apartment with an office table, one or two chairs, and bookshelves
covered with paper-covered publications. Out of this opened another
room, and the door was open. 'You better sit down here,' said the
young lady with the button nose.
"'That Smith?' asked a voice. 'Come right in.'
"I went in, and the young lady with the button nose vanished from my
world.
"I discovered a gentleman sunken deeply in an arm-chair before a
writing-table, and lost in contemplation of a row of vivid drawings
which were standing up on a shelf against the wall of the room. He
had an intensely earnest, frowning, red face, a large broad mouth
intensely compressed, and stiff black hair that stood out from his
head in many directions. His head was slightly on one side and he
was chewing the end of a lead-pencil. 'Don't see it,' he whispered.
'Don't see it.' I stood awaiting his attention. 'Smith,' he
murmured, still not looking at me, 'Harry Mortimer Smith. Smith,
were you by any chance educated at a Board School?'
"'Yessir,' I said.
"'I hear you have literary tastes.'
"'Yessir.'
"'Then come here and stand by me and look at these damned pictures
there. Did you ever see such stuff?'
"I stood by his side but remained judiciously silent. The drawings I
now perceived were designs for a magazine cover. Upon all of them
appeared the words 'The New World' in very conspicuous lettering.
One design was all flying machines and steamships and automobiles;
two others insisted upon a flying machine; one showed a kneeling
loin-clothed man saluting the rising sun--which however rose behind
him. Another showed a planet earth half illuminated, and another was
simply a workman going to his work in the dawn.
"'Smith,' said Mr. Cheeseman, 'it's you've got to buy this magazine,
not me. Which of these covers do you prefer? It's your decision.
_Fiat experimentum in corpore vili_.'
"'Meaning me, Sir?' I said brightly.
"His bristle eyebrows displayed a momentary surprise. 'I suppose
we're all fitted with the same tags nowadays,' he remarked. 'Which
do you find most attractive?'
"'Those aeroplane things, Sir, seem to me to be shoving it a bit too
hard,' I said.
"'H'm,' said Mr. Cheeseman. 'That's what the Sun says. You wouldn't
buy on that?'
"'I don't think so, Sir. It's been done too much.'
"'How about that globe?'
"'Too like an Atlas, Sir.'
"'Aren't geography and travel interesting?'
"'They are, Sir, but somehow they aren't attractive.'
"'Interesting but not attractive. H'm. Out of the mouths of babes
and sucklings.... So it's going to be that labour chap there in the
dawn. You'd buy that, eh?'
"'Is this going to be a magazine about inventions and discoveries and
progress, Sir?'
"'Exactly.'
"'Well, the Dawn's good, Sir, but I don't think that sort of Labour
Day Cartoon man is going to be very attractive. Looks rheumatic and
heavy, Sir. Why not cut him out and keep the dawn?'
"'Bit too like a slice of ham, Smith--thin pink streaks.'
"I was struck by an idea. 'Suppose, Sir, you kept that dawn scene
and made it a bit earlier in the year. Buds on the trees, Sir. And
perhaps snowy mountains, rather cold and far off. And then you put a
hand right across it--just a big hand--pointing, Sir.'
"'Pointing up?' said Mr. Cheeseman.
"'No, Sir, pointing forward and just a little up. It would sort of
make one curious.'
"'It would. A woman's hand.'
"'Just a hand I think, Sir.'
"'You'd buy that?'
"'I'd jump at it, Sir, if I had the money.'
"Mr. Cheeseman reflected for some moments, chewing his pencil
serenely. Then he spat out small bits of pencil over his desk and
spoke. 'What you say, Smith, is exactly what I've been thinking.
Exactly. It's very curious.' He pressed a bell-push on his desk and
a messenger girl appeared. 'Ask Mr. Prelude to come here.... So you
think you'd like to come into Thunderstone House, Smith. I'm told
you know a little about science already. Learn more. Our public's
moving up to science. I've got some books over there I want you to
read and pick out anything you find interesting.'
"'You'll be able to find me a job, Sir?' I said.
"'I've got to find you a job all right. Orders is orders. You'll be
able to sit in that room there....'
"We were interrupted by the arrival of Mr. Prelude. He was a tall,
thin, cadaverous man with a melancholy expression.
"'Mr. Prelude,' said Mr. Cheeseman, waving his arm at the cover
sketches, 'this stuff won't do. It's--it's too banal. We want
something fresher, something with a touch of imagination. What I
want to see on the cover is--well, say a dawn--a very calm and simple
scene, mostly colour, mountain range far away just flushed with
sunrise, valley blue and still, high streamer clouds touched with
pink. See? Trees perhaps in the foreground--just budding--spring
_motif_ and morning _motif_. See? All a little faint and
backgroundy. Then a big hand and wrist across the page pointing at
something, something high and far away. See?'
"He surveyed Mr. Prelude with the glow of creative enthusiasm on his
face. Mr. Prelude looked disapproval. 'The Sun will like that,' he
said.
"'It's the goods,' said Mr. Cheeseman.
"'Why not those flying machines?'
"'Why not midges?' asked Mr. Cheeseman.
"Mr. Prelude shrugged his shoulders. 'I've got no use for a magazine
on progress without a flying machine or a Zeppelin,' he said.
'Still--it's your affair.'
"Mr. Cheeseman looked a little dashed by his colleague's doubt, but
he held to his idea. 'We'll get a sketch made,' he said. 'How about
Wilkinson?'
"They discussed some unknown Wilkinson as a possible cover designer.
Then Mr. Cheeseman turned to me. 'By the by, here's a youngster
we've got to make use of, Prelude. We don't know what he can do, but
he seems intelligent. I thought we'd use him to sift some of those
scientific books. What he likes, _they'll_ like. _I_ can't read
that stuff. I'm too busy.'
"Mr. Prelude surveyed me. 'You never know what you can do till you
try,' he said. 'Do you know anything of science?'
"'Not very much,' I said. 'But I've done some physiography and
chemistry and a little geology. And read a lot.'
"'You don't want to know very much,' said Mr. Prelude. 'You're
better without it here. Makes you High-Brow. High-Brow goes to tens
of thousands, but Crane & Newberry go to hundreds of thousands. Not
that our brows aren't rising some in this establishment. Educational
and improving, we're going to be. So far as is consistent with our
profits. See that notice,--_We lead_? All the same, Cheeseman,'
said Mr. Prelude, 'the thing that has sold, the thing that sells and
the thing that's going to sell, is the magazine with a pretty girl on
the cover--and the less costume the better. Consistent with decency.
Now here--what's your name?'
"'Smith, Sir.'
"'Smith. And here's all these covers on the book-stall. And then I
produce _this_. Which does he buy?'
"_This_ was the cover of the summer number of Newberry's Story
Magazine, on which two young ladies in skin-tight bathing dresses
disported themselves on a sandy beach.
"'Smith goes for this,' said Mr. Prelude triumphantly.
"I shook my head.
"'You mean to say that isn't attractive?' said Mr. Cheeseman, turning
in his chair and pointing with his well-chewed pencil.
"I reflected.
"'There's never anything about them inside,' I said.
"'Got you there, Prelude!' said Mr. Cheeseman.
"'Not a bit. He bought six or seven before he found that out. And
most of 'em forgot about it when they read inside.'"
§ 10
"I found my introduction to Thunderstone House far less terrifying
than I had anticipated. It was gratifying to have come so near to
what Mr. Cheeseman had thought about the magazine cover, and there
were presently other very reassuring coincidences of the same sort.
I was immediately interested in the editorial and publishing work
that was going on about me, and my mind took one of those forward
strides that are characteristic of adolescence. I was still a boy
when I left Mr. Humberg; I had not been with Crane & Newberry six
weeks before I perceived that I was a capable and responsible young
man. I began to form opinions rapidly, to write with confidence;
even my handwriting suddenly grew up from a careless or over-careful
boyish scrawl to a consistent and characteristic script. I began to
think about the clothes I was wearing and of the impression I made
upon other people.
"In quite a little time I was writing short contributions to some of
our minor weeklies and monthlies and suggesting articles and
'features' as we called them to Mr. Cheeseman. The eighteen
shillings a week at which I started went up in a series of jerks to
three pounds, which was quite a big salary in those days for a
youngster not yet eighteen. Fanny took the keenest interest in my
work and displayed an extraordinary understanding of its conditions.
She seemed to know all about Mr. Cheeseman and Mr. Prelude and the
rest of my colleagues directly I mentioned them.
"One day I was working in the room next to Mr. Cheeseman's with
another youngster called Wilkins at a rather odd little job. One of
the authors our firm employed had written a long story for the _Story
Reader's Paradise_, and it had been set up by the printers and passed
for press before it was discovered that in a careless moment she had
given her chief villain the name of a very prominent lawyer who
unhappily also had a country house in a village almost identical in
name with the corresponding village in the story. The prominent
lawyer might see fit to consider this use of his name as libellous
and make trouble for us. So Wilkins and I were going through two
sets of proofs, one to check the other, and we were changing the name
of the prominent lawyer to an entirely different one whenever it
occurred. To brighten the task we had made a game of it. Each one
raced down his galley proof and called the name of 'Reginald Flake'
whenever he found it and scored a point for every name he called
first. I was some points up when I heard a voice in the passage that
seemed oddly familiar to me. 'They're all spread out on my desk,
sir, if you like to come into my room,' I heard Mr. Cheeseman say.
"'Fay-nits,' said Wilkins. 'It's the Sun.'
"I turned round as the door opened and saw Mr. Cheeseman holding the
door open for a good-looking youngish man, with rather handsome
regular features and a sort of bang of brown hair over his forehead.
He wore a pair of very round large spectacles with glasses tinted a
faint yellow colour. He met my eyes and an expression of partial
recognition came into his and faded again. Either he recognised me
or he recognised a resemblance in me. He followed Mr. Cheeseman
across the room. Then he turned sharply.
"'Of course,' he said smiling and returning a step or two towards me.
'You must be young Smith. How are you getting on here?'
"'I'm working for Mr. Cheeseman mostly,' I said standing up.
"He turned to Mr. Cheeseman.
"'Very satisfactory, sir. Quick, interested; he'll do well here.'
"'I'm glad to hear it--very glad. Everyone has a chance here and
there's no favours. No favours. The best man does the job. Glad to
see you among the directors whenever you care to come up to us,
Smith.'
"'I'll do my best, Sir.'
"He hesitated, smiled again in a very friendly way and went into Mr.
Cheeseman's room....
"'Where are we?' I said. 'Middle of galley 32? Score, 22-29.'
"'How d'you know _'im_?' asked Wilkins in a fierce undertone.
"'I don't know him,' I said, suddenly hot and flushed. 'I've never
seen him before.'
"'Well, he knew you.'
"'He's heard about me.'
"'Who from?'
"'How the deuce should _I_ know?' I asked with needless heat.
"'Oh!' said Wilkins and reflected. 'But----'
"He glanced at my troubled face and said no more.
"But at the game of 'Reginald Flake' he overhauled me and beat me at
the end of the book, 67-42."
§ 11
"I concealed altogether from my mother the share that Fanny had had
in getting me my new job and all the opportunities it carried with it
in Thunderstone House, and so it was possible for her to find some
pride and satisfaction in my increasing prosperity. I was presently
able to double and then still further to increase my contribution to
the household expenses, and I exchanged my attic, which was handed
over to Prue for her very own, for the room which had once sheltered
the old Moggeridges. It was rearranged as a bed-sitting room for me,
and soon I had first one and then several shelves full of books and a
writing-desk of my own.
"And also I concealed from my mother, for there was no use in
distressing her, the frequency of my visits to Fanny. We began to
make little excursions together, for Fanny, I discovered, was often
very lonely. Newberry was a very busy man, and often he could not
come near her for ten days or a fortnight, and although she had some
women friends, and classes and lectures, there were gaps often of
several days when she would have had no one to speak to but the
servant who came in daily to her, if it had not been for me. But all
this companioning of Fanny I tried to hide from my mother, though now
and then her suspicions stabbed my falsehoods. Ernie and Prue,
however, were able to follow the calls of love unhampered by the
family shame, and presently they were both engaged and his young lady
and her young man were brought to a Sunday tea-party in the
drawing-room--through the kind permission of Mr. and Mrs. Milton who
were, as usual, 'away.' Ernie's Young Lady--I've completely
forgotten her name--proved to be a well-dressed, self-possessed young
woman with a vast knowledge of people in what we used to call
'society'; she talked freely and fashionably, taking the larger share
of the conversation, of Ascot and Monte Carlo and the Court. Prue's
Mr. Pettigrew was of a more serious quality, and of the things he
said I remember now only that he expressed a firm conviction that
Messages from the Dead were Bound to Come in a few years' time. He
was a chiropodist and very well thought of in chiropodological
circles."
"Stop!" cried Radiant. "What is this? You are talking nonsense,
Sarnac. What is chiropodological--hand--foot--scientific?"
"I thought you'd ask me that," said Sarnac, smiling. "Chiropody
was--corn-cutting."
"Corn-cutting--harvesting," said Starlight. "But where do the hands
and feet come in? There were machines then, were there not?"
"No, this was a different sort of corn. Mr. Humberg's shop was full
of corn-salves and corn-cures. Corns were painful and tiresome
callosities produced on people's feet by the pressure of ill-fitting
boots. We don't know of such things nowadays, but they darkened
scores of lives in Pimlico."
"But why did they wear ill-fitting boots?" demanded Radiant.
"Oh!--never mind. Never mind. I know. A mad world which made boots
at hazard without looking at the feet that had to wear them! And
wore boots that hurt it when no sane people would dream of wearing
boots! Go on with your story."
"Let me see," said Sarnac. "I was talking of a tea-party, a family
tea-party in the drawing-room--in which we talked of everything in
the world but my sister Fanny. And quite a little while after that
tea-party my mother fell ill and died.
"It was a swift and sudden illness. She caught a cold and would not
go to bed. When she did go to bed, she got up after one day of it,
because she couldn't bear to think of all that Prue might be doing or
not doing in the house-work downstairs. And her cold turned to
pneumonia, the same sort of inflammation that had carried off the
Moggeridges, and she died in three days.
"Now when the fever came upon her she changed suddenly from something
white and hard and unapproachable to something flushed and pitiful.
Her face grew smaller and younger looking, her eyes bright, and
something came into them that reminded me of Fanny when Fanny was
distressed. And all my habit of sullen resistance to my mother
melted when I saw her struggling for breath on her tumbled pillow and
realised that she might be near the end of all her hates and
drudgeries. Matilda Good became again the old friend who had known
her since she was a young woman, and they called each other 'Tilda'
and 'Marty' instead of Matilda and Martha. Matilda for all her
varicose veins was up and down stairs fifty times a day; and there
was much sending out for expensive things, the more expensive the
better, that Matilda thought my mother might 'fancy.' They stood
appealingly untouched upon the table by her bedside. Once or twice
towards the end my mother asked for me, and when I came in the
evening and bent over her she whispered hoarsely, ''Arry boy--promise
me! ... Promise me! ...'
"I sat down and took the hand she held out to me, and so holding to
me, she dozed.
"What she wanted me to promise she never said; and whether it was
some last vow she wanted to extract from me that would separate me
from Fanny for ever, or whether her thoughts about Fanny had changed
under the shadow of death and she had some new message for her, I
cannot imagine to this day. Perhaps she herself did not know what I
had to promise; a dying desire for predominance moved her. Will
stirred in her and faded again to nothing. 'Promise me!' Fanny she
never mentioned by name and we did not dare to bring my sister in to
her. Ernest came and kissed her and knelt down by the bedside and
suddenly, dreadfully wept aloud like the child he was and set us all
weeping; he was her firstborn and her dearest, he had known her
before her final embitterment, he had always been a dutiful son to
her.
"Presently she was lying there very straight and still, as hushed and
still as my father's shop on Sundays, and the traffics and struggles
and angers of life had done with her for ever. Her face was now
neither young nor old, a marble face of peace. All her peevish
resentment was smoothed and wiped away. It had never occurred to me
before that she had or had not good looks, but now I saw that Fanny's
fine regularity of feature came from her. She was like Fanny, like
an immobile, unhumorous Fanny.
"I stood beside her still body oppressed by a grief too wide and deep
for tears, an immense grief that was not so much for her as for all
that distress of life she had embodied. For now I saw that there was
not and there never had been anything hateful in her; I saw for the
first time the devotion of her, the misguided passion for right, the
mute, blundering, tormented and tormenting love in her heart. Even
her love of Fanny was a love capsized and inverted; her fallen
daughter had been to her a detested changeling for the pretty clever
little girl who was to have been a paragon of feminine virtue.
Except for Ernest how bitterly and repeatedly had we children
offended her rigid and implacable standards, Fanny and I openly and
rebelliously and Prue by discovery! For Prue--I will not tell you
the details of Matilda's exposure--pilfered.
"Long before we children began to thwart my mother there must have
been a still more monstrous disappointment for her. What sort of
dreams of manly piety and decorum had she wrapped about my poor,
maundering, ramshackle, loose-limbed father when he and she walked
out together in their Sunday clothes, making the best and more than
the best of themselves? He must have been a tall, good-looking,
young man then, and reassuringly apt with pious reflections. What
shocks had he, gross, clumsy, wayward, ignorant and incompetent as
the dear man was, inflicted upon her set and limited expectations?