I
“Professor Joslin, who, as our readers are doubtless aware, is engaged in
writing the life of Mrs. Aubyn, asks us to state that he will be greatly
indebted to any of the famous novelist’s friends who will furnish
him with information concerning the period previous to her coming to
England. Mrs. Aubyn had so few intimate friends, and consequently so few
regular correspondents, that letters will be of special value. Professor
Joslin’s address is 10 Augusta Gardens, Kensington, and he begs us to
say that he will promptly return any documents entrusted to him.”
Glennard dropped the SPECTATOR and sat looking into the fire. The club
was filling up, but he still had to himself the small inner room, with
its darkening outlook down the rain-streaked prospect of Fifth Avenue.
It was all dull and dismal enough, yet a moment earlier his boredom had
been perversely tinged by a sense of resentment at the thought that, as
things were going, he might in time have to surrender even the despised
privilege of boring himself within those particular four walls. It was
not that he cared much for the club, but that the remote contingency of
having to give it up stood to him, just then, perhaps by very reason
of its insignificance and remoteness, for the symbol of his increasing
abnegations; of that perpetual paring-off that was gradually reducing
existence to the naked business of keeping himself alive. It was the
futility of his multiplied shifts and privations that made them
seem unworthy of a high attitude; the sense that, however rapidly he
eliminated the superfluous, his cleared horizon was likely to offer no
nearer view of the one prospect toward which he strained. To give up
things in order to marry the woman one loves is easier than to give them
up without being brought appreciably nearer to such a conclusion.
Through the open door he saw young Hollingsworth rise with a yawn
from the ineffectual solace of a brandy-and-soda and transport his
purposeless person to the window. Glennard measured his course with a
contemptuous eye. It was so like Hollingsworth to get up and look out of
the window just as it was growing too dark to see anything! There was
a man rich enough to do what he pleased--had he been capable of
being pleased--yet barred from all conceivable achievement by his own
impervious dulness; while, a few feet off, Glennard, who wanted only
enough to keep a decent coat on his back and a roof over the head of the
woman he loved Glennard, who had sweated, toiled, denied himself for
the scant measure of opportunity that his zeal would have converted into
a kingdom--sat wretchedly calculating that, even when he had resigned
from the club, and knocked off his cigars, and given up his Sundays out
of town, he would still be no nearer attainment.
The SPECTATOR had slipped to his feet and as he picked it up his eye
fell again on the paragraph addressed to the friends of Mrs. Aubyn. He
had read it for the first time with a scarcely perceptible quickening of
attention: her name had so long been public property that his eye passed
it unseeingly, as the crowd in the street hurries without a glance by
some familiar monument.
“Information concerning the period previous to her coming to
England....” The words were an evocation. He saw her again as she had
looked at their first meeting, the poor woman of genius with her long
pale face and short-sighted eyes, softened a little by the grace of
youth and inexperience, but so incapable even then of any hold upon
the pulses. When she spoke, indeed, she was wonderful, more wonderful,
perhaps, than when later, to Glennard’s fancy at least, the consciousness
of memorable things uttered seemed to take from even her most intimate
speech the perfect bloom of privacy. It was in those earliest days, if
ever, that he had come near loving her; though even then his sentiment
had lived only in the intervals of its expression. Later, when to
be loved by her had been a state to touch any man’s imagination, the
physical reluctance had, inexplicably, so overborne the intellectual
attraction, that the last years had been, to both of them, an agony of
conflicting impulses. Even now, if, in turning over old papers, his hand
lit on her letters, the touch filled him with inarticulate misery....
“She had so few intimate friends... that letters will be of special
value.” So few intimate friends! For years she had had but one; one
who in the last years had requited her wonderful pages, her tragic
outpourings of love, humility, and pardon, with the scant phrases by
which a man evades the vulgarest of sentimental importunities. He
had been a brute in spite of himself, and sometimes, now that the
remembrance of her face had faded, and only her voice and words remained
with him, he chafed at his own inadequacy, his stupid inability to rise
to the height of her passion. His egoism was not of a kind to mirror its
complacency in the adventure. To have been loved by the most brilliant
woman of her day, and to have been incapable of loving her, seemed to
him, in looking back, the most derisive evidence of his limitations; and
his remorseful tenderness for her memory was complicated with a sense of
irritation against her for having given him once for all the measure of
his emotional capacity. It was not often, however, that he thus probed
the past. The public, in taking possession of Mrs. Aubyn, had eased his
shoulders of their burden. There was something fatuous in an attitude of
sentimental apology toward a memory already classic: to reproach one’s
self for not having loved Margaret Aubyn was a good deal like being
disturbed by an inability to admire the Venus of Milo. From her
cold niche of fame she looked down ironically enough on his
self-flagellations.... It was only when he came on something that
belonged to her that he felt a sudden renewal of the old feeling, the
strange dual impulse that drew him to her voice but drove him from her
hand, so that even now, at sight of anything she had touched, his heart
contracted painfully. It happened seldom nowadays. Her little presents,
one by one, had disappeared from his rooms, and her letters, kept from
some unacknowledged puerile vanity in the possession of such treasures,
seldom came beneath his hand....
“Her letters will be of special value--” Her letters! Why, he must have
hundreds of them--enough to fill a volume. Sometimes it used to seem
to him that they came with every post--he used to avoid looking in his
letter-box when he came home to his rooms--but her writing seemed to
spring out at him as he put his key in the door--.
He stood up and strolled into the other room. Hollingsworth, lounging
away from the window, had joined himself to a languidly convivial group
of men to whom, in phrases as halting as though they struggled to define
an ultimate idea, he was expounding the cursed nuisance of living in
a hole with such a damned climate that one had to get out of it by
February, with the contingent difficulty of there being no place to take
one’s yacht to in winter but that other played-out hole, the Riviera.
From the outskirts of this group Glennard wandered to another, where
a voice as different as possible from Hollingsworth’s colorless organ
dominated another circle of languid listeners.
“Come and hear Dinslow talk about his patent: admission free,” one of
the men sang out in a tone of mock resignation.
Dinslow turned to Glennard the confident pugnacity of his smile. “Give
it another six months and it’ll be talking about itself,” he declared.
“It’s pretty nearly articulate now.”
“Can it say papa?” someone else inquired.
Dinslow’s smile broadened. “You’ll be deuced glad to say papa to IT
a year from now,” he retorted. “It’ll be able to support even you in
affluence. Look here, now, just let me explain to you--”
Glennard moved away impatiently. The men at the club--all but those who
were “in it”--were proverbially “tired” of Dinslow’s patent, and none
more so than Glennard, whose knowledge of its merits made it loom large
in the depressing catalogue of lost opportunities. The relations between
the two men had always been friendly, and Dinslow’s urgent offers to
“take him in on the ground floor” had of late intensified Glennard’s
sense of his own inability to meet good luck half way. Some of the men
who had paused to listen were already in evening clothes, others on
their way home to dress; and Glennard, with an accustomed twinge of
humiliation, said to himself that if he lingered among them it was in
the miserable hope that one of the number might ask him to dine. Miss
Trent had told him that she was to go to the opera that evening with her
rich aunt; and if he should have the luck to pick up a dinner-invitation
he might join her there without extra outlay.
He moved about the room, lingering here and there in a tentative
affectation of interest; but though the men greeted him pleasantly no
one asked him to dine. Doubtless they were all engaged, these men who
could afford to pay for their dinners, who did not have to hunt for
invitations as a beggar rummages for a crust in an ash-barrel! But
no--as Hollingsworth left the lessening circle about the table an
admiring youth called out--“Holly, stop and dine!”
Hollingsworth turned on him the crude countenance that looked like the
wrong side of a more finished face. “Sorry I can’t. I’m in for a beastly
banquet.”
Glennard threw himself into an arm-chair. Why go home in the rain to
dress? It was folly to take a cab to the opera, it was worse folly to go
there at all. His perpetual meetings with Alexa Trent were as unfair to
the girl as they were unnerving to himself. Since he couldn’t marry her,
it was time to stand aside and give a better man the chance--and
his thought admitted the ironical implication that in the terms of
expediency the phrase might stand for Hollingsworth.