"he was my husband, you know. But as for loving,--no, I don't think
Ned ever really loved me," she reflected, with puckering brows. "He
took that money for--for another woman, if you remember. But he is
fond of me, and--and he _needs_ me."
I did not say anything; and after a little she went on, with a quick
lift of speech.
"Oh, what a queer life we have led since then! You can't imagine it,
my dear. He has been a tavern-keeper, a drummer,--everything! Why,
last summer we sold rugs and Turkish things in Atlantic City! But he
is always afraid of meeting someone who knows him, and--and he drinks
too much. So we have not got on in the world, Ned and I; and now,
after three years, I'm the leading lady of the Imperial Dramatic
Company, and he is the manager. I forgot, though,--he is advance-agent
this week, for he didn't dare stay in Fairhaven, lest some of the men
at Mr. Charteris's should recognize him, you know. He came back only
this evening--"
She paused for a moment; a wistful quaver crept into her speech. "Oh,
it's queer, it's queer, Bobbie! Sometimes--sometimes when I have time
to think, say on long Sunday afternoons, I remember my old life, every
bit of it,--oh, I do remember such strange little details! I remember
the designs on the bread and butter plates, and all the silver things
on my desk, and the plank by my door that always creaked and somehow
never got fixed, and the big, shiny buttons on the coachman's coat,--
just trifles like that. And--and they hurt, they hurt, Bobbie, those
little, unimportant things! They--grip my throat."
She laughed, not very mirthfully. "Then I am like the old lady in the
nursery rhyme, and say, Surely, this can't be I. But it is I, boy
dear,--a strolling actress, a barn-stormer! Isn't it queer, Bobbie?
But, oh, you don't know half--"
I was remembering many things. I remembered Lethbury, a gross man,
superfluously genial, whom I had never liked, although I recalled my
admiration of his whiskers. I recollected young Amelia Van Orden, not
come to her full beauty then, the bud of girlhood scarce slipped; and
I remembered very vividly the final crash, the nine days' talk over
Lethbury's flight in the face of certain conviction,--by his father-in-
law's advice (as some said) who had furnished and forfeited heavy bail
for the absconder. Oh, the brave woman who had followed! Oh, the brave,
foolish woman! And, for the action's recompense, he was content to
exhibit her to yokels, to make of her beauty an article of traffic.
Heine was right; there is an Aristophanes in heaven. And then hope
blazed.
"Your husband," I said, quickly, "he does not love you? He--he is not
faithful to you?"
"No," she answered; "there is a Miss Fortescue--she plays second
parts--"
"Ah, my dear, my dear!" I cried, with a shaking voice; "come away,
Signorina,--come away with me! He _doesn't_ need you,--and, oh, my
dear, I need you so! You can get your divorce and marry me. Ah,
Signorina, come away,--come away from this squalid life that is
killing you, to the world you are meant for, to the life you hunger
for! Come back to the clean, lighthearted world you love, the world
that is waiting to pet and caress you just as it used to do,--our
world, Signorina! You don't belong here with--with the Fortescues. You
belong to us."
I sprang to my feet. "Come now!" said I. "There's Anne Charteris; she
is a good woman, if ever lived one. She used to know you, too, didn't
she? Well, then, come with me to her, dearest--and tonight! You shall
see your father tomorrow. Your father--why, think how that old man
loves you, how he has longed for you, his only daughter, all these
years. And I?" I spread out my hands, in the tiniest, impotent
gesture. "I love you," I said, simply. "I cannot do without you,
heart's dearest."
Impulsively, she rested both hands upon my breast; then bowed her head
a little. The nearness of her seemed to shake in my blood, to catch at
my throat, and my hands, lifted for a moment, trembled with desire of
her.
"You don't understand," she said. "I am a Catholic--my mother was one,
you know. There is no divorce for us. And--and besides, I'm not
modern. I am very old-fashioned, I suppose, in my ideas. Do you know,"
she asked, with a smile upon the face which lifted confidingly toward
me, "I--I _really_ believe the world was made in six days; and that
the whale swallowed Jonah, and that there is a real purgatory and a
hell of fire and brimstone. You don't, do you, Bobbie? But I do,--and
I promised to stay with him till death parted us, you know, and I must
do it. I am all he has. He would get even worse without me. I--oh, boy
dear, boy dear, I love you so!" And her voice broke, in a great,
choking sob.
"A promise--a promise made by an ungrown girl to a brute--a thief--!"
"No, dear," she answered, quietly; "a promise made to God."
And looking into her face, I saw love there, and anguish, and
determination. It seemed monstrous, but of a sudden I knew with a dull
surety; she loved me, but she thought she had no right to love me; she
would not go with me. She would go with that drunken, brutish thief.
And I suddenly recalled certain clever women--Alicia Wade, Pauline
Ashmeade, Cynthia Chaytor--the women of that world wherein I was
novitiate; beyond question, they would raise delicately penciled
eyebrows to proclaim this woman a fool--and to wonder.
They would be right, I thought. She was only a splendid, tender-hearted,
bright-eyed fool, the woman that I loved. My heart sickened as her
folly rose between us, an impassable barrier. I hated it; and I revered
it.
Thus we two stood silent for a time. The wind murmured above in the
maples, lazily, ominously. Then the gate clicked, with a vicious snap
that pierced the silence like the report of a distant rifle. "That is
probably Ned," she said wearily. "I had forgotten they close the
barrooms earlier on Saturday nights. So good-bye, Bobbie. You--you may
kiss me, if you like."
So for a moment our lips met. Afterward I caught her hands in mine,
and gripped them close to my breast, looking down into her eyes. They
glinted in the moonlight, deep pools of sorrow, and tender--oh,
unutterably tender and compassionate.
But I found no hope there. I lifted her hand to my lips, and left her
alone in the garden.
3
Lethbury was fumbling at the gate.
"Such nuishance," he complained, "havin' gate won't unlock. Latch mus'
got los'--po' li'l latch," murmured Mr. Lethbury, plaintively--"all
'lone in cruel worl'!"
I opened the gate for him, and stood aside to let him pass toward his
wife.
9.
_He Puts His Tongue in His Cheek_
It was not long before John Charteris knew of the entire affair, for
in those days I had few concealments from him: and the little wizened
man brooded awhile over my misery, with an odd wistfulness.
"I remember Amelia Van Orden perfectly," he said--"now. I ought to
have recognized her. Only, she was never, in her best days, the
paragon you depict. She sang, I recollect; people made quite a to-do
over her voice. But she was very, very stupid, and used to make loud
shrieking noises when she was amused, and was generally reputed to be
'fast.' I never investigated. Even so, there was not any real doubt as
to her affair, in any event, with Anton von Anspach, after that night
the sleigh broke down--"
"Oh, spare me all those ancient Lichfield scandals! She is an angel,
John, if there was ever one."
"In your eyes, doubtless! So your heart is broken. Yet do you not
realize that not a month ago you were heartbroken over Stella
Musgrave? Child, I repeat, I envy you this perpetual unhappiness, for
I have lost, as you will presently lose, the capacity of being quite
miserable."
"But, John, it seems as if there were nothing left to live for, now--"
"At twenty-one! Well, certainly, at that age one loves to think of
life as being implacable. But you will soon discover that she is
merely inconsequential, and that none of her antics are of lasting
importance; and you will learn to smile a deal more often than you
weep or laugh."
Then we talked of other matters. It was presently settled that
Charteris was to take me abroad with him that summer; and with the
thorough approval of my mother.
"Mr. Charteris will be of incalculable benefit to you," she told me,
"in introducing you to the very best people, all of whom he knows, of
course, and besides you are getting to look older than I, and it is
unpleasant to have to be always explaining you are only my stepson,
particularly as your father never married anybody but me, though,
heaven knows, I wish he had. Of course you will be just as wild as
your father and your Uncle George. I suppose that is to be expected,
and I daresay it will break my heart, but all I ask of you is please
to keep out of the newspapers, except of course the social items. And
if you _must_ associate with abandoned women, please for my sake,
Robert, don't have anything to do with those who can prove that they
are only misunderstood, because they are the most dangerous kind."
I kissed her. "Dear little mother, I honestly believe that when you
get to heaven you will refuse to speak to Mary Magdalen."
"Robert, let us remember the Bible says, 'in my Father's house are
many mansions,' and of course nobody would think of putting me in the
same mansion with her."
It was well-nigh the last conversation I was to hold with my mother;
and I was to remember it with an odd tenderness....
2
Upon the doings of myself in Europe during the ensuing two years I
prefer to dwell as lightly as possible. I had long anticipated a
sojourn in divers old-world cities; but the London I had looked to
find was the London of Dickens, say, and my Paris the Paris of Dumas,
or at the very least of Balzac. It is needless to mention that in the
circles to which the, quite real, friendship of John Charteris
afforded an entry I found little that smacked of such antiquity. I had
entered a world inhabited by people who amused themselves and
apparently did nothing else; and I was at first troubled by their
levity, and afterward envious of it, and in the end embarked upon
sedulous attempt to imitate it. I continued to be very boyish; indeed,
I found myself by this in much the position of an actor who has made
such a success in one particular role that the public declines to
patronize him in any other.
3
It was during this first year abroad that I wrote _The Apostates_,
largely through the urging of John Charteris.
"You have the ability, though, that dances most gracefully in fetters.
You will never write convincingly about the life you know, because
life is, to you, my adorable boy, a series of continuous miracles, to
which the eyes of other men are case-hardened. Write me, then, a book
about the past."
"I have thought of it," said I, "for being over here makes the past
seem pretty real, somehow. Last month when I was at Ingilby I was on
fire with the notion of writing something about old Ormskirk--my
mother's ancestor, you know. And since I've seen what's left of
Bellegarde I have wanted to write about his wife's people too,--the
dukes and vicomtes of Puysange, or even about the great Jurgen. You
see, I am just beginning to comprehend that these are not merely
characters in Lowe's and La Vrilliere's books, but my flesh and blood
kin, like Uncle George Bulmer--"
"And for that reason you want to write about them! You would, though;
it is eminently characteristic. Well, then, why should you not
immortalize the persons who had the honor of begetting you--oh, most
handsome and most naive of children!--by writing your very best about
them?" "Because to succeed--not only among the general but with the
'cultured few,' God save the mark!--it is now necessary to write not
badly but abominably."
"What would you demand, then, of a book?"
I meditated. "What one most desiderates in the writings of to-day is
clarity, and beauty, and tenderness and urbanity, and truth."
"Not a bad recipe, upon the whole, though I would stipulate for
symmetry and distinction also--Write the book!"
"Ah," said I, "but this is the kind of book I wish to read when, of
course, the mood seizes me. It is not at all the sort of book, though,
I would elect to write. The main purpose of writing any book, I take
it, is to be read; and people simply will not read a book when they
suspect it of being carefully written. That sort of thing gets on a
reader's nerves; it's too much like watching a man walk a tight-rope
and wondering if he won't slip presently."
"Oh, 'people!'" Charteris flung out, in an extremity of scorn. "Since
time was young, a generally incompetent humanity has been willing to
pardon anything rather than the maddening spectacle of labour
competently done. And they are perfectly right; it is abominable how
such weak-minded persons occasionally thrust themselves into a world
quite obviously designed for persons who have not any minds at all.
But I was not asking you to write a 'best-seller.'"
"No, you were asking me to become an Economist, and be one of 'the few
rare spirits which every age providentially affords,' and so on. That
is absolute and immoral nonsense. When you publish a novel you are at
least pretending to supply a certain demand; and if you don't
endeavour honestly to supply it, you are a swindler, no more and no
less. No, it is all very well to write for posterity, if it amuses
you, John; personally, I cannot imagine what possible benefit you will
derive from it, even though posterity _does_ read your books. And for
myself, I want to be read and to be a power while I can appreciate the
fact that I _am_ a sort of power, however insignificant. Besides, I
want to make some money out of the blamed thing. Mother is a dear, of
course, but, like all the Bulmers, with age she is becoming tight-fisted."
"And Esau--" Charteris began.
"Yes,--but that's Biblical, and publishing a book is business. People
say to authors, just as they do to tailors: 'I want such and such an
article. Make it and I'll pay you for it.' Now, your tailor may
consider the Imperial Roman costume more artistic than that of today,
and so may you in the abstract, but if he sent home a toga in place of
a pair of trousers, you would discontinue dealing with him. So if it
amuses you to make togas, well and good; I don't quarrel with it; but,
personally, I mean to go into the gents' furnishing line and to do my
work efficiently."
"Yes,--but with your tongue in your cheek."
"It is the one and only attitude," I sweetly answered, "in which to
write if you indeed desire to be read with enjoyment." And presently I
rose and launched upon
_A Defence of That Attitude_
"The main trouble with you, John Charteris, is that you will never
recover from being _fin de siecle_. Yes, you belong to that queer
dying nineteenth century. And even so, you have quite overlooked what
is, perhaps, the signal achievement of the nineteenth century,--the
relegation of its literature to the pharmacopoeia. The comparison of
the tailor, I willingly admit, is a bad one. Those who write
successfully nowadays must appeal to men and women who seek in fiction
not only a means of relaxation, but spiritual comfort as well, and an
uplifting rather than a mere diversion of the mind; so that they are
really druggists who trade exclusively in intoxicants and hypnotics.
"Half of the customers patronize the reading-matter shops because they
want to induce delusions about a world they know, and do not find
particularly roseate and the other half skim through a book because
they haven't anything else to do and aren't sleepy, as yet.
"Oh, in filling either prescription the trick is much the same; you
have simply to avoid bothering the reader's intellect in any way
whatever. You have merely to drug it, you have merely to caress it
with interminable platitudes, or else with the most uplifting
avoidances of anything which happens to be unprintably rational. And
you must remember always that the crass emotions of half-educated
persons are, in reality, your chosen keyboard; so play upon it with an
axe if you haven't any handier implement, but hit it somehow, and for
months your name will be almost as famous as that of my mother's
father remains the year round because he invented a celebrated
baking-powder.
"It is all very well for you to sneer, and talk about art. But there
are already in this world a deal more Standard Works than any man can
hope to digest in the average lifetime. I don't quarrel with them,
for, personally, I find even Ruskin, like the python in the circus,
entirely endurable so long as there is a pane of glass between us. But
why, in heaven's name, should you endeavour to harass humanity with
one more battalion of morocco-bound reproaches for sins of omission,
whenever humanity goes into the library to take a nap? For what other
purpose do you suppose a gentleman goes into his library, pray? When
he is driven to reading he does it decently in bed.
"Besides, if I like a book, why, then, in so far as I am concerned, it
_is_ a good book. No, please don't talk to me about 'the dignity of
literature'; modern fiction has precisely as much to do with dignity
as has vaudeville or billiards or that ridiculous Prohibitionist
Party, since the object of all four, I take it, is to afford diversion
to people who haven't anything better to do. Thus, a novel which has
diverted a thousand semi-illiterate persons is exactly ten times as
good as a novel that has pleased a hundred superior persons. It is
simply a matter of arithmetic.
"You prefer to look upon writing as an art, rather than a business?
Oh, you silly little man, the touchstone of any artist is the skill
with which he adapts his craftsmanship to his art's limitations. He
will not attempt to paint a sound or to sculpture a colour, because he
knows that painting and sculpture have their limitations, and he,
quite consciously, recognizes this fact whenever he sets to work.
"Well, the most important limitation of writing fiction nowadays is
that you have to appeal to people who would never think of reading you
or anybody else, if they could possibly imagine any other employment
for that particular vacant half-hour. And you cannot hope for an
audience of even moderately intelligent persons, because intelligent
persons do not attempt to keep abreast with modern fiction. It is
probably ascribable to the fact that they enjoy being intelligent, and
wish to remain so.
"You sneer at the 'best-sellers.' I tell you, in sober earnest, that
the writing of a frankly trashy novel which will 'sell,' is the
highest imaginable form of art. For true art, in its last terms, is
the adroit circumvention of an unsurmountable obstacle. I suppose that
form and harmony and colour are very difficult to tame; and the
sculptor, the musician and the painter quite probably earn their hire.
But people don't go to concerts unless they want to hear music;
whereas the people who buy the 'best-sellers' are the people who would
prefer to do _anything_ rather than be reduced to reading. I protest
that the man who makes these people read on until they see how 'it all
came out' is a deal more than an artist; he is a sorcerer."
And I paused, a little out of breath.
"What a boy it is!" said Charteris. "Do you know, you are uncommonly
handsome when you are talking nonsense? Write the trashy book, then. I
never argue with children; and besides, I do not have to read it."
4
It thus fell about that in the second European year, not very long
after my mother's death, _The Apostates_ was given to the world, with
what result the world has had a plenty of time wherein to forget....
It was first published in _The Quaker Post_, with pictures by Roderick
King Hill, and in the autumn was brought out as a book by Stuyvesant
and Brothers. I made rather a good thing cut of it financially; but
the numerous letters I received from the people who had liked it I
found extremely objectionable. They were not the right sort of people,
I felt forlornly.... So I endured my plaudits without undue elation,
for I always held _The Apostates_ to be, at best, a medley of
conventional tricks and extravagant rhetoric, inanimate by any least
particle of myself,--and its success, say, as though the splendiferous
trappings of an emperor were hung upon a clothier's dummy, and the
result accepted as an adequate presentation of Charlemagne.
In other words, the book was the most unbridled kind of balderdash,
founded on my callow recollections of the Green Chalybeate,--not the
least bit accurate, as I was afterward to discover,--with all the good
people exceedingly oratorical and the bad ones singularly epigrammatic
and abandoned and obtuse. I introduced a depraved nobleman, of course,
to give the requisite touch of high society, seasoned the mixture with
French and botany and with a trifle of Dolly Dialoguishness, and
inserted, at judicious intervals, the most poetical of descriptions,
so that the skipping of them might afford an agreeable rest to the
reader's eye. There was also a sufficiency of piddling with unsavoury
matters to insure the suffrage of schoolgirls.
And a number of persons, in fine, were so misguided as to enthuse over
the result. The verb is carefully selected, for they one and all were
just the sort of people who "enthuse."
5
I was vexed, however, at the time to find I could not achieve an
appropriate emotion over my mother's death. The news came, to be sure,
at a season when I was preoccupied with getting rid of Agnes Faroy....
I have not ever heard of any rational excuse for the quite common
assumption that children ought to be particularly fond of their
parents. Still, my mother was the prettiest woman I had ever known,
though without any claim to beauty, and I had always gloried in our
kinship; for I believed her nature to be generous and amiable when she
thought of it; and the cablegram which announced the event aroused in
me sincere regret that a comely ornament to my progress had been
smashed irrevocably.
For a little I reflected as to whither she had vanished, and decided
she had been too futile and well-meaning ever to be punished by any
reasonable Being. Yet how she would have enjoyed the publication of my
book!--without any attempt to read it, however, since she had never,
to my knowledge, read anything, with the exception of the daily
papers.... And besides, I disliked being unable to have the
appropriate emotion.
But I simply could not manage it. For here, in the midst of the Faroy
mess,--with Agnes weeping all over the place, and her brothers
flourishing pistols and declaiming idiocies,--came the news from Uncle
George that my mother had left me virtually nothing. She must have
used up, of course, a good share of her Bulmer Baking Powder money in
supporting my father comfortably; but she had always lived in such
estate as to make me assume she had retained, anyhow, enough of the
Bulmer money to last my time. So it was naturally a shock to discover
that this monetary attitude was inherited from my mother, who had been
cheerfully "living on her principle" all these years, without
considering my future. I had no choice but to regard it as abominably
selfish.
"I think Claire was afraid to tell you," wrote Uncle George, "how
little there was left. In any event, she always shirked doing it, so
as to stave off unpleasantness. And when we cabled you how ill she
was, it now seems most unfortunate you could not see your way clear to
giving up your trip through the chateau country, as your not coming
appeared to be on her mind a great deal at the last. I do not wish to
seem to criticize you in any way, Robert, but I must say...."
Well, but you know what sort of nonsense that smug gambit heralds in
letters from your kindred. Even so, I now owned the Townsend house and
an income sufficient for daily bread; and it looked just then as
though the magazine editors were willing to furnish the butter, and
occasional cakes. So the future promised to be pleasant enough.
6