THE FAMOUS NOVELIST
It was very early morning, seven o'clock perhaps, and Hugh Kinross, the
famous novelist, sat in a camp chair at "Tenby," his feet on the
verandah rail, and marvelled at his fame.
It was not his custom to rise quite so early to do this, but
circumstances over which he alone had any control, namely the mountain
fly, had driven him out of bed. There are no mosquitoes on the
mountains; consequently many householders will not go to the expense of
mosquito nets.
But the mountain fly rises earlier than any other fly extant, and the
stranger who is not provided with a guardian net, leaping desperately up
with it, has the early-rising virtue forcibly thrust upon him.
Later in the day, his wrath forgotten, the novelist writes to his city
friends and boasts of the light atmosphere of the mountains, as if he
had had something to do with the manufacture of it.
"I actually find myself rising at six," he writes, "simply to get out
into the delicious air." And not one mention does he make of the debt he
owes to the fly.
Hugh Kinross had been routed out at six and, his first choler spent, was
quite pleased with himself. He discovered a path leading to a gully, and
in the gully a pool beneath a fall, and here he had a circumscribed but
delightful swim. Then he climbed up the gully side again, and the
Lomaxes' home caught his eye, and so pleased the artistic side of him
that he leaned over one of its hedges to gaze at it.
And "Greenways" in the clear morning air, nestling in its setting of
tender green, splashed everywhere with the light tints of
flowers,--"Greenways," with its eyes turned to the mountain where the
marvellous morning lay in the first fresh indescribable blueness that
creeps there after the pinks and purples and yellows of the
dawn,--"Greenways," with a chimney at the rear sending up the friendly
line of its earliest smoke, begot in him a vague emotion that all the
bricks and mortar in the city were incapable of doing. He told himself
that he, too, wanted a home;--not the boarding-house life that had been
his before fame swooped down on him, nor the more luxurious club life
that had followed, nor a holiday-month like this present one, in a
rented cottage with his favourite sister for companion; but a home--like
"Greenways"--with a slender woman in white, like the one there moving
about the paths. There was no question in his mind but that she must be
slender, for he himself and his sister were both stout. How Miss Bibby's
heart would have leapt could she have known whose eyes were watching her
as she walked perseveringly up and down, practising the early
deep-breathing exercises that she maintained were so essential to
health!
And it must be a home with signs of children's occupancy about--he was
quite sure of that. Max and Muffie would have been amazed to know that
the little red tricycle on the verandah, and the doll's perambulator
overturned on a path, were assisting a celebrated man to this vague
emotion.
"Ridiculous!" he said. "I'm hungry; that's what it is; this mountain air
is doing me good already."
He crossed the road and went back to "Tenby," where his sister's bedroom
was yet darkened, and the very servant still slept serenely. He was
good-hearted, and could not bring himself to hammer on the doors; but as
he went to the pantry to find something for himself, he concluded that
they had fortified themselves against the fly by drawing the sheets over
their heads.
The pantry and kitchen left him rueful. Boxes of every size stood about
in what seemed to him the same wild confusion that they had worn last
night when they had been tossed out of the carrier's cart. He foraged
everywhere and could find no bread; in none of the tins or jars in which
he peered lurked there any butter. Yet he realized that he had no one to
blame but himself for this confusion. Matters had been beautifully
arranged. His married sister, Mrs. Gowan, had taken "Tenby" for him, and
seen to it that it was spotlessly clean; his unmarried sister, Kate,
with an efficient servant, was to come up a week ahead of himself to get
everything in perfect order and comfort for him, since he was supposed
to be overworked and in need of a change.
And then, what must he do but upset everything! He had told Kate he
would come to the station and see her comfortably off; but, indeed, she
had seen all the luggage into the van, and the servant into another
carriage, and bought her own magazines and ensconced herself comfortably
in an empty first-class compartment before there was a sign of him. But
then he came, and with a vengeance. She saw him, red-faced with
hurrying, come striding along the platform, a Gladstone bag in his hand,
plainly looking for her. She waved to him and he seized on a guard to
unlock her door for him.
"You'll be carried on,--quick, quick, get out!" she gasped, for the bell
was ringing.
But he had dropped comfortably on to the seat opposite to her, after
putting his portmanteau on the rack.
"I'm coming, too," he said.
"You're not," she cried,--"you can't,--I shan't be ready for you;
there'll be no breakfast. Get out immediately, Hugh, and don't be so
foolish." She actually dragged at his coat to pull him up from his seat.
But then the train gave a jerk, and she recognized the matter was out of
her hands.
"Well, of all the wild doings!" she said; "you really might be twenty
again, Hugh, and going off to England at two days' notice with your very
socks undarned."
"I wish I were," he said, and ruefully smoothed a bald patch on the top
of his head.
"But--but--you don't realize things a bit. I haven't ordered
anything,--the very beds aren't made,--there won't be a meal fit to eat
for at least two days." Kate looked as nearly put out as a stout,
bright-faced woman of forty-five could look.
"I'll sleep on a sofa," he said, good-humouredly.
"It will have to be made up," she snapped, or tried to snap.
"Very well, I'll sleep under it."
"And what about breakfast? Well, you will simply have to go to the hotel
till I'm ready for you."
"I'll go to no hotel," he said; "I'm sick of them. I'll have half of
your breakfast."
"A boiled egg and bread, and the possibility of no butter," she said
scornfully.
"A boiled egg and bread, and the possibility of no butter be it," he
answered.
"But what on earth induced you to do such a mad thing?" she persisted.
He rubbed his chin thoughtfully.
"I think it was chiefly because the beggar wouldn't propose," he said.
"What are you talking about, you mad boy?"
"You see," he said, "he was a decent fellow--I'd quite spread myself on
him, and she was no end of a girl, quite the best I've done. And I'd got
him right up to the fence, and I'm hanged if I could get him over. He
perorated, he posed like a shop-walker, you could see him hanging limp
like a broken puppet, and me behind with beads on my forehead uselessly
jerking the wires."
"Poor old boy!" said Kate sympathetically. "Oh, he'll do it beautifully
when once you're on the mountains. Now I look at you I can see you
really are run down. I've been planning how I will make you a
comfortable little study out of one of the bedrooms, and fix up your
writing-table under a window that has a view, and give you a verandah to
stalk up and down on when the fine frenzies seize you. But I don't want
you to come in for all the confusion of the first day."
"Nonsense," he said; "if you can stand it, I ought to be able to."
But that noble sentiment was uttered at night, after a comfortable
dinner at the club, and with the grateful appreciation of the sacrifice
this loyal sister was making in breaking all her engagements to come to
look after his welfare. It was before breakfast now, a time when the
sentiments are absolutely raw, and the noblest mind is capable of
resentment when not fortified with food. Hugh went out of the pantry and
settled himself gloomily upon a side verandah, uncertain which to
anathematize, the flies that had broken in upon his slumbers, or the
ones that evidently were studiously refraining from awakening his sister
and her handmaid.
But after a time the peace of the perfect morning soothed him, and he
put his feet up on the verandah rail, and fell to marvelling at his own
fame.
Five years ago he had been quite unknown--a struggling journalist
savagely treated by Fate. And for sheer need once of saner employment
for his leisure hours, he poured out some of the bitterness that a
severe attack of indigestion had deposited on the wholesome substratum
of his nature in perhaps as fierce a novel as had yet been written.
Five publishers rejected it with their customary regret; to the
stereotyped refusal of the sixth the reader added a few lines, saying he
had found much to admire in the work, but that a gracious public full of
nerves would not stand so much cold water poured upon it. The seventh
firm to whom he submitted the tale was on the verge of bankruptcy.
Kinross was absolutely startled when he received a laconic note
accepting his MS., and offering a very fair royalty. He was not to know
that these publishers had taken it in the spirit of a man who with six
shillings for his only capital puts five of them in a sweep where the
odds are a thousand to one.
And then Fortune, who for more than forty years had pretended she did
not know that there was any such person as Hugh Kinross cumbering the
globe, suddenly veered round and smiled one of her most gracious smiles
upon him.
He fairly leapt into fame. The inscrutable reading world, long bored
almost to death by a sameness of methods, actually rose up and waved its
hat at this savage treatment, and demanded that he should continue so to
deal with it.
So Hugh, marvelling more than any one, continued to "lay about him with
a knotted stick" as Kate, who had long typed his stories unsuccessful
and successful, expressed it.
And he found himself wealthy, or at least comfortable, beyond the hopes
of his most avaricious days, and famous beyond the wildest dreams that
had flamed up in him when he had read his first journalese in print.
Even at forty-nine he had made no close ties. One sister, Mrs. Gowan,
was married to a somewhat consequential brewer, who in the journalistic
days had rather patronized Hugh. So there was no corner in that home the
author cared to accept for his own.
The other sister, Kate--
"Fair, fat and fortiter in re,
And suave in manner"--
had long since refused the brewer's patronage and pompous proposal that
she should make a home in his house, and in return act as governess to
his children. She had thrown in her lot with Hugh, and was soon making,
as a typewriter who could be relied upon for faithful work, a very
comfortable income. The brother and sister boarded generally at the same
house, and, absorbed in their work, drifted over the borderland of
middle age together, and together lost their respective waist lines.
They were the best of chums and respected each other's weaknesses. It
was rather a trial to Hugh, perhaps, that Kate, being fat, had taken
ardently to the bicycle and was therefore a joke among onlookers. But
seeing the extreme enjoyment she got from her machine, and recognizing
that a healthy, hardworking woman, without home or children, must break
out somewhere, he had never tried to make her desist from her pleasure.
And Kate had to bear with Hugh.
He had a maddening habit of casting forth the match with which he
lighted his pipe.
He would sit at a table surrounded with match-holders of every
variety--one Christmas Kate had put six of the latest novelties in this
line in his sock--and he would strike a light, and then thoughtlessly
throw the dead match either towards the window or the fireplace.
As he pointed out to Kate, the wish to do well was plainly imbedded in
his breast, or he would simply fling the useless thing down at his feet.
Conscience was not deadened in him; he was quite aware that matches
should not be casually strewn upon a carpet, and in his most
absent-minded moods he sent them in the direction of those approved
receptacles--the window or fireplace. Let her blame others if the window
was closed--the sole use of a window, as far as he could see, was to
throw matches through,--or if the fireplace was ridiculously decorated
with plants and such foolishness, instead of holding its rightful
consuming element for used vestas.
When Fortune smiled so marvellously on Hugh, one of the first things he
did was to go down to the city, and with his own hands take down the
strip of painted tin that, in a building of offices, announced "Miss
Kinross, Typist."
He was on the verge of following this act by dropping the typewriter out
of the window, when Kate came in just in time to point out to him that
some one might be passing beneath, and so receive a worse headache from
the thing than it had ever given her. She accepted, as wholeheartedly as
he gave it, an income of two hundred a year from him. But she clung to
her old typewriter, and copied lovingly all his stories for him.
A deprecatory little cough just below him took Hugh's attention from
himself, and the place he had come so unexpectedly to occupy in the
economic scheme of Nature.