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To-morrow?
By
Victoria Cross
"Cras te victurum, cras dicis Postume semper
Dic mihi cras istud, Postume quando venit?
Quam longe cras istud, ubi est? aut unde petendum?
Cras istud quanti dic mihi, possit emi?
Cras vives? hodie jam vivere, Postume, serum est
Ille sapit, quisquis Postume, vixit heri."
MART. v. lviii.
CHAPTER I.
"REJECTED! rejected!"
I crushed the letter spasmodically in my hand as I walked mechanically
up and down the length of the dining-room, a rage of anger filling my
brain and the blood thundering in my ears.
"Rejected! and that not for the first time. Another year and a half's
work flung away--simply flung away, and I am no nearer recognition than
ever. Incredible it seems that they won't accept that."
I stopped under the gasalier and glanced again through the letter I had
just received.
"DEAR SIR,--With reference to your last MS., we regret to say we cannot
undertake its publication, owing to the open way in which you express
your unusual religious views and your contempt for existing
institutions.
"At the same time, our reader expresses his admiration for your style,
and his regret that your unmistakably brilliant genius should be
directed towards unsatisfactory subjects.--We are," etc., etc.
The blood flowed hotly over my face, and my teeth closed hard upon my
lip.
Always the same thing! rejection from every quarter.
The last clause in the letter, which might have brought some momentary
gratification to a man less certain, less absolutely sure of his own
powers than I was, could bring none to me.
It only served to make sharper the edge of my keen disappointment.
Brilliant genius! I read the words with the shadow of a satirical smile.
What need to tell me that I possessed a power that inflamed every vein,
that heated all the blood in my system, that filled, till they seemed
buoyant, every cell of my brain? As much need as to tell the expectant
mother she has a life within her own.
I was tired of praise, tired of being called gifted, tired of hearing
reiterated by others that which I knew so well myself.
We are invariably little grateful for anything freely and constantly
offered to us, and I cared now simply nothing for compliments, praise,
or felicitation.
These had been given to me from my childhood upwards, and yet here, at
six and twenty, I was still unknown, unrecognized, obscure, and not a
single line of my writing had met the public eye.
I craved and thirsted after success far more than a fever-stricken man
in the desert can crave after water, for the longings and desires of
the body are finite, and when a fixed pitch in them has been surpassed,
death grants us a merciful cessation of all desire, but the longings of
the mind are infinite, absolutely without limit and without period; and
where a physical desire, ungratified, must eventually destroy itself as
it wears away the matter that has given it birth, a mental desire does
not wane with the flesh it wastes, but remains ravening to the last,
and reigns supreme over the death agony, up to the final moment of
actual dissolution.
I had done what I could to attain my own wishes; I was not one of those
idle, clever fellows who imagine talent independent of work, and who
are too lazy to throw into words and commit to paper the brilliant but
vague, unformed inspirations that visit them between the circling rings
of smoke from their cigar.
I had no thought, no expectation, no wish even to be offered that
celebrated sweet condition of the palm without the dust of the struggle
in the arena.
But for me it had been dust, dust, and nothing but dust, and there were
times when it seemed to blind, choke, overpower me.
My capacity for work was unlimited; labour was comparatively no labour
to me. The mechanical work of embodying an idea in a manuscript was as
nothing to me.
To write came to me as naturally as to speak.
Therefore work had not been wanting. Manuscript after manuscript had
been completed, submitted to various publishers, and returned with
thanks, with commendation, and regrets that I had not written something
totally different.
And there they all stood in a pile, an irritating, distracting pile, a
monument of unrequited labour, an unrealised capital, a silent
testimony to the exceeding narrowness of the limits of British
indulgence to talent.
My persistent ill-luck was all the more aggravating as I was not
handicapped by poverty, as so many authors are. The question of terms
had not been one to present a difficulty.
I had no need to ask a publisher to accept my MSS. at his own financial
risk.
I was not the traditional struggling young writer of the lady novelist
who treats poverty and genius as convertible terms, making up with the
former quality whatever her hero lacks of the other.
No; although the combination may be very romantic, I confess,
notwithstanding that I was an unrecognised author, I was not living in
a garret, nor writing my MSS. by the proverbially flaring candle, nor
going without my dinner in order to pay for foolscap.
But my feelings were as bitter, and the sense of disappointment as
sharp, as any attic-dwelling genius' could have been, even if we
suppose the lady novelist to have thrown in a conventionally
consumptive wife.
In fact they were stronger because more absolute, more concentrated in
themselves.
There were no pangs of hunger to distract my attention, no
traditionally patient wife to look sadly at me, no responsibilities for
others lying upon me and my rejected MSS.
Simply all my own desires for myself centred in them.
There was one side issue which at times seemed to include everything,
to be everything in itself, but the moments when this forced itself in
overwhelming prominence upon my brain were few.
The wish that I had to publish my works could not be traced to distinct
motives; it did not spring from a desire to gain money, nor yet
celebrity.
I was not particularly keen on fame while I lived, and I certainly had
no sentimental ideas of my name surviving me.
I cared little in fact whether my name ever reached the public,
provided only my works were known and read. The wish to give them out
was not a thing of motive, nor thought, nor will. It was the fierce,
instinctive impulse that accompanies all creative power, the tremendous
impetus towards production that is an integral part of all conceptive
capacity. The same driving necessity that compels a writer in the
middle of the night to rise and take his pen and commit to paper some
thought or thoughts that are racing about in his brain, trying to find
an outlet, that compels him to produce them as far as he is able, this
same urgent impulse forces him to complete his manuscript, and when
completed, to strain his utmost to give it actual life in the thoughts
and brains of the public.
The pressing want to produce is as wholly natural, as innate, as
independent of the individual's volition as the conceptive impulse
itself.
And it was thus with me.
I could not be said to wish to publish from this or that motive,
because of this, that, or the other. I was simply dominated by the
instinct to do so, which grew more and more urgent as it found no
gratification.
It had risen now rampant at this last rebuff, and it seemed to rage
about in my brain like a Bengal tiger in a net.
I walked up and down the long dining-room, backwards and forwards, from
the grate where the fire blazed to the glass-panelled sideboard at the
other end, where its reflection sparkled, yawning every now and then
from sheer nervous irritation. "Cursed, infernal nuisance!"
I had just muttered this when the door was pushed open, but the
enterer, on hearing my exclamation, promptly drew it to again, and
would have shut it, but that I caught the handle.
It was the butler.
"What do you want, Simmonds," I said.
"Nothing, sir. I was told to enquire if you was in."
"Well, I am."
"Yes, sir. Please, Mr. Hilton said was you ready for dinner?"
"Certainly; and, Simmonds, where's Nous?"
"Tied up, sir, in the stable."
"Tied up! Again! I gave orders he was never to be tied up!"
"Yes, sir; but please, sir, he was that dirty and muddy to go
scrimmaging over the house, and it's the ruination of the furniture--"
"The dog is not to be tied up," I interrupted.
"Have him let loose at once, and in future remember, if he comes in wet
and muddy, and chooses to lie on the drawing-room couch, let him."
The man disappeared, and I walked over to the hearth.
A minute or two later there was a scratching and whining outside the
door, and I went to it and let Nous in.
He bounded over me, licked my face furiously, and scratched
enthusiastically at my shirt front.
He was wet, and his fur laden with mud, as the butler had said, and my
clothes suffered from his demonstrativeness, but his feelings were of
more import than a dress-coat, and I would not have hurt them by
checking his greeting.
"Dear old boy," I said, taking the collar off with which he had been
chained up,--and just then my father came into the room.
"Ah, got back, Victor?"
"Yes," I said, looking up.
"They've rejected your last, eh?" he said at once.
"Yes. Why? Have they sent it? How did you know it was rejected?"
"By your face, my dear boy," answered my father.
"It's odd that these failures knock you up still. You must be
accustomed to them now!"
That was cutting, and it cut.
"One does not easily get accustomed to anything that is against natural
law," I said, coldly.
"Oh! and you mean that it is against the natural law of things that so
brilliant a genius as yourself should be perpetually rejected?"
I nodded. "Just so," I answered.
"It is a pity they will not take your estimation of your own powers!"
"There is very little difference in the estimation," I said. "The
difference is in the courage. I have the courage to write things they
have not the courage to print. There is no question as to my powers. No
one, except yourself, perhaps, has ever denied those."
"Well, why the dickens don't you write something that they will accept?
Why not make up something quite conventional?"
I looked across the hearth at him with a half amused, half ironical
smile, and said nothing. It is so hard to explain to an outsider the
involuntariness of all real talent.
This great leading characteristic is invariably but imperfectly grasped
by others.
They cannot realise it.
I was too flat in spirits and too tired in body to feel inclined to
enter then into an abstruse discussion with him, and I would have let
the matter slide.
His last remark to the ear of anyone who has genuine talent, whether
artist or author or poet, or what you please, sounds like a
sacrilegious blasphemy.
"Make up something!"
Great heavens! What an expression!
Is a writer, then, a cook, preparing a new dish? Is he a nursery maid
soothing a refractory child? Is he a woman's dressmaker taking her
mistress's orders?
Dinner was served just then, and we took our seats at the table in
silence.
I thought I should have no need to answer.
However, when the butler had deposited the soup and shut the door after
him, my father returned to the attack.
"Yes, Victor," he said in a friendly way, as if a happy solution of my
difficulties had just occurred to him, "why don't you make up something
quite orthodox and keep your own opinions out of it?"
I sighed and took half a glass of claret to fortify me. I saw I was in
for propounding my views upon genius, and I did not feel up to it.
I could have avoided the argument, doubtless, by seeming to assent, by
promising to "make up something," and saved myself a number of words.
But there is a strong impulse in me to revolt against allowing myself
to seem to accept a false statement or opinion that I do not really
hold.
And I pulled myself together with an effort.
"I don't think you understand in the least my view of a writer and his
writings," I said. "It is not a voluntary thing, led up to by
pre-determination. There can be no question of making up. I never try
to write nor to think. I do not invoke my own ideas. They spring into
being of themselves, quite unsought. And, in a measure, they are
uncontrollable."
My father was staring at me in silence.
"Eh?" he said merely as I paused.
I laughed.
"What I mean is, that a man, as a man, endowed with will, control,
wishes, and so on, ceases to exist, you may say, while he is writing.
He becomes then the tool of that peculiar, mysterious power that is
moving in his brain. He writes as a clerk writes from dictation. He is
the clerk pro tem of the impulse stirring his being, which dictates to
him what it pleases. There is no consideration in his mind--'I will
write this or that' or 'I won't write the other.' He simply feels he
must write a particular thing; it crowds off his pen before he can stop
it. He does not know where, whence, how, or why the idea came to him.
But it is there, clamouring to be written, and he writes it because he
must. The expression, very often, of a thought is as uncontrollable as
a physical spasm, and the man who writes it cannot always be held
responsible for it."
"My dear Victor!"
"No, really," I said, laughing, "I am simply stating ordinary facts. I
believe any writer, any acknowledged writer of talent, will bear me
out, more or less. It is the old idea of inspiration--one cannot
express it better--a breathing into. It is exactly that. The man of
genius, in any form, feels at times-that is to say, when his fit is on,
that there is a breathing into his brain. It becomes full of images he
is unfamiliar with, crowded with thoughts that are quite foreign
perhaps to the man himself, to his life, to his habits, and invested
with a peculiar knowledge of things he has had no personal experience
of. Then as suddenly as it came the fit goes; it is over, and he can
write no more. Should he be so foolish as to try, his sentences become
mere linked chains of nouns and verbs; his inspiration has gone. He
cannot invoke it, cannot restrain it, cannot retain it, cannot recall
it, and only very slightly control it."
"Ha!" said my father reflectively, going on with his soup, "deuced
inconvenient."
"Inconvenient it may be," I said quietly. "All the same, that which is
written under inspiration is the only stuff worth reading. The Greeks
expressed the peculiar feeling that a man has when his inspiration
comes upon him by the phrase, entheos eimi, and we can hardly find a
better one, only unfortunately we don't believe in gods. Otherwise,
entheos eimi contains everything, for the man who was only common clay
before his inspiration, and will be common clay when it departs, feels,
for the time, as if a god had descended, and was within him. And when,
afterwards, he looks at what he has written he feels it is something
not wholly his own, but that it is the work of some powerful influence
he can hardly comprehend, and cannot certainly rule."
"But really I don't see that this has much relation to what I said
about your writing something to please the British public!"
"It is the whole gist of the matter," I said. "I am proving to you that
I am, to a certain extent, helpless in what I write; that it is
impossible for me to think of publics, British or otherwise, of
publishers or critics, when I am writing. I have no time to consider
them, no space in my brain for them, no memory that such things, or
anything outside of what I am describing, exists even. My only thought
is to drive along my pen fast enough, in obedience to the strenuous
impulse urging me. I do not 'make up,' as your phrase is, anything. I
simply put down on paper, as fast as I can, the thoughts that are
pouring into my brain, like the waves of a flood flowing over it. I am
whirled away on the stream myself; my identity is lost, submerged. Now
look here, I'll give you a cut and dried instance which will make clear
how it is that I offend the prejudices, or the proprieties, or whatever
you call it, in my books; at least I imagine it is in this way: Suppose
I have a death scene to write. My MS. is waiting for that to complete
it. I don't say to myself beforehand, Now there shall be a bed with
Tomkins dying in it; there shall be Maria at the left-hand corner, and
Jane at the right. The wife and doctor shall be grouped artistically at
the foot. Tomkins shall make two speeches before he dies; no,
three--three is more natural--uneven number. Now what shall Tomkins
say? Yes. Ah--hum--what the deuce shall I make him say? It must not be
too much like what a dying man would say, because the British public is
dead against realism. It must not either show any strong contempt for
religion; a little mild contempt, of course, goes down and is
fashionable, but I must not express it forcibly. He must not either
evince a disbelief in immortality--at least that's dangerous ground.
Some publishers will accept it and some won't.--Better leave it out.
Ah--hum--what shall Tomkins say? I have it! A retrospect of his past
life! And yet--No, stay! that won't do. Something that sounds like
something that might possibly be immoral might turn up in it, and that
would be fatal--damn the MS. utterly. Well, look here, Tomkins has got
to die, and I've got to finish the book, so I must get something down.
'Darling Mabel, this parting is terrible, but still I feel we shall
meet in another world.' Now, is that safe? Has a similar phrase been
put in heaps of novels before? Because the British public won't have
anything too new. It likes to head over again what it has heard at
least fifty thousand times before, and then it knows it won't be
shocked. Yes, that sentence will do. Now I must put in a few more and
then, thank goodness, the scene will be done! Now," I said, springing
up from the table, "do you call that art? do you call it genius? Is a
collection of bald phrases and second-hand sentiments, hooked together
like that, worth anything when it's done?"
"My dear boy, don't excite yourself like that," my father answered
deliberately. "Sit down and finish your soup."
"Oh, hang the soup!" I said, resuming my seat. "Shall I sound the gong?
I have not told you my way yet, but I'm coming to it when the man's
gone." I sounded the gong, and the butler came in with the next course.
There was no carving ever done at our table, so my father had only to
tranquilly continue eating while I talked. He had forced me into the
discussion, and now he should hear it to the end.
"Of course, if you do write the death of Tomkins like that you can keep
your scenes orthodox, or whatever word you have in view. But, supposing
my MS. is lying incomplete;--I have a conviction that I am going to
write of death, but the method of the man's death is at present unknown
to me, unthought of.--Then, some afternoon, I happen to be sitting
smoking, and just perhaps wondering whether I shall go round to the
club or not, when suddenly a scene, a death scene, the scene I have
been waiting for, comes rushing through my head. It comes upon me with
tremendous impetus; mechanically, almost unconsciously, I take up a pen
and write. Space opens before me and I see a hospital ward. A blaze of
light floods it. Rows of narrow beds are there, and on one I see
Tomkins--dying. I make my way to him: now I am by his bed. I see him
stretched beneath my eyes. I see the pillow dark with the sweat of his
death agony--the night-shirt torn at his throat to get air. Have I time
to consider then whether the British public like the word night-shirt,
and whether it would not be safer to put Tomkins into a dressing-gown?
The man is there before me, dying, and he is in his night-shirt, and I
must write it. Besides, my pen is tearing on. I cannot stop--he is
dying. Will he speak before he dies? I do not know yet. His eyelids
quiver, the black veins in his throat knot up, he gasps. I bend lower:
'his breath comes hurriedly: his eyes open and fix upon me: they are
red, vitreous but conscious: then I know he will speak, he is going
to--the next moment his half-strangled voice reaches my ear. He is
speaking, and that which I hear him say, I write: no more, no less, no
different. His voice dies away, inarticulate. I see his lips whiten and
draw back upon his teeth. His hands clutch me as a convulsive spasm
wrenches his muscles. There is a tense, rigid silence, and then one
deep-drawn groan. Nerve, limb, muscle, and flesh collapse as the Life
is set loose. The damp body sinks back, leaving its death sweat on my
arms, its gasp in my ears. Tomkins is dead. But the impulse is not done
with me yet. I cannot get out of that hospital ward till I have done
everything, passed through all the circumstances that crop up naturally
from the death of Tomkins. There is no 'making up.' The scene is being
enacted before me. It is. It exists. It is the truth for the time
being, and, as the truth, I write it. There is the miserable girl,
sobbing convulsively, with her arms out-stretched in the bed-clothes.
Can I leave her without some words of consolation? I must write down
that she is there, because I see her there. There are some arrangements
to be made with the nurse, and then, when I am leaving the ward, or at
least intend to, my brain hurries the doctor up the ward to me. I don't
'make him up.' I had not the remotest idea of the head doctor appearing
when I sat down to write. But now I see him approaching me between the
beds, and before I can pass him, as I want to, he button-holes me and
proceeds to explain that Tomkins never would have died if he had
undergone an operation that the doctor had perceived from the very
first moment was necessary. After a long talk with him, perhaps, my pen
stops. I pause: and when I pause I know the inspiration has gone. As
the ancients would say, the Muse or the God has departed and dictates
no more. I fling aside the paper and look at my watch. Several hours
passed in the hospital, but I'll go round to the club now. And I go. I
know Tomkins is dead. It only occurs to me afterwards, as a secondary
consideration, that in consequence the MS. is finished. Tomkins was not
for the manuscript, but the manuscript for Tomkins. Now the point
is--Can I be held responsible for that scene? It is not my fault that I
have mentally seen a private soldier dying in hospital. The whole thing
was involuntary."
"Very extraordinary views!" muttered my father.
I shrugged my shoulders in silence, and called up Nous to give him my
untouched dinner.
"The best joke of it is, too," I said, suspending a strip of sirloin
over the collie's nose, "the publishers admit if I had less talent they
would print my things. I could not understand why my 'Laura Dean' was
refused, so I went down to the publishers to try and find out. I saw
the reader himself, and an awfully nice fellow he is, too. In reply to
my question, he said the objection to the book was that it dealt with a
wife leaving her husband. I stared at him in amazement. 'But, great
Scott!' I said, 'that's a good old-fashioned theme enough. It's as old
as the hills. It's the subject of--' and I gave him a list of about a
dozen eminent novels. 'Yes,' he admitted. 'But they are not written in
the same way.' 'Is there anything coarse or low in the writing?' 'Oh,
no! I should not say that!' 'Well, what is the matter with it, then?'
'The thing is too much brought before you. Of course, in these books
you have mentioned the wife runs away, but it does not make much
impression. You have put it all so forcibly, and given the characters
and episode so much life, and driven the idea of her infidelity so far
home to one, that, well, it becomes a different thing--one realises
it.' 'Oh, then you admit the immoral theme and the language to be
unobjectionable, and the book would have been accepted by the British
public provided only it had been less well written?' 'Yes, I suppose it
comes to that.' And then I caught his eye, and we both laughed. He is a
clever fellow himself, I should think, and the ludicrousness of the
idea tickled him as much as it did me. I came away. His admission was
quite the truth. It is the British way to take the second-rate in every
art and scout the best. Write a book poorly and feebly, and it passes.
Write the same thing powerfully and well, and the cry is--It's
improper! It's just the same thing in painting. Paint a nude woman
snowy white, without a shade or a shadow, and looking altogether as no
mortal woman ever did look, and the picture will be hung at the
Academy, and people will say, 'How charming! So artistic!' But paint a
woman with a glow on her neck and bosom, and the warm blood running in
her arms, dare to make her a living, breathing thing on canvas, and
your picture will be rejected. 'Excellent, unequalled, perfect, but--it
cannot be seen!' And what is British art as a consequence? Justly is it
looked down upon by the other nations. We simply set our heel upon the
best men. And look at our productions! Look at the rot and the trash
that floods the libraries every year! Look at the average novel! It's a
disgrace to our intellect! Look at the woodeny dolls that are its men
and women! And behold our Academy! See our pictures!"
"Don't rock your chair like that, Victor; it annoys me."
"Very good," I said, bringing my chair down on its fore legs again.
"Are you ready for the cheese?"
"Yes; but won't you eat anything?"
"No, thanks. I am fed upon annoyance just now."
"You are getting thin on it, too," he answered, looking at me. "It's a
pity you are so excitable!"
"It's a pity I was born in this confounded Britain! I should have got
on all right with Parisian readers. But I don't despair even here. They
can reject my MSS., but they can't take out my brains. I daresay I
shall stumble across some man at last with courage enough to stand by
me in the beginning and help me force open the British public's jaws
and cram my ideas down its throat; and that once done, it will digest
them perfectly, for it's a tough old beast, though very blind. Why on
earth has that fellow carried off the champagne?"
"You finished the bottle yourself just this minute!" returned my
father, in surprise.
"Did I? Oh, very likely! Absence of mind!"
"It seems to me if you had a little less of this talent you boast of
you would be considerably the gainer."
"Possibly," I rejoined. "But a gift is a gift. You can't say to nature,
take this back and let me have something more paying! Besides, I can't
admit that for any earthly reason I would change. I have no desire to
be a second-rate writer when I know I am a first!"
"By Jove! if conceit could carry the day!"
"No, there is no conceit," I persisted. "Is it conceit to say my hair
is black? It is black, and everybody can see it is. I have nothing to
do with it. Nature made it black, and black it is, and I know it.
Should I gain anything by contending that it was red? I don't see that
I should. However," I added, laughing, "The point is of no consequence.
Put me down as a fifth-rate writer, if you like, until I become the
fashion!"
"It does not seem you ever will, at this pace," he said quietly.
"Very good," I answered, equally quietly.
"Then you will not have the trouble of changing your opinion."
There was a long silence then. We each smoked without a word. At twenty
minutes to ten my father got up. He always went to bed horribly early.
"What are you going to do, Victor?"
"I am going out," I answered, getting up and stretching myself.
"Will you be late?"
"Probably. I got no sleep last night, nor the night before. It's no
earthly use my going to bed when I feel like this. I can't get to sleep
by repeating hymns, as some fellow suggested the other day."
"Why don't you take morphia or something to help you?"
"I don't care to begin taking drugs," I said, "I would rather wear
myself out, and induce sleep in that way. I shall take a three hours'
walk or so."
"Well, good-night."
"Good-night."
When he was gone, I sat a few minutes in the easy chair, with my head
in my hands thinking. I had meant to ask him a question at dinner, but
that argument on talent had put it on one side. Well, it would do later.
"Coming out, Nous?" I said to the collie. The dog started and pricked
his ears.
"Out?" I repeated, and he leapt to his feet and gave himself a joyful
shake, and then stood on the hearth-rug in front of me, swaying slowly
his great brush of a tail and poising his head at an intelligent angle.
I got up, felt for my latch-key, and went into the hall. Nous waited
impatiently while I put on my hat and overcoat, and then we went out
together. The night was cold, wet, and foggy. It was late in November,
and a light mist veiled the end of each black, deserted street.
I took no heed of anything, neither the atmosphere round me nor the
direction in which my feet carried me. I was wrapped up in a maze of
thoughts, and there was not a decently pleasant one in the whole lot.
They were warmed and brightened every now and then as a form that I
loved glided amongst them, but even that form dragged after it a chain
of painful, fettering considerations, and the gleams of light that it
threw round it were only like those weak, pallid flashes of sun that
flit through the clouds of thunder and storm in a hurricane.