It was bang upon this completeness all the same that the turn arrived,
the turn I can’t say of his fortune--for what was that?--but of his
confidence, of his spirits and, what was more to the point, of his
system. The whole occasion on which the first symptom flared out is
before me as I write. I had met them both at dinner: they were diners
who had reached the penultimate stage--the stage which in theory is a
rigid selection and in practice a wan submission. It was late in the
season and stronger spirits than theirs were broken; the night was
close and the air of the banquet such as to restrict conversation to the
refusal of dishes and consumption to the sniffing of a flower. It struck
me all the more that Mrs. Limbert was flying her flag. As vivid as a
page of her husband’s prose, she had one of those flickers of freshness
that are the miracle of her sex and one of those expensive dresses that
are the miracle of ours. She had also a neat brougham in which she
had offered to rescue an old lady from the possibilities of a queer
cab-horse; so that when she had rolled away with her charge I proposed a
walk home with her husband, whom I had overtaken on the doorstep. Before
I had gone far with him he told me he had news for me--he had accepted,
of all people and of all things, an “editorial position.” It had come to
pass that very day, from one hour to another, without time for appeals
or ponderations: Mr. Bousefield, the proprietor of a “high-class
monthly,” making, as they said, a sudden change, had dropped on him
heavily out of the blue. It was all right--there was a salary and an
idea, and both of them, as such things went, rather high. We took our
way slowly through the vacant streets, and in the explanations and
revelations that as we lingered under lamp-posts I drew from him I found
with an apprehension that I tried to gulp down a foretaste of the bitter
end. He told me more than he had ever told me yet. He couldn’t balance
accounts--that was the trouble: his expenses were too rising a tide. It
was absolutely necessary that he should at last make money, and now he
must work only for that. The need this last year had gathered the force
of a crusher: it had rolled over him and laid him on his back. He had
his scheme; this time he knew what he was about; on some good occasion,
with leisure to talk it over, he would tell me the blessed whole. His
editorship would help him, and for the rest he must help himself. If he
couldn’t they would have to do something fundamental--change their
life altogether, give up London, move into the country, take a house
at thirty pounds a year, send their children to the Board-school. I saw
that he was excited, and he admitted that he was: he had waked out of a
trance. He had been on the wrong tack; he had piled mistake on mistake.
It was the vision of his remedy that now excited him: ineffably,
grotesquely simple, it had yet come to him only within a day or two. No,
he wouldn’t tell me what it was; he would give me the night to guess,
and if I shouldn’t guess it would be because I was as big an ass as
himself. However, a lone man might be an ass: he had room in his life
for his ears. Ray had a burden that demanded a back: the back must
therefore now be properly instituted. As to the editorship, it was
simply heaven-sent, being not at all another case of _The Blackport
Beacon_ but a case of the very opposite. The proprietor, the great Mr.
Bousefield, had approached him precisely because his name, which was to
be on the cover, _didn’t_ represent the chatty. The whole thing was
to be--oh, on fiddling little lines of course--a protest against
the chatty. Bousefield wanted him to be himself; it was for himself
Bousefield had picked him out. Wasn’t it beautiful and brave of
Bousefield? He wanted literature, he saw the great reaction coming,
the way the cat was going to jump. “Where will you get literature?” I
wofully asked; to which he replied with a laugh that what he had to get
was not literature but only what Bousefield would take for it.
In that single phrase without more ado I discovered his famous remedy.
What was before him for the future was not to do his work but to do what
somebody else would take for it. I had the question out with him on the
next opportunity, and of all the lively discussions into which we had
been destined to drift it lingers in my mind as the liveliest. This
was not, I hasten to add, because I disputed his conclusions: it was an
effect of the very force with which, when I had fathomed his wretched
premises, I took them to my soul. It was very well to talk with Jane
Highmore about his standing alone: the eminent relief of this position
had brought him to the verge of ruin. Several persons admired his
books--nothing was less contestable; but they appeared to have a mortal
objection to acquiring them by subscription or by purchase: they begged
or borrowed or stole, they delegated one of the party perhaps to
commit the volumes to memory and repeat them, like the bards of old, to
listening multitudes. Some ingenious theory was required at any rate to
account for the inexorable limits of his circulation. It wasn’t a thing
for five people to live on; therefore either the objects circulated must
change their nature or the organisms to be nourished must. The former
change was perhaps the easier to consider first. Limbert considered
it with extraordinary ingenuity from that time on, and the ingenuity,
greater even than any I had yet had occasion to admire in him, made the
whole next stage of his career rich in curiosity and suspense.
“I have been butting my skull against a wall,” he had said in those
hours of confidence; “and, to be as sublime a blockhead, if you’ll allow
me the word, you, my dear fellow, have kept sounding the charge. We’ve
sat prating here of ‘success,’ heaven help us, like chanting monks in a
cloister, hugging the sweet delusion that it lies somewhere in the
work itself, in the expression, as you said, of one’s subject or the
intensification, as somebody else somewhere says, of one’s note. One has
been going on in short as if the only thing to do were to accept the law
of one’s talent and thinking that if certain consequences didn’t follow
it was only because one wasn’t logical enough. My disaster has served
me right--I mean for using that ignoble word at all. It’s a mere
distributor’s, a mere hawker’s word. What _is_ ‘success’ anyhow? When a
book’s right, it’s right--shame to it surely if it isn’t. When it sells
it sells--it brings money like potatoes or beer. If there’s dishonour
one way and inconvenience the other, it certainly is comfortable, but
it as certainly isn’t glorious to have escaped them. People of delicacy
don’t brag either about their probity or about their luck. Success be
hanged!--I want to sell. It’s a question of life and death. I must study
the way. I’ve studied too much the other way--I know the other way
now, every inch of it. I must cultivate the market--it’s a science like
another. I must go in for an infernal cunning. It will be very amusing,
I foresee that; I shall lead a dashing life and drive a roaring trade.
I haven’t been obvious--I must _be_ obvious. I haven’t been popular--I
must _be_ popular. It’s another art--or perhaps it isn’t an art at
all. It’s something else; one must find out what it is. Is it something
awfully queer?--you blush!--something barely decent? All the greater
incentive to curiosity! Curiosity’s an immense motive; we shall have
tremendous sport. They all do it; it’s only a question of how. Of course
I’ve everything to unlearn; but what is life, as Jane Highmore says,
but a lesson? I must get all I can, all she can give me, from Jane.
She can’t explain herself much; she’s all intuition; her processes are
obscure; it’s the spirit that swoops down and catches her up. But I must
study her reverently in her works. Yes, you’ve defied me before, but
now my loins are girded: I declare I’ll read one of them--I really will:
I’ll put it through if I perish!”
I won’t pretend that he made all these remarks at once; but there wasn’t
one that he didn’t make at one time or another, for suggestion and
occasion were plentiful enough, his life being now given up altogether
to his new necessity. It wasn’t a question of his having or not having,
as they say, my intellectual sympathy: the brute force of the pressure
left no room for judgment; it made all emotion a mere recourse to the
spyglass. I watched him as I should have watched a long race or a
long chase, irresistibly siding with him but much occupied with the
calculation of odds. I confess indeed that my heart, for the endless
stretch that he covered so fast, was often in my throat. I saw him peg
away over the sun-dappled plain, I saw him double and wind and gain and
lose; and all the while I secretly entertained a conviction. I wanted
him to feed his many mouths, but at the bottom of all things was my
sense that if he should succeed in doing so in this particular way I
should think less well of him. Now I had an absolute terror of that.
Meanwhile so far as I could I backed him up, I helped him: all the more
that I had warned him immensely at first, smiled with a compassion it
was very good of him not to have found exasperating over the complacency
of his assumption that a man could escape from himself. Ray Limbert at
all events would certainly never escape; but one could make believe
for him, make believe very hard--an undertaking in which at first
Mr. Bousefield was visibly a blessing. Limbert was delightful on the
business of this being at last my chance too--my chance, so miraculously
vouchsafed, to appear with a certain luxuriance. He didn’t care
how often he printed me, for wasn’t it exactly in my direction Mr.
Bousefield held that the cat was going to jump? This was the least he
could do for me. I might write on anything I liked--on anything at least
but Mr. Limbert’s second manner. He didn’t wish attention strikingly
called to his second manner; it was to operate insidiously; people were
to be left to believe they had discovered it long ago. “Ralph Limbert?
Why, when did we ever live without him?”--that’s what he wanted them
to say. Besides, they hated manners--let sleeping dogs lie. His
understanding with Mr. Bousefield--on which he had had not at all to
insist; it was the excellent man who insisted--was that he should run
one of his beautiful stories in the magazine. As to the beauty of his
story however Limbert was going to be less admirably straight than as
to the beauty of everything else. That was another reason why I mustn’t
write about his new line: Mr. Bousefield was not to be too definitely
warned that such a periodical was exposed to prostitution. By the time
he should find it out for himself the public--_le gros public_--would
have bitten, and then perhaps he would be conciliated and forgive.
Everything else would be literary in short, and above all _I_ would be;
only Ralph Limbert wouldn’t--he’d chuck up the whole thing sooner. He’d
be vulgar, he’d be rudimentary, he’d be atrocious: he’d be elaborately
what he hadn’t been before. I duly noticed that he had more trouble in
making “everything else” literary than he had at first allowed for;
but this was largely counteracted by the ease with which he was able to
obtain that his mark should not be overshot. He had taken well to heart
the old lesson of the _Beacon_; he remembered that he was after all
there to keep his contributors down much rather than to keep them up. I
thought at times that he kept them down a trifle too far, but he
assured me that I needn’t be nervous: he had his limit--his limit was
inexorable. He would reserve pure vulgarity for his serial, over which
he was sweating blood and water; elsewhere it should be qualified by
the prime qualification, the mediocrity that attaches, that endears.
Bousefield, he allowed, was proud, was difficult: nothing was really
good enough for him but the middling good; but he himself was prepared
for adverse comment, resolute for his noble course. Hadn’t Limbert
moreover in the event of a charge of laxity from headquarters the great
strength of being able to point to my contributions? Therefore I must
let myself go, I must abound in my peculiar sense, I must be a resource
in case of accidents. Limbert’s vision of accidents hovered mainly
over the sudden awakening of Mr. Bousefield to the stuff that in the
department of fiction his editor was palming off. He would then have to
confess in all humility that this was not what the good old man wanted,
but I should be all the more there as a salutary specimen. I would cross
the scent with something showily impossible, splendidly unpopular--I
must be sure to have something on hand. I always had plenty on
hand--poor Limbert needn’t have worried: the magazine was forearmed
each month by my care with a retort to any possible accusation of
trifling with Mr. Bousefield’s standard. He had admitted to Limbert,
after much consideration indeed, that he was prepared to be perfectly
human; but he had added that he was not prepared for an abuse of this
admission. The thing in the world I think I least felt myself was an
abuse, even though (as I had never mentioned to my friendly editor) I
too had my project for a bigger reverberation. I daresay I trusted mine
more than I trusted Limbert’s; at all events the golden mean in which
in the special case he saw his salvation as an editor was something I
should be most sure of if I were to exhibit it myself. I exhibited it
month after month in the form of a monstrous levity, only praying heaven
that my editor might now not tell me, as he had so often told me, that
my result was awfully good. I knew what that would signify--it would
signify, sketchily speaking, disaster. What he did tell me heartily was
that it was just what his game required: his new line had brought with
it an earnest assumption--earnest save when we privately laughed about
it--of the locutions proper to real bold enterprise. If I tried to keep
him in the dark even as he kept Mr. Bousefield there was nothing to
show that I was not tolerably successful: each case therefore presented
a promising analogy for the other. He never noticed my descent, and it
was accordingly possible that Mr. Bousefield would never notice his.
But would nobody notice it at all?--that was a question that added
a prospective zest to one’s possession of a critical sense. So much
depended upon it that I was rather relieved than otherwise not to know
the answer too soon. I waited in fact a year--the year for which Limbert
had cannily engaged on trial with Mr. Bousefield; the year as to which
through the same sharpened shrewdness it had been conveyed in the
agreement between them that Mr. Bousefield was not to intermeddle. It
had been Limbert’s general prayer that we would during this period let
him quite alone. His terror of my direct rays was a droll, dreadful
force that always operated: he explained it by the fact that I
understood him too well, expressed too much of his intention, saved him
too little from himself. The less he was saved the more he didn’t sell:
I literally interpreted, and that was simply fatal.
I held my breath accordingly; I did more--I closed my eyes, I guarded my
treacherous ears. He induced several of us to do that (of such devotions
we were capable) so that not even glancing at the thing from month to
month, and having nothing but his shamed, anxious silence to go by, I
participated only vaguely in the little hum that surrounded his act
of sacrifice. It was blown about the town that the public would be
surprised; it was hinted, it was printed that he was making a desperate
bid. His new work was spoken of as “more calculated for general
acceptance.” These tidings produced in some quarters much reprobation,
and nowhere more, I think, than on the part of certain persons who had
never read a word of him, or assuredly had never spent a shilling on
him, and who hung for hours over the other attractions of the
newspaper that announced his abasement. So much asperity cheered me a
little--seemed to signify that he might really be doing something. On
the other hand I had a distinct alarm; some one sent me for some alien
reason an American journal (containing frankly more than that source
of affliction) in which was quoted a passage from our friend’s last
instalment. The passage--I couldn’t for my life help reading it--was
simply superb. Ah, he _would_ have to move to the country if that was
the worst he could do! It gave me a pang to see how little after all he
had improved since the days of his competition with Pat Moyle. There was
nothing in the passage quoted in the American paper that Pat would for a
moment have owned. During the last weeks, as the opportunity of reading
the complete thing drew near, one’s suspense was barely endurable, and
I shall never forget the July evening on which I put it to rout. Coming
home to dinner I found the two volumes on my table, and I sat up with
them half the night, dazed, bewildered, rubbing my eyes, wondering at
the monstrous joke. _Was_ it a monstrous joke, his second manner--was
_this_ the new line, the desperate bid, the scheme for more general
acceptance and the remedy for material failure? Had he made a fool of
all his following, or had he most injuriously made a still bigger fool
of himself? Obvious?--where the deuce was it obvious? Popular?--how on
earth could it be popular? The thing was charming with all his charm
and powerful with all his power: it was an unscrupulous, an unsparing, a
shameless, merciless masterpiece. It was, no doubt, like the old letters
to the _Beacon_, the worst he could do; but the perversity of the
effort, even though heroic, had been frustrated by the purity of
the gift. Under what illusion had he laboured, with what wavering,
treacherous compass had he steered? His honour was inviolable, his
measurements were all wrong. I was thrilled with the whole impression
and with all that came crowding in its train. It was too grand a
collapse--it was too hideous a triumph; I exalted almost with tears--I
lamented with a strange delight. Indeed as the short night waned and,
threshing about in my emotion, I fidgeted to my high-perched window for
a glimpse of the summer dawn, I became at last aware that I was staring
at it out of eyes that had compassionately and admiringly filled. The
eastern sky, over the London housetops, had a wonderful tragic crimson.
That was the colour of his magnificent mistake.