“Both Goethe and Schiller were profoundly convinced that Art
was no luxury of leisure, no mere amusement to charm the
idle, or relax the careworn; but a mighty influence, serious
in its aims although pleasureable in its means; a sister of
Religion, by whose aid the great world-scheme was wrought
into reality.” Lewes’s Life of Goethe.
Man is a selfish being, and I am a particularly fine specimen of the
race as far as that characteristic goes. If I had had a dozen drunken
parents I should never have danced attendance on one of them; yet in my
secret soul I admired Derrick for the line he had taken, for we mostly
do admire what is unlike ourselves and really noble, though it is the
fashion to seem totally indifferent to everything in heaven and earth.
But all the same I felt annoyed about the whole business, and was glad
to forget it in my own affairs at Mondisfield.
Weeks passed by. I lived through a midsummer dream of happiness, and a
hard awaking. That, however, has nothing to do with Derrick’s story,
and may be passed over. In October I settled down in Montague Street,
Bloomsbury, and began to read for the Bar, in about as disagreeable a
frame of mind as can be conceived. One morning I found on my breakfast
table a letter in Derrick’s handwriting. Like most men, we hardly ever
corresponded--what women say in the eternal letters they send to each
other I can’t conceive--but it struck me that under the circumstances
I ought to have sent him a line to ask how he was getting on, and my
conscience pricked me as I remembered that I had hardly thought of him
since we parted, being absorbed in my own matters. The letter was not
very long, but when one read between the lines it somehow told a good
deal. I have it lying by me, and this is a copy of it:
“Dear Sydney,--Do like a good fellow go to North Audley Street for me,
to the house which I described to you as the one where Lynwood lodged,
and tell me what he would see besides the church from his window--if
shops, what kind? Also if any glimpse of Oxford Street would be visible.
Then if you’ll add to your favours by getting me a second-hand copy of
Laveleye’s ‘Socialisme Contemporain,’ I should be for ever grateful. We
are settled in here all right. Bath is empty, but I people it as far as
I can with the folk out of ‘Evelina’ and ‘Persuasion.’ How did you get
on at Blachington? and which of the Misses Merrifield went in the end?
Don’t bother about the commissions. Any time will do.
“Ever yours,
“Derrick Vaughan.”
Poor old fellow! all the spirit seemed knocked out of him. There was not
one word about the Major, and who could say what wretchedness was veiled
in that curt phrase, “we are settled in all right”? All right! it was
all as wrong as it could be! My blood began to boil at the thought of
Derrick, with his great powers--his wonderful gift--cooped up in a place
where the study of life was so limited and so dull. Then there was his
hunger for news of Freda, and his silence as to what had kept him away
from Blachington, and about all a sort of proud humility which prevented
him from saying much that I should have expected him to say under the
circumstances.
It was Saturday, and my time was my own. I went out, got his book
for him; interviewed North Audley Street; spent a bad five minutes in
company with that villain ‘Bradshaw,’ who is responsible for so much of
the brain and eye disease of the nineteenth century, and finally left
Paddington in the Flying Dutchman, which landed me at Bath early in the
afternoon. I left my portmanteau at the station, and walked through the
city till I reached Gay Street. Like most of the streets of Bath, it
was broad, and had on either hand dull, well-built, dark grey, eminently
respectable, unutterably dreary-looking houses. I rang, and the door
was opened to me by a most quaint old woman, evidently the landlady. An
odour of curry pervaded the passage, and became more oppressive as the
door of the sitting-room was opened, and I was ushered in upon the Major
and his son, who had just finished lunch.
“Hullo!” cried Derrick, springing up, his face full of delight which
touched me, while at the same time it filled me with envy.
Even the Major thought fit to give me a hearty welcome.
“Glad to see you again,” he said pleasantly enough. “It’s a relief to
have a fresh face to look at. We have a room which is quite at your
disposal, and I hope you’ll stay with us. Brought your portmanteau, eh?”
“It is at the station,” I replied.
“See that it is sent for,” he said to Derrick; “and show Mr. Wharncliffe
all that is to be seen in this cursed hole of a place.” Then, turning
again to me, “Have you lunched? Very well, then, don’t waste this fine
afternoon in an invalid’s room, but be off and enjoy yourself.”
So cordial was the old man, that I should have thought him already a
reformed character, had I not found that he kept the rough side of his
tongue for home use. Derrick placed a novel and a small handbell within
his reach, and we were just going, when we were checked by a volley
of oaths from the Major; then a book came flying across the room, well
aimed at Derrick’s head. He stepped aside, and let it fall with a crash
on the sideboard.
“What do you mean by giving me the second volume when you know I am in
the third?” fumed the invalid.
He apologised quietly, fetched the third volume, straightened the
disordered leaves of the discarded second, and with the air of one well
accustomed to such little domestic scenes, took up his hat and came out
with me.
“How long do you intend to go on playing David to the Major’s Saul?”
I asked, marvelling at the way in which he endured the humours of his
father.
“As long as I have the chance,” he replied. “I say, are you sure you
won’t mind staying with us? It can’t be a very comfortable household for
an outsider.”
“Much better than for an insider, to all appearance,” I replied. “I’m
only too delighted to stay. And now, old fellow, tell me the honest
truth--you didn’t, you know, in your letter--how have you been getting
on?”
Derrick launched into an account of his father’s ailments.
“Oh, hang the Major! I don’t care about him, I want to know about you,”
I cried.
“About me?” said Derrick doubtfully. “Oh, I’m right enough.”
“What do you do with yourself? How on earth do you kill time?” I asked.
“Come, give me a full, true, and particular account of it all.”
“We have tried three other servants,” said Derrick; “but the plan
doesn’t answer. They either won’t stand it, or else they are bribed
into smuggling brandy into the house. I find I can do most things for my
father, and in the morning he has an attendant from the hospital who is
trustworthy, and who does what is necessary for him. At ten we breakfast
together, then there are the morning papers, which he likes to have read
to him. After that I go round to the Pump Room with him--odd contrast
now to what it must have been when Bath was the rage. Then we have
lunch. In the afternoon, if he is well enough, we drive; if not he
sleeps, and I get a walk. Later on an old Indian friend of his will
sometimes drop in; if not he likes to be read to until dinner. After
dinner we play chess--he is a first-rate player. At ten I help him to
bed; from eleven to twelve I smoke and study Socialism and all the rest
of it that Lynwood is at present floundering in.”
“Why don’t you write, then?”
“I tried it, but it didn’t answer. I couldn’t sleep after it, and was,
in fact, too tired; seems absurd to be tired after such a day as that,
but somehow it takes it out of one more than the hardest reading; I
don’t know why.”
“Why,” I said angrily, “it’s because it is work to which you are quite
unsuited--work for a thick-skinned, hard-hearted, uncultivated and
well-paid attendant, not for the novelist who is to be the chief light
of our generation.”
He laughed at this estimate of his powers.
“Novelists, like other cattle, have to obey their owner,” he said
lightly.
I thought for a moment that he meant the Major, and was breaking into an
angry remonstrance, when I saw that he meant something quite different.
It was always his strongest point, this extraordinary consciousness of
right, this unwavering belief that he had to do and therefore could do
certain things. Without this, I know that he never wrote a line, and in
my heart I believe this was the cause of his success.
“Then you are not writing at all?” I asked.
“Yes, I write generally for a couple of hours before breakfast,” he
said.
And that evening we sat by his gas stove and he read me the next four
chapters of ‘Lynwood.’ He had rather a dismal lodging-house bedroom,
with faded wall-paper and a prosaic snuff-coloured carpet. On a rickety
table in the window was his desk, and a portfolio full of blue foolscap,
but he had done what he could to make the place habitable; his Oxford
pictures were on the walls--Hoffman’s ‘Christ speaking to the Woman
taken in Adultery,’ hanging over the mantelpiece--it had always been a
favourite of his. I remember that, as he read the description of Lynwood
and his wife, I kept looking from him to the Christ in the picture till
I could almost have fancied that each face bore the same expression. Had
this strange monotonous life with that old brute of a Major brought him
some new perception of those words, “Neither do I condemn thee”? But
when he stopped reading, I, true to my character, forgot his affairs in
my own, as we sat talking far into the night--talking of that luckless
month at Mondisfield, of all the problems it had opened up, and of my
wretchedness.
“You were in town all September?” he asked; “you gave up Blachington?”
“Yes,” I replied. “What did I care for country houses in such a mood as
that.”
He acquiesced, and I went on talking of my grievances, and it was not
till I was in the train on my way back to London that I remembered how
a look of disappointment had passed over his face just at the moment.
Evidently he had counted on learning something about Freda from me, and
I--well, I had clean forgotten both her existence and his passionate
love.
Something, probably self-interest, the desire for my friend’s company,
and so forth, took me down to Bath pretty frequently in those days;
luckily the Major had a sort of liking for me, and was always polite
enough; and dear old Derrick--well, I believe my visits really helped
to brighten him up. At any rate he said he couldn’t have borne his life
without them, and for a sceptical, dismal, cynical fellow like me to
hear that was somehow flattering. The mere force of contrast did me
good. I used to come back on the Monday wondering that Derrick didn’t
cut his throat, and realising that, after all, it was something to be
a free agent, and to have comfortable rooms in Montague Street, with
no old bear of a drunkard to disturb my peace. And then a sort of
admiration sprang up in my heart, and the cynicism bred of melancholy
broodings over solitary pipes was less rampant than usual.
It was, I think, early in the new year that I met Lawrence Vaughan in
Bath. He was not staying at Gay Street, so I could still have the vacant
room next to Derrick’s. Lawrence put up at the York House Hotel.
“For you know,” he informed me, “I really can’t stand the governor for
more than an hour or two at a time.”
“Derrick manages to do it,” I said.
“Oh, Derrick, yes,” he replied, “it’s his metier, and he is well
accustomed to the life. Besides, you know, he is such a dreamy, quiet
sort of fellow; he lives all the time in a world of his own creation,
and bears the discomforts of this world with great philosophy. Actually
he has turned teetotaller! It would kill me in a week.”
I make a point of never arguing with a fellow like that, but I think I
had a vindictive longing, as I looked at him, to shut him up with the
Major for a month, and see what would happen.
These twin brothers were curiously alike in face and curiously unlike in
nature. So much for the great science of physiognomy! It often seemed to
me that they were the complement of each other. For instance, Derrick in
society was extremely silent, Lawrence was a rattling talker; Derrick,
when alone with you, would now and then reveal unsuspected depths of
thought and expression; Lawrence, when alone with you, very frequently
showed himself to be a cad. The elder twin was modest and diffident, the
younger inclined to brag; the one had a strong tendency to melancholy,
the other was blest or cursed with the sort of temperament which has
been said to accompany “a hard heart and a good digestion.”
I was not surprised to find that the son who could not tolerate the
governor’s presence for more than an hour or two, was a prime favourite
with the old man; that was just the way of the world. Of course, the
Major was as polite as possible to him; Derrick got the kicks and
Lawrence the half-pence.
In the evenings we played whist, Lawrence coming in after dinner, “For,
you know,” he explained to me, “I really couldn’t get through a meal
with nothing but those infernal mineral waters to wash it down.”
And here I must own that at my first visit I had sailed rather close to
the wind; for when the Major, like the Hatter in ‘Alice,’ pressed me
to take wine, I--not seeing any--had answered that I did not take it;
mentally adding the words, “in your house, you brute!”
The two brothers were fond of each other after a fashion. But Derrick
was human, and had his faults like the rest of us; and I am pretty sure
he did not much enjoy the sight of his father’s foolish and unreasonable
devotion to Lawrence. If you come to think of it, he would have been a
full-fledged angel if no jealous pang, no reflection that it was rather
rough on him, had crossed his mind, when he saw his younger brother
treated with every mark of respect and liking, and knew that Lawrence
would never stir a finger really to help the poor fractious invalid.
Unluckily they happened one night to get on the subject of professions.
“It’s a comfort,” said the Major, in his sarcastic way, “to have a
fellow-soldier to talk to instead of a quill-driver, who as yet is not
even a penny-a-liner. Eh, Derrick? Don’t you feel inclined to regret
your fool’s choice now? You might have been starting off for the war
with Lawrence next week, if you hadn’t chosen what you’re pleased to
call a literary life. Literary life, indeed! I little thought a son of
mine would ever have been so wanting in spirit as to prefer dabbling in
ink to a life of action--to be the scribbler of mere words, rather than
an officer of dragoons.”
Then to my astonishment Derrick sprang to his feet in hot indignation.
I never saw him look so handsome, before or since; for his anger was
not the distorting, devilish anger that the Major gave way to, but real
downright wrath.
“You speak contemptuously of mere novels,” he said in a low voice, yet
more clearly than usual, and as if the words were wrung out of him.
“What right have you to look down on one of the greatest weapons of the
day? and why is a writer to submit to scoffs and insults and tamely to
hear his profession reviled? I have chosen to write the message that
has been given me, and I don’t regret the choice. Should I have shown
greater spirit if I had sold my freedom and right of judgment to be one
of the national killing machines?”
With that he threw down his cards and strode out of the room in a white
heat of anger. It was a pity he made that last remark, for it put him
in the wrong and needlessly annoyed Lawrence and the Major. But an angry
man has no time to weigh his words, and, as I said, poor old Derrick
was very human, and when wounded too intolerably could on occasion
retaliate.
The Major uttered an oath and looked in astonishment at the retreating
figure. Derrick was such an extraordinarily quiet, respectful,
long-suffering son as a rule, that this outburst was startling in the
extreme. Moreover, it spoilt the game, and the old man, chafed by the
result of his own ill-nature, and helpless to bring back his partner,
was forced to betake himself to chess. I left him grumbling away to
Lawrence about the vanity of authors, and went out in the hope of
finding Derrick. As I left the house I saw someone turn the corner into
the Circus, and starting in pursuit, overtook the tall, dark figure
where Bennett Street opens on to the Lansdowne Hill.
“I’m glad you spoke up, old fellow,” I said, taking his arm.
He modified his pace a little. “Why is it,” he exclaimed, “that every
other profession can be taken seriously, but that a novelist’s work is
supposed to be mere play? Good God! don’t we suffer enough? Have we
not hard brain work and drudgery of desk work and tedious gathering of
statistics and troublesome search into details? Have we not an appalling
weight of responsibility on us?--and are we not at the mercy of a
thousand capricious chances?”
“Come now,” I exclaimed, “you know that you are never so happy as when
you are writing.”
“Of course,” he replied; “but that doesn’t make me resent such an attack
the less. Besides, you don’t know what it is to have to write in such an
atmosphere as ours; it’s like a weight on one’s pen. This life here is
not life at all--it’s a daily death, and it’s killing the book too; the
last chapters are wretched--I’m utterly dissatisfied with them.”
“As for that,” I said calmly, “you are no judge at all. You can never
tell the worth of your own work; the last bit is splendid.”
“I could have done it better,” he groaned. “But there is always a
ghastly depression dragging one back here--and then the time is so
short; just as one gets into the swing of it the breakfast bell rings,
and then comes--” He broke off.
I could well supply the end of the sentence, however, for I knew that
then came the slow torture of a tete-a-tete day with the Major, stinging
sarcasms, humiliating scoldings, vexations and difficulties innumerable.
I drew him to the left, having no mind to go to the top of the hill.
We slackened our pace again and walked to and fro along the broad level
pavement of Lansdowne Crescent. We had it entirely to ourselves--not
another creature was in sight.
“I could bear it all,” he burst forth, “if only there was a chance of
seeing Freda. Oh, you are better off than I am--at least, you know the
worst. Your hope is killed, but mine lives on a tortured, starved life!
Would to God I had never seen her!”
Certainly before that night I had never quite realised the
irrevocableness of poor Derrick’s passion. I had half hoped that time
and separation would gradually efface Freda Merrifield from his memory;
and I listened with a dire foreboding to the flood of wretchedness
which he poured forth as we paced up and down, thinking now and then how
little people guessed at the tremendous powers hidden under his usually
quiet exterior.
At length he paused, but his last heart-broken words seemed to vibrate
in the air and to force me to speak some kind of comfort.
“Derrick,” I said, “come back with me to London--give up this miserable
life.”
I felt him start a little; evidently no thought of yielding had come
to him before. We were passing the house that used to belong to that
strange book-lover and recluse, Beckford. I looked up at the blank
windows, and thought of that curious, self-centred life in the past,
surrounded by every luxury, able to indulge every whim; and then I
looked at my companion’s pale, tortured face, and thought of the life
he had elected to lead in the hope of saving one whom duty bound him to
honour. After all, which life was the most worth living--which was the
most to be admired?
We walked on; down below us and up on the farther hill we could see the
lights of Bath; the place so beautiful by day looked now like a fairy
city, and the Abbey, looming up against the moon-lit sky, seemed like
some great giant keeping watch over the clustering roofs below. The
well-known chimes rang out into the night and the clock struck ten.
“I must go back,” said Derrick, quietly. “My father will want to get to
bed.”
I couldn’t say a word; we turned, passed Beckford’s house once more,
walked briskly down the hill, and reached the Gay Street lodging-house.
I remember the stifling heat of the room as we entered it, and its
contrast to the cool, dark, winter’s night outside. I can vividly
recall, too, the old Major’s face as he looked up with a sarcastic
remark, but with a shade of anxiety in his bloodshot eyes. He was
leaning back in a green-cushioned chair, and his ghastly yellow
complexion seemed to me more noticeable than usual--his scanty grey
hair and whiskers, the lines of pain so plainly visible in his face,
impressed me curiously. I think I had never before realised what a wreck
of a man he was--how utterly dependent on others.
Lawrence, who, to do him justice, had a good deal of tact, and who, I
believe, cared for his brother as much as he was capable of caring
for any one but himself, repeated a good story with which he had been
enlivening the Major, and I did what I could to keep up the talk.
Derrick meanwhile put away the chessmen, and lighted the Major’s candle.
He even managed to force up a laugh at Lawrence’s story, and, as he
helped his father out of the room, I think I was the only one who
noticed the look of tired endurance in his eyes.