Mr. Wick, on his way to "Happy House" one very wet afternoon, in the
beginning of November, gave way to pleasant dreams. He knew that the
lady of his affections was still in Torquay, for he had had a letter
from her, but she had bidden him go and see her mother, and collect one
or two books that she wanted, and send them down to her.
"I'm rather worried about Mum," she had written, "without any particular
reason. I wish you'd go and take a look at her and let me know if
everything's all right."
Mr. Wick, who had had a serious conflict with his chief a few days
before, and come out with streaming colours, was feeling very happy, in
spite of the pouring rain and the dreadful uniformity of the
wet-November-afternoon faces about him. He was one step farther on
towards his goal, which was nothing less than becoming a great newspaper
proprietor and running the political world from a swivel chair somewhere
in Fleet Street. And it was very sweet to him to be sent in this
intimate way by Griselda Walbridge to inspect and report on her mother.
And now, under the shelter of his dripping umbrella, he was finishing a
book, which he had read conscientiously, though with incredible
swiftness. Since his meeting with Griselda, he had taken the trouble to
look through half a dozen of Mrs. Walbridge's books, and could see (for
he was unconsciously a very good critic) what the secret of their
success was.
"Very slow," he explained to his mother. "Nothing much happens and there
are the same people in all of them, with different names. She always has
pretty names for the girls, and the men are usually swells. Kind of book
a woman could read while she's knitting, or boiling the clothes, or
bathing the baby, without either losing the thread of the story or
scamping her work."
But this new book, he realised, had lost that easy quality. There were
pages of undigested realism scattered through it; several of the stock
characters were missing. There was, for instance, no faithful old family
butler, no sinuous foreign adventuress. (The innocence of Violet
Walbridge's adventuresses was prodigious, in spite of the desperate
epithets she showered on them) and there was a superfluous infant,
nameless, and as unnecessary to the story as it was to his mother, whose
presence was as inappropriate as that of Gaby Deslys at a Quaker
meeting.
"That baby puts the lid on," the young man thought, stuffing the book in
his mackintosh pocket and feeling in the other pocket for the safety of
the treasure he had put there. "She'll bust the whole show if she goes
on like that. She can't do the new stuff, and her old patients won't
stand such strong doses as this."
As he got off the bus his mind was engaged with wondering whether Mrs.
Walbridge had any fortune apart from her pen.
"Strikes me that Paul is something of an _objet de luxe_," he reflected,
as he turned off Albany Street. "Bank clerks oughtn't to go messing about
with stockbrokers, and that fellow Brock is a bad egg. When I've
married Griselda, pretty pet, we shan't have very much to do with
Master Paul. The other one, Guy, the soldier, looks a decent lad. I like
that photograph."
As he reached the house his pace slackened and over his shrewd
journalistic face came an odd softening as if for a moment his very
thoughts had stopped using slang. The green swing gate with its half
effaced words touched him anew. The more he knew of Mrs. Walbridge and
her family, the greater seemed the pathos of the name of her house.
"I suppose she named it that years ago when she was young," he thought
gently. "I suppose she kept the paint fresh at first, and then later it
didn't seem worth while."
A very modern product was this Oliver Wick--the kind of a man that could
not have existed a quarter of a century ago, when young men were either
gentlemen or cads, as the saying went. He had set out to make a great
fortune and he was going to make it. He was conscious to his finger-tips
of his powers and his gift of observation and of managing inferior
minds. His habitual language was a jargon composed of journalistic,
sporting, and society slang, yet his mind was open to the most tender
impressions, his sharp little eyes always ready to soften to a tear, and
he loved and read poetry with avidity.
Now he stood for a moment in the pouring rain, touched to the quick by
the pathos of the shabby little gate of the unsuccessful, overworked old
novelist.
* * * * *
He found Mrs. Walbridge sitting by the fire in her expressionless
drawing-room, reading. She was so engrossed in her book that, after a
hurried greeting, she at once began to talk of it.
"Oh, Mr. Wick," she cried, forgetting to ask him to sit down, which,
however, he promptly did, "have you read this?"
He glanced at the book. "Yes, it's the book Mr. Crichell talked about
that night at dinner here." After a second he added a little awkwardly,
"I--I wouldn't read it if I were you, Mrs. Walbridge."
She closed the book and drew back in her chair with a little flush.
"I--I've nearly finished it. Everyone's been talking about it, and I
found it in my son's room."
He was silent for a moment, for he did not know quite what to say to
her, to this old lady whose literary stockpot produced such a harmless
and uniform brew.
"Reek" was not important enough to be called strong meat; it was just a
thoroughly nasty book whose author dwelt lovingly on obscene side-issues
of ordinary life, and in whose three hundred odd pages of closely
printed matter there was not a word, nor even a suggestion that could
help or even cheer for a moment any conceivable reader.
"Disgusting rubbish," he declared after a moment. "My old mother read
the first chapter and marched down with it in the tongs and put it in
the kitchen fire." He chuckled at the vision of the old lady's slow
progress down the narrow passage, with the tongs held straight out
before her. "That showed my young sister Jenny what _she_ thought of
it!" He paused and then went on very quickly, with a little flicker of
colour in his thin, white face, "You won't let Grisel read it?"
Mrs. Walbridge shuddered. "Dear me, no. Not that she would understand
it," she added slowly.
There was a pause and the young man watched the firelight playing over
the hollowed, haggard face with the deeply-lined white brow, and the
tired violet eyes. It came to him suddenly how very pretty she must have
been in her youth--her youth, so long ago, and before he was born (he
was twenty-six). And then she said slowly, in a hesitating voice:
"It's such a stupid book. It's so badly put together and the people
aren't real."
If a six months' old baby had sat up in its cradle and quoted Plato to
him the young journalist could not have been more surprised. That Violet
Walbridge, of all people on earth, should criticise the construction of
a novel by Bruce Collier! Bruce Collier, who was undoubtedly the head of
the new school of writers, and about whom most serious critics wrote
columns in the morning papers. He stared at her in frank, almost
open-mouthed astonishment, and she went on without apparently noticing
his emotion, and speaking modestly, but with a sureness that he had
never observed in her before.
"You see, if Swithin Cleveland had been in the ruins that time--_you_
know--he could not possibly have written that letter to Sophia."
"Why couldn't he?" stammered Wick.
For a few minutes he listened to her soft, rather unmodulated voice, as
she unfolded her ideas to him, and then suddenly he jumped up and
slapped his knee.
"By Jove," he shouted, "you're right, you're right, Mrs. Walbridge, and
not one of them--the critics I mean--has seen it!"
He tramped up and down the room, talking rapidly, brandishing his arms
in a characteristically ungraceful, but expressive way.
"Why don't you write an article about it? I'll make my chief print it in
one of his decent papers. Not that--not that," he broke off stammering
hopelessly, "_Round the Fire_ isn't very good in its _way_, you
know--but I mean in _Cosmos_ or _The Jupiter_."
Mrs. Walbridge laughed softly. "Don't apologise for _Round the Fire_,"
she said. "I think I know exactly what it is."
He sat down again. The wind was whipping against the window with a
delightful crackling noise. The corner by the homely hearth in the dim,
inexpressive drawing-room was very pleasant in its way, and he liked, he
very greatly liked, the old-fashioned lady in the shabby grey gown--the
lady whom, if he had to stop the stars in their courses to accomplish
it, was going to be his mother-in-law. He had always liked Mrs.
Walbridge; he had always known that she held qualities that in a
mother-in-law would be shining ones, but she had a personality a little
too like this drawing-room of hers, too like the old mirror that hung
over the mantelpiece and was a little cloudy, a little obscure, and now,
behold, something had breathed on the mirror and it had cleared! Like a
flash he saw the future. Himself England's greatest newspaper king, in a
great, fine, romantic old house somewhere--St. James's Square for
choice, failing that, Manchester Square might do--and by his side was
his lovely little blackest white girl, and beside her, in subdued grey
velvet and lace, the perfect mother-in-law, perfect because, not only
had she been capable of producing a wife fit for the greatest man in
England, and of being herself gently and quietly and modestly
impressive, but she possessed that great blessing to a man in the
position that he would be in, a keenly critical mind, and the mind would
be, he felt, in a way his, because he had discovered it. He was sure
that no one in her household or among her friends even suspected Mrs.
Walbridge of such an astonishing possession.
"Look here," he said at the end of half an hour or so, when they had
discussed Mr. Collier's rather putrescent masterpiece pretty thoroughly,
"I suppose Grisel's told you that I mean to marry her?"
"She's told me that you'd asked her."
"Oh, that's nothing," he waved his hand impatiently, "asking her, I
mean. I have asked her two or three times, just for the sake of form,
you know. But she's got to do it sooner or later. I'm in no hurry."
"Dear me," murmured his hostess, a little frightened by the novelty of
his point of view.
"Yes. You mustn't think me cheeky or--dashing, you know," he protested
gravely. "I'm not really. I only mention it now to you so that you would
understand what I'm going to say."
"Yes?" She spoke very gently, and her eyes were kind and benign.
"I was going to ask you," he said, his manner suddenly changing to one
that impressed her, unconsciously to both of them. "I was going to ask
you if you don't think you could do something to modernise your style a
little. Just from the business point of view, I mean."
He saw her wince, but kept on, with benevolent ruthlessness.
"I've been reading over some of your books since I met you, and I like
'em, and I quite see the reason for their popularity." He broke off
shortly, and asked her, his head cocked on one side, his lips pursed
fiercely: "How are your sales now, compared to what they were, say, ten
years ago?"
Mrs. Walbridge took up the poker and bent over the fire. He knew she was
doing it to hide her face, and moved slightly so that he could keep on
looking at her, for he meant to have the truth, and knew that this
truthful lady would not hesitate to lie to him on this occasion.
"About the same, I think," she said in an undertone, poking the fire
destructively.
He took the poker out of her hand, and by pointing it at her, forced her
slowly back into her chair.
"Oh, come now," he protested. "Honour bright--man to man, you
know--_business_----"
There was a pause, after which she said: "Well, then, if you put it like
that, no! my sales have been growing less for some years now, slowly,
until--until quite lately. My last book was really almost a failure.
Don't," she added, clasping her thin hands and bending forward a little,
"don't mention this to Grisel, will you? They none of them know. I--I
didn't like to worry them."
The young man rose and walked to the window, saying: "Oh, hell!" under
his breath.
"Of course I won't tell Grisel," he almost shouted from between the lace
curtains; "but doesn't your husband know?"
"Oh, no--no. They none of them do. It would only worry them, you know."
"It must worry you, doesn't it?"
Neither of them noticed that the young man, who might so well have been
one of her younger children, was behaving quite as if he were what he
had destined himself to be, a powerful and experienced king of
journalism. And she, who had written books while he was crawling on his
nursery floor, sat before him with folded hands, answering his questions
with the simplicity and lack of reserve of a child. For once he had
broken her barriers down, he realised how the poor thing was relieved
and glad to talk about her troubles.
Thus it came that she told him all about that dreadful interview with
Messrs. Lubbock & Payne, and of her struggles with "Lord Effingham."
"I've modernised it," she said, with hopefulness that made him want to
cry, "but it didn't seem very good to me. But then I don't suppose one's
ever a very good judge of one's own work----"
"Then one ought to be," he thrust in brutally. "Every man and every
woman ought to be the best judge of his or her work. Any other kind of
talk's nonsense. You ought to know your best book. Don't you? Because if
you don't, I can tell you."
She trembled as she looked up at him. "I know you're going to say
'Queenie's Promise,'" she said feebly.
He shook his head. "Well, it isn't, then. It's the 'Under Secretary.' I
read that through from start to finish in the Underground the other day,
and it's--it's got the makings of a real good story."
At this moment the door opened, and Jessie brought in the tea, and by
doing so changed these two bewitched people back to their real selves,
and the millionaire newspaper king found himself once more only a young
reporter, and the trembling literary aspirant at his feet became, as at
the wave of a wand, again the tired, once mildly successful old
novelist, his hostess and potential mother-in-law.
They were both embarrassed for a few minutes, and then, as they drank
their tea, Mrs. Walbridge found herself, to her great though gentle
surprise, telling him what she instinctively called the story of her
life.
"My father was a solicitor," she said, "in Lincoln's Inn, and we lived
in Russell Street. It's a boarding-house now. I went past it the other
day on my way to the Tube, and it brought it all back so clearly! My
mother died when I was a child, and one of my aunts brought me up. She
was very old-fashioned, and rather an invalid, so as a child I saw
hardly anyone but her and my nurse, and once in a long while my father.
For years I never read anything but Miss Yonge's books, and Edna
Lyall's, and _The Girl's Own Paper_. My aunt was very particular about
my books."
"She must have been," growled the young man, trying to eat his toast
silently, so that he could hear.
"I never went to school, but had a series of governesses, all very sad
women. Most governesses seem to be sad, don't they? And all oldish, and
not in very good health. I was allowed to read Sir Walter Scott's poems,
and one or two of Dickens as I grew older. But I never liked Dickens; he
writes about such common people. I loved Bulwer, and my aunt allowed me
to read several of his. My aunt died when I was sixteen, and six months
after her death my father went to Mexico on business, which would have
made him a very rich man if it had turned out as he hoped. One of my old
governesses came to stay in the house while he was gone. Her name was
Miss Sweet, and I liked her because she was sentimental and had a soft
voice, and wasn't at all particular about dates. Then it was that I
wrote my first book--or not quite then, for I was nearly eighteen, but
my father was still away."
She hesitated for a moment. She was allowing her voice more scope since
the gloom had thickened in the quiet room. The young man did not move,
for he feared to disturb her.
"It was a caretaker in the next house which had long been empty that put
the idea into my head. She was an old woman with a niece, who lived with
her, and the niece was very pretty. The story was a dreadful one--a
tragedy, and the girl committed suicide. I can't quite tell you," the
quiet voice went on, "what it meant to an ignorant girl, sheltered as I
was, to be plunged into the midst of such horrors. Poor old Mrs. Bell
waked us up in the middle of the night when it happened, and I went
alone, as Miss Sweet had a bad attack of asthma."
She shuddered, and reaching to the back of a chair, took from it and
wrapped round her shoulders a little old red shawl. On and on went the
quiet voice, telling the story with a kind of neat dexterity and absence
of the overburdening adjectives common to such narration.
Wick was amazed and filled with pity at the thought of what life had
been to this woman to reduce her powers to the deadly level of the tales
that she poured out regularly every autumn.
"It was a dreadful business, as you see, but somehow after the first it
didn't frighten or upset me much, though it made poor Miss Sweet quite
ill. Afterwards we went down to Lulworth Cove for a change, and it was
while we were down there that I wrote the book. I was very happy then.
Your work," she added, with a touch of innocent vanity, "not being
creative, you may not realise what writing a book really is, but it's
very wonderful. I used to sit on the rocks and scribble away by the
hour. I think it was very good too, and I was proud of it. And the day
after we got home, in the autumn--we had been called back by a telegram
saying that my father had reached Liverpool--I packed up the manuscript
on the dining-room table and addressed it to Mr. Murray. Someone had
spilt a little black currant jam on the tablecloth, and as I arranged
the pages I managed to smear a little of it across the title, and I
remember getting cold water and a bit of cotton-wool and washing it off,
and then drying it before the kitchen fire, and mending the spoilt
letters with a very fine pen, so that it would look nice. 'Hannah' was
the name of it. Not a very good title, but that was the way it came to
me," she added softly, and her voice trailed away into silence.
The darkness increased suddenly, and the firelight made a lake of colour
on the hearthrug, the only colour left in the room.
"Well," Wick asked hoarsely, "did John Murray publish it?"
She laughed. "John Murray never saw it. I left it on the hall table that
night, and was going to register it myself in the morning. When my
father came in late he noticed it, and opened it."
"Well----?"
Somehow he never forgot the feel of the room at that moment, or the
chill sound of the next words as they fell on his waiting ears.
"He burnt it." After a little while she went on: "He was horrified by
it. I suppose it was not very proper, written by a young girl, and he
had never known that I understood about such things, but of course I
did, after the adventure of poor Kitty Bailey. Ring the bell, will you,
Oliver? It's growing very dark."
He rang, and while the lamp was being brought he knelt on the old
hearthrug and mended the fire. In a few moments the crude, unlovely room
was piteously bright, and the mystery had flown.
"Weren't you very angry?" Wick asked, as the door closed on the maid.
"I? Oh, no. It was he who was angry--my father. I think he was too hard
on me, but it didn't matter very much. It was probably very badly
written, though at the time I thought it was good."
Wick held out his hand. "Well, I must be off. Thank you so much for
telling me, Mrs. Walbridge. Did you go on writing at once then?"
Her thin, small-boned hand quivered in his as she answered:
"Oh, no. I didn't write again until--until after my marriage."
They stood looking very kindly at each other, the old woman and the
young man, and then she said suddenly, as he took up his hat and stick:
"I don't know why I told you, except, perhaps, that it happened, the
burning of 'Hannah,' I mean, thirty-five years ago to-day. I was
thinking about it before you came."
As he hurried through the rain towards the 'bus, the young man counted
back.
"That makes her fifty-two," he said. "I thought she was older than
that."
As he squeezed into the crowded interior of "everybody's carriage," as
de Amicis calls it, a feeling of great pity swept over him. "How it must
have hurt," he thought, "for her to remember it like that."