Complete Works of E W Hornung

by E. W. Hornung

  “Can you not?”

  Mrs. Mason had put down the typewritten sheets, and lay gazing at her husband with gentle shrewdness in her kind eyes.

  “No, I cannot,” said the novelist, defiantly.

  “Have you quite forgotten Saltburn-by-the-Sea?”

  “I am certainly doing my best to forget it, my dear; a deadlier fortnight I never spent in my life. Not a decent library in the place, nor a man in the hotel who knew more than the mere alphabet of whist! Why remind me of it, my love?”

  “Because that’s what ails Ida. She is suffering from the effects of Saltburn-by-the-Sea.”

  “My dear Margaret, I simply don’t believe it!”

  “But I know it, Wolff. Do listen to reason. Dear Ida has told me everything, and I am sorry to say she is very sadly in love.”

  “In love with whom?” cried the novelist, who had been pacing up and down the room, after the manner of his kind, but who stopped now at the foot of the bed, to spread his hands out eloquently. “With that young Overton?”

  “With that young Overman. You were so short and sharp with him, you see, that you never even mastered his name.”

  “I was naturally short and sharp with a young fellow whom she had only seen two or three times in her life — once on the pier, once in the gardens, once or twice about the hotel. It was a piece of confounded presumption! We didn’t even know who or what the fellow was!”

  “He put you in the way of finding out, and you said you didn’t want to know.”

  “No more I did,” said Wolff Mason.

  “You liked him well enough before he proposed to Ida.”

  “That may be. He had more idea of whist than any of the others, which is saying precious little. But his proposal was a piece of infernal impertinence, and I told him so.”

  “I am sorry you told him so, Wolff,” said Mrs. Mason softly. “However, the affair is quite a thing of the past. You put a stop to it pretty effectually, and I daresay it was for the best. Only it is right you should know that young Overman and Ida met in Oxford Street yesterday, and that she has not slept all night for thinking about him.”

  “The villain!” cried Wolff Mason, excitedly. “I suppose he asked her to run away with him?”

  “They did not speak. I was with Ida,” said his wife. “It was the purest accident. Ida bowed — indeed, so did I — and he took off his hat, but no one stopped or spoke. Ida is troubled because he looked extremely wretched; even I can see his eyes now as they looked when we passed him. However, as I say, you put a stop to the matter, and they must both get over it as best they can. I have never blamed you, I think. It was very premature, I grant you. My only feeling has been that, as a writer of romance all your days, you showed remarkably little sympathy with a pair of sufficiently romantic young lovers!”

  “My dear, I choose to keep romance in its proper place — between the covers of my books. I have more than enough of it there, I can assure you, if I could afford to consult my own taste.”

  “You can’t put in too much of it to suit mine. Your love-story has been the strong point in all your novels, Wolff, and it is still. This new one is of your very best in that respect. I foresee a sweet scene in the boat-house.”

  “I am in the middle of it now,” the novelist said, complacently.

  “I have visions of the old general turning up when she is in his arms. I do hope you won’t let him, Wolff.”

  “How well you know my work, my love! The general came in and caught them just before I wiped my pen yesterday. It ended the chapter very nicely. I was in good form at lunch.”

  “And what is going to happen to-day?”

  “Can you ask? The general blusters. George behaves like a gentleman, and scores all down the line, for the time being.”

  “But surely she is allowed to marry him in the end?”

  “She always is, my dear, in my books.”

  Mrs. Mason cast upon her husband a fixed look which turned slowly into a sweet, grave smile. He was still standing at the foot of the bed, but now he was leaning on the brass rail, with his hands folded quietly, and a good-humoured twinkle in his eyes.

  Whatever he might say about his own books at the club, he enjoyed chatting them over with his wife as keenly as in the dear early days when his first book and their eldest daughter appeared simultaneously. He had forgotten Ida for the moment, and the pleasant though impossible young man at the sea-side; but Mrs. Mason did not mean that moment to be prolonged.

  “Ah,” said she, “in your books! Twice you have allowed the heroine to marry the hero in your life too.”

  “I was under the impression, my dear, that we were talking about my books.”

  “But I am thinking about Ida. You needn’t look at the clock, Wolff. You know very well that you never leave the house before ten minutes past, and it isn’t five past yet. You may look at your watch if you like, but you will see that my clock is, if anything, fast. I say that you raised no opposition in the case of either Laura or Hetty.”

  “Didn’t I?” exclaimed the novelist with a grim chuckle. “By Jove, I did my worst! If that wasn’t very bad you must remember that we knew all about Charles and Macfarlane. It wasn’t like young Overton. By Jove, no!”

  “Young Overman’s is better romance,” murmured Mrs. Mason.

  “Therefore, it is worse real life. I do wish you would see with me that the two things clash if you try to bring them together. Frankly, my dear, I wish you wouldn’t try. I make a point of never doing so — that’s why I don’t live over the shop.”

  “Wolff, Wolff, say that sort of thing at your club! With me you can afford to be sincere. Why, you have put Ida’s hair and eyes into every book you have written since she grew up. The things don’t clash. If you borrow from Ida for your books, I think you ought to be prepared to pay her back out of your books too, and allow her to live happily ever after, like all the rest of your heroines.”

  There were moments when Wolff Mason realised that the one-sided game of letters has a bad effect on the argumentative side of a man’s mind. The present was one. He looked again at his watch, and replaced it very hurriedly in his waistcoat pocket.

  “My dear, I really must be going.”

  “One minute more — just one,” pleaded Mrs. Mason, and her voice was as soft as ever it had been thirty years ago. “I want your hand, Wolff!”

  The novelist came round to the bedside and sat down for a few moments on the edge. During those few moments two frail, worn, thin hands were joined together, and Wolff Mason’s spectacles showed him a moisture in his wife’s eyes — not tears, but a shining film which only made them more lovely and sweet and kind. That film had come over them in the old days when they were both young and he had told her of his love. On very rare occasions he had described it in the eyes of his dark-eyed heroines, and never without a hotness in his own. He rose suddenly. His hand was pressed.

  “You will reconsider it, Wolff?”

  “My dear, she is our last.”

  “My love, we have each other!”

  Some moments later, when Wolff Mason had closed the door behind him, he had to open it again to hear what it was that his wife was calling after him.

  “Mind you don’t make the general too inhuman, Wolff, or I shall be so disappointed in you both!”

  The novelist laughed. So did his wife. The secret of their complete happiness was not love alone. It was love and laughter.

  Nevertheless, Wolff Mason drove to the office of the Mayfair Magazine in a less literary frame of mind than he either liked or was addicted to at this early hour of the day. It is not true that the novelist constructed all his stories in the hansom which deposited him in Paternoster Row at a quarter to ten every morning, and in front of his own door at a quarter-past seven in the evening. That was the invention of the lady journalists who wrote paragraphs about Wolff Mason for the evening papers — those paragraphs his old-world soul abhorred. It is a fact, however, that he liked to get out of his hansom with more
ideas than he had taken into it. He made it a rule to think only of his work on the drive in.

  But this morning he was breaking all his rules: he had cut himself with his razor; he had left the house five minutes late, owing to a series of little domestic scenes of which his head was still full. And how he hated scenes outside his books! He treated the psychological moments in his own life as lightly, indeed, as in his novels, but the former worried him. This morning he had kissed Mrs. Mason with all the exuberance of a young man, and on coming downstairs, and finding Ida waiting for him with his tall hat and overcoat nicely brushed, and his gloves warmed on both sides, he had kissed her too, and so fondly as to bring out the same film on her sweet eyes as he had produced a few minutes before in those of her mother.

  To begin the day by making people cry was peculiarly odious to the kind-hearted gentleman who held it the whole duty of a novelist to make people laugh; and those two pairs of dear eyes, so like each other in every look, duly accompanied him to the orderly, tobacco-scented room, where he edited Mayfair and wrote his own books. The clock on the chimney-piece stood at ten minutes to ten. He was five minutes late at this end also.

  On a little table under the window lay the long envelopes and the cylinders of manuscript which had arrived since the day before. Wolff Mason lit a cigarette, and examined the packets without opening them. Thus he invariably began his official day, tossing aside the less interesting-looking missives for his weekly “clean sweep,” and leaving on the little table work enough for the afternoon, mostly the work of previously accepted contributors, whose handwriting was familiar to the editor. These were the people who gave the trouble, the people who had sent in a good thing once. Not all of them did it twice.

  The editor recognised this morning on one of the long envelopes the superscription of a most promising contributor who had done it thrice, but who had lately failed as many times in succession. Wolff Mason had never known a valued contributor go to the bad at such a pace; but this one had done such merry work in the beginning that there was hope for him still. At all events he could write, and must therefore be read carefully. The editor would have read him there and then, in the hope of a laugh, which he felt he needed, had he not been five minutes late as it was. At three minutes to ten he loaded four brier-wood pipes out of a stone tobacco-jar, set three of them in a row on his desk, and lit the fourth. When the hour struck the ink stood thick on certain symbols at the top of a clean sheet of unlined foolscap, and Wolff Mason was glancing over his previous morning’s work.

  The clock on the chimney-piece had a quiet, inoffensive tick, but this, and an occasional squeal from the novelist’s pipe, which was exceedingly foul, were the only sounds within the editorial sanctum between ten and half-past that morning. The ink had dried upon the pen of as ready a writer as ever told agreeable stories in good English; at the half-hour all that had been written was the heading of the new chapter, and the number of the page (with a ring round it) in the right-hand top corner. Some ten minutes later Wolff Mason took up his second pipe, lit it, and began to write. He wrote for an hour, more rapidly and less gracefully than was his wont. Then he flung down his pen, lit the third pipe, and blew clouds of smoke against the square of blue framed by the upper sashes of the double window on his right. The novelist was in trouble. The best character in his book, the old general, was failing him sadly in the hour of need. It was necessary to the plot that this hearty, weather-beaten warrior should make a complete brute of himself in the boat-house on discovering his only daughter in the embrace of the young poet who inhabited cheap chambers in Mitre Court when he was at home. But the general had treated the poet as his own son hitherto, had taken his daughter to tea at the Mitre Court chambers, had himself invited their interesting tenant down to his country house for change of air; and he refused to be so inconsistent. It was a case of inventing something disreputable (afterwards to be disproved) against the poet; the general must only now have heard of it to justify his ordering his guest off the premises as the plot demanded. It was necessary and easy, but undeniably conventional, and it distressed the novelist, because he had not foreseen this contingency in the garden before breakfast. Moreover, for some reason or other, he felt his inventive faculty to be at its lowest vitality to-day. He did not ask himself what the reason was. He had at least got back to the world of fiction, and whatever their effects, the domestic scenes of the early morning were entirely forgotten.

  He was aware, however, that this morning he was breaking all his rules. He was about to invent in the room where it was his practice only to write down what he had invented elsewhere. He got up and paced the room in order to do so, and this was another rule broken, for he very seldom stirred from his chair between ten o’clock and one. And now, as he walked, Wolff Mason’s eye was caught by the packet from that promising contributor who could write so amusingly when he liked; the creative portion of his brain gave sudden way to the editorial; and the editor informed himself, with a characteristic chuckle of self-depreciation, that the new man’s story would in any case amuse him more than his own was doing at the moment. At all events he would try it. He had broken so many rules already that he caught up the interesting envelope with a certain recklessness, and having lighted his fourth pipe, sat down to read manuscript as calmly as though it were three o’clock in the afternoon instead of the middle of his sacred working morning.

  The story, which was quite short, was accompanied by the unpresuming business-like note which this contributor always forwarded with his literary offerings. It was called “A Good Father,” which was not a very good title, but the editor prepared to give it his “careful consideration,” in accordance with the pledge embodied in his printed notice to contributors. He pushed his spectacles on to his forehead and began to read with the manuscript held close to his nose. Over the third leaf his fine, thoughtful forehead became scored with furrows; on the fifth he exclaimed “Ha!” Half way through the story he muttered “Upon my word!” and a little later, “A most remarkable coincidence.” Then his face lost its interested look under the gathering clouds of disappointment, and he finished reading with a brow awry.

  “Not free from merit — anything but free — yet it won’t do! This is a young man with a naturally sweet sense of humour, but something has embittered him since he first began to send me his stories. I wish I knew what! He is the most disappointing person I have had to deal with for many a day; a writer after my own heart, which he is half breaking with his accursed childish cynicism!”

  The genuine character of the editor’s regrets was obvious (to himself) from the fact that all his observations were made aloud. He very seldom caught himself in the act of soliloquy; it was yet another of the several irregularities which were destined to stamp this day in the memory of one who notoriously lived and worked by routine. The matter of the unacceptable story, however, suggested an entry in the commonplace book in which he was accustomed to accumulate raw material for future use. He felt happier when he had jotted down a note or two anent the cynicism of the modern young author and his lamentable liking for unhappy endings. The story he had just read ended shockingly, and all owing to the unnatural obduracy of an impossible parent, the “Good Father” of the cynical title. Otherwise it was a very good story indeed. The coincidence, however, was quite remarkable. Paternal opposition was the rock on which Wolff Mason’s own pen had split that morning. But his old general was not going to run him into an unhappy ending — not he! He turned to that irate personage with positive relief, and saw his way more clearly after the ten minutes he had spent in the company of a much more terrible specimen of the same class. What he did not see was the full force of the coincidence which had caused him to exclaim aloud. It was a double one; but the man of letters lived a double life, and in the atmosphere of fiction had forgotten those unpleasant facts which had compelled his attention earlier in the day.

  Another matter worried the writer when the clock struck one, and he found himself mechanically wiping the
pen that had inscribed some twelve hundred and fifty words only instead of the regulation fifteen hundred. He felt humbled by a sense of failure most mortifying at his age, and though he put away his papers and went off to the club as usual, he was not in his customary spirits, and the younger novelists who listened for his good things, in order to repeat them to their friends, heard nothing worth taking home with them that day. One of the latter, indeed, broached very deftly the subject of Wolff Mason’s books; but the veteran treated the subject with unnatural seriousness, was aware of the unnaturalness himself, and left the club before his time in an evil humour. And evil humours were the greatest rarity of all with the editor of the Mayfair, whom common consent credited with the most charming personality in literary London.

  By two-thirty he was back in the editorial chair; the first of a newly-loaded set of pipes was in full blast under his nose, and the remaining contents of the little table under the window were being dealt with carefully and in turn. Not one of them proved to be of any use at all. In each case this kind-hearted man felt it his duty to pen a considerate little letter explaining the reason of rejection in the present instance, and encouraging the unsuccessful contributor to further effort. It is amazing, indeed, and little known, what a talent Wolff Mason had for the composition of kindly little notes of this nature; he made even the rejected love him, for his heartening words, and for the sympathy and humour with which he tempered disappointment to his tender young contributors.

  Last of all this afternoon he returned to “A Good Father,” and glanced over it again with a sigh. Then he took a sheet of Mayfair Magazine note-paper, and scrawled the date and “Dear Sir.” There he stopped. After a few moments’ hesitation, the spoilt sheet was dropped into the waste-paper basket, and a new note begun with “My” thrown in before the “Dear Sir.” But the editor paused again.