by Unknown
These were but his leisure moments, for during the long working hours he was still at the exercises, toiling fondly, and right willing to tear himself asunder to get at the trick of writing. So he passed from exercises to the grand experiment.
It was to be a tale, for there, they had taken for granted, lay the treasure. Pym was most considerate at this time, and mentioned woman with an apology.
“I have kept away from them in the exercises,” he said in effect, “because it would have been useless (as well as cruel) to force you to labour on a subject so uncongenial to you; and for the same reason I have decided that it is to be a tale of adventure, in which the heroine need be little more than a beautiful sack of coals which your cavalier carries about with him on his left shoulder. I am afraid we must have her to that extent, Thomas, but I am not asking much of you; dump her down as often as you like.”
And Thomas did his dogged best, the red light in his eye; though he had not, and never could have had, the smallest instinct for story-writing, he knew to the finger-tips how it is done; but for ever he would have gone on breaking all the rules of the game. How he wrestled with himself! Sublime thoughts came to him (nearly all about that girl), and he drove them away, for he knew they beat only against the march of his story, and, whatever befall, the story must march. Relentlessly he followed in the track of his men, pushing the dreary dogs on to deeds of valour. He tried making the lady human, and then she would not march; she sat still, and he talked about her; he dumped her down, and soon he was yawning. This weariness was what alarmed him most, for well he understood that there could be no treasure where the work was not engrossing play, and he doubted no more than Pym that for him the treasure was in the tale or nowhere. Had he not been sharpening his tools in this belief for years? Strange to reflect now that all the time he was hacking and sweating at that novel (the last he ever attempted) it was only marching towards the wastepaper basket!
He had a fine capacity, as has been hinted, for self-deception, and in time, of course, he found a way of dodging the disquieting truth. This, equally of course, was by yielding to his impulses. He allowed himself an hour a day, when Pym was absent, in which he wrote the story as it seemed to want to write itself, and then he cut this piece out, which could be done quite easily, as it consisted only of moralizings. Thus was his day brightened, and with this relaxation to look forward to be plodded on at his proper work, delving so hard that he could avoid asking himself why he was still delving. What shall we say? He was digging for the treasure in an orchard, and every now and again he came out of his hole to pluck an apple; but though the apple was so sweet to the mouth, it never struck him that the treasure might be growing overhead. At first he destroyed the fruit of his stolen hour, and even after he took to carrying it about fondly in his pocket, and to rewriting it in a splendid new form that had come to him just as he was stepping into bed, he continued to conceal it from his overseer’s eyes. And still he thought all was over with him when Pym said the story did not march.
“It is a dead thing,” Pym would roar, flinging down the manuscript,—”a dead thing because the stakes your man is playing for, a woman’s love, is less than a wooden counter to you. You are a fine piece of mechanism, my solemn-faced don, but you are a watch that won’t go because you are not wound up. Nobody can wind the artist up except a chit of a girl; and how you are ever to get one to take pity on you, only the gods who look after men with a want can tell.
“It becomes more impenetrable every day,” he said. “No use your sitting there tearing yourself to bits. Out into the street with you! I suspend these sittings until you can tell me you have kissed a girl.”
He was still saying this sort of thing when the famous “Letters” were published — T. Sandys, author. “Letters to a Young Man About to be Married” was the full title, and another almost as applicable would have been “Bits Cut Out of a Story because They Prevented its Marching.” If you have any memory you do not need to be told how that splendid study, so ennobling, so penetrating, of woman at her best, took the town. Tommy woke a famous man, and, except Elspeth, no one was more pleased than big-hearted, hopeless, bleary Pym.
“But how the —— has it all come about!” he kept roaring.
“A woman can be anything that the man who loves her would have her be,” says the “Letters”; and “Oh,” said woman everywhere, “if all men had the same idea of us as Mr. Sandys!”
“To meet Mr. T. Sandys.” Leaders of society wrote it on their invitation cards. Their daughters, athirst for a new sensation, thrilled at the thought, “Will he talk to us as nobly as he writes?” And oh, how willing he was to do it, especially if their noses were slightly tilted!
* * *
CHAPTER III
SANDYS ON WOMAN
“Can you kindly tell me the name of the book I want?”
It is the commonest question asked at the circulating library by dainty ladies just out of the carriage; and the librarian, after looking them over, can usually tell. In the days we have now to speak of, however, he answered, without looking them over:
“Sandys’s ‘Letters,’”
“Ah, yes, of course. May I have it, please?”
“I regret to find that it is out.”
Then the lady looked naughty. “Why don’t you have two copies?” she pouted.
“Madam,” said the librarian, “we have a thousand.”
A small and very timid girl of eighteen, with a neat figure that shrank from observation, although it was already aware that it looked best in gray, was there to drink in this music, and carried it home in her heart. She was Elspeth, and that dear heart was almost too full at this time. I hesitate whether to tell or to conceal how it even created a disturbance in no less a place than the House of Commons. She was there with Mrs. Jerry, and the thing was recorded in the papers of the period in these blasting words: “The Home Secretary was understood to be quoting a passage from ‘Letters to a Young Man,’ but we failed to catch its drift, owing to an unseemly interruption from the ladies’ gallery.”
“But what was it you cried out?” Tommy asked Elspeth, when she thought she had told him everything. (Like all true women, she always began in the middle.)
“Oh, Tommy, have I not told you? I cried out, ‘I’m his sister.’”
Thus, owing to Elspeth’s behaviour, it can never be known which was the passage quoted in the House; but we may be sure of one thing — that it did the House good. That book did everybody good. Even Pym could only throw off its beneficent effects by a tremendous effort, and young men about to be married used to ask at the bookshops, not for the “Letters,” but simply for “Sandys on Woman,” acknowledging Tommy as the authority on the subject, like Mill on Jurisprudence, or Thomson and Tait on the Differential Calculus. Controversies raged about it. Some thought he asked too much of man, some thought he saw too much in women; there was a fear that young people, knowing at last how far short they fell of what they ought to be, might shrink from the matrimony that must expose them to each other, now that they had Sandys to guide them, and the persons who had simply married and risked it (and it was astounding what a number of them there proved to be) wrote to the papers suggesting that he might yield a little in the next edition. But Sandys remained firm.
At first they took for granted that he was a very aged gentleman; he had, indeed, hinted at this in the text; and when the truth came out (“And just fancy, he is not even married!”) the enthusiasm was doubled. “Not engaged!” they cried. “Don’t tell that to me. No unmarried man could have written such a eulogy of marriage without being on the brink of it.” Perhaps she was dead? It ran through the town that she was dead. Some knew which cemetery.
The very first lady Mr. Sandys ever took in to dinner mentioned this rumour to him, not with vulgar curiosity, but delicately, with a hint of sympathy in waiting, and it must be remembered, in fairness to Tommy, that all artists love sympathy. This sympathy uncorked him, and our Tommy could flow comparatively freely a
t last. Observe the delicious change.
“Has that story got abroad?” he said simply. “The matter is one which, I need not say, I have never mentioned to a soul.”
“Of course not,” the lady said, and waited eagerly.
If Tommy had been an expert he might have turned the conversation to brighter topics, but he was not; there had already been long pauses, and in dinner talk it is perhaps allowable to fling on any faggot rather than let the fire go out. “It is odd that I should be talking of it now,” he said musingly.
“I suppose,” she said gently, to bring him out of the reverie into which he had sunk, “I suppose it happened some time ago?”
“Long, long ago,” he answered. (Having written as an aged person, he often found difficulty in remembering suddenly that he was two and twenty.)
“But you are still a very young man.”
“It seems long ago to me,” he said with a sigh.
“Was she beautiful?”
“She was beautiful to my eyes.”
“And as good, I am sure, as she was beautiful.”
“Ah me!” said Tommy.
His confidante was burning to know more, and hoping they were being observed across the table; but she was a kind, sentimental creature, though stout, or because of it, and she said, “I am so afraid that my questions pain you.”
“No, no,” said Tommy, who was very, very happy.
“Was it very sudden?”
“Fever.”
“Ah! but I meant your attachment.”
“We met and we loved,” he said with gentle dignity.
“That is the true way,” said the lady.
“It is the only way,” he said decisively.
“Mr. Sandys, you have been so good, I wonder if you would tell me her name?”
“Felicity,” he said, with emotion. Presently he looked up. “It is very strange to me,” he said wonderingly, “to find myself saying these things to you who an hour ago were a complete stranger to me. But you are not like other women.”
“No, indeed!” said the lady, warmly.
“That,” he said, “must be why I tell you what I have never told to another human being. How mysterious are the workings of the heart!”
“Mr. Sandys,” said the lady, quite carried away, “no words of mine can convey to you the pride with which I hear you say that. Be assured that I shall respect your confidences.” She missed his next remark because she was wondering whether she dare ask him to come to dinner on the twenty-fifth, and then the ladies had to retire, and by the time he rejoined her he was as tongue-tied as at the beginning. The cork had not been extracted; it had been knocked into the bottle, where it still often barred the way, and there was always, as we shall see, a flavour of it in the wine.
“You will get over it yet; the summer and the flowers will come to you again,” she managed to whisper to him kind-heartedly, as she was going.
“Thank you,” he said, with that inscrutable face. It was far from his design to play a part. He had, indeed, had no design at all, but an opportunity for sentiment having presented itself, his mouth had opened as at a cherry. He did not laugh afterwards, even when he reflected how unexpectedly Felicity had come into his life; he thought of her rather with affectionate regard, and pictured her as a tall, slim girl in white. When he took a tall, slim girl in white in to dinner, he could not help saying huskily:
“You remind me of one who was a very dear friend of mine. I was much startled when you came into the room.”
“You mean some one who is dead?” she asked in awestruck tones.
“Fever,” he said.
“You think I am like her in appearance?”
“In every way,” he said dreamily; “the same sweet — pardon me, but it is very remarkable. Even the tones of the voice are the same. I suppose I ought not to ask your age?”
“I shall be twenty-one in August.” “She would have been twenty-one in August had she lived,” Tommy said with fervour. “My dear young lady—”
This was the aged gentleman again, but she did not wince; he soon found out that they expect authors to say the oddest things, and this proved to be a great help to him.
“My dear young lady, I feel that I know you very well.”
“That,” she said, “is only because I resemble your friend outwardly. The real me (she was a bit of philosopher also) you cannot know at all.”
He smiled sadly. “Has it ever struck you,” he asked, “that you are very unlike other women?”
“Oh, how ever could you have found that out?” she exclaimed, amazed.
Almost before he knew how it came about, he was on terms of very pleasant sentiment with this girl, for they now shared between them a secret that he had confided to no other. His face, which had been so much against him hitherto, was at last in his favour; it showed so plainly that when he looked at her more softly or held her hand longer than is customary, he was really thinking of that other of whom she was the image. Or if it did not precisely show that, it suggested something or other of that nature which did just as well. There was a sweet something between them which brought them together and also kept them apart; it allowed them to go a certain length, while it was also a reason why they could never, never exceed that distance; and this was an ideal state for Tommy, who could be most loyal and tender so long as it was understood that he meant nothing in particular. She was the right kind of girl, too, and admired him the more (and perhaps went a step further) because he remained so true to Felicity’s memory.
You must not think him calculating and cold-blooded, for nothing could be less true to the fact. When not engaged, indeed, on his new work, he might waste some time planning scenes with exquisite ladies, in which he sparkled or had a hidden sorrow (he cared not which); but these scenes seldom came to life. He preferred very pretty girls to be rather stupid (oh, the artistic instinct of the man!), but instead of keeping them stupid, as he wanted to do, he found himself trying to improve their minds. They screwed up their noses in the effort. Meaning to thrill the celebrated beauty who had been specially invited to meet him, he devoted himself to a plain woman for whose plainness a sudden pity had mastered him (for, like all true worshippers of beauty in women, he always showed best in the presence of plain ones). With the intention of being a gallant knight to Lady I-Won’t-Tell-the-Name, a whim of the moment made him so stiff to her that she ultimately asked the reason; and such a charmingly sad reason presented itself to him that she immediately invited him to her riverside party on Thursday week. He had the conversations and incidents for that party ready long before the day arrived; he altered them and polished them as other young gentlemen in the same circumstances overhaul their boating costumes; but when he joined the party there was among them the children’s governess, and seeing her slighted, his blood boiled, and he was her attendant for the afternoon.
Elspeth was not at this pleasant jink in high life. She had been invited, but her ladyship had once let Tommy kiss her hand for the first and last time, so he decided sternly that this was no place for Elspeth. When temptation was nigh, he first locked Elspeth up, and then walked into it.
With two in every three women he was still as shy as ever, but the third he escorted triumphantly to the conservatory. She did no harm to his work — rather sent him back to it refreshed. It was as if he were shooting the sentiment which other young men get rid of more gradually by beginning earlier, and there were such accumulations of it that I don’t know whether he ever made up on them. Punishment sought him in the night, when he dreamed constantly that he was married — to whom scarcely mattered; he saw himself coming out of a church a married man, and the fright woke him up. But with the daylight came again his talent for dodging thoughts that were lying in wait, and he yielded as recklessly as before to every sentimental impulse. As illustration, take his humourous passage with Mrs. Jerry. Geraldine Something was her name, but her friends called her Mrs. Jerry.
She was a wealthy widow, buxom, not a day over thirt
y when she was merry, which might be at inappropriate moments, as immediately after she had expressed a desire to lead the higher life. “But I have a theory, my dear,” she said solemnly to Elspeth, “that no woman is able to do it who cannot see her own nose without the help of a mirror.” She had taken a great fancy to Elspeth, and made many engagements with her, and kept some of them, and the understanding was that she apprenticed herself to Tommy through Elspeth, he being too terrible to face by himself, or, as Mrs. Jerry expressed it, “all nose.” So Tommy had seen very little of her, and thought less, until one day he called by passionate request to sign her birthday-book, and heard himself proposing to her instead!
For one thing, it was twilight, and she had forgotten to ring for the lamps. That might have been enough, but there was more: she read to him part of a letter in which her hand was solicited in marriage. “And, for the life of me,” said Mrs. Jerry, almost in tears, “I cannot decide whether to say yes or no.”
This put Tommy in a most awkward position. There are probably men who could have got out of it without proposing; but to him there seemed at the moment no other way open. The letter complicated matters also by beginning “Dear Jerry,” and saying “little Jerry” further on — expressions which stirred him strangely.
“Why do you read this to me?” he asked, in a voice that broke a little.
“Because you are so wise,” she said. “Do you mind?”
“Do I mind!” he exclaimed bitterly. (“Take care, you idiot!” he said to himself.)
“I was asking your advice only. Is it too much?”
“Not at all. I am quite the right man to consult at such a moment, am I not?”
It was said with profound meaning; but his face was as usual.
“That is what I thought,” she said, in all good faith.
“You do not even understand!” he cried, and he was also looking longingly at his hat.
“Understand what?”
