by Unknown
‘So am I.’
‘No, you are to be a bridesman.’
‘I’m not. They needn’t think it.’
‘It’s very important.’ (Not half so important as whether there is to be a bride.)
‘What does a bridesman do?’ Tommy asks guardedly.
‘He holds up the train.’
‘Oh, well, I’ll be a bridesman.’ (For a moment I am gratified, but then I remember that he has lately been told the story of a train-robber who did that.)
‘Tommy.’
‘Stow that.’
‘Thomas.’
‘Well?’
‘Do you know what he calls Auntie in his letters?’
‘I know, but I have forgotten.’
‘If you say you know I won’t tell you.’
‘Well, I don’t know.’
‘Come closer and I’ll whisper.’ (I suppose she does whisper, for screams of distasteful mirth follow.)
‘Oh, gee!’ cries Tommy.
‘Tommy, please, please, don’t tell Bill.’
‘Rather not.’ (They are insufferable. I decide to write my letter in the house. But what should I say? Yes or No? What did I intend to say if these wretches had not confused me?)
‘By jingo, May, what an awful sell to Auntie if he took it back.’
‘What?’
‘The ring. And I say—’ (I collect my writing things. Through the golden broom I fly.)”
I REMEMBER Anon’s writing this; indeed it was one of a series (all the others lost), written on a houseboat which his friend Gilmour and he had hired for a month or more at Molesey.
I revisited the scene lately and found it was now as grand as if it were being presented nightly at Drury Lane. There remained no houseboats of our humble kind; magnificent successors encircled Tagg’s Island. Each seems to have a garden; there is a gorgeous hotel, and there are putting-greens and lawn-tennis courts and dancing galore. I was discomfited, because I had thought it a gay place in my day and that I had been seeing life. Now I know that by comparison we were all humdrum folk, living prosaically round a field with a cow on it, a cow that became the one companion of Anon. There was a little inn with a bar where he sometimes went forlornly to listen to the swashbucklers from the other houseboats. Mr. Anon thought that any one in flannels was a swashbuckler. I wonder what he drank at that bar. I think by this time he must have been on the verge of beer. The reason he listened to them was because they often talked about him. A number of articles were appearing in the ‘St. James’s’ about the island (Anon had struck a lucky vein), the island by day, the island by night, life on houseboats, the ferry, the barroom, the cow, the field, there was even one on ‘the pretty girl,’ implying that she was not only pretty but that she was the only one. This was the article that gave rise to most discussion at the bar, the question in debate being which of the houseboats had the distinction of harbouring the girl. From her they would be led to wondering who was the author, and fix momentarily on this person or that, sometimes on one of themselves who did not always deny the charge. As for the real author, no one ever suspected him; even on such a little island Mr. Anon failed to impress. As for knowing a pretty girl when he saw one nobody conceived it of the object in the corner. It was equally inconceivable to the ladies of the island, who were chiefly interested in which of them was the pretty girl. I suppose they would have hurled him into the water (as the reader may be inclined to do also) had he up and told them that the pretty girl was really the cow.
This was not cynicism, though it may have been touched with the pique of the ‘quite harmless.’ At some still earlier age, battered by the neglect of the sex, Anon had conceived an esteem for the cow, the placid divinity who chews the cud of life equably, ever the same, yesterday, to-day and tomorrow, judging man more by the way he offers her grass than by his personal attractions. On the island in the heat of the day Anon and the cow often had the field to themselves, for the flannelled ones were at their offices in the city, and we are speaking of an age when woman did not want to bask and be brown. The cow browsed, and Anon meditated, building up a pretty girl for himself who did not mind a man’s being harmless. Thus it was inevitable that she should have many of the adorable qualities of cows. A tinkle of sweet laughter from the houseboats, a flash of picture hats, would remind him of qualities in which cows are as yet deficient, and he would add touches from those ladies who regarded him not; here the soft voice that was awaiting the return of the flannels, there a pair of eyes, blue or green, but bovine. She was always elegant was Anon’s pretty girl, but, in justice to the cow, of an attractively indolent carriage and slightly inclined to embonpoint. This kept the interest of the ladies at fever heat, several recognizing themselves for a moment, only to be dumbfounded the next. As for Anon, he never told his love.
In an old notebook I find some entries showing that I once planned a play to the glory of our island cow. The only male character mentioned in the notes is an author whom ladies consider quite harmless. He becomes guardian to a baby-girl and decides to bring her up as a child of nature. The title was to be ‘The Cow-Woman,’ but the play was never written. Perhaps poor Anon had come to the conclusion that cow-women are the most disturbing of them all.
Farewell, ladies (though I daresay you will crop up again).
If only I could write something harmful.
CHAPTER XXI
“MY HUSBAND’S PLAY” — HANDWRITING WITH THE RIGHT OR LEFT AND THE DIFFERENCE IT MAKES TO AN AUTHOR
“EVEN before we were engaged I knew of Charles’s delicious literary ambition. I was so proud of it. He meant to write a play, not an ordinary play, but the one for which everybody who knows the great plays of the past has been calling for years. We felt a little selfconscious when we heard those demands for a real play, and even nervous lest some one should write it before Charles had settled the preliminaries. I was the chief preliminary, but there were others connected with business, for by day he is only a clerk, though a much valued one, and has to give to the ledger many hours that really ought to be at the service of the public.
I sometimes sighed over this, because it prevented his beginning at once to write the darling play; but he was undaunted. ‘You will find,’ he said cheerily, ‘that the big artistic things have nearly always been done by men who seemed to have no spare time in which to do them. Obstacles 226 were made merely to be overcome. I am firmly convinced that what is in a man will out.’
As soon as summer arrived he was to begin. One of his first presents to me was the works of Aristotle, a famous Greek author (385 — 322 B.C.) who knew exactly how a perfect play should be written. I was very angry with the dramatic critic of the ‘Times’ for constantly calling attention to this writer, lest, as I have said, some other dramatist might read him and write Charles’s play.
Charles glowed with quiet fire when he spoke to me of the play, and he told me a number of things about it, quite the most delightful of which was that he would never really have understood women if he had not known me. ‘There are to be little bits of the heroine,’ he would say, ‘which will be simply chipped off you.’ Often of an evening before our marriage when he and I sat together I could not raise my eyes to his because I had the exquisite sensation that he was chipping.
Our engagement was not of long duration, for Charles coaxed me to church in these words, ‘Time is on the wing, and I cannot settle down to the play until we are married.’
We built our sweet new furniture, as one may say, round the play, giving it one entire room, with everything there that we felt it could possibly want, and so we had to be comparatively skimpy in the furnishing of the other rooms. I don’t know which of us was the more anxious to make sacrifices for the sake of the play; the same thought often leapt to both minds at once, ‘Yes, truly that drawingroom settee is a dream, but let us rather buy that study table with the secret drawer; it will so help me (you) at your (my) work, and once the play is launched we can have a surfeit of settees.’ Our taste was too fin
e to want a surfeit of them, but I did want one settee.
‘Every evening,’ I told him, ‘you will find your manuscript (we pronounced it MS. — I do so love that word) lying on the table waiting for you. But you must not work too hard at it,’ I insisted; ‘you must have fixed hours, and at a certain time, say at ten o’clock, I shall simply order you to cease writing for the night.’
He saw the wisdom of this, but at the same time shook his head over its practicability. ‘You don’t know,’ he said (he was always a great reader, and indeed has a book-plate), ‘how the hours rush by on wings when one is in the throes of inspiration. I shall often feel when ten strikes that I have just begun.’
I vowed that I would come behind him at ten and softly snatch the pen from his hand, as if I was a darling Dora.
‘Every Saturday evening,’ he promised, ‘I shall read to you what I have written during the week.’
We were married on a September day (15th), and quite an appreciable part of the honeymoon was spent in talk about the play and its heroine. I got him to promise to make her a brunette in case she was so like me as to raise smiles among our friends. Often from the movement of his fingers I knew, while we sat in evening-dress in the exquisite lounge of our hotel, that he was yearning to be writing the play, and nothing proved the depth of his affection more than his not yielding to the temptation. I often told him so, and he admitted it laughingly, saying that I read him like a play.
Conceive us at home in our dear little house at Willesden. ‘Will you begin the very first evening?’ I asked him as soon as we had run up and down the stairs a few times and peeped sharply into all the rooms as if to take the pets by surprise. His wish was to do so, but he felt it would be wiser to settle down first. ‘I shall keep off it for a week,’ he said firmly.
‘Please, not for my sake,’ I begged him, for I had watched his hungry look at the study table.
‘For your sake entirely,’ he said in his dear way.
‘But isn’t it a pity to waste any more time?’ He did just a little surprise me.
‘There is no such violent hurry,’ he said rather testily: it was the first time I had ever heard that note in his voice except when speaking to a cabman, and we don’t speak to them often. I suppose he noticed my surprise (he notices everything), for he added, ‘The time won’t be wasted, I can be thinking.’
‘But you have thought so long,’ I said.
This was silly of me. ‘Isn’t the lack of thought,’ he reminded me, pulling my ears, ‘acknowledged to be the curse of the drama?’
We had of course a good many callers at this time, and rather imprudently I told them about the play. They were so interested, and continued to be so interested, that I afterwards regretted it. When the week had become a fortnight I insisted on leaving Charles alone in the study after dinner. He looked rather gloomy, but I filled the ink-bottles (one for red ink because he likes his MS. to be so neat) and put the dreadfully large sheets of paper before him. As my share of the work (this had been planned during the honeymoon) I wrote the title of the play, which had been fixed on long before (and a most tantalizing title it is), though I was sworn to secrecy, because if divulged it might be stolen (such is the state of the copyright laws). I also wrote the words ‘Act I,’ and kissed the place beneath them, also a tiny blank spot on the back of Charles’s head, and handed him the pen. He did not, however, thank me. I don’t mean that he was unkind, he is never that, but he certainly did not thank me.
An hour afterwards I slipped into the study with a cup of tea for him. He was sitting by the fire with the cat on his knee and an odd expression on his face, as if the cat were his only friend.
‘You were not sleeping, Charles?’ I asked before I saw the cat.
‘Sleeping,’ he said rather indignantly, as if I had charged him with some crime. ‘No, I am thinking.’
‘Again,’ I said thoughtlessly.
He asked me almost tartly what I meant by ‘again.’
I said I only meant that he had not written anything yet.
‘I was just going to begin when you came in,’ he said; ‘I shall begin as soon as I have drunk this tea.’
But when I returned at ten to insist on his stopping work he was still nursing the cat. I didn’t like to look at the MS.
Next evening Charles said he felt a curious disinclination for writing, and thought he would take a night off. I must have looked disappointed, for though he is the gentlest of men he flared up.
‘I can’t be eternally writing,’ he growled; but fortunately I like his growling.
‘But you haven’t done anything at all yet.’
Of course this was inconsiderate of me, and I think he took it rather nicely. All he said was, ‘Don’t you think that is a rather ungenerous way of putting it?’ I reminded him, ‘But you always spoke as if the work would be such a pleasure to you.’
‘Have I said, my dear, that it is not a pleasure? If you knew anything of literary history you would know that there are times when the most industrious writers cannot pen a line. My present feeling is merely a proof that I have the artistic temperament, and surely it is all to the good to find that I have that.’
‘Still,’ I said diffidently, ‘they must all make a beginning some time.’
‘Undoubtedly,’ he said, ‘and I shall make mine tomorrow.’
Tomorrow came, however, without finding him in the study. He almost implored me to let him spend the evening hanging the bedroom pictures.
I said I could not possibly drag him away from the play.
‘You are in a most uncommon desperate hurry to see me shut myself up with that play,’ he said; it was the first time he had called it ‘that play.’
‘You spoke as if you were so anxious to begin it.’
‘So I am; have I said I was not?’
He marched off to the study, banging the drawingroom door, but I do love him when he bangs. An hour or so afterwards I again took him tea, and somehow I knew that between his hearing the rattle of the cup and saucer and the opening of the door he had sprung from the couch to the study table, where I found him pen in hand. I noticed also that one arm was raised as a barricade against my seeing the MS.
‘How are you getting on?’ I said nevertheless out of sheer niceness, and this time he had the effrontery to reply, ‘Excellently, oh excellently.’ And yet except on this one matter I suppose there never was a more truthful man.
He drank his tea so slowly that it could only have been because he was reluctant to reach the bottom of the cup. I tried to look over the barricade, but it at once rose higher.
‘I shall come in to stop you at ten sharp,’ I said, preparing to go.
He tried to be appealing and brazen at the same time.
‘I think I have perhaps done enough for one night,’ he said, ‘I mustn’t overdo it.’
‘But how much have you done?’
He made an evasive reply about quality being better than quantity, and muttered something about writer’s cramp.
‘If you would like me to be your amanuensis—’ I began, but he would not hear of that. He declined to make a slave of his wife.
‘Do read me the opening scene,’ I begged him, but he preferred that I should wait till Saturday. When Saturday came he was not in the mood for reading it. He was not even in the mood for writing it; he was in the mood for mending the kitchen clock. He became quite a handy man about the house, except in the study.
So the play-writing went on.
One morning when he was at the office I counted the clean sheets (the first page was missing), and found they were just as I had placed them on the table the evening before. He had not even torn any of them up that night. Thus it went on for a week or two, with this difference: he either suspected that I peeped in his absence or thought I might take it into my head to do so. He therefore now locked away the MS. (as we still called it) in a drawer. I had a key which could unlock that drawer, and here is a really lovely little story about me, complete in one
sentence, I never did unlock the drawer, no, not even when I accidentally discovered that he added several clean pages nightly to those left on the desk in order to deceive me about the progress of the work. His new way of avoiding Saturday was to say that it would be better not to read any of the play aloud to me until a whole act was finished.
Then the study became, I suppose, so detestable to him that he had to take stronger action. He came home one day from the city with a pair of spectacles. ‘Yes, it does seem a pity,’ he admitted, when I shrank from the horrid things, ‘but I must take care of my eyesight, and what with all this writing by such poor gas light—’
Here he paused to let me say something; I knew so well by this time what he wanted me to say, and I am such a good wife, that I gulped and said it. The upshot was a decision to postpone any further work on the play, or to defer beginning the play (I forget how we put it), until the long days set in. May was the month I suggested for resumption, but he insisted on April. April arrived (the middle of it), and I said I thought it would be a good omen if he resumed work on the 23rd, which was the birthday of another dramatist (1564-1616).
‘You are eternally talking about that play,’ he snapped, which was almost unkind of him, for the play was the one subject now tabooed in our little home by unspoken mutual agreement.
‘Because you used to be so enthusiastic about it,’ I said.
‘I am as enthusiastic as ever, but I can’t be always writing the thing.’ He said ‘thing.’
‘We have now been married seven months and you haven’t shown me a line yet,’ I said.
He retired to the study in dudgeon and sat staring at the MS. as I daresay a hen may regard an egg that isn’t there. My chief feeling about Charles is usually pride, but I felt very sorry for him that night when he broke down and told me everything. His play has a splendid plot, with delightful scenes and some of the darlingest touches of character (especially in the heroine). It is absolutely the play for which every one has been calling. This I knew from the first, for he had again and again regaled me with titbits on our honeymoon. What, then, was the trouble? It was this; Charles simply could not find a beginning for his play. All the rest he knew, but he could not begin.
