My American

by Stella Gibbons

  “It seems impossible!” said Mr. Danesford abruptly, sitting down and staring at her almost suspiciously. “You buying The Prize!”

  “Well, perhaps I shan’t have enough money,” she said more cautiously, “but at least I can try. Is Mr. Cavendish still at his old address? I’ll call him up to-night.”

  “But you can’t do it like that, over the telephone!” he protested, shocked. “Those are American methods, Miss Lee!”

  “Well, I’ve been living there for over a year,” she reminded him (and indeed, she had a charming slight accent to prove it) “and I like to get things settled.”

  “Just as if it were a packet of cigarettes——” he muttered, and took out his handkerchief and blew his nose.

  “Mr. Danesford,” she went on, leaning a little towards him and speaking warmly and eagerly, “if Mr. Cavendish accepts my offer, please will you stay on as Editor?”

  There was a pause, while she looked at his face and he looked at the floor. Then he said unsteadily without raising his eyes—

  “I am nearly seventy, Miss Lee. Would you not want—a younger man?”

  “But no-one knows so much about The Prize as you do now,” she said. “I shall be in America, you know. I’m going to live there. I’m going to be married very soon, as a matter of fact.”

  “Indeed? I congratulate you—I wish you every happiness,” he put in, courteously but quite mechanically, while he kept his anxious gaze fixed on her face.

  “Yes,” she nodded. The thought of that happiness made her smile a little and brightened her eyes. “So you see I shan’t be able to keep an eye on things. I shall want you to do that for me.”

  “I appreciate that … very much, Miss Lee. If all turns out well and Mr. Cavendish accepts your offer I shall be more than honoured—Lord Welwoodham hinted more than once to Mr. Cavendish, I believe, that I—but of course, everything has happened so suddenly—I never imagined—”

  The yellow ruler slipped between his shaking fingers and fell to the floor.

  “I have been worrying about the future a great deal lately, as a matter of fact” (he was stooping to look for the ruler, out of the light) “because of my own private responsibilities. My only son” (he straightened himself and put the ruler carefully on the desk without looking at her) “is—an invalid. He has never been able to take his place in the world as an adult, and he needs constant care. So you may imagine——”

  His voice died away; and she did what he had given her permission to do. She saw herself six years ago, sitting opposite to Old Porty in the teashop, telling him of her imaginary romance with Mr. Danesford’s broad-shouldered, grey-eyed young son; and for a second she felt bodily sick, while for the first time in her life her power of making up stories seemed a horrible thing. She stood up rather quickly, buttoning her fur collar, and said—

  “I’ll call you up in the morning, then, shall I, to let you know what’s happened?”

  “I shall be most anxious to hear, Miss Lee.”

  He moved to the door with her, but he did not at once hold out his hand in farewell and she could tell that something was still troubling him.

  “Excuse my asking, Mr. Danesford,” she said, and her voice unconsciously dropped into the flat, polite, little-girl tone of her office days, “but is there something you’re still worried about?”

  “Yes, there is, Miss Lee,” he answered at once. “It is this. If your offer is accepted by Mr. Cavendish and you become the owner of The Prize, shall you make drastic changes in our policy?”

  “Of course not!” she cried at once. “I want it to stay as it is!”

  “You will lose money,” he warned her.

  “I’ll write a serial for it—then I shan’t,” she promised confidently.

  Mr. Danesford looked taken aback: Amy’s new kind of book was not at all traditional Prize material. But he was considerably relieved by what she had said, and when they shook hands his clasp was no longer limp but firm and strong.

  “Good-bye then, Mr. Danesford. I’ll call you up tomorrow about ten.”

  “Good-bye, Miss Lee.” He hesitated. “I am sure that you must know how much I feel—it is so difficult to express——”

  She smiled at him, then bit her lip, shook her head, put up her muff to hide her mouth, and almost ran from the room.

  To the extreme horror of Messrs. Aubrett and Humfriss, her offer was accepted only too willingly by the exquisite Rupert Cavendish and she became owner of The Prize. Their horror was justified, for the paper not only took most of the money she had saved but proved a steady liability; under her and Mr. Danesford’s careful nursing it stopped actually losing money, but it only just paid its way, and anything like a European crisis or a heavy fall of snow sent its sales down at once. Finally she was compelled to make some changes in its Late Victorian policy and make up or abandon it to its fate, for she had already spent so much on it that she could no longer be called a rich woman and could afford to spend no more; her new kind of book did not immediately prove so popular as her former kind, and while she was making considerably less money from her writing she had had to live on her savings.

  So The Prize was forced to take a story in her new “domestic” vein (with Mr. Danesford fighting every inch of the way) and Amy gradually broadened the paper’s scope so that it appealed to girls as well as to boys.

  She always guiltily felt that Mr. Danesford would never forgive her, but there was no doubt that from the first issue in the new form the paper began to do better. Now, in Mr. Danesford’s latest report, the news from Rosemary Lane was cheerful. (Lady Welwoodham always swore that the improvement was due not so much to her serial and the change of policy as to a delightful third leader that appeared in The Times a few days after the new Prize had made its bow: every reader of The Times, she vowed, had at once decided to take in The Prize on reading what the third leader-writer had so charmingly said about the transformation. Be that as it may, The Prize was prospering.

  She remembered (leaning back in her chair with Mr. Danesford’s letter on her lap) how she had glanced back at the windows of the old office as she hurried down Rosemary Lane, and seen the light in Mr. Danesford’s room suddenly go out. Mr. Danesford, like millions of other Londoners, would soon be on his way home—to his son. She had remembered that he lived in Harrow and used sometimes to come to work in the summer with a small red rose in his buttonhole. He had been a widower for twenty years, Miss Grace had once let drop.

  And now he was no longer an austere, terrifying Presence; he was only a shrunken, loyal old man, old-fashioned and prejudiced, who was in her employ. How strange was Time, that brought such changes about! And (she remembered) she had suddenly felt frightened of the mysteriousness of life and longed for Bob, who was three thousand miles away.

  She heard the Ford come out of the yard and drive off, and then Myron suddenly stuck his head round the door again.

  “Joe’s gone,” he announced.

  “Didn’t you want to?”

  “Aw—no. I gotta whole heap of things to do. It’s half-after five. Folks’ll be comin’ in soon, too.”

  She nodded, smiling. She knew that he had stayed behind because he had remembered that Bob did not like her to be alone in the house in case the baby started to come—a fact which she herself had forgotten in the press of Christmas duties.

  “Feelin’ all right, are yer?”

  “Grand, thanks. I—Myron, Bob didn’t call up, did he?”

  “Now—now! Quit that, will yer? Yer know he can’t never say what time he’ll be in; a doc. never can.”

  She nodded again, meekly.

  “I know, Myron. It’s awfully silly of me. I wasn’t worrying, really. It’s only just——”

  “Lou’ll be here any minute; cheer yer up. Well——”

  He vanished, slamming the door after him, and after a moment or two she struggled out of her chair, gathered up her letters, and climbed slowly upstairs to Lou’s room to see that everything was ready for her.r />
  The house was warm and quiet, tidy and decorated, as if waiting for the spirit of Christmas to descend and fill it. There was a tree glittering and sparkling at the dining-room-window where everyone passing in the street could see it, and a thick circle of glossy holly leaves and scarlet berries hung on the front door. Christmas cards, frosted, gleaming with fantastic angels or entwined with wreaths made from silvered shells and musical instruments were arranged on the chest in the hall. Dozens of unopened parcels were piled in the drawing-room. Myron’s radio in the kitchen was softly giving, “Stilly Night, Holy Night,” by the Dixie Chocolate Cookie Choir; the lovely tune crept wistfully up the well of the staircase, making her pause with her hand on the bannister to listen. From where she stood she could see the nursery with the crib, draped in white, glimmering through the dusk. One star, a huge star that seemed full of meaning and message, shone steadily through the window panes. She went slowly in to Lou’s room and sat down on the bed. Everything was ready, even to some roses which had arrived for Lou that morning. Amy had not been able to help seeing the card tucked among their thorny stems, which said only “Forgiven? Bless you.” And over that she had pursed up her mouth.

  It was so warm and quiet and peaceful everywhere. I’m so happy I can’t believe it’s true, she thought dreamily, sitting on the bed with the letters from England spread about her. If only he’d come in! Shall I never get over this feeling when he’s away? Shall I always be afraid he won’t come back—even when I’m an old, old woman?

  Then she resolutely picked up a fat letter addressed in a hand which she had good cause to know only too well and opened it.

  Out fell a very large Christmas card with a crimson and green coach careering gaily across it, cheered on by a group of ladies and gentlemen dressed in what is popularly known as Jane-Austen-sort-of-costume. Inside was written—“Wishing You Both All the Best from E. Talbot Porteous (Porty).”

  Her present of twenty pounds to Old Porty had had the most disastrous results, unloosing upon her a flood of letters and literature dealing with every imaginable method of making a fortune, from Pools to Orange Farming, that a florid fancy could suggest and a distaste for hard work could encourage. Porty, after many ups-and-downs, had finally established himself with a luckless distant male relative who kept a small family and commercial hotel at Castleford in Yorkshire, and had at once undertaken a series of reforms in the management of the establishment, described by him as “overhauling the whole bally place, lock, stock and barrel,” apparently with the object of saving the luckless relative from bankruptcy. …

  Downstairs the telephone bell rang. In a moment Myron called up—

  “It’s Ma Boadman. She says has the baby come yet? Shall I put her through?”

  “Oh no!” cried Amy, glancing in alarm at the telephone by the bed. “Give her my love and say I’m resting. (And Myron, don’t call her Ma, please!)” She waited, her peace of mind disturbed.

  Presently he shouted—

  “She says you’re a bad thing an’ she don’t believe you want to talk to her one bit but all the same she loves you and how’s that man of yours. I said we all had plenty to do, it being Christmas. O.K.?”

  “O.K.” she called back, laughing, and picked up the mass of literature on silver fox breeding that was enclosed with Porty’s card.

  She and Bob had often said to one another that Porty’s relative would probably prefer bankruptcy and ruin to the continual presence of Porty, but as he never seemed to make any attempts to get rid of Porty (and they felt sure that Porty’s letters would have said plenty about it if he had) perhaps he did not mind having Porty about the place so much as they would have done. Bob had forbidden her to send Porty one halfpenny more, and as she obeyed him in money matters as she did in all matters, she often found it difficult to think of convincing excuses for not sending money for investment in one of Porty’s gorgeous schemes. Her correspondence with Porty, in fact, was more than a nuisance in a life already full. But she kept up with him because he had known her mother and because he was part of her memories of London.

  She liked to remember London, and thought often and with affection of her friends there, but she did not miss the city painfully or long to live there with Bob. She had always been unhappy in London, whereas her happiness in Alva was so new, continuous and delightful that she never ceased to wonder at it. On her last visit to England two years ago she had revisited all her former haunts with the kind of fearful pleasure that a freed prisoner might feel as he curiously turned over in his hands the chains that had bound him. She had been Up Highgate, too, and noticed the blue Air Mail box in the village opposite the butcher’s shop that has been there for two hundred years; and had seen a neat official plate with AIR RAID WARDEN on it outside one of the familiar shabby houses in Fortess Road. But the really exciting event had been her encounter, during her visit to Kenwood House, with a large portly dignified black cat whom she found on inquiry had been living round the House for eleven years! Could it be the kitten she had been carrying on the afternoon that she first spoke to Bob? It might be, admitted the waitress in the tea-rooms, cautiously. But Amy was sure that it was.

  She put down the pamphlet about fox-breeding with a little sigh. I ought to go down and do a bit of my story, she thought, arranging herself more comfortably on the bed.

  She was no longer able to give whole days to her writing, for looking after Bob and managing the house took up most of her time. But fortunately she no longer needed to retreat into a long trance of concentration and excitement in order to create; her books were now the kind that can be written in time snatched from domestic affairs. She had almost forgotten the frightening morning some years ago, when she had sat for an hour, in silence, staring at a blank page on which she was unable to write a word.

  After the night when Bob had gone out to post a letter and had not come back, she had had a nervous collapse in which all the suppressed fears and unhappiness of years had come to the surface of her mind. And when her health returned, restored by happiness, she found her secret world had vanished. Not even its ruins were left. She opened the unfinished manuscript of Tower of The Wicked, staring at the last words she had written before her illness and could not remember writing them, nor believe that she had written them. She knew, as she stared at the words, that never again would she be able to make stories out of danger and fear. In the hours of that night when she believed that Dan had found Bob and killed him, she had come face to face with reality at last, and had been powerless to defeat her fear by making it romantic. She had been forced to accept it, in its unutterable horror, and the acceptance had almost killed her and had shattered her secret world for ever.

  For weeks after her marriage she had put off trying to write, and when at last she did try, urged by Mr. Humfriss and her publishers, this blankness and despair was all that she could feel. Her power to tell stories seemed dead.

  Bob had come in and found her sitting there, white and silent. He gathered from her confused explanation what had happened and gave her the first piece of advice that came into his head, for he was late for a lecture and in a hurry.

  “Well, darling, maybe you could write something more homey,” he said, and he gave her a tender kiss and hurried away.

  When he came back that evening, two chapters of On The Porch were written and Amy, with flushed face and the little bump on her third finger once more reddened by the pressure of the pen, had started upon the famous “second manner” that was to bring her in time nearly as big a public for her stories of domestic life in England and America as she had once had for her stories of danger and death. The new public did not come all at once, for readers (bless them) do like to know what to expect from a writer, but it came. Her stories of family life communicated (because she herself felt it) to the passing of an examination or the breaking of a betrothal the excitement she had once given to escapes from death and last-minute rescues, and she charmed her readers by showing them the variety and interest of ev
ery day. (Mr. Humfriss and Mr. Aubrett had now outwardly recovered from the shock, but they occasionally told one another in confidence over their morning Sanatogen that they would never, never have believed such a thing could happen, and added in a kind of Tibetan-prayer chorus that never, never could they feel quite safe about a writer again.)

  Miss Cordell took to herself the entire credit for the change and never hesitated to tell Amy as much.

  In the kitchen Joe was unwinding his muffler while he argued with Myron.

  “It was mighty like her, anyway,” said Joe.

  “Mebbe. But she married a sales representative for Sweetbriar Toothpaste an’ went to Wisconsin with him. It couldn’t hev been Francey,” said Myron, shaking his grey head. He was on his knees stacking bottles for to-morrow’s festivities into the ice-box.

  “She might have come back.”

  “Not she. Skeered.”

  “She didn’t do anything. The bulls hadn’t anything on her; they let her go. What’s she got to be scared of, anyway?”

  “Mrs. Doc might shoot her. Fer not calling us up that night when Bob told her to,” Myron got up, rubbing his knees, and gave one of his loud quick laughs that did not seem to disturb his face.

  “Myron,” coaxed Joe, settling comfortably in the old hickory rocker that had come with the handyman from Vine Falls, and stretching out his legs and beginning to rock, “tell about the time you shot Dan. Aw—go on! The sicks won’t be here yet.”

  “There’s a sick at the door right now, so you git up an’ let him in,” said Myron threateningly, as the front door bell rang.

  It was not a sick, however, but Mrs. Stebby Viner, who gave him her usual cool smile.

  “Hullo, Joe. What’s new? Baby here yet?”

  “No, mam,” said Joe, grinning. “Will I fetch your grips in and put the automobile away?”

  “Do, will you? Mrs. Vorst up there?” and then, as Joe nodded, she began to mount the stairs calling ironically: