The Cords of Vanity. A Comedy of Shirking Page 15

  Nor had I any difficulty in preserving nearly all she said to me, for Marian was never a chatterbox; yet her responses had, somehow, that long-sought tang it wasn't in me to invent for any imaginary young woman who must be, for the sake of my new novel, quite heels over head in love.

  And I began to see that Bettie was right, as usual. I had portrayed Gillian Hardress pretty well in Afield; but by and large, I had always written about women as though they were "pterodactyls or some other extinct animal, which you had never seen, but had read a lot about."

  And now, in looking over my notes, I knew, and my heart glowed to know, that I was not about to repeat the error.

  So the Book was builded, after all, a little by a little. And a little by a little the summer wore on; and in the lobby of the Main Hotel was hung the beautiful Spirit of the Falls poster of the Buffalo Exposition; and we talked of Oom Paul Krüger, and Shamrock II, and the Nicaragua Canal, and lanky Bob Fitzsimmons, and the Boxer outrages; and we read To Have and To Hold and The Cardinal's Snuff Box, and thought it droll that the King of England was not going to call himself King Albert, after all.

  And then came the news of how the President had been shot, "with a poisoned bullet," and a week of contradictory bulletins from the Milburn House in Buffalo. And there were panicky surmises raised everywhere as to "what these anarchists may do next," so that Maggio was mobbed in Columbus, and Emma Goldman in Chicago; and Colonel Roosevelt was found, after days of search, on Mt. Marcy in the Adirondacks, and was told in the heart of a forest that to-morrow he would be at the head of a nation. And the country's guidance was entrusted to a mere lad of forty-three, with general uneasiness as to what might come of it; and the dramatic tale of Colonel Roosevelt's taking of the oath of office was in that morning's paper; and Marian and I were about to part.

  4

  "It will be dreadful," sighed she; "for we have to stay a whole week longer, and I shall come here every afternoon. And there will be only ghosts in the woods, and I shall be very lonely."

  "Dear," said I, "is it not something to have been happy? It has been such a wonderful summer; and come what may, nothing can rob us now of its least golden moment. And it is only for a little."

  "You will come back?" said she, half-doubtingly.

  "Yes," I said. "You wonderful, elfin creature, I shall undoubtedly come back—to your real home, and claim you there. Only I don't believe you do live in Aberlin,—you probably live in some great, gnarled oak hereabouts; and at night its bark uncloses to set you free, and you and your sisters dance out the satyrs' hearts in the moonlight. Oh, I know, Marian! I simply know you are a dryad,—a wonderful, laughing, clear-eyed dryad strayed out of the golden age."

  "What a boy it is!" she said. "No, I am only a really and truly girl, dear,—a rather frightened girl, with very little disposition to laughter, just now. For you are going away—Oh, my dear, you have meant so much to me! The world is so different since you have come, and I am so happy and so miserable that—that I am afraid." An infinitesimal handkerchief went upward to two great, sparkling eyes, and dabbed at them.

  "Dear!" said I. And this remark appeared to meet the requirements of the situation.

  There was a silence now. We sat in the same spot where I had first encountered Marian Winwood. Only this was an autumnal forest that glowed with many gem-like hues about us; and already the damp odour of decaying leaves was heavy in the air. It was like the Tosti thing translated out of marine terms into a woodland analogue. The summer was ended; but As the Coming of Dawn was practically complete.

  It was not the book that I had planned, but a far greater one which was scarcely mine. There was no word written as yet. But for two months I had viewed life through Marian Winwood's eyes; day by day, my half-formed, tentative ideas had been laid before her with elaborate fortuitousness, to be approved, or altered, or rejected, just as she decreed; until at last they had been welded into a perfect whole that was a Book, bit by bit, we had planned it, I and she; and, as I dreamed of it as it would be in print, my brain was fired with exultation, and I defied my doubt and I swore that the Book, for which I had pawned a certain portion of my self-respect, was worth—and triply worth—the price which had been paid…. This was in Marian's absence.

  "Dear!" said she….

  Her eyes were filled with a tender and unutterable confidence that thrilled me like physical cold. "Marian," said I, simply, "I shall never come back."

  The eyes widened a trifle, but she did not seem to comprehend.

  "Have you not wondered," said I, "that I have never kissed you, except as if you were a very holy relic or a cousin or something of that sort?"

  "Yes," she answered. Her voice was quite emotionless.

  "And yet—yet—" I sprang to my feet. "Dear God, how I have longed! Yesterday, only yesterday, as I read to you from the verses I had made to other women, those women that are colourless shadows by the side of your vivid beauty,—and you listened wonderingly and said the proper things and then lapsed into dainty boredom,—how I longed to take you in my arms, and to quicken your calm blood a little with another sort of kissing. You knew—you must have known! Last night, for instance—"

  "Last night," she said, very simply, "I thought—And I hoped you would."

  "What a confession for a nicely brought up girl! Well! I didn't. And afterward, all night, I tossed in sick, fevered dreams of you. I am mad for love of you. And so, once in a while I kiss your hand. Dear God, your hand!" My voice quavered, effectively.

  "Yes," said she; "still, I remember—"

  "I have struggled; and I have conquered this madness,—for a madness it is. We can laugh together and be excellent friends; and we can never, never be anything more. Well! we have laughed, have we not, dear, a whole summer through? Now comes the ending. Ah, I have seen you puzzling over my meaning before this. You never understood me thoroughly; but it is always safe to laugh."

  She smiled; and I remember now it was rather as Mona Lisa smiles.

  "For we can laugh together,—that is all. We are not mates. You were born to be the wife of a strong man and the mother of his sturdy children; and you and your sort will inherit the earth and make the laws for us weaklings who dream and scribble and paint. We are not mates. But you have been very kind to me, Marian dear. So I thank you and say good-bye; and I pray that I may never see you after to-day."

  There was a sub-tang of veracity in my deprecation of an unasked-for artistic temperament; the thing is very often a nuisance, and was just then a barrier which I perceived plainly; and with equal plainness I perceived the pettier motives that now caused me to point it out as a barrier to Marian. My lips curled half in mockery of myself, as I framed the bitter smile I felt the situation demanded; but I was fired with the part I was playing; and half-belief had crept into my mind that Marian Winwood was created, chiefly, for the purpose which she had already served.

  I regarded her, in fine, as through the eyes of future readers of my biography. She would represent an episode in my life, as others do in that of Byron or of Goethe. I pitied her sincerely; and, under all, what moralists would call my lower nature, held in leash for two months past, chuckled, and grinned, and leaped, at the thought of a holiday.

  She rose to her feet. "Good-bye," said she.

  "You—you understand, dear?" I queried, tenderly.

  "Yes," she answered; "I understand—not what you have just told me, for in that, of course, you have lied. That Jemmett girl and her money is at the bottom of it all, of course. You didn't want to lose her, and still you wanted to play with me. So you were pulled two ways, poor dear."

  "Oh, well, if that is what you think of me—!"

  "You see, you are not an uncommon type,—a type not strong enough to live life healthily, just strong enough to dabble in life, to trifle with emotions, to experiment with other people's lives. Indeed, I am not angry, dear; I am only—sorry; for you have played with me very nicely indeed, and very boyishly, and the summer has been very happy."

>   5

  I returned to Lichfield and wrote As the Coming of Dawn.

  I spent six months in this. My work at first was mere copying of the book that already existed in my brain; but when it was transcribed therefrom, I wrote and rewrote, shifted and polished and adorned until it seemed I would never have done; and indeed I was not anxious to have done with any labour so delightful.

  Particularly did I rejoice in the character for which Marian Winwood had posed. Last summer's note-book here came into play; and now, for once, my heroine was in no need of either shoving or prompting. She did things of her own accord, and I was merely her scribe…

  I would vain-gloriously protest, just to myself, that the love scenes in this story were the most exquisite and, with all that, the most genuine love scenes I knew of anywhere. "By God!" I would occasionally say with Thackeray; "I am a genius!"

  Besides, the story of the book, I knew, was novel and astutely wrought; its progress caught at once and teased your interest always, so that having begun it, most people would read to the end, if only to discover "how it all came out." I knew the book, in fine, could hardly fail to please and interest a number of people by reason of its plot alone.

  I ought to have been content with this. But I had somehow contracted an insane notion that a novel is the more enjoyable when it is adroitly written. In point of fact, of course, no man who writes with care is ever read with pleasure; you may toil through a page or two perhaps, but presently you are noting how precisely every word is fitted to the thought, and later you are noting nothing else. You are insensibly beguiled into a fidgety-footed analysis of every clause, which fatigues in the outcome, and by the tenth page you are yawning.

  But I did not comprehend this then. And so I fashioned my apt phrases, and weighed my synonyms, and echoed this or that vowel very skilfully, I thought, and alliterated my consonants with discretion. In fine, I did not overlook the most meticulous device of the stylist; and I enjoyed it. It was a sort of game; and they taught me at least, those six delightful months, that a man writes admirable prose not at all for the sake of having it read, but for the more sensible reason that he enjoys playing solitaire.

  I led a hermit's life that winter; and I enjoyed that too. Night, after all, is the one time for writing, particularly when you are inane enough to hanker after perfected speech, and so misguided as to be the slave of the "right word." You sit alone in a bright, comfortable room; the clock ticks companionably; there is no other sound in the world except the constant scratching of your pen, and the occasional far-off puffing of a freight-train coming into Lichfield; there is snow outside, but before your eyes someone, that is not you exactly, arranges and redrills the scrawls which will bring back the sweet and languid summer and remarshal all its pleasant trivialities for anyone that chooses to read through the printed page, although he read two centuries hence, in Nova Zembla….

  Then you dip into an Unabridged, and change every word that has been written, for a better one, and do it leisurely, rolling in the mouth, as it were, the flavour of every possible synonym, before decision. Then you reread, with a corrective pen in hand the while, and you venture upon the whole to agree with Mérimée that it is preferable to write one's own books, since those of others are not, after all, particularly worth reading in comparison.

  And by this time the windows are pale blue, like the blue of a dying flame, and you peep out and see the sparrows moving like rather poorly made mechanical toys about the middle of the deserted street, where there is neither light nor shade. The colour of everything is perfectly discernible, but there is no lustre in the world as yet, though yonder the bloat sun is already visible in the blue and red east, which is like a cosmic bruise; and upon a sudden you find it just possible to stay awake long enough to get safely into bed….

  6

  Thus I dandled the child of my brain for a long while, and arrayed it in beautiful and curious garments, adorning each beloved notion with far-sought words that had a taste in the mouth, and would one day lend an aroma to the printed page; and I rejoiced shamelessly in that which I had done. Then it befell that I went forth and sought the luxury of a Turkish bath, and in the morning, after a rub-down and an ammonia cocktail, awoke to the fact that the world had been going on much as usual, that winter.

  Young Colonel Roosevelt seemed not to have wrecked civilization, after all, according to the morning Courier-Herald, despite that Democratic paper's colorful prophecies last autumn in the vein of Jeremiah. To the contrary, Major-General McArthur was testifying before the Senate as to the abysmal unfitness of the Filipinos for self-government; the Women's Clubs were holding a convention in Los Angeles; there had been terrible hailstorms this year to induce the annual ruining of the peach-crop, and the submarine Fulton had exploded; the California Limited had been derailed in Iowa, and in Memphis there was some sort of celebration in honor of Admiral Schley; and the Boer War seemed over; and Mr. Havemeyer also was before the Senate, to whom he was making it clear that his companies were in no wise responsible for sugar having reached the unprecedentedly high price of four and a half cents a pound.

  The world, in short, in spite of my six months' retiring therefrom, seemed to be getting on pleasantly enough, as I turned from the paper to face the six months' accumulation of mail.

  7

  A few weeks later, I sent for Mr. George Bulmer, and informed him of his avuncular connection with a genius; and waved certain typewritten pages to establish his title.

  Subsequently I read aloud divers portions of As the Coming of Dawn, and Mr. Bulmer sipped Chianti, and listened.

  "Look here!" he said, suddenly; "have you seen The Imperial Votaress?"

  I frowned. It is always annoying to be interrupted in the middle of a particularly well-balanced sentence. "Don't know the lady," said I.

  "She is advertised on half the posters in town," said Mr. Bulmer. "And it is the book of the year. And it is your book."

  At this moment I laid down my manuscript. '"I beg your pardon?" said I.

  "Your book!" Uncle George repeated firmly; "and scarcely a hair's difference between them, except in the names."

  "H'm!" I observed, in a careful voice. "Who wrote it?"

  "Some female woman out west," said Mr. Bulmer. "She's a George Something-or-other when she publishes, of course, like all those authorines when they want to say about mankind at large what less gifted women only dare say about their sisters-in-law. I wish to heaven they would pick out some other Christian name when they want to cut up like pagans. Anyhow, I saw her real name somewhere, and I remember it began with an S—Why, to be sure! it's Marian Winwood."

  "Amaimon sounds well," I observed; "Lucifer, well; Larbason, well; yet they are devils' additions, the names of fiends: but—Marian Winwood!"

  "Dear me!" he remonstrated. "Why, she wrote A Bright Particular Star, you know, and The Acolytes, and lots of others."

  The author of As the Coming of Dawn swallowed a whole glass of Chianti at a gulp.

  "Of course," I said, slowly, "I cannot, in my rather peculiar position, run the risk of being charged with plagiarism—by a Chinese-eyed mental sneak-thief…."

  Thereupon I threw the manuscript into the open fire, which my preference for the picturesque rendered necessary, even in May.

  "Oh, look here!" my uncle cried, and caught up the papers. "It is infernally good, you know! Can't you—can't you fix it,—and—er— change it a bit? Typewriting is so expensive these days that it seems a pity to waste all this."

  I took the manuscript and replaced it firmly among the embers. "As you justly observe," said I, "it is infernally good. It is probably a deal better than anything else I shall ever write."

  "Why, then—" said Uncle George.

  "Why, then," said I, "the only thing that remains to do is to read The Imperial Votaress."

  8

  And I read it with an augmenting irritation. Here was my great and comely idea transmuted by "George Glock"—which was the woman's foolish pen-na
me,—into a rather clever melodrama, and set forth anyhow, in a hit or miss style that fairly made me squirm. I would cheerfully have strangled Marian Winwood just then, and not upon the count of larceny, but of butchery.

  "And to cap it all, she has assigned her hero every pretty speech I ever made to her! I honestly believe the rogue took shorthand jottings on her cuffs. 'There is a land where lovers may meet face to face, and heart to heart, and mouth to mouth'—why, that's the note I wrote her on the day she wasn't feeling well!"

  Presently, however, I began to laugh, and presently sitting there alone, I began to applaud as if I were witnessing a play that took my fancy.

  "Oh, the adorable jade!" I said; and then: "George Glock, forsooth! George Dandin, tu l' as voulu."

  9

  Naturally I put the entire affair into a short story. And—though even to myself it seems incredible,—Miss Winwood wrote me within three days of the tale's appearance, a very indignant letter.

  For she was furious, to the last exclamation point and underlining, about my little magazine tale…. "Why don't you stop writing, and try plumbing or butchering or traveling for scented soap? You can't write! If you had the light of creation you wouldn't be using my material"….

  —Which caused me to reflect forlornly that I had wasted a great deal of correct behavior upon Marian, since any of the more intimately amorous advances which I might have made, and had scrupulously refrained from making, would very probably have been regarded as raw "material," to be developed rather than shocked by….