The Better Sort (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1903)/The Papers/Chapter 2
II
They met again a few days later, and it seemed the law of their meetings that these should take place mainly within moderate eastward range of Charing Cross. An afternoon performance of a play translated from the Finnish, already several times given, on a series of Saturdays, had held Maud for an hour in a small, hot, dusty theatre where the air hung as heavy about the great "trimmed" and plumed hats of the ladies as over the flora and fauna of a tropical forest; at the end of which she edged out of her stall in the last row, to join a small band of unattached critics and correspondents, spectators with ulterior views and pencilled shirtcuffs, who, coming together in the lobby for an exchange of ideas, were ranging from "Awful rot" to "Rather jolly." Ideas, of this calibre, rumbled and flashed, so that, lost in the discussion, our young woman failed at first to make out that a gentleman on the other side of the group, but standing a little off, had his eyes on her for some extravagant, though apparently quite respectable, purpose. He had been waiting for her to recognise him, and as soon as he had caught her attention he came round to her with an eager bow. She had by this time entirely placed him—placed him as the smoothest and most shining subject with which, in the exercise of her profession, she had yet experimented; but her recognition was accompanied with a pang that his amiable address made but the sharper. She had her reason for awkwardness in the presence of a rosy, glossy, kindly, but discernibly troubled personage whom she had waited on "at home" at her own suggestion—promptly welcomed—and the sympathetic element in whose "personality," the Chippendale, the photographic, the autographic elements in whose flat in the Earl's Court Road, she had commemorated in the liveliest prose of which she was capable. She had described with humour his favourite pug, she had revealed with permission his favourite make of Kodak, she had touched upon his favourite manner of spending his Sundays and had extorted from him the shy confession that he preferred after all the novel of adventure to the novel of subtlety. Her embarrassment was therefore now the greater as, touching to behold, he so clearly had approached her with no intention of asperity, not even at first referring at all to the matter that couldn't have been gracefully explained.
She had seen him originally—had had the instinct of it in making up to him—as one of the happy of the earth, and the impression of him "at home," on his proving so good-natured about the interview, had begotten in her a sharper envy, a hungrier sense of the invidious distinctions of fate, than any her literary conscience, which she deemed rigid, had yet had to reckon with. He must have been rich, rich by such estimates as hers; he at any rate had everything, while she had nothing—nothing but the vulgar need of offering him to brag, on his behalf, for money, if she could get it, about his luck. She hadn't in fact got money, hadn't so much as managed to work in her stuff anywhere; a practical comment sharp enough on her having represented to him—with wasted pathos, she was indeed soon to perceive—how "important" it was to her that people should let her get at them. This dim celebrity had not needed that argument; he had not only, with his alacrity, allowed her, as she had said, to try her hand, but had tried with her, quite feverishly, and all to the upshot of showing her that there were even greater outsiders than herself. He could have put down money, could have published, as the phrase was—a bare two columns—at his own expense; but it was just a part of his rather irritating luxury that he had a scruple about that, wanted intensely to taste the sweet, but didn't want to owe it to any wire-pulling. He wanted the golden apple straight from the tree, where it yet seemed so unable to grow for him by any exuberance of its own. He had breathed to her his real secret—that to be inspired, to work with effect, he had to feel he was appreciated, to have it all somehow come back to him. The artist, necessarily sensitive, lived on encouragement, on knowing and being reminded that people cared for him a little, cared even just enough to flatter him a wee bit. They had talked that over, and he had really, as he called it, quite put himself in her power. He had whispered in her ear that it might be very weak and silly, but that positively to be himself, to do anything, certainly to do his best, he required the breath of sympathy. He did love notice, let alone praise—there it was. To be systematically ignored—well, blighted him at the root. He was afraid she would think he had said too much, but she left him with his leave, none the less, to repeat a part of it. They had agreed that she was to bring in prettily, somehow, that he did love praise; for just the right way he was sure he could trust to her taste.
She had promised to send him the interview in proof, but she had been able, after all, to send it but in typecopy. If she, after all, had had a flat adorned—as to the drawing-room alone—with eighty-three photographs, and all in plush frames; if she had lived in the Earl's Court Road, had been rosy and glossy and well filled out; and if she had looked withal, as she always made a point of calling it when she wished to refer without vulgarity to the right place in the social scale, "unmistakeably gentle"—if she had achieved these things she would have snapped her fingers at all other sweets, have sat as tight as possible and let the world wag, have spent her Sundays in silently thanking her stars, and not have cared to know one Kodak, or even one novelist's "methods," from another. Except for his unholy itch he was in short so just the person she would have liked to be that the last consecration was given for her to his character by his speaking quite as if he had accosted her only to secure her view of the strange Finnish "soul." He had come each time—there had been four Saturdays; whereas Maud herself had had to wait till to-day, though her bread depended on it, for the roundabout charity of her publicly bad seat. It didn't matter why he had come—so that he might see it somewhere printed of him that he was "a conspicuously faithful attendant" at the interesting series; it only mattered that he was letting her off so easily, and yet that there was a restless hunger, odd on the part of one of the filled-out, in his appealing eye, which she now saw not to be a bit intelligent, though that didn't matter either. Howard Bight came into view while she dealt with these impressions, whereupon she found herself edging a little away from her patron. Her other friend, who had but just arrived and was apparently waiting to speak to her, would be a pretext for a break before the poor gentleman should begin to accuse her of having failed him. She had failed herself so much more that she would have been ready to reply to him that he was scarce the one to complain; fortunately, however, the bell sounded the end of the interval and her tension was relaxed. They all flocked back to their places, and her camarade—she knew enough often so to designate him—was enabled, thanks to some shifting of other spectators, to occupy a seat beside her. He had brought with him the breath of business; hurrying from one appointment to another he might have time but for a single act. He had seen each of the others by itself, and the way he now crammed in the third, after having previously snatched the fourth, brought home again to the girl that he was leading the real life. Her own was a dull imitation of it. Yet it happened at the same time that before the curtain rose again he had, with a "Who's your fat friend?" professed to have caught her in the act of making her own brighter.
"'Mortimer Marshal'?" he echoed after she had, a trifle dryly, satisfied him. "Never heard of him."
"Well, I sha'n't tell him that. But you have," she said; "you've only forgotten. I told you after I had been to him."
Her friend thought—it came back to him. "Oh yes, and showed me what you had made of it. I remember your stuff was charming."
"I see you remember nothing," Maud a little more dryly said. "I didn't show you what I had made of it. I've never made anything. You've not seen my stuff, and nobody has. They won't have it."
She spoke with a smothered vibration, but, as they were still waiting, it had made him look at her; by which she was slightly the more disconcerted. "Who won't?"
"Everyone, everything won't. Nobody, nothing will. He's hopeless, or rather I am. I'm no good. And he knows it."
"O—oh!" the young man kindly but vaguely pro tested. "Has he been making that remark to you?"
"No—that's the worst of it. He's too dreadfully civil. He thinks I can do something."
"Then why do you say he knows you can't."
She was impatient; she gave it up. "Well, I don't know what he knows—except that he does want to be loved."
"Do you mean he has proposed to you to love him?"
"Loved by the great heart of the public—speaking through its natural organ. He wants to be—well, where Beadel-Muffet is."
"Oh, I hope not!" said Bight with grim amusement.
His friend was struck with his tone. "Do you mean it's coming on for Beadel-Muffet—what we talked about?" And then as he looked at her so queerly that her curiosity took a jump: "It really and truly is? Has anything happened?"
"The rummest thing in the world—since I last saw you. We're wonderful, you know, you and I together—we see. And what we see always takes place, usually within the week. It wouldn't be believed. But it will do for us. At any rate it's high sport."
"Do you mean," she asked, "that his scare has literally begun?"
He meant, clearly, quite as much as he said. "He has written to me again he wants to see me, and we've an appointment for Monday."
"Then why isn't it the old game?"
"Because it isn't. He wants to gather from me, as I have served him before, if something can't be done. On a souvent besoin d'un plus petit que soi. Keep quiet, and we shall see something."
This was very well; only his manner visibly had for her the effect of a chill in the air. "I hope," she said, "you're going at least to be decent to him."
"Well, you'll judge. Nothing at all can be done—it's too ridiculously late. And it serves him right. I sha'n't deceive him, certainly, but I might as well enjoy him."
The fiddles were still going, and Maud had a pause. "Well, you know you've more or less lived on him. I mean it's the kind of thing you are living on."
"Precisely—that's just why I loathe it."
Again she hesitated. "You mustn't quarrel, you know, with your bread and butter."
He looked straight before him, as if she had been consciously, and the least bit disagreeably, sententious. "What in the world's that but what I shall just be not doing? If our bread and butter is the universal push I consult our interest by not letting it trifle with us. They're not to blow hot and cold—it won't do. There he is—let him get out himself. What I call sport is to see if he can."
"And not—poor wretch—to help him?"
But Bight was ominously lucid. "The devil is that he can't be helped. His one idea of help, from the day he opened his eyes, has been to be prominently—damn the word!—mentioned: it's the only kind of help that exists in connection with him. What therefore is a fellow to do when he happens to want it to stop—wants a special sort of prominence that will work like a trap in a pantomime and enable him to vanish when the situation requires it? Is one to mention that he wants not to be mentioned—never, never, please, any more? Do you see the success of that, all over the place, do you see the headlines in the American papers? No, he must die as he has lived—the Principal Public Person of his time."
"Well," she sighed, "it's all horrible." And then without a transition: "What do you suppose has happened to him?"
"The dreadfulness I wasn't to tell you?"
"I only mean if you suppose him in a really bad hole."
The young man considered. "It can't certainly be that he has had a change of heart—never. It may be nothing worse than that the woman he wants to marry has turned against it."
"But I supposed him—with his children all so boomed—to be married."
"Naturally; else he couldn't have got such a boom from the poor lady's illness, death and burial. Don't you remember two years ago?—'We are given to unstand that Sir A. B. C. Beadel-Muffet K.C.B., M.P., particularly desires that no flowers be sent for the late Hon. Lady Beadel-Muffet's funeral.' And then, the next day: 'We are authorised to state that the impression, so generally prevailing, that Sir A. B. C. Beadel-Muffet has expressed an objection to flowers in connection with the late Hon. Lady Beadel-Muffet's obsequies, rests on a misapprehension of Sir A. B. C. Beadel-Muffet's markedly individual views. The floral tributes already delivered in Queen's Gate Gardens, and remarkable for number and variety, have been the source of such gratification to the bereaved gentleman as his situation permits.' With a wind-up of course for the following week—the inevitable few heads of remark, on the part of the bereaved gentleman, on the general subject of Flowers at Funerals as a Fashion, vouchsafed, under pressure possibly indiscreet, to a rising young journalist always thirsting for the authentic word."
"I guess now," said Maud, after an instant, "the rising young journalist. You egged him on."
"Dear, no. I panted in his rear."
"It makes you," she added, "more than cynical."
"And what do you call 'more than' cynical?"
"It makes you sardonic. Wicked," she continued; "devilish."
"That's it—that is cynical. Enough's as good as a feast." But he came back to the ground they had quitted. "What were you going to say he's prominent for, Mortimer Marshal?"
She wouldn't, however, follow him there yet, her curiosity on the other issue not being spent. "Do you know then as a fact, that he's marrying again, the bereaved gentleman?"
Her friend, at this, showed impatience. "My dear fellow, do you see nothing? We had it all, didn't we, three months ago, and then we didn't have it, and then we had it again; and goodness knows where we are. But I throw out the possibility. I forget her bloated name, but she may be rich, and she may be decent. She may make it a condition that he keeps out—out, I mean, of the only things he has really ever been 'in.'"
"The Papers?"
"The dreadful, nasty, vulgar Papers. She may put it to him—I see it dimly and queerly, but I see it—that he must get out first, and then they'll talk; then she'll say yes, then he'll have the money. I see it—and much more sharply—that he wants the money, needs it I mean, badly, desperately, so that this necessity may very well make the hole in which he finds himself. Therefore he must do something—what he's trying to do. It supplies the motive that our picture, the other day, rather missed."
Maud Blandy took this in, but it seemed to fail to satisfy her. "It must be something worse. You make it out that, so that your practical want of mercy, which you'll not be able to conceal from me, shall affect me as less inhuman."
"I don't make it out anything, and I don't care what it is; the queerness, the grand 'irony' of the case is itself enough for me. You, on your side, however, I think, make it out what you call 'something worse', because of the romantic bias of your mind. You 'see red.' Yet isn't it, after all, sufficiently lurid that he shall lose his blooming bride?"
"You're sure," Maud appealed, "that he'll lose her?"
"Poetic justice screams for it; and my whole interest in the matter is staked on it."
But the girl continued to brood. "I thought you contend that nobody's half 'decent.' Where do you find a woman to make such a condition?"
"Not easily, I admit." The young man thought. "It will be his luck to have found her. That's his tragedy, say, that she can financially save him, but that she happens to be just the one freak, the creature whose stomach has turned. The spark—I mean of decency—has got, after all, somehow to be kept alive; and it may be lodged in this particular female form."
"I see. But why should a female form that's so particular confess to an affinity with a male form that's so fearfully general? As he's all self-advertisement, why isn't it much more natural to her simply to loathe him?"
"Well, because, oddly enough, it seems that people don't."
"You do," Maud declared. "You'll kill him."
He just turned a flushed cheek to her, and she saw that she had touched something that lived in him. "We can," he consciously smiled, "deal death. And the beauty is that it's in a perfectly straight way. We can lead them on. But have you ever seen Beadel-Muffet for yourself?" he continued.
"No. How often, please, need I tell you that I've seen nobody and nothing?"
"Well, if you had you'd understand."
"You mean he's so fetching?"
"Oh, he's great. He's not 'all' self-advertisement—or at least he doesn't seem to be: that's his pull. But I see, you female humbug," Bight pursued, "how much you'd like him yourself."
"I want, while I'm about it, to pity him in sufficient quantity."
"Precisely. Which means, for a woman, with extravagance and to the point of immorality."
"I ain't a woman," Maud Blandy sighed. "I wish I were!"
"Well, about the pity," he went on; "you shall be immoral, I promise you, before you've done. Doesn't Mortimer Marshal," he asked, "take you for a woman?"
"You'll have to ask him. How," she demanded, "does one know those things?" And she stuck to her Beadel-Muffet. "If you're to see him on Monday sha'n't you then get to the bottom of it?"
"Oh, I don't conceal from you that I promise myself larks, but I won't tell you, positively I won't," Bight said, "what I see. You're morbid. If it's only bad enough—I mean his motive—you'll want to save him."
"Well, isn't that what you're to profess to him that you want?"
"Ah," the young man returned. "I believe you'd really invent a way."
"I would if I could." And with that she dropped it. "There's my fat friend," she presently added, as the entr'acte still hung heavy and Mortimer Marshal, from a row much in advance of them, screwed himself round in his tight place apparently to keep her in his eye.
"He does then," said her companion, "take you for a woman. I seem to guess he's 'littery.'"
"That's it; so badly that he wrote that 'littery' ply Corisanda, you must remember, with Beatrice Beaumont in the principal part, which was given at three matinees in this very place and which hadn't even the luck of being slated. Every creature connected with the production, from the man himself and Beatrice herself down to the mothers and grandmothers of the sixpenny young women, the young women of the programmes, was interviewed both before and after, and he promptly published the piece, pleading guilty to the 'littery' charge—which is the great stand he takes and the subject of the discussion."
Bight had wonderingly followed. "Of what discussion?"
"Why, the one he thinks there ought to have been. There hasn't been any, of course, but he wants it, dreadfully misses it. People won't keep it up—whatever they did do, though I don't myself make out that they did anything. His state of mind requires something to start with, which has got somehow to be provided. There must have been a noise made, don't you see? to make him prominent; and in order to remain prominent he has got to go for his enemies. The hostility to his ply, and all because it's 'littery', we can do nothing without that; but it's uphill work to come across it. We sit up nights trying, but we seem to get no for'arder. The public attention would seem to abhor the whole matter even as nature abhors a vacuum. We've nothing to go upon, otherwise we might go far. But there we are."
"I see," Bight commented. "You're nowhere at all."
"No; it isn't even that, for we're just where Corisanda, on the stage and in the closet, put us at a stroke. Only there we stick fast—nothing seems to happen, nothing seems to come or to be capable of being made to come. We wait."
"Oh, if he waits with you!" Bight amicably jibed.
"He may wait for ever?"
"No, but resignedly. You'll make him forget his wrongs."
"Ah, I'm not of that sort, and I could only do it by making him come into his rights. And I recognise now that that's impossible. There are different cases, you see, whole different classes of them, and his is the opposite to Beadel-Muffet's."
Howard Bight gave a grunt. "Why the opposite if you also pity him? I'll be hanged," he added, "if you won't save him too."
But she shook her head. She knew. "No; but it's nearly, in its way, as lurid. Do you know," she asked, "what he has done?"
"Why, the difficulty appears to be that he can't have done anything. He should strike once more—hard, and in the same place. He should bring out another ply."
"Why so? You can't be more than prominent, and he is prominent. You can't do more than subscribe, in your prominence, to thirty-seven press cutting agencies in England and America, and, having done so, you can't do more than sit at home with your ear on the postman's knock, looking out for results. There comes in the tragedy—there are no results. Mortimer Marshal's postman doesn't knock; the press-cutting agencies can't find anything to cut. With thirty-seven, in the whole English-speaking world, scouring millions of papers for him in vain, and with a big slice of his private income all the while going to it, the 'irony' is too cruel, and the way he looks at one, as in one's degree responsible, does make one wince. He expected, naturally, most from the Americans, but it's they who have failed him worst. Their silence is that of the tomb, and it seems to grow, if the silence of the tomb can grow. He won't admit that the thirty-seven look far enough or long enough, and he writes them, I infer, angry letters, wanting to know what the deuce they suppose he has paid them for. But what are they either, poor things, to do?"
"Do? They can print his angry letters. That, at least, will break the silence, and he'll like it better than nothing."
This appeared to strike our young woman. "Upon my word, I really believe he would." Then she thought better of it. "But they'd be afraid, for they do guarantee, you know, that there's something for everyone. They claim it's their strength—that there's enough to go round. They won't want to show that they break down."
"Oh, well," said the young man, "if he can't manage to smash a pane of glass somewhere———!"
"That's what he thought I would do. And it's what I thought I might," Maud added; "otherwise I wouldn't have approached him. I did it on spec, but I'm no use. I'm a fatal influence. I'm a non-conductor."
She said it with such plain sincerity that it quickly took her companion's attention. "I say!" he covertly murmured. "Have you a secret sorrow?"
"Of course I've a secret sorrow." And she stared at it, stiff and a little sombre, not wanting it to be too freely handled, while the curtain at last rose to the lighted stage.