The Soft Side (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1900)/John Delavoy/Chapter 6
VI
I dare say it was the desire to make this out that, in the evening, brought me back a little before my time. Mr. Beston had not arrived, and it's worth mentioning—for it was rather odd—that while we waited for him I sat with my hostess in silence. She spoke of my paper, which she had read over—but simply to tell me she had done so; and that was practically all that passed between us for a time at once so full and so quiet that it struck me neither as short nor as long. We felt, in the matter, so indivisible that we might have been united in some observance or some sanctity—to go through something decorously appointed. Without an observation we listened to the door-bell, and, still without one, a minute later, saw the person we expected stand there and show his surprise. It was at me he looked as he spoke to her.
'I'm not to see you alone?'
'Not just yet, please,' Miss Delavoy answered. 'Of what has suddenly come between us this gentleman is essentially a part, and I really think he'll be less present if we speak before him than if we attempt to deal with the question without him.'
Mr. Beston was amused, but not enough amused to sit down, and we stood there while, for the third time, my proof-sheets were shaken for emphasis. 'I've been reading these over,' she said as she held them up.
Mr. Beston, on what he had said to me of them, could only look grave; but he tried also to look pleasant, and I foresaw that, on the whole, he would really behave well. 'They're remarkably clever.'
'And yet you wish to publish instead of them something from so different a hand?'
He smiled now very kindly. 'If you'll only let me have it! Won't you let me have it? I'm sure you know exactly the thing I want.'
'Oh, perfectly!'
'I've tried to give her an idea of it,' I threw in.
Mr. Beston promptly saw his way to make this a reproach to me. 'Then, after all, you had one yourself?'
'I think I couldn't have kept so clear of it if I hadn't had!' I laughed.
'I'll write you something', Miss Delavoy went on, 'if you'll print this as it stands.' My proof was still in her keeping. Mr. Beston raised his eyebrows. Print two? Whatever do I want with two? What do I want with the wrong one if I can get the beautiful right?'
She met this, to my surprise, with a certain gaiety. 'It's a big subject—a subject to be seen from different sides. Don't you want a full, a various treatment? Our papers will have nothing in common.'
'I should hope not!' Mr. Beston said good-humouredly. 'You have command, dear lady, of a point of view too good to spoil. It so happens that your brother has been really less handled than any one, so that there's a kind of obscurity about him, and in consequence a kind of curiosity, that it seems to me quite a crime not to work. There's just the perfection, don't you know? of a little sort of mystery—a tantalising demi-jour.' He continued to smile at her as if he thoroughly hoped to kindle her, and it was interesting at that moment to get this vivid glimpse of his conception.
I could see it quickly enough break out in Miss Delavoy, who sounded for an instant almost assenting. 'And you want the obscurity and the mystery, the tantalising demi-jour, cleared up?'
'I want a little lovely, living thing! Don't be perverse,' he pursued, 'don't stand in your own light and in your brother's and in this young man's—in the long run, and in mine too and in every one's: just let us have him out as no one but you can bring him and as, by the most charming of enhances and a particular providence, he has been kept all this time just on purpose for you to bring. Really, you know'—his vexation would crop up—'one could howl to see such good stuff wasted!'
'Well,' our young lady returned, 'that holds good of one thing as well as of another. I can never hope to describe or express my brother as these pages describe and express him; but, as I tell you, approaching him from a different direction, I promise to do my very best. Only, my condition remains.'
Mr. Beston transferred his eyes from her face to the little bundle in her hand, where they rested with an intensity that made me privately wonder if it represented some vain vision of a snatch defeated in advance by the stupidity of his having suffered my copy to be multiplied. 'My printing that?'
'Your printing this.'
Mr. Beston wavered there between us: I could make out in him a vexed inability to keep us as distinct as he would have liked. But he was triumphantly light. 'It's impossible. Don't be a pair of fools!'
'Very well, then,' said Miss Delavoy; 'please send me back my drawing.'
'Oh dear, no!' Mr. Beston laughed. 'Your drawing we must have at any rate.'
'Ah, but I forbid you to use it! This gentleman is my witness that my prohibition is absolute.'
'Was it to be your witness that you sent for the gentleman? You take immense precautions!' Mr. Beston exclaimed. Before she could retort, however, he came back to his strong point. 'Do you coolly ask of me to sacrifice ten thousand subscribers?'
The number, I noticed, had grown since the morning, but Miss Delavoy faced it boldly. 'If you do, you'll be well rid of them. They must be ignoble, your ten thousand subscribers.'
He took this perfectly. 'You dispose of them easy! Ignoble or not, what I have to do is to keep them and if possible add to their number; not to get rid of them.'
'You'd rather get rid of my poor brother instead?'
'I don't get rid of him. I pay him a signal attention. Reducing it to the least, I publish his portrait.'
'His portrait—the only one worth speaking of? Why, you turn it out with horror.'
'Do you call the only one worth speaking of that misguided effort?' And, obeying a restless impulse, he appeared to reach for my tribute; not, I think, with any conscious plan, but with a vague desire in some way again to point his moral with it.
I liked immensely the motion with which, in reply to this, she put it behind her: her gesture expressed so distinctly her vision of her own lesson. From that moment, somehow, they struck me as forgetting me, and I seemed to see them as they might have been alone together; even to see a little what, for each, had held and what had divided them. I remember how, at this, I almost held my breath, effacing myself to let them go, make them show me whatever they might. 'It's the only one', she insisted, 'that tells, about its subject, anything that's any one's business. If you really want John Delavoy, there he is. If you don't want him, don't insult him with an evasion and a pretence. Have at least the courage to say that you're afraid of him!'
I figured Mr. Beston here as much incommoded; but all too simply, doubtless, for he clearly held on, smiling through flushed discomfort and on the whole bearing up. 'Do you think I'm afraid of you?' He might forget me, but he would have to forget me a little more to yield completely to his visible impulse to take her hand. It was visible enough to herself to make her show that she declined to meet it, and even that his effect on her was at last distinctly exasperating. Oh, how I saw at that moment that in the really touching good faith of his personal sympathy he didn't measure his effect! If he had done so he wouldn't have tried to rush it, to carry it off with tenderness. He dropped to that now so rashly that I was in truth sorry for him. 'You could do so gracefully, so naturally, what we want. What we want, don't you see? is perfect taste. I know better than you do yourself how perfect yours would be. I always know better than people do themselves.' He jested and pleaded, getting in, benightedly, deeper. Perhaps I didn't literally hear him ask in the same accents if she didn't care for him at all, but I distinctly saw him look as if he were on the point of it, and something, at any rate, in a lower tone, dropped from him that he followed up with the statement that if she did even just a little she would help him.