III
VALEDICTORY
Mrs. McNaughten has assured me that I stood for nearly five minutes, the brown paper parcel under my arm, staring blankly, first in one direction, then in another, and licking my lips. I am glad of her evidence that a mood so abject and personal lasted no longer. Because—alas!—what held me in a trance that temporarily lost count of time was not that this intolerable thing had befallen Paul Ingram, dear Paul, with whom I had sat, so many a night and on into the small hours, holding converse, high and austere, on man's destiny through life and beyond—no, it was that, having befallen him, it might befall any one, and, befalling any one—let me give the full measure of my craven heart—it might befall me. For one paralyzing instant that veil which mercifully cloaks the extreme chances of fate had been plucked aside. I had looked full into its malignant eyes, and, like the man in the Greek fable, what I had seen had been enough to turn flesh to stone. In that moment the shadowy safeguards which men erect between themselves and the grim possibilities of destiny—knowledge of the world, self-consciousness, confidence in untested friendships—stood revealed, the shams they are. The security born of years—anxious, toilsome years it is true, but during none of which, for a single day or night, bread, clothing, or sheltered sleep had failed me—shook and fluttered darkly like the eternal hills in an earthquake. I literally lost hold on life.
Thank God, the mood was over soon. I had time to be pitiful, to be even angry, with an illogical but humanizing wrath that fate, taking hourly toll of the world, had not spared one dear to me. I blamed myself bitterly for leaving him alone those few minutes. I had wearied of well-doing too soon. He must have yielded at last. Seated by the familiar fireside, fed and comforted, with the pipe in his mouth that still bore the scar of his long wolfish teeth upon its stem, a better mood must have awakened. I say a better mood, because, at certain depths, misfortune calls almost for the same treatment as crime, and the kindness that seeks to save must be disciplining as well as compassionate.
I dined at theÀ-peu-prèsafter my work was done, hoping against hope there would be news of him there—some indication that might put me on his track again. Smeaton was in the chair to-night—old Smeaton, best and bravest knight that ever set quill in rest—with his little restless pink face, snapping black eyes, tumbled white hair, and bulging and disordered waistcoat. I was greeted uproariously. For nearly a month I had been away in the south of France, press correspondent at a murder trial which had stirred all thinking Europe by the depths it revealed of cynical depravity on the one side, and of morbid, reiterated condonation on the other. It was by far the biggest thing I had been given to do yet, and I hoped I had done it well; but it was too much to hope that, in a subject coming home so nearly to the average sensual male, the psychological conclusions I had drawn should pass unchallenged. I sat for over an hour, besieged by questions, pelted with authorities, shouted down, derided unexpectedly and as unexpectedly championed. Even madame's indulgence was not proof against such pandemonium. She pushed open the lace-curtained door, put her hands to her pretty brown ears, and shook a reproving finger at her unruly family.
"Quel tapage! Mon Dieu, quel br-r-ruit!"
"Oui!" cries Smeaton, pointing at her excitedly with the nut-crackers. "Et vous en êtes la cause!"
"Do you remember your Yankee friend's dictum on the little point of manners we've been discussing?" Mackworth asked me when order was restored. He was a dark, depressed man, perhaps the richest who dined at theÀ-peu-prèsregularly, and had written the most talked-about novel of the year before last.
"By the way," interrupted Smeaton, whose manners are bad, "who's seen Ingram lately?"
"I saw him—to-day," I answered, balancing the spoon on my coffee-cup.
"What's he doing? I thought he'd gone back to the States."
"He followed a growler I took from Victoria and wanted to carry in my trunk. Would have had to fight another man, too, for the sixpence."
Madame could not have desired a more complete cessation of turmoil than followed these words of mine. In more than one pair of eyes I saw the panic that would be my own lasting shame rise suddenly, and as suddenly be checked. I wonder how they got it under.
"Was he very bad?" asks Smeaton, in a low voice. "Down—right down?"
I nodded.
"Poor—devil!Did he know you, Prentice?"
"Not at first. It was too foggy to recognize the house."
"What did you do?"
"Grabbed him as he turned to run, and held him. He wouldn't come in, but let me go to fetch him some clothes. When I came out, he'd bolted."
"Bravo!" said Smeaton, and clapped his pudgy little hands.
"Why do you say that?" I asked, voicing a surprise I think we all shared.
"Because it confirms a judgment of my own upon Ingram. He was the logical animalpar excellence, and to take money or substance one hasn't been allowed to earn, if it's only a penny to buy a loaf or a rag to cover nakedness, is to sell logic as Esau sold his birthright. If there were more like Ingram, the tangle of this filthy old kaleidoscope we call life might straighten out. He'll die, of course, but at least he'll die with a man's soul in him."
"Listen to Satan rebuking sin!" said Waldron of theHemisphere.
Smeaton brought his fist down on the table. "Yes," he thundered. "I know what you mean. Yes, I've given charity. I've cast bread on the waters—to drowning men that were begging for a rope. I've helped lame dogs—over stiles that led to nowhere. And every time I've done it, Waldron, I've been ashamed of myself. For I know I'm helping to protract an agony and perpetuating a state of things that ought to have been done with twenty years ago. Literature isn't paying its way to-day: that's the cold fact we must face. And a thing that isn't paying its way is a sham, no matter if it's as brilliant as the last ten years of the old French monarchy. It's falling more and more into the hands of men and women who either eke out a little private means by scribbling, or else eke out their hire by borrowing. Journalism's not so rotten; but, by the Lord Harry, after a morning in Fleet Street I sometimes think half of us are living by taking in one another's washing."
"You're taking rather a black view," said Waldron.
"Am I? Well, compare the present day with long ago—with Grub Street—with what Macaulay calls the darkest period of English letters. Read Johnson's early life—Savage—all the historical instances. Look at the sums those beggars got! Twenty-five pounds benefit from a play that ran fourteen nights: fifty pounds for an ode to Royalty once a year: ten pounds for translating a volume of Portuguese travels. Why, to many a man whose name is a household word to-day these things read like a fairy tale. They used to call on publishers with 'projects' and have luncheon served them while he read 'em over."
"What about the novel?" says Waldron, with a half-look at Mackworth.
"In its death throes. Fifty years hence the English novel—considered as literature, mind you—will be as dead as the epic poem. I stick to what I've said. When a thing ceases to pay its way, it's a sign the stage of national development that called for it is over."
"What's going to take its place?"
"Look around you. Something's begun to take its place already: articles, books—by people who'vedonethings, not dreamed them—written in the English any one can write who tries. 'Three months' lion slaughter in Central Africa'; 'One degree nearer that pole'; 'How I made my millions.' Especially the last. People never weary of that. They don't see that the game must be up, or the secrets wouldn't be being given away."
"Come!"—noticing a silence of dissent round the table. "Take a concrete instance. Mackworth, there's only one opinion about 'When the Sky Fell.'"
"You're very good."
"Simple justice, my boy. Now, take us behind the scenes a little. How long did it take you to write it?"
"Nine or ten months."
"Say nine. Working hard?"
"All day and every day."
"How long before you found a publisher?"
"Finished in June, and it came out in the autumn season."
"That's a year. Were you paid on publication?"
"No: six months afterward."
"Eighteen months. I don't like to ask you any more."
"Oh, I don't mind telling. I've cleared a hundred and twenty pounds."
"For eighteen months' work and worry."
"It's great fun. I've nearly done another."
"Yes, but assuming, for the sake of argument——"
"——that I had to live on it, eh? Well, I'm afraid there'd have been a third after Prentice's cab this morning."
"I think that settles it," said Smeaton, looking round. "No. The novel's had its day. And what a day it's been! Let us think of that. Fielding to Henry James! It's like the creation of another world. Come! I'll give you a toast we can all drink in silence—'Speedy deliverance to Paul Ingram!' And now let's talk of something more cheerful. Who's been to see Fenella Barbour's Cuckoo dance at the Stadium?"
"I suppose that's really the stage of national development we've reached," hazarded Mackworth.
"If it is, there's something to be said for it," said Smeaton, stoutly.
"She's payingherway, anyhow," said some one. "Two hundred and fifty a week ought to keep the wolf from the door."
"Oh, the wolf at the stage door is a domesticated animal. No one wants to frighten him away."
I wasn't interested in what followed, and dropped out. Now and then a word or two struck me: "A clog-dancer with sophistications." "Anyway, you'll see a jolly pretty girl!" "No, not Jewish, Mackworth—Phœnician. Mother was Cornish, and she's a throw-back more than two thousand years straight to Carthage." "As much again for the posters. Briggses paid her four hundred for the 'Crême de Pêche.'"
And I smoked on, thinking of Ingram's rags. As our party broke up, I thought Smeaton made me a sign to stop on. When we were alone, he smoked silently for a while, and then—
"This is a more than usually filthy tragedy, Prentice."
"About Ingram? Yes, it's pretty bad."
"Wasn't there some book he was going to set the Thames alight with? Has it been published?"
"No. It had some funny adventures; but not that one."
"You read it. Was it really good? Between ourselves, you know."
"Oh, I answer for it."
"Don't be in a hurry. It's not late. You knew Ingram better than most of us. Now, wasn't there something between him and the little girl we've been talking of? Perhaps you guessed I didn't mention her by accident. Didn't they come here together more than a year ago?"
I told him what I knew, including the boat-train incident.
"Isn't that Ingram all over?" he exclaimed. "If his eye or his friend or his ladylove offended him, one felt the axe would be out in a minute. You know what they're saying about her now?"
"About dancing the night her mother died? Why shouldn't she? If she'd been a shop-girl or a typist, no one would have thrown stones at her for going on with her work. They'd have thought the more of her for it."
"No, no, my dear boy. I mean the Darcher case—woman at Hampstead who poisoned herself and the little boy, you know. There was a mysterious lady came down in the car with Lumsden. Her name was kept out, but they say——"
"That it was she. Oh! impossible, Smeaton! How could it be?"
"Because she left the theatre with him, and happened to be in his house when the message came through. Two o'clock in the morning! I had it from a quarter that isn't usually wrong."
"And you believe it?"
Smeaton shrugged his shoulders. "My dear boy, I've given up guessing. Anybody that wants it can have the benefit of the doubt, now."Puff! puff!"I often think of poor Newstead, last time I saw him, at Guy's. They thought he was going to get well, and he was sitting up on the pillows reading one of those blasted Sunday papers that you write for. 'Well Newstead,' said I, as I was going, 'what am I to tell the boys?' 'Tell them,' he says, laying his poor claw of a hand on the paper, 'tell them I'm driven to my grave at last by the beauty and the horror of life!'"Puff! puff!"Why don't you go and see her? You can get there easy enough. She's interviewed once a week on an average."
"What good would it do?"
Smeaton rapped for hisaddition. "I dunno. I think if I were a friend of Ingram's I'd take a certain amount of malicious pleasure in letting her know what you saw to-day."