V
"SAD COMPANY"
I first met Ingram by chance at the oldCafé à peu prèsin Greek Street. TheÀ peu prèsof those days was far from being the institution which, in the capable hands of Philippe, the sulky waiter, who took to himself Madame's moustached daughter plus Madame's economies, it has since become—an over-lighted,bruyantrestaurant of two stories and a basement, wherein an eighteen-penny meal of six exiguous courses, served at inhospitable speed to hurried suburban playgoers, is raised to the dignity of adiner françaisby various red and yellow compounds which masquerade under the names of the old French provinces of themidi. Then it was nothing but a secluded back room, panelled and painted green, with an oval table in the centre, round which the little circle of which I was, if not an ornament, at least an accredited unit—free lances of the press, war correspondents stranded during lengthening periods of peace and ill-will among nations, obscure authors and unbought painters—met nightly to dine and to nurse our chilled ambitions, under Madame's supplemental smile and in the warmth of a roaring fire which, during nine months of the year, was burning under the heavy Jacobean mantel.
Strangers were not exactly resented at theÀ peu près, but by an elaborate unconsciousness of their presence, to which the Oxford manner of one or two of us was a great assistance, we contrived for a long time to keep the circle restricted. Thus it happened that the bronzed and bearded man who spoke French so volubly at coming and going, and who seemed so little discountenanced by our exclusive attitude—glad, indeed, to be let alone—had been an irregular visitor for some weeks before we entered upon any conversation. One night the talk had turned, as it often did, upon the strong British preference for death as a preliminary to appreciation in matters literary or artistic, and little Capel, burrowing, as the subject drooped, into the obvious for a suitable remark, repeated that well-known legend—Milton's ten pounds for "Paradise Lost." The big man at my shoulder laughed.
"Fancy," said he, "any one getting as much as that for a poem to-day."
I turned, before the guard had descended on his eyes, and saw in them an expression that I, of all men, should recognize at the first glance: the sickness of the literary hope deferred.
We had become sufficiently intimate for me to receive a call from him, at my rooms, during an attack of the gout, which is an inheritance from Chislehurst, before he mentioned his book. I grieve to-day, remembering how often he was on the point of doing so, and waited in vain for the word from me that would have made the task less irksome than, I am sure, it was at last. By what I know now isn't a coincidence, his final appearance in Pimlico with the dreadful brown-paper parcel under his arm followed upon a period of three or four months during which he had practically disappeared from my consciousness. He looked worn, I thought, and had a new trouble in his eyes. He told me his story shamefacedly, and stammering like a schoolboy.
He had written a book, a novel, and could not get it published. None of the houses to which he had offered it advanced any reason for rejection, and in the one or two cases where he had pressed for one, seemed to think his insistence a solecism. He understood I not only wrote but published. Would it be troubling me unduly.... If I wasn't too busy....
Well, itwasa great worry. I was busy just then too, after my futile fashion; but somehow it didn't seem the thing to have that man stammering and blushing before a wretched little ink-slinger like myself, and I tendered the vague service that is known as one's "best." But I was unaffectedly sorry the thing had happened. It is such happenings that, in literary circles, writeFINISto many a promising friendship. Ten men will lend you a pound for one that will lend you his countenance.
It was six o'clock the next morning when my lamp suddenly flared and went out. I stretched myself—realized that the fire was out as well, that I was cold and stiff, that dawn was coming up over the roofs of the stuccoed terrace opposite, and that the reason I had forgotten light and fire and the march of time lay in a disreputable, dog-eared typed manuscript that I had begun in weariness, gone on with in half-resentful surprise, and finished in a complete oblivion of everything save the swift rush of joys and fears, sorrows and mistakes to a doom that never befell. I remember a funny swelled feeling, as though I had been crying internally.
It is late in the day to attempt a criticism or even an appreciation of "Sad Company." Even as it stands to-day, in the close stereotype of the popular reprint, it is flawed and marred to my mind with many anaïvetéand rawness, with here and there one of those lapses into the banal that are an evil legacy to American literature from the days of Poe and Hawthorne. Imagine what it must have been before, fearfully and reverently, for I knew I was handling a masterpiece, I helped brush off a little of the clay that still clung to it from the pit in which it had been cast.
What I did, then and there, was to sit down, chilled and numbed as I was, in the raw morning light, and write to Ingram bidding him, on pain of perpetual displeasure, repair to me that evening, to be severely rebuked for his presumption in having, without previous apprenticeship or servitude, taken his livery and chair with the pastmasters and wardens of his craft. This letter I carried downstairs through the sleeping house, tremulous with the good consciences of my fellow-lodgers, and slipped it in the pillar box at the corner of the crescent. I remember I even chuckled as I posted it, to the evident surprise of the stolid policeman who had wished me good morning. You see, I thought I was making literary history.
I am sorry to say that my enthusiasm didn't communicate itself to Paul. Six mute and incurious publishers were sitting too heavily on his self-esteem for that. He even took their part, with a perversity I have noticed before in the misunderstood of the earth. I have a theory that books like his are posthumous children, and that the state of mind which created them dies in giving them birth. What enraged him—what baffled him, because it was contrary to every lesson his strenuous life had taught him—was, that so much effort could be all in vain. I imagine he wrote the book with difficulty and without conscious exaltation of spirit.
"If I had put as much pains," I remembered his saying, "into any other thing I've set my hand to, I should be either a famous man, or a very rich one, to-day, Prentice."
And then, returning to the old grievance, that I could see had become a prepossession—
"And yet—six men can't be all wrong."
"Of course they can," I exclaimed indignantly, "and sixty."
He shrugged his shoulders wearily. "What can a man do, then?"
"One thing you can do," I answered severely, "is to sit down opposite me for a few hours a week and alter some of your modes of expression. I've made a list of some: Listen here!
"'Brightly shone the snow on the roof of the Rio Negro County Farmers' Institute.' You mustn't say that."
"Why not?" asked Paul, simply; "it's the name."
"If you don't know why, I can't tell you. You must take it from me that such a thing, in England, will almost secure rejection of itself. Then again: we don't talk of a man's 'white linen shirtbosom.' The word isde modefor a woman, but used for a man, it's offensive. And to say that Celia 'cached the mail-bags in a wash-out,' conveys no meaning at all to us."
Paul laughed out, and suddenly looked ten years younger.
"Sit down," he said, "and 'fais feu!' Don't spare me!"
But the revision was a thankless task. Only a determination on my part that such a book shouldn't be lost supported me through it at all. Paul came to work irregularly, and in a mood that oscillated between a careless acceptance of every suggestion I made and a peremptory refusal to consider any alteration at all. But it was done at last, and I admit I waited hopefully for news from Carroll and Hugus.
After three weeks, in fact, I got a postcard asking me to call. Bonnyman was sitting in his sanctum, looking as young and as wise as on the day he came down from Balliol, and with his habitual air of finding the publishing trade a great lark.
"How's the industrious Prentice?" he cried, as soon as he saw me. "What's he been doing with himself these many moons?"
I shook hands and sat down. I profess I have never felt so jumpy when work of my own has been in question.
Bonnyman put his finger to his forehead. "What did I want to see you about, Prentice?... Oh, yes!" He touched an electric button on his desk.
"Byrne!" said he to the clerk who answered it, "bring me down 'Sad Company.' I sent it up to the packing-room the day before yesterday. It ought to be ready."
My heart sank into my boots. "Aren't you going to publish it?" I faltered.
Bonnyman shook his head.
"No go, my boy! No go at all. You've brought it to the wrong shop."
"It kept me awake a whole night," I flashed out angrily.
Bonnyman smiled and yawned. "Kept me awake too, because I'd slept in the afternoon trying to read it."
"Oh! come now, Bonnyman," I protested. "You know better than that. Take the one scene alone," I went on eagerly, "where Holt is sitting with his dead wife, and the step-daughter comes to the door and he won't open because——"
But Bonnyman went on shaking his head with the impenetrable self-confidence any man acquires in time who exercises an habitual right of veto.
"Hugo and water!" he said. "Who can't write it? No, Prentice. To tell you the honest truth we're cutting out a lot of this problem stuff lately. What we're specializing in at present is the 'light touch.' The 'light touch,'" he repeated, illustrating what the world is hungering for, delicately, with an ivory paper cutter on his blotting-pad.
"'Polly Prattlings!'" I sneered.
"And d—d good stuff, too. Bring me some one like that, Prentice, and we'll talk.—Don't get angry, old man! Who is your little friend? American, ain't he?"
I nodded gloomily.
"Why don't he get a Rhodes scholarship and learn how to write English?"
"He's thirty-five," I said; "he's been all round the world and done everything."
Bonnyman pulled a long face that sufficiently disposed of Ingram's future. The brown-paper parcel was brought in and I slunk away with it under my arm, like a man repulsed from a pawnshop.
I didn't see Ingram for a long time, and was secretly glad of it. For I had no good news to give him. Other publishers were equally emphatic, with unimportant variations of delay and discourtesy. I don't say I lost faith in the book, but I did begin to doubt whether, in the present state of things, great work was worth while. It was too much like giving grand opera on a raft in mid-Atlantic.
At last, when I'd practically exhausted the firms I knew, and was beginning to wonder whether we wouldn't have to come down to a publication "by special arrangement," or a setting up in linotype by one of the smaller provincial weeklies, an idea flashed into my head. I knew one great writer, a woman, American, too; fashionable, rich, but with a passionate reverence for all that was worthiest in letters. She had succeeded by means of a brilliance and impetuosity of style that had literally stormed the defences of dullness. In her books I had noticed an underlying mysticism that I thought might find Paul's work akin. It was a ticklish undertaking, and I hadn't done screwing up my courage to it when Ingram suddenly reappeared. His long arm pushed open the paper curtained door of the sanctum where we dined, one raw night in June. By his side was absolutely the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. She wore a long purple coat, cut very smartly, and a big ribboned hat, and was swaying a little from side to side as though the lapsed rhythm of some tune she had just heard was still in her feet. She glanced round shyly but brightly and bowed with a pretty blush to Caulfield. We all gaped, and old Smeaton's pipe suddenly smelt very foul.
"Don't move!" said Ingram, as I made room for them at my side. "I haven't come for dinner. Just to ask if you've had any news, before I go away."
"No news at present," I confessed. "But I hope to have some soon."
He smiled a little grimly, and felt in his long rubber coat for a pocketbook.
"If anything turns up in the next month or so, write me here," he said, and handed me a card with an address scrawled across its face. "I'm going to France for a few weeks. Come, Nelly!" and was gone with his companion as abruptly as he had come.
"'Beauty like hers is genius,'" Capel quoted, breaking the silence with an air of saying something apposite, for once.
"Who's the pretty lady, Caulfield?" asked old Smeaton. "She bowed to you."
"She's a little person I've met at dances, and things," said Caulfield. "Goes round with the De Rudder woman. Doesgavottesandpavanesandcorantosand all that sort of thing. Pretty name, too,—'Fenella Barbour.'"