CHAPTER XVI
As soon as Deborah came out of college she made fresh literary attempts; she was not successful. Now, frequent and continuous failures are depressing, but they usually have the good effect of weeding out the unfit and leaving only the strong. However, she was beginning to feel dispirited. She had tried tragedy, comedy, mixtures, satires, ghost stories, and myths, and everything had failed and been returned. Each rejection had come like a dull thump on the top of her heart, but none perhaps for some years had had quite the same dispiriting effect as the first. Still she had hoped that when once out of college, and with more time to give to writing, she would manage better; but that was not so, the failures still continued. When she had been in the country about a year she went to London for a week’s holiday.
Susan was there and they had a very enjoyable time.
“Do you know, I have a most irresistible longing to have my fortune told,” Deborah said one day during this holiday. “It has been growing on me for some time.”
“I thought you didn’t believe in that kind of thing,” remarked Susan.
“No, I don’t. But I want to try to find out something. Will you come?”
“Oh, yes,” Susan answered; she rather liked the idea.
There was a nurse staying in the same house who believed implicitly in such things, and she furnished them with the name and address of a woman who, according to her accounts, had much fame as a truthful fortune-teller.
It was a hot Friday afternoon when they went, and the next day Deborah was returning to the country.
The woman had a fine face and a pleasing manner.
She first of all told Susan’s hand—and she really did contrive to tell it marvellously well. She told her a great deal too, and all that she said was true. By this time it was getting very dark, and there was every appearance of a thunder-storm—the heat all day had been intense.
When she came to read Deborah’s hand she had exhausted her supply of words. But after a while she said,—
“You are unfair in your prejudices. You take strong likes and dislikes without any good foundation for them.”
“There now,” said Susan. “That is you to a ‘T,’ Deborah.”
After that the lady was some time casting about in her mind as to what she should say next, till suddenly Susan queried,—
“Has she any particular gift for writing?”
That rather startled Deborah; she had not expected it, although it was the one thing and the only thing she wanted to know.
The fortune-teller looked very minutely at both hands and then declared very decidedly,—
“No. There is not the slightest indication of any gift that way—not in the slightest.”
There was a short silence, during which Deborah had the most curious feeling of baffled anger she had ever felt in her life.
“I told you so,” said a voice in her ear far plainer than any human voice. “How many times do you want telling? You may be quite sure if this woman saw the least signs of anything that way she would tell you at once.”
By this time the fortune-teller had begun to speak again.
“You have a gift though, and that is for acting. You should go on the stage. You would make an excellent actress.”
Deborah laughed, and she might be excused the rudeness of it: a more unlikely person for an actress was never born.
It was she who had always been told to sit down in college when she got up to recite, and who had invariably been placed in the lowest class for reading. Moreover, she was short and insignificant in appearance, and by no means understood the art of dressing to advantage. Besides, another word for being an actress, in Deborah’s mind, was being “fast,” and she knew she was very far from being that. Again, she was not fond of actresses nor acting, though that was probably due to ignorance. There were only three of the few she had seen whom she had ever really liked, and those were Ellen Terry, Winifred Emery, and Annie Hughes. Yes, and one other—Amy Roselle; but she was dead.
Ellen Terry had entranced her. She had only seen her once, but that once to her had been a perfect dream. She watched her almost with the absorbed interest she gave to the people in her other world, and when the play was over had felt an intense longing to go and put her arms round her neck and kiss her.
To return to the fortune-teller.
After she had delivered the last shot, as it were, she had no more to say, and they took their leave.
Deborah was so angry and so disappointed that she could scarcely eat any tea, but was actress enough not to show it; so perhaps there was an ironical truth in the lady’s statements after all.
“Fancy her telling you you could act,” said Susan.
“Oh, yes, they always tell you something like that, or they think your vanity will be wounded,” Deborah replied, and hoped the thunder-storm would pass off before they went into the street again.
They visited the theatre that night, and the fortune-teller passed completely out of Deborah’s mind, not to return for nearly two years.
As she sat in the theatre and watched a great actor she began thinking of the curious interest she had always taken in him ever since the hanging of the little picture, long before she knew there was such a man in reality at all.
“I wonder if, supposing I tried very hard with my writing, I might some day just be allowed to shake hands with him,” she thought. “I’d rather be spoken to by him than any other celebrity in the whole world.” She sighed.
“I’d never be able to make a great enough name. I try hard enough now, and it never has the least effect.”
When she went home she wrote another story, and pocketed all her pride and sent it to a very inferior novelette series. But they returned it.
Deborah then made up her mind.
“I will write nothing more till I am thirty,” she thought. “I’ve spent all my life so far in nothing but rejections, and after a certain point I don’t think they’re good for people. Besides, it’s waste of time.”
The truth was that she had been thoroughly disheartened and did not like to own up to it.
So she began to study for matriculation, but she was not fond of this kind of study, and it took all her strength of mind to keep it up. Perseverance, however, will do much, and when she had worked successfully through a book on mechanics she felt almost as if she had worked successfully through the examination itself.
Still, as time went on she began to grow low-spirited. Never in all her life before had she stuck persistently to books. Never had she let more than four months at most pass without writing some story or other; it had seemed a part and a necessity of her life.
Now month followed month, and one year lengthened almost into two, and still she stuck to the lesson books.
Low spirits were natural to her, but this was a place which would never dispel them. The unkindnesses, the unpleasant quarrels weighed on her just as much as her failures, and no amount of not-caring could ever take the sting away.
Besides, there were other troubles, flimsy skeletons in the cupboard that one never mentions, sending out at times their unwholesome odour from between the narrow chinks.
The wish to pray, to cast this heavy, darkening burden on to other shoulders grew. Deborah prayed to Christ, as she had never prayed for anything before, except her father, to give her faith and light to throw off the gloom.
She might just as well have prayed to a stone wall; to pray was simply to increase the gloom, an empty mirage that on approach mocked at the struggling traveller’s pain.
All the time she could spare from lessons she spent in that other world; it was the one bright spot in her life, the thing for which she was ineffably thankful.
One day at the beginning of the last year of the old century she sat down to work out a problem in mechanics.
She never solved it. Indefinitely she began to scribble on the paper as in the olden time.
“Oh, God!” she cried, “give me a man who can resist temptation for the sake of good, and not because he is bound in by tradition or the world.”
And straightway she left this world and flew to that other. There she found the man she wanted, him who had gone there so strangely long ago as it seemed from the printed picture.
And Deborah began to write, and having once taken up the pen had not the power to lay it down.