The Real Thing and Other Tales

This was for Sir Baldwin Luard to say; but he naturally never confided to me the secret.  He was a joyless, jokeless young man, with the air of having other secrets as well, and a determination to get on politically that was indicated by his never having been known to commit himself—as regards any proposition whatever—beyond an exclamatory “Oh!”  His wife and he must have conversed mainly in prim ejaculations, but they understood sufficiently that they were kindred spirits.  I remember being angry with Greville Fane when she announced these nuptials to me as magnificent; I remember asking her what splendour there was in the union of the daughter of a woman of genius with an irredeemable mediocrity.  “Oh! he’s awfully clever,” she said; but she blushed for the maternal fib.  What she meant was that though Sir Baldwin’s estates were not vast (he had a dreary house in South Kensington and a still drearier “Hall” somewhere in Essex, which was let), the connection was a “smarter” one than a child of hers could have aspired to form.  In spite of the social bravery of her novels she took a very humble and dingy view of herself, so that of all her productions “my daughter Lady Luard” was quite the one she was proudest of.  That personage thought her mother very vulgar and was distressed and perplexed by the occasional license of her pen, but had a complicated attitude in regard to this indirect connection with literature.  So far as it was lucrative her ladyship approved of it, and could compound with the inferiority of the pursuit by doing practical justice to some of its advantages.  I had reason to know (my reason was simply that poor Mrs. Stormer told me) that she suffered the inky fingers to press an occasional bank-note into her palm.  On the other hand she deplored the “peculiar style” to which Greville Fane had devoted herself, and wondered where an author who had the convenience of so lady-like a daughter could have picked up such views about the best society.  “She might know better, with Leolin and me,” Lady Luard had been known to remark; but it appeared that some of Greville Fane’s superstitions were incurable.  She didn’t live in Lady Luard’s society, and the best was not good enough for her—she must make it still better.

I could see that this necessity grew upon her during the years she spent abroad, when I had glimpses of her in the shifting sojourns that lay in the path of my annual ramble.  She betook herself from Germany to Switzerland and from Switzerland to Italy; she favoured cheap places and set up her desk in the smaller capitals.  I took a look at her whenever I could, and I always asked how Leolin was getting on.  She gave me beautiful accounts of him, and whenever it was possible the boy was produced for my edification.  I had entered from the first into the joke of his career—I pretended to regard him as a consecrated child.  It had been a joke for Mrs. Stormer at first, but the boy himself had been shrewd enough to make the matter serious.  If his mother accepted the principle that the intending novelist cannot begin too early to see life, Leolin was not interested in hanging back from the application of it.  He was eager to qualify himself, and took to cigarettes at ten, on the highest literary grounds.  His poor mother gazed at him with extravagant envy and, like Desdemona, wished heaven had made her such a man.  She explained to me more than once that in her profession she had found her sex a dreadful drawback.  She loved the story of Madame George Sand’s early rebellion against this hindrance, and believed that if she had worn trousers she could have written as well as that lady.  Leolin had for the career at least the qualification of trousers, and as he grew older he recognised its importance by laying in an immense assortment.  He grew up in gorgeous apparel, which was his way of interpreting his mother’s system.  Whenever I met her I found her still under the impression that she was carrying this system out and that Leolin’s training was bearing fruit.  She was giving him experience, she was giving him impressions, she was putting a gagnepain into his hand.  It was another name for spoiling him with the best conscience in the world.  The queerest pictures come back to me of this period of the good lady’s life and of the extraordinarily virtuous, muddled, bewildering tenor of it.  She had an idea that she was seeing foreign manners as well as her petticoats would allow; but, in reality she was not seeing anything, least of all fortunately how much she was laughed at.  She drove her whimsical pen at Dresden and at Florence, and produced in all places and at all times the same romantic and ridiculous fictions.  She carried about her box of properties and fished out promptly the familiar, tarnished old puppets.  She believed in them when others couldn’t, and as they were like nothing that was to be seen under the sun it was impossible to prove by comparison that they were wrong.  You can’t compare birds and fishes; you could only feel that, as Greville Fane’s characters had the fine plumage of the former species, human beings must be of the latter.

It would have been droll if it had not been so exemplary to see her tracing the loves of the duchesses beside the innocent cribs of her children.  The immoral and the maternal lived together in her diligent days on the most comfortable terms, and she stopped curling the mustaches of her Guardsmen to pat the heads of her babes.  She was haunted by solemn spinsters who came to tea from continental pensions, and by unsophisticated Americans who told her she was just loved in their country.  “I had rather be just paid there,” she usually replied; for this tribute of transatlantic opinion was the only thing that galled her.  The Americans went away thinking her coarse; though as the author of so many beautiful love-stories she was disappointing to most of these pilgrims, who had not expected to find a shy, stout, ruddy lady in a cap like a crumbled pyramid.  She wrote about the affections and the impossibility of controlling them, but she talked of the price of pension and the convenience of an English chemist.  She devoted much thought and many thousands of francs to the education of her daughter, who spent three years at a very superior school at Dresden, receiving wonderful instruction in sciences, arts and tongues, and who, taking a different line from Leolin, was to be brought up wholly as a femme du monde.  The girl was musical and philological; she made a specialty of languages and learned enough about them to be inspired with a great contempt for her mother’s artless accents.  Greville Fane’s French and Italian were droll; the imitative faculty had been denied her, and she had an unequalled gift, especially pen in hand, of squeezing big mistakes into small opportunities.  She knew it, but she didn’t care; correctness was the virtue in the world that, like her heroes and heroines, she valued least.  Ethel, who had perceived in her pages some remarkable lapses, undertook at one time to revise her proofs; but I remember her telling me a year after the girl had left school that this function had been very briefly exercised.  “She can’t read me,” said Mrs. Stormer; “I offend her taste.  She tells me that at Dresden—at school—I was never allowed.”  The good lady seemed surprised at this, having the best conscience in the world about her lucubrations.  She had never meant to fly in the face of anything, and considered that she grovelled before the Rhadamanthus of the English literary tribunal, the celebrated and awful Young Person.  I assured her, as a joke, that she was frightfully indecent (she hadn’t in fact that reality any more than any other) my purpose being solely to prevent her from guessing that her daughter had dropped her not because she was immoral but because she was vulgar.  I used to figure her children closeted together and asking each other while they exchanged a gaze of dismay: “Why should she be so—and so fearfully so—when she has the advantage of our society?  Shouldn’t we have taught her better?”  Then I imagined their recognising with a blush and a shrug that she was unteachable, irreformable.  Indeed she was, poor lady; but it is never fair to read by the light of taste things that were not written by it.  Greville Fane had, in the topsy-turvy, a serene good faith that ought to have been safe from allusion, like a stutter or a faux pas.

She didn’t make her son ashamed of the profession to which he was destined, however; she only made him ashamed of the way she herself exercised it.  But he bore his humiliation much better than his sister, for he was ready to take for granted that he should one day restore the balance.  He was a canny and far-seeing youth, with appetites and aspirations, and he had not a scruple in his composition.  His mother’s theory of the happy knack he could pick up deprived him of the wholesome discipline required to prevent young idlers from becoming cads.  He had, abroad, a casual tutor and a snatch or two of a Swiss school, but no consecutive study, no prospect of a university or a degree.  It may be imagined with what zeal, as the years went on, he entered into the pleasantry of there being no manual so important to him as the massive book of life.  It was an expensive volume to peruse, but Mrs. Stormer was willing to lay out a sum in what she would have called her premiers frais.  Ethel disapproved—she thought this education far too unconventional for an English gentleman.  Her voice was for Eton and Oxford, or for any public school (she would have resigned herself) with the army to follow.  But Leolin never was afraid of his sister, and they visibly disliked, though they sometimes agreed to assist, each other.  They could combine to work the oracle—to keep their mother at her desk.

When she came back to England, telling me she had got all the continent could give her, Leolin was a broad-shouldered, red-faced young man, with an immense wardrobe and an extraordinary assurance of manner.  She was fondly obstinate about her having taken the right course with him, and proud of all that he knew and had seen.  He was now quite ready to begin, and a little while later she told me he had begun.  He had written something tremendously clever, and it was coming out in the Cheapside.  I believe it came out; I had no time to look for it; I never heard anything about it.  I took for granted that if this contribution had passed through his mother’s hands it had practically become a specimen of her own genius, and it was interesting to consider Mrs. Stormer’s future in the light of her having to write her son’s novels as well as her own.  This was not the way she looked at it herself; she took the charming ground that he would help her to write hers.  She used to tell me that he supplied passages of the greatest value to her own work—all sorts of technical things, about hunting and yachting and wine—that she couldn’t be expected to get very straight.  It was all so much practice for him and so much alleviation for her.  I was unable to identify these pages, for I had long since ceased to “keep up” with Greville Fane; but I was quite able to believe that the wine-question had been put, by Leolin’s good offices, on a better footing, for the dear lady used to mix her drinks (she was perpetually serving the most splendid suppers) in the queerest fashion.  I could see that he was willing enough to accept a commission to look after that department.  It occurred to me indeed, when Mrs. Stormer settled in England again, that by making a shrewd use of both her children she might be able to rejuvenate her style.  Ethel had come back to gratify her young ambition, and if she couldn’t take her mother into society she would at least go into it herself.  Silently, stiffly, almost grimly, this young lady held up her head, clenched her long teeth, squared her lean elbows and made her way up the staircases she had elected.  The only communication she ever made to me, the only effusion of confidence with which she ever honoured me, was when she said: “I don’t want to know the people mamma knows; I mean to know others.”  I took due note of the remark, for I was not one of the “others.”  I couldn’t trace therefore the steps of her process; I could only admire it at a distance and congratulate her mother on the results.  The results were that Ethel went to “big” parties and got people to take her.  Some of them were people she had met abroad, and others were people whom the people she had met abroad had met.  They ministered alike to Miss Ethel’s convenience, and I wondered how she extracted so many favours without the expenditure of a smile.  Her smile was the dimmest thing in the world, diluted lemonade, without sugar, and she had arrived precociously at social wisdom, recognising that if she was neither pretty enough nor rich enough nor clever enough, she could at least in her muscular youth be rude enough.  Therefore if she was able to tell her mother what really took place in the mansions of the great, give her notes to work from, the quill could be driven at home to better purpose and precisely at a moment when it would have to be more active than ever.  But if she did tell, it would appear that poor Mrs. Stormer didn’t believe.  As regards many points this was not a wonder; at any rate I heard nothing of Greville Fane’s having developed a new manner.  She had only one manner from start to finish, as Leolin would have said.

She was tired at last, but she mentioned to me that she couldn’t afford to pause.  She continued to speak of Leolin’s work as the great hope of their future (she had saved no money) though the young man wore to my sense an aspect more and more professional if you like, but less and less literary.  At the end of a couple of years there was something monstrous in the impudence with which he played his part in the comedy.  When I wondered how she could play her part I had to perceive that her good faith was complete and that what kept it so was simply her extravagant fondness.  She loved the young impostor with a simple, blind, benighted love, and of all the heroes of romance who had passed before her eyes he was by far the most brilliant.

He was at any rate the most real—she could touch him, pay for him, suffer for him, worship him.  He made her think of her princes and dukes, and when she wished to fix these figures in her mind’s eye she thought of her boy.  She had often told me she was carried away by her own creations, and she was certainly carried away by Leolin.  He vivified, by potentialities at least, the whole question of youth and passion.  She held, not unjustly, that the sincere novelist should feel the whole flood of life; she acknowledged with regret that she had not had time to feel it herself, and it was a joy to her that the deficiency might be supplied by the sight of the way it was rushing through this magnificent young man.  She exhorted him, I suppose, to let it rush; she wrung her own flaccid little sponge into the torrent.  I knew not what passed between them in her hours of tuition, but I gathered that she mainly impressed on him that the great thing was to live, because that gave you material.  He asked nothing better; he collected material, and the formula served as a universal pretext.  You had only to look at him to see that, with his rings and breastpins, his cross-barred jackets, his early embonpoint, his eyes that looked like imitation jewels, his various indications of a dense, full-blown temperament, his idea of life was singularly vulgar; but he was not so far wrong as that his response to his mother’s expectations was not in a high degree practical.  If she had imposed a profession on him from his tenderest years it was exactly a profession that he followed.  The two were not quite the same, inasmuch as his was simply to live at her expense; but at least she couldn’t say that he hadn’t taken a line.  If she insisted on believing in him he offered himself to the sacrifice.  My impression is that her secret dream was that he should have a liaison with a countess, and he persuaded her without difficulty that he had one.  I don’t know what countesses are capable of, but I have a clear notion of what Leolin was.

He didn’t persuade his sister, who despised him—she wished to work her mother in her own way, and I asked myself why the girl’s judgment of him didn’t make me like her better.  It was because it didn’t save her after all from a mute agreement with him to go halves.  There were moments when I couldn’t help looking hard into his atrocious young eyes, challenging him to confess his fantastic fraud and give it up.  Not a little tacit conversation passed between us in this way, but he had always the best of it.  If I said: “Oh, come now, with me you needn’t keep it up; plead guilty, and I’ll let you off,” he wore the most ingenuous, the most candid expression, in the depths of which I could read: “Oh, yes, I know it exasperates you—that’s just why I do it.”  He took the line of earnest inquiry, talked about Balzac and Flaubert, asked me if I thought Dickens did exaggerate and Thackeray ought to be called a pessimist.  Once he came to see me, at his mother’s suggestion he declared, on purpose to ask me how far, in my opinion, in the English novel, one really might venture to “go.”  He was not resigned to the usual pruderies—he suffered under them already.  He struck out the brilliant idea that nobody knew how far we might go, for nobody had ever tried.  Did I think he might safely try—would it injure his mother if he did?  He would rather disgrace himself by his timidities than injure his mother, but certainly some one ought to try.  Wouldn’t I try—couldn’t I be prevailed upon to look at it as a duty?  Surely the ultimate point ought to be fixed—he was worried, haunted by the question.  He patronised me unblushingly, made me feel like a foolish amateur, a helpless novice, inquired into my habits of work and conveyed to me that I was utterly vieux jeu and had not had the advantage of an early training.  I had not been brought up from the germ, I knew nothing of life—didn’t go at it on his system.  He had dipped into French feuilletons and picked up plenty of phrases, and he made a much better show in talk than his poor mother, who never had time to read anything and could only be vivid with her pen.  If I didn’t kick him downstairs it was because he would have alighted on her at the bottom.

When she went to live at Primrose Hill I called upon her and found her weary and wasted.  It had waned a good deal, the elation caused the year before by Ethel’s marriage; the foam on the cup had subsided and there was a bitterness in the draught.

She had had to take a cheaper house and she had to work still harder to pay even for that.  Sir Baldwin was obliged to be close; his charges were fearful, and the dream of her living with her daughter (a vision she had never mentioned to me) must be renounced.  “I would have helped with things, and I could have lived perfectly in one room,” she said; “I would have paid for everything, and—after all—I’m some one, ain’t I?  But I don’t fit in, and Ethel tells me there are tiresome people she must receive.  I can help them from here, no doubt, better than from there.  She told me once, you know, what she thinks of my picture of life.  ‘Mamma, your picture of life is preposterous!’  No doubt it is, but she’s vexed with me for letting my prices go down; and I had to write three novels to pay for all her marriage cost me.  I did it very well—I mean the outfit and the wedding; but that’s why I’m here.  At any rate she doesn’t want a dingy old woman in her house.  I should give it an atmosphere of literary glory, but literary glory is only the eminence of nobodies.  Besides, she doubts my glory—she knows I’m glorious only at Peckham and Hackney.  She doesn’t want her friends to ask if I’ve never known nice people.  She can’t tell them I’ve never been in society.  She tried to teach me better once, but I couldn’t learn.  It would seem too as if Peckham and Hackney had had enough of me; for (don’t tell any one!) I’ve had to take less for my last than I ever took for anything.”  I asked her how little this had been, not from curiosity, but in order to upbraid her, more disinterestedly than Lady Luard had done, for such concessions.  She answered “I’m ashamed to tell you,” and then she began to cry.

I had never seen her break down, and I was proportionately moved; she sobbed, like a frightened child, over the extinction of her vogue and the exhaustion of her vein.  Her little workroom seemed indeed a barren place to grow flowers, and I wondered, in the after years (for she continued to produce and publish) by what desperate and heroic process she dragged them out of the soil.  I remember asking her on that occasion what had become of Leolin, and how much longer she intended to allow him to amuse himself at her cost.  She rejoined with spirit, wiping her eyes, that he was down at Brighton hard at work—he was in the midst of a novel—and that he felt life so, in all its misery and mystery, that it was cruel to speak of such experiences as a pleasure.  “He goes beneath the surface,” she said, “and he forces himself to look at things from which he would rather turn away.  Do you call that amusing yourself?  You should see his face sometimes!  And he does it for me as much as for himself.  He tells me everything—he comes home to me with his trouvailles.  We are artists together, and to the artist all things are pure.  I’ve often heard you say so yourself.”  The novel that Leolin was engaged in at Brighton was never published, but a friend of mine and of Mrs. Stormer’s who was staying there happened to mention to me later that he had seen the young apprentice to fiction driving, in a dogcart, a young lady with a very pink face.  When I suggested that she was perhaps a woman of title with whom he was conscientiously flirting my informant replied: “She is indeed, but do you know what her title is?”  He pronounced it—it was familiar and descriptive—but I won’t reproduce it here.  I don’t know whether Leolin mentioned it to his mother: she would have needed all the purity of the artist to forgive him.  I hated so to come across him that in the very last years I went rarely to see her, though I knew that she had come pretty well to the end of her rope.  I didn’t want her to tell me that she had fairly to give her books away—I didn’t want to see her cry.  She kept it up amazingly, and every few months, at my club, I saw three new volumes, in green, in crimson, in blue, on the book-table that groaned with light literature.  Once I met her at the Academy soirée, where you meet people you thought were dead, and she vouchsafed the information, as if she owed it to me in candour, that Leolin had been obliged to recognise insuperable difficulties in the question of form, he was so fastidious; so that she had now arrived at a definite understanding with him (it was such a comfort) that she would do the form if he would bring home the substance.  That was now his position—he foraged for her in the great world at a salary.  “He’s my ‘devil,’ don’t you see? as if I were a great lawyer: he gets up the case and I argue it.”  She mentioned further that in addition to his salary he was paid by the piece: he got so much for a striking character, so much for a pretty name, so much for a plot, so much for an incident, and had so much promised him if he would invent a new crime.

“He has invented one,” I said, “and he’s paid every day of his life.”

“What is it?” she asked, looking hard at the picture of the year; “Baby’s Tub,” near which we happened to be standing.

I hesitated a moment.  “I myself will write a little story about it, and then you’ll see.”

But she never saw; she had never seen anything, and she passed away with her fine blindness unimpaired.  Her son published every scrap of scribbled paper that could be extracted from her table-drawers, and his sister quarrelled with him mortally about the proceeds, which showed that she only wanted a pretext, for they cannot have been great.  I don’t know what Leolin lives upon, unless it be on a queer lady many years older than himself, whom he lately married.  The last time I met him he said to me with his infuriating smile: “Don’t you think we can go a little further still—just a little?”  He really goes too far.