The Real Thing and Other Tales

VII

“I’ve had time to look a little further into what we’re prepared to do, and I find the case is one in which I should consider the advisability of going to an extreme length,” said Mr. Locket.  Jersey Villas the next morning had had the privilege of again receiving the editor of the Promiscuous, and he sat once more at the davenport, where the bone of contention, in the shape of a large, loose heap of papers that showed how much they had been handled, was placed well in view.  “We shall see our way to offering you three hundred, but we shouldn’t, I must positively assure you, see it a single step further.”

Peter Baron, in his dressing-gown and slippers, with his hands in his pockets, crept softly about the room, repeating, below his breath and with inflections that for his own sake he endeavoured to make humorous: “Three hundred—three hundred.”  His state of mind was far from hilarious, for he felt poor and sore and disappointed; but he wanted to prove to himself that he was gallant—was made, in general and in particular, of undiscourageable stuff.  The first thing he had been aware of on stepping into his front room was that a four-wheeled cab, with Mrs. Ryves’s luggage upon it, stood at the door of No. 3.  Permitting himself, behind his curtain, a pardonable peep, he saw the mistress of his thoughts come out of the house, attended by Mrs. Bundy, and take her place in the modest vehicle.  After this his eyes rested for a long time on the sprigged cotton back of the landlady, who kept bobbing at the window of the cab an endlessly moralising old head.  Mrs. Ryves had really taken flight—he had made Jersey Villas impossible for her—but Mrs. Bundy, with a magnanimity unprecedented in the profession, seemed to express a belief in the purity of her motives.  Baron felt that his own separation had been, for the present at least, effected; every instinct of delicacy prompted him to stand back.

Mr. Locket talked a long time, and Peter Baron listened and waited.  He reflected that his willingness to listen would probably excite hopes in his visitor—hopes which he himself was ready to contemplate without a scruple.  He felt no pity for Mr. Locket and had no consideration for his suspense or for his possible illusions; he only felt sick and forsaken and in want of comfort and of money.  Yet it was a kind of outrage to his dignity to have the knife held to his throat, and he was irritated above all by the ground on which Mr. Locket put the question—the ground of a service rendered to historical truth.  It might be—he wasn’t clear; it might be—the question was deep, too deep, probably, for his wisdom; at any rate he had to control himself not to interrupt angrily such dry, interested palaver, the false voice of commerce and of cant.  He stared tragically out of the window and saw the stupid rain begin to fall; the day was duller even than his own soul, and Jersey Villas looked so sordidly hideous that it was no wonder Mrs. Ryves couldn’t endure them.  Hideous as they were he should have to tell Mrs. Bundy in the course of the day that he was obliged to seek humbler quarters.  Suddenly he interrupted Mr. Locket; he observed to him: “I take it that if I should make you this concession the hospitality of the Promiscuous would be by that very fact unrestrictedly secured to me.”

Mr. Locket stared.  “Hospitality—secured?”  He thumbed the proposition as if it were a hard peach.

“I mean that of course you wouldn’t—in courtsey, in gratitude—keep on declining my things.”

“I should give them my best attention—as I’ve always done in the past.”

Peter Baron hesitated.  It was a case in which there would have seemed to be some chance for the ideally shrewd aspirant in such an advantage as he possessed; but after a moment the blood rushed into his face with the shame of the idea of pleading for his productions in the name of anything but their merit.  It was as if he had stupidly uttered evil of them.  Nevertheless be added the interrogation:

“Would you for instance publish my little story?”

“The one I read (and objected to some features of) the other day?  Do you mean—a—with the alteration?” Mr. Locket continued.

“Oh, no, I mean utterly without it.  The pages you want altered contain, as I explained to you very lucidly, I think, the very raison d’être of the work, and it would therefore, it seems to me, be an imbecility of the first magnitude to cancel them.”  Peter had really renounced all hope that his critic would understand what he meant, but, under favour of circumstances, he couldn’t forbear to taste the luxury, which probably never again would come within his reach, of being really plain, for one wild moment, with an editor.

Mr. Locket gave a constrained smile.  “Think of the scandal, Mr. Baron.”

“But isn’t this other scandal just what you’re going in for?”

“It will be a great public service.”

“You mean it will be a big scandal, whereas my poor story would be a very small one, and that it’s only out of a big one that money’s to be made.”

Mr. Locket got up—he too had his dignity to vindicate.  “Such a sum as I offer you ought really to be an offset against all claims.”

“Very good—I don’t mean to make any, since you don’t really care for what I write.  I take note of your offer,” Peter pursued, “and I engage to give you to-night (in a few words left by my own hand at your house) my absolutely definite and final reply.”

Mr. Locket’s movements, as he hovered near the relics of the eminent statesman, were those of some feathered parent fluttering over a threatened nest.  If he had brought his huddled brood back with him this morning it was because he had felt sure enough of closing the bargain to be able to be graceful.  He kept a glittering eye on the papers and remarked that he was afraid that before leaving them he must elicit some assurance that in the meanwhile Peter would not place them in any other hands.  Peter, at this, gave a laugh of harsher cadence than he intended, asking, justly enough, on what privilege his visitor rested such a demand and why he himself was disqualified from offering his wares to the highest bidder.  “Surely you wouldn’t hawk such things about?” cried Mr. Locket; but before Baron had time to retort cynically he added: “I’ll publish your little story.”

“Oh, thank you!”

“I’ll publish anything you’ll send me,” Mr. Locket continued, as he went out.  Peter had before this virtually given his word that for the letters he would treat only with the Promiscuous.

The young man passed, during a portion of the rest of the day, the strangest hours of his life.  Yet he thought of them afterwards not as a phase of temptation, though they had been full of the emotion that accompanies an intense vision of alternatives.  The struggle was already over; it seemed to him that, poor as he was, he was not poor enough to take Mr. Locket’s money.  He looked at the opposed courses with the self-possession of a man who has chosen, but this self-possession was in itself the most exquisite of excitements.  It was really a high revulsion and a sort of noble pity.  He seemed indeed to have his finger upon the pulse of history and to be in the secret of the gods.  He had them all in his hand, the tablets and the scales and the torch.  He couldn’t keep a character together, but he might easily pull one to pieces.  That would be “creative work” of a kind—he could reconstruct the character less pleasingly, could show an unknown side of it.  Mr. Locket had had a good deal to say about responsibility; and responsibility in truth sat there with him all the morning, while he revolved in his narrow cage and, watching the crude spring rain on the windows, thought of the dismalness to which, at Dover, Mrs. Ryves was going back.  This influence took in fact the form, put on the physiognomy of poor Sir Dominick Ferrand; he was at present as perceptible in it, as coldly and strangely personal, as if he had been a haunting ghost and had risen beside his own old hearthstone.  Our friend was accustomed to his company and indeed had spent so many hours in it of late, following him up at the museum and comparing his different portraits, engravings and lithographs, in which there seemed to be conscious, pleading eyes for the betrayer, that their queer intimacy had grown as close as an embrace.  Sir Dominick was very dumb, but he was terrible in his dependence, and Peter would not have encouraged him by so much curiosity nor reassured him by so much deference had it not been for the young man’s complete acceptance of the impossibility of getting out of a tight place by exposing an individual.  It didn’t matter that the individual was dead; it didn’t matter that he was dishonest.  Peter felt him sufficiently alive to suffer; he perceived the rectification of history so conscientiously desired by Mr. Locket to be somehow for himself not an imperative task.  It had come over him too definitely that in a case where one’s success was to hinge upon an act of extradition it would minister most to an easy conscience to let the success go.  No, no—even should he be starving he couldn’t make money out of Sir Dominick’s disgrace.  He was almost surprised at the violence of the horror with which, as he shuffled mournfully about, the idea of any such profit inspired him.  What was Sir Dominick to him after all?  He wished he had never come across him.

In one of his brooding pauses at the window—the window out of which never again apparently should he see Mrs. Ryves glide across the little garden with the step for which he had liked her from the first—he became aware that the rain was about to intermit and the sun to make some grudging amends.  This was a sign that he might go out; he had a vague perception that there were things to be done.  He had work to look for, and a cheaper lodging, and a new idea (every idea he had ever cherished had left him), in addition to which the promised little word was to be dropped at Mr. Locket’s door.  He looked at his watch and was surprised at the hour, for he had nothing but a heartache to show for so much time.  He would have to dress quickly, but as he passed to his bedroom his eye was caught by the little pyramid of letters which Mr. Locket had constructed on his davenport.  They startled him and, staring at them, he stopped for an instant, half-amused, half-annoyed at their being still in existence.  He had so completely destroyed them in spirit that he had taken the act for granted, and he was now reminded of the orderly stages of which an intention must consist to be sincere.  Baron went at the papers with all his sincerity, and at his empty grate (where there lately had been no fire and he had only to remove a horrible ornament of tissue-paper dear to Mrs. Bundy) he burned the collection with infinite method.  It made him feel happier to watch the worst pages turn to illegible ashes—if happiness be the right word to apply to his sense, in the process, of something so crisp and crackling that it suggested the death-rustle of bank-notes.

When ten minutes later he came back into his sitting-room, he seemed to himself oddly, unexpectedly in the presence of a bigger view.  It was as if some interfering mass had been so displaced that he could see more sky and more country.  Yet the opposite houses were naturally still there, and if the grimy little place looked lighter it was doubtless only because the rain had indeed stopped and the sun was pouring in.  Peter went to the window to open it to the altered air, and in doing so beheld at the garden gate the humble “growler” in which a few hours before he had seen Mrs. Ryves take her departure.  It was unmistakable—he remembered the knock-kneed white horse; but this made the fact that his friend’s luggage no longer surmounted it only the more mystifying.  Perhaps the cabman had already removed the luggage—he was now on his box smoking the short pipe that derived relish from inaction paid for.  As Peter turned into the room again his ears caught a knock at his own door, a knock explained, as soon as he had responded, by the hard breathing of Mrs. Bundy.

“Please, sir, it’s to say she’ve come back.”

“What has she come back for?” Baron’s question sounded ungracious, but his heartache had given another throb, and he felt a dread of another wound.  It was like a practical joke.

“I think it’s for you, sir,” said Mrs. Bundy.  “She’ll see you for a moment, if you’ll be so good, in the old place.”

Peter followed his hostess downstairs, and Mrs. Bundy ushered him, with her company flourish, into the apartment she had fondly designated.

“I went away this morning, and I’ve only returned for an instant,” said Mrs. Ryves, as soon as Mrs. Bundy had closed the door.  He saw that she was different now; something had happened that had made her indulgent.

“Have you been all the way to Dover and back?”

“No, but I’ve been to Victoria.  I’ve left my luggage there—I’ve been driving about.”

“I hope you’ve enjoyed it.”

“Very much.  I’ve been to see Mr. Morrish.”

“Mr. Morrish?”

“The musical publisher.  I showed him our song.  I played it for him, and he’s delighted with it.  He declares it’s just the thing.  He has given me fifty pounds.  I think he believes in us,” Mrs. Ryves went on, while Baron stared at the wonder—too sweet to be safe, it seemed to him as yet—of her standing there again before him and speaking of what they had in common.  “Fifty pounds! fifty pounds!” she exclaimed, fluttering at him her happy cheque.  She had come back, the first thing, to tell him, and of course his share of the money would be the half.  She was rosy, jubilant, natural, she chattered like a happy woman.  She said they must do more, ever so much more.  Mr. Morrish had practically promised he would take anything that was as good as that.  She had kept her cab because she was going to Dover; she couldn’t leave the others alone.  It was a vehicle infirm and inert, but Baron, after a little, appreciated its pace, for she had consented to his getting in with her and driving, this time in earnest, to Victoria.  She had only come to tell him the good news—she repeated this assurance more than once.  They talked of it so profoundly that it drove everything else for the time out of his head—his duty to Mr. Locket, the remarkable sacrifice he had just achieved, and even the odd coincidence, matching with the oddity of all the others, of her having reverted to the house again, as if with one of her famous divinations, at the very moment the trumpery papers, the origin really of their intimacy, had ceased to exist.  But she, on her side, also had evidently forgotten the trumpery papers: she never mentioned them again, and Peter Baron never boasted of what he had done with them.  He was silent for a while, from curiosity to see if her fine nerves had really given her a hint; and then later, when it came to be a question of his permanent attitude, he was silent, prodigiously, religiously, tremulously silent, in consequence of an extraordinary conversation that he had with her.

This conversation took place at Dover, when he went down to give her the money for which, at Mr. Morrish’s bank, he had exchanged the cheque she had left with him.  That cheque, or rather certain things it represented, had made somehow all the difference in their relations.  The difference was huge, and Baron could think of nothing but this confirmed vision of their being able to work fruitfully together that would account for so rapid a change.  She didn’t talk of impossibilities now—she didn’t seem to want to stop him off; only when, the day following his arrival at Dover with the fifty pounds (he had after all to agree to share them with her—he couldn’t expect her to take a present of money from him), he returned to the question over which they had had their little scene the night they dined together—on this occasion (he had brought a portmanteau and he was staying) she mentioned that there was something very particular she had it on her conscience to tell him before letting him commit himself.  There dawned in her face as she approached the subject a light of warning that frightened him; it was charged with something so strange that for an instant he held his breath.  This flash of ugly possibilities passed however, and it was with the gesture of taking still tenderer possession of her, checked indeed by the grave, important way she held up a finger, that he answered: “Tell me everything—tell me!”

“You must know what I am—who I am; you must know especially what I’m not!  There’s a name for it, a hideous, cruel name.  It’s not my fault!  Others have known, I’ve had to speak of it—it has made a great difference in my life.  Surely you must have guessed!” she went on, with the thinnest quaver of irony, letting him now take her hand, which felt as cold as her hard duty.  “Don’t you see I’ve no belongings, no relations, no friends, nothing at all, in all the world, of my own?  I was only a poor girl.”

“A poor girl?” Baron was mystified, touched, distressed, piecing dimly together what she meant, but feeling, in a great surge of pity, that it was only something more to love her for.

“My mother—my poor mother,” said Mrs. Ryves.

She paused with this, and through gathering tears her eyes met his as if to plead with him to understand.  He understood, and drew her closer, but she kept herself free still, to continue: “She was a poor girl—she was only a governess; she was alone, she thought he loved her.  He did—I think it was the only happiness she ever knew.  But she died of it.”

“Oh, I’m so glad you tell me—it’s so grand of you!” Baron murmured.  “Then—your father?”  He hesitated, as if with his hands on old wounds.

“He had his own troubles, but he was kind to her.  It was all misery and folly—he was married.  He wasn’t happy—there were good reasons, I believe, for that.  I know it from letters, I know it from a person who’s dead.  Everyone is dead now—it’s too far off.  That’s the only good thing.  He was very kind to me; I remember him, though I didn’t know then, as a little girl, who he was.  He put me with some very good people—he did what he could for me.  I think, later, his wife knew—a lady who came to see me once after his death.  I was a very little girl, but I remember many things.  What he could he did—something that helped me afterwards, something that helps me now.  I think of him with a strange pity—I see him!” said Mrs. Ryves, with the faint past in her eyes.  “You mustn’t say anything against him,” she added, gently and gravely.

“Never—never; for he has only made it more of a rapture to care for you.”

“You must wait, you must think; we must wait together,” she went on.  “You can’t tell, and you must give me time.  Now that you know, it’s all right; but you had to know.  Doesn’t it make us better friends?” asked Mrs. Ryves, with a tired smile which had the effect of putting the whole story further and further away.  The next moment, however, she added quickly, as if with the sense that it couldn’t be far enough: “You don’t know, you can’t judge, you must let it settle.  Think of it, think of it; oh you will, and leave it so.  I must have time myself, oh I must!  Yes, you must believe me.”

She turned away from him, and he remained looking at her a moment.  “Ah, how I shall work for you!” he exclaimed.

“You must work for yourself; I’ll help you.”  Her eyes had met his eyes again, and she added, hesitating, thinking: “You had better know, perhaps, who he was.”

Baron shook his head, smiling confidently.  “I don’t care a straw.”

“I do—a little.  He was a great man.”

“There must indeed have been some good in him.”

“He was a high celebrity.  You’ve often heard of him.”

Baron wondered an instant.  “I’ve no doubt you’re a princess!” he said with a laugh.  She made him nervous.

“I’m not ashamed of him.  He was Sir Dominick Ferrand.”

Baron saw in her face, in a few seconds, that she had seen something in his.  He knew that he stared, then turned pale; it had the effect of a powerful shock.  He was cold for an instant, as he had just found her, with the sense of danger, the confused horror of having dealt a blow.  But the blood rushed back to its courses with his still quicker consciousness of safety, and he could make out, as he recovered his balance, that his emotion struck her simply as a violent surprise.  He gave a muffled murmur: “Ah, it’s you, my beloved!” which lost itself as he drew her close and held her long, in the intensity of his embrace and the wonder of his escape.  It took more than a minute for him to say over to himself often enough, with his hidden face: “Ah, she must never, never know!”