Embarrassments

In that single phrase without more ado I discovered his famous remedy.

What was before him for the future was not to do his work but to do what somebody else would take for it. I had the question out with him on the next opportunity, and of all the lively discussions into which we had been destined to drift it lingers in my mind as the liveliest. This was not, I hasten to add, because I disputed his conclusions: it was an effect of the very force with which, when I had fathomed his wretched premises, I took them to my soul. It was very well to talk with Jane Highmore about his standing alone: the eminent relief of this position had brought him to the verge of ruin. Several persons admired his books--nothing was less contestable; but they appeared to have a mortal objection to acquiring them by subscription or by purchase: they begged or borrowed or stole, they delegated one of the party perhaps to commit the volumes to memory and repeat them, like the bards of old, to listening mult.i.tudes. Some ingenious theory was required at any rate to account for the inexorable limits of his circulation. It wasn"t a thing for five people to live on; therefore either the objects circulated must change their nature or the organisms to be nourished must. The former change was perhaps the easier to consider first. Limbert considered it with extraordinary ingenuity from that time on, and the ingenuity, greater even than any I had yet had occasion to admire in him, made the whole next stage of his career rich in curiosity and suspense.

"I have been b.u.t.ting my skull against a wall," he had said in those hours of confidence; "and, to be as sublime a blockhead, if you"ll allow me the word, you, my dear fellow, have kept sounding the charge. We"ve sat prating here of "success," heaven help us, like chanting monks in a cloister, hugging the sweet delusion that it lies somewhere in the work itself, in the expression, as you said, of one"s subject or the intensification, as somebody else somewhere says, of one"s note. One has been going on in short as if the only thing to do were to accept the law of one"s talent and thinking that if certain consequences didn"t follow it was only because one wasn"t logical enough. My disaster has served me right--I mean for using that ign.o.ble word at all. It"s a mere distributor"s, a mere hawker"s word. What _is_ "success" anyhow? When a book"s right, it"s right--shame to it surely if it isn"t. When it sells it sells--it brings money like potatoes or beer. If there"s dishonour one way and inconvenience the other, it certainly is comfortable, but it as certainly isn"t glorious to have escaped them. People of delicacy don"t brag either about their probity or about their luck. Success be hanged!--I want to sell. It"s a question of life and death. I must study the way. I"ve studied too much the other way--I know the other way now, every inch of it. I must cultivate the market--it"s a science like another. I must go in for an infernal cunning. It will be very amusing, I foresee that; I shall lead a dashing life and drive a roaring trade.

I haven"t been obvious--I must _be_ obvious. I haven"t been popular--I must _be_ popular. It"s another art--or perhaps it isn"t an art at all. It"s something else; one must find out what it is. Is it something awfully queer?--you blush!--something barely decent? All the greater incentive to curiosity! Curiosity"s an immense motive; we shall have tremendous sport. They all do it; it"s only a question of how. Of course I"ve everything to unlearn; but what is life, as Jane Highmore says, but a lesson? I must get all I can, all she can give me, from Jane.

She can"t explain herself much; she"s all intuition; her processes are obscure; it"s the spirit that swoops down and catches her up. But I must study her reverently in her works. Yes, you"ve defied me before, but now my loins are girded: I declare I"ll read one of them--I really will: I"ll put it through if I perish!"

I won"t pretend that he made all these remarks at once; but there wasn"t one that he didn"t make at one time or another, for suggestion and occasion were plentiful enough, his life being now given up altogether to his new necessity. It wasn"t a question of his having or not having, as they say, my intellectual sympathy: the brute force of the pressure left no room for judgment; it made all emotion a mere recourse to the spygla.s.s. I watched him as I should have watched a long race or a long chase, irresistibly siding with him but much occupied with the calculation of odds. I confess indeed that my heart, for the endless stretch that he covered so fast, was often in my throat. I saw him peg away over the sun-dappled plain, I saw him double and wind and gain and lose; and all the while I secretly entertained a conviction. I wanted him to feed his many mouths, but at the bottom of all things was my sense that if he should succeed in doing so in this particular way I should think less well of him. Now I had an absolute terror of that.

Meanwhile so far as I could I backed him up, I helped him: all the more that I had warned him immensely at first, smiled with a compa.s.sion it was very good of him not to have found exasperating over the complacency of his a.s.sumption that a man could escape from himself. Ray Limbert at all events would certainly never escape; but one could make believe for him, make believe very hard--an undertaking in which at first Mr. Bousefield was visibly a blessing. Limbert was delightful on the business of this being at last my chance too--my chance, so miraculously vouchsafed, to appear with a certain luxuriance. He didn"t care how often he printed me, for wasn"t it exactly in my direction Mr.

Bousefield held that the cat was going to jump? This was the least he could do for me. I might write on anything I liked--on anything at least but Mr. Limbert"s second manner. He didn"t wish attention strikingly called to his second manner; it was to operate insidiously; people were to be left to believe they had discovered it long ago. "Ralph Limbert?

Why, when did we ever live without him?"--that"s what he wanted them to say. Besides, they hated manners--let sleeping dogs lie. His understanding with Mr. Bousefield--on which he had had not at all to insist; it was the excellent man who insisted--was that he should run one of his beautiful stories in the magazine. As to the beauty of his story however Limbert was going to be less admirably straight than as to the beauty of everything else. That was another reason why I mustn"t write about his new line: Mr. Bousefield was not to be too definitely warned that such a periodical was exposed to prost.i.tution. By the time he should find it out for himself the public--_le gros public_--would have bitten, and then perhaps he would be conciliated and forgive.

Everything else would be literary in short, and above all _I_ would be; only Ralph Limbert wouldn"t--he"d chuck up the whole thing sooner. He"d be vulgar, he"d be rudimentary, he"d be atrocious: he"d be elaborately what he hadn"t been before. I duly noticed that he had more trouble in making "everything else" literary than he had at first allowed for; but this was largely counteracted by the ease with which he was able to obtain that his mark should not be overshot. He had taken well to heart the old lesson of the _Beacon_; he remembered that he was after all there to keep his contributors down much rather than to keep them up. I thought at times that he kept them down a trifle too far, but he a.s.sured me that I needn"t be nervous: he had his limit--his limit was inexorable. He would reserve pure vulgarity for his serial, over which he was sweating blood and water; elsewhere it should be qualified by the prime qualification, the mediocrity that attaches, that endears.

Bousefield, he allowed, was proud, was difficult: nothing was really good enough for him but the middling good; but he himself was prepared for adverse comment, resolute for his n.o.ble course. Hadn"t Limbert moreover in the event of a charge of laxity from headquarters the great strength of being able to point to my contributions? Therefore I must let myself go, I must abound in my peculiar sense, I must be a resource in case of accidents. Lim-bert"s vision of accidents hovered mainly over the sudden awakening of Mr. Bousefield to the stuff that in the department of fiction his editor was palming off. He would then have to confess in all humility that this was not what the good old man wanted, but I should be all the more there as a salutary specimen. I would cross the scent with something showily impossible, splendidly unpopular--I must be sure to have something on hand. I always had plenty on hand--poor Limbert needn"t have worried: the magazine was forearmed each month by my care with a retort to any possible accusation of trifling with Mr. Bousefield"s standard. He had admitted to Limbert, after much consideration indeed, that he was prepared to be perfectly human; but he had added that he was not prepared for an abuse of this admission. The thing in the world I think I least felt myself was an abuse, even though (as I had never mentioned to my friendly editor) I too had my project for a bigger reverberation. I daresay I trusted mine more than I trusted Limbert"s; at all events the golden mean in which in the special case he saw his salvation as an editor was something I should be most sure of if I were to exhibit it myself. I exhibited it month after month in the form of a monstrous levity, only praying heaven that my editor might now not tell me, as he had so often told me, that my result was awfully good. I knew what that would signify--it would signify, sketchily speaking, disaster. What he did tell me heartily was that it was just what his game required: his new line had brought with it an earnest a.s.sumption--earnest save when we privately laughed about it--of the locutions proper to real bold enterprise. If I tried to keep him in the dark even as he kept Mr. Bousefield there was nothing to show that I was not tolerably successful: each case therefore presented a promising a.n.a.logy for the other. He never noticed my descent, and it was accordingly possible that Mr. Bousefield would never notice his.

But would n.o.body notice it at all?--that was a question that added a prospective zest to one"s possession of a critical sense. So much depended upon it that I was rather relieved than otherwise not to know the answer too soon. I waited in fact a year--the year for which Limbert had cannily engaged on trial with Mr. Bousefield; the year as to which through the same sharpened shrewdness it had been conveyed in the agreement between them that Mr. Bousefield was not to intermeddle. It had been Limbert"s general prayer that we would during this period let him quite alone. His terror of my direct rays was a droll, dreadful force that always operated: he explained it by the fact that I understood him too well, expressed too much of his intention, saved him too little from himself. The less he was saved the more he didn"t sell: I literally interpreted, and that was simply fatal.

I held my breath accordingly; I did more--I closed my eyes, I guarded my treacherous ears. He induced several of us to do that (of such devotions we were capable) so that not even glancing at the thing from month to month, and having nothing but his shamed, anxious silence to go by, I partic.i.p.ated only vaguely in the little hum that surrounded his act of sacrifice. It was blown about the town that the public would be surprised; it was hinted, it was printed that he was making a desperate bid. His new work was spoken of as "more calculated for general acceptance." These tidings produced in some quarters much reprobation, and nowhere more, I think, than on the part of certain persons who had never read a word of him, or a.s.suredly had never spent a shilling on him, and who hung for hours over the other attractions of the newspaper that announced his abas.e.m.e.nt. So much asperity cheered me a little--seemed to signify that he might really be doing something. On the other hand I had a distinct alarm; some one sent me for some alien reason an American journal (containing frankly more than that source of affliction) in which was quoted a pa.s.sage from our friend"s last instalment. The pa.s.sage--I couldn"t for my life help reading it--was simply superb. Ah, he _would_ have to move to the country if that was the worst he could do! It gave me a pang to see how little after all he had improved since the days of his compet.i.tion with Pat Moyle. There was nothing in the pa.s.sage quoted in the American paper that Pat would for a moment have owned. During the last weeks, as the opportunity of reading the complete thing drew near, one"s suspense was barely endurable, and I shall never forget the July evening on which I put it to rout. Coming home to dinner I found the two volumes on my table, and I sat up with them half the night, dazed, bewildered, rubbing my eyes, wondering at the monstrous joke. _Was_ it a monstrous joke, his second manner--was _this_ the new line, the desperate bid, the scheme for more general acceptance and the remedy for material failure? Had he made a fool of all his following, or had he most injuriously made a still bigger fool of himself? Obvious?--where the deuce was it obvious? Popular?--how on earth could it be popular? The thing was charming with all his charm and powerful with all his power: it was an unscrupulous, an unsparing, a shameless, merciless masterpiece. It was, no doubt, like the old letters to the _Beacon_, the worst he could do; but the perversity of the effort, even though heroic, had been frustrated by the purity of the gift. Under what illusion had he laboured, with what wavering, treacherous compa.s.s had he steered? His honour was inviolable, his measurements were all wrong. I was thrilled with the whole impression and with all that came crowding in its train. It was too grand a collapse--it was too hideous a triumph; I exalted almost with tears--I lamented with a strange delight. Indeed as the short night waned and, threshing about in my emotion, I fidgeted to my high-perched window for a glimpse of the summer dawn, I became at last aware that I was staring at it out of eyes that had compa.s.sionately and admiringly filled. The eastern sky, over the London housetops, had a wonderful tragic crimson.

That was the colour of his magnificent mistake.

IV

If something less had depended on my impression I daresay I should have communicated it as soon as I had swallowed my breakfast; but the case was so embarra.s.sing that I spent the first half of the day in reconsidering it, dipping into the book again, almost feverishly turning its leaves and trying to extract from them, for my friend"s benefit, some symptom of rea.s.surance, some ground for felicitation. This rash challenge had consequences merely dreadful; the wretched volumes, imperturbable and impeccable, with their shyer secrets and their second line of defence, were like a beautiful woman more denuded or a great symphony on a new hearing. There was something quite sinister in the way they stood up to me. I couldn"t however be dumb--that was to give the wrong tinge to my disappointment; so that later in the afternoon, taking my courage in both hands, I approached with a vain tortuosity poor Limbert"s door. A smart victoria waited before it in which from the bottom of the street I saw that a lady who had apparently just issued from the house was settling herself. I recognised Jane Highmore and instantly paused till she should drive down to me. She presently met me half-way and as soon as she saw me stopped her carriage in agitation.

This was a relief--it postponed a moment the sight of that pale, fine face of our friend"s fronting me for the right verdict. I gathered from the flushed eagerness with which Mrs. Highmore asked me if I had heard the news that a verdict of some sort had already been rendered.

"What news?--about the book?"

"About that horrid magazine. They"re shockingly upset. He has lost his position--he has had a fearful flare-up with Mr. Bousefield."

I stood there blank, but not unaware in my blankness of how history repeats itself. There came to me across the years Maud"s announcement of their ejection from the _Beacon_, and dimly, confusedly the same explanation was in the air. This time however I had been on my guard; I had had my suspicion. "He has made it too flippant?" I found breath after an instant to inquire.

Mrs. Highmore"s vacuity exceeded my own. "Too "flippant"? He has made it too oracular. Mr. Bousefield says he has killed it." Then perceiving my stupefaction: "Don"t you know what has happened?" she pursued; "isn"t it because in his trouble, poor love, he has sent for you that you"ve come?

You"ve heard nothing at all? Then you had better know before you see them. Get in here with me--I"ll take you a turn and tell you." We were close to the Park, the Regent"s, and when with extreme alacrity I had placed myself beside her and the carriage had begun to enter it she went on: "It was what I feared, you know. It reeked with culture. He keyed it up too high."

I felt myself sinking in the general collapse. "What are you talking about?"

"Why, about that beastly magazine. They"re all on the streets. I shall have to take mamma."

I pulled myself together. "What on earth then did Bousefield want? He said he wanted intellectual power."

"Yes, but Ray overdid it."

"Why, Bousefield said it was a thing he _couldn"t_ overdo."

"Well, Ray managed: he took Mr. Bousefield too literally. It appears the thing has been doing dreadfully, but the proprietor couldn"t say anything, because he had covenanted to leave the editor quite free. He describes himself as having stood there in a fever and seen his ship go down. A day or two ago the year was up, so he could at last break out.

Maud says he did break out quite fearfully; he came to the house and let poor Ray have it. Ray gave it to him back; he reminded him of his own idea of the way the cat was going to jump."

I gasped with dismay. "Has Bousefield abandoned that idea? Isn"t the cat going to jump?"

Mrs. Highmore hesitated. "It appears that she doesn"t seem in a hurry. Ray at any rate has jumped too far ahead of her. He should have temporised a little, Mr. Bousefield says; but I"m beginning to think, you know," said my companion, "that Ray _can"t_ temporise." Fresh from my emotions of the previous twenty-four hours I was scarcely in a position to disagree with her. "He published too much pure thought."

"Pure thought?" I cried. "Why, it struck me so often--certainly in a due proportion of cases--as pure drivel!"

"Oh, you"re more keyed up than he! Mr. Bousefield says that of course he wanted things that were suggestive and clever, things that he could point to with pride. But he contends that Ray didn"t allow for human weakness. He gave everything in too stiff doses."

Sensibly, I fear, to my neighbour I winced at her words; I felt a p.r.i.c.k that made me meditate. Then I said: "Is that, by chance, the way he gave _me?_" Mrs. Highmore remained silent so long that I had somehow the sense of a fresh pang; and after a minute, turning in my seat, I laid my hand on her arm, fixed my eyes upon her face and pursued pressingly: "Do you suppose it to be to my "Occasional Remarks" that Mr. Bousefield refers?"

At last she met my look. "Can you bear to hear it?"

"I think I can bear anything now."

"Well then, it was really what I wanted to give you an inkling of. It"s largely over you that they"ve quarrelled. Mr. Bousefield wants him to chuck you."

I grabbed her arm again. "And Limbert _won"t?_"

"He seems to cling to you. Mr. Bousefield says no magazine can afford you."

I gave a laugh that agitated the very coachman. "Why, my dear lady, has he any idea of my price?"

"It isn"t your price--he says you"re dear at any price; you do so much to sink the ship. Your "Remarks" are called "Occasional," but nothing could be more deadly regular: you"re there month after month and you"re never anywhere else. And you supply no public want."

"I supply the most delicious irony."

"So Ray appears to have declared. Mr. Bousefield says that"s not in the least a public want. No one can make out what you"re talking about and no one would care if he could. I"m only quoting _him_, mind."

"Quote, quote--if Limbert holds out. I think I must leave you now, please: I must rush back to express to him what I feel."

"I"ll drive you to his door. That isn"t all," said Mrs. Highmore. And on the way, when the carriage had turned, she communicated the rest.

"Mr. Bousefield really arrived with an ultimatum: it had the form of something or other by Minnie Meadows."

"Minnie Meadows?" I was stupefied.

"The new lady-humourist every one is talking about. It"s the first of a series of screaming sketches for which poor Ray was to find a place."

"Is _that_ Mr. Bousefield"s idea of literature?" "No, but he says it"s the public"s, and you"ve got to take _some_ account of the public. _Aux grands maux les grands remedes_. They had a tremendous lot of ground to make up, and no one would make it up like Minnie. She would be the best concession they could make to human weakness; she would strike at least this note of showing that it was not going to be quite all--well, all _you_. Now Ray draws the line at Minnie; he won"t stoop to Minnie; he declines to touch, to look at Minnie. When Mr. Bousefield--rather imperiously, I believe--made Minnie a _sine qua non_ of his retention of his post he said something rather violent, told him to go to some unmentionable place and take Minnie with him. That of course put the fat on the fire. They had really a considerable scene."

"So had he with the _Beacon_ man," I musingly replied. "Poor dear, he seems born for considerable scenes! It"s on Minnie, then, that they"ve really split?" Mrs. Highmore exhaled her despair in a sound which I took for an a.s.sent, and when we had rolled a little further I rather in-consequently and to her visible surprise broke out of my reverie. "It will never do in the world--he _must_ stoop to Minnie!"

"It"s too late--and what I"ve told you still isn"t all. Mr. Bousefield raises another objection."

"What other, pray?"

"Can"t you guess?"

I wondered. "No more of Ray"s fiction?"

"Not a line. That"s something else no magazine can stand. Now that his novel has run its course Mr. Bousefield is distinctly disappointed."