The Cords of Vanity Part 38

This millionaire was lonely, because of his millions, and Stella was dead; and somehow I understood, and laid one hand upon his shoulder.

"Oh, _you_ can't help it, I suppose, if all women love by ordinary because he is so like another person, where as men love because she is so different. My poor caliph, I would sincerely advise you to play the fool just as you plan to do,--oh, anywhere,--and without even a Mesrour.

In fine go Bunburying at once. For very frankly, First Cousin of the Moon, it is the one thing worth while in life."

"I half believe I will," said Peter.... So he was packing in the interim during which I pretended to be writing, and was in reality fretting to think that, whilst Avis was in England by this, I could not decently leave America until those last five chapters were finished. So, in part as an excuse for not scrawling the dullest of nonsense and subsequently tearing it up, I fell to considering the unquestionable fact that I was in love with Avis, and upon the verge of marrying her, and was in consequence, as a matter of plain logic, deliriously happy.

"For when you are in love with a woman you, of course, want to marry her more than you want anything else. In nature, it is a serious and--well, an almost irretrievable business. And I shall have to cultivate the domestic virtues and smoke cheaper cigarettes and all that, but I shall be glad to do every one of these things, for her sake--after a while. I shall probably enjoy doing them."

And I read Bettie Hamlyn's letter for the seventeenth time....

4

For Bettie had answered the wild rhapsody which I wrote to tell her how much in love I was with Elena Barry-Smith. And in the nature of things I had not written Bettie again to tell her I was, and by a deal the more, in love with Avis Beechinor. The task was delicate, the reasons for my not unnatural change were such as you must transmit in a personal interview during which you are particularly boyish and talk very fast.

Besides, I do not like writing letters; and moreover, there was no real need to write. I was going to Gridlington; what more natural than to ride over to Fairhaven some clear morning and tell Bettie everything? I pictured her surprise and her delight at seeing me, and reflected it would be unfair to her to render an inaccurate account of matters, such as any letter must necessarily give.

Only, first, there was the garden of Peter's aunt,--which sounds like an introductory French exercise,--and then Avis came. And, somehow, I had not, in consequence, traversed the scant nine miles that lay as yet between me and Bettie Hamlyn. I kept on meaning to do it the next day.

And the next day after this I really did.

"For I ought to tell Bettie about everything," I reflected. "No matter if the engagement is a secret, I ought to tell Bettie about it."

5

When I had done so, Bettie shook her head. "Oh, Robin, Robin!" she said, "how did I ever come to raise a child that doesn't know his own mind for as much as two minutes? And how dared that Barry-Smith person to slap you, I would like to know."

"Now you're jealous, Bettie. You are thinking she infringed upon an entirely personal privilege, and you resent it."

"Well,--but I've the right to, you see, and she hadn't. I consider her to be a bold-faced jig. And I don't approve of this Avis person either, you understand; but we poor mothers are always being annoyed by slushy, mushy Avises. I suppose there's a reason for it. She'll throw you over, you know, as soon as _her_ mother has had an inning or two. That's why she took her to Europe," Bettie explained, with a fine confusion of personalities. "Only she just wanted any quiet place where she could take aromatic spirits of ammonia and point out between doses that she has given up her entire life to her child and has never made any demands on her and hasn't the strength to argue with her, because her heart is simply broken. We mothers always say that; and the funny part is that if you say it often enough it invariably works far better than any possible argument."

I told her she was talking nonsense, and she said, irrelevantly enough: "Setebos, and Setebos, and Setebos! I don't think very highly of Setebos sometimes, because He muddles things so. Oh, well, I shan't cry Willow.

Besides there _aren't_ any sycamore-trees in the garden. So let's go into the garden, dear. That sounds as if I ate in the back pantry, doesn't it? Of course you aren't of any account any more, and you never will be, but at least you don't look at people as though they were a new sort of bug whenever they have just thought a sentence or two and then gone on, without bothering to say it."

So we went into Bettie's garden. It had not changed....

6

Nothing had changed. It was as though I had somehow managed, after all, to push back the hands of the clock. Fairhaven accepted me incuriously.

I was only "an old student." In addition, I was vaguely rumoured to write "pieces" for the magazines. Probably I did; "old students" were often p.r.o.ne to vagaries after leaving King's College; for instance, they told me, Ralph Means was a professional gambler, and Ox Selwyn had lately gone to Shanghai and had settled there,--and Shanghai, in common with most other places, Fairhaven accorded the negative tribute of just not absolutely disbelieving in its existence.

Nothing had changed. The Finals were over; and with the noisy exodus of the college-boys, Fairhaven had sunk contentedly into an even deeper stupor, as Fairhaven always does in summer. And, for the rest, the unpaved sidewalks were just as dusty, the same deep ruts and the puddles which never dry, not even in mid-August, adorned Fairhaven's single street; the comfortable moss upon Fairhaven's roofs had not varied by a shade; and George Was.h.i.+ngton or Benjamin Franklin might have stepped out of any one of those bra.s.s-knockered doorways without incongruity and without finding any noticeable innovation to marvel at.

Nothing had changed. In the precise middle of the campus Lord Penniston, our Governor in Colonial days, still posed, in dingy marble; and the fracture of the finger I had inadvertently broken off, the night that Billy Woods and I painted the statue all over, in six colours, was white and new-looking. Kathleen Eppes had married her Spaniard and had left Fairhaven; otherwise the same girls were already planning their toilets for the Y.M.C.A. reception in October, which formally presents the "new students" to society at large; and presently these girls would be going to the germans or the Opera House with the younger brother of the boy who used to take them thither....

Nothing had changed; not even I was changed. For I had soon discovered that Bettie Hamlyn did not care a pin for me in myself. She was simply very fond of me because, at times, I reminded her of a boy who had gone to King's College; and her reception of me, for the first two days, was unmistakably provisional.

"Very well!" I said.

And I did it. For I knew how difficult it was to deceive Bettie, and in consequence all my faculties rose to the challenge. I did not merely mimic my former self, I was compelled, almost, to believe I was indeed that former self, because not otherwise could I get Bettie Hamlyn's toleration. Had I paused even momentarily to reflect upon the excellence of my acting, she would have known. So I resolutely believed I was being perfectly candid; and with constant use those older tricks of speech and gesture and almost of thought, at first laborious mimicry, became well-nigh involuntary.

In fine, we could not wipe away five years, but with practice we found that you would very often forget them, and for quite a while....

I had explained to Bettie's father I was going to board with them that summer. Had I not been so haphazard in the progress of this narrative, I would have earlier announced that Bettie's father was the Latin professor at King's College. He was very old and vague, and his general att.i.tude toward the universe was that of remote recollection of having noticed something of the sort before. Professor Hamlyn, therefore, told me he was glad to hear of my intended stay beneath his roof; hazarded the speculation that I had written a book which he meant to read upon the very first opportunity; blinked once or twice; and forthwith lapsed into consideration of some Pliocene occurrence which, if you were to judge by the expression of his mild old countenance, he did not find entirely satisfactory....

So I spent three months in Fairhaven; and Bettie and I read all the old books over again, and were perfectly happy.

7

And what I wrote in those last five chapters of my book was so good that in common decency I was compelled to alter the preceding twenty-nine and bring them a bit nearer to Bettie's standard. For I was utilising Bettie's ideas. She did not have the knack of putting them on paper; that was my trivial part, as I now recognised with a sort of scared reverence.

"Of course, though, you had to meddle," I would scold at her. "I had meant the infernal thing to be a salable book. To-day it is just a stenographic report of how these people elected to behave. I haven't anything to do with it. I wash my hands of it. I consider you, in fine, a cormorant, a conscienceless marauder, a meddlesome Mattie, _and_ a born dramatist."

"But, it's _much_ better than anything you've ever done, Robin--"

"That is what I'm grumbling about. I consider it very unfeeling of you to write better novels than I do," I retorted. "But, oh, how good that scene is!" I said, a little later.

"Let's see--'For you, dear clean-souled girl, were born to be the wife of a strong man, and the mother of his dirty children'--no, it's 'st.u.r.dy', but then you hardly ever cross your T's. And where he goes on to tell her he can't marry her, because he is artistic, and she is too practical for them to be real mates, and all that other feeble-mindedness? Dear me, did I forget to tell you we were going to cut that out?"

"But I particularly like that part--"

"Do you?" said Bettie, as her pen scrunched vicious lines through it.

Then she said: "I only hope she had the civility and self-control not to laugh until you had gone away. And 'We irrelevant folk that design all useless and beautiful things,' indeed! No, I couldn't have blamed her if she laughed right out. I wonder if you will never understand that what you take to be your love for beautiful things is really just a dislike of ugly ones? Oh, I've no patience with you! And wanting to print it in a book, too, instead of being content to make yourself ridiculous in tete-a-tetes with minxes that don't especially matter!"

"Well--! Anyhow, I agree with you that, thanks to your editing and carping and general scurrility, this book is going to be," I meekly stated, "a little better than _The Apostates_ and not just 'pretty much like any other book'."

"Do you know that's just what I was thinking," said Bettie, dolefully.

She clasped both hands behind her crinkly small black head, and in that queer habitual pose appraised me, from between her elbows, in that way which always made me feel I had better be careful. "d.a.m.n you!" was her verdict.

"Whence this unmaidenliness?" I queried, with due horror.

"You are trying to prove to me that it has been worth while. This nasty book is coming alive, here in our own eight-cornered room, with a horrid crawly life of its own that it would never have had if you hadn't been learning things my boy knew nothing about. That's what you are crowing in my face, when you keep quiet and smirk. Oh, but I know you!"

"You do think, then, that, between you and me, it is really coming alive?"

"Yes,--if that greatly matters to the fat literary gent that I don't care for greatly. Yes, the infernal thing will be a Book, with quite a sizable B. I am feeding its maw with more important things than a few ideas, though. The thing is a monster that isn't worth its keep. For my boy was worth more than a Book," she said, forlornly,--"oh, oceans more!"

8

All in all, we were a deal more than happy during these three very hot months. It was a sort of Lotus Eaters' existence, shared by just us two, with Josiah Clarriker intruding occasionally, and with echoes from the outer world, when heard at all, resounding very dimly and unimportantly.

I began almost to a.s.sume, as Fairhaven tacitly a.s.sumed, that there was really no outer world, or none at least to be considered seriously....

For instance: Marian Winwood had come to Lichfield, and wrote me from there, "hoping that we would renew an acquaintance which she remembered so pleasurably." It did not seem worth while, of course, to answer the minx; I decided, at a pinch, to say that the Fairhaven mail-service was abominable, and that her letter had never reached me. But the young fellow who two years ago had wandered about the Green Chalybeate with her had become, now, as unreal as she. I glimpsed the couple, with immeasurable aloofness, as phantoms flickering about the mirage of a brook, throwing ghostly bread crumbs to Lethean minnows.

And then, too, when the police caught Ned Lethbury that summer, it hardly seemed worth while to wonder about his wife. For she was, inexplicably, with him, all through the trial at Chiswick, you may remember, though you were probably more interested at the time by the Humbert trial in Paris. In any event, no rumor came to me in Fairhaven to connect Amelia Lethbury with Nadine Neroni, but, instead, a deal of journalistic pity and sympathy for her, the faithful, much-enduring wife. Still quite a handsome woman, they said, for all her suffering and poverty.... And when he went to the penitentiary, Amelia Lethbury disappeared, n.o.body knew whither, except that I suspected Anton von Ans.p.a.ch knew. I could not explain the mystery. I did not greatly care to, for to me it did not seem important, now....