Under Two Skies Page 11

  Of late there had been little enough in common between Evelyn and her father; but to-night she desired to say more than the customary three words. She was in great spirits, naturally; she wanted to talk. She shut the door and sat down; she sat down in the chair in which Follet had sat night after night for nearly five months.

  “Do not sit there, Evelyn.”

  Dr. Methuen had found his voice, but to Evelyn it seemed a new voice. It was harsh, yet it quavered. She rose hastily, and as she rose the diamonds on her finger lightened under the lamp.

  “Why not?”

  “Because—because I wish to be alone.”

  She stooped to kiss him.

  “Do not kiss me!” he cried, pushing back his chair.

  “Why—why ever not?”

  “I am smoking strong tobacco.”

  “You are not; your pipe is out.”

  “I don’t think so,” said the Bishop, pulling in quite good faith at cold tobacco. “Good-night, Evelyn.”

  “You are vexed with me!” exclaimed the girl, indignantly. “I shan’t go until you tell me the reason. Pray, what have I done?”

  Then the Bishop could contain it no longer; though he never forgave himself for what he did. He jumped up, holding out the paper, and answered with a trembling finger on the place:

  “This!”

  An Idle Singer.

  I.

  “I have it!” cried the Editor suddenly.

  Adeane, who was spoken to, looked up quickly, but a little mechanically, for his mind was inconveniently preoccupied with the sestett of an unwritten sonnet; and “it” was merely the subject of his prose contribution to the Christmas Number of the Spider. Still, as this contribution meant as many sovereigns in Adeane’s pocket as the sonnet would fetch shillings, he was compelled to roll down from poetic heights, to trump up a look of acute personal interest, and to ask what “it” was to be after all.

  The Editor of the Spider—who was the Spider—got up from his chair and went into a corner where a small table stood stacked with new books. He chuckled as he found the book he wanted, and he handed it to Adeane with an air of occult humour.

  “The Lesser Man,” Adeane read aloud from the cover. “But I don’t see who it’s by?”

  “Anonymous—some woman, in spite of the title.”

  Adeane glanced at the title-page, but it was innocent of previous record: this was a first conviction.

  “All right,” said he, tucking the volume under his arm, and letting his soul soar back to the sestett “I suppose you aren’t in a great hurry for the review?”

  “Review! I didn’t say anything about a review, did I?” The Spider spoke rather sharply; and really Adeane was very absent. “We were talking about your thing for the Christmas Number. I want you to fill a couple of pages with your smartest stuff—something in story shape, but topical. And you say you can’t get a subject. Very good, here’s your subject: write me a smart, tart skit on The Lesser Man, and it’ll be the very thing—the very thing!”

  “Is it so popular?” asked Adeane, who worked too hard to keep quite abreast of the literary current.

  “Now, my dear Mr. Adeane!” said the Spider, with a kind of fatherly compassion for his youthful contributor, “both press and public are idiotic about this book; I’m surprised you haven’t heard of it. I haven’t read it, but I’ve glanced at it, and it looks pretty good, though plainly feminine; it’s highly impassioned, and a little embittered; and the title’s ironical—one for us. There’s humour in the title before you touch it! I saw no humour anywhere else, but that’s all the better; you’ll extract lots. Popularity apart, from what I’ve seen and heard of it, the book was made to burlesque; some books are. Mind you mangle the title; it’s a pity there’s no author’s name to hash up as well; but you must just do your best, Mr. Adeane.”

  “I’ll certainly try to,” Adeane said earnestly, with the timorous humility with which he treated all his editors in those days. But he had just skimmed half a page of The Lesser Man and seen a phrase that pleased him, and he could not help adding, a little nervously: “It does seem a bit unkind, though!”

  “Unkind!” The Spider seized on the word with evident glee. “That’s it exactly; you must make it so. Unkindness is the soul of parody, and we may as well own it. Good nature is insipid, Mr. Adeane, too insipid for the Spider. As for parody, why it is the greatest flattery there is, and a far sincerer sort than imitation; besides which, it’s the best advertisement a book can have. But don’t try to do the thing by halves. Laugh loud if you laugh at all. Make fun of the whole thing, and of the public that reads it. That’s it. Show up the British public and their precious taste. That’s the touch! Copy by the twentieth, and your weekly stuff as usual. Good afternoon, Mr. Adeane, and glad to have seen you.”

  Those were the days of Adeane’s apprenticeship. The particular day on which he carried home a copy of The Lesser Man, for what he euphemistically described to a man in the street as “a professional purpose” occurred in the second year of Adeane’s sojourn in London, and in the twenty-third of his age. He was at this time beating round the financial Horn, and not yet out of dangerous waters; in fact, his income was trembling between two and three figures a year. He was a literary free-lance, and more or less a poet; more by inclination, by necessity less. At present he could afford to mix very little verse with his assorted prose. Verse supplied but a doubtful tithe of that extremely doubtful hundred a year. On the other hand, more than half of this income was derived from the Spider.

  There is little to be said about the Spider. It dealt with most things, and it seldom dealt gently. It cost a piece of silver, it was nicely printed, its wrapper suggested respectability and good taste, and from some points of view the paper may have justified its publication. Certainly the Christmas and Summer Numbers were in fair demand; but these were something special. In the ordinary way it was written by a clever, if a slightly lawless, crew; and Adeane was glad enough to be one of them; though if he found one paper absolutely unreadable (with the exception of his own things, over which he was inclined to gloat when they were in type) that paper was the Spider.

  Now Adeane was a curious compound, or rather, he would have been a curious compound if he had not been a poet. Being a poet it was no more than his duty to be peculiar; it showed that he did not look upon himself as superior to his position, or to other poets. Yet his peculiarities were not on the surface. His hair was not long. His coat was not velvet. His neck-tie did not flow, neither did his hat slouch. He shaved himself at least as regularly as other young men whose beards have not yet arrived at their full strength. He even did without glasses, that sure sign of ink, if not of poetry. Externally, in a word, Adeane was the most incomplete of all poets. But internally—

  Well, he might have been worse. He was self-centred, but not self-seeking; he was hard-working, and wonderfully persevering, though in many ways weak; and if he was not always quite admirable, he was very lovable—which is something. It is true that he had lofty ideals which he made no earnest effort to realise, and principles which he did not exert himself to live up to personally; and his intimate friend, Digby Willock, who had a legal mind, but no principles and no ideals, had certainly the advantage of him here; but for all that there was some good in Adeane, quite apart from his brains.

  He carried The Lesser Man between two and three miles to his lodging, which so far consisted of one room only. But he forgot about the book as he walked; he had got back to his sestett, and his mind did not quit it again for some time. The words seemed very nearly to have sorted themselves by the time he reached his room. He sat down for a minute to write them roughly; and the minute lasted a couple of hours. For it is one thing to get a poem into your head, and another thing to get it out again, on paper. The fitting together of any form of verse is the most soul-possessing employment to be found; but its hard-and-fast requirements render the sonnet the greatest strain of all. Adeane did not even smoke during those two hours, nor pause to p
ut on his slippers; yet he was a terrible fellow for his slippers and his pipe. But when he did rise he had not only ground the thing out at last but rewritten it, and enclosed it in an envelope, with an “accompanying note.” Moreover, he took that sonnet to the post before either looking at his slippers or smelling tobacco; and after many days it brought back ten-and-sixpence.

  Rid at last of the sonnet, which had been with him all day, Adeane washed his mind of it with bird’s-eye, relit the fire (versifying invariably put it out) and carelessly cut open The Lesser Man.

  An hour later Adeane’s landlady came up with tea and eggs, the poet’s repast. She kept him very comfortable up in his garret; there was nothing she would not do for him. The gas was lit, and the poet was lying on his bed reading. The landlady introduced the tea in a word or two of rather timid entreaty, received no answer, and discreetly retired. Her young man was reading much too attentively to look up from his book or to speak to her.

  She returned in another hour. Adeane had not moved; his tray was untouched, and the woman felt personally stung, and complained. But Adeane only opened his mouth to refuse sustenance, waved his hand as from another world, and was once more left in peace, reading now with a ravenous, glistening eye.

  “Is Mr. Adeane in?” a young fellow inquired at the street door later in the evening.

  “Well, now, Mr. Willock, you’re the very gentleman I wanted to see,” cried Mrs. Trotter, with warm welcome, and an air of personal relief. “He is in, sir; but he wants rousing—he wants rousing very bad. He’s lying like a log, a-reading some new trash or other he brought home this afternoon. He won’t look an’ he won’t speak, and, would you believe it, he’s never touched his tea, though it was that strong it might ha’ lifted his ‘air off, which he will persist in, though I tell him what it’ll end in till I’m sick and tired. And the eggs done as he likes ’em to a second. What do you think o’ that, sir? What am I to do with him?”

  “It’s very sad,” said Willock, clicking his tongue and affecting concern; “but, you see, he’s a poet. They’re all either sad, or bad, or mad. Our friend’s all three by turns. I’ll run up and see which it is tonight.”

  “Do, sir. It’s what he wants, to have somebody at him. But, Mr. Willock, happen he fancies his eggs still, I’ve more good ’uns where them came from, or I could send for a chop, as he’s been so long fasting—”

  “All right, I’ll see,” said Willock, running upstairs, and adding to himself: “The spoilt baby! Heaven, what a soft place he manages to find in the female heart!”

  Now, Adeane had been intensely moved by The Lesser Man. His eyes had been frequently dimmed by sudden, swift, surprising touches. Over one situation he had cried like a girl. The story was entrancing, in spite of its bitterness. The title turned out to be the finest bit of feminine irony Adeane had yet met with. It was the kind of story he fancied he might have written himself, had he written stories at all; in that case it would have made him jealous, as of words snatched out of his mouth; as it was, it satisfied his soul.

  But the spell had relaxed, as such spells will, even before the arrival of Digby Willock. Adeane had thrown down the book after finishing it, and been for some time perambulating the floor with his hands in his pockets and a cutty in his mouth; he had walked himself back into realities; he had smoked himself into the frame of mind required by the Spider. At first, indeed, he had been weak enough to think of returning the book to the Spider, with a sturdy, independent letter; but he had conquered that temptation as he conquered few others. Perhaps it was not a really powerful temptation. And no doubt the smoking had blunted his moral sense. For already, actually, he had seen the comic side of the situation which had upset him, and made a note or two for his own version of that scene; and Willock found him with the fag-end of a grin on his lips—in very queer contrast to certain signs about the eyes.

  And Willock incurred—on the spot, and without the option of other refreshment—a dose of The Lesser Man, so potent and so absurdly sweet as to prejudice anybody against the best book ever written. But Willock knew better than to listen; he knew Adeane of old. He hadn’t read the book, he rarely did read novels; he only read his law books and the amusing papers; but he was a kind of intimate friend of Adeane—not a very true friend—and he pretended to listen, and caught a sentence here and there. He sneered when the poet paused. He had a trick of sneering at Adeane in a quasi-friendly way, which Adeane used to note, as he noted most things, more on reflection than at the moment.

  “So this is the best book you ever read in your life, eh?”

  “I believe it is, upon my word,” said Adeane, childishly. “In some ways it most certainly is.”

  “But you always say that,” rejoined Willock, rolling up his smooth upper lip and showing his teeth. “It always is the last love with you.”

  “Not always now, hang it!” cried Adeane, quite earnestly. He was fully conscious of a certain fickle strain in his character; he was beginning to get reconciled to this, as you do get reconciled to your faults between twenty and thirty. “But it is a treat to be able to like a new book unstintedly, and to be in a position to say so.”

  “Are you going to say so in the Spider?”

  “What?”

  “Are you going to review the book?”

  “No, I’m not” Adeane hesitated. “The fact is,” he explained, with a frank little laugh, “I’m going to guy it for the Spider’s Christmas Number; it’s had a great run, you know.”

  “I like that. That’s choice!” murmured Willock, in pure self-congratulation. He had a sense of humour which could not be gratified too often; he frequently looked up Adeane just to have it gratified. “So you’re going to burlesque the book you’ve been crying over.”

  His upper lip was furled nearly to his nose, but Adeane himself was laughing heartily. “My dear fellow, it’s the fortune of war—war against poverty,” he said; “besides, it will really burlesque rather easily—genius always does.”

  “But do you like doing it?” asked Willock, who had not to work for his living, and lacked the imagination to appreciate Adeane’s position.

  “My dear old chap, you know I don’t.”

  “No, I’m not omniscient. For one thing I should have thought it was against those principles of yours to turn into rot what you think so admirable.”

  “Well, it is against them,” Adeane owned.

  “Then why do it?”

  “Well, I must.”

  “Then why have principles?”

  Willock was filing his fingers upon his chin; he was quite grave, and looking at his friend in a psychological light, as he generally did. The result gratified in some subtle way his peculiar order of mind. But Adeane laughed again, and still good-humouredly.

  “Confound you,” he said, “I’m not in the witness-box, nor are you public prosecutor—yet. Come, I say, I can’t stand your shrewd questions to-night. Besides, after all, there’s no greater advertisement for a book than a skit on it; the Spider said so this afternoon, and the thing’s obvious.”

  “Much the Spider cares about the advertisement!”

  “But I do.”

  “Come, I don’t think the advertisement has much to do with it in your case either,” said Willock, buttoning up his coat; and this rankled with Adeane when he remembered it afterwards: for it was perfectly true.

  “Will you come out and see something?” Willock added.

  “No, thanks; I shall be working late.”

  “Good-night, then. No, I won’t have anything to drink,” said the legal limb, looking askance at what Adeane offered him; he was as bad as a teetotaller, and he could not refuse to drink—at all events with Adeane—without a faint suggestion of personal superiority. Some men are like this.

  “I’m afraid he doesn’t like me so much as he used to,” Adeane said rather sadly to himself; not because he had a particularly exalted opinion of Digby Willock, but because they had been greater friends once than they were now, and he had very few
friends in the world; and also because liking to be liked was his weakest point but one.

  But Willock had met the landlady on the stairs with a loaded tray. And he was thinking:

  “A set of principles, for ornament, not use; the fine art of self-humbug; a secret passage to the feminine soft side, and vanity, which goes without saying. These seem to be the chief points of the poetic temperament; and they’re not so amusing as they used to be.”

  II.

  It fell out later that the name of Adeane became known in the town. To his own thinking, and to that of the two or three who had watched his unsigned career, this happened only in the fulness of time; but for the rest of the world his name was made in a moment. It seems incredible, but he did the trick with a parcel of verses. Variations the book was called, and its shade was olive, and its edges rough. On the title-page it came out for the first time, even to many who knew him pretty well, that his Christian name was Bertram; and very old maids, and very young girls, said that Bertram and Adeane “went” sweetly together. The chances are that the queerest name might get sweetened by association with lovable work; and this is just what Adeane’s work was. His notes were sweet, his tone tender, his manner airy; but it was a lovable something, on every page, in every stanza, that sold Variations.

  A new poet was wanted, to cultivate the masses, to educate the classes, to elevate the age, and to hustle up the millennium. That poet is wanted still. The post remains vacant. Adeane never applied for it. He had neither the qualifications nor the temperament of a professional prophet. He was no Thinker: he could simply sing; and he owed half his success to his doing very well what it was well within him to do—the other half to his knowing where to stop. He lacked the public spirit of a social thorough-cleaner: he let the dust lie on the old order of things, save where he traced his verses in it, and his finger but skimmed it then—he never handled the corruption underneath. For he was confessedly of the minor poets: in an age infested with them he had the insolence to come forward and make one more. He was a minor poet to the marrow; he never tried to be anything better. But in one respect (apart from his unorthodox personal tidiness) he was differentiated from the other ruffians of the band: he was a minor poet with no sort of preference for the minor key.