Leonard Merrick

“ All Paris seemed to have surged on to the Boulevard, thronging the pavements and the roads, and playing the fool. He pushed forward as best he could, and tried the Grand, in the faint hope that the other might be dining there, or that something could be learnt of his movements, but he was able to learn nothing. After all, he thought, it would have been wiser to inquire at the bar in the rue Saint-Honoré; and retracing his steps, he now pressed through the crowd in the direction of the Madeleine, impeded and pelted with confetti at every yard. ”

“ He has known everything before he comes to her, and she has known nothing. She's told that it doesn't matter, that it's right. She doesn't believe it in her heart —the more she loves him, the less she believes it—but she tries to persuade herself she believes it. It's wrong—wrong! To him she's a new girl, and to her he is a new world. How can marriage be the same thing to both. You didn't love her, but you gave yourself to her. Could a husband think less of his wife's sin for a reason like that?"
Kent rose, and stood beside her dumbly. ”

“ Walford looked at him indignantly.
"Ha!" he said. "It's a nice position, 'pon my word! And no news, I suppose—nothing fresh?".
"Nothing, sir."
"You'll have to chuck it all. You'll have to chuck this folly of yours, and put your shoulder to the wheel and work."
"I thought I did work," said Kent doggedly. "Do you think literature is a game?"
"I think it's an infernal rotten game—yes!"
"Ah, well, there," said Kent, "many literary men have agreed with you."
"You'll have to put your mind to something serious. If you only earn thirty bob a week, it's more than your novels bring you in. ”

“ I don't want to pose on the strength of a solitary novel—I'm not arrogant—but let me know something—at all events, more than you! Heavens above! a novelist devotes his life to trying to learn the technique of an art which it wants three lifetimes to acquire, and Mr. Jones, who is a solicitor, and Mr. Smith the shoe manufacturer, and little Miss Pink of Putney, who don't know the first laws of fiction —who aren't even aware there are any laws to know—are all prepared to tell him how his books should be written. ”

“ At the age of nineteen Humphrey had realised that, with no stock-in-trade beyond an education and a bundle of rejected manuscripts, it was incumbent on him to fight the world unassisted, and, suppressing his literary ambitions as likely to tell against him, he had betaken himself to some connections who throve in commerce and had been socially agreeable. To be annihilated by a sense of your own deficiencies, seek an appointment at the hands of relations. ”

“ Beaufort put out his tongue and drank some more of the contents of the tumbler thirstily.
"That'll be all right," he said, yawning; "don't you bother about that!"
"But the point is, that I want it now," said Kent. "I dare say it would be 'all right,' but I'm in need of it this morning. My bill came up on Monday, and I put the woman off till yesterday—I can't put her off any more."
"What? Is this the first week you owe her? My boy, a week! I haven't paid my bill here for eleven weeks. Let her wait."
"You haven't a wife," said Kent. "I have. It's damned unpleasant for a girl, I can tell you!" ”

“ You mustn't mind my speaking plainly, Humphrey. You are a young man, and—er—you have no one to advise you, and you may thank me for it one day."
"Let me thank you now," he said, fighting to conceal his rage.
"If you can," she said; "if you feel it, I am very glad. You see what you have done: you wrote a book, which you got very little for—some nice reviews"—she smiled meaningly—"which we needn't talk about. And then you spend a year on another, which nobody wants. To succeed as a novelist, one must have a very strong gift; there is no doubt about it. ”

“ Then your aunt what-was-her-name left you the thousand pounds, and you chucked your berth and sat down to a novel. 'Nothing happens but the unforeseen'—the result justified you. You sold your novel; you got a hundred quid for it; and The Saturday, and The Spectator, and every paper whose opinion is worth a rush, hails you as a coming light. For you to consider marrying now would be flying in the face of a special providence."
"Why?" said Humphrey Kent.
"'Why'! Are you serious? Because your income is an unknown quantity. Because you've had a literary success, not a popular one. ”

“ Kent pulled his moustache silently, and there was a moment's pause.
"Than us!" said the lady again defiantly. "Unquestionably it is 'than us!"
"Very well," he replied; "I'm not arguing about it, mater."
"I always say 'than us,'" said Sam Walford good-humouredly. "Ain't it right?"
"No," said Miss Wix; "of course it isn't, Sam!"
"Ridiculous!" declared Mrs. Walford, with asperity. "'Than we' is quite wrong—quite ungrammatical. I don't care who says it isn't—I say it is."
"A literary man might have been supposed to know," said Miss Wix ironically. "But Humphrey is mistaken too, then?" ”

“ Neither wanted anybody else, nor, in point of fact, did Humphrey know many men to invite. For time to attend the wedding the journalist had applied to his Editor on the grounds of "a bereavement," and as he watched Kent collect possessions, and pore over a Continental Bradshaw, and fondle the sacred ring, he was more than ever convinced that he had used the right term.
It was a wet evening—the eve of the wedding-day. A yellow mist hung over Soho, and a light rain had fallen doggedly since noon, turning the grease of the pavements to slush. ”

“ Walford, "I must say I agree with Humphrey; I must say I think it's very clever to write a good novel—I do really! I couldn't write one; I'm sure I couldn't—I haven't the patience."
"Oh!" exclaimed Cæsar, with charming confusion; "it's Humphrey's own line—of course it is! I always forget." He turned to Kent deprecatingly: "You know, I never associate you with it; it's a surprise every time I remember." ”

“ There was a lengthy pause—a thing that had seldom occurred between them—followed by platitudes.
"Well," he murmured, getting up, "I'm afraid I must go."
She did not press him to remain.
"Must you?" she said. "I dare say we shall meet again. It's a small world in every sense."
"I hope we shall. Au revoir, and bon voyage, Mrs. Deane-Pitt."
"If you should go back yourself, you'll come to see me? You know where I live."
"Thank you; I shall be very glad."
But as he went down the stairs Kent was surprised to perceive that he felt suddenly mournful. ”

“ Deane-Pitt.
"How d'ye do, Mr. Kent? Are you trying to cut me?"
"I beg your pardon, I didn't see! It's awfully stupid of me; I'm always passing people like that."
"You've returned, then! For good?"
"Oh yes; we live in town, you know—in the suburbs, at least."
"You told me," she smiled. "'Battersea.'"
"So I did. 'Battersea' is Streatham, but that's a detail."
The mechanicalness of his utterance passed, and animation leapt back in him as he recovered from his surprise. The sun was shining and her sequins were iridescent. She was wearing violets. ”

“ It shows the light hand, which has grown no heavier, though it has grown surer, the little effervescence of cynicism, with never a hiccough in it, the underlying, deeply-funded sympathy with real things, great things and fine things, and the seriousness of aim which, tantalisingly, stops short just where you want it to go on, and provokes the reader to get every book of Mr. Merrick's as it appears, just to see him let himself go—which he never does. He is one of the most discreet dissectors of the human heart we have. ”

“ Beaufort believed in Turquand's opinion, and had always thought him a fool for being so shabby, knowing him to have ten times the brain-power that he himself possessed, and Turquand had blown Humphrey's trumpet sturdily. He did more than merely recommend him; he declared—with a recollection of the nurse and baby—that Kent was the man to get, but that he was afraid it would not be worth his while to accept less than seven pounds a week. ”

“ To 'like' and to 'criticise'——Men are paid to criticise books when they can do it; it's thought to be worth payment. Editors, who don't exactly bubble over with generosity, sign cheques for reviews. I don't pretend to teach Mr. Smith how to make his shoes; I've sense enough to understand that he knows the way better than I. Nor do these people think that they can teach a painter how to compose his pictures, or that they can give a musician lessons in counterpoint. Why on earth should they imagine they're competent to instruct a novelist? ”

“ Julian's last goes into a fourth edition next week," observed Turquand grimly, "if that's any encouragement to you."
"Good Lord," said Kent, "it only came out in January! Is that a fact?"
"One of 'Life's Little Ironies'! Hers is the kind of stuff to sell, my boy! The largest public don't want nature and style; they want an improbable story and virtue rewarded. The poor 'companion' rambles in the moonlight and a becoming dress, and has love passages in the grounds at midnight—which wouldn't be respectable, only she's so innocent. ”

“ A man is so lost without a watch. Saturday? Saturday will be mi-carême, won't it? We shall celebrate it nicely.... Oh!" She sat upright, and stared at him with frightened eyes. "Humphrey—Nurse!"
His jaw dropped, and he looked back at her blankly.
"I'd forgotten her," he said.
"To see our luggage detained—it could only mean the one thing! Humphrey, what would she think? What can we do? She mustn't, mustn't know; I should die of shame." ”

“ I cannot now remember a single interesting novel about a novelist. There is Pendennis of course; but who believes that Pen was a great novelist, or cares what kind of a novelist he was? Who cares about Walter Lorraine? Would anybody give twopence to read it? The reason is that in the poet the manifestations of literary genius are direct and explicit—some are susceptible of quotation, some may be cut out with the scissors—while in the novelist they are oblique and implied. Humphrey Kent in Cynthia is in no sense an explicit genius; we are not, in fact, told that he was a genius at all. ”

“ There was much for Kent to consider besides the novel. Also there were anticipations in which they momentarily united and he felt her to be as close to him as she was dear. But these moments could not make a life; and despite the fact that the time when they expected their baby to be born was rapidly approaching, he was living more and more within himself. Cynthia had no complaint to make against him; if marriage was not altogether the elysium that she had imagined it would prove, she did not hold that to be Humphrey's fault. ”

“ When Turquand came in, it had shaped. Saying that he had work to do, Kent left him, and went upstairs. He drew a chair to the table, and sat down and wrote—slowly, painfully. The man was an artist, and he could not help the care he took. He sneered at himself for it. Mrs. Deane-Pitt had impressed on him that anything would do, and here he was meditating and revising as if it were a story to submit to the most exclusive of the magazines in his own name. He dashed his pen in the ink, and threw a paragraph on the paper. ”

“ Deane-Pitt took the boy on her lap, among the folds of her elaborate tea-gown, and fondled him. "Do you think I make a nice mother, Mr. Kent?" she said, flashing a glance. "This monkey doesn't appreciate his privileges." She kissed the child three times, and in the gaze that she lifted over his curly head there was, for an instant, provocation that shook the man. ”

“ There is hope for the man who boasts of what he means to do; there is hope for the boaster who lies about what he is doing; but the man whose weakness is to boast of what he once did is doomed—he is a man who will succeed no more. If the sporting Baronet had grasped this fact, The World and his Wife would never have been started, and Billy Beaufort would not have been looking for an assistant-editor to do all the work.
Kent obtained the post. ”

“ The only fault I have to find with my wife is that she's the Walford's daughter. She's not literary, but she's a very good girl. Don't blink facts, Turk; my money would have lasted longer if I hadn't married, but I shouldn't have got my novel taken on that account. The point of this situation is that, after being lauded to the skies by every paper of importance in England, I can't place the book I write next at any price at all, nor find a way to earn bread and cheese by my pen! If a musician had got such criticisms on a composition, he'd be a made man. ”

“ The tales tickled the fancy of the Editor for whom they were intended. They tickled it so much that he asked Mrs. Deane-Pitt to contribute regularly for a few months; and the lady accepting the compliment and the invitation, Kent continued to supply The Society Mirror with an idyll, or a tragedy, or a comedy every week, astonished at his own fecundity.
It was amazing how his hand was emboldened, I his imagination stimulated, by the knowledge that his work was accepted before it was penned. There were weeks during which he turned out a story for Mrs. Deane-Pitt nearly every day. ”

“ He knew that it was folly, in a man like himself, with whom literature was a profession, and not a luxury, though he was aware at the same time that he would never be able to help it—that to the end there would be nights when he went up to bed having written no more than a hundred words all day, and yet went up with elation, because, rightly or wrongly, he felt the hundred words to have been admirably said. ”

“ He was conscious, just as he had been conscious in Paris, when he had informed her casually of the supper in the avenue Wagram, that it was as much the weakness of his character as its nobility which urged him to voice the load that lay on his mind; but, weak or noble, the longing was always there, and at times it mastered him completely.
Sleet began to fall, and he went into a tea-room and ordered some coffee. A copy of Fashion lay on the table, and, mechanically turning the pages, he noticed that the feature of the issue was an instalment of a story in three parts by Lady Cornwallis. ”

“ She was still Cynthia—more than ever Cynthia, he understood; but there had been a fascination when "Cynthia" was a goddess to him, which an acquaintance with strings and buttons had destroyed. The corylopsis stood in a squat little bottle with a silver lid among brushes and hair-pins on a toilet-table, and his senses swam no more when he detected its faintness on her frock.
Companionship, and not worship, was required now, and neither found the other quite so companionable as had been expected. This the girl in her heart excused less readily than the man. ”

“ Their rambles together had a charm which one associates with a honeymoon, but in which their own honeymoon had been lacking. In these rambles Kent was never bored; it appeared to him delightful to place himself in her hands and be taken where she listed in the April twilight. To seek shelter from showers in strange quarters was adventurous; and milk had a piquancy drunk with Cynthia in farmyards. He signed the extension of the Streatham agreement with gladness. ”

“ It is not whether he can be a good novelist and a good lover too, but whether he can be a good novelist and pay his bills. That's not very exciting, though George Gissing in New Grub Street drew out of it a squalid and miserable tale which, once begun, had to be finished. Luckily, in Cynthia, Mr. Merrick finds a secondary theme, and handles it so delicately and so tenderly that the book has an abiding charm because of it. That theme is the growth of Cynthia's soul. ”

“ Cynthia was standing in the middle of the room, pale and frightened. She had her hat on; the baby, dressed for the streets, was clasped in her arms.
"She won't let the luggage go," said Kent hoarsely. "God knows what's come to her—I don't! Perhaps she thinks we were trying to get out more than was arranged; she swears now that she promised nothing. Come on; it's no good waiting. There's a cab at the door, let's go!"
"But—but what shall we do?" faltered the girl. "Humphrey, Baby must have his things; it's impossible to do without them! ”

“ Cynthia was upstairs, playing with the baby, and Kent went in and shut the door that communicated with the nursery.
"What is it?" she asked, after a glance at his face.
He wondered if he could soften the news, but it did not lend itself to euphemisms. He told it to her in as light a tone as he could acquire.
"It won't be for any length of time, and we can easily make shift for a bit," he said. "It isn't as if the child's things had to be left behind, you see. A handbag will hold all we really need for ourselves. What do we want, after all, for a week? ”

“ She did not, however, take any steps to gratify the desire, and Kent was not regretful. He felt that few things more productive of boredom for two could be devised than a tête-à-tête between Mrs. Deane-Pitt and Cynthia; and, though he was reluctant to acknowledge it to himself, he had a feeling also that, if it occurred, the lady would be a little contemptuous of him afterwards. He knew her opinion of young men's marriages in the majority of cases, and was uncomfortably conscious that she would not pronounce his own to be one of the exceptions. ”

“ They drove down the dusty hill listening to her. The girl spoke scarcely at all, and the onus of appearing entertained devolved upon Kent. When the fiacre deposited them at the hotel at last, he drew a sigh in which relief and apprehension mingled. Cynthia followed her mother upstairs, and he caught a glance from her, and smiled his gratitude; but he questioned inwardly what would be the upshot of the announcement that she was about to make. He perceived with some amusement that he was on the verge of an experience of whose terrors he had often read. He was a candidate for a young lady's hand. ”

“ Cynthia pointed radiantly to a letter lying on the table.
"For you," she cried, "from Cousins! Be quick; we're all dying of impatience. How did you leave Aunt Emily?"
"She's going to bed," he said, tearing the envelope open.
His heart had leapt, and he trusted only that he wasn't destined to be damped by the suggested price. The others sat regarding him eagerly, waiting for him to speak. Cynthia tried to guess the amount by his expression.
"Well?" said Mrs. Walford at last—"Well? What do they say?"
Kent put the note down; all the colour had gone from his face. ”

“ The child missed her, when he woke at eight o'clock, if she was not at home to run in to him; she wanted to practise on the wheezy piano; there was needle-work she was compelled to do—always something!
The first time, Kent was merely disappointed, and came back early in low spirits; but after the third of his solitary walks, misgivings oppressed him with double weight. She was indifferent—no other explanation was possible; she was indifferent, and no longer chose to mask it!
"You're always busy," he told her at last. "I miss you dreadfully, Cynthia. ”

“ Do you remember Willy Holmes, Cynthia, and the tales he used to tell me? I used to think that young man was so steady, I was always quoting him! And it turned out he was a regular scapegrace and everybody knew it all the time, and had been laughing at me. I've given up believing in any one, Mr. Kent—in anyone, do you hear?" She shook the splendours of her hat at him, and gasped and gurgled archly. "I've no doubt you're every bit as bad as the rest!"
He answered with some inanity. Miss Walford asked him a question, and he took a seat beside her in replying. Turquand sat down too. ”

“ There's nothing to be gained. What does one acquire? Whether Angelina marries Edwin, or whether she marries Charles——!" He shook his head and smiled compassionately. Sam Walford guffawed. "When I feel that my mind's been at too great a tension, I sometimes glance at a novel; but I'm afraid—I'm really afraid—I can't concede that I should be justified in giving up an afternoon to one."
"Cæsar has his work to think of, you know," put in Cynthia; "he's not like us women."
"You'll find it a tough job to get the best of Cæsar in an argument," proclaimed Walford boisterously. ”

“ A woman may have little comprehension of her husband's work, and yet feel the tenderest sympathies for the disappointments that it brings him, but of this platitude the novelist had shown himself ignorant.
Cynthia did not go up to her room at once. She sat down by the dying fire and wondered. She wondered—in the hour in which she had come mentally nearest to him—if, after all, Humphrey and she were united so closely as she had supposed. ”

“ At the moment that he was moved to the demonstration, however, she was really wishing that the dressmaker had cut the corsage of her blue theatre frock square, instead of in a "V." She was sure it would have looked much better. He was agreeably conscious that his mind had "something feminine in it" and congratulated himself on his insight into hers. Some men would have failed to comprehend! Cynthia was distressfully conscious that the tears with which she was fighting had made her nose red, and she longed for an opportunity to use her powder-puff. ”

“ As the man mounted to the box, a woman approached with whom they had grown rather friendly in the house, and, seeing Humphrey with the bag, she came to the cab-window and put amiable and maddening questions as to where they were going and when they were coming back. Kent was voiceless, but Cynthia leant forward and replied. In the midst of his misery and abasement, he admired his wife for the composure she contrived to simulate in such a moment. ”

“ Kent."
"You may give him all the good advice you can. I've said before that I like Mrs. St. Julian's stories, but Humphrey has made up his mind not to. That's firmness, I suppose, as he is a man!" She laughed.
"Turk didn't imply that he liked them either. Isn't it painful, though, to think of the following a woman like that can command? What a world to write for—it breaks one's heart!"
"It's an over-rated place," said Turquand; "it's a fat-headed, misguided, beast of a world!"
"It isn't the world," said Cynthia brightly; "it's the people in it!" ”

“ When Kent and Cynthia entered and beheld it so, suspense tightened its grip about their hearts.
The mail would not be delivered until about nine o'clock, and when they judged that the hour was near, they sat with tense nerves, straining to hear Etienne's heavy footsteps on the landing. As yet they had not arranged where to remove to on the morrow, and they spoke disjointedly of the necessity for deciding something. Kent said that it would be desirable to have two rooms in the new place also; then they would be able to talk when the baby was asleep; in one room it would be awful. ”