Robert Barr

“ Trenton saw the most astonishing account of his ideas on art matters imaginable. What struck him most forcibly was, that an article written by a person who admittedly knew nothing at all about art should be in general so free from error. The interview had a great number of head lines, and it was evident the paper desired to treat the artist with the utmost respect, and that it felt he showed his sense in preferring Boston to New York as a place of temporary residence; but what appalled him was the free and easy criticisms he was credited with having made on his own contemporaries in England. ”

“ Now, am I not good?”
“No, you are cruel,” replied Mason. “You are going up to the falls. I insist on that. Let’s take that as settled. The canoe is yours.” He caught an encouraging look from his wife. “If you want to torture me you will say you will not go. If you want to do me the greatest of favours, you will let my friend go in the canoe with you to the landing.”
“What! go alone with a stranger?” cried Miss Sommerton, freezingly.
“No, the Indians will be there, you know.”
“Oh, I didn’t expect to paddle the canoe myself.” ”

“ My experience is rather limited, of course, but, as far as it goes, I find good and bad in all nations. There are Englishmen whom I find it impossible to like, and there are Americans whom I find I admire in spite of myself. There are also, doubtless, good Englishmen and bad Americans, if we only knew where to find them. You cannot sum up a nation and condemn it in a phrase, you know.”
“Can’t you? Well, literary Englishmen have tried to do so in the case of America. No English writer has ever dealt even fairly with the United States.” ”

“ But perhaps her chief delusion was the belief that she was an artist. She had learned all that Boston could teach of drawing, and this thin veneer had received a beautiful foreign polish abroad. Her friends pronounced her sketches really wonderful. Perhaps if Miss Sommerton’s entire capital had been something less than her half-yearly income, she might have made a name for herself; but the rich man gets a foretaste of the scriptural difficulty awaiting him at the gates of heaven, when he endeavours to achieve an earthly success, the price of which is hard labour, and not hard cash. ”

“ Miss Sommerton saw that he was a handsome man, and wondered this had escaped her notice before, forgetting that she had scarcely deigned to look at him. She thought he had spoken to her with inexcusable bluntness at the falls, in refusing to destroy his plate; but she now remembered with compunction that he had made no allusion to his ownership of the boat for that day, while she had boasted that it was hers. She determined to return and send one of the boatmen up to awaken him, but at that moment Trenton suddenly opened his eyes, as a person often does when some one looks at him in his sleep. ”

“ The construction of staterooms is such that every word uttered in one above the breath is audible in the next room; Miss Jessop could not help hearing the whole controversy, from the time the steward was ordered so curtly to remove the portmanteau, until the culmination of the discussion and the evident defeat of Mr. Hodden. Her sympathy was all with the other fellow, at that moment unknown, but a sly peep past the edge of the scarcely opened door told her that the unnamed party in the quarrel was the awkward young man who had found her book. ”

“ Now, when each man’s place in literature is so clearly defined, it seems ridiculous to state that there was a time when Kenan Buel thought J. Lawless Hodden a great novelist. One would have imagined that Buel’s keen insight into human nature would have made such a mistake impossible, but it must be remembered that Buel was always more or less of a hero-worshipper. ”

“ I want to be a dependence. I admit the conquest. I wish to swear fealty to Miss Eva Sommerton of Boston, and now I ask my third question, will you accept the allegiance?”
Miss Sommerton was a little slow in replying, and before she had spoken Mrs. Lennox bustled in, and said—
“Oh, Mr. Trenton, I have been looking everywhere for you. There are a hundred people here who wish to be introduced, and all at once. May I have him, Miss Sommerton?”
“Well, Mrs. Lennox, you know, if I said ‘Yes,’ that would imply a certain ownership in him.” ”

“ The captain, who was now in excellent humour, walked the deck and chatted affably with every one. A successful voyage had been completed. Miss Jessop feared the coming of the customs boat as much as Hodden feared the reporters. If anything, he was the more resigned of the two. What American woman ever lands on her native shore without trembling before the revenue laws of her country? Kenan Buel, his arms resting on the bulwarks, gazed absently at the green hills he was seeing for the first time, but his thoughts were not upon them. ”

“ Blundering foreigners—foreigners as far as Boston is concerned, although they may be citizens of the United States—considered Boston to be a large city, with commerce and railroads and busy streets and enterprising newspapers, but the true Bostonian knows that this view is very incorrect. The real Boston is penetrated by no railroads. Even the jingle of the street-car bell does not disturb the silence of the streets of this select city. It is to the ordinary Boston what the empty, out-of-season London is to the rest of the busy metropolis. ”

“ It was the first time he had ever been on board a steamship, and he could not trust himself unguided to explore the depths below, and see what kind of a state-room and what sort of a companion chance had allotted to him. They had told him when he bought his ticket that the steamer would be very crowded that trip, so many Americans were returning; but his state-room had berths for only two, and he had a faint hope the other fellow would not turn up. As he paced the deck his thoughts wandered to the pretty girl who did not buy his book. ”

“ Mason, you would never think of committing such an act of sacrilege?”
“Sacrilege, indeed! I like that. Why, the man who makes one saw-mill hum where no mill ever hummed before is a benefactor to his species. Don’t they teach political economy at Boston? I thought you liked saw-mills. You drew a very pretty picture of the one down the stream.”
“I admire a ruined saw-mill, as that one was; but not one in a state of activity, or of eruption, as a person might say.”
“Well, won’t you go up to the falls to-day, Miss Sommerton? I assure you we have a most unexceptionable party. ”

“ The table in the centre of the room was already set for two, and the array of wine-glasses around each plate looked tempting. Brant pushed the electric button, drew up his chair, and said—
“Sit down, Buel, sit down. What’s your favourite brand of wine? Let’s settle on it now, so as to have no unseemly wrangle when the waiter comes. I’m rather in awe of the waiter. It doesn’t seem natural that any mere human man should be so obviously superior to the rest of us mortals as this waiter is. ”

“ She is a lady, there is no doubt of that. There is nothing of the backwoods about her. But she might at least have answered me. What have I done, I wonder? It must be something terrible and utterly unforgivable, whatever it is. Great heavens!” he murmured, aghast at the thought, “I hope that girl isn’t going up to the Shawenegan Falls.”
Trenton was no ladies’ man. The presence of women always disconcerted him, and made him feel awkward and boorish. He had been too much of a student in higher art to acquire the smaller art of the drawing-room. ”

“ But during his absence it appeared Boston had awakened to the fact that in its midst had resided a real live artist of prominence from the other side, and nothing had been done to overcome his prejudices, and show him that, after all, the real intellectual centre of the world was not London, but the capital of Massachusetts. ”

“ Unless I’m a Dutchman there will be, after your new book is published. Of course, that is one of the things no fellow can find out. If he could, publishing would be less of a lottery than it is. A book is sometimes a success by the merest fluke; at other times, in spite of everything, a good book is a deplorable failure. ”

“ He got his third publisher a year after that. He thought he would never succeed in getting the same firm twice, and wondered what would happen when he exhausted the London list. It is not right that a man should go on for ever without a word of encouragement. Fate recognised that there would come a breaking-point, and relented in time. The word came from an unexpected source. Buel was labouring, heavy-eyed, at the last proof-sheets of his third book, and was wondering whether he would have the courage not to look at the newspapers when the volume was published. ”

“ But there are some things that do not commend themselves to me, and those I ventured to touch upon lightly on one or two occasions, much to the displeasure of a section of the inhabitants—a small section, I hope.”
“Don’t you think,” ventured Buel, “that a writer should rather touch on what pleases him than on what displeases him, in writing of a foreign country?”
“Possibly. Nations are like individuals; they prefer flattery to honest criticism.”
“But a writer should remember that there is no law of libel to protect a nation.”
To this remark Mr. Hodden did not reply. ”

“ It means fame; it means wealth; it means that you have turned the corner; it means you have the world before you; it means everything. Those young men are not reporters to you; they are the heralds of fame, my boy. A few of them may get there themselves some day, but it means that you have got there now. Do you realise that?”
“Hardly. I suppose, then, the book has been a success?”
“A success? It’s been a cyclone. I’ve been fighting pirates ever since it came out. You see, I took the precaution to write some things in the book myself.”
Buel looked alarmed. ”

“ Let me go back with you to the Three Rivers, and then you stay with me till next week, when you can visit the falls all alone. It is very pleasant at Three Rivers just now. And besides, we can go for a day’s shopping at Montreal.”
“I wish I could.”
“Why, of course you can,” said Mason. “Imagine the delight of smuggling your purchases back to Boston. Confess that this is a pleasure you hadn’t thought of.”
“I admit the fascination of it all, but you see I am with a party that has gone on to Quebec, and I just got away for a day. I am to meet them there to-night or to-morrow morning. ”

“ We will have a band of trained Indians stationed at the landing, and they will allow no one to disembark who does not express himself in sufficiently ecstatic terms about the great cataract. You will draw up a set of adjectives, which I will give to the Indians, instructing them to allow no one to land who does not use at least three out of five of them in referring to the falls. People whose eloquent appreciation does not reach the required altitude will have to stay there till it does, that’s all. ”

“ If the picture of the falls is at all correct, as I expect it will be, then your picture will be nothing but a shadow unrecognisable by any one.”
“But they do take pictures with the cataract as a background, do they not? I am sure I have seen photos of groups taken at Niagara Falls; in fact, I have seen groups being posed in public for that purpose, and very silly they looked, I must say. I presume that is one of the things that has prejudiced me so much against the camera.”
“Those pictures, Miss Sommerton, are not genuine; they are not at all what they pretend to be. ”

“ You strike me as a girl who would paddle her own canoe pretty well.”
“Now, Edward,” said his wife. “He wants to take some photographs of the falls, and—”
“Photographs? Why, Ed., I thought you said he was an artist.”
“Isn’t a photographer an artist?”
“You know he isn’t.”
“Well, my dear, you know they put on their signs, ‘artist—photographer, pictures taken in cloudy weather.’ But he’s an amateur photographer; an amateur is not so bad as a professional, is he, Miss Sommerton?”
“I think he’s worse, if there is any choice. A professional at least takes good pictures, such as they are.” ”

“ People thrive on the condescension of the great; they like it, and boast about it. Yet Buel did not seem to be pleased. But the most astounding thing was that the young man should actually have taken it upon himself to lecture Miss Jessop once, when they were alone, for some remarks she had made to Hodden as she sat in her deck-chair, with Hodden loquacious on her right and Buel taciturn on her left. What right had Buel to find fault with a free and independent citizen of another country? ”

“ There is only one thing to try, and it is this—Miss Sommerton must think that the canoe is hers. You must appeal to her generosity to let Mr. Trenton go with her.”
“Won’t you make the appeal, Jen?”
“No, I will not. In the first place she’ll be sorry for you, because you will make such a bungle of it. Trial is your only hope.”
“Oh, if success lies in bungling, I will succeed.”
“Don’t be too sure. I suppose that man will be here by daybreak to-morrow?”
“Not so bad as that, Jennie. You always try to put the worst face on things. He won’t be here till sunrise at the earliest.” ”

“ Hodden?” asked the girl.
“That is a hard question to answer. I think, however, that one of the most deplorable features of American life is the unbridled license of the Press. The reporters make existence a burden; they print the most unjustifiable things in their so-called interviews, and a man has no redress. There is no escaping them. If a man is at all well known, they attack him before he has a chance to leave the ship. If you refuse to say anything, they will write a purely imaginative interview. ”

“ I have never had the good fortune to become acquainted with any of our celebrated writers. I would think it a privilege to know Hodden and some of the others.”
“You’re lucky, and you evidently don’t know it. I would rather meet a duke any day than a famous author. The duke puts on less side and patronises you less.”
“I would rather be a celebrated author than a duke if I had my choice.”
“Well, being a free and independent citizen of the Democratic United States, I wouldn’t. No, sir! I would rather be Duke Brant any day in the week than Mr. Brant, the talented author of, etc., etc. ”

“ Buel was perfectly satisfied with the meal, and thought if they produced a better one in New York, or anywhere else, the art of cookery had reached wonderful perfection. Brant, however, kept apologising for the spread as he went along. The talk drifted on in an apparently aimless fashion, but the publisher was a shrewd man, and he was gradually leading it up to the point he had in view from the beginning, and all the while he was taking the measure of his guest. He was not a man to waste either his time or his dinners without an object. ”

“ My dear Buel, no city is a pleasant place for a poor man to live in. I don’t suppose New York is worse than London in that respect. The poor have a hard time of it anywhere. A man owes it to himself and family not to be poor. Now, that’s one thing I like about your book ”

“ And what you say makes me sigh for dear old London. How honest they are, and how little they care for money there! They don’t put up the price 50 per cent. merely because a girl has an American accent. Oh no. They think she likes to buy at New York prices. And they are so honourable down in the city that nobody ever gets cheated. Why, you could put a purse up on a pole in London, just as—as—was it Henry the Eighth—?”
“Alfred, I think!” suggested Buel.
“Thanks! As Alfred the Great used to do.”
Mr. Hodden looked askance at the young woman. ”

“ Trenton’s acquaintance with Mason was about a fortnight old, but already they were the firmest of friends. Any one who appreciated the Shawenegan Falls found a ready path to the heart of the big lumberman. It was almost impossible to reach the falls without the assistance of Mr. Mason. However, he was no monopolist. Any person wishing to visit the cataract got a canoe from the lumber king free of all cost, except a tip to the two boatmen who acted as guides and watermen. The artist had not long to wait for his answer. ”