Chapter XV: Fresh Light on Romeo

“Sidney Trevelyan is a great man,” Romeo said to me later; “but his ideas are _too_ great—especially his idea of his own greatness. This taints life for him: he moves in an atmosphere of social suspicion. ’Tis his fixed belief that all the world is always thinking of him, when it is really doing as he does—thinking of itself. He imagines reporters as a sultan imagines poison, or as a tsar imagines nihilists; he scents a paragraphist in every hedge, and a critic in every stranger.” Which explains, I suppose, his odd behaviour.

But my own opinion is that he needed an audience; I could catch it in his voice that he meant me to overhear; because I affected to be absorbed in my work he thought I was not listening, and that made him angry.

Romeo was kindness itself to me; yet I dare say I might never have grown to know him better had it not been for the special providence of an accident—or the accident of a special providence; put it whichever way best suits your philosophy.

Straying one afternoon through the Cretan labyrinth of Soho, I happened to note a young girl, very poorly dressed, but with the air of a lady, staring in at a confectioner’s. Her face struck a chord. I ransacked my memory for it in vain. Then I recalled in a flash where I had met her before; she was the girl whom I had passed on the stairs at Romeo’s on the day when I went to apply for the situation; the girl whom I had supplanted in the struggle for existence.

Her shrinking figure, her whipped air, made me turn to ask an inevitable question: “Have you found work yet?”

“No, none,” she said dejectedly. “How came you to know I wanted it?”

I explained where I had seen her, and how I had heard or guessed her errand. She seemed unduly grateful. My heart was touched, for though I doubt not you think me, on my own evidence, a heartless young woman, I _have_ a heart, after all, when aught occurs to rouse it. I reflected at once how even my gentle Romeo had said of this poor child that she was hopelessly incompetent. Still, the incompetent have mouths to feed, and bodies to clothe, and possibly, also, souls to save, like the rest of us. The struggle for life has not quite choked out my soul (if I have one). I invited her to my room for a cup of tea, and an ounce of sympathy. Her gratitude was a satire on Christian charity in this town of London. I found she could type fairly well, though quite unintelligently, like a well-trained Chinaman; but she had no machine of her own, and no money to buy one; nor could she undertake work where dictation was necessary; though, given a copy, she could reproduce each word with mechanical fidelity.

It flashed across me at once that all day long I was away at Romeo’s, and did not need my machine. “Better come here,” I said, “and use it. I will find you manuscripts to transcribe; we have plenty of such work to give away at the office.”

She fawned on me like a dog accustomed to ill-treatment, and for once used kindly. The ravenous way in which she ate bread and butter would have satisfied even the Charity Organisation Society as to the genuineness of her hunger. She was painfully grateful. Her gratitude distressed me. After that we became fast friends. It is true, she was terrified at the first smell of tobac—— But I forget; that delinquency I have hitherto concealed from you. However, she used my machine every day, and I helped her in the evenings. Pale, blue-eyed, colourless, with thin hair tied up in a knot the size of a nutmeg, she was built on the same lines as Michaela (whom I always remembered), but with this trifling difference—that Michaela was rich, while my new little friend had not a cent to bless herself with. One was bound in Morocco, with gilt edges; the other, a cheap edition, in paper covers.

Her name was Elsie, her front name, that is to say; for she had another, I suppose, a surname; but I took no heed of it. Surnames lie on the surface of things, and do not interest me. They are of this age, utilitarian; while I, who dwell ever in Once-upon-a-time, care little save for the persons and dates of fairyland. We give each other surnames, indeed, only so long as we are mutual phantoms; once pierce to the underlying realities of human life, and we call one another by pet names, like so many children.

In time Elsie became to me a sort of adopted daughter. She was older than I to be sure; but her helplessness and incompetence inspired in me at last that sense of motherliness which we women love—does it not come out in us even toward our dolls in childhood? Her affection was canine. I found work for her from a type-writing office hard by—simple work, selected with a special eye to her limitations. She toiled at it with that patience which one observes in the squirrel who turns the unceasing treadmill of his cage; for minds of a certain calibre prefer routine, which would kill a thinking animal, to any task that calls for the slightest exercise of intelligence. As long as she was permitted to go on copying like a machine, Elsie was perfectly happy: a doubt or a query seemed (as she said) to comb her brain; she lost heart before an alternative.

I spent little time in my room myself, save for the strict necessaries of sleep and breakfast; at other times I was driven out of it by a work of art on the walls—the Portrait of a Locket. It represented, or rather represents (for doubtless it still exists), a gold locket and chain, reposing on an ample black silk bosom, with a woman’s face and hands in the background. The face and hands, so far as can be seen, are fat and placid; the hands crossed; the face featureless. Flesh-tints and modelling, however, cast much rude work upon the imagination. I had not courage enough to suggest the removal of this gem to my landlady, who valued it highly as “a real oil-painting”; but it, and two vases, drove me out, I will not say to the public-house, but to the public buildings. I retired at odd moments to my drawing-room in the National Gallery, or to the hospitable electric light of the British Museum. Elsie, on the other hand, was not repelled by the locket or the lady. I had now no use for my machine, and she worked on it constantly. She and the Commissioner struck up a violent friendship. It did her good to have some living creature at hand in the room to whom she could talk in the intervals of click-clicking. To enlarge her circle I added in time a starling and a canary, whom we christened Beef and Mustard. The canary was Mustard because of his colour, and the starling Beef because there was so much more of him.

One of the points which had barred Elsie’s way in the matter of obtaining employment, she felt profoundly convinced, was her religious opinions, which were soundly narrow. This happily enabled her, like Rothenburg, to gild her penury with the halo of the martyr.

For myself, I suspect that incompetence had more to do with her failure than religious prejudice; but that is a private conviction. She was a Positivist, or a Plymouth Sister, or a member of some other uncanny small sect; I will plead guilty to discriminating ill these minor brands of creed; I am hazy as to the true distinction between General and Particular Baptists (though, perhaps, a Particular Baptist uses soap); and I always mix up Swedenborgians with Irvingites. It was a surprise to Elsie to find that her form of faith seemed to me a question of small import either way. I hold that most men are human, and, still more, most women. My tolerance astonished her. When I suggested that perhaps at that very minute Swedenborg and Irving, John Knox and Thomas à Kempis, might perchance be gazing down upon us with kindly eyes and an amused smile from some sequestered garden bench in one of the spacious pleasure-grounds of the Celestial City, where they sat in rapt converse with the soul of John Glas, who first prospected her own strictly provincial path to Paradise, she turned her face to me with mingled delight and terror. My view seemed to her sweet but highly heterodox. She refused to her God a breadth of sympathy which she instinctively admired in a fellow-creature.

One evening I came home and found Elsie at work on a piece of transcription which was evidently too deep for her. It was poetry, she said, in an awed whisper: she had been given it at the office under a promise of secrecy. But the arrangement of the long and short lines of complicated stanzas, which needed some care in the adjustment of margins, was evidently beyond her. She looked tired and worried, and was mildly tearful. “Besides, dear,” she said, smoothing my hair, “there are such difficult words in it—words nobody could spell; not even you, I believe—such as _myrrh_ with two _r_’s and an _h_. I can’t manage them anyhow.”

“Dictate to me,” I said; “I can write for a bit. I’ve not done much to-day, and I’m hardly the least bit tired.”

She dictated several strophes. I was not surprised that she found the words hard. “Chrysoprase” “mandragora,” “anaglyph,” “Libitina”—these lay some miles outside poor little Elsie’s vocabulary.

At first I noticed only the rare richness of the language, the many-faceted words, set like jewels so as to show their full beauty; gradually, as she dictated, I began to be aware that the verses she read aloud to me in her infantile sing-song were not merely rhyme but also poetry. I do not pretend to the name of critic; but I judged them to be written with limpid felicity. They had that artlessness which comes of the apt use of the perfect word without show of effort. Each noun and adjective fell so naturally into its place that one fancied the writer could have used no other—till one began to reflect that only studious care results in so absolute a sense of inevitability. And the poems were statuesque; they had none of the tropical exuberance of our time; they were Greek in their austerity.

“Who is the author?” I asked, curious to know the name of the poet with this Ionic note, new to our English Helicon.

“They didn’t tell me. They wished me not to know. He particularly desired that his verses should be kept secret.”

She went on dictating in her mechanical way. My hand struck the keys rapidly. At last she paused, near the close of a curious variant on the Spenserian stanza. “There’s a word I can’t make out,” she murmured. “‘True woman has the magic’ _something_——”

I took the manuscript from her hands.

“True woman has the magic Midas gift;
Touched by her hand, dull clay transmutes to molten gold.”

But that was not what made me give a sudden cry of surprise, and then turn red as a peony. The verses were written in Romeo’s hand. And Romeo was their author.

In a second I was buried in them, like a bee in a crocus. I felt he was even more to me than before. I had believed him a publisher; now I knew him a poet. No Barabbas, but a Byron.

How long I lay awake in my garret that night—thinking of whom but of Romeo!