Chapter XVI: I Try Literature

Next morning at lunch time, as I crossed Long Acre, I caught a glimpse of Michaela, in the gondola of London, steering rapidly northward. A big summer hat, all wild roses and gossamer, half hid her face, like a wild rose itself, pink and white and delicate.

At sight of me she recognised me, and stopped her hansom short for a second to grasp my hand. I was pleased at her remembrance. She had come from Waterloo, she said, and was hurrying now to catch a train at Euston. She looked radiantly happy; I told her so. Her face flushed with pleasure; she leaned forward and confided to me in a thrilling whisper that she was to be married in the autumn to the friend whom she had lost on the day I first met her. I wished her joy, and waved my hand. She vanished, smiling, towards Euston and the Unknown, a phantom once more among the flickering phantoms.

Happy at her happiness, I tripped back to Romeo’s. She was an airy little thing of gauze and bergamot, like a breath of fairyland.

That afternoon Romeo’s talk to me was more human than usual. It was always plain that he wanted to talk, but a sense of the official nature of our relation restrained him often. To-day he spoke much of woman’s place in literature. So many women, he said, wrote of life with a note of personality rare among men. They put more heart in it. Even squalor or crime grew less base when they handled it.

Half unconsciously to myself, I murmured under my breath,

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

I murmured it quite low; but he caught at the words with a sharp gasp. “Where did you see that?” he asked quickly.

I was forced to confess, “The lines occurred in some verses a little friend of mine—I told you of her some days since—had for copy yesterday from a type-writing office.”

I tried not to let him know more; but, for a woman, I am a poor dissembler; my colour or the trembling of my lips betrayed me.

“Did you see the manuscript?” he inquired.

“Yes; I helped her to transcribe it.”

“They promised secrecy!” he cried.

“And you shall have it,” I answered.

He paused a moment. “But _you_ were the last person I would have wished to see them,” he went on, his face twitching.

I knew why. In some of them an allusion, a description—here, a blue-veined eyelid; there, a gloss like a swallow’s wing on a woman’s smooth hair—had seemed to me familiar.

He paced up and down the tawny carpet for awhile. Then he broke out once more. “I have written verse since I was a boy,” he said. “It has ever been my ambition to be found worthy of the crown of poet. But if I printed these lyrics under my own name, what use? I could but give a handle for Sidney Trevelyan to ask in the _Saturday Review_ ‘Is Barabbas also among the prophets?’ Nobody will take a publisher’s rhymes seriously. So I decided to issue mine under an assumed name, and with another firm, that critics might at least be rude to them on their merits. For that purpose I had them type-written—and not by you. I am sorry you have seen them.”

“And I am glad,” I answered. “You may not care for my opinion; but these verses are masterpieces of handicraft. You have the rare gift of reticence. Besides, you understand the fitness of words; you appreciate their melting shades of tone; you feel the emotional atmosphere with which each is girdled.”

“Thank you,” he said, checking himself. “And _you_ are one of the few whose praise I value. You speak well of my work for the qualities I strive to have, not for those I know I have not.”

From that day forth he was much more at home with me. You see, we shared a Secret in common.

When his volume came out, several months later, it made no stir in the world; but it gained the approbation of five or six out of the twenty-three men and women in England who love poetry. It will yet be known, I think; for though the public often flock together like sheep after some noisy impostor, true poetry is always forced upon them from above by the chosen few who can discover and impose it. The few are frequently obscure, and bear no hall-mark; but they know one another by the two gifts which make a critic—insight and foresight.

My knowledge of this book drew me nearer to Romeo. Having once accepted the fact that I knew of his work, he consulted me time and again as to type and paper—sometimes also as to the choice of an epithet or a point of cadence, when two equally-balanced alternatives divided his preference. Should it be _lurid_ or _livid_? was _ruddy_ or _russet_ the better? This led us into talks not altogether official. Though always reticent, he began to treat me less as a type-writer and more as a woman.

This quality of reticence, which I observed in Romeo’s self no less than in his work, impressed me profoundly. I admired his quiet strength, his calm, his urbanity. I am not urbane myself, and I fear I must grant that I am rather vehement than strong; therefore I respected all the more these traits in Romeo. One honours one’s complement above one’s counterpart. He never spoke strongly; he reserved strength for action. A week or two after Sidney Trevelyan’s visit I asked him one day whether the cheap edition of “Mahatmas” was going forward. He smiled his restrained smile, and answered, “No, certainly not; I never intended it.”

“But Mr. Trevelyan was so urgent, so instant; he had quite made up his mind.”

“Yes; that is unimportant. The moment had not arrived, and I told him so, calmly. He is a rock when opposed; but calmness, like faith, can move mountains. I did not oppose him at the time; opposition just then could only have irritated him. I saw the state of his soul; he came to me, seething internally with suppressed wrath at the critics. I let him blow off steam; in such circumstances I judge it unwise to sit upon the safety-valve. He opened his heart and had it out, flinging many hard jibes at me and at the public. That relieved the tension. I let three days pass; then I wrote an ultimatum, stating quietly what I thought. He gave in at once. The cheap edition shall not appear till the autumn.”

Such masculine absence of fussiness pleased me.

Once or twice when I discussed with him he asked me seriously why I had never written. I laughed off his assault. He returned to the charge; so much racy material going to waste in my own adventures. I told him of my work among the East-End slop-makers! “Ready-made stories,” was his verdict. I doubted my own faculty. He was sure I possessed it.

This encouraged me to narrate my experience at Pinfold. “Anarchists!—and they blamed me because I could not fall in love to order!”

“You are an intrepid young lady,” Romeo said. “Do you know, I doubt if you quite realise always in what galleys you have embarked.”

“I think I do,” I answered: “but I have confidence in myself and my guardian angel.”

He urged me to try my hand at a short story of the modern girl who earns her own living in London—“for example, this little friend who uses your type-writer,” he added with a clever side-thrust; I was grateful to him for thus diverting the theme from my own personality: “there is no more pathetic figure in our world to-day than the common figure of the poor young lady, crushed between classes above and below, and left with scarce a chance of earning her bread with decency.”

“I fear,” I said, “I have no knack of pathos; even at difficult turns I am apt to see rather the humorous than the tragic side of things.”

“So I note. But why not try; your own late adventures, for instance?”

I felt that that romance had not yet reached its _dénoûment_; but I refrained from telling him so. I promised to make an attempt, however, with one of my earlier East-End reminiscences, or else with a little vignette of the infant anarchists, unsullied by soap, pulling Commissioner Lin’s tail, while their sisters turned the House that Jack built into Czech and Yiddish.

For a week or two I worked hard in my stray moments at this my poor little literary first-born. I put its phrases in curl-papers till I was sick of twisting them. When it was ripe for the birth, I confess I thought meanly of it. Mine own, but a poor thing, to reverse Touchstone’s saying: I brought it to Romeo, trembling. He read it and was enthusiastic. For the first time now I felt sure he really cared for me; what else could so have blinded his critical faculty? For he was a judicious reader.

He praised it as if it were the work of a consummate artist. His encouragement was unstinted. I will not repeat what he said as to my style; you, who are reading my second effort in that line, would be painfully aware how much personal partiality must have warped his judgment.

“It is so breezy,” he said. “You write open-air English.”

“I learnt it on the moors, among the whins,” I answered.

“This eclogue must go into the magazine!” he cried; for, like most other great houses, the firm published one of its own.

I drew a line at that. “Oh, no,” I cried, flushing. “You are too kind, too generous. I will not allow it to be printed where—where personal acquaintance and your recommendation may disturb the editor’s calmer opinion. I must send it to someone else. Then it will be weighed for what it is worth, and if it is accepted, I shall know on what grounds.”

“But I shall be sorry to lose it,” he exclaimed; “for the magazine’s own sake. When one discovers a new writer, one wishes to keep the full credit of the discovery.”

I looked down to hide my burning cheeks. “No, no,” I said firmly. “You are too flattering—too good. Your”——I paused to think how I could best word it; “your knowledge of me predisposes you too much in my favour.”

He looked at me and hesitated. “Not my knowledge alone,” he corrected; “my . . . friendship, my——”

He did not say “affection”; but we raised our eyes in unison; and in a flash of those eyes each knew that he meant it.

There was a long pause. I was aware of my heart, which called attention to its existence by a violent throbbing. I went back to my machine and began typing mechanically. Then he added all at once, “But quite apart from that, I _want_ this story; I want the honour of publishing it, because I see it is a good one.”

I went on clicking. “You cannot separate these things,” I said, without looking up. “A person is a totality. We do not know, ourselves, how much of any feeling is due to this cause, and how much to that. Nothing ever goes wholly free from either fear or favour. But I have made up my mind. I shall send it to _The Pimlico_.”

I sent it in the end; and, to my great joy, not unmixed with surprise, the editor accepted it, in a chastening letter. He did not say, like Romeo, “a gem of English”; he called it on the contrary, “high-spirited if flippant”; but he printed it none the less, and forwarded me a cheque for twelve guineas.

Twelve guineas! Such wealth seemed to me almost incredible. I felt like an Argonaut.

Still, Romeo was vexed. “We ought to have had it,” he said; “for, after all, you were _my_ discovery.”