Under Two Skies (14 page)

“How despicable!” Evelyn exclaimed.

“Which of us?” asked her father, with a sarcasm he would not have employed towards her in former days.

“That intoxicated wretch, of course!”

Dr. Methuen lashed his horses. “Evelyn,” said he between the strokes, “I profoundly wish that you would be less free with your contempt. There are worse sins than drunkenness, which is chiefly shocking. You should pray to avoid those sins—mark me, they are so much the worse for not looking so bad—and try yourself to be becomingly humble.”

Evelyn, not unnaturally, sulked during the remainder of that drive. She was too much offended to take notice even of the unwonted pace. On reaching the Lodge she went straight to her room. And the Bishop, saddling his riding horse with his own hands, galloped back to the spot where he had left the drunken sleeper. The man was gone. The Bishop had recognised him; he was unaware that the man was then in the recovering stage, and that he had himself been recognised.

He scoured the country. Late in the evening,
which was very dark, with a sandy wind, he rode slowly home, completely crestfallen. He bitterly upbraided himself for having spared Evelyn's feelings with a result infinitely more deplorable than any scene she could have created on the road. He had imagined the poor fellow to be incapable for hours to come. Leaving the horse with the groom, he was following round the picket-fence to the front gate, as the night was so dark, when a figure rose from the ground at his very feet. Dr. Methuen had no time to draw back. Strong arms embraced him, a heart thumped thrice against his own, and then the Bishop was left standing alone, peering into the darkness and dust, and listening to the dying beat of footsteps he should never overtake.

And this was the last he saw of his old schoolfellow's son. Some few weeks later came the noted night when the wholesale jeweller was at length known to be on his way inland to caress the hand that exhibited his merely representative ring. On that night the Bishop read in
The Grazier
of the violent death of Samuel Follet, by drowning, many miles higher up the river. It appeared that the young man's condition had become such as to necessitate a constant supply of watchers; that from one of these he had broken away, jumping into the river and being drowned, as stated. This was all. The Bishop had been alone with it more
than an hour when Evelyn came in to bid him goodnight. The paper was clenched tightly in his two hands. The pipe between his teeth had long been out.

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!”

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 put 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.