GEOFFREY BETTON woke rather late — so late that the winter sunlight sliding across his warm red carpet struck his eyes as he turned on the pillow.
Strett, the valet, had been in, drawn the bath in the adjoining dressing-room, placed the crystal and silver cigarette-box at his side, put a match to the fire, and thrown open the windows to the bright morning air. It brought in, on the glitter of sun, all the shrill crisp morning noises — those piercing notes of the American thoroughfare that seem to take a sharper vibration from the clearness of the medium through which they pass.
Betton raised himself languidly. That was the voice of Fifth Avenue below his windows. He remembered that when he moved into his rooms eighteen months before, the sound had been like music to him: the complex orchestration to which the tune of his new life was set. Now it filled him with horror and weariness, since it had become the symbol of the hurry and noise of that new life. He had been far less hurried in the old days when he had to be up by seven, and down at the office sharp at nine. Now that he got up when he chose, and his life had no fixed framework of duties, the hours hunted him like a pack of blood-hounds.
He dropped back on his pillows with a groan. Yes — not a year ago there had been a positively sensuous joy in getting out of bed, feeling under his bare feet the softness of the sunlit carpet, and entering the shining tiled sanctuary where his great porcelain bath proffered its renovating flood. But then a year ago he could still call up the horror of the communal plunge at his earlier lodgings: the listening for other bathers, the dodging of shrouded ladies in “crimping”-pins, the cold wait on the landing, the reluctant descent into a blotchy tin bath, and the effort to identify one’s soap and nail-brush among the promiscuous implements of ablution. That memory had faded now, and Betton saw only the dark hours to which his blue and white temple of refreshment formed a kind of glittering antechamber. For after his bath came his breakfast, and on the breakfast-tray his letters. His letters!
He remembered — and that memory had not faded! — the thrill with which he had opened the first missive in a strange feminine hand: the letter beginning: “I wonder if you’ll mind an unknown reader’s telling you all that your book has been to her?”
Mind? Ye gods, he minded now! For more than a year after the publication of “Diadems and Faggots” the letters, the inane indiscriminate letters of condemnation, of criticism, of interrogation, had poured in on him by every post. Hundreds of unknown readers had told him with unsparing detail all that his book had been to them. And the wonder of it was, when all was said and done, that it had really been so little — that when their thick broth of praise was strained through the author’s anxious vanity there remained to him so small a sediment of definite specific understanding! No — it was always the same thing, over and over and over again — the same vague gush of adjectives, the same incorrigible tendency to estimate his effort according to each writer’s personal preferences, instead of regarding it as a work of art, a thing to be measured by objective standards!
He smiled to think how little, at first, he had felt the vanity of it all. He had found a savour even in the grosser evidences of popularity: the advertisements of his book, the daily shower of “clippings,” the sense that, when he entered a restaurant or a theatre, people nudged each other and said “That’s Betton.” Yes, the publicity had been sweet to him — at first. He had been touched by the sympathy of his fellow-men: had thought indulgently of the world, as a better place than the failures and the dyspeptics would acknowledge. And then his success began to submerge him: he gasped under the thickening shower of letters. His admirers were really unappeasable. And they wanted him to do such preposterous things — to give lectures, to head movements, to be tendered receptions, to speak at banquets, to address mothers, to plead for orphans, to go up in balloons, to lead the struggle for sterilized milk. They wanted his photograph for literary supplements, his autograph for charity bazaars, his name on committees, literary, educational, and social; above all, they wanted his opinion on everything: on Christianity, Buddhism, tight lacing, the drug-habit, democratic government, female suffrage and love. Perhaps the chief benefit of this demand was his incidentally learning from it how few opinions he really had: the only one that remained with him was a rooted horror of all forms of correspondence. He had been unutterably thankful when the letters began to fall off.
“Diadems and Faggots” was now two years old, and the moment was at hand when its author might have counted on regaining the blessed shelter of oblivion — if only he had not written another book! For it was the worst part of his plight that his first success had goaded him to the perpetration of this particular folly — that one of the incentives (hideous thought!) to his new work had been the desire to extend and perpetuate his popularity. And this very week the book was to come out, and the letters, the cursed letters, would begin again!
Wistfully, almost plaintively, he contemplated the breakfast-tray with which Strett presently appeared. It bore only two notes and the morning journals, but he knew that within the week it would groan under its epistolary burden. The very newspapers flung the fact at him as he opened them.
READY ON MONDAY.
GEOFFREY BETTON’S NEW NOVEL
ABUNDANCE.
BY THE AUTHOR OF “DIADEMS AND FAGGOTS.”
FIRST EDITION OF ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY THOUSAND ALREADY SOLD OUT.
ORDER NOW.
A hundred and fifty thousand volumes! And an average of three readers to each! Half a million of people would be reading him within a week, and every one of them would write to him, and their friends and relations would write too. He laid down the paper with a shudder.
The two notes looked harmless enough, and the calligraphy of one was vaguely familiar. He opened the envelope and looked at the signature: Duncan Vyse. He had not seen the name in years — what on earth could Duncan Vyse have to say? He ran over the page and dropped it with a wondering exclamation, which the watchful Strett, re-entering, met by a tentative “Yes, sir?”
“Nothing. Yes — that is — ” Betton picked up the note. “There’s a gentleman, a Mr. Vyse, coming to see me at ten.”
Strett glanced at the clock. “Yes, sir. You’ll remember that ten was the hour you appointed for the secretaries to call, sir.”
Betton nodded. “I’ll see Mr. Vyse first. My clothes, please.”
As he got into them, in the state of irritable hurry that had become almost chronic with him, he continued to think about Duncan Vyse. They had seen a lot of each other for the few years after both had left Harvard: the hard happy years when Betton had been grinding at his business and Vyse — poor devil! — trying to write. The novelist recalled his friend’s attempts with a smile; then the memory of one small volume came back to him. It was a novel: “The Lifted Lamp.” There was stuff in that, certainly. He remembered Vyse’s tossing it down on his table with a gesture of despair when it came back from the last publisher. Betton, taking it up indifferently, had sat riveted till daylight. When he ended, the impression was so strong that he said to himself: “I’ll tell Apthorn about it — I’ll go and see him to-morrow.” His own secret literary yearnings gave him a passionate desire to champion Vyse, to see him triumph over the ignorance and timidity of the publishers. Apthorn was the youngest of the guild, still capable of opinions and the courage of them, a personal friend of Betton’s, and, as it happened, the man afterward to become known as the privileged publisher of “Diadems and Faggots.” Unluckily the next day something unexpected turned up, and Betton forgot about Vyse and his manuscript. He continued to forget for a month, and then came a note from Vyse, who was ill, and wrote to ask what his friend had done. Betton did not like to say “I’ve done nothing,” so he left the note unanswered, and vowed again: “I’ll see Apthorn.”
The following day he was called to the West on business, and was gone a month. When he came back, there was another note from Vyse, who was still ill, and desperately hard up. “I’ll take anything for the book, if they’ll advance me two hundred dollars.” Betton, full of compunction, would gladly have advanced the sum himself; but he was hard up too, and could only swear inwardly: “I’ll write to Apthorn.” Then he glanced again at the manuscript, and reflected: “No — there are things in it that need explaining. I’d better see him.”
Once he went so far as to telephone Apthorn, but the publisher was out. Then he finally and completely forgot.
One Sunday he went out of town, and on his return, rummaging among the papers on his desk, he missed “The Lifted Lamp,” which had been gathering dust there for half a year. What the deuce could have become of it? Betton spent a feverish hour in vainly increasing the disorder of his documents, and then bethought himself of calling the maid-servant, who first indignantly denied having touched anything (“I can see that’s true from the dust,” Betton scathingly interjected), and then mentioned with hauteur that a young lady had called in his absence and asked to be allowed to get a book.
“A lady? Did you let her come up?”
“She said somebody’d sent her.”
Vyse, of course — Vyse had sent her for his manuscript! He was always mixed up with some woman, and it was just like him to send the girl of the moment to Betton’s lodgings, with instructions to force the door in his absence. Vyse had never been remarkable for delicacy. Betton, furious, glanced over his table to see if any of his own effects were missing — one couldn’t tell, with the company Vyse kept! — and then dismissed the matter from his mind, with a vague sense of magnanimity in doing so. He felt himself exonerated by Vyse’s conduct.
The sense of magnanimity was still uppermost when the valet opened the door to announce “Mr. Vyse,” and Betton, a moment later, crossed the threshold of his pleasant library.
His first thought was that the man facing him from the hearth-rug was the very Duncan Vyse of old: small, starved, bleached-looking, with the same sidelong movements, the same queer air of anaemic truculence. Only he had grown shabbier, and bald.
Betton held out a hospitable hand.
“This is a good surprise! Glad you looked me up, my dear fellow.”
Vyse’s palm was damp and bony: he had always had a disagreeable hand.
“You got my note? You know what I’ve come for?” he said.
“About the secretaryship? (Sit down.) Is that really serious?”
Betton lowered himself luxuriously into one of his vast Maple arm-chairs. He had grown stouter in the last year, and the cushion behind him fitted comfortably into the crease of his nape. As he leaned back he caught sight of his image in the mirror between the windows, and reflected uneasily that Vyse would not find him unchanged.
“Serious?” Vyse rejoined. “Why not? Aren’t you?”
“Oh, perfectly.” Betton laughed apologetically. “Only — well, the fact is, you may not understand what rubbish a secretary of mine would have to deal with. In advertising for one I never imagined — I didn’t aspire to any one above the ordinary hack.”
“I’m the ordinary hack,” said Vyse drily.
Betton’s affable gesture protested. “My dear fellow — . You see it’s not business — what I’m in now,” he continued with a laugh.
Vyse’s thin lips seemed to form a noiseless “ Isn’t it?” which they instantly transposed into the audibly reply: “I inferred from your advertisement that you want some one to relieve you in your literary work. Dictation, short-hand — that kind of thing?”
“Well, no: not that either. I type my own things. What I’m looking for is somebody who won’t be above tackling my correspondence.”
Vyse looked slightly surprised. “I should be glad of the job,” he then said.
Betton began to feel a vague embarrassment. He had supposed that such a proposal would be instantly rejected. “It would be only for an hour or two a day — if you’re doing any writing of your own?” he threw out interrogatively.
“No. I’ve given all that up. I’m in an office now — business. But it doesn’t take all my time, or pay enough to keep me alive.”
“In that case, my dear fellow — if you could come every morning; but it’s mostly awful bosh, you know,” Betton again broke off, with growing awkwardness.
Vyse glanced at him humorously. “What you want me to write?”
“Well, that depends — ” Betton sketched the obligatory smile. “But I was thinking of the letters you’ll have to answer. Letters about my books, you know — I’ve another one appearing next week. And I want to be beforehand now — dam the flood before it swamps me. Have you any idea of the deluge of stuff that people write to a successful novelist?”
As Betton spoke, he saw a tinge of red on Vyse’s thin cheek, and his own reflected it in a richer glow of shame. “I mean — I mean — ” he stammered helplessly.
“No, I haven’t,” said Vyse; “but it will be awfully jolly finding out.”
There was a pause, groping and desperate on Betton’s part, sardonically calm on his visitor’s.
“You — you’ve given up writing altogether?” Betton continued.
“Yes; we’ve changed places, as it were.” Vyse paused. “But about these letters — you dictate the answers?”
“Lord, no! That’s the reason why I said I wanted somebody — er — well used to writing. I don’t want to have anything to do with them — not a thing! You’ll have to answer them as if they were written to you — ” Betton pulled himself up again, and rising in confusion jerked open one of the drawers of his writing-table.
“Here — this kind of rubbish,” he said, tossing a packet of letters onto Vyse’s knee.
“Oh — you keep them, do you?” said Vyse simply.
“I— well — some of them; a few of the funniest only.”
Vyse slipped off the band and began to open the letters. While he was glancing over them Betton again caught his own reflection in the glass, and asked himself what impression he had made on his visitor. It occurred to him for the first time that his high-coloured well-fed person presented the image of commercial rather than of intellectual achievement. He did not look like his own idea of the author of “Diadems and Faggots” — and he wondered why.
Vyse laid the letters aside. “I think I can do it — if you’ll give me a notion of the tone I’m to take.”
“The tone?”
“Yes — that is, if I’m to sign your name.”
“Oh, of course: I expect you to sign for me. As for the tone, say just what you’d — well, say all you can without encouraging them to answer.”
Vyse rose from his seat. “I could submit a few specimens,” he suggested.
“Oh, as to that — you always wrote better than I do,” said Betton handsomely.
“I’ve never had this kind of thing to write. When do you wish me to begin?” Vyse enquired, ignoring the tribute.
“The book’s out on Monday. The deluge will begin about three days after. Will you turn up on Thursday at this hour?” Betton held his hand out with real heartiness. “It was great luck for me, your striking that advertisement. Don’t be too harsh with my correspondents — I owe them something for having brought us together.”