A Rebellious Heroine

The evening passed pleasantly enough, and I found Harley’s heroine to be all that he had told me and a great deal more besides.  In fact, so greatly did I enjoy her society that I intentionally prolonged the evening to about three times its normal length—which was a very inartistic bit of exaggeration, I admit; but then I don’t pretend to be a realist, and when I sit down to write I can make my evenings as long or as short as I choose.  I will say, however, that, long as my evening was, I made it go through its whole length without having recourse to such copy-making subterfuges as the description of doorknobs and chairs; and except for its unholy length, it was not at all lacking in realism.  Miss Andrews fascinated me and seemed to find me rather good company, and I found myself suggesting that as the next day was Sunday she take me for a walk.  From what I knew of Harley’s experience with her, I judged she’d be more likely to go if I asked her to take me instead of offering to take her.  It was a subtle distinction, but with some women subtle distinctions are chasms which men must not try to overleap too vaingloriously, lest disaster overtake them.  My bit of subtlety worked like a charm.  Miss Andrews graciously accepted my suggestion, and I retired to my couch feeling certain that during that walk to Bald Mountain, or around the Lake, or down to the Farm, or wherever else she might choose to take me, I could do much to help poor Stuart out of the predicament into which his luckless choice of Miss Andrews as his heroine had plunged him.  And I wasn’t far wrong, as the event transpired, although the manner in which it worked out was not exactly according to my schedule.

I dismissed the night with a few paragraphs; the morning, with its divine service in the parlor, went quickly and impressively; for it is an impressive sight to see gathered beneath those towering cliffs a hundred or more of pleasure and health seekers of different creeds worshipping heartily and simply together, as accordantly as though they knew no differences and all men were possessed of one common religion—it was too impressive, indeed, for my pen, which has been largely given over to matters of less moment, and I did not venture to touch upon it, passing hastily over to the afternoon, when Miss Andrews appeared, ready for the stroll.

I gazed at her admiringly for a moment, and then I began:

“Is that the costume you wore”—I was going to say, “when you rejected Parker?” but I fortunately caught my error in time to pass it off—“at Newport?”  I finished, with a half gasp at the narrowness of my escape; for, it must be remembered, I was supposed as yet to know nothing of that episode.

“How do you know what I wore at Newport?” she asked, quickly—so quickly that I almost feared she had found me out, after all.

“Why—ah—I read about you somewhere,” I stammered.  “Some newspaper correspondent drew a picture of the scene on the promenade in the afternoon, and—ah—he had you down.”

“Oh!” she replied, arching her eyebrows; “that was it, was it?  And do you waste your valuable time reading the vulgar effusions of the society reporter?”

Wasn’t I glad that I had not come as a man with a nose to project into the affairs of others—as a newspaper reporter!

“No, indeed,” I rejoined, “not generally; but I happened to see this particular item, and read it and remembered it.  After all,” I added, as we came to the sylvan path that leads to the Lake—“after all, one might as well read that sort of stuff as most of the novels of the present day.  The vulgar reporter may be ignorant or a boor, and all that is reprehensible in his methods, but he writes about real flesh and blood people; and, what is worse, he generally approximates the truth concerning them in his writing, which is more than can be said of the so-called realistic novel writers of the day.  I haven’t read a novel in three years in which it has seemed to me that the heroine, for instance, was anything more than a marionette, with no will of her own, and ready to do at any time any foolish thing the author wanted her to do.”

Again those eyes of Miss Andrews rested on me in a manner which gave me considerable apprehension.  Then she laughed, and I was at ease again.

“You are very amusing,” she said, quietly.  “The most amusing of them all.”

The remark nettled me, and I quickly retorted:

“Then I have not lived in vain.”

“You do really live, then, eh?” she asked, half chaffingly, gazing at me out of the corners of her eyes in a fashion which utterly disarmed me.

“Excuse me, Miss Andrews,” I answered, “but I am afraid I don’t understand you.”

“I am afraid you don’t,” she said, the smile leaving her lips.  “The fact that you are here on the errand you have charged yourself with proves that.”

“I am not aware,” I said, “that I have come on any particularly ridiculous errand.  May I ask you what you mean by the expression ‘most amusing of them all’?  Am I one among many, and, if so, one what among many what?”

“Your errand is a good one,” she said, gravely, “and not at all ridiculous; let me assure you that I appreciate that fact.  Your question I will answer by asking another: Are you here of your own volition, or has Stuart Harley created you, as he did Messrs. Osborne, Parker, and the Professor?  Are you my new hero, or what?”

The question irritated me.  This woman was not content with interfering seriously with my friend’s happiness: she was actually attributing me to him, casting doubts upon my existence, and placing me in the same category with herself—a mere book creature.  To a man who regards himself as being the real thing, flesh and blood, and, well, eighteen-carat flesh and blood at that, to be accused of living only a figmentary existence is too much.  I retorted angrily.

“If you consider me nothing more than an idea, you do not manifest your usual astuteness,” I said.

Her reply laid me flat.

“I do not consider you anything of the sort.  I never so much as associated you with anything resembling an idea.  I merely asked a question,” she said.  “I repeat it.  Do you or do you not exist?  Are you a bit of the really real or a bit of Mr. Harley’s realism?  In short, are you here at Profile Lake, walking and talking with me, or are you not?”

A realizing sense of my true position crept over me.  In reality I was not there talking to her, but in my den in New York writing about her.  I may not be a realist, but I am truthful.  I could not deceive her, so I replied, hesitatingly:

“Well, Miss Andrews, I am—no, I am not here, except in spirit.”

“That’s what I thought,” she said, demurely.  “And do you exist somewhere, or is this a ‘situation’ calculated to delight the American girl—with pin-money to spend on Messrs. Herring, Beemer, & Chadwick’s publications?”

“I do exist,” I replied, meekly; for, I must confess it, I realized more than ever that Miss Andrews was too much for me, and I heartily wished I was well out of it.  “And I alone am responsible for this.  Harley is off fishing at Barnegat—and do you know why?”

“I presume he has gone there to recuperate,” she said.

“Precisely,” said I.

“After his ungentlemanly, discourteous, and wholly uncalled-for interference with my comfort at Newport,” she said, her face flushing and tears coming into her eyes, “I don’t wonder he’s prostrated.”

“I do not know to what you refer,” said I.

“I refer to the episode of the runaway horse,” she said, in wrathful remembrance of the incident.  “Because I refuse to follow blindly his will, he abuses his power, places me in a false and perilous situation, from which I, a defenceless woman, must rescue myself alone and unaided.  It was unmanly of him—and I will pay him the compliment of saying wholly unlike him.”

I stood aghast.  Poor Stuart was being blamed for my act.  He must be set right at once, however unpleasant it might be for me.

“He—he didn’t do that,” I said, slowly; “it was I.  I wrote that bit of nonsense; and he—well, he was mad because I did it, and said he’d like to kill any man who ill-treated you; and he made me promise never to touch upon your life again.”

“May I ask why you did that?” she asked, and I was glad to note that there was no displeasure in her voice—in fact, she seemed to cheer up wonderfully when I told her that it was I, and not Stuart, who had subjected her to the misadventure.

“Because I was angry with you,” I answered.  “You were ruining my friend with your continued acts of rebellion: he was successful; now he is ruined.  He thinks of you day and night—he wants you for his heroine; he wants to make you happy, but he wants you to be happy in your own way; and when he thinks he has discovered your way, he works along that line, and all of a sudden, by some act wholly unforeseen, and, if I may say so, unforeseeable, you treat him and his work with contempt, draw yourself out of it—and he has to begin again.”

“And why have you ventured to break your word to your friend?” she asked, calmly.  “Surely you are touching upon my life now, in spite of your promise.”

“Because I am willing to sacrifice my word to his welfare,” I retorted; “to try to make you understand how you are blocking the path of a mighty fine-minded man by your devotion to what you call your independence.  He will never ask you to do anything that he knows will be revolting to you, and until he has succeeded in pleasing you to the last page of his book he will never write again.  I have done this in the hope of persuading you, at the cost even of some personal discomfort, not to rebel against his gentle leadership—to fall in with his ideas until he can fulfil this task of his, whether it be realism or pure speculation on his part.  If you do this, Stuart is saved.  If you do not, literature will be called upon to mourn one who promises to be one of its brightest ornaments.”

I stopped short.  Miss Andrews was gazing pensively out over the mirror-like surface of the Lake.  Finally she spoke.

“You may tell Mr. Harley,” she said, with a sigh, “that I will trouble him no more.  He can do with me as he pleases in all save one particular.  He shall not marry me to a man I do not love.  If he takes the man I love for my hero, then will I follow him to the death.”

“And may I ask who that man is?”

“You may ask if you please,” she replied, with a little smile.  “But I won’t answer you, except to say that it isn’t you.”

“And am I forgiven for my runaway story?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said.  “You wouldn’t expect me to condemn a man for loyalty to his friend, would you?”

With which understanding Miss Andrews and I continued our walk, and when we parted I found that the little interview I had started to write had turned into the suggestion of a romance, which I was in duty bound to destroy—but I began to have a glimmering of an idea as to who the man was that Marguerite Andrews wished for a hero, and I regretted also to find myself convinced of the truth of her statement that that man did not bear my name.

VIII

HARLEY RETURNS TO THE FRAY

“I will be master of what is mine own:
She is my goods, my chattels.”

    —“Taming of the Shrew.”
At the end of ten days Harley returned from Barnegat, brown as a berry and ready for war, if war it was still to be.  The outing had done him a world of good, and the fish stories he told as we sat at dinner showed that, realist though he might be, he had yet not failed to cultivate his imagination in certain directions.  I may observe in passing, and in this connection, that if I had a son whom it was my ambition to see making his mark in the world as a writer of romance, as distinguished from the real, I should, as the first step in his development, take care that he became a fisherman.  The telling of tales of the fish he caught when no one else was near to see would give him, as it has given many another, a good schooling in the realms of the imagination.

I was glad to note that Harley’s wonted cheerfulness had returned, and that he had become more like himself than he had been at any time since his first failure with Miss Andrews.