Sir Dominick Ferrand

He had shuffled the papers together with a movement charged, while he spoke, with the air of being preliminary to that of thrusting them into a little black bag which he had brought with him and which, resting on the shelf of the davenport, struck Peter, who viewed it askance, as an object darkly editorial.  It made our young man, somehow, suddenly apprehensive; the advantage of which he had just been conscious was about to be transferred by a quiet process of legerdemain to a person who already had advantages enough.  Baron, in short, felt a deep pang of anxiety; he couldn’t have said why.  Mr. Locket took decidedly too many things for granted, and the explorer of Sir Dominick Ferrand’s irregularities remembered afresh how clear he had been after all about his indisposition to traffic in them.  He asked his visitor to what end he wished to remove the letters, since on the one hand there was no question now of the article in the Promiscuous which was to reveal their existence, and on the other he himself, as their owner, had a thousand insurmountable scruples about putting them into circulation.

Mr. Locket looked over his spectacles as over the battlements of a fortress.  “I’m not thinking of the end—I’m thinking of the beginning.  A few glances have assured me that such documents ought to be submitted to some competent eye.”

“Oh, you mustn’t show them to anyone!” Baron exclaimed.

“You may think me presumptuous, but the eye that I venture to allude to in those terms—”

“Is the eye now fixed so terribly on me?” Peter laughingly interrupted.  “Oh, it would be interesting, I confess, to know how they strike a man of your acuteness!”  It had occurred to him that by such a concession he might endear himself to a literary umpire hitherto implacable.  There would be no question of his publishing Sir Dominick Ferrand, but he might, in due acknowledgment of services rendered, form the habit of publishing Peter Baron.  “How long would it be your idea to retain them?” he inquired, in a manner which, he immediately became aware, was what incited Mr. Locket to begin stuffing the papers into his bag.  With this perception he came quickly closer and, laying his hand on the gaping receptacle, lightly drew its two lips together.  In this way the two men stood for a few seconds, touching, almost in the attitude of combat, looking hard into each other’s eyes.

The tension was quickly relieved however by the surprised flush which mantled on Mr. Locket’s brow.  He fell back a few steps with an injured dignity that might have been a protest against physical violence.  “Really, my dear young sir, your attitude is tantamount to an accusation of intended bad faith.  Do you think I want to steal the confounded things?”  In reply to such a challenge Peter could only hastily declare that he was guilty of no discourteous suspicion—he only wanted a limit named, a pledge of every precaution against accident.  Mr. Locket admitted the justice of the demand, assured him he would restore the property within three days, and completed, with Peter’s assistance, his little arrangements for removing it discreetly.  When he was ready, his treacherous reticule distended with its treasures, he gave a lingering look at the inscrutable davenport.  “It’s how they ever got into that thing that puzzles one’s brain!”

“There was some concatenation of circumstances that would doubtless seem natural enough if it were explained, but that one would have to remount the stream of time to ascertain.  To one course I have definitely made up my mind: not to make any statement or any inquiry at the shop.  I simply accept the mystery,” said Peter, rather grandly.

“That would be thought a cheap escape if you were to put it into a story,” Mr. Locket smiled.

“Yes, I shouldn’t offer the story to you.  I shall be impatient till I see my papers again,” the young man called out, as his visitor hurried downstairs.

That evening, by the last delivery, he received, under the Dover postmark, a letter that was not from Miss Teagle.  It was a slightly confused but altogether friendly note, written that morning after breakfast, the ostensible purpose of which was to thank him for the amiability of his visit, to express regret at any appearance the writer might have had of meddling with what didn’t concern her, and to let him know that the evening before, after he had left her, she had in a moment of inspiration got hold of the tail of a really musical idea—a perfect accompaniment for the song he had so kindly given her.  She had scrawled, as a specimen, a few bars at the end of her note, mystic, mocking musical signs which had no sense for her correspondent.  The whole letter testified to a restless but rather pointless desire to remain in communication with him.  In answering her, however, which he did that night before going to bed, it was on this bright possibility of their collaboration, its advantages for the future of each of them, that Baron principally expatiated.  He spoke of this future with an eloquence of which he would have defended the sincerity, and drew of it a picture extravagantly rich.  The next morning, as he was about to settle himself to tasks for some time terribly neglected, with a sense that after all it was rather a relief not to be sitting so close to Sir Dominick Ferrand, who had become dreadfully distracting; at the very moment at which he habitually addressed his preliminary invocation to the muse, he was agitated by the arrival of a telegram which proved to be an urgent request from Mr. Locket that he would immediately come down and see him.  This represented, for poor Baron, whose funds were very low, another morning sacrificed, but somehow it didn’t even occur to him that he might impose his own time upon the editor of the Promiscuous, the keeper of the keys of renown.  He had some of the plasticity of the raw contributor.  He gave the muse another holiday, feeling she was really ashamed to take it, and in course of time found himself in Mr. Locket’s own chair at Mr. Locket’s own table—so much nobler an expanse than the slippery slope of the davenport—considering with quick intensity, in the white flash of certain words just brought out by his host, the quantity of happiness, of emancipation that might reside in a hundred pounds.

Yes, that was what it meant: Mr. Locket, in the twenty-four hours, had discovered so much in Sir Dominick’s literary remains that his visitor found him primed with an offer.  A hundred pounds would be paid him that day, that minute, and no questions would be either asked or answered.  “I take all the risks, I take all the risks,” the editor of the Promiscuous repeated.  The letters were out on the table, Mr. Locket was on the hearthrug, like an orator on a platform, and Peter, under the influence of his sudden ultimatum, had dropped, rather weakly, into the seat which happened to be nearest and which, as he became conscious it moved on a pivot, he whirled round so as to enable himself to look at his tempter with an eye intended to be cold.  What surprised him most was to find Mr. Locket taking exactly the line about the expediency of publication which he would have expected Mr. Locket not to take.  “Hush it all up; a barren scandal, an offence that can’t be remedied, is the thing in the world that least justifies an airing—” some such line as that was the line he would have thought natural to a man whose life was spent in weighing questions of propriety and who had only the other day objected, in the light of this virtue, to a work of the most disinterested art.  But the author of that incorruptible masterpiece had put his finger on the place in saying to his interlocutor on the occasion of his last visit that, if given to the world in the pages of the Promiscuous, Sir Dominick’s aberrations would sell the edition.  It was not necessary for Mr. Locket to reiterate to his young friend his phrase about their making a sensation.  If he wished to purchase the “rights,” as theatrical people said, it was not to protect a celebrated name or to lock them up in a cupboard.  That formula of Baron’s covered all the ground, and one edition was a low estimate of the probable performance of the magazine.

Peter left the letters behind him and, on withdrawing from the editorial presence, took a long walk on the Embankment.  His impressions were at war with each other—he was flurried by possibilities of which he yet denied the existence.  He had consented to trust Mr. Locket with the papers a day or two longer, till he should have thought out the terms on which he might—in the event of certain occurrences—be induced to dispose of them.  A hundred pounds were not this gentleman’s last word, nor perhaps was mere unreasoning intractability Peter’s own.  He sighed as he took no note of the pictures made by barges—sighed because it all might mean money.  He needed money bitterly; he owed it in disquieting quarters.  Mr. Locket had put it before him that he had a high responsibility—that he might vindicate the disfigured truth, contribute a chapter to the history of England.  “You haven’t a right to suppress such momentous facts,” the hungry little editor had declared, thinking how the series (he would spread it into three numbers) would be the talk of the town.  If Peter had money he might treat himself to ardour, to bliss.  Mr. Locket had said, no doubt justly enough, that there were ever so many questions one would have to meet should one venture to play so daring a game.  These questions, embarrassments, dangers—the danger, for instance, of the cropping-up of some lurking litigious relative—he would take over unreservedly and bear the brunt of dealing with.  It was to be remembered that the papers were discredited, vitiated by their childish pedigree; such a preposterous origin, suggesting, as he had hinted before, the feeble ingenuity of a third-rate novelist, was a thing he should have to place himself at the positive disadvantage of being silent about.  He would rather give no account of the matter at all than expose himself to the ridicule that such a story would infallibly excite.  Couldn’t one see them in advance, the clever, taunting things the daily and weekly papers would say?  Peter Baron had his guileless side, but he felt, as he worried with a stick that betrayed him the granite parapets of the Thames, that he was not such a fool as not to know how Mr. Locket would “work” the mystery of his marvellous find.  Nothing could help it on better with the public than the impenetrability of the secret attached to it.  If Mr. Locket should only be able to kick up dust enough over the circumstances that had guided his hand his fortune would literally be made.  Peter thought a hundred pounds a low bid, yet he wondered how the Promiscuous could bring itself to offer such a sum—so large it loomed in the light of literary remuneration as hitherto revealed to our young man.  The explanation of this anomaly was of course that the editor shrewdly saw a dozen ways of getting his money back.  There would be in the “sensation,” at a later stage, the making of a book in large type—the book of the hour; and the profits of this scandalous volume or, if one preferred the name, this reconstruction, before an impartial posterity, of a great historical humbug, the sum “down,” in other words, that any lively publisher would give for it, figured vividly in Mr. Locket’s calculations.  It was therefore altogether an opportunity of dealing at first hand with the lively publisher that Peter was invited to forego.  Peter gave a masterful laugh, rejoicing in his heart that, on the spot, in the repaire he had lately quitted, he had not been tempted by a figure that would have approximately represented the value of his property.  It was a good job, he mentally added as he turned his face homeward, that there was so little likelihood of his having to struggle with that particular pressure.

VI

When, half an hour later, he approached Jersey Villas, he noticed that the house-door was open; then, as he reached the gate, saw it make a frame for an unexpected presence.  Mrs. Ryves, in her bonnet and jacket, looked out from it as if she were expecting something—as if she had been passing to and fro to watch.  Yet when he had expressed to her that it was a delightful welcome she replied that she had only thought there might possibly be a cab in sight.  He offered to go and look for one, upon which it appeared that after all she was not, as yet at least, in need.  He went back with her into her sitting-room, where she let him know that within a couple of days she had seen clearer what was best; she had determined to quit Jersey Villas and had come up to take away her things, which she had just been packing and getting together.

“I wrote you last night a charming letter in answer to yours,” Baron said.  “You didn’t mention in yours that you were coming up.”

“It wasn’t your answer that brought me.  It hadn’t arrived when I came away.”

“You’ll see when you get back that my letter is charming.”

“I daresay.”  Baron had observed that the room was not, as she had intimated, in confusion—Mrs. Ryves’s preparations for departure were not striking.  She saw him look round and, standing in front of the fireless grate with her hands behind her, she suddenly asked: “Where have you come from now?”

“From an interview with a literary friend.”

“What are you concocting between you?”

“Nothing at all.  We’ve fallen out—we don’t agree.”

“Is he a publisher?”

“He’s an editor.”

“Well, I’m glad you don’t agree.  I don’t know what he wants, but, whatever it is, don’t do it.”

“He must do what I want!” said Baron.

“And what’s that?”

“Oh, I’ll tell you when he has done it!”  Baron begged her to let him hear the “musical idea” she had mentioned in her letter; on which she took off her hat and jacket and, seating herself at her piano, gave him, with a sentiment of which the very first notes thrilled him, the accompaniment of his song.  She phrased the words with her sketchy sweetness, and he sat there as if he had been held in a velvet vise, throbbing with the emotion, irrecoverable ever after in its freshness, of the young artist in the presence for the first time of “production”—the proofs of his book, the hanging of his picture, the rehearsal of his play.  When she had finished he asked again for the same delight, and then for more music and for more; it did him such a world of good, kept him quiet and safe, smoothed out the creases of his spirit.  She dropped her own experiments and gave him immortal things, and he lounged there, pacified and charmed, feeling the mean little room grow large and vague and happy possibilities come back.  Abruptly, at the piano, she called out to him: “Those papers of yours—the letters you found—are not in the house?”

“No, they’re not in the house.”

“I was sure of it!  No matter—it’s all right!” she added.  She herself was pacified—trouble was a false note.  Later he was on the point of asking her how she knew the objects she had mentioned were not in the house; but he let it pass.  The subject was a profitless riddle—a puzzle that grew grotesquely bigger, like some monstrosity seen in the darkness, as one opened one’s eyes to it.  He closed his eyes—he wanted another vision.  Besides, she had shown him that she had extraordinary senses—her explanation would have been stranger than the fact.  Moreover they had other things to talk about, in particular the question of her putting off her return to Dover till the morrow and dispensing meanwhile with the valuable protection of Sidney.  This was indeed but another face of the question of her dining with him somewhere that evening (where else should she dine?)—accompanying him, for instance, just for an hour of Bohemia, in their deadly respectable lives, to a jolly little place in Soho.  Mrs. Ryves declined to have her life abused, but in fact, at the proper moment, at the jolly little place, to which she did accompany him—it dealt in macaroni and Chianti—the pair put their elbows on the crumpled cloth and, face to face, with their little emptied coffee-cups pushed away and the young man’s cigarette lighted by her command, became increasingly confidential.  They went afterwards to the theatre, in cheap places, and came home in “busses” and under umbrellas.

On the way back Peter Baron turned something over in his mind as he had never turned anything before; it was the question of whether, at the end, she would let him come into her sitting-room for five minutes.  He felt on this point a passion of suspense and impatience, and yet for what would it be but to tell her how poor he was?  This was literally the moment to say it, so supremely depleted had the hour of Bohemia left him.  Even Bohemia was too expensive, and yet in the course of the day his whole temper on the subject of certain fitnesses had changed.  At Jersey Villas (it was near midnight, and Mrs. Ryves, scratching a light for her glimmering taper, had said: “Oh, yes, come in for a minute if you like!”), in her precarious parlour, which was indeed, after the brilliances of the evening, a return to ugliness and truth, she let him stand while he explained that he had certainly everything in the way of fame and fortune still to gain, but that youth and love and faith and energy—to say nothing of her supreme dearness—were all on his side.  Why, if one’s beginnings were rough, should one add to the hardness of the conditions by giving up the dream which, if she would only hear him out, would make just the blessed difference?  Whether Mrs. Ryves heard him out or not is a circumstance as to which this chronicle happens to be silent; but after he had got possession of both her hands and breathed into her face for a moment all the intensity of his tenderness—in the relief and joy of utterance he felt it carry him like a rising flood—she checked him with better reasons, with a cold, sweet afterthought in which he felt there was something deep.  Her procrastinating head-shake was prettier than ever, yet it had never meant so many fears and pains—impossibilities and memories, independences and pieties, and a sort of uncomplaining ache for the ruin of a friendship that had been happy.  She had liked him—if she hadn’t she wouldn’t have let him think so!—but she protested that she had not, in the odious vulgar sense, “encouraged” him.  Moreover she couldn’t talk of such things in that place, at that hour, and she begged him not to make her regret her good-nature in staying over.  There were peculiarities in her position, considerations insurmountable.  She got rid of him with kind and confused words, and afterwards, in the dull, humiliated night, he felt that he had been put in his place.  Women in her situation, women who after having really loved and lost, usually lived on into the new dawns in which old ghosts steal away.  But there was something in his whimsical neighbour that struck him as terribly invulnerable.

VII

“I’ve had time to look a little further into what we’re prepared to do, and I find the case is one in which I should consider the advisability of going to an extreme length,” said Mr. Locket.  Jersey Villas the next morning had had the privilege of again receiving the editor of the Promiscuous, and he sat once more at the davenport, where the bone of contention, in the shape of a large, loose heap of papers that showed how much they had been handled, was placed well in view.  “We shall see our way to offering you three hundred, but we shouldn’t, I must positively assure you, see it a single step further.”

Peter Baron, in his dressing-gown and slippers, with his hands in his pockets, crept softly about the room, repeating, below his breath and with inflections that for his own sake he endeavoured to make humorous: “Three hundred—three hundred.”  His state of mind was far from hilarious, for he felt poor and sore and disappointed; but he wanted to prove to himself that he was gallant—was made, in general and in particular, of undiscourageable stuff.  The first thing he had been aware of on stepping into his front room was that a four-wheeled cab, with Mrs. Ryves’s luggage upon it, stood at the door of No. 3.  Permitting himself, behind his curtain, a pardonable peep, he saw the mistress of his thoughts come out of the house, attended by Mrs. Bundy, and take her place in the modest vehicle.  After this his eyes rested for a long time on the sprigged cotton back of the landlady, who kept bobbing at the window of the cab an endlessly moralising old head.  Mrs. Ryves had really taken flight—he had made Jersey Villas impossible for her—but Mrs. Bundy, with a magnanimity unprecedented in the profession, seemed to express a belief in the purity of her motives.  Baron felt that his own separation had been, for the present at least, effected; every instinct of delicacy prompted him to stand back.

Mr. Locket talked a long time, and Peter Baron listened and waited.  He reflected that his willingness to listen would probably excite hopes in his visitor—hopes which he himself was ready to contemplate without a scruple.  He felt no pity for Mr. Locket and had no consideration for his suspense or for his possible illusions; he only felt sick and forsaken and in want of comfort and of money.  Yet it was a kind of outrage to his dignity to have the knife held to his throat, and he was irritated above all by the ground on which Mr. Locket put the question—the ground of a service rendered to historical truth.  It might be—he wasn’t clear; it might be—the question was deep, too deep, probably, for his wisdom; at any rate he had to control himself not to interrupt angrily such dry, interested palaver, the false voice of commerce and of cant.  He stared tragically out of the window and saw the stupid rain begin to fall; the day was duller even than his own soul, and Jersey Villas looked so sordidly hideous that it was no wonder Mrs. Ryves couldn’t endure them.  Hideous as they were he should have to tell Mrs. Bundy in the course of the day that he was obliged to seek humbler quarters.  Suddenly he interrupted Mr. Locket; he observed to him: “I take it that if I should make you this concession the hospitality of the Promiscuous would be by that very fact unrestrictedly secured to me.”

Mr. Locket stared.  “Hospitality—secured?”  He thumbed the proposition as if it were a hard peach.

“I mean that of course you wouldn’t—in courtsey, in gratitude—keep on declining my things.”

“I should give them my best attention—as I’ve always done in the past.”

Peter Baron hesitated.  It was a case in which there would have seemed to be some chance for the ideally shrewd aspirant in such an advantage as he possessed; but after a moment the blood rushed into his face with the shame of the idea of pleading for his productions in the name of anything but their merit.  It was as if he had stupidly uttered evil of them.  Nevertheless be added the interrogation:

“Would you for instance publish my little story?”

“The one I read (and objected to some features of) the other day?  Do you mean—a—with the alteration?” Mr. Locket continued.

“Oh, no, I mean utterly without it.  The pages you want altered contain, as I explained to you very lucidly, I think, the very raison d’être of the work, and it would therefore, it seems to me, be an imbecility of the first magnitude to cancel them.”  Peter had really renounced all hope that his critic would understand what he meant, but, under favour of circumstances, he couldn’t forbear to taste the luxury, which probably never again would come within his reach, of being really plain, for one wild moment, with an editor.

Mr. Locket gave a constrained smile.  “Think of the scandal, Mr. Baron.”

“But isn’t this other scandal just what you’re going in for?”

“It will be a great public service.”

“You mean it will be a big scandal, whereas my poor story would be a very small one, and that it’s only out of a big one that money’s to be made.”

Mr. Locket got up—he too had his dignity to vindicate.  “Such a sum as I offer you ought really to be an offset against all claims.”

“Very good—I don’t mean to make any, since you don’t really care for what I write.  I take note of your offer,” Peter pursued, “and I engage to give you to-night (in a few words left by my own hand at your house) my absolutely definite and final reply.”

Mr. Locket’s movements, as he hovered near the relics of the eminent statesman, were those of some feathered parent fluttering over a threatened nest.  If he had brought his huddled brood back with him this morning it was because he had felt sure enough of closing the bargain to be able to be graceful.  He kept a glittering eye on the papers and remarked that he was afraid that before leaving them he must elicit some assurance that in the meanwhile Peter would not place them in any other hands.  Peter, at this, gave a laugh of harsher cadence than he intended, asking, justly enough, on what privilege his visitor rested such a demand and why he himself was disqualified from offering his wares to the highest bidder.  “Surely you wouldn’t hawk such things about?” cried Mr. Locket; but before Baron had time to retort cynically he added: “I’ll publish your little story.”

“Oh, thank you!”

“I’ll publish anything you’ll send me,” Mr. Locket continued, as he went out.  Peter had before this virtually given his word that for the letters he would treat only with the Promiscuous.