CHAPTER IX
AN UNEXPECTED DEVELOPMENT
I ascribed Anastasia’s fainting spell to the somewhat sketchy meals we had been having; so for the next few weeks I fed her up anxiously. That same evening we held a special meeting of the Finance Committee to consider our improved position.
“Be under no illusion,” I observed as Chairman, “with reference to our recent success. It is not, as you might imagine, the turn of the tide. There are three reasons why this particular article was accepted: First, it was snappy and up-to-date; second, it compared Manhattan and Modern Babylon in a way favourable to the former; third, and chief reason, the editor happened to have some very good cuts that he could work in to make an attractive spread. Given these inducements, and a temporary lack of more exciting matter, any offering can dispense with such a detail as literary merit.”
Here I regarded some jottings I had made on an envelope.
“Let us now see how we stand. We started with twelve manuscripts, of which we have sold four. There remain five more articles, and three fairy stories. The articles I regard as time wasted. People won’t read straight descriptive stuff; even in novels one has to sneak it in.”
Here the Secretary regarded ruefully some manuscripts rather the worse for postal transit.
“Go on wasting stamps on them if you like,” I continued; “but, candidly, they’re the wrong thing. As for the fairy stories, where are they now?”
“I have sent them to the Pickadeely Magazine.”
“They might have some chance there. The editor devotes a certain space to children that aren’t grown up. Now as to funds.”
The Secretary sat down, and the Treasurer rose in her place. She stated that there were five hundred francs in the treasury, of which a hundred would be needed to pay the rent up to the end of September. Two hundred francs would have to be allowed for current expenses; that would leave a hundred for contingencies.
“Very good,” I said; “I move that the money be expended as suggested. And now—two blissful months of freedom from worry in which to re-write my novel. Thank Heaven!”
With that I plunged into my work as strenuously as before. I must confess I re-read it with a tremor. It was bad, but—not too bad. Unconsciously I had reverted to my yarn-spinning style, yet often in the white heat of inspiration I had hit on the master-word just as surely as if I had pondered half a day. However, the result as a whole I regarded with disfavour. The work was lacking in distinction, in reserve, in the fine art of understatement. Instead of keeping my story well in hand I had let it gallop away with me. Truly I was incorrigible.
“Anastasia,” I said one day, as I was about half through with my revision, “you’re always asking if there’s no way you can help me. I can suggest one.”
“Oh, good! What is it?”
“Well, I know where I can hire a typewriter for a month very cheaply. You might try your hand at punching out this wonderful work of fiction on it.”
“Oh, that please me very much.”
“All right. I’ll fetch the instrument of torture.”
It was a very old machine, of eccentric mechanism and uncouth appearance. With fumbling hesitation she began. About a word a minute was her average, and that word a mistake; but rapidly she progressed. Sometimes I would hear a vigorous: “Nom d’un Chien!” and would find that she had gone over the same line twice. Then again, she would get her carbon paper wrong, and the duplicate would come out on the back of the original. At other times it was only that she had run over the edge of the paper.
The typewriter, too, was somewhat lethargic in action. It seemed to say: “I’m so old in service, and my joints are so stiff—surely I might be allowed to take my own time. If you try to hurry me I’ll get my fingers tangled, or I’ll jam my riband, or I’ll make all kinds of mistakes. Really, it’s time I was superannuated.” No beginner, even in a Business School, ever tackled a more decrepit and cantankerous machine, and it said much for her patience that she turned out such good copy.
So passed August and most of September—day after day of grinding work in sweltering heat; I, pruning, piecing, chopping, changing; she pounding patiently at that malcontent machine. Then at last, after a long, hard day it was done. The sunshine was mellow on the roofs as I watched her write the closing words. She handed the page to me, and, regarding the sunlight almost sorrowfully, she folded her tired hands.
Two tears stole down her pale cheeks.
All at once I saw how worn and weary she was. Thin, gentle, sad—more than ever like a child she looked, with her exquisite profile, and the heaped-up masses of her dark hair; more than ever like a child with her shrinking figure and her delicate pallor: yet she would soon be nineteen. The idea came to me that in my passion of creative egotism I had given little thought to her.
“Why, what’s the matter, Little Thing? Are you sick?”
She looked at me piteously.
“Have you not see? Have you not guess?”
“No, what?” I demanded in a tone of alarm.
“Pretty soon you are going to be a fazzer.”
“My God!”
I could only gasp and stare at her.
“Well, are you not going to kees me, and say you are not sorry?”
“Yes, yes. There, Little Thing ... I—I’m glad.”
But there was no conviction in my tone, and I sat gazing into vacancy. In my intense preoccupation never had such a thing occurred to me. It came as a shock, as something improper, as one of those brutal realities that break in so wofully on the serenities of life. There was a ridiculous side to it, too. I saw myself sheepishly wheeling a baby carriage, and I muttered with set teeth: “Never!”
“Confound it all! It’s so embarrassing,” I thought distressfully. “It upsets my whole programme. It makes life more complex, and I am trying to make it more simple. It gives me new responsibilities, and my every effort is to avoid them. Worst of all, it seems to sound the death-knell of my youth. To feel like a boy has always been my ideal of well-being, and how can one feel like a boy with a rising son to remind one of maturity?”
Perhaps, however, it would be a daughter. Somehow that didn’t seem so bad. So to change the subject I suggested that we take a walk along the river. As we went through the Tuileries all of the western city seemed to wallow in flame. The sky rolled up in tawny orange, and the twin towers of the Trocadero were like arms raised in distress amid a conflagration. The river was a welter of lilac fire, while above the portal of the Grand Palace the chariot driver held his rearing horses in a blaze of glory. To the east all was light and enchantment, as a thousand windows burned like imperial gems, and tower and spire and dome shimmered in a delicate dust of gold.
“What a city, this Paris!” I murmured. “Add but three letters to it and you have Paradise.”
“Where you are, darleen, to me it is always Paradise,” said Anastasia.
In the tranquil moods of matrimony, how is it that one shrinks so from sentiment? On the Barbary Coasts of Love we excel in it. In books, on the stage, we revel in it; but when it comes to the hallowed humdrum of the home it suits us better to be curtly commonplace. This is so hard for the Latin races to understand. They are so emotional, so unconscious in their affection. Doubtless Anastasia put down my reserve to coldness, but I could not help it.
“Look here, Little Thing,” I said, as we walked home, “you mustn’t work any more. Let’s go to the country for a week or two. Let’s go to Fontainebleau.”
“How we get money?”
“We’ll use that extra hundred francs.”
“Yes, but when that is spend?”
“Oh, don’t worry. Something will turn up. Let’s go.”
“If you like it. I shall love it, the rest, the good air. Just one week.”
“And let’s take the Môme with us. Frosine will let her go. It will be such a treat for her. Perhaps, too, Helstern will spare a few days and join us.”
“Ah, it will all be so nice.”
So next day I bundled up Tom, Dick and Harry, and under the name of Silenus Starset, I sent it off to the publishers of my other novels.
“I’ve been thinking, Little Thing,” I said, “that when we come back we’d better give up the apartment and take a room. We can save over twenty francs a month like that. It won’t be for long. When the novel’s accepted, there will be an end of our troubles.”
“Just as you like it. I’ve been very happy.”
Helstern promised to meet us in the forest, so that afternoon with the Môme and a hundred francs we took the train to Barbizon. If we had not both been avid for it, that holiday would have been worth while only to see the rapture of the Môme. It was her first sight of the real country, and she was delirious with delight. Anastasia had a busy time answering her questions, trying to check her excitement, gently restraining her jerking arms and legs. Her eyes shone, her tongue rattled, her head pivoted eagerly, and many on the train watched her with amusement.
As we rolled through the country of Millet, the westering sun slanted across the level fields, catching the edges of the furrows, and launching long shadows across the orchards. We took rooms in a cottage in Barbizon. From the sun-baked street a step, and we were in the thick of the forest, drowned in leafy twilight and pine-scented solitude. And with every turn, under that canopy of laughing leaves, the way grew wilder and more luring. The molten sunshine dripped through branches, flooding with gold the ferny hollows, dappling with amber the russet pathway. Down, through the cool green aisles it led in twilights of translucent green, mid pillering oak and yielding carpets of fine-powdered cones. And ever the rocks grew more grotesque, taking the shapes of griffins and primordial beasts, all mottled with that splendid moss of crimson, green, and gold. Then it grew on one that wood nymphs were about, that fawns were peeping from the lightning-splintered oaks, and that the spell of the forest was folding one around.
On the second day Helstern joined us. He was gloomily enthusiastic, pointing out to me beauties of form and colour I would have idly passed. He made me really feel ashamed of my crassness. What a gifted, acute chap! But, oh, how atrabilious!
“For Heaven’s sake, old man,” I said one day, “don’t be so pessimistic.”
“How can a man be other than pessimistic,” he answered, “with a foot like mine. Just think what it means. Look here.”
Rolling up his sleeve he showed me an arm a sculptor might have raved over.
“If I’d been all right, what an athlete I’d have made. Look at my torso, my other leg. And my whole heart is for action, for energy, for deeds. Just think how much that makes life worth while is barred to me. And I shrink from society, especially where there are women. I’m always thinking they pity me. Oh, that’s gall and wormwood—to be pitied! I should have a wife, children, a home, yet here I am a lonely, brooding misanthrope; and I’m only forty-six.”
Yet he cheered up when the Môme was near. The two were the greatest of friends now, and it was a notable sight to see the big man with his Forbes Robertson type of face and his iron-grey mane, leading by the hand the little girl of five with the slender limbs, the pansy-blue eyes, and the honey-yellow hair.
And what exciting tales the Môme would have to tell on her return: how they had surprised a deer nibbling at the short grass; how a wild boar with tushes gleaming had glared at them out of the brake; how an eagle had arisen from a lonely gorge! Then there were lizards crawling on the silver-grey rocks, and the ceaseless calling of cuckoos, and scolding squirrels, and drumming woodpeckers. Oh, that was the happy child! Yet sometimes I wondered if the man was not as happy in his own way.
He was a queer chap, was Helstern. I remember one time we all sat together on a fallen log, and the sky seen through the black bars of the pines was like a fire of glowing coals. Long, serene and mellow the evening lengthened to a close.
“You know,” said the sculptor, as he pulled steadily at the Turk’s head pipe, and regarded the Môme thoughtfully, “I believe that all children should be reared and educated by the State. Then there would be no unfair handicapping of the poor: each child would find its proper place in the world.”
“What would you do with the home?”
“I would surely destroy the millions of unworthy homes, stupid homes, needy homes, bigoted homes, sordid homes. I would replace these with a great glorious Home, run by a beneficent State, where from the very cradle children would be developed and trained on scientific principles, where they would be taught that the noblest effort of man is the service of man; the most ignoble, the seeking of money. I would teach them to live for the spiritual, not the sensual benefits of life. Many private homes do not teach these things. Their influence is pernicious. How many men can look back on such homes and not declare them bungling makeshifts, either stupidly narrow, or actually unhappy?”
“You would destroy the love ties of parent and child?”
“Not at all. I would strengthen them. As it is, how many children are educated away from their homes, in convents, boarding-schools, Lycees? Do they love their parents any the less? No; the more, for they do not see so much that is weak and contemptible in them. But if mothers wish, let them enter the State nurseries and nurse their own little ones—not according to our bungling, ignorant methods, but according to the methods of science. Then the youngsters would not be exposed to the anxieties that darken the average home; they would not pick up and perpetuate the vulgarities of their parents. The child of the pauper would be just as refined as the child of the peer. Think what that would mean; a breaking down of all class distinction. The word ‘gentleman’ would come into its true significance, and in a few years we would have a new race, with new ideals, new ambitions, new ways of thought.”
“You would educate them, too?”
“They would have all the education they wanted, but not in the present way. They would be taught to examine, to reason: not to accept blindly the beliefs of their fathers; to sift, to analyse: not to let themselves be crammed with ready-made ideas. I would not try to turn them all out in one mould, as the pedagogues do; I would try to develop their originality. Question and challenge would be their attitude. I would establish ‘Chairs of Inquiry.’ I would teach them that the circle is not round, and that two and two do not make four. Up the great stairway of Truth would I lead them, so that standing on its highest point they might hew still higher steps in the rock of knowledge.”
“And how would you pay for this national nursery nonsense?”
“By making money uninheritable. I believe the hope of the future, the triumph of democracy, the very salvation of the race lies in the State education of the children. The greatest enemies of the young are the old. Instead of the child honouring the parents, the parents should honour the child; for if there’s any virtue in evolution the son ought to be an improvement on the father.”
In the growing darkness I could see the bowl of his pipe glow and fade. I was not paying much attention to what he was saying, but there in that scented pine-gloom it was a pleasure to listen to that rich, vibrating voice.
“I want to be fair, I want to be just, I want to see every man do his share of the world’s work. Let him earn as much money as he likes, but at his death let it revert to the State for the general education of the race, not to pamper and spoil his own particular progeny. Let the girls be taught the glory of motherhood, and the men military duty; then, fully equipped for the struggle, let all go forth. How simple it is! How sane! Yet we’re blind, so blind.”
“Solonge is sleeping in my arms,” said Anastasia. “I sink it is time we must go home.”