The Real Thing and Other Tales

IV

On the evening that succeeded this apparently pointless encounter he had an interview more conclusive with Mrs. Bundy, for whose shrewd and philosophic view of life he had several times expressed, even to the good woman herself, a considerable relish.  The situation at Jersey Villas (Mrs. Ryves had suddenly flown off to Dover) was such as to create in him a desire for moral support, and there was a kind of domestic determination in Mrs. Bundy which seemed, in general, to advertise it.  He had asked for her on coming in, but had been told she was absent for the hour; upon which he had addressed himself mechanically to the task of doing up his dishonoured manuscript—the ingenious fiction about which Mr. Locket had been so stupid—for further adventures and not improbable defeats.  He passed a restless, ineffective afternoon, asking himself if his genius were a horrid delusion, looking out of his window for something that didn’t happen, something that seemed now to be the advent of a persuasive Mr. Locket and now the return, from an absence more disappointing even than Mrs. Bundy’s, of his interesting neighbour of the parlours.  He was so nervous and so depressed that he was unable even to fix his mind on the composition of the note with which, on its next peregrination, it was necessary that his manuscript should be accompanied.  He was too nervous to eat, and he forgot even to dine; he forgot to light his candles, he let his fire go out, and it was in the melancholy chill of the late dusk that Mrs. Bundy, arriving at last with his lamp, found him extended moodily upon his sofa.  She had been informed that he wished to speak to her, and as she placed on the malodorous luminary an oily shade of green pasteboard she expressed the friendly hope that there was nothing wrong with his ’ealth.

The young man rose from his couch, pulling himself together sufficiently to reply that his health was well enough but that his spirits were down in his hoots.  He had a strong disposition to “draw” his landlady on the subject of Mrs. Ryves, as well as a vivid conviction that she constituted a theme as to which Mrs. Bundy would require little pressure to tell him even more than she knew.  At the same time he hated to appear to pry into the secrets of his absent friend; to discuss her with their bustling hostess resembled too much for his taste a gossip with a tattling servant about an unconscious employer.  He left out of account however Mrs. Bundy’s knowledge of the human heart, for it was this fine principle that broke down the barriers after he had reflected reassuringly that it was not meddling with Mrs. Ryves’s affairs to try and find out if she struck such an observer as happy.  Crudely, abruptly, even a little blushingly, he put the direct question to Mrs. Bundy, and this led tolerably straight to another question, which, on his spirit, sat equally heavy (they were indeed but different phases of the same), and which the good woman answered with expression when she ejaculated: “Think it a liberty for you to run down for a few hours?  If she do, my dear sir, just send her to me to talk to!”  As regards happiness indeed she warned Baron against imposing too high a standard on a young thing who had been through so much, and before he knew it he found himself, without the responsibility of choice, in submissive receipt of Mrs. Bundy’s version of this experience.  It was an interesting picture, though it had its infirmities, one of them congenital and consisting of the fact that it had sprung essentially from the virginal brain of Miss Teagle.  Amplified, edited, embellished by the richer genius of Mrs. Bundy, who had incorporated with it and now liberally introduced copious interleavings of Miss Teagle’s own romance, it gave Peter Baron much food for meditation, at the same time that it only half relieved his curiosity about the causes of the charming woman’s underlying strangeness.  He sounded this note experimentally in Mrs. Bundy’s ear, but it was easy to see that it didn’t reverberate in her fancy.  She had no idea of the picture it would have been natural for him to desire that Mrs. Ryves should present to him, and she was therefore unable to estimate the points in respect to which his actual impression was irritating.  She had indeed no adequate conception of the intellectual requirements of a young man in love.  She couldn’t tell him why their faultless friend was so isolated, so unrelated, so nervously, shrinkingly proud.  On the other hand she could tell him (he knew it already) that she had passed many years of her life in the acquisition of accomplishments at a seat of learning no less remote than Boulogne, and that Miss Teagle had been intimately acquainted with the late Mr. Everard Ryves, who was a “most rising” young man in the city, not making any year less than his clear twelve hundred.  “Now that he isn’t there to make them, his mourning widow can’t live as she had then, can she?” Mrs. Bundy asked.

Baron was not prepared to say that she could, but he thought of another way she might live as he sat, the next day, in the train which rattled him down to Dover.  The place, as he approached it, seemed bright and breezy to him; his roamings had been neither far enough nor frequent enough to make the cockneyfied coast insipid.  Mrs. Bundy had of course given him the address he needed, and on emerging from the station he was on the point of asking what direction he should take.  His attention however at this moment was drawn away by the bustle of the departing boat.  He had been long enough shut up in London to be conscious of refreshment in the mere act of turning his face to Paris.  He wandered off to the pier in company with happier tourists and, leaning on a rail, watched enviously the preparation, the agitation of foreign travel.  It was for some minutes a foretaste of adventure; but, ah, when was he to have the very draught?  He turned away as he dropped this interrogative sigh, and in doing so perceived that in another part of the pier two ladies and a little boy were gathered with something of the same wistfulness.  The little boy indeed happened to look round for a moment, upon which, with the keenness of the predatory age, he recognised in our young man a source of pleasures from which he lately had been weaned.  He bounded forward with irrepressible cries of “Geegee!” and Peter lifted him aloft for an embrace.  On putting him down the pilgrim from Jersey Villas stood confronted with a sensibly severe Miss Teagle, who had followed her little charge.  “What’s the matter with the old woman?” he asked himself as he offered her a hand which she treated as the merest detail.  Whatever it was, it was (and very properly, on the part of a loyal suivante) the same complaint as that of her employer, to whom, from a distance, for Mrs. Ryves had not advanced an inch, he flourished his hat as she stood looking at him with a face that he imagined rather white.  Mrs. Ryves’s response to this salutation was to shift her position in such a manner as to appear again absorbed in the Calais boat.  Peter Baron, however, kept hold of the child, whom Miss Teagle artfully endeavoured to wrest from him—a policy in which he was aided by Sidney’s own rough but instinctive loyalty; and he was thankful for the happy effect of being dragged by his jubilant friend in the very direction in which he had tended for so many hours.  Mrs. Ryves turned once more as he came near, and then, from the sweet, strained smile with which she asked him if he were on his way to France, he saw that if she had been angry at his having followed her she had quickly got over it.

“No, I’m not crossing; but it came over me that you might be, and that’s why I hurried down—to catch you before you were off.”

“Oh, we can’t go—more’s the pity; but why, if we could,” Mrs. Ryves inquired, “should you wish to prevent it?”

“Because I’ve something to ask you first, something that may take some time.”  He saw now that her embarrassment had really not been resentful; it had been nervous, tremulous, as the emotion of an unexpected pleasure might have been.  “That’s really why I determined last night, without asking your leave first to pay you this little visit—that and the intense desire for another bout of horse-play with Sidney.  Oh, I’ve come to see you,” Peter Baron went on, “and I won’t make any secret of the fact that I expect you to resign yourself gracefully to the trial and give me all your time.  The day’s lovely, and I’m ready to declare that the place is as good as the day.  Let me drink deep of these things, drain the cup like a man who hasn’t been out of London for months and months.  Let me walk with you and talk with you and lunch with you—I go back this afternoon.  Give me all your hours in short, so that they may live in my memory as one of the sweetest occasions of life.”

The emission of steam from the French packet made such an uproar that Baron could breathe his passion into the young woman’s ear without scandalising the spectators; and the charm which little by little it scattered over his fleeting visit proved indeed to be the collective influence of the conditions he had put into words.  “What is it you wish to ask me?” Mrs. Ryves demanded, as they stood there together; to which he replied that he would tell her all about it if she would send Miss Teagle off with Sidney.  Miss Teagle, who was always anticipating her cue, had already begun ostentatiously to gaze at the distant shores of France and was easily enough induced to take an earlier start home and rise to the responsibility of stopping on her way to contend with the butcher.  She had however to retire without Sidney, who clung to his recovered prey, so that the rest of the episode was seasoned, to Baron’s sense, by the importunate twitch of the child’s little, plump, cool hand.  The friends wandered together with a conjugal air and Sidney not between them, hanging wistfully, first, over the lengthened picture of the Calais boat, till they could look after it, as it moved rumbling away, in a spell of silence which seemed to confess—especially when, a moment later, their eyes met—that it produced the same fond fancy in each.  The presence of the boy moreover was no hindrance to their talking in a manner that they made believe was very frank.  Peter Baron presently told his companion what it was he had taken a journey to ask, and he had time afterwards to get over his discomfiture at her appearance of having fancied it might be something greater.  She seemed disappointed (but she was forgiving) on learning from him that he had only wished to know if she judged ferociously his not having complied with her request to respect certain seals.

“How ferociously do you suspect me of having judged it?” she inquired.

“Why, to the extent of leaving the house the next moment.”

They were still lingering on the great granite pier when he touched on this matter, and she sat down at the end while the breeze, warmed by the sunshine, ruffled the purple sea.  She coloured a little and looked troubled, and after an instant she repeated interrogatively: “The next moment?”

“As soon as I told you what I had done.  I was scrupulous about this, you will remember; I went straight downstairs to confess to you.  You turned away from me, saying nothing; I couldn’t imagine—as I vow I can’t imagine now—why such a matter should appear so closely to touch you.  I went out on some business and when I returned you had quitted the house.  It had all the look of my having offended you, of your wishing to get away from me.  You didn’t even give me time to tell you how it was that, in spite of your advice, I determined to see for myself what my discovery represented.  You must do me justice and hear what determined me.”

Mrs. Ryves got up from her scat and asked him, as a particular favour, not to allude again to his discovery.  It was no concern of hers at all, and she had no warrant for prying into his secrets.  She was very sorry to have been for a moment so absurd as to appear to do so, and she humbly begged his pardon for her meddling.  Saying this she walked on with a charming colour in her cheek, while he laughed out, though he was really bewildered, at the endless capriciousness of women.  Fortunately the incident didn’t spoil the hour, in which there were other sources of satisfaction, and they took their course to her lodgings with such pleasant little pauses and excursions by the way as permitted her to show him the objects of interest at Dover.  She let him stop at a wine-merchant’s and buy a bottle for luncheon, of which, in its order, they partook, together with a pudding invented by Miss Teagle, which, as they hypocritically swallowed it, made them look at each other in an intimacy of indulgence.  They came out again and, while Sidney grubbed in the gravel of the shore, sat selfishly on the Parade, to the disappointment of Miss Teagle, who had fixed her hopes on a fly and a ladylike visit to the castle.  Baron had his eye on his watch—he had to think of his train and the dismal return and many other melancholy things; but the sea in the afternoon light was a more appealing picture; the wind had gone down, the Channel was crowded, the sails of the ships were white in the purple distance.  The young man had asked his companion (he had asked her before) when she was to come back to Jersey Villas, and she had said that she should probably stay at Dover another week.  It was dreadfully expensive, but it was doing the child all the good in the world, and if Miss Teagle could go up for some things she should probably be able to manage an extension.  Earlier in the day she had said that she perhaps wouldn’t return to Jersey Villas at all, or only return to wind up her connection with Mrs. Bundy.  At another moment she had spoken of an early date, an immediate reoccupation of the wonderful parlours.  Baron saw that she had no plan, no real reasons, that she was vague and, in secret, worried and nervous, waiting for something that didn’t depend on herself.  A silence of several minutes had fallen upon them while they watched the shining sails; to which Mrs. Ryves put an end by exclaiming abruptly, but without completing her sentence: “Oh, if you had come to tell me you had destroyed them—”

“Those terrible papers?  I like the way you talk about ‘destroying!’  You don’t even know what they are.”

“I don’t want to know; they put me into a state.”

“What sort of a state?”

“I don’t know; they haunt me.”

“They haunted me; that was why, early one morning, suddenly, I couldn’t keep my hands off them.  I had told you I wouldn’t touch them.  I had deferred to your whim, your superstition (what is it?) but at last they got the better of me.  I had lain awake all night threshing about, itching with curiosity.  It made me ill; my own nerves (as I may say) were irritated, my capacity to work was gone.  It had come over me in the small hours in the shape of an obsession, a fixed idea, that there was nothing in the ridiculous relics and that my exaggerated scruples were making a fool of me.  It was ten to one they were rubbish, they were vain, they were empty; that they had been even a practical joke on the part of some weak-minded gentleman of leisure, the former possessor of the confounded davenport.  The longer I hovered about them with such precautions the longer I was taken in, and the sooner I exposed their insignificance the sooner I should get back to my usual occupations.  This conviction made my hand so uncontrollable that that morning before breakfast I broke one of the seals.  It took me but a few minutes to perceive that the contents were not rubbish; the little bundle contained old letters—very curious old letters.”

“I know—I know; ‘private and confidential.’  So you broke the other seals?”  Mrs. Ryves looked at him with the strange apprehension he had seen in her eyes when she appeared at his door the moment after his discovery.

“You know, of course, because I told you an hour later, though you would let me tell you very little.”

Baron, as he met this queer gaze, smiled hard at her to prevent her guessing that he smarted with the fine reproach conveyed in the tone of her last words; but she appeared able to guess everything, for she reminded him that she had not had to wait that morning till he came downstairs to know what had happened above, but had shown him at the moment how she had been conscious of it an hour before, had passed on her side the same tormented night as he, and had had to exert extraordinary self-command not to rush up to his rooms while the study of the open packets was going on.  “You’re so sensitively organised and you’ve such mysterious powers that you re uncanny,” Baron declared.

“I feel what takes place at a distance; that’s all.”

“One would think somebody you liked was in danger.”

“I told you that that was what was present to me the day I came up to see you.”

“Oh, but you don’t like me so much as that,” Baron argued, laughing.

She hesitated.  “No, I don’t know that I do.”

“It must be for someone else—the other person concerned.  The other day, however, you wouldn’t let me tell you that person’s name.”

Mrs. Ryves, at this, rose quickly.  “I don’t want to know it; it’s none of my business.”

“No, fortunately, I don’t think it is,” Baron rejoined, walking with her along the Parade.  She had Sidney by the hand now, and the young man was on the other side of her.  They moved toward the station—she had offered to go part of the way.  “But with your miraculous gift it’s a wonder you haven’t divined.”

“I only divine what I want,” said Mrs. Ryves.

“That’s very convenient!” exclaimed Peter, to whom Sidney had presently come round again.  “Only, being thus in the dark, it’s difficult to see your motive for wishing the papers destroyed.”

Mrs. Ryves meditated, looking fixedly at the ground.  “I thought you might do it to oblige me.”

“Does it strike you that such an expectation, formed in such conditions, is reasonable?”

Mrs. Ryves stopped short, and this time she turned on him the clouded clearness of her eyes.  “What do you mean to do with them?”

It was Peter Baron’s turn to meditate, which he did, on the empty asphalt of the Parade (the “season,” at Dover, was not yet), where their shadows were long in the afternoon light.  He was under such a charm as he had never known, and he wanted immensely to be able to reply: “I’ll do anything you like if you’ll love me.”  These words, however, would have represented a responsibility and have constituted what was vulgarly termed an offer.  An offer of what? he quickly asked himself here, as he had already asked himself after making in spirit other awkward dashes in the same direction—of what but his poverty, his obscurity, his attempts that had come to nothing, his abilities for which there was nothing to show?  Mrs. Ryves was not exactly a success, but she was a greater success than Peter Baron.  Poor as he was he hated the sordid (he knew she didn’t love it), and he felt small for talking of marriage.  Therefore he didn’t put the question in the words it would have pleased him most to hear himself utter, but he compromised, with an angry young pang, and said to her: “What will you do for me if I put an end to them?”

She shook her head sadly—it was always her prettiest movement.  “I can promise nothing—oh, no, I can’t promise!  We must part now,” she added.  “You’ll miss your train.”

He looked at his watch, taking the hand she held out to him.  She drew it away quickly, and nothing then was left him, before hurrying to the station, but to catch up Sidney and squeeze him till he uttered a little shriek.  On the way back to town the situation struck him as grotesque.

V

It tormented him so the next morning that after threshing it out a little further he felt he had something of a grievance.  Mrs. Ryves’s intervention had made him acutely uncomfortable, for she had taken the attitude of exerting pressure without, it appeared, recognising on his part an equal right.  She had imposed herself as an influence, yet she held herself aloof as a participant; there were things she looked to him to do for her, yet she could tell him of no good that would come to him from the doing.  She should either have had less to say or have been willing to say more, and he asked himself why he should be the sport of her moods and her mysteries.  He perceived her knack of punctual interference to be striking, but it was just this apparent infallibility that he resented.  Why didn’t she set up at once as a professional clairvoyant and eke out her little income more successfully?  In purely private life such a gift was disconcerting; her divinations, her evasions disturbed at any rate his own tranquillity.

What disturbed it still further was that he received early in the day a visit from Mr. Locket, who, leaving him under no illusion as to the grounds of such an honour, remarked as soon as he had got into the room or rather while he still panted on the second flight and the smudged little slavey held open Baron’s door, that he had taken up his young friend’s invitation to look at Sir Dominick Ferrand’s letters for himself.  Peter drew them forth with a promptitude intended to show that he recognised the commercial character of the call and without attenuating the inconsequence of this departure from the last determination he had expressed to Mr. Locket.  He showed his visitor the davenport and the hidden recess, and he smoked a cigarette, humming softly, with a sense of unwonted advantage and triumph, while the cautious editor sat silent and handled the papers.  For all his caution Mr. Locket was unable to keep a warmer light out of his judicial eye as he said to Baron at last with sociable brevity—a tone that took many things for granted: “I’ll take them home with me—they require much attention.”

The young man looked at him a moment.  “Do you think they’re genuine?”  He didn’t mean to be mocking, he meant not to be; but the words sounded so to his own ear, and he could see that they produced that effect on Mr. Locket.

“I can’t in the least determine.  I shall have to go into them at my leisure, and that’s why I ask you to lend them to me.”

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.