The New York Stories of Edith Wharton

by Edith Wharton

  This was the confession that, reluctantly, yet with a kind of white-lipped bravado, he flung at Betton in answer to the latter’s tentative suggestion that, really, the letter-answering job wasn’t worth bothering him with—a thing that any type-writer could do.

  “If you mean that you’re paying me more than it’s worth, I’ll take less,” Vyse rushed out after a pause.

  “Oh, my dear fellow—” Betton protested, flushing.

  “What do you mean, then? Don’t I answer the letters as you want them answered?”

  Betton anxiously stroked his silken ankle. “You do it beautifully, too beautifully. I mean what I say: the work’s not worthy of you. I’m ashamed to ask you—”

  “Oh, hang shame,” Vyse interrupted. “Do you know why I said I shouldn’t have time to dress tonight? Because I haven’t any evening clothes. As a matter of fact, I haven’t much but the clothes I stand in. One thing after another’s gone against me; all the infernal ingenuities of chance. It’s been a slow Chinese torture, the kind where they keep you alive to have more fun killing you.” He straightened himself with a sudden blush. “Oh, I’m all right now—getting on capitally. But I’m still walking rather a narrow plank; and if I do your work well enough—if I take your idea—”

  Betton stared into the fire without answering. He knew next to nothing of Vyse’s history, of the mischance or mismanagement that had brought him, with his brains and his training, to so unlikely a pass. But a pang of compunction shot through him as he remembered the manuscript of The Lifted Lamp gathering dust on his table for half a year.

  “Not that it would have made any earthly difference—since he’s evidently never been able to get the thing published.” But this reflection did not wholly console Betton, and he found it impossible, at the moment, to tell Vyse that his services were not needed.

  III

  During the ensuing weeks the letters grew fewer and fewer, and Betton foresaw the approach of the fatal day when his secretary, in common decency, would have to say: “I can’t draw my pay for doing nothing.”

  What a triumph for Vyse!

  The thought was intolerable, and Betton cursed his weakness in not having dismissed the fellow before such a possibility arose.

  “If I tell him I’ve no use for him now, he’ll see straight through it, of course;—and then, hang it, he looks so poor!”

  This consideration came after the other, but Betton, in rearranging them, put it first, because he thought it looked better there, and also because he immediately perceived its value in justifying a plan of action that was beginning to take shape in his mind.

  “Poor devil, I’m damned if I don’t do it for him!” said Betton, sitting down at his desk.

  Three or four days later he sent word to Vyse that he didn’t care to go over the letters any longer, and that they would once more be carried directly to the library.

  The next time he lounged in, on his way to his morning ride, he found his secretary’s pen in active motion.

  “A lot to-day,” Vyse told him cheerfully.

  His tone irritated Betton: it had the inane optimism of the physician reassuring a discouraged patient.

  “Oh. Lord—I thought it was almost over,” groaned the novelist.

  “No: they’ve just got their second wind. Here’s one from a Chicago publisher—never heard the name—offering you thirty percent on your next novel, with an advance royalty of twenty thousand. And here’s a chap who wants to syndicate it for a bunch of Sunday papers: big offer, too. That’s from Ann Arbor. And this—oh, this one’s funny!”

  He held up a small scented sheet to Betton, who made no movement to receive it.

  “Funny? Why’s it funny?” he growled.

  “Well, it’s from a girl—a lady—and she thinks she’s the only person who understands Abundance—has the clue to it. Says she’s never seen a book so misrepresented by the critics—”

  “Ha, ha! That is good!” Betton agreed with too loud a laugh.

  “This one’s from a lady, too—married woman. Says she’s misunderstood, and would like to correspond.”

  “Oh, Lord,” said Betton.—“What are you looking at?” he added sharply, as Vyse continued to bend his blinking gaze on the letters.

  “I was only thinking I’d never seen such short letters from women. Neither one fills the first page.”

  “Well, what of that?” queried Betton.

  Vyse reflected. “I’d like to meet a woman like that,” he said wearily; and Betton laughed again.

  The letters continued to pour in, and there could be no farther question of dispensing with Vyse’s services. But one morning, about three weeks later, the latter asked for a word with his employer, and Betton, on entering the library, found his secretary with half a dozen documents spread out before him.

  “What’s up?” queried Betton, with a touch of impatience.

  Vyse was attentively scanning the outspread letters.

  “I don’t know: can’t make out.” His voice had a faint note of embarrassment. “Do you remember a note signed Hester Macklin that came three or four weeks ago? Married—misunderstood—Western army post—wanted to correspond?”

  Betton seemed to grope among his memories; then he assented vaguely.

  “A short note,” Vyse went on: “the whole story in half a page. The shortness struck me so much—and the directness—that I wrote her: wrote in my own name, I mean.”

  “In your own name?” Betton stood amazed; then he broke into a groan.

  “Good Lord, Vyse—you’re incorrigible!”

  The secretary pulled his thin mustache with a nervous laugh. “If you mean I’m an ass, you’re right. Look here.” He held out an envelope stamped with the words: “Dead Letter Office.” “My effusion has come back to me marked ‘unknown.’ There’s no such person at the address she gave you.”

  Betton seemed for an instant to share his secretary’s embarrassment; then he burst into an uproarious laugh.

  “Hoax, was it? That’s rough on you, old fellow!”

  Vyse shrugged his shoulders. “Yes; but the interesting question is—why on earth didn’t your answer come back, too?”

  “My answer?”

  “The official one—the one I wrote in your name. If she’s unknown, what’s become of that?”

  Betton’s eyes were wrinkled by amusement. “Perhaps she hadn’t disappeared then.”

  Vyse disregarded the conjecture. “Look here—I believe all these letters are a hoax,” he broke out.

  Betton stared at him with a face that turned slowly red and angry. “What are you talking about? All what letters?”

  “These I’ve got spread out here: I’ve been comparing them. And I believe they’re all written by one man.”

  Betton’s redness turned to a purple that made his ruddy mustache seem pale. “What the devil are you driving at?” he asked.

  “Well, just look at it,” Vyse persisted, still bent above the letters. “I’ve been studying them carefully—those that have come within the last two or three weeks—and there’s a queer likeness in the writing of some of them. The g’s are all like cork-screws. And the same phrases keep recurring—the Ann Arbor news-agent uses the same expressions as the President of the Girl’s College at Euphorbia, Maine.”

  Betton laughed. “Aren’t the critics always groaning over the shrinkage of the national vocabulary? Of course we all use the same expressions.”

  “Yes,” said Vyse obstinately. “But how about using the same g’s?”

  Betton laughed again, but Vyse continued without heeding him: “Look here, Betton—could Strett have written them?”

  “Strett?” Betton roared. “Strett?” He threw himself into his armchair to shake out his mirth at greater ease.

  “I’ll tell you why. Strett always posts all my answers. He comes in for them every day before I leave. He posted the letter to the misunderstood party—the letter from you that the Dead Letter Office didn’t return. I posted my own letter to her;
and that came back.”

  A measurable silence followed the emission of this ingenious conjecture; then Betton observed with gentle irony: “Extremely neat. And of course it’s no business of yours to supply any valid motive for this remarkable attention on my valet’s part.”

  Vyse cast on him a slanting glance.

  “If you’ve found that human conduct’s generally based on valid motives—!”

  “Well, outside of mad-houses it’s supposed to be not quite incalculable.”

  Vyse had an odd smile under his thin mustache. “Every house is a mad-house at some time or another.”

  Betton rose with a careless shake of the shoulders. “This one will be if I talk to you much longer,” he said, moving away with a laugh.

  IV

  Betton did not for a moment believe that Vyse suspected the valet of having written the letters.

  “Why the devil don’t he say out what he thinks? He was always a tortuous chap,” he grumbled inwardly.

  The sense of being held under the lens of Vyse’s mute scrutiny became more and more exasperating. Betton, by this time, had squared his shoulders to the fact that Abundance was a failure with the public: a confessed and glaring failure. The press told him so openly, and his friends emphasized the fact by their circumlocutions and evasions. Betton minded it a good deal more than he had expected, but not nearly as much as he minded Vyse’s knowing it. That remained the central twinge in his diffused discomfort. And the problem of getting rid of his secretary once more engaged him.

  He had set aside all sentimental pretexts for retaining Vyse; but a practical argument replaced them. “If I ship him now he’ll think it’s because I’m ashamed to have him see that I’m not getting any more letters.”

  For the letters had ceased again, almost abruptly, since Vyse had hazarded the conjecture that they were the product of Strett’s devoted pen. Betton had reverted only once to the subject—to ask ironically, a day or two later: “Is Strett writing to me as much as ever?”—and, on Vyse’s replying with a neutral headshake, had added, laughing: “If you suspect him you’ll be thinking next that I write the letters myself!”

  “There are very few to-day,” said Vyse, with an irritating evasiveness; and Betton rejoined squarely: “Oh, they’ll stop soon. The book’s a failure.”

  A few mornings later he felt a rush of shame at his own tergiversations, and stalked into the library with Vyse’s sentence on his tongue.

  Vyse was sitting at the table making pencil-sketches of a girl’s profile. Apparently there was nothing else for him to do.

  “Is that your idea of Hester Macklin?” asked Betton jovially, leaning over him.

  Vyse started back with one of his anemic blushes. “I was hoping you’d be in. I wanted to speak to you. There’ve been no letters the last day or two,” he explained.

  Betton drew a quick breath of relief. The man had some sense of decency, then! He meant to dismiss himself.

  “I told you so, my dear fellow; the book’s a flat failure,” he said, almost gaily.

  Vyse made a deprecating gesture. “I don’t know that I should regard the absence of letters as the final test. But I wanted to ask you if there isn’t something else I can do on the days when there’s no writing.” He turned his glance toward the book-lined walls. “Don’t you want your library catalogued?” he asked insidiously.

  “Had it done last year, thanks.” Betton glanced away from Vyse’s face. It was piteous how he needed the job!

  “I see... Of course this is just a temporary lull in the letters. They’ll begin again—as they did before. The people who read carefully read slowly—you haven’t heard yet what they think.”

  Betton felt a rush of puerile joy at the suggestion. Actually, he hadn’t thought of that!

  “There was a big second crop after Diadems and Faggots,” he mused aloud.

  “Of course. Wait and see,” said Vyse confidently.

  The letters in fact began again—more gradually and in smaller numbers. But their quality was different, as Vyse had predicted. And in two cases Betton’s correspondents, not content to compress into one rapid communication the thoughts inspired by his work, developed their views in a succession of really remarkable letters. One of the writers was a professor in a Western college; the other was a girl in Florida. In their language, their point of view, their reasons for appreciating Abundance, they differed almost diametrically; but this only made the unanimity of their approval the more striking. The rush of correspondence evoked by Betton’s earlier novel had produced nothing so personal, so exceptional as these communications. He had gulped the praise of Diadems and Faggots as undiscriminatingly as it was offered; now he knew for the first time the subtler pleasures of the palate. He tried to feign indifference, even to himself; and to Vyse he made no sign. But gradually he felt a desire to know what his secretary thought of the letters, and, above all, what he was saying in reply to them. And he resented acutely the possibility of Vyse’s starting one of his clandestine correspondences with the girl in Florida. Vyse’s notorious lack of delicacy had never been more vividly present to Betton’s imagination; and he made up his mind to answer the letters himself.

  He would keep Vyse on, of course: there were other communications that the secretary could attend to. And, if necessary, Betton would invent an occupation: he cursed his stupidity in having betrayed the fact that his books were already catalogued.

  Vyse showed no surprise when Betton announced his intention of dealing personally with the two correspondents who showed so flattering a reluctance to take their leave. But Betton immediately read a criticism in his lack of comment, and put forth, on a note of challenge: “After all, one must be decent!”

  Vyse looked at him with an evanescent smile. “You’ll have to explain that you didn’t write the first answers.”

  Betton halted. “Well—I—I more or less dictated them, didn’t I?”

  “Oh, virtually, they’re yours, of course.”

  “You think I can put it that way?”

  “Why not?” The secretary absently drew an arabesque on the blotting-pad. “Of course they’ll keep it up longer if you write yourself,” he suggested.

  Betton blushed, but faced the issue. “Hang it all, I shan’t be sorry. They interest me. They’re remarkable letters.” And Vyse, without observation, returned to his writings.

  The spring, that year, was delicious to Betton. His college professor continued to address him tersely but cogently at fixed intervals, and twice a week eight serried pages came from Florida. There were other letters, too; he had the solace of feeling that at last Abundance was making its way, was reaching the people who, as Vyse said, read slowly because they read intelligently. But welcome as were all these proofs of his restored authority they were but the background of his happiness. His life revolved for the moment about the personality of his two chief correspondents. The professor’s letters satisfied his craving for intellectual recognition, and the satisfaction he felt in them proved how completely he had lost faith in himself. He blushed to think that his opinion of his work had been swayed by the shallow judgments of a public whose taste he despised. Was it possible that he had allowed himself to think less well of Abundance because it was not to the taste of the average novel-reader? Such false humility was less excusable than the crudest appetite for praise: it was ridiculous to try to do conscientious work if one’s self-esteem were at the mercy of popular judgments. All this the professor’s letters delicately and indirectly conveyed to Betton, with the result that the author of Abundance began to recognize in it the ripest flower of his genius.

  But if the professor understood his book, the girl from Florida understood him; and Betton was fully alive to the superior qualities of discernment which this implied. For his lovely correspondent his novel was but the starting point, the pretext of her discourse: he himself was her real object, and he had the delicious sense, as their exchange of thoughts proceeded, that she was interested in Abundance because of
its author, rather than in the author because of his book. Of course she laid stress on the fact that his ideas were the object of her contemplation; but Betton’s agreeable person had permitted him some insight into the incorrigible subjectiveness of female judgments, and he was pleasantly aware, from the lady’s tone, that she guessed him to be neither old nor ridiculous. And suddenly he wrote to ask if he might see her...

  The answer was long in coming. Betton fidgeted at the delay, watched, wondered, fumed; then he received the one word “Impossible.”

  He wrote back more urgently, and awaited the reply with increasing eagerness. A certain shyness had kept him from once more modifying the instructions regarding his mail, and Strett still carried the letters directly to Vyse. The hour when he knew they were passing under the latter’s eyes was now becoming intolerable to Betton, and it was a relief when the secretary, suddenly advised of his father’s illness, asked permission to absent himself for a fortnight.

  Vyse departed just after Betton had dispatched to Florida his second missive of entreaty, and for ten days he tasted the joy of a first perusal of his letters. The answer from Florida was not among them; but Betton said to himself, “She’s thinking it over,” and delay, in that light, seemed favorable. So charming, in fact, was this phase of sentimental suspense that he felt a start of resentment when a telegram apprised him one morning that Vyse would return to his post that day.

  Betton had slept later than usual, and, springing out of bed with the telegram in his hand, he learned from the clock that his secretary was due in half an hour. He reflected that the morning’s mail must long since be in; and, too impatient to wait for its appearance with his breakfast-tray, he threw on a dressing-gown and went to the library. There lay the letters, half a dozen of them: but his eyes flew to one envelope, and as he tore it open a warm wave rocked his heart.

  The letter was dated a few days after its writer must have received his own: it had all the qualities of grace and insight to which his unknown friend had accustomed him, but it contained no allusion, however indirect, to the special purport of his appeal. Even a vanity less ingenious than Betton’s might have read in the lady’s silence one of the most familiar motions of consent; but the smile provoked by this inference faded as he turned to his other letters. For the uppermost bore the superscription Letter Office,” and the document that fell from it was his own last letter from Florida.