He wondered whether he should ever marry, and what manner of woman his wife would turn out to be. Of one thing he was sure. He would not now marry any woman unless he loved her with all his heart, and he would not ask her to marry him unless he were already sure of her love. The third must be the decisive case, from which he should never desire to withdraw and in which there should be no disappointment. He thought of Grace Fearing, and of her marriage and short-lived happiness with its terribly sudden ending and the immensity of sorrow that had followed its extinction. It almost seemed to him as though it would be worth while to suffer as she suffered if one could have what she had found; for the love must have been great and deep and sincere indeed, which could leave such scars where it had rested. To love a woman so well able to love would be happiness. She never doubted herself nor what she felt; all her thoughts were clear, simple and strong; she did not analyse herself to know the measure of her own sincerity, nor was she a woman to be carried away by a thoughtless passion. She loved and she hated frankly, sincerely, without a side thought of doubt on the one hand nor of malice on the other. She was morally strong without putting on any affectation of strength, she was clear-sighted without making any pretence to exceptional intelligence, she was passionate without folly, and wise without annoyance, she was good, not sanctimonious, she was dignified without vanity. In short, as George thought of her, he saw that the woman who had openly disliked him and opposed him in former days, was of all the three the one for whom he felt the most sincere admiration. He remembered now that at his first meeting with the two sisters he had liked Grace better than Constance, and would then have chosen her as the object of his attentions had she been free and had he foreseen that friendship was to follow upon intimacy and love on friendship. Unfortunately for George Wood, and for all who find themselves in a like situation, that concatenation of events is the one most rarely foreseen by anybody, and George was fain to content himself with speculating upon the nature of the happiness he would have enjoyed had he been loved by a woman who seemed now to be dead to the whole world of the affections. It was sufficient to compare her with her sister to understand that she was, of the two, the nobler character; it was enough to think of Mamie to see that in that direction no comparison was even possible.
“It would be strange if it should be my fate to love her, after all,” George thought. “She would never love me.”
He roused himself from his reverie and sat down to his table, by sheer force of habit. Paper and ink were before him, and his pen lay ready to his hand, where he had last thrown it down. Almost unconsciously he began to write, putting down notes of a situation that had suddenly presented itself to his mind. The pen moved along, sometimes running rapidly, sometimes stopping with an impatient hesitation during which it continued to move uneasily in the air. Characters shaped themselves out of the chaos and names sounded in the willing ear of the writer. The situation which he had first thought of was all at once transformed into a detail in a second and larger action, another possibility started up out of darkness, in brilliant clearness, and absorbed the matters already thought of into itself, broadening and strengthening every moment. Whole chapters now stood out as if already written, and in their places. A detail here, another there, to be changed or adapted, one glance at the whole, one or two names spoken aloud to see how they sounded in the stillness, a pause of a moment, a fresh sheet of paper, and George Wood was launched upon the first chapter of a new novel, forgetful of Grace, of Constance Fearing and even of poor Mamie herself and of all that had happened only two or three hours earlier.
He was writing, working with passionate and all-absorbing interest at the expression of his fancies. What he did was good, well thought, clearly expressed, harmoniously composed. When it was given to the public it was spoken of as the work of a man of heart, full of human sympathy and understanding. At the time when he was inventing the plot and writing down the beginning of his story, a number of people intimately connected with his life were all in one way or another suffering acutely and he himself was the direct or indirect cause of all their sufferings. He was neither a cruel man, nor thoughtless nor unkind, but he was for the time utterly unconscious of the outer world, and if not happy at least profoundly interested in what he was doing.
During that hour, Sherrington Trimm, pale and nervous, was walking up and down his endless beat in the little room at the club where George had left him, trying to master his anger and disgust before going home to meet his wife and the inevitable explanation which must ensue. The servant came in and lit the gaslight and stirred the fire but Trimm never saw him nor varied the monotony of his walk.
At his own house, things were no better. Totty, completely broken down, by the failure of all her plans and the disclosure of her discreditable secret, had recovered enough from her hysterics to be put to bed by her faithful maid, who was surprised to find that, as all signs fail in fair weather, none of the usual remedies could extract a word of satisfaction or an expression of relief from her mistress. Down stairs, in the little boudoir where she had last seen the man she loved, Mamie was lying stretched upon the divan, dry eyed, with strained lips and blanched cheeks, knowing nothing save that her passion had dashed itself to pieces against a rock in the midst of its fairest voyage.
In another house, far distant, Grace Bond was leaning against a broad chimney-piece, a half-sorrowful, half-contemptuous smile upon her strong sad face, as she thought of all her sister’s changes and vacillations and of the aimlessness of the fair young life. Above, in her own room, Constance Fearing was kneeling and praying with all her might, though she hardly knew for what, while the bright tears flowed down her thin cheeks in an unceasing stream.
“And yet, when he came to life, he called me first!” she cried, stretching out her hands and looking upward as though protesting against the injustice of Heaven.
And in yet another place, in a magnificent chamber, where the softened light played upon rich carvings and soft carpets, an old man lay dying of his last fit of anger.
All for the sake of George Wood who, conscious that many if not all were in deep trouble, anxiety or suffering, was driving his pen unceasingly from one side of a piece of paper to the other, with an expression of keen interest on his dark face, and a look of eager delight in his eyes such as a man may show who is hunting an animal of value and who is on the point of overtaking his prey.
But for the accident of thought which had thrown a new idea into the circulation of his brain, he would still have been sitting in his shabby easy-chair, thoughtfully pulling at his short pipe and thinking of all those persons whom he had seen that day, kindly of some, unkindly of others, but not deaf to all memories and shut off from all sympathy by something which had suddenly arisen between himself and the waking, suffering world.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
THE SUN SHINES alike upon the just and the unjust, and it would seem to follow that all men should be judged by the same measure in the more important actions and emotions of their lives. To apply the principle of a double standard to mankind is to run the risk of producing some very curious results in morality. And yet, there are undoubtedly cases in which a man has a claim to special consideration and, as it were, to a trial by a special jury. There have been many great statesmen whose private practice in regard to financial transactions has been more than shady, and there have been others whose private lives have been spotless, but whose political doings have been unscrupulous in the extreme. There are professions and careers in which it is sufficient to act precisely as all others engaged in the same occupation would act, and in which the most important element of success is a happy faculty of keeping the brain power at the same unvarying pressure, neither high nor low, but always ready to be used, and in such a state that it may always be relied upon to perform the same amount of work in a given time. There are other occupations in which there are necessarily moments of enormous activity at uncertain intervals, followed by periods of total relaxation and rest. One migh
t divide all careers roughly into two classes, and call the one the continuous class and the other the intermittent. The profession of the novelist falls within the latter division. Very few men or women who have written well have succeeded in reducing the exercise of their art to a necessary daily function of the body. Very few intellectual machines can be made to bear the strain of producing works of imagination in regular quantities throughout many years at an unvarying rate, day after day. Neither the brain nor the body will bear it, and if the attempt be made either the one or the other, or both, will ultimately suffer. Without being necessarily spasmodic, the storyteller’s activity is almost unavoidably intermittent. There are men who can take up the pen and drive it during seven, eight and even nine hours a day for six weeks or two months and who, having finished their story, either fall into a condition of indolent apathy until the next book has to be written, or return at once to some favourite occupation which produces no apparent result, and of which the public has never heard. There are many varieties of the genus author. There is the sailor author, who only comes ashore to write his book and puts to sea again as soon as it is in the publisher’s hands. There is the hunting author, who as in the case of Anthony Trollope, keeps his body in such condition that he can do a little good work every day of the year, a great and notable exception to the rule. There is the student author, whose laborious work of exegesis will never be heard of, but who interrupts it from time to time in order to produce a piece of brilliant fiction, returning to his Sanscrit each time with renewed interest and industry. There is the musical author, whose preference would have led him to be a professional musician, but who had not quite enough talent for it, or not quite enough technical facility or whose musical education began a little too late. There is the adventurous author, who shoots in Africa or has a habit of spending the winter in eastern Siberia. There is the artistic author, who may be found in out-of-the-way towns in Italy, patiently copying old pictures, as though his life depended upon his accuracy, or sketching ragged boys and girls in very ragged water-colour. There is the social author — and he is not always the least successful in his profession — who is a favourite everywhere, who can dance and sing and act, and who regards the occasional production of a novel as an episode in his life. There is the author who prepares himself many months beforehand for what he intends to do by frequenting the society, whether high or low, which he wishes to depict, who writes his book in one month of the year and spends the other eleven in observing the manners and customs of men and women. There is the author who lives in solitary places and evolves his characters out of his inner consciousness and who occasionally descends, manuscript in hand, from his inaccessible fastnesses and ravages all the coasts of Covent Garden, Henrietta Street and the Strand, until he has got his price and disappears as suddenly as he came, taking his gold with him, no man knows whither. There is the author whom no man can boast of having ever seen, who never answers a letter, nor gives an autograph, nor lets any one but his publisher know where he lives, but whose three volumes appear punctually twice a year and whose name is familiar in many mouths. Unless he is to be found described in an encyclopædia you will never know whether he is old or young, black or grey, good-looking or ugly, straight or hunchbacked. He is to you a vague, imaginary personage, surrounded by a pillar of cloud. In reality he is perhaps a fat little man of fifty, who wears gold-rimmed spectacles and has discovered that he can only write if he lives in one particular Hungarian village with a name that baffles pronunciation, and whose chief interest in life lies in the study of socialism or the cholera microbe. Then again, there is the fighting author, grim, grey and tough as a Toledo blade, who has ridden through many a hard-fought field in many lands and has smelled more gunpowder in his time than most great generals, out of sheer love for the stuff. There is also the pacific author, who frequents peace congresses and makes speeches in favour of a general disarming of all nations. There are countless species and varieties of the genus. There is even the poet author, who writes thousands of execrable verses in secret and produces exquisite romances in prose only because he can do nothing else.
If we admit that novels, on the whole, are a good to society at large, as most people, excepting authors themselves, are generally ready to admit, we grant at the same time that they must be produced by individuals possessing the necessary talents and characteristics of intelligence. And if it is shown that a majority of these individuals do their work in a somewhat erratic fashion, and behave somewhat erratically while they are doing it, such defects must be condoned, at least, if not counted to them for positive righteousness. With many of them the appearance of a new idea within the field of their mental vision is equivalent to a command to write, which they are neither able nor anxious to resist; and, if they are men of talent, it is very hard for them to turn their attention to anything else until the idea is expressed on paper. Let them not be thought heartless or selfish if they sometimes seem to care nothing for what happens around them while they are subject to the imperious domination of the new idea. They are neither the one nor the other. They are simply unconscious, like a man in a cataleptic trance. The plainest language conveys no meaning to their abstracted comprehension, the most startling sights produce no impression upon their sense; they are in another world, living and talking with unseen creations of their own fancy and for the time being they are not to be considered as ordinary human beings, nor judged by the standard to which other men are subject.
It would not therefore be just to say that during the days which followed the breaking off of his engagement with Mamie Trimm, George Wood was cruel or unfeeling because he was wholly unconscious of her existence throughout the greater part of each twenty-four hours. By a coincidence which he would certainly not have invoked, a train of thought had begun its course in his brain within an hour or two of the catastrophe, and he was powerless to stop himself in the pursuit of it until he had reached the end. During nine whole days he never left the house, and scarcely went out of his room except to eat his meals, which he did in a summary fashion without wasting time in superfluous conversation. On the morning of the tenth day he knew that he was at the last chapter and he sat down at his table in that state of mind to which a very young author is brought by a week and a half of unceasing fatigue and excitement. The room swam with him, and he could see nothing distinctly except his paper, the point of his pen, and the moving panorama in his brain, of which it was essential to catch every detail before it had passed into the outer darkness from which ideas cannot be brought back. His hand was icy cold, moist and unsteady and his face was pale, the eyelids dark and swollen, and the veins on the temples distended. He moved his feet nervously as he wrote, shrugged his left shoulder with impatience at the slightest hesitation about the use of a word, and his usually imperturbable features translated into expression every thought, as rapidly as he could put it into words with his pen. The house might have burned over his head, and he would have gone on writing until the paper under his hand was on fire. No ordinary noise would have reached his ears, conscious only of the scratching of the steel point upon the smooth sheet. He could have worked as well in the din of a public room in a hotel, or in the crowded hall of a great railway station, as in the silence and solitude of his own chamber. He had reached the point of abstraction at which nothing is of the slightest consequence to the writer provided that the ink will flow and the paper will not blot. Like a skilled swordsman, he was conscious only of his enemy’s eye and of the state of the weapons. The weapons were pen, ink and paper, and the enemy was the idea to be pursued, overtaken, pierced and pinned down before it could assume another shape, or escape again into chaos. The sun rose above the little paved brick court below his window, and began to shine into the window itself. Then a storm came up and the sky turned suddenly black, while the wind whistled through the yard with that peculiarly unnatural sound which it makes in great cities, so different from its sighing and moaning and roaring amongst trees and rocks. The first snowflak
es were whirled against the panes of glass and slid down to the frame in half-transparent patches. The wind sank again, and the snow fluttered silently down like the unwinding of an endless lace curtain from above. Then, the flakes were suddenly illuminated by a burst of sunshine and melted as they fell and turned to bright drops of water in the air, and then vanished again, and the small piece of sky above the great house on the other side of the yard was once more clear and blue, as a sapphire that has been dipped in pure water. It was afternoon, and George was unconscious of the many changes of the day, unconscious that he had not eaten nor drunk since morning, and that he had even forgotten to smoke. One after another the pages were numbered, filled and tossed aside, as he went on, never raising his head nor looking away from his work lest he should lose something of the play upon which all his faculties were inwardly concentrated, and of which it was his business to transcribe every word, and to note every passing attitude and gesture of the actors who were performing for his benefit.
Some one knocked at the door, gently at first and then more loudly. Then, receiving no answer, the person’s footsteps could be heard retreating towards the landing. The firing of a cannon in the room would hardly have made George turn his head at that moment, much less the rapping of a servant’s knuckles upon a wooden panel. Several minutes elapsed, and then heavier footsteps were heard again, and the latch was turned and the door moved noiselessly on its hinges. Jonah Wood’s iron-grey head appeared in the opening. George had heard nothing and during several seconds the old gentleman watched him curiously. He had the greatest consideration for his son’s privacy when at work, though he could not readily understand the terribly disturbing effect of an interruption upon a brain so much more sensitively organised than his own. Now, however, the case was serious, and George must be interrupted, cost what it might. He was evidently unconscious that any one was in the room, and his back was turned as he sat. Jonah Wood resolved to be cautious.
Complete Works of F Marion Crawford Page 529