by Unknown
All the villains I know smoke. It is notorious that publishers take a few whiffs before drawing up the agreement which they send to authors to sign. I observe that when the Irish members were meeting in Committee Room No. 15, they retired at intervals to the smoking-room. Could we divide them into smokers and non-smokers, we should know for certain which are the real patriots. The following, I have reason to believe, is the true history of the American Copyright bill: The English Authors’ Society bribed the doctors of America to forbid the legislators there to smoke. Then the bill was passed at once. A hitch has since occurred, however. The explanation is that the American publishers forwarded a cigar (Regalia, full-flavored) to each member of the Senate. The critics smoke all the time they are reviewing my books. Nearly every editor smokes. The editor of the Illustrated London News does not smoke. So he says.
For my own part, I should give up smoking gladly if I could discover any easier way of feeling villanous. As it is, I must be a villain now and again, for two reasons. One is that, in the course of business, I have to meet publishers and editors. They smoke when they know I am coming, and I smoke because I know they are smoking. The other day, for instance, I called on the editor of Black and White. I had brought my natural character, the name of which is Amiability, with me; but as I was about to enter the office I hastily drew back, remembering the type of man with whom I had to deal. I hurried to the nearest tobacconist’s shop, took three whiffs, and then kept my appointment with the editor. It is thus that authors prime themselves for business. Of course, if editors and the like were willing to give up smoking, we should be delighted to do so too, and meet them as honest men.
I have spoken of another reason for smoking. It only holds with novelists. People sometimes ask me why all novelists are such depraved characters, and my reply (if any) is that the novelist who respects his art must smoke. The critics frequently say of a novelist that he does not get inside a certain character. If you have the pluck to read the novel as well as the review of it, you will find, five times in six, that it is the villain whom the novelist does not get inside of. In other words, the novelist has not smoked. To draw a character well an author must sympathize with him — must, for the time being, identify himself with him. Now, there is only one way of getting in touch with a villain. You must smoke. If the villain is merely the victim of circumstances, an occasional cigarette is sufficient. A villain who in the last chapter hears the Christmas chimes, bursts into tears, and is willing to begin a new life in Canada, can also be done on cigarettes. On the other hand, a pipe is needed for the lady adventuress (especially if she smokes herself); nor can one hope on cigarettes to get inside a villain with two wives. Cigars may be avoided, except where the villain is at the very top of his profession. Thackeray made Becky Sharp out of Manillas, but had to take to Cabanas (Maduro) for the chapters about Lord Steyne. I have been told that Mr. Christie Murray becomes very dejected when he has to write of rascals, as the smell of tobacco, not to speak of its taste, is most offensive to him. “Why don’t you tell us more of shady life in Simla?” some one said recently to Mr. Kipling. “My dear sir,” he replied, “I can’t be always smoking.” Mr. Payn doubtless learned to smoke while writing “Lost Sir Massingberd.”
The much-discussed “unhappy ending” question is merely a matter of tobacco, for if the novelist did not smoke he could never kill any of his characters. It is true that female novelists occasionally end their stories unhappily, and yet are not themselves smokers (unless they belong to the gifted new school). But on inquiry you would find, I expect, that these ladies have villanous husbands or brothers. When the author feels that she must end her story sadly, she doubtless asks the nearest villain to come into her room and smoke while she writes. If you find a man smoking in a conservatory he will give, as his reason, that tobacco kills the insects which are in league to destroy his wife’s flowers. Count Tolstoï should have drawn attention to this wholesale murder. He might have compared the husbands in the conservatory to the husbands in their wives’ writing-rooms, smoking their utmost, to the destruction of doomed heroes and heroines. It has been pointed out frequently that the wives of geniuses have their troubles, but so have the husbands of geniuses. If the lady’s genius takes the form of fiction, her husband, as we have seen, is compelled to be a villain, that he may help her on with her work. The male novelist, however, is his own villain. I never heard of a male genius so lost to all sense of shame that he ordered his wife to sit beside him and smoke while he put some inoffensive character in his story to death. It is notorious that the wives of novelists are untiring in their efforts to hide their husbands’ tobacco-pouch; but is this because they would save their husbands from villany? Those who are in a position to decide say not. Their story is that the wife of the novelist is in plot with the editor in whose magazine the novel appears. Editors never sleep at nights, from a fear that their novelist means to end his story unhappily, and so decrease the magazine’s circulation. They accordingly warn his wife that unless the heroine and hero marry in the last chapter they will never again invite her husband to write for them. What can the poor lady do? She has the housing and clothing of her children to think of, and therefore she conceals her husband’s tobacco, knowing that he will not have the cruelty to separate his lovers, unless there is a pipe in his mouth. We are constantly reading in the papers that “Mr. Dash, the wellknown novelist, has left London for a quiet fishing village on the east coast, where he intends to finish the story upon which he is at present engaged.” The public has no understanding of the significance of this paragraph, but the editor shudders when he reads it. He translates it thus: “Mr. Dash, the novelist with a sneaking fondness for unhappy endings, has escaped for a fortnight from his wife’s control, and is now smoking heavily in a fishing village whose name he is keeping secret. We understand that Mr. Dash, who had promised to end his new story happily, has changed his mind, and decided to kill the hero and heroine in each other’s arms.”
I need say no more, except that I smoked a cigarette before writing this article.
THE RESULT OF A TRAMP IN SURREY.
POSSIBLY I am a little old-fashioned in my views of professional courtesy. At any rate, when Watson and Miller suggested a tramp through Surrey from Dorking to Sheire in honor of May Day, I consented, on the understanding that it was to be a tramp and nothing more. If I had thought that either of them proposed making an article out of it, I would have stayed at home. For one thing, it was not fair to me (who trusted them), and for another, I fail to see why pressmen should be unable to enjoy Nature without making copy of her. That Miller and Watson felt they were meditating a mean thing is proved by the fact that each kept his intentions to himself. Whether either suspected the other, I cannot say, but it is a pleasure to me to know that I had implicit trust in both until I caught them in the act. Mine is not a suspicious nature, but they do not seem to know that there is such a thing in journalism as esprit de corps. At least Watson does not, for, as you will see, he shows even worse than Miller. It is painful to expose even one’s friends, but still I don’t mind doing it.
Where possible, it is my custom to combine pleasure with business; and my intention was to write a light, readable paper on our walk, putting it in such a form that I could make a background, so to speak, of Miller and Watson, who have some laughable points about them, that would amuse newspaper readers. Of course I said nothing of this to them because, as already mentioned, I trusted them. Had I suspected for one moment that either of them intented an article, I would have written mine that night, after I returned home, so that theirs would have been too late. That, as you will learn, was what Watson did, I suppose because he mistrusted Miller; for though I may, for all I know, have my faults, to steal a march on my friends is not one of them. Perhaps my idea of the perfect gentleman is too fine for common use, though I try to live up to it. How true is it that each of us makes himself the measures of his surroundings. Being without guile myself, I anticipated none from Miller and
Watson. They, on the other hand, having unworthy designs in their minds, suspected each other.
Watson having forestalled me in a way that does him little credit, I shall say nothing of our walk. Suffice it that we drank in the ozone of the Surrey hills and dined pleasantly at Sheire, I unsuspecting, believing them as loyal to me as I to them, and drawing them out in the hope that they would say a few good things. We parted in the evening at Charing Cross, without either of them saying a word of his mean intentions, and next forenoon I wrote about half of my article. Owing to Watson’s perfidy that article is merely waste paper, though the description of the pine-woods and the roar of the wind among the trees were both prettily done. The little bit about the kitten, which followed Watson through Sheire, too, would have made him as ridiculous in the eyes of the public as it did to the villagers. However, there is no use thinking of that now, I merely mention it, because it suggests the kind of man Watson turns out to be. I meant to finish my article before I went to bed, but in the evening I went to see Miller, who lives near Willesden. He was in his bedroom, which opens off his sitting-room, when I arrived, and instead of coming forward politely to welcome me, as I would have done had he called on me, he shouted out in his brusque way, “Oh, is it you, Ogilvy? sit down.” This rudeness on the part of Miller — for I can call it nothing else — found him out, for as I looked about me for something to do (that is, for his cigar-case) I caught sight of two pieces of paper on the table. Now I am the last person in the world to give way to curiosity, but seeing that there was writing on both sheets, I took a look at them. In a flash I saw what Miller was after. The man who called himself my friend, had basely deceived me; and here was the damning evidence of his guilt. The one paper consisted of notes about our tramp in Surrey; on the other he had actually begun his article, or rather tried several beginnings. I could not have believed it had I not seen it with my own eyes. One attempt began: “To the jaded Londoner, who breathes smoke instead of air, what can be pleasanter than a tramp across — There was another: “It has been frequently observed that God made the country, while man made the town.
I felt this with a new force on May Day when—”
Again: “Thanks to our much-abused railway system, the pine-woods of Surrey have become a suburb of London. Here the jaded—” Lastly:
“With the advent of summer, the dweller in cities casts his longing eyes—” As for the notes, they showed Miller in an even baser light. One of them was “Ogilvy and the kitten — touch it up a little;” so that it was evidently Miller’s intention to say that the kitten at Sheire followed me! The “touch it up a little” too, suggested a depth of moral depravity that I had never dreamed of in Miller. I had just time to replace the papers on the table before he came in, and when he saw them, conscience made him blush. He thrust them into his pocket hastily, and then looked at me suspiciously, as if I had any interest in his papers. I hate these unworthy suspicions, but of course I said nothing. Several times that evening Miller asked me what I had been doing with myself all day. A striking illustration this of the way in which suspicion haunts the guilty mind. Of course I did not tell him.
“Been writing anything particular?” he asked, with affected carelessness.
“Nothing particular,” I answered, though the deceit of the man exasperated me. Perhaps you ask why I sat on. That is easily answered. In the circumstances, I need not say Miller’s company (which is at no time very enlivening), was more a pain than a pleasure to me, but on the other hand I knew he wanted me to go. Most fortunately I was aware of Miller’s many weaknesses, of which one is a habit of taking things leisurely. I felt that if I stayed with him till ten o’clock, he would not write his article that night. So I stayed till ten and then hurried home to finish my article. This seemed the best way of punishing Miller for his duplicity. Here I would again call the reader’s attention to the fact that I had still absolute faith in Watson. A less generous mind would have reflected that if the one friend abused my confidence, so might the other. But I wrote and posted my article, suspecting no guile.
Consider the pain with which I got the article back next day, with the accompanying note from the editor: “Dear Mr. Ogilvy: I am sorry to have to return this, but I received by an earlier post a very similar paper about a Surrey tramp from Mr. Watson, which is now in the printers’ hands.” It is difficult to recall without prejudice a scene in which one has himself played a prominent part, and undoubtedly there was a scene in my chambers on receipt of this communication. Nevertheless, I am quite certain that shame was my uppermost feeling; shame to think that Watson could have done this thing — I was pained, cut to the heart. If it had been any other, I would not have minded, but it was hard that the blow — the stab in the back — should have been given by Watson, from whom I have never had a secret. I was wondering whether I had better go to Miller’s when the bell rang, and next moment Miller bounced into the room. He had a newspaper in his hand. “Was it you who wrote this?” he cried.
“Wrote what?” I asked, whereupon he pointed to an article — Watson’s article — on a tramp in Surrey. It annoyed me to think that Miller could suspect me, even for a moment, of such an underhand proceeding. I told him so. He begged my pardon, and we gripped hands; but, of course, I was less warm than Miller, for I knew all the time that with him it was merely a case of selfish disappointment. On that head, however, I said nothing, so we made common cause against Watson. First we read over his article carefully, and among its minor blemishes picked out four mixed metaphors, a misquotation, a clear case of plagiarism, and some very clumsy English. How any editor could have printed such a paper surprised both of us, but more especially me, as I, of course, knew that he had another much better one which he could have used instead. Its style, however, was the article’s least offence. If Watson was to be so mean as to make an article out of what was intended to be merely a relaxation, he might have done it decently. Instead of confining himself to the tramp and the scenery we passed through, he, with execrable taste, held up his companions to ridicule, and had the effrontery to incorporate into his paper the remarks which he had drawn out of us at the Sheire inn. Miller was especially annoyed, because it was said that the kitten already mentioned followed him. That I consider a trifle, and not worth making a fuss about. Tonight we mean to call on Watson together and tell him what we think of him, though, of course, I cannot help feeling that Miller is every whit as bad as Watson. I thank my conscience that I, at least, am not the kind of man who would make an article out of his friends.
MY HUSBAND’S BOOK.
LONG before I married George I knew that he was dreadfully ambitious. We were not yet engaged when he took me into his confidence about his forthcoming great book, which was to take the form of an inquiry into the Metaphysics of Ethics. “I have not begun it yet,” he always said, “but I shall be at it every night once the winter sets in.” In the daytime George is only a clerk, though a much-valued one, so that he has to give the best hours of his life to a ledger.
“If you only had more time at your disposal,” I used to say, when he told me of the book that was to make his name.
“I don’t complain,” he said, heartily, like the true hero he always is, except when he has to take medicine.. “Indeed, you will find that the great books have nearly always been written by busy men. I am firmly of opinion that if a man has original stuff in him it will come out.”
He glowed with enthusiasm while he spoke in this inspiriting strain, and some of his ardor passed into me. When we met we talked of nothing but his future; at least he talked while I listened with clasped hands. It was thus that we became engaged. George was no ordinary lover. He did not waste his time telling me that I was beautiful, or saying “Beloved!” at short intervals. No, when we were alone he gave me his hand to hold, and spoke fervently of the Metaphysics of Ethics.
Our engagement was not of a very long duration, for George coaxed me into marriage thus—’”I cannot settle down to my book,” he said, “until we ar
e married.”
His heart was so set on that book that I yielded. We wandered all over London together buying the furniture. There was a settee that I particularly wanted, but George, with his usual thoughtfulness, said:
“Let us rather buy a study table. It will help me at my work, and once the book is out we shall be able to afford half a dozen settees.”
Another time he went alone to buy some pictures for the drawingroom.
“I got a study chair instead,” he told me in the evening. “I knew you would not mind, my darling, for the chair is the very thing for writing a big book in.”
He even gave thought to the ink-bottle.
“In my room,” he said, “I am constantly discovering that my ink-bottle is empty, and it puts me out of temper to write with water and soot. I therefore think we ought to buy one of those large inkstands with two bottles.”
“We shall,” I replied, with the rapture of youth, “and mine will be the pleasant task of seeing that the bottles are kept full.”
“Dearest!” he said, fondly, for this was the sort of remark that touched him most.
“Every evening,” I continued, encouraged by his caressing tones, “you will find your manuscripts lying on the table waiting for you, and a pen with a new nib in it.”
“What a wife you will make!” he exclaimed.
“But you mustn’t write too much,” I said. “You must have fixed hours, and at a certain time, say at ten o’clock, I shall insist on your ceasing to write for the night.”
“That seems a wise arrangement. But sometimes I shall be too entranced in the work, I fancy, to leave it without an effort.”
“Ah,” I said, “I shall come behind you, and snatch the pen from your hand!”
“Every Saturday night,” he said, “I shall read to you what I have written during the week.”