by Unknown
No wonder I loved him.
We were married on a September day, and the honeymoon passed delightfully in talk about the book. Nothing proved to me the depth of George’s affection so much as his not beginning the great work before the honeymoon was over. So I often told him, and he smiled fondly in reply. The more, indeed, I praised him the better pleased he seemed to be. The name for this is sympathy.
Conceive us at home in our dear little house in Clapham.
“Will you begin the book at once?” I asked George the day after we arrived.
“I have been thinking that over,” he said. “I needn’t tell you that there is nothing I should like so much, but, on the whole, it might be better to wait a week.’’
“Don’t make the sacrifice for my sake,” I said, anxiously.
“Of course it is for your sake,” he replied.
“But it is such a pity to waste any more time,” I said.
“There is no such hurry,” he answered, rather testily.
I looked at him in surprise.
“What I mean,” he said, “is that I can be thinking the arrangement of the book over.”
We have, of course, a good many callers at this time, and I told most of them about the book. For reasons to be seen by and by I regret this now.
When the week had become a fortnight, I insisted on leaving George alone in the study after dinner. He looked rather gloomy, but I filled the ink-bottles, and put the paper on the desk, and handed him his new pen. He took it, but did not say thank you.
An hour afterward I took him a cup of tea. He was still sitting by the fire, but the pen had fallen from his hands.
“You are not sleeping, George?” I asked.
“Sleeping!” he cried, as indignantly as if I had charged him with crime. “No, I’m thinking.”
“You haven’t written any yet?”
“I was just going to begin when you came in. I’ll begin as soon as I’ve drunk this tea.”
“Then I’ll leave you to your work, dear.”
I returned to the study at nine o’clock. He was still in the same attitude.
“I wish you would bring me a cup of tea,” he said.
“I brought you one hours ago.”
“Eh? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Oh, George! I talked with you about it. Why, here it is on the table, untouched.” —
“I declare you never mentioned it to me. I must have been thinking so deeply that I never noticed you. You should have spoken to me.”
“But I did speak, and you answered.”
“My dear, I assure you I did nothing of the sort. This is very vexing, for it has spoiled my evening’s work.”
The next evening George said that he did not feel in the mood for writing, and I suppose I looked disappointed, for he flared up.
“I can’t be eternally writing,” he growled.
“But you haven’t done anything at all yet.”
“That is a rather ungenerous way of expressing it.”
“But you spoke as if the work would be a pleasure.”
“Have I said that it is not a pleasure? If you knew anything of literary history, you would be aware that there are occasions when the most industrious writers cannot pen a line.”
“They must make a beginning some time, though!”
“Well, I shall make a beginning tomorrow.” Next evening he seemed in no hurry to go into the study.
“I’ll hang the bedroom pictures,” he said.
“No, no, you must get begone to your book.”
“You are in a desperate hurry to see me at that book.”
“You spoke as if you were so anxious to begin it.”
“So I am. Did I say I wasn’t?”
He marched off to the study, banging the drawing room door. An hour or so afterward I took him his tea. He had left his study door open so that I could see him on the couch before I entered the room. When he heard the rattle of the tea-things he jumped up and strode to the study table, where, when I entered, he pretended to be busy writing.
“How are you getting on, dear?” I asked, with a sinking at the heart.
“Excellently, my love, excellently.”
I looked at him so reproachfully that he blushed.
“I think,” said he, when he had drunk the tea, “that I have done enough for one night. I mustn’t overdo it.”
“Won’t you let me hear what you have written?”
He blushed again.
“Wait till Saturday,” he said.
“Then let me put your papers away,” I said, for I was anxious to see whether he had written anything at all.
“I couldn’t think of it,” he replied, covering the paper with his elbows.
Next morning I counted the clean sheets of paper. They were just as I had put them on the table. So it went on for a fortnight or more, with this difference. He either suspected that I counted the sheets, or thought that I might take it into my head to do so. To allay my suspicions, therefore, he put away what he called his manuscript in a drawer, which he took care to lock. I discovered that one of my own keys opened this drawer, and one day I examined the manuscripts. They consisted of twenty-four pages of paper, without a word written on them. Every evening he added two more clean pages to the contents of the drawer. This discovery made me so scornful that I taxed him with the deceit. At first he tried to brazen it out, but I was merciless, and then he said:
“The fact is that I can’t write by gas-light. I fear I shall have to defer beginning the work until spring.”
“But you used to say that the winter was the best season for writing.”
“I thought so at the time, but I find I was wrong. It will be a great blow to me to give up the work for the present, but there is no help for it.”
When spring came I reminded him that now was his opportunity to begin the book.
“You are eternally talking about that book,” he snarled.
“I haven’t mentioned it for a month.”
“Well, you are always looking at me as if I should be at it.”
“Because you used to speak so enthusiastically about it.”
“I am as enthusiastic as ever, but I can’t be forever writing at the book.”
“We have now been married seven months, and you haven’t written a line yet.”
He banged the doors again, and a week afterward he said that spring was a bad time for writing a book.
“One likes to be out-of-doors,” he said, “in spring, watching the trees become green again. Wait till July, when one is glad to be indoors. Then I’ll give four hours to the work every evening.”
Summer came, and then he said:
“It is too hot to write books. Get me another bottle of iced soda-water. I’ll tackle the book in the autumn.”
We have now been married more than five years, but the book is not begun yet. As a rule, we now shun the subject, but there are times when he still talks hopefully of beginning. I wonder if there are any other husbands like mine.
A LADY’S SHOE.
I.
AFTER it is too dark to read, save to those who will travel to their windows in search of light, a man I know is sometimes to be found in his armchair, by the fire, toying with a lady’s shoe. He is a bachelor — whimsical you will say — and how that frayed shoe became his I know not; for often though he has told me, the tale is never twice the same. When such is his odd mood, he will weave me strange histories of the shoe, and if I would be sad they are sportive, and when one makes me merry he will give it a tragic ending, for such is the nature of the man. Sometimes he is not consistent, which, he quaintly explains, is because he has only one of the shoes; and he will argue that so-called inanimate objects accustomed to the married life, such as shoes and gloves and spectacles, mourn the loss of their mate even as Christians do, which he proves, should I smile, by asking whether, though previously hard workers, they are ever, if separated, of much more use in the world. Nor is that the only hard question he a
sks me; for when I tell him that all his stories of the shoe cannot be true, he demands of me which of them is necessarily false, and then I have no answer. Perhaps you, too, will be dumb to that question after you have listened to me, if such be your pleasure, while I repeat a little of what he tells me in the twilight, as we sit by the fire looking at the little bronze shoe.
II.
A HUNDRED and one years, and six months ago, says my friend, who is scrupulously exact about dates where they are of no consequence, that shoe and its partner got their first glimpse of the world. They sat all day in a shoemaker’s window in the Strand, looking out upon the great fair which human beings provide for the entertainment of the articles that have the luck to get a seat in shopkeepers’ windows, instead of being hung up inside on strings, or hidden away in boxes. They were a very dainty pair, made for the feet of some Cinderella with a godmother, and many ladies stopped to look at them who passed St. Paul’s without giving it a glance. But there was a little dressmaker who loved these shoes as no other loved them, and she stood admiring them so often that they got to know her and wondered why she did not come in and buy. You see they had as yet no knowledge of the world, and thought that a trumpery dressmaker ought to have them, just because she had such pretty little feet. They did not understand that beautiful shoes are not for feet that fit them, but for purses that can buy them.
She was not so very little, this dressmaker who hungered for the tiny bronze shoes; but she was only a girl, and she had to sew for her life all day and often all night, and that, my friend says, is why he calls her the little dressmaker. I suppose he means that she was so small compared to the big foes a poor girl has to fight in London. But though she was poor, she was not unhappy. She not only made pretty dresses out of rich material for fine ladies, such as the shoes were meant for, but pretty, cheap frocks for herself, in which she was delightful to look at. A really pretty girl always looks best in something at twopence-halfpenny the yard, and really plain ones look their worst in silk and velvet. These, be it noted, are my friend’s views. The little dressmaker never quite rose to them. She often smiled with satisfaction when she saw herself in a mirror; but as often she sighed over her sewing, wishing she could see herself in the fine brocades that were meant for my Lady Mary. As it is the duty of all women to look as nice as possible, the little dressmaker cannot be blamed for wishing sometimes that she had five thousand a year. Had she had that sum, her first purchase would have been the shoes. She often thought of them at nights, and looked at her pretty feet and counted her money, and then shook her head mournfully.
The little dressmaker had only one relative in the whole wide world, and he was a boy of twelve, six or eight years younger than herself. He was her brother, and they lived together in a shabby room that looked bright, for no other reason than because these two loved each other. Will ran errands for anyone who would employ him, and he had such an appetite that he often felt compelled to apologize for it. The little dressmaker could have bought the shoes to which she had given her heart, had she not known that the consuming desire of Will was to possess a certain magnificent knife.
“How absurd of Will,” the little dressmaker often said to herself, “to want that ugly knife. What can he do with it, except cut his fingers?”
At these times she could not help comparing boys to girls, and thinking that the desires of her own sex were much more reasonable, for what could be more natural and proper than to pine for the loveliest pair of bronze shoes?
Will knew why his sister often gazed at these shoes, and he would smile at her infatuation.
“How foolish girls are!” was his comment to himself. “No sensible person could see that knife without wishing to own it; but what does it matter whether one wears pretty shoes or ugly shoes, or even no shoes at all?”
Nevertheless, these two loved each other, and Will would have liked his sister to get the shoes, if only he could get the knife as well. The little dressmaker loved Will even more than that, and was determined that he should have the knife, though she had to give up the shoes.
Can you see her at the shoemaker’s window, looking at the shoes, and then at her own feet, until she felt certain that all the Strand was laughing at her? Once she went into the shop and asked the price of the shoes. She came out scared. Next day, notwithstanding, she was back at the window, with the money in her possession, and it almost compelled her to go in and buy. She had to run away. After that she left the money at home, lest it should some day drag her into the shop.
She tried to avoid the Strand altogether, but still her feet took her there against her will, for you cannot conceive how anxious they were to step into those little bronze shoes.
The little dressmaker, who was the most unselfish of women, despised herself for her vanity, and thought to be happy again by buying the knife without delay. Then the shoes would be beyond her reach as completely as if some great lady had bought them.
“Here is the money for the knife, Will,” she said, bravely, one day, and Will grasped the money, which was in many pieces, all earned with toil.
“But the shoes?” Will said, repressing his desire to rush out for the knife.
“I don’t care about them,” his sister said, turning her head away.
“It is not,” Will said, uncomfortably, “as if you had no shoes. Those are nice ones you are wearing now.”
They were not really nice ones. It was quite a shame that such pretty feet should be libelled by them. But these were matters Will did not understand.
“All one wants of shoes,” he said, “is that they should have no holes in them.”
“That is all,” answered the little dressmaker, with a courageous smile, and she spoke of the knife with such interest that Will set off to buy it, convinced that she no longer cared about the shoes. Forgetting something, however, he turned back for it, and behold, he found the little dressmaker in tears. You must not blame her. It was quite a big sacrifice she had made, and therefore, though she was crying, she was not very unhappy. Unselfishness is the best cure for trouble. Will, of course, did not realize this. He suddenly remembered that, though they were so poor, he seemed to get everything he wanted very much, while she seemed to get nothing. He was stricken with remorse, and said craftily that he wanted her to come with him to buy the knife. Well, she went with him, and presently she discovered that it was not the knife he meant to buy.
“Oh, Will,” she whispered, trembling, “I won’t have the shoes. I want you to get the knife.”
“Pooh,” said Will, grandly, “I don’t care to have the knife. What use do I have for it?”
“You will make me wretched, Will,” the little dressmaker said, “if you buy the shoes. These I have are quite nice ones.”
“You are to have the shoes,” replied Will, firmly. “No one could look so pretty in them as you will do.”
“Oh, Will, have you noticed?” faltered the little dressmaker, meaning had Will noticed that her feet really were made for lovely shoes.
“Of course I have,” answered Will, not at all understanding what she was referring to.
“But I can’t spend so much money on myself,” she said.
“It is my money now,” said Will, triumphantly, “and I am to give you the shoes as a present.” Feeling like a man, he requested her to take his arm, and so they advanced along the Strand, making quite a gallant show for such wayfarers as could read faces. Alas! they reached the shop too late. The shoes were gone. An hour earlier they had been bought by an heiress, for whom they were too small. The shopkeeper had pointed this out to her courteously, but she, too, had fallen in love with the pretty shoes, and her only answer to him was, “I buy them: I undertake to get into them.” Now we must leave the sad little dressmaker and follow the fortunes of the shoes.
III.
I INTERRUPTED my friend at this point, saying, “ It is the little dressmaker I am interested in; not the shoes. Tell me more of her.”
“She vanished out of my knowledg
e at that point in her history,” he answered, “I don’t know what became of her.” —
“A story-teller,” I complained, “has no right to close his tale so abruptly. It is his duty to leave nothing to the public’s imagination.”
“Mine,” he said, “is not a story, it is only something that happened, and I warned you that I did not know the end. In real life you never get the end of a story, but you can guess it if you will.”
“Then,” I said, “I guess that the little governess—”
“Had more severe disappointments in after life than the loss of a pair of shoes,” he said.
“But had a happy future,” I broke in, almost entreating him to say the words. “When her brother became a man he gave her a pretty house in the suburbs to be mistress of, and she was as happy “As Ruth Pinch,” he suggested; “no, I think Will married, and left the little dressmaker alone in the shabby room.”
“Until she married, you mean?”
“Or until,” said my friend, very sadly, “she was damned to all eternity that a gentleman might have his pleasure.”
“Don’t say that,” I implored.
“The little dressmaker is dead,” he answered, “and the worms have eaten her long ago, so it does not matter much.” Then he looked at me sharply: “If I cannot give the story an end,” he said, “I can at least give it a moral. When I was in your house yesterday I found a pale little governess teaching your children, and I thought (forgive me) that you were somewhat brusque to her. She was the little dressmaker over again. Ah, sir, that is what I mean when I say that the stories in real life have no ending! The brave little dressmaker is still in London; you brush against her in every street, you meet her in scores of houses. Remember that little bit of her history, and you will help to make her next scene brighter. And now I must tell you of her who bought the shoes and took them to Gretna Green, and of how they entirely altered her future because they were a size too small. This time the story has an ending, or what passes for such in a world of make-believe. It is about a grandfather of mine, too, whose marriage, as you shall hear, was entirely arranged by this shoe.”