The Call of the Town Part 21

"A pity that; for little of real value is done without the impulse. But one never knows. Try and see. The impulse may follow in the same sense that certain psychologists believe the simulation of an emotion produces its effect. I like the idea; but am not quite ready to accept it.

Reproduce the muscular expressions of sorrow or joy, and you will after a time be sorrowful or glad, says Nordau. There's something in the thought, perhaps. Similarly, determine to write a novel, and the mood for novel-writing will be induced. I don't say I agree with the theory.

But it's worth a trial, and anyhow a novel is the easiest form in which to make a public appeal, to make merchandise of your personality."

Adrian Grant's face wore its half-cynical smile as he said this, and extending his hand to Henry, he added abruptly, as his manner was: "This is your 'bus, I think; I must make for Kensington."

Henry shook hands at once with a hurried expression of thanks for his friend's kindness, and jumped on the 'bus, while Mr. P. hailed a pa.s.sing hansom, and set out for his rooms in Gloucester Road.

Vague and confused were the thoughts of Henry as the 'bus lumbered its way by historic Drury Lane and across Holborn, to his door in Bloomsbury. A 'bus ride was still full of romance to him, and the glimmering lamps of London were dearer to his mind than "the swing of Pleiades"; every jingling cab that pa.s.sed, every lighted window, was touched with romance in his eyes. To make this wondrous City listen to him--how the dream thrilled him! That the unknown thousands who flitted through these world-famous streets, and lived behind these lighted windows, might read what he wrote and know him for the writer--it was worth trying for. Already he had seen his book brave in bright gilt, shouldering the best of them in the book-shops of Holborn and the Strand; he could read the reviews distinctly: noticed even the size and style of the type they were set in, was gratified to find them so remarkably favourable, and--"Wob'n Plice!" shouted the conductor.

Henry descended to asphalt, and was presently putting on his slippers in his small sitting-room in a Bloomsbury boarding-house.

CHAPTER XX

THREE LETTERS, AND SOME OTHERS

ON the mantelpiece of his room, set on end against the little marble clock which ignored the flight of time, Henry found three letters. He examined the addresses and postmarks of each, and saw at a glance that one was from his sister Dora, another from Flo, and the third from Edgar Winton. For a moment he hesitated, undecided which to open first. Home for him had a far-off call by now, and it was with the vague sense of a dream that was past that he read Dora's fortnightly letters. Flo--hers was a more recent influence--and from a fascinating it had come to be an irksome one: the more real by that token. He burst open Edgar's letter with his forefinger, and read:

"DEAR HENRY,--I've been going to write you any time these last six weeks, but--well, old man, I'm no hand at correspondence unless it's a penny a line. Besides, I hear about you through Flo, who is quite reconciled to your absence, which the poet tells us makes the heart grow fonder. I wonder!

"But first of all, you'll want an inside view of the dear old rickety old _Leader_. Your successor is a daisy, and no mistake.

Walks into the office in knickers and a cloth cap, and shaves once a week when his beard is ready for clipping. Even Dodge, the newest junior, sneers at him, and refuses to recognise 'that josser' as editor. It's hard cheese on a youngster to run up against a weed like Steel for his first editor. Gives a low idea of our n.o.ble profession, don't you know.

"Steel's greatest feat has been to a.s.sault his wife in the street while drunk (that's Steel, not the wife, I mean, who was lus.h.i.+ng), and get run in; but a word from 'Puggie' [Mr. Albert Scriven, the chief reporter, so called by reason of his physical appearance], who happened to be at the police station at the time, put the matter right, and 'Puggie' took our warrior to his ''appy little 'ome.' It fell to my lot to vamp up the usual editorial cackle myself that night, but I've got to help the beauty most nights, as he doesn't like work. Jones knows of his little exploits, but does nothing. He's got him cheap, and that's enough for him. Besides, n.o.body outside the office--and n.o.body in it, for that matter--would believe that Steel was editor of the paper, so Jones swaggers about the town, and has taken to describing himself as 'managing editor.' Oh, we enjoy life here! there's a lot of fun in the game. Steel wonders how the paper lived through the editors.h.i.+p of 'a literary a.s.s.' He isn't nuts on literature; but with a pair of scissors, some gum, and a pencil, the Johnnie can knock out leaders while you cough, and the joke is n.o.body seems to be a bit the worse. Hope you don't mind my telling you this; but really, do you think anybody reads leaders? I hope they don't read mine.

"The _Leader_ appeared four hours late yesterday. What do you think of that? Jones again. He's a treat. A cog-wheel of the Hoe machine burst, and there wasn't a spare one in stock, nor in the town. Though he had been warned months ago, when a similar accident happened, that the last spare wheel had been used, he would not spend the money to stock one or two. We had to borrow one from the _Milton Daily Post_. You are well out of the hole, I can tell you.

"I read the _Watchman_ every week, and think it immense; but you fly above me, old man. I'm only a country scribbler, and must admire you a long way off. I takes off my hat to you, sir.

"The mater is rather queer just now, and I hope she isn't going to kipper. But one never can tell. 'Our times are in His hand,'

that's Browning, isn't it? I saw it quoted the other day, and managed to drag it into a leaderette this week. Sounds well, I think.

"Pater joins in kind regards--at least, I suppose he does, though I haven't asked him--and Flo is sending her warmest breathings direct, I understand.--Believe me, ever thine,

"EDGAR WINTON."

Henry was inclined to resent the flippant tone of the letter, the senseless slang; but he remembered that it was "only Edgar's way," and stuffed the sheets back into their envelope and into his inside pocket.

Flo's letter he turned over again as he lifted it and Dora's from his knee. He opened his sister's next, and laid the other down.

It was the usual Hampton budget of uninteresting details about the doings of that little community, and Henry read it in his usual perfunctory way, scarce recollecting the people whose names were recalled by it. "Who on earth is old Gatepost? I believe she means old John Crew, the farm bailiff. I'm surprised he is only dying now. Thought he would have been dead long ago." Often his thoughts would run thus over some bit of news from Dora. She seemed to write from out the past.

"Hoping you are well, as we all are when this leaves. No more at present, from your loving Sis."

The phrase might have been stereotyped; it was Dora's one form of "drawing to a close." Indeed, she did not draw thither; she simply closed according to formula when she had spun her loose threads of news into some semblance of a web of words.

Dora's letter was presently keeping Edgar's company, with many another tattered envelope and note, in Henry's pocket.

He turned to the third of the letters with no apparent zest.

"She writes a neat hand after all," he murmured, as he scanned the superscription. A bad sign that. A man in love should be the last person to ask for an opinion of the handwriting of his sweetheart. When he can speak with deliberation on the subject or think of it with detachment, he has become critical, and the end--happy or otherwise--is not far off.

Happy only if there is still time or courage to draw back.

"She writes a neat hand after all," said Henry, as he rammed his finger into the flap of the scented envelope and burst it open. "After all!"

These even more than the words preceding them were suggestive.

The hour was late, and who knows but that may, to some extent, have been responsible for the blinking mood in which the young man read his sweetheart's letter? It was the typical feminine scrawl, chiefly chatter about society doings in Laysford.

"Oh, I'm becoming quite a giddy girl, dearest, and me engaged.

It's too awful. Just fancy, I've been to three functions--_three_! Poor me that used to go nowhere at all. The Mellises' garden party was a very swell affair. I was there because I teach the daughter the pianoforte--and a silly thing she is. But--_don't_ be angry now, Hal--who do you think took me to the Mayor's reception? Why, that terrible goose, Mr.

Trentham, the Mayor's secretary. You remember him? Short, stout, fair moustache, but _always_ well dressed. Fancies himself, _rather_. He has asked me to go with him to another reception, when some sort of conference comes to Laysford. I don't know what it is, but the receptions are all right. Lots of fun and the best of everything. Perhaps you wouldn't like me to go, dearest? But really you needn't be _jealous_. Trentham is _really_ a goose. Only one is so dull, and then _everybody_ knows I'm engaged."

Henry knew, certainly; and he had no doubt the "everybody" was not unjustified. He accepted the information without a pang of jealousy.

"Everybody knows I'm engaged." Somehow, he would not readily have confessed to delight in the fact. Trentham he did not recall as suggestive of the ungainly biped. "Rather a decent sort of chap,"

thought Henry. "Not much in Flo's way, I imagine." He blinked through the remainder of the letter, never dreaming--though near to dreamtime--that Trentham was wondering what Flo could see in Henry Charles. The man who can divine just why another man loves or admires one woman, or why a woman "sees anything" in another man, has yet to be born. He was certainly neither Henry Charles nor Mr. Trentham.

"Not a word from Flo about her mother," Henry reflected, on his way to bed. "Just like her--all about herself. I wonder if I'm an a.s.s!"

How unreasonable men are. Why should Flo have written about anyone but herself?

It was time for Henry to wonder. But he was still wondering months later, when Trentham was not.

The fact is, this Trentham was a very fair specimen of the average bull-headed Englishman, and better than most in the eyes of Miss Winton, since he enjoyed a private income, which made him quite independent of the salary attaching to his official position. His name cropped up frequently for a time in Flo's letters to Henry, but the latter scarcely referred to it in any of his replies, from which Flo judged him jealous, and when Trentham had never a mention from her, Henry supposed him circling in some other orbit. Here, of course, he was wrong, and he might have noticed a lowering temperature in the tone of Flo's epistles.

There was still need to ask himself whether he was an a.s.s, and to answer in the affirmative. But he never thought out an answer until one day it came ready-made in a fine right-hander, which took his breath away:

"DEAR HENRY,--I am so sorry to tell you that I cannot continue our engagement. My affections have undergone a change, and I think it best for both of us that we should not carry out the engagement. I have promised to marry Mr. Trentham, who really thought we were never engaged. I haven't worn the ring much, as I didn't care greatly for the style of it, and now return it.

I feel it is best for both of us to cease our correspondence.

I shall always wish you well.--Sincerely yours,

"FLO WINTON."

"An a.s.s," undoubtedly. The thing that he had often wished had happened, yet he felt chagrined, and the sense of having been wronged leaped up at him.

"She has made a fool of me," thought Henry, after reading the brief note, "and yet I'm glad." But he was nothing of the kind. He knew that he ought to be glad; he had hoped for this for nearly a year in the odd moments when he saw things clearly, and realised that Flo was receding from the place she had once held in his esteem. His visits to Laysford had not improved matters. He was vexed, irritated, disappointed--anything but glad. His self-esteem was wounded, and to have avoided an injury there he would have faced even the obligation he had entered into before coming to London.

"She has taken up Trentham because the creature has a bit of money," he muttered savagely, crumpling up the offending note, and then opening it out to read the fateful words again. "So much for women!" And he swept the s.e.x aside for the perfidy of this one, though the woman's very selfishness was the saving of him.

"Delighted!" he wrote in bold letters on a postcard, and put her name and address on it. Then he tore it up, and feared he was a cad to the bargain.

Delighted! He was miserable for three days, until he could sit down and pen a sensible letter, in which he expressed the opinion that Flo had a better knowledge of her affections than he had, and that while he would never have given her the pain of breaking their engagement, he accepted the situation with some philosophy, since it did not altogether run against his own inclination.

A silly affair enough, as he came to understand once the final letter had been posted, and even so he had a delusion that at some time he had been actually in love with Flo. One cannot tell whether she had any delusions on the same object. She was not of the kind who dream dreams.

"I'm terribly sorry, old man, that Flo has cut up this way," wrote Edgar. "I always fancied you and she were engaged, but evidently not.

Trentham is a very decent sort. They're to be married soon now that the mater is all right again. Flo is nuts on 'style,' you know, and you are not--unless it's literary style. After all, perhaps it's for the best. I think everything is for the best except what happens at the _Leader_ office. Steel still keeps the uneven tenor of his way. I make wonderful progress. Don't gasp when I tell you that, quite unsolicited, I got a rise of half-a-crown last week. I think I shall buy a motor-car with it. Fancy, Jones has gone in for electric light. You wouldn't know the place now--the light shows up the dirt so strongly."