George Moore - "Spring Days"

Julian Hawthorne - "The Lock and Key Library"

Walter Horatio Pater - "Aesthetic Poetry"

Wei Liao - "Wei Liao Zi (Military Science Of Wei Liao Zi)"

Tales Of Men And Ghosts

E >> Edith Wharton >> Tales Of Men And Ghosts




One evening, finding himself unexpectedly disengaged, he asked Vyse
to dine; it had occurred to him that, in the course of an
after-dinner chat, he might delicately hint his feeling that the
work he had offered his friend was unworthy so accomplished a hand.

Vyse surprised him by a momentary hesitation. "I may not have time
to dress."

Betton stared. "What's the odds? We'll dine here--and as late as you
like."

Vyse thanked him, and appeared, punctually at eight, in all the
shabbiness of his daily wear. He looked paler and more shyly
truculent than usual, and Betton, from the height of his florid
stature, said to himself, with the sudden professional instinct for
"type": "He might be an agent of something--a chap who carries
deadly secrets."

Vyse, it was to appear, did carry a deadly secret; but one less
perilous to society than to himself. He was simply
poor--inexcusably, irremediably poor. Everything failed him, had
always failed him: whatever he put his hand to went to bits.

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 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 to-night? 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 mis-management 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 per cent. 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 moustache 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 stared at him with eyes 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 spread out here: I've been comparing them. And I believe
they're all written by one man."

Burton's redness turned to a purple that made his ruddy moustache
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 corkscrews. And
the same phrases keep recurring--the Ann Arbor news-agent uses the
same expressions as the President of the Girls' 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
arm-chair 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 moustache. "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 head-shake, had added
with a laugh: "If you suspect _him_ you might as well think I write
the letters myself!"

"There are very few to-day," said Vyse, with his 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 started back with one of his anaemic 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 ultimate 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 sha'n'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 in Florida
understood _him;_ and Betton was fully alive to the superior
qualities of discernment which this process 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 fumed at the delay, watched,
wondered, fretted; 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 profound 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 despatched to Florida his second
missive of entreaty, and for ten days he tasted the furtive 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 favourable. 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 eye 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 "Dead Letter Office," and
the document that fell from it was his own last letter from Florida.

Betton studied the ironic "Unknown" for an appreciable space of
time; then he broke into a laugh. He had suddenly recalled Vyse's
similar experience with "Hester Macklin," and the light he was able
to throw on that obscure episode was searching enough to penetrate
all the dark corners of his own adventure. He felt a rush of heat to
the ears; catching sight of himself in the glass, he saw a red
ridiculous congested countenance, and dropped into a chair to hide
it between flushed fists. He was roused by the opening of the door,
and Vyse appeared on the threshold.

"Oh, I beg pardon--you're ill?" said the secretary.

Betton's only answer was an inarticulate murmur of derision; then he
pushed forward the letter with the imprint of the Dead Letter
Office.

"Look at that," he jeered.

Vyse peered at the envelope, and turned it over slowly in his hands.
Betton's eyes, fixed on him, saw his face decompose like a substance
touched by some powerful acid. He clung to the envelope as if to
gain time.

"It's from the young lady you've been writing to at Swazee Springs?"
he asked at length.

"It's from the young lady I've been writing to at Swazee Springs."

"Well--I suppose she's gone away," continued Vyse, rebuilding his
countenance rapidly.

"Yes; and in a community numbering perhaps a hundred and
seventy-five souls, including the dogs and chickens, the local
post-office is so ignorant of her movements that my letter has to be
sent to the Dead Letter Office."

Vyse meditated on this; then he laughed in turn. "After all, the
same thing happened to me--with 'Hester Macklin,' I mean," he
recalled sheepishly.

"Just so," said Betton, bringing down his clenched fist on the
table. "_ Just so_," he repeated, in italics.

He caught his secretary's glance, and held it with his own for a
moment. Then he dropped it as, in pity, one releases something
scared and squirming.

"The very day my letter was returned from Swazee Springs she wrote
me this from there," he said, holding up the last Florida missive.

"Ha! That's funny," said Vyse, with a damp forehead.

"Yes, it's funny; it's funny," said Betton. He leaned back, his
hands in his pockets, staring up at the ceiling, and noticing a
crack in the cornice. Vyse, at the corner of the writing-table,
waited.

"Shall I get to work?" he began, after a silence measurable by
minutes. Betton's gaze descended from the cornice.

"I've got your seat, haven't I?" he said, rising and moving away
from the table.

Vyse, with a quick gleam of relief, slipped into the vacant chair,
and began to stir about vaguely among the papers.

"How's your father?" Betton asked from the hearth.

"Oh, better--better, thank you. He'll pull out of it."

"But you had a sharp scare for a day or two?"

"Yes--it was touch and go when I got there."

Another pause, while Vyse began to classify the letters.

"And I suppose," Betton continued in a steady tone, "your anxiety
made you forget your usual precautions--whatever they were--about
this Florida correspondence, and before you'd had time to prevent it
the Swazee post-office blundered?"

Vyse lifted his head with a quick movement. "What do you mean?" he
asked, pushing his chair back.

"I mean that you saw I couldn't live without flattery, and that
you've been ladling it out to me to earn your keep."

Vyse sat motionless and shrunken, digging the blotting-pad with his
pen. "What on earth are you driving at?" he repeated.

"Though why the deuce," Betton continued in the same steady tone,
"you should need to do this kind of work when you've got such
faculties at your service--those letters were magnificent, my dear
fellow! Why in the world don't you write novels, instead of writing
to other people about them?"

Vyse straightened himself with an effort. "What are you talking
about, Betton? Why the devil do you think _I_ wrote those letters?"

Betton held back his answer, with a brooding face. "Because I wrote
'Hester Macklin's'--to myself!"

Vyse sat stock-still, without the least outcry of wonder. "Well--?"
he finally said, in a low tone.

"And because you found me out (you see, you can't even feign
surprise!)--because you saw through it at a glance, knew at once
that the letters were faked. And when you'd foolishly put me on my
guard by pointing out to me that they were a clumsy forgery, and had
then suddenly guessed that _I_ was the forger, you drew the natural
inference that I had to have popular approval, or at least had to
make _you_ think I had it. You saw that, to me, the worst thing
about the failure of the book was having _you_ know it was a
failure. And so you applied your superior--your immeasurably
superior--abilities to carrying on the humbug, and deceiving me as
I'd tried to deceive you. And you did it so successfully that I
don't see why the devil you haven't made your fortune writing
novels!"

Vyse remained silent, his head slightly bent under the mounting tide
of Betton's denunciation.

"The way you differentiated your people--characterised them--avoided
my stupid mistake of making the women's letters too short and
logical, of letting my different correspondents use the same
expressions: the amount of ingenuity and art you wasted on it! I
swear, Vyse, I'm sorry that damned post-office went back on you,"
Betton went on, piling up the waves of his irony.

But at this height they suddenly paused, drew back on themselves,
and began to recede before the spectacle of Vyse's pale distress.
Something warm and emotional in Betton's nature--a lurking
kindliness, perhaps, for any one who tried to soothe and smooth his
writhing ego--softened his eye as it rested on the drooping figure
of his secretary.

"Look here, Vyse--I'm not sorry--not altogether sorry this has
happened!" He moved slowly across the room, and laid a friendly palm
on Vyse's shoulder. "In a queer illogical way it evens up things, as
it were. I did you a shabby turn once, years ago--oh, out of sheer
carelessness, of course--about that novel of yours I promised to
give to Apthorn. If I _had_ given it, it might not have made any
difference--I'm not sure it wasn't too good for success--but anyhow,
I dare say you thought my personal influence might have helped you,
might at least have got you a quicker hearing. Perhaps you thought
it was because the thing _was_ so good that I kept it back, that I
felt some nasty jealousy of your superiority. I swear to you it
wasn't that--I clean forgot it. And one day when I came home it was
gone: you'd sent and taken it. And I've always thought since you
might have owed me a grudge--and not unjustly; so this ... this
business of the letters ... the sympathy you've shown ... for I
suppose it _is_ sympathy ... ?"

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