CHAPTER XXI

It was very jolly to be back with Turquand. The first evening, while they smoked with the enjoyable consciousness of there being no last train to catch, was quick with the sentiment of their old association. And after a letter arrived from Cynthia, in which she clapped her hands with pleasure, the respite was complete. Kent had been impatient to hear how the place struck her, and she wrote that she had been agreeably astonished. The cottage was roomier than she had expected, and beautifully located. It was furnished very simply, of course; but there was a charm in its simplicity and freshness. The landlady was a rosy-cheeked young woman who had already "fallen in love with Baby," and overwhelmed her with attentions. "If you do not see what you want, please step inside and ask for it." Kent smiled at that; it was a quotation from one of the Streatham shop-windows. Also there was a quite respectable garden, which her bedroom overlooked. "There are fruit-trees in it--not my bedroom, the garden--and a little, not too spidery, bench, where I know I shall sit and read your answer when it comes." She wrote a very happy, spontaneous sort of letter, and Kent's spirits rose as he read it. There was the rustle of dimity and the odour of lavender in the pages, and momentarily he pictured her sitting on the bench under the fruit-trees, and thought that it would be delightful if he could run down one day and surprise her there.

It was very jolly to be back with Turquand, though the satisfaction was perhaps a shade calmer than, during the first year of his married life, he had fancied that it would be. It was convenient, moreover, to be in town, and a relief to feel that the unsettled accounts with the tradespeople round Leamington Road were, at any rate, not waxing mightier. Nevertheless, he missed Cynthia a good deal; not only in the daytime when he was alone, but even in minutes during the evening when he was in Turquand's company. It was curious how much he did miss her--and the baby: the baby, whose newest accomplishment was to stroke his father's cheek, and murmur "poor" until the attention was reciprocated, when he bounded violently and grew red in the face with ridiculous laughter. Soho, too, though it saved him train-fares, soon began to appear as distant from a salary as Streatham. Turquand remained powerless to put any work in his way, and, despite his economies and the cheapness of Monmouth, Kent found his expenses dismaying. He was encroaching on the money laid aside for the landlord and the rates, and, if nothing turned up, there would speedily be trouble again. The butcher who had supplied No. 64 had been to the agent for Mr. Kent's address, and he presented himself and his bill with no redundance of euphemism. When another advertisement had been inserted ineffectually, the respite was over and anxiety returned.

As yet Kent had not called on Mrs. Deane-Pitt, and on the afternoon following his interview with the butcher he paid his visit to the lady. He was very frank in his replies to her questions. He did not disguise that it was imperative for him to secure an appointment at once, and when she agreed with him that it was immensely difficult, instead of answering that it was likely some opening might be mentioned to her, his face fell. He felt that it behoved him to deprecate his confidences.

"You must forgive my boring you about my affairs," he said. "And what are you doing? Are you at work on another book now?"

"I've a serial running in _Fashion_," she said; "and they print such ghastly long instalments that it takes me all my time to keep pace with them. You haven't bored me at all. A post on a paper is a thing you may have to wait a long time for, I'm afraid. You see, you aren't a journalist really, are you? You're a novelist."

"I'm nothing," said Kent, with a dreary laugh. "For that matter, I wouldn't care if it weren't on a paper. I'd jump at anything--a secretary-ship for preference."

"Secretaryships want personal introductions; they aren't got through advertisements." She hesitated. "_I_ can tell you how you might make some money, if you'd like to do it," she added tentatively. "It's between ourselves--if it doesn't suit you, you'll be discreet?"

"Oh, of course," said Kent, with surprise. "But I can promise you in advance that _any_ means of making some money will suit me just now. What are you going to say?"

She looked at him steadily with a slow smile.

"How would you like to write a novel for me?" she asked.

Instantaneously he did not grasp her meaning.

"How?" he exclaimed. "Do you mean you are offering to collaborate with me?"

"I can't do that," she said quickly. "I'm sure you know I should be delighted, but I shouldn't get the same terms if I did, and I haven't the time, either. That's just it! I'm obliged to refuse work because I haven't time to undertake it. No, but it might be a partnership as far as the payment goes. If you care to write a novel, I can place it under my own name, and you can have--well, a couple of hundred pounds almost as soon as you give it to me! I can guarantee that. You can have a couple of hundred a week or two after it's finished, whether I sell serial rights or not."

She took a cigarette out of a box on a table near her and lit it, a shade nervously. Kent sat pale and disturbed. That such things were done, at all events in France, he knew, but her proposal startled him more than he could say, or than he wished to say. His primary emotion was astonishment that Mrs. Deane-Pitt had had the courage to place her literary reputation in his hands; and then, as he reflected, an awful horror seized him at the thought of a year of his toil, of effort and accomplishment, going out for review with another person's name on it. The pause lasted some time.

"I don't much fancy the idea," he said at last slowly, "thanks. And it wouldn't assist me. I want money now, not a year hence."

"A year hence!" she murmured. "A year hence would be no use to _me_. But you could do it in a month! Pray don't mistake me. I'm not anxious to get any kudos at your expense, I don't want you to do the kind of thing that I suppose you have done in this novel of yours that's making the round now; I don't want introspection and construction, and all that. All I want is to buy shoes for my poor little children, and what I suggested was that you should knock off a story at your top speed. I don't care a pin what it's like; only turn me out a hundred thousand words!"

"A hundred thousand words," cried Kent, "in a month? You might as well suggest my carrying off one of the lions out of Trafalgar Square! _The Eye of the Beholder_ isn't a hundred thousand words, and I worked at it day and night, and then it took me a year! Besides, that's another thing; it is going the round--the story mightn't be any use to you if I did it."

"I can place it," said Mrs. Deane-Pitt, with emphasis. "Don't concern yourself about its fate, my friend; your responsibility will be limited to writing it. Your book took a year? I've no doubt you considered, and corrected, and spent an afternoon polishing a paragraph. Supposing you take six or seven weeks, then? Do you mean to say you couldn't write two thousand words a day?"

"No, I don't believe I could--not if you offered me the Mint!" said Kent.

"But you can put down the first words that come into your head! _Anything_ will do. Naturally, it would be no use to me if you wrote 'Mother Hubbard went to the cupboard' over all the pages, but any trivial thing in the shape of a story, I assure you, I can arrange for at once. Indeed, it _is_ practically arranged for; all that remains is for you to give it to me."

She puffed her cigarette silently, and the young man mused. The plan was repugnant to him, but if, as she said, anything would do--well, perhaps he _could_ manage it in the time; he did not know. Two hundred pounds would certainly be salvation, and, for seven weeks' work, a magnificent reward.

"I'll tell you," she continued, after a few moments: "if you liked to do me a short story or two now and again, we should have money from those in the meanwhile. I don't want to persuade you against your convictions, if you have any, but our business together would pay you better than an appointment, even if you found one; and--though that's nothing to do with it--it would be a tremendous benefit to me as well. See, with our two pens we can produce double the work, and we share the advantage of the popularity I've gained."

"Oh, I quite appreciate the pecuniary pull," he answered. "I could hardly write short stories while I was fagging at a novel, though."

"I think myself one goes back to the novel all the fresher for the break," she said; "but, of course, everybody has his own system of working. Would you care to write me a couple of three-thousand-word stories first? We can discuss the book later. If you let me have two stories to-morrow night, I could give you five guineas each for them on Saturday."

"To-morrow is out of the question. You don't realise how slowly I write, and I haven't the motives."

"Say the next day--say by Thursday. But it must be by then. The man goes out of town on Saturday, and I want him to read them before he goes. If _I_ can have the manuscripts on Thursday, _you_ can have ten guineas Saturday night."

"It's a very good offer," said Kent. "You must get a royal rate."

"Well, I couldn't always offer you so much, but, then, I don't often want them quite so long. Two, of three thousand words, and to end happily, for choice. Not too strong. If they will illustrate well, all the better, but you needn't give yourself any trouble on that score--it's the artist's affair."

"I'll do them," said Humphrey. "I suppose I must make an attempt to imitate your style?"

"It isn't necessary. I generally begin with a very short sentence, like 'It was noon,' or 'It rained'; you might do that; but I really don't know that it matters.... Mr. Kent----"

"Yes?" he said.

"This is a confidential matter; I rely on your honour not to mention it to a living soul, of course! I don't know how much married you are, but I depend on you not to tell your wife. It would ruin me if it came out."

He assured her that she might trust him, and having pledged himself to the lighter task, he resolved on his way home that he would undertake the heavier, too. She did not want a year of his best work--he doubted if he could contemplate that, even if refusal meant Strawberry Hill for Cynthia and the baby, and the workhouse for himself--she asked only a few weeks of his worst. Money was indispensable; he must make it in whatever way he could. A ghost, eh? He was rising finely in the career of literature. His first novel had received what was almost the highest possible cachet; his second was "declined with thanks"; and now no mode of livelihood was left him but to be a ghost. His throat was tight with shame; there were tears in it.

That passed. He reflected that with two hundred pounds in his pocket he would be able to sit down to another novel on his own account; he might be luckier with that than with _The Eye of the Beholder_. What were a few weeks compared with two hundred pounds? Mrs. Deane-Pitt must have thought him a fool to hesitate. Practical herself, indeed! But--well, for all that, it was rather fascinating to feel that so intimate a confidence was going to subsist between them! She had been a trifle nervous, too, as she took that cigarette; he hoped he hadn't been a prig. She was very nice; it distressed him to think that she had been afraid of him even for a second. Two hundred pounds? He wondered what share it was--half, or more than half, or less. With a woman, however, he could not go into that. His admission that five guineas seemed a lot to him for a three-thousand-word story had probably been injudicious--and it must have made him sound very ignorant besides. Well, that couldn't be helped. And he would be glad if the partnership paid her well; whatever terms she obtained, she must be perfectly aware that her offer was a liberal one to a man in his position, and he was grateful to her. He felt it again--she had been "nice." He began to revolve a plot for the first of the stories, and by the time he reached home he had vaguely thought of one. When Turquand came in, it had shaped. Saying that he had work to do, Kent left him, and went upstairs. He drew a chair to the table, and sat down and wrote--slowly, painfully. The man was an artist, and he could not help the care he took. He sneered at himself for it. Mrs. Deane-Pitt had impressed on him that anything would do, and here he was meditating and revising as if it were a story to submit to the most exclusive of the magazines in his own name. He dashed his pen in the ink, and threw a paragraph on the paper. But he could not go on. His consciousness of that slip-shod paragraph higher up clogged his invention, so that he had to go back to it and put it right. Presently a touch of cheerfulness crept into his mood. That was well said. Yes, she would praise that! The pride of authorship possessed him; he wrote with pleasure; and at two o'clock, when a third of the tale was achieved, he went to bed feeling exhilarated.

It was no easy duty to him to complete both stories by Thursday morning, and, confronted by the necessity for making Turquand a further excuse for retirement, he almost wished now that he were living alone. He was vastly relieved that the other accepted his allusions to "something that would keep him busy for a month or so" with no apparent perception of a mystery. After the first inevitable question was shirked, the journalist put no more, and behaved as if the explanation had been explicit. Neither Kent's friendship, nor his admiration for him, had ever been so warm, as while he decided that Turquand's experience must lead him to suspect something like the truth and enabled him to conceal the suspicion under his normal demeanour.

With Cynthia the ghost was less fortunate, though he barely divined it by her answer. He told her as much as he was free to tell: he wrote that he had work on hand at last, and that they would have ten guineas on Saturday, and a large sum in a couple of months. Where the stuff would appear, he could not say without a falsehood, and he trustee! she would not be curious on the point. The reservation that he regretted gave to his tone an aloofness that he did not design; Cynthia refrained from inquiring, but she was hurt. She felt that he might have imparted such intelligence a little more enthusiastically, at a little greater length. Did he suppose that her interest was limited to the payment? Was she only held sympathetic enough, to mind the baby when they were obliged to discharge the nurse? Now that he returned to work, her husband was going to treat her as a child again, just as he had done when he was engaged on his book! She did not perceive that, while he had been writing the book, she had occupied the position most natural to her; she did not detect that the attitude in which she recalled it was a new one. It was, however, the attitude of a woman. The hidden chagrin and urbanity of her reply was a woman's. These things were part of a development of which, while they had remained together, neither she nor the man who missed her had been acutely aware.