Part 13

Dick Fairfield had much the attitude of other writers of his day and generation. He had set out to make a living by writing, because he liked it, and because, in provincial Boston at least, there is still a certain sense of distinction attached to the profession of letters, a legacy from the time when the public still respected art. Fairfield had been for years struggling to get a foothold of reputation sufficiently secure to enable him to stretch more vigorously after the prizes of modern literary life, where notoriety commands a price higher than genius could hope for. He had done a good deal of hack work, of which that which he liked least, yet which had perhaps as a matter of training been best for him, had been the rewriting of manuscripts for ambitious authors. A bureau which undertakes for a compensation to mend crude work, to infuse into the products of undisciplined imagination or incompetency that popular element which shall make a work sell, had employed Fairfield to reconstruct novels which dealt with society. In this capacity he had made over a couple of flimsy stories of which Mrs. Croydon claimed the credit, on the strength of having set down the first draught from events which had happened within her own knowledge. So little of the original remained in the published version, it may be noted in passing, that she might have been puzzled to recognize her own bantlings. The success of these books had given Dick courage to attempt a society novel for himself; and by one of those lucky and inexplicable flukes of fortune, "Love in a Cloud" had gained at least the success of immediate popularity.

Fairfield had published the novel anonymously partly from modesty, partly from a business sense that it was better to have his name clear than associated with a failure. He had been deterred from acknowledging the book after its success by the eagerness with which the public had set upon his characters and identified each with some well known person. If the scene of a novel be laid in a provincial city its characters must all be identified. That is the first intellectual duty of the readers of fiction. To look at a novel from a critical point of view is no longer in the least a thing about which any reader need concern himself; but it would be an omission unpardonably stupid were he to remain unacquainted with some original under the disguise of every character. A single detail is sufficient for identification. If a man in a tale have a wart on his nose, the intelligent reader should not rest until he think of a dweller in the town whose countenance is thus adorned. That single particular must thenceforth be held to decide the matter. If the man in the novel and the man in the flesh differ in every other particular, physical and mental, that is to be held as the cunning effort of the writer to disguise his real model. The wart decides it, and the more widely the copy departs in other characteristics from the chosen person the more evident is it that the novelist did not wish his original to be known. The more striking therefore is the shrewdness which has penetrated the mystery. The reader soddens in the consciousness of his own penetration as the sardine, equally headless, soaks in oil. Fairfield was now waiting for this folly of identification to pass before he gave his name to the novel, and in the mean time he was tasting the delight of a first literary success where the pecuniary returns allowed his vanity to glow without rebuke from his conscience.

Fairfield was surprised, one morning not long after the polo game, by receiving a call from Mrs. Croydon. He knew her slightly, having met her now and then in society, and his belief that she was entirely ignorant of his share in her books might naturally invest her with a peculiar interest. She was a Western woman who had lived in the East but a few years, and her blunders in regard to Eastern society as they appeared in her original manuscripts had given him a good deal of quiet amusement. Why she should now have taken it upon herself to come to his chambers could only become evident by her own explanation.

"You are probably surprised to see me here, Mr. Fairfield," she began, settling herself in a chair with the usual ruffling of rag-tag-and-bobbery without which she never seemed able to move.

"I naturally should not have been vain enough to foresee that I should have such an honor," he responded, with his most elaborate society manner.

She smirked, and nodded.

"That is very pretty," she said. "Well, I'll tell you at once, not to keep you in suspense. I came on business."

"Business?" repeated he.

"Yes, business. You see, I have just come from the Cosmopolitan Literary Bureau."

Fairfield did not look pleased. He had kept his connection with that factory of hack-work a secret, and no man likes to be reminded of unpleasant necessities.

"They have told me," she went on, "that you revised the manuscript of my novels. I must say that you have done it very satisfactorily. We women of society are so occupied that it is impossible for us to attend to all that mere detail work, and it is a great relief to have it so well done."

Fairfield bowed stiffly.

"I am glad that you were satisfied," he replied; "but it is a violation of confidence on the part of the bureau."

"Oh, you are one of us now," Mrs. Croydon observed with gracious condescension. "It isn't as if they had told anybody else. They told me, you see, that you wrote 'Love in a Cloud.'"

"That is a greater violation of confidence still," Fairfield responded. "Indeed, it was a most un-gentlemanly thing of Mr. Cutliff. He only knew it because a stupid errand boy carried him the manuscript by mistake. He had no right to tell that. I shall give him my opinion of his conduct."

Mrs. Croydon accomplished a small whirlwind of ribbon ends, and waved her plump hand in remonstrance.

"Oh, I beg you won't," she protested. "It will get me into trouble if you do. He especially told me not to let you know."

Fairfield smiled rather sardonically.

"The man who betrays a confidence is always foolish enough to suppose his confidence will be sacred. I think this is an outrageous breach of good faith on Mr. Cutliff's part."

Mrs. Croydon gave a hitch forward as if she were trying to bring her chair closer to that of Fairfield.

"As I was saying," she remarked, "we society women have really so little time to give to literature, and literature needs just our touch so much, that it has been especially gratifying to find one that could carry out my ideas so well."

The young man began to regard her with a new expression in his face. As a literary woman she should have recognized the look, the expression which tells of the author on the scent of material. Whether Fairfield ever tried his hand at painting Mrs. Croydon or not, that look would have made it plain to any well-trained fellow worker that her peculiarities tempted his literary sense. Any professional writer who listens with that gleam in his eyes is inevitably examining what is said, the manner of its saying, the person who is speaking, in the hope that here he has a subject for his pen; he is asking himself if the reality is too absurd to be credible; how much short of the extravagance of the original he must come to keep within the bounds of seeming probability. Fairfield was confronted with a subject which could not be handled frankly and truthfully. Nobody would believe the tone of the woman or her remarks to be anything but a foolish exaggeration; if she had had the genuine creative instinct, the power of analysis, the recognition of human peculiarities, Mrs. Croydon must have seen in his evident preoccupation the indication that he was deliberating how far toward the truth it would in fiction be possible to go.

"It is very kind of you," he murmured vaguely.

"Oh, don't mention it," responded she, more graciously than ever. "You are really one of us now, as I said; and I always feel strongly the ties of the literary guild."

"The guild owes you a great deal," Fairfield observed blandly.

Mrs. Croydon waved her hand engagingly in return for this compliment, incidentally with a waving of various adornments of her raiment which gave her the appearance in little of an army with banners.

"I didn't come just for compliments," she observed with much sweetness. "I am a business woman, and I know how to come to the point. My father left me to manage my own property, and so I've had a good deal of experience. When I see how women wander round a thing without being able to get at it, it makes me ashamed of them all. I don't wonder that men make fun of them."

"You are hard on your sex."

"Oh, no harder than they deserve. Why, in Chicago there are a lot of women that do business in one way or another, and I never could abide 'em. I never could get on with them, it was so hard to pin them down."

"I readily understand how annoying it must have been," Fairfield observed with entire gravity. "Did you say that you had business with me?"

"Yes," she answered. "I suppose that I might have written, but there are some things that are so much better arranged by word of mouth. Don't you think so?"

"Oh, there's no doubt of it."

"Besides," she went on, "I wanted to tell you how much I like your work, and it isn't easy to express those things on paper."

It would be interesting to know whether to Fairfield at that moment occurred the almost inevitable reflection that for Mrs. Croydon it was hard, if her manuscripts were the test, to express anything on paper.

"You are entirely right," he said politely. "It is easy enough to put facts into words, but when it comes to feelings such as you express, it is different, of course."

He confided to Jack Neligage later that he wondered if this were not too bold a flout, but Mrs. Croydon received it as graciously as possible.

"There is so complete a difference," she observed with an irrelevance rather startling, "between the mental atmosphere in Boston and that I was accustomed to in Chicago. Here there is a sort of--I don't know that I can express it exactly; it's part of an older civilization, I suppose; but I don't think it pays so well as what we have in Chicago."

"Pays so well?" he repeated. "I don't think I understand."

"It doesn't sell so well in a book," she explained. "I thought that it would be better business to write stories of the East for the West to buy; but I've about made up my mind that it'll be money in my pocket to write of the West for the eastern market."

Fairfield smiled under his big mustache, playing with a paper-knife.

"Pardon my mentioning it," he said, "but I thought you wrote for fame, and not for money."

"Oh, I don't write for money, I assure you; but I was brought up to be a business woman, and if I'm going to write books somebody ought to pay for them. Now I wanted to ask you what you will sell me your part in 'Love in a Cloud' for."

Whether this sudden introduction of her business or the nature of it when introduced were the more startling it might have been hard to determine. Certain it is that Fairfield started, and stared at his visitor as if he doubted his ears.

"My part of it?" he exclaimed. "Why, I wrote it."

"Yes," she returned easily, "but so many persons have supposed it to be mine, that it is extremely awkward to deny it; and you have become my collaborateur, of course, by writing on the other novels."

"I hadn't realized that," Dick returned with a smile.

"You've put so much of your style into my other books," she pursued, "that it's made people attribute 'Love in a Cloud' to me, and I think you are bound now not to go back on me. I don't know as you see it as I do, but it seems to me that since you took the liberty of changing so much in my other stories you ought to be willing to bear the consequences of it, especially as I'm willing to pay you well."

"But as long as you didn't write the book," Dick observed, "I should think you'd feel rather queer to have it said you did."

"I've thought of that," Mrs. Croydon said, nodding, with a flutter of silken tags, "but I reason that the ideas are so much my own, and the book is so exactly what I would have written if social duties hadn't prevented, that that ought not to count. The fact that so many folks think I wrote it shows that I might have written it."

"But after all you didn't write it," Fairfield objected. "That seems to make it awkward."

"Why, of course it would have been better if I had given you a sketch of it," Mrs. Croydon returned, apparently entirely unmoved; "but then of course you got so much of the spirit of 'Love in a Cloud' out of my other books--"

This was perhaps more than any author could be expected to endure, and least of all a young author in the discussion of his first novel.

"Why, how can you say that?" he demanded indignantly.

"Do you suppose," she questioned with a benign and patronizing smile, "that so many persons would have taken your book for mine in the first place if you hadn't imitated me or taken ideas from my other books?"

Dick sprang to his feet, and then sat down, controlling himself.

"Well," he said coldly, "it makes no difference. It is too late to do anything about it now. An edition of 'Love in a Cloud' with my name on the title-page comes out next Wednesday. If folks say too much about the resemblance to your books, I can confess, I suppose, my part in the others."

She turned upon him with a burst of surprise and indignation which set all her ribbon-ends waving in protest.

"That," she said, "is a professional secret. No man of honor would tell it."

She rose as she spoke, her face full of indignation.

"You have not treated me fairly," she said bitterly. "You must have seen that the book was attributed to me, and you knew the connection between 'Love in a Cloud' and my other books--"

"Other books!" exclaimed Dick.

Mrs. Croydon waved him into silence with a magnificent gesture, but beyond that took no notice of his words.

"You saw how everybody looked at me that day at Mrs. Harbinger's," she went on. "If you were going to give your name to the book why didn't you do it then?"

"I didn't think of you at all," was his answer. "I was too much amused in seeing that absurd Barnstable make a fool of himself with Count Shimbowski. Did you know that the Count actually challenged him?"

Wrath of celestial goddesses darkened the face of Mrs. Croydon as a white squall blackens the face of the sky. Her eyes glared with an expression as fierce if not as bright as the lightning.

"What do you say?" she screamed. "Challenge my husband?"

"Your husband!" ejaculated Dick, a staring statue of surprise.

"Yes, my husband," she repeated vehemently. "He didn't make a fool of himself that day! A man can't come to the defense of a woman but you men sneer at him. Do you mean that that beastly foreign ape dared to challenge him for that? I'd like to give him my opinion of him!"

When a man finds himself entertaining a wildcat unawares he should either expel the beast or himself take safety in flight. Dick could apparently do neither. He stood speechless, gazing at the woman before him, who seemed to be waxing in fury with every moment and every word. She swept across the short space between them in a perfect hurricane of streamers, and almost shook her fists in his face.

"I understand it all now," she said. "You were in it from the beginning! I suppose that when you worked on my books you took the trouble to find out about me, and that's where your material came from for your precious 'Love in a Cloud.' Oh, my husband will deal with you!"

Fairfield looked disconcerted enough, as well he might, confronted with a woman who was apparently so carried away by anger as to have lost all control of herself.

"Mrs. Croydon," he said, with a coldness and a dignity which could not but impress her, "I give you my word that I never knew anything about your history. That was none of my business."

"Of course it was none of your business!" she cried. "That's just what makes it so impertinent of you to be meddling with my affairs!"

Fairfield regarded her rather wildly.

"Sit down, please," he said beseechingly. "You mustn't talk so, Mrs. Croydon. Of course I haven't been meddling with your affairs, and--"

"And not to have the courage to say a word to prevent my husband's being dragged into a duel with that foreigner! Oh, it does seem as if I couldn't express my opinion of you, Mr. Fairfield!"

"My dear Mrs. Croydon--"

"And as for Erastus Barnstable," she rushed on to say, "he's quick-tempered, and eccentric, and obstinate, and as dull as a post; he never understood me, but he always meant well; and I won't have him abused."

"I hadn't any idea of abusing him," Dick pleaded humbly. "Really, you are talking in an extraordinary fashion."

She stopped and glared at him as if with some gleam of returning reason. Her face was crimson, and her breath came quickly. Women of society outside of their own homes so seldom indulge in the luxury of an unbecoming rage that Dick had perhaps never before seen such a display. Any well-bred lady knows how to restrain herself within the bounds of personal decorum, and to be the more effective by preserving some appearance of calmness. Mrs. Croydon had evidently lacked in her youth the elevating influence of society where good manners are morals. It was interesting for Dick, but too extravagantly out of the common to be of use to him professionally.

"I hope you are proud of your politeness this morning," Mrs. Croydon ended by saying; and without more adieu she fluttered tumultuously to the door.

XXIV

THE MISCHIEF OF A CAD

The fierce light of publicity which nowadays beats upon society has greatly lessened the picturesqueness of life. There is no longer the dusk favorable to crime, and the man who wishes to be wicked, if careful of his social standing, is constantly obliged to be content with mere folly, or, if desperate, with meanness. It is true that from time to time there are still those, even in the most exclusive circles, who are guilty of acts genuinely criminal, but these are not, as a rule, regarded as being in good form. The days when the Borgias invited their enemies to dinner for the express purpose of poisoning them, or visited nobles rich in money or in beautiful wives and daughters with the amiable intent to rob them of these treasures, are over, apparently forever. In the sixteenth century--to name a time typical--success made an excuse more than adequate for any moral obliquity; and the result is that the age still serves thrillingly the romantic dramatist or novel-writer. To-day success is held more than to justify iniquity in politics or commerce, but the social world still keeps up some pretext of not approving. There is in the best society really a good deal of hesitation about inviting to dinner a man who has murdered his grandmother or run away with the wife of his friend. Society is of course not too austere in this respect; it strives to be reasonable, and it recognizes the principle that every transaction is to be judged by the laws of its own class. In the financial world, for instance, conscience is regulated by the stock market, and society assumes that if a crime has been committed for the sake of money its culpability depends chiefly upon the smallness of the amount actually secured. Conservative minds, however, still object to the social recognition of a man who has notoriously and scandalously broken the commandments. He who has not the skill or the good taste to display the fruits of his wickedness without allowing the process by which they were obtained to be known, is looked at askance by these prudish souls. In all this state of things is great loss to the romancer, and not a little disadvantage to bold and adventurous spirits. Were the latter but allowed the freedom which was enjoyed by their forerunners of the sixteenth century, they would do much to relieve the tedium under which to-day the best society languishes.

This tendency of the age toward the suppression of violent and romantic transgressions in good society was undoubtedly largely responsible for the course taken by Sibley Langdon. Foiled in his plan of blackmailing Mrs. Neligage into being his companion on a European tour, he attempted revenge in a way so petty that even the modern novelist, who stops at nothing, would have regarded the thing as beneath invention.

Mr. Langdon had sent Mrs. Neligage her canceled note, with a floridly worded epistle declaring that its real value, though paid, was lost to him, since it lay in her signature and not in the money which the document represented. This being done, he had called once or twice, but the ignominy of living at the top of a speaking-tube carries with it the advantage of power to escape unwelcome callers, and he never found Mrs. Neligage at home. When they met in society Mrs. Neligage treated him with exactly the right shade of coolness. She did not give rise to any gossip. The infallible intuition of her fellow women easily discovered, of course, that there was an end of the old intimacy between the widow and Mr. Langdon, but nobody had the satisfaction of being able to perceive anything of the nature of a quarrel.

They met one evening at a dinner given by Mrs. Chauncy Wilson. The dinner was not large. There were Mr. and Mrs. Frostwinch, Mrs. Neligage, Alice Endicott, Count Shimbowski, and Mr. Langdon. The company was somewhat oddly assorted, but everybody understood that Mrs. Wilson did as she pleased, leaving social considerations to take care of themselves. She had promised Miss Wentstile, who still clung to the idea of marrying Alice to the Count, that she would ask the pair to dinner; and having done so, she selected her other guests by some principle of choice known only to herself.

The dinner passed off without especial incident. The Count took in Alice, and was by her treated with a cool ease which showed that she had come to regard him as of no consequence whatever. She chatted with him pleasantly enough at the proper intervals, but more of her attention was given to Mr. Frostwinch, her neighbor on the other side. She would never talk with the Count in French, although she spoke that tongue with ease, and his wooing, such as it was, had to be carried on in his joint-broken English. The engagement of May Calthorpe and Dick Fairfield, just announced, and the appearance of "Love in a Cloud" with the author's name on the title-page, were the chief subjects of conversation. The company were seated at a round table, so that the talk was for the most part general, and each person had something to add to the little ball of silken-fibred gossip as it rolled about. Mr. Frostwinch was May's guardian, and a man of ideas too old-fashioned to discuss his ward or her affairs in any but the most general way; yet even he did now and then add a word or a hint.

"They say," Mrs. Wilson observed, "that there's some kind of a romantic story behind the engagement. Mrs. Neligage, you ought to know--is it true that Richard Fairfield got Jack to go and propose for him?"

"If he did," was the answer, "neither you nor I will ever know it from Jack. He's the worst to get anything out of that I ever knew. I think he has some sort of a trap-door in his memory to drop things through when he doesn't want to tell them. I believe he contrives to forget them himself."

"You can't conceive of his holding them if he did remember them, I suppose," chuckled Dr. Wilson.

"Of course he couldn't. No mortal could."