Part 19

And into the hands of this “reader” I was to commit my “brain-child!” I cried out against the act in such terms as these, and stronger, in relating the substance of the interview to my father.

“Be sensible, little girl! Keep a cool head!” he counselled. “Business is business. And I suppose John R. understands his. I will take the manuscript to Morris myself to-morrow.”

“And make him comprehend,” I interjected, “that I do not shirk criticism. I see the faults of my book. If I were sure that it would be judged fairly, I wouldn’t mind it so much.”

The reader kept the manuscript two months. Then my father wrote a civil demand to Mr. Morris for the return of the work. I was too sick of soul to lift a finger to reclaim what I was persuaded was predestined to be a dead failure. Two days later the bulky parcel came back. Mr. Morris had enclosed with it the reader’s opinion:

“I regret that the young author’s anxiety to regain possession of her bantling has prevented me from reading more than a few pages of the story. Judging from what I have read, however, I should not advise you to publish it upon speculation.”

I laid the note before my father after supper that evening. Our mother had early inculcated in our minds the eminent expediency of never speaking of unpleasant topics to a tired and hungry man. We always waited until bath, food, and rest had had their perfect work upon the head of the house. He leaned back in his arm-chair, the evening paper at his elbow, his slippered feet to the glowing grate, and a good cigar between his lips. His teeth tightened suddenly upon it when he heard the note. It was curt. To my flayed sensibilities, it was brutal. I see, now, that it was businesslike and impersonal. Were I a professional “reader,” I should indite one as brief, and not a whit more sympathetic. _Alone_ was my first book, and a sentient fraction of my soul and heart.

For a whole minute there was no sound in the room but the bubbling song of the soft coal. I sat upon a stool beside my confidant, and, having passed the letter up to him, my head sank gradually to his knee. I was unspeakably miserable, but I made no moan. He had not patience with weak wails when anything remained to be done. His cigar had gone out, for when I lifted my head at his movement toward the lamp, he had folded the scrap of paper into a spile, and was lighting it. He touched the dead cigar with the flame, and drew hard upon it until it was in working order before he said:

“I believe in that book! I shall send it back to Morris, to-morrow, and tell him to bring it out in good style and send the bill to me.”

“But,” I gasped, “you may lose money by it!”

“I don’t think so. At any rate, we will make the experiment.”

XXIV

THE DAWNING OF LITERARY LIFE

“_January 28th, 1854._

“_My very dear Friend_,—I wish you were here this morning! I long to talk with you. There are many things I cannot commit to paper, or of which I might be ashamed as soon as they were written. There are no short-hand and long-tongued reporters at our face-to-face confabulations.

“Of one thing I will give you a hint: Have you any recollection of a certain MS., portions of which were read in your hearing last spring? I should not be surprised if you were to hear something of it before long. Keep your eyes upon the papers for a few weeks, and if you see nothing that looks like a harbinger of the advent, just conclude that I have changed my mind at the last gasp and recalled it. _For it has gone out of my hands!_ After the appearance of anything that looks that way, I unseal your mouth.

“Seriously, I have much pending upon this venture. The success of the book may be the opening of the path I cannot but feel that Providence has marked out for me.

“As it is a Virginia story, Southerners should buy it, if it has no other merit. My misgivings are grave and many; but my advisers urge me on, and notices of fugitive articles that have appeared in Northern and Southern papers have inoculated me with a little confidence in the wisdom of their counsel.

“I had not meant to say this, or, indeed, to mention the matter at all, but as the day of publication draws near, I am, to use an expressive Yankeeism—‘fidgety.’

“If anything I have said savors of undue solicitude for the bantling’s welfare, recollect that I am the mother. One thing more: I shall have nothing to do with advertisements. If they laud the work too highly, bear in mind that it is ‘all in the way of trade,’ and that booksellers will have their way.

“Our ‘Musical Molasses Stew’ came off last night. We had a grand ‘time!’ Violin, flute, guitar, piano—all played by masculine amateurs, and a chorus of men’s voices. It was ‘nae sae bad,’ as the Scotch critic said of Mrs. Siddons’s acting. The same might be said of the real frolic of pulling the treacle. My partner was a young Nova Scotian—‘Blackader’ by name—an intelligent, agreeable, and versatile youth who entered gloriously into the spirit of the occasion. He played upon the piano, sang treble, tenor, and bass by turns, and pulled and laughed with me until he had no strength left.”

I was but feebly convalescent from a brief illness when, chancing to pick up the latest number of _Godey’s Magazine_, and fluttering the leaves aimlessly, my eyes rested upon a paragraph in the “Editor’s Table.”

“Will the author of ‘Marrying Through Prudential Motives’ send her address to the editor?”

A queer story followed. The tale, sent so long ago to Mr. Godey that I had almost forgotten it, had fallen behind a drawer of his desk, and lain there for three years and more. When it finally turned up, curiosity, aroused by its disappearance and exhumation, led the editor to read it more carefully than if it had reached him through ordinary channels. He liked it, published it, and waited to hear from the author.

By some mischance that particular number of the “Lady’s Book” had escaped my notice. The story was copied into an English periodical; translated from this into French, and appeared on the other side of the channel. Another British monthly “took up the wondrous tale” by rendering the French version back into the vernacular. In this guise the much-handled bit of fiction was brought across the seas by _The Albion_, a New York periodical that published only English “stuff.” Mr. Godey arraigned _The Albion_ for piracy, and the truth was revealed by degrees. Richmond papers copied the odd “happening” from Northern, and Mr. Morris made capital of it in advertising the forthcoming novel.

I have more than once spoken of the Richmond of that date as “provincial.” It was so backward in literary enterprise that the leading bookseller had not facilities at his command for publishing the book committed to him.

On March 9, 1854, I wrote to my Powhatan correspondent:

“Cousin Joe says he was charged by you to get ‘my book.’ I am sorry to say that it cannot be procured as yet. Unlooked for delays have impeded the work of publication. But, as the proofs arrive daily, now, I trust that the wheels are beginning to run more smoothly. It is printed in Philadelphia, although copyrighted in Richmond. Not a printer in this city could finish it before the 1st of May, so we were forced to send it to the North....

“You will read and like it, if only because I wrote it. Whether or not others may cavil at the religious tone, and ridicule the simplicity of the narrative, remains to be seen. Thus far I have had encouragement from all sides. My own fears are the drawback to sanguine expectation.”

The actual advent of _Alone_ was a surprise, after all the waiting and wondering that left the heart sick with hope deferred.

I was setting out for a walk one balmy May morning, and standing on the front porch to draw on my gloves, when Doctor Haxall, who had long had in our family the sobriquet of “the beloved physician,” reined in his horses at the gate and called out that he was “just coming to ask me to drive with him.” He had often done the like good turn to me.

I was not robust, and he had watched my growth with more than professional solicitude. Had he been of my very own kindred, he could not have been kinder or displayed more active interest in all my affairs—great to me and small to him.

“Headache?” he queried, with a keen look at my pale face when I was seated at his side.

“Not exactly! I think the warm weather makes me languid.”

“More likely overexcited nerves. You must learn to take life more philosophically. But we won’t talk shop!”

We were bowling along at a fine rate. The doctor drove fast, blooded horses, and liked to handle the ribbons himself. The day was deliciously fresh, the air sweet with early roses and honeysuckle. I called his attention, in passing Conway Robinson’s grounds, to the perfume of violets rising in almost visible waves from a ravine where the grass was whitened by them as with a light fall of snow. I asked no questions as we turned down Capitol Street, and thence into Main Street. Sometimes I sat in the carriage while he paid a professional call. This might be his intention now. We brought up abruptly at Morris’s book-store, and the blesséd man leaped out and held his hand to me. He probably had an errand there. He handed me into the interior in his brisk way, and marched straight up to Mr. Morris, who advanced to meet us.

“Good-morning! I have come for a copy of this young lady’s book!”

If I had ever fainted, I should have swooned on the spot.

For there, in heaps and heaps upon the front counter—in bindings of dark-blue, and purple, and crimson, and leaf-brown—lay in lordly state, portly volumes, on the backs of which, in gleaming gold that shimmered and shook before my incredulous vision, was stamped:

“ALONE.”

I saw, through the sudden dazzlement of the whole world about me, that a clerk had set a chair for me. I sat down gratefully.

Mr. Morris was talking:

“Opened this morning! I sent six copies up to you. I suppose you got them?”

“No!” I tried so hard to say it firmly that it sounded careless. I would have added, “I did not know it was out,” but dared not attempt a sentence.

Mr. Morris attended us to the door to point to placards a porter was tacking to boards put there for that express purpose:

JUST OUT!! ALONE! By Marion Harland

The doctor nodded satisfiedly and handed me into the carriage. In taking my seat, I thought, in a dull, sick way, of Bruce at the source of the Nile. I had had day-dreams of this day and hour a thousand times in the last ten years. Of how I should walk down-town some day, and see a placard at this very door bearing the title of a novel written and bound, and lettered in gilt, and PUBLISHED! bearing my pen-name! The vision was a reality; the dream was a triumphant fulfilment. And I was sitting, unchanged, and non-appreciative, by the dear old doctor, and his full, cordial tones were saying of the portly purple volume lying on the seat between us:

“Well, my dear child, I congratulate you, and I hope a second edition will be called for within six months!”

He did not ply me with questions. He may not have suspected that the shock had numbed my ideas and stiffened my tongue. If he had, he could not have borne himself more tactfully. He was a man who had seen the world and hobnobbed with really distinguished live authors. It would not have been possible for him to enter fully into what this day was to me. When I thought of Bruce and the Nile, it was because I did not comprehend that the very magnitude of the crisis was what deprived me of the power of appreciating what had happened.

No! I am not inclined to ridicule the unsophisticated girl whose emotions were too mighty for speech that May noon, and to minimize what excited them. Nothing that wealth or fame could ever offer me in years to come could stir the depths of heart and mind as they were upheaved in that supreme hour.

The parcel of books had been opened and the contents examined, by the time I got home. I stole past the open door of my mother’s chamber, where she and Aunt Rice, who was visiting us, and Mea were chatting vivaciously, and betook myself to my room.

When my sister looked me up at dinner-time I told her to excuse me from coming down. “The heat had made me giddy and headachy.”

She bade me “lie still. She would send me a cup of tea.”

“I’ll leave you this for company,” she cooed, laying the book tenderly on my pillow. “_We_ think it beautiful.”

With that she went out softly, shutting me in with my “beautiful” first-born. Mea always had her wits within easy call. The sixth sense was born within her.

I saw of the travail of my soul and was satisfied; was repaid a thousandfold for months of toil and years of waiting, when my father read my book. He did not go down-town again that day, after coming home to dinner. My mother told me, with a happy break in her laugh, how he had hardly touched the food on his plate. Aunt Rice’s pleasant prattle saved the situation from awkwardness when he lapsed into a brown study and talked less than he ate. When dessert was brought in, he excused himself and disappeared from general view for the rest of the afternoon. The door of “the chamber” to which he withdrew was fast shut. Nobody disturbed him until it was too dark to read by daylight. My mother took in a lighted lamp and set it on the table by him.

“He didn’t see or hear me!” was her report. “He is a quarter through the book already, and he doesn’t skip a word.”

He spent just fifteen minutes at the supper-table. It was two o’clock in the morning before he reached the last page.

After prayers next morning he put his arm about me and held me fast for a moment. Then he kissed me very gravely.

“I was right about that book, daughter!”

That was all! but it was, to my speechless self, as if the morning stars had sung together for joy.

I record here and now what I did not know in the spring-tide of my happiness. I never had—I shall never have—another reader like him. As long as he lived, he “believed” in me and in my work with a sincerity and fervor as impossible for me to describe as it can be for any outsider to believe. He made the perusal of each volume (and they numbered a score before he died) as solemn a ceremony as he instituted for the first. His absolute absorption in it was the secret jest of the family, but they respected it at heart. When he talked with me of the characters that bore part in my stories, he treated them as real flesh-and-blood entities. He found fault with one, and sympathized with another, and argued with a third, as seeing them in _propia personæ_. It was strange—phenomenal—when one considers the light weight of the literature under advisement and the mental calibre of the man. To me it was at once inspiration and my exceeding great reward.

“_June 5th, 1854._

“DEAR EFFIE,—From a formidable pile of letters of good wishes and congratulation, I select (not _happen_ upon!) your sweet, affectionate epistle, every word of which, if it did not come from your heart, went straight to mine.

“I shall never be a literary iceberg! That is clear. I have had a surfeit of compliments in public and in private, but a word of appreciation from a true, loving friend gives me more delicious pleasure than all else.

“I make no excuse for speaking freely to you of what you say is ‘near akin’ to you. I thank you heartily for owning the relationship. Two editions have been ‘run off’ already, and another is now in press—unprecedented success in this part of the world—or so they tell me. Northern papers notice the book more at length and more handsomely than does the Richmond press.

“Of the sales in your county, I know nothing. Oh yes! C. W. told Mr. Rhodes that ‘Miss Virginia Hawes’s novel is having a tremendous run in Powhatan. Tre-_men_-dous, sir! Why, I had an order to buy a copy and send it up, myself, sir!’

“Isn’t that characteristic?”

XXV

BROUGHT FACE TO FACE WITH MY FATE

THE promised visit to Powhatan was paid in July.

“How happily the days of Thalaba went by!”

I said over the strangely musical line to myself scores of times in the two months of my stay in the dear old county. “Homestead,” the home of the D.’s, was never more beautiful, and the days were full of innocent fun, and junketings without number. College and University boys were at home, and city people were flocking to the country. There were walks, drives, “dining-days,” early and late horseback parties, setting out from one hospitable house before sunrise, and breakfasting at another ten or twelve miles away; or, better yet, leaving home at sunset, and pacing, cantering, and galloping (women never rode trotting horses) along highroad and plantation lane to a house, buried in ancestral woods, in the very heart of the county, for supper, returning by the light of the harvest moon, as fresh as when we set forth. With no premonition that this was to be the most eventful summer and autumn of my hitherto tranquil life, I gave myself up, wholly and happily, to the influences that sweetened and glorified it.

Late in August I resolved rather suddenly to go home. My sister was in Boston; my father would not leave his business for so much as a week; my mother and the younger children ought to be in the country. Since she would not resign my father to what she spoke of as “Fate and servants,” I would throw my now rejuvenated body into the breach, abide by the stuff and her husband and sons, while she took a sadly needed rest with old friends in Nottoway County.

Recollecting how persistently I clung to the decision in the face of a tempest of protest, my own heart in secret league with the protestants, I acknowledge with humble gratitude the guidance of the “moving finger that writes” out the destinies we think to control for ourselves.

The glow of the halcyon summer had not passed from my spirit when I wrote to my late hostess two days after my return:

“RICHMOND, _August 29th, 1854._

“MY OWN FRIEND,—I said ‘I will write next week,’ but it suits my feelings and convenience to write this morning.

“In the first place, my heart is so full of happiness that it overflows upon and toward everybody that I love, and don’t you dear Homesteadians—yourself and Powhie, especially—come in for a share?

“Mrs. Noble was very pleasant, but the journey was a bit tedious. It always is! Richmond looked enchanting when at last the spires and chimneys appeared upon the horizon, and my sweet home was never so pretty before.

“Mother had planned an agreeable surprise, and not told me that the painters had been at work elsewhere than in my room. So the freshly painted shutters and the white window-facings and cornices, contrasted with the gray walls, were doubly beautiful, because not expected. Then Percy came tumbling down the steps, clapping his hands and shouting in glee, and Alice’s bright smile shone upon me at the gate, and mother left company in the parlor to give me four kisses—and all I could say was, ‘I have had _such_ a pleasant visit, and now I am _so_ glad to see you all!’

“Father could not be coaxed to bed that night until one o’clock, although mother reminded him that he had a headache.

“‘Never mind! Daughters don’t come home every night!’

“‘But this one will be tired out!’

“‘Well, she may sleep late to-morrow morning.’

“He doesn’t know how lazy I have grown of late.

“I am surprised to find vegetation so luxuriant here. My inquiries concerning the ‘late drought’ are answered by a stare of amazement. Rain has been abundant in this region. In our garden the vegetables and grape-vines grow rank and tall. And as for flowers! There were seven bouquets in the parlor, smiling and breathing a welcome. Last night I received one per rail from Horace Lacy (bless his soul!), and Herbert to-night brought up another and a magnificent, when he came to his late supper.

“Mother had delicious peaches for supper the night I got back, but advised me to ‘eat them sparingly, at first.’ Yesterday I forgot her caution, and I think I am the better for the lapse. Peaches, watermelons, apples, sweet potatoes, etc., were liberally patronized by us all. The cholera ‘scare’ seems to be over. Doctor Haxall advised the members of our family to make no change in their diet while they continued well, and they have prospered wonderfully under his regimen....

“I wish I had time to tell you of some queer letters I found waiting for me. Father would not forward them, ‘for fear of annoying me.’ They are meant to be complimentary, one requesting ‘some particulars of your birthplace, education,’ etc. ‘Wish he may get them!’

“Now, dear, forgive this egotistical scrawl—written as fast as fingers can scratch—but just seat yourself and tell me exactly what you have been doing, saying, and thinking since I left; how our pet, Powhie (the dear old scamp!), is thriving; and the state of your mother’s health, also the news from The Jungle.

“Our Heavenly Father bless and love you, my darling!”

We packed my mother and her younger children off to the country the first of September, and rejoiced unselfishly that they had escaped the fervid heats of the following week. Our house was deliciously cool by comparison with the sultriness of the outer world. The thick walls and lofty ceilings kept the temperature at an equable and comfortable point. We breakfasted early, and by nine o’clock the day was my own—or six consecutive hours of it.

In unconscious imitation of Charlotte Brontë, who began _Jane Eyre_ while _The Professor_ was “plodding his weary round from publisher to publisher,” I had begun another book by the time _Alone_ was turned over to the tender mercies of Mr. Morris’s “reader.” I finished the first draught on the forenoon of September 11th, having wrought at it with the fierce joy in work that ever comes to me after a season of absolute or comparative idleness.

I was very weary when the last word was written:

“Alma was asleep!”

I read it aloud to myself in the safe solitude of my shaded library. I had not heard then that Thackeray slapped his thigh exultantly after describing the touch of pride Becky felt in her husband’s athletic pummelling of her lover. I could have understood it fully at that instant.

“Thackeray, my boy, that is a stroke of genius!” cried the great author, aloud, in honest pride.

The small woman writer sat wearily back in her chair, and said—not murmured: “I flatter myself _that_ is a neat touch!”

Then I found that my head ached. Moreover, it had a strange, empty feeling. I compared it to a squeezed sponge. I likewise reminded myself that I had not been out of the house for two days; that my father had shaken his head when I told him it was “too hot for walking,” warning me that I “must not throw away the good the country had done for me.” He would ask me, at supper-time, if I had taken the admonition to heart.