Part 9

Jessamine is difficult. I thought of it now with a pang, as her brown curls lay soft against a red cushion and she crunched a biscuit, heavily stuccoed with marmalade, with her little popcorn teeth. I have wooed her with bonbons; I have bribed her with pennies; but indifference and disdain are still my portion. To-day was my opportunity. The rest of the household had gone to explore the village bazaars, and we were left alone. It was not that she loved me more, but the new nurse less; and, as sailing had usually been denied her, she derived from our few hours in my catboat the joy of a clandestine adventure. We had never been so much together before. I wondered how long the spell of our sail would last. Probably, I reflected, until the wanderers came back from town to afford a new diversion; or until her nurse came to carry her away to tea. For the moment, however, I felt secure. The fire snapped; the clock ticked insistently; my face burned from its recent contact with a sharp west wind, which had brought white caps to the surface of the lake and a pleasant splash to the beach at our front door. Jessamine folded her arms, rested her head upon them, and regarded me lazily. She was slim and lean of limb, and the lines she made on the couch were long. I tried to remember whether I had ever seen her still before.

“You may read, if you like,” she said.

“Thank you; but I’d rather have you tell me things,” I answered.

I wished to be conciliatory. At any moment, I knew she might rise and vanish. My tricks of detention had proved futile a thousand times; I was always losing her. She was a master opportunist. She had, I calculated, a mood a minute, and the mood of inaction was not often one of them.

“There are many, many things I’d like to have you tell me, Mischief,” I said. “What do you think of when you’re all alone; what do you think of me?”

“Oh! I never think of you when I’m all alone.”

“Thank you, Mischief. But I wonder whether you are quite frank. You must think of me sometimes. For example,--where were you when you thought of knotting my neckties all together, no longer ago than yesterday?”

“Oh!” (It is thus she begins many sentences. Her “Ohs” are delightfully equivocal.)

“Perhaps you’d rather not tell. Of course, I don’t mind about the ties.”

“It was nice of you--not to mind.”

Suddenly her blue eyes ceased to be. They are little pools of blue, like mountain lakes. I was aware that the dark lashes had stolen down upon her brown cheek. She opened her eyes again instantly.

“I wish I hadn’t found your ties. Finding them made a lot of trouble for me. I was looking for your funny little scissors to open the door of my doll-house that was stuck, and I saw the ties. Then I remembered that I needed a rope to tie Adolphus--that’s the woolly dog you bought for my birthday--to my bed at night; and neckties make very good ropes.”

“I’m glad to hear it, Mischief.”

“There’s a prayer they say in church about mischief--” she began sleepily.

“‘From all evil and mischief; from sin; from the crafts and assaults of the Devil?’” I quoted.

“That is it! and there’s something in it, too, about everlasting damnation, that always sends shivers down my back.”

She frowned in a puzzled way. I remembered that once, when Jessamine and I went to church together, she had, during the reading of the litany, so moved a silk hat on the next seat that its owner crushed it hideously when he rose from his knees.

The black lashes hid the blue eyes once more, and she settled her head snugly into her folded arms.

“Why,” she murmured, “do you call me Mischief? I’m not Mischief; I’m Jessamine.”

“You are the Spirit of Mischief,” I answered; and she made no reply.

The water of the lake beat the shore stormily.

“The Spirit of Mischief.”

Jessamine repeated the words sleepily. I had never thought of them seriously before, and had applied them to her thoughtlessly. Is there, I asked myself, a whimsical spirit that possesses the heart of a child,--something that is too swift for the slow pace of adult minds; and if there be such, where is its abiding-place?

“I’m the Spirit of Mischief!”

There, with her back to the fire, stood Jessamine, but with a difference. Her fists were thrust deep down into the pockets of her coat. There was a smile on her face that I did not remember to have seen before. The wind had blown her hair into a sorry tangle, and it was my fault--I should have made her wear her tam-o’-shanter in the catboat! An uncle may mean well, but, after all, he is no fit substitute for a parent.

“So you admit it, do you? It is unlike you to make concessions.”

“You use long words. Uncles _always_ use long words. It is one of the most foolish things they do.”

“I’m sorry. I wish very much not to be foolish or naughty.”

“I have wished that many times,” she returned gravely. “But naughtiness and mischief are not the same thing.”

“I believe that is so,” I answered. “But if you are really the Spirit of Mischief,--and far be it from me to doubt your word,--where is your abiding-place? Spirits must have abiding-places.”

“There are many of them, and they are a long way off. One is where the four winds meet.”

“But that--that isn’t telling. Nobody knows where that is.”

“Everybody doesn’t,” said the Spirit of Mischief gently, as one who would deal forbearingly with dullness.

“Tell me something easier,” I begged.

“Well, I’ll try again,” she said. “Sometimes when I’m not where four winds meet, I’m at the end of all the rainbows. Do you know that place?”

“I never heard of it. Is it very far away?”

“It’s farther than anything--farther even than the place where the winds meet.”

“And what do you do there? You must have bags and bags of gold, O Spirit.”

“Yes. Of course. I practice hiding things with them. That is why no one ever found a bag of gold at the end of a rainbow. I have put countless ones in the cave of lost treasure. There are a great many things there besides the bags of gold,--things that parents, and uncles, and aunts lose,--and never find any more.”

“I wish I could visit the place,” I said with a sigh. “It would be pleasant to see a storehouse like that. It would have, I may say, a strong personal interest. Only yesterday I contributed a valued scarf-pin through the agency of a certain mischievous niece; and I shall be long in recovering from the loss of that miraculous putter that made me a terror on the links. My golf can never be the same again.”

“But you never can see the place,” she declared. “A time comes when you can’t find it any more, the cave of lost treasure--or the place where four winds meet--or the end of all the rainbows.”

“I suppose I have lost my chance,” I said.

“Oh, long ago!” exclaimed the Spirit disdainfully. “It never lasts beyond six!”

“That has a wise sound. Pray tell me more! Tell me, I beg, how you have endured this harsh world so long.”

This, I thought, was a poser; but she answered readily enough.

“I suppose, because I am kindred of so many, many things that live on forever. There are the colors on water when the sun strikes it through clouds. It can be green and gold and blue and silver all at once; and then there is the foam of the white caps. It is foam for a moment and then it is just water again. And there is the moonlight on rippling water, that goes away and never comes any more--not just the same. The mirth in the heart of a child is like all these things; and the heart of a child is the place I love best.”

“Yes,” I said. “I’m sure it is better than the place where all the winds meet, or that other rainbow-place that you told me about.”

“And then,” she began again, “you know that children say things sometimes just in fun, but no one ever seems to understand that.”

“To be sure,” I said feelingly, remembering how Jessamine loved to tease and plague me.

“But there isn’t any harm in it--any more than--”

“Yes?” a little impatiently.

“Than in the things the pines say when the wind runs over the top of them. They are not--not important, exactly,--but they are always different. That is the best thing about being a child--the being different part. You have a grown-up word that means always just the same.”

“Consistent?” I asked.

“That is it. A child that is consistent is wrong some way. But I don’t remember having seen any of that kind.”

A smile that was not the smile of Jessamine stole into the Spirit’s face. It disconcerted me. I could not, for the life of me, decide how much of the figure before me was Jessamine and how much was really the Spirit of Mischief, or whether they were both the same.

“Being ignorant, you don’t know what the mirth in a child is--you” (scornfully) “who pretend to measure all people by their sense of humor. It’s akin to the bubbling music of the fountain of youth, and you do the child and the world a wrong when you stifle it. A child’s glee is as natural as sunshine, and carries no burden of knowledge; and that is the precious thing about it.”

“I’m sure that is true,” I said; but the Spirit did not heed me. She went on, in a voice that suggested Jessamine, but was not hers.

“Many people talk solemnly about the imagination of children, as though it were a thing that could be taught from books or prepared in laboratories. But children’s mischief, that is so often complained of, is the imaginations’ finest flower.”

“The idea pleases me. I shall make a note of it.”

“The very day,” continued the Spirit, “that you sat at table and talked learnedly about the minds of children and how to promote in them a love of the beautiful, your Jessamine had known a moment of joy. She had lain in the meadow and watched the thistledown take flight,--a myriad of those flimsy argosies. And she had fashioned a story about them, that they rise skyward to become the stuff that white clouds are made of. And the same day she asked you to tell her what it is the robins are so sorry about when they sing in the evening after the other birds have gone. Now the same small head that thought of those things contrived also the happy idea of cooking a doll’s dinner in the chafing dish,--an experiment that resulted, as you may remember, in a visit from both the doctor and the fire-insurance adjuster.”

My heart was wrung as I recalled the bandages on Jessamine’s slender brown arms.

“Yes, O Spirit!” I said. “I’m learning much. Pray tell me more!”

“We like very much for science to let us alone--”

“But hygiene--and all those life-saving things--”

“Oh, yes,” she said patronizingly; “they’re all very well in their way. It’s better for science to kill bugs than for the bugs to kill children. But I mean other kinds of sciences that are not nearly so useful--pedagogical and the like, that are trying to kill the microbe of play. Leave us, oh, leave us that!”

“That is a new way of putting it. We oldsters soon forget how to play, alackaday!”

She went on calmly. “Work that you really love isn’t work any more--it’s play.”

“That’s a little deep for me--”

“It’s true, though, so you’d better try to understand. If you paint a picture and work at it,--slave over it and are not happy doing it,--then your picture is only so many pennies’ worth of paint. The cruelest thing people can say of a book or a picture is, ‘Well, he worked hard at it!’ The spirit of mischief is only the spirit of play; and the spirit of play is really the spirit of the work we love.

“It’s too bad that you are not always patient with us,” the Spirit continued. (I noted the plural. Clearly Jessamine and the Spirit were one!)

“I’m sorry, too,” I answered contritely.

“The laws of the foolish world do not apply to childhood at all. Children are born into a condition of ideality. They view everything with wonder and awe, and you and all the rest of the grown-up world are busy spoiling their illusions. How happy you would be if you could have gone on blowing bubbles all your days!”

“True, alas, too true!”

The face of the Spirit grew suddenly very old.

“Life,” she said, “consists largely in having to accept the fact that we cannot do the things we want to do. But in the blessed days of mischief we blow bubbles in forbidden soap and water with contraband pipes--and do not know that they are bubbles!”

“That is the fine thing about it, O Spirit--the sweet ignorance of it! I hope I understand that.”

“I see that you are really wiser than you have always seemed,” she said, with her baffling smile. “Mischief, as you are prone to call so many things that children do, is as wholesome and sweet as a field of clover. I, the Spirit of Mischief, have a serious business in the world, which I’ll tell you about, as you are old and know so little. I’m here to combat and confuse the evil spirits that seek to stifle the good cheer of childhood. These little children that always go to bed without a fuss and say good night very sweetly in French, and never know bread and butter and jam by their real names--you really do not like them half as well as you like natural children. You remember that you laughed when Jessamine’s French governess came, and left the second day because the black cat got into her trunk. There was really no harm in that!”

The Spirit of Mischief laughed. She grew very small, and I watched her curiously, wondering whether she was really a creature of this work-a-day world. Then suddenly she grew to life-size again, and laughed gleefully, standing with her hands thrust deep into her coat pockets.

“Jessamine!” I exclaimed. “I thought you were asleep.”

“I was, a little bit; but you--you snored awfully,” she said, “and waked me up.”

She still watched me, laughing; and looking down I saw that she had been busy while I slept. A barricade of books had been built around me,--a carefully wrought bit of masonry, as high as my knees.

“You’re the wicked giant,” declared Jessamine, quite in her own manner, and with no hint of the half-real, elfish spirit of my dream. “And I’m the good little Princess that has caught you at last. And I’ll never let you out of the tower--Oh they’re coming! They’re coming!”

She flashed to the door and out upon the veranda where steps had sounded, leaving me to deliver myself from the tower of the Spirit of Mischief with the ignorant hands of Age.

Confessions of a “Best-Seller”

Confessions of a “Best-Seller”

THAT my name has adorned best-selling lists is more of a joke than my harshest critics can imagine. I had dallied awhile at the law; I had given ten full years to journalism; I had written criticism, and not a little verse; two or three short stories of the slightest had been my only adventure in fiction; and I had spent a year writing an essay in history, which, from the publisher’s reports, no one but my neighbor and my neighbor’s wife ever read. My frugal output of poems had pleased no one half so much as myself; and having reached years of discretion I carefully analyzed samples of the ore that remained in my bins, decided that I had exhausted my poetical vein, and thereupon turned rather soberly to the field of fiction.

In order to qualify myself to speak to my text, I will say that in a period of six years, that closed in January, 1909, my titles were included fifteen times in the “Bookman” list of best-selling books. Two of my titles appeared five times each; one of them headed the list three months successively. I do not presume to speak for others with whom I have crossed swords in the best-selling lists, but I beg to express my strong conviction that the compilation of such statistics is quite as injurious as it is helpful to authors. When the “six best-selling” phrase was new the monthly statement of winners may have carried some weight; but for several years it has really had little significance. Critical purchasers are likely to be wary of books so listed. It is my impression, based on talks with retail dealers in many parts of the country, that they often report as “best-sellers” books of which they may have made large advance purchases, but which are selling slowly. Their aim is, of course, to force the book into the list, and thereby create a false impression of its popularity.

I think that most publishers, and many authors who, like myself, have profited by the making of these lists, would gladly see them discontinued. The fact remains, however, that the best novels by the best English and American writers have generally been included in these lists. Mrs. Wharton, Mrs. Ward, Mr. Winston Churchill, Mr. Wister, “Kate Douglas Wiggin,” Miss Johnston, and Mr. William de Morgan have, for example, shared with inferior writers the ignominy of popular success. I do not believe that my American fellow citizens prefer trash to sound literature. There are not enough novels of the first order, not enough books of the style and solidity of “The House of Mirth” and “Joseph Vance,” to satisfy the popular demand for fiction; and while the people wait, they take inferior books, like several bearing my own name, which have no aim but to amuse. I know of nothing more encouraging to those who wish to see the American novel go high and far than the immediate acceptance among us of the writings of Mr. William de Morgan, who makes no concession, not even of brevity, to the ever-increasing demand for fiction.

I spent the greater part of two years on my first novel, which dealt with aspects of life in an urban community which interested me; and the gravest fault of the book, if I am entitled to an opinion, is its self-consciousness,--I was too anxious, too painstaking, with the result that those pages seem frightfully stiff to me now. The book was launched auspiciously; my publisher advertised it generously, and it landed safely among the “six best-sellers.” The critical reception of the book was cordial and friendly, not only in the newspaper press, but in the more cautious weekly journals. My severest critic dealt far more amiably with my book than I should have done myself, if I had sat in judgment upon it. I have been surprised to find the book still remembered, and its quality has been flung in my face by critics who have deplored my later performances.

I now wrote another novel, to which I gave even greater care, and into it I put, I think, the best characterizations I have ever done; but the _soupçon_ of melodrama with which I flavored the first novel was lacking in the second, and it went dead a little short of fifteen thousand--the poorest sale any of my books has had.

A number of my friends were, at this time, rather annoyingly directing my attention to the great popular successes of several other American writers, whose tales were, I felt, the most contemptible _pastiche_, without the slightest pretense to originality, and having neither form nor style. It was in some bitterness of spirit that I resolved to try my hand at a story that should be a story and nothing else. Nor should I storm the capitals of imaginary kingdoms, but set the scene on my own soil. Most, it was clear, could grow the flowers of Zenda when once the seed had been scattered by Mr. Hawkins. Whether Mr. Hawkins got his inspiration from the flora of Prince Otto’s gardens, and whether the Prince was indebted in his turn to Harry Richmond, is not my affair. I am, no doubt, indebted to all three of these creations; but I set my scene in an American commonwealth, a spot that derived nothing from historical association, and sent my hero on his adventures armed with nothing more deadly than a suit-case and an umbrella. The idea is not original with me that you can make anything interesting if you know how. It was Stevenson, I believe, who said that a kitchen table is a fair enough subject for any writer who knows his trade. I do not cite myself as a person capable of proving this; but I am satisfied that the chief fun of story-telling lies in trying, by all the means in a writer’s power, to make plausible the seemingly impossible. And here, of course, I am referring to the story for the story’s sake,--not to the novel of life and manners.

My two earliest books were clearly too deliberate. They were deficient in incident, and I was prone to wander into blind alleys, and not always ingenious enough to emerge again upon the main thoroughfare. I felt that, while I might fail in my attempt to produce a romantic yarn, the experience might help me to a better understanding of the mechanics of the novel,--that I might gain directness, movement, and ease.

For my third venture I hit upon a device that took strong hold upon my imagination. The idea of laying a trap for the reader tickled me; and when once I had written the first chapter and outlined the last, I yielded myself to the story and bade it run its own course. I was never more honestly astonished in my life than to find my half-dozen characters taking matters into their own hands, and leaving me the merest spectator and reporter. I had made notes for the story, but in looking them over to-day, I find that I made practically no use of them. I never expect to experience again the delight of the winter I spent over that tale. The sight of white paper had no terrors for me. The hero, constantly cornered, had always in his pocket the key to his successive dilemmas; the heroine, misunderstood and misjudged, was struck at proper intervals by the spot-light that revealed her charm and reëstablished faith in her honorable motives. No other girl in my little gallery of heroines exerts upon me the spell of that young lady, who, on the day I began the story, as I waited for the ink to thaw in my workshop, passed under my window, by one of those kindly orderings of Providence that keep alive the superstition of inspiration in the hearts of all fiction-writers. She never came my way again--but she need not! She was the bright particular star of my stage--its _dea ex machina_. She is of the sisterhood of radiant goddesses who are visible from any window, even though its prospect be only a commonplace city street. Always, and everywhere, the essential woman for any tale is passing by with grave mien, if the tale be sober; with upturned chin and a saucy twinkle in the eye, if such be the seeker’s need!

I think I must have begun every morning’s work with a grin on my face, for it was all fun, and I entered with zest into all the changes and chances of the story. I was embarrassed, not by any paucity of incident, but by my own fecundity and dexterity. The audacity of my project used sometimes to give me pause; it was almost too bold a thing to carry through; but my curiosity as to just how the ultimate goal would be reached kept my interest keyed high. At times, feeling that I was going too fast, I used to halt and write a purple patch or two for my own satisfaction,--a harmless diversion to which I am prone, and which no one could be cruel enough to deny me. There are pages in that book over which I dallied for a week, and in looking at them now I find that I still think them--as Mr. James would say--“rather nice.” And once, while thus amusing myself, a phrase slipped from the pen which I saw at once had been, from all time, ordained to be the title of my book.