Chapter 17

He didn’t persuade his sister, who despised him—she wished to work her mother in her own way, and I asked myself why the girl’s judgment of him didn’t make me like her better. It was because it didn’t save her after all from a mute agreement with him to go halves. There were moments when I couldn’t help looking hard into his atrocious young eyes, challenging him to confess his fantastic fraud and give it up. Not a little tacit conversation passed between us in this way, but he had always the best of it. If I said: “Oh, come now, with _me_ you needn’t keep it up; plead guilty, and I’ll let you off,” he wore the most ingenuous, the most candid expression, in the depths of which I could read: “Oh, yes, I know it exasperates you—that’s just why I do it.” He took the line of earnest inquiry, talked about Balzac and Flaubert, asked me if I thought Dickens _did_ exaggerate and Thackeray _ought_ to be called a pessimist. Once he came to see me, at his mother’s suggestion he declared, on purpose to ask me how far, in my opinion, in the English novel, one really might venture to “go.” He was not resigned to the usual pruderies—he suffered under them already. He struck out the brilliant idea that nobody knew how far we might go, for nobody had ever tried. Did I think _he_ might safely try—would it injure his mother if he did? He would rather disgrace himself by his timidities than injure his mother, but certainly some one ought to try. Wouldn’t _I_ try—couldn’t I be prevailed upon to look at it as a duty? Surely the ultimate point ought to be fixed—he was worried, haunted by the question. He patronised me unblushingly, made me feel like a foolish amateur, a helpless novice, inquired into my habits of work and conveyed to me that I was utterly _vieux jeu_ and had not had the advantage of an early training. I had not been brought up from the germ, I knew nothing of life—didn’t go at it on _his_ system. He had dipped into French feuilletons and picked up plenty of phrases, and he made a much better show in talk than his poor mother, who never had time to read anything and could only be vivid with her pen. If I didn’t kick him downstairs it was because he would have alighted on her at the bottom.

When she went to live at Primrose Hill I called upon her and found her weary and wasted. It had waned a good deal, the elation caused the year before by Ethel’s marriage; the foam on the cup had subsided and there was a bitterness in the draught.

She had had to take a cheaper house and she had to work still harder to pay even for that. Sir Baldwin was obliged to be close; his charges were fearful, and the dream of her living with her daughter (a vision she had never mentioned to me) must be renounced. “I would have helped with things, and I could have lived perfectly in one room,” she said; “I would have paid for everything, and—after all—I’m some one, ain’t I? But I don’t fit in, and Ethel tells me there are tiresome people she _must_ receive. I can help them from here, no doubt, better than from there. She told me once, you know, what she thinks of my picture of life. ‘Mamma, your picture of life is preposterous!’ No doubt it is, but she’s vexed with me for letting my prices go down; and I had to write three novels to pay for all her marriage cost me. I did it very well—I mean the outfit and the wedding; but that’s why I’m here. At any rate she doesn’t want a dingy old woman in her house. I should give it an atmosphere of literary glory, but literary glory is only the eminence of nobodies. Besides, she doubts my glory—she knows I’m glorious only at Peckham and Hackney. She doesn’t want her friends to ask if I’ve never known nice people. She can’t tell them I’ve never been in society. She tried to teach me better once, but I couldn’t learn. It would seem too as if Peckham and Hackney had had enough of me; for (don’t tell any one!) I’ve had to take less for my last than I ever took for anything.” I asked her how little this had been, not from curiosity, but in order to upbraid her, more disinterestedly than Lady Luard had done, for such concessions. She answered “I’m ashamed to tell you,” and then she began to cry.

I had never seen her break down, and I was proportionately moved; she sobbed, like a frightened child, over the extinction of her vogue and the exhaustion of her vein. Her little workroom seemed indeed a barren place to grow flowers, and I wondered, in the after years (for she continued to produce and publish) by what desperate and heroic process she dragged them out of the soil. I remember asking her on that occasion what had become of Leolin, and how much longer she intended to allow him to amuse himself at her cost. She rejoined with spirit, wiping her eyes, that he was down at Brighton hard at work—he was in the midst of a novel—and that he _felt_ life so, in all its misery and mystery, that it was cruel to speak of such experiences as a pleasure. “He goes beneath the surface,” she said, “and he _forces_ himself to look at things from which he would rather turn away. Do you call that amusing yourself? You should see his face sometimes! And he does it for me as much as for himself. He tells me everything—he comes home to me with his _trouvailles_. We are artists together, and to the artist all things are pure. I’ve often heard you say so yourself.” The novel that Leolin was engaged in at Brighton was never published, but a friend of mine and of Mrs. Stormer’s who was staying there happened to mention to me later that he had seen the young apprentice to fiction driving, in a dogcart, a young lady with a very pink face. When I suggested that she was perhaps a woman of title with whom he was conscientiously flirting my informant replied: “She is indeed, but do you know what her title is?” He pronounced it—it was familiar and descriptive—but I won’t reproduce it here. I don’t know whether Leolin mentioned it to his mother: she would have needed all the purity of the artist to forgive him. I hated so to come across him that in the very last years I went rarely to see her, though I knew that she had come pretty well to the end of her rope. I didn’t want her to tell me that she had fairly to give her books away—I didn’t want to see her cry. She kept it up amazingly, and every few months, at my club, I saw three new volumes, in green, in crimson, in blue, on the book-table that groaned with light literature. Once I met her at the Academy soirée, where you meet people you thought were dead, and she vouchsafed the information, as if she owed it to me in candour, that Leolin had been obliged to recognise insuperable difficulties in the question of _form_, he was so fastidious; so that she had now arrived at a definite understanding with him (it was such a comfort) that _she_ would do the form if he would bring home the substance. That was now his position—he foraged for her in the great world at a salary. “He’s my ‘devil,’ don’t you see? as if I were a great lawyer: he gets up the case and I argue it.” She mentioned further that in addition to his salary he was paid by the piece: he got so much for a striking character, so much for a pretty name, so much for a plot, so much for an incident, and had so much promised him if he would invent a new crime.

“He _has_ invented one,” I said, “and he’s paid every day of his life.”

“What is it?” she asked, looking hard at the picture of the year; “Baby’s Tub,” near which we happened to be standing.

I hesitated a moment. “I myself will write a little story about it, and then you’ll see.”

But she never saw; she had never seen anything, and she passed away with her fine blindness unimpaired. Her son published every scrap of scribbled paper that could be extracted from her table-drawers, and his sister quarrelled with him mortally about the proceeds, which showed that she only wanted a pretext, for they cannot have been great. I don’t know what Leolin lives upon, unless it be on a queer lady many years older than himself, whom he lately married. The last time I met him he said to me with his infuriating smile: “Don’t you think we can go a little further still—just a little?” _He_ really goes too far.