The Record of Nicholas Freydon Part 29

'You must let me see something of you occasionally. I'm really sorry to lose you. You know I've always appreciated your suggestions,' said Arncliffe, when I looked in to bid him good-bye. He spoke with a friendly sincerity which I valued; because it was a fact that he had, as editor, adopted and developed a good many suggestions of mine, without apparent acknowledgment, and after keeping them in his pigeon-holes until, as I thought, he had forgotten their existence, and come to think the ideas subsequently acted upon were his own.

With funds in hand amounting to something well under twenty pounds, I took lodgings on the outskirts of Dorking--a bedroom and a sitting-room in the rather pretty cottage of a jobbing carpenter and joiner named Gilchrist. Mrs. Gilchrist, a wholesome, capable woman, performed some humble duties in the church close by, in which she made use of a very long-handled feather duster, and sundry cloths of a blue and white checked pattern. Her husband had a small workshop in the cottage garden, but his work more often than not took him away from home during the day. Jasmine and a crimson rambler strayed about the window of my little study, from which the view of the surrounding hills was delightful. For some days I explored the neighbourhood a.s.siduously.

And then I began to write my fourth book. The third--a volume of short stories of mean streets, written in the days preceding my marriage--was then pa.s.sing through the press.

When I first went to Dorking my health was in a very poor way. I imagine I must at the time have been on the verge of a pretty bad breakdown. The preceding six or eight months had greatly aggravated my digestive troubles, and I had also suffered a good deal from neuralgia. The constantly increasing stress of my domestic affairs, superimposed upon steady sedentary work in which the quest for new ideas was a continuous preoccupation, and combined with the effects of an irregular and indifferent dietary and lack of air and exercise, had reduced me physically to a low ebb.

During those last weeks in London, after f.a.n.n.y's death, I was not conscious of this collapse; and my first week in Dorking had a curiously stimulating effect upon me. Indeed, I fancy that week was the saving of me. But at the end of it, after one long day's writing, I took to my bed with influenza, and remained there for some time, dallying also with bronchitis, incipient pneumonia, gastritis, and a diphtheritic throat.

Six weeks pa.s.sed before I left my bedroom, but during only one of those weeks did I fail to produce my weekly contribution to the _Advocate_. If the quality of those contributions in any way reflected my low and febrile condition, Arncliffe mercifully refrained from drawing my attention to it. At the end of the six weeks I sat at an open window, amused by the ghostly refinement of my hands, and grateful to Providence for sunshine and clean air.

The doctor was a cheery soul, toward whom I felt most strongly drawn, because he was the only man I ever met in England who smoked my particular brand of Virginia plug tobacco. I had suffered from the lack of it since leaving Australia, but this good doctor told me how to get it in England, from an agent in Yorkshire; and I was deeply grateful to him for the information. He also told me, as I sat at the open window, that he did not think much of my stewardship of my own body.

'Let me tell you, Mr. Freydon, you have been sailing several points closer to the wind than a man has any right to sail. If you treated a child so, or a servant, aye, or a dumb beast, some preventive society would be at you for cruelty and neglect. They'd call me for the prosecution, and by gad, sir, my evidence would send you to Portland or Dartmoor--fine healthy places, both of 'em, by the way! But people seem to think they're licensed to treat their own bodies with any amount of cruelty and neglect. A grave mistake; a grave mistake! In the ideal state, sir, Citizen Jones will no more be allowed to maltreat and injure the health of Citizen Jones than he will be allowed to break the head or poison the food of Citizen Smith. Why should he? Each is of the same value in the eyes of the state; and, we may suppose, in the eyes of his Maker.'

The good man blew his nose, and endeavoured to introduce extreme severity into his kindly and indomitably cheerful expression.

'Yes, sir,' he resumed. 'You've got to turn over a new leaf from now on. Three good, plain meals a day, taken to the stroke of the clock.

Eight hours in bed every night of your life, and nine if you can get 'em. Two hours of walkin', or other equally good exercise--if you can discover its equal; I can't--in the open air every day. And anything less will be a flat dereliction of duty, and bad citizenship, remember that. This is for by and by, of course. Just now you want twelve hours in bed, and half a dozen light meals a day. Mrs. Gilchrist knows all about that. Good, sensible woman, Mrs. Gilchrist. Wish there were more like her, these days. Oh, I'll be seeing you again, from time to time.

Don't you bother your head about "accounts," my dear sir. And when you begin to get about now do oblige me by remembering your duty to yourself, as I've told you. As your doctor, I warn you, it's necessary in your case--absolutely necessary. _Good_-morning!'

And so he trotted off to his high dog-cart and his morning rounds. An excellent and kindly man, designed by Nature, his own temperament, and long use, for the precise part in life he played. Such adequacy and fitness are rare, and very admirable. I sometimes think that if I could have exactly obeyed this excellent physician, my whole life had been quite different. But then, to be able exactly to obey him, perhaps it would have been necessary for me to have been a different person in the beginning. And then, I might never have met him, and--there's the end of a profitless speculation.

As a fact I surrept.i.tiously resumed work on that book long before the doctor gave permission, and within a week of settling his account I was once more living a life of which he would have strongly disapproved; though it certainly was a very much less wearing and unwholesome one than the life I had always lived in London. But, as against that, I now had a good deal less in the way of staying power and force of resistance. So far from having paid up in full, and wiped off all old scores, in the matter of those first years in London, I had barely discharged the first instalment of a penalty which was to prove part and parcel of every subsequent year in my life. And yet, as I have said, I sometimes think that doctor gave me my chance, if only it had been in me to live by his instructions. But, apparently, it was not.

II

Sidney Heron, the man who had introduced me to the country round about Leith Hill, was the first visitor received in my Dorking lodging. He came one Sat.u.r.day morning when I had resumed work (though the doctor knew it not), and returned to town on the Sunday night.

I think Heron enjoyed his visit, though, out of consideration for my lack of condition, he walked less than he would have chosen. It was a real pleasure to me to have him there; and, in the retrospect, I can clearly see that I was powerfully stimulated by talk with him on literary subjects. So much was this so, that on the Sat.u.r.day night when I lay down in bed I found my brain in a ferment of activity. I read for half an hour; but even then, after blowing out my candle, the plots of new books, ideas for future work, literary schemes of every sort and kind, all promising quite remarkable success, were spinning through my mind in most exhilarating fashion. The morning found me somewhat weary, though not unpleasantly so; and consideration of all this made me realise, as I had not realised before, the isolation and retirement of my life there in Dorking; the very marked change it represented from the busy routine of days spent in the _Advocate_ office. I prized my retirement more than ever after this.

'For,' I thought, 'of what use or purport was all that ceaseless mental stress and fret in London? It was all quite barren and fruitless, really. Whereas, here--one can develop thoughts here. This life makes creative work possible.'

I am afraid I gave no credit to Heron, or to the stimulating effects upon my own mind of contact with his bracing, if somewhat harsh, intelligence. All was attributed by me at the time to the advantages of my sequestered life. The effect of mental stimulus was not by any means so evanescent as such things often are, and the Monday following upon Heron's return to town saw me hard at work upon the book which I had outlined and begun before my illness.

There followed, in that modest little cottage room of mine, some three or four months of incessant work at high pressure; long days, and nights, too, at the table, during which my only exercise and relaxation in a week would be an occasional five minutes' walk to the post-office, or a stroll after midnight, when I found the cool night silence soothed me greatly before going to my bedroom. The doctor's counsels were all forgotten, of course, or remembered only in odd moments, as when going to bed, or shaving in the morning. Then I would promise myself reformation when the book was finished. That done I would live by rote and acquire bucolic health, I told myself.

In most respects that period was thoroughly typical of my life during the next half dozen years. When the end of a book was reached, there came the long and wearing process of its revision. Then interviews with publishers, the correction of proof sheets, the excogitation of writings for magazines--fuel for the fire that kept my pot a-boiling.

There were intervals of acute mental weariness, and there were intervals of acute bodily distress. But the intervals of reformed living, when they came at all, were too brief and spasmodic to make a stronger or a healthier man of me. My business visits to London were sometimes made to embrace friendly visits to Sidney Heron's lodgings.

Two or three times I dined with Arncliffe, and very occasionally I was visited at Dorking by two of the literary journalists who had joined Arncliffe's staff at the time of his appointment.

With but very few exceptions the critics were very kindly to my published work, and I apprehend that other writers who read their reviews of my books must have thought of me as one of the coming men.

(The early nineties was a prolific period in the matter of 'coming men.') I even indulged that thought myself for a time. But not, I think, for very long. Like every other writer who ever lived, I would have liked to reach a large and appreciative audience. But I had the most lofty scorn for the methods by which I supposed such an achievement might be accomplished.

For a long time I sincerely believed that it was not from any lack of substance, style, merit, or quality that my books failed to reach a really large public; but, rather, that they were without a certain vulgarity which would commend them to the mult.i.tude. If not precisely that they were too good, I doubtless thought that, whilst good in every literary sense, they happened to be couched in a vein only to be appreciated by the subtler minds of the minority. The critics certainly helped me to sustain this congenial theory; and it was not until long afterwards that I accepted (with more, perhaps, of sadness or sourness than philosophy) the conclusion that if my work never had appealed to a big audience, the simple reason was that it was not big enough to reach so far. It was perhaps, within the limits of literary judgment, to some extent praiseworthy. And it won praise. I should have been content.

I certainly was not content, and I dare say the life I led was too far removed from the normal, both socially and from a health standpoint, to permit of content for me, quite apart from any question of personal temperament or idiosyncrasy. I worked and I slept, and that was all.

That is probably not enough for the purchase of healthy content; at all events, where the work is sedentary and productive of strain upon the mind, nerves, and emotions.

As society is const.i.tuted in England to-day, a man of my sort may be almost as completely isolated, socially, in a place like Dorking as he would expect to be in the middle of the Sahara. The labouring sort of folk, the trades-people, and the landowners and county families, each form compact social microcosms. The latter cla.s.s, in normal circ.u.mstances, remains not so much indifferent to as unaware of the existence of such people as myself, as bachelors in country-town lodgings. The other two compact little worlds had nothing to offer me socially. And so, socially, I had no existence at all.

The same holds good, to a great extent, of my sort of person practically anywhere to-day. (The latter part of the nineteenth century produced a quite large number of people who belonged to no recognised cla.s.s or order in our social cosmos.) But it is most noticeable in the case of such a man living in a country town. In London, or Paris, or New York, there is no longer any question of a man being in or out of society, since there is no longer any compact division of the community which forms society. Rather, the community divides itself into hundreds of circles, most of which meet others at some point of their circ.u.mference.

My doctor in Dorking was a bachelor. I did not attend any church.

There literally was no person in that district with whom I held any social intercourse whatever. And then, by chance, and in a single day, I became acquainted with many of the socially superior sort of people in my neighbourhood.

Arncliffe's chief leader writer on the _Advocate_ staff was a man called Ernest Lane, who, after winning considerable distinction at Oxford, falsified cynical antic.i.p.ations by winning a good deal more distinction in the world outside the university. It was known that he had been invited to submit himself to the electors of a const.i.tuency in one of the Home counties, and his work while secretary to a prominent statesman had earned him a high reputation in political circles. His book on greater British legislation and administration added greatly to this reputation, and his friends were rather surprised when Lane showed that he intended to stick to the writer's life rather than enter parliament, or accept any political appointment. Without having become very intimate, Lane and myself had been distinctly upon good and friendly terms during my time in the _Advocate_ office, and he had visited me three or four times in my retreat in Dorking. Lane thought well of my work, and he was the only man I knew whose political conversation and views had interested me.

It was not without some pleasure, therefore, that I read a letter received from him in which he said he was coming to see me.

'It appears to be a case of Mohammed coming to the mountain,' this letter said; 'and, if you will put me up, I should like to spend Sat.u.r.day and Sunday nights at your place. I think you will receive an invitation to Sir George and Lady Barthrop's garden-party on Sat.u.r.day next, and if so I hope you will accept, and go there with me. The fact is, one of my sisters is about to marry Arnold Barthrop, the younger of the three sons, and the whole tribe of us are supposed to be there this week-end. I am not keen on these big house-parties, and would far sooner have the opportunity of seeing something of you if you would care to have me; but I have promised to attend the garden-party, and to bring you if I can. Some of the Barthrop's Dorking friends are rather interesting people, so it will be just as well for you, my dear hermit, to make their acquaintance.'

Of course, I wrote to Lane to the effect that he would be very welcome, which was perfectly true; but I was somewhat exercised in my mind regarding Lady Barthrop's garden-party, although, when her card of invitation reached me, I replied at once with a formal acceptance.

Sir George Barthrop's house, Deene Place, was quite one of the show places of the district, and the baronet and his lady were very prominent people indeed in that part of the county.

Every time my eye fell upon the invitation card, I was conscious of a sense of irritation and disturbance. What had I to do with garden-parties? The idea of my attending such a function was absurd. I should have nothing whatever in common with the people there, nor they with me. Either I should never again meet one of them, or their acquaintance would be an irritation and a nuisance to me, robbing me of my treasured sense of complete independence in that countryside.

Finally, I decided that I would have a headache when the time came, and get Lane to make my excuses-- 'Not that the hostess, or any one else there, would know or care anything about my absence or presence,'

I thought.

But my unsocial intention was airily swept aside by Ernest Lane. I did accompany him to Deene Place, and in due course was presented by him to Sir George and Lady Barthrop. No sooner had we left the host and hostess to make way for other guests than Lane touched my elbow.

'Here's the first of the five Graces,' he whispered, nodding towards a lady who was walking down the terrace in our direction. I remembered that my friend had five sisters, and a moment later I was being introduced to this particular member of the sisterhood, whose name, as I gathered, was Cynthia. As Lane moved away from us just then, to speak to some one else, I asked my companion if she had been going to any particular place when we met her. She smiled as we walked slowly down the terrace steps to the lawn.

'I am afraid my only object just then was the ungracious one of evading Sir George and Lady Barthrop,' she said. 'Theirs is such a dreadfully busy neighbourhood. I think being solemnly introduced to a stream of people is rather a terrible ordeal, don't you?'

'The experience would at least have the advantage of novelty for me,'

I told her. 'But, upon the whole, I fancy I should perhaps prefer a visit to the dentist.'

'Really!' she laughed. 'Now I didn't know men ever felt like that.

It's exactly how I feel about it. It really is worse than dentistry, you know, because you are not allowed gas.'

'At least, not laughing gas, but only gaseous laughter and small talk,' I suggested.

'Which makes you all hazy and muddled without the compensating boon of unconsciousness. But you are an author and a journalist, Mr. Freydon--my brother often speaks of you, you know--and so you must have had lots of experience of this sort of thing; enough to have made you as hardened as royalty, I should think. I always think of authors and journalists as living very much in the limelight.'

I explained that some might, but that I had spent several years in Dorking without, until that day, attending a single social function of any kind. This seemed to interest her greatly, once I had overcome her initial incredulity on the point. Then I had to answer questions about my way of living, and one or two, of a discreet and gently curious kind, about my methods of working, and the like. There was flattery of the most delightful kind in the one or two casual references she made to characters in books of mine. Miss Lane never said: 'I have read your books,' or, 'I have been interested by your books,' statements which always produce an awkward pause, and are not interesting in themselves. But she showed in a much more pleasing way that one's work had entered into her life, and been welcomed by her.

Quite apart from this, I do not think I could possibly have spent a quarter of an hour with Cynthia Lane without concluding that she was the most charming woman I had ever met. 'Charming woman,' I say.

Heavens! How extraordinarily inadequate these threadbare words do look, as I write them, recalling the image of Cynthia Lane as she paced with me across that smooth-shaven lawn--green velvet it seemed, deeply shaded here and there by n.o.ble copper beeches.

I suppose Cynthia was beautiful, even judged by technical standards; for her figure was lissom and very shapely, and the contour of her sweet face perfect--so far, at least, as I am any judge of such matters. Her eyes and her hair had a rare loveliness which I have not seen equalled. But it was the soul of her, the indefinable essence that was Cynthia Lane, which made her truly lovely. This personality of hers, at once tender and adroit, bright and grave, humorous and most sweetly gentle, most admirably kind, shone out upon one from her face, from her very movements and gestures even, giving to her outward person a soft radiance which I cannot attempt to describe. This nimbus of delicate sweetness, this irradiation of her person by her personality it was, which made Cynthia Lane lovely, as no other woman I have met has been.

I must have stolen fully half an hour of her time that day, to the annoyance it may be of many other people. And it was not until she was being in a sense almost forcibly drawn away from me by the claims of others that I learned, from the manner in which she was addressed by Lady Barthrop, that she, Cynthia Lane, of whom I had thought only as one of Lane's five sisters, as one among my own fellow guests, was indeed the guest of the occasion, and the betrothed of Lady Barthrop's younger son.

Other things happened, no doubt. I was presently introduced to young Barthrop, the bridegroom to be; and, mechanically, I endeavoured to comport myself fittingly as a guest. But, for me, the entertainment ended with my separation from Cynthia.

'Do please stop being a recluse, and call while I am here,' she had said as she was being drawn away from me into a sort of maelstrom of gaily coloured dresses, and laughing, compliment-paying men. And I blessed her for that.