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IT all came about very naturally—the correspondence with John, I mean. The two Miss Lambs agreed to turn all the manuscript over to Mr. Brunt, and in due course of time a package arrived, the size and weight of which would certainly have appalled a stouter heart than mine. Brunt, however, received it without flinching, and set to work, reading the contents, with very much the same dogged vim he used to put into his semi-annual "cram" at college. Only I doubt whether he ever found his Virgil or his Homer as interesting reading as these latest productions of the modern Muse. His good opinion of the poems was, on the whole, confirmed, though he was rather taken aback by the character of some of them. An occasional note of bitterness was struck, which accorded ill with the easy tone of the author's letters—the author's letters, I say, for, with the best intentions, we could not fail to penetrate the thin disguise which Miss Lamb had chosen to throw about her identity. Happily, the misanthropic ones were of inferior merit, so that Brunt did not think it best to include them in the collection. But, as he said, their lack of artistic merit simply went to prove that they were a direct expression of a mood, which, though not poetical, was all the more likely to be real. If the public knew what he had spared them, they would be eternally grateful. As it is, I think all will admit that those pieces which he did select for publication, were well worth while. Take, for instance, the sonnet called "Knighted." Any one who is in the way of reading poetry must be familiar with it. It is the only sonnet I ever went in for, but I think it regularly great. John says it's not one of the best of the collection. He talks learnedly about the last two lines being a couplet, and says it gives the poem the flavor of an epigram. Flavor of fiddlesticks! I say it's mighty good poetry, and most any fellow would like to have something similar written in honor of him!
But I must not go into the poems too much, for they are open to every one now. It is needless to say that John found a publisher for them. He usually does what he sets out to do, and, besides, the things only needed a friendly push in the beginning. The point of interest, as far as we are concerned, is the correspondence brought about by them.
Once launched in a straightforward correspondence in his own name, Brunt came out strong, and he conducted it with such skill as to draw the young lady out on more subjects than the main one. His own letters would, I am sure, have been a mine of gold to any one, and Miss Lamb clearly found them so. As he proceeded to toss one nugget after another before her, the reserve with which she had entered upon the correspondence—the correspondence with John Brunt, you understand—gradually wore off, and she began sending him letters which were quite up to those she received. I say the reserve wore off, by which I mean that she began writing more fully upon this or that topic of general interest which John happened to broach in his letters. Yet when her correspondent happened upon any subject which she did not choose to follow up she could be as evasive as the Sphinx. Her letters to John were singularly impersonal. It was an interesting study to note the difference between those and the ones addressed to the fictitious Miss Lamb, to whom she occasionally wrote to report progress. The letters to John were longer and more varied, yet after reading a short note to "Miss Lamb" we were both aware of having got a glimpse of the writer's personality, such as volumes of her letters to John would not have yielded.
What lent an added zest to our interest in Miss Lamb's letters was the skilful manceuvres by which the writer sought to conceal her identity with the author of the poems—or again, the cool and impersonal tone in which she wrote of them. In reference to a set of Love Sonnets which John thinks particularly good, the "Love Sonnets of Constance," she wrote:
"My friend was averse to offering these as well as some of the other pieces for publication lest they should be thought to be autobiographical. But I made haste to remind her that, as she would never be identified as the author, it could make no possible difference what people might think."
"If that isn't a pretty bit of defiance," John said. "The worst of it is, it convinces me that the poems in question are autobiographical."
"Why 'the worst of it,' Jack? What do you care about the state of mind of a woman you never set eyes upon?"
"Oh, I don't care, of course, only—blighted beings are not in my line."
But this particular "blighted being" proved to be very much in his line. He was just the man to feel the charm of a good letter, and, furthermore, he could never resist the fascination of an unproved point. We assumed that she was the author of the poems, but we were not in possession of certainty on the subject. Her age was also a much mooted question until we were lucky enough to get positive evidence on that point. The experienced tone of many of the poems had led us to think that she must be an older woman than we had at first supposed, but a chance conversation with Jim Arnold, the doctor, cleared that up for us.
It happened that Arnold dropped in at my rooms one evening and found Spoils lying on the table. I had been looking it through, as I often do to this day. The beauty of Spoils is that it is such good reading! Arnold's eye happened to fall upon it, and he said he had often wondered whether its author might not be the Lilian Lamb he had known as a child, years ago when he was visiting in Connecticut.
"I was staying with one of my classmates," he said, "whose father's country place adjoined that of Mr. Louis Ellerton, a man who owned good horses. This Lilian Lamb was a niece of the Ellertons, a small child in a long-sleeved gingham apron, who was forever riding horseback on the branches of an old apple tree behind the house. One day her aged steed gave way, and down she tumbled with a broken arm. The village doctor was non est cumatibus, and I was called in to set the arm. I was a green hand and hadn't got my surgical nerves in training. I thought the child would scream, and I was scared blue. It was a hateful fracture and it must have hurt atrociously. But the little thing bore it like a soldier, and when I got through she said, 'Thank you, Doctor,' with the sweetest little quaver of a smile. You don't often see a girl of seven or eight with the pluck of a soldier and the manners of alady. A thing like that shows brains as well as nerves, and I would give a good deal to know whether she wrote Spoils."
I did not volunteer any information on the subject. I was occupied with a simple sum in addition, by means of which I discovered that Miss Lamb could not then be more than twenty-five years of age.
John was greatly taken with the tale of the broken arm, which I made haste to pass over to him. But the fact of the young lady's youth did not shake his conviction that she wrote the poems.
"A woman like that," he said, "might have found time for plenty of experiences before she was twenty-five years old. She would probably make no more outcry over a broken heart than over a broken arm, and I can imagine her being the best of company, when she was in the very thick of it. But if she happened to have a taste for writing she might take a fancy to put on paper what wild horses would not have dragged from her lips; and once having written such poetry as hers, she would have been more or less than human if she could have kept it to herself."
"Tcan fancy just what kind of a girl she is," John told me one day. "She is probably rather plain, but with a good deal of brilliancy of expression and a touch of cynicism in her face and in her talk. A flattering manner, I should say, but with the heart a little gone out of it. Just a little. Everybody wouldn't notice it."
"Only it couldn't escape a student of human nature like you, Jack."
"Nor a master of satire like you, Francis. No, we should not be deceived."
And John pursued the correspondence with unabated vigor.
It is really a great pity that I haven't those letters, for, without having read them, it would be difficult to conceive of two sane men taking the step we perpetrated later on. As it was, the letters led up to it very naturally.
As the time for the appearance of the poems approached, Brunt began to urge upon Miss Lamb the necessity for furnishing some sort of nom-de-plume to distinguish the book from any other collection labelled simply Verses. Here is her answer:
My Dear Mr. Brunt:
You are perfectly right in requiring a distinguishing name for either the book or the author, and I have at last persuaded my friend to choose one for herself. She proposes to be called 'Leslie Smith.' The Leslie she adopts out of compliment to me. The Smith for the sake of obscurity. It seems to me rather a good combination, and, as for my own share in it, I am so puffed up by having my name for a second time associated with literature, that I am almost ready to take it as an omen of distinction. I shall not even be surprised to find myself perpetrating a literary feat one of these days. When I do, I shall insist upon Miss Lamb's rendering up her own name for my use. Do you think she would? It would be no more than a fair exchange. I only hope it is a name I should fancy. Marion de Montmorency or something like that, high-sounding and impressive. For I propose to write nothing less than an immortal epic."
"That's a good one," I shouted, as John read me this part of the letter. "Confess, Jack, that is the first time a girl ever asked you, outright, to bestow your name upon her."
John laughed too, but with a slightly preoccupied air.
"I rather wonder that she should have ventured on the Leslie," he said, "but it makes a good name. There is contrast enough in it to make it hold together."
The poems of Leslie Smith were to appear early in January. It was not practicable to get them out for the holidays, and John said that was of no consequence. They were poems which would require time before they could gain general recognition. If there should be a demand for them by the next holiday season it would be as much as we could hope for.
The business preliminaries being pretty well settled early in October, there seemed to be no special reason for keeping up so lively a correspondence as before. John evidently regretted this, and he cudgelled his brains for pretexts for writing. I do not mean that the letters ceased coming altogether, but there were pauses and John fretted. I was not surprised, about this time, to find him dwelling a good deal upon the winter climate in Colorado. He managed to beat up considerable information on the subject, and it all tended to prove that the man who had not seen Pike's Peak in mid-winter was a fit subject for commiseration. That, at least, was the drift of his communications to me. Preparing my mind, as I afterward learned, for his grand coup.