VII.
THE AUNT AND THE EDITOR
Aunt Kate was the great comfort of Kitty’s existence. Always kindly, helpful, sympathetic, no girlish trouble was too slight, no girlish question too difficult for her tender heart—her delicate insight. How different from grim Aunt Eliza, with whom it was Kitty’s fate to live. Aunt Eliza was severe, methodical, energetic. In household matters she spared neither herself nor her niece. Kitty could darn and mend and bake and dust and sweep in a way which might have turned the parents of the bluest Girtonian green with envy. She had read a great deal, too—the really solid works that are such a nuisance to get through, and that leave a mark on one’s mind like the track of a steamroller. That was Aunt Eliza’s doing. Kitty ought to have been grateful—but she wasn’t. She didn’t want to be improved with solid books. She wanted to write books herself. She did write little tales when her aunt was out on business, which was often, and she dreamed of the day when she should write beautiful books, poems, romances. These Aunt Eliza classed roughly as “stuff and nonsense”; and one day, when she found Kitty reading the Girls’ Very Own Friend, she tore that harmless little weekly across and across and flung it into the fire. Then she faced Kitty with flushed face and angry eyes.
“If I ever catch you bringing such rubbish into the house again, I’ll—I’ll stop your music lessons.”
This was a horrible threat. Kitty went twice a week to the Guildhall School of Music. She had no musical talent whatever, but the journey to London and back was her one glimpse of the world’s tide that flowed outside the neat, gloomy, ordered house at Streatham. Therefore Kitty was careful that Aunt Eliza should not again “catch her bringing such rubbish into the house.” But she went on reading the paper all the same, just as she went on writing her little stories. And presently she got one of her little stories typewritten, and sent it to the Girls’ Very Own Friend. It was a silly little story— the heroine was svelte, I am sorry to say, and had red-gold hair and a soft, trainante voice—and the hero was a “frank-looking young Englishman, with a bronzed face and honest blue eyes.” The plot was that with which I firmly believe every career of fiction begins—the girl who throws over her lover because he has jilted her friend. Then she finds out that it was not her lover, but his brother or cousin. We have all written this story in our time, and Kitty wrote it much worse than many, but not nearly so badly as most of us.
And the Girls’ Very Own Friend accepted the story and printed it, and in its columns notified to “George Thompson” that the price, a whole guinea, was lying idle at the office till he should send his address. For, of course, Kitty had taken a man’s name for her pen-name, and almost equally, of course, had called herself “George.” George Sand began it, and it is a fashion which young authors seem quite unable to keep themselves from following.
Kitty longed to tell some one of her success—to ask admiration and advice; but Aunt Eliza was more severe and less approachable than usual that week. She was busy writing letters. She had always a sheaf of dull-looking letters to answer, so Kitty could only tell Mary in the kitchen under vows of secrecy, and Mary in the kitchen only said: “Well, to be sure, Miss, it’s beautiful! I suppose you wrote the story down out of some book?”
Therefore Kitty felt that it was vain to apply to her for intellectual sympathy.
“I will write to Aunt Kate,” said she, “she will understand. Oh, how I wish I could see her! She must be a dear, soft, pussy, cuddly sort of person. Why shouldn’t I go and see her? I will.”
And on this desperate resolve she acted.
Now I find it quite impossible any longer to conceal from the intelligent reader that the reason why Kitty had never seen Aunt Kate was that “Aunt Kate” was merely the screen which sheltered from a vulgar publicity the gifted person who wrote the “Answers to Correspondents” for the Girls’ Very Own Friend.
In fear and trembling, and a disguised hand-writing; with a feigned name and a quickly-beating heart, Kitty, months before, had written to this mysterious and gracious being. In the following week’s number had appeared these memorable lines:
“Sweet Nancy.—So pleased, dear, with your little letter. Write to me quite freely. I love to help my girls.”
So Kitty wrote quite freely, and as honestly as any girl of eighteen ever writes: her hopes and fears, her household troubles, her literary ambitions. And in the columns of the Girls’ Very Own Friend Aunt Kate replied with all the tender grace and delightful warmth that characterised her utterances.
The idea of calling on Aunt Kate occurred to Kitty as she was “putting on her things” to go to the Guildhall. She instantly threw the plain “everyday” hat from her, and pulled her best hat from its tissue-paper nest in the black bandbox. She put on her best blouse—the cream-coloured one with the browny lace on it, and her best brown silk skirt. She recklessly added her best brown shoes and gloves, and the lace pussy-boa. (I don’t know what the milliner’s name for the thing is. It goes round the neck, and hangs its soft and fluffy ends down nearly to one’s knees.) Then she looked at herself in the glass, gave a few last touches to her hair and veil, and nodded to herself.
“You’ll do, my dear,” said Kitty.
Aunt Eliza was providentially absent at Bath nursing a sick friend, and the black-bugled duenna, hastily imported from Tunbridge Wells, could not be expected to know which was Kitty’s best frock, and which the gloves that ought only to have been worn at church.
When Kitty’s music lesson was over, she stood for a moment on the steps of the Guildhall School, looking down towards the river. Then she shrugged her pretty shoulders.
“I don’t care. I’m going to,” she said, and turned resolutely towards Tudor Street. Kitty had been to a high school: therefore she was not obviously shy. She asked her way frankly and easily of carman, or clerk, or errand-boy; and though, at the door of the dingy office in a little court off Fleet Street, her heart beat thickly as she read the blue-enamelled words, Girls’ Very Own Friend, her manner as she walked into the office betrayed no nervousness, and, indeed, struck the grinning idle office boy as that of “a bloomin’ duchess.”
“I want to see” she began; and then suddenly the awkwardness of her position struck her. She did not know Aunt Kate’s surname. Abruptly to ask this grinning lout for “Aunt Kate” seemed absolutely indecorous. “I want to see the editor,” she ended.
She waited in the grimy office while the boy disappeared through an inner door, marked in dingy white letters with the magic words, “Editor—Private.” A low buzz of voices came to her through the door. She looked at the pigeon-holes where heaps of back numbers of the Girls’ Very Own lay in a dusty retirement. She looked at the insurance company’s tasteless almanack that hung all awry on the wall, and still the buzz went on. Then suddenly some one laughed inside, and the laugh did not please Kitty. The next moment the boy returned, grinning more repulsively than ever, and said: “Walk this way.”
She walked that way, past the boy; the door fell to behind her, and she found herself in a cloud of tobacco smoke, compressed into a small room—a very dusty, untidy room—in which stood three young men. Their faces were grave and serious, but Kate could not forget that one of them had laughed, and laughed like that. Her chin went up about a quarter of an inch further.
“I am sorry to have disturbed you,” she said severely. “I wanted to see—to see the lady who signs herself Aunt Kate.”
There was a moment of silence which seemed almost breathless. Two of the young men exchanged a glance, but though Kitty perceived it to be significant, she could not interpret its meaning. Then one of the three turned to gaze out of the window at the blackened glass roof of the printing office below. Kitty felt certain he was concealing a smile; and the second hurriedly arranged a bundle of papers beside him.
The third young man spoke, and Kitty liked the gentle drawl, the peculiar enunciation. The poor girl, in her Streatham seclusion, had never before heard the “Oxford voice.”
“I am very sorry,” he said, “but ‘Aunt Kate’ is not here to-day. Perhaps—is there anything I could do?”
“No, thank you,” said Kitty, wishing herself miles away; the tobacco smoke choked her, the backs of the two other men seemed an outrage. She turned away with a haughty bow, and went down the grimy stairs full of fury. She could have slapped herself. How could she have been such a fool as to come there? There were feet coming down the stair behind her—she quickened her pace. The feet came more quickly. She stopped on the landing and turned with an odd feeling of being at bay. It was the fair-haired young man with the Oxford voice.
“I am so very sorry,” he said gently, “but I did not know. I did not expect to see—I mean, I did not know who you were. And we had all been smoking—I am so sorry,” he said again, rather lamely.
“It doesn’t matter,” said Kitty, more shyly than she had ever spoken in her life. She liked his eyes and his voice as much as she loathed the expressive backs of his two companions.
“If you could come again: perhaps Aunt Kate will be here on Thursday. I know she will be sorry to miss you,” the young man went on.
“I think I won’t call again, thank you,” said Kitty. “I—I’ll write, thank you; it is all right. I oughtn’t to have come. Good-bye.”
There was nothing for it but to stand back and let her pass. The editor went back slowly to his room. His friends had relighted their pipes.
“Appeased the outraged goddess?” asked one of them.
“Good old Aunt Kate!” said the other.
“Shut up, Sellars!” said the editor, frowning.
“Now, which of your correspondents is it?” pondered Sellars, ruffling the bundle of papers in his hand. “Is it ‘Wild Woodbine,’ who wants to know what will make her hands white? Chilcott, did you see her hands? Oh no, of course—bien chaussée, bien gantée. All brown, too. Is it ‘Sylph’?—no; she wants a pattern for a Zouave. What is a Zouave, if you please, Mr Editor?”
“Dry up!” said the editor, but Sellars was busy with the papers.
“Eureka! I know her. She’s ‘Nut-brown Maid’—here’s the letter—wants to know if she may talk to ‘a young gentleman she has not been properly introduced to’—spells it ‘interoduced,’ too”
The editor snatched the papers out of the other’s hands.
“Now clear out,” said he; “I’m busy.”
“Am I dreaming?” said Sellars pensively; “ or is this the editor who invited us to collaborate with him in his ‘Answers to Correspondents’?”
“I am the editor who will kick you down the entire five flights if he is driven to it. You won’t drive him, will you?”
The two laughed, but they took up their hats and went; Sellars put his head round the door for a last word.
“What price love at first sight?” said he, and the office ruler dented the door as he disappeared round it. The editor, left alone, sat down in his chair and looked helplessly round him.
“Well!” he said musingly, “well, well, well, well!” Then after a long silence he took up his pen and began the “Answers to Correspondents.”
“Dieu-donnée.—Your hair is a very nice colour. I should not advise Aureoline.
“Shy Fairy.—By all means consult your mother. Heliotrope would suit your complexion, if it is, as you say, of a brilliant fairness.
“Contadina.—No, I should not advise scarlet velvet with the pale blue. Try myrtle green.”
Presently he threw down the pen. “I suppose I shall never see her again,” he said, and he actually sighed.
But he did see her again. For on her way home poor Kitty’s imagination suddenly spread its wings and alighted accurately on the truth; she formed a sufficiently vivid picture of what had happened in the office after she left. She knew that those other young men—“the pigs,” she called them to herself—had speculated as to whether she was “Little One,” who wanted to make her hair curl, and to know whether short waists would be worn; or “Moss Rose,” who was anxious about her complexion, and the proper way to treat a jibbing sweetheart. So that very night she wrote a note to Aunt Kate, but she did not sign it “Sweet Nancy” in the old manner, and she did not disguise her hand. She signed it George Thompson, in inverted commas, and she said that she would call on Thursday.
And on Thursday she called. And was shown into the editor’s room at once.
The editor rose to greet her.
“Aunt Kate is not here,” said he hurriedly; “but if you can spare a few moments I should like to talk to you about business; I did not know the other day that you were the author of that charming story ‘Evelyn’s Error.’”
The room was clear of tobacco smoke—the editor was alone—some red roses lay on the table. Kitty caught herself wondering for whom he had bought them. The chair he offered her was carefully dusted. She took it—and he began to talk about her story; criticising, praising, blaming, and that so skilfully that criticism seemed a subtle flattery, and the very blame conveyed a compliment. Then he asked for more stories. And a new heaven and a new earth seemed to unroll before the girl’s eyes. If she could only write—and succeed—and
“Will you come again?” he said at last. “Aunt Kate”
“Oh,” she said, with eyes shining softly, “it doesn’t matter about Aunt Kate now! I shall be so busy trying to write stories.”
“The fact is” said the editor slowly, racking his brains for a reason that should bring her to the office again—“the fact is—I am Aunt Kate.”
Kitty sprang to her feet. Her face flamed scarlet. She stood silent a moment. Then: “You?” she cried. “Oh, it’s not fair—it’s mean—it’s shameful! Oh—how could you! And girls write to you—and they think it’s a woman—and they tell you about their troubles. It’s horrible! It’s underhand—it’s abominable! I hate you for it. Every one ought to know. I shall write to the papers.”
“Please, please,” said the editor hurriedly and humbly—“it’s not my fault. It is a lady who does it generally, but she had to go away—and I couldn’t get any one else to do it. And I didn’t see—till after you’d been the other day—that it wasn’t fair. And I was going to ask if you would do it—the correspondence, I mean—just for this week. I wish you would!”
“Could I?” she said doubtfully.
“Of course you could! And if you’d bring the copy on Monday—about two columns, you know—we could go through it together and”
“Well, I’ll try,” said Kitty abruptly, reaching out for the sheaf of letters which he was gathering together.
And now who was happier than Kitty, seated behind her locked bedroom door advising “Dieu-donnée” and “Shy Fairy” and “Contadina” out of the unfathomable depths of her girlish inexperience. Her advice looked wonderfully practical, though, in print, she thought, as with a thrill of pride and joy she corrected the first proofs. And she wrote stories, too, and they, too, were printed. It was indeed a bright and beautiful world. Aunt Eliza stayed away for five glorious weeks. Kitty, with an enthralling sense of reckless wickedness, gave up her useless music lessons, and in going three times a week to the office experienced a glowing consciousness of the joy and dignity of honest toil.
The editor, by the way, during these five weeks fell in love with Kitty, exactly as he had known he would do when first he saw her grey eyes. Kitty had never been so happy in all her life. The child honestly believed hers to be the happiness that comes from congenial work. And her editor was so clever and so kind! No one ever smoked in the office now, and there were always roses. And Kitty took them home with her, so that now there was no need to wonder for whom he had bought them.
Then came the inevitable hour. He met her one day with a clouded face and a letter in his hand.
“It’s all over,” he said; “the real original old Aunt Kate is coming back. She’s the dearest old thing, so kind and jolly—but—but—but—whatever shall we do?”
“I can still write stories, I suppose,” said Kitty, but she realised with a gasp that congenial toil would not be quite, quite the same without congenial companionship.
“Yes,” said he, picking up the bunch of red roses, “but—here are your flowers—don’t you know yet that I can’t possibly do without you? In a few months I’m to have the editorship of a new weekly, a much better berth than this. If only you would”
“Write the correspondence?” said Kitty, brightening; “of course I will. I don’t know what I should do without”
“I wish,” he interrupted, “that I could think it was me you couldn’t do without.” Her pretty eyes met his over the red roses, and he caught her hands with the flowers in them. “Is it? Oh, say you can’t do without me either. Say it, say it!”
“I—I—don’t want to do without you,” said Kitty at last. He was holding her hands fast, and she was trying, not very earnestly, perhaps, to pull them away. The pair made a pretty picture.
“Oh, Kitty, Kitty, Kitty!” he said softly, and then the door opened, and suddenly, without the least warning, a middle-aged lady became a spectator of the little tableau. The newcomer wore a mantle with beads on it, a black bonnet wherein nodded a violet flower—and beads and flower and bonnet were absolutely familiar to each of the astonished ones now standing consciously with the breadth of the office between them. For in that middle-aged lady the editor recognised Aunt Kate, the pleasant, sensible, companionable woman who for years had written those sympathetic “Answers to Correspondents” in the Girls’ Very Own Friend. And at the same moment Kitty recognised, beyond all possibility of doubt, Aunt Eliza—her own grim, harsh, uncongenial Aunt Eliza.
Kitty cowered—in her frightened soul she cowered. But her little figure drew itself up, and the point of her chin rose a quarter of an inch.
“Aunt Eliza,” she said firmly, “I know you will”
“Your Aunt Eliza, Kitty?” cried the editor.
“‘Kitty’?” said the aunt.
And now the situation hung all too nicely balanced on the extreme edge of the absolutely impossible. Would this middle-aged lady—an aunt beyond doubt—an aunt who so long had played a double rôle, assume, now that one rôle must be chosen, the part of Aunt Eliza the Terrible or of Aunt Kate the Kind? The aunt was dumb. Kitty was dumb. But the editor had his wits about him, and Kate, though shaken, was not absolutely paralysed.
“It’s almost too good to be true,” he said, “that my Aunt Kate is really your Aunt Eliza. Aunt Kate, Kitty and I have just decided that we can’t do without each other. I am so glad that you are the first to wish us joy.”
At his words all the “Kate” in the aunt rose triumphant, trampling down the “Eliza.”
“My dear boy,” she said—and she said it in a voice which Kitty had never heard before—the sound of that voice drew Kitty like a magnet. She did the only possible thing—she put her arms timidly round her aunt’s neck and whispered: “Oh, don’t be Aunt Eliza any more, be Aunt Kate!”
It was Aunt Kate’s arms undoubtedly that went round the girl. Certainly not Aunt Eliza’s.
“I will take a walk down Fleet Street,” said the editor discreetly.
Then there were explanations in the office.
“But why,” said Kitty, when all the questions had been asked and answered, “why were you Aunt Eliza to me, and Aunt Kate to him?”
“My dear, one must spoil somebody, and I was determined not to spoil you; I wanted to save you. All my life was ruined because I was a spoiled child—and because I tried to write. I had such dreams, such ambitions—just like yours, you silly child! But then I was never clever—perhaps you may be—and it all ended in my losing my lover. He married a nice, quiet, domestic girl, and I never made name or fame at all—I never got anything taken but fashion articles—and ‘Answers to Correspondents.’ Now, that’s the whole tale. Don’t mention it again.”
“But you did love me, even when”
“Of course I did,” said Aunt Kate in the testy tones of Aunt Eliza; “or why should I have bothered at all about whether you were going to be happy or not? Now, Kitty, you’re not to expect me to gush. I’ve forgotten how to be sentimental except on paper.”
“I don’t want to be sentimental,” said Kitty, a little injured, “neither does”
Here the editor came in.
“You don’t want to be sentimental either,” Kitty went on; “do you—Mr Editor?”
The editor looked a little doubtful.
“I want to be happy, at any rate,” said he, “and I mean to be.”
“And he can’t be happy unless you smile on him. Smile on him, Auntie!” cried a new, radiant Kitty, to whom aunts no longer presented any terrors. “Say ‘Bless you, my children!’ Auntie—do!”
“Get along with your nonsense!” said Aunt Eliza. Or was it Aunt Kate?