The Better Sort (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1903)/The Papers/Chapter 7
VII
It was demonic of Bight, who immediately answered that he would tell him with pleasure who everyone was, and she felt this the more when her friend, making light of the rest of the entertainment they had quitted, advised their sacrificing it and proceeding to the other scene. He was really too eager for his victim—she wondered what he wanted to do with him. He could only play him at the most a practical joke—invent appetising identities, once they were at table, for the dull consumers around. No one, at the place they most frequented, had an identity in the least appetising, no one was anyone or anything. It was apparently of the essence of existence on such terms—the terms, at any rate, to which she was reduced—that people comprised in it couldn't even minister to each other's curiosity, let alone to envy or awe. She would have wished therefore, for their pursuer, to intervene a little, to warn him against beguilement; but they had moved together along the Strand and then out of it, up a near cross street, without her opening her mouth. Bight, as she felt, was acting to prevent this; his easy talk redoubled, and he led his lamb to the shambles. The talk had jumped to poor Beadel—her friend had startled her by causing it, almost with violence, at a given moment, to take that direction, and he thus quite sufficiently stayed her speech. The people she lived with mightn't make you curious, but there was of course always a sharp exception for him. She kept still, in fine, with the wonder of what he wanted; though indeed she might, in the presence of their guest's response, have felt he was already getting it. He was getting, that is—and she was, into the bargain—the fullest illustration of the ravage of a passion; so sublimely Marshal rose to the proposition, infernally thrown off, that, in ever queer box or tight place Beadel might have found himself, it was something, after all, to have so powerfully interested the public. The insidious artless way in which Bight made his point!—"I don't know that I've ever known the public (and I watch it, as in my trade we have to, day and night) so consummately interested." They had that phenomenon—the present consummate interest—well before them while they sat at their homely meal, served with accessories so different from those of the sweet Chippendale (another chord on which the young man played with just the right effect!) and it would have been hard to say if the guest were, for the first moments, more under the spell of the marvellous "hold" on the town achieved by the great absentee, or of that of the delicious coarse table cloth, the extraordinary form of the saltcellars, and the fact that he had within range of sight, at the other end of the room, in the person of the little quiet man with blue spectacles and an obvious wig, the greatest authority in London about the inner life of the criminal classes. Beadel, none the less, came up again and stayed up—would clearly so have been kept up, had there been need, by their host, that the girl couldn't at last fail to see how much it was for herself that his intention worked. What was it, all the same—since it couldn't be anything so simple as to expose their hapless visitor? What had she to learn about him?—especially at the hour of seeing what there was still to learn about Bight. She ended by deciding—for his appearance bore her out—that his explosion was but the form taken by an inward fever. The fever, on this theory, was the result of the final pang of responsibility. The mystery of Beadel had grown too dark to be borne—which they would presently feel; and he was mean while in the phase of bluffing it off, precisely because it was to overwhelm him.
"And do you mean you too would pay with your life?" He put the question, agreeably, across the table to his guest; agreeably of course in spite of his eye's dry glitter.
His guest's expression, at this, fairly became beautiful. "Well, it's an awfully nice point. Certainly one would like to feel the great murmur surrounding one's name, to be there, more or less, so as not to lose the sense of it, and as I really think, you know, the pleasure; the great city, the great empire, the world itself for the moment, hanging literally on one's personality and giving a start, in its suspense, whenever one is mentioned. Big sensation, you know, that," Mr. Marshal pleadingly smiled, "and of course if one were dead one wouldn't enjoy it. One would have to come to life for that."
"Naturally," Bight rejoined—"only that's what the dead don't do. You can't eat your cake and have it. The question is," he goodnaturedly explained, "whether you'd be willing, for the certitude of the great murmur you speak of, to part with your life under circumstances of extraordinary mystery."
His guest earnestly fixed it. "Whether I would be willing?"
"Mr. Marshall wonders," Maud said to Bight, "if you are, as a person interested in his reputation, definitely proposing to him some such possibility."
He looked at her, on this, with mild, round eyes, and she felt, wonderfully, that he didn't quite see her as joking. He smiled—he always smiled, but his anxiety showed, and he turned it again to their companion. "You mean—a—the knowing how it might be going to be felt?"
"Well, yes—call it that. The consciousness of what one's unexplained extinction—given, to start with, one's high position—would mean, wouldn't be able to help meaning, for millions and millions of people. The point is—and I admit it's, as you call it, a nice one— if you can think of the impression so made as worth the purchase. Naturally, naturally, there's but the impression you make. You don't receive any. You can't. You've only your confidence—so far as that's an impression. Oh, it is indeed a nice point; and I only put it to you," Bight wound up, "because, you know, you do like to be recognised."
Mr. Marshal was bewildered, but he was not so bewildered as not to be able, a trifle coyly, but still quite bravely, to confess to that. Maud, with her eyes on her friend, found herself thinking of him as of some plump, innocent animal, more or less of the pink-eyed rabbit or sleek guinea-pig order, involved in the slow spell of a serpent of shining scales. Bight's scales, truly, had never so shone as this evening, and he used to admiration—which was just a part of the lustre—the right shade of gravity. He was neither so light as to fail of the air of an attractive offer, nor yet so earnest as to betray a jibe. He might conceivably have been, as an undertaker of improvements in defective notorieties, placing before his guest a practical scheme. It was really quite as if he were ready to guarantee the "murmur" if Mr. Marshal was ready to pay the price. And the price wouldn't of course be only Mr. Marshal's existence. All this, at least, if Mr. Marshal felt moved to take it so. The prodigious thing, next, was that Mr. Marshal was so moved—though, clearly, as was to be expected, with important qualifications. "Do you really mean," he asked, "that one would excite this delightful interest?"
"You allude to the charged state of the air on the subject of Beadel?" Bight considered, looking volumes. "It would depend a good deal upon who one is."
He turned, Mr. Marshal, again to Maud Blandy, and his eyes seemed to suggest to her that she should put his question for him. They forgave her, she judged, for having so oddly forsaken him, but they appealed to her now not to leave him to struggle alone. Her own difficulty was, however, meanwhile, that she feared to serve him as he suggested without too much, by way of return, turning his case to the comic; whereby she only looked at him hard and let him revert to their friend. "Oh," he said, with a rich wistfulness from which the comic was not absent, "of course everyone can't pretend to be Beadel."
"Perfectly. But we're speaking, after all, of those who do count."
There was quite a hush, for the minute, while the poor man faltered. "Should you say that I—in any appreciable way—count?"
Howard Bight distilled honey. "Isn't it a little a question of how much we should find you did, or, for that matter, might, as it were, be made to, in the event of a real catastrophe?"
Mr. Marshal turned pale, yet he met it too with sweetness. "I like the way"—and he had a glance for Maud "you talk of catastrophes!"
His host did the comment justice. "Oh, it's only because, you see, we're so peculiarly in the presence of one. Beadel shows so tremendously what a catastrophe does for the right person. His absence, you may say, doubles, quintuples, his presence."
"I see, I see!" Mr. Marshal was all there. "It's awfully interesting to be so present. And yet it's rather dreadful to be so absent." It had set him fairly musing; for couldn't the opposites be reconciled? "If he is," he threw out, "absent———!"
"Why, he's absent, of course," said Bight, "if he's dead."
"And really dead is what you believe him to be?" He breathed it with a strange break, as from a mind too full. It was on the one hand a grim vision for his own case, but was on the other a kind of clearance of the field. With Beadel out of the way his own case could live, and he was obviously thinking what it might be to be as dead as that and yet as much alive. What his demand first did, at any rate, was to make Howard Bight look straight at Maud. Her own look met him, but she asked nothing now. She felt him somehow fathomless, and his practice with their infatuated guest created a new suspense. He might indeed have been looking at her to learn how to reply, but even were this the case she had still nothing to answer. So in a moment he had spoken without her. "I've quite given him up."
It sank into Marshal, after which it produced something. "He ought then to come back. I mean," he explained, "to see for himself—to have the impression."
"Of the noise he has made? Yes"—Bight weighed it—"that would be the ideal."
"And it would, if one must call it 'noise,'" Marshal limpidly pursued, "make—a—more."
"Oh, but if you can't!"
"Can't, you mean, through having already made so much, add to the quantity?"
"Can't"—Bight was a wee bit sharp—"come back, confound it, at all. Can't return from the dead!"
Poor Marshal had to take it. "No—not if you are dead."
"Well, that's what we're talking about."
Maud, at this, for pity, held out a perch. "Mr. Marshal, I think, is talking a little on the basis of the possibility of your not being!" He threw her an instant glance of gratitude, and it gave her a push. "So long as you're not quite too utterly, you can come back."
"Oh," said Bight, "in time for the fuss?"
"Before"—Marshal met it—"the interest has subsided. It naturally then wouldn't—would it?—subside!"
"No," Bight granted; "not if it hadn't, through wearing out—I mean your being lost too long—already died out."
"Oh, of course," his guest agreed, "you mustn't be lost too long." A vista had plainly opened to him, and the subject led him on. He had, before its extent, another pause. "About how long, do you think———?"
Well, Bight had to think. "I should say Beadel had rather overdone it."
The poor gentleman stared. "But if he can't help himself———?"
Bight gave a laugh. "Yes; but in case he could."
Maud again intervened, and, as her question was for their host, Marshal was all attention. "Do you consider Beadel has overdone it?"
Well, once more, it took consideration. The issue of Bight's, however, was not of the clearest. "I don't think we can tell unless he were to. I don't think that, without seeing it, and judging by the special case, one can quite know how it would be taken. He might, on the one side, have spoiled, so to speak, his market; and he might, on the other, have scored as never before."
"It might be," Maud threw in, "just the making of him."
"Surely"—Marshal glowed—"there's just that chance."
"What a pity then," Bight laughed, "that there isn't some one to take it! For the light it would throw, I mean, on the laws—so mysterious, so curious, so interesting—that govern the great currents of public attention. They're not wholly whimsical—wayward and wild; they have their strange logic, their obscure reason—if one could only get at it! The man who does, you see—and who can keep his discovery to himself!—will make his everlasting fortune, as well, no doubt, as that of a few others. It's our branch, our preoccupation, in fact, Miss Blandy's and mine—this pursuit of the incalculable, this study, to that end, of the great forces of publicity. Only, of course, it must be remembered," Bight went on, "that in the case we're speaking of—the man disappearing as Beadel has now disappeared, and supplanting for the time every other topic—must have someone on the spot for him, to keep the pot boiling, someone acting, with real intelligence, in his interest. I mean if he's to get the good of it when he does turn up. It would never do, you see, that that should be flat!"
"Oh no, not flat, never!" Marshal quailed at the thought. Held as in a vise by his host's high lucidity, he exhaled his interest at every pore. "It wouldn't be flat for Beadel, would it?—I mean if he were to come."
"Not much! It wouldn't be flat for Beadel—I think I can undertake." And Bight undertook so well that he threw himself back in his chair with his thumbs in the armholes of his waistcoat and his head very much up. "The only thing is that for poor Beadel it's a luxury, so to speak, wasted—and so dreadfully, upon my word, that one quite regrets there's no one to step in."
"To step in?" His visitor hung upon his lips.
"To do the thing better, so to speak—to do it right: to—having raised the whirlwind—really ride the storm. To seize the psychological hour."
Marshal met it, yet he wondered. "You speak of the reappearance? I see. But the man of the reappearance would have, wouldn't he?—or perhaps I don't follow?—to be the same as the man of the disappearance. It wouldn't do as well—would it?—for somebody else to turn up?"
Bight considered him with attention—as if there were fine possibilities. "No; unless such a person should turn up, say—well, with news of him."
"But what news?"
"With lights—the more lurid the better—on the darkness. With the facts, don't you see, of the disappearance."
Marshal, on his side, threw himself back. "But he'd have to know them!"
"Oh," said Bight, with prompt portentousness, "that could be managed."
It was too much, by this time, for his victim, who simply turned on Maud a dilated eye and a flushed cheek. "Mr. Marshal," it made her say—"Mr. Marshal would like to turn up."
Her hand was on the table, and the effect of her words, combined with this, was to cause him, before responsive speech could come, to cover it respectfully but expressively with his own. "Do you mean," he panted to Bight, "that you have, amid the general collapse of speculation, facts to give?"
"I've always facts to give."
It begot in the poor man a large hot smile. "But—how shall I say?—authentic, or as I believe you clever people say, 'inspired' ones?"
"If I should undertake such a case as we're supposing, I would of course by that circumstance undertake that my facts should be—well, worthy of it. I would take," Bight on his own part modestly smiled, "pains with them."
It finished the business. "Would you take pains for me?"
Bight looked at him now hard. "Would you like to appear?"
"Oh, 'appear'!" Marshal weakly murmured.
"Is it, Mr. Marshal, a real proposal? I mean are you prepared———?"
Wonderment sat in his eyes—an anguish of doubt and desire. "But wouldn't you prepare me———?"
"Would you prepare me—that's the point," Bight laughed—"to prepare you?"
There was a minute's mutual gaze, but Marshal took it in. "I don't know what you're making me say; I 1 don't know what you're making me feel. When one is with people so up in these things———" and he turned to his companions, alternately, a look as of conscious doom lighted with suspicion, a look that was like a cry for mercy—"one feels a little as if one ought to be saved from one's self. For I dare say one's foolish enough with one's poor little wish———"
"The little wish, my dear sir"—Bight took him up—"to stand out in the world! Your wish is the wish of all high spirits."
"It's dear of you to say it." Mr. Marshal was all response. "I shouldn't want, even if it were weak or vain, to have lived wholly unknown. And if what you ask is whether I understand you to speak, as it were, professionally———"
"You do understand me?" Bight pushed back his chair.
"Oh, but so well!—when I've already seen what you can do. I need scarcely say, that having seen it, I sha'n't bargain."
"Ah, then, I shall," Bight smiled. "I mean with the Papers. It must be half profits."
"'Profits'?" His guest was vague.
"Our friend," Maud explained to Bight, "simply wants the position."
Bight threw her a look. "Ah, he must take what I give him."
"But what you give me," their friend handsomely contended, "is the position."
"Yes; but the terms that I shall get! I don't produce you, of course," Bight went on, "till I've prepared you. But when I do produce you it will be as a value."
"You'll get so much for me?" the poor gentleman quavered.
"I shall be able to get, I think, anything I ask. So we divide." And Bight jumped up.
Marshal did the same, and, while, with his hands on the back of his chair, he steadied himself from the vertiginous view, they faced each other across the table. "Oh, it's too wonderful!"
"You're not afraid?"
He looked at a card on the wall, framed, suspended and marked with the word "Soups." He looked at Maud, who had not moved. "I don't know; I may be; I must feel. What I should fear," he added, "would be his coming back."
"Beadel's? Yes, that would dish you. But since he can't———!"
"I place myself," said Mortimer Marshal, "in your hands."
Maud Blandy still hadn't moved; she stared before her at the cloth. A small sharp sound, unheard, she saw, by the others, had reached her from the street, and with her mind instinctively catching at it, she waited, dissimulating a little, for its repetition or its effect. It was the howl of the Strand, it was news of the absent, and it would have a bearing. She had a hesitation, for she winced even now with the sense of Marshal's intensest look at her. He couldn't be saved from himself, but he might be, still, from Bight; though it hung of course, her chance to warn him, on what the news would be. She thought with concentration, while her friends unhooked their overcoats, and by the time these garments were donned she was on her feet. Then she spoke. "I don't want you to be 'dished.'"
He allowed for her alarm. "But how can I be?"
"Something has come."
"Something———?" The men had both spoken.
They had stopped where they stood; she again caught the sound. "Listen! They're crying."
They waited then, and it came—came, of a sudden, with a burst and as if passing the place. A hawker, outside, with his "extra," called by some one and hurrying, bawled it as he moved. "Death of Beadel-Muffet—Extraordinary News!"
They all gasped, and Maud, with her eyes on Bight, saw him, to her satisfaction at first, turn pale. But his guest drank it in. "If it's true then"—Marshal triumphed at her—"I'm not dished."
But she only looked hard at Bight, who struck her as having, at the sound, fallen to pieces, and as having above all, on the instant, turned cold for his worried game. "Is it true?" she austerely asked.
His white face answered. "It's true."