The Soft Side (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1900)/John Delavoy/Chapter 4

by Henry James

IV

What may further have passed between us on this occasion loses, as I try to recall it, all colour in the light of a communication that I had from her four days later. It consisted of a note in which she announced to me that she had heard from Mr. Beston in terms that troubled her: a letter from Paris—he had dashed over on business—abruptly proposing that she herself should, as she quoted, give him something; something that her intimate knowledge of the subject—which was of course John Delavoy—her rare opportunities for observation and study would make precious, would make as unique as the work of her pencil. He appealed to her to gratify him in this particular, exhorted her to sit right down to her task, reminded her that to tell a loving sister's tale was her obvious, her highest duty. She confessed to mystification and invited me to explain. Was this sudden perception of her duty a result on Mr. Beston's part of any difference with myself? Did he want two papers? Did he want an alternative to mine? Did he want hers as a supplement or as a substitute? She begged instantly to be informed if anything had happened to mine. To meet her request I had first to make sure, and I repaired on the morrow to Mr. Beston's office in the eager hope that he was back from Paris. This hope was crowned; he had crossed in the night and was in his room; so that on sending up my card I was introduced to his presence, where I promptly broke ground by letting him know that I had had even yet no proof.

'Oh, yes! about Delavoy. Well, I've rather expected you, but you must excuse me if I'm brief. My absence has put me back; I've returned to arrears. Then from Paris I meant to write to you, but even there I was up to my neck. I think, too, I've instinctively held off a little. You won't like what I have to say—you can't! He spoke almost as if I might wish to prove I could. 'The fact is, you see, your thing won't do. No—not even a little.'

Even after Miss Delavoy's note it was a blow, and I felt myself turn pale. 'Not even a little? Why, I thought you wanted it so!'

Mr. Beston just perceptibly braced himself. 'My dear man, we didn't want that! We couldn't do it. I've every desire to be agreeable to you, but we really couldn't.'

I sat staring. 'What in the world's the matter with it?'

'Well, it's impossible. That's what's the matter with it.'

'Impossible?' There rolled over me the ardent hours and a great wave of the feeling that I had put into it.

He hung back but an instant—he faced the music. 'It's indecent.'

I could only wildly echo him. 'Indecent? Why, it's absolutely, it's almost to the point of a regular chill, expository. What in the world is it but critical?'

Mr. Beston's retort was prompt. 'Too critical by half! That's just where it is. It says too much.'

'But what it says is all about its subject.'

'I dare say, but I don't think we want quite so much about its subject.'

I seemed to swing in the void and I clutched, fallaciously, at the nearest thing. 'What you do want, then—what is that to be about?'

'That's for you to find out—it's not my business to tell you.'

It was dreadful, this snub to my happy sense that I had found out. 'I thought you wanted John Delavoy. I've simply stuck to him.'

Mr. Beston gave a dry laugh. 'I should think you had!' Then after an instant he turned oracular. 'Perhaps we wanted him—perhaps we didn't. We didn't at any rate want indelicacy.'

'Indelicacy?' I almost shrieked. 'Why, it's pure portraiture.'

'"Pure," my dear fellow, just begs the question. It's most objectionable—that's what it is. For portraiture of such things, at all events, there's no place in our scheme.'

I speculated. 'Your scheme for an account of Delavoy?'

Mr. Beston looked as if I trifled. 'Our scheme for a successful magazine.'

'No place, do I understand you, for criticism? No place for the great figures———? If you don't want too much detail,' I went on, 'I recall perfectly that I was careful not to go into it. What I tried for was a general vivid picture—which I really supposed I arrived at. I boiled the man down—I gave the three or four leading notes. Them I did try to give with some intensity.'

Mr. Beston, while I spoke, had turned about and, with a movement that confessed to impatience and even not a little, I thought, to irritation, fumbled on his table among a mass of papers and other objects; after which he had pulled out a couple of drawers. Finally he fronted me anew with my copy in his hand, and I had meanwhile added a word about the disadvantage at which he placed me. To have made me wait was unkind; but to have made me wait for such news———! I ought at least to have been told it earlier. He replied to this that he had not at first had time to read me, and, on the evidence of my other things, had taken me pleasantly for granted: he had only been enlightened by the revelation of the proof. What he had fished out of his drawer was, in effect, not my manuscript; but the 'galleys' that had never been sent me. The thing was all set up there, and my companion, with eyeglass and thumb, dashed back the sheets and looked up and down for places. The proof-reader, he mentioned, had so waked him up with the blue pencil that he had no difficulty in finding them. They were all in his face when he again looked at me. 'Did you candidly think that we were going to print this?'

All my silly young pride in my performance quivered as if under the lash. 'Why the devil else should I have taken the trouble to write it? If you're not going to print it, why the devil did you ask me for it?'

'I didn't ask you. You proposed it yourself.'

'You jumped at it; you quite agreed you ought to have it: it comes to the same thing. So indeed you ought to have it. It's too ignoble, your not taking up such a man.'

He looked at me hard. I have taken him up. I do want something about him, and I've got his portrait there—coming out beautifully.'

'Do you mean you've taken him up,' I inquired, 'by asking for something of his sister? Why, in that case, do you speak as if I had forced on you the question of a paper? If you want one you want one.'

Mr. Beston continued to sound me. 'How do you know what I've asked of his sister?'

'I know what Miss Delavoy tells me. She let me know it as soon as she had heard from you.'

'Do you mean that you've just seen her?'

'I've not seen her since the time I met you at her house; but I had a note from her yesterday. She couldn't understand your appeal—in the face of knowing what I've done myself.'

Something seemed to tell me at this instant that she had not yet communicated with Mr. Beston, but that he wished me not to know she hadn't. It came out still more in the temper with which he presently said: 'I want what Miss Delavoy can do, but I don't want this kind of thing!' And he shook my proof at me as if for a preliminary to hurling it.

I took it from him, to show I anticipated his violence, and, profoundly bewildered, I turned over the challenged pages. They grinned up at me with the proof-reader's shocks, but the shocks, as my eye caught them, bloomed on the spot like flowers. I didn't feel abased—so many of my good things came back to me. 'What on earth do you seriously mean? This thing isn't bad. It's awfully good—it's beautiful.'

With an odd movement he plucked it back again, though not indeed as if from any new conviction. He had had after all a kind of contact with it that had made it a part of his stock. 'I dare say it's clever. For the kind of thing it is, it's as beautiful as you like. It's simply not our kind.' He seemed to break out afresh. 'Didn't you know more———?'

I waited. 'More what?'

He in turn did the same. 'More everything. More about Delavoy. The whole point was that I thought you did.'

I fell back in my chair. 'You think my article shows ignorance? I sat down to it with the sense that I knew more than any one.'

Mr. Beston restored it again to my hands. 'You've kept that pretty well out of sight then. Didn't you get anything out of her? It was simply for that I addressed you to her.'

I took from him with this, as well, a silent statement of what it had not been for. 'I got everything in the wide world I could. We almost worked together, but what appeared was that all her own knowledge, all her own view, quite fell in with what I had already said. There appeared nothing to subtract or to add.'

He looked hard again, not this time at me, but at the document in my hands. 'You mean she has gone into all that—seen it just as it stands there?'

'If I've still.' I replied, 'any surprise left, it's for the surprise your question implies. You put our heads together, and you've surely known all along that they've remained so. She told me a month ago that she had immediately let you know the good she thought of what I had done.'

Mr. Beston very candidly remembered, and I could make out that if he flushed as he did so it was because what most came back to him was his own simplicity. 'I see. That must have been why I trusted you—sent you, without control, straight off to be set up. But now that I see you———!' he went on.

'You're surprised at her indulgence?'

Once more he snatched at the record of my rashness—once more he turned it over. Then he read out two or three paragraphs. 'Do you mean she has gone into all that?'

'My dear sir, what do you take her for? There wasn't a line we didn't thresh out, and our talk wouldn't for either of us have been a bit interesting if it hadn't been really frank. Have you to learn at this time of day,' I continued, 'what her feeling is about her brother's work? She's not a bit stupid. She has a kind of worship for it.'

Mr. Beston kept his eyes on one of my pages. 'She passed her life with him and was extremely fond of him.'

'Yes, and she has the point of view and no end of ideas. She's tremendously intelligent.'

Our friend at last looked up at me, but I scarce knew what to make of his expression. 'Then she'll do me exactly what I want.'

'Another article, you mean, to replace mine?'

'Of a totally different sort. Something the public will stand.' His attention reverted to my proof, and he suddenly reached out for a pencil. He made a great dash against a block of my prose and placed the page before me. Do you pretend to me they'll stand that?'

'That' proved, as I looked at it, a summary of the subject, deeply interesting, and treated, as I thought, with extraordinary art, of the work to which I gave the highest place in my author's array. I took it in, sounding it hard for some hidden vice, but with a frank relish, in effect, of its lucidity; than I answered: 'If they won't stand it, what will they stand?'

Mr. Beston looked about and put a few objects on his table to rights. 'They won't stand anything.' He spoke with such pregnant brevity as to make his climax stronger. 'And quite right too! I'm right, at any rate; I can't plead ignorance. I know where I am, and I want to stay there. That single page would have cost me five thousand subscribers.'

'Why, that single page is a statement of the very essence———!'

He turned sharp round at me. 'Very essence of what?'

'Of my very topic, damn it.'

'Your very topic is John Delavoy.'

'And what's his very topic? Am I not to attempt to utter it? What under the sun else am I writing about?'

'You're not writing in The Cynosure about the relations of the sexes. With those relations, with the question of sex in any degree, I should suppose you would already have seen that we have nothing whatever to do. If you want to know what our public won't stand, there you have it.'

I seem to recall that I smiled sweetly as I took it. 'I don't know, I think, what you mean by those phrases, which strike me as too empty and too silly, and of a nature therefore to be more deplored than any, I'm positive, that I use in my analysis. I don't use a single one that even remotely resembles them. I simply try to express my author, and if your public won't stand his being expressed, mention to me kindly the source of its interest in him.'

Mr. Beston was perfectly ready. 'He's all the rage with the clever people—that's the source. The interest of the public is whatever a clever article may make it.'

'I don't understand you. How can an article be clever, to begin with, and how can it make anything of anything, if it doesn't avail itself of material?'

'There is material, which I'd hoped you'd use. Miss Delavoy has lots of material. I don't know what she has told you, but I know what she has told me.' He hung fire but an instant. 'Quite lovely things.'

'And have you told her———?'

'Told her what?' he asked as I paused.

'The lovely things you've just told me.'

Mr. Beston got up; folding the rest of my proof together, he made the final surrender with more dignity than I had looked for. 'You can do with this what you like.' Then as he reached the door with me: 'Do you suppose that I talk with Miss Delavoy on such subjects?' I answered that he could leave that to me—I shouldn't mind so doing; and I recall that before I quitted him something again passed between us on the question of her drawing. 'What we want,' he said, 'is just the really nice thing, the pleasant, right thing to go with it. That drawing's going to take!'