The Soft Side (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1900)/John Delavoy/Chapter 7
VII
She made him wait a deep minute for her answer to this, and that gave me time to read into it what he accused her of failing to do. I recollect that I was startled at their having come so far, though I was reassured, after a little, by seeing that he had come much the furthest. I had now I scarce know what amused sense of knowing our hostess so much better than he. 'I think you strangely inconsequent,' she said at last. 'If you associate with—what you speak of—the idea of help, does it strike you as helping me to treat in that base fashion the memory I most honour and cherish?' As I was quite sure of what he spoke of, I could measure the force of this challenge. 'Have you never discovered, all this time, that my brother's work is my pride and my joy?'
'Oh, my dear thing!'—and Mr. Beston broke into a cry that combined in the drollest way the attempt to lighten his guilt with the attempt to deprecate hers. He let it just flash upon us that, should he be pushed, he would show as—well, scandalised.
The tone in which Miss Delavoy again addressed him offered a reflection of this gleam. 'Do you know what my brother would think of you?'
He was quite ready with his answer, and there was no moment in the whole business at which I thought so well of him. 'I don't care a hang what your brother would think!'
'Then why do you wish to commemorate him?'
'How can you ask so innocent a question? It isn't for him.'
'You mean it's for the public?'
'It's for the magazine,' he said with a noble simplicity.
'The magazine is the public,' it made me so far forget myself as to suggest.
'You've discovered it late in the day! Yes,' he went on to our companion, 'I don't in the least mind saying I don't care. I don't—I don't!' he repeated with a sturdiness in which I somehow recognised that he was, after all, a great editor. He looked at me a moment as if he even guessed what I saw, and, not unkindly, desired to force it home. 'I don't care for anybody. It's not my business to care. That's not the way to run a magazine. Except of course as a mere man!'—and he added a smile for Miss Delavoy. He covered the whole ground again. 'Your reminiscences would make a talk!'
She came back from the greatest distance she had yet reached. 'My reminiscences?'
'To accompany the head.' He must have been as tender as if I had been away. 'Don't I see how you'd do them?'
She turned off, standing before the fire and looking into it; after which she faced him again. 'If you'll publish our friend here, I'll do them.'
'Why are you so awfully wound up about our friend here?'
'Read his article over—with a little intelligence—and your question will be answered.'
Mr. Beston glanced at me and smiled as if with a loyal warning; then, with a good conscience, he let me have it. 'Oh, damn his article!'
I was struck with her replying exactly what I should have replied if I had not been so detached. 'Damn it as much as you like, but publish it.' Mr. Beston, on this, turned to me as if to ask me if I had not heard enough to satisfy me: there was a visible offer in his face to give me more if I insisted. This amounted to an appeal to me to leave the room at least for a minute; and it was perhaps from the fear of what might pass between us that Miss Delavoy once more took him up. 'If my brother's as vile as you say———!'
'Oh, I don't say he's vile!' he broke in.
'You only say I am!' I commented.
'You've entered so into him,' she replied to me, 'that it comes to the same thing. And Mr. Beston says further that out of this unmentionableness he wants somehow to make something—some money or some sensation.'
'My dear lady,' said Mr. Beston, 'it's a very great literary figure!'
'Precisely. You advertise yourself with it because it's a very great literary figure, and it's a very great literary figure because it wrote very great literary things that you wouldn't for the world allow to be intelligibly or critically named. So you bid for the still more striking tribute of an intimate picture—an unveiling of God knows what!—without even having the pluck or the logic to say on what ground it is that you go in for naming him at all. Do you know, dear Mr. Beston,' she asked, 'that you make me very sick? I count on receiving the portrait,' she concluded, 'by to-morrow evening at latest.'
I felt, before this speech was over, so sorry for her interlocutor that I was on the point of asking her if she mightn't finish him without my help. But I had lighted a flame that was to consume me too, and I was aware of the scorch of it while I watched Mr. Beston plead frankly, if tacitly, that, though there was something in him not to be finished, she must yet give him a moment and let him take his time to look about him at pictures and books. He took it with more coolness than I; then he produced his answer. 'You shall receive it to-morrow morning if you'll do what I asked the last time.' I could see more than he how the last time had been overlaid by what had since come up; so that, as she opposed a momentary blank, I felt almost a coarseness in his recall of it with an 'Oh, you know—you know!'
Yes, after a little she knew, and I need scarcely add that I did. I felt, in the oddest way, by this time, that she was conscious of my penetration and wished to make me, for the loss now so clearly beyond repair, the only compensation in her power. This compensation consisted of her showing me that she was indifferent to my having guessed the full extent of the privilege that, on the occasion to which he alluded, she had permitted Mr. Beston to put before her. The balm for my wound was therefore to see what she resisted. She resisted Mr. Beston in more ways than one. 'And if I don't do it?' she demanded.
'I'll simply keep your picture!'
'To what purpose if you don't use it?'
'To keep it is to use it,' Mr. Beston said.
'He has only to keep it long enough,' I added, and with the intention that may be imagined, 'to bring you round, by the mere sense of privation, to meet him on the other ground.'
Miss Delavoy took no more notice of this speech than if she had not heard it, and Mr. Beston showed that he had heard it only enough to show, more markedly, that he followed her example. 'I'll do anything, I'll do everything for you in life,' he declared to her, 'but publish such a thing as that.'
She gave in all decorum to this statement the minute of concentration that belonged to it; but her analysis of the matter had for sole effect to make her at last bring out, not with harshness, but with a kind of wondering pity: 'I think you're really very dreadful!'
'In what esteem then, Mr. Beston,' I asked, 'do you hold John Delavoy's work?'
He rang out clear. 'As the sort of thing that's out of our purview!' If for a second he had hesitated it was partly, I judge, with just resentment at my so directly addressing him, and partly, though he wished to show our friend that he fairly faced the question, because experience had not left him in such a case without two or three alternatives. He had already made plain indeed that he mostly preferred the simplest.
'Wonderful, wonderful purview!' I quite sincerely, or at all events very musingly, exclaimed.
'Then, if you could ever have got one of his novels———?' Miss Delavoy inquired.
He smiled at the way she put it; it made such an image of the attitude of The Cynosure. But he was kind and explicit. 'There isn't one that wouldn't have been beyond us. We could never have run him. We could never have handled him. We could never, in fact, have touched him. We should have dropped to—oh, Lord!' He saw the ghastly figure he couldn't name—he brushed it away with a shudder.
I turned, on this, to our companion. 'I wish awfully you'd do what he asks!' She stared an instant, mystified; then I quickly explained to which of his requests I referred. 'I mean I wish you'd do the nice familiar chat about the sweet home-life. You might make it inimitable, and, upon my word, I'd give you for it the assistance of my general lights. The thing is—don't you see?—that it would put Mr. Beston in a grand position. Your position would be grand,' I hastened to add as I looked at him, 'because it would be so admirably false.' Then, more seriously, I felt the impulse even to warn him. 'I don't think you're quite aware of what you'd make it. Are you really quite conscious?' I went on with a benevolence that struck him, I was presently to learn, as a depth of fatuity.
He was to show once more that he was a rock. 'Conscious? Why should I be? Nobody's conscious.'
He was splendid; yet before I could control it I had risked the challenge of a 'Nobody?'
'Who's anybody? The public isn't!'
'Then why are you afraid of it?' Miss Delavoy demanded.
'Don't ask him that,' I answered; 'you expose yourself to his telling you that, if the public isn't anybody, that's still more the case with your brother.'
Mr. Beston appeared to accept as a convenience this somewhat inadequate protection; he at any rate under cover of it again addressed us lucidly. 'There's only one false position—the one you seem so to wish to put me in.'
I instantly met him. 'That of losing———?'
'That of losing———!'
'Oh, fifty thousand—yes. And they wouldn't see anything the matter———?'
'With the position,' said Mr. Beston, 'that you qualify, I neither know nor care why, as false.' Suddenly, in a different tone, almost genially, he continued: 'For what do you take them?'
For what indeed?—but it didn't signify. 'It's enough that I take you—for one of the masters.' It's literal that as he stood there in his florid beauty and complete command I felt his infinite force, and, with a gush of admiration, wondered how, for our young lady, there could be at such a moment another man. 'We represent different sides,' I rather lamely said. However, I picked up. 'It isn't a question of where we are, but of what. You're not on a side—you are a side. You're the right one. What a misery,' I pursued, 'for us not to be "on" you!'
His eyes showed me for a second that he yet saw how our not being on him did just have for it that it could facilitate such a speech; then they rested afresh on Miss Delavoy, and that brought him back to firm ground. 'I don't think you can imagine how it will come out.'
He was astride of the portrait again, and presently again she had focussed him. 'If it does come out———!' she began, poor girl; but it was not to take her far.
'Well, if it does———?'
'He means what will you do then?' I observed, as she had nothing to say.
'Mr. Beston will see,' she at last replied with a perceptible lack of point.
He took this up in a flash. 'My dear young lady, it's you who'll see; and when you've seen you'll forgive me. Only wait till you do!' He was already at the door, as if he quite believed in what he should gain by the gain, from this moment, of time. He stood there but an instant—he looked from one of us to the other. 'It will be a ripping little thing!' he remarked; and with that he left us gaping.