The Soft Side (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1900)/The Great Good Place/Chapter 1
THE GREAT GOOD PLACE
I
George Dane had waked up to a bright new day, the face of nature well washed by last night's downpour and shining as with high spirits, good resolutions, lively intentions—the great glare of recommencement, in short, fixed in his patch of sky. He had sat up late to finish work—arrears overwhelming; then at last had gone to bed with the pile but little reduced. He was now to return to it after the pause of the night; but he could only look at it, for the time, over the bristling hedge of letters planted by the early postman an hour before and already, on the customary table by the chimney-piece, formally rounded and squared by his systematic servant. It was something too merciless, the domestic perfection of Brown. There were newspapers on another table, ranged with the same rigour of custom, newspapers too many—what could any creature want of so much news?—and each with its hand on the neck of the other, so that the row of their bodiless heads was like a series of decapitations. Other journals, other periodicals of every sort, folded and in wrappers, made a huddled mound that had been growing for several days and of which he had been wearily, helplessly aware. There were new books, also in wrappers as well as disenveloped and dropped again—books from publishers, books from authors, books from friends, books from enemies, books from his own bookseller, who took, it sometimes struck him, inconceivable things for granted. He touched nothing, approached nothing, only turned a heavy eye over the work, as it were, of the night—the fact, in his high, wide-windowed room, where the hard light of duty could penetrate every corner, of the unashamed admonition of the day. It was the old rising tide, and it rose and rose even under a minute's watching. It had been up to his shoulders last night—it was up to his chin now.
Nothing had passed while he slept—everything had stayed; nothing, that he could yet feel, had died—many things had been born. To let them alone, these things, the new things, let them utterly alone and see if that, by chance, wouldn't somehow prove the best way to deal with them: this fancy brushed his face for a moment as a possible solution, just giving it, as many a time before, a cool wave of air. Then he knew again as well as ever that leaving was difficult, leaving impossible—that the only remedy, the true, soft, effacing sponge, would be to be left, to be forgotten. There was no footing on which a man who had ever liked life—liked it, at any rate, as he had—could now escape from it. He must reap as he had sown. It was a thing of meshes; he had simply gone to sleep under the net and had simply waked up there. The net was too fine; the cords crossed each other at spots so near together, making at each a little tight, hard knot that tired fingers, this morning, were too limp and too tender to touch. Our poor friend's touched nothing—only stole significantly into his pockets as he wandered over to the window and faintly gasped at the energy of nature. What was most overwhelming was that she herself was so ready. She had soothed him rather, the night before, in the small hours by the lamp. From behind the drawn curtain of his study the rain had been audible and in a manner merciful; washing the window in a steady flood, it had seemed the right thing, the retarding, interrupting thing, the thing that, if it would only last, might clear the ground by floating out to a boundless sea the innumerable objects among which his feet stumbled and strayed. He had positively laid down his pen as on a sense of friendly pressure from it. The kind, full swash had been on the glass when he turned out his lamp, he had left his phrase unfinished and his papers lying quite as if for the flood to bear them away on its bosom. But there still, on the table, were the bare bones of the sentence—and not all of those; the single thing borne away and that he could never recover was the missing half that might have paired with it and begotten a figure.
Yet he could at last only turn back from the window; the world was everywhere, without and within, and, with the great staring egotism of its health and strength, was not to be trusted for tact or delicacy. He faced about precisely to meet his servant and the absurd solemnity of two telegrams on a tray. Brown ought to have kicked them into the room—then he himself might have kicked them out.
'And you told me to remind you, sir———'
George Dane was at last angry. 'Remind me of nothing!'
'But you insisted, sir, that I was to insist!'
He turned away in despair, speaking with a pathetic quaver at absurd variance with his words: 'If you insist, Brown, I'll kill you!' He found himself anew at the window, whence, looking down from his fourth floor, he could see the vast neighbourhood, under the trumpet-blare of the sky, beginning to rush about. There was a silence, but he knew Brown had not left him—knew exactly how straight and serious and stupid and faithful he stood there. After a minute he heard him again.
'It's only because, sir, you know, sir, you can't remember———'
At this Dane did flash round; it was more than at such a moment he could bear. 'Can't remember, Brown? I can't forget. That's what's the matter with me.'
Brown looked at him with the advantage of eighteen years of consistency. 'I'm afraid you're not well, sir.'
Brown's master thought. 'It's a shocking thing to say, but I wish to Heaven I weren't! It would be perhaps an excuse.'
Brown's blankness spread like the desert. 'To put them off?'
'Ah!' The sound was a groan; the plural pronoun, any pronoun, so mistimed. 'Who is it?'
'Those ladies you spoke of—to lunch.'
'Oh!' The poor man dropped into the nearest chair and stared awhile at the carpet. It was very complicated.
'How many will there be, sir?' Brown asked.
'Fifty!'
'Fifty, sir?'
Our friend, from his chair, looked vaguely about; under his hand were the telegrams, still unopened, one of which he now tore asunder. '"Do hope you sweetly won't mind, to-day, 1.30, my bringing poor dear Lady Mullet, who is so awfully bent," he read to his companion.
His companion weighed it. 'How many does she make, sir?'
'Poor dear Lady Mullet? I haven't the least idea.'
'Is she—a—deformed, sir?' Brown inquired, as if in this case she might make more.
His master wondered, then saw he figured some personal curvature. 'No; she's only bent on coming!' Dane opened the other telegram and again read out: '"So sorry it's at eleventh hour impossible, and count on you here, as very greatest favour, at two sharp instead."'
'How many does that make?' Brown imperturbably continued.
Dane crumpled up the two missives and walked with them to the waste-paper basket, into which he thoughtfully dropped them. 'I can't say. You must do it all yourself. I shan't be there.'
It was only on this that Brown showed an expression. 'You'll go instead———'
'I'll go instead!' Dane raved.
Brown, however, had had occasion to show before that he would never desert their post. 'Isn't that rather sacrificing the three?' Between respect and reproach he paused.
'Are there three?'
'I lay for four in all.'
His master had, at any rate, caught his thought. 'Sacrificing the three to the one, you mean? Oh, I'm not going to her!' Brown's famous 'thoroughness'—his great virtue—had never been so dreadful. 'Then where are you going?'
Dane sat down to his table and stared at his ragged phrase. '"There is a happy land—far, far away!"' He chanted it like a sick child and knew that for a minute Brown never moved. During this minute he felt between his shoulders the gimlet of criticism.
'Are you quite sure you're all right?'
'It's my certainty that overwhelms me, Brown. Look about you and judge. Could anything be more "right," in the view of the envious world, than everything that surrounds us here; that immense array of letters, notes, circulars; that pile of printers' proofs, magazines, and books; these perpetual telegrams, these impending guests; this retarded, unfinished, and interminable work? What could a man want more?'
'Do you mean there's too much, sir?'—Brown had some times these flashes.
'There's too much. There's too much. But you can't help it, Brown.'
'No, sir,' Brown assented. 'Can't you?'
'I'm thinking—I must see. There are hours———!' Yes, there were hours, and this was one of them: he jerked himself up for another turn in his labyrinth, but still not touching, not even again meeting, his interlocutor's eye. If he was a genius for any one he was a genius for Brown; but it was terrible what that meant, being a genius for Brown. There had been times when he had done full justice to the way it kept him up; now, however, it was almost the worst of the avalanche. 'Don't trouble about me,' he went on insincerely, and looking askance through his window again at the bright and beautiful world. 'Perhaps it will rain—that may not be over. I do love the rain,' he weakly pursued. 'Perhaps, better still, it will snow.'
Brown now had indeed a perceptible expression, and the expression was fear. 'Snow, sir—the end of May?' Without pressing this point he looked at his watch. 'You'll feel better when you've had breakfast.'
'I dare say,' said Dane, whom breakfast struck in fact as a pleasant alternative to opening letters. 'I'll come in immediately.'
'But without waiting———?'
'Waiting for what?'
Brown had at last, under his apprehension, his first lapse from logic, which he betrayed by hesitating in the evident hope that his companion would, by a flash of remembrance, relieve him of an invidious duty. But the only flashes now were the good man's own. 'You say you can't forget, sir; but you do forget———'
'Is it anything very horrible?' Dane broke in.
Brown hung fire. 'Only the gentleman you told me you had asked———'
Dane again took him up; horrible or not, it came back—indeed its mere coming back classed it. 'To breakfast to-day? It was to-day; I see.' It came back, yes, came back; the appointment with the young man—he supposed him young—and whose letter, the letter about—what was it?—had struck him. 'Yes, yes; wait, wait.'
'Perhaps he'll do you good, sir,' Brown suggested.
'Sure to—sure to. All right!' Whatever he might do, he would at least prevent some other doing: that was present to our friend as, on the vibration of the electric bell at the door of the flat, Brown moved away. Two things, in the short interval that followed, were present to Dane: his having utterly forgotten the connection, the whence, whither, and why of his guest; and his continued disposition not to touch—no, not with the finger. Ah; if he might never again touch! All the unbroken seals and neglected appeals lay there while, for a pause that he couldn't measure, he stood before the chimney-piece with his hands still in his pockets. He heard a brief exchange of words in the hall, but never afterward recovered the time taken by Brown to reappear, to precede and announce another person—a person whose name, somehow, failed to reach Dane's ear. Brown went off again to serve breakfast, leaving host and guest confronted. The duration of this first stage also, later on, defied measurement; but that little mattered, for in the train of what happened came promptly the second, the third, the fourth, the rich succession of the others. Yet what happened was but that Dane took his hand from his pocket, held it straight out, and felt it taken. Thus indeed, if he had wanted never again to touch, it was already done.