Read Ebook: Materials and Methods of Fiction With an Introduction by Brander Matthews by Hamilton Clayton Meeker Matthews Brander Commentator

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CONCERNING THE DEAD AND THE LIVING

CHAP.

THE DRAWINGS UPON THE WALL

THE OTHER SIDE

THE FOLLY OF THE WISE

THE LIVING AND THE DEAD

PREFATORY NOTE

I will ask my readers kindly to understand that this book is altogether a work of fiction. The characters it portrays, their circumstances and the episodes in which they play a part, are my own invention.

Every sincere and scientific student of human nature and the social scene must, of necessity, depend upon direct observation of life for his general types--the said types being the composite photographs with which study and observation have supplied him. But, for the shaping of individual characters out of the said types, he should, in my opinion, rely exclusively upon his imagination and his sense of dramatic coherence. Exactly in proportion as he does this can he claim to be a true artist. Since the novel, to be a work of art, must be impersonal, neither autobiographical nor biographical.--I am not, of course, speaking of the historical novel, whether the history involved be ancient or contemporary, nor am I speaking of an admitted satire.

LUCAS MALET.

CONCERNING THE DEAD AND THE LIVING

ADRIAN SAVAGE

IN WHICH THE READER IS INVITED TO MAKE THE ACQUAINTANCE OF THE HERO OF THIS BOOK

Nevertheless, as--raising his hat gallantly to the concierge, seated in her glass-fronted lodge, swathed mummy-like in shawls and mufflers--he turned shortly to the left along the backs of the tall, gray houses, a high expectation, at once delightful and disturbing, took possession of him to the exclusion of all other sensations. For the past eighteen months--ever since, indeed, the distressingly sudden death of his old friend, the popular painter Horace St. Leger--he had made this selfsame little pilgrimage as frequently as respectful discretion permitted. And invariably, at the selfsame spot--it was where, as he noted amusedly, between the third and fourth of the heavily barred ground-floor windows a square leaden water-pipe, running the height of the house wall from the parapet of the steep slated roof, reached the grating in the pavement--this quickening of his whole being came upon him, however occupied his thoughts might previously have been with his literary work, or with the conduct of the bi-monthly review of which he was at once assistant editor and part proprietor. This quickening remained with him, moreover, as he entered a doorway set in the near corner of the courtyard and ran up the flights of waxed wooden stairs to the third story. In no country of the civilized world, it may be confidently asserted, do affairs of the heart, even when virtuous, command more indulgent sympathy than in France. It followed that Adrian entertained his own emotions with the same eager and friendly amenity which he would have extended to those of another man in like case. He was not in the least contemptuous or suspicious of them. He permitted cynicism no smallest word in the matter. On the contrary, he hailed the present ebullience of his affections as among those captivating surprises of earthly existence upon which one should warmly congratulate oneself, having liveliest cause for rejoicing.

From the foregoing it may be deduced, and rightly, that Adrian Savage was of a romantic temperament, and that he was very much in love. Let it be immediately added, however, that he was a young gentleman whose head, to employ a vulgarism, was most emphatically screwed on the right way. Only child of an eminent English physician of good family, long resident in Paris, and of a French mother--a woman of great personal charm and some distinction as a poetess--he had inherited, along with a comfortable little income of about eighteen hundred pounds a year, a certain sagacity and decision in dealing with men and with affairs, as well as quick sensibility in relation to beauty and to drama. Artist and practical man of the world went, for the most part, very happily hand and hand in him. At moments, however, they quarreled, to the production of complications.

To be nine-and-twenty, the owner of a well-favored person, of admitted talent and business capacity, and to be honestly in love, is surely to be as happily circumstanced as mortal man can reasonably ask to be. That the course of true love should not run quite smooth, that the beloved one should prove elusive, difficult of access, that obstacles should encumber the path of achievement, that mists of doubt and uncertainty should drift across the face of the situation, obscuring its issues, only served in Adrian's case to heighten interest and whet appetite. The last thing he asked was that the affair should move on fashionable, conventional lines, a matter for newspaper paragraphs and social gossip. The justifying charm of it, to his thinking, resided in precisely those elements of uncertainty and difficulty. If, in the twentieth century, a man is to subscribe to the constraints of marriage at all, let it at least be in some sort marriage by capture! And, as he told himself, what man worth the name, let alone what artist, what poet--vowed by his calling to confession of the transcendental, the eternally mystic and sacred in this apparently most primitive, even savage, of human relations--would choose to capture his exquisite prey amid the blatant materialism, the vulgar noise and chaffer of the modern social highway; rather than pursue it through the shifting lights and shadows of mysterious woodland places, the dread of its final escape always upon him, till his feet were weary with running, and his hands with dividing the thick, leafy branches, his ears, all the while, tormented by the baffling, piercing sweetness of the half-heard Pipes of Pan?

WHEREIN A VERY MODERN YOUNG MAN TELLS A TIME-HONORED TALE WITH BUT SMALL ENCOURAGEMENT

Disappointment awaited him. Madame St. Leger was receiving; but, to his chagrin, another visitor had forestalled his advent--witness a woman's fur-lined wrap lying across the lid of the painted Venetian chest in the corridor. Adrian bestowed a glance of veritable hatred upon the garment. Then, recognizing it, felt a little better. For it belonged to Anastasia Beauchamp, an old friend, not unsympathetic, as he believed, to his suit.

Sympathy, however, was hardly the note struck on his entrance. Miss Beauchamp and Madame St. Leger stood in the vacant rose-red carpeted space at the far end of the long room, in front of the open fire. Both were silent; yet Adrian was aware somehow they had only that moment ceased speaking, and that their conversation had been momentous in character. The high tension of it held them to the point of their permitting him to walk the whole length of the room before turning to acknowledge his presence. This was damping for Adrian, who, like most agreeable young men, thought himself entitled to and well worth a welcome. But not a bit of it! The elder woman--high-shouldered, short-waisted, an admittedly liberal sixty, her arms disproportionate in their length and thinness to her low stature--continued to hold her hostess's right hand in both hers and look at her intently, as though enforcing some request or admonition.

Miss Beauchamp, it may be noted in passing, affected a certain juvenility of apparel. To-day she wore a short purple serge walking-suit. A velvet toque of the same color, trimmed with sable and blush-roses, perched itself on her elaborately dressed hair, which, in obedience to the then prevailing fashion, showed not gray but a full coppery red. Her eyebrows and eyelids were darkly penciled, and powder essayed to mask wrinkles and sallowness of complexion. Yet the very frankness of these artifices tended to rob them of offense; or, in any serious degree--the first surprise of them over--to mar the genial promise of her quick blue-gray eyes and her thin, witty, strongly marked, rather masculine countenance. Adrian usually accepted her superficial bedizenments without criticism, as just part of her excellent, if somewhat bizarre, personality. But to-day--his temper being slightly ruffled--under the cold, diffused light of the range of tall windows, they started, to his seeing, into quite unpardonable prominence--a prominence punctuated by the grace and the proudly youthful aspect of the woman beside her.

Madame St. Leger was clothed in unrelieved black, from the frill, high about her long throat, to the hem of her trailing cling skirts. Over her head she had thrown a black gauze scarf, soberly framing her heart-shaped face in fine semi-transparent folds, and obscuring the burnished lights in her brown hair, which stood away in soft, dense ridges on either side the parting and was gathered into a loose knot at the back of her head. Her white skin was very clear, a faint scarlet tinge showing through it in the round of either cheek. But just now she was pale. And this, along with the framing black gauze scarf, developed the subtle likeness which--as Adrian held--she bore, in the proportions of her face and molding of it, to Leonardo's world-famous "Mona Lisa" in Salon Carr? of the Louvre. The strange recondite quality of her beauty, and the challenge it offered, were peculiarly in evidence; thereby making, as he reflected, cruel, though unconscious, havoc of the juvenile pretensions of poor Anastasia. And this was painful to him. So that in wishing--as he incontestably did--the said Anastasia absent, his wish may have been dictated almost as much by chivalry as by selfishness.

All of which conflicting perceptions and emotions tended to rob him of his habitual and happy self-assurance. His voice took on quite plaintive tones, and his gay brown eyes a quite pathetic and orphaned expression, as he exclaimed:

"Ah! I see that I disturb you. I am in the way. My visit is inconvenient to you!"

The faint tinge of scarlet leaped into Madame St. Leger's cheeks, and an engaging dimple indicated itself at the left corner of her closed and smiling mouth. Meanwhile Anastasia Beauchamp broke forth impetuously:

"No, no! On the contrary, it is I who am in the way, though our dear, exquisite friend is too amiable to tell me so. I have victimized her far too long already. I have bored her distractingly."

"Indeed, it is impossible you should ever bore me," the younger woman put in quietly.

"Am I not always ready to attempt the impossible for your sake, dear Mademoiselle?" Adrian inquired gallantly.

"Hum--hum--is it as bad as that, then? Are his articles so impossible? Byewater has soaked himself in his subject. He has been tremendously conscientious. He has taken immense trouble over them."

"He has taken immensely too much; that is just the worry. His conscience protrudes at every sentence. It prods, it positively impales you!" The speaker raised his neat black eyebrows and broad shoulders in delicate apology. "Alas! he is pompous, pedantic, I grieve to report; he is heavy, very heavy, your little Byewater. The eighteenth-century stage was many things which it had, no doubt, much better not have been, but was it heavy? Assuredly not."

"Ah! poor child, he is young. He is nervous. He has not command of his style yet. You should be lenient. Give him opportunity and encouragement, and he will find himself, will rise to the possibilities of his own talent. After all," she added, "every writer must begin some time and somewhere!"

"You floated Ren? Dax."

"But he is a genius," Madame St. Leger remarked quietly.

"Yes," Adrian asserted, "there could be no doubt about his value from the first. He is extraordinary."

"He is extraordinarily perverted," cried Miss Beauchamp.

"I am much attached to M. Ren? Dax." Madame St. Leger spoke deliberately; and a little silence followed, as when people listen, almost anxiously, to the sound of a pebble dropped into a well, trying to hear it touch bottom. Miss Beauchamp was the first to break it. She did so laughing.

Whereupon Adrian, smitten by sudden apprehension of deep and possibly dangerous issues, followed her to the door, crying eagerly:

"Wait, I implore you, dear Mademoiselle. Do not be too precipitate in disposing of Byewater. I may have underrated the worth of his articles. I will re-read, I will reconsider. Nothing presses. I have to leave Paris for a week or two. Let the matter rest till my return. I may find it possible, after all, to accept them."

Then, the door closed, he came back and stood on the vacant space of rose-red carpet in the pleasant glow of the fire.

"She is a clever woman," he said, reflectively. "She has cornered me, and that is not quite fair--on the Review. For they constitute a veritable atrocity of dullness, those articles by her miserable little Byewater."

"It is part of her code of friendship--it holds true all round. If she helps others--"

Madame St. Leger left her sentence unfinished and, glancing with a hint of veiled mockery at her guest, sat down in a carven, high-backed, rose-cushioned chair at right angles to the fireplace, and picked up a bundle of white needlework from the little table beside it.

"You mean that Miss Beauchamp does her best for me, too?" Adrian inquired, tentatively.

But the lady was too busy unfolding her work, finding needle and thimble to make answer.

"I foresee that I shall be compelled to print the wretched little Byewater in the end," he murmured, still tentatively.

"Did you not tell Miss Beauchamp you were going away?" Gabrielle asked. She had no desire to continue the conversation on this particular note.

"Yes, I leave Paris to-night. That is my excuse for asking to see you this afternoon. But I feel that my visit is ill-timed. I observed directly I came in that you looked a little fatigued. I fear you are suffering. Ought you to undertake the exertion of receiving visitors? I doubt it. Yet I should have been desolated had you refused me. For I leave, as I say, to-night in response to a sudden call to England upon business--that of certain members of my father's family. I am barely acquainted with them. But they claim my assistance, and I cannot refuse it. I could not do otherwise than tell you of this unexpected journey, could I? It distresses me to find you suffering."

Gabrielle had looked at him smiling, her lips closed, the little dimple again showing in her left cheek. His eagerness and volubility were diverting to her. They enabled her to think of him as still very young; and she quite earnestly wished thus to think of him. To do so made for security. At this period Madame St. Leger put a very high value upon security.

The young man placed his hat on the floor, opened the fronts of his overcoat, and drew a chair up to the near side of the low work-table whence he commanded an uninterrupted view of his hostess's charming person.

"That is right," she said. "Now tell me about this sudden journey. Is it for long? When may we expect you back?"

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