Tales of Men and Ghosts — 06 - Full Circle

I

GEOFFREY BETTON woke rather late--so late that the winter sunlight sliding across his warm red carpet struck his eyes as he turned on the pillow.

Strett, the valet, had been in, drawn the bath in the adjoining dressing-room, placed the crystal and silver cigarette-box at his side, put a match to the fire, and thrown open the windows to the bright morning air.

It brought in, on the glitter of sun, all the shrill crisp morning noises--those piercing notes of the American thoroughfare that seem to take a sharper vibration from the clearness of the medium through which they pass.

Betton raised himself languidly.

That was the voice of Fifth Avenue below his windows.

He remembered that when he moved into his rooms eighteen months before, the sound had been like music to him: the complex orchestration to which the tune of his new life was set.

Now it filled him with horror and weariness, since it had become the symbol of the hurry and noise of that new life.

He had been far less hurried in the old days when he had to be up by seven, and down at the office sharp at nine.

Now that he got up when he chose, and his life had no fixed framework of duties, the hours hunted him like a pack of blood-hounds.

He dropped back on his pillows with a groan.

Yes--not a year ago there had been a positively sensuous joy in getting out of bed, feeling under his bare feet the softness of the sunlit carpet, and entering the shining tiled sanctuary where his great porcelain bath proffered its renovating flood.

But then a year ago he could still call up the horror of the communal plunge at his earlier lodgings: the listening for other bathers, the dodging of shrouded ladies in “crimping”-pins, the cold wait on the landing, the reluctant descent into a blotchy tin bath, and the effort to identify one’s soap and nail-brush among the promiscuous implements of ablution.

That memory had faded now, and Betton saw only the dark hours to which his blue and white temple of refreshment formed a kind of glittering antechamber.

For after his bath came his breakfast, and on the breakfast-tray his letters.

His letters!

He remembered--and _that_ memory had not faded!

--the thrill with which he had opened the first missive in a strange feminine hand: the letter beginning: “I wonder if you’ll mind an unknown reader’s telling you all that your book has been to her?

” _ Mind?

_ Ye gods, he minded now!

For more than a year after the publication of “Diadems and Faggots” the letters, the inane indiscriminate letters of condemnation, of criticism, of interrogation, had poured in on him by every post.

Hundreds of unknown readers had told him with unsparing detail all that his book had been to them.

And the wonder of it was, when all was said and done, that it had really been so little--that when their thick broth of praise was strained through the author’s anxious vanity there remained to him so small a sediment of definite specific understanding!

No--it was always the same thing, over and over and over again--the same vague gush of adjectives, the same incorrigible tendency to estimate his effort according to each writer’s personal preferences, instead of regarding it as a work of art, a thing to be measured by objective standards!

He smiled to think how little, at first, he had felt the vanity of it all.

He had found a savour even in the grosser evidences of popularity: the advertisements of his book, the daily shower of “clippings,” the sense that, when he entered a restaurant or a theatre, people nudged each other and said “That’s Betton.

” Yes, the publicity had been sweet to him--at first.

He had been touched by the sympathy of his fellow-men: had thought indulgently of the world, as a better place than the failures and the dyspeptics would acknowledge.

And then his success began to submerge him: he gasped under the thickening shower of letters.

His admirers were really unappeasable.

And they wanted him to do such preposterous things--to give lectures, to head movements, to be tendered receptions, to speak at banquets, to address mothers, to plead for orphans, to go up in balloons, to lead the struggle for sterilized milk.

They wanted his photograph for literary supplements, his autograph for charity bazaars, his name on committees, literary, educational, and social; above all, they wanted his opinion on everything: on Christianity, Buddhism, tight lacing, the drug-habit, democratic government, female suffrage and love.

Perhaps the chief benefit of this demand was his incidentally learning from it how few opinions he really had: the only one that remained with him was a rooted horror of all forms of correspondence.

He had been unutterably thankful when the letters began to fall off.

“Diadems and Faggots” was now two years old, and the moment was at hand when its author might have counted on regaining the blessed shelter of oblivion--if only he had not written another book!

For it was the worst part of his plight that his first success had goaded him to the perpetration of this particular folly--that one of the incentives (hideous thought!

) to his new work had been the desire to extend and perpetuate his popularity.

And this very week the book was to come out, and the letters, the cursed letters, would begin again!

Wistfully, almost plaintively, he contemplated the breakfast-tray with which Strett presently appeared.

It bore only two notes and the morning journals, but he knew that within the week it would groan under its epistolary burden.

The very newspapers flung the fact at him as he opened them.

READY ON MONDAY.

GEOFFREY BETTON’S NEW NOVEL

ABUNDANCE.

BY THE AUTHOR OF “DIADEMS AND FAGGOTS.

” FIRST EDITION OF ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY THOUSAND ALREADY SOLD OUT.

ORDER NOW.

A hundred and fifty thousand volumes!

And an average of three readers to each!

Half a million of people would be reading him within a week, and every one of them would write to him, and their friends and relations would write too.

He laid down the paper with a shudder.

The two notes looked harmless enough, and the calligraphy of one was vaguely familiar.

He opened the envelope and looked at the signature: _Duncan Vyse_.

He had not seen the name in years--what on earth could Duncan Vyse have to say?

He ran over the page and dropped it with a wondering exclamation, which the watchful Strett, re-entering, met by a tentative “Yes, sir?

” “Nothing.

Yes--that is--” Betton picked up the note.

“There’s a gentleman, a Mr. Vyse, coming to see me at ten.

” Strett glanced at the clock.

“Yes, sir.

You’ll remember that ten was the hour you appointed for the secretaries to call, sir.

” Betton nodded.

“I’ll see Mr. Vyse first.

My clothes, please.

” As he got into them, in the state of irritable hurry that had become almost chronic with him, he continued to think about Duncan Vyse.

They had seen a lot of each other for the few years after both had left Harvard: the hard happy years when Betton had been grinding at his business and Vyse--poor devil!

--trying to write.

The novelist recalled his friend’s attempts with a smile; then the memory of one small volume came back to him.

It was a novel: “The Lifted Lamp.

” There was stuff in that, certainly.

He remembered Vyse’s tossing it down on his table with a gesture of despair when it came back from the last publisher.

Betton, taking it up indifferently, had sat riveted till daylight.

When he ended, the impression was so strong that he said to himself: “I’ll tell Apthorn about it--I’ll go and see him to-morrow.

” His own secret literary yearnings gave him a passionate desire to champion Vyse, to see him triumph over the ignorance and timidity of the publishers.

Apthorn was the youngest of the guild, still capable of opinions and the courage of them, a personal friend of Betton’s, and, as it happened, the man afterward to become known as the privileged publisher of “Diadems and Faggots.

” Unluckily the next day something unexpected turned up, and Betton forgot about Vyse and his manuscript.

He continued to forget for a month, and then came a note from Vyse, who was ill, and wrote to ask what his friend had done.

Betton did not like to say “I’ve done nothing,” so he left the note unanswered, and vowed again: “I’ll see Apthorn.

” The following day he was called to the West on business, and was gone a month.

When he came back, there was another note from Vyse, who was still ill, and desperately hard up.

“I’ll take anything for the book, if they’ll advance me two hundred dollars.

” Betton, full of compunction, would gladly have advanced the sum himself; but he was hard up too, and could only swear inwardly: “I’ll write to Apthorn.

” Then he glanced again at the manuscript, and reflected: “No--there are things in it that need explaining.

I’d better see him.

” Once he went so far as to telephone Apthorn, but the publisher was out.

Then he finally and completely forgot.

One Sunday he went out of town, and on his return, rummaging among the papers on his desk, he missed “The Lifted Lamp,” which had been gathering dust there for half a year.

What the deuce could have become of it?

Betton spent a feverish hour in vainly increasing the disorder of his documents, and then bethought himself of calling the maid-servant, who first indignantly denied having touched anything (“I can see that’s true from the dust,” Betton scathingly interjected), and then mentioned with hauteur that a young lady had called in his absence and asked to be allowed to get a book.

“A lady?

Did you let her come up?

” “She said somebody’d sent her.

” Vyse, of course--Vyse had sent her for his manuscript!

He was always mixed up with some woman, and it was just like him to send the girl of the moment to Betton’s lodgings, with instructions to force the door in his absence.

Vyse had never been remarkable for delicacy.

Betton, furious, glanced over his table to see if any of his own effects were missing--one couldn’t tell, with the company Vyse kept!

--and then dismissed the matter from his mind, with a vague sense of magnanimity in doing so.

He felt himself exonerated by Vyse’s conduct.

The sense of magnanimity was still uppermost when the valet opened the door to announce “Mr. Vyse,” and Betton, a moment later, crossed the threshold of his pleasant library.

His first thought was that the man facing him from the hearth-rug was the very Duncan Vyse of old: small, starved, bleached-looking, with the same sidelong movements, the same queer air of anaemic truculence.

Only he had grown shabbier, and bald.

Betton held out a hospitable hand.

“This is a good surprise!

Glad you looked me up, my dear fellow.

” Vyse’s palm was damp and bony: he had always had a disagreeable hand.

“You got my note?

You know what I’ve come for?

” he said.

“About the secretaryship?

(Sit down.

) Is that really serious?

” Betton lowered himself luxuriously into one of his vast Maple arm-chairs.

He had grown stouter in the last year, and the cushion behind him fitted comfortably into the crease of his nape.

As he leaned back he caught sight of his image in the mirror between the windows, and reflected uneasily that Vyse would not find _him_ unchanged.

“Serious?

” Vyse rejoined.

“Why not?

Aren’t _you?

_” “Oh, perfectly.

” Betton laughed apologetically.

“Only--well, the fact is, you may not understand what rubbish a secretary of mine would have to deal with.

In advertising for one I never imagined--I didn’t aspire to any one above the ordinary hack.

” “I’m the ordinary hack,” said Vyse drily.

Betton’s affable gesture protested.

“My dear fellow--.

You see it’s not business--what I’m in now,” he continued with a laugh.

Vyse’s thin lips seemed to form a noiseless “_ Isn’t_ it?

” which they instantly transposed into the audibly reply: “I inferred from your advertisement that you want some one to relieve you in your literary work.

Dictation, short-hand--that kind of thing?

” “Well, no: not that either.

I type my own things.

What I’m looking for is somebody who won’t be above tackling my correspondence.

” Vyse looked slightly surprised.

“I should be glad of the job,” he then said.

Betton began to feel a vague embarrassment.

He had supposed that such a proposal would be instantly rejected.

“It would be only for an hour or two a day--if you’re doing any writing of your own?

” he threw out interrogatively.

“No. I’ve given all that up.

I’m in an office now--business.

But it doesn’t take all my time, or pay enough to keep me alive.

” “In that case, my dear fellow--if you could come every morning; but it’s mostly awful bosh, you know,” Betton again broke off, with growing awkwardness.

Vyse glanced at him humorously.

“What you want me to write?

” “Well, that depends--” Betton sketched the obligatory smile.

“But I was thinking of the letters you’ll have to answer.

Letters about my books, you know--I’ve another one appearing next week.

And I want to be beforehand now--dam the flood before it swamps me.

Have you any idea of the deluge of stuff that people write to a successful novelist?

” As Betton spoke, he saw a tinge of red on Vyse’s thin cheek, and his own reflected it in a richer glow of shame.

“I mean--I mean--” he stammered helplessly.

“No, I haven’t,” said Vyse; “but it will be awfully jolly finding out.

” There was a pause, groping and desperate on Betton’s part, sardonically calm on his visitor’s. “You--you’ve given up writing altogether?

” Betton continued.

“Yes; we’ve changed places, as it were.

” Vyse paused.

“But about these letters--you dictate the answers?

” “Lord, no!

That’s the reason why I said I wanted somebody--er--well used to writing.

I don’t want to have anything to do with them--not a thing!

You’ll have to answer them as if they were written to _you_--” Betton pulled himself up again, and rising in confusion jerked open one of the drawers of his writing-table.

“Here--this kind of rubbish,” he said, tossing a packet of letters onto Vyse’s knee.

“Oh--you keep them, do you?

” said Vyse simply.

“I--well--some of them; a few of the funniest only.

” Vyse slipped off the band and began to open the letters.

While he was glancing over them Betton again caught his own reflection in the glass, and asked himself what impression he had made on his visitor.

It occurred to him for the first time that his high-coloured well-fed person presented the image of commercial rather than of intellectual achievement.

He did not look like his own idea of the author of “Diadems and Faggots”--and he wondered why.

Vyse laid the letters aside.

“I think I can do it--if you’ll give me a notion of the tone I’m to take.

” “The tone?

” “Yes--that is, if I’m to sign your name.

” “Oh, of course: I expect you to sign for me.

As for the tone, say just what you’d--well, say all you can without encouraging them to answer.

” Vyse rose from his seat.

“I could submit a few specimens,” he suggested.

“Oh, as to that--you always wrote better than I do,” said Betton handsomely.

“I’ve never had this kind of thing to write.

When do you wish me to begin?

” Vyse enquired, ignoring the tribute.

“The book’s out on Monday.

The deluge will begin about three days after.

Will you turn up on Thursday at this hour?

” Betton held his hand out with real heartiness.

“It was great luck for me, your striking that advertisement.

Don’t be too harsh with my correspondents--I owe them something for having brought us together.

” II

THE deluge began punctually on the Thursday, and Vyse, arriving as punctually, had an impressive pile of letters to attack.

Betton, on his way to the Park for a ride, came into the library, smoking the cigarette of indolence, to look over his secretary’s shoulder.

“How many of ‘em?

Twenty?

Good Lord!

It’s going to be worse than ‘Diadems.

’ I’ve just had my first quiet breakfast in two years--time to read the papers and loaf.

How I used to dread the sight of my letter-box!

Now I sha’n’t know I have one.

” He leaned over Vyse’s chair, and the secretary handed him a letter.

“Here’s rather an exceptional one--lady, evidently.

I thought you might want to answer it yourself--” “Exceptional?

” Betton ran over the mauve pages and tossed them down.

“Why, my dear man, I get hundreds like that.

You’ll have to be pretty short with her, or she’ll send her photograph.

” He clapped Vyse on the shoulder and turned away, humming a tune.

“Stay to luncheon,” he called back gaily from the threshold.

After luncheon Vyse insisted on showing a few of his answers to the first batch of letters.

“If I’ve struck the note I won’t bother you again,” he urged; and Betton groaningly consented.

“My dear fellow, they’re beautiful--too beautiful.

I’ll be let in for a correspondence with every one of these people.

” Vyse, at this, meditated for a while above a blank sheet.

“All right--how’s this?

” he said, after another interval of rapid writing.

Betton glanced over the page.

“By George--by George!

Won’t she _see_ it?

” he exulted, between fear and rapture.

“It’s wonderful how little people see,” said Vyse reassuringly.

The letters continued to pour in for several weeks after the appearance of “Abundance.

” For five or six blissful days Betton did not even have his mail brought to him, trusting to Vyse to single out his personal correspondence, and to deal with the rest according to their agreement.

During those days he luxuriated in a sense of wild and lawless freedom;

then, gradually, he began to feel the need of fresh restraints to break, and learned that the zest of liberty lies in the escape from specific obligations.

At first he was conscious only of a vague hunger, but in time the craving resolved into a shame-faced desire to see his letters.

“After all, I hated them only because I had to answer them”; and he told Vyse carelessly that he wished all his letters submitted to him before the secretary answered them.

At first he pushed aside those beginning: “I have just laid down ‘Abundance’ after a third reading,” or: “Every day for the last month I have been telephoning my bookseller to know when your novel would be out.

” But little by little the freshness of his interest revived, and even this stereotyped homage began to arrest his eye.

At last a day came when he read all the letters, from the first word to the last, as he had done when “Diadems and Faggots” appeared.

It was really a pleasure to read them, now that he was relieved of the burden of replying: his new relation to his correspondents had the glow of a love-affair unchilled by the contingency of marriage.

One day it struck him that the letters were coming in more slowly and in smaller numbers.

Certainly there had been more of a rush when “Diadems and Faggots” came out.

Betton began to wonder if Vyse were exercising an unauthorized discrimination, and keeping back the communications he deemed least important.

This sudden conjecture carried the novelist straight to his library, where he found Vyse bending over the writing-table with his usual inscrutable pale smile.

But once there, Betton hardly knew how to frame his question, and blundered into an enquiry for a missing invitation.

“There’s a note--a personal note--I ought to have had this morning.

Sure you haven’t kept it back by mistake among the others?

” Vyse laid down his pen.

“The others?

But I never keep back any.

” Betton had foreseen the answer.

“Not even the worst twaddle about my book?

” he suggested lightly, pushing the papers about.

“Nothing.

I understood you wanted to go over them all first.

” “Well, perhaps it’s safer,” Betton conceded, as if the idea were new to him.

With an embarrassed hand he continued to turn over the letters at Vyse’s elbow.

“Those are yesterday’s,” said the secretary; “here are to-day’s,” he added, pointing to a meagre trio.

“H’m--only these?

” Betton took them and looked them over lingeringly.

“I don’t see what the deuce that chap means about the first part of ‘Abundance’ ‘certainly justifying the title’--do you?

” Vyse was silent, and the novelist continued irritably: “Damned cheek, his writing, if he doesn’t like the book.

Who cares what he thinks about it, anyhow?

” And his morning ride was embittered by the discovery that it was unexpectedly disagreeable to have Vyse read any letters which did not express unqualified praise of his books.

He began to fancy there was a latent rancour, a kind of baffled sneer, under Vyse’s manner; and he decided to return to the practice of having his mail brought straight to his room.

In that way he could edit the letters before his secretary saw them.

Vyse made no comment on the change, and Betton was reduced to wondering whether his imperturbable composure were the mask of complete indifference or of a watchful jealousy.

The latter view being more agreeable to his employer’s self-esteem, the next step was to conclude that Vyse had not forgotten the episode of “The Lifted Lamp,” and would naturally take a vindictive joy in any unfavourable judgments passed on his rival’s work.

This did not simplify the situation, for there was no denying that unfavourable criticisms preponderated in Betton’s correspondence.

“Abundance” was neither meeting with the unrestricted welcome of “Diadems and Faggots,” nor enjoying the alternative of an animated controversy: it was simply found dull, and its readers said so in language not too tactfully tempered by regretful comparisons with its predecessor.

To withhold unfavourable comments from Vyse was, therefore, to make it appear that correspondence about the book had died out; and its author, mindful of his unguarded predictions, found this even more embarrassing.

The simplest solution would be to get rid of Vyse; and to this end Betton began to address his energies.

One evening, finding himself unexpectedly disengaged, he asked Vyse to dine; it had occurred to him that, in the course of an after-dinner chat, he might delicately hint his feeling that the work he had offered his friend was unworthy so accomplished a hand.

Vyse surprised him by a momentary hesitation.

“I may not have time to dress.

” Betton stared.

“What’s the odds?

We’ll dine here--and as late as you like.

” Vyse thanked him, and appeared, punctually at eight, in all the shabbiness of his daily wear.

He looked paler and more shyly truculent than usual, and Betton, from the height of his florid stature, said to himself, with the sudden professional instinct for “type”: “He might be an agent of something--a chap who carries deadly secrets.

” Vyse, it was to appear, did carry a deadly secret; but one less perilous to society than to himself.

He was simply poor--inexcusably, irremediably poor.

Everything failed him, had always failed him: whatever he put his hand to went to bits.

This was the confession that, reluctantly, yet with a kind of white-lipped bravado, he flung at Betton in answer to the latter’s tentative suggestion that, really, the letter-answering job wasn’t worth bothering him with--a thing that any type-writer could do.

“If you mean you’re paying me more than it’s worth, I’ll take less,” Vyse rushed out after a pause.

“Oh, my dear fellow--” Betton protested, flushing.

“What _do_ you mean, then?

Don’t I answer the letters as you want them answered?

” Betton anxiously stroked his silken ankle.

“You do it beautifully, too beautifully.

I mean what I say: the work’s not worthy of you.

I’m ashamed to ask you--” “Oh, hang shame,” Vyse interrupted.

“Do you know why I said I shouldn’t have time to dress to-night?

Because I haven’t any evening clothes.

As a matter of fact, I haven’t much but the clothes I stand in.

One thing after another’s gone against me; all the infernal ingenuities of chance.

It’s been a slow Chinese torture, the kind where they keep you alive to have more fun killing you.

” He straightened himself with a sudden blush.

“Oh, I’m all right now--getting on capitally.

But I’m still walking rather a narrow plank; and if I do your work well enough--if I take your idea--” Betton stared into the fire without answering.

He knew next to nothing of Vyse’s history, of the mischance or mis-management that had brought him, with his brains and his training, to so unlikely a pass.

But a pang of compunction shot through him as he remembered the manuscript of “The Lifted Lamp” gathering dust on his table for half a year.

“Not that it would have made any earthly difference--since he’s evidently never been able to get the thing published.

” But this reflection did not wholly console Betton, and he found it impossible, at the moment, to tell Vyse that his services were not needed.

III

DURING the ensuing weeks the letters grew fewer and fewer, and Betton foresaw the approach of the fatal day when his secretary, in common decency, would have to say: “I can’t draw my pay for doing nothing.

” What a triumph for Vyse!

The thought was intolerable, and Betton cursed his weakness in not having dismissed the fellow before such a possibility arose.

“If I tell him I’ve no use for him now, he’ll see straight through it, of course;--and then, hang it, he looks so poor!

” This consideration came after the other, but Betton, in rearranging them, put it first, because he thought it looked better there, and also because he immediately perceived its value in justifying a plan of action that was beginning to take shape in his mind.

“Poor devil, I’m damned if I don’t do it for him!

” said Betton, sitting down at his desk.

Three or four days later he sent word to Vyse that he didn’t care to go over the letters any longer, and that they would once more be carried directly to the library.