The Beth Book
excuse me if you think I have."
Mollified, he turned his attention once more to the littered bureau.
"You have a goodly pile of manuscript there," he remarked; "may I ask
what it is?"
"It is a little book into which I am putting all my ignorance," she
said.
"I hope you are not going to be diffident about letting me see it?" he
answered encouragingly. "I could certainly give you some useful
hints."
"You are too kind," she said; and he accepted the assertion without a
suspicion of sarcasm. She rose when she had spoken, drew the lid of
the bureau down over her papers, and locked it deliberately; but the
precaution rather flattered him than otherwise.
"You need not be afraid," he said. "I promise to be lenient. And if we
are as fast friends when the book appears as I trust we shall be, the
_Patriarch_ itself shall proclaim its merits; if not----"
"I suppose it will discover my faults," Beth put in demurely. "I
wonder, by the way," she added, "who told you you are so much cleverer
than I am?"
But fortunately Mrs. Kilroy came in and interrupted them before he had
had time to grasp the remark, for which Beth, from whom it had slipped
unawares, was devoutly thankful.
When he had gone, she sat and wondered if she had really understood
him aright with regard to the _Patriarch_. Certainly he had seemed to
threaten her, but it was hard to believe that he had sunk so low as to
be capable of criticising her work, not on its own merits, but with
regard to the terms he should be on with its author. She was too
upright herself, however, to think such dishonest meanness possible,
so she put the suspicion far from her, and tried to find some
charitable explanation of the several signs of paltriness she had
already detected, and to think of him as he had seemed to her in the
old days, when she had endowed him with all the qualities she herself
had brought into their acquaintance to make it pleasant and of good
effect.
Beth had taken to rambling about alone in the quiet streets and
squares for exercise; and as she returned a few days later from one of
these rambles, she encountered Mr. Alfred Cayley Pounce coming out of
a florist's with a large bouquet of orchids in his hand.
"You see I do not forget you," he said, holding the bouquet out to
her. "Every lady has her flower. These delicate orchids are for you."
But Beth ignored the offering. "You are still fond of flowers then?"
slipped from her.
"We do not leave a taste for flowers behind us with our toys," he
rejoined. "If we like flowers as children, we love them as men. The
taste develops like a talent when we cultivate it. To love flowers
with true appreciation of their affinities in regard to certain
persons, is an endowment, a grace of nature which bespeaks the most
absolute refinement of mind. And what would life be without refinement
of mind!"
Beth had walked on, and he was walking beside her.
"And how does the book progress?" he inquired.
"It is finished," she answered.
"What! already?" he exclaimed. "Why, it takes _me_ a week to write
five hundred words. But then, of course, my work is highly
concentrated. I have sent home for some of it to show you. You see I
am pertinacious. I said I would help you, and I will. I hope you will
live to be glad that we have met. But you must not write at such a
rate. You can only produce poor thin stuff in that way."
Beth shrugged her shoulders, and let him assume what he liked on the
subject.
They walked on a little way in silence, then he began again about the
flowers. "Flowers," he informed her, "were the great solace of my
boyhood--the sole solace, I may say, for I had no friends, no
companions, except a poor little chap, a cripple, on whom I took pity.
My people did not think me strong enough for a public school, so they
sent me to a private tutor, a man of excellent family, Rector of a
large seaside parish in the north. He only took me as a favour; he had
no other pupils. But it was very lonely in that great empty house. And
the seashore, although it filled my mind with poetry, was desolate,
desolate!"
Beth, as she listened to these meanderings of his fancy, and recalled
old Vicar Richardson and the house full of children, thought of Mr.
Pounce's remarks about feminine accuracy.
"But had you no girl-friend?" she asked.
"Only the lady of my dreams," he answered. "There was no _other_ lady
I should have looked at in the place. I was always refined. I met the
lady of my dreams eventually. It was among the mountains of the Tyrol.
Imagine a lordly castle, with drawbridge and moat, portcullis and
pleasaunce, and sauntering in the pleasaunce, among the flowers, a
lady--dressed in white----"
"Samite?" Beth ventured, controlling her countenance.
"I cannot recall the texture," he said seriously. "How could one think
of textures at such a moment! That would have been too commercial! All
I noted was the lily whiteness--and her eyes, dark eyes! All the
poetry and passion of her race shone in them. And on the spot I vowed
to win her. I went back to the 'Varsity, and worked myself into the
best set. Lord Fitzkillingham became, as you know, my most intimate
friend. He was my best man at the wedding."
"Then you married your ideal," said Beth. "You should be very happy."
He sighed. "I would not say a word against her for the world," he
asserted. "When I compare her with other women, I see what a lucky man
I must be thought. But," he sighed again, "I was very young, and youth
has its illusions. As we grow older, mere beauty does not satisfy,
mere cleverness and accomplishments do not satisfy, nor wealth, nor
rank. A man may have all that, and yet may yearn for a certain
something which is not there--and that something is the one thing
needful."
They were opposite to the house by this time, and he looked up at the
windows sentimentally. "Which is yours?" he asked. "I pass by daily
and look up."
They had stopped at the door. "I cannot ask you in," Beth said
hastily. "Please excuse me. This is my time for work."
"Ah, the time and the mood!" he ejaculated. "I know it all so well!
Inspiration! Inspiration comes of congenial conversation, as I hope
you will find. You will take my flowers. I cannot claim to have culled
them for you, but at least I chose them."
As the door had been opened, and the footman in the hall stood looking
on, Beth thought it better to take the flowers in a casual way as if
they belonged to her. A card tied to the bouquet by a purple ribbon
fell out from among the flowers as she took them. On it was written:
"Mrs. Merton Merivale." Beth held the flowers out to Mr. Pounce, with
the card dangling, and raised her eyebrows interrogatively.
"Ah, yes," he began slowly, detaching the card as he spoke to gain
time, and changing countenance somewhat. "I confess some one else had
had the good taste to choose these orchids before I saw them; but I
always insist on having just what _I_ want, so I took them, and
suggested that another bouquet might be made for the lady. I
overlooked the card."
Beth bowed and left him without further ceremony.
She tossed the flowers under the table in the hall on her way
upstairs, and never knew what became of them. Later in the day she
described her morning's adventure to Angelica, and asked her if she
knew who Mrs. Merton Merivale was.
"Oh, that woman in the princess bonnet with the big Alsatian bow, you
know," Angelica said. "Mr. Alfred Cayley Pounce's sometime
intellectual affinity."
"Poor Alfred! he is too crude!" Beth ejaculated. "How I have outgrown
him!"
* * * * *
Ideala called next day, and found Angelica alone. "I hear that Beth is
with you?" she said. "What is she doing?"
"Writing a book."
"What kind of a book?"
"Not a book for babes, I should say," said Angelica. "She does not
pretend to consider the young person in the least. It is for parents
and guardians, she says, not for authors, to see to it that the books
the young person reads are suitable to her age. She thinks it very
desirable for her only to read such as are; but personally she does
not see the sense of writing down to her, or of being at all cramped
on her account. She means to address mature men and women."
"That is brave and good," said Ideala. "What is the subject?"
"I don't know," said Angelica; "but she is certain to put some of
herself into it."
"If by that you mean some of her personal experiences, I should think
you are wrong," said Ideala. "Genius experiences too acutely to make
use of its own past in that way; it would suffer too much in the
reproduction. And besides, it can make better use and more telling of
what it intuitively knows than of what it has actually seen."
"I do not think you believe that Beth will succeed," said Angelica.
"On the contrary," Ideala rejoined, "I expect her success will be
unique; only I don't know if it will be a literary success. Genius is
versatile. But we shall see."
Having finished her book, Beth collected her friends and read it aloud
to them. "I don't know what to think of it," she said. "Advise me. Is
it worth publishing, or had I better put it aside and try again?"
"Publish it, by all means," was the unanimous verdict; and Mr. Kilroy
took the manuscript himself to a publisher of his acquaintance, who
read it and accepted it.
"Oh," Beth exclaimed, when she heard the reader's report, "I do know
now what is meant by all in good time! If I had been able to publish
the first things I wrote, how I should have regretted it now! And I
did think so much of myself at that time, too! You should have heard
how I dogmatised to Sir George Galbraith; and he was so good and
kind--he never snubbed me. But I believe I am out of the amateur stage
now, and far advanced enough to begin all over again humbly and learn
my profession. But I find my point of view unchanged. Manner has
always been less to me than matter. When I think of all the
preventable sin and misery there is in the world, I pray God give us
books of good intention--never mind the style! Polished periods put
neither heart nor hope in us; theirs is the polish of steel which we
admire for the labour bestowed upon it, but by which we do not
benefit. The inevitable ills of life strengthen and refine when they
are heroically borne; it is the preventable ones that act on our evil
passions, and fill us with rage and bitterness; and what we want from
the written word that reaches all of us is help and advice, comfort
and encouragement. If art interferes with that, then art had better
go. It would not be missed by the wretched--the happy we need not
consider. I am speaking of art for art's sake, of course."
"We need not trouble about that," said Ideala. "The works of art for
art's sake, and style for style's sake, end on the shelf much
respected, while their authors end in the asylum, the prison, and the
premature grave. I had a lesson on that subject long ago, which
enlarged my mind. I got among the people who talk of style
incessantly, as if style were everything, till at last I verily
believed it was. I began to lose all I had to express for worry of the
way to express it! Then one day a wise old friend of mine took me into
a public library; and we spent a long time among the books, looking
especially at the ones that had been greatly read, and at the queer
marks in them, the emphatic strokes of approval, the notes of
admiration, the ohs! of enthusiasm, the ahs! of agreement. At the end
of one volume some one had written: 'This book has done me good.' It
was all very touching to me, very human, very instructive. I never
quite realised before what books might be to people, how they might
help them, comfort them, brighten the time for them, and fill them