Tales of Men and Ghosts Page 11

  “The matter?” Archie reiterated with rising passion. “Are you so lost to all sense of decency and honour that you can put that question in good faith? Don’t you really know what’s the matter?”

  Dredge smiled slowly. “There are so few things one really knows.”

  “Oh, damn your scientific hair-splitting! Don’t you know you’re insulting my father’s memory?”

  Dredge stared again, turning his spectacles thoughtfully from one of us to the other.

  “Oh, that’s it, is it? Then you’d better sit down. If you don’t see at once it’ll take some time to make you.”

  Archie burst into an ironic laugh.

  “I rather think it will!” he conceded.

  “Sit down, Archie,” I said, setting the example; and he obeyed, with a gesture that made his consent a protest.

  Dredge seemed to notice nothing beyond the fact that his visitors were seated. He reached for his pipe, and filled it with the care which the habit of delicate manipulations gave to all the motions of his long, knotty hands.

  “It’s about the lectures?” he said.

  Archie’s answer was a deep scornful breath.

  “You’ve only been back a week, so you’ve only heard one, I suppose?”

  “It was not necessary to hear even that one. You must know the talk they’re making. If notoriety is what you’re after—”

  “Well, I’m not sorry to make a noise,” said Dredge, putting a match to his pipe.

  Archie bounded in his chair. “There’s no easier way of doing it than to attack a man who can’t answer you!”

  Dredge raised a sobering hand. “Hold on. Perhaps you and I don’t mean the same thing. Tell me first what’s in your mind.”

  The request steadied Archie, who turned on Dredge a countenance really eloquent with filial indignation.

  “It’s an odd question for you to ask; it makes me wonder what’s in yours. Not much thought of my father, at any rate, or you couldn’t stand in his place and use the chance he’s given you to push yourself at his expense.”

  Dredge received this in silence, puffing slowly at his pipe.

  “Is that the way it strikes you?” he asked at length.

  “God! It’s the way it would strike most men.”

  He turned to me. “You too?”

  “I can see how Archie feels,” I said.

  “That I’m attacking his father’s memory to glorify myself?”

  “Well, not precisely: I think what he really feels is that, if your convictions didn’t permit you to continue his father’s teaching, you might perhaps have done better to sever your connection with the Lanfear lectureship.”

  “Then you and he regard the Lanfear lectureship as having been founded to perpetuate a dogma, not to try and get at the truth?”

  “Certainly not,” Archie broke in. “But there’s a question of taste, of delicacy, involved in the case that can’t be decided on abstract principles. We know as well as you that my father meant the laboratory and the lectureship to serve the ends of science, at whatever cost to his own special convictions; what we feel—and you don’t seem to—is that you’re the last man to put them to that use; and I don’t want to remind you why.”

  A slight redness rose through Dredge’s sallow skin. “You needn’t,” he said. “It’s because he pulled me out of my hole, woke me up, made me, shoved me off from the shore. Because he saved me ten or twenty years of muddled effort, and put me where I am at an age when my best working years are still ahead of me. Every one knows that’s what your father did for me, but I’m the only person who knows the time and trouble that it took.”

  It was well said, and I glanced quickly at Archie, who was never closed to generous emotions.

  “Well, then—?” he said, flushing also.

  “Well, then,” Dredge continued, his voice deepening and losing its nasal edge, “I had to pay him back, didn’t I?”

  The sudden drop flung Archie back on his prepared attitude of irony. “It would be the natural inference—with most men.”

  “Just so. And I’m not so very different. I knew your father wanted a successor—some one who’d try and tie up the loose ends. And I took the lectureship with that object.”

  “And you’re using it to tear the whole fabric to pieces!”

  Dredge paused to re-light his pipe. “Looks that way,” he conceded. “This year anyhow.”

  “ This year—?” Archie gasped at him.

  “Yes. When I took up the job I saw it just as your father left it. Or rather, I didn’t see any other way of going on with it. The change came gradually, as I worked.”

  “Gradually? So that you had time to look round you, to know where you were, to see you were fatally committed to undoing the work he had done?”

  “Oh, yes—I had time,” Dredge conceded.

  “And yet you kept the chair and went on with the course?”

  Dredge refilled his pipe, and then turned in his seat so that he looked squarely at Archie.

  “What would your father have done in my place?” he asked.

  “In your place—?”

  “Yes: supposing he’d found out the things I’ve found out in the last year or two. You’ll see what they are, and how much they count, if you’ll run over the report of the lectures. If your father’d been alive he might have come across the same facts just as easily.”

  There was a silence which Archie at last broke by saying: “But he didn’t, and you did. There’s the difference.”

  “The difference? What difference? Would your father have suppressed the facts if he’d found them? It’s you who insult his memory by implying it! And if I’d brought them to him, would he have used his hold over me to get me to suppress them?”

  “Certainly not. But can’t you see it’s his death that makes the difference? He’s not here to defend his case.”

  Dredge laughed, but not unkindly. “My dear Archie, your father wasn’t one of the kind who bother to defend their case. Men like him are the masters, not the servants, of their theories. They respect an idea only as long as it’s of use to them; when it’s usefulness ends they chuck it out. And that’s what your father would have done.”

  Archie reddened. “Don’t you assume a good deal in taking it for granted that he would have had to in this particular case?”

  Dredge reflected. Yes: I was going too far. Each of us can only answer for himself. But to my mind your father’s theory is refuted.”

  “And you don’t hesitate to be the man to do it?”

  “Should I have been of any use if I had? And did your father ever ask anything of me but to be of as much use as I could?”

  It was Archie’s turn to reflect. “No. That was what he always wanted, of course.”

  “That’s the way I’ve always felt. The first day he took me away from East Lethe I knew the debt I was piling up against him, and I never had any doubt as to how I’d pay it, or how he’d want it paid. He didn’t pick me out and train me for any object but to carry on the light. Do you suppose he’d have wanted me to snuff it out because it happened to light up a fact he didn’t fancy? I’m using his oil to feed my torch with: yes, but it isn’t really his torch or mine, or his oil or mine: they belong to each of us till we drop and hand them on.”

  Archie turned a sobered glance on him. “I see your point. But if the job had to be done I don’t see that you need have done it from his chair.”

  “There’s where we differ. If I did it at all I had to do it in the best way, and with all the authority his backing gave me. If I owe your father anything, I owe him that. It would have made him sick to see the job badly done. And don’t you see that the way to honour him, and show what he’s done for science, was to spare no advantage in my attack on him—that I’m proving the strength of his position by the desperateness of my assault?” Dredge paused and squared his lounging shoulders. “After all,” he added, “he’s not down yet, and if I leave him standing I guess it’ll be some time before anybody e
lse cares to tackle him.”

  There was a silence between the two men; then Dredge continued in a lighter tone: “There’s one thing, though, that we’re both in danger of forgetting: and that is how little, in the long run, it all counts either way.” He smiled a little at Archie’s outraged gesture. “The most we can any of us do—even by such a magnificent effort as your father’s—is to turn the great marching army a hair’s breadth nearer what seems to us the right direction; if one of us drops out, here and there, the loss of headway’s hardly perceptible. And that’s what I’m coming to now.”

  He rose from his seat, and walked across to the hearth; then, cautiously resting his shoulder-blades against the mantel-shelf jammed with miscellaneous specimens, he bent his musing spectacles on Archie.

  “Your father would have understood why I’ve done, what I’m doing; but that’s no reason why the rest of you should. And I rather think it’s the rest of you who’ve suffered most from me. He always knew what I was there for, and that must have been some comfort even when I was most in the way; but I was just an ordinary nuisance to you and your mother and Mabel. You were all too kind to let me see it at the time, but I’ve seen it since, and it makes me feel that, after all, the settling of this matter lies with you. If it hurts you to have me go on with my examination of your father’s theory, I’m ready to drop the lectures tomorrow, and trust to the Lanfear Laboratory to breed up a young chap who’ll knock us both out in time. You’ve only got to say the word.”

  There was a pause while Dredge turned and laid his extinguished pipe carefully between a jar of embryo sea-urchins and a colony of regenerating planarians.

  Then Archie rose and held out his hand.

  “No,” he said simply; “go on.”

  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, reentering, 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 hou
r 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 tomorrow.” 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.”