“I CAN never,” said Mrs.
Fetherel, “hear the bell ring without a shudder.”
Her unruffled aspect she
was the kind of woman whose emotions never communicate
themselves to her clothes and the conventional
background of the New York drawing-room, with its
pervading implication of an imminent tea-tray and
of an atmosphere in which the social functions have
become purely reflex, lent to her declaration a relief
not lost on her cousin Mrs. Clinch, who, from the
other side of the fireplace, agreed with a glance
at the clock, that it was the hour for bores.
“Bores!” cried Mrs. Fetherel
impatiently. “If I shuddered at them,
I should have a chronic ague!”
She leaned forward and laid a sparkling
finger on her cousin’s shabby black knee.
“I mean the newspaper clippings,” she whispered.
Mrs. Clinch returned a glance of intelligence.
“They’ve begun already?”
“Not yet; but they’re
sure to now, at any minute, my publisher tells me.”
Mrs. Fetherel’s look of apprehension
sat oddly on her small features, which had an air
of neat symmetry somehow suggestive of being set in
order every morning by the housemaid. Some one
(there were rumors that it was her cousin) had once
said that Paula Fetherel would have been very pretty
if she hadn’t looked so like a moral axiom in
a copy-book hand.
Mrs. Clinch received her confidence
with a smile. “Well,” she said, “I
suppose you were prepared for the consequences of authorship?”
Mrs. Fetherel blushed brightly.
“It isn’t their coming,” she owned “it’s
their coming now.”
“Now?”
“The Bishop’s in town.”
Mrs. Clinch leaned back and shaped
her lips to a whistle which deflected in a laugh.
“Well!” she said.
“You see!” Mrs. Fetherel triumphed.
“Well weren’t you prepared
for the Bishop?”
“Not now at least, I hadn’t
thought of his seeing the clippings.”
“And why should he see them?”
“Bella won’t you understand?
It’s John.”
“John?”
“Who has taken the most unexpected
tone one might almost say out of perversity.”
“Oh, perversity ”
Mrs. Clinch murmured, observing her cousin between
lids wrinkled by amusement. “What tone has
John taken?”
Mrs. Fetherel threw out her answer
with the desperate gesture of a woman who lays bare
the traces of a marital fist. “The tone
of being proud of my book.”
The measure of Mrs. Clinch’s
enjoyment overflowed in laughter.
“Oh, you may laugh,” Mrs.
Fetherel insisted, “but it’s no joke to
me. In the first place, John’s liking the
book is so so such a false note it
puts me in such a ridiculous position; and then it
has set him watching for the reviews who
would ever have suspected John of knowing that books
were reviewed? Why, he’s actually found
out about the Clipping Bureau, and whenever the postman
rings I hear John rush out of the library to see if
there are any yellow envelopes. Of course, when
they do come he’ll bring them into the
drawing-room and read them aloud to everybody who
happens to be here and the Bishop is sure
to happen to be here!”
Mrs. Clinch repressed her amusement.
“The picture you draw is a lurid one,”
she conceded, “but your modesty strikes me as
abnormal, especially in an author. The chances
are that some of the clippings will be rather pleasant
reading. The critics are not all union men.”
Mrs. Fetherel stared. “Union men?”
“Well, I mean they don’t
all belong to the well-known Society-for-the-Persecution-of-Rising-Authors.
Some of them have even been known to defy its regulations
and say a good word for a new writer.”
“Oh, I dare say,” said
Mrs. Fetherel, with the laugh her cousin’s epigram
exacted. “But you don’t quite see
my point. I’m not at all nervous about
the success of my book my publisher tells
me I have no need to be but I am
afraid of its being a succès de scandale.”
“Mercy!” said Mrs. Clinch, sitting up.
The butler and footman at this moment
appeared with the tea-tray, and when they had withdrawn,
Mrs. Fetherel, bending her brightly rippled head above
the kettle, continued in a murmur of avowal, “The
title, even, is a kind of challenge.”
“‘Fast and Loose,’”
Mrs. Clinch mused. “Yes, it ought to take.”
“I didn’t choose it for
that reason!” the author protested. “I
should have preferred something quieter less
pronounced; but I was determined not to shirk the
responsibility of what I had written. I want people
to know beforehand exactly what kind of book they
are buying.”
“Well,” said Mrs. Clinch,
“that’s a degree of conscientiousness that
I’ve never met with before. So few books
fulfil the promise of their titles that experienced
readers never expect the fare to come up to the menu.”
“‘Fast and Loose’
will be no disappointment on that score,” her
cousin significantly returned. “I’ve
handled the subject without gloves. I’ve
called a spade a spade.”
“You simply make my mouth water!
And to think I haven’t been able to read it
yet because every spare minute of my time has been
given to correcting the proofs of ‘How the Birds
Keep Christmas’! There’s an instance
of the hardships of an author’s life!”
Mrs. Fetherel’s eye clouded.
“Don’t joke, Bella, please. I suppose
to experienced authors there’s always something
absurd in the nervousness of a new writer, but in
my case so much is at stake; I’ve put so much
of myself into this book and I’m so afraid of
being misunderstood...of being, as it were, in advance
of my time... like poor Flaubert....I know
you’ll think me ridiculous... and if only my
own reputation were at stake, I should never give
it a thought...but the idea of dragging John’s
name through the mire...”
Mrs. Clinch, who had risen and gathered
her cloak about her, stood surveying from her genial
height her cousin’s agitated countenance.
“Why did you use John’s name, then?”
“That’s another of my
difficulties! I had to. There would
have been no merit in publishing such a book under
an assumed name; it would have been an act of moral
cowardice. ‘Fast and Loose’ is not
an ordinary novel. A writer who dares to show
up the hollowness of social conventions must have
the courage of her convictions and be willing to accept
the consequences of defying society. Can you imagine
Ibsen or Tolstoy writing under a false name?”
Mrs. Fetherel lifted a tragic eye to her cousin.
“You don’t know, Bella, how often I’ve
envied you since I began to write. I used to
wonder sometimes you won’t mind my
saying so? why, with all your cleverness,
you hadn’t taken up some more exciting subject
than natural history; but I see now how wise you were.
Whatever happens, you will never be denounced by the
press!”
“Is that what you’re afraid
of?” asked Mrs. Clinch, as she grasped the bulging
umbrella which rested against her chair. “My
dear, if I had ever had the good luck to be denounced
by the press, my brougham would be waiting at the
door for me at this very moment, and I shouldn’t
have to ruin this umbrella by using it in the rain.
Why, you innocent, if I’d ever felt the slightest
aptitude for showing up social conventions, do you
suppose I should waste my time writing ‘Nests
Ajar’ and ’How to Smell the Flowers’?
There’s a fairly steady demand for pseudo-science
and colloquial ornithology, but it’s nothing,
simply nothing, to the ravenous call for attacks on
social institutions especially by those
inside the institutions!”
There was often, to her cousin, a
lack of taste in Mrs. Clinch’s pleasantries,
and on this occasion they seemed more than usually
irrelevant.
“‘Fast and Loose’
was not written with the idea of a large sale.”
Mrs. Clinch was unperturbed.
“Perhaps that’s just as well,” she
returned, with a philosophic shrug. “The
surprise will be all the pleasanter, I mean.
For of course it’s going to sell tremendously;
especially if you can get the press to denounce it.”
“Bella, how can you?
I sometimes think you say such things expressly to
tease me; and yet I should think you of all women would
understand my purpose in writing such a book.
It has always seemed to me that the message I had
to deliver was not for myself alone, but for all the
other women in the world who have felt the hollowness
of our social shams, the ignominy of bowing down to
the idols of the market, but have lacked either the
courage or the power to proclaim their independence;
and I have fancied, Bella dear, that, however severely
society might punish me for revealing its weaknesses,
I could count on the sympathy of those who, like you” Mrs.
Fetherel’s voice sank “have
passed through the deep waters.”
Mrs. Clinch gave herself a kind of
canine shake, as though to free her ample shoulders
from any drop of the element she was supposed to have
traversed.
“Oh, call them muddy rather
than deep,” she returned; “and you’ll
find, my dear, that women who’ve had any wading
to do are rather shy of stirring up mud. It sticks especially
on white clothes.”
Mrs. Fetherel lifted an undaunted
brow. “I’m not afraid,” she
proclaimed; and at the same instant she dropped her
tea-spoon with a clatter and shrank back into her
seat. “There’s the bell,” she
exclaimed, “and I know it’s the Bishop!”
It was in fact the Bishop of Ossining,
who, impressively announced by Mrs. Fetherel’s
butler, now made an entry that may best be described
as not inadequate to the expectations the announcement
raised. The Bishop always entered a room well;
but, when unannounced, or preceded by a Low Church
butler who gave him his surname, his appearance lacked
the impressiveness conferred on it by the due specification
of his diocesan dignity. The Bishop was very
fond of his niece Mrs. Fetherel, and one of the traits
he most valued in her was the possession of a butler
who knew how to announce a bishop.
Mrs. Clinch was also his niece; but,
aside from the fact that she possessed no butler at
all, she had laid herself open to her uncle’s
criticism by writing insignificant little books which
had a way of going into five or ten editions, while
the fruits of his own episcopal leisure “The
Wail of Jonah” (twenty cantos in blank verse),
and “Through a Glass Brightly; or, How to Raise
Funds fora Memorial Window” inexplicably
languished on the back shelves of a publisher noted
for his dexterity in pushing “devotional goods.”
Even this indiscretion the Bishop might, however,
have condoned, had his niece thought fit to turn to
him for support and advice at the painful juncture
of her history when, in her own words, it became necessary
for her to invite Mr. Clinch to look out for another
situation. Mr. Clinch’s misconduct was
of the kind especially designed by Providence to test
the fortitude of a Christian wife and mother, and the
Bishop was absolutely distended with seasonable advice
and edification; so that when Bella met his tentative
exhortations with the curt remark that she preferred
to do her own housecleaning unassisted, her uncle’s
grief at her ingratitude was not untempered with sympathy
for Mr. Clinch.
It is not surprising, therefore, that
the Bishop’s warmest greetings were always reserved
for Mrs. Fetherel; and on this occasion Mrs. Clinch
thought she detected, in the salutation which fell
to her share, a pronounced suggestion that her own
presence was superfluous a hint which she
took with her usual imperturbable good humor.