Tales of Men and Ghosts

BETTON did not for a moment believe that Vyse suspected the valet of having written the letters.

“Why the devil don’t he say out what he thinks?  He was always a tortuous chap,” he grumbled inwardly.

The sense of being held under the lens of Vyse’s mute scrutiny became more and more exasperating.  Betton, by this time, had squared his shoulders to the fact that “Abundance” was a failure with the public:  a confessed and glaring failure.  The press told him so openly, and his friends emphasized the fact by their circumlocutions and evasions.  Betton minded it a good deal more than he had expected, but not nearly as much as he minded Vyse’s knowing it.  That remained the central twinge in his diffused discomfort.  And the problem of getting rid of his secretary once more engaged him.

He had set aside all sentimental pretexts for retaining Vyse; but a practical argument replaced them.  “If I ship him now he’ll think it’s because I’m ashamed to have him see that I’m not getting any more letters.”

For the letters had ceased again, almost abruptly, since Vyse had hazarded the conjecture that they were the product of Strett’s devoted pen.  Betton had reverted only once to the subject—­to ask ironically, a day or two later:  “Is Strett writing to me as much as ever?”—­and, on Vyse’s replying with a neutral head-shake, had added with a laugh:  “If you suspect him you might as well think I write the letters myself!”

“There are very few to-day,” said Vyse, with his irritating evasiveness; and Betton rejoined squarely:  “Oh, they’ll stop soon.  The book’s a failure.”

A few mornings later he felt a rush of shame at his own tergiversations, and stalked into the library with Vyse’s sentence on his tongue.

Vyse started back with one of his anaemic blushes.  “I was hoping you’d be in.  I wanted to speak to you.  There’ve been no letters the last day or two,” he explained.

Betton drew a quick breath of relief.  The man had some sense of decency, then!  He meant to dismiss himself.

“I told you so, my dear fellow; the book’s a flat failure,” he said, almost gaily.

Vyse made a deprecating gesture.  “I don’t know that I should regard the absence of letters as the ultimate test.  But I wanted to ask you if there isn’t something else I can do on the days when there’s no writing.”  He turned his glance toward the book-lined walls.  “Don’t you want your library catalogued?” he asked insidiously.

“Had it done last year, thanks.”  Betton glanced away from Vyse’s face.  It was piteous, how he needed the job!

“I see. ...  Of course this is just a temporary lull in the letters.  They’ll begin again—­as they did before.  The people who read carefully read slowly—­you haven’t heard yet what they think.”

Betton felt a rush of puerile joy at the suggestion.  Actually, he hadn’t thought of that!

“There was a big second crop after ‘Diadems and Faggots,’” he mused aloud.

“Of course.  Wait and see,” said Vyse confidently.

The letters in fact began again—­more gradually and in smaller numbers.  But their quality was different, as Vyse had predicted.  And in two cases Betton’s correspondents, not content to compress into one rapid communication the thoughts inspired by his work, developed their views in a succession of really remarkable letters.  One of the writers was a professor in a Western college; the other was a girl in Florida.  In their language, their point of view, their reasons for appreciating “Abundance,” they differed almost diametrically; but this only made the unanimity of their approval the more striking.  The rush of correspondence evoked by Betton’s earlier novel had produced nothing so personal, so exceptional as these communications.  He had gulped the praise of “Diadems and Faggots” as undiscriminatingly as it was offered; now he knew for the first time the subtler pleasures of the palate.  He tried to feign indifference, even to himself; and to Vyse he made no sign.  But gradually he felt a desire to know what his secretary thought of the letters, and, above all, what he was saying in reply to them.  And he resented acutely the possibility of Vyse’s starting one of his clandestine correspondences with the girl in Florida.  Vyse’s notorious lack of delicacy had never been more vividly present to Betton’s imagination; and he made up his mind to answer the letters himself.

He would keep Vyse on, of course:  there were other communications that the secretary could attend to.  And, if necessary, Betton would invent an occupation:  he cursed his stupidity in having betrayed the fact that his books were already catalogued.

Vyse showed no surprise when Betton announced his intention of dealing personally with the two correspondents who showed so flattering a reluctance to take their leave.  But Betton immediately read a criticism in his lack of comment, and put forth, on a note of challenge:  “After all, one must be decent!”

Vyse looked at him with an evanescent smile.  “You’ll have to explain that you didn’t write the first answers.”

Betton halted.  “Well—­I—­I more or less dictated them, didn’t I?”

“Oh, virtually, they’re yours, of course.”

“You think I can put it that way?”

“Why not?” The secretary absently drew an arabesque on the blotting-pad.  “Of course they’ll keep it up longer if you write yourself,” he suggested.

Betton blushed, but faced the issue.  “Hang it all, I sha’n’t be sorry.  They interest me.  They’re remarkable letters.”  And Vyse, without observation, returned to his writings.

The spring, that year, was delicious to Betton.  His college professor continued to address him tersely but cogently at fixed intervals, and twice a week eight serried pages came from Florida.  There were other letters, too; he had the solace of feeling that at last “Abundance” was making its way, was reaching the people who, as Vyse said, read slowly because they read intelligently.  But welcome as were all these proofs of his restored authority they were but the background of his happiness.  His life revolved for the moment about the personality of his two chief correspondents.  The professor’s letters satisfied his craving for intellectual recognition, and the satisfaction he felt in them proved how completely he had lost faith in himself.  He blushed to think that his opinion of his work had been swayed by the shallow judgments of a public whose taste he despised.  Was it possible that he had allowed himself to think less well of “Abundance” because it was not to the taste of the average novel-reader?  Such false humility was less excusable than the crudest appetite for praise:  it was ridiculous to try to do conscientious work if one’s self-esteem were at the mercy of popular judgments.  All this the professor’s letters delicately and indirectly conveyed to Betton, with the result that the author of “Abundance” began to recognize in it the ripest flower of his genius.

But if the professor understood his book, the girl in Florida understood him; and Betton was fully alive to the superior qualities of discernment which this process implied.  For his lovely correspondent his novel was but the starting-point, the pretext of her discourse:  he himself was her real object, and he had the delicious sense, as their exchange of thoughts proceeded, that she was interested in “Abundance” because of its author, rather than in the author because of his book.  Of course she laid stress on the fact that his ideas were the object of her contemplation; but Betton’s agreeable person had permitted him some insight into the incorrigible subjectiveness of female judgments, and he was pleasantly aware, from the lady’s tone, that she guessed him to be neither old nor ridiculous.  And suddenly he wrote to ask if he might see her. ...

The answer was long in coming.  Betton fumed at the delay, watched, wondered, fretted; then he received the one word “Impossible.”

He wrote back more urgently, and awaited the reply with increasing eagerness.  A certain shyness had kept him from once more modifying the instructions regarding his mail, and Strett still carried the letters directly to Vyse.  The hour when he knew they were passing under the latter’s eyes was now becoming intolerable to Betton, and it was a profound relief when the secretary, suddenly advised of his father’s illness, asked permission to absent himself for a fortnight.

Vyse departed just after Betton had despatched to Florida his second missive of entreaty, and for ten days he tasted the furtive joy of a first perusal of his letters.  The answer from Florida was not among them; but Betton said to himself “She’s thinking it over,” and delay, in that light, seemed favourable.  So charming, in fact, was this phase of sentimental suspense that he felt a start of resentment when a telegram apprised him one morning that Vyse would return to his post that day.

Betton had slept later than usual, and, springing out of bed with the telegram in his hand, he learned from the clock that his secretary was due in half an hour.  He reflected that the morning’s mail must long since be in; and, too impatient to wait for its appearance with his breakfast-tray, he threw on a dressing-gown and went to the library.  There lay the letters, half a dozen of them:  but his eye flew to one envelope, and as he tore it open a warm wave rocked his heart.

The letter was dated a few days after its writer must have received his own:  it had all the qualities of grace and insight to which his unknown friend had accustomed him, but it contained no allusion, however indirect, to the special purport of his appeal.  Even a vanity less ingenious than Betton’s might have read in the lady’s silence one of the most familiar motions of consent; but the smile provoked by this inference faded as he turned to his other letters.  For the uppermost bore the superscription “Dead Letter Office,” and the document that fell from it was his own last letter from Florida.

Betton studied the ironic “Unknown” for an appreciable space of time; then he broke into a laugh.  He had suddenly recalled Vyse’s similar experience with “Hester Macklin,” and the light he was able to throw on that obscure episode was searching enough to penetrate all the dark corners of his own adventure.  He felt a rush of heat to the ears; catching sight of himself in the glass, he saw a red ridiculous congested countenance, and dropped into a chair to hide it between flushed fists.  He was roused by the opening of the door, and Vyse appeared on the threshold.

“Oh, I beg pardon—­you’re ill?” said the secretary.

Betton’s only answer was an inarticulate murmur of derision; then he pushed forward the letter with the imprint of the Dead Letter Office.

“Look at that,” he jeered.

Vyse peered at the envelope, and turned it over slowly in his hands.  Betton’s eyes, fixed on him, saw his face decompose like a substance touched by some powerful acid.  He clung to the envelope as if to gain time.

“It’s from the young lady you’ve been writing to at Swazee Springs?” he asked at length.

“It’s from the young lady I’ve been writing to at Swazee Springs.”

“Well—­I suppose she’s gone away,” continued Vyse, rebuilding his countenance rapidly.

“Yes; and in a community numbering perhaps a hundred and seventy-five souls, including the dogs and chickens, the local post-office is so ignorant of her movements that my letter has to be sent to the Dead Letter Office.”

Vyse meditated on this; then he laughed in turn.  “After all, the same thing happened to me—­with ‘Hester Macklin,’ I mean,” he recalled sheepishly.

“Just so,” said Betton, bringing down his clenched fist on the table. “_ Just so_,” he repeated, in italics.

He caught his secretary’s glance, and held it with his own for a moment.  Then he dropped it as, in pity, one releases something scared and squirming.

“The very day my letter was returned from Swazee Springs she wrote me this from there,” he said, holding up the last Florida missive.

“Ha!  That’s funny,” said Vyse, with a damp forehead.

“Yes, it’s funny; it’s funny,” said Betton.  He leaned back, his hands in his pockets, staring up at the ceiling, and noticing a crack in the cornice.  Vyse, at the corner of the writing-table, waited.

“Shall I get to work?” he began, after a silence measurable by minutes.  Betton’s gaze descended from the cornice.

“I’ve got your seat, haven’t I?” he said, rising and moving away from the table.

Vyse, with a quick gleam of relief, slipped into the vacant chair, and began to stir about vaguely among the papers.

“How’s your father?” Betton asked from the hearth.

“Oh, better—­better, thank you.  He’ll pull out of it.”

“But you had a sharp scare for a day or two?”

“Yes—­it was touch and go when I got there.”

Another pause, while Vyse began to classify the letters.

“And I suppose,” Betton continued in a steady tone, “your anxiety made you forget your usual precautions—­whatever they were—­about this Florida correspondence, and before you’d had time to prevent it the Swazee post-office blundered?”

Vyse lifted his head with a quick movement.  “What do you mean?” he asked, pushing his chair back.

“I mean that you saw I couldn’t live without flattery, and that you’ve been ladling it out to me to earn your keep.”

Vyse sat motionless and shrunken, digging the blotting-pad with his pen.  “What on earth are you driving at?” he repeated.

“Though why the deuce,” Betton continued in the same steady tone, “you should need to do this kind of work when you’ve got such faculties at your service—­those letters were magnificent, my dear fellow!  Why in the world don’t you write novels, instead of writing to other people about them?”

Vyse straightened himself with an effort.  “What are you talking about, Betton?  Why the devil do you think I wrote those letters?”

Betton held back his answer, with a brooding face.  “Because I wrote ’Hester Macklin’s’—­to myself!”

Vyse sat stock-still, without the least outcry of wonder.  “Well—?” he finally said, in a low tone.

“And because you found me out (you see, you can’t even feign surprise!)—­because you saw through it at a glance, knew at once that the letters were faked.  And when you’d foolishly put me on my guard by pointing out to me that they were a clumsy forgery, and had then suddenly guessed that I was the forger, you drew the natural inference that I had to have popular approval, or at least had to make you think I had it.  You saw that, to me, the worst thing about the failure of the book was having you know it was a failure.  And so you applied your superior—­your immeasurably superior—­abilities to carrying on the humbug, and deceiving me as I’d tried to deceive you.  And you did it so successfully that I don’t see why the devil you haven’t made your fortune writing novels!”

Vyse remained silent, his head slightly bent under the mounting tide of Betton’s denunciation.

“The way you differentiated your people—­characterised them—­avoided my stupid mistake of making the women’s letters too short and logical, of letting my different correspondents use the same expressions:  the amount of ingenuity and art you wasted on it!  I swear, Vyse, I’m sorry that damned post-office went back on you,” Betton went on, piling up the waves of his irony.

But at this height they suddenly paused, drew back on themselves, and began to recede before the spectacle of Vyse’s pale distress.  Something warm and emotional in Betton’s nature—­a lurking kindliness, perhaps, for any one who tried to soothe and smooth his writhing ego—­softened his eye as it rested on the drooping figure of his secretary.

“Look here, Vyse—­I’m not sorry—­not altogether sorry this has happened!” He moved slowly across the room, and laid a friendly palm on Vyse’s shoulder.  “In a queer illogical way it evens up things, as it were.  I did you a shabby turn once, years ago—­oh, out of sheer carelessness, of course—­about that novel of yours I promised to give to Apthorn.  If I had given it, it might not have made any difference—­I’m not sure it wasn’t too good for success—­but anyhow, I dare say you thought my personal influence might have helped you, might at least have got you a quicker hearing.  Perhaps you thought it was because the thing was so good that I kept it back, that I felt some nasty jealousy of your superiority.  I swear to you it wasn’t that—­I clean forgot it.  And one day when I came home it was gone:  you’d sent and taken it.  And I’ve always thought since you might have owed me a grudge—­and not unjustly; so this … this business of the letters ... the sympathy you’ve shown … for I suppose it is sympathy … ?”

Vyse startled and checked him by a queer crackling laugh.

“It’s not sympathy?” broke in Betton, the moisture drying out of his voice.  He withdrew his hand from Vyse’s shoulder.  “What is it, then?  The joy of uncovering my nakedness?  An eye for an eye?  Is it that?”

Vyse rose from his seat, and with a mechanical gesture swept into a heap all the letters he had sorted.

“I’m stone broke, and wanted to keep my job—­that’s what it is,” he said wearily …