Ten minutes later he had reached the conclusion that life without Evangeline Pembury would be a blank.
And yet he had hesitated before laying his heart at her feet. She looked all right. She seemed all right. Quite possibly she was all right. But before proposing he had to be sure. He had to make certain that there was no danger of her suddenly producing a manuscript fastened in the top left corner with pink silk and asking his candid opinion of it. Everyone has his pet aversion. Some dislike slugs, others cockroaches. Egbert Mulliner disliked female novelists.
And so now, as they stood together in the moonlight, he said:
‘Tell me, have you ever written a novel?’ She seemed surprised.
‘A novel? No.’
‘Short stories, perhaps?’
‘No.’
Egbert lowered his voice.
‘Poems?’ he whispered, hoarsely.
‘No.’
Egbert hesitated no longer. He produced his soul like a conjurer extracting a rabbit from a hat and slapped it down before her. He told her of his love, stressing its depth, purity, and lasting qualities. He begged, pleaded, rolled his eyes, and clasped her little hand in his. And when, pausing for a reply, he found that she had been doing a lot of thinking along the same lines and felt much the same about him as he did about her, he nearly fell. over backwards. It seemed to him that his cup of joy was full.
It is, odd how love will affect different people. It caused Egbert next morning to go out on the links and do the first mine in one over bogey. Whereas Evangeline, finding herself filled with a strange ferment which demanded immediate outlet, sat down at a little near-Chippendale table, ate five marshmallows, and began to write a novel.
Three weeks of the sunshine and ozone of Burwash Bay had toned up Egbert’s system to the point where his medical adviser felt that it would be safe for him to go back to London and resume his fearful trade. Evangeline followed him a month later. She arrived home at four-fifteen on a sunny afternoon, and at four-sixteen-and-a-half Egbert shot through the door with the love-light in his eyes.
‘Evangeline!’
‘Egbert!’
But we will not dwell on the ecstasies of the reunited lovers. We will proceed to the point where Evangeline raised her head from Egbert’s shoulder and uttered a little giggle. One would prefer to say that she gave a light laugh. But it was not a light laugh. It was a giggle — a furtive, sinister, shamefaced giggle, which froze Egbert’s blood with a nameless fear. He stared at her, and she giggled again.
‘Egbert,’ she said, ‘I want to tell you something.’
‘Yes?’ said Egbert.
Evangeline giggled once more.
‘I know it sounds too silly for words,’ she said, ‘but—’
‘Yes? Yes?’
‘I’ve written a novel, Egbert.’
In the old Greek tragedies it was a recognized rule that any episode likely to excite the pity and terror of the audience to too great an extent must be enacted behind the scenes. Strictly speaking, therefore, this scene should be omitted. But the modern public can stand more than the ancient Greeks, so it had better remain on the records.
The room stopped swimming before Egbert Mulliner’s tortured eyes. Gradually the piano, the chairs, the pictures, and the case of stuffed birds on the mantelpiece resumed their normal positions. He found speech.
‘You’ve written a novel?’ he said, dully.
‘Well, I’ve got to chapter twenty-four.’
‘You’ve got to chapter twenty-four?’
‘And the rest will be easy.
‘The rest will be easy?’
Silence fell for a space — a silence broken only by Egbert’s laboured breathing. Then Evangeline spoke impulsively.
‘Oh, Egbert!’ she cried. ‘I really do think some of it is rather good. I’ll read it to you now.
How strange it is, when some great tragedy has come upon us, to look back at the comparatively mild beginnings of our misfortunes and remember how we thought then that Fate had done its worst. Egbert, that afternoon, fancied that he had plumbed the lowest depths of misery and anguish. Evangeline, he told himself, had fallen from the pedestal on which he had set her. She had revealed herself as a secret novel-writer. It was the limit, he felt, the extreme edge. It put the tin hat on things.
It was, alas! nothing of the kind. It bore the same resemblance to the limit that the first drop of rain bears to the thunderstorm.
The mistake was a pardonable one. The acute agony which he suffered that afternoon was more than sufficient excuse for Egbert Mulliner’s blunder in supposing that he had drained the bitter cup to the dregs. He writhed, as he listened to this thing which she had entitled ‘Parted Ways’, unceasingly. It tied his very soul in knots.
Evangeline’s novel was a horrible, an indecent production. Not in the sense that it would be likely to bring a blush to any cheek but his, but because she had put on paper in bald words every detail of the only romance that had ever come under her notice — her own. There it was, his entire courtship, including the first holy kiss and not omitting the quarrel which they had had within two days of the engagement. In the novel she had elaborated this quarrel, which in fact had lasted twenty-three minutes, into a ten years’ estrangement — thus justifying the title and preventing the story finishing in the first five thousand words. As for his proposal, that was inserted verbatim; and, as he listened, Egbert shuddered to think that he could have polluted the air with such frightful horse-radish.
He marvelled, as many a man has done before and will again, how women can do these things. Listening to ‘Parted Ways’ made him, personally, feel as if he had suddenly lost his trousers while strolling ‘along Piccadilly.
Something of these feelings he would have liked to put into words, but the Mulliners are famous for their chivalry. He would, he imagined, feel a certain shame if he ever hit Evangeline or walked on her face in thick shoes; but that shame would be as nothing to the shame he would feel if he spoke one millimetre of what he thought about ‘Parted Ways’.
‘Great!’ he croaked.
Her eyes were shining.
‘Do you really think so?’
‘Fine!’
He found it easier to talk in monosyllables.
‘I don’t suppose any publisher would buy it,’ said Evangeline. Egbert began to feel a little better. Nothing, of course, could alter the fact that she had written a novel; but it might be possible to hush it up.
‘So what I am going to do is to pay the expenses of publication.’
Egbert did not reply. He was staring into the middle distance and trying to light a fountain-pen with an unlighted match.
And Fate chuckled grimly, knowing that it had only just begun having fun with Egbert.
Once in every few publishing seasons there is an Event. For no apparent reason, the great heart of the Public gives a startled jump, and the public’s great purse is emptied to secure copies of some novel which has stolen into the world without advance advertising and whose only claim to recognition is that The Licensed Victuallers’ Gazette has stated in a two-line review that it is ‘readable’.
The rising firm of Mainprice and Peabody published a first edition of three hundred copies of ‘Parted Ways’. And when they found, to their chagrin, that Evangeline was only going to buy twenty of these — somehow Mainprice, who was an optimist, had got the idea that she was good for a hundred (‘You can sell them to your friends’) their only interest in the matter was to keep an eye on the current quotations for waste paper. The book they were going to make their money on was Stultitia Bodwin’s ‘Offal’, in connection with which they had arranged in advance for a newspaper discussion on ‘The Growing Menace of the Sex Motive in Fiction: Is There to be no Limit?’
Within a month ‘Offal’ was off the map. The newspaper discussion raged before an utterly indifferent public, which had made one of its quick changes and’ discovered that it had had ‘enough of sex, and that what it wanted now was good, sweet, wh
olesome, tender tales of the pure love of a man for a maid, which you could leave lying about and didn’t have to shove under the cushions of the chesterfield every time you heard your growing boys coming along. And the particular tale which it selected for its favour was Evangeline’s ‘Parted Ways’.
It is these swift, unheralded changes of the public mind which make publishers stick straws in their hair and powerful young novelists rush round to the wholesale grocery firms to ask if the berth of junior clerk is still open. Up to the very moment of the Great Switch, sex had been the one safe card. Publishers’ lists were congested with scarlet tales of Men Who Did and Women Who Shouldn’t Have Done but Who Took a Pop at It. And now the bottom had dropped out of the market without a word of warning, and practically the only way in which readers could gratify their new-born taste for the pure and simple was by fighting for copies of ‘Parted Ways’.
They fought like tigers. The offices of Mainprice and Peabody hummed like a hive. Printing machines worked day and night. From the Butes of Kyle to the rock-bound coasts of Cornwall, a great cry went up for ‘Parted Ways’. In every home in Ealing West ‘Parted Ways’ was found on the whatnot, next to the aspidistra and the family album. Clergymen preached about it, parodists parodied it, stockbrokers stayed away from Cochran’s Revue to sit at home and cry over it.
Numerous paragraphs appeared in the Press concerning its probable adaptation into a play, a musical comedy, and a talking picture. Nigel Playfair was stated to have bought it for Sybil Thorndike, Sir Alfred Butt for Nellie Wallace. Laddie Cliff was reported to be planning a musical play based on it, starring Stanley Lupino and Leslie Henson. It was rumoured that Camera was considering the part of ‘Percy’, the hero.
And on the crest of this wave, breathless but happy, rode Evangeline.
And Egbert? Oh, that’s Egbert, spluttering down in the trough there. We can’t be bothered about Egbert now.
Egbert, however, found ample time to be bothered about himself. He passed the days in a frame of mind which it would be ridiculous to call bewilderment. He was stunned, overwhelmed, sandbagged. Dimly he realized that considerably more than a hundred thousand perfect strangers were gloating over the most sacred secrecies of his private life, and that the exact words of his proposal of marriage were engraven on considerably over a hundred thousand minds. But, except that it made him feel as if he were being tarred and feathered in front of a large and interested audience, he did not mind that so much. What really troubled him was the alteration in Evangeline.
The human mind adjusts itself readily to prosperity. Evangeline’s first phase, when celebrity was new and bewildering, soon passed. The stammering reception of the first reporter became a memory. At the end of two weeks she was talking to the Press with the easy nonchalance of a prominent politician, and coming back at note-book-bearing young men with words which they had to look up in the office Webster. Her art, she told them, was rhythmical rather than architectural, and she inclined, if anything, to the school of the surrealists.
She had soared above Egbert’s low-browed enthusiasms.
When he suggested motoring out to Addington and putting in a few holes of golf, she excused herself. She had letters to answer.
People would keep writing to her, saying how much ‘Parted Ways’ had helped them, and one had to be civil to one’s public. Autographs, too. She really could not spare a moment.
He asked her to come with him to the Amateur Championship. She shook her head. The date, she said, clashed with her lecture to the East Dulwich Daughters of Minerva Literary and Progress Club on ‘Some Tendencies of Modern Fiction’.
All these things Egbert might have endured, for, despite the fact that she could speak so lightly of the Amateur Championship, he still loved her dearly. But at this point there suddenly floated into his life like a cloud of poison-gas the sinister figure of Jno. Henderson Banks.
‘Who,’ he asked, suspiciously, one day, as she was giving him ten minutes before hurrying off to address the Amalgamated Mothers of Manchester on ‘The Novel: Should It Teach?’ — ‘was that man I saw you coming down the street with?’
‘That wasn’t a man,’ replied Evangeline. ‘That was my literary agent.’
And so it proved. Jno. Henderson Banks was now in control of Evangeline’s affairs. This outstanding blot on the public weal was a sort of human charlotte russe with tortoiseshell-rimmed eye-glasses and a cooing, reverential manner towards his female clients. He had a dark, romantic face, a lissom figure, one of those beastly cravat things that go twice round the neck, and a habit of beginning his remarks with the words ‘Dear lady’. The last man, in short, whom a fiancé would wish to have hanging about his betrothed. If Evangeline had to have a literary agent, the sort of literary agent Egbert would have selected for her would have been one of those stout, pie-faced literary agents who chew half-smoked cigars and wheeze as they enter the editorial sanctum.
A jealous frown flitted across his face.
‘Looked a bit of a Gawd-help-us to me,’ he said, critically.
‘Mr Banks,’ retorted Evangeline, ‘is a superb main of business.’
‘Oh, yeah?’ said Egbert, sneering visibly. And there for a time the matter rested.
But not for long. On the following Monday morning Egbert called Evangeline up on the telephone and asked her to lunch.
‘I am sorry,’ said Evangeline. ‘I am engaged to lunch with Mr Banks.’
‘Oh?’ said Egbert.
‘Yes,’ said Evangeline.
‘Ah!’ said Egbert.
Two days later Egbert called Evangeline up on the telephone and invited her to dinner.
‘I am sorry,’ said Evangeline. ‘I am dining with Mr Banks.’
‘Ah?’ said Egbert.
‘Yes,’ said Evangeline.
‘Oh!’ said Egbert.
Three days after that Egbert arrived at Evangeline’s flat with tickets for the theatre.
‘I am sorry—’ began Evangeline.
‘Don’t say it,’ said Egbert. ‘Let me guess. You are going to the theatre with Mr Banks?’
‘Yes, I am. He has seats for the first night of Tchekov’s “Six Corpses in Search of an Undertaker”.’
‘He has, has he?’
‘Yes, he has.’
‘He has, eh?’
‘Yes, he has.’
Egbert took a couple of turns about the room, and for a space there was silence except for the sharp grinding of his teeth. Then he spoke.
‘Touching lightly on this gumboil Banks,’ said Egbert, ‘I am the last man to stand in the way of your having a literary agent. If you must write novels, that is a matter between you and your God. And, if you do see fit to write novels, I suppose you must have a literary agent. But— and this is where I want you to follow me very closely — I cannot see the necessity of employing a literary agent who looks like Lord Byron; a literary agent who coos in your left ear, a literary agent who not only addresses you as “Dear lady”, but appears to find it essential to the conduct of his business to lunch, dine, and go to the theatre with you daily.’
‘I—’
Egbert held up a compelling hand.
‘I have not finished,’ he said. ‘Nobody,’ he proceeded, ‘could call me a narrow-minded man. If Jno. Henderson Banks looked a shade less like one of the great lovers of history, I would have nothing to say. If, when he talked business to a client, Jno. Henderson Banks’s mode of vocal delivery were even slightly less reminiscent of a nightingale trilling to its mate, I would remain silent. But he doesn’t, and it isn’t. And such being the case, and taking into consideration the fact that you are engaged to me, I feel it my duty to instruct you to see this drooping flower far more infrequently. In fact, I would advocate expunging him altogether. If he wishes to discuss business with you, let him do it over the telephone. And I hope he gets the wrong number.’
Evangeline had risen, and was facing him with flashing eyes.
‘Is that so?’ she said.
‘That,’ said Egbert, ‘is so.’
Am I a serf?’ demanded Evangeline.
A what?’ said Egbert.
A serf. A slave. A peon. A creature subservient to your lightest whim.’
Egbert considered the point.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I shouldn’t think so.’
‘No,’ said Evangeline, ‘I am not. And I refuse to allow you to dictate to me in the choice of my friends.’
Egbert stared blankly.
‘You mean, after all I have said, that you intend to let this blighted chrysanthemum continue to frisk round?’
‘I do.’
‘You seriously propose to continue chummy with this revolting piece of cheese?’
‘I do.’
‘You absolutely and literally decline to give this mistake of Nature the push?’
‘I do.’
‘Well!’ said Egbert.
A pleading note came into his voice.
‘But, Evangeline, it is your Egbert who speaks.’
The haughty girl laughed a hard, bitter laugh.
‘Is it?’ she said. She laughed again. ‘Do you imagine that we are still engaged?’
‘Aren’t we?’
‘We certainly aren’t. You have insulted me, outraged my finest feelings, given an exhibition of malignant tyranny which makes me thankful that I have realized in time the sort of main you are. Good-bye, Mr Mulliner!’
‘But listen—’ began Egbert.
‘Go!’ said Evangeline. ‘Here is your hat.’
She pointed imperiously to the door. A moment later she had banged it behind him.
It was a grim-faced Egbert Mulliner who entered the elevator, and a grimmer-faced Egbert Mulliner who strode down Sloane Street. His dream, he realized, was over. He laughed harshly as he contemplated the fallen ruins of the castle which he had built in the air.
Well, he still had his work.
In the offices of The Weekly Booklover it was whispered that a strange change had come over Egbert Mulliner. He seemed a stronger, tougher man. His editor, who since Egbert’s illness had behaved towards him with a touching humanity, allowing him to remain in the office and write paragraphs about Forthcoming Books while others, more robust, were sent off to interview the female novelists, now saw in him a right-hand man on whom he could lean.