CHAPTER IX. THE EDITOR’S ROOM.
The greater man, the greater courtesy.
The Count de Lloseta and John Craik were sitting together in the editorial room of the Commentator.
It was a quiet room, with double windows and a permanent odour of tobacco smoke. An empty teacup stood on the table by John Craik’s elbow.
“Name of God!” Cipriani de Lloseta had ejaculated when he saw it. “At eleven o’clock in the morning!”
“Must stir the brain up,” was the reply.
“I would not do it with a teaspoon,” De Lloseta had answered, and then he sat down to correct the proof of Eve’s fourth article on “Spain and Spanish Life.”
They had been sitting thus together for half an hour in friendly silence, only broken by an occasional high-class Spanish anathema hurled at the head of the printer.
“A dog’s trade!” ejaculated De Lloseta at last, leaning back and throwing down his pen, “a dog’s trade, my friend!”
“It is mine,” replied Craik, without looking up. In fiction he was celebrated for a certain smartness of dialogue. His printed conversations were pretty displays of social sword-play. It had become a sort of habit with him to thrust and parry quickly; but the sudden smile on his lined face, the kindly glance from behind the spectacles, always took away the sting and demonstrated that it was mere “copy,” to fill up the dull columns of life and throw in a sparkle here and there.
“Have you finished?” he inquired.
“Yes, thank Heaven! I was not intended for a literary calling. That is number four, and I am not paid--I am not paid; there lies the sting.”
“Number four, yes; two published and two in hand,” replied John Craik. His mind was busy elsewhere; it was with the creatures of his own imagination, living their lives, rejoicing with them, sorrowing with them.
The Count rose and walked gravely to the hearthrug, holding the proof-sheets in his hand.
“Number four,” he reiterated. “Will they go on, my friend?”
John Craik looked up sharply.
“No.”
“How many more will you accept?”
“Two more at the outside, making six in all. The public is like a greedy child, it must be stopped before it makes itself sick. Nausea leaves a lasting distaste for that which preceded it.”
The Count nodded.
“And this worldly wisdom--is it the editor or the man who speaks?”
“The editor. The editor is a man who lives by saying ‘No.’”
“And you will say ‘No’ to any more from this--writer’s pen?”
“To any more about Spain I most certainly shall.”
The Count reflected. What little light the London day afforded fell full upon his long narrow face, upon the pointed Velasquez chin, the receding iron-grey hair brushed straight back.
“And the fact that the writer is supporting herself and a worn-out old uncle by her pen will make no difference?”
John Craik hesitated for a moment.
“Not the least,” he then said. “You seem to know the writer.”
“I do, and I am interested in her.”
“A lady?” John Craik was dotting his i’s with the contemplativeness of artistic finish.
“Essentially so.”
“And poor?”
“Yes, and proud as--”
“A Spaniard,” suggested John Craik.
“If you will. It is a vice which has almost become a virtue in these democratic days.”
John Craik looked up.
“I will do what I can, Lloseta,” he said. “But she is not a great writer, and will never become one.”
“I know that. Some day she will become a great lady, or I know nothing of them.”
Craik was still busy touching up his manuscript.
“I have never seen her,” he said. “But the impression I received from her manuscripts is that she is a girl who has lived a simple life among a simple people. She has seen a great deal of nature, out-of-door nature, which is pure, and cannot be too deeply studied. She has seen very little of human nature, which is not so pure as it might be. That is her chief charm of style, a high-minded purity. She does not describe the gutter and think she is writing of the street. By the way, I am expecting her here” (he paused, and looked at the clock on the mantelpiece) “in exactly two minutes.”
The Count rose quickly and took his hat. As he extended his hand to say “Good-bye” there was a rap at the door. The discreet youth who told John Craik’s falsehoods for him came in and handed his master a slip of paper with a name written thereon.
Craik read the inscription, crumpled up the paper, and threw it into the waste-paper basket.
“In one minute,” he said, and the liar withdrew.
Cipriani de Lloseta, with a quiet deliberation which was sometimes almost dramatic, stooped over the paper basket and recovered the crumpled slip of paper. He did not unfold it, but held it out, crushed up in his closed fist.
“Miss Eve Challoner,” he said.
John Craik nodded.
De Lloseta laughed and threw the paper into the fire.
“I must not be seen. Where do you propose to put me?”
“Go upstairs instead of down,” replied John Craik, as if he had been asked the same question before. “Wait on the next landing until you hear this door close; you may then escape in safety.”
“Thanks--good-bye.”
“Good-bye.”
When Eve entered the room, John Craik was writing. He rose with a bow savouring of a politer age than ours, and held out his hand.
“At last,” he said, “I have prevailed upon you to come and see me. Will you sit down? The chair is shabby, but great men and women have sat in it.”
He spoke pleasantly, with his twisted laugh, and when Eve was seated he sat slowly, carefully down again. He was thinking not so much of what he was saying as of his hearer. He saw that Eve was undeniably beautiful--the man saw that. The novelist saw that she was probably interesting. As he had just stated, great women had sat in the same chair, and it was John Craik’s impulse to save Eve from that same greatness. He had, since a brilliant youth at Oxford, been steeped, as it were, in literature. He had known all the great men and women, and he held strong views of his own. These were probably erroneous--many women will think so--but he held to them. They were based on experience, which is not always the case with views expressed in print and elsewhere. John Craik held that greatness is not good for women. That it is not for their own happiness, he knew. That it is not for the happiness of those around them, he keenly suspected. Some of Eve’s celebrated predecessors in that chair had not quite understood John Craik. All thought that he was not sufficiently impressed--not, that is, so impressed by them as they were themselves when they reflected upon their own renown.
He looked at Eve quickly, rubbing his hands together.
“May I, as an old man, ask some impertinent questions?” he inquired, with a cheerfulness which sat strangely on the wan face.
“Yes.”
“Why do you write?” he said. “Take time; answer me after reflection.”
Eve reflected while the great editor stared into the fire.
“To make money,” she answered at last.
He looked up, and saw that she was answering in simple good faith.
“That is right.”
He did not tell her that he was sick and tired of the jargon of art for art’s sake, literature for literature’s sake. He did not tell that--practical man of the world that he was--he had no faith in literary art; that he believed the power of writing to be a gift and nothing else; that the chief art in literature is that which is unconscious of itself.
“Do you feel within yourself the makings of a great author?”
Eve laughed, a sudden girlish laugh, which made John Craik reduce his estimate of her age by five years.
“No,” she answered.
He sat up and looked at her with a kind admiration.
“You are refreshing,” he said, “very, especially to a man who has seen stout and elderly females sit in that same chair and state their conviction that they were destined to be George Eliots or Charlotte Brontës, women who had written one improper or irreligious novel, which had obtained a certain success in the foolish circles.”
“Do you think I have,” asked Eve, “the--the makings of an income?”
John Craik reflected.
“A small one,” he said bluntly.
“That is all I want.”
Craik raised his eyebrows.
“And renown,” he said, “do you want that?”
“Not in the least, except for its intrinsic value.”
Craik banged his hand down on the arm of his chair and laughed aloud.
“This is splendid!” he cried. “I have never met such a practical person. Then you would be content to work for a sufficient income without ever being known to the world?”
“Yes, provided that the work was genuine and not given to me out of mere charity.”
The editor of the Commentator looked at her gravely. He had suddenly remembered Cipriani de Lloseta.
“Oh, you are proud!” he said.
Eve laughed with a negative shake of the head.
“Not more than other people,” she answered.
“Not more than other people. Well, we will have it so. And not ambitious.”
“No, I think not.”
“You may thank God for that,” said John Craik, half to himself. “An ambitious woman is not a pleasant person.”
There was a little pause, during which John Craik rubbed his chin reflectively with his bony fingers.
“And now,” he said, “that I know something about you, I will tell you why I asked you to be good enough to come and see me. To begin with, I am an old man; you can see that for yourself. I am a martyr to rheumatism, and I frequently suffer from asthma, otherwise I should have done myself the pleasure of calling on you. I wanted to see you, because lady authors are uncertain creatures. A large majority of them have nothing better to do, and therefore write. Others do not care for the money, but they do most decidedly for the renown. The nudge and whisper of society is nectar to them. Others again are brilliant in flashes and dull in long periods. Few, very few are content to work with their pen as their poorer sisters are forced to work with their needles. In that lies the secret of the more permanent success of men journalists and men authors. The journalism and the authorship are not the men, but merely the business of their lives. Now will you be content to work hard and steadily without any great hope of renown--to work, in fact, anonymously for a small but certain income?”
“Yes,” answered Eve, without hesitation.
Craik nodded his head gravely and thoughtfully. He was too deeply experienced to fall into the error of thinking that Eve was different from other women. He did not for a moment imagine that he had secured in her a permanent subscriber to the Commentator--possibly he did not want her as such. He was merely doing a good deed--no new thing to him, although his right hand hardly knew what his left was doing. He liked Eve, he admired her, and was interested in her. Cipriani de Lloseta he was deeply interested in, and he knew, with the keen instinct of the novelist, that he was being drawn into one of those romances of real life which exists in the matter-of-fact nineteenth century atmosphere that we breathe.
So Eve Challoner left John Craik’s office an independent woman for the time being, and the charity was so deeply hidden that her ever-combative pride had failed to detect it.