CHAPTER XLVII.
The reader can hardly be more amazed at the last chapter than is the writer,—amazed not so much at its contents as at its existence. I agree, at the close of the forty-fifth chapter, to exclude all save the loves of the Don from these pages, and then devote the whole of the forty-sixth to the amours of Charley and Alice! I break a promise almost in the act of making it. Some explanation seems proper, and one lies close at hand.
Your modern Genius is an out-and-out business man. He may be trusted to furnish his publisher just so many chapters, just so many pages, paragraphs, lines, words, as shall precisely fill the space allotted him in the magazine. Nor baker with his loaves, nor grocer with his herring, could be more exact. Pegasus no longer champs his bit, as of old, nor paws the earth. He goes in shafts, in these days, and is warranted not to kick in harness. He trots up to your front door, goods are delivered, and he jogs off to another customer, his flanks cool, no foam upon rein.
Now, I, being a mere Bushwhacker, bestride, of course, an untrained, shaggy mustang,—an animal sorely given to buck-jumping and to unaccountable bursts in every direction save along the beaten track. And how, pray, am I to know, astride such a disreputable prairie-Pegasus, whither I am going, and how far; and when, if ever, I may hope to return?
The average reader would probably accept this apology, but as I am (in a small way) a disciple of Epaminondas (who, as every school-boy knows, would not fib, even in jest), I shall not offer it in palliation of my conduct. The true explanation (and therefore the only one that that unique Grecian would have thought of giving) is to be found in the rather peculiar way in which this story is being written.
The romantic among my readers doubtless picture me to themselves seated in my arm-chair, my feet encased in embroidered slippers, my graceful person (for they did not believe me when I admitted that I was fat) wrapped in the folds of a rich dressing-gown. My intellectual brow is half shaded by my long hair, half illumined by the pale light of the midnight lamp. Meantime, with upturned eyes I await inspiration.
This, though a pretty enough picture, is not such as would have earned the approval of the hero who first taught the Spartans how to yield; for, on the contrary, this tale, so far, has been put together in a very different fashion—and as follows:
Whenever Charley and Alice are accessible to me,—when, that is, either they are spending a few weeks in Richmond, or I can run down to Leicester for a little holiday,—it is understood that we three are to get together, alone, of course, and at such hours as we are least liable to interruption. The door is then locked (never double-locked,—to Alice’s great regret,—for she says that this precaution is invariable in novels; but, for the life of us, none of the three could ever find out how to double-lock a door), and we begin talking over those old times, Alice and Charley doing most of it. For, as the reader may recall, either one or the other of them was an eye-witness of most of the scenes depicted in this volume. My part in the transactions is simple. From time to time I contribute some little incident which may have come within my personal knowledge; but, as a rule, I confine myself to taking notes; by the aid of which, I, in my leisure moments, draw up, between meetings, as clear a narrative as I can; and this being submitted to my coadjutors, is brought into its final shape by the combined efforts of the trio.
This method of composition explains, though I fear it will not excuse, what many readers will deem a grave defect in our joint production. Confined to what either Alice or Charley or myself saw or heard with our mere outward eyes or ears, there was obviously no place in these pages for any of that subtle analysis of thoughts, that deep insight into feelings, that far-reaching penetration into the inmost recesses of the mind and heart, that marks modern Genius.
But it is just on this point that Charley and I have had battle after battle with Alice. She will insist on Insight, on Analysis. People must be told, by the ream, what Mary felt, what the Don thought; and she cites novel after novel to fortify her position.
“Why do you bring up those books,” said Charley, one day. “Are we writing a novel, pray? We are writing, as I understand it, a—by the way, Jack-Whack, what are we writing—for instance?”
“A symph—”
“Exactly so! We are composing a Symphonic Monograph,—precisely. Now show me, in the whole range of literature, one solitary instance of a writer of symph—ic—graphs—”
Charley was not stammering. He has of late years almost entirely freed himself from this infirmity. The verbal fragments above represented escaped from alternate corners of his mouth, Alice having dammed the main channel of utterance in the most extraordinary manner. [It was a way she had. During the composition of this entire work, whenever Charley has seemed on the point of saying something that she was pleased to consider humorous, she would fly at him in the most barefaced manner, shaking with laughter, and cut him off. Then Charley glances at me, and tries to frown: “Oh, it is nobody but Jack,” says she.]
“Besides,” went on Charley, without even wiping his lips, “you know perfectly well, Alice, that you always skip that stuff. Look me in the eyes,” said he, seizing her firmly by the wrist,—“look me in the eyes and deny it!”
“Yes, but I am but a plain body, without pretensions; whereas people of ideas, of culture, you know—”
“Then you admit that where you come to pages, solid pages of Insight, you incontinently skip them for those passages where the characters are either acting or speaking? Is it not so, you little humbug?”
“But should we not always seek the praise of the judicious?”
“Oh, the simplicity of your soul, to imagine that we are making a book for the edification of the wise! As I understand it, Jack-Whack, it is composed exclusively for the delectation of—”
Alice held up her hand.
“Of the majority,” added Charley. [Interruption, remonstrance, confusion. “Pshaw! who minds Jack?”]
“The fact is,” resumed Charley, with traces of a hypocritical frown still lingering on his features,—“the fact is, all that kind of stuff which you profess to admire, but confess you never read, reminds one of the annotations of the classics for schools. They are not intended to instruct the boys, but are written by one pedant to astound other pedants. By the way, Jack, a capital idea strikes me. It will give our book such a taking and original air. Suppose we go through it from beginning to end, and simply cut out all the skipienda,—every line of it,—and leave only what is intended to be read?”
“And then publish it in the kingdom of Liliput?” inquired Alice.
This, then, my reader, is the way we talk while we write this story; some account of which I thought might interest you; and it was after a discussion like that just recorded that we three agreed (by a strictly party vote of two to one) that our lovers must, for the rest of the book, be reduced to a single pair. We reached this decision at the conclusion of our labors on the forty-fifth chapter. We also settled it to our own satisfaction, that by the time our future readers had reached this stage in our story, they would probably be consumed with curiosity to know whether it was Lucy or Mary, that, with the Don, was to constitute that favored pair. The fact is, it had now begun to dawn upon us that (although we knew better) we had actually given the supposed reader some right to look upon our mysterious hero as an emissary from Utah. So putting our heads together, we decided that it was time that he showed his colors. With a view to forwarding this end, therefore, I requested Alice and Charley to give me some account of a certain interview had between them, when the former had endeavored to discover from him which of the two girls had captured the Don. For Alice had often told me that she had made up her mind, on the night before that dinner at Oakhurst, to make an attack on the redoubtable Mr. Frobisher on that day, with this information in view. And she had formed this resolution owing to something that had occurred between Mary and herself.
It appears that on the night previous to this dinner, that reserve which Mary had shown Alice ever since the Don had crossed her path had suddenly given way. The two girls had gone to bed together, as was their wont. The Don’s visits to Oakhurst had been growing in frequency, and it was understood that this dinner was given in his honor.
“What, aren’t you asleep yet?” said Alice.
“No,” said Mary. Something in her voice touched her friend.
“You must not lie awake in this way,” said Alice. And she began to pass her fingers across Mary’s forehead and through her hair.
It was a simple action, but Mary broke down under it. Throwing her arms around her life-long friend, she pressed her convulsively to her bosom, and hiding her face in her pillow, wept in silence. After a while they began to talk, and they talked all night, as I am told that sex and age not unfrequently do. Alice arose next morning with a fixed determination to unravel the mystery that was giving her friend so much pain. Mr. Frobisher could make things plain, if he would. But would he? At any rate, she would try; for she was a plucky little soul. And so, when Charley had offered her his arm, that day, after dinner, for a promenade on the piazza, she felt that she had her opportunity. But it would appear that Charley had been looking for an opportunity himself; and so, the other day, when I asked this couple to let me have an account of the matter, with a view to the forty-sixth chapter of the Symphonic Monograph, it leaked out that Master Charles had, on this occasion, taken up Alice’s time not in telling her whom the Don loved, but whom Charles adored. This discovery, coming upon me so suddenly, upset my determination to exclude the loves of Charley and Alice from our story, and I called for an account of the courtship. For I felt assured that an authentic account of the first and only love-making of Charles The Silent would be the most delicious morsel in the whole Monograph. But at the merest allusion to such a thing, Alice blushed in the most becoming way; and when Charley, clearing his throat and putting on a bold look, made as though he were about to begin, her face became as scarlet; and rising from her seat she gave him the most dignified look that I have ever seen in those merry-glancing hazel eyes. Thereupon Charley and I laughed so heartily that Alice saw that she had been taken in by her husband’s serious face. “I thought not!” said she, laughing in turn. But the idea of a chapter given to the amours of Charles The Silent and Alice The Merry had seized upon my mind with so strong a fascination that I could not shake it off; and, as soon as I reached my bachelor quarters that night, I seized my pen. My eyes were soon in a fine phrensy rolling, I presume; for in the forty-sixth, or Galaxy Chapter, as I call it, from the numerous stars with which it is bespangled, distinct traces of Genius may be detected by the practised eye (with my assistance).
What I mean is, that chapter was composed in the manner in which true Creative Genius is in the habit of composing, as I understand; made, that is, out of the whole cloth,—woven of strands of air. But even here, though mounted on a genuine (though borrowed) earth-spurning Pegasus, I have not swerved far from the line that the great Bœotian would have marked out for me. Charley’s courtship was quite real. It was the words only that I have had to invent, left in the lurch as I was by my two collaborators. And I was going to add that, in all probability, Charley made use of not one of those I have put in his mouth, when I recalled a coincidence so singular that I feel that the reader is entitled to hear of it. When I read to my coadjutors my version of their amours, their merriment was uproarious. Charley, I may mention, who only smiled when he was a bachelor, has, since his marriage, grown stout and taken to laughing. So far as he was concerned, my putting the word “abyss” in his mouth was the master-stroke of the whole chapter.
“Why,” said he, choking with laughter, “I am sure I never made use of the word in my whole life!”
“Neither had you ever before in your life made love to a girl,” I objected.
“Don’t be too sure of that!” said Charley, with a knowing look.
“H’m!” put in Alice.
“What makes the thing so truly delicious,” said Charley, “is the lachrymose and woe-begone figure you make me cut; whereas—”
“Ah?” said Alice, bridling up.
“Whereas a chirpier lover than—”
“Chirpy! oh!”
“Why, Jack-Whack, if she did not love me the very first time she ever saw me,—love?—if she did not dote upon—”
“Dote indeed! Very well! very well! He felt sure, did he? Now, Jack, I’ll leave it to you. I’ll tell you just what he said, and let you decide whether they were the words of a ‘chirpy’ lover. Chirpy, indeed! Mr. Frobisher, you are too absurd! We were walking up and down the piazza, and I had on my green and white silk dress,—plaid, you know; and he said—the first thing he said was—I remember it as well as if it had been yesterday—”
I drew forth my pencil. Here, after all, providentially as it were, we were to have an authentic version of the amours of the silent man and her of the merry-glancing hazel eyes.
“My dear,” began Charley, with nervous haste, “we are interrupting Jack; let him go on with his reading.”
“Aha!” cried Alice, in triumph, “I thought—”
Here Alice detected Charley giving me, with his off eye, a wink so huge that its corrugations (like waves bursting over a breakwater) scaled the barrier of his nose and betrayed what the other side of his face was at.
Charley ducked his head just in time; and immediately thereafter began a series of dextrous manœuvres among the chairs and other furniture in the room, in evading Alice’s persistent efforts to smooth out some of the wrinkles that wicked wink had wrought. At last he tumbled into his seat rather blown, and with one cheek redder than the other.
Amid such scenes as this has this tale been tacked together. Can the reader wonder at its harum-scarum way of getting itself told? Am I not driving a team of mustangs?
“They are all alike,” puffed Charley; “they love us to distraction, but we must not know it. Go on, my boy.”
I read on amid much hilarity; and it was such reception of this solitary effort of my individual muse that induced me to retain it in the body of the work. At last we came to the passage where occurred the coincidence to which I have alluded.
In my fabulous and starry account of the billing and cooing on the piazza, I make Charley ask, May my heart beat in the frolic rhythm of the scherzo? This—for why should I hide my harmless self-content from my friend, the reader?—this I don’t deny that I thought a very neat and unhackneyed way of asking a girl whether she gave you leave to consider yourself a happy dog. It was my little climax, and—I confess it—my heart fluttered a little as I drew near the passage, in anticipation of the plaudits I trusted to receive.
No clapping of hands. A dead silence, rather; and looking up, I saw my friends staring at one another.
“What’s the matter?” asked I, a little sheepishly. “I rather thought,” I stammered, “that—that that was—not so bad?”
“Mr. Frobisher, I am astonished at you!” [At that period it was not usual for Virginia wives to call their husbands by their Christian names.]
“Indeed, my dear—”
“You need not say one word! I should not have thought it of you, that’s all!”
“But, Alice—”
“Why, what’s the matter?” asked I, bewildered.
“Oh, nothing!” said Alice, with a toss of her head. “Jack-Whack, I’ll tell you; she thinks I have been blabbing to you.”
“Thinks!”
“But I have not!”
“Do you mean to tell me that Jack, without a hint from you—actually—” she hesitated.
“‘Frolic rhythm of the scherzo!’” I shouted, in joyous derision; “and you positively used that phrase, you sentimental old fraud!”
Charley turned very red,—redder still, when Alice, relieved of the suspicion that he had been revealing their little love-mysteries, laughed merrily at his discomfiture.
“It was not quite so b-b-b-b-ad as that. I admit the ‘scherzo’ part; b-b-b-ut ‘frolic rhythm’! I was not so many kinds of an idiot as that amounts to.”
And so—I swear it by the shades of Epaminondas—I had actually hit upon the very word,—and truth is again stranger than fiction.