“One failure can break a dramatist, when it is a failure of this kind,� said her disconsolate lover. “Those two other plays are ... were coming out at theaters held by the same lessees—Barney and Keedler, of the Mammoth American Dramatic Trust. And so, don’t you see, all my balloons are deflated at once. I’ve come down with a crash, and ... it hurts! But you will trust me, won’t you? You will go on believing in me, though I’ve had what technical people will call a set-back. And if our ... our marriage must be delayed....� He stopped under one of the liquid soot-distilling lilacs, and caught Petronella in his arms, crushing the draperies arranged by her Hampstead dressmaker roughly against his damp evening overcoat. “You will not mind!... We will wait and hope, and love each other ... love each other.... After all, while we are together, nothing is too hard to bear....�
Thus spoke Canwarden, counting his chickens ere their emergence from the shell, after the fashion of a young man too deeply in love to see clearly what manner of young woman his heart is set upon. But Petronella shivered, conscious that the Hampstead garden was clammy, and that the dazzling halo of coming fame and approaching prosperity had been banished from Canwarden’s brow. He stood before her, tall and straight, and sufficiently good to look at, with his bright brown eyes, straight, short nose, and sensitive, clean-shaven lips, though his curly hair, it must be added, was receding too fast from a brow more bumpy than, according to the accepted canons of classical proportion, a brow should be. Upon his shirt-front a lilac had shed an inky tear, and his voice was husky with love and sorrow, not of an utterly selfish kind, as he promised Petronella to work hard, never to cease working until he had regained the lost ground.
“But you never may!...� she said, and the doubt in those shallow blue eyes—he never had realized before that they were shallow—pierced him to the soul. “And Nora will be married before me, and she is two years younger, and everybody in Hampstead will say....�
Canwarden, with heat, devoted Hampstead to the devil. I am not defending him. Petronella thought him brutal, coarse, and profane. Women of Petronella’s kind always enthusiastically uphold the dignity of the devil. She told him what she thought, and she wound up in the red-papered hall of the one-sided Hampstead villa by saying that he and she had better part. She added, as women of Petronella’s type invariably do add, that the dead past might bury its dead. And she drew off her engagement ring—an olivine, imposed by a Bond Street jeweler upon the too-confiding Canwarden as an emerald, harnessed between two indifferent diamonds of yellowish hue—and thrust it back upon him, and went upstairs to her room and locked the door; and as the hall-door banged violently and the iron avenue gates clashed behind the haggard Canwarden, his late betrothed sat down to pen a little note to Percy Flicker—a young man without a chin, junior partner of a small but pushing firm of shipbrokers at No. 35,000 Cornhill. The porch made up its mind and sat down that night, and Percy the chinless called upon the following evening, and was compelled to enter his Love’s bower by the back-door.
And Canwarden, seeing volcanic ruins smoking where his Castle of Hope had stood, wandered the West End and the Strand like a thing accursed. He went into his club, and men slapped him on the shoulder and congratulated him upon the New York success. They would learn the truth later, he said to himself, and then they would chuckle and sneer. The rustling of the cablegram in his waistcoat pocket whispered “Yes s’s’!� Meanwhile he had no appetite for solid food, and, quenching the thirst that consumed him with iced brandy and soda, he, Canwarden, usually the most temperate of men, realized how easily spanned is the gulf that severs the sober man from the inebriate. He might, perhaps, have crossed it for good and all had he not chanced to pass the invitingly open door of Grow’s Transatlantic Bureau of Exchange. The shipping advertisements loomed large and gaily-colored in the window; passenger lists and railway guides hung from hooks upon the walls, and lay in piles upon the counter, and a civil clerk and an attractive girl with squirrel-colored hair were busy over ledgers and things. Prompted by his guardian angel Canwarden went in and asked for the New York papers. The mail was just in, and he got them, and, leaning on the polished shelf-desk where people write out code telegrams, he turned to the theatrical column. His drama, The Poisoned Curse, had been withdrawn a fortnight ago from the stage of Barney and Keedler’s Theater—slain as a thing unfit to live—and a variety vaudeville substituted in its stead. Did not the cablegram—Loris K. Boodler’s cablegram—say so? He would see the hideous announcement for himself, and then go under, as men went who had broken the golden bowl of Youth and Hope, and were too weary to go on fighting.
Could it ... could it be a mistake...? Was the play a success after all? It looked like it. For in flamboyant type The Poisoned Curse: a Romantic Drama in four acts and eleven scenes, by Urban Canwarden, was announced by the New York Trumpeter as being presented to-night, and every night, and to-day at 1.30, and Saturday matinées as announced. The play had been running when Loris K. Boodler sent the cablegram announcing its withdrawal; the play was running now—would run. Canwarden’s hands shook so that the flimsy news-sheet tore. He glanced at the girl with the squirrel-colored hair and apologized, saying that he would pay for the paper. She smiled, and he found that he was able to smile back again. He despatched a short but expressive cablegram to the office of Mr. Loris K. Boodler, relieving that smart and go-ahead agent from further responsibility in connection with the collection of his percentages, and walked out of Grow’s Transatlantic Bureau of Exchange with his head up—a free man.
Petronella married Percy Flicker. Canwarden is a flourishing and popular dramatist, with a thumping bank balance and a permanent predilection for bachelor existence. All the female villains in his plays are blondes. The stage directions, underlined in red, run thus: “Enter So-and-So, a fair and slightly formed woman of barely thirty, with icy and repellent blue eyes and hair of a pale and sunless straw color. She conveys the impression of cold insincerity and self-centered absorption, and her hard and mocking laugh falls gratingly upon the ear.� Which goes to prove that Human Nature is and never will be anything but Human Nature until the Curtain drops.
THE HAND THAT FAILED
FOUR men were seated about a round table, with dessert and wine upon it, in the dining-room of a luxuriously furnished house in a fashionable street in the West End of London—a street which is the Eldorado of the struggling professional man, the Tom Tiddler’s ground of successful members of the faculties of surgery and medicine. The aroma of Turkish coffee and choice Havanas was warm and fragrant upon the air, and the Bishop consented to a second Benedictine. His left-hand neighbor was a dry-faced, courteous gentleman, a King’s Counsel, famous by reason of several causes célèbres. The third man at table was merely a hard-working, small-earning practitioner of medicine and surgery, settled in a populous suburb of the high-lying North. Coming to the host, with whom the Highgate Doctor had walked the hospitals in his student days, one may describe him as a world-famous Consulting Specialist and operator; one of the kings of the scalpel, the bistoury, and the curette; a man of medals, orders, and scientific titles innumerable. Forty-three years of age, shortly about to be married (to a widowed niece of the Bishop), and in excellent spirits—a thought too excellent, perhaps....
“Wants rest, decidedly. Pupils of the eyes unnaturally dilated, circulation not what it ought to be. Overdone.... Changed color when the servant dropped a fork just now.... He had better take care!� said the Highgate Doctor to himself. He had to deal with many cases of nervous breakdown up Highgate way, where there are so many compositors and clerks and journalists. But the Bishop and the King’s Counsel had never seen the Distinguished Surgeon look more fit, and so they told him.