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MR. AND MRS. HELMER
The next morning, Mary set out to find Letty, from whom, as I
have said, she had heard but twice since her marriage. Mary had
written again about a month ago, but had had no reply. The sad
fact was, that, ever since she left Testbridge, Letty, for a long
time, without knowing it, had been going down hill. There have
been many whose earnestness has vanished with the presence of
those whose influence awoke it. Letty's better self seemed to
have remained behind with Mary; and not even if he had been as
good as she thought him, could Tom himself have made up to her
for the loss of such a friend.
But Letty had not found marriage at all the grand thing she had
expected. With the faithfulness of a woman, however, she
attributed her disappointment to something inherent in marriage,
nowise affecting the man whom marriage had made her husband.
That he might be near the center to which what little work he did
gravitated, Tom had taken a lodging in a noisy street, as unlike
all that Letty had been accustomed to as anything London, except
in its viler parts, could afford. Never a green thing was to be
looked upon in any direction. Not a sweet sound was to be heard.
The sun, at this time of the year, was seldom to be seen in
London anywhere; and in Lydgate Street, even when there was no
fog, it was but askance, and for a brief portion of the day, that
he shone upon that side where stood their dusty windows. And then
the noise!--a ceaseless torrent of sounds, of stony sounds, of
iron sounds, of grinding sounds, of clashing sounds, of yells and
cries--of all deafening and unpoetic discords! Letty had not much
poetry in her, and needed what could be had from the outside so
much the more. It is the people of a land without springs that
must have cisterns. It is the poetic people without poetry that
pant and pine for the country. When such get hold of a poet, they
expect him to talk poetry, or, at least, to talk about poetry! I
fancy poets do not read much poetry, and except to their peers do
not often care to talk about it. But to one like Letty, however
little she may understand or even be aware of the need, the
poetic is as necessary as rain in summer; while, to one so little
skilled in the finding of it, there was none visible, audible, or
perceptible about her--except, indeed, what, of poorest sort for
her uses, she might discover bottled in some circulating library:
there was one--blessed proximity!--within ten minutes' walk of
her.
Once a week or so, some weeks oftener, Tom would take her to the
play, and that was, indeed, a happiness--not because of the
pleasure of the play only or chiefly, though that was great, but
in the main because she had Tom beside her all the time, and
mixed up Tom with the play, and the play with Tom.
Alas! Tom was not half so dependent upon her, neither derived
half so much pleasure from her company. Some of his evenings
every week he spent at houses where those who received him had
not the faintest idea whether he had a wife or not, and cared as
little, for it would have made no difference: they would not have
invited her. Small, silly, conceited Tom, regarding himself as a
somebody, was more than content to be asked to such people's
houses. He thought he went as a lion, whereas it was merely as a
jackal: so great is the love of some for wild beasts in general,
that they even think something of jackals. He was aware of no
insult to himself in asking him whether as a lion or any other
wild beast, nor of any to his wife and himself together in not
asking her with him. While she sat in her dreary lodging, dingily
clad and lonely, Tom, dressed in the height of the fashion, would
be strolling about grand rooms, now exchanging a flying shot of
recognition, now pausing to pay a compliment to this lady on her
singing, to that on her verses, to a third, where he dared, on
her dress; for good-natured Tom was profuse of compliments, not
without a degree and kind of honesty in them; now singing one of
his own songs to the accompaniment of some gracious goddess, now
accompanying the same or some other gracious goddess as she sang
--for Tom could do that well enough for people without a
conscience in their music; now in the corner of a conservatory,
now in a cozy little third room behind a back drawing-room,
talking nonsense with some lady foolish enough to be amused with
his folly. Tom meant no harm and did not do much--was only a
human butterfly, amusing himself with other creatures of a day,
who have no notion that death can not kill them, or they might
perhaps be more miserable than they are. They think, if they
think at all, that it is life, strong in them, that makes them
forget death; whereas, in truth, it is death, strong in them,
that makes them forget life. Like a hummingbird, all sparkle and
flash, Tom flitted through the tropical delights of such society
as his "uncommon good luck" had gained him admission to, forming
many an evanescent friendship, and taking many a graceful liberty
for which his pleasant looks, confident manners, and free
carriage were his indemnity--for Tom seemed to have been born to
show what a nice sort of a person a fool, well put together, may
be--with his high-bred air, and his ready replies, for he had
also a little of that social element, once highly valued, now
less countenanced, and rare--I mean wit.
He had, indeed, plenty of all sorts of brains; but no amount of
talent could reveal to him the reason or the meaning of the fact
that wedded life was less interesting than courtship; for the
former, the reason lay in himself, and of himself proper he knew,
as I have said, next to nothing; while the latter, the meaning of
the fact, is profound as eternity. He had no notion that, when he
married, his life was thereby, in a lofty and blessed sense,
forfeit; that, to save his wife's life, he must yield his own,
she doing the same for him--for God himself can save no other
way. But the notion of any saving, or the need of it, was far
from Tom; nor had Letty, for her part, any thought of it either,
except from the tyranny of her aunt. Not the less, in truth, did
they both want saving--very much saving--before life could be to
either of them a good thing. It is only its inborn possibility of
and divine tendency toward blossoming that constitute life a good
thing. Life's blossom is its salvation, its redemption, the
justification of its existence--and is a thing far off with most
of us. For Tom, his highest notion of life was to be recognized
by the world for that which he had chosen as his idea of himself
--to have the reviews allow him a poet, not grudgingly, nor with
abatement of any sort, but recognizing him as the genius he must
contrive to believe himself, or "perish in" his "self-contempt."
Then would he live and die in the blessed assurance that his name
would be for over on the lips and in the hearts of that idol of
fools they call posterity-divinity as vague as the old
gray Fate, and less noble, inasmuch as it is but the supposed
concave whence is to rebound the man's own opinion of himself.
While jewelly Tom was idling away time which yet could hardly be
called precious, his little brown wife, as I have said, sat at
home--such home as a lodging can be for a wife whose husband
finds his interest mainly outside of it--inquired after by
nobody, thought of by nobody, hardly even taken up by her own
poor, weary self; now trying in vain after interest in the feeble
trash she was reading; now getting into the story for the last
half of a chapter, to find herself, when the scene changed at the
next, as far out and away and lost as ever; now dropping the book
on her knee, to sit musing--if, indeed, such poor mental vagaries
as hers can be called even musing!--ignorant what was the matter
with her, hardly knowing that anything was the matter, and yet
pining morally, spiritually, and psychically; now wondering when
Tom would be home; now trying to congratulate herself on his
being such a favorite, and thinking what an honor it was to a
poor country girl like her to be the wife of a man so much
courted by the best society--for she never doubted that the
people to whose houses Tom went desired his company from
admiration of his writings. She had not an idea that never a soul
of them or of their guests cared a straw about what he wrote--
except, indeed, here and there, a young lady in her first season,
who thought it a grand thing to know an author, as poor Letty
thought it a grand thing to be the wife of one. Hail to the
coming time when, those who write books outnumbering those who do
not, a man will be thought no more of because he can write than
because he can sit a horse or brew beer! In that happy time the
true writer will be neither an atom the more regarded nor
disregarded; he will only be less troubled with birthday books,
requests for autographs, and such-like irritating attentions.
From that time, also, it may be, the number of writers will begin
to diminish; for then, it is to be hoped, men will begin to see
that it is better to do the inferior thing well than the superior
thing after a middling fashion. The man who would not rather be a
good shoemaker than a middling author would be no honor to the
shoemakers, and can hardly be any to the authors. I have the
comfort that in this all authors will agree with me, for which of
us is now able to see himself middling? Honorable above
all honor that authorship can give is he who can.
It was through some of his old college friends that Tom had thus
easily stepped into the literary profession. They were young men
with money and friends to back them, who, having taken to
literature as soon as they chipped the university shell, were
already in the full swing of periodical production, when Tom, to
quote two rather contradictory utterances of his mother, ruined
his own prospects and made Letty's fortune by marrying her. I can
not say, however, that they had found him remunerative
employment. The best they had done for him was to bring him into
such a half sort of connection with a certain weekly paper that
now and then he got something printed in it, and now and then,
with the joke of acknowledging an obligation irremunerable, the
editor would hand him what he called an honorarium, but what in
reality was a five-pound note. When such an event occurred, Tom
would feel his bosom swell with the imagined dignity of
supporting a family by literary labor, and, forgetful of the
sparseness of his mother's doles, who delighted to make the young
couple feel the bitterness of dependence, would immediately, on
the strength of it, invite his friends to supper--not at the
lodging where Letty sat lonely, but at some tavern frequented by
people of the craft. It was at such times, and in the company of
men certainly not better than himself, that Tom's hopes were
brightest, and his confidence greatest: therefore such seasons
were those of his highest bliss. Especially, when his sensitive
but poor imagination was stimulated from the nerve-side of the
brain, was Tom in his glory; and it was not the "few glasses of
champagne," of which he talked so airily, that had all the honor
of crowning him king of fate and poet of the world. Long after
midnight, upon such and many other occasions, would he and his
companions sit laughing and jesting and drinking, some saying
witty things, and all of them foolish things and worse; inventing
stories apropos of the foibles of friends, and relating anecdotes
which grew more and more irreverent to God and women as the night
advanced, and the wine gained power, and the shame-faced angels
of their true selves, made in the image of God, withdrew into the
dark; until at last, between night and morning, Tom would reel
gracefully home, using all the power of his will--the best use to
which it ever was put--to subdue the drunkenness of which, even
in its embrace, he had the lingering honor to be ashamed, that he
might face his wife with the appearance of the gentleman he was
anxious she should continue to consider him.
It was an unhappy thing for Tom that his mother, having persuaded
her dying husband, "for Tom's sake," to leave the money in her
power, should not now have carried her tyranny further, and
refused him money altogether. He would then have been compelled
to work harder, and to use what he made in procuring the
necessaries of life. There might have been some hope for him
then. As it was, his profession was the mere grasping after the
honor of a workman without the doing of the work; while the
little he gained by it was, at the same time, more than enough to
foster the self-deception that he did something in the world.
With the money he gave her, which was never more than a part of
what his mother sent him, Letty had much ado to make both ends
meet; and, while he ran in debt to his tailor and bootmaker, she
never had anything new to wear. She did sometimes wish he would
take her out with him a little oftener of an evening; for
sometimes she felt so lonely as to be quite unable to amuse
herself: her resources were not many in her position, and fewer
still in herself; but she always reflected that he could not
afford it, and it was long ere she began to have any doubt or
uneasiness about him--long before she began even to imagine it
might be well if he spent his evenings with her, or, at least, in
other ways and other company than he did. When first such a
thought presented itself, she banished it as a disgrace to
herself and an insult to him. But it was no wonder if she found
marriage dull, poor child!--after such expectations, too, from
her Tom!
What a pity it seems to our purblind eyes that so many girls
should be married before they are women! The woman comes at
length, and finds she is forestalled--that the prostrate and
mutilated Dagon of a girl's divinity is all that is left her to
do the best with she can! But, thank God, in the faithfully
accepted and encountered responsibility, the woman must at length
become aware that she has under her feet an ascending stair by
which to climb to the woman of the divine ideal.
There was at present, however, nothing to be called thought in
the mind of Letty. She had even lost much of what faculty of
thinking had been developed in her by the care of Cousin Godfrey.
That had speedily followed the decay of the aspiration kindled in
her by Mary. Her whole life now--as much of it, that is, as was
awake--was Tom, and only Tom. Her whole day was but the
continuous and little varied hope of his presence. Most of the
time she had a book in her hands, but ever again book and hands
would sink into her lap, and she would sit staring before her at
nothing. She was not unhappy, she was only not happy. At first it
was a speechless delight to have as many novels as she pleased,
and she thought Tom the very prince of bounty in not merely
permitting her to read them, but bringing them to her, one after
the other, sometimes two at once, in spendthrift profusion. The
first thing that made her aware she was not quite happy was the
discovery that novels were losing their charm, that they were not
sufficient to make her day pass, that they were only dessert, and
she had no dinner. When it came to difficulty in going on with a
new one long enough to get interested in it, she sighed heavily,
and began to think that perhaps life was rather a dreary thing--
at least considerably diluted with the unsatisfactory. How many
of my readers feel the same! How few of them will recognize that
the state of things would indeed be desperate were it otherwise!
How many would go on and on being only butterflies, but for
life's dismay! And who would choose to be a butterfly, even if
life and summer and the flowers were to last for ever!
"I would," I fancy this and that reader saying.
"Then," I answer, "the only argument you are equal to, is the
fact that life nor summer nor the flowers do last for ever."
"I suppose I am made a butterfly," do you say? "seeing I prefer
to be one."
"Ah! do you say so, indeed? Then you begin to excuse yourself,
and what does that mean? It means that you are no butterfly, for
a butterfly--no, nor an angel in heaven--could never begin
excusing the law of its existence. Butterfly-brother, the hail
will be upon you."
I may not then pity Letty that she had to discover that novels
taken alone serve one much as sweetmeats ad libitum do
children, nor that she had to prove that life has in it that
spiritual quinine, precious because bitter, whose part it is to
wake the higher hunger.
Tom talked of himself as on the staff of "The Firefly"--such was
the name of the newspaper whose editor sometimes paid him--a
weekly of great pretense, which took upon itself the mystery of
things, as if it were God's spy. It was popular in a way, chiefly
in fashionable circles. As regarded the opinions it promulgated,
I never heard one, who understood the particular question at any
time handled, say it was correct. Its writers were mostly young
men, and their passion was to say clever things. If a friend's
book came in their way, it was treated worse or better than that
of a stranger, but with impartial disregard for truth in either
case; yet many were the authors who would go up endless back
stairs to secure from that paper a flattering criticism, and then
be as proud of it as if it had been the genuine and unsought
utterance of a true man's conviction; and many were the men,
immeasurably the superiors of the reviewers, and in a general way
acquainted with their character, who would accept as conclusive
upon the merits of a book the opinions they gave, nor ever
question a mode of quotation by which a book was made to show
itself whatever the reviewer chose to call it. A scandalous rumor
of any kind, especially from the region styled "high life," often
false, and always incorrect, was the delight both of the paper
and of its readers; and the interest it thus awoke, united to the
fear it thus caused, was mainly what procured for such as were
known to be employed upon it the entree of houses where,
if they had had a private existence only, their faces would never
have been seen. But, to do Tom justice, he wrote nothing of this
sort: he was neither ill-natured nor experienced enough for that
department; what he did write was clever, shallow sketches of
that same society into whose charmed precincts he was but so
lately a comer that much was to him interesting which had long
ceased to be observed by eyes turned horny with the glare of the
world's footlights; and, while these sketches pleased the young
people especially, even their jaded elders enjoyed the sparkling
reflex of what they called life, as seen by an outsider; for they
were thereby enabled to feel for a moment a slight interest in
themselves objectively, along with a galvanized sense of
existence as the producers of history. These sketches did more
for the paper than the editor was willing to know or acknowledge.
But "The Firefly" produced also a little art on its own account--
not always very original, but, at least, not a sucking of life
from the labor of others, as is most of that parasitic thing
miscalled criticism. In this branch Tom had a share, in the shape
of verse. A ready faculty was his, but one seldom roused by
immediate interest, and never by insight. It was not things
themselves, but the reflection of things in the art of others,
that moved him to produce. Coleridge, I think, says of Dryden,
that he took fire with the running of his own wheels: so did Tom;
but it was the running of the wheels of others that set his
wheels running. He was like some young preachers who spend a part
of the Saturday in reading this or that author, in order to
get up the mental condition favorable to preaching on the
Sunday. He was really fond of poetry; delighted in the study of
its external elements for the sake of his craft; possessed not
only a good but cultivated ear for verse, which is a rare thing
out of the craft; had true pleasure in a fine phrase, in a strong
or brilliant word; last and chief, had a special faculty for
imitation; from which gifts, graces, and acquirements, it came,
that he could write almost in any style that moved him--so far,
at least, as to remind one who knew it, of that style; and that
every now and then appeared verses of his in "The Firefly."
As often as this took place, Letty was in the third heaven of
delight. For was not Tom's poetry unquestionably superior to
anything else the age could produce? was the poetry Cousin
Godfrey made her read once to be compared to Tom's? and was not
Tom her own husband? Happy woman she!
But, by the time at which my narrative has arrived, the first
mist of a coming fog had begun to gather faintly dim in her
heart. When Tom would come home happy, but talk perplexingly;
when he would drop asleep in the middle of a story she could make
nothing of; when he would burst out and go on laughing, and
refuse to explain the motive--how was she to avoid the conclusion
forced upon her, that he had taken too much strong drink? and,
when she noted that this condition reappeared at shorter and
shorter intervals, might she not well begin to be frightened, and
to feel, what she dared not allow, that she was being gradually
left alone--that Tom had struck into a diverging path, and they
were slowing parting miles from each other?
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