The Literary Sense/Dick, Tom, and Harry
DICK, TOM, AND HARRY
"AND so I look in to see her whenever I can spare half an hour. I fancy it cheers her up a bit to have some one to talk to about Edinburgh—and all that. You say you're going to tell her about its having been my doing, your getting that berth. Now, I won't have it. You promised you wouldn't. I hate jaw, as you know, and I don't want to have her gassing about gratitude and all that rot. I don't like it, even from you. So stow all that piffle. You'd do as much for me, any day. I suppose Edinburgh is a bit dull, but you've got all the higher emotions of our fallen nature to cheer you up. Essex Court is dull, if you like! It's three years since I had the place to myself, and I tell you it's pretty poor sport. I don't seem to care about duchesses or the gilded halls nowadays. Getting old, I suppose. Really, my sole recreation is going to see another man's girl, and letting her prattle prettily about him. Lord, what fools these mortals be! Sorry I couldn't answer your letter before. I suppose you'll be running up for Christmas! So long! I'm taking her down those Ruskins she wanted. Here's luck!"
The twisted knot of three thin initials at the end of the letter stood for one of the set of names painted on the black door of the Temple Chambers. The other names were those of Tom, who had strained a slender competence to become a barrister, and finding the achievement unremunerative, had been glad enough to get the chance of sub-editing a paper in Edinburgh.
Dick enveloped and stamped his letter, threw it on the table, and went into his bedroom. When he came back in a better coat and a newer tie he looked at the letter and shrugged his shoulders, and he frowned all the way down the three flights and as far as Brick Court. Here he posted the letter. Then he shrugged his shoulders again, but after the second shrug the set of them was firmer.
As his hansom swung through the dancing lights of the Strand, he shrugged his shoulders for the third time.
And, at that, his tame devil came as at a signal, and drew a pretty curtain across all thoughts save one—the thought of the "other man's girl." Indeed, hardly a thought was left, rather a sense of her—of those disquieting soft eyes of hers—the pretty hands, the frank laugh—the long, beautiful lines her gowns took on—the unexpected twists and curves of her hair—above all, the reserve, veiling tenderness as snowflakes might veil a rose, with which she spoke of the other man.
Dick had known Tom for all of their men's lives, and they had been friends. Both had said so often enough. But now he thought of him as the "other man."
The lights flashed past. Dick's eyes were fixed on a picture. A pleasant room—an artist's room—prints, sketches, green curtains, the sparkle of old china, fire and candle light. A girl in a long straight dress; he could see the little line where it would catch against her knee as she came forward to meet him with both hands outstretched. Would it be both hands? He decided that it would—to-night.
He was right, even to the little line in the sea-blue gown.
Both hands; such long, thin, magnetic hands.
"You are good," she said at once. "Oh—you must let me thank you. Tom's told me who it was that got him that splendid berth. Oh—what a friend you are! And lending him the money and everything. I can't tell you— It's too much— You are—"
"Don't," he said; "it's nothing at all."
"It's everything," said she. "Tom's told me quite all about it, mind! I know we owe everything to you."
"My dear Miss Harcourt," he began. But she interrupted him.
"Why not Harry?" she asked. "I thought—"
"Yes. Thank you. But it was nothing. You see I couldn't let poor old Tom go on breaking his heart in silence, when just writing a letter or two would put him in a position to speak."
She had held his hands, or he hers, or both, all this time. Now she moved away to the fire.
"Come and sit down and be comfortable," she said. "This is the chair you like. And I've got some cigarettes, your very own kind, from the Stores."
She remembered a time when she had thought that it was he, Dick, who might break his heart for her. The remembrance of that vain thought was a constant pin-prick to her vanity, a constant affront to her modesty. She had tried to snub him in those days—to show him that his hopes were vain. And after all he hadn't had any hopes: he'd only been anxious about Tom! In the desolation of her parting from Tom she had longed for sympathy. Dick had given it, and she had been kinder to him than she had ever been to any man but her lover—first, because he was her lover's friend, and, secondly, because she wanted to pretend to herself that she had never fancied that there was any reason for not being kind to him.
She sat down in the chair opposite to his.
"Now," she said, "I won't thank you any more, if you hate it so; but you are good, and neither of us will ever forget it."
He sat silent for a moment. He had played for this—for this he had delayed to answer the letter wherein Tom announced his intention of telling Harriet the whole fair tale of his friend's goodness. He had won the trick. Yet for an instant he hesitated to turn it over. Then he shrugged his shoulders—I will not mention this again, but it was a tiresome way he had when the devil or the guardian angel were working that curtain I told you of—and said—
"Dear little lady—you make me wish that I were good."
Then he sighed: it was quite a real sigh, and she wondered whether he could possibly not be good right through. Was it possible that he was wicked in some of those strange, mysterious ways peculiar to men: billiards—barmaids—opera-balls flashed into her mind. Perhaps she might help him to be good. She had heard the usual pretty romances about the influence of a good woman.
"Come," she said, "light up—and tell me all about everything."
So he told her many things. And now and then he spoke of Tom, just to give himself the pleasure-pain of that snow-veiled-rose aspect.
He kissed her hand when he left her—a kiss of studied brotherliness. Yet the kiss had in it a tiny heart of fire, fierce enough to make her wonder, when he had left her, whether, after all. . . . But she put the thought away hastily. "I may be a vain fool," she said, "but I won't be fooled by my vanity twice over."
And she kissed Tom's portrait and went to bed.
Dick went home in a heavenly haze of happiness—so he told himself as he went. When he woke up at about three o'clock, and began to analyse his sensations, he had cooled enough to call it an intoxication of pleasurable emotion. At three in the morning, if ever, the gilt is off the ginger-bread.
Dick lay on his back, his hands clenched at his sides, and, gazing open-eyed into the darkness, he saw many things. He saw all the old friendship: the easy, jolly life in those rooms, the meeting with Harriet Harcourt—it was at a fancy-ball, and she wore the white-and-black dress of a Beardsley lady; he remembered the contrast of the dress with her eyes and mouth.
He saw the days when his thoughts turned more and more to every chance of meeting her, as though each had been his only chance of life. He saw the Essex Court sitting-room as it had looked on the night when Tom had announced that Harriet was the only girl in the world—adding, at almost a night's length, that impassioned statement of his hopeless, financial condition. He could hear Tom's voice as he said—
"And I know she cares!"
Dick felt again the thrill of pleasure that had come with the impulse to be, for once, really noble, to efface himself, to give up the pursuit that lighted his days, the dream that enchanted his nights. His own voice, too, he heard—
"Cheer up, old chap! We'll find a lucrative post for you in five minutes, and set the wedding bells a-ringing in half an hour, or less! Why on earth didn't you tell me before?"
The glow of conscious nobility had lasted a long while—nearly a week, if he recollected aright. Then had come the choice of two openings for Tom, one in London, and one, equally good, in Edinburgh. Dick had chosen to offer to his friend the one in Edinburgh. He had told himself then that both lovers would work better if they were not near enough to waste each other's time, and he had almost believed—he was almost sure, even now, that he had almost believed—that this was the real reason.
But when Tom had gone there had been frank tears in the lovers' parting, and Dick had walked up the platform to avoid the embarrassment of witnessing them.
"You beast, you brute, you hound!" said Dick to himself, lying rigid and wretched in the darkness. "You knew well enough that you wanted him out of the way. And you promised to look after her and keep her from being dull. And you've done all you can to keep your word, haven't you? She hasn't been dull, I swear. And you've been playing for your own hand—and that poor stupid honest chap down there slaving away and trusting you as he trusts God. And you've written him lying letters twice a week, and betrayed him, as far as you got the chance, every day, and seen what a cur you are, every night, as you see it now. Oh, yes—you're succeeding splendidly. She forgets to think of Tom when she's talking to you. How often did she mention him last night? It was you every time. You're not fit to speak to a decent man, you reptile!"
He relaxed the clenched hands.
"Can't you stop this infernal see-saw?" he asked, pounding at his pillow; "light and fire every day, and hell-black ice every night. Look at it straight, you coward! If you're game to face the music, why, face it! Marry her, and friendship and honesty be damned! Or perhaps you might screw yourself up to another noble act—not a shoddy one this time."
Still sneering, he got up and pottered about in slippers and pyjamas till he had stirred together the fire and made himself cocoa. He drank it and smoked two pipes. This is very unromantic, but so it was. He slept after that.
When he woke in the morning all things looked brighter. He almost succeeded in pretending that he did not despise himself.
But there was a letter from Tom, and the guardian angel took charge of the curtain again.
He was tired, brain and body. The prize seemed hardly worth the cost. The question of relative values, at any rate, seemed debatable. The day passed miserably.
At about five o'clock he was startled to feel the genuine throb of an honest impulse. Such an impulse in him at that hour of the day, when usually the devil was arranging the curtain for the evening's tragi-comedy, was so unusual as to rouse in him a psychologic interest strong enough to come near to destroying its object. But the flame of pleasure lighted by the impulse fought successfully against the cold wind of cynical analysis, and he stood up.
"Upon my word," said he, "the copy-books are right—'Be virtuous and you will be happy.' At least if you aren't, you won't. And if you are. . . . One could but try!"
He packed a bag. He went out and sent telegrams to his people at King's Lynn, and to all the folk in town with whom he ought in these next weeks to have danced and dined, and he wrote a telegram to her. But that went no further than the floor of the Fleet Street Post Office, where it lay in trampled, scattered rhomboids.
Then he dined in Hall—he could not spare from his great renunciation even such a thread of a thought as should have decided his choice of a restaurant; and he went back to the gloomy little rooms and wrote a letter to Tom.
It seemed, until his scientific curiosity was aroused by the seeming, that he wrote with his heart's blood. After the curiosity awoke, the heart's blood was only highly-coloured water.
"Your old friend."
As he scrawled the signatory hieroglyphic, his only hope was that she would know it, and that the knowledge would leaven, with tenderly pitying thoughts of him, the heroic figure, her happiness with Tom, the commonplace.
He addressed and stamped the envelope; but he did not close it.
"I might want to put in another word or two," he said to himself. And even then in his inmost heart he hardly knew that he was going to her. He knew it when he was driving towards Chenies Street, and then he told himself that he was going to bid her good-bye—for ever.
Angel and devil were so busy shifting the curtain to and fro that he could not see any scene clearly.
He came into her presence pale with his resolution to be noble, to leave her for ever to happiness—and Tom. It was difficult though, even at that supreme moment, to look at her and to couple those two ideas.
"I've come to say good-bye," he said.
"Good-bye!" the dismay in her eyes seemed to make that unsealed letter leap in his side pocket.
"Yes—I'm going—circumstances I can't help—I'm going away for a long time."
"Is it bad news? Oh—I am sorry. When are you going?"
"To-morrow," he said, even as he decided to say, "to-night."
"But you can stay a little now, can't you? Don't go like this. It's dreadful. I shall miss you so—"
He fingered the letter.
"I must go and post a letter; then I'll come back, if I may. Where did I put that hat of mine?"
As she turned to pick up the hat from the table, he dropped the letter—the heart's blood written letter—on the floor behind him.
"I'll be back in a minute or two," he said, and went out to walk up and down the far end of Chenies Street and to picture her—alone with his letter.
She saw it at the instant when the latch of her flat clicked behind him. She picked it up, and mechanically turned it over to look at the address.
He, in the street outside, knew just how she would do it. Then she saw that the letter was unfastened.
How often had Tom said that there were to be no secrets between them! This was his letter. But it might hold Dick's secrets. But then, if she knew Dick's secrets she might be able to help him. He was in trouble—anyone could see that—awful trouble. She turned the letter over and over in her hands.
He, without, walking with half-closed eyes, felt that she was so turning it.
Suddenly she pulled the letter out and read it. He, out in the gas-lit night, knew how it would strike at her pity, her tenderness, her strong love of all that was generous and noble. He pictured the scene that must be when he should re-enter her room, and his heart beat wildly. He held himself in; he was playing the game now in deadly earnest. He would give her time to think of him, to pity him—time even to wonder whether, after all, duty and honour had not risen up in their might to forbid him to dare to try his faith by another sight of her. He waited, keenly aware that long as the waiting was to him, who knew what the ending was to be, it must be far, far longer for her, who did not know.
At last he went back to her. And the scene that he had pictured in the night where the east wind swept the street was acted out now, exactly as he had foreseen it.
She held in her hand the open letter. She came towards him, still holding it.
"I've read your letter," she said.
In her heart she was saying, "I must be brave. Never mind modesty and propriety. Tom could never love me like this. He's a hero—my hero."
In the silence that followed her confession he seemed to hear almost the very words of her thought.
He hung his head and stood before her in the deep humility of a chidden child.
"I am sorry," he said. "I am ashamed. Forgive me. I couldn't help it. No one could. Good-bye. Try to forgive me—"
He turned to go, but she caught him by the arms. He had been almost sure she would.
"You mustn't go," she said. "Oh—I am sorry for Tom—but it's not the same for him. There are lots of people he'd like just as well—but you—"
"Hush!" he said gently, "don't think of me. I shall be all right. I shall get over it."
His sad, set smile assured her that he never would—never, in this world or the next.
Her eyes were shining with the stress of the scene: his with the charm of it.
"You are so strong, so brave, so good," she made herself say. "I can't let you go. Oh—don't you see—I can't let you suffer. You've suffered so much already—you've been so noble. Oh—it's better to know now. If I'd found out later—"
She hung her head and waited.
But he would not spare her. Since he had sold his soul he would have the price: the full price, to the last blush, the last tear, the last tremble in the pretty voice.
"Let me go," he said, and his voice shook with real passion, "let me go—I can't bear it." He took her hands gently from his arms and held them lightly.
Next moment they were round his neck, and she was clinging wildly to him.
"Don't be unhappy! I can't bear it. Don't you see? Ah—don't you see?"
Then he allowed himself to let her know that he did see. When he left her an hour later she stood in the middle of her room and drew a long breath.
"Oh!" she cried. "What have I done? What have I done?"
He walked away with the maiden fire of her kisses thrilling his lips. "I've won—I've won—I've won!" His heart sang within him.
But when he woke in the night—these months had taught him the habit of waking in the night and facing his soul—he said—
"It was very easy, after all—very, very easy. And was it worth while?"
But the next evening, when they met, neither tasted in the other's kisses the bitterness of last night's regrets. And in three days Tom was to come home. He came. All the long way in the rattling, shaking train a song of delight sang itself over and over in his brain. He, too, had his visions: he was not too commonplace for those. He saw her, her bright beauty transfigured by the joy of reunion, rushing to meet him with eager hands and gladly given lips. He thought of all he had to tell her. The fifty pounds saved already. The Editor's probable resignation, his own almost certain promotion, the incredibly dear possibility of their marriage before another year had passed. It seemed a month before he pressed the electric button at her door, and pressed it with a hand that trembled for joy.
The door opened and she met him, but this was not the radiant figure of his vision. It seemed to be not she, but an image of her—an image without life, without colour.
"Come in," she said; "I've something to tell you."
"What is it?" he asked bluntly. "What's happened, Harry? What's the matter?"
"I've found out," she said slowly, but without hesitation had she not rehearsed the speech a thousand times in these three days? "I've found out that it was a mistake, Tom. I—I love somebody else. Don't ask who it is. I love him. Ah—don't!"
For his face had turned a leaden white, and he was groping blindly for something to hold on to.
He sat down heavily on the chair where Dick had knelt at her feet the night before. But now it was she who was kneeling.
"Oh, don't Tom, dear—don't. I can't bear it. I'm not worth it. He's so brave and noble—and he loves me so."
"And don't I love you?" said poor Tom, and then without ado or disguise he burst into tears.
She had ceased to think or to reason. Her head was on his shoulder, and they clung blindly to each other and cried like two children.
******
When Tom went to the Temple that night he carried a note from Harry to Dick. With sublime audacity and a confidence deserved she made Tom her messenger.
"It's a little secret," she said, smiling at him, "and you're not to know."
Tom thought it must be something about a Christmas present for himself. He laughed—a little shakily—and took the note.
Dick read it and crushed it in his hand while Tom poured out his full heart.
"There's been some nonsense while I was away," he said; "she must have been dull and unhinged—you left her too much alone, old man. But it's all right now. She couldn't care for anyone but me, after all, and she knew it directly she saw me again. And we're to be married before next year's out, if luck holds."
"Here's luck, old man!" said Dick, lifting his whisky. When Tom had gone to bed, weary with the quick sequence of joy and misery and returning joy, Dick read the letter again.
"I can't do it," said the letter, "it's not in me. He loves me too much. And I am fond of him. He couldn't bear it. He's weak, you see. He's not like you—brave and strong and noble. But I shall always be better because you've loved me. I'm going to try to be brave and noble and strong like you. And you must help me. Dear. God bless you. Good-bye."
"After all," said Dick, as he watched the white letter turn in the fire to black, gold spangled, "after all, it was not so easy. And oh, how it would have been worth while!"