“Do you think that would be better?”
“I don’t think—I know it would.”
But Laura was not so easily convinced as all that.
Ever a talented imitator, she next tried her hand at an essay on an abstract subject. This was a failure: you could not see things, when you wrote about, say, “Beneficence”; and Laura’s thinking was done mainly in pictures. Matters were still worse when she tinkered at Cupid’s especial genre: her worthless little incident stared at her, naked and scraggy, from the sheet; she had no wealth of words at her disposal in which to deck it out. So, with a sigh, she turned back to the advice Cupid had given her, and prepared to make a faithful transcript of actuality. She called what she now wrote: “A Day at School,” and conscientiously set down detail on detail; so fearful, this time, of over-brevity, that she spun the account out to twenty pages; though the writing of it was as distasteful to her as her reading of A Doll’s House had been.
At the subsequent meeting of the Society, expression of opinion was not lacking.
“Oh, Jehoshaphat! How much more?”
“Here, let me get out. I’ve had enough.”
“I say, you forgot to count how many steps it took you to come downstairs.”
Till the chairman had pity on the embarrassed author and said: “Look here, Laura, I think you’d better keep the rest for another time.”
“It was just what you told me to do,” Laura reproached Cupid that night: she was on the brink of tears.
But Cupid was disinclined to shoulder the responsibility. “Told you to be as dull and long-winded as that? Infant, it’s a whacker!”
“But it was true what I wrote—every word of it.”
Neither of the two elder girls was prepared to discuss this vital point. Cupid shifted ground. “Good Lord, Laura, but it’s hard to drive a thing into your brainpan. You don’t need to be all true on paper, silly child!”
“Last time you said I had to.”
“Well, if you want it, my candid opinion is that you haven’t any talent for this kind of thing. Now turn off the gas.”
As the light in the room went out, a kind of inner light seemed to go up in Laura; and both then and on the following days she thought hard. She was very ambitious, anxious to shine, not ready to accept defeat; and to the next literary contest she brought the description of an excursion to the hills and gullies that surrounded Warrenega; into which she had worked an adventure with some vagrant blacks. She and Pin and the boys had often picnicked on these hills, with their lunches packed in billies; and she had seen the caves and rocky holes where blackfellows were said to have hidden themselves in early times; but neither this particular excursion, nor the exciting incident which she described with all the aplomb of an eyewitness, had ever taken place. That is to say: not a word of her narration was true, but every word of it might have been true.
And with this she had an unqualified success.
“I believe there’s something in you after all,” said Cupid to her that night. “Anyhow, you know now what it is to be true, yet not dull and prosy.”
And Laura manfully choked back her desire to cry out that not a word of her story was fact.
She was long in falling asleep. Naturally, she was elated and excited by her success; but also a new and odd piece of knowledge had niched itself in her brain. It was this. In your speech, your talk with others, you must be exact to the point of pedantry, and never romance or draw the longbow; or you would be branded as an abominable liar. Whereas, as soon as you put pen to paper, provided you kept one foot planted on probability, you might lie as hard as you liked: indeed, the more vigorously you lied, the louder would be your hearers’ applause.
And Laura fell asleep over a chuckle.
XXII
Und vergesst mir auch das gute Lachen nicht!
Nietzsche
And then, alas! just as she rode high on this wave of approbation, Laura suffered another of those drops in the esteem of her fellows, another of those mental upsets, which from time to time had thrown her young life out of gear.
True, what now came was not exactly her own fault; though it is doubtful whether a single one of her companions would have made her free of an excuse. They looked on, round-eyed, mouths a-stretch. Once more, the lambkin called Laura saw fit to sunder itself from the flock, and to cut mad capers in sight of them all. And their delectation was as frank as their former wrath had been. As for Laura, as usual she did not stop to think till it was too late; but danced lightly away to her own undoing.
The affair began pleasantly enough. A member of the Literary Society was the girl with the twinkly brown eyes—she who had gone out of her way to give Laura a kindly word after the Shepherd debacle. This girl, Evelyn Souttar by name, was also the only one of the audience who had not joined in the laugh provoked by Laura’s first appearance as an author. Laura had never forgotten this; and she would smile shyly at Evelyn when their looks met. But a dozen reasons existed why there should have been no further rapport between them. Although now in the fifth form, Laura had remained childish for her age: whereas Evelyn was over eighteen, and only needed to turn up her hair to be quite grown-up. She had matriculated the previous Christmas,
