“Oh, spare me all those ancient Lichfield scandals! She is an angel, John, if there was ever one.”
“In your eyes, doubtless! So your heart is broken. Yet do you not realize that not a month ago you were heartbroken over Stella Musgrave? Child, I repeat, I envy you this perpetual unhappiness, for I have lost, as you will presently lose, the capacity of being quite miserable.”
“But, John, it seems as if there were nothing left to live for, now—”
“At twenty-one! Well, certainly, at that age one loves to think of life as being implacable. But you will soon discover that she is merely inconsequential, and that none of her antics are of lasting importance; and you will learn to smile a deal more often than you weep or laugh.”
Then we talked of other matters. It was presently settled that Charteris was to take me abroad with him that summer; and with the thorough approval of my mother.
“Mr. Charteris will be of incalculable benefit to you,” she told me, “in introducing you to the very best people, all of whom he knows, of course, and besides you are getting to look older than I, and it is unpleasant to have to be always explaining you are only my stepson, particularly as your father never married anybody but me, though, heaven knows, I wish he had. Of course you will be just as wild as your father and your Uncle George. I suppose that is to be expected, and I daresay it will break my heart, but all I ask of you is please to keep out of the newspapers, except of course the social items. And if you must associate with abandoned women, please for my sake, Robert, don’t have anything to do with those who can prove that they are only misunderstood, because they are the most dangerous kind.”
I kissed her. “Dear little mother, I honestly believe that when you get to heaven you will refuse to speak to Mary Magdalen.”
“Robert, let us remember the Bible says, ‘in my Father’s house are many mansions,’ and of course nobody would think of putting me in the same mansion with her.”
It was well-nigh the last conversation I was to hold with my mother; and I was to remember it with an odd tenderness. …
II
Upon the doings of myself in Europe during the ensuing two years I prefer to dwell as lightly as possible. I had long anticipated a sojourn in divers old-world cities; but the London I had looked to find was the London of Dickens, say, and my Paris the Paris of Dumas, or at the very least of Balzac. It is needless to mention that in the circles to which the, quite real, friendship of John Charteris afforded an entry I found little that smacked of such antiquity. I had entered a world inhabited by people who amused themselves and apparently did nothing else; and I was at first troubled by their levity, and afterward envious of it, and in the end embarked upon sedulous attempt to imitate it. I continued to be very boyish; indeed, I found myself by this in much the position of an actor who has made such a success in one particular role that the public declines to patronize him in any other.
III
It was during this first year abroad that I wrote The Apostates, largely through the urging of John Charteris.
“You have the ability, though, that dances most gracefully in fetters. You will never write convincingly about the life you know, because life is, to you, my adorable boy, a series of continuous miracles, to which the eyes of other men are case-hardened. Write me, then, a book about the past.”
“I have thought of it,” said I, “for being over here makes the past seem pretty real, somehow. Last month when I was at Ingilby I was on fire with the notion of writing something about old Ormskirk—my mother’s ancestor, you know. And since I’ve seen what’s left of Bellegarde I have wanted to write about his wife’s people too—the dukes and vicomtes of Puysange, or even about the great Jurgen. You see, I am just beginning to comprehend that these are not merely characters in Lowe’s and La Vrilliere’s books, but my flesh and blood kin, like Uncle George Bulmer—”
“And for that reason you want to write about them! You would, though; it is eminently characteristic. Well, then, why should you not immortalize the persons who had the honor of begetting you—oh, most handsome and most naive of children!—by writing your very best about them?”
“Because to succeed—not only among the general but with the ‘cultured few,’ God save the mark!—it is now necessary to write not badly but abominably.”
“What would you demand, then, of a book?”
I meditated. “What one most desiderates in the writings of today is clarity, and beauty, and tenderness and urbanity, and truth.”
“Not a bad recipe, upon the whole, though I would stipulate for symmetry and distinction also—Write the book!”
“Ah,” said I, “but this is the kind of book I wish to read when, of course, the mood seizes me. It is not at all the sort of book, though, I would elect to write. The main purpose of writing any book, I take it, is to be read; and people simply will not read a book when they suspect it of being carefully written. That sort of thing gets on a reader’s nerves; it’s too much like watching a man walk a tightrope and wondering if he won’t slip presently.”
“Oh, ‘people!’ ” Charteris flung out, in an extremity of scorn. “Since time was young, a generally incompetent humanity
