EPISTOLARY EPILOGUE

“IT was a summer evening four years later when, upon the sands of one of our most fashionable watering-places, a happy family group, consisting of a buxom mother and several charming children, might have been observed to disport itself. Who can this charming matron be, and who these lovely children, designated respectively Robert, Dudley, Katya, and Ellida?

“And who is this tall and robust gentleman who, wearing across the chest of his white cricketing flannel the broad blue ribbon of His Majesty’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, bearing in one hand negligently the Times of the day before yesterday and in the other a pastoral rake, approaches from the hayfields, and, with an indulgent smile, surveys the happy group? Taking from his mouth his pipe—for in the dolce far niente of his summer vacation, when not called upon by his duties near the Sovereign at Windsor, he permits himself the relaxation of the soothing weed—he remarks:

“‘The Opposition fellows have lost the by-election at Camber.’

“Oblivious of his pipe, the charming matron casts herself upon his neck, whilst the children dance round him with cries of congratulation, and the trim nurses stand holding buckets and spades with expressions of respectful happiness upon their countenances. Who can this be?

“And who, again, are these two approaching along the sands with happy and contented faces—the gentleman erect, olive-skinned, and, since his wife has persuaded him to go clean-shaven, appearing ten years younger than when we last saw him; the lady dark and tall, with the first signs of matronly plumpness just appearing upon her svelte form? They approach and hold out their hands to the happy Cabinet Minister with attitudes respectively of manly and ladylike congratulation, whilst little Robert and little Katya, uttering joyful cries of ‘Godmama’ and ‘Godpapa!’ dive into their pockets for chocolates and the other presents that they are accustomed to find there.

“Who can these be? Our friend the reader will have already guessed. And so, with a moisture at the contemplation of so much happiness bedewing our eyes, we lay down the pen, pack up the marionettes into their box, ring down the curtain, and return to our happy homes, where the wives of our bosoms await us. That we may meet again, dear reader, is the humble and pious wish of your attached friend, the writer of these pages.”

Thus, my dear ——, you would have me end this book, after I have taken an infinite trouble to end it otherwise. No doubt, also, you would have me record how Etta Hudson, as would be inevitably the case with such a character, eventually became converted to Roman Catholicism, and ended her days under the direction of a fanatical confessor in the practice of acts of the most severe piety and mortification, Jervis, the butler of Mr. Dudley Leicester, you would like to be told, remained a humble and attached dependent in the service of his master; whilst Saunders, Mr. Grimshaw’s man, thinking himself unable to cope with the duties of the large establishment in Berkeley Square which Mr. Grimshaw and Katya set up upon their marriage, now keeps a rose-clad hostelry on the road to Brighton. But we have forgotten Mr. Held! Under the gentle teaching of Pauline Leicester he became an aspirant for Orders in the Church of England, and is now, owing to the powerful influence of Mr. Dudley Leicester, chaplain to the British Embassy at St. Petersburg.

But since, my dear ——, all these things appear to me to be sufficiently indicated in the book as I have written it, I must confess that these additions, inspired as they are by you—but how much better they would have been had you actually written them! these additions appear to me to be ugly, superfluous, and disagreeable.

The foxes have holes, the birds of the air have nests, and you, together with the great majority of British readers, insist upon having a happy ending, or, if not a happy ending, at least some sort of an ending. This is a desire, like the desire for gin-and-water or any other comforting stimulant, against which I have nothing to say. You go to books to be taken out of yourself, I to be shown where I stand. For me, as for you, a book must have a beginning and an end. But whereas for you the end is something arbitrarily final, such as the ring of wedding-bells, a funeral service, or the taking of a public-house, for me—since to me a novel is the history of an “affair”—finality is only found at what seems to me to be the end of that “affair.” There is in life nothing final. So that even “affairs” never really have an end as far as the lives of the actors are concerned. Thus, although Dudley Leicester was, as I have tried to indicate, cured almost immediately by the methods of Katya Lascarides, it would be absurd to imagine that the effects of his short breakdown would not influence the whole of his after-life. These effects may have been to make him more conscientious, more tender, more dogged, less self-centred; may have been to accentuate him in a great number of directions. For no force is ever lost, and the ripple raised by a stone, striking upon the bank of a pool, goes on communicating its force for ever and ever throughout space and throughout eternity. But for our vision its particular “affair” ends when, striking the bank, it disappears. So for me the “affair” of Dudley Leicester’s madness ended at the moment when Katya Lascarides laid her hands upon his temple. In the next moment he would be sane, the ripple of madness would have disappeared from the pond of his life. To have gone on farther would have been, not to have ended this book, but to have begun another, which—the fates being good—I hope to write. I shall profit, without doubt, by your companionship, instruction, and great experience. You have called me again and again an Impressionist, and this I have been called so often that I suppose it must be the fact. Not that I know what an Impressionist is. Personally, I use as few words as I may to get any given effect, to render any given conversation. You, I presume, do the same. You don’t, I mean, purposely put in more words than you need—more words, that is to say, than seem to you to satisfy your desire for expression. You would probably render a conversation thus:

“Extending her hand, which was enveloped in creamy tulle, Mrs. Sincue exclaimed, ‘Have another cup of tea, dear?’ ‘Thanks—two lumps,’ her visitor rejoined. ‘So I hear Colonel Hapgood has eloped with his wife’s French maid!’”

I should probably set it down:

“After a little desultory conversation, Mrs. Sincue’s visitor, dropping his dark eyes to the ground, uttered in a voice that betrayed neither exultation nor grief, ‘Poor old Hapgood’s cut it with Nanette. Don’t you remember Nanette, who wore an apron with lace all round it and those pocket things, and curled hair?’”

This latter rendering, I suppose, is more vague in places, and in other places more accentuated, but I don’t see how it is more impressionist. It is perfectly true you complain of me that I have not made it plain with whom Mr. Robert Grimshaw was really in love, or that when he resigned himself to the clutches of Katya Lascarides, whom personally I extremely dislike, an amiable but meddlesome and inwardly conceited fool was, pathetically or even tragically, reaping the harvest of his folly. I omitted to add these comments, because I think that for a writer to intrude himself between his characters and his reader is to destroy to that extent all the illusion of his work. But when I found that yourself and all the moderately quick-minded, moderately sane persons who had read the book in its original form failed entirely to appreciate what to me has appeared as plain as a pikestaff—namely, that Mr. Grimshaw was extremely in love with Pauline Leicester, and that, in the first place, by marrying her to Dudley Leicester, and, in the second place, by succumbing to a disagreeable personality, he was committing the final folly of this particular affair—when I realized that these things were not plain, I hastened to add those passages of explicit conversation, those droppings of the eyelids and tragic motions of the hands, that you have since been good enough to say have made the book.

Heaven knows, one tries enormously hard to be simple, to be even transparently simple, but one falls so lamentably between two stools. Thus, another reader, whom I had believed to be a person of some intellect, has insisted to me that in calling this story “A Call” I must have had in my mind something mysterious, something mystical; but what I meant was that Mr. Robert Grimshaw, putting the ear-piece to his ear and the mouthpiece to his mouth, exclaimed, after the decent interval that so late at night the gentleman in charge of the exchange needs for awaking from slumber and grunting something intelligible—Mr. Grimshaw exclaimed, “Give me 4259 Mayfair.” This might mean that Lady Hudson was a subscriber to the Post Office telephone system, but it does not mean in the least that Mr. Grimshaw felt religious stirrings within him or “A Call” to do something heroic and chivalrous, such as aiding women to obtain the vote.

So that between those two classes of readers—the one who insist upon reading into two words the whole psychology of moral revivalism, and the others who, without gaining even a glimpse of meaning, will read or skip through fifty or sixty thousand words, each one of which is carefully selected to help on a singularly plain tale—between these two classes of readers your poor Impressionist falls lamentably enough to the ground. He sought to point no moral. His soul would have recoiled within him at the thought of adorning by one single superfluous word his plain tale. His sole ambition was to render a little episode—a small “affair” affecting a little circle of people—exactly as it would have happened. He desired neither to comment nor to explain. Yet here, commenting and explaining, he takes his humble leave, having packed the marionettes into the case, having pulled the curtain down, and wiping from his troubled eyes the sensitive drops of emotion. This may appear to be an end, but it isn’t. He is, still, your Impressionist, thinking what the devil—what the very devil—he shall do to make his next story plain to the most mediocre intelligence!

THE END

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