Derrick Vaughan Novelist
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Edna Lyall >> Derrick Vaughan Novelist
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Derrick's room was a large, gaunt, ghostly place in one of the
towers of the hotel, and in one corner of it was a winding stair
leading to the roof. When I went in next morning I found him
writing away at his novel just as usual, but when I looked at him it
seemed to me that the night had aged him fearfully. As a rule, he
took interruptions as a matter of course, and with perfect sweetness
of temper; but to-day he seemed unable to drag himself back to the
outer world. He was writing at a desperate pace too, and frowned
when I spoke to him. I took up the sheet of foolscap which he had
just finished and glanced at the number of the page--evidently he
had written an immense quantity since the previous day.
"You will knock yourself up if you go on at this rate!" I exclaimed.
"Nonsense!" he said sharply. "You know it never tires me."
Yet, all the same, he passed his hand very wearily over his
forehead, and stretched himself with the air of one who had been in
a cramping position for many hours.
"You have broken your vow!" I cried. "You have been writing at
night."
"No," he said; "it was morning when I began--three o'clock. And it
pays better to get up and write than to lie awake thinking."
Judging by the speed with which the novel grew in the next few
weeks, I could tell that Derrick's nights were of the worst.
He began, too, to look very thin and haggard, and I more than once
noticed that curious 'sleep-walking' expression in his eyes; he
seemed to me just like a man who has received his death-blow, yet
still lingers--half alive, half dead. I had an odd feeling that it
was his novel which kept him going, and I began to wonder what would
happen when it was finished.
A month later, when I met him again at Bath, he had written the last
chapter of 'At Strife,' and we read it over the sitting-room fire on
Saturday evening. I was very much struck with the book; it seemed
to me a great advance on 'Lynwood's Heritage,' and the part which he
had written since that day at Ben Rhydding was full of an
indescribable power, as if the life of which he had been robbed had
flowed into his work. When he had done, he tied up the MS. in his
usual prosaic fashion, just as if it had been a bundle of clothes,
and put it on a side table.
It was arranged that I should take it to Davison--the publisher of
'Lynwood's Heritage'--on Monday, and see what offer he would make
for it. Just at that time I felt so sorry for Derrick that if he
had asked me to hawk round fifty novels I would have done it.
Sunday morning proved wet and dismal; as a rule the Major, who was
fond of music, attended service at the Abbey, but the weather forced
him now to stay at home. I myself was at that time no church-goer,
but Derrick would, I verily believe, as soon have fasted a week as
have given up a Sunday morning service; and having no mind to be
left to the Major's company, and a sort of wish to be near my
friend, I went with him. I believe it is not correct to admire Bath
Abbey, but for all that 'the lantern of the west' has always seemed
to me a grand place; as for Derrick, he had a horror of a 'dim
religious light,' and always stuck up for his huge windows, and I
believe he loved the Abbey with all his heart. Indeed, taking it
only from a sensuous point of view, I could quite imagine what a
relief he found his weekly attendance here; by contrast with his
home the place was Heaven itself.
As we walked back, I asked a question that had long been in my mind:
"Have you seen anything of Lawrence?"
"He saw us across London on our way from Ben Rhydding," said
Derrick, steadily. "Freda came with him, and my father was
delighted with her."
I wondered how they had got through the meeting, but of course my
curiosity had to go unsatisfied. Of one thing I might be certain,
namely, that Derrick had gone through with it like a Trojan, that he
had smiled and congratulated in his quiet way, and had done the best
to efface himself and think only of Freda. But as everyone knows:
"Face joy's a costly mask to wear,
'Tis bought with pangs long nourished
And rounded to despair;"
and he looked now even more worn and old than he had done at Ben
Rhydding in the first days of his trouble.
However, he turned resolutely away from the subject I had introduced
and began to discuss titles for his novel.
"It's impossible to find anything new," he said, "absolutely
impossible. I declare I shall take to numbers."
I laughed at this prosaic notion, and we were still discussing the
title when we reached home.
"Don't say anything about it at lunch," he said as we entered. "My
father detests my writing."
I nodded assent and opened the sitting-room door--a strong smell of
brandy instantly became apparent; the Major sat in the green velvet
chair, which had been wheeled close to the hearth. He was drunk.
Derrick gave an ejaculation of utter hopelessness.
"This will undo all the good of Ben Rhydding!" he said. "How on
earth has he managed to get it?"
The Major, however, was not so far gone as he looked; he caught up
the remark and turned towards us with a hideous laugh.
"Ah, yes," he said, "that's the question. But the old man has still
some brains, you see. I'll be even with you yet, Derrick. You
needn't think you're to have it all your own way. It's my turn now.
You've deprived me all this time of the only thing I care for in
life, and now I turn the tables on you. Tit for tat. Oh! yes, I've
turned your d--d scribblings to a useful purpose, so you needn't
complain!"
All this had been shouted out at the top of his voice and freely
interlarded with expressions which I will not repeat; at the end he
broke again into a laugh, and with a look, half idiotic, half
devilish, pointed towards the grate.
"Good Heavens!" I said, "what have you done?"
By the side of the chair I saw a piece of brown paper, and, catching
it up, read the address--"Messrs. Davison, Paternoster Row"; in the
fireplace was a huge charred mass. Derrick caught his breath; he
stooped down and snatched from the fender a fragment of paper
slightly burned, but still not charred beyond recognition like the
rest. The writing was quite legible--it was his own writing--the
description of the Royalists' attack and Paul Wharncliffe's defence
of the bridge. I looked from the half-burnt scrap of paper to the
side table where, only the previous night, we had placed the novel,
and then, realising as far as any but an author could realise the
frightful thing that had happened, I looked in Derrick's face. Its
white fury appalled me. What he had borne hitherto from the Major,
God only knows, but this was the last drop in the cup. Daily
insults, ceaseless provocation, even the humiliations of personal
violence he had borne with superhuman patience; but this last
injury, this wantonly cruel outrage, this deliberate destruction of
an amount of thought, and labour, and suffering which only the
writer himself could fully estimate--this was intolerable.
What might have happened had the Major been sober and in the
possession of ordinary physical strength I hardly care to think. As
it was, his weakness protected him. Derrick's wrath was speechless;
with one look of loathing and contempt at the drunken man, he strode
out of the room, caught up his hat, and hurried from the house.
The Major sat chuckling to himself for a minute or two, but soon he
grew drowsy, and before long was snoring like a grampus. The old
landlady brought in lunch, saw the state of things pretty quickly,
shook her head and commiserated Derrick. Then, when she had left
the room, seeing no prospect that either of my companions would be
in a fit state for lunch, I made a solitary meal, and had just
finished when a cab stopped at the door and out sprang Derrick. I
went into the passage to meet him.
"The Major is asleep," I remarked.
He took no more notice than if I had spoken of the cat.
"I'm going to London," he said, making for the stairs. "Can you get
your bag ready? There's a train at 2.5."
Somehow the suddenness and the self-control with which he made this
announcement carried me back to the hotel at Southampton, where,
after listening to the account of the ship's doctor, he had
announced his intention of living with his father. For more than
two years he had borne this awful life; he had lost pretty nearly
all that there was to be lost and he had gained the Major's
vindictive hatred. Now, half maddened by pain, and having, as he
thought, so hopelessly failed, he saw nothing for it but to go--and
that at once.
I packed my bag, and then went to help him. He was cramming all his
possessions into portmanteaux and boxes; the Hoffman was already
packed, and the wall looked curiously bare without it. Clearly this
was no visit to London--he was leaving Bath for good, and who could
wonder at it?
"I have arranged for the attendant from the hospital to come in at
night as well as in the morning," he said, as he locked a
portmanteau that was stuffed almost to bursting. "What's the time?
We must make haste or we shall lose the train. Do, like a good
fellow, cram that heap of things into the carpet-bag while I speak
to the landlady."
At last we were off, rattling through the quiet streets of Bath, and
reaching the station barely in time to rush up the long flight of
stairs and spring into an empty carriage. Never shall I forget that
journey. The train stopped at every single station, and sometimes
in between; we were five mortal hours on the road, and more than
once I thought Derrick would have fainted. However, he was not of
the fainting order, he only grew more and more ghastly in colour and
rigid in expression.
I felt very anxious about him, for the shock and the sudden anger
following on the trouble about Freda seemed to me enough to unhinge
even a less sensitive nature. 'At Strife' was the novel which had,
I firmly believe, kept him alive through that awful time at Ben
Rhydding, and I began to fear that the Major's fit of drunken malice
might prove the destruction of the author as well as of the book.
Everything had, as it were, come at once on poor Derrick; yet I
don't know that he fared worse than other people in this respect.
Life, unfortunately, is for most of us no well-arranged story with a
happy termination; it is a chequered affair of shade and sun, and
for one beam of light there come very often wide patches of shadow.
Men seem to have known this so far back as Shakespeare's time, and
to have observed that one woe trod on another's heels, to have
battled not with a single wave, but with a 'sea of troubles,' and to
have remarked that 'sorrows come not singly, but in battalions.'
However, owing I believe chiefly to his own self-command, and to his
untiring faculty for taking infinite pains over his work, Derrick
did not break down, but pleasantly cheated my expectations. I was
not called on to nurse him through a fever, and consumption did not
mark him for her own. In fact, in the matter of illness, he was
always a most prosaic, unromantic fellow, and never indulged in any
of the euphonious and interesting ailments. In all his life, I
believe, he never went in for anything but the mumps--of all
complaints the least interesting--and, may be, an occasional
headache.
However, all this is a digression. We at length reached London, and
Derrick took a room above mine, now and then disturbing me with
nocturnal pacings over the creaking boards, but, on the whole,
proving himself the best of companions.
If I wrote till Doomsday, I could never make you understand how the
burning of his novel affected him--to this day it is a subject I
instinctively avoid with him--though the re-written 'At Strife' has
been such a grand success. For he did re-write the story, and that
at once. He said little; but the very next morning, in one of the
windows of our quiet sitting-room, often enough looking despairingly
at the grey monotony of Montague Street, he began at 'Page I,
Chapter I,' and so worked patiently on for many months to re-make as
far as he could what his drunken father had maliciously destroyed.
Beyond the unburnt paragraph about the attack on Mondisfield, he had
nothing except a few hastily scribbled ideas in his note-book, and
of course the very elaborate and careful historical notes which he
had made on the Civil War during many years of reading and research-
-for this period had always been a favourite study with him.
But, as any author will understand, the effort of re-writing was
immense, and this, combined with all the other troubles, tried
Derrick to the utmost. However, he toiled on, and I have always
thought that his resolute, unyielding conduct with regard to that
book proved what a man he was.
Chapter VIII.
"How oft Fate's sharpest blow shall leave thee strong,
With some re-risen ecstacy of song."
F. W. H. Myers.
As the autumn wore on, we heard now and then from old Mackrill the
doctor. His reports of the Major were pretty uniform. Derrick used
to hand them over to me when he had read them; but, by tacit
consent, the Major's name was never mentioned.
Meantime, besides re-writing 'At Strife,' he was accumulating
material for his next book and working to very good purpose. Not a
minute of his day was idle; he read much, saw various phases of life
hitherto unknown to him, studied, observed, gained experience, and
contrived, I believe, to think very little and very guardedly of
Freda.
But, on Christmas Eve, I noticed a change in him--and that very
night he spoke to me. For such an impressionable fellow, he had
really extraordinary tenacity, and, spite of the course of Herbert
Spencer that I had put him through, he retained his unshaken faith
in many things which to me were at that time the merest legends. I
remember very well the arguments we used to have on the vexed
question of 'Free-will,' and being myself more or less of a
fatalist, it annoyed me that I never could in the very slightest
degree shake his convictions on that point. Moreover, when I
plagued him too much with Herbert Spencer, he had a way of
retaliating, and would foist upon me his favourite authors. He was
never a worshipper of any one writer, but always had at least a
dozen prophets in whose praise he was enthusiastic.
Well, on this Christmas Eve, we had been to see dear old Ravenscroft
and his grand-daughter, and we were walking back through the quiet
precincts of the Temple, when he said abruptly:
"I have decided to go back to Bath to-morrow."
"Have you had a worse account?" I asked, much startled at this
sudden announcement.
"No," he replied, "but the one I had a week ago was far from good if
you remember, and I have a feeling that I ought to be there."
At that moment we emerged into the confusion of Fleet Street; but
when we had crossed the road I began to remonstrate with him, and
argued the folly of the idea all the way down Chancery Lane.
However, there was no shaking his purpose; Christmas and its
associations had made his life in town no longer possible for him.
"I must at any rate try it again and see how it works," he said.
And all I could do was to persuade him to leave the bulk of his
possessions in London, "in case," as he remarked, "the Major would
not have him."
So the next day I was left to myself again with nothing to remind me
of Derrick's stay but his pictures which still hung on the wall of
our sitting-room. I made him promise to write a full, true, and
particular account of his return, a bona-fide old-fashioned letter,
not the half-dozen lines of these degenerate days; and about a week
later I received the following budget:
"Dear Sydney,--I got down to Bath all right, and, thanks to your
'Study of Sociology,' endured a slow, and cold, and dull, and
depressing journey with the thermometer down to zero, and spirits to
correspond, with the country a monotonous white, and the sky a
monotonous grey, and a companion who smoked the vilest tobacco you
can conceive. The old place looks as beautiful as ever, and to my
great satisfaction the hills round about are green. Snow, save in
pictures, is an abomination. Milsom Street looked asleep, and Gay
Street decidedly dreary, but the inhabitants were roused by my
knock, and the old landlady nearly shook my hand off. My father has
an attack of jaundice and is in a miserable state. He was asleep
when I got here, and the good old landlady, thinking the front
sitting-room would be free, had invited 'company,' i.e., two or
three married daughters and their belongings; one of the children
beats Magnay's 'Carina' as to beauty--he ought to paint her. Happy
thought, send him and pretty Mrs. Esperance down here on spec. He
can paint the child for the next Academy, and meantime I could enjoy
his company. Well, all these good folks being just set-to at roast
beef, I naturally wouldn't hear of disturbing them, and in the end
was obliged to sit down too and eat at that hour of the day the
hugest dinner you ever saw--anything but voracious appetites
offended the hostess. Magnay's future model, for all its angelic
face, 'ate to repletion,' like the fair American in the story. Then
I went into my father's room, and shortly after he woke up and asked
me to give him some Friedrichshall water, making no comment at all
on my return, but just behaving as though I had been here all the
autumn, so that I felt as if the whole affair were a dream. Except
for this attack of jaundice, he has been much as usual, and when you
next come down you will find us settled into our old groove. The
quiet of it after London is extraordinary. But I believe it suits
the book, which gets on pretty fast. This afternoon I went up
Lansdowne and right on past the Grand Stand to Prospect Stile, which
is at the edge of a high bit of tableland, and looks over a splendid
stretch of country, with the Bristol Channel and the Welsh hills in
the distance. While I was there the sun most considerately set in
gorgeous array. You never saw anything like it. It was worth the
journey from London to Bath, I can assure you. Tell Magnay, and may
it lure him down; also name the model aforementioned.
"How is the old Q.C. and his pretty grandchild? That quaint old
room of theirs in the Temple somehow took my fancy, and the child
was divine. Do you remember my showing you, in a gloomy narrow
street here, a jolly old watchmaker who sits in his shop-window and
is for ever bending over sick clocks and watches? Well, he's still
sitting there, as if he had never moved since we saw him that
Saturday months ago. I mean to study him for a portrait; his
sallow, clean-shaved, wrinkled face has a whole story in it. I
believe he is married to a Xantippe who throws cold water over him,
both literally and metaphorically; but he is a philosopher--I'll
stake my reputation as an observer on that--he just shrugs his
sturdy old shoulders, and goes on mending clocks and watches. On
dark days he works by a gas jet--and then Rembrandt would enjoy
painting him. I look at him whenever my world is particularly awry,
and find him highly beneficial. Davison has forwarded me to-day two
letters from readers of 'Lynwood.' The first is from an irate
female who takes me to task for the dangerous tendency of the story,
and insists that I have drawn impossible circumstances and
impossible characters. The second is from an old clergyman, who
writes a pathetic letter of thanks, and tells me that it is almost
word for word the story of a son of his who died five years ago.
Query: shall I send the irate female the old man's letter, and save
myself the trouble of writing? But on the whole I think not; it
would be pearls before swine. I will write to her myself. Glad to
see you whenever you can run down.
"Yours ever,
"D. V."
("Never struck me before what pious initials mine are.")
The very evening I received this letter I happened to be dining at
the Probyn's. As luck would have it, pretty Miss Freda was staying
in the house, and she fell to my share. I always liked her, though
of late I had felt rather angry with her for being carried away by
the general storm of admiration and swept by it into an engagement
with Lawrence Vaughan. She was a very pleasant, natural sort of
talker, and she always treated me as an old friend. But she seemed
to me, that night, a little less satisfied than usual with life.
Perhaps it was merely the effect of the black lace dress which she
wore, but I fancied her paler and thinner, and somehow she seemed
all eyes.
"Where is Lawrence now?" I asked, as we went down to the dining-
room.
"He is stationed at Dover," she replied. "He was up here for a few
hours yesterday; he came to say good-bye to me, for I am going to
Bath next Monday with my father, who has been very rheumatic lately-
-and you know Bath is coming into fashion again, all the doctors
recommend it."
"Major Vaughan is there," I said, "and has found the waters very
good, I believe; any day, at twelve o'clock, you may see him getting
out of his chair and going into the Pump Room on Derrick's arm. I
often wonder what outsiders think of them. It isn't often, is it,
that one sees a son absolutely giving up his life to his invalid
father?"
She looked a little startled.
"I wish Lawrence could be more with Major Vaughan," she said; "for
he is his father's favourite. You see he is such a good talker, and
Derrick--well, he is absorbed in his books; and then he has such
extravagant notions about war, he must be a very uncongenial
companion to the poor Major."
I devoured turbot in wrathful silence. Freda glanced at me.
"It is true, isn't it, that he has quite given up his life to
writing, and cares for nothing else?"
"Well, he has deliberately sacrificed his best chance of success by
leaving London and burying himself in the provinces," I replied
drily; "and as to caring for nothing but writing, why he never gets
more than two or three hours a day for it." And then I gave her a
minute account of his daily routine.
She began to look troubled.
"I have been misled," she said; "I had gained quite a wrong
impression of him."
"Very few people know anything at all about him," I said warmly;
"you are not alone in that."
"I suppose his next novel is finished now?" said Freda; "he told me
he had only one or two more chapters to write when I saw him a few
months ago on his way from Ben Rhydding. What is he writing now?"
"He is writing that novel over again," I replied.
"Over again? What fearful waste of time!"
"Yes, it has cost him hundreds of hours' work; it just shows what a
man he is, that he has gone through with it so bravely."
"But how do you mean? Didn't it do?"
Rashly, perhaps, yet I think unavoidably, I told her the truth.
"It was the best thing he had ever written, but unfortunately it was
destroyed, burnt to a cinder. That was not very pleasant, was it,
for a man who never makes two copies of his work?"
"It was frightful!" said Freda, her eyes dilating. "I never heard a
word about it. Does Lawrence know?"
"No, he does not; and perhaps I ought not to have told you, but I
was annoyed at your so misunderstanding Derrick. Pray never mention
the affair; he would wish it kept perfectly quiet."
"Why?" asked Freda, turning her clear eyes full upon mine.
"Because," I said, lowering my voice, "because his father burnt it."
She almost gasped.
"Deliberately?"
"Yes, deliberately," I replied. "His illness has affected his
temper, and he is sometimes hardly responsible for his actions."
"Oh, I knew that he was irritable and hasty, and that Derrick
annoyed him. Lawrence told me that, long ago," said Freda. "But
that he should have done such a thing as that! It is horrible!
Poor Derrick, how sorry I am for him. I hope we shall see something
of them at Bath. Do you know how the Major is?"
"I had a letter about him from Derrick only this evening," I
replied; "if you care to see it, I will show it you later on."
And by-and-by, in the drawing-room, I put Derrick's letter into her
hands, and explained to her how for a few months he had given up his
life at Bath, in despair, but now had returned.
"I don't think Lawrence can understand the state of things," she
said wistfully. "And yet he has been down there."
I made no reply, and Freda, with a sigh, turned away.
A month later I went down to Bath and found, as my friend foretold,
everything going on in the old groove, except that Derrick himself
had an odd, strained look about him, as if he were fighting a foe
beyond his strength. Freda's arrival at Bath had been very hard on
him, it was almost more than he could endure. Sir Richard, blind as
a bat, of course, to anything below the surface, made a point of
seeing something of Lawrence's brother. And on the day of my
arrival Derrick and I had hardly set out for a walk, when we ran
across the old man.
Sir Richard, though rheumatic in the wrists, was nimble of foot and
an inveterate walker. He was going with his daughter to see over
Beckford's Tower, and invited us to accompany him. Derrick, much
against the grain, I fancy, had to talk to Freda, who, in her winter
furs and close-fitting velvet hat, looked more fascinating than
ever, while the old man descanted to me on Bath waters, antiquities,
etc., in a long-winded way that lasted all up the hill. We made our
way into the cemetery and mounted the tower stairs, thinking of the
past when this dreary place had been so gorgeously furnished. Here
Derrick contrived to get ahead with Sir Richard, and Freda lingered
in a sort of alcove with me.
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