The Girls of Slender Means (4 page)
Like the habit of changing his name after a number of years, which he had done only in the hope that his luck would turn with it, this practice of George's was fairly innocent, in that he never really succeeded in discovering the whole truth about an author, or in profiting by his investigations at all. Still, it was his system, and its plot-formation gave him a zest for each day's work. Formerly George had done these basic investigations himself, but lately he had begun to think he might have more luck by leaving new authors to Jane. A consignment of books, on their way to George, had recently been seized at the port of Harwich and ordered to be burnt by the local magistrates on the grounds of obscenity, and George was feeling unlucky at this particular time.
Besides, it saved him all the expense and nervous exhaustion involved in the vigilant lunching with unpredictable writers, and feeling his way with them as to whether their paranoia exceeded his. It was better altogether to let them talk to Jane in a café, or bed, or wherever she went with them. It was nerve-racking enough to George to wait for her report. He fancied that many times in the past year she had saved him from paying out more ready money for a book than necessary—as when she had reported a dire need for ready cash, or when she had told George exactly what part of the manuscript he should find fault with—it was usually the part in which the author took a special pride—in order to achieve the minimum resistance, if not the total collapse, of the author.
George had obtained a succession of three young wives on account of his continuous eloquence to them on the subject of the world of books, which they felt was an elevating one—he had deserted the other two, not they him—and he had not yet been declared bankrupt although he had undergone in the course of the years various tangled forms of business reconstruction which were probably too much for the nerves of his creditors to face legally, since none ever did.
George took a keen interest in Jane's training in the handling of a writer of books. Unlike his fireside eloquence to his wife, Tilly, his advice to Jane in the office was furtive, for he half believed, in the twilight portion of his mind, that authors were sly enough to make themselves invisible and be always floating under the chairs of publishers' offices.
"You see, Jane," said George, "these tactics of mine are an essential part of the profession. All the publishers do it. The big firms do it too, they do it automatically. The big fellows can afford to do it automatically, they can't afford to acknowledge all the facts like me, too much face to lose. I've had to work out every move for myself and get everything clear in my mind where authors are concerned. In publishing, one is dealing with a temperamental raw material."
He went over to the corner curtain which concealed a coat-rail, and pulled aside the curtain. He peered within, then closed the curtain again and continued, "Always think of authors as your raw material, Jane, if you're going to stay in the world of books." Jane took this for fact. She had now been given Nicholas Farringdon to work on. George had said he was a terrible risk. Jane judged his age to be just over thirty. He was known only as a poet of small talent and an anarchist of dubious loyalty to that cause; but even these details were not at first known to Jane. He had brought to George a worn-out-looking sheaf of typewritten pages, untidily stacked in a brown folder. The whole was entitled _The Sabbath Notebooks__.
Nicholas Farringdon differed in some noticeable respects from the other writers she had come across. He differed, unnoticeably so far, in that he knew he was being worked on. But meantime she observed he was more arrogant and more impatient than other authors of the intellectual class. She noticed he was more attractive.
She had achieved some success with the very intellectual author of _The Symbolism of Louisa May Alcott__, which George was now selling very well and fast in certain quarters, since it had a big lesbian theme. She had achieved some success with Rudi Bittesch, the Rumanian who called on her frequently at the club.
But Nicholas had produced a more upsetting effect than usual on George, who was moreover torn between his attraction to a book he could not understand and his fear of its failure. George handed him over to Jane for treatment and meanwhile complained nightly to Tilly that he was in the hands of a writer, lazy, irresponsible, insufferable and cunning.
Inspired by a brain-wave, Jane's first approach to a writer had been, "What is your raison d'être?" It had worked marvellously. She tried it on Nicholas Farringdon when he called to the office about his manuscript one day when George was "at a meeting," which was to say, hiding in the back office. "What is your raison d'être, Mr. Farringdon?"
He frowned at her in an abstract sort of way, as if she were a speaking machine that had gone wrong.
Inspired by another brain-wave, Jane invited him to dine at the May of Teck Club. He accepted with a special modesty, plainly from concern for this book. It had been rejected by ten publishers already, as had most of the books that came to George.
His visit put Jane up in the estimation of the club. She had not expected him to react so eagerly to everything. Sipping black Nescafe in the drawing room with Jane, Selina, dark little Judy Redwood and Anne, he had looked round with a faint, contented smile. Jane had chosen her companions for the evening with the instinct of an experimental procuress which, when she perceived the extent of its success, she partly regretted and partly congratulated herself on, since she had not been sure from various reports whether Nicholas preferred men, and now she concluded that he at least liked both sexes. Selina's long unsurpassable legs arranged themselves diagonally from the deep chair where she lolled in the distinct attitude of being the only woman present who could afford to loll. There was something about Selina's lolling which gave her a queenly eminence. She visibly appraised Nicholas, while he continued to glance here and there at the several groups of chattering girls in other parts of the room. The terrace doors stood wide open to the cool night and presently from the recreation room there came, by way of the terrace, the sound of Joanna in the process of an elocution lesson.
_I thought of Chatterton, the marvellous Boy,__
_The sleepless Soul that perished in his pride;__
_Of Him who walked in glory and in joy__
_Following his plough, along the mountain-side;__
_By our own spirits are we deified:__
_We Poets in our youth begin in gladness;__
_But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.__
"I wish she would stick to _The Wreck of the Deutschland__," Judy Redwood said. "She's marvellous with Hopkins."
Joanna's voice was saying, "Remember the stress on Chatterton and the slight pause to follow."
Joanna's pupil recited:
_I thought of Chatterton, the marvellous Boy,__
The excitement over the slit window went on for the rest of the afternoon. Jane's brain-work proceeded against the background echoes of voices from the large wash-room where the lavatories were. The two other occupants of the top floor had returned, having been to their homes in the country for the week-end: Dorothy Markham, the impoverished niece of Lady Julia Markham who was chairwoman of the club's management committee, and Nancy Riddle, one of the club's many clergymen's daughters. Nancy was trying to overcome her Midlands accent, and took lessons in elocution from Joanna with this end in view.
Jane, at her brain-work, heard from the direction of the wash-room the success of Dorothy Markham's climb through the window. Dorothy's hips were thirty-six and a half inches; her bust measurement was only thirty-one, a fact which did not dismay her, as she intended to marry one of three young men out of her extensive acquaintance who happened to find themselves drawn to boyish figures, and although she did not know about such things as precisely as did her aunt, Dorothy knew well enough that her hipless and breastless shape would always attract the sort of young man who felt at home with it. Dorothy could emit, at any hour of the day or night, a waterfall of debutante chatter, which rightly gave the impression that on any occasion between talking, eating and sleeping, she did not think, except in terms of these phrase-ripples of hers: "Filthy lunch." "Thee most gorgeous wedding." "He actually raped her, she was amazed." "Ghastly film." "I'm desperately well, thanks, how are you?"
Her voice from the wash-room distracted Jane: "Oh hell, I'm black with soot, I'm absolutely filthington." She opened Jane's door without knocking and put in her head. "Got any soapyjo?" It was some months before she was to put her head round Jane's door and announce, "Filthy luck. I'm preggers. Come to the wedding."
Jane said, on being asked for the use of her soap, "Can you lend me fifteen shillings till next Friday?" It was her final resort for getting rid of people when she was doing brain-work.
Evidently, from the sound of things, Nancy Riddle was stuck in the window. Nancy was getting hysterical. Finally, Nancy was released and calmed, as was betokened by the gradual replacement of Midlands vowels with standard English ones issuing from the wash-room.
Jane continued with her work, describing her effort to herself as pressing on regardless. All the club, infected by the Air Force idiom current amongst the dormitory virgins, used this phrase continually.
She had put aside Nicholas's manuscript for the time being, as it was a sticky proposition; she had not yet, in fact, grasped the theme of the book, as was necessary before deciding on a significant passage to cast doubt upon, although she had already thought of the comment she would recommend George to make: "Don't you think this part is a bit derivative?" Jane had thought of it in a brain-wave.
She had put the book aside. She was at work, now, on some serious spare-time work for which she was paid. This came into the department of her life that had to do with Rudi Bittesch whom she hated, at this stage of her life, for his unattractive appearance. He was too old for her, besides everything else. When in a depressed state of mind, she found it useful to remember that she was only twenty-two, for the fact cheered her up. She looked down Rudi's list of famous authors and their respective addresses to see who still remained to be done. She took a sheet of writing paper and wrote her great-aunt's address in the country, followed by the date. She then wrote:
Dear Mr. Hemingway,
I am addressing this letter to you care of your pub-
lisher in the confidence that it will be sent on to you.
This was an advisable preliminary, Rudi said, because sometimes publishers were instructed to open authors' letters and throw them away if not of sufficient business importance, but this approach, if it got into the publishers' hands, "might touch their heart." The rest of the letter was entirely Jane's province. She paused to await a small brain-wave, and after a moment continued:
I am sure you receive many admiring letters, and
have hesitated to add yet another to your post-bag.
But since my release from prison, where I have
been for the past two years and four months, I
have felt more and more that I want you to know
how much your novels meant to me during that
time. I had few visitors. My allotted weekly hours
of leisure were spent in the Library. It was un-
heated alas, but I did not notice the cold as I read
on. Nothing I read gave me so much courage to face
the future and to build a new future on my release
as _For Whom the Bell Tolls__. The novel gave me back
my faith in life.
I just want you to know this, and to say "Thank
you."
Yours sincerely
(Miss) J. Wright.
P.S. This is not a begging letter. I assure you I would
return any money that was sent to me.
If this succeeded in reaching him it might bring a handwritten reply. The prison letter and the asylum letter were more liable to bring replies in the author's own hand than any other type of letter, but one had to choose an author "with heart," as Rudi said. Authors without heart seldom replied at all, and if they did it was a typewritten letter. For a typewritten letter signed by the author, Rudi paid two shillings if the autograph was scarce, but if the author's signature was available everywhere, and the letter a mere formal acknowledgment, Rudi paid nothing. For a letter in the author's own handwriting Rudi paid five shillings for the first page and a shilling thereafter. Jane's ingenuity was therefore awakened to the feat of composing the sort of letters which would best move the recipient to reply in total holograph.
Rudi paid for the writing paper and the postage. He told her he only wanted the letters "for sentimental purpose of my collection." She had seen his collection. But she assumed that he was collecting them with an eye to their increasing value year by year.
"If I write myself it does not ring true; I do not get interesting replies. By the way, my English is not like the English of an English girl."
She would have made her own collection if only she had not needed the ready money, and could afford to save up the letters for the future.
"Never ask for money in your letters," Rudi had warned her. "Do not mention the subject of money. It makes criminal offence under false pretences." However, she had the brain-wave of adding her postscript, to make sure.
Jane had worried, at first, lest she should be found out and get into some sort of trouble. Rudi reassured her. "You say you only make a joke. It is not criminal. Who would check up on you, by the way? Do you think Bernard Shaw is going to write and make questions about you from the old aunt? Bernard Shaw is a Name."