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THE WIT OF MOUNT STREET;
or,
HER HEART IN NUMBERS.
(Continued from page 8.)
CHAPTER II.
Thomas Gives Notice.
The knocker had been taken offthe door of the house inGrosvenor Square in the last week ofJuly, as it was taken off every year, toinform the world that the family wasout of town; and the world, which wasitself out of town, had taken no notice.
The family was at Ardoch. That isto say, Lady Ardoch was at Ardoch,with four guests, two pointers, and aMiss Lauder whom she had invited forher complexion; and the head of thefamily, who should have been there,was in London, in a house where thechandeliers had been bagged in hol-land and the furniture stood about thedrawing-rooms in dust-sheets like acompany of mourners waiting to betold whose funeral it was. It was thefirst of September. Every gentlemanin England who could hold a gun wasstanding in a stubble field.Mr. Kinross was eating his breakfast.
He ate it in the small dining-roomat the back, because the large one had
been shut up, and he ate it alone, be-cause there was nobody else, and hewas served by Fenwick and two foot-men, because that was the establish-ment, and it did not occur to anyone inthe house that one man and a rack oftoast might be served by fewer. Thecoffee was at his hand before he hadlooked for it. The Times was folded atthe side of his plate, and beneath itthe Morning Chronicle, which he tookbecause it was a Whig paper and hewished to know what the Whigs weresaying, and beneath that the Courier,which he took because it was not, andhe wished to know that too. Fenwickhad ironed all three. He had neverasked Fenwick to iron the newspa-pers. He had never asked Fenwick foranything that he could remember, andit struck him, not for the first timethat summer, that he had lived for six-and-thirty days in this house withoutonce giving an order in it.
On the salver was a letter from his
aunt.
Lady Ardoch wrote a large, decidedhand, crossed and recrossed, and shewrote as she talked, which waswithout stopping. The weather wasfine. The birds were plentiful. MissLauder was a charming girl, and hadasked twice whether Mr. Kinross wasexpected, and Lady Ardoch had beenobliged to say she could not tell, sinceshe had not been told. She could notconceive what kept him in London inSeptember, unless it was his lawyers,and if it was his lawyers she couldonly say that she had never known alawyer who could not be kept waitingby a gentleman with ten thousand ayear. She remained his affectionateaunt. Under the signature, across thefirst page, in the smallest hand shehad: Pray do not tell me it is the book.
He folded the letter and put it un-der the toast-rack, which was wherehe put letters he did not mean to an-swer that day, and Fenwick, whoknew it, removed the toast-rack.
The newspapers were full ofManchester. They had been full ofManchester for a fortnight, since theMonday on which the yeomanry hadridden into a crowd of sixty thousandpeople in St. Peter’s Field with theirsabres drawn, to arrest a man on acart who could perfectly well havebeen arrested at his inn; and theywould be full of it for a long time yet.
The Courier printed the thanks of theGovernment to the magistrates, in acolumn of type that looked, hethought, as pleased with itself as typecould look. The Chronicle printed thenames of the dead, with their agesand their trades, under a headingwhich the Courier would call inflam-matory and which was merely accur-ate. A weaver. A special constable. Awoman. A child of two. He read themall, slowly, because it seemed to himthat someone ought to read them whohad not been there, and then he foldedthe paper and found that he had nottasted his coffee and that Fenwick hadalready replaced it with coffee thatwas hot.
It was not, he knew, any concern ofhis. He had no property in Lancashireand no opinions on the reform ofParliament that he had ever been re-quired to express aloud. But he hadspent the summer, and the nine yearsbefore it, in the company of a manwho kept order for a King who did nottrust him, and who had once, in theeighth number of The Lord Warden,ridden into a market-place at Ludlowwith forty spears to put down a riot ofweavers; and he had written thatscene with great care and a good dealof satisfaction, and had been ratherproud of the weavers. He did not feelproud of them this morning. He satwith the folded Chronicle under his
hand and saw, with the disagreeableclearness that comes upon a man atbreakfast, that the Warden had beenin Manchester on the sixteenth ofAugust, and that he had sent himthere.
“Will you take the carriage, sir?”said Fenwick.
He had not said that he was goingout. “I will walk,” he said; and thesatisfaction of having, for once, saidsomething that Fenwick could nothave said for him carried him as far asBrook Street before he understoodthat it was a very small satisfactionfor a man of two-and-thirty.
The Albemarle was published from ahouse in Albemarle Street, betweenthe Royal Institution, where the fash-ionable world had gone in SirHumphry Davy’s day to watch thingsset on fire, and Grillion’s, where it hadgone afterwards to dine. Mr. Radcliffehad the ground floor for his shop andthe first floor for his drawing-room, inwhich he gave dinners to authors whomight be of use to him, and a backroom on the ground floor in which hedid his business; and it was to theback room that Mr. Kinross wasshown, without being announced, be-cause he was the only man in Londonto whom Mr. Radcliffe was always athome.
It was the first of the month, and
the back room was full of magazines.The Albemarle lay on every chair, inits buff wrapper, still smelling of thepress; and on the table, in a heap thatMr. Radcliffe pretended not to havelooked at, lay everybody else’s: theEdinburgh, the Quarterly, the NewMonthly, the Gentleman’s, and theblue-grey wrapper of the Ludgate.
“You have seen the tenth number,”said Mr. Radcliffe. He was a large,pale, careful man, who had been abookseller’s apprentice in Edinburghand had never forgotten it, and hesaid it in the tone in which a physiciansays that a patient is comfortable.
“I wrote it.”
“It is much admired,” saidMr. Radcliffe, “by those who admireit.” He moved the Ludgate half aninch, so that it lay square with theedge of the table. “I had a letter fromLord Ashcombe. He wished me to saythat the siege in the ninth number wasthe finest thing of its kind sinceFroissart.”
“Lord Ashcombe has not readFroissart.”
“That is very possible. He has notread the Warden either, I think, buthe is a subscriber, and I value hisopinion.” Mr. Radcliffe sat down,which he did not usually do inMr. Kinross’s presence, and put thetips of his fingers together. “I will beplain with you, sir, since you pay me
to be. We lose by the Warden aboutwhat I told you in June. I can bear it.You can bear it a good deal more eas-ily than I can. But it is the first ofSeptember, and the town is talkingabout Manchester, and about nothingelse, and I should be glad if the elev-enth number had a little more in it ofwhat the town is talking about.”
“A massacre,” said Mr. Kinross.
“An incident,” said Mr. Radcliffe,with a faint emphasis, as of a mancorrecting the proof of somebodyelse’s newspaper. “We are printing avery temperate article in October, insupport of the magistrates. And youngWray has a second paper for us onthe Cockney School, which I thinkwill make a stir.” He touched theblue-grey wrapper again. “Baldock islucky. He has a page on Manchester inthis number, set in the last week ofAugust, I don’t know how; he musthave held his press for it. And he hasa comedy of the Manchester trade inthe same number, as it happens,which in any other month would havebeen thought vulgar, and in this onewill be thought prophetic. Wraymeans to take it to pieces in October.”
Mr. Kinross looked at the wrapper.He had a high opinion of very fewmen and a low opinion of LuciusWray, whose debts he had paid once,three years ago, for reasons that hehad not explained to anybody and did
not now propose to explain toMr. Radcliffe; and he found that hedid not care, as much as he wouldhave expected, to think of LuciusWray taking the Mortimers to pieces.It was not that he admired them. Hehad not decided what he thought ofthem. But he had decided, on a benchin the Temple garden, that they werecompetent, and he had not found thatanybody else in Albemarle Street wasin the habit of using the word.
“Will the eleventh number,” saidMr. Radcliffe, “have a little more in-cident in it?”
“No,” said Mr. Kinross. He pickedup the Ludgate. “I will take this, ifyou have done with it.”
Mr. Radcliffe, who had read it fromcover to cover at seven o’clock thatmorning, said that he had barelylooked into it, and that Mr. Kinrosswas very welcome; and when the doorhad closed behind his principal propri-etor he sat for some time looking atthe place on the table where theLudgate had been, and wondering, ashe had wondered once or twice beforein the course of a long and profitablelife, what the devil a man of ten thou-sand a year wanted with a rival’smagazine.
He walked to the Temple, because hehad said that he would walk, and be-cause a man who has refused the
carriage in Grosvenor Square cannotvery well take a hackney in Piccadilly;and he went down the Strand amongthe drays and the ballad-sellers andthe boys crying the latest fromManchester, which was a week old,with the Ludgate under his arm likeany clerk, and in at the Inner Templegate as St. Dunstan’s giants strucktwelve.
Figgis said good morning to him inthe lane. Figgis said good morning tohim every morning, in a mannerwhich conveyed that it was a privilegefor the morning, and that Figgiswould not have said it to everybody.
At his desk he read Mr. Baldock’spage on Manchester first, because hehad been told it was there, and foundit short, angry and plainly written, bysomebody who had been in St. Peter’sField and had not been able to get thesound of it out of his head; it had beenset in a smaller type than the rest ofthe number, as if it had been squeezedin with a shoehorn, and it was betterthan anything in the Courier by thewidth of England. Then he turned tothe fifth number of The Mortimers ofMount Street, and settled himself todecide, once and for all, what hethought of it.
The fifth number was about afootman.
It had seemed, in the fourth, that itwould be about Miss Mortimer and the
house she had not been asked to; butthe Author had set that aside, with abriskness he was coming to recognise,and had opened instead upon a morn-ing in Mount Street on whichThomas, the second footman, hadcome into the breakfast-parlour andgiven notice. Thomas did not say why.Mrs. Mortimer supposed it was thewages, and offered more; MissMortimer supposed it was a youngwoman, and was rebuked; the butlersupposed it was the place, and wasnot asked. Mr. Kinross, who had notexpected to be amused, found that hewas reading with the exact care of aman who is waiting to be disappoin-ted, and that he was not disappointed,and that the number was nearly over.
Then, at the foot of a column, hecame upon a sentence that he knew.
He knew it before he knew why.He knew it as a man knows his ownstep on a stair, by the weight of it, be-fore he has thought whose step it is:the long fall of the clause, the turnupon understood, the semicolons laiddown like stepping-stones across astream. He read it to the end. Then hegot up, and took the ninth number ofthe Albemarle from the shelf behindhim, and opened it at the placebetween the letter and the sermon,and laid the two magazines side byside upon the desk, the buff wrapperand the blue.
It was his. It was his to the laststone, except where it was not. Untilthat hour had become until Thomasgave notice. The one thing was so eas–ily had had become the one was to behad for thirty pounds a year. Five-and-thirty years had acquired in theManchester trade, and the belief hadbecome the firm belief, which was theonly one of the alterations that hecould have improved upon, and he wasnot sure that he could. The Warden ofthe Marches, alone in a stone roomwith a King’s letter, had become acotton-man from Manchester in a din-ing-room in Mount Street, in want ofa footman; and the sentence, whichhad cost Mr. Kinross a week in thespring and which he had believed,privately, to be the best thing he hadever written, was funny.
He laughed.
He did not do it often, and he did itnow so suddenly and so loud that a pi-geon got up off the window-sill, andsomebody on the stair below stoppedand then went on. He laughed withhis hand flat on the two magazines, asa man laughs at a good stroke madeagainst him at fives; and when he haddone he sat back in his chair andlooked at the ceiling, which neededwhitewashing, and considered whathad happened to him.
Somebody had read the Warden.
Not looked into it, not subscribed to
it, not admired it to Mr. Radcliffe byletter, but read it, the ninth number,through the siege and the sermon,which he knew nobody could read;and had found, between the one andthe other, the only paragraph in itthat he had written for himself; andhad taken it. Nobody steals what hedoes not value. It was the first opinionof his work that he had ever beenoffered by a person who did not knowwho he was, and who had nothing togain by flattering him, and nothing tolose by saying so; and it had beenoffered in the plainest language thatone writer has for another, which istheft.
And then the thief had made it bet-ter. Not finer; he would not grantfiner. But he had written the sentencein the Marches about a man who hadno notion what anything cost, and thethief had moved it to a house wheresomebody knew to a shilling what afootman cost, and had put the priceinto the sentence, and the price waswhat made it true. To be had forthirty pounds a year. Mr. Kinross didnot know what his own footmen werepaid. He had never asked. Fenwickknew.
He looked for a long while at theblue-grey wrapper, and at the wordsThe Mortimers of Mount Street in itslist of contents; and then, withoutquite meaning to, he took up his pencil
and made a tick beside them, as hehad in August. The Author wasclever; that much the page proved.The rest Mr. Kinross supplied, as aman does who is used to being right.The Author was a young man; anOxford man, very likely, who hadquarrelled with his father and comeup to London to make his name by hispen; who wrote in a coffee-house anddined on credit, and had never set footin a counting-house in his life. And hehad an ear.
He was wrong in every particularbut the last.
The eleventh number of The LordWarden was due in Albemarle Streeton the tenth, and it had not beenbegun.
It had not been begun because thetenth had been so difficult. TheWarden had answered the King atlast, in a letter of four pages whichMr. Kinross had written eleven times,and which had gone to the printer inthe second week of August with thefeeling, familiar to him and neverpleasant, of a thing sent out of thehouse before it was dressed. Sincethen he had sat at this desk on mostafternoons and looked at a sheet offoolscap headed No. XI., and hadwritten on it, at various times, thedate of the Battle of Shrewsbury, thename of a horse, and a word which he
had struck through. The difficulty wasnot that he did not know whathappened next. He knew to the daywhat happened next; it was in the boxfor 1403. The difficulty was that hehad lost, somewhere in the writing ofthe King’s letter, the reason for tellingit.
He took the August Ludgate downfrom the shelf, where it lay marked inpencil, and opened it at the fourthnumber of the Mortimers, and foundthe paragraph beside which he hadwritten competent.
Miss Mortimer understood, betweenthe soup and the fish, that she would notbe asked to Lady Harrowgate’s; and shesat out the rest of the dinner in thegown in which she had been dressed forit, because to go up and change it wouldhave been to admit that she had known.
He read it three times. It was notcompetent. He had known in Augustthat it was not competent, and hadwritten the word because he did notwish to write any other, and becauseit is a thing commonly done by menwho own a share in one magazine tothe authors of another. It was the bestsentence in the number, and it wasabout a girl who had been dressed fora house she was not to enter, and ithad been written, he was now quitesure, by somebody who had sat out adinner in that gown. He put thisdown, after some thought, to the
young man’s having sisters.
He pulled the foolscap towards himand dipped his pen.
There was a hostage at Ludlow, inthe box for 1403: a Welsh girl, thedaughter of one of Glendower’s cap-tains, kept in the castle against herfather’s good behaviour, of whom thechroniclers said nothing at all exceptthat she was there. He had alwaysmeant to do something with her, andhad never known what. He knew now.He wrote, quickly, in the small fasthand that the laundress said was likea hen walking in ink, and he did notstop to cross anything out.
The Lady Gwenllian understood,between the grace and the first dish,that she would not be called up to thehigh table; and she sat out the rest ofthe feast in the gown that had beenmade for it, because to send for anotherwould have been to own that she hadhoped.
He read it over. It was not funny. Ithad been funny in Mount Street,where it had been something else, andhe was aware, in the part of his mindthat he did not commonly consult, thathe had taken a thing that was not hisand made it graver in the taking; andthat this was precisely, stroke forstroke, what had been done to him;and that whoever had done it wouldknow, on the first of October, that ithad been noticed.
It was a curious way to begin a cor-respondence. It was the only way, hesupposed, in which a man in King’sBench Walk could begin one with ayoung man whose name he did notknow, and who had sisters, withoutbeing introduced. He wrote on untilthe giants of St. Dunstan’s struck sixand the light went off the river, andwhen he got up from the desk the el-eventh number was four pages long,and he knew again the reason fortelling it.
The Albemarle came to SalisburySquare on the third of September, twodays late, because Mr. Pelham hadtaken it into the country.
Clemency had seen her own num-ber on the first. She had gone up tothe Row to look at it, as she did everymonth, without buying it, and hadstood at Baldock’s window and readthe list of contents through the glass,and had found, set in above theMortimers in a smaller type than therest, a page headed Manchester. Shehad known that it would be there;Mr. Baldock had held his press for it,and told her so, and told her that thetown would read the Mortimers thismonth with some attention, since theywere a Manchester family. He hadmeant it kindly. She had gone homeand been unable to eat her dinner. Herfather had bought fustians for twenty
years from a house in Manchesterwhose name she could still have writ-ten in her sleep; the Hindleys’ son hadcome to Bread Street once, and eatenroast mutton, and talked about looms;and she had spent the summer makingthe Manchester trade ridiculous forseven guineas a number, and had sentit out into a month in which peoplefrom the Manchester trade had beencut down with sabres in a field. It wasnot her fault. She had written it inJuly, and finished it on the fourth ofAugust, twelve days before St. Peter’sField. She told herself so a greatmany times, and it made nodifference.
Kit had said, at supper, thatMr. Pelham said the yeomanry haddone right, and that he rather thoughtthey had; and Lucy had said that shewas sure they had done wrong, andthat she rather thought so too; andtheir mother had said that she did notsee what Manchester had to do withany of them, and had then gone veryquiet, and said that she wonderedwhether the Hindleys were all well.
So it was in no frame of mind forthe Warden that Clemency took upthe tenth number on the morning ofthe third, and she was surprised tofind that she sat down to it.
The Warden had answered theKing.
It was a long answer, and a hard
one to read. It began by setting out,as carefully as a lease, which matterslay within the Warden’s authority andwhich lay outwith it; and she read itall; and somewhere in the third page,in the middle of an account of the for-tifying of Ludlow which went onlonger than anything ought to go on,with the river going down on the ebbbeneath the castle wall, she cameupon this:
My liege, I have kept your peace inthe March these nine years, and havelearned in the keeping that it is a thingmore easily broken by the keeper thanby the kept.
She read it with the room quite stillabout her. It was impossible that itshould have been written aboutManchester. The number had beenmade up in August, before anybody inLondon had heard of St. Peter’s Field;she knew how long a number took toprint better than anyone in that house.But it read, in the first week ofSeptember, as though the man hadbeen standing on the hustings with apencil, and she sat with the magazinein her lap and was angry with him, fora moment, for having been right byaccident, which was a thing she hadnever been.
Then she turned the pages throughto the end, slowly, looking forsomething.
She did not tell herself what she
was looking for. She was looking for afootman, or a dining-room, or a manfrom Manchester, or the turn of a sen-tence that she might know; for anysign, in short, that the fifth number ofthe Mortimers had been read in theplace where the Warden was written.There was none. There could not havebeen; the tenth number had been prin-ted before the fifth was published, andshe was a fool. She shut themagazine, and found that the cornerof the page with the Warden’s answeron it was turned down, and could notremember doing it.
She put on her bonnet, because theroom had become too small to thinkin, and went out.
It was not yet three, and thegarden would not be open; so shewalked as far as the print-seller’s atthe corner of Bouverie Street, whichwas as far as a woman could walk inFleet Street without appearing to begoing somewhere, and stood at thewindow.
The print-sellers of London soldLondon to itself in two kinds, andMr. Brindle hung them side by side.On the left, in a black frame, was anold engraving of Temple Bar, done be-fore she was born, so old that it stillshowed the iron spikes on the top ofthe gate where the City had once setthe heads of traitors: and under thearch the whole street was crammed
into a space a yard wide, carts andchairmen and a ballad-singer and adog and a beadle and a man with atray of pies, all shouting, as far as anengraving can shout. On the right, ina gilt one, was a view of the InnerTemple garden, drawn from somegentleman’s window above it: the longlawn, the gravel walks, the planetrees, the river wall, a barge with abrown sail, and nobody in it at all buta lady at the wall and a gentleman ona bench, too small to have faces.
The two pictures were of placesperhaps three hundred yards apart.She had looked at them a dozen times,and she saw now, as one sees a thingin a familiar room that has been thereall the while, what was clever aboutthem: that each had been made byleaving out the other. The man whodrew the gate had left out the garden,which was behind it; the man at thewindow had left out the noise, whichwas a street away. A customer couldcarry home the din or the quiet for thesame money, but not both. She did itherself every month, at seven guineas,and called it Mount Street.
And standing there, with her ownface faint in the glass between thegate and the garden, she did what shehad not allowed herself to do upstairs:she took the Warden to pieces.
The Warden lost money, and wasnot stopped. Mr. Baldock said that it
cost Albemarle Street twenty poundsa month; and a magazine does notcarry twenty pounds a month forsomebody’s nephew. It carries themfor the man who owns it. The author,therefore, owned the Albemarle, orthe better part of it, and was rich.That was one.
On the second page of his answerthe Warden had written that a certainmatter lay outwith his authority. NoEnglishman alive would have writtenoutwith. The author was a Scot. Thatwas two.
On the third page the Warden hadstood on the wall at Ludlow andwatched the river go down on the ebb.The Teme at Ludlow had no ebb; itwas fifty miles and more from thenearest tide, and she knew it, becauseshe had once spent a wet fortnightwith a gazetteer. The man had lookedat a tidal river so long, and so often,that he had given one to a river thathad none. He wrote within sight ofthe Thames. That was three.
And the King’s letter had beenanswered as a deed is drawn, whereasand provided always and saving nev–ertheless, by somebody who had beenbred to the law, or had sat a long timenear it. That was four.
A rich Scot of the Inns of Court,who wrote within sight of the river.She looked up from the glass, alongthe street, to the gate and the roofs of
the Temple beyond it, and very nearlylaughed; for half the Temple answeredto that description, and the other halfwas trying to. And a man of that kind,she thought, turning homeward,would no more read the Mortimersthan he would read the Lady’sCabinet; he did not know they existed;he never would.
She was right in every particularbut the last.
She went home by Salisbury Court,and up the two pair of stairs, and intothe back room; and when she hadtaken off her bonnet she did a thingthat she did perhaps once a month,and never when anybody was by. Shetook out the portfolio.
It had been her father’s, and hadheld patterns of fustian. It held now,between its marbled boards, every pic-ture she had ever begun of theMortimers, and not one of them wasfinished. Mr. Mortimer at the head ofhis table, without a face.Mrs. Mortimer’s carriage at the doorin Mount Street, very handsomelydone, with the railings set at the kerb.Miss Mortimer in the gown she hadbeen dressed in for LadyHarrowgate’s, the gown washed in tothe last flounce, and the face leftwhite, because Clemency had neverbeen able to decide what the girlwould look like at the moment sheunderstood.
She had read Emma the winter itcame out, in the copy from the circu-lating library on Ludgate Hill, andhad laughed aloud at the portfolioMiss Woodhouse brought out to showMr. Elton: the miniatures and half-lengths and whole-lengths, in penciland crayon and water-colours, ofwhich not one had ever been finished,and the Author’s verdict on them,which was that steadiness had alwaysbeen wanting. It was not steadinessthat was wanting in Salisbury Square.It was colours, which cost money; anddaylight, which she could not paint bywhile she was writing by it; and areason. Emma’s drawing had beencarried to London by an admirer, andframed, and hung over a mantelpiecefor the whole of Highbury to praise. Apicture of Mount Street by somebodywho had never set foot in MountStreet would be seen by nobody at all;she had known it every time shebegan one; and her drawings went
back into a fustian-merchant’s portfo-lio, under the bed.
And yet she kept them, becausethere was a book in her head that wasnot the Mortimers as they were, soldby the sheet and forgotten by themonth, but the Mortimers as theymight one day be: three volumes inboards, with plates, and under eachplate, in small capitals, drawn bythe author. It was the most foolishthing she knew about herself, and shehad told it to nobody.
She sat down at the desk, in whatwas left of the light, and began an-other. It was the garden of the InnerTemple, seen from the river wall: thelong lawn, the plane trees, the gravelof the eastern walk, the bench underthe second plane, and on the bench agentleman, too small to have a face.
She did not finish it.
She would know on the first ofOctober.
(To be continued.)
THE WIT OF MOUNT STREET;
or,
HER HEART IN NUMBERS.
(Continued from page 8.)
CHAPTER II.
Thomas Gives Notice.
The knocker had been taken off the door of the house in Grosvenor Square in the last week of July, as it was taken off every year, to inform the world that the family was out of town; and the world, which was itself out of town, had taken no notice.
The family was at Ardoch. That is to say, Lady Ardoch was at Ardoch, with four guests, two pointers, and a Miss Lauder whom she had invited for her complexion; and the head of the family, who should have been there, was in London, in a house where the chandeliers had been bagged in holland and the furniture stood about the drawing-rooms in dust-sheets like a company of mourners waiting to be told whose funeral it was. It was the first of September. Every gentleman in England who could hold a gun was standing in a stubble field. Mr. Kinross was eating his breakfast.
He ate it in the small dining-room at the back, because the large one had been shut up, and he ate it alone, because there was nobody else, and he was served by Fenwick and two footmen, because that was the establishment, and it did not occur to anyone in the house that one man and a rack of toast might be served by fewer. The coffee was at his hand before he had looked for it. The Times was folded at the side of his plate, and beneath it the Morning Chronicle, which he took because it was a Whig paper and he wished to know what the Whigs were saying, and beneath that the Courier, which he took because it was not, and he wished to know that too. Fenwick had ironed all three. He had never asked Fenwick to iron the newspapers. He had never asked Fenwick for anything that he could remember, and it struck him, not for the first time that summer, that he had lived for six-and-thirty days in this house without once giving an order in it.
On the salver was a letter from his
aunt.
Lady Ardoch wrote a large, decided hand, crossed and recrossed, and she wrote as she talked, which was without stopping. The weather was fine. The birds were plentiful. Miss Lauder was a charming girl, and had asked twice whether Mr. Kinross was expected, and Lady Ardoch had been obliged to say she could not tell, since she had not been told. She could not conceive what kept him in London in September, unless it was his lawyers, and if it was his lawyers she could only say that she had never known a lawyer who could not be kept waiting by a gentleman with ten thousand a year. She remained his affectionate aunt. Under the signature, across the first page, in the smallest hand she had: Pray do not tell me it is the book.
He folded the letter and put it under the toast-rack, which was where he put letters he did not mean to answer that day, and Fenwick, who knew it, removed the toast-rack.
The newspapers were full of Manchester. They had been full of Manchester for a fortnight, since the Monday on which the yeomanry had ridden into a crowd of sixty thousand people in St. Peter’s Field with their sabres drawn, to arrest a man on a cart who could perfectly well have been arrested at his inn; and they would be full of it for a long time yet. The Courier printed the thanks of the Government to the magistrates, in a column of type that looked, he thought, as pleased with itself as type could look. The Chronicle printed the names of the dead, with their ages and their trades, under a heading which the Courier would call inflammatory and which was merely accurate. A weaver. A special constable. A woman. A child of two. He read them all, slowly, because it seemed to him that someone ought to read them who had not been there, and then he folded the paper and found that he had not tasted his coffee and that Fenwick had already replaced it with coffee that was hot.
It was not, he knew, any concern of his. He had no property in Lancashire and no opinions on the reform of Parliament that he had ever been required to express aloud. But he had spent the summer, and the nine years before it, in the company of a man who kept order for a King who did not trust him, and who had once, in the eighth number of The Lord Warden, ridden into a market-place at Ludlow with forty spears to put down a riot of weavers; and he had written that scene with great care and a good deal of satisfaction, and had been rather proud of the weavers. He did not feel proud of them this morning. He sat with the folded Chronicle under his
hand and saw, with the disagreeable clearness that comes upon a man at breakfast, that the Warden had been in Manchester on the sixteenth of August, and that he had sent him there.
“Will you take the carriage, sir?” said Fenwick.
He had not said that he was going out. “I will walk,” he said; and the satisfaction of having, for once, said something that Fenwick could not have said for him carried him as far as Brook Street before he understood that it was a very small satisfaction for a man of two-and-thirty.
The Albemarle was published from a house in Albemarle Street, between the Royal Institution, where the fashionable world had gone in Sir Humphry Davy’s day to watch things set on fire, and Grillion’s, where it had gone afterwards to dine. Mr. Radcliffe had the ground floor for his shop and the first floor for his drawing-room, in which he gave dinners to authors who might be of use to him, and a back room on the ground floor in which he did his business; and it was to the back room that Mr. Kinross was shown, without being announced, because he was the only man in London to whom Mr. Radcliffe was always at home.
It was the first of the month, and the back room was full of magazines. The Albemarle lay on every chair, in its buff wrapper, still smelling of the press; and on the table, in a heap that Mr. Radcliffe pretended not to have looked at, lay everybody else’s: the Edinburgh, the Quarterly, the New Monthly, the Gentleman’s, and the blue-grey wrapper of the Ludgate.
“You have seen the tenth number,” said Mr. Radcliffe. He was a large, pale, careful man, who had been a bookseller’s apprentice in Edinburgh and had never forgotten it, and he said it in the tone in which a physician says that a patient is comfortable.
“I wrote it.”
“It is much admired,” said Mr. Radcliffe, “by those who admire it.” He moved the Ludgate half an inch, so that it lay square with the edge of the table. “I had a letter from Lord Ashcombe. He wished me to say that the siege in the ninth number was the finest thing of its kind since Froissart.”
“Lord Ashcombe has not read Froissart.”
“That is very possible. He has not read the Warden either, I think, but he is a subscriber, and I value his opinion.” Mr. Radcliffe sat down, which he did not usually do in Mr. Kinross’s presence, and put the tips of his fingers together. “I will be plain with you, sir, since you pay me
to be. We lose by the Warden about what I told you in June. I can bear it. You can bear it a good deal more easily than I can. But it is the first of September, and the town is talking about Manchester, and about nothing else, and I should be glad if the eleventh number had a little more in it of what the town is talking about.”
“A massacre,” said Mr. Kinross.
“An incident,” said Mr. Radcliffe, with a faint emphasis, as of a man correcting the proof of somebody else’s newspaper. “We are printing a very temperate article in October, in support of the magistrates. And young Wray has a second paper for us on the Cockney School, which I think will make a stir.” He touched the blue-grey wrapper again. “Baldock is lucky. He has a page on Manchester in this number, set in the last week of August, I don’t know how; he must have held his press for it. And he has a comedy of the Manchester trade in the same number, as it happens, which in any other month would have been thought vulgar, and in this one will be thought prophetic. Wray means to take it to pieces in October.”
Mr. Kinross looked at the wrapper. He had a high opinion of very few men and a low opinion of Lucius Wray, whose debts he had paid once, three years ago, for reasons that he had not explained to anybody and did not now propose to explain to Mr. Radcliffe; and he found that he did not care, as much as he would have expected, to think of Lucius Wray taking the Mortimers to pieces. It was not that he admired them. He had not decided what he thought of them. But he had decided, on a bench in the Temple garden, that they were competent, and he had not found that anybody else in Albemarle Street was in the habit of using the word.
“Will the eleventh number,” said Mr. Radcliffe, “have a little more incident in it?”
“No,” said Mr. Kinross. He picked up the Ludgate. “I will take this, if you have done with it.”
Mr. Radcliffe, who had read it from cover to cover at seven o’clock that morning, said that he had barely looked into it, and that Mr. Kinross was very welcome; and when the door had closed behind his principal proprietor he sat for some time looking at the place on the table where the Ludgate had been, and wondering, as he had wondered once or twice before in the course of a long and profitable life, what the devil a man of ten thousand a year wanted with a rival’s magazine.
He walked to the Temple, because he had said that he would walk, and because a man who has refused the
carriage in Grosvenor Square cannot very well take a hackney in Piccadilly; and he went down the Strand among the drays and the ballad-sellers and the boys crying the latest from Manchester, which was a week old, with the Ludgate under his arm like any clerk, and in at the Inner Temple gate as St. Dunstan’s giants struck twelve.
Figgis said good morning to him in the lane. Figgis said good morning to him every morning, in a manner which conveyed that it was a privilege for the morning, and that Figgis would not have said it to everybody.
At his desk he read Mr. Baldock’s page on Manchester first, because he had been told it was there, and found it short, angry and plainly written, by somebody who had been in St. Peter’s Field and had not been able to get the sound of it out of his head; it had been set in a smaller type than the rest of the number, as if it had been squeezed in with a shoehorn, and it was better than anything in the Courier by the width of England. Then he turned to the fifth number of The Mortimers of Mount Street, and settled himself to decide, once and for all, what he thought of it.
The fifth number was about a footman.
It had seemed, in the fourth, that it would be about Miss Mortimer and the house she had not been asked to; but the Author had set that aside, with a briskness he was coming to recognise, and had opened instead upon a morning in Mount Street on which Thomas, the second footman, had come into the breakfast-parlour and given notice. Thomas did not say why. Mrs. Mortimer supposed it was the wages, and offered more; Miss Mortimer supposed it was a young woman, and was rebuked; the butler supposed it was the place, and was not asked. Mr. Kinross, who had not expected to be amused, found that he was reading with the exact care of a man who is waiting to be disappointed, and that he was not disappointed, and that the number was nearly over.
Then, at the foot of a column, he came upon a sentence that he knew.
He knew it before he knew why. He knew it as a man knows his own step on a stair, by the weight of it, before he has thought whose step it is: the long fall of the clause, the turn upon understood, the semicolons laid down like stepping-stones across a stream. He read it to the end. Then he got up, and took the ninth number of the Albemarle from the shelf behind him, and opened it at the place between the letter and the sermon, and laid the two magazines side by side upon the desk, the buff wrapper and the blue.
It was his. It was his to the last stone, except where it was not. Until that hour had become until Thomas gave notice. The one thing was so easily had had become the one was to be had for thirty pounds a year. Five-and-thirty years had acquired in the Manchester trade, and the belief had become the firm belief, which was the only one of the alterations that he could have improved upon, and he was not sure that he could. The Warden of the Marches, alone in a stone room with a King’s letter, had become a cotton-man from Manchester in a dining-room in Mount Street, in want of a footman; and the sentence, which had cost Mr. Kinross a week in the spring and which he had believed, privately, to be the best thing he had ever written, was funny.
He laughed.
He did not do it often, and he did it now so suddenly and so loud that a pigeon got up off the window-sill, and somebody on the stair below stopped and then went on. He laughed with his hand flat on the two magazines, as a man laughs at a good stroke made against him at fives; and when he had done he sat back in his chair and looked at the ceiling, which needed whitewashing, and considered what had happened to him.
Somebody had read the Warden.
Not looked into it, not subscribed to it, not admired it to Mr. Radcliffe by letter, but read it, the ninth number, through the siege and the sermon, which he knew nobody could read; and had found, between the one and the other, the only paragraph in it that he had written for himself; and had taken it. Nobody steals what he does not value. It was the first opinion of his work that he had ever been offered by a person who did not know who he was, and who had nothing to gain by flattering him, and nothing to lose by saying so; and it had been offered in the plainest language that one writer has for another, which is theft.
And then the thief had made it better. Not finer; he would not grant finer. But he had written the sentence in the Marches about a man who had no notion what anything cost, and the thief had moved it to a house where somebody knew to a shilling what a footman cost, and had put the price into the sentence, and the price was what made it true. To be had for thirty pounds a year. Mr. Kinross did not know what his own footmen were paid. He had never asked. Fenwick knew.
He looked for a long while at the blue-grey wrapper, and at the words The Mortimers of Mount Street in its list of contents; and then, without quite meaning to, he took up his pencil
and made a tick beside them, as he had in August. The Author was clever; that much the page proved. The rest Mr. Kinross supplied, as a man does who is used to being right. The Author was a young man; an Oxford man, very likely, who had quarrelled with his father and come up to London to make his name by his pen; who wrote in a coffee-house and dined on credit, and had never set foot in a counting-house in his life. And he had an ear.
He was wrong in every particular but the last.
The eleventh number of The Lord Warden was due in Albemarle Street on the tenth, and it had not been begun.
It had not been begun because the tenth had been so difficult. The Warden had answered the King at last, in a letter of four pages which Mr. Kinross had written eleven times, and which had gone to the printer in the second week of August with the feeling, familiar to him and never pleasant, of a thing sent out of the house before it was dressed. Since then he had sat at this desk on most afternoons and looked at a sheet of foolscap headed No. XI., and had written on it, at various times, the date of the Battle of Shrewsbury, the name of a horse, and a word which he had struck through. The difficulty was not that he did not know what happened next. He knew to the day what happened next; it was in the box for 1403. The difficulty was that he had lost, somewhere in the writing of the King’s letter, the reason for telling it.
He took the August Ludgate down from the shelf, where it lay marked in pencil, and opened it at the fourth number of the Mortimers, and found the paragraph beside which he had written competent.
Miss Mortimer understood, between the soup and the fish, that she would not be asked to Lady Harrowgate’s; and she sat out the rest of the dinner in the gown in which she had been dressed for it, because to go up and change it would have been to admit that she had known.
He read it three times. It was not competent. He had known in August that it was not competent, and had written the word because he did not wish to write any other, and because it is a thing commonly done by men who own a share in one magazine to the authors of another. It was the best sentence in the number, and it was about a girl who had been dressed for a house she was not to enter, and it had been written, he was now quite sure, by somebody who had sat out a dinner in that gown. He put this down, after some thought, to the
young man’s having sisters.
He pulled the foolscap towards him and dipped his pen.
There was a hostage at Ludlow, in the box for 1403: a Welsh girl, the daughter of one of Glendower’s captains, kept in the castle against her father’s good behaviour, of whom the chroniclers said nothing at all except that she was there. He had always meant to do something with her, and had never known what. He knew now. He wrote, quickly, in the small fast hand that the laundress said was like a hen walking in ink, and he did not stop to cross anything out.
The Lady Gwenllian understood, between the grace and the first dish, that she would not be called up to the high table; and she sat out the rest of the feast in the gown that had been made for it, because to send for another would have been to own that she had hoped.
He read it over. It was not funny. It had been funny in Mount Street, where it had been something else, and he was aware, in the part of his mind that he did not commonly consult, that he had taken a thing that was not his and made it graver in the taking; and that this was precisely, stroke for stroke, what had been done to him; and that whoever had done it would know, on the first of October, that it had been noticed.
It was a curious way to begin a correspondence. It was the only way, he supposed, in which a man in King’s Bench Walk could begin one with a young man whose name he did not know, and who had sisters, without being introduced. He wrote on until the giants of St. Dunstan’s struck six and the light went off the river, and when he got up from the desk the eleventh number was four pages long, and he knew again the reason for telling it.
The Albemarle came to Salisbury Square on the third of September, two days late, because Mr. Pelham had taken it into the country.
Clemency had seen her own number on the first. She had gone up to the Row to look at it, as she did every month, without buying it, and had stood at Baldock’s window and read the list of contents through the glass, and had found, set in above the Mortimers in a smaller type than the rest, a page headed Manchester. She had known that it would be there; Mr. Baldock had held his press for it, and told her so, and told her that the town would read the Mortimers this month with some attention, since they were a Manchester family. He had meant it kindly. She had gone home and been unable to eat her dinner. Her father had bought fustians for twenty
years from a house in Manchester whose name she could still have written in her sleep; the Hindleys’ son had come to Bread Street once, and eaten roast mutton, and talked about looms; and she had spent the summer making the Manchester trade ridiculous for seven guineas a number, and had sent it out into a month in which people from the Manchester trade had been cut down with sabres in a field. It was not her fault. She had written it in July, and finished it on the fourth of August, twelve days before St. Peter’s Field. She told herself so a great many times, and it made no difference.
Kit had said, at supper, that Mr. Pelham said the yeomanry had done right, and that he rather thought they had; and Lucy had said that she was sure they had done wrong, and that she rather thought so too; and their mother had said that she did not see what Manchester had to do with any of them, and had then gone very quiet, and said that she wondered whether the Hindleys were all well.
So it was in no frame of mind for the Warden that Clemency took up the tenth number on the morning of the third, and she was surprised to find that she sat down to it.
The Warden had answered the King.
It was a long answer, and a hard one to read. It began by setting out, as carefully as a lease, which matters lay within the Warden’s authority and which lay outwith it; and she read it all; and somewhere in the third page, in the middle of an account of the fortifying of Ludlow which went on longer than anything ought to go on, with the river going down on the ebb beneath the castle wall, she came upon this:
My liege, I have kept your peace in the March these nine years, and have learned in the keeping that it is a thing more easily broken by the keeper than by the kept.
She read it with the room quite still about her. It was impossible that it should have been written about Manchester. The number had been made up in August, before anybody in London had heard of St. Peter’s Field; she knew how long a number took to print better than anyone in that house. But it read, in the first week of September, as though the man had been standing on the hustings with a pencil, and she sat with the magazine in her lap and was angry with him, for a moment, for having been right by accident, which was a thing she had never been.
Then she turned the pages through to the end, slowly, looking for something.
She did not tell herself what she
was looking for. She was looking for a footman, or a dining-room, or a man from Manchester, or the turn of a sentence that she might know; for any sign, in short, that the fifth number of the Mortimers had been read in the place where the Warden was written. There was none. There could not have been; the tenth number had been printed before the fifth was published, and she was a fool. She shut the magazine, and found that the corner of the page with the Warden’s answer on it was turned down, and could not remember doing it.
She put on her bonnet, because the room had become too small to think in, and went out.
It was not yet three, and the garden would not be open; so she walked as far as the print-seller’s at the corner of Bouverie Street, which was as far as a woman could walk in Fleet Street without appearing to be going somewhere, and stood at the window.
The print-sellers of London sold London to itself in two kinds, and Mr. Brindle hung them side by side. On the left, in a black frame, was an old engraving of Temple Bar, done before she was born, so old that it still showed the iron spikes on the top of the gate where the City had once set the heads of traitors: and under the arch the whole street was crammed into a space a yard wide, carts and chairmen and a ballad-singer and a dog and a beadle and a man with a tray of pies, all shouting, as far as an engraving can shout. On the right, in a gilt one, was a view of the Inner Temple garden, drawn from some gentleman’s window above it: the long lawn, the gravel walks, the plane trees, the river wall, a barge with a brown sail, and nobody in it at all but a lady at the wall and a gentleman on a bench, too small to have faces.
The two pictures were of places perhaps three hundred yards apart. She had looked at them a dozen times, and she saw now, as one sees a thing in a familiar room that has been there all the while, what was clever about them: that each had been made by leaving out the other. The man who drew the gate had left out the garden, which was behind it; the man at the window had left out the noise, which was a street away. A customer could carry home the din or the quiet for the same money, but not both. She did it herself every month, at seven guineas, and called it Mount Street.
And standing there, with her own face faint in the glass between the gate and the garden, she did what she had not allowed herself to do upstairs: she took the Warden to pieces.
The Warden lost money, and was not stopped. Mr. Baldock said that it
cost Albemarle Street twenty pounds a month; and a magazine does not carry twenty pounds a month for somebody’s nephew. It carries them for the man who owns it. The author, therefore, owned the Albemarle, or the better part of it, and was rich. That was one.
On the second page of his answer the Warden had written that a certain matter lay outwith his authority. No Englishman alive would have written outwith. The author was a Scot. That was two.
On the third page the Warden had stood on the wall at Ludlow and watched the river go down on the ebb. The Teme at Ludlow had no ebb; it was fifty miles and more from the nearest tide, and she knew it, because she had once spent a wet fortnight with a gazetteer. The man had looked at a tidal river so long, and so often, that he had given one to a river that had none. He wrote within sight of the Thames. That was three.
And the King’s letter had been answered as a deed is drawn, whereas and provided always and saving nevertheless, by somebody who had been bred to the law, or had sat a long time near it. That was four.
A rich Scot of the Inns of Court, who wrote within sight of the river. She looked up from the glass, along the street, to the gate and the roofs of the Temple beyond it, and very nearly laughed; for half the Temple answered to that description, and the other half was trying to. And a man of that kind, she thought, turning homeward, would no more read the Mortimers than he would read the Lady’s Cabinet; he did not know they existed; he never would.
She was right in every particular but the last.
She went home by Salisbury Court, and up the two pair of stairs, and into the back room; and when she had taken off her bonnet she did a thing that she did perhaps once a month, and never when anybody was by. She took out the portfolio.
It had been her father’s, and had held patterns of fustian. It held now, between its marbled boards, every picture she had ever begun of the Mortimers, and not one of them was finished. Mr. Mortimer at the head of his table, without a face. Mrs. Mortimer’s carriage at the door in Mount Street, very handsomely done, with the railings set at the kerb. Miss Mortimer in the gown she had been dressed in for Lady Harrowgate’s, the gown washed in to the last flounce, and the face left white, because Clemency had never been able to decide what the girl would look like at the moment she understood.
She had read Emma the winter it came out, in the copy from the circulating library on Ludgate Hill, and had laughed aloud at the portfolio Miss Woodhouse brought out to show Mr. Elton: the miniatures and half-lengths and whole-lengths, in pencil and crayon and water-colours, of which not one had ever been finished, and the Author’s verdict on them, which was that steadiness had always been wanting. It was not steadiness that was wanting in Salisbury Square. It was colours, which cost money; and daylight, which she could not paint by while she was writing by it; and a reason. Emma’s drawing had been carried to London by an admirer, and framed, and hung over a mantelpiece for the whole of Highbury to praise. A picture of Mount Street by somebody who had never set foot in Mount Street would be seen by nobody at all; she had known it every time she began one; and her drawings went back into a fustian-merchant’s portfolio, under the bed.
And yet she kept them, because there was a book in her head that was not the Mortimers as they were, sold by the sheet and forgotten by the month, but the Mortimers as they might one day be: three volumes in boards, with plates, and under each plate, in small capitals, drawn by the author. It was the most foolish thing she knew about herself, and she had told it to nobody.
She sat down at the desk, in what was left of the light, and began another. It was the garden of the Inner Temple, seen from the river wall: the long lawn, the plane trees, the gravel of the eastern walk, the bench under the second plane, and on the bench a gentleman, too small to have a face.
She did not finish it.
She would know on the first of October.
(To be continued.)
Edited by Michael Cummins. Written in full collaboration with Anthropic’s Claude models, and set here as it might have appeared in a London magazine of 1819. Read the announcement, with the plan of London.
