Fennel and Rue

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FENNEL AND RUE

By William Dean Howells



I.

The success of Verrian did not come early, and it did not come easily.
He had been trying a long time to get his work into the best magazines,
and when he had won the favor of the editors, whose interest he had
perhaps had from the beginning, it might be said that they began to
accept his work from their consciences, because in its way it was so good
that they could not justly refuse it. The particular editor who took
Verrian's serial, after it had come back to the author from the editors
of the other leading periodicals, was in fact moved mainly by the belief
that the story would please the better sort of his readers. These, if
they were not so numerous as the worse, he felt had now and then the
right to have their pleasure studied.

It was a serious story, and it was somewhat bitter, as Verrian himself
was, after his struggle to reach the public with work which he knew
merited recognition. But the world which does not like people to take
themselves too seriously also likes them to take themselves seriously,
and the bitterness in Verrian's story proved agreeable to a number of
readers unexpectedly great. It intimated a romantic personality in the
author, and the world still likes to imagine romantic things of authors.
It likes especially to imagine them of novelists, now that there are no
longer poets; and when it began to like Verrian's serial, it began to
write him all sorts of letters, directly, in care of the editor, and
indirectly to the editor, whom they asked about Verrian more than about
his story.

It was a man's story rather than a woman's story, as these may be
distinguished; but quite for that reason women seemed peculiarly taken
with it. Perhaps the women had more leisure or more courage to write to
the author and the editor; at any rate, most of the letters were from
women; some of the letters were silly and fatuous enough, but others were
of an intelligence which was none the less penetrating for being
emotional rather than critical. These maids or matrons, whoever or
whichever they were, knew wonderfully well what the author would be at,
and their interest in his story implied a constant if not a single
devotion. Now and then Verrian was tempted to answer one of them, and
under favor of his mother, who had been his confidant at every point of
his literary career, he yielded to the temptation; but one day there came
a letter asking an answer, which neither he nor his mother felt competent
to deal with. They both perceived that they must refer it to the editor
of the magazine, and it seemed to them so important that they decided
Verrian must go with it in person to the editor. Then he must be so far
ruled by him, if necessary, as to give him the letter and put himself, as
the author, beyond an appeal which he found peculiarly poignant.

The letter, which had overcome the tacit misgivings of his mother as they
read it and read it again together, was from a girl who had perhaps no
need to confess herself young, or to own her inexperience of the world
where stories were written and printed. She excused herself with a
delicacy which Verrian's correspondents by no means always showed for
intruding upon him, and then pleaded the power his story had over her as
the only shadow of right she had in addressing him. Its fascination,
she said, had begun with the first number, the first chapter, almost the
first paragraph. It was not for the plot that she cared; she had read
too many stories to care for the plot; it was the problem involved. It
was one which she had so often pondered in her own mind that she felt, in
a way she hoped he would not think conceited, almost as if the story was
written for her. She had never been able to solve the problem; how he
would solve it she did not see how she could wait to know; and here she
made him a confidence without which, she said, she should not have the
courage to go on. She was an invalid, and her doctor had told her that,
though she might live for months, there were chances that she might die
at any moment suddenly. He would think it strange, and it was strange
that she should tell him this, and stranger still that she should dare to
ask him what she was going to ask. The story had yet four months to run,
and she had begun to have a morbid foreboding that she should not live to
read it in the ordinary course. She was so ignorant about writers that
she did not know whether such a thing was ever done, or could be done;
but if he could tell her how the story was to come out he would be doing
more for her than anything else that could be done for her on earth. She
had read that sometimes authors began to print their serial stories
before they had written them to the end, and he might not be sure of the
end himself; but if he had finished this story of his, and could let her
see the last pages in print, she would owe him the gratitude she could
never express.

The letter was written in an educated hand, and there were no foibles of
form or excesses of fashion in the stationery to mar the character of
sincerity the simple wording conveyed. The postal address, with the
date, was fully given, and the name signed at the end was evidently
genuine.

Verrian himself had no question of the genuineness of the letter in any
respect; his mother, after her first misgivings, which were perhaps
sensations, thought as he did about it. She said the story dealt so
profoundly with the deepest things that it was no wonder a person,
standing like that girl between life and death, should wish to know how
the author solved its problem. Then she read the letter carefully over
again, and again Verrian read it, with an effect not different from that
which its first perusal had made with him. His faith in his work was so
great, so entire, that the notion of any other feeling about it was not
admissible.

"Of course," he said, with a sigh of satisfaction, "I must show the
letter to Armiger at once."

"Of course," his mother replied. "He is the editor, and you must not do
anything without his approval."

The faith in the writer of the letter, which was primary with him, was
secondary with her, but perhaps for that reason, she was all the more
firmly grounded in it.




II.

There was nothing to cloud the editor's judgment, when Verrian came to
him, except the fact that he was a poet as well as an editor. He read in
a silence as great as the author's the letter which Verrian submitted.
Then he remained pondering it for as long a space before he said, "That
is very touching."

Verrian jumped to his question. "Do you mean that we ought to send her
the proofs of the story?"

"No," the editor faltered, but even in this decision he did not deny the
author his sympathy. "You've touched bottom in that story, Verrian. You
may go higher, but you can never go deeper."

Verrian flushed a little. "Oh, thank you!"

"I'm not surprised the girl wants to know how you manage your problem
--such a girl, standing in the shadow of the other world, which is always
eclipsing this, and seeing how you've caught its awful outline."

Verrian made a grateful murmur at the praise. "That is what my mother
felt. Then you have no doubt of the good faith--"

"No," the editor returned, with the same quantity, if not the same
quality, of reluctance as before. "You see, it would be too daring."

"Then why not let her have the proofs?"

"The thing is so unprecedented--"

"Our doing it needn't form a precedent."

"No."

"And if you've no doubt of its being a true case--"

"We must prove that it is, or, rather, we must make her prove it. I
quite feel with you about it. If I were to act upon my own impulse, my
own convictions, I should send her the rest of the story and take the
chances. But she may be an enterprising journalist in disguise it's
astonishing what women will do when they take to newspaper work--and we
have no right to risk anything, for the magazine's sake, if not yours and
mine. Will you leave this letter with me?"

"I expected to leave the whole affair in your hands. Do you mind telling
me what you propose to do? Of course, it won't be anything--abrupt--"

"Oh no; and I don't mind telling you what has occurred to me. If this is
a true case, as you say, and I've no question but it is, the writer will
be on confidential terms with her pastor as well as her doctor and I
propose asking her to get him to certify, in any sort of general terms,
to her identity. I will treat the matter delicately--Or, if you prefer
to write to her yourself--"

"Oh no, it's much better for you to do it; you can do it
authoritatively."

"Yes, and if she isn't the real thing, but merely a woman journalist
trying to work us for a 'story' in her Sunday edition, we shall hear no
more from her."

"I don't see anything to object to in your plan," Verrian said, upon
reflection. "She certainly can't complain of our being cautious."

"No, and she won't. I shall have to refer the matter to the house--"

"Oh, will you?"

"Why, certainly! I couldn't take a step like that without the approval
of the house."

"No," Verrian assented, and he made a note of the writer's address from
the letter. Then, after a moment spent in looking hard at the letter, he
gave it back to the editor and went abruptly away.

He had proof, the next morning, that the editor had acted promptly, at
least so far as regarded the house. The house had approved his plan, if
one could trust the romantic paragraph which Verrian found in his paper
at breakfast, exploiting the fact concerned as one of the interesting
evidences of the hold his serial had got with the magazine readers. He
recognized in the paragraph the touch of the good fellow who prepared the
weekly bulletins of the house, and offered the press literary
intelligence in a form ready for immediate use. The case was fairly
stated, but the privacy of the author's correspondent was perfectly
guarded; it was not even made known that she was a woman. Yet Verrian
felt, in reading the paragraph, a shock of guilty dismay, as if he had
betrayed a confidence reposed in him, and he handed the paper across the
table to his mother with rather a sick look.

After his return from the magazine office the day before, there had been
a good deal of talk between them about that girl. Mrs. Verrian had
agreed with him that no more interesting event could have happened to an
author, but she had tried to keep him from taking it too personally, and
from making himself mischievous illusions from it. She had since slept
upon her anxieties, with the effect of finding them more vivid at waking,
and she had been casting about for an opening to penetrate him with them,
when fortune put this paragraph in her way.

"Isn't it disgusting?" he asked. "I don't see how Armiger could let them
do it. I hope to heaven she'll never see it!"

His mother looked up from the paragraph and asked,

"Why?"

"What would she think of me?"

"I don't know. She might have expected something of the kind."

"How expect something of the kind? Am I one of the self-advertisers?"

"Well, she must have realized that she was doing rather a bold thing."

"Bold?"

"Venturesome," Mrs. Verrian compromised to the kindling anger in her
son's eyes.

"I don't understand you, mother. I thought you agreed with me about the
writer of that letter--her sincerity, simplicity."

"Sincerity, yes. But simplicity--Philip, a thoroughly single-minded
girl never wrote that letter. You can't feel such a thing as I do.
A man couldn't. You can paint the character of women, and you do it
wonderfully--but, after all, you can't know them as a woman does."

"You talk," he answered, a little sulkily, "as if you knew some harm of
the girl."

"No, my son, I know nothing about her, except that she is not
single-minded, and there is no harm in not being single-minded. A great
many single-minded women are fools, and some double-minded women are
good."

"Well, single-minded or double-minded, if she is what she says she is,
what motive on earth could she have in writing to me except the motive
she gives? You don't deny that she tells the truth about herself?"

"Don't I say that she is sincere? But a girl doesn't always know her own
motives, or all of them. She may have written to you because she would
like to begin a correspondence with an author. Or she may have done it
out of the love of excitement. Or for the sake of distraction, to get
away from herself and her gloomy forebodings."

"And should you blame her for that?"

"No, I shouldn't. I should pity her for it. But, all the same, I
shouldn't want you to be taken in by her."

"You think, then, she doesn't care anything about the story?"

"I think, very probably, she cares a great deal about it. She is a
serious person, intellectually at least, and it is a serious story. No
wonder she would like to know, at first hand, something about the man who
wrote it."

This flattered Verrian, but he would not allow its reasonableness. He
took a gulp of coffee before saying, uncandidly, "I can't make out what
you're driving at, mother. But, fortunately, there's no hurry about your
meaning. The thing's in the only shape we could possibly give it, and I
am satisfied to leave it in Armiger's hands. I'm certain he will deal
wisely with it-and kindly."

"Yes, I'm sure he'll deal kindly. I should be very unhappy if he didn't.
He could easily deal more wisely, though, than she has."

Verrian chose not to follow his mother in this. "All is," he said, with
finality, "I hope she'll never see that loathsome paragraph."

"Oh, very likely she won't," his mother consoled him.




III.

Only four days after he had seen Armiger, Verrian received an envelope
covering a brief note to himself from the editor, a copy of the letter he
had written to Verrian's unknown correspondent, and her answer in the
original. Verrian was alone when the postman brought him this envelope,
and he could indulge a certain passion for method by which he read its
contents in the order named; if his mother had been by, she would have
made him read the girl's reply first of all. Armiger wrote:

"MY DEAR VERRIAN,--I enclose two exhibits which will possess you of all
the facts in the case of the young lady who feared she might die before
she read the end of your story, but who, you will be glad to find, is
likely to live through the year. As the story ends in our October
number, she need not be supplied with advance sheets. I am sorry the
house hurried out a paragraph concerning the matter, but it will not be
followed by another. Perhaps you will feel, as I do, that the incident
is closed. I have not replied to the writer, and you need not return her
letter. Yours ever,

"M. ARMIGER."

The editor's letter to the young lady read:

"DEAR MADAM,--Mr. P. S. Verrian has handed me your letter of the 4th, and
I need not tell you that it has interested us both.

"I am almost as much gratified as he by the testimony your request bears
to the importance of his work, and if I could have acted upon my instant
feeling I should have had no hesitation in granting it, though it is so
very unusual as to be, in my experience as an editor, unprecedented. I
am sure that you would not have made it so frankly if you had not been
prepared to guard in return any confidence placed in you; but you will
realize that as you are quite unknown to us, we should not be justified
in taking a step so unusual as you propose without having some guarantee
besides that which Mr. Verrian and I both feel from the character of your
letter. Simply, then, for purposes of identification, as the phrase is,
I must beg you to ask the pastor of your church, or, better still, your
family physician, to write you a line saying that he knows you, as a sort
of letter of introduction to me. Then I will send you the advance proofs
of Mr. Verrian's story. You may like to address me personally in the
care of the magazine, and not as the editor.

"Yours very respectfully,

"M. ARMIGER."

The editor's letter was dated the 6th of the month; the answer, dated the
8th, betrayed the anxious haste of the writer in replying, and it was not
her fault if what she wrote came to Verrian when he was no longer able to
do justice to her confession. Under the address given in her first
letter she now began, in, a hand into which a kindlier eye might have
read a pathetic perturbation:

"DEAR SIR,--I have something awful to tell you. I might write pages
without making you think better of me, and I will let you think the worst
at once. I am not what I pretended to be. I wrote to Mr. Verrian saying
what I did, and asking to see the rest of his story on the impulse of the
moment. I had been reading it, for I think it is perfectly fascinating;
and a friend of mine, another girl, and I got together trying to guess
how he would end it, and we began to dare each other to write to him and
ask. At first we did not dream of doing such a thing, but we went on,
and just for the fun of it we drew lots to see which should write to him.
The lot fell to me; but we composed that letter together, and we put in
about my dying for a joke. We never intended to send it; but then one
thing led to another, and I signed it with my real name and we sent it.
We did not really expect to hear anything from it, for we supposed he
must get lots of letters about his story and never paid any attention to
them. We did not realize what we had done till I got your letter
yesterday. Then we saw it all, and ever since we have been trying to
think what to do, and I do not believe either of us has slept a moment.
We have come to the conclusion that there was only one thing we could do,
and that was to tell you just exactly how it happened and take the
consequences. But there is no reason why more than one person should be
brought into it, and so I will not let my friend sign this letter with
me, but I will put my own name alone to it. You may not think it is my
real name, but it is; you can find out by writing to the postmaster here.
I do not know whether you will publish it as a fraud for the warning of
others, but I shall not blame you if you do. I deserve anything.

"Yours truly,

"JERUSHA PEREGRINE BROWN."


If Verrian had been an older man life might have supplied him with the
means of judging the writer of this letter. But his experience as an
author had not been very great, and such as it was it had hardened and
sharpened him. There was nothing wild or whirling in his mood, but in
the deadly hurt which had been inflicted upon his vanity he coldly and
carefully studied what deadlier hurt he might inflict again. He was of
the crueller intent because he had not known how much of personal vanity
there was in the seriousness with which he took himself and his work. He
had supposed that he was respecting his ethics and aesthetics, his ideal
of conduct and of art, but now it was brought home to him that he was
swollen with the conceit of his own performance, and that, however well
others thought of it, his own thought of it far outran their will to
honor it. He wished to revenge himself for this consciousness as well as
the offence offered him; of the two the consciousness was the more
disagreeable.

His mother, dressed for the street, came in where he sat quiet at his
desk, with the editor's letters and the girl's before him, and he mutely
referred them to her with a hand lifted over his shoulder. She read
them, and then she said, "This is hard to bear, Philip. I wish I could
bear it for you, or at least with you; but I'm late for my engagement
with Mrs. Alfred, as it is--No, I will telephone her I'm detained and
we'll talk it over--"

"No, no! Not on any account! I'd rather think it out for myself. You
couldn't help me. After all, it hasn't done me any harm--"

"And you've had a great escape! And I won't say a word more now, but
I'll be back soon, and then we--Oh, I'm so sorry I'm going."

Verrian gave a laugh. "You couldn't do anything if you stayed, mother.
Do go!"

"Well--" She looked at him, smoothing her muff with her hand a moment,
and then she dropped a fond kiss on his cheek and obeyed him.




IV

Verrian still sat at his desk, thinking, with his burning face in his
hands. It was covered with shame for what had happened to him, but his
humiliation had no quality of pity in it. He must write to that girl,
and write at once, and his sole hesitation was as to the form he should
give his reply. He could not address her as Dear Miss Brown or as Dear
Madam. Even Madam was not sharp and forbidding enough; besides, Madam,
alone or with the senseless prefix, was archaic, and Verrian wished to be
very modern with this most offensive instance of the latest girl.
He decided upon dealing with her in the third person, and trusting to his
literary skill to keep the form from clumsiness.

He tried it in that form, and it was simply disgusting, the attitude
stiff and swelling, and the diction affected and unnatural. With a quick
reversion to the impossible first type, he recast his letter in what was
now the only possible shape.

"MY DEAR MISS BROWN,--The editor of the American Miscellany has
sent me a copy of his recent letter to you and your own reply, and
has remanded to me an affair which resulted from my going to him
with your request to see the close of my story now publishing in his
magazine.

"After giving the matter my best thought, I have concluded that it
will be well to enclose all the exhibits to you, and I now do this
in the hope that a serious study of them will enable you to share my
surprise at the moral and social conditions in which the business
could originate. I willingly leave with you the question which is
the more trustworthy, your letter to me or your letter to him, or
which the more truly represents the interesting diversity of your
nature. I confess that the first moved me more than the second,
and I do not see why I should not tell you that as soon as I had
your request I went with it to Mr. Armiger and did what I could to
prompt his compliance with it. In putting these papers out of my
hands, I ought to acknowledge that they have formed a temptation to
make literary use of the affair which I shall now be the better
fitted to resist. You will, of course, be amused by the ease with
which you could abuse my reliance on your good faith, and I am sure
you will not allow any shame for your trick to qualify your pleasure
in its success.

"It will not be necessary for you to acknowledge this letter and its
enclosures. I will register the package, so that it will not fail
to reach you, and I will return any answer of yours unopened, or, if
not recognizably addressed, then unread.

"Yours sincerely,

"P. S. VERRIAN."


He read and read again these lines, with only the sense of their
insufficiency in doing the effect of the bitterness in his heart. If the
letter was insulting, it was by no means as insulting as he would have
liked to make it. Whether it would be wounding enough was something that
depended upon the person whom he wished to wound. All that was proud and
vain and cruel in him surged up at the thought of the trick that had been
played upon him, and all that was sweet and kind and gentle in him, when
he believed the trick was a genuine appeal, turned to their counter
qualities. Yet, feeble and inadequate as his letter was, he knew that
he could not do more or worse by trying, and he so much feared that by
waiting he might do less and better that he hurried it into the post at
once. If his mother had been at hand he would have shown it her,
though he might not have been ruled by her judgment of it. He was glad
that she was not with him, for either she would have had her opinion of
what would be more telling, or she would have insisted upon his delaying
any sort of reply, and he could not endure the thought of difference
or delay.

He asked himself whether he should let her see the rough first draft of
his letter or not, and he decided that he would not. But when she came
into his study on her return he showed it her.

She read it in silence, and then she seemed to temporize in asking,
"Where are her two letters?"

"I've sent them back with the answer."

His mother let the paper drop from her hands. "Philip! You haven't sent
this!"

"Yes, I have. It wasn't what I wanted to make it, but I wished to get
the detestable experience out of my mind, and it was the best I could do
at the moment. Don't you like it?"

"Oh--" She seemed beginning to say something, but without saying anything
she took the fallen leaf up and read it again.

"Well!" he demanded, with impatience.

"Oh, you may have been right. I hope you've not been wrong."

"Mother!"

"She deserved the severest things you could say; and yet--"

"Well?"

"Perhaps she was punished enough already."

"What do you mean?"