Chapter I: Stuart Harley: Realist

A Rebellious Heroine

by John Kendrick Bangs

"--if a word could save me, and that word were not the Truth,
nay, if it did but swerve a hair's-breadth from the Truth, I would
not say it!"--LONGFELLOW.

Stuart Harley, despite his authorship of many novels, still
considered himself a realist. He affected to say that he did not
write his books; that he merely transcribed them from life as he saw
it, and he insisted always that he saw life as it was.

"The mission of the novelist, my dear Professor," he had once
been heard to say at his club, "is not to amuse merely; his work is
that of an historian, and he should be quite as careful to write
truthfully as is the historian. How is the future to know what
manner of lives we nineteenth century people have lived unless our
novelists tell the truth?"

"Possibly the historians will tell them," observed the Professor
of Mathematics. "Historians sometimes do tell us interesting
things."

"True," said Harley. "Very true; but then what historian ever
let you into the secret of the every-day life of the people of whom
he writes? What historian ever so vitalized Louis the Fourteenth as
Dumas has vitalized him? Truly, in reading mere history I have
seemed to be reading of lay figures, not of men; but when the
novelist has taken hold properly--ah, then we get the men."

"Then," objected the Professor, "the novelist is never to create
a great character?"

"The humorist or the mere romancer may, but as for the novelist
with a true ideal of his mission in life he would better leave
creation to nature. It is blasphemy for a purely mortal being to
pretend that he can create a more interesting character or set of
characters than the Almighty has already provided for the use of
himself and his brothers in literature; that he can involve these
creations in a more dramatic series of events than it has occurred to
an all-wise Providence to put into the lives of His creatures; that,
by the exercise of that misleading faculty which the writer styles
his imagination, he can portray phases of life which shall prove of
more absorbing interest or of greater moral value to his readers than
those to be met with in the every-day life of man as he is."

"Then," said the Professor, with a dexterous jab of his cue at
the pool-balls--"then, in your estimation, an author is a thing to be
led about by the nose by the beings he selects for use in his
books?"

"You put it in a rather homely fashion," returned Harley; "but,
on the whole, that is about the size of it."

"And all a man needs, then, to be an author is an eye and a
type- writing machine?" asked the Professor.

"And a regiment of detectives," drawled Dr. Kelly, the young
surgeon, "to follow his characters about."

Harley sighed. Surely these men were unsympathetic.

"I can't expect you to grasp the idea exactly," he said, "and I
can't explain it to you, because you'd become irreverent if I
tried."

"No, we won't," said Kelly. "Go on and explain it to us--I'm
bored, and want to be amused."

So Harley went on and tried to explain how the true realist must
be an inspired sort of person, who can rise above purely physical
limitations; whose eye shall be able to pierce the most impenetrable
of veils; to whom nothing in the way of obtaining information as to
the doings of such specimens of mankind as he has selected for his
pages is an insurmountable obstacle.

"Your author, then, is to be a mixture of a New York newspaper
reporter and the Recording Angel?" suggested Kelly.

"I told you you'd become irreverent," said Harley;
"nevertheless, even in your irreverence, you have expressed the idea.
The writer must be omniscient as far as the characters of his
stories are concerned--he must have an eye which shall see all that
they do, a mind sufficiently analytical to discern what their motives
are, and the courage to put it all down truthfully, neither adding
nor subtracting, coloring only where color is needed to make the
moral lesson he is trying to teach stand out the more vividly."

"In short, you'd have him become a photographer," said the
Professor.

"More truly a soulscape-painter," retorted Harley, with
enthusiasm.

"Heavens!" cried the Doctor, dropping his cue with a loud
clatter to the floor. "Soulscape! Here's a man talking about not
creating, and then throws out an invention like soulscape! Harley,
you ought to write a dictionary. With a word like soulscape to start
with, it would sweep the earth!"

Harley laughed. He was a good-natured man, and he was strong
enough in his convictions not to weaken for the mere reason that
somebody else had ridiculed them. In fact, everybody else might have
ridiculed them, and Harley would still have stood true, once he was
convinced that he was right.

"You go on sawing people's legs off, Billy," he said,
good-naturedly. "That's a thing you know about; and as for the
Professor, he can go on showing you and the rest of mankind just why
the shortest distance between two points is in a straight line. I'll
take your collective and separate words for anything on the subject
of surgery or mathematics, but when it comes to my work I wouldn't
bank on your theories if they were endorsed by the Rothschilds."

"He'll never write a decent book in his life if he clings to
that theory," said Kelly, after Harley had departed. "There's
precious little in the way of the dramatic nowadays in the lives of
people one cares to read about."

Nevertheless, Harley had written interesting books, books which
had brought him reputation, and what is termed genteel poverty--that
is to say, his fame was great, considering his age, and his
compensation was just large enough to make life painful to him. His
income enabled him to live well enough to make a good appearance
among, and share somewhat at their expense in the life of, others of
far greater means; but it was too small to bring him many of the
things which, while not absolutely necessities, could not well be
termed luxuries, considering his tastes and his temperament. A
little more was all he needed.

"If I could afford to write only when I feel like it," he said,
"how happy I should be! But these orders--they make me a driver of
men, and not their historian."

In fact, Harley was in that unfortunate, and at the same time
happy, position where he had many orders for the product of his pen,
and such financial necessities that he could not afford to decline
one of them.

And it was this very situation which made his rebellious heroine
of whom I have essayed to write so sore a trial to the struggling
young author.

It was early in May, 1895, that Harley had received a note from
Messrs. Herring, Beemer, & Chadwick, the publishers, asking for a
story from his pen for their popular "Blue and Silver Series."

"The success of your Tiffin-Talk," they wrote, "has been such
that we are prepared to offer you our highest terms for a short story
of 30,000 words, or thereabouts, to be published in our 'Blue and
Silver Series.' We should like to have it a love-story, if possible;
but whatever it is, it must be characteristic, and ready for
publication in November. We shall need to have the manuscript by
September 1st at the latest. If you can let us have the first few
chapters in August, we can send them at once to Mr. Chromely, whom it
is our intention to have illustrate the story, provided he can be got
to do it."

The letter closed with a few formalities of an unimportant and
stereotyped nature, and Harley immediately called at the office of
Messrs. Herring, Beemer, & Chadwick, where, after learning that
their best terms were no more unsatisfactory than publishers' best
terms generally are, he accepted the commission.

And then, returning to his apartment, he went into what Kelly
called one of his trances.

"He goes into one of his trances," Kelly had said, "hoists
himself up to his little elevation, and peeps into the private life
of hoi polloi until he strikes something worth putting down and the
result he calls literature."

"Yes, and the people buy it, and read it, and call for more,"
said the Professor.

"Possibly because they love notoriety," said Kelly, "and they
think if they call for more often enough, he will finally peep in at
their key-holes and write them up. If he ever puts me into one of
his books I'll waylay him at night and amputate his writing-hand."

"He won't," said the Professor. "I asked him once why he
didn't, and he said you'd never do in one of his books, because you
don't belong to real life at all. He thinks you are some new
experiment of an enterprising Providence, and he doesn't want to use
you until he sees how you turn out."

"He could put me down as I go," suggested the Doctor.

"That's so," replied the other. "I told him so, but he said he
had no desire to write a lot of burlesque sketches containing no
coherent idea."

"Oh, he said that, did he?" observed the Doctor, with a smile.
"Well--wait till Stuart Harley comes to me for a prescription. I'll
get even with him. I'll give him a pill, and he'll disappear--for
ten days."

Whether it was as Kelly said or not, that Harley went into a
trance and poked his nose into the private life of the people he
wrote about, it was a fact that while meditating upon the possible
output of his pen our author was as deaf to his surroundings as
though he had departed into another world, and it rarely happened
that his mind emerged from that condition without bringing along with
it something of value to him in his work.

So it was upon this May morning. For an hour or two Harley lay
quiescent, apparently gazing out of his flat window over the
uninspiring chimney-pots of the City of New York, at the equally
uninspiring Long Island station on the far side of the East River. It
was well for him that his eye was able to see, and yet not see:
forgetfulness of those smoking chimney-pots, the red-zincked roofs,
the flapping under-clothing of the poorer than he, hung out to dry on
the tenement tops, was essential to the construction of such a story
as Messrs. Herring, Beemer, & Chadwick had in mind; and Harley
successfully forgot them, and, coming back to consciousness, brought
with him the dramatis personae of his story--and, taken as a whole,
they were an interesting lot. The hero was like most of those
gentlemen who live their little lives in the novels of the day, only
Harley had modified his accomplishments in certain directions. Robert
Osborne--such was his name--was not the sort of man to do impossible
things for his heroine. He was not reckless. He was not a
D'Artagnan lifted from the time of Louis the Fourteenth to the dull,
prosaic days of President Faure. He was not even a Frenchman, but an
essentially American American, who desires to know, before he does
anything, why he does it, and what are his chances of success. I am
not sure that if he had happened to see her struggling in the ocean
he would have jumped in to rescue the young woman to whom his hand
was plighted--I do not speak of his heart, for I am not Harley, and I
do not know whether or not Harley intended that Osborne should be
afflicted with so inconvenient an organ--I am not sure, I say, that
if he had seen his best-beloved struggling in the ocean Osborne would
have jumped in to rescue her without first stopping to remove such of
his garments as might impede his progress back to land again. In
short, he was not one of those impetuous heroes that we read about so
often and see so seldom; but, taken altogether, he was sufficiently
attractive to please the American girl who might be expected to read
Harley's book; for that was one of the stipulations of Messrs.
Herring, Beemer, & Chadwick when they made their verbal agreement
with Harley.

"Make it go with the girls, Harley," Mr. Chadwick had said.
"Men haven't time to read anything but the newspapers in this
country. Hit the girls, and your fortune is made."

Harley didn't exactly see how his fortune was going to be made
on the best terms of Messrs. Herring, Beemer, & Chadwick, even if
he hit the girls with all the force of a battering-ram, but he
promised to keep the idea in mind, and remained in his trance a
trifle longer than might otherwise have been necessary, endeavoring
to select the unquestionably correct hero for his story, and Osborne
was the result. Osborne was moderately witty. His repartee smacked
somewhat of the refined comic paper--that is to say, it was smart and
cynical, and not always suited to the picture; but it wasn't vulgar
or dull, and his personal appearance was calculated to arouse the
liveliest interest. He was clean shaven and clean cut. He looked
more like a modern ideal of infallible genius than Byron, and had
probably played football and the banjo in college--Harley did not go
back that far with him--all of which, it must be admitted, was pretty
well calculated to assure the fulfilment of Harley's promise that the
man should please the American girl. Of course the story was
provided with a villain also, but he was a villain of a mild type.
Mild villany was an essential part of Harley's literary creed, and
this particular person was not conceived in heresy. His name was to
have been Horace Balderstone, and with him Harley intended to
introduce a lively satire on the employment, by certain contemporary
writers, of the supernatural to produce dramatic effects.
Balderstone was of course to be the rival of Osborne. In this
respect Harley was commonplace; to his mind the villain always had to
be the rival of the hero, just as in opera the tenor is always
virtuous at heart if not otherwise, and the baritone a scoundrel,
which in real life is not an invariable rule by any means. Indeed,
there have been many instances in real life where the villain and the
hero have been on excellent terms, and to the great benefit of the
hero too. But in this case Balderstone was to follow in the rut, and
become the rival of Osborne for the hand of Marguerite Andrews--the
heroine. Balderstone was to write a book, which for a time should so
fascinate Miss Andrews that she would be blind to the desirability of
Osborne as a husband-elect; a book full of the weird and thrilling,
dealing with theosophy and spiritualism, and all other
"Tommyrotisms," as Harley called them, all of which, of course, was
to be the making and the undoing of Balderstone; for equally of
course, in the end, he would become crazed by the use of opium--the
inevitable end of writers of that stamp. Osborne would rescue
Marguerite from his fatal influence, and the last chapter would end
with Marguerite lying pale and wan upon her sick-bed, recovering from
the mental prostration which the influence over hers of a mind like
Balderstone's was sure to produce, holding Osborne's hand in hers,
and "smiling a sweet recognition at the lover to whose virtues she
had so long been blind." Osborne would murmur, "At last!" and the
book would close with a "first kiss," followed closely by six or
eight pages of advertisements of other publications of Messrs.
Herring, Beemer, & Chadwick. I mention the latter to show how
thoroughly realistic Harley was. He thought out his books so truly
and so fully before he sat down to write them that he seemed to see
each written, printed, made and bound before him, a concrete thing
from cover to cover.

Besides Osborne and Balderstone and Miss Andrews--of whom I
shall at this time not speak at length, since the balance of this
little narrative is to be devoted to the setting forth of her
peculiarities and charms--there were a number of minor characters,
not so necessary to the story perhaps as they might have been, but
interesting enough in their way, and very well calculated to provide
the material needed for the filling out of the required number of
pages. Furthermore, they completed the picture.

"I don't want to put in three vivid figures, and leave the
reader to imagine that the rest of the world has been wiped out of
existence," said Harley, as he talked it over with me. "That is not
art. There should be three types of character in every book--the
positive, the average, and the negative. In that way you grade your
story off into the rest of the world, and your reader feels that
while he may never have met the positive characters, he has met the
average or the negative, or both, and is therefore by one of these
links connected with the others, and that gives him a personal
interest in the story; and it's the reader's personal interest that
the writer is after."

So Miss Andrews was provided with a very conventional aunt--the
kind of woman you meet with everywhere; most frequently in church
squabbles and hotel parlors, however. Mrs. Corwin was this lady's
name, and she was to enact the role of chaperon to Miss Andrews. With
Mrs. Corwin, by force of circumstances, came a pair of twin children,
like those in the Heavenly Twins, only more real, and not so Sarah
Grandiose in their manners and wit.

These persons Harley booked for the steamship New York, sailing
from New York City for Southampton on the third day of July, 1895.
The action was to open at that time, and Marguerite Andrews was to
meet Horace Balderstone on that vessel on the evening of the second
day out, with which incident the interest of Harley's story was to
begin. But Harley had counted without his heroine. The rest of his
cast were safely stowed away on ship-board and ready for action at
the appointed hour, but the heroine missed the steamer by three
minutes, and it was all Harley's own fault.