Madame Eulalie’s Rare PlumsCosmopolitan Magazine, June 1930
GEORGE MORTIMER GOSSETT cleared his throat and spoke in a low, husky voice. “There is something,” he said, “that I want to ask you.”
He paused. He felt strangely breathless. The girl was looking out across the moonlit water. The night was very still. From far away in the distance came the faint strains of the town band, as it picked its way through the “Star of Eve” song from “Tannhäuser”—somewhat impeded by the second trombone, who had got his music sheets mixed and was playing “The Wedding of the Painted Doll.”
“Something,” said George, “that I want to ask you.”
“Go on,” she whispered.
Again he paused. He was afraid. Her answer meant so much to him.
George Gossett had come to this quiet seaside village for a rest cure. By profession he was an assistant literary editor, attached to the staff of the Morning Milk; and, as every statistician knows, assistant literary editors of daily papers are ranked at Washington high up among the Dangerous Trades. The strain of interviewing a new female novelist every week takes toll of the physique of all but the very hardiest.
For six months, week in and week out, George Gossett had been listening to female novelists talking about Art and their Ideals. He had seen them in cozy corners of their boudoirs; had watched them being kind to dogs and happiest when among their flowers. And one morning the proprietor of the Milk, finding the young man sitting at his typewriter with little flecks of foam about his mouth, muttering over and over again in a dull, toneless voice the words, “Aurelia Mae McGoggin, she draws her inspiration from the scent of white lilies!” had taken him straight to a specialist.
“Yes,” the specialist had said, after listening at George’s chest for a while through a sort of telephone and apparently finding the number engaged, “we are a little run down, are we not? We see floating spots, do we not, and are inclined occasionally to bark like a seal from pure depression of spirit? Precisely. What we need is to augment the red corpuscles in our blood stream.”
And this augmentation of red corpuscles had been effected by his first sight of Evangeline Pembury. They had met at a picnic.
As George rested for a moment from the task of trying to dredge the sand from a plateful of chicken salad, his eyes had fallen on a divine girl squashing a wasp with a teaspoon. And for the first time since he had tottered out of the offices of the Morning Milk, he had ceased to feel like something which a cat, having dragged from an ash can, has inspected and rejected with a shake of the head as unfit for feline consumption.
In an instant his interior had become a sort of Old Home Week of red corpuscles. Millions of them were splashing about and calling gayly to other millions still hesitating on the bank, “Come on in! The blood’s fine!”
Ten minutes later, he had reached the conclusion that life without Evangeline Pembury would be a blank.
And yet he had hesitated before laying his heart at her feet. She looked all right. She seemed all right. Quite possibly she was all right. But before proposing he had to be sure. He had to make certain that there was no danger of her suddenly producing a manuscript fastened in the top left corner with pink silk and asking his candid opinion of it.
Everyone has his pet aversion. Some dislike slugs, others cockroaches. George disliked female novelists.
And so now, as they stood together in the moonlight, he said: “Tell me, have you ever written a novel?”
She seemed surprised. “A novel? No.”
“Short stories, perhaps?”
“No.”
George lowered his voice. “Poems?” he whispered hoarsely.
“No.”
George hesitated no longer. He produced his soul like a conjurer extracting a rabbit from a hat, and slapped it down before her. He told her of his love, stressing its depth, purity and lasting qualities. He begged, pleaded, rolled his eyes and clasped her little hand in his. And when, pausing for a reply, he found that she had been doing a lot of thinking along the same lines and felt much the same about him as he did about her, he nearly fell over backwards. It seemed to him that his cup of joy was full.
It is odd how Love will affect different people. It caused George next morning to go out on the links and get a couple of birdies on the first three holes. Whereas Evangeline, finding herself filled with a strange ferment which demanded immediate outlet, sat down at a little near-Chippendale table, ate five marshmallows, and began to write a novel.
Three weeks of the sunshine and ozone of Wissapehawkwit Bay had toned up George’s system to the point where his medical adviser felt that it would be safe for him to go back to New York and resume his fearful trade. Evangeline followed him a month later. She arrived home at four-fifteen on a crisp afternoon, and at four-sixteen-and-a-half George shot through the door with the love-light in his eyes.
“Evangeline!”
“George!”
But we will not dwell on the ecstasies of the reunited lovers. We will proceed to the point where Evangeline raised her head from George’s shoulder and uttered a little giggle.
One would prefer to say that she gave a light laugh. But it was not a light laugh. It was a giggle—a furtive, sinister, shamefaced giggle, which froze George’s blood with a nameless fear. He stared at her, and she giggled again.
“George,” she said, “I want to tell you something.”
“Yes?” said George.
Evangeline giggled once more. “I know it sounds absurd,” she said, “but——”
“Yes? Yes?”
“I’ve written a novel, George.”
In the old Greek tragedies it was a recognized rule that any episode likely to excite the pity and terror of the audience to too great an extent must be enacted behind the scenes. Strictly speaking, therefore, this scene should be omitted. But the modern public can stand more than the ancient Greeks, so it had better remain on the records.
The room stopped swimming before George Gossett’s tortured eyes. Gradually the piano, the chairs, the pictures and the case of stuffed birds on the mantelpiece resumed their normal positions. He found speech.
“You’ve written a novel?” he said dully.
“Well, I’ve got to Chapter Twenty-four.”
“You’ve got to Chapter Twenty-four?”
“And the rest will be easy.”
“The rest will be easy?”
Silence fell for a space—a silence broken only by George’s labored breathing. Then Evangeline spoke impulsively.
“Oh, George,” she cried, “I really do think some of it is rather good! I’ll read it to you now.”
How strange it is, when some great tragedy has come upon us, to look back at the comparatively mild beginnings of our misfortunes and remember how we thought then that Fate had done its worst. George, that afternoon, fancied that he had plumbed the lowest depths of misery and anguish.
Evangeline, he told himself, had fallen from the pedestal on which he had set her. She had revealed herself as a novel writer. It was the limit, he felt; the extreme edge. It put the brown derby on things.
It was, alas, nothing of the kind. It bore the same resemblance to the limit that the first drop of rain bears to the thunderstorm.
The mistake was a pardonable one. The acute agony which he suffered that afternoon was more than sufficient excuse for George Gossett’s blunder in supposing that he had drained the bitter cup to the dregs. As he listened to this thing which she had entitled “Parted Ways,” he writhed unceasingly. It tied his very soul in knots.
Evangeline’s novel was a horrible, an indecent production. Not in the sense that it would be likely to bring a blush to any cheek but his, but because she had put on paper in bald words every detail of the only romance that had ever come under her notice—her own.
There it was, his entire courtship, including the first holy kiss and not omitting the quarrel which they had had within two days of the engagement.
In the novel she had elaborated this quarrel, which in fact had lasted twenty-three minutes, into a ten-year estrangement—thus justifying the title and preventing the story’s finishing in the first five thousand words. As for his proposal, that was inserted verbatim; and as he listened, George shuddered to think that he could have polluted the air with such guff.
He marveled, as many a man has done before and will again, how women can do these things. Listening to “Parted Ways” made him, personally, feel as if he had suddenly lost his trousers while strolling up Fifth Avenue.
Something of these feelings he would have liked to put into words, but the Gossetts were famous for their chivalry. He would, he imagined, feel a certain shame if he ever hit Evangeline or walked on her face in thick shoes; but that shame would be as nothing to the shame he would feel if he spoke one millimeter of what he thought about “Parted Ways.”
“Great!” he croaked.
Her eyes were shining. “Do you really think so?”
“A wow!” He found it easier to talk in monosyllables.
“I don’t suppose any publisher would buy it,” said Evangeline.
George began to feel a little better. Nothing, of course, could alter the fact that she had written a novel; but it might be possible to hush it up.
“So I am going to pay the expenses of publication.”
George did not reply. He was staring into the middle distance and trying to light a fountain pen with an unlighted match.
And Fate chuckled grimly, knowing that it had only just begun having fun with George.
Once in every few publishing seasons there is an Event. For no apparent reason, the great heart of the Public gives a startled jump, and the public’s great purse is emptied to procure copies of some novel which has stolen into the world without advance advertising and whose only claim to recognition is that the Ypsilanti (Georgia) Courier-Intelligencer has stated in a five-line review that it is “readable.”
The rising firm of Mainprice and Schwartz published a first edition of three hundred copies of “Parted Ways.” And when they found, to their chagrin, that Evangeline was only going to buy twenty of these—somehow Mainprice, who was an optimist, had got the idea that she was good for a hundred (“You can sell them to your friends”)—their only interest in the matter was to keep an eye on the current quotations for waste paper. The book they were going to make their money on was Leola Swink Bodwin’s “Offal,” in connection with which they had arranged in advance for a newspaper discussion on “The Growing Menace of the Sex Motive in Fiction: Is There to Be No Limit?”
Within a month “Offal” was off the map. The newspaper discussion raged before an utterly indifferent public, which had made one of its quick changes and discovered that it had had enough of Sex and that what it wanted now was good, sweet, wholesome, tender tales of the pure love of a man for a maid, which you could leave lying about and didn’t have to shove under the cushions of the chesterfield every time you heard your growing boys coming along. And the particular tale which it selected for its favor was Evangeline’s “Parted Ways.”
It is these swift, unheralded changes of the public mind which make publishers stick straws in their hair and powerful young novelists rush round to the Wholesale Import and Export firms to ask if their berths in the shipping offices are still open. Up to the very moment of the Great Switch, Sex had been the one safe card.
Publishers’ lists were congested with scarlet tales of Men Who Did and Women Who Shouldn’t Have Done But Who Took a Pop at It. And now the bottom had dropped out of the market without a word of warning, and practically the only way in which readers could gratify their newborn taste for the pure and simple was by fighting for copies of “Parted Ways.”
They fought like tigers. The offices of Mainprice and Schwartz hummed like a hive. Printing machines worked day and night. From the Everglades of Florida to the rock-bound coasts of Maine, a great cry went up for “Parted Ways.” In every home in Brooklyn “Parted Ways” was found on the whatnot, next to the rubber plant and the family album. Clergymen preached about it; parodists parodied it; stockbrokers stayed away from musical comedies to sit at home and cry over it.
Numerous paragraphs appeared in the press concerning its probable adaptation into a play, a musical comedy and a talking picture. Belasco was stated to have bought it for Lenore Ulric; the Shuberts for Sophie Tucker. Ziegfeld was reported to be grooming a musical play based on it, starring Marilyn Miller, Ed Wynn and Jack Donahue; Dillingham another musical play featuring the Two Black Crows, supported by the Singer Troupe of Midgets and forty performing seals. United Artists wanted it for Harold Lloyd; Metro-Goldwyn for Marion Davies. It was rumored that Carnera was considering the part of Percy, the hero.
And on the crest of this wave, breathless but happy, rode Evangeline.
And George? Oh, that’s George, spluttering down in the trough there. We can’t be bothered about George now.
George, however, found ample time to be bothered about himself. He passed the days in a frame of mind which it would be ridiculous to call bewilderment. He was stunned, overwhelmed, sandbagged. Dimly he realized that considerably over a quarter of a million perfect strangers were gloating over the most sacred secrecies of his private life, and that the exact words of his proposal of marriage were engraven on a quarter of a million minds.
But, except that it made him feel as if he were being tarred and feathered in front of a large and interested audience, he did not mind that so much. What really troubled him was the alteration in Evangeline.
The human mind adjusts itself readily to prosperity. Evangeline’s first phase, when celebrity was new and bewildering, soon passed. The stammering reception of the first newspaper man became a memory.
At the end of two weeks she was talking to the Press with the easy nonchalance of a prominent bootlegger, and coming back at notebook-bearing young men with words which they had to look up in the office Webster. Her Art, she told them, was rhythmical rather than architectural, and she inclined, if anything, to the school of the sur-realists.
She had soared above George’s low-browed enthusiasms. When he suggested motoring down to Lakeville and tearing off a few holes of golf, she excused herself. She had letters to answer. People would keep writing to her, saying how much “Parted Ways” had helped them, and she had to be civil to her public. Autographs, too. She really could not spare a moment.
He asked her to come with him to the American Open. She shook her head. The date, she said, clashed with her lecture to the East Orange Daughters of Minerva Literary and Progress Club on Some Tendencies of Modern Fiction.
All these things George might have endured, for he still loved her dearly. But at this point there floated into his life like a cloud of poison gas the sinister figure of J. Henderson Banks.
“Who was that man I saw you coming down the street with?” he asked suspiciously one day, as she was giving him ten minutes before hurrying off to address the Amalgamated Mothers of Montclair on The Novel: Should It Teach?
“That wasn’t a man,” replied Evangeline. “That was my literary agent.”
And so it proved. J. Henderson Banks Inc. was now in control of Evangeline’s affairs. This outstanding blot on the American Scene was a sort of human charlotte russe with tortoise-shell-rimmed eyeglasses and a cooing, reverential manner towards his female clients. He had a dark, romantic face, a lissom figure, one of those beastly cravat things that go twice round the neck, and a habit of beginning his remarks with the words, “Dear lady.”
The last man, in short, whom a fiancé would wish to have hanging about his betrothed. If Evangeline had to have a literary agent, the sort of literary agent George would have selected for her would have been one of those stout, pie-faced literary agents who chew half-smoked cigars and wheeze as they enter the editorial sanctum.
A jealous frown flitted across his face. “Looked a bit of a Gawd-help-us to me,” he said critically.
“Mr. Banks,” retorted Evangeline, “is a superb man of business.”
“Yeah?” said George, sneering visibly.
And there for a time the matter rested.
But not for long. On the following Monday morning George telephoned Evangeline and asked her to luncheon.
“I am sorry,” said Evangeline. “I am engaged to lunch with Mr. Banks.”
“Oh?” said George.
“Yes,” said Evangeline.
“Ah,” said George.
Two days later George telephoned Evangeline and invited her to dinner.
“I am sorry,” said Evangeline. “I am dining with Mr. Banks.”
“Ah?” said George.
“Yes,” said Evangeline.
“Oh,” said George.
Three days after that George arrived at Evangeline’s apartment with tickets for the theater.
“I am sorry——” began Evangeline.
“Don’t say it,” said George. “Let me guess. You are going to the theater with Mr. Banks?”
“Yes, I am. He has seats for the first night of Chekhov’s ‘Six Corpses in Search of an Undertaker.’ ”
“He has, has he?”
“Yes, he has.”
“He has, eh?”
“Yes, he has.”
George took a couple of turns about the room, and for a space there was silence except for the grinding of his teeth. Then he spoke.
“Touching lightly on this blister Banks,” said George, “I am the last man to stand in the way of your having a literary agent. If you must write novels, that is a matter between you and your God. And if you do see fit to write novels, I suppose you must have a literary agent. But—and this is where I want you to follow me closely—I cannot see the necessity of employing a literary agent who looks like John Barrymore made up for something; a literary agent who coos in your left ear; a literary agent who not only addresses you as ‘Dear lady,’ but appears to find it essential to his business to lunch, dine and go to the theater with you daily.”
“I——”
George held up a compelling hand. “I have not finished,” he said. “Nobody,” he proceeded, “could call me a narrow-minded man. If J. Henderson Banks looked a shade less like one of the great lovers of history, I would have nothing to say. If, when he talked business to a client, J. Henderson Banks’ mode of vocal delivery were even slightly less reminiscent of a nightingale trilling to its mate, I would remain silent.
“But he doesn’t, and it isn’t. And such being the case, and taking into consideration the fact that you are engaged to me, I feel it my duty to instruct you to see this drooping flower far more infrequently. In fact, I would advocate cutting him out altogether. If he wishes to discuss business with you, let him do it over the telephone. And I hope he gets the wrong number.”
Evangeline had risen, and was facing him with flashing eyes. “Is that so?”
“That,” said George, “is so.”
“Am I a serf?” demanded Evangeline.
“A what?” said George.
“A serf. A slave. A peon. A creature subservient to your lightest whim.”
George considered the point. “No,” he said. “I shouldn’t think so.”
“No,” said Evangeline. “I am not. And I refuse to allow you to dictate to me in the choice of my friends.”
George stared blankly. “You mean, after all I have said, that you intend to let this blighted chrysanthemum continue to tag along?”
“I do.”
“You propose to continue chummy with this revolting piece of cheese?”
“I do.”
“You absolutely decline to give this mistake of Nature the bum’s rush?”
“I do.”
“Well!” said George. A pleading note came into his voice. “But Evangeline, it is your George who speaks.”
The haughty girl laughed a hard, bitter laugh. “Is it?” she said. She laughed again. “Do you imagine that we are still engaged?”
“Aren’t we?”
“We certainly aren’t. You have insulted me, outraged my finest feelings, given an exhibition of malignant tyranny which makes me thankful that I have realized in time the sort of man you are. Good-by, Mr. Gossett!”
“But say, listen——” began George.
“Go!” said Evangeline. “Here is your hat.” She pointed imperiously to the door. A moment later she had banged it behind him.
It was a grim-faced George Gossett who entered the elevator. His dream, he realized, was over. He laughed harshly as he contemplated the fallen ruins of the castle which he had built in the air.
Well, he still had his work . . .
In the offices of the Morning Milk it was whispered that a strange change had come over George Mortimer Gossett. He seemed a stronger, tougher man. The editor of the Literary Supplement, who since George’s illness had behaved towards him with a touching humanity, sparing him the graver perils of the department and allowing him to remain in the office and write paragraphs about Forthcoming Books while others, more robust, were sent off to interview the female novelists, now saw in him a right-hand man on whom he could lean.
When a column on Grace Terwilliger Bootle Among her Books was required, it was George whom he sent out into the No Man’s Land of the Algonquin Hotel. When young Eustace Johnson, a novice who ought never to have been entrusted with such a dangerous assignment, was found walking round in circles and bumping his head against the railings of Gramercy Park after twenty minutes with Laura La Motte Grindlay, the great Sex novelist, it was George who was flung into the breach. And George came through, wan but unscathed.
It was during this period that he interviewed Mabelle Granger Plank and Coralie O’Reilly Goole on the same afternoon—a feat which is still spoken of with bated breath in the offices of the Morning Milk. And not only in the Milk offices. To this day “Remember Gossett!” is the slogan with which every literary editor encourages the faint-hearted who are wincing and hanging back.
“Was Gossett afraid?” they say. “Did Gossett quail?”
And so it came about that when a Chat with Evangeline Maud Pembury was needed for the big Christmas special number, it was of George that his editor thought first. He sent for him.
“Ah, Gossett!”
“Well, chief?”
“Stop me if you’ve heard this one before,” said the literary editor, “but it seems there was once an Irishman, a Scotsman and a Jew . . .”
Then, the formalities inseparable from an interview between editor and assistant concluded, he came down to business.
“George,” he said, in that kind, fatherly way of his which endeared him to all his staff, “I am going to begin by saying that you can do a big thing for the Milk. But after that I must tell you that, if you wish, you can refuse to do it. If you feel yourself unequal to this task I shall understand. But the fact is, we have got to have a Chat with Evangeline Maud Pembury.”
He saw the young man wince, and nodded sympathetically.
“You think it would be too much for you? I feared as much. They say she is the worst of the lot. Rather haughty and talks about Uplift. Well, never mind. I must see what I can do with young Johnson. I hear he has recovered and is anxious to reestablish himself. Quite. I will send Johnson.”
George Gossett was himself again now. “No, chief,” he said. “I will go.”
“You will?”
“I will.”
“We shall need a column and a half.”
“You shall have a column and a half.”
The literary editor turned away, to hide a not unmanly emotion. “Do it now, George,” he said, “and get it over.”
And as the door closed, George heard him whisper, “Brave lad! Brave lad!”
A strange riot of emotion seethed in George Gossett’s soul as he pressed the familiar bell which he had thought never to press again. Since their estrangement he had seen Evangeline once or twice, but only in the distance. Now he was to meet her face to face. Was he glad or sorry? He could not say. He only knew he loved her still.
He was in the sitting room. How cozy it looked; how impregnated with her presence! There was the sofa on which he had so often sat, his arms about her waist . . .
A footstep behind him warned him that the time had come to don the mask. Forcing his features into an interviewer’s hard smile, he turned.
“Good afternoon,” he said.
She was thinner. Either she had found Success wearing, or she had been on the eighteen-day diet. Her beautiful face seemed drawn and careworn.
He fancied that her eyes had lighted up at the sight of him, but he preserved the formal detachment of a stranger.
“Good afternoon, Miss Pembury,” he said. “I represent the Morning Milk. I understand that you have kindly consented to tell us a few things which may interest our readers regarding your Art and Aims.”
She bit her lip. “Will you take a seat, Mr.——”
“Gossett,” said George.
“Mr. Gossett,” said Evangeline. “Do sit down. Yes, I shall be glad to tell you anything you wish.”
George sat down. “Are you fond of dogs, Miss Pembury?” he asked.
“I adore them,” said Evangeline.
“I should like, a little later, if I may,” said George, “to secure a snapshot of you being kind to a dog. Our readers appreciate these human touches, you understand.”
“Oh, quite,” said Evangeline. “I will send out for a dog. I love dogs—and flowers.”
“You are happiest among your flowers, no doubt?”
“On the whole, yes.”
“You sometimes think they are the souls of little children who have died in their innocency?”
“Frequently.”
“And now,” said George, “perhaps you would tell me something about your Ideals.”
“Oh, they’re fine,” she said vaguely.
“The Novel,” said George, “has been described as among this age’s greatest instruments for Uplift. How do you check up on that?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Of course, there are novels and novels.”
“Oh, yes.”
“Are you contemplating a successor to ‘Parted Ways’?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Would it be indiscreet to inquire to what extent it has progressed?”
“Oh, George!” said Evangeline.
There are some speeches before which dignity melts like ice in August, resentment takes the full count, and the milk of human kindness surges back into the aching heart as if the dam had burst. Of these “Oh, George!” especially when accompanied by tears, is one of the most notable.
Evangeline’s “Oh, George!” had been accompanied by a Niagara of tears. She had flung herself on the sofa and was now biting the cushion in an ecstasy of grief. She gulped like a bull pup swallowing a chunk of steak.
And on the instant George Gossett’s adamantine reserve collapsed as if its legs had been knocked from under it. He dived for the sofa. He clasped her hand. He stroked her hair. He patted her shoulder. He massaged her spine.
“Evangeline!”
“Oh, George!”
The only flaw in George Gossett’s happiness, as he knelt beside her babbling comforting words, was the gloomy conviction that Evangeline would use the entire scene in her next novel. And it was for this reason that, when he could manage it, he censored his remarks.
But as he warmed to his work, he forgot caution altogether. She was clinging to him, whispering his name piteously. By the time he had finished, he had committed himself to about two thousand words of a nature calculated to send Mainprice and Schwartz screaming with joy about their office.
He refused to allow himself to worry about it. What of it? He felt he had done his stuff, and if it sold three hundred thousand copies—well, let it sell three hundred thousand copies. Holding Evangeline in his arms, he did not care if he was copyrighted in every language, including the Scandinavian.
“Oh, George!” said Evangeline.
“My darling!”
“Oh, George, I’m in such trouble.”
“My angel! What is it?”
“It’s Mr. Banks.”
A savage frown darkened George Gossett’s face. He told himself that he might have foreseen this. A man who wore a tie that went twice round the neck was sure sooner or later to inflict some hideous insult on helpless womanhood. Add tortoise-shell-rimmed glasses, and you had what practically amounted to a fiend in human shape.
“I’ll murder him,” he said. “I ought to have done it long ago, but one keeps putting these things off. What has he done? Did he force his loathsome attentions on you? Has that tortoise-shell-rimmed satyr been trying to kiss you or something?”
“He has been fixing me up solid.”
George blinked. “Doing what?”
“Fixing me up solid. With the magazines. He has arranged for me to write three serials and I don’t know how many short stories.”
Despite his relief, George was conscious of being a little disappointed. He had expected something worse than this from J. Henderson Banks. It seemed unworthy of a master libertine.
“Getting you contracts, you mean?”
Evangeline nodded tearfully. “Yes. He seems to have fixed me up solid with almost everybody. And they’ve been sending me checks in advance—hundreds of them. Oh, what am I to do?”
“Cash them,” said George.
“But afterwards?”
“Spend the money.”
“But after that?”
George reflected. “Well, it’s a nuisance, of course,” he said, “but after that I suppose you’ll have to write the stuff.”
Evangeline sobbed like a lost soul. “But I can’t! I’ve been trying for weeks, and I can’t write anything. I don’t want to write anything. I hate writing. I don’t know what to write about. I wish I were dead.” She clung to him. “I got a letter from him this morning. He has just fixed me up solid with two more magazines.”
George kissed her tenderly. Before he had become an assistant literary editor, he, too, had been an author, and he understood. It is not being paid money in advance that jars the sensitive artist: it is having to work.
“What shall I do?” cried Evangeline.
“Drop the whole thing,” said George. “Evangeline, do you remember your first drive at golf? I wasn’t there, but I bet it traveled about five hundred yards and you wondered what people meant when they talked about golf being a difficult game. After that, for ages, you couldn’t do anything right. And then, gradually, you began to get the knack of it.
“It is just the same with writing. You’ve had your first drive, and it has been some smite. Now, if you’re going to stick to it, you’ve got to do the frightful toil. What’s the use? Drop it.”
“And return the money?”
George shook his head. “No,” he said firmly. “There you go too far. Stick to the money like glue. Clutch it with both hands. Bury it in the garden and mark the spot with a cross.”
“But what about the stories? Who is going to write them?”
George smiled a tender smile. “I am,” he said. “Before I saw the light, I, too, used to write stearine bilge just like ‘Parted Ways.’ When we are married, I shall say to you, ‘With all my worldly goods I thee endow.’ They will include three novels I was never able to kid a publisher into printing, and at least twenty short stories no editor would accept. I give them to you freely. You can have the first novel tonight, and we will sit back and watch Mainprice and Schwartz sell half a million copies.”
“George!” said Evangeline.
“Evangeline!” said George.
Notes:
See the Strand magazine version of this story for the original publication of the familiar version as collected in Mulliner Nights. [The end notes to that transcription include a link to the original version of this story, “Parted Ways” from 1914.]
This Cosmopolitan version, published one month earlier in 1930, is substantially the same story, but doesn’t have Mr. Mulliner as a narrator and omits the Anglers’s Rest introduction. More crucially, there are many changes to the names of the principal characters, as well as some of the references to some celebrities and authors mentioned, and there are minor differences of wording here and there. This version is set in and near New York; the Strand version is set in England. Arthur Robinson points out that the paragraph “Despite his relief … master libertine” near the end of this version is omitted in the Strand and book versions.
We are not aware that this USA magazine version has been reprinted or collected anywhere else.
Printer’s error corrected above:
Magazine, p. 106c, omitted closing quotation mark of “Aren’t we?”