Chapter VIII: Harley Returns to the Fray

A Rebellious Heroine

by John Kendrick Bangs

"I will be master of what is mine own:
She is my goods, my
chattels."
- "Taming of the Shrew."

At the end of ten days Harley returned from Barnegat, brown as a
berry and ready for war, if war it was still to be. The outing had
done him a world of good, and the fish stories he told as we sat at
dinner showed that, realist though he might be, he had yet not failed
to cultivate his imagination in certain directions. I may observe in
passing, and in this connection, that if I had a son whom it was my
ambition to see making his mark in the world as a writer of romance,
as distinguished from the real, I should, as the first step in his
development, take care that he became a fisherman. The telling of
tales of the fish he caught when no one else was near to see would
give him, as it has given many another, a good schooling in the
realms of the imagination.

I was glad to note that Harley's wonted cheerfulness had
returned, and that he had become more like himself than he had been
at any time since his first failure with Miss Andrews.

"Your advice was excellent," he said, as we sipped our coffee at
the club the night of his return. "I have a clear two weeks in which
to tackle that story, and I feel confident now that I shall get it
done. Furthermore, I shall send the chapters to Herring, Beemer,
& Chadwick as I write them, so that there must be no failure. I
shall be compelled to finish the tale, whatever may happen, and Miss
Andrews shall go through to the bitter end, willy-nilly."

"Don't be rash, Harley," I said; for it seemed to me that Miss
Andrews, having consented at my solicitation to be a docile heroine
for just so long as Harley did not insist upon her marrying the man
she did not love, it was no time for him to break away from the
principles he had so steadfastly adhered to hitherto and become a
martinet. He struck me as being more than likely to crack the whip
like a ring-master in his present mood than to play the indulgent
author, and I felt pretty confident that the instant the snap of the
lash reached the ears of Marguerite Andrews his troubles would begin
again tenfold, both in quality and in quantity, with no possible hope
for a future reconciliation between them.

"I'm not going to be rash," said Harley. "I never was rash, and
I'm not going to begin now, but I shall use my nerve. That has been
the trouble with me in the past. I haven't been firm. I have let
that girl have her own way in everything, and I'm very much afraid I
have spoiled her. She behaves like a child with indulgent parents.
In the last instance, the Parker proposal, she simply ran her
independence into the ground. She was not only rebellious to me, but
she was impertinent to him. Her attitude toward him was not nature
at all; it was not realism, because she is a woman of good breeding,
and would naturally be the last to treat any man, distasteful or not,
with such excessive rudeness. I compelled him to go on and propose
to her, though after he had been at it for five minutes I could see
that he wished he was well out of it. I should have taken her in
hand and controlled her with equal firmness, declining to permit her
to speak so openly. Frankness is good enough, especially in women,
among whom you rarely find it; but frankness of the sort she indulged
in has no place in the polite circle in which she moves."

"Nevertheless, she spoke that way--you said yourself she did," I
said, seeing that he was wrathful with Marguerite, and wishing to
assuage his anger before it carried him to lengths he might regret.
"And you've got to take her as she is or drop her altogether."

"She did--I repeat that she did speak that way, but that was no
reason why I should submit to it," Harley answered. "It was the
fault of her mood. She was nervous, almost hysterical--thanks to her
rebellious spirit. The moment I discovered how things were going I
should have gone back and started afresh, and kept on doing so until
I had her submissive. A hunter may balk at a high fence, but the
rider must not give in to him unless he wishes to let the animal get
the better of him. If he is wise he will go back and put the horse
to it again and again, until he finally clears the topmost bar. That
I should have done in this instance, and that I now intend to do,
until that book comes out as I want it."

I had to laugh in my sleeve. On the whole, Harley was very like
most other realists, who pretend that they merely put down life as it
is, and who go through their professional careers serenely
unconscious of the truth that their fancies, after all, serve them
when their facts are lacking. Even that most eminent disciple of the
Realistic Cult, Mr. Darrow, has been known to kill off a hero in a
railroad accident that owed its being to nothing short of his own
imagination, in order that the unhappy wight might not offend the
readers of the highly moral magazine, in which the story first
appeared, by marrying a widow whom he had been forced by Mr. Darrow
to love before her husband died. Mr. Darrow manufactured, with five
strokes of his pen, an engine and a tunnel to crush the life out of
the poor fellow, whom an immoral romancer would have allowed to live
on and marry the lady, and with perfect propriety too, since the hero
and the heroine were both of them the very models of virtue, in spite
of the love which they did not seek, and which Mr. Darrow
deliberately and almost brutally thrust into their otherwise happy
lives. Of course the railway accident was needed to give the climax
to the story, which without it might have run through six more
numbers of the magazine, to the exclusion of more exciting material;
but that will not relieve Mr. Darrow's soul of the stain he has put
upon it by deserting Dame Realism for a moment to flirt with Romance,
when it comes to the Judgment Day.

"As I want it to be, so must it be," quoth Harley.

"Good," thought I. "It will no doubt be excellent; but be
honest, and don't insist that you've taken down life as it is; for
you may have an astigmatism, for all you know, and life may not be at
all what it has seemed to you while you were putting it down."

"Yes, sir," said Harley, leaning back in his chair and drawing a
long breath, which showed his determination, "to the bitter end she
shall go, through such complications as I choose to have her,
encountering whatever villains I may happen to find most convenient,
and to complete her story she shall marry the man I select for my
hero, if he is as commonplace as the average salesman in a Brooklyn
universal dry-goods emporium."

Imagine my feelings if you can! Having gone as a self-appointed
ambassador to the enemy to secure terms of peace, to return to find
my principal donning his armor and daubing his face with paint for a
renewal of the combat, was certainly not pleasant. What could I say
to Marguerite Andrews if I ever met her in real life? How could I
look her in the eye? The situation overpowered me, and I hardly knew
what to say. I couldn't beg Harley to stick to his realism and not
indulge in compulsion, because I had often jeered at him for not
infusing a little more of the dramatic into his stories, even if it
had to be "lugged in by the ears," as he put it. Nor was he in any
mood for me to tell him of my breach of faith--the mere knowledge
that she had promised to be docile out of charity would have stung
his pride, and I thought it would be better, for the time, at least,
to let my interview remain a secret. Fortune favored me, however.
Kelly and the Professor entered the dining room at this moment, and
the Professor held in his hand a copy of the current issue of The
Literary Man, Messrs. Herring, Beemer, & Chadwick's fortnightly
publication, a periodical having to do wholly with things bookish.

"Who sat for this, Stuart?" called out the Professor, tapping
the frontispiece of the magazine.

"Who sat for what?" replied Stuart, looking up.

"This picture," said the Professor.

"It's a picture of a finely intellectual-looking person with
your name under it, Harley," put in the Doctor.

"Oh--that," said Harley. "It does flatter me a bit."

"So does the article with it," said Kelly. "Says you are a
great man--man with an idea, and all that. Is that true, or is it
just plain libel? Have you an idea?"

Harley laughed good-naturedly. "I had one once, but it's lost,"
he said. "As to that picture, they're bringing out a book for me,"
he added, modestly. "Good ad., you know."

"When you are through with that, Professor," I put in, "let me
have it, will you? I want to see what it says about Harley."

"It's a first-rate screed," replied the Professor, handing over
the publication. "It hits Harley right on the head."

"I don't know as that's pleasant," said Harley.

"What I mean, my dear boy," said the Professor, "is that it does
you justice."

And it really did do Harley justice, although, as he had
suggested, it was written largely to advertise the forthcoming work.
It spoke nicely of Harley's previous efforts, and judiciously, as it
seemed to me. He had not got to the top of the ladder yet, but he
was getting there by a slow, steady development, and largely because
he was a man with a fixed idea as to what literature ought to be.

"Mr. Harley has seen clearly from the outset what it was that he
wished to accomplish and how to accomplish it," the writer observed.
"He has swerved neither to the right nor to the left, but has
progressed undeviatingly along the lines he has mapped out for
himself, and keeping constantly in mind the principles which seemed
to him at the beginning of his career to be right. It has been this
persistent and consistent adherence to principle that has gained for
Mr. Harley his hearing, and which is constantly rendering more
certain and permanent his position in the world literary. Others may
be led hither and yon by the fads and follies of the scatter-brained,
but Realism will ever have one steadfast champion in Stuart
Harley."

"Read that," I said, tossing the journal across the table.

He read it, and blushed to the roots of his ears.

"This is no time to desert the flag, Harley," said I, as he
read. "Stick to your colors, and let her stick to hers. You'd better
be careful how you force your heroine."

"Ha, ha!" he laughed. "I should think so, and for more reasons
than one. I never really intended to do horrible things with her, my
boy. Trust me, if I do lead her, to lead her gently. My persuasion
will be suggestive rather than mandatory."

"And that hero--from the Brooklyn dry-goods shop?" I asked, with
a smile.

"I'd like to see him so much as--tell her the price of
anything," cried Harley. "A man like that has no business to live in
the same hemisphere with a woman like Marguerite Andrews. When I
threatened her with him I was conversing through a large and elegant
though wholly invisible hat."

I breathed more freely. She was still sacred and safe in his
hands. Shortly after, dinner over, we left the table, and went to the
theatre, where we saw what the programme called the "latest London
realistic success," in which three of the four acts of an intensely
exciting melodrama depended upon a woman's not seeing a large navy
revolver, which lay on the table directly before her eyes in the
first. The play was full of blood and replete with thunder, and we
truly enjoyed it, only Harley would not talk much between the acts.
He was unusually moody. After the play was over his tongue loosened,
however, and we went to the Players for a supper, and there he burst
forth into speech.

"If Marguerite Andrews had been the heroine of that play she'd
have seen that gun, and the audience would have had to go home inside
of ten minutes," he said. Later on he burst out with, "If my Miss
Andrews had been the heroine of that play, the man who falls over the
precipice in the second act would have been alive at this moment."
And finally he demanded: "Do you suppose a heroine like Marguerite
Andrews would have overlooked the comma on the postal card that woman
read in the third act, and so made the fourth act possible? Not she.
She's a woman with a mind. And yet they call that the latest London
realistic success! Realistic! These Londoners do not seem to
understand their own language. If that play was realism, what sort
of a nightmare do you suppose a romantic drama would be?"

"Well, maybe London women in real life haven't any minds," I
said, growing rather weary of the subject. I admired Miss Andrews
myself, but there were other things I could talk about--"like
lemonade and elephants," as the small boy said. "Let it go at that.
It was an interesting play, and that's all plays ought to be.
Realism in plays is not to be encouraged. A man goes to the theatre
to be amused and entertained, not to be reminded of home
discomforts."

Stuart looked at me reproachfully, ordered a fresh cigar, and
suggested turning in for the night. I walked home with him and tried
to get him interested in a farce I was at work on, but it was of no
use. He had become a monomaniac, and his monomania was his
rebellious heroine. Finally I blurted out:

"Well, for Heaven's sake, Stuart, get the woman caged, will you?
For, candidly, I'd like to talk about something else, and until
Marguerite Andrews is disposed of I don't believe you'll be able
to."

"I'll have half the work done by this time to-morrow night,"
said he. "I've got ten thousand words of it in my mind now."

"I'll bet you there are only two words down in your mind," said
I.

"What are they?" he asked.

"Marguerite and Andrews," said I.

Stuart laughed. "They're the only ones I'm sure of," said he.
And then we parted.

But he was right about what he would have accomplished by that
time the next night; for before sundown he had half the story
written, and, what is more, the chapters had come as easily as any
writing he ever did. For docility, Marguerite was a perfect wonder.
Not only did she follow out his wishes; she often anticipated them,
and in certain parts gave him a lead in a new direction, which,
Stuart said, gave the story a hundred per cent. more character.

In short, Marguerite Andrews was keeping her promise to me
nobly. The only thing I regretted about it, now that all seemed plain
sailing, was its effect on Stuart. Her amiability was proving a
great attraction to his susceptible soul, and I was beginning to fear
that Stuart was slowly but surely falling in love with his rebellious
heroine, which would never do, unless she were really real, on which
point I was most uncertain.

"It would be a terrible thing," said I confidentially to myself,
"if Stuart Harley were to fall in love with a creation of his own
realism."