第120章

I left London, the drums beating in my heart, the flags waving in my brain. Somewhat more than a year later, one foggy wet December evening, I sneaked back to it defeated--ah, that is a small thing, capable of redress--disgraced. I returned to it as to a hiding-place where, lost in the crowd, I might waste my days unnoticed until such time as I could summon up sufficient resolution to put an end to my dead life. I had been ambitious--dwelling again amid the bitterness of the months that followed my return, I write in the past tense. I had been eager to make a name, a position for myself. But were I to claim no higher aim, I should be doing injustice to my blood--to the great-souled gentleman whose whole life had been an ode to honour, to her of simple faith who had known no other prayer to teach me than the childish cry, "God help me to be good!" I had wished to be a great man, but it was to have been a great good man. The world was to have admired me, but to have respected me also. I was to have been the knight without fear, but, rarer yet, without reproach--Galahad, not Launcelot. I had learnt myself to be a feeble, backboneless fighter, conquered by the first serious assault of evil, a creature of mean fears, slave to every crack of the devil's whip, a feeder with swine.

Urban Vane I had discovered to be a common swindler. His play he had stolen from the desk of a well-known dramatist whose acquaintance he had made in Deleglise's kitchen. The man had fallen ill, and Vane had been constant in his visits. Partly recovering, the man had gone abroad to Italy. Had he died there, as at the time was expected, the robbery might never have come to light. News reached us in a small northern town that he had taken a fresh lease of life and was on his way back to England. Then it was that Vane with calm indifference, smoking his cigar over a bottle of wine to which he had invited me, told me the bald truth, adorning it with some touches of wit. Had the recital come upon me sooner, I might have acted differently; but six months' companionship with Urban Vane, if it had not, by grace of the Lord, destroyed the roots of whatever flower of manhood might have been implanted in me, had most certainly withered its leaves.

The man was clever. That he was not clever enough to perceive from the beginning what he has learnt since: that honesty is the best policy--at least, for men with brains--remains somewhat of a mystery to me. Where once he made his hundreds among shady ways, he now, I suppose, makes his thousands in the broad daylight of legitimate enterprise. Chicanery in the blood, one might imagine, has to be worked out. Urban Vanes are to be found in all callings. They commence as scamps; years later, to one's astonishment, one finds them ornaments to their profession. Wild oats are of various quality, according to the soil from which they are preserved. We sow them in our various ways.

At first I stormed. Vane sat with an amused smile upon his lips and listened.

"Your language, my dear Kelver," he replied, my vocabulary exhausted, "might wound me were I able to accept you as an authority upon this vexed question of morals. With the rest of the world you preach one thing and practise another. I have noticed it so often. It is perhaps sad, but the preaching has ceased to interest me. You profess to be very indignant with me for making use of another man's ideas.

It is done every day. You yourself were quite ready to take credit not due to you. For months we have been travelling with this play:

'Drama, in five acts, by Mr. Horace Moncrieff.' Not more than two hundred lines of it are your own--excellent lines, I admit, but they do not constitute the play."

This aspect of the affair had not occurred to me. "But you asked me to put my name to it," I stammered. "You said you did not want your own to appear--for private reasons. You made a point of it."

He waved away the smoke from his cigar. "The man you are posing as would never have put his name to work not his own. You never hesitated; on the contrary, you jumped at the chance of so easy an opening to your career as playwright. My need, as you imagined it, was your opportunity."

"But you said it was from the French," I argued; "you had merely translated it, I adapted it. I don't defend the custom, but it is the custom: the man who adapts a play calls himself the author. They all do it."

"I know," he answered. "It has always amused me. Our sick friend himself, whom I am sure we are both delighted to welcome back to life, has done it more than once, and made a very fair profit on the transaction. Indeed, from internal evidence, I am strongly of opinion that this present play is a case in point. Well, chickens come home to roost: I adapt from him. What is the difference?"

"Simply this," he continued, pouring himself out another glass of wine, "that whereas, owing to the anomalous state of the copyright laws, stealing from the foreign author is legal and commendable, against stealing from the living English author there is a certain prejudice."

"And the consequences, I am afraid, you will find somewhat unpleasant," I suggested.

He laughed: it was not a frivolity to which he was prone. "You mean, my dear Kelver that you will."

"Don't look so dumbfounded " he went on. "You cannot be so stupid as you are pretending to be. The original manuscript at the Lord Chamberlain's office is in your handwriting. You knew our friend as well as I did, and visited him. Why, the whole tour has been under your management. You have arranged everything--most excellently; I have been quite surprised."

My anger came later. For the moment, the sudden light blinded me to everything but fear.

"But you told me," I cried, "it was only a matter of form, that you wanted to keep your name out of it because--"

He was looking at me with an expression of genuine astonishment. My words began to appear humorous even to myself. I found it difficult to believe I had been the fool I was now seeing myself to have been.