Twilight - Julia Frankau (free novels to read .txt) 📗

scheme is a good one, and we will do everything we can to produce a beautiful book.

May I say that it was a great pleasure and privilege to me to meet you here yesterday? I hope the interest you will find in this present work will afford you some relief during this time of trouble and anxiety you are passing through; and counteract to some extent at least the pettiness and publicity of litigation. I only refer to this with the greatest respect and sympathy.

There are many details, not only of the contract, but for the plan of the book, which we could certainly best arrange if we discussed them, rather than by writing.

Could you make it convenient to lunch with me one day next week? I shall be in the West End on Wednesday, and suggest the Cafe Royal at two o’clock.

It would be good of you to meet me there. Yours sincerely,

GABRIEL STANTON.

No. 6. 211 Queen Anne’s Gate,

February yth, 1902.

Dear Mr. Stanton:

Our letters crossed. Thanks for yours with agreement. The greater part seems to me to be merely technical, and I have no observations to make about it.

Par. 2: guaranteeing that the work is in no way “a violation of any existing copyright,” etc. I think this is your concern rather than mine. You say there is a book existing on Staffordshire Pottery, perhaps you can get me a copy, and then I can see that ours shall be entirely different.

Par. 7: beginning “accounts to be made up annually,” etc., seems to give you an exceptionally long time to pay me anything that may be due. But perhaps I misunderstand it.

Therefore, and perhaps for other reasons, I very gladly accept your kind invitation to lunch with you on Wednesday at the Cafe Royal, and will be there at two, bringing the agreement with me.

With kind regards,

Yours very truly,

MARGARET CAPEL.

No. 7. 118 Greyfriars’ Square, E.G.,

February i3th, 1902.

Dear Mrs. Capel:

I am breaking into the commonplace routine of a particularly tiresome business day, to give myself the pleasure of writing to you, and you will forgive me if I purposely avoid business for indeed it seems to me today that life might be so pleasant without work. That little grumble has done me good. I want to say what I fear I did not express to you yesterday how greatly I enjoyed our talk. It was good of you to come and more good of you to tell me something of your present difficulties. I wish I could have been more helpful but please believe I am more sympathetic than I was able to let you know, and I do understand much of what must be trying and unhappy for you during these weeks. Counsels of perfection are poor comfort, but perhaps that some one is most genuinely in accord with you and anxious to help in any way possible may be of some little value.

I beg you to believe that this is so, and I should welcome the chance of being of any service to you. This all reads very formal I fear, but your kindness must interpret the spirit rather than the letter.

Last evening I went into an old curiosity shop to try and find a wedding-present for a niece who is also my god-daughter, and I secured six beautiful Chippendale chairs. Curiously enough the man showed me what he said was the best specimen of Staffordshire he had ever had. A group of musicians seeming to my inexperienced eye good in colour and design. I know not what impulse persuaded me to buy the piece. To-day I am fearing that my purchase is not genuine. May I bring it to you on Sunday for approval or condemnation? Don’t trouble to answer if you will be at home I will call at five o’clock.

Now I must return to less pleasant business affairs the telephone is insistent.

Yours very sincerely,

GABRIEL STANTON.

No. 8. 211 Queen Anne’s Gate, S.W.,

14th February, 1902.

Dear Mr. Stanton:

Thank you so much for your kind letter, it made a charming savoury to that little luncheon you ordered. Did I tell you how much I enjoyed it? If not, please understand I am doing so now. The mousse was a dream of delight, the roses were very helpful. I have a theory about flowers and food, and how to blend them. Which reminds me that my father wants to share with me in the pleasure of your acquaintance and bids me ask if you will dine with us on the 24th at eight o’clock. This of course must not prevent your coming Sunday afternoon with your pottery “find.” I am more than curious, I am devoured with curiosity to see it. I don’t know a Staffordshire “group of musicians,” it sounds like Chelsea! Bring it by all means, but if it is Staffordshire and not in my collection, I warn you I shall at once begin bargaining with you, spending my royalties in advance! Yes! I think I hate business too, as you say, and should like to avoid it. We were fairly successful, by the way, in the Cafe Royal! Our talk ranged over a large field, became rather personal I think I spoke too freely; it must have been the Steinberger! or because I am really very worried and depressed. Depression is the old age of the emotions, and garrulousness its distressing symptom.

Yours sincerely,

MARGARET CAPEL.

No. 9. 118 Greyfriars’ Square, E.C.,

15th February, 1902.

Dear Mrs. Capel:

I am so glad to have your letter and look forward to Sunday. Should my little pottery “find” prove authentic I have no doubt we can arrange for its transfer to you, on business or even unbusiness lines!

I accept with pleasure your invitation to dinner on the 24th. I have heard often of your father from my friend Wilfrid Henning, who attends to what little investments I make and who meets your father in connection with that big Newfoundland scheme for connecting the traffic from the Eastern ports to Lake Ontario. I should value the opportunity to hear of it, first hand.

Yours most sincerely,

GABRIEL STANTON.

No. 10. 211 Queen Anne’s Gate, S.W.,

16th February, 1902.

Dear Mr. Stanton:

I am no longer puzzled about the “musicians”; it is Staffordshire, I was convinced of that from the first but had to confirm my impression. I will tell you all about it when we meet again (on the 24th), I am sure you will be interested. I want you to let me have it. Whatever you paid for it I will give you, and any profit you like. I won’t bargain with you, but I really feel I can never part with it again. It was a wonderful chance that you should find it. Wasn’t Sunday altogether strange? Such a crowd, and so difficult to talk. I shall have to get out of London, I have a sense of fatigue all the time, of restless incoherent fear. I dread sympathy, and scent curiosity as if it were carrion. In that little talk I had among the tea-things I said none of the things I meant. I believe you understood this, although you only said yes, and yes again to my wildest suggestions. I am only epigrammatic when I am shy; it is the form taken by my mental stammer. Epigrams come to me too, when I have a scene in my head too big to write. I find my hand shaking, heart beating, tremulous. Then my queer brain relieves the pressure on my feelings and stammers out my scene in short cryptic sentences. That is why, although I am an emotional thinker, I am what you are pleased to call an intellectual writer.

And now for the agreement, in which I have ventured to make alterations, and even additions. Will you return it to me with comments if you think I have been too difficult or exacting. My father tells me I have inherited his business ability. He means to pay me a compliment, but I gather your point of view is that business ability is but deformity in an intellectual woman? I’m sorry for this deformity of mine, realising the unfavourable impression it may create. Try and forgive me for it, won’t you? You need not even remember it when you are telling me what I am to give you for the Staffordshire piece!

With kind regards,

Yours very sincerely,

MARGARET CAPEL.

No. n. 118 Greyfriars’ Square, E.G.,

17th February, 1902.

Dear Mrs. Capel:

What good news about the little “Staffordshire” piece! I am really delighted. Please don’t mar my pleasure in thinking of it happily housed with you by questions of price or bargaining. Rather add to my pride in my “find” by accepting it as a small recognition of my great good fortune in having made your acquaintance.

Out of the chatter and clatter of the tea on Sunday the things you said remain with me; if they were epigrams they were vivid and to me very real.

I hated everything that interrupted and hated going away. Quite humbly I say that I think I did understand, and was longing to tell you so. But I have never had the tongue of a ready speaker, and as I left your beautiful home I was choked with unspoken words a cleverer man would have found more quickly.

How much I wished I could have expressed myself. I wanted to say that I had no hateful curiosity, but only an overwhelming sympathy and desire for your confidence, a bedrock craving for your friendship. May I be your friend? May I? Or am I presuming on your kindness and too short an acquaintanceship?

Anyhow, I can’t write on business, the contract is to go through with all your alterations.

Looking forward to the 24th, I need only sign,

Au revoir,

Yours very truly,

GABRIEL STANTON.

No. 12. 211 Queen Anne’s Gate, S.W.,

18th February, 1902.

Dear Mr. Stanton:

I don’t know what to say about “The Musicians,” that is why I have not already written to say it! I have not put the group into my collection, it is on my bedroom mantelpiece. I see it when I first wake in the morning, it is the last thing upon which my tired eyes rest before I turn off the light at night. Sometimes I think those musicians are playing the prelude to the friendship of which you speak.

I wonder why you are so curiously sympathetic to me, and why I mind so little admitting it. Friendship has been rare in my life. You offer me yours, and I am on the point of accepting it; thinking all the time what it may mean, what I can give you in return. An hour now and again of detached talk, a great deal of trouble with my literary affairs… there is not much in that for you; is there? Are the Musicians really a gift? They must go on playing to me softly then, and the prelude be slow and long-drawn-out. I am afraid even of friendship, that is the truth. I’m disillusioned, disappointed, tired. Nothing has ever happened to me as I meant it. When I first came from America with my father, I was full of the wildest hopes, and now I have outlived them all. It is not an affectation, it is a profound truth, and at twenty-eight I find myself worn out, dimmed, exhausted. I have had fame (a small measure of it, but enough for comparison), wealth, and that horrid nightmare, love.

My father spoiled me when I was small, believed too much in me. He thought me a genius, and I … perhaps I thought so too. I puzzled and perplexed him, and he felt overweighted with his responsibilities, with character-studying an egotistic girl