HEMMING had a home, and dearly he loved everything in it—with one exception. He loved the furnace, and the kitchen range with its warm ruddy glow, and the violet-coloured wafer of expensive aromatic soap that always mysteriously appeared on the marble wash-basin when visitors came. He loved the little glass towel racks, and the miniature embroidered hand towels with Mrs. Hemming's maiden initials on them, which also appeared, white and fragrant, whenever there was any special festivity. Those little towels were to him a kind of symbol of the first ecstatic days of their married life, and he could not bear to think of the inevitable time when they would be frayed and discarded. He loved the shelf over the fireplace where his brown-stained corncob pipe waited for the after-supper smoke. He loved the little porch where the baby carriage stood, and the tulip beds that he and Janet had planted together, and the mission dining table, now blistered and scarred, that had been their very first piece of furniture. But in the little den upstairs stood his desk, and how he hated it!
Hemming, you see, had literary ambitions, and that desk meant to him every circumstance, every long-drawn torment, of weariness and toil. It had meant much pleasure, too, in hours when his writing had prospered; but how the bitter outnumbered the sweet! How many hundred evenings he had dragged himself to it, in lassitude and lethargy; had forced his drowsy, unwilling mind to the task at hand. How many nights, nodding over the typewriter, he had stumbled on and on. Over his desk he kept, ironically, a letter he had once had from an editor, which said: We like stories. They have a joyous freshness. You write as though you enjoyed it.
Hemming was no quick and easy composer. His stories emerged slowly, painfully, hammered and wrenched from the stubborn tissues of a weary brain. When his whole soul and body cried out for a comfortable stretch on the couch, with pipe and book, and a gradual, blissful lapse into slumber, he would throw off his coat, stick his head out of the window for a dozen gulps of cool night air, and then sit down at the wheezy old typewriter.
Its yellow keys seemed a kind of doleful rosary on which he told long petitions to whatever gods look down pityingly on young writers. He would think how wonderful it would be if he could only do his writing in the morning when he was fresh. To leap out of bed in the crisp early air, to plunge into the cold bath where the water shimmered a pale green by catching the tint of the big maple tree just outside the bathroom, to swallow two cups of hot coffee, two slices of buttered toast, and then sit down to his desk. In the zest and lustihood of the morning, how the thoughts would throng, how the great empire of words would unroll before him, far away to the blue hills where lived his unwritten poems! Such was his daily thought as he hurried down the hill on bright mornings to catch the 8.13 train to town. But to come back at night after a long day at the office, and after helping Janet wash the dishes, and stoking the furnace or mowing the lawn or planting bulbs in the garden—then to try to write seemed tough indeed.
Still, it had to be done, and Hemming threw his manhood into the task. In his little den there was just space for a couch, his desk, and his books, which were littered about the room. His only chance of accomplishing anything was to get Janet safely installed on the couch, for if he once lay down there work was impossible. She would curl up under a steamer rug, tired out from a long day with the house and the baby, reading a book or the evening paper. And then the stumbling clatter of the typewriter would begin.
After a while there always came what they humorously called “the pathetic little moment.” This was the time when Janet's book or paper would slip from her hand, she would turn away from the light, and coast down the long, smooth toboggan of sleep. Then Hemming would switch off the reading lamp above her head (with the secret economic satisfaction young householders always feel when they switch off a light), touch the soft cheek with a friendly finger, and climb the keys once more. His writing always seemed to go better after the “pathetic little moment” was past. There was a kind of subconscious satisfaction in the feeling that Janet was there, asleep, and that he was working for her. And Janet used to affirm that there was no lullaby like the irregular thumping of those keys and levers.
There was another catchword they had, which also moved stealthily in the back passages of his mind as he mulled over his manuscripts. Janet badly needed a new bonnet—a “pert little hat,” she liked to call it—and Hemming had pledged himself to write something that would bring her the saucy little ornament she craved in time for Christmas. She was a slender, bright-faced creature, and no one could wear an innocently tilted turban with more grace. But these had been hard days for small incomes. Winter coal, and warm clothes for the Urchin, and the cook's wages (when they had one), and Liberty Bonds—all these had taken precedence over the pert little hat. It had been talked of so long, it had become a kind of joyous legend, which Janet hardly expected to see realized on her head. She used to say wistfully, as she coasted off to sleep on the couch: “Would it be unpatriotic to think about the pert little hat?” And her husband would vow that patriotism that excluded pert little hats was no patriotism at all. So he had sworn that the bonnet should be millinered on the clacking loom of his typewriter. They used to laugh about it, and say that the little hat ought to be trimmed with carbon typewriter ribbons.
But Hemming did not know that Janet was not always asleep after the so-called “pathetic moment” when she ostensibly gave up the struggle with drowsiness. The twanging springs of the old couch made less noise than the typewriter keys, but they, too, moved to a secret creative refrain. There were times when Janet lay watching the lamplight on the rows of books, and little pictures of stories that she would like to write flashed into her head. They often used to come to her at inopportune periods during the day, when the Urchin was in his bath or when she was taking stock of the ice-box. Of course her husband was the literary man of the family, and she had no thought of setting up her simple imaginings against his more serious efforts. But one night, when he was engrossed in some intractable plot, Janet slipped away into the little guest room and shut herself in. With a stub pencil, on odd sheets of notepaper, she began scribbling hotly. Two hours later, when Hemming came back to earth and hunted her out, she was still at it.
“What on earth are you up to, monk?” he asked.
“Making out laundry lists,” she said.
More observant husbands might have wondered what occasion there would be for a laundry list on Thursday evening, but Hemming was always drowned in his dreams of literary fame.
His story, on which he had laboured at night for two months, and hers, which had taken the spare hours of three days, were finished almost at the same time. After dinner one night, when he had read the manuscript of his story aloud, Janet handed him her venture, with some trepidation. At first he seemed a little nettled that she should have done such a thing.
“Look here, monk,” he said, “you oughtn't to wear yourself out trying to write. You have quite enough to do with the house and the baby. Moreover, you don't know how discouraging it is. It takes years of patient apprenticeship before one can get anything across with the editors. This is my job, brownie.”
“But I enjoyed doing it,” she said.
“That's a bad sign. All really good stories take fearful effort. How long did you spend on this?”
“Oh, quite a while,” she said, vaguely. She did not like to admit that her little story had involved no “patient apprenticeship.”
He lit his pipe and began reading the sheets on which her quick pencil had flashed with such enthusiasm. She sat with her sewing, watching him shyly.
“Very nice,” was his comment; but privately he wondered how he was to avoid hurting her feelings. It seemed to him that the story had all the faults of the amateur.
“Would you submit it anywhere?” she asked, eagerly. “Do you think any magazine would buy it?”
He evaded the question. “Would you like me to type it for you?” he said.
“Oh, would you?”
“I'll tell you what I'll do,” he said, “I'll be sending my manuscript to Mr. Edwards to-morrow. I'll type yours and send it, too.”
Janet was delighted, and she fell asleep that night with the sweet music of the thumping keys in her ears. As she heard the staccato clicking, she thought: “I wonder how far he has got now? How good of him to take all that trouble to copy my poor little story.”
Hemming sat up very late that night, copying Janet's manuscript and planning what to say to Mr. Edwards, the editor of the Colonial Magazine, who had been very cordial to him. He resisted the temptation to alter Janet's na?ve phrasing here and there, to improve her technique by recasting some of the situations in her story. It was long past midnight when both manuscripts were ready to go into the stout manila envelope. Then, after some meditation, Hemming added the following note:
Dear Mr. Edwards:
I am sending you herewith my new story, and hope you may like it. I am also enclosing a manuscript from my wife. Of course she is an untrained writer—this is her first attempt—but I think her story has a certain charm. Won't you, if ............