A Marginal Acquaintance

THERE was little of the subtle influence of previous occupancy clinging to my tiny dwelling. A gray little bungalow in a village of bungalows that sheltered a ‘literary colony,’ it suffered naturally from the heterogeneity of a furnished house for rent. Five years of promiscuous ingress and egress, since the passing of its original owner, had rubbed from its portals all stamp of individuality; and when, therefore, in installing certain of my own lares and penates, that somewhat of that missing quality might hastily be lent during my occupation with a piece of literary work, I came suddenly upon signs of a grimly persistent presence, it was to be startled almost into a stammered apology for my intrusion.

For confronting me from a dark far corner of a ‘skied’ top-shelf, stolid and forbidding in the gloom, stood an oldmodel typewriter, its bars and keys festooned with cobweb chains, while beside it, lined up like sentries before a closeted past, was a row of veteran magazines. A shabby guard they were, dusty and unkempt, their tri-corns tattered, their edges frayed, some with their coats quite gone. But foremost among them, one sturdier and less antedated than the rest had managed to retain his own, and in an upper corner — on the lapel, as it were, like the decoration of some royal order — was a brief inscription written in a fine and neatly rounded hand: ‘Emma Peeples. Keep.’

Involuntarily I stepped back. It was something like five years, I had been informed, since Miss Peeples, the original owner of the house, had dwelt here — five years since that worthy lady, passing on, had left her abidingplace to the tender mercies of transient renters. Yet here, in the face of that inconsequent horde, stood stolidly this old typewriter, like a time-locked gate, and the tattered magazine guard, faithful warders of a presence reigning still through that last precisely executed order: ‘Emma Peeples. Keep’

It was arresting, this! There was something of stern tenacity in the terseness of that phrase, something that in its simple literalness was not to be gainsaid. And I was seized with a swift interest in one who, through the power of the written word alone, had thus managed to defy the oblivion of death. For I had not the slightest doubt that inside that frayed and dusty guard of magazines the person of Miss Peeples persisted still.

The power of a phrase! Certainly Miss Peeples had known it well — she who had relied upon that brief one of her own to stay so long the vandal’s hand — through all those years to maintain on that ‘skied’ top-shelf her personal sanctum. And what was there of value and significance there to her? Was there, perhaps, in those frayed backnumbers, a treasury of contributions from her own hand — that hand which had known so well the force of the written word? For undoubtedly Miss Peeples wrote! The typewriter and the literary colony attested that. Then it was not unlikely that Miss Peeples herself was living in those pages in her own masterly phrase. For all I knew, she might be hidden there behind some nom de plume. She might even prove, could I but find her, to be an old and dear, though by her own name an unfamiliar, friend. In any case, ‘Tell me what you read,’ said some wiseacre, ‘and I’ll tell you what you are.’ And that in those frayed back-numbers there was something significant to her was in itself as significant, as this other fact was graphic, of this Miss Peeples who, in defiance of the effacing hand of Time, had managed to write herself thus imperishably in that fine and neatly rounded hand: ‘Emma Peeples. Keep.’

I must know Miss Peeples! That was plain. Not to do so would be as absurd as if we were to go about the house together day after day, withholding a friendly greeting for lack of a formal introduction. For my part, now that I knew she was there, it would be almost as ungracious as to accept the lady’s hospitality while deliberately ignoring her presence. And surely Miss Peeples would not grudge me her acquaintance — and in her own house! I could not believe that she would withhold from me the comradeship of our mutual interests. It was not in miserly or jealous spirit, I felt sure, that my hostess had written in that fine and neatly rounded hand: ‘Emma Peeples. Keep.’

So it was sustained by this assurance that, after a respectful interval, I ventured one day to take into my own hands those frayed and dusty covers, and in the friendliness of one of Miss Peeples’s rustic chairs, before Miss Peeples’s hospitable hearth, to open the pages of acquaintance with Miss Emma Peeples.

I was rewarded beyond my fondest hopes. For my first cursory frilling of the leaves disclosed, dispersed along the margins in that same fine and neatly rounded hand, copious commentaries in pencil. I was delighted, charmed!

Miss Peeples was already prepared for converse with me. She was ready, even to the extent of proffering the first remark, to permit my friendship.

We had turned, I remember, to a page of literary memoirs by the dean of American letters, and with her pencil Miss Peeples now called my attention to a line referring to a distinguished magazine which, wrote the author, ‘still remains the most scrupulously cultivated of our periodicals.’

‘It’s as vulgar and provincial as any of them!’ declared Miss Peeples, with asperity.

I confess I was surprised. To happen thus upon an exponent of the higher criticism was more than I had dreamed. In all my anticipations of Miss Peeples I had not suspected such virtuosity as this — a perspicacity that hesitated neither at attacking ‘the most scrupulously cultivated of our periodicals,’ nor at taking issue with the dean of American letters! I rejoiced. Here, I gloried, is a fine scorn of compromise and an independence of thought quite rare in a contributor. To my delight, here was disclosed at the start what I found on closer acquaintance to be a fundamental characteristic of my new friend: in the honesty and zeal of her convictions this lady was no respecter of persons.

But I was relieved to discover at once that by ‘vulgarity’ and ‘provincialism’ Miss Peeples referred quite exclusively to form, not content. I found her scrupulously exacting, for instance, in the choice of words. Aside from reiterated objections to the common confusions of ‘shall’ and ‘will,’ ‘would’ and ‘should,’ ‘would better have’ and ‘had better have,’ and in addition to an unbelievable number of serpentine interlineations in protest against split infinitives, Miss Peeples accorded me many concrete examples of her standards of propriety in diction. In an article on Entomology, a noted authority’s persistent and familiar reference to his tiny subjects as ‘bugs’ as persistently elicited from Miss Peeples a correction of the word to ‘insects’ — a more seemly attitude, one must admit; while a sentence by the same author to the effect that ‘the Horticultural Commissioners receive a salary of four dollars per day,’drew from Miss Peeples in marginal disapproval: ‘“A day” or “per diem,” but not a mixture!’ I found her particularly inexorable as to prepositions. ‘We went Wednesday and returned the evening of Friday’ was presented with ‘on’ to precede properly each adverb; while ‘made the latter part of the time’was quietly but firmly supplied with ‘during’ after the verb, as a fit chaperon to its activities.

All of which, I mused happily, disclosed in Miss Peeples a praiseworthy precision, a reassuring insistence upon the small proprieties, only too often ignored in these alarming days of free literature. I confess that I was impressed, if somewhat perturbed, with the number of grammatical irregularities which Miss Peeples had succeeded in ferreting out in so ostensibly correct a magazine. Yet, while it suggested that the lady had been at infinite pains to discover so many lapses in syntactical conduct, still, I reflected, of such vigilance are the censors of our rhetorical morals, to whose constant fidelity we owe the maintenance of our literary standards.

I have said that Miss Peeples conceded nothing to eminence where indiscretions were involved. A distinguished novelist, famous for the purity of his phrase, having carelessly made use of the expression, ‘entreat to be done,’ was brought up promptly to his manners by Miss Peeples’s stern admonition, ‘to have done’; while a certain Supreme Justice, writing somewhat pompously of a specific incident at law, asserted that the details of the case ‘failed of recordation,’ the last two syllables of which offense Miss Peeples indicted with one clean-cut stroke of her righteous pencil. And when the same offender quoted himself as asking, ‘Can you aid the Court any in this?’ Miss Peeples broke forth in indignant expostulation: ‘From a Judge? Disgraceful!’

But it was not only purity but accuracy of grammatical conduct that Miss Peeples demanded from writers, and writers of fiction no less than of fact. A youthful character in a story having been allowed to remark loosely that it was ‘a quarter of five,’ was confronted on the margin by Miss Peeples with this irrefutable fact: '¼ of 5 = ¼ past 4. To.’

A moment’s mental gymnastics achieved the answer. A quarter of five is a quarter on five, which is but a quarter past four, whereas in reality it was a quarter to five. But for Miss Peeples’s timely intervention, that young man would have been half an hour late! And the mathematical rigor of Miss Peeples’s conscience in such matters was afforded in another instance. A Harvard professor, writing on a technical subject and venturing to ‘disassociate steam into its component parts,’called down upon his unsuspecting head Miss Peeples’s tart rebuke in a grim disassociation of the word into its component parts. ‘To dis-as,' said Miss Peeples crisply, ‘is to subtract-add. It must be either dis or as. Both would be neither.’

I was impressed with this cryptic truth. I was tremendously impressed. Here, I marveled, was a mind capable of the subtlest perceptions, the finest discriminations. Beyond a doubt I was getting on in my acquaintance with Miss Peeples! A lady undeniably fastidious, with a keen and penetrating intelligence, my friend was taking form before me with positive profile. Somewhat thin of feature, I discerned, Miss Peeples was wont to scan her pages with perspicacious eyes through a small pince-nez, her perceptions in no wise impaired by a slight nearsightedness. Undaunted in its charge, her small but assertive chin held pointedly to the letter of her decision, while blue-veined nostrils quivered with the earnestness of her zeal. A pale, high brow surmounted a face a little wan, perhaps, but animated by resolute purpose, a purpose which in its fine, if intolerant, virtue, scorned to utter in any but pure prose the imaginations of her heart.

Eagerly I began to look for hints of these. What of Miss Peeples’s literary tastes, I wondered? What of the sentimental proclivities of this lady so keen to niceties of phrase? What subtleties of phraseology, what points of style, what forms of art; what intricacies of allusion and delicate imagery did she enjoy? Would she vouchsafe me comradeship in these? What authors were her choice, what school of fiction? And if she herself was playing hide and seek with me behind that nom de plume, in what form did she embody the preciseness of her faiths? Was that faculty for exact analysis employed as scrupulously with her characters as with her words? Was Miss Peeples, perhaps, one of those literary surgeons, the psycho-analysts, who, employing the pen for a scalpel, falter not at any operation on the human heart?

It was with renewed zest that I paged the magazine further for glimpses into the personality of my friend. There continued to be many painstaking corrections margin-wise, and an almost pitiless readjustment of split infinitives, — barely a contributor escaped! — but with these elementary details I was no longer concerned. I sought more significant things. And I found my first revelation in an essay on the popular appeal of books. Now, I promised myself, we approached a real communion.

In his contention that it was something other than art — something more akin to sentimentality — that moved the popular taste, the essayist ventured to assert: ‘One book of Jane Austen is worth, for delicate veracity and selfsacrificing fidelity to art, all the books that Walter Scott wrote; yet she is the goddess of an idolatry beside which the worship of Scott is a race-religion.’ From her place on the margin Miss Peeples had pulled her face into a longdrawn question mark!

Can it be, I marveled, that my friend Miss Peeples takes issue with that ‘delicate veracity,’ that ‘self-sacrificing fidelity to art,’ so undeniably accredited to Miss Austen? Incredible! Then it must be the racial worship of Scott to which she objects. But it must be that she is unwilling to concede the virtue of his appeal, since she cannot deny the fact of it. That picturesque romanticism, that sentimental portraiture, that exhaustive chronicle of imaginary loves and hates, heroisms and intrigues, all that fanciful invention which the Scottish imagination gave out to a greedy world, find no favor in her sight. Not for Miss Peeples, with her Calvinistic pen, a ‘race-religion’ that chants to illusion, makes genuflections to the man in the moon, pursues its devotions in a castle in the air! Miss Peeples, I perceive, demands more of verity than this, must have more of fact in her fiction. My new friend, it seems, professes Realism.

Then a piece of realistic writing, I cry! Give us something that rings true — a tale that lingers on a moment’s stress, an hour’s pain. Hand us, on the point of a literal pen, a frozen tear, a drop of blood — Ah, here’s the thing! The night is dark with storm. A lonely spot. A furtive figure crouching in the gloom. Out of the black the shriek of an approaching train. A pause. The figure clutches at something sagging in his hand. The train shrills by. There is a leap, a swing; a form hurtles through the air, seizes the rail of the rear platform, hurls up the snow-banked steps, and lurches into the light of the car’s glass door, with grim tenacity lugging a grip.

Ah, here, I gloated, is Miss Peeples’s passion for verity realized, here a reality she approves. Lugging a grip. Here, dear lady, I rejoiced, is all the telling power of the fitting phrase. The night. The storm. The wait. The grim attack. And on the car’s rear platform a furtive figure lugging a grip. Here is a thing to strike your sense of the graphic, the true. You yourself have marked it! I felicitate you! It proves you. None but the innate literary sense would have discerned the perfect fitness of such a stroke as that.

Miss Peeples smiling, imperturbable, a little patiently pitying, met me in her fine and neatly rounded manner with the calm correction, ‘Carrying a bag!’

I sank back in my chair. ‘But, dear lady,’ I protested —

My friend was obdurate. ‘Carrying a bag!’

And all at once there was a vanishing — the night, the storm, the lonely spot, the figure lurking, the shrilling train. Vanished! And in their stead appeared an erect and leisurely gentleman, in all the poise of respectability, approaching the clean-swept steps of a waiting Pullman, ‘carrying a bag.’ Gone, all gone! Gone the potency of the fitting phrase, the fancy. Gone the comradeship of words. Gone Miss Peeples! For with almost startling literalness it was that. As mysteriously as if her literary standing were not in the very act involved, the Miss Peeples of my vision had vanished utterly with the approach of that gentlemanly figure ‘carrying a bag.’

And was this all, I lamented, my eyes seeking the empty pages? Was this as much as I was to know of Miss Emma Peeples — this as near as I was to come to fellowship with her? Were we to exchange no appreciative nods, no sympathetic smiles, indulge no understanding silences over the poetry of a phrase, the laughter in a tear, the heroism in a smile? Was she not to rejoice me now and then with a flash of luminous insight, of kindly patience, and an enduring faith which the born author harbors in his heart for the follies of men? Was I, after all, to be denied Miss Peeples even as a new, if not under some other than her own name a longfamiliar, friend?

Alas, I waited in vain for Miss Peeples to respond. The margins vouchsafed no revelation, and at last I was forced to admit that, so far as Miss Peeples’s literary communings were concerned, nothing was to be expected from her more intimate than ‘carrying a bag.’

So I had to readjust my entire estimate of Miss Peeples. I had made the mistake of regarding my new acquaintance as an author. Never, I knew now, would she be that! Never would Miss Peeples be other than what I had least, suspected — a lady. The knowledge robbed me of her! It robbed me of even the hope of her. And there was a chill disappointment in the sad admission to which I had to come at length—that not only was Miss Peeples not coquetting with me behind an elusive nom de plume; not only was she not numbered among that company of old and lasting friends; but she would be missing, also, from the ranks of even those merely ephemeral acquaintances whose hail and farewell greetings are wafted as they pass. For no writer succeeds even momentarily in mounting the juggernaut of fame, who approaches it thus sedately ‘carrying a bag.’ Charming as Miss Peeples might have proved as a lady, I found myself with little disposition to pursue the acquaintance further, even though by various tentative overtures I was invited to do so. I was no longer interested now in Miss Peeples’s naïve confession of her preference for a ’pitcher’ of milk to a ‘jug’ of the same. A lady would, of course, forswear the vulgarity of such an article; only a man and a writer would succumb. I even had little concern with the temerity — which could have arisen only in the passion of a maiden-lady for form — which actually tampered with the ’black side-whiskers’ of a pirate king to the extent of deftly snipping off the ‘side’ and leaving only ’whiskers’! And when, at last, on a reference by an unconventional author to a ‘stick of wood,’ Miss Peeples tartly inquired, ‘What can a stick be, if it is n’t of wood?’ it was quite useless, I realized, if not actually impertinent, to venture the suggestion that it might be of dynamite, or e’en of chewing-gum. Alas, a lady could know naught of either!

When, therefore, something of lost illusions and blighted hopes revealed itself unwittingly in one of Miss Peeples’s last remarks, it found me no longer unprepared, though none the less sorrowful. We were glancing, just at parting, over an exposition by an editor of the perplexities of choosing material for publication. ‘Always, by preference,’ he wrote, ‘one accepts a really good story from an unknown writer rather than a poor or even an indifferent one from the most celebrated author.’ And marginally, in her fine and neatly rounded manner, Miss Peeples commented briefly,—

‘O si sic omnia!’

The power of the fitting phrase! In one more terse line had Miss Peeples disclosed how well she knew it — a phrase that at a stroke summed up the weary hours, wasted effort, and chill despair that had attended another poor aspirer’s dreams of authorship. In one line was thus written ‘Finis!’ to the story of a life that had missed the zest of its own wine through too close scrutiny of the glass—a career in metonymy, as it were, mistaking the part for the whole, the container for the thing contained. When, therefore, one day, in casual converse with an old resident of the bungalow village, I inquired sympathetically of Miss Peeples’s passing, the brief reply seemed the one inevitable answer: —

‘Miss Peeples? Ah, yes! For years the poor lady tried to write. She was reduced at length to earning her livelihood by some less precarious means than literature. While training to become a nurse, she contracted an infection from which she died.’

It was while I was restoring with a sigh the pile of frayed and dusty magazines to their ‘skied’ top-shelf, not without some compunctions for having invaded that guarded sepulchre, that by a curious fatality a page fell open to reveal a last persistent query of Miss Peeples. There was a bit of verse entitled, ‘Prisoners and Captives’: —

And beneath it, in her fine and neatly rounded hand, Miss Peeples had written, —

‘Stuff and nonsense! Don’t we walk?’

Alas, dear lady, was my compassionate answer, I fear we do! At any rate, ’t is not such literalness that mounts on Pegasus!