Short Fiction · A Transaction In Hearts (7/12) (2/2)

He tossed the paper in the chest, and turned to Gonfallon. The latter was livid. “What do you say to that?” he asked. And then, as his friend steadied himself against the wall, “I will wager,” he continued, “that a companion-piece is in the other chest, another memento like that on the floor, and another document couched perhaps somewhat as follows: ‘This is the head of Mira Almer Wheat, daughter of Arthur Percy Wheat, of New York, esquire;’ and for epitaph, ‘Wheat is not quickened except it die.’ ”

“Hush! for heaven’s sake, hush! Someone may hear you.”

“Bah! The servants sleep in the wing; in this part of the house there is no one but Rebecca⁠—an accomplice I presume, an imbecile I am sure. And to think,” Jones added, after a moment, “to think that for twenty years that aunt of mine should not only have jockeyed the world, but that each night of those twenty years those chests should have been on either side of her, the last things she saw before closing her eyes, the first she saw on awakening! Why, Gonfallon, they were with her sleeping or waking; they were in her dreams, in her nightmares; she had made the dead her life, revenge a sustenance. What a plot! Shade of Balzac, what a plot!”

“Jones,” expostulated Gonfallon, “you are indecent.”

“Ah! I am indecent, am I? Well, perhaps⁠—perhaps. But if you knew what a trade fiction is! Whoso enters there leaves every blush behind.”

He picked up the skull, and, turning it in his hand, half to it half to his shuddering companion, he continued in a lower tone, “I am not a whit worse than another, and yet the desire for exact representation is such that if I hold a girl in my arms I study her abandonment; does she weep, I seek a simile in her tears; in her smile is the possibility of a metaphor; I even count my own pulse. To one in my trade nothing imaginable comes amiss. When a fellow adopts letters he must analyze his own sensations. Has he an emotion, he detains it; a grief, he enjoys it; a pleasure, he torments it into a phrase. He lives not alone in his own individual skin, but in that of everyone he encounters. The expression of a face is significant as a panic on the Exchange. A bow in the street will tell him as much as a page of Montaigne. He is in pursuit of the evanescent, a seeker after the key of the little dramas we all of us live and all of us conceal. If need be, he will hold his own linen to the cackle of the public. He is the comedian of the pen: it is his duty to amuse, to entertain⁠—or else to hold his peace. No wonder the critics bark; though, to be sure, they have nothing better to do. No, a viler profession never was. I hate it, I love it. It sends you rummaging where you have no business to be, it burns your fingers, it destroys your eyesight, alienates your friends, bars you from the sunlight, and for reward it offers⁠—what? A back bookshelf and a reproach. Ah, Gonfallon, preach to your congregation, but not to me. No sermon ever delivered is worth one of my aspirations. Yet see, I am indecent no longer.” And, shoving the skull back in the chest, he murmured, with the grimace of an East-Side actor, “Alas! poor Yorick!”

“And now,” he added, “let us get these odds and ends away.”