The Author

Leonard Merrick was born as Leonard Miller in Belsize Park, London of Jewish parentage. After schooling at Brighton College, he studied to be a solicitor in Brighton and studied law at Heidelberg, but he was forced to travel to South Africa at the age of eighteen after his father suffered a serious financial loss. There he worked as an overseer in the Kimberley diamond mine and in a solicitors office. After surviving a near-fatal case of "camp fever," he returned to London in the late 1880s and worked as an actor and actor-manager under the stage name of Leonard Merrick. He legally changed his name to Leonard Merrick in 1892. He later worked his experiences in South Africa and in the theatre into numerous works of fiction. Merrick's novels include Mr Bazalgette's Agent (1888), a detective story; Violet Moses (1891), about a Jewish financier and his troubled wife; The Worldlings (1900), a psychological investigation of a crime; Conrad in Quest of His Youth (1903), the tale of a disillusioned man who, at thirty-seven, sets out to pick up the romantic threads of his younger life, it is "judged his most successful work" according to John Sutherland. George Orwell thought that this is because it is one of the few of his books which is not set against a background of poverty.

Merrick was well regarded by other writers of his era. In 1918 fifteen writers, including famous authors such as H. G. Wells, J. M. Barrie, G. K. Chesterton and William Dean Howells, collaborated with publisher E. P. Dutton to issue "The Works of Leonard Merrick" in fifteen volumes, which were published between 1918 and 1922. Each volume in the series was selected and prefaced by one of the writers. In 2009 a biography was issued titled Leonard Merrick: A Forgotten Novelist's Novelist by William Baker and Jeannettes Robert Shumaker. The title is taken in part from a quote by J. M. Barrie who called Merrick a "novelist's novelist." William Dean Howells wrote of Merrick "I can think of no recent fictionist of his nation who can quite match with Mr. Merrick in that excellence [of "shapeliness" or form in the novel]. This will seem great praise, possibly too great, to the few who have a sense of such excellence; but it will probably be without real meaning to most, though our public might well enjoy form if it could once be made to imagine it."

George Orwell, while describing Merrick as a "good bad writer", rather than a strictly good writer, admitted to a great admiration for his work; he particularly praised Cynthia (which was also a favourite of Chesterton's), the story of a struggling writer and his wife, and The Position of Peggy Harper, with its portrayal of the unromantic side of provincial theatre. In Orwell's view, nobody conveyed better than Merrick how dreary and dispiriting an actor's life can be. Graham Greene, another admirer, had recruited Orwell to write an introduction to any work by Merrick while Greene was publisher for Eyre & Spottiswoode in 1944. Orwell offered to write one for The Position of Peggy Harper, but it wasn't meant to be.

At least eleven of Merrick's stories have been adapted to screen, most in the 1920s, including Conrad in Quest of His Youth (1920) directed by William C. deMille. Later adaptions include a 1931 film The Magnificent Lie based on the story "Laurels and the Lady", and a 1952 TV episode called "Masquerade" for Lux Video Theatre based on the story "The Doll in the Pink Silk Dress".

Merrick died at the age of 75, in a London nursing home on 7 August 1939, just 12 days before the start of World War II.

Aribaud's Two Wives

IN the Bois, the day before yesterday, I met Madame Aribaud. By Madame "Aribaud" I mean the wife of a very popular dramatist, and I call them "Aribaud" because it wouldn't do to mention their true name. I like meeting Madame Aribaud when I take a walk in Paris. It refreshes me—not only because she isn't preceded by a gust of scent, and doesn't daub her mouth clown red, like other Parisiennes, but because she is so cheerful. She diffuses cheerfulness. She sat beaming at her little son while he scattered crumbs for the birds, and she informed me that he was in the latest fashion, having a nurse from England to give him the real English pronunciation, though as yet he was scarcely a linguist. And the nurse said: "I tell madam we must be pietient with 'im; we can't expect 'im to talk like I do hall at once!"

Also the lady informed me that they had finished arranging their new house, and that on the morrow I must go there to déjeuner. Although they are French, the Aribauds are as hospitable a couple as you will find anywhere in the world.

So I went; and they showed me the "English nursery," and an American contrivance that she had presented to her husband for his dressing-room—"Comme ils sont pratiques, les Américains!"—and an antique or two that she had picked up for his study; and, not least, she showed us both some croquettes de pommes that looked ethereal, and—I have never tasted croquettes de pommes like Madame Aribaud's! I always declare that she is the most domesticated of pretty women, and that her husband is the most pampered of good fellows. Playgoers who know him merely by his comedies, in which married people get on so badly together up to the fourth act, might be surprised to see inside his villa.

Only when he and I were lounging in the study afterwards—my hostess was in the little garden, pretending to be a horse—I said to him, as the boy's shouts came up to us through the open window: "Isn't the child disturbing out there when you're busy?"

My friend nodded. "Sometimes," he acknowledged, "he disturbs me. What would you have? He must play, and the 'garden' is too diminutive for him to go far away in it. It makes me think of what Dumas père said when he paid a visit to his son's chalet in the suburbs: 'Open your dining-room window and give your garden some air!' Once or twice I have wondered whether I should work in a front room instead; but, to tell you the truth, I always come to the conclusion that I like the noise. A dramatist may suffer from worse drawbacks than a child's laughter, believe me!" He blew smoke thoughtfully, and added: "My first wife was childless."

Now, though I knew Maurice Aribaud very well indeed, I had never heard that this was his second marriage, and I suppose I stared.

"Yes," he said again, "my first wife was childless." And then, with many pauses, he told me a lot that I had not suspected about his life, and, though I can't pretend to remember his precise words, or the exact order in which details were forthcoming, I am going to quote him as well as I can.

"Ihad not two louis to knock together when I met her, and I wasn't so very young. I had been writing for the theater for years, and had begun to despair of ever seeing anything produced. To complete my misery, I had no companionship, if one excepts books—no friend who wrote, or aspired to write, no acquaintance who did not draw his screw from a billet as humdrum as my own. I was a clerk in the Magasins du Louvre, and though, of course, the other men in the office talked about plays,—in France everybody is interested in plays; in England, I hear, you are interested only in the players!—none of them was so congenial that I was tempted to announce my ambitions to him. I used to think how exciting it must be to know authors and artists, even though they were obscure and out-at-elbows. Every night, as I walked home and passed the windows of a bohemian café, I used to look at it wistfully. I envied the fiercest disappointments of the habitués inside; for they were at least professionals of sorts—they moved in a different planet from myself. Once in a blue moon I found the resolution to enter, pushing the door open timidly, like a provincial venturing into Paillard's. I suppose I had a vague hope that something might happen, something that would yield confidences, perhaps a comrade for life. But I sat in the place embarrassed, with the air of an intruder, and came out feeling even lonelier than when I went in.

"One windy, wet day I was at the mon-de-piété to redeem my watch. I had pawned it two or three weeks before because I had seen a second-hand copy of a book that I wanted very much and could not afford at the moment—I had feared that if I waited it might be gone. I will not inquire whether you have ever pawned anything in Paris yourself, but, if you have not, you may not know the formalities of the dégagement? You have pawned things only in London—ah!

"Well, after you have paid the principal and the interest, you are given a numbered ticket, and then you go into a room and take your choice among uncomfortable benches, and wait your turn. It is something like cashing a check at the head office of the Crédit Lyonnais, only at the mont-de-piété the people on the benches sit waiting for the most disparate articles. On one side of you there may be a fashionably dressed woman who rises to receive a jewel-case—and on the other some piteous creature who clutches at a bundle. The goods and chattels descend in consignments, and when a consignment has been distributed the interval before the next arrives threatens to be endless. The officials converse in undertones, and you have nothing livelier to do than to wonder how hard up your neighbor may be, and listen to the rain.

"THat day, however, I did not chafe at the delay. there was a young girl there whose face caught and held my attention almost immediately. Not only was her prettiness remarkable—her expression was astonishing. She looked happy. Yes, in the gaunt room, among the damp, dismal crowd, relieving the tedium by a heavy sigh or an occasional shuffling of their shoes, this fair-haired, neat, innocent little girl looked happy. Smiles hovered about her lips, and her eyes sparkled with contentment. I tried to conjecture the reason for her delight, what treasured possession she was about to regain. A trinket? No, something indefinable in her bearing forbade me to think it was a trinket. My imagination ranged over a dozen possible pledges without finding one to harmonize with her. Ridiculous as it sounds, I could picture nothing so appropriate for her to recover as a canary that should flutter singing from the counter to her finger. Every time another number was cried, curiosity made me hope that her turn had come. The latest load that had been delivered was almost exhausted. Only three packages remained. Another cry, and she got up at last! The package was a bulky one. I craned my neck. It was a typewriter.

"Quite five minutes more lagged by before I got my watch, and when I crossed the courtyard I had no expectation of seeing her again; but no sooner had I passed through the gate than I discovered her in trouble. She had been trying to carry the typewriter and an open umbrella, and now the umbrella had blown inside out, and she had put the typewriter on the pavement.

"In such a situation it was not difficult for me to speak.

"I picked the thing up for her. She thanked me, and made another ineffectual attempt to depart. I offered my help. She demurred. I insisted. We made for her tram together—and tram after tram was full. It had been raining for several hours, and Paris was a lake of mud. In the end I trudged beside her through the splashing streets, carrying her typewriter all the way to the step of her lodging. So began my courtship.

"She was as solitary as I. Her father's death had left her quite alone. He had been old, and very poor. Blind, too. But his work had been done up to the last, my little sweetheart guiding him to the houses—he had earned a living as a piano-tuner. In Sèvres she had an aunt, his sister-in-law; but, though the woman boasted a respectable business and was fairly well-to-do, she had come forward with nothing more substantial than advice, and the orphan had had only her typewriter to keep the wolf from the door. Her struggles in Paris with a typewriter! She had been forced to pawn it every time she lost a situation; but, every time she saved enough to recapture it, she felt prosperous again. Her own machine meant 'luxuries.' With her own machine she could afford a plant to put in her attic window, and a rosebud for her breast.

"She loved flowers, and she wore them often, tucked in her bodice. After the Magasins du Louvre closed, the clerk used to hurry off to meet the little typist on her way home. Yet she told me once that her love for them had come very late; for years the sight of all flowers had saddened her. She had been born on that melancholy boulevard that leads to the cemetery of Père Lachaise, that quarter of it where one sees exposed for sale nothing but floral tokens for the mourners—nothing to right and left but mountains of artificial wreaths and dreary chrysanthemums in stiff white paper cones. As a child she had thought that flowers were grown only for graves. I recall the courtship in all seasons, and always in the streets—when the trees were brown and the light faded while we walked, and when the trees had whitened and the lamps were shining, and when the trees grew green and we walked in sunlight. It was in the streets that we fell in love—in the streets that I asked her if she would marry me.

"We were on the Quai des Orfévres one Sunday afternoon in summer. I had meant to wait till we were in the Gardens of the Tuileries; but we had stopped to look at the river, and—I can see it all now: the barge folk's washing hanging out to bleach, and a woman knitting among the geraniums on a deck! There was a little fishing-tackle shop, I remember, called 'Au Bon Pêcheur,' and a poodle and a Persian cat were basking together on the door-step. Our hands just touched because of the people passing, and then we went on to the Tuileries, and talked. And before we seemed to have said much, night had fallen; a concert had begun, and away in the distance some one was playing a violin. 'Why,' I exclaimed, 'I've given you no dinner!' She laughed. She hadn't been hungry, either. No millionaires have ever dined more merrily at Armenonville than we, for a hundred sous, at a little table on the sidewalk!

"She said, 'When I am your wife, I shall typewrite all your plays for you, Maurice—perhaps that will bring you luck!' And by and by, when we came to the Magasins du Louvre, she pointed to the Comédie Française. 'You haven't to travel far to reach it, dearest,' she smiled; 'we'll cross the road together!'

"HOW sweet she looked in the wedding-frock that she had stitched! How proud I was of her! Our ménage was two rooms on the left bank and in the evening, in our tiny salon on the sixth floor, her devoted hands clattered away my manuscript on her machine till I kissed and held them prisoners. Didn't she work hard enough all day for strangers, poor child? 'You are jealous,'she would say gaily, 'because I write your dialogue so much faster than you!' And often I wished that I could create a scene as rapidly as she typewrote it! But we had our holiday evenings, also, when we built castles in the air, and chose the furniture for them. I had brought home from the Magasins one of the diaries that they issue annually. It contained plans of the theaters,—it always does,—and, perched on my knee, she pictured a play of mine at each of them in turn, and the house rocking with applause. And then we penciled the private box we'd have, and drove, in fancy and our automobile, to sit there grandly on the hundredth night.

"We spent many hours in selecting the presents that I would have made to her if I could. One of the things she wanted was, of course, a theater-bag—'the prettiest that you can pretend!' And I pretended a beauty for her in rose brocade—and inside I put the daintiest enameled opera-glasses that the Rue de la Paix could show, and a fan of Brussels point, and a Brussels point handkerchief, and a quaint gold bonbonnière with sugared violets in it. I remember she threw her arms round my neck as ecstatically as if the things were really there! We were, at the time, eating stale bread, with a stick of chocolate apiece, for supper."

The dramatist sat silent, his eyes grown wide. I think that for a moment he had forgotten his new, desirable house and the antiques on the mantelpiece, that he was back in a girl's arms in the room on a sixth floor. Under the window, his wife had ceased to play at horses, and was swinging their son, instead. The child's delight was boisterous. She called up to us now:

"Are we a nuisance, messieurs? Shall we go to the nursery?"

"No, no," cried Aribaud, starting, "not at all. We are doing nothing. Continue, mon ange, continue!"

"WHAT a heaven opened," he went on, turning to me "when, I had a piece taken at last! As long as I live I shall think of the morning that letter came, our reading it together, half dressed, and crying with joy—she was making the coffee for breakfast. And yet, even when the contract was signed, it sometimes seemed incredible. I used to dream that it had happened, and dream that I was dreaming—that I was to wake and find it wasn't true. And then, the eternity of delay, the postponements, one after another. And when we felt worn out with waiting, the night that we jolted to the show in an omnibus, and sat breathless in the fauteuils de balcon! I remember how she clung to me, sobbing and comforting, when we got home, and knew that the piece had failed.

"I had a short run the next autumn with 'Fin de Mois'; but my first hit, of course, was 'Les Huit Jours de Léonie.' When that was produced, the fees came tumbling in.

"HOW dazed we were at the beginning! And how important we felt to be taking a flat and going to a bureau de placement

Table of Contents

The Author

Aribaud's Two Wives