"No. I thought it exactly like Hubert," was his answer. He could not read her mind; he said the first thing that came into his.

He could not have said a worse. It strengthened all her doubts, fears, and regrets. She really had forgotten, almost, what was in the book.

It had been written in such hot excitement and she had scarcely read it since. Ally would not let her see the proofs; he said it wasn't safe, with Hubert there.... She had imagined that the wife was far more silly than herself, the husband altogether different from Hubert. Now, reading that synopsis, she saw (for the first time), how truly that summed up their married life: she _had_ wished to "develop an ego," he _had_ thwarted her. He would read it too, that or another, and suspect. Then he would get the book--and know. And he would think she meant it all, meant all the wild complaints of Zoe, Zoe whom at first she used to think of as "sloppy" Virginia!

It was too horrible. She loathed the stupid book, she wished that she had never shown it. She loathed Geoffrey Alison. If poor old Hubert ever saw...!

"I suppose we can't possibly suppress the book?" she jerked out suddenly.

Her conversation was more startling than ever to the male brain, to-day. "Suppress it on the strength of the first notice? When it's been out two days? And when the notice says there can't be any doubt about its popularity? Suppress it, indeed! What about friend Blatchley?"

Helena gave a little sigh of absolute despair. It had been so exciting until now: the little green book, locked away upstairs, and libraries actually buying it before it was out, just in the weird way they did Hubert's and real people's!

Now she loathed the book and feared it.

There was terror indeed in her very tones. "But you don't think," she said, "they really can ever find out who the writer was? They seem to think it's only a question of time. Mr. Blatchley couldn't be so mean."

"My dear Zoe" (he felt bound to soothe her and it was so thrilling to say), "how can they possibly? There isn't any 'they' about it. I'm the only person in the world who knows and I suppose you can trust _me_?" He got up from the sofa whilst speaking and struck an att.i.tude quite close to her, at the last words.

"Of course I do, Ally; you're a splendid pal and I know you will never breathe a word. It means a lot to me you see;" and she just pressed his hand.

It was not much perhaps, but it meant a great deal to him. _He_ did not loathe the book.

CHAPTER XIX

BUSINESS

Helena's oppression, as of some impending blow, refused to disappear.

She could not believe, whatever Geoffrey Alison might say, that their secret could be kept until the end. Every fresh notice of the book caused fresh alarm. With one accord reviewers harped upon the authorship, some of the less reputed papers embarking upon guesses.

That, to Mr. Blatchley's genuine delight, began denials. He eagerly collected all of them, and not a month had pa.s.sed before Geoffrey Alison arrived full of importance and excitement. He came, now, almost daily after five; as often, quite, as in the old days before the garden-scene with Hubert; his mind full of the need to cheer this poor sad Zoe who got no joy at all from her success. Surely as it grew and there was still no prospect of detection, she would begin to think of all the money she was earning and enjoy the praise? He hoped so.

"Look at this," he said keenly, waving an extract at her.

Her tones were dull. "What is it? Another review?"

"No, an advertis.e.m.e.nt. Awfully clever and suits our game too!"

He held it out to her. In bold print it ran thus:

"WHO?

"Already the wives of the following famous authors have publicly declared that they did NOT write

_CONFESSIONS OF AN AUTHOR'S WIFE._"

(Here followed a list of eight names.)

"Ah! But who did?

WHO?"

"I don't see it suits us at all," she said without enthusiasm.

"Why, it's putting people on the wrong track," he tried to argue.

She would not have it. "It's making people want to know when they don't really care a bit," she said with a ripe worldly wisdom quite beyond her years.

And soon, to Mr. Blatchley's yet greater delight, people did begin to care. They cared so much, in fact, that they all read the book in order to find out. And n.o.body knew even then. It was, however, something to discuss at boring dinner-parties; so every one was pleased. Every one but Helena.

Reading the book afresh, she was astounded, terrified, to see how near it was to life. She had thought it all altered beyond recognition: fiction merely based on fact. But now she realised that all the parts of it which mattered--Zoe's ambitions, her husband's repression--were true, truer than she ever knew indeed: whilst all the variations--names, place, ages, children, work--made no real difference at all. In all life it is the soul alone that matters, for there lies happiness and all those others are mere accidents. And the soul of Zoe was the soul of Helena; the life of Helena, the life of Zoe. Reading her book, she realised for the first time her life.

Daily the thing became more of a nightmare.

Hubert, of course, noticed nothing: but Geoffrey Alison grew weary of her constant admonitions as to silence.

"Oh, for Heaven's sake, Zoe," he cried at last (for he was getting almost husbandly in his remarks, encouraged by their common secret), "do try and get rid of the idea that 'all is discovered' and I'm a silly a.s.s or else a beastly cad!"

"It isn't that," she answered with a gloomy petulance; "but something might easily happen and I simply don't know how I should face Hubert."

"Hubert? Why, I expect he would be jolly proud of you."

"Proud?" she repeated bitterly; "when he has been so splendid to me always, and here I am making him out a selfish brute who sacrifices his wife's happiness to his career and me a poor little bullied creature who goes upstairs and cries. He'd never believe that it was all exaggerated--and nor, of course, would anybody else. Proud, indeed? I do like that!"

Indeed, when she thought of what an awful thing she had done, Helena very often could have gone upstairs like flabby Zoe (_nee_ Virginia) and wept.

Geoffrey Alison at length got thoroughly impatient with her.

_He_ was enjoying it all hugely and he failed to see why she should not enjoy it too. Every day he opened his paper eagerly to see what new scheme the resourceful Blatchley had devised to spur a public interest which as yet showed no signs of flagging.

Helena, in sympathy with her whole scheme, had much exaggerated the eminence of the Husband's position. It was not a case of any back-street Kit Kats here: he was away, night after night, delivering most brilliant lectures to exclusive West End literary clubs or even travelling four hundred miles to unveil well-earned lapidary tributes of great authors who had actually managed to be dead now for a hundred years. This husband, who deserted his wife and was jealous if she went to anything with any other man, was not an author of the Hubert Brett cla.s.s, so that big names were thrown about at parties where in very truth the problem soon became a topic. Each had it on the best authority that So-and-So, the celebrated author, or Mrs. So-and-So, had said this or the opposite; and n.o.body believed the other's story.

Nothing sells a book like talk. The printed word, paid or unpaid, is only useful to set tongues a-wagging. And as the authorship was bandied here and there, editions trickled slowly from the Press.

Mr. Blatchley was delighted. His firm was not among the old-established, and this could rank as his first great success; but it was very great. The book was only three-and-six; people actually bought it; the libraries roared out for more.

Journalists, hot upon dinner-table topics as vultures after flesh, interviewed him, each hoping to be in the office at that crucial moment when he decided the book's sale would gain by an announcement of the much-debated name.

But even when the interest began to wane--for nothing lasts Londoners more than a fortnight--Mr. Blatchley to every one's surprise was adamant. He still persisted in the stupid lie that he had not found out, himself....

"Look here, Alison," he said one day, when Geoffrey Alison had called in at his little office off the Strand, "you're not playing cricket, quite." He was a podgy little alien man, fattened beyond his years, and he said this with all a British sportsman's sternness.

"Oh come, you know; don't say that," exclaimed the other, naturally shocked. (His life average in the game itself would be a decimal.)

"I do, though," said the publisher and offered him a cigar. The artist did not care for that especial form of smoke, but felt that this was not the moment to be firm. He must not lose further prestige. He would leave soon and throw it away.