Fennel and Rue | Page 4

FENNEL AND RUE
By William Dean Howells

I.

The success of Verrian did not come early, and it did not come easily.
He had been trying a long time to get his work into the best magazines,
and when he had won the favor of the editors, whose interest he had
perhaps had from the beginning, it might be said that they began to
accept his work from their consciences, because in its way it was so
good that they could not justly refuse it. The particular editor who took
Verrian's serial, after it had come back to the author from the editors of
the other leading periodicals, was in fact moved mainly by the belief
that the story would please the better sort of his readers. These, if they
were not so numerous as the worse, he felt had now and then the right
to have their pleasure studied.
It was a serious story, and it was somewhat bitter, as Verrian himself
was, after his struggle to reach the public with work which he knew
merited recognition. But the world which does not like people to take
themselves too seriously also likes them to take themselves seriously,
and the bitterness in Verrian's story proved agreeable to a number of
readers unexpectedly great. It intimated a romantic personality in the
author, and the world still likes to imagine romantic things of authors.
It likes especially to imagine them of novelists, now that there are no
longer poets; and when it began to like Verrian's serial, it began to
write him all sorts of letters, directly, in care of the editor, and
indirectly to the editor, whom they asked about Verrian more than
about his story.
It was a man's story rather than a woman's story, as these may be
distinguished; but quite for that reason women seemed peculiarly taken
with it. Perhaps the women had more leisure or more courage to write
to the author and the editor; at any rate, most of the letters were from
women; some of the letters were silly and fatuous enough, but others
were of an intelligence which was none the less penetrating for being
emotional rather than critical. These maids or matrons, whoever or
whichever they were, knew wonderfully well what the author would be
at, and their interest in his story implied a constant if not a single
devotion. Now and then Verrian was tempted to answer one of them,
and under favor of his mother, who had been his confidant at every
point of his literary career, he yielded to the temptation; but one day
there came a letter asking an answer, which neither he nor his mother
felt competent to deal with. They both perceived that they must refer it

to the editor of the magazine, and it seemed to them so important that
they decided Verrian must go with it in person to the editor. Then he
must be so far ruled by him, if necessary, as to give him the letter and
put himself, as the author, beyond an appeal which he found peculiarly
poignant.
The letter, which had overcome the tacit misgivings of his mother as
they read it and read it again together, was from a girl who had perhaps
no need to confess herself young, or to own her inexperience of the
world where stories were written and printed. She excused herself with
a delicacy which Verrian's correspondents by no means always showed
for intruding upon him, and then pleaded the power his story had over
her as the only shadow of right she had in addressing him. Its
fascination, she said, had begun with the first number, the first chapter,
almost the first paragraph. It was not for the plot that she cared; she had
read too many stories to care for the plot; it was the problem involved.
It was one which she had so often pondered in her own mind that she
felt, in a way she hoped he would not think conceited, almost as if the
story was written for her. She had never been able to solve the problem;
how he would solve it she did not see how she could wait to know; and
here she made him a confidence without which, she said, she should
not have the courage to go on. She was an invalid, and her doctor had
told her that, though she might live for months, there were chances that
she might die at any moment suddenly. He would think it strange, and
it was strange that she should tell him this, and stranger still that she
should dare to ask him what she was going to ask. The story had yet
four months to run, and she had begun to have a morbid foreboding that