I.
I had simply, I suppose, a change
of heart, and it must have begun when I received my manuscript back
from Mr. Pinhorn. Mr. Pinhorn was my “chief,” as he was called in
the office: he had the high mission of bringing the paper up. This
was a weekly periodical, which had been supposed to be almost past
redemption when he took hold of it. It was Mr. Deedy who had let
the thing down so dreadfully: he was never mentioned in the office
now save in connexion with that misdemeanour. Young as I was I had
been in a manner taken over from Mr.
Deedy, who had been owner as well
as editor; forming part of a promiscuous lot, mainly plant and
office-furniture, which poor Mrs. Deedy, in her bereavement and
depression, parted with at a rough valuation. I could account for
my continuity but on the supposition that I had been cheap. I
rather resented the practice of fathering all flatness on my late
protector, who was in his unhonoured grave; but as I had my way to
make I found matter enough for complacency in being on a
“staff.”
At the same time I was aware of
my exposure to suspicion as a product of the old lowering system.
This made me feel I was doubly bound to have ideas, and had
doubtless been at the bottom of my proposing to Mr. Pinhorn that I
should lay my lean hands on Neil Paraday. I remember how he looked
at me
—quite, to begin with, as if he
had never heard of this celebrity, who indeed at that moment was by
no means in the centre of the heavens; and even when I had
knowingly explained he expressed but little confidence in the
demand for any such stuff. When I had reminded him that the great
principle on which we were supposed to work was just to create the
demand we required, he considered a moment and then returned: “I
see—you want to write him up.”
“Call it that if you like.”
“And what’s your inducement?”
“Bless my soul—my admiration!”
Mr. Pinhorn pursed up his mouth.
“Is there much to be done with him?”
“Whatever there is we should have
it all to ourselves, for he hasn’t been touched.”
This argument was effective and
Mr. Pinhorn responded. “Very well, touch him.” Then he added: “But
where can you do it?”
“Under the fifth rib!”
Mr. Pinhorn stared. “Where’s
that?”
“You want me to go down and see
him?” I asked when I had enjoyed his visible search for the obscure
suburb I seemed to have named.
“I don’t ‘want’ anything—the
proposal’s your own. But you must remember that that’s the way we
do things now,” said Mr. Pinhorn with another dig Mr. Deedy.
Unregenerate as I was I could
read the queer implications of this speech. The present owner’s
superior virtue as well as his deeper craft spoke in his reference
to the late editor as one of that baser sort who deal in false
representations. Mr. Deedy would as soon have sent me to call on
Neil Paraday as he would have published a “holiday-number”; but
such scruples presented themselves as mere ignoble thrift to his
successor, whose own sincerity took the form of ringing door-bells
and whose definition of genius was the art of finding people at
home. It was as if Mr. Deedy had published reports without his
young men’s having, as Pinhorn would have said, really been there.
I was unregenerate, as I have hinted, and couldn’t be concerned to
straighten out the journalistic morals of my chief, feeling them
indeed to be an abyss over the edge of which it was better not to
peer. Really to be there this time moreover was a vision that made
the idea of writing something subtle about Neil Paraday only the
more inspiring. I would be as considerate as even Mr. Deedy could
have wished, and yet I should be as present as only Mr. Pinhorn
could conceive. My
allusion to the sequestered
manner in which Mr. Paraday lived
—it had formed part of my
explanation, though I knew of it only by hearsay—was, I could
divine, very much what had made Mr. Pinhorn nibble. It struck him
as inconsistent with the success of his paper that any one should
be so sequestered as that. And then wasn’t an immediate exposure of
everything just what the public wanted? Mr. Pinhorn effectually
called me to order by reminding me of the promptness with which I
had met Miss Braby at Liverpool on her return from her fiasco in
the States. Hadn’t we published, while its freshness and flavour
were unimpaired, Miss Braby’s own version of that great
international episode? I felt somewhat uneasy at this lumping of
the actress and the author, and I confess that after having
enlisted Mr. Pinhorn’s sympathies I procrastinated a little. I had
succeeded better than I wished, and I had, as it happened, work
nearer at hand. A few days later I called on Lord Crouchley and
carried off in triumph the most unintelligible statement that had
yet appeared of his lordship’s reasons for his change of front. I
thus set in motion in the daily papers columns of virtuous
verbiage. The following week I ran down to Brighton for a chat, as
Mr. Pinhorn called it, with Mrs. Bounder, who gave me, on the
subject of her divorce, many curious particulars that had not been
articulated in court. If ever an article flowed from the primal
fount it was that article on Mrs. Bounder. By this time, however, I
became aware that Neil Paraday’s new book was on the point of
appearing and that its approach had been the ground of my original
appeal to Mr. Pinhorn, who was now annoyed with me for having lost
so many days. He bundled me off—we would at least not lose another.
I’ve always thought his sudden alertness a remarkable example of
the journalistic instinct.
Nothing had occurred, since I
first spoke to him, to create a visible urgency, and no
enlightenment could possibly have reached him. It was a pure case
of profession flair—he had smelt the coming glory as an animal
smells its distant prey.
II.
I may as well say at once that
this little record pretends in no degree to be a picture either of
my introduction to Mr. Paraday or of certain proximate steps and
stages. The scheme of my narrative allows no space for these
things, and in any case a prohibitory sentiment would hang about my
recollection of so rare an hour. These meagre notes are essentially
private, so that if they see the light the insidious forces that,
as my story itself shows, make at present for publicity will simply
have overmastered my precautions. The curtain fell lately enough on
the lamentable drama. My memory of the day I alighted at Mr.
Paraday’s door is a fresh memory of kindness, hospitality,
compassion, and of the wonderful illuminating talk in which the
welcome was conveyed. Some voice of the air had taught me the right
moment, the moment of his life at which an act of unexpected young
allegiance might most come home to him.
He had recently recovered from a
long, grave illness. I had gone to the neighbouring inn for the
night, but I spent the evening in his company, and he insisted the
next day on my sleeping under his roof. I hadn’t an indefinite
leave: Mr.
Pinhorn supposed us to put our
victims through on the gallop. It was later, in the office, that
the rude motions of the jig were set to music. I fortified myself,
however, as my training had taught me to do, by the conviction that
nothing could be more advantageous for my article than to be
written in the very atmosphere. I said nothing to Mr. Paraday about
it, but in the morning, after my remove from the inn, while he was
occupied in his study, as he had notified me he should need to be,
I committed to paper the main heads of my impression.
Then thinking to commend myself
to Mr. Pinhorn by my celerity, I walked out and posted my little
packet before luncheon. Once my paper was written I was free to
stay on, and if it was calculated to divert attention from my
levity in so doing I could reflect with satisfaction that I had
never been so clever. I don’t mean to deny of course that I was
aware it was much too good for Mr. Pinhorn; but I was equally
conscious that Mr. Pinhorn had the supreme shrewdness of
recognising from time to time the cases in which an article was not
too bad only because it was too good. There was nothing he loved so
much as to print on the right occasion a thing he hated. I had
begun my visit to the great man on a Monday, and on the
Wednesday his book came out. A
copy of it arrived by the first post, and he let me go out into the
garden with it immediately after breakfast, I read it from
beginning to end that day, and in the evening he asked me to remain
with him the rest of the week and over the Sunday.
That night my manuscript came
back from Mr. Pinhorn, accompanied with a letter the gist of which
was the desire to know what I meant by trying to fob off on him
such stuff.
That was the meaning of the
question, if not exactly its form, and it made my mistake immense
to me. Such as this mistake was I could now only look it in the
face and accept it. I knew where I had failed, but it was exactly
where I couldn’t have succeeded. I had been sent down to be
personal and then in point of fact hadn’t been personal at all:
what I had dispatched to London was just a little finicking
feverish study of my author’s talent. Anything less relevant to Mr.
Pinhorn’s purpose couldn’t well be imagined, and he was visibly
angry at my having (at his expense, with a second-class ticket)
approached the subject of our enterprise only to stand off so
helplessly. For myself, I knew but too well what had happened, and
how a miracle—as pretty as some old miracle of legend—had been
wrought on the spot to save me. There had been a big brush of
wings, the flash of an opaline robe, and then, with a great cool
stir of the air, the sense of an angel’s having swooped down and
caught me to his bosom.
He held me only till the danger
was over, and it all took place in a minute. With my manuscript
back on my hands I understood the phenomenon better, and the
reflexions I made on it are what I meant, at the beginning of this
anecdote, by my change of heart. Mr. Pinhorn’s note was not only a
rebuke decidedly stern, but an invitation immediately to send
him—it was the case to say so—the genuine article, the revealing
and reverberating sketch to the promise of which, and of which
alone, I owed my squandered privilege. A week or two later I recast
my peccant paper and, giving it a particular application to Mr.
Paraday’s new book, obtained for it the hospitality of another
journal, where, I must admit, Mr. Pinhorn was so far vindicated as
that it attracted not the least attention.
III.
I was frankly, at the end of
three days, a very prejudiced critic, so that one morning when, in
the garden, my great man had offered to read me something I quite
held my breath as I listened. It was the written scheme of another
book— something put aside long ago, before his illness, but that he
had lately taken out again to reconsider. He had been turning it
round when I came down on him, and it had grown magnificently under
this second hand. Loose liberal confident, it might have passed for
a great gossiping eloquent letter—the overflow into talk of an
artist’s amorous plan. The theme I thought singularly rich, quite
the strongest he had yet treated; and this familiar statement of
it, full too of fine maturities, was really, in summarised
splendour, a mine of gold, a precious independent work. I remember
rather profanely wondering whether the ultimate production could
possibly keep at the pitch. His reading of the fond epistle, at any
rate, made me feel as if I were, for the advantage of posterity, in
close correspondence with him—were the distinguished person to whom
it had been affectionately addressed. It was a high distinction
simply to be told such things. The idea he now communicated had all
the freshness, the flushed fairness, of the conception untouched
and untried: it was Venus rising from the sea and before the airs
had blown upon her. I had never been so throbbingly present at such
an unveiling. But when he had tossed the last bright word after the
others, as I had seen cashiers in banks, weighing mounds of coin,
drop a final sovereign into the tray, I knew a sudden prudent
alarm.
“My dear master, how, after all,
are you going to do it? It’s infinitely noble, but what time it
will take, what patience and independence, what assured, what
perfect conditions! Oh for a lone isle in a tepid sea!”
“Isn’t this practically a lone
isle, and aren’t you, as an encircling medium, tepid enough?” he
asked, alluding with a
laugh to the wonder of my young
admiration and the narrow limits of his little provincial home.
“Time isn’t what I’ve lacked hitherto: the question hasn’t been to
find it, but to use it. Of course my illness made, while it lasted,
a great hole— but I dare say there would have been a hole at any
rate. The earth we tread has more pockets than a billiard-table.
The great thing is now to keep on my feet.”
“That’s exactly what I
mean.”
Neil Paraday looked at me with
eyes—such pleasant eyes as he had—in which, as I now recall their
expression, I seem to have seen a dim imagination of his fate. He
was fifty years old, and his illness had been cruel, his
convalescence slow. “It isn’t as if I weren’t all right.”
“Oh if you weren’t all right I
wouldn’t look at you!” I tenderly said.
We had both got up, quickened as
by this clearer air, and he had lighted a cigarette. I had taken a
fresh one, which with an intenser smile, by way of answer to my
exclamation, he applied to the flame of his match. “If I weren’t
better I shouldn’t have thought of that!” He flourished his script
in his hand.
“I don’t want to be discouraging,
but that’s not true,” I returned. “I’m sure that during the months
you lay here in pain you had visitations sublime. You thought of a
thousand things. You think of more and more all the while. That’s
what makes you, if you’ll pardon my familiarity, so respectable. At
a time when so many people are spent you come into your second
wind. But, thank God, all the same, you’re better!
Thank God, too, you’re not, as
you were telling me yesterday, ‘successful.’ If you weren’t a
failure what would be the use of trying? That’s my one reserve on
the subject of your recovery
—that it makes you ‘score,’ as
the newspapers say. It looks well in the newspapers, and almost
anything that does that’s horrible. ‘We are happy to announce that
Mr. Paraday, the celebrated author, is again in the enjoyment of
excellent health.’ Somehow I shouldn’t like to see it.”
“You won’t see it; I’m not in the
least celebrated—my obscurity protects me. But couldn’t you bear
even to see I was dying or dead?” my host enquired.
“Dead—passe encore; there’s
nothing so safe. One never knows what a living artist may do—one
has mourned so many. However, one must make the worst of it. You
must be as dead as you can.”
“Don’t I meet that condition in
having just published a book?” “Adequately, let us hope; for the
book’s verily a masterpiece.”
At this moment the parlour-maid
appeared in the door that opened from the garden: Paraday lived at
no great cost, and the frisk of petticoats, with a timorous
“Sherry, sir?” was about his modest mahogany. He allowed half his
income to his wife, from whom he had succeeded in separating
without redundancy of legend. I had a general faith in his having
behaved well, and I had once, in London, taken Mrs. Paraday down to
dinner. He now turned to speak to the maid, who offered him, on a
tray, some card or note, while, agitated, excited, I wandered to
the end of the precinct. The idea of his security became supremely
dear to me, and I asked myself if I were the same young man who had
come down a few days before to scatter him to the four winds. When
I retraced my steps he had gone into the house, and the woman—the
second London post had come in—had placed my letters and a
newspaper on a bench. I sat down there to the letters, which were a
brief business, and then, without heeding the address, took the
paper from its envelope. It was the journal of highest renown, The
Empire of that morning. It regularly came to Paraday, but I
remembered that neither of us had yet looked at the copy already
delivered. This one had a great mark on the “editorial” page, and,
uncrumpling the wrapper, I saw it to be directed to my host and
stamped with the name of his publishers. I instantly divined that
The Empire had spoken of him, and I’ve not forgotten the odd little
shock of the circumstance. It checked all eagerness and made me
drop the paper a moment. As I sat there conscious of a palpitation
I think I had a vision of what was to be. I had also a vision of
the letter I would presently address to Mr. Pinhorn,
breaking,
as it were, with Mr. Pinhorn. Of
course, however, the next minute the voice of The Empire was in my
ears.
The article wasn’t, I thanked
heaven, a review; it was a “leader,” the last of three, presenting
Neil Paraday to the human race. His new book, the fifth from his
hand, had been but a day or two out, and The Empire, already aware
of it, fired, as if on the birth of a prince, a salute of a whole
column. The guns had been booming these three hours in the house
without our suspecting them. The big blundering newspaper had
discovered him, and now he was proclaimed and anointed and crowned.
His place was assigned him as publicly as if a fat usher with a
wand had pointed to the topmost chair; he was to pass up and still
up, higher and higher, between the watching faces and the envious
sounds—away up to the dais and the throne. The article was
“epoch-making,” a landmark in his life; he had taken rank at a
bound, waked up a national glory. A national glory was needed, and
it was an immense convenience he was there. What all this meant
rolled over me, and I fear I grew a little faint—it meant so much
more than I could say “yea” to on the spot. In a flash, somehow,
all was different; the tremendous wave I speak of had swept
something away. It had knocked down, I suppose, my little customary
altar, my twinkling tapers and my flowers, and had reared itself
into the likeness of a temple vast and bare. When Neil Paraday
should come out of the house he would come out a contemporary. That
was what had happened: the poor man was to be squeezed into his
horrible age. I felt as if he had been overtaken on the crest of
the hill and brought back to the city. A little more and he would
have dipped down the short cut to posterity and escaped.
IV.
When he came out it was exactly
as if he had been in custody, for beside him walked a stout man
with a big black beard,
who, save that he wore
spectacles, might have been a policeman, and in whom at a second
glance I recognised the highest contemporary enterprise.
“This is Mr. Morrow,” said
Paraday, looking, I thought, rather white: “he wants to publish
heaven knows what about me.”
I winced as I remembered that
this was exactly what I myself had wanted. “Already?” I cried with
a sort of sense that my friend had fled to me for protection.
Mr. Morrow glared, agreeably,
through his glasses: they suggested the electric headlights of some
monstrous modern ship, and I felt as if Paraday and I were tossing
terrified under his bows. I saw his momentum was irresistible. “I
was confident that I should be the first in the field. A great
interest is naturally felt in Mr. Paraday’s surroundings,” he
heavily observed.
“I hadn’t the least idea of it,”
said Paraday, as if he had been told he had been snoring.
“I find he hasn’t read the
article in The Empire,” Mr. Morrow remarked to me. “That’s so very
interesting—it’s something to start with,” he smiled. He had begun
to pull off his gloves, which were violently new, and to look
encouragingly round the little garden. As a “surrounding” I felt
how I myself had already been taken in; I was a little fish in the
stomach of a bigger one. “I represent,” our visitor continued, “a
syndicate of influential journals, no less than thirty-seven, whose
public
—whose publics, I may say—are in
peculiar sympathy with Mr. Paraday’s line of thought. They would
greatly appreciate any expression of his views on the subject of
the art he so nobly exemplifies. In addition to my connexion with
the syndicate just mentioned I hold a particular commission from
The Tatler, whose most prominent department, ‘Smatter and
Chatter’—I dare say you’ve often enjoyed it—attracts such
attention. I was honoured only last week, as a representative of
The Tatler, with the confidence of Guy Walsingham, the brilliant
author of ‘Obsessions.’ She pronounced herself thoroughly pleased
with my sketch of her method; she went so far as to say that I had
made her genius more comprehensible even to herself.”
Neil Paraday had dropped on the
garden-bench and sat there at once detached and confounded; he
looked hard at a bare spot in the lawn, as if with an anxiety that
had suddenly made him grave. His movement had been interpreted by
his visitor as an invitation to sink sympathetically into a wicker
chair that stood hard by, and while Mr. Morrow so settled himself I
felt he had taken official possession and that there was no undoing
it.
One had heard of unfortunate
people’s having “a man in the house,” and this was just what we
had. There was a silence of a moment, during which we seemed to
acknowledge in the only way that was possible the presence of
universal fate; the sunny stillness took no pity, and my thought,
as I was sure Paraday’s was doing, performed within the minute a
great distant revolution. I saw just how emphatic I should make my
rejoinder to Mr. Pinhorn, and that having come, like Mr.
Morrow, to betray, I must remain
as long as possible to save. Not because I had brought my mind
back, but because our visitors last words were in my ear, I
presently enquired with gloomy irrelevance if Guy Walsingham were a
woman.
“Oh yes, a mere pseudonym—rather
pretty, isn’t it?—and convenient, you know, for a lady who goes in
for the larger latitude. ‘Obsessions, by Miss So-and-so,’ would
look a little odd, but men are more naturally indelicate. Have you
peeped into ‘Obsessions’?” Mr. Morrow continued sociably to our
companion.
Paraday, still absent, remote,
made no answer, as if he hadn’t heard the question: a form of
intercourse that appeared to suit the cheerful Mr. Morrow as well
as any other. Imperturbably bland, he was a man of resources—he
only needed to be on the spot. He had pocketed the whole poor place
while Paraday and I were wool-gathering, and I could imagine that
he had already got his “heads.” His system, at any rate, was
justified by the inevitability with which I replied, to save my
friend the trouble: “Dear no—he hasn’t read it. He doesn’t read
such things!” I unwarily added.
“Things that are too far over the
fence, eh?” I was indeed a godsend to Mr. Morrow. It was the
psychological moment; it determined the appearance of his
note-book, which, however, he at first kept slightly behind him,
even as the dentist
approaching his victim keeps the
horrible forceps. “Mr. Paraday holds with the good old
proprieties—I see!” And thinking of the thirty-seven influential
journals, I found myself, as I found poor Paraday, helplessly
assisting at the promulgation of this ineptitude. “There’s no point
on which distinguished views are so acceptable as on this question—
raised perhaps more strikingly than ever by Guy Walsingham
—of the permissibility of the
larger latitude. I’ve an appointment, precisely in connexion with
it, next week, with Dora Forbes, author of ‘The Other Way Round,’
which everybody’s talking about. Has Mr. Paraday glanced at ‘The
Other Way Round’?” Mr. Morrow now frankly appealed to me. I took on
myself to repudiate the supposition, while our companion, still
silent, got up nervously and walked away.
His visitor paid no heed to his
withdrawal; but opened out the note-book with a more fatherly pat.
“Dora Forbes, I gather, takes the ground, the same as Guy
Walsingham’s, that the larger latitude has simply got to come. He
holds that it has got to be squarely faced. Of course his sex makes
him a less prejudiced witness. But an authoritative word from
Mr.
Paraday—from the point of view of
his sex, you know— would go right round the globe. He takes the
line that we haven’t got to face it?”
I was bewildered: it sounded
somehow as if there were three sexes. My interlocutor’s pencil was
poised, my private responsibility great. I simply sat staring, none
the less, and only found presence of mind to say: “Is this Miss
Forbes a gentleman?”
Mr. Morrow had a subtle smile.
“It wouldn’t be ‘Miss’— there’s a wife!”
“I mean is she a man?”
“The wife?”—Mr. Morrow was for a
moment as confused as myself. But when I explained that I alluded
to Dora Forbes in person he informed me, with visible amusement at
my being so out of it, that this was the “pen-name” of an
indubitable male—he had a big red moustache. “He goes in for the
slight mystification because the ladies are such popular
favourites.
A great deal of interest is felt
in his acting on that idea—which
is clever, isn’t it?—and there’s
every prospect of its being widely imitated.” Our host at this
moment joined us again, and Mr. Morrow remarked invitingly that he
should be happy to make a note of any observation the movement in
question, the bid for success under a lady’s name, might suggest to
Mr. Paraday. But the poor man, without catching the allusion,
excused himself, pleading that, though greatly honoured by his
visitor’s interest, he suddenly felt unwell and should have to take
leave of him—have to go and lie down and keep quiet.
His young friend might be trusted
to answer for him, but he hoped Mr. Morrow didn’t expect great
things even of his young friend. His young friend, at this moment,
looked at Neil Paraday with an anxious eye, greatly wondering if he
were doomed to be ill again; but Paraday’s own kind face met his
question reassuringly, seemed to say in a glance intelligible
enough: “Oh I’m not ill, but I’m scared: get him out of the house
as quietly as possible.” Getting newspaper-men out of the house was
odd business for an emissary of Mr. Pinhorn, and I was so
exhilarated by the idea of it that I called after him as he left
us: “Read the article in The Empire and you’ll soon be all
right!”
V.
“Delicious my having come down to
tell him of it!” Mr. Morrow ejaculated. “My cab was at the door
twenty minutes after The Empire had been laid on my
breakfast-table. Now what have you got for me?” he continued,
dropping again into his chair, from which, however, he the next
moment eagerly rose. “I was shown into the drawing-room, but there
must be more to see—his study, his literary sanctum, the little
things he has about, or other domestic objects and features. He
wouldn’t be lying down on his study-table? There’s a great interest
always felt in the scene of an author’s labours.
Sometimes we’re favoured with
very delightful peeps. Dora
Forbes showed me all his
table-drawers, and almost jammed my hand into one into which I made
a dash! I don’t ask that of you, but if we could talk things over
right there where he sits I feel as if I should get the
keynote.”
I had no wish whatever to be rude
to Mr. Morrow, I was much too initiated not to tend to more
diplomacy; but I had a quick inspiration, and I entertained an
insurmountable, an almost superstitious objection to his crossing
the threshold of my friend’s little lonely shabby consecrated
workshop. “No, no— we shan’t get at his life that way,” I said.
“The way to get at his life is to—But wait a moment!” I broke off
and went quickly into the house, whence I in three minutes
reappeared before Mr. Morrow with the two volumes of Paraday’s new
book. “His life’s here,” I went on, “and I’m so full of this
admirable thing that I can’t talk of anything else. The artist’s
life’s his work, and this is the place to observe him. What he has
to tell us he tells us with this perfection. My dear sir, the best
interviewer is the best reader.”
Mr. Morrow good-humouredly
protested. “Do you mean to say that no other source of information
should be open to us?”
“None other till this particular
one—by far the most copious— has been quite exhausted. Have you
exhausted it, my dear
sir? Had you exhausted it when
you came down here? It seems to me in our time almost wholly
neglected, and something should surely be done to restore its
ruined credit. It’s the course to which the artist himself at every
step, and with such pathetic confidence, refers us. This last book
of Mr. Paraday’s is full of revelations.”
“Revelations?” panted Mr. Morrow,
whom I had forced again into his chair.
“The only kind that count. It
tells you with a perfection that seems to me quite final all the
author thinks, for instance, about the advent of the ‘larger
latitude.’”
“Where does it do that?” asked
Mr. Morrow, who had picked up the second volume and was insincerely
thumbing it.
“Everywhere—in the whole
treatment of his case. Extract the opinion, disengage the
answer—those are the real acts of
homage.”
Mr. Morrow, after a minute,
tossed the book away. “Ah but you mustn’t take me for a
reviewer.”
“Heaven forbid I should take you
for anything so dreadful! You came down to perform a little act of
sympathy, and so, I may confide to you, did I. Let us perform our
little act together. These pages overflow with the testimony we
want: let us read them and taste them and interpret them. You’ll of
course have perceived for yourself that one scarcely does read Neil
Paraday till one reads him aloud; he gives out to the ear an
extraordinary full tone, and it’s only when you expose it
confidently to that test that you really get near his style. Take
up your book again and let me listen, while you pay it out, to that
wonderful fifteenth chapter. If you feel you can’t do it justice,
compose yourself to attention while I produce for you
—I think I can!—this scarcely
less admirable ninth.”
Mr. Morrow gave me a straight
look which was as hard as a blow between the eyes; he had turned
rather red, and a question had formed itself in his mind which
reached my sense as distinctly as if he had uttered it: “What sort
of a damned fool are you?” Then he got up, gathering together his
hat and gloves, buttoning his coat, projecting hungrily all over
the place the big transparency of his mask. It seemed to flare over
Fleet Street and somehow made the actual spot distressingly humble:
there was so little for it to feed on unless he counted the
blisters of our stucco or saw his way to do something with the
roses. Even the poor roses were common kinds. Presently his eyes
fell on the manuscript from which Paraday had been reading to me
and which still lay on the bench. As my own followed them I saw it
looked promising, looked pregnant, as if it gently throbbed with
the life the reader had given it. Mr.
Morrow indulged in a nod at it
and a vague thrust of his umbrella. “What’s that?”
“Oh, it’s a plan—a secret.”
“A secret!” There was an
instant’s silence, and then Mr. Morrow made another movement. I may
have been mistaken, but it affected me as the translated impulse of
the desire to lay hands on the manuscript, and this led me to
indulge in a quick
anticipatory grab which may very
well have seemed ungraceful, or even impertinent, and which at any
rate left Mr. Paraday’s two admirers very erect, glaring at each
other while one of them held a bundle of papers well behind him. An
instant later Mr. Morrow quitted me abruptly, as if he had really
carried something off with him. To reassure myself, watching his
broad back recede, I only grasped my manuscript the tighter. He
went to the back door of the house, the one he had come out from,
but on trying the handle he appeared to find it fastened. So he
passed round into the front garden, and by listening intently
enough I could presently hear the outer gate close behind him with
a bang. I thought again of the thirty-seven influential journals
and wondered what would be his revenge. I hasten to add that he was
magnanimous: which was just the most dreadful thing he could have
been. The Tatler published a charming chatty familiar account of
Mr.
Paraday’s “Home-life,” and on the
wings of the thirty-seven influential journals it went, to use Mr.
Morrow’s own expression, right round the globe.
VI.
A week later, early in May, my
glorified friend came up to town, where, it may be veraciously
recorded he was the king of the beasts of the year. No advancement
was ever more rapid, no exaltation more complete, no bewilderment
more teachable. His book sold but moderately, though the article in
The Empire had done unwonted wonders for it; but he circulated in
person to a measure that the libraries might well have envied. His
formula had been found—he was a “revelation.” His momentary terror
had been real, just as mine had been—the overclouding of his
passionate desire to be left to finish his work. He was far from
unsociable, but he had the finest conception of being let alone
that I’ve ever met. For the time, none the less, he took his profit
where it seemed most to
crowd on him, having in his
pocket the portable sophistries about the nature of the artist’s
task. Observation too was a kind of work and experience a kind of
success; London dinners were all material and London ladies were
fruitful toil. “No one has the faintest conception of what I’m
trying for,” he said to me, “and not many have read three pages
that I’ve written; but I must dine with them first—they’ll find out
why when they’ve time.” It was rather rude justice perhaps; but the
fatigue had the merit of being a new sort, while the phantasmagoric
town was probably after all less of a battlefield than the haunted
study. He once told me that he had had no personal life to speak of
since his fortieth year, but had had more than was good for him
before. London closed the parenthesis and exhibited him in
relations; one of the most inevitable of these being that in which
he found himself to Mrs. Weeks Wimbush, wife of the boundless
brewer and proprietress of the universal menagerie. In this
establishment, as everybody knows, on occasions when the crush is
great, the animals rub shoulders freely with the spectators and the
lions sit down for whole evenings with the lambs.
It had been ominously clear to me
from the first that in Neil Paraday this lady, who, as all the
world agreed, was tremendous fun, considered that she had secured a
prime attraction, a creature of almost heraldic oddity. Nothing
could exceed her enthusiasm over her capture, and nothing could
exceed the confused apprehensions it excited in me. I had an
instinctive fear of her which I tried without effect to conceal
from her victim, but which I let her notice with perfect impunity.
Paraday heeded it, but she never did, for her conscience was that
of a romping child. She was a blind violent force to which I could
attach no more idea of responsibility than to the creaking of a
sign in the wind. It was difficult to say what she conduced to but
circulation. She was constructed of steel and leather, and all I
asked of her for our tractable friend was not to do him to death.
He had consented for a time to be of india-rubber, but my thoughts
were fixed on the day he should resume his shape or at least get
back into his box. It was evidently all right, but I should be glad
when it was well over. I had a special fear—the impression was
ineffaceable of the hour when, after Mr. Morrow’s departure,
I
had found him on the sofa in his
study. That pretext of indisposition had not in the least been
meant as a snub to the envoy of The Tatler—he had gone to lie down
in very truth. He had felt a pang of his old pain, the result of
the agitation wrought in him by this forcing open of a new period.
His old programme, his old ideal even had to be changed. Say what
one would, success was a complication and recognition had to be
reciprocal. The monastic life, the pious illumination of the missal
in the convent cell were things of the gathered past. It didn’t
engender despair, but at least it required adjustment.
Before I left him on that
occasion we had passed a bargain, my part of which was that I
should make it my business to take care of him. Let whoever would
represent the interest in his presence (I must have had a mystical
prevision of Mrs. Weeks Wimbush) I should represent the interest in
his work—or otherwise expressed in his absence. These two interests
were in their essence opposed; and I doubt, as youth is fleeting,
if I shall ever again know the intensity of joy with which I felt
that in so good a cause I was willing to make myself odious.
One day in Sloane Street I found
myself questioning Paraday’s landlord, who had come to the door in
answer to my knock.
Two vehicles, a barouche and a
smart hansom, were drawn up before the house.
“In the drawing-room, sir? Mrs.
Weeks Wimbush.” “And in the dining-room?”
“A young lady, sir—waiting: I
think a foreigner.”
It was three o’clock, and on days
when Paraday didn’t lunch out he attached a value to these
appropriated hours. On which days, however, didn’t the dear man
lunch out? Mrs. Wimbush, at such a crisis, would have rushed round
immediately after her own repast. I went into the dining-room
first, postponing the pleasure of seeing how, upstairs, the lady of
the barouche would, on my arrival, point the moral of my sweet
solicitude. No one took such an interest as herself in his doing
only what was good for him, and she was always on the spot to see
that he did it. She made appointments with him to discuss the best
means of economising his time and protecting his privacy.
She further made his health her
special business, and had so
much sympathy with my own zeal
for it that she was the author of pleasing fictions on the subject
of what my devotion had led me to give up. I gave up nothing (I
don’t count Mr.
Pinhorn) because I had nothing,
and all I had as yet achieved was to find myself also in the
menagerie. I had dashed in to save my friend, but I had only got
domesticated and wedged; so that I could do little more for him
than exchange with him over people’s heads looks of intense but
futile intelligence.
VII.
The young lady in the dining-room
had a brave face, black hair, blue eyes, and in her lap a big
volume. “I’ve come for his autograph,” she said when I had
explained to her that I was under bonds to see people for him when
he was occupied. “I’ve been waiting half an hour, but I’m prepared
to wait all day.” I don’t know whether it was this that told me she
was American, for the propensity to wait all day is not in general
characteristic of her race. I was enlightened probably not so much
by the spirit of the utterance as by some quality of its sound. At
any rate I saw she had an individual patience and a lovely frock,
together with an expression that played among her pretty features
like a breeze among flowers. Putting her book on the table she
showed me a massive album, showily bound and full of autographs of
price. The collection of faded notes, of still more faded
“thoughts,” of quotations, platitudes, signatures, represented a
formidable purpose.
I could only disclose my dread of
it. “Most people apply to Mr. Paraday by letter, you know.”
“Yes, but he doesn’t answer. I’ve
written three times.”
“Very true,” I reflected; “the
sort of letter you mean goes straight into the fire.”
“How do you know the sort I
mean?” My interlocutress had blushed and smiled, and in a moment
she added: “I don’t
believe he gets many like
them!”
“I’m sure they’re beautiful, but
he burns without reading.” I didn’t add that I had convinced him he
ought to.
“Isn’t he then in danger of
burning things of importance?”
“He would perhaps be so if
distinguished men hadn’t an infallible nose for nonsense.”
She looked at me a moment—her
face was sweet and gay. “Do you burn without reading too?”—in
answer to which I assured her that if she’d trust me with her
repository I’d see that Mr. Paraday should write his name in
it.
She considered a little. “That’s
very well, but it wouldn’t make me see him.”
“Do you want very much to see
him?” It seemed ungracious to catechise so charming a creature, but
somehow I had never yet taken my duty to the great author so
seriously.
“Enough to have come from America
for the purpose.” I stared. “All alone?”
“I don’t see that that’s exactly
your business, but if it will make me more seductive I’ll confess
that I’m quite by myself. I had to come alone or not come at
all.”
She was interesting; I could
imagine she had lost parents, natural protectors—could conceive
even she had inherited money. I was at a pass of my own fortunes
when keeping hansoms at doors seemed to me pure swagger. As a trick
of this bold and sensitive girl, however, it became romantic—a part
of the general romance of her freedom, her errand, her innocence.
The confidence of young Americans was notorious, and I speedily
arrived at a conviction that no impulse could have been more
generous than the impulse that had operated here. I foresaw at that
moment that it would make her my peculiar charge, just as
circumstances had made Neil Paraday. She would be another person to
look after, so that one’s honour would be concerned in guiding her
straight. These things became clearer to me later on; at the
instant I had scepticism enough to observe to her, as I turned the
pages of her volume, that her net had all the same caught many a
big
fish. She appeared to have had
fruitful access to the great ones of the earth; there were people
moreover whose signatures she had presumably secured without a
personal interview. She couldn’t have worried George Washington and
Friedrich Schiller and Hannah More. She met this argument, to my
surprise, by throwing up the album without a pang. It wasn’t even
her own; she was responsible for none of its treasures. It belonged
to a girl-friend in America, a young lady in a western city. This
young lady had insisted on her bringing it, to pick up more
autographs: she thought they might like to see, in Europe, in what
company they would be. The “girl-friend,” the western city, the
immortal names, the curious errand, the idyllic faith, all made a
story as strange to me, and as beguiling, as some tale in the
Arabian Nights. Thus it was that my informant had encumbered
herself with the ponderous tome; but she hastened to assure me that
this was the first time she had brought it out. For her visit to
Mr. Paraday it had simply been a pretext. She didn’t really care a
straw that he should write his name; what she did want was to look
straight into his face.
I demurred a little. “And why do
you require to do that?”
“Because I just love him!” Before
I could recover from the agitating effect of this crystal ring my
companion had continued: “Hasn’t there ever been any face that
you’ve wanted to look into?”
How could I tell her so soon how
much I appreciated the opportunity of looking into hers? I could
only assent in general to the proposition that there were certainly
for every one such yearnings, and even such faces; and I felt the
crisis demand all my lucidity, all my wisdom. “Oh yes, I’m a
student of physiognomy. Do you mean,” I pursued, “that you’ve a
passion for Mr. Paraday’s books?”
“They’ve been everything to me
and a little more beside—I know them by heart. They’ve completely
taken hold of me. There’s no author about whom I’m in such a state
as I’m in about Neil Paraday.”
“Permit me to remark then,” I
presently returned, “that you’re one of the right sort.”
“One of the enthusiasts? Of
course I am!”
“Oh there are enthusiasts who are
quite of the wrong. I mean you’re one of those to whom an appeal
can be made.”
“An appeal?” Her face lighted as
if with the chance of some great sacrifice.
If she was ready for one it was
only waiting for her, and in a moment I mentioned it. “Give up this
crude purpose of seeing him! Go away without it. That will be far
better.”
She looked mystified, then turned
visibly pale. “Why, hasn’t he any personal charm?” The girl was
terrible and laughable in her bright directness.
“Ah that dreadful word
‘personally’!” I wailed; “we’re dying of it, for you women bring it
out with murderous effect. When you meet with a genius as fine as
this idol of ours let him off the dreary duty of being a
personality as well. Know him only by what’s best in him and spare
him for the same sweet sake.”
My young lady continued to look
at me in confusion and mistrust, and the result of her reflexion on
what I had just said was to make her suddenly break out: “Look
here, sir—what’s the matter with him?”
“The matter with him is that if
he doesn’t look out people will eat a great hole in his
life.”
She turned it over. “He hasn’t
any disfigurement?” “Nothing to speak of!”
“Do you mean that social
engagements interfere with his occupations?”
“That but feebly expresses
it.”
“So that he can’t give himself up
to his beautiful imagination?”
“He’s beset, badgered,
bothered—he’s pulled to pieces on the pretext of being applauded.
People expect him to give them his time, his golden time, who
wouldn’t themselves give five shillings for one of his
books.”
“Five? I’d give five
thousand!”
“Give your sympathy—give your
forbearance. Two-thirds of those who approach him only do it to
advertise themselves.”
“Why it’s too bad!” the girl
exclaimed with the face of an angel. “It’s the first time I was
ever called crude!” she laughed.
I followed up my advantage.
“There’s a lady with him now who’s a terrible complication, and who
yet hasn’t read, I’m sure, ten pages he ever wrote.”
My visitor’s wide eyes grew
tenderer. “Then how does she talk—?”
“Without ceasing. I only mention
her as a single case. Do you want to know how to show a superlative
consideration?
Simply avoid him.”
“Avoid him?” she despairingly
breathed.
“Don’t force him to have to take
account of you; admire him in silence, cultivate him at a distance
and secretly appropriate his message. Do you want to know,” I
continued, warming to my idea, “how to perform an act of homage
really sublime?” Then as she hung on my words: “Succeed in never
seeing him at all!”
“Never at all?”—she suppressed a
shriek for it.
“The more you get into his
writings the less you’ll want to, and you’ll be immensely sustained
by the thought of the good you’re doing him.”
She looked at me without
resentment or spite, and at the truth I had put before her with
candour, credulity, pity. I was afterwards happy to remember that
she must have gathered from my face the liveliness of my interest
in herself. “I think I see what you mean.”
“Oh I express it badly, but I
should be delighted if you’d let me come to see you—to explain it
better.”
She made no response to this, and
her thoughtful eyes fell on the big album, on which she presently
laid her hands as if to take it away. “I did use to say out West
that they might write a
little less for autographs—to all
the great poets, you know— and study the thoughts and style a
little more.”
“What do they care for the
thoughts and style? They didn’t even understand you. I’m not sure,”
I added, “that I do myself, and I dare say that you by no means
make me out.”
She had got up to go, and though
I wanted her to succeed in not seeing Neil Paraday I wanted her
also, inconsequently, to remain in the house. I was at any rate far
from desiring to hustle her off. As Mrs. Weeks Wimbush, upstairs,
was still saving our friend in her own way, I asked my young lady
to let me briefly relate, in illustration of my point, the little
incident of my having gone down into the country for a profane
purpose and been converted on the spot to holiness. Sinking again
into her chair to listen she showed a deep interest in the
anecdote. Then thinking it over gravely she returned with her odd
intonation: “Yes, but you do see him!” I had to admit that this was
the case; and I wasn’t so prepared with an effective attenuation as
I could have wished. She eased the situation off, however, by the
charming quaintness with which she finally said: “Well, I wouldn’t
want him to be lonely!” This time she rose in earnest, but I
persuaded her to let me keep the album to show Mr. Paraday. I
assured her I’d bring it back to her myself. “Well, you’ll find my
address somewhere in it on a paper!” she sighed all resignedly at
the door.
VIII.
I blush to confess it, but I
invited Mr. Paraday that very day to transcribe into the album one
of his most characteristic passages. I told him how I had got rid
of the strange girl who had brought it—her ominous name was Miss
Hurter and she lived at an hotel; quite agreeing with him moreover
as to the wisdom of getting rid with equal promptitude of the book
itself. This was why I carried it to Albemarle Street no
later
than on the morrow. I failed to
find her at home, but she wrote to me and I went again; she wanted
so much to hear more about Neil Paraday. I returned repeatedly, I
may briefly declare, to supply her with this information. She had
been immensely taken, the more she thought of it, with that idea of
mine about the act of homage: it had ended by filling her with a
generous rapture. She positively desired to do something sublime
for him, though indeed I could see that, as this particular flight
was difficult, she appreciated the fact that my visits kept her up.
I had it on my conscience to keep her up: I neglected nothing that
would contribute to it, and her conception of our cherished
author’s independence became at last as fine as his very own. “Read
him, read him—that will be an education in decency,” I constantly
repeated; while, seeking him in his works even as God in nature,
she represented herself as convinced that, according to my
assurance, this was the system that had, as she expressed it,
weaned her. We read him together when I could find time, and the
generous creature’s sacrifice was fed by our communion.
There were twenty selfish women
about whom I told her and who stirred her to a beautiful rage.
Immediately after my first visit her sister, Mrs. Milsom, came over
from Paris, and the two ladies began to present, as they called it,
their letters. I thanked our stars that none had been presented to
Mr.
Paraday. They received
invitations and dined out, and some of these occasions enabled
Fanny Hurter to perform, for consistency’s sake, touching feats of
submission. Nothing indeed would now have induced her even to look
at the object of her admiration. Once, hearing his name announced
at a party, she instantly left the room by another door and then
straightway quitted the house. At another time when I was at the
opera with them—Mrs. Milsom had invited me to their box