The Death of the Lion
by
Henry James
Transcribed from the 1915 Martin Secker edition by David Price,
email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
THE DEATH OF THE LION
CHAPTER 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.
CHAPTER 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.
CHAPTER 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.
CHAPTER 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 modem 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!"
CHAPTER 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.
CHAPTER 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.
CHAPTER 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.
CHAPTER 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--I
attempted to point Mr. Paraday out to her in the stalls. On this
she asked her sister to change places with her and, while that lady
devoured the great man through a powerful glass, presented, all the
rest of the evening, her inspired back to the house. To torment
her tenderly I pressed the glass upon her, telling her how
wonderfully near it brought our friend's handsome head. By way of
answer she simply looked at me in charged silence, letting me see
that tears had gathered in her eyes. These tears, I may remark,
produced an effect on me of which the end is not yet. There was a
moment when I felt it my duty to mention them to Neil Paraday, but
I was deterred by the reflexion that there were questions more
relevant to his happiness.
These question indeed, by the end of the season, were reduced to a
single one--the question of reconstituting so far as might be
possible the conditions under which he had produced his best work.
Such conditions could never all come back, for there was a new one
that took up too much place; but some perhaps were not beyond
recall. I wanted above all things to see him sit down to the
subject he had, on my making his acquaintance, read me that
admirable sketch of. Something told me there was no security but
in his doing so before the new factor, as we used to say at Mr.
Pinhorn's, should render the problem incalculable. It only half-
reassured me that the sketch itself was so copious and so eloquent
that even at the worst there would be the making of a small but
complete book, a tiny volume which, for the faithful, might well
become an object of adoration. There would even not be wanting
critics to declare, I foresaw, that the plan was a thing to be more
thankful for than the structure to have been reared on it. My
impatience for the structure, none the less, grew and grew with the
interruptions. He had on coming up to town begun to sit for his
portrait to a young painter, Mr. Rumble, whose little game, as we
also used to say at Mr. Pinhorn's, was to be the first to perch on
the shoulders of renown. Mr. Rumble's studio was a circus in which
the man of the hour, and still more the woman, leaped through the
hoops of his showy frames almost as electrically as they burst into
telegrams and "specials." He pranced into the exhibitions on their
back; he was the reporter on canvas, the Vandyke up to date, and
there was one roaring year in which Mrs. Bounder and Miss Braby,
Guy Walsingham and Dora Forbes proclaimed in chorus from the same
pictured walls that no one had yet got ahead of him.
Paraday had been promptly caught and saddled, accepting with
characteristic good-humour his confidential hint that to figure in
his show was not so much a consequence as a cause of immortality.
From Mrs. Wimbush to the last "representative" who called to
ascertain his twelve favourite dishes, it was the same ingenuous
assumption that he would rejoice in the repercussion. There were
moments when I fancied I might have had more patience with them if
they hadn't been so fatally benevolent. I hated at all events Mr.
Rumble's picture, and had my bottled resentment ready when, later
on, I found my distracted friend had been stuffed by Mrs. Wimbush
into the mouth of another cannon. A young artist in whom she was
intensely interested, and who had no connexion with Mr. Rumble, was
to show how far he could make him go. Poor Paraday, in return, was
naturally to write something somewhere about the young artist. She
played her victims against each other with admirable ingenuity, and
her establishment was a huge machine in which the tiniest and the
biggest wheels went round to the same treadle. I had a scene with
her in which I tried to express that the function of such a man was
to exercise his genius--not to serve as a hoarding for pictorial
posters. The people I was perhaps angriest with were the editors
of magazines who had introduced what they called new features, so
aware were they that the newest feature of all would be to make him
grind their axes by contributing his views on vital topics and
taking part in the periodical prattle about the future of fiction.
I made sure that before I should have done with him there would
scarcely be a current form of words left me to be sick of; but
meanwhile I could make surer still of my animosity to bustling
ladies for whom he drew the water that irrigated their social
flower-beds.
I had a battle with Mrs. Wimbush over the artist she protected, and
another over the question of a certain week, at the end of July,
that Mr. Paraday appeared to have contracted to spend with her in
the country. I protested against this visit; I intimated that he
was too unwell for hospitality without a nuance, for caresses
without imagination; I begged he might rather take the time in some
restorative way. A sultry air of promises, of ponderous parties,
hung over his August, and he would greatly profit by the interval
of rest. He hadn't told me he was ill again that he had had a
warning; but I hadn't needed this, for I found his reticence his
worst symptom. The only thing he said to me was that he believed a
comfortable attack of something or other would set him up: it
would put out of the question everything but the exemptions he
prized. I'm afraid I shall have presented him as a martyr in a
very small cause if I fail to explain that he surrendered himself
much more liberally than I surrendered him. He filled his lungs,
for the most part; with the comedy of his queer fate: the tragedy
was in the spectacles through which I chose to look. He was
conscious of inconvenience, and above all of a great renouncement;
but how could he have heard a mere dirge in the bells of his
accession? The sagacity and the jealousy were mine, and his the
impressions and the harvest. Of course, as regards Mrs. Wimbush, I
was worsted in my encounters, for wasn't the state of his health
the very reason for his coming to her at Prestidge? Wasn't it
precisely at Prestidge that he was to be coddled, and wasn't the
dear Princess coming to help her to coddle him? The dear Princess,
now on a visit to England, was of a famous foreign house, and, in
her gilded cage, with her retinue of keepers and feeders, was the
most expensive specimen in the good lady's collection. I don't
think her august presence had had to do with Paraday's consenting
to go, but it's not impossible he had operated as a bait to the
illustrious stranger. The party had been made up for him, Mrs.
Wimbush averred, and every one was counting on it, the dear
Princess most of all. If he was well enough he was to read them
something absolutely fresh, and it was on that particular prospect
the Princess had set her heart. She was so fond of genius in ANY
walk of life, and was so used to it and understood it so well: she
was the greatest of Mr. Paraday's admirers, she devoured everything
he wrote. And then he read like an angel. Mrs. Wimbush reminded
me that he had again and again given her, Mrs. Wimbush, the
privilege of listening to him.
I looked at her a moment. "What has he read to you?" I crudely
enquired.
For a moment too she met my eyes, and for the fraction of a moment
she hesitated and coloured. "Oh all sorts of things!"
I wondered if this were an imperfect recollection or only a perfect
fib, and she quite understood my unuttered comment on her measure
of such things. But if she could forget Neil Paraday's beauties
she could of course forget my rudeness, and three days later she
invited me, by telegraph, to join the party at Prestidge. This
time she might indeed have had a story about what I had given up to
be near the master. I addressed from that fine residence several
communications to a young lady in London, a young lady whom, I
confess, I quitted with reluctance and whom the reminder of what
she herself could give up was required to make me quit at all. It
adds to the gratitude I owe her on other grounds that she kindly
allows me to transcribe from my letters a few of the passages in
which that hateful sojourn is candidly commemorated.
CHAPTER IX.
"I suppose I ought to enjoy the joke of what's going on here," I
wrote, "but somehow it doesn't amuse me. Pessimism on the contrary
possesses me and cynicism deeply engages. I positively feel my own
flesh sore from the brass nails in Neil Paraday's social harness.
The house is full of people who like him, as they mention, awfully,
and with whom his talent for talking nonsense has prodigious
success. I delight in his nonsense myself; why is it therefore
that I grudge these happy folk their artless satisfaction? Mystery
of the human heart--abyss of the critical spirit! Mrs. Wimbush
thinks she can answer that question, and as my want of gaiety has
at last worn out her patience she has given me a glimpse of her
shrewd guess. I'm made restless by the selfishness of the
insincere friend--I want to monopolise Paraday in order that he may
push me on. To be intimate with him is a feather in my cap; it
gives me an importance that I couldn't naturally pretend to, and I
seek to deprive him of social refreshment because I fear that
meeting more disinterested people may enlighten him as to my real
motive. All the disinterested people here are his particular
admirers and have been carefully selected as such. There's
supposed to be a copy of his last book in the house, and in the
hall I come upon ladies, in attitudes, bending gracefully over the
first volume. I discreetly avert my eyes, and when I next look
round the precarious joy has been superseded by the book of life.
There's a sociable circle or a confidential couple, and the
relinquished volume lies open on its face and as dropped under
extreme coercion. Somebody else presently finds it and transfers
it, with its air of momentary desolation, to another piece of
furniture. Every one's asking every one about it all day, and
every one's telling every one where they put it last. I'm sure
it's rather smudgy about the twentieth page. I've a strong
impression, too, that the second volume is lost--has been packed in
the bag of some departing guest; and yet everybody has the
impression that somebody else has read to the end. You see
therefore that the beautiful book plays a great part in our
existence. Why should I take the occasion of such distinguished
honours to say that I begin to see deeper into Gustave Flaubert's
doleful refrain about the hatred of literature? I refer you again
to the perverse constitution of man.
"The Princess is a massive lady with the organisation of an athlete
and the confusion of tongues of a valet de place. She contrives to
commit herself extraordinarily little in a great many languages,
and is entertained and conversed with in detachments and relays,
like an institution which goes on from generation to generation or
a big building contracted for under a forfeit. She can't have a
personal taste any more than, when her husband succeeds, she can
have a personal crown, and her opinion on any matter is rusty and
heavy and plain--made, in the night of ages, to last and be
transmitted. I feel as if I ought to 'tip' some custode for my
glimpse of it. She has been told everything in the world and has
never perceived anything, and the echoes of her education respond
awfully to the rash footfall--I mean the casual remark--in the cold
Valhalla of her memory. Mrs. Wimbush delights in her wit and says
there's nothing so charming as to hear Mr. Paraday draw it out.
He's perpetually detailed for this job, and he tells me it has a
peculiarly exhausting effect. Every one's beginning--at the end of
two days--to sidle obsequiously away from her, and Mrs. Wimbush
pushes him again and again into the breach. None of the uses I
have yet seen him put to infuriate me quite so much. He looks very
fagged and has at last confessed to me that his condition makes him
uneasy--has even promised me he'll go straight home instead of
returning to his final engagements in town. Last night I had some
talk with him about going to-day, cutting his visit short; so sure
am I that he'll be better as soon as he's shut up in his
lighthouse. He told me that this is what he would like to do;
reminding me, however, that the first lesson of his greatness has
been precisely that he can't do what he likes. Mrs. Wimbush would
never forgive him if he should leave her before the Princess has
received the last hand. When I hint that a violent rupture with
our hostess would be the best thing in the world for him he gives
me to understand that if his reason assents to the proposition his
courage hangs woefully back. He makes no secret of being mortally
afraid of her, and when I ask what harm she can do him that she
hasn't already done he simply repeats: 'I'm afraid, I'm afraid!
Don't enquire too closely,' he said last night; 'only believe that
I feel a sort of terror. It's strange, when she's so kind! At any
rate, I'd as soon overturn that piece of priceless Sevres as tell
her I must go before my date.' It sounds dreadfully weak, but he
has some reason, and he pays for his imagination, which puts him (I
should hate it) in the place of others and makes him feel, even
against himself, their feelings, their appetites, their motives.
It's indeed inveterately against himself that he makes his
imagination act. What a pity he has such a lot of it! He's too
beastly intelligent. Besides, the famous reading's still to come
off, and it has been postponed a day to allow Guy Walsingham to
arrive. It appears this eminent lady's staying at a house a few
miles off, which means of course that Mrs. Wimbush has forcibly
annexed her. She's to come over in a day or two--Mrs. Wimbush
wants her to hear Mr. Paraday.
"To-day's wet and cold, and several of the company, at the
invitation of the Duke, have driven over to luncheon at Bigwood. I
saw poor Paraday wedge himself, by command, into the little
supplementary seat of a brougham in which the Princess and our
hostess were already ensconced. If the front glass isn't open on
his dear old back perhaps he'll survive. Bigwood, I believe, is
very grand and frigid, all marble and precedence, and I wish him
well out of the adventure. I can't tell you how much more and more
your attitude to him, in the midst of all this, shines out by
contrast. I never willingly talk to these people about him, but
see what a comfort I find it to scribble to you! I appreciate it--
it keeps me warm; there are no fires in the house. Mrs. Wimbush
goes by the calendar, the temperature goes by the weather, the
weather goes by God knows what, and the Princess is easily heated.
I've nothing but my acrimony to warm me, and have been out under an
umbrella to restore my circulation. Coming in an hour ago I found
Lady Augusta Minch rummaging about the hall. When I asked her what
she was looking for she said she had mislaid something that Mr.
Paraday had lent her. I ascertained in a moment that the article
in question is a manuscript, and I've a foreboding that it's the
noble morsel he read me six weeks ago. When I expressed my
surprise that he should have bandied about anything so precious (I
happen to know it's his only copy--in the most beautiful hand in
all the world) Lady Augusta confessed to me that she hadn't had it
from himself, but from Mrs. Wimbush, who had wished to give her a
glimpse of it as a salve for her not being able to stay and hear it
read.
"'Is that the piece he's to read,' I asked, 'when Guy Walsingham
arrives?'
"'It's not for Guy Walsingham they're waiting now, it's for Dora
Forbes,' Lady Augusta said. 'She's coming, I believe, early to-
morrow. Meanwhile Mrs. Wimbush has found out about him, and is
actively wiring to him. She says he also must hear him.'
"'You bewilder me a little,' I replied; 'in the age we live in one
gets lost among the genders and the pronouns. The clear thing is
that Mrs. Wimbush doesn't guard such a treasure so jealously as she
might.'
"'Poor dear, she has the Princess to guard! Mr. Paraday lent her
the manuscript to look over.'
"'She spoke, you mean, as if it were the morning paper?'
"Lady Augusta stared--my irony was lost on her. 'She didn't have
time, so she gave me a chance first; because unfortunately I go to-
morrow to Bigwood.'
"'And your chance has only proved a chance to lose it?'
"'I haven't lost it. I remember now--it was very stupid of me to
have forgotten. I told my maid to give it to Lord Dorimont--or at
least to his man.'
"'And Lord Dorimont went away directly after luncheon.'
"'Of course he gave it back to my maid--or else his man did,' said
Lady Augusta. 'I dare say it's all right.'
"The conscience of these people is like a summer sea. They haven't
time to look over a priceless composition; they've only time to
kick it about the house. I suggested that the 'man,' fired with a
noble emulation, had perhaps kept the work for his own perusal; and
her ladyship wanted to know whether, if the thing shouldn't
reappear for the grand occasion appointed by our hostess, the
author wouldn't have something else to read that would do just as
well. Their questions are too delightful! I declared to Lady
Augusta briefly that nothing in the world can ever do so well as
the thing that does best; and at this she looked a little
disconcerted. But I added that if the manuscript had gone astray
our little circle would have the less of an effort of attention to
make. The piece in question was very long--it would keep them
three hours.
"'Three hours! Oh the Princess will get up!' said Lady Augusta.
"'I thought she was Mr. Paraday's greatest admirer.'
"'I dare say she is--she's so awfully clever. But what's the use
of being a Princess--'
"'If you can't dissemble your love?' I asked as Lady Augusta was
vague. She said at any rate she'd question her maid; and I'm
hoping that when I go down to dinner I shall find the manuscript
has been recovered."
CHAPTER X.
"It has NOT been recovered," I wrote early the next day, "and I'm
moreover much troubled about our friend. He came back from Bigwood
with a chill and, being allowed to have a fire in his room, lay
down a while before dinner. I tried to send him to bed and indeed
thought I had put him in the way of it; but after I had gone to
dress Mrs. Wimbush came up to see him, with the inevitable result
that when I returned I found him under arms and flushed and
feverish, though decorated with the rare flower she had brought him
for his button-hole. He came down to dinner, but Lady Augusta
Minch was very shy of him. To-day he's in great pain, and the
advent of ces dames--I mean of Guy Walsingham and Dora Forbes--
doesn't at all console me. It does Mrs. Wimbush, however, for she
has consented to his remaining in bed so that he may be all right
to-morrow for the listening circle. Guy Walsingham's already on
the scene, and the Doctor for Paraday also arrived early. I
haven't yet seen the author of 'Obsessions,' but of course I've had
a moment by myself with the Doctor. I tried to get him to say that
our invalid must go straight home--I mean to-morrow or next day;
but he quite refuses to talk about the future. Absolute quiet and
warmth and the regular administration of an important remedy are
the points he mainly insists on. He returns this afternoon, and
I'm to go back to see the patient at one o'clock, when he next
takes his medicine. It consoles me a little that he certainly
won't be able to read--an exertion he was already more than unfit
for. Lady Augusta went off after breakfast, assuring me her first
care would be to follow up the lost manuscript. I can see she
thinks me a shocking busybody and doesn't understand my alarm, but
she'll do what she can, for she's a good-natured woman. 'So are
they all honourable men.' That was precisely what made her give
the thing to Lord Dorimont and made Lord Dorimont bag it. What use
HE has for it God only knows. I've the worst forebodings, but
somehow I'm strangely without passion--desperately calm. As I
consider the unconscious, the well-meaning ravages of our
appreciative circle I bow my head in submission to some great
natural, some universal accident; I'm rendered almost indifferent,
in fact quite gay (ha-ha!) by the sense of immitigable fate. Lady
Augusta promises me to trace the precious object and let me have it
through the post by the time Paraday's well enough to play his part
with it. The last evidence is that her maid did give it to his
lordship's valet. One would suppose it some thrilling number of
The Family Budget. Mrs. Wimbush, who's aware of the accident, is
much less agitated by it than she would doubtless be were she not
for the hour inevitably engrossed with Guy Walsingham."
Later in the day I informed my correspondent, for whom indeed I
kept a loose diary of the situation, that I had made the
acquaintance of this celebrity and that she was a pretty little
girl who wore her hair in what used to be called a crop. She
looked so juvenile and so innocent that if, as Mr. Morrow had
announced, she was resigned to the larger latitude, her superiority
to prejudice must have come to her early. I spent most of the day
hovering about Neil Paraday's room, but it was communicated to me
from below that Guy Walsingham, at Prestidge, was a success.
Toward evening I became conscious somehow that her superiority was
contagious, and by the time the company separated for the night I
was sure the larger latitude had been generally accepted. I
thought of Dora Forbes and felt that he had no time to lose.
Before dinner I received a telegram from Lady Augusta Minch. "Lord
Dorimont thinks he must have left bundle in train--enquire." How
could I enquire--if I was to take the word as a command? I was too
worried and now too alarmed about Neil Paraday. The Doctor came
back, and it was an immense satisfaction to me to be sure he was
wise and interested. He was proud of being called to so
distinguished a patient, but he admitted to me that night that my
friend was gravely ill. It was really a relapse, a recrudescence
of his old malady. There could be no question of moving him: we
must at any rate see first, on the spot, what turn his condition
would take. Meanwhile, on the morrow, he was to have a nurse. On
the morrow the dear man was easier, and my spirits rose to such
cheerfulness that I could almost laugh over Lady Augusta's second
telegram: "Lord Dorimont's servant been to station--nothing found.
Push enquiries." I did laugh, I'm sure, as I remembered this to be
the mystic scroll I had scarcely allowed poor Mr. Morrow to point
his umbrella at. Fool that I had been: the thirty-seven
influential journals wouldn't have destroyed it, they'd only have
printed it. Of course I said nothing to Paraday.
When the nurse arrived she turned me out of the room, on which I
went downstairs. I should premise that at breakfast the news that
our brilliant friend was doing well excited universal complacency,
and the Princess graciously remarked that he was only to be
commiserated for missing the society of Miss Collop. Mrs. Wimbush,
whose social gift never shone brighter than in the dry decorum with
which she accepted this fizzle in her fireworks, mentioned to me
that Guy Walsingham had made a very favourable impression on her
Imperial Highness. Indeed I think every one did so, and that, like
the money-market or the national honour, her Imperial Highness was
constitutionally sensitive. There was a certain gladness, a
perceptible bustle in the air, however, which I thought slightly
anomalous in a house where a great author lay critically ill. "Le
roy est mort--vive le roy": I was reminded that another great
author had already stepped into his shoes. When I came down again
after the nurse had taken possession I found a strange gentleman
hanging about the hall and pacing to and fro by the closed door of
the drawing-room. This personage was florid and bald; he had a big
red moustache and wore showy knickerbockers--characteristics all
that fitted to my conception of the identity of Dora Forbes. In a
moment I saw what had happened: the author of "The Other Way
Round" had just alighted at the portals of Prestidge, but had
suffered a scruple to restrain him from penetrating further. I
recognised his scruple when, pausing to listen at his gesture of
caution, I heard a shrill voice lifted in a sort of rhythmic
uncanny chant. The famous reading had begun, only it was the
author of "Obsessions" who now furnished the sacrifice. The new
visitor whispered to me that he judged something was going on he
oughtn't to interrupt.
"Miss Collop arrived last night," I smiled, "and the Princess has a
thirst for the inedit."
Dora Forbes lifted his bushy brows. "Miss Collop?"
"Guy Walsingham, your distinguished confrere--or shall I say your
formidable rival?"
"Oh!" growled Dora Forbes. Then he added: "Shall I spoil it if I
go in?"
"I should think nothing could spoil it!" I ambiguously laughed.
Dora Forbes evidently felt the dilemma; he gave an irritated crook
to his moustache. "SHALL I go in?" he presently asked.
We looked at each other hard a moment; then I expressed something
bitter that was in me, expressed it in an infernal "Do!" After
this I got out into the air, but not so fast as not to hear, when
the door of the drawing-room opened, the disconcerted drop of Miss
Collop's public manner: she must have been in the midst of the
larger latitude. Producing with extreme rapidity, Guy Walsingham
has just published a work in which amiable people who are not
initiated have been pained to see the genius of a sister-novelist
held up to unmistakeable ridicule; so fresh an exhibition does it
seem to them of the dreadful way men have always treated women.
Dora Forbes, it's true, at the present hour, is immensely pushed by
Mrs. Wimbush and has sat for his portrait to the young artists she
protects, sat for it not only in oils but in monumental alabaster.
What happened at Prestidge later in the day is of course
contemporary history. If the interruption I had whimsically
sanctioned was almost a scandal, what is to be said of that general
scatter of the company which, under the Doctor's rule, began to
take place in the evening? His rule was soothing to behold, small
comfort as I was to have at the end. He decreed in the interest of
his patient an absolutely soundless house and a consequent break-up
of the party. Little country practitioner as he was, he literally
packed off the Princess. She departed as promptly as if a
revolution had broken out, and Guy Walsingham emigrated with her.
I was kindly permitted to remain, and this was not denied even to
Mrs. Wimbush. The privilege was withheld indeed from Dora Forbes;
so Mrs. Wimbush kept her latest capture temporarily concealed.
This was so little, however, her usual way of dealing with her
eminent friends that a couple of days of it exhausted her patience,
and she went up to town with him in great publicity. The sudden
turn for the worse her afflicted guest had, after a brief
improvement, taken on the third night raised an obstacle to her
seeing him before her retreat; a fortunate circumstance doubtless,
for she was fundamentally disappointed in him. This was not the
kind of performance for which she had invited him to Prestidge, let
alone invited the Princess. I must add that none of the generous
acts marking her patronage of intellectual and other merit have
done so much for her reputation as her lending Neil Paraday the
most beautiful of her numerous homes to die in. He took advantage
to the utmost of the singular favour. Day by day I saw him sink,
and I roamed alone about the empty terraces and gardens. His wife
never came near him, but I scarcely noticed it: as I paced there
with rage in my heart I was too full of another wrong. In the
event of his death it would fall to me perhaps to bring out in some
charming form, with notes, with the tenderest editorial care, that
precious heritage of his written project. But where was that
precious heritage and were both the author and the book to have
been snatched from us? Lady Augusta wrote me that she had done all
she could and that poor Lord Dorimont, who had really been worried
to death, was extremely sorry. I couldn't have the matter out with
Mrs. Wimbush, for I didn't want to be taunted by her with desiring
to aggrandise myself by a public connexion with Mr. Paraday's
sweepings. She had signified her willingness to meet the expense
of all advertising, as indeed she was always ready to do. The last
night of the horrible series, the night before he died, I put my
ear closer to his pillow.
"That thing I read you that morning, you know."
"In your garden that dreadful day? Yes!"
"Won't it do as it is?"
"It would have been a glorious book."
"It IS a glorious book," Neil Paraday murmured. "Print it as it
stands--beautifully."
"Beautifully!" I passionately promised.
It may be imagined whether, now that he's gone, the promise seems
to me less sacred. I'm convinced that if such pages had appeared
in his lifetime the Abbey would hold him to-day. I've kept the
advertising in my own hands, but the manuscript has not been
recovered. It's impossible, and at any rate intolerable, to
suppose it can have been wantonly destroyed. Perhaps some hazard
of a blind hand, some brutal fatal ignorance has lighted kitchen-
fires with it. Every stupid and hideous accident haunts my
meditations. My undiscourageable search for the lost treasure
would make a long chapter. Fortunately I've a devoted associate in
the person of a young lady who has every day a fresh indignation
and a fresh idea, and who maintains with intensity that the prize
will still turn up. Sometimes I believe her, but I've quite ceased
to believe myself. The only thing for us at all events is to go on
seeking and hoping together; and we should be closely united by
this firm tie even were we not at present by another.
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