The Death of the Lion by Henry James




  
Scanned and proofed 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.