A BUBBLE REPUTATION
One crowded hour of glorious life
Is worth an age without a name.
I had never suspected Sweeting of a desire to be “somebody.” Indeed, the jeunesse dorée, in whose ranks Nature had seemed unquestioningly to bestow him, is not subject to diffidence, or prone to the wisdom which justifies itself in a knowledge of its own limitations. I was familiar with his placid, cherubic face at a minor club or two, in the Park, in Strand restaurants and Gaiety stalls; and it had never once occurred to me to classify him as apart from his fellows of the exquisite guild. If, like Keats, he could appreciate the hell of conscious failure, its most poignant anguish, I could have sworn, would borrow from some too-late realization of the correctest “form” in a hat-brim or shirt-collar. I could have sworn it, I say, and I should have been, of course, mistaken. Keats may have claimed it as his poetical prerogative to go ill-dressed, and to object, though John, to be dubbed “Johnny.” It remained to Sweeting to prove that a man might be a very typical “Johnny” and a poet to boot. But I will explain.
One day I entered the reading-room of the Junior Winston and nodded to Sweeting, who was seated solitary at the newspaper-table. While I was hunting for the “Saturday Review”—which was conducting, I had been told, the vivisection of a friend of mine—my attention was attracted by something actually ostentatious in Sweeting’s perusal of his sheet, and I glanced across. Judge my astonishment when I saw in his hands, not “Baily’s” or the “Pink ’Un,” but the very periodical I sought. I gasped; then grinned.
“Hullo!” I said. “Since when have you taken to that?”
He attempted to reply with a face of wondering hauteur, but gave up at the first twitch.
“O,” he said rather defiantly, “you lit’ary professionals think no one’s in it but yourselves.”
“In what?”
“Why, this sort of thing,” he said, tapping the “Saturday”; “the real stuff, you know.”
“Indeed,” I said, “we don’t. You’re always welcome to the reversion of my place in it for one.”
“O, me!” he said airily. “It don’t positively apply there, you see, being a sort of a kind of a professional myself.”
“My Sweet!” I exclaimed. “A professional—you?”
“O, yes,” he said. “Didn’t you know? Write for the ‘Argonaut.’ Little thing of mine in it last number.”
I felt faint.
“May I see it?” I murmured. “If I don’t mistake, it’s under your elbow at this moment.”
“Is it?” he answered, blushing flagrantly, “Lor’ bless me, so it is!”
I took it from his hand, opened it, and read, over his undoubted signature—Marmaduke Sweeting—the title, “The Fool of the Family.”
“Ah!” I thought, “of course. Like title like author.”
But I was wrong. The tale, a veritable conte drolatique, was as keen and strong as a Maupassant. I had no choice but to take it at a draught, smacking my lips after. Then I put the paper softly down and looked across at him. His harmless features were set in a sort of hypnotic smile, his hat was tilted over his eyes, and he was making constant mouthfuls of the large silver knob of his stick. My eyes travelled to and fro between this figure and the figures of print that were he. What possible connexion could there be between the two? I thought of Buffon writing in lace ruffles, and all at once recognized a virtue in immaculate shirt-cuffs, and decided to consult some fashionable hosier about raising my price per thousand words. In the meantime my respect for Sweeting was born.
“So,” I said, “you are somebody after all?”
“Am I?” he answered, grinning bucolic. “Glad you’ve found it out.”
“Why,” I said, “honestly there’s genius in this story; but nothing to what you’ve shown in concealing that you had any. There must be much more to come out of the same bin.”
He flushed and laughed and wriggled, as I walked over and sat beside him.
“O, I dare say!” he said. “Hope so, anyhow.”
“Not a doubt. What made you think of it, now?”
“O! I thought of it,” he said; and, after all, there was no better reply to an idiotic question. I was beginning humbly to appraise intellectual self-sufficiency at its value, and to appreciate the hundred disguises of reason.
I saw a good deal of Sweeting, on his own initiative, after this. He would visit me in my rooms, and discuss—none too sapiently, I may have thought in other circumstances, and with the most ingenuous admiration for his own abilities—the values of certain characters as portrayed by him in a brilliant series, “The Love-Letters of a Nonconformist,” which had immediately followed in the “Argonaut” “The Fool of the Family,” and was taking the town by storm. Thus, “What d’ee think of that old Lupin, last number,” he would chuckle, “with his calling virtue an ‘emu,’ don’tcherknow?”
“Ha, yes!” I would correct him, with a nervous laugh. “ ‘Anæmia’ was the word. You meant it, of course.”
“Why, didn’t I say it?” he would answer. “It’s got a big swallow anyhow”; and then he would check himself suddenly, and, without further explanation, eye me, and begin to whistle.
Now I might recall the passage to which he referred (to wit, that every red blood corpuscle, being a seed peccancy, so to speak, made virtue an anæmia) and try to puzzle out a quite new significance in it. Suspecting that its author’s apparent naïveté was only assumed, I was respectfully guarded in my answers, and, when he was gone, would curiously ponder the perspicacious uses to which he would put them. He did not consult me, I felt, as an oracle; but rather drew upon me for the vulgar currency of thought, to which his exclusiveness was a stranger. He was very secret about his own affairs; though I understood that he was becoming quite an important “name” in the literary world. Ostensibly he was not, after that first essay, to be identified with the “Argonaut,” though any one, having an ounce of the proper appreciation, could scarcely fail to mark in the “Love-Letters” the right succession of qualities which had made the earlier story notable. Indeed, he suffered more than any man I knew from the penalties attaching to the popular author. The number of communications, both signed and anonymous, which he received from admirers was astonishing. Scarce a day passed but he brought me specimens of them to discuss and laugh over. I did not, I must admit, think his comments always in good taste; but then I was not personally subject to the flattering pursuit, and so may have been no more constituted to judge than a monk is of a worldling.
These testimonies to his fame were from every sort of individual—the soldier, the divine, the poet, the painter, the actor (and more especially the actress), the young person with views, the social butterfly, the gushling late of the schoolroom, the woman of sensibility late of the latest lifelong passion for art or religion, and finding, as usual, the taste of life sour on her lips after a recent debauch of sentiment. They all found something in the “Love-Letters” to meet their particular cases—some note of subtle sympathy, some first intimation to their misunderstood spirits of a kindred emotion which had felt, and could lay its finger with divine solace on the spot. No longer would they suffer a barren grievance—that hair-shirt which not a soul suspected but to giggle over. To take, for example, from the series a typical sentence which served so many for a text—
“To whom does the materialist cry his defiance—to whom but to God? He cannot rest from baiting a Deity whose existence he denies. He forgets that irony can wring no response from a vacuum.” A propos of which wrote the following:—
A Half-pay General.—Don’t tell me, Sir, but you’ve served, like me, a confounded ungrateful country, and learned your lesson! Memorialize the devil rather than the War Office. You’ve hit it off in your last sentence to a T.
A Chorus Girl.—Dear Sir,—You mean me to understand, I know, and you’re quite right. The British public has no more ears than a ass, or they’d reconise who ought to be playing Lotta in “The Belle of Battersea.” It’s such a comfort you can’t tell. Please forgive this presumptious letter from a stranger.—Yours very affectionately,
Dolly.
An Apostolic Fisherman.—I like your metaphor. I would suggest only “ground-baiting a Deity” as more subtly applicable to the tactics of a worldling. Note: “And Simon Peter said, ‘I go a-fishing.’ ”
Take, again, this excerpt: “Doctors’ advice to certain patients to occupy their minds recalls the Irishman’s receipt for making a cannon, ‘Take a hole and pour brass round it.’ ” Of which a “True Hibernian” wrote—
Sir,—I’ve always maintained that the genuine “bull,” fathered on my suffering country, came from the loins of the English lion. Murder, now! How could a patient occupy his doctor’s mind as well as his own, unless he was beside himself? And then he’d have no mind at all.
Or take, once more and to end, the sentence: “The Past is that paradoxical possession, a Shadow which we would not drop for the Substance”; which evoked the following from “One who has felt the Weariness, the Fever, and the Fret”—
How strangely and exquisitely phrased! It brings, I know not how, the memory of the Channel before me. I have only crossed it once; but, O! the recollection! the solemn moving waters to which my soul went out!
These are specimens, but a few, of the responses wrung by Sweeting from the human chords he touched. There were, in addition, prayers innumerable for autographs, requests for the reading of manuscripts, petitions for gratis copies of his works, to be sold for any and every charity but the betterment of impecunious authors. He fairly basked in the sunshine of a great reputation. There was only one flaw in his enormous self-satisfaction. By a singular perversity and most inexplicable coincidence, every one of these signed documents was without an address. But, after all, coincidence, which is only another name for the favouritism of Fate, must occasionally glut itself on an approved subject. Sweeting was in favour with the gods, and enjoyed “a high old time of it,” principally, perhaps, because he did not appear to be ambitious of impressing any “set” but that with which he was wont to forgather, and above which he made no affectation now of rising superior.
I had an example one evening of this intellectual modesty, when casually visiting the Earl’s Court grounds. There I encountered my friend, the centre and protagonist of a select company in the enclosure. All exquisitely wore exquisite evening dress (for myself I always scornfully eschewed the livery), and all gravitated about Sweeting with the unconscious homage which imbecility pays to brains—“the desire of the moth for the star.” I could see at once that he was become their Sirius, their bright particular glory, reflecting credit upon their order. And he, who might have commanded the suffrages of the erudite, seemed content with his little conquest—to have reached, indeed, the apogee of his ambition—a one-eyed king among the blind. These suffered my introduction with some condescension, as a mere larva of Grub Street. They knew themselves now as the stock from which was generated this real genius. As for me, I was Gil Blas’s playwright at the supper of comedians. And then, at somebody’s initiative, we were all swaggering off together along the walks.
Now, I had always had a sort of envy of the esprit de ton which unites the guild of amiable gadflies; and, finding myself here, for all my self-conscious intellectual superiority, of the smallest account, I grew quickly sardonic. If I knew who wrote the “Heptameron,” I didn’t know, even by sight, the Toddy Tomes who was setting all the town roaring and droning with his song, “Papa’s Perpendicular Pants.” It is a peevish experience to be “out of it,” even if the it is no more intelligible than a Toddy Tomes’s topical; and gradually I waxed quite savage. Reputation is only relative after all. There is no popular road to fame. As an abstract acquisition, it may be said to pertain at its highest to the man who combines quick perceptions with adaptive sympathies. I was not that man. In all, save exclusively my own company, I felt “out of it,” awkward because resentful, and resentful because awkward. I despised these asses, however franked by Sweeting, yet coveted, vainly, the temporary grace of seeming at home with them. I got very cross. And then we alighted on Slater.
I knew it for his name by Sweeting’s greeting him in response to his hail. He was seated at a little table all by himself, drinking champagne, and alternately turning up and biting the ends of a red tag of beard, and luridly pulling at a ponderous cigar. He was a small, dingy person, so obviously inebriated, that the little human clearing in which he sat solitary was nothing more than the formal recognition of his state. He also, it was evident, to my disgust, despised the conventions of dress, but without any of those qualms of self-consciousness with which I was troubled. He lolled back, his hat crushed over his eyes, a hump of dicky and knotted tie escaping from his waistcoat-front, his disengaged thumb hooked into an arm-hole—as filthy a little vagabond, confident and maudlin and truculent in one, as you could wish. And he hailed Sweeting as a familiar.
My friend stopped, with a rather sheepish grin.
“Hullo, Slater!” said he. “A wet night, ain’t it?”
Our little group came chuckling all about the baboon. Even then, I noticed, I was the one looked upon with most obvious disfavour by the surrounding company.
“Look here,” said Sweeting, suddenly gripping me to the front. “Here’s one of your cloth, Slate’. Let me introjuce you,” and he whispered in my ear, “Awfully clever chap. You’ll like him when you know.”
I suppose my instant and instinctive repulsion was patent even to the sot. He lurched to his feet, and swept off his crumpled hat with an extravagant bow. Sweeting’s pack went into a howl of laughter. It was evident they were not unacquainted with the creature, and looked to him for some fun.
“My cloth, sir?” vociferated the beast. “Honoured, sir, ’m sure, sir. Will you allow me to cut my coat according to it, sir? Has any gentleman a pair of scissors? Just the tails, sir, no more—quite large enough for me; and you’d look very elegant in an Eton jacket.”
I tried to laugh at this idiotic badinage, and couldn’t.
“O, crikey, wouldn’t he!” said a vulgar onlooker. “Like a sugar-barrel in a weskit.”
Then, as everybody roared, I lost my temper.
“Don’t be a fool,” whispered Sweeting. “It’s the way he’ll get his change out of you.”
“Change!” I snapped furious. “No change could be for the worse with him, I should think. Let me pass, please!”
The odious wretch was pursuing me all the time I spoke, while the others hemmed me in, edging me towards him and roaring with laughter. Sweeting himself made no effort to assist me, but stood to one side, irresistibly giggling, though with a certain anxiety in his note.
“Call off your puppies!” I cried ragingly, and with the word was sent flying into the very arms of Slater. I felt something rip, and at a blow my hat sink over my eyes; and then a chill friendly voice entered into the mêlée.
“O, look here, Slater, that’ll do, you know!”
I wrenched my eyes free. My champion was not Sweeting, but Voules, Sir Francis Voules, of whom more hereafter. He was cool and vicious, and as faultlessly dressed as the others, but in a manner somehow superior to the foppery of their extreme youth. He carried a light overcoat on his arm.
“O! will it?” said Slater.
“Yes, I said so,” said Voules, pausing a moment from addressing me to scan him. Slater slouched back to his table. Nobody laughed again.
In the meantime, Sir Francis was helping me to restore my hat to shape, and to don his overcoat.
“Yours is split to the neck,” he said. “Now, let’s go.”
He took my arm, and we strolled off together. The crowd, quite respectful, parted, and we were engulfed in it.
I was grateful to Voules, of course, but inexplicably resentful of his cool masterfulness. Truth to tell, we were souls quite antipathetic; and now he had put me right—with everybody but myself. In a helpless attempt to restore that balance, I snarled fiercely, smacking fist into palm—
“I’ll have the law of that beast! You know him, it seems? I can’t congratulate you on your friends.”
“Sweeting was most to blame,” said Voules quietly.
I grunted, and strode on fuming.
“But, after all,” said Voules, “the poor ass had to back up his confederate.”
I glanced at him as we walked.
“His confederate?”
“Of course. Didn’t you know? Slater really writes the things for which Sweeting gets the credit.”
“O, come, Voules! Here’s one of your foolhardy calumnies. You really should be careful. Some day you’ll get into trouble.”
“O, very well!”
“You talk as if it were an open secret.”
“You know Sweeting as well as I. Do you recognize his style in the Nonconformist lucubrations? Possibly you’ve had letters from him?”
“I’ve some specimens of letters to him now—letters from admirers. If anything were needed to refute your absurd statement, there they are in evidence.”
He gave a little dry laugh; then touched my sleeve eagerly.
“You wouldn’t think it abusing a confidence to show me those letters?”
“I don’t know why. Sweeting’s laid no embargo on me.”
“Very well. If you’ll let me, I’ll come home with you now.”
I stumbled on in a sort of haze.
I did not believe this to be any more than a mad shot in the dark. Sir Francis was one of those men who made mischief as Pygmalion made Galatea. He fell in love with his own conceptions—would go any lengths to gratify his passion for detraction. Do not suppose, from his prefix, that he was a bold, bad baronet. He was just an actor of the new creation—belonged to what was known by doyens of the old Crummles school as the be-knighted profession. The stage was an important incident in his social life, and he seldom missed a rehearsal of any piece to which he was engaged.
“You know this Slater?” I said, as I drove in my latchkey. “As what?”
“As a clever, disreputable, and perfectly unscrupulous journalist.”
“It's preposterous! What could induce him to part with such a notoriety?”
“The highest bidder, of course.”
“What! Sweeting? If he’s still the simple Johnny you’d have him be?”
“I’m yet to learn that the simple Johnny lacks vanity.”
“But, for him, such an unheard-of way to gratify it!”
“Opportunism, sir. There are more things in the Johnny’s philosophy than we dream of.”
“Well, I simply don’t believe it.”
Voules read, with an immobile face, the letters which Sweeting had left with me. At the end he looked up.
“Are you open to a bet?”
“Can’t afford it.”
“Never mind, then.” He rose. “Truth for its own sake will do. Anyhow, I presume you don’t object to countering on Slater?”
“O, do what you like!”
“Thanks. Would you wish to be in at the death?”
“Just as you please.”
“You see,” said he, with a pleasant affectation of righteousness, “if my surmise is correct—and you’re the first one I’ve ventured to confide in—it’s my plain duty to prick a very preposterous bubble. Thank you for lending yourself to the cause of decency. Don’t say anything until you hear from me. Good-bye!”—and he was gone, followed by my inclination, only my inclination, to hurl a book after him.
I sat tight—always the more as I swelled over the delay—till, on the third day following, Sweeting called on me. He came in very shamefaced, but with a sort of suppressed triumph to support his abjectness.
“I couldn’t help it, you know,” he said; “and I gave him a bit of my mind after you’d gone.”
“Indeed,” I answered good-humouredly; “that was what you couldn’t well afford, and it was generous of you.”
He was blankly impervious to the sarcasm. Had it been otherwise, my new-fledged doubts had perhaps fluttered to the ground. After a moment I saw him pull a paper from his pocket.
“Look here,” he said, vainly trying to suppress some emotion, which was compound, in suggestion, of elation and terror. “You’ve made your little joke, haven’t you, over all those other people forgettin’ to put their addresses? Well, what do you think of that for the Prime Minister?”
I took from his hand a sheet of large official-looking paper, and read—
Dear Sir,—You may have heard of my book, “The Foundations of Assent.” If so, you will perhaps be interested to learn that I am contemplating a complete revision of its text in the light of your “Love-Letters.” They are plainly illuminating. From being a man of no assured opinions, I have become converted, through their medium, to a firm belief in the importance of the Nonconformist suffrage. Permit me the honour, waiving the Premier, to shake by the hand as fellow-scribe the author of that incomparable series. I shall do myself the pleasure to call upon you at your rooms at nine o’clock this evening, when I have a little communication to make which I hope will not be unpleasing to you. Permit me to subscribe myself, with the profoundest admiration, your obedient servant,
J. A. Burleigh.
“Well,” I murmured, feeling suffocated, “there’s no address here either.”
“No,” he answered; “but, I say, it’s rather crushing. Won’t you come and help me out with it?”
“What do you want me for?” I protested. “I’ve no wish to be annihilated in the impact between two great minds. You aren’t afraid?”
“O, no!” he said, perspiring. “It’ll be just a shake, and ‘So glad,’ and ‘Thanks, awfully,’ I suppose, and nothing more to speak of. But you might just as well come, on the chance of helping me out of a tight place. It’s viva voce, don’tcherknow—not like writin’, with all your wits about you. And I shall get some other fellows there, too, so’s we aren’t allowed to grow too intimate; and you might as well.”
“I wonder what the ‘communication’ is?” I mused.
“O, nothin’ much, I don’t suppose,” said Sweeting, with a blushing nonchalance. But it was evident that he had pondered the delirious enigma and emerged from it Sir Marmaduke.
“Well,” I concluded rather sourly, “I’ll come.”
He went away much relieved, and I fell into a fit of stupor. In the afternoon a telegram from Voules reached me, “Be at Sweeting’s 8.45 to-night.”
At a quarter to nine I kept my appointment. Sweeting was insufferably well-to-do, and his rooms were luxurious. They were inhabited at the moment by an irreproachable and almost silent company. Among them I encountered many of the young gentlemen who had been witnesses of, and abettors in, my discomfiture the other night. But they were all too nervous now to presume upon the recognition—too oppressed with the stupendous nature of the honour about to be conferred upon their host—too self-weighted with their responsibility as his kindred and associates. They could only ogle him with large eyes over immensely stiff collars, as he moved about from one to another, panic-struck but radiant. It was the crowning moment of his life; yet its sweeter aftermath, I could feel, reposed for him in the sleek necks of champagne-bottles just visible on a supper-table in the next room. He longed to pass from the test to the toast, and the intoxicating memory of a triumph happily accomplished. And then suddenly Slater came in.
He was not expected, I saw in a moment. Indeed, how could such a death’s-head claim place at such a feast? He was no whit improved upon my single memory of him, unless, to give the little beast his due, a shade less inebriated. But he was as grinning, cocksure, and truculent a little Bohemian as ever. Sweeting stared at him aghast.
“Good Lord, Slate’,” said he, “what brings you here, now?”
“Why, your wire, old chap,” said the animal.
“I never sent one, I swear.”
“Oho!” cries Slater, glaring. “D’ you want to go back on your word? Ain’t I fine enough for this fine company?” and he pulled a dirty scrap of paper out of his pocket, and screeched, “Read what you said yourself, then!”
The telegram went round from hand to hand. I read, when it came to my turn: “Come supper my rooms 8.45 to-night. M. Sweeting.”
“I never sent it,” protested our host. “It must be a hoax. Look here, Slate’. The truth is, the Prime Minister wrote he wanted to make my acquaintance, because—because of the ‘Letters,’ you know; and—and he’s due here in a few minutes.”
The creature grinned like a jackal.
“My eyes, what fun!” he said. “I shall love to see you two meet.”
“There’s—there’s fizz in the next room, Slate’,” said the miserable Sweeting.
“You needn’t tell me,” said Slater. “I’d spotted it already.”
And then, before another word could be said, the door was opened, and the guest of the evening announced.
He came in smiling, ingratiatory, the familiar willowy figure in pince-nez. We all rose, and the stricken Sweeting advanced to meet him. The great man, looking, it is true, a little surprised over his reception, held out his hand cordially.
“And is this——” he purred—and paused.
Sweeting did not answer: he was beyond it; but he nodded, and opened his mouth, as if to beg that the “communication” might be posted into it, and the matter settled off-hand.
“I did not, I confess,” said the Premier, glancing smilingly round, “expect my little visit of duty—yes, of duty, sir—to provoke this signal welcome on the part of a company in which I recognize, if I mistake not, a very constellation of the intellectual aristocracy.”
Here a youth, with a solitaire in his eye, and a vague sense of parliamentary fitness, ejaculated “Hear, hear!” and immediately becoming aware of the enormity, quenched himself for ever.
“It makes,” went on the right hon. gentleman, “the strict limit to my call, which less momentous but more exacting engagements have obliged me to prescribe, appear the more ungracious. In view of this enforced restriction, I have equipped myself with a single question and a message. Your answer to the first will, I hope—nay, I am convinced—justify the tenor of the second.”
He released, with a smile, the hand which all this time he had retained, much to Sweeting’s embarrassment, in his own. Finding it restored to him, Sweeting promptly put it in his pocket, like a tip.
“I ask,” said the Premier, “the author of ‘The Love-Letters of a Nonconformist’ to listen to the following excerpt” (he produced a marked number of the “Argonaut” from his pocket) “from his own immortal series, as preliminary to some inquiry naturally evoked thereby”—and he read out, with the intonation of a confident orator: “ ‘We have (shall I not declare it, my sweet?) the most beautiful women and the most beautiful poets in the world—two very good things, but the latter unaccountable. Passion, in perpetuating, idyllically refines upon the features of its desire; hence the succession of assured physical loveliness in a race which, however insensible to the appeals of emotional and intellectual beauty, can understand and worship the beauty that is plain to see.’ ”
Here the reader paused, and looking over his glasses with a smile, very slightly shook his head, and murmuring, “The beauty that is plain to see! H’m! a fence that I will recommend to Rosebery,” continued, “ ‘Passion endows passion, far-reaching, to bribe the gods with a compound interest of beauty. It touches heaven in imagination through its unborn generations. It tops the bunker of the world, and, soaring, drops, heedless of Time the putter, straight into the eighteenth hole of the empyrean.”
The Premier stopped again, and, looking gravely at Sweeting, asked, “What is the eighteenth hole of the empyrean?”
Now I expected my friend to reveal himself, to sally brilliantly, referring his questioner, perhaps, to some satire in the making, some latter-day Apocalypse of which here was a sample extracted for bait to the curious. Well, he did reveal himself, but not in the way I hoped. He just strained and strained, and then dropped his jaw with the most idiotic little hee-haw of a laugh I ever heard, and—that was all.
The other, looking immensely surprised, repeated his question: “What, sir, I ask you, is the eighteenth hole of the empyrean?”
“Why, the one the Irishman poured brass round.”
I started. It was not Sweeting who spoke, but Slater. The little demon stood grinning in the background, his tongue in his cheek, and his hands in his trousers pockets.
“H’mph!” said the Prime Minister. “Very apt, sir. I recall the witticism. It is singularly applicable at the moment to the reorganization of the Liberal party. ‘Take a hole and pour brass round it.’ Exactly.”
His manner, there was no denying it, was extremely severe as he again addressed the perspiring Sweeting—
“Once more, sir,” he said, “I resume our discussion of a passage, the intellectual rights in which you would seem to have made over to your friends.” And, with a positive scowl, he continued his reading.
“ ‘So well’ (writes the impassioned Nonconformist) ‘for the national appreciation of beauty that is physical. On the other hand (tell me, dear. It would come so reassuringly from your lips), what can account for the spasmodic recurrence in our midst of the inspired singer? What makes his reproduction possible among a people endowed with tunelessness, innocent of a metrical ear?’ ”
Quite abruptly the Prime Minister ended, and, deliberately folding his paper, hypnotized with a searching stare his unhappy examinee.
“The question, Mr. Sweeting,” said he, “is before the House. You will recognize it as ending—with some psychologic subtlety, to be continued in our next—number 10—the last published of the “Argonaut.” To me, I confess, the answer can be, like the Catholic Church, only one and indivisible. Upon the question of your conformity with my view depends the nature of the communication which I am to have the pleasure, conditionally, of making to you. Plainly, then, sir, what makes possible the spasmodic recurrence of the inspired singer in the midst of a people endowed with tunelessness and innocent of a metrical ear? I feel convinced you can return no answer but one.”
A dead silence fell upon the room. Sweeting scratched his right calf with his left foot, and giggled. Then in a moment, yielding the last of his wits to the unendurable strain, he gave all up, and, wheeling upon Slater—
“O, look here, Slate’!” he said. “What does?” and without waiting for the answer, drove himself a passage through his satellites, and collapsed half dead upon a sofa.
The Premier, with an amazing calm, returned the “Argonaut” to his pocket.
“Surely, sir,” said he, “this is inexplicable; but” (he made a denunciatory gesture with his hands) “it remains to me only to inform you that, conditional on your right reply to your own postulate, it was to have been my privilege to acquaint you of His Majesty’s intention to bestow upon you a Civil List pension of £250 a year; which now, of course——”
He was interrupted by Slater—
“O, that’s all one, sir! Fit the cap on the right head. The answer’s ‘Protection,’ isn’t it? I ought to know, as I wrote, and am writing, the stuff.”
“You, sir!”
All eyes were turned upon the beastly little genius, as he stood ruffling with greed and arrogance, and thence to the sofa.
“O, shut up!” said Sweeting feebly. “It was only a joke. I paid him, handsome I did, to let me have the kudos and letters and things. He’d the best of the bargain by a long chalk.”
“He-he!” screeched Slater. “Why, you fool, did you think merit earned such recognition in this suffering world? Hope you enjoyed reading ’em, Sweet, as I did writing ’em.” He turned, half-cringing, half-defiant, upon the guest. “I’m the author of the ‘Love-Letters,’ sir—honour bright, I am; and I wrote every one of the testimonials, too, that that ass sets such store by. You’ll take those into consideration, I hope.”
“I shall, sir,” thundered the other—“in my estimate of a fool and his decoy.”
He blazed round and snatched up his hat.
“Make way, gentlemen!” he roared, and strode for the door.
A slip of pasteboard fluttered from his hand to the carpet; he flung wide the portal, banged it to behind him, and was gone.
Some one, in a sort of spasmodic torpor, picked up the card, and immediately uttered a gasping exclamation. We all crowded round him, and, reading the superscription at which he was pointing, “Mr. Hannibal Withers, Momus Theatre,” exchanged dumbfounded glances.
“Why, of course,” stuttered a pallid youth; “it was Withers, Voules’s pal; I reco’nize him now. He’s the Prime Minister’s double, you know, and—and he’s been and goosed us.”
“What!” screamed Slater.
But I was off in a fit of hysterical laughter.
It was actually a fact. It is a mistake to suppose that your professional scandal-monger is prepared to build except on a substratum of truth. Voules had pricked the bubble as he had promised. The bargain, it was admitted, had been struck—on Slater’s side for such a consideration as would submerge him in champagne had he desired it. He had written and sent the manuscripts to Sweeting, who had had them typed, and passed them on to the “Argonaut” as his own. But the real author knew that his tenure was insecure so long as the other’s colossal vanity was not ministered to. Hence the correspondence, in which the little monster burlesqued his own lucubrations. It might all have ended in a case of perpetual blackmail (Sweeting never could see beyond the end of his own nose) had not the bait answered so instantly to Voules’s calculations.
There was a bitter attack on the immorality of the stage in the next number of the “Argonaut,” which subsequently had to compound with Voules under threat of an action for libel. But Sweeting had his wish. He was “somebody,” as never yet. Until he took his notoriety for a long sea-voyage, he was more crushingly than any gentleman in the “Dunciad” “damn’d to fame.”