And he handed the last sheet of the review to a messenger, and ran off to the editorial room to report that instructions had been executed. Jack and Clementina relighted their pipes with select bits of A Question of Cubits, and threw the remaining débris of the volume into the waste-paper basket. The hour was twenty minutes past midnight....
The great majority of the reviews were exceedingly favourable, and even where praise was diluted with blame, the blame was administered with respect, as a dentist might respectfully pain a prince in pulling his tooth out. The public had voted for Henry, and the press, organ of public opinion, displayed a wise discretion. The daring freshness of Henry's plot, his inventive power, his skill in 'creating atmosphere,' his gift for pathos, his unfailing wholesomeness, and his knack in the management of narrative, were noted and eulogized in dozens of articles. Nearly every reviewer prophesied brilliant success for him; several admitted frankly that his equipment revealed genius of the first rank. A mere handful of papers scorned him. Prominent among this handful was the Whitehall Gazette. The distinguished mouthpiece of the superior classes dealt with A Question of Cubits at the foot of a column, in a brief paragraph headed 'Our Worst Fears realized.' The paragraph, which was nothing but a summary of the plot, concluded in these terms: 'So he expired, every inch of him, in the snow, a victim to the British Public's rapacious appetite for the sentimental.'
The rudeness of the Whitehall Gazette, however, did nothing whatever to impair the wondrous vogue which Henry now began to enjoy. His first boom had been great, but it was a trifle compared to his second. The title of the new book became a catchword. When a little man was seen walking with a tall woman, people exclaimed: 'It's a question of cubits.' When the recruiting regulations of the British army were relaxed, people also exclaimed: 'It's a question of cubits.' During a famous royal procession, sightseers trying to see the sight over the heads of a crowd five deep shouted to each other all along the route: 'It's a question of cubits.' Exceptionally tall men were nicknamed 'Gerald' by their friends. Henry's Gerald, by the way, had died as doorkeeper at a restaurant called the Trianon. The Trianon was at once recognised as the Louvre, and the tall commissionaire at the Louvre thereby trebled his former renown. 'Not dead in the snow yet?' the wits of the West End would greet him on descending from their hansoms, and he would reply, infinitely gratified: 'No, sir. No snow, sir.' A music-hall star of no mean eminence sang a song with the refrain:
'You may think what you like,
You may say what you like,
It was simply a question of cubits.'
The lyric related the history of a new suit of clothes that was worn by everyone except the person who had ordered it.
Those benefactors of humanity, the leading advertisers, used 'A Question of Cubits' for their own exalted ends. A firm of manufacturers of high-heeled shoes played with it for a month in various forms. The proprietors of an unrivalled cheap cigarette disbursed thousands of pounds in order to familiarize the public with certain facts. As thus: 'A Question of Cubits. Every hour of every day we sell as many cigarettes as, if placed on end one on the top of the other, would make a column as lofty as the Eiffel Tower. Owing to the fact that cigarettes are not once mentioned in A Question of Cubits, we regret to say that the author has not authorized us to assert that he was thinking of our cigarettes when he wrote Chapter VII. of that popular novel.'
Editors and publishers cried in vain for Henry. They could get from him neither interviews, short stories, nor novels. They could only get polite references to Mark Snyder. And Mark Snyder had made his unalterable plans for the exploitation of this most wonderful racehorse that he had ever trained for the Fame Stakes. The supply of chatty paragraphs concerning the hero and the book of the day would have utterly failed had not Mr. Onions Winter courageously come to the rescue and allowed himself to be interviewed. And even then respectable journals were reduced to this sort of paragraph: 'Apropos of Mr. Knight's phenomenal book, it may not be generally known what the exact measure of a cubit is. There have been three different cubits—the Scriptural, the Roman, and the English. Of these, the first-named,' etc.
So the thing ran on.