'That's more like the sort of thing that Hubert would say,' John Pilgrim whispered. 'Women never say those things. It's not true to nature. But it seems to fit in exactly with the character of Hubert. Shall we—transfer——?' His pencil waved in the air....
'Heavenly powers!' Mr. Pilgrim hoarsely murmured, as they attained the curtain of Act III., 'it's four o'clock. And I had an appointment for lunch at two. But I never think of food when I am working. Never!'
Henry, however, had not broken his fast since the previous evening.
The third and the greatest crisis in the unparalleled popularity of Henry Shakspere Knight began to prepare itself. The rumour of its coming was heard afar off, and every literary genius in England and America who was earning less than ten thousand pounds a year ground his teeth and clenched his hands in impotent wrath. The boom and resounding of The Plague-Spot would have been deafening and immense in any case; but Henry had an idea, and executed it, which multiplied the advertisement tenfold. It was one of those ideas, at once quite simple and utterly original, which only occur to the favourites of the gods.
The serial publication of The Plague-Spot finished in June, and it had been settled that the book should be issued simultaneously in England and America in August. Now, that summer John Pilgrim was illuminating the provinces, and he had fixed a definite date, namely, the tenth of October, for the reopening of Prince's Theatre with the dramatic version of The Plague-Spot. Henry's idea was merely to postpone publication of the book until the production of the play. Mark Snyder admitted himself struck by the beauty of this scheme, and he made a special journey to America in connection with it, a journey which cost over a hundred pounds. The result was an arrangement under which the book was to be issued in London and New York, and the play to be produced by John Pilgrim at Prince's Theatre, London, and by Lionel Belmont at the Madison Square Theatre, New York, simultaneously on one golden date.
The splendour of the conception appealed to all that was fundamental in the Anglo-Saxon race.
John Pilgrim was a finished master of advertisement, but if any man in the wide world could give him lessons in the craft, that man was Lionel Belmont. Macalistairs, too, in their stately, royal way, knew how to impress facts upon, the public.
Add to these things that Geraldine bore twins, boys.
No earthly power could have kept those twins out of the papers, and accordingly they had their share in the prodigious, unsurpassed and unforgettable publicity which their father enjoyed without any apparent direct effort of his own.
He had declined to be interviewed; but one day, late in September, his good-nature forced him to yield to the pressure of a journalist. That journalist was Alfred Doxey, who had married on the success of Love in Babylon, and was already in financial difficulties. He said he could get twenty-five pounds for an interview with Henry, and Henry gave him the interview. The interview accomplished, he asked Henry whether he cared to acquire for cash his, Doxey's, share of the amateur rights of Love in Babylon. Doxey demanded fifty pounds, and Henry amiably wrote out the cheque on the spot and received Doxey's lavish gratitude. Love in Babylon is played on the average a hundred and fifty times a year by the amateur dramatic societies of Great Britain and Ireland, and for each performance Henry touches a guinea. The piece had run for two hundred nights at Prince's, so that the authors got a hundred pounds each from John Pilgrim.