In the hall around the corner, I thought, they might suspect this sort of thing as inclining toward heresy. But you never can tell. "One man," as a proverb-muddled acquaintance of mine used to say, "one man may lead a horse to water, but another may not look over the fence."
They were still buying Drummond's books in large quantities,—"Natural Law in the Spiritual World" and "The Greatest Thing in the World." I liked to think that the slender gentleman with longish hair, who was sartorially British to the nth power, could write things like that in the morning and in the evening keep me company with a churchwarden, and these were very long churchwardens, old style, and we smoked "Glasgow Mild." Drummond, being a sensible man, wanted, as I say, to talk some other man's shop. He wanted to talk mine but could not pin me down. It was his shop I wanted. One of his young men with a literary turn wished to go to America and become a journalist. Would I advise?
"Why America?" I enquired mildly. "You have admirable newspapers in Scotland. Besides, you were saying that 'it is n't necessary to emigrate in order to prosper.'"
"It's unkind to remind a man of his inconsistencies," said he.
"I would like to save a good Scot, especially if young, from the mutilations of American journalism. More especially if literary. Tell him to learn the trade at home first. He 'll be trained more thoroughly here. There they 'll put him 'on space' to the uttermost ruin of any literary gift he may have. Space-writing means word-spinning—the more words the more money, if you have the knack of escaping the blue pencil. Space-work will knock seven-ways-for-Sunday any literary turn he may have. American journalism will do that, anyhow."
"Perhaps I 'd better kill him."
"My dear sir, your American experiences have done you good."
"They put me under gas and injected the spirit."
And with that we heard the clock strike the hour when we should start for the place where he was to lecture that evening on "The Greater Gratitude."
Professor Drummond, in "Natural Law in the Spiritual World", had attempted, as a clerical and friendly critic said, "to treat religion as a fact of nature, no less solid and capable of scientific analysis than any other fact which science claims for its own." Everybody read the book, for it was translated into all the European languages. And everybody read its successor, "The Greatest Thing in the World." The volumes, which were small, carried the name of their author around the globe in a large way, for they came from the press in tens of thousands. I suppose he had a million readers, and the most these knew about him was that he held the professorship of natural science in the Free Church College at Glasgow, that he was but little over thirty when he wrote the little books, and that, for a year, he had disappeared in the wilds of Africa. He returned to find himself famous, or as some thought and said, notorious.