For he was just one of Mr. Cantle’s cranks—had once invented a submarine travelling suit, with which he had hoped to inaugurate a new system of Secret Service for the Admiralty. It was an ingenious enough device, with some scheme of floating valves through which to breathe; but the authorities, after holding him on and off, would have none of it. Then the fate of many inventors had befallen him. Between practical ruin and a moral sense of wrong, he had gone crazy, and vowed warfare on the mankind which had discarded him. It should comprehend, too late, the uses of instant appearance and disappearance to which his invention could be put. He went mad, and ended his days in an asylum.
On the Monday morning Mr. Cantle posted back to the Patent Office; on the Tuesday Miss Varley was reading De Maupassant’s “Mademoiselle Fifi” under the awning of the “Mermaid’s” roof; and on the Wednesday Mr. Ivo Monk got her to name the day.
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?”