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.