Behind him he heard a droning voice:
“. . . A solemn and impressive ceremony. There’ll be sermons preached on it on Sunday. We have offered a prize for the best sermon in my paper, ‘People and Books.’ It was in ‘People and Books’ that Robert Wherry was first discovered to be a great man. We printed his first serial. I never thought he would reach the heights he did. . . .”
The reedy voice was raised in a toasty fullness:
“Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down, as a flower: he fleeth as it were a shadow and never continueth in one stay.”
Through the words came the droning voice:
“He was slow in the beginning. He had doubts and was fool enough to want to plague the public with them. The public wants certainties. It wants winners. I told him that he might have doubts, but they were his own private affair and that it was foolish to commit them to writing. I had ado to make him heed me, but he did heed me, and he got so that he couldn’t fail. It wasn’t in him to fail. He could think just the exact nothing that the public thinks a month or two before they begin to think it themselves. He was fine for religion and home life and young love and all that, but you had to keep him off any serious subject. He knew that, after a time. He knew himself very well, and he would take infinite trouble. He had no real sense of humor, but he learned how to make jokes,—little, sly jokes they were, shy things as though they were never sure of being quite funny enough. It took him years to do it, but he could do it. There’ve been a million and a half of his books sold. We’ll sell fifty thousand this week. . . . Man! I tell ye, I’ve had a hard fight for it. I’ve had thirty press agents up and down the country, working day and night, sending in stuff from the moment he was ill. I was with him when he ate the oysters. I had sick moments when I thought the newspapers weren’t going to take it up. I put the proposition to the kinematograph people and their interest carried it through. It was a near thing. The Dean hadn’t read the man’s works. I had to find some one above the Dean who had. . . . I helped to make Robert Wherry what he was. I couldn’t, in decency, fail to give my services to his fame and procure him the crowning glory of . . .”
Old Mole, straining forward, heard the reedy voice:
“. . . We give Thee hearty thanks for that it hath pleased Thee to deliver this our brother out of the miseries of this sinful world. . . .”
Sick at heart, Old Mole edged into the aisle and crept out into the air, gratefully drawing in great breaths of it, and thanking the Lord for His mercy in leaving the sky above London and suffering the winds to blow through it and the rain to fall upon it.
In his chambers he found a thin brown man, grave and dignified and dried by the sun.