There was a loud cry of ‘Author! Author!’ and Arthur Berkeley, hardly knowing how he got there, or what he was standing on, found himself pushed from behind by friendly hands, on to the narrow space between the curtain and the footlights. He became aware that a very hot and red body, presumably himself, was bowing mechanically to a seething and clapping mass of hands and faces over the whole theatre. Backing out again, in the same semi-conscious fashion, with the universe generally reeling on more than one distinct axis all around him, he was seized and hand-shaken violently, first by the Progenitor, then by the manager, and then by half a dozen other miscellaneous and unknown persons. At last, after a lot more revolutions of the universe, he found himself comfortably pitched into a convenient hansom, with the Progenitor by his side; and hardly knew anything further till he discovered his own quiet supper table at the Chelsea lodgings, and saw his father mixing a strong glass of brandy and seltzer for him, to counteract the strength of the excitement.
Next morning Arthur Berkeley ‘awoke, and found himself famous.’ ‘The Primate of Fiji’ was the rage of the moment. Everybody went to hear it—everybody played its tunes at their own pianos—everybody quoted it, and adapted it, and used its clever catchwords as the pet fashionable slang expressions of the next three seasons. Arthur Berkeley was the lion of the hour; and the mantelpiece of the quiet little Chelsea study was ranged three rows deep with cards of invitation from people whose very names Arthur had never heard of six months before, and whom the Progenitor declared it was a sin and shame for any respectable young man of sound economical education even to countenance. There were countesses, and marchionesses, too, among the senders of those coronetted parallelograms of waste pasteboard, as the Progenitor called them—nay, there was even one invitation on the mantelpiece that bore the three strawberry leaves and other insignia of Her Grace the Duchess of Leicestershire.
‘Can’t you give us just ONE evening, Mr. Berkeley,’ said Lady Hilda Tregellis, as she sat on the centre ottoman in Mrs. Campbell Moncrieff’s drawing-room with Arthur Berkeley talking lightly to her about the nothings which constitute polite conversation in the nineteenth century. ‘Just one evening, any day after the next fortnight? We should be so delighted if you could manage to favour us.’
‘No, I’m afraid I can’t, Lady Hilda,’ Arthur answered. ‘My evenings are so dreadfully full just now; and besides, you know, I’m not accustomed to so much society, and it unsettles me for my daily work. After all, you see, I’m a journeyman playwright now, and I have to labour at my unholy calling just like the theatrical carpenter.’
‘How delightfully frank,’ thought Lady Hilda. ‘Really I like him quite immensely.—Not even the afternoon on Wednesday fortnight?’ she went on aloud. ‘You might come to our garden party on Wednesday fortnight.’
‘Quite impossible,’ Arthur Berkeley answered. ‘That’s my regular day at Pilbury Regis.’
‘Pilbury Regis!’ cried Lady Hilda, starting a little. ‘You don’t mean to say you have engagements, and in the thick of the season, too, at Pilbury Regis!’
‘Yes, I have, every Wednesday fortnight,’ Berkeley answered, with a smile. ‘I go there regularly. You see, Lady Hilda, Wednesday’s a half-holiday at Pilbury Grammar School; so every second week I run down for the day to visit an old friend of mine, who’s also an acquaintance of yours, I believe,—Ernest Le Breton. He’s married now, you know, and has got a mastership at the Pilbury Grammar School.’
‘Then you know Mr. Le Breton!’ cried Lady Hilda, charmed at this rapprochement of two delightfully original men. ‘He is so nice. I like him immensely, and I’m so glad you’re a friend of his. And Mrs. Le Breton, too; wasn’t it nice of him? Tell me, Mr. Berkeley, was she really and truly a grocer’s daughter?’
Berkeley’s voice grew a little stiffer and colder as he answered, ‘She was a sister of Oswald of Oriel, the great mathematician, who was killed last year by falling from the summit of a peak in the Bernina.’