This Grinton no longer holds the bookstalls in the palm of his hand. His star has set; but at that time his stories sold enormously, and earned him a large income. They were common trash, concerned chiefly with mysterious murders, and each had a startling picture on the cover, which the publisher alleged was the chief cause of their success. He had curly hair. That was the only thing about him Henry noticed.
In turn he was next introduced to Henry Davies, the editor of the Morning Sun, the great Radical daily—a man who stuttered strangely, and had difficulty in saying that he was p—p—pleased to m—m—meet Mr. Ch—Ch—Charles; Mr. Frederick Fleming, the well-known dramatic critic of the Daily Journal; and other celebrities whom he had long worshipped from afar. The most ordinary mortals all; not one of them had the mystic touch of Adrian Grant, who seemed to Henry the most distinguished man among the company.
"Dinner is served, gentlemen," the waiter called, in rousing tones, and instantly the babble ceased, and members and guests filed out to the dining-room.
Henry was seated next to his host, and had on his right Mr. Bone, the eminent publisher, who happened to be the guest of Grinton, the novelist. The lion lay down with the lamb in the Pen and Pencil Club.
It was the custom of the fraternity after dining to carry on a discussion on some literary topic, and to "talk shop" to their heart's content. The chairman, Mr. Diamond Jones, a highly successful literary critic, whose profound ignorance of literature's deeper depths was the standing joke of his fellow-clubmen, mentioned that they did talk shop there, but contended that "literary shop" was worth talking, as everybody was interested in it; other "shop" was only "shop," and therefore contemptible. Your literary worker has a fine disdain for every branch of life but his own.
The speaking was scarcely enthralling. It happened to turn on the subject of humour in literature, and a celebrated humorist opened the discussion with some observations which suggested (unfairly) that he knew very little of what he was talking about. Apparently he had never heard that Shakespeare was a humorist, or that Carlyle was not devoid of the quality, or that Thackeray had some of it, not to mention Dickens. Even Meredith and Hardy escaped the notice of all the speakers, who talked about most things but the topic that had been introduced. Henry concluded that the gifts of writing and oratory are seldom wedded in the one. The best speaker was a novelist, whose books were as free from humour as Ireland is from snakes. He thought that humour wasn't a high quality. Good for him that he had none, as the great reading public likes a man who is either as serious as an owl or as giddy as a Merry Andrew. Sinclair was reputedly a humorist, but it was difficult to get him to open his mouth on the subject, and when he did the company was in doubt whether to laugh or applaud.
"Humour," he said, in his drawling Scotch accent, "is, according to Russell Lowell, the great antiseptic of leeterature. For my pairt, 'werna ma heart licht I wad dee.'" And he sat down.
Really these great guns of literature thundered no better than a twopenny cannon. Henry had heard as good at a church debating society in Wheelton. At least, the disparity was scarce appreciable, and yet the men he had listened to were, each of them, capable of great things pen in hand; most of them would have been a loadstar of interest in any large provincial city. They were best beheld at a distance and behind the glamour of their books, he thought.
But he had reason to modify his opinion in the light of the club-room gossip which followed the dinner and discussion. He was soon tingling with delight at hearing men whose names were widely known discussing the affairs of the literary world. He felt that he stood at the very fount of those streams of gossip which flow far and wide through the channels of the Press. He knew that many a paragraph he had clipped from a London journal and printed in his column in the Laysford Leader had originated in the after-dinner chatter of his club, or some such coterie. "I am informed that Mr. Blank's next novel will deal with," or "My readers may be interested to know that Mr. So-and-So, the celebrated author of this or that, is about to," or again, "Mr. Such-and-Such is contemplating a holiday in Timbuctoo with a view to local colour for his next romance, which has been arranged to appear in"—he could now see that these pleasant pars, with their delightful "behind-the-scenes" flavour, grew out of meetings like this.
After leaving the "Magpie," Adrian Grant walked with Henry as far as Long Acre, where the latter could get a 'bus Bloomsburyward.