Before the elderly gentleman had ceased to blaspheme the young man came within an ace of an even more emphatic reminder of earth's realities: at the end of Cranbourn Street an omnibus nearly ran over him. Still, it is the part of charity to cover his sins, because up till then, Tuesday, September the fifth had been the day of his life.
X
This mood did not last very long. He was now up against the stern facts of authorship. The story of Dick Smith would have to be written again and written differently. In the reincarnation would be little of the creative rapture of the primal birth. And so little faith had the Sailor in his powers that he could not help feeling that too much had been asked of them.
To add to his doubts, he was beset by conflicting advice. Miss Dobbs was quite angry when she learned the result of the interview with Mr. Ambrose, which she did the day after it had taken place.
"Wants you to write it again, does he?" she said with a glow of indignation. "I call that the limit! Now, if you'll be guided by me, Mr. Harper, which, of course, you ought to have been from the first, you'll do nothing of the kind. Send it to the Rotunda or the Covent Garden."
Miss Dobbs was so firm and Henry Harper was so oppressed by the magnitude of his task, that he came very near taking her advice.
It was the intervention of the author of "A History of the World" in forty volumes with an index that saved the situation. Mr. Rudge was horrified when he learned that Henry Harper thought of trying his luck with the Rotunda. It was nothing less than an act of lèse-majesté. There could be so little ground of comparison between that upstart and Brown's that in the opinion of Mr. Rudge it was better to be damned by the fountain of honor, which had published Byron and Scott, than be accepted and even tricked out with illustrations—there would be no illustrations in the "History of the World"—by a cheap and flashy parvenu which bore a similar relation to literature to that a toadstool bore to horticulture.
Miss Dobbs had force of character, but she was no match for Mr. Rudge when it came to a question of Brown's Magazine v. the Rotunda. He even went to the length of telling her that she didn't know what she was talking about. The grave spectacled eyes of the historian flashed to such purpose that Miss Dobbs was fain to admit "that she never would have thought the old fool had it in him." But great issues were at stake. All that he stood for was in the scale. Such an affront should only be offered to Culture over the dead body of the author of the "History of the World."
Finally, Henry Harper sat down to rewrite the story of Dick Smith and the brigantine Excelsior. As a fruit of victory, Mr. Rudge ordained that the young man should return to the study of grammar. It was more than ever necessary now. He was sure that had he been as well up in grammar as he ought to have been, the question of rewriting the story of Dick Smith could never have arisen.