XXI
Henry Harper found the Stylists' Club of far greater interest than he thought it would be. To one as simple as he it was a very stimulating body. Moving precariously towards fresh standards of life, he knew at once that he was in a strange new world. He knew even before a powdered footman had led him across the parqueted floors of Paradine's Hotel, and a personage hardly less gorgeous had announced him to the congeries of stylists who had assembled to the number of about sixty.
"It is such a pleasure, Mr. Harper," said a large, florid, benign and beaming gentleman, seizing him by the hand. "You will find us all at your feet."
Mr. Harper was overawed not a little by the size and the distinction of the company, but the benign and beaming gentleman, who was no less a person than Mr. Herbert Gracious himself, took him in charge and introduced him to several other gentlemen, most of whom were benign but not beaming, being rather obviously preoccupied with a sense of Style. Indeed, Mr. Herbert Gracious was the only one of its members who did beam really. The others were far too deeply engaged with the momentous matters they had met to consider.
When Mr. Henry Harper had been allowed to subside into a vacant chair in the midst of six stylists, four of whom were female and two of whom were male, he was able to pull himself together a little. He knew already that he was in very deep waters indeed: Mr. Esme Horrobins and Mr. Edward Ambroses were all around him. And these ladies ... these ladies who waved eyeglasses stuck on sticks were not of the Cora and the Miss Press and the Miss Bonser breed; they were of the sort that Klondyke put on a high hat and a swallowtail to walk with in Hyde Park. Yes, even for a sailor, he was in very deep waters just now, and he was obliged to tell himself once again, as he always did in such circumstances, that having sailed six years before the mast there was nothing in the world to fear.
All the same, at first he was very far from being happy. A dozen separate yet correlated discussions upon Style had been interrupted by his entrance. The announcement, "Mr. Henry Harper," had suspended every conversation. For a moment all the Mr. Esme Horrobins were mute and inglorious. But then, having glutted their gaze upon one whom Mr. Herbert Gracious himself had already crowned in the Literary Supplement of the Daily Age and Lyre, the Mr. Esme Horrobins and the Mrs. Esme Horrobins—the mere male was not allowed to have it all his own way in this discussion upon Style—took up the theme.
It was the part of Mr. Henry Harper to listen. The public press of England and America had compared his own style to that of Stevenson, Bunyan, Defoe, the Bible, Shakespeare, Lætitia Longborn Gentle, Memphis Mortmain Mimpriss, finally Dostoievsky, and then Stevenson again. In a true analysis Stevenson would have defeated all the other competitors together, leaving out Dostoievsky, who was a bad second, and excluding the Bible, Shakespeare, and Memphis Mortmain Mimpriss, who, to their great discredit, were an equally bad third. Stevenson was first and the rest nowhere. And there that glorious reincarnation sat, in a modest blue suit, but looking very neat and clean, listening to every word that fell in his vicinity from the lips of the elect. At least, that was, as far as it was possible for one human pair of ears to do so.
"Tell me, Mr. Harper," said Miss Carinthia Small, with all Kensington upon her eyebrows, imperiously attacking with a stick eyeglass, which she wobbled ferociously, this very obvious young genius who didn't know how to dress properly, as soon as Mr. Marmaduke Buzzard—M.B. of the Stylists' Review—had allowed her, much against his will and for purely physical reasons, to get in a word. "Tell me, Mr. Harper, exactly how you feel about Dostoievsky? Where do you place him? Before Meredith and after Cuthbert Rampant, or before Cuthbert Rampant and after Thomas Hardy?"
It was a dismal moment for Mr. Henry Harper. Fortunately he hesitated for a fraction of an instant, and he was saved. That infinitesimal period of time had given Mr. Marmaduke Buzzard his chance to get in again. And stung by the public acclamation of Mr. Cuthbert Rampant, a well-nourished young man in a checked cravat, who was curving gracefully over Miss Carinthia Small, he proceeded to show with some little violence, yet without loss of temper, that in any discussion of style qua style, Turgenieff alone of the Russians could possibly count.
"But everybody knows," breathed the defiant Miss Carinthia in the charmed ear of Mr. Cuthbert Rampant, "that had it not been for Dostoievsky, the 'Adventures of Dick Smith' could never have been written at all."