She went on: "It's rather amusing—the way he treats me. Privately, of course, we're friends. But professionally, as a member of his class, I'm nothing. Not a word or a smile. When he's finished lecturing he picks up his papers and dashes out of the room as if he's afraid somebody might follow him."
"Perhaps he is."
She admitted the possibility. "But I have such an absurd ambition to make him take some notice of me. Isn't it absurd? I feel it would be good for him to be made to break all his neat little rules.... Anyhow, don't forget that you're both coming to dinner on the twelfth. And also, by the way...." And then came her request that I should join in the general informality by calling her Helen. "Or Helène," she added, "if you like to be really correct."
III
There is no entry in my diary for the 12th. I remember why. I had got back to my rooms very late, and was too sleepy to write anything. And the next morning when I looked at the blank space I thought I would leave it blank, to express and symbolize the puzzled blankness of my own mind.
It was a small party—just the Severns, Terry, and myself. The rather sensational Roebourne case had been concluded only that afternoon, and all the evening papers were full of praise for Severn, whose brilliant handling of exceptionally difficult material had brought victory to his side. It had been a fatiguing battle between two great financial interests, and Severn had not only consolidated his already high reputation as a pleader, but had earned also an almost fabulous sum in fees. Naturally his feelings were buoyant, and their buoyancy made him talk in a way which, even for him, was amazing. Before then I had sometimes harboured a suspicion that his knowledge of many things was superficial, but that night the suspicion almost disappeared. He really did seem to have been everywhere, to have read everything, and to have met everybody. One moment he was talking about the queer sorts of hors-d'œuvres that he had sampled in various parts of the world; and the next he was discussing medical science with Terry in a way which would have tempted any outsider to assume that he was the master and Terry the rather dull pupil. With the accompaniment of excellent food and wine, the whole exhibition was a sheer delight to the onlooker like myself, and Severn's coal-black eyes gleamed all the while as if he too were thoroughly enjoying it. I believe he was slightly drunk, but that only made his talk better still.
Then, somehow or other, when we were in the drawing-room afterwards, the conversation grew personal. I don't mean "personal" in any unpleasant sense, but merely literally; we began to talk about ourselves. Or rather, perhaps, it was as if Mrs. Severn, Terry and I were suddenly being forced to expose our intimate lives to the full glare of Severn's arguments, while he alone remained aloof—interested but hardly perturbed. It began by his telling me what ought to be the successive stages of my advancement as a literary man. "In a few years," he said "you must have a sub-editorship—I'll see whether I can find one for you. You'll have to work like hell while you're at it, and in your spare time, if you have any, you must manage to write a novel—preferably one that will establish your reputation and bring you in not more than a hundred pounds altogether. After that you must take a flat in either Bloomsbury or Chelsea and decide whether you're going to plod along in Fleet Street, earning a middling salary and work jolly hard for it, or take to the wilder life of the professional fiction-writer, in which you may earn nothing at all or else fabulous sums.... On the whole, I think you had better become the successful novelist who is very shy and unapproachable. In that case you must write a stupid novel about Very Good People and Very Bad People, with a wedge of sex in between, and you must take care that all your most intimate private affairs are reported sensationally in the Press.... After your novel's in its second hundred thousand and your bank balance is beginning to stagger you, you must marry a society woman and arrange for your name to appear in the next birthday honours' list...."
And so on. Then, filling up his glass, he turned to Terry. The career of the successful scientist, he said, was in many ways a more delicate matter, but still in the main, it was conditioned by the same general principles. "Darwin," he said, "points the way for all scientists. His monkey idea was so simple that only a scientist could have any doubts about it.... Anyhow, you must do your best with the material that comes your way. First of all, you positively must go to Paris or Berlin or Vienna and put yourself under some fellow who, because his name isn't Smith or Brown or Jones, is thereby held in almost mythical esteem by the majority of Englishmen. Then, after picking the other fellow's brains as much as you can, you must launch out suddenly on your own—choosing a slack season when the newspapers haven't much to write about. You must have a new discovery, or a new theory of something—nearly anything will do, provided it is simple enough for the man in the street to misunderstand and laugh at. You might, for instance, discover that to crawl a quarter of a mile a day on hands and knees is a cure of dyspepsia. Get your disciples round you and start crawling—in public—with the cameras all round you! ... Then come back to England and make a fierce attack on the oldest, the most innocent, and altogether the most fatuous member of the Medical Council...."
Terry laughed and said that all that sort of thing was just what he would most of all loathe doing.
"But you must do it," Severn urged. "Of course I've been joking about some of the details, but the principle of it all is sound enough. The key to success in everything is advertisement."