“Has this a good sale?“ I asked, as the volume was handed to me.
The clerk at the counter opened his eyes wide.
“Sale?” he echoed—“Well, I should think so—rather! Why everybody’s reading it!”
“Indeed!” and I turned over the uncut pages carelessly—“I see no allusion whatever to it in the papers.”
The clerk smiled and shrugged his shoulders.
“No—and you’re not likely to, sir”—he said—“Miss Clare is too popular to need reviews. Besides, a large number of the critics,—the ‘log-rollers’ especially, are mad against her for her success, and the public know it. Only the other day a man came in here from one of the big newspaper offices and told me he was taking a few notes on the books which had the largest sales,—would I tell him which author’s works were most in demand? I said Miss Clare took the lead,—as she does,—and he got into a regular rage. Said he—‘That’s the answer I’ve had all along the line, and however true it is, it’s no use to me because I dare not mention it. My editor would instantly scratch it out—he hates Miss Clare.’ ‘A precious editor you’ve got!’ I said, and he looked rather queer. There’s nothing like journalism, sir, for the suppression of truth!”
I smiled, and went away with my purchase, convinced that I had wasted a few shillings on a mere piece of woman’s trash. If this Mavis Clare was indeed so ‘popular,’ then her work must naturally be of the ‘penny dreadful’ order, for I, like many another literary man, laboured under the ludicrous inconsistency of considering the public an ‘ass’ while I myself desired nothing so much as the said ‘ass’s’ applause and approval!—and therefore I could not imagine it capable of voluntarily selecting for itself any good work of literature without guidance from the critics. Of course I was wrong; the great masses of the public in all nations are always led by [p 173] some instinctive sense of right, that moves them to reject the false and unworthy, and select the true. Completely prepared, like most men of my type to sneer and cavil at the book, chiefly because it was written by a feminine hand, I sat down in a retired corner of the club reading-room, and began to cut and skim the pages. I had not read many sentences before my heart sank with a heavy sense of fear and,—jealousy!—the slow fire of an insidious envy began to smoulder in my mind. What power had so gifted this author—this mere woman,—that she should dare to write better than I! And that she should force me, by the magic of her pen to mentally acknowledge, albeit with wrath and shame, my own inferiority! Clearness of thought, brilliancy of style, beauty of diction, all these were hers, united to consummate ease of expression and artistic skill,—and all at once, in the very midst of reading, such a violent impulse of insensate rage possessed me that I flung the book down, dreading to go on with it. The potent, resistless, unpurchaseable
quality of Genius!—ah, I was not yet so blinded by my own conceit as to be unable to recognize that divine fire when I saw it flashing up from every page as I saw it now; but, to be compelled to give that recognition to a woman’s work, galled and irritated me almost beyond endurance. Women, I considered, should be kept in their places as men’s drudges or toys—as wives, mothers, nurses, cooks, menders of socks and shirts, and housekeepers generally,—what right had they to intrude into the realms of art and snatch the laurels from their masters’ brows! If I could but get the chance of reviewing this book, I thought to myself savagely!—I would misquote, misrepresent, and cut it to shreds with a joy too great for words! This Mavis Clare, ‘unsexed,’ as I at once called her in my own mind simply because she had the power I lacked,—wrote what she had to say with a gracious charm, freedom, and innate consciousness of strength,—a strength which forced me back upon myself and filled me with the bitterest humiliation. Without knowing her I hated her,—this woman who could win fame without the aid [p 174] of money, and who was crowned so brightly and visibly to the world that she was beyond criticism. I took up her book again and tried to cavil at it,—over one or two dainty bits of poetic simile and sentiment I laughed,—enviously. When I left the club later in the day, I took the book with me, divided between a curious desire to read it honestly through with justice to it and its author, and an impulse to tear it asunder and fling it into the road to be crushed in the mud under rolling cab and cart wheels. In this strange humour Rimânez found me, when at about four o’clock he returned from his mission to David McWhing, smiling and—triumphant.
“Congratulate me Geoffrey!” he exclaimed as he entered my room—“Congratulate me, and yourself! I am minus the five hundred pound cheque I showed you this morning!”
“McWhing has pocketed it then,”—I said sullenly—“All right! Much good may it do him, and his ‘charity’!”