I made no reply for a moment. I was thinking of Lucio’s remarks on this very same subject.
“Well!” I said at last—“If I had no feeling when I wrote the book, I certainly have none now. Why man, I felt every line of it!—painfully and intensely!”
“Ay, ay indeed!” said Morgeson soothingly—“Or perhaps you thought you felt, which is another very curious phase of the literary temperament. You see, to convince people at all, you must first yourself be convinced. The result of this is generally a singular magnetic attraction between author and public. However I am a bad hand at argument,—and it is possible that in hasty reading I may have gathered a wrong impression of your intentions. Anyhow the book shall be a success if we can make it so. All I venture to ask of you is that you should personally endeavour to manage McWhing!”
I promised to do my best, and on this understanding we parted. I realised that Morgeson was capable of greater discernment than I had imagined, and his observations had given me material for thought which was not altogether [p 102] agreeable. For if my book, as he said, lacked tenacity, why then it would not take root in the public mind,—it would be merely the ephemeral success of a season,—one of those brief ‘booms’ in literary wares for which I had such unmitigated contempt,—and Fame would be as far off as ever, except that spurious imitation of it which the fact of my millions had secured. I was in no good humour that afternoon, and Lucio saw it. He soon elicited the sum and substance of my interview with Morgeson, and laughed long and somewhat uproariously over the proposed ‘managing’ of the redoubtable McWhing. He glanced at the five names of the other leading critics and shrugged his shoulders.
“Morgeson is quite right,”—he said—“McWhing is intimate with the rest of these fellows—they meet at the same clubs, dine at the same cheap restaurants and make love to the same painted ballet-girls. All in a comfortable little fraternal union together, and one obliges the other on their several journals when occasion offers. Oh yes! I should make up to McWhing if I were you.”
“But how?” I demanded, for though I knew McWhing’s name well enough having seen it signed ad nauseam to literary articles in almost every paper extant, I had never met the man; “I cannot ask any favour of a press critic.”
“Of course not!” and Lucio laughed heartily again—“If you were to do such an idiotic thing what a slating you’d get for your pains! There’s no sport a critic loves so much as the flaying of an author who has made the mistake of lowering himself to the level of asking favours of his intellectual inferiors! No, no, my dear fellow!—we shall manage McWhing quite differently,—I know him, though you do not.”
“Come, that’s good news!” I exclaimed—“Upon my word Lucio, you seem to know everybody.”
“I think I know most people worth knowing—“ responded Lucio quietly—“Though I by no means include Mr McWhing in the category of worthiness. I happened to make his personal acquaintance in a somewhat singular and exciting manner. It was in Switzerland, on that awkward ledge of [p 103] rock known as the Mauvais Pas. I had been some weeks in the neighbourhood on business of my own, and being surefooted and fearless, was frequently allowed by the guides to volunteer my services with theirs. In this capacity of amateur guide, capricious destiny gave me the pleasure of escorting the timid and bilious McWhing across the chasms of the Mer de Glace, and I conversed with him in the choicest French all the while, a language of which, despite his boasted erudition, he was deplorably ignorant. I knew who he was I must tell you, as I know most of his craft, and had long been aware of him as one of the authorised murderers of aspiring genius. When I got him on the Mauvais Pas, I saw that he was seized with vertigo; I held him firmly by the arm and addressed him in sound strong English thus—‘Mr McWhing, you wrote a damnable and scurrilous article against the work of a certain poet’ and I named the man—‘an article that was a tissue of lies from beginning to end, and which by its cruelty and venom embittered a life of brilliant promise, and crushed a noble spirit. Now, unless you promise to write and publish in a leading magazine a total recantation of this your crime when you get back to England,—if you get back!—giving that wronged man the ‘honourable mention’ he rightly deserves,—down you go! I have but to loosen my hold!’ Geoffrey, you should have seen McWhing then! He whined, he wriggled, he clung! Never was an oracle of the press in such an unoracular condition. ‘Murder!—murder!’ he gasped, but his voice failed him. Above him towered the snow peaks like the summits of that Fame he could not reach and therefore grudged to others,—below him the glittering ice-waves yawned in deep transparent hollows of opaline blue and green,—and afar off the tinkling cowbells echoed through the still air, suggestive of safe green pastures and happy homes. ‘Murder!’ he whispered gurglingly. ‘Nay!’ said I, ‘’tis I should cry Murder!—for if ever an arresting hand held a murderer, mine holds one now! Your system of slaying is worse than that of the midnight [p 104] assassin, for the assassin can but kill the body,—you strive to kill the soul. You cannot succeed, ’tis true, but the mere attempt is devilish. No shouts, no struggles will serve you here,—we are alone with Eternal Nature,—give the man you have slandered his tardy recognition, or else, as I said before—down you go!’ Well, to make my story short, he yielded, and swore to do as I bade him,—whereupon placing my arm round him as though he were my tender twin-brother, I led him safely off the Mauvais Pas and down the kindlier hill, where, what with the fright and the remains of vertigo, he fell a’weeping grievously. Would you believe it, that before we reached Chamounix we had become the best friends in the world? He explained himself and his rascally modes of action, and I nobly exonerated him,—we exchanged cards,—and when we parted, this same author’s bug-bear McWhing, overcome with sentiment and whisky toddy (he is a Scotchman you know) swore that I was the grandest fellow in the world, and that if ever he could serve me he would. He knew my princely title by this time, but he would have given me a still higher name. ‘You are not—hic—a poet yourself?’ he murmured, leaning on me fondly as he rolled to bed. I told him no. ‘I am sorry—very!’ he declared, the tears of whisky rising to his eyes, ‘If you had been I would have done a great thing for you,—I would have boomed you,—for nothing!’ I left him snoring nobly, and saw him no more. But I think he’ll recognize me, Geoffrey;—I’ll go and look him up personally. By all the gods!—if he had only known Who held him between life and death upon the Mauvais Pas!”
I stared, puzzled.