"I admire you all the more for that. It always seems to me that the poet degrades his art who hunts for popularity—the poet or anybody else for that matter," added Victor, thinking of his own unpopular performances in St. Xavier's Settlements. "I am delighted to meet you, Mr. Blanchet. I have seen so much hunting after popularity in England that I honor any man of genius who has the courage to set his face against it."
"My latest volume of poems," Blanchet said firmly, "I do not even mean to publish. They shall be printed, I hope, and got out in a manner becoming of them—becoming, at least, of what I think of them; but they shall not be hawked about book shops and reviewed by self-conceited, ignorant prigs."
"Quite right, Mr. Blanchet; just what I should like to do myself if I could possibly imagine myself gifted like you. But still you must admit that it is little to the credit of the age that a poet should be forced thus to keep his treasures from the public eye. Besides, it may be all very well, you know, in your case or mine; but think of a man of genius who has to live by his poems! It's easy talking for men who have enough—my enough, I confess, is a pretty modest sort of thing—but you must know better than I that there are young men of genius—ay, of real genius—trying to make a living in London by writings that perhaps their own generation will never understand. There is what seems to me the hard thing." Mr. Heron grew quite animated.
The words sent a keen pang through Blanchet's heart. His new acquaintance, whom Blanchet assumed to be confoundedly wealthy, evidently regarded him as a person equally favored by fortune, and therefore only writing poetry to indulge the whim of his genius. Herbert Blanchet had heard from the Money women, in a vague sort of way, that Mr. Heron had been a governor of some place; it might have been Canada or India for aught he knew to the contrary; and he assumed that he must be a very aristocratic and self-conceited person. Blanchet would not for the world have admitted at that moment that he was poor; and he shuddered at the idea that Heron might somehow learn all about Mary Blanchet's official position in the court-house of Duke's Keeton. For all the dignity of poetry and high art, Mr. Blanchet was impressed with a painful consciousness of being small somehow in the company of Mr. Heron. It was not merely because he supposed Heron to be wealthy, for he knew Mrs. Money was rich, and that Lucy would be an heiress; and yet he was always quite at his ease with them, and accustomed to give himself airs and to be made much of; but it occurred to him that Mr. Heron's family, friends, and familiar surroundings would probably be very different from his; and he always found himself at home in the society of women, whom he knew that he could impress and impose on by his handsome presence. Yes, he felt himself rather small in the society of this pleasant, simple, unpretending young man, who was all the time looking up to him as a poet and a child of genius.
Greatly pleased was the poet and child of genius when Victor Heron asked him to come into his rooms and smoke a cigar before going to bed.
"You don't sleep much or keep early hours, I dare say, Mr. Blanchet; literary men don't, I suppose; and I only sleep when I can't help it. Let us smoke and have a talk for an hour or two."
"Night is my day," said Blanchet. "I don't think people who have minds can talk well in the hours before midnight. When I have to work in the day I sometimes close my shutters, light my gas, and fancy I am under the influences of night."
"I got the way of sitting up half the night," said Victor simply, "from living in places where one had best sleep in the day; but I am sure if I were a poet, I should delight in the night for its own sake."
There was something curious in the feeling of deference with which Heron regarded the young poet. He considered Blanchet as something not quite mortal, or at all events, masculine; something entitled to the homage one gives to a woman and the enthusiasm we feel to a spiritual teacher. Blanchet did not seem to him exactly like a man; rather like one of those creatures compounded of fire and dew whom we read of in legend and mythology. The feeling was not that of awe, because Blanchet was young and good-looking, and wore a dress coat and white tie, and it is impossible to have a feeling of awe for a man with a white tie. It was a feeling of delicate consideration and devotion. Had some rude person jostled against or otherwise insulted the poet as they passed along, Victor would have felt it his duty to interpose and resent the affront as promptly as if Minola Grey or Lucy Money were the object of the insult. To his unsophisticated colonial mind the poet was the sweet feminine voice of the literary grammar.
Heron occupied two or three rooms on the drawing-room floor of one of the streets running out of Piccadilly. He paid, perhaps, more for his accommodation than a prudent young man beginning the world all over again would have thought necessary; but Heron could not come down all at one step from his dignity as a sort of colonial governor, and he considered it, in a manner, due to the honor of England's administrative system, that he should maintain a gentlemanlike appearance in London while still engaged in fighting his battle—the battle which had not begun yet. Besides, as he had himself told Minola Grey, his troubles thus far were not money troubles. He had means enough to live like a modest gentleman even in London, provided he did not run into extravagant tastes of any kind, and he had saved, because he had had no means of spending it, a good deal of his salary while in the St. Xavier's his lodgings; and his condition seemed to Blanchet, when they entered the drawing-room together, and the servant was seen to be quietly busy in anticipating his master's wants, to be that of an easy opulence whereof, in the case of young bachelors, he had little personal knowledge. It was very impressive for the moment. Genius, and originality, and the school quailed at first before respectability, West End rooms, and a man servant.