"That's it," she said, with a tender smile. She was fastening a button
in her glove. I doubt her recognition of the quotation.
When we were in our hansom, Fox began:
"I'm relieved by what I've seen of your copy. One didn't expect this
sort of thing from you. You think it a bit below you, don't you? Oh, I
know, I know. You literary people are usually so impracticable; you know
what I mean. Callan said you were the man. Callan has his uses; but one
has something else to do with one's paper. I've got interests of my own.
But you'll do; it's all _right_. You don't mind my being candid, do you,
now?" I muttered that I rather liked it.
"Well then," he went on, "now I see my way."
"I'm glad you do," I murmured. "I wish I did."
"Oh, that will be all right," Fox comforted. "I dare say Callan has
rather sickened you of the job; particularly if you ain't used to it.
But you won't find the others as trying. There's Churchill now, he's
your next. You'll have to mind him. You'll find him a decent chap. Not a
bit of side on him."
"What Churchill?" I asked.
"The Foreign Minister."
"The devil," I said.
"Oh, you'll find him all right," Fox reassured; "you're to go down to
his place to-morrow. It's all arranged. Here we are. Hop out." He suited
his own action to his words and ran nimbly up the new terra-cotta steps
of the _Hour's_ home. He left me to pay the cabman.
When I rejoined him he was giving directions to an invisible somebody
through folding doors.
"Come along," he said, breathlessly. "Can't see him," he added to a
little boy, who held a card in his hands. "Tell him to go to Mr. Evans.
One's life isn't one's own here," he went on, when he had reached his
own room.
It was a palatial apartment furnished in white and gold--Louis Quinze,
or something of the sort--with very new decorations after Watteau
covering the walls. The process of disfiguration, however, had already
begun. A roll desk of the least possible Louis Quinze order stood in one
of the tall windows; the carpet was marked by muddy footprints, and a
matchboard screen had been run across one end of the room.
"Hullo, Evans," Fox shouted across it, "just see that man from Grant's,
will you? Heard from the Central News yet?"
He was looking through the papers on the desk.
"Not yet, I've just rung them up for the fifth time," the answer came.
"Keep on at it," Fox exhorted.
"Here's Churchill's letter," he said to me. "Have an arm-chair; those
blasted things are too uncomfortable for anything. Make yourself
comfortable. I'll be back in a minute."
I took an arm-chair and addressed myself to the Foreign Minister's
letter. It expressed bored tolerance of a potential interviewer, but it
seemed to please Fox. He ran into the room, snatched up a paper from his
desk, and ran out again.
"Read Churchill's letter?" he asked, in passing. "I'll tell you all
about it in a minute." I don't know what he expected me to do with
it--kiss the postage stamp, perhaps.
At the same time, it was pleasant to sit there idle in the midst of the
hurry, the breathlessness. I seemed to be at last in contact with real
life, with the life that matters. I was somebody, too. Fox treated me
with a kind of deference--as if I were a great unknown. His "you
literary men" was pleasing. It was the homage that the pretender pays to
the legitimate prince; the recognition due to the real thing from the
machine-made imitation; the homage of the builder to the architect.
"Ah, yes," it seemed to say, "we jobbing men run up our rows and rows of
houses; build whole towns and fill the papers for years. But when we
want something special--something monumental--we have to come to you."
Fox came in again.
"Very sorry, my dear fellow, find I can't possibly get a moment for a
chat with you. Look here, come and dine with me at the Paragraph round
the corner--to-night at six sharp. You'll go to Churchill's to-morrow."
The Paragraph Club, where I was to meet Fox, was one of those sporadic
establishments that spring up in the neighbourhood of the Strand. It is
one of their qualities that they are always just round the corner;
another, that their stewards are too familiar; another, that they--in
the opinion of the other members--are run too much for the convenience
of one in particular.
In this case it was Fox who kept the dinner waiting. I sat in the little
smoking-room and, from behind a belated morning paper, listened to the
conversation of the three or four journalists who represented the
members. I felt as a new boy in a new school feels on his first
introduction to his fellows.
There was a fossil dramatic critic sleeping in an arm-chair before the
fire. At dinner-time he woke up, remarked:
"You should have seen Fanny Ellsler," and went to sleep again.
Sprawling on a red velvet couch was a _beau jeune homme_, with the
necktie of a Parisian-American student. On a chair beside him sat a
personage whom, perhaps because of his plentiful lack of h's, I took for
a distinguished foreigner.
They were talking about a splendid subject for a music-hall dramatic
sketch of some sort--afforded by a bus driver, I fancy.
I heard afterward that my Frenchman had been a costermonger and was now
half journalist, half financier, and that my art student was an employee
of one of the older magazines.
"Dinner's on the table, gents," the steward said from the door. He went
toward the sleeper by the fire. "I expect Mr. Cunningham will wear that
arm-chair out before he's done," he said over his shoulder.
"Poor old chap; he's got nowhere else to go to," the magazine employee
said.
"Why doesn't he go to the work'ouse," the journalist financier retorted.
"Make a good sketch that, eh?" he continued, reverting to his
bus-driver.
"Jolly!" the magazine employee said, indifferently.
"Now, then, Mr. Cunningham," the steward said, touching the sleeper on
the shoulder, "dinner's on the table."
"God bless my soul," the dramatic critic said, with a start. The steward
left the room. The dramatic critic furtively took a set of false teeth
out of his waistcoat pocket; wiped them with a bandanna handkerchief,
and inserted them in his mouth.
He tottered out of the room.