“NOW BARABBAS WAS A PUBLISHER.”
I regret to say that from that day forth Romeo was more marked in his
courtesy to me than ever. His manner had always a tinge of sweet antique
courtliness; but now he surpassed himself. I regret it, I say, because I
was afraid I recognised in this courtesy some lingering undercurrent of
class feeling. The dear fellow would have been polite to a type-writer
girl from the dregs of the people, no doubt—he did not know how to be
less than polite to anyone; but he was politer still when he understood
that I was an officer’s daughter, and (as he learned a week later) that
my mother had sprung from a great Anglo-Indian family. This was treason
to his principles; for Romeo, as he had said, was more than half a
socialist; but I condoned that fault for the sake of his unvarying
kindness.
Besides, I think he thought well of me because I was loyal to my
father’s memory. As though anyone who had known my dear father could
have been otherwise!
Romeo published for Sidney Trevelyan. From the moment when I first
noticed “An Heir of the Plantagenets” among the rows of books in glazed
paper covers in the pigeon-holes, I had always longed to be present some
day when the famous novelist came in to discuss royalties or _éditions
de luxe_ with his publisher. Sidney Trevelyan’s name was like Charing
Cross or Hyde Park Corner—a familiar piece of public property. One
afternoon I had my will. I was seated at my table, clicking away at some
letters, when I heard on the stairs a rich strident voice, diffusing
itself very loud in clear shrill accents. I know not which struck me
most, its richness or its stridency. It was a sonorous voice, which one
turn of a note would have made unendurable. “He is in his lair?” it
said, filling the room. “Plotting schemes to suck my blood? Then I will
track him to his earth—the young vampire. My dear Barabbas, how are
you?”
He burst into the sanctum, a whirlwind of a man—large, loose-limbed,
masterful, with a restless grey eye, and a huge mop of brown hair, shot
with threads of russet. Romeo rose to greet him. He flung himself into a
chair. It creaked beneath his elephantine weight. I left off clicking at
once, and went on with a piece of long-hand transcription. Or rather, to
be frank, I feigned to transcribe, though my pen was inkless.
As a rule, when authors came, ’twas my place to leave the study for
awhile, and take refuge with Puck and Ariel in the anteroom. But as the
great man entered—two yards of humanity, double width—Romeo signed to
me to remain, with a quick movement of the eyebrow. He knew my wish, and
was kind enough to remember it. I counted it to him for righteousness.
Sidney Trevelyan sniffed, and scanned the room, with its Oriental
hangings, and its scent of cedar-wood. “A nice den, Barabbas, a nice
den!” he observed, in a condescending tone; “an Ali Baba’s cave, rich
with bones of authors; vastly improved since the days of the old
robber!”
Romeo winced. Like myself, he respected his father.
“You have garnished it afresh,” the great novelist continued, “from the
spoils of the Egyptians. You have decked yourself in purple and fine
linen! Well, ’tis well you should be comfortable in this world, no
doubt: for in the next——But I refrain from painting a Tartarean
picture. Dante has done it so well before me that, like the grocer in my
street, he defies competition. I see you, my dear Barabbas,” he raised
his voice still louder, almost lapsing into a falsetto, “I see you
lolling here in Eastern opulence, bathed in Cyprian perfumes, and fanned
by obsequious Circassian odalisques”—I _felt_ him glance my way, though
my eyes were fixed on my paper; “I see you, like the sultan in Shelley’s
_Hellas_, surrounded by large-eyed houris, of voluptuous bosoms, who
strew your restless pillow with opiate flowers—I call your pillow
restless, my dear fellow, partly because that was Shelley’s epithet, if
memory serves me, but partly also because a publisher (especially a
young one) can scarcely expect to enjoy sound slumber; later on, no
doubt, as he becomes hardened in crime, he sleeps as well as a digestion
impaired by old port permits; but at first, remorse must disturb his
fitful rest—I see you, I say, with opiate flowers on your couch
stripped—what was the rhyme?—ah, yes, ‘flowers,’ ‘pillow’—stripped
from orient bowers by the Indian billow. That is the picture—_here_.
But at last comes the awakening.” He struck a dramatic attitude, and
held up one hand; he had impressive fat hands, which seemed always in
evidence. “You start from your sleep like Mahmood. ‘Man the
seraglio—guard! Make fast the gate!’ You dream yourself still lapped in
Eastern magnificence. Then . . . . ha! what’s this? An odour of
brimstone—a pallid whiff of blue flame—Mephistopheles smiling grimly
on the victim he has landed—you know where you are—unlike the current
hero of music-hall romance—you stretch dim hands of fear and grope—you
sink down, down, down, on a couch of liquid fire. ‘All is lost! Why was
I ever a publisher?’ In which of his circles did Dante place publishers?
Was it not close between the avaricious and the prevaricators? But aloft
in the empyrean, pillowed on purple cloud, meanwhile, I enjoy that
delight upon which Tertullian insisted as a prime element in the ecstasy
of the Blest—the delight of beholding you——But your satellites
overhear me! Sense of discipline forbids! Barabbas,” he waved his hand,
“I draw a veil over your future condition!”
He paused for want of breath. Most fat men are sluggish: this mountain
of flesh was alive and volcanic in every atom. Romeo began in his soft
voice, “And on what particular conspiracy of crime have you come to-day
to consult the habitual criminal?”
Sidney Trevelyan smiled. He liked to be taken in his mood. “Well, my
business,” he said, “is, as you anticipate, a fresh raid against the
purses of the Philistines. We must spoil them, my dear Barabbas; we must
spoil them, in unison. Here, our interests are identical. They have
taken two thousand, I see, of the three-volume ‘Mahatmas.’ That’s not
enough; you must issue at once a six-shilling edition. Grovelling
beasts, prone in the mud they love, what do they mean by rejecting this
so great salvation? Let Mudies see to it! I shall answer their neglect
by flinging back ‘Mahatmas’ in their teeth for six shillings. I know
whence it comes, this rebuff: those ignorant parrots, the critics. They
toss at me ever their parrot cry of ‘Artificial, artificial!’ Their own
thoughts grub and grunt in the mud of their sty, and they blame it to
the eagle that he should circle about gleaming icy peaks in clear ether.
‘Unnatural,’ they say; ‘Overloaded.’ That man Snigg, or Snagg, or
Snogg—something Teutonic and unlovely—I decline to remember his
honoured name—he reviewed me in the _Parthenon_. He has no wings
himself, and therefore he thinks flight an indecent gambolling. But what
do I care for the whole crew? Not an obolus, not a doit—neither for
Snagg nor Bagg, neither for Archer nor Parcher.”
He paused again to catch breath. In the lull, Romeo put in quietly, “It
is too soon, in my opinion, for a cheap edition.”
“No, Barabbas, it is not; it is the psychological moment. The world
awaits it with hushed breath. Six shillings—bound in cloth—Irish
linen—dark green—a subtle shade—a shade I have in my mind’s eye—like
lavender leaves in spring, when the sap mounts emerald through sea-hoary
stems. You catch my idea? A green not wholly green, not altogether blue,
not grey, not glaucous, but something of all, and more than all; with a
cunning design by that mad young Belgian—withy-bands that twist into
interlacing dragons; the title in their midst, in somewhat Celtic
letters.”
He broke off abruptly. Once more I could feel him glance my way. I
seemed to see through the back of my head. I was sensitive to his
movements.
Suddenly, he burst out in a quite different voice, snorting like a
war-horse: “Send that young woman away!” he cried, executing a sort of
ponderous rhinoceros-dance before me. “Send her away! I tell you I can’t
stand her. I won’t have her scribbling there and making notes of all I
say. She’s a paragraphist—a paragraphist: the vilest spawn on God’s
earth, a paragraphist! What do you mean by setting spavined shorthand
writers to report my _obiter dicta_?” He advanced towards me, striding:
I had risen hurriedly. “Go off!” he cried, waving his hands at me as if
I were a gadfly. “Go off! I won’t be listened to and paragraphed. I
could feel you paragraphing me. Away, young woman: away with you.” And
by dint of sheer bulk, he drove me before him.
Romeo opened the door for me. He spoke with deference. “I think, Miss
Appleton,” he said, “you had better take a seat in the anteroom for the
moment, as your presence here seems to disturb Mr. Trevelyan.”
I went out, mystified. As the door closed behind me, I heard the great
man snort again. “Now, really, Barabbas, if you choose to keep dusky
Samian slaves chained in your lair for your hours of leisure, you should
have the decency to unchain them when fellow-conspirators come in with
proposals for a joint campaign against Askelon.”
I sat in the anteroom for half an hour. Ariel gazed in my face with
sympathetic inquiry. “The old bear was rude?” he asked at last, in a low
voice.
“I might almost call him so.”
“It is his way,” Ariel replied. “He seems to wipe his shoes on one.”
“But he’s not a bad old chap, either,” Puck put in. “He chucked me
half-a-crown once for going a message for him.”
“And called you a Tartar-nosed imp,” Ariel added; “and hit you in the
eye with it.”
“He is a very great genius,” I observed, sententiously, half to salve my
own offended dignity.
“But a genius is a man,” Ariel remarked. And I felt he had reason.
Twenty minutes later, the famous writer emerged. He cast a scowl at me
in passing. “Change your type-writer woman!” he said curtly to Romeo.
“Good-bye, my dear Barabbas. Rob on, rob ever.” His broad back vanished
down the staircase like a sinking hippopotamus.
“Well?” Romeo asked, with an anxious face, as I returned to my post when
the tornado had passed. “Now you have seen him, what do you think of
Sidney Trevelyan?”
“I think,” I said, “I would rather be a Barabbas than a Byron.”