Mrs. Linyard did not often read the papers; and there was therefore a
special significance in her approaching her husband one evening after
dinner with a copy of the _New York Investigator_ in her hand. Her
expression lent solemnity to the act: Mrs. Linyard had a limited but
distinctive set of expressions, and she now looked as she did when the
President of the University came to dine.
"You didn't tell me of this, Samuel," she said in a slightly tremulous
voice.
"Tell you of what?" returned the Professor, reddening to the margin of
his baldness.
"That you had published a book--I might never have heard of it if Mrs.
Pease hadn't brought me the paper."
Her husband rubbed his eye-glasses with a groan. "Oh, you would have
heard of it," he said gloomily.
Mrs. Linyard stared. "Did you wish to keep it from me, Samuel?" And as
he made no answer, she added with irresistible pride: "Perhaps you
don't know what beautiful things have been said about it."
He took the paper with a reluctant hand. "Has Pease been saying
beautiful things about it?"
"The Professor? Mrs. Pease didn't say he had mentioned it."
The author heaved a sigh of relief. His book, as Harviss had
prophesied, had caught the autumn market: had caught and captured it.
The publisher had conducted the campaign like an experienced
strategist. He had completely surrounded the enemy. Every newspaper,
every periodical, held in ambush an advertisement of "The Vital Thing."
Weeks in advance the great commander had begun to form his lines of
attack. Allusions to the remarkable significance of the coming work had
appeared first in the scientific and literary reviews, spreading thence
to the supplements of the daily journals. Not a moment passed without a
quickening touch to the public consciousness: seventy millions of
people were forced to remember at least once a day that Professor
Linyard's book was on the verge of appearing. Slips emblazoned with the
question: _Have you read "The Vital Thing"?_ fell from the pages of
popular novels and whitened the floors of crowded street-cars. The
query, in large lettering, assaulted the traveller at the railway
bookstall, confronted him on the walls of "elevated" stations, and
seemed, in its ascending scale, about to supplant the interrogations as
to soap and stove-polish which animate our rural scenery.
On the day of publication, the Professor had withdrawn to his
laboratory. The shriek of the advertisements was in his ears, and his
one desire was to avoid all knowledge of the event they heralded. A
reaction of self-consciousness had set in, and if Harviss's cheque had
sufficed to buy up the first edition of "The Vital Thing" the Professor
would gladly have devoted it to that purpose. But the sense of
inevitableness gradually subdued him, and he received his wife's copy
of the _Investigator_ with a kind of impersonal curiosity. The review
was a long one, full of extracts: he saw, as he glanced over them, how
well they would look in a volume of "Selections." The reviewer began by
thanking his author "for sounding with no uncertain voice that note of
ringing optimism, of faith in man's destiny and the supremacy of good,
which has too long been silenced by the whining chorus of a decadent
nihilism.... It is well," the writer continued, "when such reminders
come to us not from the moralist but from the man of science--when from
the desiccating atmosphere of the laboratory there rises this glorious
cry of faith and reconstruction."
The review was minute and exhaustive. Thanks no doubt to Harviss's
diplomacy, it had been given to the _Investigator's_ "best man," and
the Professor was startled by the bold eye with which his emancipated
fallacies confronted him. Under the reviewer's handling they made up
admirably as truths, and their author began to understand Harviss's
regret that they should be used for any less profitable purpose.
The _Investigator_, as Harviss phrased it, "set the pace," and the
other journals followed, finding it easier to let their critical
man-of-all-work play a variation on the first reviewer's theme than to
secure an expert to "do" the book afresh. But it was evident that the
Professor had captured his public, for all the resources of the
profession could not, as Harviss gleefully pointed out, have carried
the book so straight to the heart of the nation. There was something
noble in the way in which Harviss belittled his own share in the
achievement, and insisted on the inutility of shoving a book which had
started with such headway on.
"All I ask you is to admit that I saw what would happen," he said with
a touch of professional pride. "I knew you'd struck the right note--I
knew they'd be quoting you from Maine to San Francisco. Good as
fiction? It's better--it'll keep going longer."
"Will it?" said the Professor with a slight shudder. He was resigned to
an ephemeral triumph, but the thought of the book's persistency
frightened him.
"I should say so! Why, you fit in everywhere--science, theology,
natural history--and then the all-for-the-best element which is so
popular just now. Why, you come right in with the How-to-Relax series,
and they sell way up in the millions. And then the book's so full of
tenderness--there are such lovely things in it about flowers and
children. I didn't know an old Dryasdust like you could have such a lot
of sentiment in him. Why, I actually caught myself snivelling over that
passage about the snowdrops piercing the frozen earth; and my wife was
saying the other day that, since she's read 'The Vital Thing,' she
begins to think you must write the 'What-Cheer Column,' in the
_Inglenook."_ He threw back his head with a laugh which ended in the
inspired cry: "And, by George, sir, when the thing begins to slow off
we'll start somebody writing against it, and that will run us straight
into another hundred thousand."
And as earnest of this belief he drew the Professor a supplementary
cheque.
V
Mrs. Linyard's knock cut short the importunities of the lady who had
been trying to persuade the Professor to be taken by flashlight at his
study table for the Christmas number of the _Inglenook_. On this point
the Professor had fancied himself impregnable; but the unwonted smile
with which he welcomed his wife's intrusion showed that his defences
were weakening.
The lady from the _Inglenook_ took the hint with professional
promptness, but said brightly, as she snapped the elastic around her
note-book: "I shan't let you forget me, Professor."
The groan with which he followed her retreat was interrupted by his
wife's question: "Do they pay you for these interviews, Samuel?"
The Professor looked at her with sudden attention. "Not directly," he
said, wondering at her expression.