HIS JACK-HORNERISM
That autumn the Chancelleries of Europe happened to be rather less
egotistic than usual, and the English and American publics, seeing no
war-cloud on the horizon, were enabled to give the whole of their
attention to the balloon sent up into the sky by Mr. Onions Winter. They
stared to some purpose. There are some books which succeed before they
are published, and the commercial travellers of Mr. Onions Winter
reported unhesitatingly that _A Question of Cubits_ was such a book. The
libraries and the booksellers were alike graciously interested in the
rumour of its advent. It was universally considered a 'safe' novel; it
was the sort of novel that the honest provincial bookseller reads
himself for his own pleasure and recommends to his customers with a
peculiar and special smile of sincerity as being not only 'good,' but
'_really_ good.' People mentioned it with casual anticipatory remarks
who had never previously been known to mention any novel later than
_John Halifax Gentleman_.
This and other similar pleasing phenomena were, of course, due in part
to the mercantile sagacity of Mr. Onions Winter. For during a
considerable period the Anglo-Saxon race was not permitted to forget for
a single day that at a given moment the balloon would burst and rain
down copies of _A Question of Cubits_ upon a thirsty earth. _A Question
of Cubits_ became the universal question, the question of questions,
transcending in its insistence the liver question, the soap question,
the Encyclopaedia question, the whisky question, the cigarette question,
the patent food question, the bicycle tyre question, and even the
formidable uric acid question. Another powerful factor in the case was
undoubtedly the lengthy paragraph concerning Henry's adventure at the
Alhambra. That paragraph, having crystallized itself into a fixed form
under the title 'A Novelist in a Box,' had started on a journey round
the press of the entire world, and was making a pace which would have
left Jules Verne's hero out of sight in twenty-four hours. No editor
could deny his hospitality to it. From the New York dailies it travelled
via the _Chicago Inter-Ocean_ to the _Montreal Star_, and thence back
again with the rapidity of light by way of the _Boston Transcript_, the
_Philadelphia Ledger_, and the _Washington Post_, down to the _New
Orleans Picayune_. Another day, and it was in the _San Francisco Call_,
and soon afterwards it had reached _La Prensa_ at Buenos Ayres. It then
disappeared for a period amid the Pacific Isles, and was next heard of
in the _Sydney Bulletin_, the _Brisbane Courier_ and the _Melbourne
Argus_. A moment, and it blazed in the _North China Herald_, and was
shooting across India through the columns of the Calcutta _Englishman_
and the _Allahabad Pioneer_. It arrived in Paris as fresh as a new pin,
and gained acceptance by the Paris edition of the _New York Herald_,
which had printed it two months before and forgotten it, as a brand-new
item of the most luscious personal gossip. Thence, later, it had a
smooth passage to London, and was seen everywhere with a new
frontispiece consisting of the words: 'Our readers may remember.' Mr.
Onions Winter reckoned that it had been worth at least five hundred
pounds to him.
But there was something that counted more than the paragraph, and more
than Mr. Onions Winter's mercantile sagacity, in the immense preliminary
noise and rattle of _A Question of Cubits_: to wit, the genuine and
ever-increasing vogue of _Love in Babylon_, and the beautiful hopes of
future joy which it aroused in the myriad breast of Henry's public.
_Love in Babylon_ had falsified the expert prediction of Mark Snyder,
and had reached seventy-five thousand in Great Britain alone. What
figure it reached in America no man could tell. The average citizen and
his wife and daughter were truly enchanted by _Love in Babylon_, and
since the state of being enchanted is one of almost ecstatic felicity,
they were extremely anxious that Henry in a second work should repeat
the operation upon them at the earliest possible instant.
The effect of the whole business upon Henry was what might have been
expected. He was a modest young man, but there are two kinds of modesty,
which may be called the internal and the external, and Henry excelled
more in the former than in the latter. While never free from a secret
and profound amazement that people could really care for his stuff (an
infallible symptom of authentic modesty), Henry gradually lost the
pristine virginity of his early diffidence. His demeanour grew confident
and bold. His glance said: 'I know exactly who I am, and let no one
think otherwise.' His self-esteem as a celebrity, stimulated and
fattened by a tremendous daily diet of press-cuttings, and letters from
feminine admirers all over the vastest of empires, was certainly in no
immediate danger of inanition. Nor did the fact that he was still
outside the rings known as literary circles injure that self-esteem in
the slightest degree; by a curious trick of nature it performed the same
function as the press-cuttings and the correspondence. Mark Snyder said:
'Keep yourself to yourself. Don't be interviewed. Don't do anything
except write. If publishers or editors approach you, refer them to me.'
This suited Henry. He liked to think that he was in the hands of Mark
Snyder, as an athlete in the hands of his trainer. He liked to think
that he was alone with his leviathan public; and he could find a sort of
mild, proud pleasure in meeting every advance with a frigid, courteous
refusal. It tickled his fancy that he, who had shaken a couple of
continents or so with one little book; and had written another and a
better one with the ease and assurance of a novelist born, should be
willing to remain a shorthand clerk earning three guineas a week. (He
preferred now to regard himself as a common shorthand clerk, not as
private secretary to a knight: the piquancy of the situation was thereby
intensified.) And as the day of publication of _A Question of Cubits_
came nearer and nearer, he more and more resembled a little Jack Horner
sitting in his private corner, and pulling out the plums of fame, and
soliloquizing, 'What a curious, interesting, strange, uncanny, original
boy am I!'
Then one morning he received a telegram from Mark Snyder requesting his
immediate presence at Kenilworth Mansions.