One crowded hour of glorious life
Is worth an age without a name.
I had never suspected Sweeting of a desire to be “somebody.” Indeed,
the _jeunesse dorée_, in whose ranks Nature had seemed
unquestioningly to bestow him, is not subject to diffidence, or prone
to the wisdom which justifies itself in a knowledge of its own
limitations. I was familiar with his placid, cherubic face at a minor
club or two, in the Park, in Strand restaurants and Gaiety stalls; and
it had never once occurred to me to classify him as apart from his
fellows of the exquisite guild. If, like Keats, he could appreciate
the hell of conscious failure, its most poignant anguish, I could have
sworn, would borrow from some too-late realization of the correctest
“form” in a hat-brim or shirt-collar. I could have sworn it, I say,
and I should have been, of course, mistaken. Keats may have claimed it
as his poetical prerogative to go ill-dressed, and to object, though
John, to be dubbed “Johnny.” It remained to Sweeting to prove that a
man might be a very typical “Johnny” and a poet to boot. But I will
explain.
One day I entered the reading-room of the Junior Winston and nodded to
Sweeting, who was seated solitary at the newspaper-table. While I was
hunting for the “Saturday Review”—which was conducting, I had been
told, the vivisection of a friend of mine—my attention was attracted
by something actually ostentatious in Sweeting’s perusal of _his_
sheet, and I glanced across. Judge my astonishment when I saw in his
hands, not “Baily’s” or the “Pink ’Un,” but the very periodical I
sought. I gasped; then grinned.
“Hullo!” I said. “Since when have you taken to that?”
He attempted to reply with a face of wondering hauteur, but gave up at
the first twitch.
“O,” he said rather defiantly, “you lit’ary professionals think no
one’s in it but yourselves.”
“In what?”
“Why, this sort of thing,” he said, tapping the “Saturday”; “the real
stuff, you know.”
“Indeed,” I said, “we don’t. You’re always welcome to the reversion of
my place in it for one.”
“O, me!” he said airily. “It don’t positively apply there, you see,
being a sort of a kind of a professional myself.”
“My Sweet!” I exclaimed. “A professional—you?”
“O, yes,” he said. “Didn’t you know? Write for the ‘Argonaut.’ Little
thing of mine in it last number.”