“May I see it?” I murmured. “If I don’t mistake, it’s under your elbow
at this moment.”
“Is it?” he answered, blushing flagrantly, “Lor’ bless me, so it is!”
I took it from his hand, opened it, and read, over his undoubted
signature—Marmaduke Sweeting—the title, “The Fool of the Family.”
“Ah!” I thought, “of course. Like title like author.”
But I was wrong. The tale, a veritable _conte drolatique_, was as keen
and strong as a Maupassant. I had no choice but to take it at a
draught, smacking my lips after. Then I put the paper softly down and
looked across at him. His harmless features were set in a sort of
hypnotic smile, his hat was tilted over his eyes, and he was making
constant mouthfuls of the large silver knob of his stick. My eyes
travelled to and fro between this figure and the figures of print
_that were he_. What possible connexion could there be between the
two? I thought of Buffon writing in lace ruffles, and all at once
recognized a virtue in immaculate shirt-cuffs, and decided to consult
some fashionable hosier about raising my price per thousand words. In
the meantime my respect for Sweeting was born.
“So,” I said, “you are somebody after all?”
“Am I?” he answered, grinning bucolic. “Glad you’ve found it out.”
“Why,” I said, “honestly there’s genius in this story; but nothing to
what you’ve shown in concealing that you had any. There must be much
more to come out of the same bin.”
He flushed and laughed and wriggled, as I walked over and sat beside
him.
“O, I dare say!” he said. “Hope so, anyhow.”
“Not a doubt. What made you think of it, now?”
“O! I thought of it,” he said; and, after all, there was no better
reply to an idiotic question. I was beginning humbly to appraise
intellectual self-sufficiency at its value, and to appreciate the
hundred disguises of reason.
I saw a good deal of Sweeting, on his own initiative, after this. He
would visit me in my rooms, and discuss—none too sapiently, I may
have thought in other circumstances, and with the most ingenuous
admiration for his own abilities—the values of certain characters as
portrayed by him in a brilliant series, “The Love-Letters of a
Nonconformist,” which had immediately followed in the “Argonaut” “The
Fool of the Family,” and was taking the town by storm. Thus, “What
d’ee think of that old Lupin, last number,” he would chuckle, “with
his calling virtue an ‘emu,’ don’tcherknow?”
“Ha, yes!” I would correct him, with a nervous laugh. “‘Anæmia’ was
the word. You meant it, of course.”
“Why, didn’t I say it?” he would answer. “It’s got a big swallow
anyhow”; and then he would check himself suddenly, and, without
further explanation, eye me, and begin to whistle.
Now I might recall the passage to which he referred (to wit, that
every red blood corpuscle, being a seed peccancy, so to speak, made
virtue an anæmia) and try to puzzle out a quite new significance in
it. Suspecting that its author’s apparent naïveté was only assumed,
I was respectfully guarded in my answers, and, when he was gone, would
curiously ponder the perspicacious uses to which he would put them. He
did not consult me, I felt, as an oracle; but rather drew upon me for
the vulgar currency of thought, to which his exclusiveness was a
stranger. He was very secret about his own affairs; though I
understood that he was becoming quite an important “name” in the
literary world. Ostensibly he was not, after that first essay, to be
identified with the “Argonaut,” though any one, having an ounce of the
proper appreciation, could scarcely fail to mark in the “Love-Letters”
the right succession of qualities which had made the earlier story
notable. Indeed, he suffered more than any man I knew from the
penalties attaching to the popular author. The number of
communications, both signed and anonymous, which he received from
admirers was astonishing. Scarce a day passed but he brought me
specimens of them to discuss and laugh over. I did not, I must admit,
think his comments always in good taste; but then I was not personally
subject to the flattering pursuit, and so may have been no more
constituted to judge than a monk is of a worldling.
These testimonies to his fame were from every sort of individual—the
soldier, the divine, the poet, the painter, the actor (and more
especially the actress), the young person with views, the social
butterfly, the gushling late of the schoolroom, the woman of
sensibility late of the latest lifelong passion for art or religion,
and finding, as usual, the taste of life sour on her lips after a
recent debauch of sentiment. They all found something in the
“Love-Letters” to meet their particular cases—some note of subtle
sympathy, some first intimation to their misunderstood spirits of a
kindred emotion which had _felt_, and could lay its finger with divine
solace on the spot. No longer would they suffer a barren
grievance—that hair-shirt which not a soul suspected but to giggle
over. To take, for example, from the series a typical sentence which
served so many for a text—
“_To whom does the materialist cry his defiance—to whom but to God?
He cannot rest from baiting a Deity whose existence he denies. He
forgets that irony can wring no response from a vacuum._” A propos of
which wrote the following:—
A Half-pay General.—Don’t tell me, Sir, but you’ve served, like me,
a confounded ungrateful country, and learned your lesson! Memorialize
the devil rather than the War Office. You’ve hit it off in your last
sentence to a T.
A Chorus Girl.—Dear Sir,—You mean me to understand, I know, and
you’re quite right. The British public has no more ears than a ass, or
they’d reconise who ought to be playing Lotta in “The Belle of
Battersea.” It’s such a comfort you can’t tell. Please forgive this
presumptious letter from a stranger.—Yours very affectionately,
Dolly.
An Apostolic Fisherman.—I like your metaphor. I would suggest only
“ground-baiting a Deity” as more subtly applicable to the tactics of
a worldling. Note: “And Simon Peter said, ‘I go a-fishing.’”
Take, again, this excerpt: “_Doctors’ advice to certain patients to
occupy their minds recalls the Irishman’s receipt for making a cannon,
‘Take a hole and pour brass round it._’” Of which a “True Hibernian”
wrote—
Sir,—I’ve always maintained that the genuine “bull,” fathered on my
suffering country, came from the loins of the English lion. Murder,
now! How could a patient occupy his doctor’s mind as well as his own,
unless he was beside himself? And then he’d have no mind at all.
Or take, once more and to end, the sentence: “_The Past is that
paradoxical possession, a Shadow which we would not drop for the
Substance_”; which evoked the following from “One who has felt the
Weariness, the Fever, and the Fret”—
How strangely and exquisitely phrased! It brings, I know not how, the
memory of the Channel before me. I have only crossed it once; but, O!
the recollection! the solemn moving waters to which my soul went out!
These are specimens, but a few, of the responses wrung by Sweeting
from the human chords he touched. There were, in addition, prayers
innumerable for autographs, requests for the reading of manuscripts,
petitions for gratis copies of his works, to be sold for any and every
charity but the betterment of impecunious authors. He fairly basked in
the sunshine of a great reputation. There was only one flaw in his
enormous self-satisfaction. By a singular perversity and most
inexplicable coincidence, every one of these signed documents was
without an address. But, after all, coincidence, which is only another
name for the favouritism of Fate, must occasionally glut itself on an
approved subject. Sweeting was in favour with the gods, and enjoyed “a
high old time of it,” principally, perhaps, because he did not appear
to be ambitious of impressing any “set” but that with which he was
wont to forgather, and above which he made no affectation now of
rising superior.
I had an example one evening of this intellectual modesty, when
casually visiting the Earl’s Court grounds. There I encountered my
friend, the centre and protagonist of a select company in the
enclosure. All exquisitely wore exquisite evening dress (for myself I
always scornfully eschewed the livery), and all gravitated about
Sweeting with the unconscious homage which imbecility pays to
brains—“the desire of the moth for the star.” I could see at once
that he was become their Sirius, their bright particular glory,
reflecting credit upon their order. And he, who might have commanded
the suffrages of the erudite, seemed content with his little
conquest—to have reached, indeed, the apogee of his ambition—a
one-eyed king among the blind. These suffered my introduction with
some condescension, as a mere larva of Grub Street. They knew
themselves now as the stock from which was generated this real genius.
As for me, I was Gil Blas’s playwright at the supper of comedians. And
then, at somebody’s initiative, we were all swaggering off together
along the walks.
Now, I had always had a sort of envy of the _esprit de ton_ which
unites the guild of amiable gadflies; and, finding myself here, for
all my self-conscious intellectual superiority, of the smallest
account, I grew quickly sardonic. If I knew who wrote the
“Heptameron,” I didn’t know, even by sight, the Toddy Tomes who was
setting all the town roaring and droning with his song, “Papa’s
Perpendicular Pants.” It is a peevish experience to be “out of it,”
even if the _it_ is no more intelligible than a Toddy Tomes’s topical;
and gradually I waxed quite savage. Reputation is only relative after
all. There is no popular road to fame. As an abstract acquisition, it
may be said to pertain at its highest to the man who combines quick
perceptions with adaptive sympathies. I was not that man. In all, save
exclusively my own company, I felt “out of it,” awkward because
resentful, and resentful because awkward. I despised these asses,
however franked by Sweeting, yet coveted, vainly, the temporary grace
of seeming at home with them. I got very cross. And then we alighted
on Slater.
I knew it for his name by Sweeting’s greeting him in response to his
hail. He was seated at a little table all by himself, drinking
champagne, and alternately turning up and biting the ends of a red tag
of beard, and luridly pulling at a ponderous cigar. He was a small,
dingy person, so obviously inebriated, that the little human clearing
in which he sat solitary was nothing more than the formal recognition
of his state. He also, it was evident, to my disgust, despised the
conventions of dress, but without any of those qualms of
self-consciousness with which I was troubled. He lolled back, his hat
crushed over his eyes, a hump of dicky and knotted tie escaping from
his waistcoat-front, his disengaged thumb hooked into an arm-hole—as
filthy a little vagabond, confident and maudlin and truculent in one,
as you could wish. And he hailed Sweeting as a familiar.
My friend stopped, with a rather sheepish grin.
“Hullo, Slater!” said he. “A wet night, ain’t it?”
Our little group came chuckling all about the baboon. Even then, I
noticed, I was the one looked upon with most obvious disfavour by the
surrounding company.
“Look here,” said Sweeting, suddenly gripping me to the front. “Here’s
one of your cloth, Slate’. Let me introjuce you,” and he whispered in
my ear, “Awfully clever chap. You’ll like him when you know.”
I suppose my instant and instinctive repulsion was patent even to the
sot. He lurched to his feet, and swept off his crumpled hat with an
extravagant bow. Sweeting’s pack went into a howl of laughter. It was
evident they were not unacquainted with the creature, and looked to
him for some fun.
“My cloth, sir?” vociferated the beast. “Honoured, sir, ’m sure, sir.
Will you allow me to cut my coat according to it, sir? Has any
gentleman a pair of scissors? Just the tails, sir, no more—quite
large enough for me; and you’d look very elegant in an Eton jacket.”