I did not believe this to be any more than a mad shot in the dark. Sir
Francis was one of those men who made mischief as Pygmalion made
Galatea. He fell in love with his own conceptions—would go any
lengths to gratify his passion for detraction. Do not suppose, from
his prefix, that he was a bold, bad baronet. He was just an actor of
the new creation—belonged to what was known by doyens of the old
Crummles school as the be-knighted profession. The stage was an
important incident in his social life, and he seldom missed a
rehearsal of any piece to which he was engaged.
“You know this Slater?” I said, as I drove in my latchkey. “As what?”
“As a clever, disreputable, and perfectly unscrupulous journalist.”
“It’s preposterous! What could induce him to part with such a
notoriety?”
“The highest bidder, of course.”
“What! Sweeting? If he’s still the simple Johnny you’d have him be?”
“I’m yet to learn that the simple Johnny lacks vanity.”
“But, for him, such an unheard-of way to gratify it!”
“Opportunism, sir. There are more things in the Johnny’s philosophy
than we dream of.”
“Well, I simply don’t believe it.”
Voules read, with an immobile face, the letters which Sweeting had
left with me. At the end he looked up.
“Are you open to a bet?”
“Can’t afford it.”
“Never mind, then.” He rose. “Truth for its own sake will do. Anyhow,
I presume you don’t object to countering on Slater?”
“O, do what you like!”
“Thanks. Would you wish to be in at the death?”
“Just as you please.”
“You see,” said he, with a pleasant affectation of righteousness, “if
my surmise is correct—and you’re the first one I’ve ventured to
confide in—it’s my plain duty to prick a very preposterous bubble.
Thank you for lending yourself to the cause of decency. Don’t say
anything until you hear from me. Good-bye!”—and he was gone, followed
by my inclination, only my inclination, to hurl a book after him.
I sat tight—always the more as I swelled over the delay—till, on the
third day following, Sweeting called on me. He came in very
shamefaced, but with a sort of suppressed triumph to support his
abjectness.
“I couldn’t help it, you know,” he said; “and I gave him a bit of my
mind after you’d gone.”
“Indeed,” I answered good-humouredly; “that was what you couldn’t well
afford, and it was generous of you.”
He was blankly impervious to the sarcasm. Had it been otherwise, my
new-fledged doubts had perhaps fluttered to the ground. After a moment
I saw him pull a paper from his pocket.
“Look here,” he said, vainly trying to suppress some emotion, which
was compound, in suggestion, of elation and terror. “You’ve made your
little joke, haven’t you, over all those other people forgettin’ to
put their addresses? Well, what do you think of _that_ for the Prime
Minister?”
I took from his hand a sheet of large official-looking paper, and
read—
Dear Sir,—You may have heard of my book, “The Foundations of
Assent.” If so, you will perhaps be interested to learn that I am
contemplating a complete revision of its text in the light of your
“Love-Letters.” They are plainly illuminating. From being a man of no
assured opinions, I have become converted, through their medium, to a
firm belief in the importance of the Nonconformist suffrage. Permit me
the honour, waiving the Premier, to shake by the hand as fellow-scribe
the author of that incomparable series. I shall do myself the pleasure
to call upon you at your rooms at nine o’clock this evening, when I
have a little communication to make which I hope will not be
unpleasing to you. Permit me to subscribe myself, with the profoundest
admiration, your obedient servant,
J. A. Burleigh.
“Well,” I murmured, feeling suffocated, “there’s no address here
either.”
“No,” he answered; “but, I say, it’s rather crushing. Won’t you come
and help me out with it?”
“What do you want _me_ for?” I protested. “I’ve no wish to be
annihilated in the impact between two great minds. You aren’t afraid?”
“O, no!” he said, perspiring. “It’ll be just a shake, and ‘So glad,’
and ‘Thanks, awfully,’ I suppose, and nothing more to speak of. But
you might just as well come, on the chance of helping me out of a
tight place. It’s _viva voce_, don’tcherknow—not like writin’, with
all your wits about you. And I shall get some other fellows there,
too, so’s we aren’t allowed to grow too intimate; and you might as
well.”
“I wonder what the ‘communication’ is?” I mused.
“O, nothin’ much, I don’t suppose,” said Sweeting, with a blushing
nonchalance. But it was evident that he had pondered the delirious
enigma and emerged from it Sir Marmaduke.
“Well,” I concluded rather sourly, “I’ll come.”
He went away much relieved, and I fell into a fit of stupor. In the
afternoon a telegram from Voules reached me, “Be at Sweeting’s 8.45
to-night.”
At a quarter to nine I kept my appointment. Sweeting was insufferably
well-to-do, and his rooms were luxurious. They were inhabited at the
moment by an irreproachable and almost silent company. Among them I
encountered many of the young gentlemen who had been witnesses of, and
abettors in, my discomfiture the other night. But they were all too
nervous now to presume upon the recognition—too oppressed with the
stupendous nature of the honour about to be conferred upon their
host—too self-weighted with their responsibility as his kindred and
associates. They could only ogle him with large eyes over immensely
stiff collars, as he moved about from one to another, panic-struck but
radiant. It was the crowning moment of his life; yet its sweeter
aftermath, I could feel, reposed for him in the sleek necks of
champagne-bottles just visible on a supper-table in the next room. He
longed to pass from the test to the toast, and the intoxicating memory
of a triumph happily accomplished. And then suddenly Slater came in.
He was not expected, I saw in a moment. Indeed, how could such a
death’s-head claim place at such a feast? He was no whit improved upon
my single memory of him, unless, to give the little beast his due, a
shade less inebriated. But he was as grinning, cocksure, and truculent
a little Bohemian as ever. Sweeting stared at him aghast.
“Good Lord, Slate’,” said he, “what brings you here, now?”
“Why, your wire, old chap,” said the animal.
“I never sent one, I swear.”
“Oho!” cries Slater, glaring. “D’ you want to go back on your word?
Ain’t I fine enough for this fine company?” and he pulled a dirty
scrap of paper out of his pocket, and screeched, “Read what you said
yourself, then!”
The telegram went round from hand to hand. I read, when it came to my
turn: “Come supper my rooms 8.45 to-night. M. Sweeting.”
“I never sent it,” protested our host. “It must be a hoax. Look here,
Slate’. The truth is, the Prime Minister wrote he wanted to make my
acquaintance, because—because of the ‘Letters,’ you know; and—and
he’s due here in a few minutes.”
The creature grinned like a jackal.
“My eyes, what fun!” he said. “I shall love to see you two meet.”
“There’s—there’s fizz in the next room, Slate’,” said the miserable
Sweeting.
“You needn’t tell me,” said Slater. “I’d spotted it already.”
And then, before another word could be said, the door was opened, and
the guest of the evening announced.
He came in smiling, ingratiatory, the familiar willowy figure in
pince-nez. We all rose, and the stricken Sweeting advanced to meet
him. The great man, looking, it is true, a little surprised over his
reception, held out his hand cordially.
“And is this——” he purred—and paused.
Sweeting did not answer: he was beyond it; but he nodded, and opened
his mouth, as if to beg that the “communication” might be posted into
it, and the matter settled off-hand.
“I did not, I confess,” said the Premier, glancing smilingly round,
“expect my little visit of duty—yes, of duty, sir—to provoke this
signal welcome on the part of a company in which I recognize, if I
mistake not, a very constellation of the intellectual aristocracy.”
Here a youth, with a solitaire in his eye, and a vague sense of
parliamentary fitness, ejaculated “Hear, hear!” and immediately
becoming aware of the enormity, quenched himself for ever.
“It makes,” went on the right hon. gentleman, “the strict limit to my
call, which less momentous but more exacting engagements have obliged
me to prescribe, appear the more ungracious. In view of this enforced
restriction, I have equipped myself with a single question and a
message. Your answer to the first will, I hope—nay, I am
convinced—justify the tenor of the second.”
He released, with a smile, the hand which all this time he had
retained, much to Sweeting’s embarrassment, in his own. Finding it
restored to him, Sweeting promptly put it in his pocket, like a tip.
“I ask,” said the Premier, “the author of ‘The Love-Letters of a
Nonconformist’ to listen to the following excerpt” (he produced a
marked number of the “Argonaut” from his pocket) “from his own
immortal series, as preliminary to some inquiry naturally evoked
thereby”—and he read out, with the intonation of a confident orator:
“‘We have (shall I not declare it, my sweet?) the most beautiful women
and the most beautiful poets in the world—two very good things, but
the latter unaccountable. Passion, in perpetuating, idyllically
refines upon the features of its desire; hence the succession of
assured physical loveliness in a race which, however insensible to the
appeals of emotional and intellectual beauty, can understand and
worship the beauty that is plain to see.’”
Here the reader paused, and looking over his glasses with a smile,
very slightly shook his head, and murmuring, “The _beauty_ that is
_plain_ to see! H’m! a fence that I will recommend to Rosebery,”
continued, “‘Passion endows passion, far-reaching, to bribe the gods
with a compound interest of beauty. It touches heaven in imagination
through its unborn generations. It tops the bunker of the world, and,
soaring, drops, heedless of Time the putter, straight into the
eighteenth hole of the empyrean.”
The Premier stopped again, and, looking gravely at Sweeting, asked,
“What is the eighteenth hole of the empyrean?”
Now I expected my friend to reveal himself, to sally brilliantly,
referring his questioner, perhaps, to some satire in the making, some
latter-day Apocalypse of which here was a sample extracted for bait to
the curious. Well, he did reveal himself, but not in the way I hoped.
He just strained and strained, and then dropped his jaw with the most
idiotic little hee-haw of a laugh I ever heard, and—that was all.
The other, looking immensely surprised, repeated his question: “What,
sir, I ask you, is the eighteenth hole of the empyrean?”
“Why, the one the Irishman poured brass round.”
I started. It was not Sweeting who spoke, but Slater. The little demon
stood grinning in the background, his tongue in his cheek, and his
hands in his trousers pockets.
“H’mph!” said the Prime Minister. “Very apt, sir. I recall the
witticism. It is singularly applicable at the moment to the
reorganization of the Liberal party. ‘Take a hole and pour brass round
it.’ Exactly.”
His manner, there was no denying it, was extremely severe as he again
addressed the perspiring Sweeting—
“Once more, sir,” he said, “I resume our discussion of a passage, the
intellectual rights in which you would seem to have made over to your
friends.” And, with a positive scowl, he continued his reading.
“‘So well’ (writes the impassioned Nonconformist) ‘for the national
appreciation of beauty that is physical. On the other hand (tell me,
dear. It would come so reassuringly from your lips), what can account
for the spasmodic recurrence in our midst of the inspired singer? What
makes his reproduction possible among a people endowed with
tunelessness, innocent of a metrical ear?’”
Quite abruptly the Prime Minister ended, and, deliberately folding his
paper, hypnotized with a searching stare his unhappy examinee.
“The question, Mr. Sweeting,” said he, “is before the House. You will
recognize it as ending—with some psychologic subtlety, to be
continued in our next—number 10—the last published of the
“Argonaut.” To me, I confess, the answer can be, like the Catholic
Church, only one and indivisible. Upon the question of your conformity
with my view depends the nature of the communication which I am to
have the pleasure, conditionally, of making to you. Plainly, then,
sir, what makes possible the spasmodic recurrence of the inspired
singer in the midst of a people endowed with tunelessness and innocent
of a metrical ear? I feel convinced you can return no answer but one.”
A dead silence fell upon the room. Sweeting scratched his right calf
with his left foot, and giggled. Then in a moment, yielding the last
of his wits to the unendurable strain, he gave all up, and, wheeling
upon Slater—
“O, look here, Slate’!” he said. “What does?” and without waiting for
the answer, drove himself a passage through his satellites, and
collapsed half dead upon a sofa.
The Premier, with an amazing calm, returned the “Argonaut” to his
pocket.
“Surely, sir,” said he, “this is inexplicable; but” (he made a
denunciatory gesture with his hands) “it remains to me only to inform
you that, conditional on your right reply to your own postulate, it
was to have been my privilege to acquaint you of His Majesty’s
intention to bestow upon you a Civil List pension of £250 a year;
which now, of course——”