I may as well say at once that this little record pretends in no degree
to be a picture either of my introduction to Mr. Paraday or of certain
proximate steps and stages. The scheme of my narrative allows no space
for these things, and in any case a prohibitory sentiment would hang
about my recollection of so rare an hour. These meagre notes are
essentially private, so that if they see the light the insidious forces
that, as my story itself shows, make at present for publicity will simply
have overmastered my precautions. The curtain fell lately enough on the
lamentable drama. My memory of the day I alighted at Mr. Paraday’s door
is a fresh memory of kindness, hospitality, compassion, and of the
wonderful illuminating talk in which the welcome was conveyed. Some
voice of the air had taught me the right moment, the moment of his life
at which an act of unexpected young allegiance might most come home to
him. He had recently recovered from a long, grave illness. I had gone
to the neighbouring inn for the night, but I spent the evening in his
company, and he insisted the next day on my sleeping under his roof. I
hadn’t an indefinite leave: Mr. Pinhorn supposed us to put our victims
through on the gallop. It was later, in the office, that the rude
motions of the jig were set to music. I fortified myself, however, as my
training had taught me to do, by the conviction that nothing could be
more advantageous for my article than to be written in the very
atmosphere. I said nothing to Mr. Paraday about it, but in the morning,
after my remove from the inn, while he was occupied in his study, as he
had notified me he should need to be, I committed to paper the main heads
of my impression. Then thinking to commend myself to Mr. Pinhorn by my
celerity, I walked out and posted my little packet before luncheon. Once
my paper was written I was free to stay on, and if it was calculated to
divert attention from my levity in so doing I could reflect with
satisfaction that I had never been so clever. I don’t mean to deny of
course that I was aware it was much too good for Mr. Pinhorn; but I was
equally conscious that Mr. Pinhorn had the supreme shrewdness of
recognising from time to time the cases in which an article was not too
bad only because it was too good. There was nothing he loved so much as
to print on the right occasion a thing he hated. I had begun my visit to
the great man on a Monday, and on the Wednesday his book came out. A
copy of it arrived by the first post, and he let me go out into the
garden with it immediately after breakfast, I read it from beginning to
end that day, and in the evening he asked me to remain with him the rest
of the week and over the Sunday.
That night my manuscript came back from Mr. Pinhorn, accompanied with a
letter the gist of which was the desire to know what I meant by trying to
fob off on him such stuff. That was the meaning of the question, if not
exactly its form, and it made my mistake immense to me. Such as this
mistake was I could now only look it in the face and accept it. I knew
where I had failed, but it was exactly where I couldn’t have succeeded.
I had been sent down to be personal and then in point of fact hadn’t been
personal at all: what I had dispatched to London was just a little
finicking feverish study of my author’s talent. Anything less relevant
to Mr. Pinhorn’s purpose couldn’t well be imagined, and he was visibly
angry at my having (at his expense, with a second-class ticket)
approached the subject of our enterprise only to stand off so helplessly.
For myself, I knew but too well what had happened, and how a miracle—as
pretty as some old miracle of legend—had been wrought on the spot to save
me. There had been a big brush of wings, the flash of an opaline robe,
and then, with a great cool stir of the air, the sense of an angel’s
having swooped down and caught me to his bosom. He held me only till the
danger was over, and it all took place in a minute. With my manuscript
back on my hands I understood the phenomenon better, and the reflexions I
made on it are what I meant, at the beginning of this anecdote, by my
change of heart. Mr. Pinhorn’s note was not only a rebuke decidedly
stern, but an invitation immediately to send him—it was the case to say
so—the genuine article, the revealing and reverberating sketch to the
promise of which, and of which alone, I owed my squandered privilege. A
week or two later I recast my peccant paper and, giving it a particular
application to Mr. Paraday’s new book, obtained for it the hospitality of
another journal, where, I must admit, Mr. Pinhorn was so far vindicated
as that it attracted not the least attention.