I was frankly, at the end of three days, a very prejudiced critic, so
that one morning when, in the garden, my great man had offered to read me
something I quite held my breath as I listened. It was the written
scheme of another book—something put aside long ago, before his illness,
but that he had lately taken out again to reconsider. He had been
turning it round when I came down on him, and it had grown magnificently
under this second hand. Loose liberal confident, it might have passed
for a great gossiping eloquent letter—the overflow into talk of an
artist’s amorous plan. The theme I thought singularly rich, quite the
strongest he had yet treated; and this familiar statement of it, full too
of fine maturities, was really, in summarised splendour, a mine of gold,
a precious independent work. I remember rather profanely wondering
whether the ultimate production could possibly keep at the pitch. His
reading of the fond epistle, at any rate, made me feel as if I were, for
the advantage of posterity, in close correspondence with him—were the
distinguished person to whom it had been affectionately addressed. It
was a high distinction simply to be told such things. The idea he now
communicated had all the freshness, the flushed fairness, of the
conception untouched and untried: it was Venus rising from the sea and
before the airs had blown upon her. I had never been so throbbingly
present at such an unveiling. But when he had tossed the last bright
word after the others, as I had seen cashiers in banks, weighing mounds
of coin, drop a final sovereign into the tray, I knew a sudden prudent
alarm.
“My dear master, how, after all, are you going to do it? It’s infinitely
noble, but what time it will take, what patience and independence, what
assured, what perfect conditions! Oh for a lone isle in a tepid sea!”
“Isn’t this practically a lone isle, and aren’t you, as an encircling
medium, tepid enough?” he asked, alluding with a laugh to the wonder of
my young admiration and the narrow limits of his little provincial home.
“Time isn’t what I’ve lacked hitherto: the question hasn’t been to find
it, but to use it. Of course my illness made, while it lasted, a great
hole—but I dare say there would have been a hole at any rate. The earth
we tread has more pockets than a billiard-table. The great thing is now
to keep on my feet.”
“That’s exactly what I mean.”
Neil Paraday looked at me with eyes—such pleasant eyes as he had—in
which, as I now recall their expression, I seem to have seen a dim
imagination of his fate. He was fifty years old, and his illness had
been cruel, his convalescence slow. “It isn’t as if I weren’t all
right.”
“Oh if you weren’t all right I wouldn’t look at you!” I tenderly said.
We had both got up, quickened as by this clearer air, and he had lighted
a cigarette. I had taken a fresh one, which with an intenser smile, by
way of answer to my exclamation, he applied to the flame of his match.
“If I weren’t better I shouldn’t have thought of _that_!” He flourished
his script in his hand.
“I don’t want to be discouraging, but that’s not true,” I returned. “I’m
sure that during the months you lay here in pain you had visitations
sublime. You thought of a thousand things. You think of more and more
all the while. That’s what makes you, if you’ll pardon my familiarity,
so respectable. At a time when so many people are spent you come into
your second wind. But, thank God, all the same, you’re better! Thank
God, too, you’re not, as you were telling me yesterday, ‘successful.’ If
_you_ weren’t a failure what would be the use of trying? That’s my one
reserve on the subject of your recovery—that it makes you ‘score,’ as the
newspapers say. It looks well in the newspapers, and almost anything
that does that’s horrible. ‘We are happy to announce that Mr. Paraday,
the celebrated author, is again in the enjoyment of excellent health.’
Somehow I shouldn’t like to see it.”
“You won’t see it; I’m not in the least celebrated—my obscurity protects
me. But couldn’t you bear even to see I was dying or dead?” my host
enquired.
“Dead—passe encore; there’s nothing so safe. One never knows what a
living artist may do—one has mourned so many. However, one must make the
worst of it. You must be as dead as you can.”
“Don’t I meet that condition in having just published a book?”
“Adequately, let us hope; for the book’s verily a masterpiece.”
At this moment the parlour-maid appeared in the door that opened from the
garden: Paraday lived at no great cost, and the frisk of petticoats, with
a timorous “Sherry, sir?” was about his modest mahogany. He allowed half
his income to his wife, from whom he had succeeded in separating without
redundancy of legend. I had a general faith in his having behaved well,
and I had once, in London, taken Mrs. Paraday down to dinner. He now
turned to speak to the maid, who offered him, on a tray, some card or
note, while, agitated, excited, I wandered to the end of the precinct.
The idea of his security became supremely dear to me, and I asked myself
if I were the same young man who had come down a few days before to
scatter him to the four winds. When I retraced my steps he had gone into
the house, and the woman—the second London post had come in—had placed my
letters and a newspaper on a bench. I sat down there to the letters,
which were a brief business, and then, without heeding the address, took
the paper from its envelope. It was the journal of highest renown, _The
Empire_ of that morning. It regularly came to Paraday, but I remembered
that neither of us had yet looked at the copy already delivered. This
one had a great mark on the “editorial” page, and, uncrumpling the
wrapper, I saw it to be directed to my host and stamped with the name of
his publishers. I instantly divined that _The Empire_ had spoken of him,
and I’ve not forgotten the odd little shock of the circumstance. It
checked all eagerness and made me drop the paper a moment. As I sat
there conscious of a palpitation I think I had a vision of what was to
be. I had also a vision of the letter I would presently address to Mr.
Pinhorn, breaking, as it were, with Mr. Pinhorn. Of course, however, the
next minute the voice of _The Empire_ was in my ears.
The article wasn’t, I thanked heaven, a review; it was a “leader,” the
last of three, presenting Neil Paraday to the human race. His new book,
the fifth from his hand, had been but a day or two out, and _The Empire_,
already aware of it, fired, as if on the birth of a prince, a salute of a
whole column. The guns had been booming these three hours in the house
without our suspecting them. The big blundering newspaper had discovered
him, and now he was proclaimed and anointed and crowned. His place was
assigned him as publicly as if a fat usher with a wand had pointed to the
topmost chair; he was to pass up and still up, higher and higher, between
the watching faces and the envious sounds—away up to the dais and the
throne. The article was “epoch-making,” a landmark in his life; he had
taken rank at a bound, waked up a national glory. A national glory was
needed, and it was an immense convenience he was there. What all this
meant rolled over me, and I fear I grew a little faint—it meant so much
more than I could say “yea” to on the spot. In a flash, somehow, all was
different; the tremendous wave I speak of had swept something away. It
had knocked down, I suppose, my little customary altar, my twinkling
tapers and my flowers, and had reared itself into the likeness of a
temple vast and bare. When Neil Paraday should come out of the house he
would come out a contemporary. That was what had happened: the poor man
was to be squeezed into his horrible age. I felt as if he had been
overtaken on the crest of the hill and brought back to the city. A
little more and he would have dipped down the short cut to posterity and
escaped.