A week later, early in May, my glorified friend came up to town, where,
it may be veraciously recorded he was the king of the beasts of the year.
No advancement was ever more rapid, no exaltation more complete, no
bewilderment more teachable. His book sold but moderately, though the
article in _The Empire_ had done unwonted wonders for it; but he
circulated in person to a measure that the libraries might well have
envied. His formula had been found—he was a “revelation.” His momentary
terror had been real, just as mine had been—the overclouding of his
passionate desire to be left to finish his work. He was far from
unsociable, but he had the finest conception of being let alone that I’ve
ever met. For the time, none the less, he took his profit where it
seemed most to crowd on him, having in his pocket the portable
sophistries about the nature of the artist’s task. Observation too was a
kind of work and experience a kind of success; London dinners were all
material and London ladies were fruitful toil. “No one has the faintest
conception of what I’m trying for,” he said to me, “and not many have
read three pages that I’ve written; but I must dine with them
first—they’ll find out why when they’ve time.” It was rather rude
justice perhaps; but the fatigue had the merit of being a new sort, while
the phantasmagoric town was probably after all less of a battlefield than
the haunted study. He once told me that he had had no personal life to
speak of since his fortieth year, but had had more than was good for him
before. London closed the parenthesis and exhibited him in relations;
one of the most inevitable of these being that in which he found himself
to Mrs. Weeks Wimbush, wife of the boundless brewer and proprietress of
the universal menagerie. In this establishment, as everybody knows, on
occasions when the crush is great, the animals rub shoulders freely with
the spectators and the lions sit down for whole evenings with the lambs.
It had been ominously clear to me from the first that in Neil Paraday
this lady, who, as all the world agreed, was tremendous fun, considered
that she had secured a prime attraction, a creature of almost heraldic
oddity. Nothing could exceed her enthusiasm over her capture, and
nothing could exceed the confused apprehensions it excited in me. I had
an instinctive fear of her which I tried without effect to conceal from
her victim, but which I let her notice with perfect impunity. Paraday
heeded it, but she never did, for her conscience was that of a romping
child. She was a blind violent force to which I could attach no more
idea of responsibility than to the creaking of a sign in the wind. It
was difficult to say what she conduced to but circulation. She was
constructed of steel and leather, and all I asked of her for our
tractable friend was not to do him to death. He had consented for a time
to be of india-rubber, but my thoughts were fixed on the day he should
resume his shape or at least get back into his box. It was evidently all
right, but I should be glad when it was well over. I had a special
fear—the impression was ineffaceable of the hour when, after Mr. Morrow’s
departure, I had found him on the sofa in his study. That pretext of
indisposition had not in the least been meant as a snub to the envoy of
_The Tatler_—he had gone to lie down in very truth. He had felt a pang
of his old pain, the result of the agitation wrought in him by this
forcing open of a new period. His old programme, his old ideal even had
to be changed. Say what one would, success was a complication and
recognition had to be reciprocal. The monastic life, the pious
illumination of the missal in the convent cell were things of the
gathered past. It didn’t engender despair, but at least it required
adjustment. Before I left him on that occasion we had passed a bargain,
my part of which was that I should make it my business to take care of
him. Let whoever would represent the interest in his presence (I must
have had a mystical prevision of Mrs. Weeks Wimbush) I should represent
the interest in his work—or otherwise expressed in his absence. These
two interests were in their essence opposed; and I doubt, as youth is
fleeting, if I shall ever again know the intensity of joy with which I
felt that in so good a cause I was willing to make myself odious.
One day in Sloane Street I found myself questioning Paraday’s landlord,
who had come to the door in answer to my knock. Two vehicles, a barouche
and a smart hansom, were drawn up before the house.
“In the drawing-room, sir? Mrs. Weeks Wimbush.”
“And in the dining-room?”
“A young lady, sir—waiting: I think a foreigner.”
It was three o’clock, and on days when Paraday didn’t lunch out he
attached a value to these appropriated hours. On which days, however,
didn’t the dear man lunch out? Mrs. Wimbush, at such a crisis, would
have rushed round immediately after her own repast. I went into the
dining-room first, postponing the pleasure of seeing how, upstairs, the
lady of the barouche would, on my arrival, point the moral of my sweet
solicitude. No one took such an interest as herself in his doing only
what was good for him, and she was always on the spot to see that he did
it. She made appointments with him to discuss the best means of
economising his time and protecting his privacy. She further made his
health her special business, and had so much sympathy with my own zeal
for it that she was the author of pleasing fictions on the subject of
what my devotion had led me to give up. I gave up nothing (I don’t count
Mr. Pinhorn) because I had nothing, and all I had as yet achieved was to
find myself also in the menagerie. I had dashed in to save my friend,
but I had only got domesticated and wedged; so that I could do little
more for him than exchange with him over people’s heads looks of intense
but futile intelligence.