I blush to confess it, but I invited Mr. Paraday that very day to
transcribe into the album one of his most characteristic passages. I
told him how I had got rid of the strange girl who had brought it—her
ominous name was Miss Hurter and she lived at an hotel; quite agreeing
with him moreover as to the wisdom of getting rid with equal promptitude
of the book itself. This was why I carried it to Albemarle Street no
later than on the morrow. I failed to find her at home, but she wrote to
me and I went again; she wanted so much to hear more about Neil Paraday.
I returned repeatedly, I may briefly declare, to supply her with this
information. She had been immensely taken, the more she thought of it,
with that idea of mine about the act of homage: it had ended by filling
her with a generous rapture. She positively desired to do something
sublime for him, though indeed I could see that, as this particular
flight was difficult, she appreciated the fact that my visits kept her
up. I had it on my conscience to keep her up: I neglected nothing that
would contribute to it, and her conception of our cherished author’s
independence became at last as fine as his very own. “Read him, read
him—_that_ will be an education in decency,” I constantly repeated;
while, seeking him in his works even as God in nature, she represented
herself as convinced that, according to my assurance, this was the system
that had, as she expressed it, weaned her. We read him together when I
could find time, and the generous creature’s sacrifice was fed by our
communion. There were twenty selfish women about whom I told her and who
stirred her to a beautiful rage. Immediately after my first visit her
sister, Mrs. Milsom, came over from Paris, and the two ladies began to
present, as they called it, their letters. I thanked our stars that none
had been presented to Mr. Paraday. They received invitations and dined
out, and some of these occasions enabled Fanny Hurter to perform, for
consistency’s sake, touching feats of submission. Nothing indeed would
now have induced her even to look at the object of her admiration. Once,
hearing his name announced at a party, she instantly left the room by
another door and then straightway quitted the house. At another time
when I was at the opera with them—Mrs. Milsom had invited me to their
box—I attempted to point Mr. Paraday out to her in the stalls. On this
she asked her sister to change places with her and, while that lady
devoured the great man through a powerful glass, presented, all the rest
of the evening, her inspired back to the house. To torment her tenderly
I pressed the glass upon her, telling her how wonderfully near it brought
our friend’s handsome head. By way of answer she simply looked at me in
charged silence, letting me see that tears had gathered in her eyes.
These tears, I may remark, produced an effect on me of which the end is
not yet. There was a moment when I felt it my duty to mention them to
Neil Paraday, but I was deterred by the reflexion that there were
questions more relevant to his happiness.
These question indeed, by the end of the season, were reduced to a single
one—the question of reconstituting so far as might be possible the
conditions under which he had produced his best work. Such conditions
could never all come back, for there was a new one that took up too much
place; but some perhaps were not beyond recall. I wanted above all
things to see him sit down to the subject he had, on my making his
acquaintance, read me that admirable sketch of. Something told me there
was no security but in his doing so before the new factor, as we used to
say at Mr. Pinhorn’s, should render the problem incalculable. It only
half-reassured me that the sketch itself was so copious and so eloquent
that even at the worst there would be the making of a small but complete
book, a tiny volume which, for the faithful, might well become an object
of adoration. There would even not be wanting critics to declare, I
foresaw, that the plan was a thing to be more thankful for than the
structure to have been reared on it. My impatience for the structure,
none the less, grew and grew with the interruptions. He had on coming up
to town begun to sit for his portrait to a young painter, Mr. Rumble,
whose little game, as we also used to say at Mr. Pinhorn’s, was to be the
first to perch on the shoulders of renown. Mr. Rumble’s studio was a
circus in which the man of the hour, and still more the woman, leaped
through the hoops of his showy frames almost as electrically as they
burst into telegrams and “specials.” He pranced into the exhibitions on
their back; he was the reporter on canvas, the Vandyke up to date, and
there was one roaring year in which Mrs. Bounder and Miss Braby, Guy
Walsingham and Dora Forbes proclaimed in chorus from the same pictured
walls that no one had yet got ahead of him.
Paraday had been promptly caught and saddled, accepting with
characteristic good-humour his confidential hint that to figure in his
show was not so much a consequence as a cause of immortality. From Mrs.
Wimbush to the last “representative” who called to ascertain his twelve
favourite dishes, it was the same ingenuous assumption that he would
rejoice in the repercussion. There were moments when I fancied I might
have had more patience with them if they hadn’t been so fatally
benevolent. I hated at all events Mr. Rumble’s picture, and had my
bottled resentment ready when, later on, I found my distracted friend had
been stuffed by Mrs. Wimbush into the mouth of another cannon. A young
artist in whom she was intensely interested, and who had no connexion
with Mr. Rumble, was to show how far he could make him go. Poor Paraday,
in return, was naturally to write something somewhere about the young
artist. She played her victims against each other with admirable
ingenuity, and her establishment was a huge machine in which the tiniest
and the biggest wheels went round to the same treadle. I had a scene
with her in which I tried to express that the function of such a man was
to exercise his genius—not to serve as a hoarding for pictorial posters.
The people I was perhaps angriest with were the editors of magazines who
had introduced what they called new features, so aware were they that the
newest feature of all would be to make him grind their axes by
contributing his views on vital topics and taking part in the periodical
prattle about the future of fiction. I made sure that before I should
have done with him there would scarcely be a current form of words left
me to be sick of; but meanwhile I could make surer still of my animosity
to bustling ladies for whom he drew the water that irrigated their social
flower-beds.
I had a battle with Mrs. Wimbush over the artist she protected, and
another over the question of a certain week, at the end of July, that Mr.
Paraday appeared to have contracted to spend with her in the country. I
protested against this visit; I intimated that he was too unwell for
hospitality without a nuance, for caresses without imagination; I begged
he might rather take the time in some restorative way. A sultry air of
promises, of ponderous parties, hung over his August, and he would
greatly profit by the interval of rest. He hadn’t told me he was ill
again that he had had a warning; but I hadn’t needed this, for I found
his reticence his worst symptom. The only thing he said to me was that
he believed a comfortable attack of something or other would set him up:
it would put out of the question everything but the exemptions he prized.
I’m afraid I shall have presented him as a martyr in a very small cause
if I fail to explain that he surrendered himself much more liberally than
I surrendered him. He filled his lungs, for the most part; with the
comedy of his queer fate: the tragedy was in the spectacles through which
I chose to look. He was conscious of inconvenience, and above all of a
great renouncement; but how could he have heard a mere dirge in the bells
of his accession? The sagacity and the jealousy were mine, and his the
impressions and the harvest. Of course, as regards Mrs. Wimbush, I was
worsted in my encounters, for wasn’t the state of his health the very
reason for his coming to her at Prestidge? Wasn’t it precisely at
Prestidge that he was to be coddled, and wasn’t the dear Princess coming
to help her to coddle him? The dear Princess, now on a visit to England,
was of a famous foreign house, and, in her gilded cage, with her retinue
of keepers and feeders, was the most expensive specimen in the good
lady’s collection. I don’t think her august presence had had to do with
Paraday’s consenting to go, but it’s not impossible he had operated as a
bait to the illustrious stranger. The party had been made up for him,
Mrs. Wimbush averred, and every one was counting on it, the dear Princess
most of all. If he was well enough he was to read them something
absolutely fresh, and it was on that particular prospect the Princess had
set her heart. She was so fond of genius in _any_ walk of life, and was
so used to it and understood it so well: she was the greatest of Mr.
Paraday’s admirers, she devoured everything he wrote. And then he read
like an angel. Mrs. Wimbush reminded me that he had again and again
given her, Mrs. Wimbush, the privilege of listening to him.
I looked at her a moment. “What has he read to you?” I crudely enquired.
For a moment too she met my eyes, and for the fraction of a moment she
hesitated and coloured. “Oh all sorts of things!”
I wondered if this were an imperfect recollection or only a perfect fib,
and she quite understood my unuttered comment on her measure of such
things. But if she could forget Neil Paraday’s beauties she could of
course forget my rudeness, and three days later she invited me, by
telegraph, to join the party at Prestidge. This time she might indeed
have had a story about what I had given up to be near the master. I
addressed from that fine residence several communications to a young lady
in London, a young lady whom, I confess, I quitted with reluctance and
whom the reminder of what she herself could give up was required to make
me quit at all. It adds to the gratitude I owe her on other grounds that
she kindly allows me to transcribe from my letters a few of the passages
in which that hateful sojourn is candidly commemorated.