Part 16

Now, I had always had a sort of envy of the _esprit de ton_ which unites the guild of amiable gadflies; and, finding myself here, for all my self-conscious intellectual superiority, of the smallest account, I grew quickly sardonic. If I knew who wrote the “Heptameron,” I didn’t know, even by sight, the Toddy Tomes who was setting all the town roaring and droning with his song, “Papa’s Perpendicular Pants.” It is a peevish experience to be “out of it,” even if the _it_ is no more intelligible than a Toddy Tomes’s topical; and gradually I waxed quite savage. Reputation is only relative after all. There is no popular road to fame. As an abstract acquisition, it may be said to pertain at its highest to the man who combines quick perceptions with adaptive sympathies. I was not that man. In all, save exclusively my own company, I felt “out of it,” awkward because resentful, and resentful because awkward. I despised these asses, however franked by Sweeting, yet coveted, vainly, the temporary grace of seeming at home with them. I got very cross. And then we alighted on Slater.

I knew it for his name by Sweeting’s greeting him in response to his hail. He was seated at a little table all by himself, drinking champagne, and alternately turning up and biting the ends of a red tag of beard, and luridly pulling at a ponderous cigar. He was a small, dingy person, so obviously inebriated, that the little human clearing in which he sat solitary was nothing more than the formal recognition of his state. He also, it was evident, to my disgust, despised the conventions of dress, but without any of those qualms of self-consciousness with which I was troubled. He lolled back, his hat crushed over his eyes, a hump of dicky and knotted tie escaping from his waistcoat-front, his disengaged thumb hooked into an arm-hole—as filthy a little vagabond, confident and maudlin and truculent in one, as you could wish. And he hailed Sweeting as a familiar.

My friend stopped, with a rather sheepish grin.

“Hullo, Slater!” said he. “A wet night, ain’t it?”

Our little group came chuckling all about the baboon. Even then, I noticed, I was the one looked upon with most obvious disfavour by the surrounding company.

“Look here,” said Sweeting, suddenly gripping me to the front. “Here’s one of your cloth, Slate’. Let me introjuce you,” and he whispered in my ear, “Awfully clever chap. You’ll like him when you know.”

I suppose my instant and instinctive repulsion was patent even to the sot. He lurched to his feet, and swept off his crumpled hat with an extravagant bow. Sweeting’s pack went into a howl of laughter. It was evident they were not unacquainted with the creature, and looked to him for some fun.

“My cloth, sir?” vociferated the beast. “Honoured, sir, ’m sure, sir. Will you allow me to cut my coat according to it, sir? Has any gentleman a pair of scissors? Just the tails, sir, no more—quite large enough for me; and you’d look very elegant in an Eton jacket.”

I tried to laugh at this idiotic badinage, and couldn’t.

“O, crikey, wouldn’t he!” said a vulgar onlooker. “Like a sugar-barrel in a weskit.”

Then, as everybody roared, I lost my temper.

“Don’t be a fool,” whispered Sweeting. “It’s the way he’ll get his change out of you.”

“Change!” I snapped furious. “No change could be for the worse with him, I should think. Let me pass, please!”

The odious wretch was pursuing me all the time I spoke, while the others hemmed me in, edging me towards him and roaring with laughter. Sweeting himself made no effort to assist me, but stood to one side, irresistibly giggling, though with a certain anxiety in his note.

“Call off your puppies!” I cried ragingly, and with the word was sent flying into the very arms of Slater. I felt something rip, and at a blow my hat sink over my eyes; and then a chill friendly voice entered into the mêlée.

“O, look here, Slater, that’ll do, you know!”

I wrenched my eyes free. My champion was not Sweeting, but Voules, Sir Francis Voules, of whom more hereafter. He was cool and vicious, and as faultlessly dressed as the others, but in a manner somehow superior to the foppery of their extreme youth. He carried a light overcoat on his arm.

“O! _will_ it?” said Slater.

“Yes, I said so,” said Voules, pausing a moment from addressing me to scan him. Slater slouched back to his table. Nobody laughed again.

In the meantime, Sir Francis was helping me to restore my hat to shape, and to don _his_ overcoat.

“Yours is split to the neck,” he said. “Now, let’s go.”

He took my arm, and we strolled off together. The crowd, quite respectful, parted, and we were engulfed in it.

I was grateful to Voules, of course, but inexplicably resentful of his cool masterfulness. Truth to tell, we were souls quite antipathetic; and now he had put me right—with everybody but myself. In a helpless attempt to restore that balance, I snarled fiercely, smacking fist into palm—

“I’ll have the law of that beast! You know him, it seems? I can’t congratulate you on your friends.”

“Sweeting was most to blame,” said Voules quietly.

I grunted, and strode on fuming.

“But, after all,” said Voules, “the poor ass had to back up his confederate.”

I glanced at him as we walked.

“His confederate?”

“Of course. Didn’t you know? Slater really writes the things for which Sweeting gets the credit.”

“O, come, Voules! Here’s one of your foolhardy calumnies. You really should be careful. Some day you’ll get into trouble.”

“O, very well!”

“You talk as if it were an open secret.”

“You know Sweeting as well as I. Do you recognize his style in the Nonconformist lucubrations? Possibly you’ve had letters from him?”

“I’ve some specimens of letters _to_ him now—letters from admirers. If anything were needed to refute your absurd statement, there they are in evidence.”

He gave a little dry laugh; then touched my sleeve eagerly.

“You wouldn’t think it abusing a confidence to show me those letters?”

“I don’t know why. Sweeting’s laid no embargo on me.”

“Very well. If you’ll let me, I’ll come home with you now.”

I stumbled on in a sort of haze.

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——”

He was interrupted by Slater—

“O, that’s all one, sir! Fit the cap on the right head. The answer’s ‘Protection,’ isn’t it? I ought to know, as I wrote, and am writing, the stuff.”

“_You_, sir!”

All eyes were turned upon the beastly little genius, as he stood ruffling with greed and arrogance, and thence to the sofa.

“O, shut up!” said Sweeting feebly. “It was only a joke. I paid him, handsome I did, to let me have the kudos and letters and things. He’d the best of the bargain by a long chalk.”

“He-he!” screeched Slater. “Why, you fool, did you think merit earned such recognition in this suffering world? Hope you enjoyed reading ’em, Sweet, as I did writing ’em.” He turned, half-cringing, half-defiant, upon the guest. “I’m the author of the ‘Love-Letters,’ sir—honour bright, I am; and I wrote every one of the testimonials, too, that that ass sets such store by. You’ll take those into consideration, I hope.”

“I shall, sir,” thundered the other—“in my estimate of a fool and his decoy.”

He blazed round and snatched up his hat.

“Make way, gentlemen!” he roared, and strode for the door.

A slip of pasteboard fluttered from his hand to the carpet; he flung wide the portal, banged it to behind him, and was gone.

Some one, in a sort of spasmodic torpor, picked up the card, and immediately uttered a gasping exclamation. We all crowded round him, and, reading the superscription at which he was pointing, “Mr. Hannibal Withers, Momus Theatre,” exchanged dumbfounded glances.

“Why, of course,” stuttered a pallid youth; “it was Withers, Voules’s pal; I reco’nize him now. He’s the Prime Minister’s double, you know, and—and he’s been and goosed us.”

“What!” screamed Slater.

But I was off in a fit of hysterical laughter.

It was actually a fact. It is a mistake to suppose that your professional scandal-monger is prepared to build except on a substratum of truth. Voules had pricked the bubble as he had promised. The bargain, it was admitted, had been struck—on Slater’s side for such a consideration as would submerge him in champagne had he desired it. He had written and sent the manuscripts to Sweeting, who had had them typed, and passed them on to the “Argonaut” as his own. But the real author knew that his tenure was insecure so long as the other’s colossal vanity was not ministered to. Hence the correspondence, in which the little monster burlesqued his own lucubrations. It might all have ended in a case of perpetual blackmail (Sweeting never could see beyond the end of his own nose) had not the bait answered so instantly to Voules’s calculations.

There was a bitter attack on the immorality of the stage in the next number of the “Argonaut,” which subsequently had to compound with Voules under threat of an action for libel. But Sweeting had his wish. He was “somebody,” as never yet. Until he took his notoriety for a long sea-voyage, he was more crushingly than any gentleman in the “Dunciad” “damn’d to fame.”

A POINT OF LAW

BY A CAPTIOUS LITIGANT

Given a wet night on circuit, a bar parlour with a chattering fire, a box of tobacco, a china bowl of punch, and a mixed forensic company to discuss the lot, and what odds would you lay for or against the chances of a good story or so?

Grope in your memory (before you answer) among legal collectanea and the newspaper reports of famous, or infamous, trials. What then? “Lord!” you admit, “these bones unearthed seem wretched remains indeed! I find your grooms of the horsehair, young and old, cracking their ineffable chestnuts for the benefit of an obsequious tipstavery; I find a bench so conservative that, though it be pitched in the very markets of chicanery, it is never to be won from its affected ignorance of those topical affairs which are matters, else apart, of common knowledge; I find the profession for ever given to whet its wits on a thousand examples of resourcefulness and impudence, and most often failing in the retort piquant.” Give me a cheeky witness to cap the best drollery ever uttered by counsel. Legal facetiæ, forsooth! The wit that tells is the wit that can cheat the gallows, not send to it. Any dullard can hang a dog.

Look at the autobiographies of your retired legal luminaries: what scurvy bald reading they make as a rule. Look at—but no: he rests in Abraham’s bosom; he is studying the Mosaic law; we may be in need of him again some day.