Chapter V (6)

“It turns, sir, literally, on a question of fresh butter,” said the petitioner. “Who gets it nowadays, or realizes how, between churn and table, every pat becomes a dumping-ground for bacilli? Here, you will observe, the whole difficulty is resolved. We lead the cow into the cart itself, milk her into a separator, turn her out, drive off, and the revolution of the wheels completes the process. See? No chance for any freebooting germ! The result is simplicity itself—the customer’s butter made actually on the way to his door.”

Mr. Cantle put his pen in his mouth, blotted what he had been at work on, examined it cursorily but surely, rose, walked to the counter, and presented a form to the petitioner, all something with the air of a passionless police-inspector. He was a tall young man, loose-limbed, and with all his hardness, like a melancholy Punch’s show character, in his head. Much converse with cranks had engendered in him an air of perpetual unspoken protest, of exasperated resignation. For he was a trusted clerk in the office of the Commissioners of Patents for Inventions.

“Exactly,” he mumbled over the goose-quill. “That’s a matter for your provisional specification. Good morning.”

“It’s the most wonderful——”

“Of course—they all are. Good morning.”

“It will revolutionize——”

“Naturally. You will make your petition and declaration in the proper forms. Good morning.”

The inventor essayed another effort or two, met with no response, quavered out a sigh, packed up his treasure and vanished. The sound of his exit neither relaxed nor deepened a wrinkle on the brow of the neatly groomed Government official. He simply went on with his work.

At half-past one o’clock, it being Saturday, he—we were going to say “knocked off,” but the expression would be a libel on his methodical refinement. He took a hansom—selecting a personably horsed one—to his chambers in Adelphi Terrace; lunched off four _pâté de foie gras_ sandwiches, already awaiting him under a silver cover, and a glass of chablis; changed his dress for a river suit of sober-tinted flannel and a Panama hat; charged himself with a morocco handbag, also ready prepared; drove to Waterloo, and took a first-class ticket, and the train—he favoured the South-Western because it was the quieter line of two in this connexion—to Windsor. Arrived there, he was hailed and joined by a friend on the platform.

“Glad you’re come, Ned. I’m off colour a bit. You never are.”

It was hardly an attractive reception. Mr. Cantle glanced interrogatively at his companion, the Honourable Ivo Monk, son of Lord Prior.

“No?” he said. “What’s disturbing you, Monk?”

“O, the devil, I think!” said the young man peevishly. “Come along, do, out of this.”

Together they walked down to the river in almost absolute silence. Mr. Cantle had agreed to join his friend for an agreeable week-end on the water. It looked promising. He thought a little, and came to a characteristically uncompromising decision.

“Is it anything to do with Miss Varley?”

“Yes, it is.”

“She—they have a houseboat here, haven’t they?”

“Yes.”

“Close by?”

“More or less. Just above Datchet.”

“Then, I think, perhaps I’d better——”

“Then, I think, perhaps, you’d not. You don’t know anything about it. It’s not what you suppose.”

“O!”

A punt, in luxurious keeping with the tastes of its owner, awaited them at the steps. It was equipped with a number of little lockers for wine and food, a wealth of the downiest cushions, and an adjustable tilt with brass hoops for “roughing it” at nights on the water. For the Honourable Ivo was at the moment an aquatic gipsy, wandering at large and at whim, and scorning the effeminate pillow.

They loitered through Romney lock, talking commonplaces, and below relinquished their poles and sat and drifted until the reeds held them up. It was a fair, sweet afternoon, full of life and merriment, and, in view of the crowding craft, the remotest from ghostliness.

“Would you like to see her?” said Mr. Monk suddenly and unexpectedly.

Cantle was never to be taken off his guard.

“If it will please you, it will please me,” he said.

They resumed the poles and made forward. To their left a little sludgy creek went up among the osiers; and, anchored at its mouth, rocked the vulgarest little apology for a houseboat. It seemed just one cuddy, mounted on a craft like a bomb-ketch, which it filled from stem to stern; and what with its implied restrictedness, and dingy appearance, and stump of a chimney, one could not have imagined a less inviting prison in which to make out a holiday. Yet there was a lord to this squalid baby galliot, and to all appearance a very contented one, as he sat smoking a pipe, with his legs dangling over the side. Monk nodded to him, and the man nodded back with a grin.

“Who’s that?” asked Mr. Cantle, when out of earshot.

“O, a crank! You should recognize the breed better than I do.”

Mr. Cantle, thoughtfully nursing his jaw, with a frown on his face, had left off punting.

“Don’t you know him?” he said suddenly.

“We exchange civilities,” answered the other; “the freemasonry of the river, you understand. _There’s_ the Varleys’ boat.”

Forging under the Victoria Bridge, they had come in view of a long line of houseboats moored under the left bank against a withy bed, opposite the Home Park. At one of these, hight the “Mermaid,” very large and handsome, they came to, and fastening on, stepped aboard. A sound of murmuring ceased with their arrival, and Cantle had hardly become aware of two figures seated in the saloon, before he was being introduced to one of them.

Miss Varley was certainly “interesting”—tall and “English,” but with an exhausted air, and her eyes superhumanly large. She greeted the stranger sweetly, and her fiancé with a rather full, pathetic look.

“Mamma’s resting a little,” she said, in a bodiless voice, “and Nanna’s been reading to me. Papa comes down by the seven o’clock train.”

“And what’s Nanna been reading?” asked the young man.

The old nurse held up the volume. It was the Holy Book. Monk ground his teeth.

“Hush, Master Ivo!” whispered the woman. “You only distress her.”

“I’d rather see her reading a yellow-back on a July day on the river.”

The girl put a hand on his arm. “When the call has come? When my days are numbered, Ivo?” she said.

He almost burst out in an oath.

“I’d rather, if I were you, be recognized and called by my own name and nature,” he said bitterly. “But it’s all nonsense, Netta. Do, for God’s sake, believe it!”

He was so obviously overwrought, the situation was so painful, that his friend persuaded him, on personal grounds, to leave. They punted across, dropped down a distance, and brought up under the bank in a quiet spot.

“Very well,” said Cantle. “You’ll tell me, perhaps, what’s the matter?”

“Can’t you see? She’s dying.”

He dropped his face into his hands, with a groan of impotent suffering.

“There’s some mystery here,” said his friend quietly.

Monk looked up, and burst out in a sudden lost fury—

“There is, by God! Jack the Skipper!”

Cantle was rolling a cigarette imperturbably.

“Who’s—Jack the Skipper?” he drawled.

“I wish you could tell me,” cried the other. “I wish you could show these the way to his throat!” He held out his hands. “They’d fasten!” he whispered.

He came all of a sudden, quite quietly, and sat by his friend. “Its been going on for three weeks now,” he said rapidly. “They call him that about here—a sort of skit on the other—the other beast, you know. He appears at night—a sort of ghoulish, indescribable monster, black and huge and dripping, and utters one beastly sound and disappears. Nobody’s been able to trace him, or see where he comes from or goes to. He just appears in the night, in all sorts of unexpected places—houseboats, and bungalows, and shanties by the water—and terrifies some lonely child or woman, and is gone. The devil!—O, the devil! We’ve made parties and hunted him, to no good. It’s a regular reign of terror hereabouts. People don’t dare being left alone after dark. He frightened the little Cunningham child into a fit, and it’s not expected to recover. Mrs. Bancock died of an apoplexy after seeing it. And the worst of it is, a deadly superstition’s seized the place. Its visit’s got to be supposed to presage death, and——” He seized Cantle’s hand convulsively.

“Damn it! It’s unnatural, Ned! The river’s haunted—here, in Cockney Datchet—in the twentieth century! You don’t believe in such things—tell me you don’t! But Netta——”

His head sank on his breast. Cantle blew out a placid whiff of smoke.

“But—Miss Varley?” he said.

“You know—you’ve heard, at least,” said the other, “what she was. The _thing_ suddenly stood before her, when she was alone, one night. Well—you see what she is now.”

“I don’t see, nevertheless, why she don’t——”

“Pack and run? No more do I. Put it to her if you like. I’ve said _my_ say. But she’s in the grip—thinks she’s had her call—and there’s no moving her. Cantle, she’s just dying where she stands.”

Cantle’s cigarette made a tiny arc of light, and hissed in the river. He had heard of epidemic hysteria. The world was full of cranks.

“Now,” he said, “drop the subject, please. Shall I tell you of some fools I’ve come across in my time?”

He related some of his experiences in the Patent Office. The most impudent invention ever proposed, he said, was a burglar’s tool for snipping out and holding by suction in one movement a disk of window glass. His dry self-confidence had a curiously reassuring effect on the other. While they ate and drank and smoked and talked, the life of the river had become gradually attenuated and delivered to silence; a mist rose and hung above the water; sounds died down and ceased, concentrating themselves into the persistent dismal yelp of a dog somewhere on the bank above; the lights in the houseboats thinned to isolated sparks—twelve o’clock clanged from a distant tower.

Then, all at once, he was alert and quietly active.

“Monk, listen to me: I’m going to cure Miss Varley.”

“Ned!”

“Take the paddle and work up—up the river, do you hear? I’ll sit forward.”

The ghost of a red moon was rising in the east. They slipped on with scarce a sound. A sort of lurid glaze enamelled the water. All of a sudden a sleek bulk rose ahead right in their path, wallowed a moment like a porpoise, and disappeared.

“Good God!” cried Monk, in a choking voice, half rising from his seat.

“Keep down!” whispered his friend.

“Cantle! Did you see it? Cantle! It was he!”

“Keep down!”

They paddled on, past the last of the boats, through the bridge, on as far as the squat little bomb-ketch bulking black and menacing at the mouth of the creek.

“Hold on!” whispered Cantle. “Run her out of sight into the reeds. We must wade on board there.”

“There? That fellow Spindler’s boat?”

“Of course, now. That was his name.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’ll soon know.”

They accomplished the feat, though near mud-foundered by the way, and scrambled, dripping, on board. The door of the cuddy yielded to their touch. Monk was beginning to gather dim light.

“Don’t let me,” he whispered, almost sobbing. “Keep my hands off him.”

“Leave him to me,” said Cantle gravely.

Not a sound of life greeted them. They stole into the cabin and closed the door, almost, upon themselves.

“We must yield him to-night for the sake of to-morrow,” murmured Cantle.

“Ned! If he goes again——”

“Hush! It’s not probable he’d risk a second visit, knowing her watched.”

The crack brightened as the moon rose: glowed into a ribbon of light. Suddenly Cantle gripped the other’s wrist.

A stealthy puddling, sucking sound close by reached their ears. Over the side came swarming a great shapeless fishy creature, which settled with a sludgy wallop on the little triangle of foredeck almost at their feet. Monk gave a soft, awful gasp, and, with the sound, Cantle had dashed open the door and flung himself upon the monster.

“Quick!” he cried; “you’ve got matches! Light a candle—lamp—anything! Lie still, Mr. Spindler. It’s all up. I know you and your Marine Secret Service suit! A knife now, Monk! Out he comes.”

He was merciless with the blade when he got it, slashing and cutting at the oilskin suit, splitting it from top to toe. Mr. Spindler’s red beard and extravagant face came out of it like a death’s-head out of its chrysalis.

“There goes the proud monument of a lifetime,” said the madman. He had made no effort to resist. The first blow at this darling of his invention had seemed to hamstring him, morally and materially.

For he was just one of Mr. Cantle’s cranks—had once invented a submarine travelling suit, with which he had hoped to inaugurate a new system of Secret Service for the Admiralty. It was an ingenious enough device, with some scheme of floating valves through which to breathe; but the authorities, after holding him on and off, would have none of it. Then the fate of many inventors had befallen him. Between practical ruin and a moral sense of wrong, he had gone crazy, and vowed warfare on the mankind which had discarded him. It should comprehend, too late, the uses of instant appearance and disappearance to which his invention could be put. He went mad, and ended his days in an asylum.

On the Monday morning Mr. Cantle posted back to the Patent Office; on the Tuesday Miss Varley was reading De Maupassant’s “Mademoiselle Fifi” under the awning of the “Mermaid’s” roof; and on the Wednesday Mr. Ivo Monk got her to name the day.

A BUBBLE REPUTATION

One crowded hour of glorious life Is worth an age without a name.

I had never suspected Sweeting of a desire to be “somebody.” Indeed, the _jeunesse dorée_, in whose ranks Nature had seemed unquestioningly to bestow him, is not subject to diffidence, or prone to the wisdom which justifies itself in a knowledge of its own limitations. I was familiar with his placid, cherubic face at a minor club or two, in the Park, in Strand restaurants and Gaiety stalls; and it had never once occurred to me to classify him as apart from his fellows of the exquisite guild. If, like Keats, he could appreciate the hell of conscious failure, its most poignant anguish, I could have sworn, would borrow from some too-late realization of the correctest “form” in a hat-brim or shirt-collar. I could have sworn it, I say, and I should have been, of course, mistaken. Keats may have claimed it as his poetical prerogative to go ill-dressed, and to object, though John, to be dubbed “Johnny.” It remained to Sweeting to prove that a man might be a very typical “Johnny” and a poet to boot. But I will explain.

One day I entered the reading-room of the Junior Winston and nodded to Sweeting, who was seated solitary at the newspaper-table. While I was hunting for the “Saturday Review”—which was conducting, I had been told, the vivisection of a friend of mine—my attention was attracted by something actually ostentatious in Sweeting’s perusal of _his_ sheet, and I glanced across. Judge my astonishment when I saw in his hands, not “Baily’s” or the “Pink ’Un,” but the very periodical I sought. I gasped; then grinned.

“Hullo!” I said. “Since when have you taken to that?”

He attempted to reply with a face of wondering hauteur, but gave up at the first twitch.

“O,” he said rather defiantly, “you lit’ary professionals think no one’s in it but yourselves.”

“In what?”

“Why, this sort of thing,” he said, tapping the “Saturday”; “the real stuff, you know.”

“Indeed,” I said, “we don’t. You’re always welcome to the reversion of my place in it for one.”

“O, me!” he said airily. “It don’t positively apply there, you see, being a sort of a kind of a professional myself.”

“My Sweet!” I exclaimed. “A professional—you?”

“O, yes,” he said. “Didn’t you know? Write for the ‘Argonaut.’ Little thing of mine in it last number.”

I felt faint.

“May I see it?” I murmured. “If I don’t mistake, it’s under your elbow at this moment.”

“Is it?” he answered, blushing flagrantly, “Lor’ bless me, so it is!”

I took it from his hand, opened it, and read, over his undoubted signature—Marmaduke Sweeting—the title, “The Fool of the Family.”

“Ah!” I thought, “of course. Like title like author.”

But I was wrong. The tale, a veritable _conte drolatique_, was as keen and strong as a Maupassant. I had no choice but to take it at a draught, smacking my lips after. Then I put the paper softly down and looked across at him. His harmless features were set in a sort of hypnotic smile, his hat was tilted over his eyes, and he was making constant mouthfuls of the large silver knob of his stick. My eyes travelled to and fro between this figure and the figures of print _that were he_. What possible connexion could there be between the two? I thought of Buffon writing in lace ruffles, and all at once recognized a virtue in immaculate shirt-cuffs, and decided to consult some fashionable hosier about raising my price per thousand words. In the meantime my respect for Sweeting was born.

“So,” I said, “you are somebody after all?”

“Am I?” he answered, grinning bucolic. “Glad you’ve found it out.”

“Why,” I said, “honestly there’s genius in this story; but nothing to what you’ve shown in concealing that you had any. There must be much more to come out of the same bin.”

He flushed and laughed and wriggled, as I walked over and sat beside him.

“O, I dare say!” he said. “Hope so, anyhow.”

“Not a doubt. What made you think of it, now?”

“O! I thought of it,” he said; and, after all, there was no better reply to an idiotic question. I was beginning humbly to appraise intellectual self-sufficiency at its value, and to appreciate the hundred disguises of reason.

I saw a good deal of Sweeting, on his own initiative, after this. He would visit me in my rooms, and discuss—none too sapiently, I may have thought in other circumstances, and with the most ingenuous admiration for his own abilities—the values of certain characters as portrayed by him in a brilliant series, “The Love-Letters of a Nonconformist,” which had immediately followed in the “Argonaut” “The Fool of the Family,” and was taking the town by storm. Thus, “What d’ee think of that old Lupin, last number,” he would chuckle, “with his calling virtue an ‘emu,’ don’tcherknow?”

“Ha, yes!” I would correct him, with a nervous laugh. “‘Anæmia’ was the word. You meant it, of course.”

“Why, didn’t I say it?” he would answer. “It’s got a big swallow anyhow”; and then he would check himself suddenly, and, without further explanation, eye me, and begin to whistle.

Now I might recall the passage to which he referred (to wit, that every red blood corpuscle, being a seed peccancy, so to speak, made virtue an anæmia) and try to puzzle out a quite new significance in it. Suspecting that its author’s apparent naïveté was only assumed, I was respectfully guarded in my answers, and, when he was gone, would curiously ponder the perspicacious uses to which he would put them. He did not consult me, I felt, as an oracle; but rather drew upon me for the vulgar currency of thought, to which his exclusiveness was a stranger. He was very secret about his own affairs; though I understood that he was becoming quite an important “name” in the literary world. Ostensibly he was not, after that first essay, to be identified with the “Argonaut,” though any one, having an ounce of the proper appreciation, could scarcely fail to mark in the “Love-Letters” the right succession of qualities which had made the earlier story notable. Indeed, he suffered more than any man I knew from the penalties attaching to the popular author. The number of communications, both signed and anonymous, which he received from admirers was astonishing. Scarce a day passed but he brought me specimens of them to discuss and laugh over. I did not, I must admit, think his comments always in good taste; but then I was not personally subject to the flattering pursuit, and so may have been no more constituted to judge than a monk is of a worldling.

These testimonies to his fame were from every sort of individual—the soldier, the divine, the poet, the painter, the actor (and more especially the actress), the young person with views, the social butterfly, the gushling late of the schoolroom, the woman of sensibility late of the latest lifelong passion for art or religion, and finding, as usual, the taste of life sour on her lips after a recent debauch of sentiment. They all found something in the “Love-Letters” to meet their particular cases—some note of subtle sympathy, some first intimation to their misunderstood spirits of a kindred emotion which had _felt_, and could lay its finger with divine solace on the spot. No longer would they suffer a barren grievance—that hair-shirt which not a soul suspected but to giggle over. To take, for example, from the series a typical sentence which served so many for a text—

“_To whom does the materialist cry his defiance—to whom but to God? He cannot rest from baiting a Deity whose existence he denies. He forgets that irony can wring no response from a vacuum._” A propos of which wrote the following:—

A Half-pay General.—Don’t tell me, Sir, but you’ve served, like me, a confounded ungrateful country, and learned your lesson! Memorialize the devil rather than the War Office. You’ve hit it off in your last sentence to a T.

A Chorus Girl.—Dear Sir,—You mean me to understand, I know, and you’re quite right. The British public has no more ears than a ass, or they’d reconise who ought to be playing Lotta in “The Belle of Battersea.” It’s such a comfort you can’t tell. Please forgive this presumptious letter from a stranger.—Yours very affectionately,

Dolly.

An Apostolic Fisherman.—I like your metaphor. I would suggest only “ground-baiting a Deity” as more subtly applicable to the tactics of a worldling. Note: “And Simon Peter said, ‘I go a-fishing.’”

Take, again, this excerpt: “_Doctors’ advice to certain patients to occupy their minds recalls the Irishman’s receipt for making a cannon, ‘Take a hole and pour brass round it._’” Of which a “True Hibernian” wrote—

Sir,—I’ve always maintained that the genuine “bull,” fathered on my suffering country, came from the loins of the English lion. Murder, now! How could a patient occupy his doctor’s mind as well as his own, unless he was beside himself? And then he’d have no mind at all.

Or take, once more and to end, the sentence: “_The Past is that paradoxical possession, a Shadow which we would not drop for the Substance_”; which evoked the following from “One who has felt the Weariness, the Fever, and the Fret”—

How strangely and exquisitely phrased! It brings, I know not how, the memory of the Channel before me. I have only crossed it once; but, O! the recollection! the solemn moving waters to which my soul went out!

These are specimens, but a few, of the responses wrung by Sweeting from the human chords he touched. There were, in addition, prayers innumerable for autographs, requests for the reading of manuscripts, petitions for gratis copies of his works, to be sold for any and every charity but the betterment of impecunious authors. He fairly basked in the sunshine of a great reputation. There was only one flaw in his enormous self-satisfaction. By a singular perversity and most inexplicable coincidence, every one of these signed documents was without an address. But, after all, coincidence, which is only another name for the favouritism of Fate, must occasionally glut itself on an approved subject. Sweeting was in favour with the gods, and enjoyed “a high old time of it,” principally, perhaps, because he did not appear to be ambitious of impressing any “set” but that with which he was wont to forgather, and above which he made no affectation now of rising superior.

I had an example one evening of this intellectual modesty, when casually visiting the Earl’s Court grounds. There I encountered my friend, the centre and protagonist of a select company in the enclosure. All exquisitely wore exquisite evening dress (for myself I always scornfully eschewed the livery), and all gravitated about Sweeting with the unconscious homage which imbecility pays to brains—“the desire of the moth for the star.” I could see at once that he was become their Sirius, their bright particular glory, reflecting credit upon their order. And he, who might have commanded the suffrages of the erudite, seemed content with his little conquest—to have reached, indeed, the apogee of his ambition—a one-eyed king among the blind. These suffered my introduction with some condescension, as a mere larva of Grub Street. They knew themselves now as the stock from which was generated this real genius. As for me, I was Gil Blas’s playwright at the supper of comedians. And then, at somebody’s initiative, we were all swaggering off together along the walks.

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.

There is an odd family likeness between the personalia of lawyers and of actors. The fellows, out of court, stripped of their melodramatic trappings, can’t raise a laugh which would tickle any one less than a bishop. They are obsessed with the idea of their own importance. Much self-inflation has killed in them all sense of proportion. They prove themselves, the truth is, dull dogs on revision.

The law is not so exhausting a study as it appears on first sight to a layman. Given an understanding of its main principle, which is syllogism, and there you are already in its Holy of Holies. As, for instance, I call a man a beast: a cheetah is a beast: I have called the man a cheater—ergo, he can proceed against me for defamation. There is its rubric in a nutshell—perfectly simple.

However, _exceptis excipiendis_, there were Curran, and Erskine, and some others. There was also Brindley, the great Crown Prosecutor, whose eloquence was of such persuasiveness that it was said the very Bench _hung upon his word_. I had the chance to meet him once, in such a place and on such a night as I began by describing. It was in the “Maid’s Head” at Norwich, and my experience is at your service.

It had, I knew, been a full list and a varied; yet the great man, it seemed, had found nothing in it all to stimulate his humorous faculties. The liveliness was all supplied by a pert Deputy Clerk of the Peace, whose bump of reverence was as insignificant as his effrontery was tremendous. The Bar began by tolerating him; went on to humour his sallies; chilled presently over his presumption; grew patronizing, impatient, and at last rude. He didn’t care; nor I, certainly. His readiness was the only relief from a congested boredom.

The talk drifted, in the course of the evening, upon legal _posers_—circumstantial evidence, ex-statutory cases, and so forth. There were some dull examples proffered, and I observed, incidentally, that the Law, when it couldn’t hark back to precedent, was wont to grow a little hazy and befogged. Many solemn conundrums were propounded; but the Deputy Clerk, as usual, pushed himself to the front with an impertinence—

“If I slink out of the company of a bore, am I guilty of stealing from his person?”

“Pooh, pooh!” said Brindley, with contempt. “Don’t be flippant, sir.”

The Deputy Clerk was not a whit abashed.

“Sir, to you,” he said. “If that isn’t liked, I’ll propose another. If a woman is divorced from her husband, and a child is born to her before the decree is made absolute, is that child, lawfully begot, legitimate or illegitimate?”

They were glad to take this seriously. I forget what the decision was—that, given the necessary interval between the decree and its confirmation, I think, the situation was virtually impossible.

“Very well,” said the Deputy Clerk. “But perhaps one can conceive such a question rising. Let it pass, however; and answer me this, gentlemen: If one is imprisoned unjustly—that is to say, for a crime one has not committed—and, breaking out of prison, gives proof of one’s innocence, can one be indicted for prison-breaking?”

This, at least, was a fair poser, and discussion on it grew actually warm.

“Bosh!” said a fierce gentleman. “You ain’t going to justify your defiance of the law by arguing that the law is liable to make an occasional mistake—don’t tell me!”