A Great Man Part 20

'What's his name?' she inquired.

Henry gazed at her. 'His name's Gerald,' he said, and she flushed.

'Well, at sixteen this youth is considerably over six feet in height, and still growing. At eighteen his figure has begun to excite remark in the streets. At nineteen he has a severe attack of scarlet fever, and while ill he grows still more, in bed, like people do, you know. And at twenty he is six feet eight inches high.'

'A giant, in fact.'

'Just so. But he doesn't want to be a giant He wants to be an actor, a great actor. n.o.body will look at him, except to stare. The idea of his going on the stage is laughed at. He scarcely dare walk out in the streets because children follow him. But he _is_ a great actor, all the same, in spirit. He's got the artistic temperament, and he can't be a clerk. He can only be one thing, and that one thing is made impossible by his height. He falls in love with a girl. She rather likes him, but naturally the idea of marrying a giant doesn't appeal to her. So that's off, too. And he's got no resources, and he's gradually starving in a garret. See the tragedy?'

She nodded, reflective, sympathetically silent.

Henry continued: 'Well, he's starving. He doesn't know what to do. He isn't quite tall enough to be a show-giant--they have to be over seven feet--otherwise he might at any rate try the music-hall stage. Then the manager of a West End restaurant catches sight of him one day, and offers him a place as doorkeeper at a pound a week and tips. He refuses it indignantly. But after a week or two more of hunger he changes his mind and accepts. And this man who has the soul and the brains of a great artist is reduced to taking sixpences for opening cab-doors.'

'Does it end there?'

'No. It's a sad story, I'm afraid. He dies one night in the snow outside the restaurant, while the rich noodles are gorging themselves inside to the music of a band. Consumption.'

'It's the most original story I ever heard in all my life,' said Geraldine enthusiastically.

'Do you think so?'

'I do, honestly. What are you going to call it--if I may ask?'

'Call it?' He hesitated a second. '_A Question of Cubits_,' he said.

'You are simply wonderful at t.i.tles,' she observed. 'Thank you. Thank you so much.'

'No one else knows,' he finished.

When he had seen her safely to Chenies Street, and was travelling to Dawes Road in a cab, he felt perfectly happy. The story had come to him almost by itself. It had been coming all the evening, even while he was in the box, even while he was lost in admiration of Geraldine. It had cost him nothing. He knew he could write it with perfect ease. And Geraldine admired it! It was the most original story she had ever heard in all her life! He himself thought it extremely original, too. He saw now how foolish and premature had been his fears for the future. Of course he had studied human nature. Of course he had been through the mill, and practised style. Had he not won the prize for composition at the age of twelve? And was there not the tangible evidence of his essays for the Polytechnic, not to mention his continual work for Sir George?

He crept upstairs to his bedroom joyous, jaunty, exultant.

'Is that you, Henry?' It was Aunt Annie's inquiry.

'Yes,' he answered, safely within his room.

'How late you are! It's half-past twelve and more.'

'I got lost,' he explained to her.

But he could not explain to himself what instinct had forced him to conceal from his adoring relatives the fact that he had bought a suit of dress-clothes, put them on, and sallied forth in them to spend an evening with a young lady.

Just as he was dropping off to sleep and beauteous visions, he sprang up with a start, and, lighting a candle, descended to the dining-room.

There he stood on a chair, reached for the blue jar on the bookcase, extracted the two eggs, and carried them upstairs. He opened his window and threw the eggs into the middle of Dawes Road, but several houses lower down; they fell with a soft _plup_, and scattered.

Thus ended the miraculous evening.

The next day he was prostrate with one of his very worst dyspeptic visitations. The Knight pew at Munster Park Chapel was empty at both services, and Henry learnt from loving lips that he must expect to be ill if he persisted in working so hard. He meekly acknowledged the justice of the rebuke.

On Monday morning at half-past eight, before he had appeared at breakfast, there came a telegram, which Aunt Annie opened. It had been despatched from Paris on the previous evening, and it ran: '_Congratulations on the box trick. Worth half a dozen books with the dear simple public A sincere admirer._' This telegram puzzled everybody, including Henry; though perhaps it puzzled Henry a little less than the ladies. When Aunt Annie suggested that it had been wrongly addressed, he agreed that no other explanation was possible, and Sarah took it back to the post-office.

He departed to business. At all the newspaper-shops, at all the bookstalls, he saw the placards of morning newspapers with lines conceived thus:

AMUSING INCIDENT AT THE ALHAMBRA.

A NOVELIST'S ADVENTURE.

VANIs.h.i.+NG AUTHOR AT A MUSIC-HALL.

A NOVELIST IN A BOX.

CHAPTER XVIII

HIS JACK-HORNERISM

That autumn the Chancelleries of Europe happened to be rather less egotistic than usual, and the English and American publics, seeing no war-cloud on the horizon, were enabled to give the whole of their attention to the balloon sent up into the sky by Mr. Onions Winter. They stared to some purpose. There are some books which succeed before they are published, and the commercial travellers of Mr. Onions Winter reported unhesitatingly that _A Question of Cubits_ was such a book. The libraries and the booksellers were alike graciously interested in the rumour of its advent. It was universally considered a 'safe' novel; it was the sort of novel that the honest provincial bookseller reads himself for his own pleasure and recommends to his customers with a peculiar and special smile of sincerity as being not only 'good,' but '_really_ good.' People mentioned it with casual antic.i.p.atory remarks who had never previously been known to mention any novel later than _John Halifax Gentleman_.

This and other similar pleasing phenomena were, of course, due in part to the mercantile sagacity of Mr. Onions Winter. For during a considerable period the Anglo-Saxon race was not permitted to forget for a single day that at a given moment the balloon would burst and rain down copies of _A Question of Cubits_ upon a thirsty earth. _A Question of Cubits_ became the universal question, the question of questions, transcending in its insistence the liver question, the soap question, the Encyclopaedia question, the whisky question, the cigarette question, the patent food question, the bicycle tyre question, and even the formidable uric acid question. Another powerful factor in the case was undoubtedly the lengthy paragraph concerning Henry's adventure at the Alhambra. That paragraph, having crystallized itself into a fixed form under the t.i.tle 'A Novelist in a Box,' had started on a journey round the press of the entire world, and was making a pace which would have left Jules Verne's hero out of sight in twenty-four hours. No editor could deny his hospitality to it. From the New York dailies it travelled via the _Chicago Inter-Ocean_ to the _Montreal Star_, and thence back again with the rapidity of light by way of the _Boston Transcript_, the _Philadelphia Ledger_, and the _Was.h.i.+ngton Post_, down to the _New Orleans Picayune_. Another day, and it was in the _San Francisco Call_, and soon afterwards it had reached _La Prensa_ at Buenos Ayres. It then disappeared for a period amid the Pacific Isles, and was next heard of in the _Sydney Bulletin_, the _Brisbane Courier_ and the _Melbourne Argus_. A moment, and it blazed in the _North China Herald_, and was shooting across India through the columns of the Calcutta _Englishman_ and the _Allahabad Pioneer_. It arrived in Paris as fresh as a new pin, and gained acceptance by the Paris edition of the _New York Herald_, which had printed it two months before and forgotten it, as a brand-new item of the most luscious personal gossip. Thence, later, it had a smooth pa.s.sage to London, and was seen everywhere with a new frontispiece consisting of the words: 'Our readers may remember.' Mr.

Onions Winter reckoned that it had been worth at least five hundred pounds to him.

But there was something that counted more than the paragraph, and more than Mr. Onions Winter's mercantile sagacity, in the immense preliminary noise and rattle of _A Question of Cubits_: to wit, the genuine and ever-increasing vogue of _Love in Babylon_, and the beautiful hopes of future joy which it aroused in the myriad breast of Henry's public.

_Love in Babylon_ had falsified the expert prediction of Mark Snyder, and had reached seventy-five thousand in Great Britain alone. What figure it reached in America no man could tell. The average citizen and his wife and daughter were truly enchanted by _Love in Babylon_, and since the state of being enchanted is one of almost ecstatic felicity, they were extremely anxious that Henry in a second work should repeat the operation upon them at the earliest possible instant.

The effect of the whole business upon Henry was what might have been expected. He was a modest young man, but there are two kinds of modesty, which may be called the internal and the external, and Henry excelled more in the former than in the latter. While never free from a secret and profound amazement that people could really care for his stuff (an infallible symptom of authentic modesty), Henry gradually lost the pristine virginity of his early diffidence. His demeanour grew confident and bold. His glance said: 'I know exactly who I am, and let no one think otherwise.' His self-esteem as a celebrity, stimulated and fattened by a tremendous daily diet of press-cuttings, and letters from feminine admirers all over the vastest of empires, was certainly in no immediate danger of inanition. Nor did the fact that he was still outside the rings known as literary circles injure that self-esteem in the slightest degree; by a curious trick of nature it performed the same function as the press-cuttings and the correspondence. Mark Snyder said: 'Keep yourself to yourself. Don't be interviewed. Don't do anything except write. If publishers or editors approach you, refer them to me.'

This suited Henry. He liked to think that he was in the hands of Mark Snyder, as an athlete in the hands of his trainer. He liked to think that he was alone with his leviathan public; and he could find a sort of mild, proud pleasure in meeting every advance with a frigid, courteous refusal. It tickled his fancy that he, who had shaken a couple of continents or so with one little book; and had written another and a better one with the ease and a.s.surance of a novelist born, should be willing to remain a shorthand clerk earning three guineas a week. (He preferred now to regard himself as a common shorthand clerk, not as private secretary to a knight: the piquancy of the situation was thereby intensified.) And as the day of publication of _A Question of Cubits_ came nearer and nearer, he more and more resembled a little Jack Horner sitting in his private corner, and pulling out the plums of fame, and soliloquizing, 'What a curious, interesting, strange, uncanny, original boy am I!'

Then one morning he received a telegram from Mark Snyder requesting his immediate presence at Kenilworth Mansions.

CHAPTER XIX

HE JUSTIFIES HIS FATHER

He went at once to Kenilworth Mansions, but he went against his will.

And the reason of his disinclination was that he scarcely desired to encounter Geraldine. It was an ordeal for him to encounter Geraldine.

The events which had led to this surprising condition of affairs were as follows:

Henry was one of those men--and there exist, perhaps, more of them than may be imagined--who are capable of plunging off the roof of a house, and then reconsidering the enterprise and turning back. With Henry it was never too late for discretion. He would stop and think at the most extraordinary moments. Thirty-six hours after the roseate evening at the Louvre and the Alhambra, just when he ought to have been laying a scheme for meeting Geraldine at once by sheer accident, Henry was coldly remarking to himself: 'Let me see exactly where I am. Let me survey the position.' He liked Geraldine, but now it was with a sober liking, a liking which is not too excited to listen to Reason. And Reason said, after the position had been duly surveyed: 'I have nothing against this charming lady, and much in her favour. Nevertheless, there need be no hurry.' Geraldine wrote to thank Henry for the most enjoyable evening she had ever spent in her life, and Henry found the letter too effusive.

When they next saw each other, Henry meant to keep strictly private the advice which he had accepted from Reason; but Geraldine knew all about it within the first ten seconds, and Henry knew that she knew.

Politeness reigned, and the situation was felt to be difficult.

Geraldine intended to be sisterly, but succeeded only in being resentful, and thus precipitated too soon the second stage of the entanglement, the stage in which a man, after seeing everything in a woman, sees nothing in her; this second stage is usually of the briefest, but circ.u.mstances may render it permanent. Then Geraldine wrote again, and asked Henry to tea at the flat in Chenies Street on a Sat.u.r.day afternoon. Henry went, and found the flat closed. He expected to receive a note of bewitching, cajoling, feminine apology, but he did not receive it. They met again, always at Kenilworth Mansions, and in an interview full of pain at the start and full of insincerity at the finish Henry learnt that Geraldine's invitation had been for Sunday, and not Sat.u.r.day, that various people of much importance in her eyes had been asked to meet him, and that the company was deeply disappointed and the hostess humiliated. Henry was certain that she had written Sat.u.r.day.

Geraldine was certain that he had misread the day. He said nothing about confronting her with the letter itself, but he determined, in his masculine way, to do so. She gracefully pretended that the incident was closed, and amicably closed, but the silly little thing had got into her head the wild, inexcusable idea that Henry had stayed away from her 'at home' on purpose, and Henry felt this.