Aaron Rodd, Diviner. E. Phillips OppenheimЧитать онлайн книгу.
it. There was a green streak in the sunrise. I hastened——"
Harvey Grimm had paused in front of a boot shop.
"This place," he said firmly, "will do as well as another."
"Why not?" the young man agreed, entering promptly, seating himself upon the nearest vacant chair and holding out his foot. "Something light," he begged. "You will observe that my foot is long and narrow."
The shopman withdrew the tattered remnants of shoes and stared in amazement at his prospective customer's bare feet. The latter held out his hand for a cigarette and tapped it against the side of Harvey Grimm's case.
"It appears to me," he continued, gazing at his mud-stained feet, "that I came out without socks. The sunrise again. However, it is a deficiency which I perceive that you are in a position to remedy."
He selected without embarrassment a pair of socks and shoes, and was perfectly willing to don a tie which they purchased from a small haberdasher's shop at the end of the street. That affair disposed of, however, he became quite firm.
"The affair of the chop——," he insisted.
"We are there," Harvey Grimm interrupted, leading him to an hotel grill-room.
The young man paused before the large, open grid and carefully indicated the chop which he considered suitable for his consumption. He then seated himself opposite his two friends and expressed himself in favour of a mixed vermouth.
"A very pleasing encounter, this," he declared, drawing the eightpence from his pocket and looking at it thoughtfully. "May I ask, sir, whether you are acquainted with my poems?"
"Not yet," Harvey Grimm confessed.
"Your purchase, then, was accidental?"
"Entirely," his patron explained. "My friend and I are adventurers. We seek the unusual. The appearance of the shop where we met you attracted us. The young lady to whom we addressed some enquiries tendered us a copy of your verses."
The young man sighed.
"It is a scandalous thing," he said, "to be published in paper covers at eightpence—fourpence to the author. So you are adventurers. You mean by that thieves?"
"Sir," Aaron Rodd interrupted, "I am a solicitor."
"My ignorance," the young man declared, "is amazing, but that, I presume, is a legalised form of robbery? I am one of the few persons in the world who give value for the money I earn. I produce, create. If only ten thousand people in the city were to pay eightpence for a copy of my works, I should be affluent, as you two are. I should lunch here every day and drink Burgundy."
"Then in a very short time," Harvey Grimm reminded him, "you would cease to write poetry."
His protégé shook his head.
"A well-nurtured body is an incentive to poetic thought," he insisted. "There is a richness of imagery which comes with after-dinner composing; a sort of mental starvation, an anæmic scantiness of similes, which follows the fruit luncheon and cold water of necessity. Adventurers, gentlemen, are you? That is to say you are people with wits. Tell me, then—bring me an idea from the practical world—how shall I make ten thousand people buy a copy of my poems?"
"Come, that's an interesting problem," Harvey Grimm declared. "Of course, if one were to answer you in a single word, that one would be advertisement."
"If I could write my name across the heavens, or flash it from a million lights through the clouds," the young man remarked, "I would do so, but these things call for either miraculous powers or money. I have neither."
"Your case," Harvey Grimm promised, "shall have our attention, my friend's and mine. In the meantime, the moment seems opportune, pending the arrival of our chops, for a glance at your work. Permit me."
The poetaster crossed his legs, leaned back in his chair, thrust an eyeglass into his eye, and turned over the pages of the paper volume which he had been carrying. Aaron Rodd followed his example. The poet, entirely unembarrassed, eyed hungrily each covered dish which passed. At the arrival of the meal, Harvey Grimm solemnly pocketed his book and replaced his eyeglass. Aaron Rodd went on reading for a moment. Then he glanced surreptitiously at their guest and laid his volume face downwards upon the table.
"Your poems, I perceive," Harvey Grimm observed, as he helped himself to a potato, "are not written for the man in the street."
"They are written," the poet declared, falling hungrily upon his chop, "for any one who will pay eightpence for them."
Conversation faded away. It was not until the service of coffee and cigars that anything more than disjointed words were spoken. The young man's face was still colourless but his eyes were less hard. He took out his pencil and toyed for a moment with the menu.
"Some little trifle," he suggested, "commemorative of the occasion?"
"I would rather," Harvey Grimm confessed, "think out some scheme for advertising your work. There's a little thing here about a lame 'busman——"
"Any scheme you suggest," the young man assented dreamily. "I frankly admit that the dispersal of my productions is a matter in which I have failed. The appreciative few may have purchased but the man of the day passes on, ignorant of the great need he really has of poetry. Ten thousand copies of my poems, sold in London, would produce at once a more gracious spirit. You would observe a difference in the deportment, the speech, the greater altruism of the multitude. How shall I force my works into their hands and their eightpences into my pocket?"
"Fourpence only," Aaron Rodd reminded him. "The publishers get half."
"In the event of a large circulation," the poet pointed out, with a wave of the hand, "better terms might be arrived at. You, as a legal man, can appreciate that possibility."
"There is only one idea which occurs to me," Harvey Grimm declared, after a brief pause. "Come and we will make an experiment."
They marched out into the streets and walked solemnly along towards Leicester Square. Suddenly Harvey Grimm stopped short and accosted a small, grey-haired man who was carrying a bag and walking quickly.
"I beg your pardon, sir," the former began.
"What is it?" the little man demanded.
Harvey Grimm took him gently by the lapel of his coat. The little man seemed too surprised to resist.
"I want the privilege of a few minutes' conversation with you," Harvey Grimm continued. "You are one of the uneducated ten thousand who, on behalf of my friend here, Stephen Cresswell, the great poet, I am anxious to reach. Have you read Cresswell's poems?"
"I am in a hurry," the little man insisted, gazing at his interlocutor in a bewildered manner, and struggling to escape.
"The whole world is in a hurry," Harvey Grimm observed, drawing the paper volume from his pocket with the other hand. "This volume of poems will cost you eightpence. It will bring relief to its impoverished author, you yourself will become an enlightened——"
"I wish you'd let me go," the little man protested angrily. "I don't know you, and I don't want to stand about the streets, talking to a stranger. Let me go or I'll call a policeman."
"A policeman can afford you no assistance," Harvey Grimm assured him. "I shall remain polite but insistent. You will buy this volume of poems for eightpence, or——"
"Or what?" his victim demanded.
Harvey Grimm leaned down and whispered in his ear. The little man's hand shot into his pocket. He produced sixpence and two coppers, snatched at the book and hurried off. The victor in this little rencontre turned to his companions with an air of triumph and handed the eightpence to the poet, who immediately pocketed it.
"The whole problem is solved," he declared.
"You are a great man, sir," the poet exclaimed, grasping him by the hand, "but what was it you whispered in his ear?"