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a kind of success; London dinners were all material and London ladies were fruitful toil. “No one has the faintest conception of what I’m trying for,” he said to me, “and not many have read three pages that I’ve written; but I must dine with them first—they’ll find out why when they’ve time.” It was rather rude justice, perhaps; but the fatigue had the merit of being a new sort, and the phantasmagoric town was probably after all less of a battlefield than the haunted study. He once told me that he had had no personal life to speak of since his fortieth year, but had had more than was good for him before. London closed the parenthesis and exhibited him in relations; one of the most inevitable of these being that in which he found himself to Mrs. Weeks Wimbush, wife of the boundless brewer and proprietress of the universal menagerie. In this establishment, as every-body knows, on occasions when the crush is great, the animals rub shoulders freely with the spectators and the lions sit down for whole evenings with the lambs.
It had been ominously clear to me from the first that in Neil Paraday this lady, who, as all the world agreed, was tremendous fun, considered that she had secured a prime attraction, a creature of almost heraldic oddity. Nothing could exceed her enthusiasm over her capture, and nothing could exceed the confused apprehensions it excited in me. I had an instinctive fear of her which I tried without effect to conceal from her victim, but which I let her perceive with perfect impunity. Paraday heeded it, but she never did, for her conscience was that of a romping child. She was a blind, violent force, to which I could attach no more idea of responsibility than to the creaking of a sign in the wind. It was difficult to say what she conduced to but to circulation. She was constructed of steel and leather, and all I asked of her for our tractable friend was not to do him to death. He had consented for a time to be of india-rubber, but my thoughts were fixed on the day he should resume his shape or at least get back into his box. It was evidently all right, but I should be glad when it was well over. I had a special fear—the impression was ineffaceable of the hour when, after Mr. Morrow’s departure, I had found him on the sofa in his study. That pretext of indisposition had not in the least been meant as a snub to the envoy of The Tatler—he had gone to lie down in very truth. He had felt a pang of his old pain, the result of the agitation wrought in him by this forcing open of a new period. His old programme, his old ideal even had to be changed. Say what one would, success was a complication and recognition had to be reciprocal. The monastic life, the pious illumination of the missal in the convent cell were things of the gathered past. It didn’t engender despair, but it at least required adjustment. Before I left him on that occasion we had passed a bargain, my part of which was that I should make it my business to take care of him. Let whoever would represent the interest in his presence (I had a mystical prevision of Mrs. Weeks Wimbush) I should represent the interest in his work—in other words in his absence. These two interests were in their essence opposed; and I doubt, as youth is fleeting, if I shall ever again know the intensity of joy with which I felt that in so good a cause I was willing to make myself odious.
One day, in Sloane Street, I found myself questioning Paraday’s landlord, who had come to the door in answer to my knock. Two vehicles, a barouche and a smart hansom, were drawn up before the house.
“In the drawing-room, sir? Mrs. Weeks Wimbush.”
“And in the dining-room?”
“A young lady, sir—waiting: I think a foreigner.”
It was three o’clock, and on days when Paraday didn’t lunch out he attached a value to these subjugated hours. On which days, however, didn’t the dear man lunch out? Mrs. Wimbush, at such a crisis, would have rushed round immediately after her own repast. I went into the dining-room first, postponing the pleasure of seeing how, upstairs, the lady of the barouche would, on my arrival, point the moral of my sweet solicitude. No one took such an interest as herself in his doing only what was good for him, and she was always on the spot to see that he did it. She made appointments with him to discuss the best means of economizing his time and protecting his privacy. She further made his health her special business, and had so much sympathy with my own zeal for it that she was the author of pleasing fictions on the subject of what my devotion had led me to give up. I gave up nothing (I don’t count Mr. Pinhorn) because I had nothing, and all I had as yet achieved was to find myself also in the menagerie. I had dashed in to save my friend, but I had only got domesticated and wedged; so that I could do nothing for him but exchange with him over people’s heads looks of intense but futile intelligence.
VII
THE young lady in the dining-room had a brave face, black hair, blue eyes, and in her lap a big volume. “I’ve come for his autograph,” she said, when I had explained to her that I was under bonds to see people for him when he was occupied. “I’ve been waiting half an hour, but I’m prepared to wait all day.” I don’t know whether it was this that told me she was American, for the propensity to wait all day is not in general characteristic of her race. I was enlightened probably not so much by the spirit of the utterance as by some quality of its sound. At any rate I saw she had an individual patience and a lovely frock, together with an expression that played among her pretty features like a breeze among flowers. Putting her book upon the table, she showed me a massive album, showily bound and full of autographs of price. The collection of faded notes, of still more faded “thoughts,” of quotations, platitudes, signatures, represented a formidable purpose.
“Most people apply to Mr. Paraday by letter, you know,” I said.
“Yes, but he doesn’t answer. I’ve written three times.”
“Very true,” I reflected; “the sort of letter you mean goes straight into the fire.”
“How do you know the sort I mean?” My interlocutress had blushed and smiled, and in a moment she added: “I don’t believe he gets many like them!”
“I’m sure they’re beautiful, but he burns without reading.” I didn’t add that I had told him he ought to.
“Isn’t he then in danger of burning things of importance?”
“He would be, if distinguished men hadn’t an infallible nose for nonsense.”
She looked at me a moment—her face was sweet and gay. “Do you burn without reading, too?” she asked; in answer to which I assured her that, if she would trust me with her repository, I would see that Mr. Paraday should write his name in it.
She considered a little. “That’s very well, but it wouldn’t make me see him.”
“Do you want very much to see him?” It seemed ungracious to catechise so charming a creature, but somehow I had never yet taken my duty to the great author so seriously.
“Enough to have come from America for the purpose.”
I stared. “All alone?”
“I don’t see that that’s exactly your business; but if it will make me more appealing I’ll confess that I’m quite by myself. I had to come alone or not come at all.”
She was interesting; I could imagine that she had lost parents, natural protectors—could conceive even that she had inherited money. I was in a phase of my own fortune when keeping hansoms at doors seemed to me pure swagger. As a trick of this bold and sensitive girl, however, it became romantic—a part of the general romance of her freedom, her errand, her innocence. The confidence of young Americans was notorious, and I speedily arrived at a conviction that no impulse could have been more generous than the impulse that had operated here. I foresaw at that moment that it would make her my peculiar charge, just as circumstances had made Neil Paraday. She would be another person to look after, and one’s honor would be concerned in guiding her straight. These things became clearer to me later; at the instant I had scepticism enough to observe to her, as I turned the pages of her volume, that her net had, all the same, caught many a big fish. She appeared to have had fruitful access to the great ones of the earth; there were people, moreover, whose signatures she had presumably secured without a personal interview. She couldn’t have worried George Washington and Friedrich Schiller and Hannah More. She met this argument,