Terminations E-Book

Henry James

• Herausgeber: Librorium Editions
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

I had simply, I suppose, a change of heart, and it must have begun when I received my manuscript back from Mr. Pinhorn. Mr. Pinhorn was my “chief,” as he was called in the office; he had accepted the high mission of bringing the paper up. This was a weekly periodical, and had been supposed to be almost past redemption when he took hold of it. It was Mr. Deedy who had let it down so dreadfully; he was never mentioned in the office now save in connection with that misdemeanor. Young as I was I had been in a manner taken over from Mr. Deedy, who had been owner as well as editor; forming part of a promiscuous lot, mainly plant and office furniture, which poor Mrs. Deedy, in her bereavement and depression, parted with at a rough valuation. I could account for my continuity only on the supposition that I had been cheap.

Leseprobe

Terminations

Henry James

© 2021 Librorium Editions

ISBN : 9782383831372

Contents

The Death of the Lion

The Coxon Fund

The Middle Years

The Altar of the Dead

The Death of the Lion

1

I had simply, I suppose, a change of heart, and it must have begun when I received my manuscript back from Mr. Pinhorn. Mr. Pinhorn was my “chief,” as he was called in the office; he had accepted the high mission of bringing the paper up. This was a weekly periodical, and had been supposed to be almost past redemption when he took hold of it. It was Mr. Deedy who had let it down so dreadfully; he was never mentioned in the office now save in connection with that misdemeanor. Young as I was I had been in a manner taken over from Mr. Deedy, who had been owner as well as editor; forming part of a promiscuous lot, mainly plant and office furniture, which poor Mrs. Deedy, in her bereavement and depression, parted with at a rough valuation. I could account for my continuity only on the supposition that I had been cheap. I rather resented the practice of fathering all flatness on my late protector, who was in his unhonored grave; but as I had my way to make, I found matter enough for complacency in being on a “staff.” At the same time I was aware that I was exposed to suspicion as a product of the old lowering system. This made me feel that I was doubly bound to have ideas, and had doubtless been at the bottom of my proposing to Mr. Pinhorn that I should lay my lean hands on Neil Paraday. I remember that he looked at me first as if he had never heard of this celebrity, who indeed at that moment was by no means in the centre of the heavens; and even when I had knowingly explained, he expressed but little confidence in the demand for any such matter. When I had reminded him that the great principle on which we were supposed to work was just to create the demand we required, he considered a moment and then rejoined: “I see; you want to write him up.”

“Call it that, if you like.”

“And what’s your inducement?”

“Bless my soul – my admiration!”

Mr. Pinhorn pursed up his mouth. “Is there much to be done with him?”

“Whatever there is, we should have it all to ourselves, for he hasn’t been touched.”

This argument was effective, and Mr. Pinhorn responded: “But where can you do it?”

“Under the fifth rib!”

Mr. Pinhorn stared. “Where’s that?”

“You want me to go down and see him?” I enquired, when I had enjoyed his visible search for this obscure suburb.

“I don’t ‘want’ anything – the proposal’s your own. But you must remember that that’s the way we do things now,” said Mr. Pinhorn, with another dig at Mr. Deedy.

Unregenerate as I was, I could read the queer implications of this speech. The present owner’s superior virtue, as well as his deeper craft, spoke in his reference to the late editor as one of that baser sort who deal in false representations. Mr. Deedy would as soon have sent me to call on Neil Paraday as he would have published a “holiday number”; but such scruples presented themselves as mere ignoble thrift to his successor, whose own sincerity took the form of ringing door bells, and whose definition of genius was the art of finding people at home. It was as if Mr. Deedy had published reports without his young men’s having, as Pinhorn would have said, really been there. I was unregenerate, as I have hinted, and I was not concerned to straighten out the journalistic morals of my chief, feeling them indeed to be an abyss over the edge of which it was better not to peer. Really to be there this time, moreover, was a vision that made the idea of writing something subtle about Neil Paraday only the more inspiring. I would be as considerate as even Mr. Deedy could have wished, and yet I should be as present as only Mr. Pinhorn could conceive. My allusion to the sequestered manner in which Mr. Paraday lived (which had formed part of my explanation, though I knew of it only by hearsay) was, I could divine, very much what had made Mr. Pinhorn nibble. It struck him as inconsistent with the success of his paper that any one should be so sequestered as that. And, then, was not an immediate exposure of everything just what the public wanted? Mr. Pinhorn effectually called me to order by reminding me of the promptness with which I had met Miss Braby at Liverpool on her return from her fiasco in the States. Hadn’t we published, while its freshness and flavor were unimpaired, Miss Braby’s own version of that great international episode? I felt somewhat uneasy at this lumping of the actress and the author, and I confess that, after having enlisted Mr. Pinhorn’s sympathies, I procrastinated a little. I had succeeded better than I wished, and I had, as it happened, work nearer at hand. A few days later I called on Lord Crouchley, and carried off in triumph the most unintelligible statement that had yet appeared of his lordship’s reasons for his change of front. I thus set in motion in the daily papers columns of virtuous verbiage. The following week I ran down to Brighton for a chat, as Mr. Pinhorn called it, with Mrs. Bounder, who gave me, on the subject of her divorce, many curious particulars that had not been articulated in court. If ever an article flowed from the primal fount it was that article on Mrs. Bounder. By this time, however, I became aware that Neil Paraday’s new book was on the point of appearing, and that its approach had been the ground of my original appeal to Mr. Pinhorn, who was now annoyed with me for having lost so many days. He bundled me off – we would at least not lose another. I have always thought his sudden alertness a remarkable example of the journalistic instinct. Nothing had occurred, since I first spoke to him, to create a visible urgency, and no enlightenment could possibly have reached him. It was a pure case of professional flair – he had smelled the coming glory as an animal smells its distant prey.

2

I may as well say at once that this little record pretends in no degree to be a picture either of my introduction to Mr. Paraday or of certain proximate steps and stages. The scheme of my narrative allows no space for these things, and in any case a prohibitory sentiment would be attached to my recollection of so rare an hour. These meagre notes are essentially private, so that, if they see the light, the insidious forces that, as my story itself shows, make at present for publicity will simply have overmastered my precautions. The curtain fell lately enough on the lamentable drama. My memory of the day I alighted at Mr. Paraday’s door is a fresh memory of kindness, hospitality, compassion, and of the wonderful illuminating talk in which the welcome was conveyed. Some voice of the air had taught me the right moment, the moment of his life in which an act of unexpected young allegiance might most come home. He had recently recovered from a long, grave illness. I had gone to the neighboring inn for the night, but I spent the evening in his company, and he insisted the next day on my sleeping under his roof. I had not an indefinite leave; Mr. Pinhorn supposed us to put our victims through on the gallop. It was later, in the office, that the dance was set to music. I fortified myself, however, as my training had taught me to do, by the conviction that nothing could be more advantageous for my article than to be written in the very atmosphere. I said nothing to Mr. Paraday about it, but in the morning, after my removal from the inn, while he was occupied in his study, as he had notified me that he should need to be, I committed to paper the quintessence of my impressions. Then thinking to commend myself to Mr. Pinhorn by my celerity, I walked out and posted my little packet before luncheon. Once my paper was written I was free to stay on, and if it was designed to divert attention from my frivolity in so doing, I could reflect with satisfaction that I had never been so clever. I don’t mean to deny of course that I was aware it was much too good for Mr. Pinhorn; but I was equally conscious that Mr. Pinhorn had the supreme shrewdness of recognizing from time to time the cases in which an article was not too bad only because it was too good. There was nothing he loved so much as to print on the right occasion a thing he hated. I had begun my visit to Mr. Paraday on a Monday, and on the Wednesday his book came out. A copy of it arrived by the first post, and he let me go out into the garden with it immediately after breakfast. I read it from beginning to end that day, and in the evening he asked me to remain with him the rest of the week and over Sunday.

That night my manuscript came back from Mr. Pinhorn, accompanied with a letter, of which the gist was the desire to know what I meant by sending him such stuff. That was the meaning of the question, if not exactly its form, and it made my mistake immense to me. Such as this mistake was, I could now only look it in the face and accept it. I knew where I had failed, but it was exactly where I couldn’t have succeeded. I had been sent down there to be personal, and in point of fact I hadn’t been personal at all; what I had sent up to London was just a little finicking, feverish study of my author’s talent. Anything less relevant to Mr. Pinhorn’s purpose couldn’t well be imagined, and he was visibly angry at my having (at his expense, with a second-class ticket) approached the object of our arrangement only to be so deucedly distant. For myself, I knew but too well what had happened, and how a miracle – as pretty as some old miracle of legend – had been wrought on the spot to save me. There had been a big brush of wings, the flash of an opaline robe, and then, with a great, cool stir of the air, the sense of an angel’s having swooped down and caught me to his bosom. He held me only till the danger was over, and it all took place in a minute. With my manuscript back on my hands I understood the phenomenon better, and the reflections I made on it are what I meant, at the beginning of this anecdote, by my change of heart. Mr. Pinhorn’s note was not only a rebuke decidedly stern, but an invitation immediately to send him (it was the case to say so) the genuine article, the revealing and reverberating sketch to the promise of which – and of which alone – I owed my squandered privilege. A week or two later I recast my peccant paper, and giving it a particular application to Mr. Paraday’s new book, obtained for it the hospitality of another journal, where, I must admit, Mr. Pinhorn was so far justified that it attracted not the least attention.

3

I was frankly, at the end of three days, a very prejudiced critic, so that one morning when, in the garden, Neil Paraday had offered to read me some thing I quite held my breath as I listened. It was the written scheme of another book – something he had put aside long ago, before his illness, and lately taken out again to reconsider. He had been turning it round when I came down upon him, and it had grown magnificently under this second hand. Loose, liberal, confident, it might have passed for a great, gossiping, eloquent letter – the overflow into talk of an artist’s amorous plan. The subject I thought singularly rich, quite the strongest he had yet treated; and this familiar statement of it, full too of fine maturities, was really, in summarized splendor, a mine of gold, a precious, independent work. I remember rather profanely wondering whether the ultimate production could possibly be so happy. His reading of the epistle, at any rate, made me feel as if I were, for the advantage of posterity, in close correspondence with him – were the distinguished person to whom it had been affectionately addressed. It was high distinction simply to be told such things. The idea he now communicated had all the freshness, the flushed fairness of the conception untouched and untried; it was Venus rising from the sea, before the airs had blown upon her. I had never been so throbbingly present at such an unveiling. But when he had tossed the last bright word after the others, as I had seen cashiers in banks, weighing mounds of coin, drop a final sovereign into the tray, I became conscious of a sudden prudent alarm.

“My dear master, how, after all, are you going to do it?” I asked. “It’s infinitely noble, but what time it will take, what patience and independence, what assured, what perfect conditions it will demand! Oh, for a lone isle in a tepid sea!”

“Isn’t this practically a lone isle, and aren’t you, as an encircling medium, tepid enough?” he replied, alluding with a laugh to the wonder of my young admiration and the narrow limits of his little provincial home. “Time isn’t what I’ve lacked hitherto; the question hasn’t been to find it, but to use it. Of course my illness made a great hole, but I dare say there would have been a hole at any rate. The earth we tread has more pockets than a billiard table. The great thing is now to keep on my feet.”

“That’s exactly what I mean.”

Neil Paraday looked at me with eyes – such pleasant eyes as he had – in which, as I now recall their expression, I seem to have seen a dim imagination of his fate. He was fifty years old, and his illness had been cruel, his convalescence slow. “It isn’t as if I weren’t all right.”

“Oh, if you weren’t all right I wouldn’t look at you!” I tenderly said.

We had both got up, quickened by the full sound of it all, and he had lighted a cigarette. I had taken a fresh one, and, with an intenser smile, by way of answer to my exclamation, he touched it with the flame of his match. “If I weren’t better I shouldn’t have thought of that!” He flourished his epistle in his hand.

“I don’t want to be discouraging, but that’s not true,” I returned. “I’m sure that during the months you lay here in pain you had visitations sublime. You thought of a thousand things. You think of more and more all the while. That’s what makes you, if you will pardon my familiarity, so respectable. At a time when so many people are spent you come into your second wind. But, thank God, all the same, you’re better! Thank God, too, you’re not, as you were telling me yesterday, ‘successful.’ If you weren’t a failure, what would be the use of trying? That’s my one reserve on the subject of your recovery – that it makes you ‘score’, as the newspapers say. It looks well in the newspapers, and almost anything that does that is horrible. ‘We are happy to announce that Mr. Paraday, the celebrated author, is again in the enjoyment of excellent health.’ Somehow I shouldn’t like to see it.”

“You won’t see it. I’m not in the least celebrated – my obscurity protects me. But couldn’t you bear even to see I was dying or dead?” my companion asked. “Dead – passe encore; there’s nothing so safe. One never knows what a living artist may do – one has mourned so many. However, one must make the worst of it; you must be as dead as you can.”

“Don’t I meet that condition in having just published a book?”

“Adequately, let us hope; for the book is verily a masterpiece.”

At this moment the parlormaid appeared in the door that opened into the garden. Paraday lived at no great cost, and the frisk of petticoats, with a timorous “Sherry, sir?” was about his modest mahogany. He allowed half his income to his wife, from whom he had succeeded in separating without redundancy of legend. I had a general faith in his having behaved well, and I had once, in London, taken Mrs. Paraday down to dinner. He now turned to speak to the maid, who offered him, on a tray, some card or note, while agitated, excited, I wandered to the end of the garden. The idea of his security became supremely dear to me, and I asked myself if I were the same young man who had come down a few days before to scatter him to the four winds. When I retraced my steps he had gone into the house and the woman (the second London post had come in) had placed my letters and a newspaper on a bench. I sat down there to the letters, which were a brief business, and then, without heeding the address, took the paper from its envelope. It was the journal of highest renown, The Empire of that morning. It regularly came to Paraday, but I remembered that neither of us had yet looked at the copy already delivered. This one had a great mark on the “editorial” page, and, uncrumpling the wrapper, I saw it to be directed to my host and stamped with the name of his publishers. I instantly divined that The Empire had spoken of him, and I have not forgotten the odd little shock of the circumstance. It checked all eagerness and made me drop the paper, a moment. As I sat there, conscious of a palpitation, I think I had a vision of what was to be. I had also a vision of the letter I would presently address to Mr. Pinhorn, breaking, as it were, with Mr. Pinhorn. Of course, however, the next minute the voice of The Empire was in my ears.

The article was not, I thanked Heaven, a review; it was a “leader,” the last of three, presenting Neil Paraday to the human race. His new book, the fifth from his hand, had been but a day or two out, and The Empire, already aware of it, fired, as if on the birth of a prince, a salute of a whole column. The guns had been booming these three hours in the house without our suspecting them. The big blundering newspaper had discovered him, and now he was proclaimed and anointed and crowned. His place was assigned him as publicly as if a fat usher with a wand had pointed to the topmost chair; he was to pass up and still up, higher and higher, between the watching faces and the envious sounds – away up to the daïs and the throne. The article was a date; he had taken rank at a bound – waked up a national glory. A national glory was needed, and it was an immense convenience he was there. What all this meant rolled over me, and I fear I grew a little faint – it meant so much more than I could say “yea” to on the spot. In a flash, somehow, all was different; the tremendous wave I speak of had swept some thing away. It had knocked down, I suppose, my little customary altar, my twinkling tapers and my flowers, and had reared itself into the likeness of a temple vast and bare. When Neil Paraday should come out of the house he would come out a contemporary. That was what had happened; the poor man was to be squeezed into his horrible age. I felt as if he had been overtaken on the crest of the hill and brought back to the city. A little more, and he would have dipped down the short cut to posterity and escaped.

4

When he came out it was exactly as if he had been in custody, for beside him walked a stout man with a big black beard, who, save that he wore spectacles, might have been a policeman, and in whom at a second glance I recognized the highest contemporary enterprise.

“This is Mr. Morrow,” said Paraday, looking, I thought, rather white; “he wants to publish Heaven knows what about me.”

I winced as I remembered that this was exactly what I myself had wanted. “Already?” I exclaimed, with a sort of sense that my friend had fled to me for protection.

Mr. Morrow glared, agreeably, through his glasses; they suggested the electric headlights of some monstrous modern ship, and I felt as if Paraday and I were tossing, terrified, under his bows. I saw that his momentum was irresistible. “I was confident that I should be the first in the field,” he declared. “A great interest is naturally felt in Mr. Paraday’s surroundings.”

“I hadn’t the least idea of it,” said Paraday, as he had been told he had been snoring.

“I find he has not read the article in The Empire,” Mr. Morrow remarked to me. “That’s so very interesting – it’s something to start with,” he smiled. He had begun to pull off his gloves, which were violently new, and to look encouragingly round the little garden. As a “surrounding” I felt that I myself had already been taken in; I was a little fish in the stomach of a bigger one. “I represent,” our visitor continued, “a syndicate of influential journals, no less than thirty-seven, whose public – whose publics, I may say – are in peculiar sympathy with Mr. Paraday’s line of thought. They would greatly appreciate any expression of his views on the subject of the art he so brilliantly practises. Besides my connection with the syndicate just mentioned, I hold a particular commission from The Tatler, whose most prominent department, ‘Smatter and Chatter’ – I dare say you’ve often enjoyed it – attracts such attention. I was honored only last week, as a representative of The Tatler, with the confidence of Guy Walsingham, the author of ‘Obsessions’. She expressed herself thoroughly pleased with my sketch of her method; she went so far as to say that I had made her genius more comprehensible even to herself.”

Neil Paraday had dropped upon the garden bench, and sat there at once detached and confused; he looked hard at a bare spot in the lawn, as if with an anxiety that had suddenly made him grave. His movement had been interpreted by his visitor as an invitation to sink sympathetically into a wicker chair that stood hard by, and as Mr. Morrow so settled himself I felt that he had taken official possession and that there was no undoing it. One had heard of unfortunate people’s having “a man in the house,” and this was just what we had. There was a silence of a moment, during which we seemed to acknowledge in the only way that was possible the presence of universal fate; the sunny stillness took no pity, and my thought, as I was sure Paraday’s was doing, performed within the minute a great distant revolution. I saw just how emphatic I should make my rejoinder to Mr. Pinhorn, and that, having come, like Mr. Morrow, to betray, I must remain as long as possible to save. Not because I had brought my mind back, but because our visitor’s last words were in my ear, I presently enquired, with gloomy irrelevance, if Guy Walsingham were a woman.

“Oh, yes! a mere pseudonym; but convenient, you know, for a lady who goes in for the larger latitude. ‘Obsessions, by Miss So-and-so’, would look a little odd, but men are more naturally indelicate. Have you peeped into ‘Obsessions’?” Mr. Morrow continued sociably to our companion.

Paraday, still absent, remote, made no answer, as if he had not heard the question: a manifestation that appeared to suit the cheerful Mr. Morrow as well as any other. Imperturbably bland, he was a man of resources – he only needed to be on the spot. He had pocketed the whole poor place while Paraday and I were wool-gathering, and I could imagine that he had already got his “heads.” His system, at any rate, was justified by the inevitability with which I replied, to save my friend the trouble: “Dear, no! he hasn’t read it. He doesn’t read such things!” I unwarily added.

“Things that are too far over the fence, eh?” I was indeed a godsend to Mr. Morrow. It was the psychological moment; it determined the appearance of his notebook, which, however, he at first kept slightly behind him, even as the dentist, approaching his victim, keeps the horrible forceps. “Mr. Paraday holds with the good old proprieties – I see!” And thinking of the thirty-seven influential journals, I found myself, as I found poor Paraday, helplessly gazing at the promulgation of this ineptitude. “There’s no point on which distinguished views are so acceptable as on this question – raised perhaps more strikingly than ever by Guy Walsingham – of the permissibility of the larger latitude. I have an appointment precisely in connection with it, next week, with Dora Forbes, the author of ‘The Other Way Round’, which everybody is talking about. Has Mr. Paraday glanced at ‘The Other Way Round’?” Mr. Morrow now frankly appealed to me. I took upon myself to repudiate the supposition, while our companion, still silent, got up nervously and walked away. His visitor paid no heed to his withdrawal; he only opened out the notebook with a more motherly pat. “Dora Forbes, I gather, takes the ground, the same as Guy Walsingham’s, that the larger latitude has simply got to come. He holds that it has got to be squarely faced. Of course his sex makes him a less prejudiced witness. But an authoritative word from Mr. Paraday – from the point of view of his sex, you know, would go right round the globe. He takes the line that we haven’t got to face it?”

I was bewildered: it sounded somehow as if there were three sexes. My interlocutor’s pencil was poised, my private responsibility great. I simply sat staring, however, and only found presence of mind to say: “Is this Miss Forbes a gentleman?”

Mr. Morrow hesitated an instant, smiling. “It wouldn’t be ‘Miss’ – there’s a wife!”

“I mean is she a man?”

“The wife?” – Mr. Morrow, for a moment, was as confused as myself. But, when I explained that I alluded to Dora Forbes in person, he informed me, with visible amusement at my being so out of it, that this was the “pen name” of an indubitable male – he had a big red mustache. “He only assumes a feminine personality because the ladies are such popular favorites. A great deal of interest is felt in this assumption, and there’s every prospect of its being widely imitated.” Our host at this moment joined us again, and Mr. Morrow remarked invitingly that he should be happy to make a note of any observation the movement in question, the bid for success under a lady’s name, might suggest to Mr. Paraday. But the poor man, without catching the allusion, excused himself, pleading that, though he was greatly honored by the visitor’s interest, he suddenly felt unwell and should have to take leave of him – have to go and lie down and keep quiet. His young friend might be trusted to answer for him, but he hoped Mr. Morrow didn’t expect great things even of his young friend. His young friend, at this moment, looked at Neil Paraday with an anxious eye, greatly wondering if he were doomed to be ill again; but Paraday’s own kind face met his question reassuringly, seemed to say in a glance intelligible enough: “Oh, I’m not ill, but I’m scared: get him out of the house as quietly as possible.” Getting newspaper men out of the house was odd business for an emissary of Mr. Pinhorn, and I was so exhilarated by the idea of it that I called after him as he left us:

“Read the article in The Empire, and you’ll soon be all right!”

5

“Delicious, my having come down to tell him of it!” Mr. Morrow ejaculated. “My cab was at the door twenty minutes after The Empire had been laid upon my breakfast table. Now, what have you got for me?” he continued, dropping again into his chair, from which, however, the next moment he quickly rose. “I was shown into the drawing room, but there must be more to see – his study, his literary sanctum, the little things he has about, or other domestic objects or features. He wouldn’t be lying down on his study-table? There’s a great interest always felt in the scene of an author’s labors. Sometimes we’re favored with very delightful peeps. Dora Forbes showed me all his table-drawers, and almost jammed my hand into one into which I made a dash! I don’t ask that of you, but if we could talk things over right there where he sits I feel as if I should get the keynote.”

I had no wish whatever to be rude to Mr. Morrow, I was much too initiated not to prefer the safety of other ways; but I had a quick inspiration, and I entertained an insurmountable, an almost superstitious objection to his crossing the threshold of my friend’s little lonely, shabby, consecrated workshop. “No, no – we sha’n’t get at his life that way,” I said. “The way to get at his life is to – but wait a moment!” I broke off and went quickly into the house; then, in three minutes, I reappeared before Mr. Morrow with the two volumes of Paraday’s new book. “His life’s here,” I went on, “and I’m so full of this admirable thing that I can’t talk of anything else. The artist’s life’s his work, and this is the place to observe him. What he has to tell us he tells with this perfection. My dear sir, the best interviewer’s the best reader.”

Mr. Morrow good-humoredly protested. “Do you mean to say that no other source of information should be open to us?”

“None other till this particular one – by far the most copious – has been quite exhausted. Have you exhausted it, my dear sir? Had you exhausted it when you came down here? It seems to me in our time almost wholly neglected, and something should surely be done to restore its ruined credit. It’s the course to which the artist himself at every step, and with such pathetic confidence, refers us. This last book of Mr. Paraday’s is full of revelations.”

“Revelations?” panted Mr. Morrow, whom I had forced again into his chair.

“The only kind that count. It tells you with a perfection that seems to me quite final all the author thinks, for instance, about the advent of the ‘larger latitude.’”

“Where does it do that?” asked Mr. Morrow, who had picked up the second volume and was insincerely thumbing it.

“Everywhere – in the whole treatment of his case. Extract the opinion, disengage the answer – those are the real acts of homage.”

Mr. Morrow, after a minute, tossed the book away. “Ah! but you mustn’t take me for a reviewer.”

“Heaven forbid I should take you for anything so dreadful! You came down to perform a little act of sympathy, and so, I may confide to you, did I. Let us perform our little act together. These pages overflow with the testimony we want: let us read them and taste them and interpret them. You will of course have perceived for yourself that one scarcely does read Neil Paraday till one reads him aloud; he gives out to the ear an extraordinary quality, and it’s only when you expose it confidently to that test that you really get near his style. Take up your book again and let me listen, while you pay it out, to that wonderful fifteenth chapter. If you feel that you can’t do it justice, compose yourself to attention while I produce for you – I think I can – this scarcely less admirable ninth.”

Mr. Morrow gave me a straight glance which was as hard as a blow between the eyes; he had turned rather red, and a question had formed itself in his mind which reached my sense as distinctly as if he had uttered it: “What sort of a d–d fool are you?” Then he got up, gathering together his hat and gloves, buttoning his coat, projecting hungrily all over the place the big transparency of his mask. It seemed to flare over Fleet Street and somehow made the actual spot distressingly humble: there was so little for it to feed on unless he counted the blisters of our stucco or saw his way to do something with the roses. Even the poor roses were common kinds. Presently his eyes fell upon the manuscript from which Paraday had been reading to me and which still lay on the bench. As my own followed them I saw that it looked promising, looked pregnant, as if it gently throbbed with the life the reader had given it. Mr. Morrow indulged in a nod toward it and a vague thrust of his umbrella. “What’s that?”

“Oh, it’s a plan – a secret.”