Embarrassments | Page 4

dispersed, to carry me in the proper manner--I mean in a spotted jacket
and humming an air--into the smoking-room. I took my way in some
dejection to bed; but in the passage I encountered Mr. Vereker, who
had been up once more to change, coming out of his room. He was
humming an air and had on a spotted jacket, and as soon as he saw me
his gaiety gave a start.
"My dear young man," he exclaimed, "I'm so glad to lay hands on you!
I'm afraid I most unwittingly wounded you by those words of mine at
dinner to Miss Poyle. I learned but half an hour ago from Lady Jane
that you wrote the little notice in The Middle."
I protested that no bones were broken; but he moved with me to my
own door, his hand on my shoulder, kindly feeling for a fracture; and
on hearing that I had come up to bed he asked leave to cross my
threshold and just tell me in three words what his qualification of my
remarks had represented. It was plain he really feared I was hurt, and
the sense of his solicitude suddenly made all the difference to me. My
cheap review fluttered off into space, and the best things I had said in it
became flat enough beside the brilliancy of his being there. I can see
him there still, on my rug, in the firelight and his spotted jacket, his fine,
clear face all bright with the desire to be tender to my youth. I don't
know what he had at first meant to say, but I think the sight of my relief
touched him, excited him, brought up words to his lips from far within.
It was so these words presently conveyed to me something that, as I
afterwards knew, he had never uttered to any one. I have always done
justice to the generous impulse that made him speak; it was simply
compunction for a snub unconsciously administered to a man of letters
in a position inferior to his own, a man of letters moreover in the very
act of praising him. To make the thing right he talked to me exactly as
an equal and on the ground of what we both loved best. The hour, the
place, the unexpectedness deepened the impression: he couldn't have
done anything more exquisitely successful.

III.
"I don't quite know how to explain it to you," he said, "but it was the
very fact that your notice of my book had a spice of intelligence, it was
just your exceptional sharpness that produced the feeling--a very old
story with me, I beg you to believe--under the momentary influence of
which I used in speaking to that good lady the words you so naturally
resent. I don't read the things in the newspapers unless they're thrust
upon me as that one was--it's always one's best friend that does it! But I
used to read them sometimes--ten years ago. I daresay they were in
general rather stupider then; at any rate it always seemed to me that
they missed my little point with a perfection exactly as admirable when
they patted me on the back as when they kicked me in the shins.
Whenever since I've happened to have a glimpse of them they were still
blazing away--still missing it, I mean, deliciously. You miss it, my dear
fellow, with inimitable assurance; the fact of your being awfully clever
and your article's being awfully nice doesn't make a hair's breadth of
difference. It's quite with you rising young men," Vereker laughed,
"that I feel most what a failure I am!"
I listened with intense interest; it grew in-tenser as he talked. "Youa
failure--heavens! What then may your 'little point' happen to be?"
"Have I got to tell you, after all these years and labours?" There was
something in the friendly reproach of this--jocosely exaggerated--that
made me, as an ardent young seeker for truth, blush to the roots of my
hair. I'm as much in the dark as ever, though I've grown used in a sense
to my obtuseness; at that moment, however, Vereker's happy accent
made me appear to myself, and probably to him, a rare donkey. I was
on the point of exclaiming, "Ah, yes, don't tell me: for my honour, for
that of the craft, don't!" when he went on in a manner that showed he
had read my thought and had his own idea of the probability of our
some day redeeming ourselves. "By my little point I mean--what shall I
call it?--the particular thing I've written my books most for. Isn't there
for every writer a particular thing of that sort, the thing that most
makes him apply himself, the thing without the effort to