The Death of the Lion | Page 5

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've 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 wasn't, 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 dais and the throne. The article was "epoch-making," a
landmark in his life; 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 something 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.

CHAPTER IV.

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 recognised 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 cried 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 modem ship, and I felt as if
Paraday and I were tossing terrified under his bows. I saw his
momentum was irresistible. "I was confident that I should be the first in
the field. A great interest is naturally felt in Mr. Paraday's
surroundings," he heavily observed.
"I hadn't the least idea of it," said Paraday, as if he had been told he had
been snoring.
"I find he hasn't 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 how 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 nobly
exemplifies. In addition to my connexion 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 honoured only last week, as a
representative of The Tatler, with the confidence of Guy Walsingham,
the brilliant author of 'Obsessions.' She pronounced herself thoroughly
pleased with my sketch of her method; she went so far as to