The Death of the Lion | Page 8

Take up your book again
and let me listen, while you pay it out, to that wonderful fifteenth
chapter. If you feel 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 look 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 damned 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 on the manuscript from which Paraday had been reading to me and
which still lay on the bench. As my own followed them I saw it looked
promising, looked pregnant, as if it gently throbbed with the life the
reader had given it. Mr. Morrow indulged in a nod at it and a vague
thrust of his umbrella. "What's that?"
"Oh, it's a plan--a secret."
"A secret!" There was an instant's silence, and then Mr. Morrow made
another movement. I may have been mistaken, but it affected me as the
translated impulse of the desire to lay hands on the manuscript, and this
led me to indulge in a quick anticipatory grab which may very well
have seemed ungraceful, or even impertinent, and which at any rate left
Mr. Paraday's two admirers very erect, glaring at each other while one
of them held a bundle of papers well behind him. An instant later Mr.
Morrow quitted me abruptly, as if he had really carried something off
with him. To reassure myself, watching his broad back recede, I only
grasped my manuscript the tighter. He went to the back door of the
house, the one he had come out from, but on trying the handle he
appeared to find it fastened. So he passed round into the front garden,
and by listening intently enough I could presently hear the outer gate
close behind him with a bang. I thought again of the thirty-seven
influential journals and wondered what would be his revenge. I hasten
to add that he was magnanimous: which was just the most dreadful

thing he could have been. The Tatler published a charming chatty
familiar account of Mr. Paraday's "Home-life," and on the wings of the
thirty-seven influential journals it went, to use Mr. Morrow's own
expression, right round the globe.

CHAPTER VI.

A week later, early in May, my glorified friend came up to town, where,
it may be veraciously recorded he was the king of the beasts of the year.
No advancement was ever more rapid, no exaltation more complete, no
bewilderment more teachable. His book sold but moderately, though
the article in The Empire had done unwonted wonders for it; but he
circulated in person to a measure that the libraries might well have
envied. His formula had been found--he was a "revelation." His
momentary terror had been real, just as mine had been--the
overclouding of his passionate desire to be left to finish his work. He
was far from unsociable, but he had the finest conception of being let
alone that I've ever met. For the time, none the less, he took his profit
where it seemed most to crowd on him, having in his pocket the
portable sophistries about the nature of the artist's task. Observation too
was a kind of work and experience 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, while 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