The Descent of Man Other Stories | Page 9

eased by the futility of resistance.

IV

Mrs. Linyard did not often read the papers; and there was therefore a
special significance in her approaching her husband one evening after
dinner with a copy of the New York Investigator in her hand. Her
expression lent solemnity to the act: Mrs. Linyard had a limited but
distinctive set of expressions, and she now looked as she did when the
President of the University came to dine.
"You didn't tell me of this, Samuel," she said in a slightly tremulous
voice.
"Tell you of what?" returned the Professor, reddening to the margin of
his baldness.
"That you had published a book--I might never have heard of it if Mrs.
Pease hadn't brought me the paper."
Her husband rubbed his eye-glasses with a groan. "Oh, you would have
heard of it," he said gloomily.
Mrs. Linyard stared. "Did you wish to keep it from me, Samuel?" And
as he made no answer, she added with irresistible pride: "Perhaps you
don't know what beautiful things have been said about it."
He took the paper with a reluctant hand. "Has Pease been saying
beautiful things about it?"
"The Professor? Mrs. Pease didn't say he had mentioned it."
The author heaved a sigh of relief. His book, as Harviss had prophesied,
had caught the autumn market: had caught and captured it. The
publisher had conducted the campaign like an experienced strategist.
He had completely surrounded the enemy. Every newspaper, every
periodical, held in ambush an advertisement of "The Vital Thing."
Weeks in advance the great commander had begun to form his lines of
attack. Allusions to the remarkable significance of the coming work
had appeared first in the scientific and literary reviews, spreading

thence to the supplements of the daily journals. Not a moment passed
without a quickening touch to the public consciousness: seventy
millions of people were forced to remember at least once a day that
Professor Linyard's book was on the verge of appearing. Slips
emblazoned with the question: _Have you read "The Vital Thing"?_
fell from the pages of popular novels and whitened the floors of
crowded street-cars. The query, in large lettering, assaulted the traveller
at the railway bookstall, confronted him on the walls of "elevated"
stations, and seemed, in its ascending scale, about to supplant the
interrogations as to soap and stove-polish which animate our rural
scenery.
On the day of publication, the Professor had withdrawn to his
laboratory. The shriek of the advertisements was in his ears, and his
one desire was to avoid all knowledge of the event they heralded. A
reaction of self-consciousness had set in, and if Harviss's cheque had
sufficed to buy up the first edition of "The Vital Thing" the Professor
would gladly have devoted it to that purpose. But the sense of
inevitableness gradually subdued him, and he received his wife's copy
of the Investigator with a kind of impersonal curiosity. The review was
a long one, full of extracts: he saw, as he glanced over them, how well
they would look in a volume of "Selections." The reviewer began by
thanking his author "for sounding with no uncertain voice that note of
ringing optimism, of faith in man's destiny and the supremacy of good,
which has too long been silenced by the whining chorus of a decadent
nihilism.... It is well," the writer continued, "when such reminders
come to us not from the moralist but from the man of science--when
from the desiccating atmosphere of the laboratory there rises this
glorious cry of faith and reconstruction."
The review was minute and exhaustive. Thanks no doubt to Harviss's
diplomacy, it had been given to the _Investigator's_ "best man," and the
Professor was startled by the bold eye with which his emancipated
fallacies confronted him. Under the reviewer's handling they made up
admirably as truths, and their author began to understand Harviss's
regret that they should be used for any less profitable purpose.
The _Investigator_, as Harviss phrased it, "set the pace," and the other
journals followed, finding it easier to let their critical man-of-all-work
play a variation on the first reviewer's theme than to secure an expert to

"do" the book afresh. But it was evident that the Professor had captured
his public, for all the resources of the profession could not, as Harviss
gleefully pointed out, have carried the book so straight to the heart of
the nation. There was something noble in the way in which Harviss
belittled his own share in the achievement, and insisted on the inutility
of shoving a book which had started with such headway on.
"All I ask you is to admit that I saw what would happen," he said with a
touch of professional pride. "I knew you'd struck the right note--I knew
they'd be quoting