The Figure in the Carpet | Page 2

He appreciated my present eagerness and undertook
that the periodical in question should do no less; then at the last, with
his hand on the door, he said to me: "Of course you'll be all right, you
know." Seeing I was a trifle vague he added: "I mean you won't be
silly."
"Silly--about Vereker! Why what do I ever find him but awfully
clever?"
"Well, what's that but silly? What on earth does 'awfully clever' mean?
For God's sake try to get AT him. Don't let him suffer by our
arrangement. Speak of him, you know, if you can, as I should have
spoken of him."
I wondered an instant. "You mean as far and away the biggest of the
lot--that sort of thing?"
Corvick almost groaned. "Oh you know, I don't put them back to back
that way; it's the infancy of art! But he gives me a pleasure so rare; the
sense of"--he mused a little--"something or other."
I wondered again. "The sense, pray, of want?"

"My dear man, that's just what I want YOU to say!"
Even before he had banged the door I had begun, book in hand, to
prepare myself to say it. I sat up with Vereker half the night; Corvick
couldn't have done more than that. He was awfully clever-- I stuck to
that, but he wasn't a bit the biggest of the lot. I didn't allude to the lot,
however; I flattered myself that I emerged on this occasion from the
infancy of art. "It's all right," they declared vividly at the office; and
when the number appeared I felt there was a basis on which I could
meet the great man. It gave me confidence for a day or two--then that
confidence dropped. I had fancied him reading it with relish, but if
Corvick wasn't satisfied how could Vereker himself be? I reflected
indeed that the heat of the admirer was sometimes grosser even than the
appetite of the scribe. Corvick at all events wrote me from Paris a little
ill-humouredly. Mrs. Erme was pulling round, and I hadn't at all said
what Vereker gave him the sense of.

CHAPTER II

The effect of my visit to Bridges was to turn me out for more
profundity. Hugh Vereker, as I saw him there, was of a contact so void
of angles that I blushed for the poverty of imagination involved in my
small precautions. If he was in spirits it wasn't because he had read my
review; in fact on the Sunday morning I felt sure he hadn't read it,
though The Middle had been out three days and bloomed, I assured
myself, in the stiff garden of periodicals which gave one of the ormolu
tables the air of a stand at a station. The impression he made on me
personally was such that I wished him to read it, and I corrected to this
end with a surreptitious hand what might be wanting in the careless
conspicuity of the sheet. I'm afraid I even watched the result of my
manoeuvre, but up to luncheon I watched in vain.
When afterwards, in the course of our gregarious walk, I found myself
for half an hour, not perhaps without another manoeuvre, at the great
man's side, the result of his affability was a still livelier desire that he
shouldn't remain in ignorance of the peculiar justice I had done him. It
wasn't that he seemed to thirst for justice; on the contrary I hadn't yet

caught in his talk the faintest grunt of a grudge--a note for which my
young experience had already given me an ear. Of late he had had more
recognition, and it was pleasant, as we used to say in The Middle, to
see how it drew him out. He wasn't of course popular, but I judged one
of the sources of his good humour to be precisely that his success was
independent of that. He had none the less become in a manner the
fashion; the critics at least had put on a spurt and caught up with him.
We had found out at last how clever he was, and he had had to make
the best of the loss of his mystery. I was strongly tempted, as I walked
beside him, to let him know how much of that unveiling was my act;
and there was a moment when I probably should have done so had not
one of the ladies of our party, snatching a place at his other elbow, just
then appealed to him in a spirit comparatively selfish. It was very
discouraging: I almost felt the liberty had been taken with myself.
I had had on my tongue's end, for my own part, a phrase or two about
the right word at the