The Inheritors | Page 7

start the rag called--?"
"Yes, yes," Callan answered, hastily, "he's been very successful in
launching papers. Now he's trying his hand with a new one. He's any
amount of backers--big names, you know. He's to run my next as a
feuilleton. This--this venture is to be rather more serious in tone than
any that he's done hitherto. You understand?"
"Why, yes," I said; "but I don't see where I come in."
Callan took a meditative sip of whiskey, added a little more water, a
little more whiskey, and then found the mixture to his liking.
"You see," he said, "Fox got a letter here to say that Wilkinson had died
suddenly--some affection of the heart. Wilkinson was to have written a
series of personal articles on prominent people. Well, Fox was
nonplussed and I put in a word for you."
"I'm sure I'm much--" I began.
"Not at all, not at all," Callan interrupted, blandly. "I've known you and
you've known me for a number of years."
A sudden picture danced before my eyes--the portrait of the Callan of
the old days--the fawning, shady individual, with the seedy clothes, the
furtive eyes and the obliging manners.
"Why, yes," I said; "but I don't see that that gives me any claim."
Callan cleared his throat.
"The lapse of time," he said in his grand manner, "rivets what we may
call the bands of association."
He paused to inscribe this sentence on the tablets of his memory. It
would be dragged in--to form a purple patch--in his new serial.
"You see," he went on, "I've written a good deal of autobiographical
matter and it would verge upon self-advertisement to do more. You

know how much I dislike that. So I showed Fox your sketch in the
Kensington."
"The Jenkins story?" I said. "How did you come to see it?"
"Then send me the Kensington," he answered. There was a touch of
sourness in his tone, and I remembered that the Kensington I had seen
had been ballasted with seven goodly pages by Callan himself--seven
unreadable packed pages of a serial.
"As I was saying," Callan began again, "you ought to know me very
well, and I suppose you are acquainted with my books. As for the rest, I
will give you what material you want."
"But, my dear Callan," I said, "I've never tried my hand at that sort of
thing."
Callan silenced me with a wave of his hand.
"It struck both Fox and myself that your--your 'Jenkins' was just what
was wanted," he said; "of course, that was a study of a kind of
broken-down painter. But it was well done."
I bowed my head. Praise from Callan was best acknowledged in
silence.
"You see, what we want, or rather what Fox wants," he explained, "is a
kind of series of studies of celebrities chez eux. Of course, they are not
broken down. But if you can treat them as you treated Jenkins --get
them in their studies, surrounded by what in their case stands for the
broken lay figures and the faded serge curtains--it will be exactly the
thing. It will be a new line, or rather--what is a great deal better, mind
you--an old line treated in a slightly, very slightly different way. That's
what the public wants."
"Ah, yes," I said, "that's what the public wants. But all the same, it's
been done time out of mind before. Why, I've seen photographs of you
and your arm-chair and your pen-wiper and so on, half a score of times

in the sixpenny magazines."
Callan again indicated bland superiority with a wave of his hand.
"You undervalue yourself," he said.
I murmured--"Thanks."
"This is to be--not a mere pandering to curiosity--but an attempt to get
at the inside of things--to get the atmosphere, so to speak; not merely to
catalogue furniture."
He was quoting from the prospectus of the new paper, and then cleared
his throat for the utterance of a tremendous truth.
"Photography--is not--Art," he remarked.
The fantastic side of our colloquy began to strike me.
"After all," I thought to myself, "why shouldn't that girl have played at
being a denizen of another sphere? She did it ever so much better than
Callan. She did it too well, I suppose."
"The price is very decent," Callan chimed in. "I don't know how much
per thousand, ...but...."
I found myself reckoning, against my will as it were.
"You'll do it, I suppose?" he said.
I thought of my debts ... "Why, yes, I suppose so," I answered. "But
who are the others that I am to provide with atmospheres?"
Callan shrugged his shoulders.
"Oh, all sorts of prominent people--soldiers, statesmen, Mr. Churchill,
the Foreign Minister, artists, preachers--all sorts of people."
"All sorts of glory," occurred to me.

"The paper will stand