A Great Man - Arnold Bennett (romantic story to read txt) 📗

addressed Shakspere again. 'Well. Let me begin by telling you that first books by new authors never pay expenses. Never! Never! I always lose money on them. But you believe in your book? You believe in it, don't you?' He faced Henry once more.

'Yes,' said Henry.

'Then, you must have the courage of your convictions. I will give you a royalty of three halfpence in the shilling on every copy after the first five thousand. Thus, if it succeeds, you will share in the profit. If it fails, my loss will be the less. That's fair, isn't it?'

It seemed fair to Henry. But he was not Sir George's private secretary for nothing.

'You must make it twopence in the shilling,' he said in an urbane but ultimatory tone.

'Very well,' Mr. Onions Winter surrendered at once. 'We'll say twopence, and end it.'

'And what will the price of the book be?' Henry inquired.

'Two shillings, naturally. I intend it for the Satin Library. You know about the Satin Library? You don't know about the Satin Library? My dear sir, I hope it's going to be _the_ hit of the day. Here's a dummy copy.' Mr. Winter picked up an orange-tinted object from a side-table. 'Feel that cover! Look at it! Doesn't it feel like satin? Doesn't it look like satin? But it isn't satin. It's paper--a new invention, the latest thing. You notice the book-marker _is_ of satin--real satin. Now observe the shape--isn't that original? And yet quite simple--it's exactly square! And that faint design of sunflowers! These books will be perfect bibelots; that's what they'll be--bibelots. Of course, between you and me, there isn't going to be very much for the money--a hundred and fifty quite small pages. But that's between you and me. And the satin will carry it off. You'll see these charming bijou volumes in every West End drawing-room, Mr. Knight, in a few weeks. Take my word for it. By the way, will you sign our form of agreement now?'

So Henry perpended legally on the form of agreement, and, finding nothing in it seriously to offend the legal sense, signed it with due ceremony.

'Can you correct the proofs instantly, if I send them?' Mr. Winter asked at parting.

'Yes,' said Henry, who had never corrected a proof in his life. 'Are you in a hurry?'

'Well,' Mr. Winter replied, 'I had meant to inaugurate the Satin Library with another book. In fact, I have already bought five books for it. But I have a fancy to begin it with yours. I have a fancy, and when I have a fancy, I--I generally act on it. I like the title. It's a very pretty title. I'm taking the book on the title. And, really, in these days a pretty, attractive title is half the battle.'

Within two months, _Love in Babylon_, by Henry S. Knight, was published as the first volume of Mr. Onions Winter's Satin Library, and Henry saw his name in the papers under the heading 'Books Received.' The sight gave him a passing thrill, but it was impossible for him not to observe that in all essential respects he remained the same person as before. The presence of six author's copies of _Love in Babylon_ at Dawes Road alone indicated the great step in his development. One of these copies he inscribed to his mother, another to his aunt, and another to Sir George. Sir George accepted the book with a preoccupied air, and made no remark on it for a week or more. Then one morning he said: 'By the way, Knight, I ran through that little thing of yours last night. Capital! Capital! I congratulate you. Take down this letter.'

Henry deemed that Sir George's perspective was somewhat awry, but he said nothing. Worse was in store for him. On the evening of that same day he bought the _Whitehall Gazette_ as usual to read in the train, and he encountered the following sentences:

'TWADDLE IN SATIN.

'Mr. Onions Winter's new venture, the Satin Library, is a pretty
enough thing in its satinesque way. The _format_ is pleasant, the
book-marker voluptuous, the binding Arty-and-Crafty. We cannot,
however, congratulate Mr. Winter on the literary quality of the
first volume. Mr. Henry S. Knight, the author of _Love in Babylon_
(2s.), is evidently a beginner, but he is a beginner from whom
nothing is to be expected. That he has a certain gross facility in
the management of sentimental narrative we will not deny. It is
possible that he is destined to be the delight of "the great
public." It is possible--but improbable. He has no knowledge of
life, no feeling for style, no real sense of the dramatic.
Throughout, from the first line to the last, his story moves on the
plane of tawdriness, theatricality, and ballad pathos. There are
some authors of whom it may be said that they will never better
themselves. They are born with a certain rhapsodic gift of
commonness, a gift which neither improves nor deteriorates. Richly
dowered with crass mediocrity, they proceed from the cradle to the
grave at one low dead level. We suspect that Mr. Knight is of
these. In saying that it is a pity that he ever took up a pen, we
have no desire to seem severe. He is doubtless a quite excellent
and harmless person. But he has mistaken his vocation, and that is
always a pity. We do not care so see the admirable grocery trade
robbed by the literary trade of a talent which was clearly intended
by Providence to adorn it. As for the Satin Library, we hope
superior things from the second volume.'

Henry had the fortitude to read this pronouncement aloud to his mother and Aunt Annie at the tea-table.

'The cowards!' exclaimed Mrs. Knight.

Aunt Annie flushed. 'Let me look,' she whispered; she could scarcely control her voice. Having looked, she cast the paper with a magnificent gesture to the ground. It lay on the hearth-rug, open at a page to which Henry had not previously turned. From his arm-chair he could read in the large displayed type of one of Mr. Onions Winter's advertisements: 'Onions Winter. The Satin Library. The success of the year. _Love in Babylon._ By Henry S. Knight. Two shillings. Eighteenth thousand.--Onions Winter. The Satin Library. The success of the year. _Love in Babylon._ By Henry S. Knight. Two shillings. Eighteenth thousand.'

And so it went on, repeated and repeated, down the whole length of the twenty inches which constitute a column of the _Whitehall Gazette_.


CHAPTER XII


HIS FAME

Henry's sleep was feverish, and shot with the iridescence of strange dreams. And during the whole of the next day one thought burned in his brain, the thought of the immense success of _Love in Babylon_. It burned so fiercely and so brightly, it so completely preoccupied Henry, that he would not have been surprised to overhear men whisper to each other in the street as he passed: 'See that extraordinary thought blazing away there in that fellow's brain?' It was, in fact, curious to him that people did not stop and gaze at his cranium, so much the thing felt like a hollowed turnip illuminated by this candle of an idea. But nobody with whom he came into contact appeared to be aware of the immense success of _Love in Babylon_. In the office of Powells were seven full-fledged solicitors and seventeen other clerks, without counting Henry, and not a man or youth of the educated lot of them made the slightest reference to _Love in Babylon_ during all that day. (It was an ordinary, plain, common, unromantic, dismal Tuesday in Lincoln's Inn Fields.) Eighteen thousand persons had already bought _Love in Babylon_; possibly several hundreds of copies had been sold since nine o'clock that morning; doubtless someone was every minute inquiring for it and demanding it in bookshop or library, just as someone is born every minute. And yet here was the author, the author himself, the veritable and only genuine author, going about his daily business unhonoured, unsung, uncongratulated, even unnoticed! It was incredible, and, besides being incredible, it was exasperating. Henry was modest, but there are limits to modesty, and more than once in the course of that amazing and endless Tuesday Henry had a narrow escape of dragging _Love in Babylon_ bodily into the miscellaneous conversation of the office. However, with the aid of his natural diffidence he refrained from doing so.

At five-fifty Sir George departed, as usual, to catch the six-five for Wimbledon, where he had a large residence, which outwardly resembled at once a Bloomsbury boarding-house, a golf-club, and a Riviera hotel. Henry, after Sir George's exit, lapsed into his principal's chair and into meditation. The busy life of the establishment died down until only the office-boys and Henry were left. And still Henry sat, in the leathern chair at the big table in Sir George's big room, thinking, thinking, thinking, in a vague but golden and roseate manner, about the future.

Then the door opened, and Foxall, the emperor of the Powellian office-boys, entered.

'Here's someone to see you,' Foxall whispered archly; he economized time by licking envelopes the while. Every night Foxall had to superintend and participate in the licking of about two hundred envelopes and as many stamps.

'Who is it?' Henry asked, instantly perturbed and made self-conscious by the doggishness, the waggishness, the rakishness, of Foxall's tone. It must be explained that, since Henry did not happen to be an 'admitted' clerk, Foxall and himself, despite the difference in their ages and salaries, were theoretically equals in the social scale of the office. Foxall would say 'sir' to the meanest articled clerk that ever failed five times in his intermediate, but he would have expired on the rack before saying 'sir' to Henry. The favour accorded to Henry in high quarters, the speciality of his position, gave rise to a certain jealousy of him--a jealousy, however, which his natural simplicity and good-temper prevented from ever becoming formidable. Foxall, indeed, rather liked Henry, and would do favours for him in matters connected with press-copying, letter-indexing, despatching, and other mysteries of the office-boy's peculiar craft.

'It's a girl,' said Foxall, smiling with the omniscience of a man of the world.

'A girl!' Somehow Henry had guessed it was a girl. 'What's she like?'

'She's a bit of all right,' Foxall explained. 'Miss Foster she says her name is. Better show her in here, hadn't I? The old woman's in your room now. It's nearly half-past six.'

'Yes,' said Henry; 'show her in here. Foster? Foster? I don't know----'

His heart began to beat like an engine under his waistcoat.

And then Miss Foster tripped in. And she was Goldenhair!

'Good-afternoon, Mr. Knight,' she said, with a charming affectation of a little lisp. 'I'm so glad I've caught you. I thought I should. What a lovely room you've got!'

He wanted to explain that this was Sir George's room, not his own, and that any way he did not consider it lovely; but she gave him no chance.

'I'm awfully nervous, you know, and I always talk fast and loud when I'm nervous,' she continued rapidly. 'I shall get over it in a few minutes. Meanwhile you must bear with me. Do you think you can? I want you to do me a favour,