<h2>CHAPTER VI.</h2>
<p>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 <i>The Empire</i> 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
everybody knows, on occasions when the crush is great, the
animals rub shoulders freely with the spectators and the lions
sit down for whole evenings with the lambs.</p>
<p>It had been ominously clear to me from the first that in Neil
Paraday this lady, who, as all the world agreed, was tremendous
fun, considered that she had secured a prime attraction, a
creature of almost heraldic oddity. Nothing could exceed
her enthusiasm over her capture, and nothing could exceed the
confused apprehensions it excited in me. I had an
instinctive fear of her which I tried without effect to conceal
from her victim, but which I let her notice with perfect
impunity. Paraday heeded it, but she never did, for her
conscience was that of a romping child. She was a blind
violent force to which I could attach no more idea of
responsibility than to the creaking of a sign in the wind.
It was difficult to say what she conduced to but
circulation. She was constructed of steel and leather, and
all I asked of her for our tractable friend was not to do him to
death. He had consented for a time to be of india-rubber,
but my thoughts were fixed on the day he should resume his shape
or at least get back into his box. It was evidently all
right, but I should be glad when it was well over. I had a
special fear—the impression was ineffaceable of the hour
when, after Mr. Morrow’s departure, I had found him on the
sofa in his study. That pretext of indisposition had not in
the least been meant as a snub to the envoy of <i>The
Tatler</i>—he had gone to lie down in very truth. He
had felt a pang of his old pain, the result of the agitation
wrought in him by this forcing open of a new period. His
old programme, his old ideal even had to be changed. Say
what one would, success was a complication and recognition had to
be reciprocal. The monastic life, the pious illumination of
the missal in the convent cell were things of the gathered
past. It didn’t engender despair, but at least it
required adjustment. Before I left him on that occasion we
had passed a bargain, my part of which was that I should make it
my business to take care of him. Let whoever would
represent the interest in his presence (I must have had a
mystical prevision of Mrs. Weeks Wimbush) I should represent the
interest in his work—or otherwise expressed in his
absence. These two interests were in their essence opposed;
and I doubt, as youth is fleeting, if I shall ever again know the
intensity of joy with which I felt that in so good a cause I was
willing to make myself odious.</p>
<p>One day in Sloane Street I found myself questioning
Paraday’s landlord, who had come to the door in answer to
my knock. Two vehicles, a barouche and a smart hansom, were
drawn up before the house.</p>
<p>“In the drawing-room, sir? Mrs. Weeks
Wimbush.”</p>
<p>“And in the dining-room?”</p>
<p>“A young lady, sir—waiting: I think a
foreigner.”</p>
<p>It was three o’clock, and on days when Paraday
didn’t lunch out he attached a value to these appropriated
hours. On which days, however, didn’t the dear man
lunch out? Mrs. Wimbush, at such a crisis, would have
rushed round immediately after her own repast. I went into
the dining-room first, postponing the pleasure of seeing how,
upstairs, the lady of the barouche would, on my arrival, point
the moral of my sweet solicitude. No one took such an
interest as herself in his doing only what was good for him, and
she was always on the spot to see that he did it. She made
appointments with him to discuss the best means of economising
his time and protecting his privacy. She further made his
health her special business, and had so much sympathy with my own
zeal for it that she was the author of pleasing fictions on the
subject of what my devotion had led me to give up. I gave
up nothing (I don’t count Mr. Pinhorn) because I had
nothing, and all I had as yet achieved was to find myself also in
the menagerie. I had dashed in to save my friend, but I had
only got domesticated and wedged; so that I could do little more
for him than exchange with him over people’s heads looks of
intense but futile intelligence.</p>
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