Chapter 4

I went up to town bearing the Callan article, and a letter of warm commendation from Callan to Fox. I had been very docile; had accepted emendations; had lavished praise, had been unctuous and yet had contrived to retain the dignified savour of the editorial “we.” Callan himself asked no more.

I was directed to seek Fox out--to find him immediately. The matter was growing urgent. Fox was not at the office--the brand new office that I afterward saw pass through the succeeding stages of business-like comfort and dusty neglect. I was directed to ask for him at the stage door of the Buckingham.

I waited in the doorkeeper’s glass box at the Buckingham. I was eyed by the suspicious commissionaire with the contempt reserved for resting actors. Resting actors are hungry suppliants as a rule. Call-boys sought Mr. Fox. “Anybody seen Mr. Fox? He’s gone to lunch.”

“Mr. Fox is out,” said the commissionaire.

I explained that the matter was urgent. More call-boys disappeared through the folding doors. Unenticing personages passed the glass box, casting hostile glances askance at me on my high stool. A message came back.

“If it’s Mr. Etchingham Granger, he’s to follow Mr. Fox to Mrs. Hartly’s at once.”

I followed Mr. Fox to Mrs. Hartly’s--to a little flat in a neighbourhood that I need not specify. The eminent journalist was lunching with the eminent actress. A husband was in attendance--a nonentity with a heavy yellow moustache, who hummed and hawed over his watch.

Mr. Fox was full-faced, with a persuasive, peremptory manner. Mrs. Hartly was--well, she was just Mrs. Hartly. You remember how we all fell in love with her figure and her manner, and her voice, and the way she used her hands. She broke her bread with those very hands; spoke to her husband with that very voice, and rose from table with that same graceful management of her limp skirts. She made eyes at me; at her husband; at little Fox, at the man who handed the asparagus--great round grey eyes. She was just the same. The curtain never fell on that eternal dress rehearsal. I don’t wonder the husband was forever looking at his watch.

Mr. Fox was a friend of the house. He dispensed with ceremony, read my manuscript over his Roquefort, and seemed to find it add to the savour.

“You are going to do me for Mr. Fox,” Mrs. Hartly said, turning her large grey eyes upon me. They were very soft. They seemed to send out waves of intense sympatheticism. I thought of those others that had shot out a razor-edged ray.

“Why,” I answered, “there was some talk of my doing somebody for the Hour.”

Fox put my manuscript under his empty tumbler.

“Yes,” he said, sharply. “He will do, I think. H’m, yes. Why, yes.”

“You’re a friend of Mr. Callan’s, aren’t you?” Mrs. Hartly asked, “What a dear, nice man he is! You should see him at rehearsals. You know I’m doing his ‘Boldero’; he’s given me a perfectly lovely part--perfectly lovely. And the trouble he takes. He tries every chair on the stage.”

“H’m; yes,” Fox interjected, “he likes to have his own way.”

“We all like that,” the great actress said. She was quoting from her first great part. I thought--but, perhaps, I was mistaken--that all her utterances were quotations from her first great part. Her husband looked at his watch.

“Are you coming to this confounded flower show?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said, turning her mysterious eyes upon him, “I’ll go and get ready.”

She disappeared through an inner door. I expected to hear the pistol-shot and the heavy fall from the next room. I forgot that it was not the end of the fifth act.

Fox put my manuscript into his breast pocket.

“Come along, Granger,” he said to me, “I want to speak to you. You’ll have plenty of opportunity for seeing Mrs. Hartly, I expect. She’s tenth on your list. Good-day, Hartly.”

Hartly’s hand was wavering between his moustache and his watch pocket.

“Good-day,” he said sulkily.

“You must come and see me again, Mr. Granger,” Mrs. Hartly said from the door. “Come to the Buckingham and see how we’re getting on with your friend’s play. We must have a good long talk if you’re to get my local colour, as Mr. Fox calls it.”

“To gild refined gold; to paint the lily,

To throw a perfume on the violet--”

I quoted banally.

“That’s it,” she said, with a tender smile. She was fastening a button in her glove. I doubt her recognition of the quotation.

When we were in our hansom, Fox began:

“I’m relieved by what I’ve seen of your copy. One didn’t expect this sort of thing from you. You think it a bit below you, don’t you? Oh, I know, I know. You literary people are usually so impracticable; you know what I mean. Callan said you were the man. Callan has his uses; but one has something else to do with one’s paper. I’ve got interests of my own. But you’ll do; it’s all right. You don’t mind my being candid, do you, now?” I muttered that I rather liked it.

“Well then,” he went on, “now I see my way.”

“I’m glad you do,” I murmured. “I wish I did.”

“Oh, that will be all right,” Fox comforted. “I dare say Callan has rather sickened you of the job; particularly if you ain’t used to it. But you won’t find the others as trying. There’s Churchill now, he’s your next. You’ll have to mind him. You’ll find him a decent chap. Not a bit of side on him.”

“What Churchill?” I asked.

“The Foreign Minister.”

“The devil,” I said.

“Oh, you’ll find him all right,” Fox reassured; “you’re to go down to his place to-morrow. It’s all arranged. Here we are. Hop out.” He suited his own action to his words and ran nimbly up the new terra-cotta steps of the Hour’s home. He left me to pay the cabman.

When I rejoined him he was giving directions to an invisible somebody through folding doors.

“Come along,” he said, breathlessly. “Can’t see him,” he added to a little boy, who held a card in his hands. “Tell him to go to Mr. Evans. One’s life isn’t one’s own here,” he went on, when he had reached his own room.

It was a palatial apartment furnished in white and gold--Louis Quinze, or something of the sort--with very new decorations after Watteau covering the walls. The process of disfiguration, however, had already begun. A roll desk of the least possible Louis Quinze order stood in one of the tall windows; the carpet was marked by muddy footprints, and a matchboard screen had been run across one end of the room.

“Hullo, Evans,” Fox shouted across it, “just see that man from Grant’s, will you? Heard from the Central News yet?”

He was looking through the papers on the desk.

“Not yet, I’ve just rung them up for the fifth time,” the answer came.

“Keep on at it,” Fox exhorted.

“Here’s Churchill’s letter,” he said to me. “Have an arm-chair; those blasted things are too uncomfortable for anything. Make yourself comfortable. I’ll be back in a minute.”

I took an arm-chair and addressed myself to the Foreign Minister’s letter. It expressed bored tolerance of a potential interviewer, but it seemed to please Fox. He ran into the room, snatched up a paper from his desk, and ran out again.

“Read Churchill’s letter?” he asked, in passing. “I’ll tell you all about it in a minute.” I don’t know what he expected me to do with it--kiss the postage stamp, perhaps.

At the same time, it was pleasant to sit there idle in the midst of the hurry, the breathlessness. I seemed to be at last in contact with real life, with the life that matters. I was somebody, too. Fox treated me with a kind of deference--as if I were a great unknown. His “you literary men” was pleasing. It was the homage that the pretender pays to the legitimate prince; the recognition due to the real thing from the machine-made imitation; the homage of the builder to the architect.

“Ah, yes,” it seemed to say, “we jobbing men run up our rows and rows of houses; build whole towns and fill the papers for years. But when we want something special--something monumental--we have to come to you.”

Fox came in again.

“Very sorry, my dear fellow, find I can’t possibly get a moment for a chat with you. Look here, come and dine with me at the Paragraph round the corner--to-night at six sharp. You’ll go to Churchill’s to-morrow.”

The Paragraph Club, where I was to meet Fox, was one of those sporadic establishments that spring up in the neighbourhood of the Strand. It is one of their qualities that they are always just round the corner; another, that their stewards are too familiar; another, that they--in the opinion of the other members--are run too much for the convenience of one in particular.

In this case it was Fox who kept the dinner waiting. I sat in the little smoking-room and, from behind a belated morning paper, listened to the conversation of the three or four journalists who represented the members. I felt as a new boy in a new school feels on his first introduction to his fellows.

There was a fossil dramatic critic sleeping in an arm-chair before the fire. At dinner-time he woke up, remarked:

“You should have seen Fanny Ellsler,” and went to sleep again.

Sprawling on a red velvet couch was a beau jeune homme, with the necktie of a Parisian-American student. On a chair beside him sat a personage whom, perhaps because of his plentiful lack of h’s, I took for a distinguished foreigner.